AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Healing Brush

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Healing Brush.

Chantal Gibson is not just a poet, but a visual artist, who wants to understand how graphic design and technology shapes who we are. For instance, in her latest book, titled with/holding, she studies the internet as a place where Black pain is so often turned into memes, clickbait, products, and virtue-signaling messages. And because she’s a visual artist, she plays with the way her poems look graphically. One poem, for instance, tumbles over the page, with the letters squished out and piled up like rubble. Another poem is stretched out in the shape of a mask. And then there’s a series of poems in the form of a web shop, with an “Add to cart” button that never lets us forget we’re here to buy.

But besides being a poet and visual artist, Chantal Gibson is also a scholar. And she has this way of talking to other scholars—who are long dead—as if they’re right beside her. For instance, there’s one poem where she’s in conversation with Frantz Fanon. She writes, “Some days I think of you, like you just pop into my head.” So she tells him about all the crazy infuriating anti-Black products and news articles and logos she sees—and he already saw, in his time—but that still somehow keep existing, keep multiplying. She tells him, “If you come back, you better step up your game.” It’s intimate, as if they’re close friends. But it took her a while to feel this close to him. Because, as she alludes to in one poem, she came to university, and to Black Studies, late. So I was curious what she did beforehand. Here’s Chantal Gibson.

Chantal Gibson: I totally had a full on life before I started university. I went to high school in a really small town in Northern BC, population probably, I think at that time, maybe 6 or 7,000 people, quite an isolated town. You know, pulp and paper mill town. So, that’s where I went to high school. And then I moved to Vancouver to go to college. And I went to college for about a year and a half, and my mom passed away. And so there is a gap there from about, you know, 19 and probably like 25, where I just worked. I worked in a hair salon. I managed hair salon. I did acting, and I worked in group homes as a residential counselor. Like I just had all of these lives. And then I just reached this point where I was like, “I need to go back to school.” And when I did, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to study English, but I stumbled on an art history course that completely changed me. And so from then I finished my undergrad and I went into grad school and I did English Lit and art history. And it’s that combination of disciplines and learning critical reading and understanding how literature works, but also understanding art in history and representation, which informs my work now. So, I’m a writer, and I’m a visual artist, and I’m most interested in that sweet spot where the text and the image overlap, which is really what this with/holding, is all about, is that spot.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And when I talk about being a latecomer, you know, I have like a super colonial upbringing up here in Canada. I didn’t see people of color in any of my primary school or any, you know, even right up until university, I wasn’t really encountering Blackness until, you know, I went to UBC.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: And that’s when I met, you know, Frantz Fanon. That’s when I met Audre Lorde. That’s when I really met Dionne Brand. Like, all of the beautiful humans that informed me as a person, but also my practice. You know, bell hooks who is so important in this book. And of course, you know, my love, James Baldwin. It’s funnym I’m looking across at a poster which I made of the cover of The Fire Next Time, which is in my office screaming loud in yellow and orange in my office.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Chantal Gibson: So when I talk about being a latecomer, that’s what I mean, is that, you know, I really didn’t start encountering Blackness until I started learning cultural studies. And even then I wasn’t necessarily seeing, you know, Blackness in the content of the curriculum in the way that we’re seeing it now. So that’s where that comes from.

Helena de Groot: And those years, you know, that gap that you talked about between 19 and 25 where you were doing all kinds of jobs, from managing a hair salon to, you know, counseling at group homes, do you feel like when you then went back to university and you read all these scholars and poets, you learned things that you were able to apply on what you had seen in your working life, in the communities where you, you know, where you worked?

Chantal Gibson: I love your question because the thing that I think about, especially when I’m talking to my students right now who think that they have to have everything figured out, you know, probably my most informative schooling, my most important, you know, kind of life-altering schooling happened when I was managing a hair salon. Because it was like this really dope hair salon in the ’90s in Vancouver. It still exists. It’s called Suki’s. But it was on the best street, Robson Street. And I was just one of those people that I kind of like, I think I’ve kind of grown up backwards, like I was way more mature in my 20s than I am now. And super organized, right?

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Chantal Gibson: I had a, you know, I, I got this job as a receptionist and then I, you know, gradually became a manager. But I worked with this staff of like 35 people from all over the world. So this is where I actually really learned to engage with people across different cultures, across all the continents, you know, all the stuff that I understand about the LGBTQ community, around queerness, around identity, I was experiencing it there with such a diverse group of people. Like it was, it was a home for me, because I didn’t really think about myself as other there because everyone was different.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And part of my growing up, and I think an informative part of my, my growing up there was, folks there kind of checking me on what was appropriate in terms of how we call each other, how we talk to each other. You know, that’s where I understood cultural difference. And when I started university, everybody was to read in the same way and understand in the same way. You know, it’s kind of making me smile because when I think about—of course, you know, there’s a difference between academic learning and, you know, learning how to swim and breathe in that water, right?

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Chantal Gibson: And some of us just never, we never do it. Like it’s never comfortable. So when I, when I started, you know, engaging with critical material, I realized that there were these other ways, like you know, Said, right? Like there were just these other ways of talking about people who are not white from, you know, the Western world.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: But it was never comfortable. I guess because I didn’t swim in an academic world, it didn’t feel as comfortable to me, right? Theory wasn’t easy for me. Reading Homi Bhabha wasn’t easy for me.

Helena de Groot: Is it for anyone? I really wonder.

Chantal Gibson: I don’t know, right? But I would always have so much admiration for people who, you know, just really got theory. Like, my really good friend James, who I met in third year art history course, like, he was, he was so amazing with theory, and he’d have to coach me and help me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And really what I needed was like, I got really good at those books. Like, you know, that would, you know, like, I still have Fanon For Beginners, right?

Helena de Groot: Yes, yes.

Chantal Gibson: But I was one of those people that really needed, you know, secondary sources to help me understand, like, the pure ideas that were coming through scholarship.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And I mean, and I guess that’s the thing is, is that in the time, you know, when I read Black Skin, White Masks, there were some parts that I felt like, “Oh, I think I get this.” I understood that moment of being called out. I understood that moment of being othered. But also, the things that I was thinking about, or not thinking about at that time was, like, the world that Fanon was working in, as a psychologist, as a doctor, like, in this kind of white Western tradition, all of these references to Freudian psychology, like, I just didn’t know about that stuff, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And since I have become a teacher, and I’ve been teaching for over 20 years, it’s just like, your education doesn’t end when you get the degree. It actually just kind of starts, right. And so, I have, like I’ve gone back, especially with my writing, and thought about, you know, whose voice did I first meet in university and who still matters to me. And for this book, it really was Fanon. But what I did was I end up really thinking and learning about him as a doctor. You know, his practice as a psychoanalyst, and him working with patients and encouraging them to use culture as a way of working through their issues. So like, he would have them create newsletters and engage with film and engage with literature, you know, and this idea of creativity being a really important part of working through trauma. And that was something that I, you know, I didn’t get 20 some odd years ago when I was in school. So I saw this person in a completely different way. So, yeah, so I just don’t think, if you’re a lifelong learner, I just don’t think it goes away. And there’s some people you keep circling back to. There’s those people that become your favorites.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Chantal Gibson: That’s, for me, why I could sit in this book in a very long poem called “Fanon’s Couch.” Much of this book was, you know, came out of 2020. And it’s this like, how do I imagine myself coming back to this person that I met in grad school, and imagine myself talking to him about what’s happening right now? Right. What’s happening with the representation of Black people in this time in 2020? You know, in terms of capitalism and technology and the very ideas that he was talking about when he was writing, you know, in the ’50s, we are still engaging those ideas. Right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And, you know, the masks just took on a whole other meaning because COVID was happening. But there was just something about the positioning of the book that this was the person that I needed to sit with.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I love the epigraph that you use from Frantz Fanon, who writes that, in order to understand what colonization does to the self, “we need only to study and appreciate the scope and depth of the wounds inflicted on the colonized during a single day under a colonial regime.” And I love that so much. I love that, you know, all that he prescribes is looking closely at a single day. So, so tell me, how did this quote guide you through the writing of this book?

Chantal Gibson: Oh, that’s such a good question. There’s something about the single day. So in with/holding, there’s lots of encounters with single days. So, for example, there’s a poem called “Add to Cart.” And, you know, I teach in a school, art, design and technology. We talk about the impact of technology on humans, human-centered design. And so, the poem “Add to Cart” really came from me spending, you know, days and days and days of moving through these, you know, DIY design sites.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: Because I was interested in—I have been interested in for a very long time, and, you know, how we can make our own stuff, and whose images do we take and what is the ethics of, you know, taking somebody else’s image and putting it on a T-shirt or a hat or a coffee cup? But I just started looking at, like, iconic images around Blackness.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: And I started to, you know, how quickly we could see a Black Lives Matter T-shirts appear for marches, right? Or images that were related to, you know, Breonna Taylor. But I would start to kind of see images like the Brooks slave ship.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And I saw there was an image of the Brooks slave ship, and you could put it on a T-shirt or a bedspread or a yoga mat. And then, of course, the deep dive into images like the golliwog, images that, you know, so many of us saw in our early schoolbooks, and that you could have that on an iPhone case.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: The big one for me was, you know, the irony in seeing an “I can’t breathe” facemask.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: Right? And so the thing that I was thinking about was, first of all, that people could take other people’s images or archival images and sell them and put them on objects, right. Without really any care or consideration for the real human beings that were represented by these objects, right. That was just like, one day. And the idea for me that I really started thinking about is these iconic images—and very racist images, you know, most of them, right—just recirculating.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Chantal Gibson: That’ve been around a really long time. And guess what? Fanon is even talking about the same kind of imagery in his books, right. So it just kept circling back for me. And even though I can’t imagine that somebody would want to have a yoga mat with a slave ship on it, but for me, when I saw that Brooks slave ship and I saw that object, it’s just that the potential to be able to make that object was enough for me. So, so, to me, that was just one of the Fanonian days, right.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: Yeah. Another one was the black square. And that that Tuesday, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. After the murder of George Floyd that everyone on Instagram was like, “In solidarity, we should do this totally empty gesture and post a black square.”

Chantal Gibson: Post the black square. And then Black Lives Matter. You know, the Black Lives Matter folks have to come on and say, “Would you please stop doing this? Because you’re actually interfering with really important content that we’re trying to produce.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: And so that’s another, for me, Fanonian day, right?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: In this really crazy, whether you call it, I don’t know, colonial, post-colonial capitalist interaction.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, and I don’t know if you follow this at all, but in 2020, the Poetry Foundation was under fire, because after the murder of George Floyd, they had, like so many organizations and corporations, put out this statement of concern or whatever, you know, which was totally toothless and so kind of sanitized and, you know, and they came under fire and were actually boycotted by a lot of poets, and still by some poets who are just like, “Yeah, we’re, we’re good, you know, we don’t need you, big funded organization, if that’s how you’re going to show up for our community.” Yeah, because of that reason, I was really arrested by that poem that you have in the book on page 22. It’s titled-less, but it has, yeah, it’s like in the shape of a statement, you know, by a, like an organization like that. And I’m wondering, before we talk about this, if you mind reading it.

Chantal Gibson: Yeah, that’s called “whitewash.”

Helena de Groot: Oh, it is, okay, sorry.

Chantal Gibson: Yeah it’s called “whitewash (underlying images).”

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: Yeah. And so that’s what it is. It’s a solidarity statement in the shape of a mask. So. Alright. So, I’ll, I’ll hold the spaces where the spaces are.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Chantal Gibson:

(READS POEM) –

During the _________________(insert general time period here) we have
taken time to quietly reflect and listen to our valued
[customers/associates/fans/friends/employees/stakeholders]. We
have made a commitment to change by removing the [name
/image/icon] from our [packaging/branding] recognizing
it does not reflect our core values. We want to express
our solidarity and our deep commitment to taking action.
We believe this will make a difference over time. To our loyal
[customers/associates/fans/friends/employees/stakeholders]
we thank you for your feedback. While the [name/logo/image]
has changed we assure you our product will remain the same.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Chantal Gibson: And the thing about the problem is that, in bold, you see what the real statement is. And it says, “We have made a deep commitment to remain the same,” which is really what the poem is. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Right. It is so, I mean, I love how you play with—I mean, this is harder to do on a podcast, of course, but visually, the fact that the words are kind of, you know, laid out in the shape of a mask, and then indeed, with that kind of bold face that you have like a secondary poem transmitted at the same time. It’s just really great. And I feel like you do that in so many of the poems in this book. It’s like you use the language to show the emptiness behind the language. What are some of the techniques that you use to pin down that emptiness?

Chantal Gibson: Well, again, I guess I would come back to that overlap between the image and the text. Uh huh. So, for example, I have a poem called “Blackout (Refrain)” and it just repeats the line, “I can’t breathe” over and over again. But what it does is it uses the language of graphic design and the language of kerning. And so kerning is the space between letters.

Mm-hmm.

So slowly what happens is that that phrase gets kerned all the way down to a single point.

Helena de Groot: So it get squeezed, basically.

Chantal Gibson: It gets squeezed, yeah.

Helena de Groot: The breath gets squeezed out of it. Oh, okay, I didn’t—

Chantal Gibson: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Okay. Right.

Chantal Gibson: And so, if you’re a graphic designer, you can totally see, like, you know, this is a death by kerning.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: But what it does is, you had a, you know, talked about earlier, is that it leaves space, because the murder of George Floyd is not my story to tell. Right? That is not. But I am somebody who was affected and continues to be affected by it. And so, the poem in itself is a Fanonian—it’s a day. It’s a day expressed in a repeated line that gradually gets, you know, squished to the point, you know, kerned, to the point of absence.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: What I was grateful for that your book did, it’s almost like a medicine against gaslighting. You know, like, you grab these pieces of culture and of language that exists in our daily life that feels harmful, but it’s sometimes you’re just like, “Am I overreacting? Am I crazy?” You know? And I feel like the way that you combine those in your book, like this empty corporate statement, together with the stuff that’s on sale, you know, a slave ship on a yoga mat, you know, Breonna Taylor duvet cover, like all that stuff. The way you combine it, it makes me see, “Oh, okay, I’m not alone. I’m not crazy. This is indeed the world that surrounds us.” But I do wonder what it was like for you to spend, I don’t know, a year or however long you worked on this book, focusing on and sort of lifting out of the wash of everyday, you know, like, how did that affect you?

Chantal Gibson: That’s a really good question. And I, I’m going to pull on the word wash, actually. That was really like, wow. So first of all, I’m really grateful that you found in the work a place where you connected to it.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Chantal Gibson: And I think that idea of, like, not feeling alone was one of the reasons that I was actually writing the work, because I was, it was COVID, and I was spending a lot of time alone. And talking to my wonderful writer friends who really kept checking in with me to make sure that I was okay. Because I can rationalize anything: I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. But coming to the to this book, I was realizing that I wasn’t fine. And there was a couple of things. One had to do with my hearing the emptiness in all of the language that was coming out. So whether it was the language of nostalgia, the language of capitalism, like, yes, these statements that are written that are, you know, you hear the falseness in the tone.

Helena de Groot: Absolutely.

Chantal Gibson: Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: On the websites, on the social media. So there was that stuff that was happening. But the other thing, like, one of the things I would say this book is really about is, like, the difference in how I started to read. So for example, the very first interaction in the book, I’m just going to turn to it here so I can sound like I know what I’m talking about. The very first interaction is this piece of text and it says:
“HAND WASH COLD WITH COLORS DO NOT BLE
DRY IN THE SHADE

LAVAR A MANO CON
CON COLORES SIM
USAR BLANQUEAD
EL TENDEDERO
NO SE DEB”
Right. So it’s just chunks of something. So.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: Getting to wash, right? If you recognize that language, you recognize that that is the language on a wash tag. And it’s just a segment of it, and it’s blown up really big on the first page. Once you get to the poem called “Forensic Report,” which is me spending way too much time with the New York Times piece on the killing of Breonna Taylor, you’ll find it in one of the poems. And it was because in one of the scenes, they showed where the bullets landed. And one of the bullets landed in a basket of laundry. And I—you could see the images. And I blew up the image, and I could see this tiny bra tag. And so that moment doesn’t feel like a poem. It doesn’t look like a poem, but it’s doing something. And what it’s reflecting is the trace of a human being, which was really important to me.

Helena de Groot: Mm hmm. I was wondering if you wanted to read that poem, “Forensic Report.” It’s on page 122.

Chantal Gibson: Sure. Do you want me to read the whole thing or part of it?

Helena de Groot: Maybe because we just talked about the bra, just read only on page 122.

Chantal Gibson: Okay.

(READS POEM) –

Forensic Report

December 28, 2020– April 28, 2021

1.

It’s about the way The New York
Times laid out her home for the re-
creation. It’s about nearly 1,000,000

YouTube views. It’s about the over
10,000 comments and the nearly 3.5
million subscribers, and the fact that

i’m one. It’s about going over all of
the evidence, the reports, recordings
and crime scene photos, the lemon

yellow saucepan, the small blue one
hiding inside, the pot holders and the
oven mitts hooked on the wall above

the sink, and the folded dish cloth
draped over the tap. It’s about the
burgundy throw pillows against

the sage green sofa and the gap be-
tween the seat cushions, like some
body just got up. It’s about that

Yoki rainbow sequined sneaker and
a purple blouse and Exhibit 47, the
beige bra tag with the tag sticking out.

HAND WASH COLD WITH
DO NOT BLEACH
DRY IN THE SHADE

LAVAR A MANO CON
COLORES SIM
USAR BLANQUEAD
EL TENDEDERO
NO SE DEB

It’s about all the clicking, pausing and
zooming in. Trying to get at the truth.
It’s about my sweaty hands, my swollen

hashtags, and my scrolling heart rate.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, I, whew, this is so extraordinarily moving. These details of her life, you know, “the lemon yellow saucepan,” “the potholders and the oven mitts hooked on the wall above the sink.” Yeah, the bras in the laundry hamper, you know, with the tag sticking out, it’s so close to any home that we know. And then to contrast that with how you begin the poem, you know, “It’s about nearly 1 million YouTube views. It’s about the over 10,000 comments and the nearly 3.5 million subscribers.” That in itself is so dehumanizing, the scale. Yeah, the scale at which her one small life has been blown up and taken from her in so many more ways than one.

Chantal Gibson: I think what’s important, though, I just want to, you know, I just wanted to add that, you know, my place as the poet is not to tell that story. It’s about how that story is being told, how it’s being represented. And how it is so easy to forget the human being and the, kind of the falseness of the retelling over—just because we tell the same story over and over and over again doesn’t mean that we are humanizing or remembering someone, right? I mean, like, it’s just a different kind of a, of a way of erasing, right? It’s kind of this palimpsest, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: One on top of each other. And so, I think that what I was deeply interested in trying to figure out for myself is my own engagement with technology, with news, with social media, how I just kept going in, you know, reading the same things over and over again, looking at the same images, blowing them up, doing this as a way to try to understand, you know, really the, the, the unthinkable. Because, underneath every one of these poems is a human being. Every single one of them, whether it is George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or, you know, Gordon, known as Whipped Peter or whether it is, you know, Frantz Fanon or our recently deceased bell hooks, tight. There’s just people in this entire book.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Your book is dedicated “To us.” I mean, not me, but, you know “us” as in the community of Black people. And yeah, I was wondering, like, can you make that more explicit? Like, what—because your book is not, is not an easy book. It does not provide an escape of any sort. It does not provide relief in the traditional sense of that word. It holds up a mirror that is rather stark. And so, I wonder, since you dedicate this book to Black people, do you feel holding up this mirror can be liberatory?

Chantal Gibson: Hmm. That’s a good question. Well. Hmm. I would say that, we’re talking a lot about images that I know is a little bit challenging, right?

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: But I think what was important is that, the book ends with a kind of a reparation. And it must. Right? Like, it just, it just has to. And as the writer, I needed that. But I also need to leave my reader with that. And it’s really interesting because I met—finally, I met one of my heroes recently, NourBese Philip,

Helena de Groot: Who wrote Zong!, sorry.

Chantal Gibson: Yes. And she was here in Vancouver for a conference. And we were sitting around and having some pizza together. And she said this amazing thing. She was talking about reparations, and she said, “Reparations”—and I want to try to paraphrase her as generously as possible, but I wrote it down as, “Reparations are what we do for ourselves, reparations are what we give ourselves.”

Helena de Groot: Hm.

Chantal Gibson: Right? Because when we think of, you know, large-scale reparations, you know, that can become so abstracted into, you know, language around money and funds and just—but it’s the daily care that we give ourselves and each other, right. And that was really interesting and very poetic way of me trying to understand what that meant. And so, I’m thinking a lot about that. But there’s a poem that kind of represent—the, you know, the last group of poems, there is an attempt at, you know, a circling back and a kind of healing or revisiting an object that we met in the beginning and somehow giving that object some attention or letting it escape a little bit or something. So, if it’s okay, I’m going to read “EMT.”

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Chantal Gibson: Because we’ve talked a lot about technology. We’ve talked and, you know, I feel like one of the things that I needed to be thinking about is, how might we use the tools that we have for good?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: How might we be more critical about how we use social media and technology, in how we might perpetuate racism, you know, or all of the isms in the way that we use technology. So, in the beginning section, I introduce you to Gordon, who is also known as Whipped Peter and it’s, you know, an image from a carte de visite from the Civil War. And it is just this image of this Black man whose back is deeply scarred from being whipped. And I keep seeing this image everywhere. And of course, in my research, I could see that I could buy this image on a coffee cup or a T-shirt.

Helena de Groot: Of course, yeah.

Chantal Gibson: Yeah. So I thought about, you know, how this image is being used now and thinking about responsibility around ancestors. And so, this poem is called “EMT”, which stands for Emancipation Modification Therapy.

Helena de Groot: Is that an actual abbreviation or you thought of it?

Chantal Gibson: I made it up.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, you made it up. Right.

Chantal Gibson: Because the other thing that I’ve learned about, you know, kind of doing this kind of healing and this kind of work, is that what we have is our creativity. Right? When we talk about Black futures, we have to make those. We need new words. We need new ways in.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Chantal Gibson: So this is called “EMT (Emancipation Modification Therapy)”. Here is the epigraph by Antoine Fuqua. “It was the first viral image of the brutality of slavery that the world saw, which is interesting when you put it into perspective with today and social media and what the world is seeing, again. You can’t fix the past, but you can remind people of the past, and I think we have to, in an accurate, real way.” And this is the film director, Antoine Fuqua, June 15th, 2020.

(READS POEM) –

EMT

Dear Gordon or is it Peter?
Today I Googled ‘Whipped

Peter and got 8,230,000 hits
in 0.89 seconds. i found out

Will Smith will be playing you
in an action thriller called

Emancipation,“based on a
true story fueled by that in-

delible image. i downloaded
the carte de visite from your

Wiki,the abolitionist calling
card still circulating widely in

the public domain. i know
you can’t fix the past. i can

only imagine what they’ll do
to you with a budget. i have

no use for Nostalgia, but i am
your descendant, here to re-

mind you of the past, to make
you whole. i want you to know i Photo-

shopped your back, removed
each tally mark with the Eraser

Tool, restored your skin with the
Clone Stamp, and touched you up

with the Healing Brush. i combed
your hair and oiled your scalp and

rubbed a little cocoa butter on your
shoulders. A little salve or a bit of

salvation, i pray I’ve done you no
harm. May that all signifying star,

the untethered keloid of our mean
remembering, find a new sky

and hold its place in a kinder loving uni-

verse. May you carry a lighter burden,
if only for a little while, and find some

relief from a lifetime of Februaries.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. This is really such a beautiful poem. And again, I love how powerful you make totally banal things: the eraser tool, the clone stamp, the healing brush. I mean, when you think about these words, they become so meaningful. But of course, in the context of the Photoshop thing, it’s totally banal, you know? And yeah, and then how you go on from that to the even more fantastical: “I combed your hair and oiled your scalp and rubbed a little cocoa butter on your shoulders.” And it’s beautiful because you say earlier in the poem, “we cannot fix the past.” But I’m also wondering if you find that there are ways to care retroactively for our ancestors. I mean, your ancestors. And what does that care look like?

Chantal Gibson: I think the way that I would say that I show that care now is, I’m trying to be a good ancestor now. Like, I am absolutely thinking through the futurism of that poem, right? Like, yes, all of those tools are mundane and many of them are used in the service of creativity, and many of them are not. Many of them are used in nefarious ways, right. And so the kind of erasure that I am talking about is a different kind of erasure, right. And so I’m just adding to the layers. So I think about what I’m doing now. I have one job. Which is to, you know, to be a good ancestor and the way that I try to do that is I try to write and make work that will live past me. My goal when I wrote my first book, How She Read was that I would create a book that would end up in, you know, school curriculum, because it wasn’t a book that I saw when I went to school. And that I would try to write work that was smart and engaging and showed somebody that was thinking deeply about their time. Another way that I do that, which comes back to my teaching, is I try to mentor Black students, young Black artists, creatives, and so much of being a good ancestor today is supporting their practice, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: So I’m pretty much thinking beyond this moment.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: You know, there’s the life outside the book. You know, there’s what the book is doing and there’s what I hope it’ll leave behind. So, I mean, part of doing this work and sitting with you is that we connect with somebody else today. Maybe there’s a student out there that’s interested in graphic design and is interested in, like, you know, busting, like, super racist algorithms and intent on doing that stuff. Or the next time we, you know, we sit and we watch a Black History Month PowerPoint presentation and, you know, Gordon is shown that we just take a moment to recognize that this is, this was a human being.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Chantal Gibson: This was a human being. And writing this book was really challenging. And the thing that made me feel like I could do it was that I was just grounded in these voices before me and voices around me. I knew exactly why I was doing it. You know, the question was going to be the how. But the why was pretty clear. And it’s just because all of this groundwork has already been done. And yeah, and I guess it just comes back to being a good ancestor.

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Helena de Groot: Chantal Gibson is the author of two poetry collections, with/holding, and her debut collection, How She Read, which won the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Both were published by Caitlin Press. She’s also a visual artist and arts educator whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across Canada and the US, including the Senate of Canada building in Ottawa. She’s a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow, and she teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. To find out more, check out her website, chantalgibson.com. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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