The Big Melt

Emily Riddle

Nightwood Editions, 2022

         For some years–well, for two years–I have been nibbling away at book called The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. To quote the blurb (as a convenient shortcut), this book “fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and begins to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.”Our past, they argue, was not necessarily an evolution from hunter gatherer through agriculture, to that apex of civilization, the European Enlightenment. Or to use another shortcut, a straight path from the Stone Age to Guns, Germs and Steel. Some of us happened to follow this path but there were, and still are, many other possibilities.

         This may seem a curious way to begin a review of a poetry book. However, reading The Big Melt gave me some of the same thoughts. What if what poetry does or has were a much larger field, what if the Western Canon weren’t the apex of poetic evolution, on some sort of trajectory from Homer to Philip Larkin. What if there were many much different purposes and methods that poetry could (and does) pursue?

         As a matter of fact, only a moment’s thought has to be given to this proposition to see immediately that it must be true. Or to quote Rudyard Kipling (and is Kipling himself inside or outside the Canon, or even a poet at all, I ask you?): “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!”

         The reason The Big Melt spurred me on to consider this question is that it is not on that trajectory, neither in poetic diction and imagery, where we kind of expect to find in every word or phrase an echo or counterpoint to something written by another poet, nor in the essential subject matter. Sweetness and light are not to be found, nor is there honey yet for tea. What is she on about, Emily Riddle?

         I usually start with the personal and try to find my way in from that.

“I stopped talking to you because you called me Pocahontas,” for starters.

people who were raised on the Prairies have a gruffness

not because of the winters

but rather austerity, discrimination, blue pickup trucks. . .

i don’t know how to account

for your non-prairie softness. . .

i wonder why skydaddy sent me a white girl to love.

I am bisexual and I am not sure I want to do this . . .

go on dates with people who go home and google “plains cree”

         The first two sections of the book, The Big Melt and The Big Prayer are devoted to this, love, sexual identity. I found some of the poems in these two sections lacking in poetic complexity, by which I guess I mean a rich interplay of diction and structure with subject matter. Some are purely confessional, and then there are the colour-coded poems with oranges and purple petunias, where thematic unity seems a gimmick.

         In the next section, The Big Kinship, there’s a longer poem with stanzas numbered in the Cree language, which I also felt was a false unity. I did not grasp the integrity of this as a poem as a whole, although some of the stanzas are interesting.

I stood by your asiniy kehkwahaskanikh ohci

except it wasn’t a gravestone at all

i don’t know why none of the aunties got them

peeling wood crosses it is then

a cousin told me he took them all out to mow the lawn

“looked in the little brown bottle,” he said

and forgot where they went

so now all these peeling wooden crosses are all mixed up

nehiyawak didn’t bury people; we suspended them in trees . . .

         (At this point I started to read with my cell phone in my other hand to translate the Cree words, and I was not always successful. A glossary or a few footnotes would have been helpful.)

         Things began to get more interesting in the second half of the book as some of these themes of personal history and sexual identity became entwined with history and the landscape and a richer sense of cultural identity.

         Two very large female characters emerged. One is Louise Umfreville, the Metis wife of the first factor of Fort Edmonton, whose amazing biography is delivered in a prose poem.

this is the story I loved as a child—you saved this white man, not the other way around

         The second is the author’s mother, who is diagnosed with cancer in the poem ‘Worms’ (because the Cree language has no word for ‘cancer’), and who goes through surgery and chemotherapy in ‘It Flows Here, But,’ which begins with the tender funny image of her parents Facetiming with the author as they do the dishes

         . . . they fight over whose turn it is

         to carry me around . . .

         The author describes how her mother took her and her sister out of school as children and down to the banks of the North Saskatchewan to sketch “the contours of the banks, the lines of sediment, the clouds above.” In this long poem, the author is on a search for the very landscape buried underneath the city of Edmonton, which is the home of her ancestors, the Papaschase Cree. The gardens of Fort Edmonton were originally protected from the “ndns” “who persisted in helping themselves in carrot theft” by a fence and eventually even an armed guard.

         It’s a poem about her mom and about the North Saskatchewan River, and also about the moon.

         our stories tell us that the buffalo will re-emerge from the earth

                  if we lovingly remake the earth for them

                           remove the armed guard

                                    ask the moon for help

                                             hug your mom

         It is in these last two sections of the book that I felt the poems that represent the true and developing voice of this poet emerged.

         I also particularly liked the poem, Maskwa Ponders Revolution, where the author asks herself, what if Ethan Bear refused to stand at the beginning of the hockey game for the national anthem. Her stream of consciousness rolling on, she continues stubbornly to sit in the arena,  eating popcorn, and thinking about Frantz Fanon, but then somehow ends up

sitting in the back seat of a truck on the way through Battleford

i think about how mistahi maskwa [Big Bear] lived peaceful refusal

what he would have thought of hockey and the bears who came

                                                                                   after him.

         I also liked Cree Girl Explodes the Political Project Called Alberta, where the poet deconstructs the Alberta legislature building, calling first of all upon the beavers to dismantle the woodwork and the furniture, sending the totem pole back to the West Coast to the people it belongs to, returning Louise Umfreville to her old home, to write emails from the dead to each of her descendants: “all of Louise’s descendants who were single moms moved into her house and built other houses on the grounds of the non-existent alberta legislature. There was no chief factor. There was no premier . . .”

         It is in one of these last poems that she introduces the unusual word “indigiqueer”, pondering why “indian” is an identity she would seek for her hypothetical children, while she would “raise them with the freedom to grow into their own gender.” But of course, as this book proves, “indian” is a category invented by the laws of Canada. It is not what Emily Riddle is on about at all.

         I thought the best poems in this collection were the ones that looked underneath the city of Edmonton to the river and the river valley. Why not start the deconstruction of the so-called history of Alberta and begin to rewrite it as poetry? As I said in the beginning, this poet is carving her way into a new medium using a set of unusual cultural tools. This is no familiar poetic voice, and no familiar set of assumptions either.

         The Big Melt won the inaugural $10,000 Griffin Canadian First Book Prize. I think it will be very interesting to see what Emily Riddle does next.