Permanent Collection

Su-Ying Lee opens her exhibition, Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour by reminding us that “in real and symbolic terms, a deep enmeshment exists between the disturbance of land, and the disruption and exploitation of transported human lives.” I want to ponder, as a writer and literary scholar, on the nuance and expansiveness of “constellation.” I write this during the widespread fires of Los Angeles, the second inauguration of Trump in what is, for now, known as the United States, a broken postponed ceasefire in Palestine, congratulatory Nazi salutes, the de-historicization and implementation of binaric genders across Turtle Island (a razing of the rich ecological meadow of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer longevity, which, since the docking of power in 1492 upon our island and its targeting death drive,^[1] comes, unfortunately, as no surprise as we have forever been in that hunting scope), the marching onwards of ironic mass deportations, ongoing Canadian xenophobia and settler colonialism, the unmasking of global oligarchies, resource extraction and climate catastrophes, and forgotten nouns like: Sudan, Kashmir, Darfur, Congo, Myanmar, Uyghur.

I see the constellation therein. The rich seedling of Indigenous sovereignty, its global rooting, and the intersections of its premeditated rot. Intersected by capitalism, trafficking, ethnobotany, displacement, genocide, colonization (residual psychic post and ongoing settler), forced labour, assimilation, cultural cleansing, imperialism, and the revocation of EDIA initiatives (and any other auspicious tool of the Global North). See: your beating pronoun “I” existing in the thistle, bramble, as scratch and postmark, squeezed into thinking resiliency is an inborn trait of the human condition, a naturalized adjective, choking grammar, spiked serif, on the page, on the land, lodged into the body. Wherein that constellation does personhood, let alone peoplehood, exist? How do we seed sovereignty in ways that are rejuvenating, holistic, and wholly mercenary to its invasive borders? How do we persist through resistance? What nutrient remains in the collusive murk of this corrosion?

I used to rent a small bungalow in Inglewood having moved from a condo in Dover. I moved for the sake of my dog, a German Shepherd, to give him more room to stretch his limbs. Together we had quickly outgrown my compact apartment. It was a light green house, two bedrooms, one of which I used for an office, and had ample yard space. I planted flowers and vegetables and fruits on my front porch and in the backyard. The yard had one of the last remaining apple trees from when that area of Mohkinstsis was yet an orchard. Though the yard needed a lot of love, as when I moved there it was mostly patches of intact grass scattered across dirt, I loved spending time back there.

My home was sandwiched between two houses: one of which was a well-loved but aged four-plex and the other, a modern home with a curated backyard removed of its grass and laid over with stone and concrete. The fence I shared with my neighbour was peppered with Canada thistle and its shiny purple heads. I found it quaint, this plant, being so named after the nation-state. It is a difficult weed to get rid of. I uprooted it constantly. I used a spade to dig out its rhizome. And every year it persisted yet. My neighbour asked me to get rid of it, indefinitely, lest he call the invasive species centre. The Canada thistle was growing onto his side of the yard, from under the fence, and colonizing his flowers and disrupting his cobbled walkway. It is said that Canada thistle was one of the first weeds imported to Turtle Island by early settlers likely introduced as a seed contaminant from ship ballasts.

To look at my yard, a microcosm of stolen swindled land, as metonym I found it rich with constellation: Canada thistle as metaphoric flora—genome of empire propagating in Treaty 7 far from port and harbour. Or the starling singing upon the apple tree, another constellatory thread and invasive species that colonizes the nests of native birds, flinging out their eggs and young to make room for themselves. The starling was introduced to Turtle Island in 1890 by a Shakespearean enthusiast. Literature too, a bioprospect. I thought of the endangered monarch and their rich milkweed being strangled and overtaken by dog vine. Microcosm, macrocosm, metaphor, literality. The yard, and the exchange, were both simple and supreme. And here, now, I think of Antonio Gramsci, whose words are popularized on social media as a call to rebellion: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.” I think of David Blandy’s opening epigraph for his instructions for Gathering Storm, “The monsters’ time is over. But some still remain along with the alien fruit that fills pockets and their bellies. We strive for another world. Perhaps the world before. But the world from before is gone. So, we must grow something new.” I think of Candice Lin’s La Charada China which gestures to “slab[s] of earth, seeds, and plants—an interconnected, expansive ecology of colonialism” and the bone char that whitens sugar. I think of Deborah Jack’s Foremothers in which her ancestors emerge from behind a mound of mineral salt and for which it is written that they are “reinscribed, out from under the mineral of the colony, from commodification” and in her poetry writes, “smell the blood the toil / the saliva / the amniotic waters / that flow / in / under / ground / streams.” I think of Dinh Q. Lê’s The Colony, three looping films featuring the Chincha islands off the coast of Peru where birds leave mountains of noxious guano used as fertilizer and the labourers who are buried in these arid dried feces calcified into the landscape. Little yard, larger doom, the land its own archive, storyteller. And I here perturbed, although comfortable and safe in my conditions comparatively, sit measuring the long thread of death. And to avoid its crushing weight, I recite Leanne Simpson and Robyn Maynard who, in their book Rehearsals for Living, remind us that “not all world endings are tragic.” And I am pleased. And I am fed of their consort. And I don a pandemonic mask for what’s to come.

January 2025: a syzygy is ongoing. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will all be aligned. Yoked together. In the bowl of the cosmos. There will be no occultation. All will be visible by the naked eye. A minor miracle. You may think it akin to an act of god. If your faith so determines. Or, instead, you may interpret it as a proxy to some noun that approximates such an idol. I imagine it as a marker of creation. A humility and a humiliation. That from our vantage point, we can see such titans as peas that fit between our fingers and we think ourselves all the mightier for it. That we are called to remember our origins. As insignificant. That our epistemologies of capital, commerce, and concedes are of no use to what is only the navel of life, “the doorknob from the beginning”^[2] and the porthole of the “great dying.”^[3] Fear the limbs we cannot see or comprehend. Remember the milk you nursed from the singularity. For these too were once gods to the Roman and the Greek (from which you feign your salute). These are kin. These are mother and womb. How quickly we can smother.

Move through the nettle, photosynthesize on the apex.

Connie Zheng’s Roots/Routes opens Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour in the Columbian Exchange, her aperture projected with the Galls-Peter tradition. Her cross-stitched cartography a living archive, the sweetness of an orange slice, the umami of a soybean, colonial citrine embryo and our molars mossed with mashed history making native the tongue, native the stomach. Or so the tang of pineapple, that “alien fruit” and the DDT and insecticide and the silent spring^[4] repellent that cannot foreclose the oracle of Kenya exorcising the remnant of authority.^[5] If pleasant words a honeycomb^[6] then know “the Lord detests lying lips [and] delights in people who are trustworthy,” as begins Andrea Chung’s Proverbs 12:22. Sing the hymn, the “Broken Vessel” and the honeyed script, aural imperial. If you the potter and I the clay^[7] then who do I taste in the saccharin orality of this verbiage?^[8] Do you taste the muck of Gosine’s soil, Trinidad and Tobago, across kali pani^[9] and the coolitude and the Late Victorian Holocaust—here: on the cane, on the stalk?^[10] Perhaps you feel the sucker of the octopus, singular, exhaustive, el pulpo^[11] around the globe, mantle in Guatemala, banana republic and ostentatious in its fashions. Potassium rich Chiquita and Del Montte and the crossed T of Montt in the smoothie in the juicing. And know the gestation across generation in the African paddy: seminal root, nodal root, lateral root, and the root hairs and the feeding and the women in the crown root braided ancestor bloom.^[12] Mind the transit between state in the Great Salt Pond and the manifest, where the liminal, the here and there, is so easy to overlook when measured with kilometer, oceanic, and that the mineral too remembers and harkens the genocide in-between and the wound thereafter and the salt hereupon and the cellular respiration housing the women’s spitfire.^[13] Here the wonderworking tech, King Cotton, in the dead zone: splitter, hacker, shrubbed into the exosphere signal jamming as thorn and diadem and euphorbia and wholly righteous in its reigning.^[14] And of the dreamer rise the rebel fostered in the root, fed the spirit organic in the glasshouse, hothouse, greenhouse, shrined epoxy gloss gleaming its votive offering: the resurgence of the root and feast for the returned.^[15]

ishkwakiiwan, apocalypse.

The Anishinaabe, like many Indigenous peoples do, have a story for this bound up in the knowing of bagonegiizhig. The word bagone meaning “it has a hole in it”^[16] and giizhig meaning “day or the heavens”. The word giizhig also has linguistic kinship with giizhik, “cedar”. The hole in the sky that is pierced through by the cedar tree. There are many stories for this word. One of which you may know and recognize is in the work of Carl Beam’s New World, which details our creation story of life upon the turtle’s back scooped from the paw of muskrat where Sky Woman rested and made the people. What you may not have asked is: where did Sky Woman come from? In the cyclicity of our life, there exists no form of finality. Like the sweat lodge, or the arbour, or the shaking tent, what we know as the beginning and the end are always kissing, locked lips, shotgunning breath between the new and the old, infant and elder, and we enter through the middle passage. Time is out of order. Slipstream. The mercantile ticking of the clock is a dead note on the floor. Alien to this temporality. We begin and we return to the Fourth World, ether, ancestral plane, spirit world, star map. Sky Woman fell from there. Another dimensionality. An otherwise. A whereas. A whereby. A whereupon. The bagonegiizhig is a piercing of the flesh of this kind of spacetime, galaxyflesh, celestialmilk. The wound a wormhole between this world and the next. And it was the cedar tree that was the instrumental bevel that tore through. Our embodied, planetary existence here, cedar our stepping stool, and the infinite homeland beyond. Our creation stories also exist here. That we come from the stars, having climbed down the bough, buoyant on our island. We are temporary. Migratory. And that we never came alone but with shepherding kin: animkiig,^[17] mishipeshu,^[18] nanabozho, star woman, meteorite, stone. As is the webbed constellation of the dreamcatcher, we exist in that continuum, fluxed, woven in and out and in-between temporality, braided between the strands, rooted, mothered, interconnected, constellatory.

We know monsters.

We know death.

We know the spool and this mound of thread.

And we birth tomorrow, mighty.

Notes:

^[1] For more information see George Catlin’s painting Dance to the Berdash (1835).

^[2] Carl Beam’s New World

^[3] Carl Beam

^[4] David Blandy’s Gathering Storm in which he uses “silent spring” to refer to the environmental destruction and harm to human and more-than-human lives through the introduction of pesticides

^[5] Blandy

^[6] Proverbs 16:24

^[7] Lyrics from Andrae Crouch’s “The Broken Vessel” utilized by Zheng.

^[8] Chung

^[9] For more information see “Black Water” from Ananda Devi’s Le Voile de Draupadi

^[10] Minerva Cuevas’s Del Montte—Bananeras

^[11] From Minerva Cuevas’ description of “el pulpo,” or the octopus, as metaphor for the United Fruit Company (UFC) having their tentacles around everything.

^[12] Inyang Essien’s Our Rice

^[13] Deborah Jack’s Foremothers

^[14] Aria Dean’s Dead Zone

^[15] Daniela Ortiz’s Rebellion of the Roots

^[16] For more information see Kent Monkman’s Being Legendary at the ROM (2022).

^[17] For more information see Daphne Odjig’s Spirit of the Mighty Thunderbird (1968).

^[18] For more information see Norval Morisseau’s Water Spirit (1972).