The Point: June 2008

Monday, June 23, 2008

Sauvage

All right, I'm about to get all NPR on you.

On Friday I was riding my bike home from work, and I almost literally ran into strawberry season. I was riding by the Peterborough Artspace, and I saw this sort of epic sculpture made out of plump, poised red berries, and I noticed a sign out front that implied, 'Come in - something is new and there might be a handful of fruit in it for you.' I immediately parked my bike to investigate.

I walked in and admired some of the acrylic paintings hanging of places I was familiar with, but with all of their English and French names erased. Instead, they were painted over with older names, a few of which seemed vaguely familiar (Tyendenaga, something that sounded like Ottawa) but most of which were totally foreign to me. But they were all around this place where I am living now. Someone came in to offer up the plates of strawberries for the taking if we were hungry. I took a paperplateful. I kept looking and sucked all that sour sweet red nectar off my fingers. Standing with a friend I'd run into staring at one of the paintings of two different maps of the Great Lakes region, my friend asked me what we were looking at. A woman came up beside us and said, 'Turtle Island.'

Within a few minutes I was surrounded by about 40 more people, and just when I thought I was going to collapse from the heat of all those bodies, the woman who'd announced the upforgrabsness of the fruit welcomed everybody into the space and told us she was proud to host this, artist Christi Belcourt's showing, as the kickoff for the weekend long Ode'min Giizis, or Strawberry Moon, festival. There was more prayers and songs in Anishnaabe and then Christi took us all upstairs to see a slideshow of her family and their story.

She was from Curve Lake, a First Nation not far from here, but her parents and her grandparents never taught her their language (which I gather was Ojibwe, but don't quote me on that). In this tepid but much needed debate that started about the legacy of residential schools in Canada after Harper apologised on behalf of the Canadian people this month, it was powerful for me to see and hear the loss in her voice and in the pictures she showed of this sudden break in the continuity of her family history. It reminded me of the breaks in my own family's continuity, severed nerves that should have linked me back to Hakka, to Danish, to Gaelic, to Dutch and lord knows what else. To feel that immediacy of sensing that something unknowable is lost and can never really be brought back.

She talked about her experience trying to relearn the names of places around North America, or Turtle Island, that they had before the Europeans arrived. About her art's attempts to reconcile her past and this deep well of collective memory she was trying to tap into that was cut off from her by centuries of settlers claiming ownership over 'true' naming rights on this land, claiming the right to say what the real names are of the rivers and moraines and forests they met. She showed us a film her husband made of her painting a work she called 'So much depends upon who holds the shovel.'

The night after that it rained, and it rained hard. Lately I seem to be just missing it as I bike home; as soon as I get inside my building, I can hear the thunder and feel the pressure change and the wind shift and suddenly it's a torrential downpour outside and I worry about rust. It was dark outside, pretty late at night and I was on my laptop when suddenly lightning cracked not far away (thank you, science lessons I learned from Poltergeist) and all the lights went out inside my apartment and outside on the street. I went to the window to watch the world for a little while surviving without the permanent orange twilight. By the time I'd thought to get dressed and get my keys, everything had flickered and rumbled back to electrical life.

Sunday night was the end of the strawberry festival, and it was kind of funny to see so many people's eyes light up getting directions to U-Pick strawberry fields and buying our little green plastic baskets fresh from Havelock or wherever and just savouring that juicy burst of flavour that just makes you stop and savour this moment, happening right now, not going anywhere at all but over your tongue. My friend Thalia and I were speculating as to why the seeds of a strawberry are all on the outside. She guessed that they're probably just too lazy to grow flesh over the whole thing.

Headlining the last concert of the festival was Cambridge Bay-born 'Edith Piaf-like' throat-singing goddess of the esophagus Tanya Tagaq. Tagaq played with Björk for quite some time touring for Vespertine and collaborating on a capella electronic opera Medúlla, which is about as much work for the untrained ear to enjoy as you might imagine but well worth the journey. It was my first time seeing her play live, and I was pretty pumped because my friend June interviewed her last summer for her radio show on CJSR when she played at the Edmonton Folk Fest, and she just sounded like the craziest, funniest woman, someone who did what she did well and wasn't afraid to do it boldly and still make fun of herself. (June, did you ever get to air it?)

Good lord was it wilder than I could have ever imagined. A few friends of mine went to, and when I told them I couldn't find a seat in the cramped little bar, they said it didn't matter, because we'd be up dancing before long anyway. Dancing? For a singer whose music was mostly grunts and groans and wails?

She came on stage and told us she was 'about to bleed.' Her words. She rubbed her belly. She said she loved being a woman. She's got this deceptively squeaky, adorable voice that she used to tell us how in love she was with her body and being who she was. At the time, of course, she was strutting around in a zip-up black top and the shortest hot pants you've ever seen, with a red hairband though her hair (which I guess was somewhat thematically appropriate with her new album out called Auk/Blood) and a polar bear claw bracelet. It looked like a dagger.

At that point, Tagaq let the cellist and the beatboxer introduce themselves 'sonically,' and she honestly looked so excited, it was like she'd never heard them play before. And then without any clear transition, they started riffing off one another, taking leads from one another, and before I knew it the whole room had swelled and she was on her knees and people were swaying back and forth and sure enough, there were women up dancing around and around. A baby was crying behind me, and I thought of the lightning and I thought of the joy of those strawberries and the sound of a voice and the incredible sexiness of this woman who really and completely owned her body and every sound it made. And I thought of this author David Gessner, who talks about how all of us can live with these wild moments in our lives every day, this wildnerness, that keeps us alive. The sound of grief. The squeal of birth. The pop of a seed sizziling in hot oil. A lover's touch.

Wild moments.