| Karen Connelly has come home. Sort of. After several years abroad – in Thailand, Greece and refugee camps on the Burmese border – the former Calgarian currently resides near the country's Western edge, in Victoria, where she's four years into her first novel. Its subject matter, however – Burmese political prisoners – isn't far from the central poems in her latest collection, The Border Surrounds Us. As refreshingly open and sincere as her poetry during a recent interview, Connelly spoke about the experiences behind the book, about borders of various kinds and about her ambivalence regarding the label "Canadian writer."
For many years Connelly says she struggled with being Canadian and what that meant, and felt that she might live abroad indefinitely. After winning a Governor General's Award for her travelogue, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, at the tender age of 22 (she wrote the book when 18), Connelly found herself relatively uninterested in "working the system." Early success, she discovered, bred "self-consciousness and the need to stay humble." Her latest poems aren't impeded by the former, and her experiences abroad obviously brought large doses of the latter. In Greece she says she was known as a person, not a writer, and as a foreign woman, moreover, she often felt voiceless.
But Connelly also recognized her privilege when living amongst Burmese tribes people combatting the voicelessness of cultural genocide, and condemned to a marginal existence along an embattled border. In language free from conceit and ornamentation Connelly records fragments of this life.
"Now," she writes, "the generals devour/the holy bones and jewels/ children's fingers, the tongues/and hearts of your people," while acknowledging that "A poem is not an escape path/nor a jungle to hide in./No explanation explains/and the poet presumes nothing."
As if confronted with the falsity of poetic devices in the face of brutal necessity, many of the poems about the border people are virtually documentary, avoiding, Connelly hopes, the estheticization of violence and of the silenced others on behalf of whom she speaks.
The simplicity and sincerity enforced by Connelly's experience in the camps inform other poems in the collection, which take us from Greece to Turkey, Alberta to Algiers and the streets of Paris. Often about internal borders – "the blurred but authentic lines / between what we are and what we must become" – these poems share a similar freedom from meta-poetic hocus pocus, and retrace, often luminously, the borders between the mundane and miraculous, fear and elation, life and death.
Connelly's subjects and settings may not be wholly unique amongst her contemporaries, but the style that walks, and often dances on, the border between lyricism and the sincerely simple arguably distinguishes her work from the mass coming out of the major houses and workshops.
When asked if a "uniformity of sensibility" – about which Newfoundland writer Kenneth J. Harvey complained during last year's Giller and G.G. ballyhoo – infects Canadian poetry as much as it may mainstream Canadian prose, Connelly answers "Canadian poetry irritates me. And you can quote me on that."
Despite her newfound sense of belonging in Canada, Connelly obviously isn't any more comfortable with whatever being a Canadian writer may mean. But one thing it may mean is something that she demonstrates: a sensitivity to the ways in which landscapes – geographical and political – shape the self.
"All landscape inhabits us," she writes in the collection's title poem, recalling a childhood truck ride across the open earth of prairie with her mother "flying dragon-like / through twilight / cigarette smoke rising / from her nostrils / the cracked grain of her voice:/ If the prairie is this wide/ imagine the world. / Twenty years later, I begin / to fathom what she meant."
If Connelly is still ambivalent about national labels, the borders that surround us, her poetic landscape – a pastiche of borderlands, liminal zones, sun-scorched Greek islands and wintry Canadian prairie – allows us to inhabit territories and experiential spaces beyond "the hardest frontiers to cross... the ones inside our skin." |
