Shani Mootoo talks to Sharon Berg about her poetry latest title.
1. The writing in Cane Fire sorts out various issues of space on the page devoted to text, space between line breaks, the position of visual and graphic elements, the sounds and words employed, and repetition of various elements in a different way than a traditional text would. At times one wonders if you are closer to prose than poetry, at other times it seems closer to graffiti than art. Interestingly, many people who create graffiti are being recognised as artists lately. Do you see a similar process toward freedon from convention in poetry?
While I respect and delight in some of the traditional conventions of the poetry of what we think of as the western world, the world as a whole has changed because of massive migrations of peoples–with exchanges and clashes of cultures, knowledges, experiences, desires, expectations. It is imperative, I believe, that categories of forms become and remain flexible, open, otherwise a gated community is enforced. This will only exclude. To open the gates is to be open to new ways, new possibilities, to, yes, hybridity of genres even–and inevitably to new forms, which will require of audiences a mirrored openness and willingness.
2. The way you’ve laid out the text in Cane Fire invites a different response. Often your work intrigues, but at times this book is disturbing in the way it breaks a variety of expectations in designing poetry books. You include visual artwork in ways that are uncommon, even for visual poetry. Even the illustrations are cropped up to focus on different elements within a larger picture. Clearly, you’re not using ‘traditional forms’, yet poetry usually asserts a form, however loosely. Is your experimentation simply innate and intuitional? Have you discovered an approach to form you could share with others?
I came to writing out of a long practice of artmaking that was personally and in community fairly experimental. It was a time of minority-identified artists in Canada insisting on and being given a ‘voice,’ finally. It was highly unlikely that many of us would succumb, once we got the platform, to using ‘traditional’ voices to speak. New ways and experimentation were necessary. Throughout time, as in forever, conventions in the arts have been broken by artists in every field. In any case, we live in a time when much of what we do is determined by algorithms that dictate to us as artists, designers, writers, musicians, creative people in general, what sells. We give people what they want, and if we dare to challenge, it is in the tiniest increments, preparing to groom them, yet again, for the purpose of business. This is the death of creativity. When I work, when I work best in fact, is when I put on blinders, and trust that the knowledge and experience I have in all my previous artmaking and appreciating, and writing and reading, will come into something akin to an innate and/or intuitional question and answer approach to working.
3, You’ ve written and won awards for several novels before releasing Cane Fire, a book of poetry. Shazia Hafiz Ramji says in her article about Cane Fire and you in Quill and Quire “Interrupting the linearity of narrative and meaning is second nature to Mootoo.” Yet, several reviewers on Goodreads (some saying they’ve enjoyed your fiction) have panned this book as ‘pretentious’ in its word-play. Or they’ve dismissed it because “it didn’t sing for me, didn’t dance for me, didn’t excite.” That has to affect you. How do you reconcile your need to experiment with form when delivering what are clearly very personal messages with this sort of negative response to your experimentation?
It saddens me that you would assume that this particular criticism has to affect me. An artist is like a child, it is true, and loves praise rather than criticism, but I hope I have also grown up to be able to parse censure, as well as praise. At the same time, I have never thought of myself as being, or have I desired to be, at anyone’s service. Writing and artmaking for me are not business ventures. My desire is to push boundaries and break conventions, to be free. The notion of pretentiousness levelled at artists, and in particular ‘othered’ artists, suggests that we should not presume to step out of our supposed place. One has to ask what is at stake in such policing. At the same time, of course I want to communicate, and I am always aware of this as a guiding force, which keeps me from speaking to myself. If I were to be speaking only to myself, I don’t think I would have the audiences I do have, nor the accolades you point out. I really do see my work, the verb of it, all of it, as seriously challenging the prisons that have confined and tried to control people like myself with my several minority positions. I have never wanted to be a dancer for the people—as much as I love people, and long for interaction with even those who do not want to interact with me. Perhaps that last is my ultimate desire. For that kind of willingness, or suspension of disbelief, between us all.
4. How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point, or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
When I began the book, as with all my others, I did not think about audience, a final product or publication. If I work with the world out there on my eyeball, I would not be able to think. At the end of a work, I can only hope that at least a few people will connect with it. Perhaps the stories within the poems are mirrors of theirs too. Perhaps the book will appeal because of how space, page, image, ideas, words come together to create an aesthetic resonance.
5. Was there a specific incident or experience or series of events that inspired this work? What was the development process for the inspiration to become this newest collection?
It is usual for me to believe, quite honestly, at the end of writing a book, that it is the last book I will ever write. While I love writing, there are other kinds of creative works I ache to be doing, but writing projects have a way of taking over one’s life. Upon finishing the last book (Polar Vortex) I would ever write (or so I said yet again), I became quite ill. For the next two years, I grew progressively worse. Test after test provided no diagnosis. By the time I was, finally, diagnosed–with sarcoidosis–I could barely walk from one room to the next. Once treatment began and I was strong enough to work, I was compelled to embark on a project I’d long dreamed of doing and for the sheer love of it. Not for career or accolades, but for love of art, words, play. I wanted to honor people from my past, to record early memories, to play, to treat the page as if it were a canvas for all that moved and made me. That was how Cane Fire came about.
6. What would you say is the most fundamental difference between your earlier work and this new collection?
Cane Fire is a merging of the various genres in which I have worked. One of the differences is that it is not one entire thing or another. Cane Fire blends poetry with prose with attention to the page as a canvas with image-based works, visual art and photography, all with the desire to try and make images work like words, and words work visually—yet in a different way than concrete poetry. The act of making this book, the process, is more akin, at the same time, to my early art-making days when experimentation, breaking, bending and redefining were a major part of my method. The freedom I felt that caused me to begin work on what would become Cane Fire was simply a sudden and unexpected gift.
7. What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
Five volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Peter Doig and Derek Walcott’s Morning, Paramin, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, Vahni Capildeo’s Like a Tree Walking.
8. Other than finding the most effective way of reaching a version of ‘truth’, were you conscious of any particular literary ambitions e.g., developing a distinctive voice or a narrative style or disrupting standard reader expectations of the genre?
I am not the kind of writer who can actually set out to do any of these things in a work or body of work. Over time one naturally develops a voice. To consciously set out to develop a distinctive voice seems like a painful and, if it doesn’t fully serve the art, a dishonest endeavor to me. The emergence of a narrative style should be, to my mind, a delightful discovery, a long-life–rather than a conscious–pursuit. When I began writing and making art, I didn’t know that I would arrive at a particular style or voice, but after the fact I can say that one need only trust that this will naturally develop if one works consistently. I have come to see, that this will happen.
9. How do you see this work situating itself in terms of genre, literary ideas, time and place and literary history?
Perhaps room will be made for what makes these times unique– a time of hybridity, of breaching the boundaries, of opening the gates, of returning to the child in us who delights in surprising ourselves and others rather than striving to succeed in the business that the arts has become where one is encouraged to think about legacy.
10. How would you like this book to be taught – as a historical document, socio-political document or as a document about a certain kind of taste in writing or particular aesthetic, genre, literary style or something else?
Why limit oneself to only one of these? Why not all? Because if it were to be taught at all, it can certainly be taught in any of these ways. Anything can be, and perhaps should be. Oh, it could also be a thesis on love and longing, too.
Shani Mootoo, born in Ireland, grew up in Trinidad. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Predicament of Or, and the latest, Cane | Fire. She is the author of several novels, including Cereus Blooms at Night, now a Penguin Modern Classic, and Polar Vortex, both shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized widely. She is the recipient of a Dr. James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Award and has been awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Western University. Mootoo lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.