CURRENT ISSUE

The Experience of Remembering:
Stephanie Erickson interviews
Jennifer Gossoo

I notice how, for most of this poem, the speaker tells of their Nôhkom in present tense, where the last two stanzas switch to past tense. How do you consider the experience of remembering in this poem? Further, as a poet, how do you feel our experience of time helps us to engage with grief and memory?

For the majority of the poem, I reminisce about my grandmother as I do when I’m alone: “Nôhkom has a small brown face.” “Nôhkom serves orange Tang from a can.” She is alive and present in these memories. The experience of remembering was essential to (and nearly synonymous with) the poem’s creation. Each stanza is composed of those images which define my grandmother most wholly in my memory, and which, I hope, convey her essence accurately to a reader. Of course, enough time has passed that this accuracy can be achieved, those memories can be accessed and creatively communicated. Grief has its time, but it’s no good writing from that place if you value clarity and objectivity in your writing practice, as I do.

This poem engages the reader with Nôhkom’s character in a strong and personable way. Can you speak to how you understand the relationship between your poetic practice and the practice of remembering more broadly?

The practice of remembering and the practice of writing poetry are similar creative acts. Both practices rely upon the medium of imagination to recall, relive, recolour, and retell one’s lived experiences and observations; the two practices feed one another. I think that my (and many) poetic practices rely upon the practice of remembering to record those memories which have become poetic fodder with the passage of time.

Is there something in the medium of poetry that allows you to hold multiple experiences at the same time? For example, Nôhkom seems to be friendly with the coyotes but have a vaguely adversarial relationship with the bear. Elsewhere she shares of the lights in the sky over Candy Mountain and her version of the valley hoodoos relative to a science teacher. What do you think of poetry’s capacity to hold space for multiple and sometimes contradictory ways of knowing and being in the world, and how does this serve Indigenous poets specifically?

As a medium, poetry can be used in various ways—I like to use it as a storytelling (or re-telling) device. When your goal is to descriptively convey aspects of life to your reader, then it’s necessary that your writing be able to hold multiple (human) experiences. I favour freeform poetry for conveying short strokes of information in a flowing story format. I used this format to hold my grandmother’s varied experiences: she was chummy with the coyotes and in a turf war with the bears; she valued fresh air and smoked a pack a day; she weighed about 99 pounds and exuded toughness. These contrary facts are essential in painting an accurate portrait of her, and poetry is the creative framework in which they can be painted. This framework might prove especially valuable to Indigenous poets in communicating the polarity of knowing and being from within a culture shaped, for many years, by colonization.

In what ways does your Métis identity interact with your experience living on Okanagan Syilx Territory, and how does this inform your poetry craft?

I moved to the Okanagan in 2020 to complete my degree online when the pandemic closed UVic. Despite spending the first 19 years of my life in the Nicola Valley, the ancestral territory of the N’laka’pamux and Syilx people, I didn’t hear a territorial acknowledgement until my first year of university at the age of 25. I was already aware of and interested in my Métis heritage through my grandparents, but this awareness deepened and expanded during my university experience; I’ve since become deeply interested in the pre-colonial history of the land/s I inhabit, as a child of both Métis and settler ancestries. This interest has translated to the goal of familiarizing Canadian readers with aspects of Indigenous culture through creative mediums, like poetry and fiction (for example, introducing my grandmother in Michif: nôhkom).

To me, as a Métis reader, this poem reads with a slight tilt towards what I know as village English (a Métis speaking of the English language found in villages as described by Maria Campbell in Stories of the Road Allowance People 1995), lines like “don’t open no windows” and “but I seen her chase a griz in her mocs”. Can you speak to your choices of grammatical structure in the poem and how you see the relevance of this writing style in preserving cultural memory in poetic practices?

The grammatical structure in this poem is based purely on my grandmother’s speech. Her vocabulary consisted of words like “ain’t” and “skookum,” and phrases like “she weren’t” and “it don’t feel like.” It felt like the natural thing to write about Loretta in her own voice; the poem isn’t just about her—it is her. While I wrote Loretta Lee / Nôhkom without intending to reference a cultural speaking style, I think that contemporary Canadian literature could be made richer and more culturally accurate with the inclusion of speech styles and writing traditions specific to Indigenous cultures across Canada.

How do you hope Métis readers will engage with this poem?

I hope that readers with Métis ancestry, like myself, might see aspects of their own experience growing up in a tiny Canadian town on unceded territory. Maybe a reader will be reminded of their own grandmother who wore deerskin moccasins and smoked like a chimney in her trailer. My main, and original, hope for anyone who reads this poem is simply to meet my nôhkom, Loretta, as I feel like I’m sitting down for a visit with her every time I re-read it.

 

 

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