Cecily Nicholson Clip 2
Details
Cecily Nicholson Clip 2
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Cecily Nicholson Clip 2: |
| Name | Cecily Nicholson |
| Name | Dr Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Cecily Nicholson |
| Abstract | In this second clip of the interview, Nicholson touches on topics such as space, colonial history, poetry, and settler language. The discussion then shifts to comment on language use—in particular thinking of the language used in regards to the non-human elements of space. |
| Extent | 10:53 Minutes |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | JL: When you’re thinking of non-indigenous and yet non-white space, especially in this sort of really fraught zone that we know of as Vancouver. What do you think, and you spoke of responsibility but also about having certain forms of power that you obviously want to use in ways, for the good, and you were saying “the people.” What kinds of complexities do you think still need to be thought through or that you’re still sort of thinking through when we think about you know sort of diasporic and indigenous solidarities in this space. Especially through artistic production, cultural production, literary production, in ways that balance that kind of that colonial history. 0:45 CN: Well, and I think that’s, those are really important questions. In a fraught context, maybe not the lower mainland, but in North America, turtle island, you know, globally. We’re not gonna escape these / any context geographically or relative to a nation state or municipal province. So that said, I feel like I carry this no matter where I am. We carry it. This moment is important. I think we’re at a rapid—what is it? I don’t want to say growth or development because these words are all co-opted, but strengthening of our, I’m gonna say discourse and our language, and I mean so much more than that and the materiality, but I see the ways in which we’re talking and relating is shifting. Collective we. I’m saying, just in the realm of cultural production, say even just in the realm of poetry and poetry writing. We have an interest in... I mean, we use language like “decolonisation.” I’m also very interested in the anti-colonial and I want to think through also the non-colonial and think through all those kinds of examples or methodologies as possibly existing in many occasions without me being present. So, I want to support spaces and projects and agency and autonomy that may exclude me as well. However, in many ways, in many intersections, it needs to include me and that history or that trajectory I was talking about in terms of ancestry, because our histories are entwined relative to these systems of colonisation, imperialism, and capitalism. We’re entwined in ways that we understand increasingly that might be necessary to continue to be entwined in our collaborations if we are to truly dismantle some of these structures. Collaboration, we can’t demand it, we can’t simply be present as allies and have that sort of line up with what “let’s get together and do this.” It’s not something I direct, it’s something we work on collectively with agreement or not, or with agreement, rather, or we don’t work on it. I think that the particular experience for a black, and in my case, it’s a convoluted sort of realisation of black identity, definitely I understand and think about it in terms of diasporic experience. I think of it as um cultural and an integral legacy for me in terms of existence and survival. I think of it in terms of economy and our relationship to political economy and the long-standing outcomes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, in doing, and just a very careful observation of the difference between, um, what an immigration experience might be, what a migrant experience might be, what is a non-status migrant experience and so on. And what is the experience of being the descendants of slaves? So, forced—not just forced migrations, not strong enough language—enslavement of people who have been enslaved. Has been foundational to the foundations of the nation state, including Canada absolutely. And all our colonial relations globally, so here we are. So, it’s really important for me, personally, to think that through and to not set that aside and think of it as being subsumed in a broad category of “settler.” And so, it’s less the indigenous / non-indigenous that I’m focused on. I think what I’m agitated by at this current moment is assumptions and projections of a broad notion of “settler,” particularly if that comes from non-black and non-indigenous community. So, um and I would say especially when it comes with privileges of white passing, class, status, and um great mobility, socially, and political and cultural mobility. Which many many many peoples do not have. So, when it comes from those positions of power, and so, for example, in academia—is very adept at talking about lots of things around settler colonialism—somehow is failing still to really understand a broad vision of what a settler—an anti-settler colonialism would actually entail. Because it must entail other colonised bodies, both as complicit and as subject, and of course it would spill out beyond the black or African decent experience of people who have black or African descent. For sure, so there’s more to think about there as well. But for my own, I’ll speak just to my own experience and for me it is an absolutely isolating problem, um and that problem is heightened back to the nation-state, back to this region and back to Vancouver. It’s heightened here. Because anti-blackness and anti-black racism in Vancouver is insidious and very much unresolved. 5:58 JL: That’s a great response to that. Clearly a very difficult question to think through [CN and JL talk over top each other about this being difficult to think through]. I mean, I really appreciate the kind of specificity of the language and the histories that you’re bringing into that response, and one of the things that I really love about your work, um, is you manage to weave through that thinking or that processing with an extremely specific language about the landscape that you find yourself surrounded in, particularly in the text. And I would love to hear you speak more about that. To think about that language of place the specificity of words identifying particular kinds of non-human aspects of the plants, of the materiality of that space, and I was really interested in thinking, in wanting to ask you how in your mind has that come through as well? So, you’re thinking about this sort of really complicated and painful and difficult human history of colonisation and occupation in the lower mainland and Vancouver, but then you’re also thinking of these really non-human elements, these plants, these animals, these the rocks, the water. And how does that, in your mind—how do those things fit together for you? 7:17 CN: Well, they just do, for starters. So, it’s kind of the magic of existence that somehow, you know—repairing ecology, for example, is of course present simultaneous to massive shipping industry and the paper mill factory. It’s all there, still. And for me it is a kind of magic in a long sense of it and I would say in terms of a profoundly grounding sense and it directly relates to poetry and the reasons why for poetry from a young age, for me, there’s an opportunity to see or to take what I observe in the sensory relative to the non-human and to heighten that awareness because it’s been integral to my existence, my survival, and all of my continuation. I do not find—I could not find fullness in terms of joy if I didn’t have that grounding in the quote unquote natural world—the language fails us. [JL “yes” laughing]. And that is a problem and also why poetry, the language does fail us, and so, I am embedded and entrenched in my thinking, and world views as informed by the English language. That is a deep and psychological and, you know, unextractable thing for me. So, um poetry does become an opportunity to really start to break down and engage in a different way than the regular syntax of everyday economy and life allows us to do. But it’s also a kind of adhesive or glue or continuity that creates. So when you’re working through the stutter scales of economy, industry, human settlement, or um you know, when you’re looking at these kind of systematic or systems, it would be a—I think almost a terrible project to read the book that just studies that. I mean, I have a long history in terms of my education, I did a lot of studies relative to political economy and economics and business and these kinds of broad views, and I really value thinking like that and that kind of knowledge. But at the end of the day, I can’t think like that or write like that and feel um thorough in being, in what I’m witnessing, I guess. And I am interested in what makes us, not just what makes us engage, but also what makes us thrive. For me, art and poetics is an aspect of that help me thrive. There is beauty, all the time. It’s always present. And when it’s not, maybe beauty is one of those words like nature—what am I actually saying?—things that are astounding or extraordinary or heartbreaking, the simplest of things, like the salmon run—which is not happening in the north arm of the Fraser, by the way—but just there’s these intense emotional connections to just the regular cycles of the world for me, and so, if there’s any way to help to think through language and help connect that to other people, collectively to readers or other poets or whatever it is, then um I’ve lucked out in terms of what my practice might be doing. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr Joanne Leow |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| Subject Local Name | ------Ecology--Natural World--Poetry--Mobility--Culture--Settler--Language--Economy--Identity--Space--Diasporic--History---- |