Garry Thomas Morse's Multilingual Writing

At Jacket2, Sarah Dowling thinks through multilingual writing in the poetry of Garry Thomas Morse, and argues that "In asking that we attend to the untranslatable, to the unassimilable, multilingual writing also asks whose languages we are speaking, what languages aren't we hearing, which histories are contained within a word. To read multilingual writing is to trace the soft and sometimes permeable boundaries of our own ignorance." For Dowling, a poem that makes these complications most urgent is Garry Thomas Morse's "500 Lines," which brings English and Indigenous languages in contact. She writes:

In my view, one of the most fascinating contemporary multilingual poems is Garry Thomas Morse's "500 Lines," which is the final poem in his book Discovery Passages. This book documents the stolen worlds of Morse's ancestors, retracing Captain George Vancouver's sailing route along the Pacific Northwest coast, from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, B.C. The book uses a variety of documentary and appropriative procedures, but "500 Lines" consists almost entirely of one repeated phrase: "I will not speak Kwak'wala." It appears 500 times, consuming nearly eleven single-spaced pages. Through the spare, conceptual technique of repetition, we are invited to imagine this sentence as a punishment: hard chalk clicking against the board, breaking and crumbling all the way around the classroom. A student has been caught speaking her mother tongue, and this is the cruel result. But Morse's poem doesn't represent any one student; rather, it represents the incarceration of First Nations children in residential schools, and the resulting decline of Indigenous languages in Canada.

[...]

Morse's "500 Lines" directs our attention away from individual psychology and instead impels us toward the archives of policy and procedure, toward techniques of colonization and their ongoing effects. This poem avoids conferring subjectivity upon the young student or students whose punishment it depicts; there is no self or subject in the poem to anchor the experience. Instead, "500 Lines" attends to the rigorous distinction between "Indians" and "persons" codified in Canada's Indian Act (1876), and the ways in which this distinction was used to extinguish property rights and self-determination. This poem's relentless, desubjectivized form suggests the repetitive, systematic character of linguistic and cultural genocide, which was attempted — not to say accompished — through everyday punishments like the one depicted in this poem.

Head to Jacket2 to read on!