Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Carrying by Ada Limón

2019; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2019.0132

1945-8134

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish,

Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

be done within a country declared by its colonizers a little over two centuries ago to be Terra nullius. The first section, “whitework,” opens with the poem “blakwork ,” and establishes the dialectical labor Whittaker’s texts seek to perform: Fresh blakwork; industrial complexes hands with smooth and flat palm callouses. Soothing re— —conciliation. That dawdling off-trend meme, white guilt. To survive among it: well, it’s naff to say, but compul— —sory to do. Indentured blakwork, something like; nine to five, forgiv— —ing you. In this ever-necessary fight, here is a poet showing how the discourse of indigeneity must never be brought into the ideological service of epistemic whitework , nor simply subsumed by politically expedient gestures (a clear reference to then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s generations -late apology to indigenous peoples, made in 2008). Indeed, this book asserts a fastidious impulse and in that invaded, sheep-infested , bleating antipodean place of “nullius men” calling “oi there / boong-y slut—bra line legging line spaghetti strap / oi there!”, the tone remains aggressively elegiac, the styles always experimentally transgressive . In the section titled “the abattoir,” Whittaker momentarily shifts into prose fiction, perhaps indicating how, amid the barbarisms, so often the solace of poetry remains impossible: “We were hunters and gatherers and ecological strategists. Our old towns established by gubs to boil down tallow . Now, we gather up backstrap. We hunt cheap supermarket cuts. We adapt, always mediators of the squeamish line between life and the lives we have to take to keep living.” Perhaps this is the book’s greatest value, and Whittaker fearlessly provokes anew a conversation in which indigenous Australians can hope to do more than simply survive. She writes of how “Blakness [is] a code embedded in your bones,” the spelling signaling a disruptive dialogical intent that will function both orthographically and genetically, these cudgel-like poems empowering alternative modes of speaking, knowing, and being. In his blurb, John Kinsella suggests Blakwork “undoes all polite colonial conventions that have been used to mask the ongoing horror” and regards Whittaker’s poetry as “a living tool.” Perhaps this book is a key Ada Limón The Carrying Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 120 pages. ADA LIMÓN’S breathtaking new collection opens with “A Name,” a poem that asks whether Eve, when she named the animals, “ever wanted / them to speak back,” if she wanted to say to the animals, “Name me. Name me.” It is an appropriate opening piece because many of the poems are attempts at starting conversations, often about difficult matters. The poet repeatedly reaches out, to her readers, to flora and fauna, to her loved ones—the desire for connection, for generous reciprocity, is the dynamo that drives the book. The Carrying, as the title implies, explores the costs of the physical, emotional , psychological, cultural, and social burdens we carry. For Limón, this includes the inability to have a child, a “crooked spine,” disabling vertigo, and panic attacks. The collection also considers the gifts we receive, particularly from the natural world and from those we love. It also prods us to do our part to make a better world from the one we’re surviving in now. Of the sixty-two poems in the book, in at least thirty-six of them, nature imagery is central to the poem, often serving to introduce the turn. Limón’s relationship with natural things is expressed as an elemental kinship, one of the modes of connection expressed in the collection . In “Ancestors,” the poet declares she has “come from” rocks and trees and “the lacing patterns of leaves.” In “On a Pink Moon,” she plants seeds, one to “Cling and remind me— / We are the weeds.” She “root[s] / for that persecuted rosette” of the dandelion and finds peace while weeding her garden where even the humble burying beetle is recognized. It is impossible in this limited review to explicate the myriad ways in which nature in Limón’s poems is stubbornly itself—never romanticized —while, at the same time, serving as foundational imagery within the worlds of the poems. The speaker in these poems is richly embodied, sweating and hurting and feverish, a...