Community’s safety and ‘swagger’ questioned

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This article was published 23/11/2024 (312 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In cop city swagger (Talonbooks, 136 pages, $20), Mercedes Eng uses documentary and testimonial practices to expose the harm done by the connection of municipal politics, policing and capital accumulation. The specific term “swagger” comes both from Ken Sim, Vancouver’s first Asian-Canadian mayor, as well as the CEO of the Resonance consulting firm, who says “swagger is an increasingly important factor that helps attract people and investment.”

In contrast to publicly available Vancouver city documents, wherein the safety of the well-off is inextricably bound to violence against marginalized people, Eng considers how true safety might emerge with fury and urgency “because people of colour with mental illnesses are not safe from the police who hurt and kill us, who do not leave us// intact, unharmed, in good health, still alive.”

Early in the collection, Eng begins to introduce a counter point to the swagger the mayor calls for. In these poems, she invokes dead elders from the Chinese community and from the Gitxan Nation, to give “advice on cultivating hope.” The elders in these poems, Popo Su and Muriel Marjorie, come back throughout cop city swagger as models of an ethical vision of care, abolition and solidarity.

As a symbol of this vision, Eng describes Su and Muriel’s odyssey to rescue police dogs and robot dogs, at the end of which the pack disperses: “some form poh poh protection squads,/ several congregate in Chinatown and the DTES to keep unhoused/ people and low-income people safe.”

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Jody Chan’s impact statement (Brick, 160 pages, $24), examines carceral structure of psychiatry. Using erasure, documentary and lyric poems, they expose the the coercive power behind this supposedly protective system.

Chan explores some of the consequences in the way mental illness is used to criminalize people of minority races, sexualities and genders. In A Community Witnesses they break the silence of the page by emphasizing that people’s material conditions are rooted in their marginalization. Chan also makes space for resistance and survival: “a person can survive so much living// / // yes, if we must/ we will go on grieving forever//.”

Early in Glossary, Chan refuses the bloodless euphemism of such terms as “psychiatric assessment,” “medical debt,” “mandatory reporting” and others. Under the heading “psychiatric assessement,” that “the police administrator says, compliance can be best achieved through/ tactics of terror. / the doctor says, if you are at risk of hurting yourself or others we have to/ call the police.” This forms the backdrop against which a speaker seeking treatment must lie “about wanting to die to keep myself safe.”

Throughout impact statement, a ghost chorus of people across history gathers force and momentum. This chorus historicizes and resists the concept and treatment of mental illness, and it centres those marginalized by its strictures: “the city knows what it’s seen —/ beneath soil and scratch, flashback/ and concrete, remnants of her and me/ and you and we.”

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In Baby Cerberus (Wolsak and Wynn, 88 pages, $20), Natasha Ramoutar presents a vision of revolutionary softness. These poems reel through space and myth, past and future, tracing kinship between people, animals, monsters and the universe itself. “I think reverence is built// in both love and pain. I think kinship is when I/ am looking through a window at you, and see myself// looking back.”

The if/then logical structure Ramoutar uses in Medusa Doesn’t Kill Spiders evokes the riddles around which she structures the collection: “If this is a riddle with two truths and a lie/ then does that make me a liar?” As the subsequent couplets proceed, Ramoutar brings together two Ovidian transformations — Medusa’s transformation into a monster and Arachne’s transformation into a spider — into a kinship, which pushes the poem’s governing structure from one that points to an answer or a definition to one that invites an act of solidarity: “If this were meant to be a mercy// but we know better, then let’s scheme.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.