Each morning when I come to work, I walk past entrances to numerous hospitals, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, and a clutch of Christian institutions housed within the University of Toronto. To my left is Queen’s Park, where who knows how many people reside in half a dozen tents. Some are new, taut, and bright, while others’ broken poles flag between bits of old furniture. To my right, outside the Lieutenant Governor’s office, there are two nineteenth-century cannons. Painted black to prevent them from rusting, they aim more or less toward the park and the people who live there.
If I was still a poetry professor in an MFA program, I could probably write about all of this as part of my paid work. My professionally sanctioned research output could take the form of a lyric poem whose line breaks lead inevitably into some sort of epiphany. Or maybe it would be a jagged cento made up of the text on different signs, historical markers commemorating “la grève des typographes” cutting against flyers for “anarchist piano lessons.” Another idea: I could put together a site-specific, locodescriptive project that would surface original placenames and point to where now-subterranean streams bubble up and flood from beneath the concrete.
There’s nothing stopping me from writing any of these texts, of course, except that now I teach comparative literature. I’m certainly free to write as much poetry as I want, but whatever deep thoughts I may have about my morning commute are best left outside the door—safely deposited, perhaps, on the bench in front of the library next to the statue of Northrop Frye. As anyone who’s ever read a monograph can probably attest, the details of our immediate surroundings tend to make it into literary studies scholarship only as minor anecdotes, if they make it in at all.
In my book Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form, I wanted to find a way of writing that was a bit more grounded—a bit more responsive to the conditions of its own production. Poetry is not usually imagined as a way of increasing one’s analytical capacity, but I think that it can be, and I wanted to see whether the methods of creative writing and those of literary scholarship could be brought a bit closer together. My thought was that the writerly practices we scholars study can be more than just objects of knowledge. They can be taken up, shared and used—integrated into our projects. A work of scholarship might not be improved by line breaks, but what if it began from an image, a poignant moment, or a strange coincidence, like a poem does? Maybe it could partake of the impulse to document so often seen in the poetry of the past century. Obviously, this wouldn’t work for every kind of project, but I write about literature that is being produced now. It seems both obvious and necessary that my work should be firmly connected to the practices of people who are writing today, and that it should begin from what is close at hand.
The image that obsessed me throughout the decade during which I wrote Here Is a Figure is one that is ubiquitous not just in the parks outside my work, not just in the news that flashes up from my phone, but in the pages of the books that I read and teach. The figures that are insistently here in my book are the bodies laid out on the ground all around us. We have seen so many of them lately that it seems both impossible and wrong to ignore them. People will blink past the tents in Queen’s Park, although their figuration of our societal failings is a stark one. But the 63-day student encampment just across the street in King’s College Circle from last summer still excises the powerful and afflicts the comfortable. Similar to a die-in, the protestors’ tents and their positions on the ground dragged the genocide of Palestinians dramatically into view, putting it at the symbolic center of our campus. These neighboring camps reveal the paradox of high-beam visibility and total disavowal that often structures our view of those who are laid out. There is the sick, bright ubiquity—seemingly always someone struck down, their body grotesquely spread for all to see. There is the blunt horror of representativeness, that what we have seen, what we do see daily is only a tiny fraction of some unknowable total. There is the flat repetition of the awful image, whose capacity to provoke feelings will never be the same as making it stop.
As I wrote this book, I spent years looking for more recumbency, expecting always to be exhausted by our endless aptitude for innovating new and devastating forms of victimization. Instead, I found myself surprised by the ways that supine and prone figures—even those composed by the most politically radical writers—tend to cluster up with well-established images of luxury and repose. To give just one example, I write about the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, musician, and intellectual Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which is narrated by a person frozen into the ice of Lake Ontario after “tragedy happened again.” Simpson rose to prominence during the Idle No More movement, and is a preeminent theorist of Indigenous resurgence, so it surprised me that her narrator’s bodily position explicitly evokes the odalisques of nineteenth-century painting, and the sick person retreating into a rest cure. In moments, it even suggests the contemplative posture of the patient on their analyst’s couch. Noopiming offers a powerful counterweight against the insistent relentlessness of subjugation: the narrator’s pose helps us picture processes of resting up and regeneration. The many characters in this novel who lie down on the ground forge intimate connections with their territory that contest the ways the state has split them from it. Here, lying down configures a kind of steadfastness, a refusal to be moved.
Noopiming is partly set in Toronto, and many of the figures who populate the novel live under the Gardiner Expressway, a poorly-planned elevated highway that cuts the city off from Lake Ontario. When my train trundles parallel to the Gardiner, I see the people Simpson writes about trying to scrape survival off the edges of our infrastructure. I wanted to write about Noopiming because I admire Simpson’s commitment to looking around, to taking stock, to documenting what’s happening, and to finding a form adequate to its conveyance. This groundedness in material circumstance is shared by all the texts I discuss—poems, plays, novels, performances. What I really wanted for Here Is a Figure—what I hope that this book does—is to stay correspondingly rooted in the world that it comes from, to stay responsive and responsible to the world’s demands. What I hope the book offers is a kind of embeddedness, a refusal to be untouched. It took poetry to get here; I think it will take poetry to stay.
SARAH DOWLING is an assistant professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto and the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, as well as several books of poetry, including Entering Sappho.
Here Is a Figure
How Story Can Break Free From Landscape: On Setting as the Origin of Narrative by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum