Caribbean Beat — November/December 2021 (#167)

Yet, as much as Lubrin maintains Toronto is
still a hard locale, she unsurprisingly loves the
woven pattern of its many languages. She delights
in telling me that, here, “You can walk through
Portuguese, then streets away you’re in Spanish,
in Hindi, in Cantonese. There’s something magical
about a place where this is the ordinary.”
From the streets to the library stacks, Lubrin
actively sought language, finding a revelation
in the poetry and prose of Trinidad-born writer
Dionne Brand. Up to that point in her undergraduate
career, there was but one Derek Walcott poem
on the syllabus, “Forest of Europe”, and Brand had
not been explicitly taught. It was only following
an urgent recommendation from her teaching
assistant on a satire course, Stephanie Hart, that
Lubrin “ran, not walked” to the library, seizing
No Language is Neutral and Land to Light On, reading
the former in one fell swoop. She laughs at
the recollected miracle of it, saying how “utterly
pissed” she was that Brand had not been formally
introduced into her academic learning, alongside
the feeling of sheer, unalloyed gratitude for the fact
of Brand’s writing in the world. Not many years
after this, Lubrin would be sitting in Brand’s graduate
poetry seminar, another vital thread in the
making of an intimate professional and creative
bond between them.
Entering publication’s lettered halls, however, proved
daunting. Four solid years of journal rejections lined Lubrin’s
path, so much so that a solicitation from an editor at publisher
Wolsak and Wynn for what would become her first book, Voodoo
Hypothesis (2017), shook her. The first twelve poems she’d written
during Brand’s course were included in that manuscript, but it
was spilt blood that gave the work its form and voice.
In 2016, Lubrin, alongside countless others, reeled at the
murder of Philando Castile, slain in front of his partner Diamond
Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter near Minneapolis,
Minnesota. That summer, Canisia grimly nods, was a horrific
sequence of violence against Black bodies and minds. The killings
piled up, and Lubrin took to her pages, reworking ninety-five
per cent of Voodoo Hypothesis to reflect the conditions of the
world as she saw them, “through my place as a diaspora woman
writer, with my queer lens.” The result was a debut book committed
to “raising up language like a shield against European
histories and sciences,” as poet Sonnet L’Abbé described it. But
while Voodoo Hypothesis was astonishing in its power, it was only
Lubrin’s beginning.
The Dyzgraphxst (2020), her second collection, took its first
pulse from interrogation. Dionne Brand, in whose conversations
“books are made,” says Lubrin fondly, asked the younger
writer about the absence of the “I” voice in her poems. This
prompted soul-and-verse searching, and when the first draft of
the manuscript arrived, Brand asked “Who is this Jejune? We
need more of this voice.” Thus, what had been intended as a peripheral figure
became the animating force of The Dyzgraphxst, a narrator not restrictive in
vision, but invitational: “I absolutely found that I was reflected in the concerns
of the language, and could make that space horizontal rather than vertical,
so you can enter it, so I can sit with you, so the next person can enter and sit
Lubrin is modestly conscious — not to
mention grateful — for the space and time
that literary prizes create for her writing.
Fame, however, has never been her ambition
with us.” Critical responses to Lubrin’s sophomore offering might be said to
speak for themselves, and the poet is modestly conscious — not to mention
grateful — for the space and time that literary prizes create for her writing.
Fame, however, has never been her ambition. She pursues something far less
glittering, but perhaps no less inwardly luminous.
“I had to break the language open, reconfigure it so something different
could come to the world — jagged, not making apology for its breakages, that
simply exists and shows what it shows,” Lubrin says of her labours. In her roles
as educator and poetry editor at publishing house McClelland & Stewart, her
work is as originary, as border-resistant. “In every sphere, I try always not to
make it about me, to enter into a kind of appreciation for what is possible,” she
concludes, already envisioning multiple worlds where language — Canisia
Lubrin’s guiding light — reveals what has always been. n
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM