Reframing the Art of the Interview with Poet & Novelist Canisia Lubrin

For this episode of Reframeables, we had the opportunity to speak with award-winning poet and novelist Canisia Lubrin about her new book Code Noir. After the interview, she sent the Reframeables duo an email, calling us both badass and tender, which is probably the best compliment we’ve ever been given — so there’s that. For context about her book, in 1685 France’s King Louis XIV passed a decree consisting of 59 articles meant to govern not only chattel slavery but Black subjecthood throughout France and its colonies. The document was called “le code noir.” Lubrin’s novel is written around and against these articles. In our interview, we talked about so many things: identity, and why Canisia isn’t interested in it; green underwear, and why this writer’s words make us hot (literally); poetry as something that originates in the body, not the mind. Our reframing takeaway? The art of the interview isn’t achieved in a straight line — or maybe we reframed the art of conversation as a whole. Either way, we had a blast.

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, professor, poet, and editor. Originally from St. Lucia, she now lives in Whitby, Ontario. Her books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir. Canisia is currently poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart, and has taught at Humber College, University of Toronto, and University of Guelph.

Links:
Code Noir
A Conversation with Canisia Lubrin by Rosie Long Decter for Vallum Mag
Follow Canisia on Instagram

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Chapters

• 0:00 This week's episode
• 2:01 What makes autobiography and identity not so interesting
• 4:37 Resisting the need to explain yourself through your work
• 8:46 The corrosive effects of cult of personality and celebrity
• 13:19 Characterization in Code Noir
• 21:43 The embodied experience of poetry
• 23:33 What poetry should do
• 31:54 What literature makes possible
• 34:16 Different languages we carry around with us
• 40:52 Reframing the art of the interview
• 43:44 A parasocial story

Transcript

Natalie
Hey, it’s Nat.

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers.

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something.

Rebecca
For this episode of Reframeables, we had the opportunity to speak with award-winning poet and novelist Canisia Lubrin about her new book Code Noir. After the interview, she called the Reframeables duo both badass and tender, which is probably the best compliment we’ve ever been given — so there’s that. For context about her book, in 1685 France’s King Louis XIV passed a decree consisting of 59 articles meant to govern not only chattel slavery but black subjecthood throughout France and its colonies. The document was called “le code noir.” Lubrin’s novel is written around and against these articles. In our interview, we talked about so many things: identity, and why Canisia isn’t interested in it; green underwear, and why this writer’s words make us hot (literally); poetry as something that originates in the body, not the mind. Our reframing takeaway? The art of the interview isn’t achieved in a straight line — or maybe we reframed the art of conversation as a whole. Either way, we had a blast. Listen to our conversation with Canisia Lubrin.

Did I hear it correctly that Canisia, you were just saying… not so interested in talking about autobiography and identity and how that factors into your work. Is that correct?

Canisia
That’s very correct, your honour.

Rebecca
Ok. It’s just very interesting for me, because it’s true — I do like to go to those places, and I’ll have to consider for myself why.

Canisia
But you know, it’s interesting that we can certainly have a conversation about how much I’m uninterested in identity and autobiography. So that could still be a really cool conversation.

Rebecca
Can we start that right now?

Canisia
Yes.

Rebecca
I think that it’s been started, so let’s do it — like, what is it about autobiography that is, like, less interesting for you?

Canisia
I find it limiting in the ways that it flattens out our complexities and our presence in relation to whether we’re talking about art or philosophy or some other thing. And it has become a kind of very easily digestible talking point that seems to have a therapeutic purpose rather than, you know, a kind of critical understanding and awareness of who we are as people, as a species, et cetera. And so there are certain things that are functional — they are just functional details. But when everything becomes about proving your identity, the corollary is about proving you belong. And that for certain groups of people historically, who have been marginalized, it’s a way to keep a certain set of legibilities on your presence — as opposed to really being present to what’s true about who you are and the things that you value. So I resist the always already available bracket of, you know, “This is about identity because, you know, you’re a black person making art.”

Natalie
This is going to be one of those conversations, Rebecca, where I’m just going to, like, sometimes sit in somebody else’s words. Because I’m like, “I want to use ‘bracket’ in that way and mean it in that moment.” I’m not trying to be silly — I really actually mean that. It’s so fun listening in sometimes on conversations with folks where they use a turn of phrase in a way that it’s like, “That’s what I wanted to say.”

Canisia
Well, I hear you.

Rebecca
Claudia Dey had said specifically, “Do you not think I could invent this?” Like, that idea, like, does that resonate at all for you when we want to know about autobiography? The idea that “Do you think I’m not capable of inventing something?” I think we were talking about women specifically. So does that resonate at all?

Canisia
Absolutely, yeah — and there is something about the ways that the work of (since we are in this context) women writers gets received, as opposed to male writers. There’s a tendency when the work is, say, more experimental, or that it puts forward a set of complexities that it is not quote-unquote ‘immediately accessible’ in the ways that fast food is digestible. If those things don’t happen, women get labelled ‘clever’ — you know, and with negative connotation. Or you have these forms of critical reception that are like, you know, if it’s a man, “Oh, they’re genius. How amazing it is that they work with these degrees of obscurity and complexity and deliver art.” You know? And women are sort of relegated to these performances of cleverness that somehow we ought not to walk around in, you know — as if we have to explain why it is that we have the audacity to make a certain kind of work. You know? That’s the implication. They don’t say that quiet part out loud, but that’s what’s between the lines, as we say.

Rebecca
So you resist this need to explain yourself in your work?

Canisia
Oh yeah, because I’m not really doing myself in my work per se. Yeah, again, going back to the fact, you know, that I really am uninterested in autobiography, unless it’s the kind of material that is transformed such that it becomes a work of art, right? I’m not doing straight biography nor am I doing, you know, kind of diaristic recording, right — and that we can talk about even in terms of why these works have evolved. And I am always already aware of the historical environment that my work comes out of, right? So something like, for instance, the slave narrative, which was purely and only about an appeal to the moral, whether it existed or not — the moral sense, let’s say, of enslavers to sort of argue for one’s own humanity and prove it with a very particular rubric. You know, “Look, I can speak. Look, I can think. Look, I can make a line of poetry. Look, I can do all of these things, and this is why abolition should happen pronto.” That was a necessity in its historical period, in its time.

And certainly biography can be interesting, you know? People are interested in biography for many reasons, but I think it’s part of the sort of social contract of literature in that people are interested in each other’s lives and in the materials of those lives and what they have to say about who we are, why we are, and all of these things. But there is a certain kind of monstrous extrapolation of that thing that is about performing a certain kind of legibility because it has become part of what the master narrative expects, and I am uninterested in that. I find it utterly uninteresting and kind of base. You know, I’m interested in ideas. I’m interested in what art is, what language makes possible, what it limits, you know, and what the tension is between those two poles and in that space. If there is something called autobiography, it is transformed to the level of art.

Natalie
I’m sitting with that because I have to, like, face myself as a thinker, because when you say, “That can feel almost base,” I’m like, “I guess I’m going to like my base need to connect,” because there is something about the person that I am so drawn to in my connection to literature. Ok, so I would say this as, like, you know, one who has taught literature for a long time: I didn’t find in my younger years myself that interested in knowing like, all, the history of the person I was reading, because I think I was just sort of surrounded by so much material in those early years of reading. Like, I don’t remember reading A Wrinkle in Time and wanting to know all about Madeleine L’Engele, right? Like, that wasn’t something that I needed because I just wanted to absorb all that story and I loved it and I wanted more.

But then as I got older, and obviously you go through the process of schooling and what school does to all of us — I mean, talk about rubrics, oh my gosh, right? So and as educators, we live in that language all the time and want to problematize — and at the same time I’m drawn to the people behind the work because I want to connect somehow to them. And maybe this podcast has been such an interesting experience for both Bec and me because as writers and thinkers ourselves, the chance to kind of sit in a space with another writer and hear them share about their work feels so selfish — like it’s a selfish game, right, for us to just get to sit here for this time. We hope that the people who are listening to the podcast get something out of our conversation, but there’s a little bit of it like, “Yeah, but I want to know you, Canisia.” Because my question is: am I just one of those parasocial creepers — like, that’s what I’ve become? And the only answer is yes, and so I’m having to be like, “Shit.”

Canisia
Yeah. You know what, and I hear everything that you’re saying — it just reinforces to me exactly what my position is, because there is a kind of social conditioning that because it’s so ubiquitous, it becomes invisible. It becomes an invisible part of our thinking. And there is something to be said about the cult of personality and celebrity and its really corrosive effects — not just on, you know, the kind of relationship that we have to art and to creativity, because everything has been commercialized in this way to be brought to the level of the most consumable point. You know, an easily consumable point, right? That it lacks all nutritional value. It doesn’t really enrich, it becomes this consumptive impulse to sort of celebratize, and I don’t even know if that’s a word — maybe it should be. To work out our sense of who we are, and I’ll throw the word ‘identity’ in in this context because I think it actually has some kind of analytical value as opposed to simply, you know, a more consumptive one. That it becomes part of our social identity that privileges this idea of, like, the personality as being the entire orbit of what our interpersonal relationships become and carry.

And so there is a part of me certainly that understands where that comes from. On the other hand, I think it’s actually quite interesting that that can be the actual material of study, right? To see how that thing produces a kind of parasocial structure. And I think at this point in 2024, we can see how corrosive that is. We can see how, you know, people go online, and the cult of personality that has sort of migrated into our psyches — become, you know, these points of a kind of unthinking that is just passed off as entertainment. And so, you know, like I was saying earlier, there are really great conversations that we can have about this stuff, but the sort of one-on-one, you know, “The person behind the thing,” has gotten us in so much trouble already that the sort of invisible shape it’s taken in our thinking, it takes us to the wrong lessons. I mean, we take the wrong things away from it. But that’s just me thinking around what you’re saying.

Natalie
In your book Code Noir, that we love, there’s a piece in the midst of it about two sisters. And both Bec and I were reading that completely separately, separate houses, separate times, and yet we both had the same, “Oh my gosh” — this is like the conversation we had but didn’t have, but kind of had at one point in our own experience.

Rebecca
We totally co-opted it.

Natalie
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rebecca
This is our experience.

Natalie
And we made it all about us. Obviously I’m being facetious a little bit because there is that part of, like, reader connectivity, right? I mean, like, we’re connecting right in there. But wow, what a moment to sort of have the idea of a lesson learned because that’s, like, the last line of the story is, “That’s not the lesson you’re going to take away,” the one sister says to the other. And obviously the complexity of what is built into that story is much more than that line. But it’s so interesting to tie it to this moment — because what lessons are learned, at what times, in what conversations? We love that story.

Canisia
Thank you, yeah. There are two separate stories between the sisters.

Rebecca
Yeah, because I was thinking of the other one actually.

Natalie
Ok.

Rebecca
Or am I thinking of the same one? Because there’s a story about sisters closer to the beginning and there’s one closer to the…

Canisia
In the middle.

Rebecca
Ok, Nat, was the one you were just describing the one where the sister, she’s a priest or a minister of sorts, right?

Canisia
Close to home.

Natalie
So close to home.

Rebecca
Is that the same one?

Natalie
Yeah.

Rebecca
But then there’s another one…

Canisia
Oh yes.

Rebecca
I feel like actually I have to go back and read the whole thing again, because it’s almost like a dizzying experience. The back-and-forth in time, all the characters, like… and your use of language. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it, maybe ever. And I could almost follow a novel about any one of these characters. Like, the character who she’s about to fight and she takes off all her clothes, except for her… do I remember right? Her emerald green underwear.

Canisia
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca
That alone — like, even that could be a novel. Like, you zone in on a detail. I guess you’re just like… I don’t know. Like, I don’t really have words.

Natalie
I love this, because Rebecca usually has all the words.

Rebecca
I think I was so astounded by it, and your use of language, just frankly — just the sentences. There were so many sentences I could just pull out and be like, “Wow, what a way to…” — and when you have such facility with language, how you can reveal something about the human condition. So does language open up for you the human condition in a way that someone without the language might not have access to? I don’t know what you think about that. I’m getting hot. I have to take my sweater off. Oh, your work makes me hot.

Canisia
Oh, there’s a blurb.

Natalie
We’ll use that.

Canisia
Oh, that’s awesome. I want that on a t-shirt. Oh, I have somewhere in my wall just for that.

You’re completely right, and it’s good to hear you sort of circle around these characters because it’s really that. You know, and if we can talk about the people — you know, when you say you’re interested in the people, I mean I think that’s a legitimate interest, right? It’s so very legitimate. And then I’ll say this last thing and then just leave it alone, but it’s just that for some of us it’s the only thing we ever get. And so my refusal of being interested in people is really about that very exact context that I find reductive. When I enter fiction, I go with people and I want the characters to feel whole and particular and strange, because that is where I think the complexity of the human condition can have a measure in language.

Of course there are these like, you know, common denominators. And they’re cool, and they’re fine, you know, and for certain people they make that stuff sing. But I would like to open a further door. I want to move past the common denominator and stay with a character. To me that feels whole, that feels… human. And that I know them down to their syllables. I can hear their music on the level of the syllable and give them really interesting details that make the stories live and that still allow for the reader to arrive at these insights that you’re talking about, Rebecca. And I think for me that’s just what memorable storytelling is. You know, it’s like if you’re sitting in front of 12 similar characters and we all choose the most obvious details to bring forward, what we have is a mass of something. We have an undifferentiated mass.

But if we sort of find that one strange, awkward detail and somehow bring that thing to life, not only is that for me more exciting storytelling and more compelling storytelling and more memorable storytelling, it also sort of trains me to not reduce people to stereotypes out there in the real world, right? To be available to people’s quirks and their particularities, you know, and the sort of way that they enter language. The way that they enter a room, the way that they lean, and what that says about the person one imagines, because we make projections all day. You know, when we walk around with these projections it’s just a point of curiosity, you know, rather than making a judgement, right? It’s like, “Oh isn’t that curious?”

And I think I’m lucky because I grew up, you know, on a small island by the sea in a small fishing village with the poorest on the island. And it’s really the collection of people that are still so alive in my imagination, and all of the quirks that people display. It’s like you walk around naked when you don’t have the padding of privilege and wealth and all of these things that put posture forward. You walk raw and naked into the world. And that to me is what characterization in fiction is about — is that even when you have all of the other things that pad a person, the details of their being are those naked things. It’s really the way that they carry themselves, the style of their speech, you know — which is why the stories are so varied in voice, right? The style of their thinking, the style of their thought, you know? And to make that interesting somehow for the reader.

Rebecca
Sometimes people ask us if we make money doing this podcast. The answer is we don’t. In fact, every hour we spend on Reframables is time not spent at a paying gig. And the steps to making a podcast are actually many. Finding the guests, booking the guests, reading the books, planning the questions, editing the interview, uploading it into the podcast world, making the artwork. So if you value this podcast, please consider supporting it with a financial contribution. Memberships start at $6 a month on Patreon and include a monthly extra where we record our five things in a week. In this world we have to support what we love, and with that support an energy comes back to us — so thanks for going to patreon.com/reframables and becoming a supporter. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to be making a podcast, but here we are, three years later, still doing it with your help. So go to patreon.com/reframables — now, on to the show.

Natalie
Do you feel a tenderness for your characters? There’s sort of like a memory of not necessarily a person, but of voices of sort of past experiences that kind of inform how they show up. So then if you do, do you feel that same tenderness for your poetry? Or are they a more heady experience? Like, what is…?

Canisia
I don’t know that poetry is a heavy experience for me.

Natalie
No — ‘heady,’ sorry.

Canisia
Oh, heady.

Natalie
Yeah, yeah, just because I’m thinking tenderness — I’m sort of attaching to emotion and then I’m thinking words, but I don’t know if there’s actually that separation for you.

Canisia
No, not at all. Poetry for me cannot be heady. It is a kind of a material for thinking, yes, but poetry is always embodied. You know, poetry is the experience of the flesh made language. I think there’s a direct connection between our embodiedness and the fact of language for us. I think of language as a kind of matter — you know, like that fourth state of matter. That it can allow for things to be affected, that it is a causal agent. And so there is tenderness always for me in poetry, because what I want to go after is the truth. The true thing. And you know, in any mode, in any genre, you want to write the thing that is true. So that sort of embodied experience — I feel poetry in my body. It’s not just a strictly intellectual exercise. I want to walk away from the page having felt. And if I don’t feel, then the poem doesn’t work.

Rebecca
I think I’m a bit scared of poetry. I’m trying to figure it out — like, what’s my problem? Is it one of the braver art forms? And I have a sense that you would be like, “No.” Like, I don’t know that you would think that way. I guess I think of it as it’s the least practical, or something. It’s less consumable, so we engage with it less, the average person… I don’t know. Can you speak to this at all? Because I feel after reading your work that I have to engage poetry now much, much more, and that I would be a different person if I was engaging with it and language — as opposed just to thinking everything is practical. And we’re doing a lot of TV writing, and I think in some ways how that… I don’t know what it does to us. Like, I just think there’s something — your work is challenging me to what kind of human I want to be.

Canisia
Well, that’s a really lovely thing for you to say. Thank you. I think that’s kind of what poetry should do — that is, its measure. Dionne Brand says poetry interrogates the reader. Of course, that’s a scary thing, because none of us wants to be interrogated. Poetry interrogates the reader, but the reader interrogates narrative. And so there is something to poetry that troubles our sense of power. But there’s also the fact that poetry, being the oldest art form on Earth, seems to outlast almost every instance of instrumentalization. And what I mean by instrumentalization is that there’s always a certain amount of social focus that’s given to the usefulness of things. And then in our modern world, of course, all of that is tied to capital. All of that is tied to gains and return and wealth, and how one can pay the light bill. You know, how one can keep water in the tap. How one can go to the grocery store and afford to eat dinner. You know, all of these things are important, yes.

But when they are totalizing in a way that is actually outside of our control, we are left internalizing the belief that all we have to be is useful in this way, that we are only instruments in someone else’s factory of gains. And I think poetry has stayed intact in that other arena where we are concerned with our being in the world and with our relationships and with our experience of ourselves, of one another, of the world, of the planet. Poetry sort of puts us back in the storehouse of human experience. And sometimes that can feel really uncomfortable and disjointed. But I also think that there’s a truth to the way that poetry is taught that is antithetical to the work that poetry does. That we have somehow been educated to think that poetry is a puzzle for the smartest people to figure out.

And that has damaged our relationship to poetry. Poetry is a different kind of reading. It’s a different kind of experience of language. We are not in the linear, straightforward syntax of the sentence. We are in the poetic line, which puts an immense amount of pressure on the experience of language as the thing itself, and therefore offering us these various nodes of insight that we can feel, that we can know in different ways. And it’s not always what we comprehend. But knowledge arrives in many of these different forms. That experience arrives in many different modes, even though we’re sitting in front of something that is a language material.

And poetry itself has evolved, right? To be all kinds of things: language, purely sound, visual. So many iterations. There’s an object — if someone could walk around with, you know, this little blue mic here, do something with it, and then call it a poem, we can’t say no to that. We can’t say, “Well, that’s not a poem.” There is something about poetry that simply belongs to everyone, and that we have, you know, our own intimate understandings of what that thing is. It’s just that when we put it in a book and it goes out there to another person, there is an invitation to extend our experience of the world as a conversation with one another. And sometimes we find that there is really smooth overlap. And sometimes it’s really uncomfortable and it does other things. But I think a huge part of why a lot of people are, like, poetry-phobes is the fact that we were taught poetry the wrong way. It has been intellectualized as merely an intellectual exercise where you’re dissecting it as if it’s a puzzle for meaning — and if you don’t arrive at that one meaning, then you have somehow failed.

Rebecca
That breaks that open for me in a way that is… I feel like it would be nice to go back to school and be like, “No, I can participate here,” without thinking that I don’t have the right insight — like I’m not right.

Canisia
Yeah. Your insight is yours. You know, and I can totally understand how damaging that is because, you know, although I did very well with those exercises, because I have a schematic brain, but not everyone does. I feel like people with schematic brains have an easier time with that pedagogy of poetry.

Rebecca
What does that mean, ‘schematic brain’?

Canisia
Oh — I can see the architecture of the thing and how it’s put together. I can see the schema. I can see how the parts and everything come together very easily and clearly, right? And so I have a kind of formal relationship, let’s say, to language and to experience and things like that. I see the form of it, and that sort of allows me to grasp it. And I think that’s what that style of teaching poetry, that’s what that is. It’s just, “Ok, let’s dissect this thing and we could standardize a language around it,” but it’s wholly inadequate. And often with my students, I say, “You come to the work and it will find its completion with you. You complete it. You have a place in it, and your door is your door. And we can have a really enriching conversation with 75 different doors in this one room.”

Natalie
I’m just going to walk away from this conversation going, “I need to go change my whole teaching life,” because I do have these moments, right, where I’ve had the odd student reach back out to me and say, “Hey, thanks Ms. Davey for that time.” Like, grade 12 students who enjoyed their English class with me, and that’s super. And I like to think upon reflection that I did what you’re saying. I certainly presented, because that was what I thought they needed — was some way through, to be able to, like, take a Dunbar poem and be able to understand a little bit of not just context, but also, you know, what kind of form was being played with even within. And all that still I think is at some level useful, but for whose brain? Like, I mean, was I doing it for myself? Maybe, right? Like, now I have to kind of sit with that one too. And these are good questions anyways, but I wonder if I’d be a different poetry teacher today. I think I probably would be.

Canisia
Yeah, perhaps. Perhaps we would be. But you know, I think people find their way anyway. Look at us sitting here talking, however many years removed. Bec, I don’t know how long ago it was that you were in that poetry class. And look at us sitting here talking about, “Hey, you know, maybe there’s a way for me to get back into poetry.” You know, and it’s totally fine — that’s the thing. The poetry will be ok — and so will we, hopefully.

Natalie
I like that.

Rebecca
Do your students find your classes… they must find them exciting?

Canisia
Well, I mean I teach grad school, right? So it’s a different set of engagements.

Rebecca
They’re already engaged.

Canisia
Yeah, yeah — they already know. I mean, I have students who come into the class having already published full-length works. But I’ve also taught… I actually began teaching teenagers poetry in St. James Town, Cabbagetown, in this after school community arts program. I had great fun doing that. Even now, I find that some of the most engaging conversations I have are with those students — are with young students who have not been calcified…

Natalie
Yes.

Canisia
By all the usual things that we know, you know what I mean? And it’s like one of the best conversations I had about my first book of poems was in Washington, D.C. with a group of 16 and 17-year-olds, and it was just astounding to me the way they entered that book. And nobody would say that actually, you know, that’s the primary audience for the book — you know, no one would say that. No one by the metric of the so-called market would say that, you know, this is the primary audience. But I really felt like I had written these poems for these students. They really came into it and offered something back to me that I didn’t have before. My own work, you know?

And that’s the possibility — that’s it. That is the entire subjunctive of why literature exists: is the things that it makes possible that you sometimes have absolutely no way of predicting or orchestrating. And so I always think that the book is incomplete until it gets to the reader and the reader makes their meaning of it. Because as writers all we have is the page, and we have to be very selective about what we put there — and that’s very, very particular and narrow. But what the reader brings to the page is their entire lives. That’s where meaning gets made — in that interaction.

Natalie
You said a beautiful thing in this one Vallum Mag article that we were reading through. And you said that: “The reader brings a lot to the reading — their experiences, their beliefs, the everydayness of their living. And I would like to see more generosity given to that fact when people talk about reading and books and what that interaction makes possible.” So you’ve had so many conversations now about Code Noir.

Canisia
I’ve had a few, yeah.

Natalie
You’ve had a few — and big ones. I mean, like, our little podcast, this is a chance for us to kind of get to be intimate together, but you’ve been on big stages talking about this work. And I mean, there’s a bit of a treadmill that you’re on right now in that, like, this is the time, right, where you’re talking about the book — that’s what has to happen in the selling of books. But is there something that is coming back to you?

Canisia
Yeah. You know, one thing that it’s allowing me to do is to give some more thought and to stay a bit longer with the visual art and my collaboration with Torkwase Dyson, because that part of things happened very late in the process. It was at the very end. And to just think of these different languages that we carry around with us — you know, as artists, as people. The various forms of artfulness that people walk around with. In Torkwase’s case, I mean, she’s such an astounding visual artist who works with these massive structures.

Natalie
So big, yeah.

Canisia
Yeah. And what that must do — not just to the person making them, but to the people arriving to pay attention to what has been created. And there’s a question of scale that is fundamental to the work that Torkwase does, which is about creating these portals to imagine a richer, more collective future for all of us. But her language, her visual language is in these abstract shapes that reveal just how a body is placed in space, and what things put pressure on our sense of balance or not. And it just makes me more hyper-aware of other people in space. You know — yes, I’m standing in front of this massive sculpture, but then I turn around and there’s someone next to me, a stranger, who I don’t know, and suddenly I’m hyper-aware of them. You know?

And there is a sincere degree of generosity to something like that. It’s not our primary language. None of us walk around with that as our primary language. You don’t, you know, meet somebody on the street corner at Bloor and Dufferin and speak sculpture or something, you know? But having walked away from one of Torkwase’s sculptures, I encountered this person at the corner of Bloor and Dufferin with another appreciation of how they are in space — of their vulnerability, and the vulnerability of the body, and our interactions with one another, and the kind of pressures that that puts on the materials of our lives and our bodies moving through space. So it has sort of allowed me to think a little bit more on that, and to have a lot more appreciation for the fact that Torkwase has doubled the valences of meaning in the book by offering these portals that layer and layer and layer, and that disturbed the presence of the terrible codes. But it’s been some great conversations, I’ll say.

Natalie
Have you ever spent time with Charmaine Lurch’s work? She does these wonderful wire bees, and I mean, her work is very much connected these days from what I’m observing online. Like, we interviewed her a long time ago for another publication we had worked on, but at the time she was working on other things and now she’s moved on to these wire bees that are kind of sculpted to be conversation points, I would say, around climate change. So there’s just a real movement there in terms of environmental conversation to be had. But so when you said “speaks culture,” I really loved that idea.

Canisia
Yeah.

Natalie
Because I think there is something about, like, the idea of the novel is a raft of hope. So, like, the idea of this text or this object, you know — the meaning-making that can happen when two bodies are brought together through this work, and that’s maybe what your work is doing.

Canisia
Yeah, I remember some of Charmaine Lurch’s work and I think I know what you’re talking about with those wire sculptures and things.

Natalie
Bees — yeah, yeah.

Canisia
Because I think it reminds me a lot of Ruth Asawa’s work — but with a wire.

Natalie
Ok, I don’t know that one.

Canisia
Yeah — it’s really astounding what Ruth does with the wire mesh sculptures. They look simultaneously present and diffuse, and totally vulnerable but really powerful because there’s simultaneously shadow and light. And she has them hanging from the roof, you know — with the light passing through them and hitting the wall, it looks like there’s three or four of them, but it’s really one. It’s really quite astounding, and to think of, you know, the ecosystem of climate concern that we are a part of, and to think more than ourselves, more than just the human self in space, and who we have a responsibility to, you know? Everybody in the sea, everybody in the air, everybody underground — and to sort of hold that as a fact of our lives and a fact of our experiences on this planet. It’s an antidote to the ceaselessly extractive things that sort of dominate our waking hours. And if there’s anything that art (like, I mean really sincere art) does, it’s that. It sort of pulls us back into that. It disturbs the presence of the extractive — even though we can, you know, have a long conversation about how contemporary art has become part of that extraction.

Natalie
Sure, yeah. But let’s sit with this side, because I like this side.

Canisia
This side is a good side.

Natalie
We’re on the right side here. And I need to go look up that name, because I love learning about new artists to me.

Canisia
Ruth Asawa.

Natalie
Yeah.

Canisia
I’ll send you a thing after.

Natalie
Wonderful — thank you.

Rebecca
Yeah, thanks — and I appreciate so much this conversation. You’re such an amazing writer and human. Yeah, I’m really inspired. So thank you for putting your soul into all of this.

Natalie
Yeah.

Canisia
I appreciate it very much. It was really nice talking to the two of you. I did listen to a number of your episodes just for my own research and to, you know, get a sense of your tone and all that. And so I have enjoyed a number of them. It’s been cool. And you know, the thing that I find really affecting is that collaboration between the two of you. And it really sort of enhances this idea that the podcast has become this strangely misapplied tool for flexing one’s authority on something, and…

Natalie
Yeah! Oh my gosh.

Canisia
Yeah, but I really enjoy what the two of you are up to. It’s really cool. So thank you for having me.

Natalie
That means a lot. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Canisia
Yeah, it’s nice. Thank you for having me.

Natalie
I don’t know if you did ever get to listen to the Ian Williams one, but if you do, that’s a really funny one with him talking about cuddling in a closet in a fur coat.

Canisia
Ian would say things like that.

Rebecca
He’s so great too, because he’s so self-deprecating. We got into the discussion and immediately he went to: his word for his forties was disappointment. He’s just so unafraid to be vulnerable, or just say what this life really is. He’s not posturing at all.

Natalie
No, but I think that’s actually what we were hoping — just, like, as our goodbye here with you. I think that we didn’t know what to expect. Like, I mean, even in terms of what will emerge here as, like, what was reframed. I think for me, what has been reframed here is, like, the art of the interview. Because I don’t see myself as, like, an interviewer — like, I don’t know, I’m not Jon Stewart. Like, whatever that’s supposed to mean — any of these people that, like, this is what they do, right? Like, and for good or for bad that means that our conversations are going to look and sound different than one of those. Things can get missed if we don’t just get to be in conversation with people. So you’ve given us an hour and that means a lot.

Canisia
Yeah, no, I appreciate being here for sure. It was good.

In your email you were saying that you ran into Christina at Type Books?

Natalie
Oh my goodness. I had such a ridiculous fangirl moment. Canisia, I’m just going to tell you — so this was so fascinating. I started my career teaching at York Detention Center when it was Central Booking for Ontario. And I was like 22, ridiculous — like, I had no idea what I was doing. At the time I taught — whatever, life happened, it was its own experience. And then when I went on and came back to that time in my doctoral work, York Detention was closing. And so I wanted to basically, like, look at the space again. And was there anything educational to sort of be taken from that space?

And so, you know, I worked with my doctoral committee, my advisor — like, lots of good smart people, everybody. And, you know, it came out to be whatever piece it came out to be. But I think I did. I think I did try to frame it as, you know, a place that is lacking in anything educational at its root, but yet there was something educational in our interactions. So that’s how I came to it. And then I read Christina’s work and I’m like, “This is all bad.” Like, that’s really kind of what I came out with. Like I’m like, “I can’t actually stand on.”

Rebecca
But why, what does she say?

Natalie
Well, she would basically say no — that there was nothing rectifiable about that space in terms of what it was enacting on these children’s bodies and what are we saying? How can we try and frame incarceration in any way as something to be gained from if we’re going to connect it to education. And so then we have to, like, throw out even what we mean by education. So anyways, my book, when I did end up writing it, was basically like an homage to Christina because I was like, “And here’s how I was wrong, and here’s why.” So I don’t know that she’d ever even look at it — it doesn’t even matter to me. It was my experience with it. But then I’m now in Type, and there she is. And she and Dionne Brand have walked in together and I’m like, “Whew,” and I have nobody — like, nobody’s in there. My kid — like, my kid’s, like, eight. He doesn’t care.

Rebecca
Nat, were you sweating?

Natalie
I was totally taking off my clothes. But… I mean, because I don’t know her, it’s again this parasocial experience. She’s friends with my advisor. So in my brain, she’s my friend, right?

Canisia
Who was your advisor?

Natalie
Mario Di Paolantonio.

Canisia
Oh, ok.

Natalie
Wonderful human — like, she thanked him in her intro. So I was like, “Well, then they’re friends. So now we’re friends.” So I wanted to say hi to her just because I was like, “You changed me, and it didn’t sell me any books, but you changed me.” Like, I wanted to say that, but I just got all flubbed up and she’s kind of like, “Dionne’s over there.” Like, I think she’s so self-effacing that she was really honestly like, “You’re probably interested in another person.” And I’m like, “No, no, it’s you I’m going to die for.” Anyways, my son was like, “Can we go? Because this is a lot.”

Rebecca
“You’re acting strange right now.”

Canisia
That’s hilarious.

Natalie
So anyways, I have no idea what she got out of that moment or not, but I got a lot.

Canisia
I hear that. That’s hilarious. I’ll see her tomorrow. I’ll mention I spoke to you all today.

Rebecca
Yes, please.

Natalie
Well, that’s very generous of you.