This is the first poem in Fred Wah’s 1982 Governor General award winning book [_Waiting for Saskatchewan_].
What surprises me about the first line of the poem, and about the title of the book, is the primary importance given to the gerund: waiting. It’s the only gerund in the whole poem. The gerund builds permanent expectation never fully achieved in the nasal glottal stop of the higher sinuses. A small grammatical element in a poem that writes grammar and identity together. But _who_ is waiting?
Nouns build nouns: “grandparents countries places converged / Europe Asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators / Swift Current my grandmother in our house.”
One of the more impressive buildings in most prairie towns is the Land Registry Office which store deeds and land surveys. In the land registry office in Ottawa, where I live, the architect has worked unhewn granite boulders into the building’s smooth concrete surface. I can’t think of a better image of land meeting real property law.
This is the first poem in Fred Wah’s 1982 Governor General award winning book [_Waiting for Saskatchewan_].
What surprises me about the first line of the poem, and about the title of the book, is the primary importance given to the gerund: waiting. It’s the only gerund in the whole poem. The gerund builds permanent expectation never fully achieved in the nasal glottal stop of the higher sinuses. A small grammatical element in a poem that writes grammar and identity together. But _who_ is waiting?
Nouns build nouns: “grandparents countries places converged / Europe Asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators / Swift Current my grandmother in our house.”
One of the more impressive buildings in most prairie towns is the Land Registry Office which store deeds and land surveys. In the land registry office in Ottawa, where I live, the architect has worked unhewn granite boulders into the building’s smooth concrete surface. I can’t think of a better image of land meeting real property law.
The poem says much about ownership through title and ownership through possessive pronouns: “[_my_] grandmother,” “[_her_] house,” “him _his_ cafes” (italics mine).
It would be difficult now not to compare this poem and this book to Robert Kroetsch’s [_The Ledger_], with its writing of family history through the archive of an old accounts ledger.
As the poem moves from the introductory lines, ownership slips from place to body: “[_my_] forehead,” “[_my_] stomach,” “[_my_] body.” The “I” and the “me” begin to appear. The poem moves from one generation to another, from the terrestrial to the physical.
The poem reveals many different variants of “own”: “arrowed,” “downtown,” “owed,” “won’t,” “arrow,” “snowblown,” “own,” and “owes.”
Wah is stuck mid-voyage, waiting in an immigration process that never fully takes hold, suspended above dirt he never really owns.
But the poem’s nervousness about ownership makes sense in a country where anti-Chinese bills were passed into law (such as the Act to Prevent Chinese from Acquiring Crown Lands which was passed in BC in 1884 and only repealed in 1950, or the federal Chinese Immigration Act which was passed in 1923 and repealed in 1947) and where property rights could be legally denied.
“the most political place I know”
Each line of the poem is laid out, thin and flat, like the line of a treeless horizon.
As we move through the poem, the nouns of placement become more obviously historic and displaced: “Saskatchewan,” “Europe Asia,” “Swift Current,” “Pleistocene / sediment plate wedge / arrow beak.” Reading becomes an archeological dig full of the jumbled artifacts of history and pre-history.
No mention in name is made of Aboriginal ownership of Saskatchewan other than the near silent references to the historic presence of “arrows”
and “Saskatchewan.”
kisiskatchewan
“Saskatchewan” which, really, is a name for a geo-political division of land, mapped and surveyed.
“place” is “political”
An odd shift at the end: “still waiting for that / I want it back, wait in this snowblown winter night.” I can almost hear a sigh as Wah finally rids himself of that “-ing” in “wait.” But it does him no good.
Wah writes of something he once had but has no longer (“I want it back”). Maybe the writing of origins, or writing of the past, really facilitates its escape?
Is Wah [_Writing for Saskatchewan_]?
Maybe it’s not the balanced accounts but the debts that are remembered?
Kroetsch, from [_The Ledger_]: “it balances” “PAID IN FULL”
“it still owes me, it does”
“Owes me” or “owns me”?