{"id":10361,"date":"2015-07-24T16:54:26","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T11:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/fracked-up-settler-poetry-janeys-arcadia-by-rachel-zolf\/"},"modified":"2023-02-15T16:13:23","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T11:13:23","slug":"fracked-up-settler-poetry-janeys-arcadia-by-rachel-zolf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/fracked-up-settler-poetry-janeys-arcadia-by-rachel-zolf\/","title":{"rendered":"Fracked-Up Settler Poetry: Janey\u2019s Arcadia by Rachel Zolf"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although the cover of Janey\u2019s Arcadia<\/em> casts a calm, blond gaze over a blue and gold prairie landscape (the cover image is from a 1930 Canadian immigration pamphlet), the book is anything but Arcadian. Beneath this surface of seeming rural contentment, Zolf\u2019s book writhes with remembering, dismembering and membering.<\/p>\n

As with many projects of memory, found material forms the poetic base. With constantly shifting dictions and tone within any one poem, it is clear that Zolf mashes together many found texts throughout Janey\u2019s Arcadia<\/em>; however, it is often unclear what documents are being used, as texts from the present messily merge and morph with texts from the past. So that, for example, the poem \u201cConcentration\u201d uses snippets from the Prime Minister\u2019s Apology on Behalf of Canadians for the Indian Residential Schools System, what seem like comments from a newspaper discussion thread, and lines from historical material concerning the creation of the Indian residential school system. The poem ends with:<\/p>\n

Therein ligaments the sediment Goy bless
\nall of you of the great Rewrite and God bless
\nour land sniffled the original the prime
\nminstrel of the Mission Rivi\u00e8re Rouge.<\/p>\n

And this is just a small sample of the found material played with in Janey\u2019s Arcadia<\/em>. Other poems use text from Rev. James Evan\u2019s creation of the Cree syllabics system (Evan was also, Zolf tells us, \u201cthe first missionary in the \u2018Canadian North-West\u2019 to be tried . . . for sexual abuse of Indigenous children in his care\u201d), snippets from texts by Rev. J. S. Woodsworth (\u201cauthor of two well-known, openly white-supremacist, books\u201d), and CPR immigration-recruitment pamphlets called \u201cWhat Women Say of the Canadian North-West\u201d and \u201cWhat Settlers Say\u201d.<\/p>\n

All of this material is sampled, read, misread, wrought, erased, fucked up and kneaded into poems that shift and move beneath every reading. Simultaneously, Zolf has included the added disjunction of Optical Character Recognition software (used to translate .pdf images into text) so that the poems become riddled with language glitches and puns. As Zolf states, \u201cOCR software is used to translate scanned images of printed (often old, acid-worn) texts into malleable language \u2026 these accidents can \u2026 conjure other forms of mis- and non- and dis- and un-recognition\u201d. Although Zolf\u2019s play with OCR isn\u2019t new, the technique has useful allegoric significance in a project partially about mis-reading, translation and incomprehension.<\/p>\n

Cumulatively, all of this poetic disjunction evinces a palpable textual anger \u2013 an anger at the past and its textual relics, at the atrocities of settlement and colonization and at how firmly our violent present is rooted in our history of violation. Zolf makes the connection between past and present all the more tangible by inserting pages of the handwritten names of murdered and missing Aboriginal women.<\/p>\n

But who is the \u201cJaney\u201d of Janey\u2019s Arcadia<\/em>? Zolf explains in her notes that Janey is<\/p>\n

a savage, fleshy rendezvous between Janey Canuck and punk pirate Kathy Acker\u2019s guerrilla icon Janey Smith. What pops out skewed-wise is Janey Settler-Invader, a fracked-up mutant (cyborg?) squatter progeny, slouching toward the Red River Colony.<\/p>\n

So Janey is a conglomeration Janey Canuck (who was the prolific pseudonym of Emily Murphy, one of Canada\u2019s \u201cFamous Five\u201d who got women acknowledged as \u201cpersons\u201d and was a vocal supporter of the forced sterilization of the \u201cinsane and feeble minded\u201d) and Acker\u2019s fictional Janey Smith. At the same time, Janey is also \u201cJane Doe,\u201d the unknown female body discovered at a crime scene. Whatever Janey is, all of the already difficult poems in the book are channeled\u2014as if in dramatic monologue\u2014through the tempered lenses of her \u201cfracked-up\u201d personality.<\/p>\n

Yet, by the end of Janey\u2019s Arcadia<\/em> (especially after the six pages of end notes written by Zolf), I wonder why the book even needs \u201cJaney.\u201d I understand the distancing of the author from the lyric \u201cI\u201d that Janey offers, but, in a project about racism, colonization and settlement where the writer, Rachel Zolf, is so integral to the problems the book investigates, what real purpose does Janey-as-persona serve? As Zolf states in her interview with TO Magazine that this book started with very personal questions: \u201cWhile working on a book on colonialism in Israel-Palestine I realized I was ignoring my role as a settler in Canada \u2013 and my thinking shifted from \u2018not in my name\u2019 to \u2018look into your own backyard.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end,\u201cJaney\u201d seems like a strange mask, the sort of covering a white writer may feel they need to be removed enough (or e-raced enough) to write about race \u2013 and it\u2019s the comforting (though far from comfortable) distance that \u201cJaney\u201d offers that I mistrust in this book. \u201cJaney\u201d is an unneeded complication to a project that\u2019s far closer to Zolf than she may be comfortable in letting on, for it\u2019s precisely the complications that Janey hides that make this project vital.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>Shane Rhodes<\/strong> is the author of five books of poetry including his most recent <\/span>X<\/span><\/em> (2013), and <\/span>Err<\/span><\/em> (2011 and a finalist for the City of Ottawa book award) both with Nightwood Editions. Shane has also published three earlier books with NeWest Press. Shane\u2019s poetry has won an Alberta Book Award, two Lampman-Scott Awards, the P. K. Page Founder\u2019s Award for Poetry and a National Magazine Gold Award. Shane is the poetry editor for <\/span>Arc<\/span> and is the 2013 Queensland Poet in Residence in Brisbane, Australia.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

WRITHING WITH VOICES WAITING TO BE HEARD: ARC<\/a>!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although the cover of Janey\u2019s Arcadia casts a calm, blond gaze over a blue and gold prairie landscape (the cover image is from a 1930 Canadian immigration pamphlet), the book is anything but Arcadian. Beneath this surface of seeming rural contentment, Zolf\u2019s book writhes with remembering, dismembering and membering. As with many projects of memory, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2382,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"9783,10139,10435,9960","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2086,1924],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[170],"issue":[59],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[],"topic":[3258],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10361"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}