There’s a Poem for That: Shani Mootoo + Oh Witness Dey!

All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about Oh Witness Dey! and how it came to be?

Shani Mootoo: The title poem Oh Witness Dey! Was commissioned by Spike Island Gallery in the UK, for the catalogue of American artist Candice Lin ‘s Pigs and Poison traveling exhibition. I did not have a book in mind at the time. My poem contrasted Lin’s work on Chinese indentureship in the U.S.A. with Indian indentureship in Trinidad, where I grew up. Lin’s work references the Witness, and for my poem I, too, called on a Witness. I happened to show the finished poem to Andil Gosine, artist and curator, who, unknown to me at the time, was guest co-editor of the British journal Wasifiri. Andil asked for a poem on the same theme as the Spike Island commission, as “his” issue of Wasifiri was to be on the afterlives of Indian indentureship. After the fact, of course, it seemed inevitable that the research for these two poems would lead to a book that would explore the questions that arose from the poems: how indentureship, why the conditions of indentureship? The question of ancestry, about which I am often asked by theorists who consider my written work in theirs, inevitably arose. Oh Witness Dey! Is my attempt to get to the root of the rootlessness of those of us whose ancestry is mired in the deep and dark waters of the colonial labour systems. 

ALU: What did you learn while writing your collection? 

SM: Before I worked on this collection my knowledge of the so-called discovery of the Americas in the 15^th and 16^th centuries came from my high school textbooks and, since then, from more general conversations and debates about discovery, colonialism, and indentureship. But to speak, as I do in this collection, about the years from the late 1400s to the present, I had to read the works of historians, speak with people who are schooled in the subjects, read pertinent poets, and push myself mentally to pull together these sources, my family stories, and my own experiences of immigration. It was a huge experience, learning, reassessing, and unlearning, taking into account and interrogating what one has already been living and has taken for granted. It wasn’t until I began to peer into and excavate my own daily world that I saw the extraordinary in the everyday and ordinary.  

ALU: What sparked your initial love of poetry?

SM: If I am allowed to go all the way back in time, I’d say that my interest in writing poetry started when I was a child. But this particular start is probably true of many children—a child first sees in her introduction to these sparse lines called poetry an opportunity to speak, to state what is going on in her life, without revealing herself. Back then one poured out one’s heart, protected by the obfuscation that poetry seemed to call for and to offer. Poetry was a form of confession and catharsis, a way to create oneself for oneself, it was not meant to be shared, but kept under lock and key. One could love and cry, one could protest and delight, without the fear of contradiction, because how you wrote, this thing you thought of as poetry, protected you. This would eventually change however. So, see the following question for how.

ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?

SM: How and when searching for answers, wanting truths, speaking out and needing to be heard, superseded the childhood need for obfuscation, is difficult to pinpoint. But I do recall an eye-opening discovery: I found a little used book of poems in my school library by Rainer Maria Rilke, and saw that deep emotions were not feelings to fear or hide but, crafted, gave depth to a person, to life itself.  It was at this time I discovered, also, that language is an amazing tool for excavating and understanding, and then for sharing and explaining. To lay it all bare is now the drive behind all of my prose work and poetry. 

ALU: Can you discuss the significance of language and word choice in your collection? How did you land on which words to use?

SM: Oh Witness Dey! Falls into the category of poetry because this collection needed to be held within a genre broad-minded enough to accept its inherent slipperiness. The subject matter I was dealing with could not, to my mind, be clipped, truly reasoned, made precious, or sweetened. As the descendant of people whose language-of-origin was replaced by English, the ripping apart of, and mending back together, aspects of my own history had me wrestling constantly with the “what and how” of poetry for someone who is a product of geopolitical shenanigans and who, as a result, straddles multiple and sometimes conflicting identities. Choice of language, placement of lines, word and sound, and the page itself—as canvas—were all weighed to hold poetry, story, history, identity, and politics.