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Marie Annharte Baker, Exercises in Lip Pointing. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2003.

Reviewed by Reg Johanson
The Rain 1:1 (September-October 2003): 7


Don’t look to Annharte for representations of the “Indian” as spiritually wise, or possessing a special relationship to nature, or as crushed-abject, or for poems that trade on sacred knowledge for the white urban shaman, Hollyhock retreaters, the West Broadway patchouli crowd. What she writes in her third book (she’s the author of Being on the Moon, published in 1990, and Columbus Coyote Café, published in 1994) isn’t intended to make her popular among “Indian” or non-“Indian” readers. This book enunciates what gets stifled:

don’t say anything out loud
to Mr Mrs Ms Authority Person In Charge
don’t say aw fuck off either
you bug me aw come off it
enough enough
that bullshit

(“Exercises in Lip Pointing” [40])

There’s no bullshit in these poems at all, though some tell of having to put up with it: overhearing the conversation of a “family court judge” at the next table in a Vietnamese restaurant,

the sloshing in my stomach gives away my presence
the gurgle is in resistance
to white noise in the background

(“Who Am I to Judge” [51]).

“White noise is used for torture”, she says in the same poem, registering the power discourses that judge and punish and police the sayable. Not having any more time than anyone does for intervening in every racist conversation, Annharte has to pick her fights. She’s got one with “bad writing”:

Given enough poison
Indians will die out but who will give us
the secret remedy or cure for bad writing?

(“How To Stop Writing About Indians” [55]).

And in “Four directions After Her Life”, a poem “dedicated to a parting of spirit at Jocelyn House, Winnipeg”, the parting spirit remembered in the poem “again will escape bad poetry nights”. These are serious questions. Annharte’s poetry and prose has never suckered for the ready-made identities and tropes of nativeness available to her:

I get told the identity problem
is 100,000 Indians do not know
tribes of origin but make up lies
numbers make facts more credible
the pretended past does distract
I have tattooed the verification
of Indian status on my big toe
band number without the photo
I will show it if I’m ever asked
when I sneak behind the lines
next seige demo protest to help out
I have provable identity in case
clan membership expires annually
or my traditional but urban story
requires I reinvent my ancestors

(“In The Picture I Don’t See” [14-15]).

Serious questions because Annharte sees the stakes of representation:

fight for home fight for sanctuary
defend status regained
a right to being Indian
is not a pretty picture
an identity made questionable
by invasion or evasion

(“In The Picture I Don’t See” [15]).

As if the politics of identity and authenticity weren’t complex enough within native communities, there are always the appropriators to deal with—in “Turtle Island Woman” it’s Gary Snyder: “he tells me / white boys / claim to be artists first / like Indians are supposed to be / artists first / to write whiteboy stink / if we are artists first / then we don’t need to be Original People / first is a first for first nations / we have to imagine Turtle Island Woman / with her borrowed green heart / not taken as outright steal.”

In “I Want To Dance Wild Indian Blackface”, the aboriginal krewes in the New Orleans Mardi Gras offer a liberatory opportunity to celebrate in a kind of “Indian blackface” that honours a mixed-race, creole reality that doesn’t seem to be available in Kanada: “I don’t want to be authentic all the time […] I want to be that big bad black Indian in a carnival parade. I want an Indian day off.” Annharte takes pride in “our First Nations business woman” who “dispel[s] typical “squaw” image / Hollywood Indian Princess” and “[…] brings friends / to ride her new Jaguar to the bank / cash another cheque / she wants a lift from the past” (“Squaw Pussy”). As “a cynic” who “tends to see grey linings / hid in pink socialist clouds” (“In The Picture I Don’t See”), Annharte takes a lot of satisfaction in that image. Not hard to understand when at the “end of millenium / to get a cheque / takes an apocalypse” (“It Was Like”).

Annharte’s own representational strategy—what she “exploits”—has a clear motive:

I exploit the Native woman issue
especially those lately who lost kids
exploit this cause to raise up
rude thoughts I should keep
silent vigil

(“Who Am I To Judge” [53]).

If the cultural apparatus around the “Indian” “poisons”, sells out, and appropriates, the courts, prisons, cops, and social workers carry out the real dirty work. The poem “JJ Bang Bang” directly attacks police brutality, exposing the absurdity and hypocrisy of the “cultural sensitivity” initiatives that inevitably follow, and precede yet another, police brutality scandal:

After a lengthy inquiry police need
time to fabricate events records heal
go to sweat lodges pow wows
next police class is at least half Native
but native what?
half Native part pig siouiii
Aboriginal cop out

(“JJ Bang Bang” [48]).

In “JJ Bang Bang” and “Woman Bath”, in which Annharte and white feminist social workers discuss the murder of a native sex worker, the paternalistic (maternalistic in social work) attitude of the nice liberal is offended by Annharte’s critique, implying that it’s Annharte’s attitude that’s the problem:

curious I have been discussed as to how my racism prevents
treatments deserved by other Indian women tending to trust not
disappoint or please others who work for them

(“Woman Bath” [32]).

This is the old “reverse racism” accusation, another silencer. But Annharte doesn’t take the bait, ending the poem with the simple, brilliant assertion,

I found the dead girl in me she wasn’t killed by my words

(“Woman Bath” [33]).

Exercises in Lip Pointing helps to clear out the “clutter / of plastic tomahawks buried in our”—and I take that “our” to refer to “Indian” and non-“Indian”—“minds” (“An Account of Tourist Terrorism” [29]).