The Rain Review of Books

Box 2684 Station Terminal, Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory BC/CA V6B 3W8 | 604-682-3269 ext 7326 | books@rainreview.net


Kaie Kellough, Lettricity. Montréal: Cumulus Press, 2004.

Reviewed by Wayde Compton
The Rain 3:1 (January-March 2005): 3


While the regional nature of Canada is fretted over as a problem for those engaged in building it, I don’t think us Black Canadians are so worried in this regard, and, in fact, seem downright comfortable that local particulars refract us. As it is in the greater diaspora, so it is in the intra-diaspora. If one will ever come, we are not yet now at a tipping point after which black writing in Canada will be divided into regional camps, or even aesthetic ones. We are calling and responding to each other across a vast map, one or the other lighting up a city here and there, and the map looks a little like the circuit board on the cover of Lettricity—all fuses and latitudes. And if you’re Kaie Kellough, Canada is all yours anyway, because you were born in Vancouver, raised in Calgary, and started publishing in Montréal. As Kellough writes, “‘we are job’s children. god speaks to us in rewind’,” and it’s a revision of The Last Spike africanized that I choose to see, in this season after the death of Pierre Berton.

Indeed, I think Lettricity is best read as a dialectic composed of the spirit of jazz—which Kellough tells us “de- / creates”—and matters of nation and building. The book is suffused with samples and riffs from the diasporic canon; stylings of Kamau Brathwaite, George Elliott Clarke, and the present author are reworked and reworded, as is the tradition. The names of the loas, ancestors, and heroes are invoked, as is the tradition, but also here is included the Québecois nationalist Hubert Aquin. (Kellough writes himself into Aquin’s novel Prochain épisode, intertextually tailing, film noir-style, a Wolof character as he is divergently described in 1967 and 2001 English language translations.) The two most powerful and poignant poems in Lettricity are “Carifiesta” and “(Parenthetical People)”, both ambitious and convincing attempts to versify black communitarian moments and movements on the “enemy isle” of Montréal. Not unintentionally, these two poems speak against each other in places, the first positing a momentary achievement of black nationalism in the chaos of the fête:

as the dim past dawns
on the dinning present

we fuse
into one
timeless vibration. one
force coursing
through the veins
of one
indivisible

african nation.

But in “(Parenthetical People)”, an emotionally harrowing study of the black community’s official response when, during the lead-up to the 2000 federal election, none of the official parties accepted invitations to address them, the community itself is rendered in Kellough’s language as the most fragile of notions, wittily transcribed throughout the poem as “co / mutiny”, “the lack community” and a monosyllabic chorus called “com”. The building itself becomes a force in the events, as the meetings take place in a church basement, prompting some of the badder brothers to reject the activism altogether as simply “church bullshit”. This, together with the earlier poem “The Brick”, which cites Marie-Joseph Angélique (the black slave who burned down old Montréal), and the photographs throughout the book of walls, tagged streets, and doorways, reminds one of the physicality of the city, the literal matter that is discussed when race and culture are made civic. As the parade of “Carifiesta” moves through the streets, we are told that

a thun-
dering rum-
ble                        (bruk

boulevard rené-lévesque’s
national fault line. de-
lineating

impure
immigrant laine.

In the book’s opening poem, “Ascension”, we can see the depth of Kellough’s vision, and his answer to the contradictions of the resident dialectic. This poem is a complicated portrait of a Metro busker, a “tuneless” horn player who, the speaker tells us, undeniably fails to “enter / the dizzy vortex // zephyr whence / gillespie inspired”. There is the implication of tragedy in the figure, perhaps of  homelessness or addiction, and he is a scruffy, uneven doppelganger of the jazz loas of our hagiographic Afrocentric dreams: “he ain’t // the perfect past cast in timeless wax / the mecca of DECCA”. But in this image of misapplication and failure, Kellough draws forth a beauty in his very portraiture and connection. Where the sound, we are told, is hapless—his errant squawks would “freak / the kink out a ’fro”—the poet applies a beautiful rendering of the man in his own verse. If the sound is ugly, it is the man’s fingers playing, striking the valves, that Kellough makes beautiful. Finally, the speaker reveals that the busker “knows descent by heart and strives to blow its inverse ... he vies to verse his listeners in ascent, that they may transcend the fear of faltering”, and it is hereafter that Kellough himself knows that “he be we / alive, unproven”, and it is there in that swinging that the ascent really begins.