BY ANY
OTHER NAME
Out of the rubble
you come
crusted with
dust--
cockroach, pickaninny--
your clothes
bundled in a blanket
barefoot, faceless
you walk the
ditches north
or trust your body
to the smugglers,
wedge inside a
sweatbox,
board the
overloaded trucks and boats--
shark chum, flotsam, face down
petals on the
grit-sand beach.
At night you climb
the fences,
thicken their
dreams
with your
dark-skinned hunger,
swim the river
into the promised land--
wetbacks, ragheads, the hired help
to do the heavy
work, dirty work.
Inside you that
other too,
the one we fear
and long for:
devil/god, doppelganger,
shadowed
brilliance bloomed
and gone, a kiss
and other shifts
to lover or
brother, now they’re unfolding
your body from the
wheel carriage
of a 747—runaway, refugee---
death your sole
asylum
you become the
blossom
on a crush of
baby’s breath
in God’s most
perfect vase.
Derek Hanebury
Sherry: This poem was written by
Derek Hanebury, who lives in Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island. It was
shortlisted for the 2019 Literary Writes contest, on the theme of “the Other”.
When I saw the announcement, I asked
Derek if I might feature him here. This feature is longer than usual, as I
know Derek, and the subject matter of his book of poems touches on the issue of
murdered and missing women in Canada, that I have covered in this column
before. I know this story will touch your heart.
I was fortunate to take Derek’s
creative writing class some years ago at North Island College, where he taught
for 30 years. He recently retired with an Emeritus distinction.
Derek, congratulations on being
shortlisted, and on the Emeritus distinction! “By Any Other Name” carries a
powerful message. I especially resonate with the refugee being the blossom in
“God’s most perfect vase”. Would you tell us about this poem?
Derek: I wrote this poem in response
to the contest prompt but mostly in response to the demonizing of the migrant
caravans coming up from South and Central America. Of course, that broadened
out as the poem got going, as it seems to me that human migration has become
one of the top global issues. (Sadly enough, if climate change continues its
trajectory, this humanitarian crisis will only deepen as sea levels rise and
habitable land begins disappearing.)
What I wanted to get at is how we use
labels to shift our perceptions away from the humanity of other people. Fear is
often the first response to anything different from ourselves, and it doesn’t
take much rhetoric to stoke that fear, especially when it comes from people in
positions of power. In the end, people are going to have to get past that fear
because the blending of cultures is not about to stop or be reversed as much as
they may want to curtail it.
In the latter part of the poem, I try to dig a
little deeper to connect that fear to the fear we all have of parts of our own
inner being. You could use the Jungian term “shadow” I suppose for those
energies that we all work hard at repressing and denying, but I wanted to
express some optimism too for the possibility of embracing those outcast
energies and bringing them into our inner families, just as the migrants can be
included in our intimate lives and treated as equals in the human family. In
the poem, of course, (and too often in real life as well), those treated as
“other” are only elevated after death, becoming the metaphorical roses in God’s
vase. Sadly, it often takes startling images of dead or dying children in the
media, to return the humanity to these people fleeing poverty and oppression,
at least in the eyes of the developed world.
Sherry: Those images of children do
touch our hearts, and make us more aware. We are bombarded with so many crises,
I hope we remember people are still suffering, once the news media moves on to the next pressing crisis.
Would you tell us the meaning behind
the title of your poetry book, Nocturnal
Tonglen?
Derek: Tonglen is a Budddhist
practice where a practitioner sits with another and uses his or her inbreath
like a vacuum cleaner to draw out all the negativity trapped within the person,
and his or her outbreath to return the purified energy to that person.
Typically, the practitioner will visualize breathing in black smoke and
breathing back white light. It can be a very powerful healing technique and
seemed to me to be a perfect metaphor for what artists do when they tackle dark
subject matter, as my book of poetry does, and try to create something
beautiful out of the horror.
It also seemed to be a good metaphor
for what the human psyche does when it processes traumatic experiences. This
can happen consciously through hard inner work, creative effort, and therapy,
or unconsciously as we go about our daily lives. I pay close attention to my
dreams and found much in the symbolic content of my dreams reflecting how I was
processing the disappearance of my sister-in-law, hence the “nocturnal” part of
the title. In fact, I had finished what I thought was the whole book of poems,
and then I had a powerful dream that became the raw material for what became
the first poem in the collection. All of the imagery in there came like a gift
from my subconscious, highlighting exactly what the book was documenting in my
journey from trauma to healing.
Sherry: That’s amazing, Derek. Would
you please share with us the story behind this collection of poems?
Derek: This book of poetry, as I
mentioned earlier, came out of that horrible loss our family went through in
1984, when my 19-year-old sister-in-law was abducted and never found. On one
level, it tells the physical story and the healing journey we went through, but
it broadens out to explore the bigger issues of violence against women and
men’s difficulty reconciling with their own feminine sides. In my short life,
I’ve seen some great strides being made on the latter issue of
masculine/feminine integration, but the violence against women carries on
despite the #metoo movement and the public’s increased awareness of the
problem. As I say in one of the poems, it’s way past time for us to say “Never
again, not once, no more!” when it comes to violence against women, let alone
all the other forms of misogyny that have predicated so many relationships and
interactions between men and women.
On a positive note, my
sister-in-law's cold case has recently been taken up under a new RCMP program
that uses highly sophisticated software to re-examine all the evidence
available from old investigations and suggest new avenues of exploration.
Apparently, it has led to the resolution of four other cold cases already, so
who knows. One can always choose to accept things as they are but still
continue to hope, which is where I land by the end of the book.
I had a
profound few minutes in my life, where I was shown how perfection glides behind
everything that happens in the world. I knew the truth of that with a certainty
I had never had about anything else and have never had since. That revelation
led to a deeper commitment to the meditation practice I had already begun and, ultimately, to some reconciliation to the fact that Carolyn was never coming
back in that form again and that it was okay, despite the tragic nature of what
happened. All of this gets explored in the poems, though often not so directly.
Sherry: It takes deep practice, and a
wise soul, to reach that level of awareness. I love the idea of perfection gliding behind
everything – especially now, when so
much of what we witness seems so unjust.
I would love to share the following
poem, from Nocturnal Tonglen, if I may.
CEREMONIAL
UNEARTHING
After seven years they say
we can call her
dead but what to bury by then?
We could box this
pair of earrings ceramic
mask of tragedy the photograph
that fell from the shelf
and shattered us with glass.
Add the hair the RCMP
scrounged from her brush
a collection of Lawrence
her drama award…
all I can hear is her giggling
Guinevere unearthed and the downpour
of her voice over the phone
saying she would be the best damned
Ann Franks the world had ever seen,
still nightied at noon and cracking
up
over what happened in the last act.
Carolyn, with tulips
Sherry: This poem helps me see her,
the giggling Baby Sister, heartbreakingly absent from the family who loves and
mourns her still. It is beautiful, Derek. So sad.
Would you like to say something here
about your sister-in-law, and this poem?
Derek: Yes, Carolyn was the surprise
afterthought arriving a full eleven years after her next oldest sister, and
consequently she was truly the baby of the family and cherished by all of us.
She had an irrepressible joy for life and that joy would often spill over into
giggling laughter that swept everybody up with it. She had just finished her
first year of a degree in drama when she was murdered, and like many actors,
she had that kind of outgoing personality that drew everyone’s attention and
sparked a lot of fun. Her disappearance kicked a huge hole in family
gatherings, but it’s true what they say, after enough time, it’s the good
memories that stay, and I tried to catch some of those in this poem.
Sherry: Thank you, Derek. She
definitely lives, in all of her youthful joy, in this poem. Are you working on
a book at present?
Derek: I have enough poems for
another collection (or two), but I’m working to select the ones that will link
up thematically and create some kind of overall effect beyond their individual
ones. It’s a process I enjoy, but I’m finding I can’t rush it. In the end, I
think I’ll be glad I took the time, rather than hurrying out something I’ll
have regrets about.
Sherry: I look forward to it, when it
comes out. As well as poetry, you also write fiction (your first book, the novel Ginger Goodwin: Beyond the Forbidden Plateau), creative non-fiction, short fiction and even drama. When did
you begin writing poetry? What do you love about it?
Derek: Poetry started early on in my
life, when I was eleven or twelve, but gained momentum through my hormone
enriched teens, culminating with my enrollment in the Creative Writing Program
at the University of Victoria in my twenties. That’s when things really began
in earnest as I learned what poetry could do and immersed myself in the work of
so many great poets. I loved the more romantic poems from poets like e.e.
cummings and W.B. Yeats, and went through serial monogamy with a long list of
poets after them. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were in there along with Rumi and
Robert Bly, Gwendolyn MacEwan and W.S. Merwin, to name a few.
To me, the joy of discovery is what
keeps me writing poetry. An idea comes, and I do my best to get out of the way
and start throwing down whatever words come until they stop. Then I come back
to earth and try to figure out what my subconscious was trying to write, which
is sometimes a bit like going on a treasure hunt. Once I figure that out, I can
start revising to that end. I love that tinkering and tweaking, and can do that
forever if I let myself. In the end, it’s such a satisfying art form when
something as compact as a poem can speak to someone else’s heart and move them.
When you feel like you’ve really captured something, there’s nothing quite so
rewarding.
Sherry: Rewarding to read, for your
readers, as well. Are you enjoying retirement?
Derek: Retirement is awesome. It’s so
nice to live more in tune with my natural rhythms: to eat and sleep when I feel
like it, to write when the inspiration strikes, and to not have the weight of
prep and marking hanging over me. I did miss the student interactions in class
sometimes. Seeing poets like you catch fire was always a treat, Sherry.
Lately I’ve started monthly meetings
with a few of my favourite local writers and that seems to be filling the void.
We share our work over tea at the Steampunk Café and give a bit of feedback to
keep each other growing, and then there’s the monthly Words on Fire open mics
at Char’s Landing to test new work aloud on a live audience.
I’ve also been leading some workshop
events, including a poetry workshop on May 4th at the
Federation of BC Writers Conference Spring Writes in Nanaimo. Between
that, other reading gigs, and some private mentoring I’ve been doing online
with some talented young writers, it’s been easy to keep inspired. Yes, retired
life is highly recommended!
Sherry: It all sounds wonderful! If I
were still in Port, I’d pull up a chair at Steampunk!
Derek: Thanks for this chance to
introduce myself to your readers, Sherry. I hope I haven’t rattled on too long
about things, but I think we agree that poetry is one subject that deserves to
be talked about way more. Thanks for all you do to keep people inspired and
talking!
Sherry: Thank you so much for
allowing me to introduce you here, Derek. When I read Nocturnal Tonglen, I knew
this is a topic our readers are very concerned about, as we are about the
refugee situation unfolding at the southern border, and globally.
Derek can be contacted, for mentoring
or book purchases, at
Material shared in 'I Wish I'd Written This' is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other writings remain the property of the copyright owners, usually their authors.
