Black Out

This essay weaves poetics, personal anecdotes, and narrative to argue for the dismantling of patriotism of national history that obscures the challenges and complications that are faced by Black and Indigenous peoples in Canada. It reads Sadiqa de Meijer's "Lake Ontario Park," and Britta Badour's "63 Kingstons," as treatments on the play between the surface and recesses of national consciousness and history. Readings of Armand Garnet Ruffo’s “Lake Cousin” and “On the Day the World Begins Again” explore the challenges and possibilities of Indigenous freedom when bound by carceral strategies of the colonial state. Dylan Robinson’s “Event Score for Guest Listening I” encourages a practice of listening for flaws in the structural integrity of coloniality, while also pointing decolonial potential made possible by new listening practices. In reading experience as text, alongside poetry, the essay means to break down boundaries between creation and critique in the service of imagining decolonization.