PLACE AND IDENTITY: Reading From God’s Spider at the Federation Of Humanities And Social Sciences Congress

Abstract

Being a guest-writer at the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences Congress was an honour. I thank the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (CACLALS) and the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) for hosting me to read from my new volume, God’s Spider (Peepal Tree Press, UK)–a shortlisted finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature (Best Poetry Book category).  Indeed, a reading is always a special occasion for me; it’s also a time of liminality–in-betweenness, if you will-- placelessness, a void, quest, looking or yearning for an identity; and being nowhere, but searching. Wanting.  As a preamble to my reading, I touched on W.H. Auden’s view that a poet should “mythologize the ground on which he walks.”  Having now lived for over four decades in Canada, I am well equipped to do this: mythologizing Canada, sometimes with post-colonial verve and style, or angst. Post-colonial, presumably because all art is political (see Salman Rushdie’s essays in his Outside the Whale).