The Big Melt, Emily Riddle. Nightwood Editions, 2022.
We often talk about different nations inhabiting the same physical spaces and the uneasiness that accompanies that sharing. In Canada, one of these most lasting and visible divides comes from Indian Country and the settler nations that landed on top of its constituent nations centuries ago. Throughout the course of our collective relationships, it is the stories of the profoundly personal that make their way between all of these nations.
Poetry is often the realm of the personal. One of the most laudable poetic collections from Indian Country in recent years is Emily Riddle’s The Big Melt. Laudable in that it has garnered significant literary hardware. But also laudable in that the work speaks truths, and speaks those truths in not only an approachable manner, but also a lyrically beautiful form. Poetry often comes down to two central aspects: poetics and content. Content being the concepts and events addressed and poetics being the methods the writer uses to address that content. The Big Melt offers a successful balancing of the two. In terms of poetics, we have poems that span a wide range of forms and mechanics. I have to admit to not being particularly fond of the centre-justified format (the format often speaks to attempts at being a stereotypical poem to the detriment of line control and concrete poetics. It misses the challenge of poetry, often). But Riddle does manage to turn the format rather consistently to good use. Meaning that line control and flow remain well rendered, even when they don’t always appear to be. Pieces like “Green” stumble around that centre line metre-wise, but manage to craft a visual space for silence. You can hear it as you read aloud: “if you order a non-alcoholic mojito at happy hour, / people will look at you like you’ve known fun, / i’ve met her a few times” (28).
The central strength of Riddle’s collection comes in its rootedness. The work is a reflection of a strong poetic consciousness within an all-too-real world. This is a collection that finds a welcome home outside the academy poets. With a diction that you might describe as “everyday” in its voice and tone, the sort you would expect to overhear on the LRT, Miley Cyrus and bitumen and the West Edmonton Mall run alongside less familiar (to an outsider) aspects of Cree culture and language. While the former touchpoints are a recognizable experience to an average urbanite in Canada, the vantage point is much different with Riddle. Because as a Cree survivor of the nation atop her ancestral lands, there is a different sort of need to familiarize oneself with the unfamiliar, to understand the cultures and languages that not only showed up in your homelands, but did so in way that sought to erase you and your familiar. This process has been ongoing in Indian Country since the first forts went up 500 years ago. As changes unfolded around first peoples, we collectively have found connection points to those new and less familiar aspects of our surroundings. That same line of experience runs through Riddle’s collection, one in which newness, healing, and reclamation are all afforded a moment, as in the piece “vi”: “if you take your teachings seriously / you’ll come to the realization that the wave pool in WEM / is extra sacred” (58). This cutting edge of reclamation of the physical world around us is central to The Big Melt. That famous mall and its very cold wave pool become a space that is both traditional and contemporary, and in that they become entirely Cree and are reclaimed.
That ongoing, if not ever-present, act of reclamation within this collection places The Big Melt firmly and distinctively within the Cree traditions of both content and poetics. As such, Riddle’s The Big Melt affords readers a unique view of the spaces shared by Nehinaw within Canada. And it does this with a keen ear to that Nehinaw experience, most notable through undocumented usages of traditional language within the text. Poetry is an art that is fundamentally interested in sound. An interest that many Indigenous poets are pursuing in their work today. Riddle is following a familiar and necessary path in this collection, even including small stanzas entirely in Cree. This is a strong move for Riddle as it most aggressively re-asserts Indigenous sovereignty over the space, the text, and the sound of collection. The longer poem “Learning to Count” affords the strongest view of this process:
but it won’t cost you any soniyaw either (40)
Most any reader can clearly make out meaning of these lines, even within what may be an unfamiliar context. The search for that clear meaning is part of the process of reading the poem: sounding out the terms in their strangeness is the point, it brings them closer to familiarity. And most importantly, each of those terms has specific cultural meanings behind it that cannot be conveyed through any other term. They are not in English for good reason. Refusing to document them within the text speaks to their importance and insists that they should come to be familiar if not common knowledge to those who come to inhabit this originally Indigenous or Cree spaces. Riddle consciously conducts the reader through this process, delivers an experience that lies at the heart of her successful poetics. This a move that I would argue is fundamental to pushing our collective literature to match the inclusive and mosaic-like culture that Canada as whole has been aspiring to for decades. The approachability and recognizability of the collection’s diction are a real part of its strength for Cree readers, while for readers unacquainted with Cree, many of the Cree words are embedded in familiar phrasing and a conversational style.
Emily Riddle’s The Big Melt is touted by the publisher as a lyric work that speaks to repairing kinships, crafting spaces for ambiguity in terms of gender and sexuality, and examining the chaotic psychological and ecological aspects of climate change. Riddle does all of this wonderfully, speaking to critical aspects of the contemporary urban Indigenous experience. But moreover, she is doing something interesting and important poetically: melting the hard borders between nations and experiences and meaning. Her work carves out a truthful and carefully voiced Nehinaw experience largely absent in the literary world. An experience and space that is full of the sounds we long to hear more of — like iskwew, wisakahwaw, nikaway — and the sensual world we know emerges organically from the land beneath and around us.
— D.A. Lockhart is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, a writer, and publisher based out of Waawiiyaatanong (Windsor, ON — Detroit, MI).
