Ideas - The Poetry of Why: Chimwemwe Undi

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

A conversation with Winnipeg Poet Laureate Chimwemwe Undi about home, belonging, racism, living downtown, and about poetry as a vehicle for life’s big questions — as her first collection of poetry, Scientific Marvel, is set to be published.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Burden from need.

Do and then don't. And without would have swallowed the river. I survived and feel survival in my arms. What's brought over water and then hung overhead. Chimamwe Andi, reading Winnipeg poem, Portage. Chimamwe Andi lives and works in downtown Winnipeg at the intersection of poetry and law. People have said, oh, you're a lawyer who writes poems, and I correct them and say I'm a poet who practices law.

Chimamwe, known as Chim for short, practices labor, employment, and intellectual property law. And she's Winnipeg's third poet laureate. intellectual property law, and she's Winnipeg's third poet laureate. Poets and lawyers share an interest in words and in how things work. I'm very interested in understanding why people make the choices that they do and how those choices are constrained by larger systems of power. Chim's own choice to live downtown was both personal and political. The ability to become distanced from the people in my life, my neighbors, my community, who are having the hardest time, that's the thing that worries me the most about the city.

As Winnipeg's Poet Laureate, part of Chim's responsibility is to hold up a mirror to the city and to put her passion for words at the service of narratives that have been erased from the Prairie City's history and its present day. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed, and welcome to Winnipeg, a place both Chim and I call home. Sure. My name is Chimamwe Andi. You can call me Chim, everybody does. I am the Poet Laureate of Winnipeg for 2023 and 2024. I'm a poet and I'm a lawyer and I live here on Treaty 1 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. That's brilliant. Thank you.

I met Chimamwe Andi at a food court in a high-rise in the heart of Winnipeg's downtown. Not far from landmarks every Winnipegger knows. The Fort Garry Hotel, Portage Avenue and Portage Place Mall. You and I have an uncannily similar relationship with Winnipeg. We were born here, both children of immigrants. Both moved away for a spell. And they came back here as a 13-year-old, which was not a hell of a lot of fun. What was your story?

Similar, yeah. Like you said, I was born in Winnipeg. My dad was doing his PhD at the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg. My dad was doing his PhD at the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg. And then we moved to Zambia and then to Namibia shortly after when I was two or so. And then we came back to Winnipeg when I was about to turn 13, which is a terrible time to move to a new place. Junior high is not a fun time to be different in any way. But I've been here, besides a one-year break for grad school, I've been in Winnipeg since. What is that absence? What is that experience due to your sense of belonging?

It ruptures it really significantly. I assume that I always would have been interested in observing others but that tendency in me was enhanced by the fact that I was taken out of one environment and put into an entirely different one into an entirely different context which I'm sure is common for for immigrants but at that age of sort of figuring out what kind of person I was going to be at 13. Having to navigate everything that you have to navigate when you're 13, alongside navigating a new culture, yeah, made me very interested in how people work and what kind of invisible rules we live by

and how we speak, things that I think have shaped the rest of my life. And what about your poetry? Has it shaped your poetry in some ways? Absolutely. I mean, the interest in being an observer, in figuring out how things work, for me is really at the heart of writing poetry. Asking questions, to me, is the purpose of writing poetry. And I was asking questions all the time. In elementary school in Namibia, you treated adults in a very specific way.

When a teacher came into a room, everybody stood up and said, Good morning, in a chant. And then the relationship between students and teachers here in Winnipeg was very different and I wanted to know why just as an example asking why all the time. What does Winnipeg mean to you? Winnipeg is my home by choice by repeated choice it's a place that I love deeply and that I worry about a lot. Winnipeg Poem. One, a reference to the famously frigid winters, often by way of reference to winter clothing or activities. Two, for obvious reasons, the phrase prairie sky.

Three, lamenting, general. Four, lamenting, winter specific. Five, invoking John K. Sampson explicitly or by prosody. Six, a reference to the history of the name Winnipeg, being murky water in an Inamoan. 7. A passing or rote reference to Indigenous peoples broadly, post-2015 apologetic in tone. 8. A mention of local flora, typically in metaphor. A mention of local flora, typically in metaphor. For example, lilac, chokecherry, birch, milkweed, saskatoon berry, thistle, goldenrod, prairie grass, etc. Nine, a mention of local fauna, typically in metaphor. For example, deer tick, blackfly, skeeter, canker worm, pigeon, crow, etc.

10. A reference to the forking of the Red and Assiniboine rivers and or to the forks. 11. A reference to Salisbury House. Sal's and pre-2019 Stella's restaurants. 12. Portage and Main and or Confusion Corner and or the Golden Boy. 13. Invoking Guy Madden's My Winnipeg, explicitly or in tone. 14. Grain, etc.

Jim reading her simply titled Winnipeg poem. I was trying to imagine how I would describe this poem if somebody hadn't read it. It kind of sounded a little bit like the word equivalent of a postcard, where you see the cliches, the stereotypes, the things that you might just expect to see in a particular city. What is it that you wanted to leave with the reader at the end of this poem? Well, I should say first, the poem is a bit of a joke. Like it is a bit of a send up of not just poems that other people have written about Winnipeg, but of poems that I have written about Winnipeg. But the kind of stereotypes that we lean on to paint a picture of the city.

The Prairie Sky. The Prairie Sky, John Kay, who I love and admire very deeply, but who's, I think, has made some of the sort of anthemic depictions of Winnipeg that can become cliche. Yeah. The cold weather. Yeah, the cold weather. Orange Maine.

The golden boy. Yeah. The beats that you hit when you're trying to say, and this is in Winnipeg. And I thought in the context of the book that this poem is from that if i put them all in one place then i would be forced not to use them part of the comment is that the city is so much more complex and there's so much more to say about it than the things that we all reach for. So is there pressure for you to to write that kind of postcard-y poem? As poet laureate I would say absolutely yes I think people are drawn to easy reflections of the city the postcard the the tag, the easy version of the city.

And so the sort of more nuanced or more complicated depictions can be less reader-friendly. Chim's poetry embraces nuance and complication. Her first collection, published in her final year as Winnipeg's Poet Laureate, is titled Scientific Marvel. Can you tell the story of how that title came about? What a great title. So Scientific Marvel, I walk past it on my way to work every day. It at one point was a beauty school in downtown Winnipeg. And I thought the name Scientific Marvel for a beauty school was so funny. And I think about it all the time. And as I started reaching a point where I thought the next thing for me to do

would be to write a collection, that title just really stuck with me. Also as a way of talking about the practice of poetry as sort of precision about the magical, the science of Marvel, I thought was a really funny way of thinking about writing poetry. And the title came before the book, but it's always stuck. It was the title looking for a book. Yeah. Describing this book, you once said, this is my first book, so I feel like I've been writing it my whole life. If that's the case, what is it that you've

been waiting your whole life to say whoa uh big question um or some of it anyway yeah really my I think it's a an idea I got from musicians talking about their albums that you have your whole life to draw on for the first album and then the spaces shrink, the things to draw on shrink after that. There's a lot in this book about my family, about my relationships, and about my kind of coming into awareness of the city that I live in. I grew up on the south end of the city, which is, you know, a fairly affluent area near the University of Manitoba and had a really kind of sheltered upbringing in a lot of ways. I grew up with a lot of immigrant kids whose parents worked for the university, very nerdy high school. And I had a really, you know, in a lot of ways, lovely upbringing there.

But I think also the impression that I have of the city I lived in was a narrative that was fed to me, which was the narrative that drew my parents to the city the first time and back the second time, and one that has not held up to scrutiny as I've grown older. has not held up to scrutiny as I've grown older. Learning about the place that you're from and staying in that place feels in some ways like moving. It feels like I live in a different city than the city that I grew up in because there was so much context that I didn't have about, you know, my parents bought a home in Waverly West, which is one of these new developments that is filled with immigrant families like mine who, you know, were drawn to this certain picket fence dream of Manitoba.

But the existence of that suburb is tied to a movement away from downtown Winnipeg and a desire to divert the population from being in the center. And yeah, the place that we live in a city is a personal choice and a political choice. It's a result of city planning. It's a result of history. And those sort of layers of meaning are really interesting. So your choice to live downtown, how would you describe it? It is a personal choice. I like being able to walk to work. It's a political choice in many ways. I like living somewhere that I am forced to be close to my neighbors

and I'm forced to not turn away from the people around me that I share resources most of the people in my neighborhood don't have personal green space but the green space that we have is in the parks and the community gardens and that forces us to come together when you kind of look beyond these the postcards or the as you say, the picture that your parents and my parents bought about, about the city and which does exist in pockets, of course. Yeah. When you look around the corner, what worry, what would you say worries you most about this city? I mean, I think the easy answer is not really the true answer. The true answer for me is that I'm worried about our increased capacity not to care about each other. have lives that are living in a house, getting into a car, driving to an indoor parking space in an office building,

and looking at the poverty and the addiction from our windows and in the news, that it becomes abstract in a way that is really harmful. And that's something I felt in myself, the ability to become distanced from the people in my life, my neighbors, my community, who are having the hardest time. That's the thing that worries think are the easier issues to talk about the poverty, the addictions crisis that has become so much more easily visible since lockdown. A lot of people who were living precarious lives fell off the edges that they were navigating. And it's much starker how much need there is in the city, how much pain there is in the city.

Yeah, and I'm afraid that not enough of us are thinking about our responsibility to each other to do something. You work in a high-rise downtown. I do, yeah. And so you do see on a daily basis what it's like on the streets, downtown Winnipeg. How much of that influences what you write about? All of it does. A lot of it does. It influences what I write about, but also the way that I navigate my life. It is, for me, a really conscious decision to live in downtown Winnipeg.

It's a conscious decision to be involved with organizations that I'm involved with, like the Broadway Neighborhood Center that does a lot of programming, food programming and educational programming for youth in the central neighborhood. Because for me, a thing that I actively worry about in this sort of privileged life that I studied for and was hired into, is becoming distanced from the people that I advocated for and alongside as a younger person in the city. How do you stay close to those local issues?

And as you say, that become separate from your life when you pursue the career that you do and the life that you lead? Certainly in my case I'm really entrenched in my community and a lot of the people that are doing more of the frontline work are people who I am friends with and care about and who hold me accountable. And considering myself a part of a community means feeling accountable to those people to do what I can to not... I don't even like the phrase give back because it's sort of...

Transactional. Yeah, transactional, rather than what it is, which is mutual, that my community makes sure that I remain a good part of my community. I'm accountable to them. They are accountable to me. And that's really important to me. And I think part of being a member of a society and a part of a city is recognizing that you have a responsibility,

that we have responsibilities to each other. Not a bomb, but leveled. Still unkeeling. Listless or lacking inventory. Shortly nothing. Shortly unmade, hearkening back to blondes on VHS, stockings named for a favored subset of flesh, glitter rides the escalator's churn, jingle dirges in the backlight, specter,

backlight blue, geometrical, impossible, this edifice, the biggest thing to hit the city since the flood. Flood displaced in meaning by a bigger flood. Mall displaced in meaning by the flood of us. Flood again, toxic metaphor. Begat by bordering, black and brownness, by bodies blued, bluing, made buoyant by the mass of us, liquid in our number. To be sure, us does not mean this keen city, nostalgic amnesiac, supplicant lustrated in silted water, ten-tented fingers, breaks for wagging. Us means something like my people. Penotes a buoyant mass, joyous noise.

Gestures to uncle strangers in the food court, stuffing ears with courage. Lies. In Dalarama, auntie compliments my accent, offers me her son. Strained plaid polyester, portage place First Nation, which Dee says to mean something like my people. People made a demographic, disappeared from municipal imagination, struck like noon, inside exit doors locked into exterior walls, before unmaking again return to the blueness of the light, gossamer and permanent, to the trees indoors at that, a rube's early wonder, to these

planters built for sitting, uniformed men imported from the suburbs to tell us not to sit, to the clock's bright mechanics, spiral torsions only visible coming down the escalator, blunt blade also promised better things. The trouble is how to build it, the blue unmade amidst mist and wind and unhurried anarchy, how to conjure house and universe. Even dexterous in this new split tongue, I am full of all the wrong language, full of little but language, lungs full of elsewhere's smoke. I am helpless before what can't be helped,

mouth busy to be tuning the questions. What beautiful thing has ever left me and returned? What else, in the middle distance, is burning? Chim Undi, reading her poem on the imminent destruction of Portage Place Mall. She wrote it after hearing that the mall was slated for redevelopment. I'm old enough to remember when the mall opened in 1987, to remember the excitement of walking through its shiny halls.

Chim's own memories of it evolved with the years. So I have really early memories of Portage Place Mall because my mother worked there when I was 14 or 15 and I spent a take your kid to work day with her in the mall and then I when I worked at the public Interest Law Center and their offices were still in there I worked in the mall and now I live downtown and so the mall is the easiest walkable access to a number of services and the mall is frequented by black and brown people by black and indigenous people and so when this poem is was written few years ago, when the conversation about remaking Portage Place Mall was not really accounting for the fact that the mall continues to be used and relied upon as a community space by Black and Indigenous people who are living and working and making their lives downtown. I was really sort of concerned with that, with the erasure of certain demographics from the downtown and from the mall,

and also from the narrative that because Portage Place is not frequented anymore by people who live in the suburbs, by people who think of downtown as a dangerous place that's not worth visiting, that is for working in the safety of a high-rise building and then going home, or, you know, for accessing for sports games and concerts and not really investing in forgetting that people live here. That because, because you know a certain kind of person was not spending time in the mall that the mall was therefore completely lacking in value that it was a failed project because it was not doing the thing it was imagined that it would do another

reality of the mall is that it divides the downtown into sort of two halves that there's central park behind the mall and then neighborhoods that are filled with black people and indigenous people behind the mall and so it has really become a kind of dividing line in the city anyway all of these things were kind of in my mind especially at the time i was reading the book stolenolen City by Owen Taves, which is about the history of Winnipeg and how it became sort of a downtown surrounded by sprawling suburbs, which is hard as a person who really values living in a walkable city, and all those things sort of converged in this poem. In this poem, you say,

us, us does not equal this keen city. To be sure, us does not mean this keen city, nostalgic amnesiac, supplicant, lustrated, insulted water. Can you elaborate on what you meant by that line? That the idea of Winnipeg that is broadcasted and that is leaned on is not one that includes the Black and Indigenous people that frequent Portage Place or the people that live and work downtown

or the people that live and work downtown, or the people that live on the streets of downtown, that those are sort of, those groups of people are sort of an addendum to the real Winnipeg. And at least that's what the narrative is. And I have real problems with that narrative. You say the biggest thing to hit the city since the flood. The biggest thing to hit the city since the flood. Flood displaced in meaning by a bigger flood.

Mall displaced in meaning by the flood of us. What do you mean by the flood of us? Of immigrants to the city. So the biggest thing to hit the city since the flood, I was watching these archival YouTube videos of ads that were broadcasted when the mall was first built and was imagined of being this high-end shopping centre for wealthier people to spend time in. And flood, the metaphor of a flood of immigrants is one that's been sort of studied in linguistics as a way of talking about and pathologizing immigrants and refugees coming into a country as a flood, as a natural disaster,

affecting the people who are sort of imagined to have a right to be here. Because of the flood of us, the mall is not what it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be, in quotes, right, in scare quotes, Yeah, the flood of us who are so central to the city and important to the city, but are still kind of imagined as an afterthought. What beautiful thing has ever left me and returned? What else in the middle distance is burning? What was the original meaning behind the words

at the end of that poem about burning? I was thinking about who gets to destroy things and on what basis. to destroy things and on what basis. So I was thinking about how people from certain demographics, people who have less access and less power in the world, are unable to rely on anything because they don't have the power to maintain things or to make them disappear. So I was really thinking about the folks that I

kind of referenced in that poem, who I would watch, you know, meet every day at the same place at the same table on the food court and get Tim Hortons coffees and sit and talk for hours. You know, recent immigrants who go there and find other people who literally and metaphorically speak their language, people who go to the Dollarama to get basic necessities because it's because downtown Winnipeg is a food desert and also Dollarama is more affordable than a lot of other places especially now and how those priorities because of the people who held those priorities were deemed less important than other priorities, like creating value through real estate and things like that.

This may be stating the obvious, but does that make you an advocate? I'm an advocate in my work. I mean, I don't know that I write my poems to advocate, but I think that telling a story well can be a form of advocacy and that it helps people understand a different perspective. I'm in conversation with Winnipeg Poet Laureate Chimamwe Undi. On Ideas, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. You can also hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, in North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

You can also find us on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. And being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. A beautiful country, so full of breath, the sky as wide open as a howling throat. My throat as wide open as a prairie sky, as blue, as hungry to ungive what's been taken. Chimamwe Andi, reading an excerpt of her poem, Grunthal, Manitoba, 2019. In her own words, Chim wants her poetry to be a balm, as well as keys gripped between fingers on the dark part of the walk,

or a hot water bottle, or a mirror. You can't give back what has been taken. Unname the place named what it already is. Rename a place that was already named in language with altitude and implication. This language's altitude and implication good for making art and telling lies. Good for making art on telling lies. For making promises it meant to keep. In her first published collection of poetry,

she tackles matters of urban life, race, gender, and belonging. She was born and raised mostly in Winnipeg and is now its third Poet Laureate. Chim writes eloquently about the challenges that define our age, no matter where we live, and about the city she loves. Given your love for the city, what's it like to be asked to be the Poet Laureate? It's a great honour. A lot of my love for the city comes from my love

for the arts community here, which is, I think, has always punched above its own weight, is remarkably diverse and tight-knit and productive and inspiring. Yeah, the arts in Winnipeg is, I think, really the heart of Winnipeg is, I think, really the heart of Winnipeg. And so taking any kind of role to be a representative of that community in any capacity is a big honour. I feel very much like I was kind of raised in a way by the literary community in Winnipeg.

I've been practising poetry since I was 16 and people have just been so nice to me. It's really the story of how I kept going, is that every time I tried to do something, someone was encouraging, which I think is the story of being a writer in Winnipeg, is that there's always someone there for you. And so getting to be the public face of that is huge. So what do you think the responsibility of a poet laureate is? I've been sort of inviting people to revisit poetry, turn back to a practice that a lot of people tell me that they dabbled in as children. A remarkable number of people tell me as a child,

as a teenager, I wrote a lot of poetry, but it fell to the wayside as I grew older. And I have been trying to invite people back to writing poetry, to reading poetry, to recognize it as an art that can be a source of comfort or fun or recognition in their lives, the same way that music can be or movies can be. I strongly believe we are living in like a golden age of poetry. There's such easy access to great poetry no matter kind of what interests you have there's a poet that has the same interests as you and that's writing about them in an interesting way. A golden age of poetry. I think so, I do. I feel sort of spoiled for choice. I can access so much great poetry within seconds during the pandemic, as in while everything was on lockdown. A lot of writers that I admire moved their readings and their classes online, and so suddenly I had access

to sort of some of the greatest writers of our time. Examples? Terrence Hayes. I'm currently obsessed with Terrence Hayes. And I watched a reading of his, like, last Friday that was taking place in Brooklyn. Just that level of access, you know, being able to see a poet who I really admire and whose work I have turned to to inspire my own writing, Working through his new work by reading it in front of people is just remarkable. Going back to the living in a golden age of poetry,

it has never been easier to find a writer who writes from a similar place identity-wise that you do. In Canada. Yeah, in Canada, certainly. Also, the tradition of spoken word, I think, really opened up the publishing world in that it was an accessible way for marginalized people to access the poetry community. And now a lot of those writers who came up in the spoken word community are really widely published, widely respected sort of page poets, if I can put it that way.

So there's a lot of opportunity to find yourself in poetry right now. And so that's the responsibility of a poet to the art. What's the responsibility of the poet to the city? Are they the same? Maybe. That's a harder question. In some ways, sort of holding a mirror up to the city is the work of a poet and also the work of the laureate. A lot of what I've been doing has just been bringing poetry into rooms where it would not have existed explicitly. I've been invited to all sorts of fancy luncheons, and just having a presence in those rooms has been really interesting legitimize the conversation about writing poetry as an adult, as a part of a person with a fuller

life of doing other things. But I wonder what it is you think you can do in poetry that you can't do just in straight up writing or in music or something else. What is it about poetry that helps you better express whatever it is that you're trying to say? I think that metaphor opens up room for more meaning and for more connection than literal writing can. That I can write into a poem the things that I'm feeling and seeing and draw connections that are clear to me and somebody else can take the same poem much like the same person two people can look at an abstract painting and see completely different things a poem because of its use of metaphor and of coming at things at different angles provides more doorways into it and out of it than some kinds of prose writing can.

Meaning it's a bit more abstract. Yeah, and that abstraction is an opportunity for people to bring more of themselves into the writing. Is it a safer place to write? To express oneself than other forms? Or the opposite? For me, the opposite. I feel like my poems expose me much.

But then again, I guess there is a way of hiding behind metaphor that might make it a safer way to write. It's all there, I think, in the poem. But the wrong way of looking at it can obscure what is there. You know these stories. You've heard them all before from those of us who have them, that share them, hopeful our tears will salt the earth from which they came. Maybe it's her, writing the old tremble in her voice when she raises it to beg for or demand a better thing.

Maybe this time it's a sibling told to be a kinder version of the fistfight that formed them, of the righteous anger that carved a space for them in this world. Maybe it's me, the only black girl in too many rooms, asked to be an avatar, a metaphor, a megaphone, to speak when spoken to and then never for myself, to open my mouth and unfurl the whole brown world like a late summer fiddlehead. The same old tale. It eats itself. An excerpt from Chim's recitation of Speaking My Truth in 2019. Just one example of work in which she addresses racism and bigotry head-on, as well as the challenges of growing up Black and queer on the prairies. I do have to ask whether you feel any special obligation or responsibility

given that you're also a Black writer, and I believe you describe yourself also as also as a queer writer yeah I yeah I'm a black queer writer I do and I don't I mean I think when I first became involved with poetry I was it was in the capacity of being a spoken word artist and I was performing a lot and I felt really beholden to the audience because every week I was going to open mics and poetry slams and everything I was writing was immediately being delivered to an audience and that interaction started to shape the way that I was writing and it came to a point that I had to actively resist thinking about the audience in my writing because I was not writing from an honest place anymore. I was kind of anticipating what people wanted to hear from me. I was responding in a way that ended up being really harmful to me to news about black death and violence about black people

without enough time to process how I felt about things or to sit with feelings long enough to actually have something to say, something of my own to say about them. So I feel a responsibility, rather, I feel a responsibility in my poetry only in the sense, the same sense that I feel a responsibility as a person and that I won't write things that are harmful to people and I won't write, my politics are reflected in the way that I write. But I don't have anybody else in my head on purpose when I'm writing. Yeah, it's just me in there. else in my head on purpose when I'm writing. Yeah, it's just me in there. One of Chim's earlier poems is a very personal exploration of how queer people find belonging in a world that largely isn't safe for them. A poem inspired by a memorable dance party

and by Amy Winehouse, the sole prodigy who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 years old. None of us know Amy personally, but she's here, and she's singing, rising above our sodden heads bowed in something like prayer, maybe. Most of us are trying to move enough to pretend she doesn't remind us of our mothers, and Sunday morning spring cleans, the sharp bleached smell of it, the shrill peak of their voices demanding something far less beautiful. We're trying not to think of mothers who mostly whisper now, or girls who looked away and uninvited us from sleepovers,

even though they were smiling the whole time, or the last time that we were here, how it felt the same when we got home after. It as in everything. The same as in worse. You gotta move sometimes when you're stuck in the middle of it. That's the philosophy we're buying into here. Using drip tickets we bought at the dollar store and tucked into bras and ace bandages and sagging back pockets, you gotta move.

Your body a last resort, occupying unseated space. The only thing that's ever belonged to you and half the girls here have called that into question. Girls only because that's how you get in here or in here just because of the girls. Because here is nowhere and here lives the only God that thinks our wetness akin to holy water, that answers to that tense-bodied hallelujah's escaping mouths we thought had forgotten how to form them. Us broken daughters and all our pieces jangling, all strobe light, sweat, and saxophone. When Amy died, we danced off the sorrow we knew our mothers would shed, split their self-satisfied smugness between us like a quarter. We tucked a backbeat under a promise of an always love,

used those tickets to buy into that sacred oath in Mezzo Soprano and we move to it, right into it, because that's what the fuck you do. Our love been a losing game, Amy. We know the power of no, no, no, even when it was the wrong thing. And we know we belong here. Maybe not everywhere, but that's what nowhere is for and here we are in the middle of it. Besides, it's different for us. Us as in everyone. Different as in the same. Jim Undy, reading

A History of Houses Built Out of Spite. The poem was first published in an online anthology called Poetry in Voice, and it very quickly found an audience. I've been really fortunate, really fortunate, that I have some poems that have resonated particularly with teenage girls, which if I had designed an audience for my own writing, I could not have picked a better one. And for the past few years,

teenagers from across Canada have selected that poem and recited it, and hearing them recite that poem and even better, write to me or pull me aside to tell me about the relationship with that poem is just incredibly rewarding in a way I can't even articulate how meaningful

that is. In this country of noise, we turn to wist and salt. In a country of noise, we turn to whist and salt. The salt is white, but less than fluent in my mother tongue. Twelve hundred points for my father's head, in fractions fractions as we shrink. I learn to speak fast and gain points because I am bright, questioning borders in my only country, a hole dark with want, where language breaks and then breaks us.

us. In this country of noise, I learn to speak fast. We turn to whist and salt and gain points because the salt is white. I am bright, but less than fluent in questioning borders in my mother tongue. My only country, twelve hundred points, a hole dark with want for my father's head, where language breaks in fractions and then, as we shrink, breaks us. Chim Undi reading comprehensive ranking system. You probably noticed some repetition. It's because Chim wrote it as two poems in one. The Comprehensive Ranking System

is the system that gives immigrants in a certain stream points, and you get enough points, and then you are put into a lottery, and then you can come into Canada if you're selected. So that's how my family came back to Canada, is that we were put through this ranking system, checked off these boxes,

were deemed a good enough immigrant to come into Canada, and then were brought here. And the poem also on the page is split in half so that you can read it down on both sides and then across on both sides. And so I was interested in rupture in that way and how language, which is a medium that inherently evolved in order to connect people. The purpose of language is for people to communicate and to connect

and to share information. How language can also disrupt lines of ancestry in that I can't speak to, you know, my grandmother except for in the language that she sort of forcibly learned in school and associates only with learning in a classroom is a language that I spend my entire life in, right? That's such a difference in life and in worldview. This poem, I'm thinking about English, which is the only language that I speak fluently, which was a conscious choice by my parents in sort of setting us up for opportunities in the world. They had a fear that allowing another language into us would kind of corrupt the English that we spoke and would therefore hold us back from being able to do other things. How do you feel about that decision that was made? Oh, I feel so sad. I would love to

fluently be able to speak the language that my parents the languages that my parents speak and that their grand my grandparents and their grandparents spoke which language would that be or which languages uh chichewa and shona among others i feel my parents both speak multiple languages and are both perfectly fluent in english so wow you know that tells you something about the story that they were told about the English that they spoke like also I'm coming at this from like I studied linguistics and so I'm really interested in the relationship between language and power generally about English as a thing that can be plural and that there are many ways there are many varieties of English that are all legitimate and that are spoken all over the world but that they understood something that I don't

think they made up about the kind of lives that me and my sisters would live if we spoke other languages and if we spoke just English. Are there limits that you feel with the language, with English, even though it is your only language? Does it still feel limiting in some ways? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's that I have one tool that I have. I mean, I write poetry and I spend all day interpreting language as a lawyer and I study the structure in linguistics.

I'm really pressing against the edges of the language as hard as I can, trying to get as much of it as I can, but I still know that there are things that I can't do. So how will you address that? Is there a way to address that beyond learning a new language? I guess keep pushing. I mean, keep trying to figure out what I can do with English, which I am doing my best to put through its paces.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Jim whether pushing against the limits of language and the limits of convention complicates her ability to write with the pride that she clearly has about where she lives. I still very much love Manitoba and love Winnipeg. I think a pride that is based on misinformation or disinformation is sort of an empty pride. And part of what I love about Winnipeg is that there are people here who are using their platforms and their education and their resources to tell a better story of Winnipeg that more honestly reflects the city that exists, that is, as opposed to the city that we

have been taught about and that we wish existed, but is much more complicated. Given everything we've talked about, how healthy an urban environment do you think this is? I worry about it. Yeah, I worry about the number of empty storefronts. I worry about both the perception of violence downtown and the reality that there is violence downtown. community members that don't have food to eat or a place to sleep. But I try to be hopeful. There are moments of possibility that shine through from time to time, like Nuit Blanche, which is a night of sort of public art in the city where folks from all over Winnipeg pour into the downtown to walk around and look at art installations.

And you see people on foot and people the downtown and kind of play act, living in a healthier urban environment than we do. There are efforts, grassroots efforts, all the way up to sort of more city government level efforts to re-enliven, to bring back to life the urban environment. But I am worried and I am hopeful. Yeah. And if you imagine yourself two years down the road, what is the definition of success in your role as a poet laureate of this both hopeful and worrying city? Two things. I hope that people spend more time with poetry, and I hope that people spend more time with each other to be good to one another. And if anything that I do in this role helps

anyone do either one of those things, I'll be over the moon. That's so beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was so fun. On Ideas, you've been listening to the 2023-24 Winnipeg Poet Laureate and Lawyer, Chimemwe Andi, in conversation with me in Winnipeg. Her new book, Scientific Marvel, is published by House of Anansi Press. Thank you to Chim Andi and to Suzanne Dufresne at CBC Winnipeg. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or in any other, please visit our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, or write us at ideas at cbc.ca. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas, technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.