“yes the body:” A Quarantined Review of Spawn

When Marie-Andrée Gill’s Spawn arrived at my house, courtesy Book*hug Press, I was still able to move around the world at will. I read that Kristen Renee Miller, Gill’s translator, lived in Louisville, Kentucky. I had plans to be in Louisville in the fall for my day job. I thought to myself, “Maybe I will email her to see if she would like to meet for an interview while I’m there.”

I wanted to talk with her in person about what she wrote in her translator’s note: “As Spawn’s translator, tasked with rendering the text from one settler language (French) into another (English), my work was delicate and intense.” But by the time I began writing the review, all travel plans were suddenly on hold.

“Delicate and intense” also described my experience reading Miller’s translation of Gill’s spare and precise poetry during a pandemic that caused various levels of quarantine across the world.

*****

“Ouananiche remain in the lake, while Atlantic salmon migrate to the sea for part of their life cycle. With the exception of this difference, ouananiche and Atlantic salmon are the same species.” — Marie-Andrée Gill, from Spawn, translated by Kristen Renee Miller

*****

Normally, I would be writing this review from the coffee shop I call “my Saturday office.” I would be drinking orange blossom tea and eating a huge brown sugar cookie. I would be sitting in the back room, where the writers go. I would contribute my rhythm to the percussion of the room. Ensemble for Laptops, №32. Of course, coffee shops are not open now. My Saturday office offers curbside service, and I take advantage of it sometimes, but it’s the uncomfortable bar stool and disheveled writers I want, not the tea.

“Excuse me,” we used say to each other. “I just need to reach past you to plug in my laptop.”

“Sure,” we used say. “No problem.”

We would make room.

********

Gill is Pekuakamishkueu, and Spawn takes place on the Mashteuiatsh Reserve in what is now Quebec, Canada. Quebec’s settlement caused her ancestors to stay there, on a smaller and smaller piece of land. They are still there today.

I’m Muscogee (Creek). In the 1830s, my ancestors were “removed” from our ancestral homelands in what is currently Alabama and Georgia to Indian Territory, now called Oklahoma. The Dawes Act of 1887 magnanimously “gave” allotments to my great-grandparents’ generation. Often, family members’ allotments were far from each other. The U.S. government was trying to make us start thinking of ourselves as individuals.

In 2003, soon after the Global War on Terror started, I married a soldier, and we lived all over the place. Last year he retired, and we moved back to Oklahoma. It’s what Muscogee people mostly do, eventually, even when we don’t really want to be here.

Being quarantined in Oklahoma does poke a generational bruise for me. I can’t leave, and our family can’t be together, and our tribe can’t gather for ceremonies or anything else. I like the solitude, which is something a Muscogee woman seldom has, and I understand why we must quarantine ourselves. But being told to stay here and not gather … that’s the bruise.

The bruise of generational exile is a personal reason Spawn reads so powerfully, and the double exile of quarantine adds another layer of meaning:

“We the unlikely

the aftermath

the remains of heart muscle

and black earth

We the territory

in a word”

The book takes the life cycle of the ouananiche salmon in Lake Piekuakami as an overarching metaphor, reflecting on confines — those we choose, those chosen for us, and those we don’t realize we have a choice about. Gill contemplates, in small poems surrounded by lots of white space, the struggle of “spawning” and all it represents (instinct, fulfillment, continuance, more), for a young person just stepping over the threshold into independence.

Reading Spawn from this present confinement, I am struck by the section titled “Adolescence,” in which young people do the things young people sometimes do: Kiss. Share a bong. Touch. Deeply desire each other’s presence. Wander around in groups. All of these things that are much too dangerous for anyone to do right now. Young bodies, less susceptible to severe cases of the pandemic virus, are portrayed as dangerously unidentifiable asymptomatic carriers, a peril to their elders. In the early days of the pandemic, just before the quarantines, the media fixated on young people partying on beaches. Graphs were created to show the deadly effects of their good time.

Gill’s rendering of the spawning of newly-independent youth was, before the pandemic, something more than wistful and nostalgic. Mid-pandemic, it reads like something that happened so long ago it doesn’t seem real, though you know it is … Like when kids in 1950s movies go barreling down unlit back roads in cars with no seatbelts.

It was always important for Gill to chronicle the carvings in trees, the rubbing of balloons in hair, the online and outside hijinks, the “chaos” of “humanity’s bright future.” It was always important, but now it is more important.

“Perhaps we’ve forgotten that the body, yes the body, finds a desolate kind of beauty once exposed.” –Gill

In this quietly audacious collection, Gill exposes the body: what it contains and confines, as well as how it becomes a vehicle for connection and movement. I often dismiss the body as an inconveniently delicate necessity of life. However, reading these poems at a time when masks cover faces and people must keep their bodies far apart for safety, I see that the body — “yes, the body” — matters terribly, in its breaking and in its spawning, when it’s well and when it’s waiting. This collection chronicles the last moments before the body became what it will be in the unimaginable future.

“yes the body”: A Quarantined Review of Spawn was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.