Burning the Dead

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

Irie speaks to Canada in the voice of a penitent who wears the nisei’s
burden. Burning the Dead is his way of speaking and reliving the way
Japanese-Canadians might have felt as they confronted an alien white
Christian culture. Irie also tries to portray and to experience the
deportations of World War II, when Canadians of Japanese ancestry were
sent to B.C. internment camps such as Slocan Lake.

The book is structured in four parts. Part 1 directly confronts the
immigrant in flight, in a foreign world. Part 2 shows the immigrant and
the immigrant’s children in place, going to school, riding the
streetcar, living in flats. Part 3 comprises three poems about people
whom it can be assumed the poet knew as he grew up in Toronto; the poems
show each person adapting differently as a child and adult of immigrant
culture. Part 4 deals specifically with the Japanese internment camps
and the effects of World War II on Japanese in Canada.

But this collection is also about the immigrant experience, in many
forms and under many racial guises. The collection articulates what it
is to live in two cultures at once and to be faced with contradictions
and choices. The elemental theme is similar to that of Michael
Ondaatje’s The English Patient, but delivered in a more direct and
sparing language.

Irie also demonstrates how language can be a tool, a weapon, or a
vehicle for consolation and redemption. Throughout these poems is a
sense of language as an event, as a creator of experience. Born too late
to have been sent to the B.C. camps, Irie is still drawn to the stories
he heard. He is torn by the realization that his life is different, and
yet he confronts similar problems. He recognizes a debt owed, and
perhaps this is why he so willingly takes on the burden of a nisei. He
is by default a spokesperson for the exiled as well as a contemporary
poet who doles out words carefully, with sympathy and humor, to
illuminate the different worlds we live in.