Genrecide

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Adeena Karasick is an active performance poet who explores language’s
outer limits in diverse global venues, including the Lollapalooza
alternate rock festival. This book is the latest record of her literary
journeys.

Karasick’s verse combines rap’s verbal agility with a secular
glossolalia. The poet sometimes writes “in tongues,” but not in the
fundamentalist Christian sense of reversion to lost ancient languages.
She inserts phrases in French, the language of linguistic icon Jacques
Derrida, and in Hitler’s German, thereby evoking her major themes: the
Holocaust, which menaced Judaism; and linguistic postmodernism, which
challenges our basic concepts of communication. Both are united in the
book’s title Genrecide.

This work’s literary radicalism extends beyond poetry aimed at hip,
multilingual deconstructionists. The middle section features text/art
combinations, including a completed puzzle and a “Far Side” cartoon
that features a cowboy referring to “syncretic intersects.”

Despite such jests, Karasick offers no comic relief, or indeed any form
of relief. The words in the above-mentioned cartoon name concentration
camp atrocities. Two photographs, captioned with the German word
“Kanada,” illustrate its meanings: our country, symbolized by a map,
and Auschwitz storehouses, represented by a heap of inmates’
prostheses. These works teach younger postmoderns about the Holocaust,
before the literary equivalent of the Aryan rock musician does.

Karasick’s most profound challenge to literary doctrines implicitly
unites her two major themes. She seems to insinuate that authoritative
linguistic conventions—separate languages and fixed meanings—shade
into authoritarian Nazi “superhuman / subhuman” dichotomies.

Genrecide is an introduction to Canadian postmodern literature.
Karasick may expertly handle the text, but postmodernism is, and may
remain, marginal in the real world.