A Really Good Brown Girl

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Marilyn Dumont’s powerful, angry voice comes out of a Canadian Métis
heritage shaped by courage and defiance. These poems and paragraphs
catch the gritty texture of living as an object of constant
discrimination.

In Squaw Poems, the first section, Dumont portrays her first day at
school, where rows of small tables are “lined up like variety cereal
boxes” and she attempts to become invisible. The child learns by
watching how to survive in a white classroom and live a dual life. Later
she resolves to become “so god-damned respectable that white people
would feel slovenly in my presence.”

A section called White Noise includes “Letter to Sir John A.
Macdonald,” in which Dumont writes of being “railroaded / by some
steel tracks that didn’t last / and some settlers who wouldn’t
settle”; and “The Devil’s Language,” where the poet feels
measured and judged by “lily white words / its picket fence sentences
/ and manicured paragraphs.”

In “Instructions to My Mother,” the poet urges her to “dig out my
10th grade sketch book and / homesick letters to you and / tell me they
are remarkable and / that they make you cry.” Dumont’s talent has
been long in the making, forged with tears and steel.