Triage
In a world where the corporate iron fist clad in the velvet glove of the state has appropriated all that is authentic and authoritative in language, there seems little left for us to say to each other. Yet against the determination of borders, capital, criminalization and violence, stigmatized bodies also remember patterns, history, possibility and solidarity. Triage attempts an ordered, critical response to the surges of overlapping manufactured crises that perpetuate the conditions and symptoms of our public and private disentitlements.
Drawing on the increasingly marginalized and criminalized language of protest and resistance, these poems present a polyvocal narrative of human communities struggling at the brutal margins of the neoliberalized state. Triage acknowledges and legitimizes dialogical practices of organizing for food, shelter, mobility, access and voice grounded in a global network of specific communities and movements. It addresses the resilience of people refusing disposability in these highly contested zones; articulates their commonalities in their struggle to take back the garish interventions of commercial language and enterprise in their lives.
The routes to the urban centre from rural, suburban and reserve communities are shared experiences articulated by many of the poems’ characters. Their displacement has concentrated and “naturalized” their entrenchment in the ghetto and turned habit and need into specific areas of surveillance, where low income means risk, focusing primarily on the particular conditions of women caught in the everyday grind at the mercy of the propertied.
Accustomed to framing that which simultaneously victimizes as it offers assistance, Triage acknowledges a powerful legacy of women’s creative resistance to everyday physical and systemic violence. It understands the costs and remembers the losses as it sorts through the rubble of language to salvage a redefinition of beauty and reify a meaningful aesthetic. After loss, hurt, survival and recovery, more is warranted, and more is coming.
Cecily Nicholson, from small-town Ontario via Toronto and South Bend, relocated to the Pacific coast almost two decades ago. On Musqueam-, Squamish-, and Tsleil-Waututh-occupied lands known as Vancouver, she has worked, since 2000, in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, most recently as administrator for the artist-run centre and mental health resource, Gallery Gachet. A part of the Joint Effort prison abolitionist group and a member of the Research Ethics Board for Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Cecily was also the 2017 Ellen Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Triage and From the Poplars, winner of the 2015 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
