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    A Really Good Brown Girl
    A Really Good Brown Girl
    A Really Good Brown Girl
    Ebook87 pages29 minutes

    A Really Good Brown Girl

    By Marilyn Dumont

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    About this ebook

    Marilyn Dumont’s Metis heritage offers her challenges that few of us welcome. Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society of the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal exploitation of Indianness (“there it is again, the circle, that goddamned circle, as if we thought in circles, judged things on the merit of their circularity, as if all we ate was bologna and bannock and lived in teepees”); more-Indian-than-thou oneupmanship (“So, I’m having coffee with this treaty guy from up north … I say I’m Metis like it’s an apology and he says, ‘mmh,’ like he forgives me, like he’s got a big heart and mine’s pumping diluted blood”); and white condescension and ignorance (“The White Judges”). She celebrates the person, clearly observing, who defines her own life. These are Indian poems; Canadian poems; human poems.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 1, 1996
    ISBN9781894078863
    A Really Good Brown Girl
    Author

    Marilyn Dumont

    Marilyn Dumont is the author of four collections of poems: A Really Good Brown Girl (winner of the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award), green girl dreams Mountains (winner of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award), that tongued belonging (winner of the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and Aboriginal Book of the Year Award) and The Pemmican Eaters (published in 2015 by ECW Press). Marilyn has been Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library and in numerous universities across Canada. In addition, she has been faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Writing with Style and Wired Writing programs, as well as an advisor and mentor in their Indigenous Writers’ Program. She serves as a board member on The Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada, and freelances for a living.

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      Book preview

      A Really Good Brown Girl - Marilyn Dumont

      tisa

      SQUAW POEMS

      THE WHITE JUDGES

      We lived in an old schoolhouse, one large room that my father converted into two storeys with a plank staircase leading to the second floor. A single window on the south wall created a space that was dimly lit even at midday. All nine kids and the occasional friend slept upstairs like cadets in rows of shared double beds, ate downstairs in the kitchen near the gas stove and watched TV near the airtight heater in the adjacent room. Our floors were worn linoleum and scatter rugs, our walls high and bare except for the family photos whose frames were crowded with siblings waiting to come of age, marry or leave. At supper eleven of us would stare down a pot of moose stew, bannock and tea, while outside the white judges sat encircling our house.

      And they waited to judge

      waited till we ate tripe

      watched us inhale its wild vapour

      sliced and steaming on our plates,

      watched us welcome it into our being,

      sink our teeth into its rubbery texture

      chew and roll each wet and tentacled piece

      swallow its gamey juices

      until we had become it and it had become us.

      Or waited till the cardboard boxes

      were anonymously dropped at our door, spilling with clothes

      waited till we ran swiftly away from the windows and doors

      to the farthest room for fear of being seen

      and dared one another to

      ‘open it’

      ‘no you open it’

      ‘no you’

      someone would open it

      cautiously pulling out a shirt

      that would be tried on

      then passed around till somebody claimed it by fit

      then sixteen or eighteen hands would be pulling out

      skirts, pants, jackets, dresses from a box transformed now

      into the Sears catalogue.

      Or the white judges would wait till twilight

      and my father and older brothers

      would drag a bloodstained canvas

      heavy with meat from the truck onto our lawn, and

      my mother would lift and lay it in place

      like a dead relative,

      praying, coaxing and thanking it

      then she’d cut the thick hair and skin back

      till it lay in folds beside it like carpet

      carving off firm chunks

      until the marble bone shone out of the red-blue flesh

      long into the truck-headlight-night she’d

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