The following is a dialogically-composed essay produced through collaboration between Duncan Mercredi, a Winnipeg-based Cree/Métis poet, writer and storyteller, and Jason Wiens, a settler scholar in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. In early 2023, Mercredi, Wiens, and University of Manitoba English professor Warren Cariou organized “Do I Have Time For One More? Remembering Marvin Francis: A Reading and Listening Celebration,” a SpokenWeb-sponsored listening practice with audio recordings from the Marvin Francis fonds held at the University of Manitoba. Francis was a Cree poet, playwright, theatre director, and printmaker, a prominent member of the Winnipeg arts community in the 1990s and early 2000s, up until his untimely death at age 49 in 2005. The event was held at the Urban Shaman Gallery in downtown Winnipeg in April 2023, and consisted of two parts: an hour long listening practice in which attendees in person and online listened to clips from various readings, interviews, plays, and other literary audio recordings in the Francis fonds, followed by readings of Francis’ work by current members of Manitoba’s Indigenous Writers Collective, namely Mercredi, Cariou, Rosanna Deerchild, Elizabeth Denny, Trevor Greyeyes, and katherena vermette. The event echoed a memorial reading which took place shortly after Francis’ passing in 2005, and which featured readings by some of the same participants in addition to others. What follows places “Do I Have Time For One More?” within the wider context of the Marvin Francis collection, and considers the role of this curatorial project in collective memory and affect, as well as the different political and ethical considerations of a project of this kind. Our dialogue, we hope, also addresses the different meanings and affects this archival audio holds for an Indigenous writer who knew Marvin Francis, and for a settler scholar who has only come to know Francis through his archive.
The event, from the perspective of Wiens, developed out of an intersection of his participation in the SpokenWeb network and archival research he had been undertaking in the Marvin Francis fonds since 2021 – research that was supposed to begin in 2020 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This research had been rooted in pedagogy, specifically, a desire to create a digital collection of Francis’ drafts, audio recordings, and other materials which could be used in teaching his work. Archival collections of Indigenous writers’ papers in Canada are few and far between, and Wiens was aware that the Special Collections at the University of Manitoba held the papers of Francis, who was working towards his doctorate at the University of Manitoba until his passing in 2005. Wiens reached out to librarians and archivists at Manitoba to see if they would be open to the idea of digitising the Marvin Francis papers to create an open-source digital collection which could be used for teaching and research purposes, and was pleased to find them supportive of the project.
In addition to creating a digital resource that would allow students to conduct primary research in the Marvin Francis papers similar to what they might undertake in the material archives, Wiens saw this project as a challenge to consider the particularities and problematics of working with the archives of an Indigenous writer housed in a colonial institution. The project had been undertaken with a recognition that, as Indigenous scholars Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd put it, “[t]o decolonise the archives requires an erasure or negation of the colonial realities of the archives themselves. Given the inherent realities of the archives as institutions, any effort to decolonise or Indigenise the archives in Canada can therefore only ever be partial.”1 Recognising and “[a]cknowledging the inherent colonial paradigms that inform and shape the archives as institutions we propose moving away from the question of decolonising the archives themselves and suggest instead applying a historically-informed critical decolonial sensibility in our engagement with the archives.”2 Although Francis’ materials were donated to the UManitoba collection with his blessing, they have still to some extent been absorbed into a colonial institutional framework, a framework that his writing, ironically, continually resists through strategies such as parody, miscitation, cultural re-appropriation, and genre-bending, as evidenced in his first perfect-bound publication, 2002’s book-length poem City Treaty. As Warren Cariou asserts in a discussion of City Treaty, “Indigenous poetics can work to shake up prevailing colonial mindsets by taking colonial icons, phrases, and stereotypes and setting them in a new and revealing context.”3 Moreover, while the archive has historically functioned as a tool of colonial power, archival materials themselves are messy and heterogeneous, always presenting a challenge to the archive’s drive toward order, Marvin Francis’s materials in particular.
Jo-Ann Episkenew warns that scholars working on Indigenous writing “examine the ideological baggage they bring to their readings and counter it by looking outside the texts into the contexts in which they were written to some kind of understanding of the ideology of the people whose work they interpret.”4 We were motivated to heed this admonition at least in part because of a desire to respectfully activate the archive’s holdings in a public space, or more specifically, in a collective space of community, the members of which maintain living memory of events that the archive preserves in fragments. In “Strategies for Ethical Engagement: an Open Letter Concerning Non-Native Scholars of Native Literatures,” the non-Indigenous scholar Sam McKegney posits a strategy of ‘ethical engagement’ on the part of non-Indigenous scholars conducting research on Indigenous writers. Part of that strategy of ethical engagement “appreciates that multilayered and ultimately valid understandings of cultures, communities, and histories can never emerge solely from book research and that the ongoing vitality of Indigenous communities must serve to augment and correct what Jana Sequoya calls ‘the alienated forms of archival material.’”5 From this perspective, the live event created a more vital and relational space for engagement with the archival materials than the silent, solitary space of a Special Collections Reading Room. It also staged the performance of the audio archive in a space and among a community that were significant to Francis during his life, and afforded members of that community the opportunity to collectively reflect on and respond to the recordings.
Duncan Mercredi’s first-person contributions to this essay are interspersed throughout, and indicated by sets of opening and closing asterisks.
***
Why did I become involved with the event? Simple: I was asked. When Warren approached me with the project Jason had envisioned I was hesitant at first. I had successfully faded back into the background after Marvin’s passing; he was really the catalyst of the MIWC [Manitoba Indigenous Writers Collective], and I was happy to become invisible. I missed my friend and had lost interest in continuing with MIWC. With the exception of the memorial held after Marvin’s passing, I continued to write, but only for myself. I instead concentrated in traditional oral storytelling, sharing what I knew to interested schools.
After thinking over the request to be part of the project and since it was to honour Marvin’s work by digitising his materials, I relented. My part was easy: to convince the members of MIWC who were closest to Marvin, ie, Rosanna [Deerchild], kate [vermette], Trevor [Greyeyes], Elizabeth [Denny], David [McLeod] and Jordan [Wheeler]. Once they knew it was for Marvin, they all enthusiastically agreed, but unfortunately Jordan had to decline later as he was busy with another project. So, really, that was it, agreeing on the site was not difficult: Urban Shaman, was Marvin’s go-to place; date and time was touch and go as all of the above had commitments we had to work around and of course the debate amongst us on who got dibs on which piece each one got to read.
***
The Marvin Francis fonds reveal a writer keenly interested in archives, both print and audio, the relationship of Indigeneity to the archive, and of his own place in the archive. In the introduction to an essay draft found in his papers and which he presumably wrote as a graduate student on “Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada,” Francis posits pemmican as perhaps “the first archive on this continent,” which “functions not only as a preservative of food, but also contains the memory and experience of a successful hunt.”6 Francis suggests “that all archives, just like pemmican, need a lubricant to allow the discharge of words, and that this liquid is ‘archiva saliva,’ a process where the contents of an archive lie dormant, like a seed, or hibernating bear, until the saliva prepares the archival fond for the digestion of others.”7 Early in the essay, Francis notes the absence of papers of any Indigenous writers, or indeed the papers of any writers of colour, in the university archives he worked in for the purpose of the course: “gaps,” Francis writes, which “reveal something about the process of who or what gets archived.”8 This leads Francis to further ruminations about the “suitable mediums for the archiving of Native literature,” in particular relation to the importance of orality in Indigenous storytelling and the problematics of representing such embodied narrative practices given the conventional archive’s privileging of written documentation.9 Even here, Francis notes that “[t]he image of the Native storyteller, laden with stereotypes and obscurity… requires some contemporary urban input.”10 Given the urban Indigenous foundations of Francis’ poetics and his own self-figurations in his writing, this fragment seems to suggest Francis was anticipating the archiving of his own work, as does his earlier comment that “I searched in vain for my own previous writerly involvement [in the Prairie Theatre Exchange], and didn’t find it.”11
***
We rarely spoke of his time at the U of M, although every so often he’d make a comment on how he found it at times as very unfriendly to Indigenous students. He never did say how it affected him personally, Marvin moved in both worlds without letting the isolation ruin his day. Yes, isolation in a crowd of “others” is very real. We’d talk about the invisibility we felt in a roomful of people that didn’t “look like us,” although truth be told, Marvin never stood out as a person with an Indigenous bloodline. He would talk about the lack of resources that covered First Peoples’ history told from their point of view.
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The audio collection in the Marvin Francis fonds includes cassette tapes, compact discs, and minidiscs, on which are recorded poetry readings by Francis and others, readings from his radio plays, interviews conducted on various radio stations, conversations during meetings of the Indigenous writing collective, Indigenous language lessons, and an intriguing compilation of many of the above. This audio archive reveals Francis to be interested in the dynamics of the poetry reading and the relationship of the writer to a live audience. For instance, during a reading Francis gave at Greg’s Café, in Osborne Village, shortly before his passing in 2005, Francis remarks:
If you’re a Native person, you know who Billy Jack is, and if you’re not Native, I guess you’ll find out who Billy Jack is [laughter]. I call this one, “Billy Jack Shoes.” Now, first of all, who knows what kind of shoes Billy Jack wears? [unclear] Well, it’s a white audience. Billy Jack doesn’t wear shoes. He kicks you in the head with bare feet.12
Along similar lines, Francis responds to a question posed in a radio interview conducted in 2004 as to the importance of audience reaction to his work by noting “there’s different reactions. I’ve written some poems where the audience is primarily Native, and they’ll laugh at certain parts, and a non-Native, white audience will think it’s really sad.” In such observations of the different reactions of white and Indigenous audience response to his work, Francis seems to intuit the distinction in settler and Indigenous listening positionalities which Stó:lō artist, curator, and writer Dylan Robinson outlines in Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Specifically, the white settler response as recounted by Francis might substantiate Robinson’s observation that such audiences hunger for “damage-centered narratives, stories of trauma, and the resultant accounts of healing and transformation” which sustain this public’s “appetite for a norm (or supposed fact) of ‘Indigenous lack’ and a paternalistically narrated overcoming of such lack.”13
***
We had a different style when it came to readings, Marvin was more laid back in his delivery, while mine, at the time, tended to read in a monotonous tone. He loved to share his work to an audience; hence the term, “do I have time for one more” was his catch phrase, since every time his time was up, he’d always ask that question. We always knew he’d ask and we, meaning MIWC, would slot him in as the final reader. I know we’d always gauge the audience, trying to determine their reaction to what we were going to share. I missed many of his readings so I can’t say if he ever changed how he would present his works. He knew his audience though, knowing most of the people that would attend would be white more often than not, and in most cases, there would be polite applause when he was finished. I personally think they missed the satire and sarcasm many of his pieces contained. Now, if the audience was a mixed crowd, Indigenous people caught on and laughed; that he really enjoyed. Marvin was a master of double entendre.
It’s a reaction I have witnessed many times. One doesn’t have to search too far to see how audiences react to works by Indigenous writers. One example: a play by Rosanna Deerchild which premiered last fall, a mixed audience. The laughter from the Indigenous audience was quite different than the reaction from the white audience, almost a shock to them at what they were witnessing and hearing. What they found depressing we found funny. I think it was more of a shock that we would find humour in what we saw and heard while they found it shocking and had a feeling that we were being disrespectful. Marvin never considered it being disrespectful if a piece he shared, even if it was dark, would make people laugh. To him laughter from the audience meant they were listening. Really, it is our way of saying, “no matter the harm caused, we laugh because laughter is healing.”
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Urban geographer Owen Toews argues “Indigenous ‘city poetry’ — that is, texts by poets writing as Indigenous poets about the city — expresses a powerful Indigenous connection and claim to Winnipeg, not merely as a setting for Indigenous life, but as a source of identity itself, as a social relation, as the basis of a new politics, and as a place that will be crucial to the future of life itself on Turtle Island.”14 These audio recordings provide fascinating insight into the various communities Francis was a part of, including the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba (now the Manitoba Indigenous Writers Collective), in which he “became a central figure.”15 Among the events recorded was a memorial reading shortly after Francis’ death in early 2005, held at the Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg and featuring readings of Francis’ work and work written in memoriam for him by members of the Collective, including Duncan Mercredi, Shayla Elizabeth, Trevor Greyeyes, Rosanna Deerchild, Dave McLeod, Liz Denny, and Jordan Wheeler. That recording, and all the recordings in the Francis fonds, amplify the encodings of community in Francis’ poetry in publications such as City Treaty. The audio archive amplifies what we might term Francis’ reverberative poetics: the performances of Francis’ poems by his friends in the collective reverberate alongside other recordings in which Francis reads those same poems himself, just as Francis’ performances in some recordings reverberate alongside musical accompaniment. The April 2023 event was designed in part to further extend these reverberations within the Winnipeg writing community.
***
Marvin was a writer, a scholar, with a blue-collar background. His works cover what he was. Many pieces he created would make you laugh, other times would make you angry and others would make you scratch your head in confusion, asking yourself, “what did he mean by that piece?” As a Collective and individually we started to explore his way of expressing himself, which meant we had to think about what it was we were writing and how better to write it down, hiding what we meant by the words we used, and really, Marvin was the only “scholar” we had in the MIWC. He wasn’t just sharing, he was teaching us. Not that he ever lorded it over us, his going to university. In fact he’d become a little grumpy if we mentioned it too often. We were a group of off the street, some community/university college graduates, activists and in my case and Marvin’s with a blue-collar workers history. It wasn’t hard to imagine we’d gravitate to someone who had no problem straddling the line between worlds. He gave us direction and he really had no use for those that attended our group meetings for no other reason than to say they were members of MIWC.
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At the memorial event in 2005, several attendees read poems that were previously recorded by Francis himself, reading the same poems, affording a comparative approach to these performances. For instance, Dave McCleod reads “Furby Shakespeare,” which was one of a number of poems by Francis installed on the walls of Urban Shaman at the event; introducing the poem, McLeod comments that he’s just going to “read this one off the wall.” There are multiple recordings of Francis reading this poem, including one he read at the Osborne Village reading accompanied by Trevor Greyeyes on guitar. Here is the text of “Furby Shakespeare” in its entirety:
Oh Romeo, Romeo, bum me a smoke
pogey check, pogey check, where are thou?
Traffic jams all stages of a life of the street of my mind
star-crossed drugs love
feed me feed me lethal feed me deep
furby theatre thrives
purple fountains from the veins
mini tragedy mini comedy all live
no script cuz furby plays end
it’s curtains today go home now16
In his essay “My Urban Rez,” Francis describes “Furby Shakespeare” as growing from his reality “of living next door to a crack house on Furby Street in Winnipeg.”17 In an interview with Duncan Mercredi about his memories of the influx of Indigenous peoples into Winnipeg from more distant, northerly communities in the middle of the twentieth century, Owen Toews notes that Mercredi “mapped the emerging geography of urban apartheid in Winnipeg” and that “The first Indigenous families to move to Winnipeg in the 1940s and 1950s settled on a few specific West End blocks – Young, Spence, and Furby Streets, north of Portage Avenue.”18 “Furby Shakespeare,” then, relies to some extent on a reader’s or listener’s awareness of this urban geography and history, and of the contrast in registers announced in the title. The poem collides the tragic (and comic) actions staged in the confines of traditional theatre with the tragic and comic actions observed in the everyday environs of Furby Street. Both Francis (in the Osborne Village recording) and McLeod’s performances of “Furby Shakespeare,” in their intonational rise and fall, replicate the poem’s deflating of Shakespeare’s canonical stature and lofty language through its collision with the quotidian idioms of the street, defamiliarizing the overly familiar line from Romeo and Juliet with the demand to “bum me a smoke.” And McLeod, who in his introductory remarks notes that he heard Marvin read this poem before, performs the poem in a somewhat similar manner, mimicking the brisk pace of Francis’ Osborne village reading. Digital listening tools such as Drift can lend quantitative data that supports these qualitative observations in listening. A comparison of prosodic elements generated by Drift, for instance, shows that Francis reads the poem at 174 words per minute (WPM), McLeod at 155. Both performances, then, exceed the average of 134 WPM in Marit Macarthur et al’s analysis of the reading styles of 100 U.S. poets.19
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Marvin’s main goal, and of course this is my take on it, was reaching the community as a whole. I’m not just referring to the Indigenous village but to the city of Winnipeg as a whole. He recognized the division that existed within this city. People tend to migrate to neighbourhoods inhabited by people that look like them, share the same voice (language) or religious beliefs, rarely leaving those villages within the city. Marvin understood why, based on what he observed wandering throughout the city by any means he could find. Whenever he walked through those neighbourhoods he found he was considered an outsider and hence had to be distrusted. He asked me if that was always the case. My answer was, “it’s always been that way and it still is.” I think he was surprised at my answer. He then asked me why I stayed; again my answer surprised him. “My village I was born in was not the same village I left; maybe the others that left felt the same way, and we became distrustful of those that came later. This city is the same way. We look for a place that feels safe and the people around me accept me.” MIWC became that oasis for us. He knew that and some of his writings reflected that feeling and it was probably why he moved into the Furby Street neighbourhood, to experience it firsthand, (Furby Street always had a reputation as a place to avoid).
***
Other poems read at the 2005 memorial event were ones for which no recordings of Francis are extant in the archive. “Jam Cig Poem,” for example, was read by both Shayla Elizabeth and, later in the event, Steve Loft, then director of Urban Shaman. “Jam Cig Poem” is one of a genre of poem particular to Francis: the “cig poem” (or cigarette poem) as he called them, poems whose initial drafts were scrawled on the backs of unfolded cigarette packs. One such draft in the archive is of Francis’ “First Job Poem” composed on the back of a package of Player’s Lights.20 Francis’ “cig poems,” whose drafts reveal a material context of spontaneous, public composition as well as a spatial writing constraint, are comparable to Samuel Beckett’s so-called mirlitonnades, doggerel verse Beckett would compose on similar quotidian scraps, including “torn envelopes, pages of a calendar, the back of a packet of cigarettes, or a cigar box.”21 The cigarette package on which “Jam Cig Poem” was first composed is not found in the archive; rather, the earliest extant draft is found in one of Francis’ notebooks, the opening lines of which read:
freaking
I want to ^ jam this poem up that
cop’s ass
-who punched us in the back seat
-who wanted us to confess to B&E
meaning broke & evil
-good thing we jam xtian confession
down that in the NORTHERN outhouse black
hole spit out
cop told me ^ my blood shot eyes
gave him holy chills up & down
-afterwards we pissed blood in the
alley where they skidded us out
-true blood bros now me &
mike22
Material elements which are not entirely transcribable suggest this is a first draft of the poem: Francis introduces lines with dashes, for instance, while also appearing to replace a pen in red ink with one in black ink as the red ink fades, both of which suggest an urgency to get certain details down. The draft functions as both written testimony of a violent encounter with the repressive state apparatus of the police, while including Francis’ signature tactics of punning (“blood bros”; “skidded us out”), semantic echo (“xtian confession” and “holy chills”), and urban Indigenous idiom (“broke & evil” rather than “breaking and entering” for B&E). Perhaps Francis’s cigarette pack was not emptied and thus not available as a writing surface; perhaps the cigarette pack was confiscated (stolen) by the police. That Francis still titled this “Jam Cig Poem” suggests he saw it as sharing certain elements of that genre, namely spontaneity and immediacy.
“Jam Cig Poem” condemns police harassment of and violence towards Indigenous people in Winnipeg. In his prefatory remarks to his reading of the poem, Loft states: “this poem strikes me because of what’s been going on, here in Winnipeg, and recently all across the country. And Marvin really articulated that, and it was really important to him that he was a voice for the unheard, the invisible, and the often beaten.” In her prefatory remarks, Shayla Elizabeth notes that the poem was printed on the back of the Urban Shaman’s invitations to the memorial event. The poem thus transits from an ephemeral space of composition to the ephemeral space of the event invitations. Like McLeod’s decision to read a poem off the wall of the gallery, Elizabeth reads a poem whose written form was in similar proximity.
Wiens’ research in the Marvin Francis fonds generally, and the audio archives in particular, has been assisted greatly by Marvin’s surviving friends and members of the Indigenous Writing Collective. As part of the research process, and in preparation for “Do I Have Time For One More” in 2023, Wiens listened to the recording of the 2005 memorial event over Zoom with Cindy Singer, Marvin’s former partner, who was able to answer many – though not all – of his questions about an event she attended over 18 years earlier. The April 2023 event was an attempt, from Wiens’ perspective, to make public these private, informal exchanges and listening practices. Wiens envisioned a unique listening practice in which an audience comprised primarily of listeners who knew Marvin, and who would have been in attendance at many of the recordings we listened to, would listen collectively to a recording of the earlier event. Duncan Mercredi suggested pairing the listening practice with another event in which members of the Indigenous Writing Collective would again share stories of Marvin and read selections from his work. Wiens shared the digitised recordings with his co-organisers, and they all agreed that after they had listened to the recordings, they would convene and discuss which recording(s) to listen to at the event. One of the files in the digitised audio, however, was already a compilation of selections from the audio archive as a whole. When the organisers heard the compilation in question, they had thought perhaps Francis had compiled it himself, prior to his passing – an intriguing possibility and one which would absolve them of the perhaps problematic curatorial role they were playing. However, when Wiens looked at the actual audio artifacts in the Francis collection, he realised the compilation was a recording titled Shakespeare from the Hood: Urban Rez Tales, produced in Francis’ memory by Lost Dogs records in 2006.
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I didn’t know about the Lost Dogs recording until [Wiens] bought it up. Marvin rarely discussed what he was up to unless he wanted some feedback from the collective, which again was rare. He did things his way and he’d give you that look said, “did I ask you for your opinion?”, which meant, “wait, you’ll see.”
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The organisers decided to play the Lost Dogs album at the event anyway, as it offered a wide sample from the recordings, and the event was held on April 14, 2023, at Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg’s Exchange District, with many of the readers and listeners in attendance the same as those who had attended the memorial event in 2005. The experience of listening to recordings of events at which Marvin read, and which many in attendance in 2023 would have attended live in the 1990s and early 2000s, confirm Wolfgang Ernst’s observation that when listening to audio recordings “humans are locked in a double bind between the historic and ahistoric sensation, between cognitive understanding and affective listening. Thereby it is possible to experience sonic artifacts from the past both in their difference to the present and as presence.”23 Given the event took on the character of a memorial, it lent particular resonance to Ernst’s observation that “at any technologically given moment of phonetic reproduction we are dealing with media, not humans; that we are not speaking with the dead, but that an apparatus is operating in an undead mode.”24
After listening to the Lost Dogs album, the five readers took the stage. Elizabeth Denny performed “Slut Mittens,” reading the poem from the back of a cigarette package, and “Deer Water Zeal Goodbye Poem,” followed by katherena vermette reading “McPemmican” (commenting “I feel like we are going to get into a fight over who reads ‘McPemmican’”), “Nicotine Whore,” and “Word Drummers.” “Word Drummers” was an especially apt choice for the event, as the poem is itself an homage in the form of puns on the names and works of other Indigenous writers in Canada, such as Marie Annharte Baker (“annaharte frankensquaw”), Jeannette Armstrong (“armstrong slashes”), Louise Bernice Halfe (“bernice half bones”), and Duncan Mercedi (“as Duncan mixes it / all together in his traditionalist stew”).25 “Word Drummers” concludes City Treaty with a celebratory cry of Indigenous literary resurgence:
those word drummers pound away and hurtle
words into that english landscape like brown beer
bottles tossed from the back seat on a country
road shattering the air turtle words crawl slowly from
the broken glass26
Trevor Greyeyes did not read any of Marvin’s poems, but rather reflected on his friend and told a rather bawdy anecdote of missing the memorial reading for Marvin because he was pretending to be a dog in a bathroom, and telling the story to those who did attend the memorial at a pub afterwards and being told “Marvin would have loved that story.” Rosanna Deerchild (whom Mercredi introduced as “everyone’s favourite auntie”) read “New Crossing” and “BNA Actor”. Deerchild hit such loud and high notes on the lines “drunken fucken penguins, man” and “I AM EAGLE I AM EAGLE I AM EAGLE” that the video recording of the performance could not capture the audio: inscribing into the audio recording record an ellipsis which further differentiates recording and event. (Francis, City Treaty, 36-37.) Warren Cariou read two poems from Bush Camp – “Bull Cook Poem” and “Push Push in that Bush” – a volume Cariou posthumously edited and on which he prefaces his reading by commenting:
I had the honour of editing Bush Camp, Marvin’s second book, and it was an amazing process, it was a very difficult process as well, because this was a posthumous volume. And so we had to spend a lot of time going through the manuscript, and this was with Marvin’s partner Cindy especially, and with others, trying to get a sense of what he intended in certain aspects of the book, because the word play is so amazing you can’t tell if it’s a typo or if it’s wordplay.
Such comments on the process of collective authorship and the indeterminacies of intention seemed especially appropriate at an event which celebrated the work of the individual writer at the heart of community, and in which members of that community collectively reimagine and redeploy these “turtle words,” to invoke “Word Drummers”, yet again.
Duncan Mercredi, the final reader of the evening, read Francis’ “Soup for the Hood” – another poem of which there are extant recordings by Francis, one of which the audience and participants at the event had listened to on the Shakespeare from the Hood recording earlier in the evening. In contrast to Dave McLeod’s reading of “Furby Shakespeare” which I discuss above, Mercredi’s performance is dramatically different from Francis’, as heard in different recordings of the poems: Francis typically reads at a hurried pace, whereas Mercredi’s pace was slower, more deliberate, and to my ear more plaintive, perhaps appropriate to an event of this nature. There has not been, to my knowledge, much scholarship on poets “covering” the works of other poets in performance. But Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann’s essay “Deformance and Interpretation,” to me, offers one possible way of framing such performances, or deformances, to use their term: “[I]maginative work has an elective affinity with performance,” they write, “it is organised as rhetoric and poiesis rather than as exposition and information-transmission. Because this is so, it always lies open to deformative moves.”27 If a performance or deformance of a poem is an interpretive act, then we might understand these collective performances of a poet’s work as articulations of an “interpretive community,” to use Stanley Fish’s well-known formulation.28 When we disaggregate the performances of this collective event, however, we hear other, more personal connections of individual readers to the poet whose work and memory they commemorate, such as Mercredi’s shared experience with Francis of manual labour, a connection which Mercredi does not see extending to their individual reading styles.
***
I first met Marvin at an event where I was to hold workshops with interested attendees at this event, which was a multi arts show, in which spoken word and writing workshops were part of the event. It was when Marvin walked in with his wild hair and over his shoulder was the little canvas army bag he always carried that held all his writings that he was working on or was just starting. It also held his cigarettes, Marvin was a smoker, and when I realised he wrote little bits and pieces of poems on empty cigarette packages. Many of what he scribbled on those empty cigarette packages eventually became longer pieces. That was when I dubbed him “the cigarette poet.” It was also when we realised we had something in common besides writing. We both had worked in bush camps for a few years, his was working on the railroads, mine was in northern Manitoba working on the highways and later for hydro. We’d talk about those camps, the differences, the similarities, the men that worked in those camps, the isolation, the bar visits to the small towns we’d come across now and then. He had already started writing, it took me a few years before I started. I think we both had an interest in those men, what drove them to work in isolation, for many it was the only place they were comfortable, those we called “lifers,” moving from one construction job to the next regardless of where they would end up. Our styles though were different, I consider mine more “blue collar”, while his had a more refined style. It was when I listened to his readings or sharing at the MIWC sessions that I came to the realisation with all we had in common, our style of readings were much different. While his style didn’t change much, mine did, and listening to the recordings made that very clear.
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Listening to the Francis recordings is a moving experience, all the more so in the collective space of a curated event. If, as Katherine McLeod suggests with respect to the recordings of Phyllis Webb, part of what moves us in listening to audio archives is “a proximity to voice – a proximity that is fraught and that serves as a reminder that the voice of any poet as represented in the archive is both hers and not hers,” then listening in proximity to other voices both recorded and immanent moves us even further.29 I – that is, Jason Wiens – was involved in this event as both organiser and participant, and yet I must also acknowledge I came to the event as an outsider, both to the particular community of the Manitoba Indigenous Writers Collective, as well as the wider Indigenous community in Winnipeg and Treaty 1 territory, even as I was – perhaps because I was – born and raised as a settler-descended person in that very territory. Participatory listening, for the settler subject in this context, becomes less about empathy for the poet and the experiences which shape his writing and more about respect. Margery Fee suggests empathy “ignores cultural differences” while respect “takes them into account, if only by avoiding any presumption to know them without deep experience.”30 Fee further distinguishes between empathy and respect:
if I am empathetic to someone, I appear to be virtuous by demonstrating my sensitivity to others, even fictional or distant others. This empathy does not require action, reciprocity, or even meeting the other face-to-face. Respect, on the other hand, is a kind of deference: in this system politeness consists of personal modesty and recognition of the other’s autonomy.31
We should not forget that the Marvin Francis fonds held at the University of Manitoba’s Archives and Special Collections are a short walk from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, also on that campus. Curation of the audio materials of an Indigenous writer in this context can contribute to a project of reconciliation, I hope, if it decentres the white scholar who defers to that writer’s Indigenous community. I am grateful to that community for their generosity in collaboration and participation with me in this project.
***
How does one begin to write about this project, sharing digital audio versions of the works created by Marvin Francis? An idea of digitising works by Indigenous writers he had shared with me many times when we’d meet. Marvin was afraid that many works by said writers would disappear over time due to negligence, forgotten/ignored?, in academic buildings gathering dust until the paper they were written on or erased by time and weather. He was a man who prized the pieces he’d share at the many meetings we had with the Indigenous Writers of Winnipeg. His play on words that told stories but only if you studied them deeply, because so many had hidden meanings not easily understood and ones he refused to explain. His response many times was, “if I have to explain what I meant, you weren’t paying attention” and he’d smile, that sly smile; sometimes he’d laugh. Yet, so many were written in ways that you could find the humour or the sarcasm with no problem. Marvin was an observer of people and society, a gift he acquired while working on the railroads, many weeks spent in isolation in work camps. His thoughts and ideas scribbled on pieces of paper or cigarette packages, that he later worked on to fill in the blanks and he stored in a small army satchel. Those one or two lines scribbled until they found a voice to give them meaning.
Although we had never forgotten the impact Marvin had on the Collective, we had buried his voice in our minds; hearing that voice again at the event we had, awakened how he could grab an audience with his voice. That night we tried to put new voice to his work, hearing the interpretation from some of the Collective was, how do I put this, okay, simple, it was amazing, each reader had their own version of the pieces they shared. The message in his words were not lost, but how it was delivered gave them a new meaning. Of course, as always the Collective put a lot of humour on how they delivered the poems they chose. It was not a night for closure but a night for reminding us how much we lost.
So, why digitising? Marvin wanted that future students should have access to his work without the fear that because of time and weather his words would fade. The fear that those that studied his works would be unable to enter his mind without access to his original, unedited words buried in a damp, the usually dimly lit archives of academic institutions.
When he knew his time was close at hand, he asked me to be the one to give his eulogy, I asked him “why,” he replied, “you know me best, we’ve walked the same path.”
Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd, “Decolonial Sensibilities: Indigenous Research and Engaging with Archives in Contemporary Colonial Canada,” in L’Internationale, Special Edition: Decolonizing Archives (February 2016), n.p. ↩
Fraser and Todd, “Decolonial Sensibilities”, n.p. ↩
Warren Cariou, “Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement,” in Indigenous Poetics in Canada, ed. Neal McLeod (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), 33. ↩
Jo-Ann Episkenew, “Socially Responsible Criticism: Aboriginal Literature, Ideology, and the Literary Canon,” in Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada, ed. Heather Macfarlane and Armand Garnet Ruffo (Broadview, 2016), 191-92. ↩
Sam McKegney, “Strategies for Ethical Engagement: An Open Letter Concerning Non-Native Scholars of Native Literatures,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 20, Vol 20, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 63. ↩
“Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada”, Marvin Francis, author, unpublished paper, Marvin Francis fonds, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, 1. ↩
“Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada”, 1. ↩
“Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada”, page 2, note 1. ↩
“Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada,” 5. ↩
“Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada,” 5. ↩
“Archiving Aboriginal Literary Work in Canada,” 3. ↩
Digital Audio Recording, Marvin Francis fonds, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, UM_tc141_A09-026_001_0001_011_0001. ↩
Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (U of Minnesota P, 2020), 49-50. ↩
Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (ARP Books, 2018), 207. ↩
Toews, Stolen City, 208. ↩
Marvin Francis, “My Urban Rez,” Canadian Dimension, November 1, 2004, https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/my-urban-rez-marvin-francis. ↩
Francis, “My Urban Rez”: n.p. ↩
Toews, Stolen City, 212. ↩
Marit MacArthur, Georgia Zellou and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 3, no. 1 (April 18, 2018): 29. ↩
ms. draft of “First Job Poem,” Marvin Francis, author, Marvin Francis fonds, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, A2006-051, Box 9, Folder 9. ↩
Dirk Van Hulle, Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (Oxford UP, 2022), 48. ↩
ms. draft of “Jam Cig Poem,” Marving Francis, author, notebook page, Marvin Francis fonds, University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, A2006-051, Box 5, Item 1. ↩
Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (Amsterdam UP, 2021), 98. ↩
Ernst, Sonic Time Machines, 86. ↩
Marvin Francis, City Treaty (Turnstone, 2002), 68. ↩
Francis, City Treaty, 69. ↩
Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann, “Deformance and Interpretation,” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 33. ↩
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text In This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Harvard UP, 1980), 171. ↩
Katherine McLeod, “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb,” in Moving Archives, ed. Linda Morra (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020), 128. ↩
Margery Fee, “Respect or Empathy: Affect/Emotion in Indigenous Stories,” in All the Feels / Tous les Sens: Affect and Writing in Canada, ed. Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser and Kit Dobson (U of Alberta P, 2021), 205. ↩
Fee, “Respect of Empathy,” 218. ↩
Article: Creative Commons NonCommerical 4.0 International License.
Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.