Islanding Canada, Islanding the World — Introduction

“Shall we make ‘island’ a verb?” So asks Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, the late Pacific poet, scholar, and educator. Born to an African American mother and a Banaban/I-Kiribati father in Hawai‘i, Teaiwa was educated there as well as in Fiji and the continental United States, later dedicating much of her professional life to teaching and helping build Pacific studies in Aotearoa, New Zealand.¹ Of particular interest in her life and work across islands is “To Island” (2022), a poem in which she urges us to envision islands as verbs to help develop what might be called “islanding” perspectives. For Teaiwa, viewing islands as nouns leaves them “vulnerable to impinging forces,” including to what she calls “the stupor of continental fantasies.” Paying tribute to the work of Epeli Hau‘ofa, her former colleague at the University of the South Pacific, Teaiwa acknowledges, “Yes, there is a sea of islands”—but, she adds, “‘sea’ can be a verb, just as ‘ocean’ becomes a verb of awesome possibility.” By making island a verb, Teaiwa urges us to act with more care: “Care for other humans, care for plants, animals; care for soil, care for water.” Doing so, she writes, “could save our lives.” Teaiwa’s call to transform island into a verb has profound ethical implications for how we might learn to relearn received notions of which places, spaces, and stories matter. When relocated into the contexts of our teaching and learning and writing, her call affirms the similarly expansive work of “the worlding project” developed at the University of California Santa Cruz, where the notion of “worlding” was tied to what Christopher Connery calls “an interruption and critique of a range of field imaginaries,” helping us to question “the ways in which a given discipline or scholarly field sets its own boundaries” (1).

In this spirit, the contributors to this forum have sought to think through existing configurations of “Canadian literature” as a field, seeking to do so by “islanding” Canada and “islanding” the world. Eva Darias-Beautell opens our discussion by focusing on the tensions between islands conceived as objects to be controlled through an imperial and/or a marketing gaze and islands as places of uncertainty eluding such forms of control. By foregrounding her subject position as a scholar working in the Canary Islands, and unfolding a reading of Michael Christie’s novel Greenwood, her contribution helps us to better understand the politics of representing islands by evocatively “reopening the island archive.” Cornel Bogle extends this approach by viewing islands not simply as physical spaces but also as “a critical lens.” Through his discussion of Caribbean Canadian writing—including the works of Olive Senior, Kaie Kellough, Lorna Goodison, and Austin Clarke—Bogle thoughtfully attends to islands as “spaces of dynamic and diverse experiences rather than fixed, isolated entities.” Presenting her poetry as research creation, Joanne Leow reflects on the stakes involved in reading across texts from Canada—including the work of Wayde Compton—and from Singapore. Instead of viewing national spaces as discrete and separate, Leow helpfully calls attention to the politics of waterways and extraction through “nodes in Canada,” including on the prairies, and through specific sites in Southeast Asia. Finally, I turn to Jessica J. Lee’s creative non-fiction text Two Trees Make a Forest, a text that stitches together glimpses of political and family histories in diaspora with attempts to better understand Taiwan’s fractured and shifting ecologies. Focusing on the notion of the fragment, I urge us to develop a critical language to adequately address the connections, complicities, and displacements depicted in Lee’s text and beyond. However richly resonant, the texts and sites noted here are of course not the only ones worth discussing. So much more could and should be addressed. We hope that this forum can help to animate new critical conversations to inspire further reading, learning, teaching, and writing about configurations of “Canadian literature” and its complex points of connection with the world.

Notes

1. For a glimpse of the range of Teaiwa’s creative and critical contributions, including her commitment to program building, see her posthumously published collection Sweat and Salt Water (2021).

Works Cited

Connery, Christopher Leigh. “Introduction: Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz.” The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, North Atlantic Books, 2007, pp. 1–11.

Teaiwa, Teresia Kieuea. Sweat and Salt Water: Selected Works. Edited by Katerina Teaiwa, April K. Henderson, and Terence Wesley-Smith, U of Hawai‘i P, 2021.

“To Island: Poetry Written by Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, Performed by Katerina Teaiwa.” YouTube, uploaded by Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), 10 Nov. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO5bmGtLWyE.