Islands, Lost and Imagined

In contributing to this forum, I am struck by the resonances between colonial power and the multifaceted ideas of how we might think through islands in the context of Canadian literature, which has often seemed to be a very regional and continental endeavour. If you will indulge me, I’d like to start by sharing a poem from my collection Seas Move Away (2022), where I consider the island of Singapore, where I’m from, but also Saskatchewan, where I worked from 2016 to 2022. As a preamble, I am very interested in the territorialization of extraction and the role of islands as we think about it. Cornel and Eva, in your pieces, you think through terms such as “escape,” “exclusion,” “seclusion.” And I’ve been thinking about the waterways that surround islands, what it means to define an island by the waterways that surround it, and how we think of continent versus island. How exactly do we conceive of these landmasses in our imagination and also in our politics?

 

When I was living in Saskatoon, I was possibly as far from the ocean as I’ve ever been in my life. I was very upset by this, on an emotional level, not to be on an island anymore. I would return constantly to my island of birth, Singapore, but then come back to a place where I could not see the ocean. As I wrote Seas Move Away, I was thinking about the ways in which Canada functions as this site of constant crossings and the islands that figure around Canada, home to some thirty to fifty thousand islands, as Cornel notes in his contribution to this forum.

 

I’m going to share a poem called “Western Interior Seaway.” It came about when Joanne Arnott, the Métis poet, told me, “Hey, you know, if you go back, just not to the history of coloniality, but if you go back way further to the geological, the middle of the continent used to be an interior seaway.” So, I’m looking out at these grasslands and thinking, “How could they be part of an ocean?” and really trying to imagine what used to be here before.

 

Western Interior Seaway
— With gratitude to Joanne Arnott

From the air I can almost
see it, believe that
the lights of the houses

are those of ships
set against dark waters

 

I recall other night landings
my home islands

surrounded by oil tankers
glutted with barrels of crude

 

Here, though, traces are deeply buried
veins of potash and oil
thick pink salts, black slurry
the substances of death and life

 

shaping the politics of this bone-dry
land          deep in the lungs of those insisting
all pleasures and rights are linked
to mining out all that remains

 

All this used to be tropical
lush green humid warm
a shallow wide salty body of water
now buried beneath
the centuries of suburban and rural life

ruination, occupation
dams railways asphalt
pipes gas lines sewage

 

Memory must descend (72–73)

 

I read this poem thinking about CanLit. I’ve never thought of myself as a CanLit author or a CanLit poet, but I’ve also realized through our conversation here that there is no way to escape this conception of Canada in the world. I’m also thinking about all this research I’ve been doing through my poetry as research creation, but also through critical and close analysis of texts from Canada and from Singapore, and finding these resonances between, for example, Wayde Compton’s idea of the lost island, and ideas of islands as needing to be new or to reappear, or to be places of contention, of contestation.

 

In Compton’s story “The Lost Island,” the island in question suddenly erupts in the middle of Burrard Inlet and is variously a site of scientific study, a refugee centre, and a condo development. And then there’s always this idea of how land is treated, especially on the West Coast, especially in this thing that we call the Greater Vancouver area, which incorporates all these islands as well. Reading Compton’s collection, I’ve been struck by the genius of how he has focalized and compressed difficult questions about unceded land in Vancouver through the trope and materiality of the island. The story reminds us of the human and non-human aspects of what makes up an island: whether these are volcanic elements, volunteer species of plants, activists, scientists, politicians, ghosts, or other transient inhabitants. In reading “The Lost Island,” one cannot help but think of E. Pauline Johnson’s identically titled short story, and how Compton was influenced by it, and of Lee Maracle’s writing about the coast and the islands as well.

 

All this to say that there has been a long tradition of thinking through some of the ideas of how Canada is connected to or
represented by these imaginary or speculative island spaces. One can venture even farther, geographically, to consider the islands that were part of the Commonwealth or the British Empire and how they are in relation to Canada. And, as Cornel has discussed, Canada wanted an island in the Caribbean, again demonstrating how it is connected to other islands in the British Empire, including Singapore, where I was born and educated.

 

As you see in the poem above, and as we also read in Eva’s contribution to this forum, I take my positionality with great importance. I think my Chinese diasporic community in Singapore was complicit in empire. We were brought there, not necessarily by coercion—although there was indentured labour, very similar to Chinese Canadian histories—but also brought there to settle the island, to build the plantations, to mine the tin, to take care of the rubber plantations, and then as a merchant class as well, to control the financial wealth and institutions there. These histories are very similar to, although also obviously different from, the kind of pathways and mobilities that we see in Asian Canadian writing, particularly from the West Coast.

 

Through these similarities, even as we must note the specificities of each history and geography, I’ve been thinking about these waves of colonization, these waves of immigration, these waves of diasporic communities as they are also complicit and imbricated in extraction. Why I think about straits and waterways as opposed to just thinking about land is related to mobilities, specifically of petroleum and other by-products, and the labour that it takes to facilitate their extraction as well as their transportation.

 

When I was living and working on Treaty 6 territory and in the homeland of the Métis, I couldn’t quite see how I was connected to Canada’s coastal histories and spaces. How does one conceive of the shores of a continent when one is so far from the sea? But then, through Joanne Arnott’s insight, I realized the reason there are resources to extract on the prairies—whether in Saskatchewan or Alberta—is because there used to be a waterway there that divided the continent. The traces of that saltwater, a humid waterway, are the fossils that form the basis of the incredibly sought-after materials that are then transported across pipelines, and then out again through other waterways, coasts, and islands.

 

And two really interesting things I discovered are, first, that Singapore—at some point or another, or perhaps still—refines oil from Alberta. It does so on an offshore island that is not accessible to most people. I also found out that Canadian miners actually travelled to Indonesia, to Miri, to help them set up their first oil wells. So, it’s really vital to think about this expansiveness of islandness, island politics, and also to think in terms of waterways and straits, and the middle of continents. And I do think that’s some of the writing that I’ve been doing, but I’m also thinking of Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Rita Wong’s forage, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, and even Burning Vision by Marie Clements. Madeleine Thien’s Certainty, where she writes about Indonesia, and Dogs at the Perimeter, where she writes about the relation to Southeast Asia, have these moments when they see these discrete sites as crucial, as nodes in Canada that are linked to one other. There are so-called islands of exception, but islands are both bounded and not by straits and waterways—or perhaps, bounded by straits and waterways that we can no longer see.

 

It’s been so lovely and illuminating, in this forum, thinking through ideas of tourism, movement, mobility. Because how do we reframe Canadian literature to think of not just the ways in which it is regional or strategically essentialist, or to think about ideas of diaspora, but to think also of spaces inland, where one might imagine settler communities saw themselves as exclusionary islands? I think that Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, and all these places we think of predominantly as inland prairie cities have a long history of defining themselves as garrisons, as forts, within a sea of what they would consider to be wilderness or a hostile terra nullius. And then out of these nodes, wherever they were situated, mostly on bodies of water with the various rivers—and I’m thinking of Montreal and Toronto as well—and, of course, the network of pipelines—they are also bridges and nodes and through which Canada seeks to assert global dominion and positionality. Not just through finance, but through material ideas of how to transport whatever is being extracted from this continent and elsewhere offshore. I’ve always thought of Toronto, for instance, which is not an island, and yet is, in a sense: its edifices are constructed by mining money. You don’t think of the skyscrapers as money made from mining. And yet obviously they are, and they are a kind of monument to it.

 

Bringing these disparate threads together, I think that there’s a certain way to not just focus on the coasts of Canada and the islands, the literal islands that make up some of the thirty- to fifty-thousand-island archipelago—but to really think, as well, in the middle of the continent, and of people coming from islands, people building islands, of why there are so many forts, of the geological history of what used to be there, and listening to the stories of how places of contact also occur. What is an island of settlement versus Indigenous communities like the Cree and the Dene and the Métis, who have a slightly more fluid idea of what community, kinship, and territory could be. It is such a rich area of possibility to think of Canada not as a part of this great big continent, but as a node and multiple nodes, connected to not just the politics and the histories of empire, but the ongoing politics and histories and legacies of these pathways, these important connections across bodies of water and across what used to be bodies of water to the rest of the world.

 

Works Cited

Clements, Marie. Burning Vision. Talonbooks, 2003.

Compton, Wayde. The Outer Harbour: Stories. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015.

Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. 1994. NeWest Press, 2014.

Johnson, E. Pauline [Tekahionwake]. “The Lost Island.” Legends of Vancouver. David Spencer Ltd, 1911, pp. 71–78.

Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl. Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002.

Leow, Joanne. Seas Move Away. Turnstone Press, 2022.

Thien, Madeleine. Certainty. Knopf Canada, 2017.

Wong, Rita. forage. Nightwood Editions, 2008.

 

Joanne Leow grew up in Singapore and lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her first academic monograph is Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool UP, 2024). She is also a poet and writer with a debut collection of poetry, Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022). Her creative work and research lie at the intersections of the environmental humanities, transnational and diasporic cultural production, global Asia studies, autotheory, and decoloniality.