Babel on a Page

Introduction

Marja: We asked six Toronto writers of diverse cultural backgrounds to write about "voice" and the creative writing process. In order to evoke the plurality of their voices, we have merged their answers into a dialogue that at once disconnects and integrates their voices- a kind of babel on a page.
Veronika: And so we asked ourselves: what is voice? What are voices? What happens when voices are merged on a page? Do they agree? Do they interrupt? Do they talk past one another? Or do they merge together in a kind of fluid incongruity, their sense only to be disentangled by the devoted reader?
Ramya: And as readers how do these voices resonate with us? What happens to the unvoiced voice? The act of reading is in many ways an act of imaginative appropriation, taking upon ourselves the construction of the self and other, silencing some voices while privileging others. The reader in this way joins the writer, the two forming a sort of symbiotic relationship, in an unbroken cycle of creation, interpretation, and transformation. (John Reibetanz, Priscilla Uppal, Rachel Zolf, Simon Ortiz, George Elliot Clarke, and Lee Maracle.)

I

REIBETANZ: “Appropriation” is altogether a good thing for writers:

UPPAL: We believe in pronunciation, adjudication, and/ all for the nation;

ZOLF: where many voices question and contradict one another, laying bare the ephemeral, relative nature of memory and truth,

CLARKE: or gripe and blab like a Protestant pope.

UPPAL: My brother and I can mimic a South-Asian accent/ when we say:

MARACLE: let the breath of others take their own journey through the body.

REIBETANZ: Here, for instance, is Salvador:

ZOLF: struggling with self-identity through the poetry

REIBETANZ: a refugee who has learned the value of conversation from his solitary confinement as a political prisoner in Chile: “He refuses to eat in silence/ even when alone / because, he says, it is”

CLARKE: a feinting langue haunted by each slave boat.

ORTIZ: As a Native American writer of the Acoma Pueblo community in New Mexico, I write

REIBETANZ: if one agrees with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas that the self finds its primary definition:

CLARKE: a wanton lingo.

MARACLE: Insulted.

REIBETANZ: More distinctive through acts of imaginative sympathy:

ORTIZ: that is the power of my voice.

II

UPPAL: My poetry comes out of/ my father’s chest, tough and wholehearted,

ZOLF: questioning of the authority given to the particularly lyric

CLARKE: bitter grapes of Creole verse

ORTIZ: or other "colonial languages".

REIBETANZ: “It’s character assassination time”

UPPAL: just as I know that being Canadian

REIBETANZ: develops by looking outwards rather than inwards.

UPPAL: I know little Punjabi

ORTIZ: even if I am speaking and writing fluently in the English language.

REIBETANZ: Safe choice, that place / half underground

CLARKE: taunted and tainted by wine.

ORTIZ: A use of language in your own terms,

MARACLE: with conviction

REIBETANZ: deeper (through dramatic monologue)

UPPAL: far more Chicken a la King than curry.

ZOLF: The particular slipperiness of the polyvocal:

CLARKE: I gabble a garrote argot, guttural, by rote,

MARACLE: arias of painful transformation

UPPAL: and all-you-can-eat buffets;

REIBETANZ: the vast perspectives offered by this non-European otherness

MARACLE: that we can come to love:

ORTIZ: I insist on that.

Copyright © 2006 by Hart House Review