reading in the margins: Jordan Abel
, another fragment of a longer work-in-progress,
I am now, at least temporarily, caught up on the work of Jordan Abel, an Edmonton-based queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver, having spent the past few weeks reading his novel, Empty Spaces (2023). Attending a recent reading and panel Abel was part of via the Ottawa International Writers Festival, I was fascinated to hear that he considers the whole of his published books-to-date, whether poetry, memoir or this recent novel, all part of a single, ongoing project. From the poetry collections The Place of Scraps (2013), Un/inhabited (2014) and Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Injun (2016) to the memoir NISHGA (2021) and Empty Spaces (which won the 2024 Governor General’s Award for Fiction as I was finishing up this piece), Abel weaves elements of recombination, personal and historical archive, lyric, theory, personal history, straight narrative and visual poetry to form book-length shapes, all of which hold a core of seeking to centre himself, as both reclamation and recovery, in his Indigeneity.
The nature of genre, in Abel’s hands, appears fluid, even as each published work offers a shared sense of tone, of landscape, allowing for anything and everything to be contained within the scope of a book-length manuscript. Genre, it would seem, is less than a sequence of boundaries than a shared handful of tools and concerns that lean into a different direction to best serve the concerns of the material. Every project, in its own way, leading into the next. The novel Empty Spaces, as he mentioned that night, which simultaneously appeared with an American publisher, but as “philosophy” instead of “fiction,” thus further blurring these classifications.
Composed as a sequence of individual accumulations of block-text chapters that describe an unnamed, and at first, unspecified wilderness landscape in great detail, Empty Spaces evolves into a play on the fabrication of the “empty spaces” available across what would become the Canadian and American Midwest and further west, claimed by government and cultural media to be uninhabited and free for the taking by any and all colonial interest. Abel opens with a wilderness free from human activity until threads of evidence begin to emerge, including blood, and bodies, there in the water. The evidence, emerges. As his text progresses, Abel offers voices and death, slipped between lines of rich prose, nearly buried, comparable to the death Sheila Watson slipped into the lyric prose of the opening passages of her infamous novel The Double Hook (1959). Through long stretches of lyric detail, Empty Passages is a novel akin to Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), providing a propulsive and evocative lyric flow that holds tone and texture over direct narrative. What is the story, exactly, he is telling? As Abel writes, early on: “If there are voices. If there are parallels between the tree branches. If the waters rise. If a line is drawn. If there are connections between the precipices. If there are no more hills or banks or caverns or ravines. If the soft curvature of the lake sometimes shines in the light from the sun at dawn. If there are roses. If the bodies float down the stream. If there are bodies with hooves and mouths and fur and fingers. If there are moments that intersect with other moments. If the smoke consumes the forest.” Abel articulates landscape, dismissing the easy or obvious narrative. Or, as the cover blurb offers:
Jordan Abel’s extraordinary new work, Empty Spaces, grows out of his groundbreaking visual compositions in NISHGA. In those visual pieces, Abel began by integrating descriptions of landscape from James Fenimore Cooper’s settler classic The Last of the Mohicans into his father’s artwork. In Empty Spaces, Abel reconfigures those descriptions and subjects them to bold rewritings.
Reimagining the nineteenth-century text from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga’a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, the successive chapters of Empty Spaces move toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America.
There’s an expansiveness to Empty Spaces, one that sings and rings and ripples outward, layering image upon image, bubbling references and ideas into a swirl of landscape, bodies, blood and aftermath, time and temporality. Abel writes into and through a colonial landscape, one that requires the erasure, the genocide, of Indigenous people to construct its foundations: “If the west is to be made, then bodies must float down these rivers. If the west is here at all, it is caught up somewhere in the intersecting voices that cut softly through the silence. If the summer hangs in the air, then the water must reflect the light from the moon at midnight. If there are echoes that cut through the wind. If there is light shining down on the bodies and the trees.”
I’ve written prior how NISHGA works very much as simultaneous high point, pivot and logical progression in Abel’s work: a deep, critical dive that assesses and potentially reassesses not only his relationship with his own past and indigeneity, but that of his own creative responses. At the time, I wondered: How might his work progress from here? As he writes as part of NISHGA’s “Notes”:
I remember being at a conference in southern Ontario right after my second book came out. I had just given a talk an hour or two before, and was still having conversations between panels about my work. At one point, an established and popular Indigenous artist came up to me to asked me point blank what gave me the right to work with and deconstruct the work of others. I think I told her that the work I do attempts to mirror the appropriative mechanisms of colonialism. But she was unhappy with that answer and unhappy with my work. Looking back at that moment, I am unsatisfied too. If I could return to that moment now, I would have said that I work with found text because that was my first real connection to Indigeneity, and, as an intergenerational survivor of Residential Schools, I create art that attempts to reflect my life experience, including my severance from Indigenous knowledge and land.
His first full-length title, the poetry collection The Place of Scraps, is a three hundred page reclamation project articulated through fragments, erasures, scraps, texts, visuals and concrete poems. As the press release tells us, the author works to:
[…] re-articulate the voice of Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer who studied First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. But through acquiring indigenous goods to sell to Canadian museums, Barbeau ended up playing an active role in displacing the very cultures he strove to protect.
Rather than condemn Barbeau’s actions and the unfortunate history he created, Abel examines how history itself comes to be written. Just as Barbeau once sawed through a huge Nisga’a totem pole to ship by train to Ontario, Abel makes precise incisions in Barbeau’s canonical text, Totem Poles, allowing the “scraps” to disperse into multiple, graphic re-presentations of indigenous ethnography.
Canadian ethnographer and folklorist Marius Barbeau (1883-1969), online sources offer, has long been considered “a father of Canadian anthropology,” and catalogued a number of cultures within Canada, from various aboriginal cultures to Quebec’s Francophone cultures, misunderstanding that practices of removing artifacts and other items from its native culture was in fact helping to erase the very histories he attempted to preserve. From scraps to spaces, as Abel dismantles and reassembles, articulating landscape from and through deliberately suppressed perspectives. It is through these rearrangements and reconceptualizations that Abel works to clarify his own sense of belonging. The Place of Scraps, then, is less a re-articulation of Barbeau’s voice than Abel repurposing the building blocks of Barbeau’s voice and texts to articulate those deeply-felt losses, and work toward rebuilding a text of what had been stolen, including Abel’s own relationship to the Nisga’a Nation. Abel’s erasure picks apart a history of dismantling and a dismantling of history itself, turning Barbeau’s work, if not specifically against him, back around, against the damage wrought by Barbeau’s presumptions.
Abel’s second collection, Un/inhabited, is constructed out of the texts of mass market works of “frontier” fiction. As Kathleen Ritter writes in her essay “Ctrl-F: Reterritorializing the Canon,” included at the back of the book: “A browse through the collection shows that most of these novels were written around the turn of the last century and, with titles like The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories, Gunman’s Reckoning, The Last of the Plainsmen, Way of the Lawless and The Untamed, they are stereotypical of the romanticism of the frontier, the height of North American colonialism and a time when the indigenous population was being dispossessed of their lands and driven down to their lowest numbers in history as a direct result of European conflict, warfare and settlement.” As the back cover describes the project:
Abel constructed the book’s source text by compiling ninety-one complete western novels found on the website Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works. Using his word processor’s Ctrl-F function, he searched the document in its totality for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) that accumulates toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.
Un/inhabited opens with erasure of specific words (uninhabited, settler, extracted, territory, indianized, pioneer, treaty, frontier, inhabited) before shifting to an erasure that shows the text almost as a cartographic map, before stripping the erasure down entirely, comparable to a depleting printer ink or photocopy toner cartridge. The only way these texts hold together is in the ways in which Abel allows them to degrade, before collapsing completely in on themselves. In an interview at Touch the Donkey, he spoke a bit about the compositional process of Un/inhabited:
I think, if I were to guess at an answer to my own question, that the thread of literary terms engages with an aspect of the western genre that is, at the very least, unusual. You don’t often think about the western genre being rich with metaphors or allusions or symbols, and, perhaps, it isn’t. But those words are there. Those words are doing something that we don’t normally associate with the traditional foundations of literary studies. There is an exploration here that, I think, subverts the tendencies of literary analysis by compressing and recontextualizing common analytic diction.
Right now, these pieces are not part of a separate project. But they easily could be. I think there’s more there to dig through. Other approaches that could be taken.
Injun extends Abel’s reclamation project established across his first two collections, one that both engages and purposefully pushes to unsettle, attempting both an ease and unease into the ongoing shame of how aboriginals are treated and depicted in Canada through repetition, erasure and settler language. Simply through usage, Abel forces us, the occupiers, to confront our language, in an effort to reconcile, restore and heal, none of which can truly exist without real conversation. The poems in Injun exist as a single book-length erasure, one with the result of seeing sketched erasures alongside exploded characters that are difficult to replicate within the space of this kind of review. Lines and phrases explode across the page. At the end of the collection, he includes this short “[ PROCESS ],” that writes:
Injun was constructed entirely from a source text comprised of 91 public domain western novels with a total length of just over ten thousand pages. Using CTRL+F, I searched the source text for the word “injun,” a query that returned 509 results. After separating out each of the sentences that contained the word, I ended up with 26 print pages. I then cut up each page into a section of a long poem. Sometimes I would cut up a page into three- to five-word clusters. Sometimes I would rearrange the pieces until something sounded right. Sometimes I would just write down how the pieces fell together. Injun and the accompanying materials are the result of those methods.
In conversation after Abel’s Ottawa reading, he mentions to me how Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis considers Abel to be working in the form of the long poem, and there are elements of this ongoing project that are certainly comparable to the multiple books of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (1972-1993), Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (2000), Steven Ross Smith’s ongoing “fluttertongue” or Dennis Cooley’s “Love in a Dry Land”: an expansive, open-ended project made up of multiple book-length publications, although Abel opens his project further through exploring elements of blended collage through lyric, visual and prose narratives. It is true that Abel’s unnamed and ongoing project, through the opening trio of poetry titles, was already expansive, but the critical memoir NISHGA provided a levelling-up, as it were, moving beyond the scope of the “long poem” into something potentially beyond even those boundaries. NISHGA utilizes archival scraps, talks, interviews, visual poems and other forms into a book-length collage that speaks of and to generational trauma and the residential school system, and the ways in which he has used his work to engage larger conversations about aboriginal culture and colonialism, and an exploration on his own identity and indigeneity. As he writes early on in the collection under the title “Notes”: “I remember talking with a colleague of a colleague at a book launch in Vancouver. She came up to me after my reading and wanted to talk. At some point, she asked me if I spoke Nisga’a. I said no and she asked why. But it wasn’t just the question why. There was something else there too. She didn’t say it, but she wanted to know how I could have been so irresponsible. How I could have been Nisga’a my whole life but never bothered to learn the language. As if I had access. As if I could just flip a switch and know. as if I hadn’t wanted to. As if I hadn’t felt that hole inside me. As if filling it was that easy.”