An Alchemy of Words

The burning of a Guy

"The burning of a Guy"

That winter, after supper when it was dark outside,

I joined the oily bonfire

where the glow ignited the warm faces

of my neighbours.

A year's worth of lumber,

Christmas trees still tinsel'd,

and hockey sticks.

Sweat pant effigies stuffed with rags,

a nylon head with a ratty toque,

all of it the burning of an enemy,

the burning of a Guy.

Guy the Traitor;

Guy the Anarchist;

Guy the Crazy One;

the Devil's Martyr;

the Evil Nesting Hen,

perched atop his kegs of gas

as the flaming torch dispelled the gloom

beneath the British House of Lords.

He screamed threats as the billy clubs rushed in,

as the tar-smeared brushes clutched him,

as he smothered on the feathers stolen from our pillows

where we all slept well that night.

The King is Dead. (Long Live the King.)

We burn him every year,

in multiple, now.

He goes up in ashes like a sacrifice

in every Labrador town, every little village

on the Rock:

Cartwright, Goose Bay, Gander,

St. Anthony, Grand Falls, St. Johns,

Hopedale, Bonavista, Come-by-Chance,

Black Tickle...

I remember being young,

an outsider watching, unable to understand

the ritual,

no Guy to burn,

no Raggle-Taggle-Gypsy-O.

I am Canadian.

I lack the traitors,

the anarchists to pour the oil on my flames

and make me burn so all-consumingly.

I have no devil's martyrs,

no evil nesting hens,

no torch.

(my world began when i was born,

i will lose it when i die.)

I am Canadian,

without a past,

without a face,

without a voice to speak,

just sweat pant limbs

and rag-stuffed joints,

no buttons wasted

on my nylon head

to give me the eyes I need to see

my neighbour burn like me.

˗ˏˋ・。☆.・゜✭・.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
✫・゜・。.・。. ✭

Yesterday was Canada Day. This year, many Canadians have been reeling as a growing number of unmarked graves are "discovered" at residential schools across the country. As with Columbus and the Americas, these graves are hardly news to Canada's Indigenous people, many of whom were tasked with digging them as children. This poem predates all of that but the disenchantment I feel this year has deep roots. It's not the first time I've questioned whether or not we live up to our vaunted sense of nationhood.

This poem began as a monologue from my stageplay "Canada Ending and Other Wars of 1812". I wrote the play in the wake of the Quebec Referendum where one of Canada's founding provinces came within inches of separating from Canada and becoming its own country -- think of it as Brexit on a more intimate scale. 49.42% voted to separate. 50.58% voted to remain.

I was attending the University of Winnipeg at the time, studying political science and history, and felt that, had the referendum passed, it would have set Canada down a path that, inevitably and inexorably, would have led to its collapse and dissolution. This play was my emotional response to the Referendum - one I promised myself I would write if we woke up the next morning to find that we were still a country.

The Saskatchewan Playwrights' Centre helped me workshop it and I created a theatre company called the Royal Black Tickle Society to tour it two summers later at the Winnipeg and Saskatoon Fringe Festivals, billing it as a soap-box play for two men and an imagi(nation). A couple of years later, a major beer company would run a series of overtly nationalist "I am Canadian" TV commercials, a crass and eerie echo to these lines.

The play, much of it poetic in style and approach, is a travelogue through the mythic underbelly of a Canada that's spiralling towards that collapse. It takes the form of overlapping letters written back and forth between two friends as they hop a train from Winnipeg, one travelling west, the other east, to Canada's coastal extremities. This letter, near the play's end, captures the strange and haunting Guy Fawkes Day festivities I remember from my time in Newfoundland and Labrador on the east coast.

The province remained under British rule and cultural influence through both World Wars until a similarly close and contested referendum led them to join Canada in 1949, not even half a century before I put these words on stage. 52.3% voted to join Canada. 47.7% voted for independence.

As for me, some days I vote yes. Some days I vote no. It's complicated.