SPOILER ALERT: We will be making further productions of Lake of the Strangers in the future so if you weren’t able to make it out to one of the theatrical performances in early 2019 and wish for the plot to remain a mystery, please don’t continue reading!
Welcome to the penultimate instalment of our limited edition Iskotew: Our Circle series! It is our absolute pleasure to introduce another deeply talented and passionate artist that we had the honour of collaborating with: Lisa Mulrooney.
Hailing from Redditch, England, Lisa emigrated to Canada with her family when she was 15 and has made her home in Stony Plain, Alberta, where she has picked up the mantle of first Poet Laureate. Writing poems for as long as she can remember, we’re eternally grateful Lisa shared her perspective in an eight section poem that invites readers to reflect on their own experiences between the ideas and memories she shared.
Lisa hopes her poem serves as a springboard for your contemplation of how we all engage in myth-making in our day to day lives to make sense of the world around us, and we do too.
I
We are children drowning
in our loss, in our fear,
in our rebellion against creation.
We pace around the waters of our birth
afraid to leave, knowing that we must.
Name the violence
before it names us.
We are given new words, new worlds,
before the old ones are removed,
oceans torn apart,
replaced with spit,
sputum passed from hand to hand,
trust undone.
Sometimes fathers lie.
II
Promises are carnivals:
children get hurled from their beds, mid-dream,
tossed at strangers,
who bathe their nightmares in smiles.
Beneath the surface, tiny ripples
absorb the world.
Rocks that once fed the beach,
return to sand,
pummelled by the same crashing waves
that hurl creatures to the stars,
each footprint a constellation.
We wish ourselves there, in the sky,
instead of communing with the dead
while the rest of creation sleeps.
We try not to weep.
III
My story is my sextant,
my only means of navigation.
Truth borrowed from celestial bodies,
brought down to my own horizon.
I began inland, in parch-lipped complacency,
a strange continent lacking the predictability
of home.
So eager, until I arrived
with nothing
but a suitcase of dolls.
Foreign is a shroud in place of blankets.
Reminded daily of otherness,
I pulled on doors I should have pushed,
mistook sunshine for heat,
missed the smell of mold.
IV
My brother was a constant, a comfort,
an annoyance.
He was every childhood injustice awakened:
younger,
smaller,
weaker,
and just enough like me to breed contempt,
to incite a daily mirror-smashing.
My pet, when doting served a purpose,
my peer, when there was reason to be punished:
I taught him to smoke and drink,
break rules and clocks.
Self-worth redefined
as inclusion.
I led and he followed.
Remonstrations an entertaining challenge.
Here is where our memories diverge.
V
I cannot remember the specifics of every incident:
if he ever had permission to drive the car he smashed,
if I ever understood his injuries,
if I ever took his side in the issues of our parents,
if, as I age, it matters more or less
what I forget.
He would tell me if I ask him,
but there would be more consequences than this poem:
recollection,
reflection,
shame.
And I am ill-equipped
to tear away the only identity I have known
since immigration,
since I convinced myself of all the reasons
I had to bring my dolls with me.
We do not come equipped
to lose our stories,
so I deny my brother’s to save my own.
Didn’t he give me implicit permission,
when he assumed an accent that wasn’t his
to fit in?
VI
When I taste new vowels
in a mouth full of marbles,
I choke on my difference,
choose to be pedestalled,
not pilloried,
vomit words instead of glass.
And the words are fabrications.
VII
We lock ourselves in personal stories,
tales wound around ourselves for protection:
my flaws have been my father’s fault,
my brother was the favoured child.
But what stories does my brother tell?
He told me once I was the favourite.
I grow more isolated in the distance between us.
Where is my brother?
VIII
It has never been enough to belong to myself.
I belong to the stars, to all creation.
I belong to my ancestors, to the stories they placed in the stars.
I belong to my brother’s stories and he belongs to mine.
I must learn how to weave.
I must become Pollux,
prevent my brother’s death
by sharing my immortality.
We shall be placed in the stars together, like Gemini.
We must name the future
before it names us.
All rights reserved to Lisa Mulrooney.
What moment or moments from Lake of the Strangers did you respond to with your artwork and why?
My artwork responds to the grief of losing a sibling, as well as to the creation of identity through weaving together history, myth and story. My family emigrated from the UK when I was fifteen, and I have often struggled with questions of identity. Even the most basic of associations — with my immediate family — has often been strained, complicated by my father’s alcoholism. The upbringing that my younger brother and I had was often turbulent. As adults, he and I are not as close as I think we should be. In that respect, I feel a certain amount of grief, only for a sibling who is still very much alive. This relationship has the potential to heal, but not without overcoming significant challenges, like learning to communicate all over again. Much of our past would have to be revisited, our different perspectives respected and acknowledged.
After watching Lake of the Strangers, I recognized in my own relationship with my brother some similarities with the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
I wanted my response to describe a longing to connect and to identify some of the personal challenges we have in building trust and healthy relationships (not just between Indigenous or non-Indigenous people, but between all people in all of their various human relationships).
What medium did you choose and what was the inspiration for that decision?
I responded to the play with poetry, which I feel is well-suited to the complicated and disjointed emotions that were stirred up in me after watching the play.
Poetry has the ability to touch people on a deeply personal level, moulding itself to the specific circumstances of different readers.
Although the poem includes some intimate and personal details of my own life, I would like to think that it invites others to access the potential for healing in their own distinctly personal way.
How did you approach creating this work both technically and artistically?
I sat with my thoughts and emotions for a long time after I attended Lake of the Strangers. I saw the play twice and, each time, I knew that I had to write about my relationship with my brother and about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people — as siblings. I did not want to approach my own history with bitterness or hopelessness, because I saw my grief as an indicator of hope, and I also wanted to be cautious about trivializing the experiences of Indigenous people in making loose comparisons.
The play had treated grief and the politics of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in a delicate and caring way, and I desperately wanted to maintain that approach.
After agonizing about whether or not I could write a poem that would be appropriately sensitive to all readers, I decided that honesty, vulnerability and authenticity would be my guiding principles: fear of failing to be understood should not stop me from instilling the hope that challenges in our relationships can be surmounted.
Technically, the poem is divided into eight separate sections. While the poem is largely chronological in terms of my own story, I tried to create space for a reader to engage in personal reflection between the ideas and the various memories that I was recalling.
What do you hope people take away after experiencing your piece?
I would like people to reflect on how we all engage in myth-making, to make sense of our histories, our memories and our identities.
The stories that we tell ourselves sometimes have a tenuous relationship with the truth, and sometimes they are barriers to communicating with those who can offer alternative perspectives.
I’d like to encourage a postcolonial reconciliatory approach to history and story, and to create a space where all readers can find some common ground as brothers and sisters. If my poem invites just one reader to consider a new perspective within the whole spectrum of relationships to which he/she/they belong, then I will consider it a success.
Some art revolves around the creation of one piece or experience. In joining the creative journey with Lake of the Strangers, can you share your experience in creating an artistic response alongside the show?
I feel honoured to be a part of the creative journey of Lake of the Strangers and I think it is incredibly generous of Jacquelyn and Hunter to have invited me along. Shortly after I completed the poem, I expressed to them my concerns about using my own sibling relationship as a metaphor (and certainly a flawed one) for some aspects of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations.
This amazing brother and sister team reminded me that the spirit of treaty-making in Canada was one of kinship and that honouring that relationship is an important step toward reconciliation and healing.
I hope my poem will be recognized more for its intent than its flaws and I wish to thank Jacquelyn, Hunter and all of their creative team for sharing with me the opportunity to celebrate, through this collaboration, both a personal and a societal longing for connection.
If you’d like to learn more about Lisa and her work you can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and check out her website here.
For other posts in this series you can visit the Iskotew: Our Circle page on our blog and to hear from the extraordinary person who made this Reflection Ceremony and all of its creations possible you can click here.
