No, I’m not sorry I read this powerful and haunting book. It’s not an easy read, and (please consider this a trigger warning, although I don’t intend to go into details) I wouldn’t expect it to be: the subject matter, which includes child sexual abuse, ought to be difficult. If it weren’t, something would be wrong. And the author’s experience is, distressingly, too common. Maybe, if the stigma and silence that surrounds that kind of abuse were to be dispelled, it might happen less frequently, and if that’s the case, You Might Be Sorry You Read This will do important work. Brown clearly understands all of that. In “poetic statement,” she writes,
I write as a refusal to be silenced.
I write to resist shame.
I write as an answer to questions I’m tired of explaining.
I write to put down my side of the story.
I like the way she considers the embodied nature of both our experience and our writing:
We are, each of us, walking-around, knowing beings, holding ideas and memories that show in our gait, in the way we hold our face. A poem is an exercise in bringing forward from the body the sense of a moment–following my breath, the rise of my spine, the sense of my skin as I sit on a rock watching a heron hunt, or in my garden listening to bees in the borage, or as I walk an urban street and smell toast.
Brown is Métis, and some of the poems here consider the effects of Canada’s ongoing colonialism and the way that they have affected her. Those poems are angry, but why wouldn’t they be? “Beneficiaries of a Genocide,” for instance, addresses settler-descendants like me directly. That poem’s speaker demands that settlers identify themselves using that term, something many of us are reluctant to do, especially if we were born here, as I have learned from my students, and it rightly suggests an alternative term: “I don’t imagine you’ll like this term any better. / Beneficiary of a genocide. / But I think it narrows the argument.” “Let us stay in this room where you are now uncomfortable / and I am now unwelcome,” it concludes. “Let us begin with what you call yourselves.” The discomfort such discussions occasion, as I argue in my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, is unpleasant–of course it it!–but it’s far less painful than living on a road allowance or being sent to a residential school. Let’s try to develop some sense of perspective.
Read this book. You will not be sorry.
Michelle Poirier Brown is a profoundly complex nehiyaw-iskwew with the guts to share realities many of us continue to hide. She is an inspiration to the Metis community.