Postcolonial Afterlives of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Keywords: Poetry, sonnets, identity formation, race, women of colour, postcolonial, feminism, music, songwriting.

 

Interview audio

Originally published 9 August 2024. 

 

 

Interview transcript

Introduction

Amrita Dhar

Hello and welcome. My name is Amrita Dhar, and I am the Director of the project Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies which is hosting a series of interviews with postcolonial Shakespeareans from around the world.

In today’s conversation, I speak with the Canadian poet, editor, professor, and critic Sonnet L’Abbé.

 

Conversation

Amrita Dhar

Can I open by asking you about your name?

Sonnet L’Abbé

My parents named me Sonnet. It is a combination of my parents’ first names. My dad’s name is Jason and my mom’s name is Janet. So, you take S-O-N from Jason and N-E-T from Janet and you get Sonnet! It’s like Brangelina! They realized that it would be “Sonnet,” and they liked it. And so that’s what they did—and set me on this path!

Amrita Dhar

Thank you. I, am partial to sonnets. [laughs] So I, of course, deeply appreciate their choices! Where and how did you first get into Shakespeare?

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, I would say it’s probably because of my name.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

My dad had a little paperback, dark blue paperback of Shakespeare’s sonnets that had been a high school text for one of my uncles, or for my dad.

 

 

I remember that somebody had written something, like there was a signature or a dedication in the front page. But it had my name on it. And as a child, any of those kid things that had kids’ names on it in stores, in the mall, like, there’d be Billy, and Jane, and you know, whoever, Jason, Michelle, but no Sonnet.

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, I was really interested in this thing that had my name on it, and I wanted to know what it was. And so, and people also, when they met me when I was younger, would say, “Do you mean like the song?” And so, I was, as a child, I’d be, like, “No, like the poem.” [laughs]

Amrita Dhar

[laughs]

Sonnet L’Abbé

I was a precocious reader before I knew of the sonnets. I begged my parents to read to me. I taught myself to read, pretty much. And so by the time I was seven, I could read the sonnets. I skipped a grade, and then we moved from Calgary to a small town in Manitoba. And I remember the class was doing things that I had already done. Grade 3 class was doing things that I had already done in Grade 2. So, I brought this book with me to occupy myself while they were talking about things I already knew, like times tables and stuff. I remember the teacher coming by and being like, “What are you doing?” [laughs] And so, uh, I would say, you know, I was trying to figure out the sonnets.

And then later, in high school—I went to a girls’ high school—and I took a computer science class and we were learning to program in BASIC. And for whatever reason, I thought it was a funny idea to program in a bunch of sonnets. So I dealt with them again in high school. And I would say that both times my familiarity was largely because I had, um, identified with them.

Amrita Dhar

What is your inheritance…? What I’m thinking of also is: what then is your relationship, would you say, to the sonnet form? Including literary inheritance, through your family, for instance? Or as a function of your background?

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, my mom had worked in a library in Guyana. So, my mother is from Guyana. She came to Canada in 1970, I believe. And my father is French-Canadian. His parents were Québécois, and he only spoke French. They moved… He was born in Northern Ontario, but spoke only French until he was five, and then he moved to another town in Ontario that was Anglo. And I would say that my mom’s family was actually more book-oriented. My mom, she read for pleasure, but she’d had a Guyanese education, which is a very British system of education. And my grandmother could recite poetry by memory, right? And my mom could a little bit too, because of this British education that they’d had. And she, she taught me to recite “Lady Clare” by—is that Tennyson?

The British school system would teach you to recite, and that was part of this Caribbean experience that I had no, I had, like, I did not go to Guyana until last year. So, Guyana was always just this story place that my mother was from. As far as guidance within the family around what a sonnet was, I wouldn’t say that there was a lot. When we did, like when in high school, we did Merchant of Venice for the first time—we started reading the plays in school—I guess I already had this sense of Shakespeare as the person who’d written “When all alone I beweep my outcast state.” [sic] That was my favorite line [laughs] of the whole thing. And as a, as a little person, I think there were just a couple of lines that would have stuck out to me. And then in high school, Sonnet 29 was my fave. It’s not like I knew all of them. I didn’t get into it to the point where I could say, “Oh, here’s the arc from talking about the youth all the way to the dark lady. That part didn’t come until I sat with them to write this book.

Amrita Dhar

You’re talking about your most recent collection of poetry, which indeed is the reason we’re having this conversation in this series, which is Sonnet’s Shakespeare.

 

Sonnet L’Abbé

That’s right. Yeah. So I, I ended up, quote-unquote “ended up,” writing poetry. I was in Film as an undergrad. I couldn’t afford to do Film because it was literal film, still, then. I couldn’t afford that program because you had to pay for all the production costs. And so, I was like, okay, they, they had a screenwriting branch of the Film degree that I could do. So, I decided to just do that. And within that, took Creative Writing electives. And then after undergrad, wrote some stories, wrote some poems… And when I went to grad school a couple of years later, I got more response around my poems. So I became a poet, like, I published poetry, and stayed away from sonnets. [laughs] You know, it just seems so cheesy.

Amrita Dhar

[laughs]

Sonnet L’Abbé

And everybody would always ask me if I had picked my name, right?

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé:

So I published two books and a chapbook, just leaving the sonnets alone. And then when this particular project came to mind, I was thinking, the goal was to think about erasure—like cultural erasure and erasure of one’s own expression, like self-erasure, almost—and then to have a source text that would really work for that. And, and that allowed me to finally just really mine the opportunity that was there in my name.

Amrita Dhar

So, growing up, that almost square of the printed sonnet, especially in the English language, certainly in Shakespeare’s, sonnets, that squareness, and page after page of that squareness, that wasn’t anything that you minded?

 

 

Sonnet L’Abbé

I wouldn’t say that I had enough context to mind. I would have been exposed to books that had nursery rhymes in them, right?

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Dr. Seuss. Things like that. Or Mother Goose type.

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, I think what I thought was: this is old people’s poetry.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé:

Right? I think intuitively, this sense of, like, squares on the page—whether it was quatrains for ballads or the square of the sonnet—just signaled to me an antiquated text.

Amrita Dhar

And older people’s nursery rhymes! I like that very much.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Yes.

Amrita Dhar

This is just what they do.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Don’t know why they don’t like pictures, but they seem to not like pictures!

Amrita Dhar

That’s right!

Sonnet L’Abbé

No illustrations.

Amrita Dhar

One of my children who is now starting to read and is about to enter school—this is a conversation that I have with her all the time. “This is a story. This square on the page is a picture in its own right. It is allowing you to have pictures in your mind. No, there are no pictures in the volume, but that’s because you get to make the pictures in your mind.”

Sonnet L’Abbé

Yeah. Hm. Yeah.

Amrita Dhar

I don’t fully know how I am being received! [laughs]

Sonnet L’Abbé

[laughs]

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, it’s an interesting question because there must be so many different ways to meet the sonnets, and have questions about the form, depending on what you’ve been exposed to.

Amrita Dhar

This is something that you just mentioned and is obviously important in your work. You mentioned erasure. Why did that come to be important for you at all, not just as a form of creative literary exegesis, but also as a cultural experience?

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, I think I’ve generally written about belonging. And if, as a young person, if all I knew at that point was that poems were about writing your feelings, and often expressed longing, or dissatisfaction, or passion, my formative feelings as a child involve being the child of mixed-race parents, right? And being Brown. The places like Calgary in the 70s and small town Manitoba in the 80s were particularly harsh for identity development…

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé 

And my folks… It wasn’t the 2020s. It was the 1970s. And they themselves had a narrative for their marriage that was progressive and that really spoke to the ways that they were somewhat defying the general culture. So, I don’t know in hindsight what I, think they should have done. Now, sometimes I’m like, “Oh, you should never have said, you know, “I don’t see colour.” Because it was very much an “I don’t see colour” kind of vibe that I was encouraged to adopt.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

I think now we know enough, uh, to understand how that would not be great for a child’s identity development.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, I, I had a lot of struggles from very small, with what I could see, versus what I was being told. Like, I was told Canada was one thing and I was experiencing something very different. And I didn’t understand: why would people not want my parents to get married, you know? Why do people still think this way? Like at five years old, I was trying to solve racism.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So I think that my poetry has always reflected those tensions. And when it came time to think about my third book, I had finished, I had just finished my PhD and a dissertation, and erasure poetry was a thing. It was popular again in Vancouver and across the country. It was popular with the poets, and the person that I had written my dissertation on, Ronald Johnson, was considered one of the first erasure poets in the United States, or in the English language. And then the criticism around his erasure was, it was surprising to me. Because it was, you know, this white guy, um, taking Milton, and erasing Paradise Lost to become Radi Os and, and it was just celebrated as this way of dealing with found text and that he was liberating his poem from within this source. And it was like described as etching, it was described as carving. The criticism focused on the process and nobody talked about it as a, as a desecration, as an editing, as a silencing of the original text.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, that was really bizarre. And then you had people like NourbeSe Philip, who’d done Zong! And Jordan Abel was, was doing erasure, like, the kind of blackout or whiteout erasure that we might be more familiar with. And the work of, um, Indigenous and Black writers, in my immediate creative professional context, using erasure to think about deletion, to think about silencing and fragmentation and lost histories. My intuitive spark was like, okay, well we can delete. Like, deletion is not the only way to silence.

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Deletion is not the only way to erase. One also erases culturally by speaking over, speaking for. Or just being so loud that the speech that’s happening is, uh, inaudible. So, I asked myself, how could I find a literary process or literary form that would stage that experience, that perspective on language-making, storytelling, literary inheritance, et cetera. And so, I guess I’ll describe it just a little bit for your listeners who may not have read it.

Amrita Dhar

Please.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So I chose the sonnets as my source text because of that personal relationship that we’ve just talked about. But also as a part of the artefact, part of the archive of Shakespeare used as a colonial tool to educate within the colonies.

Amrita Dhar

One of the things that you mentioned is that you’ve always had a consciousness about race because, again, of your cultural and family background.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Yes.

Amrita Dhar

Is your consciousness about the colonial/post-colonial world also a function of that cultural and family background? Or where did that come into it? Because now you’re talking about how you wanted to work with an artefact, with a prime artefact of the colonial enterprise. Where did that come into your thinking, and why?

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, this maybe would be a good question to help me choose which poem to read to you, because one of the sonnets, like, addresses this on the nose. It is poem 114 and it’s on page 115 of the actual book. Okay, so, for your readers, these poems are long. It probably takes me about four or five minutes to to read out loud.

So, I will say just a little bit about the process before I start to read, because sometimes it frames the listening experience. Each of my poems has the Shakespeare sonnet’s text, the text of the sonnet, in it. And Shakespeare’s text is there in its entirety. But you might not necessarily know that if you just stumble across my poem, because I have broken up the letters and weaved my own letters in between the text of Shakespeare. So for example, if Shakespeare’s first word was “the,” I could put an “mo” at the beginning and an “r” on the end, and my first word might be “mother.” Or I could break it up and put an “r” in the middle and an “e” on the end and say “three” as my first word. And so, Shakespeare’s text is all still there, but mine continues that way. So, in this text, the poem that has been woven through almost like a frame— Like, I think of it sometimes like rug-hooking, where the Shakespeare sonnet is the little frame, and then I’ve, hooked my yarn all over it. So you don’t see the grid anymore. But it’s there, and it actually is a frame.

Amrita Dhar

And you are reading Sonnet 114.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Reading Sonnet 114, specifically in response to your question of “When did your sense of this place as colonial come to be?”

“I’m not sure whether it happened in Manitoba, or Alberta. Go home, they complained. Go back, wherever Pakis or niggers come from. Was I seven years old? Was I five? The day was cloudy, there was wind, and a sidewalk underfoot, a path of cement on which we kids marched. In whose place was I a guest if home wasn’t this flat territory we were on? The hard sidewalk under my shoes, their sense of here. I walked home alone. I say home, quote unquote. I went where my parents paid rent, right? Our house wasn’t ours? Overhead the sky spread out. The sky’s country was itself. We had moved from Ontario, but my gut got that they didn’t mean there. Immigrants, all of us, we’d chorused in assembly, the more immigrants, the kindlier the country, the folksier the mosaic. First, the English and the French, then Western Europeans and the Ukrainians, I guessed, then Chinese and Indians, then the Guyanese and other such Commonwealth stragglers. Eventually, we’d bring in to us, Canadians, a panoply of the human race. So my sweet young self, in Trudeau’s aftermania thought. Believed. Those children’s hate had a kind of guilelessness, however, that conveyed my objections straight from their Canadian parents’ hearts. I was foreign to clear distinctions between master and savage, to fantasies of homesteaders who, by subjecting trees to their saws, had mixed their labor with unowned lands. Homesteaders, they called themselves by principle. Home was theirs because they were first to fence it. As if we were still at war, with whatever made entreaty against their fencing, my existence, existing too near, threatened. My very being entreated something before I ever opened my mouth. “Get lost.” Here, kingly kids drink from institutions cup. Something older than English. Yeah, well knows what with his guts he must disagree. Something français dit bon histoire là, je parle au dessus du poète. Domination, dominion, domicile, home. I protested. One of my parents is here’s occupying family. Don’t blacken me. Please see my colonialist blood inside. They practiced the policing of reserve on the surface of my brown skin. They practiced homing in on enemy. The clouds above, the sky above, witnessed. The land underfoot said here was here first. We thought about beginnings.”

Amrita Dhar

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Does that answer some of your question? [laughs]

Amrita Dhar

Yes, it does. Very much. Would you be willing to talk through this a little bit?

Sonnet L’Abbé

Sure. So, you know, these experiences as a child, right? Like, I mean, I knew, I don’t know if you remember, but I mean, I remember that time as a child when we, we barely knew gender at that point. Like, we were still that time when, when you could play all together. And then suddenly the boys start saying like, “Ew, girls,” like, “I don’t want to be a girl. I don’t want to throw like a girl.” And, and you’re sort of like, “Wait a second. Why is there anything wrong with how God made us? You know, like how we showed up on the planet? Clearly nature is fine with us being this way. Why are you not fine with us being this way?” And, and that my skin colour and my mother’s skin colour were also so viscerally treated as toxic, treated as a contamination. And, you know, I’m just processing as a kid, with my body, people’s visceral recoil or tightening or the way that their voice tenses, or all the things that never got said to me. Like little girls around me would always get called “sweetheart” and “angel” and I never got called that.

So, the “go home” thing was confusing. Like, didn’t we all, didn’t y’all all show up on a boat from Europe? So why you getting here four hundred years ago is any different than my mother showing up? And I was born there, right? So I was like, I doubly have entitlement to be treated the way everybody else is being treated. The rest of the poem just sort of tracks me and my little mind trying to grok this stuff.  I don’t immediately jump to “There are Indigenous people here.” Because I did not know Indigenous people. I was a product of, of the miseducation of settler colonialism. The first 35 years of my life, I really had my striving and emotional life structured by the immigrant narrative that said “Here’s our country. And then these Brown people, these late-comer Brown people that we were sort of not nice to, but now we are, will eventually have what we have and be integrated into this benevolent society that made some mistakes in the past, but is generally good.”

This book also documents, I hope, the coming to awareness as a mixed-race, Black, visible-minority person with a Canadian passport, the way that the racism that I experienced is a dimension of that ongoing settler colonialism. I knew, as a child, like, what I figured out emotionally was: “Oh, we’re still at war. They came, they took. And my body reminds them that they took it.”

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

And they don’t like that because they like to tell a story that they’re good. So, I don’t know if, if I would have chosen that moment as one to focus on in that way, if, if I hadn’t been thinking about the wider context of like, what does it mean to be of colour? What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be mixed on these territories? How does one handle the privileges of one’s citizenship, of one’s passport, one’s complicity?

Amrita Dhar

I think I share many of your questions. And I grew up in Calcutta. I currently live in the United States. I think I share many of your questions about identity, about race, about being complicit within a settler colonialism, a persistent settler colonialism. And this is a related question to which I have my own answer, but I’d very much like to know yours, which is: why Shakespeare in this? Why was a Shakespeare sonnet a means and a vehicle for you to think this question out?

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, I, there are probably other texts that, um, could be held up as something worth defacing or worth erasing, as a gesture of anti-colonialism. But I am so personally shaped by Shakespeare, right? And have an affection for it, right? It’s a good tool in part because it’s good to, you know, the plays are good! [laughs]

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

It’s great writing! There’s wit, there’s drama, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry. It’s that deeply personal relationship to them, to the word “sonnet,” to the form sonnet, that, that just gave dimension to this book. Because it’s 154 poems. Like, I wrote over each of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I like a pun and I, it felt a little out of my comfort zone, like, it just takes ownership of Shakespeare.

Amrita Dhar

Yes, that’s why I love it! Perhaps listeners might appreciate knowing that you and I are having this conversation on 23rd April 2024.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Yeah.

Amrita Dhar

23rd April is, as Shakespeare scholars think, the date on which Shakespeare was born. I just have to say one thing that has kept coming up in this entire series is all these postcolonial creatives having ownership of their Shakespeare. Not everyone has been working in a medium or has had the opportunity to say something like, you know, this person’s Shakespeare, but effectively that is the whole series. And now we’re talking about Sonnet’s Shakespeare, as is quite fitting.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Lovely. Yeah, I, love that way of thinking about it. Because if my school system were to give me the artefacts of my own heritage, I would be getting French literature, Quebecois literature, and I’d be getting Indian, and I’d be getting African stuff, right? My literal tool is this colonial language, right?

NourbeSe Philip wrote, “Anguish, anguish, English is a foreign language, a foreign language, a foreign language, anguish.” Like,… And has so much work around what it means to be speaking the experience of the colonized consciousness with the language of the colonizer. And I learned that in postcolonial studies at Guelph, from white professors, but I never forgot it. That sense of always working with the master’s tools was there for me. Those sonnets quite literally shaped my facility with language.

Amrita Dhar

And now when you’re working with these sonnets, and there is a form of erasure through crowding Shakespeare out, through entering the very words, entering even between the letters of words, between words themselves, of these very significant texts of Shakespeare—which are also very significant texts in world literature—as you are erasing or crowding Shakespeare out, or a moment ago you even said defacing, what is it, do you think, that you are doing to or with Shakespeare in your work, which is Sonnet’s Shakespeare?

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, for the form itself, I had three attempts. It says “Sonnet’s Shakespeare, 154 textile winds.” You could read it as “textile winds” or “textile winds,”  whichever one, because, you know, we do wind in the Caribbean. So, “154 textile winds or aggrecultures, or ecolo izations, or.” And then I just left an “or.”

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Because I knew that this form, this form had not been invented before. So this is a new, this is something that nobody else has done before. I didn’t want to close it down into just one word. I wanted to do the material thing to the source material, do the text thing, and notice how language emerges or doesn’t emerge from that embodied, material interaction. Should I be so lucky as to have people write about this work, they can take on those ways of describing the process, or they can try to describe it themselves or, see the thing that’s done but sit in that pre-lingual space about it. Yeah.

Amrita Dhar

One of the things that I so deeply appreciate about this book as a whole is… You say Sonnet’s Shakespeare, but it’s not just Sonnet’s Shakespeare, it’s Sonnet’s many things! There’s Shakespeare on one end, there’s Sonnet on the other, and there’s almost everything else in between which Sonnet is reading. Sonnet is reading Sonnet’s Shakespeare through everything else and everyone else who have also read their Shakespeare. So let me ask you, actually, what else is in Sonnet’s Shakespeare?

Sonnet L’Abbé

When I started the project, I had just the process in mind and I knew that colonialism and erasure and self-erasure would be a theme. And I realized, “Okay, if I’m going to do this, I need to have much more distinct foci in, in each poem to make the book readable. And I also, if I was going to overwrite and overspeak Shakespeare, with what would I do that? Because the colonial project overwrites the experience of the subjected with their narratives of justice or their narratives of establishing peaceful community or whatever it is that they need their narratives to talk about what they did. [laughs]

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, I was, like, what am I going to…? Like, I don’t just want to reproduce the dynamic of oppression. So, I thought, well, just being in a, you know, being in a mixed-race, Black-Brown, you know, fluid-gender body should be enough! Because that’s what feels like it’s getting erased—is, is all of the mundane wisdom. Okay, I’ll go there. With Palestine, for example, like it is not, it does not take a PhD to be, like, “Whoa, that’s horrible.” Like, “Stop killing people.” But the way that the machine tries to complicate that and turn that just human experience of “That’s injustice happening. I can see that and feel it.” I felt like writing who I am and having reactions to things is enough. So, so, I became quite diaristic. I was writing it through Trump’s getting elected. I got a job here at, in VIU [Vancouver Island University]. So, when I bought my house, I meditated on property. When there were the migrants that were landing on beaches in Europe, I noticed that. I was in Paris for when the “Je suis Charlie” thing happened. So I wrote about that. So there are moments of documenting just where I was in life.

And then there’s a lot of thinking through subjectivity, like animal and plant subjectivity, because that’s where my PhD research and thinking was centered.

And quite a bit about my romantic life: my trying to have a family in settler colonialism and the not happy ending of that. Where I just wanted to be myself and have a partnership and create, you know, have kids in a place where I wasn’t being dominated, in a relationship where I was not being exploited or dominated. And I did not find that. I lived a lot of my life in spaces, especially my professional life, my PhD life, in spaces where I was the only person of colour. I’m sad now for, for young Sonnet who did not have the support. Because York University, where I went to undergrad, had diversity and had a Black Students Association, had the South Asian Students Association. But I was that girl who was, like, “I don’t need that. I’ve got friends.”

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

But I had no idea, yet, how it would feel to have to silence all of my experiences in order to remain comfortable for white friends or white boyfriends to be around. And I tried my best to be that person. I know that white friends and boyfriends that I’ve lost experienced me as very vocal, but they heard it because I spoke about it one in ten times!

So, the book— When I got the physical book for the first time when it was published, I opened up the box and sat down with a glass of wine. I’m like, “I’m going to read this book.” And read it from cover to cover. It was one thing to write it over seven years, and then another thing to see it all, to see how often I returned to my sadness and my anger and, and all of the assaults—the ways that my body and sexuality were, were perceived, just means so much, yeah, stuff. And I’m surprised actually, now that we’re talking about it, I’m surprised that, that when you asked that I didn’t say that first, which means that my therapy is working. There’s a poem in there about not having a therapist of colour.

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

I now have prioritized Black therapists and, and a certain kind of trauma work, that has made a huge difference. I was triggering white supremacy in every therapist that I ever, like—we’re talking somewhere between ten and twenty! I would go in there and tell my story, and like clockwork, eventually, they would be, like, “But not all white people,” “but you must be mistaken,” “here are some tools that work for this, and I’m sure it’s gonna work for that.” Like, “You just need to get to the point where you stop seeing everything in terms of race.”

Amrita

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

The mindfuck that that is, when you’re there!

Amrita:

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

But ideally, right? You know, a woman should not come into a space expecting to be counseled to reconcile with an abusive person. And to me, that’s just your basic 101 Feminism. The structure cannot grok that we should not be counseled to reconcile with our oppressors and our colonizers. We’ve got Bessie Head to read about that. We’ve got Frantz Fanon to read about that. But as far as, like, your day-to-day, Sonnet-working-in-their-cubicle, picking up their employee-assistance package, being, like, “I need some help,”—no, it’s not there. You can hear in my voice that that propels a lot of, I’ve got a lot of energy around that topic. And so my explorations of my own sanity are a huge [laughs] dimension of the book.

Amrita Dhar

I appreciate that dimension very much. To me, as a scholar of poetry, it’s not funny how frequently I actually do encounter it, especially among women, postcolonial writers, and especially poets. I’m thinking of, you know, magnificent persons of craft, like Bhanu Kapil or Safiya Sinclair. It’s just not funny how much poetry has to bear the weight of how much. And thank goodness we have poetry.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Thank goodness. Yes, agreed.

Amrita Dhar

Who else is in the poems? If you, if you…

Sonnet L’Abbé

Who else?

Amrita Dhar

Yes. I mean, for instance, NourbeSe Philip is absolutely in some of this poetry.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Yes.

Amrita Dhar

So, in that way, who else would you say is formatively part of Sonnet’s consciousness to have made it into Sonnet’s Shakespeare?

Sonnet L’Abbé

A bit of Fanon. Christina Sharpe’s concept of the weather of anti-Blackness, I think, is huge. The lyric “I” in the book is, like, “I’m experiencing this weather right now. I’m in the weather. We’re in the weather.”

Amrita Dhar

You mentioned other writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha, Larissa Lai, and so on.

Sonnet L’Abbé 

Anzaldúa is about borderlands, right? One of my pet, pet themes is places between languages, between identities, between genders…

Amrita Dhar

And can I just say, this making space between is what this book does fantastically well. To me, this is not so much that you are erasing Shakespeare or writing over Shakespeare, crowding Shakespeare out. To me, you’re making your own space in between Shakespeare, in between parts of Shakespeare, in the interstices, if you like. And more simply, that you are making space.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Thank you. When we think of it in those 3-D terms, spatial terms, I think of it as being in the same space as Shakespeare.

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Right? Like a sit-in in the executive offices of Shakespeare. But I’m, you know, I’m in there and wanted to… As opposed to having my own separate room somewhere else.

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Do you know what I mean? Building my own space.

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

So, I imagine us all breathing the air of Shakespeare. And we breathe in the Shakespeare without even knowing it. But if our attention is called to it, it’s like, “Yeah, fine, Shakespeare.” I want it to be like, “And you’re breathing Sonnet molecules all the time. You might not have thought you were, but you are now.”

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Sonnet molecules are hanging with the Shakespeare molecules in the same air. Yeah. So Homi Baba, like, he was the “third space” theorist, right? And then Larissa Lai was, was one of my advisors during my PhD. And so we talked a lot about a capital “I” and a lyric “I” and what poets were doing. Leanne Simpson and Chelsea Vowel were who I was turning to read on: how do I represent my relations to the people in the various territories that I’ve lived? I made some shitty mistakes writing this book, and caused people pain in some of the poems that I read before I was taught, you know, a better sense of how to engage with Indigenous languages, with the stories of experience that other people had told me.

So I’ll get students writing about quote-unquote “nature” or quote-unquote “place” and they can engage for a while without talking about Indigenous people, without talking about the place by its Indigenous names, right? Like, they’re not bad people, they don’t want to offend, they don’t know, they don’t know what to do. But at the same time, their work is not even acknowledging the story ecosystem, the language ecosystem of the land on which they are producing language.

Amrita Dhar

Yes.

Sonnet L’Abbé

These are, you know, young people that are trying to talk about their own histories. But they’ll talk about their grandmother’s farm on these territories, like it’s some idyllic, um, sort of pastoral thing. And then they’ll talk about, you know, maybe grandpa’s alcoholism, or grandma’s, you know, putting up with his alcoholism. And that’s the edge that comes into the work. And I’m like, “Deal with where we are, go think about something else than just interpersonal relationships. When you’re going to talk about land, when you’re going to characterize the land, when you’re going to characterize history, and…”

Amrita Dhar

Well, so much of that is so actively discouraged by formal systems of education in North America.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Well, maybe I got misled, like, I feel somewhat misled by having, like, when I went to Guelph and did my English MA… Guelph is, is fairly strong, and at the time was, like, known as a place internationally for postcolonial studies. I just got the wrong impression about how many people… To watch, people function as though we needed to not say that and we needed to never grapple with it has been confusing, honestly.

I think I’ve learned a lot in, in seeing the difference between, um, what is encouraged to say around that as a graduate student or an undergraduate student, as a, you know, young person of colour that is being educated and given a voice—then you’re allowed to say it, as long as somebody else is marking it and validating it. But then as soon as you’re a peer looking at your peers saying, yeah, “So, what’s the policy of our institution? How are we treating faculty of colour? How are we treating students of colour, staff of colour?” Then it, then it’s a whole other ballgame. And then I’m back on the playground again.

The way that I don’t know and don’t have interpersonal relationships with people who are the First Peoples of this place, the absence of those relationships, I hope, is also a character, you know, a presence in the, in the book. Because it wouldn’t be real for me to just seek out a whole bunch of Indigenous writers and, like, make like I’m having a community.

Amrita Dhar

Can I ask you about the language of the poems? First of all, there are languages, and even within languages, there are dialects of those languages, and there are registers of language. So that there is a kind of hybridity to the languages in which the poetry is rendered. And the poetry, your poetry, I should mention, if people have not looked at the poems on the page, is that they don’t leap off the page as sonnets.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Right. I think it’s really important to have my ear for Guyanese English and Creoles. Because that sense of English as this structuring for my expression… When I use language, the one I am most expressive in is English. And yet what I am trying to express is… [sighs] It… You know, so, if, if Shakespeare is one of the musics, it felt very, very important to me to have as much that was not that, into the text.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

In some ways, the best version of this book would be if I spoke Anishinaabemowin from where I grew up and overwrote it with that!

I find it important to very consciously be able to say, you know, “It’s rough out here in these streets!” I want to bring my not-disciplined-by-the-academy voices into my embodiment of the academy. Because it’s a role. I can profess and do profess in the ways that I needed to in order to earn the credential, and when I need to use language in a particular way, I can do that. But the ways that tone itself is policed in life, and in texts, and in even the disciplining and training that I am paid to do to help people hear tone, is something that I, I never want to engage in uncritically or unplayfully.

Amrita Dhar

Mm hm. I have a final question, which is: what are you working on now? And is there a future for work like this, that is sort of at the nexus of Shakespeare studies, postcolonial thought, poetic craft, and critical race work?

Sonnet L’Abbé

I have experienced a turn away from text-based poetry. It’s kind of coming back now… I don’t know if I will engage Shakespeare again, soon, but a part of me wanted to, like, give up— I laugh! Part of me wanted to give up all of the social-justice Sonnet! But you can’t leave your body behind, right? Like everywhere I go, here I am, and here my impulses are, and here my history is, et cetera. I find that trying to speak as if there is some abstraction that’s possible, that, that leaves out racialized experience, I ultimately end up not finding it interesting.

Amrita Dhar

Hm.

Sonnet L’Abbé

The dimension of racialized experience, which to me is synecdochal [laughs] for colonial, like living in settler colonialism, always makes its way back in. And so, I have been working with songwriting for the past five years or so. I still feel, like, English, on its own, is hemming me in. Something wants to be expressed that is not happy with just this quiet putting my words in a book that is going to be read by mainly academics. So, so now, I have been trying to bring the same, like this consciousness that’s evident in the book, into a form of expression that allows me to speak much more popularly. So, I have songs that are like Blues. I had to learn how to play guitar. I had to learn how to sing and had to learn how to play guitar. So, I’m still feeling like a student around those things. I’ve never put out an EP [extended play musical recording], I’ve never put out an album. So, to me, that next project feels like a book, but this book needs to be very out-loud-able. That’s where my heart is. Up until this year, we’ve had a Jazz Department at the school where I’m at. And I performed one of my Blues songs that— And introduced it as, like, okay, so here’s… Angela Davis wrote about the Blues as Black Feminism. Here’s what she had to say about how it intervened in social discourse and allowed women to talk about domestic violence, for example, and addiction. I was trying to use that form to consider what is worth talking about, what is worth bringing into social discourse that hasn’t been there, yet. That’s what I’m doing.

Amrita Dhar

Sounds fantastic. And given how out-loud-able Sonnet’s Shakespeare already is, I’m excited for the future work.

Sonnet L’Abbé

Thank you. Thank you, Amrita.

 

Conclusion

Amrita Dhar

If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to this podcast, spread the word, and leave a review. Do take a look also at our project website at shakespearepostcolonies.osu.edu for materials supplementing this conversation and for further project details. Thank you for listening, and until next time, for the Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies Project, I am Amrita Dhar.