The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow
“The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow” is an important collection of poetry for Canlit in cracking open a traditional narrative placeholder of nation-building, lyrically and with experimental storytelling, of an Indigenous lens on war that has been absent in a Canadian consciousness. Renowned author, Armand Garnet Ruffo tells the story of a WWI Indigenous sniper from Wasauksing (Parry Island) and conveys Francis Pegahmagabow’s experience with elements of storytelling and layers Indigenous and Western knowing, illuminating a testimony of the war that will propel readers to think differently of military narratives of our country and the way it was for Indigenous persons during a major historical event in Canadian history. Threading through the creation of an opera on Pegahmagabow’s life story, “Sounding Thunder,” “The Dialogues” contains sound and a spiritual layer that makes this text sacred. Speaking from both a colonial language and the Anishinaabemowin language, Canadians can gain from this collection a deeper understanding of the collective identity of war and just how interconnected we are, enabling a reclaiming of heart and spirit in literature.
Armand Garnet Ruffo teaches at Queen’s University with interests in Indigenous cultures and literatures, Indigenous literary nationalism, transnationalism, and carceral writing, representation, genre studies, and creative writing. Ruffo is an Anishinaabe writer from Treaty #9 territory in northern Ontario. His passion of bridging the creative with scholarly writing gives directions to students to practice telling their story with a critical and inquiring mind. He is a poet, writer, filmmaker and scholar. He has co-edited The Oxford Anthology of Indigenous Literature and An Anthology of Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada. His poetry has been included in over thirty anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry (2023) and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English (2017). A recipient of an Honourary Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, Ruffo brings expertise and passion to his work and has become a renowned and respected writer for indigenous literature in Canada. His books Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird (creative non-fiction) and Treaty # (poetry) were both shortlisted for Governor General’s Literary Awards. Ruffo’s international feature film, A Windigo Tale won Best Film at both the Native American Film Awards in San Francisco and the Dreamspeaker’s Film Festival in Edmonton.
Ruffo’s experimental style with formatting, shifting page alignments and juxtaposition of a colonial voice with an Indigenous language established a dual narrative that flowed together to establish a singular powerful voice that will stay with me with this collection. In a poem entitled, “Dimensional Interlude,” Ruffo aligns two separate poems, line by line, one line bolded and one line faded that tell the story of Lieutenant-General E.A.H. Alderson in command of the 1st Canadian Division, not as a hero, but leading his men into massacre at Ypres. It was interesting to study this poem in reading only the bolded lines, reading only the faded lines and reading them together. Ruffo creates a style and sets a tone of authenticity in reshaping our national war memories, there are always different sides to a historical re-telling, a glorified war narrative, and a lens of social history, a bottom-up view, and, this voice rising up to take hold of a traditional war narrative is an Indigenous lens.
Set in the backdrop of an Indigenous voice making itself heard, is sound. Ruffo tells his reader, “remember you are hearing music,” and he threads throughout his poetic lines a calling in of instrumentation, musical keys and sounds the instruments. Plotted amongst this poetry is sheet music and scores with a storytelling line embedded within the musical bars and notes. Before the pandemic, Ruffo was called to meet with Canadian Conductor and musician, Larry Beckwith, and artistic director James Campbell. They were looking for someone to write a libretto to the life of WWI sniper Francis Pegahmagabow for the 35th anniversary of the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound. From this collaboration came the production “Sounding Thunder: The Song of Pegahmagabow.” So indeed, “The Dialogues” is written to a backdrop of music. In his Afterward, Ruffo provides context to the creative process of the collection weaving in poetics and song. “The Dialogues” consist of a conversation with the poetic-narrative “Sounding Thunder.” The poetry collection serves to fill in the spaces, the gaps, of the libretto.
I connected with the character of Francis in his spirituality that shields him during the war. A Canadian readership is traditionally used to encountering war narratives from a Christian scope and walking The Way and second eyes of an Indigenous worldview was refreshing and grounding. With the alliance of ethereal forces, Francis’ presence on the front becomes powerful and sheds light on viewing larger historical processes from a character point-of-view of interconnectivity. There is a poem that describes Francis offering tobacco before a fight, he asks the wind guardians “to overtake the gas.” His prayers and offerings are heard by the spirit world, the winds change and “the Germans suffer/ just as much as the allies do.” As the poems cycle through movements and events on the front, Francis garners strength and holds fast to his ways in facing death and insurmountable odds of survival for himself and the men. They ask him what laying the tobacco down does, he takes a piece of branch and puts it in his mouth and responds that he becomes “the grey earth. / My medicine is strong/ and I feel invisible/ invincible.” Ruffo’s writing style in conveying this walking in The Way of nature with a cyclical style of storytelling that repeats, but also, when the narrative comes full circle in a sacred spiral, the reader learns more, their perspective is widened and the reader can understand that they are being showed a life story and a way of being slowly, an unfurling; a cracking open. This medicine that makes Francis feel invincible “has come down from generations past and holds the power to protect you when you think all is lost.” These words had been spoken by a shaman whom Francis had visited before, he was unsure of the shaman’s teachings until the war continues on and he comes to know his own way of being with the ethereal more intimately. The repetition of the text enables this Coming-To-Know journey. The integration of this Indigenous worldview also pushed me to make a parallel between war and collective Indigenous identity on a larger scale, colonial structures and society designed to assimilate Indigenous identity, a front of a different war, yet, presence remains, extinction of culture was not realized.
Thank you to Armand Garnet Ruffo, Wolsak & Wynn and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
Sources
https://www.queensu.ca/english/people/armand-garnet-ruffo
