Dawaa: the space between : poetry

"This book of poems is not not meant to be a didactic tool for language learning. It is meant to encapsulate the way an anglophone with Anishnaabe identity feels as an outsider to the language of her own people. How “walking in two worlds” or “two-eyed seeing” manifests itself when an Anishnaabe person is left with a deep longing to learn a language but has only dictionaries and thesauruses to turn to for knowledge. The result is a poetic experiment, to transmute my lived experience using the literal translations and concepts of Anishnaabemowin into English, and arranged with poetic license. The words I found in my ancestral language are lined up on the right, to show the process of how I processed the polysynthetic morphemes into English. I hope this book provides insight into the tensions of language I have experienced being an Anishnaabekwe in the modern world—the liminal feeling of existing in two worlds and not belonging fully to either language. Many of us exist inhabit in the blank space between the columns in this book."--