Jacob Alvarado
JOSEPH DANDURAND, THE PUNISHMENT.
GIBSONS: NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS, 2022. $21.95.
Delving with painful honesty into Joseph Dandurand’s life to explore generational trauma, love and loss, Kwantlen culture, and much more, The Punishment offers a glimpse into the past and present trials of Indigenous peoples through a collection that’s as wide-ranging as it is intimate. With the voice of a wizened storyteller, Dandurand fearlessly examines the mistakes he’s made, the pain he’s endured, and the man he’s become in a series of prose poems that confront the truth – both of his own life and the lives of his people – with unflinching resolve.
“Forever in debt to the last who were sent away / They are still here among us, little and broken” begins the “The Unhappy Daybreak”, the opening poem of The Punishment that describes residential school survivors, and later on, one survivor in particular: Dandurand’s own mother. One of many recurring subjects throughout the work, Dandurand’s mother, portrayed as an “elder” now “respected for her suffering”, helps to establish from the get-go that The Punishment isn’t seeking to preach to its readers from a distant pulpit, but to link what may feel to many like a history-book issue to the life of a living person.
It’s this bridge between larger issues and personal hardships that serves as the defining quality of this collection, and when it comes to Dandurand’s life, the effects of his mother’s trauma on his childhood (“She knew, remembered how to punish / and he learned how to be punished”) is only the beginning. With moments that span from his youth to the present day, Dandurand explores everything from his criminal past (“…we joined hands to be a gang / from the south side, then joined hands / with the crew from the west side / and sold drugs and drank every weekend”), to his time spent in a psych ward (“…I sat in that cold room / with walls painted so white and pure. / I rocked back and forth and / they said the medicine would help), all while, despite having had a legitimately hard upbringing, taking a mature level of responsibility for his actions in more regretful poems like “I am punished…” (for being a liar and a cheat / and a man who cared only for himself”).
What becomes even more interesting is how, rather than simply focusing on the broader issues of residential school trauma and mental health in his life, Dandurand makes room for very specific ruminations on everything from his day-to-day routine (“Vivaldi spins in the back of this room where I come every morn / to write poems so I can pay the bills and feed my kids”) to his past romances (“we laughed at how clumsy we had been / she told me I was her first”), weaving moments of vulnerability together with the commonplace to create an all-encompassing image of his identity in poems like “How to Smoke a Dog Salmon”:
…When they are done I take them down
and put them in bags. I sell some of them, and all the eggs,
but eat most of what I have caught over the long winter.
This is who we are, the Kwantlen,
The tireless people on an island in the river.
This insertion of himself into the traditions of his people – the Kwantlen First Nation located in modern-day British Columbia – represents Dandurand’s commitment not only to discussing the trauma of his ancestors, but to discussing their way of life. Particularly in the collection’s middle section, poems like “Keep It for the Endless Nights” (“They say a sasquatch came here the other day / looking for a child to have for herself…”) and “Perhaps the Only Thing” (“The Scent of fire aims itself upon me / We the people rejoice in our ceremony of the afterlife”) take on a folktale quality, alluding to the nature-centric images and rituals of First Nations myth and religion. While these detours may seem at first like diversions from the collection’s true purpose, they’re in fact essential to understanding its power as an immersive text. Dandurand doesn’t only want to portray himself and his people as victims of trauma, but as people seeking happiness, normalcy, and a connection to their heritage just like anyone else.
Fearless to the very end, The Punishment hardly ends on a happy note, with its final poem “The Cheerfulness of Nothing Else” returning to Dandurand’s ill mother in a heartbreaking cycle that also cleverly reflects the cyclical nature of Indigenous storytelling (“she wept today as I write / the words break the skin / there is no one here for me”). But while this conclusion may leave readers with melancholy, it’s my belief that The Punishment is meant to leave a scar. A scar that, while not at all as severe as the ones Dandurand bears, is a scar that bonds one to his story and to the story of Turtle Island’s original people. All in all, The Punishment is a rewarding, transformative read that uses bluntness, patience, and a commitment to the truth to turn its readers into people of greater empathy and understanding.
Jacob alvarado
is the editorial intern for The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing and a 4th-year student in the Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College. He lives and writes in Orangeville, Ontario.