Sarah Everett peers into the 'push and pull' between assimilating and retaining one's cultural identity
dying thing is a poem by the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award winner
dying thing is an original poem by Sarah Everett. It is part of Identity, a special series of new, original writing featuring work by the English-language winners of the 2023 Governor General's Literary Awards, presented in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts.
"I was thinking about poetry that deals with my experience being a first-generation Canadian immigrant, what it felt like to arrive in Canada and the push and pull between assimilating and retaining your cultural identity," Everett told CBC Books.
CBC's IDEAS will host an episode featuring participants from this original series.
Everett won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for literature — text for her middle-grade novel The Probability of Everything.
You can read more works from the Identity series here.
dying thing
She is a dying thing
From the moment she's
Born on a Boeing into a chorus of
Anticipation, airborne strangers,
Plastic-wrapped food and overpriced headphones.
A newborn of seven or thirty emerging, teething
On mashed potatoes and gelatinous gravy,
She wraps her tongue around new words she
Holds them like a stranger's pinkie, baby-fisted.
Cheeks chubby with promise
Skin warm and milky
In a few hours she'll be
Dead of a safe landing, customs, welcomes
By then she'll have forgotten
Her mother's voice, thick with trying,
Unforgivable, once it was comfort,
A life inside the warmth
Womb,
Claustrophobia,
three-seated sac
between window and aisle
Embryonic cocoon
between metal appendages.
This making new of all things,
This wreckage of everything old,
Where to live is to die,
Sometimes slowly or all at once.
Sudden, infant,
Immigrate, naturalize,
Christen, rename.
For a world that
Looks like home and
Smells like home, and
Voices reproach
Your teenaged dream
You
Forget who you are.
Who
do you think you are?
The cells that made you and
Hands that knit you,
Let you become.
Thank goodness you've become,
Glorious, free.
Dead wrong in ways she,
Didn't know she existed.
Dead wrong on most days, the
Dearly deported.
Terminal from the trying,
But she's wearing her mother's ghost.
She's choosing to live,
Wrong, right,
Lost,
And found.
Cause of life, connection,
Jaws of death, resurrection
Destined, destination.
In her blemished skin,
liver-spotted lives,
She sets off metal,
Just trying to breathe.
But knowing eyes know she's
Not taking off her kin, next of, skin
Tattooed with new cities,
Passport of forgotten names,
Laid over with this and that,
Lucky to live and die,
Glorious, free.
Landed, here.
Grounded, home.
You were a dying thing,
But you were born a thousand times.
About Sarah Everett
Sarah Everett is an author of several books for teens, currently based in Alberta. She won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for literature — text for The Probability of Everything. Her YA and middle grade books include Some Other Now, How to Live without You and No One Here is Lonely.
About the series Identity
The English-language books that won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Awards in many respects reflect on the idea of changing or shifting identity.
CBC Books asked the 2023 Governor General's Literary Awards winners to reflect further on the theme of identity in original works. The special series explores the complex ways we maintain, construct and subvert who we are and what we represent in the outside world. dying thing was Sarah Everett's contribution to the series.
