Issues of Colonialism in Dennis Lee's “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space”

Abstract

<p>In “Cadence, Country, and Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,” Dennis Lee finds that “for an English Canadian, exploring<br />the obstructions to cadence means exploring the nature of colonial space.” His statement, “the prime fact about my country<br />is that it has become an American client state”, speaks volumes on cultural colonization in Canada. Lee finds that,<br />“Canadian media is over flown with “Yankee program”, and the schoolchildren learn that, “Abraham Lincoln was their<br />country's greatest President”, and thus suggests that the artifacts of popular culture in Canada are imported from America.<br />Surprisingly he finds that, “Canadian achievement in any field, especially those of the imagination, was a direct reflection<br />of our sense of inferiority.” Dennis Lee candidly puts forward the pervading irony in elite media and finds himself<br />astonished at two findings, “the first that the American government had been lying about the war on a colossal scale, and<br />the second that the Canadian media, from which he had learnt most of the facts about Vietnam were spreading its lies.”<br />In this context how to write something of our own is the question, and for answering to it, Dennis Lee finds the process of<br />making a poem which “enacts in words the presence of what we live among. It arises from the tough, delicate,<br />heartbreaking rooting of what is in its own nonbeing. From that rooting, there arise elemental movements of being: of<br />hunger, of play, of rage, of celebration, of dying .Such movements are always particular, speaking the things which are. A<br />poem enacts those living movements in words.”<br />The present paper is a discussion on writing something of our own under different pressures in current cyber space of<br />liquid nationality, with reference to the ideas of Dennis Lee as discussed in “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in<br />Colonial Space.”</p>