Thesis Defence: Early Morning, Leaving Kagami

Jesse Norman, supervised by Professor Matt Rader, will defend their thesis titled “Early Morning, Leaving Kagami” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

An abstract for Jesse Norman’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.

Abstract

Early Morning, Leaving Kagami is a book of lyric poems that tells two narratives. One follows a settler-Canadian man who, in an attempt to know himself more deeply, moves to Japan to teach English as a foreign language. The other follows Sarah, a radically reimagined character from the biblical text of Tobit, who engages in a violent liberatory quest to escape her oppressive circumstances. The poems ask how a tourist operating within, and privileged by, the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in which he was socialized can learn to see through, beyond, and in between the hegemonic systems that encultured how he is in relation to place, others, and poetry.

Through this investigative lyric process, the self-discovery trope popular in contemporary travel-tourism is identified as bound up in colonial ways of knowing and Christian proselytizing. While Early Morning, Leaving Kagami seeks to highlight the intersections between these hegemonic power structures that have influenced the speaker, it aims, too, to implicate the reader in his actions to trigger an awareness of and an alteration in perspective in the reader. Such an implication may prompt the reader to observe how their ways of being are reflected in the poems, and thereby ask how they may be in better, more right relation to place and others as well.

Early Morning, Leaving Kagami uses the travelogue genre to richly depict the places the traveller visits and resides in throughout his stay in Japan while passing his voyueristic gaze through a post-colonial lens. Other forms such as the prose poem, the sonnet, and collage are also utilized to invite readers to experience the travelogue in numerous modes, such as a non-linear traverse, to further counter the traditionally colonial nature of the genre.

In their ideal intent, the poems look to shock and subvert the readership’s held expectations of what travel and the other should offer, and, in the absence of these expectations, they offer a toolkit to interrogate one’s relationships.