Thesis Defence: White-Out

Tosh Sherkat, supervised by Matt Rader, will defend their thesis titled “White-Out” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

An abstract for Tosh Sherkat’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.

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Abstract

White-Out is a book of elegiac poems that seek new aesthetic expressions for the ethical demands faced by the inheritors of settler colonialism in Canada. In A History of My Brief Body, Billy Ray Belcourt makes a demand for a poetics that exists “in the register of futurity”, that abolishes the “one who describes, the settler” in order to write from a “less sovereign…less hungry” place (133, 147-148). Adhering to the performance obligations of the elegy, which through lamentation transforms “the powers that want to kill us” (Hass 298), White-Out makes a lyric inquiry into poetry’s capacity for an “inclusive consciousness” (Heaney 8) to create a poetics of solidarity that demand decolonial action. In the writing of White-Out, I drew from my complex of identities, ancestral cultures, experiences as a Persian-Doukhobor settler-of-colour in Canada, and as a beneficiary of settler colonialism to inform my work. In the first chapter of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talking Up To The White Woman, Moreton-Robinson articulates a “protocol for introducing oneself to other Indigenous peoples” that provides “information about one’s cultural location so that connections can be made on political, cultural, and social grounds and relations established” (xv), suggesting, too, that language attuned to solidarity must “speak out of a particular place and a particular history” (Stuart Hall, qtd. in Joanne Saul 24). The poems within White-Out contend with the “uncertain process of cultural recovery” (Hall qtd. in Saul 27) within a relationship to space and time—the white-out—which has produced assimilation and racialization as temporal experiences. The performance of the elegy functions two-fold in White-Out: the first, to bring ancestral stories and experiences of marginalization to the forefront and lament their losses in a way that makes gives shape to the white-out in the present-future moment, destroying whatever imaginings made Canada feel real/possible; and the second, to ‘clear’ the white-out, the cognitive and temporal dissonances that construct the Canadian identity.