The Poetry of Why: poet Chimwemwe Undi on a lifetime of questions in verse

Ideas53:59The Poetry of Why: Chimwemwe Undi

Chimwemwe (Chim) Undi was born in Winnipeg, but as a toddler, her parents moved to Zambia and then Namibia. The family returned to make Winnipeg their permanent home when Chim was 13.

Moving between worlds, both in literal and figurative senses, ruptured the simple idea of where she really belonged. That rupture led to a penchant for observation, and to a lifetime of questions she now expresses in poetry.

"I was taken out of one environment and put into an entirely different one, into an entirely different context," said Undi.

It was a rupture that "made me very interested in how people worked and what kind of invisible rules we live by."

Winnipeg's third poet laureate is also a practicing lawyer. She writes about the city she calls home, as well as everything from gender, racism to language, immigration and belonging.

One example is "Comprehensive Ranking System," included in her soon to be published first collection of poetry titled Scientific Marvel. The poem, shown below, speaks of several themes not only in the words contained within it, but even in its structure it's really two poems in one.

In an interview withIDEAS host Nahlah Ayed, Chim explains.

"The comprehensive ranking system is this system that gives immigrants in a certain stream points and you get enough points and then you are put into a lottery and then you can come into Canada if you're selected. So that's how my family came back to Canada we were put through this ranking system, checked off these boxes and were deemed good enough immigrants to come into Canada and then were brought here.

And the poem is split in half so that you can read it down on both sides and then across on both sides. And so I was interested in rupture in that way, and how language, which is a medium that inherently evolved in order to connect people can also disrupt lines of ancestry. In that I can't speak to my grandmother, except for in the language that she forcibly learned in school and associates only with learning in the classroom. And it's the language that I spend my entire life in. That's such a difference in life and in world view.

In this poem I am thinking about English, which is the only language that I speak fluently, which was a conscious choice by my parents in setting us up for opportunities in the world. They had a fear that allowing another language into us would corrupt the English that we spoke and would therefore hold us back from being able to do other things.

Nahlah: How do you feel about that decision?

Oh, I feel so sad. I would love to fluently be able to speak the language that my parents, the languages that my parents speak and that my grandparents and their grandparents spoke. In fact, my parents both speak multiple languages and are both perfectly fluent in English. So, you know, that tells you something about the story that they were told about the English that they spoke.

I studied linguistics. And so I'm really interested in the relationship between language and power generally and about English as a thing that can be plural and that there are many varieties of English that are all legitimate and are spoken all over the world. But they [parents] understood something that I don't think they made up, about the kind of lives that me and my sisters would live, If we spoke other languages and if we spoke just English.

Are there limits that you feel with the language? Even though it is your only language, does it still feel limiting in some ways.

Yes, absolutely. I write poetry and I spend all day interpreting language as a lawyer, and studied its structure in linguistics. I'm really pressing against the edges of the language as hard as I can, trying to get as much of it as I can. But I still know that there are things that I can't do.

Listen to the full episode by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.

*Q&A have been edited for length and clarity. This episode was produced by Nahlah Ayed.