In the follow-up to her BC Book Prize-winning book of poetry, Prison
Industrial Complex Explodes, Mercedes Eng continues her poetic
investigation of racism and colonialism in Canada, weaponizing the
language of the nation-state against itself in the service of social
justice. my yt mama is a collection of poems that considers historic
and contemporary colonial violence in the Canadian prairies, a settler
geography and state of mind that irrevocably shaped Eng's understanding
of race as person of colour born and raised in Treaty 7 Territory in
Medicine Hat, Alberta.
These poems document an education in white supremacist ideology that
began in infancy and occurred everywhere: at home where the author lived
with her white mother, 1261 kilometres away from her Chinese migrant
father's family; in public institutions such as the school, the library,
and the museum that erase Indigenous peoples' histories while producing
the myth of the "vanishing Indians;" and in the media and entertainment
in which white supremacist beauty standards are constructed and
reinforced. Keenly attuned to the language of those in power, Eng
exposes the violence of the English language in the colonial project,
taking on the words of Canadian politician F. W. Gershaw's history of
the city of Medicine Hat as occasioned by Canada's Centennial, to derail
the superficially neutral language of yt history that mythologizes
nation and city while simultaneously deriding Indigenous ways of being
(ontology) and ways of knowing (epistemology) as "legends" or "myths."
Like the author herself, my yt mama is hybrid: part memoir, part
history, part discourse analysis, part love letter to her mother.
