The Big Melt by Emily Riddle

The Big Melt

by Emily Riddle

Harbour Publishing, 2022; 88 pages; $19.95

Reviewed by Marion Benkaiouche

Emily Riddle’s collection is an assortment of poems on the personal and the political, much of it about Riddle’s life in Edmonton and Vancouver. The Cree notation is beautiful, and greatly enriches the text. I read each poem slowly, multiple times as I flipped between the Cree dictionary on my computer and pages in my hand.

There is a strong sense of autoethnography; the bilingual recollection and exploration of family memories are highly original, and a pleasure to read. In this way, Riddle contributes significantly to the literary community.
While the personal and autoethnographic aspects are strong — I found that the polemics weakened the text.

To articulate my point is an excerpt from “Revitalize Me”:

        i would define violence as a
    transgression of natural law. I would define
     whiteness as the annihilation of
    natural law from one’s collective being.

As many students of political theory will know, the concept of “natural law” was one of the main justifications used for the American colonial enterprise. The ideas of Natural Law undergird the doctrine of Discovery and the concept of Just War.

The second sentence (“whiteness as the annihilation of natural law from one’s collective being”) therefore makes no sense. Additionally, there is also no definition of “whiteness” which further cements the polemical tone.

What is white? If white people are colonists (Francisco da Vitoria, Lord Stanley…?), they utilized the levers of natural law.

I went back to one of my undergraduate texts — of Francisco da Vitoria’s De Indio. I felt that revisiting that work would help me more fairly address my critiques of Riddle’s work.

In De Indio, da Vitoria makes the argument that the Indigenous people of North America seem to have similar practices and modes of living to Europeans. These similarities, he argues, are more or less in accordance with natural law. The proof of this, Vitoria says, is that the “barbarians” are not

… madmen, but have judgment like other men. This is self-evident because they have some order (ordo) in their affairs: they have properly organized cities, proper marriages, magistrates and overlords (domini), laws, industries, and commerce, all of which require the use of reason. They likewise have a form (species) of religion, and they correctly apprehend things which are evident to other men, which indicates the use of reason.

But they are not perfectly in accordance: but in accordance enough that the “Indians” believe in natural law. Wars over dominion, then, and jurisdiction, are justified when the parties have corresponding values of natural law.

This is the argument the colonizers make — and it is in clear disjunction with Riddle’s intended message. They also say that clearly, the Indigenous people “possessed true dominion, both in public and private affairs.” Transgressions of natural law therefore justify wars of dominion.

I am not suggesting Riddle needed to become intimately familiar with the Salamanca school before writing a poem. But how much more interesting would this collection be if it went a little deeper, was a little heftier? or how much more powerful if Riddle kept the words spare, did not attempt to join the internet zeitgeist.

De Indio is evidence that colonizers will always find arguments to justify their actions: because words can be manipulated. Because of this it is imperative the decolonial artists and scholars familiarize themselves with post-colonial and decolonial literature and treat their work rigorously.

Art has the potential to transcend mundane, quotidian arguments; it has the potential to take the Reader to a new place of understanding. Ultimately, while funny and easy-reading, The Big Melt seems aimed at a Twitter audience: one who will take snippets of poems, maybe overlaid overtop of an image, and dispense them into the ether.