By Effie Mihelakis 
[Dossier: Write Here, Write Now, Anglo Montreal Writings: Spirale No. 210, September-October 2006]

In the House of the Sun
By Sonja A. Skarstedt
Empyreal Press, 100 pages

(This review translated by SAS)

Multidisciplinary artist – poet, writer and illustrator – of Montreal origin, Sonja A. Skarstedt founded Empyreal Press in 1990. There, she published her first poetry collection entitled Mythographies. Over the years there followed A Demolition Symphony (1995), Beautiful Chaos (2000), and Saint Francis of Esplanade (2001). In her poetic work, In the House of the Sun, which appeared in 2005, Skarstedt takes on two definitions that explain the origin of the name “Hawaii”: one is an adaptation of Hawaiki, mythical birthplace of the Polynesians, the other, a variation on the name given to the South Pacific island, Raiatea, renamed Havai at the time of the migratory influx. It thus seems that this archipelago shares two “crossbreeding” identities: myth and history. The question of this nominative division takes shape from the union of historical and mythical elements.  

On one hand, the poem opens with factual information often accompanied by dates and places: “On March 12th, 1959 Honolulu’s dancing/ in the streets and Sand Island’s bonfire” or “Your breath cool as silt carried in/ by a 1957 tsunami”. On the other hand, it is a mythical world that deploys the poem: “Still you are determined to find/ the fish-stealing akua/ that not even Maniniholo/ chief of fishermen was able to catch/ and so he dug this grotto fit for a god”, a world where beings embody the forces of nature beneath their symbolic forms.  

From the historical to the mythical, everything passes as if Skarstedt is gliding on the poem’s impetus, succeeding in a tour de force: to rally a misunderstood Polynesian past from within a contemporary historical framework. From “Sea Urchin King” to the 1957 tsunami, in passing through an entire oceanic mythography, this collection enjoins the reader to think in a tempo similar to that of the Polynesian gods and of this archipelago’s singular history.  

Thus, the mythical past is grafted to the actual past in order to seal the breach that institutes a certain historiography. Skarstedt delivers a double testimony that takes root both in the immediacy of the traveling poet’s experience and within the vestiges of a distant past. And this testimony could not take place without foreign words, those of the Other that are scattered throughout the entire collection. 

Foreign Words 

If Skarstedt paints a mytho-historical portrait of Hawaii, she calls equally on the words and their inhabitants. Is this an exotic effect with which to seduce the reader or linguistic respect for the language of the native? One does not venture without the other. It is certainly true that In the House of the Sun unveils much of a world far removed from the West. The nomenclature that elucidates the linguistic specificity of Polynesians could easily divert the reader’s interest through prevention of understanding the poem in its totality.  

Nevertheless, Skarstedt, through her insistence on seeking the exact word, her requirement that the language of otherness bring her close to the most accurate idiom, to that certain untranslatable element which her own native language cannot unveil. More than some simple concern for precision, these borrowings reveal to us something of a tribute, the commemoration of an oral language that would seek to live on, first through the words and next through the recollections of us, the readers. The latter will find, moreover, at the end of this poetry collection, a glossary of those Aboriginal words of which the poet makes use. In consulting it, foreign words become familiar, and become once again a means via which to draw closer to the experience of distance through the familiar.  

One question remains all the same, once the reading is done: how to (re-) read this collection in light of the consulted glossary? Sonja Skarstedt obliges her readers to find their own personal significance within the native word, before permitting them to become acquainted with the true meaning via the glossary. Thus, the translation is made a posteriori* and the glossary erected like a sort of appendix to the collection which makes it possible for the reader to (re) discover the text. It is as if the estrangement provoked by the exotic lexicon promises to bridge the gap in and of itself. 

Once in play, this process is gracefully set in place with the utilization of the pronoun “you” which creates an effect of distance between the text and the poet. This pronoun in effect becomes an invitation to the reader to participate in the events of the poem. It is remarkable to note that Hawaii, a priori* a strange and distant place for a Montreal reader, manages to be transformed into an accessible and familiar place. Indeed, once I had read the poems, I saw myself dancing in the streets of Sand Island; promenading along the numerous beaches “where memories writhe/ dense as calcite drippings”. 

From myth to history, from foreign words to the linguistically familiar, In the House of the Sun draws an ambiguous portrait of Hawaii. In linking up the mythical past to a contemporary historical framework, the distant, often unidentifiable past erupts into the more familiar present. Skarstedt thus succeeds in bringing two solitudes closer together without confusing them.

*used to distinguish two types of propositional knowledge

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