In the Field - Softcover

Sadiqa De Meijer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1990293999 ISBN 13: 9781990293993

Publisher: Palimpsest Press, 2025

Synopsis

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer’s follow up to the Governor General’s Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

About this title

About the Author

Sadiqa de Meijer is a poet and essayist. Her poetry collections are Leaving Howe Island (2013) and The Outer Wards (2020). Her book alfabet / alphabet (2020) won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. She is currently Poet Laureate of Katarokwi/Kingston.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOUND I lost my notebook. This was, for a few days that summer, my distracted answer when people asked me how I was. It clearly wasn’t a disaster, I wanted to convince myself, but my body seemed to argue; there was a void in my chest, and I couldn’t relax, repeating my searches until they were senseless compulsions. Only some of that discomfort had to do with the possibility of exposure—with someone, anyone, reading my private scribblings. Sure, it was unsettling to imagine eye contact with that individual, to be so inwardly naked, but after those seconds of awkwardness, I would have my notebook back; the universe would resume its semblance of order. First, it was not in the three likeliest places. Not in my pocket, or in the maroon messenger bag, or on my desk. Then it wasn’t in other bags either, or on the table, or in the corner of the living room where books tended to cluster. Not on the shelf by the phone, or the kitchen counter, or my dresser. I searched every notebook-sized vacancy in our home: between the couch and its cushions, between furniture and walls, inside the furnace vents, among the toys. Interrogating the four-year-old, trying to sound unconcerned, Did you play with it? Did you hide it? It wasn’t in the alley between my locked bike and the door. Not on the sidewalks or in the gutters along recent routes of travel. And not in the sand of the playground, or in the grassy parking lot of the farm where I last wrote in it, or in the lost and found of the art gallery where I thought I had felt its weight in my pocket. As I searched the neighbourhood, I found other things: a broken phone, a working mp3 player (mostly Beatles songs), a single children’s shoe, a credit card, a ring, scraps of shopping lists (grapefruit, razors) and study notes (pulmonary physiology). I put up posters with the notebook’s likeness. MISSING, REWARD. As I fastened them to buildings and lamp posts, neighbours and strangers commiserated. They told me of other, worse writerly losses: a car stolen with a hand-written poetry manuscript on the passenger seat, a novel on a computer in a room that flooded. Someone wrote I hope and pray that you find it on the poster in the grocery store. It was a very rainy few days. If the notebook was outside, it was probably soaked. Maybe the ink of my name and phone number had blotted illegibly. Maybe the pages had come loose under the wheels of cars and trucks. Or maybe it was inside the house and remained jammed in an unlikely corner, steps from where I slept. And what was in it? Things I thought or saw or overheard—whatever seemed to matter, even though I couldn’t yet say why. Almost a year’s worth of writing, from minute cursive paragraphs to large, hurried scrawls. There were notes from lectures and other events—the idea of a reader feeling comfortable rather than spellbound within a work, a series of viewer responses to a friend’s paintings. A sight I walked past with my daughter one day; a man in a hard hat emerged from a house and started vomiting on the front lawn and between each heave took one long drag from his cigarette. Something I overheard while at that farm, where we were picking strawberries: a jolly, elderly woman saying, I’m covered in bug juice, the good stuff with lots of DEET! I liked the words bug juice. I thought it was odd to praise DEET and organic berries in almost the same breath. Serial attempts at describing the sound of pigeons cooing. Names of movies to see and books to read. How I felt in the hour before reuniting with a favourite teacher after almost two decades. The sight of a woman walking with an ornate wooden crucifix on her shoulder, pausing to wink at me. The unliterary, too: a recipe for yogurt, shopping lists, private intentions and admonitions, phone numbers, tasks. And small drawings done for or by my daughter— granting her my notebook usually gave me a few minutes of quiet. The progression in her forms over that year; from waving lines to rudimentary faces. My records of short conversations with her, the peculiar or endearing or funny statements I wanted to remember. I was doing the work of looking after her, along with part-time jobs that paid. I wasn’t sleeping enough or reading enough, and often it felt impossible to have an uninterrupted thought. I don’t mean to overstate the difficulty; I could have written, I suppose, or someone in my circumstances could have written—but I didn’t. Those years held bright and profound experiences, and they also made me feel that I might prove to be a writer only in my mind. My notebook, then, was the small but reliable dwelling where my potential self could live. When I was a teenager, my mother found a poster on the curb on garbage day, and gave it to me. An image mounted on foam board. I live with it still. The board comes to my waist, but before I went upstairs to take its measure, I wrote that it reaches my chest; my mind instilling the dimension of meaning. The poster advertises a long gone exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam titled Millet & Van Gogh. The text and background are an electric red and blue and leave a vivid retinal imprint. Within them the deep vista and muted tones of Millet’s well-known painting, The Gleaners. We had been in Canada for a certain period. Not long enough for either of my parents to have secure employment, but long enough to feel a diminishing of the relationships with everyone we had left behind. A phase of shifting our weight, leaning more heavily on the new map. I was close to leaving home. I wanted to study art, and my father was violently against it. We fought until I gave in. The neighbourhood south of the Rijksmuseum is where I was born, on a short street named for Millet. The poster, when my mother found it, was a beacon that lay both far behind and out in front of me. The women in the painting glean; they gather what the harvesters have missed. One has lifted the bottom of her apron and tied its corners to make a pocket. Each woman holds a small bundle of grain, which won’t be enough to sell, but is for their private use. In The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda follows contemporary French gleaners, who still pick the potatoes and grapes and apples left after the harvests, and urban gleaners who gather food and other items from dumpsters or on the grounds of farmer’s markets. Near the film’s end, Varda acknowledges the metaphoric gleaning she does with her camera, picking images from the field of visual possibilities. Watching that documentary in the summer of the missing notebook, I saw that what I'd lost was a gleanings container. Later, in the wake of the film, the metaphor settled in deeper. Leaving home, when home is a place that hurts, leads to the slow and strange revelation that the outside world is friendlier than the family that made you. It took me a long time, through many rooms and apartments, to trust that most days of my life would pass without disparagements or threats. I was gleaning not only as an aspiring writer, but also as a mother. Every day, feeling my own childhood pass through me almost too viscerally, I had to find what was worth saving from the stubbled field. To glean from farms or garbage is a method of survival. Gleaning from life might be as consequential; here are the grains I choose to take and plant again. I started a new notebook. My notes on Varda’s film are in it. Tasks from a meeting of the parent committee at school. A short list of plants that grow in the trampled parts of the park: plantain, dandelion, clover. A friend's phrase: I'm moonlighting as a trauma surgeon. A list of subversive answers to the question where are you from? E-mail addresses and phone numbers, some without any context I can recall. The words CLOSE THIRD PERSON! taking up a whole page. A stern note to read Darwin. The dimensions of our front window. Lists of slant rhymes: panic/tonic, detector/doctored, elder/alder. Occasionally, I remember something I’ve written down—the vague return of a thought or idea with promise in it—and flip through the pages. When I realize this material is in the old, lost notebook, there’s a small ache, and a flaring of maybe, maybe it will still return to me. My daughter is at the stage now of pretending to write. I give her my new notebook, flatten it open. Her attempts at script consist of strings of loops, like a stretched old-fashioned telephone cord. She concentrates, her brow furrowed, and then beams over the results. So the first writing is recursive; momentarily, it tricks the endless forward line and circles back, hovers protectively over the present, then makes a loop that can hold it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palimpsest Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1990293999
• ISBN 13: 9781990293993
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250