Message Sticks
Tshissinuatshitakana
Description
This bilingual work (English and Innu-aimun) is an invitation to discourse. Batons message makes reference to a set of reference points that allow nomads to orient themselves inland and to rediscover their voice and their way. Equally sensitive to the relationship, the work is founded on the mutual support, solidarity and sharing, necessary to the survival of the Innu people. The language echoes Nutshimit, the language of the region, chanted by the drum. The history of the First Nations people resonates in their rightful anger and their struggles for dignity, the rights to their territory, and cohabitation. Simple and beautiful, Josphine Bacon’s poetry is an homage to the land, the ancestors, and the Innu-aimon language. This poetic testimony recounts the unpublished areas of history. A cosmogenic vision that plunges us into the intensity of the elders’ words: the voyage of the bearer of dreams and visions, the horizons of the guide women, the courage of the huntsmen, the children, guarantors of the endurance of the voyage and the trees, unfaltering witnesses of the journey.
Reviews
"Joséphine Bacon has written a moving and necessary collection of poems." --Tristan Malavoy-Racine, Voir
"Bâtons à message / Tshissinuatshitakana, Joséphine Bacon's first collection of poetry, is one of those books you want to give to a friend, saying, "Here, drink in this light.'" --Denise Brassard, Inter, art actuel
"It is rare that one reads a poet as refined and precise as Bacon, a poet with an authentic and personal voice who truly has something to say, a message to transmit and share." --Jean-Sébastien Ménard, Terra Nova
"On the brink of catastrophe, the poet always finds the way of beauty." --Jade Bérubé, La Presse