Chantal Gibson is an artist-educator living in Vancouver with ancestral roots in Nova Scotia. Her visual art collection Historical In(ter)ventions, a series of altered history book sculptures, dismantles text to highlight language as a colonial mechanism of oppression. How She Read is another altered book, a genre-blurring extension of her artistic practice. Sculpting black text against a white page, her poems forge new spaces that challenge historic representations of Black womanhood and Otherness in the Canadian cultural imagination. How She Read is Gibson’s debut book of poetry. An award-winning teacher, she teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Judges’ Citation
Chantal Gibson invites scrutiny of where language maps, or fails to map, the quiddity of the world.
Chantal Gibson invites scrutiny of where language maps, or fails to map, the quiddity of the world. Here the English language carries and transmits the burden of its service to the imperial ‘adventure’, in schoolbooks, in literature, in historical artifacts and through image and portraiture in paint and photograph. Her interanimation of the visual and the verbal energises a private mark-making, a resistance poetry to the coded, at times subliminal, oppressions of history. To detox the soul then, to be free and creative as citizens, we deserve to read each mark with schooled attention. And trust in our own mark making, our right to speak it the way we see it. This is a fabulous primer, ludic and ferocious, in the grand tradition of liberation handbooks.
Selected poems
by Chantal Gibson
Oh, how she read this. Girl
beloved daughter of daughters
blood, kin, and kind
sagacious grammarian
post-fly phoneticist
every syllable she say be sapphires
Oh, how she read that Girl
beloved daughter of daughters
blood, kin, and kind
sassy semiotician
post-def decoder
every book she crack parts oceans,
sends waves rushing back to their shores
every page she turn sets free a caged bird,
whose wings are spread and ready for flight
Oh, how she read, this Girl
beloved daughter of daughters
blood, kin, and kind,
post-dope dissenter
mos-bomb seditionist
every word she speak be a teeth-sucking act of resistance
every word she write be a battle cry
every tap of her pen be the beat of an ancestor’s drum
From How She Read by Chantal Gibson
Copyright © 2019 Chantal Gibson
from How She Read
From How She Read by Chantal Gibson
Copyright © 2019 Chantal Gibson
reciprocal pronouns
- Chantal Gibson Official Website
- Chantal Gibson Profile Simon Fraser University
- How She Read: Confronting the Romance of Empire
- Article Times Colonist