Sarah Everett peers into the 'push and pull' between assimilating and retaining one's cultural identity

dying thing is an original poemby Sarah Everett.It is part ofIdentity, a special series of new, original writing featuring work by theEnglish-language winners of the 2023Governor General's Literary Awards,presented in partnership with theCanada Council for the Arts.

• Calling all writers! The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is now open

"I was thinking about poetry that deals with my experience being a first-generation Canadian immigrant, what it felt like to arrive in Canada and the push and pull between assimilating and retaining your cultural identity," Everett told CBC Books.

CBC'sIDEASwill host an episodefeaturing participants from this original series.

LISTEN | 5 of the 2023Governor General's Literary Award winners explore identityonIDEAS:

Ideas53:595 Canadian Writers on Subverting Identity

Everettwon the 2023Governor General's Literary Award for literature textfor her middle-gradenovelThe Probability of Everything.

You can read more works from the Identity series here.

dying thing

She is a dying thing
From the moment she's
Born on a Boeing into a chorus of
Anticipation, airborne strangers,
Plastic-wrapped food and overpriced headphones.
A newborn of seven or thirty emerging, teething
On mashed potatoes and gelatinous gravy,
She wraps her tongue around new words she
Holds them like a stranger's pinkie, baby-fisted.
Cheeks chubby with promise
Skin warm and milky
In a few hours she'll be
Dead of a safe landing, customs, welcomes
By then she'll have forgotten
Her mother's voice, thick with trying,
Unforgivable, once it was comfort,
A life inside the warmth

Womb,
Claustrophobia,
three-seated sac
between window and aisle
Embryonic cocoon
between metal appendages.
This making new of all things,
This wreckage of everything old,
Where to live is to die,
Sometimes slowly or all at once.
Sudden, infant,
Immigrate, naturalize,
Christen, rename.
For a world that
Looks like home and
Smells like home, and
Voices reproach
Your teenaged dream
You
Forget who you are.
Who
do you think you are?
The cells that made you and
Hands that knit you,
Let you become.
Thank goodness you've become,
Glorious, free.

Dead wrong in ways she,
Didn't know she existed.
Dead wrong on most days, the
Dearly deported.
Terminal from the trying,
But she's wearing her mother's ghost.
She's choosing to live,
Wrong, right,
Lost,
And found.
Cause of life, connection,
Jaws of death, resurrection
Destined, destination.
In her blemished skin,
liver-spotted lives,
She sets off metal,
Just trying to breathe.
But knowing eyes know she's
Not taking off her kin, next of, skin
Tattooed with new cities,
Passport of forgotten names,
Laid over with this and that,
Lucky to live and die,
Glorious, free.
Landed, here.
Grounded, home.
You were a dying thing,
But you were born a thousand times.

About Sarah Everett

Sarah Everett is an author of several books for teens, currently based in Alberta.She won the 2023Governor General's Literary Award for literature textforThe Probability of Everything.Her YA and middle grade books includeSome Other Now, How to Live without YouandNo One Here is Lonely.

About the series Identity

The English-language books that won the2023Governor General's Literary Awardsin many respects reflect on the idea of changing or shifting identity.

CBC Booksasked the2023Governor General's Literary Awards winnersto reflect further on the theme of identityin original works. The special series exploresthe complexways we maintain, construct and subvert who we are and what we represent in the outside world.dying thingwas Sarah Everett's contribution to the series.