Politics, Poetics, Protest

Rita Wong and the Practice of Solidarity

Abstract

In August 2018, the poet and activist Rita Wong was arrested for her involvement with the TMX pipeline protests in British Columbia. Her arrest was followed by a landmark display of settler-colonial, state-sanctioned oppression through her legal case and an unprecedented demonstration of poetic solidarity by the Canadian literary community. In this essay, Payal Nagpal and Kit Dobson examine the literary production that emerged from Wong’s sentencing—work both produced by her and written in response to her—through the lens of Joan Retallack’s notion of poethics as aesthetic praxis. The authors situate Wong’s legal case and the work that emerged from it within the larger context of her literary career, arguing that Wong’s poetry and political activism intersect to form an oeuvre that embodies solidarity with human and non-human life on Turtle Island.