5 Things Calgary Poet and Scholar Bertrand Bickersteth Loves

A proud alum of the former Olds High School who married his high-school sweetheart, Bertrand Bickersteth is a poet, playwright, essayist and scholar of Alberta Black history. These days, he lives in Calgary and teaches communications at Olds College. Recently, he also served as writer-in-residence at Athabasca University. In short, he’s a deeply entrenched Albertan.

Still, Bickersteth, whose family emigrated to Edmonton from Sierra Leone when he was an infant, is regularly asked where he’s really from.

“People aren’t always satisfied with my answer when I say, ‘I’m from here,’” says Bickersteth. “I got asked that question so often growing up that I felt I couldn’t be Albertan.”

Though he felt alienated, he used that feeling of not belonging to seek connection to his home province through the lens of Black identity. The rich history he discovered of Black Albertan fur traders, pioneers, homesteaders and cowboys roots him and informs his formidable creative work. Bickersteth’s multiple-award-winning poetry collection, The Response of Weeds, explores the question of what it means to be both Black and from the Prairies. In 2020, he also had a role in acclaimed author Cheryl Foggo’s documentary, John Ware Reclaimed, about Alberta’s legendary cowboy.

Lately, Bickersteth has tasked himself with bringing forgotten Black cowboys into the digital present by creating visual poetry and a unique typeface, or font, using the symbols from their cattle brands.

“Branding marks are a form of expression, a language,” he says. So far, Bickersteth has uncovered at least eight brands registered by early Black Alberta cowboys. Many untold stories remain in the province’s Black history; who better to tell them than one of our own literary mavericks?

Bertrand Bickersteth’s High Five

These five things, reflecting intersections between history and race, move and shake this poet and educator.

“The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks is a brilliant anthology of the history of Black cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin. I enjoy cooking, but I am also very much a person who reads cookbooks more than one who cooks from them. This one ticks all the boxes for me and, most importantly, is a moving example of how Black history can be carefully sieved from the ephemera of what’s been ignored in the past.”

“The poet Langston Hughes is a massive influence on me, and I regularly go back to his poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ I love its reconfiguring of landscape into historical perspectives. I also love that Hughes was a founding contributor to the Harlem Renaissance — the Black literary and arts movement of the 1920s and ’30s — and that, like me, he was a prairie boy, born in Missouri, raised in Kansas.”

“The song ‘Hipnosis’ by Archie Shepp from his 1975 album, A Sea of Faces. It’s avant-garde jazz, so not for everyone. For me, though, Shepp is intentionally trying to give voice to the unvoiced growing pains of Black America. When you listen to it with that perspective, it’s nothing short of spine-chilling. I seek to inspire at that level in my own work.”

“I inherited my piano from my wife’s family, who only managed to get one of their six kids to make it through enough lessons to play. It’s a very plain upright with no brand name anywhere. It has so many problems and, I won’t lie, has become something of a landing spot for household ‘things without a home.’ I had planned to fix it as a [COVID-19] pandemic project, but, ahem, haven’t managed to get to it yet. Still, I love it and squeeze whatever music I can out of it.”

“Grass. It defines us here. We live in grasslands. Historically, the cattle industry grew out of the growing patterns of grasses. Is there anything more Albertan than wheat and cattle? Many successful grasses that grow on this continent originate from Africa, haphazardly brought over on slave ships as bedding, as seeds that were collected or on the bodies of Africans. Some of these grasses, like Bermudagrass and Kikuyu, are today used on golf courses. There you have it: grass.”

The post 5 Things Calgary Poet and Scholar Bertrand Bickersteth Loves appeared first on Avenue Calgary.