Bearing Witness

Gary Geddes

In 1987, Gary Geddes interviewed victims of Chile’s 1973 coup, championing poetry’s power to name and to heal in “Bearing Witness.” After two decades of testimonies in West Bank and Gaza, sub-Saharan Africa, and at Canada’s TRC hearings, he wrote a companion essay in 2012, “The Blind Witness,” that reconsiders the nature of literary witnessing.

“Drop the ‘e’ in ‘bearing,’” he says, “and you have baring witness, laying bare the limitations and strengths … focusing on telling narratives through which we give imaginative shape to our own history and the history of those who trust and share their experiences with us.”

Bearing Witness

Gary Geddes

$20.00

Arbutus Editions, 2016
48 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-928172-09-3

“What does it mean to be a witness, first- or second-hand? It’s often said that students witnessing a staged assault in a classroom each report the event differently. Some claim to have heard two or more shots when there was only one; most disagree on the appearance, gender, age, hair colour, and clothing of the accused, and especially the words exchanged between the person acting as perpetrator and the intended victim or victims.

Clearly, our senses cannot always be relied upon. Memory is known, at worst, to fail, at best to be unreliable, whole chunks of it vanishing over time, the rest distorted for a variety of reasons, both medical and psychological. If you do remember with a degree of accuracy, what good is that when language itself is an unreliable vehicle, a transforming medium? Putting memories, feelings, or impressions into words is like passing white light through a prism; all is transformed by the very nature of the medium. If the reliability of a witness is questionable, what can be said about the words of someone who has neither seen nor experienced the events in question?

Is the notion of being a witness nothing more than a supporting illusion? I get things wrong—dates, dimensions, participants, degree, tone, and so much else. I have ideological blinkers, biases, and shortcomings that colour or distort what I see and how it will be rendered. I have limited imagination and language skills that add to my inability to grasp or comprehend an event from all sides. Given these shocking confessions, in what sense can I be considered, never mind trusted, as a witness?”

—Gary Geddes
Headshot of Gary Geddes

Gary Geddes has a PhD from the University of Toronto, has taught at Concordia, Western Washington, and Victoria universities as well as the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and has been writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Public Library. He has written and edited more than 45 books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, criticism, translation, and anthologies and won a dozen national and international literary awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize.

Read an interview with Gary Geddes in Portal 2001.

Poetry

Poems (1971)
Rivers Inlet (1972)
Snakeroot (1973)
Letter of the Master of Horse (1973)
War & other measures (1976)
The Acid Test (1980)
The Terracotta Army (1984)
Changes of State (1986)
Hong Kong (1987)
No Easy Exit (1989)
Light of Burning Towers (1990)
Girl by the Water (1994)
The Perfect Cold Warrior (1995)
Active Trading (1996)
Flying Blind (1998)
Skaldance (2004)
Falsework (2007)
Swimming Ginger (2010)
What Does A House Want? (2014)
The Resumption of Play (2016)

Geddes’s non-fiction includes Conrad’s Later Novels (1980), Letters from Managua (1990), Sailing Home (2001), Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things (2005), Out of the Ordinary (2009), Drink the Bitter Root (2010), and Medicine Unbundled (2017).

In addition to the indispensable 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics and four editions of 15 Canadian Poets Times 3, his editorial work includes 70 Canadian Poets (2014), Skookum Wawa (1975), Divided We Stand (1977), The Inner Ear (1983), Chinada: Memoirs of the Gang of Seven (1983), Vancouver: Soul of A City (1986), Compañeros (1990), and The Art of Short Fiction (1992).

He has written one short story collection, The Unsettling of the West (1986), and one drama, Les Maudits Anglais (1984).

“What does it mean to be a witness, first- or second-hand? It’s often said that students witnessing a staged assault in a classroom each report the event differently. Some claim to have heard two or more shots when there was only one; most disagree on the appearance, gender, age, hair colour, and clothing of the accused, and especially the words exchanged between the person acting as perpetrator and the intended victim or victims.

Clearly, our senses cannot always be relied upon. Memory is known, at worst, to fail, at best to be unreliable, whole chunks of it vanishing over time, the rest distorted for a variety of reasons, both medical and psychological. If you do remember with a degree of accuracy, what good is that when language itself is an unreliable vehicle, a transforming medium? Putting memories, feelings, or impressions into words is like passing white light through a prism; all is transformed by the very nature of the medium. If the reliability of a witness is questionable, what can be said about the words of someone who has neither seen nor experienced the events in question?

Is the notion of being a witness nothing more than a supporting illusion? I get things wrong—dates, dimensions, participants, degree, tone, and so much else. I have ideological blinkers, biases, and shortcomings that colour or distort what I see and how it will be rendered. I have limited imagination and language skills that add to my inability to grasp or comprehend an event from all sides. Given these shocking confessions, in what sense can I be considered, never mind trusted, as a witness?”

—Gary Geddes

Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.

Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.

On My Way to Get a Pail of Water
Fred Wah

Bearing Witness
Gary Geddes

On Entering the Echo Chamber of Epic
George Elliott Clarke

Re-Greening the Undermusic
Dennis Lee

From Here to Infinity or So
Don McKay

Songs Without Price
Tom Wayman

A Kind of Perfect Speech
Dionne Brand

Wild Language
Robert Bringhurst