Language Has Memory

Cre(e)ativity and Transformation in Louise Halfe’s Bear Bones and Feathers

Abstract

“The prairie is full of bones. The bones stand and sing and I feel the weight of them as they guide my fingers on this page”: in Bear Bones and Feathers, her first collection of poems, the Cree poet from Alberta (Canada) Louise Halfe attempts to rebuild a dialogue with the Nokhomak bones, that is her cultural memory, through the cre(e)ative transformation of English. Focusing on some of her poems, the paper aims at investigating the indigenization of “the enemy’s language” through Halfe’s Cree worldview, and the invention of a new language, haunted by the poet’s linguistic memory.