Hannus [Paperback]

Can the re-imagining ever pack more wallop than the artefact? Is it possible to write a poem that is as thrilling as the moment of finding your great-grandmother’s journal, seeing the handwriting change over the course of years, flipping through its yellowed pages, of smelling the leathery gluey dust coming off the spine? It’s a question Rachel Lebowitz tries to answer in her first book of poetry.
Hannus is a poetic account of the historical and biographical life and times of Lebowitz’s great-grandmother, Ida Basilia Hannus, a socialist and suffragist, and one of the founding members of the Sointula Finnish commune in British Columbia. The collection tells the story of Hannus’s arrival in Canada, her speculated marriage to one Voitto Peppo (Lebowitz’s great-grandfather), and her subsequent marriage to Juho Wilfred Strom. Lebowitz has scrounged up death notices and articles from the Vancouver Daily Province, includes emails from her mother and old photos, and recalls bits of Finnish songs. The thoroughness and care of her research is impressive.
What Ida Hannus is able to tell us, via Lebowitz’s poetic recreations, is that life in the rural communities of the Gulf Islands in the early 20th century was tough, harder still for the attempts at implementing a socialist ideology, and characteristically complicated for an early feminist. “Marriage is not as harmonious as one would expect,” she confesses in one of several edited and translated journal excerpts. In “The Family Way”, the great-granddaughter poet reprises the inevitable conjugal consequences:

She puked on the side of the road,
Voitto walking ahead. Her hands blotches
of sweat on her dress; dust on her shoes.

The diction is clearly Lebowitz’s, as are the frames within which she vividly describes meals she hasn’t eaten herself, deaths she hasn’t mourned, wildflowers and ramshackle houses she hasn’t seen, songs she hasn’t sung. Lebowitz is obviously aware of this; as she searches backward, the poems call attention to the lack of certainty in the documents and stories she finds. It’s probably also the reason why she doesn’t seem to fully trust her own imaginative and linguistic aptitudes, and is always leaning more heavily on the existing narrative, and especially the gaps therein. In any case, the hands as blotches cited above are striking, as is, elsewhere in this same poem, a description of fatal childhood diseases:

tubercular meningitis, dysentry, scarlatine-
how beautiful they sound
on the tongue. Roses on his skin.

The moments when Lebowitz’s poetry stops us short are often the glossed-over bits of daily life, throwaway lines that are included almost incidentally to the larger project of recreating an ancestor’s life in verse. Lebowitz quotes from, and probably edits, letters from her mother, who refers to her own mother, Ida Hannus’s daughter-in-law, as a horrible cook: “She’d cook the vegetables till they were limp”; later, also from a letter, a description of winter-“Mom used to have to break the ice under the bed with a hammer. I’d wake up to the sound of ice breaking.” The documentary pathos of those limp vegetables, that early-morning shatter of ice, is poignantly unadorned. The simple transcribed comments of an insurance assessor on a 1903 fire that killed eleven members of the Sointula colony are equally stark: “Under an iron bedstead I found a human skull,” Lebowitz quotes,

A woman came hurrying up as I was trying to get the body [. . .] She murmured something about something about not understanding English and then with a wail in her voice that . . . I will never forget . . . said “baby, baby.”

A page later, however, Lebowitz intrudes on the assessor’s spare factuality:

I don’t believe you. Why would she speak English at that moment? Why fumble with another language? There was no need.

[. . . ] I think she said vauva. Vauva! Vauva! she wailed, and pointed into
the steaming ruins.
I think she didn’t speak at all.

Lebowitz puts the Finnish word for baby-and by association the whole language-back in the mouth of this Sointula mother, replacing it a moment later with silence, and then with a body that, faced with the enormity of grief, has become “uncontrollable”, “loose” and “watery”.
Therein lies the hope and hazard of Lebowitz’s attempt at rewriting history. Poetry gets to tag along during her process of remembering, but Lebowitz doesn’t let it do much more than expose the deficiencies of memory. And so, despite the competent reconstruction of Ida Hannus’s story and the public history it spanned (emigration, socialist experiments, the ’30s in Vancouver, World War II), despite the commendable re-embodiment of Ida herself, and despite the successful poetic translation of a particular segment of history into a contemporary voice, readers of Hannus may find themselves on the outside of the story.
One poem in the first section tellingly begins, “I started writing to a woman I’ve never met,” and blurs the first-person voices of two characters “Ida Hannus” and “Rachel Lebowitz”: “You’re like the necklace in your photograph, the one that was drawn in after, absent and seen.” Even an apparent photographic truth is untrustworthy, and suddenly we see a poet / protagonist struggling to believe the story of a life she has traced herself. For a great-granddaughter in search of her roots to lose that faith in biographical accuracy means in some sense to lose herself. If only she had been there during the fire, exposed, or elated at the V-Day celebrations, or torn between exasperation and allegiance to her flaky musician husband!
Hannus fails because it never falls far enough from the family tree displayed on the first page. Lebowitz tries to reconcile the power of omniscient hindsight and the solidarity of genealogy. In other words, she is both seeking and speaking her ancestry. But if the writer is to be a character in her own story, then the demands of motive, consistency and nuance need to be the same as in a completely fictional character. “Underneath ash, there could be anything,” this poem ends, but we see no possibilities until we get to the end of the book, the end of the writing, and the poet apologises to her grandfather-“I’m sorry if I got you wrong. So much goodness mixed up with cruelty.” A more daring mix of both would have lent this collection more dynamism and weight. As it is, Lebowitz keeps herself, and us, at arm’s length, carefully avoiding both risk and redemption.
Katia Grubisic (Books in Canada)

Hannus is a poetic biography of Ida Hannus, a Finnish-Canadian suffragist and socialist living in Vancouver and in the BC Finnish commune Sointula, through the turn of the 20th century to the Cold War. This is Rachel Lebowitz's debut book of poetry.