VOICES 2023: Rebecca Salazar, sulphurtongues and Fashion Tips for the Apocalypse
Rebecca Salazar’s sulphurtongue won a slew of awards for her poetry.
Host Triny Finlay identified several main areas of her poetry related to mental health: personal traumas, collective and intergenerational trauma, and ecological traumas.
“I feel like they’re all a continuation of the same thing in some ways,” says Salazar, who lives in Fredericton. Her writing explores those connections. How does your personal trauma relate to the climate crisis? How do personal survivor strategies play out on the collective scale? She said it’s hard work.
“Seeing that up close and showing that to people and presenting it in a way that feels safe is sometimes a weird line to navigate,” she says.
She knows many people are doing the same thing and finds strength in connecting those efforts, and those to the broader climate problems.
“Every kind of violence that we are facing – environmental, gendered, sexual violence, social violences – those are connected by the same ideology of exploitation and extraction. It’s a deeply colonial ideology.”
She draws from Indigenous writers, who have “already faced the end of the world,” and have already developed ways to care for each other and their land even in the face of attempts to destroy both.
She also plays with ideas of femininity in poems like “Fashion Tips for the Apocalypse.”
“I felt like writing was a way to reclaim something about femininity that could be more powerful than what I was given,” she says. “Making it gross, making it funny, making it preposterous was a way of taking some control back from it.”
Salazar grew up in a mix of Latin American and French Canadian culture, all with a heavy Catholic backdrop. “I started by being like, How blasphemous can I be toward my Catholic high school experience?” she says with a laugh.
Finlay noted her use of recurring images of dirt, soil and digging. Haunting is another recurring theme, along with an enduring love of puns.
She’s found that “voicelessness” amplifies trauma, while speaking through poetry and other means can relieve it as you relive it. “Grief kind of turns you into that sort of haunting of your relationships outside of that grief, because you become this unusual half-presence and you’re entirely fixated on someone who is no longer alive.”
Grief creates many hauntings. “Grief and mental illnesses, especially trauma-related mental illnesses, they are like a cry for another world. It’s a refusal of the current world that haunts you.
“Even if you can fake your way through life, work, family, whatever relationships you have, you feel like you’re not actually there. There’s a temporal dislocation to it as well because you’re constantly living – at least in PTSD – it’s like time travelling and you’re living several time lines at once, and you’re not sure what the ‘real’ one is, because they’re all kind of real. You don’t know which one you’re currently physically in because your body is reacting as though you are in all of them.”
She ends the interview reading “Daddy Issues,” a poem that hilariously flips that concept on its head and has the child questioning a homophobic and sexist father about his issues that lead to his weird take on the world.
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