On Oct. 3, Simon Fraser University (SFU) will celebrate the 2024 Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence poet Junie Désil with a launch event at its Harbour Centre. The evening will feature a reading by Désil, whose goal is to support writers not just in developing their work but also their literary identities.

“I want people to know that it is possible to write and still be in service to the community,” she says.

Zombies and liminal spaces

Born in Montréal to immigrant parents from Haiti, Désil spent her formative years in Winnipeg before moving back to Montréal at the age of 15. She did not start writing poetry until her studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Frustrated by on-campus racism, she joined a social justice club, Colour Connected, and was asked to write a poem for UBC’s student newspaper, The Ubyssey.

“I ended up writing what felt like a rant piece about what it was like experiencing academic life at UBC and being in this body,” she recalls.

Her debut collection, eat salt | gaze at the ocean, returns to exploring these themes of social justice, race and body. Shortlisted for the 2021 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the collection investigates the state of being undead through representations of water and zombies. The latter of which is drawn from Désil’s understanding of Haitian folklore.

“Haitians understand that when you are made into a zombie, you are no longer under the control of the person who made you into a zombie,” she says.

She first came upon Haitian zombies as a child, reading about them in a newspaper found in her parents’ old suitcase. While completing SFU’s Writer’s Studio program years later, Désil researched zombies, discovering how western culture co-opted them into representations of mass consumption and disease.

“I remember thinking how it’s ironic that even the zombie figure is made to labour for the benefit of our screens and entertainment,” she says. “There’s this constant extraction of [Black people’s] labour, ideas, our very beings for people’s consumption.”

For Désil, this exploitation of Black bodies is more than just theory – it has also formed her lived experience. She highlights the feeling of being both invisible and hyper visible as a Black woman, creating a liminality like the zombie’s state of undead. In response, she points to water as a healing source – another major theme in her debut collection.

For Désil, water is also connected to history, both the personal one of her family’s Caribbean heritage but also the societal history of the transatlantic slave trade. Inspired by Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and her own experience of moving around Canada, Désil’s reflections on identity questions the idea of a rooted home.

“I don’t think I’m attached to having to know where I’m from and who I am,” she says. “I’m more attached to figuring out how I exist in the world in relation to other folks and communities.”

Her second book, Allostatic Load, will continue to explore the theme of race – this time through the lens of ill health. Set for release in April 2025, this collection reflects on her family’s medical history and the work of Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who has written on health in relation to ecology, water, and Indigenous ways of living.

“I look at the cost and burden, sort of the toil on my body, specifically living as a Black woman in this world,” she adds, noting that the collection also looks at ways of restoring through nature.

Désil will be offering public consultations as part of her residency. She hopes that aspiring poets will learn to identify advice that is useful to them and practice self-care when writing painful narratives – skills that she had to learn, both as a poet and a former Downtown Eastside support worker.

“What influences and what underpins my writing all the time, whether that be in the DTES or now working in the corporate DEI world, is that I write because I feel enraged about deep inequality,” she says.

For more information, see: https://events.sfu.ca/event/41403-junie-desil-reading-launch-event