The language of “the fringes of urban streetlife” as the language of spiders

Language noun

• a way of expressing ideas and feelings using movements, symbols and sound

  Oxford Dictionaries 

I realised fairly early on in engaging with Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew’s web-based interactive screenplay and multi-media storyboard project, “Isi-pîkiskwêwin-Ayapihkêsîsak (Speaking the Language of Spiders),” that I was not the target audience. As a settler living in a neighbourhood far removed from the realities of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, I do not speak the language of spiders. The nine pieces in the project are told by, for, and about people who are “consigned to the fringes of urban streetlife,” and employ a different language than the scholarly works which I most frequently encounter at UBC to do so. 

This piece brought me back to Lisa Tatonetti’s visit to our FNIS 310 class with Matthew Wildcat, during which she explained the relationship between the associated works Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature and Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature.

As implicated in the titles, they are both collections of works by Two-Spirit authors, but the former is in creative literary format, while the latter contains academic articles. The two books were purposefully co-released because they develop the same body of theory, despite being formulated very differently.

The production of scholarly work requires a certain level of privilege. Tatonetti gave a hypothetical example of someone who has a hectic life full of jobs and children for whom insights come in creative bursts which can sometimes only be jotted down on used dinner napkins. Using the definition of language from the outset of this post, we can consider Sovereign Erotics and Queer Indigenous Studies as using different languages to convey their messages.

As a creative work, the language in “Speaking the Language of Spiders” is closer to that employed in Sovereign Erotics than in Queer Indigenous Studies, but what is the “language of spiders”?  With Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in mind, it can be seen as having two main components. Firstly, there is how the majority of Vancouver residents and visitors see the people in the DTES, which conforms to the metaphor of spiders in many ways: sneaky, unkind, a fear and even a phobia in mainstream consciousness, transient, and, most of all, solitary.  

On the other hand, there is the inherent relationship of spiders to the World Wide Web as natural creators of webs. Consider Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew’s statement about using the internet to host the project:

“The screenplay and storyboard are produced entirely on the World Wide Web in order to construct networks of relationships between the elements at each stage of development as a primary part of the work.”

In this domain, no piece stands alone. Spiders move left and right at the bottom of each artist’s piece, connecting them to the one before and the one after, and the glowing buffalo brings viewers back to the main grid to connect all nine pieces through the nine domains of the Saulteaux cosmological cycle. Here, spiders have a larger purpose, and their web-building work is meaningful and community-forming. 

The content of the pieces is highly personal and complex, eluding straightforward interpretation in its richness with symbols and references which only people with a certain knowledge base will connect with. For example, in our class discussion, several of my classmates discussed images within the piece which allude to the Downtown Eastside, but I had not made these connections when I looked through the site. In speaking directly to a marginalized community, the piece “creatively honour[s] those who have achieved the miracle of survival in the face of inhuman odds, and those who have not,” rather than “add[ing] to sociological theories about these issues.”

In “Isi-pîkiskwêwin-Ayapihkêsîsak (Speaking the Language of Spiders),” the tables are turned on the metaphor of spiders as they become agents in their own representation, using their distinct style of language to assert and build community. On the interface of the World Wide Web, spiders cannot be confined to dark corners.