By David Bateman
Pieces of My Self
by Keith Garebian
Guernica Editions (2023)
From the mauve velvet of his mother’s most stylish evening gown, to the sights and sounds of bearing visual and aural witness to “the kitchen slaughter of poultry and wild fowl” in his family home in Bombay, Keith Garebian’s autobiography Pieces of My Self attests to a deeply detailed memory. From the powerfully personal father/son dynamics in Children of Ararat to the maternal and marital gender/sex queer machinations of Finger to Finger – the prose glows with the depth and richness of imagery and lush wordplay that the poet always displays in his work.
As quickly and concisely as he delineates a party scene in Bombay among a “gentle grotesque” professional wrestler, and a male film star’s maddeningly mock solo-sexual tableaux bolstered by “booze-sodden voyeurs,” he turns to a dream-like recollection.
“The topology has dissolved in large part from my memory, though I possess a dreaming memory of some of the lay of the land. Malabar Hill suspended in rock and bower, manicured lawns, trellises, sculptured hanging gardens with hedges carefully shaped into animal forms, white villas with riotous bougainvillea, hibiscus, jasmine, and mulberry.”
Insights, images, and analyses are sharply crafted and powerfully expressed. Attention to detail takes the reader to the core of the very places and personalities recalled. Frequent brushes with great celebrity figures in the theatre and literary world reveal Garebian’s fascination, admiration and fondness for a global community of artist/colleagues that share his diverse creative passions. Letters to Garebian from various luminaries (Irving Layton, V.S. Naipaul, Hal Prince, William Hutt, etc.) make for a fascinating engagement with other artists.
From a sense of both being and not being an exile, the writer/poet eloquently summarizes with an essential paradox informing a lifetime of rigorous self/examination.
“Paradoxically, I am not an exile in another sense; I can write no matter where I am, even while I dream. Books are my true homeland, even as they sit on my shelves or in my memory.”
Garebian’s professional and personal lives mesh and entangle as the product of a consummate artist remembering the details of his past. Experiences as profoundly affecting as being the son of a genocide survivor tragically enrich the pages of a book representing a vigorous life, well lived through a great attention to historical, cultural, and emotional nuance.
Garebian’s marriages, and life as a gay man, although noticeably absent, are cited in a chapter that directs the reader to Finger to Finger, his 2022 collection from Frontenac House (Calgary). Always the poet directing his reader to other voices, other rooms, he intertextualizes within his own work as he cites one of his most personal and revealing works – moving the idea of exile toward a gender/sex milieu that is not elaborated upon in Pieces of My Self.
Ending with an excerpt from his collection Against Forgetting (Frontenac House, Calgary, 2019), Garebian leaves us with the grace and poetic wisdom of an artist in touch with the beauty and the glory of words well wrought as they explore past present and future:
“Need pushes my mind over words,
standing apart, singing in my chains,
wounded by what I have seen
This self-portrait is a reflection
once removed. Words the glass,
unglazed, adhering to the face,
soul trying to break through…All is metaphor,
all is winding, leading to further windings,
all is changing slightly, profoundly.The past is here.”
David Bateman is a performance poet and arts journalist based in Toronto. He has four collections of poetry from Frontenac House (Calgary), a collection of short stories and creative non fiction from Hidden Brook Press (Brighton), and a novel (DR SAD) from University of Calgary Press. His reviews have been published in Canadian Theatre Review, the Gay & Lesbian Review, and ARC Poetry Magazine.