Sacred Mire and the Cutting Edge of Anti-: Tawahum Bige’s _Cut to Fortress_

In the opening poem “Origin” from their debut poetry collection, Cut to Fortress, indigenous activist poet Tawahum Bige asks “Where is the green inside me?” They realize they cannot go back to their sacred connection with earth due to “eroding landfill / lifestyles.” They instead desire “sacred mire, to spread throughout / the insides of my body.” By the end, the lines break off and create the empty space for them to do so:

Purge cover
of any manufactured divine.

We are all dirty here.

So, breathe.

By conflating the profane with the sacred, Bige challenges traditional colonial divisions between the holy and unholy. This subversion reflects a larger tension that runs throughout the collection: the struggle between colonized and colonizer who impose and contaminate. Bige, joining the tradition of protest poetry—from Rukeyser to Joy Harjo to Claudia Rankine—fully commits to their activist drive through a poetic voice that neither preaches as a dogmatist nor speaks as an “us” nor distances as an observer. Rather, in this worthwhile book, Bige as an in-your-face activist-poet resists the colonizer through a poetry they themselves appropriate and transform mainly via language play and voice into an indigenous poetry of personal redemption.

From the beginning, there’s…