In the Field by Sadiqa de Meijer

I thought I’d probably like poet and essayist Sadiqa de Meijer’s new collection of essays, In the Field, because I loved her Governor General’s Award-winning book, alfabet/alphabet: a memoir of a first language, an abecedarian collection of essays about de Meijer’s relationships with her first language, Dutch, and her second, English. What I wasn’t expecting about In the Field was just how much I love it. It is a remarkable book: thoughtful, nuanced, beautifully written, and thoroughly researched. I wouldn’t be surprised if In the Field collects more awards for its author. It deserves to.

Along with stories from de Meijer’s life and descriptions of places where she’s lived, alphabet/alphabet included short essays related to language and translation: a list of the ways friends have described the sounds of Dutch; a phonetic rendering of the Dutch alphabet, with explanatory notes; a discussion of a translation of a poem by the twentieth-century Dutch writer Ida Gerhardt; a reflection on what it means to be someone without a single first language, like her father; and a comparison of three English translations of Martinus Nijhoff’s 1934 long poem, Awater. In the Field is different. It’s more of a reflection on its author’s life, although it does include a stand-out essay on the Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. The essays consider life-changing events, like de Meijer’s decision to leave a residency in family medicine to focus on her writing, as well as smaller ones, like losing a notebook, something any writer has likely experienced. The book’s title essay, one of my favourites, recollects a summer spent working for a research project that was studying a pond in southwestern Ontario. Its conclusion thinks about the gap between Western scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledges; de Meijer acknowledges the limitations of the former and the ethical and practical difficulties of pursuing the latter in a lovely, three-sentence paragraph:

When I was sitting on a boulder and watching the pond’s world roll at my feet, still forming only a limited awareness of what it possessed in shapes, contingencies, bonds, conversations, spirits, threats, resemblances, seductions, and nourishments, I could feel myself pressing against a cloud of ignorance: not only a lack of knowledge but a lack of the means to know. In the decades since then, I have been fortunate to start perceiving nature differently, through listening to local Indigenous people’s conceptions of land and plants and animals, and spending more time in the woods simply waiting. The fog of not knowing has shrunk around its edges, but the bulk of it remains, because it isn’t possible or ethical for me to make Indigenous cultural and linguistic perspectives my own.

I love the heterogeneity of the catalogue presented in that paragraph’s long, supple first sentence, the suggestion that “simply waiting” in the woods is a way to understand the world differently, and the careful ethic that accepts limitations on her desire to know despite her frustration with her “fog of not knowing.” So much thought and feeling is rendered in these three sentences.

It wasn’t just what de Meijer writes about that held my attention, though. It was also how she writes. Take this description of her early childhood in Amsterdam:

Places teach you how to move. You start out clumsy, flailing in eager repetitions, until the willed action occurs. Crawling on linoleum floors, over the raised thresholds between rooms. A small, groping hand finding that the radiator is hot. Amsterdam means being lifted onto the front of your mother’s bicycle, grinning into the weather, the city flooding your rudderless, permeable, epiphanic attention and tuning your senses. That street with the rhythm of tree trunks at steady intervals. Grand green sigh of the park. Rasped pulse of a dog’s bark. Voices of the market, funk of raw fish, a cold plum pressed into your hand.

What a symphony of sensory information, conveyed in such beautiful language! I mean, “grinning into the weather”? “Grand green sigh of the park”? “Rasped pulse of a dog’s bark”? The poetry of de Meijer’s prose astonishes me. What a lovely, thoughtful book.

Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. His first book is Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; his second, Walking Well, will appear in 2026.

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