Julia Bouwsma | Our Arms Spread Out around It All: A History of Malaga Island through Poems

In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-seven people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg that had been their home for generations. The erasure of the Malaga Island community included the removal of all dwellings and the island's schoolhouse, the involuntary commitment of nine residents to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and the exhumation and mass reburial of seventeen graves. This atrocity was followed by a century of socially-enforced silence and as a result, many Mainers today still do not fully know the story of Malaga. This talk will pair a discussion of Malaga Island and its residents with a reading of poems from Julia Bouwsma's award-winning collection Midden, considering the history of this shameful event, the relevancy of this history to our current moment, and also the process and implications of writing poems based on historic research.