Category: Reading

16. Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters

I reread Tomson Highway’s first hit play, The Rez Sisters, this morning. I needed to refresh my memory before teaching it this week. I’ve read it many times, mostly because I’ve taught it many times, although I’ve never seen a production; I did see the National Arts Centre’s production of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing 35 years ago, and I’ve always been curious about what The Rez Sisters is like onstage.

Every time I reread something, I find something new in it. I don’t suppose that’s unusual. This time, I was focused on moments where Nanabush appears, and where Christianity is mentioned, mostly because Highway was interviewed in The Globe an Mail recently (here’s a link, but it’s paywalled), on the occasion of the NAC production of Rose, the final play in the Wasaychigan Hill trilogy, and during that conversation he talked a lot about the differences between Cree or Ojibway mythology (since Nanabush is also known, in Cree, as wîsahkîcahk, and the sacred stories about the two figures are similar), on one hand, and the Christian mythology, which he encountered first in residential school, on the other. Highway has been talking about those differences since The Rez Sisters opened in Toronto. They’re important in his recent book, Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions, and they’re mentioned in every interview with him I’ve read. In The Globe and Mail interview, he says,

In non-Native culture, God is male. . . . Gender is the fulcrum on which rests the structure of patriarchal religion. In Christianity, God created man and forgot to create woman – woman was an afterthought. It’s her fault she ate the apple and submitted to temptation; it’s her fault we’re cursed as a species, that we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

By contrast, Cree and Ojibway mythology, and their culture hero, emphasizes the pleasure of eating: “You’re supposed to enjoy the fruit. One system of thinking treats the fruit as a curse; the other talks about a gift of pleasure, a gift of beauty.” The Christian God has no sense of humour, either, unlike Nanabush. “I have yet to hear him laugh,” Highway stated. “His principal weapon is this spiritual terrorism, where everything you do is forbidden.” Instead of that spiritual terrorism–a term which echoes Jo-Ann Episkenew’s description of colonialism, “psychological terrorism”–the mythology with Nanabush as its culture hero is centred on laughter. “God put us on this planet to laugh,” Highway told The Globe and Mail‘s interviewer, Aisling Murphy. “We’re here to have a good time, to laugh until we cry.” 

The contrast between the two belief systems helps me understand, once again, the horrific damage residential schools did by forcing children to reject the one they already knew, to feel terrible shame about it, and to adopt one that is so alien and, from Highway’s perspective, repellent. In the play, Nanabush is silly, mocking, and goofy; he’s (in this play, he takes a male form; in Dry Lips, she’s a woman) also serious, a link to the spirit world and a catalyst in the play’s cathartic resistance to The Biggest Bingo in the World, to which the characters travel and which they discover is a cheat. That game, Jesse Archibald-Barber argues, is a closed system without transcendence that offers economic or consumerist freedom while also being a trap. At the end of the play, Pelajia, who seems to be the most important member of the play’s ensemble, recognizes Nanabush’s importance instead of mourning his absence, and Nanabush himself, in the guise of a seagull, lands behind her, dancing “merrily and triumphantly,” according to the stage directions.

That’s pretty much the lecture I’m giving tomorrow. This is likely the last time I teach The Rez Sisters, and to be honest, I think I’ve finally figured it out. Better late than never.

15. Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me

Almost everything I’ve read and posted about in the past month has been connected to work. This book, Laurie D. Graham’s Calling It Back to Me, wasn’t–at least, not directly. I’m a fan of Graham’s poetry, and when I heard back in January that Calling It Back to Me was going to be published, I preordered a copy. It arrived on Friday. Yesterday I found myself eating dinner in a restaurant by myself, and luckily, Calling It Back to Me was in my backpack. I read it quickly, unable to put it down. It’s just excellent.

Calling It Back to Me begins with two epigraphs. One is from the Irish writer Eavan Boland (who is a recurring presence in Louise Halfe-Skydancer’s new book wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration): “A hundred years ago she was a child. But where? Strange to think that once the circumstances of her life were simple and available. They have become, with time, fragments and guesswork.” The second is from The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place by Tim Lilburn, a book that’s been waiting on my bookshelf for my attention for quite some time: “All thinking is a kind of autobiography, and autobiography always encompasses more than a single life.” Both fit Calling It Back to Me perfectly, since it’s about Graham’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers, the fragments of their lives she’s been able to piece together, to guess at, and the lives around their lives, their families and communities.

The book is divided into four sections, and I’m not sure if they’re four long poems (possible) or four collections of untitled poems (also possible). In syntax, line, and layout, they emphasize the fragmentary nature of what Graham has been able to piece together about her forebears. The first section, “Calling It Back to Me,” focuses on the objects those women left behind: photographs, a few documents, “a darning mushroom / a tin of teaspoons.” Those objects might be “heirlooms” that belong to Graham’s mother or grandmother, who is the subject of the final section, “A Good Closing,” where she is being moved from her home into assisted living or long-term care with Graham’s assistance. The other two sections, nestled within that frame, turn to other ancestors: “The Great-Grandmothers” presents fragmentary biographies of those four women, all of whom settled in Saskatchewan and Alberta after emigrating from Europe; and “Toward an Origin Story” provides a slightly broader consideration of the causes and effects of the arrival of Graham’s forebears (and other settlers) here. I had been at a meeting that afternoon of people working to encourage the preservation of grassland ecology in Saskatchewan before I sat down to read Calling It Back to Me, and “Toward an Origin Story” reflected the concerns I heard expressed there:

they sailed off
to become the boot

of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees–

investment companies
bulldozing the windbreaks,

filling in the sloughs, flattening
hills and houses, seeding the ditches,

every arable, pilfered inch–

the settlement story going sour
in the heat and the haze.

The ecological damage of that process is paired with the human costs (addiction, injury, child mortality, exile), which shifts to Graham’s experiences of funerals, of trying to pull together fragments of information to tell her ancestors stories, a history which stubbornly remains a collection of shards. The lines here tend to be short, encouraging a slow, even elegaic reading cadence, and the poems are in couplets and single lines, sometimes spread across the page or spaced out almost as if they were in columns and could be read horizontally or vertically, all of which reinforces the way that stories, especially the stories of women, don’t survive intact.

I read Calling It Back to Me without stopping, almost without taking a breath. I want to read it again: more slowly this time, I think, so that I can savour it.

14. Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

I finished rereading Métis writer Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 novel The Marrow Thieves yesterday–good thing, since I’m teaching it next week. I taught it seven or eight years ago, and at some point during that semester I met Dimaline, who was here giving a talk. I’d forgotten about that, or that I got my copy signed, but when I saw the inscription, I remembered telling her I was teaching the book and that her bank account was $35 richer as a result. On the book’s title page, she wrote, “For Ken–the light in my bank account.” Without that inscription, I might not have remembered that conversation. Why I forgot about it I don’t know. I remember liking her quite a bit–her confident energy and her friendliness were appealing.

Such recollections might be all I’m capable of today. I feel drained of insight, but I started this post, so I need to say something halfway intelligent, if that’s possible. The Marrow Thieves seamlessly brings together post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and young-adult fiction. It’s set in the 2050s, after war, the ongoing climate catastrophe, and other forms of pollution have rendered large parts of Ontario almost uninhabitable. Since the polar ice caps have melted, it rains constantly, but there’s little to drink, because much surface water has become toxic sludge. As a result of this apocalypse, the majority of the population–descendants of settlers–have lost the ability to dream. Literally dream, that is, not imagine the future or fantasize. First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, though, have retained that capability, and it’s somehow connected to their bone marrow. Without dreams, people are going crazy. The government’s response: to recreate something like the Indian Residential School system, except this time, instead of trying to eliminate Indigenous languages, cultures, and ceremonies, it is harvesting their bone marrow so that settlers can regain the ability to dream. The government’s Recruiters are everywhere, rounding up likely looking suspects. They’re dressed like gym teachers, with running shoes, shorts, and whistles, except that they also carry pistols. Like the people responsible for residential schools in our past, they’re remorseless.

The narrator of almost all of the book is Frenchie, a 16-year-old Anishinaabe boy with the usual problems a 16-year-old boy has, along with new ones that go along with the way settler colonialism has metastasized in his lifetime. He’s become separated from his family and is on the run in northern Ontario with a small group of Indigenous people, mostly children and teenagers, shepherded by Miigwans, who teaches the kids how to survive, and Minerva, who has other essential abilities. They constantly watch for the Recruiters and snitches that seem to be everywhere in the forest. In two chapters, the narration shifts to two other characters, Wab and Miigwans, who tell their stories about how they found themselves part of the group. That’s an interesting writing decision, and I wonder why more of the characters don’t also get to tell their “coming-out” stories, and why the focus is on those two. If I had to speculate, Miigwans is included because he’s central to the story, and Wab’s experience is perhaps the most difficult of the group, although nobody has had an easy time. It’s hard to say, though, because we don’t get a lot of detailed information about the rest.

The Marrow Thieves was a big success, winning a Governor General’s Literary Award and being made into a feature film. I like the book better than the movie (of course), mostly because the movie stays close to Toronto, as I recall, while the book shows the characters on the run far from the big city. Given the omnipresent danger of the Recruiters, heading for the woods is more believable and frankly more sensible than going underground in the south.

The adolescent narrator makes this a young-adult book, but it works for older folks, too, particularly the ending, which is quite moving. I like the touches of the fantastic: the way that First Nations languages become weapons against the colonizers in a literal fashion, which echoes their essential role in what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls resurgence and resistance, and the way the ability to dream is rooted deep in the body. The dystopian framework feels all-too-possible, sadly. In interviews, Dimaline talks about the easy fit between Indigenous experience and the notion of an apocalypse. “We have survived our apocalypse. I thought of the worst thing I could write about and it was stuff that had already happened,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2017. True enough. If the world were to come to an end, as more and more it seems to be doing, given the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, I’d want to hang out with people who had some experience with such catastrophes. For Dimaline, our current world is already post-apocalyptic. The notion that some limited form of collective survival is possible is oddly cheering. So too is The Marrow Thieves. I’d like to read more of Dimaline’s work. Maybe when this semester is finally in the rearview mirror.

13. Anne Swannell, Mall

The honours student I’m co-supervising (and what a lucky introduction to supervising students!) likes Anne Swannell’s 1993 book of poetry, Mall. She’s interested in writing poems about places that aren’t particularly “poetic”–nice to look at, complete, obvious subjects for contemplation–and recommended Mall as an example of the kind of thing she would like to write. (Her poems are much different and, I think, a world of ambition away from Mall, but that’s another story–one I’ll tell when my student’s first book comes out.) Since Mall considers the West Edmonton Mall, which is, as Wikipedia tells me, the second-largest mall in North America, with more than 800 stores, services, and attractions, her interest makes sense. Who would choose to write poems about a massive shopping mall? Anne Swannell, that’s who. And why not?

This student found a review from Books in Canada, written by that publications poetry columnist, which savages Mall–unfairly, she argues, and I would agree. “I admit that the very idea of a collection of poems about the West Edmonton Mall made my eyes roll,” he (it has to be a man) begins. He goes on to complain about the design of the book (the small press that published this collection likely couldn’t afford a trained designer) and to call the book’s social satire “broad and obvious” and its poetry “dreary,” unredeemed “by any obvious talent for image or rhythm or form.” Only the presence of a blurb by Phyllis Webb, who gave Swannell suggestions about the manuscript and encouraged her to continue, kept this book out of the reviewer’s “no” pile, he says.

Well, nobody likes everything, but if you set out to review something with which you have no sympathy at all, you might be better off deciding to write about something else. Mall just isn’t that bad. Swannell sets out to find stories about the West Edmonton Mall. Some are found stories, I think, but most are imagined. It’s part of an attempt at turning what the French anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-place”–a location without stories or connections–to place. If we evaluate Mall against that intention, it’s reasonably successful. It’s certainly not the abject failure the Books in Canada reviewer complained about.

Mall turns non-place into place using several different strategies. One is to bring the history of Edmonton into focus, as in the book’s first poem, “Lessons in Cartography,” which presents five vignettes about that city: four about transportation (trains and airplanes), and the last one about oil, Gretzky, and the Mall. Another strategy involves considering what’s missing from the Mall: crime, unhoused people, winter weather, broken glass and cigarette butts. Yet another is looking at what is there: bronze and plaster statues, rides, video games, the poor people who visit to avoid the heat or the cold.

One poem, “Balls,” describes (in two columns) a device that drops coloured balls through a complicated Rube Goldberg-like contraption and then hauls them back up to the top to drop them again. The right-hand column consists of verbs that give us the balls’ movements: “roll,” “fall,” “clunk,” “spin,” “climb,” “drop.” The left-hand column describes the parts of the machine in which those actions take place. It might be the book’s most successful poem, and since my student likes to write columnar poems that can be read both vertically and horizontally, I can see why she would have an affinity for it.

Another strategy considers commercialism more generally, starting with the fur trade (Edmonton’s Plains Cree name, amiskwaciy-waskâhikan, or “Beaver Mountain House,” alludes to that commercial enterprise) and then moving indoors, into a juxtaposition between the sacred (the Mall’s chapel) and the profane (the items for sale in the Super Love Boutique), along with objects and locations that might fit either category, like the statues that seem to be strewn everywhere. Is that art sacred? Maybe. It’s shabby, broken and vandalized, and its subjects (Venus, the Emperor Augustus) stand near the food court. Maybe, if it was sacred, it’s been profaned. One poem reflects (what a terrible pun! mine, not Swannell’s) on the plethora of mirrors in the Mall, quoting Rudy Wiebe:

No one can endure
so many copies of himself.

Read one way, the result of the sacred/profane disjunction is an easy irony, the kind of thing the Books in Canada was complaining about. Read another way, though, the distinction between the sacred and profane begins to wear away, to erode into something new. Maybe one thing can be both. The final section, for instance, imagines the goings-on in the Fantasyland Hotel, where the lovemaking of human guests is both sacred (it’s love, after all) and profane (the round bed, the polyester sheets). The theme rooms in the hotel are simultaneously tacky and energized by their fantastic, expressive decor. Not bound by standards of “good” taste or restraint, they are exuberant, silly, and fully of grotesque life:

In the Polynesian Room,
there’s a small erupting fiberglass volcano
molded into one wall
with an electric light inside
that causes lava to glow and pulsate
while wisps of steam belch out.

The speaker imagines other rooms, perhaps in Polynesia, that present similar scenes of western Canada: a skating rink; the Rockies; grain elevators, train tracks, cows, and gophers–ideas that have less to do with the reality of the prairie provinces than the Mall which suggests their possibility.

So, why can’t the West Edmonton Mall be a subject fit for poetry? Why can’t anything? Why should poets limit themselves to serious subjects? Swannell’s Mall answers those questions. Maybe it was ahead of its time, or at least ahead of its reviewer.

12. Tommy Orange, There There

Yesterday, I wrote that at this point in the semester I only have time to read books I’m teaching. That wasn’t entirely true. I managed to finish Tommy Orange’s There There last night. Jenna Hunnef, a colleague from the University of Saskatchewan, is coming down to Regina on Friday to give a talk on this novel, and since I’m the organizer, I thought I needed to reread There There so I could ask an intelligent question during the discussion–or at least a question informed by something beyond a reading from six years ago.

For some reason, I have a copy of the hardcover edition of There There. I don’t recall why I was so eager to read this book, but I think there may have been a positive review in The New Yorker. Before rereading it over the past week or so, all I could remember was that I liked this book. Now I remember why.

Jenna’s paper is about neomodernism in this novel, and there are signs of modernism everywhere in it: in the quotations that begin the book’s four sections (from Bertolt Brecht, Javier Marías, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and Jean Genet); in the title’s allusion to the famous remark of Stein’s about Oakland, California, having “no there there,” which one of the novel’s characters, Dene Oxendene, explains to us, which is also the title of a Radiohead song; and in the narrative structure. The book is a collage of voices, almost all of which belong to urban Indigenous people living in Oakland or with some connection to that city. For the first half of the novel, those characters speak to us in third person, tightly focalized on their thoughts, feelings, and experiences; in the second half of the novel, that narrative mode opens up a little to include chapters in first-person and also (the quite rare) second-person narration. To me, the term “collage” is essential to understanding how this novel works, partly because part of its collage includes two collage essays (one in the prologue, one in a chapter identified as an “interlude”). Sometimes, when characters appear, I wasn’t sure if I had met them before, and I would flip back through the book looking for them; sometimes I’d find them, sometimes not. My bad, really, for not tracking the characters on a sheet of paper as they appeared. This novel demands that kind of attention. Modernist texts tend to require effort. That’s okay. We all need more cognitive friction in our lives; it’ll help us deal with the other kinds of difficulty we experience.

There There is also the story of a heist, kind of like Stanley Kubrick’s film noir The Killing, which is (I think) an intertext here, although There There‘s structure is so much more complex than the one in that movie. I’m not going to say anything else, because I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody, but I think it’s fair to say that signs of doom are everywhere, from the first chapter, where Tony Loneman (a 21-year-old Cheyenne man with FASD) tells us that his favourite rapper is MF Doom. The robbery, though, is important in two other ways: as a version of the lateral violence that colonialism has left the Indigenous characters with, and also as a version of colonialism itself, which has led to multiple thefts from Indigenous Peoples: of land, of resources, and through boarding schools and residential schools, of languages, cultures, and ceremonies. Colonialism doesn’t define these characters, even as they struggle to survive and resist it, but it’s their world. If they were fish, it would be the water in which they swim, something omnipresent but also, perhaps, hard to identify. It’s easier to see their struggles as personal. They are personal, sure, unique to them, but they’re part of that broader reality.

If you’re in Regina, and you want to know more, come to La Cité 215 on Friday afternoon at 2:30 to hear what Jenna has to say. There will be cookies–the good kind. You don’t need to have read the book beforehand, although you might be inspired to get a copy afterwards.

11. Louise B. Halfe–Sky Dancer, Burning in This Midnight Dream

It’s March. At this time in the semester, I can’t read (or reread) anything unless it’s something I’m teaching. This week, my students and I begin talking about Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream, so I got to reread this wonderful book.

Wonderful, yes, but also horrifying. These poems are scalding, a mosaic of the direct and intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools. They are personal, even confessional, although they don’t only reflect Halfe’s own experience at Blue Quills IRS in St. Paul, Alberta, not far from Saddle River Cree Nation, where she grew up; they also speak of the poisonous effects Blue Quills had on her parents and grandparents.

The volume is divided into sections which are marked by family photographs. The mostly carefree smiles in them act as a counterpoint to the description of family relationships in the poems. Not all of those relationships are damaged by residential school and colonialism, but many are, which is a sign of what Jo-Ann Episkenew describes as the “psychological terrorism” that creates the post-colonial traumatic stress response we see in these poems.

These poems are hard to read, but if they were easy to read, if they didn’t provoke anger and deep sadness, they wouldn’t be much good. What other emotions should a genocide, especially one practiced on children, generate in us?

And these poems are good. Better than good. Marvellous. Filled with pain, but free from self pity, as in the second stanza of the opening poem, “Dedication to the Seventh Generation”:

Sit by the kotawân–the fire place.
Drink muskeg and mint tea.
Hold your soul
but do not weep.
Not for me, not for you.
Weep for those who haven’t yet sung.
Weep for those who will never sing.

Silence is a recurring theme in these poems, almost a motif, which makes so much sense, since those institutions were intended to silence the children incarcerated in them. Halfe, thankfully, sings in these poems, in English and in Plains Cree, which is usually translated (where it isn’t, you can use the itwêwina online dictionary if you need to). Let’s be grateful for these poems, and for their author, who has taken such risks by publishing this book.

You might decide to take my thoughts with a grain of salt. Louise Halfe is a friend, and I’m a huge fan of her poetry, so yes, I might be biased. I’ll tell you what: find a copy of Burning in This Midnight Dream in the library, either the first edition, published by the late, great Coteau Books, or the new edition, republished by Brick Books, and try it out. My guess is that you’ll agree with my evaluation.

10. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

One of the great things about my job during the past couple of years is that I’ve had the opportunity to teach Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. It’s like no novel you’ve read before, because it’s a powerful anticolonial novel that decolonizes the genre. I get to reread this book every winter, and it’s always a treat.

Most (not all, but most) novels work in similar ways. They tend to focus on one protagonist; the other characters are more or less secondary to that main character. In most novels, we get engaged with the plot of the novel, in which the protagonist works through conflicts of various kinds. Most novels are in prose (although novels-in-verse do exist, and some parts of Noopiming resemble that form). Some novels depart from these characteristics–William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for instance, tells a story about an entire family, but it does so by rendering the experience of the characters in series, one at a time, through stream-of-consciousness narration–but most novels are more straightforward. All of this makes sense, because novels came into being during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, a time when people tended to think about individuals as separate from their communities (I’m making a lot of generalizations here, I realize) and when prose fiction with an engaging narrative appealed to a newly literate population. Yes, works of prose fiction existed before then, but we call them novels now in retrospect, because of the invention of this new form of writing 200 or 300 years ago. We can think of lots of examples; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one. Even when novels have a larger cast of characters, one tends to be primary and the others exist to serve the story of that primary character in some way (in the narrative as helpers or sources of conflict, or to provide thematic parallels, for instance).

Noopiming throws that model away. The story–to the extent that there is a story here–is presented in a mix of poetry and prose. In fact, the eighth chapter, “Mashkawaji’s Theory of Ice,” consists of poems that became the lyrics of Simpson’s 2021 album Theory of Ice. The story is communal; I would argue that none of the characters, not even the narrator, Maskhawaji, functions as a main character, and new characters appear at surprising moments while others characters that we’ve grown accustomed to vanish. Mashkawaji is an unusual omniscient narrator; they tell the story from the bottom of a lake, a place where their body was dumped (so this is a story about MMIWG2S people, in part, although it’s not limited to that thread). The narrative, as I’ve suggested, doesn’t behave like any narrative you’ve ever read; Mashkawaji tells a story about their family and friends, but the events in that narrative are surprisingly slight, and after the eighth chapter, we’re presented with new characters (a group of Canada geese and then a mixed group of people and raccoons, all of whom live in Toronto) who function allegorically, suggesting (following Simpson’s earlier writing, particularly Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back and As We Have Always Done) forms of Indigenous resistance and resurgence.

If you expect a resolution of Mashkawaji’s story, or to the story of any of the characters in the first eight chapters, you’ll be mostly disappointed. That’s not what this novel does. That makes it strange, and the reason for its strangeness is that it refuses to participate in the colonial (or colonizing) form of most prose fiction. The title sets up this radical ambition: “noopiming” is an Anishinaabemowin word that means “in the bush,” and the white ladies referred to are Susanna Moodie (author of the Canlit classic Roughing It in the Bush) and Catharine Parr Trail, settlers who homesteaded on land near Rice Lake, not far from Peterborough, Ontario, which belonged to Anishinaabe people until the Crown took it and started handing it out to newcomers from Great Britain and elsewhere. This novel provides the cure for their writing, formally, and for their colonial ideas, thematically–ideas which still dominate this country.

Yes, there is a lot of Anishinaabemowin in this book, and as I read it, I keep my phone beside me, the browser open to the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, which Simpson thanks in her acknowledgements. None of the words in Anishinaabemowin are translated; readers are expected to confront the strangeness of that linguistic Other directly. Simpson isn’t a fluent speaker of Anishinaabemowin, but she makes English behave like it, partly by refusing to use gendered pronouns. It’s not that all the characters are nonbinary; it’s that, like other Algonquian languages, Anishinaabemowin doesn’t use gendered pronouns.

In other words, Noopiming is the most anticolonial, or decolonizing, book you’re ever likely to read. It’s angry, despondent, hilarious, and hopeful. A wild ride, in other words. My students end up liking it, I think, perhaps because we walk together through it very, very slowly, stopping to enjoy the sights along the way. As a community, like the novel’s geese and raccoons and humans, trying to look after each other as we go.

9. Rosanna Deerchild, calling down the sky / î-nîhci-tîpwâtamân kîsik

I read calling down the sky / î-nîhci-tîpwâtamân kîsik ten years ago when the first edition came out. I reread it last weekend–the new bilingual English/nîhithawîn (Woods Cree) edition–and I like even better now.

calling down the sky is a book about the traumatic legacy of Indian Residential Schools. Parts of the book are what the Cree-Métis literary critic Deanna Reder describes as âcimisowin: “a story about oneself.” Memoir or autobiography, in other words, although those categories don’t quite map onto âcimisowin, because the primary distinction one makes between kinds of stories in Cree is the difference between sacred stories or âtayôhkana and secular stories or âcimowina, rather than (as in English) between stories that are true and those that are fictional. Other parts of the book, though, are âtosiwêwina, or stories about other people. Sometimes Deerchild tells stories about her relationship with her mother from her perspective; other times she inhabits the voice of her mother to tell stories about her experience in residential school and afterwards. That voice is haunting; the short lines encourage the reader to go slowly, pausing often, as if to take a sip of tea or a drag on a cigarette, or just to gather thoughts before speaking again. Deerchild is also the author of a play, The Secret to Good Tea, which is being produced this year at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, and when I read these poems out loud, I can feel the voices of the book’s characters as if I were an actor on stage delivering a monologue. Yes, even a môniyâw napêw like me can feel those voices. I take that as a sign of the book’s power and strength.

Not surprisingly, the stories told in this collection are hard to read. Stories about what happened to children in those facilities (former Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald suggested we call them “institutions of assimilation and genocide” rather than “schools”) are always hard to read: they relate experiences of physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, loneliness, and unfathomable cruelty. The book’s first poem, “mama’s testament: truth and reconciliation,” calls out the violence of the nuns in the school, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for those institutions, and the community’s refusal or inability to do anything about any of it, perhaps out of a numb despair or a belief that resistance was impossible:

don’t make up stories
that’s what they told us kids

when we went back home
told them what was going on
in those schools

still got sent back
every year
less of us came home

still they said nothing
until we were nothing
just empty skins

full of broken english
ruler broken bones
bible broken spirits

and back home
became a broken dream

calling down the sky also looks at what happened after Deerchild’s mother left Guy Hill Indian Residential School, the physical and psychological aftereffects of her childhood trauma: scars, including being left blind in one eye and deaf in one ear; arthritis; diabetes from the inadequate diet in the facility; and poor sleep, caused by nightly visits from “the dead” who “ask for forgiveness” that cannot be granted. The federal government would not pay any compensation for those experiences, claiming there were “no records” and “no proof.” “there is no word for what they did / in our language,” Deerchild’s mother says.

The book also gives a frank account of the effects Deerchild’s mother had on her relationship with her mother: “mama is always just / out of reach // a bird i could watch / but never catch.” But it also explains how Deerchild slowly built a relationship with her mother, that distant figure whose own childhood made it difficult to express warmth or love, through conversations about her life, including (eventually) her residential school experiences. Those conversations are the backbone of this book. The way calling down the sky stages those conversations, draws on them as sources while crafting them carefully into poems, suggests that it’s an example of documentary poetry.

Together, this collection of poems moves towards relationship, love, and connection. That’s the narrative arc of the book. It also highlights resistance to colonialism and what the critic Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” After all, surviving what the critic Jo-Ann Episkenew calls the “psychological terrorism” of colonialism is victory enough. But this book goes beyond survival; the book’s conclusion suggests something more like resurgence, to borrow Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s term. So too does the decision to publish calling down the sky in a bilingual edition, which quietly but powerfully argues that the assimilative project of residential schools did not succeed, no matter how much damage those institutions did to individuals, families, and communities. Let’s all be grateful for that failure. And let’s all grieve that those places were ever built.

8. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Last fall, I gave a paper on precarious masculinity in the sitcom Ted Lasso at a conference on that show. The conference happened in Richmond, the London borough where the show’s fictional Greyhounds are based, and while at first I was excited about going to London for the weekend, I quickly wised up and opted for the Zoom option. I’m glad I did, because one of my fellow panelists, a PhD student from Louisiana State University named Madeline Grohowski, mentioned bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love in her paper. The organizers had mentioned the possibility of publishing an anthology of essays from the conference, and as I listened to Madeline’s description of hooks’s ideas about men, I thought, I’ll have to get a copy of that. When it came time to turn my conference paper into a chapter in the conference proceedings, I got a copy of The Will to Change and started reading it. This book may have changed my life.

I was sold by the way hooks puts the behaviour of men, including men she loves and has loved, into a broader context: patriarchy. That’s especially true of her father, who was angry and held his family hostage “behind the walls of his patriarchal terrorism.” He learned that terrorism by being inculcated into patriarchy as a child, as many (most?) men do, as I did. That’s not surprising: the only emotion patriarchy allows men to express is rage. Any other feeling must be stifled, because if any other feeling is expressed, the man becomes unmanly–and that turns him into a target for the kind of abuse women and children receive. I was never convinced of the utility of the term “patriarchy” before reading this book–it always felt too monolithic and one-dimensional to me–but hooks’s discussion of it opened my eyes to its value. More importantly, I could suddenly understand my father’s behaviour in a different way. When hooks writes about her father, about the way she would wish him dead so that she could live, she could be describing my experience, too:

Lying in my girlhood bed waiting to hear the hard anger in his voice, the invasive sound of his commands, I used to think, “If only he would die, we could live.” Later as a grown woman waiting for the man in my life to come home, the man who was more often than not a caring partner but who sometimes erupted in violent fits of range, I used to think, “Maybe he will have an accident and die, maybe he will not come home, and I will be free and able to live.” Women and children all over the world want men to die so that they can live. This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die, for the patriarchal father not to come home. Women and female and male children, dominated by men, have wanted them dead because they believe that these men are not willing to change. They believe that men who are not dominators will not protect them. They believe that men are hopeless.

Being able to see my experience in those words, and being given an explanation for that experience–well, it is a gift, one for which I am grateful. I’m also grateful for the openness in hooks’s analysis of the way men act, for the, well, love she has for men despite their damage and the way they act. All of us, men and women, are patriarchy’s hostages. To dethrone that way of thinking about the world, which hooks defines as “the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death,” would set us all free. That is a truth that bros like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate appear to be incapable of understanding.

Of course the book isn’t perfect. It’s 20 years old, and some of the sources feel outdated or perhaps too rooted in pop psychology, and when hooks describes men as people whose “human body . . . has a penis” she is ignoring the existence of trans folks. But nothing is perfect, and the value of her analysis makes up for those flaws.

I’ve read some of hooks’s essays before, but I’ve never read one of her books. She wrote many of them, and I’m looking forward to reading more.

7. Debora Greger, Off-Season at the Edge of the World

One of my students, a talented poet, is working on a project influenced by Debora Greger’s Off-Season at the Edge of the World, and she lent me her copy so we could discuss it. Of course, I’ve been slow turning to it–this semester is, well, overwhelming–and she needs me to return it. The good news today was that invigilating a make-up midterm gave me an opportunity to read it, finally. The even better news is that this book is wonderful.

Off-Season at the Edge of the World is more than 30 years old. I had never heard of its author, who taught English at the University of Florida and won all kinds of awards. If the rest of her writing is like this, she deserved the accolades. The poems tend to be in tight stanzas–couplets, tercets, quatrains–with subtle patterns of sound and surprising metaphors. Take the poem “Three Graces,” for instance, which comes with the subtitle “after Canova”:

In the dim tent they are dimmer still,
three elephants chained by the leg
one to the next, one to the ground.

Fogbound oceans, they ebb and surge
in a leathery tide. Lost in a rhythm
not even feeding stops, they rock again

the black hold of a freighter
tossed on open seas, the dark portholes
of their unblinking eyes unfathomable.

The tattered maps of their ears
flick away the local flies.
Nothing to them our incurious stares,

having no use for us who neither
feed them nor let them go.
There is no grace as dark as theirs.

That extended metaphor of these circus animals (why else would they be in a tent?) as the sea, their movements as the tide, their eyes “unfathomable”–I wish I could write like that. And the last line! Wow.

I don’t know how my student ran across Greger’s poems, but I’m grateful that she shared them with me.