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Jan. 9th, 2010 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseTomson Highway - Kiss of the Fur Queen
I know Tomson Highway through his plays from the 90's (The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing), but even though he's been a name in Canadian and Cree literature for well over a decade, Kiss of the Fur Queen is his first novel.
Short version; it's good.
Longer: It's the story of Champion/Jeremiah Okimasis and his brother Gabriel (Who has a Cree name that, unlike Jeremiah's, goes mostly unused even before he leaves his family), two Cree from Northern Manitoba who end up going through the abuses of the Residential School system, which was intended to deliberately wipe out their language and culture. Both end up divorced from where they came from in different ways; Jeremiah clings to his parents' Roman Catholic church in spite of its abuses, and in spite of his own rapidly failing belief, and looks on fancy-dancing and drumming as terrible and pagan, while Gabriel turns to the Native American Church, but also travels further and further away from home, and doesn't want to go back north, and can't fit in. Both grow to excel at arts from white culture - Jeremiah as a concert pianist and a writer, Gabriel in ballet - which they ultimately turn back into expressions of their own culture, of northern subarctic landscapes, particularly under the encouragement of the Fur Queen, a trickster figure who slips in and out of their lives.
Which sounds a downer, and even though it does feature funerals and tragedies, and the painful realities of both the northern reserve and the urban life, it's a weirdly upbeat book, with a surprising number of light moments (Gabriel's first experience of shopping in Polo Park mall), and even the bad ones made bittersweet by odd funny details (Jeremiah and almost every one of his altercations with Amanda Clear Sky, the Ojibway girl who tries to drag him will-he or nill-he back into pride in his ancestry.) the language sometimes goes almost hallucinatory; some of this is rooted in a culture for which spiritual events are not nearly so divorced from the everyday, so Christmas ornaments singing along with a cassette is hinted as commonplace or at least not to be blinked at, and some is just a looping pleasure in language. Big events and small details are thoroughly mixed, and a lot happens - so much so that sometimes major turning points are painted in a blink-and-you-miss-it paragraph.
I know Tomson Highway through his plays from the 90's (The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing), but even though he's been a name in Canadian and Cree literature for well over a decade, Kiss of the Fur Queen is his first novel.
Short version; it's good.
Longer: It's the story of Champion/Jeremiah Okimasis and his brother Gabriel (Who has a Cree name that, unlike Jeremiah's, goes mostly unused even before he leaves his family), two Cree from Northern Manitoba who end up going through the abuses of the Residential School system, which was intended to deliberately wipe out their language and culture. Both end up divorced from where they came from in different ways; Jeremiah clings to his parents' Roman Catholic church in spite of its abuses, and in spite of his own rapidly failing belief, and looks on fancy-dancing and drumming as terrible and pagan, while Gabriel turns to the Native American Church, but also travels further and further away from home, and doesn't want to go back north, and can't fit in. Both grow to excel at arts from white culture - Jeremiah as a concert pianist and a writer, Gabriel in ballet - which they ultimately turn back into expressions of their own culture, of northern subarctic landscapes, particularly under the encouragement of the Fur Queen, a trickster figure who slips in and out of their lives.
Which sounds a downer, and even though it does feature funerals and tragedies, and the painful realities of both the northern reserve and the urban life, it's a weirdly upbeat book, with a surprising number of light moments (Gabriel's first experience of shopping in Polo Park mall), and even the bad ones made bittersweet by odd funny details (Jeremiah and almost every one of his altercations with Amanda Clear Sky, the Ojibway girl who tries to drag him will-he or nill-he back into pride in his ancestry.) the language sometimes goes almost hallucinatory; some of this is rooted in a culture for which spiritual events are not nearly so divorced from the everyday, so Christmas ornaments singing along with a cassette is hinted as commonplace or at least not to be blinked at, and some is just a looping pleasure in language. Big events and small details are thoroughly mixed, and a lot happens - so much so that sometimes major turning points are painted in a blink-and-you-miss-it paragraph.
