FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| WORDFEST "Cree is a language of the viscera. It speaks of the body in a very relaxed way, full of humor." In his famously gentle and musical voice, playwright and novelist Tomson Highway explains that for him, English is very much a language of the intellect. Writing his new novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, reminded Highway that just as in his award-winning plays, the transition from Cree into English remains the most challenging part of his craft. Though the author himself speaks four languages, "the characters in my head speak in Cree. Then something funny happens between my head and my fingers," he laughs. "It just comes out weird." While Kiss of the Fur Queen follows the shape of Highway's own life much more closely than any of his plays, it preserves their unique blend of tragedy and humor. Funny, bawdy and spiritual all at once, it evokes deep sadness and anger without souring into bitterness. In English, that is a weird combination. Magic realism, move over. Here comes Cree mythic tragi-comedy. The novel opens with Abraham Okimasis's victory in the 1951 World Championship Dog Derby in Oopaskooyak, Manitoba. With a kiss from the newly-crowned Fur Queen fresh on his cheek, he returns to his family hunting camp and an idyllic world founded upon the love of children. But as good converted Catholics, Okimasis and his wife Mariesis entrust their sons to the church's residential school in the south. There, forbidden to speak Cree, Jeremiah and Gabriel enter a strange world of heaven and hell, of guilt and punishment - and of secretive abuse at the hands of the dark-robed men their parents revere. Kiss of the Fur Queen chronicles the deliberate effort to destroy a culture, and the corresponding struggle to survive. Banning the Cree language was one front in the cultural war; religion, another. Apart from sex, Highway believes religion offers the most powerful of human experiences. To attack a people's religion through its own children is the worst part of a terrible betrayal. Jeremiah and Gabriel live out the consequences, as they are sundered from their heritage and isolated from their family by shame and secrets. "An entire generation of Indian men has grown up with this legacy," Highway points out. "It's a chapter of Canadian history that has to be told." Later, in Winnipeg, the two adolescents find more heaven and hell. The hell is easy to glimpse in the drunkenness, abuse and murder among the native men and women they meet in bars and on the street. Yet a heaven more compelling than the priests ever described glimmers in their artistic apprenticeships in music and dance - and, for the beautiful dancer Gabriel, in the worshipful advances of so many men. Jeremiah, like Highway himself, trains as a concert pianist. (Though the author still plays daily and composes for himself "with great pleasure," he now describes the novel as his instrument, and calls language a form of music.) Dance and music become sources of hope in the novel, allowing the brothers to rediscover something broken and betrayed within themselves. As they do, they see more clearly the destructive generational split among their people. Highway himself sees this as the greatest threat to surival: "If we don't heal the split we will be destroyed." Using his work to help heal this inter-generational wound provides a mission for Highway's writing, one that goes beyond providing entertainment or insight. Art simply becomes a necessity. "The only alternative is to be a drunk or to kill myself. I'm not ready for that." Though he's always confronting serious issues, Highway's playfulness and sensual joy in the world make ponderousness impossible. For instance, when Jeremiah hits bottom, he sees God in a vision - and she's a "torch-singing fox" with "missile-like tits, ice-blond meringue hair." Commenting on the scene, Highway says that "something in Jeremiah's system rejects the vengeful angry god hiding behind a puffed-up cloud. He goes for the opposite - a fun-loving party girl." In its burlesque way, the scene affirms its author's conviction that we're not born evil. "We have nothing to atone for. The point of life is to have one fuck of a good time." Really? Despite the high price so many have paid for their good times? "Within reason," he adds. |