SELF-DISCOVERY, AT HOME AND AWAY
Collections of poems, city-life stories offer window to soul-searching journeys
Mika Lafond’s first collection of poems, Nipe Wanin, is the first thesis from the master’s of fine arts in writing at the University of Saskatchewan to be turned into a published book. (Disclosure: I read an early version of this manuscript for the program). Lafond, a member of the Muskeg Cree Nation who teaches at the U of S, divides her collection into three parts: Spirit, Me and Land.
The book’s title, Nipe Wanin, translates roughly from Cree to English as Coming Home, and that’s what these poems show. Lafond, like many a prodigal before her, ignored or openly refuted her parents’ and elders’ advice, made poor choices and got herself into some troubles. For instance, My Mother’s Voice begins: “I stole a van the other night/ whiskey tasted warm — my feet were cold,” while Don’t Call Me Beautiful talks of the debts she owes sweet-talking men: “tangled lies I’ve heard/ I despise the sound of a man — empty words.” Other poems such as The Last Time, Anxiety Disorder and Butter Mixed with Honey reveal the distance she strayed from what she knew to be real and true.
But while My Mother’s Voice starts with a stolen van, it ends with the poet hearing her mother through the walls where she and her pals hide out. Now that she’s a mother herself, she instructs her own daughter, “respect yourself as a woman/ mother of tomorrow,” and in Great Grandfather closes, “tell me where I come from,” thus revealing the true heart of this collection. The larger middle part of the book is about self, its trials and its triumphs, but that self is informed by the spirit and tied to the land, that home she’s come back to.
In collection opener, I Am, she says “I am a spiritual being — I do not die,” and in the significantly titled My Way Back she closes, “in a circle of women I find myself.” In Homebound, she ends, “I come home again to remind myself/ my land is with me,” while What I Learned and Father Mountain, both from the Land section, close with invocations to home. And in Her Journey From Home and Back Again, she casts a cold eye on the country in which she lives, and laments, “oh Canada/ when will you get it right?” That political flintiness informs a letter to Chief Dan George, as well. In When You See Me, she asks if what you see is a little girl, a reckless teenager, a beaten wife, a tired teacher. Who am I, she’s asking, and closes: “when you see me/ see me.”
What adds significantly to Lafond’s collection is the Cree translation of all her poems on each facing page. Even if you can’t read Cree, to see the words lined up across from the English, and to see Lafond use Cree, untranslated, in some of her English versions, is to feel the home about which she so strongly speaks. The land and the spirit are in the language. The pairing of languages is a gift to the reader.
Writer, comedian and syndicated newspaper columnist Dawn Dumont is back with her third book, Glass Beads. The cover labels it a collection of stories, but that isn’t the case. For the author of the short story collection Nobody Cries at Bingo and the novel Rose’s Run, Glass Beads is a radical departure.
In a series of mostly dated chapters, Dumont follows the interlocking lives of four young First Nations people living offreserve and trying to make a go of school, work or just getting by. Like many young people away from home and new to the city, they go through various romantic incarnations and career permutations. But, unlike many young people, for Everett, Nellie, Julie and Taz, there’s always the haunting refrain of race, like a song that won’t go away, accompanying their movements.
Whether it’s internalized inferiority, like Nellie paralyzed with fear when applying for a job amid white people; or spoken and self-protective inferiority, such as a conversation in which one of the group exclaims, “I mean, as if, right? Like he’s gonna take an Indian to some fancy restaurant”; to the usual racism from outside, such as the carpenter asking Everett, “So are you the kind of Indian that works hard or the kind that wastes my f----time?”; or the young, white Christians’ questions to Nellie in Central America: “What kind of native are you? … What was the reserve like? Was there a lot of poverty?” and the blithe inquisition that continues. These are the remarks, the observations, the self-evaluations that trail Dumont’s characters wherever they go.
And then there are their own day-to-day observations of the reality of their lives, from cheap Indian Affairs houses to Taz asking Nellie, “Why don’t you speak your language?” and working his way to a judgment, to the old blood quantum debate engineered years ago by the Indian Act so that Taz can say of his friends, “Yup, I’m a real Indian. Not a fake-ass, mostly monias Indian like these ones.” Divide and conquer go the unspoken rules of colonialism, and Dumont’s characters exemplify those old rules still in play.
The quartet work, go to school, party, get into trouble and have some fun, one becoming a lawyer, one becoming a chief, but, always, as noted by Julie, there’s the anger, the simmering rage that goes with all these debates, all these verbal shots and casual observations: “Nellie blew up all the time … but they were small fires, easily contained. Everett just got mad, punched people and then was done … With Taz, anger was as natural as breathing. … Julie never got mad.” And now she’s the one in jail for assault.
Dumont could have gone with the winning formulae of her previous books, but she’s taken a real chance here to recreate the risky, tricky, often maddening lives of young First Nations people growing up and taking charge of their lives in the city. It’s a serious book with some funny moments, though occasionally Dumont’s well-exercised comic muscles betray her and she slips in a one-liner where the tone should remain serious. All in all, though, Glass Beads is a courageous novel about courageous people.