Perceptive tales of truth deliver
Coyote’s hard-won wisdom apparent in a collection with pathos, bathos, everything else
A lot happens to Ivan Coyote.
I follow them on Twitter and Facebook and when they feel like sharing, the cascade of stories of decisions and stands, moral crossroads little and large, people rising above and falling short, makes my own life seem uneventful.
But that’s the thing: My own life is uneventful by comparison. As a cis white male, I am confronted by fewer things. I noticed it when I started travelling a lot. I’d come back with stories born out of the classic travel influencer credo, “Just say yes.” I’d say yes to striking up conversations, to strangers’ invitations, to staying out late and exploring empty pre-dawn streets.
After the first few dozen polite smiles I got from women and people of colour, I started to get the picture: I travel as a cis white man, and that’s different from how everyone else travels. It’s like I’m covered in an opaque, oleaginous film, lubricating my movements through the world. I don’t see that clearly through it, and it smooths the friction, throws off fewer sparks.
Then I started thinking about how that worked at home. I used to see Toronto, and Canada as a whole, as uniquely just, functional, safe, until I started reading Desmond Cole, a young Black man, and Tanya Talaga, an Anishinaabe woman, in these pages and elsewhere.
Ivan, white but neither cis nor het, is met with friction wherever they go: thoughtless prejudice, complacent ignorance, sudden enlightenment, compassion in the oddest places and bravery everywhere. It’s what makes them such a good storyteller; that, along with a lot of talent and an unusual brand of empathetic compassion you hear writers talking about when they need to write about serial killers and cops, but rarely notice when it comes to people of different colours, genders and classes.
They’re a storyteller by profession, on the road more than they’re at home in Yellowknife, speaking in theatres and schools, sometimes explicitly about being trans, but often — maybe mostly — just telling stories composed out of their extraordinary breadth of daily experience and the human insight it confers.
They’ve been writing a book about every two years since 1998, when “Boys Like Us,” a collaboration with three other writer-performers in a troupe called Taste This, presaged a way of seeing the world and telling it that the rest of literature is only now catching up. I’ve read many of them, and every one is better than the last, if for no other reason than that their author continues to learn as much as they teach.
“My own masculine presentation has allowed me to see the insides of the machine,” they write in “Rebent Sinner,” about a post of theirs telling men how to know a woman doesn’t want to talk to them going viral because they look like a man in their profile pic. “Being masculine in a female-assigned body is not an escape hatch that lets me avoid male violence and harassment. It is a window, and it allows me to look out, but it also obligates me to look in.”
There’s humour in this book, alongside pathos and bathos and Joan Armatrading and everything else you’d want from a collection of true stories. But it’s the level of perception and introspection evinced in that short passage — a critique of an aspect of male privilege experienced by a female-assigned, masculine-presenting thinker and its relationship to toxicity and violence — seemingly complex but utterly fundamental, wisdom hard-won, that makes “Rebent Sinner” a book you need to read.