{"id":477906,"date":"2022-07-25T18:22:20","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T15:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/joshua-whitehead-takes-on-canlit\/"},"modified":"2022-07-25T18:22:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-25T15:22:20","slug":"joshua-whitehead-takes-on-canlit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/joshua-whitehead-takes-on-canlit\/","title":{"rendered":"#Joshua Whitehead takes on CanLit"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_84 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a2e5b48f05ba\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a2e5b48f05ba\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-1'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/joshua-whitehead-takes-on-canlit\/#%E2%80%9CJoshua_Whitehead_takes_on_CanLit%E2%80%9D\" >&#8220;Joshua Whitehead takes on CanLit&#8221;<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h1><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"%E2%80%9CJoshua_Whitehead_takes_on_CanLit%E2%80%9D\"><\/span>&#8220;Joshua Whitehead takes on CanLit&#8221;<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h1>\n<div>\n                                                                        It has been an intense five years for Joshua Whitehead, marked by both personal loss and remarkable literary achievement. Since 2017, the Oji-Cree writer has published the poetry collection <em>full-metal indigiqueer<\/em> and the novel <em>Jonny <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">App<\/a>leseed<\/em>, winner of both the 2019 Lambda prize for gay fiction and Canada Reads 2021. He\u2019s also experienced the end of a long-term relationship, deaths in his family and, of course, the pandemic. Now 33 and a newly minted assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary, Whitehead has come out on the other side and continued his run of creative brilliance with <em>Making Love With the Land<\/em>, a collection of linked essays set for an August 23 release.<\/p>\n<p><em>Making Love<\/em> defies categorization, with elements of manifesto, memoir, apologia, literary theory, experimental writing and interior conversation colliding on almost every page. Throughout the book, Whitehead resists the strictures of Western genre and what he sees as the intrusive demands of readership and <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">media<\/a>. Equally striking is an effect he never set out to achieve: the whole of <em>Making Love<\/em>\u2019s extraordinary parts comprise a bookend companion to Margaret Atwood\u2019s 1972 classic <em>Survival<\/em>, the best-known and most influential book about literature in Canada ever published. Where <em>Survival<\/em> argued that Canadian writing was defined by settlers\u2019 antagonistic response to this country\u2019s harsh topography and climate, <em>Making Love<\/em> suggests that what shapes Indigenous literature is a much more mutually sustaining relationship with the land.<\/p>\n<p>A child of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, Whitehead was raised in the city of Selkirk, the son of a trucker father and a mother who worked at a shelter for Indigenous women. Growing up and attending school in mostly white Selkirk, Whitehead would beeline almost daily to the local library. He wasn\u2019t there for the books, much as he liked to read, but for the internet access that allowed him to join online role-playing <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/game\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"7\" title=\"Game\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">game<\/a>s and create digital personas. In his <em>Making Love<\/em> essay \u201cThe Year in Video Gaming,\u201d Whitehead writes about his avatar, Zoa, in the game Lineage II, a character who later gave birth to the protagonist of the poems in <em>full-metal indigiqueer<\/em>. Zoa\u2014\u201ca muscle queen with a red mohawk\u201d\u2014enabled Whitehead to ignore a body the world around him didn\u2019t value: \u201cI was queer, Indigenous and fat,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>He had another foot in Peguis, spending the better part of his summers there with his maternal grandmother and cousins of his own age. \u201cMy grandmother and aunties would sit around a table, drinking Red Rose tea and eating bannock, telling stories about snakes\u2014you\u2019ve got to visit Narcisse Snake Dens during mating season, it\u2019s a wild sight\u2014or about certain people they slept with at the bingo hall,\u201d Whitehead says. \u201cSometimes it was horrific and sometimes it was fantastical and sometimes someone saw a UFO or dreamed of a thunderbird.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1238061\" style=\"width: 730px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-sizes=\"auto\" class=\"wp-image-1238061 size-featured-image-square lazyload\" src=\"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Josh2019_60-720x720.jpg\" alt=\"In 2010, Whitehead was a university dropout working at Subway. Today he has a Ph.D. and a post as an assistant prof at the University of Calgary.\" width=\"720\" height=\"720\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">In 2010, Whitehead was a university dropout working at Subway. Today he has a Ph.D. and a post as an assistant prof at the University of Calgary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Whitehead himself was a born storyteller\u2014his parents still keep a box of stories and poems he told them. \u201cThey\u2019re very secretive about it. I\u2019m always trying to find it,\u201d he says. He describes himself as a muckatoon, using a Cree term he defines as meaning \u201cunabashedly verbose.\u201d But his Cree remained rudimentary through his youth, and he was drawn to the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. \u201cI was trained, like we all are, really, to write white,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>After graduating high school, Whitehead attended the University of Winnipeg, majoring in psychology. By 2010, he had dropped out and was working the night shift at Subway. (\u201cI was basically paid to read and eat subs,\u201d he fondly recalls.) But he soon grew restless. He returned to the University of Winnipeg and enrolled in a course dedicated to Toni Morrison. \u201cWe read <em>Beloved<\/em> first, and everything kind of clicked in my brain,\u201d he says. \u201cI will always credit Toni Morrison, all of her work\u2014the vernacular use, the morality, the use of temporality to mix past, present and future\u2014as teaching me how to not write white.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In 2017, he began studying for his Ph.D. at the University of Calgary, where his department required a second-language credit, which presented a conflict\u2014and an opportunity. \u201cI refused to have another colonial tongue,\u201d Whitehead says. He enrolled in a Cree course at the university, his first and only formal one. Now he tries to practise every day and describes the My Cree app on his phone as one of his best friends. \u201cI grew up listening to a mix of Cree and Anishinaabe. There\u2019s quite a bit of crossover between them, with small inflection changes. Learning unlocks a lot of memories from childhood. Even the alphabet felt like it was lying dormant in me.\u201d His <em>full-metal<\/em> poem \u201cmihkokwaniy\u201d is about his paternal grandmother Rose Whitehead\u2019s 1962 murder; the title means \u201crose\u201d in Cree. Some of its most plangent lines intertwine personal tragedy and cultural genocide: \u201cwhat would life have been like \/ if you had lived beyond 35? \/ would i be able to speak cree \/ without having to google translate \/ this for you?\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>MORE:\u00a0What do you do when your mother is Miriam Toews?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Whitehead looked outside of contemporary Western terminology for the best way to express his sexual identity. Though others saw him, rightly enough in his opinion, as a gay fem cis man, he did not find a true fit with these identifiers. \u201c\u2009\u2018Gay\u2019 was too white. It was too classed. It was able-bodied,\u201d he says. \u201cYou look at Pride festivals\u2014which I do completely understand and I do partake in\u2014but they\u2019re just slashed by whiteness, slashed by masculinity. The participants are dancing on the back of these banks that are actively putting pipelines through Indigenous communities.\u201d He tried out being \u201cqueer,\u201d which was better because it was more politically radical, but in the end, it didn\u2019t have the ancestral credibility he was seeking. The iconic 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, which are widely considered the birth pangs of contemporary gay liberation, are only minutes in the past, Whitehead says, compared to the long history of thinking about gender and sexuality and community among Indigenous people. In \u201ctwo-spirit,\u201d which reflects these concepts, Whitehead found the language he needed. He also applies Indigiqueer, a more sexualized and Westernized term, to himself.<\/p>\n<p>Whitehead\u2019s evolving ideas about language and literature, along with developments in his life\u2014including debilitating bouts of insomnia and anxiety\u2014are all visible in <em>Making Love<\/em>. But for sheer cerebral and emotional rewiring, little matched his 2018 promotional tour for <em>Jonny Appleseed<\/em>. The novel tells the story of a two-spirit Indigiqueer youth who leaves his Manitoba reserve and becomes a cybersex worker in Winnipeg. Whitehead allows that he and Jonny are \u201cembryonically tied,\u201d but he is adamant that the character is not him.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, while touring for the book, Whitehead was often addressed as \u201cJonny\u201d by interviewers. (\u201cI should have given him a different consonant,\u201d he says.) Sometimes they probed for revelations of real-life trauma that could explain the Jonny\u2019s experience. Whitehead calls this \u201cextractive questioning\u201d\u2014focusing more on biography than text. As a novice writer who was eager to please, Whitehead automatically responded to these questions, often to his regret. After he answered a journalist\u2019s question about the possible influence of his paternal grandmother\u2019s murder on Jonny Appleseed, Whitehead was racked by grief and anxiety. He reeled around downtown Toronto until he found himself in the Eaton Centre, sitting in the food court, sobbing uncontrollably.<\/p>\n<p>The tour was a lesson in the quid pro quo of a writer\u2019s life in a market economy. Whitehead describes author and book as being laid out on a slab, open to what he flatly calls an autopsy. \u201cIt happened with any type of reporting or Q&amp;A or book signing: \u2018Tell me something real about your life. What limbs have you lost? What pain have you experienced that will legitimize this book for me?\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All authors are open to that kind of metaphorical autopsy, but BIPOC authors far more so, and\u2014in Canada at least\u2014Indigenous ones most of all, even when their forensic dissectors are sympathetic readers. Whitehead points to what he calls the non-Indigenous \u201cstarving hunger\u201d for residential school trauma narratives. \u201cI definitely have the utmost respect for residential school survivors, and I think their stories should be told,\u201d he says. \u201cBut Indigenous writers have so much more to give. I don\u2019t want residential school stories to be the synecdoche for Indigenous writing.\u201d<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-sizes=\"auto\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1238358 lazyload\" src=\"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Untitled-design.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"4034\" height=\"2000\"\/><br \/>\nFor a writer repelled by the idea of having to reveal all to the world, adopting a universal second-person in Making Love was an effective way of presenting an authorial persona rather than a real and vulnerable person. \u201cI love, love the pronoun \u2018you.\u2019 I began using it in the essays to address ex-partners, aggressors in my life, and some very specific writers and audience members at festivals. Just levelling the playing field,\u201d says Whitehead.<\/p>\n<p>Cree also bolstered his defences. It doesn\u2019t have genders, which is liberating for a two-spirit writer, and it animates things like rocks, mountains and waters. This led Whitehead to think about animating his experiences of insomnia and anxiety, seeing them as symbiotes that bring benefit along with their damage. Insomnia is a tool of the writerly trade, for example, and anxiety an ancestral warning to stop what he is doing. Even rendered in the Roman alphabet, Cree words like nicimos (lover), which readers can translate online with relative ease, offered Whitehead some protective distance from the text.<\/p>\n<p>So did Cree syllabics, the building blocks of its written form. \u201cA Geography of Queer Woundings,\u201d one of the book\u2019s more visceral personal essays, opens with a bureaucratic-sounding list of pain: \u201cLoss, mourning, sexual assault, abandonment, colonial violence, imperialism, state-sponsored genocide\u2014all of which, for me, normalizes an absurd fact of Indigenous life: it hurts to live.\u201d The essay is also full of syllabics, making it nearly impossible to read for those who don\u2019t know the Cree alphabet. That is on purpose. \u201cTo remove myself from the autopsy table,\u201d Whitehead says, \u201cI had to ghost myself into Cree.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Whitehead has been straddling borders his whole life. That experience is what he wants to write about, and on his own terms. \u201cFrom an Indigenous perspective, he\u2019s asking you as a reader to make incredible leaps, between languages, between experiences, between histories,\u201d says Lynn Henry, Whitehead\u2019s editor at Knopf. \u201cHe is not only breaking down genre, but breaking down language itself\u2014putting Indigenous words alongside English words and allowing them to disrupt each other.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For all its subtly expressed thought, intense personal detail and unconventional storytelling, for all Whitehead\u2019s success in portraying himself as an indefinable \u201cmirage in the middle space between languages,\u201d what makes his new book so compelling is the way it matches up with Atwood\u2019s Survival. The two books can seem like polar opposites\u2014one the settler colonial tradition, the other the Indigenous\u2014right down to their titles. But they share profound similarities, too. They speak for literature that almost always carries a note of \u201cwe are still here,\u201d and make the case that the stories and writing they describe are at once distinct and universal. That is the core of Whitehead\u2019s new book. It makes plain that Indigenous literature arises from very different ways of thinking, feeling and living but that it\u2019s also as Canadian as Atwood and Munro, and as universal in its meaning and importance.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1238359\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-sizes=\"auto\" class=\"wp-image-1238359 size-featured-image-portrait lazyload\" src=\"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/makinglove-300x400.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"400\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Making Love With the Land<\/em>, Knopf, 2022<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><em>This article appears in print in the\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/magazine.macleans.ca\/\">August 2022<\/a>\u00a0issue of<\/em>\u00a0Maclean\u2019s\u00a0<em>magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/secure.macleans.ca\/loc\/MME\/head_subscribe\">here<\/a>,\u00a0or buy the issue online\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"c-link\" tabindex=\"-1\" href=\"https:\/\/canadianmags.ca\/products\/macleans-august-2022\" data-stringify-link=\"http:\/\/canadianmags.ca\/products\/copy-of-macleans-single-issue\" data-sk=\"tooltip_parent\" data-remove-tab-index=\"true\">here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p><script async defer crossorigin=\"anonymous\" src=\"https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/sdk.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. 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Since 2017, the Oji-Cree writer has published the poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer and the novel Jonny Appleseed, winner of both the 2019 Lambda prize for gay fiction and Canada Reads 2021&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":477907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Josh2019_73-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17209,122401,29035,83078],"class_list":["post-477906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-books","tag-canlit","tag-indigenous","tag-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}