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Books Culture

Joshua Whitehead creates his ideal image of queer Indigeneity

JOSHUA WHITEHEAD with guests GWEN BENAWAY and ALICIA ELLIOTT at the Native Canadian Centre (16 Spadina), Tuesday (December 11). 7 pm. Free. anotherstory.ca.


Less than a year after his poetry collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer dazzled poetry lovers, Joshua Whitehead’s debut novel, Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95), landed on the long list for the 2018 Giller Prize. The book follows protagonist Jonny as he navigates life between the rez and the city. Showing a surprising wisdom, Jonny knows himself better than most young adults, and adjusts himself to move between different spaces safely.

The title – taken from a Christian song – refers to a character ripe with racism and colonial authority. With a lot of humour, Whitehead has written a fantastic novel about pain, reclamation, family and being Two-Spirit while bearing the weight of 151 years of Indigenous genocide.

Ahead of his long-overdue Toronto book launch, I caught up with author to talk about his breakout novel and his favourite current Indigenous literature.

The way you’ve written Jonny is remarkable. He transitions between many facets of life quite smoothly – city to rez, sex worker to family guy, proud queer to hidden and protective of himself and his friend/lover, Tias. He is both sensitive and rational. Did you write him this way intuitively or intentionally?

Jonny’s characterization as whole – though I would call him a fractured whole – came from both intuition and intention. I wanted to portray a character who was confident in their traumas, who didn’t shy away from them, and who, in fact, uses them to navigate the world. His memories are sometimes his weapons he is accountable to pain like he is to his kokum [grandmother] – they inform who he is. And I wanted to write in a vein of verisimilitude with urban Indigeneity in Winnipeg. I drew upon the slang we use – which I read as dormant Indigenous languages coded in compounds – and our humour to fully flesh him out. His traumas don’t entirely define him – there is majesty in his wreckage.

Is Jonny an idealized or realistic portrayal?

Again, both. I definitely drew from real lived experiences to characterize him – though which ones I will not say. But Jonny is also the ideal image, for me, of Two-Spirit, queer Indigeneity in the now. I call Jonny the better bits of me: that haughty salvage, all beatific and glittering in the dim light of hope. For me, he is the ideal real.

I found your use of satire disarming. It softened the intensity of Jonny’s experiences. Did you do this to make some subjects easier for readers to digest?

Humour, as Jonny notes, is the application of a salve to a bursting wound – sometimes it upsets whiteness. Indigeneity, at least my Indigeneity [Ojibwe-nêhiyâw], deploys humour in equal measure with trauma. Humour saves, humour relinquishes, humour dreams. Perhaps it may seem that it’s there to act as a buffer, but I think Jonny invites readers to experience the lives within narrative, asks you to enter his body and feel his breadth and humour is an integral part of that. There are definite elements where Jonny uses satire to bolster himself, either by demonstrating his agency by quoting Hemingway in a hallway after a breakup or musing on the inadequacy of Robert Frost when lost in the woods.

What’s your next project?

I’m currently working on a book entitled Making Love With The Land, which braids together form and genre. The manuscript ruminates on the ways in which the land itself houses Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous stories in its sediments – I want to unearth some of them. Through that I discuss issues of queerness, mental health, mourning, futurisms, childhood and time.

Which authors are you excited about right now?

I am currently obsessed with Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries. It is gorgeous and generous in its honesty. I am excited about Gwen Benaway’s Holy Wild, Arielle Twist’s upcoming Disintegrate/Disassociate, Alicia Elliott’s forthcoming A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, and Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth. Indigenous literature is brimming right now and my belly is full of story.

@checkoutrach

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