culture
IFOA 2011: Boyden, Groulx, Maracle, and Taylor
Celebrated Native-Canadian authors set scenes at IFOA.
Left to right: Boyden, Groulx, Maracle, and Taylor; photos courtesy of IFOA.
It’s easy to group authors Joseph Boyden, David A. Groulx, Lee Maracle, and Drew Hayden Taylor together as core contributors to an Aboriginal-Canadian literary canon, but upon being presented with samples of their work in succession, one realizes that they they have something more in common: these writers deal in pictures.
Possibly the most well-known of the foursome—thanks to his 2008 Giller-winning novel, Through Black Spruce—Boyden opened Wednesday night’s IFOA event with a reading of Turtle Island, a short story so jarring and evocative that it was difficult not to tremble at it, to alternately giggle and weep at its startling emotional immediacy. “It’s a true story,” Boyden informed the audience after one particularly great line about bestowing the middle name “Buick” upon a firstborn son.
Poet Groulx, who comes from the uranium-scarred community of Elliot Lake, followed Boyden with a reading of poems—or, to be precise, deadpan deliveries of telling pop-cultural subversions. “John Wayne is trying to kill me,” opened one. “He has a Winchester on his hip. Custer is hiding under my bed with a sabre in his hand. He’ll cut me to pieces if I open my eyes. I haven’t slept in years.” The crowd chuckled with some trepidation, because, as Groulx’s poems demonstrate, that old comedic formula of tragedy plus time only sort of holds in the ongoing saga of bungled Native-Canadian relations.
Indeed, shadows of trauma curtained the backdrop of each of the author’s readings. In one poem, author Lee Maracle delivered a visceral love scene that was equal parts empathy and gripping, blushworthy sensuality. She says, by way of explanation after her readings are done, “In my language, we say, ‘You are my sweet mountain air…’ it’s the only way we have to say, ‘I love you.'”
Drew Hayden Taylor, the prolific journalist-playwright-documentarian-novelist, closed the evening with a bit of satire, a well-placed digestif following Maracle’s heavy-breathing heart-tugger of a reading. His appropriation of “Indian characters written by white people”—Disney’s Pocahontas, The Lone Ranger’s Tonto, and Twain’s Injun Joe among them—sent the audience into peals of semi-embarrassed laughter. “Me tired of being second banana,” says Taylor’s Tonto. “Me want to wear mask. Just once!”
The common thread among the works of these authors is a sense of tremendous urgency, a voicing of historically quietened perspective through striking, yet accessible, images. But, English lit analysis aside, these are a painterly crew of Canadian writers, and we are lucky to have them.