Volume 4, No. 6: Stitching Connection in the Wilderness
On the possibilities of radical collaboration
Greetings, book and treat people! Thank you so much to everyone who reached out with kind words, encouragement, and excitement about last week’s newsletter. It means a lot to me that hearing about my creative practice resonated with so many of you.
I’m working (always) on staying flexible and honoring my limits. This week I have one (just one!) book review for you, and that’s it. It’s a wonderful book, and it’s free to download from the Athabasca University Press! I read it with the Queer Your Year book club, which is ongoing and wonderful—come join us!
A few other things:
I made my first recipe from Yossy Arefi’s new(ish) cookbook, Snacking Bakes: lemon poppy seed cake. I used oranges instead because that’s what I had and wow was it perfect.
A dear friend and avid newsletter reader (hi Cheryl!) told me about the Queer Liberation Library back in December. It’s incredible! It also just went viral on TikTok. They’ve gone from 4000 members to 30,000 members in the last week. You should absolutely join, but you should also consider donating, if you can.
A Thousand Eulogies Are Exported to the Comma by Nicki Kattoura (Lit Hub) is a gutting read that’s worth your time.
The Book
Indigiqueerness by Joshua Whitehead, with Angie Abdou (Nonfiction, 2023)
This is a short but beautifully dense book about language, storytelling, grief, making art, reading, and so much more. It’s a mix of interview questions and responses, photo collages in both black and white and color, and excerpts from Whitehead’s writing and from other writers. The structure is wonderfully queer, open, and collaborative—it feels like getting to actively witness Whitehead thinking about different ways of making a book outside of and beyond genre. Even though it’s short, it’s expansive, full of portals and doorways leading the reader to places outside of the book.
I couldn’t stop thinking about collaboration as I was reading this. On the surface, the book is a collaboration—an interview. Whitehead also talks about his characters as if they’re his collaborators. He writes about how long characters like Jonny (from Jonny Appleseed) have been with him, and the different ways they appear in his work. There’s a brilliant passage where he discusses Jonny as an avatar for grief—a being who digests and transforms his own pain.
He also writes a lot about Cree understandings of aliveness, and how the idea of animation is deeply central to Cree worldviews:
Animations are the backbone to nêhiyawêwin (or Cree) as we don't have genders. We instead animate things including rocks, sky, mountains, earth, the non-human, and in animating them we are in relation. What I mean here is, I animate my kin/relations, and listen to them, that's where stories begin.
This process he’s describing is a collaboration—between him and his characters, as well as his kin, ancestors, land, dreams—that challenges and upends the narrow visions of collaboration that dominate white/western discourse about art.
Everything he has to say about language also brought me right back to collaboration. He doesn’t doesn’t translate Cree words because he wants non-Cree readers to do some work. So many white readers talk about getting lost in texts full of untranslated language, where they are not the “expected reader” (Elaine Castillo). But refusing to be legible (to the white/straight/cis/etc. world) is actually an invitation for collaboration. If the book sits outside of your knowledge and experience, you’re being invited in as collaborator instead of a passive observer. What a gift.
I like books that give these insights or language revitalization without explaining. Then when readers get it, it's an Easter egg. It's validating. It's fun to put the work on the reader. Readers don't get unbridled access to this character's life; if they want to maintain this relationship while reading, they have to do some of the work. Maybe they even have to get the Cree Dictionary. Or maybe they have to listen to a song. Do some research. Engage. Reading is a very collaborative endeavor.
Once I started thinking about reading as a collaborative process, a process in flux, the book came alive for me in a new way. It took me through so many doors to so many beloved texts. Whitehead’s thoughts on memoir, publishing, writing as a way to metabolize grief, and art as an intimate and communal practice led me to Body Work by Melissa Febos. His insight into pop culture references in Jonny Appleseed and his use of them as a way to ground Indigenous characters in the present led me to Anthony Veasna So’s Songs On Endless Repeat. His way of blending creative and academic work, theory and poetry, led me to—of course—A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt. The mixed-media structure led me to The Unfortunates by J. K. Chukwu, and the shared histories of resistance and creativity among Black and Indigenous peoples.
Since I read this with the Queer Your Year book club, everyone else’s experiences of it colored my own. Someone mentioned how often Whitehead uses digestion imagery, and so I started thinking more deeply about eating and digestion and medicine.
I take it as my job to eat these theories—eat gender theory and queer theory and decolonial theory and post-colonial theory - and dissolve it all in my belly and spew it onto the page as fiction and poetry and nonfiction.
Another reader shared her observations on the similarities between Cree and her own ancestral Indigenous language, and that got me thinking about all the collaborations present in this book (and everywhere) that I can’t even see. There is nothing in this book that isn’t a collaborative process. Whitehead comes back to this idea over and over again in so many different ways.
But I never write in a vacuum. Everything I've crafted and made has been a whirlwind of community and folks and friends and lovers and family. I kind of write as an animated avatar. A lot of my material comes from listening fiercely to those around me and witnessing that which is discarded or not seen.
We read this book for the anti-colonial prompt. For me, it illuminates one of the fundamental violences of white western culture: our resistance to collaboration. This insistence on non-porous boundaries, on being able to claim something as yours alone, on provenance. Whose book is this? Of course it’s Whitehead’s book. But who does he belong to? And when I read it—in curiosity, in work, when I follow its portal—then it begins to belong, also, to me. And who do I belong to?
I see everyone defying the expectations of border, whether it's border of province or territory or nation, but also the borders of genre or the borders of form.
Collaboration is anti-colonial. Collaboration—a weaving, a joint making of song, a blending and merging and making anew between creatures and lands and peoples—is not possible in a colonial framework. It’s what colonialism destroys. Part of my work, then, part of the work of all settlers, is to open ourselves back up to collaboration. To heal and remake the ancestral legacies of dominance and subjugation that we carry in our bodies. To utterly reject every form of hierarchy and appropriation, which sometimes masquerade as fake collaboration. To humble ourselves to the wild and beautiful possibilities of truly radical collaboration.
What does Two-Spirit mean? I know. And I don't know. The body remembers, the blood knows, it has a memory like water does. But it's also untranslatable and unknowable in English translations as well as, although not all nor always, contemporary understandings of sexualities. To animate 2S like a necromancer to fit cleanly and neatly in the present is a violent reanimating of our ancestors (see: the consistent revival of We'wha during June Pride and Indigenous History months). The language though, not so much, because language never dies, but a body does, a human does—we can reanimate the language, bring it back, but it can't be preserved in temporal amber. It needs to mutate and change. Hence Indigiqueer. Hence, not knowing and knowing. That's the whole damn point to me. That's the whole futuristic key of Indigenous sexual, and by relation, environmental sovereignty because to be undefinable is to be unknowable to colonial powers—that's radical freedom.
And Beauty
As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: Will I ever get tried of watching my pup bound along the ridge? I will not.
Catch you next week, bookish friends!