from “Making Love with the Land”
Joshua Whitehead | Making Love with the Land: Essays | University of Minnesota Press | 2022 | 232 Pages
Me, the Joshua Tree
You and I share a secret place in Calgary, the Inglewood irrigation canal that is a few kilometres from our home. I show you this place one day when we go for a walk, tell you how I would run through the dog park and down along the canal while exercising, often stopping to wade my hands through the cold waters. In turn, you show me a place beyond the canal, where the railroads cut across Bow sîpîy (1).
After the annihilation leading to the death of our relationship has begun, we walk down to the canal after a weekend of stewing in depression. It’s a beautiful Sunday; pîsim (2) is there above us, massaging our shoulders until they brown. As we stride along a path, I stop and ask, “Do you hear that?” and you say, “It must be from the golf course nearby.” I have stopped us because I hear voices, almost from beneath, as if they were in the catacombs of the canal—a whimpering, maybe; an exultation? What are the trees whispering to us in this moment, what of the water, what of the rocks? We continue on this path you have walked many times, a handful of them to escape me after I have hurt you through words weaponized, and you take me to the clearing.
As we continue through the clearing, we come across a jutting of land and openness of water: Bow sîpiy is here, greets us through its steady rocking. Sometimes a wave is a wave. There are duck feathers strewn about, a carcass, and a firepit here on this little outcrop of land that believes it is a cliff. You say, “Someone has been here, caught a duck looks like,” and I think, “I’m so happy they used everything.”
We sit on the edge smoking cigarettes. You skip rocks across the lake, and I run my hands through the water, sift my fingers through silt. This whole journey reminds me of the film Stand by Me, which is one of my favourites; I feel like I am Gordie Lachance, and here you are Chris Chambers. In this vignette I play in my head, I imagine us having started that fire, roasted that duck, slept here in the tall grasses, let sîpiy sing us to sleep. I’ll ask, “Do you think I’m weird?” and you’ll say, “Definitely, but so what? Everybody’s weird.” And in that moment my belly will bloom because this is a moment I have craved since I was a child, latched on to the ghost of Lachance; I live through the intimacy I share with characters whose lives I have imagined. We’ll talk into the night, that kind of talk that seems important until, as Lachance narrates, you discover girls. Of course, we have discovered girls—but in this moment, we are also just two queer boys discovering one another, and the landscape around us, and how our bodies are now braids separated, culled for the smudging. How easy is intimacy, honesty, truth, when imagined in a dream or when we are apart? How we grind into one another, spark flints for the fire we let die, and feast through the blaze we create now, here, in this moment, as individuals. In this vignette, I hear you say—by which I mean I hear myself say—“I wish that I could go someplace where nobody knows me.” We have come here to see a body—which doesn’t exist, because this is a vignette; but we have come nonetheless. And so what I offer up is bodies in multiplicity: the river body, the earthen body, a pocket of air, a breast of rock, bicep of branch, me, you, us. We witness death here too, though in a different fashion from the film, more holistic than nihilistic, that continuum where death kisses birth—and is there even a concept such as division?
I come back into myself, having lived a full life in the briefest of moments while that rock skipped across the lake and your forehead pores swelled so much they began to sweat and your index finger, with its scythe-shaped scar, uncurled from the hook you bent it into—you and me, we have our own sense of time.
You smile at me, I giggle back, and we sit side by side. Across the river, a man fly-fishes. We watch him catch a fish and then leave, climbing back up the hill on the other side. There, a cyclist passes by, singing along to a song he intimately knows. sîsîp (3), niska (4), and ayîk (5) come to visit us as we sit together, kneecaps buckling, maybe even aching to hold one another, and pîsim beats time into our backs, which form continents of sweat. kâhkâkiwak (6) land in the middle of sîpiy, which is disturbed by the leg of a railway. There atop the railings they meet, cawing at one another, feathers extended into hands, greetings; they talk with one another, and we listen, smiling. What are these kâhkâkiwak talking about? Boisterously, they chat as if at a reunion or a send-off—and what’s the difference anyway? We sit silently, witnessing askiy (7) talk all around us, a pair of ravens saying, “I love you,” in a language not our own—yet maybe also one we know intimately? Raven is a sign, I think; these ones are here to demonstrate the ravenous appetite of finality.
Finality is a horrendous word; it eats, you know? It has teeth. I thought and still think of finality a lot, especially during that final weekend when we decided to sever and then spent every waking moment together healing. Finality—as severity—is a word that I need to erase from my vocabulary. It’s too linear, too colonial. We, of course, as Indigenous peoples, know that finality is simply an opening into continuity. But during that weekend I plagued myself with the word, I swallowed it whole and squawked up a stomachful of knots—meaning, there were continuums there too. My body rejects finality as an end-stop; my own cells fight against this invasion.
It’s funny, though, how mourning changes language, the grammar of being. Finality transforms morphologies into a series of becomings and grievings—but in that becoming I find how language wraps around wounds like a suture, and I am a compressor pounding meaning into broken chains. The first time I heard you call me Joshua in the aftermath, my dorsal was spliced in half and I was kinêpik (8) again, tonguing the decadence of a splitting letter: it was like watching how an A halves into a broken ladder, and suddenly I was trapped in the abyss of signs. Then I too worked up the effort to transform language: I called you by your name, or friend, and as much as it wounded me to do so, this act told me that transformation always begins with the tongue, that wonderful glossia. When I reminisce about you, I laugh, throwing my tongue into the air as if it were a newborn—and I find a hinterland of thrush growing there upon it. The biosphere, askîy, finds me here too, grows upon my buds: I taste snakeroot, rainwater, chokecherries, the taste of growth is nêhiyâwewin. This thrush, bush, forest-tongue, divides into treaties, a treatise with no subject, and my mouth becomes a geography of grammar. Nothing will ever be the same again, I think. Normal will have to be redefined; grammar, that slick tool, that scaffold, will have to die and lilt into a new language.
•
In what ways is a manuscript an exhibit? In what ways are these words animate? Maybe you understand these pages as an artifact, sacred words from an NDN; or maybe you read me as a sex worker of language, one who strips and fucks the page and spills himself all over it? Do you clone me? Do you seed me? Do you let narrative germinate? Do you shake the page and expect me to fall out? How do you read me? How do you envision me? Maybe I say I am a broken web, blown into singularity from a wind that knows no bounds? Maybe I say I am sand in an hourglass and you are peeking into granularity? What I will tell you is that this specific chain of letters, spaces, commas, punctuation marks, and white space is in fact an animate being. Through it, you survey my body, my memory, my spirits, my heart, my emotions. You, in this moment, own me, or think you do, even as I escape through the loophole of an end-stop, that damning boulder, that prick of ink that bleeds the skin.
•
Now you and I are in Nanaimo, BC, and I am visiting your temporary home. We are in a “sketchy” part of town, as you call it, but it feels familiar—as if poverty has a universal look across Turtle Island: the same siding, the same windows looking like eyes, colours, doors, roofing. Your bed is on the floor, your living room is beautifully nostalgic for the prairies, your patio is littered with cigarettes but well cared for. I crossed on a ferry just to meet you here, dolphins and orca greeting this lonely NDN far from his homeland. The wind salts my face, my pores clog, and I shine in the daylight as my hair tries to free itself from its braids.
I shower while you’re at work. Waiting for you to come back to this place you call home, I inspect the inventory of your identities. Smell is such a powerful tool of memory—I pick up your soap and huff before I use it. There are little whiskers attached to it, curlicues; even your body hair spells out stories to me. I bask in the scent of your armpits, your jawline, the way the delicate skin on the bridge of your nose has spread its oils here. I lather myself with your shampoo, heavily so, and I scrub the scalp clean of its dandruff. I rinse myself, dry my hair, and smell the scent of the towel afterwards. I linger like a ghost in the reeds of the fabric, taking it all in, because this is the first time I’ve seen you in the months since your move and I am a nostalgic person.
When you get home, you offer to show me around the town. We visit the docks, stroll through the downtown, sand and salt water pecking our faces. You take me through a path in Bowen Park, show me the totem poles that have fallen down and are returning to the foliage of their mother’s skin. Here: bear, frog, orca, eagle lie side by side, not in a tomb or a finality, but as elders turned newborn waiting to be birthed again into the soil from the roots of saplings turning into children once again. Later we decide to eat dinner, and you take me to the Oxy, a lovely little pub that turns into a karaoke bar later in the evening. We sit in the corner, order a pint each, and sip, massaging the link that is between us, lovers reunited over long distances. A cavalcade of older women jaunt in. One has recently undergone a divorce, and she asks us if we’re together. When we muster up the courage to say yes, she eyes us more closely: we might be queers who can navigate her through her breakup. Later, someone sings “Love Shack,” and suddenly the whole bar is up and dancing. You and I join the crowd of shimmying folks, across from one another, smiles wide as bucket handles. Your hair bounces when you hop, your hair again a curlicue with those beautiful curls that look like tendrils or foliage, and I am the NDN artifact, a totem pole, melding into them, rotting into nutrient. When the song ends, you go up to speak to the DJ while I sit with another round of beer for us. Then I see you standing alone in the middle of the dance floor, your eyes attached to mine. A song comes on: the twang of country and the familiar banjo of Dolly Parton. You sing “Joshua” to me, and I imagine myself as the isolated, mean, vicious man living alone in a shack with a black dog, while you, as the bouncy-haired Dolly, arrive just in time to find me pondering pandemonium.
I have come here just to meet you.
(1) river
(2) sun
(3) duck
(4) goose
(5) frog
(6) ravens
(7) the land
(8) snake
Excerpted from Making Love with the Land: Essays by Joshua Whitehead. Published in the U.S. by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2022 by Joshua Whitehead. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.