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The Teaching Rocks

The Teaching Rocks

A review of Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Petropaths” in Take Us To Your Chief (Douglas &McIntyre, 2016)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Petropaths” is a tale of the ongoing nature of colonial violence, centred on the exploration of the way that this continued assault has created a generation of indigenous youth who are, as he suggests “stuck between the past and the future”. He points out a need for youth to connect to their past and to create a future, something that colonialism has sought to deny indigenous peoples by erasing the past and presenting imagery of a white future. It is significant that Hayden Taylor uses science fiction as a genre of critique when exploring the issue of most science fictional texts presenting a very white future that portrays an absence of indigenous people. Hayden Taylor uses science fiction and a time-travel narrative to explore the idea of temporal uncertainty, but also calls attention to the problematic way that indigenous people are portrayed in most time travel narratives.

Hayden Taylor centralizes elders in “Petropaths”, pointing out their role in providing educational opportunities for youth that ground them in the ongoing practice of engaging with teachings. The narrator, an elder, explains to his grandson along with the other elders that “he need to know who he was, where he came from and what his path was”. Elders in this tale are situated not only as guardians of the past (as they are in many narratives that feature ageing), but also as guides to the future, having a role that subtends time.

“Petropaths” is a tale about petroglyphs, sacred carvings in rock, and Hayden Taylor situates these rocks as a text that extends through time, connecting the person exploring the texts to the past when they were created, to their presence now, and to the future they will survive into. Hayden Taylor is from Curve Lake First Nation whose territory extends to the petroglyphs frequently called the “Peterborough Petroglyphs”, and often acknowledged as “The Teaching Rocks” by Anishnaabe people. Teaching is central to this tale and the relationship between Hayden Taylor himself and “the teaching rocks” underscores the role of the petroglyphs in his story as storytellers and teachers themselves.

Hayden Taylor illustrates the role of conversation that the petrogyphs represent in his tale when he says “It took me a while to understand these were musings and dreams of our ancestors, the thoughts and history of our people carved into Mother Earth for us to see.” These are not static background images in his tale, but, rather, are centred and engaged in a conversation with the characters. He describes these stones as teaching “a lot more than one of those degrees at university”. These stones are not static, rather they “tell their own story their own way… like a whisper in the wind…. Like it was the Earth telling us a story… or, more accurately… like it was a song waiting to be sung”. The stones are not static background figures, but, rather they are storytellers and teachers, engaged in a process of conversation.

The imagery of stone is not isolated to the petrogyphs, but is also evident in the imagery that Duane’s grandfather ascribes to his dissociation from his emotions. He discusses “the wall he had spent years building, emotional brick by emotional brick”, paralleling and yet also contrasting the petroglyphs, which the story situates as a wall. Yet, although both are walls, the petroglyphs are a living, changing text that speaks and shifts for Duane, and may have the power to disrupt the static wall he has constructed for himself.

“Petropaths” is a story that acknowledges the importance of learning and, especially learning through storytelling. This learning is not individualistic, but, rather, it exists in conversation with petroglyphs, the land, animals, and community elders. It’s a story about taking the time to listen to others, but also to listen to oneself. This community of teachers engaging in storytelling is part of the process of beginning to heal Duane from the colonial violence that he has experienced. Storytelling is not just something that Duane hears, but, rather, Hayden Taylor has him engage in storytelling, adding his stories to others while also becoming part of the story. The past is not something fixed or static in Hayden Taylor’s tale, rather it is something that shifts and changes while bringing new voices into it. Duane’s time travel is part of this conversation with storytelling and his role in becoming part of the story. He is an active participation in the past and Hayden Taylor uses this active participation to illustrate that history is not passive, but, rather, that we are always in conversation with the past and the stories told about the past. As Duane says “History isn’t in books anymore. We can walk through it.”

To discover more about Take Us to Your Chief, visit http://www.drewhaydentaylor.com/books/take-us-to-your-chief/

To find out more about Drew Hayden Taylor, visit http://www.drewhaydentaylor.com

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Intertextual

Intertextual

A review of Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer: Age of Doom Part 1 (Dark Horse, 2019)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Throughout the Black Hammer series, Jeff Lemire has been experimenting with intertextuality, playing with his knowledge of Golden Age comics while adding modern comic sensibilities and skepticism about the genre. In Black Hammer: Age of Doom, Lemire’s superheroes, who have been thrust into a world without superheroes, begin to see the patterns around them slipping. They begin to see through the idyllic world that has been their home since their battle with Anti-God. Their world starts being full of plot holes that, as much as they try to ignore, become far too apparent for them.

Lemire plays with the idea of story itself in Black Hammer: Age of Doom, examining authorial intent and the role of characters in shaping their own narratives. He examines the idea of suspended disbelief, so essential for the superhero genre, but twists it so that his characters themselves are the skeptical readers, reading their own narratives and noticing what is missing. In a powerful meta-narrative that is evocative of the comic Fables, Lemire even has a character enter a world with personifications of types of narratives, having young Black Hammer meet Mystery, Romance, The Editor, Grammar, and The Pagecounter. These are elements of writing made physical and they guide Black Hammer on her narrative. Lemire even plays with his own writing history by having Black Hammer open a doorway into one of his other graphic worlds – that of his book Sweet Tooth.

Lemire points out his love of story in Black Hammer: Age of Doom Part 1, having Mystery tell Black Hammer “It’s all real because stories are real”. In this statement, Lemire blurs the lines between reality and fiction, pointing out that stories have substance, meaning, and that they are important.

To find out more about Black Hammer: Age of Doom Part 1, visit Dark Horse’s website at https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/3002-552/Black-Hammer-Age-of-Doom-1

To find out more about Jeff Lemire, visit http://jefflemire.blogspot.com

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Disrupting Some Tropes and Reinforcing Other Tropes

Disrupting Some Tropes and Reinforcing Other Tropes

A review of Jeff Lemire’s The Sentry: Man of Two Worlds (Marvel Comics, 2018).

By Derek Newman-Stille

Superhero narratives tend to have clear boundaries between heroes and villains. They tend to play with the duality between civilian identity and hero identity, but tend to privilege the hero identity. Like most of his comics, in The Sentry: Man of Two Worlds, Jeff Lemire disrupts these easy binaries, creating a super powered person who lives in moral greyness while trying to push himself to live in a world of good and bad, to conform to the ideas of the superhero. Sentry has given up his superhero identity because every time he becomes a hero, The Void (a dark entity within him) becomes active and conducts evil deeds that far outweigh Sentry’s good ones. Instead of being a superhero primarily and wearing his civilian identity, “Bob” is a civilian who has to enter into a world inside of himself to become Sentry to fight The Void in order for that internal evil not to spill out into the world. He is trapped in his civilian identity with the constant desire to become his superhero self and relives his golden days only in a world in his own mind. Lemire calls into question the tropes of the superhero narrative, inviting his audience to ask critical questions about the way their superheroes are generally presented while also giving readers a powerful narrative of internal struggle and suffering.

Bob works at a greasy spoon restaurant with his former sidekick Billy, who also no longer has powers. The two of them share old stories constantly, pining after the life they lived as superheroes. Yet, Misty Knight and Tony Stark view Bob as an embodiment of danger, as a threat contained within a human body and Bob feels the prison walls around him even though he is technically free. He has to go into his inner world to fight The Void at specific times, not given time to live his life and the constant threat of permanent incarceration surrounds him even though Bob and those around him think of him as a superhero. His danger outweighs the benefit he can bring to society, so he is contained. There is no simple morality in Lemire’s tale of Sentry and heroism doesn’t always mean social acceptance or freedom. Bob has to challenge the simple morality of his Sentry persona in order to find a way to exist in the world completely and without constant suppression of parts of himself.

Although Lemire challenges tropes around superhero narratives and opens up those narratives, he unfortunately (like many authors) perpetuates problematic tropes of disability. Like many authors, Lemire presents a disabled character (Billy, who had his arm ripped off by The Void) as a threat and a villain. This is a common portrayal of disability, often predicated on the belief that disabled people are “self loathing cripples” and hate the world because we are disabled. It is a far too common portrayal that has unfortunately meant that disabled people like myself have frustratingly again and again seen ourselves only conceived of as self hating and villainous. Of course there are real-world implications of this such as the general public seeing disability as a problem and therefore disabled people as a problem.

Lemire further brings in an additional trope of disability – the disabled person who is “powerless” and therefore craves power. This trope tends to be related to the first one as these “powerless” disabled people frequently become villains in stories because they seek out the power they are believed not to have as disabled people. Billy in Lemire’s story craves superhero powers since he views himself as broken and powerless as a disabled man. The real world issue with this trope, of course, is that it portrays disabled people as powerless and this imagery often gets internalized by people in the disabled community and shapes our perceptions of ourselves.

An additional, and perhaps more damaging trope that Lemire incorporates into his narrative is the trope of disabled men using their disability to manipulate care-giving women. This trope dangerously suggests that disabled people abuse their care-givers and use their disability as a way of getting “sympathy” that manipulates others. The problem with this, of course, is that because this narrative is so prevalent, society picks up on it and it is common for people to view relationships with disabled people as being one-sided, only benefitting the disabled person and not the care-giver. Like most of these tropes, I have witnessed this in my own life where people frequently ask my partner how much work he has to do to care for me while looking sympathetically at him, or tell him that he is too kind for looking after a disabled person. In addition to this problem in the trope, this trope also portrays disability as inherently manipulative, which has repercussions around the way that people view disability and assume disabled people are constantly out to gather sympathy (rather than the fact that we generally find sympathy frustrating and wish people would treat us like anybody else while also respecting our accommodation needs). Lemire presents this trope in The Sentry: Man of Two Worlds when he has Billy date a girl only to steal from her, saying to another villain “turns out said grandniece is a real bleeding heart for wounded young men. especially blue-eyed blonds with one arm”.

Lemire also repeats the “better dead than disabled trope” that is so frequently seen in disabled narratives. I have spoken about this narrative repeatedly before and the danger that it poses for disabled people – including society not viewing disabled lives as worth the lives of others or thinking that euthanasia and dangerous surgeries that can kill patients are better than letting us live while disabled. Lemire not only kills off the disabled character as so many people do, but also has him internalize this idea of being better off dead. Billy is told that the serum that is made for him could kill him or give him power and billy responds “it could. But living another day like this is death anyway”. These statements are dangerous, especially since many disabled people are repeatedly told that our lives have no worth. It presents the idea that we are better off risking death than living while disabled.

It’s important to note that, like most people in our society, Jeff Lemire isn’t intentionally seeking out to harm disabled people. Instead, he is replicating the images of disability that he (and the rest of us) have seen repeatedly in popular culture – which is why they are tropes. He is not portraying his character in this way to do harm to disabled people, but, unfortunately, these tropes and these portrayals DO harm disabled people. I would encourage him and others to get to know people in the disabled people who look critically at popular culture and the impact that it has on social perception of disability and political decisions around disabled people. I hope that in the future, Lemire brings his critical, creative perspective to disability and pushes the boundaries of the way disability is portrayed beyond simplistic, problematic tropes

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Flipped Worlds

Flipped Worlds

A review of “Flip” (Markosia, Enterprises, 2018) edited by Jack Briglio and featuring work by Derek Kunsken, Wendy Muldon, Eleonora Dalla Rosa, Miguel Jorge, Hugh Rockwood, Alberto Massetti, Marcello Bondi, Francesco Della Santa, and Salvador’s Coppola.

By Derek Newman-Stille

The comic “Flip” offers a series of flashes through different worlds filled with different possibilities, inviting readers to turn the world on its head and look at it differently. Like most Speculative Fiction, even when it is set on a different world, in a different reality, or in the future, it is really about our own world and the things that occupy our imagination, thoughts, and perspectives. “Flip” invites readers to delve into those imaginings, to ask critical questions, and imagine what is not in order to think anew about what is.

The stories in “Flip” bring the reader into worlds where credit card debt is paid back with death, inviting us to think about credit card companies as loan sharks; worlds where people are forced to divorce after only 7 years of marriage, evoking questions about matrimony; worlds where luchadors meld their bodies into those of gorillas to fight, inviting questions of animal violence, human fear, and corporate control; worlds where pensions are saved for the young and people work later in life, inviting questions about age and ageing. There are tales of people meeting between flipped worlds and of choices made and the impact of choices that weren’t made. It is a comic about possibility and change. 

“Flip” is a collection of stories that are meant to unsettle, to disrupt, to FLIP reality and let us see it from another angle. 

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Dreaming of Justice

Dreaming of Justice

A review of Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Dreams of Doom” in Take Us To Your Chief And Other Stories (Douglas & McIntyre, 2016)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Dream catchers have fascinated the cultural imagination and been used by white authors as a plot feature in their stories (such as Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher), so it is powerful that Drew Hayden Taylor, an aboriginal person, reclaims the image of the Dream catcher in his fiction. “Dreams of Doom” is a story about government conspiracy connected to Dreamcatchers. Pamela Wanishin, a writer for a small, Aboriginal newspaper, gets mailed a thumb drive full of secret government documents and finds herself at the heart of a conspiracy by the Canadian government to control and further oppress Indigenous peoples.

This is a common tale of a reporter who finds herself followed by government agents who want to silence her, but Hayden Taylor puts a spin on the tale, combining the traditional story with aspects of the Canadian government’s oppression of Aboriginal people. Hayden Taylor uses metatextual approaches to point out the way that he has played with a common text by putting an Indigenous slant to stories, even referring to some of these stories in his tale, but with names altered to highlight their Indigenous connection like All the Prime Minister’s Men, Ojibway Holiday, The Blue Heron Brief, and The Girl with the Orca Tattoo. He also connects the events of his story to other aspects of Canada’s oppression of Indigenous people, bringing up attempts in the past to pacify First Nations through things like the White Paper, the Oka Crisis, Ipperwash, and Idle No More.

Hayden Taylor disrupts Canada’s image of itself as a “Just Nation” by illustrating the history of injustices the country has perpetrated as well as the country’s ability to hide its injustices and erase them from history or wash over them. As for the connection to Dream catchers, I will leave that for Hayden Taylor to tell you all about in “Dreams of Doom”.

To discover more about Take Us To Your Chief, visit http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/take-us-to-your-chief

To find out more about Drew Hayden Taylor, visit https://www.drewhaydentaylor.com

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Decolonized Space

Decolonized Space

A review of Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Lost in Space” in Take Us To Your Cheif (Douglas & McIntyre, 2016).

By Derek Newman-Stille

In “Lost in Space”, Drew Hayden Taylor explores the first Anishinabe man to travel into space. He is travelling as part of a mining operation set out amongst asteroids. Hayden Taylor uses the imagery of being Lost in Space to explore how an Anishinabe man negotiates his connection to Earth and to the four directions when he is in space, without a reference point. Although he knows exactly where he is in space, he ponders his relationship to his planet and to his people. He explores the sense of disconnection with home.

Hayden Taylor shapes these questions partially through a conversation between Mitchell and his grandfather. His grandfather invites critical questions about what space will mean for Mitchell: “But being Native in space… Now that’s a head-scratcher. Think about it. We sprang from Turtle Island. The earth and water are so tied into who we are. There’s an old saying, ‘the voice of the land is in our language'”. Mitchell seeks to find his own language and his own connection to his culture while away from home, having been denied his hand drum, which scientists said would put too much vibrational pressure on the hull, he needs to find new ways of expressing who he is and expressing his connection to family and home.

To discover more about Take Us To Your Chief, visit http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/take-us-to-your-chief

To find out more about Drew Hayden Taylor, visit https://www.drewhaydentaylor.com

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Colonialism

Colonialism

A review of Drew Hayden Taylor’s “A Culturally Inappropriate Armageddon Part II: Old Men and Old Sayings ” in Take Us to Your Chief And Other Stories (Douglas & McIntyre, 20160.

By Derek Newman-Stille

Indigenous people have been accustomed to alien invasions and the decimation of land and culture and Drew Hayden Taylor adapts the history of colonialism to new frontiers of science fiction in his book Take Us To Your Chief and Other Stories. In A Culturally Inappropriate Armageddon Part II: Old Men and Old Sayings, Hayden Taylor focusses on an old man, Willie Whitefish, and his experiences of care homes, but, beyond that, he explores Willie’s history of surviving residential schools and his unique ability to see potential warning signs when he hears about an approaching alien space ship. Willie’s history of dealing with a violent, colonial government has prepared him for what he (and the rest of the world) is likely to experience.

Although ignored by most of the PSWs in the care home he is living in, Willie reflects on his knowledge of history “everything from Columbus straight through the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, to the Traill of Tears, to the impact of the sale of Alaska on the Inuit and the Aleutians”. Willie is aware of what happens with the arrival of strangers from a distant place and that it traditionally means mass murders of the indigenous people of a region and the cultural genocide of those people in following generations. He points out that people should know better, but, then again, most of the people welcoming these visitors from the stars have been the colonizers, not the displaced and colonized people and therefore that the people excited about visitors from the stars haven’t paid enough attention to history from an indigenous perspective.

To discover more about Take Us To Your Chief, visit http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/take-us-to-your-chief

To find our more about Drew Hayden Taylor, visit https://www.drewhaydentaylor.com