Spotlight #15 : Joshua Whitehead

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

My work is centred around Indigenous reclamations, and to be more specific, Indigiqueer reclamations. Where settler colonial and Indigenous cultural nationalisms like to read Two-Spiritedness as romantic — the truth of the matter is our livelihoods and hi/stories are far too often nec-romantic. Even within our own mandates with the TRC there are no direct calls for the empowerment and betterment of Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer peoples. I thought: if I cannot see myself in the world, I’ll write myself into my own world, make space for us to be vicious and vivacious. I place sexual health as a primary nexus of health, one that is linked to mental, physical, spiritual, and cultural; I say: make love to make live. My forthcoming book full-metal indigiqueer is a practice of this type of decolonial loving. Our hi/stories are appropriated as genealogical epistemologies for settler colonialism from We’Wha to Out Magazine’s “The Men of ‘Tribe’” (http://www.out.com/art-books/2015/12/11/men-tribe) and made peripheral if not outlawed from Indigenous cultural nationalisms that force me to ask myself: what do we do when ceremony hurts us? So I invented a Two-Spirit cyborg trickster, the pro(1,0)zoa who is the protagonist of my book. They act much like a virus: cybernetic, venereal, biowarfare, nanotech, to infect and invade the canon in order to recentre an Indigiqueer presence; zoa is a spectre, a revenant, a replicant, nanabozho and iktomi, a bio/cyberpunk that graffitis “hereiam” on the covers of the canon’s most prestigious novels and contemporary popular culture (from The Faerie Queene to Charles Dickens to The Terminator and Lana Del Rey). Indigiqueerness is a primer in survivance, poetry is its exoskeleton. My second work, Jonny Appleseed, is a sex-positive young adult novel which tells the story of the titular protagonist and his work in cybersex. He, too, acts much like a trickster drinking whiskey and jack (wisakedjak?) and morphing into alter-native people through his sex work. I craft mirrors for others to see themselves in, to recognize the beauty, sexiness, and loveliness of Indigiqueer lives; my work is a starblanket of stories that nourish, warm, rejuvenate. The women in my life taught me how to craft like this — taught me that hard-work, creativity, and fierce listening can make a haven too.

notes on the red river

my tub is the yellow of cigarettes
the kind that stain fingers, braille your tongue
water less the colour of blue & more a shimmer
water the colour of a pickerel scale
the deep sheen of a bottom-feeder’s whisker
i wonder how cold the rapids in peguis are?
thin leech waiting suckling blood
the river is always red
here, too, my penis a kind of fish
— i too am cheap tackle
i far too often forget that leeches are a medicine too;
water the colour of lucky draining in the storm
water more a froth of severed hands & oak leaves
water more a mentor to me
this water is my mother
my wants are simple: to regress, climb back up
into the womb of nikâwiy
crawl backwards into time
into a uterus that smells of earthworms, eggshells
before they were ever mined for uranium
nuclear injections, trump infections
my mother’s vulva is a weapon of mass destruction
sterile, foxing like piss
breasts leaking less the two-percent you drink with frosted flakes
more the yellow stain of cigarettes
areolas ringed a wine-stained oval
the river is always red;
i wonder too if crawfish ever get cysts
if their lungs are filled with tar
their membranes sweet and wrack?
or do they boil in their homes
harsh rays that brown skin, decay a carcass
sun a heat lamp that steams walleye on the rocks
i wonder what life would be like if i were a crawfish?
a pest that ages like an NDN benjamin button
youth being a mere three months long
before you’re plunged into the real flow of things:
bare, naked, limbs still limber with child-fat
to be a crawfish is to be in constant fear of your own self
ripped apart by kin whip pierce your soft-spots, teeth
claws & cutting-things that shred from the inside-out
to be a crawfish, i deduct, is the best primer in survival
fumble, scramble, try to live
tumble into ducts, disappear
pincers more for pinching your genitals
ectoplasm a valiant orgasm
scrambling into oblivion
you may as well make yourself feel good;
the rapids are an apocalyptic landscape
water is a furious road
water is an archive
water is a secret-keeper
cracking language on the docks:
witnessmewitnessmewitnessme
water less the colour of bow rivers
more the stain of urinals
expunging phlegm & dirt & shit
cat-calls & ious on the stalls
this river is always red
this river as feral as my rapids
this river eats children, not crawfish
river named manitowapow:
the strait of the spirit
this river queers me
this river is my mentor
this river is running red
water a primer in great-sex
how to give good head
how to live & love & like yourself
water the precursor to cosmopolitan
this river is a space of convergence
this river is a body of thought
this river is a medicine wheel
this river is a life-giver
this river is an elixir
this river is a tradition
this river is a life-tasker
mantiowapow is a ceremony
the sound of drums
water beating the rocks in a constant throb
noise like a round dance
this river is always red
this river is a strait
a hub of sex & slapping fins
water less the colour of rust
more the sheen of a sequin
blazing in a thunderstorm
this river isn’t straight
this river is a queer partner
this river is my lover
this river is my pain-killer
this river is a woman-killer
this river is ashamed
this river owns itself
urine, sweat, spit, cum, milk, blood, tears
this river is humility
this river is humiliation
this river is a basin of thought
this river is a love-maker
this river is a life-giver
this river is a strait
but this river isn’t straight
manitoapow is a manitou
ain’t that why i’m gifted two?
this river is a (wo)manitowapow
this river is my mother
this river owns itself;
this here is my tub
more the stain of cigarettes
air bubbling from excrement
water that reddened my skin
bathwater lullabies
here i am a woman
penis shriveled into itself
my mother’s hair draped over me
l’oreal my fish-kin
bc you never burned my eyes
skin pruning into grapes
hot flakes of skin
turn the water opaque
bellies as hard as rocks
soap the curvature of my breasts
more a degree of measurement
equators a belt that cinches
my mother is a beauty queen
all pink tingling in the tub
this river is always red;
the water never set me straight
it leaked with me, through me, for me
here, in my bathtub, i think of momma
those rapids, think of manitowapow
think of the water my momma drank
to swallow down her percocet
mamas got the sickness of loneliness
kind to turn liver into coal
here, too, again, she is a fossil & a fuel
i hide her veins which bubble with memory
hide&seek is a type of pale(ontology)
& yes, this river is always red
just how in the hell do we live in a world
that ages us like crawfish?
i wash my hair with head & shoulders
kill the bugs that make a life on my scalp
that, too, has been a type of currency
my hair an idealized idyll
that clogs my landlords pipes
faucet drip-dripping in ndn time
water the colour of cigarettes
water the colour of wisakedjak
water the colour of sugarcane
water my humble lover
water who owns itself
water who stiffens blood into a point
beats time into my testicles
water a singer who vibrates my throat
water the hand that back-beats drums
water the machine that makes me breath
exulting fat & cancers & stones
water a steady stream of ejaculation
the tingle of poprocks on your nerve endings
semen & zoa swimming in the tub
wiggle, screech, & die
mapping out the cosmos —
politan rivulets
this river is a caduceus
this river is a manifesto
this river is a serpent
this river is a trickster
& this river is always, always red.

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory). He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary (Treaty 7) where he focuses on Indigenous Literatures and Cultures in the Department of English. He is the 2016 winner of the Aboriginal Arts and Stories Challenge which awarded him a Governor General’s History Award. His debut book of poetry, full-metal indigiqueer will be published this fall from Talon Books while his second book, Jonny Appleseed, is nearly complete.