Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing
Taking
the High Road:
With all the disruption of moving from my home of 20
years, waiting for deliveries, trying to get organized and establish
a routine, I missed my reading goal of one book a week. So I was
happy to spend leap-year day with this slim volume by a favourite
former-Manitoban writer. This copy, which I found at Value Village,
has a great 25+-year-old cover photograph of famous Canadian First
Nations actors--Gary Farmer, Errol Kinistino, Billy Merasty, Graham
Greene.
I love
Tomson Highway. His humour. His voice. The music in his writing. The
Cree-ness of his work. The way he incorporates mythology. The way his
characters seem so real, at the same time as they fade in and out of
other realities. The way in his novel The
Kiss of the Fur Queen the
brothers hover for shelter in the midst of a caribou migration, like
cowboys during a buffalo stampede in old western movies.
This
Tomson Highway play, Dry
Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing,
is the male companion piece to The
Rez Sisters, except that
hockey replaces bingo as the game of their lives. The road into this
reserve is a rough one. On my first reading, I found Dry
Lips to be somewhat
confusing and very disturbing. There are laughs. There is nudity.
There is sex. There is blood. There is violence. There are issues.
Fornication. Monogamy. Adultery. Illegitimacy. Homophobia. The
madonna/whore dichotomy. I can see why the play suffered from some
very unfavorable reviews accusing it of negative and abusive
attitudes towards Indigenous women. I can also see that a Cree
playwright will have major challenges. For whom are you writing? Just
who is the target? Will an urban mainstream audience "get it"
or will they see only stereotypes of "the other" and their
worst fears realized?
A Cree
audience, or any northern reserve audience, will recognize everything
and everyone and every theme in this play. Substance abuse.
Promiscuity. Practical jokes. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Preachers.
Powwow Dancers. Entrepreneurs. Pregnant, hugely pregnant women. Women
of varied shapes and sizes. Hockey. Suicide. Violence. Nature.
Knitting. Parental anxiety. But, is there a Cree audience for live
theatre? How does the writer reach them? The most positive thing I
can think is that perhaps art like this can help us communicate
across those cultural divides -- Cree/First Nations and
"White"/newcomer [I hate that term "settler"]
culture, rural and urban, male and female.
I had to
think about these things for some time. I found a critical essay on
line which mapped a useful way "into" the drama.* The First Approach off the highway leads into the field at the
sign saying DREAMLAND. The whole play is a dream. A nightmare. Your
(and the main character Zachary's) worst fears, incarnate. The Second
Approach is at the sign saying TRICKSTER CROSSING. All the
fear-inducing female characters the nightmare men interact with are
played by the omniscient androgynous shape-shifting male/female
Trickster saviour--Nanabush in Ojibway, Weesageechak in Cree. All
right? So, it's not really happening. And those characters up there
on stage are all your worst fears come to life.
The
first phrase uttered in the play is "Hey, bitch!" That's
your first clue. There is something wrong here. And something wrong
with the guy who says/thinks it. And the abuses pile higher and
higher. Disrespect for women. Sexualization of women. Failure to care
for pregnant women. Failure to acknowledge and accept responsibility
for loving and teaching the child. The old "fathers day on the
reserve" joke. The power struggle between males and females.
Male on female violence. Substance abuse. Suicide. Anti-church
rhetoric. "There are
many, many other ways of communicating with the Great Spirit. And
they are all perfectly legitimate. What them priests said about
me--about us--is not right. It's just not right. Respect us. Respect
all people!" (p. 106)
These nightmare men have been colonized by a racist and paternalistic
worldview. They have lost their cultural beliefs in gender equality
and mutual respect. With the poison named, a prescriptive "return
to the old ways" edict follows. Nothing good can happen unless
they stop the abuse and return to the old ways.
Tomson
Highway is also a Trickster. He sees the humour in the darkness. And
the irony -- of a plot centering upon the acceptance of an imported
game, hockey. Of the closing curtain tableau, a sentimental holy
family trinity.
This
play was written almost thirty years ago. In the meantime we have
had the Residential Schools Settlement, the apology in parliament,
and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I don't know. I just
feel as if I don't have to be told this message again. Unfortunately,
we will hear a great deal of the same themes in the proposed inquiry
into missing and murdered women and girls. Dry
Lips says to an audience of
First Nations, "We have to change. We have to go back."
This play, heavy on the symbolism, shows how many appropriated
prejudices of colonization continue to harm the colonized. But does
it say, does it say loudly enough, to the rest of the audience, the
Canadian capitalists paying to peer through that invisible wall,
"Look what you have done! What are you going to do to fix
yourselves?" I wish. I hope.
*
www.rupkatha.com Diehl, Lindsay. University of British Columbia,
Okanagan Campus. "And What Are You Dreaming About?": An
Analysis of Tomson Highway's Dry
Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Vol. VI,
No. 2, 2014.
jmb
April
23, 2016
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