Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead

Author:Joshua Whitehead [Whitehead, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780735278868
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Skip Notes

1 See Audre Lorde’s The Master ’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master ’s House.

2 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirited People

I Own a Body That Wants to Break

MY SISTER AND I share secret conversations. We talk about the darker things in ourselves, desires, fantasies, what harms us, and the practices we’ve mastered to harm ourselves. Last week she had a panic attack, something that happens to her since the birth of her daughter and the postpartum depression she overcame, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe as she sat on my parents’ couch. My mother held my sister in her arms while my sister gasped for breath, reassuring her everything would be okay. I imagine my sister’s breaths, those sharp staccato inhales, lungs aflutter in their bone cage, and the mind enacting its acute stress response, fight or flight. What does the mind fight against? What does it fly against? When I talk to my sister afterwards, she tells me she’s stressed from school, from moving homes, from a new marriage, a new daughter. I want to tell her that at the bottom of all this is colonialism—we’re all fighting and flying from that revenant.

My sister-cousin, too, experiences attacks like this in school. They cause her loneliness, depression, isolation, fear. She has suicidal inclinations, seeks out substances. And last month my cousin-brother called me one afternoon to tell me he wanted to die. We talked on the phone for well over an hour, me using my writing abilities, asking him to describe little details around him. What colour is the floor? Is it cracked? Is it darker in the corners? What kind of dirt do you think caused that? I then moved on to larger questions: Have you thought about what you’ll make for lunch? What about dinner? Are your shirts clean for tomorrow? Oh yeah, which one do you think you’ll wear? I felt as if I hijacked his mind, however briefly, to become his senses, to reel in the mind from its universal inclination to die by acting like a camera, zooming in on the minuscule, the smaller world, so that he could locate his self, feel grander, feel more present. He cried the whole time, telling me he loved me, and I returned the love. From out of a mouldy crack in the floor we blossomed into his traumas, observing how the world likes to break him, how he likes to break himself, how as a family we have normalized the rhetoric of destruction. I made him laugh, telling old stories from when we were kids, reminding him of how much he is loved, reconnecting the tendrils of story that tie him to us and to the land. And we both smiled. I could hear his smile on the other end of the line because his lips always twist into a knotted cherry stem in his dimples, causing his vowels to whistle. I told him I’d e-transfer him a forty so he could eat the next day, and buy a pack of cigarettes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.