[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: Aotearoa
year: 2022
form: short fiction
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 25.5.23-26.5.23
go read Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall’s Tauhou immediately.
if that injunction isn’t enough, I’ll try to describe it for you as best I can. it’s described as a novel, but by way of calibrating expectations it’s probably more useful to describe it as a linked short story collection. some of the stories are realist, some are not; those that aren’t explore a dystopian capitalist future where sea levels have risen substantially and cities in ambiguously-BC are on elevated platforms over the water, and also Aotearoa and Vancouver Island are adjacent to each other, separated by a day’s canoe paddle, and Māori and WSÁNEĆ people maintain kinship and social ties, though they’ve been separated and strained by history.
the stories present a fragmented and/or kaleidoscopic (I think both words are accurate) cross-generational view of Indigenous women living in these parallel colonial contexts, mainly following the family history of Hīnau, a Māori and WSÁNEĆ woman living in ambiguously-BC who is beginning to rediscover her W̱SÁNEĆ family’s history, the violence of residential schools, and the intergenerational trauma that has shaped the trajectory of her life. other stories explore, variously:
also only a very few of them are maybe straight.
the prose is simultaneously matter-of-fact (but always artful) and dreamy — it reminded me of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s short fiction in some ways, but also of Gloria Siphiwe Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight, in its multiplex exploration of (a) family history and the ways individual lives and communities at large are interwoven with colonial histories.
it’s so, so good. please go read it.
moods: emotional, hopeful, mysterious, reflective