The play’s live audience follows a modern-day heroine, a young girl named Jen from a small English town who finds herself trapped in an alternate version of reality consisting of an endless succession of Shakespeare plays. This world is populated by a strange cast of actors who, at first, don’t seem to notice her twenty-first century attire or her inability to speak in verse. The dizzying odyssey that becomes her quest to find a way back to the outside world comes alive in an inventive text brimming with unmistakable wit and intensity. Coloured with the absurdist humour that contemporary playwrights seem to find irresistible and yet carefully maintaining its hold on the illusory curtain between spectacle and reason, Thorn’s writing negotiates an understanding with the viewer that the world of The Prince is capable of shifting with the switch of a stage light as quickly as the story derives new and poignant meaning from the pages of its original materials.

We’ll hear a play

The first time Jen (played by Mary Malone) delivers a line is minutes into the play, after watching the opening scene of Henry IV Part One unfold before her in full. To the audience, Jen’s sudden
materialization into the foreground is a dramatic departure from the events we expected to follow the King’s discussion with his counsel. This shift in focus forces an addendum to any narrative framework that may already have formed in the viewer’s mind, making it necessary to regain our bearings – it’s clear from Jen’s dialogue that she’d had very little to do with Shakespeare in her former life and, by zoning in on her character, the play hints for us to calibrate our experience to her perspective. Regardless of how familiar one might have been with Act 1, Scene 1 of Henry IV, we get an idea of Jen’s point of view from her bewilderment at the idea of speaking in metre and the incredulity with which she digests the idea of using thee and thou.

True to its form as the dramaturgical equivalent of a frame narrative, The Prince has no shortage of opportunities to suggest these changes in perspective. Jen is cautioned to follow the social conventions of the “characters” in Henry IV, who are described as “antibodies” with unalterable responses and pre-determined actions. She tries to comply, but her disorganized attempts at passing for an attendant in the presence of “Hotspur” Percy (played by Abigail Thorn) — a young noble leading the rebellion against King Henry — end up drawing attention to herself and leading to an off-script interaction in which the two actually trade free remarks about their differences in diction. Sympathy builds between them until Hotspur manages to utter a free line completely in modern prose. This conversation compels both Jen and the audience to once again question our understanding of the narrative setting: if it was possible for the cast of Henry IV to speak out of turn and out of verse, should they not be considered “actors” instead? As the events of the play continue to progress, the viewer is suspended in a perceptive social limbo: we, along with Jen, find ourselves trying to make a judgment on the humanity of these characters in order to assign them their due identities.

What’s in a name?

Thorn’s discerning treatment of the inherited characters — largely the dramatis personae of Henry IV Part One — speaks to a deliberate conscientiousness regarding their original circumstances. This manifests itself in an adroit sensitivity towards the themes and progressions associated with each role. One by one, through their proximity to the disturbance caused by Jen’s unsanctioned verbal investigations and often as a direct response to her sympathy for the hardships Shakespeare assigned them, the borrowed characters are given a chance to speak their minds in prose. Without necessarily creating new identities for them, the play takes this opportunity to recontextualize each character’s “role” in relation to the others and reimagine their conflicts with one another in the light of Jen’s (and our) modern world. The rambunctious Prince Hal (played by Corey Montague-Sholay) is given a new reason to be at odds with his father’s traditional values — the suggestions of queerness half- hidden in the subtext of his original characterization as a flippant tavern-hopper are drawn into focus, escalating tensions between father and son to an all-out row. The comedic proportions of their argument, including the various insults hurled by the King, struck me as suitably cathartic. At the same time Lady Kate Percy (played by Tianna Arnold,) trussed in a restless marriage with the impulsive Hotspur, received a gratuitous helping of emotional restitution and wasted no time making clear that, by all reason, she had just as much right to her freedom as Hotspur did to ride off to war on a moment’s whim. While these adaptations realized certain characters more idyllically and perhaps less practically than others, it’s evident that they were transliterated with the utmost tenderness and honesty. The excess of care afforded to Kate in particular is, I would argue, a measure of the collective sympathy accrued toward her character by the centuries of readership since Shakespeare first published his characterization of her.

As recurring tensions between the same characters steer them inevitably toward the same conflicts, so do their roles in relation to each other — as Hal, Henry, and Kate, but also equally as father, son, or wife – reinforce their captivity within the overarching narrative they share. More and more of the Henry IV cast begin to break form and lapse into prose, lending a growing sense of unrest to the environment of their “play.” It becomes evident that Hotspur, at least, has realized their predicament, but no sooner does so than quickly demonstrates a refusal to give up the associated role. Hotspur is aware of injuring Kate by failing to reassure her of their eventual reconciliation, but spurns her attempts at making amends: a choice which, in conjunction with a sudden reticence to acknowledge any previous interactions with Jen and the worldview she brings, points to a deliberate and discomforting repression. The players’ dual identities are sustained by the level on which they choose to engage with their own narratives: with the presumed identity afforded by their roles comes presumed purpose, which all the “cast” are hesitant to abandon.

The Prince killeth Percy

Portrayed by the playwright herself, Hotspur represents the play’s way of addressing identity and individual potential. As the insular “play” begins to unravel within the larger world of The Prince’s
constructed reality, Hotspur also becomes the first to step off the stage. Before the ambiguity around the identity of the “actors” is dispelled, Hotspur’s character was already hinting at a certain measure of dissonance between the parts they played and their underlying truth. Even though Lady Kate calls Hotspur her “lord,” and Hal and Douglas consistently use the language expected toward their male adversary, Jen, the true outsider to the ecosystem of the “play,” refers to the same with “she” and “her.” This discrepancy is never addressed until Hotspur is finally confronted about the truth of the “play’s” reality, and Thorn’s dialogue betrays her as answering for someone who, once separated from the assumed identity of Hotspur, would never have been called a “son” by the Earl of Northumberland. With her admission, the viewer is released from suspending the uncertainty in their minds, and instead is faced with the understanding that Hotspur’s choices were never anything but perfectly human. The world of Henry IV is indeed a stage, but its actors are no less than men and women.

While Henry IV derailed from its original script, the overarching narrative of The Prince was also on a turbulent course of collision with the world outside. Hotspur’s abandonment of the “stage” is facilitated gradually through an unspoken dalliance with the elements of the real stage — the one being filmed and surrounded by a live audience. As the characters within Henry IV lose conviction in the insulation of their theatrical reality, the actors’ costumes start shedding their literal lustre from scene to scene. Hotspur’s armour is progressively removed and replaced with a tousled mix of modern and medieval garments, while Kate’s regalia is slowly reduced to an underskirt and tube top. The production delights in using its most direct modes of information to affect the other dimensions of its narrative, in a way that could only suit its chosen subjects. Thorn’s first appearance had Hotspur locked in a duel with the Earl of Douglas, clad in full plate armour and wielding a longsword, only for more unlikely weapons to take its place once the character’s facade begins to fold — in a devastating sequence towards the end of the play, she attempts to reenact the fight armed with only her bare hands, while at another point she finds herself holding an empty glass bottle given to her by Jen clearly labelled as Diet Coke. The cleverness of The Prince also informs an acerbic sense of humour: the play is wholly unafraid to move at breakneck speeds between probing its existential themes and delivering the incursion of Diet Coke into its world as a jarring gag. Its best comedic moments hinge on the irony created by the characters of Henry IV grappling with the real world in the form of dialogue with Jen or, rarely, through a chip in the proverbial fourth wall — the same modes of narration from which it derives its strongest development. In this way, it manages to remind us not to take it too seriously without the writing feeling flippant.

Since its release on the video streaming platform Nebula this summer, The Prince has had no difficulty reaching a wide audience of virtual theatregoers. Between the boldness of its premise, the thoughtful execution, the approach to queer commentary, and the effusive adoration it has for Shakespeare’s oeuvre, its draw is obvious to those who can identify with its transformative direction. Although not without its flaws, it awards a novel outlook to anyone who is willing to engage with the multitudes within its narrative. The play’s the thing, wherein the play’s the thing — wherein, as long as one catches the conscience that is one’s own, one might always have a part to play.

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Devil, fiend, being, creature, abomination: out of all the words used in Frankenstein to describe the animated being at the heart of the story, it’s a bit odd that most often he is only called “the monster.” Why do we never use daemon (tastefully spelled as such by Mary Shelley in the original 1818 edition of the novel) or wretch, as the being sometimes calls himself? Even construct, which feels admittedly stiff for a creature of bone and flesh, might suit him better considering that he came to life only after being sewn together at the painstaking hand of his creator.

The being has never been given a name of his own – monster has simply been his moniker ever since he was first introduced to the literary readership of Regency-era England. Confronted with the visage of his rogue creation, Victor Frankenstein reaches for a word to realize what he saw as being formless, abominable, and unnatural. But the monster was not preconceived as an outcast, which he would later become: in fact, he was hardly preconceived of at all. What Frankenstein had animated was the result of an obsessive occupation with the power to endow life. His ambition was not set on shaping an individual awareness, but rather on the lofty ideal of a consciousness from whose existence he could draw the ultimate sense of obligation. This being, whose countenance he fled at the moment of its awakening, developed sensitive agency incidentally; his very existence was a natural consequence of Frankenstein’s unnatural actions. His progeny occurred through accident, and his monstrous condition was therefore manifest.

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.”

To the vague end of his creator’s design, the creature was intended to be comprised of a seemly arrangement of limbs and features, which Frankenstein had curated himself for their characteristic beauty. Perhaps unconsciously he’d expected a natural degree of conformity from something he could consider beautiful. But as soon as the creature stirs, Frankenstein is overcome with repulsion at its animism – its monsterhood, to him, becomes horrifyingly apparent. He watches the monster’s formless ambitions, now inextricable from this sinewed amalgamation, hoist up its outsize mass and take its first ungainly steps.

Something about reading Frankenstein to this point speaks to a familiar narrative of the queer experience. This becomes most obvious in the painful relationship between creature and creator, progeny and progenitor, and is also present in the monster’s baleful abandonment of a human society that will never accept him. At the same time, the thematic exploration of guilt, progeny and responsibility hints at an unmistakably feminine perspective: the one request of the creature to his creator in return for his own removal from the skirts of human society is not for retribution, but a singular understanding. The monster’s only demand is for a reciprocal, female companion.

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”

The archetype of the female abomination began, insofar as concerns the public imagination, with the superfluous influence of Medusa’s image — vicious, terrifying but just as often tempting to her victims — which has only ever grown since her inception in legend. Her narrative, from her assault at the hands of the god Poseidon to her monstrous transformation, has become inextricable from both feminine violence and appeal. In varying ways, the mantle of desire has been donned by every one of her successors.

Even such obliquely irredeemable creatures as the Anglo-Saxon “sea witch” have managed to inspire rather liberal interpretations of their appearances and motivations according to certain artistic visions. A 2007 film adaptation of the epic Beowulf by the same name reimagined her in the form of a nearly nude woman with a golden serpentine tail, entirely subverting her original antagonism with the introduction of a misplaced strain of overtly seductive appeal. In the original epic poem no less, the “sea witch,” mother to the monster Grendel, isn’t even referred to by a single set of consistently gendered pronouns.

The literary intersection between the monstrous and the feminine, already occupied by a fearsome lineage of female characters, would certainly have welcomed another addition. The precipice on which Shelley leaves off the completion of the female creature by Frankenstein – and the brutality with which he dismantles his progress – leaves room to wonder how she would have considered the role of a feminine conscience in keeping with the particular natal violence of Frankenstein’s creature. Perhaps she’d decided that Victor Frankenstein, who spent most of the novel looking forward to a marriage with his first cousin, would simply have drawn a blank.

“I do not destroy the lamb and the kid.”

The creature becomes an outcast twice from the world of his progenitors. He is rejected for his nature, which is of an unknowable misery, but it is for the undoing of his own creation that he finally chooses to distance himself. In an off-beat lockstep echoing their first conversation, he incites Frankenstein to a pursuit toward the edge of the known world – away from the conditions of humanity. The nature that binds them resolves only with the dual demise of anomaly and antagony. There also lies monstrosity: in the preter-natal space between the human, the abominable, and the unconceived. In Frankenstein, it’s between every page.

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Start off the Year of the Dragon with this quick and delicious dumpling recipe! They’re steaming hot and accompany just about any meal. Stuff a few with strawberries: whoever sinks their teeth into those will be blessed with luck from the Jade Emperor himself. Versatile and perfect for all occasions, family meals and quick snacks alike. 

You will need:

(Filling)

• 1 cup cabbage
• 1 cup ground chicken
• 2/3 cup grated carrots
• 2 sprigs green onion
• 1/3 bulb yellow onion
• 1 ½ tsp salt
• ¾ tsp pepper
• 1 tsp ginger powder

(Dipping sauce)

• 8 parts dark vinegar
• 1 part sesame oil

Cut cabbage, green and yellow onions into small pieces. Add with carrots to a large bowl with ground chicken. Add salt, pepper, and ginger powder and mix well. Take  a dumpling wrapper in the palm of your hand and add a dollop of filling in the centre using a small spoon. Wet the edges of the wrapper and fold in half over the filling, pinching along the edges. Bring water to a boil. Add dumplings, then cover and simmer on medium heat until boiling once more. Remove lid and simmer for another three minutes. Mix vinegar and sesame oil in a small dish. Remove dumplings from pot, and serve hot. 

Tip: “Dumpling soup” can be made in the pot after the dumplings are removed – the residual flavour in the boiled water can suffice for a side dish of its own!

***

Tofu Stir Fry (3 portions)

In need of a last minute hot meal? Have guests coming for dinner, and no idea what to cook? This simple, tasty tofu stirfry will be ready for serving in under half an hour. The tofu’s firm, rich texture compliments the sweet, spicy vegetables and can be customizable with any number of garnishes and side dishes.

You will need:

(Ingredients)

• 1 carrot
• ½ head of cauliflower
• 1 cup of frozen corn
• Tofu, firm
• 3 spoons of vegetable oil

(Seasoning)

• Sea salt
• Soy sauce
• Peppercorns, whole
• 1 cayenne or jalapeno pepper
• Anise
• Coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon of ginger
• 3 garlic cloves
• ½ onion bulb
• Cream (optional)
• Sesame oil (for seasoning)

Oil your pan, add soy sauce, and set the stove to high heat. Dice tofu and fry in the pan, stirring until light brown. Oil the bottom of your pot. Crush and dice the garlic and onions, then add to the pot with the ginger. Slice the  pepper into thin rings, without de-seeding, and also add into the pot. Add the remaining seasonings, and turn the stove to medium heat. Wait until the onion starts to turn golden. Dice the carrot, and cut the cauliflower into small, bite-size chunks. Add the carrots to the pot, then the corn and finally the cauliflower. Set the stove to medium-high heat and stir until the cauliflower and carrot are tender, and the corn starts to caramelize. Take off the stove. Season with sesame oil and serve hot with steamed rice.

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Hopkinson has been a long-time author of speculative and science fiction, writing steadily since the 1980s. Her first few novels centred on nuanced Black and queer characters, in contrast to the white male saviour protagonists which then dominated the emerging sci-fi scene. Her novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) revolutionized the genre with its captivating construction, oriented around Black female heroine Ti-Jeanne and featuring powerful Obeah – African seer – characters. 

Hopkinson built a considerable body of work over the decades, attracting publishers and critics with her bold literary voice and unapologetic authenticity. In 2021, she became the youngest person to receive the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Earlier in 2019, she was entrusted with the task of writing a comic for DC’s Sandman series — based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series of the same name — by none other than Gaiman himself. “I wanted Nalo to do it”, said Gaiman to Entertainment Weekly, “because there isn’t anybody better.”

Hopkinson carved a characterful presence on the Tanna Schulich stage with her sparkling blouse and wire-frame glasses. She began with a simple request for the audience: to listen to a simple line of prose and pay attention to the physiological responses it produced. This approach to diction brings narratives to life by applying the sensations evoked by her words straight “to the nerve endings.” Readers are meant to be able to experience them with the same immersion as they would the real world.

To Hopkinson, an empathetic experience of any narrative must also be possible as a “bodily” sensation. A single word, for her, can change the energy of an entire phrase. She examined the immediate effect evoked by the sentence “the horse cantered down the street” compared to if it had “walked”; then “cantered”, compared to “galloped”, brought yet another layer of vivid feeling to the description. 

Early critics of Hopkinson’s work were eager to dismiss her surreal inspirations as “escapism.” Along with other writers from queer and ethnically diverse backgrounds at the end of the last century, Hopkinson’s fiction ran into a literary community which saw her work as inherently superficial. The label of “escapist” literature, however, did little to diminish the value of her writing to those who connected with her stories. Certain people understood her speculative fiction as a channel of relief from an inflexible world that many would “want to escape.”

One of the enduring social factors in Hopkinson’s writing is her deep commitment to understanding the historical wounds carved by colonialism on the Canadian West Coast, affecting First Nations, South American and African people alike. Drawing from her Jamaican background and experiences, she persistently connects threads from the present to the looming past, exploring parallels through the worlds she writes into being. For her, storytelling is instrumental to preserving cultural vitality – as long as its stories are being circulated, a culture will maintain its “refusal to disappear.”

Having cultivated an interest in sci-fi before her academic career, it was no wonder that Hopkinson found herself drawn to speculative fiction later on. The genre’s allure of bending the rules of our universe and creating “experimental worlds” appealed to her with its limitless possibilities. She saw the opportunity to write what she hoped would be “fiction that had it all.”

A recent upwelling of support for speculative and genre fiction in academic literary circles, due to the undeniable influence of authors like Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, and now Nalo Hopkinson, has led to an uptick in the number of university courses and resources dedicated to these genres. In her speculative fiction classes at UBC, Hopkinson has found that her students are also showing an increasing propensity toward incorporating queer themes and characters in their writing. She takes heart in their interpretations of representation that promise to be true to life for queer people in the real world, and makes the heartening prediction that the emerging generation of speculative fiction writers will finally have what it takes to “completely change publishing” in the genre. 

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Introduced by writer Veena Gokhale, the panel – made up of Farzana Doctor, Zahida Rahemtulla, Shailee Rajak, and Angela Misri – took their spots on one side of the Atwater Library’s auditorium. They were joined by an additional, empty chair; a silent acknowledgement of writers around the world facing imprisonment and suppression.

Ghokale’s introduction was followed by a wry apology for the lack of male writers featured at the event, sending a ripple of laughter around the room. Between the four women on the panel, almost every literary genre was more than amply represented – Farzana Doctor has published a series of short novels garnering critical acclaim; Zahida Rahemtulla writes plays exploring themes from the comical to the profoundly human; literary scholar Shailee Rajak made her creative writing debut with a graphic novel addressing ancient mythology to young students; and novelist Angela Misri has written works of fiction spanning countless micro-genres. Yet despite the wide variety of backgrounds and approaches present, subtle commonalities were quick to emerge from the successive presentations.

Many writers in today’s world, particularly those from diasporic cultural backgrounds, find an increasing need to reconcile with a collective, and sometimes evasive, past. In an emotive reading from one of her best-known mimetic novels, Seven, Farzana Doctor illustrated the fragility of this pursuit as a chase after “memories of memories.” This particular yearning for definition around one’s history strikes a familiar chord with many readers from fractured cultural backgrounds whose collective familial memories draw a similar blank. The particular effectiveness of Doctor’s prose demonstrates a subtle and piercing understanding of the interplay between culture and individual mentality that informs how many of us engage with these unremembered pasts.

Doctor, who has a developed career as a private psychotherapist in addition to her published writing, spoke to finding harmony between her pursuits. Although her psychotherapy practice doesn’t contribute directly to her writing, she finds certain parallels between the two processes that enhance her understanding of the way characters – and real people – work. In doing both, she finds herself asking the same question: “How will [my work] be understood?”

Understanding the audiences who engage with their narratives is often instrumental for writers to develop their storytelling technique. Zahida Rahemtulla, who is seeing her newest play go into production (imminently), has been conscious of a gradual shift in demographic among the people taking interest in her work. “Audiences are changing,” she said, referring to the growing number of people discovering her plays who don’t necessarily share her South Asian background. As her work gained more attention with the diversification of attendance, Rahemtulla adapted accordingly — for example, by introducing hints to clue in new audience members on the specific cultural references that occur in her writing. Facilitating understanding between one side of the stage and the other is of considerable importance in cultivating authentic appreciation.

Rahemtulla’s new play, Frontliners, explores the social and cultural dynamics revealed by interactions between social workers, new refugees, and Samaritan volunteers on the Canadian west coast. She animates arrestingly accurate characterizations of young workers at a non-profit organization who stretch their resources and personal faculties to aid a number of Syrian refugee families. Based in part on her own experiences as a social worker in British Columbia, Rahemtulla also drew on insight she gained from working alongside Syrian colleagues over the years to weave together the play’s spirited discourse and unmistakable humanity into a nuanced depiction of personal and cultural interchange.

The celebration of parallels and differences between disparate cultures, it seems, refuses to be limited to a single medium. Graphic novels have surged in popularity among young readers attracted to the irresistible combination of narrative prose with the equally powerful potency of imagery and design. CBC Radio recently hosted an interview with McGill alumnus Shailee Rajak on Helen and Sita, her graphic novel for young people, which she created in collaboration with illustrator Priyadarshini Banerjee. Written in a clear and poignant tone, the book assumes the points of view of two of the most famous women in world mythology — Helen of Troy and Sita from the Indian epic Ramayana — and thoroughly humanizes them by narrating their thoughts and feelings around the fateful marital arrangements made for them by their families. In a fluid visual language that allows text and imagery to flow synchronously from one page to the next, the book places the women’s stories side by side and allows the reader to realize the universality of the longing to control their own destinies.

As for the two myths from which she drew her material, Rajak sought to highlight numerous parallels between the Ancient Greek and Indian moral institutions that led Helen and Sita down their twin paths. These similarities point to the deep connections — “cultural, linguistic, and pedagogical” — between branches of the ancient Indo-European continuity she examines as a literary scholar.

The cultural sense of identity has long been tangled with the idea of a certain level of ownership over the stories and traditions that make up each person’s individual awareness. While it is easier to become attached to narratives that bear a certain amount of resemblance to what is familiar to one’s own background or experiences, the incidental worlds and stories encountered by an impressionable young mind can make for lasting and surprising inspiration. Angela Misri was raised by Indian parents in London, where she was introduced at an early age to works by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle. Her career as a writer since has been marked with a willingness to engage with the impossible, as well as a distinctly dry tone of humour. Her newest novel, The Detective and the Spy, follows a young woman living alone who discovers her familial connection to the life of Sherlock Holmes and relocates to London, creating a “fish-out-of-water” scenario reminiscent of the way Misri describes her own childhood.

For Misri, some of the most important creative and professional relationships in her career were developed with her editors — the people she credits with holding her to the task of organizing her own ideas. Often, it is during the editing process that she realizes some explanation is missing between the stages of one of her fast-paced stories. Understanding a narrative on the reader’s part begins with an author’s invitation. Telling any story, after all, does entail owing a little explanation — if only sometimes to oneself.

The post The ‘Garden of Literary Delights’ is in Bloom appeared first on The McGill Daily.

As part of this year’s lineup of events during McGill’s annual back-to-back Indigenous Awareness Weeks (September 18-30), the talk was given in the SSMU building ballroom and attended en masse by students, academic professionals, and members of the university community. Seats quickly filled up; I drew up a folding chair in the back row and found myself between two other students waiting with their notebooks open. 

Together with Dr. Pamela Palmater – a longtime friend and collaborator from the Mi’kmaw Nation who penned the foreword to his book – Dr. Alfred addressed the continued effects of Canadian state-led colonization on First Nations communities and individuals. His book lends a unique perspective to this conversation by exploring how policies on land acquisition set the course for many Indigenous communities today.

Published through the University of Toronto Press earlier this year amid considerable excitement for its release, It’s All About the Land is a compendium of collaborative insight and lucid commentary on the interplay of sovereign policy, social attitude, and Native identity cultivated through a series of bold conversations and complex reflections. Alfred’s writing is richly informed by his educational background in political philosophy as well as his personal journey to becoming a force of action for the Kahnawà:ke people. Both academic and personal perspectives are woven into a fluid conversational flow directed at deconstructing the negative impact made by systems of the Canadian government on First Nations sovereignty, security, and cultural identity. 

A short introduction by Professor Veldon Coburn, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Ottawa, underlined the significance of Alfred’s contribution to the socio-political discourse on contemporary conflicts faced by Indigenous people: his four previous books on the subject set such a considerable precedent for his work that some among the ballroom audience had waited more than a decade for the release of his most recent publication. 

With most of his work concerning processes of decolonization and cultural recovery through the legal and political empowerment of Indigenous people, Dr. Alfred’s primary driving force is his innate desire to find “the truth” about his people. A major consequence of the colonization endured by the Kahnawà:ke and other First Nations communities was the loss of large-scale social integrity due to the effective dispersal of their hereditary collectives. The truth must be reconstructed by picking up the pieces. He draws an analogy, referencing the great historical leader for whom he was named: “The figure of Taiaiake in 1701…stood on a rock as big as Mont Royal. I am barely standing on a rock that’s big enough.”

Alfred cites his parents’ generation of community leaders as an early source of inspiration; the earnest dedicatees of the book are his aunt and uncle, from whose influence he adopted his “militant” attitude towards justice for his community. Addressed to the people who shaped such an important aspect of his identity, his intention was to explain, through the book’s exhaustive dialogues and painstaking commentary, his own “Mohawk worldview.” The title, in addition, came from a succinct reminder he heard constantly from peers and elders in Indigenous activist spaces during his youth: “Remember – it’s all about the land.”

For many First Nations across the continent, the inability to live on their own territories or to hand down the land within the community constitutes a fundamental, original loss with no recourse. Divided land, as divided truth, denies the possibility of a complete identity. Alfred enumerates the experiences that separate him from the other Taiaiake: “I didn’t know our language…I went to Catholic school and I lost the [Kahnawà:ke] spirituality.” But despite knowing these differences, he still grapples with the question: “What’s this Tai’s reality?” 

Today, Alfred’s work occupies its own league in the Indigenous literary space. His particular impact, remarked by Professor Coburn, is owed in part to the firm, prosaic style that translates his personal magnanimity into a compelling literary voice that draws readers from all backgrounds together. Unfailingly sensitive towards nuances in the subject matter, his writing preserves a clarity of articulation which renders even his most theoretical arguments plainly accessible. From a stylistic approach, Alfred added that It’s All About the Land was, perhaps more so than any of his other works, very much “like an oratory.” Like the course of one of his unscripted speeches, the free prose aligns with the gravity of his concerns in stark authenticity to follow a winding path — though by no means complete — of one man’s journey after the truth.

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