I’ve started doing something I haven’t done in a while. I swore never again, but as with prom-night promises, we know what such promises are worth.
I have started reviewing things again. A few weeks ago, I reviewed Avatar: The Way of Water. I gave it two soggy muskrats out of 10 in case you were curious. More recently, I was asked to review a new novel by a Cree writer. Eight golden Bannocks out of 10, for sure. Many years ago, I used to do this a lot. I’ve reviewed books, movies, and television shows — I think I even reviewed a restaurant or two. Of course, the problem is I have no real experience in reviewing. But I have two definite and necessary qualifications. I am Indigenous, and I seem to have a working knowledge of storytelling. With those two things behind me, I can develop an opinion on just about anything.
On occasion, non-Indigenous people can get into trouble saying what’s good and what’s bad in the Indigenous artistic community. Some theatre artists have even made a point of urging critics born of the dominant culture not to review their plays, saying these individuals don’t have the necessary perspective to truly understand what the artist is trying to say. Fair enough. But, speaking as a professional Indigenous theatre artist, I know for a fact that about 80 per cent of the patrons attending the vast majority of Indigenous productions will, quite probably, I’m fairly sure, more than likely, be members of the People of Pallor contingent.
Let me give you a couple of examples related to this confusing topic.
A thousand years ago, I did book reviews for an Indigenous magazine. Its unofficial position was “we find it’s much better to support our artists than to be critical of them. It’s healthier for the community.” That sort of limited the point of a critical review.
More recently, there was a production of a popular play in Toronto. One prominent Indigenous personality was in the audience. This person found the play to be pandering to the primarily white audience and not overly inventive. Being modestly disgusted at the mediocrity, the person quietly left at intermission.
The lesson here is that, after confessing this to me, this person urged me not to tell anybody. “It would look bad if I confessed my dislike of the artist’s work. I don’t think we’ve reached that stage yet.” This person preferred anonymity.
Being an Indigenous critic can be both a strength and a problem. Frequently, in our work, we have to answer to the larger Indigenous community. They’re looking over our shoulder. On one level, we understand and know the audience whom we write about and for. We also want to promote and encourage artistic development in our communities, seeing as our art had been openly banned for so many years. (I’m talking about you, Potlatch Ban, as you made social, spiritual, and cultural practices illegal up until 1951.) So that’s a good thing.
On the other hand, while we don’t know every single Indigenous person in the country, we may know someone who knows someone who knows someone. They aren’t an anonymous, blank population. Knowing this can be difficult. As Glen Sumi, theatre critic at large, told me, “there’s also the possibility of being too close to the community you’re writing about — especially if you’ve worked with or are going to be working with some of the artists you’ll be reviewing.” True.
I remember reading a quote from some famous novelist who said something to the effect of “I never felt freer as a writer than when my parents died.” Now picture that sense with a whole nation watching you. It can be somewhat problematic.
But not being a part of the culture can have its own difficulties. Way back when the Contemporary Indigenous Literary Renaissance was in full gear (early 1990s), most new First Nation plays were being assessed by critics/academics via what I call the spot-the-trickster syndrome. Especially by way of comparisons to Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters. That is to say, most critics and academics thought there were underlying themes in most (if not all) plays coming out of our community that could be traced back to trickster metaphors.
The problem, of course, being… no. Not all Indigenous cultures even had a trickster. You can see the problem.
In fact, responding to one of my early plays, an academic reasoned that the sound of a crow cawing was a callback to the importance of the raven in West Coast mythology. Well, I’m not West Coast. The play took place in Ontario. A Native critic would know this.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, “Sometimes a crow cawing is just a crow cawing.”
I’ve been both the reviewed and the reviewer. I’m not sure which is better.
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