Richard WagameseFor Joshua: An Ojibwe Father Teaches His Son

Abstract

grandmother and aunts. His was an obsessive love for his invalid mother, Marine, whom he cares for until she dies. Left to his own devices, he works as a gardener for the rich fifty-year-old Creole, Loraine, and alternately nurses her through her alcoholinduced comas and her need for sexual gratification. The setting is turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury Guadeloupe, amidst municipal strikes, power outages, 35 percent unemployment , and violence. The country is split into two factions: “The fortunate, who possessed generators, and the unfortunate, who did not.” Dieudonné has no interest in politics, history, or religion, yet he maintains a curious friendship with a homeless poet, Boris, and Rodrigue, a young criminal friend who introduces him to crack. He finds solace aboard the decaying thirtyfive -foot sailboat The Belle Créole, owned by the Cohen family, who left the country for better opportunities. Dieudonné invites comparison with Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Condé’s descriptions of the country also bring to mind Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. The narrator is vintage Condé, both philosophically engaging and derisive. Of Dieudonné’s friend Boris, the narrator queries: “Did Boris have talent? This sort of question shouldn’t be asked, because it has no answer. For some, he was an unsung national bard, the only true champion of popular culture. For others, a weak rhymester and a first-class bore.” The genius of the novel rests with its characterizations. There is no one character type, and characters’ actions escape predictability. From Arabella (described as “no doting grandma”) to Matthias Serbulon , Esq. (Dieudonné’s defense attorney), to Luc (a charming mixed-blood painter and also Loraine’s lover), there are no stock characters or easy pronouncements to be made about their actions. The novel is a satisfying adventure. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Richard Wagamese For Joshua: An Ojibwe Father Teaches His Son Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milkweeed Editions. 2020. 205 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED by Doubleday Canada in 2002, For Joshua’s posthumous release as the first US edition of the late, renowned Ojibwe author Richard Wagamese’s (1955–2017) memoir is timely. Winner of numerous awards and best known for his novel Indian Horse, which won the 2013 People’s Choice award for Canada Reads, Wagamese wrote this text as a letter to his then-estranged six-year-old son. For Joshua not only powerfully describes Wagamese’s individual journey in life as an Ojibwe man, it also conveys universal truths about First Nations/American Indian traditional ways to which most readers have no access. What Wagamese says of traditional stories is also true of his own, which “act as guides to our selves.” While some traditional Native readers might take exception to Wagamese using his vision quest, a traditional four-day fasting Books in Review Fatima Bhutto The Runaways New York. Verso. 2020. 432 pages. OSAMA, THE BROKEN BUT learned Marxist in Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, delineates a way of looking at societies that provides a much-needed critical approach to race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality: “The only way to look at powerful societies was through the people they excluded. The blacks encapsulated all the sorrow of their history in art—in music, in literature, in dance. The way the Sindhis or Baloch did here. Even as they suffered, the blacks sang to the world of beauty and terror.” Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, with its complex fusion of ideas—personal, national, and transnational identity; the relationship between fervor and selfdestruction ; and the nature of the matrix within which we live—generates a complex fictional topography. The sensibilities of the novel’s protagonists suggest a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology prove to be profoundly interrelated . Migration, in the form of new social formations that transgress national borders , provides a key context to exploring this work of fiction. It is no secret that in this day and age, several new and transnational social formations have reverted to fundamentalist, exclusionary, and antiinternationalist interests. Also, transnational politics in the twenty-first century often lead to cultural and religious fanaticism by emphasizing a conception of identity between the “authentic” and the “demonic.” I would...