Playwright-musician Tomson Highway wrote the libretto for the Cree opera The Journey (Pimooteewin). (Soundstreams Canada)
If you’re ever feeling blue, try talking to Tomson Highway. Not only is he Canada’s foremost First Nations playwright, he’s also a great mood elevator. The man who wrote The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing loves to goof around, pull your leg and crack silly jokes worthy of a 12-year-old.
His lighthearted attitude is infectious. I remember interviewing him in 1998 about his first novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen. It’s a semi-autobiographical work that deals with, among other things, child abuse, loss of cultural identity and AIDS; I was braced for a heavy conversation. When I called him up, he answered the phone with a jaunty, “Earwax removal specialists. How can we help you?”
Here we are, a decade later, and this time Highway is calling me — from a telephone cabina in Buenos Aires. I pick up the phone and there’s his cheery voice, like a ray of southern sunshine slicing through the grey Canadian winter. The occasion for his call is the premiere of his new chamber work, The Journey or Pimooteewin, which is being touted as the first opera in Cree. It’s a musical adaptation of a classic First Nations myth, with music by Montreal-based composer Melissa Hui. The production is directed and choreographed by National Ballet alumnus Michael Greyeyes, and features soprano Xin Wang, tenor Bud Roach and the Elmer Iseler Singers.
The Journey has two performances, Feb. 15 and 16, at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre, but Highway won’t be there to see it. As his surname suggests, the guy loves to travel. Normally he splits his time between northern Ontario and the south of France, but this year he’s wintering in South America. In a breezy interview, the 56-year-old Highway talked about the opera, how Cree is the language of the groin and why political correctness is the bane of First Nations playwriting.
Tenor Bud Roach, front left, and soprano Xin Wang, front right, star in The Journey (Pimooteewin). (Cylla von Tiedemann/Soundstreams Canada)
Q: So Tomson, what are you doing in Buenos Aires?
A: I’m getting a sex-change operation. In fact, I’m already a woman.A: I’m a new woman. [Laughs.] No, of course not, I’m quite happy as a man. I’m just basically having a wonderful time, becoming fluent in Spanish, adding it to my repertoire of languages. This year, I got this fabulous invitation, which, at the risk of blowing my own horn — which I never do, because I’m not a horn player, I’m a piano player; the last time I tried to blow my piano, my piano wasn’t agreeable to the act! [Laughs.] Anyway, I get the most extraordinary invitations to do readings, and this time, I got an invitation to do a national tour of Brazil in November. I basically crisscrossed the country, doing lectures and cabarets in six different cities, and had an absolute ball. Then my partner said, “Why don’t we just spend the winter down here? You’ve always wanted to master Spanish, so here’s your chance.”
A: Five years ago, I was invited to a conference held by Soundstreams Canada, which does homegrown Canadian opera and choral music. It’s run by [oboist and founder] Lawrence Cherney. I get invited to these things because I’m a combination writer and musician. [Highway is a classically trained pianist who studied music at the University of Western Ontario.] I made this presentation about Cree, which is my mother tongue, and how I believe as an artist that human language is a musical instrument. Afterwards, [Cherney and I] started talking on that level and he said, “Well, why don’t you write us a Cree opera?”
A: It’s not specifically Cree, it’s sort of universal to the aboriginal people of Canada in general. It’s this story about what is basically a crossing of the River Styx — although it’s not called that in native mythology — into the land of the dead. It involves the Trickster, one of the essential characters of aboriginal mythology, and the time he decided to cross that river with his best friend, the Eagle, to go visit the ancestors. They go off to this magic island of the dead and go to this ball, this dance. I chose that story specifically because I had, at that point in time, five years ago, experienced a lot of death in my immediate family. And ultimately, in the philosophical and theological context of aboriginal beliefs, death is not negative at all, it’s positive — it’s not an end, it’s a continuation of life in a different energy form. The dead are still among us — that’s the gist of it.
A: Yes, I think this is the first work where I’ve used Cree extensively. The text itself is all in Cree, but there’s also an English narrator who provides translations for the audience.
Q: When you published Kiss of the Fur Queen, you were quoted as saying that the story came to you in Cree, and that you had to translate it into English as you wrote it.
A: They always do — all my works. That’s the world I come from. My parents didn’t speak English. My father [fisherman and trapper Joe Highway] spoke a kind of pidgin English, but my mother didn’t. My older brothers and sisters didn’t. I come from [the Brochet Reserve in northern Manitoba], a part of the world that’s so isolated that English has only arrived with the last generation. You write about what you know best, which in my case is my community. So my characters all speak Cree in my head, and the biggest challenge is the simultaneous translation. My new novel is about 15 per cent in Cree. When I can’t express something in English, I switch over to Cree.Q: What does Cree have as a language that English lacks?
A scene from The Journey (Pimooteewin). (Cylla von Tiedemann/Soundstreams Canada)
A: The strongest aspect of English for me is that it’s the world’s foremost intellectual language, it comes from the head. The French language comes from the heart, it’s an emotional language. And Cree is a visceral language, it comes from a third part of the human body, a part that’s forbidden to be talked about in English. It’s the garden of joy, of pleasure, from which the English language was evicted 4,000 years ago — to put it in theological terms. It’s hysterical. When you speak Cree, you laugh all the time. Every syllable is a kick in the arse. So when I want to laugh, I speak Cree. When I want to make money, I speak English. When I want to make love, I speak French.
A: Well, I’ve never had any ambition to become an opera librettist. It was an interesting experience [writing The Journey], I loved every second of it, but I don’t think I’ll write another one. I have a limited amount of time on this earth, another 40 years if I’m lucky, and I’d like to concentrate those 40 years on the form that is most successful for me as a working artist. And that’s the novel.
A: That’s become smaller and smaller in my field of vision. [In getting productions of his work done,] a native writer is seriously hampered by political correctness. There’s this attitude out there that only native actors can play native roles. But acting — the verb “to act” — means to pretend to be who you are not, so I don’t believe in that idea that you have to be a native to play one. Look at [playwright] Morris Panych — and I don’t want to say a word against him, because I adore the man — but what if someone were to come up to him and say, “You’re only allowed to work with Polish actors?” He wouldn’t have much of a career. If someone were to go up to Atom Egoyan and say, “You can work only with Armenian actors,” his career would die tomorrow. There’s a very real danger of that happening with native writers. And the older I get, the less interested I become in immersing myself in that problem.
A: No, not really, it’s too delicate, it’s too raw. The writing is exhilarating most of the time, but also very scary. Basically, it takes place in northern Manitoba and it’s about the Cree community I come from. It’s a tragicomedy. It tells a very serious story in a very funny way.
The Journey (Pimooteewin) runs Feb. 15 and 16 in Toronto.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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