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Cherie Dimaline is an emerging talent
Book Review
By Derryll White
Dimaline, Cherie (2019). Empire of Wild.
Eden Robinson gave me hope that a whole new language of Canada was about to be written. Her “Trickster” novels excited me in deep-rooted ways that other Canadians, even the lusty Leonard Cohen, hadn’t. One only has to read the Prologue to Cherie Dimaline’s ‘Empire of Wild’ to know that a whole new Canadian cosmology is being laid down. The crass ugliness of occupation, displacement and colonial power is squashed by the awakening of a new imagist beauty in Dimaline’s clear, haunting prose.
She does not make me ashamed to be an old white Caucasian male; instead she makes me proud to be able to comprehend and sympathize with the story she tells and the ancient loss she feels. We all have rougarous in our past. Mine used to threaten to come out each night from underneath my bed and do terrible things to me. Dimaline’s Métis roots contain mystical stories, and she brilliantly uses this this heritage to take the reader on a fascinating journey from a Walmart parking lot to a deep forest with unending possibilities.
Cherie Dimaline is certainly an emerging talent that everyone should try to read. Coming from a Georgian Bay Métis community, she has channeled her grandmother into a voice all Canada would benefit from. And don’t lose track of Zeus, her 12-year-old Johnny Cash loving nephew. He speaks of the promise of a Canada not yet quite realized.
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Excerpts from the novel:
HOME – Like any small community, Arcand demanded familiarity and loyalty. It pushed outsiders out like splinters, and it tried its best to eliminated Victor in this way.
THE SITUATION – “Sometimes we have to do what we have to do, even if that means working in the mines. What are we supposed to do? Stay poor! Would that prove to you that we‘re Indian enough?”
THE MESSAGE – “And my friends, that wrong worship that pagan way of life, is exactly what laid me to waste – what has led our people, our good people, to waste. And because of it, we fell into a time of degradation and great poverty. Why have we, among all God’s men, suffered so greatly? Why have we been left behind when it comes to enjoying the riches of His bounty? Why are our youth dying, our men in prisons at such a high rate, our women being murdered and going missing? We are paying for the sins of our fathers.”
PERSPECTIVE – “Wonder if the old white people in town know anything?” she mused, then answered her own question. “No, that’s the problem, them – no connection, no living in their old stories.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
