What makes our parties doubly unruly, and therefore doubly spectacular, is the fact that a clown god lives inside us. A spirit half-human and half-god, as is the case with all superheroes in all world mythologies. The difference is that our Trickster has a sense of humour and a concupiscence that know no limit.
I chose to read Laughing with the Trickster — a contribution to the CBC Massey Lectures series by noted Indigenous author and playwright Tomson Highway — on the occasion of Canada’s second National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and it was perfectly suited to the occasion. Over five chapters — examining language, creation, sex and gender, humour, and death — Highway shares personal stories, Indigenous mythology (particularly focussed on Trickster tales), and compares how language and creation myths from around the world set the tone for how a society decides to live within these five areas; easily making the case that colonialism (and the imposition of English and Christianity on Indigenous peoples) not only separated colonised people from their own culture and history but also forced them to adopt a more restrictive and frightening worldview. Thomson lays out these truths with a generosity of spirit and good humour, and this is the sort of informative and accessible book that should be widely read and widely taught as we seek reconciliation with our First Nations. Very highly recommended. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
For me, after having pored through every single word and syllable of its verbal fecundity, and comparing it to the many other languages I have tried on my world travels, I find English to be the world’s quintessential language of the intellect. It’s brilliant. When I need money, I speak English faster than the speed of sound. And generally get it. When I try to make money in Cree, by comparison, I go hungry. Cree is terrible when it comes to making money. But laughter? Hysteria unzippered, unbound, uncorked? That’s Cree’s genius.
Highway’s comparison of Cree and English (and how one’s native tongue informs mindset) was my most profound learning: Apparently, in Cree, there are no “bad words”; everything is on the table for joking and teasing and laughing about — even the way that words are formed is half a smile, and whether a person is talking (at a mile a minute) or listening, people engaging in a conversation in Cree are always ready to start laughing. This mindset contributes to and is the product of Cree mythology — from creation myths to hilarious tales of the Trickster — and also extends to the afterlife: as they believe that the spirit does not survive death (and the body returns to nourish the earth), traditional Cree peoples enjoy life, and laughter, and the pleasures of the body in the here and now. Comparing that to compulsory English and forced conversion to Christianity (with its inherent misogyny, sexual taboos, and fear of judgement in the afterlife), Highway makes the point that the First Nations weren’t just forced to live life in translation after first contact but compelled to change their entire view of reality; and I don’t know why I never considered it that way before. For this learning, I am grateful.
If the marriage between the sky god Zeus and his wife, the Earth goddess Hera, was violent, then it was nothing in comparison to the moment when the one Christian God met Mother Earth on these shores and the aggression was total — he almost killed her. But didn’t. The culture could have disappeared. The figure of the Trickster could have disappeared forever. The culture came close to disappearing. The figure of the Trickster came close to disappearing. But it didn’t. It hung on by a hair. And hung on and hung on and hung on, if by one spark. And that is the spark that Indigenous artists stoked to life. Not least of which did these Trickster stories they tell make us laugh, and laughter is medicine. In fact, never before has laughter saved an entire race of people in quite this manner.
Languages go extinct all the time (a quick Google search tells me that one dies every two weeks with its last speaker) and I can be a bit blasé about that fact: it's objectively sad, but globalisation and the free movement of people and the internet can make homogenisation feel like progress towards some Star Trek future where we’re all equal Earthlings. So I am grateful for what Highway taught me here about what’s at stake when a language — and its attendant culture and worldview — is under threat of extinction; this world would be a lesser place without the Trickster and they who share his tales and I am enlarged for having been on the receiving end of this learning.
