I thought that I could leave the bad behind. But I guess the bad isn’t a thing you can run from, because it’s not a thing that can be held. It doesn’t announce itself, there’s no siren or beacon. Instead, it’s a steady beating, like a heart or a drum. It’s a sound that lives in the body and grows down into the ground.
Expanded from an award-winning short story with the same title, Bad Cree is about grief and guilt and loneliness and how one young woman learns to deal with these “bads” by reconnecting with her community. And while this novel opens with a bang and dangles the promise of a thrilling and thoughtful examination of the modern Indigenous experience, with cliché-ridden writing, strange inconsistencies, and a rushed climax, the early promise never felt fulfilled. In an interview, author Jessica Johns explains that the original short story, her MFA project, was not only written as a rebuke to a faculty member who warned her class that readers don’t care about dreams (which Johns took as an affront to her Cree heritage of dream-sharing), but Johns also states, “I was learning a lot of great things during my MFA, but also I learned a lot of things about craft that were very colonial. There were Western ways of storytelling that I had to unlearn.” So, perhaps this wasn’t so much a failure of editing as a pointed resistance to meet my Western expectations of storytelling — which I am happy to have challenged — but still, this didn’t entirely satisfy my tastes. I would be interested to read the author again.
Before I look down, I know it’s there. The crow’s head I was clutching in my dream is now in bed with me. I woke up with the weight of it in my hands, held against my chest under the covers. I can still feel its beak and feathers on my palms. The smell of pine and the tang of blood sting my nose. My pillow feels for a second like the cold, frozen ground under my cheek. I yank off my blanket, heavy like I’m pulling it back from the past, and look down to my hands, now empty. A feeling of static pulses inside them like when a dead limb fills with blood again. They are clean and dry and trembling.
Shit. Not again.
I loved this opening passage: creepy and mysterious — artefacts from nightmares crossing into the light of day! — I sure wanted to know more about what was going on. And while the mystery of this situation kept me reading to the end for answers, this novel isn’t quite the “horror” that it seems to be marketed as. More than anything, this is the story of turning to one’s (female) relatives in order to heal a broken heart/psyche/identity.
The plot: Mackenzie fled her northern Alberta home for Vancouver three years earlier after the death of her beloved kokum; the grief was just too much for her to handle. And although one of her older sisters also died suddenly the year before the novel begins, Mackenzie was unable to bring herself to go home for the funeral; was unable to even share that heartache over the phone with her family. But now she’s having nightmares about her dead sister that are dangerously crossing over into the real world, and with a gang of crows suddenly following her everywhere she goes, and the nightmares morphing into repressed memories, Mackenzie is convinced to finally go back home and seek help and answers.
Johns does a wonderful job with the setting — from Mackenzie’s cheap and squalid Vancouver apartment to a home in High Prairie bustling with family and food and laughter, I believed all of it — and her characters are real and relatable. (But as much as I appreciate the girl-power support offered by Mackenzie’s mother, friends, and aunties, I do want to take a moment to wonder where the men are. Her [white] father has a couple of lines but he isn’t included in any of the action or the healing; he’s forced to “go away” for work shortly after Mackenzie gets home and he isn’t mentioned again. Even her grandfather [moshum] is only referred to a couple of times whereas her grandmother [kokum] is a central character. Johns writes of life at home, “Uncles followed orders, kids made things harder on everyone, but aunties carried the magic that made it all come together.” I didn’t need male characters to swoop in and save everyone, but it felt odd that they never even entered a room where the women were.) And there was something really interesting in the solution to the mystery that I wish Johns had explored deeper. (The community — and Mackenzie and her family in particular — are being stalked by a “wheetigo”; a cannibalistic monster from Cree tradition. In Johns’ explanation, this monster was summoned to the area by the greed of the oil industry, and as the drilling rigs are now rusting in the fields and the workers have mostly moved away, the wheetigo is forced to feed on anyone it can; attracted to those with “bad” energy in their hearts. This is only explained very briefly, but I would have eaten up an entire book exploring just this.) For the most part, this is a story of Mackenzie wanting to reconnect with her family, but every time she decides to tell them what’s really going on in her dreams, she decides to keep it to herself; waffling back and forth, not moving the plot forward, needing help, refusing it, then suddenly asking for it. It’s frustrating and sucks the energy out of such a promising setup.
I still hold a piece of the bad inside me. I used to think enough love was supposed to wipe all the bad clean, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. The truth is, I’m brimming with love. The love pouring from the tip of kokum’s finger when she pointed out wapanewask. The love in Auntie Verna’s eyes when we got a good bingo. In Mom’s hands carrying the other end of a pile of lumber. I have so much love I’m sick with it. But there will always be bad living alongside it, etched under my skin. Living with bad doesn’t make me bad, though, it’s just there like everything else.
In the short story (which can be read here), the crossing-into-real-life nightmares are a neat metaphorical device for dealing with grief and guilt and loneliness. By layering on supernatural elements from Cree mythology in order to draw the concept out to book length, Johns loses some of the literary satisfaction of the metaphorical device, but she is also able to satisfyingly paint a picture of her community’s day to day life. There’s something lost in the transition, something worthwhile gained, and while I still think this could have benefitted from further editing, I’m not disappointed to have read this.
I also liked the following passage because it reminded me of Tomson Highway's Laughing with the Trickster (reviewed here) wherein he explains that it's not just the language that a people speak but how they speak it that expresses and reinforces a people's worldview; Cree children being forced to speak English in residential schools caused those children to lose more than just language; it altered their mindset, too:
Once, I had laughed with my hand over my mouth because my teacher told me an open mouth was a rude mouth. Kokum gently moved my hand from my face and told me to laugh like I was blowing air into a giant balloon, as open and as hard as I could. She said that if my teacher ever told me to cover my mouth again, I should tell her and she’d take care of it.
Gotta love a kokum for that.
