Drowning in Fire (review)

The Oklahoma of American Indian cultural critic Craig Womack, who's Red on Red affirmed a literary renaissance in American Indian studies, has a definite set of looks, sounds, and smells. But mostly, it has shape, the shape of inspiration. In his first work of fiction, Drowning in Fire, Womack leaves few rocks unturned; and there are no skeletons in the closet, straightly speaking, because the Oklahoma of the main character, Josh, a gay, adolescent Creek boy growing up in the thickets, hills, and creeks of Indian territory, has the vaporous presence of all those who have died, gone missing, still live, and permeate the land of red earth.

Josh's search for himself brings him in contact with a throng of oppositional forces. In line with most coming-of-age novels, the boy is positioned between Indian and white religion, between Creek and white cultures, and ultimately, he hangs between genders. Josh's family is strung along both ethnic and economic marginalization and courage comes only after reconciling his present life—one as a gay Indian in love with his best friend and basketball star, Jimmy, who has lived a life near poverty in homes built by HUD in rural Oklahoma—with the life of his family's past, which lies in dream state on the lips of his elders and under the waters of Oklahoma's rivers and lakes. The oppressive social climate of white Southern Baptist Oklahoma is juxtaposed with a young gay Indian cast and culture that peruses personal ads and the empty streets of monstrous Oklahoma City in search of fulfillment, desire, and self.

Josh, and Womack himself, grew up in a time when Indian history and the Indian story were neglected in the schools, and mystified war chiefs and savages of the white-understood past had been replaced by children stereotyped as welfare dependent, uneducated thugs, who were supposed to, and sometimes did, steel bicycles off the racks in front of local pharmacies and grocery stores. Josh and his companions are searching to become humans—instead of an "undifferentiated Indian"—in the eyes of a culture that denies them their roots and is, effectively, trying to erase the realities of the present and stunting the prospects for the future. The boy's daily life is filled with magazines, trout fishing, swimming, and ultimately by his love for Jimmy. But as the young, troubled Mvskoke canvasses the Oklahoma landscape, he encounters clean, unrefutable bits of his family's history and his own story, presented to him through magical realism brought on by the tales of his great aunt Lucille. Womack constantly reflects upon a past where the waters of reservoirs remove Josh's family from their historic homes and which reveal hidden legacies, people, and secrets. In the end, the waters of Oklahoma cleanse the young teen of a misunderstood past and allow the bitterness, insecurity, and selflessness of the present to disappear no longer as unsavory secrets.

Drowning in Fire looms like spring thunderclouds on the plains. It sets on the horizons of a new Indian literature and the new American studies as part of an emerging genre of texts that truly evoke the reciprocity between life and land and between past and future. Womack takes us to places that, for those of us who have spent time in Oklahoma or whose families are there, remind us of the oppressive summer heat in the cross timbers. Womack stretches and spins the details into a sometimes melancholic, often confused, but ultimately liberating verse that rings out quietly throughout the book. Like the hum of the locusts in a hot, sultry Oklahoma August, the sounds of revelation, understanding, and freedom undercut the pure madness, desolation, and insecurities any adolescent, let alone a gay one, may feel.

Womack's mutated pictures of life in Oklahoma over the past thirty-eight years bring to mind a land and a life...