Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters LlNA PERKINS "/s there a time of the Other, another, separate history?" - Kadiatu Kanneh For critics of Tomson Highway's theatre, the character of Nanabush has become something of a distraction.' Nanabush, the Cree and Ojibway trickster figure, plays a pivotal role in both of Highway's published plays, The Rez Sisters and its sequel, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. In conjunction with analysis of Highway's political motives, the cultural weight of Nanabush has provided almost all the material for criticism on Highway's plays. With the notable exception of Helen Gilbert, Highway's critics tend to regard his plays as venues for political protest and to read his use of Nanabush as an assertion of the values of an intact and monolithic culture. Even those who recognize other strains in Highway's writing give an inordinate amount of prominence to the trickster. William Morgan's interview with Highway, for example, contains a great deal of infonnation that has nothing to do with the trickster, including Highway's remarks on his training as a pianist and on Greek myth and classical drama. The title of the piece, however, "The Trickster and Native Theatre," proclaims these remarks to be comparatively insignificant . Perhaps it should not be surprising that many critics focus exclusively on his use of the trickster or that they treat his use of the trickster simply as a product of his politics, given Highway's material and his statements elsewhere . Such a reading, however, oversimplifies both Nanabush as a character and the plays as a whole. The primary difficulty with the readings I have cited above is that they ignore the fact that Nanabush is a character in a play, a product of dramaturgical craft, as well as being a cultural figure. This means two things: first, that he' is not identical to the trickster figure who appears in Cree and Ojibway mythologies; and second, that he functions as part of an ensemble of other Modern Drama, 45:2 (Summer 2002) 259 260 UNA PERKINS characters and that he must be assessed in relation to them. Nanabush's importance to The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips is unquestionable. In the plays and elsewhere, Highway makes it clear that the trickster is central to his work.' The Nanabush who appears in Highway's plays has not simply been lifted from stories or histories. He has been drawn out of personal and cultural memory and must be drawn out further by the other characters in the ensemble. For Highway and for the characters in Highway's plays, Nanabush is neither a contemporary nor a readily available figure; he is a figure brought back from the past of a culture that no longer exists in any coherent form. The point of Nanabush's presence is that he has been forgotten, at least in part, and needs to be recovered. Because the Nanabush in Highway's work is a memory figure , he is subject to the exigencies of time, change, and human perspective. The play's emotional centre is not Nanabush himself but the ways in which other characters relate to him. Highway's fascination with the trickster provides the occasion for a larger set of concerns that have to do with the past, with the mutability of cultural identity, and above all with the difficulties and subtleties of human memory. This is not to say that Nanabush is entirely cut off from the world of the play. As an embodied memory, he blurs the lines of presence and absence. In The Rez Sisters, Nanabush is present physically on the stage, but he is only half-present to most of the characters, who either do not see him or see him as a bird, as the bingo master, as a shadow, or as an emotion. He is a figure of divided temporal allegiances, spanning the gap between the present action of the play and the past of the people it portrays. The divided sense of time that results, like the "time of the Other" posited by Kadiatu Kanneh (148), recalls and subsumes the structures of evolutionary time attacked by 10hannes Fabian...