Father Meme, and: Shrouds of White Earth (review)

"Storier." "Visionary creatures for ever in magical flight over the White Earth Nation." Both these phrases, from Father Meme and Shrouds of White Earth, respectively, have yet to win the currency of such signature Vizenor locutions as "postindian," "survivance," "shadow distance," or even his always lowercase and often enough italicized indians. But if they supply yet latest route markers into the inventive high swerve of his authorship, they also, quite precisely, help position these two latest fictions, both novellas, both seeming if not actual colloquies, and both razor sharp in their demolition of different kinds of institutional bad faith. Moreover they both carry any number of Vizenor's best shots, a Native humanity seen (and celebrated) against odds of history for its unvictimized creativity, an own ongoing trickster-postmodern imaginative play of ideas and contrariety.

Father Meme, nothing if not compassionate revenge story, tackles priestly abuse of altar boys on the reservation. That might have edged into mere sanctimony, agreed outrage. In fact, in the story of Meme—one Father Conan Whitty—and his co-conspiratorial monk lover, Swayback, in reality Brother Roger Placid Chrisp, their sexual predations upon the boys—Pants, Bush, and the narrator—and their sumptuously baroque comeuppance, Vizenor weaves a tale true to the ironic flourish of Bearheart, Griever, The Heirs of Columbus, The Trickster of Liberty, or Hotline Healers. This invites being thought his version of Crime and Punishment, even Witness for the Prosecution, set in the 1950s of Lake Leech and then Namakan and Wiindigoo Lakes, a cautionary tale of meanest clerical pedophilia and its due but also exquisite retribution.

Told in the voice of a Native ex-journalist to a visiting French female lawyer over Anishinaabe haute cuisine, with matching quality French wine, at the Mayagi Ashandiwin Restaurant of the Good Cheer Casino, it pitches benign consumption against the memory of its malign counterpart. For Meme and Swayback also act as nothing if not consumers, but of flesh, boy innocence, and on each occasion, be it in vestry or even by church altar, as if to summon the larger historic ravage of the Native body through colonial disease, rape, and the would-be dispossession of both tribal and existential sovereignty. As each of the narrator's "ma chère Madame" and exquisite good-host manners accompany the story, so they highlight the cannibal unmanners of the priestly Jekyll and Hyde pair. Together with dips into other Anishinaabe history such as the tragic suicide story of Dane White or shies at American Indian Movement (AIM) luminaries such as Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, the text steers subtly between case history and beautifully paced and controlled imaginative narrative.

Each of the key filaments builds into the gathering rhythm and dénouement. Meme's warning nosebleeds presage his own ecstatic death by beating. His July 4th sexual groping at Walker by Lake Leech anticipates a whole series of acts against the boys' bodily independence. The frequent and every-opportunity onanism is unsparing, flesh over spirit, cleric as neither father nor brother. The trip to the St. Johns Benedictine Abbey, with its high requiems and light-filled architecture and windows, plays against the Lake Namakan trip, which Meme and Swayback intend as cover for their all-too-earthbound lust—albeit the boys trick their tormentors into literally naked and fly-bitten abandonment.

In their altar boy war, however, the trio develop a counterstrategy worthy of the wiliest insurgent. Their Fourteen Torments of Meme, long-range rifle shots not only at him but also at the Vatican and diocesan authorities who have protected him, transpose the Stations of the Cross into a brilliant iconography of judicial revenge. As the boys finally lure the naked Meme into his winter fish-house death, he sure to be aroused by the beatings they administer, and with only his red hair and death's-head...