Laughter. Not bitter sarcastic laughter, but wholehearted merriment. Life is there to be enjoyed, and this is what Tomson Highway tells in words and music and in his way of being.

This is what we had the priviledge of sharing on 18 November 2013 at the University of Liège. A Cree born in a Dene community in the north of Manitoba, he spoke these two radically different languages first and exclusively until he was sent to a Residential School in the south of the province. So while he is known as a writer of plays and a novel in English, English somehow is still a language which is fully his (he lives with a French-speaking partner and has started writing in French too). He points out that Cree is a happy funny language that does not shy away from what is prudishly ignored in our European idioms, and futher explains that while it does not differentiate between genders the difference it does express is between animate and inanimate, with all orders of the natural world, including worms, say, or rocks being in the first category. Similarly Cree mythology is embracing with woman as a primary creative principle and the continuity of the circle in which there is room for all and everyone as a central metaphor, while the Christian mythology, based as it is on a male and emphatically celibate god and the rejection of sex, enforces a hierarchical approach to the world and insists on such strange notions as guilt and redemption through suffering.

Before writing Highway’s first medium of communication is music. As we could hear he is a talented and passionate pianist. He is also, and more and more so, a composer, inspired by jazz and cabaret music : a substantial part of his presentation consisted of his playing some of the songs in his latest play The (Post)Mistress (he had brought some (as yet not commercially released) CDs of the music. Best source of information on Tomson Highway is his website.

Christine Pagnoulle
Février 2014

Christine Pagnoulle enseigne la traduction et les littératures anglophones à l'Université de Liège. Ses recherches portent principalement sur la poésie et les littératures des Caraïbes.