Making Love with the Land – Joshua Whitehead

[University of Minnesota Press; 2024]

Making Love with the Land, first published in 2022, is a lyrical, subversive, genre-defiant collection of theory, questions, and intimacies from Indigiqueer writer and scholar Joshua Whitehead. The book is formally categorized as essays, and each of the ten essays within it is a world larger than its boundaries. “Let me make a universe of a freckle,” Whitehead writes, a directive that asks for the reader’s patience while the speaker burrows into minutiae, examines it from within, and in doing so, rediscovers the world. He follows his meditations down to their biochemical elements, and elsewhere invites the reader into the moment-by-moment experience of insomnia, breaking out which percentage of one’s days is spent blinking.

This book is like a black hole. What can I say about a book I cannot get out of? Making Love with the Land protects a core that is infinitely dense but inaccessible. Whitehead’s work engages in parallel play alongside the enactments of Fred Moten and Édouard Glissant’s invocation of “the right to opacity.” Glissant himself, in his seminal text Poetics of Relation, gives voices to a hypothetical detractor, who says, “How can you communicate with what you don’t understand?” But Whitehead and Glissant both suggest there are kinds of understanding that come not from logic or language but a more embodied attention. “One must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components,” Glissant writes. As for the texture of Making Love with the Land, its gravity consumes me. It reads like a shining hologram of the universe is scripted onto its surface in an overly intricate projection. Whitehead’s prose is lyrical, reverberating with the musicality of alliteration, but its meandering subclauses and extensive clarifications sometimes scatter meaning across the cosmos as much as they reveal it.

Whitehead’s writing operates on several levels—intimate, cellular, bodily—and simultaneously in the realm of meta-commentary, deconstructing the expectations leveraged on his writing by genre, heteronormativity, colonialism, and more. Whitehead writes of ingesting trauma, holding space to help his kin process theirs, and his own fraught experience of living in a body. “My belly is full of quantum physics,” Whitehead writes, “elements making love to one another—metals plate organs, earth meets water, and at the atomic level, I am a kind of biotech. My belly is a prairie, my belly is the bush, my belly is a wild land, hinterland, ancestral land.” Passages like these are poetic and sly, running ahead of me like a fox weaving through the fields. While I read, I felt myself swept away by the momentum of Whitehead’s prose, but I also found myself sometimes struggling to pin down exactly what he was talking about, due to complexity of concept and the denseness of his sentences.

The meta-commentary in this collection often revolves around literature and the hegemonic influence of Westernness. “Literature,” Whitehead asserts, “is the decadence of anthropology, the end result(s) of excavation and its institutional grants, and the glamorized tales of fossil fuels and land/bodies made into literary technologies.” Whitehead rejects the colonial model of literature that would seek to archive Indigenous existence, pressing it like dried flowers into the defanged pages of the past. For readers who have suckled on Western myths of Indigenous erasure, Whitehead demands to be seen and recognized, not as a totem but a person, discrete and layered. “This book, to me, is wholly an attempt to remove Indigeneity from the prison house of the ‘then’ and release it into the ‘now.’”

“Writing as a Rupture,” the longest and central essay in the book, concentrates its energies on the question of genre. Whitehead reveals his dissatisfaction with the reductive categorization of “essays” and riffs on other possibilities. “Do I call it biographical? Autofiction? Autobiographical?” he asks, before offering “biostory.” At points, his refusal of preexisting structures seems pedantic, but to a perspective as integrated as Whitehead’s, nothing is neutral or untethered. The book decries any understanding of literature—or any art—divorced from politics. “What forms of colonial violence do I underpin,” Whitehead writes, “when I mark myself with form and genre as glyph and brand?” He teases out the ways that genre is an extension of the kind of thinking that elevates certain stories while marginalizing and tokenizing others. The book purposefully resists interpretation, seeing interpretation as a tool of the Western academy used to archive, historicize, and neutralize living Indigenous narratives. “To call genre naive or innocent, as many do, is nothing more than a quaint way of ignoring the colonial imperative behind literary and academic publishing,” Whitehead asserts. This point forces me to recognize that, unlike Whitehead, I’m often willing to settle for so-called “normative” categories, even as I acknowledge their imperfection. One reason is that I’m not as wounded by their shortcomings, whereas Whitehead belongs to a lineage that has been uniquely targeted by colonialism. My acceptance (of genre, and of broader preexisting structures that provide a framework for communication) is a mark of privilege. However, Whitehead’s rigorous rejection self-alienates. “I refuse to put my signature upon the ledger of genre,” Whitehead declares. “I refuse to be X or chromosome. I am Indigenous and gendered beyond Western understandings, beyond sex and nation and nuclear categorizations.” By coining a new genre, Whitehead perpetuates his distance from the hypothetical mainstream, positioning himself beyond the realm of what many readers might consider approachable. Whose job is it to build bridges, or to undertake translation? For me, the text prompted me to consider what kind of expectations I hold when cracking open a new book, and how willing I am to relinquish those expectations. Reading Making Love with the Land was not an act of leisure, but a rigorous encounter with a shape-shifting narrator whose experiences and identities dramatically differ from my own. Was I willing to release my attachment to self-reiteration for long enough that I could steep in Whitehead’s words?

The various essays in Making Love with the Land display different orientations to the nuances of language, translation, and legibility. All of them reverberate with Whitehead’s contempt for the ways English has been used to strangle other linguistic expressions. “Where English enflames trauma to its boiling point, saturated and pressurized, I run from your properness, English.” In “My Body is a Hinterland,” the third essay in the book, Whitehead intersperses English and transliterated Cree words, refusing to exoticize them with italics or other differentiating notation. In another essay, “A Geography of Queer Woundings,” Whitehead employs the traditional alphabet of the Cree language, followed by a transliteration, then a translation. Once certain words have been established through repetition, he phases out their translations.

Interestingly, the book seems to progress from less accessible to a more accessible format. One of the final essays of the book translates the meaning of each Cree word via footnote. Each of these renderings require something different of me as a reader: different levels of empathy, imagination, and intellectual engagement with the text. Whitehead’s choice to dislocate a monolingual English reader carries reverse echoes of the cultural genocide enacted on the First Nations when they were stripped of their languages and forced to speak English at residential schools.

Speech—and its animation—is one of Whitehead’s driving preoccupations. In the essay “Writing as a Rupture,” Whitehead argues for orality—“the deployment of our voices, senses, bodies.” Furthermore, the consonance and assonance throughout his writing demands it. “Here my soul too becomes a bowl,” he writes, lines shaped by prosody that beg to be read aloud. “I foreground the arch of my foot against the bevel of the Rockies. We craft a parallax of containers thirsting to be filled.” The sonic experience of Whitehead’s writing is part of its point, and I yearn to crawl into a cave that reverberates with his musicality. While reading, I wondered how my experience of the book would change if I could witness it performed by Whitehead: animated by breath and body, an incarnation for which the text cries out. But is that not another form of commodification? Would such enactment be the commandeering of Whitehead’s voice or the usurpation of my ears? In the dialectic between speaker and audience, what is the distribution of power?

The penultimate essay, “Me, the Joshua Tree,” is the most concrete and most affectionate essay in the collection, reading like a hymn of thanks to a former lover. It regurgitates the end of a romance. Whitehead recalls sharing a smile with his lover at his sister’s wedding, noticing him seated among family in the front row: “You are a beauty of a man, sitting there in your baby-blue suit jacket, white shirt, black tie, your facial hair a bonnet around your face.” Some of Whitehead’s most frequently invoked words are lover/partner (nîcimos), friend (nitôtem), and kinship (wahkohhtowin), all of which reiterate the centrality of human connection. Whitehead repositions my understanding of queerness within his Indigenous context: “‘Queerness’ is not a word we know in nêhiyâwewin,” he notes. “While surely we had polyamory, and what we would now consider queer couplings, we did so to continue the bounty of community and the reciprocal care that it took to remain within the tenets of miyopimatisowin [the good life, or communal wellness].” Making Love with the Land is a revelation of the many forms queerness can take, an expansion, a celebration of an ever-widening canon.

The prose reads like lovemaking, but the kind of lovemaking that involves grappling, hints of frustration muddled in with the tenderness. The speaker swells against the constraints that would stifle him. The text teems with passages of transcendence and abjection. When depicting scenes culled from his relationships, Whitehead’s vignettes of togetherness bioluminesce with tenderness. “I shower while you’re at work,” Whitehead narrates. “Waiting for you to come back to this place you call home, I inspect the inventory of your identities . . . Even your body hair spells out stories to me. I bask in the scent of your armpits, your jawline, the way the delicate skin on the bridge of your nose has spread its oils here.”

The mapping of self is senseless without the relativity of relationship, Whitehead demonstrates. But the specificity of the relationships Whitehead explores evade the reader, because Whitehead leaves so much unspoken. His proclivity for allusion and lyricism smudge the boundaries of shapes, leaving the reader uncertain about the nature of the addressee. Different essays—or different sections within individual essays—suddenly break into second person. “I look at the “you’s” who have harmed me in ways big or small,” Whitehead writes, “and I will you all to stone, carry you like gall in the bladder of my being and expunge you in the beautiful delight of a well-deserved urination.” The image is striking, but it’s like making a sculpture from the breeze: The content is too fluid for the form to hold its shape. In different essays, the “you” is a current lover, a former lover, a representation of colonialism, or any other number of specters. Whitehead acknowledges the second person as a literary construct, and he pushes the concept to its own splintering. “Ain’t that the funniest thing about writing? The ‘you’ I keep invoking is multifarious, shattered glass, and I have only ever been talking to myself.” But the point of a book is that the speaker is not speaking solely to themself. The reader is the one left to collect the shards, to attempt to assemble a singular object from all the shape-shifting second persons. “I am striking this flint,” Whitehead writes, “to break this pronominal form, this ‘you’ down to its roots too, inspect ‘you’ elementally, granite of loss, determine not its ecological but its emotional value to me. Instead, I break me, because this ‘you’ is a simulation, and I am faced with truth.”

The text is limned with grief for departed kin, suspended mourning, and the interminable trauma of continually uncovering deeper wounds of colonialism. Homophobia shadows nearly every public interaction with a partner. Throughout the book, Whitehead references developments in the news, from the discovery of the hundreds of bodies of Indigenous children interred near the Kamloops Residential School to the two years of intensive isolation from the covid-19 pandemic. “This running home,” Whitehead writes, “is a raging against the death knell the world has been ringing, both in this particular momentous pandemic but also in the echo of those church bells that have been tolling their death hymns for Indigeneity since 1492.” Whitehead dialogues with these forces of fear and violence, asserting his humanity while refusing to negotiate dignity. This is not an activist text: It does not provide neatly codified steps for societal improvement. Rather, by demonstrating his own reliance on medicine, his own practices of integration and healing, Whitehead pushes the reader to question what fractures permeate our own beings, and how we can move toward deeper relationship, connectedness, and kinship. In the final essay, “The Pain Eater,” Whitehead returns to the porousness of the second person: “Here I’ll build a world from a pronoun, and balloon it into wishes. I place a kiss into the wind in the hope it finds you when you need love.”

McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University and participated in the inaugural Emerging Critics Workshop with Anaphora Literary Arts. McKenzie is the executive editor for sneaker wave, an online home for compelling nonfiction storytelling. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.