“So aside from saving their future marriages, they’re coming to the workshop because of the MuchMusic van?”
“Yup. It’s their only connection to the outside world. And they’re coming for the snacks, of course.”
“Okay.”
I sighed and mentally steeled myself for the gruelling week he had just prepared me for. Working with teenagers was often akin to pulling teeth, and this was going to be no different.
That afternoon we did the rounds, picking up the boys from their modest homes. Bleeding, glassy-eyed deer carcasses hung from the trees, rusted-out vehicles and appliances, some decades old, lay abandoned in the yards, and naked toddlers covered in snot and dirt chased after dogs. A couple of forgotten nineteenth-century wooden chapels stood amongst the tall grass of the valleys, and families of bears rummaged through the garbage dump. It was my first time on a rez, although I’d driven by the ones in Vancouver, wealthy and developed in comparison with this rural one.
Once the boys were loaded into the van, Hossein dropped us all off at the gym, the lone structure on a mountaintop. He pulled out a cooler with juice boxes, sandwiches, and fruit for dinner break, and drove away. Standing in a circle in the wake of the vehicle’s dust, the boys nailed me with their black eyes, their faces neutral masks framed by their hoodies. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. I was alone with a group of absolute strangers, six teenaged boys covered in scars, in the middle of nowhere, on the summit of a hill that would swallow the sun by the time the session was over, prey to their predatory eyes. I took a deep breath, levelled their collective stare with my own steady gaze, and said:
“It’s time to start.”
I broke the circle and strode towards the door, key chain shaking in my hand.
“Someone bring the cooler.”
They followed my orders and walked inside.
I spent the entire afternoon and evening trying to get them to open their mouths. Keeping my panic under wraps, I grasped at straws. If I couldn’t even get them to make a single utterance, much less stand up after opening circle, in which the only one who had spoken was me, how was I ever going to lure them onto the stage to tell their stories?
After I explained that we were going to create short plays based on moments of oppression in their own lives, they remained steadfastly mum and stone-faced, refusing to play any of the drama games designed to break the ice. At 9 p.m., after five hours of muteness—they’d had their dinner in total silence, without breaking the circle—I managed to coax them onto their feet by modelling an exercise wherein a person took on the role of an oppressor or oppressed person. I demonstrated an inner monologue, voicing my character’s secret thoughts and feelings through phrases that expressed fear, pain, shame, and anger. When I was done, I asked,
“Is that clear?”
They just stood there, with their concave chests, fists rammed deep into their pockets, staring at me with blank faces.
Just as I was about to speak again, one of them broke the silence and observed:
“Boy. I never heard nobody talk so much. You talked a lot, eh?”
His mouth broke into a wee smile and his eyes danced with mischief. Repressing the impulse to hug him with all my might, I said,
“Yes, I suppose that was a lot of talking, but that’s what the inner monologue is about, it’s—”
“Where you from?” he interrupted.
The others cocked their heads. Was the silence-breaker the leader of the pack? When we’d picked him up, Hossein had told me his name was Callum. I’d watched him walk towards our idling van, black baseball cap pulled low under his hoodie-covered head, a pack of dogs barking playfully around him.
“Vancouver,” I answered.
“No. Where you really from?” Callum demanded.
“Chile.”
“Where’s that?”
“South America.”
“Where’s that?”
Undoubtedly he was pulling my leg.
“South of here. Past the States, past Mexico, past Central America. Way down south.”
“You act like an urban Indian.” He scowled.
“Oh. Well, one could argue that I’m Metis, what with the Indigenous blood in my family. You know, most Chileans are a mix of Spanish with Mapuche, and my great-grandmother was Diaguita for sure—”
“What kind of a name is Carmen?”
“It’s Spanish. It’s from Spain. Apparently it means ‘house.’ But who knows if that’s accurate. Although in Granada there are houses called Carmens that—”
“You talk too much.”
“Oh. Okay. I’ll stop now.”
The ice was broken, so I pushed my luck and introduced the exercise designed to pull the stories out of them, presenting a tableau of a moment of oppression in my own life. I always shared a banal, generic sketch that reeked of generalizations. In other words, it lacked truth. Usually I sat on the ground, head dropped, while I shaped other members of the workshop into oppressors pointing their fingers at me, evil grins on their diabolical faces. A grotesque, one-dimensional illustration of bullying that had never really happened to me. I did this because I knew that the facilitator could not engage emotionally with the group, that emotional involvement voided the entire process, as no one would be present to hold the space and keep the room safe.
I had only ever taken the risk of revealing a real moment of oppression in my life—the rape—when I had co-facilitated a workshop at the women’s jail in Burnaby. And by doing so, I had let the double doors of possibility swing open so wide that the harrowing and disturbing images the prisoners subsequently created were like a hurricane blasting through rooms that had been padlocked for decades. Each impression was so honest, so rich and vulnerable, that the risk I had taken had proven to be worthwhile. I had exposed myself yet still managed to keep the facilitator–participant boundary intact. And when I opened myself to those women, they in turn had dropped their guard, their images so real and complex that the plays presented at the end were some of the best I’d facilitated.
Since then, I had returned to the generic bullying cartoon, out of simple fear. I hadn’t felt safe enough while facilitating other groups, which included male offenders at halfway homes and reform schools, to display the rape vignette. This made me a hypocrite. Who was I to ask them to unveil their most vulnerable moments if I wasn’t able to do the same with them? Whether they knew this consciously or not, I was positive it was something they could sense. And so I took the risk with Callum and the rest of the boys, and I constructed a detailed, no-holds-barred depiction of the rape. Unbeknownst to them, the act of hiking through their woods twice in one day to get to and from the road was the first time I’d walked alone through dense foliage since the attack, fifteen years earlier.
I wasn’t afraid of rapists in that remote area, and yet the symbol of trekking solo under the canopy of the temperate rainforest was a powerful one for me, the strength of that picture propelling me in the construction of my piece. One of the boys, playing Macarena, lay face down on the gym floor, fingers woven behind his head, while another was a jogger on the trail nearby. Callum, standing on a chair, spread his arms, the bald eagle flying above, and the final boy was shaped into a pose that echoed the downward-facing dog. I placed myself underneath this boy, eye on the eagle, my face and body a lifeless Raggedy Ann doll. From that position, I instructed everyone to breathe, those who were in the image as well as the two who were witnessing, our collective lungs filling with breath and exhaling over and over again, the act of wilful breathing an exercise in and of itself.
The floodgates opened when each boy galvanized my still life with his inner monologue, spoken out loud, and flew off their hinges when we left my rendition behind and they constructed their own, each placing himself as the central oppressed person in the impression he offered. By the end of the week, we had three dramas based on the many scenes explored during those five days.
Drummers from Kamloops opened the event. After their welcome son
g, the plays were presented. The boys embodied versions of themselves, their parents, sisters, brothers, grandparents, uncles, and cousins. In the opening number, Callum, playing a raging father, delivered the following speech while his young son cowered in the corner:
“I went to residential school. I was raped, I was beaten, I was starved. I had dust thrown in my eyes.”
The residential boarding school system was designed by the federal government to “beat the Indian out of the child.” The goal was assimilation, because an Indian who identified with the white man would not fight for his or her land. The schools, run by the Christian churches, which were offered five dollars per head for every Indian they converted to Christianity when the system first began in the 1870s, operated for over a hundred years. The last one had shut down only one month before this play was performed. Attendance at the schools was compulsory, and over 150,000 Indian, Inuit, and Métis children were sent to them, some forcibly removed from their homes by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Once there, beatings, sexual abuse, neglect, medical experiments, malnutrition, disease, and even death were not out of the ordinary.
In the second play, Keith, master of the smoky eye, red lipstick, and green-and-blue-hued hair, played a boy being sexually abused by a group of male relatives during a house party. In the third, half the boys played a group of parents off on a bender, while the remaining three were small children left behind to fend for themselves for days on end, in the dead of winter, with no food or heat.
A loaded hush came over the audience once the plays were shown, the kind of alert quiet that befalls one when face to face with an unpredictable wild animal. After a few moments, I broke the charged silence by asking the audience, some of whom had come from neighbouring reserves, others white people from the nearby town, if they recognized the stories the six boys had told. They nodded. For the next two hours, the audience took turns going on the stage, taking the place of the person they believed was being oppressed, and trying different things so that the outcome wouldn’t lead to violence, abuse, and neglect. When one of the elders took the stage, I noticed she had scars around her lips. She told that her mouth had been sewn shut at the age of five for speaking her language at residential school.
Hossein, ecstatic with the evening’s success, was too busy with social work to take me to the train the following day. So Aunt Tiny, who probably weighed three hundred pounds, picked me up in a 1970s wood-panelled burgundy station wagon. All the seats were missing, except for hers. Callum, Keith, and the other boys sat on wooden crates or leaned against the station wagon’s walls. They had come to see me off. A couple of runny-nosed two-year-olds rolled around the floor (so rusty that if one looked down, one could see, through its holes, the dirt road passing by), their tangled black hair halos around their brown moon faces.
I took a seat on a crate next to Callum, who was propped up against one of the walls. Aunt Tiny gunned it, and I lived in terror that one of the toddlers would smash their head. But the little ones squealed with glee, and Callum, the most nonchalant person I’d ever met, asked in his admirable deadpan,
“Got a gun?”
“No. Why would I need one?”
“Cougars. Bears.”
I deduced this was in reference to my twice-daily hikes through the bush.
“You mean to say that you’ve been letting me walk that trail for a week completely unprotected?”
“Urban Indian,” he muttered with his poker face, shaking his head, palms flat on the floor, pushing his weight back into the wall of the car as Aunt Tiny took a dangerous corner. My crate was of no use, so I abandoned it and followed his lead. Earlier in the week, when being driven to the workshop, Callum had looked out the window at the green mountain range and told me that centuries earlier their nation had been ten thousand strong. Disease had wiped out most of them. Now there were only five hundred, and everyone was everyone else’s cousin, aunt, or uncle.
Keith, leaning right next to me, studied his black-painted nails and sang along to the tape blasting from the speakers, “Waterfalls” by TLC. He wore his usual uniform of black nylon tracksuit with two parallel white lines down the sides, and knew every last word to the song.
“I’m gonna make it to Vancouver someday,” he promised me now.
“Well, you better look me up when you do,” I ordered.
His uncles had taken him to Las Vegas once on the Greyhound bus. And he’d gone to Kamloops and to the town over the next set of mountains, where the bumper stickers were sold. But he knew all about the world thanks to the satellite dishes found all over the rez, where the TV was kept on day and night and the young ones lived for MuchMusic.
“I’m gonna do drag at Celebrities,” he continued, referring to the largest gay bar on Davie Street.
“Will you lip-synch to ‘Waterfalls’?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, baby,” and he kept on singing, swaying back and forth to the music.
“T-Boz?”
“Left Eye.”
“Of course.”
We arrived at the spot where the train stopped. The boys stood by the tracks with me, the seven of us in a circle again, their chests full, eyes shining, faces open and smiling.
I would return over the next two years to facilitate workshops with the rest of the youth and the elders, and this would lead to work at other reserves around the province. I would come in the dead of the twenty-five-below winter, at the height of the forty-plus summer, and in every season in between. Always staying at the same cabin, with its windows that looked out onto the frozen lake during the frigid temperatures, the same lake that invited me for daily swims when the Weather Channel deemed this one of the hottest places in the country. On the train, I would be treated to bear and deer crossings, to the ruthless salmon run when the tracks paralleled the river, the blood and guts of the many casualties washing over the rocks, to flocks of eagles circling above in the expansive blue sky.
On this July day, the last day of my first visit to that rez, I hugged the boys when the train arrived, thanked them for their courage, and let the tracks take me back to Vancouver, vowing to share the rape image in every workshop I facilitated from then on.
When I embraced Callum, he confessed, “I don’t feel like I’m hiding anything anymore.”
Ever since I’d started pursuing my own selfish impulses, now all about theatre creation and the facilitation of storytelling, as opposed to the selflessness of being a teenaged revolutionary, I’d also given free rein to the romantic infatuations that rendered me certifiably insane. Estéban’s appearance on that faraway basketball court had set my Antarctic loins on fire and burnt my house-of-cards marriage to the ground. Since his return to Argentina and our subsequent breakup, the flames fanned by our fucking-and-fighting relationship had continued to lick the sky. I was on a roll, and my crushes often had me cursing the gods above with “Go fuck yourselves, Aphrodite, Eros, and Cupid!” There was a married British rock star, an Australian cokehead TV actor two decades my senior, and an endless parade of other unavailable men who ranged from an American acrobat with a girl in every port, to a South African musician who suddenly took a vow of celibacy when he became an evangelical Christian, to a Canadian mime who couldn’t consummate our love due to a long-distance girlfriend whose imminent arrival never happened, to an Italian art teacher who still lived with his mother and who I suspected was a straight woman born in a man’s body.
In my late twenties, one of these obsessions led to a serious relationship with a Canadian playwright and actor, a man I loved to pieces and who vowed to love me until death did us part. He was an upper-middle-class rugby-playing, British-boarding-school-attending WASP raised in West Vancouver’s British Properties, and had displeased his parents when he’d announced he’d be going to acting school instead of following in his judge father’s foot steps. When we started dating, he was shocked when his mother expressed dismay at the fact that I was Latina, and this led him down a path of re-thinking his assumptions about race i
n Canada—namely, that racism didn’t exist. Everything came together. There was sustained emotional, sexual, spiritual, and intellectual intimacy. The immense love I felt for him filled me with equal parts joy and fear, because I had never felt so naked in a relationship, so out of control. Putty in his hands, I was terrified he’d abandon me once he saw the ugly girl who hid within me. A girl so vile she’d deserved to be raped, deserved to have guns pointed at her since she was small, a girl unworthy of the love he was offering. Once I surrendered my vulnerability to him, that ugly, wounded, furious girl took over. She was ultra-controlling, insanely jealous, verbally violent, testing him, seeing how far she could go, letting him know that she wasn’t worth staying for, praying he’d prove her wrong. She ultimately succeeded in pushing him away. My fear of being left to my own devices after experiencing true intimacy became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The separation was so excruciating, it was as if the entire front of my body was gone, like I was walking around with all my organs exposed. Friends later told me it was akin to watching me go through a war, while others described it as like witnessing someone try to heal from a near-fatal disease, yet others as a heroin addict going cold turkey. At that time, between 1997 and 1999, I lived with three roommates in a large apartment above a restaurant on Commercial Drive, my East Vancouver neighbourhood. I could be found sobbing at all hours of the day and night in different areas of our abode. When not in the house, I could be spotted blubbering in my car to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, in cafés and restaurants, walking down the street, strolling through the Musqueam house posts, Haida House and totem poles behind UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, the sacred place where I connected to the spirit of my late abuelita Carmen, who passed away in 1993, eagles coasting above. I wept sitting at my computer hammering out the first draft of my play The Refugee Hotel, during rehearsals for plays I was working on, in trailers of TV shows I was acting in.
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