Making Love with the Land

Reading Whitehead demands full focus from me, as I work to take full meaning from his poetic language,  to gain further understanding of a different culture, a different experience of the world, interspersed with the use of a different language. 
This is a collection of non-fiction essays, but it defies the dry confines of that description. 
‘Writing as a Rupture' particularly is a fascinating meditation on what autobiography means, the introduction of the idea of biotext, and how western, colonialist traditions and definitions of genre and writing hem in a more expansive idea of storytelling known in Indigenous tradition. The concern that critical analysis is not leaving space for a modern, changing understanding of Indigenous writing, analysis currently wants to label a tradition and tie it to the past. The necessity of boundaries in what a writer, a person, chooses to share, without necessitating that any literary critic or reporter has a right to that person's trauma as ‘background' to stories published. How trauma narrative has overwhelmed the idea of non fiction testimony, the need to seek balance as well as truth. 
Whitehead discusses the labelling of his writing in other points in the collection, also referring to creative non-fiction, and I think the exploration of labels, in writing and in people, as he interacts with his Two-Spirit, queer Indigeneity, were the places I felt most able to relate, to the pull between curiousity and yearning for acceptance, wanting to leave things open, not be tied, but also wanting to be recognized appropriately, respected, belonging. 
The other major theme that struck me was pain, encountering personal emotional and physical injury, loss, and grief, and sharing these same feelings also experienced by family and friends. 
Given the intimate and difficult nature of the topics discussed, the trigger warnings are lengthy: 

⚠️ author describes SA personally experienced; discussions of mental health, suicide, suicidal ideation; drug overdose; residential school program genocide and trauma; ED, fatphobia/internalized fatphobia, self image/body image issues; frank and natural accounting of bodily fluids and bodily functions, so if you're easily icked, exercise caution; pandemic isolation