‘The Lover Snake’ by Tomson Highway

Slip into the pages of Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020 with ‘The Lover Snake’ by featured author Tomson Highway. Watch, in this tender exploration of love and loss, as the beloved slides through memory.

First published thirty years ago, this piece carries resonance today. And — in the story behind the story — even offers inspiration to new and emerging writers. As Tomson tells us, Back when I wrote it, I didn’t even know I could write. I never even wanted to become a writer in the first place. I just wanted to learn how to write clearly and neatly in a language which was … foreign to me. My first dream was to be a concert pianist.

As it turns out, he accomplished both! Whatever your dream, enjoy this excerpt from Pulp Literature, Issue 27.

The Lover Snake

by Tomson Highway

The magazine photograph is of a Sikh. A male Sikh. Sikhs wear turbans. It’s a tradition that goes back many, many generations, so it is said. You can always tell a Sikh when you see one by the turban he wears. Men, as I recall, also wear beards like this one in the photograph does. Fine beards. A fine-boned people. This particular Sikh, the man in the photograph, has, pictured with him, the uppermost portion of a large snake slithering down over the front and centre of the bright orange turban he wears, the reptile’s diamond-shaped head, with its distended eyes, hovering just centimetres over the man’s forehead, its flickering tongue slicing air between his eyes. This is the photograph in the magazine. 

Dahljeet has always worn a turban, as I remember. In fact, he has an entire closet full of them at his home in Vancouver. Dahljeet is a Sikh.

Now Dahljeet and I have been friends for many years. An unusual alliance, people would observe from time to time. And between us, Dahljeet and me, we would agree that the friendship was an unusual friendship. I mean, there he was, very much an Indian and here I was, also very much an Indian. Only, we were such totally different kinds of Indian. Worlds apart. So different, it was laughable. And we’d laugh. North Cree hunter ambles down the slope of Robson Street beside north Indian maharajah. An odd pair. To be sure. 

And yet, we became close, Dahljeet and I. More than friends, more than brothers, more than lovers, even. It was almost as if, in the midst of certain totally unexpected moments in time we spent together, there would arrive from somewhere a certain buzzing half-sound, a certain inner ringing as perfect in pitch and purity as the tone from a tuning fork. It was beautiful.

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020 here!

Tomson Highway is a Cree writer from northern Manitoba who also happens to be a classically-trained pianist. As such, he writes music in addition to his plays and novels, music that comes out as songs which he performs in cabaret with singers and such, wherever and whenever he gets invited. What makes his writing unique in all these forms is that his mother tongue, Cree, figures largely; one almost always reads or hears it. ‘The Lover Snake’ was published in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford University Press), and predates most of his published work. You can find Tomson Highway’s music on his website tomsonhighway.com.