More than Friends
In ‘The Lover Snake’ by Tomson Highway, the beloved slides through time and place and memory.
In our feature author interview, we asked Tomson, a classically trained pianist, about the intersection of music and writing. Here’s what he told us: “One feeds the other, and back and forth and back and forth. For instance, I always think musically, as in rhythm, form, phrasing, breathing, structure, etc. To me, each sentence is a song and thus has to sing. I think fugally; I think symphonically, in terms of form, of dynamic.“
To read more from our interview with Tomson, pick up your copy of Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020. For now, enjoy this excerpt from ‘The Lover Snake’.
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.
Find out what happens next in Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020!
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. Find Tomson’s music at tomsonhighway.com.
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