Permanent Astonishment by Tomson Highway
Permanent Astonishment is one of the best books I have ever read. Author Tomson Highway regales us with tales of his childhood in remarkable detail.
Relying mostly on his older sister Louise, he re-creates his birth in the midst of the dog-sled ride of his family to their winter home in Brochet, Manitoba. With great hilarity, he makes the reader a companion who can’t help marveling at the ingenuity and resilience of his parents. They raised their children in a beautiful, harsh land where they harmonized their existence with the natural forces that shaped life itself.
Tomson Highway loves his parents, his family, his extended family, and all his friends. His Cree heritage pre-disposes him to finding the funny side of everything in life. Joe Highway, his father, recognized that his clever son needed to expand his horizons beyond fishing and go into the coming world. He sent him (and his other siblings) to school, inevitably a residential school, accessed by air. While the terrors that we now know about residential schools assailed him, Tomson as a memoirist tucks them quietly into the design of a life well-lived.
My favourite scene is a room full of little Cree- and Dene-speaking boys learning English from a unilingual English-speaking nun. Tomson is so excited! D: dee, dee, dee, dee, he repeats. O: owe, owe, owe, owe. So far so good. G: gee, gee, gee, gee. Exactly right! Why is the teacher saying “dog”? What does the sound “dog” have to do with “dee” and “owe” and “gee”? He is then encouraged to colour a very strange dog, which the teacher calls “cat”, an animal he has never seen.
Even though he was bullied by older pupils, the slight quick-silver Tomson loved school. Blundering through language confusion and failing at sports, he found joy in the ceremonies of the Catholic faith and in the friendship of so many children. Unusually, in his memoir, he chooses to honour those around him by naming each individual and their home – not just once, but every time the person has a role in his story. The naming becomes a lyrical refrain in this extended love poem to the people and the land of Canada’s Subarctic.
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