DROWNING IN FIRE
By
Craig S. Womack
The
ISBN 0-8165-2168-9
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
A
tradition of Native American literature is its non-traditional structure: multiple points of view, including
first-person and third-person for the same character; disparate plot lines tied
tenuously together and sometimes not at all; rich characterization. N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer for this
approach in House Made of Dawn in the 1960 s, and Leslie Marmon Silko
also employed it in Ceremony.
Both sit on the editorial committee for Sun Tracks, the series of Native
American literature established by the
In a scene symbolic of the entire novel, Josh Henneha and others go swimming and challenge one another to dive to the bottom of the lake to bring up a rock as proof of reaching the bottom. Josh, not athletic, always the last chosen for anything, surprises himself. He swims all the way to the bottom, grabs a rock, and propels himself to the surface, gasping for air, only to find himself in the dark, confused, as if awakened in the middle of the night not knowing where he was. Then he discovers he s under the raft, his leg ensnared in a mooring line, such that he can t get free, with the other boys above him oblivious to his predicament.
The entire novel moves this way a young gay man, lonely for someone to love, for someone to love him, hidden and silent in the shadows for a lifetime. It s much like the world Womack describes beneath the reservoirs, behind man-made dams, where fish swim unseen through underwater farms, barns, houses, pastures. It s a mute world, where self-expression is dangerous and exposes you to ridicule, with gay bashing an equal opportunity sport, where, in the mind of an adolescent struggling to find his place, it s better to be called a pussy than a faggot. In this silent and unexpressed world, Womack puts a new twist on the image of Demosthenes: He would put all the rocks in his mouth and find his voice in their swirled streaks of sky, fire, water.
For all of this, Womack s protagonist Josh Henneha is a young man not unlike other young men, who carries a story ember, waiting for a chance to touch the spark to tinder, to dance around the fire. Who, Womack asks, can explain desire?
One answer comes from Lucy, an old woman of mixed descent whose father molested her and whose mother ignored her. In a scene symbolic of her attempt to break the mold of convention, she plays in a jazz band, but because she is a woman, she plays behind the curtain, while a man stands on stage, horn to his mouth, faking the jazz she played for him and the unknowing crowd. But if she can t come out from behind the curtain, she certainly sees through it, just as she sees through Henneha s attempt to hide his homosexuality. It is Lucy who sees what he cannot the desire he seeks to douse. Only when he journeys in his imagination to Lucy s younger years does he discover what s true. There, in a twist of magic realism in which he flies back in time, he asks a medicine woman what s wrong with a gay man. The woman says there s nothing she can do for such a man, because there s nothing wrong with him. The epiphany for Henneha is he never before considered the possibility the world itself might be tilted sideways rather than himself.
Gaining courage, he seeks out Jimmy Alexander once a gifted and powerful athlete who now works as a grease monkey in an auto repair shop who, in contrast to Henneha, accepts his homosexuality and masculinity in such a natural manner you might have to go back to Achilles and Patroclus to find anything similar. Desperate for a connection to another human being, Henneha wants to feel Alexander swimming beneath my fingertips like cool water streaming from cupped hands, and see the glow of his eyes like animals peering out of the darkness.
What Womack accomplishes is a shattering of myth. Henneha could be everyman, regardless of race, culture, or sexual preference; with a loneliness so harrowing and a desire so consuming he d risk death to love an HIV-infected partner.
#