Eleanor Hoskins Reviews:

Chelsea Vowel, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022
Corinna Chong, The Whole Animal, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023

From the outset, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo is a boldly ambitious collection that both represents and accomplishes a lot of work. There is the work of developing a new tradition: it is explicitly a text ‘not interested in being overly specific with genre’ beyond its development of the literary and political project of Métis futurism, which ‘envision[s] a number of potential futures rooted in [the author’s] history, community, and worldview,’ and it incorporates conventions from academic writing, Métis storytelling and genre fiction to this end. 

There is also the documentary work of education and research. Each story is annotated with bibliographic references that provide support for the fiction’s speculation, and each is followed by an ‘exploration,’ in which Vowel details her influences and authorial intent. 

Finally, these stories are also intended to do activist work outside the text: as Vowel states, ‘within otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwina [the Métis worldview], stories, like all language, have power. Language is not merely a tool of communication, but also a place where reality can be shaped.’ 

These are noble and ably handled goals, but execution sometimes falters under the weight of concept. Dialogue and narration occasionally slip into a didactic register, and characters occasionally lean toward caricature. This is especially pronounced in ‘Unsettled,’ where technologically enabled mass human hibernation sets the stage for what often feels like an internecine Twitter argument. While the post-story explorations contain useful contextual insights as compelling as the stories themselves (particularly the description of an ohén:ton karihwatéhkwen [thanksgiving address] after ‘Maggie Sue’ and the discussion of Elder Brother tales after ‘Dirty Wings’), the overall effect is at times defensive. The exploration of ‘âniskôhôcikan’ is notably concerned with describing the genre constraints Vowel set for herself, when the work itself, delicate and vivid in its bittersweet dreams of the future, needs no apology. 

Elsewhere, the daunting task of incorporating academic work into the fiction yields mixed results. The footnotes include unexpected and refreshingly funny commentary: Vowel does not hesitate to bring the personal voice into a usually formal medium, whether to recommend a cousin’s business or to bluntly comment ‘The article is a piece of trash’ about colonially inflected journalism. At other points, however, the inclusion of academic style and language is unwieldy and reads more like authorial interjection than worldbuilding, especially when it explains its humour. 

On the whole, this is a valiant and rewarding read that broadened this reviewer’s thinking. The cast of characters is diverse, colourful and resourceful. The work shines when Vowel allows them the space to experience moments, progressions, digressions—room for their unique voices to emerge outside the aims they embody. ‘Buffalo Bird,’ for instance, features a touching depiction of its protagonist Angelique’s queerness and shape-shifting power being accepted by her community, despite the occasional flatness of its historical figures and the parodic villainy of its antagonists. ‘I, Bison’ is a complex and sensitive portrayal of the turbulent relationship between Angie, Gus and emergent technologies, centred around true love that enfolds transformation, across worlds and bodies that were once familiar. ‘A Lodge within Her Mind’ enters the show-stealing no-nonsense point of view of a beaver. The stream-of-consciousness narration of ‘Maggie Sue’ is lively and endearing, and the occasionally over-the-top style of ‘Michif Man’ works to great effect in the superhero genre: one can easily imagine this story adapted into a terrific comic book. 

A real triumph is that these stories, much like their characters, are ‘âniskê… linked together end to end.’ They share very charming resemblances and subtle relationships, a narrative technique that allows Vowel to recharge the same story beats with new perspectives and significance. Buffalo Is the New Buffalo is adamant in foregrounding the relationships that made its creation possible: the honouring of these relationships was an obvious impetus to write it, from the initial locating statement to the references section at the end. Vowel’s connections to manitow-sâkihikan (Lac Ste. Anne), family, academic community and creative works anchor the collection and are a key element of its successes. These are stories concerned with adaptation and recombination, whose worlds do not yet exist or never had the chance to, but they are suffused with a deep, reclaiming love for what does exist, however damaged, dispossessed or displaced it might be.  

The collection suggests that while the history of the Lac Ste. Anne Métis is a testament to the power of adaptation, appropriation and ingenuity, there are gifts that are essential to recuperate in the struggle for resurgence. Buffalo are the new buffalo; an alternative does not need imagining—the buffalo are still here, and in a world racked by inequality and upheaval, they represent a hope for a flourishing future, if we can fight to change the spatial, social, systemic order that decimated and displaced their once untold numbers.

The Whole Animal, Corrina Chong’s debut collection of short fiction, is masterfully attuned to the minute details that can suddenly turn familiar worlds into wilderness. Its realism punctures routine and perception as it maintains a relentless focus on moments of solidification, deflation and revolution; on conditions that invert the comforting fictions of security and stability. This work casts a tender and unflinching eye on a wide array of human ugliness, large and small, internal and external, in order to show the whole animal: to lay bare the dark emotional forces and gut feelings that enable our survival, even in a period of supposedly unparalleled human enlightenment, hygiene and technology. 

To this end, Chong is particularly compelling in her depiction of the hypnotically disgusting. In ‘Zora, in the Whirl,’ the narrator is fascinated by substances caked around her childhood best friend’s mouth: the sauce that ‘dries there like a halo, and tiny cracks worm their way through the coating as she talks and smiles,’ or the image of ‘yellow jelly flecked with eggshell hanging in syrupy strands from her face.’ The stories are permeated by unsettling images of rupture: a miscarried fetus in a ‘purplish-red sac, like a chicken liver’; a sandwich torn into tiny pieces and spread across the table before being devoured; a steak sweltering blood; a dragonfly ‘split down the centre. Flesh pink as ham.’ The effort to capture the entirety of things, the hunger to have and to know, breaks the world along unexpected cracks into new and disturbing parts. 

In examining these fragments, many of these stories also probe and distort the organs of sight, detailing the wax that holds together embalmed corpses’ eyelids and the defiantly expressive eyes of animals. ‘Porcelain Legs’ is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a mother’s eyelid hair catching the light ‘the way a beetle’s back shines’ and ‘threatening to fish in the wet of her eyeball,’ its grip on the preteen narrator reflecting her growing awareness of and adaptation to racialization and sexualization. This fixated looking, in fiction as in reality, presents the insight that life is in profusion everywhere, springing up unexpectedly and sometimes more vigorously when threatened. Characters emerge at their fullest in the way they examine (or are confronted by) truths that their mode of life depends on refusing to acknowledge. Repressed and shameful memories resurface, and once-stable boundaries—both physical and conceptual—become porous. In the face of their denied and overlooked agency, images and objects take on a rebellious life of their own. A narrator repressing trauma remembers a ‘congealed mass of rice inside flipping like a dreaming body,’ and the narrator’s self-portraits in ‘Fixer’ appear to botch themselves. While these symbols do not always cohere into a larger statement, they consistently suggest a complete world beyond the limited and fracturing prism of the self and the story. 

Much like Buffalo Is the New Buffalo, The Whole Animal is preoccupied by transformation. Chong speaks without judgement to the power and possibility of metamorphosis, and she never allows the reader to forget ‘the body that [allows us] to feel feelings and act accordingly.’ Characters’ experiences and encounters are revealed to be as gradual, commonplace and consequential as the movements of the Earth’s crust. The links between what they feel, how they act and who they are, between their pasts, presents and futures, turn these stories of everyday survival and perseverance into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. These unwavering depictions of the gory, grimy material of life cut through illusion, illuminating the heart of things like facets on a gemstone. 

—Eleanor Hoskins