Obomsawin of Sioux Junction

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

This wonderfully satirical and lively novel, translated by Wayne Grady
(winner of the 1989 Governor General’s Literary Award for English
translation), records a parody of justice that takes place in a forlorn
Ontario town. A Native painter, who is only partly Native, is accused of
arson, having set fire to his paintings and his house, which people had
wanted to turn into a museum. The local three-room hotel, at once
prison, court, and restaurant/hotel, is run by M. et Mme Constant, who,
as their name indicates, are keeping it all together.

Founded by a francophone ex-priest and an anglophone ex-mountie, a fact
that strongly recalls Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, Sioux Junction
is by now a deserted city, except for a few crazy inhabitants who are
the descendants of Native women and of Greek, Roumanian, and other
immigrants. Then there are the languages; some speak French, some
English, and some their own versions of the two; others still speak
Amerindian tongues.

When Sioux Junction was alive, music played a unifying role, as almost
everyone either played the piano or sang, whereas religion led to a
clear split between anglophones and francophones that prompted some of
the immigrants to move on and brought about the town’s death.

Thomas Obomsawin, Sioux Junction’s son, has become a world-famous
painter but has given up painting. He is what Poliquin calls
“alingual,” which is to say he doesn’t know any language very
well, by choice. Ostracized by the Natives, whose language he has never
properly learned, Obomsawin believes that French is degenerate and that
English trivializes whatever needs to be expressed. Painting comes
naturally to Obomsawin, and he abuses it by joining another painter in
organizing creativity workshops all over Ontario and getting rich while
“expanding popular sensitivity to the pictorial aesthetic.”

All of this very funny material is expressed without much ado by a
biographer who, for the third time, is trying to complete a portrait of
his hero, the painter who perhaps was not a painter. Poliquin’s is a
crazy world, not really nasty but rather hopeless. Nominated for the
1990 Trillium Award, but probably too satiric a parable to win the
prize, the book has an energy that is well rendered by its translator.