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WITHOUT RESERVATION: INDIGENOUS EROTICA
Edited By Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm Co-Published with Huia Publishers, New Zealand
"This anthology is a great read in the warmth of the sun, encouraging trickles of sweat to flow and your mind to overdose on the intimacies and loving we yearn for It is indeed a ripe plum. Pick it, taste it read and enjoy the pleasure over the summer… its for you."
(Tü Mai magazine, NZ) - www.tumaimagazine.com
Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica
Collected and Edited by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
Kegedonce Press
By Sarah Petrescu
Few anthologies of literary erotica dare to delve into realms of genital jittering smut, opting more for the high ground of ethereal poetry and carefully crafted fiction with a so-called “erotic” edge.
Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica does both. While Linda Hogan’s beautifully written poem, “The Creations of Water and Light,” hovers around first-base foreplay, Thom E. Hawke’s “Pow Wow Moment” scores a home run with lines like, “Slowly, I move my cock inside you, withdrawing it just to the point where its / bulbous head parts your labia minor.”
Without Reservation contains the who’s who of First Nations Lit, such as Daniel David Moses, Beth Brant, Maria Campbell and Sherman Alexie, and newcomers, such as UVic’s William George.
Editor and contributor Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm says the anthology is the first of its kind. In her introduction to the book she writes, “A person could reach puberty, live her entire adult life, go through menopause and still not have stumbled across a single erotic poem or story by a First Nations writer.”
She came up with the idea for the anthology in a bar in Toronto, while joking with fellow Aboriginal writers Drew Hayden Taylor and Lee Maracle. Akiwenzie-Damm took the idea seriously and began her five-year search collecting and soliciting Indigenous erotica.
The pieces in the book are vast and varied, perhaps too much so. The order of poetry and prose doesn’t seem to follow any coherent movement or theme. The result is erotica blueballs: a mish-mash of tantalizing and deflating works. There are some hot ones though. Namely, Beth Brant’s prose poem, “So Generously,” about the poet’s affair with a sensual Puerto Rican woman and Akiwenzie-Damm’s poem, “more than skindeep.”
The light and dirty side of Without Reservation is satiated through fantasy poems by Randy Lundy in “In the Bikini Bar” and “The Lost Art of Winking.” Maria Campbell’s poem “Good Dog Bob,” relays the story of the speaker’s near encounter with the husband of a one-time mistress and how he came to get the nickname “Good Dog Bob.” The poem is hilarious and innocent, written entirely in the cadence and voice of the young male speaker.
Without Reservation is good literature and even better erotica. More importantly, it signifies that the breadth of First Nations literature is expanding and in demand.
- The Martlet Arts
Style
Non fiction
Reviewer
Anita Heiss
Released
2004
Australian Area
Canada
Language
English
Distributor
Kegedonce Press / Huia Publishers, 2003
ISBN: 0-9731396-2-5 214pp |
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“The night was dark… and so was he”, Drew Hayden Taylor joked to Lee Maracle and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm some years ago in a Toronto bar. And so Damm began thinking about sex, apparently quite a lot. So much so it drove her to cross countries and oceans to pull together proof that erotica is alive and well in Indigenous communities in Canada, the USA, Aotearoa and Australia (and no doubt elsewhere too!!).
Without Reservation is a collection of prose and poetry by some of the world’s top writers including Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo (US), Maria Campbell (Canada), Hone Tuwhare, Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimeara (NZ) and Haunani-Kay Trask (Hawaii), who write richly and at times rawly about love, lust, longing, feelings, desire, passion, ecstasy, intimacy and ‘self-love’.
The usual characters – moonlight and darkness, flesh, thighs, breasts, tongues, curves, fingers, mouths, and other essential organs are all there, as are soft, gentle, long, wet, thick and deep kisses. There was luscious, spontaneous, orderly, dutiful, clumsy and thankful love-making, in conference hotel rooms, at powwows and with old friends. If you’re feeling hot and bothered just reading this, wait until you read the book!!
I particularly enjoyed the writing by Briar Grace-Smith in Rongamoi does Dallas, on one level because it was a better-developed story than some other prose in the collection. And I loved that although the two may not have been destined to be ‘together’, “One without the other left appetites unsated and made the world a sorrier place”.
Richard Van Camp’s lengthy contribution was entertaining, sometimes shocking and often bordering on sick with his character Larry’s obsession with porn, having said that I was engaged until the end. And if you’re wanting to spice up your sex-life, take some tips from Van Camp (Canada’s writer of outstanding promise in 1997) on the use of menthol lollies! I can say no more.
There was humour to be found in Joseph Bruchac’s Sojy visits his friends and the obligatory “volcanic spermatozoa eruption” was provided in Alootook Ipellie’s Twenty-four.
Stand out lines for this reader include words by Tiffany Midge in Baskets:
I want to braid
My thoughts tight
As drum-hides into
The thread of your
Particular reasoning
And Chrystos’s Kiss me / as though we have nothing else to eat, in Brush & Braid My Hair.
The Australian contributions are all prose and come from acclaimed novelist Melissa Lucashenko who writes of unspoken, yet tempting and unforbidden love, even that which only lives in the mind in “Let me tell you what I want”. Author of Not Quite Men No Longer Boys, Kenny Laughton tells of a young boys discovery of self-gratification in “Master Bates”, and Wiradjuri writer Velvet Black (no it’s not me!) writes of satisfied passion under the moonlight behind the back shed.
So, for those of you who were concerned that there may not have been time for love, romance and sex amongst the ongoing struggle for human rights and land rights, the battles for treaties and acknowledgement as First Peoples, then fret no more. It seems that like all human beings, Indigenous people can always make time for a bit of slap’n’tickle too!
Reviewed By Anita Heiss on Message Stick http://www.abc.net.au/message/blackarts/review/s1117291.htm
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