Small Ceremonies - Hardcover

Edwards, Kyle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593701518 ISBN 13: 9780593701515

Verlag: Pantheon, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A poignant coming-of-age story following the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg’s North End illuminating what it's like to grow up forgotten, urban, poor, and Indigenous.

Word on the street is that this is the Tigers' last season. For Tomahawk "Tommy" Shields, an image-obsessed high school student from a northern Indian reserve, the potential loss of his hockey team serves as a stark reminder of the fact that he is completely uncertain about his future. He can't help but feel that each of his peers has some skill or gift that he lacks, yet each of their perceived virtues hides darker truths too. Clinton is beloved by teachers, but his "good kid" disposition is a desparate attempt not to end up falling prey to the gang violence his older brother has become enmeshed in. Floyd has incredible talent on the ice, yet behind that talent lies deep insecurity about his multiracial background. And the adults that populate Tommy's life—his mother who struggles with schizophrenia; Pete, the wayward Zamboni driver; and elders Maggie and Olga—offer a mixture of well-intentioned but often misguided support and a depressing portent of what the future could hold.

Set in Winnipeg's north end, a remote neighborhood at the border of Canada's eastern woodlands and central prairies, Small Ceremonies follows a community that both literally and figuratively straddles two worlds. As its richly drawn characters navigate the thrilling independence of adulthood and the loss of innocence that accompanies adolescence, one can't help but root for Tommy and his community, even as Tommy himself reckons with his place in it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kyle Edwards grew up on the Lake Manitoba First Nation in Winnipeg's North End. A graduate of Ryerson University, he has worked as a journalist for Native News Online, ProPublica and Maclean’s, and was a 2021 Nieman Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. He has won two National Magazine Awards in Canada for his reporting, and was named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists in 2019. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

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game one

It starts with a rumble, a heartbeat, a powwow on a gym floor. All echo and thunder, a storm before the lightning, coming not from the sky but from the ice, rising above the glass and mesh meant for foul pucks and empty cans and trash and wrappers, the revenants of lost souls. Foot stomps and air horns. It’s the sound of a beginning, a new longing, a new hockey season.

There’s excitement in the air: it’s growing, raising hearts and neck hair, and a residue of sadness. It starts before the players leave the dressing room, with the music turned up deafeningly high, all eighties rock and guitar solos, by a boy DJ not yet old enough to be in high school, operating from a stereo system in the box beside the scorekeeper. There are fans, but only a few, mostly parents and friends and fellow students and girlfriends in jerseys with their boyfriend’s name and number on the back in thick font, climbing aboard paint-­chipped bleachers in what looks like single file, mining the seats for a place along the cracked wood and wobbly planks.

Outside the sky is big and blue, as endless as the prairies. The fall sun hangs on, casting lean shadows over the uneven sidewalks and dusty pavement. Inside Memorial Arena, a place where it’s unclear what is being memorialized because all around there seems nothing worth remembering, the scoreboard counts down from fifteen minutes, at which point the puck will drop and a new campaign will begin. It’s colder in the lobby by several degrees and the temperature drops even further behind the doors where the game is played. Each cold breath rises from the mouth and floats for a moment above toques and ball caps and then vanishes before the next one.

Boys, in groups of three or four, push their way to the front of the crowd, ahead of parents and elders. Local misfits and dropouts smile and laugh at nothing in particular, each holding something long and bottle-­shaped inside their baggy sweaters and jackets, and in about four or five elegant leaps and a single breath, using muscles and tendons that could only be exercised by scaling beaten streets slant with danger and a certain beautiful misery, they reach the very top of the stands, where they will stand above the rest like it means something special to be there and where they shout a graphic litany of curses at the opposition and their supporters for the next three periods like prophets of a lost world. Some younger boys, a dozen in all, follow the pack nervously, careful to avoid the stern eyes and shaking heads of their grandmothers and aunties. Their movement is rough and forced, and the chants from the top only begin once all the boys assemble: “Fuck you, Bullfrogs! Fuck you, Bullfrogs! Fuck you, Bullfrogs!” And then the aunties turn around and hiss at the younger boys to smarten up and act civilized, but the older ones continue hurling their curses across the ice to the bleachers filled with the other team’s supporters. In front of them, just behind the glass, elders escorted by adult grandchildren take their seats, and their laughter, when it comes, is high-pitched and with their bodies as much as their faces. They disappear into the crowd.

The first games always begin with faces halfway hopeful, because even in the North End, the soul of this young city, triumph is scary business. The game never changes—­the pucks are made of hot rubber and a goal means the same and there is the constant mixture of dread and pleasure and suspense; a coming-­together of a whole country’s faith and passion and geography and the histories that hang from rafters and are carefully etched forever on trophies. For the Tigers, the outcome of the games doesn’t seem to change either. But there’s hope anyway. None of it changes but it’s always changing.

Tommy sat in the dressing room rubbing the whites of his knuckles. Games always made him nervous, but there was something different about the first one of the season. Something different about the first and last and playoffs (maybe) games, which during his tenure they never, ever, qualified for. They felt like the exam, a test of their preparation and how far they’ve come as a team and as players and as men, if one ignored that few of them were actually raised by men and instead by women with dreams of something better. The first game of the season was their chance, his chance, to reap the rewards of all their hard work over the summer, all the weights lifted, all the miles run, all the whey protein shaken and consumed.

There was a breathable tension in the room, not much chatter. Most of the players bounced their heads in time to the music echoing through the walls. A whistle sounded in the distance, a referee trying out his silver. A scrawny eleventh grader pounded a fist on his naked chest and smiled with the enthusiasm of a bright-­eyed rookie, then leaned toward Tommy and said shyly, “How’d you get so big, Tomahawk?”

Tommy worked on lacing his skate, flexing his biceps with each tight pull. “Water,” he said, and immediately regretted trying to act good but continued getting dressed in silence.

“Water,” the boy repeated. “Holy smokes.” When their coaches came in for the pregame pep talk Tommy pulled on his jersey—­black with orange stripes on the arms and shoulders and around the waist—­and smoothed out the hissing face of an angry tiger stitched across his abdomen, while Coach Johnson took the locker room floor, his hands deep in the pockets of his track pants, his eyes fixated on nothing in particular. His speeches, which had become a pregame fixture ever since he took over the bench, had drifted more and more toward animal allegory.

“We’re Tigers,” he began, raising his head to observe the faces of his players. “They’re Bullfrogs. If this was tigers versus frogs, and by that I mean tigers versus frogs in the wild, I know for damn sure which animal would come out on top.” He cleared his throat and continued in a different vein: “Look, there are two types of sharks. Real-­life sharks and the Hollywood myth of a shark. Real-­life sharks are boring, they’re actually quite smart, not easily fooled, they don’t really care for human flesh, and really, they only ever attack humans when they’re curious what we taste like. But the Hollywood Shark, the Hollywood Shark is a monster from hell, killing and eating anything in sight. Anyone see Jaws? The Hollywood shark takes names, has memory, exacts revenge on its enemies. He’s a ferocious motherfucker. A complete badass. What I’m saying is, the Hollywood Shark mentality wins hockey games. We lost to these fucking frogs twice last year, don’t forget that. We need to go out there and be hungry, hungry to win. Play for each other, play for Jonah, play for your school. Go out there and play like fucking sharks!” For a moment the room remained quiet. There was an air of confusion, but once Coach Johnson started circling the room to give each player a fist bump the room erupted with claps and cheers and high-­pitched battle cries. They were Sharks, the Hollywood kind, but also Tigers.

Tommy didn’t listen. The words were muffled in his ears. He tried to visualize his game, his reactions to both dangerous and opportunistic situations, the pass he’d make, the shot he’d take, and each time it ended getting knocked on his ass he smacked the side of his head with his palm. He came out of it as Coach Johnson, already sweating and screaming, the veins bulging from his neck, issued his final words, “Urgency, urgency, urgency, urgency!” The whole team cheered but not him. The graduating class before him didn’t...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pantheon
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593701518
• ISBN 13: 9780593701515
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: PANTHEON; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar