Carry

Toni Jensen’s memoir is stunning. There’s no other words that come to mind — it’s about growing up Métis, existing as an Indigenous woman in America, and the looming threat of ever-pervasive gun violence. The subhed, “A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land,” is particularly fitting — Jensen is constantly reminding the readers of those who lived on the land where she is. It’s a land acknowledgement, again and again, to a powerful literary effect. “History is lived, in our lands and in our bodies,” Jensen writes. She writes about trauma and abuse and whiteness and mass shootings and rural America and southern America and violent neighbors.

Jensen uses her life to explore gun violence, yet not on mass shootings — rather, on domestic violence. As she explains to Shondaland, “ Mass shootings get an inordinate amount of media space. They capture the public imagination and we're fixated on them culturally, as Americans, in ways that we aren't with other sorts of violence. But the other sorts of violence make up 99 percent of American gun violence. The only time mass shootings come up are when I have intersected with those places and those cultures, but otherwise, no. I think it’s very important to shift the focus of the conversation. Yes, mass shootings are terrible, tragic events that happen, but what about the other 99 percent of gun violence in this country?”

I adored this line from the Chicago Review of Books: “ Jensen traces the fault lines of American society — domestic violence, racism, misogyny, economic inequality, environmental degradation — and maps them on to her lived experience, and ours.”

A must-read.

Rating: ★★★★★