The Brooklyn Rail

I don’t know if you know this, but America is fraught. After years of learning systemic racism, a new government seeks to smooth things over by rewriting history and dismantling marginalized identities under the guise of dismantling “woke” laws that punish the white man. We—or half the country, rather—would rather lie to ourselves than grapple with thorny issues that might make us uncomfortable. America has never been racist, and if the history books tell you otherwise, please burn them.

These politics—and resistance towards them—have seeped into the contemporary novel, which is the case for Lauren Haddad’s debut, Fireweed, a spiky and unnerving thriller depicting the most uncomfortable relationship between white and Indigenous people since Nathan Fielder’s The Curse. But Fireweed isn’t really resistance against an oppressor, a fist-raise in novel form. It’s an outside look in, untapped in current fiction.

Jenny Hayes is a twenty-four-year-old housewife in the trailer park of Prince George, Canada, a town rocked by the disappearance of Beth, a white woman given billboards, television advertisements, and search teams. But when Rachelle, an Indigenous mother of two, suffers the same fate, the neighborhood shrugs. Jenny, who lives nearby, is irked by the discrepancy. “Rachelle was gone, this much I knew,” she thinks. “And I was going to find her.”

This savior complex is messy at best and deeply problematic at worst. Jenny integrates herself within Native culture, learning about the Sixties Scoop with all the wide-eyed innocence of a puppy. “I knew what those words meant individually but had no point of reference for them together. Was I supposed to?” Often, her naivete is a little much: “The way I learned it, the schools were set up by the government to help, not harm…. Native children were offered a fresh start: an education, free room and board—a chance at success.”

The dilemma is this—Haddad is white. So, is Jenny—with her ignorant comments and racist views—a manifestation of her own ideas, or simply a character choice to illustrate the backwards views of such people? It’s the American Psycho problem: can I say slurs if I’m in character?

Jenny is certainly misguided, but I’m not convinced Haddad is. Writing a novel like this is risky, but not wrong. Recently I’ve been thinking of John Updike’s rules for reviewing, the first of which is to “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame [them] for not achieving what [they] did not attempt.” Fireweed does not: conduct an in-depth investigation on the tensions between Indigenous and white people occupying spaces both make claim to; analyze the history of Native women disappearing and their subsequent mistreatment in the hands of the police and government, and the resulting guilt that can arise from it.

And the book’s better for it. I don’t think Haddad (or anyone) can achieve the above, but better yet, she doesn’t think she can either. Fireweed, she writes in her author’s note, is a fictionalization of the violence she saw Native women endure with little publicity. Rachelle’s story could be anyone’s. A white woman narrates because, “we can (often unwittingly) use the injustices faced by marginalized communities to confirm our own goodness; … by ignoring the agency of these communities, we end up centering ourselves.” Jenny’s self-involvement isn’t a blueprint, just a common error.

This allows Fireweed to operate strictly as a character study and not, as so many people want it to be, a definitive stance on race relations. Asking a novel for a moral framework is like asking a stop sign for directions—it can help you get there, just not by itself. Once that’s established, we can meet the book on friendly terms. But not everyone wants to.

Forgive me, Father, for I must quote Goodreads. The community-driven scoring website that rewards romances and punishes difficult literature hasn’t reacted favorably to Fireweed, questioning Haddad’s permission to write such a tense story.

Most comments focus on Jenny’s bigoted comments about her Native neighbors (we’ll get there) or Fireweed’s alleged distastefulness in daring to write about a different race’s struggles, no matter that Jenny is white. “What we truly need,” one indignant commenter writes, “are more books written by Indigenous authors,” which is true. But this just isn’t that story. Such an uncharitable reading forgoes Haddad’s (hopefully) apparent strategy, which sidelines every Native character. Jenny’s ignorant and unable to see past herself; we are in her headspace, after all. Patting yourself on the back for deducing the wrongness of her actions ignores Fireweed’s tactics. “The book gave me ‘white savior’ vibes,” another wrote. You think?

Even through a fictionally acceptable character, Haddad certainly toes the line. To Jenny, Native people are sex addicts (“[they] popped out babies, was why the system was so clogged.” “What’s the Indian word for condom, went the joke. There is none”), rapists (she imagines Rachelle’s husband sexually assaulting her multiple times: “It wasn’t love, what had made Little Beth. She likes it, huh, she likes it”), and bizarre, screeching aliens. She’s enamored by Cree, “the melodious cadence of the alien language,” like a bewildered anthropologist. She’s shocked after seeing a white prostitute—“I always thought it was only them who did it,” she thinks, implicit intonation like a racist grandmother. When snooping in Rachelle’s home, Jenny finds some garb, “extravagant, a costume… Maybe they were from a powwow, the robes they wore to twirl and drum.” When snooping in Rachelle’s sister’s home, she spots an envelope with “crudely formed letters” and assumes they’re “the ones reared in the bush, adults barely able to sign their own welfare checks…. Maybe they’d been raised in the wild.” No noble savages here—Jenny expects the worst.

But her ignorance is fitting—Jenny wasn’t taught about Indigenous history or equipped with the empathy needed to see them as anything other than rungs on the ladder of her self-fulfillment. Why would she be woke? “By the time I was nine, I knew every slur,” she remembers. Her flighty mother made jizz jokes while she was still pre-pubescent. When she dresses up to go out one night, Jenny thinks she looks “more like a whore than Rachelle.” Her husband’s friends have tattoos of skulls and swastikas and rank “powwow pussy.” One sexually assaults her, pressed up against her car, outside of a concert. The only time she hears the proper term “First Nations” is in the newspaper, below the mug shots.

Interestingly, Jenny’s clearest thinking about the Native struggle arrives when she views it in agrarian terms. “Indigenous,” she reflects, “A five-dollar word if there ever was one.”

I’d never heard it used to describe them. I knew it from Erin, a way to categorize plants. What was local to a place versus what was non-native. You could forget, sometimes, the meaning of that word. Native. They were here first—like the cow parsnip, the fireweed. What I’d always been taught to weed out.

“Invasive was the antonym,” she continues. “Foreigners to a habitat with a tendency to spread, smothering out all other plant life… Giant knotweed, a ground cover called creeping Jenny. My cheeks burned, seeing from that perspective.” It’s a clever touch, the shame that comes only with the help of narcissism.

Her self-involvement might be Rachelle’s only hope. Jenny’s friends dissuade her from investigating: “You don’t know what type of people she ran with,” one says over lunch. The police aren’t any help either. They relegate Jenny to the bureaucracy of claim-filing and chastise her for “playing detective.” Jenny returns to the station for updates, which one officer takes as a desperate act. “What are you really doing here?” he taunts. “Lonely? Husband’s out late, don’t look at you like he used to?” Jenny certainly deludes herself into thinking only she can help, but she might be right.

More involved in the case, she stumbles through conversations with Native people, showing her unfamiliarity despite the town’s significant population. She meets a Native woman at a protest who invites her to their local reservation, where an older man pegs her as Métis—she doesn’t correct him. “A half-breed, like me,” he smirks. “Maybe you just don’t know it yet.”

Things start to click into place. Jenny’s absent father allows her to project whatever she wants onto his identity. “That was why no one ever talked about him. Why Mom resented me. Why I was so hard to love,” she thinks and, like a conspiracy theory, realizes that was why she connected to Rachelle. It wasn’t empathy, no, but an earthy, Native spirit. “We were sisters,” she delusionally concludes. “Maybe even from the same tribe.”

Haddad’s perpetual casting of every Native person in Fireweed simply as Jenny’s entourage is calculated while also clumsy. It’s uncomfortable, but a woman so self-absorbed in her own hero’s journey doesn’t see them as equal humans, just talking points. “Is it because he’s Native? Why was I never allowed to meet him?” she furiously questions her aunt Erin, who she goes to for answers. “They’d axed my connection to who I really was: my people, my tribe,” she seethes. Of course, instead of spending more time with “her people,” who seem inclined to help, she’s moved on to weaponize her rage against someone just as confused as she is.

The raceplay is brazen, and more than a little funny. Jenny tripping down the path of her own identity, knocking photos off the walls, makes Fireweed shockingly gutsy. Without its diabolical centering of white womanhood, and an implicit conversation around storytelling limits, it’d be an average thriller. Some may question Haddad’s claim to the material, but I prefer a bold writer over a scared one.

Against my best efforts to not sound like a reactionary, Fireweed’s complete lack of political correctness is its best asset. Rachelle remains missing, forgotten about except for a prayer Jenny says in the epilogue, ten years later. Like a missing toy, Rachelle’s absence was filled when Jenny found something better to play with—herself. “Was I seeking … something?” she asks herself in a motel on her way to Erin’s. “I wasn’t sure anymore, but sometimes escape could lead you down the same path.” The distraction is as good as real.