Nov 29

Nov 29 Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land

Author: Toni Jensen
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.

Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. “The Worry Line” explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. “At the Workshop” focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In “Women in the Fracklands,” Jensen takes the listener inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom.

In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history — as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country.

TL;DR Review

Carry is one of those memoirs that just stands so far out from all the others. The writing is fierce, poetic, and self-assured. Read it.

For you if: You liked Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.

Full Review

Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land absolutely blew me away. Toni Jensen’s prose sings and cuts, drawing you in and rooting you to the spot until it’s finished.

Jensen masterfully weaves together two defining focuses of her life: her Native identity, and the recurring presence of guns and gun violence — be it in her fraught childhood home, on any of the various campuses where she’s taught, or in the neighborhoods where she’s lived. Somehow, she never loses the examination on either one of those things, even though they are not always related to one another. She also broadens out to examine the impact of racism against Native people, violence against women, classism, and more.

It’s heavy, but it rings with humanity. It’s honest, it’s sad, it’s hopeful, it’s important. I cried, I shook, I laughed. I’m still in awe.

This won’t be for everyone, in that it’s an untraditional memoir — but in the best way, I thought. It’s written in essays rather than a narrative arc, jumps around in time, and rings with metaphorical, poetic prose. The best comparison I can draw is In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. If you liked that one, I think you’ll like this one. Jensen’s skill with words is incredible.