My own anxieties about the novel had to do with my hunch that English is much too compromised a language to engender a portrait of Indigenous life that isn’t subsumed by colonial fantasies of our disrepair. Little in my arsenal seemed spacious enough to combat a centuries-old reading practice that made Indigenous peoples out to be bombs. How instead to make a novel into a bomb? How to plant a novel in the moral infrastructure of a corrupt nation? How to write sentences that go tick, tick, tick?
