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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
The Fire
Explanation and Analysis—Myth:
In "The Fire," Frenchie explores the origin of his own name: "Francis." He utilizes simile as a means of contextualizing his name, connecting it to ancestry and history:
I was nicknamed Frenchie as much for my name as for my people — the Metis. I came from a long line of hunters, trappers, and voyageurs. But now, with most of the rivers cut into pieces and lakes left as grey sludge puckers on the landscape, my own history seemed like a myth along the lines of dragons.
Frenchie compares his personal and ancestral history to a mythology, akin to "histories" told about dragons and other fantastical creatures. Colonial governments have spent great deals of time and money to accomplish the erasure of indigenous history, making it appear as though those communities never even existed (like dragons).
The name "Frenchie" takes on a certain irony when discussing naming conventions and personal history. French people were among the first to colonize the traditional homelands of the Anishnaabe people. Some of the hunters, trappers, and voyagers Frenchie lists might have actually been French. This passage, while it does serve as historical context for Frenchie's indigenous roots, also demonstrates how indigenous histories have been muddled by colonial interference.
Related Themes:
Haunted in the Bush
Explanation and Analysis—Bedbugs:
In "Haunted in the Bush," Frenchie meditates on his own ability to dream, contemplating the existential threat that dreamlessness presents. He does so through the use of a simile:
I thought about the sickness and the insanity that crept like bedbugs through families while they slept. What would I have done to save my parents or Mitch, given the chance? Would I have been able to trap a child, to do what, cut them into pieces? To boil them alive? I shuddered. I didn’t want to know what they did. And I didn’t really want to know if I’d be capable of doing it.
Frenchie compares the dreamlessness and insanity creeping up on non-Native people to bedbugs—critters that, though apparently small and inconsequential, can perpetuate sickness and disease. One might not think that dreamlessness could have such a drastic psychological impact. Like bedbugs, dreamlessness was underestimated.
Curiously, in the above passage Frenchie demonstrates a radical form of empathy for his oppressors. Many other people in Frenchie's circumstances would refuse to empathize with those who hunt them and orchestrate their genocide. Frenchie would have every right to do the same. Instead, he wonders what he would do to save his own life, to protect his family. He wonders if, deprived of dreams and a future, he would make the same choice.
Miigwans' Coming-To Story
Explanation and Analysis—Monsters:
In "Miigwans' Coming-to Story," Miig relays the tragic narrative of his husband Isaac's capture at the hands of the Recruiters. Miig and Isaac were betrayed by several fellow indigenous people seeking shelter, faking camaraderie all while they wore tracking devices, leading Recruiters to the door. Miig explains Isaac's naivety to Frenchie, recalling that Isaac had no familial memory of residential schools and, thus, did not anticipate the Recruiters' depravity. Miig, however, remembers stories of these schools. He uses a simile to describe their inhumanity to Frenchie:
I heard a sharp rap on the front door, and my heart jumped into my throat. Isaac didn’t have memories in his family of the original schools, the ones that pulled themselves up like wooden monsters coming to attention across the land back in the 1800s — monsters who stayed there, ingesting our children like sweet berries, one after the other, for over a hundred years.
Miig personifies residential schools as monsters, eager to gobble up and digest indigenous children. He likens the children to "sweet berries," tiny morsels that go down easily and quickly, capable of being consumed in large and greedy handfuls. Such schools were and are truly monstrous, examples of the inhuman villainy settler-colonialism enables.
