Description
John McDonald is a Neyhiyaw/Metis multidisciplinary artist and author from Treaty Six Territory in Northern Saskatchewan and a sixth-generation direct descendant of Nehiyawak Chief Mistawasis. Electricity Slides describes a disjointed, somewhat dystopian, slightly connected series of events, written in the Dadaist "cut-up" style of the 1950s. The book first started out as a series of performance art monologues written and performed live for a multidisciplinary exhibition put on by the Indigenous Peoples Artists Collective every year in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The stories alternate between a third-person narrative and the first-person narrative of the protagonist, who goes without a name throughout the book, but whom we discover is a military officer who has suffered an emotional breakdown during a battle and as a result speaks in a lyrical, poem-prose manner. Throughout the book, the reader is taken through a psychotropic funhouse-like journey, like a dream, where vignettes are connected only slightly, but keep the reader moving.