In ‘Stars and Scars,’ Jesse Thistle shares even more of his heart

Even before Jesse Thistle’s 2019 memoir, “From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way,” hit bookshelves, people who had managed to get an advance copy were recommending it. “This book is something else,” they would say, shaking their heads in wonder as they urged me to read it. “Really.”

The heartfelt word-of-mouth recommendations were honest and reflected the power of what was — and is — an astonishing story. Of being homeless, on the streets. Of rehab, serving time in a minimum security jail; of, less than 10 years later, having a home, a wife, a daughter and a job as an assistant professor in humanities at York University.

That book, and the power of Thistle’s storytelling, won him many prizes, including the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction, among others. Part of the power came from the way he told his story, using a combination of prose and poetry.

Those prose parts, he says, tell a certain part of the story. “It’s all empirical; it’s only what my eyes can see, my ears can hear, and so the effect is that you’re immersed in a world that feels like you’re watching a movie.”

There was not “a lot of introspective writing,” he said in a Zoom interview a few days before Thanksgiving. Although, sprinkled through that volume were poems, and they allowed something different.

“The only time you see my heart is when I talk through poetry.”

In “Scars and Stars,” the followup to that first book, you see much more of Thistle’s heart. It’s a much different book than “From the Ashes,” although it deals with some of the same time periods. Structured in five parts, with a long, scene-setting introduction at the beginning of each — “A Private War,” “Show Me Your Scars,” “Love Letters From Rehab,” “Forgotten Tobacco” and “Someone’s Ancestor” — which is followed by a series of poems that explore his life in a different way, for instance, his time homeless, on the streets and being ignored.

“Looking back, that was what hurt most—

not hearing my name.

Sometimes I’d wander alone,

and whisper Jesse just to hear it,

a reminder that I was still me,

and still human,

and that I, too, had a name.”

In one of the essays Thistle talks about the injury he received to his Achilles tendon from a jump he took when inebriation skewed his judgment. At the time he wasn’t getting the medical help he needed and so he “thought that I had to do a robbery. I forced the state, basically, to pay attention to me,” he said.

They did; they arrested him. He was given medical help and the option of spending the “dead time” in pretrial custody before his case would be heard at Harvest House, a Christian rehab centre near Ottawa.

While on the streets with his injured foot, he had learned more about the story of Achilles, about how he chose to go to war over having a family, and that poetry created the shield the hero of Greek myth went to war with. “It was a tool of agency then. Poetry became agency … Homer describes that, through the language of poetry, you can create the world anew. You can create anything,” Thistle said.

And so he began looking at the world a bit differently. His experience going through the justice system? That’s a kind of poetry, he said, and he writes about it that way.

At one point during his reintegration, he had access to a computer and was able to create a Facebook profile. One of the first people who messaged him was Lucie, an old school friend, with her condolences over his grandmother’s death.

He found talking to her intimidating, so he began writing poetry to her. “It was a way that we created love.”

“In the temple of the human heart

she laid supplications of kindness.”

His was a story of trauma, he said, on both sides of his family, which led to addictions that led to homelessness. His poems advocate: against police brutality, but also for people he’s known who’ve died from opioid addictions, for example. “These are really, really good people that were there at critical moments in my life, that actually saved my life.”

Ang, is one:

“These streets remember

the time you wrapped your wings

around that wandering soul.”

They are stories from people who have a right to be heard. Thistle said he finds some comfort in that, when the book comes out “there will be hopefully some action and there will be certainly some criticism. And in that criticism and in people trying to figure out what I’m trying to say, there’s a tension that’s drawn to the issue. And people can mobilize and do something about the issue.”

These poems — many written from a place way back, far from where he is now — are now part of a book he wrote in a month and a half after he and his now wife Lucie had their daughter, Rose.

He wasn’t getting much sleep. There was talk of him doing another book “and then Lucie opened up an old file on her desk, and out pop all these old love poems from back when I was trying to win her heart when I was in rehab/minimum security jail.”

“And she said, ‘They’re pretty good, Jesse, you really should maybe consider making a book of this.’”

They are, he said, love poems. To Lucie, sure, but also “to the street and my former life, love poems to my wife and then love poems to my daughter, and family at the end.”

“All of it is worth it—

to be someone’s ancestor.”

It is also a love story about finding and creating his Indigenous life and hope and imagination. About an anti-hero who became a family man.

“(W)e are allowed to imagine ourselves as something more, even if you’re just some Native guy with a broken heart living at the shelter with a rotten leg who thinks he’s Achilles,” he writes at the end of the book, handing over his shield to Rose. “So you can overcome and be who you are supposed to be.”

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