Full-Metal Indigiqueer: the Pro(1,0)zoa

Zoa is a hybrid Indigiqueer Trickster who joins the organic (the protozoan) with the technological (the binary). Zoa is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that rises in the apocalypse to haunt, to wear things down and to reclaim. The aim is to restore beauty and memory to queer Indigeneity.

This is a poetry collection by Joshua Whitehead. Following oral tradition, in the manner of Iktomi, Nanaboozho and Wovoka, Zoa behaves like a virus and infects canonical and popular works so that Two-Spirit lives sit at the centre. Targets include Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and John Milton, alongside Lana Del Rey, Grindr and Peter Pan.

Zoa builds a fourth dimension, lives in cyberspace and keeps to NDN-time. Their skin has been sung back onto their body. Their request to the reader is plain: see a ghastly ndn, not a vanished one.

The book is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people who have been ghosted in policy, on the page, in tradition and in history. Zoa has little interest in reconciliation as burying the hatchet. Zoa wants to unearth the bones and hold a séance that ghost dances Indigiqueerness into existence.

Whitehead treats deconstruction as a means of decolonization, in the tradition of writers such as Jordan Abel, Tanya Tagaq, Claudia Rankine and Vivek Shraya. The collection is sex-positive and stands in solidarity with queer people of colour, singing with Donna Summer, RuPaul, Effie White and Trixie Mattel. Its space is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization.