Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words:
Healing in the Inuit Arctic
ABDENOUR BOUICH
Introduction
Split Tooth (2018) is the debut novel of Inuk throat singer and artist Tanya Tagaq.
As a narrative that addresses colonial traumas in
the peripheries of what is known today as the settler-colonial state of Canada,
the novel stands out notably for its plasticity in terms of form, style, and
aesthetic techniques. It brings together prose,
poetry, illustrations, narrative registers that are anchored in Inuit ontologies,
epistemologies, and worldviews along with Tagaq's own memoir. Together, the
novel is described by Tagaq as "non-fiction, embellished non-fiction and pure
fiction" (qtd. in Doherty). Indeed,
there is no indication of when the fiction ends and the non‑fiction
memoir begins (nor vice-versa), "underscor[ing] the inability of those binaries of Euro-defined disciplines to
categorize, embrace, or discipline the exciting work of Indigenous artists and
scholars" (Beard 317). By not conforming to those western literary genres of
realism, fantasy, or science fiction, nor to experimental literary categories
of magical realism, speculative fiction, and imaginative literature, Split
Tooth presents itself as what Cherokee scholar and writer
Daniel Heath Justice terms "Indigenous Wonderworks." In his
landmark study of Indigenous literatures Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018),
Justice opens
with an introduction titled "Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal" (1). He
explains that, although many toxic stories were written about Indigenous
peoples—especially from a colonial Eurocentric perspective—the most
damaging of them all is that of "Indigenous deficiency" (2, original
emphasis).
According to this story, Justice explains,
lack in all its forms is inherent to Indigenous peoples' nature, whether it is
a lack of "morals, laws, culture [...] language [...] a lack of responsibility"
towards themselves and their families—a lack that this story attributes
to Indigenous biological, intellectual, and psychological deficiency (2).
Besides, Justice states, this story asserts that lower rates of life
expectancy, employment, and education, along with higher rates of homelessness,
substance abuse, and suicide are due to the Indigenous "lack of human decency"
rather than a consequence of longstanding colonial violations of Indigenous
people's lives, cultures, and identities (3). Mental health issues related to
trauma, depression, and despair, according to this story, find genesis in the
Indigenous peoples' "lack of mental fitness" rather than being sustained by
ongoing colonial oppressive and racist social structures (3). Justice asserts
that the story of "Indigenous deficiency works as a protective shell hiding
"settler colonial guilt and shame" while simultaneously exonerating society
from taking "responsibility for the story's devastating effects" (4). In the introduction of Decolonizing
Methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains that (post-)colonial and
settler-colonial governments, states, institutions, and societies continue to
ignore the "historical formations" of degrading conditions imposed upon Indigenous
peoples' such as poverty, physical and mental health issues, alcoholism, and
substance abuse that are direct results of colonialism as well as
socio-political and economical marginalisation and oppression (34).
Instead, these institutions place the blame on Indigenous peoples, trying to
convince them that there is an inherent deficiency within them that explains
their "worthlessness, laziness, dependence and lack of 'higher' order human
qualities" (34). These are, indeed, part of the "Stories That Wound" to which Justice
refers in the title of his introduction.
However, Justice also insists that
there are other stories, which he refers to as "Stories That Heal." Written
from Indigenous perspectives, these bring about spiritual and bodily healing by
reminding Indigenous people that they are not "determined by the colonial
narrative of deficiency" that have been long internalised and accepted as fatal
truth (5). The author explains that these stories are found in Indigenous
literacies, yet they should not be understood simply as "diverse literary
forms" or looked at from a narrow aesthetic prism, for "they perform other
kinds of vital functions in their respective cultures, many of them ceremonial,
ritual, and spiritual" (23). Justice asserts that Indigenous "speculative"
literatures carry within them these "Stories That Heal." In fact, he explains that
Indigenous speculative literatures provide "transformative modes" which, through a "complementary and distinctive range of
reading and interpretive strategies," make it possible to dismantle the
monolithic and fatalist "models of 'the real'" and provide transformative
visions of other lives, experiences, and histories" (142). Therefore, Justice avers
that the "ethical import" provided by speculative fiction––whether
fantasy, horror, or science fiction––demands to be looked at
critically and pedagogically (142). He maintains that within Indigenous
speculative fiction, "the fantastic is an extension of the possible, not the
impossible; it opens up and expands the range of options for Indigenous
characters (and readers); it challenges our assumptions and expectations of
'the real,' thus complicating and undermining the dominant and often domineering
functions of the deficit model [of the real]" (149).
However, Justice questions the relevance of
the terminology that informs speculative fiction when it is viewed from
Indigenous cultural and literary perspectives. He takes issue with terms such
as "fantasy fiction" or "speculative/imaginative literature" as they are
"burdened by dualistic presumptions of real and unreal" and "leave [no]
legitimate space for other meaningful ways of experiencing this and other
worlds" (152). Even more problematic for Indigenous cultures and literatures,
explains Justice, is that the term "fantasy" suggests a kind of fabrication
which, if understood from a Freudian psychoanalytical perspective, could suggest
a pathology of neurosis and delusion (152–3). Instead, he proposes the
concept of "wonderworks" that implies a polylithic
understanding of the world and reality (152). Justice explains that "[w]ondrous things are other and otherwise;
they're outside the bounds of the everyday and mundane [...]. "They remind us
that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own"
(153, original italics). Indigenous wonderworks are grounded in Indigenous
peoples' cultural specificities and experiences, allowing for the resurgence
and the recovery of Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and politics that
have long been dismissed by colonial discourses and narratives (154). Furthermore,
per Justice, Indigenous wonderworks subvert the "expectations of rational
materialism" that insist on the inevitability and fatality of "the oppressive
structures and conditions" as inherent to Indigenous experiences (154–5).
This article examines the
ways in which Split Tooth revisits various sites of colonial and
neo-colonial traumas that the Inuit endured and still endure in the Arctic
region of what is known today as Canada. The novel provides a vigorous critique
of colonial capitalist modernity and its destructive "development" from which
the Inuit suffer, with a particular focus on the ecological disasters provoked
by resource extraction and global warming brought about by global capitalism
and Canadian capitalist expansionism in the Arctic region. In doing so, Split
Tooth highlights the ways in which environmental disasters and their
anthropogenic effects find geneses in colonialism's ecocidal logics. In fact,
this is precisely what is argued by settler-Canadian scholar Heather Davis and Métis
Anthropologist Zoe Todd in "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the
Anthropocene" (2017). In their article, Davis and Todd call for a re-evaluation
of the start date of the Anthropocene by linking it to western colonisation and
approaching it as a continuation and accumulation of colonial dispossessions,
genocides, and ecocides (761). The authors explain that the logic of the
Anthropocene resides in "the ruptures and cleavages between land and flesh, story
and law, human and more-than-human" caused by colonialism and contemporary petrocapitalism (775).
Davis and Todd's parallel between the start of
the Anthropocene and the beginning of western colonialism of "the Americas"
suggests that Indigenous peoples are well acquainted with its repercussions. In Split Tooth, the relationship between colonialism and Canadian
petrocapitalism, and environmental destruction in the Arctic region is
aesthetically registered not only through a panoply of narrative registers in which non-human agencies that pertain
to Inuit worldviews and knowledge systems are mobilised,
but also through a subversive appropriation of the Gothic and phantasmagoria. In
parallel, aspects of the western Gothic are deployed as a subversive strategy
to capture the protagonist's trauma of sexual abuse and rape that is implicitly
equated with colonial encroachment and environmental destruction in the Arctic.
Reflecting on the land's agency and ability to exert an influence of human and
the other-than-human beings in "Indigenous Place-thought & Agency amongst
Humans and Non-humans" (2013), Vanessa Watts writes: "Our truth, not only
Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee people but in a majority of Indigenous societies,
conceives that we (humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an
extension of soil" (27). This conceptualisation, which Watts calls "Place‑Thought,"
is "based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and
non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts" (21). In Split Tooth, the protagonist inscribes her path of
healing within the worldviews and knowledge systems that inform the Inuit
perspectives and visions of the natural environment and landscape of the Arctic. As such, the power of Tanya Tagaq's novel lies in the way in which it
presents itself as a narrative of healing and survivance.
In the context of colonial
traumas, survivance is, as Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor puts it, neither
mere survival, nor endurance and passive presence; rather, "survivance is an
active repudiation of dominance, tragedy and victimry" (Fugitive Poses
15). In a recent article
by Valerie N. Wieskamp & Cortney Smith, entitled ""What to do when you're
raped"" (2020), the authors conduct a rhetorical analysis of Lucy M. Bonner's illustrated
handbook What to Do When You are Raped (2016).
In it, they explore the potential of the "rhetoric of
survivance" in expanding the discussion about trauma and sexual violence within
Indigenous women and girls (73). Wieskamp and
Smith start with a critique of the Euro-American discourses of trauma and
sexual violence that they consider incompatible with the experiences of women
of colour (73). In addition to their racial and gendered tendencies, they
explain, Euro-American discourses of trauma follow a linear "traumatological
timeline" which assumes a stable subject position before traumatisation. Thus,
traumatised individuals are capable "of being forever cured of that
trauma, even if they cannot regain their initial
subject position" (76). This understanding, the authors contend, victimises
those who fail to detach themselves from their trauma (76). Moreover, Wieskamp and Smith state that Euro-American conceptions of
trauma and healing are highly individualistic, such that the accountability of
the state's structural oppression is hidden via grammars of psychology and
individual well-being (73). In Split Tooth, the
narrator is not trapped
in a traumatic compulsion. Nor does she accept the status of a passive survivor
of her trauma in which healing and recovery are, as Deborah L. Madsen points
out, equated with a therapeutic re-assimilation or reintegration of the
fragmented self that aims to bring the patient "to a condition of cultural productivity,"
and in which "the concept of psychic integration or assimilation" is
imperatively conflated with social assimilation ("On Subjectivity and
Survivance" 64).
As such, the
novel can be read in terms of what Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard
calls, in Red Skins, White Masks
(2014), a rejection of the colonial politics of recognition (17). In this
study, Coulthard draws on Fanon's
critique of the colonial politics of recognition to investigate the current
situation of Indigenous-settler state relations in Canada (17). The author explains
that Fanon's critique of the colonial politics of recognition consists of two
dimensions. The first dimension presents a structural problem that lies at the
heart of colonial recognition as it occurs in "in real world contexts of
domination" such that "the terms of accommodation" concerning this recognition
are regulated and shaped "by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in
the relationship" (17). The second dimension, he adds, presents a subjective
problem that consists of the colonised people's psychological and affective
attachment to "structurally circumscribed modes of recognition" that facilitate
and perennate "the economic and political structure of colonial relationships
over time" (1718). In Split Tooth,
the protagonist resists pathologisation and
victimisation while simultaneously rejecting assimilation by asserting her self‑determination
through her historical consciousness, political agency, and cultural
affirmation. In this way, the novel manifests what Coulthard calls a "resurgent politics of recognition" which
he conceives as a decolonial praxis that focuses on Indigenous self-empowerment
"through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning" (18,
original italics). As an Indigenous wonderwork, not only does Split Tooth reflect Indigenous
perspectives on the world, reality, and existence, it also offers a
decolonising reading of healing that is articulated as an ongoing process of
survivance entrenched within the natural environment of the Arctic. Therefore, the novel presents itself as what Justice calls a story that
heals.
Traumatised Land, Traumatised Bodies
Split Tooth is
set in a small, peripheral town in the Arctic region of Nunavut, situated in
the northern territories of what is known today as Canada. The peripherality of
the town is not limited to its geographic location in relation to the
core-capitalist metropoles of the settler-colonial state of Canada. Indeed,
through a myriad of narrative registers, such as non-human agencies, Indigenous
Inuit narrative registers and storytelling, free-verse poetry, and scientific
terminologies of geology, the author formally and aesthetically registers the
town's peripherality in a logic of an uneven and traumatic modernity produced
by the expansion of Canadian colonial capitalism. The plot of Split Tooth is
told entirely from the first-person perspective of an unnamed adolescent girl
and is centred on her life in a coming-of-age narrative through which she
confronts the trauma of longstanding sexual abuse. From the first page of the
novel, this unnamed narrator provides an overview of the economical
precariousness that haunts this peripheral arctic town. Amid this harsh arctic
environment, she describes the house she lives in as made of "[f]ake-wood panel walls" (1, emphasis added). Although
short as a description, it is possible to discern the critique that lies behind
it. The fragility of the house walls speaks volumes about the uneven modernity
produced in the logic of colonial and neo-colonial capitalism in Canada. In Combined and Uneven
Development (2015), the Warwick
Research Collective (WReC) reflect on the uneven
nature of development and modernity brought about by capitalism in the (semi‑)
peripheries of core-capitalist countries. They contend that modernity in an
economic logic of a combined and uneven development "is coded into the fabric
of built space[s]" (148). In the novel, the fallacious character of the walls
being made of "fake-wood panels"—instead of real wood which, as a natural
resource, is hardly lacking in settler-colonial countries like Canada—provides
a glimpse into the uneven distribution of wealth and the nature of development
that a racially inscribed capitalism entails in the peripheries of these core-capitalistic
settler-colonial countries
Tagaq depicts the tormented life of an Inuit child whose community is
still plagued by longstanding colonial and neo-colonial traumas and their
far-reaching psychological, social and economic repercussions. However, the
novel focuses more on the traumatic impacts of the Canadian residential school
policies among Indigenous Inuit communities, shedding light on the social ills
of alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and suicide among the youth.
Indeed, Tagaq dedicates her novel "[f]or the Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women and Girls, and survivors of residential schools" (Split Tooth VII,
original italics). Early in the novel, this traumatic environment, fuelled with
alcohol and violence, is portrayed as the narrator's everyday life. The opening
sentence reads: "Sometimes we would hide in the closet when the drunks came
home from the bar. [...] Sometimes there was only thumping, screaming, moans,
laughter" (1). From childhood, the narrator is exposed to persistent molestation
and sexual abuse, both in public and domestic spaces. During a routine day at
school, she describes "[t]he teacher squirming his
fingers under my panties. / [...] He looks around and pretends he's not doing it"
(Split Tooth 4). Later, speaking of the school custodian, she declares:
"Watch out for the old walrus. / The old man likes to touch young pussy. / [...]
I wonder why nobody kicks him out" (4, emphasis added). In this way, the
novel's first poem exposes the educational environment that, ordinarily, is
meant to offer security and fulfilment for children. Yet, located in a
peripheral town of a settler-colonial country infested by uneven-race
relations, the school becomes another space where Inuit children encounter
institutionally facilitated oppression and abuse that the rhetorical question
illuminates.
Tagaq's critique of
colonial capitalist modernity and the destructive "development" endured by the
Inuit of "Canada" takes on other proportions when she addresses the ecological
disasters provoked by resource extraction and global warming brought about by
global capitalism and Canadian capitalist expansionism in the arctic region. The
novel highlights
the ways in which environmental disasters and their anthropogenic effects find
genesis in colonialism's ecocidal logics. In "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing
the Anthropocene" (2017), Davis and Todd contend that relating the Anthropocene
to the beginning of colonialism allows it to be set as a critical project
through which it is possible to consider today's "ecocidal logics" not as
fatality or as something inherent to "human nature," but rather as the outcome
of a constellation of attitudes that "have their origins and reverberations in
colonization" (763). By linking the Anthropocene to colonialism, they
demonstrate the way in which the emergence of ecological disaster is inherently
tied to a western ideology that not only separates but also places the human
above "geology and biota" (769). Indeed, Davis and Todd argue that colonialism
and settler-colonialism "[were] always about changing the land, transforming
the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and
the atmosphere. It was about moving and unearthing rocks and minerals. All of
these acts were intimately tied to the project of erasure that is the
imperative of settler colonialism" (770). The logic of the Anthropocene, they
assert, resides in colonialism and contemporary petrocapitalism's severing of
the bonds between "humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between
minerals and our bones" (770). By relating the
Anthropocene to colonialism, Davis and Todd concretely ground the concept in
the current ecological and environmental crisis.
As an Indigenous
wonderwork, Split Tooth captures the
violence and the ecological impact of oil extraction in Nunavut through a
mixture of phantasmagoria and anthropomorphism. Early in the novel, the
narrator anthropomorphises "[g]lobal warming" through the use of active verbs,
asserting that it "will release the deeper smells" and "coax stories out of the
permafrost" (Split Tooth 6). Later,
in an ominous phantasmagorical tone, she wonders "what memories lie deep in the
ice? Who knows what curses?" (6). Addressing such issues in their work, the WReC contributors argue that in literary works that
register ecological failures induced by violent resource extractions, there is
often a self‑conscious recourse to—and appropriation of—"catachrestic
narrative devices," fantastic tropes, and aesthetics of speculative fiction in
order to "visualise spectral economies of oil and energy, hyper-commodity
fetishism" and "to register the violent impact of petroleum extraction and
reorganisation of socio-ecological relations" (Combined and Uneven 97–8). In the novel, the use of western
aspects of phantasmagoria and the Gothic to register the destructive impact of
global warming can be read as a subversive strategy whereby the author
explicitly links the attacks on the arctic environment to colonialism in
general, and to the Canadian neo-colonial policies of resource extraction in
particular.
In other passages that touch upon the
same theme, the narrator addresses the land directly. Yet, unlike "global
warming," which is gothicised and anthropomorphised, the land is approached as
a character per se through a
conferred agency that is reflected in the novel's typography. In an interlude,
the narrator enters in a direct conversation with the land as their gazes meet,
"[b]lack eye on black
eye" (64). She addresses the land as a human being with human organs using
the second person pronoun "you" when she says: "Your mouth opens and emits a
toothless scream" and "[y]our hair falls out" (65). This embodiment of the land
reaches an apotheosis when the narrator corporealises the suffering it endures while
being stripped of its oil resources. First, she compares it to bleeding and
haemorrhaging when she describes the way in which "[o]il begins to seep from
all of [the land's] orifices" (65). Afterwards, she equates the process of
well-drilling with the skinning of a caribou: "This is happening to you with
invisible hands, and then the skin reattaches itself so you can feel that same
thing again and again" (65). Finally, the narrator considers the land as a
traumatised body to which "[d]eath" would be "a
thousand times more desirable than this" and for which she "will always bear
witness" (65). These passages register the stark differences that exist between
Indigenous worldviews and western conceptions of space and the environment. Indeed,
Smith argues that, for the west, space is regarded "as being static or divorced
from time. This view generates ways of making sense of the world as a 'realm of
stasis', well-defined, fixed and without politics" (Decolonizing Methodologies 109). She writes: "Land, for example,
was viewed as something to be tamed and brought under control" (106). In fact, what
is described in the above passages is precisely what Davis and Todd posit as the severed bonds between humans,
other-than-humans, and the land caused by colonialism and later exacerbated by
extractive capitalism.
As discussed above,
the WReC contributors consider the mobilisation of
fantastic tropes and speculative fiction aesthetics a deliberate and purposeful
technique that endeavours to invoke the shock and violence entailed by "petro‑modernity's
blind dependence on oil and its unrelenting drive to expansion" (Combined and Uneven 109). Nevertheless,
in the case of Indigenous wonderworks, the speculative and the fantastic are,
as Justice puts it, "an extension of the possible, not the impossible" and, by
extension, the real, not the unreal (149). He argues that such works depict
"experiential realities" found in "most traditional Indigenous systems" that
"don't always fit smoothly into the assumptions of Eurowestern
materialism" (141–2). Being an Indigenous wonderwork, it would be
inaccurate to consider the land's sentience in the novel as mere fantasy or fabrication
because concepts of other-than-human personhood and agencies are inherent to
those "experiential realities" of many Indigenous knowledge systems. The
non-human agency with which the earth is endowed in Split Tooth is a deliberate technique on Tagaq's part to assert an
Inuit perspective on the land and the environment, in which both are considered
living beings with agency. In this way, Tagaq presents an acute critique of
western colonisation's commodification of Indigenous space through the oil
industry—a commodification that is symptomatic of the destructive
modernity lived by the Inuit as a direct result of the Canadian colonial and
expansionist capitalism.
As with the trauma of the land, the protagonist's trauma is
predominantly captured through narrative registers that pertain to the western
Gothic and is conveyed in episodic free-verse poems that predominantly ignore
the novel's overall linearity. It is worth noting that throughout the passages that describe scenes
of sexual abuse, whether in the poetic or prosaic parts of the novel, the
perpetrator is never referred to by name. Commenting on this namelessness in
her review of the novel, M. Jacqui Lambert notes that "it could serve as a true function of the reality within the story where
the narrator prefers to play it safe, rather than naming her uncle, a parent's
friend or another man within the small community" (Lambert). If, as mentioned
above, Tagaq's novel does contain portions of her memoir, then Lambert's
statement is plausible. However, what is at stake here is the aesthetic value
and impact that is produced by this namelessness, particularly in a second
untitled poem where the narrator spectralises the perpetrator as a reflection
on the haunting impact of living under the constant horror of abuse. She
writes:
Something is lurking [...]
Something imperceptible
Something unseen
Something war-driven
Something obscene. (Split Tooth 35)
Here, the
narrator depicts the rapist as a malicious presence, a menacing demon or ghost
capable of concealing himself to better hunt her down and attack at a
propitious moment. The rhythm produced by the anaphoric verses strengthens this
phantasmagorical portrayal, such that it textually and aesthetically reproduces
and reflects the narrator's constant and anxious anticipation of abuse.
Moreover, in a prosaic passage, she declares: "There are evil beings in the
room near the ceiling waiting to take over the drunken bodies, Grudges and
Frustrations slobbering at the chance to return to human form, to violate, to
kill, to fornicate" (106). Here, the narrator spectralises drunkenness itself,
comparing it to a demonic possession. The mobilisation of western gothic tropes
in this Inuit literary text can, therefore, be read as a subversive strategy.
On the one hand, it materialises Tagaq's endeavour to register a reality that,
due to its extreme traumatic impact, cannot be embodied or grasped through a
realist narrative register. On the other hand, doing so specifically by
appropriating aspects of the western Gothic, she conceives the narrator's
trauma and pain as, in one way or another, an aftermath of western colonialism,
as well as the subsequent oppressive policies and the socio-political peripheralisation of the Inuit in the settler-colonial state
of Canada.
Through references to human anatomy, as well as the intimacy of
corporeality, Tagaq's Split Tooth captures the extent by which the
deeply personal spaces of both the body and the home are violently intruded and
encroached upon by the trauma of sexual abuse. Indeed, the use of spatiality—more
precisely corporeal spatiality—is recurrent within the novel. Yet, in an
untitled poem that captures another instance of rape, it is rather the absence
of space that most profoundly registers that violence. The narrator states: "He
keeps trying. / Pushing his hard thing. / Into a space that has no space" (22).
The language of this poem furthers this corporeal violence by presenting the
act of rape as an act through which a new, traumatic corporeal space is imposed
upon the body. Indeed, the two mentions of the word "space" are not synonymous.
In the first instance, it denotes a corporeal container, a space into which something
can enter. In the second instance, however, "space" is both physiological and
psychological; to possess "no space" during this moment is a violent image that
registers not only the act of rape but specifically the rape of a child.
Furthermore, it is a psychological construction that, due to the narrator's age
and lack of sexual maturity, does not yet possess a referent. The infringement
here, therefore, far exceeds the corporeal and threatens the "no space" that
is, for the narrator, still an unknown space and which is, through this
especially traumatic rape, instantaneously created and then destroyed.
Capturing the traumatic
impact of her longstanding exposure to sexual abuse and violence in another
poem, the narrator states: "I only work from the waist up / Psychological
epidural [...] I was entered too young" (Split Tooth 41). These verses
encapsulate the repercussions of the physiological and psychological intrusion
and infringement discussed above and echoes
precisely David Lloyd's definition of trauma as "violent intrusion and a
sense of utter objectification that annihilates the person as subject or agent"
("Colonial Trauma" 214). Indeed, the impact of this traumatic intrusion is
simultaneously physiological and psychological, both of which veer towards an
annihilation of agency and subjectivity. On the one hand, by describing herself
as someone whose lower body does not "work," the narrator seems to suggest a
sense of dissociation, a loss of possession of that body part. On the other
hand, this physical numbing is projected onto the psyche, conveyed here through
the reference to an "epidural," a medical
procedure entailing the administration of anaesthesia to numb the spinal
nerves, usually deployed during childbirth. To use the metaphor of "epidural"
here is, therefore, to denote an induced psychological numbness, registering
the traumatic annihilation of the narrator's psychological agency and
subjectivity, thus propelling her towards a path of substance abuse and, eventually, a
suicide attempt.
Alter/Native Wor(l)ds of the Arctic:
As delineated above, Davis
and Todd's parallel between the
start of the Anthropocene and the beginning of western colonisation of the
"Americas" indicates that, far from being speculative, Indigenous peoples have
already gone through its repercussions. Nevertheless, despite having faced countless
anthropogenic scenarios that unfolded along with colonisation and extractive
capitalism, Indigenous peoples, the authors assert, "contended with the end of
their worlds, and continue to work to foster and tend to strong relationships
to humans, other-than-humans, and land today" ("On the Importance of a Date" 773).
In Split Tooth, it is precisely by striving
to foster and tend to her relationships with other-than-human persons, and the natural environment of
Arctic informed by Inuit worldviews and ways of knowing that the protagonist
initiates her
path of
healing, and which takes the form of a journey of constructing and
strengthening her psychological and sexual agency. This is articulated
when, at a given moment during her adolescence, the narrator experiences a kind
of astral projection during which her spirit leaves her body and is carried by
the wind to the ocean shore, ending up a "large ice floe" that
is "swept out to sea" by the shifting wind (92). As the water
starts to heat up and the floe melts into small pieces, the narrator is
"plunged into the water," stating that: "It is so cold that it burns. Treading
water and feeling the life leave my body, I accept" (93). Suddenly, the
small pieces that make up the ice floe morph into "miniature polar bears,
dozens of them" and make "mewling noises" in an "indecipherable"
language which the narrator understands as an attempt "to comfort [her]" (93).
However, one of the small polar bears stands out. It grows and becomes massive,
"his sphere of reality warming
the ocean for [her]" (93, emphasis added). He gives her "his corporeality," she states, such that the ocean becomes "like a warm bath"
(93, emphasis added). These passages reflect a multiplicity and fluidity of
realities that are intrinsic to Inuit ways of knowing, captured here through
what Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon calls in Walking the Clouds (2012) "Native
Slipstream" (3). Dillon defines Native Slipstream as "a species of speculative
fiction within the sf realm, [which] infuses stories with time travel,
alternate realities and multiverses, and alternative histories" (3). In this
way, the narrative concretises what Justice considers a multiplicity of forms
and experiences of reality that "bleed into one another" (124). Indeed, not
only does the reality of the polar bear reach out to the narrator's, it does so
through its "corporeality," endowing her with one its natural attributes: the
ability to endure the cold Arctic waters.
Nevertheless, the respective realities of the narrator and
the polar bear do not simply interact; they merge into each other, becoming
one. This fusion is articulated through an act of erotic communion; she
declares:
I mount his back and
ride him. [...] We are lovers. We are married. [...] He keeps me safe and I am
drunk on his dignity. [...] My skin melts where there is contact with my lover.
The ocean and our love fuse the polar bear and me. He is I,
his skin is my skin. Our flesh grows together. [...]
My whole body absorbs him and we become a new being. I am invincible. [...] I
will live another year. (Split
Tooth 93)
The polar bear, or Nanuq in the Inuktitut language,
holds a special position in various Indigenous Inuit knowledge systems,
regarded as a resilient and strong totemic ancestor, and often associated with
hunting. In "Nanook, Super-Male" (1994), Bernard D'Anglure
explains that, in "ancient times," the boundaries between humans and animals
were permeable with the polar bear as "the closest to man of all animals: when
it metamorphosed it was recognizable by the size of its canine teeth and its
pronounced liking for fat" (170). D'Anglure writes
that, "according to our informants, 'the bear is the ancestor of man and its
flesh much resembles that of human beings in colour, texture and taste'. [...]
It was said that the soul of a bear was very dangerous, that it should be
treated like that of a kinsperson" (174). Accordingly, the above communion
informs the novel's assertion of "kinship with the
other-than-human peoples" present in "most traditional Indigenous systems" and
reflected in Indigenous wonderworks (Justice, 141).
Nevertheless, the agency and subjectivity conferred on the
bear—for he is presented
as a character with whom the narrator has sexual intercourse that leads to
their fusion into a "new being"—makes this passage a quintessence of the aesthetics of
survivance. Among the neologisms that Vizenor presents in his works is the
concept of "transmotion," an aesthetic strategy of Native survivance. In "The Unmissable" (2015),
Vizenor explains that the prefix "trans" in transmotion "initiates a sense
of action or change, a literary and unitary motion, and a wider concept of the
motion in images and words" (64). As an aspect of survivance aesthetics that
celebrates Indigenous ontologies, "transmotion" entails a representation of
transformation that, according to Madsen, includes "the interchangeable
transformations of the human into animal and animal into human" ("Tragic
Wisdom and Survivance" 4). "Native transmotion," Vizenor writes, "is
survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial
sovereignty. Native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and
sovereignty" (Fugitive Poses 15).
Tagaq's aesthetics of transmotion not only informs the natural motion of the
narrator towards the ocean in a spiritual form, but also captures the
transformation she undergoes after merging with the totemic animal. This fusion
creates a "new being", after which the narrator acquires a sense of dignity and
invincibility.
In Split Tooth, the narrator's journey of
reclaiming her psychological and sexual agency culminates when, in physical
form, she walks to the sea for a second time. Lying on the ice, her spirit
"find[s] the smallest crack and slip[s] into the Arctic water below" (111). Now
in spiritual form, the narrator explores the bottom of the Arctic water, which
she describes as "a stadium event of Life" form which her "Spirit" drinks
(112). Feeling her "Body" slipping away, the narrator travels back to the
surface and regains possession of it: "It takes a monumental effort to wiggle
my toes and open my eyes after the Exploration" (112). Interestingly, the words
"Body," "Spirit," "Life," and "Exploration" are capitalised in this passage,
asserting the relationship that the Inuit have with life, corporeality, and
spirituality. Indeed, Justice underlines the significance of such
capitalisation in Indigenous literatures which, he contends, affirms the
status of subjectivity and agency (6). This is expressed, for example, when the
narrator declares that "Body give[s] Spirit permission to leave" and
"Spirit moves through it [water] differently than Body does" (111). Here, the
Body, the Spirit, and the Life of the narrator are characters in their own
right, capable of exerting influence on the course of events. Accordingly, this
expresses Tagaq's assertion of an Inuit specificity, according to which
the relationship to these aspects extends beyond the material and utilitarian—indeed,
beyond mere possession and objectification.
This process of the separation and then
reunion of body and spirit that the narrator calls "Exploration" triggers a
crucial event in her journey of healing. As her body and spirit reunite, she
declares:
The Northern Lights
have descended upon me during my spirit journey. [...] Light leaves Time and
takes on physical form. The light morphs into faces and creatures, and then
they begin to solidify into violent shards. This energy is not benign like that
of the ocean dwellers; these are the Masters of Law and Nature. (113)
Again, the capitalisation of "Northern Lights" and their
designation as "Master of Law and Nation"—which are, in turn, also
capitalised, is not innocuous. In Inuit worldviews, the phenomena of the Northern
Lights (Aurora Borealis), known as "Arqsarniq" in
Inuktitut, is believed to be the embodiment of the spirits of ancestors.
In Firebridge to Skyshore (2009),
Siobhan Logan explains that one of the most common traditional stories among
the Inuit is that of the "realm of spirits" that could only be reached by the
ravens and the dead (10). According to these stories, Logan adds, spirits of
those who succeed to reach this realm are called "sky-dwellers." When the
Northern Lights appear in the sky, these spirits are understood to be playing a
football-like game using a walrus skull (10).
In Split Tooth, the narrator contrasts the "Northern Lights" with the
"ocean-dwellers"—a reference to the polar bears—stating that the energy
of the former is more powerful. In yet another erotic scene, she lets the
"Lights" penetrate every orifice of her body and fill her womb. Afterwards, she
declares:
I have felt renewed
after the night on the ice. My tendons are thicker, my thoughts quicker. I am
more capable. Fear is learning to run from me, not the other way around. I am
not afraid anymore, as if meekness is slinking away into the deeper corners
where it cannot dominate my psyche. The night with the Northern Lights changed
my whole life. [...] This is where my lesson was learned: pain is to be expected,
courage is to be welcomed. There is no choice but to endure. There is no other
way than to renounce self-doubt. It is the time of Dawning in more ways than
one. The sun can rise, and so can I. (121–2)
Similar to her sexual
communion with the polar bear, the narrator's erotic encounter with the
Northern Lights empowers her physically and, more importantly, psychologically.
Yet, while the former is provisional and allows her to "live another year," the
latter "changed [her] whole life" (93; 122). Indeed, not only does she rebuke
fear, she also ironises it by appropriating its very
quality of "fright." Here, "fear" is metaphorised
and depicted as a sentient being that no longer possesses control over her
psyche. Moreover, her interaction with what she calls "the Masters of Law and
Nature" embodied by the Northern Lights instils traits in her psyche that had
been annihilated by psychological and sexual trauma. Though she states that
"pain is to be expected, courage is to be welcomed," the narrator asserts her
resilience and resistance as an imperative to confronting the pain of her
trauma (122). Through the capitalisation of the word "Dawning"—used here
in its gerund form—the narrator parallels the quotidian victory of light
over darkness. This is embodied by "the dawn," with the need for an active and
permanent sense of survival, resistance, and resilience in the face of the pain
inflicted not only by a traumatised environment plagued by centuries of
oppressive colonial policies and their far reaching traumatic impacts, but also
by her own exposure to violent and cumulative sexual trauma.
Nonetheless, the narrator's path to healing does not end
here. The lesson that the Northern Lights want to teach her has only just
begun. Soon after this night, the narrator notices that she does not menstruate
and begins to feel a "flipping in [her] belly" (132). She states: "All I know
is that I am not alone anymore; I am protected now. [...] I have the twins in
my belly. I speak with the twins every day, a boy and a girl" (132–3).
Strikingly, the spiritually conceived twins recall the divine conception of
Jesus by the Virgin Mary, as recorded in Christian scriptures; yet the former
subverts the latter in a number of ways. Unlike the biblical figure of Mary,
the narrator's pregnancy is the result of a consensual and welcomed sexual
intercourse which empowers her both physically and psychologically. In
addition, rather than a single male child, the narrator is expecting fraternal
male-female twins, to whom she refers as her elders and not her children. She
declares: "My elders are in my tummy. I respect and admire them. They know so much more than I do.
[...] They are not my children but my equals and my leaders" (133,
emphasis added). Moreover, the narrator asserts that she can "communicate
freely" with them by "leav[ing]
[her] consciousness and com[ing] to them into
[their] spirit world" (133,
emphasis added). This passage explicitly asserts an Indigenous Inuit vision of
life and death and the unique understanding and conceptualisation of the
relationship between the living and the dead.
Indeed, the Northern Lights in Indigenous Inuit worldviews
are the embodiment of ancestors and the spirits of the dead. As discussed
above, one of the aesthetic qualities and specificities that Justice attributes
to Indigenous wonderworks is their ability to register the flexible and
permeable relationship between the realms of the living and the spiritual
worlds. According to this vision, respect and veneration extend to the dead, for
they are "ancestors with continuing relationships with the living" (Justice124–6). In Split Tooth, it is precisely within this
logic that the narrator's twins are presented; the narrator she considers them
her elders and leaders, whom she respects and admires, for they have deeper and
greater knowledge than she does. Indeed, the narrator is soon imbued with the
knowledge the twins embody, allowing her to understand not only the nature of
her pain and trauma, but also the nature of healing and the way in which it can
be fulfilled. When the narrator gives birth to the twins, whom she names Savik
and Naja, she describes Savik as "pointed, brooding" making people "cry in
mourning or in grief" if they hold him in their hands for a long time (156).
She states: "Savik eats up the agony, and seems to grow stronger when he bears
witnesses to suffering. [...] Forcing out that agony leaves an open wound, it
leaves people depleted. I notice that those who spend too much time with him
grow ill and radiate a grey pallor"
(156, emphasis added). Naja, on the other hand, is "bright," "calm
and soft" with a voice that "heals anxiety" (158). Unlike her twin brother,
Naja "inhales trouble and exhales solutions like a filtration system. She
cleans people. [...] I saw her healing my mother's cold on a molecular level"
(159). Accordingly, the narrator comes to understand that her twins represent
pain and healing respectively, with the ability to affect her and her
entourage.
Tagaq plays with the
motif of colours to provide a material manifestation of trauma and healing in
her novel. While Savik makes people sick and radiate that grey pallor, Naja "brings
sheen to people's hair and glow to their cheeks" (163). After some time, the
narrator notices that Savik grows bigger than Naja, realising that "[t]here
must be an imbalance of pain in the world" (159). The repercussions of this
imbalance begin to impact the people around her, starting with her uncle, an
alcoholic, who slowly dies from liver failure. Indeed, Savik's ability to
inflict and bring out pain eventually targets the narrator herself. While
breastfeeding, he bites his mother's breast, "biting off the end of [her]
nipple" (177). Here, the narrator notes that "there was no room for him on this
earth" (177). She states: "I knew he would only grow stronger and his prey
would not only be restricted to the old or sick, to the malevolent or weak. I
knew his prey would become Love" (177). It is precisely this fear that forces
the narrator to kill Savik by returning him to "the frozen ice" (180). Instead
of dying, however, Savik transforms into a seal. In a violent scene of
metamorphosis, his "neck hardens into a solid, boneless mass [...]. He builds a
wall of protection around his heart [...]. My hands are burning, the bones in my
hands are burning and there are a thousand boiling blisters where I am holding
him. [...] he is mutating", becoming a seal that then "flops into the crack in
the ice" (181). Intertwined as they are, Savik's contact with the Arctic waters
impacts Naja as well, and she dies of hypothermia in her mother's arms.
Deciding to release Naja's body into the water, the narrator finds that Savik
"absorbs her flesh and they are one. She is he and he is she. Finally they are
whole [...]. The seal looks up at me with love and hatred, death and life. It
looks at me with the Knowing. Then
the seal swims away" (181, emphasis added). Tagaq's choice of the "seal" is not
fortuitous. Kristen Borré explains in "The Healing Power of the Seal" (1994)
that for many Inuit communities
Seals and seal
hunting have intrinsic social value [...] seal maintains the physical, mental
and spiritual health of the individual, the social well-being of the community,
and confidence in Native power relations to maintain self-determination in the
national and international world which is vested in the body politic. 1
In the context of Tagaq's novel, the
seal embodies that very same "physical, mental and spiritual health" to which
Borré refers, and through which the novel grounds its processes of physical and
psychological healing. Indeed, the seal is
evidence of a healing that, the novel seems to be suggesting, is attainable
only through a balance between pain and recovery. There is a lesson here to be
learned—one which the Northern Lights intend to impart upon the narrator.
If she had once believed that her healing is dependent on letting go of her
pain, here she learns that this is impossible. There can be no healing without
achieving the balance between Savik (who imparts pain and trauma) and Naja (who
provides solace). Their union is, therefore, the novel's final aesthetic
statement about the representation of a path of healing and survivance that is grounded
in Inuit epistemologies, ontologies, and worldviews.
The relationship between colonialism and
Canadian petrocapitalism, and environmental destruction in the Arctic region is
aesthetically registered not only through a panoply of narrative registers in which non-human agencies that pertain
to Inuit worldviews and knowledge systems are mobilised,
but also through a subversive appropriation of the Gothic and phantasmagoria.
In parallel, aspects of the western Gothic are also deployed as a subversive
strategy to capture the protagonist's trauma of sexual abuse and rape that is
implicitly equated with the colonial encroachment and environmental destruction
in the Arctic. Yet, it is precisely within the worldviews and knowledge systems
that inform Inuit perspectives and visions of the natural environment and
landscape of the Arctic that the protagonist inscribes her path of
healing. Indeed,
in the second last poem of the novel, she states:
I do not forgive and
forget
I Protect and Prevent
Make them eat shame
and repent
I forgive me. (188)
By rejecting entrapment
in a traumatic compulsion, while also resisting the victimising label of
passive survivor of a traumatic history, the novel can be read in line with
what Coulthard calls "Indigenous anticolonialism as a resurgent practice of
cultural self-recognition" (Red Skin,
White Masks 26). To explain this Indigenous anticolonial formulation,
Coulthard draws on Fanon's "theory of anticolonial agency and empowerment" in
which personal and collective self-determination lie entirely within the
colonised subject's striving for their "freedom and self-worth" and working
through their "alienation/subjection against the objectifying gaze and
assimilative lure of colonial recognition" (43). Coulthard further explains
this decolonising process, stating that the colonised subject must first
acknowledge "themselves as free,
dignified, and distinct contributors to humanity" (43, original italics).
Central to this decolonising project, he explains, is the imperative of a
personal and collective reconsideration of culture and identity that "could
serve as a source of pride and empowerment" (43–4). In Split Tooth, it is
precisely the empowering virtues of identity, culture, and, by extension, the
land that allows the narrator to confront the trauma of rape and sexual abuse
and derive her agency and her self-determination.
In addition, healing in the novel is not presented as linear
and finite; rather, it is conceptualised as an ongoing process. This is
reflected in the closing poem of the novel where the narrator
declares: "Cleanse me. Wash the blood off. I am still working. I survive
still. I am stronger now. / Worship me. I am boundless. I stood up. I am
worthy. / Start again" (189, emphasis added). These closing lines reflect a need for a continuous survival, resistance, and
self-determination to allow for an escape from
the cyclical nature of trauma. In ""What to do when you're raped,"" Wieskamp and Smith explain that a rhetoric of survivance
challenges the Euro-American linear temporality of trauma and its assumed
traumatological timeline (80). Indeed, they state that, by resisting restriction
to the past, present, or future, a rhetoric of survivance reflects what they
call "infinitive' temporality", which allows past, present, and future to flow
together and "embraces the role of one's past to influence one's present
and future" (81). As such, Wieskamp and Smith argue
that survivance in the face of trauma conceives survival/resistance as an
ongoing process that, in contrast to the Euro-American traumatological
timeline, does not assume a "a trajectory towards brighter future, but
presupposes surviving as a constant action" (81). In doing so, they assert, a rhetoric of survivance expresses an
Indigenous "temporal sovereignty by rendering
Native experiences visible and actionable" (81). In Split Tooth, it is precisely this non-linear and ongoing sense of
healing that is formally and aesthetically registered in the novel, thus
presenting itself as a narrative of survivance.
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