Heart Berries: A Memoir
Terese Marie Mailhot
introduction
by Sherman Alexie
Terese Marie Mailhot arrived in my life via vision. Well, she was due to give birth at any moment and couldn’t attend the writing workshop in person, so she was beamed into the classroom via Skype or iChat or Facebook streaming on somebody’s laptop. She became the cyborg writer in the room. It was hilarious at first. It never stopped being hilarious. But as the week went on, I realized that Terese’s lack of physical presence gave her voice more power. When she spoke, we all had to lean toward the computer to better hear. And then we’d sometimes forget she was in the room. It’s easy to forget about a computer. But then Terese would speak—would politely seek our attention—and we’d turn toward that laptop as if it were a shrine. Hilarious. It all seemed like a contradiction. But that twenty-first-century technology turned Terese into an ancient. Well, it made her feel like she was powered by something ancient.
So, in reading Heart Berries, I was not surprised to learn that Terese, as a child in search of answers, in search of protection, pretended to be ancient.
I didn’t say any of this at the time. I didn’t want to single her out. Or praise her too much. I was the professor and I needed to be fair, objective, and critical. But what I really wanted to say was, “Terese, when I sat down with your manuscript and began to read your words, I was aware within maybe three sentences that I was in the presence of a generational talent. I was in the presence of something new.”
To be glib, Terese is putting the “original” in aboriginal.
So, yeah, I didn’t say it then. But I am saying it now. Terese Marie Mailhot has arrived in all of our lives now, and she is ancient. She is pretending to be ancient. She is speaking from an ancient place. She is smart and a smart-ass. She is wounded and seeking to wound. She is forgiving and vengeful. She is mentally ill and smarter than all of us. She is cynical and deeply, deeply romantic.
She is the metaphorical love child of Emily Dickinson and Crazy Horse. She is the biological child of a broken healer and a lonely artist.
Terese is a healer and an artist. She is broken and she is lonely.
Just read a few of her out-of-context sentences:
Observation isn’t easy, and the right eyes can make me feel like a deer, while the wrong ones make me feel like a monster.
The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you.
I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.
I am not too ugly for this world.
I walk backward up the steps, knowing my feet like I never did.
This book is not only memoir. It is poetry. It is meditation. It is mystical, but not in the kind of old-time Indian way that Terese wants to avoid. It is a hard-earned mysticism. A blue-collar mysticism. The mysticism of callused hands and blistered feet. It is the mysticism of resilience. Or something larger than resilience.
As you will discover in reading this book, Terese is suspicious of the word resilence. She is suspicious of all words. Because she is acutely aware of their ability to heal and harm, often at the same time.
But as a writer, as a storyteller, Terese returns to the words, to the stories, because she must. She doesn’t have a choice. She was given this extraordinary gift. And this gift of vision, of words, has sent her screaming into the night. It has left her weeping naked in the shower. It has pushed her into a mental hospital. It has fractured her family and her own soul.
But here she is, still standing, and she is interrogating the world. She is the judge and jury. But she is a powerful indigenous woman who interrogates herself.
Yes, I think, in the end, this is perhaps why I believe Terese is a spectacular talent. She is willing to look deep into the mirror and tell us what she sees. And in doing so, Terese herself becomes a mirror, and we, her readers, can see our reflections.
Terese is unafraid now. Does that mean she is calling on us, her readers, her reflections, to be unafraid, too? Or maybe Terese just accepts her fear. Does that mean we readers should accept our fear, too? I don’t know the answer to that question. Terese wants to be “torn apart by everything.” So does that mean I should want to be torn apart, too? I don’t know. I don’t know. But I am certainly aware that Heart Berries has torn me apart. And I fully expect, as I read it again, as I keep rereading it over the years, that Terese and her stories will put me back together.
Sherman Alexie
July 27, 2017
1
indian condition
My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity—like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.
Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn’t thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much.
The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men’s questions or their calls.
Women asked me for my story.
My grandmother told me about Jesus. We knelt to pray. She told me to close my eyes. It was the only thing she asked me to do properly. She had conviction, but she also taught me to be mindless. We started recipes and lost track. We forgot ingredients. Our cakes never rose. We started an applehead doll—the shrunken, carved head sat on a bookshelf years after she left.