Heart Berries: A Memoir(30)
It might have been two in the morning when I emailed you one night. I was in Vermont lying on this dingy residency bed and I had Crazy Brave open on my chest. I thought, I need to tell people that my story was maltreated, and I need to make an assertion that I am nobody’s relic. I won’t be an Indian relic for any readership. So I decided this book would stand apart from some of the identified themes within our genre.
Q: Native literary writers are often compelled to or must take on a great deal of social context. How did you contend with that in this book?
A: I hope that people can contextualize the state of our world in my work. The writers before me seemed to do the work of looking at being Indigenous so we could look through it. In many ways the experimental form, language—everything—I feel freer to do that because so much was done before.
Q: Can you talk about how the book began—as fiction? How did you make the decision not to hide behind characters?
A: The original drafts of the chapters “Heart Berries” and “Indian Sick” were written and published as fiction. It was my intention to write with a polemic voice, and have a First Nations woman character be overtly sexual, ruined, and ruining people’s lives, respectively. It was an audacious feeling to write a Native woman as gratuitous, even if it was ruining her—it empowered me. And then I was in Starbucks, holding a cup of coffee, and I had the memory of my father in the shower with me, and I believe I was five or six at the time. It was shaky and I had to write that down—and it was my final semester studying fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Instead of using that semester to finish my book of fiction, I started writing essay. I realized that I had been using the guise of fiction to show myself the truth, and the process of turning fiction into nonfiction was essentially stripping away everything that didn’t actually happen to me, and filling those holes left behind with memory.
It made sense that the fiction, and then what came after—it’s so different but it makes sense bound together and retold as truth, because there really was a before and after that memory.
Q: Do you think Heart Berries approaches the politicization of grief? What power dynamics moved to the fore in writing this book? I mean in terms of the narratives that the book brings together.
A: I didn’t think about the politicization of grief, but the worst part of me imagined I could be redeemed.
Q: Can you talk at the craft level about what it means to work with the risk of self-disclosure? Can you talk about what it means at the level of personal relationships? Alliances? Political relationships? When you were writing the book, and now that it is moving into production, what are your observations about the extent to which your writing is politicized, removed from context, or made to be in the control somehow of, if not the writer, one’s readers? What are your perspectives on the different relationships a Native woman has to her audience of readers and the relationships she might have with the individuals that comprise her communities?
A: I moved with the surety that the work could not be as contrived as I normally present myself. Disclosure, personally, cannot work if I’m thinking rhetorically about appeal, or thinking about appealing to someone I love. If I am gluttonous, exploitative, or punched a man, or tried to stab someone, or failed my children, then I wanted to write it without rhetorically positioning myself as just. Crafting truth to be as bare as it feels was important. Memoir, for me, functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing.
The danger politically or artistically is that people won’t give me my craft. Because I’m an Indian woman someone might call my work raw and disregard the craft of making something appear raw. Raw would be fighting for myself, defending myself, telling people how hard it is to write about molestation and repeatedly saying, “I was a child!” Because I wanted to do that, constantly give refrain and remind myself it was not my fault, but I didn’t want to engage in sentimentality, or the wrong type of sentimentality. I crafted the voice, and, while it’s earnest, it takes work to be earnest and cut my shit. I wanted to give my life art because nobody had given my experience the framework it deserved—as complex, more than raw, or brutal, or familiar, or a stereotype—I don’t know.
Q: Shame and forgiveness have very different functions and histories in my tribal communities and in the space that a Native woman is permitted to inhabit in dominant culture. So here’s a question: What, if anything, do you anticipate about these perhaps competing responses from readers? And please tell me you were not preoccupied to the extent of self-censorship with the notion of competing responses while you wrote the book. Or, rather, please discuss.
A: I knew nothing I said would change the trajectory of my life, not in any real way. The work would not make it easier for me to move bureaucratically as an Indian woman. It would not make people processing a Native girl’s casework any different, because I believe we all try to articulate our stories, our voices, to those people, and they do not see us differently. I don’t feel burdened when I say that, but I feel chagrined.
That’s a big part of the book: shame, being chagrined by my transgressions and my family’s, and I didn’t censor that exploration. I hate the world exploration; it feels funny to say it because those words don’t do it justice. It feels colonized to say I explore or discover, but what other word could I own? The terrain was there inside of me, and I decided to meditate, or examine it with a brutal honesty because I knew if I wrote it I could know it.