Heart Berries: A Memoir(33)

A: In some ways I acted with reckless abandon because I had been abandoned—there was no father to work against or for—there was nothing, and it didn’t always feel like absence, but a white room to paint.

Q: In another moment, you write: “In my kitchen I turn the lights off again, like I used to. It allows me to feel as nothing as the dark. I know where everything is, like I did before. I become scared because it is this behavior that causes me to commit myself. I still take a knife and I press it against the fat of my palm—in the dark, hoping that I have the bravery to puncture myself, so that the next day I can be more fearless.” Is this less about a connection to an individual body and more about a mode of survival?

A: This is hard to admit, but I thought I could gradually build my tolerance to physical pain and die—and that never happened. I just couldn’t move forward to my destruction, and I couldn’t appreciate death, even though I tried. Death becoming less interesting artistically, physically, heart-wise—it was the best thing I came away with.

Q: What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you think the current questions are?

A: I wanted to articulate the truth, but was unsure if the truth could be singular. I had existed in a double consciousness to the point where I wondered if I were an object, or paralyzed in fear, and the book is me moving forward and putting myself at the apex of my own story—it’s not immediate, but gradual, because it was happening as I was writing it, or as I was trying to articulate the truth of what exactly happened.

In the first chapters I am asking if my father hurt me, then how, and then, finally, I can behold myself. And that could be why it’s roving temporally, or not really concerned with a linear structure—but with the story as it should be presented, rhetorically and truthfully.

Questions exist in the last pages of the book: Is the uncovered truth and the knowledge of it, wholly, enough for me to move away from? Is admitting the nature of my father, or my mother’s transgressions and my own, or realizing I’ve entered my own renaissance, enough to let the worst parts of my father, mother, and myself, rest?

So, where are we now? With Terese Mailhot’s Heart Berries, we move well beyond the yesteryear satisfactions of mere representation and oblique lyricism. The reader now anticipates that the forefront of contemporary indigenous literature will imbue terror with angst, of course, and that we are no longer tasked with the hauntings of various types of loss. That silence, too, is a construction. That we are no longer complicit in presenting Native experience as historical content rather than literary apotheosis.

I mean that silence is not representative of loss. I mean to call attention to the fact that, yes, through craft, we assemble what remains of ourselves through language. We imagine, create, tell, reprise, contradict, refuse, estrange, assimilate, and determine our language. What we do becomes part of our existing story—even though at times, our detractors (all of them) seem to argue that, through language, we seem to exist in opposition to the very notion of story.

So, where are we? Who is telling whose story? Who is preventing misreading? No one. Violence happens through our bodies. Isn’t that how colonialism used to work? Their adversaries were simple. Our families (our genealogies, marriages, children, our sexual and domestic violence) and ourselves (our suicides, our recuperations) were simultaneously reduced and amplified as social facts rather than private matters. Our literature was not ours. It was theirs.

So, where are we? Where we have always been. Where are you?





acknowledgments


Endless gratitude for Seabird Island Chief and Council, Cindy Kelly, SWAIA, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Lannan Foundation, and Writing by Writers for all their support and generosity.

Thank you, Emma Borges-Scott, my agent, and Harry, my editor.

Sherman, for saying, “Send me the manuscript!” the day I finished it. Thank you for that support. It was such a lonely and dark night in Vermont, and you made me feel less alone.

Joan, so much love for you and your brilliance. You’re the shit, obviously. Kane out.

Ismet Prcic (Izzy), Ramona Ausubel, Linda Hogan, Toni Jensen, Justin Torres, Pam Houston, Jon Davis, Tommy Orange, Barbara Robidoux, Viva (Gris), Elissa Washuta, and my peers at IAIA M.F.A., Low Rez, and Rudolfo, I admire you all and thank you for changing my life.

Denise Baldwin, I love you. Sisters forever. Rhonda, your love is the safest, biggest, and brightest thing. Daughter, thank you for making me go back to school, and thank you for letting me bring the baby into the classroom, and thank you to your mother, who taught me how to sew, and thank you for showing me literature.

Ovila and Guyweeyo, thank you for protecting me and taking care of me. Zena, thank you for being my sister and my blood, and for your children: Jordin, Cherish, Boon, Chubby (Trevor), Boo, and Dawson. I love you, Myka.

Isadore, Baby Casey, and Isaiah, my heart—everything good—every joy in the world. I love you.

Thank you, Cathy and David.

Casey, I fall all over myself for you, every time. My god.

All my cousins—my crazy-ass cousins, and aunties and uncles, I love you. Thank you for letting me eat at your house and cook there and thank you for every nice thing you did.

Thank you, The Rumpus, Burrow Press Review, Carve Magazine, The Offing, BOAAT, The Butter, Yellow Medicine Review, The James Franco Review, Transmotion for the University of Kent in Canterbury (Teddy), The Feminist Wire, Storyscape, Juxtaprose, and Indian Country Today, for your support and encouragement.