Commentary: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
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Tanya Tagaq's debut book Split Tooth masterfully captures a profound relationship between people and place. Set in the arctic region of Nunavut-- the northernmost territory in so-called Canada-- we meet a young girl (whose name we never quite catch) knee-deep in the process of growing up. Under the midnight sun, she plays with other children in the blissful freedom of no schedule. In the months of pitch darkness, she hides and sneaks away from the rowdy, drunken adults, itching for cigarettes and inhalants. As puberty approaches, she dizzily turns between unwanted touches and craving tenderness. Abuse lingers all around her from unnamed penetration to Christian colonization. But there is also joy-- wonder, awe, and terror at the cruel and dazzling arctic all around.
Poems stitch her story together as she grows from a play-hungry child into a wise mother, so wise that pain and love become one, so wise that the spirit world is never far away. She encounters animal spirits and manifestations of the divine. Sex is a language between them, both tender and horrific, tied not to the present moment but to the boundless history and future of the arctic. What is intangible and unknown lives and breathes in this book and Tagaq introduces us to these devastating truths through the day-to-day struggle of growing up. Simple, yet gut-wrenchingly true. Childhood friends die just like the other animals of the arctic die-- nature is both indifferent and magically in love with us. Contradictions fill the pages, but they are painted both as warring ideas and as inseparable, married so that both malice and comfort exist together. Neither is singularly true.
I cannot convey the brilliance of Tagaq's writing. Split Tooth is an experience unlike any other. While reading, I felt the distinct sensation of witnessing something delightfully wild, prophetic, and nightmarish all at once. I knew, from page one, that this was not a book I could finish unchanged.
Like a vision or a dream, Tagaq's writing translates the ethos of the arctic into tragically moving stories of love, loss, family, ancestry, and folklore that crack open forgotten wounds inside each of us-- regions of knowledge that are bound to land and place. We know all things and know nothing.
To be swallowed whole by this book, digested, broken down into ego-less molecules, buried and lost, then reborn again thousands of years later, was a gift.