The Indigenous Literature Reading Group met on 23rd April 2021 to discuss Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth (Penguin, 2019). University of Exeter PhD candidate Abdenour Bouich reviews the novel’s themes and potency.
Split Tooth (2018) is the debut novel of the 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 for its plasticity in terms of form, style, narrative registers, and aesthetic techniques. It brings together prose, poetry, illustrations, Inuit worldviews and epistemologies, as well as Tagaq’s own memoir. However, the author provides no indication of when the fiction ends and the non-fiction/memoir begins, thus presenting the novel as what Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice terms in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018), an ‘Indigenous wonderwork’.
Split Tooth revisits various sites of colonial and neo-colonial traumas the Inuit endured and still endure in the Arctic region of what is known today as Canada. First, by mobilising a panoply of narrative registers such as phantasmagoria and anthropomorphism, as well as other-than-human agencies that pertain to Inuit worldviews and knowledge systems, the novel sheds light on the ecological disasters provoked by resource extraction and global warming accelerated by Canadian capitalist expansionism in the Arctic region. Second, the novel anchors the protagonist’s trauma of sexual abuse and rape within the broader collective traumas of her community that is still plagued by longstanding Canadian colonial and neo-colonial policies and their far-reaching psychological, social, cultural, and economic repercussions. Indeed, the novel highlights the traumatic impacts of child removal and the Canadian residential school system among the Inuit of Nunavut and sheds light on the social ills of alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and suicide among the youth.
Nevertheless, the power of Tanya Tagaq’s novel lies in the way in which it presents itself as a narrative of healing and survivance by reflecting Inuit experiences and perspectives of the world, reality, and existence. In Split Tooth, the narrator is endowed with a strong political agency, historical consciousness, and cultural affirmation. She asserts her resilience, and resistance to victimisation by inscribing her path of healing – which takes the form of a journey of regaining both her psychological and sexual agency – within the worldviews and knowledge systems that inform the Inuit perspectives and visions of the natural environment and the landscape of the Arctic.
Abdenour Bouich is an Indigenous Amazigh (North-African) member of the Kabyle people. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter in the UK. His areas of interests include Indigenous studies, trauma studies, and world literatures. You can read his article, ‘Translated Poems of the Berber Kabylian Poet Si Mohand ou-Mhand (1845–1906)’ here.