This story is yours, culprit of my pain. Which one of us is asking for mercy?
Heart Berries is a memoir by the Salish writer Terese Marie Mailhot, told over eleven “fractured” essays. Growing up on Canada's West Coast, this could have been a sadly familiar-sounding Reserve-based childhood tale, but Mailhot is a writer with an edge and an MFA. Her “narrative” is beyond the ordinary (with an artist/activist mother whose correspondence with an American prisoner formed the basis for a Paul Simon project, and an artist father whose life with his second family was documented in the NFB film Hope), but it's her heart that Mailhot puts on display here; her pain and need and grief that evokes the universal while insisting that this is a personal project that exists independent of my experience of it. I could have marked beautiful or otherwise striking passages on every page – in the introduction, Sherman Alexie quips that Mailhot puts “the 'original' in aboriginal” – but from the material at the back of the book, I felt chastened by that greed: Mailhot's words are not beholden to my evaluation of them, but I will say they moved me.
I wrote like I had something to prove to you. The stories were about the Indian condition alongside the mundane. Most of the work felt like a callback to traditional storytelling. Salish stories are a lot like its art: sparse and interested in space. The work must be striking.We learn early that after a messy breakup, and some threats of self-harm, Mailhot committed herself to a brief stay at a mental health facility. While there, she was provided with a pen and notebook, and through a series of unmailable letters to her former lover, Mailhot began to write her story. Like Salish art, her writing is “sparse and interested in space”; the essays in this book comprise only 130 small pages, but they contain a big life. Mailhot's story is her own, so I'll not outline it here.
I woke up today, confused, inside of something feminine and ancestral in its misery. I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage. My illness has carried me into white buildings, into the doctor's office and the therapist's – with nothing to say, other than I need my grandmother's eyes on me, smiling at my misguided heart. Imagine their faces when I say that?And yet, I can't help but include at least this one quote that contains something of Mailhot's politico-poetical voice and viewpoint. My edition of Heart Berries ends with a Q&A between Mailhot and Joan Naviyuk Kane; an Inupiaq American poet and fellow MFA. Kane's first question about the field of Native memoir, and Mailhot's experience with it, elicited this answer from the author:
When I look at these books, the distinctions are clear; the voices are present and impactful; different, obviously. Not so much Elissa's book – and people could stand to write about it more because her work is fascinating and cerebral and new – but the genre-marketing of Native memoir into this thing where readers come away believing Native Americans are connected to the earth, and read into an artist's spirituality to make generalizations about our natures as Indigenous people. The romantic language they quoted, or poetic language – it seemed misused to form bad opinions about good work.And that is what I find so chastening: the last thing I want to do is to excerpt the lovely bits – the romantic or poetic passages born of Mailhot's pain – in an effort to support my (bad) opinions about her (good) work. Which is a pickle for a regular goodreads user; and especially since Mailhot is a writer with an MFA – this isn't diamond-in-the-rough naive-genius or traditional Native storytelling; this is a unique voice, but one formed through education and practise. In answer to another question, Mailhot writes, “Because I'm an Indian woman someone might call my work raw and disregard the craft of making something appear raw.” I recognise that danger, but as Mailhot and Kane toss around phrases like the “polemic voice”, writing pain into “phenomenological circumstance”, and the “politicization of grief”, I also recognise that these writers, with their prestigious MFAs, have been willingly trained in the tradition of the “colonisers”; shouldn't I feel less the interloper for consuming something so evidently crafted for the purpose?
Nonetheless, I was moved by Mailhot's story; by her life and the art she makes of it. This book can't be generalised into some "Native memoir" category, but I reckon it has value for anyone interested in the unique lives of fellow humans.
