Tag: colonialism

Heart Berries: A Memoir Review

This book gets 4 out of 5 deliciously juicy and somehow painfully tart berries. Like when you bite into a raspberry and your taste buds sing but also you want to cry.
[The photo is a grid of pints of assorted beautiful berries: blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and something that looks a little like salmon berries?]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

This book has been on my radar for quite some time. In fact, in January, I made a list of books I wanted to read, and Heart Berries was pretty high on that list from the get go. It’s a critically acclaimed memoir by a woman who grew up in British Columbia – something I did as well (the living in BC, not the writing a critically acclaimed memoir) – on an isolated reservation. It was also praised by another amazing indigenous writer – Eden Robinson, writer of Monkey Beach – that I love, so I was honestly so pumped to start.

However, a bit of a *trigger warning* is necessary, as Mailhot is writing about some pretty traumatic events, mental illness, and the deep effects of colonialism in Canada.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

I would definitely recommend this book! If you live in Canada, or the United States, then you live in a settler colonial state. If you live in a culture of settler colonialism and are white, you may not even realize the impact it has on the whole fabric and day to day life of your society. Heart Berries will help show you why behind every “drunk Indian” story is a legacy of cultural genocide and continued forced poverty and marginalization.

I would also recommend this book if you like reading about people who are incredibly talented and creative, but also in a lot of pain and distress. This may not sound appealing to some, but there is nothing like a good writer describing difficult emotions and situations.

I guess do not read this book if you are too triggered by reading about alcoholism, sexual assault, and manipulative relationships.

This is also a pretty slim book, so even if it isn’t something you would normally read, you should give it a go, because it ends quickly – too soon, if I may say.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Heart Berries is the result of Terese Marie Mailhot being hospitalized for her suicidal ideation and bipolar disorder in the wake of her relationship with a man named Casey breaking down. Put a pin in that.

She is encouraged to write about her feelings while in the hospital; most of the writing we read are ‘letters’ to Casey, explaining herself and her life. Nothing is revealed to us linearly, but eventually we discover that Mailhot was raised on a reservation by her wonderful and contradictory mother. Her mother is an activist, an addictions counsellor, and a woman who loves problematic and dangerous men. She is a woman who fights for marginalized people, loves her children fiercely, but has a tendency to neglect them and put them at risk. Mailhot writes about how her mother’s death led to one of her biggest breakdowns, around the birth of her first son.

We learn that Mailhot – at the beginning of writing Heart Berries – has two sons, one of which she does not have custody of. We see into the trauma that Mailhot has experienced, and how her academic pursuits seemed like a lifeline for her in a time of crisis. We also see how the academic world treats Mailhot as a second-class citizen, and how men treat her like shit, not only because she is a woman, but because she is an indigenous woman.

She then writes about her relationship with Casey, before and after winding up in the hospital. We see how her bipolar disorder and trauma affect her relationships and mood. She gets pregnant with Casey’s child and they get married. Mailhot keeps writing, and the memoir ends with a letter to her mother, explaining her grief for her death, as well as her grief and anger over the abuse she experienced at the hands of her father, also a complex figure: he is an artist, an alcoholic, and an abuser who died tragically.

I wanted to showcase the cool metallic owl art we have in our apartment. I have two other ones like that!
[A hand holds a small black book in front of a groovy piece of art of an owl sitting on a tree. The cover of the book is black, except for a outline of red strawberries on the bottom right corner. At the top ‘heart berries’ is written in a small white scrawl that is obviously meant to look like notebook scribbles.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

Guys, this book is good. Like very good. It is a very heavy book for something so thin. There were certain things I didn’t like about it, but that’s because it’s a memoir and real people are not perfect. One example of this is Casey. I find him to be very manipulative, and sometimes pretty much a garbage man. This is pretty judgemental of me, because I don’t know the guy, and he and Mailhot are still married, so what do I know. But I do find him act shady at times, and to be emotionally manipulative of Mailhot, which I find particularly saddening to read considering her personal and intergenerational trauma.

Mailhot writes about the isolated reservation of Seabird Island was also heart-wrenching, and key to read for people who are uninformed about the crisis happening in reservations, or for those who think indigenous people are “just so lucky and get so much free stuff from the government”. The statistics for how many First Nations are under water advisory warnings is staggering, and as the article I’ve linked to concludes; “the water crisis was created by Canada and has been maintained by Canada for decades, with devastating but predictable outcomes”.

  • What does it mean?

This book is a meditation on the impact of trauma on mental health. It is a meditation on the violent and lasting impact of colonialism on indigenous people, and in particular indigenous women. There is a really interesting link to Paul Simon and this musical he ‘wrote’ that demonstrates how much women and racialized people get exploited by white men, and how this erasure is a violence, an aggression.

Heart Berries also shows the ways in which love is insanely complicated, particularly when the people in the relationship are dealing with mental illness and intense trauma. It’s a memoir, so Mailhot has to work with her version of the truth to make a narrative, and so unlike a fictional one, it may be lacking in plot or resolution or things that ‘make sense’, and that is ok. It is part of the journey of reading about someone’s life, and I honestly can’t express how brave Mailhot has been for publishing something so raw and uncompromising.

  • Favourite passages :

Honestly on any given page I could have picked a sentence that I wanted to showcase, but in the end I settled for transcribing the passages on pages I had purposefully dog-eared.

A lot of these passages support my decision to not like Casey, which is maybe a jackass judgement on my part, but I am admitting to it freely, so there.

When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse. You should have just fucked me. It was degenerative. You inside me, outside, then I leave, then I come back, get fucked, you look down at me and say, ‘I love you. I love you.’ I go home and degenerate alone.

Terese Marie Mailhot, pg 46-47

Mailhot has an excellent no-bullshit therapist in this passage:

‘I’m worried that he’s using you.’

‘It’s much deeper than sex. He tells me that he loves me and explains carefully why he can’t be with me. He considers me.’

‘You’re in a vulnerable position. Months ago, you were in the hospital with suicidal ideation. He should consider how telling you that he loves you could make you feel. He should consider how having sex with you, and then explaining why he can’t be with you, is manipulative.’

pg 58

This passage does prove my judgement of Mailhot and Casey’s relationship to be somewhat self-righteous, and by the end of the novel, I put my judgement aside somewhat.

For you, and our child, and my sons, I said what happened up and down on the page. Because, if my sons want to see how terrible our love was, and why we chose it, they can see us closest here.

pg 68

My mother didn’t feel like mine as much as I wanted to belong to her – to be inseparable from her.

She taught me that I didn’t own things. I really liked the idea of possession. We don’t own our mothers. We don’t own our bodies or our land – maybe I’m unsure. We become the land when we are buried in it. Our grand-mothers have been uprooted and shelved in boxes, placed on slabs of plastic, or packed neatly in rooms, or turned into artifact – all after proper burials. Indians aren’t always allowed to rest in peace. I want to be be buried in a bone garden with my ancestors someday. I’d like to belong to that.

pg 73
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you liked this book, consider reading a book that has been mentioned in this book before: Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach! It is full of amazing descriptions of coastal British Columbia, ghosts, and is just an all around excellent book.

If you want to read another excellent and slim book about the effects of abuse and living in isolation (but it’s about so much more than that too), is Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed.

Another excellent memoir about a completely different side of poverty in Vancouver is Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir. This book also has interesting parallels to Heart Berries in relation to the impact of literature on life and coping with trauma. Yay books and writing!

Also I’m proud that all these suggestions are Canadian, and excellent. Canadiana is not all Susanna Moodie!

Stay tuned for my next review, Cormac McCarthy’s critically acclaimed and often discussed novel, The Road. Post-apocalypse, oh my!

There, There Review

This book gets 4 and a half heart squeezes out of 5. I picked this photo for a variety of reasons; A) I own these sunglasses and they are so fun; B) A photo of a heart being squeezed would be so freaking creepy; and C) I don’t know how to do a half picture so just imagine a heart-shaped monocle next to these photos.
[There are two identical photos lined up next to each other: in them, a hand with cute pink nail polish holds a pair of heart-shaped blue-lensed sunglasses in front of an ocean shore.]

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I picked There, There by Tommy Orange up because my girlfriend needed a book at the airport; so technically she picked it up, based on the fact that it A) looked good, and B) looked like something I’d like (because I like good books of course). Nothing like getting a book everyone in a household will read and enjoy. Anyways, she started reading it while we were on vacation in BC, and while I was crying reading The Trial, she suggested I read There, There one day at the beach. She was probably tired of hearing me cry and whine about Kafka. So I high-jacked her book. But as mentioned, she gave me the high-jacking idea in the first place. Eventually I finished the book way before her and moved on. I even mailed the book to her so she could finish it when she got to Ottawa (and so I could write this blog post) before you start accusing me of ruining her reading experience. Anyways, she was right that this book would interest me because of all the boxes it ticks for me: it is a contemporary novel by an indigenous writer about ‘urban indians’, told from a variety of perspectives, in a tightly interwoven narrative.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Hell yeah I would recommend this book! Do you not understand what a 4.5 out of 5 rating means?!

Anyways, I would recommend this book if you like indigenous literature, if you like books that make you think, laugh, and maybe even cry. That’s a lot of things for a book to do!

You should also read this book if you like learning about powwows and Oakland. There is also a character who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the chapters in his point of view are excellently and heart-wrenchingly good.

I guess don’t read this book if you don’t like to be confronted with what it means to live in a settler colonial nation (but honestly you’re probably the person who needs to read this book most). Or don’t read this book if you only like Heart of Darkness style musings on colonialism… But again, probably the kind of person who should read this book most…

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Anyways, There, There tells the story of twelve people who are all for some reason or another trying to get to the Oakland powwow. The narrative shifts between these people’s point of view, and jumps around temporally. We can go from present-day Oakland to the 1970s occupation of Alcatraz. Orange presents his ‘cast of characters’ as a cast list, like in a play, and it is through these jumps in narrative and perspective that we the readers get to see the rich past and history of each person in the text. Orange deftly weaves together twelve distinct narratives, forcing readers to flip back into the book again, to find where that name comes from, where this detail resurfaces, how all the characters and their collective yet distinctive experiences of racism and identity coalesce and collide. Without saying too much, expect a book where all the pieces fit together like a beautiful mosaic, but also the pieces make you cry, so like a mosaic where the pieces come alive and try and stab you.

The climax of the narrative occurs when all twelve perspectives and experiences collide at the Oakland powwow, by which time readers have fully understood the various familial connections between characters, as well as their various motivations.

We see that all the characters have different reasons for attending the powwow – some want to engage in crime, to reap whatever financial benefit can be had from a large gathering of people, some want to reconnect to their cultural identity while some are exploring it for the first time. However, even if they do not know it explicitly, they are also all at the powwow to articulate some form of grief. There, There uses the event of the powwow to explore how colonialism, alcoholism, urban migration, racism, internalized self-loathing, and cultural genocide have affected all indigenous peoples and how this legacy of trauma lives in the present.

Yet, There, There is not just sad. It also celebrates contemporary indigenous peoples and their resilience; the powwows are shown to have an abundance of beautiful dancing and regalia, an emphasis on craft and storytelling. There, There engages with the myth of the Vanishing Indian and the Noble Savage, and we see that indigenous people are exactly that: people with a rich history that preceded colonial intervention. While colonialism has inextricably woven itself into the narrative of indigenous people, There, There shows us that this is not the whole story, and that to label identities as ‘authentic’ wholly misses the point.

Nothing says well-loved like being battered from travelling cross-Canada twice and being eaten by a cat.
[A hand holds an orange book in front of a plush pink rug and a feisty grey and white cat that is biting the corner of the book. There are two feather on the orange cover, and There There is written in yellow.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

Holy shit did I love this book. It took me almost an hour to read the “Prologue” (which is basically a short essay written by Orange about colonial history and indigenous identity politics) because I kept having to pause to let the magnitude and weight of the words sink in. I think I reread each paragraph at least three times before moving on, and that was when I knew that I was in for a treat of a book!

The amount of times that I had to put the book down and take a deep breath because I felt like my heart was being squeezed by hard truths were too often to count. And yet, as I said before, There, There is not just sad, and sometimes those moments of pause were not to process something heavy, but instead to revel in the joy and beauty embedded in the text.

I also always like a narrative where all the stories get braided together: sure in real life it would be unrealistic for all your characters to be somehow connected, but this isn’t real life, it’s a book, and you should use that suspension of disbelief to your advantage! Also the amount of times that life has proved to me just how small the world really is makes me say that these connections aren’t even far-fetched!

  • What does it mean?

There, There means a lot of things. This is the kind of book that I would have loved to write a paper on in university. The wealth of themes to be discussed, as well as the craftsmanship of the writing and storytelling make it a joy to unpack and analyze. All of the characters – particularly the older ones – deal with immense feelings of guilt. There is guilt for the past, for who they are in the present, and from young characters such as Orville and Dene, there is a feeling of guilt when it comes to identity and self-expression. Orville and Dene both feel guilty that they don’t really know how to articulate their indigeneity, and when they do articulate it, they feel guilty that they are doing it wrong, or in secret.

There, There highlights the pervasive ways in which colonialism affects indigenous people’s lives and perceptions of themselves. It also celebrates identity struggles, and demonstrates that self-exploration is made complicated when wrapped with the history of colonialism and cultural genocide. Instead of focusing only on the intergenerational effects of trauma, Orange also focuses on the ways in which connections can catch people by surprise. The novel wants us to understand the power of stories to unify, to conquer, to divide, and to heal.

The tragic ending makes it hard to feel happy, and yet it is the image of birds singing everywhere that closes the novel, demonstrating that even in the darkest night there is light.

Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn’t going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he’ll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing.

Orange, pg. 290
  • Favourite passages :

I could probably find a passage on nearly every page that I loved, but here are some real standouts.

We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay – which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.

Tommy Orange, pg 9

Orange has a lot of interesting stuff to say about indigenous people and the city and the ways in which people deal with intergenerational trauma.

The Indian head in the jar, the Indian head on a spike were like flags flown, to be seen, cast broadly. Just like the Indian Head test pattern was broadcast to sleeping Americans as we set sail from our living rooms, over the ocean blue-green glowing airwaves, to the shores, the screens of the New World.

Orange, pg 5-6

I find it super neat that Orange manages to weave a story of colonialism into one of technology, charting the ways in which technological advances in society have changed the world while leaving it wholly unaltered. See, colonialism and racism.

“You know what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland?… There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper… Dene wants to tell his he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore… The quote is important to Dene. This there there… for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”

Orange, pg 38-39

Obviously I had to include the eponymous passage, which has a lot to say not only about gentrification, but about time and memory, and belonging. Sometimes, the way Stein describes going home is exactly how I feel going back to my hometown after a long time away.

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would call an attempted murder victim resilient?

Orange, pg 137
  • Things that made me go “ugh” :

Really the only thing in this book that made me go “ugh” was that it ended! I could keep reading Orange’s prose forever, and also when it ended found myself saying “NOOOOO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!” Also the other thing that made me sad is that this is Orange’s debut novel, which means I have to wait who knows how long to read more of his work.

Also colonialism. Colonialism makes me go “ugh”.

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

The prologue in particular made me think of Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water, which is a book that plays with Western tropes and engages in a lot of the same themes as Orange; however it is a magic-realist novel so expect some interesting maybe ghosts, and things from books literally coming to life. I also thought of King’s Truth and Bright Water if you want a book that will probably make you cry as much as it makes you laugh.

I also thought of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is probably one of the first books by an indigenous writer that I read as a teenager, and I recall it as being excellent, funny, and thought-provoking.

If you want to read a narrative that has a lot of braiding thematic and plot-wise, I can’t recommend Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven enough. This book is always in my Top 10 Books list, is a ‘Canadian’ text (definitely more than American, so stop trying to claim her U.S.), and is also a post-apocalyptic novel! So come on, what are you waiting for?! Read a good book! Don’t waste your time reading dead white men when so much good stuff is coming out!

Stay tuned for my next review, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (cue Law and Order theme song, murdermurdermurder).