Memoir gives searing look at Native American experience
Sherman Alexie’s introduction to Terese Marie Mailhot’s debut memoir, “Heart Berries,” is incandescent with glowing praise, all of it deserved. “I was aware,” he writes, “within maybe three sentences that I was in the presence of a generational talent.” If that weren’t enough, in his blurb, he calls the book — centered on Mailhot’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia and later as a writer — “an Iliad for the indigenous,” invoking Homer’s classic saga.
Although this slim and devastatingly calibrated memoir which features brief, impressionistic and carefully modulated essays tops out at 160 pages, “Heart Berries” truly does provoke the reader to reconsider what it means to be epic. For an epic is traditionally a long narrative poem in an elevated style, one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds of a heroic figure or the history of a nation.
Here, in her fragmentary and interconnected narratives of family love and trauma, neglect and healing, mental illness and recovery, Mailhot offers her own quest for autonomy and self-determination in a milieu in which “Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.” In blunt yet lyrical prose, she depicts struggles and stories — of herself, her mother, her father and her grandmother — that are at once singular and sovereign, yet also representative and collective, portraying the travails and quotidian heroism required to be “a woman wielding narrative now,” particularly in a world where “no one wants to know why Indian women leave or where they go.”
The book opens with the tone-setting “Indian Condition.” Without apology, arrogance or sentimentality, Mailhot divulges key features of her story, including her teen marriage and decision to leave her reservation. “I left my home because welfare was making me choose between my baby’s formula or oatmeal for myself,” she writes. “The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. … The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery date aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father.”
The collection’s epigraph comes from Maggie Nelson’s genre-bending book “Bluets,” and that choice is apt. Not unlike Nelson, Mailhot chops and loops her narrative threads, pausing to rest on aphoristic truths and rhetorical questions. In the middle of the epistolary “Indian Sick” — set inside the hospital where she has committed herself and directed at “Casey,” her white fiction professor, erstwhile lover and eventual father of her third son — she stops and states, “If transgressions were all bad, people wouldn’t do them. Do you consider me a transgression?”
Sharp and scorching, her approach walks the knife’s edge between accessibility and experimentation, rendering in detail what it’s like to be “ill and alone and intelligent,” trying to make a life as an artist and a single mom with PTSD, an eating disorder and being bipolar.
It’s exciting to think that a person might be able to write their way out of seemingly insurmountable personal, cultural and historical trauma. It’s even more exciting to actually watch someone appear, at least partly, to do so.
The afterword takes the form of a frank Q&A with Mailhot, conducted by the Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane. Replying to Kane’s question about her assertion that “indigenous identity is fixed in grief,” Mailhot says, “I don’t feel liberated from the governing presence of tragedy. The way in which people frame our work, and the way our work exists, or is canonized — we are not liberated from injustice; we’re anchored to it.” And that’s an excellent point: No amount of literature can remedy or reverse the colossal injustices perpetrated against indigenous people by white individuals and institutions. Nevertheless, this unconventional epic should be part of the canon.