Facing critics helps Tagaq give voice to hurt
IQALUIT— If you’ve ever encountered one of Tanya Tagaq’s hair-raising live performances, you most certainly would not peg her as a shrinking violet.
Indeed, “fearless” is far more likely the first word to pop into one’s mind in a game of free word association with the name Tanya Tagaq. What the diminutive Inuk vocalist does onstage — spewing mostly wordless torrents of pure id and pent-up horror over the fiendish free-form noise conjured up by her improv-savvy accompanists, violinist and electronics whiz Jesse Zubot and jazzbo percussionist Jean Martin — can often resemble possession more than it does performance.
Tagaq’s art has its roots in traditional Inuit throat singing, but she’s the last person who’d ever call herself a throat singer. And yet her persistent (mis)identification with throat singing was the source of a rare case of nerves on the Cambridge Bay native’s part upon landing in Iqaluit this week for her first home-territory show in Nunavut in years — going down this Saturday night at the venue-deprived territorial capital’s Inuksuk High School — because there are still many members of the Inuit community, particularly the elders of that community, who consider her music a desecration of tradition corrupted by the same colonial forces that have bedevilled Aboriginal culture since well before Canada’s “creation” 150 years ago.
The Polaris Music Prize-winning Tagaq might be the best-known Inuk artist on the planet at the moment and the draw that’s brought both the New York Times and Rolling Stone to Iqaluit this weekend, but she’s been a lightning rod here during the weeks since Saturday’s gig was announced. Upon arrival in Iqaluit this past Wednesday to participate in the inaugural Nunavut Music Week conference, of which her Saturday gig is not an official part but was nevertheless purposefully timed to generate interest in an event created and curated by her friends in Iqaluit combo the Jerry Cans, she admitted she was dwelling on the performance more than she usually does.
By Friday, however, any of those worries had considerably dissipated. After spending Thursday co-running a workshop on “Feminism, Femininity and Inukness Onstage” with local performance artist and sometime Tagaq collaborator Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, she was freshly emboldened to take the stage in Iqaluit.
“I spent all day yesterday with beautiful Inuit women and we just had such a wonderful bonding experience,” Tagaq said. “It’s given me the absolute strength to be unafraid and faith in the ability of Inuit to love and trust each other so I’m absolutely not afraid anymore. There will always be naysayers but this is what I do and what I was born to do and I’m not gonna stop for anyone.
“There’s a lot of people who say a lot of horrible things online. But that happens generally so that’s not surprising.”
Tagaq is used to polarizing people anyway. In the days before her Polaris win for 2014’s bristling Animism — and another nomination for the prize this year for its even heavier and even more harrowing followup, Retribution — she struggled to get bookings anywhere because the music she was making was so completely and uncompromisingly different from the music everyone else was making. As she puts it: “People have a strong response to it physically, mentally and spiritually wherever we go.”
The people who don’t get it perhaps haven’t taken the time to explore what it’s about: principally, the damage inflicted on her people, their culture and their land by Western attempts to “civilize” them.
“I understand why people don’t like it,” Tagaq shrugs. “So much has been taken away from us culturally and people are desperate to cling to whatever they can to preserve whatever we can at a cultural level . . .
“What we do in the live show, it never translates properly on video or even on CD. It’s an experience that you need to be there to understand. So what I’m looking forward to on Saturday is performing for a roomful of bright, honest, open, incredible human beings waiting and ready for something different and a different experience so what I’m going to do here is focus on them, the wonderful supporters and the fans. The people who criticize can just not come to the show. It’s not obligatory. If you’re curious and you want to see it, come. If you don’t want to see it, don’t come.”
Tagaq’s opening act on Saturday, Kathleen Ivaluarjuk Merritt — an In- uk throat singer of sorts herself who performs under the name IVA — admits she was once one of the naysayers.
Such a naysayer, in fact, that she actually started a Facebook hate page directed squarely at Tanya Tagaq when she left her home port of Rankin Inlet to attend school in Ottawa and started developing more of a consciousness about her culture.
“For a long time growing up in Rankin Inlet, I never really thought about who I was and what my place in the world was, right?” Merritt said. “And so it wasn’t until I left to go to school in Ottawa and learned about the history of Inuit and Nunavut and why Nunavut is what it is — why it’s a territory — I could never really understand why our communities were the way they are (after) generations of trauma through colonialism and all the different waves of change that happened in such a short time. Understanding that helped me to understand who I was.”
Merritt gravitated to throat singing as a way of connecting to her culture because she didn’t yet speak Inuktitut, she says, and when Tagaq started making waves with her thoroughly anti-traditional take on the same she was instantly “not very supportive of it without really trying to understand it.”
The more she explored the music and the messages therein, the more she realized she and Tagaq were actually on the same page.
“I grew as a person and so a couple of years later I messaged her on Facebook and said ‘I’m really sorry. I’m one of the people who started that hate group on Facebook, and that was such a hurtful thing to do.’ And now we’re really good friends and I’m opening for her on Saturday here at home and it’s f---ing amazing.
“A lot of the backlash towards Tanya from the Inuit community is a reflection of the hurt that’s happening in individual people’s lives. I think that’s where it comes from — from not understanding Tanya as a person, from seeing what she does onstage and not understanding where that comes from. I asked her a couple of years ago at a festival, ‘Where does your energy come from?’ And she said ‘I’m angry. This is me expressing all the hurt and anger that we as the Inuit community face because of our past.’ Now I defend Tanya all the time.”