TERESE MARIE MAILHOT'S HEART BERRIES
“My story was maltreated,” writes Mailhot in the opening lines of her recent memoir in essays. “The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.” She returns to this observation a few pages later: “It’s too ugly—to speak this story . . . . How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time? I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences.”
A story demands a listener. In a direct address to her white male lover, Casey, the source of her obsessive and painful love, the second essay begins “You had a hard-on for my oratory.” Many of the essay chapters are addressed to this lover, a creative writing professor, but some are addressed to her mother, some passages to the son she lost to his father’s custody and supervised visits. The intimacy of this writing turns the reader into a secondary witness, a discomfiting role as a potentially passive bystander to the accumulated historical pain of colonialism, violence, and child neglect.
This is not an easy book to read, but it is a necessary one, a corrective to trauma and colonization stories that rush to resolution and reconciliation. Compressed into fewer than 150 pages is Mailhot’s perfectly drawn account of a devastating relationship, her memories of a fractured childhood with a complicated mother and mostly absent, sometimes violent father.
The author lives in the U.S., where she has studied and taught. Her opening epigraph is from Maggie Nelson’s ingenious Bluets, and Mailhot’s admirers include Lidia Yuknavitch—the two American authors I am reading most avidly because their genre-gender/bending-blending is so utterly new and different. So is this an American or a Canadian book, an Indigenous memoir (Sherman Alexie’s introduction describes her as “the metaphorical love child of Emily Dickinson and Crazy Horse”) or a particularly gritty trauma memoir? All of the above, in important ways that complicate how contemporary literature by women is being read and written about by critics.
Mailhot is from southern British Columbia’s Seabird Island First Nation, which is near Agassiz, and part of the Stó:lō Tribal Council. The Nation’s website describes the founding of the reserve in 1879, when provincial land commissioner Gilbert M. Sproat allocated it “as a reserve to be held in-common by the people from Popkum, Skw’átits, Ohamil, Ska-wah-look, Hope, Union Bar and Yale because the land they currently resided on could not sustain crops.” The history is a fascinating microcosm of the BC land question; a reference in Keith Thor Carlson’s The Power of Place, The Problem of Time led me to Hilary Blair’s MA thesis, “Settling Seabird Island: Land, Resources, and Ownership on a British Columbia Indian Reserve,” which provides helpful historical and geographical context for Mailhot’s spare memoir.
Rather than exposition, Mailhot provides flashes: a glimpse of her gentle grandmother, mentions of her mother, Wahzinak, and her mother’s painful death, the heartbreak of the loss of her son to his father’s custody. In the wake of the rupture of an intense love affair she agrees to a psychiatric hospitalization, a round of pills and group therapy. A nurse shows her the reading room, where no one reads: “‘You’re welcome to read so long as it doesn’t take away from your healing . . . We have romance novels in stock and some books from the Oprah Book Club.’ I did enjoy Oprah.”
Her relationship with her complicated and conflicted mother is the emotional core of much of this work, as she moves back and forth between family and personal stories. Her mother was an activist and social worker whose epistolary relationship with Salvador Agron, imprisoned for murders he committed at the age of sixteen, attracted the attention of singer Paul Simon, who wrote the musical Cape Man about the man’s life. Simon compensated her mother, who shared her letters, offering either a family trip to New York to see the play, or cash; they needed the money, and then it turned out that Cape Man “reduced Mom to an ‘Indian hippie chick’ . . . a ‘prison groupie.’”
Mailhot’s father, an artist, was murdered when he was in his sixties; a documentary crew from the NFB made a film, Hope, about his life and family, but when the crew arrived at Mailhot’s door she refused to talk to them.
Reading Mailhot’s heartrending account of supervised visits with her son as critical social workers record notes made me think of Tamara Malcolm, who has fought for the right to have all of her children live with her.
Resonant, too, is a description of the male graduate school professor who praised her writing then suggested she avoid “conversations about feminist theory and politics in your work”: “He didn’t think feminism belonged in the classroom. It was the school of white male authors who wanted to write freely, and could not concern themselves with politics or responsibility.”
Released from hospital, Mailhot returns to her writing studies—and is drawn back to Casey. They decide to have a baby together, but when she stops taking her medication to protect the fetus she becomes suicidal once more as their relationship degenerates.
There are observations here that feel so raw and real that they are more like aphorisms: “I think our pain expands the longer we’re neglected.” “I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about.” “I am not too ugly for this world.”
Self-indulgence is entirely absent here, and at times the author’s unflinching insistence on examining her pain—what she bears, as well as what she causes—made me wish more comfort for her, more safety. In the memoir’s brevity, lyricism, and biblical intertextuality, it reminded me of Elizabeth Smart’s modernist masterpiece, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
In the Afterword, an interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane, Mailhot cites her models, including the autobiographical writings of Joy Harjo and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as her concern about the reception of their books. “When I look at these books the distinctions are clear,” she writes. “The voices are present and impactful, different, obviously. And then I saw the literary criticism, or lack of, and these books were being mishandled to essentialized Indigenous people’s art.” After a careful delineation of the artistic choices she made to evade this categorization, Mailhot concludes, “I won’t be an Indian relic for any readership.”
Several of the pieces in Heart Berries have been published previously, some initially as fiction. Collected, they form an important intervention and introduce to a broader reading public a very important new writer.
(With thanks to NetGalley for the advance reading e-copy.)
“My story was maltreated,” writes Mailhot in the opening lines of her recent memoir in essays. “The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.” She returns to this observation a few pages later: “It’s too ugly—to speak this story . . . . How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time? I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences.”
A story demands a listener. In a direct address to her white male lover, Casey, the source of her obsessive and painful love, the second essay begins “You had a hard-on for my oratory.” Many of the essay chapters are addressed to this lover, a creative writing professor, but some are addressed to her mother, some passages to the son she lost to his father’s custody and supervised visits. The intimacy of this writing turns the reader into a secondary witness, a discomfiting role as a potentially passive bystander to the accumulated historical pain of colonialism, violence, and child neglect.
This is not an easy book to read, but it is a necessary one, a corrective to trauma and colonization stories that rush to resolution and reconciliation. Compressed into fewer than 150 pages is Mailhot’s perfectly drawn account of a devastating relationship, her memories of a fractured childhood with a complicated mother and mostly absent, sometimes violent father.
The author lives in the U.S., where she has studied and taught. Her opening epigraph is from Maggie Nelson’s ingenious Bluets, and Mailhot’s admirers include Lidia Yuknavitch—the two American authors I am reading most avidly because their genre-gender/bending-blending is so utterly new and different. So is this an American or a Canadian book, an Indigenous memoir (Sherman Alexie’s introduction describes her as “the metaphorical love child of Emily Dickinson and Crazy Horse”) or a particularly gritty trauma memoir? All of the above, in important ways that complicate how contemporary literature by women is being read and written about by critics.
Mailhot is from southern British Columbia’s Seabird Island First Nation, which is near Agassiz, and part of the Stó:lō Tribal Council. The Nation’s website describes the founding of the reserve in 1879, when provincial land commissioner Gilbert M. Sproat allocated it “as a reserve to be held in-common by the people from Popkum, Skw’átits, Ohamil, Ska-wah-look, Hope, Union Bar and Yale because the land they currently resided on could not sustain crops.” The history is a fascinating microcosm of the BC land question; a reference in Keith Thor Carlson’s The Power of Place, The Problem of Time led me to Hilary Blair’s MA thesis, “Settling Seabird Island: Land, Resources, and Ownership on a British Columbia Indian Reserve,” which provides helpful historical and geographical context for Mailhot’s spare memoir.
Rather than exposition, Mailhot provides flashes: a glimpse of her gentle grandmother, mentions of her mother, Wahzinak, and her mother’s painful death, the heartbreak of the loss of her son to his father’s custody. In the wake of the rupture of an intense love affair she agrees to a psychiatric hospitalization, a round of pills and group therapy. A nurse shows her the reading room, where no one reads: “‘You’re welcome to read so long as it doesn’t take away from your healing . . . We have romance novels in stock and some books from the Oprah Book Club.’ I did enjoy Oprah.”
Her relationship with her complicated and conflicted mother is the emotional core of much of this work, as she moves back and forth between family and personal stories. Her mother was an activist and social worker whose epistolary relationship with Salvador Agron, imprisoned for murders he committed at the age of sixteen, attracted the attention of singer Paul Simon, who wrote the musical Cape Man about the man’s life. Simon compensated her mother, who shared her letters, offering either a family trip to New York to see the play, or cash; they needed the money, and then it turned out that Cape Man “reduced Mom to an ‘Indian hippie chick’ . . . a ‘prison groupie.’”
Mailhot’s father, an artist, was murdered when he was in his sixties; a documentary crew from the NFB made a film, Hope, about his life and family, but when the crew arrived at Mailhot’s door she refused to talk to them.
Reading Mailhot’s heartrending account of supervised visits with her son as critical social workers record notes made me think of Tamara Malcolm, who has fought for the right to have all of her children live with her.
Resonant, too, is a description of the male graduate school professor who praised her writing then suggested she avoid “conversations about feminist theory and politics in your work”: “He didn’t think feminism belonged in the classroom. It was the school of white male authors who wanted to write freely, and could not concern themselves with politics or responsibility.”
Released from hospital, Mailhot returns to her writing studies—and is drawn back to Casey. They decide to have a baby together, but when she stops taking her medication to protect the fetus she becomes suicidal once more as their relationship degenerates.
There are observations here that feel so raw and real that they are more like aphorisms: “I think our pain expands the longer we’re neglected.” “I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about.” “I am not too ugly for this world.”
Self-indulgence is entirely absent here, and at times the author’s unflinching insistence on examining her pain—what she bears, as well as what she causes—made me wish more comfort for her, more safety. In the memoir’s brevity, lyricism, and biblical intertextuality, it reminded me of Elizabeth Smart’s modernist masterpiece, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
In the Afterword, an interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane, Mailhot cites her models, including the autobiographical writings of Joy Harjo and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as her concern about the reception of their books. “When I look at these books the distinctions are clear,” she writes. “The voices are present and impactful, different, obviously. And then I saw the literary criticism, or lack of, and these books were being mishandled to essentialized Indigenous people’s art.” After a careful delineation of the artistic choices she made to evade this categorization, Mailhot concludes, “I won’t be an Indian relic for any readership.”
Several of the pieces in Heart Berries have been published previously, some initially as fiction. Collected, they form an important intervention and introduce to a broader reading public a very important new writer.
(With thanks to NetGalley for the advance reading e-copy.)