A: Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck—this book is sometimes for her—everything she’s done for me.
Q: Can you talk about the necessary contrivances Native writers often have to employ to make their work accessible not just to dominant culture but also to other Native writers? Overdetermination, surfaces, any evasions? Elusiveness?
A: People want a Native identity crisis. The most digestible thing we can do is to note what it’s like being an Indian somewhere Indians aren’t supposed to be (anywhere in North America, really). We want to see that too—to some degree. I feel some type of affinity for the Indian in the sculpture, End of the Trail. I want to be that Indian, but, no. The reckoning, or futile endeavor of being Indian, there’s profundity there, but ultimately it’s false and contrived—put upon us because they want us to stay relics, and romance is beautiful, relics are beautiful—I feel pulled in and I resist.
Q: There are several images in the book that do the work of expressing “without formulating,” such as: “A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lighting haunted me.” How does this series of images foreshadow the consciousness at work in the book?
A: These images felt jarring to write as one sentence—I was torn, but they’re all the indicators that my power was in something destabilizing, that was electric and white, that would not let me be, that was pressing and could not be contained—it was a matter of time. I was so terrified of myself and the things I saw, and my mother was right there the whole time, telling me to let it be—let it exist within me and stir, and maybe women experience this—thinking refrain is admirable, when cut loose is what it needs to be.
Q: As Native writers, and particularly as Native women writers, our lives are literally and mythically born(e) through catastrophe, innocence, and destruction. You ask, early in the book, “How could misfortune follow me so well and why did I choose it every time?” How does this inform your content and context?
A: When I read this I feel the compulsion to literally look back, because misfortune is always here behind me.
Q: You say, too: “In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.” How do you write pain into phenomenological circumstance?
A: I think pain is presented as good for us—that we can even identify it. Before, it was a secret. In my mother’s time it was a secret burden, and women were admired for their ability to ignore, to be silent, to be selfless. They were the backbone of every significant movement in our history because they were not cast to the front. Now we can speak it, and that’s true healing, not a problem—to admit there is some constant pain.
Q: In the chapter “Thunder Being Honey Bear,” you write, “I avoid the mysticism of my culture. My people know there is a true mechanism that runs through us. Stars were people in our continuum. Mountains were stories before they were mountains. Things were created by story. The words were conjurers and ideas were our mothers.” In conversation about this work, you said, “everyone in our lives exists right now.” I’m interested in the way the words “true mechanism” enmesh themselves with the metaphor of language as an extension of the fabric of the lived world. How do you work within—or without—these figurative suggestions?
A: This ties into the images I saw when I was a child—the spinning wheel. Beholding myself was facing the wheel—which literally appeared to me. It didn’t feel mystical—it felt like an image that came to me, an abstract part of my identity’s collage or composition, and I believe that is also how I regard my culture. We spoke the world into being. Mountains were stories before they were mountains, especially where I’m from, especially when my name translates to Little Mountain Woman. Having the name introduced the question of if I, or the mountain, came first. Which do I regard as origin or speaker, and I think those questions definitively answer the nature of the people I grew up with.
Q: Your book presents so many dimensions of motherhood, both from your perspective as a daughter and as a mother: “Even Mom’s cynicism was subversive. She often said nothing would work out.” You present pessimism differently than cynicism, as irony that has to be lived rather than merely understood, right? How does this reconcile with your mother’s operating principles?
A: She was hilarious in that she dedicated herself to the betterment of Native people but never believed in it. She discouraged herself from believing things could be better, while working toward it. I guess she didn’t want to jinx healing. Being cynical when people were so desperate for altruistic, new age, good time healing—it was a funny thing to watch that still brings me joy.
Q: The way in which you interrogate the failures of conversation is grounded in imperative and observation, like when you write: “Mom, I won’t speak to you the way we spoke before. We tried to be explicit with each other. Some knowledge can only be a song or a symbol. Language fails you and I. Some things are too large.” What can you say about the function of ritual language by contrast?
A: My mother needed the poetry of biblical work; she needed an epic when I tried so hard to show her the truth in explicit language. Instead of saying, “Larry touched me,” she needed to hear about the death in his presence—that he was a ghost. She would have heard that and known the depth of the pain her boyfriend caused me, and she wouldn’t have been defensive about it. Somehow, saying things explicitly was never enough—we never found language. Had I told her that she was my Jesus, and that now I need her to wash me from sin—that’s something my mother would understand—poetry, because reality was not real to her. I had always thought she was evasive, but I believe now that the more I tried to create finite parameters, realities, truths, messages—the more I tried to do that, the more she misunderstood. We both wanted something abstract from each other, and those desires aren’t fulfilled by plain language. Plain language does not serve love.
Q: Later, you say, “I preferred abandoned over forsaken—and estranged to abandoned. I loved with abandon. It’s something I still take with me. Estranged is a word with a focus on absence. I can’t afford to think of lack—I’d rather be liberated by it.” What are the ways in which you construct absence or departure as possibility?
A: In some ways I acted with reckless abandon because I had been abandoned—there was no father to work against or for—there was nothing, and it didn’t always feel like absence, but a white room to paint.
Q: In another moment, you write: “In my kitchen I turn the lights off again, like I used to. It allows me to feel as nothing as the dark. I know where everything is, like I did before. I become scared because it is this behavior that causes me to commit myself. I still take a knife and I press it against the fat of my palm—in the dark, hoping that I have the bravery to puncture myself, so that the next day I can be more fearless.” Is this less about a connection to an individual body and more about a mode of survival?
A: This is hard to admit, but I thought I could gradually build my tolerance to physical pain and die—and that never happened. I just couldn’t move forward to my destruction, and I couldn’t appreciate death, even though I tried. Death becoming less interesting artistically, physically, heart-wise—it was the best thing I came away with.
Q: What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you think the current questions are?
A: I wanted to articulate the truth, but was unsure if the truth could be singular. I had existed in a double consciousness to the point where I wondered if I were an object, or paralyzed in fear, and the book is me moving forward and putting myself at the apex of my own story—it’s not immediate, but gradual, because it was happening as I was writing it, or as I was trying to articulate the truth of what exactly happened.
In the firs
t chapters I am asking if my father hurt me, then how, and then, finally, I can behold myself. And that could be why it’s roving temporally, or not really concerned with a linear structure—but with the story as it should be presented, rhetorically and truthfully.
Questions exist in the last pages of the book: Is the uncovered truth and the knowledge of it, wholly, enough for me to move away from? Is admitting the nature of my father, or my mother’s transgressions and my own, or realizing I’ve entered my own renaissance, enough to let the worst parts of my father, mother, and myself, rest?
So, where are we now? With Terese Mailhot’s Heart Berries, we move well beyond the yesteryear satisfactions of mere representation and oblique lyricism. The reader now anticipates that the forefront of contemporary indigenous literature will imbue terror with angst, of course, and that we are no longer tasked with the hauntings of various types of loss. That silence, too, is a construction. That we are no longer complicit in presenting Native experience as historical content rather than literary apotheosis.
I mean that silence is not representative of loss. I mean to call attention to the fact that, yes, through craft, we assemble what remains of ourselves through language. We imagine, create, tell, reprise, contradict, refuse, estrange, assimilate, and determine our language. What we do becomes part of our existing story—even though at times, our detractors (all of them) seem to argue that, through language, we seem to exist in opposition to the very notion of story.
So, where are we? Who is telling whose story? Who is preventing misreading? No one. Violence happens through our bodies. Isn’t that how colonialism used to work? Their adversaries were simple. Our families (our genealogies, marriages, children, our sexual and domestic violence) and ourselves (our suicides, our recuperations) were simultaneously reduced and amplified as social facts rather than private matters. Our literature was not ours. It was theirs.
So, where are we? Where we have always been. Where are you?
acknowledgments
Endless gratitude for Seabird Island Chief and Council, Cindy Kelly, SWAIA, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Lannan Foundation, and Writing by Writers for all their support and generosity.
Thank you, Emma Borges-Scott, my agent, and Harry, my editor.
Sherman, for saying, “Send me the manuscript!” the day I finished it. Thank you for that support. It was such a lonely and dark night in Vermont, and you made me feel less alone.
Joan, so much love for you and your brilliance. You’re the shit, obviously. Kane out.
Ismet Prcic (Izzy), Ramona Ausubel, Linda Hogan, Toni Jensen, Justin Torres, Pam Houston, Jon Davis, Tommy Orange, Barbara Robidoux, Viva (Gris), Elissa Washuta, and my peers at IAIA M.F.A., Low Rez, and Rudolfo, I admire you all and thank you for changing my life.
Denise Baldwin, I love you. Sisters forever. Rhonda, your love is the safest, biggest, and brightest thing. Daughter, thank you for making me go back to school, and thank you for letting me bring the baby into the classroom, and thank you to your mother, who taught me how to sew, and thank you for showing me literature.
Ovila and Guyweeyo, thank you for protecting me and taking care of me. Zena, thank you for being my sister and my blood, and for your children: Jordin, Cherish, Boon, Chubby (Trevor), Boo, and Dawson. I love you, Myka.
Isadore, Baby Casey, and Isaiah, my heart—everything good—every joy in the world. I love you.
Thank you, Cathy and David.
Casey, I fall all over myself for you, every time. My god.
All my cousins—my crazy-ass cousins, and aunties and uncles, I love you. Thank you for letting me eat at your house and cook there and thank you for every nice thing you did.
Thank you, The Rumpus, Burrow Press Review, Carve Magazine, The Offing, BOAAT, The Butter, Yellow Medicine Review, The James Franco Review, Transmotion for the University of Kent in Canterbury (Teddy), The Feminist Wire, Storyscape, Juxtaprose, and Indian Country Today, for your support and encouragement.
Lastly, to all my friends back home, who are women now, thank you. This is something for us.
Author photograph © Isaiah Mailhot
about the author
terese marie mailhot
graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an M.F.A. in fiction. Mailhot’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of several fellowships—SWAIA Discovery Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Writing by Writers Fellowship, and the Elk Writer’s Workshop Fellowship—she was recently named the Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University and resides in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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