Split Tooth

Split Tooth

by Tanya Tagaq
Split Tooth

Split Tooth

by Tanya Tagaq

Paperback

$16.99 
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Overview

Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English
Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award

From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.


Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.

A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.

Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780143198055
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Publication date: 09/24/2019
Pages: 208
Sales rank: 168,356
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

TANYA TAGAQ is an improvisational performer, avant-garde composer, and experimental recording artist who won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for her album Animism, a work that disrupted the music world in Canada and beyond with its powerfully original vision. Tagaq contorts elements of punk, metal, and electronica into a complex and contemporary sound that begins in breath, a communal and fundamental phenomenon. While the Polaris Prize signaled an awakening to Tanya Tagaq's art and messages, she has been touring and collaborating with an elite international circle of artists for over a decade. Tagaq's improvisational approach lends itself to collaboration across genres, and recent projects have pulled her in vastly different directions, from contributing guest vocals to a F**ked Up song (a hardcore punk band from Toronto) to premiering a composition made for Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future collection, and composing a piece for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Tanya's most recent album Retribution was released in fall 2016.

Read an Excerpt

1975

Sometimes we would hide in the closet when the drunks came home from the bar. Knee to knee, we would sit, hiding, hoping nobody would discover us. Every time it was different. Sometimes there was only thumping, screaming, moans, laughter. Sometimes the old woman would come in and smother us with her suffering love. Her love so strong and heavy it seemed a burden. Even then I knew that love could be a curse. Her love for us made her cry. The past became a river that was released by her eyes. The poison of alcohol on her breath would fill the room. She would wail and grab at us, kissing us, kissing the only things she could trust.

Fake-wood panel walls, the smell of smoke and fish. Velvet art hung on the walls, usually of Elvis or Jesus, but also polar bears and Eskimos.

The drunks came home rowdier than usual one night, so we opted for the closet. We giggle nervously as the yelling begins. Become silent when the thumping starts. The whole house shakes. Women are screaming, but that sound is overtaken by the sound of things breaking. Wet sounds of flesh breaking and dry sounds of wood snapping, or is that bone?

Silence.

There are loud pounding footsteps. Fuck! Someone is coming towards us. We stop breathing. Our eyes large in the darkness, we huddle and shiver and hope for the best. There is someone standing right outside the closet door, panting.

The door slides open, and my uncle sticks his head in.

Towering over us, swaying and slurring. Blood pouring down his face from some wound above his hairline.

“I just wanted to tell you kids not to be scared.” Then he closed the door.
 

a day in the Life
 
It’s 9 a.m., late for school
Grade five is hard
Rushing, stumbling to get my pants on 
Forgetting to brush my teeth  
Dreading recess
The boys chase us and hold us down
Touch our pussies and nonexistent boobs 
I want to be liked
I guess I must like it 
We head back to class
The teacher squirming his fingers under my panties 
Under the desk
He looks around and pretends he’s not doing it 
I pretend he’s not doing it
He goes to the next girl and I feel a flash of jealousy 
The air gets thinner and tastes like rot
School is over
I leave for the arcade
Watch out for the old walrus
The old man likes to touch young pussy 
We try to stay away
I wonder why nobody kicks him out 
Things are better at home now
Three’s Company and a calm air 
Archie comics and Lego 
Goodnight

Reading Group Guide

1. While Split Tooth is formally categorized as fiction, Tanya Tagaq’s style of Indigenous storytelling resonates beyond the genre. How would you describe this book to a friend? Take turns sharing what you think the novel is about.

2. Discuss what you think some of Tagaq’s influences were, and what aspects of the story (if anything) could have been drawn from real-life experiences. Do you think there is anything the author wants us to understand about her life?

3. The narrative structure of Split Tooth is potent and unique: the chapters are unnamed and unnumbered, each punctuated by a poem, and occasionally accompanied by a spare line drawing (by Jamie Hernandez). How did this structure inform your experience as a reader or complement the story? Did you decipher the Inuktitut poem?

4. What are your impressions of the physical book? The jacket illustration, the spacious page design: did they influence your reading experience? Would you consider listening to the audiobook (narrated by the author) for a completely different experience?

5. What aspects of the narrative resonated with you the most in this glimpse into the lives of youth growing up in a rural northern community in the 70s and 80s? If you are a non-Indigenous person, did you align with any specific elements of the story? What did you find the most transformative?

6. Why do you think the protagonist, and many of the major characters, remains nameless throughout the story?

7. “Snow is fickle. Snow picks itself up and goes wherever Wind tells it to. One element controls the other in a cyclical oblivion.” (pp 37) How do the Artic landscape, the weather, and the drawn-out seasons shape the characters in Split Tooth?

8. “I’m running. Hair in face, ice in lung, heavy of foot. Sometimes they are too slow to catch me.” (pp 105) The phrase “ice in lung” appears often throughout the main narrative, as well as in almost every poem. What do you think the meaning behind it is?

9. “The pain was real. This is where my lesson was learned: pain is to be expected, courage is to be welcomed. There is no choice but to endure. . . . The sun can rise, and so can I.” (pp 122) Examine the significance and incidences of pain, rape, shame, and courage that arise throughout the story.

10. “He shot me with truth and the burden of our bodies. I saw in an instant the spiritual world we all ignore. Like the radio waves we can’t see, it is everywhere.” (pp 69) The narrator’s first (consensual) sexual experience is with a fox, and it triggered a sort of shamanic awakening that galvanized her spiritual connection to nature. Discuss the interplay and encounters between the physical and the spiritual world that are a hallmark of this story.

11. “Sedna the Sea Goddess came before Christianity. She came from the time when the land was our Lord, and we were her servants.” (pp 85) What are the implications and complications of Christianity on Inuk culture that are expressed throughout the narrative?

12. “Society dictates the rules of what is acceptable, but in reality there are only the rules of nature. Natural law.” (pp 51) The narrator conceives twins with the Northern Lights. What, if anything, do you think the twins symbolize? How did you interpret her relationship with this natural phenomena?

13. Helen the midwife bears witness to the mythical birth of Savik and Naja, but then the twins (in a mythical scene via their umbilicus) eradicate the memory. Why do you think Helen was spared the knowledge of the twins cosmic birth?

14. “They sleep in a yin-yang position. Their bodies melt into each other.” (pp 162) Why do you think Tagaq pointedly gave the twins, Savik and Naja, Inuk names?

15. “We all give ourselves to people that cannot help themselves. How can we not?” (pp 171) Take a moment to consider the nuances of the twins’ personalities, and the role of Best Boy in the “family” dynamic.

16. “It is so cold outside. The cold is slapping my exposed cheeks and hardening my resolve.” (pp 180) What did you think of the ending? Was there a lesson, and if so, what was it?

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