Tanya Tagaq's 'Split Tooth' and the Resilience of Spirit

Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth plunges us into a disorientating story rooted in deep emotional truth, crafted through magical realism, Inuit folklore and the painful, wondrous journey into womanhood. With Tagaq’s own biography woven sharply throughout, the narration guides us through unflinching depictions of child abuse, colonial trauma, and the horrors of adolescence. Yet it never loses its grip on magic, the unrelenting relationship between spirit and body, and the narrator’s proximity to nature and ancestry both. The otherworldly is never far from reality – in fact through Tagaq’s words, written like spells, they are one and the same.

As an outsider to the culture, I find Inuit folklore fascinating. From the tales I have read, there seems to be a strong focus on the body – its resilience and its ability to transform. In Split Tooth Tagaq writes of the sea goddess Sedna, whose blood becomes sea animals after her Father cuts her fingers from his kayak. The selkie women of Orkney may return to their seal forms once they find their stolen skins. In Japan, though Izanami dies in childbirth and is trapped in the land of the dead, she ultimately becomes the goddess of death.

The idea that transformation can come from suffering is an empowering one, one that allows us perhaps to live beyond the body. In a moment of unbearable loss, the narrator asks, ‘Take me to the place where my body no longer owns me.’ The desire to live without the constraints of a body; one that is sick, one that has been hurt, one that does not feel like your own, is so strong, but ultimately it means death. Tagaq eloquently paints the pain of bodies – the suffering they undergo, the violation they face. She describes how ‘the spirit must be consoled after the trauma of flesh,’ and these words surely bear truth to anyone who has experienced illness, trauma, suffering. Anyone alive. The body is relentless, a mortal vessel that leaves us vulnerable, and can betray us at any moment. Yet equally, Tagaq paints the magic afforded us through bodies. The exhilaration of the elements, the connection of touch, the resilience brought through growth. ‘We must make the most of our gristle and meat.’

Magic is essential to Split Tooth – it is no less real than any autobiographical or historical elements included. Depictions of cursed foxes, immaculate conception and disembodied spirits are rooted as much in truth as sexual assault, alcoholism and the scars of colonial violence. ‘How presumptuous it is to assume that an experience is limited to your own two eyes.’ The emotional truth holds the sometimes dizzying narrative together. There are moments of brutal reality: a shaman’s body found discarded after being refused burial by Anglican ministers, and those of ecstatic magic: the Northern lights singing to and entering the narrator’s body. There are reminders of Inuit culture lost, yet how it adamantly persists in those who continue to practice, speak, and create.

On a trip to Cambridge, my friends and I visited the Polar Museum where there was an exhibition following the HMS Terror’s voyage to Nunavut. In this exhibition, there were many artefacts depicting Inuit shamanistic practices. One spoke of shamans who called upon ancestors to aid them against enemies. Tagaq speaks often of ancestry, how we are what came before, how we ‘always live alongside the dead.’ In some Japanese beliefs, ancestors are revered as kami after their deaths and worshipped by their families. In a social climate where we are quick to reject the past, to look upon stories as irrelevant and fictitious, it is exciting to read a work that is so confident in its truth, its culture, and its strength. Moreover, Tagaq weaves such a ruthless, honest, heartbreaking story that is both difficult to read at times, and full of childlike magic.