The narrator of Split Tooth is, in many ways, an ordinary teenage girl. She cares about makeup and getting her hair just right; she looks at boys, wants them to like her, is frightened of the feelings this attraction evokes.
It’s the 1970s – no one has a phone, there’s not much television, boredom and excitement alike are self-generated in a community of young people. But the environment the narrator inhabits is not one most readers will know. “It’s a dusty summer night in the High Arctic. The sun is shining brightly overhead. The sun always brings life and mischief, serenity and visions. It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’ve shrugged off my curfew. There will be hell to pay when I get home and my father’s thunderous footsteps shake the house with a blazing ire that only he can conjure.”
Tanya Tagaq’s debut novel is set in her native Nunavut, and the writing is saturated by this distinctive environment. The simple facts of life in the Arctic mean time and space function in a completely different way from in the south. This is a story deeply informed by an extraordinary landscape and the Inuit connection to that landscape, but it is also a story about how colonialism worked to brutally fracture that connection, and how it might be remade.
Tagaq is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and a visual artist. Split Tooth was published in 2018 in Canada, where it was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller prize. It has been picked up in Britain by And Other Stories, and increasingly it is small independent publishers who will commit to the radical possibilities of the novel, opportunities fully on display in Split Tooth. Sections of prose are interwoven with poems or lyrics, some of which can be found in Tagaq’s 2022 album Tongues, which works as a companion to the novel. There are also black and white line drawings that add another layer of understanding. Tagaq is creating a world that, for many readers, will be like nothing they have known: the book’s multifaceted structure allows alternating paths into the space Tagaq wishes to open.
The narrator’s daily life is, from the beginning, imbued with a powerful bond to the natural world that is elementally expressed. Her family has a fish tank in the living room; no big deal. But her “ritual” is to take one of the newts that live in the tank and place it on her tongue, “the little suction cups on its toes grasping my taste buds”. Eventually, the newt crawls under her tongue and sleeps there for a while, “using my tongue as a huge duvet”. She pulls nature within her. As the novel progresses we will see how animals, plants and spirits of the Arctic call to her and possess her. Running in parallel to the narrator’s deep sense of her heritage, Tagaq demonstrates – in devastatingly casual asides – the destruction wreaked on her people by European violence: lives permanently damaged by residential schools, by alcoholism and drugs.
But Split Tooth is a reclamation, and as it progresses the narrator’s closeness to the Land (the capital letter is Tagaq’s) deepens to an extraordinary extent. “Land protects and owns me,” the narrator says. “Land feeds me. My father and mother are the Land. My future children are the Land. You are the Land. We destroy her with the same measured ignorance of a self-harming teenager. That is what I was in my fifteenth year, what is your excuse?”
She spends a night out on the ice, allowing the northern lights to enter and consume her – a spiritual and physical awakening. The aftermath of this consummation is the beautiful, terrifying heart of this tale. Split Tooth is a compact wonder: remarkable honesty and a sense of the deep magic of the Earth combine in this brief, compelling book.
• Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq is published by And Other Stories (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
