From stage to page

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/09/2018 (2885 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s two weeks prior to her debut novel, Split Tooth, hitting bookshelves on Sept. 25, and musician/author Tanya Tagaq does not feel good.

“I’m terrified. I hate my life right now,” Tagaq, 43, says with a laugh over the phone from a Toronto dog park.

“It’s the worst, because I’m comfortable with music, and I’m really confident with it. You can put me in any situation and I’ll figure out a way to deal with it. But this is a whole other situation. It feels brand new, and I feel like I’m walking on shaky legs. It’s just a little scary, because it’s my mind and it’s my heart. There isn’t the removal. Maybe the removal of page, but there isn’t the removal of stage.”

It’s hard to imagine Tagaq scared. Many are familiar with the Inuk throat-singing artist from her record Animism, which won the 2014 Polaris Prize. Those lucky enough to have been in the audience when she performed at the Polaris gala that year know nothing written about it comes close to capturing what it was like. As an endless list scrolled behind her, naming missing and murdered Indigenous women, Tagaq unleashed a boundless fury that is rare on the stage — something mesmerizing, supernatural, all-consuming. It felt fearless, yes, but also fearsome.

Split Tooth, recently long-listed for Canada’s Giller Prize, often conjures the same feelings that performance did, and is akin to its deeply sensual and visceral nature. While the form of a novel offers more opportunity for clarity of narrative than music might, it’s no surprise Tagaq reveals as much mastery of tone and feeling on the written page as she does in song — perhaps because, while Split Tooth is her published literary debut, it’s not something entirely new to her.

“I always had a journal. I always wrote down my dreams and my thoughts and my ideas,” Tagaq says. “So I just had, basically, a stockpile of writing that had been naturally occurring over the years.

“It wasn’t a ­cognitive shift from one genre to another. They existed in tandem, but one was public and one wasn’t.”

The book follows an unnamed teenage girl gowing up in Nunavut in the 1970s (Tagaq herself was born in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), witnessing the death of friends and the destructive nature of alcohol, getting walloped by the heavy feelings of a crush, being sexually assaulted, navigating high school and becoming a young mother. It addresses rape and mortality in brutally clear terms.

Amid the turmoil, the reader is subjected to the protagonist’s hypnotic vision — one that offers adolescent hilarity, wide-eyed wonder and a deep connection to the supernatural. She is split open by the northern lights. Babies have dark powers. There is a sex scene with an entity that is not human.

It feels inevitable that because of these elements, the book will be associated with magical realism. But that would be dismissive of what is perhaps Split Tooth’s biggest triumph: real life overflows with the supernatural, the unexplained, the unknown, if only you remain open to it.

The narrator is sometimes swept into that world and sometimes seeks it out, but she always trusts in it and allows herself to consider the power of dreams, visions and what lies beneath the plane of existence we’re used to. In the wake of giving birth, that receptivity leads her character to a place where she suddenly seems fearless.

Tagaq, too, seems fearless, but she admits she’s not immune to the emotion. After listing the typical grounding moves — “Lots of exercise, lots of sleep, no wine,” she says with a laugh — she continues.

“It’s similar to when I was first pregnant,” Tagaq says. “I knew birth was coming, and I was terrified of it. So I spent the entire pregnancy being terrified of it, and really focusing on my terror, and the unknown, and being very afraid of it, acknowledging that fear and taking the time to feel it.

“And a funny thing happened when I started giving birth. I had ruminated on the fear for so long that I wasn’t scared when it was actually happening.”

Even a Giller Prize nomination may not have been enough to quell the fear of loosing Split Tooth upon the world. But now that the book is out, Tagaq doesn’t have to focus on it any more; she can return to seeking out the next terrifying thing.

“I think it’s important to do things that scare you,” Tagaq says.

“It’s important to keep that growth moving forward. And it’s important to challenge yourself. It sounds really cheesy, but I want to live truly. I want to live and be truly alive, so if I die tomorrow, I wouldn’t have a mountain of regrets for what I haven’t done yet, for who I could’ve been. I want to be who I am right now, as much as possible.”

Former Winnipegger Matt Williams is a writer and photographer who now hangs his hat in Halifax.