![]() ![]() ![]() It tells the story of a young Inuk girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, and while there are moments of carefree joy and childhood scattered here and there it is safe to assume that there are a lot of things about growing up in that place and time as an Indigenous person that are, frankly, terrible, and Tagaq’s depiction of the sexual abuse that her main character has to endure are unflinching and harrowing. It’s partially memoir, but with one foot firmly in mythic fantasy (the main character is impregnated by the Northern Lights late in the book, for example) and probably 15% of the total wordcount is poetry. Split Tooth really straddles and/or defies genre categorization I saw it referred to as a “mythobiography” in one interview with the author and I like that word so let’s go with that. I’m 20 books into my planned 52 books by women of color in 2020 project, and in all honesty I came across this and basically bought it blind upon realizing that Tanya Tagaq was a Canadian Inuit and I’m fairly certain I’ve made it through 43 years and have never read a book by a Canadian Indigenous author. I don’t really know how the hell to write this. ![]() Content warning: Split Tooth contains rape, sexual assault, child abuse, infanticide and a really weird and explicit erotic dream sequence involving a fox god. ![]()
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