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korrick 's review for:
Heart Berries
by Terese Marie Mailhot
4.5/5
I'm sure there are plenty of reviews out there expressing dislike for this work because no one's "sympathetic," or everyone's "stereotypical," or that the writing was "pretentious." The problem is, I really don't know if these are any worse than the gushing approvals that see no need to personally reconcile themselves with the histories here, despite said histories more clearly and credibly showing their jawbones and their spines beneath the skin of this work than many a work out there that apes at the same. How many know someone who is comfortable with being "insane" in their company, or better yet, are insane themselves? How many imbibe something like this on a regular basis for the sake of their catharsis and then pass by the MMIW epidemic as simply another tragic inevitability of the modern world? It's the same old story as the ones that occur in many other corners of the globe, and lord knows I'm as exhausted as the rest of those who concern themselves with such topics during what will likely prove to be Year 1 of COVID-19. However, there are too many out there who only read works like these in the belief it will improve their "empathy," as if the idea of humanizing a complete stranger without complete reliance on the chemicals in their brain is monstrous, even heretical. I myself was like that back in the day, but since then I've learned that, the only difference between the self improvement section of the book market and the liquor shelves in the grocery store is that the latter are more honest.
Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution.So long as there are settler states, this kind of literature will be composed. I'm not saying that the eradication of the former will directly impact the generation rates of the latter in any sort of provably causal relationship. I'm saying, so long as the fact that human sacrifice did occur in certain indigenous nations in the lands now known as the Americas is used, consciously or otherwise, as excuse to condemn the descendants for eternity, and the fact that certain European folks participated in massacres through violence and the plague, directly or otherwise, to such an extent as to cause such a increase in CO2 intake by the reemerging forests as to cause miniature ice ages in various parts of the globe, is used as reason for their descendants to inherit the earth forevermore, you're going to get these new age time capsules of blood and bone and brain that, the further away they are from the sanctified lineages, the more every aspect of their mind, body, and soul will be legally set down as anathema across every mile of soil from sea to shining sea. I hoped to learn in reading Mailhot, but I also hoped to find a kindred soul who looked at the contents of their skull as a holism in conjunction with the universe entire, rather than as a cry for attention, a problem to be solved, the first introduction of sane savior in the love film and the final twist of the resolution in the horror film. I found all that and more, and if I didn't absolutely love what I found, one would naturally be suspicious of an indigenous work that white people absolutely adore, no? At least I'm not one of those voyeurs who read the memoirs of those in my community, on the mental side of things at any rate, and get bored when things aren't 'crazy' enough to shake up their complacent pastiness of a mental scape.
I knew that someone else would have congratulated herself for being contained. I understood how things could be misunderstood.Adrienne Rich, prison work, art, Salish that if you look up quickly explodes into the kind of multiplicity that white people so despise when it doesn't concern topics such breed of dogs or types of cheese, the Canadian Indian residential school system, alongside a nonexistent list of trigger warnings that would fill a full fleshed paragraph, if not more. Things I expected, and things I didn't, laid out in the sort of prose that is part bitten off, part drawn out, part spit back but not in the self-absolving manner that most readers raised on the words of white men have come to expect. Reading is probably the worst way to get at the "truth" of this kind of topics, but considering how the popular white mentality sniffs at what is publicly offered and chooses instead to rapaciously pick at the wounds of closed cultures and closed spiritual practices, sticking with the printed page is likely the best way to maintain some semblance of ethical transference between the settlers and the settled. Coming across unadulterated praise for Rich was the biggest surprise, and I have to wonder whether my particular reservations about that particular fount of both women empowerment and rampant transphobia falls in line with the slow and necessary effort of healing, or with instinctive white disgust at the thought of killing ladybugs. Does it matter? Mailhot has her suicide ideation, and I have mine: best to wait on the future to figure itself out without carving out rat race tracks in our brains on the strength of the possibilities.
I'm sure there are plenty of reviews out there expressing dislike for this work because no one's "sympathetic," or everyone's "stereotypical," or that the writing was "pretentious." The problem is, I really don't know if these are any worse than the gushing approvals that see no need to personally reconcile themselves with the histories here, despite said histories more clearly and credibly showing their jawbones and their spines beneath the skin of this work than many a work out there that apes at the same. How many know someone who is comfortable with being "insane" in their company, or better yet, are insane themselves? How many imbibe something like this on a regular basis for the sake of their catharsis and then pass by the MMIW epidemic as simply another tragic inevitability of the modern world? It's the same old story as the ones that occur in many other corners of the globe, and lord knows I'm as exhausted as the rest of those who concern themselves with such topics during what will likely prove to be Year 1 of COVID-19. However, there are too many out there who only read works like these in the belief it will improve their "empathy," as if the idea of humanizing a complete stranger without complete reliance on the chemicals in their brain is monstrous, even heretical. I myself was like that back in the day, but since then I've learned that, the only difference between the self improvement section of the book market and the liquor shelves in the grocery store is that the latter are more honest.
Familiarity is boring, but these fucking people—they keep hurting us in the same ways. It's putting the onus on us to tell it differently, spare people melodrama, explicative language, image, and make it new. I think, well, fuck that.I read this, and I felt seen. Probably not something Mailhot wants to hear from some rando white women, but the true joy of the Internet is that she almost certainly, leastwise from me, won't.