Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

A young Inuk girl growing up in 1970s Canada is witness to, and victim of, all the decay and contamination that Westernisation has brought to the First Nations. Navigating a path between the every day tribulations of being a teenager in the 70s and the wild and mystical heritage of her people, things come to a head when she falls pregnant.

This is a powerful debut novel from celebrated composer and throat singer Tagaq, one that opens a window onto her people, their experiences and their worldview.

It would be easy, as a white reader, to wax lyrical about the more mystical elements of this novel, the relationship between the Inuk and the natural world – easy, and predictably condescending. There is a lot of mysticism in the novel, animals and spirits, their energy and it can seem alien and exotic to those with a more prosaic upbringing, but it would cheapen the book to suggest that that is all that is on offer here.

For Split Tooth is a remarkable book by any standard. The prose is exquisite, the poetry that’s interspersed with the story beautiful and lyrical, and complements the narrative perfectly. The illustrations, by Love & Rockets legend Jaime Hernandez, charming and well-suited. It’s of a quality that speaks of a master storyteller, an artist, of exemplary skill and craft.

Above all, there’s an emotional heart to the story that transcends culture. Anyone who’s been forced to live in fear of adults that should be protecting them, anyone who’s been the victim of school hierarchy, anyone who’s navigated the dangerous waters of nascent sexuality will find moments of identification within. Split Tooth is very particularly a product of culture and environment, but is nevertheless universal as well, as all good stories must be.

I mention environment, I should spare a word for the way Tagaq brings her landscape to life. It is a different world she describes, and one rendered vividly in her descriptions of life within the Arctic Circle. One can feel the beauty of the natural world her characters inhabit, just as one can sense the squalor of the financially challenged community. It’s a real, tangible place that her narrative inhabits, and that serves to ground the mystical elements that ebb and flow like a tide within the story, building to a final, heartbreaking crescendo.

A triumph, then, and one that deserves the acclaim it’s received.

Split Tooth is published by And Other Stories.

Support Independent bookshops and my own writing by buying at uk.bookshop.org

Promotion choices, events, recommendations

Friday 10th September was World Suicide Prevention Day. For me, this created somewhat of a conundrum. As a first-time author looking to push his book, the instinct is that any related chance to promote the book should be taken. It is, as I’ve observed before, a tough old time for the debut author. Given Playtime’s Over‘s central construct, any discussion around suicide seems like a natural tie-in. However, given the subject matter, the idea of using that specific Awareness Day as a chance to sell my book felt all kinds of off.

Interestingly, one of the good folk at the Book Hive made the connection as well and messaged me in the afternoon to ask if I wanted them to put something out about the book, tying it in, though they too weren’t convinced of the wisdom of doing so. In the end, we decided against. I did put out a blog that day about the subject, mentioning the book, but I avoided any suggestion of people buying it, merely referencing it. Instead, I talked briefly about my experience, said I was thinking about those who’d lost their lives to it, and posted a link for additional help/resources. It felt right to me to mark it but I couldn’t bring myself to use it as an opportunity.

And that is the challenge around the subject matter. While I’m not averse to tying the promotion of the book to Mental Health stuff – I still believe that there are important discussions to be had that the book may shed some small light on – to use World Suicide Prevention Day as a marketing tool is clearly beyond the pale. It’s just not an appropriate thing to try and make money off the back of. One of the additional factors in considering promoting a book with these themes is when and how it’s appropriate to do so. I’m balancing the need to put the work in to assist my publisher where I can with sales against the need to be sensitive. Not a complaint, or something I hadn’t considered before, but there it is.

In other news, a brief email exchange with my editor/publisher has confirmed that he has submitted my book for the East Anglian Book Awards. In and of itself, nothing to get carried away about – submitting is a straightforward affair, we now just sit and wait to see if we get a sniff at the shortlisting. I’m told that if the panel react to the book as well as the public have, we are in a good position – positive feedback continues to come in and I’m told that recently we had a customer come back to purchase no less than ten copies! I’m assuming somewhere there’s a book group with an interesting meeting coming up. But certainly keep an eye out for the nominations when they’re announced and keep your fingers crossed for us.

I’ve also been invited to my first London Literary Event! Terribly excited about this, I’ve been invited to Deixis Press‘ Launch Party. You may remember that back in May, I was asked to give a quote for one of their books, Richard Gadz’ The Workshop of Filthy Creation. Not only was I happy to get my name out there, I was also more than happy to endorse the book, as it’s a cracking read. I’m also currently enjoying Sion Scott-Wilson’s Some Rise By Sin, another really well-written book that they’re putting out this year. An imprint to keep an eye on, for sure. Anyway, as a result of making that connection, I now get to go down to that there London and rub shoulders with other literary types. As regular readers might be aware, the idea of a party would usually make my skin itch but I’m facing this as a professional opportunity for James Kinsley the author, rather than as a social one for old uncle Kins. Hopefully that will get me through it. If nothing else, at least I have an excuse now to catch the Paula Rego exhibition at the Tate Britain, which my wife tells me is excellent.

Elsewhere, the two horsemen of the current mini-apocalypse*, Br*xit & Covid-19, are causing potential issues for the book industry, as supply chains are hit. How/whether that effects us , I don’t know. I’m not imagining we’re looking at a second print run just yet, so probably not much, but if you haven’t bought one yet, QUICK! DO IT NOW! DON’T WAIT ANOTHER MINUTE!

Delighted this weekend to have had the chance to see Emma Raducanu make history at the US Open. The extent of her achievement cannot be overstated. For a qualifier to win a major is unprecedented; to do so without dropping a set and with the complete absence of nerves she displayed is nothing short of incredible. However, those of us who watched her at Wimbledon this year won’t be surprised perhaps as much as we should be. The young woman has formidable written all over her. Perhaps less enjoyable was seeing the likes of Nigel F*rage, who in 2014 stated in a radio interview that he would be ‘concerned’ if a Romanian family moved in next door, hypocritically express delight that a Chinese-Romanian immigrant had won the title for Britain. Seems there are some migrants we can welcome to this country, instead of trying to drown at sea.

Couple of recommendations for you. Admittedly, I have yet to read Elisa Victoria’s Oldladyvoice, but it arrived this morning as part of my And Other Stories subscription and it looks fantastic. Given And Other Stories’ track record, which I believe I’ve spoken of before, and the enticing blurb, I’ve no doubt this will be an absolute gem. It’s due out on 5th October – hopefully I can get it read before then and give you a proper heads up. The other is my film choice for this week, Tiger Bay. Child performances can, as we know, make or break a film. In this, Hayley Mills (13 at the time, playing younger) absolutely makes it as the young girl witness to a murder who ends up trying to help the murderer, a sympathetic Horst Buchholz (The Magnificent Seven‘s Chico). There are, admittedly, a few questions that would legitimately be asked today about leading an audience to sympathise with a man who kills his former lover for no longer wanting him, but the film at least doesn’t go so far as to let him off the hook. Nevertheless, the connection between Mills and Buchholz is tangible and convincing, and the plot is genuinely tense at times with no outcome entirely clear. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me, showing my ignorance, is the multiracial portrayal of Cardiff in the 1950s, especially as it’s not something explored in the plot, just presented as the backdrop the story plays out against. In any event, if you get a chance, I’d very much recommend it.

* hyperbole acknowledged

Photo credit: my wife (I was stuck for an idea for the featured image this week)

Representation

I hopefully don’t need to explain what The Bechdel Test (or more accurately the Bechdel-Wallace Test) is, but as it’s the starting point for today’s thoughts, let’s briefly summarise. It was a concept outlined in a 1985 comic by Alison Bechdel for applying a test to movies. To pass the test, a movie needed to have (1) two female characters (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. You can find a cleaned-up version of the original strip here. In essence, it’s was intended as a way of identifying movies that have at least partways decent female representation.

It also won’t surprise you to learn that if you use this test and only watch the movies that pass, it reduces the number of movies you can watch by a disappointingly huge number. Maybe to a lesser degree now but certainly when the strip came out in the 80s, you were limiting your viewing potential to a very bare minimum.

You can use the test for other media of course. As a writer (as I have to keep reminding myself I am now), I’ve become more conscious of it when it comes to books. Playtime’s Over, my novella coming out summer 2021 from Propolis, doesn’t pass the test. Only two characters have any dialogue and they’re both men. In fact, due to the book being a conversation between a man and his subconscious discussing the man’s suicide attempt as he drowns in the North Sea, it’s only one man. Talking to himself. About a man. Himself.

The Bechdel-Wallace test was on my mind as I wrote it. I made a deliberate decision that this book wouldn’t pass it. A couple of minor characters have a line or two of dialogue. None of them are women. If I was going to fail the test, I wanted to fail it completely. It’s only my first book, and I restricted myself to the worldview I was most familiar with – my own.

Interestingly, my first self-published sci-fi novella, The Forcek Assignment, does pass the test. Again, this was a deliberate decision I made as I wrote it, that there should be a scene where two women talk to each other about something other than a man. Okay, so one of them is a mysterious, genderless entity inhabiting the body of a woman, but close enough, right? Does this make The Forcek Assignment a better book? Frankly, no. It proves, in fact, that as a measure of quality, the Test offers very little. Having two cheerleaders talking about icecream before being killed may pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, but it won’t make your slasher movie a Feminist masterpiece. The Test is, paradoxically, both highly significant and, on its own, virtually meaningless.

Representation is a thorny subject. We want more of it, there should be more of it, but how do we achieve it? And whose responsibility is it?

The first question is one that has no easy answers. Armando Iannucci’s 2019 film The Personal History of David Copperfield got a lot of chatter about the casting, most notably Dev Patel in the title role. Casting a British actor of Indian descent was, in the end, generally well-received. Not least of all because it’s blindingly obvious from the start that Patel is perfection in the role. It’s brilliant casting, not because of his skin, but because of his performance. It’s a reaction not experienced by Scarlett Johansson when she took the lead in the live-action adaptation of Ghost In The Shell. A white actor playing an asian character getting a different reaction to an asian actor playing a white character – is this a double standard?

It takes a certain kind of person to just say yes to that question. The difference in response isn’t at all hard to understand. On the one hand, you have the under-represented getting a chance to appear in a starring role. On the other, an opportunity for the under-represented being pushed aside in favour of the over-represented. To take the position that it’s just hypocrisy, you would have to be tone-deaf to a lot of real world injustice.

But there are other considerations. Some Japanese people welcomed the chance for a Japanese property to garner a world-wide audience, a chance that came from casting a well-known white actor in the role. You could also argue that the film’s themes of self-identity and the blurring of natural and artificial bodies actually lends itself to that casting, or at least renders the point moot. You could also argue that as an action movie, and potential franchise, with a female lead, perhaps this wasn’t the time to fight that particular battle. There is more than one thing going on here, and it has also been suggested that it received more negative reaction amongst Asian-Americans than it did amongst Asians.

Another discussion point of recent years has been cisgender actors playing transgender roles. In a rapidly changing culture, we need to open up opportunities for transgender actors in an overwhelmingly cisgender industry. There’s a strong case for them being the ones who get to tell their story, rather than seeing their story being told by people who know nothing about it, while they are silenced. But do all transgender actors only have ambitions to play transgender characters in transgender stories? And what is acting, if not inhabiting the skin of another? Can gay actors only play gay characters? Can only gay actors play gay characters?

Of course, the answer is that when we have a movie industry where everyone is represented then the only thing that should matter is who’s right for the part. But we don’t have that. Representation is important for audiences, because it matters that people, especially kids, see people who look like them in popular media. Read any interview with an actor of colour about the significance of the first time they saw someone who looked like them onscreen and, if you’re white like me, you still won’t really understand what the big deal is, because we see people who look like us all the time.

The real question is how do we get from where we are to where we need to be? What does that journey look like? In all honesty, it probably looks a lot like Dev Patel getting rave reviews for David Copperfield and Scarlett Johansson leaving a bad taste in the mouth for Ghost In The Shell (and that’s if we ignore the fact that it’s a man getting praise and a woman who’s getting criticism).

The second question, of responsibility, is a thorny one. Should Johansson get the flack for Ghost In The Shell, or does she end up getting it because she’s the visible face? After all, she accepted the role, yes, but she didn’t direct or produce the movie. She didn’t cast it. She didn’t foot the bill. Is the director to blame? The producer? The studio? Marc Bernardin of the Los Angeles Times wrote on this issue that “the only race Hollywood cares about is the box office race”. The studios don’t care that Johansson is white, they only care that she sells tickets. And if that’s the case, does the fault ultimately lie with audiences?

The success of the MCU’s Black Panther was heralded as proof that race is no barrier to movie audiences. A more cynical reaction might be to suggest that race is no barrier to movie audiences when it comes to movies in an already well-established and hugely popular, overwhelmingly white movie franchise (and try telling that to John Boyega or Kelly Marie Tran). We know studios play safe with their money, especially in this period of industry transition where streaming is tearing down the status quo. We may get uncomfortable with the idea that we only want to see white actors, just as we get annoyed with the constant deluge of reworkings and reimaginings of existing properties, but do our viewing habits lie at the heart of the issue of representation?

Coming back to me, as a writer, my current raft of projects is slowly coming to an end. These are the projects I started before I was ‘a writer’, when I was just a bloke with a laptop in his dining room, with no real idea that anyone would read the end product. The next time I start a fresh project, I’ll do so in the hope that it might well be something I end up putting in front of readers, which throws all of these questions into sharp relief. Does the world need more books by and about white, middle aged, middle class cis-het males? After all, we’re not exactly a dying breed. Should I be trying to introduce more diverse voices into my work (I mean, yes), or if I do that, do I run the risk of being accused of appropriating those voices, stealing them from the mouths of people who should be getting the opportunity to tell their own stories? And yes, that sounds like the white guy moaning about being oppressed and not being able to do anything without being criticised. I really I hope I’m not that guy, because I do genuinely care about this. I want to do what I can for representation and diversity, but I’d also quite like to have a writing career, and not just step back because there’s too many of me out there already.

Ultimately, my thinking comes down to the fact that it’s the landscape that needs to be changed, not every feature of that landscape (so really, talk to publishers, not writers, about this stuff).We shouldn’t have just ‘black shows’ and ‘white shows’, but we also don’t need every individual show to meet a quota of black, asian, white, male, female, straight, gay, trans representation. Perhaps again, my role as a consumer is more critical than that as a creator. The fact that I’m really enjoying Ramy, that I’m looking forward to catching up with season two of Kingdom, that I think I May Destroy You was one of the most remarkable pieces of television in the past decade – maybe this is how I best serve the idea of representation. Not by starting a campaign to get more white people into Kim’s Convenience, but by getting over my fear that it looks like I’m trying to make a big deal about how open-minded a white guy I am, and just rave about these brilliant shows. Not because of who made them, just because of how great they are.

I recently read Claudia Hernandez’ novel Slash and Burn. Set in El Salvador, it’s the story of one woman and the effect war, and life after the war, has on her as a woman and as a mother, daughter, sister. It is a remarkable book, a genuinely astonishing piece of literature. And one that I’d never had heard of were it not for And Other Stories, a publishing house that works on a subscription model, where readers pay upfront for 2, 4 or 6 books a year. That money is then used to fund their publishing, with the subscribers getting their copies sent to them when the book comes out. You don’t get to pick or choose your books, you give them your money, they then make their publishing choices and you get the results. They specialise (though not exclusively) in translated fiction from around the world. Thanks to them, I’ve loved books by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Rita Indiana, Mario Levrero, Alia Trabucco Zeran, Emmanuelle Pagano and others, writers I’d have never come across otherwise. I’m fascinated by these glimpses into other cultures, not only for their differences but also for their similarities. Crucially though, I don’t subscribe because these writers are foreign (I’ve also loved books from AOS by Rachel Genn, Luke Brown and Tim Etchells), out of any sense of doing my bit for diversity. I subscribe because, as a publisher, AOS reliably put out books of a consistently high quality. I buy the books because of how good they are, not because of who wrote them.

As a consumer, I can have quality and diversity. By constantly seeking out both, and talking about what I find, maybe that’s how I can start to contribute most to this debate.