The publisher categorizes the genre as magical realism, as the author noted Gabriel García Márquez as being an influence, though it also fits within the genre of Bildungsroman. For example, the story of Sedna is related as a counterpoint to the 1970s Panarctic Oils seismic testing. The book integrates some of the author's real life background and experiences, fiction and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. The illustrations are all full-page, black-and-white drawings by Chicano artist Jaime Hernandez. The poems include one written in Inuinnaqtun, a dialect of an Inuit language. The prose is written with a poetic quality and moves the narratives along. The book is divided by unnumbered chapters with poems and illustrations in between pieces of short prose. The unnamed adolescent girl protagonist lives in the tundra landscape, spends time with friends, copes with sexual abuse, witnesses domestic violence, experiences Inuit culture and religion, and gives birth. Through a series of alternating short prose, poems and illustrations, the Inuk narrator recollects aspects of growing up in a small Nunavut town in the 1970s. At 43 years old in 2018 when Split Tooth, Tagaq's first and only book was published, she had already released four studio albums and was appointed to be a Member of the Order of Canada. Tagaq was raised in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and attended high school in Yellowknife before finding success in Toronto performing Inuit throat singing. Split Tooth was written by Tanya Tagaq based on journal entries, poems, and short stories that she had written over the previous 20 years. The novel was also longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. The book won the Indigenous Voices Award for English Prose in 2019. Characterized by the publisher as magic realism, it has also been characterized as an example of Daniel Heath Justice's critical concept of "wonderworks" or literature by Indigenous writers that defies conventional Western notions of literary genres. The book has been described as a blend of fiction, memoir, poetry and Inuit folklore.
Based in part on her own personal journals, the book tells the story of a young Inuk woman growing up in the Canadian Arctic in the 1970s. Split Tooth is a 2018 novel by Canadian musician Tanya Tagaq.
0 kommentar(er)
