As Split Tooth’s protagonist puts it, “Humans have damned themselves and it has nothing to do with Satan, it has only to do with greed.” The following spring, hunters noticed devastating effects on the local wildlife: they found that the seals were deaf and had pus oozing from their ears. Panarctic Oils conducted a series of surveys at this time using dynamite along the coast north of Clyde River. A story of Sedna the Sea Goddess, for example, provides a counterpoint for references to the seismic testing that began in Nunavut in the 1970s. In much the same way, by moving seamlessly between traditional stories and the central narrative, Tagaq effectively frees readers from the shackles of reality. Tagaq instead foregrounds the inherent timelessness of a place that seasonally cycles between 24-hour day and perpetual night: “Life pops forth brightly and death is a soft exhalation … not so much living and dying as glowing and darkening.” This view of time as cyclical rather than linear is key to the story and is alternately grounding and disorienting. On its most straightforward level, it tells the story of an unnamed adolescent girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, although this time frame is communicated only through subtle clues.

To unpack Split Tooth’s labyrinthine structure in a single review is a challenge. Formally identified as fiction, it is in fact a thick braid of lived experience, philosophy, poetry, and traditional knowledge.

It’s no surprise, then, that Split Tooth, Tagaq’s literary debut, defies categorization. An Inuk artist from Iqaluktuutiaq, Tagaq’s performances are innovative and face-meltingly intense, and she has collaborated with a wide array of music’s weird geniuses from Björk to the Kronos Quartet. As a vocalist and composer, Tanya Tagaq cares little for conventional rules of engagement.

Split tooth tagaq