AND THEN SHE FELL

A tale of compromise, madness, and recuperation by a Mohawk writer in Ontario.

Alice, a young Mohawk woman and new mother to a baby girl named Dawn, finds herself living comfortably in Toronto, married to a white man whose academic specialty happens to be her own culture. Unsettling encounters with prying neighbors, whose racism emerges in both subtle and obvious ways, mark the beginning of Alice’s deteriorating mental health. Her salvation, as she understands it, is to retell the Haudenosaunee Creation Story, though an increasing paranoia and apparent psychosis complicate her efforts. This novel seems, in part, like a contemporary, Indigenized retelling of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with the first-person narration here similarly highlighting not just a woman’s descent into insanity, but the bigotries and toxic power relations that structure society. Alice’s observations, however unreliable they become, suggest above all the significance of cultural erasure and appropriation for Indigenous peoples, the ongoing impact of policies of cultural genocide, and the rest of the country’s routine incomprehension of or indifference to Indigenous suffering. Particularly intriguing is the representation of Alice’s self-doubt as she attempts to modernize a traditional story without betraying it and the people it represents. As she asks herself, in a passage that seems to sum up a conundrum facing many contemporary Indigenous artists: “Is there a definite, observable moment where interpretation becomes bastardization? If there is I’m flirting with it. I mean, I’m writing my people’s Creation Story—the story that lays out our entire worldview as Haudenosaunee—in the voice of a gossipy, irreverent young woman when common sense (and stereotypes) say I should be writing it in the voice of a sage old Indian man.” 

A tale of injustice and veiled persecution seen through a fevered imagination.