45 pages • 1 hour read
Tanya TagaqSplit Tooth
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Surviving Trauma and Abuse
Content Warning: This section discusses childhood sexual assault and abuse, colonialism, suicide, and substance abuse.
Split Tooth is largely a story about trauma. The narrator responds to these traumas in varying ways, but the strategies that enable her to survive in the moment sometimes come back to haunt her. Ultimately, this is because the framing of trauma as personal is itself an artifact of colonialism—an insistence on individualism that erases the systemic roots of suffering and stands in the way of healing.
The narrator experiences repeated sexual abuse and assault beginning in early childhood. She does not have a safe space to retreat to and has nobody to talk to about her experiences. To survive the abuse, the narrator dissociates, separating herself from her body and retreating from whatever she is experiencing. Sometimes she disconnects from reality by using drugs that give her a temporary escape, though she knows how dangerous substance abuse can be. These strategies help the narrator survive her experiences, but they also damage her. When she gets pregnant and turns her attention to her twin babies, she experiences a more meaningful kind of healing and recognizes her own power.
However, though the narrator loves her children, she also finds that they have inherited her trauma. Savik is a manifestation of her own pain and desire for revenge, killing any man who spends too much time with him. Naja inherited the narrator’s compassion and healing but is not as strong as her brother. The two children represent two different responses to trauma—one selfish and one selfless. Trauma can compound on itself when it isolates individuals, but it can also create empathy for others’ suffering, bringing people together. The narrator chooses the second path, killing her children to protect her community, the pain is too great. The implication is that survival cannot be an individual effort. It takes whole communities, rehabilitation initiatives, and efforts to address the root causes of suffering and abuse to effectively move forward. The same is true of life in the Arctic: In a traditional Inuit society, everyone’s participation was crucial for survival in a harsh environment. Attempting to survive alone was virtually impossible because of the freezing temperatures, the scant resources, and the effort required to sustain life. Even though the narrator does not ultimately survive the narrative, there is hope in the text that survival is still possible if people are willing to acknowledge their trauma and show compassion to each other.
Repeating and Breaking Cycles
There are countless cycles woven into the narrative of Split Tooth. Some of these are harmful, including the widespread sexual violence against women and girls in the narrator’s community. Young boys in Cambridge Bay replicate the same kinds of violence the men employ, likely ensuring that the cycle will continue for at least another generation. Another harmful cycle is substance abuse. The adults in the narrator’s life often abuse alcohol, hosting raucous parties that are not safe for the narrator when she is a child. She knows how harmful the adults’ substance abuse is and recognizes that when they are drunk, “[T]hey think they are so clever but they are just bleary and repetitive” (63). Despite this, the narrator and her friends start using drugs early, perpetuating the same cycles. During her pregnancy, the narrator loses all desire to consume drugs and alcohol, suggesting that she might be able to break the cycle, at least in her own life.
Other, more positive cycles are already broken. Colonial forces pushed traditional Inuit communities to assimilate, disrupting traditional culture and lifestyle. Inuit belief systems experienced a similar rupture when missionaries and residential schools pushed many people to convert to Christianity. Many Inuit, represented in the story by the narrator’s mother, who attended residential schools lost the ability to speak Inuktitut, breaking a key part of their cultural heritage. However, the narrator’s experience suggests that repair of these broken cycles is possible. She learns Inuktitut from Helen and develops a much closer relationship with the spirit world while rejecting Christianity. Her experiences reflect ongoing efforts to maintain and restore Inuit cultural practices in the face of colonialism.
Split Tooth ultimately frames the cyclical nature of reality as a double-edged sword. While trauma and abuse may proliferate, so too do life and compassion, anchored in a natural world that is constantly renewing itself. However, the reality of climate change and environmental degradation—alluded to in the novel—add an element of uncertainty even to this. In future years, the cycle of the seasons in the Arctic might look extremely different. Climate change could destabilize ecosystems, create even greater food insecurity among the Inuit, and have wide-reaching consequences for the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the fact that the narrative ends with the command to “start again” implies the resumption of life and hope for the future.
Reality and the Spirit World
Split Tooth begins as a realistic portrayal of a young girl’s life in Nunavut. Though the Arctic landscape is singular, the basic facets of her life are recognizable to those who come from very different environments: She goes to school, navigates her own challenging interpersonal relationships, and experiences abuse. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator and some others around her, such as her younger cousin, can perceive the invisible spirit world that surrounds them. Interacting with the spirit world tends to evoke powerful emotions and physical sensations in the narrator, in stark contrast to her everyday life, where she tries to mitigate the impacts of trauma by deadening herself through drug use and dissociation. When she connects with the spirit world, her senses become acute.
Over time, the narrator becomes more at home in the spirit world than in the mundane world around her. The spirit world can be frightening, as when she and her cousin narrowly avoid having a spirit possess them, but it can also be exhilarating and healing. When Northern Lights impregnate the narrator, she is “healed with torture” in an experience that is both horrifying and ecstatic (121). While the real world is always difficult to navigate and frequently punishing, the spirit world offers healing, true feeling, and an intense experience of life. This helps the narrator connect with her culture and heritage and makes her feel powerful in the real world. Even her dreams are meaningful experiences that feel more real than the banal trauma of daily life.
When the Northern Lights impregnate her, the spirit world becomes indistinguishable from the narrator’s reality. However, nobody other than the narrator acknowledges that Naja and Savik are special, and she encourages the twins to hide their true nature from the world. This dynamic suggests that the community has a continuing fear and disapproval of their spiritual heritage, resulting from colonialism. It isolates the narrator from those around her, as nobody else knows the truth about her children. Ultimately, that isolation makes it more difficult for her to heal. Even the narrator cannot quite accept her spirit-world children, and she ultimately loses them to that world. In dying by suicide, the narrator fears she loses access to that spirit world, instead entering a realm of profound suffering, but like much about the work, this is ambiguous; elsewhere, the novel frames pain itself as a gateway to the spiritual world, implying that she is perhaps not so far from her children as she believes.
