Dreams, sick horror and exploding pleasure: Destabilising Colonial Erotic Hierarchy in Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

This essay was originally submitted as my final assessment in an undergraduate English Literature module studying Indigenous literatures written in English, originally titled ‘Dreams of sick horror and exploding pleasure: Wonder, Eroticism and Destabilising Colonial Hierarchies in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth’ achieving a 78/100 mark. I wanted to share it because I adored Split Tooth and its wonderfully confusing approach to sexuality, and it would be amazing if there was more noise about it both inside and outside of academia. I have edited it a little since it was marked, adding extra bits of context I had to take out due to word count restrictions and making the prose smoother, but please bear in mind the original context it was written in!

This essay discusses colonialism and sexual violence against Indigenous women and girls.

‘I don’t feel like prey. I too am a predator,’ the protagonist of Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth asserts.¹ This predator/prey hierarchy runs throughout the novel’s depictions of sex and violence, and their relationship to Inuit culture. In Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Smith argues that colonialism instituted hierarchy in Indigenous societies, directly linking the hierarchy of patriarchy to the hierarchy of human over land. In the chapter titled ‘Rape of the Land’, Smith writes that ‘the colonial/patriarchal mind that seeks to control the sexuality of women and indigenous peoples also seeks to control nature.’² In order to achieve masculine dominance, the coloniser must subjugate the natural world, and with it, the Indigenous people who have failed to make “use” of its natural resources. Environmental racism, Smith argues, is a form of sexual violence: as the land is ‘violated’ by pollution, so are the bodies of the Indigenous people who live alongside it.³ For example, ‘in Nunavut, Inuit mothers’ breast milk has twice the level of dioxin as does women’s breast milk in southern Quebec’. If the land is “raped”, the Indigenous people who inhabit the land face the same violence.⁴

Split Tooth subverts colonialism’s “rape of the land”. Confronting systemic sexual abuse against Inuit women and girls alongside a complex portrayal of the agency of the natural world, Tagaq presents the Land as a spiritual body in an erotic relationship with the protagonist; it reclaims its sexual potential from the human that seeks to sexually dominate it by sexually dominating the human. Similarly, in eroticising the Land’s dominance over her, the protagonist resists being a traumatised victim of human sexual violence. Abdenour Bouich argues that the protagonist’s relationship with the Land initiates a ‘path of healing’ from her sexual trauma, ‘constructing and strengthening… her psychological and sexual agency.’⁵ However, this reading of the novel is complicated by the protagonist’s passivity at what the Land dictates upon her body. Although the protagonist consents to when she is impregnated, it is nevertheless an inescapable fate. The colonial hierarchy within which the human dominates the land is destabilised, yet the female, Indigenous body that is dominated alongside the land remains subjugated. Nevertheless, in portraying two sexually subjugated bodies in a mutually erotic relationship, Tagaq subverts the notion that both Indigenous woman and land must be victim. This essay will explore Split Tooth as a text that resists simple categorisation within colonial erotic hierarchy. Although the protagonist engages with the predator/prey colonial hierarchy to achieve dominance among humans, she accepts and eroticises violent dominance of her body by the Land. Although this essay will read all the protagonist’s spiritual encounters with the other-than-human as manifestations of what she terms ‘the Land’, it would be equally plausible to consider the Fox, the polar bear and the Northern Lights as separate entities, a reading which would further illustrate the novel’s erotic complexities.⁶

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm finds that the imposition of Christianity upon Indigenous peoples by colonizers and missionaries actively supressed Indigenous erotic traditions, thus creating a sexually repressive culture within modern Indigenous communities: ‘we were beset by missionaries bent on offering us “salvation” for our sinful ways, and in their view sex was a sin, unless for procreation’; and so ‘a good many of our ceremonies were banned, and of course we were taught that those “erotic” songs and stories were unacceptable in a civilized society’. ⁷ Split Tooth engages with the lasting consequences of this sexual repression, in particular in its depictions of sexual violence. Throughout the protagonist’s childhood, sexual abuse is an everyday occurrence. However, at the end of a poem about a rape, ‘someone comes to the door/and he jumps off me/pretending like nothing happened’.⁸ The poem illustrates how the sexually repressive culture that fails to grant the protagonist the means to speak about sexual violence allows the rapist’s actions to go unacknowledged. For the protagonist, her parents’ drunken parties represent her simultaneous fear of and expectation of sexual violence: a house where ‘nobody is drinking’ with ‘no adults, no rules’ is ‘a safe house’.⁹ Brad Buckhalter argues that the parties represent ‘settler logic’, particularly ‘in the figure of [Johnny Cash] an American country and western music icon’; the parties are a space dictated by colonial trauma, both an escape from the realities of Inuit life under colonialism, and a product of it.¹⁰ However, the protagonist does not consider herself afraid. Instead, she claims that she avoids the parties because ‘nothing bores [her] more’.¹¹ She is resistant to viewing herself as a victim and uses violence to posit herself over her ‘prey’. Early in the novel, she steals the trousers of a boy who is taunting her:

I think of all the times I have been told I was inferior for being a girl. I think about all the times men have touched me when I didn’t want them to. I think about how good it feels to be waving the pants of one of the cocky boys in the air while he hides behind the corner.¹²

While this is a powerful moment for the protagonist, it is explicitly an act of sexualised vengeance: the protagonist and a group of girls pin the boy to the ground and undress him. Although this subverts the gender dynamics associated with systemic sexual violence, it shows that the protagonist can only gain status within the predator/prey hierarchy by playing by its violent rules. As she grows older, she degrades her Inuktitut teacher because she ‘can tell he was abused by his posture’: ‘He is small. He is defeated. He disgusts me.’¹³ Distancing herself from the status of “abused”, the protagonist idolises violence in order to assert her status as ‘predator’ among humans.

She is not, however, a ‘predator’ to the land. She fears the Northern Lights with bodily intensity: ‘I admit to running home quickly when the whole horizon is full of light and the movement of the roaring green thunder shakes my vertebrae like dice.’¹⁴ While she distances herself from colonial trauma, her Inuit belief in the Northern Lights presents a palpable threat. However, the encounter is self-destructive: the protagonist challenges the Northern Lights to either kill her, as Inuit stories warn that they will, or reveal themselves as ‘ridiculous’.¹⁵ Her actions mirror Smith’s finding ‘as a rape crisis counsellor… that Indians who have survived sexual abuse would often say that they no longer wish to be Indian’: driven to the Northern Lights in an effort to escape her parents’ parties – spaces of colonial trauma and sexual violence – the only escape the protagonist sees is by sacrificing either her Inuit faith and identity or herself.¹⁶ However, the Northern Lights subvert the protagonist’s binary expectations. The spiritual experience is neither violent nor underwhelming: the Lights communicate with the protagonist, and she ‘weep[s] at the majesty of [her] ancestors’.¹⁷ They renew the protagonist’s faith in her Inuit identity, creating a space where she can express and reconnect with it outside of colonial domination and violence.

This marks a turning point in the narrative, establishing Split Tooth as an Indigenous wonderwork. Both Bouich and Buckhalter apply Daniel Heath Justice’s definition of a wonderwork in their analyses of Split Tooth, distinguishing Indigenous wonder from the western colonial idea of fantasy:

If “fantasy” presumes some measure of falsehood or deeply Freudian impulses too readily transformed into pathology and neurosis, it also presumes a kind of arrogant certainty over what is real and unreal, true and false, legitimate and delusional. “Wonder,” on the other hand, is a word rooted in meaningful uncertainty, curiosity, humility; it places unsolvable mystery, not fixed insistence, at the heart of engagement.¹⁸

Wonderworks present that which is ‘outside the bounds of the everyday and mundane, perhaps unpredictable, but not necessarily alien, not necessarily foreign or dangerous – but not necessarily comforting and safe either’.¹⁹ They are ‘neither strictly “fantasy” nor “realism”’; they are ‘rooted in the land… specific places with histories, voices, memories’.²⁰ The protagonist’s simultaneous fear of and reverence towards the Land following her first encounter with the Northern Lights can be considered, by Justice’s definition, wonder: a destabilisation of the binary between real and unreal. The protagonist’s acceptance of ‘other realities’ is established as fact early in the novel: ‘it is foolish to think otherwise’.²¹ This directly parallels Justice’s assertion that the wonderwork ‘remind[s] us that… other realities abide alongside and within our own’.²² This paradigm destabilises a hierarchy that prioritises the experience of the settler over the Indigenous person, the human over nature, the materially provable over the spiritually non-provable. The protagonist’s wonder, not only destabilises, but directly inverts this hierarchy:

The Land has no hierarchy. The Land has no manners; you only obey and enjoy what is afforded to you by her greatness. […] We obey or we succumb.²³

She posits hierarchy as a human creation that one has no need for, if they accept the Land’s dominance. The protagonist becomes ‘too… a predator’ when she first dissociates from her body and meets another spiritual inhabitant of the Land.²⁴ Under the Land’s spiritual dominion, its inhabitants have the potential to be both predator and prey. The Land subverts a Christian hierarchy, elevated to the status of a cruel, all-powerful god, while all its spiritual inhabitants are equal.

Furthermore, the protagonist eroticises her wonder towards the Land, destabilising the separation between spirituality and eroticism in Christianity. Tagaq employs synaesthetic metaphor in the protagonist’s spiritual and erotic encounters with the Land, particularly in the form of light, linking the two states through a typically Christian motif. In a prose section that directly attacks sexually repressive Christian ideals, Tagaq juxtaposes two light metaphors:

Open your legs and [the Sun] will give you a birth. Open your mouth and she will pour flowing light down your throat.²⁵

Christians seem to love Shame: […] Put a cork in all of your holes and choke on the light of God. […] How can Christians shame the process of welcoming spirit into flesh?²⁶

Reuven Tsur argues that, as a literary device, synaesthesia either ‘reinforces… [the] emotional qualities’ of an image, or ‘violently yokes together opposite or discordant qualities, inducing tension’.²⁷ Emotional synaesthesia ‘requires a smooth fusion of sensations’, which ‘boundaries of well-defined shapes tend to resist’.²⁸ By fusing light and liquid, both of which lack defined boundaries, Tagaq celebrates fertility and sexuality as gentle and comforting. Conversely, for light to choke is discordant; a motif that implies gentleness within Christianity is refigured as violent, driven by sexual shame, thus destabilising colonial hierarchy’s privileging of “benevolent” Christianity. Furthermore, Tsur links synaesthetic poetry with religious ecstasy, ‘the state of rapture in which the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation, while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of divine things’.²⁹ Tagaq employs this tension between Body and Spirit throughout Split Tooth:

Body is so crude, viscous and lumbering. Spirit has learned to hibernate within the confinement of mucus and gristle. […] We will spend our lives trying to contemplate and encapsulate the divinity of Spirit, only to blunder forth and never relax into letting the Communication happen.³⁰

Spirit is posited as greater than Body, which is ‘crude’, almost primitive. However, in order to escape Body’s confines humans need to ‘relax’: there is no hard work involved in reaching spiritual ecstasy, as Christianity preaches; humans need only to allow the Land to connect with them. The protagonist describes ‘being outside of Body’ as ‘comfort[ing]’ and ‘our true state of existence’.³¹ Although ecstasy and ‘divinity’ are both terms specifically related to Christian religious belief, Tagaq subverts them, denoting a specifically Inuit spirituality.

Indeed, Bouich argues that the protagonist’s impregnation by the Northern Lights subverts the story of the Virgin Mary, as Tagaq portrays ‘consensual and welcomed sexual intercourse which empowers [the protagonist] both physically and psychologically’.³² However, while the protagonist enjoys and eroticises her pregnancy, Bouich’s straightforward reading ignores the violence of the sexual encounter. It is ‘torture’ that leaves the protagonist ‘powerless’; it is not erotic but reads as a scene of sexual violence as the phallic ‘column of green light simultaneously impales [her] vagina and anus’.³³ The synaesthetic ‘shard of light… thrust down [her] throat’ mirrors the violent, jarring metaphor of choking on the light of Christianity’s God; the link between sexuality and spirituality is, in both instances, a violent one, not the gentle sexuality previously attributed to the land.³⁴ Furthermore, later, the protagonist uses language of sexual ownership to describe the encounter:

My heart knows I will never truly belong to another after being with the Northern Lights. There was no corner of me unexplored, unsalvaged or unused. The Northern Lights will know me always.³⁵

The Northern Lights have colonised the protagonist’s body: she was ‘explored’, ‘salvaged’ and ‘used’, and now ‘belong[s]’ to them because they ‘know’ her sexually. Tagaq directly subverts colonial hierarchy: the Land colonised the human through sexual domination – not the male coloniser, but the disempowered Inuk girl. Her fate to carry the Land’s children is established early in the narrative. The protagonist knows that her first sexual encounter with the Fox has the potential to ‘change the lifeline of [her] clan for generations’; while she appears to initiate every sexual action, she is compelled by spiritual knowledge whose forces she cannot control: ‘I knew I had to put him in my mouth’.³⁶ When she encounters him again, just before the Northern Lights impregnates her, she decides, ‘Not yet.’³⁷ She decides when she is impregnated, but the fate of her body is set. She is a vessel for the Land’s sexual, spiritual quest.

Nevertheless, while this scene with the Northern Lights is violent, the protagonist is ‘healed’ by it. Where her sexual trauma alienated her from her body, the Northern Lights reconnect her with her sexuality: ‘I have learned to coax orgasms out of the sacred place and all the fluid in the world is mine.’³⁸ The description of (implicitly) her vagina as ‘sacred’ not only subverts Christian contempt of female sexuality, but contrasts how she previously described her body. Analysing the poem beginning ‘I only work from the waist up/Psychological epidural’, Bouich writes that,

by describing herself as someone whose lower body does not “work,” the narrator seems to suggest a sense of dissociation, a loss of possession of that body part. On the other hand, this physical numbing is projected onto the psyche, conveyed here through the reference to an “epidural,” […].³⁹

Not only do the Northern Lights reconnect her to her body, but to her erotic desires. She ‘dreams in a sick horror of the exploding pleasure of the Northern Lights’.⁴⁰ The juxtaposition of ‘sick horror’ and ‘exploding pleasure’ exemplifies the complexity of the protagonist’s desire: Tagaq presents a sexuality that does not straightforwardly subvert colonial ideas of ownership, but accepts the complex dualities of wonder and erotic desire. Akiwenzie-Damm argues that Indigenous erotica is always politically subversive because of the colonial forces that tried to stamp it out: ‘When this [erotic] part of us is dead, our future survival is in jeopardy’, in part because settlers aimed to stop Indigenous people procreating, in part because a lack of sex education has caused high levels of HIV/AIDS in First Nations communities, but also because ‘Eroticism is uniquely human. To deny it in any culture or individual is to deny humanity’.⁴¹ Although the Northern Lights dominate the protagonist and violate her body to use as a vessel, her expression of desire opposes narratives of colonial dominance, not only through elevating Inuit belief but by expressing it in a specifically erotic context.

Furthermore, there is no violent and dominant sexuality in the protagonist’s erotic relationship with the polar bear. Bouich describes this relationship as an ‘act of erotic communion’ wherein the protagonist and the bear literally ‘merge into each other’: ‘His face is my pussy and she is hungry’.⁴² There can be no hierarchy between the two figures because they are each other, both human and animal, male and female. As with the Northern Lights, the polar bear saves the protagonist from self-destruction. She ‘slice[s]… meat off [her] own bones’ for her spirit ‘to eat’, implying she sustains her sense of self through self-harm, and eventually ‘succumb[s]’ to the possibility of drowning.⁴³ However, saved by the polar bear she ‘will live another year’.⁴⁴ Like Akiwenzie-Damm highlighted, eroticism literally saves the protagonist’s life. Bouich notes that the polar bear is ‘regarded as a resilient and strong totemic ancestor, and often associated with hunting’.⁴⁵ Through the bear the protagonist can merge with her Inuit identity, elevated to the position of hunter without needing to make anyone into her ‘prey’. Although only one brief scene, Tagaq uses wonder to illustrate the power of a mutually dependent, respectful and erotic relationship with the Land: to coexist with nature, to subvert the erotic hierarchy that pits the human over the land allows the disempowered human to regain power in opposition to colonial forces that wish to oppress them.

It would be limiting to read the protagonist’s relationship with the Land as straightforwardly a subversive reclamation of her sexuality in the face of colonial sexual repression and violence. The protagonist’s body is violated by the Northern Lights to become a vessel for their children. Nevertheless, in attributing this sexual power to the Land, Tagaq flips the “rape of the land” narrative of colonial violence on its head. Through wonder, the protagonist reveres and eroticises the Land’s power and capacity for violence, situating herself outside the predator/prey hierarchy that alienated her from her body’s erotic potential. Tagaq does not provide easy answers to the question of destabilising colonial hierarchies, but presents a complex, ultimately very human response to colonial trauma.

Bibliography

Works Cited

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri. ‘Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style’. Journal of Canadian Studies 35, no. 3 (2000): 97-104.

Buckhalter, Brad. ‘Calling (Out) Contemporary Settlers: Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth and ‘Colonizer’ as Trans-Media Indigenous Wonderwork’. Transmotion 10, no. 1 (2024): 26-52.

Bouich, Abdenour. ‘Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words: Healing in the Inuit Arctic’. Transmotion 7, no. 2 (2021): 77-104.

Justice, Daniel Heath. ‘Indigenous Wonderworks and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary’. Apex Book Company. August 10th 2017. Accessed May 20th 2025. https://www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-magazine/post/indigenous-wonderworks-and-the-settler-colonial-imaginary/.

Oxford English Dictionary. “ecstasy (n.), sense 3.a.”. December 2024. Accessed May 24th 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9471105436.

Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Duke University Press, 2015.

Tagaq, Tanya. Split Tooth. Penguin, 2018.

Tsur, Reuven. ‘Issues in Literary Synaesthesia’. Style 41, no. 1 (2007): 30-52.

Works Consulted

Altamirano-Jiménez, Isabel. ‘Nunavut: Whose Homeland, Whose Voices?’ Canadian Woman Studies 26, no. 3-4 (2008): 128-134.

Caputi, Jane. ‘The Dirty/Earthy Mother’. In Call Your “Mutha”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, 27-41. Oxford University Press, 2020.

England, Phil. ‘Tooth & Reconciliation’. The Wire. May 2019. 40-44.