The Antelope Wife (22 page)
Nimiigwechiwi-aanaanig: Awanigaabaw (Dr. Brendan Fairbanks), also Netaa-niimid Aamoo-ikwe, Biidaanamad, Migizi, and Nenaa’ikiizhikok, my daughters.
Thank you: Trent Duffy, my indefatigable copy editor, and Terry Karten, my editor at HarperCollins. Brendan Fairbanks was my consultant for most of the Ojibwe language in this book; any mistakes are mine. Thank you also to my sister, Heid E. Erdrich, who over the years helped me think about this book.
Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction
“Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208,” interview by Lisa Halliday, first published in
The Paris Review
. Copyright © 2010 by
The Paris Review
, used with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
O
NLY ONE PASSENGER TRAIN
per day makes the Empire Builder journey from Chicago to Seattle, and when it stops in Fargo, North Dakota, at 3:35 in the morning, one senses how, as Louise Erdrich has written, the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers.” Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, but we met in the Fargo Econo Lodge parking lot. From there, with Erdrich’s eight-year-old daughter, Kiizh (Sky in Ojibwe), we drove five hours up to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, on the Manitoba border. Every August, when tick season has subsided, Erdrich and her sister Heid spend a week in a former monastery here to attend the Little Shell Powwow and to conduct a writing workshop at the Turtle Mountain Community College. One afternoon, participants took turns reciting poetry under a beside the single-room house where Erdrich’s mother grew up. The workshop is mainly attended by Ojibwe or other Native people from neighboring reservations, and is in its eighth year.
Moving east with my mattress and writing table.
Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, was the first of seven children raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, by a German American father and a mother who is half “a mixture of other tribes plus French” and half Ojibwe—Ojibwe, also known as Chippewa, being one of numerous Native American tribes comprised by the Anishinaabe (“Original People”). Both of Erdrich’s parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. For many years, her grandfather Patrick Gourneau, Aunishinaubay, was the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair.
Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976, and returned in June 2009 to receive an honorary doctorate of letters and deliver the main commencement address; the same year, her novel
The Plague of Doves
, which centers on the lynching of four Indians wrongly accused of murdering a white family (and which Philip Roth has called “her dazzling masterpiece”), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After invariably classifying Erdrich as a Native American writer, many reviewers proceed to compare her work to that of William Faulkner or Gabriel García Márquez: Faulkner for her tangled family trees, her ventriloquist skill, and her expansive use of a fictional province no less fully imagined than Yoknapatawpha County; García Márquez for her flirtations with magical realism. But so strange are Erdrich’s narrative rhythms, and so bonded is her language to its subject matter, that it seems just as accurate to call hers a genre of one.
When the workshop was over, Erdrich drove us back to Fargo for walleye cakes at the Hotel Donaldson, and then to visit her parents, who still live in the modest house in Wahpeton where Erdrich grew up. The next day, while Erdrich attended a wedding in Flandreau, South Dakota, her sister took me the remaining two hundred miles to Minneapolis, where, three days later, Erdrich and I reconvened at her bookstore and Native American arts shop, Birchbark Books. Here, Erdrich’s eldest daughter, Persia, decides which children’s books to stock. Taped to most of the shelves are detailed recommendations handwritten by Erdrich herself. An upside-down canoe hangs from the ceiling, suspended between a birchbark reading loft and a Roman Catholic confessional decorated with sweetgrass rosaries. We linger at the store, but not until we make the long walk to Erdrich’s house do we finally sit down on the back porch and turn the tape recorder on.
Erdrich was wearing her driving clothes: jeans, sandals, and an untucked button-down shirt. A Belgian shepherd named Maki dozed at our feet, and Erdrich’s youngest daughter came out a couple of times—once to ask whether we wanted Play-Doh ice-cream cones, later to report that a Mr. Sparky was on the phone. Then a neighboring buzz saw started up, and we moved inside: up to a small attic room pleasantly cluttered with photographs, artifacts, and many more Catholic and Ojibwe totems, including moccasins, shells, bells, dice, bitterroot, a bone breastplate, an abalone shell for burning sage, a turtle stool, a Huichol mask with a scorpion across its mouth and a double-headed eagle on its brow, and a small army of Virgin statuettes. Crowded into a bookshelf beside a worn armchair in the center of the room are the hardbound spiral notebooks in which, in a deeply slanted longhand, Erdrich still writes most of her books—sitting in the chair with a wooden board laid across its arms as a desk.
INTERVIEWER:
In
The Beet Queen,
Dot Adare’s first-grade teacher puts Dot into the “naughty box.” Was there a naughty box in your own childhood?
LOUISE ERDRICH:
Do I have to talk about this? It is a primal wound. Yes, I was put into the naughty box.
INTERVIEWER:
What had you done?
ERDRICH
: Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake, I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.
INTERVIEWER:
Was your teacher anything like the one in your story “Sister Godzilla”?
ERDRICH:
No, but I had Franciscan Sisters for teachers later. Some were celestial, others were disturbed. My sixth-grade teacher, Sister Dominica, hit home runs at recess and I loved her, but there was no exact Sister Godzilla. As for Miss Smith, I still have her photograph. She had cat’s-eye glasses and a blond bouffant do, and wore a chiffon scarf tied at the tip of her chin. Before Miss Smith, I’d never recognized a presence inside of words. The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit. Miss Smith drew eyelashes on the o’s in
look
, and irises in the middle of the o’s, and suddenly
look
contained the act of looking. I had a flash of pure joy, and was a reader from then on.
My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently I’ve been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother’s, are one of my life’s treasures.
INTERVIEWER:
What are the letters about?
ERDRICH:
Mushroom hunting. Roman Stoics. American Indian Movement politics. Longfellow. Stamp collecting. Apples. He and my mother have an orchard. When I went off to college, he wrote about the family, but in highly inflated terms, so that whatever my sisters and brothers were doing seemed outrageously funny or tragic. If my mother bought something it would be a cumbersome, dramatic addition to the household, but of course unnecessary. If the dog got into the neighbor’s garbage it would be a saga of canine effort and exertion—and if the police caught the dog it would be a case of grand injustice.
INTERVIEWER:
Did your mother speak Ojibwemowin (the Ojibwe language) when you were growing up?
ERDRICH:
My grandfather spoke the Red Lake dialect of the language as his family had originated there, but he also spoke and wrote an exquisite English. My mother learned words here and there, but you have to be immersed in a language as a child to pick it up completely. Learning language is far more difficult later on.
Often when I’m trying to speak Ojibwe my brain freezes. But my daughter is learning to speak it, and that has given me new resolve. Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality.
INTERVIEWER:
Were you raised to be devout?
ERDRICH:
Every Catholic is raised to be devout and love the Gospels, but I was spoiled by the Old Testament. I was very young when I started reading the Bible, and the Old Testament sucked me in. I was at the age of magical thinking and believed sticks could change to serpents, a voice might speak from a burning bush, angels wrestled with people. After I went to school and started catechism I realized that religion was about rules. I remember staring at a neighbor’s bridal-wreath bush. It bloomed every year but was voiceless. No angels, no parting of the Red River. It all seemed so dull once I realized that nothing spectacular was going to happen.
I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt.
INTERVIEWER:
What was it like to leave Wahpeton for Dartmouth?
ERDRICH
: My father, rightly, picked out a paragraph in
The Plague of Doves
as a somewhat autobiographical piece of the book. Evelina leaves for college and at their parting her parents give her a love-filled stare that is devastating and sustaining. It is an emotion they’ve never before been able to express without great awkwardness and pain. Now that she’s leaving, that love beams out in an intense form.
As the eldest child, I often felt that I belonged more to my parents’ generation than to my own. In the beginning of the book, Evelina is always scheming to watch television. My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad had us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism. Shakespeare’s history plays and
The Three Stooges
were major influences.
INTERVIEWER:
When did you start writing?
ERDRICH
: I went back to North Dakota after college and became a visiting poet in a program called Poets in the Schools. It was a marvelous gig. I went all around the state in my Chevy Nova, teaching, until I contracted hepatitis at the old Rudolf Hotel in Valley City. What did I expect for eight dollars a night? I was in my smoking, brooding phase, and I was mostly writing poetry. In time, the poems became more storylike—prose, really—then the stories began to connect. Before the hepatitis I also drank, much more than I do now, so I spent a lot of time in bars and had a number of crazy conversations that went into
Love Medicine
. I also used to go to tent revivals up in the Turtle Mountains—that experience eventually became part of
The Plague of Doves
.
I started writing poems with inner rhymes, but as they became more complex they turned into narrative. I started telling stories in the poems. But the poems I could write jumping up from my desk or lying on the bed. Anywhere. At last, I had this epiphany. I wanted to write prose, and I understood that my real problem with writing was not that I couldn’t do it mentally. I couldn’t do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally, could not sit still. So I had to solve that. I used some long scarves to tie myself into my chair. I tied myself in with a pack of cigarettes on one side and coffee on the other, and when I instinctively bolted upright after a few minutes, I’d say, Oh, shit. I’m tied down. I’ve got to keep writing.
INTERVIEWER:
Where were you when you wrote
Love Medicine?
ERDRICH
: I had come back to Fargo again and was living downtown. I worked in a little office space with a great arched window on the top floor. It was seventy bucks a month. It was heaven to have my own quiet, beautiful office with a great window, green linoleum floors, and a little desk with a view that carried to the outskirts of Fargo. The apartment I lived in over Frederick’s Flowers belonged to my brother and had no windows, only a central air shaft that was gloomy and gray. That apartment also got into the book. It was a peculiar apartment—you couldn’t stay in it all day or you’d go nuts. It cost fifty dollars a month, so all I had to pay every month was one hundred and twenty bucks in rent. I had a bicycle. I ate at the Dutch Maid café. I was living well.