45 pages • 1 hour read
Split Tooth
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Pages 12-57Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 12-27 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of childhood sexual assault, sexual abuse, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, and substance abuse.
This book has an unusual format. Instead of numbered chapters, the book features prose sections, poems, abstract dreamlike sequences, and illustrations. Some sections have names; others do not.
Split Tooth opens with an epigraph from Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.
The first section, “1975,” describes the narrator, a young girl, in a closet with other children hiding from drunk and violent adults. The narrator’s uncle, whose head is bleeding, finds them and drunkenly tells them not to be afraid. An illustration depicts the uncle with a bloody face, standing over the children in the doorway of the closet.
The poem “A Day in the Life” describes the narrator’s experience in fifth grade, where her teacher and boys in her class regularly sexually abuse her and the other girls.
The narrator lives in a small community in the Canadian Arctic. In spring and summer, daylight lasts 24 hours, and the children enjoy their freedom after a long winter indoors. The narrator and her friends push makeshift rafts out into a large pond, though none of them can swim. A week later, seven children drown playing in a different pond; the narrator and her friends never play their game again.
An untitled poem discusses the interplay between fear and love.
The narrator ignores her curfew to stay out with her friends. The sun is still up at 2:00 am, and she and her friends hang out behind their school, prepared to hide from the bylaw officer if he should drive by. The narrator acknowledges the officer wants the children to be safe at home in bed but questions how safe her bed is. She and her friends are on the cusp of puberty and are learning how to navigate their crushes on each other. She grapples with no longer being taller or faster than the boys her age.
The narrator is annoyed by one boy who hangs out with her and her friends. He teases her about her crush on another girl and says that boys are stronger, faster, and smarter than girls. She and her friends hold him down, steal his clothes, and run down the street holding his pants and shirt. The narrator notes that the boy’s bravado and arrogance will one day kill him. An illustration depicts the narrator and a friend running and laughing, holding a pair of pants. The boy, wearing only boots and underwear, runs after them, looking upset.
Pages 28-45 Summary
The poem “Sternum” describes the functions of a human sternum. It references someone sexually assaulting the narrator.
In “Ritual,” the narrator finds baby lemmings under a piece of plywood. She puts them in her pocket and brings them home. She feeds them carrots and celery on the back porch. The narrator also has a fish tank full of fish, snails, and newts. She kills a few snails to prevent overpopulation. Next, she takes a newt and puts it in her mouth, where it goes to sleep under her tongue. She keeps it there while she does her chores, then puts it back in the tank. The narrator lies on the porch with the lemmings and lets them burrow and dig in her hair before returning them to where she found them. An illustration depicts the narrator dangling a newt over her open mouth.
An untitled poem describes an unnamed man sexually assaulting the narrator as a young child.
In “Nine Mile Lake,” the narrator is 11, and her cousin is seven. They hike for hours to reach the lake under the midnight sun. They are proud of themselves for making it through a seagull nesting zone, braving the screaming seagulls that swoop and peck at them. They find a nest of baby birds and feed them popcorn. The birds choke on the popcorn and die while the narrator and her cousin look on in horror and cry. At Nine Mile Lake, the cousins drink the lake water. The narrator swallows baby trout whole and feels like she is absorbing their life force into her body.
The poem “Topography of Pity” explores the pity humans feel for one another and the Earth. It questions whether the Earth looks back on humans with indifference.
In “The First Time it Happened,” the narrator and her friends are hanging out unsupervised when the narrator feels a spirit enter the room. The spirit wants to enter her so it can have a physical body again. Among the narrator’s companions, only her cousin can feel the spirit’s presence. Together, the narrator and her cousin detach from their bodies, travel to an incorporeal realm, and confront the spirit. The spirit was once human, and he wants to kill one of the narrator’s friends. He tries to enter the narrator’s body, but at the last second, she shoves him aside and returns to her body. Though the other children do not know what happened, they suddenly feel frightened.
This section ends with an untitled poem about trauma that describes something lurking in the shadows. The narrator wants to hide from it and knows it “can be freed only with tears” (45).
Pages 46-57 Summary
In “1978,” it is the middle of winter, and the sun has not risen in three months. The narrator goes to school despite the vicious cold; it must be -50 degrees Celsius or colder for school to be canceled. She is in the eighth grade, struggling with cold sores and puberty. She does well in school but deliberately fails tests to avoid being bullied. She has a crush on a boy, Best Boy, who has a popular girlfriend, Alpha. After Best Boy flirts with her, Alpha slams the narrator’s head into a locker.
An unnamed poem outside the narrative time frame describes the physical and psychological trauma of rape.
The narrator begins inhaling butane to get high. One night, there is a party at her house. The noise of the party wakes her. Someone climbs onto her bed, and she pretends to be asleep.
An abstract poem describes dissociation and trauma during sexual assault.
In the final chapter of this section, the narrator, sharing a room with an older teenage girl, wakes when a man enters the room. The man sits on the older girl’s bed and sexually assaults her. The narrator pretends that nothing is happening.
The section concludes with a table of Inuktitut syllabics.
Pages 12-57 Analysis
Split Tooth’s early chapters detail the narrator’s experience of Surviving Trauma and Abuse in childhood. The repeated instances of violence and sexual abuse render her permanently unsafe both at home and at school. These chapters repeatedly depict and suggest instances of sexual abuse that resemble each other closely. The narrator’s experiences with abuse mirror those of other girls her age, as suggested by her experience witnessing the older girl’s assault. The narrator does not specify which men in her life have abused her, or even how many. Besides her teacher and the boys in her class, there is at least one unnamed man, but potentially several. The choice to remain ambiguous about this detail allows the book to focus on the narrator, her feelings, and her experiences. The narrator is very young in these chapters and does not always understand what is happening to her. The ambiguity also suggests that these experiences are common, unavoidable, and unlikely to be addressed by the adults in her life.
Tagaq links trauma to the process of Repeating and Breaking Cycles. Many of the traumatic events described in this section, such as sexual assault and abuse, are cyclical. The young boys in the narrator’s life are already assaulting girls. Without adults to correct bad behavior and model better behavior, these boys end up repeating harmful cycles rather than working to break them. Moreover, these chapters link abuse to other forms of oppression, including misogyny, anti-gay bias, and bullying, which also compound upon themselves. For example, the scene in which the narrator and her friends pin and strip the boy teasing her about her orientation and gender mirrors the imagery of an earlier scene in which a boy holds the narrator down and sexually assaults her. Notably, however, the power dynamics are partially inverted; while it is the boy who is bullying, it is the narrator who engages in quasi-sexual violence. This tendency to replicate the trauma one experiences is something the narrator will struggle with throughout her life.
Nor is this the only dangerous cycle in which the narrator is caught. For example, despite experiencing the negative repercussions of substance abuse, the narrator begins using drugs to escape the challenges of her reality. However, the narrator displays a desire to break abusive cycles by trying to protect her younger cousin—something nobody did for her.
Tagaq also depicts positive and natural cycles. For instance, the author renders the Arctic seasons clearly, showing the extremes of both light and dark that come and go with summer and winter. These cycles help ground the narrator in her hometown and determine the kinds of adventures she and her friends have, especially during the endless light in the summer. In the Arctic, the character of daily life varies widely depending on which part of the cycle is in force, suggesting that survival depends on people’s connection to nature. The survival of people’s way of life, too, depends on the natural cycles of the region.
Split Tooth takes place in both Reality and the Spirit World. Early chapters focus more on verisimilitude, depicting numerous bleak elements of Arctic life, including extended darkness, frigid temperatures, and high cost of living. The narrator grows up under harsh conditions in her community, which struggles with widespread addiction, abuse, and colonial trauma. However, she receives comfort and freedom in nature, which connects her to the spiritual world of her ancestors. For example, the narrator plays with lemmings on her porch and feels stronger after swallowing a baby trout at Nine Mile Lake, foreshadowing later events. The narrator also finds comfort and strength against spiritual dangers in her friends, illustrated when the narrator and her cousin combine spirits to keep the evil spirit out of their world.
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