Parul Sehgal calls Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir of her childhood on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation and beyond,“a sledgehammer . . . a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery.” It’s quite a compliment, and one Mailhot lives up to when she’s at her best: while applying her razor-sharp wit to the chasms between different cultures and modes of thought.
Struggling with the ghosts of abuse and mental illness, she commits herself to a mental institution, but only so long as they allow her to write. One point in particular that Mailhot makes while relating this experience stuck with me. After committing herself, she wonders to what extent the tools (in this case those of the mental health industry) of a culture that doesn’t understand her own can help her.
She writes, “In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.”
Regardless of what traditions we were brought up with, I think we could all benefit from learning to reconcile with pain through ceremony. Moreover, Mailhot’s take on this rhetoric concerning suffering and letting go emphasizes the problem with trying to use one culture’s mode of thought to try to “cure” another’s. It also presents a different way of approaching the disease and cure mentality that I grew up with. It moves beyond the idea of suffering as something that needs to be snuffed out immediately.
As in her discussion of transcending the facile concept of “letting go,” in an NPR interview, Mailhot invites us to look at mental illness in a more multifaceted way. She even raises the question of whether there could be creative potential in our most painful experiences:
“I feel that polarity just in my daily life — like, I feel like I have a swinging heart, you know? And I’m driven by that. And I think artistically, it’s done a lot of good. And in my real life, I think it’s made my relationships more intense, even with my children. I think I love harder this way. But coping with the ups and downs has been a real challenge. And I feel like only in my 30s have I really begun to understand that I’m not bad because I’m ill — I am OK, you know?”
In Heart Berries, Mailhot asks us as readers to push beyond our outworn notions concerning female experience, mental illness, motherhood, and more, in order to inhabit that transcendent ambiguity and complexity she reaches at points in her book. Of her labyrinthine relationships with her partner and her children, she writes, “I had to fill these pages with the story of our new family, because the merging was so complicated, even I was confounded.” Ultimately, Heart Berries takes us on a tour of these very confounding complications and we’re richer for it.