“I Woke Up Already Hurting”: Postcolonial Affect in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth

Abstract

Indigenous writing with postcolonial themes foregrounds the erasure and marginalization that result from colonialism. The genre-disrupting, coming-of-age novel Split Tooth (2018) by Inuit author Tanya Tagaq explores the personal and public life of a young Inuk woman from one of the Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic region. Split Tooth focuses on themes like the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women, Inuit cultural settings, sexual assault, precarity, and violence. The novel meanders through emotions such as fear, shame, and grief, and can be analyzed through the theoretical framework of postcolonial affect. Postcolonial affect primarily examines the diverse emotional states of the colonized as indicators of the crisis that arises from colonization. The objective of the analysis is to highlight the delineation of affect in Split Tooth, as Tagaq blends the personal and the political in her narrative. Postcolonial affect is used for the theoretical examination of appropriation and violence that constitute the precarity of Inuit people, particularly women.