Creatures and natural phenomena are anthropomorphized and figure alongside the archetypes of bildungsroman: beleaguered parents, loyal sidekicks, mean girls, local drunks, the crush. She grew up reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s awed realism, to get “an idea of the formalities that didn’t exist in my culture.” In Split Tooth, blood is in the air and on the ground, bringing both fear and comfort. Split Tooth is a short mythobiography about a teenage girl living in a small Nunavut community in the 1970s, where, she writes, “the air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged.” Tagaq’s music is intensely corporeal and so is her writing. “Revolution happens by garnering public opinion, we’ve made a lot of gains in my generation.” “All of my work is about inching public discourse toward government change,” she explains. And the intellectual mission that anchors her life’s work bubbles, like the cool alert of fizzy water, through Split Tooth, which was culled from scraps of poetry, dream journals and observations jotted down over the past 20 years. In addition to recording four studio albums, including 2014’s Polaris Prize-winning Animism, she is a painter and actress, performing in the 2009 short film Tungijuq. She speaks as if the book were a gamble, but Tagaq is basically a professional risk-taker. What Tagaq offers with Split Tooth is a still too rare glimpse of the inner lives of young people, particularly girls and women, living in northern and rural communities.

So, this is not a crossover artist memoir. 'I can’t drink until the book comes out because I don’t want to be interrupted physically, mentally or spiritually from anything that’s about to transpire. It’s protected by the fierceness – my gown, my makeup – and scaring away anxieties or pain. “I’ve had 17 years of wordless expression,” she explains, referring to the sensuous throat singing (“my weird ass music!”) that marks her as one of Canada’s rare renegades. The release of Split Tooth is just a few weeks away – after we speak, it will be longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize – and Tagaq is shook for the first time in forever. “I can’t wait until it’s minus 20.”Ī short while later we’re cooling down with booze-free spritzers.

“I don’t know why any Inuk would live here,” she says, joking – but not – and leaning in for an unapologetically damp hug. Tagaq stands in the doorway of the restaurant where we’ve met to discuss her first book, Split Tooth, and shakes off the heat, her body silhouetted against the sun-bleached street. It’s the first week of September and every single body in Toronto is soaked from yet another wave of humidity.

Split tooth tanya tagaq