#tracey lindberg

[sadladypoetssociety]

Pictures swim together with memories like a slide show….Remembering them, re-remembering them, she wanders around the borders of her emotional ground zero, never quite approaching and never quite looking directly at it, hoping to find survivors of the place she ran away from.

Tracey Lindberg, Birdie

[volimetangere]

Tracey Lindberg, Birdie

Published in 2015, Birdie follows the eponymous character's journey from Alberta to BC, in which she travels through non-linear time to make sense of her experience of trauma. Birdie's healing through her spiritual journey is enabled by the presence of a mixture of chosen and biological family: Lola, Val, and Maggie.

The Intimacy of Recognition

At first, Lola seems like a white women who has a limited understanding of Indigenous women, as "Bernice did have to shame her into changing the name of her 'Happy Squaw Squares!' to brown sugar kisses" (9). However, Lola's moved by Bernice's vulnerability, and Lola develops a tenderness towards her that makes her question her own position in the world. Bernice's gaze takes Lola outside of herself. When Lola's spending time with The Whippets, a group of white women in their sixties, "she sees their cruelty and deplores the image in herself" (112). Under Bernice's gaze, Lola feels like she is "a different woman... quiet kindness and soft intelligence meets harsh observations and boiling wit" (112). The intimacy of recognition enables Lola to experience otherness--in both herself and Bernice, to the extent that she begins to feel motherly feelings towards Bernice. Their non-biological relationship has the intimacy of a family, especially when Lola tells Bernice to "go to bed" in Cree (55), momentarily bringing Bernice back to a home that she has always already lost.

Storytelling

When staying with Lola, Bernice has trouble talking, only having some "bad Cree" to work with, a sign of her experience of trauma and alienation from her biological family and Indigenous community. As a child, Bernice would tell "rich stories" (183), but eventually stories would have to be coaxed out of her. Her inability to tell stories--to bridge her internal world and the world outside of her--demonstrates the unresolved traumas she has experienced: the lack of love and attention, the brutality of sexual assault. Eventually, under Lola's care and among the presence of her Aunt Val and cousin Freda, Bernice is able to journey through the spiritual world in order to make sense of her past and present, moving towards the possibility of healing. At the end of the novel, she dreams up a recipe to offer to the Pimatisewin, a tree of life representing the kinship relations among people and obligations within these bonds. Her chosen and biological family helps her to assemble this offering, reinforcing their care for her. They enable her journey in the first place: 'The three women moving around her generate some sort of resistance that allows her to travel back and forth (Now and Then, Here and There) without much pain" (157). The presence of other women mitigate what Elaine Scarry conceptualizes as a pain that removes the possibility of language (4), making one's experience unshareable and removing the possibility of healing. But the women's gestures--their presences that hover around Birdie, offering her food, giving her their attention--manage to hold her in her unspeakable pain, enabling the conditions for her to reemerge and be ready to tell her story (250).

[opulentquotes]

She almost pondered it again on the way home in the cab but was struck with the loveliness of being alone with her thoughtlessness.

Birdie by Tracey Lindberg

[opulentquotes]

She found herself too visible in silence; exposed in the quiet of reflection.

Birdie by Tracey Lindberg

[a-reading-journal]

Incredible. So many reviews talked about the struggle of getting through the first section of this book but I found that it breezed along, only coming to a halt once the narration began shifting between the various women. It may have worked better if the book was divided into four parts. The dream sequences and storytelling bits were highlights. The only criticism that comes to mind is that a physical description of Birdie is given near the end that completely clashed with what I had imagined in the preceding 3/4 of the novel, and it would have been better to be given this information much earlier.

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

I just finally finished reading Birdie by Tracey Lindberg for my native feminisms class and it was so horrifically beautiful it gave me chest pains when I wasn’t close to tears. There were so many moments, mostly connected to mental illness, honestly, that Birdie experiences that I connected with and that’s what hurt but at the same time it’s so freeing to have them, like, legitimized in this book. I really, especially appreciated the community and over-importance of strong women in this novel. When the cover says “This is the novel Canada has been waiting for,” I absolutely understand that (even though, oops, I don’t live in Canada and never have, but knowing, however briefly, its history with its indigenous population, I totally get it). Even though it’s about Cree women (who I can’t, therefore, relate to by virtue of racial sameness) who are and have been, arguably, quite damaged, I absolutely fucking love and appreciate the way the women are still viewed as strong and enduring in spite of their traumas and how it almost seemed like they were stronger because of this. That is something that I know I’ve heard before about overcoming bad experiences but I have never witnessed it as reality in literary form. So…Tracey Lindberg has all of my respect, I mean, all of it. I’m just absolutely floored. (And still kinda crying, yes, hi.)

[canadianbooks]

Birdie by Tracey Lindberg

... from HarperCollins ...

Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from wounds of the past, informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions. Bernice Meetoos, a Cree woman, leaves her home in Northern Alberta following tragedy and travels to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, seeking to understand the messages from The Frugal Gourmet (one of the only television shows available on CBC North) that come to her in her dreams. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns, who played Jesse on The Beachcombers, because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Bernice heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers but they are not the ones she expected.

With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Bernice finds the strength to face the past and draw the lessons from her dreams that she was never fully taught in life. Part road trip, dream quest and travelogue, the novel touches on the universality of women's experience, regardless of culture or race.

Published in 2015.

[broadlycast]

“There is something about that summer, something stuck in her that she can’t quite figure out. Like a hint or a whisper, it gently sits in her mind while she steeps in her own disquiet on her mattress. The feeling that joins her in the still room is one of almost longing. Near aching. She becomes aware of her physical self because the emotions pain her.”

Tracey Lindberg in Birdie