Haudenosaunee author Alicia Elliott at the offices of Penguin Random House Canada in Toronto on March 21, 2019.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
- Title: And Then She Fell
- Author: Alicia Elliott
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Doubleday Books
- Pages: 352
“I don’t know what’s going on. Because I do have a choice. The cockroach said as much.”
The mind of Alicia Elliott is a fascinating place to visit. You know where her interests lie but you never know what to expect.
Elliott is primarily known for her bestselling book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. In it, she mined her own personal life – the good and the bad – in a series of revealing and powerful essays that shed a light on her journey as an Indigenous woman in contemporary Canadian society. The book explored the continuing effects of personal, intergenerational and colonial traumas.
In this, her first novel, one gets the feeling she is doing much the same, shedding the light on the trials and tribulations of a Haudenosaunee woman from Six Nations named Alice. This time, the spotlight seems to be on what the Victorian writers would describe as her central character’s slow descent into madness. Contemporary society would prefer to call it a continuing battle with mental illness. Regardless, it’s a damn good read.
Alice’s journey through the looking glass begins when she is buffeted by waves of both good and bad news. She’s newly married (to a seemingly nice white guy named Steve), and freshly transferred from rez life to a very different suburban life. She’s a new mother, but her own mother has just died under unfortunate conditions. In the midst of this altering of everything she’s known, little things of an unusual nature begin to surface. It’s as fantastic as Wonderland, but the implications have a much darker edge.
For example, Alice has a conversation with Pocahontas from the Disney film, and eventually finds herself further confused by several non-traditional commentators on her life, from cockroaches to the houses that live along the residential street where life has placed her. This does not happen in normal Indigenous life.
A growing sense of paranoia emerges as this new world begins to turn her against everything and everyone she’s always held sacred and important. This culminates at one of the most middle-class events of the dominant culture: a dinner party.
Contemporary Indigenous literature, since the 1980s, has largely focused on the repercussions of colonization to First Nations people. Most of those stories written dealt with the doom, gloom and tragedy brought on by the attempted Canadianization of our people. Unfortunately there was a lot of source material available.
A lot of Elliott’s work does the same, but in her case, there’s a unique edge to it. There’s an ironic, almost humorous twist to the way she combines Alice’s situation and the gradual erosion that we witness. Like the previously mentioned Pocahontas, in full Disney regalia and angry about what Hollywood has done to her memory, who shows up early in the book to warn of a potentially bad and life-altering choice Alice is about to make. Split-level duplexes grow increasingly ominous (but who isn’t afraid of suburbia?). Amidst all this, Alice struggles to write a contemporary version of the Haudenosaunee Creation story but the question soon emerges: Is she writing the story, or is the story writing her?
Elliott’s smooth writing style makes all this seem … normal. Her ability to make such a difficult story – and a heartfelt one, with questions of parental obligation – recognizable is truly admirable. It’s not a pleasant book to read, nor an easy one. It is uncomfortable. One reason for this is that we’ve all done or experienced the things Alice endures. It’s familiar. It’s a path travelled. For instance, Alice runs into an ex-flame in public and then obsesses over how she may have physically appeared to them. Let ye who has not suffered this put the book down now.
But the landmarks of this journey are different. Logic is lost and we become victims to the different rules of Alice’s universe. She has friends and family. A strong support group. But as her condition grows worse, their distance from her universe increases. And our fascination with how Alice lurches from her Haudenosaunee teachings, to the ways of the dominant society, and finally to herself as an individual makes us turn page after page.
The climactic ending is unique. It makes sense, in its own anarchic way.
Being a critic in the Indigenous literary world can sometimes be difficult. You’re frequently urged to be supportive rather than critical. That is our way. It’s better to be positive than negative. With this book, it was quite easy.
But in all honesty, I did not like the cover.