Page 178 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

When Lou’s father calls her by her formal name, Louise, on her tenth birthday, and tells

her not to be a pussy when she hesitates to skin a freshly killed rabbit, she crosses over

into an unwanted yet unavoidable womanhood. She is pulled out of childhood innocence

by what she see and senses around her: a fox who mourns for a relative whose remains

are tossed in her father’s outdoor bone cage, a man who leaves bruises on his wife and

frequents the taxidermy, the whole desperate and displaced violence and love that runs

between humans and animals. Louise begins to take revenge. She takes up cursing and

blessing and springs traps in the woods. When one of the hunters comes upon her in the

woods and takes out his deadly mix of longing and frustration on her body, she seeks

the old woman, Sophie Carson, who offers her refuge, wisdom and healing in the old

manner, with feathers and smoke and teachings from the elders.

These loosely interconnected stories have the internal complexity of Louise Erdrich, the

sharp tang of Linda Hogan, and the quirkiness of Leslie Marmon Silko, but Jamieson’s

voice is unique; her perspective is shifty-eyed, her language an irreverent mix of raw

emotion, probing intellect, soulful reflection and deep wisdom. In this work, Jamieson

issues her readers a passport into the invisible and unspoken realms of forgotten stories:

the human ones and also those of other-than-humans. Along with the passport, the only

thing required at the border crossing is an open mind, an open heart and a willingness to

be moved. The signpost warns, “Here is where history ends and the healing of deep

memory begins.”

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