26 pages • 52 minutes read
Terese Marie MailhotHeart Berries
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Western Medicine Versus Traditional Healing
A prominent theme in Mailhot’s narrative is how the story of her mental illness is tied to her culture. As an indigenous woman, she struggles with the differences in cultural perception and treatment of mental illnesses that she experiences in the Western world. Mailhot’s view of her mental illness, as an inheritance to reconcile, is dramatically different from the Western idea, which focuses on symptom-management and medication.
The longest essay in this collection takes place in a psychiatric hospital. Mailhot writes about checking herself in: “I was signing a new treaty.” (18) Her use of the word treaty calls back the tortured history of Indian and American/Canadian relations. By calling her medical documentation a new treaty, she considers the colonial roots of Western medicine and hospitalization, and the dangers Western medicine poses for an Indian woman such as herself. Though the hospital is a healing space, it is also a dangerous space.
Mailhot recalls similar dark histories when she says in the same essay: “I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage.” (16) The thought of being locked away and forgotten as an indigenous woman living with a mental illness is not lost on her. She thinks of her ancestors’ stolen bones—in many ways, she is in a foreign space as a Native woman in an American hospital.
Mailhot’s alienation from her therapists and her diagnosis is ongoing. She struggles to explain to a White therapist how distance from her ancestral land and the mountains that give her power may be the cause of her spiritual and psychic pain. Mailhot tries to maintain her culture in the wake of a bipolar diagnosis, but struggles because she is the only person who sees her illness as “spiritual or inherited” (98).
Mailhot’s cultural alienation from the mental health community is an ongoing struggle in the text. She sees herself as crazy, but also recognizes the spiritual roots of her behavior. This dichotomy causes ongoing tension, as Mailhot tries to manage her illness while staying true to her heritage.
Love and Agency
Mailhot’s love affair with a White professor named Casey serves as one of the biggest points of tension in her memoir. Mailhot’s shifting perception of love, and her relationship to her own agency in the face of it, is at the root of her character development.
Mailhot writes early on: “When you loved me it was degrading.” (44) This is the foundation to her relationship to love—it degrades her sense of self. This is true for several reasons, but particularly because she gives herself up in the name of love. She finds validation in love and uses it as a tool to avoid the pain of internalized racism and trauma. Her degradation in love is further emphasized because her lover, Casey, is a White man who does not understand her mental illness or the struggles of being an indigenous woman. Casey sexualizes her, disrespects her, and makes her feel unworthy because of her bipolar disorder. Therefore, the degradation is on both sides—Mailhot degrades herself due to her low self-esteem, and her lover degrades her due to his inability to understand her suffering.
Mailhot struggles to find agency in love. She recalls an aunt who told her that giving a man her power was the root of pain. She knows that she gives Casey her power but feels consumed by her love for him. She gives up her agency most obviously when she allows her love for Casey to cause her harm and hides that pain from him: “I was polite enough, and considerate enough, to hurt myself like a secret.” (62) Hiding her pain from Casey for fear of his response represents her total loss of self. She struggles to heal in his presence.
As the memoir progresses, Mailhot finds ways to reclaim her sense of self. But ultimately, she finds her agency and power when she realizes that she can leave Casey. She tells a friend: “I guess I took him back to leave him” (103). In the realization that she can leave, she finds herself again. This discovery allows her to recognize the ways she can validate and rely on herself. The desire for validation she felt with Casey is nullified when he is no longer the idealized, romanticized lover from the beginning of her memoir.
Power of Narrative and Education
Mailhot writes about the power of storytelling at the beginning and end of her memoir and it serves as the spiritual center of her essays. Mailhot is a writer, and she reflects on the power of creating narrative in order to make sense of the world. She also understands, however, that story has a power much greater than her own. She begins the collection by telling Casey: “Story is inhuman and beyond me, and I’m not sure you ever recognized that” (6).
The supernatural nature of storytelling connects Mailhot to her indigenous culture, but it also allows her to rescind control of parts of her life. It allows her to have feelings she cannot convey, and experiences she cannot adequately express. This is something her mother taught her, and she acknowledges it in the final essay: “Language fails you and me. Some things are too large” (118). The enormity of story allows Mailhot to give up some of her control and acknowledge that while story is all-powerful, human language cannot totally convey all facets of experience.
We also see power in storytelling through Mailhot’s formal and academic education as she receives her MFA from the American Indian Institute of the Arts. At her graduation, Mailhot finds herself in the world of academia. Her language and perspective are respected in a way they never were earlier in her life. Mailhot’s intensive study of language gives her power because it allows her to prove herself in the Western world as a storyteller. While this kind of prestige isn’t necessary in her culture, where storytelling is shared and not hierarchical, she finds that after receiving her MFA, her story is finally valued. While before her story was “maltreated” (1), her pain is “more sophisticated” (115) after she graduates. It is the same story, but it is received differently.
The heart of Mailhot’s memoir is that storytelling is an inherently powerful act. Mailhot uses language to make sense of her life and process her love and her pain. By weaving cultures and memories, she finds herself represented on the page. In that representation, there is power.
