Living on the Borderlines by Melissa Michal (review)

Adeptly navigating between individual and collective traumas ("borderline" personalities due to imposed borders defying tribal autonomy …), Michal's work is distinctly poetic, poignant, and political. It traces the thin line between enough and not enough, and the subtle boundaries between people, especially those who love each other. With an impressive span of characters and tribal affiliations (sometimes reminiscent of Sherman Alexie's much acclaimed collection, Ten Little Indians), she portrays contemporary American Indian identities with irreverent humor and astute sensitivity: "Some white person's legend says that there's a white doe, a woman who jumps over the edge with her man and turns into a deer. Who does that? Certainly not a Seneca woman" ("The Crack in the Bridge," 140). Both Michal and Alexie universalize American Indian experiences, mocking and overturning stereotypes along the way. Michal has a particularly effective way of doing this, often not mentioning that her protagonists are Indian at all until well into the story. This is the literary Trojan Horse approach advocated by Monique Wittig, through which authors universalize the particular and through this make the Other, One.¹ By the time readers from the dominant group recognize the nature of the literary gift, the shifted identification has already crept inside their minds. Readers of any Indigenous identity, and particularly American Indians, may approach Borderlines as a work of healing, inspired (as the author states) from storytelling traditions. Trauma survivors will appreciate how accurately Michal depicts trauma's lingering effects on the body, mind, and spirit.

The thirteen stories included in the book vary in length and form. Often the evolution of more than one person is central, rather than an individualistic focus on a single protagonist. The use of sounds, short phrases, and exclamations, even outside of dialogue, heighten the perception of orality, of being told a story. The language, clean, straight, and forceful as a mountain stream, is at times delicately figurative: "The liquid trickled down her throat, burning in the way she liked, filled with her grandmother's choices" ("The Long Goodbye," 18). Indeed, food is often a theme with deeper meanings, for example the young protagonist Nala's rejection of fried bread: "Why do we make this? … It only carries pain, you know … We sell that stuff to white people at festivals, powwows. They eat our past. We didn't have that flour or lard before them or before the long trails" ("The Long Goodbye," 17). There is a poetic frugality to the descriptions; a little goes a long way, nothing wasted: "They weren't the kind of couple who finished each other's sentences. But thoughts they read by a simple gesture or look. A familiarity from years of listening when there were more words" ("The Carver and the Chilkat Weaver," 48). The woman of the couple described is white, but Michal has significantly given her the title "Chilkat Weaver" as she spent a lifetime with her husband's tribe, honoring traditions even while innovating together with her (carver) husband. Women traditionally do not make the designs for their weaving, but in a graceful dance, the couple work together. The everyday poetry of the couple's lives is by no means romanticized: the opening scene has this aging pair walking hand-in-hand down the cleaning supplies aisle. This story also characterizes the extended family (and her relationship with them) with a stroke that is sharp, bold, and true: "She told them, 'Don't bring anything.' They always did. They came bundled down with children and some type of food or paper product, making the tables multicolored and full of flavors" (58). Though each story is distinct, they seem to fall into three intertwined categories: trauma, poverty, and the living world.

Michal portrays the much neglected and misconstrued issue of trauma in the body at a time when many professionals still deny the impact of lived experience and provide chemical "cures" to the lived realities of trauma: "'What would you do if you were...