Kaitlyn Purcell's ?bédayine

Reviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio

(Metatron Press, 2019)

A story of profound displacement and search of identity unravels in this collection of short stories and flash fiction by Kaitlyn Purcell, which is based on her personal experience of drug addiction. The protagonist, Ronnie, wishes to attain a more authentic self in a world that is hostile to her Indigenous background. She leaves her home, Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories at the border with Alberta, with her schoolfriend Thana. Thana initiates Ronnie into sex, alcohol and drugs in a rollercoaster kind of life in which intimacy mixes with sleeping rough, caring for each other and desolation. The narrative is a fragmented diary that tells their lives in moving poetic imagery occurring in a cruel and sometimes violent environment, where survival becomes tougher day by day.
 
The smell of decomposition and death haunts the town where they live; there is no running water, and families are torn apart by government regulations and by addiction to alcohol and other substances. The young girls wander about, lost and in love, dreaming of other worlds that might fulfil their desires and hopes, as well as their hunger for life. They head to Edmonton hoping to find a more exciting kind of life that can fill the emotional gaps of their past. The language adopted by the author reflects the fragmented and experimental quality of this narrative, both in terms of themes and syntax. It is “one-dream-inside-a-dream,” where episodes of assault and violation alternate with casual encounters, romantic descriptions and ecstasy induced by drugs.
 
Most of the narration is in the first person, involving the reader directly in Ronnie’s engaging and sometimes harrowing experiences: 

I wake up to the sounds of dogs barking and screeching. I go to the window, but it’s still dark out. I walk down the hallway to try and find our dog, Bebi, but the front door is open. The screeching gets louder, so I run outside. As I step out the screeching turns silent. I become surrounded in light. A wind grabs me. It feels like I’m falling through heavy air.

The two girls share a room in Edmonton, have jobs, and enjoy bus drives: “a bus of addicts,” looking for different realities or “the end of the world,” which, for them, means “a big change in your life.” But the world is a big question mark, a reality they wish to fall in love with, though artificially, with “little pink pills of ecstasy … stamped with a little heart or bumblebee.” The artificial bliss shakes their lives; they spend their nights at parties immersed in an anonymous crowd, isolated in their heaven. It is a loss of control that is pleasant and unpredictable at the same time, “a blur behind a blur,” a confusion that brings her to addiction in an endless search for happiness, which is both extreme bliss and carelessness. As she says, “I don’t care if I die”: 

Food becomes a distant memory. I begin to fall or black out at least once a day. I can’t bend down, can’t move too fast, fuck stairs (broke my toe the other day), and lying down makes it harder to get up. I’m walking and falling and falling and falling. My teeth are yellowing. The skin on my legs looks like old bananas.
 
A guy from work with a big rounded face and crinkled eyes says I need to stop. I need to put down the drugs. But I like to mash my brain.

This is an experiment she undergoes by testing herself and her capacity of survival, and, at the same time, she is unable to control it. It seems as if her innocence, her deprivation and her dreams cannot be fulfilled without experimenting with the dreadful unknown, a frightful underworld of blackouts, abuses and unconscious fears: 

quasi-stars penetrate the “Indian” i was. sky evolves into an inviting shadow. allow light to enter the third eye, brightening holistic. phantom of her words. denesuline: “the real people”. i don’t like thinking about the doubling of shadows as midnight approaches. the light bares healing stories.
                                                                 moving out of slum indigo.

At times she becomes sober, finds a job, has a stable relationship. Nevertheless, risk and adventure seem to be part of her being. Maybe it is her way of coping with her displaced roots in an endless search for rewarding alternatives that may give temporary happiness. Being “on fire” in a chaos that is provoked by drugs is a way to fall again into her familiar emptiness, but also an escape from a reality too hard to face. Being high is a hole she falls into, an illusion of fulfilment that grants her temporary emotional survival and, at the same time, dooms her to addiction, dependence, vulnerability and, eventually, death. Therefore, yearning for life and love paradoxically mixes with pain and death: 

“I love you,” he says. My hollow cheeks blush. The dealer that needs me. I need his drugs and to look into his pretty brown eyes. I keep wanting to get hit with feelings, to be deformed with ecstasy.
 
I like it when your heart seeps into your eyes; I like to see it bleed.

​Being in “ecstasy” is a state beyond reality, an extreme experience, sometimes painful though unequalled. The description of its effects is imaginative and effective; it combines a mixture of fear and pleasure: 

In the center of downtown, the lights grow brighter under the darkening sky, a parking sign flickers OPEN in neon green, thrusts against my eyes, digs deep into my brain. Lights that turn on and off inside the tall buildings strobe and swim though the summer air, lightening, darkening, pressing inside my frail skull –
 
Fuck this. Shit’s getting too real.

It is an experience that changes the mind and the body as well as her way of seeing, triggering a deformed vision of reality. It is an excruciating pain on the one hand, and a blissful experience on the other. Life and death, love and loss are investigated at the levels of both language and everyday experience. However, the protagonist’s state of displacement lacks the relationship with the environment and the land, which is denied by being an Indigenous person in the hostile city. This is clear in the episode narrated in “Sisters,” in which Ronnie is beaten by two Indigenous girls. Her dignity and the ritual of reciprocal respect is broken, and she descends deeper and deeper in a fallen reality that reduces her to nothing. Her teenaged adventure in the city becomes weird and dangerous. On her “first real Valentine’s Day date,” while she speaks of love and peace with her boyfriend, one of her friends is stabbed, and, in another episode at a party, she is verbally abused and almost raped. Thana saves her once again, helps her take a shower and get off drugs, at least temporarily. Nevertheless, Ronnie’s “philosophy” of loss and loneliness is the cause of her addiction, and, therefore, difficult to completely eradicate: 

Can anyone ever really know themselves? These people who say shit just to say that they said something – they never expose their insides. Their words are nothing, and their insides are a tree falling in a forest when nobody is around. Comfort is an illness, and I’m only alive if I spend my days in a moderate amount of pain. Or am I only alive if I’m in absolute chaos, and ecstasy?

The need to be high relates to being in pain, being torn apart, a condition that is simultaneously extreme and exciting. It gives an inner understanding, an alternative vision, the vision of the Third Eye that seems to be more authentic than the view proposed by “our deluded society.” She hits the bottom when she wakes up naked on a leather couch with an unknown guy beside her who sends her away with a $ 20 bill. She feels “[n]aked and nothing”: 

he left me crying by the river where i held the grass in my hands depression erupting; sick world sick men sick dicks sick fucks sick cops sick judges sick lawyers sick system a whole world left me

She is becoming a shadow, disappearing slowly, a ghost of herself, and she becomes aware that she needs to find a way back “to stitch together the fragments in my mind.” She has no land, no place to go. From her nothingness she needs to find a reason to survive, acknowledging her painful experience in a process of death and rebirth that brings her awareness of who she is.
 
A final Mahsi Cho in the afterword expresses the author’s thanks to her family and to the people who supported her and helped her “transform [her] grief into freedom,” and who helped create “spaces for Indigenous students to exist and thrive in the university.” ?bédayine is a distinctive achievement, both in terms of language and themes. It proposes a unique vision that questions identities and challenges social conventions that respond neither adequately nor effectively to people’s needs, marginalising minority groups and vulnerable people. Its strength is in the poetic quality of the narration and in its innovative imagery, which convey an enthralling, touching message with honesty and sensitivity.

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Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011. She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.

Visit her websites:
http://carlascarano.blogspot.com/
http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/