Teaching a Wound to Speak
Reviews
By Joe Koch
Consciousness craves meaning. We begin our lives looking for patterns, experiencing joy when we recognize them, battling frustration and disappointment where they elude us. The child who won’t stop asking why? challenges our patience because, by the time we reach adulthood, we’ve erected mental infrastructures to cope with the unpredictability of our world and the deeply unsettling aspects of our existence. Too many questions can open old wounds.
According to the established cosmic horror lore, some measure of denial is how we function without being paralyzed. We close our minds off to what we can’t control. Otherwise, we’d go mad.
Gently, and with the most careful language, Tiffany Morris suggests instead that we can’t stay sane—or survive—by turning away from the horror beyond comprehension that is climate change.
Rather than paralyzing readers with some bleak, overwhelming global doom scenario, her debut novella Green Fuse Burning softly, so softly—like a very shy child—asks questions. The questions are personal, implied, and psychologically resonant. While Morris’s book resists offering easy answers, it works its magic (I don’t use this word lightly; I’m almost certain Tiffany is part witch) through hallucinatory imagery and powerfully controlled prose, leading the reader on an internalized quest.
Morris gives us a small view of our global predicament through one woman’s eyes, at one particular pond, for the duration of one brief week. (This smallness is important. It renders the huge unthinkable threat palatable.) The woman is protagonist Rita Francis, a part Mi’kmaw artist stuck in a creative block, aching from the recent death of her father, and desperate to salvage a failing relationship with her partner Molly. Six of her paintings, described like standalone prose poems in the exhibition catalogue entries that precede each chapter and provide an epistolary framework for the novella, have been recovered from her residency cabin by the pond following Rita’s mysterious disappearance.
Although we’re told at the outset that Rita has gone missing, I’ll confess I quickly forgot this plot point on my first reading. My technical-writer brain kicked in and thought the book flawed for not giving the most brutish reader a “hook,” some mystery that promises later resolution and motivates them to keep reading. This may be my own failure. It may be because the narrative proper is so immediately engrossing. Or it may be because Rita is such a strong character that she continues to feel present even after her disappearance.
We meet Rita in the midst of an anxiety attack. On her first day at the unfamiliar cabin where she plans to complete a one week artist’s residency, she hears—or imagines—someone dumping a body in the swamp outside the cabin’s windows.
In any other typical cabin-in-the-woods story, objective details and explanations of this “inciting event” would form the bulk of the remaining narrative. But Morris has an entirely different design. She roots her story in the clichés of folk horror in order to challenge them. Further, she defies the Othering embedded in both folk horror and cosmic horror, writing not from the settler perspective, but from an older tradition informed by indigenous philosophy, and by incorporating a deeply personal feminine experience of horror.
Perception is often the question in horror. Who is the monster? Is this real or imaginary? If I hide under my blanket, nothing can hurt me, right? Rita, as an artist, is our vehicle of perception. We’re allowed no objectivity. Our immersion in her journey is thorough, leaving us subject to what may be her delusions. By employing this intense specificity in point of view, Morris creates a sort of quiet rhythm that gradually achieves more universal magnitude. I was often moved to tears while reading, reliving my own experiences with death as though the story had opened some internal eye.
Here’s where I should probably mention that Tiffany Morris is an award-nominated poet who only recently began writing fiction. This is her first work longer than a short story, although her poetry collections Havoc in Silence and Elegies for Rotting Stars also work with and elaborate upon sustained themes. She brings a poet’s precision to every word choice and packs luxurious layers of meaning into each descriptive passage. Often, single phrases, such as “She felt the knife-curve of his gaze slide over her,” and, “grief is just the animal experience of time” stopped me in my tracks. Without an excess of words, Morris offers the reader a wealth of language to dwell upon.
Language becomes both subject and praxis in Green Fuse Burning. Rita is disassociated from her heritage. She grew up “outside the rez” with a divorced mother, and thus knows only a few words of the Mi’kmaw language. Visually oriented, Rita has struggled—and failed—to retain enough words to feel as if she is part of the extended family gathered in her father’s hospital room and, later, at his funeral. We also learn that the reservation Rita briefly visited as a child was “a place where prayer could be shaped by any number of languages, few of which spoke to her own soul, or her life, or her memories.”
Memories “colonized by trauma” during her father’s hospitalization and death distance Rita even further from her heritage. Describing her father’s illness, the narrator tells us the “whole person she’d once loved disintegrated in front of her.” This, she goes to the cabin with her last tie to the Mi’kmaq community severed. While the typical cabin-in-the-woods protagonist invades a wilderness where they do not belong, Rita instead returns to land stolen from her by historical events, “this place of her ancestors” where “the violence of displacement mark[s] her.” Turning these genre tropes on their head, Morris effectively equates inner and outer worlds, the personal with the global, and past and present time.
As Rita explores the wilderness around the cabin, she accidentally cuts her hands on some mossy rocks. Morris devotes an entire chapter, entitled Un/wound and Un/wounding, to this incident. Suspense abates here if we approach the story as devourers of entertainment. As a fiction writer, I think about these things, choosing carefully (I hope) how much to demand of a reader, trying to gauge (or ignore) their tolerance for literary fugue. Although I was spellbound by the writing, I wondered if some readers might become lost here. But, in retrospect, Un/wound and Un/wounding sticks in my mind more than the wild, hallucinogenic scenes that build up to a transformational apotheosis later in the novella. Un/wound and Un/wounding holds the key to what Morris strives to achieve via her language, her invasion of Euro-centered horror, and her approach to didactic narrative.
Teaching through story is an ancient human art. It is not always synonymous with preaching or proselytizing, but more akin to bearing witness through a shared journey. Rita’s experience in Un/wound and Un/wounding, going deeper into her pain, portrays the wound or opening as an organ of perception. Bringing “the outside world’s deep greens into her body” and accepting “the infection of her mind” gives Rita renewed agency.
The wound or invasion turned inside out (the unwound) leaves the impression of a sort of wormhole, referencing temporal elasticity and embracing paradox. Healing does not happen through closing the wound, the narrative seems to suggest to this reviewer, but by letting it remain open. Even though Rita can’t halt linear time as it leads everything toward death, she can find a new language through the body—which is, after all, a thing made from the planet on which she lives. The connection between body and planet in Green Fuse Burning is simple, and yet profound. Or perhaps I should say it’s profoundly felt, making it easier for readers to grasp this horror beyond comprehension called climate change.
After the incident in the woods, Rita’s ready to paint again. Of her paintings, Morris writes: “The longer the viewer considers the piece, the more the canvas reveals.” Morris might as well be describing her own work. Single paragraphs dazzle. Faceted meanings and passions blend the green colors of lush verdant growth with the sordid greens of rotten stinking decay. Paradoxically contrasting and unifying images of life and death, past and present, inside and out, Morris invites us to savor the fullness bursting from the page without ever losing control as an author.
The strict boundaries that delimit madness from sanity are murky in Green Fuse Burning, like the boundary between ground and water in the swampy pond outside Rita’s cabin. Tenets of cosmic fear like loss of control, psychic or bodily invasion, and biological impurity have a different meaning and impact when seen as forms of unwounding. Awe functions more as a passageway than a final and debilitating assault. It’s exciting to read cosmic horror from authors who reclaim and alter the lore built on their historic exclusion from and misrepresentation within literature. In Green Fuse Burning, Morris’s language invades the established body of cosmic horror, wounds it, and strives to teach the genre a new way to speak.
Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Convulsive, and The Couvade, which received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination in 2019. His short fiction appears in publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Queer Book of Saints. Joe also co-edited the art horror anthology Stories of the Eye.
More Reviews