Sanaaq

Sanaaq
is an atypical novel. Atypical like its author Mitiarjuk, an Inuk
1
from Nunavik (Arctic Quebec) who was illiterate in the sense of being unable to read or write the Roman letters that European languages use and that have recently been adopted for her language. Yet she is deservedly called a writer. She wrote over a thousand pages in syllabics â a kind of shorthand that Wesleyan missionaries created in the late nineteenth century to advance the conversion of the Canadian Cree Indians, who had no writing system of their own. The syllabic alphabet was then adapted by other missionaries to the Inuit language of present-day Nunavik and Nunavut. As new prayer books came into use, it spread quickly through imitation and learning.

Mitiarjuk never went to school. She nevertheless earned a PhD from McGill University in June 2000 for helping advance the teaching of Nunavik's Inuit language and culture. Her school was the world of her mother and related female elders, who taught the many tasks of women's traditional work. Less traditionally, her father taught her the secrets of hunting and other male tasks, having no sons and she being his oldest daughter. He was in poor health and often had to let her hunt wild game alone. Culturally and socially, she belonged to a “third sex”
2
(or gender), neither male nor female, which gradually made her a mediator between the men and women of her people and between different generations. Perhaps this explains her renowned creativity, as evidenced by the stone carvings that have earned her prestigious awards.

While not shirking the role of a devoted mother (later a grandmother) and wife, she always enjoyed taking part in the political and social debates of her community and even in academic debates, such as at several conferences organized by
Inuit Studies.
Occasionally, at seasonal camps she always enjoyed rounding out her diet by hunting seals or birds. She was valued by everyone in her home village, men and women alike, and became known far beyond the borders of Quebec and Canada. In 1977, Radio-Canada featured her in the TV series
Femmes d'aujourd'hui.
In 1999, the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation awarded her its national prize for excellence and, in 2001, UNESCO honoured her literary works at an international conference of Indigenous writers in Paris.

At the age of sixteen, she was courted by the best hunters of the local bands, being admired for her personal qualities and hunting prowess. The successful suitor was the youngest one. He agreed to live with her parents and take her place as the family's provider â contrary to the Inuit custom of the wife moving in with the husband's parents. She devoted the first years of her marriage to her children and husband, at times missing the hunting life. Yet she quickly came to the attention of the local Catholic missionaries, who were studying the Inuit language and translating their prayer books. Her dynamism and familiarity with the local culture made her a valuable assistant. She initially assisted Father Lucien Schneider, O.M.I., in producing his Inuit/French dictionary. She then worked with Father Robert Lechat, O.M.I., who wanted to improve his proficiency in the native language. He provided lined notebooks and asked her to write down sentences, in syllabics, that contained as many terms as possible from daily life. She started writing in her igloo or tent, while the children slept or when free from household chores. But this task grew wearisome. Letting her imagination roam, she created characters and described their fortunes and misfortunes over the different seasons. In short, she recounted the life of a small group of semi-nomadic Inuit families just before the first (Europeans) became established in the region. At twenty-two years of age, Mitiarjuk reinvented the novel, even though she had never read one.

This novel is atypical in more than one way. First, it reflects the author's initial task of transcribing as many terms and grammatical structures from her language as possible. The vocabulary is thus large (nearly 3,000 words) and highly redundant, as may be seen in the frequent use of synonyms. Second, the novel took almost twenty years to write, for several reasons. The first part covered a little over half of the final manuscript. It stopped at the beginning of episode 24 (The Legend of Lumaajuq) because the author had to leave for a long stay at a hospital in the South and then because Father Lechat had been transferred to Kuujjuaq (Fort Chimo). Father Joseph MÃ©eus, O.M.I., took over supervision of her work and about forty new pages were written, i.e., episodes 25 to 37. The novel continued to remain unfinished with her return to hospital and the transfer of Father MÃ©eus to another village. Mitiarjuk stopped writing for several years.

I met Father Lechat in January 1956 during my first stay in Arctic Quebec. He welcomed me to Kuujjuaq, offering the hospitality of his mission, and told me about the novel
Sanaaq.
In his hands was the first part, written in pencil with almost nothing crossed out or added. It had been transliterated into Roman letters, with the author's help, before he had left Kangirsujuaq, and had also been partially translated. But the spelling of the Inuit language had not yet been standardized and the imprecision of syllabic writing, the lack of punctuation, and the distance from the author made the job impossible for him to pursue. He read me some of the translation and my interest was aroused right away. It was not until 1961 that I finally met Mitiarjuk, during anthropological fieldwork at Kangirsujuaq. I convinced her to start writing again. The next year Father Lechat gave me his manuscript of
Sanaaq
so that I could work on it with Mitiarjuk. This literary work was now the focus of my PhD, the challenge being to make it available to the public. When Father MÃ©eus provided the other part of the manuscript, everything fell into place for what became the final novel.

With the support of Claude LÃ©vi-Strauss, who had been supervising my research from his Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale in Paris, I was given funding for an eighteen-month mission by the Centre national de la Recherche scientifique (France). I went to Kangirsujuaq in the spring of 1965 with a heavy agenda:

â¢ record Mitiarjuk reading the syllabic version of her manuscript, in order to transliterate it as precisely as possible into standard alphabetical spelling;
â¢ punctuate the text with her help;
â¢ work with her on a line-by-line translation;
â¢ check the transliteration and the translation with the village's new missionary, Father Jules Dion, O.M.I., who had offered me his assistance;
â¢ ask Mitiarjuk about any difficult passages we might come across;
â¢ record, transcribe, and translate her comments on the text;
â¢ go through the different activities in the novel and observe them in day-to-day Inuit life, to gain a better understanding;
â¢ photograph (or even shoot on 16-mm colour film) the technical operations described in the manuscript; and
â¢ identify the animal and plant species mentioned in the novel, etc.

These activities took me six years, including the time spent working with the author during the summers of 1967, 1968, and 1969. She completed episodes 24 and 38, and added six new ones, nearly sixty new pages, not to mention a sequel to the novel, now being transliterated and translated. In addition, nearly 500 pages of ethnographic commentary were written, transcribed, and translated and now await publication. Father Schneider agreed to read and revise my translations and transcriptions before retiring to Europe. Finally, in 1983 a publishing contract was signed with Mitiarjuk, who asked me to make the necessary arrangements for publication of her work, then in my hands. The first draft of
Sanaaq
was published by the Association Inuksiutiit (Quebec) with funding from Quebec's MinistÃ¨re des Affaires culturelles. It had been rewritten in standard syllabics from my alphabetical transliteration and was lavishly illustrated. While visiting Mitiarjuk in the spring of 1999, I was quite surprised to see the fifty author's copies she had received in 1984 carefully kept in a cupboard. She intended to have them passed on to her many descendants after her death.

This version may be found in all Inuit schools across northern Canada. It is now out of print.

Much remained to translate the manuscript for non-Inuit readers. There were many additions and the whole text needed the form and flow of a novel written for the average person. I again got to work and, with the assistance of the Avataq Cultural Institute and Canada's Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, this task dominated my life for much of the years 2000 to 2002. The enthusiasm of publisher Alain StankÃ© and his publishing team brought everything to fruition, and fifty years after being first written my French translation of this unique work was published (2002) and soon became a Canadian bestseller. This English edition of
Sanaaq
was translated by Peter Frost from the French version.

This novel lets us share the daily lives of Mitiarjuk's characters, with their seasonal activities and also the joys and pains of their life cycle. But it seems appropriate to inform the reader about certain aspects of this life story, using the very numerous comments that the author made to me during our many years of working closely together. I will thus deal with the form, the content, the historical and cultural context and, finally, the characters of this striking work of literature.

FORM AND STYLE

Mitiarjuk's style is brisk, fluid, and lively, with precise, detailed descriptions. This is all the more remarkable because she seldom reread her work and hardly ever corrected what she wrote. It must be said that the syllabic writing system, in its simplest form â the one used in
Sanaaq'
s manuscript â is really a kind of shorthand that can be written almost as fast as it can be read aloud. This fact, together with the oral manner of passing on traditional knowledge among the Inuit, may account for the great spontaneity of her writing and the importance given to direct speech. There are virtually no pages without at least one sentence in direct speech. This makes the writing so vivid that the novel seems at times to read like a film script. On another note, the sensorial intelligence of the Inuit is more developed than that of Western peoples. For them, the senses of hearing, sight, touch, and smell, combined with taste, are invaluable tools for hunting, sewing, and food preparation. Mitiarjuk has strewn her novel with expressions that evoke sounds: the crackling of a flame in an oil lamp or the dripping of water falling to the ground. One also comes across onomatopoeia: words like
tikkuu
for a gun going off or
sarvaq
for an object plunking into the water. There are many interjections to express feelings or the calls of animals. Finally, much use is made of children's language with its reduplication of syllables:
apaapa
(food),
uquuqu
(bird or sea animal), and
utuutu
(land animal).

Content and Implicit Surrounding Details

This novel may be read on several levels. First, one can focus on the action, the feelings, and the relationships between the characters, thereby gaining a mass of details on the Inuit culture and life of the past â and also on Inuit psychology, which is so inaccessible when one does not speak the language and does not know the sociocultural milieu. On this first level, too, slight variations are noticeable in the content of the episodes, depending on whether they were written for the missionaries or for the anthropologist. Some self-censorship by the author may be detected in the first two manuscripts collected by the Oblates, i.e., the first thirty-seven episodes. Mitiarjuk was a practising Catholic and in these episodes, through the utterances of Sanaaq, her heroine, she expresses moralizing judgments on the old beliefs, such as omens. She avoids any allusions to sex or to invisible beings, which appear in the rest of the novel. In episode 27, when describing the bone game, the author wrote after listing the different little bones: “There is still one whose name I don't dare give.” Questioned in 1965 about this omission, she confessed that the bone was an
utsulutuq
(figurine of a vulva), which she then added to her list. The second part of episode 24, interrupted by the author's hospitalization and completed later for the anthropologist, clearly shows a change in attitude, with a long development on mythology and beliefs. Furthermore, the last ten episodes address themes that are absent from the initial manuscripts, such as conjugal violence, sexual possession by incubus and succubus spirits, and sexual relations with
Qallunaat.

On a second level of textual understanding, which requires good knowledge of the Inuit milieu, there is a mass of implicit information that fleshes out the meaning of the text and that appears in the author's comments. It would have doubled the novel's volume had it been included.

A third level of interpretation of
Sanaaq
is harder to grasp. On the one hand, it deals with Mitiarjuk's personal life, i.e., the events and experiences that inspired or influenced her literary creation. On the other, it deals with the symbolism that is present in Inuit culture. This symbolism may be detected in the form of day-to-day objects, in the way different aspects of the human body and the natural environment are perceived, and in the Inuit terms that designate them. I will confine myself here to one example. When Mitiarjuk began to read aloud the first few lines of episode 9 of her manuscript, where Qalingu
is coming back from hunting in his
qajaq,
I was surprised to see her smile while reading the following passage: “Arnatuinnaq hauled the
qajaq
out of the water by pulling on its
usuujaq
(bow).” This term, as mentioned in the glossary, literally means “what looks like a penis.” I interrupted her and asked what was making her smile. She burst out laughing and told me the following story:

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