Memoirs of Trauma and Loss:
Eden Robinson and Helen Macdonald
Authors have used animals to convey themes, ideas, and emotions for millennia. In Native American writing, for example, animals are often used as symbols to transmit legends, myths, and values. The passing on of knowledge ensures that history, culture, and tradition are not forgotten. Story-telling teaches both the reader and the storyteller: they look into the past, present, and future to understand the information that must be preserved and transmitted. Two authors, in particular, have written memoirs of loss that use animals to represent the importance of passing on these lessons: their stories ensure that critical teachings will not be lost. In The Sasquatch at Home, author Eden Robinson uses the decline of the oolichan to represent the loss of her traditional Haisla territory, history, and culture. Helen Macdonald, an English author, uses the training of a juvenile goshawk in H is for Hawk to symbolize her metamorphosis through the loss of her father. The oolichan and the goshawk are representations of vital teachings and values that the world must perverse. By putting their stories to paper, Robinson and Macdonald ensure that their memoirs of loss are documented and transmitted, allowing for healing, regeneration, and growth.
Helen Macdonald: H is for Hawk
H is for Hawk is a perilous account of how Macdonald trains her goshawk to return to her, time and again, as Macdonald releases the bird into the England landscapes to hunt for rabbits, mice, and pheasants. This training takes immense trust on both the part of the hawk and the trainer. It also takes patience, perseverance, and tremendous dedication, and these are the values that are imbued into Macdonald as she recommits, day after day, to the training of her hawk. Macdonald shares that “Hawks cannot be punished. They would rather die than submit. Patience is my only weapon. . . It is an ordeal. I shall triumph” (Macdonald 81). She starts dreaming of hawks and where they might take her, for, in her grief, she is nowhere she wants to be: “I dreamed of the hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else. I wanted to follow it” (24). In a personal interview with Sanderson, Macdonald speaks of the person she becomes through training the hawk:
I had to learn things about life and love and death I didn’t know before. I was writing a primer for myself about how to deal with the dark days after my father died. About how you just have to wait, and be patient. And then eventually, you grow into a person that can bear it. (Sanderson)
Macdonald reveals the goshawk as a messenger; a harbinger of those vital life lessons that make people better, showing them how to be more human, more loving, more alive.
On her journey to the other side of grief, Macdonald discovers things about herself she can only learn with the goshawk by her side. The bird teaches Macdonald how to be wilder, how to let go of her comfortable domesticity and stretch out into the open spaces around her. The process commences from the start: “with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realized that everything was different . . . The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with the scent” (Macdonald 65). The hawk is fearful, and Macdonald must use food to win its trust before they can even go outdoors: “But the space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together” (67). By crossing the gulf together, Macdonald must enter into the mental space of the hawk: “The goal was to be motionless, the mind empty, the heart full of hope” (69). Derdeyn writes that Macdonald “does not adopt a puppy or a kitten. Domesticated animals would share a human world easily. In her dystopia, she chooses a feral animal that will initially contribute to this sense of the world as wilderness, distanced from human usurpers” (Derdeyn 776). Macdonald reveals the goshawk as a teacher, a guide that will allow Macdonald to access the parts of herself that were previously inaccessible.
The goshawk gives Macdonald a reason to keep going, a reason to hold her life together after her father dies. Training her hawk, Macdonald writes, “was a reassuringly familiar state of mind, meditative and careful and grave. For the first time in months my life had purpose” (Macdonald 69). This purpose is vital for her healing process; it gets her out of bed, and it gets her outdoors. Macdonald learns the traits she needs to get to the other side of loss: “I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything that I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life” (85). By acquiring the traits of hawk, Macdonald starts to morph into a new being: “I didn’t shrink and grow plumes like the Wart. . . But I was turning into a hawk all the same” (85).
As Macdonald becomes more like the hawk – wild, free, and clear-minded – a sense of her own humanity starts to return, and she realizes she was wrong; she does not fit into the hawk’s world after all (98). Derdeyn writes, “Macdonald turns back towards humanity—realizes her mental illness and reaches out for human help. It is in connecting back with the world in which humans are not all foes that her world comes back toward balance” (782). The goshawk takes Macdonald on a journey of discovery and healing through grief, while Macdonald takes the goshawk on its journey from juvenile bird to a focused hunter. Macdonald writes: “Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. . . I had thought my world was ending, but my hawk had saved me again, and all the terror was gone” (Macdonald 278). The relationship between hawk and trainer is utterly reciprocal, and Macdonald reveals the bird to be her unlikely and unintentional healer.
When her father dies, Macdonald loses a central focal point in her life. She needs a new reference for where to place her love. The recognition of “her” hawk occurs immediately upon seeing the goshawk for the first time; when she is offered the second hawk, Macdonald knows it is wrong: “I didn’t recognize her. This isn’t my hawk” (Macdonald 55). She goes against all decorum and etiquette and tells the hawk seller: “This is really awkward. . . But I really liked the first one. Do you think there’s any chance I could take that one instead?” (55). With her hawk in hand, Macdonald determines that she will train her bird with kindness and love and remembers the “fierce burst of love I’d felt on the quayside for a man who held a bird terrified by a world it couldn’t comprehend” (57). All of this love emanates from Macdonald’s heart, but she soon realizes it isn’t just for the breeder, White, or the goshawk: “It took me miles of gentle puzzling before I worked out that the love was about my father and me” (57). The goshawk becomes a representation for the creation of love inside all of us, how focusing our love on one specific point of reference can expand our love for all things around us.
Eden Robinson: The Sasquatch at Home
In traditional Haisla culture, the oolichan is a rich source of medicine, sustenance, and food preservation. In The Sasquatch at Home, Robinson writes that the oolichans are especially important because they arrive just in the nick of time, at the end of winter when other food sources are often depleted; oolichans do not just feed; they save lives (Robinson 17). Robinson reveals that oolichans are becoming endangered; runoff from paper mills and aluminum smelters are infecting the local rivers (20). As the fish disappear, so does the vital Haisla history. Kundoque writes that “I must go directly to oolichan camps and learn the old ways of my family and of my people. . . To share our stories and teachings with my children is to model how we can truly revive our old teachings” (Kundoque 21). Robinson uses the decline of the oolichan to symbolize the loss of traditional Haisla food and medicine and the corresponding loss of the rich history that the oolichan represents.
The oolichans in Robinson’s memoir also represent the loss of Native American knowledge. Without the oolichans to harvest, whole threads of Indigenous information are left behind: there is no more reason to teach the children how to fish, where or when to go, or how to render them. Robinson writes of an unsuccessful oolichan fishing trip with her father and how they ended up having to buy oolichan in a Wal-Mart parking lot: “Of course the fish are a concern, but it’s the traditions that go with the fish that are in real trouble” (Robinson 20). One of these critical traditions is the passing on of knowledge for future generations. Kundoque writes that “by knowing our personal stories we can regenerate our traditional Indigenous knowledge, we thus assert our Indigenous philosophy wherever we are!” (11). The very act of telling the story about the loss of oolichans becomes an integral part of the solution. Robinson writes of the importance of the stories her father shares with her: “I hate to think of thousands of years of tradition dying with my generation. If the oolichans don’t return to our rivers, we lose more than a species. We lose a connection with our history” (Robinson 22). These stories preserve her ancestral and personal identity and that of future generations, ensuring that the wealth of Native American knowledge imbuing the Haisla traditions are never lost.
The oolichans teach and offer vital life lessons on how to be a better human being. Robinson writes of the Haisla people still carrying on the annual oolichan fishing traditions: “At the mouth of the Kitlope river, the boats pause. Each person reaches over the side and, one by one, washes their face. They re-introduce themselves to the living land. They clear away the past so they can see with new eyes” (Robinson 17). These are lessons that cannot be properly replicated in modern society, as Robinson states with: “the irony of food fishing in the imperial era of McDonald’s” (22). There are critical components to successful oolichan fishing, such as effective timing, which demand learning patience and communication skills that are respectful and honorable (Kundoque 18). These lessons extend into other relationships: “The entire process of oolichan fishing included teaching respect, honor, modeling our relationship with the land, the importance of family, and community” (18). The fishing process teaches Haisla how to work together as a team: “For Haisla people, oolichan fishing generates this collective aspect throughout the community. There were traditional, specific roles for all family members (18). Robinson reveals the oolichans as great teachers, and like the goshawk, harbingers of vital lessons that teach humanity how to be kinder, gentler, and more collective.
Conclusion
The Sasquatch at Home and H is for Hawk are both memoirs of grief and loss. Robinson’s memoir on the repercussions of the decline of the oolichan teaches the importance of regenerating oolichan fishing, which not only heals the fish, rivers, and people, but also represents a regeneration of Haisla tradition, culture, and history. Macdonald’s memoir on her journey through grief and loss by training a goshawk is also a learning opportunity for the reader: the goshawk teaches patience, perseverance, love, and transformation. It isn’t just that these stories are opportunities to pass on important lessons, however, but that the very act of story-telling is a part of the lesson: story-telling puts the lessons to paper and ensures the transmission of their knowledge and wisdom to past, present, and future generations.
Works Cited
Derdeyn, LeeAnn. “Trauma and the Anthropocene: Fear and Loathing in Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 25, no. 4, Autumn 2018, pp. 767–785, 0-doi-org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/10.1093/isle/isy059
Kundoque, Jacquie G. “Reclaiming Haisla Ways: Remembering Oolichan Fishing.” Canadian Journal of Native Education, no. 1, 2008, pp. 11-23. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbl&AN=RN252432540&site=eds-live.
Macdonald, Helen. H is for Hawk. Grove Press, 2014.
Robinson, Eden. The Sasquatch at Home, Kindle ed., Canadian Literature Centre, 2012.
Sanderson, Caroline. “Helen Macdonald: Helen Macdonald Has Written a Deeply Moving Account about Her Relationship with a Goshawk and How It Enabled Her to Deal with the Pain of Losing Her Father.” The Bookseller, no. 5624, May 2014, p. 22. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsglr.A369461941&site=eds-live.