"Where the Maps Stopped": The Aesthetics of Borders in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks

Style, Spring, 1999 by Rita Ferrari

Because many of Erdrich's characters exist simultaneously inside and outside Native American culture, they embody the fluidity of identity that has come to epitomize so much postmodern self-conception. Gloria Anzaldua writes about the experience of growing up "between two cultures" (in her case, "the Mexican [with a heavy Indian influence] and the Anglo [as a member of a colonized people in our own territory]"), extending the ramifications of this experience by declaring,

[t]he psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (3)

To clarify, she explains, "Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition."(4) Erdrich makes this tenuous territory - a product of political, social, ideological forces - the substance of her fiction through a border aesthetics. Her negotiation of borders in her novels is a way not only of redrawing the boundaries of cultural representation, but of making the idea and image of the border or boundary problematic. "Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads," writes Anzaldua (87).

A telling image in Love Medicine suggests the poetic technique through which Erdrich engages representation and borders: Marie Lazarre recognizes that the convent to which she makes a pilgrimage as a young girl is disqualified from power because it has been put in the territory of the reservation, a place "[w]here the maps stopped" (45).(5) The maps to which Marie refers are those drawn by White culture; it is in the imaginative assertion of vision on the part of Erdrich's Native American characters that new maps begin.(6) These maps portray the intricacies of delineating in language the borders between the individual and culture, self and other, the visible and invisible, absence and presence, outside and inside. In the first section of Love Medicine Lipsha and Albertine, who are cousins, look at the Northern lights; Albertine says, "Everything seemed to be of one piece [...]. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it" (37). The image suggests a collapse of the boundary between the tangible and intangible, the past and the present, the individual and the collective, the collective and the universe. This poetically evocative sentiment has a pragmatic counterpart in the words of Nanapush, the elderly Anishinabe man who is one of Tracks's narrators, when he suggests that an act of aggression against him and his family by another tribal family has its roots not just in an act of sexual seduction, but in a complex of issues: "[T]his had to do with everything. The land purchase. Politics. Eli and Sophie" (113). Erdrich's aesthetic manipulation of borders also has to do with everything; she inscribes an aesthetic mapping of thoughts and memories in which harmonies and discordances are all of a piece. It is a world of entangled complexity. And every decision - from choosing how to handle land, to choosing a mate, to choosing words - is political.