We are delighted to share an excerpt from “Lady with the big head chronicle” by Angélique Lalonde, which appears in our SPRAWL issue (58.3). When the editors were putting SPRAWL together, this captivating story was everything we dreamed would find its way to us, and to our readers. Read on for notes from Angélique about walking the land and listening for the stories of place, and pick up a copy of the issue to read the story in full.
“Lady with the big head chronicle” is a tricky story for me to write about in a straightforward way. There is a lot in there that I am still sensing my way through. It began to emerge in the months after my second child was born. When I was writing this story, I had very little time or space of mind to hold direction with my work, while also feeling a new project wanting to begin. The structure of the story emerged from that––segments that are connected but in a disjointed kind of way. I was severely sleep deprived and mourning the disruption of my connection with the more-than-human world outside––the time and presence spent quietly amidst voices that are hard to hear when other people are talking or needing you. The few moments I had to myself were immensely precious––a surreal state stolen to sit at my writing table or walk in the forest, trying to sift through the way the body navigates land truths as it births new stories into being.
I walk as an Indigenous person who has been dispossessed of land, language, and culture. I walk as a settler living on stolen land. Both of these things are true, so I have to think a lot about where I am and whose land I am on when I am walking. To consider in my hearing how stories interweave in place. The stories I know, the stories I know are missing (from my history, from telling about colonized lands), and how this shapes my being and knowing. How deeply embedded where I am is in the walking, knowing, and being of Gitxsan people. Stories that shaped this land into being and are shaped by this land into being. And the non-human voices that speak in ways that are so hard to hear when our minds are always busy with thinking they know what there is to be known.
Many of these stories are not mine to know––embedded in kinships of relationality between land and people in the ways they are passed on. But some are stories that can be shared.
In walking here I know there are also settler stories. A few generations, which is not as many as tens of thousands, but settler stories also root themselves in land. The home I live in, the ways settlers have tended in the ways they know how. The ways we live here that are so very harmful.
As descendants of settlers living on stolen land, we need to move our own story-making around so that we can learn how to learn the shared stories of the Indigenous peoples whose lands we live on. The stories Indigenous people are telling right now. Because how can we say we love the land when our love is allowed to flourish on the basis of legislated violence? When it is always saying, “shh, shh, shh.”
My table overlooks the garden, the greenhouse, the barn, the mountains beyond––mountains whose Gitxsan names I’m not given to know. Between here and the mountains is the Xsan (Skeena) River. I can’t see it, but I can hear it when the windows are open. One day when I sat at my desk the lady with the big head was out there tending my onions. And the next day she was doing something else. She started showing up doing all sorts of things and wanting me to write about them, so I did.
The lady with the big head was trying to help me understand about being here. About saying something and being quiet at the same time, or knowing the difference between those things. About how to hear my own ancestors when we have been severed from one another and from land by the same processes that brought me here to settle on Gitxsan lands. The lady with the big head is about sensing ways of being here, whether they make sense or not.
An excerpt from “Lady with the big head chronicle” (58.3 SPRAWL)
1. Lady with the big head in the garden
The lady with the big head is out there in the misty morning. Is she wearing a veil? What is she doing in my garden? The mist is sitting on the river, slightly spread over the land. I see the mountain beyond, and the lady with the big head stooped over my onions. Not like yesterday when the mist was so thick I wouldn’t have seen her if she were there.
Was she out there yesterday, picking calendula seeds to save for next season? She didn’t ask me if she could tend my garden while I am in the house doing other things. She’s never talked to me at all. She avoids me if I try to approach her, floating off into the mist or the memory of mist, then reappearing later doing different things in different places. I saw her digging at an anthill with the bear that has been hanging around our yard. She used a stick and the bear used her big broad paws.
The lady with the big head was helping the bear, or the bear was helping the lady with the big head, I’m not sure which. Either way they were digging up the anthill near the apple tree. I didn’t mind that. I had noticed the ants were in the sickly tree crawling all around and that probably was not a good sign, so maybe the lady with the big head and the bear were helping the apple tree too?
She might be taking some onions, or weeding, or eating slugs. I can’t tell exactly what she is doing because of the veil that hangs down from her big head over her body and drapes on the ground, hiding her movements. Also the light has not yet come, only a faint blueness and all that mist. I could offer her a hot tea but if I walk out there she’ll float away from me.
Later I’ll go look and see if she’s taken onions or left any knick-knacks. Once I found a golden spool of thread so strong, fine, and shiny, I knew it was magical. The kind of thread that could be used to build spider webs that are always visible no matter the light. Visible but still translucent, an ephemeral quality of there and not quite there, only gold instead of silver. It might be what she makes her veil out of, or at least what she uses to mend the veil, because now that I think of it the veil is not golden, it’s more of a purple-grey shadow. Sometimes she has it pulled back and I can almost make out her features as she goes about doing things ladies with big heads do. She looks a little bit like me and a little bit like Rod Stewart, which is an odd mix for a lady. A couple of times I’ve glimpsed her looking like my dog, John Black, who died last winter. She might have taken her skull from the forest where we left the dog’s body to use as a mask; it seems like something the lady with the big head would do.
Angélique Lalonde is the second eldest of four daughters. Her mother is Métis and her father is Québecois. She dwells on Gitxsan Territory in Northern British Columbia with her partner, two small children, and many non-human beings. Angélique holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Victoria. She is the recipient of the 2019 Journey Prize, has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, and was awarded an Emerging Writer’s residency at the Banff Centre. Angélique’s work has been published in PRISM international, the Journey Prize Anthology, Room, The Malahat Review, and Mom Egg Review. She is currently at work on a collection of short fiction, and a hybrid collection of essays and stories.