Summary
Part 2 opens with the narrator speaking about altered states of consciousness and the trance-like states we enter into through movies, daydreams, or obsessions, and that to contact the spirit world, one must control the way they enter the state of being between waking and sleeping.
On the boat, Lisa recalls going to the graveyard with Mick and seeing a gravestone etched with “100” and a backwards F, which in reverse spells out “fool.” Her grandmother had told her “everything in the land of the dead is backwards.” She remembers Mick’s funeral and how his old friend Barry sings an honor song for him. At the afterparty, Aunt Trudy is very upset and is one of the only people who cries. Many people come up to Lisamarie and give her food. Barry asks Lisa to come outside while he smokes. Barry tells her about Mick’s conflictual relationship with his ex-wife, Cookie, who he met through A.I.M. We find out that Mick died by drowning in the ocean and being attacked by seals.
Aunt Trudy and Aunt Kate fight over who will get to keep Mick’s basketball trophies. There is a violent altercation at Trudy’s house when Josh tries to take some of the trophies for himself and Trudy and her drinking buddies try to fight Josh and his fishing crew. After this, Trudy and Tab get evicted and move to Vancouver. Lisamarie visits the Octopus Beds with Jimmy on Mick’s birthday. They make a fire and Lisa offers tobacco and plays an Elvis tape in his honor.
Lisamarie is driving with Ma-ma-oo on a logging road until they reach a wild spot. They walk around, getting covered with mud. She shows Lisa the root of a plant called oxasuli which she warns is a powerful medicine that can kill someone if they don’t offer it respect. They collect it and Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa to leave some by her windowsill to protect herself from ghosts. She takes some cedar branches and leaves the tree some tobacco, explaining to Lisa that when you take something, you have to give something in return. When Lisa asks what the tree spirits look like, she says that the spirit of the chief trees is a little man with red hair, which shocks Lisamarie.
She reveals to Ma-ma-oo that she has seen the little man and asks what it means. Ma-ma-oo says she has a gift, which her mother Gladys also has; something Lisa never knew about. Her mother always knew through dreams who would die next. This caused a lot of people to feel nervous, so she suppressed it. Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa that the little man is a guide, but not a reliable one. She also says those who practice “medicine” are mostly gone now, and that it is better not to practice it if one does not know what they are doing.
Shortly after Mick’s death, Lisamarie is at school and keeps being picked on by Frank, her former bully. During this time, she feels very “blank” and passes time just laying in bed. Other days, she runs around the village until her mother makes her stop. One night while her parents are out, Jimmy comes up with the idea to steal their father’s car, even though neither of them know how to drive. They get stopped by the police and brought home, where Lisamarie is yelled at by both her parents, who mistakenly think it was her idea.
Lisamarie goes berry-picking with her grandmother, who shares that she had a sister named Mimayus who died many years prior while out on sea during a whirlwind. Next, Lisa describes the anatomy of the heart in appreciation of the “complexity of this organ.” Back to the present on the boat, she craves a cigarette and her thoughts turn gloomy. She feels regret that she did not go with Jimmy and Josh when they took off on their boat.
She has a flashback to school when she was getting poor grades on her report card while Jimmy always made the honor roll. Lisa feels disillusioned in school where she has to read stories that have “nothing to do with her life.” Jimmy falls in with a circle of friends from his swim team and he and Lisa grow apart. When his friends come over, Lisa embarrasses him. One day she puts on a monkey mask and hides in Jimmy’s closet before his friends come over to scare them.
At school, Lisa feels exasperated with the shallow conversation of the other girls including her cousin Erica. The conflict escalates into a fight between Lisa and Erica on the school bus. Lisa reveals something embarrassing about Erica which leads to all the kids on the bus taunting her. This makes Lisa feel satisfied at first, but then she feels bad when she realizes how upset her cousin is. Starting from this moment Lisa becomes the most unpopular kid at school.
Lisa visits Ma-ma-oo and they make a cake and then take it out on the boat to the old graveyard. There, Ma-ma-oo points out the many family members buried there. They feed the cake to the fire and Ma-ma-oo asks Lisa about the trouble she has been having. They hear noises around them, which she says are just the ghosts of family. They talk about Mick, and Lisa questions if Ma-ma-oo even misses him, and she says she does, and that she cut off her hair when Mick died. This inspires Lisa to cut off her own hair, which takes away some of her grief.
Analysis
The opening scenes of “The Song of Your Breath” have Lisamarie speaking about the proper state of consciousness for contacting the dead, which foreshadows the pages to come. In this section, we find out that Mick has died, eaten by seals in the ocean, and we learn how his death has had a lasting effect on the psyche of Lisamarie. We see her suffer through losing the person she was closest to, who she felt more kinship towards then even her own parents.
In the Haisla worldview, when someone dies, they are not truly gone, but simply have moved on to another realm. Lisamarie knows this to be true through her own lived experiences; she has witnessed ghosts and “friends” like the little man who have shown her reality is not all that it seems to be. Right after Mick dies, Lisamarie has a fire ceremony for him with her brother Jimmy, who does not quite buy into the idea that Mick is somewhere on the other side to receive the offerings. This difference in perception of the world seems to push them farther and farther apart, until normal sibling rivalry become all-out war between the all-star Jimmy and the social outcast Lisamarie.
While she is with her grandmother, Lisamarie reveals her “gift” of sensing spirits, which introduces her to the fact that these “powers” are something that has been experienced throughout her maternal lineage. Suddenly we can understand why Lisa’s mother is somewhat resistant to anything otherworldly: she has tried to push this aspect of herself and her heritage away because it does not fit in with the Western lifestyle that she desperately wants. Lisamarie is thus left somewhat in the middle. She knows what she has experienced and also longs to commune with her passed uncle. But she also seems to have a mistrust for the spirit world and the way it snatches away her loved ones. She is not quite sure how to integrate her abilities into her life.
Like the oxasuli plant, the spirit beings have a dual nature: beneficial if approached with respect, but dangerous if approached foolishly. Through the events in this section, however, it is shown that Lisamarie already has a door open to the spirit world which means she will continue to be haunted until she acknowledges her powers and learns to use them wisely. As she becomes a young adult, she attracts more and more negativity in her life through bullying and being bullied, not quite wanting to conform to the expected behavior of the other girls yet not quite embracing the traditional ways either, either. She doesn’t know who she is, illustrated when she describes how she often feels numb and empty. Even at present, she is still reluctant to embrace her gifts, as can be seen when she chooses not to share a significant dream about Jimmy at the time he has gone missing.
When Lisamarie chooses to cut her hair as her Ma-ma-oo said she had done, we see she experiences a sense of wellness and healing after carrying grief for so long. The power of ceremony is emphasized throughout the novel, whether a fire offering or the placing of tobacco at cedar trees. These are actions which do not make a lot of sense to the rational mind but undoubtedly bring a degree of peace to Lisa and her grandmother as a means of giving respect to the ineffable.
There are snippets of poetic text which come as interludes between the more narrative-style telling of events. In one such section, Lisamarie portrays the intricacy of the human heart as an anatomical object. There are scientific-like description of this organ and the Lisa points out that the heart is not controlled by the brain, as it forms first in a developing embryo. Here it is emphasized the seeming split between the rational and the mystical; one can explain something with precise scientific detail, but the words do not give way to the spiritual purpose behind the functions. In the same way, Lisamarie’s close contact with love, death, and everything in between is not quite articulable in logical sequence, as reflected in the free association style of the story. She knows her experiences, but does not quite yet know the deeper meaning behind them.
