A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
Written by Alicia Elliott
Published in 2019 by Penguin Random House Canada
The title of Alicia Elliott’s collection of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, comes from a conversation with her sister about the translation of the Mohawk words for depression, “wake’nikonhrèn:ton and wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on. A mind hanging by a thread, and a mind spread out on the ground.” Elliott’s debut is a remarkable series of creative nonfiction pieces that combine intimate personal storytelling with social commentary and historical analysis. She writes with brutal honesty and vulnerability about depression and anxiety, her mother’s bipolar disorder, becoming a mother as a teenager, surviving sexual assault, and poverty:
There’s a certain shame in learning about the food pyramid when you’re poor. Just like Canada’s nutrition survey in the 1960’s, teachers who preach the gospel of the food pyramid assume that if you’re eating unhealthily, you have a choice. That if you’re eating unhealthily, it’s entirely your fault. I felt this shame acutely when I was in high school. We had to track food for a few days in health class to measure our diet against what we were supposed to be eating according to the food pyramid. My diet, like the diets of so many poor and racialized families, consisted mostly of carbs, dairy, and fat. There was very little fibre, fruits, or vegetables. As I filled out the worksheets, I knew I was failing, that my family was failing. I lied to make myself seem healthier, adding tallies of fresh fruit and protein where really there was none. (pp. 101-102)
Her essays interweave personal experiences with critical questions about colonialism, capitalism, racism, intergenerational trauma, and genocide:
This is the exact tactic Canada has used on Indigenous people for hundreds of years. So many of our nations have been forcefully displaced, so many of our children stolen from our arms and placed in residential schools or, more recently, in the arms of overworked social workers and violent foster parents, as if white abuse could ever be better than indigenous love. These policies are not about what’s best for Indigenous peoples, despite repeated claims of faux concerns from government officials. These policies are about what’s best for Canada. They are the reason Indigenous peoples have control over only 0.02 percent of their original lands—a meagre amount that is still, according to some Canadians, too much. Canadian success has always depended upon Indigenous destruction. (p. 105)
In an interview with the Adroit Journal, Elliott describes one of her intentions for writing A Mind Spread Out on the Ground:
I find that it’s easy for people to turn away from abstract things like statistics, reports, etc. They don’t necessarily know what poverty and colonialism, for example, look like on an individual, day-to-day level. I wanted to make it comprehensible to those people by grounding these big abstract concepts and histories in concrete, personal detail. That often meant rooting these oppressions in the body, because that’s usually where we feel these systems of oppression most acutely. It’s not just in our minds; racism affects our bodies, our stress levels, our health. It’s a totally different, but more accurate way, of looking at oppression than the sorts of conversations we often see happening in the mainstream media.
Elliott describes the final essay of the collection, “Extraction Mentalities,” as “a participatory essay” where she directly addresses the reader with questions and includes space for readers to reflect and comment. Her final hope is:
I want the nations and communities we live in to stop holding individuals to different standards than they hold themselves to—to dismantle abuse and gaslighting at all levels, micro and macro.
I want you to feel safe being vulnerable.
I want us both to be safe being vulnerable. (p. 217)
Introducing the Author:
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Alicia Elliott’s essays deliver ‘gut punch’ to Canadian settler narratives