Love Medicine

“With one blast it had taken out his insides. And that too made her throat ache, although she’d heard of worse things. It was that moment, that one moment, of realizing you were totally empty. He must have felt that. Sometimes, alone in her room in the dark, she thought she knew what it might be like.”

June thinks of a story she heard about a man who died by being blown up by a hose. This story situates June inside of her body, disembodying herself then re-claiming her corporeality. This reveals June’s body empathy and foreshadows the many layers between her psychology and body. It also reveals the traumas that surround June.

‘“Patient Abuse.’ There were two ways you could think of that title. One was obvious to a nursing student, and the other was obvious to a Kashpaw. Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis. When it broke out, it was almost a relief.”

Erdrich frequently uses metaphors throughout her narrative. Here, the resentment that characterizes Albertine’s relationship with her mother is compared to a disease that cannot be cured and is largely unseen. This extreme metaphor of “Patient Abuse” and hepatitis helps to depict the relationship between mother and daughter with honest brutality.

“Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished. The same color as water. Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time. Or at least it seemed that way to me. Grandma and the others were always hushing up the wild things he said or talking loudly over them. Maybe they were bored with his craziness, and then again maybe his mind blurted secrets from the past. If the last was true, sometimes I thought I understood.”

Grandpa’s suppressed knowledge of the past is a larger symbol of the silencing of Ojibwe histories throughout time. Whether his own mind holds his stories back, or his family keeps him from talking, a lineage and a history is lost within Grandpa’s silence. This silencing parallels the efforts of the Ojibwe to keep their heritage and culture alive within the fearful constraints of white supremacy.