What about the sweetheart?: The “Different Shape” of Anishinabe Two Sisters Stories in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love

Even though she grew up off-reservation speaking English, and writes a novel, a European form, Louise Erdrich's work is informed and ordered by elements of Anishinabe as well as of German-American, Catholic, and Midwestern cultures. These elements tantalize non-Anishinabe readers by lending a different shape to her fiction, a shape that they can sense but cannot fully distinguish. In order to discern the different shape of her novels, readers must educate themselves about the Anishinabe background of the works. The meaning of Anishinabe storytelling relies on cultural knowledge through which the hearer fills in the blanks of the teller's "synechdochic omission[s]" (Kroeber 104-05). This transaction between speaker and listener is illustrated in the story of a white translator, Frederick Burton; his unnamed Anishinabe informant; and an Anishinabe song. Burton had been told by the informant that the song meant "I am out all night on the river seeking for my sweetheart," and had translated it into a song popular in the early part of this century. Later, however, he was informed of the literal translation, which is this: Throughout night I keep awake throughout night I keep awake upon a river I keep awake. (Kroeber 105) But what about the sweetheart?, Burton asked. His informant replied that the repetition of awake three times told the Anishinabe hearer all he or she needed to know. "Why does a man keep awake all night when he want to sleep?.... Only one reason. I go to find my sweetheart. The word is not there but we understand it" (Burton qtd. in Kroeber 105).(1) Like the traditional song with its invisible lover, Erdrich's novels contain knowledge, concepts, and characters that become apparent only when readers educate themselves in the Anishinabe culture that informs her works. Although she attended college and graduate school in writing and literature, Erdrich insists that a more primary influence on her novels is the practice of oral storytelling, because she grew up in a household where both Native and non-Native relatives told and still tell stories with great virtuosity (Wong interview 38-39). This oral influence is demonstrated formally in the episodic form of the novels and the fact that, as in traditional stories of the Anishinabe, the same characters evolve through many works (Schumacher interview 175-76). As in oral storytelling, the events of a story will sometimes be contradicted in its retelling by another narrator: no definitive version exists (Caldwell interview 67; Chavkin interview 224). As in the Nanabozho story cycle, stories continue "nose to tail" (Jones interview 4); sometimes characters dead in one tale live again in another story. For example, June Kashpaw dies in the opening scene of Love Medicine but appears as a ghost in The Bingo Palace; the scene of her death is retold from a different point of view as the opening of Tales of Burning Love. Sister Leopolda apparently dies in Love Medicine but appears as a centenarian in Tales of Burning Love. Formal features of oral narrative in Erdrich's work have been noted by Erdrich herself (Chavkin 4), Pittman, Rainwater, Ruppert, Schultz and others. In addition to formal features, however, Erdrich's work also draws on characters, plot patterns and relationships from traditional Anishinabe culture and mythology.(2) Specifically, stories about Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis, a polar pair of sisters in a cycle of stories commonly told by Anishinabe women, gives the reader a new perspective on the relationships between women that are central to Erdrich's novels. The relationship between these sisters has no close analogue in European American folklore and therefore lends a different shape to Erdrich's fiction. The metaphor of a "different shape" of relationships between women is derived from a key scene in Tales of Burning Love in which Eleanor and Dot, the "two sisters" of this novel, first meet. …