Page 17 - GALIET BEING´S FLEUR: Eldrich IV

so much of death, had to squeeze so many stories in the corners of my brain” (Erdrich 46)
Nanapush’s vice 3⁄4 as bringer of tales, bringer of “tracks” 3⁄4 paradoxically serves to collapse his own communal narrative for in the end, despite his efforts to seek “remedies” for permanence through oral language, “linguistic divisions” within his community do arise: the community is irretrievably lost. Even Lulu’s return is problematic since she has also been “contaminated” by the innuendos of language (for she won’t call Fleur her mother). Consequently, not only the houses on the Anishinabe’s graveyards collapse but also the forest becomes suspended as “...fingered lobes of leaves floated on nothing. The powerful throats, the columns of trunks and splayed twigs, all substance was illusion...” (Erdrich 223) like Language’s illusions to name the unnamed. Language thus fails over and over again in trying to utter what is beyond utterance and trace: Fleur.
It is precisely in track-less-ness, in the “Dionisyan-like” flowing liquids of life and its embrace of woods and nature, where Fleur, idyllically, does dare dwell: she is infused with rawness and pre- lingual instincts. We are told 3⁄4 certainly (or uncertainly?) 3⁄4 how Fleur’s “green” dresses drape her, how Eli could feel “the smell (of her) dark green-smoked... hair” (Erdrich 106), how Misshepeshu, the man of Matchimanito’s Lake, appears with green eyes and how, Lulu, her daughter, is lovely and is endowed with verdant sight. Even Matchi-”manito,” a possibly bilingual name that insinuates in its Spanish’s “ito” 3⁄4 an endearing tenderness of a “‘man’s’sensual
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