Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings

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Author: Angela L. Cotten | Christa Davis Acampora

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Cultural Sites of Critical Insight

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Cultural Sites of Critical Insight Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings

Edited by Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2007 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384 Production by Judith Block Marketing by Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cultural sites of critical insight : philosophy, aesthetics, and African American and Native American women’s writing / edited by Angela L. Cotten, Christa Davis Acampora. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6979-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6980-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature— African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature— Indian authors—History and criticism. 3. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. African American women authors—Aesthetics. 5. Indian women authors—Aesthetics. 6. African American women in literature. 7. Indian women in literature. 8. Feminism in literature. I. Cotten, Angela L., 1968- II. Acampora, Christa Davis, 1967PS153.N5C85 2007 810.9’928708996073—dc22 2006009009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Angela’s two mothers— Mary Rogers Cotten and Martine Watson Brownley And to Christa’s grandmothers— Lillian, I wish I had known you, Stella, I am glad I did, and Ila James, I’m so very grateful I do.


Contents

I. INTRODUCTION

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ON THE “RES” AND IN THE “HOOD”: MAKING CULTURES, LEAVING LEGACIES Angela L. Cotten

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II. TRANSFORMATIVE AESTHETICS

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13

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SELF-HELP, INDIAN STYLE? PAULA GUNN ALLEN’S GRANDMOTHERS OF THE LIGHT, WOMANIST SELFRECOVERY, AND THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION AnaLouise Keating MAKING

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AWAKENING HERS: PHILLIS WHEATLEY AND THE TRANSPOSITION OF AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY TO CHRISTIAN RELIGIOSITY Elizabeth J. West

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“ANY WOMAN’S BLUES”: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS AND THE BLUES AESTHETIC Michael A. Antonucci

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THE

III. CRITICAL REVISIONS

15 16 17

THROUGH THE MIRROR: RE-SURFACING AND SELFARTICULATION IN LINDA HOGAN’S SOLAR STORMS Ellen L. Arnold

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THE RED-BLACK CENTER OF ALICE WALKER’S MERIDIAN: ASSERTING A CHEROKEE WOMANIST SENSIBILITY Barbara S. Tracy

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WOMANIST INTERVENTIONS Angela L. Cotten

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IN

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

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viii

CONTENTS

IV. RE(IN)FUSING FEMINISM

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19

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“BOTH THE LAW AND ITS TRANSGRESSION”: TONI MORRISON’S PARADISE AND “POST”–BLACK FEMINISM Noelle Morrissette

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LUCI TAPAHONSO’S “LEDA AND THE COWBOY”: A GYNOCRATIC, NAVAJO RESPONSE TO YEATS’S “LEDA AND THE SWAN” Maggie Romigh

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MOTHER TIMES TWO: A DOUBLE TAKE GYNOCENTRIC JUSTICE SONG Margot R. Reynolds

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ON A

REFERENCES

191

CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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Part I Introduction


1 On the “Res” and in the “Hood” Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies ANGELA L. COTTEN

Research in aesthetics and philosophy has generated insightful and thought-provoking criticism of literature as a site of aesthetic innovation, philosophical critique, and consciousness-raising. Yet, there is a noticeable dearth of criticism on the writings of African American and Native American women in these fields. These women’s cultural productions and social activism reflect carefully reasoned perspectives on dilemmas of the human condition, knowledge and truth, structure and agency, history, and ethics. They often draw on and rework philosophical systems and literary genres to convey fresh, new perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. This anthology features essays that use interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods to make works by (both contemporary and historical) African American and Native American women writers more accessible for critical consideration in aesthetics and philosophy. While the works of many writers featured here have been analyzed in other critical contexts, in this volume their productions are treated for innovations in aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. It is a matter of extending the scope of issues and interests treated in other critical fields and thus broadening our understanding of aesthetic and philosophical formations in Native American and African American women’s literary traditions. This compilation of essays provides multiple openings for exploring the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns that are mediated by sensitivity to the historical and cultural contexts of aesthetic values production. Some essays specifically provide a natural segue for discussions of value theory in aesthetics as they explore the continuities between cultural 3

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CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT

production and social and political theory. All contributors, moreover, make connections between aesthetic experience in everyday life and analyses of art and artistic appreciation in ways that facilitate discussions of aesthetic agency as it applies broadly to lived experience. The critical thrust of these women’s cultural productions engenders irony in challenging the western tradition’s most revered philosophies, as they deploy the same tools (discourse/language and artistic imagination) used by whites historically to rationalize the removal, enslavement, and extermination of Indians and Africans. Such resistance stands as a challenge to the claims of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury philosophers and scientists such as Immanuel Kant, George W. F. Hegel, David Hume, and Francis Bacon, who argued that the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas lacked any capacity for rational thought and aesthetic ingenuity. To white Europeans and Americans this meant that blacks and Indians were less than human—primitives, savages, or subhuman links between whites and animals in the Chain of Being—and thus exploitable as chattel slaves. Subsequent eugenics and social Darwinist discourses in the nineteenth century reinforced these mythologies of blacks and Indians and served to legitimize social policies of segregating them in ghettos and reservations and of sterilizing the women of childbearing age. The rise of Hollywood and the emergence of “salvage” anthropology in the early twentieth century spawned new racial images, including the “extinct” or “dying primitive,” to accompany the old racial mythologies in the American cultural imagination. It is within these discursive minefields of racialized negation that Africans, Indians, and their descendants have had to navigate and manipulate the written word in expressing their knowledge, spiritualities, and visions of beauty, truth, and eco-humanistic possibility. Native American and African American writings share a literary history of critical intervention in these discourses in ways that are insightful, ironic, playful, and transformative—for themselves, their communities, and the cultural traditions with which they engage. AFRICAN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CROSSBLOOD AESTHETICS This collection encourages comparative investigations of African American and Native American literature to explore aesthetic similarities and intersections between both cultures. In fact, evidence reveals that the contact and shared histories of these groups led to the generation of a

On the “Res” and in the “Hood”

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third, syncretic culture of African Native Americans, whose very existence poses problems and challenges for those seeking to study strictly one culture or the other. To read the essays gathered in this book is to begin to recognize what might be called crossblood literary aesthetics. The indigenous populations of the Americas and the Africans brought to America in the slave trade shared experiences of cultural dislocation and dispossession, enslavement, and exploitation. Together, many found common cause in resisting western imperialism. This led to the development of what have been termed “maroon societies.” In colonial America, contact with Indians for many Africans and African Americans occurred through fur trading and mining in which they served as guides and interpreters for whites dealing with Indians (Porter 1971). Maroon societies were composed of fugitive slaves (both Indian and African) from plantations and defiant tribes of the Americas and Caribbean basin (Price 1973). Three of the largest known maroon groups were the Seminoles of Florida, the Garinagus of Saint Vincent, and the Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. Others included the Seneca, Onodaga, Minisink, Powhatan, Chowan, and Susquehanna nations. They were often the sites of planned resistance and revolt against territorial expansion and white domination. Some indigenous nations also held slaves, such as the Cherokee, Creek/Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw (Littlefield 1979). The conditions of enslavement and treatment varied according to tribal law and tradition. Cherokee captivity of slaves took a more repressive character, approximating the structures of white southern slavery, than Creek/Seminole enslavement of blacks, for example, which resembled indentured servitude although with fewer restrictions and more individual rights (Littlefield 1977; Perdue 1979). Seminole maroons grew out of Creek enslavement of Africans and African Americans, some of whom also became allies in the Seminole struggle against removal policies. Maroon societies were particularly significant in fomenting the Cherokee slave uprising of 1842. Maroon societies and Indian enslavement of Africans are evidence of cultural mixing among Africans, people indigenous to the Americas, and their descendants, and of the formation of a syncretic African Native American culture. This historical intermingling confounds our attempt to theorize a black cultural tradition that is distinct from American indigenous cultural influences and vice versa. People of African and indigenous American descent intermarried and traded technology, food, clothing, and knowledge, among other things. They influenced one

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another’s language, ceremonial rituals, beliefs, and worldviews (Price 1973, 11–13). David Elton Gray, for example, considers how the rabbit trickster tales of both black and indigenous American oral traditions in the Southeast might be a product of mutual cultural influence: “Similar tales in different traditions that are in contact are likely to influence each other, creating new forms of the tales that do not have their origins in a single tradition” (2003, 104). Such cultural entwinement poses interesting questions for how scholars have conceived black and Native culture and identity, particularly when construed as discrete developments with little cross-cultural exchange. Archaeological evidence also suggests that the contact between indigenous Americans and Africans predated European colonization (Forbes 1993; Van Sertima 1976, 1992). Thus, the depths of African and indigenous American histories and the complexity of their cultures may be greater than our current knowledge reflects. If archaeological evidence points to cross-cultural interaction before contact with Europeans, how have African values and cultural practices been retained in the formation of African American culture? The work of Melville Herskovits (1958), John S. Mbiti (1970), and Albert Raboteau (1978) have brilliantly illuminated the ways in which African slaves and their descendants masked and preserved certain African values and customs in America. Yet, evidence about African Native American exchange before contact with Europeans raises speculation about what kind of African culture survived the Middle Passage in slave memory and culture. Are African slaves and their descendants the only bearers of cultural knowledge preserving precolonial Africanity in America? Or was some preservation also owing to an already existing network of cultural influence between Africans and Indians prior to the fifteenth century? Similar questions can be raised about Native cultures that survived conquest: How much of the culture has been influenced, not only by western/Anglo peoples, but also by Africans traveling to the Americas? These questions inevitably lead to methological considerations regarding the formation and use of interpretive frameworks, and how their objects of analysis are constituted.

Cultural exchange between Africans and indigenous Americans occurred in European and Caribbean contexts as well, as both were shipped to slave markets and plantations (Forbes 1993). Black Carib communities (composed of Ebo, Efik, Fon, Yoruba, and Fanti-Ashanti)


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and Island Caribs have been around since the early 1600s, migrating from Saint Vincent to other islands in the West Indies and Central America (Brennan 2003, 13–15). For example, the French shipped two hundred Natchez to Haiti in 1730, whose lives, interests, and cultures became intertwined with slaves from West Africa—mainly from the Dahomean region (13–15). Common beliefs in the power of ancestral spirits, herbal healing, and values of harmony and wholeness constituted a cultural lexicon of shared values and understanding among Indians and Africans outside North America—the remnants of which have survived in religions like Haitian voodoo.

By bringing together criticism on both African American and Native American women writers, this anthology encourages readers to explore similar literary aesthetics, philosophies, and expressive modalities, and to theorize points of overlap and continuity between these literary traditions. For example, AnaLouise Keating explores the broader horizon of Alice Walker’s womanist concept in Paula Gunn Allen’s work. She uses Walker’s term as a point of departure for explicating Allen’s writing on myth and the oral tradition, and shows how Allen’s work articulates an indigenous womanist aesthetic of self-recovery. Comparative investigations can open up new intertextual sites of analysis and lead to the formation of new critical tools to study African, African American, and Native American literature, thereby providing possibilities for reassessing writers of these traditions and discovering ways in which they signify on each other’s literary and oral traditions. This kind of signifying practice involves textual revision and rewriting of literary and oral traditions. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains that “this can be accomplished by the revision of tropes. This sort of Signifyin(g) tradition serves, if successful, to create a space for the revising text. It also alters fundamentally the way we read the tradition, by defining the relationship of the text at hand to the tradition. The revising text is written in the language of the tradition, employing its tropes, its rhetorical strategies, and its ostensible subject matter” (1988, 125). For a variety of reasons, such acts of signification have been critical for the women whose works and lives are considered in this volume. Many of the artists included here express frustration, insofar as they wish to embrace a cultural past from which they feel disconnected, and wish to tap into a sense of female empowerment that might be absent from contemporary characterizations of their cultural legacy. Jonathan Brennan observes the importance

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of reevaluating ethnically mixed writers who have been positioned in one tradition by critics who are not sensitive to writers’ mixed cultural heritages. “In order to really understand the tradition from which [ethnically mixed] writers create their works, one must also examine their parallel heritages without denying either one” (2002, 19). Alice Walker and Ann Plato are exemplary. Scholars have treated their works in African American cultural criticism, while simultaneously downplaying their Cherokee and Pequot cultural connections. Both Walker and Plato have demonstrated significant regard for Native Americans and their cultures in their works. Alice Walker embraces her Cherokee and African heritages, and Native American worldviews are apparent in most of her writings; yet, few scholars have explored their impact on her critical thought and imaginative productions. Except for Patricia Riley (2003), Madhu Dubey (1994), and Daniel Turner (1991), who explore this angle, most scholars working on Alice Walker have glossed over the importance of indigenous ways of life to concentrate instead on her development as a writer and activist. Barb Tracy of this anthology suggests, however, that full appreciation of Walker’s works cannot be had without analyzing her oeuvre for indigenous values and worldviews. Certainly, the emergence of environmentalist concerns in Walker’s writings was underwritten (in part) by her appreciation for Native ethics regarding the land-earth and its underlying ontology of humans as inextricably connected to the natural world. Her critique of the African American appropriation of Christianity, moreover, is informed by more than by a Marxian suspicion of religion as an opiate of the masses. It is also supported by the ecohumanistic and life-affirming beliefs of certain Native cosmologies. Cherokee, Lakota, and los indios de Mexico figure importantly in Walker’s second novel, Meridian (1976), which explores historical (including genealogical) connections between Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans and makes a case for the vital role of Native spirituality, ancestral traditions, and sacred places in blacks’ struggles for justice. Her fourth novel, Temple of My Familiar, also explores the possibility of Indian-African cultural exchange before the fifteenth century and foregrounds many similarities between the two peoples. Scholars position nineteenth-century writer, Ann Plato, in the African American literary tradition. Although she was of African Pequot descent (Brennan 2003), critics tend to downplay her Native heritage (in favor of an African American racial identity) and any influ-


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ence it might have had on her writing. Because there is little information about Plato’s life, scholars like Kenny J. Williams, who wrote the introduction to her productions in the Shomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers Series, must rely on her writings for biographical information. Plato’s poem, “The Natives of America,” hints at her Pequot cultural background and raises questions about how it might have affected her conception of nature, death, and the oral tradition. In his overview of Plato’s life and in the mention of her poem, however, Williams does not discuss Plato’s invocation of her Pequot father’s spirit to tell the poetic persona the story of their people’s demise. Informing readers of how to interpret the poem, Williams displaces the reference to Native suffering with the plight of blacks: “In some ways and with some obvious changes, the ‘cruel oppression’ suffered by the Indians could be transferred to the subjugated blacks” (1988, xlix). But isn’t the whole poem (and not only one stanza) really about Indians? Frances Smith Foster does a similar elision in Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892, but she (at least) allows that Plato might have been referring to both Africans and Native Americans (1993, 20). Both critics assume that Plato was thoroughly Christianized and do not explore how some of her writing might be concerned with Pequot/Native American issues and might express certain indigenous values of nature, human beings, and orality. Calling on her Indian father’s spirit to tell the story of their tribe’s demise might be more than a poetic device by Plato. It might suggest something about the impact of Plato’s African and Pequot background on her work: namely, that she might have embraced ancestral spirits and the mythic and oral tradition. Such beliefs, in turn, may reflect a more cyclic ontology in which death is viewed as a transitional passage into another state or form of being, instead of as the finitude of consciousness. The poem also recalls Native life before the conquistadors, when harmonious, cooperative relations with the land were possible. Plato’s paternal spirit presents an idyllic scene that figures his people as an inextricable part of the land along with the buffalo, mountains, and prairies. For many indigenous peoples, their place of origin is a fundamental layer of identity, and losing connection to the land is akin to social and spiritual death. The poem closes on a pessimistic note with the spirit mourning the loss of place and the crisis of identity and meaning for his (now dispersed) people. Plato figures place and ancestral

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proximity in ways that should stimulate explication of her work for indigenous American influences rather than eclipsing part of her heritage with another. New sites of intertextual analysis and interpretive tools also open up possibilities for theorizing African Native American literary aesthetics and philosophies that are constituted not only by writers of dual African Native American identity, but also by writers of singular cultural heritage who signify on African American and Native American traditions. Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Nettie Jones are just a few writers who signify on both literary traditions. Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1992) treats the interwoven histories of blacks and Indians and recounts the geographical displacement and settlement of African slaves among indigenous peoples of the Americas. She explores similar cosmologies, mythic and oral traditions, and concepts of time and land-place of Africans and indigenous tribes. For her, cultural commonalities and centuries of comingling and intermarriage bind Africans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples in a larger common (and cosmically constituted) destiny of international uprisings. The black Indian character, Clinton, a figure connecting historical memory to a transnational revolution of tribal consciousness, is a testament to this history of red and black (erased but not silenced) crossings. Other characters in the novel such as the Hopi Indian, travel around the world meeting with other tribal peoples and planning international revolts. The groups share similar spiritual lexicons regarding the roles of serpent gods (Da or Damballah, Odoun, and Quetzalcoatl), prophecy, and ancestral power. For Silko, people of African and indigenous American descent are connected, not only through a shared history of white/western oppression and cultural similarities, but also by larger, unseen forces and cosmic entities. Other historical black writers, such as Zora Neal Hurston, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, John Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano, wrote about Native Americans in their works (Young 2002). Indians first began appearing in captivity, criminal, and slave narratives written by blacks in the colonial period. Representations of Indians in the works of Africans like John Marrant and Olaudah Equiano were notably different from those of whites writing in these genres. Besides the sense of shared struggle against white tyranny that united many blacks with Indians, similar cultural practices and beliefs also contributed to a sense of fellowship between them. Concerning the Mosquitos and his own Ido background, for example, Equiano recalls that “a few times they


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offered to cut some trees down in order to build us houses which they did exactly like Africans; by the joint labor of men, women, and children . . . I do not recollect them to have any more than two wives. They accompanied their husbands when they came to our dwelling, and . . . then always squatted down behind their husbands” as in Ibo customs (Young 2002, 31). Olivia Ward Bush-Banks was a prolific poet, playwright, and essayist of the Harlem Renaissance who affirmed both her Montauk and African American heritage in her work. She maintained close connections with her Montauk origins after moving to Harlem, where she attended tribal ceremonies in traditional dress and composed a script, Indian Trails, or Trail of the Montauk, which portrays Montauk culture and life as it is and makes no apology for Native existence in America (Guillaume 1991). In the twentieth century, black newspapers and periodicals reported Indian resistance—especially the American Indian Movement’s recapturing of Wounded Knee—to galvanize the black protest. Rhetorical ingenuity in black journalism allowed journalists to interrogate the dominant culture’s version of history and dispel racist myths of indigenous peoples (Gourgey 2001). Indians were often referred to as “first Americans,” which deconstructed ideologies of Manifest Destiny and honored indigenous peoples as preexisting settlers. As the century and struggle for justice wore on, black newspapers increasingly employed the trope of memory to link black power to Native American insurrection. The web of concern woven by African American and Native American writers for the fate of each other’s peoples and correlative appreciation for each other’s literary and oral traditions is a crossblood tradition. We draw on Sharon P. Holland’s notion of “crossblood identity” to underscore the parameters and dynamics by which this tradition is constituted. Crossblood identity differs from multiracial categorization as construed (and arguably constructed) by the U.S. Census Bureau. Holland’s concept recognizes choice of cultural alliance and appreciation as the primary value of crossblood identities when written proof of heritage is inaccessible. To identify as crossblood, in fact, is “to read the ‘racial’ categories on the U.S. census as bogus and to consistently cross the borders of ideological containment” (2003, 259). As explored above, some African American and Native American women writers’ alliance with and appreciation for one another’s cultures confound our attempts to draw sharp distinctions between literary/oral and other cultural traditions. Regardless of their racial and ethnic identifications, these writers demonstrate that literary and cultural borders

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between these peoples are more porous and fluid than critics (other than Jonathan Brennan [2002, 2003] and Sharon Holland [2003]) have theorized. Crossblood aesthetics refers to both the textual practices of (self-identified) African Native American writers like Alice Walker and Nettie Jones and of writing that explores cultural connections and interactions between people of African and indigenous American descent like Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich. Mapping crossblood literary aesthetics between African Americans and Native Americans reveals the syncretic, dialogical character of their cultural formation, exchange, and development in American history, which critics of literature and philosophy have elided. Many essays in this volume integrate traditional disciplinary methods to formulate unique interdisciplinary interpretive frameworks for decoding the multiple levels of complex cultural play between Native and black writers in America, and pave the way for innovative hermeneutic possibilities for making a crossblood literary aesthetic and tradition more apparent. Jonathan Brennan stresses that attending to differences within these traditions is also important (2003, 34–45). Issues of genre, historical period, language, and regional cultural differences play a significant role in understanding the composition, structure, direction, flow, and authorial intention of texts—both oral and written. This volume provides an opening to theorizing crossblood aesthetics by bringing together criticism on African American and Native American writings for critical comparisons. Myth, ritual, linguistic ingenuity, storytelling/oral traditions, and the transgression of conventional literary genres are typical features of both African American and Native American women’s literature and poetry. Indigenous and black American writers often share beliefs in the concept of identity as relational and myth as ritual-processional and in continuity and fluidity between flesh and spirit, mind and body, individual and society. Exploration of mixed-race subjectivity and problematization of hegemonic racial categories and civil rights protest are also features of African American and Native American literature. Issues of belonging and roaming are common to both traditions and their innovations. For example, in this collection, AnaLouise Keating observes that for black and Native writers, recovery from personal/individual and historical/collective trauma extends to social responsibility: personal transformation engenders and encourages outward efforts for more extensive social change. Individual and communal survival is interdependent and mutually sustaining rather than oppositional and strained by different interests. The com-


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monalities explored here constitute points of analysis for a crossblood literary aesthetic and for its philosophical underpinnings of African American and Native American textual practice, including conceptions of nature, human beings, community, social totality, time, history, art, and beauty. CROSS-FERTILIZING U.S. ETHNOCRITICAL AND POSTCOLONIAL INTERPRETIVE PARADIGMS Cultural Sites of Critical Insight also encourages readers to draw on postcolonial literary theory while exploring the criticism on Native American and African American writings in this collection. The meaning and parameters of postcoloniality have been outlined by several scholars. In this study we combine multiple definitions of the postcolonial as a reference to the complex, multilayered matrix of economic, political, social, and ideological structures of formally colonized peoples, and the current global financial institutions and neoconservative economic programs that undermine their struggles for sovereignty and self-possession (Singh and Schmidt 2000; Dirlik 1997; During 1987). Postcolonial also refers to writing that contests the trauma and legacies of colonial domination and offers alternative visions of rebuilding culture from the ruins (Ania Loomba 1998; Fawzia and Seshadri-Crooks 2000). Such projects usually entail rediscovering cultural practices and values and oral traditions that existed prior to colonial conquest, and/or inventing new ones of self-affirmation and cultural pride that lie outside Eurocentric cultural norms. To qualify here, we are not proposing a postcolonial categorization of African American and Native American literature, for technically, North American Indians have never been granted formal sovereignty and have, since conquest, been subjected to the rule of the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican governments. They have never regained sovereign control over stolen ancestral lands. (See Arnold Krupat [2000] for a discussion of this issue.) While this may be the case, postcolonial literary theory nonetheless offers a rich depth of hermeneutic concepts, which may illuminate certain (heretofore inconceivable) dimensions and features of Native American literatures. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt observe several areas of commonality between U.S. ethnic, cultural, and postcolonial critical discourses: deconstructing the politics of whiteness and its genealogy, explicating the complexly constituted subjectivities of “Third World” women of color, and theorizing

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transnational/diasporic traversals and connections (Singh and Schmidt 2000; see also Madsen 1999 and Owens 1998). They also believe that interpretive paradigms of U.S. cultural studies are enriched by the employment of postcolonial concepts to explore ethnic American cultural productions. Drawing on a conception of borders as “internal stratification within an ethnicity or a nation and the ways in which cultural differences may be used to define transnational connections and tensions” (2000, 7), Singh and Schmidt offer an example: Consider the idea of borders as applied to Native Americans in their interactions with others and with themselves. There are over 500 recognized Native Americans within the U.S. alone, with many registered members who do not reside exclusively on a “reservation”; in what ways must our current understanding of all the above terms be revised or discarded when Native American cultural production is viewed as central? Or to what degree may the necessity of borders and transnational emphases be truly confirmed—especially when debates about “authenticity” and identity and who may claim to speak on behalf of tribal communities have such huge consequences? (2000, 42) There are several areas of overlap in the conditions of African Americans and postcolonial peoples, the cultural productions of African American and postcolonial writers and artists, and the critical discourses engaging them. While African Americans did not endure territorial colonization like Native Americans, Africans, Southeast Asian and Australian aborigines, to name a few, they nonetheless experienced internal colonization that included forced migration and dispossession, slavery and economic exploitation, cultural repression, political disenfranchisement, and genocide (Singh and Schmidt 2000, 20). It is more difficult to pinpoint a historical date of formal independence for African Americans than for Nigerians, Kenyans, Hindus, Algerians, and Philippines, for example. Does the Emancipation Proclamation and end of slavery constitute the beginning of African American postcoloniality? Or do the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles? Whichever the case, scholars observe how systemic oppression and structural violence against African Americans share similarities with colonial oppression of peoples outside the U.S. (Fleischmann 2000; Singh and Schmidt 2000; Han 2004; Locke 1997; Du Bois [1903] 1996).


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Black and Native writers who take up their peoples’ struggles in their works share with many postcolonial writers several commonalities of narrative and rhetorical strategy, ideological affinity, and aesthetic creativity. Both give voice to the suffering of their peoples brought by European modernity, like the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, world war and military occupation, the neoconservative New World Order, and so on. Many also explore the conditions of racial/ethnic liberation, wanting to heal the peoples’ spirit by countering racist stereotypes with more humanizing images. The Signifyin’ Monkey is the master trope of tropes of African American discourse. Like much of the black vernacular theorized by Gates, it derives from the Yoruban tradition of Esu-Elegba, mythic figures of writing, speaking, and interpretation that survivved the Middle Passage and informed much of African Diaspora expression. While Esu refers to textual discourse, the Monkey has also evolved (by way of the Afro-Cuban figure of guije) to mean the rhetorical strategies of textual composition. Taken together, these figures manifest as satire, parody, irony, double-voicedness, magical realism, indeterminacy, ambiguity, chance, and uncertainty, to name a few. Chinua Achebe has discussed aspects of his own writing along similar lines (Williams and Chrisman 1994). The hybrid modalities of such texts force a rethinking of Eurocentric/western literary standards as the norm for measuring and appreciating the literary aesthetics of other cultures. Tensions between nationalist and coalitionist approaches to liberation, which are explored in both anticolonial and postcolonial writings, also appear in the African American literary tradition. These are just a few of the similarities between African American and postcolonial literature. We encourage readers to think about the writings of black American women authors discussed in this volume in a comparative postcolonial framework, mapping areas of aesthetic, ideological, and philosophical continuity and difference between African American and postcolonial literary traditions. Postcolonial, Native American, and African American literary criticism all seek to uncover the rich literary histories of their people (usually originating in mythic and oral traditions) that existed before European imperialism. Scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ann DuCille, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby and Michael Awkward (among others) have contributed to the unveiling of a black American literary tradition and the establishment of a critical discourse on African American literary aesthetics. Some of these uniquely African American inno-

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vations include the black vernacular, blues matrix, call and response (such as in the black church and blues traditions) and riffing (in the melodic progressions of jazz improvisation). Double-voicedness is another feature of this tradition in which tension between the written (Esu) and the oral (the Monkey) is played out in texts like Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Oscillation between oral and written voices and first and third person narration in this novel highlight the play between Esu and the Monkey that characterizes much black literature in the Diaspora. At the same time, this discourse interrogates the hegemony of white/western metaphysics and standards of literary appreciation in the explication of both African American and white/western literature. African American literary criticism is as concerned with reading (and deconstructing) white/western literature for its “racial” constitution (Morrison 1992) as demonstrating the creative genius of black writers. Postcolonial cultural criticism has also contributed to this end. The work of Homi Babbha and Giyatry Spivak is representative. Homi Bhabha’s work explores Orientalism for its hegemonic control over colonial peoples, as well as its generative possibilities of opening seams of anti-colonial resistance. Concepts such as “hybridity” and “third space,” for example, emerged from his work on postcolonial cultures, which highlights the dialectic of human agency in discursive and non-discursive practices of colonial subjugation, and has contributed to the development of subaltern studies. These concepts foreground the subject’s instability, yet, also allow for appreciation of its creative ingenuity through cultural production. Gayatri Spivak’s speculations on the subaltern explore how speech-agency of the postcolonial subject is always interpolated, determined, and appropriated by hegemonic discursive positions and practices before its arrival. What postcolonial critics also share with black American literary scholars is the appropriation of western methods of philosophical and literary critique such as structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, which, for better, has enhanced the critical scope and evaluative depth of investigative projects in the field. It is worth noting, however, that both African American and postcolonial criticism also have come under fire for uncritically integrating western systems of thought that are disconnected from the existential realities of black masses and complicitous with neocolonial regimes of power and knowledge (Ahmed 1992; Adell 2000; Boyd 2000; Awkward 1995; DuCille 1994). In keeping with the black vernacular’s appreciation of language as


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inventive and manipulatable, the texts as polyvalent and performative, and of meaning as open-ended, we have allowed authors leeway to use language creatively in their analyses. For example some contributors capitalize “Black” while others use the lower case designation “black.” Still, others mainly prefer African American over “black/Black.” Noelle Morrissette’s approach to the significance of Toni Morrison’s works for Black feminist literary criticism resembles certain readings of Native American and African American literature for their postdeparture from nationalist aesthetics and ideology to a more transnational vision. Tracing textual aporias and contradictions that characterize Morrison’s love for the indeterminacy of language, Morrissette shows how the novel articulates a “post–Black feminist practice that is both critical of its own processes and creative beyond its own named limits and terms.” This “post” for Black feminism, she observes, “marks more than a departure from the 1970s moment that initiated the theoretical parameters of Black feminist criticism. It encompasses the global experience of colonialism and the self-consciousness of form that defines the post-modern . . . not just national in scope, but global; not “pure” but fluid and complex, both person and context.” In “Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature,” Arnold Krupat uses Anthony Appiah’s topology of African novels to characterize Native literature on a continuum of ideological themes (2000). Works published in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Scott Mamaday’s A House Made of Dawn (1968) and Silko’s Ceremony (1977), are written in realist modes and espouse values of nationalism and the return to tradition. Narrative tones are usually nostalgic yearnings for (and the privileging of) ancient ways over modernization. Changes in narrative modes—from realist to postrealist—and ideology begin emerging in Indian novels produced in the 1980s, according to Krupat, so that Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994) did not so much authorize a “return to tradition, as, instead, the necessity of writing, of producing tradition and community” and “shows a move to memory and language as important in the maintenance of tradition” (2000, 86). He reads Silko’s Almanac of the Dead as an example of postrealist and postnativist writing that champions transnational solidarity over nationalist sentiment and enacts an “anti-imperial translation.” Her use of south-to-north/north-to-south directionality for temporal movement in the novel displaces the trope of historical progress in east-west/westeast movement that celebrates western cultures as superior over others.

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In addition to subverting such narratives and resisting the violence of translating an oral tradition into writing, I would argue, Silko’s use of this direction entails a deeper ironic reversal of western epistemologies. She encircles (and enfolds) the Hegelian dialectical pattern of history within a larger Mayan prophesy (or cosmic history) unfolding according to a cyclic pattern of birth-death regeneration. This casts European history as merely one stage among others in the development of worlds as forecast by the ancient almanacs. Thus, Europeans who had pronounced Indians and Africans as being mere children (because of their oral cultures) in comparison to themselves as accomplished scientists and artists, are now revealed by Silko to be children with merely rudimentary knowledge of the whole. Other commonalities include foregrounding the limitations of western aesthetic norms and exploring the relationship between place, vision, and cultural dislocation in Native identity formation. An important motif of Native writing is how separation from ancestral lands wreaks havoc on multiple levels, including the personal through loss of identity (or sense of belonging to a place) and lack of visionary guidance. Like many others’ experiences of imperialism and colonialism, Indians’ forced (or involuntary) migrations, enslavement, and ecological exploitation have combined to affect an identity crisis and alienation of vision. “Land and people are interdependent,” explains Simon Ortiz. “In fact,” he continues, “they are one and the same essential matter of Existence” (1998, xii). In contemporary Native American literature, Robert M. Nelson observes that “whoever wishes either to recover or to sustain a healthy state of existence, then, must enter into some working identity not only with the cultural tradition, but also with a particular landscape” (1997, 267). Recovery usually occurs in a circular plot structure called “honing in” in which the alienated protagonist wanders away from home, encounters visions and/or supernatural entities of personally transforming significance, and returns to the community reinvigorated by a sense of purpose and direction (Moser 1997, 286–87). As in many postcolonial literatures, mythic and oral traditions are instrumental to this narrative movement. They “depict, assert, and confirm the natural evolvement—or the origin and emergence—of Native people from the boundless creative energy of the universe,” and remind us “that we have always lived here . . . as lands and waters and all elements of Creation” before our human forms (Ortiz 1998, xiii–xiv).


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CRITICAL SCOPE This collection is divided into three main sections, “Transformative Aesthetics,” “Critical Revisions,” and “Re(in)fusing Feminism.” These groupings are organized by analytical focus and are meant to be helpful in offering schemes for making cross-cultural connections and comparative considerations of black and Native American women’s writing. Each section contains essays on work by at least one writer of each cultural tradition. Readers will invariably encounter many other connections between the writers and cultures besides those most apparent in focus. For example, although the poetry of Luci Tapahonso and Phillis Wheatley are discussed with different interpretive emphases and are thus located in different parts of this collection, for example, they are nonetheless connected by certain poetic practices. Both treat written poetics as ritualistic or ceremonial calls. Wheatley’s eulogies are (written) enactments of certain African rituals of celebrating the dead and death. Tapahonso infuses poetic verse with the Navajo oral tradition so that each reading of her poetry initiates ceremonial healing and restoration. Emphasis on cultural recovery, healing, and wholeness connect Ellen Arnold’s reading of Linda Hogan’s work in “Critical Revisions” and AnaLouise Keating’s analysis of Paula Gunn Allen’s aesthetics of self-recovery in “Transformative Aesthetics.” The womancentered politics of womanism, black feminism, and gynocentric culture are also discussed. Part II. Transformative Aesthetics Contributers to “Transformative Aesthetics” read Native American and African American women’s literature and poetry to identify the creation of new literary and poetic forms, motifs, and techniques that testify to unique experiences, visions of human possibility, self-recovery, and spiritual celebration. AnaLouise Keating uses a policitized conception of aesthetics in showing how Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light (1991) draws on the oral traditions of “gynocratic” (woman-centered) tribal cultures as guides or ritual maps of self-renewal and healing for which Keating coins the term “womanist self-recovery.” Typical of Native tribal storytelling traditions, Allen’s concept of self-recovery spirals outwardly in ever-widening circles that connect the self to family,

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tribe, ancestors, nature, the cosmos, and the Great Mysterious. Keating identifies six forms of “outward movement” of healing toward wholeness in Allen’s emphasis on storytelling and initiates a long overdue discussion of the philosophical and aesthetic import of Native American women’s writing. Belief in the performative power of thought and language in stories to affect healing at the individual, collective, and global levels is a cultural value that Allen shares with the other Native American and African American writers explored here. Keating explains that Allen’s project sets readers on a journey of personal self-transformation that, founded on the metaphysics of interconnectedness, extends outwardly to embrace family, community, land, and cosmos in a larger web of healing and restoration. Keating’s exploration of how Allen uses mythic and oral traditions in a performance aesthetic of self-renewal foregrounds the differences of indigenous epistemologies from western metaphysics. Allen’s project is “transcultural” in that it celebrates a number of spiritual disciplines and oral traditions and enables us to formulate complex systems of empowering knowledge and alternative, holistic modes of perception without eliding cultural particularities. In doing so, Keating points out, Allen redefines Enlightenment concepts of the universal and the subject in more “expansive, open-ended terms” that are founded on “the metaphysics of interconnectedness,” which “posits a cosmic, fluid spirit or force . . . manifest[ing] itself as material and nonmaterial forms.” Keating continues with the pragmatic potential of Allen’s project for healing and wholeness on the personal, communal, global, and cosmic levels. In fact, this project is similar to others by Alice Walker and Patricia Hill Collins, both of whom Keating also identifies as part of the womanist self-recovery tradition. She draws on Walker’s womanism as a point of departure to show how Allen’s writing articulates an indigenous womanist aesthetic of self-recovery. Keating’s insights about the conceptual continuities between African American and Native American women’s visions and activism encourage a rethinking of womanism as a cross-cultural web of creativity and critique spun by many writers outside African American literary traditions. Whereas Keating concentrates on the transformative aesthetics of Native mythic and oral traditions, Michael Antonucci examines the blues poetics of Sherley Anne Williams, whose work has yet to be fully appreciated for its critical contributions to the discourse on black music and culture. Focusing on her Peacock Poems, he shows how she creates


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a unique aesthetic blend of cathartic self-expression, historical testifying, and social critique. By incorporating certain features and practices of the blues aesthetic (such as the black vernacular, syncopated cadences, improvisation and appropriation, call-and-response, riffing, repetition and difference), Williams bends written poetics into an oral/aural medium of rendering the concrete texture of black women’s lives as they work, love, daily confront challenges in the world, and look toward a better day tomorrow. In this respect, Williams is part of a poetic tradition that includes Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Amari Baraka, to name a few, who incorporated blues idiom in their poetry. Antonucci argues that Williams’s call-and-response tribute to the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, should be “understood as transposing a blues-rooted conversation about poetics into a poetic conversation about the blues.” By the same token, Williams’s poetic blues or bluesy poetics recast black women’s classic blues as a “toolkit of survival” and self-transformation. Like Angela Davis and Hazel Carby, Antonucci makes a strong case for seeing (and hearing) black women’s classic blues as something more than a folk medium of sorrow and hopelessness. Language has always played a significant role in black and Native Americans’ sense of self and cultural identity. Many Indians were forced to assimilate in boarding schools and resettlement houses by the U.S. government, and the slave trade cut most Africans off from their land and culture. These circumstances conspired against blacks and Indians from developing a healthy sense of self, particularly since the English lexicon was used to offer only negative valuation of Africanity and indigeneity as savage, irrational, and subhuman. Hence, acquiring proficiency in the English language, while liberating in the sense that it provided a certain social access, also carried the risk of becoming ensnared in an ideological minefield of racial and ethnic negations and cultural shame. Many Native American and African American writers adeptly navigated the journey, circumventing racism and producing literature that affirms their black and red selves while preserving significant parts of their culture. According to Elizabeth West, this is the case with Phillis Wheatley, an African slave in colonial America who drew on the vocabulary of evangelical Christianity and Roman and Greek mythology in her poetry to preserve African spiritual values. Wheatley draws on both neoclassic aesthetics and the religious discourse of the Great Awakening for negotiating and preserving an African self and worldview in a white western cosmology that was (and

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continues to be) antagonistic to blackness and Africanity. West shows how the conflation of memory with spirit and the repetition of sun imagery and elegy in Wheatley’s oeuvre indicate cultural preservation of certain African values regarding nature and being. Some scholars have interpreted Wheatley’s poetry as an acquiescence to western values and a negation of blackness, but she defies the view of Africans held by Hume, Kant, and Hegel by privileging her own African conception of memory as spirit and grace over the western conception of it as a repertoire of past events. The intricately interwoven relationship between nature, humanity, and God in her poetry echoes the metaphysics of interconnectedness in Paula Gunn Allen’s work as identified by Keating. Repetitions of sun imagery and elegies in Wheatley’s corpus of writings also signal her transposition of African customs and values relating to the cycle of life and death and project a view of (human) beings that differs radically from her lettered contemporaries of philosophy. Wheatley’s poetics, West observes, cloak the Christian God in an African conception of the sun as divine being, and thus preserve animistic emphasis on nature as an inspirited manifestation of the divine principle. Repetitions of the continuity between death and the lifegiving sun, moreover, point to an African understanding of death as a transition “to a new life medium.” Part III. Critical Revisions Essays in “Critical Revisions” explore African American and Native American women’s writings for their innovative and insightful revisions of varying literary and critical traditions. Here, subalterns are shown to speak back critically to proponents of psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism and inscribe their own subjectivity in these critical traditions. Drawing on African and Native American cultural traditions, they also retell their peoples’ history to inspire a vision of black and red coalition struggle. Ellen Arnold reads Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms as signifying on ecofeminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic discourses of individual, cultural, and ecological recovery. In this reinsertion, Arnold explains, Hogan seeks to “heal the wounds of conquest by deconstructing the discourses that serve colonial interests and ‘indigenizing’ them.” To indigenize them is to “rewrite them within more complex contexts that include tribal worldviews,” but in ways that do not replicate the binary classifi-


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catory schemes of western culture. Hogan presents the journey of personal recovery and reintegration from the viewpoint of First Nations’ peoples in Canada (who merely haunt the margins of Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing) and thus brings to life vital indigenous worlds and living traditions that are silenced in Surfacing. Arnold shows that Hogan challenges western conceptions of subjectivity and language, as well as the epistemological and ontological systems on which they rest, making apparent the complex matrix of interconnected relations between humans and the natural world and between signs and their referents that Surfacing and Lacanian psychoanalysis ultimately deny. Hogan also challenges some of Jacques Lacan’s writings on recovering psychic wholeness. Unlike him, she believes that language severs humans from original contiguous relations with creation by virtue of induction into the symbolic, but it also can be a portal through which humans can reconnect with the natural world and experience original unity. For Hogan, violence and alienation are spawned by the broken covenant, originating in abstraction, between cooperative living and mutual regard between humans and the natural world. The oral tradition heals and can return us to this covenant, however. Through storytelling, both Arnold and Hogan explain that “the author ‘puts together’ a disconnected life through a step-by-step process of visualization,’ a ‘seeing’ that enables character and reader ‘to understand the dynamic interrelatedness in which all things exist and which heals’. By ‘unify[ing] the inner and the outer’, stories help humans rediscover the ability to see into the abyss between signifier and signified and thus remake the covenant that binds word to world.” The multiple levels of healing in the novel depend on extending the power of signification to the natural world and recognizing that all beings inhabiting it are co-constructive of the world. Arnold observes that “Angel thus comes to see through her image as an isolated, fragmented victim of history and split identity to an image of herself as whole and in process.” Barbara Tracy and Angela Cotten explore how Alice Walker’s second novel Meridian signifies on the Cherokee-Lakota cultural and Marxian critical traditions respectively. Drawing on different interpretive paradigms and literary, oral, and critical traditions, these essays present two entirely different, yet compatible, readings of the same novel—even of some of the same passages. This underscores the extent to which texts are polyvocal—composed of multiple strains of meaning—and how interpretive foci constitute their objects. Interpretations

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of Walker’s writings tend to stress her connections to the African American literary tradition and overlook her complex African Cherokee identity and how it manifests in her productions. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Christian, and Mary Helen Washington have emphasized Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) as a revision of Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Barb Tracy opens a new interpretive angle in this discussion by showing how Walker’s Meridian signifies on John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks ([1932] 1992) and the story of Wild Boy in the Cherokee oral tradition. Walker writes from all her cultural heritages (Anglo, Cherokee, and African American) and treats the overlapping histories and interwoven genealogies of African Americans and Native Americans in much of her writing. Applying tools of Native cultural criticism, Tracy sheds a spotlight on objects of literary analyses that have not heretofore been explored in Walker’s writings and provides a new reading of previously examined themes. The land is sacred and significant for Walker: transformative and retentive of the people’s history. Angela Cotten explores Alice Walker’s critique of Karl Marx’s method of historical materialism in Meridian and contextualizes her womanist philosophy within the black radical tradition. Like the Native American cultural expressions in Walker’s writings, philosophical systems of thought have also remained an unexamined area of her oeuvre. Studying philosophy at Sarah Lawrence was a formative experience for Walker, and she takes up several issues in existentialism and Marxism in regards to blacks’ and Indians’ situation in America. Cotten shows how Walker uses literature to identify problems in some of Marx’s ideas of revolutionary struggle, including the diagnostic capacity of historical materialism as a critical tool, the role of the lumpenproletariat, the dialectical character of racial ideology, and the conception of power in terms of capital. What emerges is a compelling argument for revising historical materialism so that it reflects how capitalism (in conjunction with racism) has shaped class struggles differently in America than in Europe and thus created conditions of systemic oppression that Marx could not have anticipated. Part IV. Re(in)fusing Feminism Historically, Native and African American women’s relationship to white/western feminists has been both productive and problematic. On the one hand, they have worked together to achieve substantive gains


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for women, poor people, and people of color, especially in the 1960s and 1970s social protests era. On the other hand, Native American and African American women’s skepticism of feminism is born out of several factors, including white women’s reluctance to wage an all-out attack against the racist capitalist patriarchy from which they (in part) benefit. Additionally, many women of color find feminism’s nearly exclusive focus on gender and sexuality too narrow for the myriad problems of racial and ethnic domination, colonialism structural violence, and poverty, and position themselves in more culturally appropriate traditions such as womanism and gynocentric ideals. Many women of color reject the narrow focus of much feminism by (ironically) infusing their writing with their own ideas about language and literature, social struggle, and wholeness. None of the next three writers discussed in this section have identified with feminism or called themselves feminists. Yet, their works have been read for woman-centered themes and insights for various schools of feminist thought. Toni Morrison distances herself from feminism and resists categorization of her work in either racial or gendered terms. Despite this, however, Morrissette observes that her work has been read for feminist values and aesthetics by black feminist literary critics, who appreciate Morrison’s explorative depth into black feminine subjectivity. Morrissette takes an approach to Paradise that is similar to Antonucci’s treatment of Sherley Anne Williams’s poetry by assessing Morrison’s work through her own critical commentary. She reads Paradise for contributions to black feminist literary criticism regarding its parameters, arguing that Morrison’s novel raises questions about what constitutes black feminist literature and its defining features. Who and what are the subjects of black feminist literature? And how are these criteria derived? What is the relation of ideology to aesthetics in these standards? Deborah McDowell, Barbara Smith, and Barbara Christian, to name a few, have considered these issues. Morrissette shows how Morrison takes us beyond some of the more traditional characteristics defining black feminist literary criticism by using a “self-described strategy of writing in a ‘race-specific yet race-free prose.’” Paradise reminds us that the critical process of black feminist literary criticism must be fluid “to the extent of avoiding the Name, the Letter. Black feminism must avoid residing in the letter of the law; it must reside in the spirit of the law, where imagination is supreme.” Maggie Romigh analyzes Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso’s “Leda and the Cowboy” within the context of western critical and poetic traditions

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that have grown up around the Greek myth of Zeus’s rape of Leda and W. B. Yeats’s treatment of it in “Leda and the Swan.” She shows how Tapahonso draws on the gynocratic principles and oral traditions of her own culture to recast Leda as a powerful supernatural agent who restores harmony and balance to the world. Leda’s supernatural agency in Tapahonso’s work is especially poignant, because poets and critics have been so focused on Leda as a powerless victim and so intent on expressing outrage for Zeus that they have neglected to treat the domino effect of the violence and alienation generated by his assault. In “Leda and the Cowboy,” explains Romigh, Tapahonso recasts Leda in Navajo feminine vestige according to the traditional knowledge that sexual unions between supernatural entities and mortals entail transferring knowledge from the spirit world to the human realm. In traditional historical Navajo society, women have not been systemically oppressed like women in most western cultures, for patriarchy was not institutionalized among the Navajo. In fact, Navajo culture is matrilineal, organized according to a “gynocratic principle” and governed by childbearing women (Allen 1991, xiii–xiv). It is recognized that the nation’s lifeblood depends on the mother/earth. Social roles in many historical Native cultures were determined more by one’s relationship to the spirit world— the gifts of creativity, hunting, craftsmanship, and so on, which are bestowed by the ancestors—rather than on biological sex differences (Allen 1986). Drawing from her own oral tradition, Tapahonso’s poem infuses the poetic, critical tradition of Leda, poems with new directions for healing, overcoming alienation, and restoring balance to the world. Romigh reads Tapahonso’s verse as a ritual and ceremonial restoration of hózhó (balance, harmony and beauty) to the universe that Zeus’s original violation disturbed. A similar performative poetics is also explored in Michael Antonucci’s interpretation of Sherley Anne Williams’s blues poems. “Deliberately, skillfully, and beautifully,” Romigh explains, “Tapahonso has used ‘Leda and the Cowboy’ to create a new story, with all the power of her own Navajo culture’s old stories, to look again at the Greek myth that became a famous Irish poem, to transform that myth into a Navajo story set within the context of her own matrilineal society, and to offer an answer to Yeats’s poetic question, “Did she put on his knowledge with his power . . . ?” Margot Reynolds shows how early twentieth-century writer, Zitkala-Sa’s (Yanton Sioux), treatment of the mother figure forms a gynocentric “justice song” that protests imperial conquest and racist


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patriarchal imagery of Indians—especially Indian women. The work of Zitkala-Sa has received little attention by feminist literary critics. She uses the mother figure to critique imperial Christian patriarchy and exposes how Euro-American conquest depended on destruction of women’s central role in tribal culture. Reynolds helps us understand how Native women’s struggle encompasses a broader range of concerns and issues than the scope of liberal, socialist, and lesbian feminism. For many women of color, feminism entails fighting an imperialist patriarchy. Reynolds’s investigation of motherhood in Zitkala-Sa’s writings reminds us of its primacy for women of other cultural traditions as well. Oyeronke Oyewumi suggests that motherhood is perhaps even more meaningful for women of African and Latin descent than “sisterhood” (2003). Stemming from cultures that recognize the importance of multiple mothers and co-mothers in communal life, the relational dynamics of the mother-daughter bond for many women of color is transmutable to other kinds of relationships outside the family (Collins 1990; Oyewumi 2003). The maternal ethic, with its values of mutual support, trust, and protectiveness and its practice of mutual nurturing, expresses more authentic solidarity among women than the “sisterhood” that they have felt in white women’s organizations. To this mix of values and practices, the maternal bond of Zitkala-Sa’s gynocentric prose articulates a concern for justice, reparations, and cultural survival. Gynocentrism is an indigenous feminism that focuses on women’s traditional primacy in tribal life and on oral traditions as a way of resisting Euro-American hegemony and restoring self-governance. “Gynocentrism as a framework for understanding cultures, their histories, and collective knowledge,” explains Reynolds, “comprises a powerful song in praise of Native worldviews.” In this way gynocentrism shares certain values and interests with black feminism as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins. Both assert truths about Indians and blacks that counter Western mythologies and are grounded in epistemologies that depart from positivism and rationalism. Revering the mother figure, these traditions esteem “mother wit” (practical/ethical and spiritual/cosmic) as an important source of knowledge. Ethics and morality are approached pragmatically and are conveyed in terms of individual responsibility to tribal and ancestral traditions, the land, and the Great Mysterious, rather than by reference to abstract a priori principles.


Part II Transformative Aesthetics


2 Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of Transformation ANALOUISE KEATING Like an individual, America can be whole only by going back to its roots—all of them. My premise is this: the Native American story— and the holistic mode of thought it embodies—springs from the original root in our homeland. The story is designed to move among the strands of life’s web both within the individual and within the community, to restore balance and harmony. —Marilou Awiakta (1993)

Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook (Allen 1991) represents a startling departure from Paula Gunn Allen’s earlier academic work in Native American studies. As in her groundbreaking collection of scholarly essays, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), Allen examines Native cultures, mythic worldviews, and feminist themes. But in Grandmothers of the Light, she employs a distinctly nonacademic tone and combines her personal experiences and beliefs with theory, history, story, and myth to construct a contemporary feminist, indigenous-based worldview, which she invites readers (of any cultural/ethnic/racial background) to share. Shaped by her belief in the “magical” power of thought and targeted at a wide, multicultural female audience, Grandmothers of the Light can easily be (mis)interpreted as a mainstream self-help book heavily influenced by New Age thinking. (For definitions and discussions of New Age thought, see Heelas 1996 and Aldred 2000.) And indeed, Allen makes a number of claims that could strike many readers as outrageous: she relies on her own “spirit guides” for information 31

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concerning the stories she retells (1991, xiii); insists on the reality of the “spirits, the supernaturals, goddesses, gods, . . . holy people” (xvii), “extraterrestrials” (5), “little people,” and “giants” (6) she describes; speaks respectfully of the “channeled information” she received from the “Crystal Woman” (195); and asserts that the stories in her book, “when used as ritual maps or guides, enable women to recover our path to the gynocosmos that is our spiritual home” (xv). As she explains in the preface, she has drawn from “the vast oral tradition of Native America” to select twenty-one stories that have been personally empowering for her; she believes that these stories can assist other women in “navigat[ing] the perilous journey along the path that marks the boundary between the mundane world and the world of spirit” (xiii). Outlining what she describes as the seven-fold path of “the medicine woman’s way” (10), Allen suggests that the stories in her collection can teach readers how to follow this path in a sacred manner. But what can it mean to use indigenous stories as “ritual maps,” or to follow “the medicine woman’s way”? Given the brutal history of interactions between Native and non-Native peoples in the Americas—a history which Allen herself has explored in painful detail (1986, 1998)— how do we interpret this open invitation? Does Allen rely on sentimentalized Indian stereotypes in an attempt to pander to non-Native readers who crave authenticity, certainty, and escape from their meaningless lives (Vizenor 1994)? Has she succumbed to the “plastic shamanism” of Lynn Andrews and other non-Indian women and men who make their fortunes through the “commercial exploitation of indigenous spiritual traditions” (Aldred 2000)? In other words, does Grandmothers of the Light represent yet another version of what Allen herself has criticized as the ongoing “New Age cooptation and recontextualization of Native thought” (1998, 97)—in this instance authorized, authenticated, and essentialized by Allen’s family ties to the Laguna and Sioux? I would suggest that, despite some apparent evidence to the contrary, Grandmothers of the Light cannot be dismissed as a “New Age” self-help book that trivializes and commercializes Native spiritualities and beliefs. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. While New Age self-help generally reinforces the status quo, Allen attempts to transform it. Building on her personal experiences and her extensive knowledge of indigenous storytelling traditions, Allen uses these traditions to expose and alter the dominant culture’s epistemological-ethical system. Like the intricate, holistic story Awiakta (1993) describes in my epigraph, the stories in Grandmothers of the Light, drawn “from the original root in

Self-Help, Indian Style?

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our homeland,” are designed “to restore harmony and balance” on both individual and collective levels. Allen attributes the personal and social dis-ease and fragmentation in contemporary westernized cultures to a lack of balance: “It is the loss of harmony, an inner-world imbalance, that reveals itself in physical or psychological ailment. . . . [and] also plays itself out in social ailments, war, dictatorship, elitism, classism, sexism, and homophobia” (1991, 168). In Grandmothers of the Light Allen offers readers an indigenous-based epistemology, a nondual mode of perception that restores balance by realigning the “innerworld” with the outer, the individual with the larger whole.

As such, Grandmothers of the Light is part of a contemporary transcultural project, a holistic transformational process that I call womanist self-recovery. This phrase is intentionally paradoxical (and, I hope, provocative), juxtaposing the radical liberatory potential of womanism with the conservative tendencies in mainstream self-help literature for women. (For a discussion of mainstream self-help literature for women and its elision of feminism, see Cynthia D. Schrager 1993.) I borrow the term womanist from Alice Walker and use it to underscore the womanloving, feminist-inflected, multicolored dimensions of this enterprise, as well as the personal agency and “outrageous, audacious, courageous, willful behavior” it generates (Walker 1984, xi). And I borrow the term self-recovery from women’s self-help literature, and use it to underscore both contemporary U.S. women’s widespread desire and apparent need for self-healing and the dangers of focusing exclusively on the individual which this “multi-billion-dollar publishing phenomenon” represents (Schrager 1993, 177). Womanist self-recovery creates communally-based, multicultural transformation narratives—stories of self-empowerment that begin with the personal but move outward to encourage and facilitate collective change, stories that synthesize self-love and self-reflection with the quest for social justice. Other texts that I would describe as womanist selfrecovery include Luisah Teish’s Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (1985), Marilou Awiakta’s Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom (1993), Elena Avila’s Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health (2000), and Ana Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994). Despite the many differences among them, these books share a number of significant

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traits, including the transgression of conventional literary genres; the visionary belief in language’s performative power; and the use of nonwestern cultural symbols, myths, and beliefs to develop inclusive communities. In this essay, I focus on Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light because it was my attempt to make sense of this puzzling text that led me to invent the term womanist self-recovery and theorize it as a mode of literary and cultural intervention. In the following pages I interweave a discussion of womanist self-recovery with an analysis of Grandmothers of the Light. Both popular self-help books for women and womanist self-recovery begin with the individual’s quest for wholeness and adopt a twofold strategy designed to empower women: emphasizing the importance of self-esteem, self-trust, and individual agency, they offer readers tactics designed to enhance these qualities. There is, however, a crucial difference between them: while mainstream self-help focuses primarily if not exclusively on the individual woman’s problems, desires, and needs, womanist self-recovery does not. As a number of scholars have explained, popular self-help books for women attribute each woman’s feelings of alienation and self-loss to the isolated individual self (Rapping 1996; Schrager 1993). Often drawing on their own personal experiences, mainstream self-help authors employ what Maureen Ebben describes as a biblically-inspired story of the Fall: “a descent into original sin through gluttony and loss of self-control, and an ascent accomplished through repentance and abstention” (1995, 116). In these stories (as in the Genesis account of Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge), the blame lies almost entirely with the individual woman herself. It is her lack of control and her inability to conform, which leads to her unhappiness and need for healing. As this exclusive emphasis on the personal suggests, mainstream self-help books for women are highly apolitical. Pathologizing the individual and ignoring the systemic nature of gender-, color-, and economic-based injustices, they do not challenge the existing social standards and practices. Instead, they insist that the individual, not the larger culture, must change. As Elayne Rapping (1996, 123) explains, “the terms of such discourse . . . lead to kinds of treatment in which women are subtly coerced into ‘adjusting’ to sexism by changing their own behavior, rather than changing sexist society.” Ebben makes a similar point: “By labeling women’s unhappiness dysfunctional, and by locating these dysfunctions within the individual woman rather than in systemic social inequalities, self-help texts depoliticize women’s discon-


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tentment and contribute little to fundamental structural reforms” (1995, 112; see also Schrager 1993). In short, conventional self-help books for women facilitate assimilation into existing social systems. Unlike mainstream self-help, womanist self-recovery does not stop with the individual woman but instead moves outward to incorporate vital political and collective dimensions as well. As I will explain in the following pages, these outward-directed movements take a number of forms, including (1) analyses of the underlying systemic causes contributing to women’s alienation and self-loss; (2) the use of indigenous mythic figures both to affirm each woman’s power and to critique negative stereotypes and beliefs about womanhood and the feminine; (3) an insistence on the communal dimensions of individual identity; (4) dynamic negotiations among diverse cultural traditions; (5) the creation of inclusive, multicultural communities; and (6) a metaphysics of interconnectedness that posits a fluid, cosmic spirit or force embodying itself as material and nonmaterial forms. To begin with, Allen and other womanist self-recovery authors do not attribute women’s difficulties solely to the individual women themselves. Instead, they incorporate an analysis of the underlying systemic causes—the patriarchal, capitalist, “white” supremacist institutions and beliefs—contributing to an individual’s feelings of alienation and selfloss. Thus for example Allen associates women’s devalued position in contemporary western cultures with the spiritual imbalance and the resulting over-emphasis on rational thought that occurred during European conquest of the Americas and continues today. According to Allen (1991, xiv), many precontact tribal nations were “gynocratic,” and gave both women and men important social, political, and spiritual roles. In such systems, women (along with men) held recognized legislative and governing positions. For instance, the Women’s Council of the Cherokee made decisions about war and public policy; the head of the Council, referred to as “Beloved Woman,” was viewed as the embodied representative of the “‘Great Spirit’” (1986, 32). In “gynecentric” communities, the spiritual and the mundane were entirely interwoven, creating a balanced worldview that ensured each woman’s vital role in maintaining the interconnectedness of all forms of life. As she retraces the devastating impact of colonial conquest on indigenous North American peoples and beliefs, Allen charts the transition to male-dominated, hierarchical social and religious structures. These historical analyses are especially evident in Grandmothers of the Light’s final section, entitled “Postscript: Cultural Dimensions,

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Ge-Ological Locations, and Herstorical Circumstances of the Goddesses, the People, and the Ritual Tradition.” Here Allen educates her readers about the devastating impact that colonial conquest made on specific tribal nations, ranging from the Aztec and Maya in the south to the Lummi/Nootsak in the northwest. I want to underscore the important role these historical accounts play in Grandmothers of the Light. By including them in her book, Allen challenges her non-Indian readers’ historical amnesia, thus making them accountable for the ways they have benefited from the conquest. Second, womanist self-recovery employs indigenous mythic figures both to affirm each woman’s power and to critique the negative images of female identity circulating in contemporary cultures. Allen’s mythic women offer an important alternative to western gender roles. They are not defined by their relationships with fathers, sons, husbands, or other men. Nor are they defined by their biological reproductive functions. Instead, they are fully autonomous, nonstereotypical creative beings. In Grandmothers of the Light and elsewhere, Allen claims that Native cosmologies offer contemporary women empowering models of female identity, models that counter the sexism and other forms of misogyny found in Judeo-Christian socioreligious belief systems. Insisting that “relations between human women and supernaturals are as viable and powerful in the present time as in days gone by” (xvi), she uses indigenous stories to empower her readers. Throughout Grandmothers of the Light, Allen retells a variety of Native myths, exploring the central roles that female creatrix figures such as the Keres Pueblo’s Thought Woman, the Navajo’s Changing Woman, and the Cherokee’s Selu play in tribal cultures. My personal favorite is Thought Woman, who uses thought and song—rather than biological reproduction—to create the entire cosmos, including nature, human beings, sociopolitical systems, literature, and the sciences: Grandmother Spider, Thought Woman, thought the earth, the sky, the galaxy, and all that is into being, and as she thinks, so we are. She sang the divine sisters . . . into being out of her medicine pouch or bundle, and they in turn sang the firmament, the land, the seas, the people, the katsina, the gods, the plants, animals, minerals, language, writing, mathematics, architecture, the Pueblo social system, and every other thing you can imagine in our world. (Allen 1991, 28)


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This creation story redefines feminine creativity by associating Thought Woman with spiritual, intellectual, and linguistic power. Positing a cosmic female-embodied intelligence, Allen displaces western cultures’ traditional association of the body with the feminine, affirms women’s intellectual and creative capacities, and challenges patriarchal beliefs concerning women’s subordinate status. (For an extensive discussion of how Allen’s creatrices and other mythic images challenge patriarchal beliefs and representations of women, see Keating 1996.) Third, womanist self-recovery emphasizes the communal dimensions of individual identity. Defining the “self” we recover as relational, womanist self-recovery authors critique the rhetoric of self-contained individualism deeply embedded in the United States and other Enlightenment-based cultures. Those of us raised in these cultures are taught to define ourselves as unique, fully autonomous individuals with permanent, inflexible boundaries that separate each individual from all others. When taken to an extreme, this hyper-individualism makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recognize our interconnectedness with others. In fact, this solipsistic individualism prevents us from recognizing the full humanity and selfhood of others, for it leads to a hierarchical, dualistic relationship where the individual and the external world occupy mutually exclusive poles. In this hyper-individualistic perspective, nature and all other human beings become objects lacking genuine existence. This extreme individualism leads to fragmentation and isolation. When we adopt this version of individualism, we distance ourselves from all that surrounds us. We assume that success depends only on individual effort; those people who do not succeed have only themselves to blame, and their failure has absolutely no impact on our lives. We do not understand that what affects others—all others, no matter how separate we seem to be—ultimately affects us as well. Not surprisingly, then, this highly personalized, self-enclosed individualism greatly increases self-blame and almost entirely inhibits social justice work. After all, if each individual is fully responsible for his or her own life, there is no need for collective action and systemic social change. (For critiques of this solipsistic individualism see Bloom 1997; Dalton 1995; Oliver 2001; Warren 1984.) In Grandmothers of the Light (as in her other writings), Allen associates this selfish, solipsistic individualism with patriarchal, monotheistic religions like Christianity. She maintains that the belief in

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a single godhead is closely associated with the development of hierarchical worldviews that entirely separate the individual from the community. Thus in the preface to “Making Sacred, Making True” (her version of the Navajo story of Changing Woman and White Shell Woman), Allen contrasts non-indigenous cultures’ monotheistic beliefs with indigenous cultures’ beliefs in multiple gods: In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism. Because of this, Changing Woman is often spoken of alone in the literature of the bilagána, the white people. But in the texts . . . singularity is sad and undesirable. Belonging to a people—a community, a clan—is a necessity for all beings, human, holy people, animals, everyone. (Allen 1991, 71; italics mine) With this insistence on “multiplicity,” Allen offers readers both an important alternative to the self-contained forms of individualism described above, and a possible solution to the fragmentation of contemporary cultures. She models a relational individualism that meets each person’s specific needs for self-affirmation without severing the individual from a larger whole. According to Allen, in gynocratic tribal systems “egalitarianism, personal autonomy, and communal harmony were highly valued, rendering the good of the individual and the good of the society mutually reinforcing, rather than divisive” (1991, xiv). As Allen’s emphasis on the value of “personal autonomy” and “the good of the individual” indicates, she does not deny each individual’s importance. However, by locating the individual within a larger social context, Allen replaces oppositional, self-enclosed types of individualism with a relational definition of selfhood that synthesizes the personal and collective dimensions of each individual’s life (Keating 1996). Like other womanist self-recovery authors, Allen posits a relational individualism that balances the individual with(in) the community. She explains that, “identity is formed by context and is a function of ritual purpose rather than of self-will or individuation” (1991, 109). Allen’s description of the medicine woman’s final stage, which she calls “The Way of the Wise Woman,” illustrates one form this contextual, relational identity can take: “The sphere of her work has broadened far beyond that of her personal, private self and of her familiar group; her


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community extends to the stars” (1991, 15). This “Wise Woman” is an extremely powerful human being with a strong sense of her identity both as a unique individual and as a member of the cosmos. She has reflected on and learned from her personal experiences; as Allen explains, she has “developed true wisdom through gathering information and experience and applying them in every area of her life” (15). She can recognize cosmic patterns, and she uses this knowledge to enhance others’ lives. Fourth, womanist self-recovery is transcultural. As I use the term, transcultural indicates dynamic negotiations among diverse traditions. Transculturalism does not ignore the differences among distinct cultures but instead uses these differences as pathways enabling us to generate highly complex forms of commonalities. Although each womanist selfrecovery writer “roots” herself in the indigenous beliefs of her particular geo-cultural location, she draws from other indigenous and non-indigenous cultures as well. These negotiations among diverse traditions and beliefs enable womanist self-recovery authors both to validate their words and to develop specific belief systems and practices designed to meet contemporary needs. Allen’s work provides an especially useful illustration of this transcultural process. Throughout Grandmothers of the Light, Allen makes connections among a variety of distinct Indian and non-Indian belief systems. In her introductory chapter, she insists that “the ritual tradition is of ancient and worldwide standing” (1991, 8), defines “tribal people” globally, and maintains that all oral literature shares a supernatural, psychic trait: The oral traditions of all tribal people—whether Native American, Hindu, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Samois, Roman, or Papuan—should be understood as psychic literature. It can only be comprehended adequately in terms of the universe of power, for it speaks to the relationships among humans, animals of all kingdoms, supernaturals, and deities in a landscape that is subject to influences of thought, intention, will, emotion, and choice under the kinds of conditions described above. (1991, 22) These cross-cultural, cross-species connections enable Allen to redefine Enlightenment-based concepts of the universal in more generous terms and to develop complex commonalities that do not ignore the differences among people (Keating 2000). By definition, the “universal”

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should be all-inclusive; for example, if we talk about universal attributes of humankind, we should be talking about attributes shared by all human beings. However, as a number of scholars have observed, all too often the universal has its source in narrow, eurocentric definitions which exclude far more people than they include (Cornell 1991; Moya 2000). Rather than represent a shared category embracing all people, these pseudo-universals overlook the many differences among people. Such restrictive concepts of the universal are not benign, for they dehumanize and in other ways delegitimize those who do not fit (PalumboLiu 2002). While some feminists (see for instance Butler 1989; Haraway 1989) have responded to universalism’s potential dangers by rejecting the concept itself, Allen and other womanist self-recovery authors adopt a transcultural approach which enables them to reinvent the universal in open-ended ways. Look for instance at her introduction to the second section, “Cosmogyny: The Goddesses,” where Allen moves among the cosmic (which she redefines as “the Great Goddess”); the intertribal (or what she calls “the gynocentric universe throughout the Americas”); the tribally specific (she discusses a variety of distinct tribal nations, including the Cherokee, the Hopi, and the Navajo); and the personal (“my tribe, the Laguna Pueblo”) (1991, 27). Throughout this section, Allen talks in both general (universal) and particular (tribal) terms, associating a variety of cultural traditions with a cosmic worldview (or what she terms “cosmogyny”). By so doing, she draws connections among diverse North American cultural traditions in ways enabling her to redefine the universal in more expansive, open-ended terms. Similarly, in her discussion of the oral tradition, she underscores the parallels between a variety of spiritual practices—including “The Tao, the Sufi Path, the Way of the Madonna, the Quest for the Grail, the Good Red Road”—to support her assertion that “spiritual discipline is the hallmark of any ritual path” (9). As I have explained elsewhere in more detail (Keating 2000a), these transcultural negotiations enable Allen to explore their commonalities without overlooking their differences. Fifth, as this emphasis on commonalities might imply, womanist self-recovery is inclusive, and addresses itself to a wide multicultural audience. As I mentioned earlier, Allen indicates that the “path of the medicine woman” can be traveled by women of diverse cultural backgrounds. According to Allen, her stories illustrate “the great power women have possessed, and how that power, when exercised within the life circumstances common to women everywhere can reshape (terraform) the


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earth” (1991, xvi; italics mine). Allen’s point here is not to imply that all women are the same. Her emphasis on commonalities (which must not be confused with sameness!) plays a crucial role in her political intervention. More specifically, she attempts to create a broad-based movement for social change. She believes that the sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of social injustice experienced today are directly related to the imbalance that occurred when patriarchal belief systems—with their hierarchical, dominant/subordinate worldviews—replaced “gynocratic” belief systems (1991, xiv). Associating women’s commonalities with a sacred feminine power, she encourages readers to recognize and begin utilizing an alternate, holistic mode of perception. As she explains in her most recent collection of essays, Off the Reservation, the urgent necessity that faces women and men who long to encounter the greater, larger, more inclusive and therefore more Whole and balanced sacred essence . . . is that we heal the great sickness patriarchal thought has inflicted upon all citizens of planet Earth, human and otherwise, and return to the Feminine source of our being. Let us begin that healing by acknowledging that if we fail to empower the feminine within and outside of ourselves, all of our attempts at righting the great destructions of the past five or six thousand years will go for naught. (1998, 91–92) Sixth, and perhaps most important for my argument in this essay, womanist self-recovery relies on a “metaphysics of interconnectedness” (Keating 2000b) that posits a cosmic, fluid spirit or force that manifests itself as material and nonmaterial forms. I would suggest that indigenous teachings from many cultures (Cajete 2000; Cheney and Hester 2001; Forbes 2001; Mosha 1999; Semali and Kincheloe 1999; L. Smith 1999), recent developments in quantum physics and other branches of science (Barabási 2002; Bohm 1996; Macy 1991; Sheldrake 2003; Watts 2003; Wolf 2001), and even my own experiences (Keating 2002) confirm this relational, participatory worldview. But my point here is not to argue that this spiritual-material essence “really” exists. Instead, I want to point out some of the pragmatic, performative functions this metaphysics of interconnectedness serves in womanist self-recovery texts. On the personal level, the belief in a dynamic cosmic energy offers those individuals who feel fragmented and self-divided a highly positive self-image that affirms their personal power. As Ana Castillo explains:

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Espiritismo, . . . [the] acknowledgment of the energy that exists throughout the universe subatomically generating itself and interconnecting, fusing, and changing. . . . offer[s] a personal response to the divided state of the individual who desires wholeness. An individual who does not sense herself as helpless to circumstances is more apt to contribute positively to her environment than one who resigns with apathy to it because of her sense of individual insignificance. (1994, 159) Because she views herself as a vital part of a larger cosmic whole, the individual Castillo describes attains a sense of her own self-worth and power. This increased personal agency enables her to act and gives her the confidence that her actions will be meaningful, useful, and successful. On the collective level, the belief in a cosmic force generating all that exists offers a theoretical framework for social change, a relational framework connecting each individual with a cosmic whole. Those individuals who see themselves as integral parts of this cosmic whole recognize their interdependence with others. This recognition fuels both the desire for social change and the assurance that individual actions—no matter how insignificant they may seem—can and do impact others. Allen’s metaphysics of interconnectedness takes a distinct mythic form. Whether she refers to it as “thought,” as “female intelligences,” as “language,” or as “mind,” Allen posits a cosmic force creating, infusing, and uniting all that exists. In Grandmothers of the Light and elsewhere (1986, 1998), she associates this force with the oral tradition shared by all tribal peoples. Rejecting ethnocentric anthropological and literary descriptions of mythology as primitive belief systems, mystifying falsehoods, or nostalgic retreats into an irrecoverable past, she maintains that mythic stories offer an alternative, holistic worldview. Thus in Grandmothers of the Light’s opening pages, for example, she describes the oral tradition as a type of guidebook: an apprentice medicine person becomes familiar with a number of these stories because they act as general guides to that special universe. They enable practitioners of the sacred to recognize where they are and how to function, the entities they might encounter, their names, personalities, and likely disposition toward them, the kinds of instruction they might gain from them, and how to explore the universe of power to gain greater paranormal knowledge and ability. (1991, 3)


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Allen equates myth with metamorphosis and change by defining “myth” as a “ritual” mode of communication, “a language construct that contains the power to transform something (or someone) from one state or condition to another” (1991, 7). Focusing their thought and channeling thought’s energy in specific ways, spiritual practitioners can align themselves with this spiritual force and bring about material “transformations”—ranging from “weather changes” to “physiological changes in both humans and animals” to “bodily changes” to “earth renewal [and] terraforming (making mountains, rivers, drainage plains, and other geological features), and other activities too numerous to mention” (16). According to Allen, the ability to effect these transformations has its source in a holistic mode of perception that recognizes and utilizes thought’s creative power: Practitioners function by thought, using language, movement, sound, painting . . . herbs, minerals, and repetitive devices as foci for that thought. Most of all, they use their ability to deal adeptly in supernatural realms to achieve their objectives, depending on long training, familiarity with Great Mysterious and its (their) ways, and contacts among the supernaturals. The ability to dance, drum, chant dramatically, or alter consciousness so that one can see amazing things are of little use without the aid and protection of some helpers from the other side. (16–17) To be sure, these references to “supernatural realms” and “helpers from the other side” seem almost laughably naive when we read them relying on only the rational mind and empirically based knowledge. And indeed, Allen willingly acknowledges that this mythic worldview defies conventional linear thinking, yet she insists on its validity: In the ritual tradition, wholeness is the rule; in it chronology ceases to function, though both temporality and duration play a fundamental role. Ritual affirms an order of reality that secular materialists, logical positivists, and deconstructionist postmodernists believe to be false, imaginary, primitive, or impossible. Yet within the workings of ritual, the impossible becomes the very probable, the imaginary becomes the factual, the primitive becomes the sophisticated, and the false becomes the actuality. Within the

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ritual universe the entire matter of true/false is turned on its head, and the dancers bring down the rain. (1991, 8) In Grandmothers of the Light, Allen invites readers to participate in this holistic, supernatural worldview. But to do so, people brought up under western knowledge systems must learn to perceive reality mythically. That is, they must forego their over-reliance on empirical knowledge and rational, linear thinking by entering into a liminal space where alterations in perception can occur. Allen associates this liminal space at the interface between the spiritual and mundane worlds, or what she calls “the universe of power” (1991, 3, 109), with mythic narratives invoked by the oral tradition. She suggests that the stories in her book (like other stories in the oral tradition) can facilitate a transformation in consciousness: “When these stories are entered as a room is entered, as wilderness is entered, as the surf (and self) is entered, one moves into mythic space and becomes a voyager in the universe of power” (109). This puzzling metaphoric statement offers important clues to understanding Allen’s project in Grandmothers of the Light. When we enter a room, we step into it; we locate ourselves within its walls. The room and all it contains become our reality. Likewise, the form of storytelling Allen describes requires entering into and existing within the story’s world, accepting its reality—replete with supernatural beings, goddesses, and holy people—as our own, as “factual accounts” (1991, 7). This acceptance triggers a shift in perception, enabling readers to recognize their interconnections with all existence.

The political writer . . . is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of changing and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. A privatism which keeps us back and away from each other, which renders us politically useless. —Cherríe Moraga (1983)

What is the relationship between Grandmothers of the Light and the politics of change that is signified in my title? Transformation (as I’m defining the term because of course “transformation” has many meanings) requires vision, motivation, and the desire for social justice. I would suggest that Allen and other womanist self-recovery writers attempt to embody this vision, this motivation, and this desire in their texts and—by extension—in their readers. Like the political writer


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Moraga describes in my epigraph to this section, Allen and other womanist self-recovery authors believe that people can and must change; they use their words to facilitate transformation, on both personal and communal levels. Womanist self-recovery authors begin with the personal—the individual trapped in the “privatism” of her life—and move outwardly, demonstrating each individual’s intimate interconnections with others. They synthesize the personal with the communal and use this synthesis to urge readers to work for social change. In many ways, womanist self-recovery and the metaphysics of interconnectedness it posits resembles the “visionary pragmatism” and the “passionate rationality” Patricia Hill Collins (1998) associates with African American women’s spirituality. According to Collins, in the quest for social justice, many black women have developed ethical frameworks and spiritualized worldviews that combine utopian vision with pragmatic action; they merge “caring, theoretical vision with informed, practical struggle” (Collins 1998, 188). The desire to achieve social justice is infused with deep feeling, or what Collins describes as “passionate rationality” which motivates us to work together for social change. As the term suggests, “passionate rationality” represents a nondualistic form of intervention synthesizing emotion with intellect. Collins makes a similar point: “This type of passionate rationality flies in the face of Western epistemology that sees emotions and rationality as different and competing concerns. . . . [D]eep feelings that arouse people to action constitute a critical source of power” (243). Like the African American women Collins describes, Allen and other womanist self-recovery writers attempt to generate this passionate rationality in their readers. Their emphasis on the relational, interdependent nature of all that exists inspires self-confidence, hope, and potentially radical social action. Given U.S. culture’s attraction to the personal (seen for instance in the popularity of mainstream self-help books), Allen’s womanist selfrecovery, as well as that by other contemporary writers, can be very useful for social actors in at least four interrelated ways. First, womanist self-recovery can trigger passionate rationality—the urgent desire to join together and work for concrete social change—in readers. Second, because it begins with the personal but redefines the individual as part of a larger whole, womanist self-recovery provides a theoretical justification and motivation linking self-healing and self-affirmation with social transformation. Third, because it negotiates among culturally specific histories and traditions and uses these negotiations to generate

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relational commonalities, womanist self-recovery intervenes in contemporary debates concerning the universal. More specifically, it demonstrates the possibility of inventing transcultural universals: new concepts of the universal that move between commonalities and particularities without denying the importance of either (Keating 2000a). And fourth, because it synthesizes personal, political, and spiritual concerns, womanist self-recovery gives us tools to achieve more inclusive activist communities. We can insist on underlying commonalities that allow us to create “new connections” (Awiakta 1993, 155) and work together to transform our worlds. Thanks to Gloria Anzaldúa, Renae Bredin, Angela Cotten, and Deborah A. Miranda for comments on earlier versions of this essay.

3 Making the Awakening Hers Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition of African Spirituality to Christian Religiosity ELIZABETH J. WEST

From the late eighteenth-century poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the spiritual narratives and autobiographies of nineteenth-century black women writers, the transformation of traditional African cosmologies into an African American cosmology translated through the language of Christian religiosity is apparent. Even as slaves in a foreign land, Africans and their descendants in America transformed their centuries-old cultures into a worldview that fused their past with present experiences in the so-called New World. Black women were central to the maintenance and transformation of African-rooted survivals, and their contributions in this regard have been explored in a number of highly acclaimed works by modern black women authors. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977), and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1989) explicitly celebrate the African spiritual presence in African American culture. Unlike their literary descendants, early black women writers left works that show little evidence of proclaiming an African self. However, even in the face of this contrast, there lies a significant link between those modern black women writers who have openly claimed a connection to Africa and those early black women writers who seemingly gave no voice to their African selves. Despite their silence, early black women writers often recounted principles and practices that scholars have only recently recognized as originating from a precolonial African worldview. The poetry of Phillis Wheatley exemplifies an early landmark work whose connection to Africanity has been given only cursory consideration by 47

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scholars. Wheatley’s poetry is central, however, to a more comprehensive understanding of African spirituality in black women’s writing. A product of one of America’s deepest transgressions, Wheatley was nevertheless shaped and defined by more than the slave system. She was also influenced by the religious wave in colonial America that afforded blacks an entry into the formal discourse of their humanity.

The Great Awakening of the mid-1700s has been recognized by many scholars as central to African American Christianity and activism. In contrast to the early Puritan theology maintaining that only a small (and yes, white) elect would be saved in the final days, the Awakening promised salvation to all and opened the floodgates to new groups of converts. Blacks, who had for the most part been ignored, excluded, or given incidental consideration in Puritan religious reflection, could appropriate the language of Christian salvation to proclaim their humanity and their rights in the eye of the divine authority. The Bible became the written authority for African American calls for equality and justice, as well as a guiding spiritual force for a disenfranchised black population. In the poetry of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley; the autobiographical narrative of Olaudah Equiano; and the nonfiction writings of Benjamin Banneker, Prince Hall, and Lemuel B. Haynes, we find that people of African descent in America had begun to internalize and interpret the Bible as their own by the end of the eighteenth century. In these early writings there is an African American typology of Scripture much like that of the Puritans a century before, which marks the beginning of a tradition in African American arts and letters and political activism. Interpreting their struggles in America as the reenactment of key biblical stories of struggle and suffering, these writers gave historical and religious legitimacy to their cause. Phillis Wheatley’s hallmark 1773 collection of poems (edited and reprinted by John Shields [1988]) exemplifies the birth of a longstanding tradition of black writers who transformed an Anglo-Christian discourse into a language of self-affirmation. Wheatley’s criticized poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” illustrates this literary manipulation. Her use of understatement and her seeming acquiescence in this poem leads many readers to dismiss it as self-denigrating. Her use of the word “brought” to represent the horrific transportation of Africans to the Americas can be read as an appeasement to her white audience. However, in its entirety, the poem

Making the Awakening Hers

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asserts the place of Africans in biblical history and affirms their place at the gates of redemption. With Wheatley’s call to her Christian/white audience to remember that “Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (Wheatley 1988, 7–8), she appropriates the westerner’s myth that links blacks to the cursed Cain of the Genesis story. But Wheatley also demonstrates her own interpretive astuteness as she proclaims the salvation of blacks using the very story that whites had employed to justify black enslavement. Wheatley knows that in its entirety the story of Cain is a redemptive one, for he is ultimately restored to the good graces of God. She therefore maintains that blacks, like their presumed ancestor, Cain, will be similarly redeemed. Wheatley’s discursive appropriation of Scripture is early in the history of AfroChristianity but not singular. Her contemporary, the black slave poet Jupiter Hammon (1998) also emphasized God’s offer of redemption to all, including Africans. In his poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries,” Hammon repeatedly asserts that God alone is the source of salvation and that he extends his offering to all peoples and nations. Hammon and Wheatley, and the countless black interpreters of biblical Scripture who followed them, embraced the message of spiritual inclusiveness born out of America’s Great Awakening. Trusting their own abilities to interpret Scripture and history, they adopted biblical stories and doctrine to tell the story of black experience in America. The evangelism of the Great Awakening struck a chord with the spiritual sensibilities of many blacks in colonial America, both slave and free. Colonial blacks were introduced to Christianity in significant numbers. Many were moved to conversion experiences that ultimately led them to choose a Christian, and most often Protestant, denomination. Though there were no black churches at the onset, and while blacks were generally segregated or denied admittance in white churches, the seed of Afro-Christianity had been planted by the end of the eighteenth century: the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia and black Baptist churches in the Southeast confirmed the beginnings of the black church in America (Franklin and Moss 1994).

While scholars have recognized the Great Awakening as a pivotal event in the history of African American religion, too often the influence of traditional African cosmology in African American spirituality has been

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overlooked. For more than a century before the Great Awakening, blacks in America were guided by the belief system they brought across the Atlantic. In particular, during the first century of African enslavement in America, when slaveholders were not as concerned about their slaves’ religion, many slave communities were able to transform much of their traditional culture into their new condition. Hence, the slave work songs, field hollers, folktales and cultural rituals of Africans in America were an outgrowth of their African heritage. It is important to recognize, then, that the Afro-Christian enthusiasm of The Great Awakening was not born out of an African spiritual void, but rather was the result of a particular social dynamic. The meeting of traditional African spirituality and the Awakening’s revivalism exemplifies the formative period defined by George Brandon in his study of African carryovers in America, Santeria from Africa to the New World. In Brandon’s words, this period is marked “when a religion is beginning to assume a different physiognomy than previously, through exposure to other religions, internal developments, economic or political catastrophe, and so forth” (1993, 3). By the time of the Awakening, this is clearly the cultural dynamic at work in African American society. Unable to live uncompromisingly under the cosmology that defined traditional African life, Africans in America faced the task of reshaping their worldview. Though slave life was in many ways isolated from the larger culture, the most threatening of African rituals and beliefs were banned by slaveholders. Drums, which were central to African spiritual worship, were banned, as whites understood the communicative and unifying power of drums among slaves. African supernatural beliefs that either interfered with slave labor or incited slaves to behavior unacceptable to slave owners were condemned, and those who did not comply faced severe punishment. Whether Africans had adopted Christianity or dismissed it, they were, out of necessity, compelled to transform their religion and worldview to their new condition. The Awakening’s evangelism and rhetoric of inclusiveness offered blacks a means to transformation. The spiritual emotionalism of this period was compatible with traditional African worship, and the doctrine that promised salvation to all fit into an African cosmology that saw all humans as connected and sacred creatures. The Awakening, then, marked a pivotal moment in the formative period of African American spirituality. It fueled a religious adaptation that would continue in the next century for slaves as well as for free blacks in the North: “After the Revolution, revivals continued to occur in the South and increasing num-


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bers of slaves were moved to convert by the dramatic preaching of the revivalist ministers, especially Methodists and Baptists” (Raboteau 2001, 18). At the close of the eighteenth century, black churches and congregations were springing up in the North and South. Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 collection of poems, a work that was notably religious/spiritual in nature, marked a comprehensive meditation on the African American formative experience of negotiating an African worldview into a Christian framework. And as Katherine Clay Bassard suggests, “early black women’s writing community begins with Phillis Wheatley’s seven-year correspondence with Obour Tanner, her confidant and a fellow enslaved African woman” (1996, 515). Wheatley’s ongoing correspondence with Tanner, who lived in the neighboring state of Rhode Island, challenges the notion of some scholars that she was isolated and removed from the experiences and conditions of fellow slaves. Moreover, her friendship with Tanner suggests that the community of black women writers was born in early America with the likes of Wheatley and Tanner and perhaps black women whose correspondences are yet uncovered, or worse, permanently lost. Their correspondence suggests that black women (in life and in fiction) find salvation more in each other than in the church. While Trudier Harris insightfully points to the primacy of religion and community in contemporary black women’s writings (1996), we must consider the legacy that informed this contemporary practice. Black women surviving in a community of women is no cultural accident, but rather a continuation of an African-rooted cosmology that sanctioned community as sacred, and as a result of gender divisions, empowered women to collectively aid and support each other. Wheatley’s efforts to maintain a relationship with Tanner through letter writing, the only avenue available to them, hints at her desire to remain connected to an African community. Her greeting to Tanner as friend and sister in the seven extant letters that Wheatley wrote to her, moreover, underscores the deep alliance between the two despite the miles that separated them. Wheatley’s own poem entitled “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,” Jupiter Hammon’s 1778 poem “To Miss Phillis Wheatley,” and the now highly anthologized portrait of her by African American artist Scipio Moorhead (S.M.) attest to the bonds that existed among New England slaves in colonial America (Shockley 1988, 19). These intertextual works also contradict simplistic historical glossing of Wheatley as “not concerned with the problems of blacks or the country” (Franklin and Moss 1994, 94).

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In her life and her poetry Phillis Wheatley represents the struggle of early generations of African Americans to carve a meaningful spiritual cosmology in a foreign, hostile land. She embodies the formative experience of blacks reinventing the world through the convergence of Anglo-Christianity and African spirituality. While it is tempting to read her poetry as a submission of her African self to a dominant discourse that privileged whiteness, Wheatley’s poetry is the narrative of a young African renegotiating an African self and worldview in an antagonistic white Western cosmology. To salvage a self in this environment, Wheatley, like Africans at large in America, was challenged with the task of adopting a worldview that designated blackness to a realm outside of humanity. Her success came from her intellectual shrewdness and a strong sense of self-worth that survived the Middle Passage. Like other Africans forced into bondage, Wheatley did not completely lose connections to her African roots. This connectivity, albeit held by the thinnest of threads, is evident in her poetry, which represents one clearly aware of one’s African self. In a number of her poems, Wheatley asserts her African identity, reminding her white audience that she defies their presumptions about blackness and humanity. She is African and literate, as she reminds readers in “To Maecenas.” This poem, which serves as the prologue and invocation for the 1773 collection, ties Wheatley and Africanity to both history and intellectualism. With her reflection on the ancient poet, Terence, an African sold into slavery in Rome, Wheatley hints at her own poetic genius with the similar circumstances of their lives. Like Terence, Wheatley is a native African taken and made a slave in a distant land, and like Terence, she masters the language and art of her non-African captors. Recurring references to herself in her poetry as the “Afric muse,” hints at a need to reassure herself that she can be both black and literate and intelligent. This ongoing struggle for self-justification is layered with what is perhaps a more subconscious struggle to reorient her spiritual cosmos. We cannot say with certainty that Wheatley’s assertions of African selfhood represent a conscious or deliberate struggle against personal and national erasure. However, her writings do suggest that at the very least in her subconscious mind, Wheatley attempted to reconstruct herself in a way that would validate her and other Africans in the Western cosmos. More concretely, we find in Wheatley’s poetry and correspondences a connection to an African worldview that survived her Christian conversion. While many readers presume that the infusion of Greek


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and Roman classics in her poetry is the result of the neoclassical influence in early American writing, I would posit that Wheatley was also fascinated with the classics because she found meaningful parallels between the mythological cosmos of this culture and that of her own native Africa. Consequently, converging Greek and Roman classical images with her poetic interpretations of Christianity may have served as a means to whitewash, but salvage, her African memories. For example, Greek and Roman representation of spiritual entities as gods of natural forces was consistent with traditional African spiritual concepts of nature. Hence, Wheatley’s poetry expressing her awe at the power of the sun, the moon, and other natural forces may have been reflections on African spiritual concepts of nature. Similarly, her constant call to the muses for artistic inspiration also may have been triggered by memories of her native culture. While John Shields argues convincingly that “her [Wheatley’s] grasp of the possibility of using the sublime as a principle of freedom exceeds that of her predecessors and anticipates Kant, English romanticism, and American transcendentalism” (1988, 257), an exploration of the origins of Wheatley’s notions of the aesthetic must also look to the possible influence of traditional African beliefs and practices. It is not unlikely that Wheatley’s “use of her imagination to create ‘new worlds’” (256) points to rituals of African spiritual possession that she likely witnessed as a young child in Africa. Spiritual possession is an act through which the subject, as well as the community, enters a different or new realm, one that can provide participants with a new way of seeing themselves and the world around them. Poetry was clearly the medium through which Wheatley was lifted to a new world, a world in which she could claim her humanity and reflect on her African past. Wheatley’s writings demonstrate a negotiation of key African cosmological ideas and the dominating rhetoric of colonial American Christianity. In particular, she struggles to define the place of memory in art and life. She also attempts to seat African notions of nature and being into Christian discourse and constructs a self that is centered not in her individuality, but by her connection with community. The centrality of memory to Wheatley’s ontological orientation is evident in her contemplations and as she engages in the act of remembering. Her most evident conscious musing on memory is in the poem, “On Recollection.” Here, she defines memory as both a source of creative inspiration for the poet and as a spiritual beacon that guides humanity. Speaking of memory in the language of classical Greek,

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Wheatley hails it as “Mneme, immortal pow’r,” and in her request for “mneme’s” artistic inspiration, Wheatley highlights the African concept of reciprocity between spirit and human. “Assist my strains, while I thy glories sing” (4), she pleads. This reciprocity of grace echoes the African dynamic of spirit and human interdependence that Joseph M. Murphy describes as a relationship in which the spirit bestows blessings onto humans, but only as humans celebrate and acknowledge the greatness of the spirit (1995). “On Recollection” emphasizes the power of memory as it manifests itself in dreams. In traditional African cosmology, spirits speak to humans most often through possession and dream visions. Wheatley echoes the latter as she connects the power of spirits and their message transmissions to dream visions or prophesies: Mneme in our nocturnal visions pours The ample treasure of her secret stores; . . . And, in her pomp of images display’d, To the high-raptur’d poet gives her aid, Through the unbound regions of the mind, Diffusing light celestial and refin’d. (9–10, 13–16) When the lessons of memory are heeded, memory, like traditional African spirits, is a source of human empowerment and good fortune. However, when memory’s message is disregarded, misfortune follows. In contrast to the Western construct of memory as a human act that serves as a means to recount past events, Wheatley defines memory as a life force. Residing within humans, memory guides and comforts those who hear its message, but leaves desolate those who fail to listen: Mneme, enthron’d within the human breast, Has vice condemn’d, and ev’ry virtue blest. How sweet the sound when we her plaudit hear? Sweeter than music to the ravish’d ear, Sweeter than Maro’s entertaining strains Resounding through the groves, and hills, and Plains. But how is Mneme dreaded by the race, Who scorn her warnings, and despise her grace? By her unveil’d each horrid crime appears, Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears. Days, years mispent, O what a hell of woe! Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know. (19–30)


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The power of memory in human fortune is painted as a double-edged sword: memory, like most African spiritual forces, can both bless and curse. Equally notable is Wheatley’s portrayal of memory as a conduit between worlds. It is not an image that Wheatley draws overtly, but rather one that is intimated in her reflection of the swiftness of time passing during her own first eighteen years: Now eighteen years their destin’d course have Run, In fast succession round the central sun. How did the follies of that period pass Unnotic’d, but behold them writ in brass! In Recollection see them fresh return, (31–35) While “On Recollection” speaks to memory’s grace and terror, the poem, “To the Honourable T.H. Esq; on the Death of his Daughter,” employs memory for its power of consolation. To this father who has suffered the loss of a child, Wheatley recommends that he give himself over to memory to counter the pain. While the poem ends with the usually offered elegiac promise of a meeting in the next world, Wheatley first speaks of the consolation found in remembering: While deep you mourn beneath the Cypress-shade The hand of Death, and your dear daughter laid In dust, whose absence gives your tears to flow, And racks your bosom with incessant woe, Let Recollection take a tender part, Assuage the raging tortures of your heart, Still the wild tempest of tumultuous grief, And pour the heav’nly nectar of relief: (1–8) While we can only speculate whether Wheatley’s concept of memory as spirit is born out of a conscious connection to her African heritage, her musings on the nature and authority of memory remain a powerful testament to the survival of African spirituality in the African American psyche. Wheatley’s conflation of memory and spirit do not originate in the religious discourse of her Christian mentors. On the contrary, this concept is more likely the fusion of Wheatley’s African heritage and her education in Greek and Roman classics. Memory as a spiritual force that must be fed by human sacrifice or acknowledgment bears greater resemblance to African spirituality than Christian theology.

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The importance of memory in Wheatley’s ontological view is also evident in the act of remembering. Along with her cognitive negotiation of memory, Wheatley engages in the act of memory as a means of spiritual connection. Her frequent references to her own African origins, while read by some as a subversion of white authority, can also be interpreted as remembering and reaffirming the African self. In a world in which whiteness is validated and Africanity and blackness are negated, Wheatley remembers with self-satisfaction that she is African and that there is worth and humanity in Africanness. This memory act is most striking when Wheatley interjects the self in poems where the focus is not the self. The oft-anthologized “To the University of Cambridge, in New England” illustrates this pattern. The poem, ostensibly an admonishment and a reminder to the young, rising intelligentsia of America, begins with a brief autobiographical reflection by the poet. She reminds these great minds that she is but a humble African standing before them: While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, The muses promise to assist my pen; Twas not long since I left my native shore The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom: Father of mercy, ‘twas thy gracious hand Brought me in safety from those dark abodes. (1–6) Following this self-reflection, the body of the poem reminds listeners that no matter how great their worldly accomplishments, their ultimate test is God’s final judgment—a measurement of their spiritual achievements. On one level, this autobiographical reflection serves as a biting proclamation of both Wheatley and Africans’ equal status before God, but it also serves as a ritual of self-acknowledgement and selfaffirmation. Taking moments in her poetry to remember her African self and its journey echoes a traditional African belief in the necessity and power of remembering. Wheatley understands—whether consciously or unconsciously—that to remember is to render the spirit alive and whole. We find further evidence of this insight in the poem of praise, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c,” and the elegiac poem, “To His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor, on the Death of His Lady.” Here again, Wheatley engages in moments of remembering that seem outside the focus of the poems. As is typical of her elegiac poetry, Wheatley


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offers the Christian message of salvation and eternal life to console one who has lost a loved one. Focusing on the message that death is not the ultimate victor, Wheatley reminds this grieving husband that his lost wife has been delivered into the eternal kingdom: There sits, illustrious Sir, thy beauteous spouse; A gem-blaz’d circle beaming on her brows. Haul’d with acclaim among the heav’nly choirs, Her soul new-kindling with seraphic fires, To notes divine she tunes the vocal strings, While heav’n’s high concave with the music rings. (19–24) Wheatley’s reminder to this man of prominence (emphasized by her acknowledgment of him as “illustrious Sir”) that Christianity’s promise of eternal life leaves no room for grief would be otherwise typical of eighteenth-century American elegies. However, in the closing lines of this stanza, his grief seems remarkably unfit. Just as she presumes she can advise the Cambridge scholars, Wheatley reminds this respected figure that it is she, a simple African, who brings him this all-important message: “Nor canst thou, Oliver, assent refuse / To heav’nly tidings from the Afric muse” (27–28). The subversion of white male supremacy does not lie far beneath the surface in this passage: given that the interjection of a line calling attention to her African identity adds no meaning to the elegiac theme, one can reasonably argue that Wheatley constructs the contrasting image of her humble African self to the powerful white male figure to highlight their equality before the ultimate judge—God. This subversive moment also shows her engaging again in the act of remembering; it suggests that in an overwhelming cloud of whiteness, Wheatley unapologetically claims a black space. The brevity of Wheatley’s self-reflective line in “To His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor” is a striking contrast to the more revealing self-reflection in the poem, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth.” This poem pays tribute to the Earl of Dartmouth, a British official in the colonies who Wheatley presumes is a sympathizer to the American call for freedom from British rule: Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn, Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn: The northern clime beneath her genial ray, Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway: (1–4)

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Whether he is, in fact, a sympathizer is of little consequence to the poem’s secondary discourse. Wheatley’s praise for William’s recognition of the colonists’ rightful desire for freedom is tied to her secondary narrative of the African’s rightful desire for freedom: “Should you, my lord, while you peruse my Song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung” (20–21). Here again Wheatley interjects the self (herself) into a work whose purpose is seemingly unrelated to her own personal narrative. The focal shift from the colonists’ and the Honorable William’s love of freedom to Wheatley’s love of freedom opens the discourse to the self-reflective memory that follows: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch d from Afric’s fanc’d happy seat: What pangs excrutiating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (24–30) Overlaying her own personal narrative of desire with that of the colonists’ desire for freedom, Wheatley makes an unmistakable plea for the cause of enslaved Africans, positing both their humanity and their equality. In addition to the more political argument suggested in these lines, Wheatley engages in the spiritual act of remembering and affirming the self. Her brief autobiographical reflection in this poem represents a rare moment in her extant writings. Here she remembers her homeland beyond the Western construct of a generalized paganism. She offers a more personal vision of a happy homeland where her loving parents were left devastated by her abduction. Wheatley may not have actually seen her parents’ faces as she was taken from her home, but through memory and imagination she reconstructs and relives this moment. The image of her father, suffering the loss of “his babe beloved” quells the colonial discourse that painted Africans as a people with no meaningful past. This account of Wheatley’s early life reminds readers of her sadness then. However, despite the “cruel fate” she endured at being “snatchd from her happy home” and the subsequent suffering of her parents, the memory of her childhood consoles and confirms her. In addition to the scattered reflections on memory in her poetry, carryovers of African spirituality are evident in repetitions. In particular,


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Wheatley’s recurring use of sun imagery and the prevalence of elegies among her poetic works point to traditional African concepts of nature and being. The recurrence of sun imagery in Wheatley’s poetry has been noted by a number of scholars, and much has been made of the fact that “all that she is known to have recalled to her white captors about her native land is the fact that ‘her mother poured out water before the sun at his rising’” (Shields 1988, 241). While one can make the simplistic connection between Wheatley’s familiarity with Greek classics and the early American elegiac tradition to explain her frequent use of sun imagery and the significant number of her poems that focus on death, John Shields argues that the animistic emphasis on death among the people of her native Africa may help to explain Wheatley’s celebration of death in her numerous elegies . . . [and] the fetishistic emphasis on material objects—where in the case of sun worshipers the focal point is, of course, the object worshiped— may have so pressed itself upon Wheatley’s memory as never to have been far beneath her conscious mind; this memory may indeed have served her as a powerful source of consolation. (242) Evidence of this lay in Wheatley’s indiscriminate reference to sun imagery: in her elegies, religious contemplations, and musings on nature, Wheatley found a place for sun imagery. In light of the common belief among precolonial Africans that nature is the manifestation of God’s power, Wheatley’s preoccupation with God’s most marvelous natural wonder—the sun—is understandable. The sun is sacred: “sunshine is one of the expressions of God’s providence, as held by some peoples like the Akan, Ankore, Igbira, Kpelle and Ila . . . The Akan call God ‘the Shining One’ . . . One of the Ankore names for God means ‘Sun,’ . . . For the Igbira, the sun symbolizes God’s benevolence, an expression of His providence” (Mbiti 1970, 53). The connection drawn by Mbiti between Africans’ conception of the sun and God’s benevolence is evinced in Wheatley’s three meditative poems, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” “An Hymn to the Morning,” and “An Hymn to the Evening.” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” is ostensibly a meditation on the Christian God; however, Wheatley’s conflation of Christianity’s God and the god of her African homeland whose being is manifested in nature (in particular, the sun) demonstrates the religious duality that Wheatley negotiates. Wheatley

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combines terms that predate Mbiti’s similar use by more than two centuries: just as Mbiti speaks of the African’s concept of the sun as providential and benevolent, Wheatley opens with imagery of the rising sun and suggests that this is the sign of God’s benevolence: Arise, my soul, on wings enraptur’d, rise To praise the monarch of the earth and Skies, Whose goodness and beneficence appear As round its centre moves the rolling year, Or when the morning glows with rosy charms, Or the sun slumbers in the ocean’s arms: Of light divine be a rich portion lent To guide my soul, and favour my intent. (1–8) God, the monarch of the earth and skies, is the center, the sun, around which all life revolves: “Ador’d for ever be the God unseen, / Which round the sun revolves this vast machine” (11–12). This Wheatley reiterates within the first half of this 131 line poem: Creation smiles in various beauty gay, While day to night, and night succeeds to day: That Wisdom, which attends Jehovah’s ways, Shines more conspicuous in the solar rays: Without them, destitute of heat and light, This world would be the reign of endless Night. (29–34) As the poem progresses, we find that Wheatley’s meditation on providence is a reflection on God’s manifestation through nature. While the sun is the central sign of God, all of nature signals God’s presence and goodness: But see the sons of vegetation rise, And spread their leafy banners to the skies. All-wise Almighty Providence we trace In trees, and plants, and all the flow’ry race; As clear as in the nobler frame of man, All lovely copies of the Maker’s plan. (69–74) God is “Almighty Providence,” “the Maker,” who is ever-present in the world. Implicit in this worldview of God is the assumption that all is


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divine, for everything is a manifestation of God. He is not the God of Western Christianity, who is the creator of all but an entity distinct from his creations. Wheatley sees God as creator of and existing in everything, and his salvation is thus granted to everyone. God, who is “Love,” which is “Nature’s constant voice,” has made the wonders of nature “to nourish all, to serve one gen’ral end, / The good of Man . . .” (127–28). The significance of the sun is again made evident in Wheatley’s corresponding contemplations on nature, “An Hymn to the Morning” and “An Hymn to the Evening.” Though the two works reflect on two contrasting parts of the day, both highlight the sun as central and powerful. Morning is marked by the gentle west wind, the songs of birds, and the early shade and protection offered by trees: The morn awakes, and wide extends her rays, On ev’ry leaf the gentle zephyr plays; Harmonious lays the feather’d race resume. Dart the bright eye, and shake the painted Plume. Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display To shield your poet from the burning day: (7–12) This pastoral scene is interrupted, however, by the emergence of the sun in the eastern sky. The powerful sun will become the overwhelming presence in the day, nullifying the protection offered by the early shade: See in the east th’ illustrious king of day! His rising radiance drives the shade away— But Oh! I feel his fervid beams too strong, And scarce begun, concludes th’ abortive song. (17–20) The quest of “the king of day,” the sun, over the “gentle zephyr” may also be read as a subversive assertion of the might of the East (Africa) over the West (Anglo) in Wheatley’s cosmology. It is a trope that she repeats again in “An Hymn to the Evening,” as she contrasts the west wind and the sun of the east: Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain; Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing, Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. (1–4)

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While the evening is painted as a magnificent showcase of artistry— “Through all the heav’ns what beauteous dies are spread! / But the west glories in the deepest red” (7–8)—it is still the sun that Wheatley paints as the controlling force. God, or the sun, “gives the light” by which humans make their way through each day and “draws the sable curtains of the night,” allowing for human solace and rest (11–12). Contrasted against the eastern sun, which answers human need at both sunrise and sunset, is the “deepest red” of the West that perhaps is synonymous with the deep red of human blood. The picture of a West that “glories” in a deep red hue is not so distinct from the picture of a Western society whose wealth and glory are tied to the spilling of African blood across thousands of ocean miles. A physical entity and a metaphor for her eastern home, the sun is a medium through which Wheatley connects with Africanity. By carefully converging her African-rooted reverence for the sun with her adopted Christian concepts of an omnipotent God, Wheatley maintains a lifeline to African spirituality. This is exemplified in the elegy, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770.” Here, as in her other elegies, Wheatley grounds her consolation in the Christian language of the eternally blissful hereafter, but she also draws on her deeply rooted concept of the divine sun to explore the meaning of life and death. Focusing on death and the sorrow of loss, Wheatley calls on sun imagery as a metaphor for both life and death. The sun signifies the warmth and brightness that fills our carnal existence, and it also signifies the light of the hereafter. God, as light, prevails in the carnal and the spiritual world. While death may bring darkness and sadness, it also brings the light of eternity. Therefore, Wheatley can represent the death of a well-known preacher and slave sympathizer, George Whitefield, as both a sunset and a bright vision. She speaks of Whitefield himself as the sun that will no longer rise: “Unhappy we the setting sun deplore, / So glorious once, but ah! It shines no more” (9–10). This picture of death as the fading light is later eclipsed by the final image of Whitefield in heaven. In the eternal hereafter, Whitefield, the setting sun, has been restored to a shining light: But, though arrested by the hand of death, Whitefield no more exerts his lab’ring breath, Yet let us view him in th’ eternal skies, Let ev’ry heart to this bright vision rise; (42–45)


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The repeated connection Wheatley draws between death and the lifesustaining sun is indicative of an African cosmology that sees death as simply an entry to a new life medium. Just as the memory of her mother in Africa greeting the rising sun in the mornings connected Wheatley to her African homeland, the remembrance of the sun’s central power and its eastern location may have symbolized her ultimate return to her spiritual home in the bliss beyond this world. The connectedness of nature, God, and humanity in Wheatley’s poetry suggests an African spiritual view that survived the Middle Passage and Anglo-Christianity. Wheatley’s understanding of a physical world that God has created as a manifestation of his greatness, echoes an African understanding of humankind as intricately connected to all that God has created. This extends to Wheatley’s concept of human connectedness, which is exemplified by the many poems in her collection that honor those she deems part of her extended family and community. Her overwhelming concern for her friends as well as those she admires from afar who have suffered the loss of loved ones or have themselves succumbed to death is exemplified by the fact that more than half the poems in her 1773 collection are addressed to individuals. While many scholars have painted Wheatley as a young black woman isolated from the larger slave community and the dominant white society, Wheatley’s poetry and her correspondences suggest the contrary. She felt a particular connection to whites who were sympathetic or who she thought capable of being sympathetic to African rights and humanity. Hence, her eulogy to George Whitefield focuses more on the ideas of Whitefield than the man himself. “He pray’d that grace in ev’ry heart might dwell” (20), she says of Whitefield, crediting him with having indiscriminately called sinners to Christ: Take him my dear Americans, he said, Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid: Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you, Impartial Saviour is his title due: (32–35) Whitefield’s recognition of the African’s equality in God’s eyes renders him part of Wheatley’s spiritual community. Wheatley’s many eulogies serve to connect her to a community of Christians and reflect an African worldview that maintains death as a human transition that must be acknowledged and experienced by the community. In traditional African

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societies, the individual does not face death alone, but rather is attended by members of the community to help in the crossing-over experience. The death must then be followed by ceremony that celebrates the life of the departed and the entrance into the world of the spiritual. While her eulogies may be read for their Puritan-influenced notions of deliverance from suffering to the heavenly hereafter, they just as powerfully transformed traditional African spiritual rituals into written form. Her eulogies then represent a written enactment of the African celebration of the dead—again, an act that calls on the community to remember and to celebrate.

The survival of Africanity in Wheatley’s writings represents the undercurrent of a traditional African worldview that would be transformed, but not extinguished. Among Wheatley’s nineteenth-century literary successors, however, the voice of Africanity became more submerged in dominant Anglo-Christian rhetoric. Spiritual autobiographies and essays became the prevailing written genres of early nineteenth-century black women writers. While traditional African rituals and ideologies remained part of black oral culture, African American writing painted a world that had given itself over to a Christian worldview. This is evidenced in varying degrees in the spiritual writings of Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, and Rebecca Cox Jackson—itinerant black women preachers whose spiritual callings were an outgrowth of both an Africanrooted culture that validated women as spiritual leaders and the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. While their claim to public space is born out of an African-rooted heritage that acknowledged women as spiritual leaders, these black women articulated a Christian worldview that made no claims or connections to Africa. In particular, “Lee and Stewart grounded their sermons and spiritual writings in biblical discourse” (Peterson 1998, 23), a practice that became commonplace for Wheatley’s nineteenth-century literary descendants. While critics have often reproved Wheatley for her presumed acquiescence to racist discourse, careful examination of her work reveals her legacy as a poetic repository of African culture. More than her nineteenth-century successors, Wheatley is a clear link between her modern literary descendants and the traditional African worldview that informed African American spirituality. The emphasis on memory, nature, and community in her poetry reflects an African worldview that lies at the narrative core of numerous contemporary fictional works by


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black women. Among the most well-known examples is Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the fictional account of a black woman and a black community healing from the wounds of slavery. Through memory, the protagonist, Sethe, travels in and out of time and experiences reliving the past not only to understand and break free of its evils, but also to grow from the strength and good that it offers. Similarly, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s female protagonist, Janie, finds her way to God not by sitting in the fine house that her husband has provided, but rather by going to the marshlands of Florida, close to nature and the community that allows her the freedom of self-discovery. The juxtaposition of Wheatley’s poetry and fictional works by black women such as Morrison and Hurston highlight the fluid and dynamic presence of an African cosmology among Americans of African descent. The central place of African spirituality in contemporary works by black women writers demonstrates that blacks have maintained traditional African worldviews not by accident, but rather, as Wheatley shows us, through survival strategies that validate the self in a world that is designed to deny and destroy it.


4 “Any Woman’s Blues” Sherley Anne Williams and the Blues Aesthetic MICHAEL A. ANTONUCCI

Too often, the blues are understood as a predominately male, rural, and Southern mode of expression. Examined in this way, the wide range of geographic, social, and material conditions that converge to create this foundational mode of African American cultural production become conflated and compressed into a critical shorthand. Placed within this framework, solo male musicians represent the quintessence of blues artistry; the so-called Country blues is privileged over urban forms, such as the East Coast blues; and blues modes associated with the South, like the Delta blues, are regarded as more “authentic” when compared with Northern iterations, like the Chicago blues. As a result, even when it is recognized as something more than a particular form of African American folk music, the blues’ impact as an aesthetic and cultural force is limited, diminished and obscured by this myopia. These traditional (mis)readings of the blues were largely offset in groundbreaking investigations into the blues roots of African American cultural production offered by Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, and Houston A. Baker, Jr. In a quarter century of debate and dialogue, these writers and their allies traded riffs in a high-profile, high-stakes exchange concerning African American music and culture. Through works such as Blues People (1963), Shadow and Act (1964), and Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984), Baraka, Ellison, and Baker recognize the blues as the taproot of African American cultural production. Producing a complex set of discursive harmonies, along with Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues (1976) and Richard Powell’s The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989), these writers collectively established the idea that a “blues aesthetic” underwrites the great 67

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works by the giants of Black music, including Charlie “Bird” Parker, Ornette Coleman, and Ma Rainey. Yet, despite its brilliance, this extended critical jam session represents just one portion of the extended conversation about the blues and African American cultural expression that is present in the written, performed, and visual work thoroughly grounded in blues tradition. As such, works by Baraka, Ellison, and Baker form the ostinato, or powerful bass line, which sustains a wider critical discussion of the blues. The rhythms driving their celebrated exchange are accented, articulated, and further contextualized in creative and scholarly works by other blues practitioners. For example, blues poetry by Jayne Cortez and Sterling D. Plumpp, studies by Julio Finn and Daphne Duval Harrison, and visual art by Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold also demonstrate the blues’ broad capacities as an expressive mode, beyond and away from its musical manifestations. This expansion is seen, in particular, through the work of female artists and writers such as Cortez, Harrison, and Ringgold, who point out how the critical work of Baraka, Ellison, and Baker, and others is informed by a masculinized vision of the blues. Works by these Black women reference powerful, but overshadowed, styles, in both their choice of forms and subject matter, thereby engaging these critical conversations concerning the mode and its impact on both African American and American cultural production in a new way, especially when examining the classic blues. When it is recognized as a complex cultural phenomenon, the classic blues demonstrate an unrivaled capacity to transform vast stretches of the American cultural landscape. As a musical form, this sophisticated blues style provided Black women vocalists such as Ma Rainey, Sippy Wallace, Trixie Smith, and Bessie Smith with an expressive vehicle that harnessed the visual, aural, and gestural frequencies of the blues. As they performed and recorded these blues in the early part of the twentieth century, these women professionalized and industrialized Black music. As Baraka points out in Blues People: “socially, the classic blues and the instrument styles that went with it represented the Negro’s entrance into the world of professional entertainment and the assumption of the psychological imperatives that must accompany such a phenomenon” (Jones 1999, 81–82). Baraka goes on to claim that “just as the wandering primitive blues singers had spread a certain style of blues-singing, the performance of classic blues served as models and helped standardize certain

“Any Woman’s Blues”

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blues styles” (Jones 1999, 83). The influence of classic blues, and the women who sang it, on African American music and other forms of expression has also been explored by Hazel Carby and Angela Davis. Poetic works of Michael S. Harper, Lyn Lifshin, and Al Young, among others, furhter augments these scholarly investigations of htis blues mode. In sketches of classic blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Ma Rainey these poets affirm the fundamental claim Powell makes in “The Blues Aesthetic”: “If one is knowledgeable about [Black] America—its history, its traditions, its geography, its verbal and visual codes, its heroes, its demons and its ever changing styles, and its spiritual dimensions—then one knows the blues” (Powell 1989, 23). While measuring the aesthetic and ideological imprint that classic blues has made on African American cultural production and American culture at-large, scholars should be more mindful of the work of Sherley Anne Williams. Through her work as both poet and theorist, Williams emerges as a central figure in ongoing conversations about the blues and blues aesthetic. In her first volume of published poetry, The Peacock Poems (1975), Williams explores both form and content of the classic blues. Her poetic examinations of the classic blues gains an additional measure of definition when read in conjunction with “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.” Through this foundational essay on the relationship between the blues and African American poetic traditions, Williams’s readers receive a critical guide for reading the Peacock Poems as well as her later blues poetry in Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982). I “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry” begins by by stating that: blues is essentially an oral form meant to be heard rather than read: and the techniques and structures used to such powerful purpose in the songs cannot always be transferred directly to literary traditions within which Afro-American poets write” (Harper and Stepto 1979, 123). Williams discusses the wide range of Black poets who use the blues as a medium for experimenting with form, voice, and language. Citing works by Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Nikki Giovanni, Williams ultimately contends that these poets provide examples that indicate how the blues and blues-rooted poetry “confront experience” and “evoke a powerful response in the listener because of

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[their] direct relationship to concepts and events in the collective experience” (131). Williams thus establishes an important platform for discussing the blues aesthetic impact on African American cultural production. Reading Williams’s own poetic engagement with the blues through the critical lens she develops in “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry” illustrates the call-and-response relationship between the blues and lived experience. In The Peacock Poems, Williams initiates this dialogue by undertaking an extended conversation with classic blues recordings by Bessie Smith. Drawing on the fundamental blues impulses of improvisation and appropriation, Williams contacts the Bessie Smith legacy with a series of riffs in which the poet works and reworks several of Bessie’s songs, beginning in the first section of The Peacock Poems, “every woman is a victim of the feel bad blues, too.” Throughout her first poem, “Any Woman’s Blues,” Williams offers a response to the calls sent by Bessie in two of her songs, “Any Woman’s Blues” and “Empty Bed Blues.” Williams’s version of “Any Woman’s Blues” conveys a bluesy ambivalence that mirrors the sort of side banter associated with the performance of the classic blues singer. This becomes evident in the poem’s first line: “Blues Is Something to Think About.” In the parenthetical line that follows, “(the last verse of One-Sided Bed Blues”), Williams casually contextualizes the poem’s opening line as a reworking of Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues.” The simulated stage chatter continues with the third line in the form of an italicized, one-line statement, “and this is the way that shit come down.” With these lines serving as her introduction, Williams delivers a six-line stanza that appears on the page as a fractured version of a three line, a-a-a blues verse. My bed one-sided from me sleepin alone so mucha the time. My bed one-sided, now, cause I’m alone so mucha the time. But the fact that it’s empty show how this man is messin with my mind. (1975, 11) At the same time as answering Bessie Smith’s call, Williams’s poem offers a studied contrast to Smith’s blues. While Smith sings what may be described as a boastful lament, “My man ain’t actin’ right / He stays out late at night / and still he says he loves no one but me,” (A. Davis


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1999, 260) Williams speaks directly to the contradictions associated with that peculiar blues condition: “love in vain.” With “Any Woman’s Blues,” Williams’ readers find an entry point for The Peacock Poems and its exploration of motherhood, family, and love. These themes inform the volume and its poetic account of one Black woman’s struggle to find her voice and exercise its creative capacity. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Bessie Smith’s blues heroines, Williams’ poetic persona recognizes the blues as a medium for witnessing the travels and travails of Black women in the United States. Writing as an African American “any woman,” Williams records the situations she encounters while moving from the cotton fields of Southern California to an Ivy League university and beyond, making a connection with Bessie Smith and black women’s blues tradition writ large. Williams’ poetry addresses what Angela Davis describes in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism when she writes: “For Bessie Smith’s black workingclass audiences, she was a serious artist—not an exotic oddity—who courageously explored unknown terrains of the blues and honed and stretched the form to its very limits. . . . Smith made the blues into woman’s music and a site for the elaboration of black cultural consciousness that did not ignore the dynamics of gender” (1999, 142). Significantly, Williams’s verse also provides a set of stark contrasts to the stock imagery conjured when Bessie Smith and the classic blues are evoked. Throughout The Peacock Poems, Williams’s poetry effectively revises conventional readings of the blues that oversimplify the mode as an emotional expression, alternating between languid melancholic and raucous excesses. Instead, the poet recognizes the blues’ capacities to serve as a life-affirming survival kit, designed to negotiate and adapt to a range of hostile environments and circumstances. This is particularly apparent in the “every woman” section of The Peacock Poems, which continues with two prose poems, mapping California’s Imperial Valley and the route leading east to Providence, Rhode Island, where Williams attended Brown University. The traveling blues that Williams presents in the opening section of The Peacock Poems are as deep as any that Smith sings. Like the Empress of the Blues, Williams explores the blues’ (infinite) capacity for linking disparate elements, while simultaneously measuring the chill of loneliness and isolation. By doing so, Williams makes use of a primary impulse of the blues aesthetic: embracing radical juxtapositions. This underscores her decision to include a second version of “Any Woman’s Blues” midway through the opening section of The

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Peacock Poems. In this poem she cements her formal connections to the Bessie Smith legacy by referring to Bessie’s “Empty Bed Blues,” a recording that was released in two parts. With her second version of “Any Woman’s Blues,” Williams extends the call she made in the first version of the poem, with a slight variation. By beginning this reprise of “Any Woman’s Blues” where the first poem formally leaves off, she demonstrates the modular or interchangeable structure of the blues. Williams recognizes the poem’s series of six-line stanzas as fractured versions of the a-a-a rhymes found in both Bessie’s “Empty Bed Blues” and the first version of “Any Woman’s Blues.” Through her use of spacing and juxtaposition, Williams conveys the poetic tensions that underlie this version of the poem: its solitary, nocturnal scene is founded upon restless movement. Working with the blues aesthetic and its impulse toward dynamic oppositions, she fuses these fragments together to establish the poem’s pensive mood, evident in lines from the poem’s first stanza, “Soft lamp shinin / and me alone at night,” and “I left many peoples and places / tryin not to be alone.” In the second stanza, she repeats the line, and pursues this exploration of the blues aesthetic. Presenting her own variations on a staple blues image, the circle in the sun she concludes the stanza by writing “What’s gone can be a window / a circle in the eye of the sun” (1975, 25). Williams once more demonstrates the flexibility that underlies the blues aesthetic. Through this stock image, which identifies the round and embracing structure of the blues universe, the poet identifies an opportunity to resolve the hostile circumstances confronting her. Looking through the sun circle, she seeks and seemingly arrives at a new vantage point, which becomes clear as she stitches the poetic blues quilt in the fourth stanza. These is old blues and I sing em like any woman do. These the old blues and I sing em, sing em sing em. Just like any woman do. My life ain’t done yet. Naw. My Song ain’t through. (25) In these lines Williams declares that the desperate sense of loneliness that she experiences in the first version of “Any Woman’s Blues” is not a debilitating or all-consuming condition. Instead, “the old blues”


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becomes her purchase on the blues process of introspection and selfdefinition that she conducts throughout The Peacock Poems. Williams’s “Any Woman’s Blues” cycle reaches its crescendo with “Blues is Something to Think About,” the final poem in the “every woman” section of The Peacock Poems that completes Williams’s reply to Bessie Smith. The poem’s title recycles and recontextualizes the opening line of the first “Any Woman’s Blues,” and the speaker of the poem assumes the on-stage persona of a classic blues singer. In the poem’s first six lines, the speaker “counts off” the time signature of this blues poem. As this bracketed block of poetic text provides the “one-two / one-twothree-four,” it also introduces the rhymed lines that compose the cycle’s last stanza, which the poet describes as A traditional statement about a traditional situation with a new response Or, another ending for One-Sided Bed Blues (37) As such, this “count off stanza” presents the poem as an alternative to the heartache and hardship that Smith invests in “Empty Bed Blues.” The poet’s claim is validated when the final stanza of “The Blues is Something to Think About” is compared to the closing verse of “Empty Bed Blues.” In her recording of the song’s second part, the Empress of the Blues cautions her audience against these sort of blues by singing, “When you get good loving’, never go and spread the news / Yeah, it will double cross and leave you with them empty bed blues” (A. Davis 1999, 263). When compared with Smith’s song lines, Williams’s “new response” to “a traditional situation,” becomes apparent in the lines concluding the “every woman” section of The Peacock Poems. I’m lonesome now but I bet’ not be lonesome long Yeah, I’m lonesome now, but I don’t need to be lonesome too long: You know, it take a do-right man to make a pretty woman sing a lonesome song. (37) Giving her readers “something to think about,” these lines effectively revise conventional readings of the blues that understand this expressive

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mode as little more than a condition defined by hopelessness and despair. Ultimately, the poem serves as preparation for the unexpected incidents that compose the verse found in the volume’s second section, “I never neva thought I’d sing this song.” II Williams intensifies her experiment to revise and reconfigure familiar patterns in the blues impulse in the second part of The Peacock Poems. She does this by conducting an extended study in repetition and difference throughout “I neva, neva thought I’d sing this song,” interspersing six distinct poems in the course of the section. The poems are arranged in such a way as to create an extended variation on twelve bar blues, demonstrating its powerful flexibility while respecting both its form and content. The piece begins with “The Peacock Poems: 2” followed by two different versions of “Peacock Poems: 1.” variations of this motif course through “The Peacock Poems: 3” and “The Peacock Song.” In this way, Williams effectively presents her work so as to respond to the call she herself issues. Just as she does in the “Any Woman’s Blues” cycle, Williams conducts an investigation of the blues’ formal elements while working with issues and situations drawn from lived experience. She remains committed to a tenet of the blues aesthetic: “keeping it real,” demonstrated in the content of the peacock poems that compose the “neva, neva thought” section. For example, in “The Peacock Poems: 1” the poet recalls a series of moments from her childhood, fashioning them into a three-canto blues meditation on her family’s life and labors in the cotton fields of California’s Imperial Valley. Formally, the poem evokes the blues through its use of alternately rhymed four-line stanzas. Contextually, the poem reconfigures the geography of African American experience, the first canto of “1,” “the trimming of the feathers,” when Williams describes the end of a working day at harvest time: then. Us all be tired. I be thinking bout the beans Mamma cook. Jack come with the bus. Daddy take the baby and Mamma drag the sack. (43) Williams’s use of the African American vernacular for the speaker’s voice in “The Peacock Poems: 1,” further grounds the poem


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in blues idiom. Through her use of phrases such as “Us all be tired” and “Mamma cook,” the speaker engages and acknowledges this significant aspect of African American collective experience, satisfying the criteria for blues poetry that Williams lays out in “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.” The speaker’s language serves as a vehicle that relates the blues’ actual and poetic engagements with conditions of everyday life. These intimate relationships become evident in the speaker’s unvarnished treatment of several inanimate objects named in the stanza. “The beans,” the “bus,” and “the sack” mark the psychic and physical limits of the poet’s childhood. As unadorned and present boundaries, they witness and record a primary function of the blues: the ongoing struggle for existence. Their weight and impact of these lines become magnified through the occasion they recall: the end of the workday during the cotton harvest. Williams’s “1” makes a series of connections between African American experience in mid-twentieth-century California, the legacy of slavery in the Old South, and the economic injustice of the sharecropping system in the New South. In rendering this complexity of history, politics, and economics, the poet validates her claim that “the blues is something to think about.” “The Peacock Poems: 1” identifies two potent markers of African American collective experience—growing cotton and working from “can till can’t”—as significant components of the poet’s California experience. As a result, Williams’ poetic reflections on her early home life do not harmonize with the groovy, laid-back California dreamscape conjured in the music of the Beach Boys or the Grateful Dead. Instead, as she writes her family into a California landscape and history shaped by the blues and African American experience, the poet reorients her audience and its understanding of these spaces and places. She effectively moves backwards in time, linking her own mid-twentieth-century experiences to living conditions experienced by enslaved Africans and people of African descent living in the so-called New World prior to the abolition of slavery. By doing so, the poem not only undercuts prevailing cultural images of California, but also challenges notions about American historical and material progress. “The Peacock Poems: 1” thereby offers a corrective to the reciprocal undercurrent of Manifest Destiny ideology, particularly the unquestioned belief in the righteous and rightful execution of extending American hegemony “from sea to shining sea.” Through the poem Williams’s speaker witnesses a broader systemic failure to equitably distribute the benefits of modernity and

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technology, identifying the persistence of racism and sexism in the living patterns of Black women. The poet supports her investigation into these notions of progress in formal terms by using a non-linear time sequence throughout the peacock poems. For example, the early memories she presents in “The Peacock Poems: 1” may be understood as providing the poetic cycle with a point of origin. At the same time, this poem’s title, which designates it as the first in the series, also appears to establish it as the cycle’s formal point of origin. However, sequentially, “1” is the second peacock poem that appears within the “neva, neva thought” section. Questions regarding the cycle’s origins or starting point are further complicated by “The Peacock Poems: 2,” which precedes “1” by two poems. Despite being the first poem in this section of Williams’s collection, “2” opens with the line “This ain’t the beginning; maybe its the end” (1975, 41). In this way, the poet breaks conventional chronology, setting her peacock poems within a blues-rooted, cyclic-temporal sequence. Her experiment becomes more evident in “The Peacock Poems: 3,” as the poet explores these formal possibilities by situating “3” two poems after “1” in the sequence. Read within Williams’ larger poetic experiment with blues time and place throughout The Peacock Poems, the content of “3” extends the poet’s riff on the blues’ cyclic time structure: You know it’s really cold when you wake up hurtin in the middle of the night and the only one you know to call is the operator and she put you through to the police. (48) The situation confronting the speaker in “3” is both a cold and lonesome blues and a summary of her present circumstances. In this sense the poem is neither a beginning nor an end. It could be described as an extreme case of Bessie’s “Empty Bed Blues.” Lost and far from home, the speaker feels a lack of the intimate contact with those “people and places” that she claims to have left behind in the second version of “Any Woman Blues.” Yet, even so, her situation is not as dire and desperate as it would seem. When the twelve poems comprising the second section of The Peacock Poems is read as a variation on the structure of the twelve-bar


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blues, the deep blues that Williams lays out in “3” gains a measure of resolution in the second version of “The Peacock Poems: 1.” This is seen as the poet positions the “1” refrain just two poems after “3.” In this way it responds to the call that her speaker puts out in “The Peacock Poems: 3.” As she does in the first version of “1,” Williams grounds her speaker’s circumstances and conflicts within a larger sense of African American collective experience: A ship A chain A distant land A whip A pain A white man’s hand A sack A stove A corn husk bed Couldn’t bend Grea’gra’ma’s back. Never lowered Gra’ma’s head. (57) With these lines, the poet contextualizes the emotional and existential despair she examines in “2” and “3.” The heartbreak and loneliness she expresses in this poem are examined against and grounded in historical realities confronted by her ancestors. The resilience of “Gra’ma’ and “Grea’ gra’ma,” who emerge neither bent nor bowed by the harsh experiences of slavery and its legacy, affirms the speaker and gives her strength to continue. In this way the poet employs a time-tested blues strategy. She seeks a greater sense of her own circumstances by interrogating these collective experiences and situations. Drawing on the strength of her grandmothers, the speaker is able to sing a song, which she “neva, neva” thought she would sing: a song with a power summoned through the poet’s evocation of her female ancestors. III This song ultimately manifests as “The Peacock Song,” the final poem in the second section of The Peacock Poems. Like the other poems in the peacock cycle, it presents a variation on the standard a-a-b blues

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lyrics. This is readily seen in its opening stanza, composed of eight irregularly broken blues lines, in which the speaker once again assumes the persona of a classic blues singer on stage. As such, she furnishes the audience with an account of her reasons for singing the blues, grounding this testimony in the blues idiom by employing vernacular African American dialect: They don’t like to see you with yo tail draggin low so I try to hold mines up high. No one want to know where you goin til after you been and even though I told em ain’t nobody heard. How a peacock gon speak: I got no tongue. (67) With these lines Williams’s speaker offers a set of observations on the blues condition. By presenting the situation as one in which “no / one want to know where you go- / in til after you been”, she addresses the contradictory and seemingly impossible circumstances that converge to inform the “both/and” proposition that sustains the blues. In this way the poet directs her attention to the logic of the blues that would seem to defy the reason inherent to the most basic thinking (for example, “I had to laugh to keep from crying” or “Been down so long, it seems like up to me”). Approaching the blues in this manner ultimately leads the poet to ask the question, “How a peacock / gon speak: I got no tongue.” As a result, Williams establishes a critical connection between her classic blues singer persona and the peacock image that she explores in the course of her poetic cycle. As she conjures the plumed and beaded costumes that Bessie Smith and other classic blues singers wore on stage, the poet seems to embrace the incongruity and ambiguity that underlie the classic blues experience. In this way the poet moves into the blues space where incongruity and dissonance is not simply tolerated, but promoted as a means of generating creative energy. This is made especially evident when the condition of Williams’s peacock singer—fundamentally mute and inarticulate—becomes further compounded by recalling that the vibrant, colored feathers, which the poet evokes throughout the cycle, is the distinguishing characteristic of the male peafowl. This inherent gender discrepancy between the image Williams sustains throughout the cycle and the female persona of her


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classic blues singer ultimately brings an additional layer of performance to her blues poems. As such, Williams’ speaker offers a stunning variation on the “antagonistic cooperation” that underscores the blues aesthetic. This impulse becomes particularly apparent in the second stanza of “The Peacock Song,” where she continues to pursue these poetic links between the blues and performance: Here I come with my pigeon-toed strut and my head is up for balance and so they can look in my eyes. (67) Just as she does in the first eight lines of “The Peacock Song,” the poet opens the second stanza of the poem by referring to an indeterminate “they,” who are, perhaps, best understood as the audience who witnesses her blues performance but, perhaps fails to recognize its nuance. Ultimately, the success of this performance is contingent on the singer’s ability to authenticate her blues by producing a set of convincing markers that she has collected in the course of her life—and from which she can thereby effectively “play the blues.” As a result, the heartache, trouble, and uncertainty faced by the speaker of Williams’s poem become tangible as “feathers” in the cap she has fashioned from the blues. Holding her head high, like Gra’ ma in the second version of “The Peacock Poem: 1”, the speaker challenges her audience to “look in my eye.” As she begins the guided tour of the blues “plumage” covering her body, the speaker states, “See that sty? that / was from beggin; that callus / come from brushin against all / the some ones I met on my way to been . . . or is it, am?” (67). Significantly, in this final line the indeterminate condition of the poet’s blues comes to take center stage. Hesitating, she confesses that she is unable to situate herself within a state of the past or present. In the next line of “The Peacock Song,” she admits that “I never do know” (67). The poem concludes as the speaker offers additional confirmation that her blues performance may be best understood as an attempt to communicate her “peacock status” to an audience that, at a very basic level, is unequipped to recognize what this means or entails, given the blues basic engagement with contradictions and juxtapositions. Yet, in spite of these circumstances, she continues singing:

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I never do know. But I was trying to make em feel that I need a little heart rubbin, soul scrubbin this is real. But if I’m a peacock my feathers’s’ sposed to cover all hurts and if you want to stay one then you got to keep that tail from draggin so mines is always held up high. (67) Contextualized within Williams’s peacock imagery, classic blues emerges as a musical form that is as complex as any in the Black music continuum. Throughout her peacock cycle, the poet presents the classic blues and their variations on “the changing same” as an expressive mode fully grounded in the organic experiences of African American life. Williams’s poetry successfully makes this case by bringing attention to the performative aspects of the classic blues as well as its incumbent layers of intrigue. With these poems she asserts that the classic blues are as unpredictably fluid as Robert Johnson’s Delta blues or every bit as voluble as the blues rooted-sound experiments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Williams’s peacock cycle delivers a set of detailed sketches of the blues terrain. Her poetic renderings ultimately come into sharper focus when read in conjunction with the poems in “the lines converge here,” the final section of The Peacock Poems. The verse Williams includes in “lines” identifies her speaker as having gained a new perspective on her life and the events that have shaped it. Poems found in this section of The Peacock Poems demonstrate the greater sense of clarity the poet has attained in confronting the emotional upheavals of the “One-Sided Bed Blues” and tracing the complications of family through African American experience in the peacock cycle. No longer a “victim of the feel blues too” and having sung the song she “neva, neva thought” she would, the poet delivers the volume’s final set of blues-rooted poetry, effectively spotlighting the full grandeur of her plumage. Williams continues to riff and generate variations on the established blues forms in poems such as “Quartet,” “1 Poem 2 Voices a Song” and “I Sing This Song for Our Mothers.” Through her use of blues conventions such as repetition, difference, and call-and-response, in addition to a full-range of syncopated cadences, Williams locates herself in the here and now of a bluescape. Poems in


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“lines” demonstrate a departure from the sense of spatial and temporal displacement that cloud her speaker’s vision in the first two sections of the volume. The command of the blues that the poet demonstrates throughout “lines” becomes especially apparent in “Communion in a Small Room,” an extended commentary on the aesthetic possibilities of the blues. Broaching a range of topics surrounding the economy of the blues, including origin, exchange, and theft, the poem offers another way of discussing the blues as an expressive mode. “Communion” provides a bookend to the conversation regarding blues and blues-rooted expression, which Williams begins in the opening section of the volume through her dialogue with Bessie Smith. This appears in the poem’s opening epigraph, attributed to poet Michael S. Harper: for sherley: whose epigraph I stole to make the blues—blue! (84) The trajectory of Williams’s The Peacock Poems may be understood as transposing a blues-rooted conversation about poetics into a poetic conversation about the blues. Williams opens “Communion” with the single line, “I give it to you Michael.” Her speaker answers Harper’s epigraph, effectively returning the credit and attribution he had hoped to give back to her. However, according to the poet, “it is not enough” to use the blues as a vehicle in some form of literary game. After undergoing the transformation of the peacock poems, she cautions her interlocutor that using the blues to perform literary parlor tricks, which she describes in the poem as “the soft explosive, wow! / the silent yesyes, speak,” neither honors the form nor authenticates the blues. But perhaps more importantly, she says, “That don’t make it real” (87). Williams repeats the line, “I give it to you Michael” before more commentary on Harper’s epigraph: “My / words but they don’t answer your / call.” After repeating “I give it to you Michael” once more, she explains that “I am not, / your audience. / The line converge here, spread.” The poet suggests that theft is ultimately impossible within the wide range of possibilities afforded by the blues. Occasionally, she positions “lines converge” in a particular spot and then “spread” in their own directions. Once again, she repeats “I give it to you Michael” to underscore the spirit of generosity that is a foundational

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element of the blues. She continues and further qualifies her conception of the blues as common property: “We live in that pattern, are / us now; are all.” The final line punctuates Williams’s belief in the blues as common currency of African American culture and experience: “I give it to you Michael—” (87). “Communion in a Small Room” concludes with the poet delivering a one-word response to Harper’s epigraph. After simply writing, No, she goes on to qualify her response in a parenthetic statement that effectively summarizes Williams’s understanding of the blues aesthetic in African American poetry and Black expressive culture at large: That ain’t Truth. It has always been ours: Speech verifies communion between living and living quick and dead in this small room. (87) Williams’s final peacock poem stands as part of her tribute riff on the classic blues. She provides both her audience and interlocutors—from Bessie Smith to Michael S. Harper—with a means of refreshing common assumptions that frame discussion of the blues, in terms of both forms and content. By doing so, she recognizes the blues as something other than a mode of African American folk music and offers her verse as a revised approach for engaging this dynamic mode of expression.

Part III Critical Revisions


5 Through the Mirror Re-Surfacing and Self-Articulation in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms ELLEN L. ARNOLD

Critical consideration of the work of Native American women writers is often segregated within literary studies, examined primarily in relation to work by other Native writers or ethnic women writers. However, as Osage poet Carter Revard demonstrates in his essay “Herbs of Healing,” there is much to be gained by bringing Native writers into crosscultural literary conversations; the “‘new’ regions” of minority literature, he says, are “lands of plenty, filled with herbs of healing” that can restore silenced histories and perspectives to mainstream literatures and criticism (1998, 162). By bringing Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s 1995 novel Solar Storms into dialogue with Margaret Atwood’s 1972 feminist classic Surfacing, I hope to illuminate Hogan’s complex project of cultural recovery and healing. Hogan praises Atwood’s Surfacing as “one of the novels that carried the [feminist] movement forward,” but she also criticizes mainstream feminists’ tendencies “to turn to traditions other than their own, . . . attempting to impose themselves into the world of old and complex spiritual traditions, simplifying and diminishing the religions they seek to gain strength from” (1986, xii). In Solar Storms, Hogan again pays tribute to Atwood’s novel in significant resonances of narrative structure, setting, imagery, and theme; at the same time, Solar Storms expands Atwood’s important ecofeminist insights to include a postcolonial perspective, providing a mirror to Surfacing that exposes and revises its appropriation of Native traditions and its reinscription of Western culture/nature dualisms.

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Parallels between Solar Storms and Surfacing are myriad and compelling. Both novels tell the story of a young woman’s return to a childhood home in Canada in search of a missing parent and healing from personal traumas. Each alienated protagonist undertakes a journey into wilderness that allows repressed memories and internalized self-destructive narratives to surface and be integrated into subjectivity, bringing her into spiritual alliance with the natural world. Set in the early 1970s, a period of environmental destruction accelerated by the damming of Canada’s rivers to produce hydroelectric power, both novels implicate Western constructions of gender and nature that sustain national histories of violence against women and earth. Each traces this violence to deeper dismemberments of mind and spirit from body that originate in language—in the split of signifier from signified that also separates self from other. Each explores this gap of alienation in terms and images that echo modern psychology’s assumption of a “preconscious unity with the environment”—the original union of the fetus with the mother’s body, the infant’s sense of continuity with environment—that is lost as the “ego crystallizes out of an . . . undifferentiated matrix” (Berman 1990, 25). Jacques Lacan names this process the “mirror stage”: the infant recognizes its image in a reflective surface or experience that provides the child a sense of itself as a body perceived as an other by someone else. This moment of self objectification initiates the emergence from the Imaginary—the presemiotic realm of identification with images in which there is no sense of a unitary self—into the symbolic order of prescribed social/sexual roles. The acquisition of language opens an irrevocable breach between the self as signifier and the image of the self as a signified, sealing the self off from the Imaginary (1977). The resulting split subject, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “can never have any direct access to reality” and is doomed to an endless quest for lost unity (1983, 167). Both Atwood and Hogan acknowledge the emergence of self-consciousness and its alienating effects in language, but refract the Lacanian scheme through the perspectives of gendered and/or racialized “others” and extend the mirroring process to include relationships with non-human nature. Both posit the possibility of healing the wounds of alienation and reexperiencing unity of self with world by plunging into the gap that separates self and not-self, signifier and signified. For Atwood’s protagonist, this recovery occurs through a regressive experience that many critics term psychotic: the repressed material of her

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unconscious mind pushes at her until it finally erupts, immersing her in the Imaginary and freeing her (temporarily) from the naming, severing powers of language and the discourses that define her as object and victim. Hogan, on the other hand, suggests that a recovery of original participation, of the experience of continuity with creation, can occur within and through language. For Hogan, the processes of mirroring that open the gap of alienation can also participate in closing it. In retelling Atwood’s journey of female recovery and reintegration from the point of view of the indigenous people of Canada who haunt the margins of Surfacing, Hogan brings to life the vital indigenous worlds and living oral traditions that are silenced in Atwood’s novel. Though space does not permit a comprehensive comparison of the novels, by exploring the two protagonists’ parallel encounters with water, mirrors, and ancient Indian pictographs, I examine some of the ways Hogan rewrites Western discourses about language and subjectivity reproduced in Surfacing, making visible the complex web of interconnections that link humans to world and signs to referent that Surfacing ultimately denies. SURFACING: THE SPLIT SUBJECT Surfacing recounts the return of a young Canadian woman to the Northern Quebec lake island summer home of her childhood, accompanied by her lover Joe and their married friends, Anna and David, in search of her missing father. The clues to his disappearance (and to the unnamed protagonist’s mysterious emotional anesthesia)—sketches of ancient Indian rock paintings left by her father—lead the narrator deep into memory and self-confrontation. Her initial encounter with the lake mirrors her alienation, the diminishment of her creativity and agency: she stands shivering, “seeing my reflection and my feet down through it, white as fish flesh on the sand, till finally being in the air is more painful than being in the water, and I bend and push myself reluctantly into the lake” (Atwood 1998, 72). Three days later, the narrator takes a second, deeper dive into the lake in search of the pictographs her father was cataloging. Originally painted on cliffs above the lake, the pictographs have been submerged by the power company’s damming. Her father’s drawings at first seemed to the narrator “lunatic,” evidence of his insanity. She is particularly disturbed by an unrecognizable figure—its “body was long, a snake or a fish; it had four limbs or

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arms and a tail and on the head were two branched horns,” like “an animal” viewed lengthwise, “more human” turned upright (Atwood 1998, 101). Marie-Francoise Guedon identifies this figure as Misshipeshu, the Great Lynx or horned snake, a powerful water spirit recognized by the Ojibwas (1983, 94). An anthropological essay in her father’s papers explains the pictographs as “symbolic” markers of the “abodes of powerful or protective spirits,” reassuring the narrator with “academic prose breath[ing] reason” (Atwood 1998, 103). Yet, she realizes her father’s obsessive measuring and charting have left “a gap, something not accounted for” (104) that compels her to locate the paintings. At this point, the narrator’s focus shifts: “it was no longer his death but my own that concerned me” (107). She has begun to understand that the “fear that I wasn’t alive,” which drove her as a child to pierce her skin with “pen nibs and compass points . . . instruments of knowledge,” originated in her education into objective reasoning as the only valid source of knowledge. The “tiny wounds” that “stippled the insides of [her] arms . . . like an addict’s” (112) write on her flesh the history of her anesthetization, the legacy of the eighteenth-century rationalists her father so admired (34). Severed from her body’s knowledge— the intuitive, emotional identification with other living beings—she is also denied autonomy as a woman. (Even the weeds in her father’s garden were “burned, like witches” for defying the patriarchal order [77].) Her search for the pictographs becomes a quest for an/other source of knowledge and power from which to exercise agency. Poised for her second dive, the narrator sees, “My other shape . . . in the water, not my reflection but my shadow, foreshortened, outline blurred, rays streaming out from around the head” (Atwood 1998, 142), an image that links her to the pictographs and their mysterious power. Now the lake reveals to her the potential for transformation, and she plunges into her own “shadow,” her repressed memories, emotions, and generativity. This time, the underwater world teems with living fish, below which floats a darker discovery: “It was there, but it wasn’t a painting. . . . It was below me, . . . a dark oval trailing limbs” (143). The god she seeks merges with the drowned body of her father, and finally with the memory, submerged beneath an invented history, of the aborted baby she sacrificed to the wishes of a married lover. She surfaces to a flood of memories and her first acknowledgment of complicity, through her failure to resist, with “the killers”—the “husbands,” doctors, hunters, sport fishermen, and developers who take life without respect (146)—and “feeling . . . begin[s] to seep back” into her body

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(147). Accepting the “forgotten” Indian gods and their “sacred places . . . where you could learn the truth” (146) as a gift from her father, the narrator understands they are “gods of the head,” insufficient to protect her. She must locate her deceased mother’s gift to her as well: “Not only how to see but how to act” (154). Returning to the cabin, the narrator resumes her study of the childhood scrapbooks her mother had saved. Previously, seeking “where I had come from or gone wrong,” she had found her scrapbook of paper “ladies” cut from magazines, images of the sterile roles from which her father tried to avert her through education (but which she, a commercial artist, continues to reproduce in her lifeless romanticized illustrations of fairy tales). An earlier scrapbook contains her drawings of brightly painted Easter eggs and laughing rabbits, “grass and trees, normal and green”—a “vision of ‘Heaven’” (Atwood 1998, 91) that denies the violence of the world war occurring in the background of her childhood, violence so exuberantly expressed in her brother’s drawings of “explosions of red and orange, soldiers dismembering in the air” (90). Reflected in this archaeology of images are the essential dualisms of Western culture—the splitting of body and mind, creativity and destruction, nurturing and power—that socialize children into “killers” who objectify themselves and others and glorify violence or disguise it with discourses of reason and romance. Finally, the narrator discovers the oldest scrapbook and in it, her mother’s gift: her drawing of herself as an unborn baby gazing out of her mother’s belly at a “man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail.” The Christian God she endowed with the “advantages” of the Devil (159) merges with the Indian god of the pictograph, each refusing the severance of human from animal, evil from good, power from emotion. The narrator understands that to recover the “true vision” of the child, who knows “everything is alive” (131), she must “immerse [her]self in the other language” (159) of the animal body, which knows “what to eat without nouns” (151). In a ritualized act of animal intercourse with Joe, the narrator imagines herself impregnated, her “lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me” (Atwood 1998, 165). Though many critics interpret Surfacing as a condemnation of abortion (for example, Alaimo 2000, 142), I agree with Carol Christ that the “abortion was wrong for her because she did not choose it herself” (1980, 52). That the abortion and conception of new life are symbolic of the sacrifice and rebirth of the narrator’s agency is supported by her awareness that the fetus is only a

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possibility, “perhaps not real” (Atwood 1998, 197). The reclaiming of agency enables the self-forgiveness that prepares her for her own rebirth, a visionary experience in the womb of earth, which is framed by two key mirror scenes. The power of the mirror to entrap women as objects is evident to the narrator as she watches Anna apply makeup with a compact: “She opens it, unclosing her other self . . . a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere” (Atwood 1998, 169). By a similar “trick done with mirrors,” the narrator herself was “cut in two,” made “nothing but head” (109). Maneuvering her companions into leaving her alone on the island, she grieves her parents’ deaths, “crying finally, it’s the first time,” though she realizes she is “watching [herself] doing it” (176). To rejoin head and body, she must act to close the distance between specular image and somatic experience. She turns the mirror in her parents’ cabin to the wall, resolving: “I must stop being in the mirror. . . . Not to see myself but to see. I reverse the mirror so it’s toward the wall, it no longer traps me” (180–81). Destroying or renouncing everything that identifies her as human—most importantly, the speech that “divides us into fragments” (Atwood 1998, 147)—the narrator submerges herself a third time in the lake, leaving the “false body” of her clothing behind in a ritual act of purification (183). Baptized in the “multilingual water” (184), she merges with place: “The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word. I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning. . . . I am a place” (187). Her subjectivity absorbed into a presemiotic state of participation with her environment, she has access to “the past” (195). Through visions of her parents—her mother in wordless communion with jays; her father gazing at her with “yellow . . . wolf’s eyes,” become the irrational, animal “thing” he tried to keep at bay with measurements and fences, not understanding that “logic excludes love” (192–93)—and the dream that follows of the two of them paddling away together, “gone finally, back into the earth” (194), the narrator accepts their deaths and joins within herself their separate gifts, her father’s reason and her mother’s silent, embodied capacity to connect, to love. Afterwards, sitting on the shore, she muses: From the lake a fish jumps. An idea of a fish jumps.

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A fish jumps, carved wooden fish with dots painted on the sides, no antlered fish thing drawn in red on cliffstone, protecting spirit. It hangs in the air suspended, flesh turned to icon, he has changed again, returned to the water. . . . I watch it for an hour or so, then it drops and softens, the circles widen, it becomes an ordinary fish again. (193) The narrator resumes the power of human signification to name the fish object or god. Symbol, sliding signifier, the fish in its essential existence below the surface of water remains inaccessible to her, and language remains the impermeable boundary dividing the real from representation, animal from human, unconscious from conscious mind. Though she has re-identified emotionally with the lives hunted and fished for sport, has made the crucial connection between their objectification and her own as a woman, the animals represent for her the pure, indifferent power of corporeality and instinct. Reentering civilization, the narrator reexamines her reflection: I turn the mirror around: in it there’s a creature neither animal nor human, furless, only a dirty blanket, shoulders huddled over into a crouch, eyes staring blue as ice from the deep sockets; the lips move by themselves. This was the stereotype, straws in the hair, talking nonsense or not talking at all. To have someone to speak to and words that can be understood, their definition of sanity. . . . I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being killed: a mouse, a bird? (Atwood, 1998, 196) The narrator again sees herself as other, the signifying “I” observing in the glass a creature unable to signify. Knowing that if she refuses her place in the symbolic order she will be named insane, she rejects the animal in herself, caught in a solipsistic split subjectivity that casts the natural world as the mute medium of her transformation. She reclaims her humanity with a murderous laugh of self-recognition and “reenters [her] own time” (197). “If I go with him we will have to talk,” she says of returning to the city with Joe; “For us it’s necessary, the intercession of words” (198). Communication will enable a kind of balance between her logic and abstraction, and Joe’s “furry body” and inarticulate emotion. Only the fetus, a “time-traveler” in symbiotic unity with the mother’s body, is whole in itself, containing both the gills of the fish (the

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participatory power of the horned water god) and the “word furrows” in the brain (197). The self-consciousness that language makes possible remains for her what distinguishes humans from the animals, who “don’t have pleasure” (165) and “have no need for speech.” (187) Atwood challenges the Lacanian claim that entrance into language forever precludes the experience of original unity. Read not as psychosis but as a carefully planned ritual of immersion (outlined in the anthropological essay in her father’s papers), the narrator’s disintegration reconnects her to a “natural” ground of power outside patriarchal discourses that define women and nature as objects for consumption, and allows her to construct a new narrative of self in alliance with the natural world in which she can “refuse to be a victim” (Atwood 1998, 197). However, the indeterminacy of the novel’s ending serves to reinforce the narrator’s split subjectivity and its roots in the boundary that is language. Poised at the edge of the woods, she listens to Joe call her name, considers the return to civilization, but does not reply. The novel ends: “The lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking and giving nothing” (199). The experience of original participation, the “other language” that mediated her recovery of memory and feeling, are possible only outside history, in the isolation of relatively untouched nature, not in the bulldozed, diseased world that has been made by men (like Anna) into “an imitation of other places . . . themselves imitations” (23–24). Even though the narrator has come to understand her victimization as part of what Stacy Alaimo terms “a matrix of domination” formed by “capitalism, imperialism, sexism, and the exploitation of nature” (2004, 141), the novel ultimately “abandons nature to silence” (142). Reinscribing the separation of nature and culture, Surfacing thus, as Alaimo observes, “becomes determined by the very matrix of forces it denounces” (142). In the process, Atwood also reinscribes the association of Canada’s indigenous inhabitants with a mute and threatened wilderness, reproducing the objectification of both nature and Native on which the colonization of the New World rests.

SOLAR STORMS: THE MULTIPLE SELF Set in 1972–73 in the Great Lakes boundary waters region and northern Quebec, home to indigenous Crees, Anishnabeg (Ojibwas), and descendants of immigrants brought by the fur trade (including an invented tribe Hogan names the “Fat Eaters”), Solar Storms gives voice to the

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First Nations people who are nearly vanished in Atwood’s text. Surfacing’s single impoverished Indian family are unidentified by name or nation and described in naturalistic, mythic terms: the father, “wizened and corded like a dried root,” and the mother with her “gourd body” appeared with their children on the lake every year in blueberry season, “condensing as though from air” and “disappearing . . . as though they had never been there” (Atwood, 1998, 86). The narrator only vaguely acknowledges the violence of European colonization in her observation that the government had “corralled” the others and “put them somewhere else,” and in her realization that “they must have hated us” (85–86). Absent from the novel is any reference to the groundswell of cultural recovery and resistance that produced the American Indian Movement and highly visible political actions in the U.S. and Canada during the 1960s and early 1970s, in the midst of which Solar Storms is set. Inspired by successful indigenous resistance to the James Bay HydroQuebec Project (see, for example, Churchill 1993), Solar Storms reinserts living Native histories into North American history, seeking to heal the wounds of conquest by deconstructing the discourses that perpetuate colonialism and “indigenizing” them—rewriting them within more complex contexts that include tribal worldviews. Hogan thus resituates Surfacing’s narrative of isolated individualism within a communal perspective that includes all the living inhabitants of specific place, effectively relocating culture within nature. (See Arnold [2001, 2004] for similar explorations of Solar Storm’s interventions into Western scientific and religious discourses.) Ecofeminist critic Patrick Murphy names Surfacing the “first of the current generation of ecofeminist novels” to challenge the white male canon of American nature writing by making associations between the oppression of women and land (1995, 26, 31). Yet, in many ways Surfacing remains within the American narrative tradition of the alienated male hero who escapes to “uninhabited” wilderness for renewal and self-discovery and returns, fortified, to civilization. On the other hand, Murphy observes, Native American women write from a culturally based relationship with nature that is not alienated but “inhabitory” and “calls into question the ontological authenticity of nature writing based on Cartesian dualisms and alienation models of humannature relationships” (126, 130). Hogan, like Atwood and post-structuralists such as Lacan, locates alienation and the dualistic systems that perpetuate it in language. The violence of Western cultures, Hogan argues in Dwellings, is a result of the “broken covenant” between

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humans and world that originates in abstraction, in the “abyss” between signifier and signified. In tribal oral traditions, however, she says, “An object and its name were not separated. One equaled the other” (Hogan 1995, 52–53). The words that separate us from contiguity with the world can also return us to it, as Hogan spells out in her essay “Who Puts Together” (1983, 172): “The author ‘puts together’ a disconnected life through a step-by-step process of visualization,” a “seeing” that enables character and reader “to understand the dynamic interrelatedness in which all things exist and which heals” (169). By “unify[ing] the inner and the outer” (172), story can help humans rediscover the ability to see into the abyss between signifier and signified and thus remake the covenant that binds word to world. In her memoir Woman Who Watches Over the World, Hogan echoes: “Words . . . are the defining shape of a human spirit. . . . Without them, there is no accounting for the human place in the world” (Hogan 2001, 6–57). Unlike Atwood or Lacan, however, for Hogan language is not exclusive to humans, and the human “place” is co-constructed in all the languages of particular places. Solar Storms traces the return of mixed-blood teenager Angela Jensen to the boundary waters area in search of the mother who abandoned her. She also seeks her lost history, for which she, like Surfacing’s narrator, has substituted a fabricated story. Raised in white foster homes in the U.S., Angela locates her great-grandmother Agnes Iron through stolen court records. At her birthplace, Adam’s Rib, she is awaited by not only three generations of maternal grandmothers and a community that has mourned her absence for eleven years, but also by the “place that holds her life” (Hogan 1995b, 23). Resuming her birth name, Angel, she finds herself “traveling toward [her]self like rain falling into a lake” (26), suggesting a reunion of self and world that is not disjunctive, like Surfacing’s narrator’s, but cyclical, like different forms of water coming together. The linear narrative that occurs over a few days’ time in Surfacing is in Solar Storms embedded within a full turn of the seasons and a nonlinear structure that circles on itself, opening and closing with the same memory: “Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze” (11); “Even now the voice of Agnes floats toward me” (350). Told as a collective memory in multiple voices, Solar Storms reorders and expands the key events of Surfacing to tell a more contextualized and multifaceted story.

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Angel is welcomed home by Agnes and Agnes’s ancient mother Dora-Rouge (descendants of the Fat Eaters), who began the process of storytelling that “called [Angel] home” (Hogan 1995b, 48). From them she learns parts of her personal story, histories of the environmental devastation brought by the fur trade, and narratives that teach her how to remake her place within this broken world—of the creation of the world by Beaver, of times when humans and animals could talk and were bound by “a covenant . . . that they would care for one another” (35). This ancient pact, broken by the pressures of colonization, is kept alive in contemporary narratives as well, such as the story of Agnes’s life-long bond with the blue glacier bear she killed to free from captivity. Having laid a groundwork that will sustain her through the next stage of her re-creation, the two women send Angel to Bush, who had helped care for Angel’s disturbed mother Hannah and the infant Angel. A displaced woman of mixed blood, Bush inhabits the borders between cultures, between water and land; “a woman who puts things together” (Hogan 1995b, 95), Bush helps Angel piece together the fragments of her life story. On Fur Island, “navel of the world” (22), surrounded by a wilderness that is always watching, wanting in—darkness “stared [Angel] in the eyes”; vines reach into the cabin, trying to “turn everything back to its origins” (73)—Angel moves with Bush gradually back in time to the story of her birth. Angel’s stay on Fur Island is framed by mirror scenes analogous to those in Surfacing. When Angel first comes to Adam’s Rib, she is, like Surfacing’s narrator, trapped in self-objectification: “I cared only about what I looked like,” she recalls (147); “I was nothing more than emptiness covered with skin” (74). Similarly marked by self-made tattoos— crosses and a boy’s initials (26), signs of patriarchal histories—Angel also bears scars inflicted by her mother. Soon after her arrival, she studies her face in Agnes’s bathroom mirror: Half of it . . . looked something like the cratered moon. I hated that half. The other side was perfect and I could have been beautiful in the light of earth and sun. I’d tried desperately all my life to keep the scars in shadows. Even then, before the mirror, I tried not to see them, and I wondered what Agnes saw, or Dora-Rouge, when they looked at my angular cheekbones and large eyes, the red hair so unusual above dark skin. (34)

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Distanced from herself by the internalization of dominant cultural values, Angel is further split by her mixed blood, the history of conquest written on her body. When a visitor questions her about the origin of her scars, Angel accidentally cuts herself, and the sight and smell of blood bring to the surface repressed, embodied memories of violence. She retreats to the bathroom, where suddenly, “I hit the mirror with my hand, hit the face of myself. . . . Glass shattered down into the sink and broken pieces spread across the floor. . . . I heard a voice yelling ‘Damn it!’ and it was me, my own voice, raging and hurt” (52). Afterwards, Angel cries for the first time. Like Surfacing’s narrator, she is pushed by the emergence of submerged memories to an expression of grief that allows healing to begin. But instead of turning the mirror away to escape its constructions, Angel smashes her reflection, collapsing the gap between her internal self and external image, between signifier and signified (“I . . . hit the face of myself”). The shards of mirror in the sink hold “broken reflections of my face” (Hogan 1995b, 53), reproducing her fragmenting. At the same time, the iron-rich water that stains the sink red (and everything else at Adam’s Rib) mirrors the blood she has shed, the blood that links her to her people, to earth and water, holding those fragments within a larger connectedness. Later, Angel recalls: I began to form a kind of knowing at Adam’s Rib. I began to feel that if we had no separate words for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin, you would see me. What would meet your eyes would not be the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of violence. . . . You would see the dust of sun, the turning of creation taking place. (54) Having broken through the surfaces that separate her inner and outer worlds and divide her against herself, Angel opens to the processes of re-creation. In Bush’s house, Angel has only a tiny pocket mirror in which she continues “to imagine what I’d look like without scars.” Eventually it shatters as well, and finally, she recalls, “I had no choice but to imagine myself, along with the parts and fragments of stories, as if it all was part of a great brokenness moving . . . toward wholeness” (Hogan 1995b, 85). As I have argued elsewhere (Arnold 2001), the reduction of

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Angel’s objectified reflection to smaller and smaller fragments results, not in further self-objectification, but in a conscious reconceptualization of those pieces as parts of a dynamic whole. She “g[ives] up on all surfaces” and begins to focus on the depths within herself and the world. Her “vision shifts” to “see inside water . . . even . . . the fish on the bottom, as if I was a heron” (85); she learns to swim by “th[inking] turtle” (92). Angel senses and imagines her way into the lives of birds and animals to learn new ways of being in the world. Her growing engagement with life is reflected in her final encounter with the mirror at Agnes’s house, at the end of her winter with Bush, when Agnes comments on the maturing of her body: “I’d seen myself in their new mirror and yes, I was changing” (135). Angel thus comes to see through her image as an isolated, fragmented victim of history and split identity to an image of herself as whole and in process. In contrast to Surfacing’s narrator, Angel’s movement into animal embodiment is simultaneously a journey into language and community, her passage through the mirror embedded within a collective history of loss and survival. As Berman observes, the use of mirrors “parallel[s] . . . the development of consciousness,” increasing in the West with the rise of individualism (1989, 45). That this period coincides with the era of European expansion and conquest is evident in the novel. Bush will have no mirrors in her house, for, she says, “mirrors had cost us our lives” (1995b, 69). In her dreams on Fur Island, Angel sees the fur traders coming down the river toward her: “There were women who looked like me. . . . They wore mirrors as if they were gold, on their belts, around their necks, pinned to dresses. The light caught them and threw a glare on me, my face in every one.” The desire for trade goods, the objectification of self and others, the commodification of nature and spirit, born across the gap of cultural deterritorialization and from the desperation to survive, split the Native people not only from the animals they slaughtered for trade, but from themselves and each other, pitting “mixed-bloods . . . against the others” (119). Indian women taken as wives by traders were abandoned at places like Adam’s Rib when the land was used up. Mixed blood offspring like Hannah’s mother Loretta were “sold into sickness and prostitution” (119). Angel’s image is no longer fragmented but multiplied, reflecting the shared inheritance of colonization. As Andy Smith points out, the colonization of tribal cultures that were historically matrilineal and matrifocal such as the Cree and Anishnabeg, required that the power

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of women be destroyed in order to possess the land. Thus successful resistance to colonial and neocolonial exploitation requires that women be restored to positions of power (1997). Angel learns to conceptualize her personal history and identity in terms of a larger history: “My beginning was Hannah’s beginning, one of broken lives, gone animals, trees felled and kindled. Our beginnings were intricately bound up in the history of the land” (Hogan 1995b, 96). Hannah’s body was a “meeting place . . . where time and history and genocide gather” (101), her skin scarred by the “signatures of torturers” (99), which Angel and her half-sister Henriet (117–18) reproduce by cutting their own skins. This contextual knowledge (together with the physical and emotional strength she acquires in interaction with her environment) enables Angel to read her own scars as both a record of violence and “proof . . . that there is healing” (125). Like the protagonist of Surfacing, she redefines herself as a survivor. However, for Angel this new narrative is not preparation for a return to human society, but context for a passage deeper into wilderness, in the course of which she steps “outside [her] skin” (159) to renegotiate the borders of her self in relationship to the world. In the spring Angel sets out with the three older women on a difficult canoe journey north to search for Angel’s mother, to return DoraRouge to her homeland among the Fat Eaters, and to join the protest against the dam project that threatens the land and its indigenous inhabitants. Reversing the course of the fur traders south from Hudson Bay into the Great Lakes, the women “unravel” time (Hogan 1995b, 170) and enter a “place between worlds” (177) that is neither beyond history nor uninhabited, but rather an older world alive in the present one. In this border world where “everything merged and united” (177), Angel says, “I came alive”: Cell by cell, all of us were taken in by water and by land, swallowed a little at a time. . . . [N]ow the world was made up of pathways of its own invention. We were only one of the many dreams of earth. . . . But there was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams. . . . These dreams they called hunger maps, and when they followed these maps, they found their prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. (170)

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Angel learns new senses, becomes “equal to the other animals” (172). She begins to dream of plants, suggesting to the older women that she is a “plant dreamer,” a healer who can enter the dreams of earth to locate medicinal plants (171). Not knowing their names, Angel identifies the plants by drawing them, translating earth’s language with her body into visual signs. Increasingly merged with the world, Angel now enters moving water full of confidence: “The water was cold and it was sharp against my skin, as if it had blades or edges. But I swam. My arms were lean and newly muscled” (173–74). As Angel writes earth’s dreams onto paper, water inscribes a new history of strength and interconnection on her body. Water and sky replace the “mirrors our lives had fallen into,” and in them the women see themselves remade, “wearing the face of the world” (177). Hogan expands the mirror experiences of Surfacing’s narrator by multiplying them until Angel mirrors and is mirrored by the world. Similarly, she refracts the narrator’s dive at the site of the submerged pictographs, breaking it into mirror parts as well. Angel’s passage through the mirror precedes her discovery of ancient Indian pictographs on the canoe journey. Her development of conceptual and embodied knowledge of relationships between internal and external worlds guides her immersion beneath the pictographs into a collective unconscious that exceeds the boundaries of her own mind and body. The women come first to “drawings” on rock “said to have been painted not by humans, but by spirits” (Hogan 1995b, 178), signaling their entrance into a “gap in time” (177). Hogan’s use of the word “drawings” removes the pictographs from the realms of artifact and symbol and links them to Angel’s plant drawings, suggesting that earth speaks through these figures as well. Later, the women find a painting of a wolverine with wings that become visible in rain, transformed by water (like Angel) into a creature at home in both earth and air. Here Angel dives into a mirror world of trees and paintings submerged by rising water, where she becomes both fish and water: “I forgot to breathe, swimming as if once again, as before birth, I had a gill slit . . . I remembered being fish. I remembered being oxygen and hydrogen, bird and wolverine” (179). Angel enters an embodied memory of her own fetal development and her shared origins with all forms of life in the creation of water. A final configuration of paintings, reflected on the surface of the water, include the lynx (Misshipeshu, the horned water god of Surfacing in cat form). The lynx “gazes down at itself, looking at its twin . . . as if

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it could step away from stone, enter water, its own reflection, and come alive, the way spirit meets matter” (Hogan 1995b, 182), mirroring the process that is closing the gap between Angel’s somatic experience and specular image, between body and mind. In contrast to Western notions that sever mind and body or declare them identical, Hogan understands mind, spirit, and body to be interdependent processes within a system that is already whole. Matter and spirit are mirrors to each other, twinned (but not identical) aspects of a greater whole; spirit and matter, mind and body, male and female are articulated out of wholeness by surfaces—time, mirrors, skin, words—which are, like Angel’s scars, sites of both division and connection, destruction and creation. What are perceived as dualities are “kindred spirits” (66) that long for reunion. Coming together, they may give birth to something new. Angel’s journey through water teaches her the languages, spoken and embodied, that translate her split subjectivity and isolated individuality into a fluid multiple positionality and an awareness of herself as co-creator with the world. Even before departing on the canoe trip, Angel realizes she is “part of the same equation as birds and rain” (Hogan 1995b, 79). Her location of healing plants in dreams and her union with fish and water beneath the pictographs are described in terms of this equation: “The roots of dreaming . . . are like the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together create ocean, lake, and ice. In this way, the plants and I joined each other” (171); “I thought of Bush . . . saying, ‘Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen,’ in her dreamy way. When I was inside water, I understood how these simple elements married and became a third thing” (179). Angel’s entry into earth’s language is not metaphorical but material, a transformation (like the creation of water from its elements) that allows her to “see” differently, to experience physically, cognitively, and spiritually her interconnectivity with all of life. This shift of vision is reflected in Angel’s plant drawings, which, like the childhood drawings of Surfacing’s narrator, tell a perceptual history. Angel’s drawings, two of which are reproduced in the text, do not represent an excavation of the past, however, but the emergence of the past into present time, “an old world dawning new “ in Angel’s consciousness (189). The first is sketched from above, from the perspective of objective vision (172), the second, from the perspective of earth, tracing the underground paths of growth that form “new bulbs and connected tubers, splitting and multiplying” (188), visible only in inner vision. Angel’s healing lies

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not in a suturing or balancing of severed binaries, but rather in learning to “see” from multiple perspectives. The “step-by-step process of visualization” illustrated by the drawings parallels Hogan’s alteration of written language to express an indigenous worldview that is process-oriented and based in interdependence. In contrast to the syntactic and descriptive spareness of Surfacing, Solar Storms’ language is thick with organic descriptors and patterns of elaboration and repetition that emphasize the interconnectedness and transformability of all things, including words. In the same way that water, the encompassing metaphor of the story, cycles through the novel, constantly changing form and interlinking—ice to water to blood, steam to breath to prayer—Hogan’s language flows, refusing fixity. Nouns are suffused with process: “Grasses and moose meat lived in the pelts of the wolves, water and trees in the skins of beavers” (Hogan 1995b, 146); even Agnes’s old kettle, which had bathed and fed generations, “was alive” (142). Making explicit this process occurring at the textual level, Angel, trying to come to terms with God, concludes that, “[T]he word ‘God’ . . . does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon. To use words and sing, to speak” (169). Hogan transforms text to carry a sense of language as spoken and heard, moving, connecting, creating. Words come to equal the objects they name. Signifier and signified form a twinned structure linked by intricate, fluid patterns of relationship. The language of the colonizers and dam builders, on the other hand, denies the dynamism of life, the interdependence of humans and world. As Angel observes, “[T]heir language didn’t hold a thought for the life of water, or a regard for the land that sustained people from the beginning of time. They didn’t remember the sacred treaties between humans and animals. Our words were powerless beside their figures, their measurements, and ledgers” (279). Hannah herself is the “sum total of ledger books and laws” (Hogan 1995b, 101), severed from the world by the languages of commodification and exploitation written on her body. It is not language itself, but rather the use of language to contain, control, and possess that renders the world spiritless and consumable. The remaking of the covenant between humans and world requires a “re-marriage” of signifier and signified, a contract that recognizes and resists the potential of language to objectify and consume and practices its power to connect and inspirit. By the time Angel arrives in the land of the Fat Eaters, she is no longer seeking a lost unity or identity beyond herself. She bridges

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the Lacanian gap through an embodied and articulated perception of herself as participant in an interconnected totality. In contrast to Surfacing—which, as Christ complains, fails to integrate the narrator’s personal transformation with social action (1980, 49)—Solar Storms’ concluding chapters follow Angel’s initiation into a pan-Indian community united in defense of earth and life. When she arrives at Two-Town Post, the center of dam resistance, Angel experiences a final “baptism” (Hogan 1995b, 228) that marks her rebirth from water (her inner journey) into community. Reminiscent of Surfacing’s narrator’s third dive, Angel removes her clothes and steps “out of [her] rational mind,” not out of language, but into an ancient story that tells her how to live on land: I held my breath past my own limit . . . I thought about how Dora-Rouge had told me once about Eho, the old woman keeper of the animals. She had been sent down to the mother of water to bargain for all life, nearly swimming to her death. She was the woman who fell in love with a whale in the heart of water. . . . She drifted to where the world was composed long ago in dark creation. Because of her, the animals and other lives were spared, but in the end, Eho could not remain in water or with the whale of her loving. Soon, back on land, she died. Now men and women were to be the caretakers of the animals. (229) Angel emerges from this dive to encounter her mother for the first time, but the meeting is brief and futile, and Hannah dies soon afterwards. The gifts Angel receives from her mother are inherited and communal: through Hannah’s blood, Angel receives the gift of plant healing practiced by her ancestor Ek (171); from Hannah’s body, her own life and her newborn half-sister, Aurora, who will be raised by “many parents” (264) to “know her world and not be severed from it” (258); and from her quest for reunion, the knowledge that “we embodied the land” (228). A third drawing reproduced in the text (Hogan 1995b, 256) visually brings these gifts together: an open page from Ek’s birch bark book of plants shows diagrams of plant parts surrounded by “symbols for sun and moon which depicted the best times of day to gather the plant” and arrows indicating the “parts that were useful for healing” (256–57). Like Angel, the dissected plants are re-embedded within a

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social history of relationship and mutual responsibility among earth, sky, and humans. At Two-Town, Angel continues her study of herbal medicine with tribal elders and contributes her personal gifts to the resistance effort. “In those days,” Angel recalls, “We were still a tribe. Each of us had one part of the work of living. . . . All of us together formed something like a single organism” (262). Having come to wholeness by fulfilling meaningful roles within the communities they inhabit, Angel and Tommy (the young man who looks after the old people at Adam’s Rib) can marry, “two become one” (350) without the need to complete or balance each other. Solar Storms concludes, like Surfacing, with the ambiguous suggestion that Angel is pregnant: “Something wonderful lives inside me,” she tells Bush (351). Hogan’s text alters the Lacanian scheme by fragmenting, passing through, and dispersing it. Self-recognition occurs not just through the medium of other people; “full humanity” (Hogan 1995b, 324) is possible only within nature’s gaze. As Angel puts it, “We are seen, our measure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even by the alive galaxy in deep space” (80). For Hogan, “everything [is] alive” (81) and experiences the “gap” of self-awareness that Atwood refuses to grant to fish, lake, or trees. When sentience and agency are recognized everywhere, the subject realizes its existence in a fluid web of mutual constructions, and the gap between self and other, imaginary and symbolic, signifier and signified, is filled with the voices of the world, telling our interconnectedness into being. Thus Hogan levels the hierarchies of humanism, implicating not only its anthropocentrism, but also postmodern and post-structuralist gendered and ethnic critiques of humanism, which remain determined by the centrality of the human and deny the perspectives of other beings in the universe. Like Surfacing, Hogan’s text mediates between humanism’s conception of a unified autonomous self and post-structuralism’s unstable, fragmented subject. But Angel comes to claim and celebrate both her constructedness within language and social/material relationships and histories, and her power to selfdefine, so that by the end of the novel, she can say, “I’ve shaped my own life, after all” (346). Angel’s subjectivity unfolds outward from a central locus of will, emerging at the interfaces between body, self, and world. She comes to wholeness in the ability to shift perspectives, to move back and forth across the gap (which is also connection) between the interior experience of a self that is bounded by surfaces, and the exterior that is a

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mirror to that self. For Hogan humans know the world not only because we are connected to it through embodied processes of perception and exchange, but also because we are the world. When Angel says, at the end of her journey, “We are tree” (Hogan 1995b, 351), we are “alive water” (350), she is not identifying symbolically with nature, but naming human equivalence within the natural world. The dust of solar storms is materially present in human flesh as “atoms . . . from distant stars” that have passed through “stones and ferns and even cotton” (138). Like Surfacing, Solar Storms suggests an alliance between women and nature born of a common history of objectification and exploitation, but Hogan’s nature is neither Surfacing’s mute, indifferent force, nor remote and passive wilderness to be preserved apart from human habitation. Even back in the city, Angel knows that “pavement is only a thin shell on earth, the plants would outlast it and grow over it again” (341). Humans and their cultural constructions are held within nature—participants in nature’s ongoing cycles of destruction and creation.

6 The Red-Black Center of Alice Walker’s Meridian Asserting a Cherokee Womanist Sensibility BARBARA S. TRACY

While Alice Walker’s name frequently appears in both African American and feminist studies, little has been written of her identity as an African Cherokee. However, this is not surprising as literary scholarship concerning the works of any African Native American writers remains minute. Despite African Native American historical studies emerging in the early 1900s and a literary history of over 200 years, African Native American literature has endured an either/or approach, a focus on one or the other identity, stifling opportunities to discuss the rich syncretism of multiple traditions and voices emerging in the works of African Native American writers. In fact, little has been written to date about African Native American literature, despite the noted presence of writers such as William Apess (African Pequot), Olivia Bush-Banks (African Montauk), Langston Hughes (African Cherokee), Alice Walker (African Cherokee), and many others. In 1998, a special edition of American Indian Quarterly featured writings from anthropologists and historians such as James Brooks and Circe Sturm. Many of the essays were later collected by Brooks in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (2002). Sturm has since published her complete study of African Cherokees in Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (2002). In 2000 Dartmouth held a symposium titled “Eating Out of the Same Pot,” which featured many new and established voices in the field, such as Brooks, Ron Welburn, Jack Forbes, and Theda Purdue. However, only a handful of literary scholars presented at the symposium, and until the recent emergence of Jonathan Brennan’s books, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African Native American Literature 105

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(2003) and Mixed Race Literature (2002), little work has been published in this area of African Native American writing. James Brooks comments that “historians and ethnographers [were driven] toward archives and/or field sites in the hope of recovering moments of alliance between these victims of Euro-American expansion” (Brennan 2002, 128). He also notes, however, that intellectuals have been slow to recognize the complexities beyond mere “analyses” of multicultural communities or to “engage in the ambiguities of cultural hybridity, especially as seen from the perspective of the mixed descent people themselves [sic]” (Brennan 2002, 129). What better place than the narratives and fiction of ethnically mixed peoples from which to recognize these complexities? Jonathan Brennan calls for an examination of African Native American writing within an interpretive framework combining both African American and Native American critical theories. To read through only one identity, he explains, leads to “misinterpreting the merging traditions that underlie the hybrid text” (2002, 19). He suggests that “in order to really understand the tradition from which [ethnically mixed] writers create their literary works, one must also examine their parallel heritage without denying either one” (19). One might also argue that indigenous identity is political or national, which further complicates the discussion of culturally mixed identity. In examining Native American mixed-blood literature, it is equally essential to engage a tribally specific perspective. Creek/Cherokee writer Craig Womack explains: In terms of a Creek national literature, the process had been based on the assumption that it is valuable to look toward Creek authors and their works to understand Creek writing. My argument is not that this is the only way to understand Creek writing but an important one given that literatures bear some kind of relationship to communities, both writing communities and the community of the primary culture from which they originate. (1999, 4) A balanced reading of Alice Walker and particularly Meridian requires examination of her African and Cherokee, as well as feminist, perspectives to relate more clearly to all of her communities. A careful rereading of Meridian that listens for the multiple voices found in Walker’s identity demonstrates the ways in which Walker—in the shared African and Cherokee tradition of call-and-response—answers the call

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of John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1932) not simply as a womanist (a term for African American feminists coined by Walker), but as a Cherokee womanist. Although Walker’s participation in the civil rights movement is central to her writing, particularly in the novel Meridian, her interest in the continued violation of Native American civil liberties and treaties as well as the struggle to regain sovereignty also threads a distinct pattern throughout Walker’s writing. Native American characters and values, some more subtle than others, frequently appear. In her autobiographical works, she mentions her Cherokee great-grandmother Tallulah. Although her use of the ubiquitous Cherokee grandmother may raise concern, it also reveals what Ron Welburn found in his own African Native American home, where it was common practice to publicly embrace Black ethnicity while distancing, yet recognizing, Native American heritage (2002, 293). In 1979 Walker published Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (1979), whose frontpiece begins: For two who / slipped away/ almost / entirely: / my “part” Cherokee / great-grandmother / Tallulah / (Grandmama Lula) / on my mother’s side / about whom only one / agreed-upon / thing / is known: / her hair was so long / she could sit on it; / And my white (Anglo-Irish?) / great-great grandfather / on my father’s side; nameless / (Walker, perhaps?) / whose only remembered act/ is that he raped / a child: / my great-greatgrandmother, / who bore his son, / my great-grandfather, / when she was eleven. Rest in peace. / The meaning of your lives / is still / unfolding. Rest in peace. / In me / the meaning of your lives / is still / unfolding. Rest in peace. / In me / the meaning of your lives / is still / unfolding. Rest in peace. / In me / the meaning of your lives / is still / unfolding. Rest in peace. / In me / the meaning of our lives / is still / unfolding. Rest. (1979, viii–ix) The poem trespasses upon an unspoken but known practice as described by Welburn:

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Most of us living on the Indian-Negro color line grew up with mixed signals and coded information. Our elders had learned to protect us from the ridicule and abuse they had experienced as Indians or from which their parents had sheltered them. They instilled in us the sense that we were “different” from our peers; but that we were Indian or of Native descent, when it was raised, was a covert issue. Why we should live with such a covert identity was seldom explained. (2002, 292) As a result of her poem, Walker publicly experienced one possible reaction from which Welburn’s elders hoped to protect him. In a 1984 review for the Richmond News Leader, K. T. H. Cheatwood criticized Walker’s exploration of her mixed ancestry, accusing her of trying to pass from one identity to another in order to disassociate herself from her African identity (Walker 1987, 86–87). Several years later Walker wrote: But crucial to our development, too, it seems to me, is an acceptance of our actual as opposed to our mythical selves. We are the mestizos of North America. We are black, yes, but we are “white,” too, and we are red. To attempt to function as only one, when you are really two or three, leads, I believe, to psychic illness. . . . Regardless of who will or will not accept us, including perhaps, our “established” self, we must be completely (to the extent it is possible) who we are. (82) She further wrote that Cheatwood “assumes an interest, on my part, in being other than black, of being ‘white.’ I, on the other hand, feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find” (89). Walker’s endeavors to explore and create a literature that recognizes her ancestors risks much pain and criticism, but also it is one that makes visible an often-overlooked shared history. The climate for African Native American studies shares the rough terrain of Native studies. Louis Owens describes such debates in the discourse: “Not merely disagreement . . . but more significantly a dynamic energy that brings life to a kind of literature and literary debate that barely existed a quarter


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century ago. . . . [V]irtually everything that is new and vital and exciting in American literature is coming from the so called margins” (1998, xv). The recovery of early African Native American texts, the emergence of new African Native American voices, and the prelude of African Native American literary criticism, while rife with arguments of identity, appropriation, sovereignty, and much more, invites an exciting, vital discourse which joins and involves the voices of Native American and African American scholars in a vibrant rediscovery of shared and often intertwined histories. Sharon P. Holland in her discussion of African Native American literature states: “finding a space, let alone a subjectivity, that embraces both African and Native identity is also an endeavor to develop an understanding of literature as a process of both emancipation and sovereignty, as we are seeking the history and lives of people whose experience crossed the barriers of enslaved bodies and lands” (2003, 260). Jean Toomer, interestingly, named that space the “Blue Meridian” in his poem by the same name. Toomer, a light skinned, mixed-blood man whose origin still intrigues scholars, identified himself as the first man of a true melting pot of America: “My own father likewise came from Middle Georgia. Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling.” (Bontempts 1971, 21) Somewhat like Walker, Toomer also saw himself as a total of all his ancestors. He continues, “Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony” (21). In “Blue Meridian,” he writes, “Growing towards the universal Human being; / And we are the old people, witnesses / That behind us there extends / An unbroken chain of ancestors, / Ourselves linked with all who ever lived” (72). Alice Walker likewise reflects her awareness of this unbroken chain of ancestors by writing from all parts of her identity.

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While discussion of Walker’s Meridian portrays the work as an African American civil rights novel, Walker in embracing all that she is, reflects also on Native American civil rights and the American Indian Movement (AIM). As Patricia Riley clarifies: In Meridian, Walker writes within an African Native American subjectivity that not only includes cultural elements from her Cherokee and African American heritage but, additionally inspired by Lakota (Sioux) culture and the heroic endeavor of the Lakota people to retain their autonomy, firmly links together the collective struggle for freedom undertaken historically by Native American and African American peoples. (2003, 242) Walker’s writing emerges out of the center of both civil rights and AIM recognizing not only the struggles of the Cherokee people but of all tribes. Near the publication of Walker’s Meridian, 1976, much was happening in Indian country, particularly regarding Cherokee communities. It was: • approximately 137 years after her ancestors survived the Trail of Tears, which brought more than four thousand Cherokees to their deaths (1838–1839); • fifteen years after the TVA announced its intention to build the Tellico Dam and flood the Cherokee’s ancient burial ground—the site of an ancient peace city and the center of Cherokee history (1961); • eight years after the birth of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis, and after the Bill of Rights was extended to include Native Americans (1968); • seven years after the Indians of All Nations seized Alcatraz (1969); • five years after W. W. Keeler became the first principal chief of the Cherokee Nation (1971); • four years after AIM occupied the BIA offices in Washington, DC and the resulting march known as the “Trail of Broken Treaties” (1972); • three years after the second Wounded Knee (1973); • and one year after the resulting wrongful conviction of Leonard Peltier for the murder of two FBI agents (1975); • The book was published two years before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed at the same time that the BIA established which American Indian tribes and nations would be recognized as such (1978); • and the year before Congress passed the SelfDetermination and Assistance Act (1975). Within this background, Walker responds in Meridian to the call of John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks.


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As a Cherokee-African American woman, Walker speaks to John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks in the tradition of call-and-response or what Henry Louis Gates identifies as “Signifyin,” a system of language and interpretation that he traces from Africa to the writings of present-day African Americans. His theory for African American literature brings much to light in understanding the echoes of John Neihardt’s Black Elk in Walker’s novel: Writers Signify upon each other’s texts by rewriting the received textual tradition. This can be accomplished by the revision of tropes. This sort of Signifyin(g) revision serves if successful, to create a space for the revising text. It also alters fundamentally the way we read the tradition, by defining the relationship of the text at hand to the tradition. The revising text is written in the language of the tradition, employing its tropes, its rhetorical strategies, and its ostensible subject matter. (1988, 124) Interestingly, Gates reads Walker’s The Color Purple as signifyin’ upon Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God. He further posits that this particular strategy demonstrates “an act of ancestral bonding that is especially rare in black letters” (245). Walker’s revision of Black Elk Speaks demonstrates her deep feelings of ancestral connection to Native Americans and particularly a respect for Black Elk himself. Walker’s selection of this particular text does prove problematic in the ongoing discussion of its dramatic deviation from the actual transcripts of the Black Elk interviews. In comparing the original transcripts of the Black Elk interviews, many discrepancies appear between what he actually said and the resulting publication, Black Elk Speaks. Raymond J. DeMallie’s The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (1984) makes a close comparison of the original transcripts versus the resulting Neihardt text. Interestingly, it is the most quoted passages of Black Elk Speaks, including those used by Walker, which DeMallie reveals as Neihardt’s poetic imagination. Nevertheless, the Neihardt book remains essential to Walker and to many disenfranchised Indians, especially in a time of relocation and cultural revival. In his introduction to Black Elk Speaks, Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) explains that the most important aspect of the book has been its influence upon the contemporary generation of young

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Indians (1992, xiii). He writes that the book was essential for young Indians who have been aggressively searching for roots of their own in the structure of universal reality. To them the book has become a North American bible of all tribes. They look to it for spiritual guidance, for sociological identity, for political insight, and for affirmation of the continuing substance of Indian tribal life, now being badly eroded by the same electronic media which are dissolving other American communities. (xiii) That Walker’s Meridian is framed around Neihardt’s book and that her character in many ways mirrors Black Elk indicates that she finds much insight in the text despite any fictionalization of Black Elk’s story. Her character Meridian, like Neihardt’s Black Elk, experiences visions, works for the liberation of her people, and witnesses death and destruction threatening the center of her community, the land, and a sacred tree called The Sojourner. In her creation of Meridian, Walker signifies on Black Elk Speaks using both African American and Cherokee oral traditions. Her use of Cherokee stories raises issues of appropriation and misappropriation. In a discussion of Coco Fusco’s English is Broken Here, Sandra Baringer argues there is a difference between “culturally positive signifying practice when practiced by marginalized or disempowered groups” and the “appropriation or fetishization” of such cultures “by a dominant group” (2003, 26). However, neither social positioning nor membership bestows entitlement without responsibility. Many Native American writers have been criticized by their own tribal, and/or other tribal, members for their use or perceived misuse of tribal traditions in their writing. Walker’s intent in signifying appears to focus on the message of the traditions from which she speaks to—rather than to focus on the traditions themselves. Walker signifies in numerous ways to create a text, which speaks from all of her cultures. She most notably signifies on Cherokee traditions, through the story of Wild Boy, the son of first man Kanáti and first woman Selu. Meridian learns of a thirteen-year-old girl “Wile Chile,” who eats from garbage cans and has lived like this in the neighborhood for years. She was said to have arrived with a younger brother whose disappearance is rumored to be at the hands of a “local hospital for use in experiments, but it was never looked into” (Walker 1976,


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35). Walker, in the tradition of signifyin’, takes the Cherokee story of Wild Boy and changes his gender, but retains the meaning of his origin: Long years ago, soon after the world was made, a hunter and his wife lived at Pilot knob with their only child, a little boy. The father’s name was Kana’ti (The Lucky Hunter), and his wife was called Selu (Corn). No matter when Kana’ti went into the wood, he never failed to bring back a load of game, which his wife would cut up and prepare, washing off the blood from the meat in the river near the house. The little boy used to play down by the river every day, and one morning the old people thought they heard laughing and talking in the bushes as though there were two children there. When the boy came home at night his parents asked him who had been playing with him all day. “He comes out of the water,” said the boy, “and he calls himself my elder brother. He says his mother was cruel to him and threw him into the river.” Then they knew that the strange boy had sprung from the blood of the game, which Selu had washed at the river’s edge. (Mooney [1900] 1995, 242) The story of Kana’ti and Selu continues in the Cherokee explanation of the origin and continuation of game and corn. In the story Selu, who with Kana’ti takes responsibility for the creation of the second boy and calls him “son,” teaches both boys the laws of respect, and we learn the consequences of disregarding that respect. Also the story speaks of being careful with children. Selu unknowingly has thrown away her child when the game blood spilled into the river. As a result, Wild Boy, who disregards the laws of respect, causes the community hardship in attaining and maintaining its sources of food. Marilou Awiakta, Cherokee writer and friend of Walker, teaches us in her book Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom that “a terrible manifestation of society’s spiritual illness is violence, especially toward women and children. Women represent the life-force; children ensure its continuance. Any species that damages or brings ill to its life-bearers and its children is doomed” (1993, 190). Throughout Meridian, Walker suggests that our future lies in our children, who like Wile Chile and her disappearing brother are often thrown away, harmed, or disregarded. Wild Child lives in a society that will not respond to her abandonment or her needs and that cannot see that her abandonment will impact the community’s future.

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From her womanist sensibility, Walker’s signification upon Wild Boy focuses not only on society’s neglect of children but also on its disregard for black women. Although only thirteen, Wile Chile has not only been thrown away but she is pregnant probably as a result of rape. Upon her discovery of the Wile Chile, Meridian captures her and brings her to the college where Wile Chile horrifies the proper young ladies of Saxon College with her uncouth table manners. While Meridian unsuccessfully looks for a home or school to accept Wile Chile, the girl escapes and is hit by a car ending both hers and her baby’s life. Following Wile Chile’s death, Meridian makes plans for the funeral to occur at the Saxon College chapel. The mourners are met at locked doors by armed guards who refuse their admittance. The neighbors flee and the students riot that night, destroying the school’s Singing Tree, named The Sojourner, which has come to represent a center for the students, particularly the black students. Here the naming of the tree conjures the memory of the former slave Sojourner Truth, known for her strength, height, and love of singing, for her memorable speech on human rights and the power of her spiritual transformation. Just as Neihardt created the well-loved quotations of Black Elk, Truth’s famed “Ain’t I a Woman” may have been the invention of Frances Dana Gage. Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996) argues that many who wrote about Truth during her lifetime exaggerated her life and even relocated her dialect to meet the needs of both abolitionists and feminists. Whether or not Walker is aware of the questions of authenticity surrounding both Black Elk and Sojourner Truth, she recognizes the power of both as symbols of strength. With the introduction of The Sojourner, the Singing Tree, Walker takes the reader back to the frontpiece of Meridian, which quotes the final chapter of Black Elk Speaks: I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now . . . I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. (Neihardt [1932] 1992, 270) Walker’s juxtaposition of The Sojourner with Black Elk’s sacred tree gives power to the narrator’s comments: “Even before her death forty


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years later the tree had outgrown all the others around it. Other slaves believed it possessed magic. They claimed the tree could talk, make music, was sacred to birds and possessed the power to obscure vision. . . . So many tales and legends had grown up around The Sojourner that students of every persuasion had a choice of which to accept” (Walker 1976, 44–45). While commenting on the fictional Sojourner, the tree and its powerful legends, Walker reveals what Painter describes as a powerful need for these stories, “I finally realize Americans of goodwill deeply need the colossal Sojourner Truth: the black woman who faces down a hostile white audience. . . . Truth is consumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need her to have said” (Painter 1996, 284–85). Similarly, Neihardt’s version of Black Elk and the various versions of Sojourner Truth come together to create a much needed symbol in The Sojourner tree which is immortalized in stories passed down from student to student. In addition, The Sojourner brings to mind a feminist sense of place and emphasis on the land often found throughout Walker’s work. In Black Elk Speaks, he says much about sacred places, but most memorable is the statement made from the top of Harney’s Peak: “Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all shapes as they must live together like one being” (Neihardt [1932] 1992, 43). Through Black Elk’s words, he not only emphasizes the sacredness of place, but also his instructions to “live together like one being.” Walker in reply comments on the land while acknowledging that to live together like one being also means to acknowledge all the mixed-race parts of oneself. Meridian, whose own name brings to mind geography, astrology, time, and a center point, learns from her father and Feather Mae, her paternal grandmother, the importance of place as they pass on their spiritual connection with the Sacred Serpent Indian Burial Mound. As a young woman, Feather Mae spends much time at the Sacred Serpent Mound and eventually discovers an opening into the mound. Once inside, she has her first physical response to the sacred place: She felt as if she had stepped into another world, into a different kind of air. The green walls began to spin, and her feeling rose to such a high pitch the next thing she knew she was getting up off the ground. She knew she had fainted but

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she felt neither weakened nor ill. She felt renewed, as from some strange spiritual intoxication. Her blood made warm explosions through her body, and her eyelids stung and tingled. (Walker 1976, 57) Meridian has a similar first experience in the mound. Her physical experience is much like her grandmother’s, but she also adds a vision to her description: “And in this movement she saw the faces of her family, the branches of trees, the wings of birds, the corners of houses, blades of grass and petals of flowers rush toward a central point high above her and she was drawn with them, as whirling, as bright, as free, as they” (58). The Sacred Serpent becomes a connection between the three generations. Meridian’s visions continue through her life and are accompanied by a sort of temporary paralysis. The experiences of both Feather Mae and Meridian find several similar examples in Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. Black Elk’s legs fail him as he slips into a vision at the age of nine. During his collapse, he receives a vision that shows him the sacred tree at the center of the nation’s hoop; the potential death and destruction of the tree, the hoop, and his people; and the hope found in the buffalo. Meridian has her first similar experiences with temporary paralysis in college as she sees a bluish light, until one day she loses her sight and becomes sick. Upon losing the blue light and feeling of illness, Meridian experiences paralysis (Walker 1976, 119). This state of paralysis takes place throughout Meridian’s life when she exhausts herself in human rights work and she requires renewal. Walker signifies on John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks with the sickness Meridian experiences in which she collapses in a state of paralysis and experiences dreams or visions. In John Neihardt’s account, Black Elk’s first vision came at the age of five when he heard voices and saw two men come from the clouds to sing him a sacred song. ([1932] 1992, 18–19) Meridian’s visions, similarly, start at the Serpent Mound where she sees the images of her family. While still living at home as a young girl, Meridian discussed the Serpent Mound with her father, Mr. Hill. They interpreted their experiences at the Sacred Serpent as a means of linking to the past. The link finds father and daughter connected to one another, to the physical place of the past, and to the ancestral spirits. Possibly because of his experience in the mound, her father holds an acute interest in land and Indians. His office walls are papered with images of Indians and maps


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of Indian lands. He never clearly reveals his motivation for this interest other than his affinity to the land and his recognition that Georgia once belonged to the Cherokee. However, his mother’s name is Feather Mae, implying a possible Native tie. When Mr. Hill gives his land title to Walter Longknife, a Cherokee “wanderer” passing through the area, Meridian notices something familiar in the Cherokee man’s face that explains her father’s interests. “She began to recognize what her father was by looking at [Walter]” (Walker 1976, 54). Here Walker may be indicating more than a shared oppression: the possibility of shared blood. For whatever reasons her father’s interest began, his act of giving the deed might seem like a parallel to white guilt. Yet, in an argument with his wife about the roles played by Indians in the Civil War, Mr. Hill replies, “I never said that either side was innocent or guilty, just ignorant. They’ve been a part of it, we’ve been a part of it, everybody’s been a part of it for a long time” (Walker 1976, 55). Like Black Elk, Meridian’s father sees a need for blacks, Indians, and those of mixed blood to unite and support one another. The comparison between African American and Native American experiences clearly appears when Meridian’s family’s land is taken by the government. Longknife spends the summer on the land and then gives back the deed at the end of summer when he moves on, reinforcing Native beliefs that land cannot be owned. Ironically, and perhaps more to Walker’s point, the land is then stolen. “The Indian burial mounds of the Sacred Serpent and her father’s garden of prize beans, corn, and squash were to be turned into a tourist attraction, a public park” (56). The scene points poignantly to the shared land issues of both blacks and Indians, neither of whom are allowed to attain and keep land. The county courthouse adds further insult when after offering a small payment, the family is further warned, “to stay away from Sacred Serpent Park which, now that it belongs to the public, was of course not open to Colored” (56). Like Black Elk’s Black Hills and the Cherokee’s Appalachian Mountains, the government takes the land with indifference to its sacred meaning. With the Snake Mound destroyed by tourists, The Sojourner tree becomes Meridian’s new place to find peace of mind while she attends Saxon College. The tree itself and the earth from which it gains strength calls to the oral tradition of Louvinie, a black slave who is sought out for her rich African stories and storytelling abilities, until one white child dies of fright. As a result, her tongue is cut out at the root, but she

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preserves her tongue and buries it at the base of a small magnolia tree, which, by the time of her death twenty years later, is the largest tree of its kind. It is thought to have had the power to hide many slaves and later was the site of a yearly ritual, held to remember Fast Mary of Tower Hall, whose pregnancy is legendary among the coeds who celebrate menstruation as the sign of having escaped pregnancy. In the abandonment and death of the Wile Chile and the destruction of The Sojourner tree, Meridian conjures memories of the civil rights movement and the American Indian Movement, of Sojourner Truth and Selu, of the dreams of both Martin Luther King and Black Elk. The pain and loss felt upon King’s assassination, and the series of bombings, mob attacks, brutality, lynchings, and other murders of black men, women, and children, are paralleled with the sorrow experienced by Black Elk as he witnessed the murder of men, women, and children by the U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee. However, both Neihardt’s Black Elk and Walker’s Meridian find hope for their peoples. In Neihardt’s postscript, he tells the reader that later he returned with Black Elk to Harney’s Peak where Black Elk speaks to the Great Spirit: “I recall the great vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people: I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree” ([1932] 1992, 274). Near the end of Meridian, Truman Meridian’s introduction to the voter registration movement and former lover, notices a photograph hanging on Meridian’s wall among her collection of letters from Anne-Marion, Meridian’s Saxon College friend. It shows a huge tree stump with a finger-sized branch, barely visible. The accompanying note says: “‘Who would be happier than you that The Sojourner did not die” (Walker 1976, 217). Through the multiple voices found in Meridian—Lakota, Cherokee, African, and African American—we hear these texts, both oral and written, speak to one another in a conversation that focuses on the message found in Black Elk’s vision, Selu’s Wild Boy, and Sojourner Truth’s work for social justice. These oral stories come out of histories that dynamically evolve without end. This reading of Meridian requires discovery and rediscovery, recognition of both identity and multi-identity in an effort to bring cohesive wholeness that represents all of who the author is. Walker’s desire to speak in multiple voices and to harmonize those voices is especially difficult when ethnically diverse voices are


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silenced in favor of one voice. However, Walker successfully brings together the voices of those ancestors found in her poem about Tallula and responds to Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks in a strong chorus as an African Cherokee feminist who embraces and responds to the voices of all her ancestors and recognizes all of their complexities.


7 Womanist Interventions in Historical Materialism ANGELA L. COTTEN

Alice Walker has been a writer and activist for over forty years. Her second novel Meridian (1976) deals with a broad range of subjects, including: African American and Native American struggle, the race/class/gender matrix underlying black feminine subjectivity, Christianity as an opiate of black consciousness, and the critical methods and tactical problems of revolution in America. Of the latter, this paper focuses more specifically on her treatment of Karl Marx’s historical materialism. Meridian is a historical novel interlaced with autobiographical currents of Walker’s activism in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the life experiences of its titled protagonist, it narrates both actual and fictional events of the civil rights and black power movements and probes the concrete textures and nuances of African American struggle. Meridian Hill navigates a maze of sexual and racial inequality while finding her passion and a sense of dignity in civil rights womanist activism. Her feelings of hope intertwined with bouts of despair captures the experiences of many activists during that period. Meridian’s reflection on the movement’s trajectory as a way of ascertaining lessons of value and preparing for struggle in the future was an important moment for activists like Walker who believed that much work still remained to be done. The novel conveys some of these lessons, one of which entails a more critical consideration of Karl Marx’s ideas for organized resistance taking place today. One of Walker’s major concerns in the novel is the utility of historical materialism as an analytic tool of contemporary social struggle, including his conception of social totality and power. She shares certain perspectives with Marx on alienation, agency, and revolutionary struggle. Walker insists that infrastructural analyses are a necessary component of emancipatory protest and signals the importance of Marxian

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thought in varying ways in the novel. They depart, however, on crucial issues of political economy, like the determining dynamics between political forms such as the state, infrastructures, and ideology and what constitutes capital and power in the modern body politic. The role of the lumpenproletariat revolutionary struggle is another point of difference between them. Her engagement with Marx’s ideas yields insights on multiple levels. Walker presents a scenario of class, race, and ethnicity in America that suggests the need to reconsider (even contemporize) historical materialism as a critical tool of revolutionary struggle. Her critique of fundamental assumptions embedded in Marx’s approach to history and capitalism, moreover, and her recognition of the dialectical character of white supremacy in America, suggest the need to rethink determining relations between the state, economic infrastructures, and ideologies of race in modern society. And finally, Walker’s insistence on the facticity of racialized-gendered bodies initiates an important discussion on how capital and power have evolved historically since Marx’s time. Social class is constituted by more than one’s relationship to the means of production. Walker’s treatment of Marx’s ideas enriches both the Marxian and black radical tradition, which has treated Marxian philosophy since at least W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, Richard Wright, and Lucious Outlaw. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois draws on black history to challenge some of Marx’s writings on revolution. DuBois argues that Reconstruction was “the historical moment in the developing world system” (Robinson 1983, 312). Racist ideology foreclosed the unity between ex-slaves and poor whites which had previously emerged as a major revolutionary force in the Civil War, disabling and weakening the Confederate cause. DuBois showed how Marx’s notion of the peasantry as a backward class (in contrast to the bourgeoisie and proletariat) incapable of revolutionary consciousness and action did not hold true on American soil. The revolution had been brought about, not by the working class as Marx and Engels had postulated, nor by the intellectual vanguard, as Lenin had necessitated, but rather by a contradiction between the modes of production and the social relations out of which black slaves and poor white people emerged as a revolutionary force. They deserted the plantations and Confederate armies in what Du Bois identifies as “the General Strike.” The plantocracy was toppled, slaves were freed (nominally at least), and Reconstruction was initiated, only to be undermined by racism. The white working class that emerged after the Civil War could have helped established a proletarian dictatorship in the South, but had no class

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consciousness, as Marx and Engels had anticipated. It scoffed at coalitions with blacks and undermined all possibilities of emerging as a revolutionary force. As Du Bois points out, the material force of racial ideology had been felt. Du Bois suggests that, while “Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth-century despite some of its logical difficulties, . . . [it had to] be modified so far as Negroes are concerned . . . [because of the] peculiar race problem here in America” (321). Alice Walker continues Du Bois’s critical engagement of Marxian thought. She draws on Native and black American history to suggest that Marx’s conception of the determining relations between infrastructures, ideologies, and forms of governance in modern societies requires modification in investigations of political economy in America so that the ideological and state apparatus are recognized for their relatively autonomous functioning in constituting social class strata and power in the body politic. Her reading of American history suggests that we acknowledge the dialectical character of ideology and admit the historical fact that while racial ideology has been the instrument and effect of capitalist expansion, racial relations of ruling have morphed into something else in America since their origins in slavery. Ideology has been a catalyst for creating and maintaining formidable political and social institutions that determine social class strata since Emancipation. Recognizing the co-constitutive impact of ideology on modern social development inevitably calls for rethinking Marx’s conception of the relation between capital and social class: the need to broaden conceptions of capital—how it operates and its effects—to include other social identity markers like race, ethnicity, and gender as currencies of social class positioning. This means, moreover, that analysis of social class cannot be limited to explicating one’s relationship to the means of production but must also investigate how race and gender further stratify the general class contradiction. This has always been a tenet of black feminist and womanist thought: that the relations between interlocking systems of oppression must be studied for how they serve as contexts and reinforcements of one another, because social class cannot be understood apart from gender, racial, and ethnic power relations. THE NECESSITY OF ANALYZING POLITICAL ECONOMY Walker signals the necessity of infrastructural analyses in social struggle throughout Meridian. Her activist characters debate the merits of

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socialism in one scene. Anne-Marion reads “the Communist Manifesto, which she considered a really thought provoking work” (Walker 1976, 120). [Meridian and Anne-Marion] had lived and studied enough to know they despised capitalism; they perceived it had done well in America because it had rested directly on their fathers’ and mothers’ backs. The difference between them was this: Anne-Marion did not know if she would be a success, Meridian did not think she could enjoy owning things others could not have. Anne-Marion wanted blacks to have the same opportunity to make as much as the richest white people. But Meridian wasted the destruction of the rich as a class and the eradication of all personal economic reserves. (118) Meridian’s senior thesis explains that capitalism tends toward excessive accumulation of wealth for the ruling few, and argues that “no one should be allowed to own more land than could be worked in a day, by hand.” (118) A significant problem of today’s social formation, Walker is suggesting, is the lack of state regulations on market growth. Walker and Marx concur that successful revolution requires changes not only in the political form and ideological landscape, but also in the material conditions and popular consciousness (McLellan 1971, 610, 45–56). In fact, Walker suggests that lasting, substantive changes cannot be gained by reforming the laws of civil society alone. Change must also include seizure of the means of production by the proletariat: “To [Lynne and Meridian] this was obvious. That the country was owned by the rich and that the rich must be relieved of this ownership before ‘Freedom’ meant anything was something so basic to their understanding of America they felt naïve even discussing it” (Walker 1976, 173). In these excerpts Walker signals the importance of analyzing political economy in social struggles today and hence the relevance of Marx’s ideas as a guidepost. Historical materialism especially illuminates the structural relations of class antagonism. Walker draws on the histories of blacks and Natives in America to reinforce this contemporary significance of Marx’s writings on revolution, but then highlights limitations of historical materialism’s diagnostic capacity to suggest that economic infrastructures do not determine class formations in the last instance as Marx had theorized. Instead, she points out how non-eco-


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nomic spheres like ideology (discourses and values) and the state have functioned as co-constitutive forces of social formation in America, and suggests that Marx’s conception of power operations in the social body (engendered in his conception of historical materialism) should be reconceived for social movements taking place today. While Walker agrees with Marx on key features of modern social development and revolutionary struggle, she suggests that his conception of social totality, capital, and the general class contradiction requires modification for the method to explain accurately how power functions currently—including its increasingly sophisticated reorganization in successive stages of capitalist development. THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT: PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES The lumpenproletariat has no place in revolutions for Marx, but Walker assigns it the significant role of mobilizing the masses. For Marx, this group’s abject positioning vis-à-vis the ownership and control of the means of production determines their potential for revolutionary struggle. According to David McLellan, Marx considers them “drop outs of society who [have] no stake in the development of society and so have no historical role to play . . . They were at times reactionary since they were willing to sell their services to the bourgeoisie” (1971, 155). “Drop outs” are not directly integrated into the capitalist system of production. In The Class Struggles in France, Marx characterizes them as “a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, without a hearth and home” (154). In The Communist Manifesto he ventures further in describing the group as an obstacle to revolutionary success: a “‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” (154). Marx is reminded historically of those who sold their allegiance to Bonaparte for “wine skins and sausages” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. His denouncement of their loyalty comes from a fundamental conviction that human consciousness and choice are determined by conditions. Walker’s existentialism counters this view. In contrast to Marx, Walker emphasizes the freedom of consciousness to choose regardless of conditions by portraying the

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lumpenproletariat in Meridian as a band of street hustlers, addicts, sex workers, and grifters who transform into a capable, indispensible wing of the struggle. Tommy Odds had hung out every Saturday evening at the pool hall on Carver Street, talking and shooting pool. He had been playing with the niggers-on-the-corner for almost a month before ever opening his mouth about the liberating effects of voting. At first he had been hooted down with shouts of “Man, I don’t wanna hear that shit!” and “Man, let’s keep this a clean game.” (Walker, 1976, 134–35) Walker is careful not to romanticize the revolutionary potential of fringe subjectivity. These characters are initially apolitical and apathetic. Lack of class consciousness notwithstanding, the lumpenproletariat have potential for commitment to revolutionary causes, because consciousness is never determined solely by the conditions of its existence. Walker’s existentialist leanings, most clearly articulated in earlier works, are apparent here as she treats consciousness as a for-itself (or transcendence) exceeding the in-itself (immanence) of being human that makes us free to choose and thus articulate values. Far from abject, this class plays a vital role in revolutionary success. By the end of the first month [Tommy’s] niggers-on-thecorner liked him too much not to listen to him. At the end of three months they’d formed a brigade called “The Niggerson-the-Corner-Voter-Machine.” It was through them that all the derelicts, old grandmammas and grandpas and tough young hustlers and studs, the prostitutes, and even the boozy old guy who ran the pool hall registered to vote in the next election. (Walker, 1976, 134) Walker’s conviction about the freedom of consciousness is indicated in the signifying play between the anagram’s structure of the lumpens’ organization “NOTC” and the infinite possibilities of signifying the group’s identity. The anagram sequence remains constant but group members signify on the numerous possibilities of the name. This conveys slippage between signifying structure and meaning, and a sense that structures do not exhaust the range of possibilities for choosing and reinventing the self.


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“What do NOTC mean?” Asked the old grandmammas who were escorted like queens down the street to the courthouse. “Oh, it mean ‘Not Only True, but Colored,” the hustlers replied smoothly. Or, “Not on Time, but Current,” said the prostitutes to the old grandpas, letting the old men dig on their cleavage. “Notice of Trinity, with Christ,” the pool sharks said to the religious fanatics, who frowned, otherwise, on pool sharks. (134–35) There are infinite possibilities of identity or self-formation for niggers-on-the-corner, which depend on context and rhetorical ingenuity. Such signifying slippages indicate that human consciousness and action are not completely restricted by the given, but create new avenues of morphing and speaking. AXES OF DOMINANCE IN MODERN SOCIAL TOTALITIES Walker focuses mainly on Marx’s early ideas, such as his identification of modes of production as the major organizing principle of modern society, from Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it further follows that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal emancipation—and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation. (Marx in Tucker 1978, 80) Marx’s pronouncement of varying relations of inequality as discrete, mechanistic, and hierarchical is sometimes referred to as “economic determinism” or “vulgar Marxism.” He distinguishes between the primary class contradiction and secondary social relations of ruling, like gender and racial oppression and views the latter as symptoms of capitalism. By asserting the determining significance that class antagonism

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has over other forms of dominance, Marx also implies that social class position is primarily constituted by one’s relation to the ownership and control of the means of production. These ideas reflect a deeper conception of the determining dynamics of social totalities that influenced his studies of political economy in Europe. Prior to the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx had already formulated a conception of social totality in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations . . . of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general . . . At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production . . . Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. (80) Here Marx is most explicit about how modes of production determine in the last instance the governmental and ideological relations. Economic infrastructures are the chief catalysts of social formations.

CONTESTING THE CRITICAL DIAGNOSTIC OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Walker might agree with Marx that racial oppression is a consequence of economic interests, but it cannot be reduced solely to the profit motive alone. On the one hand, she believes that white Euro-American imperialism is the original condition of black and Indian subjugation in the Americas, a situation that historical materialism helps to illuminate. But on the other hand, she does not believe that a social theory of economic motive adequately accounts for the suffering and oppression of African and Native Americans. This is apparent in several dialogues between Meridian’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hill.


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“Other men run away from their families outright,” said her mother. “You stay, but give the land under our feet away. I guess that makes you a hero.” “We were part of it, you know,” her father replied. “Part of what?” “Their disappearance.” “Hah,” said her mother. “You might have been, but I wasn’t even born. Besides, you told me how surprised you were to find that some of them had the nerve to fight for the South in the Civil War. That ought to make up for those few black soldiers who rode against Indians in the Western cavalry.” Her father sighed. “I never said that either side was innocent or guilty, just ignorant. They’ve been part of it, we’ve been part of it, everybody’s been part of it for a long time.” . . . . . . “The answer to everything,” said Meridian’s mother, “is that we live in America and we’re not rich.” (Walker 1976, 55–56) In the first exchange, Walker frames black and indigenous oppression as a consequence of Euro-American imperialism. Mr. Hill’s observation refers to the invasion and destruction of African and indigenous cultures wrought by Manifest Destiny. Reference to the Civil War recalls the structural origins of black servitude in slavery and underscores how black freedom hung in the balance of profit maximization, since the war was a clash of interests between northern capitalists and southern planters over which mode of production—slavery or industrial capitalism—should continue in westward expansion. Blacks who rode against Indians in the cavalry were called “Buffalo Soldiers,” which alludes to Indian removal campaigns from lands considered economically profitable for whites. Finally, Mrs. Hill’s closing retort, punctuating the conversation with a totalization of history, emphasizes capitalist development (and the profit motive) as the primary organizing principle of modern social formations. In Mr. Hill’s observation of Indians’ and blacks’ roles in this historical march of greed, Walker hints that capitalism’s success depends on manufacturing false social antagonisms. Elsewhere in the novel Walker frames social inequality and destruction as symptoms of larger economic conditions: “Most of the students—timid, imitative, bright

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enough but never daring, were being ushered toward Ladyhood everyday . . . They [never] risk[ed] being raped in the rough neighborhood as they attempted to discover the economic causes of inner-city crime, as Anne Marion had” (Walker 1976, 39). Maintaining social discord, especially racial antagonism, is crucial to capitalist domination on a large scale according to Walker (and Marx). This is underscored in the state’s expropriation of the family’s farm, which is turned into a tourist park for whites only (Walker 1976, 56). Like Marx, Walker views the state as an instrument of private interests that masquerades as a representative of the general will. It manufactures discord among constituencies by erecting structures of social privilege and inequality that undermine cooperative protest among them. Marx observes a similar practice of the English and Irish working classes. Ethnic antagonism was “artificially kept alive and intensified . . . by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. . . . It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power” (Marx 1972, 337). Walker’s disdain for capital’s high-jacking of the state is further conveyed in the following pun on the state capitol: “In the Capital’s museum of Indians [Meridian] peered through plate glass at the bones of a warrior, shamelessly displayed, dug up in a crouch position and left that way, his front teeth missing, his arrows and clay pipes around him. At such sites she experienced nausea at being alive” (Walker 1976, 59; emphasis mine). These two excerpts show how Walker concurs with Marx on some of the constitutive dynamics of modern social totalities, as she traces the origins of black and Native oppression in the U.S. Whether it is bureaucratic machinations, social anomie, or racial mythologies that are used to justify ethnic oppression, Walker suggests throughout Meridian that economic infrastructures are significant engines of culture, effectively manipulating and controlling political, social, and ideological relations in the social body. Because historical materialism illuminates structures and relations that seem disparate on the surface, but which are actually more fundamentally connected in the core logic of capitalism, it is a necessary critical tool of social struggles taking place today.

Elsewhere, however, Walker suggests that the determining relations of modern social totalities engendered in Marx’s historical materialism


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should be reconceived to account for the complex ways that power has come to operate since his time. To this end, she recalls other instances of African American and Native American oppression since its inception in slavery to show that, for many whites, relations of racial servitude have been invested with additional meanings and motives that have little connection to capitalist expansion. This means that aside (but not exclusive) from economic infrastructures, ideological forces are also co-constitutive of class antagonisms in America. Thus, Walker raises questions about the diagnostic accuracy of historical materialism as a critical tool of revolutionary struggle, suggesting that class relations in America have evolved in ways that exceed the analytic capacity of Marx’s method. The “Sojourner” is a fictional diversion of how the system of slavery became imbued with additional meanings that had nothing to do with the profit motive, and how these, in turn, fuel black oppression long after Emancipation. The narrative segment is about the struggle between slaves and whites for recognition of power. Louvinie is an African slave whose remarkable gift of storytelling is destroyed by the overseer, who wants a visible display of her submission. She refuses to mediate his narcissism, however, and he cuts out her tongue in retaliation, giving the absurd excuse that her stories killed his son. His cruelty has nothing to do with production and profit. It is sadism retaliating against her will and determination not to be broken—a dialectical struggle for recognition of ownership of black bodies—reflected in the senseless nature of the violence. Walker suggests that there is a thirst for psychological dominance that lies at the heart of racist brutality against blacks and Indians that exceed the explanatory capacity of Marx’s historical materialist. This point is reiterated again in the novel’s epigraph, which comes from the autobiography of the Lakota Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, who as a boy witnessed the slaughter of his nation. I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now . . . I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. (Neihardt [1932] 1992, 270)

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Black Elk’s autobiography serves several purposes in Meridian, not least among them is that of signifying on (and celebrating) the medicine man’s visions and narrative. Regarding the absurdity of white supremacy, Black Elk’s memories recall one of the most brutal assaults by whites against Indians: the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of the Lakota Sioux nation. Federal troops were forcing the Sioux from their homelands and reassigning them to reservations to make room for mining companies and migrating whites. During the campaign, soldiers killed approximately 300 Indians, most of whom were women and children. The Sioux were unarmed and emigrating reluctantly but peacefully. Investigations revealed that many Indians had been shot from behind, and that the powder-burned bodies of many women and children suggested that they had been fired upon at close range (Beasley 1995; Gonzalez and Cook-Lynn 1999). Again, what still stands out about this massacre is the unnecessary and grotesque quality of the violence committed. Walker reminds us that non-white peoples are victimized in ways that cannot be explained satisfactorily by appeal to production and profit motives. Economic interests of westward expansion might explain the trafficking of Africans, African Americans, and Indians and the expropriation of their lands and resources. But it cannot fully explain brutality that is born out of psychic investment in a racist system. This idea is explored again in Walker’s second collection of short fiction, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). “Elethia” is a story about how slavery created a psychic need in whites for dominance over blacks, which became a powerful determinant of class structures, social relations, Jim Crow, and segregation in the twentieth century. The story recalls a white restaurant owner who is so obsessed with the era of slavery that he keeps the corpse of his grandfather’s slave, Albert Porter, in the restaurant window. The owner’s portrayal of Albert as a loyal and deferent servant is nothing like Albert’s family’s memories of him. Like Louvinie, Albert refused to mediate the slaveholder’s will to dominance. The old folks said he wasn’t nobody’s uncle and wouldn’t sit still for nobody to call him that either. Albert was born in slavery and he remember that his mama and daddy didn’t know nothing about slavery’d done ended for near ‘bout ten years, the boss man kept them so ignorant about the law . . . so he was a mad so-an’-so when he found out. They used to beat him severe trying to make him forget about the past and


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grin and act like a nigger . . . But he never would. Never would work in the big house as a head servant neither— always broke up stuff. The master at that time was always going around pinching him. Look like he hated Albert more than anything—but he never would let him get a job anywhere else. (1981, 29–30) This is not a unique marketing strategy to increase patronage, for Walker tells of the owner’s real designs: “There had been many slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slave owners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of course. Not in the present—it went without saying—but at that time [of slavery], stopped, just on the outskirts of his memory: his grandfather’s time” (27). While Walker agrees with Marx that the relations of private property and class have played (and continue playing) a central role in organizing modern social formations, she does not give primacy to economic foundations in the context of class and race relations in America. Ideologies of white supremacy, while invented in the eighteenth century to rationalize and justify imperialism and slavery, have continued thriving in this century apart from economic considerations to have a significant impact on the social class structures of our culture through social and economic policies. What had functioned originally as an instrument of capitalist expansion has also historically produced a system of racial castes that has continued to thrive beyond its original conditions in slavery and become imbued with additional meanings of dominance for many whites. Walker observes the dialectical development of the ideology of white supremacy and how it has become a self-constituting structure of its own in North America: a relatively autonomous system of values and cultural practices buttressed by social policies of containment and repression, which further stratify the general class contradiction. Industrial development and capitalist growth were certainly retarded by the rule of mob violence and lynching in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as foreign and northern investors were hesitant to develop in such an unpredictably explosive and volatile social climate. Lynching as an institution had several regulatory functions and performative consequences. On one level, it was a backlash against Emancipation, guaranteeing the exploitation of black labor and thwarting black citizenship and economic advancement. On another level, it

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was instrumental in displacing class antagonism between whites through the assertion of white supremacy. It was a performative ritual through which the plantocracy and white working class closed ranks among themselves during Reconstruction, and the black body became ritually exorcised—literally and figuratively—from the body politic. The dynamic of suture-and-mutilation lay at the heart of these effects. Whites gathered together, sometimes traveling great distances from other regions, to take part in a communal ritual of torture and dismemberment that had been advertised like entertainment venues. In fact, many rituals were publicized as town picnics and community gatherings. A kind of sociopsychological suture unfolded between the planter and working classes in some 5,200 (or more) rituals of white mobs mutilating black bodies. Lynching was a kind of ritualized sociopolitical exorcism. It operated as a ritual through which whites cleansed the body politic of blackness and restored the (antebellum) order of white rule. The Black Codes and Jim Crow were the legislative correlative of lynching that both racialized crime, criminalized blacks, and reinforced blacks’ abject status outside the national citizenry. Walker’s observation of the evolving nature of non-economic spheres like ideology as co-constitutive broadens our understanding of capital and how power operates in the modern social body in ways that Marx could not have foreseen. Capital entails more than simply owning property and controlling the means of production. There are other breeds or species of capital like gender and race that also function as currencies of social mobility and opportunity, as well as liability and disadvantage. I think there is probably as much difference between the life of a black black woman and a “high yellow” black woman as between a “high yellow” woman and a white woman. . . . Ironically, much of what I’ve learned about color I’ve learned because I have a mixed-race child. Because she is lighterskinned, straighter-haired than I, her life—in this racist colorist society—is infinitely easier. (Walker 1984, 291) Identity markers of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality either facilitate or inhibit our access to avenues of social class mobility in similar (though not identical) ways that wealth—having or not having it—opens up or limits possibilities of multiplying its base. Because of this women and people of color are even further marginalized from centers of power


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and influence within the American proletariat. Hierarchies of gender, racial, and ethnic dis/advantage further fracture the general class contradiction and splinter the proletariat. For Walker, then, ideology is both an instrument of capital and a determinant of social class formation. A word of theoretical caution about Walker’s conception of racism’s evolution vis-à-vis capitalist expansion is important here. Her conception is not the same as supersession in Hegel’s dialectic of history. Racist ideologies and values are not a lingering presence of the negated in its negated state, because ideology and correlative social policies are more than non-substantial traces of the past anticipating the present moment. They are co-constitutive with the state and market forces. Having to negotiate one’s way in the world in a body that is saturated by racial mythologies makes a difference in one’s social standing (as a day-laborer, manager, or owner), which Walker illustrates in another short story, “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff” (1973). Living in destitute poverty, the titled character travels to a government assistance bureau to receive rations for her family. The kernel of this story comes from the struggle of Walker’s own mother to feed her family during the Depression. Mrs. Walker was denied welfare relief because of the bureau officer’s prejudice, which Walker recalls in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: “Humph” said the woman, looking at my mother more closely and with unconcealed fury. Anybody dressed up as good as you don’t need to come here begging for food. “I ain’t begging”, said my mother, “the government is giving away flour to those that need it, and I need it. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. And these clothes I’m wearing was given to me. But the woman had already turned to the next person in line, saying over her shoulder to the white man behind the counter with her, “Imagine the gall of some niggers in here dressed better than me!” This thought seemed to make her angrier still, and my mother, pulling three of her small children behind her, and crying from humiliation, walked sadly back into the street. (1984, 16) This excerpt calls attention to the materiality of racist ideology as a system of values and cultural practices. No longer simply an instrument of imperialism, white supremacy has evolved into a constitutive force of the American social formation through historical agents who are heavily invested in maintaining some semblance of the caste

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structure of slavery. In this story, it is a formidable obstacle of black advancement that further stratifies the proletariat. CONCLUDING REMARKS Walker shows how important it is to understand the intricate nature and history of alienation and anomie in contemporary America in order to mobilize the proletariat effectively for revolution and to implement substantive structures of equality that guard against replicating old patterns of servitude in the revolutionary aftermath. She suggests that historical materialism is an indispensable critical tool of revolutionary struggle that requires (at least) two conceptual shifts. First, Marx’s conception of the determining relations between infrastructures, ideologies, and the state apparatus require rethinking so that relations of the latter two are recognized for instances of relatively autonomous functioning in constituting relations of power in the American social body. This reconsideration enhances the method’s diagnostic capacity to accurately grasp how the social formation—especially regarding the proletariat—is fractured into a more complex structure since Marx’s observations of the working class struggles in nineteenth-century Europe. Namely, we must treat the dialectical character of ideology as an instrument and effect of capitalist expansion that has also evolved into a new constitutive power since its original condition of emergence. It has been the catalyst for creating and maintaining formidable institutions that stratify our society by skin pigment (among other markers of social identity). Recognizing the co-constitutive impact of ideology leads to theoretical reformation in Marx’s notion of the relation between capital and social class. Social class can no longer be thought of exclusively as a function of one’s relationship to the means of production (whether one is a manager or laborer) but must also investigate how racial and gender structural inequality further stratify the general class conflict. Social class cannot be understood apart from gender, racial, and ethnic power relations: the relations between interlocking systems of oppression must be studied for the ways in which they serve as contexts, reinforcements, and masked strategies. Conceptions of capital and power need to be updated, moreover, to explain how gender, race, and ethnicity function interactively as currencies of social class advantage and disadvantage.

Part IV Re(in)fusing Feminism


8 “Both the Law and Its Transgression” Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Post”–Black Feminism NOELLE MORRISSETTE

How can a writer of what Toni Morrison describes as “race-specific yet race-free prose” be defined as a black feminist author? (1993a, 211) Morrison’s reference to her own practice in this phrase stands in contradiction to the themes and characters readily apparent in her body of writing. From Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, which gave voice to the shared struggles of Claudia and Frieda MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove to cultivate a sense of self-worth and beauty as young black girls, to Sula Peace’s quest “to make [her] self,” as a New World woman, rather than be weighed down by the restrictions placed upon black women (and perpetuated by them) in Sula, black feminist themes and characters appear at the center of her works. Morrison’s focus here and elsewhere, on the lived experience of being young, black, and female, provides ample material for black feminist criticism. Indeed, Morrison’s works of the 1970s and early 1980s were used as case studies for the newly developing field of Black feminist criticism. As Barbara Smith, Deborah McDowell, and Barbara Christian discussed the parameters of the field and their collective goals, Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye and Sula were constantly invoked to answer the questions, “what is Black feminist literature?” and “what is Black feminist criticism?” In fact, the debate between Smith and McDowell, encompassing several years of Black feminist thought, raised but did not resolve the tension that exists between black feminist criticism and black feminist literary criticism. Barbara Smith feels that “the politics of feminism have a direct relationship to the state of black women’s literature,” asserting that

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“criticism makes a body of literature recognizable” (1994, 411). But more than this, Smith observes, unlike the white feminist movement, which was an “essential precondition” to the flowering of feminist literature and criticism, there is no political movement for black women’s experience. She asserts contentiously that “until a black feminist criticism exists we will not even know what these [black women] writers mean” (412). Equally contentious is Smith’s claim that “black feminist criticism applied to a particular work can . . . expose for the first time its actual dimensions” (417). Her subsequent discussion, which focuses on Sula as “a lesbian novel” and therefore a Black feminist work as well, was countered by Deborah McDowell who found such an equation of lesbianism and feminism only approximate, and because of the limitations it contained assuming an isolationist position (Smith 1994, 417; McDowell 1994, 432). McDowell critiqued Smith of overgeneralizing to fit black women’s literature into categories imposed by an ideological position that “subsumes far more black women writers . . . than not into the canon” (McDowell 1994, 432). Raising the important question of the relationship of black feminist criticism to literature, McDowell cautions against reading literature as polemic, which runs the risk of reducing art to a political viewpoint and depriving it of aesthetic consideration. She writes, “political ideology and aesthetic judgment . . . must be balanced” (433). However, a “balance” between ideology and aesthetics may be impossible. As she herself asserts, she is “against critical absolutism” (438). The demands of political ideology often work in tension, not in tandem, with aesthetics, because ideology usually demands an absolute position. As the interchanges of Smith and McDowell suggest, there are aspects of Morrison’s writing that help to define her as a Black feminist writer, as one who concentrates on and speaks through the lives and struggles of Black women. But there are also ways in which her selfdescribed strategy of writing in a “race-specific yet race-free prose” has led Morrison beyond some of these traditional aspects defining Black feminism. In fact, Morrison has been transgressive within the discourses of Black feminism—and feminism in general—over the years of her writing, particularly by incorporating racial ambiguity in combination with class issues into her work. Paradise represents Morrison’s greatest transgression. The specific features of Paradise—of laws and especially of women who are “both the law and its transgression”—suggest ways in

“Both the Law and Its Transgression”

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which black feminist practices, critical and creative, can transform themselves while continuing their exploration of American culture, history and society. By considering the ramifications of a post–Black feminism, which can self-consciously address the problems that are presented by defining it—what constitutes “black,” “feminist,” and how “post” functions in relationship to these terms—we can begin to understand how Paradise’s themes reflect a Black feminism that is “both the law and its transgression,” and how the novel uses laws of religion and community to express this complex, seemingly contradictory relationship. Morrison’s refusal to be limited by resisting the terms of literary criticism and her writing about “outlaw” women are similar. Although the “law” of literary criticism is transgressed, it has to be part of the process of interpretation. Placed in a productive tension, this relationship of “law” and “outlaw” has lessons for a post–Black feminist practice that is both critical of its own process and creative beyond its own named limits and terms. Morrison resists the vocabulary of literary criticism as a dead language, petrified; Morrison would rather that readers participate in the creative process—the process of embodying language. When asked whether she agreed with critics who had called Paradise a “feminist novel,” Morrison responded, “Not at all. . . . I don’t write ‘ist’ novels.” Explaining why she distances herself from feminism, Morrison states: In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book—leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe [those categories]. I think it’s off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things. (Jaffrey 1998) Paradoxically, Morrison herself is reductionist in describing feminism as a matriarchal substitute for patriarchy. She has stated that she dislikes “either/or” formulations, and sees “personality” as “more fluid” (Moyers 1994b), but her formulation here merely reinforces her

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perception of “ist” ideology on the one hand, and aesthetic practices on the other. With her dismissal of “ist” novels, Morrison steps away from labels and from being categorized with other writers of her generation, particularly feminists, whether black or white. As Hilton Als wrote in his recent profile of Morrison in the New Yorker, when asked “her opinion about the novels of one of her contemporaries, she said, ‘I hear the movie is fab,’ and turned away.” (2003, 64) Als’s question seems a fairly obvious attempt to elicit Morrison’s response to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. But the message Morrison sends is clear: she does not want to be grouped with other black writers simply because she is black; she does not want to be classified as a feminist just because she writes about women. It is wise to recall the controversial critique of Morrison by New York Times reviewer Sara Blackburn, who wrote that Morrison should “transcend that early and unintentionally limiting classification ‘black woman writer’ and take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working” (Blackburn 1973, 3) by abandoning the subject of “provincial” black American life. Morrison asserts that she is “already discredited . . . already politicized, before I get out of the gate.” However, she adds, “I can accept the labels”—like “black” and “female”— that are used to describe her work “because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it” (Als 2003, 66). This comment should make clear that there are themes and characters in her novels that can be read as feminist and expansive. Rather, what Morrison resists is the reduction and simplification that accompany the terms themselves. She points out that while growing up, [she] was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. They had enormously high expectations of their daughters, and cut no quarter with us; it never occurred to me that it was feminist activity. (Jaffrey 1998) Their activity, “later . . . called feminist behavior,” included “confrontation with the world at large” over issues of equality, especially “what was going to happen to the children . . . —the black children— . . . her daughters as well as her sons” (1998). Morrison’s objection to the terminology applied to describe the lives and activity of black women orig-


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inates in part in the absurdity of reclaiming them for a cause. These women were many things, Morrison seems to say, and their conduct was empowered and powerful even within their marginalized position, but to call it “feminist” is to reduce their lives to a single point. This observation has been made by scholars of black feminism. As Kimberly Springer usefully points out, the “third wave model often used to describe feminist activity in the United States” effectively excludes “the race-based movements before them that served as precursors, or windows of political opportunity, for gender activism” (2002, 1061). Springer finds that Black feminists of the 1970s and today “attempt to strike a balance between adequately theorizing race and gender oppression as they exist in the United States,” (1059) something that informs Morrison’s practice of writing about black women’s lives. But Morrison dismisses such critical practice as holding the potential for lifelike contextualization. Morrison addresses the lives of young black women through the themes of love and freedom, which she finds broader than a feminist agenda. Like her early novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, Beloved follows the lives of generations of young black women: “Baby” Suggs; Sethe as an enslaved young woman; Beloved, her daughter and Beloved, the ghost giving voice to the Middle Passage; and Denver, the daughter who saves her mother from being consumed by the past. Morrison expresses an interest in the concept of love as it relates to freedom and has called her three novels previous to her latest, Love, a “love trilogy.” Beginning with Beloved, continuing through Jazz, and ending with Paradise, each of these novels explores a different kind of love. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Morrison explained the important aspects of love as it relates to freedom. On the one hand, there is a selfish love—a “toothick love,” like Sethe’s—and on the other hand, a selfless love, like Pilate’s, in Song of Solomon, a love that according to Morrison makes Pilate “a totally generous, free woman, fearless. Not afraid of anything [and] available for almost infinite love and complete clarity . . . reliable . . . [possessing an intimate relationship with God]” (Moyers 1994b). But more than the lives of little girls, more than love and freedom, Morrison’s concept of what she calls “outlaw women” suggests connections to black feminist criticism and confounds a clearly defined relationship. These women can be described as marginalized agents waging a war against the status quo, be it black or white. But, while this victimization and rebelliousness might point to a clear relationship to black feminist criticism, it is confounded by racial ambiguity and the

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resistance to static definition. Morrison places Sula and Pilate in this “outlaw” category—clearly, characters who place themselves or are placed outside normative female behavior by their own preference and/or by their struggles with what is seen as more mainstream culture. But these women are not really free; rather, they are at odds with social and jurisprudential laws, laws made by men, and are therefore defined or define themselves in relationship to them. Many such outlaw women appear in Morrison’s recent novel, Paradise; they represent the culmination of Morrison’s thinking about outlaw women, love, and God.

Paradise intertwines the stories of two communities in Oklahoma—one, of the all-black town of Ruby; the other, of the women who inhabit the space that is called the Convent. The town of Ruby, founded by former slaves who moved west during Reconstruction, defines itself by the founding families and by the racial purity and exclusionism of “eightrock”—dark skin, the color of coal. This racial exclusionism has its basis in a hierarchical, patriarchal community. As Patricia, one of its outsider women, observes, “The generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery, too . . . In that case, everything that worries them must come from women” (Morrison 1998, 217). The Convent, in contrast, is built upon layers of female experience and meaning. It was constructed by a millionaire as a palace of sin; in later years it was taken over by nuns who are successful in concealing only some of its former functions. As the last survivor of the Convent, Consolata gives refuge to several women who find their way there from abusive and life-threatening situations. She directs the women to love both their body and spirit. The Convent thus embraces Candomblé, a syncretic New World religion that combines paganism and Christianity with the female-centered religions of West Africa. It assembles numerous gods who represent the range of human behaviors in a religious community headed by a matriarch, who connects the human world and the spiritual world. Significantly, expressive storytelling is key to the religion. This spiritual-theological hybrid takes the best of these worship traditions (leaving their worse parts behind) and combines them into a healthy spirituality that overcomes the duality and alienation between body and spirit so prevalent in Christianity. Morrison in fact traveled to Brazil to learn more about Candomblé; while there she heard a story that turned out to be apocryphal about a group of black nuns who were murdered by a group of men because it was rumored


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that they practiced Candomblé in the basement of their convent (Bouson 2000, 238–40). Connie is a key figure for a post–Black feminism, one that fits Morrison’s standard of expansiveness: not just national in scope, but global; not “pure” but fluid and complex, both person and context. This “post” marks much more than a departure from the 1970s moment that initiated the theoretical parameters of Black feminist criticism. It encompasses the global experience of colonialism and the self-consciousness of form that defines the postmodern. Morrison has stated that she views her novels as “inquiries,” and since Paradise explores lives shaped by race, gender, and the use of language as a tool of oppression and death or conversely of freedom and life, it is the obvious work to use for an inquiry into how black feminism is at work in her writing. In Paradise Morrison explores the love of God and the laws men and women inscribe and enact in his (or her) name. The history of the township called Ruby is set in tension with the commune (or “coven,” as it is called by Ruby’s second generation of men) of women who live in the former convent. There are many outlaw women in Paradise, more than there first seem to be, because although the women of the convent surely fit the description, there are women in Ruby who do as well. The very issues of racial purity, adultery, and women that Patricia Best identifies are underscored in explicit and implicit ways by the relations that Ruby’s men and women have not only with each other, but also with the women of the Convent. The town’s women refuse to create progeny for Ruby. Soane, Deek’s wife, consumes an herbal concoction that serves as birth control provided by Connie; Grace (“Gigi”) has sexual relations with K. D., the man who is engaged to be married to Arnette; Arnette has an abortion in the sanctuary of the Convent; and Connie has an affair with Deek. The women of the Convent are identified as the source of Ruby’s impurities, the “outrages that had been accumulating all along . . . A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons” (Morrison 1998, 11) These women—particularly the women of the Convent—are virtually defined by their antagonistic relations with the law of Ruby, both at the beginning and the end of the novel, when they are massacred by the men. The question of how law and outlaw relate to Paradise is an important one. Does Morrison suggest that paradise is outlawed, or lawless? The novel shows how an African American community uses the religious symbolism of Puritan theology and American civil religion

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to form its ethnic identity (Fraile-Marcos 2002, 99). More than this, however, Morrison’s novel plays with the historical discourse of preslavery America as Edenic, with its law seen as reflecting the grammar of good order. As Morrison has said, “America was this Eden . . . perceived as uninhabited land . . . Puritans were trying to get their life over here so that they could be disciplined and contained” (Moyers 1994b). But Morrison’s novel shows how Paradise is itself created out of God’s grammar, and that grammar is therefore exclusionist. The town of Ruby is the prime example of this. Ruby is figured as a refuge from one law—the law of white supremacy. But in making a space of refuge, it creates another law that is almost private and exists independently of white law. The public-private distinction that is usually made, with law representing open space and relationships representing the hidden and private is hard to maintain in the town of Ruby. In fact, while law is what defines the distinction between public and private, one must know both in Ruby. The Oven, Ruby’s communal “kitchen,” is the emblem of this refusal of a public-private distinction. Painstakingly transferred brick by brick from Haven, where Ruby’s founding fifteen families had previously settled in Oklahoma, the Oven represents an altar to the purity of the community’s women, a refuge from the white men and their laws of justification who made black women their “quarry”: Zechariah corralled some of the men into building a cook oven. They were proud that none of their women had ever worked in a whiteman’s kitchen or nursed a white child. Although field labor was harder and carried no status, they believed the rape of women who worked in white kitchens was if not a certainty a distinct possibility—neither of which they could bear to contemplate. So they exchanged that danger for the relative safety of brutal work. It was that thinking that made a community “kitchen” so agreeable. (Morrison 1998, 16, 99) The Oven is a symbolic and material space that both proclaims the unity of the community and is meant to ensure the purity of its women. This refuge creates the imperative of making the private public, with women the focus of not just the community’s identity, but also its purity. In fact, the Oven has a communal law literally nailed onto it. Only no one in present-day Ruby can agree on what it says, much less


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what it might mean. The law plays a key role in Morrison’s exploration and reconfiguration of women’s narratives. Paradise, which Morrison gave the working title of “God and War,” explores God’s law and constitutional law; it also shows how these laws are tied to the American history of migration. She ultimately shows how societies define themselves and others by concentrating on the exile not only of African Americans but also of women—and not solely African American women. Because of this indeterminacy, Morrison’s writing, especially in Paradise, shows new theoretical directions for Black feminism. Morrison develops these concepts in her Nobel Prize speech, where she describes, an old woman. Blind. Wise. In the version I know, the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away, to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement. (Morrison 1997b, 267–68) When some young people come to question her, the answer to their question rides solely on her difference from them . . . : her blindness. “Old woman, “ one of them says. “I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” . . . she doesn’t answer. She is blind, and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender, or homeland. She knows only their motive. Finally she speaks: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.” (267–68) Morrison applies the old woman’s meaning that “whatever the case . . . , it is your responsibility” to language and writing: in choosing to read the bird as language and the woman as practiced writer, Morrison confronts her audience with the responsibility of exploring possibilities, resisting routine inscriptions, daring to transgress the accepted wisdom

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which has petrified into law. “The question the children put to her—‘is it living or dead?’—is not unreal because [the old woman] thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure, certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will” A dead language “is an unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis” (267–68). The idea of a rigid, stultifying language, “susceptible to death, erasure, certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will,” illustrates the exclusionary, rigid language of the town of Ruby, especially as it is applied to women. Each of the chapters of Paradise is devoted to a woman, some from Ruby, but mostly those who seek refuge at the Convent. These women who come to the Convent are imperiled, horribly scarred, and alone. Already outlaws, through the process of joining Connie in a ritual exorcism that pairs body and spirit, they become lawless. That is, the hybrid spirituality of the Convent moves them to a nonalienated, nonhierarchical spiritual sanctuary beyond the clutches of man-made religious and social law. But they are not allowed to remain so: they are massacred by men from Ruby, bringing them within the discourse of law once again. The specific features of Paradise—of laws and especially of women who are “both the law and its transgression”—suggest ways in which black feminist practices, critical and creative, can transform themselves while continuing their exploration of race and gender. Paradise’s themes reflect a black feminism that is “both the law and its transgression,” using laws of religion and community to express this complex, seemingly contradictory relationship. The concept also helps to explain Morrison’s resistance to labels such as “black” and “feminist.” Morrison refuses literary critical inscriptions as reductionist, especially in the novel Paradise. In their hands, the bird is dead, or at least its trajectory is restricted to the cage in which it has been placed (a feminist cage, a black feminist cage, and so on). It is intentional that the women of the Convent paint themselves rather than carve words into their flesh. This painting suggests a new living language, one that is transformative—a passionate rephrasing of their inherited inscriptions. From its opening line, “they shoot the white girl first,” Morrison’s novel presents her reader with interpretive challenges (Page 2001, 637–50). This transgressive use of language shocks us into attention, forcing us to consider all of the possibilities. We never do learn which of the women is that “white girl”; many readers have tried to answer the riddle through class associations, picking either Pallas because she is wealthy or Mavis because she is poor. Such racial indeterminacy


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makes it difficult to maintain that Paradise is a Black feminist novel insofar as Black feminism concerns itself centrally with Black women’s lives. Certainty of racial identity is suspended for all the women, since any one of them could be the “white girl.” Nevertheless, race remains an important concept, especially in the town of Ruby where it defines the “eight-rock” families—the darkest families—as the rightful heirs to this paradise on earth. Their Oven is a monument to “the narrow path of righteousness” that the original migrants discovered after the Disallowing in which the travelers are turned away from an established black community in Oklahoma for being too black, “too poor, too bedraggled-looking” according to Ruby’s second generation (Morrison 1998, 14). But the Oven’s message presents a greater interpretive challenge than the question of race. The constructors of the Oven, referred to as the Old Fathers, “put most of their strength into constructing the huge, flawlessly designed Oven that both nourished them and monumentalized what they had done. When it was finished—each pale brick perfectly pitched; the chimney wide, lofty; the pegs and grill secure; the draft pulling steadily from the tail hole; the fire door plumb—then the ironmonger did his work. From barrel staves and busted axles, from kettles and bent nails, he fashioned an iron plate five feet by two and set it at the base of the Oven’s mouth” (Morrison 1998, 7). The grandfather of Steward and Deek, the two men who run the town of Ruby, “chose the words for the Oven’s lip. Furniture was held together by wooden dowels because nails were so expensive, but he sacrificed his treasure of three-inch and four, bent and straight, to say something important that would last” (14). “It is still not clear where the words came from. Something he heard, invented, or something whispered to him while he slept curled over his tools in a wagon bed. His name was Morgan and who knew if he invented or stole the half-dozen or so words he forged” (7). But what exactly the words say, and in what spirit they are meant to be interpreted, is a source of bitter contention. “Words that at first seemed to bless them; later to confound them; finally to announce that they had lost” (7). Steward believes them to be “words of beaten iron” (99). But the townspeople question, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” “Be the Furrow of His Brow,” or simply “The Furrow of His Brow”? Is it a command or a motto? Morrison obscures the original quotation in order to encourage a new mapping of possibilities. The third generation of Ruby questions the command to “beware”; instead they want to follow the spirit of “be”:

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“What’s so wrong about ‘Be the Furrow’? ‘Be the Furrow of his Brow’? “ “You can’t be God, boy.” . . . “It’s not being Him, sir; it’s being His instrument, His justice. As a race—” “God’s justice is His alone. How you going to be His instrument if you don’t do what He says?” asked Reverend Pulliam. “You have to obey Him.” “Yes, sir, but we are obeying Him,” said Destry. “If we follow His commandments, we’ll be His voice, His retribution. As a people—” Harper Jury silenced him. “It says ‘Beware.’ Not ‘Be.’ Beware means ‘Look out. The power is mine. Get used to it. ‘“ “‘Be’ means you putting Him aside and you the power,” said Sargeant. “We are the power if we just—” “See what I mean? See what I mean? Listen to that! You hear that, Reverend? That boy needs a strap. Blasphemy!” (87) According to the second generation of Ruby, the younger generation “want[s] to kill it [the meaning of the Oven and its statement], change it into something they made up” (86). As with the story of the children, the old woman, and the bird, there are generational issues. As Dovey contemplates the antagonism, she wonders, “‘Beware the Furrow of His Brow’? ‘Be the Furrow of His Brow’? Her own opinion was that ‘The Furrow of His Brow’ alone was enough for any age or generation. Specifying it, particularizing it, nailing its meaning down, was futile. The only nailing needing to be done had already taken place. On the Cross” (Morrison 1998, 93). Because the inhabitants of Ruby nearly come to blows over how to read and interpret the words on the Oven, it is clear that Morrison wants to present interpretive issues both within and external to the text. At stake is the very definition of the community, relying as it does upon its relationship to the past for its present identity. As Philip Page has pointed out, the younger generation’s interpretation of “Be the Furrow of His Brow” points to a New Testament reading of God and Christ, while the older generation’s “Beware the Furrow of His Brow” is firmly grounded in an Old Testament reading (Page 2001, 638). The younger generation, of course, seeks to combine their reading with the black cultural nationalism of the late sixties and seventies that looked


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to Africa for its roots of identity, thus turning their backs on the emphasis that Ruby’s second generation places on the hardships of the Old Fathers in America. But as active interpreters, the women of Ruby have something more to offer than their male counterparts. The town is named for a woman who was among the Old Fathers and who suffered greatly; the Oven is a testament to the purity and safety of their women; blind Esther, who remembered the words nailed to the Oven, is remembered as a kind of saint; but the women of present-day Ruby are more than icons and sounding stones. As active interpreters, Patricia, Dovey, and Soane offer mostly internalized, private assessments of the meaning of the Oven’s message and the generational antagonisms. These women are almost exclusively of the second generation. Patricia is unwed because she is too light in skin color, Soane is the mother of two sons who were sent off to World War II and returned as dismembered bodies, and Dovey is unable to bear children. These women ruminate on the meaning of the town’s genealogy and genesis, while resisting further procreation. Their attitudes shape the Oven’s meaning, tacitly and implicitly. In fact, their attitudes and activities show that, although as icons of purity Soane and Dovey are the law of Ruby, they are also the transgression. The women residents of Ruby are transgressive especially by visiting the Convent and being tolerant of the women who live there. As a result, the very food of Steward Morgan—the self-appointed secondgeneration Old Father of Ruby and the leader of the ultimate massacre of the Convent’s women—is seasoned with spices grown only at the Convent. Soane, as mentioned earlier, purchases an herbal birth control from the Convent, unbeknownst to her husband Deek Morgan, the other self-appointed, second-generation Old Father and co-conspirator in the massacre. Dovey’s interpretation of the Oven’s words—that “The Furrow of His Brow” was all that was necessary—points to the tolerance and moderation of these women, who seem unsure of whether they should infuse spirit into Ruby’s law or reject the law altogether. Connie and the communal living that springs up at the Convent offer an alternative to the rigidity of Ruby, to the “words beaten in iron” that imprison the men and especially the women. Connie is the great figure of the Convent who ultimately encourages self-discovery and lawlessness in the women who seek refuge there, and her example is followed by the other women. Their ability to pull together meaningful aspects of various religious traditions (while simultaneously rejecting these oppressive aspects) is an example of women creating a tradition

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that does not ensnare them in dictates and rigid positions, but rather encourages fluidity. Morrison’s shaping of this alternative follows directly from her stance on stultifying, dead language and the prison house of terms like black and feminist. Consolata, the surviving member of the now-defunct Convent, was an orphan kidnapped from her native Brazil as a girl and raised by the Portuguese order of Catholic nuns who stole her from her mother. After initially embracing the Catholic teaching that polarizes the impulses of spirit and body, Consolata learns that, while embracing the Catholicism she is taught, she must infuse it with her native religion. In fact, she uses it to keep Sister Mary Magna, or Mother, alive well beyond her normal life span. The outsider woman of Ruby, Lone, a midwife reputed to “practice,” nudges Connie toward this awareness by giving her “advice that made her uneasy. Consolata complains that she did not believe in magic; that the church and everything holy forbade its claims to knowingness and its practice . . . ‘In my faith, faith is all I need’” (Morrison, 1998, 244). Lone tells her, “you need what we all need: earth, air, water. Don’t separate God from His elements. He created it all. You stuck on dividing Him from His works. Don’t unbalance His world” (244). Consolata comes to perceive that by following the teachings of Mother Mary, she has divorced body and spirit. After her affair with Deek, which ends with his rejection of her as uncontrollable and whorish (she bites his lip and draws blood), she is a changed woman who resolves to unite body and spirit once more. After preparing an exquisite meal, Connie invites the women to share in her teachings and new-found discovery: The table is set; the food placed. Consolata takes off her apron. With the aristocratic gaze of the blind she sweeps the women’s faces and says, “I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for. . . . If you have a place,” she continued, “that you should be in and somebody who loves you waiting for you there, then go. If not, stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet you.” (262) Not one woman leaves, finding that “they could not leave the one place that they were free to leave” (262). The women find themselves in the basement of the Convent, where they externalize their inner scars, artic-


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ulating the “unspeakable” (Morrison1989) by painting their experiences into their bodies’ silhouettes, drawn on the cellar floor by Connie: In the beginning the most important thing was the template. First they had to scrub the cellar floor until its stones were as clean as rocks on a shore. Then they ringed the place with candles. Consolata told each to undress and lie down. In flattering light under Consolata’s soft vision they did as they were told. How should we lie? However you feel. They tried arms at the sides, outstretched above the head, crossed over breasts or stomach. Seneca lay on her stomach first, then changed to her back, hands clasping her shoulders. Pallas lay on her side, knees drawn up. Gigi flung her arms and legs apart, while Mavis struck a floater’s pose, arms angled, knees pointing in. When each found the position she could tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata walked around her and painted the body’s silhouette. Once the outlines were complete, each was instructed to remain there. Unspeaking. Naked in candlelight. (Morrison 1998, 263) Consolata guides them in the process of inscribing themselves as they choose rather than accepting the larger community’s inscription of them—she appears to lead them toward claiming and maintaining ownership of themselves, body and spirit. She “spoke first,” initiating the “loud dreaming” (264) of all the women: My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teach me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed with her until I met another. My flesh is so hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the woman rescue me from my body again. Twice she saves it. When her body sickens I care for it every way flesh works. I hold it in my arms and between my legs. Clean it, rock it, enter it to keep it breath. After she is dead I can not get past that. My bones on hers the only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No different from the man. My bones on his the only true thing. So I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like bones. It is good, like bones. One sweet, one bitter. Where is it lost? Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve. (263)

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With this sermon, Connie puts Lone’s teachings into practice, humanizing Eve (temptress and whore) and Mary (immaculate virgin) by putting the women in a mother-daughter relationship with one another. As body and spirit are one, both acceptance and transgression of the law appear to be one. Out of this, the collective voice arises, the floodgates opened to “loud dreaming” “loud stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above the guttering candles . . . and it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or perhaps because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale” (Morrison 1998, 264). This process of giving voice to their interior thoughts shifts the Convent, as “life, real and intense, shifted to down there in limited pools of light . . . The templates drew them like magnets” (264). Pallas suggests they shop for paint and colored chalk: They understood and began to begin. First with natural features: breasts and pudenda, toes, ears and head hair. Seneca duplicated in robin’s egg blue one of her more elegant scars, one drop of red at its tip. Later on, when she had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on the cellar floor. They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn. (265) Significantly, Seneca’s self-mutilation is described as a transgressive kind of writing: “she entered the vice like a censored poet whose suspect lexicon was too supple, too shocking to publish. It thrilled her. It steadied her” (261). Transferred to her template, she is able to continue and develop her articulation without damaging herself. And this is the important part: the women are learning to step outside the way they have been inscribed by the elite of Ruby to reinscribe themselves. The other women also find that “careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them” (265). “With Consolata in charge, like a new and revised Reverend Mother, feeding them bloodless food and water alone to quench their thirst, they altered. They had to be reminded of the moving bodies they wore, so seductive were the alive ones below” (265), so transformed were they by their relationship to Connie and to their new capacity to inscribe themselves.


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These transformations have consequences, however subtle. A customer visiting the Convent would notice “little change,” a neighbor would notice “a sense of surfeit,” but a “friend”—a woman—would find it annoying, “being unable to say exactly what was absent” (Morrison 1998, 265): “As she drew closer to home and drove down Central Avenue, her gaze might fall on Sweetie Fleetwood’s house, Pat Best’s house . . . Then she might realize what was missing: unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted. Or hunted either, she might have added. But there she would have been wrong” (Morrison 1998, 266). Collectively wedding body and spirit, the women exorcise their ghosts and unspeakable experiences and attain a wholeness that had been impossible before the ritual in the cellar. In fact, the massacred women, unnamed at the beginning of the novel, have merged by the narrative’s conclusion and are unable to be distinguished as individuals (Dalsgard 2001, 243). As a consequence of their independence, the women of the Convent are seen as a poisonous threat to the town of Ruby, and the source of all the evil that ails it. Approaching the cellar of the Convent, the twin brothers Steward and Deek identify the Convent as the “sheer destructive power” aimed at Ruby; smashing the door of the cellar, “what they see is the devil’s bedroom, bathroom, and his nasty playpen” (Morrison 1998, 17). The very source of the women’s articulation of their agony and suffering, their exploration of their bodies as “templates” written upon by others and now only by themselves, is viewed by these men as the devil’s home. What these men fail to understand is that what they see is the women’s external expression of their unspeakable treatment by men and women. Unable to comprehend this union of body and spirit, which allows such articulation, the men see only “Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary. . . . God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby” (18). Whereas the women of the Convent have succeeded in unifying Eve and Mary as body and spirit, the men who pursue them use the division to judge and justify their massacre of them.

Paradise can be read as a twice-told tale, to be read once for Ruby’s judgment and a second time for a refutation of that judgment. What the reader learns in between the two tellings of the massacre of the Convent

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women is not just their names and histories, but what has driven the men of Ruby to enact such violence upon these women. The reader must then decide whether these women have truly died—only the death of the white woman is confirmed—and where she would like the narrative to end. Such a circular conclusion to the novel will not surprise experienced readers of Morrison’s works. In creating interpretive problems within the story, and more importantly outside the story, Morrison not only heightens awareness of how meaning is made out of text, but also emphasizes the importance of individual interpretation. She formulates this role of the reader as interpreter, where the reader is seen in an intimate embrace with the story: “The Dancing Mind,” as she calls it in her speech (Morrison 1997b). The concept is at work and especially apparent in the endings of her narratives: Nel’s “circles and circles of sorrow” in Sula, Milkman’s flying in Song of Solomon, Beloved’s “not a story to pass on,” and Jazz’s “I love the way you hold me . . . I like your fingers . . . lifting, turning . . . Look where your hands are. Now.” And here, Paradise’s Convent women who, depending on the reader’s desires, are either dead or still-living revolutionaries, are armed outlaws once again. In the structuring of her stories, particularly this one, Morrison invites readers to transgress the “law” of the single, authorized reading, be it that of the tradition of the male-dominated Academy or of Religion— precisely because such authorized readings have tended to close off possibilities for all of us. Morrison leaves it to her readers to discover and explore feminist themes in her work. But she shows her readers that they must never do so to the detriment of other themes—be they race, religion, or imaginative expression. Instead of explicitly engaging such categories as black and feminist, Morrison favors the complexity of narrative itself, the interactions of multiple narratives, and, importantly, the reader’s increased awareness of her role in constructing meaning from the stories. Morrison seeks this expansion through her emphasis on the equity of man to woman, of reader to story. Indeed, the process she describes of “opening doors to all sorts of things” is much like the “stepping in” that Lone, the lawless woman of Ruby, teaches Connie, as a means of “balancing” God’s world, wedding body and spirit. It is also the lesson of “the bird is in your hands,” that language is what you make of it. Morrison’s approach to writing (and reading) has significant implications for a post–Black feminist literary criticism. Itself transgressive of category, her writing shows the importance of reflexivity, self-


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consciousness, and collaboration of the characters and the readers of her fiction. The women of the Convent participate in this collaboration on the cellar floor where they actively construct as well as interpret the acts that constitute and shape their lives, and emphasize their own interpretations of their experiences. The reader, deciding its conclusion and returning to the beginning of the novel, also participates in this act—as she interprets and pieces together the women’s lives and the narrative itself. Especially in the act of choosing the fate of the women by ending or extending their lives at the close of the narrative, the reader must consider the consequences of interpretation as a creative rather than a reductive process, one which enables individual and collective change. Indeed, the reader of Paradise must embrace multiple and contradictory identities, ultimately realizing that exploring the very absence of a unitary female identity or position “opens doors.” This act paves the way for the method that might define a post–Black feminist critical process. Since feminist processes are not unitary, processes of inquiry need to consider how exploring the contradictions and gaps that characterize multiple and diverse identities help show readers how they know, heightening the processes of knowing a “we” that is black and feminist (Springer 2002, 1061). Many would argue that Black feminism is reflexive, self-conscious, and intersubjectively collaborative and that it embraces multiple and contradictory identities, precisely because this is the nature of black feminine subjectivity—being both gendered and racialized in a world that seems capable of dealing with one or the other but not both. Morrison’s act of signifying on language, religion, and law has implications for new theoretical directions in black feminist literary criticism because she insists on the fluidity of the practice, to the extent of avoiding the Name, the Letter. Black feminism must avoid residing in the letter of the law; it must reside in the spirit of the law, where imagination is supreme. This practice entails aesthetics and imagination over and above name and letter; all-encompassing fluidity and connectivity through dialogue and storytelling; and intimacy and worldliness. Morrison’s transgressions of certain Black feminist interpretive paradigms show her work to favor a postmodern vision that can at once “step in” as the reader takes responsibility for interpretation and help to define a multiple and contradictory Black feminist “we”—one that is both the law and its transgression.


9 Luci Tapahonso’s “Leda and the Cowboy” A Gynocratic, Navajo Response to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” MAGGIE ROMIGH

In 1992 Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso offered the first positive poetic response to a question raised in William Butler Yeats’s 1923 “Leda and the Swan.” In his poem Yeats retells the ancient Greek myth in which the god Zeus transforms himself into a swan and then rapes and impregnates a young woman named Leda. Yeats’s poem, with its themes of subjugation and victimization, ends with an unanswered question: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” (Yeats 1965, 211–12). There are many versions of the Leda myth, and these stories have long become part of the European literary tradition. In some versions of the story, Zeus transforms himself into a swan and seduces Leda. In other versions he rapes her. In another, she mates with her husband in the same evening, and two of the four children she later bears are sired by Zeus while the others are the children of her husband. In still another version, the children of Zeus are not from Leda but from Nemesis, who attempts to escape Zeus by transforming herself into many different animal shapes. Zeus, in the form of a swan, finally rapes Nemesis when she turns herself into a goose. She leaves the egg that results from this union with Leda, and Leda mothers the children who hatch from the egg along with her own. In still another version, Nemesis pursues Zeus as they each change into various animal forms until she finally catches him at the winter solstice and devours him (Yeats 1956, 837). These mythic stories have been depicted in literature, as well as other forms of creative expression.

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Though Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” is certainly not the first poem to deal with this myth and the images that it conjures, to students of English literature it is surely the most well-known of the Leda poems. It was the first English poem, moreover, to deal with the encounter between Zeus and Leda as a forceful rape. Since “Leda and the Swan” was published, no critic, scholar, or poet has offered a response without confronting the vital importance of Yeats’s final question. Ian Fletcher argues that “A strong reason why the poem will not let us rest are those questions: rhetorical? Expecting the answer, yes, no, or don’t know? Can one . . . resist answers, even ones that do limit by fiat?” (1982, 82). Scholars have analyzed and discussed the poem ad nausium so that Fletcher felt the need to begin his essay with the following: “‘One more word on ‘Leda and the Swan’ is three too many’ has been apologetically or defiantly intoned by critics about to commit three thousand. The brevity, force, ambiguousness, of Yeats’s poem continuously challenge, so I too join their number” (82). Trowbridge writes that “This question could not be translated as a declaration, for the poem leaves the question open. It is a oracular question, forcing the mind to think and the heart to feel, but baffling inquiry” (Trowbridge 1954, 124–25). “Perhaps it is a distinguishing mark of this poem’s enigmatic greatness,” Todd Davis writes, “that the interpretation of the question and the subsequent answers have been so diverse” (T. Davis 1997, 16). Throughout the critical discourse, however, there has been little consensus regarding how the final question in this poem should be answered, and though many poets have responded with their own Leda poems, only two have attempted to offer an emphatic answer to Yeats’s poetic question. One of these is Luci Tapahonso, who is the only poet to offer a positive answer. Yeats published “Leda and the Swan” in three different versions and in many different forms. When he published it for the final time, it was as an introduction to a chapter of A Vision, the book that contains the personal mythology that Yeats had developed throughout a lifetime of searching for answers to fulfill his own spiritual longing. The chapter that is introduced by “Leda and the Swan” is one that discusses Yeats’s belief that a cycle exists in which every two thousand years a powerful and usually violent annunciation, a merging of the divine and the human, takes place and creates major directional changes in history. Yeats sees the rape of Leda by Zeus as one such annunciation. Throughout this chapter he repeats the phrasing that “All things are antithetical” (Yeats 1956, 267–300).

Luci Tapahonso’s “Leda and the Cowboy”

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How appropriate then that the first poet to offer an unequivocally positive answer to Yeats’s final question should offer a response that is antithetical to the poem. That is exactly what Tapahonso does in her poem “Leda and the Cowboy.” The themes of Yeats’s poem are rape, terror, subjugation, and victimization. By contrast, the themes of Tapahonso’s poem are seduction, healing, and reestablishing balance and harmony. In Yeats’s poem Zeus is the powerful and indifferent rapist while Leda is a helpless and terrified victim. In Tapahonso’s poem Leda is a powerful supernatural agent who seduces and heals a womanizing cowboy, thereby returning him to a life of balance and harmony. There are no victims in “Leda and the Cowboy.” Tapahonso is able is enfold the poetic expression of terror in Yeats’s poetry into her own poetics of healing and overcoming alienation. Perhaps it is the question’s ability to force “the mind to think and the heart to feel” that has inspired so many poets to respond with Leda poems of their own. Some of these poems can be seen as direct responses to Yeats’s poem; still others offer alternative visions of Leda’s encounter with the swan. But, with the exception of Tapahonso’s, all of these poems view Leda through the lens of European culture. And, almost without exception, the poets and the many critics who have written about this poem tend toward answering Yeats’s question negatively. Because of the devaluation of women in much of Western culture, Leda is almost always viewed as powerless. This makes Tapahonso’s poem, with its Navajo perspective and positive response, even more intriguing. I To appreciate fully the ingenuity and contrast of Tapahonso’s response to both Yeats and the critical and poetic discourses that have emerged over his poem, it will be helpful to review some of these other responses to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” The first three Leda poems to follow Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” were written by D. H. Lawrence. In the first poem entitled “Swan,” Lawrence writes from the perspective of the men cuckolded by this swan god: “He is treading our women / and we men are put out” (2001b). Though this poem definitely seems to be a response to Yeats’s poem, it does not offer any answers to his question. It merely provides a perspective that lies outside the vantage points of either Leda or Zeus. In the second poem, entitled simply “Leda,” the narrator seems to be Leda beseeching Zeus to come to her “not with

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kisses [or] caresses” but with the “hiss of wings / and the sea-touch tip of a beak / and treading of wet, webbed, wave-working feet / into the marsh-soft belly (Lawrence 2001a). This Leda likes the strangeness of the swan form of Zeus. She appears to enjoy the bestial sexual possibilities that his trans-speciation offers, but she mentions neither power nor knowledge. The third of Lawrence’s Leda poems is entitled “Won’t It Be Strange—?” This poem deals only with the supposed father’s reaction to the imagined child of Leda born with “webbed greenish feet” and “the round, vivid eye of a wild-goose staring” who squawks with a “little bird-cry” (2001c). Other poets have also responded to Yeats with Leda poems. In “Leda,” Robert Chute portrays Zeus as a stalker waiting in the park to attack an unsuspecting Leda who has “worked late / at the library that night” (2001). Olga Broumas offers a poem entitled “Leda and Her Swan” in which the narrator, as the swan, gazes with desire at Leda, while a mysterious group called “the fathers” “are lingering in the background nodding assent” and are “nodding like overdosed lechers” (1977, 5–6). Robert Graves also addresses the lechery aroused by the idea of rape. He writes of how his heart has “lecherously mused upon / That horror with which Leda quaked” and has become pregnant “as Leda was, of bawdry, murder, and deceit” (1958, 125). Carl Phillips, in “Leda, After the Swan,” portrays Leda as confused, believing that she recognized something more than swan but unable to describe just what it is (2001). Peter Meinke moves far away from the myth as he describes a statue of Leda and the swan scrawled with the phrasing, “Helen Goldberg is a good peece of ass” (2001). He questions this Helen about her encounter with her ungallant and poor-spelling lover: “I’d be willing to bet / there was not a swan back then, either, / just a story that brownhaired Leda / made up for her mother” (ibid). In Engendering Inspiration, Helen Sword contends: So dramatic and memorable is Yeats’ sonnet that most twentieth-century readers have come to think of it as the definitive account of the Leda myth. Certainly, we cannot easily imagine “Leda and the Swan” beginning in any other way than with a “sudden blow,” an emphatic collision that collapses the origins of Western civilization into a single, startling moment of divine presence. (1995, 199) Phyllis Stowell validates Sword’s observation when she begins her poem “Leda” with: “‘A SUDDEN blow’: my student shudders” (2001).


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Stowell’s poem addresses the difficulties of teaching Yeats’s “Leda” poems in classes where female coeds have been sexually assaulted and are still suffering psychologically—perhaps even physically, as well. In this poem both Leda and the students are powerless. Yet James Harrison collapses Sword’s argument when he imagines not only a different beginning, but also a beginning that pokes fun at the “sudden blow.” His poem “Leda’s Version” begins: “A furtive blow, more like.” Harrison is definitely responding to Yeats’s poem, but his Leda has gained only contempt for Zeus rather than any kind of knowledge or power (1983, 84). In “Leda,” Mona Van Duyn makes it clear that she is responding directly to Yeats’s poem when she includes, as an epigraph, a quote of the final question from Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” (1971a, 12). Van Duyn’s poem then proceeds to answer the question with an unequivocal opening line: “Not even for a moment. . . . Her body became the consequence of his juice / while her mind closed on a bird and went to sleep” (12). Further in the poem Van Duyn writes of Leda: “She tried for a while to understand what it was / that had happened, and then decided to let it drop” (12). Van Duyn’s Leda cannot even begin to understand what has happened to her. She is traumatized into silence, deciding to drop the matter as Zeus had dropped her and to move on with life. Van Duyn wrote another Leda poem entitled “Leda Reconsidered” (1971b). This time she responds to the entire cultural repertory of Leda myths rather than responding to only Yeats’s poem. She conjures the remembrance of confusion between Leda and Nemesis with: “And now, how much would she try / to see, to take / of what was not hers, of what / was not offered? / There was that old story of matching him change for change, pursuing, and at the solstice / devouring him. / A man’s story. / No, she was not that hungry” (Van Duyn 1971b). This Leda recognizes Zeus in his swan form and decides to allow him to have his way: “to give up was an offering / only she could savor, simply by covering / her eyes” (77–78). This Leda surrenders herself willingly and receives pleasure but does not gain any power or knowledge from the encounter. II Luci Tapahonso imagines an altogether different Leda myth from Yeats’s, a Leda who is outside of the European cultural context and so

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different as to be unrecognizable in comparison to Yeats’s Leda for most readers. Very little criticism has been written about Luci Tapahonso’s productions. But as Paula Gunn Allen writes: “No cultural artifact can be seen existing outside its particular matrix; no document, however profoundly aesthetic, can be comprehended outside its frame of reference—a frame that extends all the way into the depths of the consciousness that marks a culture differentiating it from another” (1992, 308). I suggest that to fully appreciate Tapahonso’s response to Yeats’s poem, her poem must be read not only in comparison to his, but also in consideration of her own Navajo worldview. Because Tapahonso was born and raised in the Navajo culture of the American Southwest, her poem, though familiar in language, is unfamiliar in its contextual assumptions. She says, “Though I am now in a predominantly English-functioning environment, I consider Navajo language to be the undercurrent, the matrix which everything in my life filters through (Bataille 1997, 79). In another interview, she explains, “most of the time I will see something, and I will think about what this would be in Navajo, or is there an equivalent of this in Navajo?” (Binder and Breinig 1995, 122). Therefore, when Tapahonso first read Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” it was natural for her to envision a Leda acting and reacting in accordance with Navajo values and customs. In traditional matrilineal Navajo society, women have always held far more power in their personal lives and clans than did their white European and American counterparts. Traditionally, Navajo women have owned all family land and livestock along with their own horses and other personal property. Their property was then passed down through generations from mothers to daughters. Navajo men owned only their own tools, hunting equipment, and personal horses. When couples married, the man moved into the matriarchal home of the woman. The woman, along with her brothers, made all major decisions regarding the couple’s children. The father was asked his advice out of courtesy, but all decisions remained in the mother’s hands. The mother also approved of and made all marriage arrangements for the children. Traditionally, women did not idle around, waiting to be asked to dance as European women did. At ceremonial dances women picked their own dance partners while the men waited to be chosen (Kluckhohn and Leighton 1962, 102–8). Assertiveness and autonomy were important characteristics of Navajo women, which contrast sharply with white Western conceptions of women as helpless and dependant.


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The last three lines of Tapahonso’s poem are: “as he follows Leda through / the stark beauty of the old stories, / he has already left his own life behind” (Tapahonso 1993, 22). These lines indicate that Tapahonso’s Leda is a traditional Navajo woman. Only a traditional Navajo woman, or at least one who retains strong vestiges of Navajo tradition, would know “the old stories” well enough to lead someone else through them. Tapahonso’s Leda personifies Paula Gunn Allen’s “gynocratic principle”—found in much Native American literature and oral traditions—which deals with the realities of a society governed by childbearing women (Allen 1991, xiii–xiv). As a woman in a gynocratic Navajo society, Tapahonso’s Leda is completely in charge of her first meeting with the cowboy. She is not the helpless victim depicted in Greek mythology and Yeats’s poem, or the flighty (but still helpless) victim of the European literary tradition. She is certainly not a vulnerable woman who allows herself to be sweet-talked, seduced, impregnated (like Yeats’s Leda) and then dumped as some readers of Tapahonso’s poem have suggested. Tapahonso’s poem is not an updated version of “Leda and the Swan.” It is, in fact, the antithesis of Yeats’s poem, in which Leda is the victim and her children were Helen, the spark that ignited the Trojan War, and Clytemnestra, murderer of her own husband. A violent act begets generations of more violence in the fruits of its degradation. As Yeats writes, “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead” (1956, 211–12). In contrast, Leda is the seducter in Tapahonso’s poem. The consequences of her union with the cowboy will be a healing restoration of balance and harmony—a mythic trope that is specific to many Native American stories that deal with sexual encounters between humans and spirits. According to Patricia Clark Smith, “A male being may abduct a human woman, or a female being may seduce a human man, but subjugation is not the dynamic of either event. . . . The ultimate purpose of such ritual abductions and seductions is to transfer knowledge from the spirit world to the human sphere, and this transfer is not accomplished in an atmosphere of control or domination” (P. Clark and Allen, 178). III There are still other observations to be made about Tapahonso’s Leda within the context of the Navajo worldview. In the introduction to Diné

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bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story, Paul Zolbrod refers to the story of Ma’ii, the Coyote, and Asdzáni shash nádleehé, the Changing Bear Maiden, as an example of the importance of sexual themes in ancient Navajo oral narratives (1984). There is precedence in the tradition for the belief that a woman can obtain the power of a supernatural being through sexual intercourse. Zolbrod points out that when Coyote wins Changing Bear Maiden as his wife, “he consummates his success by tricking her into having intercourse with him . . . she receives her evil power from him by permitting him to insert his penis into her” (11). In fact, throughout the stories translated by Zolbrod, many heroes interact with the gods of the Navajo Indians, who are generally called the “holy people.” All these heroes gain supernatural powers from their contact with the holy people and thereafter find it impossible to live among mortals. Eventually, they return to live with the holy people and afterwards interact with humans as supernatural agents. In speaking of those moments in which humans have sexual encounters with a supernatural agent or a spirit in Native American oral traditions, Smith explains: “The coming together of person and spirit may lead to the birth of magical children, the discovery of rich sources of food or water, or the gift of a specific ceremony” (1987, 178). She also contends, “Unlike Yeats’s Leda, the human protagonist does, without question, put on both knowledge and power through the sexual act” (178). We have already seen how Tapahonso’s Leda is a woman who is aware of her own personal power and who makes her own choices. Given the precedence of traditional Navajo tropology, it is possible that Leda is more than simply in command of her own sexuality. According to traditional Navajo beliefs, Leda would, in her encounter with Zeus, naturally have acquired the supernatural knowledge and abilities that are imparted to humans who copulate with holy people. She acquired Zeus’s knowledge and power when he raped her. This idea is supported by Tapahonso’s line “it was clear he didn’t know the raw music she lived” (1993, 21). Claude Levi-Strauss has discussed the Zuni order of raw and cooked realms and beings, which their neighbors, the Navajo, adopted. According to tradition, “raw people” are either supernatural beings or animals. “Cooked people” are humans. This relates to the fact that only humans eat cooked food (Levi-Strauss 1983). The fact the Leda lives this “raw music” suggests that she is no longer completely human; she has become one of the holy people. Tapahonso’s Leda is both a traditional Navajo woman and the original Leda of Greek myth. If she were not the original Leda, this Leda would be a Navajo woman


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empowered by her matrilineal culture, but she would not be supernatural. Tapahonso has looked at the Greek Leda who has been raped by a god and asked herself, “What would this Leda be like if she were Navajo?” Zolbrod also contends that in Navajo thought, the nature of sexual harmony and the way of achieving and maintaining it are central. Such harmony epitomizes the pattern of hózhó (beauty, harmony, and balance) manifest everywhere in the universe. It does not just govern male-female relationships; directly or indirectly it is reflected in the harmony of relationships between all sorts of counterparts in the broad cosmic scheme: earth and sky, night and day, mortals and supernaturals, summer and winter. . . . Likewise when sexual imbalance or aberration occurs, the breakdown of hózhó is explained. (1997, 10–11) If Zolbrod is correct, then Zeus’s rape of Leda—a sexual aberration— would create a lack of harmony in the Navajo cultural worldview, which would require some type of ceremony to reestablish hózhó and recreate harmony in the world. It is clear that hózhó is important to Tapahonso. As Bataille explains, “Tapahonso writes of hózhó, beauty that comes from a state of balance with all things living and nonbreathing” (1997, 84). Through Leda’s seduction Tapahonso wants to restore balance and harmony to the world. Leda beguiles a womanizing cowboy who thinks he is seducing her, but she woos him away from his life and back into the harmony and balance found in the “old stories” of Navajo oral tradition (Tapahonso 1993, 22). Leda’s seduction of the cowboy is a kind of poetic ceremonial healing of Zeus’s original violation. When Leda enters the bar alone, she allows herself a moment to become accustomed to the smoke-filled room. Then, in the first stanza, Tapahonso makes it clear that Leda instigates her meeting with the cowboy: “it was easy enough, Leda saw him across / the damp justwiped bar—she did nothing / but hold the glance a second too long.” Leda sees the cowboy, makes her choice, and deliberately maintains eye contact long enough for him to become aware of her interest. Leda has in fact called him over simply by holding “the glance a second too long” (Tapahonso 1993, 21). “It was easy,” she continues. “Sure enough, as if she had called out his name, / he walked over—a slight smile and a straw hat” (21).

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In the next stanza, Tapahonso writes: “Leda smiled and a strange desperation / engulfed him. ‘I have to leave,’ she said, / remembering the clean, empty air outside. / He followed her . . . / and it was clear he didn’t know the raw music she lived” (Tapahonso 1993, 21). Here the cowboy is definitely not in charge of the events of the evening. He follows Leda, but the “raw music” that Leda has taken in—from her initial violation by Zeus—is unknown to and beyond the comprehension of the cowboy. Perhaps it is the source of that “strange desperation” that he feels. In the third stanza, Tapahonso illustrates the smooth-talking patter with which the cowboy attempts to win Leda, but she also hints that he is facing the unknown when she says, “He thinks he is leaving for a rodeo 400 miles to the north / in a few hours” (21). By dropping this “one shoe,” Tapahonso allows the reader to fill in “the sound of the other shoe dropping.” He thinks he is leaving, but he is not. In the fourth stanza, the cowboy continues the seduction game by telling Leda that he has been searching for her all over town. Tapahonso again lets her reader know, however, that Leda is fully in charge: “But Leda saw his straw hat and half-smile as he watched from the bar.” She is aware of the cowboy before he is aware of her, and, indeed, she brings herself to his attention. Tapahonso gives the reader yet another clue: “He thinks he has done this many times before” (Tapahonso 1993, 22). This cowboy is a womanizer who has made a habit of picking up women, of seducing them with his words. Again, however, Tapahonso creates the silence in which the reader can hear “the sound of the other shoe dropping”: “He thinks he has done this many times before” (Tapahonso 1993, 22). But he hasn’t. Though the cowboy has not yet recognized it, this is something new, something different, something that has never before happened to him. In her closing lines, Tapahonso gives readers one last lead regarding the one who holds power in this life-changing encounter: “as he follows Leda through / the stark beauty of the old stories, / he has already left his own life behind” (Tapahonso 1993, 22). In Navajo thought, the ancient oral narratives are considered extremely powerful: they are the basis of most (perhaps all) healing ceremonies. As Zolbrod writes in his foreword to Washington Matthews’s translation of The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony: “The knowledge is then preserved by medicine men and other elders who reify the experience by way of the ceremony . . . This recreates the experience of the narrative’s action” (1997, x). When these Navajo customs and values are considered, along with the last line of Tapahonso’s poem (“he has already left his own life


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behind”), we see that Leda uses the knowledge and power that she absorbed from Zeus’s sperm with the ceremonial healing power of the “old stories” to seduce this cowboy so that he will leave behind the roving life he has led, leave behind the rodeo he thinks he will attend, leave behind his habit of seducing women, and leave behind his old reality. She is leading him into a new (ironically ancient) reality, into a dance with her to her “raw music,” and into “the old stories” that can now become a part of his healing ceremony. IV In speaking of the literature of Tapahonso and Simon Ortiz, and of American Indian literature more generally, Rader states, “it either invokes or literally performs a ritual” (1997, 85). He continues: “Often in the poems of Tapahonso and Ortiz, their acts of poetic performance, not only speak the ritual into being; the poems become the ritual just as the ritual becomes that to which it refers” (85). In “Leda and the Cowboy,” Tapahonso is invoking and creating a ritual—a ceremony of healing for both Leda and the cowboy. What Leda chooses to take from the cowboy, whether she seeks revenge for her rape, or whether she chooses to use him for her own purposes and then carelessly drop him as the swan dropped her, is left to the reader’s imagination. She could choose to devour him as, in one form of the Greek myth, Nemesis devoured Zeus. Just as Yeats had left his readers with a final question in “Leda and the Swan,” Tapahonso also leaves the reader with the discursive question of what Leda will do with the cowboy she has captured. Because of the weight placed on balance and harmony in the Navajo worldview in order for the world to function properly, it is not likely that Tapahonso’s Leda will seek revenge for Zeus raping her. Instead, this Navajo Leda chooses to use her knowledge and power and lead the cowboy through a ceremonial healing process that will rebalance the scales of sexual power that were disrupted by Zeus. She will heal what is broken within him so that he will no longer be a seducer of women. She will restore hózhó between mortals and supernaturals, and she will restore hózhó in the human community, and she will restore hózhó in both herself and the cowboy. Bataille writes, “By adhering to the old stories and songs, by transforming them so that a new generation continues the beliefs, and by chanting her poems as prayers, Tapahonso maintains that balance (hózhó) in her own life. Tapahonso’s culture is dynamic and changing,

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always in the process of being recreated using new forms and new stories” (1997, 84–85). Deliberately, skillfully, and beautifully, Tapahonso has used “Leda and the Cowboy” to create a new story, with all the power of her own Navajo culture’s “old stories,” to look again at the Greek myth that became a famous Irish poem, to transform that myth into a Navajo story set within the context of her own matrilineal society, and to offer an answer to Yeats’s poetic question, “Did she put on his knowledge with his power . . . ?” Though the power that Tapahonso’s Leda “puts on” is certainly not the capricious power that Zeus abuses, she undeniably obtains power and knowledge that she uses to induce positive change, to reestablish hózhó, and to overcome the terror of rape and sense of helplessness that she felt earlier as a victim herself. Tapahonso offers the first unequivocally positive poetic response to Yeats’s final question, and her gynocratic, Navajo answer resonates: Yes, indeed, she did.

10 Mother Times Two A Double Take on a Gynocentric Justice Song MARGOT R. REYNOLDS “Mother, when I am tall as my cousin Warca-Ziwin, you shall not have to come for water. I will do it for you.” With a strange tremor in her voice which I could not understand, she answered, “If the paleface does not take away from us the river we drink.” “Mother, who is this bad paleface?” I asked. “My little daughter, he is a sham—sickly sham! The bronzed Dakota is the only real man.” I looked up into my mother’s face while she spoke; and seeing her bite her lips, I knew she was unhappy. This aroused revenge in my small soul. Stamping my foot on the earth, I cried aloud, “I hate the paleface that makes my mother cry!” —Zitkala-Sa, “Impressions from an Indian Childhood”

Between 1900 and 1902 Yankton Sioux writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, aka Zitkala-Sa, published a series of autobiographical essays in Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly: “Impressions from an Indian Childhood” (1900a), “School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900c), “An Indian Teacher among Indians” (1900b), and “Why I Am A Pagan” (1902). The essays address her personal experiences with assimilation, especially the loss of traditional ways of living and the forced removal of Native American children from their homes for education and westernization. Throughout her work, and especially in “Impressions from an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa focuses on the figure of her mother and on woman-centered Sioux traditions. Criticism on these productions address the function of the mother figure from a biographical perspective, and consider only how Zitkala-Sa’s relationship with her mother shaped her acculturation process. Few scholars have considered ZitkalaSa’s work from a Native American and feminist perspective. I want to

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suggest that the mother figure and women-centered focus of her work is what Native American and feminist critic Paula Gunn Allen describes generally as gynocentrism: women’s traditional primacy in Native American tribes and women’s literature (1992). Extending Allen’s observation, I will show that Zitkala-Sa, particularly her “Impressions” essay (1900a), uses a gynocentric framework through which to interrogate and expose the imperialist social practices and policies of the U.S. government. Her attention to Native women’s domesticity represents a powerful gynocentric framework through which she critiques imperial patriarchy, records her people’s history, and preserves traditional values. Drawing on the concept of double consciousness, I contend that her domestic experiences or “impressions” in “Impressions from an Indian Childhood” and the subsequent essays’ treatment of the symbol of the mother construct a justice song that reworks patriarchal images of Native Americans, and particularly Native women. I designate Zitkala-Sa’s revision of imperial patriarchy as a justice song because it fuses both Native American oral and western rhetorical traditions. She offers a Yankton Sioux woman’s perspective on the experience of westernization, while at the same time using this experience to establish how gynocentrism resists colonial invasion. In other words, these domestic “impressions,” like legend-based storytelling, beadwork, coffee making, and preserving food, cyclically repeat a gynocentric refrain that can be read as a song. This refrain refuses western notions of how Native Americans ought to live, preferring instead the way of the mother. Gynocentrism as a framework for understanding cultures, their histories and collective knowledge, composes a powerful song in praise of Native worldviews and life-ways. The gynocentric device of the justice song reconsiders western notions of what constitutes “proper education” for Natives, as Zitkala-Sa demonstrates when sharing her experiences with beadwork. Thus, Zitkala-Sa’s persuasive melodic arrangement of her own experiences illuminates the larger failures of western acculturation practices that equate Native with “savage.” Feminist and Native American literary scholars, such as Paula Gunn Allen, continue to recover women writers, especially those that draw on gynocentric traditions, to shift imperial patriarchal ways of thinking and writing. In the introduction to her book, The Sacred Hoop, Allen discusses this goal in the context of Native American themes and issues that extol the sentiment: “life is a circle, and everything in it has its place in it” (1992, 1). The themes that characterize Native American living are that Indians and spirits are always found

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together, that Indians endure—they are like the daisy in the crack of concrete that persists, and that many traditional Native American tribes are gynocratically influenced (2). Thus, Native Americans carry the dream of thoughtful living, are “ritual, spiritual, and woman focused” (2). Further, she claims that Native American philosophies are based on social responsibility rather than privilege, the reality of the human condition rather than merely power, equal distribution of goods, no punitive measures as a means to control society and open discourse with spirituality (3). These tenets of Native American philosophies are an example of the ways in which cultural theorists can reenvision imperial patriarchy and other oppressive institutions like racism. Allen demonstrates the need for the recovery of Indian women like Zitkala-Sa to both encourage women-focused writing and to demonstrate how feminist Native American writers are instrumental in saving their gynocentric tradition of a gender inclusive worldview (263). Moreover, with the number of women writing critical analyses of women-authored texts, the opportunity to “map the possibilities” of contemporary women’s literature is limitless (263). These opportunities encourage a gender, ethnic, and cultural inclusive worldview because they welcome discussion of gynocentric traditions of Native American tribes rather than storing them away as museum fixtures (79). However, such opportunities also run the risk of essentializing gender to forward ethnic and racial primacy. This article thus will utilize Allen’s concepts and those scholars who privilege gender, with this risk noted, and will consciously deploy these subject positions. Allen’s recovery work extends beyond literature because she sees Native American writers as they “define themselves and are defined by ritual understandings and by spiritual or sacred ceremonial shapings” (79). ZITKALA-SA Gertrude Simmons Bonnin is a “Yankton Nakota (Eastern Sioux) who is known by her pen name, Zitkala-Sa, which means Red Bird. She lived from 1876 to 1938, and was a short story writer, cultural preserver, essayist, orator, editor, musician and composer and political activist” (Giese 2001, 1). Zitkala-Sa wrote the first and only Native American opera Sun Dance. She was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Critic Dexter Fisher notes that she “christened herself ZitkalaSa, Red Bird,” when she had a falling out with her sister-in-law (1985, 203). In contrast, biographer Paula Giese contends that Zitkala-Sa may

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have chosen the name to protect her job while she wrote critical essays (2001, 1). She is the third child of Ellen Tate Iyohinwin (She Reaches for the Wind) Simmons, a full-blooded Yankton Sioux, and a white man named Felker. Little is known about Felker or his absence from ZitkalaSa’s childhood, and she does not mention her father in the autobiographical essays. Biographer Roseanne Hoefel shares that Zitkala-Sa “was raised in a tipi on the Missouri River” until “she went to a Quaker missionary school for Indians—White’s Manual Labor Institute, in Wabash, Indiana” at the age of eight (1999). Zitkala-Sa later went to the Santee Normal Training School and in 1895 to Earlham College of Indians. Additionally, she was a student at the Boston Conservatory School and went to Paris in 1900 as a violin soloist at the Paris Expedition (Hoefel 1999). In a series of autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, Zitkala-Sa describes her time on the reservation with her mother in “Impressions from an Indian Childhood.” Similarly, her time at White’s and the hardships of acculturation are discussed in “School Days of an Indian Girl.” The subsequent essay, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” describes her work at the Carlisle Indian School and how the school (and others like it) devalued Native American cultural traditions. The final essay, “Why I am a Pagan,” and later “The Great Spirit” assert Zitkala-Sa’s return to her mother’s Sioux traditions through activism for her people. Her other literary works include editing for the American Indian Magazine and publishing works like Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft, Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes; Legalized Robbery; and “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” which generated much literary and cultural buzz about Native American rights. These works published in Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly point to Zitkala-Sa’s exposure to upper-class societies in Boston and Paris. Although there is no documentation in her biographies, these publications were likely costly and geared toward affluent white individuals who would have been piqued by curiosity of the “little Indian girl.” However, the “little Indian girl” had plans to publish a collection of legends through Ginn and Company of Boston, which was later reissued as American Indian Stories in 1921 (Giese 2001, 3). In each work, Zitkala-Sa’s activism on behalf of Native American rights demonstrates a woman committed to changing how Native Americans were perceived and treated. Many analyses of revisionist critics such as Paula Giese and Dorothea Susag help to create a transformative place in which feminist

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scholars can recover authors like Zitkala-Sa by valuing their (Indian) life experiences and writings as significant cultural contributions. Giese’s biography of Zitkala-Sa counters the patriarchal, racist stereotype of the “little Indian girl,” who submits to colonial conquests (Zitkala-Sa 1900b, 373). Zitkala-Sa had a the fastidious nature and a renaissance-like ability to engage in life, a life that exemplifies activism and conscious community interest. She is many things: “Yankton Nakota (Eastern Sioux), 1876–1938: short story writer, cultural preserver, essayist, orator, editor, musician and composer (she wrote the first and only Native American opera Sun Dance), and political activist” (Giese 2001, 1). This revival by feminist and Native American literary scholars calls attention to Paula Gunn Allen’s idea of Indian women’s primacy in Native American literature, in that the most important theme is “transformation and continuance” (1993, 7). In Zitkala-Sa’s essays, women’s concerns are embedded in subtexts of themes like the mother figure and spirituality. Notably, these themes also situate race and ethnicity alongside gender. Zitkala-Sa’s productions are autobiographically influenced and fictively supplemented. However, for this analysis, I will treat only the first essay of the series, “Impressions from an Indian Childhood.” I am interested in how the identity politics of Native American and western ideologies constitute a context for understanding the complexity of Zitkala-Sa’s life as a westernized Indian woman. In addition, examining tropes and dialogue as a justice song with these strategies might contribute to establishing Zitkala-Sa’s unique style of resistance as a model for radical politics. “Impressions from an Indian Childhood” The style of her essays is a sharp departure from other Native American autobiographies. Rather than relating the story of her own life to a western, Christian man, Zitkala-Sa creates her own written story. This liberation from western infuence, including anthropologists, results in an autobiography that demands attention as an independent creation from a gynocentric Native American writer. Arnold Krupat notes that Native Americans, unfortunately, remain “the red sheep, as it were, of the postcolonial, multicultural, multiethnic, world literature world” (Krupat 1994, 162). Although Krupat’s essay was written in 1994, Native American women’s literature like Zitkala-Sa’s is still the “red sheep” of feminist literary investigations and excluded from the traditional American literary canon and classrooms. Native Americans are a

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passing fancy that many non-Indians fantastically depict in all types of media—but as Winston Churchill’s statistics observe: “Indians experience twelve times the U.S. national rate . . . of malnutrition, nine times the rate of alcoholism, seven times the rate of infant mortality, five times the rate of death by exposure, [with the] present life expectancy of reservation-based male [amounting to] 44.6 years. Reservation-based women can expect to live three years less” (162). These statistics are sobering when we consider how marginalized Native Americans are in the United States. From this position of marginality, Zitkala-Sa opens up the themes of the mother, the woman writer, and spirituality for the dominant white culture by writing and discussing missionary educational practices from a Native American woman’s perspective. Exploring themes of the mother and the woman writer is particularly interesting because the themes are shared interests between most feminists and Native Americans. This commonality includes an emphasis on the bond between mother and child. However, the bond, for many Native Americans, fortifies the commitment to continuance after devastating losses incurred through colonialism, and thus is significantly different from the situation of mothers who have not suffered a similar fate. Like feminist literary investigation, a Native American literary interpretation uses multiple perspectives that honor and respect traditions (nature imagery, mother, spirit, and so on) that have long been undervalued and misunderstood by western critics. Paula Gunn Allen explains this devaluation in an interview with Laura Coltelli. The effects of western ideologies and acculturation on Native American women, Allen says, “shifted us from women centered cultures or cultures that had a high respect for women to the position of no respect—the loss of status is so great” (Coltelli 1990, 13). This “loss of status” is important when considering how ZitkalaSa’s historical context affected her writing. She wrote at a time when Native American activists demanded better treatment and civil rights protection. Thus her productions correspond to the justice songs that were being sung by many Native American activists. The theme of mother is fashioned with a broad range of shifting tones in the song. For instance, in the first essay, Zitkala-Sa’s discussion of her life with her mother is bright: “I was a wild little girl of seven . . . I was as free as the wind, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother’s pride, my freedom, and overflowing spirits” (1900a, 37). In contrast, her last essay, “Why I am a Pagan,” is suspicious and indignant of Christianity’s influence on her mother’s traditions: “Like instan-

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taneous lightning flashes came pictures of my own mother’s making, for she, too, is now a follower of the new superstition” (1902, 803). These tonal shifts, when scrutinized from a feminist literary perspective, bring attention to the mother as a thematic symbol and show a young woman writer in a man’s world who wants to maintain her culture’s traditions despite the colonizer’s anti-Indian education. Consequently, this song represents elements of Yankton Sioux culture that face erasure both from Mother and Christian influences. Thus the shifts in tone, particularly those bitter reprieves by Zitkala-Sa, situate the justice she desires but cannot obtain because of cultural changes. Ultimately, Zitkala-Sa’s double consciousness allows her perspective a loss without more direct means, other than writing, to fully address it. In addition, as with all themes explored here, the mother communicates a keen literary use of Native American and western images that persuade readers to embrace her justice song. For both Native American and western peoples the great reverence attached to the symbol of the mother is undeniable. The mother figure in Native American tribes is not confined to the production of children but embodies several roles that differ from her role in many western cultures. The term “mother” or “grandmother” in many Native American tribes signifies a wise woman who is committed to wholeness and well-being. This kind of commitment can manifest itself in multiple ways—from gardening to childrearing to mentoring. Depending on tribal gods and goddesses, the mother figure can be a symbol of “mother Earth” as a creator (Allen 1992, 13). For instance, for the Keres Indians of Laguna Pueblo, the mother figure is contrived through “Thought Woman,” who creates the thoughts of the state of living and “without her blessing, her thinking . . . no thing is sacred” (13). Creation stories like “Thought Woman,” where women’s primacy is the rule rather than the exception, are central in many tribal cosmologies. Consequently, Allen’s remarks on Native American women’s definitions of the mother and cultural loss intensify Zitkala-Sa’s purposeful first words, “My Mother,” in the essay series (Zitkala-Sa 1900a). These words situate the thematic importance of her mother throughout the essay and create a platform from which to view Zitkala-Sa’s impressions about her Native American childhood. “Impressions from an Indian Childhood,” contains a series of impressions that show Zitkala-Sa’s childhood as privileged in the context of her mother’s traditions. The repetition of her mother’s influences elevates the sense of reparation the essay seeks. Zitkala-Sa’s writing

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foregrounds her mother, where the implicit or metaphorical meaning of the mother figure draws on gynocentric traditions, and subsequently tribal ways of life before western contact. Allen writes of Native American traditions that often claim that “your mother’s identity is the key to your identity (1992, 209). This “key” to identity through the mother can be explored in the close relationship between Zitkala-Sa and her own mother. In feminist terms, recovery of women’s tradition to restore a balance or equality in life takes on enhanced importance, especially when a young female writer like Zitkala-Sa expresses her frustrations about U.S. domination. Zitkala-Sa’s concentration on communicating the impressions of her biological mother is problematic because her tone and the symbolic situation of her mother are veiled, in the sense that western cultural expectations inhibit Native American free speech by perpetuating the image of the “savage” Indian needing to be subdued—Zitkala-Sa’s own educational experience speaks to this problem. In the essays she implies that the missionary educators want to eliminate her mother’s traditions, her language, and the crucial bond between mother and child. Consequently, the feminist critic must look closely to determine mother and spirituality themes, as well as to find juxtaposed gynocentric allusions that speak to the loss of the mother’s traditions. When Zitkala-Sa’s mother is introduced, she is characterized as “sad and silent,” with expressions that formed her lips into “hard and bitter lines” as she goes about her daily chores (1900a, 37). These images of her mother are not joyous, nor do they send a message of peace; rather these images send messages of grief, loss, and heartbreak that the mother deals with everyday. Inherent in this initial description of her mother is sharp criticism of a culture being raped of its gynocentric identity. The mother is symbolized as a caretaker who fears that she may not be able to fulfill her job to care for her tribe’s traditions, or to care for Zitkala-Sa. When Zitkala-Sa asks why her mother cries, she answers, “‘Hush; my little daughter must never talk about my tears;’ and smiling through them, she patted my head and said, ‘Now let me see how fast you can run today’” (37). In an act of desperate protection from the atrocities that occurred against Native Americans, her mother encourages innocence and freedom rather than bitter despair. This display also illustrates the difficulty Indian mothers faced when they raised children in a vanishing culture. However, the mother’s attempts at encouragement are futile because these emotions will come to Zitkala-Sa as a woman’s burden in the form of her justice song.

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This justice song that Zitkala-Sa creates out of respect for her mother indicates the strong role that the continuance of tradition has in Native American mother/daughter relationships. At the same time, Zitkala-Sa situates her mother as a symbol that becomes doubled in the sense that her literary style traverses both western and Native American cultures, generating different signifiers depending on the ethnicity of the reader. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, defines black America in the twentieth century with his notion of “double consciousness”—the idea that “African Americans experience everything in this world both as Americans and as black people” (Coates 2004). Thus, as a colonized individual, Zitkala-Sa writes as both a westernized Indian and a Native American; similarly, when she creates a mother figure, she uses both Indian and non-Indian signifiers in her narrative. The significance of this doubled symbol of the mother might remain elusive without the aid of a critical paradigm informed by Native American literary traditions. For instance, the continuity of identity through mother is one aspect of this doubled symbol where maintenance of this tradition endures. As in western culture, Native Americans socialize their children; however, one significant difference is that family history is not always through the male line, as Christianity and other masculine-specific religions insist. For Native Americans like Zitkala-Sa, who sought to distance themselves from Christian patriarchal traditions that eschew the primacy of mothers, “naming your own mother (or her equivalent) enables people to place you precisely within the universal web of your life, in each of its dimensions: cultural, spiritual, personal and historical” (Allen 1992, 209). Here a mother’s identity is the way of looking at the world through a mother’s eyes. Thus, “failure to know your mother . . . is failure to remember your significance, your reality, your right relationship to earth and society” (209). Velikova asserts that the absence of a name or the “singular autobiographical pronoun I” in the essay demonstrates Zitkala-Sa’s emphasis on “the abstract” rather than her own personal details to draw attention to her activist work on behalf of Native Americans (2000, 51). I emphasize Velikova’s claim and extend Allen’s idea that mothers are a key to identity to show how Zitkala-Sa gives her mother no name to indicate a deep sense of loss in women’s traditions in the tribes. In this way, Zitkala-Sa’s responsibility to her mother, that is her tradition of maintaining her mother’s culture, sheds light on the doubled sense of the mother that a western reader might otherwise miss. A mother is not just a woman who bore a child, but a tradition whose

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continuance signals part of a cyclical way of life. Life, for many Native Americans, occurs cyclically, mimetically representative of nature—the four seasons, gestation, menstruation, cosmology, and spirituality. Such powerful conclusions and their significance can be more clearly elucidated with the aid of a feminist literary investigation. Another part of Zitkala-Sa’s justice song is the awareness of her own position as a westernized Native American. This position is clarified through dialogue that occurs between her mother and herself. Zitkala-Sa recalls saying, “Mother, when I am tall as my cousin WarcaZiwin, you shall not have to come for water. I will do it for you” (1900a, 37). Her mother’s bitterness ensues, and “with a strange tremor in her voice which I could not understand, she answered, ‘if the paleface does not take away from us the river we drink’” (37). Through the bitter tone of this parable and the knowledge that the land was stolen from Native Americans, we can deduct that there will be no river to drink from in the future. In a broader sense, the consequence of western encroachment on Indian lands results in a discontinuance of gynocentric tradition and the colonizer’s erasure of Indians. However, the mother’s response reflects the loss of a daughter where Zitkala-Sa would assume a role of caretaker for her mother as her duty to her ancestral rite. Zitkala-Sa writes about her inability to perform this rite in the mother/daughter relationship—her awareness of her westernized position is clear. Despite her positive efforts, the loss of tradition by forced westernization inevitably distances Indian women like Zitkala-Sa from their home culture. And, although this change marks her, she will go on to build on her mother’s traditions with new ones. Moreover, the clarity of her inability to perform her duties as a young Yankton Sioux girl manifests itself as a criticism of taking Native American children away for a Christian education. This kind of reasoning begs the question, who in their right mind would want western culture and its people if they only offer death and loss of tradition? Zitkala-Sa answers this question in these autobiographical essays by criticizing the loss of Native American tradition in the “impressions” of a child who becomes a Native American activist across the essay series. Zitkala-Sa’s fervent message about the trauma and loss encountered by Native Americans when their children are sent away for Christian education can benefit from a discussion that contextualizes what is at stake in losing tradition. Allen’s thoughts on traditionalism in the essay, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots in White Feminism,” indicate that “the Native American sense of the importance of continuity . . .

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runs counter to contemporary American ideals” that eagerly prescribe the casting off of traditions in the spirit of the colonial amalgamation of the masses, where difference is deadly (Allen 1992, 210). This casting off of tradition encourages a “reinvention of the wheel,” which “in the view of the traditionals [sic], rejection of one’s culture . . . is the result of colonial oppression and is hardly to be applauded” as a valuable definition of national identity (210). The contrast between having tradition and not having tradition is simple. “The Native American view, which highly values maintenance of traditional customs, values, and perspectives might result in a slower societal change . . . but it has the advantage of providing a solid sense of identity and lowered levels of psychological and interpersonal conflict” (210). When Allen highlights Native Americans having “a slower societal change,” she references the colonialist idea that Native Americans are unintelligent, unadvanced peoples—a view, which inspired (and justified) the rape of a land and a people by Christian missionaries and international explorers. We now have public records that acknowledge the indigenous of North America as intelligent with advanced cultural structures. For instance, in World War II, the Navajo language proved unbreakable to the Nazis. Despite political correctness, stereotypes further create a double consciousness among Indians by repetitive negativity. This example relies on western standards but also illustrates that Native Americans, such as Navajo, maintained their language despite genocide. Thus when Allen merits the advantages of maintaining the traditional ways of Native Americans through “lowered levels of psychological and interpersonal conflict,” the western critic and reader can better appreciate the tension of leaving tradition in favor of western acculturation. For example: in Zitkala-Sa’s impression of Native American life and the appreciation of the difference afforded to non-white racial and ethnic groups. This tension of leaving tradition in favor of western acculturation is marked repeatedly in Zitkala-Sa’s “Impressions from an Indian Childhood,” in moments where women’s traditions are elevated as the best part of home life. These moments are the refrain that make up the message of Zitkala-Sa’s justice song. In the section entitled “Legends,” Zitkala-Sa writes, “I loved best the evening meal, for that was the time old legends were told” (1900a, 38). During this time of legend telling, Zitkala-Sa implies that traditions and tribe secrets were shared. One such example is Zitkala-Sa’s curiosity as she gazes at a “grandmother” who has “parallel lines” on her chin, whereby the grandmother tells a

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story “of a woman whose magic power lay hidden behind the marks upon her face” (39). This type of cultural transmission recalls Allen’s maintenance of the traditional elements of tribal life. Through a doubled meaning of the oral tradition, a simple story is about both magic and tribal history. Zitkala-Sa’s essays take on new meanings when feminist criticism brings the gynocentric details from the margin to the center. Moreover, the combined approach of feminist and Native American criticism clarifies symbols that can have different meanings for the western and Native American reader. The symbol of the mother in the essay also relates to how a young Indian girl’s rite of passage persists in the text despite her removal from her mother at the age of eight. Oftentimes, Zitkala-Sa will remark on her childhood in reference to her spirit as a freedom valid only when in her mother’s land. This spirit that infuses her well-being helps her identify as a Yankton Sioux woman. The sections entitled “Beadwork” and “The Coffee Making” express a refrain that signals the complexity of becoming a woman. I view these examples through the intersecting perspectives of feminist, race, and Native American criticism. Zitkala-Sa leads us to believe that woman’s jobs as beaders and as teachers of beading taught lessons about life and womanhood. For instance, Zitkala-Sa’s mother “required [that her] original designs” needed to be symmetrical and characteristic of her tribe’s traditions (1900a, 40). These seemingly trivial details of beading are important indicators of values like consistency, honesty, and hard work. In addition, these values aid in our contemporary understanding of Native American life, where living a useful life is extremely important for the continuance of tribal traditions. Part of becoming a useful member of society for a girl was, “impersonating . . . mothers” in the ways of storytelling, conversation, and other skills characteristic of mothers (41). Thus, with her mother’s influences, a young Zitkala-Sa engages in individual responsible living. Similarly, in “Coffee-Making,” Zitkala-Sa demonstrates how children were respected as individuals, as well as respected members of a community; in contrast, generally in western communities children were to be seen, not heard. This type of respect characterizes why losing the opportunity to maintain her mother’s traditions is devastating. ZitkalaSa shows how she was respected as a child even after she incorrectly made coffee for a guest. She says, “but neither she [Zitkala-Sa’s mother] nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated

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my best judgment, as poor at it was, with the utmost respect” (1900a, 41). This instance shows how a rite of passage is completed in tribal customs and laws. Part of distinguishing between degrees of right and wrong means that children figure out their responsibility to traditions, themselves, and the Great Spirit. Through this example, we can understand this notion of childhood responsibility in connection to the choices Zitkala-Sa makes when she shuns her mother’s tradition. It is in this moment of responsibility that Zitkala-Sa’s identity politics and double consciousness begin to take shape in the essays. Often in early critical reviews, Zitkala-Sa’s privileging of her tribal home was interpreted from “the cultural bias of patriarchy,” where gynocentric traditions were discounted and devalued (Allen 1992, 3). As it is, this idea of a child’s responsibility combined with a rite of passage that favors egalitarian living is characteristic of gynocentric influenced societies. Allen informs the western reader that, “among gynocentric or gynocentric tribal peoples the welfare of the young is paramount, the complementary nature of all life forms is stressed and the centrality of powerful women to social well-being is unquestioned” (3). A clear definition of gynocentric traditions and what they stand for influences how the reader can view Zitkala-Sa’s departure from traditional Native American standpoints and allows individuals to pull this work from the margin of western literary thinking. There are instances when identity politics between Zitkala-Sa the Indian and Zitkala-Sa the missionary-educated teacher create opposition in tone as she recounts her history. At this juncture, the double consciousness of Zitkala-Sa reflects the rhetoric of her justice song because she chooses to share her confusion about her position. This tension in identity extends Zitkala-Sa’s criticism of the removal and education of Indian children by foregrounding the difficulty of being both Indian and western educated. For instance, fondly recalling life in South Dakota, Zitkala-Sa says that she and her friends, “were like little sportive nymphs on that Dakota sea of rolling green” (1900a, 41). Martha Cutter has argued that this metaphor elevates the contrast that comes at the end of the essay when the “Dakota sea of rolling green” is discarded in favor of the land of the “Big Red Apples” (the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania) (Cutter 1994, 43). What Cutter misses is how this metaphor sets up a contrast between Zitkala-Sa’s battle with her own competing interests as a Native American and a western teacher who is Native American. When she and her playmates tired of impersonating their mothers, they would turn to chasing “cloud shadows,” where the

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pursuit of interpolating nature, a theme extensive in Native American writing, reveals itself to the reader. As mentioned earlier, the Great Spirit that Zitkala-Sa references frequently is emblematic of a whole, integrated self. This game of chasing shadows, especially when ZitkalaSa reveals that “I forgot the cloud shadow in a strange notion to catch up with my own shadow,” indicates coming together with her self or her tribal nature, which elided her as a child as she made decisions to turn away from tradition (1900, 41). In the section entitled “The Big Red Apples,” Zitkala-Sa shows the reader how she departs from tradition, from her mother, and from life. This effort in her song constitutes the beginning of a cautionary tale. She reveals, “the first turning away from the easy, natural flow of my life occurred in an early spring . . . my eighth year” (1900a, 45). Tonally bitter images of life as a westernized Native American replace this departure from “the easy, natural flow” of life that signifies that introduction to western culture strips Zitkala-Sa of her mother as a cornerstone for identity at the tender age of eight. Zitkala-Sa follows this harrowing reality with a check on what gynocentric living meant; she says, “at this age I knew but one language, and that was my mother’s native tongue” (45). The importance of her “mother tongue” crystallizes the idea that gynocentrically influenced tribal life is about a stability of identity through the stability of culture. The brevity of this sentence displays isolation both visually and orally. The orality of this statement clues the reader in on the significance of this break from tradition—the emphasis on “one language” and “mother’s native tongue” clarifies the mother’s importance. The diction is succinct, creating a tonal effect equivalent to statements like “I am an American” or “I am a feminist,” which, when expressed, are powerful. Additionally, this statement marks Zitkala-Sa’s identity as an Indian familiar with the power of differentiation. It is this brief statement that sets the tone and perspective in the following essays, where diction coupled with reconstructed dialogue with her mother paint a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the effects of westernization on a young Indian girl. These effects, like the privileged features of domestic life, recall the refrain of ZitkalaSa’s song—the mother. However, during this part of the song, ZitkalaSa persuades the reader that the negative effects of westernization are too high a price to pay for belonging. One way that westernization is portrayed negatively is when Zitkala-Sa defines how her mother allows her to go away to the east for

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schooling. Setting up a series of contrasts, Zitkala-Sa is not subtle in her criticism of herself or what happened to her Native American identity. Typical of a child, the young Zitkala-Sa recounts to her mother that her friend Judewin “is going to a more beautiful place than ours; the palefaces told her so” (1900a, 45). Here the “palefaces,” or western white men, are positioned as fanciful liars. Within this same conversation the reader learns that her brother Dawee’s education in the east caused her “mother to take a farther step from her native way of living” (45). In addition, we are led to believe that Dawee, as a man who has influence in this colonized, white world, is encouraging the Native American mother’s loss of tradition. In this moment when Zitkala-Sa’s identity politics play out before the reader, we understand her mother’s view that little girls should not listen to “white men’s lies” because it will cause separation from tradition. The rhetoric Zitkala-Sa employs creates bitter distinctions between herself as a girl who had “a strange notion to catch up with her own shadow” and the young woman who looks back on her mother’s views with remorse because she did not follow tradition (45). Zitkala-Sa’s shadow in this context doubles as her Native American identity. Upon this hindsight that her mother’s tradition was better, Zitkala-Sa laments, “Alas! They came, they saw, and they conquered!” (46). Colonial conquest images take over the narrative in the form of appropriated Christian images that reflect Zitkala-Sa’s criticism of Christian education for Indians. She does this by recuperating images. The most heavily critiqued images are the “big red apples.” Zitkala-Sa’s friend Judewin tells her, “of the great tree where grew red, red apples” where they can “pick all the red apples we could eat” (1900a, 46). The missionized interpreter confirms Judewin’s statements for Zitkala-Sa, promising, “Yes, little girl, the nice red apples are for those who pick them”; and from this promise, the interpreter establishes the implied work necessary to achieve salvation through Christianity (46). From this exchange, scholars such as Martha Cutter have noted the dual images inherent in Zitkala-Sa’s blend of Sioux and western tradition (1994, 34). Cutter ascertains that “Zitkala-Sa’s use of edenic imagery is highly self-conscious,” as she “blends and layers traditional Christian symbolism (the garden of Eden motif) with elements of Sioux cultural and tribal lore in order to create a complex irony” (34). On the “big red apples,” Cutter eloquently surmises that “most ironically, this edenic world of the mother is already under siege, and it is white men who

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play the serpent in Zitkala-Sa’s recasting of the Fall” (34). Although this claim captures the irony of race inherent in the passage, my emphasis contextualizes this “recasting of the fall” as a way to situate Zitkala-Sa, as a western-educated Indian, to deploy this imagery for her song. Thus my analysis adds to the significance one pays to her and her vision as a racialized agent. It is in the subtext, informed by feminist and Native American criticism, where the metaphor of the fall is only a vehicle through which Zitkala-Sa, the Native American woman writer, makes her judgments about western, Christian colonial educational practices. However, this analysis does not acknowledge the deeper uses of such imagery as ways to upbraid these educational practices. For instance, although attention is paid to the duality of these symbols, what Cutter argues as an “authentication” of Sioux over “Christian motifs against their creators (white men) to critique the destruction of Native American culture,” she deploys an unconscious western gaze when she interprets nature imagery as a pseudo-Eden (1994, 34). Cutter’s argument is in the right place, but emphasizes a western interpretation, which is inattentive to race and concurrent agency. For example, she writes that “Zitkala-Sa portrays a type of Eden—a world of perfect peace and cooperation between humankind and nature, a world where food is not earned by the sweat of the brow and language is not distorted” (34). The implication that “food is not earned by sweat” or that “perfect peace” exists contradicts the apparent lack of peace of Zitkala-Sa’s mother and demeans the food gathering that her family did. Cutter’s claim that “language is not distorted” is unsubstantiated because there is no way to know how language was before colonial contact. Part of the rhetoric of Zitkala-Sa’s justice song encapsulates a sense that the primacy of the mother not only recalls her historical moment steeped in her mother’s bitterness, but also the first moment of contact between Natives and Europeans. Therefore, Cutter’s analysis, although insightful, misses the significance of race in the essays where the mother, nature, and spirituality are viewed in a holistic sense prior to any European contact. Additionally, this analysis does not foreground gynocracy or any women-centered ideology Zitkala-Sa represents symbolically through her mother. With the reversal of the fall, I would claim that through tone, symbol, and diction, Zitkala-Sa makes a powerful statement against westernizing children in Christian missionary schools, showing that the transfer of a daughter to the hands of the colonial conqueror is an unwise decision that will cause heartache. This transaction

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between Zitkala-Sa and western culture illicits a sharp sense of loss of Indian gynocentric traditions to white patriarchal traditions. Zitkala-Sa begins the transition of leaving the the mother land with a painful dialogue between mother and daughter. Her mother says, “my daughter, do you still persist in wishing to leave your mother?” and Zitkala-Sa replies, “Oh, mother, it is not that I wish to leave you, but I want to see the wonderful Eastern land” (1900a, 47). This exchange signals Mother’s response when her son Dawee comes for the answer: Yes, Dawee, my daughter, though she does not know what it all means, is anxious to go. She will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces. This tearing away, so young, from her mother is necessary, if I would have her an educated woman. The palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen lands, have begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education for our children. But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in this experiment. For her sake, I dread to tell you my reply to the missionaries. Go, tell them that may take my little daughter, and that the Great Spirit shall not fail to reward them according to their hearts. (47; emphasis mine) Mother’s astute assessment of the missionaries intent belies the weakening of her tradition. “Tearing away” Zitkala-Sa from her mother is an “experiment” where “suffering,” “dread,” and loss are worth a “tardy justice,” whereby the “education” of Zitkala-Sa will empower her to speak out about “stolen lands” and stolen culture. These phrases suggest a defeated, but resilient tone as Zitkala-Sa is left alone to define her identity through a justice song that her mother helps to create. The mother believes that “the Great Spirit shall not fail to reward the missionaries” their due when Zitkala-Sa sings about the mistreatment and abuse her people suffered. This tone suggests an ambiguity that even Zitkala-Sa will be punished for leaving tradition, but will fulfill her legacy in the context of her mother’s traditions. When she boarded the train she “no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings;” a sharp departure from the “wild freedom” the reader appreciated at the beginning of the essay (47). Instead of freedom the song issues a cautionary tale that asks for both justice and remembrance of the mother.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS Zitkala-Sa’s justice song in “Impressions” offers readers a vision of Native living that respects the mother. To recover radical women writers like Zitkala-Sa, we must ask what they offer contemporary readers in conjunction with shifting patriarchal trends within literature. Gynocentrism is particularly significant for feminists and interested individuals who theorize about reenvisioning our current capitalist, patriarchal way of living. Gynocracies involve an egalitarian way of life where women are foregrounded as those who hold power. These values and philosophies correspond to an agenda that wants to amend the discord and unhappiness brought about by imperial patriarchy and its means of controlling people, particularly people of color and non-westerners. The notion that imperial patriarchy, coercion by men to perpetuate men’s control, is the only or best way to live is a lie that many of us are forced to live everyday. There is always the (joyous) danger in feminist scholarship of destabilizing patriarchal ways of living. In pursuit of social justice, we, in the literary discipline, can embrace radical ways of writing and living and subvert canonical writing in favor of gynocentric writing. Thus, Native American women writers like Zitkala-Sa, who incorporate gynocentric perspectives like mother, nature, and spirituality into their writing, are significant when we consider how such work can be used as model for transformative thinking that can reconceptualize imperial patriarchy. In Allen’s essay “Angry Women Are Building: Issues and Struggles Facing the American Indian Woman Today,” she indicates that eradicating the popular patriarchal image of the Savage Indian, along with imperialism and racism, are forces behind the recovery of gynocracies (1992, 192). Moreover, drawing on the shared relationship of recovery of women, both Indian and non-Indian, adds to the social justice dialogue of feminist and cultural theorist advocates. Allen charges the U.S. government and other misogynists with high treason in their treatment of women when she says that “their revision” of Native American life devastated gynocentric conceptual frameworks and caused a retardation of a complimentary society that inspired multiple ways of living (1992, 193). Consequently, when contemporary literary scholars gloss over Zitkala-Sa’s works, they miss a whole sign system for activist work, subversive writing, and gynocentric living. In fact, I would argue that the limitations imposed on Zitkala-Sa’s work by academic practices of canonization reduce discursive practices and foreground racism and

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sexism in institutional practices. That is not to say that American literature professors do not highlight recovered authors like Zitkala-Sa; rather, from an institutional standpoint, these professors are on their own in reshaping the American literature canon. With the aid of feminist and Native American criticism, race and ethnicity studies, imperialism, and patriarchy can be reenvisioned to open up ways of living and thinking that respect and focus on women’s contributions. Women and Native American’s complete and full participation in the recovery of Native American gynocentric traditions can shift how we teach about Native American authors, women authors, and feminist advocates. When such shifts occur, a genuine dialogue can occur between feminists instrumental in garnering recognition of gynocentric practices and those who want to work with this knowledge and extend it to young children as critical thinkers. Then “women writers will have more and more accessibility to female traditions from which to write and think and will be more greatly empowered to use these resources” (Allen 1992, 265). Consequently, strong women writers like Zitkala-Sa will become the rule rather than the exception in the empowerment of women and people of color, and, the transformation of activism, subversive writing and gynocentric living toward a gender-inclusive worldview will become tangible as more women (and men) are exposed to such strong woman writers. This work reflects Zitkala-Sa’s adaptability and adroitness in implementing cultural changes to rework imperial, Christian-influenced patriarchy. Viewing Zitkala-Sa’s work as a justice song invites her readers to do a double take on her cultural experiences, affording them an opportunity to contemplate issues like status, identity, voice, family, motherhood, beauty, friendship, history, traditions, and spirituality from feminist and Native American perspectives. Women-centered devices are valuable for their insight into the culture from which the literature was produced and that influenced its production. The symbolic situation of mothers and women can be used as literary tools to undermine racist, patriarchal practices in literature. Zitkala-Sa’s use of the mother figure provides an important source of valuable philosophical reflection and insight about the gynocentric worldview that informs this Native American woman’s writing and thinking about imperialism, colonialism, and racism. In doing so, I wish to bring us closer to understanding how this literary use of gynocentrism can be useful for politicizing a woman’s cultural experience and garner exposure to issues relevant to women and marginalized cultures.

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Ultimately, I wonder how gynocentric devices, like the mother figure, operate as justice songs in Native American women’s literature, as they articulate concerns of justice, reparation, and cultural survival to a broader American public. There is no doubt that these Native women writers demonstrate tremendous commitment to thinking through and acting out their experiences. Whether or not these acts bring justice, information, or exposure, women of color’s works are cultural sites of critical insight. In solidarity, the contributors to this collection humbly recognize the power of their insight and would ask readers to imagine, for themselves, the rich ways that these women elevate our lives.

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Contributors

Christa Davis Acampora is an associate professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the coeditor of A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal and a coeditor with Angela Cotten of Unmaking Race/Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, forthcoming from SUNY Press. Michael A. Antonucci teaches in the English Department of Marquette University. His research interests include African American literature, Black music, and American poetics. He coedited with Garin Cycholl Make Up on an Empty Space, an introduction and anthology of American poetry. Michael is also a founding member of the collaborative writing collective, Jimmy Wynn Ensemble, in Chicago. Ellen L. Arnold is an associate professor of American literature in the English Department at East Carolina State University, where she teaches courses in Native American literature, ethnic studies, and women’s studies. She has published numerous articles on Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, and Carter Revard, and also has edited Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Angela L. Cotten is an assistant professor of women’s studies at Stony Brook University. Her areas of research and teaching are political economy, race, and gender, as well as philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. She has coedited an anthology with Christa Acampora, Unmaking Race/Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom. Currently, she is completing a book, A Question of Freedom: Womanist Origins and Travels in the Works of Alice Walker, on the critical discourse of womanism in Alice Walker’s writings.

207

208

CONTRIBUTORS

AnaLouise Keating is an associate professor of women’s studies at Texas Woman’s University. Her books include Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (coedited with Anzaldúa); and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa. AnaLouise is also the editor of Anzaldúa’s Interviews/Entrevistas and coeditor of Perspectives: Gender Studies. She has published articles on critical race theory, queer theory, Latina authors, African American women writers, and pedagogy. AnaLouise is currently working on several projects, including a collection drawing on her personal experiences as a bisexual, light-skinned, mixed-race queer to explore pedagogy, transformation, “whiteness,” and race. Noelle Morrissette is an adjunct assistant professor of English at Loyola University-Chicago, where she teaches courses in African American, African Caribbean, and American literature. Her research focuses on feminism and black identity, law and literature, and African American biography. She received her PhD in African American Studies and English literature from Yale University and is currently completing a literary biography of James Weldon Johnson, entitled Critical Fictions: The Prose Writings of James Weldon Johnson, 1901–1938. Margot R. Reynolds is an instructor of literary, cultural, and queer studies at the University of Central Florida. Her research traverses American studies, Native American studies, and gender/queer studies. Her current research treats Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and its relationship to queer theory, and the presence of ecofeminist politics in national feminist organizations. Reynolds comes from a mixed Irish, English, Scottish, Quapaw, and Cherokee heritage. Maggie Romigh is an independent scholar of mixed cultural heritage (Scottish, Irish, French, English, and Cherokee), who works and lives in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the village of Rociada, New Mexico. Her research spans several disciplinary concentrations, including anthropology, literature, and Southwestern Studies. Currently, she is focusing on the matrilineal culture of the Diné (Navajo) and its expression in literary and oral traditions.

Contributors

209

Barbara S. Tracy is an instructor of women’s and Native American literature in the English Department at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, Nebraska. She is a doctoral candidate specializing in minority and mixed race literature at the University of Nebraska, and has authored The Melungeons: An Annotated Bibliography: References In Both Fiction and Nonfiction. Elizabeth J. West is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, where she conducts research and teaches with particular interest in the intersections of gender, race, class, and spirituality in literary works. She has published essays and reviews in MELUS, South Atlantic Review, South Central Review, Womanist, JCCH, and CLA, as well as entries in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Her current book project examines the evolution of African spirituality in black women’s writings and has been supported by a research fellowship from the American Association of University Women—the award that also made this essay possible.


Index

abortion, 89–90 aesthetics and agency, 4 and balancing ideology, 139–40 flexibility of blues, 71–72 of self-recovery, 19–20 agency, 121 healing and cultural recovery, 85–86, 96–98 reclaiming, 90–91, 153–54 Alaimo, Stacy, 92 alienation gap of, 86–87, 93–94 healing from, 23, 121 language effects, 86, 90–91 protagonal, 86 Allen, Paula Gunn, 164–65, 172–73, 175–77, 181–82 Als, Hilton, 142 American Indian movement (AIM), 11, 93, 110, 118 annunciation, 160 Appess, William, 105 Appropriation and revision, 70, 172 discursive, 85–86 irony of, 4 poetic, 160–61, 165–66 Atwood, Margaret, 85–91, 103 Avila, Elena, 33 Awiakta, Marilou, 33, 113 Bacon, Francis, 4 Baker, Houston A., 67–68 Banks, Olivia Bush, 105 Banneker, Benjamin, 48 Baraka, Amiri, 67–69

Barringer, Sandra, 112 Bassard, Katherine Clay, 51 Bataille, Gretchen, 176 Bearden, Romare, 68 Beloved Woman (Cherokee), 35 Best, Patricia, 145 black church, 49 Black Codes, 134 black cultural nationalism, 150–51 Black Elk, 111–12, 114–17, 131–32 black feminine subjectivity, 121 black vernacular, 15, 20 blues a-a-a, 70–72 a-a-b, 77–78 broader capacities, 67–69 Chicago blues, 67 classic, 69, 78–80 condition, 78 country blues, 67 Delta blues, 67, 80 East Coast blues, 67 Empress of, 21, 73, 78, 81–82 Existentialist grounding of, 75–77 masculinized vision of, 68 matrix, 16 of motherhood, 71 as poetic medium, 69–70 as survival kit, 71 time and place, 76 traveling, 71 twelve-bar, 74, 76–77 bluescape, 80 body and spirit (or mind), connection between, 12, 153–54 borders, 95 211

212

INDEX

Brandon, George, 50 Brennan, Jonathan, 105–6 Brooks, James, 105–6 Broumas, Olga, 162 Buffalo Soldiers, 129 Cain, 49 call-and-response, 16, 20, 70, 106–7, 111–115 Candomble, 144–45 capital identity markers as, 134 reconception of, 135–36 Carby, Hazel, 69 Castillo, Ana, 33, 41 Changing Bear Maiden, 166 “changing same, the,” 80 Changing Woman (Navajo), 36–38 Cheatwood, K.T.H., 108 Christ, Carol, 89, 102 Christian, Barbara, 139 Christian religiosity, 47 African American, 48 negotiating African worship and, 51–53 Chute, Robert, 162 Clifton, Lucille, 69 Clytemnestra, 165 Coleman, Ornette, 68 Collins, Patricia Hill, 20, 27, 45 Coltelli, Laura, 176 co-mothers, 27 “cooked people,” 166 cooperative antagonism, 79 Cortez, Jayne, 68 Coyote, 166 cross-blood aesthetics, 4–5, 12 identity, 11 Crystal Woman, 32 culture cultural hybridity, 106 recovery, 189–90 syncretic, 5–7 Cutter, Martha, 183, 185–86 Da/Damballah, 10 Davis, Angela, 12, 69, 71

Davis, Todd, 160 death, 88 cyclic ontology of, 9, 55–57, 62–63 and sun imagery, 62–63 Deloria Jr., Vine, 111 DeMallie, J., 111 determining relations, 122–23 dialectic Hegel’s, 135 of ideology, 136 discourse Anglo-Christian, 48 appropriating, 48–49, 93 deconstructing, 93 negotiating Africanity in Christian, 52–53 displacement spatial and temporal, 81 double consciousness, 179 double-voicedness, 16 dream/s, vision and memory, 54 dualism, 90–91 alienation of, Cartesian, 3 culture and nature, 85 spirit and body (or flesh), 12, 86, 89, 144 DuBois, W.E.B., 122, 179 ecofeminism a postcolonial perspective, 85 ecohumanistic, 8 economic infrastructure, 122, 124, 128, 130–31 determinism, 127 Ellison, Ralph, 67–68 Emancipation, 123 Enlightenment ideology, 37–39 Equiano, Olaudah, 48 ethics/morality, 27 eugenics, 4 Euro-American, 27, 106, 128–29 Eurocentric, 13, 15, 40 evangelical, 21 existentialism/ist, 24 Alice Walker’s, 125–27

Index Expansion/ism, 5, 58, 97, 106, 123, 129, 131–36, 156 feminism, feminist African Cherokee, 118–19 Morrison and, 141–43 Finn, Julio, 68 Fisher, Dester, 173 Fletcher, Ian, 160 Forbes, Jack, 105 fragmentation of culture, 37–38 of identity, 37–38 of self, 86, 96, 103 Fusco, Coco, 112 Gage, Frances Dana, 114 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 111 General Strike, the, 122–23 geography, of African American subjectivity, 74–75 Giese, Paula, 173–74 Giovanni, Nikki, 69 Graves, Robert, 162 Gray, David Elton, 6 Great Awakening, 21, 48–50 Second, 64 Great Mysterious, 43 Great Spirit, 19, 35, 118, 174, 183–84, 187 gynocentrism, 25, 173, 177–78, 183–84 and black feminism, 27 gynocracy, 19, 41, 188 gynocratic principle, 25–26, 35, 163 Hall, Prince, 8 Hammon, Jupiter, 48–49, 51 Harney’s Peak, 115, 118 Harper, Michael S., 69, 81–82 Harris, Trudier, 51 Harrison, Daphne Duval, 68 Harrison, James, 163 Haynes, Lemuel B., 48 Hegel, 4, 135 Helen of Troy, 165 Herskovits, Melville, 6

213

historical materialism limitations, 124–25 as tool of revolution, 121 Hoefel, Roseanne, 174 holistic knowledge, 41–44 Holland, Sharon P., 109 hozho, 169–70 Hughes, Langston, 69, 105 humanism, 103 Hume, David, 4 Hunter, Alberta, 69 Hurston, Zora Neal, 47, 65, 111 hybrid spirituality, 144–45, 148 text, 106 identity indigenous, 106 markers, 134–35 mixed-race (-blood), 106–8 multiple and contradictory, 157 politics, 183–84 split, 23 ideological minefield of cultural identity, 21 ideology and aesthetics, 139–40 dialectical character of, 24, 133 of race and the Civil War, 122 social class structures, 133 Imaginary, the, 86–87, 103 improvisation and appropriation, 70 indeterminacy and black feminism, 147–48 of meaning, 126–27 of narrative, 92 racial identity, 148–49 Indian removal, 128–29 indigenous resistance, 93 individualism, 37–38 relational, 38 rise of, 97 infrastructures, 121 interlocking systems of oppression, 92, 123, 136, 175 irony, 4 Iyohinwin, Ellen Tate, 174

214

INDEX

Jackson, Rebecca Cox, 64 James Bay HydroQuebec Project, 93 James, C.L.R., 122 Jim Crow/ism, 134 Johnson, Robert, 80 Jones, Claudia, 122 justice, 27 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 53 Keeler, W.W., 110 knowledge holistic, 41–44 supernatural, 43 western, 44 Krupat, Arnold, 175 Lacan, Jacques, Lacanian scheme, the, 86–87, 92, 94, 100–3 Law Constitutional, 147 God’s, 147 of Ruby, 151 spirit of, 157 Lawrence, D.H., 161 Lee, Jarena, 64 Lenin, 122 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 166 Lifshin, Lyn, 69 literary criticism African Native American, 109 black feminist, 25, 139–40 post-Black feminist, 140 “little Indian girl,” the, 174–75 Louvinie, 131 lumpenproletariat, 24, 125–27 lynching, 133–34 Manifest Destiny, 11, 75, 129 maroons, maroon societies, 5–6 Martin Luther King, Jr., 118 matrix of domination, 92 Matthew, Washington, 168 Mbiti, John, 6, 59 McDowell, Deborah, 139–40 medicine woman, 40 Meinke, Peter, 162

memory centrality of, 53–55 as conduit between worlds, 55 embodied, 99 life force, 54–55 and self-confrontation, 87–88 as spirit, 55 as spiritual connection, 56 mestizos, 108 metaphysics of interconnectedness, 20, 41–44, 63 Middle Passage, 52 mirror stage, 86, 95 mirrors, 96–97 power of, 90 Misshipeshu, 88, 99 mixed-blood, 97 literature, 106 as sign of conquest, 96 Moorhead, Scipio, 51 Morrison, Toni, 47, 65 mother tongue, 184 Moyers, Bill, 143 Murphy, Joseph M., 54 Murphy, Patrick, 93 Murray, Albert, 67 muse/s, 53 African, 52–53 myth as ritual mode of communication, 43 nature African spiritual concepts of, 53 Navaho women, 164–65 worldview, 164–65 Naylor, Gloria, 47 Neihardt, John, 107, 110–11, 114, 116, 118 Nemesis, 159, 163, 169 neoclassical, the, 52–53 New Testament, 150 objectification, 90–92 reinscribing Native, 92 self-objectification, 95 Odoun, 10

Index

215

Old Fathers, 151 old stories, the, 165, 166 ceremonial healing of, 152–55, 168–69 Old Testament, 150 oral tradition (see also storytelling), 12, 23–24, 40 Ortiz, Simon, 169 ostinato, 68 Outlaw, Lucious, 122 Oven, the, 146, 149–51 Owens, Louis, 108–9

racial mythologies, 4 materializing in social class, 135 racism, instrument and symptom of capitalism, 127–30 Rainey, Ma, 68 “raw music,” 21, 166–69 Reconstruction, 122, 134, 144 Revard, Carter, 85 riffing, 16, 20 Riley, Patricia, 110 Ringgold, Faith, 68 romanticism, 53

Page, Philip, 150 Painter, Nell Irvin, 114 Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 68 passionate rationality, 45 peacock image, 78–79, 80 Philips, Carl, 162 pictographs, 87–89, 99 place (land) between worlds, 98 and blues, 75 loss of, 18 merging with, 90, 98–99 and personal identity, 9 sacred, 89, 115–18 and time, 10 Plato, Ann, 8 poetic/s as ceremonial healing, 19 performance in Native American literature, 169 post-black feminism, 17, 147 postcolonial condition, 13 and African Americans, 13–15 and Native Americans, 15–18 postnativist (or postrealist), 17–18 Powell, Richard, 67 precolonial contact, 6 public-private distinction, 146 purification ritual, 90

sacred hoop, 114–16 Sacred Serpent, 115–18 salvage anthropology, 4 savage/s, 4, 178 Saxon College, 114, 117–18 self-consciousness, 92 self-help genre, 33–35 self-recovery, 94–96, 102–3 womanist principles of, 35, 44–45 Selu (Cherokee), 36, 112–13, 118 sharecropping, 75 Shields, John, 53, 59 Signifier gap between signified, 86, 93–94, 103 power of, 91 sliding, 91 twinned structure, 101 Signifying Monkey, 15 practices, 7, 111–15, 167 Smith, Barbara, 139–40 Smith, Patricia Clark, 165 Smith, Trixie, 68 social class, Marxian conception of, 123 social totality, 13, 125 Sojourner, the, 112–15, 131 Sojourner Truth, 114–15, 118 South, Old and New, 75 spirit commodification of, 97 and flesh, 12

Quetzalcoaltl, 10 rabbit trickster tales, 6 Raboteau, Albert, 6

216

INDEX

spiritual, the alliance with nature, 86 concepts of nature, 53, 59–62 emotionalism, 50 possession, 53–54 spirituality African American, 49–50, 64 banning African, 50 split subjectivity, 91–92 Springer, Kimberly, 143 Stewart, Maria, 64 storytelling, 23, 182 of Candomble, 144 as ritual maps, 32, 95 and self-recovery, 95 Stowell, Phyllis, 162 structural relations of class antagonism, 124 Sturm, Circe, 105 subaltern, 16, 22 Sun Dance, 173 sun imagery, 22, 59–63 and death, 62–63 supernatural, the, 43–44, 160–61 Sword, Helen, 162 Symbolic, the, 86, 103 Tanner, Obour, 51 Teish, Luisah, 33 Thought Woman (Keres Pueblo), 36, 177 Toomer, Jean, 109 “Trail of Broken Treaties,” 110 Trail of Tears, 110 Transcendentalism, 53 trickster tales, 6

Trojan War, 165 tropes, 7, 15, 111, 175 Truth, Sojourner, 114–15 typology of Scripture, 48 universal/ism, 39–40, 109 Van Duyn, Mona, 163 Velikove, Roumiana, 179 vernacular, African American, 78 visionary pragmatism, 45 visions, 89, 116–17 Walker, Alice, 8, 47, 105–19 Wallace, Sippy, 68 Welburn, Ron, 105, 107 westernization, 180–82, 184–85 wholeness (holism), 19, 25, 186 and healing, 153–55 as inspirited interdependence, 100–1, 103 matter and spiritual, 99–100 psychic, 23 Wild Boy, 112–14 Wile Chile, 113–14, 118 Womack, Craig, 106 womanism/ist, 33 aesthetic of self-recovery, 19–20, 44–46 Cherokee, 107 Wounded Knee, 11, 110, 132 Wright, Richard, 122 Young, Al, 69 Zolbrod, Paul, 166, 168

ISBN: 978-0-7914-6979-8 EAN

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