What do you even want with my sorrow? You are so inefficient with pain—I realized you never had to cultivate it the way I did. The way Indian women do.
You think weakness is a problem. I want to be torn apart by everything.
My people cultivated pain. In the way that god cultivated his garden with the foresight that he could not contain or protect the life within it. Humanity was born out of pain.
I learned how to abstain from good things. I didn’t expect the best things, and I have turned loss into a fortune—a personal pleasure. It’s not a sustainable joy, I know. I’ve seen you happy. Being close to your joy has been a measured success. I’ve somehow retained myself, after all of this with you—retained the ability to revel in loss. This loss has spun and twisted itself into silk my sons will hold to their faces.
I almost killed myself, trying to match your potential joy. It was taking my misery. The thing I am most familiar with. The thing I rove into love. I realized that I could have you and the pain.
Pain expanded my heart. Pain brought me to you, and our children have blood memories of sorrow and your joy, too. They inherited their share, to cultivate their own children, whose humanity and gentleness will remind them of you and me.
Our boys, their compassion to will away inherited sorrow, it’s what makes them good and mine and Indian.
Had I not been born and cultivated in this history, I wonder how dim and dumb my life would be. I feel fortunate with this education, and all these horrors, and you.
Today, in front of a slew of white authors, during a fellowship, with a drink in my hand, I said that I was untouchable. There was a gasp, and maybe it was a hundred years of work for my name to arrive here, where I can name my pain so well that people are afraid of the consequences and power.
11
better parts
Mom, I won’t speak to you the way we spoke before. We tried to be explicit with each other. Some knowledge can only be a song or a symbol. Language fails you and me. Some things are too large.
What of the body, Wahzinak? What of your skin—that pine, and then the winter willow beneath.
What of the hair, Wahzinak? When you cut it, was it because he touched it? That is a type of mourning, too. Or was it the manner of the touch? How much of your movements do I contribute to a lack of love or the manner of it?
There is the sentiment that love is radical, from the very radicals you walked with. They say, now, that hate is the absence of love. It’s poster fodder. I follow the logic to death.
What of death, Wahzinak? It’s not the absence of something, but a new thing. I would never resurrect you, but I know your sons, my sister, and I often will you in our sleep. You told us it was dangerous to travel in our dreams. I know.
What of your death, Wahzinak? Was exacting hunger a type of satiation? The waist and hollow stomach in your soil—is that what you wanted? I died hungry that day. Everyone’s stomachs were thrown into your cedar box—all your children, still your responsibility.
I hold my baby’s head to my chest. The skin is the same as kissing a narrow stream, and even his hair feels perennial, without roots, just moving. Life is a running thing without roots for me. I’ll take his stomach when I die, and throat, and he’ll spend his life receiving better parts that I have not split.
Do you know the reservation received your body like Christ or the Holy Ghost or the Father?
Tsel th’í:thomé.
Tà:l
Th’í:lsometsel
Are you Perpetua in the den? Was I the infant you tore from your chest, before you walked toward the lion? Mother, can I know my inheritance now?
Is the fall of man your story, Wahzinak? Not that you were born to a green world and trespassed, but were you born into the blood? Were you the corporeal manifestation of a spirit world—your leather jacket and brown body and fist—holy?
God foreordained Eve’s transgression. He didn’t see you, though. You were stealthier than Eve. So stealthy, there is no text of you—until now. You were folklore and rumor, and there is a myth a man took, like the apple, but of your person.
If the fall was purposeful, then so are your transgressions. If there were no fall, there wouldn’t have been an incarnation. To ascend there must be a dark, a descent. Is that why, Wahzinak, our fathers were prisoners? My brother doesn’t talk about it. I do.
Tsel th’í:thomé.
Tà:l
Th’í:lsometsel
What of Salvador, your lover, Mother? I found his words in the underground presses and in old newspaper clips, and in photos, with brown, rotting edges. Your limbs are there, beneath his. You hadn’t risen yet.
You were just there turning water into wine for men.
Salvador wrote, “Que viva Wounded Knee!” And you wrote him back. He said his best weapon was his mouth and laughed. Governor Rockefeller commuted his death sentence, and prolonged yours.
Both of your mouths, weapons. Both of you, writing from boxes. You, from your island; Sal, from a box in Attica. That’s how love works for a spirit like you: a determined torture. Who could fault you? Did you come from misery?
What of your mother’s body, Wahzinak? Her olive seed and the red hill earth beneath. How many times did she hold you back from the other side of the door?
Do you know you left us hungry, Wahzinak? We exacted hunger like you. When we were children, you came home and fed me bruised bananas—was that transubstantiation? Did you see my sister’s eyes, like Eve’s at the gates of the garden?
“What do my eyes look like?” I asked. I couldn’t see.
What of my body, Mother? Do I write from pain, like Hildegard?
What of my body and the women who’ve left? My citrine and the bark beneath.
When you met the serpent, who was my father, what did his eyes look like? He painted you a drum. From his box, he wrote that he could not take care of you. What provocation to a spirit like you.
Do you remember when you banished the serpent, Mom? That we all waited by the door, with weapons in our hands?
In the root of my mind, which is contained like our old house, and formed just so, I see you lying down against the concrete and my father standing above you. I walk backwards up the steps, knowing my feet like I never did. Do I forgive you both? We shine brighter in heaven. You are formless to me now. But, still, your pine and winter willow are in my body. As are my grandmother’s olive seed and red hill earth.
I am leaving your body in the earth, Mother. My words lay still like shadows on the page, but they are better than nothing. Better than your formless looming and the dead men who left you. I lament and lament the beginning until the end, where your red hands are waiting. Did you foreordain heaven before you died? Was I there on your chest, or did you hold me from the door.
afterword
by Joan Naviyuk Kane
Q: What has been your experience as a writer and reader within the general field of Native memoir? Most specifically, can you delineate your choices to write intimately, honestly, lyrically, compellingly?
A: Joy Harjo and Elissa Washuta’s memoirs were in my periphery as I was considering writing one myself and—I considered the memoirs of Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday and Linda Hogan when I thought about my aesthetic. When I look at these books the distinctions are clear; the voices are present and impactful; different, obviously. And then I saw the literary criticism, or lack of, and these books were being mishandled to essentialize Indigenous people’s art. Not so much Elissa’s book—and people could stand to write about it more because her work is fascinating and cerebral and new—but the genre-marketing of Native memoir into this thing where readers come away believing Native Americans are connected to the earth, and read into an artist’s spirituality to make generalizations about our natures as Indigenous people. The romantic language they quoted, or poetic language they liked––
it seemed misused to form bad opinions about good work.
It might have been two in the morning when I emailed you one night. I was in Vermont lying on this dingy residency bed and I had Crazy Brave open on my chest. I thought, I need to tell people that my story was maltreated, and I need to make an assertion that I am nobody’s relic. I won’t be an Indian relic for any readership. So I decided this book would stand apart from some of the identified themes within our genre.
Q: Native literary writers are often compelled to or must take on a great deal of social context. How did you contend with that in this book?
A: I hope that people can contextualize the state of our world in my work. The writers before me seemed to do the work of looking at being Indigenous so we could look through it. In many ways the experimental form, language—everything—I feel freer to do that because so much was done before.
Q: Can you talk about how the book began—as fiction? How did you make the decision not to hide behind characters?
A: The original drafts of the chapters “Heart Berries” and “Indian Sick” were written and published as fiction. It was my intention to write with a polemic voice, and have a First Nations woman character be overtly sexual, ruined, and ruining people’s lives, respectively. It was an audacious feeling to write a Native woman as gratuitous, even if it was ruining her—it empowered me. And then I was in Starbucks, holding a cup of coffee, and I had the memory of my father in the shower with me, and I believe I was five or six at the time. It was shaky and I had to write that down—and it was my final semester studying fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Instead of using that semester to finish my book of fiction, I started writing essay. I realized that I had been using the guise of fiction to show myself the truth, and the process of turning fiction into nonfiction was essentially stripping away everything that didn’t actually happen to me, and filling those holes left behind with memory.
It made sense that the fiction, and then what came after—it’s so different but it makes sense bound together and retold as truth, because there really was a before and after that memory.
Q: Do you think Heart Berries approaches the politicization of grief? What power dynamics moved to the fore in writing this book? I mean in terms of the narratives that the book brings together.
A: I didn’t think about the politicization of grief, but the worst part of me imagined I could be redeemed.
Q: Can you talk at the craft level about what it means to work with the risk of self-disclosure? Can you talk about what it means at the level of personal relationships? Alliances? Political relationships? When you were writing the book, and now that it is moving into production, what are your observations about the extent to which your writing is politicized, removed from context, or made to be in the control somehow of, if not the writer, one’s readers? What are your perspectives on the different relationships a Native woman has to her audience of readers and the relationships she might have with the individuals that comprise her communities?
A: I moved with the surety that the work could not be as contrived as I normally present myself. Disclosure, personally, cannot work if I’m thinking rhetorically about appeal, or thinking about appealing to someone I love. If I am gluttonous, exploitative, or punched a man, or tried to stab someone, or failed my children, then I wanted to write it without rhetorically positioning myself as just. Crafting truth to be as bare as it feels was important. Memoir, for me, functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing.
The danger politically or artistically is that people won’t give me my craft. Because I’m an Indian woman someone might call my work raw and disregard the craft of making something appear raw. Raw would be fighting for myself, defending myself, telling people how hard it is to write about molestation and repeatedly saying, “I was a child!” Because I wanted to do that, constantly give refrain and remind myself it was not my fault, but I didn’t want to engage in sentimentality, or the wrong type of sentimentality. I crafted the voice, and, while it’s earnest, it takes work to be earnest and cut my shit. I wanted to give my life art because nobody had given my experience the framework it deserved—as complex, more than raw, or brutal, or familiar, or a stereotype—I don’t know.
Q: Shame and forgiveness have very different functions and histories in my tribal communities and in the space that a Native woman is permitted to inhabit in dominant culture. So here’s a question: What, if anything, do you anticipate about these perhaps competing responses from readers? And please tell me you were not preoccupied to the extent of self-censorship with the notion of competing responses while you wrote the book. Or, rather, please discuss.
A: I knew nothing I said would change the trajectory of my life, not in any real way. The work would not make it easier for me to move bureaucratically as an Indian woman. It would not make people processing a Native girl’s casework any different, because I believe we all try to articulate our stories, our voices, to those people, and they do not see us differently. I don’t feel burdened when I say that, but I feel chagrined.
That’s a big part of the book: shame, being chagrined by my transgressions and my family’s, and I didn’t censor that exploration. I hate the world exploration; it feels funny to say it because those words don’t do it justice. It feels colonized to say I explore or discover, but what other word could I own? The terrain was there inside of me, and I decided to meditate, or examine it with a brutal honesty because I knew if I wrote it I could know it.
I could know the depth of my pain if I wrote it, revised it, and it felt true, or as true as words can be. I wrote explicitly in some ways to display shame. True shame is the ugliest thing, the most hurtfully honest thing I can say about myself or another person, and then I revised it to cut deeper, and then I cut the fat off it so that the truth felt expedient, but it wasn’t for me. Maybe that was a type of censorship. I didn’t want readers to do the interior work I did to arrive at a specific point.
The book is structured by pain. What I did with that shame arrives at something pure, I think, which is that my mother is a biblical character in my story. Her and her mother and her mother have become larger myths than I originally thought.
Q: You’ve said elsewhere, “Indigenous identity is fixed in grief.” Can you elaborate?
A: I don’t feel liberated from the governing presence of tragedy. The way in which people frame our work, and the way our work exists, or is canonized—we are not liberated from injustice; we’re anchored to it. It feels inescapable and part of the zeitgeist of Indian in the twenty-first century, or every century since they came, which doesn’t limit me, or us, but limits the way we are seen and spoken about. It’s unfortunate, and real to me.
Q: I asked about why you wrote the book, and you said, “One reason I wrote the book is there is so much criticism about the sentimentality of writing about trauma. Writing about it is irrefutably art but also does the work of saying something. Women should be able to say this and say it however we want. There’s so much pushback about how a child abuse narrative can’t be art.” Can you say more?
A: I know the book isn’t simply an abuse narrative, but then it is. I was abused, and brilliant women are abused, often, and we write about it. People seem so resistant to let women write about these experiences, and they sometimes resent when the narrative sounds familiar. It’s almost funny, because, yeah—there is nothing new about what they do to us. We can write about it in new ways, but what value are we placing on newness? Familiarity is boring, but these fucking people—they keep hurting us in the same ways. It’s putting the onus on us to tell it differently, spare people melodrama, explicative language, image, and make it new. I think, well, fuck that. I’ll say how it happened to me, and by doing that maybe it became new. I took the voice out of my head that said writing about abuse is too much, that people will think it’s sentimental, or pulling at someone’s pathos, unwilling to be art. By resisting the pushback, I w
as able to write more fully and, at times, less artfully about what happened.
I remember my first creative writing professor in nonfiction asked his class not to write about abortions or car wrecks. I thought, You’re going to know about my abortion in detail (if only there had been a car crash that same day). I don’t think there is anything wrong with exploring familiar themes in the human experience. When the individual gets up and tells her story, there’s going to be a detail so real and vivid it places you there, and you identify. I believe in the author’s right to tell any story, and the closer it comes to a singular truth, the more art they render in the telling.
Q: Can you speak to the competing impulses of memoir being therapeutic at the expense of being imaginative or provocative/hurtful/critical?
A: Cathartic or therapeutic—those words are sometimes used to relate a feeling, like a sigh of relief, or release, but therapy is fucking hard. My therapists didn’t pity me, not the good ones; they made me strip myself of pandering, manipulation, presentation—they wanted the truth more desperately than I did, and then they wanted me to speak it—live it every moment. I feel like writing is that way. Writing can be hard therapy. You write, and then read it, revise your work to be cleaner, sharper, better, and then, when you have the best version of yourself (not rhetorically, but you’ve come close to playing the music you hear in your head)—you give it time and re-read it—you go back to work—it seems endless. Nothing is ever communicated fully. The way being healed is never real unless every moment of every day you remind yourself of your progress and remind yourself not to go back, or hurt someone, or do the wrong thing—it’s not healing unless you keep moving—you’re never done. The work of “never done”: therapy and writing.
Q: Within the work, you most explicitly name one influence: “Her name was Adrienne, like a poet I loved. A woman of exclusion, who loved women enough to give her work solely to them. Adrienne was part of a continuum working against erasure.” Her friendship and support of Jean Valentine, one of my mentors and teachers, brings up another literary lineage. How does this assert, in some ways, that a woman’s story is a story for “everywoman,” and what, if any particular aspect of her work, is this referencing?
Heart Berries Page 10