by Bill Moyers
About half.
The shadow half?
No, I think the shadow half is very important to show in a marriage. This doesn’t happen often. We wait and hold back that half until we’re absolutely secure with each other. You can’t completely immerse yourself in another human being.
You’re also writing about love, survival, and memory. Those themes that the reader understands come from your American Indian past. Memory is very important to the survival of Native Americans.
Memory is all. Memory is where the language resided, because it was an oral language. The stories were not written down. I have to say that as you said that, the image of my father came into my mind. I thought about the letters he’s written me. He’s written me hundreds, maybe thousands of letters over my lifetime. And his letters are really the treasures of my life. They take in whole pieces of memory, and they’re his gift to me. He described everything that was happening around him.
You keep returning to this Native American imagery in your past.
That is one of the reasons Native American people puzzle other people. Why is that so strong with them? Why don’t they just become like the rest of us? What is it that’s so important in their culture that they cling to it so? I think this has to do with the belongingness and the sense of peace that I feel among other Native people, this sense of community, where I’m in the comfort of a very funny, grounded people who are related to everything that’s around them. And that’s why being Ojibwe or Anishinabe is so important to me. I’m very proud, very comfortable with it.
You heard Ojibwe spoken when you were growing up.
Oh, yes, my grandfather spoke Ojibwe. He had his medicine bundle as he prayed, and he would walk in back of the house and stand in the woods before he went a little way into them. I would stand behind him and listen to him praying. And as I grew up, I thought that Ojibwe was like Latin, a ceremonial language. And it wasn’t until I was in my teens that I walked into a situation where people in a store were all speaking Ojibwe. They were laughing and having a good time, and I wanted to know what the jokes were. I wanted to get the jokes. And one day I said to myself: “I have to know this language.” When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving, determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. Now, I’ve never come to be a competent speaker, I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience.
How so?
You see the world in a different way. You’re working in a language in which there is a spirit behind it. I think it has to do with Ojibwe being one of the indigenous languages of this continent. You see the forms of things that were named long, long ago. And you see the forms of things that have been named relatively recently.
Give me an example of what you’re talking about.
Okay, I’ll read from this book. It’s for the Ojibwe immersion schools, a vocabulary project.
Mii sa go da-gaagiigidowaad, da-anama’ewaad, daozhibii’igewaad endaso bebezhig debendaagozid.
Now, that’s a translation by Rose Tainter of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You know, Native Americans put their deepest trust in the United States government. And they teach their children about their relationship to that government.
After all their bad experiences with a government constantly going back on its word, breaking its promises?
After all those bad experiences, yes. Native Americans first fought in World War I before they had citizenship. The American flag comes out first at every powwow. There’s a heart-to-heart feeling about the government that we are nation-to-nation with you. It’s a sense of equality, that you will recognize us, that we did not vanish as you thought. We survived. We exist. We have our language. We have your words in our language. We have your constitution in our language.
And your children are learning Ojibwe?
Yes. For that sense of community, peace, comfort, and because this speaks to our background. I’d love to meet my ancestors. I’d love to be able to speak to them. There’s a teaching that after you die you’re going to be asked what your name is in Ojibwe. You will have to give your name. And you will speak to the spirit if you want to go to that place of your ancestors. Otherwise, you will go to the Christian heaven, which doesn’t seem like much fun.
And the difference?
You can do all sorts of things in your Ojibwe heaven that you can’t do in the Christian heaven. You can gamble. You can make love. You can eat. It’s a world where there are no sad consequences to any pleasurable thing you do, a world like this one, but without the pain.
When you reach the other side and you’re asked your name in Ojibwe, what are you going to say?
I have two Ojibwe names. The first is my grandfather’s name for me. The second name, Kinewgonebiik, means “the feather of the golden eagle.” But I don’t know that I’m going to reach the other side, Bill. I keep shifting my spiritual beliefs about an afterlife.
Well, you may have to invoke your Catholic past, right? Your German side of the family.
That’s the beauty of being a mixed person. Assuming there’s a German afterlife, I’ll just have to think fast.
You have that capacity. Your cultures keep competing within your imagination, don’t they?
They do. They do.
And the ideas in this book—they come from this constant interplay between these many cultures?
I live on the margin of just about everything, Bill. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my Native life, and marginally German. I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer, too. I have to write. I have a very fractured inner life.
Your first nonfiction was about your pregnancy and your child’s birth, the first year of that child’s life, The Blue Jay’s Dance. What was the metaphor there?
It was a blue jay’s dance of courage in front of a hawk. I saw it from the window as I was nursing my baby. I kept feeders, and all sorts of birds came down. I saw a blue jay. And then a hawk swooped down on it. The blue jay knew it was doomed, but it started to dance at the hawk. And the hawk was startled. The blue jay was confusing it. This dance of an inferior bird against a superior raptor finally so mortified the hawk that it flew away.
This is the mother’s role, the blue jay’s dance to keep the aggressive threats at a distance, right?
I never really thought of it exactly that way. Yes, it’s the advantage so many of us have, in a small way. It’s the advantage of behaving in a surprisingly courageous fashion when the odds are completely against you.
Which is what mothers do.
I’ve seen it—many do.
And it comes through in Shadow Tag, with Irene.
Yes.
There’s this prescient kid in the family named Stoney.
Yes.
And he comes to a profound truth in this one short passage. Will you read it for us?
Irene bent over and held her son. With her arms locked, she backed up to the living room couch and toppled them both onto the pillows. Stoney tightened his arms around Irene, still sobbing so harshly that he couldn’t form words. There was nothing to do but stroke his sun-shot hair. Soon Irene could feel the hot tears soak through her shirt.
What is it? What is it?
The crying began all over again with the same miserable force. Then Stoney quit.
I don’t want to be a human, he said. His voice was passionate. I want to be a snake. I want to be a rat or spider or wolf. Maybe a cheetah.
Why, what’s wrong?
It’s too hard to be a human. I wish I was born a crow, a raccoon, or I could be a horse. I don’t want to be human anymore.
“It’s too hard to be human.” This is a six-year-old speaking. Unpack that. What are you saying through him?
That we rationalize ourselves out of shame. We can rationalize anything away as we get older and older, but a child hasn’t that
capacity yet. And when the shame hits, he’s knocked over. The truth of shame can do that. And it’s what comes back to us. This is what happens to everybody. There’s going to be a time, no matter who we are, that we participate in the very oldest of human sorrows. We are at one with other people in our loss, in our shame, and we come to the very limit of who we are as people. We face that part of ourselves that we never wanted to look at. And then we experience shame the way a child experiences it. It’s one of those moments that link us with other human beings. At least I think so.
There’s something else that comes up here, too, which is that no matter how much a parent loves a child, you can’t protect the child from the cruelty of the world.
No. Well, a mother is a frayed net, you know. We stretch ourselves over everything we can, but there are holes all over the place where things get through. And we do everything, fathers and mothers. We try so hard. But we can’t do it all. We can’t completely protect our children, obviously. I do want things to be ordinary for my children. Routine can be a good thing. I want things to be simple, so they can cope. But that’s not what the world is like, and that’s not even what they want. They want to grow in every way that they possibly can, and that’s going to involve pain.
That conflict—the reality in your stories—reminds me that a well-known reviewer said that with each successive novel Louise Erdrich is writing, she’s writing more like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Albert Camus. That’s a heavy burden.
If I thought that way, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing.
No, but some reviewers do. And they expect your next novel to be Hemingway, Camus, Faulkner.
Just got to be Erdrich. I can’t do anything else. Let me read you something else. There are many writers who are more deserving of that sort of praise, but I don’t think many of them have as many children, or as messy a house, as I do. I wrote a poem and called it “Advice to Myself”:
ADVICE TO MYSELF
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls under the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementoes.
Don’t sort the paperclips from screws from saved baby
teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
Now I know how it is you’re so prolific. That’s real discipline!
In my case, I suspect it has to do with a small, incremental, persistent, insect-like devotion to putting one word next to the next word. It’s a very dogged process. I make myself go upstairs, where I write, whenever I can. And I never have writer’s block. If I went up there and had writer’s block, I think I’d lose my mind. I have to get up to my papers and my books and my notebooks—I am always jotting things down, by the way. And I just keep going.
You’ve come such a long way from those days when you were a waitress, a signal woman at a construction site. You kept getting a lot of rejection slips when you first started writing. When you got rejection after rejection, why did you keep writing? And what do you say to young writers about keeping it up despite a slap in the face?
I kept writing because I grew up as a Catholic. The one place we were allowed to be emotional and to really talk about ourselves was in the confessional. You’re safe there, in the darkness. And you begin to think, “Well, I have a sacred part of me—like the priest, who is supposed to be a conduit to God—that can also receive these unknowable emotions.” Eventually I began to write about what was innermost. Sometimes I was astonished at what I read that I had written down, because I didn’t mean to have written some of those things. I’m from a small town, as you know, and sometimes mothers come up to me in my daughters’ grade schools, they look at me, and they say, “It must be unique, living in your head. How could you write that?” I don’t know why the filter is not there, but I have to be as truthful as I can. I have to get as close to the bare truth as I can.
The truth of what?
Experience. When I talked about the insulation between yourself and your experience—back to what we were saying about a child—you don’t develop this insulating skin until you begin to be hurt, over and over, until you begin to rationalize, over and over. But when you can go back to it as an adult in writing, you get inside that skin and just hang on for dear life. I loved writing because of that. I’m able to live in a world where I can be expressive and I can be truthful about emotion and about human nature.
Did you want to be a priest when you were growing up?
I wanted the power of the priest. The priest had a great deal of power. A lot of the women who taught me were Franciscan sisters. They could have been happier as priests. Their power was thwarted.
The theme to many of your stories.
Thwarted female power. Yes.
And identities, often stolen by the men in their lives.
Often.
That helps me understand the story in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.
About Father Damien, yes.
Father Damien was secretly a woman.
Yes, having worn the habit of a sister, a nun, and knowing that she’s called to be a priest—well, she is a very good priest. She wore her disguise well. The best priest I ever wrote about.
She sacrificed her female identity.
Yes, she did. But she lived as the priest. She was able to do that.
Do you have an assured faith now?
I go through a continual questioning. And I think that is my assurance—if I were to let go of my doubt, I believe that I would somehow have surrendered my faith. My job is to address the mystery. My job is to doubt. My job is to keep searching, keep looking. We don’t understand works of art when we see them. We see the greatest works of art through a glass darkly. They’re very difficult for us to understand. So with this great work of art in which we’re all participating—this life—the Great Artist has made beauty and terror and death and cruelty and humor and mystery part of who we are. As well as commerce and politics and all the rest. Everything is part of this mystery.
So who is God in Ojibwe?
Gichi-Mandidoo or Gizhe Manidoo. The great kind spirit, the spirit that looks after all of the good in the world but also looks after all that is painful in the world. The Creator.
So God is life.
“Endless forms most beautiful.”
NIKKI GIOVANNI
&nbs
p; When she heard about the shootings, Nikki Giovanni had a flash: could the killer be that odd young man who had once sat in her class? She was off campus that spring day in 2007 when Seung-Hui Cho, an English major at Virginia Tech, suddenly turned violent, murdering thirty-two people and wounding twenty-five before killing himself. Heading back to the stricken community, Giovanni heard his name and knew it was so: he had attended her poetry class. The next day she was asked to speak at a memorial service for the victims. Her words brought thousands to their feet in a tearful standing ovation—a moment, someone said, “of profound healing.” Here are some excerpts:
Nikki Giovanni reading from:
WE ARE VIRGINIA TECH
(16 APRIL 2007)
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does the child in Africa
Dying of AIDS
Neither do the Invisible Children
Walking the night away
To avoid being kidnapped by a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community
Be devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water. ...
We are Virginia Tech...
We will continue
To invent the future
Through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness ...
We will prevail.
Watching on C-SPAN, I wondered how many others remembered, as I could, the younger Nikki Giovanni, bursting on the scene in the incendiary ’60s, a time of bitter divides and wounds that would not heal. A student activist at Fisk University in Nashville, a soul mate of Angela Davis and James Baldwin, a founding member of the Black Arts Movement, the “Princess of Black Poetry.”
POEM FOR FLOR A