Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual 9781554583645, 9781554583928, 9781554583935

Citation preview

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond

This page intentionally left blank

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual

Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy, editors

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Listening up, writing down, and looking beyond : interfaces of the oral, written, and visual / Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy, editors. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued also in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-55458-364-5 1. Performance art—History and criticism. 2. Performance art—Social aspects. I. Gingell, Susan, 1951– II. Roy, Wendy, 1957– NX456.5.P38L58 2012

700.1

C2011-907605-5

–––– Electronic monograph in PDF format. Issued also in print format. ISBN 978-1-55458-392-8 1. Performance art—History and criticism. 2. Performance art—Social aspects. I. Gingell, Susan, 1951– II. Roy, Wendy, 1957– NX456.5.P38L58 2012

700.1

C2011-907606-3

© 2012 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca Cover design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design. Front-cover image: Wîhtikow pîsim/wîhtikow sun (2002), a painting by Neal McLeod. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Patrick Altman. Text design by Angela Booth Malleau. This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy. Printed in Canada Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Contents

Acknowledgements

■

vii

Introduction Opening the Door to Transdisciplinary, Multimodal Communication Susan Gingell, with Wendy Roy ■ 1

■

Listening Up: Performance Poetics Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi young and Oni Joseph ■ George Elliott Clarke ■ 53 the storyteller’s integrity ■ d’bi.young.anitafrika ■ (only at http://drc.usask.ca/projects/oral/) Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage: Insights from Slam Helen Gregory ■ 77 Poetry and Overturned Cars: Why Performance Poetry Can’t Be Studied (and Why We Should Study It Anyway) ■ Hugh Hodges Echohomonymy: A Poetics of Ethos, Eros, and Erasure Adeena Karasick ■ 111

■

■

97

■

Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance: The Case of William Barnes ■ T. L. Burton ■ 119 The Speech–Music Continuum

■

Paul Dutton

■

123

v

vi

Contents

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa: The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng ■ Gugu Hlongwane ■ 137 The Ballad as Site of Rebellion: Orality, Gender, and the Granuaile Aislingi ■ Naomi Foyle ■ 153 “pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”: Inferring Pronuntiatio and Actio from the Text of John Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon ■ Brent Nelson ■ 177 “The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story: Challenges to the Tyranny of the Written in Contemporary Canadian Fiction ■ Wendy Roy ■ 201 What’s in a Frame? The Significance of Relational Word Bundles in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow ■ Mareike Neuhaus ■ 221 Toward an “Open Field”: The Ethics of the Encounter in Life Lived Like a Story ■ Emily Blacker ■ 239

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual Becoming the Storyteller: Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance Waziyatawin ■ 265 Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature: Photographs in The Days of Augusta ■ Cara DeHaan ■ 283 Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in Neal McLeod’s Writings of the Oral+ ■ Susan Gingell ■ 305 A Nexus of Connections: Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest ■ Kimberly M. Blaeser ■ 331 Contributors Index

■

363

■

357

Acknowledgements

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) provided a standard research grant with release time that helped Susan Gingell to develop the idea for The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media conference, which was further supported by a SSHRC conference grant. The eVOCative! festival was also generously supported by the Canada Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. The pair of related events was the original impetus for a number of the papers in this collection, and we are grateful to those who helped organize these events: Azalaea Barrieses, Kevin Flynn, Neal McLeod, Brent Nelson, and Ella Ophir, who joined Susan and Wendy on the conference committee, and Theresa Cowan, Holly Luhning, Neal McLeod, and Steven Ross Smith, who joined Susan on the festival organizing group. We also thank graduate student assistants Kristen Warder, Natasha Beeds, and Amelia Horsburgh, as well as the many graduate student volunteers. Without the integrated work of both organizing groups, the conference and festival would never have taken place and this book would have been the poorer. We acknowledge and thank the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the grant through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program. We also acknowledge and thank the University of Saskatchewan and a number of people there who helped ensure the success of each stage of this project. We are grateful to the University of Saskatchewan for a Publishing Subvention from the University Publications Fund. We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Jon Bath, Meshon Cantrill, and Jeff Smith of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan for website assistance in relation to the conference and festival and for help creating the website supplementary to this book. Thanks are also due to the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan and its former Head, Douglas Thorpe; Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Peter Stoicheff; Sabrina Kehoe, Research Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Centre vii

viii

Acknowledgements

for Culture and Creativity; the Co-Directors of the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan, Len Findlay and Marie Battiste; and Dwight Newman, former Dean of the College of Law, all of whom provided crucial support to the conference at critical times. We extend further thanks to colleagues who helped vet papers but must remain anonymous. Our gratitude also goes out to the readers and editors for Wilfrid Laurier University Press, whose comments helped us markedly strengthen the book. Finally, to all of the contributors who worked so diligently and patiently through the multilevel editing process, our warm appreciation and respect.

Introduction

OPENING THE DOOR TO TRANSDISCIPLINARY, MULTIMODAL COMMUNICATION Susan Gingell, with Wendy Roy

An Urging and an Invitation (r.s.v.p.)

Word up, dear reader: open the door to transdisciplinary, multimodal communication as widely as you can. This book and the website you will find if you look and listen beyond this volume’s pages to http://drc.usask.ca/projects/ oral invite you to move away from what stl’atl’imx poetscholartheorist1 Peter Cole, in Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village, calls the “dysauditory linguistic space” (102) created by “visuocentricity” (111). Book and website issue this invitation while cherishing the gifts of sight and reading, as, indeed, Cole does, in balanced relationship with the other senses. The urgings here are to participate in a levelling of the established hierarchy of written over oral, and to make sense of experience in new ways by joining in a sensory rebalancing in perceiving and responding to the world, including the discursive spaces of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual. The rebalancing requires you to ignore any signs that suggest “listenaries” (101) need not apply; to avoid “zeroing in on the eye and its orbit/uary” (Cole 111); and to open the multisensory channels of perception with which humans are endowed. If you reckon with Cole that “there’s been a whole lot of seeing going on,” that “maybe we could use some of those other senses the creator gave us” to shake up the sensory hierarchy of Western tradition, and that “you got to use all your givens including your hunches” (101), maybe you can even develop a little “trickster rap port” (87). Then you might sense upon entry into the conversations of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond a movement toward a more fully embodied knowing, a knowing that issues from attending to the complete sensorium and thus pleasures the knower with a knowing that doesn’t forget to have fun. Yes, and all this we urge even though our work/play in this project inevitably falls short of the articulated ideal.

1

2

Introduction

We might be guided, too, by Euro-Canadian poetcritictheoristcomicsartist bpNichol. His playful essaying into the territory of Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics (a realm beyond the metaphysical) results in “The ’Pata of Letter Feet, or, the English Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in which Nichol formulates the kin(a)esthetic interrelatedness of the three elements of the present book’s main title, listening, writing, and looking, in combination with the element of the oral from its subtitle. Nichol’s essay maintains that it is “at the interface between the eye, the ear and the mouth that we suddenly see/hear the real ’pata of poetic feet” (Meanwhile 354). He calls the kind of writing at this interface notation, describing it as “the conscious act of noting things down for the voice.” Such writing entails “instructing the eye on the movement of the tongue for the pleasure of the ear.” We have here, then, writing directed by and to the listening ear, the speaking mouth (and tongue), and the looking/seeing eye. A precursor text to the present book in featuring the oral, written, and visual in its title, Marshall McLuhan and Victor Papanek’s Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations, includes the same elements as Nichol’s formulation but to quite different effect. The book emblematizes the chief argument of the work by presenting the image of a human face with an ear below the eyes and above the mouth. The fixity of this grotesque emblem suggests an unnatural reordering, and, more particularly, that the triumph of the visual over the auditory, of literacy over orality, has produced gross distortions in our understanding of and relationship to the world. By contrast, Nichol’s articulation effects an integrative, aesthetic movement, a kin(a)esthesis. Nichol is first and foremost a poet, and so brings his understanding of notation to his criteria for good poetry. He recognizes the genre as an embodied, multiplex, and interactive co-creation of the poet and one whom we might, by expanding on and adapting Simon Ortiz’s concept of the listenerreader (151), call a listenerreaderkin(a)esthete. The expansion is necessary to do full justice to Nichol’s take on good poetry, because he says such poetry “gets the writer’s tongue in your ear, breathes into it, & makes the whole body squirm with the pleasure of it” (354). On academic terrain, the project that anthropologist of communication Ruth Finnegan identified in her 2003 essay “‘Oral Tradition’—Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity?” continues apace. She remarks in that article that rather than pursuing the differences between the oral and written, contemporary scholars are “explor[ing] the overlap and interpenetration of oral and written (their intermingling with other media too—music, dance, material displays, electronic options) and look[ing] …

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

to historical changes and multiplicities (to changing genres, to new media interacting with established themes, to contemporary forms [of the oral] not just ‘traditional’ ones)” (84). The present collection continues in this line.

Explaining Key Terms Before we can join the lively conversation outlined by Finnegan, we need to define and elaborate on some of the key terms that are creatures of the discursive ecologies of such verbal exchanges, namely the terms orature and orality; performance, speech, and sound; audience; text; textualized orature and orality; and storytelling. Although the central pair of terms in the present context is orature and orality, their definition rests on that of performance. Disciplinary usage of the term performance varies across the humanities and social sciences, the former set of disciplines tending to emphasize the aesthetic qualities of performance, and the latter focusing more closely on its social functions. However, scholars of performance, whatever their disciplinary location, generally recognize both elements. The account of performance offered here draws on the work of both social scientists—most notably anthropologists Ruth Finnegan (especially Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts), Richard Bauman (Verbal Art as Performance), Bauman and Charles L. Briggs (“Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life”)—and humanities scholars—most prominently literary critic John Miles Foley (especially How to Read an Oral Poem) and Performance Studies professor Deborah Kapchan (“Performance”). This account is also derived from years of attending performances: of plays in theatres; of poems at poetry readings and dub poetry events, music in concert spaces, and dance in a variety of locales; of storytelling occasions, some carefully planned, others spontaneous; of rituals in churches, in Hindu temples and kirtan (sacred chanting) locales, and in Cree spaces from the sweatlodge to First Nations University; and of other forms of Indigenous orature. Because of these experiences and my training as a literary scholar with particular interests in poetry and the literatures and oratures of decolonizing contexts, and because this book’s centre of gravity is the verbal arts at the interfaces of the oral, written, and visual, the definition of performance offered below pulls toward expressive culture. Foley stresses that performance is an event that occurs within a tradition that enables methodological variation within limits (How 183). Tradition enables both fluent composition of the performance and fluent reception of it, but tradition is elastic enough to allow for adaptation to the demands of

3

4

Introduction

the specific performance context and some individual shaping of the performance. The degree of that shaping depends on the genre; oral genealogies and sacred orature are forms that have less elasticity than praise poems, for example. In the context of discussing performance as one of the Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, Deborah A. Kapchan notes, “There is an agentive quality to performance, a force, a playing out of identities and histories” (121). Because to perform is to act on, she notes, performance has the potential to be transformative (134). Such observations suggest how central performance is to humans’ sense of themselves and their social relations, but Kapchan also remarks that performance is “so intricately bound up with the nonverbal attributes of sound, taste, shape, color, and weight that it cannot be verbally mapped” (134). Thus she points to performance’s fully embodied quality, its engagement of the full human sensorium. Despite her position that performance cannot adequately be represented in words, the present project requires a working definition in which verbal communication is central. I therefore offer the following five-part one, and a follow-up comment: 1 Performance is an embodied event recognizable as distinct from other action because performers frame their communication with heightened verbal and body language and other elements of display to invite and maintain focused attention. 2 Performance unfolds over time in specific social and discursive contexts. 3 It is a forum in which histories and social identities are negotiated. 4 It is “a display of communicative competence to an audience” (Bauman 11) embedded in particular genres specific to the cultural context in which it occurs. 5 It is the co-creation of a primary performer or performers with an audience (about whom, more later). As Foley succinctly summarizes performance theory’s view of the performative event, “‘being there’ makes a difference” (How 173). Of course the variety and complexity of performance as it is explicated by Finnegan in the “Observing and Analyzing Performance” chapter of Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts make the working definition above an inadequate answer to her question in Oral Poetry, “What is to count as ‘performance’?” (21). Thus, I shall add a wrinkle to the overly smooth definitional dress I’ve drawn over the live body of performance by following up on her observation that “a performance need not involve an audience” (21). Finnegan cites the case of Sudanese Nilotic herdsmen singing to their cows to back her claim,

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

but do the herdsmen really have no audience? I would argue there are at least two, their cows and themselves, because both can take pleasure from the singing. But how Finnegan builds on her (mis)perception is of real interest because she goes on to entertain the possibility that reading aloud and “even the related process of hearing the sound of a poem in one’s head while reading it” (21) might be varieties of performance. She thus cracks open the window to the idea of silent verbal performance. It’s a window that Caribbean poet-critic Edward Baugh, writing about performance and page-based poetries, swings wide open when he writes, “The moment a pair of conscious eyes engage with [a poem’s text on the page], those words begin to get up off the page and to perform” (43). Baugh lets a breath of fresh air into the discussion of performance with his move, which amounts to rejecting an absolute distinction between performance in an external social arena and one in the private forum of the head. Instead, he opts for a continuum of performance possibilities. For working at the oral/written interface, conceptualizing continua has, in general, proven more helpful than conceiving binaries, but Baugh invites us in his statement to think of another person’s disembodied words as performers, and so the performance becomes metaphorical. Perhaps, then, we’d do better to refer to what’s going on in silent reading as a literacy event, as Paul Goetsch does in The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (14). By doing so, we can acknowledge that silent reading is an activity, while preserving the important distinctions in terms of embodiment between oral and written modes of communicating, and keeping our concept of performance “live” in the popular sense of the term. Orature is a kind of performance in which the live voicing of words is the central mode of meaning making. The portmanteau word orature (oral + literature) was coined on analogy with literature, the OED recording first usage in 1976 in the context of Black Studies, when J. W. Ward wrote of societies in which “‘orature’ not ‘literature,’” and “speech not writing” are “the primary mode[s] of communication.” In such societies, communication through orature is said to be via oral transmission and aural reception – that is, via the mouth and ear; however, much of the communication that occurs in the performance of orature takes place outside the mouth and beyond the ear. What linguists call the paralinguistic elements of communication (those that go along with the words)—elements like posture, gesture, facial expression, and the quality of movement (jerky, flowing, aggressive, gentle, frenetic, and so on)—convey a great deal. Clothes and costumes, musical and dance elements, and proxemics (the primary performer’s or performers’ distance from or nearness to the audience) can “tell” audiences much, too.

5

6

Introduction

The term oral masks the multimodal elements of communication, then, and insofar as oral is one of the etymological parents of the term orature, the latter’s many modes of meaning making are similarly obscured. When we want to signify the co-functioning of paralinguistic elements with speech and other vocalizations, however, the partialness of the term oral can be signalled by following it with a superscript plus sign: oral+. We re-sign the oral rather than resigning from using the term altogether because its use has enabled so much. However, the unmarked word orature needs to be understood as a portmanteau carrying the signs oral+ and literature in its etymology, and we invite you when reading the introduction to hear the silent plus sign in cognates of the word oral, like re-oralization, and in its compounds, like oral tradition. We have not used the plus sign in these contexts to avoid cluttering the page and tiring the eye, thus weakening the force of marking oral in this way. However, the effacing of the integrated, multimodal creation of meaning is but one dimension of the partialness of the sign oral, because what gets called the oral is further inseparable from the aural. Thus oral+ needs to be read as shorthand for oral+/aural+. With the partialities of the sign oral acknowledged, and the resulting partialities of orature recognized, it remains to be said that despite orature being in some ways an analogue of literature, it is not a thing,2 but an event, a performance of embodied words functioning with their paralinguistic elements to communicate meaning. Orature is an artful voicing of embodied words and other sounds in which audience members are co-creators, with whom the primary performer(s) work(s) in self-reflexive concert, attending to audience members’ responses, or lack thereof, as cues. However, orature is not just a technology of communication; it is also a socio-cultural event because it entails the reproduction of cultural codes and sound patterns, and is at different times an enactment of remembering, of transmitting collective memory, of accounting for the present, and of envisioning the future. Much ink has been spilled contending over the alleged appropriateness or inappropriateness, and advantages and disadvantages, of alternative terms to orature, which include oral literature or oraliture, unwritten literature, and oral verbal art. Distinguished scholars and artists line up on opposite sides of the debate, sometimes rather fiercely staking out and defending their namings. In general, social scientists tend to be less concerned than humanists with the self-contradictory nature of the words comprising the term oral literature, a term that bothers humanists in no small part because the root of the word literature lies in the Latin word for letters, litera. As a result, the contemporary word literature indicates that letters are constitutive elements of this form of cultural production.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

Beginning with Oral Literature in Africa (15–25), and again in Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (16) and Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (9–10), Finnegan has repeatedly affirmed the usefulness of the term oral literature. Finnegan argues that its efficacy for preparing people who have a scriptist bias—Roy Harris’s term in The Origin of Writing (46), not Finnegan’s—to receive “oral literature” as sophisticated art trumps the problems with the term’s etymology. She goes so far as to say that it is “an excess of pedantry to worry about the etymology of the word ‘literature’” (16). But humanists’ objection to the term oral literature arises, we contend, not from an overdeveloped concern merely for etymological consistency—humanists know as well as anyone that the meaning of words changes over time—but because we understand oral communication to be a different matter from the kind carried out when writers arrange letters into words and build words into sentences or other segments of meaning. Perhaps, too, humanists have been inclined to keep our disciplines “pure,” unsullied by the messy and difficult business of dealing with the people who perform orature, because we fear the complex and time-consuming negotiation of the ethical issues that arise when working with human subjects. In considering the defence of the term oral literature, we might also listen attentively to the views of someone who is a practitioner of both orature and literature, Jeannette Armstrong. She argues in “Aboriginal Literatures: A Distinctive Genre within Canadian Literature” that words do not have to be written to be literature and that to define literature solely in terms of the written tradition “diminishes and subverts a wider definition of artistry in words” (180). Thus the term literatures, as she uses it when writing about the place of Aboriginal verbal arts in relation to Canadian literature, “can be broadened to include artistic discipline contained in words—through perspective, subject, and contextual experience—encompassing all forms of Aboriginal oral tradition as a distinctive genre within Canadian literature” (181). Why, then, use the term orature in preference to oral literature? Partly the decision results from the persuasive power of Walter J. Ong’s argument in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word that the term oral literature “reveals our inability to represent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all” (12). Though his rhetoric seems to us overwrought when he calls the term oral literature “monstrous” and “strictly preposterous” (11), he memorably figures it as being “rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels” (12). Our naming practice also rests on the belief that we can honour the spirit informing Finnegan’s and

7

8

Introduction

Armstrong’s arguments without observing their letter. We use the term orature to recognize and respect artful voiced performances for themselves, as sui generis, but do so in the context of reaching for the umbrella of W. R. Bascom’s term verbal art (Finnegan, Oral Traditions 10), spreading it out to make space for literature proper (i.e., artful writing) underneath it and placing literature on the same footing as orature in that space. Defining orality in binary relation to literacy, as is the common discursive practice following Ong’s Orality and Literacy, is a fundamentally ideological operation that situates orality as a set of skills and practices inferior to those of literacy. As Margery Fee explains, the distinction is “deployed to favour particular classes, cultures and interests” (27). Moreover, just as James Paul Gee argues that literacy is not a single skill applicable across all discourses, but a set of “concrete social practices” embedded in specific social contexts crosshatched by the operation of ideologies (61), orality, or more properly, oralities, are inseparable from the ideological ecologies in which they are formed and operate. We have, therefore, chosen to use the term orality as “a very plural noun,” to borrow Foley’s formulation of oral poetry (How 128), and employ it principally to refer to the speech and other oral+ practices of specific social groups or cultural communities, whether those communities be constituted by ethnicity, class, gender, or other socially differentiating forces. Speech may seem like a word that scarcely needs explication, but it, too, proves complex in this context. From a physiological perspective, speech is constituted by articulation (the language-specific ways in which sounds are produced), voice (use of the vocal folds, breath, and articulators such as the lips, tongue, teeth, and palate to produce sound), and fluency (including rhythm, with its elements of speed and hesitations). We use the word speech with an awareness of these constitutive elements, further meaning it to cover the full range of vocalized verbal dynamics—in other words, the range in delivery of vocalized words from whispered to shouted as they are employed in meaningful stretches of discourse within or across speech communities. Moreover, following the speech act theory of John L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, speech can be understood at three levels: as an utterance, or locution, with phonological, syntactic, and semantic elements; as intended meaning, or as having illocutionary force; and as effect, or as perlocutionary force. The performers of orature thus use their voices to articulate locutions that have both intended and received meanings, though the two are not necessarily identical even within a speech community, let alone across communities. In addressing their speech to an audience, primary performers can be

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

said to seek to act on audience members. Skillfully framed and heightened speech can make things happen, especially when uttered in community, as we are reminded by the ability of political orators to move their audiences for good or ill. A further distinction useful in our present context is one that sociolinguists such as Nessa Wolfson make between natural speech, produced in the normal course of participation in conversations, and what Cole calls fauxvrais s(t)imulati (16), speech produced when speakers know their utterances are being studied. The performed speech of orature can also be usefully distinguished from natural speech because while not a fauxvrais s(t)imulation, it is a framed and heightened, or artful, usage. Such usage sounds out its difference from natural speech as performers organize it according to the generic conventions of their societies, conventions that help “fluent audiences” (Foley, How 221) identify that performance is taking place as well as helping them make sense of what is being said. One could argue that having added a plus sign after oral and its cognates, we should do the same with speech, since it, too, is an embodied, multimodal form of communication. But quite apart from the argument about not wanting to tire the eye, speech does not carry the same ideological baggage that oral does in its frequent collocation with colonized or otherwise subjugated groups; thus continuously marking its reduction seems to us less imperative. The word sound must also have a special place in our vocabulary. Among Ong’s memorable formulations in Orality and Literacy are his remarks about sound as ephemeral and indicative of power. “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (32), he writes, encapsulating an idea that helps explain why orature is never exactly repeatable, even when exactly the same words are repeated, at least in the opinion of literates. Differences in context, audience, and nuances of performance, both vocal and otherwise, account for the irreproducibility of any performance of orature. Ong’s other soundrelated maxim, “Sound cannot be sounding without the use of power” (32), reminds us that sound is an energy, and as energy needs to be respected for its power. The idea that sounded words can move people thus returns to us in this aphorism. As Jonathan Sterne points out in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, “the phenomenon of sound … rest[s] at the in-between point of culture and nature” (10), because without human and animal abilities to hear, sound would not exist in the world, only vibrations (11). The historian of sound reproduction technologies also makes a productive distinction between hearing and listening, explaining that hearing is requisite for listening “but is not simply reducible to it” (19). As a “directed, learned

9

10

Introduction

activity,” hearing is decidedly a cultural practice and therefore variable across cultures. As readers of textualized orature, we will therefore produce the best readings when we understand the culturally specific parameters of listening to specific forms of orature. One instance of such a parameter is “responseability,” a concept that Anishinaabe poetscholaranthologist Kimberly Blaeser argues is part of North American Native oral and written storytelling (54). Her term implies a form of active listening that entails not only attending to sounds, words, and phrases, but also trying to “perceive the context, meaning, and purpose” (Ortiz qtd. in Blaeser, “Writing” 55) and to add to the exchange in this and other ways.3 Even more concrete in its delineation of listening parameters is Foley’s discussion of the highly responsive, rapt sectors of an audience of a Serbian singer of oral epic, a guslar whom Foley identifies only by the name of the ´ Foley reports, “The most involved of the place where he performed, Tršic. singer’s audience responded by calling out alternate or additional lines, or by loudly offering observations about the action of the saga unfolding before him” (How 83). However, Foley also acknowledges that some audience members, unmoved by the performance that others found so engaging, wandered away. The lack of sanction by other members of the audience or by the guslar suggests that such behaviour is not a violation of listening parameters in the specific cultural context of the performance, which was not on the festival stage in the village but under a tree outside the ancestral home of the celebrated guslar in whose honour the festival was being held. The importance of knowing how to “listen” when reading textualized orature and/or orality, of being an enculturated “listenary,” to recall Cole’s term into the discussion, is a common implication of several of the contributions to the present project. These include George Elliott Clarke’s discussion of White critics’ disparaging responses to Black textualized orality; the explanations provided by way of introduction to T. L. Burton’s performances of William Barnes’s poems in the video “Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance”; and Mareike Neuhaus’s elucidation of a recurrent stylistic feature of Cree poet Louise Halfe’s book-length poem Blue Marrow. To speak of listeners is of course linked to speaking of audience, a word whose etymology designates those who hear, but in practice most often means those who listen in culturally influenced ways. Because the audience of orature, as we have pointed out above, always does more than hear (receive auditory stimuli), more even than engage in the culturally conditioned act of listening, perhaps audience ought also to be designated by the suffixing of the plus sign as audience+. However, having marked the term here, we will

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

follow the practice used in relation to cognates and compounds of oral+ and its related term aural, allowing the sign oral+ in our text to prompt recall of how often other aspects of our vocabulary related to verbal artistic performance are reductive. What we do need to make explicit, however, is that while the term audience can suggest a homogeneously responsive group all functioning and responding in the same way, variables in audience constitution include the degree to which members are active or passive; what roles they play in performance and when; and whether they are primary, secondary, or tertiary audiences.4 The varying proximity of audience to primary performer(s) is perhaps the aspect of audience most unfamiliar to non-ethnographers or those not engaged in Performance Studies. Thus, an example central to Emily Blacker’s essay in this collection may be helpful here—that of Tagish-Tlingit oral storyteller Angela Sidney and her multiple audiences. Concerned to pass on the wealth of her stories to her grandchildren and subsequent generations of children, Sidney told the stories to ethnographer Julie Cruikshank so that the latter could write down and publish them in various venues and in varying forms—community newspapers, broadcast readings, and illustrated booklets (such as Tagish Tlaagú / Tagish Stories) for use in schools, language revival projects, and other community-based purposes. In this circumstance, Sidney’s primary audience is Cruikshank, and her secondary audience is community members, even though there is an important sense in which her community members are more culturally proximate than Cruikshank and the ones for whom the perlocutionary force of Sidney’s speech acts is ultimately the most important. But Sidney, along with two other storytellers, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned, granted permission for Cruikshank to publish their stories in a scholarly text, which appeared as Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders, thus creating a tertiary audience primarily of academics and their students, but including an educated public. Members of this tertiary audience can “hear” the stories in their mind’s ear, reconstructing the original storytelling from the cues to performance in the Yukon elders’ texts and from the information provided in the critical apparatus with which Cruikshank supports the texts. Audience is, then, far from the simple concept it may appear to be, but it is nonetheless a necessary word in the vocabulary of those studying textualized orature. I have coined the terms textualized orature and textualized orality,5 minting the first from the conviction that to call what appears in books orature or works of oral tradition is distorting and even damaging.6 The second I formulated by analogy, but also with the recognition that when speech-in-writing

11

12

Introduction

or simulated speech is the actual referent, referring simply to speech can be problematic, especially when the speech is that of marginalized groups and/or is in non-standard language, and even more so when that speech is created by someone from outside the speech community of the alleged “speaker.” Print textualized versions, which lack the dynamism of actual orature and orality, can, when judged by strictly literary standards rather than with an awareness of oral+ aesthetics, seem pale, sickly, and boring poor relations of their apparently more vigorous, engaging, and rich literary kin. Worse, the language of those who speak a low-prestige version of the language, if not sensitively textualized, can make the speakers appear laughable, even ridiculous, as is too often the case with textualized dialect. When textualized orature is presented as just another type of literature and read using literary criteria, and/or when the textualized orality of politically and socially marginalized groups is read with ethnocentric and class-centred criteria for “proper” speech, something political happens. Readers’ lack of requisite information and knowledge of how to read textualized orature and orality gets refigured as textual inadequacy. For example, many if not most readers are ignorant of the way both oral+ and literary aesthetics are tied to what is requisite for successful communication in those respective contexts. The vaunted economy of literary poetry, for instance, is directly related to readers’ ability to re-read passages whose meaning escapes them on the first pass. However, repetition serves effective communication in oral situations in which a cough, a baby’s crying, or a listener’s moment of inattention to a speaker means that irrevocable words have been spoken but not heard. Such extra-textual considerations will not save textualized orature from the charge of repetitiousness, however, unless readers have been instructed in oral+ aesthetics either by teachers or textual apparatus. Similarly, without pedagogical intervention, the simulated speech of the “poor relations” in printed texts buttresses the deficit model of marginalized groups (for example, Indigenous peoples lack development/civilization; women lack a penis) that sustains and justifies the dominance of the powerful. It is instructive to note that just as Freud argued that women have penis envy, Ong maintains that those in cultures supposedly without writing “want literacy passionately” (15) when they become aware of its power.7 The term textualized orature signals that orature has undergone a process of de- and re-contextualization that fundamentally changes the oral+ verbal art, making it into what Jamaican critic Carolyn Cooper calls the neo-oral (6). This process of remaking orature can entail transcription, translation, digitizing, other forms of technological mediation, or some combination of the foregoing. Textualized orality is, by analogy, the technological mediation of a

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

social or cultural group’s ways of communicating orally in combination with any idiolectal speech characteristics—that is, those specific to an individual’s language variety. Certainly the process of moving from embodied performance to a textual form, be it manuscript, print, audio or audio-visual, or digital, is always in some measure reductive and alienates the original from the context in which it lived. What Kamau Brathwaite in History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry called “total expression” (18) becomes in textualized orature and orality partial expression. This reduction and alienation occurs even when the result serves positive purposes in its new environment, such as preserving language and cultural teachings for young people who are uninterested in listening to stories of “the old days” while their Elders are still alive. Textualization impairs the communication of sense in terms of the performers’ and readers’ abilities to make meaning; it does so precisely because textualization reduces sensory processing. Were this reduction, alienation, and impairment not part of the textualization process, Foley would not have had to devote an entire book to teaching readers the skill named in the book’s title, How to Read an Oral Poem. But learning both some generally applicable skills to help us read textualized orature as a genre and skills specific to the culture from which the orature comes is possible, and the rewards are multiple. Many of the essays in the present collection serve a pedagogical function by modelling the exercise of such skills, and also manifest the rewards of learning them. The terms textualized orature and textualized orality rest with varying degrees of physicality on an understanding of two of the usual senses of the term text in literary studies. The first is the kind of material object that has pages, a codex, the kind that appears, for example, on the textbook list for a university course. In this sense, a text is something we can see, touch, smell, hear (when we handle it, turning pages), and taste (should we be unaccountably prompted to do so). The words of such a text have a degree of fixity that is great, but not complete, as anyone can tell you who has ever had a book invaded by a non-human species of bookworm, doodled on enthusiastically by a child, scorched by fire, or dropped into water. The second meaning of text in literary studies is the words the poems, short fictions, novels, and plays comprise, which words we can see and may even be able to feel, but which are otherwise literally insensible to us, though by active and imaginative reading we may restore auditory, olfactory, and gustatory elements of what the text represents. The words of this kind of text can change from edition to edition as the result of conscious authorial or editorial interventions,

13

14

Introduction

or accidentals, those unintended mistakes that occur so often when humans processs text. (Yes, I have intentionally created a mistake to exemplify unintentional ones.) In the field of oral-written studies, however, text is what is produced when orature is lifted out of the discursive environment where it lived, thus decontextualizing or decentring it, and reifying it when it is then carried across into a new medium and discursive environment, thus also recontextualizing or recentring it. In this view, text is not solely the product of processes such as incising, writing, printing, or digitally processing words; it can refer just as readily to films, video, records, compact discs, and digital audio files. Moreover, in the Bauman and Briggs view—and theirs is the one we take here— text is not a word we can use to designate the spoken/sung/chanted/whispered or otherwise articulated vocalizations of an oral+ performance itself because those vocalizations are embodied constituents of a performance event, inseparable from the other constituents of performance. Bauman and Briggs remark the irony, however, that the very signals of performance that mark performed speech off from the flow of natural speech—signals like frequent use of heightened language—by making a display of speech, in some measure objectify it. Thus “stretches of discourse [are rendered] discontinuous with their discursive surround” (73–74), thereby facilitating their extraction from their context and their transformation into text. Storytelling is a word often used without marking the differentiation between a particular form of orature and a process enacted through text. In the script-centric world of the academy, literary scholars rarely feel a need to designate what they study as literary storytelling to mark its descent from oral storytelling, though in many instances the medium is made clear by the context. However, Wendy Roy in her essay in this collection makes the useful distinction between spoken story and written story, and we further recognize that visual culture is another locus of storytelling, as is dance, though the idioms are of course quite different. If differentiating medium and mode when discussing storytelling brings precision to the discussion, differentiating genre in culturally specific ways also strengthens critical practice, as Julia Emberley has pointed out in Thresholds of Difference by citing the difference between the Cree sacred stories (âtayôhkêwina) and everyday stories (âcimowina) (180n1). The immediacy of live storytelling and dance performance as compared to the distances across which written and painted storytelling or videotaped dance can occur is an important difference related to media. The feedback loop between the audience of live storytelling and the primary storyteller

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

is, for example, far more direct and immediate than that related to textual forms because response in live storytelling takes place within the event and thus helps constitute it, as well as potentially continuing beyond the event. In contrast, critical response in reviews, readers’ communications with authors, integration of texts into curricula, and the commercial success of books and other forms of storytelling texts is not actually part of the storytelling to which they relate, though they may well shape future editions of that storytelling or brand-new storytelling by artists who work in those media.

The Conversational Circle of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond Equipped with a shared vocabulary, you can more easily join the conversational circle of this book and its related website. The circle shares the purpose, with the authors of Orality and Literacy across Disciplines and Cultures, a 2011 collection of essays edited by Keith Carlson, Kristina Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, of exploring theoretical issues related to the interaction of the oral and the written in specific cultural contexts; however, the present book distinguishes itself from its immediate predecessor not only by adding into the oral-written mix an interest in the visual, but also by focusing more precisely on cultural production and by including the voices of oral performance practitioners. Moreover, the scholarship of a number of the academics gathered here is informed by their participation in storytelling, whether as poets, singers, or visual artists. We join with them in seeking to open spaces within academic environments and scholarly discourses in which orally centred or related ways of making and transmitting knowledges can be affirmed and validated in expanded ways,8 so that the definition of what constitutes expert work can be enlarged. Moreover, the contributions of this volume are sometimes framed in language that challenges the notion that valuable work can only be done in the sober and serious language of the academy. The artists of our circle are inclined to play with the way language looks on the page and how it sounds, exploiting language’s semantic power while working the verbi-voco-visual nexus that McLuhan and Papanek foregrounded. By including such work we are answering Jacques Attali’s call in Noise: The Political Economy of Music for “theoretical indiscipline” (6), but we attend to sound not just as “a herald of society,” as Attali suggested noise was, or even as a record of past and present cultural and political realities; sometimes we attend for the sheer pleasure of listening to the sensuous playing with language that so often occurs in work that simulates the oral in the written.

15

16

Introduction

The move to include in the present volume the work of those scholars who have turned to visual culture as another site of encoding, transmitting, and contextualizing what we have come to call “oral knowledges” may appear contradictory in light of the warning against “visuocentricity” in the introduction’s opening, but the apparent contradiction dissolves when balanced perception is understood to be the goal. Working toward that balance entails a commitment to respect and embrace the diversity of forms that people use to tell their stories, and those forms include the visual. Making the visual a key feature of this collection was further motivated by the perception that books of textualized orature and orality frequently include visual representations of the world of the stories, often picturing the physical context from which the stories come, and/or providing graphic signs of embodiment, human or otherwise. By such means, the books effectively counter some of the loss that occurs when words are disembodied and orature is otherwise decontextualized.9 The essay in this collection by Anishinaabe poetscholaranthologist Kimberly M. Blaeser, “A Nexus of Connections: Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest,” confirms this perception by explaining that writers’ use of visual material in their work enables them to “counter … one-dimensional text-based expression” and “to suggest multiple elements of performance.” Blaeser explains that “[t]hrough visual or verbal juxtaposition … Native artists can compel connection or relationship, can imply movement,” and thus can “approximate the spoken, chanted, danced, drummed reality of ceremonial moments … [and] invoke scent, mime, and powerful silences.” The “imaginative crossing of time, space, and ways of knowing” that Blaeser finds in Native American writing is in accord with the view expressed by Okanagan/Nsyilxcen storytellerpoettheoristteacherpublisher Jeannette Armstrong in the bio-bibliographical note prefacing her poems in Native Poetry in Canada. She envisions there a synaesthetic integration of oral+, written, and visual in work yet to be created: “I want to continue to work with poems that deconstruct linearity, the page. Maybe someday I’ll make a three-dimensional installation that will speak poetry the way I see it” (Armstrong and Grauer 106). However, more bounded kinds of integration are already occurring. To suggest the pervasiveness of the practice, examples of the integration of orature and visual representation from one context, Metis writing in Canada, are discussed below, as are more summarily reviewed examples from other contexts.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

The Visual Interface in Metis Writings of the Oral Metis authors in Canada10 engaged in writing the oral+ integrate into their work drawings, paintings, and visual motifs reflective of their cultures, and photographs of people and places. Poet Gregory Scofield uses line drawings of stones forming one of the four quadrants of the Medicine Wheel to preface the four sections of his book The Gathering. Then, to signify that the Wheel’s medicine power is helping make whole again the still fragile persona whose healing journey is tracked through the poems, Scofield rounds out the book with the image of the entire Medicine Wheel.11 In I Knew Two Metis Women, Scofield records his genealogy and the musically infused environment in which he grew up not just in the poems but also by including family photographs, many of relatives playing instruments. Musical staffs used as section headers and guitar motifs beside the page numbers, while not of Scofield’s creation, are features of the book design that become part of its signification (Scofield “Re”). The Gabriel Dumont Institute’s edition of I Knew Two Métis Women more fully represents the multimodality of embodied Metis oral tradition and its appeals to the complete sensorium. Two compact discs feature the author and community members Maria Campbell and Tantoo Cardinal reading the poems; the music of Métis fiddler John Arcand, multi-instrumentalist Donny Parenteau, and singer Andrea Menard; and excerpts from the country music classics to which the poems allude. The sleeve for these discs pictures the Métis sash and beadwork flowers so vividly reproduced that viewers who have previously touched either can imaginatively feel them again. Pictures of recipe cards for “Aunty Georgie’s ‘Sunday’ Bannock” evoke the smell and taste of this traditional flatbread, a feature of many gatherings at which Métis stories are told. The pamphlet included further evokes the multiple sensations of the Métis oral traditional context through pictures of such objects as an old vinyl LP, leather fiddle case, wicker laundry basket, and scrubbing board. Moreover, photographs of the compact discs’ performers remind us that oral traditional performances are always community events. Further evidence from the Metis context of the intimate connections between oral, visual, and other senses is a collection of stories made into a graphic novel anthology, which appeared under the title Stories of Our People: Liizistwayr di la naaysoon di Michif. Darren Prefontaine, a researcher at the Gabriel Dumont Institute in Saskatoon, explains the thinking behind turning the stories into graphic novel format: “We thought it would be a good way to promote the intergenerational transmission of Metis stories … [The graphic novel is] the main medium to reach teens.… And there’s a definite

17

18

Introduction

link between the oral tradition and visual media” (quoted in Simcoe A2). The anthology is a direct descendant of Maria Campbell’s translations and transcriptions in Stories of the Road Allowance People, a book with paintings by Sherry Farrell Racette that work with the verbal transcriptions and translations by fellow Metis community member Maria Campbell to bring a group of their people’s oral narratives to the page. When Campbell remarks that Racette’s paintings provide “the other part of the stories” because her art “gives us another dimension, another layer” (“One” 197), she confirms the strong connection between oral tradition and the visual while also suggesting that her versions, like any tellings of traditional stories, are inevitably partial; there is no such thing as an authoritative version. Campbell thus invites us to see the book as a collection of bimodally translated stories, not as a gathering of stories in words that are then illustrated.

Other Visually Signifying Textualized Orature and Orality The integration of the visual as part of the meaning making of textualized orature and orality is also part of the practice of poets from other cultural groups in Canada. We can find it in books of dub poetry and in Euro-Canadian poets’ writings of the oral+. Dub is the reggae-born, highly political oral poetry that came out of the ghettoes of Kingston, Jamaica, and the diasporic community in London, England, before being transplanted to multiple other locations, flourishing in particular in Toronto. Books of dub poems that picture some aspects of their world include Ahdri Zhina Mandiela’s Speshal Rikwes, which uses labelled dubplates to list the contents of each section of her book; Clifton Joseph’s Metropolitan Blues, in which Kwasi Ahmad’s drawings offer visual “translations” of the characters and historical personages in the poems, and record the immediate milieu from which the poems came, the housing projects of the Jane–Finch area of Toronto;12 and d’bi.young’s art on black, which reprints on the covers and as preface to each section Judy Singh photographs of young’s body painted with African-inspired body art, thus suggesting that young identifies as African (or afrikan, as she writes the word) and perhaps that Africa had graphic sign systems before either the Moslem or European invader-settlers brought their Arabic or Roman alphabets to Africa. Euro-Canadian writings of the oral+ are just as likely as print-textualized dub to integrate the visual. Stephen Scriver’s mass-market paperback of colloquial people’s poems about hockey, All Star Poet!, features whimsical drawings of its characters and contexts; and in Just Off Main, fellow prairie poet Gary Hyland provides a material context for his voice portraits of male adolescents growing up in a mid-twentieth-century Canadian prairie town

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

by reprinting photographs of the settings for and activities of these youths’ lives. As part of the sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, bpNichol participated in bringing selected performance scores to the vigorously and variously inscribed pages of The Prose Tattoo. His Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography matches its “oral-storytelling methods” (7) with ten sketches of the body parts that together form the work’s (table of) contents, and that separately act as visual chapter headings. Nichol’s comics move that nexus of oral-visual-and-written into (and out of) the different frames of the comic strip, where hand-drawn letters often sit in minimalist landscapes with everyday objects dramatized by radical alterations in scale (Peters 19), and words in the speech and thought balloons of his cartoon characters manifest a “system of no/tation—listening with the eyes” (Peters 214). The phenomenon I have been tracing to help explain our project’s interest in the visual is time-honoured and transnational as well. J. B. Bessinger speculates in “Oral to Written: Some Implications of the Anglo-Saxon Transition” that the change from oral traditional singers’ culture to that produced by the reading aloud of books may have been “made smoother by the production of illustrated codices” and simultaneously “complicated by the bookish suppression of the musical bases of oral poetry” (11). Bessinger develops his argument by suggesting that “in the richly decorated Gospel books of the Age of Bede or the sensitive linear illustrations of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the eye of the reader struggling toward fluent literacy might be distracted and delighted by pictures” (11). Pictures as facilitators of literacy may also be a further explanation for the inclusion of work directed to social groups more at home in “iterature” than “literature.” But when the word illiterate makes its two appearances in the essays collected here, it is in the context of Naomi Foyle’s recording colonial and Catholic Church restrictions on people’s learning to read and write, and George Elliott Clarke’s citation of Frantz Fanon’s scathing confrontation of European prejudice against Blacks and their alleged “jabber.” Clarke notes that this prejudice is then used to dismiss literature by Blacks “as highfalutin gibberish” because it “issues from a historically illiterate foundry.” In a countermove, Clarke’s chapter reads art on black’s pictures of young’s graphically marked body as issuing a manifesto of both Black presence in poetry in the face of White inscriptions of the Black body, and of the Black poet’s multiple literacies.

19

20

Introduction

Other Interfaces This collection’s inclusion of the visual interface with the oral and written was not made in the belief that visual culture is the only other art form that could usefully be attended to when considering the translation of the oral into other media; indeed, the phrase “Other Verbal Media” in the name of the conference for which the precursor papers of a number of the essays in this collection were written invited participants to consider more than the visual. We need look no further than one of Campbell’s translated stories, “Jacob,” to point to yet another mode of knowledge construction and transmission. There, the narrator remarks that his people “use dah membering / an we pass it on by telling stories an singing songs. / Sometimes we even dance dah membering” (88). The story expressly contrasts this form of knowledge making and sharing with that of “Dah whitemans,” whose records reach back thousands of years, “Cause him / he write everything down” (88). The compact disc that is part of the revised edition of Stories of the Road Allowance People provides a soundtrack to the stories that documents the audience’s role in storytelling and the place of the fiddle in the Metis storytelling for(u)m,13 but the recorded reading of “La Beau Sha Shoo,” a narrative about a fiddle player, also presents evidence that toe-and-heel-tapping jigs with spoonplaying rhythmic accompaniment (Hourie) were also part of that for(u)m. Moreover, Foley, in discussing oral epic from a wide range of international contexts, writes that these epics “may incorporate dance [and] visual aids” (How 204). Dance does surface briefly as part of oral tradition in Gugu Hlongwane’s study here of South African poet Rampolokeng, who in “rap 33” represents himself as a dancer who knows that quite different musics are trying to make him dance to their tune: one kind of music is, he says, “meant to break my knee” and so lacks the power to “move me”; another is constituted by “the beat of progressive hands” and is thus the only one that he “can … dance / to.” But no presentation centrally about dance was offered either for the conference or for the present collection. Thus, the contributions of dance to forms of remembering and its place in what, in a kind of verbal shorthand, we call oral tradition, will have to be addressed in a more extended way elsewhere. The Road Allowance people’s story “Jacob” does not argue for the superiority of danced or orally produced, embodied, and transmitted knowledges over written ones, or vice versa. The expressive forms are simply presented as alternative media for transmitting rememberings. Western scholarship would, we believe, do well to adopt this respectful approach to stories, recognizing that each mode of constructing and transmitting knowledge has

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

its own richnesses to offer, its own advantages or strengths that may be diminished or absent in others. As J. Edward Chamberlin argues in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, if we are to get beyond divisive Us–Them binaries, we will need to understand the value of approaching each storytelling with an attitude of believing it and not, rather than believing it or not, such double-minded believing being “the challenge,” Chamberlin reminds us, “of every metaphor, of every myth, of every religion, of every community” (34). Without awareness of that challenge, he maintains, “myth degenerates into ideology, religion into dogma, and communities into conflict” (34). Depending on which genre(s), modes, and forms the story operates in, and which dimensions of experience it attends to, it can create credibility of one kind but not another. Furthermore, different groups of people may believe the same story in different ways. Because each story will almost certainly have its “and not” dimensions for some of those experiencing its ceremony of belief (Chamberlin 2), a diversity of narratives in a range of genres, modes, and media and with a wide variety of subjects can help bring an awareness of the always kaleidoscopic truths of both human experiences and our universe as we perceive and story them.

Joining a Conversation Already in Progress The current book joins the scholarly conversation outlined by Finnegan in “‘Oral Tradition’—Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity?” in the wake of two related events: an interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and cross-cultural conference, The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences, held 28–30 June 2008 at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada; and a simultaneous, related festival of oral performance called eVOCative!, co-curated by spokenwordartistscholar T. L. Cowan and poetscholarstandupcomedian+ Neal McLeod. The conference was designed to facilitate participants’ exposure to the ways scholars working in other disciplines, cultural contexts, and historical periods approached the study of the relationships among the oral, written, and other media; the festival provided living proof of the vitality of the performing arts working at the intersections of the oral, written, and visual while also giving participants the opportunity to learn more about contemporary cultural production in these media. Twelve of the seventeen chapters in this volume had their first form as talks presented by artists and academics at the conference run in tandem with eVOCative!, but a few specific invitations to contribute and a general call for chapters also went out. The resulting collection offers the perspectives of

21

22

Introduction

artists who work in a range of performance, visual, and literary arts, and of scholars in disciplinary locations that include English, History, Indigenous Studies, and Sociology but who engage with a much broader range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship. It focuses on performance and other forms of cultural production arising from the modern and contemporary Canadian contexts, but also from Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean, and from eras ranging from the early modern to the present day.

Situating Listening Up in Relation to the Artistic and Multi-Disciplinary Turn to the Oral Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond participates in a broad and sustained turn to the oral+ in both artistic practices and scholarly disciplines of the twentieth century and beyond. The artistic turn is manifested in the emergence of new audiocentric genres and in moves away from script-centred practices in the performance arts. Among the new genres constituting or featuring a turn to the oral by artists in this period are sound poetry and sound singing (traditions in which Paul Dutton and Adeena Karasick, contributors to this volume, work); dub, slam, and other forms of spoken word poetry (addressed here in the contributions by Clarke, anitafrika, Karasick, Helen Gregory, and Dutton); and the vocal aspects of sound art, which is staged in gallery, museum, concert, and other public spaces (Dutton is again representative here). There have always been, of course, performers whose work is improvised and musicians who play by ear (including most who can read music), but the move away from scripted music is being taken to new edges by the practices of artists like Dutton. In his contribution to the current project, “The Speech–Music Continuum,” Dutton maps his own career-long journey as a multigenre writerperformer, situating a number of his poems along an oral–written–music continuum by reading from his print-published poems and by providing for his readers sound files accessible on this volume’s companion website. Presenting his essay in a concert of oral+ and written forms, he richly contextualizes his own sound-based experiments by attending closely to the music of vocalizations in other artists’ work as well. Despite his confessions of weariness with terminological distinction, his nuanced discussion of sound poetry, oral, verbal, and sound arts, and “soundsinging” contributes substantially to the clarification of genres along the speech–music continuum. Karasick’s “Echohomonymy: A Poetics of Ethos, Eros, and Erasure,” a phono-sensuous “theorogram,”14 turns to the oral+ in multiple ways. Karasick introduces the print-textualized performance poem that appears in this

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

volume as “a poetics of performance that focuses on not what is being said, but how ‘meaning’ is determined through what’s eVOCative, provocative, talkative.” Her reference to the Saskatoon festival, where she performed a version of her piece as part of a rhapsodic duet with bill bissett, provides one indication of how her practice is informed by the dynamics of oral traditional performance in that she adapts her poems to the specific contexts in which she presents them. Readers can get a fuller sense of this practice by comparing the version printed here with the one in Amuse Bouche titled “Ecohymonymy.” The sexualized play of phonological difference across homophonic sameness in Karasick’s poem is a manifestation of jouissance, the kind of total pleasure that Julia Kristeva envisions emanating from the semiotic chora and “flow[ing] into language” (Revolution 79) as evidence of the “dying Mouth,” the dying oral, that yet refuses to die (Desire 153). “Echohomonymy” has, then, the character of good poetry as bpNichol defined it, that is, the kind that “gets [its] tongue in your ear, breathes into it, & makes the whole body squirm with the pleasure of it” (“’Pata” 354). Moreover, Karasick’s language functions like that of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which is to say, as a kind of metonymy of oral tradition. Thus we use Joyce’s orally animated language as foretaste of “Echohomonymy” and to say to Karasick: “How good you are in explosition! How farflung your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary!” (Joyce, 3.1, 419). Within the academy, the turn to the oral has taken shape principally as a move away from the visual in response to the distorting epistemological and ontological effect of vision’s dominance. The discipline of philosophy has been an important site both for this turn and for a critique of its excesses. The line of twentieth-century “audiocentric” philosophers begins with Martin Heidegger. His critique of Western “ocularcentrism” (Martin Jay’s coinage, and an alternative naming to Cole’s “visuocentricity”) forwarded a tripartite auditory alternative of Hören, Horchen, Gehören, whose German names reveal their connection to hearing in a way that the last of their English equivalents (to hear, to harken, to belong) does not. As McLeod points out in “nêhiyâwiwin and Modernity,” Heidegger “advocates a ‘thinking outside’ the interpretive horizon of modernity … urg[ing] a more holistic way of conceiving our place in the world” (50). The line of audiocentric thinkers rooted in Heidegger runs through the French feminist theorists of écriture féminine, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Kristeva. They give a gendered dimension to the critique of ocularcentricity by focusing on the evaluative power of the male gaze, turning to listening and touch as ways to perceive gendered difference, and theorizing a

23

24

Introduction

disruption of patriarchal “sense” through sound vibrations emanating from what Irigaray formulated as woman’s resonant body. Their focus on embodied sound is replicated in many contributions to the present project. Jacques Attali’s Noise explores the political economy of its subject, reading noise as a sign of the life of the marginalized, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening seeks by shifting attention to the audiocentric to overcome the objectifying power of ocularcentrism, a power that facilitates the dehumanization of the gendered, racialized, classed Other by the hegemonic European subject. The “noise” of Africanadian voices is taken up in this volume by Clarke, and the strengthening of bonds through listening is addressed by Dakota scholartist Waziyatawin and by Blaeser, while T. L. Burton, in “Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance: The Case of William Barnes,” in advocating strongly for the Dorset dialect poet Barnes (1801–1886), is equally passionate about the necessity of reading aloud poems written in a variety of English that departs from what he refers to as “a homogenized and colourless ‘global English.’” This English is of course the language of the standard grapholect, the apparently accentless written version of the language, from which so many writings of the oral+ turn away. Philosophy has further relevance as background to thinking about the oral+, written, and visual in its interactions with and critiques of structuralist linguistics and of anthropology, most notably in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss’s concept of difference as a transcendental signifier rather than a relational term, and in his critique of Ferdinand de Saussure’s phonocentricism. The three most prominent names in the line of thinkers associated with the turn to the oral in linguistics are the structuralists Saussure, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Roman Jakobson. Saussure made the case that spoken rather than written language was the proper province of linguistics and forwarded an understanding of the word as linguistic sign composed of sound patterns (the signifier) and concept (the signified). He also argued that meaning was created through differences between a language’s set of signifiers and the concepts its signifiers stood for, and he distinguished between the impersonal, social system of language (langue) and individual, personal use of the system (parole). He thus laid important foundations for sociolinguistics and for a re-valuing of the varieties of speech used outside the privileged sectors of society. This revaluation is of major interest to those studying textualized orality because to understand this genre we must first understand orality, and, as Graham Furniss points out in “On the Implications of Orality,” if we as critics are to understand the writing of the multidimensional oral, “we

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

need the insights of sociolinguistics to begin to understand the complexities of [speech’s] effectiveness, or its lack” (269). Trubetzkoy is credited with distinguishing phonology (the study of sound patterns and how differences in sound change the meanings of utterances) from phonetics (the physical production of audible speech sounds and their combination, description, and representation through written symbols), and with developing, along with Jakobson, techniques for analyzing sound systems in language. These techniques Jakobson then used to elaborate structuralist approaches to other disciplines, including poetry and the visual arts. Anthropology was also a major site of the turn to the oral because the discipline constituted itself in relation to cultures that it constructed as savage or primitive—that is, those cultures whose verbal communication was misunderstood to be exclusively oral. Structuralist arguments that the human mind everywhere has the same structures and that those structures operate on the basis of binary opposites is certainly conducive to an understanding of the oral and the written as separated by a great divide. Eric Havelock’s crystallization of the idea of the Great Divide between the oral and the written in Preface to Plato was no doubt significantly shaped by structuralism, the dominant mode of thinking about culture in the Western academy of the 1960s and 1970s. Lévi-Strauss’s nostalgic oralophilia in Tristes Tropiques was, however, a major stimulant to Derrida’s poststructuralist response to phonocentrism in his critique of the metaphysics of presence. Moreover, ethnographers who engaged in the massive project of salvage anthropology, powered by the belief that Indigenous peoples were dying out, did fieldwork to collect and write down Indigenous stories. Working from the script-centred view of culture, they thought they were recording the oral texts of primitive cultures when in fact what they were doing was extracting from performances of Indigenous orature. Most of the time, these anthropologists published the results in print form, sometimes—as in Franz Boas’s case—as edited or rewritten summaries, thereby creating a large archive of textualized orature. Ethnographers first studied orature for its social functions in the cultures that created and homeostatically transmitted it; anthologists then mined the ethnographic texts, which were recognized as verbal art both within anthropology and, belatedly, in literary studies.15 These ethnographic texts were in fact a major force in effecting the turn to the oral in literary studies, although the work of classicists Milman Parry and his student Albert B. Lord, who created oral formulaic theory to explain the composition of Homeric epic, was another such force.

25

26

Introduction

The ethnographic overwriting of Indigenous orature is most directly addressed in this volume by Blaeser’s and Emily Blacker’s essays. Blaeser arraigns the overwriting as part of a set of colonizing practices while also using it to explain the palimpsestic strategies that contemporary Native writers have developed as they “strive to counter colonial discourse and image by writing over, writing through, or importantly, writing differently.” Blacker in “Toward an ‘Open Field’: The Ethics of the Encounter in Life Lived Like a Story” focuses on the ethical implications of the complicated process of an ethnographer, Julie Cruikshank, print-textualizing stories of a cultural group of which she is not part and encountering what may well be generic incommensurability between her culture and that from which the orature comes. Blacker concludes that Cruikshank’s book, while valuable in recording and publishing community and individual stories, and while the product of a generally respectful approach, is at the same time “shaped by her own culturally determined ideas about life history—ideas that led her to produce a text that would facilitate smooth cross-cultural encounters.” This worthy goal of smoothing cross-cultural communication is, however, arguably achieved at the cost of pushing the stories into an autobiographical frame that violates the elders’ concept of proper presentation of self. To live one’s life like a story is, then, different from telling one’s life story. Blacker’s essay thus resonantly echoes a note about genre briefly sounded by Gugu Hlongwane when she remarks in her essay “Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa: The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng” on how some critics have sought to dismiss the South African work as not poetry because its political character does not match their expectations for the genre. “Towards an Open Field” can also serve as a caution in relation to Sophie McCall’s tentatively worded argument in First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship that the negotiations between Indigenous storytellers and White textualizer that produced Julie Cruikshank’s Life Lived Like a Story may be a model for more efficacious and respectful land claims negotiations. Cara DeHaan’s essay “Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature: Photographs in The Days of Augusta,” while not technically about the overwriting of Indigenous orature, considers the impact of Robert Keziere’s black-and-white photographs that accompany Mary Augusta Tappage Evans’s thirty-seven autobiographical stories as recorded, transcribed, and edited by Jean E. Speare. DeHaan argues that on the positive side, the photographs can resite/resight the text by bringing to mind both the bodily presence of the narrator and some specifics of the locale where she lived and told her stories.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

However, the photographs’ intense personal focus on Tappage Evans also creates a contradiction analogous to the one that Blacker’s essay points out in Cruikshank’s work and that is evident in other books of ethnographically mediated Aboriginal narrative: the photos, like those in a conventional Western autobiography, centre on the first-person narrator, but the stories, like many First Nations textualized oral narratives, explore the narrator’s wider relations with her community. Collectively, the essays by Blaeser, Blacker, and DeHaan suggest that the kind of ethical relations that Derrida conceived of and articulated as “the ear of the other” signing back to an interlocutor (Ear 51) remain extraordinarily difficult to realize across cultures. Thus the work done by Laura J. Murray and Keren Rice in Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Traditions is a vital critical enterprise. DeHaan makes use of the introduction to set up her account of the difficulties inherent in textualizing orature, as well as of Blaeser’s discussion in “Writing Voices Speaking: Native Writers and an Oral Aesthetic” regarding the importance of storyteller–audience interaction; and Blacker draws explicitly on Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer’s “The Paradox of Talking on the Page: Some Aspects of Tlingit and Haida Experience” in the Murray and Rice book to enable a comparative discussion of Cruikshank’s textualization practices. However, the essays of DeHaan and Blacker also continue the work of Hopi filmmaker and language preserver– animator Victor Masayesva, Jr., in “It Shall Not End Anywhere: Transforming Oral Traditions,” in its concerns for the integrity of the life and language of oral tradition as it is textualized, and for the political valence of this issue, which Masayesva connects to the loss of sovereignty: he asks, “[W]hat is left of our sovereignty if we allow non-community members to record, learn, speak and express our Selves?” (Murray and Rice 94). As part of a larger exploration of the motivations for, and ethical issues related to, textualizing orature and orality, J. Edward Chamberlin in his essay for the Murray and Rice collection “Doing Things with Words: Putting Performance on the Page” also engages the issue of the promiscuous access that writing down oral traditions enables. His concern for finding the right form (in the broadest sense of the term) for translating the embodied experiences of oral tradition, for finding what he calls a “ceremony of belief that accompanies the chronicle of events” (77), is another way of expressing the concerns of DeHaan’s and Blacker’s essays. These concerns overlap with those addressed in d’bi.young.anitafrika’s digitally textualized oral+ essay “the storyteller’s integrity.” The poet’s multifaceted responsibility and accountability to community, to the earth, and to one’s embodied and spiritual self are emphasized in the talk that the dynamic

27

28

Introduction

dub storyteller performs before the audience of conference-goers gathered at the “The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media” (see drc.usask. ca.projects/oral). anitafrika’s question “Do you have to dialogue with the village that comes to listen to you, that gives you the space to speak?” makes room for an extended sense of not just audience but community beyond that of her most proximate Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian ones; willing listeners of whatever cultural background constitute a new village in her formulation. Vitally connected to community, anitafrika uses talkbacks after performances of her scripted versions of the life and languages of her various communities to ensure that her work is both accurately presenting their lived experiences and traditions, and also meeting the oral+ storyteller’s responsibility to use the communities’ traditional stories to address the issues its members face in the present. The embodiment of performance is for her critical, and in “the storyteller’s integrity” she somatically and vocally emphasizes that storytellers have to use all the resources that are available to them, not just words, to communicate in ways that are “going to be clear to our village.” The turn to the oral necessarily results in attention to the other side of the oral/aural interface, and the study of what Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner call “the culture of the ear” (xiii) has also flourished in multidisciplinary contexts. Sound history, for example, has become a burgeoning subfield in the larger discipline since the publication of James H. Johnson’s Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1995), as studies of both sound-generating practices and listening appear with increasing frequency. Several features of Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction are prime exemplars of the greater turn away from the visual that manifested itself as a turn to the aural/oral; among them is his argument that the cultural process and phenomenon we call the Enlightenment has counterparts in sound history, counterparts he collectively dubs the “Ensoniment” (2). His telling a story in which “sound, hearing, and listening are central to the cultural life of modernity … [and] foundational to modern modes of knowledge, culture, and social organization” (2)16 reconfigures modernity by centring on sound reproduction technologies. Susan Gingell also focuses on sound in relation to modernity in “Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in Neal McLeod’s Writings of the Oral+” (this volume). She contends that McLeod undertakes his traditionalizing project by recourse to several media, but principally writing that carries Cree sound and oral traditional stories.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

Locating Listening Up in the Field of Oral–Written–Visual Studies While part of the multidisciplinary turn to the oral, the essays of Listening Up are most closely related to studies of the relationship between the oral and written, with some additionally focusing on the visual. Music, literary, and communication theorists, having observed a shift from eye to ear culture in the twentieth century, often identify technologies as subverting visual hegemony. Music theorist Chris Cutler, for example, in his political theory of popular music, File under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music, argues that score-centred music culture—which is to say musically literate culture—has been toppled from its pre-eminent position by sound recording, but he also argues that class plays a role in restricting some composers’ and players’ access to music literacy and in maintaining their sole reliance on the ear. Cutler thus steps beyond the more determinist accounts of human technological development that are features of work in a lineage that stretches from Havelock through McLuhan to Ong, early Jack Goody, and beyond. The thinkers in this lineage lent part of the force of their considerable learning and often innovative thinking to building and maintaining a theory of the Great Divide between orality and literacy with which contemporary scholars—including many whose work is featured here—continue to engage. The latter do so largely by showing the ongoing traffic across that alleged Great Divide and by reconstructing the relationship of oral to written in terms of a continuum, interface, or interdiscursive exchange. The work presented in Listening Up exists in dialogue with similar projects that function in virtually all, if not all, fields of contemporary literary study to displace the theory of the Great Divide. Whether the context be Early Modern England or contemporary West Africa, scholars have found that an interactive model of oral and literate practices has greater explanatory power than theories of fundamental differences between orality and literacy. Adam Fox, for example, in Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, explains that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was frequently the site of multifaceted interactions and interfusions of the three media of speech, script, and print. Fox demonstrates that songs, stories, and expressions or reports of news could readily circulate among the three media as they were transmitted through every level of society, around the country, and over time. No “necessary antithesis between oral and literate forms of communication and preservation” existed, writes Fox: “[T]he one did not have to destroy or overwhelm the other. If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality, albeit sometimes in

29

30

Introduction

different forms” (5). Fox is responding here to Ong’s argument that “literacy consumes its oral antecedents” (15), though in discussing how writing was necessary for the development of the discipline of rhetoric, Ong contradicts his own cannibalizing view of literacy, arguing instead that “writing from the beginning did not reduce orality but enhanced it” (9). This latter view is the one with which most scholars working in the contexts of decolonizing literatures engage, and Rita Nnodim in “Yorùbá Neotraditional Media Poetry: A Poetics of Interface” asks whether “the study of ‘the oral’ and ‘the written’ might not be more fruitfully conceptualized” (249) than it is in the “naturalized dichotomy” that Ong’s book has done so much to effect. Convinced that “emphasiz[ing] the interface” between the oral and the written (249) will allow for a more nuanced reading of many forms of cultural expression, she uses the example of a scribally composed, chanted, and often musically accompanied neotraditional poetry called ewì—which is frequently broadcast on radio, and sometimes print and audio-recorded—to show both that the akéwì (those who chant ewì) made writing “an additional space for cultural creativity” (250) and that this Yorùbá language genre “transcends ‘the oral’ and ‘the written’” (251). In this volume, one of the most focused challenges to the Great Divide comes from a perhaps unexpected source: a sociologist, slam poet, and compère of the form. Helen Gregory foregrounds, in “Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage: Insights from Slam,” the collaboration that goes into creating slam in live and print for(u)ms, her double-voiced signifier calling attention to slam as a specific form of poetry but also as an event in public space. Though she establishes that the visibility of the collaborators in the presentation of a poem is one of the key differences between written and oral poetries, her larger interest is in countering a contemporary re-emergence of the Great Divide between oral and written in the form of misperceptions about how distinct oral and written poetry are. This countering is achieved first by showing that sociality is a feature of print publication, too, and that, for all its being a form of spoken word poetry, slam depends on writing in a variety of ways. Then she argues that oral and written poetries are still further alike in being “communicative performances mediated by the specific social contexts of their production and consumption.” Although Finnegan’s Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication offered the first decisive challenge to the idea of the Great Divide, Canadian education theorist David Olson also disputes, in The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading, the evidence forwarded by Havelock, Ian Watt, McLuhan, and Goody that

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

alphabetic literacy facilitates social, cultural, and cognitive development to a greater degree than orality. He argues instead that the relationship between speech and writing needs to be understood in terms outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology—namely, that the way we (in the academy at least) think about speech, our very consciousness of language, is a product of writing. The relevance of this particular understanding for studies at the oral–written interface is to remind us of the difficulty that Ong identified in criticizing the term oral literature: our inability to conceptualize orature “except as some variant of writing” (11). Ong’s Orality and Literacy, though deeply invested in the idea of a divide in consciousness between those whom he believed to lack writing of any kind and those who were literate, also enabled the articulation of a continuum between the oral and the written by identifying people allegedly “untouched by writing in any form” (9) as belonging to “primary oral cultures.” The oral– written continuum model more often used by scholars today requires a literate far end, a “pure literacy,” as medieval literature scholar Mark Amodio puts the matter (4), but having produced this naming, Amodio at once identifies it as a purely theoretical construct, like its partner term at the continuum’s other end. However, he goes on to claim that “as theoretical postulates, the end points of the oral-literate continuum retain considerable heuristic value for the investigation of human cognition and development” (4). Because of the ideological nature of the distinction between orality and literacy that Fee has argued, and the resulting too easy alignment between primary oral societies and racist notions of the primitive and civilized, this focus on cognition and human development is not the aspect of Ong’s scholarship that much interests the thinkers gathered here. Yet there can be no denying that Ong is among the most often cited if not the most often cited scholar in the field of oral–written studies, including in the work of the present contributors, whether the latter are, for example, calling upon some aspect of Ong’s work to frame their title, as Hugh Hodges does in composing his subtitle “Why Performance Poetry Can’t Be Studied (and Why We Should Study It Anyway)”; or citing some part of Ong’s account of the psychodynamics of orality, as Hlongwane, Foyle, and Roy do; or deploying his concepts of oral residue and primary orality, as Brent Nelson does; or critically citing his account of the relationship of literacy to human cognition and the development of civilization, as Gingell does. Goody is included in Olson’s critique because, in The Interface between the Written and the Oral, he retains an allegiance to the idea of the Great Divide, despite the title metaphor of his book. In this respect he is an inheritor of

31

32

Introduction

the thinking of the loose collective that Donald F. Theall dubbed the Toronto School of Communication (Havelock, Watt, and McLuhan). More contemporary studies that pick up on the metaphor of the interface between the oral and written, such as Alain Ricard and Flora Veit-Wild’s Interfaces between the Oral and the Written / Interfaces entre l’écrit et l’oral and the special number of Research in African Literatures titled The Oral-Written Interface 28.1 (1997) edited by Ricard and Chris Swanepoel, do so in ways that challenge the Great Divide. They thus animate an understanding of the oral–written interface that works counter-colonially, in line with the version of the social interface that Norman Long offers in Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives when he defines such an interface as “a critical point of intersection between different lifeworlds, social fields or levels of social organization, where social discontinuities based upon discrepancies in values, interests, knowledges and power, are most likely to be located” (243). Such a view of the interface stands behind the organizing metaphor of Listening Up because it acknowledges that the interfaces of the oral, written, and visual are often contested zones characterized by highly asymmetrical relations of power. Stewart Brown’s The Pressures of the Text: Orality, Texts, and the Telling of Tales encodes those relations in its title, which in punning repetition and subversion of Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text signifies on the French theorist’s representation of textuality as offering one of two kinds of pleasure: the readerly or the writerly. Brown’s collection thus frames textuality as an ambiguous medium for African and African-Caribbean writers, as likely to (op)press as to pleasure them because the white space of the page was the colonial master’s before it was theirs. For example, Carolyn Cooper and Hubert Devonish’s “A Tale of Two States: Language, Lit/orature and the Two Jamaicas” shows that while the response of Jamaican “high culture” to the pressures of the text was to write as much like English authors as the Jamaicans could manage, other Jamaican writers inserted aspects of orature into literature by encoding those features of the vernacular commonly deprecated by the elite as low, broken, and even dirty. The noise of the marginalized in the literary system compelled attention against the backdrop of polite imitation that is ultimately a deathly quiet for the lively vernacular culture of Jamaica. Clarke’s orally infused essay for this collection, “Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi young and Oni Joseph,” can be seen as extending in three ways the work done by the critics of Brown’s collection and others studying the relationship of vernacular to high culture. The essay works in the tradition of the Afro- and Black Caribbean–centred critical

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

studies in The Pressures of the Text to show how the strategies for textualizing Black voices and, more broadly, Black oralities enable two Caribbean Canadian writer-performers to resist in a multiplicity of ways what we might, by recourse to the Dreadtalk of Jamaica’s Rastafarians, call the “downpressions” of the text. Clarke asks of the Black writer’s relation to the page, “Can the author’s blackness still be voiced in this white arena?” and he reports on “the panoply of guerrilla tactics” that poets like young and Joseph use to noisily disrupt the conventions of the silent white page. Moreover, he helps ease some of the White critical pressures on Black texts by situating those texts within Black oral and written traditions while not segregating them altogether from Anglo-American literary traditions. Clarke’s advocacy for the Caribbean vernacular voice has both White and Black counterparts: Dennis Cooley’s The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature is, among other things, a spirited and theoretically driven defence of prairie vernacular oral culture, and many works of African American literary criticism represent Black oralities as keys to the literature. Among the most influential studies in this mode are Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, Houston Baker’s Blues, Ideology, and African American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, and Gayl Jones’s Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Jones’s book is perhaps the most relevant for situating the essays of Listening Up because Jones makes connections between African American literary practices and those of writers from other contexts, including the Canadian. Jones represents African American authors as often not recognizing boundaries, so that “[t]he territories of so-called ‘art forms’ and ‘folk forms’ interpenetrate” (1). Styling the written texts informed by oral tradition “multilinguistic” (13) because of their “admixture” of the vernacular and the literary, she raises the question of whether fair critical assessment of literary works that textualize the oral does not require an understanding of oral aesthetics— a question that Blaeser’s essay in the Murray and Rice collection and Clarke’s essay here answer in the affirmative. But Jones’s work also praises Margaret Laurence’s fiction, in which, Jones says, we can “see … clearly the relationship between oral tradition and national aesthetic identity” (6), thus providing a provocative context for reading Roy’s account in this volume of novels by Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Tomson Highway, and Yann Martel. Moreover, Jones argues that when African American writers “began to trust the literary possibilities of their own verbal and musical creations, and to employ selfinspired techniques, they began to transform the European and European American models and to gain greater artistic sovereignty” (1). Such linking of

33

34

Introduction

print-textualized oral traditions with questions of sovereignty, if only here in the restricted field of art, resonates with the concern for literary and political sovereignty among an increasing number of critics of Indigenous literature. For example, Armstrong’s collection Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature models a sovereigntist literary criticism, and in the current volume Blaeser discusses Gerald Vizenor’s “Hearsay Sovereignty” and approvingly cites Richard Pearce’s reading of George Flett’s neotraditional ledger art as “an act of resistance and a performance of sovereignty.” In affirming the performance of sovereignty as a project of contemporary Indigenous practice in criticism and the visual arts, Blaeser connects with the politicized readings of Native American literature by critics working within the paradigm of literary nationalism as foundationally articulated by Craig Womack in Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. That book acts to politicize the kind of textualizing, performance, and interpretive work that had been done on Native American oral traditions by leading Euro-American ethnopoetics scholars and theorists—work presented in books like Dell Hymes’s “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, Dennis Tedlock’s The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation, and Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg’s Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse toward an Ethnopoetics. Womack’s assertion that Creek “oral tradition has always been a deeply politicized forum for nationalistic literary expression” (57) also harmonizes with the view of Dakota oral tradition that Waziyatawin, in “Becoming the Storyteller: Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance” (this volume), shows she holds after listening to the narratives of the Dakota experience of genocidal colonialism and their resistance to it as told by her grandmother, Elsie Two Bear Cavender, and others. Waziyatawin’s essay documents the ways that she has continued the resistance ever since arts-based qualitative inquiry led her to render into powerful contemporary forms the stories her grandmother told her. Waziyatawin learned in a university course about the ethical uses of found poetry as a means to prompt researchers to “situate themselves in their studies and work intimately with their participants”; and having experienced in the classroom that a combination of history and artistic expression evoked fuller responses than more traditional Western historical narratives, she turned to found poetry, to the contemporary photograph with historic photo image overlay, and to a printed text–visual art hybrid to tell Dakota oral history, all these expressive forms running parallel to her more standard periodical and book publications as an academic historian. Waziyatawin consciously transformed her grandmother’s words into what readers would recognize as poetry,

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

presenting Elsie Cavender’s stories in standard English; however, by including photographs of her grandmother along with her print textualizings of her grandmother’s oral stories, Waziyatawin resites those stories to the context from which they came as embodied words and enables the body of her grandmother to function semiotically as post-Indian, to use Gerald Vizenor’s term to signify the Indigenous subject beyond the field of colonial discourse. In “A Nexus of Connections,” Blaeser mixes modes and media to do the political work of revealing the many vectors of colonization that the Anishinaabe people have endured and resisted. She weaves together storytelling; the oral metaphor of throwing words into space; standard essayist prose about Indigenous North American oral traditions, literature, and visual arts; and her own poetry in response to an early ethnography of the White Earth Anishinaabe. Her essay establishes in both form and content that the territory where orality meets writing and visual images is a “nexus of connections” that becomes dynamic as verbal and visual language leads audiences to the nonverbal and the spiritual. Essays in this volume by Hlongwane, Foyle, Neuhaus, and Gingell also place oral tradition in political contexts, but they can additionally be seen as working in a mode analogous to, when not specifically drawing on, Ato Quayson’s Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing and Paul Goetsch’s The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Both Quayson and Goetsch move away from the practice of viewing the inscription of oral traditions in literature as markers of authenticity. Quayson does so by developing an interdiscursive framing of orature and writing that enables the study of how writers strategically deploy the conceptual resources of their oral traditions for historically specific purposes, and Goetsch by bringing to the representation of oral traditions in fiction the distinctions made by sociologists between everyday and “special” knowledges. Both critics importantly argue that oral traditions provide continually renewed and recirculated conceptual resources to help people come to terms with ever-emerging challenges. Working in this vein, Hlongwane’s “Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa” discusses the way the contemporary South African poet Rampolokeng draws on the oral traditional resources of South African, Black diasporic, and less culturally specific origins to issue a double challenge. Traditional Sesotho praise poetry (dithoko), dubbing and rapping, and ranting are all part of the arsenal he deploys in confronting both White colonial oppressors and those of the Black-led post-apartheid state. But Rampolokeng’s challenge is double in another way, too, Hlongwane explains, in that he exploits the strengths of

35

36

Introduction

communicating in both oral and written forms. The oral medium allows him both to share his critique with those South Africans who cannot read and to communicate with immediacy and urgency in the face of the new Black oppressors using the airwaves of the South African Broadcasting Corporation to promulgate the lie that all South Africans in the post-apartheid state are one. Print, on the other hand, enables him to communicate more widely than orature does, and print’s cultural capital lends another kind of force to his political critique. Naomi Foyle in “The Ballad as Site of Rebellion: Orality, Gender, and the Granuaile Aislingi” shows that in the case of the aislingi (a genre of Irish nationalist vision poem) about the sixteenth-century female Irish chieftain, sea captain, trader, and pirate Gráinne Ní Mháille, oral traditional resources have been put to work variously to challenge colonial power, buttress patriarchal power, and in the case of her own ballad, “Grace of the Gamblers” (accessible at drc.usask.ca/projects/oral, along with recordings of two other ballads about Granuaile, Gráinne’s name in legend), subvert patriarchal power by attending to Gráinne’s negotiations, as a woman, of various power relations. Like Hlongwane, Foyle considers the political work of culturally specific oral+ and written performances, but she does so in order to argue that the overly generalized view that oral tradition is a medium for the histories of the dominated needs to be replaced by a clear-eyed and gender-informed understanding of the power dynamics at work in the transmission of oral as well as written history. In “What’s in a Frame? The Significance of Relational Word Bundles in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow,” Neuhaus pursues the issue of what is translated in the interdiscursive movement from the oral to the written, but her focus is more particularly linguistic as she shows how Cree poet Louise Halfe / Skydancer recurrently structures her thought when writing in ways analogous to the holophrases (one word clauses or sentences) of Cree speech, thus creating what Neuhaus calls paraholophrases or relational word bundles—“series of interconnected signs that point to a bundle of meaning.” In the introduction to Blue Marrow, Neuhaus argues, Halfe uses these relational word bundles to interpolate key Cree religious beliefs into the Christian Gloria Patri, thus helping frame the poem and guide readers into it by providing “interpretative context.” In using linguistic knowledge to study these language “chunks” in Halfe’s work that create metaphors, symbols, and metonymies, Neuhaus formulates a new critical approach to Aboriginal writing in Canada, one centred in Aboriginal language.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

In “Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in Neal McLeod’s Writings of the Oral+,” Gingell reads McLeod’s work in multiple genres as using practices, figures, and stories from Cree oral tradition; however, like Neuhaus, she focuses on the writer’s use of an Indigenous language. Gingell links McLeod’s weaving together of nêhiyawêwin/Cree and English as he retells traditional Cree oral stories in both his scholarship and poetry, to the teaching he received that the sound of nêhiyawêwin was central to the identities of traditional Cree people and to their sense of connection to their land. To give force to this distinctive form of identity, Gingell adapts from music education theory Glenn Hudak’s term “sound identity,” contending that the effect of McLeod’s liberal use of Cree language in his storytelling is to recreate for contemporary nêhiyawak/neechi (self-namings of Cree people) the sound identities (both healthy and sounded) of their ancestors; to make a languagebased claim to traditional Cree territory; and from this grounded place, to work to find a space for the contemporary Cree within a modernity that does not efface or violate their traditional values. Goetsch’s investigation of the techniques and functions of oral storytelling in the fiction he studies, and his examination of “how [British writers] articulate their problems as modern novelists by revealing some of the advantages and disadvantages of oral storytelling” (3), also provide a context for understanding Roy’s contribution to this volume, “‘The Power and the Paradox’ of the Spoken Story: Challenges to the Tyranny of the Written in Contemporary Canadian Fiction.” Roy investigates the function of the spoken story in novels by Laurence, Atwood, Martel, and Highway. She considers why human speech as a mode of storytelling is so integral to these works and whether the focus on the power dynamics evident in the oral–written binary evoked by the orality of these novels makes the spoken story particularly suitable for answering questions about racism, colonialism, gender, and religious belief as they relate to Canadian social and literary structures. In this way she builds an argument that the power of these works resides in the resistance that the oral storytelling mode offers to what Saussure called “the tyranny of the written.” If Roy’s study parallels Goetsch’s in considering what texts carry across from one discursive context to another and to what ends the writers she studies redeploy those translated elements, her work further resonates with his because both find that in the novels they study, writers treat orality and literacy as competing discourses. The critics who have begun to work on language in the context of Indigenous literature in Canada are engaged in a kind of criticism that has been going on for some time in relation to African and Caribbean literatures. This

37

38

Introduction

work is typified by Chantal Zabus’s The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel and Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice: Zabus’s book is a study of layering in Africa’s decolonizing fiction, an effect produced by writers reworking European colonial languages through linguistic processes such as importing idioms and syntactical structures from pre-colonial African languages and relexifying English, as well as engaging in a kind of autoethnographic recording of aspects of African cultures. Blaeser in “A Nexus of Connections” independently observes palimpsestic practice in work by Indigenous writers and artists in North America who are forced to work against the backdrop of a colonial canvas that has misrepresented their realities—which is to say, these literary and visual artists work in occupied territories. Blaeser does not explicitly look at how the different namings of experience in the Indigenous and the colonizer’s languages create palimpsests in colonially occupied territories, but her synonym for palimpsest, “multilayered ‘code-talking,’” suggests that different forms of communication are central to her project. Moreover, a notable coherence exists between Blaeser’s view of the interdiscursive movement of Native codes and Quayson’s formulation of Yoruba writers drawing on “an indigenous resource-base that may be said to be constituted not just by representative oral and written texts, but also by motifs, symbols, ritual gestures, and even unarticulated assumptions” (16). Brathwaite’s landmark study does not use the metaphor of palimpsest, but it does make the case that the vitality of Afro-Caribbean literatures rests on speech and musical rhythms that are potent African cultural survivals in the Americas. The Barbadian poetcritic’s line of argument in most respects accords with Clarke’s in “Bring Da Noise,” but History of the Voice also acknowledges the creolization of the survivals in the plantation Caribbean and its subsequently decolonizing territories, whereas the Canadian Clarke, working from a different part of the Black Atlantic, seems more concerned than Brathwaite to establish that Black writers can also work legitimately in European forms and in an English that does not always carry an identifiably African-derived orality. In Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing: Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip, Allen, and Brand, Maria Casas uses sociolinguistics to inform her analysis of the Caribbean English Creoles as simulated in the poems of the four Caribbean Canadian writers she studies. She also foregrounds the usefulness of social semiotics in analyzing the meanings of the material aspects of their books and the Black female body, both in performance and as verbally represented in their writing. The body under

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

examination in her book is what Jay Lemke calls the semiotic body—that is, the body as bearer of the symbolic meanings and valuations that a specific community assigns to it, its parts, and what it deems to be significant somatic differences (85). Such a view of somatic semiotics is taken up briefly in this collection by both Clarke in his reading of young’s body on the dub “stage” and page, and young herself when she identifies in “the storyteller’s integrity” that the body is, for Black slaves transported across the Atlantic’s Middle Passage, and for their descendants, the repository of African memory: “they were not allowed to bring anything with them … but the body remembers.” The body as signifying medium is discussed more extensively by Nelson in his reconstruction, from the text of a John Donne sermon, of the preacher’s actio, or gesture, understood as involving everything from facial expression and posture to actions and placement of the hands. By reading traces of the oral+ in printtextualized ecclesiastical oratory, Nelson’s “‘pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts’: Inferring Pronuntiatio and Actio from the Text of John Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon” in some measure counters the decontextualizing that occurs when impassioned preaching is reduced to text. Nelson takes a heuristic approach to reconstructing the embodied performance of an Early Modern English sermon by a highly acclaimed preacher of the period, and in doing so creates a method that may serve as a model for other reconstructions of sermons and perhaps other orature of various eras. The scholarly discussion of the relationship between oral tradition and visual culture that the current volume makes one of its focuses has to date been conducted mostly if not exclusively in article-length studies. James Carrier and Achsah Carrier, in “Every Picture Tells a Story: Visual Alternatives to Oral Tradition in Ponam Society,” frame that relationship in terms of parallel routes to knowledge. In seeking to counter the “partiality of the concern with words” (355) that anthropology has long shown, “Every Picture Tells a Story” focuses on the gift display of the Ponam islanders of Papua New Guinea. Carrier and Carrier acknowledge that exchanging words with the islanders was for them not only a necessary part of coming to an understanding of the practice, but also part of the Ponam people’s display and exchange of gifts. In this context, the anthropologists point out, the display is primary, words secondary. Waziyatawin’s use of print and visual media to recount the oral+ history of her people also establishes parallel routes to knowledge of the Dakota past, though she textualizes oral tradition in both media, and in her “text-art collaboration” with visual artist Molly Schoenhoff, “Wokiksuye k’a Woyuonihan”

39

40

Introduction

(Remembering and Honoring), neither the text nor the visual art is made primary; each works in balanced partnership with the other. This balanced relationship is precisely that which Cara DeHaan’s essay for this volume reports characterizes other Indigenous integrations of the written and visual. Quoting Hertha Sweet Wong’s “Native American Visual Autobiography: Figuring Place, Subjectivity, and History,” DeHaan reports that Leslie Marmon Silko chose in Storyteller not to provide “captions (sounds like ‘captive’)” (Sweet Wong 153) next to each photograph; this was “an attempt to equalize the relationship between word and image and to allow (or force) readers to make connections” (154). In another of the few works that explicitly link oral tradition with the visual, Haruo Shirane’s “Performance, Visuality, and Textuality: The Case of Japanese Poetry,” the balanced bimodality found in Indigenous work at the interfaces of the oral, written, and visual is reported in the textualizations of the originally oral poems of the Japanese poet Basho- in hanging scrolls and paintings that also present the poems in calligraphic form. Shirane notes that “the same poem may be re-contextualized or re-materialized many times over a lifetime in different media and in different genres … with different partners” (229), and this process, he remarks, “can seriously alter the meaning of the poem.” Quoting his description of the recontextualizations makes - practice was like Waziyatawin’s in clear that in a number of respects Basho’s her recontextualizing of her grandmother’s oral history narratives in different media at various times, including in her essay for this volume. However, in terms of the serious alteration of meaning as different visual artists serve as partners, we might think more of DeHaan’s observation about how Robert Keziere’s photographs in Days of Augusta foreground the storyteller in ways that Tappage Evans herself likely never would, of her own accord, have done. The complexities of studying orature in its original and textualized forms made clear by the foregoing discussion surely have pedagogical implications when orature or textualized orature is made part of the curriculum, and Foley has also been a field leader in exploring these implications. With his eye focused principally on undergraduate curriculum development and practical pedagogy, Foley edited Teaching Oral Traditions (1998), a volume that considers its subject in a wealth of international and temporal contexts and that offers practical suggestions for bringing the subject of oral traditions into the classroom. However, given the difficulties of studying live oral tradition and the plethora of works of print-textualized orature, many of the essayists in this collection centre their pedagogy on works in this latter genre. Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem, whose title clearly announces its pedagogical

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

intentions, similarly focuses on both live and textualized versions of oral traditions from around the world. So, too, does Hodges’s essay in this collection, “Poetry and Overturned Cars: Why Performance Poetry Can’t Be Studied (and Why We Should Study It Anyway),” as it continues the work of those essayists in Part Three of Teaching Oral Traditions, “Praxis: Oral Traditions in the Classroom.” Hodges’s essay quixotically considers the impossibility of teaching that which is going out of existence even as it comes into being, that which is event rather than thing, while also showing that by stepping outside of standard university pedagogical procedures and structures, teachers and students can engage with more than printed or audio/visually recorded extracts from oral tradition. The previous paragraphs’ locating of the present essays in the context of prior scholarship is not meant to be comprehensive; rather, the discussion aims to suggest the burgeoning of scholarship at the oral–literary interface and to indicate something of the lineage of many of the studies in the present volume. The bias toward the Canadian detectable in the extent of the annotations is partly a function of how many of the authors of these essays are scholars working in Canada, and partly a reflection of the desire to call the attention of scholars working elsewhere to more Canadian work at the interface of the oral and written, as well as that initiated here at the additional interface of the visual.

The Structure of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond The essays in this volume are arranged into three thematic arcs: performance poetics, print texualizations of the oral+, and the place of visual culture at the oral–written interface. The papers also spiral outside their places in these arcs to engage with other themes and subthemes, including the layering and multimodal qualities of textualized orature; audiences, collaboration, and community; the critical importance of the semiotic body and of context in studying orature and textualized orature; and politics and ethics at the oral– written (and sometimes visual) interface. While several of the contributions could have gone into other sections, we have tried to place them so as to facilitate the most interesting conversations among them in each section and have also worked to make the crosstalk clearly audible. The book’s structure tries to create internal conversation, for example, by juxtaposing Blacker’s and DeHaan’s essays about ethics in cross-cultural print-textualizing of Aboriginal orature with Waziyatawin’s contribution, which recounts how her multigenre storytelling practice was enabled by her listening both to the stories of her grandmother and other Elders and to ideas from Dakota and academic

41

42

Introduction

contexts about how to honour storyteller and stories in transmitting them. Moreover, to encourage even richer exchanges among the contributions to the project, we have departed from conventional practice by including in the contents list a video from the book’s related website. As a group, the print and video essays in the first section, “Listening Up: Performance Poetics,” both foreground and simulate performance in textualized form. The section takes shape as an arc moving from African diasporic oral performance poetics to those with European groundings; readers are prompted by the architecture of “Listening Up” to connect the section opener on Black performance poetics and poets to slam poetry and work within Dada and other European and Euro-North American sound art traditions. The essay at the centre of the arc looks in both directions to consider the pedagogy of performance poetries of both the Black African diaspora and European-derived cultures. Merely to reproduce the printed text of talks and performances that were part of “The Oral, Written, and Other Verbal Media” and eVOCative! would be to reproduce the problems of print textualization that many of the essays in the second section of the book discuss, so the book’s related website at drc.usask.ca/projects/oral offers videos of anitafrika’s “the storyteller’s integrity,” Burton’s performance of Barnes’s poems, and Dutton’s “Speech as Performance,” as well as his eVOCative! performance of his own work. The second part of the book, “Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality,” like the first, works as a polyphonic, transnational conversation. In this section a South African dub/rap/page-based poet working in the postapartheid context sounds off against the strains of Irish ballads about the pirate queen Granuaile, which in turn are counterpointed by the sermonizing of Early Modern British preacher John Donne. Then, a discussion of Canadian literature’s thematizing and simulation of oral storytelling follows, before the section sounds its final notes by exploring issues connected with the print textualizing of Indigenous voices in Canada. Hlongwane’s “Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa” and Foyle’s “The Ballad as Site of Rebellion” are placed first in this second section because they are transitional in the collection, connecting back to the focus on performance in the first section and forward to the remaining essays in the second, sharing with these latter studies an interest in aspects of what has been written down from various kinds of oral performance. Similarly, the essays in the last arc of the project’s conversational circle— an arc we have called “Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual”—talk back to those in the closing curve of Part Two by exploring multiple instances of

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

the print textualizing of Indigenous orature; yet the third arc’s essays also look beyond words to examine the integration of visual elements into the texts being studied. Given the sole focus on Indigenous texts in this section and this introduction’s having previously established that writings of the oral+ from non-Indigenous communities also integrate visual components, we can identify a need for research into this latter work.

R.S.V.P. This introduction began by somewhat boisterously urging you as reader to open widely the door into a world of transdisciplinary, multimodal communication. After issuing an invitation to participate in the levelling of the hierarchy of written over oral and engage the full range of your senses as you move through the discursive spaces of this book, the website, and the world beyond, we more quietly asked you to r.s.v.p., hoping to engage you as active reader. Of course response to a written introduction can come in many forms, from personal communication to its author(s), through communication with others about it, to professional review, to silence. In reiterating the r.s.v.p. in capital and bolded letters here at the threshold of that part of the book’s architecture that houses the lively, multivoiced conversation within, we once more, and more emphatically, request that you consider yourself an active participant in the conversation. We imagine you as readerlistenerspeakerkin(a)esthete+ as you move through the discursive spaces of the essays and other texts. As you step inside, may you find pleasure for your senses and profit for your own purposes as you mingle with the other thinkers assembled there.

Notes Warm thanks to Margery Fee for multi-vectored conversations and sharing of books and papers during the revision of this introduction, and for comments on a draft. 1 The lack of hyphens here is a deliberate usage to reflect Cole’s integrated identity and to gesture toward his poetic, self-consciously oral style. The non-bounded “words” also serendipitously evoke a form of writing used in early manuscripts that reflects the continuous flow of sounds in speech, and hence is closer to oral+ performance than hyphenated words would be. As Matei Calinescu argues in “Orality in Literacy: Some Historical Paradoxes of Reading,” reading and writing have always depended on the resources of orality, and when scribes did not leave spaces between words, they created conditions under which the manuscript needed to be re-oralized in order to be understood. 2 To imply that literature is a thing is, of course, to tell another partial truth. In the sense of the word used in a phrase like “an anthology of twentieth-century literature,” literature is the composite of texts we have decided to call by that name, and hence a thing; however literature can also be thought to exist only in the activity of reading and the other social activities that lead to calling the texts as an ensemble literature.

43

44

Introduction

3 Even as Blaeser provides us with this example of cultural expectations for listening to orature, and by extension to textualized orature and texts by North American Native writers in general, she provides us with a basis for recognizing a parallel urging in Derrida’s The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. His outlining of a mode of listening that entails attending in a responsive way to what another says in order to return to that other in strengthened form what she or he has said, is how, thanks to Diane Mitchelfelder’s “Derrida and the Ethics of the Ear,” I understand Derrida’s assertion that “[i]t is the ear of the other that signs” (51). Moreover, the collaborative construction of meaning at the interface of speaking and listening might be traced further back in European thought to Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that “the listener becomes the speaker” (Speech 68). Taken together, Blaeser and Derrida could be seen to provide a foundation for responsible listening that might provide us a wider basis for responsible relations. 4 For a fuller discussion of audience, see Finnegan, Oral Traditions 97–100. 5 I first defined the terms in Textualizing Orature and Orality, the special issue I edited of Essays on Canadian Writing (#83, 3–4), and in “Teaching the Talk That Walks on Paper: Oral Traditions and Textualized Orature in the Canadian Literature Classroom” (275– 76). I subsequently discovered that Bauman and Briggs used the term entextualization (73) to refer to what I was calling textualization, but seeing no gain in the extra syllable, have stuck to my original naming practice. 6 For a critique of this practice in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, see Susan Gingell’s review of the third edition in Canadian Ethnic Studies 38.1 (2005): 205–08. 7 Responding to my example of women being described as lacking and envying the penis, Margery Fee reminded me of this passage in Orality and Literacy. 8 The qualifier is necessary because of course anyone who has spent ten minutes in a university classroom or at a conference paper session will know that both are sites of knowledge making and transmission characterized by a complex interplay between the oral and written, not to mention the auditory and visual more broadly, and the entire sensorium most comprehensively. 9 Jennifer Andrews’s “Haunting Photographs, Revisioning Families,” Chapter 4 of In the Belly of the Laughing God: Humour and Irony in Native Women’s Poetry, offers an overlapping view of how—and how often—Indigenous poets use photographs in their collections of poems. Andrews suggests that including photographs is one way to address the paradox that Native women authors face in describing “rituals and memories that cannot be fully expressed in writing” (184). She contends that in the “liminal spaces between the poetic texts and the photographs a different kind of phantasmatic representation [from that created by non-Indigenous photographers] occurs, one that … resists the limitations of the written word and creates the opportunity to revise dominant white western assumptions about Native family histories and identities” (184). 10 Following Maria Campbell, we use Métis (with an accent on the e) to refer only to people of part-French origin. 11 In an e-mail of 29 July 2011, Scofield confirmed both that the stone-outlined quadrants and entire Medicine Wheel of The Gathering were his idea, and that the musical staffs as headers and guitar motifs in the footers beside the page numbers of I Knew Two Metis Women, which I discuss below, were creations of the book designer. 12 Pamela McCallum called attention to this cityscape when I circulated a copy of the chapbook during a seminar presentation on dub poetry at the University of Calgary in 2004.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

13 For an explanation of Helen Gregory’s double-voiced signifier of form and forum, see below (page 77). 14 I adopt the term from Betsy Warland’s Proper Deafinitions: Collected Theorograms. 15 For a politically and ethically sensitive account of the process, see McCall. 16 For a list of other foundational studies in sound history, see Cox and Warner, xvi, n1.

Works Cited Amodio, Mark C. Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2004. Print. Andrews, Jennifer. In the Belly of a Laughing God: Humour and Irony in Native Women’s Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. Armstrong, Jeannette C. “Aboriginal Literatures: A Distinctive Genre within Canadian Literature.” Hidden in Plain Sight: Contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canadian Identity and Culture. Ed. David R. Newhouse, Cora J. Voyageur, and Dan Beavon. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. 180–86. Print. ———, ed. Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Penticton: Theytus, 1993. Print. Armstrong, Jeannette C., and Lally Grauer, eds. Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology. Peterborough: Broadview, 2001. Print. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2003. Print. Theory and History of Literature 16. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. 1962. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975. Print. Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Print. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Note by Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1975. Print. Baugh, Edward. “Poem, Reading, Performance.” Caribe 2000: definiciones, identitades y culturas regionales y/o nacionales: Simposio III: un convite de poetas y teatreros: voz y performance en la(s) cultura(s) caribeña(s). Ed. Lowell Fiet and Janette Becerra. San Juan: Faculdad de Humanidades, U de Puerto Rico, 1999. 38–45. Print. Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1977. Print. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 59–88. Bessinger, J. B. “Oral to Written: Some Implications of the Anglo-Saxon Transition.” Explorations 8 (October 1957): 11–15. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly. “Writing Voices Speaking: Native Authors and an Oral Aesthetic.” Murray and Rice 53–68. Print. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon, 1984. Print.

45

46

Introduction

Brown, Stewart, ed. The Pressures of the Text: Orality, Texts, and the Telling of Tales. Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies, U of Birmingham, 1995. Print. Calinescu, Matei. “Orality in Literacy: Some Historical Paradoxes of Reading.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.2 (1993): 175–90. Print. Campbell, Maria. “‘One Small Medicine’: An Interview with Maria Campbell.” By Susan Gingell. Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (Fall 2004): 188–205. Print. ———, trans. “Jacob.” Stories 86–104. ———, trans. and transcriber. “La Beau Sha Shoo.” Read by Roy Poitras. Stories, rev. ed. CD, print. ———, trans. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Paintings by Sherry Farrell Racette. Penticton: Theytus, 1995. Print. ———, trans. and transcriber. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Rev. ed. Paintings by Sherry Farrell Racette. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2010. CD, print. Carlson, Keith, Kristina Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, eds. Orality and Literacy across Disciplines and Cultures. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. Carrier, James, and Achsah Carrier. “Every Picture Tells a Story: Visual Alternatives to Oral Tradition in Ponam Society.” Oral Tradition 5.2–3 (1990): 354–75. Web. 7 August 2011. Casas, Maria Caridad. Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing: Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip, Allen, and Brand. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print. Cross/Cultures 112. Chamberlin, J. Edward. “Doing Things with Words: Putting Performance on the Page.” Murray and Rice 69–90. ———. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Knopf, 2004. Print. Cole, Peter. Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Print. Cooley, Dennis. The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1987. Print. Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the Vulgar Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print. Cooper, Carolyn, and Hubert Devonish. “A Tale of Two States: Language, Lit/orature and the Two Jamaicas.” Brown, ed. 60–74. Cox, Christopher, and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 2004. Print. Cruikshank, Julie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders. Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 1990. Print. Cutler, Chris. File under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music. London: November, 1984. Print. Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer. “The Paradox of Talking on the Page: Some Aspects of the Tlingit and Haida Experience.” Murray and Rice 3–41. Print.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. Print. ———. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Print. Emberley, Julia V. Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Fee, Margery. “Writing Orality: Interpreting Literature in English by Aboriginal Writers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 18.1 (1997): 23–39. Print. Finnegan, Ruth. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Print. ———. Oral Literature in Africa. 1970. Nairobi: Oxford UP, 1976. Print. ———. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context. 1977. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Print. ———. “‘Oral Tradition’—Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity?’” Oral Tradition 18.1 (2003): 84–86. Web. 19 December 2009. ———. Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Fleury, Norman, et al. Stories of Our People: Lii zistwayr di la naaysyoon di Michif: A Métis Graphic Novel Anthology. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2008. Print. Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print. ———, ed. Teaching Oral Traditions. New York: Modern Language Association, 1998. Print. Four Horsemen, The (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol). The Prose Tattoo: Selected Performance Scores. Milwaukee: Membrane, 1983. Print. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. Print. Foyle, Naomi. Grace of the Gamblers: A Chantilly Chantey. Illus. Peter Griffiths. London: Waterloo, 2009. Print. Furniss, Graham. “On the Implications of Orality.” Ricard and Veit-Wild 267–75. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. New York: Falmer, 1990. Print. Gingell, Susan. Introduction. Textualizing Orature and Orality. Ed. S. Gingell. Spec. issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004): 1–18. Print. ———. Rev. of The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. Ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie. 3rd ed. Canadian Ethnic Studies 38.1 (2005): 205–08. Print.

47

48

Introduction

———. “Teaching the Talk That Walks on Paper: Oral Traditions and Textualized Orature in the Canadian Literature Classroom.” Home-work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy and Canadian Literature. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. 285–300. Print. Goetsch, Paul. The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003. Print. Goody, Jack. The Interface between the Written and the Oral: Studies in Literacy, the Family, Culture and the State. Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1987. Print. Studies in Literacy, Families, Culture, and the State. Halfe, Louise. Blue Marrow. 1998. Regina: Coteau, 2004. Print. Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. London: Duckworth, 1986. Print. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Bellknap, 1963. Print. Hourie, Audreen. “Traditional Metis Music and Dance.” Metis Culture and Heritage Resource Centre. Web. 20 August 2011. Hyland, Gary. Just Off Main. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 1982. Print. Hymes, Dell. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981. Print. Janus, Adrienne. “Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the ‘Anti-Ocular’ Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory.” Comparative Literature 63.2 (2011): 182–202. Print. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Western Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print. Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Print. Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Print. Joseph, Clifton. Metropolitan Blues. Illus. Kwasi Ahmad. Toronto: Domestic Bliss, 1983. Print. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Web. Web. 12 Aug. 2011. Kapchan, Deborah A. “Performance.” Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture. Ed. Bert Feintuch. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2003. 121–45. Print. Karasick, Adeena. “Echohomonymy.” Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. 25–36. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Print. ———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. Intro. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Print. Lemke, Jay. Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. London: Taylor, 1995. Print. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. 1955. Trans. John Russell. New York: Criterion, 1961. Print.

Opening the Door

■

Susan Gingell with Wendy Roy

Long, Norman. Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Mandiela, Ahdri Zhina. Speshal Rikwes. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1985. Print. Masayesva, Jr., Victor. “It Shall Not End Anywhere: Transforming Oral Traditions.” Murray and Rice 91–95. McCall, Sophie. First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. Print. McLeod, Neal. “nêhiyâwiwin and Modernity.” Plain Speaking: Essays on Aboriginal Peoples and the Prairie. Ed. Patrick Douaud and Bruce Dawson. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2002. 35–53. Print. McLuhan, Marshall, and Victor J. Papanek. Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations. New York: Something Else, 1967. Print. Mitchelfelder, Diane. “Derrida and the Ethics of the Ear.” The Question of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Ed. Arlene B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott. Albany: SUNY P, 1989. 47–54. Print. Murray, Laura J., and Keren Rice, eds. Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham UP, 2007. Nichol, bp. “The ’Pata of Letter Feet, or, the English Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol. Ed. Roy Miki. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002. 353–72. Print. ———. Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography. Windsor: Black Moss, 1988. Print. Nnodim, Rita. “Yorùbá Neotraditional Media Poetry: A Poetics of Interface.” Ricard and Veit-Wild 247–64. Olson, David R. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1994. Print. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1982. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Ortiz, Simon. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992. Print. Peters, Carl, ed. bpNichol Comics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002. Print. Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Print. Ricard, Alain, and Chris Swanepoel, eds. The Oral–Written Interface. Spec. issue of Research in African Literatures 28.1 (1997). Print. Ricard, Alain, and Flora Veit-Wild, eds. Interfaces between the Oral and the Written/ Interfaces entre l’écrit et l’oral. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Print. Versions and Subversion in African Literatures 2. Rothenberg, Jerome, and Diane Rothenberg. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse toward an Ethnopoetics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Print. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977. Print.

49

50

Introduction

Scofield, Gregory. “Re: Staff and Guitar Motifs in I Knew Two Metis Women.” Message to the author. 29 July 2011. E-mail. ———. The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel. Vancouver: Polestar, 1993. Print. ———. I Knew Two Metis Women: The Lives of Dorothy Scofield and Georgina Houle Young. Vancouver: Polestar, 1999. Print. ———. I Knew Two Métis Women: The Lives of Dorothy Scofield and Georgina Houle Young. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, 2009. CDs, print. Scriver, Stephen. All Star Poet! Moose Jaw: Thunder Creek, 1981. Print. Shirane, Haruo. “Performance, Visuality, and Textuality: The Case of Japanese Poetry.” Oral Tradition 20.2 (2005): 217–32. Web. 20 August 2011. Sidney, Angela. Tagish Tlaagú/Tagish Stories. Rec. Julie Cruikshank. Illus. Susan McCallum. Whitehorse: Council for Yukon Indians, 1992. Print. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981. Print. Simcoe, Luke. “Metis Stories Captured in Graphic Novel Anthology.” Saskatoon Star Phoenix. 6 October 2008, A2. Print. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Sweet Wong, Hertha D. “Native American Visual Autobiography: Figuring Place, Subjectivity, and History.” Iowa Review 30.3 (2000): 147–56. Literature Online. Web. 2 August 2005. Tappage Evans, Mary Augusta. The Days of Augusta. Ed. Jean E. Speare. Photographs by Robert Keziere. Vancouver: J. J. Douglas, 1973. Print. Tedlock, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983. Print. Warland, Betsy. Proper Deafinitions: Collected Theorograms. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1990. Print. Wolfson, Nessa. “Speech Events and Natural Speech: Some Implications for Sociolinguistic Methodology.” Language in Society 5 (1976):189–209. Print. Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print. young, d’bi. art on black. Photos by Judy Singh. Toronto: Women’s, 2006. Print. Zabus, Chantal. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. Print. Cross/Cultures 4.

Listening Up Performance Poetics

This page intentionally left blank

BRING DA NOISE The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi.young and Oni Joseph George Elliott Clarke

For the Rt. Hon. Gilbert Randall Daye (1956)1

Speaking Up One warm April Saturday, in Toronto, Ontario, in 1983, I was typing up poems in my office at Queen’s Park, the Ontario Provincial Parliament, when I decided to head toward the lobby of the red-sandstone, Hindu-templestyle building and regard the tens-of-thousands strong, anti-nuclear-weapon protest rally assembled on the front lawn. However, a phalanx of Toronto police constables, standing about, surveying the marchers, and disparaging them from behind the legislatures’s closed front doors (thus rendering the officers inaudible and invisible to the protestors), blocked my approach to this vantage point. Then, one officer—brawny where I was slight, tall where I was short—ordered me to leave the area. I refused to do so, and he threatened my arrest. I declared that I worked for the legislature and that I had every right to be where I was. But as he loomed forward, I stepped back. And then, and then, it happened. He said something, and I answered, in a voice I had forgotten I owned, a speech-act that had everything to do with the “streets.” In a “hot” second, I forgot all the Queen’s English I had polished as an undergraduate and slid right back—deep-down—into the nappy roots of my genealogy. I spewed up words with slippery pronunciations, a set of guttural, back-talking cusses, and shockingly anti-grammatical constructions. This sudden blackening of my tongue did not surprise the obstreperous white constable. I suppose that my swift “fall” into “Black English” was what he had expected—even from a buttoned-down, then-civil-servant-poet. I did retreat to another section of the edifice to watch the protesters, but as I seethed at my treatment by the officer, I also felt astonished by my recourse to the “bad English” of the schoolyard. I had thought that my upbringing by my Encyclopedia Britannica–tutored father and my absorption of “proper” grammar had 53

54

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

exiled from my consciousness any knowledge of the salty, peppery, vinegary, and sugary tongue of my African-Nova Scotian (Africadian) peers. But I was wrong: it had taken refuge in my subconscious.

Performance Anxiety That long, opening anecdote empowers me to say that the problem of voice determines every black writer’s style of utterance. It is also the bane of almost every critic, whether Afrocentric or Eurocentric (or someplace in between), stranded in the Americas between Shakespeare and Robbie Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Note that any responsible anthology of “Afrosporic” poetry must include song lyrics. AfricanAmerican collections sound the words of the spirituals and the blues, and, more recently, rap. In the Caribbean, calypso, reggae, and dub command literary attention. No less a writer than Derek Walcott, a Nobel Laureate in poetry, pays tribute to calypso in his own verse styles.2 Honest critics of AfroCaribbean poetry must haunt, not just the bookstores and the libraries, but also the record shops and the dancehalls. But yet, but yet, an excruciating chasm yawns in our reception of the Negro literatures, a cleavage opened by race. The black poet who seeks to exploit the music of words as well as the drama of his or her ministry, may be dismissed as a “performer,” I mean, as a minstrel, a harlequin. In contrast, the black poet who adheres strictly to the grade school grammars and collegeapproved styles of imperious educators, may be faulted by this lactic dialectic of dialect: the more “standard” the speech, the “whiter” the speaker.3 Hence, J. Edward Chamberlin, a Euro-Canadian critic, observes, “the perennial tension between tradition and individual talent [has] this additional twist in the West Indies, with writers sometimes being expected to surrender their imaginative autonomy to unwelcome communal prerogatives on one hand, and to uncongenial literary conventions on the other” (62). I translate: the Afro-Caribbean poet who asserts his or her “racial” independence, to the point of writing “raceless” poetry according to the canons and conventions of “Mama” England (or “AmeriKKKa”), may find a reception as stony and as hard as the “master” literary rules he or she has adopted. Uh huh: no black—or Afro-Caribbean—writer may presume the ability to write from a space as seemingly clear as the blank page, for history hovers over and shadows his or her inked being. Chamberlin underlines this reality: In the West Indies after emancipation, colonial experience and imperial ambition converged in a determination to turn blacks into whites, or Africans into Europeans. To many European listeners, the absence of articulate

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

language—or more precisely the presence of what was construed as the inarticulate babble of African languages (with the transfer of some of their intonations into West Indian speech)—was inevitably associated with the absence of coherent thought and civilized feeling. (73)

The stress—the pressure—of this more or less legislated diglossia, a situation wherein shared tongues divide between “high” and “low” functions (with the “‘high’ [language] being used on occasions of greater formality [and] monopolizing written texts, and the ‘low’ variety being the language of everyday intercourse and popular culture” [Chamberlin 110]), with standard English associated with European governance and patois suggesting colonial (“Coloured”) incompetence, makes it impossible for any black writer to profess an apolitical self-expression. Moreover, as the black hand with the black pen spews its black ink, some white—or black but white-masked—critic, equating Africa with unreason, may decide that this writing, this print, has no permanence of thought or narrative, but is merely transcribed (and inferior) speech, fake writing good only for a laugh. The Martiniquan-Algerian theorist of decolonization, Frantz Fanon, imagines the Euro-Caucasian (or white-identified) critic presuming, “The Negro loves to jabber, and from this theory it is not a long road that leads to a new proposition: The Negro is just a child. The psychoanalysts have a fine start here, and the term orality is soon heard” (27). If Fanon is right, as soon as the Negro4 writer is perceived as being a showbiz player manqué, his or her “literature” may be written off as highfalutin gibberish: after all, his or her type issues from a historically illiterate foundry. As much as some Eurocentric critics may ignore black writers who seem, to their ears, all slang and no imagery, Afrocentric critics may shout back that the only valid (black) poetry is that which emphasizes orality. Say they, print is secondary to the voice—its rhythms and its instrumentation. How a word or sentence is spoken conveys more than its ideational content; moreover, “truth” resides in pronunciation, not just in diction. Yes, Lord Byron pens “righteous” love sonnets, but James Brown’s screams and wails cut nearer to the heart. That his “language” cannot be transcribed, nor circumscribed, is its divine strength: it is a core, not a subtraction. It is as fundamental, ultimately, as the Genesis command, “Let there be light.” To the Afrocentric ear, the expression of a work is its meaning. The minister who says he loves God cannot be trusted as much as the one who falls on his knees, crying, shouting, weeping, stuttering, sweating, and standing either in desperate need of salvation or demonstrating his secure possession of his transfiguring redemption.

55

56

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

The word becomes plastic and elastic in the lungs. The self-consciously Negro poet shares the same aim as the Negro performer, to be physically apprehensible, escaping the stultifying fate of being “smothered in paper and embalmed in regulations” (White 175).5 Yep, none of the foregoing is new. American writer Norman Mailer asserts, “the Negro communicated more by voice than by his word” (203). But this analysis is too passive. Fanon feels, “Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country” (18). Their salvation is to be “elevated above … jungle status in proportion to [their] adoption of the mother country’s [linguistic] standards” (18). Fanon dictates that grammar is a cultural battlefield—or minefield, one that the “colonized” speaker must negotiate to establish his or her political equality with putative oppressors. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre reports, “since the oppressor is present even in the language they speak, they [the colonized] will speak this language to destroy it” (Black 26).6 He insists, “It is only when [European words] have disgorged their whiteness that [the black poet] adopts them, making of this language in ruins a superlanguage, solemn and sacred, in brief, Poetry” (Black 26). In the postcolonial era, then, Negro poetry emerges from an endless war with European tongues.7 Indeed, G. E. Clancier accents the psychological war that Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire conducts against the white—French—language that he also loves: This language belongs to the whites whose domination the black poet intends to destroy; it is therefore the very essence of an obsessive and abhorred universe; it is at the same time the black poet’s most precious possession, since it is one with his song, be it of praise or revolt, since it is the locus and the soul of his poetry. (qtd. in Arnold 130)

Jamaican-Canadian dub poet d’bi.young8 (1977–) accords with this sentiment. For her, dub—and note her idiosyncratic literary style—“chants in the tongue of the under/working class. The form speaks to and for the people by breaking with british hierarchical linguistic rule and grammatically, syntactically, and stylistically represents the working-class experience” (4). Her sentiment cannot be doubted, but her argument overlooks the potential, equivalent political power of a shouted, Socialist sonnet penned with strictest grammar, but also, the blue-blood black writer who uses “dub” to speak of champagne and caviar. young’s definition may skirt clichés. But this problem

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

is not unique to her: the relative blackness—or “Caribbeanness”—of either a poem or its performance is dastardly difficult to decode or decide.9 Reading Césaire, A. James Arnold determines that “[a]mong the modifications that [his] view of poetry involves for readers in the European tradition is an ability to consider the poetic text as a verbal score, the poem in the fullest sense being a reading or a performance” (225). Arnold admonishes us that “[s]uch a total poetics is of course not exclusively African, nor is it by any means unknown in European poetry” (225). Prudently too, Arnold posits, “The reader who hopes to find anything substantial that might connect any of Césaire’s poems to precise African or Afro-American rhythms will encounter promises and suggestions enough but no demonstration or even much sound argument” (233). Even a poet as skilled as Césaire cannot set down on paper rhythms that echo actual drumming or singing. Nor can a critic as able as Arnold detect them easily. Analyzing one Césaire poem, Arnold senses, “One can locate [its] Africanization … acoustically in the guise of a highly original departure from the norms of phonemic usage in modern French poetry” (238). Maybe, then, the blackness of a black-authored poem is best realized in its performance.10 Therefore, even a Caucasian-composed anthem—“O Canada,” for instance—despite its classically derived notation, may be rendered black, if delivered via black expressive cultural traditions. Conversely, a black-authored poem, say, Jamaican poet Claude McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die” (1919), may be voiced according to a European convention, as when Sir Winston Churchill reputedly quoted the poem to heighten British resolve against Nazi aggression during the Second World War.11 Yet even this proposition cannot aid us utterly, for as Arnold maintains, “Although we may all agree that a poem … is made to be performed, there is no reasonably objective way to decide who the best performers are or—and the question is aesthetically a different one—what constitutes an appropriate performance” (231). When Sartre, leafing through an anthology of Negro-composed poetry, declares, “the tom-tom tends to become a genre of black poetry, as the sonnet or the ode were of ours [Europeans]” (Black 32), he denies the truth that the “jazzy,” rhythmic, polyphonic poem exists in white Western literature (see e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Garcia Lorca, Geoffrey Chaucer, and André Breton, just for starters), but also the truth that both the sonnet and the ode may be voiced—acted out—according to the syncopation of the tom-tom. Thus, both Sartre and young are guilty of perpetuating racial fantasy, and “race-based romanticism,” says Alfred Appel, Jr., “can be rot” (99). Then again, as I have written elsewhere, “Form is as form does” (Whylah xxiv): no poetic form is primordially black or white in its signification.12

57

58

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

But despite all the essays that conscientiously deny that words carry any colour other than the ink they assume when printed, Negro—and thus, AfroCaribbean-Canadian—poets announce they wring black poems from their bluesy souls that “shake the stage” and “rock the mike.” Introducing T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers (2004), co-editor Steven Green posits that the contributors are griots—African “bards or praise singers” (v)—“first generation Canadians … Artists who are informed by the western world around them—speaking it’s [sic] language and influenced by its principles—yet harking back in a spiritual, intuitive way to their ancestral African roots; a tapping in to [sic] the soul of blackness” (vii). Unapologetically, Green relies on essentialism to connect his youthful, urbane, First World-resident, relatively rich—but Black—Canadians with African “traditions such as call and response and signifying” (ix). The anthology writers are, he maintains, “improvisers, and spontaneous creators; off the cuff performers whose traditions are largely oral” (ix). He ain’t wrong. Check the contributors’ bios (167–79), and, of the fifty writers and artists included, a strict minority have authored books, a larger minority have recorded compact discs of their recitations, occasionally with music. Still, Green and his co-editor Karen Richardson insist that their anthology grants the ephemeral nature of Spoken Word performance a measure of historical record and longevity. Green acknowledges, “it is necessary to permanently create a time capsule and a foundation that brings disparate artists together in a [sic] collaborative community” (ix). Richardson believes, “Canonized here, our words shall live on to document our experience in this land of migrants called Canada” (166). This desire for printed resonance is as old as writing itself. Canada’s media guru Marshall McLuhan affirms, “The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print” (23–24). Yet the tension remains between the spoken and the written, for, as McLuhan also attests, “The spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically” (81). Witnesses Chamberlin, “Theatre often employs local speech” (91). Too, speech generates “audience participation” (McLuhan 81); and, promises American poet Ezra Pound, “[P]oetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music” (qtd. in Cookson xxii). Hence, the Afro-Caribbean-Canadian—or black—poet, if given to dramatic recitation, produces poems that are really songs, and songs that are one-man or one-woman plays, whose intent is to communalize, uplift, and educate the audience. These ends may be achieved more readily from an instantly accessible concert stage than from the relative remoteness of a page.13 Even so, the strength of the page is its portability: it requires no electricity to be experienced. Too, once committed to memory, the written poem

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

is instantly available for recitation and performance. (True: written music may also be widely communicated, but, unless it is vocal, it requires instruments and musicians to be heard.) Classically speaking, then, an oral command of Judeo-Christian texts (say the King James Version of the Holy Bible) was, in black, ex-slave communities, the first signifier of an educated mind, not whether one could read or write.14 The folk recitation of biblical lore—in story and song—was the pre-eminent standard of education, not one’s scholastic achievement, grades passed, or degrees obtained. While the black person with formal education could be appreciated and respected, the preacher who could, through oratory and song, move the audience/community to some unity of purpose was the real “perfessor.” If this vision of ex-slave “antiquity” is valid, the movement of “live” poetry to “script” always figures, for black writers, a break with audience and a turn to readership, that is to say, a separation from black auditors and an exposure to white critics. Ironically, though, it is this retreat/graduation into print that accords the black performer-poet greater legitimacy, authority, and permanence than that won by those who temporarily create a receptive audience that is, in every sense, “merely” a speech community. I mean: black-sponsored orality is generally directed to black audiences, who respond authentically—spontaneously—to the stimulation of the performance.15 But black-authored print is scrutinized most readily by whites. This point demands that the black “performance” lyric receive a distinctly different “reading” or assessment than that given conventional, European “print” poetry, for it is, essentially, a defiant element of the print anthologies.16 Agreed: all good poetry asserts defiance of those formal and grammatical features that would silence its expressive originality (in syntax, diction, imagery). Carrie Noland establishes, “Poetry is in fact implicated in and often formative of subcultural and minority identities, discursive constructions of the nation, everyday practices, folk and rock music, and the images and compositional strategies of advertising and MTV” (42).17 For the black writer conversant with the media world of his or her audience, where stylistic “flash” and verbal “flaming” are de rigueur elements of “street cred,” the lyric poem becomes an instrument for negotiating “film, popular fiction, journalism, and advertising” (45). This citational dynamism is a prerequisite for popular success (“relevance”), for, wagers Noland in a discussion of French Modernist poet Blaise Cendrars, “poetic language, even if drawn from advertising, can only increase in density and thus in value when read as interacting with and as having been formed in relation to its various discursive intertexts” (49).

59

60

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

The Negro poet who adopts such a poetic may be more interested in “electrifying” an audience than in holding readers “spell-bound.” Certainly, the hip-hop aesthetic of sampling riffs and words—of creating a (usually) danceable, aural collage—represents this tendency to engage with every form of discourse, from graffiti to television newscasts, to clad one’s works with “relevance” (or commercial appeal). Tobagan-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip practises just such a poetic, splicing together, in one book, “poetry and polemic” and “writing in a language that is neither ‘standard’ English nor Caribbean demotic but a syncretic language that draws on a spectrum of Englishes” (Mahlis 166). By so doing, Philip “remakes English in the image of the Anglophone Caribbean” (167). Philip herself realizes, “The bringing together of different genres in one piece points to the idea of poly-vocality that is so much a part of the Caribbean aesthetic, and I see that poly-vocality expressing itself in the poly-formal” (quoted in Saunders 215). Philip’s polyphony exemplifies African diasporic speech. Thus, H. Samy Alim asks, “If the Black speech community possesses a range of styles that are suitable for all of its communicative needs, then why the coercion and imposition of White styles?” (68, my italics). And if the out-and-out black poet—African, American, Canadian, or Caribbean—insists on the performative grace of his or her work, why must he or she be assessed (condemned) by the print conventions of Eurocentric poetry?18

young: Gifted and Black The cover of d’bi.young’s debut collection, art on black, manifests an AfricanCanadian manifesto: The poet’s shaved head, sombre face, and naked shoulders bear white-paint, geometric designs. Art appears literally on her black skin. This aesthetic is reversed as soon as one encounters the black words on the white page: Can the author’s blackness still be voiced in this white arena? First, the dub poet is a poet first. She uses all the resources of rhetoric to cast forth her being. In her vital essay, “‘Always a Poem, Once a Book’: Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Caribbean-Canadian Dub and Performance Poetry,” Euro-Canadian scholar Susan Gingell assures us, “Canadian dub poets have brought dub to the page in a wide range of ways” (220). Furthermore, [t]hese include providing introductions and other explanatory apparatuses; using contextualizing illustrations and other graphics; exploiting the semantic possibilities of unusual placement of words and letters on the page; privileging sound over verbal semantics; using varying fonts and

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

letter sizes, and employing capitals to script differing voices and sound dynamics; deploying non-alphabetic symbols as semantic resources; making allusions to substantive and stylistic aspects of music and other parts of oral traditions to link the written texts to the oral and to guide how the texts should be vocalized; and paying careful attention to prosody and using non-standard spelling and code-switching in order to convey the “riddims” and other phonological dimensions of Caribbean English Creoles and dub itself.19 (222)

This exhaustive catalogue underlines the panoply of guerrilla tactics that poets like young must utilize to force their loud presence into the recalcitrant—and muffling—alabaster canons of English.20 Her opening poem, “I dub poet d’bi.young,” is a triptych of the poet’s interests and self-styles. Each section is a separate stanza. In Part I, the poet portrays her developing, music-mediated, literary-political consciousness: sometimes She-wind shifts her course swirls softly about my head making me remember dub plates dancing on black vinyl a slow rub-a-dub pounding the pressures of a people transferred (I.1–5)

The circular movement of a breeze about the poet’s head reminds her of the spinning records and their individual “tracks” that she encountered in her childhood. Her adult self knows, however, that these recordings were not mere entertainment, but addressed the “pressures” endured by emigrant and immigrant parents and elders. This personal history informs her assessment, as the stanza continues, that “dub/poetry [birthed] herself through a canal / of concrete jungle/chaos and/community” (I.6–7). young suggests that she— her mature consciousness—was born simultaneously with dub as it emerged from “mean streets” and housing projects (Canuck ghettoes), until she became one more “griot in [the] americas” (I.8).21 The “She-wind” seems a kind of goddess, one who, like the Judeo-Christian God, speaking to Job from out of the whirlwind (Job 38:1), brings revelation to a chosen recipient. The movement of the wind conjures the cyclical revolutions of stereo recordings and resuscitates the “record”—memory—of the speaker’s poetic and political maturation. Part II of this ars poetica spurns Standard English, favouring instead the sound—obtained via orthography—of Jamaican patois.22 Here young—as “roots dawtah” (II.1)—pushes “’gainst di parametah of a box-like strukchah.

61

62

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

envisioning a more circular. form” (II.2). She depicts the standard stanzas as “boxy”—implying a stasis of style and content. Opposed to these “cramped” forms, young extols the virtues of the “circular,” that is, the art of speaking (“dub”) “ovah” a 33 or 45 (r.p.m.) recording (II.3). This page-free versifying allows “popular reggae vibez” to be reproduced by youths “siddung pon street cornah” who also “chant dung babylon” (II.4–5). This communal and soulful creativity (and political or religious sermonizing) constitutes a “cycle” or “circle … weh mus continue” (II.7). Thus, young’s employment of patois represents a commitment to “recycle” her youthful introduction to communal song-poem composing. But this “circle” is also related to the “womb” (II.3): young asserts the special agency (or responsibility) of the black woman poet to carry on the “cycle” of “singing” the political troubles and aspirations of “her people.” Part III of “I dub poet d’bi.young” revisits the Standard English of Part I, but repeats the concerns of Parts I and II. young acknowledges she is a poet whose heart is “in balance with the wind” (III.2)—presumably the “Shewind” (I.1) of Part I. Her duty, as “one,” is to compose “many / herstories” (III.6–7). Even so, this documentation is threatened by erasure: “I am tomorrow’s forgotten yesterday / a programmed amnesia” (III.11–12). While she accepts the responsibility to further the “cycle” or “circle” of recitation of communal memory and commentary, she also fears that this process represents “a dys/functional re/invention of the wheel” or “changing remaining the same” (III.13, 15). Yes, young seizes the right to speak of black (Caribbean) history, to use patois to do so, and to put public address to music. But she also worries that such activity will go unremembered—or unrecorded: “how will the scroll keepers grow / my son / how will you grow?” (III.31–33). Writing— publishing—her oral poetry is one means, if congenitally dissatisfying, of putting communal address into civilization-wide circulation. Her son, once older, may open—unscroll—art on black and find its wisdom-verse freshly ready for iteration and promulgation.23 “a poem for rosie douglas” also meditates on the poet’s commission to pass on Afro-Caribbean-Canadian history. Roosevelt “Rosie” Douglas (1942– 2000), as a graduate student in Canada in the later 1960s, spearheaded a historic protest at the then–Sir George Williams College in Montreal in February 1969, against allegedly racist grading practices. He was incarcerated for eighteen months for his troubles, and then deported from Canada in 1974. Elected a member of the Parliament of Dominica in 1985, he became that island’s prime minister in 2000, but died before the first anniversary of his ascension. These biographical and political details are absent from young’s

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

eulogy: she expects her readers to understand Douglas’s importance because he merits this poem.24 Repeating the theme of her introductory poem—her concern over the cyclical erasure of Negro history—she connects Douglas’s death to the loss of a library: lawd anoddah library burn down anoddah one (1.1–3)

In fact, Douglas’s death is akin to the loss of history itself: I watch you go as tomorrow mourns dis history claims (l.4–7)

The third stanza praises Douglas’s “cross / into / freedom land” (1.11–13). But these plain lines acquire force only when set in the context of a Negro and African diasporic history of resistance to slavery, colonialism, and neoimperialism. Significantly, the verb “cross” ferries the memory of the initial, transatlantic crossing that brought Africans to the Americas as slaves, but also the memory of slave escapes effected by crossings of terrain and wet. However, here, the escape—or passage—is not to Canada or to any worldly (supposed) refuge but into the “freedom land” of death. (These lines may be read ironically, too, as referring to Douglas’s arrival in Canada as a student, only to discover that it was not the “freedom land” its Underground Railroad history advertised it as being.) The poem closes, “come mek we celebrate / rosie gawn” (1.14–15). Yet celebration can only be realized in the context of a retrieval of Douglas’s biography along with his Marxist anti-racism and antiimperialism. For the poem to progress effectively from mourning the loss of a “library” to exulting in Douglas’s “cross,” the poet must “recycle” Douglas’s historical meaning. In other words, this poem cannot know its full potential unless the poet performs—brings to life—Douglas’s biography and radical politics and its connections to wider African diasporic history. I have said before that “because African-Canadian history is ignored in Canada, AfricanCanadian writers are forced to act as historians” (Eyeing xx). A signal poetic of performance is, then, for young and other Negro Spoken Word poets, to dramatize chronicles that would otherwise go unheard or remain unknown. Each African-Canadian / Afro-Caribbean performance poet is compelled to act out and recite usually repressed and “whited-out” history.

63

64

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

The longest poem in art on black is “brown skin lady,” whose twelve parts narrate the speaker’s shifting responses to her native Jamaica (during a visit “home”) as well as to her sojourn in Canada. Writ mainly in Standard English, the poem seems directed to non-Jamaican patois readers, and even to Euro-Canadians specifically, to inform them how harsh and unaccommodating their Canada can be for an Afro-Caribbean immigrant: when I walked in jamaica … i embraced my soul allowed her to kiss my face and sweat canada out of my pores (I.6, 7–10)

The speaker feels literally touched by Jamaica(ns): “jamaica had not forgotten what I felt like” (I. 24). But as the poem continues, and she outgrows the experience of “heat and nostalgia” (I.7), she encounters dreadful news that strips the island of the Edenic impression she had accorded it in memory. She learns of the murder of “horrett, my man when I was way too young to have one” (II.12): dem tek juney frock from off di clothes line wrap it round him head so nobody wouldah hear and shot him dead two time rain di fall di morning (II.13–18)

Significantly, this visual information unfolds in patois, reinforcing the truth that this episode of violence is specific to (black) Jamaica. The passage concludes with the repetition of “horrett / my man when i was too young to have one” (II.19–20), though now, “I” appears in lower case: the revelation of Horrett’s death humbles the speaker: “i want to crawl into you jamaica / protect me from yourself ” (II.21–22). Recalling her days as a schoolgirl at the elite “campion college,” the poet notes how her “thick-ghetto-jamaican-accent” was forced to “almost fit” (III.5, 11, 9): I spoke like this at home “nuh becuz mi poor mean mi nuh belong ’ere mi belong ’ere jus as much as you do”

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

the same sentence the campion way the british jamaican way the best of the best way “not because i am poor means i do not belong here I belong here just as much as you do” (III.12–20)

The shifting majuscule and minuscule self is evidence that the speaker’s divided tongue echoes her split Jamaican culture (discourse): one part is “ghetto” fact; the other is “elite” British fantasy. However, the speaker’s identity has been further altered by her Canadian life: I still had my [Jamaican] accent which come to think of it sounded different compared to the others I felt like a fucking tourist in my own country [Jamaica] fifteen years there six years here [in Canada] in retrospect even a year here is too long strip my tongue my identity (X.8–18)

Although Canada is pictured as the cause of the poet’s linguistic difference and cultural separation from her native land, the primary intellectual division between the poet and Jamaica was wrought by her education (indoctrination) there “for four fucking years” (III.23) to repress her maternal, “ghetto” voice in favour of speaking “elite” English. Years in Canada have worsened this division—so that the Jamaican poet no longer sounds readily Jamaican. Shorn of nostalgia, though, young’s analysis shows that her separation from other “roots” Jamaicans began with her access to upper-class-oriented education. young’s movements between “i” and “I,” patois and Queen’s English, Jamaican and Canadian settings and interests are depicted—in print—orthographically and grammatically. However, her possession of a bifurcated tongue—and consciousness—is best revealed through vocal performance. Accordingly, Maria Caridad Casas opines, “[O]rality is in the dialect of one

65

66

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

end [of a speech continuum] while literacy is in the dialect of the other [end] (a dialect … much closer to the grapholect [written] in syntax and lexis)” (21). young’s command of written versions of patois and spoken styles of Standard (Canadian) English (and vice versa) reveals what she sometimes feels as “division,” but it also allows her the freedom to exploit multiple discourses. These speech-acts may include “the romantic, with its roots in Montaigne’s noble savage; youth culture, with its ‘sound’ [black pop music]; reggae as a political protest tradition; and images of Creole [patois] speakers as the underclass, the poor, and the Other” (21).25 Too, young may embrace—perform—the roles of the historian, the rhetorician, the confessor, and the (bisexual) lover …

Oni: “Haitian Sensation” Oni Joseph writes in English, but her performance moniker, “Oni the Haitian Sensation,” reveals that her first culture is Haitian, whose popular tongue is Creole—an indigenous form of French. Bilingual (in Canadian French and English), Oni also commands Haitian Creole and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Based in Ottawa—the bilingual (French–English) Canadian capital, but also a one-time resident of the neighbourhood of South Central LA (a cradle—hotbed—of rap and hip hop), Oni employs AAVE as skillfully as she does French, Haitian Creole, and Her Majesty’s English. Although her first book, Ghettostocracy (2006), is out, Oni is, primarily, a performance poet. While young splices together Jamaican patois and imperial English in stanzas that privilege lower-case spellings, shifting rhythms, and little punctuation, Oni tends to highlight majuscule-headed lines, rhythms based on rhyme (internal and end), and punctuation that “scores” the reading.26 Stylistically speaking, if young replays e.e. cummings, Oni channels Robert Frost.27 Oni’s title poem seems to conjure an African-American ghetto. Characters such as “The Queen of Spades,” “who has three baby-daddies” and who calls herself “welfare’s property” and keeps “food stamps in my bra” (l.15–16, 18–19), seem indelibly Afro-American, perhaps even stereotypically evocative of South Central LA. Wickedly though, in signing her foreword to the book, Oni locates herself in “South Central Ottawa, Ontario” (12). She signals that her ostensibly gritty African-American depictions apply with equal force to urban Canada. Too, she says she descends from “a long line of naturally Black Haitian poets” (9): from this francophone perspective, the Afro-anglophone lifestyles of LA and Ottawa are more similar than not. The poet states forthrightly, “In 1997, I lived in Crip [Los Angeles gang] territory, with a Canadien accent” (10). “Gangster Alliance” makes explicit the American and Canadian

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

likeness: “Fourteen days of death in the fall of 2002 / In South Central LA, / Plus the Bloody Weekends in Toronto” (l.1–3). While young highlights the differences between (rich white) Canada and (poor black) Jamaica, Oni cites the similarities between (black) Canada and (black) America. Presuming that the social realities of African Americans and African Canadians harmonize, Oni diagnoses their mutual vices. Her critique of “Gwen” analyses, then, a treacherous black woman “friend,” one who could straddle either side of the 49th Parallel, that is, show up in either New York or North York: Gwen painted her face with caramel and fudge. Her cherry-stained lips never had a smudge. Belly had a pudge, she hardly ever budged. She held a big grudge if her beauty was misjudged. Gwen and I met guys named Stan and Sam Stan was fly, Sam was mine, Stan was her man. Gwen was fine not refined, she had a plan— To become the concubine of Stan and Sam. Gwen and I had an eye for men— If I checked one, Gwen checked ten. (l.19–28)

The swinging, Skeltonic end-rhymes and insistent, internal rhymes yield easy aural comprehension (and play) when read aloud, so that the “love-gameplaying”—or “Jezebel”—Gwen is starkly paraded as such. The Mother Goose simplicity of the quatrains casts the speaker’s discourse as wisdom intrinsic to smart survival in an arena of amoral romance. Nevertheless, appropriately dramatic recitation, stressing “voice quality, timbre, pitch, and movement style making its sounds” (Casas 25), along with gesticulations and wordlessly communicative facial expressions, can only enhance the reception of this poem. Turning explicitly to heterosexual relations in the “Love Hustle” section of her five-part book, Oni drafts a Shakespearean “come-on” in which the Bard himself meets an uproarious comeuppance—vis-à-vis the verbal verve, sly slang, puns, euphemisms, and mock Elizabethan style of “Bitches in Ditches,” a poem that requires complete quotation:

67

68

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Thou paper-faced, fod fat rabbit sucker, Shake your hideous, shag-eared, clot-pole. Saucy bitches in ditches, mud-brained, Hideous, evil-eyed, dog-hearted, Lewd, wannabe whoresons, motley-minded Hideous, eye-offending, soul creatures, Piss off! Run mad, and addeth unmuzzled, Saucy, yeasty rump-fed, queasy, jaded lies, And thou shalt have rank, empty-hearted bits Of pernicious gruel between thou thighs. Anon knavish kitty, let thyself go. Thou purpled labia, rug-headed sow, Knowest thy meaning of thy noun, ‘hoe cake’ Let they self match visual imagery That suits the true likes of thou raw-boned foe! Thou wretch’d, roynish, onion-eyed lass, Peevish-witted karma will kick thy fat ass! Thou gnarling, drooling, shaved kitty cat growls And combineth grace with mold on thy towel. Thy pinch-spotted, jackanape stories are foul. (1.1–20)

Beyond acknowledging their generously lewd nature, their witty assault on the licentious activities of lascivious lovers, these joyously anarchic lines tend to evade mere “sense.” As insolently insular as Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (1871), Oni’s poem infuses the English literary heritage with hip-hop rhetoric, to compose an excoriation of “loose” women and “fast” men. It is Juvenalian satire—a Philippic—a congeries (or pile of words). But it also replays the African-American street insult game, “the dozens,” wherein competitors attempt to “one up” each other by spouting explicit and graphic outrages about one another’s families, parents, lovers, or spouses. (One loses when one ceases to be able to instantly invent creatively shaming retorts, or, worse, resorts to force to silence an opponent.) Yes, playful is her language, but Oni’s poem constitutes fightin’ words—a denunciation of sexual immorality. Yet her decision to juxtapose archaic, Elizabethan terms and contemporary slang also reminds her audience that oft-disparaged AAVE descends, powerfully, from the entirety of the English poetic canon—even as it perennially proclaims its dissent from same.

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

Oni indulges dexterous rhymes and muscular rhythms, while flirting slyly with a four-letter vulgarity, in “Who Gives a Flux?” Though tightly organized around chiming couplets, the poem offers a stream-of-consciousness recitation of the poet’s life, poetics, and politics: Too many fluxing phony phonies out there claim that they are fluxing ripe. I’m fluxing lyrically imbalanced, and my fluxing rhymes are fluxing tight! … I’m the best poetic, diva flux that you ever, fluxing had! Even my fluxing kindergarten teacher will tell you that I was so fluxing bad! Fluxing sperm donors should never flux with the fluxing word, “dad.” If I got any fluxing child support payments, I’d be so fluxing glad. I treat fluxing metaphors like fluxing whores, like a fluxing lyrical pimp. My verbal inflorescence will flux you up like a fluxing imp. (1.14–17, 23–31)

These devious and delicious rhymes do not sit well on the page, for they want to “get up offa that thang” and hog the spotlight and be heard. The poem is a triumphant series of shouts—or “shout-outs”—that showcase the speaker as a masterful student of pop culture, slang, hip hop, and literature. It is, in short, a manifesto for sexual and artistic independence: “Flux cockblockers, I’m fluxing multi-orgasmic and I’m fluxing / cataclysmic. / Ever since I performed in the Vagina Monologues, my fluxing pussy is fluxing // Algorithmic” (l.49–53). The concatenation of rhyme permits the poem an endless supply of surprise—or intellectual energy expressed through snappy social commentary. The poem could be—should be—performed, maybe with a snarl, à la Bob Dylan’s anthemic and radical rock recording “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965). Familiar with Elizabethan, pyrotechnic “metaphysics” as well as the ferocious put-downs and truth-trumpeting word games of Negro street life, Oni invests her texts with a quality absent from much postmodern poetry: wit. She slings bons mots everywhere: couplets calculated to coax a smile or prod philosophical revery. See, for instance, “Love Letter to My Boo”: If you give me a chance, gurl, I’ll try to make you mine. Your curves are soft like puddin, And you have the juiciest behind … I love your nappy head, gurl. Damn gurl! You have good hair! If you fry it like bacon, it would mess up your flair. (l.4–6, 18–19)

69

70

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

See also “I Knead [Need] Your Nuts”: Yesterday, a Blackman Pulled a trigger— It was his phallus— And he shot me like a ni@@er,28 The bullet holes in my womb were deep. In nine months, The resurrection had hands and feet. (l.44–50)

Most black men and women hearing Oni’s recitation of such images—“hip,” “relevant,” and bluesy (ballsy)—would emit a roar, a sob, or a loud amen, of recognition. Existentialism is usually a brooding, stoic affair, but here it turns rollicking and subversive: half Albert Camus and half Yma Sumac.

Percussive Conclusion On a cold Saturday night in January 2003, I joined a standing-room-only crowd of three hundred at a downtown Toronto nightclub, where, after each having paid the not inconsiderable “cover” charge of $15, we were treated to the live recitation of their works by fifteen black women poets from Canada and the United States. For roughly two hours, these performers (whose ranks included Oni), charmed a tough, urban audience, eliciting spontaneous whoops and hollers, applause and cheers, whenever they coined a formidable rhyme or stirring phrase or expressed some rousing, undeniable, shocking, or mirthful truth. Often have I reflected on that night, recognizing that few page-bound poets—despite their fame—could draw such a rapt and paying audience. Yet the same Oni who received the adulation of the nightclub crowd won only the disrespect of a literary jury.29 The divide, in Canadian letters, between those who speak, sweat, and gesticulate, and those who mumble in a monotone while covering their mouths and faces with their books, gapes still, and the abyss between the two remains coloured—stained—by “race.” No matter this pain—their absence from the Eurocentric (white) anthologies and the ranks of grant recipients, Afro-Caribbean-Canadian poets like young and Oni the Haitian Sensation refresh all of English-Canadian poetry. The rejection of performance poetry—or of black Spoken Word verse—by the white aristocracy of Academia is nothing but a reactionary attack upon the possibility of a popular poetry that articulates the deepest feelings of its auditors.

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

And yet, the orality of Negro poetry always will out, bursting through all stifling blandishments and attempted erasures, because those who choose to speak their verse, seek both to face brethren and sistren blacks and to face down (white) racists. Poetry puts on flesh only when it pulses in speech.

Notes 1 Gilbert R. Daye is a right-on black bluesman—unrecorded—straight outta our ’hood of North End Halifax … 2 See Walcott’s The Odyssey (1993). 3 Frantz Fanon charges caustically, “The Negro … will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of [a European] tongue” (18). 4 In this essay, I use Negro to refer to all black people, whatever their cultural, ethnic, or geographic affiliation. To refer to specific groups, I use African-American, African-Canadian, Caribbean, and Afro-Caribbean, accordingly. Although Negro has been tainted by racist usage, I do not forget that one of the foremost African diasporic intellectuals of our Common Era, namely, W. E. B. Du Bois, preferred it due to its racially collectivizing connotation. See his The Negro (1915). 5 For Peter Conrad, “the steady, incremental rhythm of literary narrative … takes its tempo from the disciplined and deliberate way our eyes work through a page of print” (177). The culturally Negro poet may find this rote rhythm imprisoning, and will seek to explode it through inventive vocalization or through giving the printed text the spatial “freedom” of a jazz composition. Euro-American Modernist poet Ezra Pound lectures, “Rhythm is the hardest quality of a man’s style to counterfeit …” (103). 6 Sartre, speaking of emancipated black writers, asserts, “If I were them … I’d prefer my Mumbo-Jumbo to their [the West’s] Acropolis” (Preface 20). 7 How could it be otherwise? “Black” poetry is a conscious counter-propaganda versus the grammatical and literary “standards” of any number of European tongues. It stages “uprisings against the government of the tongue” (Chamberlin 84). Caribbean poetry arises, then, from “broken words and dislocated peoples” (5). 8 young has appended to her name the suffix “anitafrika,” prefaced by a period. However, her debut book is signed ‘d’bi.young,” so that is the name I choose to use in this essay. 9 young’s comments echo typical Jamaican Rastafarian beliefs about reggae music and dub poetry. William David Spencer endorses “reggae’s identification as a vehicle of protest” (268). Maria Caridad Casas reports, “Dub poetry is a performance-and-print genre that developed under the inspiration of reggae, both politically and aesthetically” and that voices an “emancipatory activist content” (10). Too, “Dub poetry by women tends to be socialist or radical feminist in its politics” (11). Spencer affirms that reggae “has championed education, women’s causes, the value of indigenous cultures, and a variety of religious stances, primarily … Rastafari in Jamaica.… It has been employed to inspire freedom fighters, to awaken black identity and pride, to lift up new cultural heroes, to inspire repatriation, to publicize various locales, and to promote peace among all people” (280). young articulates these themes. For African-Canadian scholar Peter Hudson, dub is “a politically-charged oral poetry that draws on … dialect poems… the ‘rapping’ of Jamaican DJs over instrumental versions of reggae songs, the language of rastafarianism [sic]” (“Primitive” 194). 10 Perusing an interview with Jamaican Canadian poet Lillian Allen, in which she provides a culturally informed, phonetic reading of poetry as “poor-e-tree,” Gingell remarks,

71

72

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

11 12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

“Such a comment should remind non-Jamaican readers how important it is to actually voice, in an approximation of whatever version of Black English they can muster, the words of a dub poem and even syllables when they are set off as units in any part of the poem” (237). In turn, Gingell’s analysis reminds us that “Negro” accents, pronunciations, and speech styles—I mean, orality, even when staged as literature—must be performed to render the distinctively, even inimitably, Negro. See Lee M. Jenkins, ‘If We Must Die’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay,” Notes and Queries 50 (2003): 333–37. The quandary of the African diasporic writer is that if he or she is read primarily as a performer, then the value of his or her work is centred on his or her physical representation of it, thus demarcating the poem as ephemeral as the body is mortal. The form of the poem is thus the body, and as the body withers and vanishes, so must the poem. The black communal bias in favour of live performance is so pronounced that, says African-American pop culture critic Mark Anthony Neal, some singers and musicians have prospered spectacularly in this genre (32). Some artists, he claims, “produced careerdefining recordings in live contexts” (32). African-Canadian literacy worker Alfred Jean-Baptiste holds that Anglo-Caribbean speakers of “Erudite English” embrace “performance, biblical and proverbial English” and that their sole intention “is to impress [audiences] by sound, length, or unusual combinations of words” (41). Peter A. Roberts’s West Indians and Their Language (1988) insists, “From the lowest to the highest levels, Church-controlled education involved rote learning, especially of the Bible.… Even now knowledge in this area is not judged by one’s understanding of philosophical and theological concepts but by the ability to recite biblical passages and identify where they occur in the Bible” (29). Jean-Baptiste adds, “Meetings, religious services, songs or social functions were most often the contexts for the use of extreme forms of performance English. At these events, the speeches would contain long sentences with many Latin and Greek words and biblical phrases” (41–42). Afro-Canadian scholar Peter Hudson designates “the use of performativity, non-English syntax, neologisms and vernacular lexicons, and code- or register-switching [as] typical of black Canadians” (“Primitive” 194). Stephen M. Finn remarks, “performed poetry … is aimed not at the intelligentsia and the literary elite but at the proletariat, [and] can be regarded as helping bring people together and unite them in hope” (8). Randolph Chase, commenting on the relative currency, among the West Indian ‘”folk,” of “protest” in reggae songs versus printed poetry, registers, “One must realize that both types of protest are recorded—one electronically and the other in print. This is an important difference since print has a way of establishing a permanent record” (27). Carrie Noland assures us that “[m]aking noise … is of course the very opposite of making poetry in the traditional sense” (43). But every successful poem is, one must imagine, a kind of can(n)on blast. Every true anthology is a raucous babble. I will also insist, however, that it is only in the context of performance that the organic atavism of bodily expression (including the speaking aloud of a poem) combines—or collides—with any apparent styling of the avant-garde. In relation strictly to poetry, performance is the unstable enabler and disabler of form. Whatever its formal properties in print, the poem assumes an utterly new form, received differently, when performed. The performance itself will “reform”—or “deform”—the print-bound original. This panoply of versification methods accords with African-Canadian poet Andrea Thompson’s perception that performance poetry includes “everything from rap music to Shakespeare” and “steals from actors, singers, musicians and comedians” (“Article”

Bring Da Noise

20 21

22

23

24 25

26 27

■

George Elliott Clarke

21). It is so multifaceted because “[i]t walks a thin line between entertainment, education, revolution and revelation” (21). Peter Hudson contends that “[t]he dub poets and their progeny remain the step-children of the CanLit establishment” (“Primitive” 194). Although young imbibed dub along with speech from her mother (a dub practitioner in her native Jamaica), what is vital here is her self-positioning as having “come to voice” via the experience of Toronto’s immigrant-dominated streets. Hence, her putative autobiography connects her with many other urban writers-performers who have found their art among spray paint and bullet spray. Jean-Baptiste terms some Jamaican speech “Rasta English” (42). It is characterized by the inventive altering of Standard English words to reflect the Rastafarian philosophy of Black uplift in the face of White oppression and the veneration of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I (Ras Tafari). I have written elsewhere about the influence of African-American writers upon AfricanCanadian ones (see my Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature [1992], esp. 51–57). Certainly, young’s stanzas and literary devices recall Ntozake Shange’s remarkable ‘choreopoem’ for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1977). This relationship is definite. In “children of a lesser god …,” young cites Shange: “blood / is the colour of the rainbow / when brown girls consider suicide” (l.37–38). In “ain’t I a oomaan,” young refers to “ahdri zhina” (l.23)—ahdri zhina mandiela—whose 1991 verse-play, dark diaspora—in dub is itself a domestication (Canadianization) of Shange’s verse-play. Discussing poets Dionne Brand and Lillian Allen, Casas tells us that she has “followed a Caribbean canonical line of descent” for them “rather than an African-American one because their themes and orientation seem to me fundamentally Caribbean—and Canadian—rather than American” (30). I maintain that African-American models retain a distinct provenance in African-Canadian letters. Brand has indicated that she left Trinidad in 1970 to be nearer the Black Power movement of the United States, while Oni Joseph has titled her first book, Ghettostocracy (2006), for it is, in part, a response to her experience of South Central Los Angeles. Presumably, in performing this piece, young would explain precisely who Douglas was—and his importance to Black Canadian and Caribbean history. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant praise “Creole orality” because, “even repressed in its aesthetic expression, [it] contains a whole system of countervalues, a counterculture” (895). Spoken Word requires syncopation; print poetry requires punctuation—and/or its absence, including the use of space. No one can deny Oni’s claim to diverse influences. She declares, “I am a rap poet, a beat poet, a spoken word poet, a dub poet, a rock poet, a jazz poet, a blues poet, a sound poet, a punk poet, a slam poet, a spoken word poet” (12). The repetition of “spoken word poet” emphasizes this label’s importance to the poet. African-Canadian scholar Peter Hudson says that the difference between writers like young and Oni is that, while the former is influenced by “dub, reggae, as well as … dancehall’s elaborate, insiderist configurations of patois” (“Primitive” 195), the African-American orientation of Oni means that her writing “draws on constructions of a black nationalist subject …, Negritude, or nation-conscious rap artists, and uses idealized notions of blackness and Africa,” but also yields “a place for feminist critique, sometimes radical, sometimes limited to a plea for the reformation of male/female relationships in the black community” (“Primitive” 195).

73

74

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

28 The “@” symbol allows Oni to avoid spelling out an ugly epithet; yet it also may represent the circular marking on the bottom of a bullet. 29 In 2007, a Canada Council for the Arts jury refused Oni’s publisher, McGilligan Books, funding assistance. The jury cited Oni’s “lack of literary merit” as a reason for this negative.

Works Cited Alim, H. Samy. Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Appel, Alfred, Jr. Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce. 2002. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. 1981. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 886–909. Trans. Mohamed B. Taleb. Khyar. Eloge de la creolite. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1989. Print. Carroll, Lewis. “Jabberwocky.” 1871. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Fifth Edition, Volume 2. Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. New York: Norton, 1986. 1594–95. Print. Casas, Maria Caridad. “Orality and the Body in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand: Towards an Embodied Social Semiotics.” ARIEL 33.2 (2002): 7–32. Print. Chamberlin, J. Edward. Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Print. Chase, Randolph. “Protest in West Indian Folk Poetry.” Kola 2.3 (1988–1989): 20–27. Print. Clarke, George Elliott. Introduction. Eyeing the North Star: Directions in AfricanCanadian Literature. Ed. George Elliott Clarke. Toronto: McClelland, 1997. xi– xxv. Print. ———. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. ———. Whylah Falls. 1990. Vancouver: Raincoast-Polestar, 2000. Print. Conrad, Peter. The Hitchcock Murders. 2000. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Print. Cookson, William. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. 1985. New York: Persea, 2001. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Negro. New York: H. Holt, 1915. Print. Dylan, Bob. “Like a Rolling Stone.” Columbia Records, 1965. Song. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Maspero, 1961. Print. Finn, Stephen M. “Transcolonial Metapoetry in South Africa.” SPAN 36 (1993). Web. 12 February, 2008. Gingell, Susan. “‘Always a Poem, Once a Book’: Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Caribbean-Canadian Dub and Performance Poetry.” Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1 & 2 (2005): 220–59. Print.

Bring Da Noise

■

George Elliott Clarke

Green, Steven. “What Makes Us Griots?” Introduction. T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers. Ed. Karen Richardson and Steven Green. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2004. v–ix. Print. Hudson, Peter. “Primitive Grammars.” Sulfur 44 (1999): 193–95. Print. Jean-Baptiste, Alfred. Caribbean English and the Literacy Tutor: Tutor’s Kit. Toronto: ALFA Centre, 1995. Print. [An audio cassette accompanies this book.] Jenkins, Lee M. ‘If We Must Die’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay.” Notes and Queries 50 (2003): 333–37. Print. Mahlis, Kristen. “M. NourbeSe Philip: Language, Place, and Exile.” Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1 & 2 (2005): 166–201. Print. Mailer, Norman. The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer. 1964. Toronto: Bantam, 1964. Print. mandiela, ahdri zhina. dark diaspora—in dub: a dub theatre piece. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1991. Print. McKay, Claude. “If We Must Die.” 1922. American Negro Poetry. Ed. Arna Bontemps. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. 31. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Toronto: New American Library of Canada/Signet Books, 1966. Print. Neal, Mark Anthony. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Noland, Carrie. “Poetry at Stake: Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom.” PMLA. 112.1 (1997): 40–55. Print. Oni the Haitian Sensation (Oni Joseph). Ghettostocracy. Toronto: McGilligan, 2006. Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. 1952. New York: New Directions, 2005. Print. Richardson, Karen. “A Footfall in the Snow.” Afterword. T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers. Ed. Karen Richardson and Steven Green. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2004. 165–66. Print. Roberts, Peter A. West Indians and Their Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Black Orpheus. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976. Trans. S. W. Allen. “Orphée noire.” Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie negre et malgache de langue française. Ed. L. S. Senghor. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948. Print. ———. Preface. The Wretched of the Earth. By Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove, 1968. 7–31. Print. Saunders, Patricia. “Trying Tongues, E-raced Identities, and the Possibilities of Be/ longing: Conversations with NourbeSe Philip.” Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1 & 2 (2005): 202–19. Print. Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. 1977. Toronto: Bantam, 1981. Print. Spencer, William David. “Chanting Change Around the World through Rasta Ridim and Art.” Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader. Ed. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell et al. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. 266–83. Print.

75

76

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Thompson, Andrea. “Article.” Fine Print (Winter 2002): [21]. Print. Walcott, Derek. The Odyssey: A Stage Version. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Print. White, Theodore H. Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Atheneum & Reader’s Digest, 1975. Print. young, d’bi (Debbie Young). art on black. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2006. Print.

POETRY PERFORMANCES ON THE PAGE AND STAGE Insights from Slam Helen Gregory

This is not the start of the text. It is a shifting reference point located somewhere between an indeterminate beginning and an equally indeterminate end. Neither is this essay a solitary creation. Rather, it is a collaborative performance between you and me, made possible through dialogue with numerous others, such as the editors of this volume, and the poets and scholars to whom I will refer, not to mention the printers, publishers, booksellers, and others through whom the text has passed on its journey to you, the reader. This essay, then, should not be viewed as fixed, absolute, or singular. This conceptualization of the text as dynamic, interactive, and multiple is most often reserved for oral performances, with written texts commonly viewed as a more private (if socially mediated) communication between author and reader. In the case of poetry, oral performances like poetry slam make the sociality of poetry clearly visible, allowing for the close observation and exploration of social contexts and artistic collaborators. I would contend, however, that the distinction between written and oral poetry is less distinct than is often assumed.1 Both are inherently collaborative, communicative performances mediated by the specific social contexts of their production and consumption, so that “the difference between performance and non-performance poetry is more a matter of degree than strictly of kind” (Baugh 41). As McKenzie (4) argues, there is much to be gained by exploring the congruence between these textual forms. The current essay develops this argument, using data drawn from an ethnographic study of poetry slam based in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Slam provides the perfect departure point from which to explore the similarities, differences, and relationships between performances on the page and stage since slam is typically located firmly at the stage end of this putative dichotomy. Both this positioning and the dichotomy itself are central to the way in which slam is defined by its critics and advocates alike. In this context, 77

78

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

written poetry can be seen as representing the dominant literary world while slam is equated with performance poetry more generally. As this essay seeks to demonstrate, however, written poetry is no more absent from slam than performance and orality are absent from the printed text. Rather, a close analysis of the slam world supplies many examples of interactions between page and stage, between performance poetry and the poetry valued by the academy.

The Oral and the Written Poetry is a diverse art, widespread in both form and application. Many of our daily activities and significant life events are played out to a poetic accompaniment. Poems are recited at weddings and funerals and chanted in playgrounds; they are printed on birthday cards, on chocolate bar wrappers and cereal boxes, and, of course, in magazines and books. There are many features that distinguish these myriad forms. The site of their presentation is one such feature, with poems published in birthday cards or called out in the playground clearly operating within a very different set of parameters than those which are published in a literary anthology or read at a book launch. Whether a poem is presented orally or in writing is often considered to be among the most prominent of these distinguishing characteristics. While recent decades of literary scholarship have seen a movement toward analyzing the social and paratextual elements of written poetry (see, for example, Genette), this development has yet to permeate popular understandings to any significant degree. Non-specialist audiences often view a poem on the page as being fixed in time and space. A printed poem can apparently be transported across the globe or preserved in one site for centuries, yet remain relatively unchanged but for a slight curl of the pages or yellowing of paper. This perspective is also evident in many North American and European schools and colleges, where a written poem may be taught in different institutions, states, or even countries, with the confidence that the individuals who interact with it are teaching, studying, and critiquing the same text. Thus, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which regulates school curricula and assessments in England, refers teachers to literary works by title, only rarely distinguishing between different versions. Instead, poems are accorded an essence that transcends the medium of their presentation. For instance, Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” popularly known as “Daffodils,” may be considered the same poem whether as published in 1807 or revised for its 1815 publication, and unchanged whether it is printed in The Oxford Book of English Verse, published on a website like poemhunter

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

.com, or reproduced in an exam paper in England, Australia, Jamaica, or India. Indeed, we can query the extent to which any one of these is an accurate copy of the so-called original. In short, written poetry is not commonly considered to be radically transformed by the social contexts of its (re)production and consumption. There are exceptions to this general rule, of course. Notable among these is the work on the sociology of texts exemplified by the scholarship of Jerome McGann and Donald McKenzie. These authors argue for a more socialized view of the text, in which attention is focused, not simply on the author and his or her apparent intentions, but also on the various professionals who collaborate in the production, distribution, and reception of the printed work, and on the specific socio-historical contexts in which these actions are accomplished. As McGann (121) notes, “literary works remain human products with the broadest cultural interests and relationships.”2 When oral poetry is considered, this sociality of art becomes more visible and explicit. Indeed, a number of scholars have remarked on the diverse ways in which oral poetry is shaped by the social contexts of its consumption (see, for example, Foley and Pfeiler). Oral performances are further distinguished from written performances by the visibility of those individuals who are involved in a poem’s presentation. An artist-run support structure, combined with the sharing of space and place between artists and audience, creates a unique kind of community for oral poetries like slam (Matthews 50). This community is both framed by and helps shape the event, giving a specific flavour to each poem that is performed in its midst (Middleton, “Contemporary” 291). Oral poems, then, are self-evidently dynamic, interactive, performative, and context-dependent in a way that printed ones are not. The physical appearance of the performer, the sound and use of her voice, the noises of the audience or the street outside, the setting of the performance, and the network of individuals whose existence makes the performance possible, all apparently work to ensure that the poem on the stage is a fundamentally different entity from the poem on the page. Moreover, not only do performance poetries in general have many distinctive features but so does slam in particular. My argument, however, is that the border traditionally drawn between oral and written poetry is permeable. Not only can poetry be viewed as a social performance on both stage and page, but also poets frequently mobilize both media to present their work, using oral performances to sell poetry books, for instance, or committing to paper a piece that began its life in voice. I will illustrate this argument with reference to social scientific writing on

79

80

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

the arts and to observations arising from my own ethnographic research on American- and United Kingdom–based poetry slam. The research study in question was conducted in 2006 and 2007. During this time, I analyzed secondary materials that discussed, presented, and promoted slams, interviewed forty-four poets, promoters, event organizers, and educators involved in slam,3 and observed twenty-five slams and slamrelated events at four sites: Bristol and London in the United Kingdom, and New York and Chicago in the United States. These data were analyzed using a combination of content, discourse, and thematic analysis.4 Prior to beginning this study I was already active as a poet, event organizer, and audience member for United Kingdom slam (especially in Bristol). My insider status placed me in an advantageous position in terms of knowledge of and access to these scenes, yet it also inevitably raised a number of concerns. My ongoing involvement in slam communities, for instance, meant that ethical issues around confidentiality and informed consent continued to be negotiated long after the research itself had ended.5 Before returning to my main thesis, a brief discussion of poetry slam itself is in order. This is important because, while it is arguably the most notable recent development in oral poetry, slam is not widely known or understood. Many who are acquainted with this art have only a passing familiarity with it, and commonly confuse slam with other oral poetry contests, such as the hiphop emcee battles that entered public consciousness through texts like 8 Mile. For such people and for those who have participated in slam, the description that follows should enrich their understanding both of the art itself and of the central tenets of this thesis, highlighting issues around the interactive accomplishment of oral poetry, its reconstruction at different sites, and the tensions between slam and the academy.

Introducing Slam It is 3rd December 2006. I am sitting in the bar of the Stratford Theatre Royal in London to watch the Word Up Grand Slam Final. Most of the room is dimly lit, and the fifty-plus individuals who are clustered around its twenty tables are quiet and attentive. Our attention is focused on a small, slightly raised corner, where a spot-lit poet stands behind a single microphone. Joshua Idehen is an engaging presence, still in body, yet turning somersaults with his voice and words. At times funny, but with an underlying seriousness, he tells of a sadistic schoolteacher who forced him and his classmates to run for miles. When he finishes, the room fills with applause and cheers. He returns to his seat in the audience, where his companions land congratulatory slaps on his back.

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

As he leaves, the compere, or host, Kat Francois, takes the stage. The (often comic) banter that characterises her compering is less in evidence tonight than it has been on my previous visits here, and she tells us that she is losing her voice. This does not seem to dent the obvious pleasure she takes in the poets’ performances, though, and she is smiling broadly as she asks the audience if they like what they have heard. In response, I enthusiastically hold above my head the laminated “Word Up” card that I have been given. Many of those around me do the same, and Kat points to each in turn, as she counts them up. She writes something down in her notebook (presumably recording the score), and moves on to introduce the next slammer. As she does, the low-level chatter that has filled the room begins to die down, so that by the time the next performer has reached the stage, we are all quiet and attentive once more …

This vignette sets the scene for the analysis that follows by providing an account of a UK-based slam that will be both familiar and strange to many American slam participants. There are indeed important differences between slam in these countries. I would argue that both these differences and the vignette itself highlight the importance of social context and social interaction in the (re)construction of slam and “slam poetry.” The presence of such geographical variations, for instance, supports the contention that slam is a dynamic practice, (re)created in line with local conventions, discourses, and art worlds. In addition, the heterogeneity of slam demonstrates the ease with which the page/stage divide can obscure subtle yet important distinctions within oral poetry forms, thus emphasizing the problematic nature of such broad-brush dichotomies. Before I expand on this argument, however, it is important to say a little more about the nature and history of slam. As I explained in “(Re)presenting Ourselves,” “Poetry slam is a movement, a philosophy, a form, a genre, a game, a community, an educational device, a career path and a gimmick” (201). At its core is a knockout oral poetry competition in which poets are judged on the composition and performance of their work. Scoring is typically carried out by randomly selected audience judges, although as the above example indicates, there are many variations on this system, especially outside the United States. Besides being a competition, slam is associated with a particular style of poetry (and performance), and “slam poetry” is an important aspect of the phenomenon. In order to capture this dual (and contested) identity as both art form and forum, I refer to slam throughout this essay as a “for(u)m.” Slam’s history spans more than two decades and thousands of miles. The first official poetry slam was organized and run in 1986 by Marc Smith at the

81

82

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Green Mill Tavern, Chicago (Heintz). This Uptown Poetry Slam continues to run on a weekly basis, attracting poets from across the United States and beyond. Since its inception, slam has expanded into numerous geographical and social contexts. One of the most interesting of these is the development of youth slam (Gregory, “Quiet”). While slam follows poetry as a whole in remaining a rather “niche” art, it has grown into perhaps the most popular poetry movement of recent decades (see, for example, Gioia). The National Poetry Slam, held annually in the United States, can attract audiences in the thousands, while slams and related events have been aired on American television and radio and on Broadway. Slams are held regularly in many other countries, too, covering such disparate contexts as Japan, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Despite the prevalence of slam and the number of intriguing research avenues this phenomenon presents, it has received very slight, and often skeptical, scholarly attention, and much of this attention focuses strongly on slam as a North American phenomenon (see, for example, Eleveld and Smith; Foley; Glazner).6 Slam, though, is a heterogeneous global for(u)m, (re)constructed differently in each new site to which it is imported. To understand something of this rich variety requires a consideration of the important role played by social context.

The Social Context of Slam Slam is underscored by social interaction. A slam is an interactive event in which audience involvement is actively solicited. As one participant puts it: It’s about [the] performance/audience dynamic. It’s making that absolute, clarifying the performer/audience dynamic which already exists in every performance poetry gig, and you do this by making them part of the process.… It’s about trying to get the public or the audience as involved as the people on the stage. (Joelle Taylor, performance poet and coordinator of SLAMbassadors UK)7

The explicit attention that is paid to the “performer/audience dynamic,” then, is something that sets slam apart not only from written poetry, but also from other forms of oral poetry. This dynamic is particularly evident in the scoring of poems, which is usually carried out by randomly selected audience judges, a clapometer, or some other measurement of audience response. Even where preappointed judges are used, they are often asked to take the audience reaction into consideration. Audience members may also participate in other respects, helping organize, compere, and promote events; host visiting poets;

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

or carry out a range of other tasks. Poets, too, are often involved in slam in more than one capacity, acting out performance, organizational, curatorial, ticket selling, leafleting, sound engineering, set design, and other roles. Indeed, it seems there is often no shortage of volunteers willing to offer their time and other resources to complete such tasks. Although these actions must be performed in order for a slam to be successfully run, the social interactions that take place in and around slam have more than merely practical value. Rather, for many participants, they are an important part of what makes the for(u)m enjoyable and meaningful. In the words of New York–based slam poet and curator Mahogany Browne, “that’s what [slam’s] all about, building relationships.” Chicago-based performance poet Lisa Buscani also stresses this point: “If you talk about seeing somebody live, then there’s that community … getting involved, getting a drink, sitting down with someone, sitting down with a group of people and enjoying something.” This focus on social interaction brings to the fore the contexts in which oral poetry is created and communicated. Oral poems cannot be viewed as abstract texts, but must be understood as sited within concrete social interactions, which are themselves framed by the broader socio-historical context. Thus we can ask (after Robinson 46), not simply “What does the text say?” but “How is the text realized?” Slams must take place in specific social contexts: bars, cafés, theatres, bookshops, marquees, and other venues, which are situated in particular neighbourhoods of particular cities in particular countries around the world. These do not simply house carbon copies of the art for(u)m, but create it anew. I would argue that this process of re-creation is characteristic of poetry, and indeed literature more generally, in that the resiting and reperformance of particular works in different contexts heralds new forms, voices, and meanings. This observation is supported by McKenzie’s (18-25) discussion of the fundamental shift of meaning that an extract from William Congreve’s prologue to The Way of the World underwent when represented by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their article “The Intentional Fallacy.” This shift is accomplished partly through the authors’ (almost certainly accidental) misquotation of one key word, but also through their use of punctuation and capitalization, and the context in which the extract is placed. Consequently, a paragraph that could be seen to argue for the preservation of authorial intention becomes, in the hands of Wimsatt and Beardsley, an argument for its demise. That said, this process of reconstruction is more clearly observable with slam than with written poetry. Indeed, the rich variability, immediacy, and temporality of slam (and other oral) performances highlights the transience of

83

84

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

poems that can so easily appear fixed, complete, and final when presented on the page. Furthermore, slam is characterized by a degree of standardization that allows us to observe more easily the ways in which it does vary between different contexts. In the United States, for instance, the organization Poetry Slam Inc. (PSI) has produced a detailed system of rules by which any participant wishing to qualify for the National Poetry Slam must abide. A PSI-recognized slam in Alaska will thus follow the same structure as one in New York. This standardization brings into sharp relief any deviations from this model, including the many prominent differences that distinguish slam in the UK from slam in the United States.8 Slam poetry in the UK, for instance, is frequently described by interviewees in terms of comedic verse and wordplay, with its American counterpart more likely to be identified as serious, emotive, identity poetry. Bristol-based performance poet, slam poet, and slam organizer Mike Flint9 gives a flavour of this difference when he suggests that “in the UK, comedy is the big thing for slams; over in America politics is the thing.” Similarly, David Johnson (performance poet, co-founder of Paralalia Poetry partnership, playwright, and slam winner, Bristol) argues that “generally there’s a bit more of a presumption [in the UK] that humour will win out, whereas in America I’ve observed that more serious, gut-wrenching topics can succeed, coupled with very powerful performances.” This greater focus on comedy and entertainment in UK slam reflects a more enduring and widespread distinction between art worlds in North America and the UK. There are, for instance, remarkable similarities between this US/UK slam divide and the different approaches taken by the American Beats and British Liverpool Poets in the 1960s. Indeed, the latter group wrote work that was less persistently and explicitly political than that of the Beats, tending to emphasize poetry as entertainment (Mackean 265–69; Shepard 42). More recently, a number of British poets have moved between performance poetry and stand-up comedy, while the term stand-up poetry, which links these arts, is becoming increasingly popular among poets in the United Kingdom, though less often used in the United States.10 The for(u)m is also constructed very differently within youth slam as compared with adult slam (Gregory, “The Quiet Revolution”). Indeed, many youth slam participants are highly critical of the work produced in the context of adult slam: I do think the writing in youth slams is superior to the writing in adult slams. I think adult slams have become very much rant based, stand-up comedy based, and they become a big cliché. I think youth slams have a

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

little bit more freshness to the writing, and I would put on the page your better youth slammers’ writing, up against your better adult slammers’ writing, pretty much hands down. (Peter Kahn, Chicago-based Spoken Word Educator)

As this statement suggests, youth slam participants often seek to distance themselves from adult slam, explicitly re-creating the for(u)m in new ways. Rather than randomly selecting judges from the audience, for instance, many youth slam organizers appoint professional writers and slam poets to the role. Thus, the West Midlands Youth Poetry Slam event that I observed in March 2007 used two performance poets and one member of theatre staff as judges, while the Rise! Slam Quarter Finals I attended in London in April 2007 saw the scores of audience judges adjusted by moderators from the Poetry Society, a well-established and respected literary organization based in the United Kingdom.

Exploring the Page–Stage Dichotomy in Slam Slam, then, is an interactive, contextualized, dynamic art that is (re)created differently in each new context in which it is played out. As suggested earlier, these features are readily associated with oral poetry more generally. This analysis would thus appear to support popular discourse that places slam firmly at the oral end of a page–stage dichotomy. Oral performance is indeed focal to slam. One interviewee, for instance, suggested that “a slam poem would not be wholly defined by the words. It would be at least as much the performance as words on the page” (Colin Brown, Director of Poetry Can, Bristol-based poetry development agency). Furthermore, one could argue that the written text takes a secondary position within slam, with poets performing their work from memory and audience members required to pay full attention to on-stage activities, rather than following the poem on the page. In seeking to represent poetry as a performative rather than page-based genre, slam has drawn on the conventions of the theatre, live music, and other performance-based arts. These influences can be seen in slam poets’ use of such techniques as singing, beatboxing, and “call and response,”11 and in the language with which they discuss the for(u)m. The term performance poetry, for instance, which is used by many (particularly UK-based) slam poets to describe their work, classifies slam as something very different from textbased poetry readings or recitals. This oral–written dichotomy is central to slam’s very identity. As Chicago-based writer and media artist Kurt Heintz puts it, “inevitably people fall victim to the page versus stage dilemma.”

85

86

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Slam is frequently juxtaposed against written poetry, and this contrast is used to both criticize and promote the for(u)m. Its critics, for example, have argued that slam devalues poetry by emphasizing oral performance over the writing itself. Thus, Wojahn condemns slam for relying on “methods of delivery and gimmickry that owe more to show-biz than to literature” (qtd. in Middleton, “The Contemporary Poetry Reading” 263). This concern is also raised by some slam participants. As one Chicago-based slam poet comments, “[Slam poets] get over on an audience with just the sheer technique of their performance, and a lot of times they’re not saying anything. And the criticism of the national scene is just that. What happened to the writing? What happened to the text?” Others mobilize this dichotomy to emphasise slam’s superiority, promoting the for(u)m as an entertaining spectacle that is accessible, meaningful, and enjoyable to individuals for whom written poetry apparently lacks appeal. As Bristol-based performance poet, events organizer, writer, and tutor Caroline Jackson12 puts the matter, “people have a perception of slam as being exciting, accessible, perhaps more rooted in everyday life. It’s certainly not perceived with a lot of the negative baggage that page poetry and readings have.” In the context of this debate, slam is often taken as representative of contemporary oral poetry forms, like performance poetry/spoken word, while written poetry is implicitly associated with the work that is taught, promoted, and sanctified through the institutions and publications of the dominant literary world. This division is, of course, an artificial one that conflates many different forms, but it is undoubtedly salient. It is also an ideological opposition that positions slam as inferior to the “legitimate” art of written poetry (to use Bourdieu’s term in “Distinction”). New York–based teaching artist and poet Lynne Procope articulates this ideological operation clearly: “People who are aspiring to academia are afraid to be aligned with slam.… [A] cademia in this country particularly is so elitist and so much the bastion of the privileged that if you can get your leg in there, you certainly don’t want your work to then be labelled either as spoken word or as slam poetry.” Slam participants seek to overturn this representation, portraying slam as something that has more to offer than the poetry of the dominant literary world. Indeed, slam originated partly in explicit opposition to what was perceived as being the inaccessibility, irrelevance, and dullness of the literary sphere. As one participant says, “It’s very difficult to get people into poetry, and the reason for that is very, very, very simple, which is that most poetry readings, quasi-poetry readings, i.e. not performance poetry, not performances, are dreadful and tedious and the poetry isn’t very good” (Brett Van Toen, Londonbased poet and poetry promoter).

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

Slam, then, is a performative oral for(u)m that relies on the page–stage dichotomy in order to carve a unique identity for itself. A close analysis, however, reveals the fallacy of this dichotomy. There are many examples, for instance, of written poetry permeating slam. The poems performed in slams often exist on page as well as on stage. They may be composed on the page, sold in chapbooks, or published in anthologies like The Bristol Slam Anthology (Carmichael and Arbury), The Spoken Word Revolution (Eleveld and Smith), and Poetry Slam (Glazner). Indeed, it is not uncommon for an audience member to ask for a written copy of a poem after hearing it performed in a slam. Other books exist that critique slam or guide would-be slammers on how to develop their art (see, for example, Smith and Kraynak). Oral slam performances can also have an impact on the way in which a poem is written on the page. My own introductions to poems often become appended to the written work, for example, and asides that have proved successful with an audience may find their way onto the page as well.13 Furthermore, slam participants themselves often resist the categorizations of “slam poet” and “slam poetry,” suggesting that these labels pigeonhole artists into artificially constructed categories and limit the kinds of work they are expected to produce. From this perspective, the page–stage dichotomy serves merely to close off opportunities to poets and other slam participants: “It’s very easy for us to say ‘Okay. That’s performance poetry more than poetry or more than page poetry’ and kind of set up these dichotomies; but myself and a range of the poets that I work with, we kind of appreciate strong poetry in a wider sense” (Jacob Sam-La Rose, poet and former artistic director of the London Teenage Poetry SLAM). There is also much overlap and interaction between slam and the dominant literary world. Kurt Heintz (Chicago) gestures toward this intersection: “In the early days I remember clearly we felt like we were trying to tear down the ivory towers; now we’re actually looking to them for our paycheques.” Similarly, more and more scholars are choosing to study slam, and there has been a recent burst of scholarly attention directed at the for(u)m by postgraduate researchers (particularly in North America). This acknowledgement of interactions between slam and the dominant literary world is reflected in slam discourse more generally, and there are signs of movement toward a cessation of the old hostilities. In New York, for instance, louderARTS is often portrayed as the more literary of the city’s three main slam venues and receives much praise for this status, particularly among more established slam poets. Similarly, many UK poets with whom I spoke were keen to perform and publish in both slam and more academic for(u)ms.

87

88

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

As I discussed in my essay “The Quiet Revolution,” this overlap between slam and the academy is particularly salient within youth slam, where many participants are seeking to reconstruct the for(u)m using the conventions of both slam and the dominant literary world. This re-creation is evident in Joelle Taylor’s (London) discussion of the work of a recent Rise! slam winner: “He writes in his mouth. He doesn’t write on paper, but he allowed me to write it down, and I wrote it as a page poem. It’s a rap. You know, you just divide it up in a different kind of way, just restructure it, and Poetry Review were really, really impressed by it.” The strong identification of slam with oral poetry, then, does not equate to an absence of the written word from the for(u)m. Neither does it lead to a complete separation of slam from the dominant literary world. Rather, there are many points at which these arts intersect with each other. This interconnection suggests that poetry performances on the page and stage may not be as different as is often suggested. In particular, I would argue that written poetry as well as slam can be viewed as interactive, contextualized, and plural.

Social Performances on the Page and Stage: Hidden Commonalities Unlike slam, written poetry is easy to view as something that occurs outside of social interactions. The poet is seen to create a poem, which is committed to the page and digested by the reader. Both poet and reader could be alone when these activities take place. Under such circumstances, written poetry appears to be a static, silent object, readily extricated from the various social contexts of its production and consumption. This assessment presents an artificial picture, however, one that obliterates much of the meaning and significance of written poetry. Indeed, as Peter Middleton notes, “all reading, silent as well as public, depends on the network of hermeneutic communicative interactions within which we live” (“The Contemporary Poetry Reading” 295). Moreover, written poetry may not be presented in a bustling bar, as is common with the oral poetry of slams, but it is a social activity nonetheless. The production, distribution, and consumption of the printed text make literature an interactive process. Just as somebody must advertise a poetry slam, set up the stage, sell tickets, and introduce the poets, so poetry books and magazines must be edited, poems laid out on the page, texts marketed and sold, and page-based poets introduced to the reading public. Additionally, poetry on the page is often supported by poetry on the stage, as social events are held to launch and promote books and artists. Indeed, such readings and recitals are becoming increasingly important vehicles for purveyors of the written word (Gioia 20).

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

Both written and oral poems are thus created through the interactions of groups of individuals. These collectivities include people involved in the work’s conception, execution, manufacture, distribution, appreciation, and evaluation; people who carry out the training and education of art world participants; and individuals who contribute to the general stability of the society that supports such work. Emphasizing the importance of these interactive networks in the creation and recreation of artistic works gives a lie to the “romantic myth” of the artist as a solitary, creative genius (Becker 14). This myth segregates and elevates the artist’s activities over those of all other individuals whose actions contribute to an art work’s production, so that these support personnel are effectively written out of the story (2–6). As Barthes suggests, when this myth operates, it is the artist, and the artist alone, who takes the responsibility, and receives the credit, for an artwork (Barthes 147) and who determines its meaning. Audience members, in turn, are relegated to a passive, vicarious position, distinguished only by their ability to uncover the meaning the artist has embedded within the work. The process of production thus stops with the author (147). Scholars like Barthes, Becker, and Griswold argue instead that artistic production and consumption cannot be understood as isolated components, divorced from each other or from their social context. They view artworks as essentially social objects that acquire meaning through the behaviour of individuals toward them. Thus, a poem only becomes a poem when individuals respond to it as such. As Bob Holman aptly notes, “Poetry is a contact sport! The poem is not written until you read it!” (1). Much as with slam, then, written poetry can be seen to be accomplished through an interactive performance in which poet and audience cooperate in the presentation and evaluation of a poem. This collaboration is evident in Baugh’s observation that “a poem is only ever just ‘the text on the page’ when no one is looking at it. The moment a pair of conscious eyes engage with it, those words begin to get up off the page and perform” (43). It follows from this assessment that both written and oral poems can be radically transformed by the social context/s in which they are performed. An analysis of slam lends support to this claim. In particular, the variations that exist between slam in the United Kingdom and the United States, and between youth and adult slam, suggest that, rather than being imported to new contexts unaltered, slam poetry (on both stage and page) is re-created in line with existing artistic traditions and conventions and the concerns and values of local participants. The work of scholars like Mahtani and Salmon and Bennett indicates that this observation can be extended to other global

89

90

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

artistic phenomena as well. Bennett’s analysis of hip hop in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, for instance, provides an excellent illustration of this process in the context of music production and reception. Much as with slam, hip hop in these cities has developed geographically specific forms, as young people use it to articulate (and reconstruct) their different concerns and identities. In addition, both Bennett’s hip-hop artists and UK-based slam participants engage explicitly with the different global constructions of these arts, seeking to balance authentic local identities with the appeal of an American cultural import.14 Research such as that cited in the previous paragraph problematizes the model of the audience as passive consumers, proposing instead that individuals actively seek to make sense of artworks, infusing them with meanings from their everyday lives. Audience members are not empty vessels; rather, they bring to their consumption specific understandings, interests, and values, all of which lead them to become artistic producers who reconstruct the artworks with which they interact. Thus we can understand the meaning of a poem as arising in an interaction among poet, poem, and audience, rather than simply being embedded in a piece by the poet. This conceptualization is as true of written poetry as it is of slam.

Poetry as Plural Performance Understanding (written and oral) poetry as a social performance enables us to view it as something that is dynamic and multiple, constructed differently in distinct social contexts. As Charles Bernstein notes, “The poem, viewed in terms of its multiple performances, or mutual intertranslatability, has a fundamentally plural existence.… To speak of the poem in performance is, then, to overthrow the idea of the poem as a fixed, stable, finite linguistic object” (9). Once again, this concept is readily observable with slam, the plurality of which is apparent both within and among different social contexts. The presentation of a slam poem inevitably varies with each event, for instance. That is to say that the range of gestures and other body language, the variations in tone, pitch, and volume of voice through which the poet delivers her work, the clothes she wears, the props she might use, the way in which she is introduced, and, in turn, introduces her poem, the venue that houses the event, and the audience composition all work to make each slam (and poem) a unique experience. Furthermore, the event itself frames the work in a unique way, so that a poem is likely to be received differently when it is performed within a slam, compared to an open mic. event or showcase performance. Poems can also be viewed as having a plural existence within a given event, in

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

line with the unique experiences of audience members. Thus a love poem, for instance, will mean very different things to the object of the poet’s affections, someone who is going through a divorce, and a couple who are out on their first date. Similarly, the event is likely to have differing significance to a poet who is slamming, the event organizer(s), and an audience judge. As this essay has sought to demonstrate, however, it is not just oral poetry that is performative (and thus plural), but written work too. Indeed, Bernstein’s comment was aimed at poetry in all of its forms. Written poems are not finished products, static in space and time. Rather, they exist in many varied forms and are realized within a range of social interactions that construct the text differently. While many would acknowledge that each slam is a distinct experience, however, the features that distinguish “textual performances” (Bernstein 8) from one another are more easily overlooked. Yet manuscripts and type- or digital scripts evolve over time, and printed versions of a poem often exist alongside one another. Furthermore, as McKenzie (2) notes, the widespread use of new technologies has made the presence of multiple parallel versions of a text increasingly common. Treating the printed poem as a static end product ignores the importance of these variations, pointing instead to an often elusive definitive manuscript as the source of some ultimate meaning (McGann 30). Just as the seating arrangements and stage set-up of a slam venue have an impact on how poems are heard, so the presentation of text on a page and the use of particular fonts influence how they are read. The poems presented after or before a given piece shape the reception of poetry on the page as well as on the stage, as do the context of presentation (in a magazine, in an anthology, on the Internet) and the conditions of reception (whether the poem is read aloud or silently, at the reader’s home, on a bus, or in a classroom). Furthermore, as McGann (113) remarks, the audience for which a work is intended has a profound impact on the text itself. Thus, to return to an earlier example, Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” does not remain unchanged whether read in The Oxford Book of English Verse, on the Internet, or in an exam paper. Rather, its meaning is dependent, at least in part, on the social contexts in which it is realized. Both written and oral poetry can thus be understood better as process than as product, as “potential” than as “fixed, determined artefacts” (McKenzie 51). In Foley’s words, “texts are seldom the replicable objects we buy, sell and tote around, and readers aren’t often the scrutinizing, object-dependent dissectors we assume them to be” (73).

91

92

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Conclusions Oral poetry for(u)ms like slam are essentially social phenomena. Slams are interactive events, the successful accomplishment of which requires the combined efforts of poets, curators, audience members, judges, bar staff, and others. Slams, and the poetry they showcase, acquire much of their meaning and significance from the social interactions of these participants. Individuals go to a slam not just to hear poetry being performed, but also to make contacts, promote shows, and meet their friends. Furthermore, the poems they hear there take on different forms, depending on the setting, delivery, audience response, and a host of other factors that vary from event to event. The performative, interactive, and contextualized nature of slam, then, is readily apparent. As this essay has attempted to show, however, these are not just features of oral poetry, but of written poetry, too. Just as on the stage, poetry on the page can be viewed as a kind of social performance. The meaning of written poetry is not static, singular, and asocial, but dynamic, plural, and interactively produced. Written and oral poems alike exist in numerous versions, which embody multiple voices and act as foci for a complex, interactive process of meaning construction. This understanding supports the contention of Baugh, McKenzie, and others that the distinction between oral and written poetries is less sharp than is widely believed, and that we would do well to pay greater attention to the social determinants of the latter. Oral poetries like slam highlight the importance of this sociality, demonstrating that removing any mode of poetry from the socio-historical contexts of its production and consumption also removes much of its meaning and significance. Furthermore, the complexity and heterogeneity of these respective arts means that we should consider more subtle distinctions and interactions than are allowed for by a generalized distinction between the written and oral. Accordingly, this essay has argued that poetry performances on both page and stage must be understood as diverse arts, ones that are created, disseminated, consumed, and critiqued through concrete social interactions. I hope I have demonstrated that a social scientific analysis of oral poetry for(u)ms like slam can offer valuable insights into the social and performative nature and significance of poetry, and indeed the arts more generally. Thus we can conclude, in haiku form, that: On page as on stage we interact to create words in performance.

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

Notes I am grateful to Theresa Cowan, Susan Gingell, Catherine Kidd, and the anonymous reviewers of this collection for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 “Written poetry” refers here to work that is primarily intended for presentation on the page. I am aware, however, that this term is far from ideal. All poetry is written in the sense of being composed, while a great many poems (in the Western world at least) find their way onto the page in some form, at some point. This difficulty in finding terms to represent the putative oral–written divide immediately highlights the problematic nature of this distinction. 2 A similarly contextualised and nuanced approach is presented in Becker’s “Art Worlds.” I return this and to the work of McGann and McKenzie later in this essay. 3 Interview quotations are presented in this paper using cleaned-up speech, which omits the hesitations, overlaps, and repetition of everyday conversation in favour of presenting a more lucid text. This decision was taken in order to respect participants’ wishes; several of them objected strongly to their words being shown in an unedited form, which they felt represented them as ineloquent. While this form of presentation is not appropriate for all analytic approaches, it is sufficient to support the broad focus on discursive themes that I take here. Indeed, the verbatim presentation of participants’ words would likely act more as a distraction, than an aid, to this analysis. 4 See Krippendorff, Hayes (178), and Burman and Parker respectively for more detail on each of these methods. 5 An in-depth discussion of this and other issues raised by this study’s methodology is available at Gregory, “Studying Slam. Part 1” and “Studying Slam. Part 2.” 6 Although Foley discusses oral poetry in a range of geographical and historical contexts, including Tibet, South Africa, and ancient Greece, his observations on slam are confined to North America. 7 Except where noted, all quotations presented in this paper refer to interview data and use interviewees’ real names. (All interviewees were given the option of using a pseudonym; however, very few decided to do so.) Descriptions of interviewees were also written by themselves, except in the few cases where this information was not supplied. 8 See Somers-Willett, “Slam Poetry” for more on US-based slam, and Gregory, “(Re)presenting Ourselves,” for a comparison between this and slam in the UK. 9 Name changed on request of interviewee. 10 The term stand-up poetry clearly alludes to the stand-up comedy tradition, emphasizing the performative and comedic elements of these artists’ poetry. As Jude Simpson remarks, “I describe myself as a ‘stand-up poet’ now, as my act is a fusion of poetry, comedy, and music.” 11 Call-and-response is an oral tradition and theatrical technique in which the audience is asked to call back a response to a key word or words uttered by the speaker or poet; for instance, whenever the poet says “there’s no place like,” the audience shouts “home.” 12 Name changed on request of interviewee. 13 One audience heckle, for instance, drew my attention to the auditory ambiguity in the line “I like being chased,” from my unpublished poem “These are a Few of My Favourite Things.” I have subsequently highlighted both interpretations (chased and chaste) in oral and written performances, to some comic effect. 14 See Gregory, “(Re)presenting Ourselves,” for a more in-depth discussion of slam participants’ attempts to balance authentic local identities with the appeal of a cultural import from the United States.

93

94

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Works Cited 8 Mile. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Written by Scott Silver. Perfs. Eminem, Brittany Murphy, Kim Basinger, Mekhi Phifer, Evan Jones. Universal Studios, 2003. DVD. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music and Text. Trans. and ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Print. Baugh, Edward. “Poem, Reading, Performance.” Caribe 2000: Regional and/or National Definitions, Identities and Cultures. Ed. Lowell Fiet and Janette Becerra. San Juan: Faculty of Humanities, U of Puerto Rico, 1999. 38–45. Print. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. California: U of California P, 1982. Print. Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Print. Bernstein, Charles. “Introduction.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 3–26. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 1989. Print. Burman, Erica, and Ian Parker, eds. Discourse Analytic Research: Repertoires and Readings of Texts in Action. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Carmichael, Glenn, and Sara-Jane Arbury, eds. The Bristol Slam Anthology. Bristol: Pimp$ of the Alphabet, 1998. Print. Eleveld, Mark, and Marc Smith, eds. The Spoken Word Revolution. Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2004. Print. Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. E-companion at http://www.oraltradition.org. Print. Genette, Girard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Gioia, Dan. Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2004. Print. Glazner, Gary Mex, ed. Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. California: Manic D, 2000. Print. Gregory, Helen. “Studying Slam. Part I.” Metaroar. 2007. Web. 2 February 2008. ———. “Studying Slam. Part II.” Metaroar. 2007. Web. 2 February 2008. ———. “The Quiet Revolution of Poetry Slam: The Sustainability of Cultural Capital in the Light of Changing Artistic Conventions.” Ethnography and Education 3.1 (2009): 61–71. Print ———. “(Re)presenting Ourselves: Art, Identity and Status in U.K. Poetry Slam.” Oral Tradition 23.2 (2008): 201–17. Print Griswold, Wendy. Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theater, 1576–1980. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Print. ———. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. 2nd ed. California: Sage, 2004. Print. Heintz, Kurt. An Incomplete History of Slam. 3rd ed. 1999. Web. 24 January 2006.

Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage

■

Helen Gregory

Holman, Bob. “Congratulations. You Have Found the Hidden Book: Invocation.” Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Ed. Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. 1–3. Print. Krippendorff, Klaus. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed. California: Sage, 2004. Print. McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Print. Mackean, Ian. The Essentials of Literature in English Post-1914. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Print. McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Mahtani, Minelle, and Scott Salmon. “Site Reading? Globalization, Identity, and the Consumption of Place in Popular Music.” Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Ed. C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. 165–79. Print. Matthews, Kevin. “Site of Slam.” Canadian Theatre Review 130 (2001): 47–51. Print. Middleton, Peter. “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 262–99. Print. ———. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (2005): 7–34. Web. 30 Aug 2009. Pfeiler, Martina. Sounds of Poetry: Contemporary American Performance Poets. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003. Print. Poetry Slam Inc. The Official 2008 PSI Handbook. Whitmore Lake: Wordsmith, 2008. Print. Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Qualifications and Curriculum Authority Website. 2008. Web. 25 Nov 2008. Robinson, Paul A. Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Print. Sheppard, Robert. The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950–2000. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2005. Print. Silliman, Ron. “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 360–78. Print. Smith, Marc, and Joe Kraynak. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2004. Print. Somers-Willett, Susan B. Anthony. “Slam Poetry: Ambivalence, Gender, and Black Authenticity in ‘Slam.’” Text, Practice, Performance III (2001): 37–63. Print.

95

This page intentionally left blank

POETRY AND OVERTURNED CARS Why Performance Poetry Can’t Be Studied (and Why We Should Study It Anyway) Hugh Hodges

On the first day of the performance poetry symposium that I coordinated at Trent University in February 2008,1 Christian Bök said: I actually dislike the term “performance poetry,” for the same reasons that I would probably dislike the term “performance music.” There is no such thing as “performance music.” It begs the question when we say “performance poetry” … [Is] “poetry”… something not to be performed?2

Bök’s rejection of the term notwithstanding, I’m going to use it here, as I did in the fourth-year seminar that dovetailed with the symposium. I use it to refer not so much to a kind of poetry as to a kind of performance, one characterized by the always self-reflexive production of meaning in the relationship between performer and audience. Since this is often not the character of poetry readings (where one frequently gets the sense that the performance would be nicer for the poet if the audience weren’t there), it is useful to have a term that excludes such events. The course, a fourth-year seminar titled simply “Performance Poetry,” was an attempt to engage academically, then, with something that is not in fact available for academic study in any conventional sense. Hence the subtitle of this piece, a nod to Walter Ong’s observation that “[h]uman beings in primary oral cultures … do not ‘study,’” at least not “in the strict sense of extended sequential analysis” (8–9). Even for those who have deeply interiorized writing and the analytical style it fosters, it is nearly impossible to return to an unrecorded event, such as the performance of a poem, and analyze it closely and systematically. In the classroom this near-impossibility has practical implications. Students who hear oral compositions (and we can include here recordings of oral compositions to which students do not have the opportunity to listen repeatedly) will be able to talk about their themes, affinities, and influences (often more effectively than students who have read a text), but, lacking a 97

98

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

printed text for reference, they will be largely unable to offer close readings of the performances’ content and mechanics. And this points to a second explanation of this paper’s subtitle: because close reading remains the default strategy of literary studies, oral performance is still generally not part of an English Department’s remit. Where “oral performance” does appear in university calendars, it is generally not, in fact, oral performance but the textualized trace of it that is being offered for study3 (so, for example, the University of Toronto’s offer to study African Literature “through close readings of oral performances, short stories, novels, plays, and selected essays”). That is to say, performance poetry can’t be studied by students if no one offers to make it available by actually immersing students in that reflexive relationship between performer and audience. And I’m going to squeeze a third meaning out of the title: we can’t study performance poetry if we assume that an undergraduate course necessarily demands regular meetings, readings (close or otherwise), and assignments over a period of several months. A performance poetry course has to have a different shape. So, in this paper I’m going to give the outlines of the course I developed in the spring of 2008. I don’t think I got the shape quite right, but I do think I got close enough that what follows will be useful to anyone planning something similar. As I’ve already intimated, any course on performance poetry, taught in the context of an English Literature program, is going to face a basic challenge: how exactly is one to teach performance poetry (as distinct from the textualized record/trace of performance poetry)? It is tempting to answer the challenge by conceding defeat immediately. After all, one can build a perfectly legitimate course around texts (either book-bound or audio) of works by Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats, for example; or around Amiri Baraka and Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Chuck D; or Patti Smith and Jim Carroll; Lillian Allen, LKJ, Michael Smith, and Bob Marley. Indeed, when I teach West Indian literature, I invariably include Bob Marley on the reading list without feeling the slightest anxiety about the missing context of his live performance. And in the course I am reporting on here, we resorted to texts by all of the poets mentioned here. However, when teaching a course specifically on performance poetry, one has to face up to the fact that, axiomatically, the textualization of a performance poem is not the poem. It seems unlikely that I need to elaborate much on that point in the context of this collection of essays. I will say only this, then: as a tool for studying performance poetry qua performance poetry, texts are of very limited value, particularly to undergraduate students, who generally lack even the barest historical context that might put some heuristic

Poetry and Overturned Cars

■

Hugh Hodges

flesh on the textual skeleton. The conventional analogy for reading the textualization of performance poetry is that it is like trying to enjoy a concerto by reading the sheet music. However, too many musicians claim to be able to actually do so for the analogy to fully convey the hopelessness of the attempt. A closer analogy would be trying to enjoy a concerto by sniffing the ink used to write the sheet music. For this reason, when I conceived the course, I was determined to avoid ink sniffing as much as possible and make it a study of poetry in performance, which is to say that actually going out and watching/listening to poets perform had to be an integral part of the process. This focus on performance entailed planning an event where students could immerse themselves in performance poetry, if only briefly. In Toronto, Montreal, or Calgary one could, with a little luck perhaps, simply pay attention to who was performing where over the period of the course and instruct one’s students to attend. At Trent University in Peterborough, however, this is not an option, and in any case, it would not provide the immersion in performance poetry that I think is needed to effectively “study” it. I will return to the event I coordinated shortly and talk about it at some length, but first I should outline the coursework that led up to it. Despite my thesis that only by participating in performance can one study it, I felt that conventional course study could at least produce informed participants with some sense of the modern history of oral performance. So we began by reading the first two parts of Martina Pfeiler’s Sounds of Poetry, “Back to the Roots” and “Listen Up!” I wanted students to be aware from the outset that we were going to be concerned not just with specific texts (or textualizations) but also, in a very broad way, with issues of oral performance, the relationship between orality and literacy, and the problems surrounding textualization. Pfeiler’s account made a useful place to start, for several reasons. It outlines an approach that was very much what I wanted students to attempt: “[I]nstead of working with poems on the level of silent reader reception, or as an oral articulation by the reader, [it] analyze[s] poetry as verbal art performed by the poet, whose main artistic tools are real sounds of spoken language” (9). And it provides a basic vocabulary for discussing oral performance: “phonetic intensifiers and onomatopoeia, cacophony and euphony, rhyme and repetition, rhythm and meter, tone and pitch, and volume and pause” (9). As the course evolved, these formal considerations actually became less important to our discussions than the politics of performance, the semiotics of context, and the shaping of publics, but to begin with they gave students a way to talk about poetry that was rooted in literary studies while clearly pulling

99

100

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

away from the page. Pfeiler’s Sounds of Poetry has the additional advantage of being both accessible (as in easy to read) and available online (through ubu. com).4 This meant that I could instruct students to read and make sure they’d got the drift of it but not print it off and not bring it to class. This directive, naturally enough, led to some fairly patchy discussion at first, characterized by prefaces like “I’m not sure where, but doesn’t Pfeiler say …” and, “If I’m remembering right, she says something like …” But because, by the end of the seminar, everyone had participated in this reconstruction of and expansion on Pfeiler’s themes, it was also an object lesson in how knowledge and communication are inextricably related when orality is the order of the day. In the second week we read Ginsberg’s Howl. That is to say we listened to, and had available for reference in class, two recorded versions of the poem: the 1956 recording from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University and the Kronos Quartet’s treatment of the poem. Students also had the City Lights edition of the text, but I begged them not to rely solely on it; most obliged me. Discussion revolved around two sets of issues: first, of course, questions about the relationships among the various performances and various texts of the poem, and which should be preferred and why; and second, the irony of Howl’s canonization, its total reclamation (or, as some students argued, castration) as a text for academic study. The former set of questions seemed to resolve themselves quite easily, everyone acquiescing readily to the principle that a recording is a text, fundamentally different from an oral performance. I state this principle with mock formality because, at this point in the course, my students’ understanding of this fact was purely formal; it would not be felt as lived reality until later in the course. So, for the time being, it was the concern with appropriation and betrayal that became the richer vein of discussion and remained our focus as we considered Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Public Enemy, and others in the weeks that followed. In the third week we talked about Baraka and Scott-Heron. We had no written texts to work from, only recordings, and even I felt a bit like we were stepping out into the void. Teachers are, I suspect, even more dependent on the safety of the text than students are. In any case, the results of that class and the ones that followed (in which we considered first dub and punk poetry and then, finally entering the deep end, Dada) were summarized by one of my students, Jennifer Placid, in her final project for the course. An education student with a strong interest in the pedagogical value of performance in the classroom, she recalled:

Poetry and Overturned Cars

■

Hugh Hodges

In Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” many common sayings and phrases are used. For example, The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat. (Scott-Heron) At times members of the seminar group seemed compelled to analyze specific word use. This led to discussions on why Scott-Heron referenced a large corporation and cars. Overall, it was decided that these were not side-points intended by the author for the listener to analyze; rather, these were general sayings that could summarize the feeling of watching television, aiding Scott-Heron’s message on Black revolution. Students began to become comfortable with the concept that, during a performance, not every word has significance, that the “meaning is in the context” of the whole phrase. Dub, Punk, and Dada depended heavily on rhythms and sound to express emotion. This made it increasingly difficult for students to attempt to transcribe the “poem,” as words were not always understandable or present. At this time more people became comfortable speaking about the “moods” expressed in the performances. In some cases a transcribed text needed to be provided, as students did not feel comfortable discussing what they guessed the speaker was saying. However, for pieces unaccompanied by a transcription, students learned how to detect the use of tension between elements outside of the performer’s voice, such as the music, and general delivery. This is important because it introduced the seminar group to new research possibilities, which are unique to performance. 5 (15–16)

I quote Jennifer Placid at length here (and below) because, although she is perhaps more optimistic than I am about the total success with which all of her colleagues made the transition, she does nicely outline part of what was meant to happen. I had included a selection of punk poetry in the syllabus—recordings by Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, for example, as well as Wire, The Mekons, The Desperate Bicycles, and other second-wave British punk bands dedicated to do-it-yourself—intending to talk about punk strategies for breaking down the illusion of separation between performer and audience (or recording artist and audience—“It was easy, it was cheap. Go and

101

102

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

do it” as the sleeve of The Desperate Bicycles’ “The Medium Was Tedium” announced). This discussion, however, turned out to be too abstract to be really helpful. Talking about deconstructing the artist–audience relationship created by texts and textualized performance is all very well, but working with recordings, in a classroom, it’s impossible to recapture what was at stake and what seemed possible when The Desperate Bicycles asked, “Why [haven’t you] recorded your single yet?” In this respect, the inclusion of Patti Smith’s Horses on the syllabus was probably a mistake; the album has become so revered over the past thirty years that it effectively reinforces the very passive relationship to music that punk aimed to subvert. How, in the face of something as definitive as Horses, can one cling to the Bicycles’ belief that cheaply produced and distributed d.i.y. (do-it-yourself) recordings might mimic the artist–audience conflation achieved by punk performance? I had also hoped that, as we discussed punk, selections from Simon Frith’s Performing Rites would help explain the idea that the point of a performance is the public created by the performance. But despite the earlier, general acquiescence to the principle that a recording is a text, we couldn’t quite get past the idea that, while obviously a recording “loses something” that would be there in performance, the two are on some fundamental level the same thing, two versions of the same song. I was not surprised by this; I often use field recordings by Alan Lomax, Kenneth Bilby, and others in my West Indian courses and never feel I’ve managed to adequately explain why it’s important not to think of them as giving access to the oral performance. But then, I was not worried by it either, convinced (rightly as it turned out) that the next couple of weeks would bring things into clearer focus. As Jennifer Placid says, the course had two turning points: The first occurred during the seminar on Dada and Sound Poetry. This class included essays which explained the performances that were being discussed, but the poetry was based on sounds rather than words. At this point many students appeared resigned to the idea that they were not required to recreate and dissect the works like a text. Before and after the class, students were discussing the studied performances rather than continuing to worry about how their participation would be evaluated. This was reflected in the class’s atmosphere. The seminar finally appeared to have reached a balance, where students could express what they learned, listen to others and form constructive debates. There was less attention on the learning process and more on the content of the course. (18)

Poetry and Overturned Cars

■

Hugh Hodges

I would add that this was also the point at which the class began to come to terms with the fact that the textualization of a performance poem doesn’t merely “lose something”; it loses everything (which is not to say it doesn’t gain all kinds of things that are irrelevant to the study of performance poetry in the same moment). Listening to recordings of performances by Hugo Ball, for example, or Kurt Schwitters or bpNichol, students finally began to realize that stripped of the illusion of semantic stability created by words, performance poetry’s meaning is coeval and coextensive with its instantiation of what Kamau Brathwaite calls “total expression” (273). Brathwaite uses the term to identify the way a performance always finds its meaning in the embodied and contextualized reciprocal relationship between performer(s) and audience (if indeed the distinction is worth making). Implicitly, the term also indicates that the total meaning of a performance is in its expression. The second turning point came when the students’ inkling of this revelation became conviction. At the heart of the course—the event toward which all of the preparatory class discussion was directed—was a weekend symposium, including panel discussions, workshops, and performances, which we titled “Doing It in Public.” My intention had been to have the students involved in every element of planning, organizing, and running the symposium, first, to give them a sense of the extent to which the performance of a poem is always part of a complex set of events (and meanings), and, second, to underline the fact that, if you’re studying performance poetry, you are necessarily studying something you have helped create. Unfortunately, because the planning had to be started almost a year in advance, this was impossible. I had to be satisfied with having the students take on those things that could be done either shortly before or during the event: designing and distributing promotional materials, setting up the performance space, taking on various coordinating functions over the weekend itself, and, in the case of three very enterprising students, recording the performances and panel discussions. It was enough, I think, to give most of them a sense of ownership. Most of the poets who participated will need no introduction here: Christian Bök, Adeena Karasick, Jill Battson, Angela Rawlings, Motion (Wendy Brathwaite), Alexis O’Hara, Lebogang Mothibatsela, Ziy (Ziysah Markson), and Derek Beaulieu.6 All of them agreed to participate in one of two public panel discussions on the day of their arrival (Jill, Motion, Lebogang, and Ziy in the first, titled “From Text to Performance,” and Christian, Adeena, Alexis, and Derek in the second, titled “From Word to Sound”). The panel discussions were intended primarily to introduce my students (and the public) to the

103

104

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

poets before they performed. In fact, the panels yielded much more than that. The first discussion ranged widely over questions of the relationships among text, performance, and the textualization of performance (“You bring a poem to life between two people, as opposed to between text and a person”—Lebogang);7 the relationship between poetry activism (bringing poetry to “people who wouldn’t normally go to a poetry reading,” as Jill put it) and activist poetry (“You watch the news and you can learn about things … but then you can very easily turn off the TV and say, ‘Oh, that’s too bad.’ If you have someone looking you in the eyes and saying it’s time to do something about this, you take that home with you”—Ziy); and, finally, the democratizing d.i.y. ethic of much performance poetry (“an ocean of opportunity”—Lebogang). It was the last of these topics that proved the most productive avenue of discussion. Lebogang probably spoke for the whole panel when she argued that spoken word is “a performance style which has lost the barriers to entry.… [A]nyone can practically jump in and it depends on whether other people will find you legitimate or not which makes you a poet. So that’s opened up avenues to anyone.… [Spoken word] break[s] down all the economic barriers: you can do it at school, you can do it in the playground” (Lebogang). Ziy identified this democratization as a necessary element in poetry as an activist tool; Motion linked it to hip hop and jazz. The panel concluded with a celebratory discussion of slam and its democratizing effects. The second panel took an unexpected turn. Christian Bök spoke first, and responded directly to the tenor of the previous panel, lamenting what he saw as the decline in poetry’s power and prestige: It’s very difficult now to imagine a poem … instilling in us a desire to get up and dance, instilling in us a desire to actually flip a car and set it on fire. This to me is a problem. It seems to me that poetry has fallen in its estimation as a high art form. It is now the lowest art form; it is the art form to which all other artists are demoted. That if you cannot, for example sing, well, at least you can be a poet; if you can’t be a hip hop artist, well, at least you can be a poet; that if you can’t in fact succeed as a stand-up comedian or as an actor, well, hell, you can be at least a poet. We actually tolerate such a large degree of incompetence in the performance of poetry that were we exposed to such incompetence in the milieu of music or in acting the person would be lambasted and walk out covered in tomatoes and cabbages. This is a problem for me. When we talk about the democratization of poetry, I feel that really what we’re discussing here is the kind of kid who goes home, makes a numchuck out of two broken broom handles linked together with a bike chain, imitates Bruce Lee … and thinks he knows Kung Fu.

Poetry and Overturned Cars

■

Hugh Hodges

Alexis O’Hara, who, as she puts it, comes from an “autodidactic and populist world,” defended the populist poetics of slam (she started the first poetry slam in Montreal), recalling several “overturning car sort of moments, where people who had the microphone and had the bravado would express their very marginalized, very controversial perspectives.” However, she also acknowledged that eventually she had to move on from the scene because “it wasn’t rewarding creativity or innovation”; like much written poetry, slam risks becoming safe in its own rules. “I’m … interested in this idea of risk and failure,” she said. “And I think that there’s not enough risk or embracing the transformative power of failure in a lot of what is popular culture … popular education … academics.” At this point, the ostensible topic of the panel—the relationship between sound and meaning, word and sound—went irretrievably out the window. Adeena Karasick, Angela Rawlings, and Derek Beaulieu all engaged interestingly with Alexis’s discussion of risk, mainly in terms of improvisation and experimental poetics. However, when the discussion was opened up to questions from the audience, Christian, playing the agent provocateur, offered this: I often joke that the audience is, in fact, the enemy of art; that you have to actually conquer your audience, vanquish them, convince them of your merit.… The relationship between the artist and the audience is antagonistic for that reason: you’re really trying to make an argument on behalf of the merits of this work, and obviously the standards by which we make those judgments now in the world of poetry I think are very low; they’re lower than almost any other form of art…. Almost every other art form demands a level of innovative risk at play in the work, and poetry does not.

He added, “If you had something of epistemological importance to say, poetry is exactly the wrong place to do it.” At this point the room erupted in protest. It was a challenge that effectively set the agenda, not just for the rest of the panel discussion but, to some extent, for the rest of the weekend. And really nothing could have been better calculated to engage my students—especially after the first, very successful evening of performances by the poets Christian was most explicitly challenging: Ziy, Lebogang, Motion, and Alexis. I won’t review the performances individually here, nor will I engage with the debate that Christian provoked. My students wrote reviews of the event as part of their coursework; for the curious, a sampling of them is available online. Those reviews reflect the extent to which Christian’s challenge had raised the stakes for all involved. For one weekend, at least, my students were

105

106

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

prepared to consider the possibility that poetry does matter—indeed, it’s something worth overturning a few cars for (if only metaphorically). Jennifer Placid makes an additional observation about students’ engagement with the performances: During and after the performances, the students had the opportunity to speak casually. Interestingly, these discussions often centered on the event or the course rather than outside matters. Another interesting observation was that, even seminar topics which had not been … understood at the time, by some students, were being referenced in these conversations. This means that even though a topic, such as Dub Poetry or Punk, may not have been understood initially, the students were still contemplating the lessons. The learning process had continued outside of the classroom. (18)

I would argue that, in fact, as far as actually learning about performance poetry as performance poetry goes, the real learning process began here, in the interactive extension of the event itself. And the most important part of that process was the recognition that the history they had absorbed before the symposium (and all the work they had done to help realize it) is only important inasmuch as it is contained in the present act of total performance. One of my students, Jason Stovell, observed of Alexis’s performance, “This is the kind of performance that is transcendental. This is the kind of performance which makes you forget where you are, who you are, where you’ve been or what you plan to do” (3). I think many of the students experienced that moment at some point over the weekend: that moment when, however briefly, that self-reflexive production of meaning in the relationship between performer and audience becomes total. For those students, the course was already a complete success. The second evening included Angela Rawlings performing her work Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists with Ciara Adams, a Toronto-based jazz vocalist; Jill Battson performing with composer Andrew Staniland; and Christian Bök performing a selection of sound poems accompanied by improvised jazz bass and percussion provided by Michael Morse and Joe Sorbara. Again, I will not review each performance here, as tempting as it is to dwell on the sheer beauty of Angela’s work, or on the sheer gleeful noisiness of Christian’s (as one of my students wryly observed, when Christian performed, at full amplified volume, Murray Schafer’s Patria 6, a work written to be howled across a lake, “and the audience had to put their fingers in their ears, it was clear that he had significantly changed the meaning of the poem”—Kastner 4). Pedagogically, I think, the real value of the evening was in those casual discussions

Poetry and Overturned Cars

■

Hugh Hodges

Jennifer Placid mentions, at least one of which I know went on until four in the morning. The only other part of the weekend that needs mentioning here is the series of workshops that took place on the second day. These workshops were, perhaps, the only part of the weekend that was not entirely successful. I invited all of the poets to lead their own sessions, a mistake because not every poet’s practice lends itself to transmission in a workshop setting, and because having eight sessions meant that each had to be relatively short (two hours, with several running simultaneously). It would have been better to have had fewer, afternoon-long workshops to allow participants to engage more fully with the poets. Nevertheless my students found it exciting to work with people they had either seen perform the night before or were looking forward to seeing perform that evening, and the workshops certainly contributed to their sense of participating in something much more complex than a mere poetry reading. Returning to the classroom was, inevitably, a bit anticlimactic. After a week’s hiatus we reconvened to talk over the event and discuss the rough drafts of the reviews students had been writing. This meeting was valuable, but the weeks that followed did not, I think, contribute much to the value of the course. I had planned the symposium for approximately the middle of the semester because it would have been unfair and impractical to ask students to set aside an entire weekend at the end of the year (in the middle of final papers and exams). This schedule meant that we had five weeks of classes following the symposium. In retrospect, it would have been better to meet just once after the symposium to compare notes, and perhaps once more informally at the end of the year to share the results of final projects. Given that all of the students put in at least a dozen classroom-equivalent hours during the symposium (and some of them double that), it would have been perfectly legitimate to cancel those formal meetings. This is what I was driving at when I said that a performance poetry course cannot have the shape of a conventional literature course. It has to be much more intensive (even if that means it also has to be shorter to balance student workloads); it has to create the opportunity for students to become immersed, because if they don’t, at some point in the course, drop everything else and become part of the total expression of the performance, they won’t have studied performance poetry. I estimate that the course I taught was successful, in this respect, for about three quarters of the students in it. Reciprocally, about three quarters of the students succeeded very dramatically in the course. That is to say, while one obviously can’t assign final grades based on whether students “got it” or not,

107

108

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

it was fairly clear that the best final projects in the course came out of an unusually close identification with the subject.8 Wanting to give them every opportunity to make the most of that identification, I allowed students much more liberty than I would have in a conventional course to devise alternative projects. As a result, while I received several excellent research papers, including Jennifer Placid’s, I also allowed some students, aspiring poets themselves, to base their final projects on their own practice. Several others made working with the recordings of the performances and panel discussions part of their projects, one of them producing a sound cut-up titled “My Blackbelt” that manages to be a smart, critical exploration of Christian Bök’s work and an effective audio-poem in its own right.9 In all of these cases, the students engaged with performance poetry not merely as a subject of study but as something personally meaningful to them. The result was that, altogether, the work the students produced in this course was some of the most exciting and rewarding I’ve seen in years. My own conclusions about the course are very much contained in this paper’s subtitle. We can’t teach students performance poetry, but we can provide them the scholarly framework for its study, we can prepare them to analyze it on its own terms, and most important we can create situations where they can experience it. And finally we can also create situations where they bring that experience back into the academy, perhaps overturning a few metaphorical cars in the process. One student, in his fourth year of study at the time of the course, said the symposium completely changed the way he thought about academia; he has now begun an MA thesis on the way reggae produces its public. Another is writing his thesis on Bruce Springsteen’s performance of masculinity, drawing on work he originally did for the performance poetry course. Jennifer Placid, meanwhile, is now teaching high school, regularly uses performance poetry and music in her classroom, and keeps me updated on her pedagogical adventures.

Notes 1 Half of the credit for organizing it has to go to Kim Fielding, the English Department’s administrative assistant. 2 Panel discussion, Doing It in Public, 29 February 2008. The recording is available at http://www.trentu.ca/english/doingit. The transcription is mine. 3 I am borrowing this very useful term from Susan Gingell. As she put it neatly, in an e-mail, “I use the … term [textualized] to describe any technological mediation of the oral, whether print, audio, audio-visual, or any form of the digital.” 4 Whenever possible this was a strategy I used throughout the course, making use of several other texts archived by Ubu: Dick Higgins’s “A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry” and Steve McCaffery’s “Sound Poetry—A Survey,” Marjorie Perloff ’s “Language Poetry and

Poetry and Overturned Cars

5 6

7 8

9

■

Hugh Hodges

the Lyric Subject,” and Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises. But we also had recourse to a number of other secondary sources, including Kamau Brathwaite’s “History of the Voice,” Simon Frith’s Performing Rites, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, selections from Charles Bernstein’s collection Close Listening, and Ronald Jackson and Elaine Richardson’s collection Understanding American Rhetoric. I have lightly copy-edited the quotations from student essays, correcting typographical errors. Lebogang Mothibatsela, an emerging performance poet from Botswana, happened to be studying at Trent when I organized the event; Ziy is a Peterborough-based poet who has been making a name for herself in the Toronto slam scene; Derek Beaulieu, to those familiar with him, will seem the odd man out here—one of Canada’s most interesting experimental (and definitely text-based) poets, Derek agreed to participate as a kind of limit case. This, and all of the quotations from the panel discussions that follow, are transcribed from recordings available online at http://www.trentu.ca/english/doingit. Final grades in the course were based on in-class presentations and participation, participation in the symposium, a review of one or both of the evenings of performance, and a final project. A plan to have all students conduct and record interviews with performers proved unworkable, but several students did interviews anyway, some carrying on extensive e-mail exchanges as they developed their final projects. Cliff McCarten, “My Blackbelt,” can be heard at http://www.trentu.ca/english/doingit/ reviews.html.

Works Cited Battson, Jill. “Panel Discussion: From Text to Performance.” 28 February 2008. Recording transcribed by the author. Bök, Christian. “Panel Discussion: From Word to Sound.” 28 February 2008. Recording transcribed by the author. Brathwaite, Kamau. “History of the Voice.” Roots. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1993. 259–304. Print. Desperate Bicycles. “The Medium Was Tedium.” 1977. Record sleeve. Gingell, Susan. E-mail to the author. 7 January 2009. Kastner, Sarah. “Doing It in Public Review: Unclear Intentionality in Christian Bök’s Performance.” Web. 20 January 2009. Markson, Ziysah. “Panel Discussion: From Text to Performance.” 28 February 2008. Recording transcribed by the author. Mothibatsela, Lebogang. “Panel Discussion: From Text to Performance.” 28 February 2008. Recording transcribed by the author. O’Hara, Alexis. “Panel Discussion: From Word to Sound.” 28 February 2008. Recording transcribed by the author. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Pfeiler, Martina. Sounds of Poetry: American Performing Poets. Web. 20 January 2009. Placid, Jennifer. “The Effects of Performance Mediums within Education.” Web. 20 January 2009.

109

110

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Stovell, Jason. “The Headliners Headed Towards a Head to Head from the Get-Go.” Web. 20 January 2009.

ECHOHOMONYMY A Poetics of Ethos, Eros, and Erasure Adeena Karasick

This is a poetics of performance that focuses on not what is being said, but how “meaning” is determined through what’s eVOCative, provocative, talkative In the aching ochos of tokable vocables, soaking in the awkward pockets of sticky fricatives, a flickerin’ flux of all that is fluid formal, rhythmic, dialogical, slippery, elliptic and colloquial; where danger lurks through your mouth’s silhouette Come with me into “a mounting semantic pressure, a structure of intensity”, full of folds, flaws, plaits, pleats, plutards; a polysonorous system of aural texture; cosmic and erotic fields of discourse. For, this is a poetics of a world that was created through language: letters, tropes, figures, sound, substitutions, structures, sutures, systems, intrasemiotic salience. So, whether i’m a slammin’ semia-philiac, secular political, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E focused beat-inspired, post-structuralist, sublingual eVOCative interfacer, or a sound-induced lyric pomo boho blaspheming structuralist of “oozing and thrusting swelling tapestries”, each letter, each processual hermeneutic moment, every exegetical entry is a simulacric re-enactment of a continual creative process. Follow me into this crossword this glowing tenebrae of dreams, shouts sufferings, pleadings resistances & dwell in the terror of the thickness of desire in the loom of this legacy mired in the imprint of history 111

112

Listening Up: Performance Poetics ■

Come with me into this veritas erratas fissured reverence for all that is uncontainable ■

Rip open this sprawling insignia crazed censure of textatic fragments taste my kaleidoscopic interiorized s’ecrets (s’ecrit) circumnavigating translation, r’elations expulsions / these syllables born into and out of borrowed languages; an enraged polylogue, apostrophic dislocated dazzling points of departure ■

Come dwell under my roof, in my stanzas Between the letters of these words, monads, nomos, the mnemonymy, synonymy, ignonymy, homonymy of wet matters. Come delight in the fluid spaces wrapped in fringed lineaments. Rest a little on the fractured banquette of cluttered syntax and bathe in the joy of reference mysteries and exquisitely unravel in grandeur and chant the accumulation of tender aplomb. ■

For, the text becomes a practice of layering and infolding of meaning, full of puns, plays, ploys, pliés, plais appelez Carved out of the blood of these scars, wounds, broken insignias, tortured textemes, excisions, decisions revisions of slippery ellipses palimpsesting and diverting; averting, subverting the sticky enclosures of pulsing appearance.

Echohomonymy

■

Adeena Karasick

which becomes not a narrative, but a n(err)ative of fiery potential; a semerotic lingua-static nexus of rupture (rapture), fractures and fragments of light. ■

And each day i wait wanting to reweave this circuitry. Each day i am looking for an exit strategy of stitches signs scars craving savings exchanges. Each day i grow full from this fear, this gaze aching gestures of syntactic tumult, resistance. Each day, i take you with me ((through connexion, infection, intersection, scission, fission a radical juxtaposition of differing codes, idioms, dialects, drawing from flarffy blog filled technomediatic e-zines, systems of coding and decoding, mapping currents, ciphers, rumpled measures, menus, billboards, pop songs)) in the spiraling concealment. And each day i repeat this process. A strung cluster of illegible narratives. Reach towards you through awkward urgencies links and perversions and all that is forbidden and unthinkable Each day i reach towards you with defiance dripping with secret blood, text, breath a fraught marinade of luxuries and perversions And fraught with illegality, i am vehemently shaping this intimacy, unexpected complicity through images, pauses and vacancies shaping this intimacy through each letter employed with exquisite care, like pillars of fire in the far-flung system of meaning.

113

114

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Each letter, mysterious, majestic and ceremonious; like a day which includes all the days and all the nights and all the bodies and games and frivolity and vulgarity and grandeur. And, as i lay down in the profanity of clattering syntax, enter into dissonant acquisition, betrayals and embezzlements inculcated or calculated systems of remissions, admissions inter-missions, markings — i enter this palace (plais) of radical dissemination worship at the alter of utterance consecrated by quotation, serration the art of combination; and whether it is the Russian Formalists, Structuralists, 13th C Kabbalists, French feminist deconstructionst theorists, Canadian sound ’n concrete artists, Zizek or Kabalevsky or Schlovsky or Osama bin Laden, i inhale you and stand before you as i spiral though your pulsing entrances, exigencies axiomatic excesses, disguises i dwell in you fraught with tumultuous re-pose reprisals pleasure porous paradigms of observance and desecration. And, through ensnared quotation, serialized deixis, excessive resistance, turbulence i thrust this towards you with sweat-drenched amorous lust, as these worlds cut up and recruited, re-circulated, swell in morsels distractions and evasions – remains as traces, questions of filial supplements /substitutions additions grammatical axis, eros. ■

Echohomonymy

■

Adeena Karasick

And as a result of your concentration on the letters, your mind will become bound to them. The hairs on your head will stand on end and tremble. The blood within you will begin to vibrate because of the living permutations that loosen it. Your entire body will then begin to tremble, and all your limbs will be seized with shuddering. You will experience the terror of G-d and will be enveloped in euphoria. You will then feel as if an additional spirit is within you, arousing you and strengthening you, passing through your entire body and giving you pleasure. It will seem as you have been anointed with perfumed oil from head to foot. You will rejoice and experience a kind of (JEWYsance). You will experience ecstasy and trembling – as if you are swallowed up by the letters and could die of rapture. ■

In the sultry linguistic morass between what’s veiled, unveiled, revealed, concealed, sealed and salient; meaning is not bound to particulars, to fixed promises, premises but chosen between sites systems, constructs, curtains. And, remember these tropes of affliction, affection, infection vows, vowels, volumes, as you come to the tent of my house. In the bed that is spread across this lexicon haunted by the tragedy of misshapen histories, heresies masqued arteries connections, clusters of interminable desire And, as you sign and cosign in the aching ochos of stolen skin, i taste you through these rooms, runes sites of encrypted scripture saturated with choice. taste you with the paradox of worship

115

116

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

through these curved echoes, cycles, succulent swells, rapture, in garments of surging mystery, cadenced considerations, celebrations, smashed constructs, the ghostly revenance of pulsing plutards where all is throbbing against the confines of the sky ■

According to the Kabbalists, all the letters make up the Name of G-d. So, no matter what you are writing you are in essence reciting the Sacred name. When you get up to read you are engaging in an act that is even MORE elevated, MORE complete than the Priests of the Temple times. Traditionally the masses sacrificed only rams, but in knowing and reciting the Sacred Name (all the letters of the alphabet in any order you wish), you are sacrificing YOUR ENTIRE BEING! – Presenting before the universe, your bootylicious fat and your blood, your eyes which see the combinations of the names and your ears which pay heed to their sound. So, anytime you speak, you, in fact, are reciting the Sacred Name – sacrificing YOURSELF on the altar of mystical union. And it is written that you should constantly keep the letters of the Unique Name in your mind as if they were in front of you, written in a book of Torah. Each letter should appear as if it is always in front of you. Each letter should appear infinitely large. And you should keep this sensation with you, wherever you are … ■

Welcome these letters. Serenade the syntax. For these signs are runes whose meaning is burgeoning in the lacunae of desire drowning in the foundation of ontological heresy. So, enter these words, sounds, gates of meaning and inhabit a shrine of dissonant shifts, systemic arousal. Confound yourself. Embrace the accumulation, the trajects of affliction, affection, confection confusion where all syntagmatic connexion is sheltered within you – For, the text shall be built in the cite of its enunciation So, conjoin irreverence until the last stanza. Let the innoculous arise as a signatum,

Echohomonymy

■

Adeena Karasick

as a welcoming and a veiling of all that is visible and volumous, valued. Greet these signs with reverence, deference, diferrance. Come with a penchant for turbulence, recombination and choice. Come with joy and cheerfulness amidst the fallow, flagrance pernicious pericopes and programs, pogroms sweet caresses and fears, flummoxed, fracas of memes mnemes, memories, membranes and languish in the shifting.

Note An earlier version of this poem, titled “Ecohymonymy,” appeared in the collection Amuse Bouche (Talonbooks 2009).

117

This page intentionally left blank

DIALECT POETRY AND THE NEED FOR PERFORMANCE The Case of William Barnes T. L. Burton

We live in a primarily visual culture in which a picture is thought to be worth a thousand words. How many people (other than literature students and their teachers) read classic novels nowadays if they haven’t first seen an adaptation on television or on film? How many directors of Shakespeare on film let us visualize Ophelia’s death from the Queen’s words rather than presenting it visually as the Queen speaks (on the assumption, apparently, that our imaginations have atrophied)? Pop singers no longer depend solely on the sounds they make to sell their recordings: they have to produce a video as part of the package. And the twentieth-century rage for concrete and visual poetry produced many poets who care as much about how their poems look on the page as about how they sound. In conditions such as these, poems written in dialect (and particularly those written long ago) are in a double or triple bind: they have to be heard to be properly appreciated (and heard in a pronunciation that is as close as possible to that of the time and region in which they were written), but by and large we in the Western world have lost the art of listening without supporting visuals, and even if we’re willing to listen, we are now so used to a homogenized and colourless “global English” that we can’t cope with the strangeness of the pronunciation or the peculiarities of the vocabulary. It has not always been thus. Certainly there have long been poems designed for the eye as well as for the ear (George Herbert’s shaped poems “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” spring instantly to mind), but for the majority of poets the sound is the thing. Not all poets would go so far as Dylan Thomas, for whom the sound (at least at first) was more important than the sense,1 but poets have traditionally thought of their art as aural rather than visual, and have written their poems to be read aloud, or at the very least, if they are read silently, to be sounded in the mind’s ear.

119

120

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

When performing dialect poetry, accordingly, I strongly resist the notion that the audience should be given a written text that they can follow as they listen. I think it’s crucial for an appreciation of the poems that the first encounter be aural. When people have a written text to look at, they tend to stop listening: they’re too busy looking at the written text, coming to terms with the strangeness of the spelling, and so forth, to take much notice of what their ears are telling them. The oddness of the spelling (when poets try to give some idea of how the words should be pronounced) becomes a distraction: it puts a barrier between listeners and what they’re supposed to be hearing: their hearing, indeed, becomes less acute (I would argue) because they are not depending on their ears for the meaning, but trusting to their eyes. Why else is the injunction “close your eyes and listen” so frequently heard? But if an audience is not familiar with the dialect they’re hearing, the risk is that they won’t understand what’s being said; and the response at the eVOCative Festival in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on 19 June 2008, suggested that for some at least of my audience intelligibility was a real problem. My reply to a member of the audience who told me that he had had difficulty understanding the poems—namely, that they would have been intelligible if I’d read them well enough—was perhaps disingenuous: people don’t expect to understand a foreign language merely because they hear it clearly read or well spoken, and if dialects from different parts of England have been mutually unintelligible since the Middle Ages,2 can it really be surprising that a regional dialect from one corner of nineteenth-century England is not immediately intelligible to twenty-first-century speakers of different varieties of English from other parts of the globe? Does this mean, then, that I must abandon my policy of not providing a written text to accompany my readings of poetry in dialect? I would like to think not, for the reasons given earlier. Of course I have no objection to supplying a written text when a reading is finished: on the contrary, I am strongly in favour of such a move. A written text is essential to anyone who wants not only to hear a poem but also to study it. As will be immediately apparent from the text below of William Barnes’s “Carn a-turnèn yoller” (“Corn a-turning yellow”) it is much easier to appreciate the technicalities of intricate stanza forms, challenging rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, varied line lengths, varied refrains, and so forth if one sees the written text than if one hears it without seeing it. The ideal solution, it seems to me, is to make available after a reading an audio recording of the poems chosen, together with a printed text of them, along with such other critical apparatus as will be of help to those who wish to study the poems. (This is the policy I adopted at the 2009

Dialect Poetry and the Need for Performance

■

T. L. Burton

Adelaide Fringe in Australia, following the eVOCative Festival in Saskatoon in 2008.) But it remains my firm conviction that if the poems are to be fully appreciated they must be heard first, without the crutch of a written text.3 CARN A-TURNÈN YOLLER THE copse ha’ got his shiady boughs, Wi’ blackbirds’ evemen whissles; The hills ha’ sheep upon ther brows, The zummerleäze ha’ thissles.

leäze: pasture

The meäds be gây in grassy Mây, But O vrom hill to holler, Let I look down upon a groun’ O’ carn a-turnèn yoller. - da grow in tangled beds, An’ pease An’ beäns be sweet to snuff, O; The tiaper woats da bend ther heads,

tiaper: tapering

The barley’s beard is rough, O; The turnip green is fresh between The carn in hill ar holler, But I’d look down upon a groun O’ wheat a-turnèn yoller. ’Tis merry when the brawny men Da come to reap it down, O, Wher glossy red the poppy head

- so brown, O; s among the sta’ks

- stalks sta’ks:

’Tis merry while the wheat’s in hile

hile: stook of sheaves

Ar when, by hill ar holler, The leäzers thick da stoop to pick The ears so ripe

an’ yoller.4

leäzers: gleaners

121

122

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

Notes 1 “I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolised, or meant, was of very secondary importance; what mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world.… I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill & the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes” (from Thomas’s “Poetic Manifesto,” 6). 2 The locus classicus for this belief is this memorable statement from chapter 59 of John Trevisa’s translation in the fourteenth century of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon: “Al the longage of the Northumbres, and specialych at York, ys so scharp, slyttyng and frottyng and unschape that we southeron men may that longage unnethe undurstonde” (qtd. in Pearsall 231). Higden (d. 1364) was himself quoting from the Prologue to Book 3 of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum (1125). 3 For a fuller statement than there is space for here of the likely benefits to Barnes of the growing iPod culture, see Burton and Ruthven’s “Dialect Poetry, William Barnes and the Literary Canon,” especially pages 325–28. 4 First published in the Dorset County Chronicle on 1 August 1839. The text here is from the first edition of William Barnes’s first collection of dialect poems, Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect, 141–42, with marginal glosses added.

Works Cited Barnes, William. Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect: With a Dissertation and Glossary. London: John Russell Smith; Dorchester: George Simonds, 1844. Print. Burton, T. L., and K. K. Ruthven. “Dialect Poetry, William Barnes, and the Literary Canon.” ELH 76 (2009): 309–41. Print. Pearsall, Derek, ed. Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Print. Thomas, Dylan. “Poetic Manifesto.” Texas Quarterly (1961). Rpt. in Louis Simpson, A Revolution in Taste. New York: Macmillan, 1978. Print.

THE SPEECH–MUSIC CONTINUUM Paul Dutton

At the Trois jours de musiques vocales festival, held in Montreal in 1982, I sat listening to a California quartet called the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble. I was performing at the same festival, there with the poetry-performance group The Four Horsemen, which also included bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. The quartet I was hearing on stage comprised three singers who were classically trained, plus another who had trained as a trumpeter. They worked solidly, if unconventionally, within a musical context. The quartet of which I was a member comprised four autodidactic writers who worked solidly, if unconventionally, within a literary context. The four performers on stage were uttering sounds similar to and identical with those we made in our group; and as they performed a passage consisting of whistling, an effect that some of us sometimes used in our Four Horsemen pieces, I asked myself what it was that qualified them as musicians and us as poets. I was soon struck with the satisfying conclusion that when one of them whistled, it was a note, but when I whistled, it was a syllable. I could have, but didn’t, reflect further that when they weren’t making the kind of sounds we made, they were mostly singing scored pitches, and that when we weren’t making the kind of sounds they made, we were mostly reading verbal texts—respective factors that might have accounted even more for the different labels applied to our two groups. I maintained my notes-versus-syllables stance for some years, proclaiming it frequently, recounting the incident as an epiphany. Ironically, during this same time I was also reclaiming my early roots in music, in which I had been involved as both an amateur and a professional, from boy chorister to church cantor and a cappella singer of traditional British folksongs. I had now, in tandem with my ongoing literary work in poetry, fiction, and sound, begun developing my abilities as a non-idiomatic free improviser (just think of it as music with no rules, no time signature, no musical key, no beat, no 123

124

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

fixed rhythm, no pre-set structure), building on the sound-poetry skills I’d acquired through a decade and more of experience, expanding my range both in pitch and technique, but studiously avoiding any kind of focus on such singerly elements as melody, harmonic structure, set pitch, tonality, and other like frameworks, concentrating instead on texture, spontaneity, variety, multiphonics (the production of more than one simultaneous sound from one source), and an array of rule-breaking, unorthodox colorations—all of which characteristics lie at the heart of non-idiomatic free improvisation, whatever the instrument used. By the early 1990s I had come to view that moment in Montreal not as an epiphany but as a pointless exercise in pedantry. After years of performance in both literary and musical contexts, using much the same material in both, the issue of whether or not a particular sound was a note or a syllable, or a particular work was poetry or music, seemed less and less relevant. True, I wouldn’t read a chapter from a novel in a concert setting, or perform a fortyminute free improvisation at a poetry reading, but it was a matter of weighting things in one direction or another, really. When I heard Québécois composer-musician René Lussier’s 1989 release Le trésor de la langue, something clicked into focus for me. A key feature of Lussier’s brilliant and complex masterpiece is the derivation of melodic content from the pitch variation and phonetic durations of everyday speech, all the subtle shifts transcribed and transposed into notation for various instruments, largely played in unison with the speakers’ recorded voices, and on occasion given solo status. (Examples of both these approaches can be heard on the companion website to this volume, drc.usask.ca/projects/oral.) The work, recently reissued in an expanded three-CD version on the La Tribu label, stands as a powerful and singularly beautiful illustration of the musicality of speech. After encountering Le trésor, I would listen with delight to a crowd of people talking all at once in what I’d often previously experienced as an unendurable cacophony, but which I now heard as the collective creation of a large free-improvisational orchestra. The speech and music link, exploited so originally and beautifully by Lussier, is one that has been noted (no pun intended) and played on (ditto) in many contexts. I recall once hearing the late blues artist Luther Allison plucking out on his guitar a recognizable approximation of “Thank you. Thank you very much,” in acknowledgement of audience applause. Canadian writer and musician John Sobol has documented in his book Digitopia Blues the very conscious intention of various jazz musicians to simulate speech with their instruments. Paul Robeson, the mid-twentieth-century opera singer,

The Speech–Music Continuum

■

Paul Dutton

once stated in a radio interview that when he started working on a singing part he always began by speaking the lines. The late-twentieth-century British essayist and novelist Brigid Brophy, writing in her 1966 essay collection Don’t Never Forget, commented on the inherent pitch values of vowels, and speculated that a poetry reading could be “quite literally off-key” (it couldn’t, actually, because speech, musical though it is, does not conform to musical keys). While I had known of the affinity between speech and music before hearing Le Trésor, Lussier’s work brought it home to me in a fresh and powerful way, leading me to articulate a perception that, however little or much I may have been conscious of it, had always informed my literary and musical practices: speech and music are two extremes of a sonic continuum, and different of my works rest at varying points along that continuum. The first poem of professional quality that I wrote, “Jazz Musician,” was painstakingly composed not just to be about jazz, but effectively to be jazz, conjuring the music equally with rhythms and sounds as with images and verbal content, a fusion of subject and form that seemed lacking in the poetry I’d so far encountered on the subject of jazz. At the same time, I also made it a point—one I’ve tried always to maintain—to employ a prosody that stuck pretty much to conversational speech rhythms and idioms, and that also for the most part avoided both inflated rhetoric and affected embellishment. As with most of my early work, “Jazz Musician” dealt very much with personal material, but in writing it I also paid more than a little attention to foregrounding the language, exploring it, listening to what it could tell me, not just bending it to my own ends. That humbler approach to artistic creation was one I had arrived at through reading about traditional Inuit sculptors, who would, before beginning their carving, spend much time establishing intimate sensuous familiarity with their materials, holding and rubbing the wood or bone or stone, examining it, communing with it, intending thereby to intuit the form immanent (or imminent) within it before undertaking to cut away what needed to be removed in order to release that form. The work of art thus takes on as much an aspect of discovery as of creation, the artist working cooperatively with the material, rather than battering it into submission, as some are wont to do. I wasn’t so terribly faithful to that principle in my early writing days, still caught up, to a greater degree than I would have liked to admit, in a notion of poetry as an expression of self-centred emotion and personal opinion. My contact with bpNichol, however, reaffirmed and consolidated my faltering inclination to surrender to something bigger: I was impressed by his view of himself as an apprentice to language, and in the course of our

125

126

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

many discussions about poetry in general and individual poems in particular, I came to embrace his approach of sensing where the poem was heading, rather than pushing it in a predetermined direction, listening to the language to hear where it was leading, as opposed to imposing on it some settled idea or other. Open the self to language in this way and you open a gateway through the poem to possible discoveries beyond the intended, beyond the self, to thoughts you likely otherwise would not have thought, might not even believe, and that may or may not be true. Because who is the artist to make pronouncements about truth? The reader has a role to play in that, has s/he not—an interpretation to apply, a choice to exercise, a creative response to make to the creative stimulus of the poem? When writing is approached in this way, the poem—or the fiction, for that matter, since the principle can be applied to either genre—affords an opportunity for both writer and reader to learn from the language, to explore it and become an instrument of it, rather than just to use it as a tool in the service of some personal end such as emotional catharsis, social commentary, or advocacy of a cause. Those all are worthy, valuable, even noble goals, and may occur in varying degree as a by-product of the process I am discussing, which they indeed sometimes do in my own poetry and fiction; but I find them to be, for the most part, unsatisfactory as the primary purpose of a piece of creative writing, and to be, in any case, better served by other modes of expression than poetry. The difference is analogous to that between pure science and applied science. Creative writing that gives primacy to the language allows for probing of the vast resources of the collective human endeavour that the language is, for experiencing the soul of the language, for touching all the levels of the mind and the unconscious of which the language is expressive. This is the realm in which I find poetry to operate most effectively. It is, for me, a spiritual (by which I do not at all mean “religious”) pursuit. The operations of applied language—emotional release and disclosure, reportage, discussion, discourse, exposition, argument, and so on—are matters of practical concern, and find more effective expression through activist, journalistic, and instructional modes of talk and writing, such as speeches, articles, documentaries, essays, blogging, and the like. An example of the language-centred approach to creative writing to which I am referring is the so-far-uncollected poem of mine, “Thinking,” given here in its entirety:

The Speech–Music Continuum

■

Paul Dutton

Language shapes thought, not thought language. And language shapes thought not thought to be languageshapes. Thought not thought to be language shapes language, shapes thought, shapes shapes. Thought thought to be shapes not thought to be language shapes thoughts thought not to be shaped by language. Thought language shapes thought-shapes shaped by language thought to be thought. Thought thought not to be language-shapes shapes language, shapes thought, shapes language-thought. Language thinks. Language thinks shapes not shaped by thought, shapes thoughts thought thinks not shaped by language. Language thinks thoughts thought thinks think language. Language thinks language.

As an item of possible interest, let me point out that the poem is written as run-on text to facilitate the flow of the language and thought that constitutes it. In tandem with the approach to writing that I adopted, I practised a particular approach to giving readings. I’d heard on record the cantorial intonations of Dylan Thomas and the rather precious inflections that E.E. Cummings employed. I had endured, at one extreme, readings by actors who treated poems as vehicles for a display of theatrical expressiveness, and at the other, ones by poets who, with arrogant amateurism, disdained clear enunciation, effective projection, and basic microphone skills, as though implying that these were shallow gimmicks providing superficial polish for mere entertainers. Wanting nothing to do with any of those approaches, and in keeping with the mainly conversational speech rhythms of my writing, I adhered—as I still do—to a delivery not far removed from my normal speaking voice. The phrase “not far removed” is paramount here, because a reading, formal by its very nature (it’s formed, isn’t it?), is not the same as normal speaking, which is informal by its very nature (it’s more being formed than it is already formed), and there is generally an audible difference in tone between words being read and words being put together as the speaker goes along. That difference allowed, in my readings I refrain from rhetorical, oratorical, or histrionic effects, endeavouring as much as possible to let the language speak (or sing) for itself. As in the writing, so in the reading: the language comes first, the poet comes second, servant to the greater entity, ushering it in, sharing the spotlight certainly, but deferring ultimately to the real star of the show.

127

128

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

To illustrate this approach to reading, a recital of another of my uncollected poems, “Strata,” is included on the companion website to this book. This poem, too, was composed as run-on text, in order to sustain a momentum that line breaks would impede: Lizard-brain from viper-mind uncoils spine-fed up through stem to shrug across perimeters of thought turned from that which thought refuses, focused on present shadows cloaking thrust of lizard-brain from vipermind uncoiling jungle-thought through branches laced above the slither-base they’re transformed from that presses up along the bark, a hiss of appetite transmitted over networks buried back of lizard-brain that loops its mesozoic mind around a present order ignorant of what slinks through suck of mud and scrape of scale upon perimeters of thought unthinking, mindless of impulses electric and uncodified, surface countered and controlled by lizard-brain from viper-mind that lashes out in wordless flick, unleashed within language that buckles and breaks, the lie in the eye of who would shrink from mind mined for reptile-minded matter sunk from sight, encoded nightly in vague reflective images that percolate from lizard-brain with slick and glistening reptilian grace.

In all of this, I am, of course, referring to verbal poems—or what I like to call syntactically coherent poems, to distinguish them from poems with words disruptively sequenced. Sound poems, which share many of the characteristics conventionally associated with music, are an entirely different matter (though they needn’t necessarily be), and I’ll get to that soon enough. But I’d like first to mark another point on the continuum that extends between speech and music. Drums are musical instruments that, perhaps more than any others, lend themselves to speech elements, even if those elements might be the basic ones of phonemes, rather than words as such. This affinity between drums and speech is evidenced musically by West African talking drums, which do approximate words as such. Linguistic examples of this affinity, expressed phonetically, range from the simplicity of rock ’n’ roll artist Little Richard’s

The Speech–Music Continuum

■

Paul Dutton

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom” to the intricacies of solkatu, the Indian system of articulating drum rhythms. I myself have exploited the affinity between drumming and speech in two poems, “Kit Talk” and “Snare, Kick, Rack, and Floor.” The first of these, included on my CD Oralizations (www.actuellecd.com/en/cat/am_130), is a verbal flight built around the percussive qualities of speech: plosives, fricatives, and sibilants. Space does not allow inclusion of the full poem here, but this opening passage gives the flavour (again, verse line-breaks would just get in the way, so it’s run-on text, with rhythms directed by very purposeful punctuation): mutter to tight head stutter at stick-tip pepper past rimpulled skin held taut. got a little. got a lot. got a metalsplash sizzle as excess is, as is a zero’s eyes assessing assizes. put. put put. put. pause. put in a pause. put in a pause ’n’ snap. put in a pause ’n’ snap off a sizable bit to tip a put-up past a pot-head patsy whose tight-lipped twotiming’s tapered off …

The second of these two drum-related poems, “Snare, Kick, Rack, and Floor” (the title is musician’s slang for the basic drum kit), consists of two complementary verbal images relevant to the title, “combustible compatibility” and “compatible combustibility.” In performance, the plosive and sibilant phonemes of these words are applied in an animated, freely improvised oral drum solo. The poem is included on my CD Mouth Pieces, which is online in its entirety at www.ubu.com/sound/dutton.html. That rendition of the poem is also available for listening on the companion website to this book. “Snare, Kick, Rack, and Floor” veers into the realm of sound poetry and, arguably, that of music. Sound poetry, a term much misunderstood and one far more problematic than is generally recognized, is best defined as a poetic approach to sound rather than a sonic approach to poetry—which latter characteristic has, after all, long been a valued feature of much poetry. Strictly speaking, sound poetry is non-verbal, although the occurrence of words within a work does not by any means exclude it from the category. Similarly, while the likes of chant, repetition, syntactic permutation, and onomatopoeia may be contained within a sound poem, they are emphatically not defining characteristics of the genre, any more than is, as the Canadian Oxford Dictionary grossly misinforms, “attempting to convey meaning through the sound of words when grouped rather than through their semantic meaning.”

129

130

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

If anything, sound poetry is a singularly dedicated attempt not to convey meaning at all, and specifically through sounds that are not at all words— which, after all, is why it’s called sound poetry. The oft-repeated dictum concluding Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” “A poem should not mean / But be,” finds no fuller realization than in a sound poem. While I would position sound poetry nearer the extreme of music on the continuum extending between speech and music, that is not to say that sound poetry is necessarily musical in any conventional sense, as can be proved by any number of poems in the canon of the genre. Anything the mouth can utter is grist for the mill of sound poetry, and musical talent as such is certainly no prerequisite for creating sound poems. In terms of physical qualifications and abilities, sound poetry is an egalitarian art wherein it matters less what you have and more what you do with what you’ve got. The point is not to hold a pitch or master a range of formalized techniques, but to develop and creatively apply the characteristics and abilities of the individual voice and the potential for other soundings (i.e., sound produced without engaging the larynx). This, in fact, does not exclude holding a pitch or mastering formalized techniques. Poet Christian Bök, for example, was initially unable to roll his rs, but wanting to use the effect, worked on it till he got it. At the same time, there are some things for which individual anatomy can be an insurmountable limiting factor: no matter how hard or how much I try, I’m unable to pop my lower lip with my tongue, something for which composer-pianist and sometime sound-performer Diana McIntosh has a natural capacity. Her status as a musician rather than a poet leads nicely into my next point, one that relates back to my opening anecdote about the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble, The Four Horsemen, and the notes–syllables dichotomy I once believed in. There’s plenty of activity that would be classified as sound poetry if it weren’t for the fact that it’s being done by artists working in areas other than literature, such as music, theatre, and dance. In fact, when utterances identical to those used in sound poetry are formalized in the field of music, they’re referred to as text-sound composition, which is likely the term that the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble applied to their work. I have come to favour another term, oral sound art, as a general one encompassing all the various manners and modes in which an expanded range of utterance is featured across artistic fields. I also use the term soundsinging a lot, especially within a specifically musical framework. I chose these terms precisely because they do not specify voice, since so much of what is done in this area does not

The Speech–Music Continuum

■

Paul Dutton

at all involve the voice box. Utterance art might be a fairly satisfactory term if it didn’t sound so clunky. To be honest, I’m ambivalent about all this terminology: the establishment of these various distinctions and the application of their labels wearies me, at the same time as I feel obliged (or perhaps compelled) to dwell on them. Fact is, no matter the amazement that people, including me, might feel and express at some of the more extreme or outré sounds that come out of the mouths of oral sound artists, there is little or nothing that any of us working this territory do that is not done every day in equal or lesser degree by every speaking human on the planet. Multiphonics? There isn’t a sound in nature, let alone human speech, that is anything else: the only truly pure single frequency ever to occur is an electronically generated sine wave. Overtones? Anyone uttering a vowel is emitting a range of overtone frequencies, known in linguistics as formants, that give that vowel its characteristic sound. Then there is the vast array of expressive non-verbal utterances employed in oral sound art, including grunts, groans, wheezes, gasps, shrieks, screams, whistles, rasps, lip smacking, tongue popping, vocal inhalations, snorts, coughs, gulps, and smooches, to name but a very few, almost any of which occur universally in the course of a multitude of human activities—physical work, sex, play, eating, sleeping—and emotional states, such as grief, joy, surprise, anger, and so on. The art of sound poetry lies not in making the sounds but in isolating and emphasizing them, and then creatively applying and organizing them. This last statement needs some expansion and explanation. What I mean by isolating and emphasizing the sounds is, for instance, making a groan and then extracting from it, by minute adjustments to the tiny muscles involved, a particular gravelly detail, let’s say, then perhaps increasing the volume of that detail, the better to work with it. Creative application and organization refers to the way that the extracted element is worked with: the length of time it’s held, the rhythmic treatment it’s given, how loud and soft it might be made—that kind of thing, coupled with how the sound is arranged with other sounds—complementarily or contrastingly, for instance, or else patterned or disordered. So, in this way, the artist is working at a kind of granular level with the raw elements of the utterance, analogous to a fabric artist teasing out the fibres of a material for a particular effect, or a painter, for instance, working with the characters and qualities of colours and their juxtapositions. Colour is, in fact, an apt image, and is the term applied in music to a similar kind of emphasis on the textural characteristics of an instrument or a voice.

131

132

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

This isolation, emphasis, application, and organization of oral sounds can be accomplished in either a formal or an improvisational mode, just as speech can be formalized in writing, or else improvised in spontaneous conversation—also, just as melody and other aspects of music can be composed in advance or made up on the spot. As for composition in the area of oral sound art, the range and complexity of sounds are so great and varied that anything approaching a comprehensive and comprehensible workable notation is plainly and simply impossible. Even in the written rendering of speech, the conventions of orthography, diacritics, and the International Phonetic Alphabet can at best provide mere approximations of the actual sounds of a language and its various accents and dialects as they occur in practice. And the more sophisticated and relatively precise notational system for music (at least for Western music, the only such system with which I’m familiar) cannot fully capture and convey every nuance of microtonal pitch and gestural colour that an instrument or voice can effect, but can only point the interpreter toward the writer’s intention. How much more hopeless, then, to formalize any written code for the vast array of nonverbal sounds the human organism is capable of uttering. Attempts have ranged from the relative success of oh, ah, and hah, to the abject failure of that quaint old orthographic effort “pshaw!”, intended to render semantically the very non-semantic utterance effected by an abrupt expulsion of breath across relaxed tongue at teeth and through slack lips, expressive of disgusted dismissal or resignation. And so, oral sound artists have resorted to such inadequate measures as typographic treatment or expressively hand-drawn letters, phonemes, and words, as well as idiosyncratic graphic mnemonics, and in one spectacular instance—realized by performer-composer Trevor Wishart, whose Anticredos is recommended listening—a fully worked-out system of graphic symbols, complete with written directions for their execution, which I defy anyone to accurately interpret without direct personal instruction and demonstration from the creator of the notational system. In my first ventures into the area of sound poetry I made what I soon saw as weak attempts to notate what I was doing, and eventually abandoned the effort, especially as I developed more and more complex effects. For more intricate soundworks that I want to shape for repeatable incorporation into my performance repertoire, I simply write out a discursive description of the sequence and character of the phonemes and colorations the poem comprises. My poem “Mercure” (mercury) is one for which I did this. The description is too long for full inclusion here, but its first sentence serves as

The Speech–Music Continuum

■

Paul Dutton

an example: “Begin with rhythmic, unvoiced labial ‘bubble-sound,’ by bringing puckered, saliva-moistened lips together and parting them with gentle release of air through saliva.” “Mercure” also serves to illustrate the process I described of isolating, emphasizing, applying, and organizing sounds—in its case, the component sounds and sonic embellishments of the letters and syllables of the French words that constitute the body of the poem, poison (poison) and poisson (fish). A version of the poem (every performance varies somewhat) is included on my CD Oralizations, and can be heard on the companion website to this book. It’s worth noting at this point that, unlike the reading of a verbal poem, for which I have stated my preference for a low-key delivery conforming more or less to the inflections of everyday conversational speech, the rendering of a sound poem is for me a very different matter, a full-body performance that entails a wholly committed physical engagement in the production of oral sound. It’s important to stress that I am stating a personal, not a universal principle, one that need by no means apply to, for instance, sound poetry created with electronically treated voice. That, by the way, is an approach that I simply have no interest in pursuing, for the two very good reasons that I don’t get along well with machines and that I’m anyway still finding new sounds that can be made without reliance on electronic effects. I continue to perform a repertoire of oral soundworks, poems with a set form that are, to greater or lesser degree, composed (though not notated), and that have improvisatory scope built into their structures, but I’ve pretty much stopped creating such works, preferring instead to simply cut loose with free-form sonic improvisations. I have long worked with extended improvisations, but have recently introduced into my practice a series I call “Antilyrics,” shorter improvisations fashioned on the model of the short lyric poem, countering the structure of that model with oral sound components. Two of these can be heard on the companion website to this book. The fully improvisatory mode facilitates simultaneous creation and discovery, as I wrote of earlier in this essay in relation to opening oneself to the language, surrendering to that larger entity in order to explore and learn from it. In oral sound improvisation, the opening up and surrender are to one’s own body and soul through the medium of sound, which derives from and resonates in every cell and in the very fibre of one’s being, not just from and in those parts of the body and the self that are engaged in the immediate production of sound. If poetry that is focused on the language opens up the greater possibilities of words and affords access to realms of the mind that

133

134

Listening Up: Performance Poetics

words can reveal and express, poetry that is focused on sound opens up possibilities beyond words and affords access to realms of the mind that words cannot reveal and express, that are ineffable, transcendent, spiritual. Whether the mode of creation I am involved in is verbal or sonic, written or improvised, literary or musical, the goal, however much I may or may not succeed in it, is always to get myself and what I know out of the way, in order to allow the emergence of whatever form and content await to reveal that which I hadn’t known. And that, I think, is a very satisfactory note—or syllable—on which to conclude this little dissertation.

Works Cited Brophy, Brigid. Don’t Never Forget. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966. Print. Dutton, Paul. “Jazz Musician.” Right Hemisphere, Left Ear. Toronto: Coach House, 1979. Print. ———. Oralizations. Ambiances Magnétiques, 2005. CD. ———. Mouth Pieces. Ohm Éditions, 2000. CD. Lussier, René. Le trésor de la langue. Ambiances Magnétiques, 1989. CD. ———. Le trésor de la langue. La Tribu, 2007. 3-CD set. Sobol, John. Digitopia Blues. Banff: Banff Centre, 2002. Print. Wishart, Trevor. Red Wing / Anticredos. October Music, 1992. CD.

Writing Down Textualized Orature and Orality

This page intentionally left blank

WRITING AND RAPPING FOR A NEW SOUTH AFRICA The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng Gugu Hlongwane

South Africa is a country desperately seeking normality. After centuries of repressive white domination, various efforts are being made to break with the violent past of apartheid, the system of legalized racism enforced by the National Party in 1948. But daily stories of ongoing racism, crime, rape, and government corruption suggest a country challenged by its new and fragile democracy. Poet Lesego Rampolokeng challenges the myth of a new South Africa by using both oral and written media to relay the urgency of his political project. Moreover, shaped by multiple African cultures in which the oral has traditionally been the most widely practised form of verbal art and continues to hold an important place, Rampolokeng carries a variety of oral features into his written work. He confronts oppressive colonial and postcolonial powers in works characterized by simple diction and uncluttered syntax as well as imagery drawn from the lifeworld (Ong 42) of the South African people he addresses, often directly, while drawing on effective mnemonic devices. For Rampolokeng, the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s popular jingle, “simunye: we are one,” not only perpetuates the lie of national oneness, but also is a sound bite that he effectively answers in ways that are aurally memorable. As I will illustrate in this essay, Rampolokeng speaks and writes against what Anthony O’Brien describes as “the hypnotic normalizing effect of the commonsense present,” a “Mandela honeymoon” (6) that is over “as public sector workers stage national economic/political strikes against the postapartheid state” (6). What Rampolokeng reveals in his work is a country limited by its apartheid past, a country of strangers—people who, as Njabulo Ndebele astutely observes, “don’t know one another as a people” (336). Rampolokeng’s published books, then, are important because they allow his challenge to both black and white oppressive regimes to take more widely transportable and enduring forms than the oral allows, although as I have 137

138

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

suggested, he carries both an oral style and an oral frame of reference into his written work. While the critical evaluations of Rampolokeng’s poetry published to date do not have a bearing on the thesis of this essay, they nonetheless provide insight into the goals of Rampolokeng’s work. Kelwyn Sole and James Ogude, for example, seem to understand Rampolokeng’s refusal to sing along with the “simunye” jingle of a post-apartheid South Africa. In his discussion of the South African poetry written by the likes of Rampolokeng, Sole argues: Never is the aspiration that South Africans should fashion a meaningful future together negated, despite the burden of their heritage. This simultaneously uncompromising and gentle stance is indeed difficult to muster and maintain. Yet it is this attitude which strikes the reader of these new poets again and again, as they attempt to embrace and represent a world in transition, uncertain as to its identity and the outcome of the processes so bravely initiated in 1990. (31)

Like Sole, who acknowledges both the difficulty of and the need to confront the ugly heritage of apartheid, James Ogude appreciates the importance of Rampolokeng’s mission: “Can we argue that we have adequately disposed of the theme of the apartheid past? Has resistance—the act of decolonisation— become irrelevant in South Africa’s emergent nation state?” (252). In Ogude’s response and estimation, the apartheid theme not only is relevant, but also allows Rampolokeng an opportunity “to restore the imprisoned nation to itself ” (253). This fight for justice achievable through what Ogude terms the “guiding ideology … rooted in universal humanism” (254), must necessarily expose South Africa’s shortcomings. Rampolokeng, in this vein, ridicules the country’s “new victims” who “herd themselves like cattle in the colour kraal” (“Riding the victim train” 14), which is likely a reference to Orania, a town in South Africa’s Northern Cape where separatist whites have created an insulated Afrikaner community, complete with an independent flag and currency. The fight that Rampolokeng wages on two fronts, via oral and written media, is especially significant for a poet who, in the days of apartheid, would probably have had his work banned, or worse, would likely have been killed by the regime for writing and performing “subversive” literature. Ironically, as I will illustrate, in the post-1994 South Africa, which ushered in black rule after universal franchise was extended to all South Africans, Rampolokeng fears being silenced by the current black government itself. Rampolokeng’s written and spoken work is powerful and dynamic in the manner described by Walter Ong, who argues: “Sound cannot be sounding

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

without the use of power” (32). Dennis Cooley, writing in the context of Canadian prairie vernacular poetry about what he in a moment of strategic essentializing terms “ear poetry,” argues more explicitly that “ear poetry … addresses someone and seeks to act on an audience” (7) as a way of bringing the listener “to life, [and] into action” (17). It is a version of this “ear poetry” that Rampolokeng employs in his fight for a more equitable South Africa. Furthermore, with regard to the potency of his work, Rampolokeng not only writes and speaks against the normalization of inequities as part of post-apartheid South African society, but also writes from a black perspective about the lived experience of those inequities. In a telephone interview, he explained that he writes “from the inside out” as he reaches his kin, those who are nearest to him. While his poems are generally personal, the “I” in his work is also communal. Jabik Veenbaas, who has commented on Rampolokeng’s work’s connection to dub, rap, and “his native oral tradition,” makes the following statement about Rampolokeng’s oral performance at the 2001 Poetry International festival in the Netherlands: Hearing Rampolokeng perform is like getting in the line of a crackling, rattling verbal fire. He flogs his adience [sic] with the scourge of his country’s pain and violence. In “Habari gani Africa” he speaks of “fleshpieces from crossed Xs / axes of man-made-wood hewers” and of “bloodstains on morgue-sheet sweat of impotence.” The images flung onto the listener’s retina are often chilling, but one cannot but feel they are true.

In speaking and writing against the grain of normalization of societal inequities in the post-apartheid state, Rampolokeng uses his poems to “flog” a people lulled by the misleadingly optimistic dominant rhetoric of reconciliation and forgiveness. South African English professor Andries Oliphant, who was the first to read the “wads of handwritten manuscripts” (i) that arrived on his desk one day, associates Rampolokeng’s oeuvre with “traditional Sesotho praise poetry, the dithoko … in which the singer talk-sings the lyrics accompanied by instrumental music.” Although Rampolokeng asserts, “I have no need for music when I perform my poetry for there is an inherent musicality to my poetry” (qtd. in Oliphant v), he does employ music as background to his poetry in his record with the Kalahari Surfers titled End Beginnings (1993). Oliphant links Rampolokeng’s poetry to African oral traditions, the “Dub poetry which developed from the ‘toasting’ practices of Reggae DJ’s,” and the rap traditions “which emerged in the United States and Britain in the 1980s” (v). Initially

139

140

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

struck by Rampolokeng’s “passionate sense of indignation and an inclination towards the grotesque and surreal image,” Oliphant describes Rampolokeng’s poems as reflective of a “[South African] social order … premised on violence and murder.” Furthermore, in Rampolokeng’s explosive poetry, “every sphere of social life and every turn in history is haunted by horror” (i). This state of horror is there in both his apartheid and post-apartheid poetry. In terms of Rampolokeng’s influences, he seems to draw inspiration for his poetry from South Africa’s Black Consciousness poets like Ingoapele Madingoane and Maishe Maponya, who inculcated in black people a love of self at a time when blackness was reviled by the white apartheid regime (see Berold). One can also argue for a connection between Rampolokeng’s writings and the Black Arts Movement in the United States of America, which called for a socially committed literature that was “not … separate from the violent struggles of the people,” a poetry that “must be a weapon in that struggle” (Cook 688). For these poets of the African diaspora, black art was not only to “expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution,” but also to “move with the masses and be moved by the masses” (Ron Karenga, qtd. in Cook 676). While Rampolokeng has very little praise for a political leadership that has forgotten the needs of the mostly poor black masses who voted them into power, he is nonetheless an important dissenting voice speaking and writing for a new South Africa. Although Rampolokeng refuses the label of a traditional imbongi, or a praise-poet, who stereotypically lauds the achievements of black leaders (Interview), he is a people’s poet in the way described by Ari Sitas when the latter writes of Rampolokeng as a poet whose work “is at its best moments self-reflective and critical of popular organizations and popular habits and practices” (159). Rampolokeng’s provocative work operates on a continuum in which the oral and the written function with equal importance, and this continuum makes it difficult to apply any one particular label to his productions. In the poems of a number of collections, Rampolokeng refers to dub poets who have had an impact on his compositions, artists like Jamaican Mutabaruka and Jamaican-born Brit Linton Kwesi Johnson, as well as the Last Poets from the United States. Rampolokeng’s poetry, however, is not strictly dub since it is “not directly moulded on the reggae rhythms or the polyglot linguistic derivations of Caribbean dub poetry” (Oliphant v). It is worth noting, here, that Christian Habekost prefers the term “riddim poetry” (6) for the poetry that shares much in common with dub poets in terms of orality and anti-colonial/ anti-racist politics, but is not authored by Jamaican-born poets and uses or has a different musical background. But also important for my discussion

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

is the assertion made by Jamaican Oku Onuora, who coined the term dub poetry: “Dub poetry is unlimited. You can dub from now till ‘a mornin’: you can dub een a South African riddim” (qtd. in Habekost 4). The rhythm that Rampolokeng evokes, especially through the many references to drumming and music, though, is arguably more broadly African than specifically South African. Wary of labels that, despite Onu’s qualifications, can seem ill-fitting, Rampolokeng fights for the freedom to write and speak in a country that has attempted to silence his radical critique of the “new” nation. Rampolokeng even sometimes resists the label of poet. On the back cover of Horns for Hondo, he reveals: “Poetry is a word I’ve often grappled with and always lost against. As a result of my bruises I’m reticent to call my work by that name.” But as I will illustrate, there have been instances when Rampolokeng has referred to himself as a poet, perhaps because one cannot entirely escape categorization. For Rampolokeng, the bottom line is that he writes and performs what he has written. The labels are imposed by others (Interview). The label that seems best to accommodate Rampolokeng’s artistry, however, is perhaps that of rapper. Adam Krims, who in Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity argues for the global impact of rap, also makes interesting observations about the social function of the genre: “The touchstone of authenticity in public representations of hip-hop culture and rap music has long been some notion of urban locality and ethnic and / or class marginality” (198). While this observation certainly applies to a poet who represents the lives of marginalized blacks in South Africa’s urban ghettos, Rampolokeng disassociates himself from commercialized forms of rap: In the late seventies I was involved in the Black Consciousness Movement. We wanted first to break the mental chains, to give up our slave mentality. Without this there could be no political liberation. We were interested in what people like Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh did. And so the things sung about by Gil Scott Heron [sic] in the USA and Linton Kwesi Johnson in Britain were important to us too. But that doesn’t make me a rap poet.… We live in a global Potemkinvillage. Political hip-hop is no longer important to young people in South Africa … At the beginning hip-hop had something to say, it was on the margins of capitalist society. But when it started gaining in significance, it was absorbed by the system. That bothers me. (qtd. in Endriss)

While distancing himself from this complicitous form of rap, this self-professed “rapmaster supreme” (“rap 31” 1) seems to understand this genre more

141

142

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

broadly. For instance, Rampolokeng pointed out in a telephone interview I conducted with him that our telephone conversation was a type of rap. Rampolokeng does not put the written and the oral into an antagonistic relationship. In fact, by placing importance on both, he challenges a Eurocentric South Africa in a way similar to Caribbean dub poets’ challenging of Eurocentrism in their parts of the world, as they engage with issues of Black Consciousness, colonization, and racism. When Rampolokeng writes, he challenges the racist perceptions of those like apartheid’s architect, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, who saw black people as perpetual labourers in the employ of white folk. What Lillian Allen asserts of dub poetry might be said with equal justice of the dub- and rap-related poetry of Rampolokeng. “Dub poetry,” writes Allen, “is not just an art form. It is the declaration that the voice of a people, once unmuzzled, will not submit to censorship of form” (“Introduction” 16). More important, whether written or performed, dub poetry and rap “validates the lives and aspiration[s] of those ignored and excluded from the dominant culture. It articulates a just vision of the future. It carries a spirit of defiance, celebration and empowerment” (20). Although Rampolokeng suggested in a telephone interview that his published work has reached people in places in the world to which he has not yet travelled, his oral work is of equal value. The venues where Rampolokeng reads his poetry are both local and international. He regularly performs his work in Europe, where his popularity is evidenced by the translation of some of his poetry collections into German. Moreover, as Endriss explains, “[a]s a poet he earns his livelihood from readings (especially in Europe), writing for the theatre, for example ‘Faustus in Africa,’ which was written for the Handspring Puppet Company and performed with great success in Europe in 1995, and sometimes by writing on commission.” Rampolokeng is popular in South Africa as well, despite the cultural authorities, the “taste-makers” who see him as an anarchist and thus tighten security whenever he performs his work (Interview). Although Rampolokeng himself argues that “script can only ever be approximation [of the oral word]” and that “the written work can never be the one spoken” (Interview), he would likely disagree with Habekost’s assertion that “[i]n print, dub poetry is out of context … there is no riddim, no performance, no music” (104). Rampolokeng’s poetry not only has “riddim,” but also speaks to how the vision of a “rainbow nation” espoused by South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, has been betrayed by postapartheid South African governments. In setting up an antagonistic relationship between oral and written dub, in which the oral is almost romanticized,

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

Habekost overlooks some of the potential drawbacks of performed poetry. In his interview with Robert Berold, for instance, Rampolokeng comments about his experiences with his first record, End Beginnings: I didn’t really want to do it, but I also realized that it could have a much more far-reaching impact. If I thought about Linton Kwesi Johnson or The Last Poets or Grandmaster Flash or any of those others—that was one way, in a way, of broadening one’s audience—so I went into it.… We had disappointments I think—for instance my own voice execution. I’m a poet and I came out quite weak because I had to wrap my words around this music. So it had both negative and positive aspects, but I’m quite glad I did it.

Interestingly, Linton Kwesi Johnson, when asked in an interview by Mervyn Morris about having “actual music behind the voice,” also mentions “the danger of the music overwhelming the word” (254)—a point which shows that even world-renowned stars of dub face this problem. In Rampolokeng’s first poetry collection, Horns for Hondo, which is written as a series of numbered “raps,” one gets a very strong sense not only of the goal of his poetry, but also of how the oral and the written intersect. Rampolokeng transmits, in these poems, the violence of the 1980s and 1990s before the first democratic elections, as well as the orality that is part of black cultural identity in South Africa. The effect of his end rhymes is mnemonic, so that the poem can be recalled with greater ease in performance. The message of the poems is thus communicated more powerfully as Rampolokeng keeps alive the history of the global sources of oppression that implicate a “europe [which] put the third reich to ground / & raised it in my land cloned to hound” (“rap 24” 33–34). In these rhymes Rampolokeng refuses to forget that “the corpses sown in german fields like seed / sprout in palestine a bad harvest of israeli weed” (37–38). Underscored in this rap is a cyclical violence that yields no benefits. Sensitive to injustice wherever it occurs in the world, whether in Germany, Palestine, or the United States, Rampolokeng essays to plant seeds that will produce a better harvest. But the reality that faces him in his native South Africa is a land ripped apart by hate. The power of Rampolokeng’s poetry, especially in collections such as Horns for Hondo, lies in how he evokes the oral by often using direct and simple concrete diction as a way of communicating his important messages to a lulled citizenry. The simplicity of his words, just like the rhyming couplets, helps his reading and listening audiences to better recall words such as the following:

143

144

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

go away from me now i’ve got to keep a vow for ululations to usher in celebration horns & drums to sound liberation when the free land rejoices lies & distortions shan’t be choices forked tongues shall be immobile & tied since the wagon of truth is what they cannot ride go to the wilderness of beasts while you still can you are no brother of man (“rap 44” 28–37)

It can be argued that in this rap Rampolokeng displays intolerance for the beast-like humans who interfere with the “sound[s] of liberation.” Perhaps it is in his understandable eagerness to witness the creation of a “free land” that Rampolokeng banishes to the wilderness the dissenting members of the healed nation he envisions. In confronting the viciousness of South African politics, especially the effects of racial segregation on black people, the perceived garbage of a racially segregated society who were the worst off and who received substandard housing, education, employment, and remuneration, Rampolokeng addresses his audience directly as an oral poet would. Lest people forget, “rap 33” offers an impromptu history lesson about the white minority government, which in 1990, when Horns for Hondo was first published, was to enter into negotiations with political movements like the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC): they came in the heat of rum to freeze the beat of my drum oh people take note I wasn’t allowed to vote they sang a song sharp as the devil’s prong they spoke in the gun & rifle tone i answered in the language of stone (1–8)

Rampolokeng’s dynamic poetry seems to talk both to the black people who suffered the oppression and to the white people of South Africa, some of whom may be in denial about this history. By evoking these different groups

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

of people in his poetry, Rampolokeng importantly engages in the type of conversation that Cooley argues is a key feature of “ear poetry.” Rampolokeng emphasizes his roots in African oral traditions especially when he employs the metaphor of himself as a dancer moving to music, but one aware that the apartheid “drummer” or perhaps the hand clapper seeks to choreograph a crippling dance. In 1990, at a time when long-established foes were turning to “friends,” Rampolokeng insists: no one can negotiate when their words amputate I can only dance to the beat of progressive hands no song can move me if it’s meant to break my knee (“rap 33” 23–28)

The staccato rhythm of this poem reflects the tug-of-war or frenzied dance between the equally stubborn wills of the oppressor and the oppressed; furthermore, the description of the apartheid government’s new rhetoric as deceptive “songs” shows one of the creative ways in which Rampolokeng evokes music in a collection about the horns that he blows for his people as a way to counter apartheid’s violently intentioned songs. Rampolokeng is an uncompromising poet whose words are dynamic both on and off the page. His confrontation of both apartheid and postapartheid leaders is relentless, both being subjected to his stinging words. In a cynical portrayal of F. W. de Klerk, the president at the time the apartheid government was negotiating a transfer of power, Rampolokeng sees only a smooth-talking leader who sedates the people with his normalizing language of reform: standing on the land’s pulpit like a holy culprit he [de Klerk] reaches for the bag of reform a magician about to perform rabbits out conditions for negotiation a hatful of tricks made of pollution (“rap 26” 21–26)

The phrase “rabbits out” is employed by a poet who, in Flora Veit-Wild’s estimation,

145

146

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

parodies the traditional English rhyming couplet, makes jokes by transforming the English language with his African accent (in his pronunciation “ship” rhymes with “sheep,” for example) … and creates unusual, comic, often absurd and impure rhymes. The result is a permanent undermining of his own words and their usual meanings, of authorities and ideologies. (562)

Veit-Wild’s observations about how Rampolokeng’s accent features in poems such as “rap 31” are an important illustration of how the oral continues to function in his poems on the page because his rhymes reflect the way that he hears and pronounces words. Readers would, of course, have to be familiar with Rampolokeng’s accent in order to “hear” the particular version of the oral in his rhymes and thus to know where he is using exact rather than slant rhyme. Whereas in “rap 26” Rampolokeng targets apartheid leaders, in “rap 23” he writes and speaks to those members of the ANC who capitulated by settling for an independence that has not freed the black masses of his country from the stark realities of poverty. The force of Rampolokeng’s arraignment of the sellout ANC leaders derives largely from his representing them as like the apartheid leaders in being scavengers, ugly animals that feed on carcasses (presumably a reference to the murderous results of their sellout for South African blacks). The analogy in the following lines between leaders and animals would communicate so powerfully to his countrymen and women precisely because these animals are part of South African readers’ and audiences’ lifeworld: when capitalist collaborators masquerade as leaders hyenas and vultures make friends for their own putrid ends trading blood for the rand selling a sacred land in independence’s name (“rap 23” 24–30)

As Rampolokeng eloquently illustrates, there were many reasons to despair about the changes promised by the new leadership, among them the widely held perception that some ANC members, rather than ensure a meaningful revolution for which many sacrificed precious lives, turned into “capitalist collaborators.” So one can imagine here the ANC collaborators “getting in

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

the line of a crackling, rattling verbal fire,” the verbal assault of which Veenbaas spoke. More important, the knowledge that Rampolokeng would perform such a poem, not content to have it only in a book, gives the poem even more edginess than it would have were he known simply as a page-based poet. While Rampolokeng employs rhyming couplets in Horns for Hondo to help his audiences remember his potent words, in other collections, written after 1994, he writes several poems that he characterizes as rants. He also creates, in the poem referred to below, the neologism ranterlude to name one of his poems. In these rants, Rampolokeng prods the reader to hear him raging out poems that reflect his frustration with the betrayed hopes for a new South Africa, or what Rampolokeng describes as “illusion building” (“Chorus for the damned ranting” 27). Rampolokeng mocks the “fronting / clowns” (2–3), the ruling elite who are “gorged on a forged simunye-ness [or oneness in isiZulu]” (“Ranterlude” 10). In other poems that are not necessarily characterized as rants, Rampolokeng resists the prescribed normalization of postapartheid inequities by using capital letters to help the reader hear the loud and overwhelming voices of South African authorities. When he capitalizes the section in the Bavino Sermons titled “From an ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK,” he satirizes the whole notion of expertise and authority. When he uses lowercase letters, which he does in almost all of his poetry, he calls into question the hierarchical structure of written English. In working outside the conventional boundaries, he not only effectively merges the oral with the written, but also experiments with both media as a way of bringing meaning to his work. Rampolokeng understands that he may pay a high price for his jabbing words. In the chilling poem “Lines for Vincent,” he writes: “as my tongue twitches / I know I might encounter the death / of speech” (68–70). This poem, which painstakingly evokes a rotten foundation upon which the “new” South Africa was created, is about Rampolokeng’s freedom-fighter cousin, Vincent, who was “killed by bravery / & a nation’s homicidal glory” (28–29). The fragments of truth that Rampolokeng reveals in the poem are of an antiapartheid soldier whose teeth were pulled out “with a pair of pliers before he died” (2). Not only is Vincent castrated with a butcher knife, but his dead body is “mutilated & sodomised” (27). The poem does not explain why Vincent’s life was terminated so violently. What we do know from interviews that Rampolokeng has granted (see Berold) is that Vincent was killed by the South African Defense Force, presumably because all freedom fighters were considered “terrorists.” Rampolokeng’s nightmares about his beloved cousin do not lead him to any answers, since the current ruling elite, the politicians

147

148

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

who are nothing more than “ornament[s] in cabinet / house of parliament” (“The rampster” 2), refuse to answer his nagging questions about why the sacrifices of Vincent and others like him “were compromised” (56) during the apartheid era. It is not only the silences that are ominous, but also what Rampolokeng refers to as the sight of a death-grin with a gun aimed at my brains & they call that figment of a fevered imagination” (46–49)

In poems such as these, Rampolokeng turns into an investigator who uses his art to achieve justice for both the living and the dead. Rampolokeng seemingly feels indebted to people like Vincent and to all of those lives “lost to get the [freedom of the] vocal” (“The rampster” 18). Rampolokeng persists in writing and speaking despite the dangers that are all too real for him. After reciting his poetry at the birthday celebration of an ANC official, he received what he describes as “a hotfashioned caution”: “I was, I suspect, expected to chant some praises to my leader—and I must have done something wrong because the next day … COSAW [the Congress of South African Writers] was advised to put me on a leash, to put a chain around my neck because I’d conducted myself like a mad dog, they said” (Berold). Rampolokeng, the so-called mad dog, goes beyond simply writing about the abuses of power by black leaders who can at times seem untouchable. He confronts male oppressors through his written and his actual voice. One can imagine both the gadfly effect and the power of performing a poem such as “A bavino love story at wet sunset,” which effectively evokes South Africa’s violent heterosexuality. In this poem, a woman who is seemingly sexually violated by a man acts the way she thinks she is expected to act, in an effort to prevent “blows to the head of manhood” (2). Despite her protests evident in the words “maybe she said this is not right” (17) and “let it be the last” (18), she is unable to assert herself against her oppressor. The poem ends violently with the image of bleeding sheets (26). The fact that some of Rampolokeng’s poems on the subject of love are characterized as rants says much about the abnormal state of relations between men and women in the “new” South Africa (see “A Nesses / Lesses Love Rant”). Rampolokeng, then, heightens the urgency of speaking and writing about these sexual issues in order to effect meaningful changes.

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

Rampolokeng is undoubtedly a fearless artist who bravely wages an important fight against the dominant discourses of reconciliation through both written and oral media. What Sole describes as his “penchant for saying exactly what he thinks, along with a laid-back, sarcastic oral delivery and stance,” (27–28) is especially important in a country where, not too long ago, black people were punished for expressing their socio-political perspectives. Those who did—like Black Consciousness activist Steven Biko, for example, who dared to write what he liked—were killed by the apartheid state. That Rampolokeng feels that his voice is threatened in a new South Africa says much about the importance of his rap for his post-apartheid nation. This “scrawny, gaunt-faced and intense poet, [who] stands with all his weight on one leg, occasionally shifting it to the other, presenting the raps in a rich voice fluctuating between historical narration and shrill invective, exhortative tones” (Oliphant vi), is an artist who cannot be taken for granted. The “shrill invective” one hears in the tone of his written poetry seems in keeping with a poet who is not afraid orally to beard the lions in their own dens, as he did at the birthday party of the ANC official, whose like would probably not be picking up his poetry to read. In his consideration of power differentials, Rampolokeng does not begin from the premise of a reconciled South Africa. A far cry from the discourses of nation building that make little room for prevailing colour politics, his poetry rather begins from the standpoint of a racist society and works toward the ideal of a non-racist society. But because South African society is not yet normal—this is a country where black children have been “mistaken” for dogs and killed, as happened in the mining town of Thabazimbi in 2006— Rampolokeng’s stance in both his oral and written work is necessarily combative. Thus in the epigraph to The Bavino Sermons he addresses the “thought control tower,” those who prescribe the manner in which he should write and speak. His seemingly out-of-step or even anachronistic impatience with the “new South Africa” that is in reality yet to be, is preparation, albeit painful, for a genuinely normal tomorrow.

149

150

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Works Cited Allen, Lillian. “Introduction.” Women Do This Every Day. Toronto: Women’s P, 1993. 11–21. Print. Berold, Robert. “Interview with Lesego Rampolokeng.” Web. 20 June 2009. Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. New York: Harper, 1978. Print. Cook, William W. “The Black Arts Poets.” The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett Millier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 674–706. Print. Cooley, Dennis. The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature. Winnipeg: Turnstone P, 1987. Print. Endriss, Beate-Ursula. “Rap-Master in the Extreme.” Culturebase.net, 2003. Web. 20 June 2009. Habekost, Christian. Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poetry. Cross / Cultures 10. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Print. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Interview by Mervyn Morris. Ed. E. A. Markham. Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989. 250–61. Print. Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Ndebele, Njabulo. “Guilt and Atonement: Unmasking History for the Future.” Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English. Ed.Victor Ramraj. Peterborough: Broadview, 336–43. Print. O’Brien, Anthony. Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print. Ogude, James. “Writing Resistance on the Margins of Power: Rampolokeng’s Poetry and The Restoration of Community in South Africa.” Alternation: Journal of the Centre for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages 5. 2 (1998): 270–81. Print. Oliphant, Andries. “Introduction: The Poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng.” Horns for Hondo. Fordsburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1990. i–vi. Print. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Print. Rampolokeng, Lesego. “A bavino love story at wet sunset.” Bavino 17–18. Print. ———. The Bavino Sermons. Durban: Gecko Poetry, 1999. ———. “Chorus for the damned ranting.” Bavino 71–72. Print. ———. E-mail interview with author. 23 May 2009. ———. End Beginnings. Shifty Records, 1993. CD. ———. “Habari Gani Africa Ranting.” Bavino 27–30. Print. ———. Horns for Hondo. Fordsburg: COSAW, 1990. Print. ———. “Lines for Vincent.” Bavino 11–13. Print. ———. “A Nesses / Lesses Love Rant.” Bavino 67–68. Print. ———. “The rampster comes straight.” Bavino 110–11. Print. ———. “Ranterlude.” Bavino 19. Print.

Writing and Rapping for a New South Africa

■

Gugu Hlongwane

———. “rap 23.” Horns 36–38. Print. ———. “rap 24.” Horns 38–39. Print. ———. “rap 26.” Horns 44–45. Print. ———. “rap 31.” Horns 53–55. Print. ———. “rap 33.” Horns 56–57. Print. ———. “rap 44.” Horns 74–75. Print. ———. “Riding the victim train.” Bavino 14–16. Print. ———. Telephone interview with author. 22 May 2009. Sitas, Ari. “Traditions of Poetry in Natal.” Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa. Ed. Liz Gunner. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand UP, 1994. 139–61. Print. Sole, Kelwyn. “Bird Hearts Taking Wing: Trends in Contemporary South African Poetry Written in English.” World Literature Today 70.1 (1996): 25–31. Print. Veenbaas, Jabik. “Lesego Rampolokeng.” Poetry International, 2001. Web. 20 June 2009. Viet-Wild, Flora. “Carnival and Hybridity in Marechera and Lesego Rampolokeng.” Emerging Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera. Ed. Anthony Chennells and Flora Veit-Wild. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1999. 93–104. Print.

151

This page intentionally left blank

THE BALLAD AS SITE OF REBELLION Orality, Gender, and the Granuaile Aislingi Naomi Foyle

Collocations of orality with the politically disadvantaged are commonplace in the popular imagination; so if, as Winston Churchill is often credited with asserting, “history is written by the victors,” oral tradition might well be looked to as a repository for the histories of the vanquished and oppressed. A fighting example of such felicitous preservation of inconvenient truths, one might argue, would be the sixteenth-century Irish Gaelic chieftain, sea captain, trader, and pirate Gráinne Ní Mháille. For though a dominating, unpredictable campaigner against the Tudor reconquest of Ireland, with her exploits well documented in the State Papers of both Ireland and England, Ní Mháille is strikingly all but absent from later written histories. As Anne Chambers stresses, “The Annals of The Four Masters, that seminal source of Irish history, compiled shortly after her death … does not even mention her name,” while she features in nineteenth-century accounts only in passing, or in relation to her two husbands (xiii; Cook xi). In contrast, as the semimythical Granuaile, the pirate queen is a veritable star of the Irish oral tradition: her infamous independence, battle courage, and private audience with Elizabeth I feature in folk tales based on living memory, and in various ballad aislingi [ash-LING-gee] composed from the eighteenth century. The aisling [ASH-ling], or “vision poem,” is a genre of nationalist verse that, I will argue, is like the ballad in having its roots in an Irish orality dating from early Celtic culture. As I will demonstrate in my analysis of eight such ballads, however, the preservation of Ní Mháille’s memory in the aisling involved a dramatic transformation, and from a feminist point of view, an alarming one. For the unruly buccaneer of the State Papers mutates in the early aislingi into a sorrowing icon of nationalist aspirations, one who falls victim, I will suggest, to the homeostasis of oral cultures, which, Walter Ong has noted, subordinate “the integrity of the past” to “the integrity of the present” (48). Oral tradition, then, I will contend, does not necessarily reflect the historical experience of 153

154

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

women, at least, in any uncomplicated way. Ultimately discussing the rehabilitation and evolution of Granuaile’s image in contemporary aislingi, including my own ballad “Grace of the Gamblers,”1 I will ground my arguments throughout in their historical context, in particular the complex dynamics that exist among gender, orality, and political conflict in Ireland. I first encountered the name of Gráinne Ní Mháille [GRAWN-ya NEE WYL-ya] (1530–1603?) several years ago while browsing on the Internet, a medium for verbal documents that shares with orality a reputation for transience, idle chat, and factual unreliability. Or perhaps I clicked on her English name, Grace O’Malley. In either event, this casual, half-remembered introduction was fitting, for even the most established facts of Ní Mháille’s life are interwoven with rumours and tallish tales that change in the telling. A near exact contemporary of Elizabeth Tudor, she was the only daughter of a chief of the seafaring Uí Mhaille dynasty, who ruled the west coast of Ireland, now County Mayo. Her Irish nickname, Granuaile [Gron-u-ALE], means “crophaired,” which, according to Judith Cook, relates to a childhood incident in which Gráinne cut off her hair to demonstrate her determination to sail with her father to Spain (21). As an adult, Granuaile overcame entrenched cultural prohibitions against both female leadership and women at sea, eventually succeeding her father as chieftain. For more than forty years she commanded a fleet of up to twenty galleys, leading two hundred men in continual interdynastic warfare as well as battles with the English. Widowed twice and the mother of four, Granuaile played a dominant role in the fortunes of her three sons and maintained political independence from her spouses. Though the State Papers indicate she remained married to her second husband until his death, she is famously said to have divorced him after a year’s trial union, garrisoning his fort and shouting down to him, “I dismiss you” (Chambers 66). So why was such a formidable leader, whose actions often placed her at the heart of the convoluted politics of her day, omitted from contemporary Irish accounts? Both Chambers and Cook conjecture that an independent female leader would have threatened the world view of male Irish commentators of the period. While Irish myth contains many examples of powerful women warriors, from the deity the Mórrigan [MOR-ri-gan] to Queen Medbh [MAYV], Scatach [SCAWT-tak], and Aoife [EE-fa] of the Ulster cycles, Chambers argues that when patriarchal Salic law, brought to Ireland along with Christianity by St. Patrick, overtook the indigenous Brehon law, women were the big losers. Beginning in the sixth century, the Roman Salic law, with its emphasis on male succession, gradually infiltrated the indigenous “matriarchal culture” with its traditional Brehon law (18). By the sixteenth

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

century, therefore, apart from the continuation of certain generous rights relating to marriage, Irish women had been relegated to positions of social subservience (26). Claims for an early Irish matriarchy are difficult to substantiate. It is true that St. Adamnán [AD-a-nawn] (627/8–704), in a stated effort to protect women, instigated legal reforms that “put an end to the bearing of arms by women in war” (de Paor 109). However, the earliest Brehon law texts, which date from the seventh and eighth centuries but reflect customs long in use, do not in general grant women equal rights with men, and prohibit female inheritance except in the case of women with no brothers (Kelly 69). Thus one cannot entirely blame Roman law for the fact that Gráinne as a widow could not inherit her husbands’ wealth, and as a woman was not permitted to stand for the elected position of tánaiste [TAW-nist]—heir apparent to the head of the larger dynastic structure (24–25).2 However, Brehon law did make special provisions for “a woman who turns back the stream of war, a hostage ruler …, one who is abundant in miracles, a female satirist, a female wright, a woman revered by the territory, a woman-physician” and also mentions the banfili [ban-FI-li], or female poet/seer (Kelly 351, 49). Such a list suggests a culture in which particular women could wield considerable social, and possibly military, power. By the medieval period, however, as Gillian Kenny explains, “the Gaelic schools of poets, historians, judges and physicians apparently had no place for female pupils,” and references to independent women are virtually non-existent (36, 40); it does appear, then, that Irish society had become even more male-dominated than was previously the case. Thus while legend easily absorbed her memory, official historians, as Chambers argues, were perhaps reluctant to “acknowledge that a woman could usurp” what had by then come to be accepted “as the exclusive role of man” (19). In England, in contrast, with Elizabeth on the throne and Mary in the wings, women leaders were an unavoidable challenge to what Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin describe as “the deep anxiety that men had about female rule at the time” (119). As Sara Mendelson elaborates, Elizabeth’s long reign was remarkable for its adroit negotiation of these Aristotelian anxieties: although she encouraged comparisons to exceptional women, including the warlike Boudica, ultimately the “Virgin Queen,” humbly declaring to her subjects that “you may have a greater prince, but you will never have a more loving prince,” deftly skirted direct challenges to male authority (206). Granuaile, with her fearless charges into battle and firm control of husbands and sons, therefore posed an intractable dilemma to the English administrators of Dublin. In order not to offend Elizabeth, in letters to London the

155

156

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

administrators praised the chieftain’s “stoutness of courage,” but among themselves they derided the authority of “a woman that hath impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler, chief commander and director of thieves” (Brewer and Bullen, Carew MS 63.19.56). As Brandie Siegfried explores, this characterization bolstered a derogatory view of local sovereignty, one that rested on a gendered colonial discourse that construed the Irish as “an unchaste and unruly wife” and England as “stern but benevolent husband” (157). Charges of treachery may also have been levelled at Granuaile by her compatriots. Chambers and Cook argue that, in addition to objecting to Grace’s gender, the official Irish historians of the day may have suspected her of being an “intelligencer” for the English. As her posthumous reputation largely rests on her image as “nurse to all rebellions” in her province—a woman who infamously beheaded one of her own son’s friends to prevent him submitting to the Crown—this supposition may initially seem spurious (Calendar of State Papers of Ireland [SPI] 63/170/37). But a closer look at the politics of the day explains why Cook in particular grants it credence (180). Sixteenth-century Ireland was not itself a nation but a volatile concatenation of sixty dynasties of chieftains that formed shifting alliances against one another and the English, the latter of whom sought to extend their control of Dublin and the area around it known as “The Pale.” Officially, the English policy was one of political persuasion, of pressuring dynastic chieftains to surrender their lands and submit to the Crown, preferably on bended knee. In exchange, chieftains would be regranted their estates under English laws, which replaced indigenous elected offices with hereditary titles. Divide and conquer was a tough game to win outright, especially when dynasties united in resistance, and the English often resorted to military tactics, including confiscating land and committing massacres and murder—a fate that befell Grace’s son Owen—as well as crop burning, which caused widespread devastation and famine (Cook 83). In an age marked by relentless violence, Granuaile had the inestimable military advantage of being able to disappear out to sea, hiring mercenaries up the coast, or raising money by plundering wrecks and forcing merchant ships to pay her a toll. As Cook contends, the knowledge of other vessels that Ní Mháille acquired in the course of this maintenance system would have made her “enormously useful” to the English—accounting perhaps for her mysterious Royal pardon for a hangable offence in 1586 (65, 115). Later, and more suspicious yet, was her meeting with Elizabeth in 1599 (143). Now in her early sixties, the notorious female chieftain was destitute. Her nemesis,

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

the Queen’s representative Richard Bingham, had mapped the coastline and inlets of Mayo, taken control of her pirate caves, and impounded her galleys and cattle. But “Grace the Gambler” had one final ace up her sleeve. She wrote to Elizabeth in Latin, petitioning for aid, in return promising to fight the Queen’s enemies. Then she sailed to London, where Elizabeth granted her a Royal audience, three new galleys, and a pension (143–58). Grace’s pledge of long-distance allegiance may be taken with a large pinch of snuff, as the strategic words of a pragmatic chieftain well versed in the niceties of Royal diplomacy. And the aging Elizabeth may have offered her support mainly as a way to “transpose the strength and allure of Gráinne’s rogue majesty over her own [waning] monument” (Siegfried 170). However, by securing a pension from Her Majesty’s coffers—even if it was subsequently never paid—Grace may have scored one coup too many for the Four Masters, who compiled their Annals in the decade before the Rebellion of 1641, in which political autonomy for Ireland and full rights for Catholics were first put on a newly nationalist agenda (Ranelagh 61–63). The manner and date of Gráinne Ní Mháille’s death are unknown. Tradition has it that her final resting place is an empty tomb in the Abbey on Clare Island, Mayo. But whether she was written out of official history because of her unconventional behaviour as a woman or her suspected career as a clandestine counter-insurgent, her memory was preserved—and some might say exploited—in Irish folklore, song, and poetry. To what extent, though, it can be argued that her name comes down to us thanks mainly to an oral tradition is a complicated question, in particular in relation to poetry and song. For while it seems clear that the stories about her, however apocryphal, derived from living memory and were “preserved by word of mouth, handed down from generation to generation,” it is less easy to sustain a contention of oral transmission in the case of the ballad aislingi collected in Chambers’ Appendix (Chambers 59). To discuss, first, the sometimes controversial relationship of orality to the ballad, it is necessary to scrutinize the popular conception that the form originates in the songs of the non-literate, rural “folk” of England and Scotland. The external history of ballad is rife with romantic conceptions of a lost age of “dancing, singing peasants” embodying an ancient collective harmony between soul, soil, and song (Bold 18). In his essay “Ballad Poetry,” Francis James Child, editor of the monumental nineteenth-century The English and Scottish Ballads, valorized the popular, or folk, ballad as the expression of a primitive, pre-“book culture” society in which “there is such a community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form an individual” (365). In the

157

158

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

twentieth century, the Parry–Lord oral-formulaic theory of spontaneous, communal composition was applied to the ballad (Freidman 215–40). And while Alan Bold takes an inclusive view of “the folk,” reminding the reader that contributors to early ballad anthologies included a Lord, a Knight, and the wife of a Scottish minister, he nevertheless begins his book The Ballad with an image of folk songs being “dragged from their natural environment” in “the oral atmosphere” (3). Citing Friedman’s observation that the term is derived from the French ballade, “an idiom imported to England in the fifteenth century,” Bold claims that the English broadside ballad, launched from 1509, came “with disastrous terminological consequences” to embrace “the traditional narrative songs of the people,” a distinction perhaps founded in Child’s disparagement of the “thoroughly despicable and worthless” printed urban ballad (12–13; 367). Michael Cohen has summarized recent critical discomfort with theories of the ballad that contrast, as Child does, two “distinct, incommensurable and diachronic” cultures, and “inscribe an authenticity and unity” to orality that is “scattered and lost with the introduction of reading, writing and printing” (2, 1). MacEdward Leach concludes that the real generators of the ballad were, from the Middle Ages onward, the middle classes: “small farmers, shoemakers, village schoolteachers, nursemaids, tinkers, wives of small tradesmen, innkeepers, drovers” (8–9). And the oral formulaic theory has been largely abandoned in relation to the ballad in favour of the more reasonable supposition that the numerous variations of individual ballads resulted from (possibly written) compositions being memorized and gradually altered in oral performance (Friedman 217). More stringently, one might even argue that the origin of the genre is inseparable from the advent of print. Ruth Finnegan explains that many “traditional” songs were in fact derived from medieval literary romances, while Cohen argues that “many of the touchstones of the ballad—its anonymity, decentralization, its association with the poor—are all features of cheap print” (62; e-mail). All these scholars demonstrate ways in which, as Mark C. Amodio has succinctly put it, literacy and orality are “interdependent, not opposing” processes. However, interdependent does not mean identical, and it would be a paradoxical and unsatisfactory state of affairs if what has been long referred to as the British and Irish oral tradition of folk song was cast out by academics into the realm of “that whereof one cannot speak.” Cohen is correct to stress the crucial role of print in the development of the ballad in the American context, and he also importantly exposes the Eurocentric nation-building ideology behind Child’s valorization of “the folk” (Cohen 8). The neo-folk-music

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

movement today is awash with bands that glorify fascist iconography and ideals, bands including the British group Death in June, stringently criticized online by Anti-Racist Action (“Death in June”). But as Finnegan acknowledges, there is still “some truth in … [the] distinction” between ballads composed for urban printers, and much older songs transcribed from oral performances for broadsheets or anthologies (161). And to posit a primarily oral origin of this (for want of a better term) folk ballad is not necessarily to embark on a deluded or dangerous quest for a lost, mythical, supposedly unified ancient culture. Rather it is to acknowledge that the relationship between orality and literacy is constantly changing and that orality may be a stronger feature of some cultures or cultural genres than of others. Anthony Easthope, for example, argues that the orality of the ballad is an inherent aspect of its form, its strong accentual meter and repetitive phrases encouraging collective, participatory performances (73). While these features do not necessarily indicate an oral origin, considering in particular the traditional 4/3 ballad measure, I contend that the form has its roots in the Goidelic, Brythonic, and Gallic oral cultures of, respectively, early Celtic Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe. In the British and Irish context, more is known about the Irish oral poetic tradition, in which practices of both oral composition and transmission were taught up until the seventeenth century (Williams 215). The orthodox view of the Irish ballad is that the form was imported from England and Scotland in the seventeenth century, and I am not attempting here to claim, conversely, that the ballad incubated in Irish Gaelic and then migrated to French, English, or even Scottish Gaelic or Scots (Welch and Stewart 28). Rather I am suggesting that, given the well-attested longevity of Irish oral practices and meters, and the close relationship of early Celtic languages and cultures, looking back before Old Irish to ancient Goidelic orality can give a sense of what oral poetry might have been like in early Gallic and Brythonic cultures. J. E. Caerwyn Williams points out, for example, that the early Irish learned hereditary professions of fili [FI-lee], druí [DRU-ee], and bard [BARD]— poet-prophet, lawmaker, and singer—which correspond to the Gaulish offices of Vate, Druid, and Bard. As the Gallic Druids were known to study for twenty years in Britain, to suppose that early Brythonic nations also included highly trained poets, perhaps in communication with their peers overseas, is not unreasonable (22). In Ireland, of the three professions, the fili was held in highest regard, being trained for fourteen years in magical arts and the oral composition and transmission of poetry and song; writing was only introduced as an Irish

159

160

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

method of instruction in the seventh century, when the “writing in the Latin alphabet spread to the native law schools” (Williams 23, 87). The bard trained for only seven years, learned the harp, and was generally regarded as a rather lowly entertainer. With the Anglo-Norman invasions, however, these two offices gradually merged, until eventually the term bard alone came to be used to describe the Irish poet, no longer a seer, but still upholding a largely oral poetic tradition (155). As late as 1650, the bards of the “dark schools” of Scotland and Ireland composed their work in windowless huts, lying upon their beds for a full day until candles and a pen were brought for them to commit their poems to writing, a practice Williams suggests stems from the magical rituals of the fili (159). It is true that the students were probably not composing ballads; quite the opposite, for the “dark schools” taught the strict, syllabic dán díreach [DAWN JEER-ak] meters that Bergin insists were recited or chanted, not sung (12). When after the dissolution of the schools, amhráin [aw-RAWN], or accentual folk song meter, supplanted dán díreach, the highly trained bards were outraged (Williams 215). Irish songs in amhráin have a long history, however, including the Fionn [FI-on] cycle of lays, narrative quatrains dating from the twelfth century that Welch and Stewart identify as the closest thing to traditional Irish balladry (201). And interestingly, one of the most common dán díreach meters was seven syllables to a line, twenty-eight in a quatrain, “the same as in the ordinary English ballad meter” (Bergin 12). Considering that, despite their elevated status in the early modern period, dán díreach meters were originally the province of the early bard, it is surely possible that the Irish ballad may have other indigenous precedents in popular narrative chants or even songs (Williams 157). As Bergin claims, “there must have been thousands of popular songs in medieval and early modern Ireland, but these songs have perished” (21). It does seem possible, then, that ballad meter could have had its origins in cross-fertilized Gallic, Brythonic, and Goidelic oral cultures, or perhaps stem from even more ancient traditions in what Haywood hypothesizes as a proto-Celtic language (15). In speculating along these lines, I certainly do not wish to identify the ballad, the Gaels, and early Britons with all things “free” and “folk.” The fili, bard, and later bard were elite professionals, with specialized political functions. Nor do I want to imply that orality is only fundamental to long dead cultures. Irish culture today maintains a far from residual orality in its popular storytellers and its regular “sessions” held in pubs all over the British Isles: informal gatherings of musicians and singers performing a wide traditional repertoire, usually from memory. But it does seem to me that orality should

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

not be conceptually interwoven so completely with written media that it ceases to make its own historical and political claims. Arguably, for example, Irish orality of the early modern period was imposed on the Gaelic population, not just by the lack of education common to all European peasantry, but also by the consequences of colonialism, including the Flight of the Earls and the Penal Laws.3 And in general, as Granuaile’s story demonstrates, while written histories can favour the powerful and exclude the unruly, histories with a greater purchase on orality can express the multiple interests, not of a unified “folk,” but of diverse groups of people marginalized on the basis of nationality, religion, race, class, or gender. Dianne Dugaw, for example, argues that the “female warrior” broadsheets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “not only depict the behaviour of lower-class women whose actual lives have left few traces in other accounts, but also illuminate telling conditions and [gender] preoccupations of an entire age” (122). To inspect more closely, for a moment, the relationship of orality to gender, I could start at no more pertinent place than the blurb on the back of Chambers’s book about Granuaile—a quotation from the Irish Times praising the biographer for “rescuing” Ní Mháille from “the rather frivolous lore” surrounding her. This association of orality with feminine inconsequence has its basis in the medieval period, when, as Christine Neufeld explores, male writers devalued the oral as women’s verbal domain (420). Yet according women any sort of domain at all was fraught with the danger of ceding power to the so-called weaker sex. William Dunbar’s “The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Women and the Wedo,” for example, exposes the threatening nature of oral poetics as demonstrated by three confident and sexually frank women (Neufeld 420–27). And in the Tudor period women were generally considered to be nimble-tongued speakers, the brilliance of Elizabeth I’s oratory and repartee depending on contemporary conventions of feminine speech, including “the art of scorning” and “careful Wives’ counsel” (Mendelson 206). To narrow the focus to the ballad again, I would say that precisely inasmuch as the form is an example par excellence of the reciprocity between not only orality and literacy, but also traditionally female and male literary themes and domains, it is also a site of conflict and tension between them. Alan Bold quotes Mrs. Hogg, who prophetically and sadly warned Sir Walter Scott that her songs “were made for singing and no for reading; but ye have broken the charm now, and they’ll never be sung mair” (14). While the form enjoyed a temporary vogue with the publication of the various ballad anthologies, its poor literary reputation in the seventeenth century may be related to its long association with women, whose enforced orality was attested by

161

162

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

John Aubrey (1627–1697) in his observation that “In the old ignorant time before women were Readers, ye [ballad] was handed downe from mother to daughter” (qtd. by Bold 40). The only respected male ballad mongers of the period were blind singers (Bold 42), while Susan Stewart notes the dominant role that “Scottish gentlewomen” later played as contributors to the anthologies (118). And Easthope notes how the collective, oral rhythms of “nursery rhymes, the lore of school children, ballads, and industrial folk-songs” have been again devalued in current English poetic discourse (65). Another consciously ideological proponent of the orality of the ballad, W. B. Yeats,4 famously exploited what Mary-Helen Thuente describes as the ballad’s history as a “medium long associated with both love and patriotism” (qtd. in Butler Cullingford 168). These traditionally gendered literary themes are also deeply entwined in the Irish aisling, a genre of political Irish poetry with its own complex relationship to orality. Based on early folk tales, transcribed by medieval clerics, in which an enchanting woman appears to the male speaker in a dream, the aisling in the hands of the eighteenthcentury Munster poets became a conventionalized vehicle for the expression of the hopes of disenfranchised Catholics, its defining feature the allegorical identification of the nation of Ireland with a spéirbhean [spare VAN] or “sky-woman” (Williams 217–19). Generally a passive figure, the spéirbhean laments the state of the land and predicts its regeneration under the rule of an exiled Jacobite prince, to whom she makes a sacred marriage of sovereignty, a symbolic union based on much earlier earth cult practices (Cullingford 59). And while the Jacobites’ dreams were dashed, and the great lineage of highly literate Gaelic poets came to an end, the aisling survived in, among other forms, the orally circulated soldiers’ song and street ballad. Like the genre itself, the spéirbhean appears in various guises: generally as a maid with a harp, but also, in an overlap with other allegorical images of Mother Ireland, as a battle queen or a suffering old woman—the sean bhean bhocht [SHAN VAN VOCT]. It is to such disparate mainstays of nationalist iconography that the spiky, politically unreliable figure of Gráinne is grafted in the “Poems and Songs” in Chambers’s Appendix I (henceforth referred to as the Appendix ballads). Such apparent disregard for Ní Mháille’s actual character and deeds aptly illustrates Ong’s insight that oral cultures “keep themselves in a state of equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories that no longer have present relevance” (46). “Equilibrium” might not seem the best word to describe a culture suffering the intensely destabilizing pressures of colonial occupation, including the famine of 1845–52, but the spread of aislingi by soldiers, street singers, and session musicians would have

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

helped sustain a unifying and motivating idea of nation in a country that had only briefly known political independence, during the Irish Confederacy of 1642–49. The volatility of the growing nationalist struggle is reflected in the variety of transformations that Granuaile undergoes in these songs and poems. In an effort to demonstrate just how closely the aislingi mirror changing political conditions, I will examine them in roughly chronological order, surmised from various historical evidence embedded in the texts. Three of the Appendix ballads, “Grana Weal” [GRO-na WHEEL], “Granuweal—An Old Song,” and “Granuaile,” almost certainly date from the mideighteenth to very early nineteenth century, when the Act of Union (1800) was passed, bringing Ireland fully under British control. Though it is impossible to say which was composed first, for the sake of establishing the historical context of the Jacobite aislingi, I shall begin with “Grana Weal,” collected and translated by James Hardiman and his assistants in Irish Minstrelsy Volume II (1831). According to William H. Grattan Flood, the earliest Jacobite aislingi date from 1707, but most, including songs referring to “Grana Mhoal,” were composed at bardic sessions between 1725 and 1775. “Grana Weal” pays homage to the “rightful” exiled King Charles III (1720–1788)—a.k.a. “The Young Pretender”—and thus probably dates from between the death of “The Old Pretender,” James III (1688–1766), and that of Charles, when the Jacobite movement in Ireland came to an end. Though existing songs would still have had sentimental currency and historical interest, it seems unlikely that “Grana Weal” would have been composed after that date. The ten quatrains of “Grana Weal” are composed in largely anapaestic tetrameter, the musicality of the translation enhanced by the repetition of rhymes and end words. The diction is formal and religious, giving the meter the feel of a 4/4 hymnal long measure (147): Ah! Knowest thou the maiden all beauteous and fair Whom her merciless foes have left plundered and bare? The force of my emblem too well cant thou feel, For that suffering lorn one is our Grana Weal. (167)

Here, the hardy pirate of the State Papers has been reduced to a ravished spéirbhean, all her hopes pinned on a sacred marriage to her Stuart saviour. While this ballad has entered the English-speaking world in print, in its origins as an Irish folk-song, it demonstrates Ong’s theory of the homeostatic transmission of oral cultural history.

163

164

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Yet this dramatic transformation of Grace’s memory was not a seamless procedure, as the other two aislingi from the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attest. These, while anachronistic in their patriotism, preserve a historically accurate memory of Ní Mháille as seasoned warrior and chieftain and as very much her own woman. “Granuaile,” for example, also found in Irish Minstrelsy Volume II, and introduced as a song dating from circa 1798, “with the survivors from Mayo of the Battle at Ballinamuck between the Franco-Irish forces and the English,” clearly acknowledges its protagonist’s sovereignty and military prowess (171). The ballad describes “strongholds on her headlands / and brave galleys on the sea,” while “dauntless Grace with Spartan soul,” in the traditional ballad use of dialogue, replies to a British herald with a stirring speech that the nineteenth-century translator conveys in 4/3 ballad meter: There’s many a brave O’Malley here With me to man the walls And rally round the flag we love Until the last man falls! (173)

Framed by descriptions of Grace’s castle lying “in a massive heap of ruins,” the poet’s account of the battle approaches the nature of a vision (171). And while not rendering a passive spéirbhean, the portrait of the chieftain nevertheless performs the vital function of identifying the nation of Ireland with a woman, a key characteristic of the aisling genre. “Granuweal—An Old Song” similarly presents a vigorous portrait of a woman clearly intended to represent Ireland. The ballad is printed with no source, though a tune bearing the same name is first recorded in Edward Bunting’s The Ancient Music of Ireland (1840), where it is described as having been obtained from a piper in 1797 but be “as old as the heroine whose name it bears” (93). The ballad mentions the Battle of Dettingen (1743), “King George,” and “Harrington”—presumably George II and Lord Harrington, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1747–1751—suggesting an eighteenth-century provenance, as does the reference in verse four to “[Scottish] Highlanders … cursing the union,” which could be read as a warning to the Irish not to follow suit. Verse six, however, notes the “large stone put in / To the heart of the church, by the leave of the King,” which may refer to the blockage of the Catholic Emancipation Act by George III in 1801 (Ranelagh 95). Possibly this verse was a later addition, or refers to George II, but on the whole, the ballad

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

appears to have been composed somewhere between the mid-eighteenth and very early nineteenth century. Like “Grana Weal,” “Granuweal—An Old Song” is composed in quatrains in a largely anapaestic tetrameter, throughout repeating the name of the heroine. The language here, though, is earthy and witty, and the addition of a tercet chorus, with its simple diction and nonsense refrain—“Sing budderoo, didderoo, Granuweal”—helps give the rhythm a jaunty, decidedly non-hymnlike feel. This is appropriate for a song in which Granuaile is pursued by a courtier who wishes to “rifle” her “charms” and take her to London, an offer she decisively declines: Says Granu, I always still lov’d to be free No foe shall invade me in my liberty While I’ve Limerick, Derry and the fort of Kinsale I’ll love and not marry, says Granuweal. (176)

Granu also speaks in the song as a political leader and warrior, reminding the English of their military dependence on her sons, and their obligation to treat Irish Catholics “with balance of justice.” Threatening to give the Spaniards and French “shillelagh,”5 she also demonstrates indigenous military clout (177). Here, folk memories of a sexually confident female chieftain jostle with the demands of the aisling, producing a bawdy, patriotic drinking song with a strong undercurrent of political defiance. In the later nineteenth century, however, the Granuaile spéirbhean succumbs not only to Victorian and Catholic ideals of femininity, but also to a nationalistic rhetoric of victimization that developed in response to oppressive post-Union social conditions. Of these ballads, the only one that conveys a sense of the actual material conditions of Granuaile’s life is the one least able to be confidently dated. “Granuaile,” not to be confused with the song from 1798, is reprinted from the late-nineteenth-century history O’Hart’s Irish Pedigrees, where its decorous, Victorian diction is introduced as a translation “from the Irish,” though unfortunately the Gaelic poem is not included or referenced (675). This “Granuaile” is the only Appendix ballad not in even roughly ballad meter. While its varying pentameters and alexandrines do sometimes resolve into the strong beats characteristic of accentual meter, at other times the enjambment and punctuation permit differing readings of the lines. However, while some might argue the translation is not strictly speaking a ballad, it is certainly a long narrative poem steeped in the aisling

165

166

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

tradition, with Granuaile appearing to the speaker in a dream. From the outset her physical environment of coastal towers and pirate caves and galleys is vividly drawn, and when the aging sea captain appears, she is portrayed much as she must have been: weather-beaten, proud, and intimidating: As a book that sun-burnt brow did fearless thoughts reveal. ....................................... She seemed as one well used to power—one that hath Dominion over men of savage mood, And dared the tempest in its midnight wrath, And through opposing billows cleft her fearless path. (165)

“Granuaile” culminates in a mythical account of Grace’s meeting with Elizabeth. Here she demands that the Queen withdraw her “evil servants” from Erin, obtaining a “fair promise” soon to be broken by English perfidy and greed (166). The possibility that it was Grace who may have reneged on her word is hinted at, however, in an earlier image of her cleaving “through opposing billows,” charting her own course through the powerful forces that ruled the day (165). Especially considering the way other nineteenth-century ballads dilute the force of Grace’s historical presence, it is tempting to surmise that the original Irish “Granuaile” is at least a hundred years older than the translation. In the absence of any such evidence, however, I can only comment that O’Hart’s version provides an intriguing reminder of Gráinne Ní Mháille as sovereign power, the general reader’s presumed interest in female leadership perhaps reoccasioned by Victoria’s long reign. The other four nineteenth-century aislingi I will discuss, however, transform Grace’s memory almost beyond recognition. To continue in roughly chronological order, “Grace O’Malley” by Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886) is the only originally authored, or literary, Appendix ballad. While the date of composition is unknown, Peter Denman discusses the poem in the context of Ferguson’s “Gaelic Lays,” written between the 1830s and 1860s, which gradually move away from political engagement with Irish struggles for nationhood, into a romanticized vision of traditional Gaelic life (96). With its courtly, medieval representation of Granuaile as a “learned lady” retreating from games of State into her island fast in order to read holy books and meditate on ancient pagan spirituality, the poem can be tentatively placed in the latter part of this cycle (169). In any event, as Denman claims, it “safely neutralises” the “political overtones” of Granuaile’s name as it was used in the

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

Jacobite aislingi (95). In Ferguson’s felicitous phrasings the aisling spéirbhean mutates yet again, into a genteel Island Queen reigning over an idyllic fantasy of indigenous culture, a world of “kindly clans” and “generous ire” magically capable of dissolving the harsh reality of colonial power: The wise, free way of life indeed, That still, with charm adaptive, Reclaims and tames the alien greed, And takes the conqueror captive. (169)

Feminine grace, though of a steelier sort, also characterizes a poem by the Archbishop of Tuam, John MacHale (1791–1881). As quoted online in John Healy’s Irish Essays, MacHale portrays Granuaile as a beautiful, sweet-voiced Queen, composing “soul stirring anthems of harp and of song.” But drawing on the patriotic Jacobite tradition, the Archbishop also represents her as “denouncing the payment of tithes.” Tithes, payable by mainly Catholic tenant farmers for the upkeep of the Anglican Church of Ireland, caused great resentment, erupting in the Tithe War of 1831–36 (Ranelagh 103). Whenever the poem was written, and despite its courtly tone, it is notable for its indirect homage to Granuaile’s actual political resistance to the English. The next two poems of this group can be dated from between 1867 and 1928, though thanks to the urgent distress they evince, I place them in the late nineteenth century, a period of increasing agitation for Irish independence. “Poor Old Granuaile” can be found in Colm Ó Loughlainn’s Irish Street Ballads (1939). It is roughly what is known as a fourteener, being composed of lines of between fourteen and sixteen syllables that can be “resolved into ballad measure,” the rhymes falling at the end of every seventh foot (Cullingford 66). Here, in what appears to be an overtly political aisling stemming from the Fenian Home Rule movement, Granuaile is depicted as a “comely maid” with a harp, appearing to the imprisoned speaker in a dream. One of the tunes she plays, “God Save Ireland,” written by T. D. Sullivan after the 1867 execution of the three “Manchester Martyrs,” has long been both an official and unofficial anthem of Irish nationalism (“God Save Ireland”). But despite her stirring songs and words of comfort, Poor Old Granuaile’s very name implies her hopeless state, and ultimately she vanishes from the speaker’s “lonely jail” (Chambers 177). Until, that is, she crops up again in the unsourced “A New Song Called Granuaile.” With its “poor old Granuaile” refrain, this aisling is likely a later version of the former ballad, which it formally resembles, being another

167

168

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

rough fourteener, the odd additional syllable sometimes jarring the meter when reading, though possibly not when singing. Here the grey-haired spéirbhean merges with that other female mainstay of Irish poetry, the long-suffering sean bhean bhocht. Dressed in a “gown stained with gore,” appearing to have been raped “by a ruffian band,” with a “mournful air” this “matron mild” claims that “[f]or six hundred years the briny tears have flowed down from my eyes” (178). The only faint note of hope she sounds is a rueful reference, in the past tense, to a “bill” drafted by “the man they call great Dan”—almost definitely a reference to Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), who campaigned extensively for the repeal of the Union (178). This pathetic vision of the pirate chieftain could hardly depart further from the historical record—once again, the nationalist demands of the aisling have completely subsumed the actual woman the ballad is named for. In contrast to the abject despair of the two “fourteeners,” “Oró! Sé do bheatha bhaile!”6 [o-RO SHAY DO VA-ha WYL-ya] (“Oró—and welcome home”) represents a return to a spirit of militant rebellion in the Granuaile aisling. This ballad, an early twentieth-century version of a Jacobite song, mirrors and indeed was intended to help spur the events that finally led to Home Rule. The new lyrics were written by Pádraig Mac Piarais [PAW-rag Mac FEE-rish] (1879–1916), or Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and, after his execution by the British, one of the country’s most famous martyrs. According to Bill Kennedy, Mac Piarais chose a tune that was traditionally played at the “bringing home” of a bride, thus retaining the Jacobite theme of a sovereign marriage between country and leader. Yet in what is still an immensely popular song, Mac Piarais’s Granuaile replaces her intended spouse Charles entirely. Initially represented as a “sorrowful” woman, “sold to the English,” she is soon rescued from the bloody gowns and broken harp strings of aisling femininity, the song restoring the female sea captain’s legendary independence and placing her at the head of a great army of “a thousand warriors / announcing ruin on the English” (176). While it is tempting to cheer Granuaile ashore, there are clearly deeply troubling aspects to the aislingi. Given the derogatory British association of the Irish with femininity, the country’s self-identification with a helpless woman might seem a sign of psychological capitulation to the colonial project. Butler Cullingford, following Ashis Nandy,7 however, argues that the spéirbhean is in fact a symptom of resistance to the reconquest—Irish men, configured as “feminine,” unreliable, of a “nervous disposition,” in fact reacted by becoming “hyper-masculine,” developing a violent and sacrificial nationalist rhetoric based on an absolute refusal to admit defeat (61). In consequence, in this

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

increasingly Catholic country, women were obliged to occupy the opposite position, of pure “hyper-femininity,” existing only in and for men (61). In this account, even the powerful hags and warrior queens who figure in some aislingi marginalize real women, idealizing instead a sacrificial goddess, drafted to sanction what Edna Longley calls “a male death-cult which has a particularly masochistic martyrology” (21). Longley also argues that poetic imagery of “the vulnerable virgin” and the “mourning mother” deceptively projects a “self-image of Catholic Nationalism as innocent victim, equally oppressed in all historical periods” (18). On the contrary, Longley claims, all the various images of “Mother Ireland” ultimately only “strait jacket” real men and women (16). Longley’s perspicacious critique finds echoes, to varying degree, in the work of contemporary Irish women poets including Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill [NU-a-la NEE GHO-nill], whose poem “Caitlín” [Cat-LEEN] gently satirizes the spéirbhean of the title, who “never stops bending your ear / about the good old days of yore” (39). As Irish filmmaker Anne Crilly reports, “the women prisoners in Armagh used to say, ‘Mother Ireland, get off my back’” (Thompson). I wholeheartedly agree that outdated gender stereotypes need to be thoroughly challenged. However, in defence of nineteenth-century Irish Nationalism—which did, after all, result in Home Rule—its gendered ideology, as discussed, can be attributed in part to British colonial attitudes, while its “sacrificial” militancy is hardly surprising: all armies make patriotic appeals to the greater good to persuade young people to go to war. And in general, there is a difference between a stereotype and an archetype, the former being fixed and restrictive, the latter protean and inexhaustible by any narrow political uses to which it is put. So if by harnessing the fury of Queen Medbh, Republicanism, as Longley argues, masked “its own patriarchal elements” (18), at the same time, Ireland’s long history of venerating legendary female figures has arguably helped enable (or at least not prevented) the rise of groundbreaking Irish women political leaders, from the militant Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz, and Máire Drumm, to President Mary Robinson and the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Máiread Corrigan and Betty Williams. As Crilly also says of the women in her controversial documentary Mother Ireland: “Some of the older women really related to [the image] … [while] women in their 40s then, like Bernadette McAliskey and Rita O’Hare … could see problems with [it] … but still felt it was part of the culture growing up.” Like suffragist Eva Gore-Booth, many of these women have empowered others, often particularly women—Drumm organized Belfast women into “pram protests” to

169

170

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

bring medicine and food to curfewed Catholics; Robinson fought to legalize contraception; McAliskey is now a community works director (Wilson and Walsh 4; O’Toole; Moreton). In the cultural realm, while stereotypes have been deconstructed, archetypes have been reclaimed. Mary Condren concludes her critical study of Goddess imagery in Irish history by appealing to the ancient spirit of “true motherhood as the basis for public social ethics” (209). Sinéad O’Connor, in the notes to her compact disc of traditional songs, explains that “Oró! Sé do bheatha bhaile” “celebrates the return of any woman to her power, having lost it to invading forces.” And while Ní Dhomhnaill can take a tart approach to the myth kitty, in “Dora Dooley” and “The Lay of Loughadoon” her subtle invocations of the banshee and banfili cast ancient spells over landscapes, listeners, and readers (46, 64). The aisling has also been subjected to literary opprobrium by those who contend that it peaked as a form in the Jacobite era to survive grimly as a “hackneyed convention” (Williams 218). The more I studied the political references in the aislingi ballads, however, the more impressed I was by the versatility and endurance of the genre. As poet John O’Donoghue suggests, it might be fairer to link its supposed decline with the struggles of the Irish language to survive repressive British policies, the influx of English, and the great human cost of the potato famine. Despite these privations, the Granuaile aislingi were able to chart crucial events and accommodate a wide variety of attitudes to the Nationalist struggle, from Ferguson’s wistful desires for simple peace, to Pearse’s urgent hopes. Currently, it appears that the Republican dream of a united Ireland is gradually giving way to what Longley calls a recognition of “the reality of the North … as a shared region of these islands”—shared, like the South, not only by Protestants and Catholics, but also by Asian, African, European, and other populations (24). That the aisling may adapt to these new circumstances has been suggested by Medbh McGuckian’s “The Aisling Hat” and Carol Rumens’s “Stealing the Genre,” poems that upend their gender and nationalist conventions.8 My own ballad “Grace of the Gamblers,” sparked in part by my interest in my maternal Irish ancestry, can be read as an aisling that has relevance to new pragmatic political alliances: The Spanish Armada was flapping its flags And ’tisn’t so hard to believe That Gráinne might guard the Gaelic back door, A trick up Elizabeth’s sleeve … ………………………………………………

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

If Bess took the long view and Gráinne the short, Preserving her life for a price, Both of the century’s hot-headed queens Might survive the next roll of the dice. (8)

In the context of Grace’s mysterious reprieve from hanging, these stanzas hint at not so much a feminist sisterhood, as a volatile marriage of convenience. They also suggest the possibility of secret talks, essential to any sensitive diplomacy, including that which facilitated the Northern Irish peace process. In contrast, Mary O’Malley’s lyric sequence “The Grannuaile Poems,” an intimate portrait of the chieftain as a “working mother,” implicitly rejects the aisling genre. However, it also speaks powerfully back to it, as well as to an emerging nation of women who don’t want to sit “by the fire / talking about children and robes, / the best way to play up to a husband” (75). To return briefly to Ong, the contemporary poetry I have cited suggests that his theory of homeostatic transmission—the process by which “word meanings come continuously out of the present”—applies as much to creative writing as it does to orality (47), for imaginative writers often, if not inevitably, use historical figures to explore their own personal and political concerns. Whether and how the oral origins of poetry and storytelling contribute to this licence to alter the so-called facts is a discussion for another time. I hope it is clear now, however, that in the case of the Grainuaile aislingi at least, orality bears a highly complicated relationship to women’s history, potentially distorting as much as preserving women’s experience. But even while the Granuaile ballads exploit their historical subject, ultimately, I offer, they constitute a site of rebellion against the restrictions of their own conventions. Alongside images of the pathetic, abused spéirbhean, the aislingi provide tantalizing glimpses of a powerful female leader whom official histories conspired to ignore. In a ballad form traditionally associated with politics, orality, and women, they chart a complex history of Ireland, one in which Archbishops spoke for the poor, and poets and women led armed rebellions. In the way it has limited Irish poetry’s representations of women, and disguised Irish nationalism’s own aggressions, the aisling is a deeply problematic genre. But in the ballads examined here it has also at times carved out radical verbal spaces charged not only with deeply emotional resistance to injustice, but also, on occasion, with the echoes of Gráinne Ní Mháille’s remarkable and iconoclastic achievements. History may be written by the victors, but it is sung by many strong and varied voices.

171

172

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Notes Particular thanks to Carol Rumens for advice on metrics and to Kevin McGimpsey for his assistance with Irish Gaelic pronunciations and the finer points of Irish history. Any errors of fact or judgment are my own. 1 An mp3 file of the ballad can be accessed at http://drc.usask.ca/projects/oral. 2 Some might argue that the Church, with its convent schools, improved the lot of women in Early Ireland. Certainly St. Patrick (c. 390–460) endeavoured to protect Irish slave women from sexual abuse (de Paor 108). 3 The “flight of the Earls” (or the “Wild Geese”), for example, was a mass exodus of prosperous indigenous families and soldiers from the late Elizabethan period to 1730, resulting in the dramatic loss of thousands of “native aristocracy, generous patrons of the Gaelic literati and poets,” who either fled with their masters or were left to bemoan the coming dark ages (Curtis 291). The eighteenth-century Penal Laws prevented Catholics from maintaining schools, thus restricting the spread of literacy for much of the population (Ranelagh 70–71). In response, rural poets ran the famous hedge schools; according to J. L. McCracken, however, “not many of them paid any attention to the reading and writing of Irish” (55). Brian Ó Cuív likewise observes that while the hedge schools taught English reading and writing, “of an estimated 1,500,000 whose household language was Irish in 1806 only 20,000 were said to be able to read Irish” (381). Matters were not helped by the Catholic Church’s disapproval of Bible Schools, which taught scripture in Irish (377). Like the druids, who kept accounts in a writing system known as ogham, nineteenth-century Gaelic speakers were not necessarily illiterate, but the language itself was surviving thanks more to orality than to the written word. 4 Yeats has been amply ridiculed for his supposed nostalgia for an authentic collective culture that never existed, but as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford points out, his Crazy Jane poems are hardly a sentimental vision of a society at one with nature, but rather a “defiant celebration of geriatric rural desire” (184). The erotic songs of an old woman would be radical material in any age. 5 Not, according to writer Kevin McGimpsey, a crude cudgel as the term is popularly translated, but a blackthorn stick used in a highly trained manner by Gaelic warriors deprived by the penal laws of the right to carry weapons. 6 Visit http://drc.usask.ca/projects/oral to hear a version of this song. 7 Nandy, writing in the context of Indian nationalism, is credited with coining the term hypermasculinity to describe a possible male response to colonial discourse associating the colonized male with the feminine (Scheff 2). 8 As O’Donoghue also wrote to me, in relation to a sonnet sequence inspired by memories of being taught to write by his mother, the aisling, “with its roots in both Gaelic and Hebraic traditions,” is “a vatic, prophetic utterance” of deliverance, and as such an available vehicle for the dreams and reflections of any generation.

Works Cited Amodio, Mark C. “Embodying the Oral Tradition: Performance and Oral Poetics in Anglo-Saxon England and Beyond.” The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media: Audiences and Interfaces Conference. U of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Sask. 21 June 2008. Plenary Address. Bergin, Osborn. Irish Bardic Poetry. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970. Print.

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

Bold, Alan. The Ballad. London: Methuen, 1979. Print. Brewer, J. S., and W. Bullen, eds. Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts. London, 1867–73. Print. Bunting, Edward. The Ancient Music of Ireland, Arranged for the Piano Forte. Dublin: Hodges, 1840. Print. Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland. London, 1860–73. Print. Chambers, Anne. Granuaile: Ireland’s Pirate Queen. 1979. Dublin: Wolfhound, 2003. Print. Child, Francis. “Ballad Poetry.” Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopedia Vol. 1. New York: Alvin J. Johnson and Son, 1878. Internet Archive. Web. 29 September 2009. Cohen, Michael C. “Re: Hello from a Saskatoon balladeer”. E-mail to the author. 19 December 2008. ———. “The Popular Ballad: A Figure for Orality.” The Oral, the Written and Other Verbal Media, Audiences and Interfaces Conference. U of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Sask., 21 June 2008. Conference paper. Condren, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Print. Cook, Judith. Pirate Queen: The Life of Grace O’Malley. Cork: Mercier, 2004. Print. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Gender and History in Yeats’ Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print. Curtis, Edmund. A History of Ireland. 1936. London: Methuen, 1996. Print. “Death in June, Der Blutharsch, Changes.” Infoshop News. 17 December 2003. Web. 29 December 2008. Denman, Peter. Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement. New York: Barnes, 1990. Google Book Search. Web. 29 December 2008. de Paor, Maire, and Liam de Paor. Early Christian Ireland. London: Thames, 1958. Print. Dugaw, Dianne. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Easthope, Anthony. Poetry as Discourse. London: Methuen, 1983. Print. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print. Flood, William H. Grattan. The History of Irish Music. Dublin: Brown, 1905. Library Ireland. Web. 29 December 2008. Foyle, Naomi. Grace of the Gamblers: A Chantilly Chantey. Hove: Waterloo, 2010. Print. Friedman, Albert B. “The Oral-Formulaic Theory of Balladry—A Re-Rebuttal.” The Ballad Image. Ed. James Porter. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1983. 215–40. Print. “God Save Ireland.” Nationmaster. Web. 29 Dec. 2008. Haywood, John. The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World. London: Thames, 2001. Print. Healy, John. “Grania Uaile.” Irish Essays: Literary and Historical. Dublin: Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, 1908. Library Ireland. Web. 27 December 2008.

173

174

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Hingley, Richard, and Christina Unwin. Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen. London: Hambledon and London, 2005. Print. Kelly, Fergus. A Guide to Early Irish Law: Early Irish Law Series Vol. III. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988. Print. Kennedy, Bill. “Oro! Sé do bheatha bhaile.” Chrsouchon.free. Web. 27 December 2008. Kenny, Gillian. Anglo-Irish Women in Ireland c 1170–1540. Dublin: Four Courts, 2007. Print. Leach, MacEdward. The Ballad Book. New York: Harper, 1955. Print. Levin, Carole, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barret Graves, eds. Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2003. Print. Longley, Edna. From Cathleen to Anorexia: the Breakdown of Irelands. Dublin: Attic, 1991. Print. McCracken, J. L. “The Social Structure and Social Life, 1741–60.” Moody and Vaughan 31–55. McGuckian, Medbh. Captain Lavender. Oldcastle, Ireland: Gallery Press. 1994. Print. Mendelson, Sara. “Popular Perceptions of Elizabeth.” Levin, Carney, and Graves 192– 214. Moody, T. W., and W. E. Vaughan, eds. A New History of Ireland IV: Eighteenth Century Ireland 1691–1800. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Print. Moreton, Cole. “Bernadette McAliskey: Return of the Roaring Girl.” The Independent. Sunday 5 November 2008. Web. 30 June 2009. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. Neufeld, Christine. “Speakerly Women and Scribal Men.” Oral Tradition 14.2 (1999): 420–29. Web. 15 December 2008. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. The Astrakhan Cloak. Trans. Paul Muldoon. Loughcrew: Gallery, 1999. Print. O Cuív, Brian. “Irish Language and Literature 1691–1845.” Moody and Vaughan 374– 422. Print. O’Connor, Sinéad. Sean-Nós Nua. Hummingbird Records, 2002. Liner notes. Print. O’Donoghue, John. “Aisling.” E-mail to the author. 29 Dec. 2008. O’Hart. Irish Pedigrees: Or, the Origin and Stem of the Irish Nation. Vol 2.2. London: James Duffy, 1887. Print. Ó Loughlainn, Colm. Irish Street Ballads. London: Constable, 1939. Print. O’Malley, Mary. Where The Rocks Float. Dublin: Salmon, 1993. Print. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. O’Toole, Fintan. “Profile Mary Robinson: Mary Quite Contrary.” The Independent. 9 June 1996. Web 29 June 2009. Ranelagh, John O’Beirne. A Short History of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Rumens, Carol. Poems 1968–2004. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2004. Print.

The Ballad as Site of Rebellion

■

Naomi Foyle

Scheff, Thomas J. “Hypermasculinity and Violence as a Social System.” Humiliation Studies. 2006. Web. 29 September 2009. Siegfried, Brandie R. “Queen to Queen at Check: Grace O’Malley, Elizabeth Tudor and the Discourse of Majesty in the State Papers of Ireland.” Levin, Carney and Graves 149–76. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Thomson, Melissa. “Anne: Interview with Anne Crilly.” Tallgirlshorts. Web. 29 June 2009. Welch, Robert, and Bruce Stewart. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Williams, Caerwyn J. E., and Patrick K. Ford. The Irish Literary Tradition. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1992. Print. Wilson, Pól, and Rosaleen Walsh, eds. A Rebel Heart. Belfast: 25th Anniversary Máire Drumm Commemoration Committee, 2001. Print.

175

This page intentionally left blank

“ PLEASURE FOR OUR SENSE, HEALTH FOR OUR HEARTS” Inferring Pronuntiatio and Actio from the Text of John Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon Brent Nelson

I “He is a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy” (16). T. S. Eliot goes on to admit that this grotesque caricature of John Donne is for effect, in the service of his comparison with another celebrated English preacher of the early seventeenth century, Lancelot Andrewes. The august Bishop of Winchester, in contrast to the sensational Dean of St. Paul’s, is disciplined, methodical, always to the point—and much more in line with Mr. Eliot’s tastes. All this Eliot bases on the printed text alone. How much more distasteful would Eliot have found Donne in performance, if we are to judge by contemporary accounts of the Dean’s preaching? And how telling is Eliot’s reference to Billy Sunday—that famous baseball player turned hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, who applied all of his considerable athleticism to his homiletic antics. Eliot was “creeped out” by the spectre of performance in the pulpit. As Peter McCullough suggests in his introduction to Donne as preacher, we need to qualify (if not correct) Eliot’s assessment with reference to ideas of preaching that were contemporary to Donne (174). Donne’s audience seemed not to be so squeamish. In this, the Golden Age of both theatre and preaching, audiences came to be entertained as well as edified; and from the preacher’s and rhetorician’s point of view, edification often required a spellbinding performance. Indeed, Donne’s contemporaries attest to this powerful presence in the pulpit that frequently bore all the passion and drama that the modern reader of Donne associates with his poetry. For the ancients as well as for Donne’s contemporaries, delivery was the most important element of oratory, more important than invention, arrangement, and style.1 In his De Oratore, Cicero writes that “all … parts of oratory succeed according as they are delivered. Delivery … has the sole and supreme power 177

178

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

in oratory” (255; III.lvi). And yet, observes Gerald P. Mohrmann, “the theory of oratorical delivery and its implications in Western thought have been neglected by historians,” though perhaps with good reason: “After all, oral presentation is ephemeral, and even for those figures of rhetoric which rely on delivery for their effect (for example, figures such as prosopoeia and exclamatio), no written description can hope to capture the full aural-visual dynamic of the event.”2 And yet, suggests McCullough, these same figures of rhetoric in print hold clues to their potential orality: they “are themselves a signifying language, which imitate, by exaggeration, human emotional states, and they should be delivered, or at least silently imagined in the reading, accordingly” (175). The intention of this essay is to explore further the possibility of inferring features of performance from a Renaissance text whose rhetorical power relied heavily on the dynamics of personal, oral delivery. An analysis of rhetorical features for indications of delivery in the context of contemporary ideas about preaching and oratory is the only accessible route into imagining the oral performance of rhetorical texts in the Renaissance, for which no YouTube recording survives.3 Although many aspects of oral performance are culturally specific, it is hoped that the model presented here might be adapted to other temporally remote or culturally different oral events whose only record is in manuscript or print. This approach is not entirely inappropriate to the humanist context, where the governing principle in the art of oratory—decorum—dictated that any utterance (or in this case, the oral delivery of an utterance) must be apt and appropriate to the matter at hand, including the subject matter and occasion of delivery. It is Eliot’s own principles of decorum, not those of Donne’s contemporary audiences, that caused the modernist poet-critic to cavil at Donne’s performance. Assuming a decorous delivery according to rhetorical standards of Donne’s time, we should be able to infer some characteristics of delivery appropriate to the subject matter, structure, and style of a given utterance. I will begin with an examination of ideas about delivery in Donne’s time and in relation to Donne specifically, drawing on contemporary comments on his preaching to glean clues about what characteristics of rhetorical delivery one might expect to find traced in the structure and elocutionary features of a text. I will then extract from these some basic principles of correlation between emotional and ideational content and some probable features of Donne’s pronuntiatio. I will finally apply these principles to an analysis of Donne’s use of rhetorical schemes and structures to match the changing emotional tone and formal operation of his second prebend sermon, preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral on 29 January 1626.4

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

First, a caveat is in order. The sermon texts that were published in Donne’s lifetime and in the three decades following his death are not identical to the texts that Donne originally preached. Donne’s usual practice, which was common in the period, was to preach “from notes of a sermon which he had carefully thought out and memorized” (Potter and Simpson, 1.48). In at least one instance, Donne wrote his entire sermon out word for word before preaching it, but most of the sermons he prepared for publication had to be reconstituted from his original, extensive notes, sometimes immediately after they were preached, and sometimes years later.5 In other words, in most cases the printed text bears close though not perfect resemblance to the sermon that Donne originally preached.

II In his discussion of the art of delivery, Antoine Foclin in La Rhetorique Française (1555) observes the standard two-part division of delivery into voice (pronuntiatio) and gesture (actio) and goes on to state the obvious—that the first part relates to the audience in hearing, and the second in seeing. But he then adds a telling assertion that “by these two senses, all knowledge comes into the mind,” implying that the aural and visual experience of oratory brought special force to rhetoric’s persuasive appeal (Howell 171). Certain features of effective delivery are to be assumed: a clear, audible voice (a requisite in the often raucous environment of seventeenth-century sermons), and appropriate apparel, which was often a function of the political climate of the congregation being addressed.6 But the manner of presentation—the tone, pace, or expression of an utterance—is often dictated by the emotional demands of the moment, so that St. Augustine (a favourite Patristic authority for early modern English divines) writes that for those who already know and who need to be moved to act upon what they know (which was largely the case for every congregation Donne preached to), a greater power of oratory— entreaties, rebukes, rousing speeches, solemn admonitions—is required to rouse the passions (203). This “grand style,” writes Augustine, derives not so much from elocution as from the subject matter itself and from the prompting of an impassioned heart in the preacher (251). And crucially, this passion must be coupled with an ethical lifestyle that gives weight to these passionate urgings (277). This integral relationship between rhetorical composition and personal performance, between art and life, is essential to understanding Donne’s method and—by all accounts—his success as a preacher. A fairly good representation of ideas pertaining to rhetorical delivery in the cultural mainstream

179

180

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

of Donne’s time (though it was published a century earlier) can be found in the third edition of William Caxton’s Mirrour of the World (c. 1527), an English translation of a French source. Caxton describes delivery as the ordering of voice and body according to the words and sense of what is being said: a merry matter is matched with a laughing and merry countenance; pitiful matter with a heavy and lamentable countenance; weighty matter with a solemn countenance. Similarly, the subject matter is punctuated by gestures that involve the whole body: solemn matter by an upright and motionless body and a pointing forefinger; cruel or ireful matter with a shaking fist; heavenly or godly matter with face looking and finger pointing upward; gentle and humble matter with hands placed upon the breast; and holy or devout matter with hands upraised (sigs. D3v–D4r; cf. Howell 90). That voice and gesture have symbiotic relationships with the elements of composition is an old idea. In Cicero’s De Inuentione, “[d]elivery is the control of voice and body in a manner suitable to the dignity of the subject matter and the style” (I.vii.9). In his Chironomia: or, the Art of Manuall Rhetorique (1644), John Bulwer notes the integral relationship between gesture, voice, and sense: “Gesture must attend upon every flexion of the voice, not Scenicall, but declaring the sentence and meaning of our minde, not by demonstration, but signification: for it must be accommodated by the Hand, that it may agree and have a proper reference, not so much to the words, as to the sense” (133–34, sig. K3–[K3v], cf. 135, sig. K4).7 That is, gesture should not be artificial and merely conventional, but integral and consonant with the sense, tone, and motivational intent of what is said—not serving just as an outward representation, but itself a significant expression of meaning. Exactly how the orator matches gesture and speech to sense, and the principles of decorum involved, are culturally specific, says Bulwer, “since the times and dispositions of men … differ; and Oratorian Action must varie according to the times and diversitie of people and Nations” (131–32, sigs. K2–[K2v]). In short, the manner must match the matter, but it also must be integral and consonant with the persona of the preacher in the moment of the sermon. Thomas Wilson suggests that “as the sound of a good instrument stirreth the hearers and moveth much delight, so a clear-sounding voice comforteth much our dainty ears with much sweet melody and causeth us to allow the matter rather for the reporter’s sake than the reporter for the matter’s sake” (241; emphasis added). The presence of the ethical life as exemplum was a common notion in this period. In his translation of Gerhard Hyperius’s The Practise of Preaching, John Ludham (1577) dictates that the preacher should emulate the same affections he treats, both in his delivery and in his lifestyle, so that

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

“Hee that burneth wholly in himselfe, and is altogither inflamed to attempt some notable thinge, hee by his oration and (as it were) by his owne example may incense others to enterprise the lyke” (43a, sig. C3). As Donne himself says in one of his sermons, “the best arguments we can prove our Sermons by, is our owne life. The whole weekes conversation, is a good paraphrase upon the Sundayes Sermon” (5:13.677–79).8 This affective/effective presence depends on both the pathos and the ethos (good character and authority) of the preacher whose presence in the pulpit, and by extension his life outside the pulpit, are consonant with the message he delivers. It is worth emphasizing that responses to Donne’s preaching were in the first instance to the spoken word, that contemporary testimony attests to his oral and gestural power, and that this power was closely associated with his personal presence in the pulpit. Our only evidence for Donne’s oral presence comes from Donne’s contemporary reputation, chiefly from his first biographer and his elegists, who consistently represent him as powerful in his delivery.9 A common theme running through these elegies is the connection between Donne’s style of delivery and its emotional effect. A second theme is Donne’s appeal to both the ear and the eye. Lucius Carey describes Donne’s facial expression as grave, humble, and pious, and the entire experience of the sermon as providing “pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts” (26). With particular respect to the ear, Carey testifies that “[n]one was so marble, but whil’st him he heares, / His Soule so long dwelt only in his eares” (29–30). Thomas Carew offers a more vivid assessment of Donne’s powerful style of preaching, in contrast to the comparatively drab preaching of the Puritans: … The Pulpit may her plaine, And sober Christian precepts still retaine, Doctrines it may, and wholesome Uses frame, Grave Homilies, and Lectures [these are the Puritans], but the flame Of thy [i.e. Donne’s] brave Soule, that shot such heat and light, As burnt our earth, and made our darknesse bright, Committed holy Rapes upon our Will, Did through the eye the melting heart distill; And the deepe knowledge of darke truths so teach, As sense might judge, what phansie could not reach. (11–20)

Carew’s incendiary language, troping on Donne’s own imagery in such poems as “Batter my heart,” adds sexual overtones to the primary sense of “rape” as a rapture of ecstasy to emphasize the force of the preacher’s effect upon the

181

182

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

will.10 Yet this preacher did not simply manhandle his congregation: his “eye” conveyed a similarly overcome, “melting heart” of his own. Carew emphasizes the importance of the visual component of live delivery (in this case a feature of Donne’s facial aspect) and the preacher’s full engagement of the senses to gain access to the hearts and minds of his auditors. These comments are more than conventional elegaic praise. Writing in a form that privileged simple report over hyperbole, diarist Thomas Crosfield in an entry dated 1 June 1630 refers to a conversation with a Mr. Hinton, parson of Hauton, concerning various churchmen, among them “Dr Donne deane of Pauls, [concerning] his powerfull kinde of preaching by his gesture & Rhetoriquall expressions”—a testament to the close relationship between Donne’s actio and elocutionary style (43). In Chironomia, Bulwer testified that among the preachers he “observed to have been very prevalent by virtue of this artifice of the Hand,” the “moste eminent was that much lamented Dr. Donne.” He goes on to quote, as added testimony, the elegy of “an ingenious friend” (presumably of Bulwer), Jasper Mayne: Yet have I seen thee [Donne] in the Pulpit stand, Where one might take notes from thy look & hand: And from thy speaking action beare away More Sermon then some Teachers use to say. Such was thy cariage, and thy gesture such, As could devide the heart, and conscience touch: Thy motion did confute, and one might see An error vanquish’d by deliverie. (20, sig. [c2v])

Indeed all these reports are in keeping with mainstream rhetorical conventions and standards of the time. With the exception of the most extreme Puritans, all churchmen accepted that a preacher must employ the full resources of oratorical performance, the degree and quality of which were largely a matter of personal style and judgment according to the circumstances of the sermon. Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton, describes Donne in his early career as “appl[ying] himself with all care and diligence” in honing his rhetorical skill, particularly with respect to his oral delivery. Walton’s depiction of Donne makes a strong connection between the personal presence and personality of the speaker and the effect of his utterance. He was a passionate preacher and was himself “by nature highly passionate, but more apt to reluct at the excesses of it” (84). Donne’s passionate but controlled preaching was an extension of himself to his audience. Again we see an Augustinian emphasis

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

on the personal presence of the preacher in Walton’s description of Donne before King James at Whitehall, where he preach[ed] the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distill into others: A Preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them: alwayes preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and inticing others by a sacred Art and Courtship to amend their lives; here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a vertue so, as to make it be beloved even by those that lov’d it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible addition of comeliness. (49)

Walton also describes Donne’s first sermon after the death of his wife, preached in the very church where she was buried. Again he emphasizes Donne’s power to move his audience with a passionate delivery, drawing from the passion of his own grief, such that his very words and looks …, with the addition of his sighs and tears, exprest in his Sermon, did so work upon the affections of his hearers, as melted and moulded them into a companionable sadness; and so left the Congregation. (52)

While this was admittedly a unique occasion, it nonetheless illustrates Walton’s more general claim that Donne was able to evoke a sympathetic response to his own tearful performance. These were real tears, on both sides of the pulpit. The efficacy of Donne’s performance can be understood in terms of ideas about performance that were contemporary to Donne. In his recent book on early modern theatre in England, Matthew Steggle demonstrates that, generally speaking, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences readily laughed and wept at the spectacle of laughing and weeping depicted on stage.11 In other words, there was much less distance between the audience, the speaker’s persona, and the speaker’s personal self than would be comfortable for a modern audience. Writing on the subject of the passions in 1604, Thomas Wright suggests that the ability to move auditors through a gamut of emotions is essential. Wright, it should be noted, also discusses in relation to the passions several of the key elements in a preacher’s delivery of a sermon: hand gesture, body attitude, and vocal control (131–34, 136–38). He tells of a preacher he encountered in Italy

183

184

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

who had such power ouer his Auditors affections, that whe[n] it pleased him he could cause them [to] shedd abundance of teares, yea and with teares dropping downe their cheekes, presently turne their sorrow into laughter: and the reason was, because hee himselfe [was] extremely passionate, knowing moreouer the Art of mouing the affections of those auditors. (3)

This anecdote helps explain Donne’s reputation. As a writer of the most emotionally intense and often raw poetry of the period, Donne was known to his elegists (if not to most of his congregants) as a passionate man, and his skill in manipulating a variable relationship between himself and his poetic persona would have been familiar in equal measure to readers of his poetry and hearers of his sermons. Rather than being concealed, this complicated relationship between performance and dramatic persona on the one hand and the pathos and ethos of the Christian orator on the other was acknowledged and considered key to Donne’s achievement as a preacher capable of expressing real tears, while at the same time doing so performatively to great effect on his audience. Donne’s own statements about delivery are more subdued than his reputation might suggest, but much in the same vein, they attributed an embodied presence to the spoken word. For Donne the oral moment has a special efficacy that the written word does not. Donne is very much in the Reformed tradition in placing a high premium on preaching and the communal, oral delivery of the Word. Echoing Paul’s imperative to preach in Romans 10:13– 14, Donne, in a sermon on God’s providence by way of the church, insists that “[t]here is no salvation but by faith, nor faith but by hearing, nor hearing but by preaching” (7:12.722–24).12 Donne stops short of calling preaching a sacrament (preferring instead the lesser category of “ordinance”), but elsewhere he comes close to an incarnational theory of the preached word, where every word from the lips of the preacher is “a drop of the dew of heaven, a dram of the balme of Gilead, a portion of the bloud of thy Saviour” (3:17.597–99). As William Meuller notes, while Donne asserts the necessity of both preaching and the sacraments, the thunder and lightning of God, his greater emphasis is on preaching (79). In language that could be used to describe the sacraments, Donne himself says that rhetoric can “make absent and remote things present to your understanding” (4:2.900–1), and it does this, as his elegists attest, by appealing to the senses. This conviction of the primacy of preaching arises as much from Protestant and, in many cases, generically Christian doctrine as it does from the rhetorical tradition.13 Donne has a great deal to say in favour of powerful rhetoric in preaching, but he also attributes much of the effect of his oratorical presence to the

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

ethos that the word of God establishes in him, the preacher. Like his elegists, Donne repudiates the extremes of the plain style. In a sermon on preaching delivered at Whitehall in 1618 with Ezekiel 33:32 as its text, Donne states that a sermon ought to “work upon,” “move,” and “affect” its audience and that an “unpremeditated, and drowsie, and cold manner of preaching, agrees not with the dignity of Gods service: they shall acknowledge (says God to this prophet [Ezekiel]) thy pleasant voice; confess thy doctrine to be good, and confesse thy playing upon an Instrument; acknowledge thy life to be good too” (2:7.130–36). Donne applies his text from Ezekiel not only to the preacher’s ability to bring spiritual delight by his art (“a pleasant voice”) but also to exemplify in himself the good conduct at which the sermon aims (“playing upon an Instrument”). This identification of the preacher’s persona with the words he preaches is recognized in a sermon on the final resurrection of the saints, where Donne acknowledges, “you assent to me now, speaking of the Resurrection, yet that is not out of my Logick, nor out of my Rhetorique, but out of that Character, and Ordinance which God hath imprinted in me, in the power and efficacy whereof, I speak unto you, as often as I speak out of this place” (7:3.39–43). Here he is using character not in its ethical application, but in its primary sense as a distinctive mark or impression stamped upon a material substance. Donne uses his favourite metaphor of coining to refer to the authority that God ordains or stamps upon him in his calling as a preacher, in the same way that an imprint gives currency to a coin. This is an existential matter that is somewhat distinct from performance, but it is nonetheless a key element in the rhetorical and specifically oratorical situation as he understands it.14 If the power of Donne’s sermons owed much to his personal presence and performance, we should at least imagine how the words on the page might have been expressed in the moment of the sermon’s original delivery. The formulaic theory of orality as set out by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in relation to classical literature, and later by Walter J. Ong in relation to Tudor writing, bears some relevance to Donne’s practice in the early seventeenth century. While many of the formulary features they associate with what Ong calls primary oral cultures (features such as stock material, set phrases, and common structures) don’t apply in Donne’s practice, some of the principles Ong identifies in the “oral residue” of Tudor prose do. Ong defines “oral residue” as “habits of thought and expression tracing back to preliterate situations or practice, or deriving from the dominance of the oral as a medium in a given culture” (Rhetoric 26). In his study of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury oratorical manuals, for example, Ray Nadeau demonstrates that in

185

186

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

education, and presumably in practice, formulaic patterns gleaned from the study of conventional examples were “used as guides to the form and matter of oral and written composition” (154). Ong finds two aspects in the residual orality of Tudor writing that, I think, remain particularly relevant to Donne. The first is the goal of copia (abundance, fullness, fluidity, and resourcefulness in composition), which is expressed in strategies and techniques for ready accumulation of material (29). From this principle follows the use of formulaic structures that are typically additive and incremental, resulting in what Ong describes as a “strung-out” quality (38).15 Whereas Ong focuses on the use of figurative language and a stitching together of commonplace materials in what he calls the “rhapsodic style,” I will focus on Donne’s use of this additive principle as an expression of copia and also as a structural device for conceptualizing, organizing, and then recalling the material of his sermon.16 I would like to propose three principles for inferring oral performance from the printed sermon. The first step is to identify the generic mode of the sermon or passage.17 Donne calls attention to the importance of generic distinctions in one of his early sermons, in which he remarks, “we are not upon a Lecture, but upon a Sermon” (2:15.352–53). Elsewhere, he explains that a sermon, in contrast to a lecture, “intends Exhortation principally and Edification, and a holy stirring of religious affections” (8:3.10–12). A sermon, implicitly, requires a measure of energy to move (as Augustine suggests) a congregation. But this generic distinction is not absolute: there are times even in sermons when Donne’s mode is principally instructive, seeking to inform or prove a point by way of ratiocination and demonstration. Such passages, like a lecture, would be delivered in an even, methodical, and comparatively plain manner. Similar distinctions could be made between, say, a Lenten sermon of grave reflection and an Easter Sunday sermon of celebration, or even within a sermon, between a moment of mortification and one of edification, each requiring a different mode of delivery. From this follows a second principle, that the mode of delivery is in part dictated by the form and structure of a sermon, which is to say, by the larger arrangement of parts and the ways in which these parts function together to move an audience from point A to B, from one state of being to another. And finally, just as literary scholars infer tone from the patterned and figurative language of a poem, so too we can speculate from conventional features of style a range of possible aspects of a passage’s oral delivery.

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

III Donne’s second prebend sermon, on Psalm 63:7, “Because thou has been my helpe, therefore in the shadows of thy wings will I rejoice,” is a sermon on the future glory of heaven as consolation for the suffering experienced in this life, a message that would have been welcomed by his central-London congregation, which was, as Janel M. Mueller notes, experiencing “the worst plague epidemic in his lifetime” (52). The key informing idea of this sermon—its principle of invention—is the metaphor of a set of scales and the idea that this life of affliction, as great as it is, is counterbalanced by Pondus Gloriæ, the hope of eternal glory and, crucially, an anticipatory attitude of joy in this life. Accordingly, Terry Sherwood observes a two-part structure to the sermon, where the emotional weight of affliction in the first part is balanced by the intellectual intensity of the second part, which runs parallel to its ostensible three-part outline. But this two-part structure is also operative within the sermon’s major divisions. In his analysis of the long opening paragraph of the sermon’s first partition (7:1.73–104), where Donne introduces the idea of the balancing effect of Pondus Gloriæ, William L. Rooney notes that the burden of the developing paragraph shifts toward the weight of oppression, until the final sentence of the paragraph where the counterweight of eternal glory is again briefly and abruptly asserted. This “structural disparity” belies the precept of the balance effected by the weight of eternal glory, which remains an abstraction, argues Rooney, while the weight of affliction is concretized, affecting the hearer’s imagination in a way that Pondus Gloriæ does not (378– 79). Rooney concludes that “the factor controlling this speech is intensity,” the ebbing and flowing, tightening and relaxing of emotional intensity as a counterpoint to the abstract concept of the weight of eternal glory; however, he cannot quite explain how this emotional intensity serves, instead of overwhelming, the logical principle of the balance achieved by Pondus Gloriæ. Although Judith Anderson subsequently argues that the Pondus Gloriæ is not so insubstantial as Rooney finds it to be, that its presence is indeed felt here in the early part of the sermon, the emotional weight of this early section of the sermon nonetheless rests upon Donne’s vivid rendering of misery and affliction. I want to clarify the rhetorical function of this counterbalance of present misery with the promise of Pondus Gloriæ in heaven—a counterbalance that, though comparatively abstract and existentially distant, is nonetheless substantial in its effect; and I would note here that this effect is not despite, but rather because of, the emotional impact, the pathopoeia, of Donne’s rendering of the misery of affliction.18 That is, Donne uses his vivid rendering of

187

188

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

suffering as a preparative, in order to instill in his audience a desire for relief that will incline them to embrace the hope of a glory that cannot be so easily apprehended, nor immediately experienced, as can the misery that it counterbalances. Structurally, the vehemence of this portion of the sermon prepares the congregation to desire and expect an answer in Donne’s methodical demonstration later in the sermon of the promise in Scripture of future glory and present joy. And we can imagine that Donne’s style of delivery for these two modes—the exhortative and the instructive—would be markedly and correspondingly different. In elaborating the first point of his sermon, “the universality of afflictions and the inevitableness thereof,” Donne is not simply driving home a point but simulating the very experience of the weight of affliction and suffering, with a view to helping his audience feel the relief of the Pondus Gloriæ, the eternal weight of glory that balances and compensates for this suffering. Critics have noted the way in which Donne’s manner here echoes his sense. Janel M. Mueller observes, “There is almost quantitative, physical weight in the amassed Biblical citations and examples” that Donne uses to illustrate heaviness (51). Rooney describes Donne’s use of repetition and diction to create a “heavy massing of meanings, denoting or connoting misery and woebegoneness” (379). In the long passage quoted below, Donne employs several rhetorical figures of repetition that appeal to the ear to convey this sense of heaviness. This repetition functions by accumulation to create a sense of emotional weight and gravity in the aural experience. The first sequence of ideas is arranged in anaphora, the repetition of the same words (in this case with slight variation) at the beginning of a series of clauses: 1 There is not onely Pestis valde gravis, (the pestilence grows heavy upon the Land) but there is Musca valde gravis, God calls in but the fly, to vexe Egypt, and even the fly is a heavy burden unto them. 2 It is not onely Iob that complains, That he was a burden to himselfe, but even Absaloms haire was a burden to him, till it was polled. 3 It is not onely Ieremey that complains, Aggravavit compedes, That God had made their fetters and their chains heavy to them, but the workmen in harvest complaine, That God had made a faire day heavy unto them, (We have borne the heat, and the burden of the day). (7:1.80–89, enumeration added for emphasis) This form of repetition instills a logic of increase and amplification in the weight of suffering, signalled by the but that pivots each statement, countering a recognizably heavy burden with a surprisingly light burden that is felt

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

to be no less burdensome to the people involved: pestilence versus a single fly; the whole self versus hair; fetters versus fair weather. Donne instills a sense of wonder that even such seemingly benign and sometimes beneficial conditions might be felt as burdensome. What does the structure of these statements suggest about how they might be pronounced to enhance the effects signalled by these stylistic features? Repetition begs to be noticed and invites emphatic oral rendering—perhaps, in this case, by a pause between each parallel of these three sentences, with moderate emphasis on the common introductory phrase, “It is not onely.” Two other features invite emphasis: the distinctive burden in each sentence along with, in the second and third instances, the bearer of that burden (“Pestis,” “Iob … he … himself,” and “Ieremy … fetters and chains”); and then the counter-burden (“Musca,” “Absoloms haire,” “workmen in harvest … faire day”). The segmented nature of the parallel clauses, enhanced by the “not onely this … but” bifurcating structure of each clause, presents a passage that calls for a measured, even plodding pace to emphasize the accumulation of sorrows and a growing sense of weight and weariness. Emphasis of this balanced, reiterated structure is important also to instill the logic of irony (and the effect of wonder) in the notion that even such slight causes might be felt so poignantly. So then, between each iterated clause, and at each conjunction, we might expect a pause followed by a growing intensity of volume and rising pitch to emphasize each point of comparison, followed by a rapid fall, followed by a similar rise in intensity to introduce the counter-example, followed by another falling off. This rising and falling of intensity and pace would give the preacher the ebbing and flowing, tightening and relaxing of emotion that Rooney recognizes. Donne continues this process of amplifying the sense of weight in affliction by elaborating Proverbs 27:3, again using a parallel structure of clauses, but with a more explicitly accumulating than balancing effect (using the conjunction and rather than but), with a series of cumbersome terms that are made all the more weighty upon the tongue and the ear by the device of alliteration: Sand is heavy, sayes Solomon; And how many suffer so? under a sand-hill of crosses, daily, hourely afflictions, that are heavy by their number, if not by their single waight? And a stone is heavy; (sayes he in the same place) And how many suffer so? How many, without any former preparatory crosse, or comminatory, or commonitory crosse, even in the midst of prosperity, and security, fall under some one stone, some grindstone, some mil-stone, some one insupportable crosse that ruines them? (89–97)

189

190

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

As explicated in this passage from Proverbs, sand can serve as an apt metaphor not only for a life of accumulating suffering, but also for the building rhetorical effect of this developing passage. Here Donne introduces another figure, congeries, or “word-heaps” in Puttenham’s Anglicized vocabulary, a figure of copia that is fitting for the sand metaphor. In its first instance, this device is rhetorically intensified by the figures of diacope (repetition of a word—“crosse”—with words in between), homoioptoton (a series of words with the same endings: -ory),19 adnominatio (words of different meaning and similar sound—“comminatory” and “commonitory”—brought together), and finally, the alliteration of hard “c” sounds and soft sibilants: a distinctively aural device. As modifiers of a common noun, these already weighty words would have received added emphasis in tone and pitch, and a halting pace, with enhanced emphasis on the phonetically differentiating syllable: preparatory, comm-in-atory, comm-on-itory. All this “even in the midst of prosperity and security,” says Donne, before continuing to bury his auditors under another rhetorical assault, this time with alliteration of sibilants, again in a parallel structure of isocolon (a series of grammatically identical and equally balanced statements) arranged in a climactic order (auxesis) of increasingly heavy and weighty objects: some one stone, some grindstone, some millstone, with a similar pattern of emphasis in tone and pitch, culminating in a variation with extra length and weight, “some insupportable crosse.” The effect of this full accumulation, this heap of sorrows, this “waight, and burden, and heavinesse,” is that “we should all sinke into nothing” (which we feel we are) “if there were not a waight of future glory to counterpoyse it” (102–04). But Donne does not allow this consolation to take full effect before launching again, using palilogia (repetition for the sake of vehemence), into another pathopoeiaic assault: But then, (sayes Solomon there) A fooles anger is heavier then both [sand and stone]; And how many children, and servants, and wives suffer under the anger, and morosity, and peevishnesse, and jealousie of foolish Masters, and Parents, and Husbands, though they must not say so? David and Solomon have cryed out, That all this world is vanity, and levity; And (God knowes) all is waight, and burden, and heavinesse, and opppression; And if there were not a waight of future glory to counterpoyse it, we should all sinke into nothing. (97–104)

The fool’s anger is amplified by a list of subordinate people who are subject to a matching list of oppressors described in a proper word-heap of attributes that one suspects could have been pulled at random from a much larger field

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

of similar vices: any selection from a number of similar words would serve as well, an instance of oral residue. The important word here is the conjunction and, deployed in polysyndeton (the use of conjunctions where they are not required, also a feature of the previously cited passage); this usage is so conspicuous as to demand emphasis in delivery to match the additive quality of suffering throughout life, and a prolonging pace through a series of segmented, accumulating semantic units. The next paragraph uses two instances of a balanced parallelism (“I ask not … but I ask …”), once again to pit a heavy cause over against an ostensibly light cause that is nonetheless felt to be a source of considerable suffering (113–19). The ensuing paragraph employs a similar series of parallel statements pivoting on yet, and then another series of parallel statements in the following pattern: “As soone as I hear God say” some statement of approbation of a faithful devotee, “I finde,” says Donne, some report of descending affliction, culminating in God’s very Son who (expressed in a notable deployment of copia, again expressed with polysyndeton) is “deserted, abandoned, and given over to Scribes, and Pharisees, and Publicans, and Herodians, and Priests, and Souldiers, and people, and Judges, and witnesses, and executioners” (120–34). Next, Donne goes on to amplify the sense of affliction by comparing these physical torments with the much more profound and consequential spiritual suffering (141–54). The gestures that might accompany these aural qualities are more difficult for us to imagine. Taking our cue from Caxton, we can speculate that Donne probably maintained a solemn countenance to match his weighty matter, and perhaps Donne would have held his body motionless, with forefinger extended, as Caxton thinks appropriate for solemn matter. Yet Donne’s vehemence might have required a more emphatic aspect of actio. Writing on the Elizabethan sermon, which had much in common with the Jacobean, Alan Fager Herr writes, “Since Elizabethan sermon audiences preferred everything else in its most sensational form, it is not taking too much for granted to suppose that they liked their pulpits well pounded” (36). This Billy Sunday of the seventeenth century, this paragon of the art of chirographia, may have resorted to more athletic gestures. At the very least, one can imagine Donne pressing forward and gripping the pulpit firmly as he brought to bear the full weight of his rhetorical invention. What other gestures might have accompanied the performance are difficult to determine. John Bulwer provides a catalogue of codified gestures to express a variety of moods and modes, two of which might apply in this case. One possibility is “Both Hands clasped and wrung together,” which Bulwer describes as “an

191

192

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Action convenient to manifest griefe and sorrow” (55). For added vehemence, Donne might have struck his breast with his hand, which Bulwer describes as “an action of Griefe, sorrow, repentance, and indignation,” although he warns against an overly “vehement percussion of the breast,” which is more fitting of the theatre than of “a solemne Assembly of venerable personages” (46– 47). Such actions might seem strangely artificial to a modern sensibility, and indeed they may have seemed so to Donne, but it should be remembered that all gestures are conventional and culturally defined to some degree, otherwise an audience would not find them meaningful.20 Donne follows this section with a passionate soliloquy that, both Rooney and Anderson observe, contributes to the weight of suffering conveyed in this first partition. Anderson imagines that “when performed, [this soliloquy] would have to have been preceded by a significant pause and an adjustment of face and voice” (42). From here, to round out the first partition of the sermon, Donne turns to the subject of his text, David, to explicate his experience of suffering in the narrative present. The second partition elaborates David’s evocation of the precedent of God’s deliverance in past times of suffering (320–489); the third partition then discusses David’s confidence, based on this precedence, of future deliverance (490–633). Although there are passages of rhetorical and emotional force in this large middle portion of the sermon, Donne’s dominant mode here is expository as he explains and interprets the text as it relates to David’s experience. In this expository mode (somewhat akin to the lecture), Donne’s manipulation of voice and gesture would presumably have been less dynamic. As Donne’s sermon draws to a close and he again moves into an exhortative mode, the dynamics of delivery once more become crucial. In contrast to the weighty performance of the opening section of the sermon, Donne’s peroration evinces lightness as he prepares his audience to exit the church buoyed with hope and joy. Donne again uses parallel structures, but here, in contrast to the segmentation of the earlier, weighty passages, he combines a long series of loose and accumulating clauses and phrases, linked by many instances of coordination (“and”, “so”) and some subordination of the looser sort (“as” and “as soon as”), with long parentheses that defer grammatical completion of sense, while he invites his congregation to imagine the flight of the soul through the heavenly realms to eternal and ultimate glory. The suspension of thought, complemented by a lightening of tone in this passage, complements his closing theme of the counterbalance of eternal glory against the weight of suffering felt so poignantly in the opening partition.21

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

[A]s my soule, as soone as it is out of my body, is in Heaven, and does not stay for the possession of Heaven, nor for the fruition of the sight of God, till it be ascended through ayre, and fire, and Moone, and Sun, and Planets, and Firmament, to that place which we conceive to be Heaven, but without the thousandth part of a minutes stop, as soone as it issues, is in a glorious light, which is Heaven, (for all the way to Heaven is Heaven; And as those Angels, which came from Heaven hither, bring Heaven with them, and are in Heaven here, So that soule that goes to Heaven, meets Heaven here; and as those Angels doe not devest Heaven by comming, so these soules invest Heaven, in their going.) As my soule shall not goe towards Heaven, but goe by Heaven to Heaven, to the Heaven of Heavens, So the true joy of a good soule in this world is the very joy of Heaven; and we goe thither, not that being without joy, we might have joy infused into us, but that as Christ sayes, Our joy might be full, perfected, sealed with an everlastingnesse; for, as he promises, That no man shall take our joy from us, so neither shall Death it selfe take it away, nor so much as interrupt it, or discontinue it, But as in the face of Death, when he layes hold upon me, and in the face of the Devill, when he attempts me, I shall see the face of God, (for, every thing shall be a glasse, to reflect God upon me) so in the agonies of Death, in the anguish of that dissolution, in the sorrowes of that valediction, in the irreversiblenesse of that transmigration, I shall have a joy, which shall no more evaporate, then my soule shall evaporate, A joy, that shall passe up, and put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy super-invested in glory. Amen. (724–49)

This is structured copia, comprising essentially a single, patterned idea (then/ there versus now/here) that is strung out (to borrow Ong’s phrase) in a series of thematically and grammatically parallel structures (“as … so”), each bearing an accumulation of phrases. Unlike the rising and falling of the opening section of the sermon, the syntactical suspension of sense in this passage (echoing the flight of the soul and elevation of his congregation’s mood) would have been matched with an aural suspension of tone and pitch, rising and falling, but reaching toward a single climax. The accompanying gestures here are easier to imagine. Bulwer describes a gesture with “[th]e Hand put forth and raised aloft” as “an action of congratulatory exclamation and amplification of joy” (35; fig. 1). Another possibility is “[th]e hollow Hand raised above the shoulder with some kinde of grave motion of the wrest, [which] doth cheere, exhort, embolden and encourage” (35–36; fig. 2).

193

194

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Figure 1 Exclamationem aptat. (an exclamation). Reproduced with the permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Figure 2 Hortatur (an inciter, encourager). Reproduced with the permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Yet given Bulwer’s own testimony about Donne’s command of gestural art, we might expect that Donne, who challenged and resisted convention so stringently as a poet, and who crafted so distinctive a preaching style, would never limit himself to prescribed forms, but would allow a similar expression of individuality in his homiletic delivery in all respects. The point of this exercise of inferring performance from printed text is not to be definitive but heuristic, to encourage an imaginative reading of the sermons that places the printed text in a context of oral and manual performance, and to suggest some principles for directing this imagination. For Donne, decisions about delivery would have followed first from the demands of the sermon’s principle of invention, in this case the idea of the weight of present suffering and affliction as an impetus to desire relief in the present based on the hope of eternal glory. Within the sermon, two distinct modes of discourse—the exhortative and the instructive—serve this objective, the former involving a stirring of emotion, the latter a methodical demonstration. And within the exhortative mode, structural and stylistic schemes suggest patterns of emphasis in tone, pitch, volume, and pace that might produce an appropriate matching of sound to sense, first initiating the congregation into the weight of suffering in the present, and then, in the end, releasing them in

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

the levity of hope in the promise of future glory, radiating in an inchoation of joy in the present moment of the sermon’s benediction. Although one can never adequately reconstruct oral performance entirely from textual evidence, it is, as Peter McCullough suggests, important that we nonetheless make some attempt to imagine oral discourse in its native form and context. To do so, one needs some cultural basis for relating textual elements to oral performance, that is, some indication of contemporary theory or practice regarding composition, transmission, and oral rendering of discourse. Within this cultural frame, analysis of relevant textual elements (in this case features of style and structure) and the way they function in a text might provide clues to complementary features of vocalization and gesture. With some imagination applied to inference, one can begin to construct an approximation of performance that does some justice to the oral origins of a textual surrogate.

Notes 1 The fifth office of rhetoric, memory, was closely tied to performance, but is itself a large topic that cannot be accommodated in this essay. For Demosthenes, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, delivery was the single most important factor in the effectiveness of an oration. The latter three all make an explicit connection between the orator’s manner of delivery and the emotional effect of an oration upon an audience. Quintilian, for example, writes that “the emotion of each member of our audience will depend on the impression made upon his hearing” (Institutio oratoria 11.3.2). For a convenient summary of classical ideas on delivery, see Kathleen E. Welch’s entry on “Delivery” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. See also Robert L. Hickey on “Donne’s Delivery.” 2 W. S. Howell notes that this neglect is evident in the Renaissance as well: delivery “was considered to be of overwhelming importance in the process of communication but was not thought to be particularly susceptible to theoretical treatment” (Howell 73). 3 See Peter McCullough (172–76) for an excellent introduction to the qualities of pronuntiatio and actio and the need to attend to markers of performance in elocutionary style. 4 A prebend is a benefice in the Church of England. Donne held the prebendary of Chiswick while he was Dean of St. Paul’s. As Donne explains in his first prebend sermon, each prebendary was assigned a group of five psalms, which he was to “rehearse” every day, and thus the whole corpus of the psalms would be recited by the body of prebendaries on a daily basis. Preaching on his prebend psalms was another of Donne’s duties. 5 Potter and Simpson base their summary on John Sparrow’s study of sermon preparation among Donne and other preachers of the period. Their study of manuscript evidence, and more recently Jeanne Shami’s study (11–27), largely confirm Sparrow’s explanation of Donne’s practice for composition and transmission of his sermons. See also Herr 75–86. 6 Generally speaking, the Reformed church in England dispensed with the ornate vestments that distinguished the various ranks of clergy in the Roman church in favour of more plain, black gowns: the more Puritan-leaning the congregation and clergy, the more plain the garments. Clerical dress was not so controversial in Donne’s time as it was at the height of the Vestiarian controversy in the reign of Elizabeth I. On the

195

196

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21

circumstances and politics of worship, see Chapter 5, “Style in Worship: Prestigious or Plain?” in Davies vol. 2, particularly pp. 211–14. On the challenging demands and circumstances of the early modern sermon (including clerical dress), see Herr 31–34, 37. John Craig describes the challenge posed by the noise of dogs in a church building in Reformation England (105, 113–21). As a centre of business and civic life, the services in St. Paul’s were often conducted “against a disorderly background” created by a “cacophony of social noise” (Parry 49–51). Chironomia, a treatise on rhetorical gesture, was published together with Chirologia, a treatise on sign language. I am citing by volume, sermon number, and line number from Potter and Simpson. Unless otherwise noted, citations of Donne’s poetry are of Grierson’s edition (with typography modernized), the edition with the most complete representation of elegies on Donne. For a nearly contemporary example of eroticization of religious ecstasy, see Richard Crashaw’s “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa,” especially ll. 1-35–96. See also McCullough on the significance of tears in preaching in general and specifically in relation to Donne’s sermon on John 11:35 (Sermons vol. 4 no. 13): 177–79. References to Donne sermons will be by volume, sermon number, and line number in Potter and Simpson’s edition. On the place of the sermon in Reformed English ecclesiology, see Wabuda 12. Raymond Frontain draws on Walter Ong to describe Donne’s sense of the aural in his poetry to achieve the “powerful immediacy” and presence of the spoken word (78–79). Similarly, in The Presence of the Word, Ong describes the cumulative commonplace in primary orality (what Parry and Lord call formulas or formulaic elements), which are additive elements that work from a communal reservoir of common materials (80–81). On oral culture and the use of the “commonplaces as part of its formulary apparatus for accumulating and retrieving knowledge,” see Presence 85 and passim 79–87. Raymond Frontain applies John Shawcross’s idea that there are liminal features of a text that signal an author’s intention for a text, in order to suggest that one might infer from generic markers something about the performative mode of a piece of poetry (89–90). On the pathopoeaic function of form, see Nelson, “Pathopoeia and the Protestant Form of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” Strictly speaking, homoioptoton applied to a repetition of case endings. For a critique of Bulwer’s claim of the naturalness of manual communication (gesture), see Yelle 225–26, 229–32. Rooney finds the same dynamic of contrast in the third and final partition, where joy, again an abstraction, is overwhelmed by the concrete rendering of “the anguish of dissolution”: here “joy operated more fully” than Pondus Gloriæ does in the first partition, but “largely because the sense of affliction ... is not developed in this section so completely as it was in Part One” (380). I am providing instead a positive explanation for this effect.

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

Works Cited Anderson, Judith H. “Patterns Proposed Beforehand: Donne’s Second Prebend Sermon.” Prose Studies 11 (1988): 37–48. Print. Augustine, Saint. De Doctrina Christiana. Trans. and ed. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Print. Bulwer, John. Chirologia: or, the naturall language of the hand. Composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof. Whereunto is added, Chironomia: or, the art of manual rhetoricke. London, 1644. Print. Carew, Thomas. “An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. Iohn Donne: By Mr. Tho: Carie.” In The Poems of John Donne. Ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1912. 378–80. Print. Carey, Sir Lucius. “An Elegie on Dr. Donne: By Sir Lucius Carie.” In The Poems of John Donne. Ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1912. 380–82. Print. Caxton, William. Mirrour of the World. Ed. Oliver H. Prior. Early English Text Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1913. Print. Cicero. De Inuentione; De Optimo Genere Oratorum; Topica. Trans. H. M. Hubbell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1949. Print. ———. On Oratory and Orators [De Oratore]. Trans. J. S. Watson. New York: Harper, 1860. Print. Craig, John. “Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the English Parish Church, 1547–1642.” Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 104–23. Print. Crashaw, Richard. The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw. Ed. George Walton Williams. London: Norton, 1974. Print. Crosfield, Thomas. The Diary of Thomas Crosfield. Ed. Frederick S. Boas. London: Oxford UP, 1935. Print. Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England. 5 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975. Print. Donne, John. The Poems of John Donne. Ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson. 2 vols. [London]: Oxford UP, 1912. Print. ———. The Sermons of John Donne. Ed. and intro. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley: U California P, 1953–1962. Print. Eliot, T. S. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. 1928. London: Faber, 1970. Print. Foclin, Antoine. La Rhetorique Française. Paris, 1555. Print. Frontain, Raymond-Jean. “Donne, Spenser, and the Performative Mode of Renaissance Poetry.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 32.1 (2006): 76–102. Print. Herr, Alan Fager. The Elizabethan Sermon: A Survey and a Bibliography. New York: Octagon, 1969. Print. Hickey, Robert L. “Donne’s Delivery.” TSL 9 (1964): 39–47. Print. Howell, Wilbur Samuel. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700. New York: Russell, 1961. Print.

197

198

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Hyperius, Gerhard. The Practise of Preaching. Trans. John Ludham. London, 1577. Print. Lord, Albert. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960. McCullough, Peter. “Donne as Preacher.” The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Ed. Achsah Guibbory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 167–82, 177–78. Print. Mohrmann, Gerald P. “Oratorical Delivery and Other Problems in Current Scholarship on English Renaissance Rhetoric.” Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Ed. James J. Murphy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 56–83. Print. Mueller, Janel M., ed. and intro. Donne’s Prebend Sermons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971. Print. Mueller, William. John Donne, Preacher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1962. Print. Nadeau, Ray. “Oratorical Formulas in Seventeenth-Century England.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (1952): 149–54. Print. Nelson, Brent. “Pathopoeia and the Protestant Form of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives. Ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 247–72. Print. Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967. Print. ———. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971. Print. Parry, Graham. The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2006. Print. Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Print. Potter, George R., and Evelyn M. Simpson. Introduction. The Sermons of John Donne. Ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1953–1962. Print. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie [1589]. 1907. Ed. Edward Arber, intro. Baxter Hathaway. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1970. Print. Qunitilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. New York: Putnam, 1921–22. Print. Rooney, William J. “John Donne’s ‘Second Prebend Sermon’—A Stylistic Analysis,” Seventeenth-Century Prose. Ed. Stanley E. Fish. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. 375– 87. Print. Shami, Jeanne, ed. John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1996. Print. Sherwood, Terry. “Reason in Donne’s Sermons.” English Literary History 39 (1972): 353–74. Print. Steggle, Matthew. Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Print. Wabuda, Susan. Preaching During the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.

“pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts”

■

Brent Nelson

Walton, Izaak. The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson. Intro. George Saintsbury. London: Oxford UP, 1927. Print. Welch, Kathleen E. “Delivery.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 217–20. Print. Wilson, Thomas. The Art of Rhetoric (1560). Ed. Peter E. Medine. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1994. Print. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. London, 1604. Print. Yelle, Robert A. “The Rhetoric of Gesture in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Gesture 6.2 (2006): 223–40. Print.

199

This page intentionally left blank

“ THE POWER AND THE PARADOX” OF THE SPOKEN STORY Challenges to the Tyranny of the Written in Contemporary Canadian Fiction Wendy Roy

Several years ago during a course on Canadian fiction at the University of Saskatchewan, my students and I began to notice a recurring mode of narration in the stories and novels we were reading. While many of the earlier works emphasized written modes of storytelling—ranging from the letters of Frances Brooke’s 1769 The History of Emily Montague to the fictional diary of Sinclair Ross’s 1941 As for Me and My House—a number of the more recent works of fiction highlighted human speech as an effective and compelling way to narrate a story. These works piqued students’ interest because they employed some of the techniques of oral communication evident in the transcribed First Nations oral narratives that we had read earlier in the term.1 A self-conscious focus on new forms of orality was not only evident in recent short works of fiction by avowed storytellers such as Alistair MacLeod and Thomas King,2 but also strikingly apparent in a number of novels not ostensibly by oral storytellers or about storytelling. In Margaret Laurence’s 1974 The Diviners, the embedded tales told by characters play a fundamental role in shaping personal histories and challenging collective ones. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, the last chapter provokes a reconsideration of the narrator’s life story because readers learn that her tale is a taped (and thus originally oral) narrative that has since been ordered and transcribed by male academics. In Yann Martel’s 2001 Life of Pi, the authority of Pi Patel’s spoken account of his shipwreck ordeal is unsettled by the final transcription of and report on his taped conversation with two Japanese shipping investigators. And in Tomson Highway’s 1998 Kiss of the Fur Queen, orality is celebrated and residential school abuse decried through imaginative reworkings of traditional Cree stories. The consideration of the fundamental reliance on orality in these written works raised a number of important questions for me and for students in the Canadian fiction course, including these: Why is human speech as a mode of storytelling so integral to these works? 201

202

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

How does spoken story function in this fiction? Does a particular characteristic of this mode of narration, such as its focus on the power dynamics evident in the oral–written binary, make these stories and novels particularly suitable for the questions about Canadian social and literary structures posed in this class?3 My conclusion, after having examined these questions in more detail for this paper, is that these texts are compelling because they emphasize the power of the spoken word to resist both authorized accounts of personal stories and official records of historical events. While written stories can also undermine official history, the explicit use of spoken stories in these four novels points to what Walter J. Ong calls the “sounded word as power and action” (31). The representation of the sounded word in fiction is of course not literally an oral utterance. Susan Gingell argues that such representations “simulate the oral” (“Towards” 17), while Paul Goetsch suggests that they provide an “illusion of orality” (10) and Wolfgang Hochbruck refers to them as “fabricated orality” (134, downplaying the negative connotations of his own term).4 Goetsch points out that providing this illusion is “a component of the text’s written strategies” (12), while Hochbruck highlights the necessity for authors who engage in this practice to include “formal clues denoting ‘orality’” (134). The novels I study all exhibit markers of authenticity (Hochbruck 135) or orality (Gingell, Introduction 7). All are explicit about storytelling, referring to and often theorizing the act, and differentiating stories from the remainder of the text through various narrative techniques that go beyond simple enclosure of speech in quotation marks. Often, the stories told by characters employ what Ong has identified as techniques of orality: the rhythm, repetition, formulaic structure, redundancy, and additive and aggregative syntax that an “authentic” oral voicing would employ to aid the storyteller’s recall and the audience’s understanding (Ong 34–40).5 Goetsch argues that such representation of storytelling in fiction has specific “illustrative or symbolic and aesthetic functions” (11) but also serves many of the same purposes as in “real life”: “It characterizes the speaker and his listeners, creates a storytelling community … and provides both information and entertainment” (26). Hochbruck points out that while “[t]he professed aim of literary texts using fabricated orality may be to invoke a sense of an oral tradition,” a more obvious effect is “an impression of textual otherness” (135). These analyses, while useful, strike me as inadequate in providing a full understanding of the reason many recent Canadian works of fiction use storytelling in such a self-conscious manner. To Goetsch’s list, I would add that orality in these texts is also structural and, like speech in “real life,” often

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

powerfully political in the way it approaches racialization, gender, culture, and so on. To Hochbruck’s analysis, I would add that in the four works I consider, the contrast between the implied oral and the explicitly written not only highlights difference or “otherness” between, on the one hand, storytelling characters and, on the other, readers from social groups other than that of the oral storyteller, but also provokes a fundamental questioning of assumptions about the accuracy of written words, especially published history. The storytellers in these books occupy marginal positions in their fictional social worlds, but paradoxically they play central roles in the plots, often as protagonists or people close to the protagonists; thus the words they speak as a means of exercising what little power they have take on considerable narrative force. While other characters in positions of greater social power often challenge the storytellers’ words, each text’s eventual privileging of the oral paves the way for a critique of the authority conventionally assigned to written or published narratives on important Canadian and global issues, such as racism and colonialism in Laurence and Highway, gender in Atwood, and religious belief in Martel. At the same time, contradictions between parts of the novels presented as written and those represented as oral, as well as within the purportedly oral narratives themselves, invite even more nuanced explorations of competing narratives about these significant concerns. The four books that I discuss were all written in the wake of considerations by members of the Toronto School of Communication Theory of the social and political implications of orality and literacy, especially those put forward by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Harold Innis in The Bias of Communication (1964) and elaborated on by writers such as Jack Goody, Ian Watt, and Ong.6 Demonstrating the influence of these ideas, the contemporary Canadian novels under discussion acknowledge the differences in meaning making promoted by different technologies of communication, including speech, handwriting, audiotaping, and publishing. However, these texts also participate in an ongoing cultural critique of the ways in which proponents and inheritors of the Toronto School at times continue to privilege the written or printed over the spoken (Goetsch 214–15). In The World on Paper, David Olson succinctly outlines and criticizes myths about the supremacy of writing over speech, such as that alphabetic literacy, to a greater extent than speech, promotes “social progress,” “cultural and social development,” and “cognitive development” (5–7). In Olson’s discussion of erroneous judgments that have repeatedly been made about the values of orality and literacy in human social interactions, he refers to Ferdinand de Saussure’s condemnation of “the tyranny of writing” in relation to linguistic

203

204

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

theory (8). While the four narratives that I discuss are themselves written and published texts, I argue that all challenge the tyranny of the written in shaping power relations among social groups by highlighting the power of the spoken story to contest or provide correctives to official versions of personal or collective history. Laurence’s The Diviners employs a number of narrative strategies as it evokes what Linda Hutcheon identifies as a postmodernist interest in competing versions of historical events and in the constructed rather than objective nature of the historical record (22).7 The book’s snapshots, memorybank movies, innerfilms, lists, letters, songs, and tales suggest an interpretation of the past as recoverable only through imagination, and as variable depending on whose imagination is being tapped and in which medium the account is expressed. The reinterpretation of personal and collective history is especially evident in the blended historical and personal tales that punctuate the narrative, purportedly told by three of the novel’s main characters—Christie Logan, Jules Tonnerre, and Morag Gunn—who are at the same time marginal in the society described in the novel because they are, respectively, poor, Métis, and orphaned and female. The tale as a genre is strongly associated with oral storytelling, but as changing dictionary definitions indicate, the word tale has been appropriated to refer to written forms of storytelling.8 Paradoxically, these definitions show that while tales are intimately related to the preservation of history, they have also often been devalued as merely fiction or falsehood. The tales in The Diviners incorporate all of these multiple significations. Each is set aside from the narrative through a title in capital letters, such as “CHRISTIE’S FIRST TALE OF PIPER GUNN,” thus emphasizing the interface between the oral and the written. Each deviates from the narration that surrounds it in that it is presented as the spoken words of the character as he or she tells the tale, without quotation marks to indicate speech but with other markers of orality. The novel’s first tale, told by Christie, begins with the words, “It was in the old days, a long time ago,” evoking both the historical record and the “once upon a time” formula of fairy tales. As he tells his story, Christie verbally pauses to collect his thoughts—“Well, now,” he begins a key sentence (59)—and employs what Ong identifies as the oral devices of formulaic structure, repetition, and additive syntax: “And Piper Gunn, he was a great tall man, a man with the voice of drums and the heart of a child and the gall of a thousand and the strength of conviction” (59). The figure Christie describes can be identified as one of the “heavy” heroic figures essential to oral storytelling because “[c]olorless personalities” are insufficiently memorable (Ong 69). The story is loosely based on historical events,

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

as Christie relates the tale of the Sutherlanders forced off land in Scotland in the early 1800s, but the fictive nature of the hero and the characteristics of orality in the way his activities are described work together to give the story a mythic quality.9 At the same time, as Lynn Pifer suggests, Christie’s version of these events is created for a specific personal purpose—to fulfill Morag’s need for family and for ancestors (144). This story is followed almost immediately by “MORAG’S FIRST TALE OF PIPER GUNN’S WOMAN,” in which she uses similar additive, storytelling diction, but reveals her own desires and her own lack of understanding as she searches for specifically female ancestors. She says of the Piper’s fictive wife, also called Morag,10 that she has “the power and the second sight and the good eye and the strength of conviction,” but then asks, “What means The Strength of Conviction?” (61). Questions about the accuracy of oral stories are introduced in Christie’s second tale of the Sutherlanders’ mistaken landing at Churchill in Hudson Bay in 1813, their overland march to York Factory, and their boat trip down to the Red River colony. Christie’s story is both more vague and more exaggerated than so-called factual accounts of the same incidents. When he says that the Sutherlanders walked a thousand miles, Morag’s childish disbelief is inserted into the narrative in parentheses: “They walked? A thousand miles? They couldn’t, Christie” (96). A further interrogation of oral tales, this time explicitly in relation to written history, is introduced in Christie’s fourth story, in which he imagines Morag’s fictive ancestor as a Euro-Canadian hero opposed to the 1869 Red River Resistance. The now fifteen-year-old Morag repeatedly corrects Christie’s version of events, telling him through bracketed interjections that “Reel” is pronounced “Riel” and that she knows the Sutherlanders did not take back the fort, as he has suggested, because “We took it in History” (144, 145). As the capital “H” suggests, her interventions propose other verbal and written accounts—those of schoolteachers and history books—as more authoritative sources. That scholarly and written records can also be inaccurate, however, is explored in “CHRISTIE’S TALE OF THE BATTLE OF BOURLON WOOD” (101–03), through which Christie responds to a published account of a First World War battle in which he and Morag’s father participated. He begins with, “Well, d’you see, it was like the book says, but it wasn’t like that, also” (101). He then revises the history-book account of the battle, one of heroism and victory, into a parallel story of mayhem, chaos, blood, and fear. Echoing and expanding on this uncertainty of representation, Jules Tonnerre’s later tale of his experiences fighting at Dieppe during the Second World War is represented in The Diviners only through a question mark (164). Because the title echoes that of Christie’s story of Bourlon Wood,

205

206

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

the question mark suggests that Jules’s untold story would also contradict written records, since such horror can never adequately be put into words. Challenges to Christie’s stories and to published versions of events continue much more explicitly with the three tales that Jules (known in the community as Skinner) tells Morag, in response to her plea, “I like stories” (157). Together, the tales relate Canadian historical events from the perspective of Jules’s imagined ancestors, but also from the broader perspective of Métis people in Canada, providing alternative versions of the so-called Seven Oaks massacre (1816),11 Red River Resistance (1869–70), and Northwest Rebellion (1885). As Gillian Siddall argues in her study of The Diviners as a postcolonial text, by challenging “the standard, colonial understanding of Canadian history” through these stories, “Laurence makes the crucial point that there is no such thing as an accurate historical narrative, because biases are inevitable” (41). All three of Jules’s stories challenge not just Christie’s prior accounts but also conventional histories: as Jules tells Morag when he speaks of Louis Riel, whom he calls “the Prophet,” “the books, they lie about him” (161). All are structured as tales that, in the tradition of orature, have been passed down from one generation to the next and have inevitably changed in the repeated telling. Thus the first story, tellingly named “SKINNER’S TALE OF LAZARUS’ TALE OF RIDER TONNERRE,” begins, “Well, my old man, he told me this about Rider Tonnerre, away back there, so long ago no one knows when, and … each time he told it, it would be kind of different” (159).12 Because the story has become more generalized as it has been told and retold, Jules does not locate the incident at Seven Oaks, although Morag’s bracketed commentary does (161). Fact is interwoven with fiction, as Jules’s purported ancestor, Rider Tonnerre, takes on many of the characteristics of much later real-life figure Gabriel Dumont; for example, both men’s rifles are called “Le Petit” or “La Petite” (160, 443). Jules’s tales invoke a tradition of oral storytelling in order to suggest both that the past can be accessed through the traces left behind in multiple stories, and that textual and Euro-Canadian versions of the historical past can and must be challenged. At the same time, the stories are part of family tradition, told—like the stories Christie tells to Morag—to provide members of the Tonnerre family with a sense of identity and carve out a place for them in the historical record. They manifest what Ong calls the homeostatic nature of the oral (46–49), in which past events are revised in light of current conditions, belief systems, and knowledge. In Laurence’s novel, people who are on the periphery of Canadian society because of their class or race or gender take on at least a limited form of power through storytelling. Through the final two tales, which Morag tells her

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

daughter, Morag converts Pique’s absent and unacknowledged grandfathers into larger-than-life, mythic characters as she attempts to help her daughter place herself within personal and collective history (390–93). Morag borrows both Christie’s and Jules’s storytelling voices as she tells her tales: “Well, a long time ago, when I was a kid, Christie used to tell me all sorts of stories. Christie Logan, he was … tough as treebark and wiry as barbwire and proud as the devil,” she begins, continuing with “Well, your grandfather, Lazarus Tonnerre, he brought up his children in the Wachakwa Valley, there” (390, 392). By referring to previous examples of storytelling and by consciously borrowing others’ diction and cadences, Morag implies that storytelling, as Ong suggests, can provide continuity and perhaps even serve as the basis for community (73). However, in The Diviners, the variation that occurs from one telling of a story to the next also reflects a postmodernist historiographic unsettling of the belief that there can be one objectively correct version of an event. As Morag reflects on the stories she has read about the Second World War, the third-person narrator says, through Morag’s consciousness, “What is a true story? Is there any such thing?” (159). When Pique asks which of the stories she has been told are true, Morag replies that “there is no one version. There just isn’t” (373). Orality is linked to texuality rather than being completely segregated from it, however, as the tales invented by others provide the basis for Morag’s later works of fiction; The Diviners itself, the last page of the novel suggests, may be the book she is writing throughout as she remembers her life story. Orality by marginal characters thus paves the way for textual power for the novel’s protagonist and allows for a continuing revision to historical accounts. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in contrast, presents an almost completely powerless first-person narrator who tells and retells her own story, apparently only to herself as she lies in bed at night. As a Handmaid in the oppressively patriarchal fictional republic of Gilead, the woman who identifies herself only by the patriarchally imposed name Offred (meaning belonging to her Commander, Fred) has no access to the written word. In a graphic exemplification of the historical linkage of texuality with men and orality with women, reading and writing are recognized as activities that convey power in this imagined dystopian military regime and thus are denied to women. Even the Bible is locked up, and can be read to women only by men (108). When Offred is invited by her Commander to play Scrabble and later to read in his private office, she interprets these acts as a challenge to social rules that is as exciting as but perhaps even more dangerous than illicit sex (231). Indeed, one of the leaders of the regime is quoted as saying of women and other

207

208

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

oppressed groups, “Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won’t do that again” (383). Offred’s mode of communication must of necessity, then, be oral, but she makes a distinction between stories that are told for entertainment and escape, and the brutal, so-called true story that she relates. She says, I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling.… Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along. Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. (50)

While Offred insists that what she says is truth and not fiction,13 she admits she tells a “story” in that it recounts personal history, albeit shaped, constructed, and revised. She indicates that she would prefer to be describing a world without the “red events” of oppression and death: “I wish this story were different” (333), she says, and “I don’t want to be telling this story” (341), and “Here is a different story, a better one” (161). To explain why she feels compelled nevertheless to relate her experiences, Offred repeatedly addresses an un-named you, who could be her lost daughter or mother or husband or friend, or just anyone willing to listen: “[I]t hurts me to tell [this story] over, over again,” she says. “I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance” (334; see also 50). The repeated evocation of an imagined listener serves to highlight the oral nature of Offred’s utterances; at the same time, her witnessing puts her society on trial and demands an audience who can act as judge. In his intriguing discussion of orality and literacy in The Handmaid’s Tale, Mario Klarer points out that Offred’s speech exemplifies the “aggregative” and “accumulative” characteristics of oral storytelling that Ong noted (132). As well as including these markers of orality in Offred’s speech, however, Atwood has her narrator repeatedly and explicitly discuss the act of constructing a story, including the impossibility of providing one true version of an event (50, 168, 333–34). Near the end of the novel, after she re-encounters her lost friend Moira, Offred tells Moira’s story of escape and recapture in eight dense

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

pages that purportedly quote her friend’s own words. Yet she prefaces this story with the note, “This is what she says … more or less. I can’t remember exactly, because I had no way of writing it down. I’ve filled it out for her as much as I can: we didn’t have much time so she just gave the outlines” (306). Offred’s storytelling is thus at times a recreation of someone else’s verbal utterances, and she admits that she is filling in gaps, adding details, striving for accuracy, providing coherence to an incoherent narrative. But even when she relates events in her own life, Offred notes that her story is not objective, factual, or coherent. Instead, she says, “This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It’s a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed.… It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because … there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances” (168). While Offred constantly revises her story, she also self-consciously points out those revisions. After she provides a description of her first sexual encounter with her lover, Nick, she says, “I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here’s what happened.” But then a few pages later, after her second, revised account of the encounter, she says, “It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction” (328, 330).14 Despite (or perhaps because of) the tentativeness of her storytelling, readers come to see Offred’s story as a valiant attempt to relate impossibly difficult experiences. However, perceptions of the nature of her story are profoundly shaken by the book’s last chapter, labelled “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale.” Because of this title, the inclination of about half the students in my classes is to stop reading when they reach it, since they interpret the chapter as a commentary on the novel rather than part of the book’s narrative structure. Indeed, the chapter purports to be a commentary of sorts: a transcription of an academic symposium analyzing the Republic of Gilead, two hundred years after the events described in Offred’s narrative.15 Speech is reported as in a transcript, with the speaker identified in capital letters followed by a colon. And not only is this chapter a transcription of oral speech (some of which, judging by the diction, is paradoxically being read from a written script), but also one of the main speakers, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, reveals that the book we have just read is itself a transcription, of thirty cassette tapes that were found in a metal footlocker. Pieixoto claims that “the tapes were arranged in no particular order … nor were they numbered. Thus it was up to Professor Wade and myself to arrange the blocks of speech in the order in which they appeared to go; but … all such arrangements are based on some guesswork and are to be regarded as approximate” (375). Offred’s words thus have been mediated through the technology of the tape recorder;

209

210

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

deliberately shaped for a future audience rather than just spoken to herself; and constructed and reconstructed not just by her, but also by Pieixoto and a male colleague, who have ordered and textualized her story and even provided a title that highlights the orality of the “tale.” Pieixoto reveals that, because Offred could not have had access to a tape recorder during the time about which she speaks, the tapes were recorded months or perhaps years later, and thus are an even more distanced reconstruction and reordering of events than they initially appear to be.16 The fictional academic concludes his talk by saying, “As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes” (388), suggesting that records of the past will always be lacunal and provisional. Indeed, the conclusion of this commentary, as with the preceding forty-six chapters, is ambiguous; despite Professor Pieixoto’s statements about how much research he has conducted, he can give readers no additional information about Offred’s fate, except that she survived long enough to make the tapes. Earlier, he has downplayed the importance of the woman’s story he has discovered, saying he would have much preferred a printout from her Commander’s computer that would have provided more conventionally masculine and authoritative historical details (386). Pieixoto’s statements ironically emphasize how herstory can become history through the intervention of biased interpreters such as himself. His comments encourage the reader to celebrate Offred’s orally inspired narrative ambiguity and at the same time criticize her researcher’s narrow-minded desire for the factual and literal. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, like The Handmaid’s Tale, ends with a coda that demands a reconsideration of the narrative we have just read, which was told by not one but two first-person narrators: the book’s fictive author, and the protagonist Pi Patel, whose life is being recounted. The novel begins with an Author’s Note that invites the reader to conflate the fictional author with Martel, and thus immediately to blur boundaries between fact and fiction. The Author introduces Pi’s story as one he has compiled after hearing it from Pi himself: “He told me his story. All the while I took notes,” he writes, adding, “It seemed natural that Mr. Patel’s story should be told mostly in the first person, in his voice and through his eyes” (x). In Part One of the book, however, that fictive author periodically intervenes in Pi’s story, through italicized sections that indicate that he revises his conception of Pi as he learns more and more about him. While most of Part One provides background information about Pi and brings his adult life up to the present, the final words of the section are the Author’s, based on the fact that he has just learned that Pi now has a wife and two children: “This story has a happy ending” (103), he writes.

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

Part Two, in contrast, consists of Pi’s uninterrupted and harrowing tale of his shipwreck when he was a teenager and his subsequent 227 days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. There are no apparently authorial interventions, no second first-person voice to remind readers of the work’s constructed and textual nature, and thus Pi’s narrative in this section of the book feels as though it is being told directly to readers. Indeed, Pi’s words are framed as a collection of “stories”: the story of his name (21), the “downright weird story” that he learns about Christianity (59), the floating island as an admittedly unbelievable “part of the story” (284). When he encounters a blind Frenchman in another boat, he says, “I have a story,” and then tells that story of starvation twice, beginning with the formulaic opening of a fairy tale that is immediately challenged by a starving boy’s reference to food: “Once upon a time there was a banana” (278, 281). Near the end of Part Two, he issues a challenge that the fictive author takes up: “[C]ould you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less?” (316).17 Finally, he states that after he lands in Mexico, “there my story ends” (317). Pi’s story, however, like the Handmaid’s, does not end with rescue but instead is radically challenged by the final section of the book. After providing Pi’s account of his survival, the book’s fictive author appends a mediated oral narrative, a transcription of a taped interview of Pi immediately after his ordeal by two Japanese shipping investigators, followed by an abbreviated written report by the senior investigator. Together, these narratives unsettle Pi’s story in at least four ways. First, they reconfigure the story (as Offred’s story has been reconfigured) as something not only told to the fictive author but also existing on tape. The story is not repeated; instead the transcriber summarizes it in the two-word Chapter 97, “The story,” which, like Laurence’s use of a question mark alone to describe Jules’s experience during the Second World War, suggests that radical summation may be the only accurate way to transcribe such harrowing accounts. Second, the transcript provides an alternative version of the events that Pi has described, one that fundamentally recasts Pi himself as the figurative tiger in the lifeboat and suggests that the inclusion of the tiger has rendered both narratable and hearable a story of survivor cannibalism. Third, the conclusion associates belief in a story with belief in religion, a comparison that has been the subject of much subsequent academic investigation by writers such as Florence Stratton and Stewart Cole. And finally, this section emphasizes the unequal power relations that arise when a child’s story is disbelieved and adults attempt to elicit another more logical, but ultimately less palatable, story.

211

212

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

The shipping investigators are incredulous about what Pi has told them, interpreting it as a “story” in terms of something fictive rather than factual: “What a story,” one says, and “Mr. Patel, we don’t believe your story,” says the other (324). When Pi responds, “So you want another story?”, the investigators tell him they want instead “to know what really happened.” Pi’s response theorizes the constructed and even invented nature of personal and historical records, as he says, “Isn’t telling about something—using words … already something of an invention?… Doesn’t that make life a story?” (335). Much earlier in the novel, the adult Pi has commented on the rejection of “dry, yeastless factuality” and the search for “the better story” (70) that he sees as essential to religious belief. In the book’s final section, the adolescent Pi uses identical words to discuss the necessity, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, of “suspending disbelief ” in order to appreciate and accept a story.18 Pi says to the investigators: “You want a story that won’t surprise you.… You want dry, yeastless factuality” (336). After he provides his other, ostensibly more factual and thus brutal story of shipwreck survival, he asks the investigators, “[W]hich story do you prefer? Which is the better story …?” (352). Clearly, the more believable story is the brutal one, and its validity is emphasized by the fact that it is starkly told and transcribed word for word. Not surprisingly, however, the investigators eventually side with Pi in choosing not the more believable story but the nicer or more palatable one, just as after Offred says, “Here is a different story, a better one” (161), she presents a story with more hope. When chief investigator Okamoto summarizes the story in the one written page that serves as the last page of the novel, his report is mostly about the technical details of the shipwreck. In his last paragraph, however, he turns to Pi’s story, writing in his final sentence that “[v]ery few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger” (354). While this concluding sentence appears to validate Pi’s version of the shipwreck, the word “claim” provides yet another element of critical questioning of Pi’s spoken account. Life of Pi, like The Handmaid’s Tale, uses the representation of taped speech to unsettle notions of truth and believability in previous accounts of the same events, but ultimately validates those original accounts by undermining the authority of investigators who seek to challenge the source or veracity of details about the harrowing ordeals of the primary narrators. In Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, as in The Diviners, challenges are made to historical records, and oral storytelling is even more central. While the main narrative mode of Highway’s novel, like Laurence’s, is third person, in both books some sections are presented as tales told in a first-person voice by the

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

characters. In Kiss of the Fur Queen, these stories are often versions of what Gingell calls textualized orature (“Teaching” 286): traditional Cree oral narratives that have become more or less fixed through their representation in written language. At the same time, as Sam McKegney argues, the entire book is infused with orality through the way that Highway reworks traditional stories and myths for distinctly modern and political purposes. McKegney suggests that Highway’s act of “taking a non-Native reliance on notions of objective history and subjecting it to Cree mythology” in essence “inverts the assimilation process” (68). Highway takes characters who have been forced to the periphery of their social world through their experiences of colonization, including residential schooling, and puts them in a central position through their participation in and transformation of traditional storytelling. Early in the novel, the narrator tells a family story about the Okimasis brothers and notes that the yarn was told repeatedly and became “ever more outrageous, exaggerated, as is the Cree way of telling stories, of making myth” (38). Making use of this “Cree way of telling stories,” Highway interweaves a narrative about the two boys’ experiences in residential school, and the long-term negative effects of those experiences, with references to traditional figures from Cree storytelling, including the Weetigo or cannibal monster, Weesagechak or the trickster, and the Son of Ayash or the wanderer.19 Throughout the book, Christianity is represented as a Weetigo, as the ritual cannibalism of communion is linked to the way that residential schools cannibalized First Nations cultures and fed on the bodies of Aboriginal children; for example, the priest’s sexual assault of one of the Okimasis brothers is described as “the Weetigo feasting on human flesh” (79). However, Christianity is not the only Weetigo, as is demonstrated by the Cree tale of the trickster, Weesagechak, taking the form of a weasel to burrow up the “bumhole” of the Weetigo and destroy it from the inside.20 Jeremiah and Gabriel tell this mythical story to each other while in a shopping mall, beginning with the words “Remember Aunt Black-eyed Susan’s story?” and thus evoking a tradition of oral storytelling (118). In this case, the mall and, by extension, Western consumer culture are characterized as Weetigos: the boys “plung[e] deep into the entrails of the beast” (116) and, later, are expelled like “detritus” from “the rear end of a beast” (121). However, Highway’s use of storytelling as metaphor is never simple; if the mall is a Weetigo that, as McKegney argues, is swallowing up Gabriel’s “Native otherness” (71), the Okimasis brothers are not weasels but Weetigos in their willing participation in this excessive consumption (Sugars 80).

213

214

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Hochbruck argues that texts written in English by indigenous authors often use explicit references to storytelling to evoke differences in language or culture (135).21 While the evocation of “otherness” is certainly one aspect of storytelling in Kiss of the Fur Queen, telling these tales is also part of a larger political project related to exposing and commenting on the effects on Canadian First Nations of assimilative practices such as those of church-run residential schools. The extent of this project is signalled by the fact that as well as using figures from traditional storytelling, Highway creates his own mythological characters, including what Cynthia Sugars calls the “hybrid” figure of the Fur Queen (74), who is both Euro-Canadian and Native, male and female, animal and human, trickster and cannibal monster.22 The Fur Queen is first just the Euro-Canadian winner of a beauty contest but soon becomes a fairy godmother who acts as a bringer of infant Cree souls. She reappears throughout the novel in the guise of a number of mythological fox women who provide gifts to help the Okimasis brothers on their journeys, or alternatively as one of many tricksters (including a cross-dressing, genderbending Arctic fox) who bring valuable lessons. And she also makes a cameo appearance as an Aboriginal woman who reminds readers of real historic wrongs; the Fur Queen in a dirty white polyester fur coat who is abducted, raped, and murdered in Highway’s book (105) raises the spectre of Helen Betty Osborne, a real Cree woman brutally raped and murdered in 1971 near The Pas, Manitoba. The transformative political possibilities of storytelling are also evident in Highway’s repeated retelling of the stories of what he calls the Cree “shaman” Chachagathoo (purported to be a historic figure) and the mythological wanderer the Son of Ayash. Chachagathoo is first presented in the novel as a witch who has “bad dream power” in the eyes of Christian missionaries and the boys’ Roman Catholic parents (90–91). Only as adults do Jeremiah and Gabriel learn that she was the last Cree medicine woman in the area where they grew up (245–47), which suggests that alternative and oppressive storytelling by Christian missionaries has damagingly reconfigured Cree spiritual leaders. In contrast, the boys are reminded of the story of the Son of Ayash by their very Christian father, who on his deathbed says not, “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” but “My son … The world has become too evil. With these magic weapons, make a new world” (227). In most Cree versions of this story, the protagonist is abandoned by an evil father figure and must use magic gifts, often provided by Fox Woman, to survive ordeals and return home (Brightman 111–12; “Legend of Iyash”; “Story of Iyash”). In Kiss of the Fur Queen, the evil father can be variously interpreted as the Christian church

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

or the British or Canadian governments, or perhaps even the boys’ Christianized parents, who unwittingly collude in their children’s abuse by allowing them to be sent to residential school. However, some of the gifts given to the boys are, paradoxically, gained through the Euro-Canadian education system, which has tried to suppress Cree language and storytelling through the reading and writing of English, Euro-Canadian, and Christian texts. Only near the end of Highway’s novel do Jeremiah and Gabriel take their father’s advice, when they combine their new skills in music and dance with the traditional tales of their great-grandparents and what they now recognize as the “good dream power” of Chachagathoo (247) to tell their own stories. Several of the pieces they perform about the Son of Ayash (267, 275) and Chachagathoo (295) reveal and revise stories of colonization through the figures of the wanderer who uses the gifts he has been given to heal from abuse, and the medicine woman who is the only person left who can battle the Weetigos of colonization and despair. Thus Highway imaginatively reworks traditional orature to tell a new kind of story that includes the possibilities for healing and reparation.23 The four contemporary Canadian novels that I have considered all risk reinscribing the binary opposition that suggests that those who have power (wealthy people, men, adults, those of European origin) can and should have access to alphabetical literacy, while the primary mode of expression of those without power (poor people, women, young people, those of Métis or First Nations descent) is orality. In her study of literacy and orality, Ruth Finnegan points out that reading and writing have historically been used by a small group in power to retain that power (28, 41–42). The characters in these novels who must tell rather than write stories often have little social power, and their stories constantly face appropriation and revision by those higher in the social hierarchy. This attempted takeover is most evident in Life of Pi and The Handmaid’s Tale, when male academics and older investigators use technologies of sound recording to elicit or interpret alternative and apparently more ordered, logical, and believable versions of events. However, appropriation in a broader societal sense is evident in The Diviners through references to biased history-book versions; and it is evident in Kiss of the Fur Queen through references to the suppression of First Nations traditional stories by means of the multiple texts of colonization and Christianity. That the literacy–orality power binary is turned on its head rather than being reinscribed in these novels is evident in the way that all four texts invite readers to sympathize with or believe in the simulated oral narratives of the less powerful characters, rather than with or in the textual or transcribed versions by those

215

216

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

who typically dominate. Spoken storytelling is privileged in all these texts, and each of its proponents takes on narrative power within the text itself. Thus while Ong suggests that what he calls primary orality, in societies in which people have no knowledge of writing, is “traditionalist” and “conservative” (41), these four novels indicate that self-consciously oral stories can be put to radically different purposes when they are included in contemporary fiction. As Goetsch argues, “oral knowledge may be utilized as oppositional knowledge in the political struggle for independence from colonial powers” (130). Similarly, Finnegan points to “oral rebel poems, party political songs and slogans, revivalist hymns and sermons, and political oratory” as evidence that “oral media can be used not just to preserve the status quo … but also to challenge it” (165, 164). I am aware that I risk charges of generalization when I compare a novel by a Cree writer who makes use of traditional Cree stories, to novels by EuroCanadian authors who refer to less traditional kinds of storytelling. I make this comparison despite the risk because all four books I have considered can be analyzed inside and outside of Canadian literature classrooms for their use of self-conscious spoken storytelling for social and political purposes. Of the novels by Euro-Canadian writers, only Laurence’s approaches the traditional forms of orature that Highway’s celebrates, but all four books provide the illusion of oral stories that are shaped and reshaped, told and retold, constructed and reconstructed. Although the methods the authors use—first-person versus third-person narratives, transcribed recordings versus traditional tales—are different (especially in the case of Highway), all suggest that a self-conscious focus on the oral can invite readers to question the assumed accuracy of apparently authoritative written sources about past events and interactions, in ways that are certainly postmodernist, as Hutcheon argues about The Handmaid’s Tale, but also certainly decolonizing, as Siddall suggests in relation to The Diviners and Sugars in relation to Kiss of the Fur Queen. Students in Canadian fiction classes and I have discovered that the revisionary representations of oral storytelling in these texts demonstrate that, in Canada, works by both First Nations and Euro-Canadian authors can manifest what J. Edward Chamberlin calls “the power and the paradox” of the spoken word (239). As Chamberlin and these books suggest, stories are paradoxical because they are constantly contradicted, revised, and retold, and they are powerful because they can unite or divide as they bring about social change.

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

Notes I thank students in my Canadian Fiction classes for helping me grapple with these ideas, as well as several audience members who commented helpfully and thoughtfully when I presented a less detailed version of this paper in 2008 at The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media conference. My attention was first drawn to techniques of oral storytelling in The Diviners when I sat in on a Canadian Literature class taught by Susan Gingell in the mid1990s. A question that remains unanswered by this paper (and by me) is why I am drawn to, and thus choose to put on course syllabi, works of fiction that use simulated storytelling as a fundamental mode of narration. 1 Gingell credits Tom McArthur with coining the term orature in this context (Gingell, Introduction 2). As she points out (7), some earlier Euro-Canadian works on my course syllabus, such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker (1836) and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), also mimic the voice of an apparently oral storyteller, although storytelling in these books is not as self-conscious or unsettling as it is in the later works on which I focus. 2 See, for example, MacLeod’s “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” and King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story.” 3 With more space and time, I could examine many other Canadian novels for their use of orality. I think in particular of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996), in which Shorty McAdoo’s story provides the central and convincing narrative drive but is overtaken and subverted by those with more societal power. Indeed, the subject of the spoken story in contemporary Canadian fiction calls for a book-length study, one that would focus on differences in writing the oral from various cultural contexts, and similarities in functions of spoken stories in these works. 4 Hochbruck notes that he does not intend “fabrication” to be taken “in a derogatory sense,” but instead “to point out the constructional aspect of the undertaking” (134). 5 Ong’s theories have been rightly criticized for their generalizations, especially for his suggestion that literacy is needed for the fulfillment of human potential (14–15); see, for example, critiques by Finnegan, Webster, Olson, and Goetsch. However, his scrutiny of manifestations of the oral is still relevant to discussions such as mine. 6 See Derrick de Kerckhove’s “McLuhan and the ‘Toronto School of Communication,’” the last chapter of Goetch’s The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, and the introduction to Rita Watson and Menahem Blondeim’s The Toronto School of Communication Theory for discussions of the theories and influence of the Toronto School. 7 Unlike me, Hutcheon ultimately identifies The Diviners as modernist rather than postmodernist because of its “search for order” rather than its “urge to trouble, to question … any such desire for order or truth” (2). 8 See, for example, definitions of tale in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as “[t]he action of telling, relating, or saying; discourse, conversation, talk” (definition 1a) and “[t]hat which one tells; the relation of a series of events” (3a), but also as “[a] story or narrative, true or fictitious, drawn up so as to interest or amuse, or to preserve the history of a fact or incident; a literary composition cast in narrative form” (4). Later definitions suggest that a tale is “[a] mere story, as opposed to a narrative of fact; a fiction, an idle tale; a falsehood” (5a); or “[a] thing now existing only in story; a mere matter of history or tradition; a thing of the past” (5c). 9 See Clara Thomas’s essay “Myth and Manitoba in The Diviners” for a further discussion of myth in the novel.

217

218

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

10 This naming suggests the “close, empathetic, communal identification” with the story that characterizes oral telling (Ong 45, citing Eric Havelock’s 1963 Preface to Plato 145–46). 11 The conflict began when Métis members of the North West Company at the Red River settlement resisted a trade embargo imposed by the Hudson’s Bay Company and the governor of the colony. 12 As Gingell argues in “When X Equals Zero,” acknowledging provenance is a feature of much indigenous orature (459). 13 See Hutcheon’s arguments about the postmodernist nature of this claim (17). 14 Similarly, after Offred says that she thinks about stabbing her Commander, she adds, “In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards.… As I said, this is a reconstruction” (176). 15 Brian Johnson argues in his study of gossip in Atwood’s novel that the “Historical Notes” serve as a metatextual comment on Offred’s narrative that reconfigures her story as something Professor Pieixoto has created (49). See also the discussion by David Hogsette of “the power dynamics of discourse” suggested by this final chapter of Atwood’s book (263). 16 Ong includes recording technology in his definition of “secondary orality” (133), which he calls “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (134). 17 As this passage suggests, Pi, like Offred, sometimes refers to an unnamed you when telling his tale. In Life of Pi, however, the implied listener is either the fictive author or the Japanese investigators, although readers of both books may feel as though they also are invited to take on the roles of auditors. 18 Cole discusses in some detail Martel’s use of Coleridge’s theory. In 1817, while considering his earlier collaboration with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge referred to the “willing suspension of disbelief … which constitutes poetic faith” (qtd. in Cole 24). 19 I employ Highway’s quasi-phonetic spellings of the Cree words and names, with the understanding that other spellings are now more commonly used. 20 Robert Brightman documents several versions of this story in Âcaðôhkîwina and Âcimôwina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians (30, 40–45, 82). 21 The references to Cree oral storytelling in Highway’s novel function in an analogous way to that of Cree language in Neal McLeod’s poetry, as Gingell argues elsewhere in this collection. 22 See Sugars’s essay for a detailed discussion of the role of the Fur Queen in the novel. 23 As Sugars and McKegney argue, the Okimasis brothers are Sons of Ayash because they “creat[e] the world anew through narrative” (McKegney 73; see also Sugars 80 and McKegney’s book on First Nations representations of residential schools, fittingly titled Magic Weapons).

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: Seal, 1998. Print. Brightman, Robert A. Âcaðôhkîwina and Âcimôwina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians. Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1989. Print. Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Knopf, 2003. Print.

“The Power and the Paradox” of the Spoken Story

■

Wendy Roy

Cole, Stewart. “Believing in Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29.2 (2004): 22–36. Print. de Kerckhove, Derrick. “McLuhan and the ‘Toronto School of Communication’.” Canadian Journal of Communication 14.4 (1989): 73–79. Print. Finnegan, Ruth. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Print. Gingell, Susan. Introduction. Special issue on Textualizing Orature & Orality. Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004): 1–18. Print. ———. “Teaching the Talk That Walks on Paper: Oral Traditions and Textualized Orature in the Canadian Literature Classroom.” Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. 285–300. Print. ———. “Towards an Aesthetics of Noise: Writing the Oral in the Canadian Context.” 2006 Pratt Lecture. St. John’s: Memorial U of Newfoundland, 2008. Print. ———. “When X Equals Zero: The Politics of Voice in First Peoples Poetry by Women.” English Studies in Canada 24.4 (1998): 447–66. Print. Goetsch, Paul. The Oral and the Written in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003. Print. Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Literacy in Traditional Societies. Ed. Jack Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. 21–68. Print. Hochbruck, Wolfgang. “ ‘I Have Spoken’: Fictional ‘Orality’ in Indigenous Fiction.” College Literature 23.2 (1996): 132–42. Print. Hogsette, David S. “Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s Role in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act.” Critique 38.4 (1997): 262–78. Print. Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Toronto: Doubleday, 1998. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern. Toronto: Oxford, 1988. Print. Johnson, Brian. “Language, Power, and Responsibility in The Handmaid’s Tale: Toward a Discourse of Literary Gossip.” Canadian Literature 148 (1996): 39–55. Print. King, Thomas. “A Coyote Columbus Story.” One Good Story, That One. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. 121–27. Print. Klarer, Mario. “Orality and Literacy as Gender-Supporting Structures in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Mosaic 28.4 (1995): 129–42. Print. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. 1974. Toronto: McClelland, 1988. Print. “The Legend of Iyash.” Keewaytinook Okimakanak First Nations Council. Web. 20 July 2008. MacLeod, Alistair. “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun.” 1985. Island: The Complete Stories. New York: Norton, 2001. 310–20. Print. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. 2001. Toronto: Vintage, 2002. Print. McKegney, Sam. “Claiming Native Narrative Control: Tomson Highway on Residential Schooling.” Culture and the State: Disability Studies and Indigenous Studies. Ed.

219

220

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux. Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studio, 2003. 66–74. Print. ———. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2007. Print. Olson, David. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 1982. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Pifer, Lynn. “ ‘It Was Like the Book Says, But It Wasn’t’: Oral Folk History in Laurence’s The Diviners.” New Perspectives on Margaret Laurence: Poetic Narrative, Multiculturalism, and Feminism. Ed. Greta M. K. McCormick Coger. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. 143–50. Print. Siddall, Gillian. “Teaching Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners as a Postcolonial Text.” Canadian Children’s Literature 79 (1995): 39–46. Print. “The Story of Iyash.” Miighan-Kurt Co. Web. 20 July 2008. Stratton, Florence. “ ‘Hollow at the Core’: Deconstructing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29.2 (2004): 5–21. Print. Sugars, Cynthia. “Weetigos and Weasels: Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Canadian Postcolonialism.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 9.1 (2002): 69–91. Print. Thomas, Clara. “Myth and Manitoba in The Diviners.” The Canadian Novel: Here and Now. Ed. John Moss. Toronto: NC Press, 1983. 103–18. Print. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Englishman’s Boy. 1996. Toronto: McClelland, 2003. Print. Watson, Rita, and Menahem Blondeim. Introduction. The Toronto School of Communication Theory: Interpretations, Extensions, Applications. Ed. Rita Watson and Menahem Blondeim. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. 7–26. Print. Webster, Anthony K. “Keeping the Word: On Orality and Literacy (With a Sideways Glance at Navajo).” Oral Tradition 21.2 (2006): 295–324. Print.

WHAT’S IN A FRAME? The Significance of Relational Word Bundles in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow Mareike Neuhaus

Blue Marrow by the Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe has an intriguing textual history. Originally published by McClelland and Stewart in 1998, Halfe’s poem was reissued by Coteau Books in 2004 in a revised and partly rewritten edition that differs considerably from the poem’s earlier published version. Of the changes made to the revised edition, the completely rewritten narrative frame is particularly intriguing,1 especially given the relevance of opening and closing frames in Aboriginal oratures and in oral traditions around the world more generally (Gingell, “When” 464, n17). The revised narrative frame in Blue Marrow not only provides the reader with the poem’s cultural and spiritual as well as interpretative contexts—thus marking the poem as a performance of the page (Bauman)—but also demands a high degree of readerly participation. Moreover, the textualization of orality thus achieved relies on what I call relational word bundles, one of the key elements of a reading strategy for textualized orality in Aboriginal literatures, and one that is based in Aboriginal languages rather than the “colonizer’s tongue.” Jeannette C. Armstrong (Okanagan) opens her essay “Aboriginal Literatures: A Distinctive Genre within Canadian Literature” with the apt observation that “[c]entral to the question whether Aboriginal literatures are a distinct genre within Canadian literature is the basic issue of Aboriginal oral traditions’ relevance and potency. Those Aboriginal literatures, in their contemporary written form, must first be positioned as an evolution of oral traditions” (180). One notable shift in the evolution from Aboriginal oratures to contemporary Aboriginal literatures, alongside the movement from oral to written discourse, is the change in language. While Aboriginal oratures were traditionally, and in part still are, composed in Aboriginal mother tongues, the majority of Aboriginal literatures are written in non-Aboriginal languages, often English. Yet one predominant and distinguishing characteristic of North American Aboriginal languages has not featured at all in discussions 221

222

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

of the movement from Aboriginal oratures to Aboriginal literatures: many Aboriginal languages in North America show a tendency toward the use of what linguists refer to as holophrases (Rood 170; Mithun 38), that is, polysyllabic units of utterance resulting from polysynthesis, which is the process of joining both lexical and grammatical morphemes into one single word that in many Indo-European languages corresponds to a complete sentence or clause (Comrie 42). An analysis of the narrative frame in Halfe’s Blue Marrow can serve to introduce holophrastic reading as a culturally specific reading strategy for textualized orality in Aboriginal literatures and to show the usefulness of the strategy for explaining features of these literatures. Such an introduction first requires discussion of the morphology of the holophrase, and then an analysis of its functional English-language equivalent, the relational word bundle, as a rhetorical device modelled on the holophrase. With these preliminaries in place, the holophrastic reading strategy can be applied to discussion of Blue Marrow, a long poem that relies heavily on nêhiyawêwin (Cree language), a holophrastic language belonging to the family of Algonquian languages. The reading of Blue Marrow offered here, however, focuses less on Halfe’s code switching from English to Cree than on the poem’s narrative frame. Comparing the poem’s two editions makes clear that Blue Marrow continues traditions of Cree orature in print by framing, and thereby contextualizing, the narrator’s “walk on paper” (Blue Marrow 98) with the help of relational word bundles.

The Background: Textualized Orality and the Holophrase “Textualized orality” refers to the use of oral strategies in writing. As such, it needs to be distinguished from textualized orature (Gingell, Introduction 3–4).2 As numerous linguists and literary critics have pointed out,3 literature often makes use of oral strategies—strategies that, as Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher argue, are independent of the medium because they are determined by the relative immediacy or distance between speaker/author and listener/reader (17–24). If all literatures textualize the oral to some degree, how do Aboriginal strategies differ from those found in non-Aboriginal literatures? One possible answer to this question lies in acknowledging that the movement from Aboriginal oratures to Aboriginal literatures involves not only a different mode of discourse but also a different language, English (and sometimes French, Spanish, or Portuguese), rather than an Aboriginal mother tongue. The key to a culturally sensitive approach to textualized

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

orality in Aboriginal literatures, therefore, is the holophrase, a structure that is “especially well developed” in North America (Rood 170). As noted earlier, the holophrase is a one-word sentence or clause. An example is the Plains Cree word “ki-nohte-h-âcimo-stâ-tinâwâw,”4 which translates as “I want to tell you folks a story.” The base of any holophrase is always a verb—in this case “âcimo-stâ” (“to tell someone a story”) combined with the preverb “nohte” (“want”); this verb has to “include some expression of each of the main participants in the event described by the verb” (Baker 111)—that is, the subject (“I”) and all of the objects (“you”), which in my example are expressed in the combination of the prefix “ki-” with the suffix “-tinâwâw.” In other words, polysynthetic verbs are what Wallace Chafe calls “holistic” (“Discourse Effects” 44–45). Due to their morphological structure, polysynthetic languages have a comparatively high degree of expressivity, when measured in terms of information expressed per word, and invite a figurative use of language. The Okanagan word for “dog” (kekwep), for example, consists of two root syllables that, put together, translate into “fur growing on a little living thing” (Armstrong, “Land Speaking” 190). Kekwep is, then, not only a complete clause but also a very apt and descriptive way of referring to a dog.5 The meaning of this word, however, is not readily accessible to an outsider by merely “un-chunking” it because, as a complex sign, it is more than the addition of its pieces: it is a figure of speech. Holophrases, then, do not just concern morphology but affect Aboriginal discourse patterns at large. Speaking is produced in a series of spurts called idea units—short clauses that can be identified by intonation, pausing, or syntax (Chafe, “Deployment” 14; “Linguistic Differences” 106). Once an idea unit in polysynthetic languages includes a holophrase, this idea unit will always be a substantive idea unit (in other words, an idea unit that communicates events, states, or referents; see Chafe, Discourse 63–64), and the holophrase, expressing the key components of grammar needed in telling a story, will form its core. Everything else needed in telling a story may be loosely grouped around the holophrase, but for such modifiers to signify, they need to be related to a given holophrase. If all the modifiers in an Aboriginal discourse are dropped, the grid of a story remains; once all its holophrases are dropped, however, this grid is lost. Forming the grid of any given narrative composed in a polysynthetic language, holophrases thus perform important narrative functions.6 For literary purposes, then, and to summarize this discussion, the holophrase may be described as a productive (in the linguistic sense of the word)7 and ordered concatenation of signs that is built around a verb, forms the core of

223

224

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

a substantive polysynthetic idea unit, and functions as a significant narrative unit in polysynthetic discourse. When Aboriginal authors composing in English weave Aboriginal words and phrases into their writing, they show involvement with their readers by defining the terms on which readers may participate with the text. Once code switching in English-language Aboriginal literatures includes the use of holophrases from a specific Aboriginal language, this code switching becomes a strategy in textualizing orality that must be regarded as culturally specific. But do contemporary Aboriginal authors weave into their works English-language equivalents to the holophrase that also qualify as Aboriginal strategies in textualizing orality?

The Theory: The Holophrase and Its Functional Equivalent in English Discourse The movement from the holophrase in Aboriginal languages to potential equivalents in English discourse implies a translation process that, following the model proposed by Eugene Nida and Charles Taber in The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969), can strive either for an equivalence of form or for what they call dynamic equivalence, that is, an equivalence of function. In order to arrive at a functional equivalent of the holophrase, a definitional transition from linguistics to rhetoric is needed to shift the focus from form (grammar) to function. Dropping and/or replacing all those components in my definition of the holophrase that represent purely linguistic notions, it is possible to define the functional equivalent to the holophrase as a creative and ordered concatenation of signs that forms the core of a complex idea and functions as a significant narrative unit in a given Aboriginal discourse. The holophrase’s functional equivalent is analogous to but at the same time separate from its source object. It lacks the unique morphological structure of the holophrase; equivalent to the holophrase in function but not in form, it is not a one-word sentence or clause that is built around a verb. The functional equivalent does, however, translate the unique morphological structure of its source object to the level of function by becoming a series of interconnected signs that point to a bundle of meaning—such as a figure of speech or an inter- or intratextual reference—which, just like the holophrase, may be said to perform important narrative functions. Marking a figure of speech in its own right, the holophrase’s functional equivalent goes beyond the structure from which it derives. Because of the peculiar relationship to its source object, it may thus be referred to—on analogy with terms such as parody (as understood by Linda Hutcheon and

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

others)—as a paraholophrase (from the Greek prefix “para,” “distinct from, but analogous to”), the term I adopt in “That’s Raven Talk.” As will become apparent in the analysis of Blue Marrow below, paraholophrases are figures of speech with significant narrative functions that, combined with other such figures, form the narrative grid of a given text. Paraholophrases, then, are figures that establish relationships between other figures and, in doing so, create an even bigger figure, synecdoche writ large (narrative grid pro narrative). A more apt term for this rhetorical structure—one that is more fully grounded in Aboriginal traditions and that I will therefore adopt in this essay—is relational word bundle, which intentionally evokes Metis writer Maria Campbell’s notion of the “word bundle”: “I always tell my students don’t just settle for the word, but imagine that the word is carrying this big huge bundle. What’s inside? What are the roots of that word? What is the story? Is there a song in the bundle, a ceremony, a protocol? Where did it come from? The word bundle is full of treasure” (200).8 It is a treasure in significant part because the word bundle, in its reference to Cree sacred bundles, also has spiritual implications. Similarly, the relational word bundle is not merely a rhetorical figure but, in its embodiment of Indigenous notions of kinship, also has much larger relevance. Jace Weaver (Cherokee) has described Indigenous notions of the relation between individual and community as “synecdochic (partto-whole), while the more Western conception is metonymic (part-to-part).” Indigenous peoples, he further explains, “tend to see themselves in terms of ‘self in society’ rather than ‘self and society’” (39). As synecdoche writ large, relational word bundles are the rhetorical embodiment of Indigenous conceptions of self and community. Further, they facilitate the invention of story, hence allowing performances of peoplehood, which in most Indigenous contexts is seen as being defined by the interdependence of language, sacred history, ceremonial cycle, and place/territory (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis). The definition of the relational word bundle given above marks the latter as a figure of speech that, given its structure and function, works on the level of both content (“core of a complex idea”) and form (“significant narrative unit”). There is nothing inherent in its definition that would point to the non-existence of the relational word bundle in literature per se. I would, however, refrain from applying the term “relational word bundle” to occurrences in non-Aboriginal literatures. Relational word bundles are significant only in the context of Aboriginal literatures. Only in these literatures can we trace relations to oratures that are composed in languages that, unlike English, are polysynthetic, and only Aboriginal literatures carry Aboriginal expressions of peoplehood into the future. As a rhetorical category, relational word bundles

225

226

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

help distinguish Aboriginal strategies in textualizing orality from those found in other cultural settings and point to a reading of orality in Aboriginal literatures that avoids approaching the originary language by way of looking at the target language. In other words, the relational word bundle is only one of many signifiers of textualized orality in Aboriginal literatures composed in English but is, arguably, a central one. What I call a holophrastic reading implies looking for Aboriginal-language holophrases, holophrastic traces, and relational word bundles.9 My interest here is not to conduct an exemplary holophrastic reading of Blue Marrow but to discuss the role of relational word bundles with respect to the narrative structure of Halfe’s long poem. This decision is informed on the one hand by the limited space available, and on the other hand by the motivation to discuss the significance of opening and closing frames in Aboriginal literatures as well as to shift the attention given to Cree language influences in Blue Marrow to other forms besides code switching.10 It should suffice to mention at this point that Cree holophrases as well as holophrastic traces situate Halfe’s poem in its proper linguistic context and complement the textualization achieved through the use of relational word bundles, whose significance in Blue Marrow will be discussed in the analysis that follows.

Framing the “walk on paper”: Relational Word Bundles in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow Blue Marrow passes on to the next generation the first-person narratives of numerous voices whose stories are woven together by another first-person narrator, a contemporary Cree woman. The narrator opens the poem with the lines “Glory be to okâwîmâwaskiy / To the nôhkom âtayôhkan / To pawâkan” (1), which inscribe key notions of Cree religious beliefs into the Christian Gloria Patri (“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit”). okâwîmâwaskiy refers to Mother Earth, who is honoured by many Aboriginal cultural groups in North America as the one who gives life. nôhkom âtayôhkan is the “Grandmother Keeper of Sacred Legends” and as such serves as a synecdoche of the line of Cree fore- and grandmothers whose stories are presented in Blue Marrow. Finally, the last of the Cree nouns inserted into the Gloria Patri, pawâkan, is the Cree word for “spirit helper,” the “Guardian of Dreams and Visions” (1). What powers are given to the narrator in Blue Marrow is not clear, but the invocation of pawâkan in the first two lines of the poem suggests that whatever words follow next have been given to the narrator by her spirit helper. The vision in which the narrator meets her pawâkan is never explicitly

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

described in the opening, yet the scattered stories between the introductory prayer of the poem and the three-page invocation of the fore- and grandmothers ending the first section may be read as a retelling of the narrator’s vision quest. This vision quest turns out to be the story of how she hears her ancestors’ stories through nôhkom âtayôhkan—stories that cause the narrator to “beg[i]n the walk for them” (3) or, as she puts it at the very end of the opening, stories that she passes on to her children in what becomes the poem: Grandmothers hold me. I must pass all that I possess, every morsel to my children. These small gifts. (7)

Ending the opening on the notion of passing on stories as gifts, the narrator joins the giver in a chain of giving. The narrator’s offerings to her children, and ultimately also to the poem’s readers, have been given to her by “Voice Dancer pawâkan, the Guardian of Dreams and Visions” (1); the poem’s opening has thus come full circle. As the narrator accepts her position as the intermediary between the past generations and those still to come, it becomes clear that the initial description of pawâkan was intentional: the phrase “Voice Dancer pawâkan, the Guardian of Dreams and Visions” points to the meaning and function of pawâkan, but by evoking both the Northern Lights and pawâkan’s role as the narrator’s spirit helper, this phrase also links the messages of the ancestors with the narrator’s dreams and visions, thereby giving birth to the poem. “Voice Dancer pawâkan, the Guardian of Dreams and Visions” tells in one phrase the story of the narrator’s vision quest. This phrase is, then, key for readers to understand the story that, however sketchily, unfolds in the opening pages of the poem and without which there would be no poem. The phrase “Glory be to okâwîmâwaskiy / To the nôhkom âtayôhkan / To pawâkan” rewrites Christian doxology and anticipates the roles of Mother Earth, of the Eternal Grandmother and Keeper of legends, and of pawâkan, all of whom accompany the narrator on her walk to vision, but it is also a metonymic invocation of the metaphor that the narrator uses after having had her vision: “The prairie is full of bones. The bones stand and sing and I feel the weight of them as they guide my fingers on this page. / See the blood” (2–3). Finally, the phrase “I began the walk for them” becomes a metaphor of the narrator’s decision to speak for her ancestors, to become their intermediary, and thus to compose the very poem readers are in the process of reading, and which the narrator

227

228

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

offers to her children as if it were food, “I must pass all that I possess / every morsel to my children” (7). The metaphor rounding out the poem’s opening points to the importance of the stories, which the narrator has been given by her grandmothers and will now offer to the next generation to ensure its survival. Readers are guided into the poem by a number of phrases that feature prominently in its opening pages. The “chunks” of language just discussed, namely ■

“Voice Dancer pawâkan, the Guardian of Dreams and Visions” (1; metonymy),

■

“Glory be to okâwîmâwaskiy / To the nôhkom âtayôhkan / To pawâkan” (1; metonymy), “The prairie is full of bones. The bones stand and sing and I feel the weight of them as they guide my fingers on this page. / See the blood” (2–3; metaphor), “I began the walk for them” (3; metaphor), and “every morsel to my children. / These small gifts” (7; metaphor),

■

■ ■

all have in common that they are equivalent in function to the holophrase and thus qualify as relational word bundles. First, these chunks of language are series of interrelated signs. They are not one-word sentences; neither are they all built around a verb. However, these chunks create “a gap between sign and meaning”—that is, a figure of speech (Genette 49)—and thus carry a surplus of meaning that readers have to work to understand. In other words, these “chunks” form the cores of intricate ideas. Second, they also constitute the structural hinges on which the opening of Blue Marrow is constructed and thus perform important narrative functions. While these “chunks” may not qualify as holophrases, as functional equivalents to the holophrase they do qualify as relational word bundles. The changes in the revised opening of Halfe’s poem are far from marginal or insignificant. First, the revised edition adds the invocation of “Voice Dancer pawâkan” and the parody of the Gloria Patri. It also interpolates in its enumeration of the narrator’s fore- and grandmothers the parodies of Christian prayers—parodies that serve to recall the three important notions of Cree spirituality that function as the main narrative components of the poem, namely, okâwîmâwaskiy, nôhkom âtayôhkan, and pawâkan. Finally, the first edition of the poem explicitly points readers to the origin and nature of the poem, namely, the “Women throughout this country whose spirit and / songs haven’t been heard. Who will be heard” because the narrator will “Tell

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

the story. / Tear down barbed-wire fences” in order “to see [her children] through life” (1st ed., 5). In order to understand that the poem’s beginning marks it as a recitation of the ancestor’s stories that the narrator has been given in a vision, readers of the revised edition rely on deciphering the opening’s relational word bundles. The latter, however, only suggest but never explicitly tell readers that the story they are reading is the story of the narrator’s vision quest, thus forcing readers to participate more deeply in the poem. The deleted lines toward the opening’s end are, then, not needed for readers of the revised edition to make sense of the opening. If these parts had been kept, the opening would be less writerly, in Roland Barthes’s sense (S/Z 4–6); that is to say, the opening would no longer call for the same degree of readerly participation in deciphering the poem’s interpretative context, which according to Richard Bauman is provided in performance through framing (9). The relational word bundles used in the construction of the revised opening help frame the poem by providing readers with the interpretative context as well as by marking Blue Marrow as a prayer that grows out of a dream vision, rather than “just” a story, thus highlighting the cultural and spiritual contexts of the revised edition. A comparison of the opening in the two editions of Blue Marrow thus reveals that the revised text has become increasingly reliant on relational word bundles. By creating the poem’s spiritual, cultural, and interpretative contexts and by showing the author’s involvement with her audience, the relational word bundles constituting the poem’s opening textualize oral strategies (context, involvement, and participation), and thus are significant for the construction of the poem, both in terms of forming its narrative hinges and in terms of creating “response-ability” in readers. Kimberly Blaeser describes this state as “being responsible by being engaged in life processes” (“Pagans Rewriting the Bible” 12) and as a state that is incited by the “active exchange” that comes with performance (Blaeser, “Writing Voices Speaking” 54). Having said her “opening prayer,” the narrator in Blue Marrow can begin her “walk on paper” for her ancestors. What follows are a series of poems in which primarily Cree women are given a chance to tell their stories of First Nations and European contact—stories of rape, hunger, loss, and cultural disorientation. Toward the end of this walk, the narrator enters into conversations with her parents, which contain the first traces of a narrative close. In her dialogue with her father, she introduces him to readers as looking with his “dubious eye” (80). The reference to his outward appearance is notable for its use of the singular form, which links her father’s eye with nôhkom’s many faces, each of which is displaying “one large eye” in the narrator’s vision

229

230

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

described in the opening (2). Other intratextual remarks in the narrator’s conversation with her father include instances of the metaphor of the narrator as being on a journey. Indian Affairs took the narrator away from her father and, she says, “Gave me a one-way / ticket.” She ended up going to residential school, and when she left, she says she “filled [her] fist with [her] father’s / walk” (85): “For miles my father and I / walked,” while “Mother and I / held our breath a hundred miles / across the sôhkêciwani-sîpiy – / the Fast Flowing River” (86; italics in original). The references to the narrator’s act of walking call to mind the “walk” she decides to undertake for her ancestors after having had her vision (1–3). When her mother’s memory stirs, the narrator joins her “in a clear and mournful chant” (87), singing the Cree Morning Song that is “sung by many Plains Cree people” (Halfe, Bear 128). With its references to voice and the land that evoke okâwîmâwaskiy, nôhkom âtayôhkan, and pawâkan in the narrative’s opening, this morning song, while on one level textualized Cree orature—it is also used in “Ditch Bitch” in Bear Bones and Feathers (50–51)—becomes an allegory of the narrator’s vision. As her mother speaks about her grandchildren, the narrator starts to remember how she would “walk the valley with my little ones, / picking chokecherries. I’d crush till / I burst all over my canvas” (92)—berries that, in the opening, she recorded picking with the woman she calls nôhkom, “[c]rush[ing] them between the rocks” (2).11 Finally, the narrator retells her vision in the “Ram Woman poem” (96– 97), but this time she directly addresses nôhkom (âtayôhkan) as Ram Woman and refers to their meeting as “a Vision” that involves the “flipp[ing] of many faces” (97). The narrator’s description of Ram Woman as “Stone-aged wrinkled” underlines her age and further supports a reading of her as nôhkom (âtayôhkan) in the opening. Like nôhkom (âtayôhkan) (2), Ram Woman stares with one “large eye” (96, 97), a symbol of her vision and wisdom, and sings to the narrator (2, 97). As in the opening, the narrator stands “naked beneath her falls” (96; also see 1), exposed and vulnerable. When the two meet, Ram Woman is pounding her hooves as if to inscribe onto the narrator’s body her duty to walk for her foremothers (96); but as readers know by now, this hoofprint disappears the moment the narrator fulfills this duty (3). The “Ram Woman poem” also contains a reference to the Northern Lights, which “[r]ibboned the Sky” and “Raw-boned / […] left their blood” (97). These lines explicitly identify the Northern Lights of the opening with the bones populating the prairie, whose marrow, or blood, produces the stories (2) the narrator is gathering: “In these moccasin gardens / I pick my medicines” (97). The “Ram Woman poem” in the narrative’s closing, then, fills all

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

those blanks that have been left in the opening; thus, the narrative is about to end and may begin yet again. The narrator closes her poem with the words “A pagan. Again. / All my relations. ahâw” (99). Moving from vision to song and prayer, the closing is the opening told backwards and hence establishes a cycle within the frame thus completed. The line marks the narrator’s self-discovery and self-affirmation as a Cree woman. “All my Relations” (99) fulfills genre conventions of Aboriginal prayer and speech and points to the importance of okâwîmâwaskiy and nôhkom âtayôhkan. With the key notions of the collection thus evoked, the narrator is finally prepared to say “ahâw,” a formulaic discourse marker used to end a formal conversation in Cree. The narrator’s task is thus fulfilled: she has imparted to the next generation the stories she received from her ancestors in a vision. With the survival of the tradition assured, her poem can now begin anew. The intratextual references to the opening discussed above all take the form of figures of speech that can be read as relational word bundles: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

■ ■

■ ■ ■ ■

■ ■ ■

“dubious eye” (80; symbol) “Gave me a one-way / ticket” (85; metaphor), “filled my fist with my father’s / walk” (85; metaphor), “For miles my father and I walked” (86; symbol), “Mother and I / held our breath a hundred miles / across the sôhkêciwani-sîpiy – / the Fast Flowing River” (86; metaphor), the Cree Morning Song (87; allegory), “walk the valley with my little ones, / picking chokecherries. I’d crush till / I burst all over my canvas” (92; metaphor), “Ram Woman” (96; symbol), “large eye” (96; symbol), “naked beneath her falls” (96; symbol), “Ribboned the Sky” and “Raw-boned / they left their blood” (97; metaphor), “In these moccasin gardens / I pick my medicines” (97; metaphor), “our / talk would walk on paper” (98; metaphor), and “A pagan. Again” (99; irony).

Picked up toward the end of the long poem, the references to the opening perfect the poem’s narrative frame. Suggesting a bundle of meaning and performing important narrative functions, these intratextual references are equivalent in function to the holophrase. Like the opening, then, the closing depends on the use of relational word bundles. Together with the relational

231

232

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

word bundles of the introduction, those of the poem’s conclusion serve as the structural hinges of Blue Marrow. They reveal the author’s involvement with her audience in the attempt to invite reader participation because they provide the interpretative context to the main part of the poem. The narrator closes by evoking a night song—Grandmother is now Grandmother Moon (99)—in a poem that she opened with a prayer. Prayer and song, both comparatively oral genres traditionally accompanying Plains Cree ceremonies (Mandelbaum 229–36), constitute the frame for the narrator’s “walk on paper” that becomes Blue Marrow. The importance of this narrative frame lies in emphasizing the cultural significance of the fore- and grandmothers’ stories: these stories are not just told in writing; they are the ancestors’ offerings to readers through the medium of the narrator who gratefully acknowledges their gifts by passing on their stories to others in the form of a prayer growing out of the narrator’s vision. The first edition of Blue Marrow lacks not only the Cree Gloria Patri but also the last two lines of the revised edition, “A pagan. Again. / All my relations. ahâw,” ending instead on “Grandmother, the Woman in Me” (1st ed., 90). In fact, the inserted final lines only make sense in the revised edition, which opens with a prayer and has to close with a prayer for the narrative frame to suggest a cyclical shape. Comparing the closings, as well as the openings, in the two editions of Blue Marrow underlines the significance of the relational word bundles as a narrative hinge as well as a culturally specific strategy in textualizing orality. These comparisons furthermore demonstrate that relational word bundles have to be interconnected in order to form the structure on which the narrative hinges as well as to create context, author involvement, and reader participation. Susan Gingell has referred to Maria Campbell’s and Louise Bernice Halfe’s choice of poetic style as “appropriating to their own purpose the Western hierarchy of genres that places poetry above prose” (“When X Equals Zero” 458). Aboriginal language structures invite a figurative use of language, which is encountered in Western literatures more often in poetry than in prose, whereas North American Aboriginal oral poetry is usually narrative in nature and is characterized by what Dell Hymes (“Discovering Oral Performance”) has termed measured, as opposed to metered, verse. Considering its Aboriginal context, I suggest reading Blue Marrow not so much as an appropriation of the Western genre hierarchy as a continuation of Aboriginal linguistic and creative traditions, one that only happens to fit conveniently into the literary tradition that has been described as “distinctively Canadian” (Tierney and Robbeson 1). The double voicing of the long poem that Stephen

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

Scobie identified as creating “dialogue between the lyric impulse of the short poem and the more extended form of discursive strategy and practice” (46) is also manifest in Blue Marrow. On a much deeper level, however, this double voicing marks both the presence of different languages within one literary tradition and an engagement of two different traditions (Aboriginal/Western) of verbal art in one literary work. Involving a figurative use of language (lyric) and taking over important narrative functions (epic), relational word bundles appear to lend themselves to the composition of long poems. In Blue Marrow, they help construct the opening and closing frame that serves to guide readers into as well as out of the narrative by providing them with the interpretative context required to make sense of this narrative’s passing on of Cree oral history. In order to uncover this context, readers of Blue Marrow first have to identify the frame and then, ultimately, the relational word bundles that constitute it. By closing but not ending the narrative, the frame helps build a cyclical narrative structure for Blue Marrow, thus evoking one of the genre conventions of Cree orature. Blue Marrow, then, conflates not just discourse modes (the written and the oral) but also languages (Cree and English), genres (lyric and epic), and literary traditions (Aboriginal and Western). Creating the poem’s various contexts, showing author involvement, and requiring reader participation, relational word bundles are a particularly crucial strategy in textualizing orality in Halfe’s poem. These relational word bundles are grammatically very different from the holophrases in Aboriginal languages, such as Cree, but the function of the relational word bundles in Blue Marrow is equivalent to that of holophrases: they form the very grid of Halfe’s long poem—just as much as Cree holophrases form the grid of narratives composed in nêhiyawêwin. They thus enable the passing on of Cree traditions on Cree terms, despite the move from nêhiyawêwin into English.

Conclusion My discussion of the narrative frame of Blue Marrow has demonstrated the far-reaching consequences of the textual revisions made to the poem’s opening and closing frame in the transition from first to revised edition. By making use of a cyclical structure, the poem passes on stories in a highly contextualized manner that draws readers into the narrator’s “walk on paper,” which is framed as performance. Creating in its narrative frame “responseability” among readers, Halfe’s poem successfully continues Cree traditions of orature in print. The relational word bundles in Blue Marrow function as culturally specific signifiers of textualized orality; more important, however,

233

234

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

they also help create the poem’s cyclical narrative frame that contextualizes the poem, thus ensuring the passing on of Cree history in print. My reading of Blue Marrow has focused on one particular manifestation of the holophrase in English discourse, the relational word bundle; as I have shown in “That’s Raven Talk,” contemporary Aboriginal literatures composed in English also feature holophrastic traces and holophrases in code switching as central signifiers of textualized orality, which help distinguish Aboriginal from non-Aboriginal strategies in textualizing orality and point to an approach to orality in Aboriginal literatures from inside rather than outside the Aboriginal languages. The culturally sensitive reading strategy introduced here, holophrastic reading, raises a number of questions that cannot be ignored. The definition of relational word bundles, as it stands at the moment, does not entail any references to the tribal and linguistic specificity of relational word bundles. The question thus remains whether we can make out tribally specific uses of relational word bundles in Aboriginal verbal traditions—oral or written—and, if this is the case, how far these uses are language related. Finally, the rhetoric of relational word bundles—their internal rhetorical structures and functions as well as their roots in Aboriginal rhetorical traditions—needs to be investigated in detail.

Notes I am indebted to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto that enabled me to write this article. I would also like to thank Martin Kuester and Ted Dyck for their mentorship; Neil ten Kortenaar for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper; and the editors of this collection and the anonymous readers for their feedback and comments. A comprehensive holophrastic reading of Blue Marrow is available in my chapter on Halfe, “That’s Raven Talk”: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures (CPRC Press 2011). Some of the analysis in that chapter, as well as in the book’s introduction, is reprinted here with permission of CPRC Press; however, the current essay adopts a revised terminology and contextualizes relational word bundles as synecdoche writ large, thus reflecting my current research on holophrastic reading. 1 Other changes made to the revised edition of Blue Marrow include the addition of a glossary, a different cover photograph, changes in the Cree orthography, changes of tense, and the addition of in-line translations. 2 This distinction is, of course, a logical inference from the distinction drawn between orature (a particular body of discourse) and orality (a particular quality). 3 See, for example, Biber, Chafe (“Integration”), Éjchenbaum, Goetsch, Kellogg, Lakoff, Ochs, Polanyi, Tannen (Talking Voices), and Willinsky. 4 The hyphens mark the various building blocks of this particular holophrase, thus revealing its morphological structure. 5 From the point of view of the English language, “fur growing on a little living thing” is a phrase, not a clause, because it lacks a finite verb (i.e., a verb that is inflected for person and tense, etc.). From the point of view of Okanagan grammar, however, it may be

What’s in a Frame?

6

7

8 9

10 11

■

Mareike Neuhaus

argued that “fur growing on a little living thing” is a clause, since Okanagan clauses rely on structures that avoid the use of copulae (see Mattina 30–31). Holophrases should not be confused with cardinal functions or nuclei, that is, with narrative units that according to Roland Barthes “define the very framework of the narrative” (“Introduction” 250–51), since they point to a complementary and consequential act and thus ensure the continuation of story (247–48, 268). In Aboriginal discourse, cardinal functions may be expressed in the form of holophrases, but they do not necessarily have to be holophrases. Similarly, not every holophrase ultimately has a cardinal function. For example, the Mohawk holophrase ra-wir-a-nuhwe’s (“he likes the baby,” Baker 112) may be used in a story only to give additional information about a character and his personality; not directly needed for the continuation of the story, it does not qualify as a cardinal function. While “there is still no consensus about the nature of productivity” despite the centrality of the concept in morphology, linguists usually describe it as “the possibility to coin new complex words according to the word formation rules of a given language” (Plag 5–6). I owe this reference to Susan Gingell. Holophrastic traces are traces of either the morphological structure of the holophrase or of discourse features invited by polysynthesis. See Neuhaus for a comprehensive discussion of holophrastic reading. For a discussion of code switching in Blue Marrow, see Cook, Gingell (“When”), and Stigter. The reference to nôhkom at this point in the poem may be to the Eternal Grandmother.

Works Cited Armstrong, Jeannette C. “Aboriginal Literatures: A Distinctive Genre within Canadian Literature.” Hidden in Plain Sight: Contributions of Aboriginal People to Canadian Identity and Culture. Ed. David R. Newhouse, Cora Voyageur, and Dan Beavon. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. 180–86. Print. ———. “Land Speaking.” Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing. Ed. Simon J. Ortiz. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1998. 174–94. Print. Baker, Mark C. The Atoms of Language. New York: Basic, 2001. Print. Barthes, Roland. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 237–72. Print. ———. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. by Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1974. Print. Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. With essays by Barbara A. Babcock et al. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1984. Print. Biber, Douglas. Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-linguistic Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly M. “Pagans Rewriting the Bible: Heterodoxy and the Representation of Spirituality in Native American Literature.” ARIEL 25.1 (1994): 12–31. Print. ———. “Writing Voices Speaking: Native Authors and an Oral Aesthetic.” Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts. Ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren Rice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. 53–68. Print. Campbell, Maria. “‘One Small Medicine’: An Interview with Maria Campbell.” By Susan Gingell. Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004): 188–205. Print.

235

236

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Chafe, Wallace L. “The Deployment of Consciousness in the Production of a Narrative.” The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Ed. Wallace L. Chafe. Norwood: Ablex, 1980. 9–50. Print. ———. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print. ———. “Discourse Effects on Polysynthesis.” Discourse Across Languages and Cultures. Ed. Carol Lynn Moder and Aida Martinovic-Zic. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. 37–52. Print. ———. “Integration and Involvement in Spoken and Written Language.” Vol. 2 of Semiotics Unfolding: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Vienna, July 1979. Ed. Tasso Borbé. Berlin: Mouton, 1979. 1095–1102. Print. ———. “Linguistic Differences Produced by Differences between Speaking and Writing.” Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing. Ed. David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 105–23. Print. Comrie, Bernard. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Print. Cook, Méira. “Bone Memory: Transcribing Voice in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow.” Canadian Literature 166 (2000): 85–110. Print. Éjchenbaum, Boris M. “The Illusion of Skaz.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (1975): 233–36. Print. Genette, Gérard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Gingell, Susan. Introduction. Textualizing Orature and Orality. Ed. Gingell. Spec. issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004): 1–18. Print. ———. “When X Equals Zero: The Politics of Voice in First Peoples Poetry by Women.” English Studies in Canada 24.4 (1998): 447–66. Print. Goetsch, Paul. “Fingierte Mündlichkeit in der Erzählkunst entwickelter Schriftkulturen.” Poetica 17.3–4 (1985): 202–18. Print. Halfe, Louise Bernice. Bear Bones and Feathers. Regina: Coteau, 1994. Print. ———. Blue Marrow. Toronto: McClelland, 1998. Print. ———. Blue Marrow. 2004. Regina: Coteau, 2005. Print. Holm, Tom, J. Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis. “Peoplehood: A Model for the Extension of Sovereignty in American Indian Studies.” Wicazo Sa Review 18.1 (2003): 7–24. Print. Hymes, Dell. “Discovering Oral Performance and Measured Verse in American Indian Narrative.” New Literary History 8.3 (1977): 431–57. Print. Kellogg, Robert. “Oral Narrative, Written Books.” Genre 10.4 (1977): 655–65. Print. Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher. “Sprache der Nähe — Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36 (1985): 15–43. Print.

What’s in a Frame?

■

Mareike Neuhaus

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. “Some of My Favorite Writers are Literate: The Mingling of Oral and Literate Strategies in Written Communication.” Tannen, Spoken and Written Language 239–60. Mandelbaum, David G. The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, and Comparative Study. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1979. Print. Mattina, Nancy J. “Aspect and Category in Okanagan Word Formation.” Diss. Simon Fraser U, 1996. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Web. 13 Sept. 2008. Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Neuhaus, Mareike. “That’s Raven Talk”: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures. Regina: CPRC Press, 2011. Nida, Eugene A. and Charles A. Taber. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: Brill, 1969. Print. Ochs, Elinor. “Planned and Unplanned Discourse.” Discourse and Syntax. Ed. Talmy Givón. New York: Academic, 1979. 51–80. Print. Plag, Ingo. Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. Print. Polanyi, Livia. “Literary Complexity in Everyday Storytelling.” Tannen, Spoken and Written Language 155–70. Rood, David S. “North American Languages.” International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Ed. William J. Frawley. 2nd ed. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 167–72. Print. Scobie, Stephen. “Double Voicing: A View of Canadian Poetry.” O Canada: Essays on Canadian Literature and Culture. Ed. Jørn Carlsen. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1995. 38–49. Print. Stigter, Shelley. “The Dialectics and Dialogics of Code-Switching in the Poetry of Gregory Scofield and Louise Halfe.” American Indian Quarterly 30.1–2 (2006): 49–60. Print. Tannen, Deborah, ed. Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Norwood: Ablex, 1982. Print. ———. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Tierney, Frank M., and Angela Robbeson. Preface. Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem. Ed. Tierney and Robbeson. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1998. 1–5. Print. Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Willinsky, John. “The Paradox of Text in the Culture of Literacy.” After Literacy: Essays. New York: Lang, 2001. 59–82. Print.

237

This page intentionally left blank

TOWARD AN “OPEN FIELD” The Ethics of the Encounter in Life Lived Like a Story Emily Blacker

In “Recent Ethnographic Research on North American Indigenous Peoples,” anthropologist Pauline Turner Strong outlines and evaluates the important and innovative forms of ethnographic research that have coincided with the “transformed social, political, and intellectual conditions” of the twenty-first century (3). Strong refers to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s advocacy, in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, of indigenous projects that are motivated by indigenous concerns as much as they are by contemporary ethnographic research interests (8). Both Smith and Strong cite the work of anthropologist Julie Cruikshank in this context, asserting that her influential work lies at the forefront of these new developments in which contemporary anthropological research is engaged. Strong suggests that such pioneering works “[e]xemplif[y] the importance of grounding ethnographic research in Native languages, the value of long-term ethnographic research, and the significance of attending closely to indigenous forms of knowledge and experience” (6). Cruikshank’s work demonstrates a dedication to all of the above: she lived in Yukon from the early 1970s to 1984, during which time she worked with Elders Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned in the collaborative project of recording their stories for distribution to an audience within and beyond their own community (The Social Life of Stories xi). While the Elders with whom Cruikshank worked recounted their stories mostly in English, all of the women were multilingual, and Cruikshank did supplementary work with linguists to develop familiarity with the Athapaskan languages to which the Elders referred. Cruikshank’s central concerns in the project on which this essay focuses are with the ways in which these Yukon Elders express their knowledge and experiences through storytelling, and what their storytelling contributes to their means of coping with change. This essay argues that even after Cruikshank reached an understanding that she and the Yukon Elders held different conceptions of life history, her work was shaped by her own 239

240

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

culturally determined ideas about life history—ideas that led her to produce a text that would facilitate smooth cross-cultural encounters. I discuss the way in which the Elders’ stories are constructed in Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (1990), as well as the project of transcribing orature itself. In this context, I compare Cruikshank’s approach to that of anthropologists Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, who work with Tlingit narratives. Both approaches emphasize the ways in which oral materials are inevitably altered when textualized but also assert that this does not preclude the project of preservation that in part motivated the work of Cruikshank, the Dauenhauers, and the Yukon Elders. By drawing attention to these alterations, this essay seeks to engage with the problems that are involved with the project of transcription (as well as translation) in order to extend the parameters of the critical conversation about these important issues. First, I situate this debate on the terrain of an interdisciplinary approach to anthropological studies. In Historicizing Canadian Anthropology, Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell raise a number of questions that are central to the “intellectual debate” over what constitutes Canadian anthropology, including this question: “What … is, in Canada, the relationship of anthropology to its sister disciplines such as history, sociology, psychology and archaeology?” (6). Such cross-disciplinary dialogue allows Gillian Beer’s concept of the “open field” to come into play. The “open field” refers to the ways in which language (and, in particular, terminology) is entrenched in a relation with its historical usages, as well as the ways it is used and defined in other disciplines and other cultures (Beer 8). With the interest of opening up interdisciplinary dialogue, this essay extends Harrison and Darnell’s question to analyze the relation between anthropology and English literature. Explorations of the ways in which stories create meaning and are interpreted are central to Life Lived Like a Story. In the “Introduction,” Cruikshank asserts that “the essential issue addressed in the following pages is how these women use traditional narrative to explain their life experiences” (2). Cruikshank highlights the importance of the relations between text and audience, and subsequently, text and reader. How is an anthropological work such as Life Lived Like a Story read as literature? Do different standards of interpretation and criticism apply in this context? If so, why? Through an examination of the relation between Life Lived Like a Story’s paratextual apparatus and the text proper, as well as the form of “life stories” in which the Elders’ narratives are constructed, I explore the complex nature of the ways in which Cruikshank adopts the role of cultural mediator and interpreter in order to make these narratives accessible to a primarily non-Native audience.

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

In Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, a study of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary encounters, Beer argues that the efficacy and value of such encounters lies in the way that they foster a plurality of “crossings” that cannot be enclosed in, or limited to, a single system of thought that takes precedence over others (1). Instead, encounters between cultures and disciplines allow the perspectives of different subject positions and disciplinary positions to inform one another. Beer asserts that although such encounters occur regularly, as individuals inhabit multiple subject positions, they remain inadequately recognized, as does the question of what is at stake in them: Encounter, whether between peoples [or] between disciplines … braces attention. It does not guarantee understanding; it may emphasize first (or only) what’s incommensurate. But it brings into active play unexamined assumptions and so may allow interpreters … to tap into unexpressed incentives. Exchange, dialogue, misprision, fugitive understanding, are all crucial within disciplinary encounters as well as between peoples. (2)

By calling attention to the assumptions and incentives that attend cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary encounters, and the ways in which they affect the outcomes of such encounters (by resulting in either reciprocity or misunderstanding), Beer illuminates the often unrecognized difficulties involved in these “crossings.” She also points out the challenges that coincide not only with cross-cultural encounters, but also with encounters within cultures because of “the diversity of knowledge-dialects [that] may set groups at odds with each other” (2). Beer proposes a set of questions that address the potential obstacles to communication within such encounters. These obstacles include issues of conflicting authority, the criteria for the valuation of testimony, the implications of various subject positions, and language barriers: “What is the authority of those native to the environment studied? How is their testimony to be valued when they are also the objects of appraisal? Where is humankind when language is … not recognized? How do the groups learn from each other when they cannot interpret their signs?” (3). Although Beer’s work focuses on the role of the encounter in the nineteenth century (in the work of scientists such as Charles Darwin and literary authors such as Thomas Hardy), these questions and issues inform my analysis of Life Lived Like a Story, which Cruikshank produced in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. The text can be read as a cross-cultural encounter between Native storytellers and a primarily non-Native audience (including Cruikshank and the subsequent readership of Life Lived Like a Story), and a cross-disciplinary encounter among anthropology, orature, and literature.

241

242

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

In her subsequent book, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (2005), Cruikshank writes that [e]ncounters come in many forms. We hear of human encounters among strangers, but also of encounters between those same people and transforming landscapes. Stories that participants tell orally or in writing about their experiences, in turn, encounter successive audiences whose interpretations of what they hear or read are shaped by their own contemporary concerns. (10)

The encounter is integral to the way in which Cruikshank’s works are framed. One purpose of the collaborative project of Life Lived Like a Story is to preserve oral testimonies: a project that relies first on the encounter between non-Native anthropologist and Native storyteller, and subsequently on the encounter between reader and text. Cruikshank sets up an immediate distinction between Native storyteller and “cultural outsider” in Life Lived Like a Story (xi), just as she distinguishes between the perspectives of “residents and strangers” in Do Glaciers Listen? (19), which takes as its subject encounters between the “local knowledge” embodied in Tlingit and Athapaskan peoples’ narratives, and “outsiders’ knowledge” as it consists in European explorers’ and scientists’ narratives; as her title suggests, Cruikshank takes glaciers as a model of “transforming landscapes” (10). In Do Glaciers Listen?, Cruikshank takes issue with the way in which “outsiders’” narratives have claimed authority over “locals” and displaced their narratives (20). By placing these narratives alongside one another and demonstrating the ways in which they intersect, Cruikshank aims to validate “local knowledge” on a global scale for a Western readership.1 Similarly, in Life Lived Like a Story, Cruikshank presents the Yukon Elders’ oral narratives in the form of “life stories, or life history” (a genre particularly familiar to a Western audience) in order to make them more accessible to a primarily non-Native, and most likely academic, readership. Four points support this assumption of a non-Native scholarly readership. First, Cruikshank addresses the reader as “cultural outsider” in the paratextual apparatus. Second, she refers to anthropological and literary works in the apparatus without providing supplementary explanatory information about them (as she does in the context of reading the Elders’ narratives), suggesting that she anticipates a readership that is trained in literature and/or anthropology but not necessarily in orature.2 Third, she constructs the Elders’ narratives in the form of “life stories” in order to make them accessible to an audience familiar with this genre. Finally, that Life Lived Like a Story is published by UBC Press

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

suggests that an academic readership is assumed. By contrast, earlier works, including My Stories Are My Wealth (1977), Nindal Kwädindür (1982), Tagish Tlaagú: Tagish Stories (1982), Haa Shagóon: Our Family History (1983), and Old People in Those Days, They Told Their Story All the Time (1984), were published by the Council for Yukon Indians in conjunction with the Government of Yukon, as well as by the Yukon Native Languages Project, suggesting that they were intended to be received by a local readership in Yukon. The decision to publish Life Lived Like a Story with a university press implies that this work was produced for a primarily academic readership outside Yukon. Cruikshank’s methodology of constructing the Elders’ narratives in the form of “life stories” complicates the concept of collaboration. Cruikshank states that the genre of traditional autobiography “has become so well entrenched, so structured by convention, that it has come to seem ‘natural’ to Western readers and a form not requiring explanation” (ix). She refers to Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in this context, suggesting that it “remind[s] us that autobiography is a culturally specific narrative genre rather than a universal form for explaining experience” (x; emphasis added). Despite Cruikshank’s and the Yukon storytellers’ differing views of what constitutes “life history,” as well as the Elders’ tendencies to avoid detailed explanations of their personal experiences, preferring to recount (and therefore preserve) “traditional narrative[s]”—stories told to them by their Elders documenting “a shared body of [local] knowledge”—Cruikshank decided to present their “traditional narratives” alongside their “personal narratives,” arguing that they intersect and together document the particular trajectories of their “life histories” (2). Cruikshank uses various familiarizing techniques to couch the Yukon Elders’ narratives in a form that is familiar to a Western readership in order to facilitate a smooth encounter between these unfamiliar narratives and a non-Native readership. While she uses these techniques in order to expand the audience for the Elders’ stories, the implications of this methodology are far-reaching with regard to the preservation of oral testimony and serve to complicate the way in which collaboration functions in this context.3 Cruikshank acknowledges the authority of the Yukon Elders, asserting that when she began working with Angela Sidney, this Elder was quick to define the terms of their work: “She understood that family members wanted her to record the story of her life and that I was a willing secretary and an eager student, and she had very clear ideas about how we should proceed” (24). However, Cruikshank writes that as a result of the “disparity between our definitions of life story,” a certain miscomprehension ensued: “Mrs. Sidney seemed to be ignoring the questions I was raising” in favour of recounting

243

244

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

traditional stories, which “added a bewildering variety of characters and events, some from historical memory and others from a timeless repository of myth” (25). Cruikshank states that as a result, “[t]here were always aspects of the interview I hadn’t understood” (25). Only after she recorded enough material for two booklets (produced for Sidney’s family) did Cruikshank begin formulating clear connections between the traditional narratives and the questions she had first posed to Sidney about her life (25). Cruikshank thus had to become much more than “a willing secretary” in order to make these narratives accessible to a non-Native audience, which would likely experience the same kind of miscomprehension that she did when faced with culturally unfamiliar narratives. Cruikshank’s methodology suggests that to facilitate effective crosscultural encounters, culturally unfamiliar narratives need to be reframed in order to become accessible to a Western readership. A difficulty attending this reframing is that it entails constructing an element of familiarity out of cultural “difference” by contextualizing these narratives according to Western concepts, categories, and language. From the 160 hours of tape-recorded dialogues with the Yukon storytellers, Cruikshank selected the sections that represented their “life stories” most “coherently”; as she notes, “[t]he transcripts are … edited to bring together materials recorded in many different sessions and over many years as one continuous narrative. I have ordered the account using a chronology that is roughly the one each woman instructs me is the ‘correct’ way to tell her life story” (18). The Elders also assumed an active role in the editing process by instructing Cruikshank to omit particular narratives; however, regarding the remaining material, Cruikshank points out that “[t]he stories included … were selected to make the link between [traditional] narrative and life as unambiguous as possible” (26). She acknowledges that “this is a specific intervention on my part determined by my desire to maintain a consistent theme at the center of what is written” (26). While the editorial process of compiling the Elders’ narratives recorded over such an extended period “as one continuous narrative” has inevitably altered the ways in which the stories were originally told, the formal technique of separating the narrators’ “life stories” into distinct sections in Life Lived Like a Story represents another form of interpretation, one designed to “maintain a consistent theme” (18; 26). As both mediator and interpreter, Cruikshank performed a crucial role in facilitating a more seamless encounter between text and reader. However, it is important to be aware of the complications that attend such cross-cultural encounters, lest cultural “difference” become misconstrued as “sameness.”

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

Is the shared goal of the Yukon storytellers and Cruikshank, that of preserving oral testimony, more important than the means required to achieve this goal? Here, I am referring to the way in which the Elders’ oral narratives are transplanted from their original place, mode, and purpose of telling in order to encounter a wider audience, a shift that results in Cruikshank’s decision to publish the narratives in the form of “life stories or life history,” rather than as a compilation of traditional narratives that excludes the Elders’ personal narratives about their individual life experiences. The latter is the form to which the Elders’ earlier publications, produced in collaboration with Cruikshank, adhered. It is important to note the increasing popularity of the life writing genre in the literary market at the time of Life Lived Like a Story’s publication (1990). In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Leigh Gilmore suggests that “[s]uddenly, it would seem, memoir has become the genre in the skittish period around the turn of the millennium” (1); she notes that “the Worldcat database shows the number of new English language volumes categorized as ‘autobiography or memoir’ [to have] roughly tripled from the 1940s to the 1990s” (1).4 Gilmore continues: “Book reviewers ritualistically cite its ubiquity as more publishers expand their lists to include memoir, more first books are marketed as memoir, and even academics … are producing personal criticism, hybrid combinations of scholarship and life writing, and memoir proper” (1). Life Lived Like a Story fits into the category that Gilmore describes as a “hybrid combination … of scholarship and life writing”; the former coincides with the consideration of Life Lived Like a Story as a contribution to anthropological scholarship, and the latter with the consideration of Life Lived Like a Story as a contribution to the literary genres of biography and autobiography (1). In the “Introduction” to a special issue of Canadian Literature on Canadian biography and autobiography, Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms point to several formal innovations within this genre that require more critical attention, including “contemporary Canadian writing experiments with collaborative auto/biography” (15). They write that such texts significantly “eschew … a single narrative voice and acknowledge … the complexity of our relational lives and storytelling by not just accommodating but actually foregrounding multiple perspectives,” but in so doing, these texts also “raise difficult ethical issues about power differentials, privacy, and appropriation” (15). Egan and Helms cite Life Lived Like a Story and Nancy Wachowich’s Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (1999), produced in collaboration with three Inuit women, as progressive examples of contemporary ethnographic auto/biography “that position the indigenous narrator as

245

246

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

auto/biographer rather than ‘informant,’ as keeper of her stories and interpreter of her own culture” (15). While the authority the Elders claim in the collaborative project of Life Lived Like a Story demonstrates their agency in the narration and production of the text, the complications that attend the cross-interpretation of cultures as well as the ramifications of (re)publishing the women’s traditional narratives alongside their individual “life stories” for distribution to a wider audience must not be overlooked. The role of the paratextual apparatus is important not only in the context of Life Lived Like a Story’s readership, but also to a consideration of how the text is compiled and the way in which it functions as a whole. The apparatus includes Cruikshank’s introduction to and conclusion of the text proper, and Cruikshank’s preface for each narrator’s section. Here Cruikshank provides instructions for reading the Elders’ narratives, including summaries, cultural context, and an analysis of recurring themes. Though the apparatus could be seen as secondary to the text proper, and though, as Cruikshank suggests, “[s]ome readers may prefer to go directly to the life stories and return to the background commentary after becoming familiar with the narratives,” this situation seems unlikely if readers are encountering culturally unfamiliar narratives for the first time (xi). As a result of the apparatus, readers, as “cultural outsiders,” immediately become aware that they will need interpretive guidance to understand the Elders’ narratives, which renders it more likely that Cruikshank’s prefatory material will direct the reading of the text (xi). Cruikshank’s position as mediator between two cultures is distinguished from the non-Native readers’ position as a “cultural outsider,” since Cruikshank has been trained to develop the tools with which to truly “hear” and understand “conventional indigenous literary formulae” from many years of working with these women (16–17). Cruikshank suggests that so-called cultural outsiders’ interpretations of the Elders’ narratives must be contextualized (for example, through the information provided in the paratextual apparatus) in order for those interpretations to be grounded in at least a preliminary familiarity with the genre: “Our interpretive abilities are inclined to fail … when we hear a culturally unfamiliar account, in which we may grasp the general framework but flounder when faced with the particular” (4). Thus, in order to approach the Elders’ narratives responsibly, the reader must rely on the supplementary explanatory information provided in the apparatus. Now to consider the issues attending the material that composes the text proper. A central concern of oral narratives’ “transplantation” into a textual medium is the way in which they are altered (due to transcription, language barriers, and editorial changes that inevitably add layers of interpretation to

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

the original “telling”) in order to make them accessible to a primarily nonNative readership. Cruikshank alters the way in which the Yukon Elders’ narratives are published in earlier works, including My Stories Are My Wealth and Nindal Kwädindür, which were published under the Elders’ names and whose intended audiences are identified as their families and community members (“Introduction” to My Stories and Nindal Kwädindür n.p.).5 In these publications, the narratives are in prose, are illustrated by line drawings, contain different versions of the same story told by different narrators in succession, and include limited, if any, explanatory notes.6 By contrast, in Life Lived Like a Story, the traditional narratives are in verse, are not illustrated, are separated into the individual storytellers’ sections alongside their personal narratives, and are framed by Cruikshank’s explanatory notes and analysis. Cruikshank notes that Native women who are familiar with the storytellers and with various versions of the text indicate that “they find it easier to ‘hear’ the speaker’s voice” when reading the traditional stories in verse form (18). However, the Elders’ personal narratives are presented in prose in order to adhere to Western expectations of the “life writing” genre (18). Other textual alterations of the traditional narratives include rewording and restructuring sentences through the use of different terms, subject referents, and punctuation. This alteration becomes evident through a comparison of the form in which Smith’s “The Stolen Woman” is published in Nindal Kwädindür and the form in which it is published in Life Lived Like a Story.7 In the introduction to My Stories, Cruikshank explains, “[a]fter several months of work, some women suggested that while personal histories should be written only for family members, these more formal myths and legends should be distributed to a wider audience” (1). While remaining aware of Cruikshank’s collaborators’ desire to broaden the readership of their narratives, scholars must consider the implications of the women’s claim in the context of Cruikshank’s decision to (re)publish the Elders’ narratives in Life Lived Like a Story in the form of (personal) “life stories or life history.” While oral narratives are unavoidably altered through the process of transcription, Cruikshank’s decision to compile the narratives in the form of “life stories” further complicates this process. The formal technique of separating the narrators’ “life stories” into distinct sections requires Cruikshank to edit the narratives to a greater degree in order to maintain their “coherence” and chronological order. Annie Ned’s account poses many challenges to the “culturally specific narrative genre” of “life stories or life history” (x). Cruikshank writes,

247

248

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

[o]f the accounts in this volume, Mrs. Ned’s is the one least likely to approximate Western notions of life history. Although she states that it is important for her to record a life story, her culturally distinctive view of her life is in no way circumscribed by personal experience. She insists that she wants to talk only about “important things,” and she rejects as trivial [particular memories] [and] … even passes over her thirty-year marriage to her third husband, a ‘white man,’ as unsuitable for inclusion in her life story. (265)

This statement indicates the discord between what Cruikshank identifies as constitutive of the Western genre of “life history,” including an emphasis on personal experience, and Ned’s “culturally distinctive view” of the genre, which prioritizes shared experience (recounted through traditional stories) over personal experience (265). Ned’s omission of certain details of her life story may suggest her discomfort with sharing those personal experiences with an audience outside of her family. Further, Cruikshank cautions the reader about the defamiliarizing effect of Ned’s distinct narrative style: Mrs. Ned’s approach to telling her story is similar to that of other narrators in this volume, except that she is more likely to use speeches and songs than traditional stories to explain events. [As a result], her speeches are sometimes obscure for a Western audience…. A formal speech may plunge an unfamiliar listener into a dense, incomprehensible world without the leavening of context; however, given that context, her “old-style words” become infused with enormous power. (267–68)

The “foreignness” of Ned’s account to a non-Native readership enhances Cruikshank’s role as mediator and interpreter. As such, Cruikshank employs various familiarizing techniques to render Ned’s narratives more accessible and to preserve their efficacy. This requires Cruikshank to make a number of editorial interventions: First, I try to introduce her account by providing some of the basic knowledge she expects her listeners to have, juxtaposing her words with my own commentary. Second, I have chosen to edit her account more than the others—not by changing her words, but by rearranging them to meet the grammatical demands of English where such reorganization seems to make her meaning clearer. (268)

Cruikshank further notes that the shorter length of Ned’s account reflects her (Cruikshank’s) “editorial decision to combine accounts she tells more than once rather than to present several parallel versions of each event” (269). Ned’s account emphasizes the way in which the Yukon Elders’ narratives can

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

be seen to resist conformity to Western expectations of both the form and genre of “life writing.” One of the latent dangers that attends an attempt to adapt these narratives to comply with the demands of a “culturally specific narrative genre” is that the form of their publication may depart from the way the Yukon storytellers had originally conceived of their stories being preserved. Some of the factors that influenced the final form in which Life Lived Like a Story was published include the disciplinary standards and publishing requirements that Cruikshank was expected to meet. Cruikshank asserts that as a “cultural outsider,” she turned to “theoretical guidance” to develop a more thorough understanding of the Yukon Elders’ oral narratives, as a theoretical framework usefully “destabilizes any simple idea that stories passed on as oral tradition transparently ‘speak for themselves,’ or that there is a prescriptive, cross-culturally valid method for assessing their historical value” (60). However, as mentioned above, in Life Lived Like a Story Cruikshank is primarily interested in how the Yukon Elders “use traditional narrative to explain their life experiences,” or, in other words, the ways in which stories are used and interpreted, rather than in the narratives’ historical value.8 Thus, while the Elders’ narratives do not simply “‘speak for themselves,’” and therefore require Cruikshank’s interpretive guidance, this attempt to provide a crosscultural bridge faces many obstacles (DGL 60). A significant obstacle that arises in the process of transcribing oral narratives is the limitations imposed by the textual medium itself regarding how the narratives are preserved and received. In Do Glaciers Listen?, Cruikshank writes that “Indigenous people who grow up immersed in oral tradition frequently suggest that their narratives are better understood by absorbing the successive personal messages revealed to listeners in repeated tellings than by trying to analyze and publicly explain their meanings—an approach that contrasts sharply with protocols in many academic disciplines” (60). These conflicting demands point to the challenges that Cruikshank’s project faces in making these narratives accessible to a wider, primarily non-Native audience, as well as bringing these narratives into an academic field. It can be assumed that the text was restricted to a particular length and form in order to adhere to the protocols of the academic discipline of which Cruikshank is a part, as well as to publishing requirements. The form of different versions of traditional stories told by the Yukon Elders in succession in My Stories and Nindal Kwädindür seems to approximate more closely the original form of “repeated tellings” than does Life Lived Like a Story’s form in which the narratives are separated into the distinct “life stories” of the storytellers. However,

249

250

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

this change may be seen as a strategic move on Cruikshank’s part as a means to render the stories accessible to a wider audience. Both Cruikshank and the Dauenhauers draw attention to the difficulties and complexities that arise in the process of textualizing oral narratives. Cruikshank asserts that “[t]he issue of transforming oral tradition into written text is a complex one, and a limited resolution of one problem simply raises others” (LLLS 15–16). She acknowledges that “an intermediary adds a layer of interpretation” but that this interpretation is required in order to make the narratives “comprehensible for a wider audience” (267). Cruikshank and the Dauenhauers argue that transcribing and textualizing oral narratives allows for the narratives’ preservation and transmission to a wider audience. Such contemporary ethnographic projects are motivated by the urgent need to transcribe oral narratives in order to preserve indigenous languages, traditions, and cultures that are disappearing.9 Both the Dauenhauers and Cruikshank cite as a primary motivation for their work the linguistic proficiency of the Elders compared to that of subsequent generations who are predominantly if not solely English speaking (“Oral Literature” 101–2; LLLS 16). However, in “Oral Literature Embodied and Disembodied,” Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer focus on the potential pitfalls that can accompany both the process and the final outcome of transcribing and textualizing oral narratives. They write that during the twenty-year period in which they have conducted research on what they call Tlingit oral literature, they have “observed an increase in the degree to which ‘The Culture’ has been detached and objectified, seen as something separate, as a product rather than as a process” because it becomes viewed from without rather than from within the culture (97). They draw attention not only to the obstacles to communication in a cross-cultural encounter, but also to the stakes involved in the encounter between anthropologist and Native storyteller, and subsequently, between transcribed oral narratives and their readers. The very process through which a narrative can be made to signify for a culturally distinct readership necessitates some form of alteration of the original narrative; the question remains one of the scale of alterations made through this transcription. The Dauenhauers argue that the transcription of oral narratives always risks objectifying the culture, and that “[a]long with objectification come[s] reductionism and simplification” (97). The former refers to the threat of reducing a complex culture to a single “representative” story about it, which they argue amounts to harnessing a complex culture within a single system of thought or theoretical scheme imposed on the culture from without. The latter refers to the threat of perceiving and

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

redefining a complex culture “in simpler, more comfortable terms” (97). Here, the Dauenhauers cite the example of work that represents Tlingit oral literature as children’s literature, thereby reducing Tlingit culture “to a childish level” and simplifying the complexity of the Tlingit language to make it accessible to those who are unfamiliar with it (98). They assert that “the children’s literature format is comfortable because it is no longer Tlingit in language, format, content, or context. It is totally disembodied. It is safely re-contextualized in the language, discourse, and literary aesthetics of the dominant culture” (98–99). Here, it becomes apparent that the methodology of transcribing and, in their case, translating orature is inevitably linked to the question of audience or intended readership. In Cruikshank’s case, her methodological approach to transcribing the Yukon Elders’ narratives in Life Lived Like a Story is consistent with “[t]heir continued enthusiasm and desire to see their work distributed more widely,” a desire that she says “led to this volume” (13). Cruikshank is willing to do what it takes to widen the audience for these women’s narratives, even if it requires altering the form they originally gave their stories and reconstructing the narratives in the form of “life stories or life history.” A comparison of Cruikshank’s approach to that of the Dauenhauers makes evident that no simple answer to this issue of the relation between transcription and intended readership exists. The conflicting demands placed on these researchers in their efforts to reach a culturally heterogeneous readership add to the complexities of the transcription process. Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer state that they are in a “paradoxical situation” because of the contradictory demands of their readers, and also because of the differences in views between the older and younger generations of Tlingit peoples regarding the function of preserving oral literature. While the older generation demanded that their narratives be presented “from a Tlingit point of view” and according to the style of their original “telling,” members of the younger generation, who are “mostly nonspeakers of Tlingit … are uncomfortable with the aesthetics of Tlingit oral literature and want it contextualized according to the ‘rules’ of written English discourse” (92; 102). The paradox is that when the Dauenhauers comply with the demands placed on them by the older generation of Tlingit narrators, they lose the readership of the younger generation and non-Tlingit speakers, who cannot readily understand this unfamiliar material and who demand that it be made more accessible to them (101–02). This paradoxical situation, in which the Tlingit peoples’ desire to preserve their culture “without a shared sense of what ‘the culture’ and ‘preservation’ entail” demonstrates the difficulties that arise not only in cross-cultural encounters (“Oral Literature” 105),

251

252

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

but also within cultures, as Beer notes. These circumstances also demonstrate Beer’s assertion that individuals’ multiple subject positions,10 as well as the assumptions and underlying incentives that correspond with these positions, remain inadequately recognized until a “clash” between them occurs. Further, this paradox demonstrates that the stakes of encounters between these subjects are high: the recognition of their differences and the obstacles to their communication, in this case, serve to emphasize that which is “incommensurate” (Beer 2). It is important for my analysis that the Dauenhauers foreground the ethical issues their work raises, particularly with respect to the cross-cultural encounter. In different ways, the Dauenhauers’ work and Cruikshank’s work bring these issues—including the implications of various subject positions, of conflicting authority, and of language barriers—to readers’ attention. Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer acknowledge the irony of their work: they claim that the performative “essence” of oral literature can never be “captured” or restored in translation and transcription, yet they simultaneously assert the imperative to preserve Tlingit culture through any means available to them. They write: The writing down of oral literature, no matter how well intentioned or how well carried out, petrifies it. It is like the molecule by molecule replacement of an organic plant by stone. A petrified log may look like wood, but it is actually stone. The danger is that the culture becomes preserved, but not as a living thing. We are well aware of this dimension of our work, but we can do little more than call it to awareness. We are working with a moribund tradition, lest it become extinct without any record or documentation. The irony is that a book documents as best we can the embodiment of the oral literature but is, in fact, a disembodied thing. (“Oral Literature” 102)

While the Dauenhauers suggest that there are inevitable limitations to that which transcription is capable of restoring (and by extension, preserving) from oral narratives, they also emphasize the importance of such contemporary ethnographic projects given that “oral tradition is dying all around the world … [and] the situation is made extreme where the languages themselves are moribund, such as Haida and Tlingit” (“Paradox” 35). One of the positive aspects of their work is thus that they take on the role of “the scribe” in order to facilitate the preservation and transmission of oral narratives: “Through the books we have edited, it is not our words that go out, but the words of the great storytellers and orators of Tlingit tradition. Their words continue to inspire and delight, and be models for the continuation and development

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

of the tradition” (33). While the Dauenhauers maintain that “there is no substitute for living oral tradition” since “[a]ny printed page at best is a replica and substitute” (34), Cruikshank argues that transcription successfully resuscitates and mobilizes oral narratives, allowing for their continuing social function. In “The Social Life of Texts: Editing on the Page and in Performance,” Cruikshank acknowledges the Dauenhauers’ position but suggests that this view does not apply to her own experience working with Sidney, Smith, and Ned and visiting the communities in which their stories continue to be retold. Cruikshank asserts, “[r]epeatedly, I’ve seen written versions of narratives used as a reference point for reanimating social meanings that might otherwise be erased” (99). The different circumstances out of which the work of the anthropologist couple and that of Cruikshank arise is worth pointing out here, as when the Dauenhauers began their work in the 1970s, they were instructed to record Tlingit oral narratives according to the formal and contextual conventions of Tlingit oral literature rather than according to the standard conventions of written English discourse. On the other hand, the Yukon Elders with whom Cruikshank began working at the same time “insisted that their narratives be recorded in English” (98). Thus, in the Dauenhauers’ work, the aesthetic style and content of the Tlingit narratives adhere to “the ‘rules’ of Tlingit oral literature” (“Oral Literature” 101). Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer also embed in the text of the stories what they call a “narrative frame” to contextualize the stories’ origins in the way oral performances do, as well as supplementary notes in the form of annotations that explain the formal and contextual conventions of Tlingit oral literature (such as a narrator’s use of repetition) “to help establish … the cultural context of the original” (93). Another major difference between the Dauenhauers’ work and that of Cruikshank is that the Elders with whom the Dauenhauers worked recounted their stories in Tlingit. Thus, the Tlingit oral narratives that they present have been translated as well as transcribed and print textualized. The Dauenhauers’ approach is to present the Tlingit textualized orature in a bilingual format “with the Tlingit text on the left-hand page, and the English translation on the right” (“Paradox” 17). By contrast, Cruikshank notes that the Yukon Elders’ stories were told “mostly in English sprinkled with place names, kinship terms, clan names, and personal names in Tagish, Tlingit, and Southern Tutchone” (16). However, the fact that Sidney, Smith, and Ned were all multilingual rendered the process of transcription more complex than simply recording the stories in English. Cruikshank states that although Sidney, Smith, and Ned explained the terms and names spoken in different languages

253

254

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

to her, she also spent considerable time working with linguists to get a better handle on Tagish, Tlingit, Southern Tutchone, and other Athapaskan languages to which the Elders referred (xiii; 16–17). While Cruikshank announces the difficulties and complexities involved in the process of transcription, she argues that once oral narratives are transcribed, they are not necessarily fixed and turned to “stone” (as Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer put it), but rather are capable of being “reanimated” in different forms through retellings to divergent audiences. Cruikshank writes that through her experience with Sidney, Smith, and Ned, she has “come to appreciate a very particular definition of ‘editing’ that includes carefully tailoring performances for specific audiences…. From this perspective, writing becomes just one more component of performance” (104). As such, writing is a “way of familiarizing readers with narratives so Elder storytellers can do the real shaping of narrative when they tell the story to a responsive audience. Viewed in this way, reading [transcribed oral narratives] is the handmaiden of listening [to them]” (DGL 79). At risk in Cruikshank’s metaphor of transcribed oral narratives as “the handmaiden” of listening to the Yukon storytellers directly is the danger of overlooking the ways in which the narratives have been altered from their original telling. Cruikshank’s approach attempts to “bridge” the cultural differences and linguistic barriers that attend the cross-cultural encounter in order to facilitate a primarily non-Native readership’s access to the narrative. At stake in the Dauenhauers’ metaphor of transcribed oral literature being inevitably “petrified” and turned to “stone” is the threat of asserting a single, monolithic definition of that which counts as interactive (and “embodied”) storytelling, thereby discrediting other forms of storytelling, such as those carried out by totem poles, or for the Yukon Elders, those carried out through the interaction between humans and landscapes (DGL 3). What do the Dauenhauers’ and Cruikshank’s uses of metaphor indicate about the cross-disciplinary nature of their work? What is the function of this literary dimension of anthropological texts? I have suggested that Cruikshank has brought the element of “literariness” to the forefront of her anthropological work through her decision to construct the Yukon Elders’ narratives in the form of “life stories, or life history.” In her discussion of cross-disciplinary encounters, Beer addresses the ways in which scientific disciplines use literary tools such as metaphors to address concepts within their field, as well as the ways in which those in the humanities use the same tools to address scientific concepts. Beer argues that the exchange of literary tools such as metaphors fosters cross-disciplinary dialogue, allowing each discipline to inform the other:

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

Science always raises more questions than it can contain, and writers and readers may pursue these in directions that go past science. Such discussions in their turn provide metaphors and narratives which inform scientific enquiry … [f]or this is not a one-way process with science as the origin and others as its intellectual beneficiaries only. Scientists work with the metaphors and the thought-sets historically active in their communities. We can see these movements to and fro, and across, between scientific and other metaphors and models. (8)

Beer understands as beneficial the mobilization of metaphors across disciplines because it is through such cross-disciplinary dialogue and exchange that her concept of the “open field” is enacted. The “open field” denotes the way in which language (and terminology) is implicated in a relation with the “Other”: the ways in which it is and has been mobilized in other disciplines, other cultures, and other historical contexts (8). Beer suggests that what is to be gained from cross-disciplinary work is its achievement of replacing a singular system of thought with one defined by plurality and multiplicity, out of which “new ideas” and “new practices” arise (8).11 The project of preserving orature through transcription or other forms of textualization, and through translation, is inevitably informed by an ethical framework that demands recognition of the “Other,” since preserving alterity is a primary concern of this endeavour. The Dauenhauers draw attention to this ethical imperative in their critique of the way in which Tlingit culture is constructed as a “product” rather than a “process” when the customs, language, and voice of the “Other” are viewed from without rather than from within. According to them, this construction is enabled by a violent form of assimilation in which the customs, language, and voice of the “Other” (which represent the complexity of the culture) are reduced and simplified according to the theoretical schema imposed on the “Other” from outside.12 I have suggested that Cruikshank’s construction of the Yukon Elders’ narratives in Life Lived Like a Story in the form of “life stories or life history” involves a certain willingness on her part to sacrifice the way in which the stories were originally told to make them more accessible on both a local and global scale to the younger, primarily English-speaking generation in Yukon, as well as to a non-Native audience. This is a contentious ethical consideration because on one hand, Cruikshank’s willingness to surrender an aspect of the particularity of “Others”—by representing the Elders’ narratives according to the language and literary aesthetics of the dominant culture—allows their stories to achieve further recognition, while on the other, the Dauenhauers’ refusal to sacrifice the particularity of “Others”—by representing Tlingit peoples’

255

256

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

narratives according to the aesthetics of Tlingit orature—carries the potential of limiting the recognition that their stories achieve because of their primary readership’s unfamiliarity and discomfort with this form. Where does this ethical quandary leave us as readers? We, too, inhabit a crucial position, as the project of preserving orature relies on the encounter between reader and text in order to carry out its intended goal. Robert Bringhurst emphasizes this notion in his Foreword to Gary Snyder’s He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, in which he recounts the “history of listening” that has brought about new cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary encounters, allowing for the continued survival of this story (x).13 Similarly, Cruikshank writes, “[s]torytellers need an audience, a response, in order to make the telling a worthwhile experience” (Life 16). Life Lived Like a Story places readers in a paradoxical position: on one hand, an immediate “untouchable” element of the text complicates the crosscultural encounter (because readers quickly become aware that they will need interpretive guidance to understand the Yukon Elders’ narratives); yet on the other hand, readers must respond to the ethical imperative that demands the narratives’ recognition, lest the project of preservation fail. Thus, the reader is simultaneously implicated in the stories as listener and challenged as literary critic and “outsider” to a particular culture. The situation here raises a version of the question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”: Can the alterity of the Yukon Elders’ narratives speak within the frames of Western reading and editorial practices? It seems that an inevitable obstacle to our attempt to read “ethically” and preserve the alterity of the “Other” is the way in which our second-hand encounter with the Elders’ narratives is mediated through the form in which they are presented to us—one that corresponds to a Western notion of “life history”—as well as through other forms of interpretation and analysis that coincide both with the process of transcription and with academic protocols. I have argued for the importance of calling attention to a number of issues that arise from the encounters among different subject positions (including cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary encounters) in order to recognize the stakes that attend such encounters. In the context of Life Lived Like a Story, I have pointed out that the relation between the way the text is constructed and the way it is received warrants particular critical attention. This approach contributes to and moves toward an “open field” in which cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue—despite its obstacles—serves the important function of creating new encounters through the plurality of ideas it produces (Beer 2). Cruikshank hints at this move when she writes, “[s]tories that

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

participants tell orally or in writing about their experiences, in turn, encounter successive audiences whose interpretations of what they hear or read are shaped by their own contemporary concerns” (DGL 10). These new interpretations, “shaped by … contemporary concerns,” serve to “open [the] field” (in Beer’s terminology), facilitating a plurality of “crossings” that resist closure within a single system of thought. Particularly relevant to this gesture to “open [the] field” is Miwok/Pomo critic Greg Sarris’s assertion about Native American studies: Academics too often frame the experiences of others with reference to scholarly norms. Yet unless we put ourselves in interactive situations where we are exposed and vulnerable, where these norms are interrupted and challenged, we can never recognize the limitations of our own descriptions. The kind of work we do is grounded in … dialogue, in interactive relationships where meanings cannot be “fixed.” Academic discourse … has to be interrogated by other forms of discourse in order to make it clearer what each has to offer the other. It is these dialogues that are most productive, because they prevent us from becoming overconfident about our own interpretations. (Sarris qtd. in Cruikshank, “The Social Life of Texts” 117)

A concluding anecdote that Cruikshank recounts about Ned’s attendance at a conference sponsored by the Yukon Historical and Museums Association in 1982 (when she was in her nineties) provides a response to Sarris’s assertion about Native American studies. Cruikshank writes that while the aim of the conference was to foster cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue and exchange between archaeologists and local Elders, the archaeologists dominated the discussion while Ned (as well as other Elders) remained silent. Eventually, Ned stood up and asserted, “[w]here do these people come from, outside? / You tell different stories from us people. / You people talk from paper— / Me, I want to talk from Grandpa” (356). Cruikshank includes this anecdote to demonstrate a parallel “between narrative explanation and academic storytelling” as well as to emphasize Ned’s articulation of the crucial relation between the way a story is told and how (as well as by whom) it is received (355–56). This anecdote also exemplifies the way in which unknown and unfamiliar discourses serve as radically interventionist forces that challenge Western “norms” of storytelling, bringing about new encounters (355). These encounters illuminate the perniciousness of assumptions, the limitations of a singular perspective, and the ways in which new ideas and storytelling practices inform one another.

257

258

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

Notes 1 Cruikshank’s cross-disciplinary approach is demonstrated by her assertion that “Romantic poets, Tlingit elders, scientists, and linguists, such as those cited in the opening epigraph, bring contrasting approaches to understanding climate change, and they all deserve attention” (DGL 7). 2 Such anthropological and literary works include ethnographer Catharine McClellan’s My Old People Say, which she suggests “provides the real context for understanding the life accounts included” in Life Lived Like a Story, as well as Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (5). This pattern is also evident in Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen?, in which she refers to poets and writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Victor Hugo on one hand, and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli on the other, to name a few (4–7). 3 As Laura J. Murray and Keren D. Rice assert, “in the context of the history of the misrepresentation or silencing of Native speech that has characterized so much of colonial history in North America, editorial decisions about the representation of Native people’s spoken words bear a particular urgency, difficulty, and weight” (xvii). Further, Yukon storyteller Annie Ned repeatedly insists to Cruikshank the importance of “‘get[ting] the words right,’” suggesting that the stakes are high when preserving oral testimony (LLLS 267). 4 Gilmore indicates that “[t]he growth pattern over that period was roughly linear, rising from fewer than 1500 in the 1940s to more than 3000 in the 1970s, to over 4000 between 1990 and 1996” (1). 5 My Stories is jointly authored by Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Rachel Dawson, recorded by Cruikshank, and illustrated by Suzannah [Susan] B. McCallum. Nindal Kwädindür is by Kitty Smith, recorded by Cruikshank, and illustrated by Susan B. McCallum. 6 In Nindal Kwädindür the explanatory notes are located at the back of the book rather than prefacing each section as in Life Lived Like a Story. 7 For the most part, the effect of rewording and restructuring sentences in this story is that these processes clarify referents and convert “slang” into “standardized English.” For example, “I don’t know no summer” (Nindal Kwädindür 30) becomes “I don’t know that summer place” (LLLS 243) and “[w]e’re going to tell you good” (Nindal Kwädindür 30) is changed to “[w]e’re going to tell you how to get there” (LLLS 243). The punctuation is also altered in Life Lived Like a Story’s version, including the use of brackets (which are either omitted or added) and the use of colons and semicolons (which are added). The latter are used to clarify as well as to join what were two sentences in the earlier publication. For example, “[t]hey’re going to split (the trail will fork) there. One way going to be big trail, other way same too” (Nindal Kwädindür 30) becomes “[t]rail is going to split here: one is going to be a big trail; other trail same, too” (LLLS 243). Other differences include alterations of the endings of stories (by either omitting or adding material), as well as title alterations. For example, the title of “How Crow Made the World” in Life Lived Like a Story (179) has been altered from the form of its publication in My Stories, in which it is titled “Story of How Crow Made World” (11). Cruikshank also alters the ending of this story by adding the last stanza from another version of the same story that notes a parallel between Crow’s creation of the world and the Judeo-Christian version of creation. I suggest that this alteration is geared toward a Western audience which she assumes will be more familiar with the Judeo-Christian version of creation. Through these alterations, Cruikshank determines how the Elders’ stories are modified, and subsequently read, thus directing the reader’s encounter with these narratives.

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

8 In her discussion of “life histories” and the specific genre of “American Indian women’s autobiographies,” Cruikshank writes that this genre “may be more closely associated with conventions of oral narrative than with positivistic evidence about the past” (LLLS 2). 9 On the disappearance of indigenous languages, Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer write that “[o]ne Alaska Native language has become extinct within our lifetime, and others are headed in that direction.… [U]nless current trends reverse, Tlingit will be extinct or nearly so in about forty years, and Haida in about twenty” (“Oral Literature” 106). 10 I am referring to the younger generation of Tlingit peoples who are English-speaking, and Nora Marks Dauenhauer’s position as both anthropologist and native speaker of Tlingit (she was raised in a traditional family whose values coincided with those of the older generation of Tlingit peoples, and she thus considers herself a “cultural insider”) (“Oral Literature” 96). 11 Beer’s recognition of the “Other” inherent in (and primary to our use of) language, and her critique of singular systems of thought, bear the trace of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theory, particularly his replacement of totalized systems of thought (which he equates with a violent synthesis) with the concept of “infinity,” denoting an ethical relation with the “Other” that involves an open-ended movement outwards with no return to the same (Ethics and Infinity 75). It is through this open-ended movement outwards that the possibilities of ethical behaviour toward the “Other” arise. 12 In this way, the Dauenhauers’ approach seems to place more value on what Cruikshank identifies as both Annie Ned’s and American writer Eudora Welty’s conception of “listening for stories” as opposed to “listening to stories,” in which the former is described as a “more acute” practice that is attentive to the Other’s voice without attempting to “capture” it in the context of one’s own interpretive agenda (DGL 76). 13 Bringhurst argues that this succession of attentive listening—exemplifying Ned and Welty’s distinction of “listening for stories” (Cruikshank, DGL 76)—is important in the context of both the history of colonization and North American writers’ “long-standing habit of ignoring Native American oral literature while at the same time blindly romanticizing whatever little they knew of indigenous tradition” (Bringhurst x; xiv).

Works Cited Beer, Gillian. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print. Bringhurst, Robert. Foreword. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth. By Gary Snyder. Bolinas: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007. vii–xv. Print. Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2005. Print. ———, with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990. Print. ———. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1998. Print.

259

260

Writing Down: Textualized Orature and Orality

———. “The Social Life of Texts: Editing on the Page and in Performance.” Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts. Ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren D. Rice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. 97–119. Print. Dauenhauer, Richard, and Nora Marks Dauenhauer. “Oral Literature Embodied and Disembodied.” Aspects of Oral Communication. Ed. Uta M. Quasthoff. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995. 91–111. Print. ———. “The Paradox of Talking on the Page: Some Aspects of the Tlingit and Haida Experience.” Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts. Ed. Laura J. Murray and Keren D. Rice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. 3–39. Print. Egan, Susanna, and Gabriele Helms. “Auto/biography? Yes. But Canadian?” Canadian Literature 172 (2002): 5–16. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. Harrison, Julia, and Regna Darnell. Historicizing Canadian Anthropology. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2006. Print. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985. Print. McClellan, Catharine. My Old People Say: An Ethnographic Survey of Southern Yukon Territory. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2001. Print. Murray, Laura J., and Keren D. Rice. “Introduction.” Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. xi–xxi. Print. Ned, Annie. Old People in Those Days, They Told Their Story All the Time. Recorded by Julie Cruikshank. Whitehorse: Yukon Native Languages Project, 1984. Print. Sidney, Angela. Haa Shagóon: Our Family History. Rec. Julie Cruikshank. Whitehorse: Yukon Native Languages Project, 1983. Print. ———, Kitty Smith, and Rachel Dawson. My Stories Are My Wealth. Rec. Julie Cruikshank. Illus. Suzannah [Susan] B. McCallum. Whitehorse: Council for Yukon Indians, 1977. Print. ———. Tagish Tlaagú: Tagish Stories. Rec. Julie Cruikshank. Illus. Susan McCallum. Whitehorse: Council for Yukon Indians and Government of Yukon, 1982. Print. Smith, Kitty. Nindal Kwädindür: “I’m Going to Tell You a Story.” Rec. Julie Cruikshank. Illus. Susan McCallum. Whitehorse: Council for Yukon Indians and Government of Yukon, 1982. Print. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed, 1999. Print. Snyder, Gary. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth. Bolinas: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2007. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. 271–313. Print. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. London: Penguin, 1966. Print.

Toward an “Open Field”

■

Emily Blacker

Strong, Pauline Turner. “Recent Ethnographic Research on North American Indigenous Peoples.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34.1 (2005): 253–68. Web. 18 May 2009. Wachowich, Nancy, with Apphia Agalakti Awa, Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak, and Sandra Pikujak Katsak. Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1999. Print.

261

This page intentionally left blank

Looking Beyond Reintegrating the Visual

This page intentionally left blank

BECOMING THE STORYTELLER Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance Waziyatawin

On winter evenings He would tell stories or fairytales Oh, I tell you He was really good at that He had a knack for telling stories —Elsie Cavender about her grandfather, Inyangmani Hoksida

As a child of an Indigenous oral tradition, I am now completing the transformation into the storyteller. I have become a bearer of our family and tribal stories. The challenges of this evolution have become apparent as I work with my grandmother’s oral narratives to complete my forthcoming project, When the Plum Trees Blossom: Indigenous Survival Strategies Passed On. The original recordings of my grandmother, Elsie Two Bear Cavender, were completed in 1990, but it is only now that I am coming into my own with the stories she transmitted, owning them in a way that would have been impossible for the young woman I was then. While always committed to their repeated transmission and continued veracity, my own intellectual and creative development, combined with a sense of ownership of the stories, allows for a newfound flexibility with the narratives. I can experiment in meaning making as I work to transfer the oral world into the written and sometimes visual worlds while also engaging in a textual dialogue with my grandmother. Engaging narratives in this fashion allows me to assume another responsibility of the storyteller: to re-imagine, re-create, and re-articulate the essence of the original stories and thus effectively maximize their impact on the intended audience while also renewing Indigenous commitment to our nations and homelands. My grandmother’s narratives offer a particularly compelling opportunity for broad-based storytelling because they not only detail the horrors perpetrated upon Dakota people through the processes of invasion, conquest, and 265

266

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

colonization, but also provide direction for Indigenous resistance. Further, in the narratives discussed here, my grandmother’s storytelling offers a powerful counter to colonial myths. That is, she employs truth telling as an active agent of decolonization. Consequently, the broad-based re-creation of such oral narratives becomes exponentially more important in the context of Indigenous liberation struggles and necessitates moving beyond the transmission of accounts from our tiwahe (family) to our Oyate (Nation) more broadly, and to those from settler society who might also become our allies in our struggle to be free from oppression. Seven generations after our ancestors were militarily conquered during the United States–Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people are ready, once again, to challenge wasicu (white) hegemony in our ancestral homeland. The stories of the ancestors form the basis of knowledge regarding all that has been lost and thus also form the basis of our vision for reclamation. For the sake of our own liberation, we too must work to become master storytellers. When we imagine warriors in a liberation struggle, we typically do not envision elderly Indigenous women. Yet I have come to view our master storytellers in such a light, including my own grandmother, who was the first to ingrain in me the importance of our stories. Kunsi Elsie was born in 1906 and raised on the Upper Sioux reservation in southwestern Minnesota by her

Figure 1 Elsie Two Bear Cavender with great-granddaughter, Autumn Cavender-Wilson (1991)

Becoming the Storyteller

■

Waziyatawin

grandparents, both of whom were also expert storytellers. She lived a life of hardship and poverty and, in that difficult context, worked tirelessly to transmit as much knowledge and wisdom to her children and grandchildren as she possibly could. Many of her teachings were passed on through the stories. Widely known as a storyteller in our community and in the state of Minnesota, Kunsi Elsie believed in educating as many people as she could about the history of Dakota people, knowing fully that it challenged the colonial status quo and hoping that it would lead to a better future for our people and homeland. She worked tirelessly to subvert the Euro-American master narrative surrounding the Dakota historical past with each new generation of Dakota children in our family. From the time we were born, she held us in the rapture of her stories, restoring our humanity and solidifying our identity with every word. During quiet afternoons and late nights, she filled our ears with expressions of Dakota pride, strengthening our attachment to our ancestors and our nation. Her stories allowed us entrance into a world different from the one we occupied under colonial rule. In effect, her stories served to lay the intellectual groundwork for the ongoing struggle against colonialism. With her storytelling dexterity, Kunsi Elsie could weave together stories of history and legend, grandfathers and grandmothers, animals and land, recognizing the importance of all they contribute to the shaping of Dakota consciousness. The stories of love, happiness, and humour demonstrated our humanity, connecting the smiles on our faces to those of our ancestors who surely similarly smiled, laughed, and celebrated with the storytellers of their generations. However, the stories of pain and suffering, repeatedly transmitted, called upon another aspect of our humanity. It is those stories, especially the ones born of colonial experience, that allow us to examine critically the horrors perpetrated against us so that we can work toward justice. The stories of suffering, and subsequent resistance, are central to our struggle for liberation. When we listen to the stories of our ancestors, we develop an intimacy with those ancestors as if they were physically and tangibly part of our everyday lives and as if they are the ones who helped lovingly to raise us. We, therefore, also share the same pain they suffered. This is one of the profound implications of growing up with the stories from the oral tradition. We feel indignant at the wrongs our ancestors suffered, and when we equate our humanity with theirs, we recognize that none of us deserves to be the victims of crimes we have suffered under colonial invasion and rule. We, like our ancestors, have a right to live as Dakota people in the Dakota homeland.

267

268

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

My Kunsi Elsie adeptly conveyed this sense of humanity in the stories she relayed to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She never shielded us from the graphic violence and trauma our ancestors suffered at the hands of the United States government and its citizens. For example, her body of stories surrounding the United States–Dakota War of 1862 provides explicit details about events such as the Dakota killing of white settlers during the 1862 summer of starvation, the declaration of war by Dakota warriors, the shooting of her great-grandfather Mazomani by white soldiers during the Battle of Wood Lake in 1862, the forced march of the women and children to the concentration camp at Fort Snelling, the fatal stabbing of her great-greatgrandmother by a white soldier on that same march, the subsequent ethnic cleansing of our people from our homeland, and the bounty killing of Chief Little Crow, who was the leader of Dakota resistance. Within this chapter I have woven condensed, poetic renditions of some of the stories relayed by my grandmother surrounding these events. Rather than providing the original lengthier transcripts from her recordings, I have included here examples of found poetry, a form of arts-based qualitative inquiry with which I have been experimenting during the course of preparing this oral history project for publication. This use of found poetry involves extracting words and phrases expressed by a research participant, or an oral history transcript approved by a traditional Dakota storyteller (in the case of my work), and creating a poetic interpretation. All the words in the poetic rendition are entirely those of the original speaker and thus represent a pared down, condensed version that captures the distinctiveness of her or his rhythm and voice. My hope is that in addition to providing an analysis that will be useful in the collaborative project with my grandmother, I may also find additional outlets for creative work stemming from our family stories, thereby reaching a wider audience. Yet my desire to engage in found poetry is also to ensure that I retain the essence of my grandmother’s voice. I was initially introduced to this analytic tool though the writings of Lynn ButlerKisber, a professor of education at McGill University, and was drawn to a method that would allow for an intimate interaction between me and the voice of my grandmother contained in the transcripts of her oral narratives. Given the way that colonizing society has routinely appropriated, misrepresented, and distorted Indigenous voices, the ethical approach of Butler-Kisber’s found poetry is particularly compelling: “This form of inquiry mandates that researchers situate themselves in their studies and work intimately with their participants. In so doing they create relationships that help to ensure that participant voices and perspectives are respected and reported” (229).

Becoming the Storyteller

■

Waziyatawin

As an academic historian, in my classrooms I often wrestled with diverse ways to teach about historical events, major themes, and questions, as well as how best to assess students’ understanding of course content, especially since my courses often addressed particularly disturbing topics such as the violence wrought from the processes of invasion, genocide, conquest, and colonization. I often made use of literary fiction, film, music, and poetry in teaching about specific historical periods and offered an arts-based option to students for final projects. Both were techniques I learned from one of my history mentors in graduate school at Cornell University, Robert Venables, whose last days of class always included student performances. Such performances allow the creator to process especially difficult ideas quite deeply, sometimes more deeply than those who produce intellectually based projects such as written exams. When students performed or shared their artistic creations with the rest of the class, we, in turn, gained additional insight into the course content through their expression. That combination of history and artistic expression evoked responses that more standard narratives might not have. Like the painful historical content that is often a part of my teaching experience, many of my grandmother’s narratives embody the pain of colonial experience. When some of the more superfluous language is stripped away from the narrative, the truth of Dakota historical experience in the colonial context is starkly revealed. What remains is the essence of my grandmother’s voice. Further, found poetry allows me to highlight specific portions of her story that reveal truths about our family and tribal history that might otherwise become lost or be overlooked within the transcripts. As I join her in the storytelling project, I can emphasize aspects of the narrative that speak most powerfully to the needs of our people today. Finally, given the performance element of the oral tradition, a poetic rendering of the teachings has the capacity to better capture this performative quality than standard transcripts of an oral interview. The particular turns of phrase and pauses distinctive to my grandmother’s voice become apparent in the found poetry derived from her narratives, especially when the poems are read aloud.

Found Poetry in Practice In the following poems, “Everyone Was Hungry,” “I Declare War on You,” and “Andrew Myrick,” my Kunsi Elsie’s accounts specifically controvert the white master narrative regarding the “Indian wars,” which typically depicts Indigenous violence against “innocent whites” as spontaneous and unprovoked. These poems reflect a marked change from the historical accounts published in the last century and a half, and they are part of a more recent

269

270

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

trend by Dakota people to rectify accounts written from the colonizers’ perspectives. White authors, predominantly male, have published dozens of historical texts and dozens more academic articles on the topic of the United States–Dakota War of 1862, but it is really only in the last decade that the master narrative has been challenged in written form by Dakota writers and scholars. For example, the volume I edited first as a special issue of American Indian Quarterly and then in expanded book form as In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century, remains one of the only publications that does not in some way justify the crimes perpetrated against Dakota people in 1862–63 and the ongoing occupation of the Dakota homeland. One of the intents of that volume was to give primacy to critical Dakota voices on the ethnic cleansing of our people and to provide space for the sharing of our stories. These Dakota accounts shift the emphasis from a depiction of white settlement as inevitable and Dakota suffering as an outcome of Dakota violence to a strong critique of the American invasion and colonization of Dakota homelands. Our oral traditions provide the cornerstone of this critical reading of the historical record, as may be seen, for example, in the following poetically concentrated versions of Kunsi Elsie’s accounts. Through them we learn how Dakota attacks against white settlers were precipitated by government withholding of rations to a starving population. The Dakota attacks are thus revealed as responses to white greed, cruelty, betrayal, and murderous indifference. Everyone Was Hungry At Little Crow’s Camp everyone was hungry The agent wouldn’t give them any of their rations All the food was in the warehouse But he just didn’t want to give it to them “Has it come yet?” They would say “Our children are really hungry They are crying Some of our women are crying too Because there is nothing to feed their children” “No, it didn’t come yet

Becoming the Storyteller

I told you I would let you know when it came” Myrick told them “Our children are hungry And our women are crying” “If they are hungry, let them eat grass!” Later Four or five braves were trying to find something Even a rabbit or a squirrel so they could shoot it and serve it to their children They just couldn’t find anything It was so hot They came to a place A house where the man was out in the field working They asked for something to eat The woman was there baking bread They asked for a piece but she wouldn’t let them have it She just kicked them out She took a broomstick and was hitting them with it One of the older men took two eggs from the basket in the shanty He put them in his pouch The lady saw that She was shouting and crying A younger brave kicked the whole basket over All of the eggs fell out They cracked The husband out in the field came running

■

Waziyatawin

271

272

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

He had his gun By that time they didn’t care what they did They shot the farmer They killed all of them They ransacked the place and took all of their food They took all of the meat kept in a sort of icehouse They took all the bread For the first time in a long time They had a nice meal I Declare War on You Soldiers came They told Little Crow to surrender those men They were going to take them because they shot a family of German settlers But he didn’t want to give them up This is the saying or expression he used He said “You can’t plant human beings In a garden when you plant one potato with two eyes you get about five, six, seven potatoes all from that one little piece of potato You can’t do that with humans I’m not going to give up my men to you” “We will still fight I will fight with my braves If my braves die I will die with them

Becoming the Storyteller

So as of this moment I declare war on you” All those young braves let out a war whoop They were angry and upset and ready to do anything They picked up every weapon they could find They ran toward the warehouse They broke down the door Sure enough there was food there They broke up big barrels of syrup sacks of oatmeal sacks of flour, rice and sugar They threw it all over It was summertime So the syrup just ran all over

Andrew Myrick They put him down on the ground He just pleaded for his life “Please Don’t kill me Don’t shoot me” By that time They were real angry They put him down in a sitting position pulled the grass out of the ground and they shoved it into his mouth until it was full of grass

■

Waziyatawin

273

274

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

One of them shot him When they found him he was sitting like that with his mouth full of grass

In this last poem, we also get a glimpse into Dakota conceptions of justice with the killing of Andrew Myrick, the trader who refused to extend credit to Dakota people faced with starvation. Myrick was present when the Indian agent refused to dispense the food from the warehouse belonging to the Dakota, making his refusal that much greater since he knew that Dakota people were starving. In this case, the Indian agent and trader worked hand in hand to issue Dakota people death sentences from lack of food. Myrick, however, was forced to eat the same heartless words he uttered to Dakota men trying to feed their hungry families. Dakota people today still cheer about his fitting end and the minor victory that Dakota people sustained in killing at least one of the invaders whose words and actions were a violent assault on Dakota humanity. The next poem, “The Killing of Mazomani,” highlights the sense of personal loss experienced by not just my family, but all the Dakota families whose lives were devastated by the war, whether they fled or were killed, were imprisoned in concentration camps, or were forcibly removed from our beloved homeland. In addition, this account highlights the reality that all Dakota people, whether they were peacemakers or participants in armed resistance, faced similar treatment at the hands of the white invaders. The Killing of Mazomani Grandmother’s father killed by White soldiers He was a chief his name was Mazomani Many wanted peace They appointed Chief Mazomani to deliver a letter of truce to the headman, whoever was in charge On the way he met some soldiers Even though he carried a white flag,

Becoming the Storyteller

he was shot Deliberately He was brought back to camp He died during the night Before he died, he made a request to see his family His wife Haza Win and his children went to see him When he saw his oldest daughter, Maza Okiye Win He motioned for her to come to his side She knelt as he was lying down He put his arms around her and said “My dear daughter I love you very much But I’m afraid I will leave you soon” Then his wife got down and sat by his side He talked to her He lived all through that day And part of the night He died early the next morning History tells it different It says Chief Mazomani was wounded at the Battle of Wood Lake That is only part of the truth He was wounded that was true But he was shot Deliberately By white soldiers They cover up these acts of atrocity

■

Waziyatawin

275

276

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

If one would stop and think Our people were fighting for what was rightfully theirs Our people were fighting for what was rightfully theirs

The last poem included in this essay is taken from the only account from the oral history project with my grandmother that has been previously published (Wilson 51–52). It is based on the most detailed description of the forced removal of Dakota women and children in November 1862 yet documented. The poem is accompanied by an art piece I created that includes a photograph of the Minnesota landscape taken in November 2002 during the first Dakota Commemorative March, a 150-mile, seven-day walk we took part in to honour our Dakota ancestors who were force-marched from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Minnesota, following the end of the United States–Dakota War of 1862. Overlaying the landscape are historic images of Dakota women during their incarceration in the Fort Snelling concentration camp (1862–63).

Figure 2

Women over Water, by Waziyatawin

Becoming the Storyteller

■

Waziyatawin

On the 1862 Death March Hot scalding water Someone threw on them The children were burned and the old people too As they rubbed their arms the skin just peeled off It was just like a nightmare

The complete oral account from which this poem was drawn was also the focus of a text–art collaboration with Molly Schoenhoff, an artist and former colleague of mine at Arizona State University. For this art project,

Figures 3–5 “Wokiksuye k’a Woyuonihan” by Molly Schoenhoff and Waziyatawin (photos by Molly Schoenhoff)

277

278

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

“Wokiksuye k’a Woyuonihan” (Remembering and Honoring), we struggled with how best to convey visually the horror of the death march. We chose to convey the arduous journey of the march by creating a book that would allow the story to unfold as the book unfolds. A solemn, typographical rendering of the story literally opens up as the book is unfolded. Readers are first required to remove the book carefully from a handmade red box and then actively participate in the unfolding of the story by opening out the continuous pages of the text. Minnesota prairies form the background image, with the suffering and bloodshed experienced by Dakota families represented by an increasing stain of red ink that follows the line on the horizon of the field. Our intent was to allow readers to experience more deeply and personally the painful story embodied in the text.

Transforming into the Storyteller When I first recorded Kunsi Elsie’s stories in 1990, I was a young woman and very much a student of the oral tradition. When my grandmother entrusted me with her stories, it was with the hope that I would someday succeed her as a storyteller, as one of the carriers committed to ensuring their veracity and continuity. Yet, through the first several decades of my life, while I appreciated the importance of the stories and worked to recite them in my grandmother’s voice, I was not yet prepared to take ownership of them. With my grandmother’s passing in 1993, she was no longer present to continue her teaching. Today, however, my own intellectual and emotional maturity is allowing my sense of ownership in the oral tradition to flourish. In coming into my own relationship with the stories, I now also feel a sense of flexibility to engage them in new ways. While I will continue to be a student of the oral tradition for the rest of my life, at some point I also became a storyteller. Like my grandmother many years before me, I have joined a long line of storytellers and, like others before me, I hope to continue to hone this craft throughout my life. This transformation into storyteller was not revealed to me until I began engaging found poetry as a means to think more deeply about the meaning of my grandmother’s accounts. Butler-Kisber comments that her introduction to arts-based analysis gave her the “impetus and permission” to begin her own experimentation with poetic representation in her research (ButlerKisber 231). Similarly, it was through my experimentation with found poetry that I became aware of my own voice and contribution to the Dakota storytelling project. In assuming this role, I have worked to find additional ways to convey the essence of the stories, but in new formats. It is a process that is also serving to facilitate new levels of understanding.

Becoming the Storyteller

■

Waziyatawin

In addition to understanding my own role as storyteller, through the use of found poetry I also became increasingly aware of the power of my grandmother’s voice in humanizing our ancestors’ experiences. Unlike the numerous history volumes that objectify Indigenous Peoples and that still convey the inevitability (and righteousness) of colonial invasion, conquest, and ongoing occupation, my grandmother’s accounts do not allow listeners to forget that every step of the way invaders had to engage in criminal and immoral acts to obtain our lands and resources. In humanizing our ancestors, Kunsi Elsie forces listeners to remember that real human beings suffered horrendously so that invaders could occupy our homes, and further, that the occupiers are still lying about it. Given the nature of the body of stories discussed here, my analysis has also involved contemplating why sharing these difficult and painful accounts was so important to my grandmother. Why was it so important to her that we never forget these crimes against humanity? If it was time for the Dakota Oyate (Nation) to accept our current reality and try to assimilate fully into American or Canadian societies, it would make little sense for us to dwell on these painful memories. The underlying assumptions behind my grandmother’s transmission of these stories might be identified in several ways: as an outcome of the belief that assimilation is not possible or desirable; that the historical harms might be affecting all of us today and it is, therefore, in our own best interest to address them so that we can live healthier lives; or, that these historical experiences represent reprehensible crimes for which we must seek restitution. I tend to think my grandmother believed all of these things. Kunsi Elsie clearly understood the beauty and the wisdom of the ways of our ancestors and maintained a healthy critique of the devastation wrought by colonialism. Given the magnitude of the crimes perpetrated against our ancestors, and the need for restitution, knowing the truth about these wrongs requires some kind of action by all who read her words. I believe she hoped that someday we might just recover all that was taken from us. With the telling of her stories, she made sure that our humanity remained intact, even in the face of tremendous inhumanity. In keeping alive the stories of struggle in her generation, she was the warrior we needed. Now it is up to the current generations to realize the messages of the stories and to shoulder their portion of the struggle. The stories have the effect of rallying outrage and provoking great sorrow, as well as a profound sense of loss. Recognition of these injustices and an acknowledgment of the deep feelings they evoke are essential steps on the pathway to liberation. It is only in recognizing the injustices that we

279

280

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

can conceive a vision of justice. If Dakota people or Indigenous people more generally never recognize injustice, our vision for the future will be limited by what settler society tells us is possible, is moral, and is just. It is only in our stories that the history of our nation and the loss of our homelands are embedded in a truthful accounting of colonial violence. When we are awakened to this history, we are also awakened to the ongoing violence of colonial occupation, a violence that manifests itself in our bodies, our minds, our spirits, and our lands. Faithfully, these stories continue to be transmitted within the context of my family. Yet they have broader applicability that transcends my familial context. Given the way that colonizing society has worked to eradicate our conceptions of ourselves and our relationships to our homelands, many Dakota families no longer tell their own alternative and subversive renderings of our colonial experience. Through the generations, many of our people have been terrorized into submission and subjugated into silence. Many maintain only vague remembrances of what our nation has experienced and have forgotten the power of the stories to heal and transform. We are in an age, however, when we need our stories and the power they possess. We need them to help steer us on a course toward liberation. We need them to help us rediscover who we are and reclaim what we have lost. Given the planetary crisis looming before us, Indigenous Peoples, like everyone else, exist on a precarious edge. If we do not remember who we are as well as the obligations we have to our homelands, we too run the risk of following the rest of humankind into the sinkhole of chaos and collapse. If, however, we remind ourselves of the goodness of our traditional ways of being and of the stories of how our ways of being were crushed by invading peoples, and open our minds to the possibilities of a liberated future, we will be set to take a more inspiring course of action. We can instead work toward dismantling the existing systems and institutions of oppression while also rebuilding our nations. And, we will have help. The fundamental flaws of the exploitative, capitalist, and imperialist ways of being are now exposed and the unravelling of settler society has begun. Further, many Indigenous nations carry stories about the coming changes and view this era of human history as an opportunity for Indigenous rebirth. The Dakota nation is no exception. It is in this context that the sharing of stories becomes of paramount importance. The storytellers must come forth and feed our people the stories we hunger for. We must speak of resistance, but we must also be sure we speak of what, precisely, we are resisting. That is, we must give voice to the historic harms the invaders perpetrated against us. These are the stories that both

Becoming the Storyteller

■

Waziyatawin

allow us to experience rage in the face of injustices and prompt us to take action. We must tell the stories as well as we can. My grandmother was an expert at this and because she is no longer here, it is up to me and her other descendants to pick up the charge where she left off, just as other families have an obligation to transmit their stories. We now have a window of opportunity to reassert our indigeneity and launch a new era of reclamation. In our time, we must not only remember the stories of our ancestors, we must also become master storytellers ourselves. It is our time to engage in the struggle against colonialism.

Works Cited Butler-Kisber, Lynn. “Artful Portrayals in Qualitative Inquiry: The Road to Found Poetry and Beyond.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research 48.3 (2002): 229–39. Print. Wilson, Waziyatawin Angela, ed. “Walking for Justice: The Dakota Commemorative March of 2002.” Rpt of spec. issue of American Indian Quarterly 28.1/2 (2004). 151–354. Print. ———. In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century. St. Paul: Living Justice, 2006. Spec. issue of American Indian Quarterly 28.1/2 (2004): 151–351. Print.

281

This page intentionally left blank

RE-SI(GH)TING THE STORYTELLER IN TEXTUALIZED ORATURE Photographs in The Days of Augusta Cara DeHaan

Transforming Aboriginal oral narratives (whether from live performances, tape recordings, films, or video tapes) into print—producing what Susan Gingell calls print textualized orature (Introduction 3)—is a valuable but complex endeavour. As Gingell points out, textualizing orature is “often a deliberate attempt to widen the circulation of oral traditions that are threatened by the radical transformations wrought by Canada’s literate and Eurocentric cultural economy, not to mention its capitalist economy” (4). Widening the circulation of oral traditions, Laura Murray and Keren Rice suggest, can “serve to combat misunderstandings and ignorance in the general population; … inform and encourage Native people living away from their elders in cities, [and] serve members of other Native groups who might welcome the stories and strategies of another culture by way of comparison” (xiv). As scholars and editors have emphasized, however, putting oral performance on the page is an aesthetically and ethically complicated task. It requires grappling with how to convey in print breath patterns, gesture, facial expression, vocal variation, body stance and movements, audience responses, and so on—all the features that are unique to oral performance and that develop the dynamic interaction between storyteller and audience that is so central to oral traditions (Blaeser, “Writing” 54–55). The textualizing process also requires being aware of the complex relationship between storyteller and transcriber-translator-editor, especially when that relationship is marked by cultural, ethnic, and/or other differences; it requires ensuring that the storyteller is not disempowered in any way and that his or her subject matter is consistently respected. In response to these challenges, editors are experimenting with how oral narratives appear on the page; they often include details about the original performance context, instructions for interacting with the published text, and reflections on their relationship to the storyteller and his or her stories (Murray and Rice xiv).1 283

284

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Although the challenges and responsibilities of textualizing orature are being addressed by editors and critics, little sustained attention has been given to the incorporation of visual texts within these publications. That visuals can significantly contribute to the effectiveness of textualized orature is acknowledged. Maria Campbell comments, for example, that Sherry Farrell-Racette’s visual art in Stories of the Road Allowance People “gives us another dimension, another layer.… The artwork is another level of translation” (“Interview” 197, 201)—a statement that “allows us to understand that the paintings are integral to the textualization project rather than simply illustrations of the stories” (Gingell, Introduction 13). The synergy possible between visuals and textualized orature is evident also in Waziyatawin’s essay in this volume. The two featured examples of creative and politically engaged photography—first, Waziyatawin’s art piece overlaying an archival photograph of two Dakota women with a contemporary photo of the Minnesotan landscape, and, second, the art project created by Waziyatawin and Molly Schoenhoff, “Wokiksuye k’a Woyuonihan,” featuring a contemporary landscape photograph touched up by red ink—convey the pathos of the Dakota Death March of 1862 and therein powerfully complement the oral narratives of Waziyatawin’s grandmother about this event. What has not yet been explored in depth, however, is the complexity of the relationship between word and image in print textualized orature. Visual texts produce meanings of their own, ones that may support, enrich, contradict, or destabilize verbal narratives (Garrett-Petts and Lawrence 166–67), so those involved in producing and publishing visuals within print textualized orature must be as responsible, creative, and sensitive as those working with the verbal stories. And just as those who read textualized orature may be encouraged to inquire into and reflect on the context of its production, so too must audiences become attuned to the rhetorical effects of any images in these texts. One exemplary source for exploring the relationship between word and image in textualized orature is The Days of Augusta (1973, 1977, 1992), a Native as-told-to autobiography2 featuring thirty-seven oral narratives and twenty-six black-and-white photographs3—such an abundance of images that reviewer David Watmough describes the text as a “slim but handsome volume” not unlike “glossy, coffeetable [sic] books” (38). The photographs in The Days of Augusta greatly enrich the text both by anchoring the narratives to a specific oral performer and a specific context and by enhancing the verbal themes in most cases. The addition of photographs to this text is not without complications, however, as evident in the level of explanatory

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

detail provided about the photographs, in the visual focus on the storyteller, and in compositional aspects of certain photos. This book thus demonstrates both the opportunities and the challenges of weaving photographs into print textualized orature. I argue that while the photographs remind readers of the narrator’s body and of her location, they also misleadingly depict the narrative as an individual rather than communal work and both add to and subtract from the power of the narrator in telling her stories. The Days of Augusta presents the oral narratives of Mary Augusta Tappage Evans (1888–1978), a woman of Shuswap-Métis ancestry living in central British Columbia, as recorded, transcribed, and edited by Jean E. Speare (b. 1921), a writer “firmly embedded in the social elite of white Cariboo [central B.C.] society” (Furniss 148). Inserted between the stories, each alone on its own page, are black-and-white photographs taken by Vancouver-based professional photographer Robert Keziere.4 Tappage Evans and Speare met in the late 1960s at a Native crafts booth at the annual stampede in Williams Lake, B.C. Fascinated by Tappage Evans’s narratives and knowledge of the handicrafts, Speare asked the older woman whether she might like to have stories about her life recorded. According to Speare, Tappage Evans was very cooperative and loved to talk about her life during Speare’s weekly visits to her Soda Creek home (Speare; cf. Furniss 148). Speare says that she did very little rewriting when transcribing and editing the elderly woman’s narratives. “I kept pretty much to the cadence that [Augusta] had,” Speare tells me. “People said to me, how did you rewrite it? I said, well, tell you the truth, I didn’t have to rewrite it. There was very little that I rewrote.”5 The textualized result of the women’s collaboration begins with a three-page preface, written by Speare upon request of the publisher (Speare), that presents a chronological biography of Tappage Evans; the verbal remainder of the text is a collection of short vignettes (many of which appear on the page as free verse poems) and longer stories that range widely in subject matter, including Tappage Evans’s memories of living and attending school at a Catholic mission; information about various people’s deaths; tips about how to make nets and baskets; myths and stories she has been told by others; narratives about her work as a self-taught midwife and nurse; and reflections on how cultural practices and technologies have changed over her long life. After J. J. Douglas Ltd. (later renamed Douglas and McIntyre) received the written manuscript from Speare, the publisher invited Keziere to contribute to the publication. The photographer stayed for about two weeks with Speare and her husband in Williams Lake and daily travelled the short distance to Soda Creek to photograph Tappage Evans in and around her summer home (Speare; Keziere,

285

286

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Interview; cf. MacSkimming 227). Keziere then worked with the designer at J. J. Douglas Ltd. to select which photographs would be included in the text and in which order (Keziere, Interview). Reviewers and critics of The Days of Augusta, like those attending to other examples of print textualized orature and as-told-to narratives, have focused predominantly on the text’s verbal aspects, both content and style. The book is heralded as “an important reference for Shuswap history” (Furniss 148) and has been cited as a source of information on Shuswap basket making (Tellqelmucw Society) and various aspects of B.C. history, such as the introduction of smallpox to the Interior (Palmer 37–39), Aboriginal health care in the early twentieth century (Kelm 6, 12, 156), and residential schools (Barman 60, 64, 73n6). Tappage Evans’s language as it appears in print also has been lauded as simple, direct, poetic, and evocative (Furniss 148; Schiff 101; Ziln 23; Watmough 38), and her use of repetition has been carefully analyzed as one instance of her skill as an orator (McKenzie 91–95). Speare, too, has been commended for her “great sensitivity” in textualizing the oral narratives (Schiff 99) and for successfully preserving the “cadence of Augusta’s narratives as verbal art” (Furniss 148). In contrast to the verbal aspects of The Days of Augusta, its photographs have received little attention beyond being praised as “superb” (Schiff 99), “beautiful” (Ziln 23), and “excellent” (Watmough 38). Stephanie McKenzie merely lists Tappage Evans’s text as one of many published during the Native Renaissance (1960s and 1970s) that include accompanying images (77, 196n14). Ziln asserts simply that the photographs “catch[] a variety of [the storyteller’s] moods and … add greatly to the book” (23). And Watmough contends that the photographs, like Tappage Evans’s “piquant and fresh use of language,” are charming and beguiling, though “not in any sense of sticky sentimentality,” as both images and stories evoke the poverty that has always been part of Tappage Evans’s life (38). Although brief, these comments provide a tantalizing point of departure for a more extensive analysis of the relationship between word and image in print textualized orature. What makes a photo excellent—or aesthetically appropriate, we might say—in this sort of publication? How do photos “add greatly” to a book like The Days of Augusta? One way to begin answering these questions is to consider how the photos relate to the oral performance context and to the text’s verbal themes, such as Tappage Evans’s focus on community and on strength and knowledge. Determining the meaning of a photograph is, like the close reading of verbal texts, a hermeneutic process whose results will vary with interpreters. My analysis of Keziere’s photographs is based largely on the lexicon and grammar

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

laid out by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen in Reading Images. This visual semiotics was developed in the context of Western visual communication (Kress and van Leeuwen 3–4), so the photographs may be read differently by those in other cultural contexts, including Tappage Evans’s own. As a non-Native reader examining visual texts produced by a non-Native photographer, I find Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar useful and compelling, but those more knowledgeable about visual narratives and cues in Aboriginal contexts may well use richer, more culturally specific approaches. Photographic texts do have a vexed history within North American Native communities. “To photograph,” Susan Sontag writes, “is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power” (4). Perhaps no one has felt this “colonization through photography” (64) more than North American Native peoples, who, since the mid-nineteenth century, have been subject to the photographic gaze of white photographers such as Edward Sheriff Curtis. Curtis and many others, fascinated by the idea of “the vanishing Indian,” forced Natives to don more “authentic” Indian clothing and accessories, invaded tribes’ social and individual privacies, and intruded on Native religious ceremonies, even daring at times to suggest changes for photogenic reasons. With such intrusions concurrent with Euro-American expansion across North America, that many Native peoples have historically been suspicious of the camera and its products is unsurprising (Lippard, Introduction 29; Silko, “Indian” 175–77; Johnson 19). Nevertheless, there are many historical and contemporary examples of Native persons using cameras and finding value in archival photographs, even those considered inauthentic and distorted;6 at the same time, some Native writers suggest that verbal stories may be more important and valuable than photographs. Gerald Vizenor, for example, writes, “Photographs are never worth the absence of narratives because languages are imagination and photographs are the simulation of closure” (8; see also King 60; Silko, “As” 168). This contextual understanding makes sensitivity and creativity even more critical for photographers, editors, and reader-viewers in projects like The Days of Augusta.

Augusta Tappage Evans: A Specific Performer in a Specific Context The fundamentally positive function of photographs in a collection of print textualized orature is their potential both to resight and to resite the oral storyteller, that is, to bring back into view the narrator’s body and to reposition the narrator and his or her stories in a particular location. These aspects

287

288

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

relate closely to two essentials in the study of oral performance as outlined by Nicholas Bradley: The first is a recognition of the importance of the individual performer and, by extension, an appreciation of a particular oral text as an individual artistic creation, not as an anonymous, culturally representative document; … not simply myths but also tellings of myths. The second aspect is an understanding of the written text as the record of a specific oral performance, tied to its particular time, place, and set of circumstances that governed the performance. (145)

Photographs can help on both counts. First, they can tie oral narratives to a specific person; even more important, they can recover some of what is lost when performance moves to the page: the storyteller’s appearance and gestures, how he or she uses facial expressions and other body language to tell the story, even some indication of the relationship between storyteller and audience. Second, photos can tie the stories to a specific context, albeit not necessarily the same site in which the storytelling took place. Augusta Tappage Evans’s specific, embodied self is revealed in 23 of Keziere’s 26 photos in the 1992 printing and in 24 of the 28 images in the 1973 and 1977 printings. Because the images were created after Tappage Evans and Speare had recorded the narratives, the photographs do not depict her in the process of telling the narratives published in The Days of Augusta. But because Keziere asked her to tell stories during the photo shoots—“just as a vehicle to animate the situation and, frankly, to be entertained” (Keziere, Interview)—many of the photos do present Tappage Evans as a storyteller in action. For example, in the photograph featured on the book cover and reproduced on page 21 (see Figure 1), the Shuswap woman is speaking, right hand gesturing in front of her, eyes focused slightly outside the frame of the photo, her mind intent either on her audience or, more likely, on the images and events she is describing. Other photos, too, represent the storyteller as a speaking (24, 32, 64), gesturing (6, 24, 60, 64), laughing (61), walking (43, 80) subject. Tappage Evans’s verbal narratives allude to her gestures (e.g., 28, 33, 38, 65), but Keziere’s photographs enable reader-viewers to see her in a way that no words could visualize her. Thus, although photographs are admittedly static, frozen in time (Sontag 17, 23), to the extent that they suggest the storyteller’s actions, they help those interacting with print textualized orature to imagine the original storytelling context and thus to engage with the storyteller as oral performer; in other words, they build some of what Kimberly Blaeser calls an “active exchange” between storyteller and audience and

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

Figure 1 The Days of Augusta, front cover and page 21; reprinted with permission of Robert Keziere

evoke the “sense of response-ability in the listener” from which oral stories derive their full power (“Writing” 54). As Sontag allows, “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation” (10). In addition to resighting the storyteller, Keziere’s photos reveal information about the original performance context and re-create a physical sense of place. In most photos, Tappage Evans is situated in various rooms of her home, particularly her kitchen (Figure 2) and her dining area, a room featuring a large table, paper-covered walls, and a large window (Figures 1, 3, 4). Because this dining area is where Tappage Evans shared many of her stories with Speare (Speare), the photos serve to resite the oral performance and the storyteller. In a few photos, the storyteller is instead outside near trees and fields in her central-B.C. context. A forest of birch trees, visible behind the storyteller in one photo (Tappage Evans 6), is featured across a double spread on the front inside cover (and also the back inside cover in the 1973 and 1977 printings). These trees ground the text in a geographical place, a task that not only is important to understanding the specificity of oral performance, as Bradley describes, but also is consistent with the verbal narratives, in which Tappage Evans often takes pains to explain exactly where an event took place (e.g., 11, 33). This emphasis is in turn consistent with Native autobiographical traditions, in which place is presented not as “symbolic setting” but as

289

290

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

“an immediate catalyst for contextualizing contemporary story in clan and tribal mythology” (Sands 11), and with Aboriginal storytelling traditions in general, in which stories are often tied to specific places (Chamberlin 1). One criticism of early photographers of Native peoples is that they removed their subjects from the land and gave them an artificial backdrop (Lippard, Introduction 25). Keziere’s photos participate in the important task of resiting Aboriginal individuals in their specific geographical contexts. The siting potential of a photograph is limited, however, by the extent of information provided about the image. The Days of Augusta offers only a few explicit details about the photographic content. The short biographical sketch of Keziere notes simply that he “took the magnificent, intimate photographs in this book over the better part of two weeks, photographing Augusta Tappage in the cabin that each year became her summer home” (82); no other captions or notes inform readers about the people and places in the photos. In her discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, Hertha D. Sweet Wong suggests that Silko’s choice not to provide “captions (sounds like ‘captive’)” (153) next to each photograph is “an attempt to equalize the relationship between word and image and to allow (or force) readers to make connections” (154). Blaeser similarly explains that she provides no captions for her photographic collage in Trailing You because she “didn’t want the photographs to be so specific; the images are intended to open a dialogue with the reader and not merely foreclose an imaginative interaction between reader

Figure 2 The Days of Augusta, page 24; reprinted with permission of Robert Keziere

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

and text” (“Living” 5). Vizenor contends in contrast that a lack of captions transforms photographed subjects into “mere ethnographic simulations, silence without names or narratives” (11). In the case of The Days of Augusta, we have the storyteller’s name and her verbal narratives, so the choice to use only one brief explanatory note may in fact encourage readers to interact actively with the photos, forming their own conclusions about the exact locations and the identity and relationships of the represented subjects. This interaction is in some ways similar to the active participation encouraged by Native oral storytellers through their minimalistic storytelling techniques (Blaeser, “Writing” 63). However, after being pleased to learn from Keziere about the locations and other people represented in his photos (Keziere, e-mail), I wonder whether more detailed information about the photographs might not deepen rather than foreclose readers’ interaction with the text. For this reason, Silko’s practice seems aesthetically and ethically appropriate: although Storyteller contains no captions, Silko does provide a detailed set of “Notes to Photographs” at the end of her text (Storyteller 269–74).

Augusta Tappage Evans: Self in Community Using photography can resight and resite the storyteller’s body in textualized orature, but determining which photos to use and how many, as well as how to represent a storyteller in the photos, must be guided by themes emerging from the oral narratives. Keziere’s goal, indeed, was to portray who Tappage Evans was and to create images in support of the stories, to which he had access before travelling to Soda Creek. “I would have known a lot about her,” he says, “and would have wanted to create visuals in harmony with her story” (Keziere, Interview). To some extent, though, Keziere’s focus on Tappage Evans is incongruent with her narratives, in which she focuses more on the community around her than on herself as an individual. She regularly cites others such as her aunt and her grandmother as the sources of her stories (e.g., 11, 30, 39). Furthermore, although she shares memories of herself as child and as adult, her stories are often about others. Even when talking about herself, Tappage Evans foregrounds her relationships with other people, including her parents and grandparents, husband, children, and grandchildren, as well as other children who needed a home (48, 53) and women whose babies she helped to deliver (28). The title is apt: like many other Native autobiographers, Tappage Evans says more to recreate the days of Augusta than to construct an autonomous individualized self. The visual narrative, in contrast, cultivates a “cult of the author.” Featured in 23 of 26 photos, Tappage Evans is transformed into the star of the text.

291

292

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

In five of these twenty-three photos, Tappage Evans is depicted with other people, both children (frontispiece, 50, 57)—whose identity Speare and Keziere could no longer remember—and adults (frontispiece, 57, 76, 80), mostly her younger brother William (57, 76, 80), who was often at Tappage Evans’s home to help with chores (Speare; Keziere, e-mail). Such photos indicate the community that is featured prominently in Tappage Evans’s stories, but a closer analysis of the photos can reveal something about the nature of the storyteller’s relationship with the represented participants. According to Kress and van Leeuwen, relationships among subjects in a photo are constructed with directional lines or “vectors” formed by eye lines and body parts (59). In the photo chosen for the frontispiece, which was taken at the Williams Lake stampede (Keziere, e-mail), Tappage Evans is sitting next to a man on a wooden step in front of a large veranda; the two appear to be friends, judging from their close physical proximity to each other and the way their bodies are turned slightly toward each other. Around them are several other people in various positions, paying attention neither to the camera nor to the couple on the step. The photo evokes a relaxed atmosphere of camaraderie and places the storyteller comfortably within the community. In other photos, the relationships between Tappage Evans and other depicted subjects are to me more ambiguous. For example, one photo depicts Tappage Evans and her brother sitting across the dining room table from each other (76). Their bodies are directed toward each other, but the large table acts as a significant physical barrier between them. Moreover, they are lost in thought: their expressions are solemn and they are not looking at each other. Tappage Evans and William could be sharing a moment of quiet camaraderie, but the composition of this photo directs viewers to consider at least briefly the possibility that Tappage Evans is withdrawn and isolated. The same ambiguity arises from another photo, in which Tappage Evans, a young child, and William are crowded on a short bench somewhere in the storyteller’s home (57). Whereas their physically close positioning could imply intimacy, the vectors in the photos do little to connect the participants. The child’s hand is on William’s right thigh, but he doesn’t acknowledge her, looking down at his hands instead. To the child’s right, Tappage Evans is also looking down, studying the cigarette in her hands, and her body is angled away from the child. Both adults’ faces register little expression, in stark contrast to the child’s gleeful grin. I wonder again whether this photo expresses simple familiarity and comfort or disturbing aloofness. Although I find it troubling to see Tappage Evans depicted as passively withdrawn, these photos do manage to capture some of the complexity of her

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

stories. Even as the storyteller focuses often on others, she conveys through her stories a sense of loneliness and isolation. “I was still a young woman when my husband died,” she says, “since 1931, quite a while ago, I’ve been all alone, struggling, yes, struggling” (38). She goes on to mention the financial difficulties she has faced, acknowledging the poverty evident in most photographs. In other narratives she reflects on losing many others close to her, including her grandmother (30–31), two infant daughters (26), and her elder son (44–45). Tappage Evans does indicate, as the photos do, that she is often on her own and that she may be only tenuously in community with others.

Augusta Tappage Evans: Knowledgeable and Strong In addition to foregrounding community in her narrative, Tappage Evans emphasizes how much she values knowledge and strength. She explicitly addresses the importance of learning in her stories: she expresses appreciation for the education she received at the Catholic mission (19, 23), describes how she taught herself to be a midwife and a nurse (27, 28), and mentions that she home-schooled her children and grandchildren (8, 9). In addition, many of her stories are linked by a theme of strength and survival. She tells, for example, of an ill woman who was abandoned to die but who managed to survive (13–14) and of her grandmother, who was one of the few to live through a smallpox epidemic (30). Tappage Evans herself comes across as someone both knowledgeable and strong. As a storyteller, she possesses a great deal of knowledge and insight about herself, her people, and her culture, and her willingness to share this knowledge is a gift to Speare and, by extension, to all readers of The Days of Augusta (cf. McKenzie 62). Furthermore, although she struggles with poverty and has experienced much loss, she has persevered through these hardships; she, too, has survived. Speare remembers Tappage Evans as a “very knowledgeable” woman with a “sharp, sharp mind … sharp about everything” (Speare), and Keziere describes her as a “very tough, very able woman” (Interview). Conveying an individual’s strength and knowledge through a photo is accomplished primarily by the construction of a particular relationship between represented subjects and photographic viewers. Kress and van Leeuwen outline that the nature of this relationship is affected by several factors, including whether or not the photographic subject is looking at the camera (116–19); the size of frame, or distance from which the photo is taken (124–29); and whether the photograph is taken from a high or low angle (140). Consider the different effects created by Figure 3 and Figure 4. Figure 3 is what Kress and van Leeuwen call a “demand” photo (118): Tappage Evans

293

294

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Figure 3 The Days of Augusta, page 55; reprinted with permission of Robert Keziere

is looking directly at the camera, demanding from the viewer an imaginary social response. In such photos, the nature of this social response depends on the subject’s facial expression, gestures, and so on (118), and here the storyteller’s inquisitive, almost stern expression commands respect. For me, the cigarette strengthens her fierce, independent, almost masculine (Starr 45, 56) ethos (although others might suggest that her use of cigarettes indicates addiction and thus weakness). The woman’s upper half fills the frame, creating a “far personal” distance between her and viewers “at which ‘subjects of personal interests and involvements are discussed’” (Kress and van Leeuwen 124)—an appropriate distance for telling and hearing stories in one’s home. The camera’s relatively low angle conveys an empowered Tappage Evans: when a camera is positioned below the represented subject, such that she

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

appears to look down at viewers, it suggests that she possesses knowledge and holds power over them (140). In contrast, Figure 4 is composed in a way that undermines Tappage Evans’s knowledge and strength as well as her positive interaction with her audience. Because the storyteller is not looking at the camera, the image is an “offer” photo, which “‘offers’ the represented participants to the viewer as items of information, objects of contemplation, impersonally, as though they were specimens in a display case” (Kress and van Leeuwen 119). Viewers are invited to stare at Tappage Evans, her clothes, her pensive expression, her gaunt cheekbones. The photo, in which the height of Tappage Evans’s body fills only one third of the frame, positions viewers at a “public,” impersonal

Figure 4 The Days of Augusta, page 77; reprinted with permission of Robert Keziere

295

296

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

distance (125), and the camera’s high vertical angle positions viewers to contemplate Tappage Evans from above, inscribing a certain power over the storyteller (140). Dwarfed by both the table in the foreground and the world map on the wall, Tappage Evans looks even more vulnerable. I dislike the bleakness of this photo, but together these two images do suggest something of the tension of Tappage Evans’s life, conveying her strength and her position of authority as storyteller while at the same time indicating that her age and meagre circumstances may be disempowering. Look again at Figure 2. Tappage Evans’s direct gaze toward the camera, as well as her expression and posture, demand viewers’ participation in her story. The level angle of the camera suggests a relationship of equality between the storyteller and her audience (Kress and van Leeuwen 140). Notice, however, how much of the scene is in shadow; much of Tappage Evans’s right side is indecipherable. Sharp shadows such as this one are evident in several photos. The shadow in Figure 4, for example, converges with the storyteller’s dark stocking cap and threatens to take over completely. These shadows could signify those aspects of Tappage Evans that escape capture by the photographer and therefore accord with the lack of personal detail in the narratives, as noted earlier. Or they could tell a more disturbing story: if light represents, among other things, the divine, illumination, and hope (Kress and van Leeuwen 192), the shadow’s absence of light becomes a metaphor of impending doom, of despair, even of death that could embrace Tappage Evans at any moment. The question remains whether this elegiac narrative destabilizes the theme of survival and strength infusing Tappage Evans’s stories or rather reveals information more available to Speare and Keziere, participants present at the original oral performances, than to reader-viewers removed from these performances by time and space.

Suggestions for Photographers and Viewers As I have shown, those producing and publishing photographs within projects of textualized orature have the opportunity to enrich the text greatly by re-sighting/siting the oral performer, by resiting his or her stories, and by enhancing verbal themes. This complicated task requires, first of all, an explicit recognition of the complex relationship between storyteller and photographer and the resultant attempt to find ways to maintain respect for the storyteller. It also requires an understanding of and sensitivity toward the oral narratives, both their style and their content, such that they are supported and enriched, not undermined, by the photos. The task involves

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

sensitivity to how a photograph is composed (e.g., camera position, lighting, relationships between subjects) and knowledge of what various compositional choices mean. And it involves providing sufficient information about the photographs. After a collection such as The Days of Augusta has been published, readerviewers have an opportunity to interact with the photos. Photographers such as Keziere deserve recognition for well-crafted images, but an audience must also consider what the photographs mean and begin to interpret the narratives they create. One must explore what each photo reveals and conceals and whether that information is consistent with the oral narratives—and then consider the ramifications of that (in)consistency. In short, reader-viewers must make the implicit explicit, such as I have tried to do in this essay. In exploring the meaning of photographs and their interaction with verbal themes, one may find it helpful to focus at times on photographic margins. As Christopher Pinney points out, “however hard the photographer tries to exclude, the camera lens always includes. The photographer can never fully control the resulting photograph, and it is that lack of control and the resulting excess that permits recoding, ‘resurfacing,’ and ‘looking past’” (7). When a photograph appears to undermine an oral storyteller or her story, one can examine the photographic edges or the background to discern positive aspects. For example, although I find the depiction of Tappage Evans in Figure 4 troubling, the marginal aspects of the photo serve to support and enrich her stories. The teapot, two teacups, and dishes on the table indicate a visitor and thus an occasion for hospitality. The world map, the map of British Columbia, and the calendar on the wall remind readers of the text’s Western Canada context and thus are useful for situating the text geographically and support the storyteller’s emphasis on education, knowledge, and place (even as they may also suggest the degree to which the Shuswap woman has been assimilated by Euro-Canadian culture, a theme often addressed in her stories). Another photo demanding this kind of ethical response is one of the most troubling “offer” photos in The Days of Augusta: a photo of Tappage Evans lying on her bed, her back to the camera, covered by a blanket that exposes only the top of her stocking cap and, at the foot of the bed, her lower legs and heavy boots (47). I imagine that the storyteller is asleep, such that the photo represents an invasion of privacy. Accordingly, I feel ethically obligated to shift my eyes from the camera’s chosen centre of focus and direct them toward the margins, where I see a handmade quilt to admire—is it her handiwork, or was it a gift?—and a collection of children’s drawings posted on the wall, which recall the love she expresses for children.

297

298

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

One may also find it useful to look for evidence that the subject has resisted or posed for the camera, specifically when there appears to be a power differential between photographer and photographed subject. In his analysis of photographs of the Apache leader Geronimo, Jimmie Durham argues that the man, though posed by the photographer, “created his own stance, … demanding to be seen, on his own terms” (56). Gerald McMaster similarly finds archival photos in which the “resistance [of the represented Native subjects] remains visible” (79). Lucy Lippard speculates that the stoic expressions on the faces of many photographed Native persons were not simply related to long exposure times on early cameras; more important, they were “voluntary defenses against yet another intrusion” (“Independent” 138). Vizenor, too, sees the silence of posed Natives as an example of survivance (8), as a sign not of the marginalized survival of culturally oppressed victims but rather of the continued vibrant presence of a storied people and culture. For me, Tappage Evans’s strength and influence as a storyteller, as well as her desire to be in relationship with the photographer, are evident most in Keziere’s “demand” photos (such as Figures 2 and 3), in which her facial expressions and body positions speak to the photographer and, by extension, to the viewers. The “offer” photos (such as Figure 4) seem less empowering, but I wonder whether Tappage Evans’s lack of eye contact may be deliberate on her part, a resistance against the intruding eye of the camera. Even though Keziere and Speare describe their relationship with Tappage Evans as warm and friendly (Speare; Keziere, Interview), there may have been times when the storyteller wearied of yet another question or photo. Vizenor suggests that by averting one’s gaze, photographic subjects resist the camera’s intrusion and close off viewers from their presence, from their world (7). Searching for instances of resistance against photographic intrusion does offer an alternative interpretation of the photo of Tappage Evans on her bed. If the storyteller is not asleep but awake, posing for the camera, her choice to expose her back to the camera suggests a willingness to make herself vulnerable and thus indicates a measure of trust (Kress and van Leeuwen 138). In this sense, the photo contributes to the warm atmosphere of openness, trust, and equality with the audience fostered by Tappage Evans in her verbal narratives. As Jean Speare tells the story, Mary Augusta Tappage Evans was pleased by the final product of her collaboration with Speare and Keziere. “She was quite excited about the whole thing,” Speare says. “She was delighted. I don’t think she could really comprehend what was happening. And then she actually held the book in her hand and looked at the pictures and, oh yeah, it made her day. Her life was laid out in front of her, and I think she really enjoyed it. I’m sure

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

she did” (Speare; cf. Furniss 148). I’d like to think that the storyteller’s own evaluation of The Days of Augusta trumps any scholarly critique we might offer. I believe, though, that storytellers are most likely to have a positive response to word-image textualized orature when those collaborating with them exemplify self-consciousness and sensitivity about the rhetorical effects of images within the published work. By all means, explore the potential of illustrations to enrich verbal narratives, but remember that photos are meaning-full, in at least as complex a way as verbal narratives.

Notes Thank you to Linda Warley, Susan Gingell, and two anonymous reviewers for helping me to clarify and deepen the insights presented in this essay. My thanks also to Jean Speare and Robert Keziere for graciously sharing memories with me about Augusta Tappage Evans and about the creation of The Days of Augusta. Finally, I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program for their financial support of this research. 1 See, for example, Bradley’s discussion of Robert Bringhurst, Campbell’s introduction to Stories of the Road Allowance People (2–3) and her discussion about the book (“Interview”), and Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer’s description of textualizing Tlingit and Haida oral narratives. Similar discussions have also become common in the related scholarly field of collaborative Native autobiography; see, for example, Rios and Sands’s Telling a Good One, in which Kathleen Sands extensively explores her collaboration with Tohono O’odham storyteller Theodore Rios to produce his life story. 2 I identify The Days of Augusta as an as-told-to autobiography with some hesitation. On the one hand, it is typical of this genre (see Bataille and Sands 11) in that, first, it features a narrator selected both for her narrative skill and for the valuable information she possesses, and second, its editor demonstrates an attempt to preserve the narrator’s oral style. On the other hand, it does not present the full-length, chronological account characteristic of most as-told-to autobiographies, the result of the editor’s careful reordering and reshaping of the narrator’s individual stories. Speare’s preface presents an abbreviated version of this style of life narrative, but the rest of the text is neither chronologically reordered nor linked into a continuous whole. Nor is it consistently focused on the individual, autonomous self as is typical of Euro-American autobiographies: Tappage Evans is often not the subject of, and not even a sideline participant in, her stories. If The Days of Augusta is to be conceived of as autobiography, it must be in an Indigenous sense. Since before Aboriginal–European contact, Indigenous life narratives have tended to “emphasize a communal rather than an individual self; … narrate a series of anecdotal moments rather than a unified, chronological life story; and … may be spoken, performed, painted, or otherwise crafted, rather than written” (Wong 12). For the purposes of this essay, however, perhaps Susan Brill de Ramirez offers a worthwhile directive: in calling scholars to focus less on the vexed notion of Native autobiography and more on the event of oral storytelling (62, 65), she suggests that we worry less about categorizing The Days of Augusta and focus more on its genesis as a series of oral performances. 3 The exact number of photographs in The Days of Augusta depends on the printing date. The first and second printings (J. J. Douglas, 1973; Madrona, 1977) include 28 images,

299

300

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

of which 26 are unique; the photo appearing on the front cover is also on page 21, and a photo of birch trees is on both front and back inside covers. The third printing (Douglas and McIntyre, 1992) includes 26 images, of which 25 are unique; no photograph appears on its back cover, and the birch-tree photo is not repeated on the back inside cover. Except where explicitly noted, I cite the 1992 text in this essay because, thanks to Keziere’s redeveloping of the photos from negatives (Keziere, Interview), its photos are noticeably crisper and warmer, with richer variations in tone than the 1970s images. (Page references are consistent in all printings.) 4 The 1973 and 1977 printings of The Days of Augusta include no details about the collaborative process that produced the text. My narrative of this process is based on my conversations with Keziere and Speare; some of the same information is available in book reviews. In addition, the 1992 printing of the text, reflecting scholarly developments in the fields of textualized orature and Native autobiography, features an introductory page (n.p.) that briefly outlines the collaboration of Tappage Evans and Speare as well as a concluding page (82) with short biographical sketches of Speare and Keziere, including a sentence about where and how the photos were taken. 5 Speare adds that she did at times remove comments that did not pertain to the content of the story being told, such as when Tappage Evans observed mid-story that she had just seen a bluebird (Speare). The editor also notes that she occasionally repeated lines for emphasis, such as adding the line “up by Barkerville” at the end of each stanza in “The Lillooets” (Tappage Evans 15–16; Speare). As Stephanie McKenzie points out, it would be worthwhile to explore further the contributions of Speare and Tappage Evans to the published text (92). 6 One can point to many other creative uses of photography by Indigenous peoples. Lee Marmon, for example, has been celebrated as a photographer of tribal peoples since the mid-twentieth century. Contemporary Aboriginal artists such as Jolene Rickard, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Shelley Niro, Bobby Martin, and Richard Ray Whitman are, according to Lucy Lippard, using the photographic medium creatively “to resist more than a century of visual distortion and downright lies, and to complement and build on the rare positive examples as well as absorbing what is useful from outside the culture” (“Independent” 135); see also James’s discussion of the autobiographical photography of Rickard, Tsinhnahjinnie, and Carm Little Turtle (93–121). For the value of archival photographs featuring Native subjects, see, for example, the story “Big John” in Campbell’s Stories of the Road Allowance People: the storyteller relates that Cree photographer Big John Janvier took and developed “All dah pictures we gots in our family / an just about all dah ones dah Indians dey gots / in Ahtakakoop” (68). Janvier’s descendant Neal McLeod describes the man’s photographic work as one way in which he “adopted elements of the colonial presence and transformed them to subvert them” (62). For other discussions of the worth of archival Aboriginal photos, see Lippard (“Independent” 142), Johnson (6), and King (36–37).

Works Cited Barman, Jean. “Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children.” Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia. Ed. Barman, Neil Sutherland, and J. Donald Wilson. Calgary: Detselig, 1995. 57–79. Print.

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women, Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly M. “Living History: A Conversation with Kimberly Blaeser.” Interview by Jennifer Andrews. Studies in American Indian Literature 19.2 (2007): 1–21. Print. ———. “Writing Voices Speaking: Native Authors and an Oral Aesthetic.” Murray and Rice 53–68. Bradley, Nicholas. “‘We Who Have Traded Our Voices for Words’: Performance, Poetry, and the Printed Word in Robert Bringhurst’s Translations from Haida.” Gingell, Textualizing Orature 140–66. Brill de Ramírez, Susan B. “The Resistance of American Indian Autobiographies to Ethnographic Colonization.” Mosaic 32.2 (1999): 59–73. Print. Campbell, Maria. “‘One Small Medicine’: An Interview with Maria Campbell.” Gingell, Textualizing Orature 188–205. ———, trans. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Penticton: Theytus, 1995. Print. Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print. Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer. “The Paradox of Talking on the Page: Some Aspects of the Tlingit and Haida Experience.” Murray and Rice 3–41. Durham, Jimmy. “Geronimo!” Lippard, Partial Recall 55–58. Furniss, Elizabeth. Review of The Days of Augusta, by Augusta Tappage Evans. Canadian Folklore [now Ethnologies] 19.1 (1997): 147–48. Print. Garrett-Petts, W. F., and Donald Lawrence. PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2000. Print. Gingell, Susan, ed. Textualizing Orature and Orality. Spec. issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 83 (2004). Print. ———. Introduction. Gingell, Textualizing Orature 1–18. James, Elisa L. “American Indian Women and Autobiography: Communal, Historical, and Mythical Expressions of the Self.” Diss. U of New Mexico, 2005. Dissertations & Theses: Full Text, ProQuest. Web. 15 July 2009. Johnson, Tim. “Introduction: Gazes Forward from the Past.” Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian. Ed. Johnson. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1998. 1–24. Print. Kelm, Mary-Ellen. Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1998. Print. Keziere, Robert. “Re: Thank you!” Message to the author. 11 July 2009. E-mail. ———. Telephone interview. 26 June 2009. King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003. Print. Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

301

302

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Lippard, Lucy R. “Independent Identities.” Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. Ed. W. Jackson Rushing III. London: Routledge, 1999. 134–48. Print. ———. Introduction. Lippard, Partial Recall 13–45. ———, ed. Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans. New York: New, 1992. Print. MacSkimming, Roy. The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada’s Writers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. Print. McKenzie, Stephanie. Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. McLeod, Neal. Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Saskatoon: Purich, 2007. Print. McMaster, Gerald. “Colonial Alchemy: Reading the Boarding School Experience.” Lippard, Partial Recall 77–87. Murray, Laura J., and Keren Rice. Introduction. Murray and Rice xi–xxii. ———, eds. Talking on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Print. Palmer, Andie Diane. Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Pinney, Christopher. “Introduction: ‘How the Other Half …’” Photography’s Other Histories. Ed. Pinney and Nicolas Peterson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. 1–14. Print. Rios, Theodore, and Kathleen Mullen Sands. Telling a Good One: The Process of a Native American Collaborative Biography. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Print. Sands, Kathleen Mullen. “Narrative Resistance: Native American Collaborative Autobiography.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 10.1 (1998): 1–18. Print. Schiff, Bennett. Rev. of The Days of Augusta by Augusta Tappage Evans. Smithsonian 5.10 (January 1975): 99–101. Print. Silko, Leslie Marmon. “As a Child I Loved to Draw and Cut Paper.” Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 166–74. Print. ———. “The Indian with a Camera.” Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 175–79. Print. ———. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981. Print. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1973. New York: Picador, 1990. Print. Speare, Jean. Telephone interview. 29 May 2009. Starr, Michael E. “The Marlboro Man: Cigarette Smoking and Masculinity in America.” Journal of Popular Culture 17.4 (1984): 45–57. Chadwick PAO Complete. Web. 16 July 2009. Sweet Wong, Hertha D. “Native American Visual Autobiography: Figuring Place, Subjectivity, and History.” Iowa Review 30.3 (2000): 147–56. Literature Online. Web. 2 August 2005.

Re-Si(gh)ting the Storyteller in Textualized Orature

■

Cara DeHaan

Tappage Evans, Augusta. The Days of Augusta. Ed. Jean E. Speare. Photographs by Robert Keziere. Vancouver: J. J. Douglas, 1973. Print. ———. The Days of Augusta. Ed. Jean E. Speare. Photographs by Robert Keziere. 1973. Seattle: Madrona, 1977. Print. ———. The Days of Augusta. Ed. Jean E. Speare. Photographs by Robert Keziere. 1973. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992. Print. Tellqelmucw Secwepemc Heritage Society. “Journey through Secwepemculew—Art and Expression: How to Make a Birch Bark Basket.” Spirit Map. Tellqelmucw Secwepemc Heritage Society. n.d. Web. 15 July 2009. Vizenor, Gerald. “Fugitive Poses.” Excavating Voices: Listening to Photographs of Native Americans. Ed. Michael Katakis. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998. 7–15. Print. Watmough, David. “Distilled Wisdom.” Review of The Days of Augusta, by Augusta Tappage Evans. Saturday Night 89.6 (June 1974): 37–38. Print. Wong, Hertha Dawn. Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print. Ziln, Glennis. “How It Was in Soda Creek.” Review of The Days of Augusta, by Augusta Tappage Evans. Books in Canada 3.1 (January/February 1974): 23. Web. 20 May 2009.

303

This page intentionally left blank

TRADITIONALIZING MODERNITY AND SOUND IDENTITY IN NEAL McLEOD’S WRITINGS OF THE ORAL+ Susan Gingell

A detail from Neal McLeod’s painting wîhtikow II (Figure 1), reproduced on the cover of his first collection of poems, Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow, shows words and phrases in both Cree/nêhiyaw syllabics and English ranged around a wîhtikow, a cannibal character from Cree oral tradition. The viewer literate in English can link the English words to constitute a meaningful statement, “progress … a new light on the land … ate our souls,” and readers of Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow will find in the wîhtikow poems of the book confirmation that the creature in the detail of the painting is a figuration of the colonizer. The movement among elements of the oral, written, and visual outlined here characterizes Neal McLeod’s work in multiple, often hybridized, media, and requires a similar integrative perceptual movement from those who seek to understand and enhance their appreciation of the work. Kimberly Blaeser in “A Nexus of Connections” (this volume) suggests that such movements are characteristic of Native writers and visual artists who seek to “counter … one-dimensional text-based expression” and “[t]hrough visual or verbal juxtaposition” to “compel connection or relationship.” Indigenous literary and visual artists’ strong rootedness in “multidimensional oral reality” prompts the creation of a palimpsest, “a complex layering of image and allusion,” which is “a particularly apt form in which to suggest multiple elements of performance,” Blaeser argues. The already considerable complexity Blaeser articulates here is further complicated by McLeod’s working in several media and because his sense of layering is about voices in time, generations of Cree people listening to their ancestors’ stories. He explains, “the collective memory of a people becomes layered through narrative memory, as the memories of older generations engage in a hermeneutical interplay with the narratives and experiences of the present generation” (39). As painteroralstorytellingpagebasedpoetscholarfilmmakerorganizer host of the Crow Hop Café (an itinerant variety show whose mostly Indigenous 305

306

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Figure 1 Detail of Neal McLeod’s painting wîhtikow II (2001). Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Patrick Altman.

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

performers change with location)—and, oh yes, founding member of the Bionic Bannock Boys stand-up and sketch comedy troupe—McLeod simply refuses to be confined by the generic borders of Western artistic, scholarly, or entertainment practices.1 The name of the comedy troupe of which McLeod is a founding member both suggests the dynamic nature of Cree identity and might be taken as a synecdoche of his project of traditionalizing modernity. To take the name Bionic Bannock Boys, as I confess I first did, as an indication of his bridging of two worlds, the Euro-Canadian and the Cree, would be to put Cree people, the nêhiyawak, makers and consumers of the unleavened bread known as bannock, on the traditional side of a traditional–modern binary, and the Western bionic on the modern side, thus missing the key point of McLeod’s project as I have come to understand it. I want to signal that my understanding is that of an outsider to the culture who has only the most preliminary knowledge of a few aspects of the Cree language, so I ask that what I offer here be understood as an account of what I have gathered so far in reading Cree and other authors and talking with Cree scholars, other insiders to the culture, and of course my larger scholarly and life communities. For a contemporary urban nêhiyaw such as McLeod,2 who grew up in an era of reruns of popular 1970s movies and the television show featuring the cyborg-cum-quasi-superhero the Six Million Dollar Man, played by Lee Majors, the bionic is a part of contemporary nêhiyâwiwin, or “Creeness,” just as bannock is. In the same way, even though the identities of Cree people have been significantly shaped by the sounding and resounding of nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) and what we have called “oral traditions” in their lives, the written (including the writing of the oral+),3 painting that includes words and phrases, filmmaking, and stand-up comedy are all undeniably parts of contemporary Cree verbal expression. Thus, in whatever medium he is working, McLeod weaves together nêhiyawêwin and English as he retells or draws on traditional Cree oral stories to help contemporary nêhiyawak “make sense of the world around them” (“mamâhtâwisiwin” 101) and to provide a sound basis for a healthy, spiritually-connected, and self-directed future. The verbal and the visual are usually understood in the West as distinct communication media, and Cree syllabics and written English are seen as belonging to different eras and separate cultural spheres. Thus McLeod’s integration of them in wîhtikow II can be understood as a traditionalizing of modernity, that is to say, a simultaneously creative and critical First Nations response to versions of modernity built upon colonizing notions of difference and progress.4 The nêhiyawak, like all Indigenous peoples of Turtle

307

308

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Island (North America)—and indeed all the people colonized by Europeans in the Age of Imperialism and neo-colonized in the era of globalization— have been depreciated as benighted in spiritual terms and belated both in economic terms and in making various technologies of communication central to their practices. If, as Zygmunt Bauman has suggested in his foreword to Liquid Modernity, speed/movement/fluidity and lightness/relative weightlessness are of the essence in Western modernities, then from the perspective of these modernities, colonized peoples were, and remain, infernally slow and s(t)olid, encumbered by the dead weight of their traditions. Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire is representative of modern Western views here: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (437). Anthony Giddens mints the positive Western flipside of the traditionalist/modernist coin, describing an order he designates “post-traditional” (2): “Modern institutions differ from all preceding forms of social order in respect of their dynamism, the degree to which they undercut traditional habits and customs, and their global impact” (1). Working in another decolonizing context, that of Irish Studies, Maria McGarrity and Claire Culleton explain in the introduction to Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive the subversion of the communal and traditional under the sign of modernity: “Modernity invokes and defines itself as the ever-present.… Central to modernity’s identification of itself as the ‘always new,’ the modern, is the necessarily associated identification of its very opposite, the ‘ever-preceding,’ the primitive. Modernity is civilization versus the savage and light amidst darkness” (8–9). Thus, when Terry Goldie explains in Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures that orality is “an intrinsic part” of the image of Aboriginal peoples (107), and adds that the oral is associated with the prehistoric (111), we can see why Westerners perceived alphabetic writing to be a key technology in subduing the so-called savage mind and enlightening it.5 Moreover, we can understand why in Western discourses the distinction between literate and illiterate is “often used as the defining point for an absolute division between white self and indigene other” (Goldie 107). Because what we have come to call oral traditions are an important part of the richness and key constitutive elements of Cree culture, and “[m]odern has generally been opposed to traditional” (Goody, Capitalism 6), the collocation in Western hegemonic discourses of oral traditions and the past situates Cree culture as pre-modern. Thus, the textualizing of the oral—that is, textualizing both orature and orality—in books like McLeod’s Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow and Gabriel’s Beach is at once a discursive mode of traditionalizing

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

modernity and a way of ascribing value to people and cultures systematically depreciated in colonizing and neo-colonizing contexts. In traditionalizing modernity by hybridizing the oral, written, and visual, McLeod creates what it is tempting to call a third space, such as that which Homi Bhabha theorizes in The Location of Culture. However, though McLeod sets up the kind of “new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” to which Bhabha refers (211), the Cree poet generates these novel structures and launches these initiatives not by displacing both prior sets of histories, as in the Bhabhaian model, but by consciously calling those histories into the present to constitute a critique of colonial history and a sound basis for a distinctively Cree future. Thus McLeod’s traditionalized modernity is the temporal and cultural space in which colonized peoples can fashion emergent identities in an always fleeting, hybridized present, one that is understood to be synchronous with their ancestral pasts and simultaneously capable of providing the basis for a dynamic future. The idea of traditionalizing modernity as a mode of regenerating Indigenous communities is one to which Stl’atl’imx poetscholar Peter Cole gives useful and memorable formulation in Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village. Cole speaks of Indigenous peoples struggling “toward refiguring regenerating our traditions traditionalizing / modernity (re)dressing the old ways in new clothes” (17; irregular spacing in original). This process, he explains, involves “indigenous ways of knowing the world,” and understanding tradition as something “other than static fossilized epistemology” (57). While within modernity the oral and the written have always been synchronous “channels” in language (Goody, Interface xii), the dispersion of the ideas of theorists associated with the Toronto School of Communication about the way in which the invention of writing enabled cognitive development crucial to the advancement of the West resulted in widespread notions of writing replacing orality in the march of progress. Walter J. Ong’s claim in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word that “writing … is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials” (82) is a now classic formulation of this position. Cole, however, presents a quite different take on the kind of one-sign– one-word writing to which Ong is referring, representing it as entry into “dysauditory linguistic space” (102), the disembodiment of language it effects creating deadly dysfunction and the initiation of a “panopticon mentality” (101) that imprisons rather than liberates human potential. Cole proposes to address the dysfunction by traditionalizing modernity, which he models by a counter-discursive valorizing of the multisensory oral+. Orality in his

309

310

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

understanding is not something to be left behind: “for us orality is about engagement rather than infringement / community rather than ‘communication’ passing on rather than passing over” (51). The qualities represented as alien to Indigenous orality here are associated with dominant Western attitudes to the oral, which are really simulations of the oral, produced by Western discursive collocation of the oral and the past. The Western master narrative of progress after all requires that we leave the past behind in order to pass over into the condition of modernity. But Cole reframes the association of (Ab)or(igin)ality with the past, identifying this association as merely a “refrain” (53) of Western culture: we were called prehistorical because we didn’t use alphabets because we did not fit in to the noun ‘history’ we were the wrong shape or the noun was the wrong shape

we were identified as being

prehistorical because we spoke together and listened rather than spending our time scratching out meaning secondhand using tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . before the boats came we had no history only a past a prepast a repast (53–54)

Cole’s observations about the need to reconceptualize the past as a source of ongoing life, as nourishing “repast” (54),6 not something disjunct from the present, and about orality as vital to the life of community, not as something inevitably cannibalized by literacy,7 accurately describe McLeod’s practice. For the adult McLeod, orality (defined here as the oral practices of particular speech communities) is constitutive of communities grounded in place and language, but he had to overcome what the Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton calls “imprisoning attitudes” (“To Capture” 61) to his own ancestral tongue. To understand how McLeod works to traditionalize modernity, then, we must pay focused attention to the ways he brings his people’s depreciated language as well as their narratives into his writing and negotiates working within, as well as in considerable measure against, the textualizing traditions that have typically devalued his people, their forms of orality, and their stories. In “nêhiyâwiwin and Modernity,” McLeod considers the relationship between Cree identity (or Cree collective memory as McLeod alternatively translates nêhiyâwiwin) and modernity, and in many respects seems more

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

inclined to stage a critique of modernity than to find ways to traditionalize it. He writes, “All too often the struggle of Indigenous people to maintain their traditions has been perceived as reactionary and backward. However, I will argue that the attempt of nêhiyawak to maintain our identity provides a radical critique of modernity” (35). The version of modernity McLeod criticizes is one in which “science [is] the benchmark for truth manifested through technology” (35), and instrumental rationality leads people to try to control their world. He tellingly frames in auditory terms an alternative way of relating to the world: “Instead of listening to the world and engaging in a discourse of attunement, people began to try to dominate the rest of creation” (36). He notes that “with modernity, ‘narrative holes’ emerge in Indigenous being” because “certain elements of Indigenous narratives can no longer explain the world” (37). Yet in the context in which “colonialism is synonymous with modernity” (36), to question tradition can seem “equivalent to assimilation” (37). Thus McLeod seems poised to write off modernity altogether. However, having set up what seem to be irreconcilable binary opposites (listening to the world / trying to dominate it), McLeod argues that nêhiyâwiwin “could correct” some of the “excesses of modernity” (35). The potential for a Cree-rehabilitated modernity thus opens up, though if modernity is not to be written off, Cree relationship to it must be carefully negotiated. Of this need McLeod is crisply aware: “The central challenge for nêhiyawak in the climate of modernity,” he writes, “is to create, in the wake of colonialism, modern institutions that draw upon traditional beliefs” (43). In short, the project is to traditionalize modernity, and in this project, Cree narrative imagination, or what is commonly called oral tradition, is seen as a resource that enables the nêhiyawak to “imag[ine] another state of affairs … not … [a] Utopia, but … a conception of a different way in which people might live together” (51). In this respect, McLeod’s take on the Cree relationship to oral tradition is very like the one the Nigerian Canadian critic Ato Quayson discerns in the Yoruba writing he studies. Yoruba discourses, in whatever medium they are formulated, recurrently draw on Yoruba oral tradition as a set of continually renewable resources that can help the Yoruba meet the ever-emerging challenges of contemporary living, Quayson explains. Given the history of colonial damage to the Yoruba mind and spirit, those demands include “recuperat[ing] a sense of self-worth for the [Yoruba] psyche” (17), and therefore generate what Quayson, adapting Edward Said’s notion of the European will-to-power exhibited in Orientalist constructions, calls the “will-toidentity” (17). Working in the literary mode in the aftermath of colonialism’s cultural genocide to reconstruct a sound identity, which is to say an identity

311

312

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

that can be sounded and found whole, entails for the writer of decolonizing literature the transvaluation from oral traditions to literature (16) of both what the indigenous culture understands to be the real and what Abiola Irele calls the “affective stance” toward life (73). Following this line of argument, we may hypothesize that contemporary Cree writers like McLeod, in searching for a way to make space for the Cree within the discourses of modernity, exhibit a will-to-sound-identity in carrying across from oral to written discourse “structures of feeling” (Williams 133)8 that constitute a Cree way of being in the world, nêhiyâwiwin. That way of being is multidimensional, dynamic, invested in listening respectfully to all of creation in order to be in communal relation with it, and is characterized by a sense of time that is markedly different from that which shapes Western modernities. Common to most non-Indigenous accounts of modernity is the idea of a chronological rupture “between past and present instituted by the Industrial Revolution” (Mishra 136), so that, as Samir Amin has argued, “modernity is … synonymous with capitalism” (12). Why, then, we might ask, would an Indigenous poet and scholar seek an integration into modernity, however qualified, rather than abrogating it? The question assumes a choice in the matter that David Scott emphatically rejects in Conscripts of Modernity, his title reconstructing Talal Asad’s notion of the conscripts of Western civilization (Scott 8). Indigenous peoples around the globe must deal with this conscription and the “modern chronopolitics” (Bauman 12) that Dipesh Chakrabarty points to in wryly observing that while every culture existent today is in one sense contemporary, “some are markedly less contemporary than others” (paraphrased by Mishra, Diaspora 137). To clarify the relevance of Chakrabarty’s insight for the present subject and to get closer to understanding Cole’s and McLeod’s desire for a traditionalized modernity, I want to draw on Daniel Coleman’s elaboration of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes, an elaboration articulated and figured in Coleman’s essay “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility.” Chronotopes are our mental maps of space and time, and Coleman theorizes competing or at least co-existent chronotopes, among them an Isochronic, Imperial chronotope and an Indigenous Concentric one. The first is animated by a concept of progressive time: “it understands everyone in the world to be on a single time-line, with some cultures being more advanced and leading the way into the future while others are more primitive and ‘backward’”:

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

Isochronic Imperial Time

Figure 2 Isochronic Imperial time. From “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility” (Coleman 19). Reproduced with permission of Daniel Coleman.

The most “progressive” culture or society thus becomes the measure of modernity, and the less “developed” in Western industrial terms a society is, the more likely it is to be discursively positioned as at best pre-modern and at worst forever outside modernity. In such circumstances, Sudesh Mishra explains, “modernity … functions as a sign of value” (137). To break the linking of Indigeneity with the backward and primitive, thinkers such as Cole and McLeod claim Indigenous peoples’ rightful—and self-defining—place within modernity. They may be conscripts of modernity, but they create what Scott would call a “problem-space” of modernity, displacing the Imperial chronotopic version of modernity with one based on Indigenous Concentric time. In such a version, Coleman explains, “the past is in the centre of ongoing life, which is why it is consulted, renewed, interpreted in the present” (22). The visual model he creates includes the ceremonial four directions (as implicit ex-centric vectors along the straight lines) in order to signify the centrality of space and land and the simultaneity of time past and time present enacted through ceremony:

Indigenous Concentric Time

Figure 3 Indigenous Concentric time. From “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility” (Coleman 22). Reproduced with permission of Daniel Coleman.

313

314

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Modernity in this conception is, then, an outgrowth of the past, just as the outermost ring of a tree is entirely dependent on and integrated with the innermost.9 The present cannot leave the past behind in the way that Isochronic Imperial Time proposes that it does. In the Indigenous chronotope, present and past are synchronous.10 Thus modernity framed according to the imperial model must be traditionalized, which is to say reconceptualized as an outer circle of vitally connected concentric circles of time, rather than understood as the condition achieved in a race along the path of progress when the leading vector in linear time (Western civilization) emerges first from antiquity.11 The imposition of colonial institutions and practices on Indigenous peoples cemented the hegemony of Isochronic Imperial Time while deleteriously positioning Cree and other Indigenous peoples as pre-modern. That positioning is of a piece with attitudes toward oral storytelling that conceive it to be less sophisticated than the practice of writing literature because literature developed out of oral+ storytelling. Though oral+ storytelling of course persisted alongside the creation of literature, in modern Western culture the former came increasingly to be associated either with leisurely social occasions or with the unlettered—be they children, members of the lower classes, or people from cultures that lacked alphabetic or other highly abstracted forms of writing. Cole, in the context of explaining why he rejects the idea of having to fit what he wants to communicate into box-like paragraphs, forcefully captures this depreciation: “to thus delegate the orality of my nation and its transcription to a para place removed / from equal symbolic even orthographic consideration / is to put us in our place illiterates illegitimates iterati” (21). Here the iterati, those whose verbal communication involves (oral+) iteration, are viewed from a Western perspective as deficient, the “missing” l of literati acting as synecdoche of the lack of alphabetic literacy in Indigenous cultures. To make matters worse, the hegemonic culture’s depreciation of Indigenous oral stories and storytelling was further synchronous with its pejoration of Indigenous values and language, a pejoration that persists in many quarters to this day. But the project of traditionalizing modernity entails revaluing the iterati, as Cole does when he asserts, “we had iterature iterati we were iterate / though we had no English words for these sautauxyeuxisismes” (54), and, as I will argue, as McLeod does in transcoding oral+ stories and nêhiyawêwin. We might come closer to understanding how devastating were the losses the Cree experienced as a result of colonizing concepts of orality and literacy if we consider what Cree people tell us about the importance to the nêhiyawak

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

of the way they sound when they speak nêhiyawêwin. Their sound was, and for many still is, so central to their identities and connection to their territory that the soundness of their subjectivity is threatened by the loss of their language’s distinctive sound as it transmits the stories that establish their connection to nêhiyawaskiy (Cree land), the ancestors, and other living beings. The title of Cree Elder Sarah Whitecalf ’s kinêhiyâwininaw nêhiyawêwin / The Cree Language Is Our Identity offers testament to the connection between nêhiyawêwin and the identities of Cree people, and a passage in McLeod’s Cree Narrative Memory elaborates on this link as follows: “The connection Indigenous people have to the land is housed in language. Through stories and words, we hold the echo of generational experience, and the engagement with land and territory. nêhiyawêwin, Cree language—perhaps more poetically rendered as ‘the process of making Cree sound’—grounds us, and binds us with other living beings, and marks these relationships” (6). Because Cree people see all beings as related, the alienation from their traditional territories results not only in the spatial and spiritual exile on which McLeod elaborates (55), but also in the land itself losing its voice. McLeod suggests the traditional idea of the land having a voice when in “Meditations on paskwâw-mostos awâsis” (Gabriel’s 38–39) he writes of contemporary Cree bodies “tattooed / with land’s memories / with land speak, askîwêwin” (38). When Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor used the assertion The Voice of the Land Is in Our Language (18) as the title of a CBC documentary, he helped spread an idea entirely consonant with what McLeod tells us of Cree thought. Cree Elder Edwin Tootoosis articulated that idea in a more traditional way in speaking to the young McLeod about the alienated state of Cree territory: “he told me, ‘moy ê-kistawêt’ (‘It does not echo’).” McLeod explains, “He was referring to the land, and the fact that the land no longer had sound in the same way it had before” (Cree Narrative 6). In these circumstances, to speak Cree is to give voice back to the land and to reclaim it. As McLeod writes, “every time one word of an Indigenous language is spoken, we are resisting the destruction of our collective memory” (67). Adopting and adapting what educational theorist Glenn M. Hudak, in writing about the relationship between popular music and identity formation, called “sound identities,” is useful for discussing the constitutive force of linguistic sound in McLeod’s work because of the meaning with which Hudak invests the term and the serendipitous suggestion of healthy, wellfounded identity that using the term in the present context carries. Hudak studies “the formation of distinct musical identities located within the nexus of activities involved in the making of music and community” and the

315

316

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

creation of what he calls “a musical ‘We’” (446). Carrying this idea into the context of communal storytelling and speaking together in a shared language demands no great imaginative leap. The formation of contemporary sound identities for Cree people living in twenty-first-century Canada counters the silencing first effected by colonization and in this sense is, as Hudak observes of other sound identities, “oppositional” (463). Yet even as the sounds of Cree are again made to echo in contemporary cultural spaces such as the page and the sites of reading poetry aloud, the linguistic code switching—that is, switching from one language or variety of language to another—that characterizes so much contemporary Indigenous writing creates in McLeod’s poetry a sense of coexistent cultural difference, not deficient consciousness but doubled consciousness. In Cree Narrative Memory, McLeod quotes Jeannette Armstrong to make the point that the residential school system brutally and radically sought to destroy nêhiyawêwin as part of a complex of cultural forces constituting Aboriginality: “Our children, for generations, were seized from our communities and homes and placed in indoctrination camps until our language, our religions, our customs, our values and our society structures almost disappeared” (qtd. in McLeod, Cree Narrative 59). McLeod emphasizes that residential schools not only “severely disrupted the transmission of language” but also did the same to the passing on of stories (59). In the face of such a pedagogy of oppression, McLeod claims a space and time within a modernity adapted to his people’s traditional values by bringing into his poems the sounds of ancestral speech, the modes of his peoples’ traditional orality, and their stories, which, when retold in the present, act in a counter-colonially discursive way. In “Mamâhtâwisiwin: Tapping into the Great Mystery,” McLeod identifies “the interface between oral and written language” as “[c]entral to [his] poetic process” (Fast Forward 101). Although he says he is not a traditional storyteller, he affirms, “my work is profoundly grounded in the old stories. I have found great inspiration from these old narratives, and they form the structure through which I make sense of my world, to imagine new characters, and new situations” (102). His grandfather, John R. McLeod, taught him “the responsibility to remember, and to hold up old ancestral echoes so future generations will have the same narrative pool from which they can draw inspiration from telling their own stories in their own time” (102). The echoes of McLeod’s Cree ancestors are clearly heard both in the stories he retells and in his use of Cree language in his work in all media.

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

The responsibility to carry those echoes forward consciously informs his creative processes. McLeod describes his poetic process as “layering language through time and through sound,” explaining that, as is the case with his paintings, “I constantly add new layers to my poems, as a response to performances” so that “each layer feeds the next” (102). Emphasizing the oral dimension of his poems, he creates an analogue with visual art: “The process is like a dialogue, a conversation between locations and possibilities. August [sic] Rodin spoke of the ‘living surface’ of lines in his work, and I see the acoustic surface of my poems in the same way” (102). The metaphor McLeod then develops accords with Coleman’s image of “the circles in the trunk of a tree” (234): “The poems, in the moment of creation are spoken performances, are a ‘living line’ of practice embedded with many layers, some older, some deeper, layers being echoed in the present” (103). The core of the tree trunk of Cree narrative memory gives life and shape to new growth, the modern outermost ring being literally vitally connected to the core values embedded in stories in Cree language. Thus, when McLeod writes elsewhere about his great-grandmother’s sister, who asked Neal to record on paper the family stories she told him, he feels bound to say of the woman he calls nicâpân, “Her life was not merely a series of scratches on paper; her stories were like an organism, a living thing that linked stories and experience together” (Cree Narrative 15). Similarly, when in the poem “cîhcam” (Gabriel’s 47–49) he speaks of his relationship and that of a number of other contemporary CreeMetis writers to his great-great-grandmother, he observes, “we are her living body / storytellers and poets” (49). Continuity—not disjunction—is what is figured here. McLeod credits his maternal great-grandfather, kôkôcîs/Peter Vandall, with having particularly nourished his “understanding of Cree narrative memory,” and he reports that the stories of his great-grandfather “are perhaps my strongest link to the past” (Cree Narrative 13). In the poem “kôkôcîs” (Songs 45–46), McLeod speaks of “the eternal song / [coming] up through … [kôkôcîs’s] mouth” (45), so readers again get a sense of the past synchronous with the present. The old man, McLeod tells us, added stories and layers of memory to the photographs bringing the old ones alive (45)

317

318

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

In this way, the poet points to an oral-visual interface in modern Cree storytelling. McLeod describes a typical kôkôcîs storytelling event as a channelling of ancestral voices: the room held his voice the voice[s]12 of others pushed through the fold of eternity were held in his textured voice (Songs 34–39)

The image of voices pushing through this fold in time is produced by a poetic way of thinking, which McLeod describes in his essay “Cree Poetic Discourse” as a dreaming and a reliance on the visceral (112). Such thinking, because it entails a radical reconceptualizing of surface reality, participates in “mamâhtâwisiwin [the process of tapping into the Great Mystery]” (111), encoded in the traditional stories of the people. Thus, McLeod, claims, “In a way, thinking poetically is radically historical, and does not mean the ‘narrative space’ is ordered chronologically. Poetic thinking involves the bending of time to a single point of consciousness” (112). Here, then, is the basis for a “re-visioning” of the Western notion of modernity, which has entailed movement out of time past. Such re-visioning is central to a poem in which McLeod juxtaposes a communication technology more recent than writing, the television, with the oral powers of the Cree okimâw (chief) whom McLeod names in the title of his poem “pîkahin okosisa” (Songs 87–88). First introducing cikâstêpayihcikan, the television, as a “shadow maker / … [that] brings the world home / in shadows and flickers” (1–3), McLeod shows the connection it has with cikâstêpêsin, “another kind of shadow / shadow on the water” (4–5), through the similarity of the Cree words. As he explains in Cree Narrative Memory, cikâstêpêsin was the name of a reserve as well as that of its first chief (73). However, it was cikâstêpêsin’s brother-in-law, pîkahin okosisa, who, McLeod tells us in the poem, “spoke the shadows / out of the water” (17–18) after having been “told things / by the powers” whom he encounters when “ê-kî-wîhtamâkowisit / he passed through time / merged the future into the present” (19–20). This folding together of time produces what McLeod calls “dream speak, organic thoughts and words” (23) as “all things / kahkiyaw kîkway, meshed into one story / one person” (23–26). The image he uses to convey the folding, “like

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

a rope bending / into itself to one point” (26–27), is like that of the Mobius strip, though McLeod’s image is drawn from the life world of the nêhiyawak rather than bearing the name of a conception of Western mathematics. Thus the story of pîkahin okosisa is part of Cree spiritual history, which, McLeod tells readers of Cree Narrative Memory, “challenges the Western notion of the construction of linear time” (17). The aligning of the oral+ and the modern that McLeod effects in “pîkahin okosisa” by creating an analogy between the television bringing the world home in shadows and flickers and pîkahin okosisa’s prophesying the future of Cree people as a result of his journeying through time is in some ways analogous to McLeod’s writing of the Aboriginal as modern in “ê-sâh-sâkiniskêpayihot” (Songs 64–65), a story about his great-grandfather, kôkôcîs. Though McLeod describes kôkôcîs in Cree Narrative Memory as having “lived at the crossroads of great historical and social changes” (57), the great-grandson also remarks that the old man “saw great joy in life and was comfortable with who he was” (13). In the poem in which McLeod signals that the events described take place on nêhiyawaskiy by giving priority to a Cree naming of the setting, “kistapinânihk, Prince Albert” (64), when that place is first introduced, the poet repeatedly compares his grandfather’s actions to those of a range of historical figures of a grand scale. kôkôcîs’s trip to Prince Albert was “a big deal / not quite like Neil Armstrong’s trip / or Diefenbaker’s trek to Ottawa in 1957, but it was a big deal, big business” (64), and his great-grandfather and his friends are said to have “walked in style, proud as peacocks / marching … down the streets of Prince Albert / like Alexander through Babylon” (64). McLeod tells us that kôkôcîs “couldn’t read English / so he couldn’t read the signs” (64) about the construction of a bridge in the centre of the city, and thus drove into oncoming traffic. Moreover, the poem informs us, kôkôcîs misinterpreted the frantic waving of the workers as due recognition of his glory. Nevertheless, McLeod explicitly counters the idea of kôkôcîs as failed modern: he was happy to beat all hell riding down the street in all of his regalia catching the sun in the chrome of his car the gloss of the metal radiating out everything in slow motion as he passed by the metal railing, time stood still as he was crossing the bridge like the fight scene of The Matrix (64–65)

319

320

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

McLeod makes a further move to traditionalize modernity at this moment in the poem. After Cree disappears completely for fourteen lines in the description of kôkôcîs’s imperial progress, McLeod makes it reappear just after the reference to the 1999 science fiction–action film when we are told, “but ê-kîwâstinamâkot, they were waving at him” (65). By such means McLeod signals that nêhiyawêwin has a place not just in kôkôcîs’s time, but also in the virtual world of the future. Moreover, by representing kôkôcîs’s imperial progress as analogous to the fight scene in the film after having compared his great-grandfather to Alexander marching through Babylon, McLeod comically annihilates the stereotype of the defeated Indian, while the movement through time to what would have been nearly a century into kôkôcîs’s future undermines the idea of the First Nations man’s belatedness. Indeed, we read that when kôkôcîs’s wife “told him / to make the signals properly” (65) because he has been waving by opening and closing his hand quickly, his rejoinder explicitly rejects the “Indian” frozen in time: my grandfather laughed, he said his wife wanted him to make signals just like old Indians making sign language (65)

Moreover, McLeod’s poetic framing of the story in a comic mode suggests a refusal of Indigenous emplotment in a tragic prose narrative of colonialism’s destruction of Indigenous culture even as he refocuses on kôkôcîs’s taking up the new conditions of subjectivity attendant on his conscription into modernity.13 Like “kôkôcîs” and “pîkahin okosisa,” “manitowêw” (Songs 94) is a poem that is a contemporary retelling of a story from Cree oral tradition that McLeod recounts in prose form in Cree Narrative Memory, providing in the scholarly book the historical context of his story when told from the Cree point of view. manitowêw’s name translates into English as Almighty Voice,14 and his is a story strikingly like the one that Pauline Johnson/Tehahionwake told in her 1894 poem “The Cattle Thief ” (97–99). Though Johnson’s poem is a stinging indictment of Canadian government policy that created the hunger that, in her words, “drove [the man] to be a thief,” and though she demands, “Give back our land and our country, give back our herds and game” (99), McLeod’s poem moves even further to reclaim Cree territory. He does so in part by using nêhiyawêwin, the sounds that Cree makes, to name

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

a real man who endured a fate similar to that of the person Johnson refers to once as “the famous Eagle Chief ” (97) before she supplants, in a couplet’s completing rhyme, the translated Indigenous name chief with the colonially discursive one, thief. But McLeod’s poem does more than tell something of manitowêw’s story; more important, it is a meditation on oral tradition (or to use the term that McLeod seems to prefer, narrative memory), and especially on the importance of sounded names: names hold old land echoes one name was almighty voice, manitowêw a voice that could not be silenced from one arrow reserve but passed by my reserve in his travel through light (94)

What McLeod means by manitowêw’s “travel through light” becomes clearer in the lines to know the light you have to pass through the darkness to know the words you have to name the silence (94)

One possible understanding of this formulation is that story carried by Cree narrative memory is the light that travels through the darkness of the colonial past in order to illuminate the present. In the thus Cree-enlightened present, the poet names the silencing of Cree voices by the Canadian government’s “linguicidal” and genocidal policies and practices enacted through the work of that government’s many agents. To counteract that silencing and to make the land again resound with Cree sound, McLeod often weaves nêhiyawêwin into his poems, characteristically giving precedence to its words, which he then juxtaposes with English glosses. However, his retelling in “maskîhkiy âstôtin” (Gabriel’s 34–35) of a story passed on to him by Cree Elder Charlie Burns (e-mail to author January 2008) shows that he sometimes alternates the language to which he gives priority. McLeod’s poem represents the refusal of the nêhiyaw chief kâ-mônahihkos, Digging Weasel, to hand over his “terribly beautiful” (34) daughter to forestall attack by Blackfoot warriors who have surrounded the nêhiyawak

321

322

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

at a riverside encampment but who promise to leave them unharmed if the daughter is surrendered. McLeod’s recounting of the chief ’s response and what follows once more establishes nêhiyawêwin as the privileged lect in this world, despite English being the primary narrative medium: “moya. No. You cannot have her” the chief said he loved her too much he threw his bonnet in the river and it was called maskîhkiy âstôtin Medicine Hat Crees went to their camp along the river nêhiyawak in the camp began to wonder what would happen ispîhk ê-wî-pê-sâkâstêk when the dawn would come (34–35)

The history obscured by the English place name Medicine Hat is made visible in “maskîhkiy âstôtin,” and the nêhiyawêwin name claims the land as traditional Cree territory. Though McLeod twice refers to his ancestors as Cree before identifying them as nêhiyawak, in every other case the Cree precedes the English that immediately glosses it. The language politics of such a poem only become fully evident, however, when a non-Cree speaker reads this poem aloud. For instance, my stumbling pronunciation of nêhiyawêwin reveals a shift in the usual power relations between nêhiyawak and anglophones. Moreover, my difficulty in articulating the Cree words and phrases goes some way to redress the imbalance between the dominant English and the nêhiyawêwin in the poem. This imbalance is produced by colonial language policies and ongoing institutionalized racism that mean that in order to have much of an audience, McLeod must as yet write primarily in English. Still, his use of nêhiyawêwin has the power to confront unilingual anglophones with reminders that they are on territory originally held by others, and his code switching on the space of the page or in speech when he reads the poem aloud encodes the coming together of two

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

cultures on now shared territory with the inequities of that “sharing” made evident by the far greater prevalence of English in the poem. This poem is also an exemplary text for revealing that Cree names carry history—and therefore what is lost when they are displaced by Christian or Euro-North American ones—and the role and importance of retelling Cree stories. The Cree people’s way out of their entrapment is shown in the poem when “veterans t[ell] stories / to steady the nerves / of the young ones” (35) and kâ-mônahihkos calls his snake helper, who digs a tunnel that “snuck past Blackfoot lines / emptied the camp.” Thus, when the dawn came the Blackfoot were left with “no one to fight” (35). kâ-mônahihkos, Digging Weasel, literally helps dig his people out of trouble, then, but the veterans’ or Elders’ unidentified stories—probably tales of valorous exploits and thinking one’s way out of tight situations—are also key to rescuing the situation. When in the modern world the contemporary Cree are surrounded by more numerous and powerful enemies, or at least by threats to their survival, might “the young ones” not take counsel from this traditional story that models finding strength in turning to traditional spirit helpers and relying on intellectual and cultural resourcefulness rather than physical strength to get them out of harm’s way? Moreover, McLeod is concerned to show that nêhiyawêwin is also dynamic and has a place within that traditionalized modernity. In “nêhiyâwiwin and Modernity,” he points to the new Cree word for computer, mâmahtawisiâpacihcikan, explaining that etymologically the word means “machine which taps into the mystery of life” (42). However, he is fully aware that contemporary communication technologies also “pose threats to the survival of nêhiyâwewin … supplant[ing] traditional narrative memory … [because] instead of listening to tribal elders, children will watch television and be heavily influenced by mainstream English-speaking culture” (49). But exhibiting the dynamism of nêhiyâwiwin, he recuperates the potential of information technologies for Cree culture by maintaining, “Cree groups can use digital technology to preserve the words of old people, and indeed for various classroom purposes” (49). Moreover, he specifically identifies this empowering attitude as proceeding from nêhiyâwiwin: “Through the use of Cree narrative imagination, the constraints of technology and modernity can be eased to some extent, and the positive aspect of modern life can be engaged” (49–50). One final point about McLeod’s Cree claims on modernity in relation to its communication technologies is his pointing out that Cree narrative memory and the Internet work in analogous ways, being open-ended. When using the Internet, he writes, “People are free to choose their own pathways and

323

324

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

create their own links—this replicates the process of Cree narrative memory wherein listeners to traditional narratives merge their own experiences within the traditional narratives, thereby creating their own discursive pathways” (49). The sense of freedom from linear notions of time that such an understanding of narrative entails is, Cole points out, “i t indian time” (20). Even though McLeod’s inscription of the oral is a form of resistance to the homogenizing forces of modern capitalist and globalized cultures, he does not escape the ironies connected with writings of the oral. His textualizings of oral stories and Cree language in a book of poems and a scholarly book offered for sale could be said to commodify, at least to the small degree entailed in selling such books necessarily supported by federal government publishing subventions, what had previously been largely outside the commercial realm. Moreover, he appropriates the oral for written culture, thus blurring the distinctions between them, and perhaps weakening the motivation for trying to pass on stories in an oral+ way. Yet as Julie Cruikshank has shown in The Social Life of Stories, textualized stories can be re-oralized. Moreover, McLeod does his poet’s and scholar’s part both to reclaim alienated Cree territory by making his prairie place once more echo with Cree sound and stories, and to tie one generation to the next and one community member to another through the passing on of stories and the modelling of a traditionalized modern nêhiyaw sound identity. The themes and characters of McLeod’s hybridizing of the oral, written, and visual also allow him to refigure and regenerate his people’s traditions while situating his community and cultural practices firmly within a traditionalized modernity.

Notes I am grateful to Neal McLeod for sharing with me his essay “Cree Poetic Discourse” before it was published and for permission to reproduce the detail from his painting wîhtikow II; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Saskatchewan for funds that enabled the researching and writing of this paper; and to Daniel Coleman and Wendy Roy for their incisive comments and Wendy’s editorial suggestions. 1 Because McLeod is so unconfined by generic borders and because of the subject matter of this essay, I have, in recording the multifaceted nature of his work, also not observed the borders between written words, using instead the early manuscript style that is based on an understanding of language as a flow of sounds. 2 McLeod is, as his father Jeremiah (Jerry) was, a member of the James Smith Cree First Nation, but to say father and son are therefore Plains Cree would be an oversimplification, as Neal explains in “Plains Cree Identity: Borderlands, Ambiguous Genealogies, and Narrative Irony.” In his poem “Fire Walks the Sky” (Songs 57), McLeod acknowledges that the McLeod name in its un-anglicized form, mahkiyoc, was that of a Saulteaux, a person whom Cree speakers would identify as nîkân-isi. However, Neal’s mother was of Swedish ancestry, and he spent two childhood years living with his

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

■

Susan Gingell

Swedish grandmother, speaks Swedish, and studied for a term at the Academy of Fine Art in Umeå, Sweden (Wild Fire 6). To further complicate matters, McLeod grew up speaking English and had to learn Cree as an adult (Songs 8). The plus sign is used to signify the occluding of non-verbal elements of what in English is called oral tradition. For a fuller discussion of this practice, see the introduction to this volume. I use Cole’s term “traditionalizing modernity” rather than “Indigenizing modernity,” as Coleman suggested I do, not because the latter term is inaccurate, but for the following three reasons. First, I wanted to take my cue from an Indigenous, even if not a Cree, theorist on the understanding that theorizing from the Indigenous point of view arises out of a world view I am seeking to understand and communicate more broadly. Second, the term “traditionalizing modernity” has a poetic resonance in its apparently oxymoronic character, and given the poetic understanding of time that McLeod argues is important to Cree conceptualization (see my discussion of the poem “kôkôcîs”), I wanted to retain the poetic quality of the term. Third, I see the term as overtly challenging the Euro-American understanding of modernity in a way that I don’t think the term “Indigenizing modernity” so directly does. As I am arguing in this essay, the term “traditionalizing modernity” is not oxymoronic in the Indigenous context, in which tradition is not understood as static. Moreover, as McLeod points out in “Cree Poetic Discourse,” “Indigenous consciousness does not simply involve glorification of tradition but rather a radical questioning of tradition, albeit one that is grounded in it” (117). E. F. Dyck identifies an exemplary instance in Euro-Canadian literature of the oral/literate opposition being collocated with the Aboriginal/Western binary in E. J. Pratt’s Canadian epic Brébeuf and His Brethren (63). Pratt represents the Jesuit Brébeuf as having a deep conviction that writing will help him bring civilizing light to the benighted and emphatically oral Hurons. Seeing positive possibilities in what begins as a negative formulation, I am taking this idea of Indigenous past as repast from a passage in Cole’s book that could certainly be read as ironic. He addresses the distorting effect of Western epistemologies being imposed as a way of “understanding” Indigenous peoples. Cole may be suggesting that colonizers and neo-colonizers are eating up the Indigenous past, but if such is his (singular) meaning, I want to effect a lexico-semantic shift aligned with a view of transmitting history through oral stories expressed by the narrator of Louise Halfe’s Blue Marrow when she says, “I must pass all that I possess / every morsel to my children” (7), a view that Cole’s ambiguous text may in fact be designed to encode and support. After all, he uses his creative neologism iterati both negatively as an encoding of illiterates whose deficiency is signalled by the missing l of literati (21), and positively as both a signalling of their oral eloquence in the statement “we had iteratur iterati we were iterate” (54) and as a reminder that the artful use of oral language preceded that of written language: “iterature precedes literature iterati prefigure literati” (151). Though Cole disdains to cite Ong, the Stl’atl’imx poetscholar may here be consciously countering Ong’s argument that “literacy … consumes its own oral antecedents” (15), but even if he is not, Cole’s words have this effect. In Marxism and Literature, Williams defines structures of feeling as those aspects of a society that “cannot without loss be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships” (133). Renate Eigenbrod points to an instance of an Indigenous writer employing the image of layers of growth in a tree to represent continuity through time when she notes that the narrator of Ruby Slipperjack’s novel Silent Words uses the image of the connection of

325

326

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

10

11

12 13

core and surface of a log to suggest the living connection that memory creates between past selves and experiences and present ones (50). The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RRCAP) juxtaposes a EuroCanadian idea of time as linear with an Aboriginal concept of time as cyclical, so Coleman’s Indigenous chronotope may seem not wholly to accord with the RRCAP representation of the Aboriginal understanding of time. However, because my understanding of Indigenous cyclic time entails every individual living the same cycle of ages from birth to death, I am hazarding that the concentric circles of Coleman’s model can be understood as graphic representations of those recurring cycles of time. That the model does not account for the idea of a fold in time to which McLeod refers in his poem “kôkôcîs,” which I discuss later in the essay by recourse to the model of the Mobius strip, shows that two-dimensional graphics are finally inadequate to representing Cree, and perhaps more broadly traditional Indigenous, ideas of time. Similarly, a linear model of Western time is an oversimplification. J. Edward Chamberlin notes in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? that too rigid a collocation of linear time with some cultures and of cyclical time with others is a “stubborn form of nonsense” because people “negotiate time’s ‘arrow’ and time’s ‘cycle’ in all cultures” (215), but by focusing on Imperial Time, Coleman’s formulation allows for the possibility of other conceptions of time existing in European cultures that also generated concepts of Isochronic Imperial time. If we allow for the idea of a curved arrow indicating the direction of an individual’s life cycle, we can also reconcile the idea of time’s arrow with Coleman’s Indigenous Concentric time. Writers within the Western tradition have certainly challenged the idea of the past as over, one of the most famous literary formulations being William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun that “the past is not dead; in fact it’s not even past” (III). Moreover, McLeod’s positing a fold in time seems to accord in some measure with Albert Einstein’s theorizing of the bending of spacetime, while the German physicist’s special theory of relativity demonstrated that simultaneity is dependent on the observer rather than being absolute. Another modern Western thinker whose ideas about time are in some notable ways similar to McLeod’s is philosopher Henri Bergson. He reasoned that outside of us there is only space, and thus only simultaneities, the latter of which he defined in Time and Free Will as the intersection of time and space (110). The differentiation RRCAP makes between Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal understandings of history supports Coleman’s reading of the differences in Western and Indigenous chronotopes. In “the western humanist intellectual tradition in the writing of history,” the report’s authors state, “is a focus on human beings as the centre-piece of history, including the notion of the march of progress and the inevitability of societal evolution” (1, chap. 3, sec. 1, para. 4). On the other hand, “[t]he Aboriginal tradition in the recording of history is neither linear nor steeped in the same notions of social progress and evolution” (para. 5). The report adds, “The first portrays time as an arrow moving from the past into the unknown future; this is a linear perspective. The second portrays time as a circle that returns on itself and repeats fundamental aspects of experience. This is a cyclic point of view” (para. 9). I add the s here because McLeod confirmed for me in an e-mail of 13 May 2008 that there is a typographical error in the text. I’m drawing here on Hayden White’s conceptualizing in Metahistory of historical narrative as emplotted and poetic because I find enabling White’s calling attention to the form of historical narratives; his noting that comedy is the form of historical emplotment that recognizes a harmony between the natural and social, that inclines to celebration,

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

and that is conservative in ideology (in the present context it is Cree traditions that are being preserved); and his attention to genre as well as form. 14 According to the note on “The Cattle Thief ” in E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake’s Collected Poems and Selected Prose, the poem was first published in 1894, and The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan entry on Almighty Voice reports that he died in 1897. Either Tekahionwake’s poem was eerily prescient or she was textualizing an oral story that indicates Almighty Voice’s resistance and fate were not unique.

Works Cited Amin, Samir. “Imperialism and Globalisation.” Monthly Review 53.2 (2001): 6–24. Print. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Print. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen, 1913. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. 1982. London: Verso, 1983. Print. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Canada. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People 1: Looking Forward Looking Back. 1996. Web. 15 June 2009. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Knopf, 2004. Print. Cole, Peter. Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Print. Coleman, Daniel. “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility.” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue Internationale d’Etudes Canadiennes 38 (2008): 221–42. Print. Cruikshank, Julie. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Lincoln : U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. Dalton, Mary. “To Capture the Sound of Water: Some Thoughts on a Language Denied.” language(s)/prisons. Ed. Bernice Lever. Living Archives Series. Toronto: League of Canadian Poets, 1998. 56–68. Print. Dyck, E. F. “The Places of Aboriginal Writing 2000 in Canada: The Novel.” The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing. Ed. Conny Steenman-Marcusse. New York: Rodopi, 2002. 63–78. Eigenbrod, Renate. Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2005. Print. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random, 1951. Print. Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ed. Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.

327

328

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Print. Goldie, Terry, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1989. Print. Goody, Jack. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004. Print. ———. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print. Halfe, Louise. Blue Marrow. 1998. Regina: Coteau, 2004. Print. Hudak, Glenn M. “The ‘Sound’ Identity: Music-Making and Schooling.” Sound Identities: Popular Music and the Cultural Politics of Education. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 447–74. Print. Irele, Abiola. “African Letters: The Making of a Tradition.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 5.1 (1995): 69–100. Print. Johnson, Pauline/Tekahionwake. “The Cattle Thief.” Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Ed. Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 97–99. Print. Klar, Barbara, and Paul Wilson, eds. Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets. [Regina]: Hagios, 2007. Print. Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1851–52.” Works of Marx and Engels. Web. 9 Jan. 2012. McGarrity, Maria, and Claire Culleton, eds. Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. McLeod, Neal. Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Saskatoon: Purich, 2007. Print. ———. “Cree Poetic Discourse.” Across Cultures/Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures. Ed. Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque. Peterborough: Broadview, 2010. 109–22. Print. ———. Email to present author. 4 January 2008. ———. Email to present author. 13 May 2008. ———. Gabriel’s Beach. Regina: Hagios, 2008. Print. ———. “Mamâhtâwisiwin: Tapping into the Great Mystery.” Klar and Wilson 45. ———. “nêhiyâwiwin and Modernity.” Plain Speaking: Essays on Aboriginal Peoples and the Prairie. Ed. Patrick Douaud and Bruce Dawson. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2002. 35–53. ———. “Plains Cree Identity: Borderlands, Ambiguous Genealogies, and Narrative Irony.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 20.2 (2000): 437–54. Print. ———. Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow. Regina: Hagios, 2005. Print. Mishra, Sudesh. Diaspora Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. Print. Nestor, Rob. “Almighty Voice (1875–97).” Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan.” Web. 30 Sept. 2009.

Traditionalizing Modernity and Sound Identity in McLeod

■

Susan Gingell

Newhouse, David. R., Cora Voyageur, and Dan Beavon, eds. Hidden in Plain Sight: Contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canadian Identity and Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Print. Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. Oxford: James Curry, 1997. Print. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print. Taylor, Drew Hayden. “The Voice of the Land Is in Our Language: The Urbane Indian.” Windspeaker 1 Jan. 2004: 18–19. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Post-Indian Survivance. Hanover: UP of New England, 1994. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Print. Whitecalf, Sarah. kinêhiyâwininaw nêhiyawêwin/The Cree Language Is Our Identity. The Cree Texts of Sarah Whitecalf. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1993. Print. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Wood, Morgan. Wild Fire on the Plains: Contemporary Saskatchewan Art: Anthony Deiter, David Garneau, Cheryl l’Hirondelle-Waynohtêw, Neal McLeod. Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 2003. Print.

329

This page intentionally left blank

A NEXUS OF CONNECTIONS Acts of Recovery, Acts of Resistance in Native Palimpsest Kimberly M. Blaeser

Oral stories must be heard to endure. “The Envoy to Haiku,” —Gerald Vizenor Ideology and domination have made certain histories unable to be spoken. Indians in Unexpected Places, —Philip Deloria Native writers began to use the Native present as a way to resurrect a Native past and to imagine a Native future. To create, in words, a Native universe. —Tom King, The Truth about Stories

A Nexus of Connections From the outset of the Indigenous North American and European colonial encounter, Native epistemologies were characteristically either overlooked or blatantly rejected as primitive. From Christopher Columbus’s professed motive in the capturing of Arawak natives “in order that they might learn to talk”1 (Hale) to the destruction of the Mayan Popol Vuh, colonial responses to Indigenous cultures consistently failed to recognize the validity or sophistication of native communications. This kind of devaluation has continued through the present, with Native literary and artistic expressions being frequently marginalized, labelled inferior to Western works and methods, or stereotyped into simplistic, romantic representations. Themselves fully aware of the political and social constructs surrounding the idea of Indian, contemporary Native writers, artists, and filmmakers often depict the colonial conditions while simultaneously offering a critique of or resisting static popular images. They counter literary or artistic colonization with their own 331

332

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

inspired and carefully crafted works. The nuanced gestures of Native poems, stories, visual art, and film become figurative acts of liberation, recovery, and resistance. My opening epigraphs suggest three critical stances important to understanding the tensions inherent in these artistic works. Gerald Vizenor’s statement asserts two necessities: oral storytelling itself must survive because oral storytelling is necessary for Indigenous peoples’ survival. The quotation from Phil Deloria attests to the still stifling effects of colonial domination on Native peoples’ ability to articulate their own experience and implies mainstream society’s unwillingness to accept the revelation of this history. Finally, Tom King’s comment points to many Native writers’ complex (and layered) project to reassert what N. Scott Momaday has called a Native “world view.” Theirs is a project that involves representation of the Native past, images of contemporary experience, and an assertion of future survival. In the pages that follow I look briefly at this critical context in which Native artists work, at their self-conscious undertakings in response to the pre-existing backdrop for their work, and finally, at the achievement of their art—how through ironic humour and gesture they succeed in exposing the colonial canvas on which they are compelled to create even as they erase, alter, or embellish those old representations. Key to the “re-visioning” of distortions in history or stereotypic popular images is an understanding of the contingency of cultural context, an awareness of the degree to which place and world view impact our expressions of “truth.” This idea might best be expressed through story: imagine two Indian communities that live in close proximity to each other, separated by a large lake (or an imaginary degree of latitude). One day, a non-Native visitor, a gichi-mookomaan, arrives at the first community. There the visitor is told that this Anishinaabe tribe’s council fire is the centre of the universe. This, of course, impresses the visitor for s/he is a seeker after enlightenment. The following day, several of the tribal people invite the visitor to travel with them to the other side of the lake, to the Blackfoot community that resides there. While the Anishinaabeg visit, the elders of the Blackfoot tribe declare that their council fire is the centre of the universe, and the Anishinaabeg nod their assent. Confused, the visitor turns to the Anishinaabe leader from the first tribe and says, “I thought you said that your fire was the centre.” The Anishinaabe replies, “When we’re there, that is the centre of the universe. When we are here, this is the centre.” This adaptation of a story told in George Tinker’s “An American Indian Theological Response to Ecojustice” suggests that culture centres are contingent. The shifting of contextual focus becomes key in

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

the literary and artistic reconstruction or performative recovery undertaken by Native writers and artists, who literally and figuratively build their art from within another / an other point of view. Creek poet Joy Harjo alludes to the same idea of contextual fluidity in her poem “My House Is the Red Earth,” but she also challenges the legitimacy of static representation itself: My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. (2)

Ultimately, the poem gestures beyond even contingency toward infinite possibility. Not only might the unexpected place be the centre of the world, but the essence of such a place, Harjo claims, eludes capture. It persists in sacred wordless form. The movement in this poem is finally away from the words toward the possibility of some kind of a-verbal spiritual connection. Harjo seems to try to create a moment of crossover, where the physical and the imaginative come together in a transformational moment, a moment of uncertainty where vision wavers in the balance between ways of seeing. Language becomes trace, gestures beyond itself toward the essence of experience. The physical uncertainty becomes the portal from which we access a moment of spiritual light. This attempt to throw language or image into connection in other realms often characterizes the Native creative process. Language leads us to the nonverbal. Image is sign, trace. Words and picture finally dissolve into gesture. Words invoke motion rather than static reality. As readers, listeners, or viewers, we are invited into an experience that moves beyond the writing on the page, the image, or the spoken. We arrive at a dynamic nexus of connection. Many Native writers have alluded to the reciprocity involved in the creative process. Simon Ortiz, for example, notes that story “becomes whole in its expression and perception” (my emphasis) and he claims: “The listenerreader should have as much responsibility and commitment to poetic effect as the poet, because when this effect is achieved the compelling poetic power of language is set in motion towards vision and knowledge” (57, 66). This artistic reciprocity, the tracing out of language connections, implies an investment in bringing the work into fullness.

333

334

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Thus, in reading the works of Native filmmakers, writers, and artists, we must explore the multiple intersections of their creations. Many creative works attempt to re-collect for the reader/listener/viewer the various elements or ideas necessary for a multifaceted understanding or consciously to invest their works with a suggestive connectivity that leads active readers to various intersections of meaning. In many of the contemporary works, I see a kind of palimpsest, a complex layering of image and allusion. As I have suggested, this kind of palimpsest becomes an artistic necessity in Native creative works as they strive to counter colonial discourse and image by writing over, writing through, or importantly, writing differently. The artistic re-imagining that takes place in Native dialogue with pre-existing constructions of “Indian” involves, as the Tom King and Joy Harjo passages imply, a different understanding or world view as well. This alternative cultural context results in philosophical and aesthetic variations in addition to the factual or intellectual tensions already at work, for example, in historical debate over propagandistic representations. How we tell is at least as important as what we tell. Calvin Martin aptly illustrates the impact of philosophical orientation on historiography in the volume The American Indian and the Problem of History. He critiques classic “Indian History” (meaning White history written about Indians), noting first the biased philosophical stance: We have created canons of reality, truth, credibility, and evidence of what constitutes fact, and identified and interpreted certain points of reference within the human psyche, which we have packaged and enshrined by calling the whole thing “social science.” Equipped with this intimidating analytical tool we have marched into the Indian realm determined to measure everything there in the algebra of its logical and conceptual circuitry. It is truly a dazzling machine, this behavioral-intellectual spectrophotometer of ours: a broad-band instrument whose program is Aristotelian, Augustian, Calvinist, Baconian, Cartesian, Newtonian, Darwinian, Marxist, and many others or combinations thereof. It furnishes us with both our questions and our interpretations of the responses we believe we receive. (7)

Having satirically characterized the cultural context of classic American history, Martin bluntly claims, “But this is surely the wrong intellectual probe” (7). Among the orientation errors Martin points to in the standard approaches is one involving core philosophical differences. He identifies the core of Indigenous philosophy as “biological,” the non-Native as “anthropological” or human-centred. “Ideological colonization,” he claims, is inherent

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

in standard historiography: “Those individuals who take it upon themselves to write Native American history … with few exceptions do so consciously or unconsciously from an anthropological perspective and commitment that inevitably does violence to the biological perspective and commitment of the American Indians, and as a result renders them in caricature” (9). Native creative works, then, must counter the philosophical stance or world view that is always so co-joined with any account or image. They must also counter the artistic aesthetic inherent in world view— one-dimensional text-based expression, for example. Given Native artistic origins in the multidimensional oral reality, the layering of a palimpsest offers a particularly apt form in which to suggest multiple elements of performance. Through visual or verbal juxtaposition, for example, Native artists can compel connection or relationship, can imply movement. Innovative uses of their artistic forms allow them to approximate the spoken, chanted, danced, drummed reality of ceremonial moments, to invoke scent, mime, and powerful silences. Verbal and visual artists use palimpsest to enact a different context. Employing the gestures of their crafts, they twist and bend language and image in order to invite imaginative crossing of time, space, and ways of knowing. They suggest Indigenous realms of being. They infer depth. The effect for a reader/listener/viewer in this kind of artistic experiment remains partly undetermined. The art not only describes experience but also strives to engage us in its making; therefore it attempts to become experience. The overlapping elements of the art interact only through imaginative engagement, through what Ortiz calls “perception.” The artist uses palimpsest to create pathways, and readers/listeners/viewers must themselves enter upon the nexus of connections, activate their own dynamic coming into knowledge or spiritual light. As Native writers, we deliberately throw our languages into connection, into new realms of meaning. We throw our voices or words or images into a particular space. Into what is certainly an already occupied space. Perhaps a colonial space. Because of what already exists in that space, we know there will be combustion—the combustion of making new meaning. I am interested in the wavering, the fire and shimmer of language and image as they flicker across the borders of knowing and unknowing. In what follows, I explore the multilayered “code-talking,” the encrypted textualized oralities, the literal and metaphorical ledger art—the palimpsest of Native literary and artistic performance.

335

336

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

And Fire Must Burn The combustion often taking place in the Native arts builds upon the understanding of several historic circumstances, upon the ramifications of Indigenous/European contact in the Americas, and upon the literary and cultural representations that surface from the historical events. At stake in land conquest, of course, was cultural conquest. And of particular note in our discussion is the complicated shifting fate of Indigenous artistic expression. Here, I turn my attention to summarize significant moments in Native literature, aware that similar moments of cultural clash and endurance played out in the other arts. Native peoples have, even in the most genocidal moments in American history, remained remarkably prosperous, rich in the arena of oral and literary performance: story, song, chant, ceremony, mythic and imaginative embodiments have flourished even in the direst circumstances and may indeed be the very fabric of survival for Indian nations. In “Man Made of Words,” N. Scott Momaday speaks of the power of “the imagination of meaning” to “sustain” us and quotes Isak Dinesen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them” (191). Anyone with even the most rudimentary acquaintance with Native American literatures knows that a certain kind of survival literature forms a metaphorical and verbal bridge from the earliest pre-contact performances of the oral cultures to the contemporary renaissance(s) of Indian literatures. Stories sustain us. Community and national literatures create and uphold our identities. We become the stories we tell. The continuity of mythic meaning breeds understanding and hope. And, as Vine Deloria, Sherman Alexie, Carter Revard, and many other Native writers remind us, humour in tribal literatures acts as the antiseptic for sorrow.2 Ultimately, we have survived as Native peoples partly because our literary traditions are embedded with our nationhood. Our spirituality, our healing rites, our community structures, our relationships to place and subsistence economies—all these elements are woven into the tribal stories, songs, and dances. Yet, as the Native oral performances began to be transcribed, translated, annotated, interpreted, and abridged, they underwent a colonization. The colonization of orature and literature is as real as the colonization of land, the evidence as concrete and as readily traced as the shrinking land holdings of Indian people across the centuries. In “‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’ in the Translation of Native American Oral Literatures,” William Clements describes the translation process, saying, “Textmakers … assumed they could translate orations, narratives, and poems in ways that would make them

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

readily accessible to Euramerican readers—that adding rhyme and regularized meter to poetry or presenting oral narrative as paragraphed prose, for example, legitimately represented Indian oral literature” (2). Similarly, linguist and scholar of ethnopoetics Dell Hymes, whose work underscored the importance of context in translation, cautioned, “If we do not deal with the means, we cannot possess the meaning,” adding, “If we refuse to consider and interpret the surprising facts of device, design, and performance inherent in the words of the texts, the Indians who made the texts, and those who preserved what they made, will have worked in vain. We will be telling the texts not to speak. We will mistake, perhaps to our cost, the power of which they speak” (5–6). But Native words were extracted from their cultural context, and, to the detriment of Native traditional literatures, many changes ensued. Oral performances were made static in text. The verbal was given visual form by translators. Genre decisions determined how words would look on the page. Repetition judged “needless” was eliminated. Telling was re-ordered in “proper” chronological form. Narratives were given “appropriate” cause and effect forms, “understandable” closure. Spiritual and mythological realities were interpreted as metaphor. Educated scholars made selections. Editors edited. Anthologizers anthologized. Marketing managers packaged. Non-Native writers imitated. Consumers consumed. And popular culture images flourished. For all intents and purposes, we could say that Native literature was invented—by the same colonizers who claimed the Americas had been discovered. Today, however, having survived the physical, spiritual, and cultural genocidal efforts, Native nations have begun to recognize the ongoing efforts to colonize Native identity, oratures, and literatures. Scholars, writers, and artists in Native communities have begun to unmask the ideological colonization, the commodification of culture and lifeways, and have undertaken, some very self-consciously, the decolonization of Native literatures through what Louis Owens calls “acts of recovery” (“Acts” 55). They are the authors of what Gerald Vizenor has called “the new ghost dance literature, the literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance” (Manifest 106). And thus we arrive at the present, the Y2K Indians remarkably prosperous in the richness of their legacy of verbal art, yet balancing on and writing about an incredibly thin rope woven of the delicate strands of nationhood, the porous hemp of identities, daring to cut away with their words one strand of false history after another, wondering, as they slice through length after length of colonization, whether they have retained or recovered enough of their own culture to sustain the new weight of twenty-first-century hyphenated realities.

337

338

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

I’d like to characterize American Indian literatures of the twenty-first century—to borrow phrases from both Vizenor and Owens—as the “postIndian frontier.” Owens distinguishes frontier from “territory” (Mixedblood 23–41). Territory, that imagined and mapped space that must be emptied of Indians and reoccupied by civilization, is a place of containment; but frontier, a “transcultural zone of contact,” is a shifting, unstable space (26). Native writers operate in the volatile world of the frontier. Vizenor distinguishes “post-Indian” from “Indian,”3 suggesting that if we understand much of contemporary experience to constitute the postmodern experience, we must understand the Native experience as instead “post-Indian.” If we recognize that the term Indian, the word, the sign Indian, was invented, and recognize the identity associated with Indianness as a popular commercialized identity, then to avoid commodification and posturing as an Indian, we have to reject the invention and claim an identity as post-Indian, deconstructing and replacing the “simulations” of Indian identity. Such simulations become another false representation to be exposed and artistically revised. Contemporary literary palimpsest arises from the experience of the “post-Indian frontier.” A nineteenth-century “Indian” photograph from the Irwin Brothers studio embodies the kind of challenge I believe is inherent in such a postIndian philosophical stance. In 1987, while I was examining photos held in a collection at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, one stood out for the apparent resistance it embodied to the romanticizing of the Indian image (cf. Figure 1).4 The photo was of a young Comanche woman with beautiful long hair, whom the caption identified as Mabel Mahseet. She was seated on a rather elaborate cane or wicker chair and dressed in what would have been considered “traditional” clothing. Around the whole of the tableau stood a huge wooden frame—a frame not around the print of the photo as I viewed it, but a frame in the actual layout of the scene that was being photographed. The woman sits literally framed in the pose. Now the frame might have been easily mistaken as an add-on to a print except for one incredible detail: her long hair was draped and her right shoulder and arm positioned so that they came outside the “photo” around the edge of the frame into the “real” world beyond the pose—thus effectively breaking the illusion of the romantic image. Whether that moment, that illusion-breaking positioning of the hair, was devised by the photographer or by the subject, I cannot be certain. I like to believe the Native woman herself chose to deconstruct the romantic image of the Indian by advertising its construction as art. And I made my own response—in art:

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

Figure 1 Mabel Mahseet. Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries. Irwin Brothers 45.

Framing An Irwin Brothers Indian in a studio photograph. A file number in a Western History collection of classic invented identities. Solemn face, long dark hair, just another sepia memory with reality leeching away like a winding red stream from a cracked inkwell. The irony of American gothic: a lone Comanche woman posed on an ornate Victorian chair. But this ogichidaakwe breaks out, her wavy waist-length hair, deliberately draped over one corner of a large wood frame, reaches beyond the captured image. Hair so full it runs down across her chest, joins the dark of her layered skirt. Together they become the swift pony on which she counts coup, rides her escape from the still-life, the Catlin-Curtis-colonized look-alikes. Mahseet. Warrior woman. Animwewebatoo. Run away making noise.

339

340

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

I choose then to read this photo as a part of a post-Indian frontier space. It is at once a vision of the romantic pose and an ironic commentary contesting such a construction. Thus, it clearly challenges, rejects, or deconstructs the pose Indian, the invention. The dynamics of the photo involve the combustion of various points of view or the bringing together of what Phil Deloria calls “expectation” and “anomaly.”5 It operates by underscoring the expectations of the audience—a romantic Native figure assimilated into the welcoming arms of “civilized” society—and throwing them into dialogue with competing notions of paternalism, spectacle, and commodification. Thus we arrive in a volatile space of contact between the manifestations of colonization and artistic attempts at decolonization. That same sort of challenge or deconstruction of the status quo is undertaken in various ways by many contemporary Native authors as they seek to expose the “frame” of the literary invention, the idea of Indian. In the study of Native writing, we are in the frontier space where all contested views come together: Is America virgin land or widowed land? Did Native people migrate to this continent or emerge here? Are the stories of Native people to be classified as myth or history? Was America discovered or invaded? In fact, in reading work by contemporary Indigenous authors, we must begin with the recognition that we are dealing simultaneously with several opposing ideas or ideals. We are dealing simultaneously with the “discovery” history of America and with the “invasion” history; we are working simultaneously with written texts and with the oral traditions that inform them. But most significantly, we must begin with the realization that we are dealing simultaneously with the expectations held for Native literature (the single entity) and with the real variations of Native literatures (plural)—with stereotypical ideas of what Indian literature is or should be and with the many actual tribal and individual variations. What is classified as Native American literature today has origins in a large body of oral literatures from the more than two hundred tribes that inhabited this continent for centuries before Columbus and before the colonial ventures that followed first contact between European and Native peoples. The print-published works in Native American literatures include translations or transcriptions of some of the oral works: songs, stories, speeches, and ceremonies; early as-told-to life stories; as well as autobiography, fiction, oratory, essays, poetry, drama, and mixed-genre works written by Indian people themselves. In the years after contact, within American and world cultures, certain kinds of stories about Indians became popular. The dime novels and captivity

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

narratives together with exhibitions like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show created a romantic image of Native existence and fostered stereotypes like the befeathered warrior and the noble savage. These popular accounts have their counterparts in contemporary culture in films like Dances with Wolves and various fake medicine ceremonies and books. Some of the delight in savagery, romance, and the vanishing tribes spills over and creates expectations for works by contemporary Native authors. If stereotype is, as Phil Deloria defines it, “a simplified and generalized expectation … that comes to rest in an image, text, or utterance,” the task of artists who work to challenge stereotypes then lies in complicating the simplistic, individualizing the general, and activating the static (9). Just as the tension in the Irwin Brothers photo arose from its disruption of audience expectations, so too do authors from Leslie Silko, Linda Hogan, and Ray Young Bear, to Richard Van Camp, Eric Gansworth, and Janet McAdams, acknowledge these stereotypic expectations at the same time as they counter them and present their own stories and ideas in one or another genre. Sherman Alexie, for example, has written playfully about the stereotypic expectations of Indian literature, satirizing them in his popular poem “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” He claims that such a novel must have Indians with tragic features, a half-breed protagonist, visions, alcohol, beautiful Indian women, Indian men from horse cultures, and a requisite tragedy like murder or suicide. To his list we might add war veterans, bits of Native language, ceremony, and a wise elder. But in all seriousness, what he alludes to is a tendency to simplify Native experiences and to pigeonhole tribal literatures, then to create a stereotypical idea of Native literature that borders on the romantic, and to use this stereotype as some kind of litmus test of authenticity for contemporary works, or use this formula to create an imitation of Native literature that suits the popular taste. The humour of the poem works to expose and undercut these expectations. Part of those expectations has to do with a homogenization, as the Alexie piece illustrates: Indian princess, drunken Ira Hayes, horse cultures.6 Although some profess that as a culture we have moved beyond these simplistic expectations and representations of Native peoples, my own experience proves otherwise. When, for example, I was interviewing for my first university job, I had the reality driven home to me quite clearly. I am Anishinaabe from White Earth Reservation in Northwestern Minnesota. Mine is a woodland culture. Regardless, after one successful interview at a university, as I was being courted, shown the sights, given the rundown on the desirable qualities of the area, I was driven into the surrounding country and shown

341

342

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

ranches where I might board my horse. Mind you, I don’t have a horse. No one had brought up the topic. The assumption: I was Indian, I needed a place to board my horse. But once was not enough. During my next interview, one well-meaning soul told me he lived out on a few acres, a hobby farm, and had a place where I could—yes, board my horse! This persistent cultural image of the Indian that stereotypes all Native people into a static tableau of history also sees tribes and their writings as part of a single homogenized tradition: Indians and Indigenous literature. Part of the task in understanding Native stories is to acknowledge the variations in cultural realities among tribal nations and to read the ensuing embodiments in literature in that context. In Silko’s story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” for example, a Catholic ritual is adapted and given new meaning based on the Pueblo experience. An old man who has died is sprinkled with holy water so that he might not “be thirsty” (184) and so he can “send us rain clouds” (183). Context looms large here: a physical place where rain is scarce and ritually invoked. This story would not be written by Northwest Coast tribes. The recognition of variations in tribal nations’ literatures also has to do with mythic traditions, ceremonies, and tribal languages. In Ceremony, Silko links the retelling of certain Laguna traditional stories to the contemporary story of the book. In this example, place and tribal myth figure significantly: the stories of Corn Woman, Reed Woman, and Hummingbird have to do with drought (as does the contemporary story), and they have to do with the ceremonial acts required to invoke rain. On the other side of the continent, Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich, whose childhood was spent partly in the land of 10,000 lakes, writes about an encounter with a water spirit. Of Ojibway background, she also writes of the trickster Naanabozho.7 But homogenized readings of Native works seldom recognize the variations in tribal literatures that stem from place, history, language, and all elements of tribal cultures from myth to subsistence economy to ceremony. So within this complex context of story and stereotype, contemporary Native writers dare to wield their pen or keyboard. Because of the backdrop against which they write, I believe there is a certain self-consciousness present in the works of American Indian writers, a constant need to respond to or interrogate the desire for commodification of Native traditions (both literary and non-literary). American Indian literatures (the plural) have become aware of the expectations placed upon Indigenous literature (the single entity) and have responded in some fashion so that what has evolved is similar to what Mary Louise Pratt calls “autoethnographic texts” in which “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

colonizer’s own terms” (7). Choctaw writer Louis Owens writes of the “more than three hundred published Indian writers whose collective project is resistance to and destruction of that colonial American metanarrative” and who share a determination to write a different story (Mixedblood 130). Their own meta-stories surface in many forms. They might, as in Silko’s novel Ceremony, be stories or commentaries embedded in the main story about the writing or telling, or about the proper or expected outcome. In Ceremony, we find a “they” present and referred to frequently. In the opening poetic sequences, Silko writes, So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then. (2)

In one of the middle scenes with the medicine man, Betonie, he says, “They will try to stop you from completing the ceremony” (131). And as the central character, Tayo, struggles with choices near the end, he is warned, “The end of the story. They want to change it.… They have their stories about us— Indian people who are only marking time and waiting for the end” (243). The novel is filled with awareness of “the contest of stories,” not just the fictional contest between the witches, but by authorial gesture and implication, the actual struggle with expectations created for contemporary Native peoples and contemporary Native literature. Here and elsewhere in the many artistic performances by Native peoples, where we have fuel for symbolic combustion, competing ideas and images ignite, cast needed light.

Ledger Art and the Dialogic Circle of Stories Although unnamed, the “they” in Ceremony clearly suggests a colonial presence and a master narrative into which “the Indian story” will be subsumed. But of course, part of Tayo’s spiritual pilgrimage involves a coming to awareness of his own or his people’s author-ity, their recognition of their right not only to tell their own story but also to determine their own destiny. The search for such autonomy (the touted if never fulfilled “self-determination” of US Indian policy) has dramatic parallels in the literature of Native peoples. Owens clearly articulated the patterns in his study Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, in which he claims, “With few exceptions, American Indian novelists—examples of Indians who have repudiated

343

344

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

their assigned plots—are in their fiction rejecting the American gothic with its haunted, guilt-burdened wilderness and doomed Native and emphatically making the Indian the hero of other destinies and other plots” (18). Here Owens suggests the layered context of the novels as the authors not only navigate the fictional territories of their stories, but somehow within the stories themselves take account and even offer ironic commentary on the placement of their works in a particular set of literary expectations in American culture. The ideas of legitimacy and authority in story hold particular sway when works involve oral or mythic accounts. Just as we recognize that cultural centres are contingent, we must also acknowledge that authority itself is relative. Who has the right or authority to speak? To declare? To assign value? Whose voice holds precedence? Gerald Vizenor’s story of wild rice rights in Minnesota is a particularly apt account to highlight the stakes in a legal “contest of stories.” The piece written by then-reporter Vizenor titled “Ojibways Seek Right to ‘Regulate’ Rice on Wildlife Refuge” first appeared on 13 September 1968. Thirty years later in the 1998 book Fugitive Poses, Vizenor was still retelling the incident and working to develop its significance. Essentially, the first newspaper account reports that eighty-six-year-old Anishinaabe Charles Aubid together with other tribal elders appeared in Minnesota federal court before Judge Miles Lord to dispute the right of the government to regulate the harvesting of wild rice. Aubid, who testified in the proceedings in Anishinaabemowin by means of an interpreter, spoke of the federal agent’s declaration to Old John Squirrel that the Anishishnaabeg would always retain control of the wild rice harvest. The federal attorney objected to Aubid’s testimony, claiming it was hearsay. Miles Lord, in agreeing with the objection, explained that Old John Squirrel was dead and that what he said was not admissible as evidence. Aubid was instructed, “You cannot say what a dead man said.” In his wise response Aubid “pointed at legal books on the bench and then shouted that those books contained the stories of dead white men.” He protested, “Why should I believe what a white man says, when you don’t believe John Squirrel?” Miles Lord’s response: “You’ve got me there” (Fugitive 168). Clearly the account challenges a legal system that values the written over the oral, documents over verbal agreements. But by allusion and literary gesture, Vizenor extends the grounds of debate, ultimately challenging the general devaluation of Native culture. In his expansion of the story into the 1998 “Hearsay Sovereignty,” Vizenor gestures in writing to long-standing Native seasonal rituals of harvest—“the anishinaabe have harvested manoomin for more than three centuries”—as well as to the colonial production of treaties

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

and the subsequent establishment of the wildlife refuge. The shadows of historical injustice imbue the story of contemporary struggle against tyranny through the text’s subtle insinuations. For example, when Vizenor writes, “the federal attorney argued that … the natives in court were not elected to represent the interests of the reservation,” he is writing within the presence of stories regarding the coercive establishment of treaties through the collection of signatures from individuals who were not recognized leaders of the nations whose land they signed away. The text is filled with such textured allusions.8 My intent is not to debate the political realities, but rather to suggest a way to read the texts, contexts, and intertextual relationships of the tellings that Vizenor has undertaken. In the account, Charles Aubid gestures in story to the presence of Old John Squirrel and the long history of Anishinaabe tradition in order to participate in an act of resistance in the courtroom and in the particular circumstances regarding the regulation of wild rice harvesting. His storied testimony is, in Vizenor’s terminology, an act of “survivance,” which Vizenor defines as “active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Fugitive 15). Although the story Aubid tells moves into and then within the present, he places himself in the context of his tribal filiations— the memory, knowledge, and traditions of wild rice harvesting among generations of Anishinaabe people—and he actively affiliates himself with the verbal authority of Old John Squirrel (that is, with the oral transmission of story and agreement) to contest the curtailment of the inherent and legally acknowledged rights of the Anishinaabeg. The story becomes an active agent in the present, in his act of resistance in the courtroom. Vizenor characterizes Aubid as positioned within a “dialogic circle of story” (169). Vizenor, in his turn, in the serial re-telling of the story, likewise invokes the historical filiations and invests himself in a relationship, an affiliation of story, with Aubid and, through Aubid, with Old John Squirrel, and beyond even that to the trickster tradition in Anishinaabe storytelling. I suggest that his own texts throughout his career have entered the same “dialogic circle” of story he describes. When he refers to the rice as “a trickster creation” and as “sustenance to the anishinaabe,” for example, his allusion is to the active presence of trickster stories, which continue to be life sustaining. This act of storied survivance on Vizenor’s part also involves current events never envisioned by the original storytellers or actors in the dramas of tribal survivance and perhaps not envisioned by the younger Vizenor who first offered an account of the courtroom story and Aubid’s testimony. The story in that first written accounting insinuated the legalistic tyranny under which the Minnesota Anishinaabe struggled. Among the contemporary

345

346

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

tyrannies against which Vizenor employs the Fugitive Poses story, for example, are those of the captured language and static representations of Indianness. The stories, then, always involve application in new circumstances; hence they involve what Vizenor calls the “transmotion” of stories.9 Today, Winona LaDuke might affiliate herself with the same story presence in her work to protect the manoomin, wild rice, against genetic modification. In his telling, Vizenor essentially links several story moments and invokes or alludes to others. I suggest that through the telescopic ring of story affiliations he creates a literary seven-generations sensibility, and the complex nexus of these multiple stories suggests much by implication. The historical canvas on which he places the various accounts provides context and ironic depth. Similar in scope and equally capable of being read with an ironic lens are nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples of ledger art. Originally an art form practised by the Plains Indians in which pictographic images on buffalo hides, rocks, tipis, and so on often featured heroic deeds by warriors or representations of visions, the works began to be created on ledger books obtained through trade, found, or taken in battles. Some of the most famous of the early works were those done by Native prisoners held at Fort Marion in Florida. The ledger books themselves might contain a variety of entries such as columns of figures, lists of supplies, or records of trade. The ironic juxtapositions that resulted became, often unconsciously, a commentary on or an indictment of the colonial project. Among the most startling examples I have found is the “Silver Horn Target Record Book,” in which drawings of the Sun Dance or representations of the trickster figure appear in a book used for recording Army target-practice sessions. Scholar Anna Blume offers a haunting description of ledger art, noting how the pieces “weave themselves in and project themselves over the logic and space of writing” and become a place where “the Native warrior repeatedly confronted the elusive discourse of U.S. expansion” (42). Similarly, Richard Pearce, in a website related to an exhibit of the ledger art of Spokane artist George Flett, offers a powerful comment on the way that engaging the nexus of connections inherent in ledger art provides viewers with an understanding of the position of the artists: While native ledger artists may not have known this history, they understood the power of writing and written records, or ledgers, whether they contained balance sheets, treaties, land divisions, maps, or congressional records. Recording their history in the language of their traditional pictographs on these ledgers has been an act of resistance and a performance of sovereignty.

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

Aligning themselves with this powerful tradition, contemporary Native artists like George Flett and Arthur Amiotte continue to create ledger art. Flett, for example, has created ledger-style drawings on 1930 US congressional record paper. He has also created a contemporary work featuring the backs of a line of pow-wow dancers reminiscent of a similar work from an older Black Hawk ledger (Figures 2 and 3). Like other native writers and artists, Flett

Figure 2 George Flett, Owl Dancing, 2002, acrylic wash on 1930 Congressional Record. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo: George Flett Exhibit at Wheaton College (MA), 2003, curated by Richard Pearce, http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/flett.

347

348

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

Figure 3 George Flett, Circle Dancing at Julyamsh, 2002, drawing on 1914 farmer’s itemized paper. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo: George Flett Exhibit at Wheaton College (MA), 2003, curated by Richard Pearce, http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/flett.

self-consciously affiliates himself with the earlier artists and builds his work in conversation with theirs, thus multiplying the context and implications of his own work. Perhaps he, too, purposefully enters a dialogic circle of stories.

Writing Home, Writing History, Writing Recovery Long before I began to think of Native literary works as similar in intent to the layered commentaries provided by ledger art, I sought to turn my poetry into a tool of recovery and resistance. I did this partly by incorporating in my works words of those beyond myself. Sometimes these were words of family members, tribal elders, or various kinds of documents. My notion of palimpsest began intuitively. Beyond language, I used gesture, allusion, metaphor—the usual doubling tools of poetry. So when I wanted to interrogate and perhaps undermine the “author-ity” of a particular social science text, I naturally included its very language in my poetry. I find then in my own work another example of the palimpsest of this essay’s title. A recent poem of mine deals with Sr. Inez Hilger’s sociological studies of Ojibwe peoples in the Great Lakes regions, specifically her 1939 publication Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation, 1938. During the five or six months between June and November of 1938, Mary Inez Hilger, a sister from the Order of St. Benedict, lived on White Earth, my home

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

reservation, and through oral interviews with the members of targeted families, she gathered facts about housing structures and the living conditions of the Anishinaabeg residing there. Her aim was to ascertain any relationship “between the type of house and the aspirations, social problems, and spiritual expressions of the family living in it” (xxi). The appendices of the volume contain a list of the questions Hilger used in her interviews and a “schedule” of the information she would record about “Housing,” “Families,” and “Living Conditions.” The questions, often leading and judgmental, were by any measure intrusive. The list of inquiries also included a reminder to “check” the answers “with some outside person” or “with reliable outside person” (154). The selection of the participants, too, was made “with the advice of white persons who had been in the service of the White Earth Indians for some years” (xxii). This framing of the undertaking itself advertises the flawed sociological assumptions on which it was based. Sister Hilger’s research, commissioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was part of a larger effort to gather survey material about each of the seven Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota. Hilger subsequently used the fieldwork to write her dissertation and complete her doctoral degree in social science at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C. The work was reprinted in 1998 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Together with Professor Brenda Child, an Ojibwe historian from Red Lake, I was asked to write an introduction to this new edition, and this was my first acquaintance with the work of Hilger. I have been haunted by it ever since, and finally responded with a series of poems related to her Chippewa Families. As I wrote in 1998 in the introduction to the new edition of Hilger’s work, she gathered a wealth of material about housing, living conditions, and social status at White Earth during that era. Because of Hilger’s work, we have information we likely would not otherwise have about day-to-day subsistence living in 1938. The depth of details gathered and enumerated in the study is absolutely astounding. She compiled, for example, a catalogue of details about structural aspects of housing—building materials used in construction, number and size of rooms, type of doors, windows, and heating units. She gave an accounting of many aspects of the life of the people from type of water source to methods of doing laundry, produce production and storage, preservation methods for meat and fish. She enumerated household equipment from bedding to towels to tableware. She counted occupants and relationships, calculated cubic air space, identified each individual’s information in regard to education, livelihood, travel experience, marital status, and religious affiliation and practices. She explored personal areas such as retention

349

350

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

of the Ojibwe language, alcohol consumption, and “legitimate” and “illegitimate” birth patterns. She compared and evaluated community reputations. Clearly, she gathered a mass of material that families from White Earth looking back might find interesting or that might be useful in various ways to scholars in several fields. But think for a minute—as I could not stop thinking after I first encountered her work—what it would mean to undertake this study. What were the assumptions and the presumptions? What would you do if I showed up on your doorstep and said I was there to count your silverware or to measure the cubic air space of your rooms? What if I were to inquire with an air of authority about your marriage arrangements, drinking patterns, belief systems? What if I were to write it down and then publish it for general consumption? Such an undertaking exhibits classic presumptions at work in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, in which the “other’ is objectified, becomes dehumanized as an object of study. The authority of the political and intellectual cultural centre (America) is dominant, the identity of the tribal people becomes subsumed, a commodity to be bartered and determined by the intellectual elite, the publishing houses, the scholars of all things Indian. Clearly Hilger’s fieldwork conveys a great deal about the culture and era of 1930s America from which it emerges. What counted in the counting, what possessions were thought to reveal in their presence or absence about individuals or family units, what questions were asked and how they were stated, what relationships were inferred between living standards and morality—those things disclose as much about the compiler and her social history as they do about the subjects of the inquiry. They certainly expose bias, uncover stereotypical views, and reflect a particular cultural stance in regard to the study and further “civilization” of American Indian people. In the American theory of manifest destiny, Indian territory is always “just west of history” and always on the verge of “vanishing,” its residents not quite worthy of the same respect given other historical peoples, its story always distorted in the cannibalism of cultural conquest. In my poem “Housing Conditions of One Hundred Fifty Chippewa Families” I try to suggest this complex cultural backdrop as I respond to my encounter with Hilger’s book. I include many italicized passages that come directly from Hilger’s Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation, 1938. My own words I layer upon her ledger-like accounting, but I also use them to construct an other cultural context. The opening stanzas illustrate the alternating voices, with the incessant listing methodology cutting across the voice of the narrator who “stories” the account:

A Nexus of Connections

White Earth Reservation, 1938: wigwam peaked lodge bark house tipi log house tar-paper shack frame house u.s. rehabilitation house. sister hilger you counted each one— seventy-one tar-paper shacks, eight united states rehabilitation houses two wigwams bark houses at rice camps— you graphed photographed measured dimensions calculated cubic air space enumerated every construction detail— 23 with broken windows; 99 without foundations, buildings resting on the ground; 98 with stove pipes for chimneys. house, dwelling, place, structure— home. Endaayaang. June to November the year my mother turned five, Mary Inez you walked these lands the fervor of your order tucked under one billowing black-sleeved arm, amassing details of crowded quarters, common-law marriages, miscegenation, illegitimate children, limited education, economic dependence on the WPA and CCCs

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

351

352

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

for charts that have outlived those Anishinaabeg of the one hundred and fifty chosen families. (79)

The poem attempts in various ways to allude to the complex nexus of connections where multiple social and cultural tensions play out. I include, for example, judgments camouflaged as interview questions: “What do you think can be done / to stop / the drinking to intoxication among the Indians?” (80). I include details that might reflect conditions: “record none / under the heading of chairs” (80). The work becomes both commentary and response as it endeavours to re-cover, re-collect, and resist: to re-cover the individuality of the White Earth people and the humanity of the Native Americans; to re-collect the data by adding additional details of place, vision, and voice, and by alluding to what is not included; and to resist the homogenization, commodification, and literary colonization of the one hundred fifty White Earth families interviewed in 1938 by offering an implied critique of the possessive presumptions inherent in the undertaking. Ultimately the poem attempts to shift the author-ity back to the Anishinaabe people. Who, after all, would know more about their lifestyles and housing than they? This shifting of author-ity I undertake partly through the inclusion of untranslated phrases in the Ojibwe language and through gestures toward the spiritual and ceremonial realities. Reviewer Robert Dale Parker suggests that the poem offers a translation of Hilger’s perspective. In the opening of the second stanza, for example, he sees “the impersonal 1938 of Hilger’s would-be empiricist title,” given “translation into another, more personal empiricist vocabulary: it is the year Blaeser’s mother turned five” (“Another Indian” 99). Throughout, I work to reanimate the life of the people. My attempt in this poem is both to present and counter the “master” narrative, to claim for the White Earth Anishinaabeg an other story. If, as Tom King suggests, Native writers are creating in words a Native universe, the assertion of our own author-ity especially in relationship with an other’s authorship of our story, becomes not only an act of resistance, but also an important step toward reclamation and recovery. We can even, as Owens writes, “[u]se the colonizer’s language … to articulate our own worlds and find ourselves whole” (Mixedblood xiii). Whether through ledger art, a “dialogic circle of story,” or other creative uses of palimpsest, we can write ourselves home.

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

Notes 1 Edward Everrett Hale, The Life of Christopher Columbus: From His Own Letters and Journals and Other Documents of His Time, gives in Chapter 4 the following translation of Columbus’s observation about the people he met on the island he christened San Salvador: “They would be good servants, and of good disposition, for I see that they repeat very quickly everything which is said to them. And I believe that they could easily be made Christians, for it seems to me that they have no belief. I, if it please our Lord, will take six of them to your Highnesses at the time of my departure, so that they may learn to talk” (Web 11 January 2010). 2 See, for example, Deloria’s essay “Indian Humor” in Custer Died for Your Sins. In “Imagining the Reservation,” Alexie writes, “Do you believe laughter can save us? All I know is I count coyotes to help me sleep”; and in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” his protagonist claims, “Laughter saved Norma and me from pain, too. Humour was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds” (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 152, 164). Revard’s work is filled with ironic humour, and in “Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe,” he offers this comment: “Comedy is worth more than tragedy any time where survival is at stake” (180). I discuss the use of humour in Native literature in “The New ‘Frontier’ of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming History with Tribal Humor.” 3 Vizenor introduces this term and discusses it at some length in Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. See especially Chapter 1, “Postindian Warriors.” 4 Although I had a print made at the time, it was misplaced. This discussion draws on Irwin Brothers studio collection #45, Mabel Mahseet, from the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma. The poem that follows mingles details from that image with my memory of the original photo, which I suspect to be another shot from the same studio sitting. 5 Deloria develops ideas of “expectation” and “anomaly” in regard to Native peoples throughout his study Indians in Unexpected Places. 6 Ira Hayes, from the Puma Reservation, served in the US Marines and gained fame as one of those photographed at the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. Although he returned as a hero, he became an alcoholic and froze to death after falling drunk in an irrigation ditch. He became the subject of a Johnny Cash hit song written by Peter LaFarge, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” the chorus of which includes the line, “Call him drunken Ira Hayes.” 7 Many of Erdrich’s works deal with the Anishinaabe trickster figure Naanabozho, including her first novel, Love Medicine. For an example of her incorporation of the water spirit Misshepeshu in her storytelling, see the novel Tracks. 8 For a more in-depth discussion of the text, see my essay “‘Trickster, Contrary … Teacher’: The Journalism, Politics, and Activism of Oshki Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor.” Although the current essay makes use of Edward Said’s notions of “filiation” and “affiliation” in describing the actions of Vizenor and Aubid, the longer discussion examines their meanings more thoroughly and takes up related terms and comments in Vizenor’s own critical philosophy. 9 Vizenor discusses “transmotion” at length in Fugitive Poses. Through transmotion a story can “reach,” Vizenor believes, “to other contexts of action, resistance, dissent, and political controversy” (182). He characterizes it as a source of survivance for tribal activists and as a “sui generis sovereignty” (15). Specifically, he claims “performative transmotion is an ethical presence of nature, native stories, and natural reason” and “Native transmotion is an original natural union in the stories of emergence and migration

353

354

Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual

that relate humans to an environment and to the spiritual and political significance of animals and other creations” (181–82).

Works Cited Alexie, Sherman. “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” The Summer of Black Widows. Brooklyn: Hanging Loose, 1996. 94–95. Print. ———. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 1993. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly M. “Framing.” Uncollected. ———. “Housing Conditions of One Hundred Fifty Chippewa Families.” Apprenticed to Justice. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007. 79–83. Print. ———. “The New ‘Frontier’ of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming History with Tribal Humor.” Native-American Writers. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. 161–73. Print. ———. “‘Trickster, Contrary … Teacher’: The Journalism, Politics, and Activism of Oshki Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor.” Profils américains: Gerald Vizenor. Montpellier, France: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007. 193–205. Print. Blume, Anna. “In Place of Writing.” Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History. Ed. Janet Catherine Berlo. New York: Abrams, 1996. 40–44. Print. Clements, William M. “‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’ in the Translations of Native American Oral Literatures: A Zuni Case Study.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 2.3 (Fall 1991): 1–13. Print. Deloria, Philip. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2004. Print. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Avon, 1970. Print. Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, 1984. Print. ———. Tracks. New York: Holt, 1988. Print. Hale, Edward Everrett. The Life of Christopher Columbus: From His Own Letters and Journals and Other Documents of His Time. 1891. Web. 11 January 2010. Harjo, Joy. “My House Is the Red Earth.” Secrets from the Center of the World. Photographs Stephen Strom. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1989. 2. Print. Hilger, Sr. Inez. A Social Study of One Hundred Fifty Chippewa Indian Families of the White Earth Reservation of Minnesota. Diss. Catholic U of America, 1939. Print. Hilger, M. Inez. Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation, 1938. Intro. Brenda J. Child and Kimberly M. Blaeser. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society P, 1998. Print. Hymes, Dell. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981. Print. Martin, Calvin. “Introduction.” The American Indian and the Problem of History. Ed. Calvin Martin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

A Nexus of Connections

■

Kimberly M. Blaeser

Momaday, N. Scott. “Man Made of Words.” Indian Voices: The First Convocation of American Indian Scholars. San Francisco: Indian Historian P, 1970. 49–62. Print. Ortiz, Simon. “Always the Stories: A Brief History and Thoughts on My Writing.” Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization. Ed. Bo Schöler. Aarhus, Denmark: SEKLOS, 1984. 57–69. Print. Owens, Louis. “Acts of Recovery: The American Indian Novel in the ’80s.” Western American Literature 23.1 (Spring 1987): 55–57. Print. ———. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Print. ———. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Print. Parker, Robert Dale. “Another Indian Looking Back.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17.2 (2005): 98–99. Print. Pearce, Richard. George Flett Exhibit. “Ledger Art: Historical Note on Balance Sheets: Balance Sheets, Justice, and Power.” Web. 2 January 2009. Poovey, Mary. A History of Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Revard, Carter. “Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe.” Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. Ed. Simon Ortiz. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College P, 1983. 166–81. Print. Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. New York: Viking P, 1977. Print. ———. “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” Storyteller. New York: Seaver, 1981. 182–87. Print. Tinker, George. “An American Indian Theological Response to Ecojustice.” Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice. Ed. Jace Weaver. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996. 153–76. Print. Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. Print. ———. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994. Print. ———. “Ojibwe Seek Right to Regulate Rice on Wildlife Refuge,” Minneapolis Tribune 13 September 1968: 24. Print.

355

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors

d’bi.young.anitafrika born in kingston jamaica’s whitfield town and birthed from the womb of dub by anita (poets in unity) stewart who raised her child at orality’s hub, d’bi.young’s a storyteller who takes literature live, she’s recorded eight dub disks she’s actor, dubpoet, and teacher, a skilled monodramatist she won two doras for the first play in her sankofa trilogy, blood.claat, benu, and word! sound! powah!, plays that speak to her village globally. she played staceyann in da kink in my hair, and founded anitafrika! dub theatre, then living in cape town and canada alternately she established yemoya international residencies. get breaking news of her latest projects from her website dbi333.com (S. G.) Emily Blacker holds an MA from the Department of English at the University of Victoria and teaches in Communications Studies at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario. Her current research focuses on theories of

357

358

Contributors

ethnography. Other research interests include postcolonial studies, indigenous literatures, and strategies of literary decolonization. Kimberly M. Blaeser, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, teaches Creative Writing and Native American Literature. Her publications include three books of poetry: Trailing You, winner of the first book award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; Absentee Indians and Other Poems; and Apprenticed to Justice. Her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first Native-authored book-length study of an indigenous author. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe who grew up on the White Earth Reservation, Blaeser is also the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. T. L. (Tom) Burton, Founding Director of the Chaucer Studio, teaches English at the University of Adelaide, Australia, specializing in medieval English literature and the history of the language. He has taken part in many audio recordings for the Chaucer Studio and is a frequent speaker and reader of poems to literary societies, writing groups, branches of the University of the Third Age, and on radio. He is the author of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide, and, in collaboration with K. K. Ruthven, is preparing a critical edition of The Complete Poems of William Barnes (3 volumes) for Oxford University Press. George Elliott Clarke From his stage in English, U of T, Pratt Professor George Elliott Clarke, OC, performs multiple roles right excellently as poet, novelist, dramatist, critic, and editor of anthologies, excavating stories of Black Canuck communities. In 2001 for Execution Poems he gleaned the coveted GG, just one of ten books, to date, of poetry; his Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature was a field-founding book his LLDs & DLetts honour; and for both his art and scholarship he won a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship. Today, much in demand, the stylin’ GEC brings da noise at home as well as globally. (Note composed after performance style of GEC by current editor Susan G.)

Contributors

Cara DeHaan was, until 2009, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, exploring the decolonizing potential of contemporary English Canadian literature. She has published an essay on the poetry of Marilyn Dumont in Studies in Canadian Literature. Cara left the doctoral program to devote her energy to family and community commitments. Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist, musician, and oral sound artist. Since 1970 he has toured, solo and ensemble, across the Americas and Europe, performing at international literary and music festivals; in concert halls, galleries, theatres, clubs, universities, and high schools; and on radio, television, and film. He was a member of the poetry performance group The Four Horsemen, and is in the free-improvisation trio CCMC and the Canada–France poetry-music group Quintet à Bras. His sixth and most recent book is the novel Several Women Dancing; his fifth and most recent solo recording is the CD Oralizations. Naomi Foyle was born in London, England, grew up in Saskatchewan, and currently lives in Brighton, UK. Her doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Wales examined the topic of the warrior woman and narrative verse. She has published two poetry collections and a ballad pamphlet with Waterloo Press: The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The World Cup (2010); and Grace of the Gamblers: A Chantilly Chantey (2010). Witwalking, a sequence of concrete prose poems exploring her relationship with her late mother, Canadian writer Brenda Riches, is due in 2012 from Postal Press (UK). Her collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and musicians include the award-winning Hush: An Opera in Two Bestial Acts (Theatre Passe Muraille, 1991); the videopoems Good Definition (2004) and The Jilted Bride (2005); and Aphrodite’s Answering Machine, a CD of spoken word erotic vignettes set to electronica music by Richard Miles. Susan Gingell teaches and researches transnational and decolonizing literatures in English at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published extensively on Canadian literature, including the scholarly editions E. J. Pratt: On His Life and Poetry and Pursuits Amateur and Academic: The Selected Prose of E. J. Pratt. With C. Lesley Biggs and Pamela Downe she co-edited the second edition of Gendered Intersections: An Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies. She has authored a number of essays on Caribbean poetry; has edited a special number of Essays on Canadian Writing, 83, titled “Textualizing Orature and Orality”; and is currently writing a study of Canadian poets who write down the oral+.

359

360

Contributors

Helen Gregory is a Psychology lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire. She completed her Sociology PhD at the University of Exeter, England, in 2009. Her research interests include the social scientific study of the arts and popular culture, and the social construction of self and identity. She has published articles exploring educational and health-based applications of poetry, the construction of slam in the UK, and the intersection of artistic and scientific domains. Helen is also a published poet, events organizer, and active participant on the UK performance poetry scene. Gugu Hlongwane is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in postcolonial literatures and theory, at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her current research and publications, which appear in journals such as Ariel and Postcolonial Text, critique the discourses of reconciliation in the “new” South Africa. Hugh Hodges is the author of Soon Come, an examination of oral and written traditions in Jamaica that focuses on the relationship between the spiritual and the poetic. He has also published articles on Bob Marley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Lord Kitchener, the calypsonian. He is Associate Professor of English at Trent University, Ontario, where he teaches African and West Indian literature, postcolonial theory, and performance poetry. Pedagogical experiments are ongoing. Adeena Karasick is a poet and media artist and the award-winning author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She has lectured and performed worldwide and regularly publishes articles, reviews, and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics, and cultural/semiotic theory. She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John’s University in New York. Her latest titles include, Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009), and This Poem: Part I (from obvious epiphanies press, Japan 2011). In the fall of 2011, she embarked on a twentieth-anniversary world performance tour with bill bissett, through London, Manchester, Barcelona, Paris, Geneva, Ghent, and St. Petersburg. Brent Nelson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, where he specializes in seventeenth-century literature and digital humanities. He has published mostly on Sir Thomas Browne and John Donne, including a monograph titled Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (2005). His new work is on the culture of curiosity in England between 1580 and 1700. He is also a member of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) project and director of the John Donne Society’s digital text project.

Contributors

Mareike Neuhaus specializes in Indigenous literatures of North America and Canadian literature. She studied at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Mount Allison University, and the University of Alberta, before completing three years of postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto. Her first scholarly book, “That’s Raven Talk”: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures, was published by CPRC Press in 2011. Wendy Roy is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research interests are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian fiction, popular culture, and travel writing. She has published essays on writers such as Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Carol Shields, as well as the book Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel (2005). Waziyatawin holds the Indigenous Peoples Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Her research interests include issues of reparative justice, indigenous knowledge recovery, decolonization strategies in indigenous communities, and the collapse of industrial civilization. She has authored, edited, or co-edited five volumes. Her latest book, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (2008) won the Independent Publisher Silver Medal Book Award for best regional non-fiction (Midwest).

361

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Aboriginal narrative/storytelling. See Indigenous oral narratives; Indigenous storytelling; Indigenous storytelling Adams, Ciara, 106 African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), 66, 68 African National Congress (ANC), 144, 146–47, 148, 149 Ahmad, Kwasi, 18 aisling (Irish vision poem), 36, 153, 162; and ballad, 36, 153, 157–62; denigration of, 170; and Jacobite movement, 162, 163–65, 166–67, 168, 170; modern adaptations of, 36, 170–71; and nationalist struggle, 162–71; as problematic genre, 168–71; spéirbhean figure in, 162–63, 164, 165, 167, 168–69, 171. See also entries for Granuaile Alexie, Sherman, 336, 341, 353n2 Allen, Lillian, 73n23, 98, 142 Allison, Luther, 124 alphabetic literacy, 31, 160, 203, 215, 308, 310, 314. See also literacy alphabet(s), 18, 160, 310; International Phonetic, 132 Amiotte, Arthur, 347 Amodio, Mark C., 31, 158 Andrews, Jennifer, 44n9 Andrewes, Lancelot, 177 Anishinaabe: trickster figure of, 342, 345, 353n7; White Earth reservation of, 35, 341, 348–52; wild rice harvest case involving, 344–46. See also Blaeser, Kimberly M.; Vizenor, Gerald

anitafrika, d’bi.young. See young, d’bi., and entry following anthropology, 3, 24, 25, 39; and ethnography, 25; interdisciplinary approach to, 240–41; and non-Indigenous philosophy, 334–35. See also Cruikshank, Julie; Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer; ethnography; Finnegan, Ruth; Speare, Jean E. Arcand, John, 17 Armstrong, Jeannette C., 16, 34, 316; on Indigenous literatures, 7, 8, 221 Arnold, A. James, 57 Attali, Jacques, 15, 24 Atwood, Margaret. See The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), spoken story in Aubid, Charles, 344–45 audience(s), 3, 10–11; of Black artists/ poets, 59–60, 70; as co-creator(s), 4, 6; of dialect poetry, 120; Donne’s engagement with, 177, 182–84; of ethnographic studies, 11, 240, 241– 43; feedback of, 14–15, 28; fluency of, 3, 9; listening by, 1, 10–11, 24; and Indigenous storytellers, 10, 27, 44n3, 229, 283, 288–89, 293–98, 333–34, 335; necessity of, 4–5; and orature/ performance, 4–5, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 20, 27–28; participation/response of, 6, 10, 14–15, 58, 70; primary, secondary, tertiary, 11, 44n4, 256; and proximity to performer(s), 11; of punk artists, 101–02; and reflexive relationship with performer(s), 97, 98, 103, 363

364

Index

105–06; of sermons/religious services, 59, 72n14, 177, 178, 185, 191; of slam, 80–81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90–91, 92. See also The Days of Augusta, and entry following; Life Lived Like a Story, and entry following audiocentricism, 22, 23–24 Augustine, Saint, 179, 182–83, 186 Austin, John L., 8 Baker, Houston, 33 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 44n3, 312 Ball, Hugo, 103 ballad, 36, 153, 157–62; “folk” origins of, 157–59; gendered nature of, 161–62; Irish, 159–61; orality of, 157–62; and print era, 158–59. See also aisling bannock (Indigenous flatbread), 17, 307 Baraka, Amiri, 98, 100 Barnes, William, 10, 24, 42; “Carn a-turnèn yoller,” 120–21 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael, 123. See also Four Horsemen Barthes, Roland, 32, 89, 229 Bascom, W. R., 8 Basho (Japanese poet), 40 Battson, Jill, 103, 104, 106 Baugh, Edward, 5, 89, 92 Bauman, Richard, 3, 229; and Charles L. Briggs, 3, 14, 44n5 Bauman, Zygmunt, 308 Beat poets, 84, 98 Beaulieu, Derek, 103, 105, 109n6 Beer, Gillian, 240, 241, 252, 254–55, 257 Bernstein, Charles, 90, 91 Bessinger, J.B., 19 Bhabha, Homi, 309 Bible: and literacy, 59, 72n14, 172n3, 207 Biko, Steven, 149 Bilby, Kenneth, 102 Bionic Bannock Boys (comedy troupe), 307 bissett, bill, 23 Black Arts Movement (U.S.), 140 Black Consciousness poets (South Africa), 140, 149

Black poetry, 53–71; and African-American influence, 66–67, 68, 73n23, 73n27; and colonial experience, 38, 54–56, 63; Eurocentric denigration of, 10, 19, 26, 54–60, 70; expression/ identity of, 55–60, 67, 72n18; language of, 54–55, 56–57, 59–60, 68, 71n7; and music, 54, 58, 61–62, 66, 71n5, 71n9; orality of, 32–33, 55–56, 59, 70–71; and performance, 55–60, 70, 72n18; in print, 54, 55, 58–59, 60–61, 70; and vernacular culture, 32–33; and white page, 32–33, 60. See also dub poetry; hip hop; Oni the Haitian Sensation, and entry following; Rampolokeng, Lesego, and entry following; rap; slam; women, Black, as poets; young, d’bi, and entry following Blaeser, Kimberly M., 341–42; photography of, 290–91; poetry of, 35, 348–52; on storyteller–audience interaction, 10, 27, 44n3, 229, 283, 288–89, 333–34, 335. See also Indigenous storytelling Blue Marrow (Halfe), 36, 221–34; Aboriginal/Western traditions in, 232–33, 234; cyclical nature of, 231, 232, 233–34; and holophrase, 36, 222–24; narrative frame of, 36, 222, 226–34; and passing on of stories, 226–28, 325n6; and relational word bundle, 36, 224–26, 234; revised edition of, 221, 228–34; as textualized orality, 221–26, 232–34; and “walk on paper,” 222, 229, 232, 233; women’s stories in, 226–27, 228–29 Blue Marrow (Halfe), relational word bundles of, 10, 36, 222, 223, 224–34; in closing narrative, 229–32, 233; and Cree spirituality, 36, 225, 226–27, 228, 229, 231, 232; and Gloria Patri, 36, 226, 228, 232; interpretative context of, 36, 221, 229, 232, 233; in narrator’s dialogues with parents, 229–30, 231; and narrator’s vision quest, 226–28, 229, 230–31; in opening narrative,

Index

226–29, 232, 233; and reader involvement, 221, 224, 227–29, 232, 233 Boas, Franz, 25 body, as signifying medium: for Black women poets, 38–39; in oratorical delivery, 39, 179, 180, 182, 191–92, 193–94, 194; in photographs of Indigenous storyteller, 285, 287–98; in slam, 90; in sound poetry, 133; in young’s work, 18, 19, 39, 60 Bök, Christian, 97, 103, 104, 106, 108, 130 Boland, Eavan, 169 Bold, Alan, 158, 161 Bradley, Nicholas, 288, 289 Brathwaite, Kamau, 13, 38, 103 Brehon law, as indigenous to Ireland, 154, 155 Breton, André, 57 Bringhurst, Robert, 256, 259n11 Brooke, Frances: The History of Emily Montague, 201 Brophy, Brigid, 125 Brown, James, 55 Brown, Stewart, 32, 33 Browne, Mahogany, 83 Bulwer, John: Chironomia: or, the Art of Manuall Rhetorique, 180, 182, 191–92, 193–94, 194 Burns, Charlie, 321 Burton, T. L.: on dialect poetry, 119–21; and readings of Barnes’s poems, 10, 24, 42, 120–21 Buscani, Lisa, 83 Butler-Kisber, Lynn, 268, 278 Calinescu, Matei, 43n1 Campbell, Maria, 17, 44n10, 225, 232; “Jacob,” 20; and “Big John,” 300n6; and “La Beau Sha Shoo,” 20; and Stories of the Road Allowance People, 18, 20, 284, 299n1, 300n6 Canadian fiction, spoken stories in, 37, 201–16; accuracy of, 205–06, 207, 211–12; authenticity/orality of, 202, 204, 208–10; gendering of, 203, 207–08, 210, 215; as mythic, 205, 207,

213–14; vs “official”/written stories, 201, 202, 203–04, 205–06, 207, 212– 13, 214–16; and power imbalance of literacy, 207–08, 211, 215; as revised/ reconstructed, 206, 207, 208–10, 212, 213, 216; as taped/transcribed, 201, 209–12, 215; as told by marginalized characters, 203, 204, 206–08, 211, 215– 16; as told to unnamed listeners, 208, 210, 211, 218n17; and Toronto School theorists, 203. See also entries for The Diviners; The Handmaid’s Tale; Kiss of the Fur Queen; Life of Pi Cardinal, Tantoo, 17 Carew, Thomas, 181–82 Carey, Lucius, 181 Carrier, James, and Achsah Carrier, 39 Carroll, Jim, 98, 101 Carroll, Lewis: “Jabberwocky,” 68 Casas, Maria Caridad, 38–39, 65–66, 71n9 Cavender, Elsie Two Bear, 266; biography of, 266–67; and Dakota Death March, 268, 276–78; on importance of remembering, 279–81; recordings of, 265, 268, 278; and subversion of colonial narrative, 266, 267, 269–70; and Waziyatawin’s recreation of narrative, 34–35, 39–40, 41–42, 265–81, 284. See also Dakota; entries for Waziyatawin Caxton, William: Mirrour of the World, 180, 191 Cendrars, Blaise, 59 Césaire, Aimé, 56, 57 Chafe, Wallace L., 223 Chamberlin, J. Edward, 27, 54–55, 58, 216; If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? 21, 326n10 Chambers, Anne, 153, 154–55, 156, 161; Granuaile ballads collected by, 157, 162 Charles Edward, Prince (the “Young Pretender”), 163, 168 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 57 Child, Brenda, 349 Child, Francis James, 157, 158

365

366

Index

chronotopes, Imperial vs Indigenous, 312–14, 313, 317 Chuck D, 98 Churchill, Sir Winston, 57, 153 Cicero: De Inuentione, 180; De oratore, 177–78 Cixous, Hélène, 23 Cole, Peter, 1, 43n1; on fauxvrais s(t)imulati, 9; on iterature, 314, 325n6; on “listenary,” 1, 10; on traditionalizing modernity, 309–10, 312, 313, 314, 324, 325n4, 325n6 Coleman, Daniel: on chronotopes, 312– 14, 313, 317 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 54, 212, 218n18, 258n2 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 54 Columbus, Christopher, 331, 340, 353n1 Congreve, William: The Way of the World, 83 Cook, Judith, 154, 156 Cooley, Dennis, 33, 139, 145 Cooper, Carolyn, 12; and Hubert Devonish, 32 Corrigan, Máiread, and Betty Williams, 169 Council for Yukon Indians, 243 Cowan, Theresa (T.L.), vii, 21, 93 Cox, Christopher, and Daniel Warner, 28 Cree, 14, 300n6, 308–09. See also Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following; Kiss of the Fur Queen (Highway), spoken stories in; McLeod, Neal, and entries following; nêhiyawêwin (Cree language); nêhiyâwiwin (“Creeness”/ Cree identity) Crilly, Anne: Mother Ireland (film), 169–70 Crosfield, Thomas, 182 Cruikshank, Julie (Life Lived Like a Story), 11, 26, 27, 324; and altering of previously published stories, 247, 249–50, 251, 254, 258n7; as compared to Dauenhauers, 27, 240, 250–53, 254, 255–56, 259n12; as “cultural outsider,” 26, 242, 246, 249; Do Glaciers Listen?,

242, 249, 258n2; editorial interventions by, 244, 247–49, 254; as facilitator/mediator, 240, 243, 244, 246, 248, 254; linguistic training of, 239, 254; and Ned’s narrative, 247–49, 258n3; and reframing of narratives, 26, 243– 50, 254, 255; and Sidney’s narrative, 243–44. See also Life Lived Like a Story, and entry following Cummings, E.E., 57, 66, 127 Curtis, Edward Sheriff, 287, 339 Cutler, Chris, 29 Dada, 42; study of, 100, 101, 102 Dakota, 34, 39, 41, 265–81; colonial atrocities against, 268, 270–76; Death March of, 268, 276–78; modern-day resistance/liberation of, 266–67, 279– 81; starvation of, 268, 270–72, 274 Dalton, Mary, 310 dance, 14, 20–21; in ledger art, 346, 347, 347–48; in Rampolokeng’s “rap 33,” 20, 145 Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer, 27, 240, 250–53, 254, 255–56, 259n9, 259n10, 259n12, 299n1 The Days of Augusta, 26–27, 40, 283–99; as “as-told-to” life story, 284, 286, 299n2; collaborative process of, 285–86, 298– 99, 300n4; genesis of, 285; reviews of, 286. See also Keziere, Robert; Speare, Jean E.; Tappage Evans, Mary Augusta The Days of Augusta, photographs published in: ambiguity of, 292, 296; body language of, 285, 287–98; challenges presented by, 284–85; “demand,” 293– 95, 296, 298; as emphasizing subject over community, 291–93; as glossed over by reviewers, 286; as invasion of privacy, 297, 298; “offer,” 295–96, 297, 298; publisher’s role in, 285–86; reproductions of, 289, 290, 294, 295; and storyteller–audience relationship, 293–98; as supporting/enriching subject and stories, 292–93, 297, 298; as

Index

taken after narrative process, 285–86, 288; as uncaptioned, 290; as varying by printing, 288, 299–300n3; visual grammar of, 286–87, 292, 293–96, 298 Death in June (band), 159 De Klerk, F.W., 145 delivery, 8–9 delivery, oratorical, 179–86, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195n1; ancient writers on, 177–78, 195n1; and apparel, 179, 195– 96n6; Donne’s methods/techniques in, 39, 181–83, 185, 191–94; Donne’s reputation for, 181–84; Donne’s statements on, 184–85; and ethical life, 179, 180–81; and gesture, 39, 179, 180, 182, 191–92, 193–94, 194; as inferred from text, 177–79, 186, 187–85; Renaissance writers on, 179–81; and voice, 178, 179, 180, 185, 192. See also Donne, John, and entry following; oratory delivery, poetic: by Burton, 120–21; by Dutton, 127–29, 133; by Rampolokeng, 139, 146–47, 149; of slam, 86 Deloria, Philip, 331, 332, 340, 341 Deloria, Vine, 336, 353n2 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 25, 27, 31, 44n3 Desperate Bicycles (band), 101; “The Medium Was Tedium,” 102 dialect poetry, 119–21; listening to, 10, 24 dithoko, 35, 139 The Diviners (Laurence), spoken stories in, 204–07; accuracy of, 205–06, 207, 211; historical events in, 204–06, 211; as mythic, 205, 207; vs “official”/written stories, 203, 205–06, 207, 212, 215, 216; as personal/collective histories, 201, 204–07; postmodernism of, 204, 207; racism/colonialism in, 203; spoken stories in, 201; and textuality, 207; as told by marginalized characters, 204, 206–07 Donne, John, 177–95; and copia, 186, 190, 191, 193; delivery methods/techniques of, 39, 181–83, 185, 191–94; elegies on, 181–82; emotion/passions of, 182–84; on ethical life, 181; and exhortative

vs instructive mode, 186; and God’s word, 185; and “oral residue” of Tudor prose, 185–86; poetry of, 177, 181, 184, 194; on primacy of preaching, 184–85; and reputation as preacher, 181–84; on sermon genre, 186; and statements on delivery, 184–85; and use of notes, 179 Donne, John, second prebend sermon of (1626), 178, 187–95; accumulation/ repetition in, 188–91; background to, 195n4; and delivery as inferred from text, 187–95; exhortative mode of, 188–95; imagined gestures of, 191–92, 193–94; instructive mode of, 188, 192, 194; intensity of, 187, 189; soliloquy of, 192; subject/metaphor of, 187, 194; two-part structure of, 187–88, 192 Douglas, Roosevelt “Rosie,” 62–63 Drumm, Máire, 169–70 drum poetry, 129 drums: and Black poetry, 57; and Rampolokeng’s poetry, 141, 145; and speech, 128–30 dub poetry, 140–41; Allen on, 142; Gingell on, 60–61, 71–72n10; and music/ rhythm, 18, 61, 62, 66, 71n9, 101, 139, 140; oral vs written, 142–43; politics of, 18, 71n9, 140, 142; Rampolokeng and, 139, 140; study of, 100, 101, 106; and visual elements, 18, 19, 60; young on, 56. See also young, d’bi., and entry following Dumont, Gabriel, 206 Dunbar, William: “The Tretis of the Twa Maritt Women and the Wedo,” 161 Dutton, Paul, 22, 123–34; delivery of, 127–29, 133; on drums and speech, 128–30; improvisation by, 133–34; on notes vs syllables, 123–24, 130, 134; on poetry as discovery process, 125–26, 133–34; on sound poetry/oral sound art, 128, 129–34; on speech and music, 124–25; verbal poems of, 126–28. See also sound poetry/oral sound art; speech–music continuum

367

368

Index

Dutton, Paul, works by: “Antilyrics,” 133; “Jazz Musician,” 125; “Kit Talk,” 129; “Mercure,” 132–33; “Snare, Kick, Rack, and Floor,” 129; “Strata,” 128; “Thinking,” 126–27 Dylan, Bob: “Like a Rolling Stone,” 69 “Echohomonymy” (Karasick), 22–23, 111–17 Egan, Susanna, and Gabriele Helms, 245–46 8 Mile (film), 80 Eliot, T. S., 177, 178 Elizabeth I, 153, 154, 155–57, 161, 166, 170–71 Emberley, Julia, 14 English: and nêhiyawêwin (Cree), 305, 307, 314, 319–23; standard vs nonstandard, 12, 24–25, 35, 53–71, 248, 258n7; Yukon Elders’ stories in, 239, 248, 250, 253–54, 258n7 Erdrich, Louise, 342, 353n7 ethnography: and academic study of oral, 25; and audience, 11, 240, 241–43; and Indigenous orature, 26–27, 40, 239– 57, 283–99; and White Earth reservation, 35, 348–52. See also Cruikshank, Julie; Speare, Jean E. eVOCative! festival (Saskatoon, 2008), 21, 42; Burton’s readings at, 42, 120–21; Karasick’s performance at, 22–23, 111–17 ewi, 30 Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble, 123, 130 Fanon, Frantz, 19, 55, 56, 71n3 Fee, Margery, 8, 31, 43, 44n7 Ferguson, Sir Samuel: “Grace O’Malley,” 166–67, 170 Finnegan, Ruth, 3, 7, 21, 30, 158–59, 215, 216; Literacy and Orality, 30; Oral Literature in Africa, 7; Oral Poetry, 4, 7; “‘Oral Tradition,’” 2, 5, 21; Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts, 3, 4, 7, 8 Flett, George, 34, 346–48; ledger art by, 347–48

Foclin, Antoine: La Rhétorique française, 179 Foley, John Miles: How to Read an Oral Poem, 3, 4, 8, 10, 13, 20, 40–41, 79, 82, 91; Teaching Oral Traditions (ed.), 40–41 folk ballad, 157–59; and neo-folk movement, 158–59 Four Horsemen, 123, 130; The Prose Tattoo, 19. See also Dutton, Paul, and entry following; Nichol, bp Fox, Adam, 29–30 Foyle, Naomi: “Grace of the Gamblers,” 36, 154, 170–71 Francois, Kat, 81 Frith, Simon: Performing Rites, 102 Frost, Robert, 66 Furniss, Graham, 24–25 Gansworth, Eric, 341 García Lorca, Federico, 57 Gates, Henry Louis, 33 Gee, James Paul, 8 gender: and body as signifying medium, 18, 19, 38–39, 60; in The Handmaid’s Tale, 203, 207–08, 210, 215; and ocularcentricity, 23–24; and orality, 161– 62. See also entries for Granuaile Giddens, Anthony, 308 Gilmore, Leigh, 245 Gingell, Susan, 202, 213; on Campbell and Halfe, 232; on dub poetry, 60–61, 71–72n10; on textualized orature, 11–14, 283 Ginsberg, Allen, 57, 98; Howl, 100 Goetsch, Paul, 5, 35, 37, 202, 216 Goldie, Terry, 308 Gonne, Maud, 169 Goody, Jack, 29, 30, 31–32, 203 Gore-Booth, Eva, 169 Granuaile, as portrayed in aislingi, 153–54, 157, 162–71; in Jacobite/ post-Jacobite era, 163–65, 167, 168; as “learned lady”/island queen, 166–67; as sorrowing nationalist icon, 153, 165, 167–69; as spéirbhean, 163, 164,

Index

165, 167, 168–69, 171; as symbol of resistance, 167, 168–69, 171; in Victorian era, 165–68; as warrior/chieftain, 164–65, 166, 168, 171. See also entry below; Ní Mháille, Gráinne Granuaile aislingi (specific): “Grace of the Gamblers” (modern), 36, 154, 170–71; “Grace O’Malley,” 166–67; “Grana Weal,” 163–64, 165; “Granuaile” (ca. 1798), 163, 164; “Granuaile” (late 19th century), 165–66; “Granuweal—An Old Song,” 163, 164–65; by MacHale, 167; “A New Song Called Granuaile,” 167–68; “Oró! Sé do bheatha bhaile!,” 168, 170; “Poor Old Granuaile,” 167 graphic novel, 17 Great Divide theory: advocates of, 25, 29, 30–31; challenges to, 29–32; as countered by slam, 30 Green, Steven, 58 guslar (Eastern European singer), 10 Habekost, Christian, 140 Haida, 27, 256, 299n1; language of, 252, 259n9 Halfe, Louise Bernice, 36. See also Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), spoken story in, 207–10; “better” version of, 208, 212; as gendered, 203, 207–08, 210, 215; vs “official”/written story, 203; orality of, 208–10; postmodernism of, 216; as revised/reconstructed, 208–10, 212; as taped/transcribed, 201, 209–10, 211, 212; and unnamed listener, 208, 218n17 Hardiman, James: Irish Minstrelsy, Vol. II, 163, 164 Harjo, Joy: “My House Is the Red Earth,” 333, 334 Harris, Roy, 7 Harrison, Julia, and Regna Darnell, 240 Havelock, Eric, 29, 30, 32; Preface to Plato, 25, 218n10 Hayes, Ira, 341, 353n6 Heidegger, Martin, 23

Herbert, George, 119 Highway, Tomson. See Kiss of the Fur Queen (Highway), spoken stories in Hilger, Mary Inez, 348–52 hip hop, 66, 104, 141; in Britain and Germany, 90; emcee battles of, 80; Oni’s use of, 68, 69; sampling in, 60. See also rap Hochbruck, Wolfgang, 202–03, 214 Hogan, Linda, 341 Holman, Bob, 89 holophrases: in Aboriginal languages, 36, 222–24; examples of, 223; grammar of, 223–24, 235n6; and holophrastic traces, 226, 234, 235n9; and paraholophrases, 36, 225; and reading of Blue Marrow, 226–34; and relational word bundles, 224–26, 234; and textualized orality, 222–24. See also Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following; relational word bundles Hudak, Glenn M., 315–16 Hutcheon, Linda, 204, 216, 224 Hyland, Gary: Just Off Main, 18–19 Hymes, Dell, 34, 232, 337 Hyperius, Gerhard: The Practise of Preaching (trans. Ludham), 180–81 Indigenous oral narratives: as “as-told-to” life stories, 284, 286, 299n2, 340; colonial devaluation of, 259n13, 308–09, 331–32, 344–45; colonial overwriting of, 336–37, 340; ethnographers’ overwriting of, 26–27, 40, 239–57, 283–99; illustrations/photographs and, 18, 26–27, 40, 283–99; and importance of place, 289–90; as necessary for survival, 331, 332; and non-Indigenous readers, 239–57; “open field” approach to, 240, 241, 254–57; as performance, 252–54, 287–91; preservation of, 11, 240, 242, 243, 245, 249, 250, 251–53, 255–56, 258n3; publication of, 18, 201, 283–84, 336–37; as recognition of “Other,” 255–56, 259n11; as recounted in English, 239, 248, 250,

369

370

Index

253–54, 258n7; and sovereignty, 34, 344–45. See also entry immediately below; visual elements, in Indigenous oral narrative Indigenous storytelling, 10, 16, 26, 27, 40, 44n3, 331–52; and audience’s responsibility, 10, 27, 44n3, 229, 283, 288–89, 333–34, 335; colonial devaluation of, 259n13, 308–09, 331–32, 344–45; vs colonial ethnography, 348–52; vs colonial historiography, 266, 267, 269–70, 334–35, 340; colonial overwriting of, 336–37, 340; and colonial photographs, 338–40, 341; and colonial stereotypes, 340–43; and cultural contingency, 332–33, 344; and cultural variations, 342; “dialogic circle” of, 344–48; ethnographers’ overwriting of, 26–27, 40, 239–57, 283–99; and importance of place, 289–90; and Indigenous authority/sovereignty, 343–48, 350– 52; by later generation, 34–35, 40, 41–42, 265–81, 316–18; ledger art as, 346–48; non-Indigenous audience and, 240–57; and non-verbal forms, 254, 333; oral tradition of, 331, 332, 335, 336–37, 340, 344–45; as palimpsest, 38, 334, 335, 338–40, 346–52; and recovery, 333, 337, 348–52; as resistance to/revisioning of colonialism, 331–35, 337, 338–48; visual elements in, 16, 17–18 Innis, Harold, 203 Ireland: aislingi of, 36, 153, 162–71; ballad form in, 159–61; bards and fili of, 159– 60; Catholics/Catholicism in, 157, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172n2, 172n3; chieftains of, 156; Home Rule in, 167, 168, 169; Jacobite movement in, 162, 163–65, 166–67, 168, 170; literacy in, 19, 172n3; mythological women warriors of, 154, 169; nationalist struggle of, 162–71; patriarchal society/culture of, 154–56, 169; women activists/politicians of, 169–70; women poets of, 36, 154, 169, 170–71; written histories

of, 153, 154–55, 157, 161, 171. See also aisling; entries for Granuaile; Ní Mháille, Gráinne Irigaray, Luce, 23, 24 iterature, 19; Cole on, 314, 325n6 Jakobson, Roman, 24, 25 James Francis Edward, Prince (the “Old Pretender”), 163 Janvier, Big John, 300n6 Jarry, Alfred, 2 Jay, Martin, 23 J.J. Douglas (publisher), 285–86 Johnson, David, 84 Johnson, James H., 28 Johnson, Linton Kwesi (LKJ), 98, 140, 143 Johnson, Pauline (Tehahionwake): “The Cattle Thief,” 320–21 Jones, Gayl, 33 Joseph, Clifton: Metropolitan Blues, 18 Joseph, Oni. See Oni the Haitian Sensation Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, 23 Kabbalism, 116 Kalahari Surfers, 139 Kapchan, Deborah A., 3, 4 Karasick, Adeena, 22, 103, 105; “Echohomonymy,” 22–23, 111–17 Keziere, Robert (The Days of Augusta), 26, 40, 285–86, 288–99; photographs by, 289, 290, 294, 295. See also The Days of Augusta, and entry following kin(a)esthesis, 2 King, Thomas, 201, 331, 332, 334, 352 Kiss of the Fur Queen (Highway), spoken stories in, 212–15; and colonialism/ racism, 203, 213–15, 216; vs “official”/ written stories, 212–13, 214–15; and textualized orature, 201, 213–15; as told by marginalized characters, 213; as transformative, 214–15 Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen: Reading Images, 287, 292, 293–96, 298 Krims, Adam, 141 Kristeva, Julia, 23

Index

LaDuke, Winona, 346 language: of Black poetry, 54–55, 56–57, 59–60, 68, 71n7; of Black women poets, 61–62, 63, 64–66, 68–69; in Blue Marrow, 36, 221–34; Haida, 252, 259n9; standard vs non-standard, 12, 24–25, 35, 53–71, 248, 258n7; Tlingit, 251, 252, 253, 259n9, 259n10. See also Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following; nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) Last Poets, 98, 100, 140, 143 Laurence, Margaret, 33. See also The Diviners (Laurence), spoken stories in ledger art, 346–48; contemporary, 347– 48, 347–48 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 24, 25 Life Lived Like a Story, 26, 239–57; academic readership for, 11, 242–43, 249, 256, 257; as anthropological/literary text, 240, 241, 242, 245, 254, 258n2; as collaborative project, 239, 241, 242, 243–44, 245–46; compared to Elders’ previous works, 243, 247, 249–50, 258n7; as cross-cultural encounter, 26, 239–40, 241–42, 244, 254, 256–57; and life story genre, 26, 239–40, 242–50, 251, 254, 255; non-Indigenous readership for, 11, 240, 241, 242–50, 251, 254, 255; paratextual apparatus of, 242, 246, 247; positive critical review of, 245–46; and preservation of oral testimonies, 11, 240, 242, 243, 245, 249, 250, 258n3; publishing of, 242–43, 249. See also entry below; Cruikshank, Julie; Ned, Annie; Sidney, Angela; Smith, Kitty Life Lived Like a Story, life stories in, 11, 26, 239–40, 242–50, 251, 254, 255; as altered versions of previously published work, 247, 249–50, 251, 254, 258n7; editing of, 244, 247–49, 254; Elders’ conceptions of, 26, 239–40, 243–44, 247–49; as familiar/popular genre, 242, 245; and non-Indigenous audience, 11, 240, 241, 242–50, 251,

254, 255; and paratextual apparatus, 242, 246, 247; as presented alongside traditional narratives, 243, 246, 247; as recognition of “Other,” 255–56; as recounted in English, 239, 248, 250, 253–54, 258n7 Life of Pi (Martel), spoken story in, 210– 12; accuracy of, 211–12; author/narrator of, 210, 211, 218n17; “better” version of, 212; vs “official”/written story, 203; religion in, 203, 211, 212; as revised/reconstructed, 212; and suspension of disbelief, 212, 218n18; as taped/transcribed, 201, 211, 215; as told by marginalized character, 211 listener-reader: Ortiz on, 2, 333, 335 listening, 1, 10–11, 24; attentive, 259n12, 259n13; Ortiz on, 2, 333, 335; and “response-ability,” 10, 229, 288–89 Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: and conference (2008), 21, 27–28; conversational circle of, 15–16; and eVOCative! festival (2008), 21, 42; and invitation to reader, 1, 43; and oral-written-visual studies, 2–3, 15–16, 29–41; perspectives offered by, 21–22; structure of, 41–43; terminology used in, 3–15; “theoretical indiscipline” of, 15–16; and turn to the oral+, 22–28 literacy: alphabetic, 31, 160, 203, 215, 308, 310, 314; Bible and, 59, 72n14, 172n3, 207; in Ireland, 19, 172n3; Ong on primacy of, 8, 12, 29, 30, 31, 217n5, 309; orality and, 8, 15, 25, 29–32, 65–66; power imbalance of, 207–8, 211, 215; and visual elements, 19. See also Ong, Walter J. Little Crow (Dakota chief ), 268, 270, 272–73 Little Richard, 128–29 Liverpool Poets, 84 Lomax, Alan, 102 Long, Norman, 32 Longley, Edna, 169, 170

371

372

Index

Ludham, John, 180–81 Lussier, René: Le trésor de la langue, 124, 125 MacHale, John, 167 MacLeish, Archibald, 130 MacLeod, Alistair, 201 Mac Piarais, Pádraig (Patrick Pearse), 168, 170 Madingoane, Ingoapele, 140 Mahseet, Mabel: photograph of, 338–40, 339, 341 Mailer, Norman, 56 Mandela, Nelson, 137, 142 Mandiela, Ahdri Zhina: Speshal Rikwes, 18 Maponya, Maishe, 140 Markievicz, Constance, 169 Marley, Bob, 98 Martel, Yann. See Life of Pi (Martel), spoken story in Martin, Calvin, 334–35 Marx, Karl, 308 Masayesva, Victor, Jr., 27 The Matrix (film), 319–20 Mayne, Jasper, 182 Mazomani (Dakota chief), 268, 274–76 McAdams, Janet, 341 McAliskey, Bernadette, 169, 170 McCaffery, Steve, 123. See also Four Horsemen McCall, Sophie, 26 McCarten, Cliff: “My Blackbelt,” 108, 109n9 McCullough, Peter, 177, 178, 195 McGann, Jerome, 79, 91 McGarrity, Maria, and Claire Culleton, 308 McGuckian, Medbh, 169; “The Aisling Hat,” 170 McIntosh, Diana, 130 McKay, Claude: “If We Must Die,” 57 McKegney, Sam, 213 McKenzie, Donald F., 77, 79, 83, 91, 92 McLeod, John R., 316 McLeod, Neal: background/family of, 300n6, 317–18,

319–20, 324–25n2; comedy troupe of, 307; and eVOCative! festival, 21; on modernity, 23, 310–11, 323–24; as multimedia artist/performer, 305, 306, 307. See also entries immediately below McLeod, Neal, traditionalizing of modernity by, 28, 37, 305–24; as artist/performer, 305, 306, 307; and concepts of time, 312–14, 318, 324, 326n10, 326n11; through Cree language/syllabics, 37, 305, 306, 307–08, 314, 316– 23; through Cree narrative memory/ ancestral stories, 305, 315, 316–23; and “Creeness”/Cree identity, 23, 307, 310–12, 319–20, 323–24; and “sound identity” of Cree language, 37, 307, 314–16, 320–21; through textualized orature/orality, 307–09. See also nêhiyawêwin (Cree language); nêhiyâwiwin (“Creeness”/Cree identity) McLeod, Neal, works by: Cree Narrative Memory, 315, 316, 317, 318–19, 320; “Cree Poetic Discourse,” 318, 325n4; “ê-sâh-sâkiniskêpayihot,” 319–20; “Fire Walks the Sky,” 324n2; Gabriel’s Beach, 308, 315, 317, 321–23; “kôkôcîs,” 317– 18, 326n10; “Mamâhtâwisiwin: Tapping into the Great Mystery,” 316–17; “manitowêw,” 320–21; “maskîhkiy âstôtin,” 321–23; “Meditations on paskwâw-mostos awâsis,” 315; “nêhiyâwiwin and Modernity,” 23, 310–11, 323–24; “pîkahin okosisa,” 318–19; Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow, 305, 308, 317–21, 324n2; wîhtikow II (painting), 305, 306, 307 McLuhan, Marshall, 29, 30, 32, 58; The Gutenberg Galaxy, 203; Verbi-VocoVisual Explorations (with Papanek), 2, 15 Mekons (band), 101 Menard, Andrea, 17 Métis, history of: as told in The Diviners, 206 Metis narrative/storytelling: music and dance in, 17, 20; visual elements in,

Index

17–18. See also Campbell, Maria; Stories of the Road Allowance People Middleton, Peter, 88 Mishra, Sudesh, 313 modernity: colonizers’ concept of, 307– 09; and concepts of time, 312–14, 318, 324, 326n10, 326n11; Cole on, 309–10, 312, 313, 314, 325n4, 325n6; and Cree identity, 23, 310–12, 323–24; and technology, 318, 319, 323–24. See also McLeod, Neal, traditionalizing of modernity by Momaday, N. Scott, 332, 336 Morse, Michael, 106 Mothibatsela, Lebogang, 103, 104, 105, 109n6 Motion (Wendy Brathwaite), 103, 104, 105 Murray, Laura J., and Keren D. Rice, 27, 33, 283 music and rhythm: and Black poetry, 54, 58, 61–62, 66, 71n5, 71n9; and dub poetry, 18, 61, 62, 66, 71n9, 101, 139, 140; in Metis narrative/storytelling, 17, 20; Rampolokeng and, 20, 139, 140–41, 142–43, 145; and speech, 123–34. See also reggae music; speech– music continuum Mutabaruka, 140 Myrick, Andrew, 273–74 My Stories Are My Wealth (Sidney, Smith, and Dawson), 243, 247, 249, 258n5, 258n7 Naanabozho, 342, 353n7 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 24 National Poetry Slam (U.S.), 82, 84 Native oral narratives. See Indigenous oral narratives. Native storytelling. See also Indigenous storytelling Ned, Annie, 11, 239, 241, 253–54, 258n3; on attentive listening, 259n12, 259n13; and challenge to academics, 257; editorial interventions in narrative of, 247–49

nêhiyawêwin (Cree language): banning/ silencing of, 316, 321; as belonging to both past and future, 319–20, 323–24; in Blue Marrow, 36, 221–34; colonial denigration of, 308, 310, 314–15, 316, 321; “computer” in, 323; and English, 305, 307, 314, 319–23; English speakers and, 322; and history of names/ place names, 319, 322, 323; and land, 37, 315, 320–22; in McLeod’s work, 37, 305, 306, 307–08, 314, 316–23; “sound identity” of, 37, 307, 314–16, 320–21; syllabics of, 305, 306, 307; as textualized orature/orality, 307–09. See also entry below; Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following; holophrases; McLeod, Neal, traditionalizing of modernity by nêhiyâwiwin (“Creeness”/Cree identity): and modernity, 23, 310–12, 323–24; and popular culture, 307, 319–20; and technology, 318, 319, 323–24; and use of comedy, 307, 319–20. See also McLeod, Neal, traditionalizing of modernity by neo-orality, 12 New Guinea, Ponam islanders of: gift exchange/display by, 39 Nichol, bp, 2, 19, 23, 103, 123, 125–26; Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography, 19. See also Four Horsemen Nida, Eugene, and Charles Taber, 224 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala: “Caitlin,” 169; “Dora Dooley,” 170; “The Lay of Loughadoon,” 170 Ní Mháille, Gráinne (Grace O’Malley), 36, 153–57; death of, 157; and Elizabeth I, 153, 154, 155–57, 161, 166, 170–71; as excluded from written histories, 153, 154–55, 157, 161, 171; family of, 153, 154, 155, 156; as “gambler,” 36, 154, 157, 170–71; as “Granuaile,” 153–54, 157, 162–71; and patriarchal society/ culture, 154–56; pension received by, 157; State Papers on, 153, 154, 156, 163; as suspected of treachery, 156–57.

373

374

Index

See also entries for Granuaile Nindal Kwädindür (Smith), 243, 247, 249, 258n5, 258n7 Nnodim, Rita, 30 noise, 32; Attali on, 15, 24. See also Black poetry Noland, Carrie, 59, 72n17 O’Connell, Daniel, 168 O’Connor, Sinéad, 170 O’Donoghue, John, 170, 172n8 Ogude, James, 138–40 O’Hara, Alexis, 103, 105 O’Hare, Rita, 169 Oliphant, Andries, 139 Olson, David, 30, 31, 203–04 O’Malley, Grace, 154, 166. See also entries for Granuaile; Ní Mháille, Gráinne O’Malley, Mary: “The Grannuaile Poems,” 171 Ong, Walter J., 203; on homeostasis of orality/oral transmission, 153, 162, 163, 171, 206; influence of, 31; on oral cultures, 12, 31, 97, 153, 162, 163, 171, 216; on oral literature, 7, 31; on “oral residue”/additive quality of Tudor prose, 185–86, 193; on primacy of literacy, 8, 12, 29, 30, 31, 217n5, 309; on sound, 9, 138–39, 202; on storytelling, 207; on techniques of orality, 202, 204, 208 Oni the Haitian Sensation, 66–70; and American/Canadian experience, 66–67, 68, 73n23, 73n27; languages used by, 66, 68–69; literary/hip-hop poetics of, 67–70; as performance poet, 66, 70; as refused funding, 70, 74n29; on sexual relationships, 67–70 Oni the Haitian Sensation, works by: “Bitches in Ditches,” 67–68; “Gangster Alliance,” 66–67; Ghettostocracy, 66–70; “Gwen,” 67; “I Knead Your Nuts,” 70, 74n28; “Love Letter to My Boo,” 69; “Who Gives a Flux?,” 69 Onuora, Oku, 141 oral, academic study of: in anthropology/

ethnography, 25; by “audiocentric” thinkers, 23–24; and Great Divide theory, 25, 29–32; in linguistics, 24–25; in political economy, 24; and sound history, 28 “The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences” (2008 conference), 21; young’s talk at, 27–28 “oral+,” 11, 12, 14, 16, 24, 36, 39–43, 43n1; definition of, 6; Euro-Canadian writings of, 18–19; in McLeod’s work, 28, 37, 305–24, 325n3; in Metis writings, 17–18; and orality, 8; and speech, 9; turn to, 22–28; visual elements of, 17–19, 39–40 oral history. See entries for Blue Marrow (Halfe); Waziyatawin orality, 3; of ballad, 157–62; of Black poetry, 32–33, 55–56, 59, 70–71; in Canadian fiction, 202, 204, 208–10; and gender, 161–62; and literacy, 8, 15, 25, 29–32, 65–66; of “Other,” 24; and vernacular culture, 32–33; vs writing, 309–10. See also Ong, Walter J. orality, textualized, 3, 11–14; and dance/ other interfaces, 20–21; and McLeod’s traditionalized modernity, 307–09; and relational word bundles, 221–26, 232–34; and sociolinguistics, 24–25; and text, 13–14; visual elements in, 16, 17–19, 39–40 Orality and Literacy across Disciplines and Cultures (ed. Carlson et al.), 15 oral literature, 6–8; Armstrong on, 7, 8; Finnegan on, 7–8; Indigenous American, 336–37, 340; Ong on, 7, 31; orature as, 5, 6–8; of Tlingit, 250–54 oral narratives. See Canadian fiction, spoken stories in; Indigenous oral narratives; Indigenous storytelling oratory: Cicero on, 177–78, 180; and decorum, 178, 180; and delivery, 39, 177–78, 179–86, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195n1; as inferred from text, 177– 79, 186, 194–95. See also delivery,

Index

oratorical; Donne, John, and entry following orature, 3; alternative terms for, 6–8; definition of, 5; as event, 6; and iterature, 19, 314, 325n6; listening to, 10–11; as “oral literature,” 5, 6–8; and speech, 8–9; and “verbal art,” 8 orature, textualized, 3, 11–14; and artistic sovereignty, 333–34; and dance/other interfaces, 20–21; Highway’s reworking of, 201, 213–15; and literary standards, 12; and McLeod’s traditionalized modernity, 307–09; photographs and, 287–91, 296–99; as reductive, 13; and text, 13–14; and vernacular culture, 32–33; visual elements in, 16, 17–19, 39–40; and widened circulation of narratives, 283. See also Indigenous oral narratives; Indigenous storytelling Ortiz, Simon: on listener-reader, 2, 333, 335 Osborne, Helen Betty, 214 “Other”: literature of, 19, 24, 26; as narrator in Canadian fiction, 203, 204, 206–08, 211, 215–16; recognition of, 255–56, 259n11, 259n12 Owens, Louis, 337, 338, 343–44, 352 palimpsests: in African fiction, 38; of Indigenous storytelling, 38, 334, 335, 338–40, 346–52 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 144 Papanek, Victor, 2, 15 paralinguistic elements of communication, 5–6 Parenteau, Donny, 17 Parry, Milman, and Albert B. Lord, 25, 158, 185, 196n15 Pearce, Richard, 34, 346 pedagogy: and oral/performance poetry, 40–41, 42; of residential schools, 316. See also entries for Trent University performance, 3–5; audience and, 4–5, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 20, 27–28; Black poetry and, 55–60, 70, 72n18; definition of,

4; Finnegan on, 4–5; Indigenous oral narrative as, 252–54, 287–91; slam as, 85–87, 90–91; speech as, 9, 14; of storytelling, 14–15; written poetry as, 79, 88–91, 92 performance poetry, teaching of. See entries for Trent University Pfeiler, Martina: Sounds of Poetry, 79, 99–100 Philip, M. NourbeSe, 60 phonocentrism, 24, 25 photographs, of Indigenous people: as captioned/uncaptioned, 290–91; and colonial gaze/power, 287, 298; and “framing” of subject, 338–40, 339, 341; and importance of place, 289–90; and oral performance/context, 287– 91; and resistance of subject, 298; as taken/used by Indigenous peoples, 44n9, 276–78, 287, 300n6; and textualized orature, 287–91, 296–99; Vizenor on, 287, 291, 298. See also The Days of Augusta, and entry following; visual elements, in Indigenous oral narrative Placid, Jennifer, 100–01, 102, 106, 107, 108 Poetry Slam Inc. (PSI), 84 Poetry Society (U.K.), 85 Popol Vuh (Mayan sacred text), 331 “post-Indian” experience, 35, 338–40 Pound, Ezra, 58, 71n5 Pratt, E.J.: Brébeuf and His Brethren, 325n5 preaching. See Donne, John, and entry following; sermons, in Renaissance England Prefontaine, Darren, 17–18 Procope, Lynne, 86 Public Enemy, 100 punk poetry, 100, 101–02, 106 Quayson, Ato, 35, 38, 311 Racette, Sherry Farrell, 18, 284 Rampolokeng, Lesego, 20, 35–36, 137– 49; and ANC, 146–47, 148, 149; on

375

376

Index

Black-led South Africa, 137–38, 139, 140, 142–43, 146–49; on colonial South Africa, 137, 140, 142, 144–46, 147–48; community/people of, 139, 140; and cousin’s murder, 147–48; critical evaluations of, 138, 139–40, 149; and dance, 20, 145; delivery of, 139, 146–47, 149; diction of, 137, 143– 47; and dub poetry, 35, 139, 140–41, 142–43; “ear poetry” of, 139, 145; global reach of, 36, 137, 142; in international context, 140–42; and music/ rhythm, 20, 139, 140–41, 142–43, 145; and oral features in written work, 35–36, 137–39, 142–47; as “poet,” 141; and praise poetry, 35, 139, 140, 148; precarious situation of, 142, 147–49; rants of, 35, 147, 148; and rap, 35, 139, 141–42, 143–46, 149; readings by, 139, 142, 149. See also South Africa Rampolokeng, Lesego, works by: “A bavino love story at wet sunset,” 148; The Bavino Sermons, 138, 147–48, 149; “Chorus for the damned ranting,” 147; End Beginnings, 139, 143; Horns for Hondo, 20, 141, 143–47; “Lines for Vincent,” 147; “A Nesses / Lesses Love Rant,” 148; “The rampster comes straight,” 148; “Ranterlude,” 147; “Riding the victim train,” 138 rant: as poetic form used by Rampolokeng, 35, 147, 148 rap, 54, 66, 88; Rampolokeng’s poetry and, 35, 139, 141–42, 143–46, 149. See also hip hop Rawlings, Angela, 103, 105; Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, 106 reggae music, 54, 108; and dub poetry, 18, 62, 66, 71n9, 139, 140; politics of, 66, 71n9, 72n16 relational word bundles, 36, 224–26, 234; in Blue Marrow, 10, 36, 222, 223, 224–34; and Cree spirituality, 36, 225, 226–27, 228, 229, 231, 232; as paraholophrases, 36, 225; and textualized

orality, 221, 225–26, 232–34. See also Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following; holophrases “response-ability,” 10, 229, 288–89. See also listening Revard, Carter, 336, 353n2 Ricard, Alain: and Chris Swanepoel, 32; and Flora Veit-Wild, 32 Richardson, Karen, 58 Rise! slam competition (London), 85, 88 Robeson, Paul, 124–25 Robinson, Mary, 169, 170 Ross, Sinclair: As for Me and My House, 201 Rumens, Carol: “Stealing the Genre,” 170 Said, Edward, 311 Salic law, as imported to Ireland, 154, 155 Sarris, Greg, 257 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 56, 57, 71n6 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 24, 37, 203 Schafer, Murray: Patria 6, 106 Schoenhoff, Molly: Wokiksuye k’a Woyuonihan (with Waziyatawin), 39–40, 277, 277–78, 284 Schwitters, Kurt, 103 Scofield, Gregory: The Gathering, 17, 44n11; I Knew Two Metis Women, 17, 44n11 Scott, David, 312, 313 Scott, Sir Walter, 161 Scott-Heron, Gil, 98, 100, 141; “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” 101 Scriver, Stephen: All Star Poet!, 18 sermons, in Renaissance England: audiences of, 177, 178, 185, 191; challenging environment of, 177, 179, 196n6; as form in Rampolokeng, 147, 149; preparation for, 179, 195n5; published texts of, 39, 179; religious vs political, 62; status quo and, 216; and theories of delivery, 179–81. See also delivery, oratorical; Donne, John, and entry following; oratory Shakespeare, Robbie, 54 Shirane, Haruo, 40

Index

Sidney, Angela, 11, 239, 241, 253–54, 258n5; My Stories Are My Wealth (with Smith and Dawson), 243, 247, 249, 258n5, 258n7; Tagish Tlaagú / Tagish Stories, 11, 243; on traditional narrative vs life story, 243–44 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 341; Ceremony, 342, 343; “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” 342; Storyteller, 40, 290–91, 342 Singh, Judy, 18 The Six Million Dollar Man (television show), 307 slam, 22, 30, 73n27, 77–92, 109n6, 111; audience’s role/participation in, 80–81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90–91, 92; British vs American, 81, 84, 89; competitions of, 80–82, 84, 85, 88; as considered inferior to written poetry, 86; democratizing nature of, 104, 105; as “for(u)m,” 81; and Great Divide theory, 30; history/global reach of, 81–82; how it works, 81; judging of, 81, 82, 85; and literary world, 87–88; and oral vs written poetry, 77, 78–80, 93n1; page-stage commonalities of, 88–90; page-stage dichotomy of, 85–88; as performance, 85–87, 90–91; and plural performance of poetry, 90–91; and publication of poems, 87; rules of, 84; social context of, 30, 77, 79, 81, 82–85, 88–91, 92; and “stand-up poetry,” 84; youth vs adult, 84–85, 89. See also written/printed poetry Smith, Kitty, 11, 239, 241, 253–54; Nindal Kwädindür, 243, 247, 249, 258n5, 258n7; “The Stolen Woman,” 247 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 239 Smith, Marc, 81 Smith, Michael, 98 Smith, Patti, 98, 101; Horses (album), 102 Snyder, Gary: He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village, 256 Sobol, John, 124 Sole, Kelwyn, 138, 149 Sontag, Susan, 287, 289 Sorbara, Joe, 106

sound, 3, 9–10; and act of listening, 10; history of, 28, 45n16; Ong on, 9, 138– 39, 202; and “sound identity,” 37; in performance, 4, 5. See also listening sound poetry/oral sound art, 22, 128, 129–34; delivery of, 127–29, 133; improvisation of, 133–34; notation of, 132–33; study of, 102; terminology of, 130–31. See also Dutton, Paul and entry following; Four Horsemen; speech–music continuum soundsinging, 22, 130 South Africa, 137–49; Black Consciousness poets of, 140, 149; under Black rule, 137–38, 139, 140, 142–43, 146– 49; under colonial rule, 137, 140, 142, 144–46, 147–48; and hypocrisy of “normalization,” 36, 137, 138, 139, 147, 149; in transition period, 138, 145–47; violence of, 140, 143, 145, 147–49. See also Rampolokeng, Lesego, and entry following Speare, Jean E. (The Days of Augusta), 26, 285, 286, 288, 289, 292, 293, 296, 298–99, 299n2; on rewriting, 285, 300n5. See also The Days of Augusta, and entry following speech, 3, 8–9; natural vs performed, 9, 14; standard vs non-standard, 12, 24–25, 35, 53–71, 248, 258n7; as textualized, 11–13, 24–25; and writing, 31 speech–music continuum, 123–34; and drumming/speech affinity, 128–30; and Lussier’s work, 124, 125; and notation, 132–33; and notes vs syllables, 123–24, 130, 134; and sound poetry/oral sound art, 128, 129–34; and terminology, 130–31; and verbal poems, 126–28. See also Dutton, Paul, and entry following; sound poetry/oral sound art spéirbhean (“sky-woman”), 162–63, 164, 165, 167, 168–69, 171. See also aisling Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 256 Springsteen, Bruce, 108 Staniland, Andrew, 106

377

378

Index

Stein, Gertrude: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 243, 258n2 Sterne, Jonathan, 9–10, 28 Stories of Our People: Liizistwayr di la naaysoon di Michif (Metis graphic novel anthology), 17 Stories of the Road Allowance People (trans. Campbell), 18, 20, 284, 300n6; “Jacob,” 20; “La Beau Sha Shoo,” 20 Storyteller (Silko), 40, 290–91; “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” 342 storytelling, 3, 14–15; audience role in, 10, 11, 14–15, 20, 213, 215–16, 258, 267, 269, 316, 332. See also Indigenous storytelling Stovell, Jason, 106 Strong, Pauline Turner, 239 Sullivan, T. D.: “God Save Ireland,” 167 Sunday, Billy, 177, 191 Tagish Tlaagú / Tagish Stories (Sidney), 11, 243 Tappage Evans, Mary Augusta, 26–27, 40, 285–99; and collaborative process of book, 285–86, 298–99; family of, 291– 93; as knowledgeable/strong, 293–96; performance/context of, 287–91; poverty of, 286, 293; and self in community, 291–93. See also The Days of Augusta, and entry following Taylor, Drew Hayden, 315 Taylor, Joelle, 82, 88 T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers (ed. Green and Richardson), 58 teaching of oral/performance poetry, 40–41. See also entries for Trent University text, 3, 13–14; and orature, 14; pleasure of, 1, 2, 23, 32, 39, 81, 115, 181ff.; pressures/“downpressions” of, 32–33. See also orature, textualized; written/ printed histories/stories; written/ printed poetry textualized orality/orature. See orality, textualized; orature, textualized

Thomas, Dylan, 119, 122n1, 127 time: Imperial vs Indigenous, 312–14, 313, 317; and modernity, 312–14, 318, 324, 326n10, 326n11 Tinker, George, 332 Tlingit, oral narratives of: Cruikshank’s work with, 242, 254; Dauenhauers’ work with, 27, 240, 250–53, 254, 255– 56, 259n9, 259n10, 259n12, 299n1; and generational conflicts, 251–52; and language, 251, 252, 253, 259n9, 259n10; preservation of, 251–53, 255–56 Tootoosis, Edwin, 315 Toronto School of Communication, 32, 203, 309 Trailing You (Blaeser), 290–91 Trent University, performance poetry course at (2008), 41, 97–103, 107–08; challenges of, 97–99; and Dada, 100, 101, 102; and dub poetry, 100, 101, 106; and Pfeiler’s Sounds of Poetry, 99–100; poets/artists studied in, 100– 03; and punk poetry, 100, 101–02, 106; and sound poetry, 102; student work in, 100–01, 102, 108; success of, 107–08; symposium of, 97, 99, 103–07; turning points of, 102–03 Trent University, performance poetry symposium at (2008), 97, 99, 103–07; Bök’s comments at, 97, 104, 105; performances at, 106–07; workshops at, 107 trickster: Erdrich on, 342, 353n7; in Highway’s fiction, 213, 214; in ledger art, 346; Vizenor on, 345 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 24, 25 Van Camp, Richard, 341 Vandall, Peter, 317–18, 319–20 Veenbaas, Jabik, 139, 147 Veit-Wild, Flora, 145–46 Venables, Robert, 269 Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (McLuhan with Papanek), 2, 15 vernacular culture, 32–33; and Black English, 66, 68

Index

Verwoerd, Hendrik, 142 visual elements, 16; in dub poetry books, 18, 19, 60; and history of literacy, 19; of Japanese poetry/scroll paintings, 40; of oral+, 17–19, 39–40. See also entry immediately below visual elements, in Indigenous oral narrative, 16; in The Days of Augusta, 26–27, 40, 283–99; and McLeod’s wîhtikow II, 305, 306, 307; in Metis writings of the oral+, 17–18; in Stories of the Road Allowance People, 18, 284; in Waziyatawin’s work, 39–40, 276–78 Vizenor, Gerald, 34; on “hearsay sovereignty,” 34, 344–46; on Indigenous literary resistance, 337; on oral storytelling/narrative, 331, 332, 344–45; on photographs, 287, 291, 298; on “post-Indian” experience, 35, 338; on “transmotion,” 346, 353–54n9; on trickster, 345 Wachowich, Nancy: Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women, 245 Walcott, Derek, 54 Walton, Izaak, 182–83 Ward, J.W., 5 Watt, Ian, 30, 32, 203 Waziyatawin, and recreation/transformation of grandmother’s oral narrative, 34–35, 39–40, 41–42, 265–81, 284; and concept of “found poetry,” 34, 268–69, 278–79; continuing storytelling tradition, 278–81; and Dakota genocide, 270, 276–78; poetic examples of, 269–78; and storyteller’s responsibility, 265–66, 279–81; and storytelling as means of Indigenous resistance/ liberation, 266–67, 279–81; in textart collaboration, 39–40, 277, 277–78, 284; in visual art, 276, 276, 284. See also Cavender, Elsie Two Bear; Dakota Waziyatawin, works by: “Andrew Myrick,” 273–74; “Everyone Was Hungry,” 270– 72; “I Declare War on You,” 272–73; “The Killing of Mazomani,” 274–76;

“On the 1862 Death March,” 277; Wokiksuye k’a Woyuonihan (with Schoenhoff), 39–40, 277, 277–78, 284; Women over Water (photo artwork), 276, 276 Weaver, Jace, 225 Welty, Eudora, 259n12, 259n13 Whitecalf, Sarah, 315 White Earth reservation (Minnesota), 35, 341, 348–52 Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe Beardsley, 83 Wire (band), 101 Wishart, Trevor: Anticredos, 132 Wolfson, Nessa, 9 Womack, Craig, 34 women. See gender; entries immediately below women, Black, as poets: and body as signifying medium, 18, 19, 38–39, 60; languages of, 61–62, 63, 64–66, 68–69. See also Oni the Haitian Sensation, and entry following; young, d’bi., and entry following women, Irish: as activists/politicians, 169–70; as mythological warriors, 154, 169; as poets, 36, 154, 169, 170–71. See also entries for Granuaile; Ní Mháille, Gráinne women, Indigenous, as storytellers. See Blue Marrow (Halfe), and entry following; The Days of Augusta, and entry following; Life Lived Like a Story, and entry following; entries for Waziyatawin Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, 40, 290 Wordsworth, William: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (“Daffodils”), 78–79, 91 Wright, Thomas, 183–84 written/printed histories/stories: Irish, 153, 154–55, 157, 161, 171; as “official,” 201, 202, 203–04, 205–06, 207, 212–13, 214–16 written/printed poetry: academic study of, 78–79; ballad as, 158–59; by Black poets, 32–33, 54, 55, 58–59, 60–61,

379

380

Index

70; as different from slam, 82, 83–84, 85–86; dub as, 142–43; oral vs, 77, 78–80, 93n1, 142–43; oral features of, in Rampolokeng’s work, 35–36, 137– 39, 142–47; and overlap with slam, 88–90, 92; slam poetry as, 87; social context of, 77, 78–79, 88–91; as social performance, 79, 88–91, 92; visual elements in, 18, 19, 60, 305, 306, 307 Yeats, William Butler, 162, 172n4 Yoruba, 30, 38, 311 young, d’bi., 39, 56–57, 60–66, 70; and African-Canadian history, 62–63; as dub poet, 56, 60–62, 73n21; and Jamaican/Canadian experience,

64–65, 67; and Jamaican patois, 61–62, 63, 64–66; orthography of, 60–61, 64–65, 66; photographs of, 18, 19, 60; and Standard English, 61, 62, 64, 65–66; talkbacks by, 28 young, d’bi., works by: art on black, 18, 19, 60–66; “brown skin lady,” 64–65; “I dub poet d’bi.young,” 61–62; “a poem for rosie douglas,” 62–63; “the storyteller’s integrity,” 27–28, 39 Young Bear, Ray, 341 Zabus, Chantal, 38 Ziy (Ziysah Markson), 103, 104, 105, 109n6