The Poetry Foundations magazine, American Poets, included a great essay by Natalie Diaz in the most recent, Fall/Winter 2015, issue. Recently, they published this same essay in their online newsletter.
Ostensibly, the essay introduces some contemporary American Indian poets you may not know, including Ofelia Zepeda, Michael Wasson, Margaret Noodin, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and Sherwin Bitsui. In the online version, be sure to visit their poems below the essay and to use the right-side arrows to scroll through the subsequent poets.
But before introducing these poets, Diaz addresses two issues important to her, the first being the state of American Indian languages. Diaz has spoken on a few occasions regarding her efforts as a language learner in the Mojave Language Recovery Project.
Sherman Alexie, (a Spokane poet I recently discovered in the CNM traveling library and blogged about this year), also speaks out frequently on preservation of the many endangered American Indian languages.
I love that this issue is getting prominent attention in American Poets. All Americans should care about preserving the continent's languages as much as an Irishman would care about preserving Celtic. As a lover of words, I fantasize there will someday be an American Institute of Languages, a college dedicated to funding the preservation of all American languages.
In a Great Courses class I’m currently taking taught by Anne Curzan, (The Secret Life of Words, a class I would highly recommend for word nerds), I just learned that Anne Curzan, Sherman Alexie and Maxine Hong Kingston are all members of the American Heritage Dictionary word usage panel. And I love to imagine a multi-cultural, multi-lingual group of wordsmiths debating the evolution of English, which has now become the first truly global language but one historically full of borrowed words, including plenty of American Indian words.
And if I wish for something short of a severe French Academy, I believe we desperately need something more than dictionary panels. We need something putting power and money behind the study of the plethora of American languages and language hybrids.
My fantasy of such a college was ignited again in the summer of 2014 when I visited the somewhat abandoned-looking Stewart Indian School in Stewart, Nevada, where my grandfather was once superintendent in the late 1950s and where my father lived when he was in high school (he drove the school bus). This school, like many Indian boarding schools, has a controversial heritage.
As a side note, when I was the interim faculty secretary at the Institute for American Indian arts I read the novel by the fiction instructor there Evelina Lucero, Night Sky, Morning Star which took place at the Steweart Indian School. From talking to her about it, we discovered she grew up in the very same house my father had lived in, the same location where my parents were married.
I couldn’t help but believe that if this beautiful stone campus resided on the East Coast it would have a huge endowment and be named a historical location and be still operating. According to the school’s website, there are "earthquake safety issues with the masonry buildings." Could this be fixed? I don’t know. Admittedly, part of the reason this is my fantasy location for an American languages school is personal. But part of my dream is politi-practical: why won’t some nationalist, rich white billionaire invest in the preservation of American languages?
And if my fantasy finds another historic location and can continue, I see Anne, Maxine, Sherman and Natalie all there teaching, working and collaborating about preserving and observing the progress of American’s languages, particularly ones we are in danger of losing.
But then Diaz’s essay changes course and starts to discuss her connotation of the word "performance" and how it is used to describe poets giving readings, particularly American Indian poets giving readings and how prescribing performance to Indian American readings can be offensive. Here is where I find I can’t agree with her assumptions about the word.
Here’s what she says in particular:
“On many occasions, after readings at which I am the only native reader in the lineup, and especially if I am the only person of color in the lineup, the things said to me are different from those said to my nonnative colleagues. The most common response I hear directed toward my colleagues is, “Good reading,” whereas I am told, “That was a good performance.” Performance, of course, is a loaded word for many reasons, not the least of which is the association the word has with the red- and blackface depictions presented in our culture as recently as the new Adam Sandler movie, scheduled for release in December. It is as if, for certain audience members, my identity as a native person overpowers my identity as a writer. While my nonnative, white colleagues are heard and even critiqued as writers who employ skill to craft a poem and deliver it to an audience, it’s as if I am looked at as having relied on some innate part of my native identity. In certain eyes, I didn’t toil over my poem,
I simply performed my nativeness.
Native poets also encounter this perception when they incorporate native language into their poems. Rather than its presence being understood as a craft choice, a language choice, a verb choice—it is all of these things and so much more—it is perceived as something less than craft and expertise. Poems that employ native language are often viewed by the academy, or audience members educated by the academy, as something more along the lines of folk art, something that has arisen out of that still “wild,” “uneducated,” “naked” part of us that hasn’t fully assimilated.
We are often regarded as dead people frozen in museum time—our languages, too, are interpreted and misunderstood as something ancient and not alive, something primitive and therefore undeveloped, therefore lesser."
I have to say I have seen Natalie Diaz read and her book is one of my favorites of the last five years. I blogged about it in 2012. And I have to admit, after reading this essay I raced back to my review to see if I referred to her reading as a performance. Thank God I didn’t but I honestly might have.
I do agree with Diaz that American Indians are often regarded as nonexistent, not only themselves, but their culture and languages. They are regarded as living museum exhibits or like “people that time forgot” especially in locations where there are few to none among the population, such as in St. Louis, Missouri, where I grew up. Not to say I was an expert, but because were were from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and because my father grew up on reservations in Arizona, I knew more about the reality of American Indian history and current culture than my friends and teachers did.
However, I’m not Indian. I can't speak to how it feels to hear the word performance. But I can speak to why it is that Diaz gets invited to more cultural and anthropology classes than poetry classes. This is a symptom of one culture’s flawed attempt to fix its first problem, the base ignorance. It’s also a symptom of the poetry problem, the fact of poetry’s devalued status in anglo-American culture.
I would also argue that there is a bit of anthropology in all poetry, just as there is a bit of philosophy, science and spirituality. Eons from now, all poets of America will be mined for anthropological purposes. I support science's exploitation of poetry. It’s just awkward that American Indians are being treated as if they’re already left the building, treated like souls from a lost time. But the political reality is that in many areas of America, they are.
What to do about this? All ways forward seem wrong. Proceeding to educate Americans about the realities of American Indian experience will be frustrating.
I just don’t agree that much of this hinges on the word performance or that the use of the word is even subconsciously intended to be derogatory. And I think that here is where many misunderstandings occur around word connotations between cultures.
Some poets read, some poets perform. Joy Harjo read her poems in this video (and performs her saxophone); she performed her show at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.
Poetry slam poets perform, even when they appear to be reading. Academic poets tend to read. I think Natalie Diaz performs; she takes it up a notch.
Part of my connotations of the words reading and performing have to do with my ideas of theatricality and my theatrical husband, Monsieur Big Bang's, critiques of poetry readings I’ve taken him to. He always notes the difference between a reader and a performer and this never maps to anything cultural, other that the poetry culture or theatrical culture. Sometimes people read when they should perform; somethings they perform when they need to read.
One of the best poet performers I’ve ever seen was at a poetry panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books back in 2006. I’ve tried to research online to figure out who that poet was. Back then I was sadly uneducated about my poets. I can tell you this: he was an old, white guy.
Here were the two poetry panels of that year (I remember hating their lame, ambiguous titles).
Poetry: Seasons in Verse
PANEL 2082
Moderator Mr. Douglas Messerli
Ms. Eloise Klein Healy
Ms. Alice Quinn
Ms. Kay Ryan
Mr. Timothy Steele
Distilling Reality: The Poet’s Craft
PANEL 1082
Moderator Ms. Dana Goodyear
Ms. Gail Mazur
Ms. Marilyn Nelson
Mr. Donald Revell
Ms. Amy Uyematsu
So there were only two white men on these panels (I'm sure it wasn’t the moderator): Timothy Steele and Donald Revell. Monsieur Big Bang thinks it was Donald Revell based on the sound of his voice. But that was almost 10 years ago; how could you remember that?
Here the thing: Jack Gilbert was at the festival too, winning an award. I think Jack made a surprise visit to one of these panels and he’s the unforgettable performer we witnessed. Why? Because I feel like I recognize his name and in online videos I see that he leans forward on his elbows when he reads and he looks like an old pirate. Monsieur Big Bang says the guy looked like an old pirate (see right).
He was the best poetry performer because he memorized his poems, he leaned forward with his elbows on the table stared right out at all of us in the audience as he recited from memory the entire poems. It was unforgettable, the true difference between a reading and a performance.
Memorization: it stinks but is effective.
If it was indeed Jack Gilbert, I should pinch myself that I was able to see even a mini-Jack-Gilbert performance. Such as LA Times Book Fest technology went, there’s probably only a cassette tape somewhere that documented the event and long boxed-away in an un-locatable archive. I didn’t even know who he was back then! Incredible! Now I can’t even afford his Collected Poems used on Amazon.
Here is Donald Revell (right) who does make some serious eye contact.
Here is Jack Gilbert in an interview and doing more of a reading than a performance.
Anyway, reading and performance—there is a difference. Diaz may get called a performer by some other Anglo by virtue of the fact she is labeled “Indian” but this Anglo insists on calling her a performer because she’s better than a reader, not less than one.
To further cause problems, I think a similar connotation problem is happening around the word costume. White culture consistently uses costume to describe traditional American Indian clothing, religious or not. And this consistently offends. Some of this may be willful ignorance, some may use the word dismissively; but often I find the user doesn’t have a good word to substitute for costume. Sure, on Project Runway costume designers (think Bob Mackie) are thought less of than the haute couture designers, but most Americans would are at a loss to name categorize various articles of clothing. I heard Anglos often refering to nun’s habits and the Pope’s robes as costumes too. I don't doubt that some of Diaz’s Anglo fans describe her reading style as drum-like or chant-like, but I see this as coming more from an inability to articulate how they are experiencing her reading in more productive ways. They might hear phantom hip-hop sounds from African American poets or misread British poets as being more refined than they actually are due to stereotypes about British accents. As Oprah says, "when you know better, you do better."
Language is notoriously imperfect when bridging the divide of cultures. I hope someday Natalie Diaz can be found teaching a class about it at The College of North American Languages.
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