(Angela L. Cotten, Christa Davis Acampora) Cultura

Cultural Sites of Critical Insight
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Cultural Sites of Critical Insight
Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American

and Native American Womens Writings
Edited by
Angela L. Cotten
and
Christa Davis Acampora
State University of New York Press

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
2007 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Cultural sites of critical insight : philosophy, aesthetics, and African American

and Native American womens writing / edited by Angela L. Cotten, Christa
Davis Acampora.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6979-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6980-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature
African American authorsHistory and criticism. 2. American literature
Indian authorsHistory and criticism. 3. American literatureWomen
authorsHistory and criticism. 4. African American women authorsAes-
thetics. 5. Indian women authorsAesthetics. 6. African American women in
literature. 7. Indian women in literature. 8. Feminism in literature. I. Cotten,
Angela L., 1968- II. Acampora, Christa Davis, 1967-
PS153.N5C85 2007
810.9928708996073dc22
2006009009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Angelas two mothers
Mary Rogers Cotten and Martine Watson Brownley
And to Christas grandmothers

Lillian, I wish I had known you,
Stella, I am glad I did, and
Ila James, Im so very grateful I do.
Contents
I. INTRODUCTION
11 ON THE RES AND IN THE HOOD:

MAKING CULTURES, LEAVING LEGACIES
Angela L. Cotten 3
II. TRANSFORMATIVE AESTHETICS
12 SELF-HELP, INDIAN STYLE? PAULA GUNN ALLENS

GRANDMOTHERS OF THE LIGHT, WOMANIST SELF-
RECOVERY, AND THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION
AnaLouise Keating 31
13 MAKING THE AWAKENING HERS: PHILLIS WHEATLEY

AND THE TRANSPOSITION OF AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY TO
CHRISTIAN RELIGIOSITY
Elizabeth J. West 47
14 ANY WOMANS BLUES: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS

AND THE BLUES AESTHETIC
Michael A. Antonucci 67
III. CRITICAL REVISIONS
15 THROUGH THE MIRROR: RE-SURFACING AND SELF-

ARTICULATION IN LINDA HOGANS SOLAR STORMS
Ellen L. Arnold 85
16 THE RED-BLACK CENTER OF ALICE WALKERS MERIDIAN:

ASSERTING A CHEROKEE WOMANIST SENSIBILITY
Barbara S. Tracy 105
17 WOMANIST INTERVENTIONS IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Angela L. Cotten 121
vii
viii CONTENTS
IV. RE(IN)FUSING FEMINISM
18 BOTH THE LAW AND ITS TRANSGRESSION:

TONI MORRISONS PARADISE AND POSTBLACK
FEMINISM
Noelle Morrissette 139
19 LUCI TAPAHONSOS LEDA AND THE COWBOY:

A GYNOCRATIC, NAVAJO RESPONSE TO YEATSS
LEDA AND THE SWAN
Maggie Romigh 159
10 MOTHER TIMES TWO: A DOUBLE TAKE ON A

GYNOCENTRIC JUSTICE SONG
Margot R. Reynolds 171
REFERENCES 191
CONTRIBUTORS 207
INDEX 211
Part I
Introduction
1
On the Res and in the Hood
Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies
ANGELA L. COTTEN
Research in aesthetics and philosophy has generated insightful and

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

make connections between aesthetic experience in everyday life and
analyses of art and artistic appreciation in ways that facilitate discus-
sions of aesthetic agency as it applies broadly to lived experience.
The critical thrust of these womens cultural productions engen-
ders irony in challenging the western traditions most revered philoso-
phies, as they deploy the same tools (discourse/language and artistic
imagination) used by whites historically to rationalize the removal,
enslavement, and extermination of Indians and Africans. Such resist-
ance stands as a challenge to the claims of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century philosophers and scientists such as Immanuel Kant, George W.
F. Hegel, David Hume, and Francis Bacon, who argued that the indige-
nous peoples of Africa and the Americas lacked any capacity for
rational thought and aesthetic ingenuity. To white Europeans and Amer-
icans this meant that blacks and Indians were less than humanprimi-
tives, savages, or subhuman links between whites and animals in the
Chain of Beingand thus exploitable as chattel slaves. Subsequent
eugenics and social Darwinist discourses in the nineteenth century rein-
forced these mythologies of blacks and Indians and served to legitimize
social policies of segregating them in ghettos and reservations and of
sterilizing the women of childbearing age. The rise of Hollywood and
the emergence of salvage anthropology in the early twentieth century
spawned new racial images, including the extinct or dying primi-
tive, to accompany the old racial mythologies in the American cultural
imagination. It is within these discursive minefields of racialized nega-
tion that Africans, Indians, and their descendants have had to navigate
and manipulate the written word in expressing their knowledge, spiritu-
alities, and visions of beauty, truth, and eco-humanistic possibility.
Native American and African American writings share a literary history
of critical intervention in these discourses in ways that are insightful,
ironic, playful, and transformativefor themselves, their communities,
and the cultural traditions with which they engage.
AFRICAN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

AND CROSSBLOOD AESTHETICS
This collection encourages comparative investigations of African Ameri-

can and Native American literature to explore aesthetic similarities and
intersections between both cultures. In fact, evidence reveals that the
contact and shared histories of these groups led to the generation of a
On the Res and in the Hood 5
third, syncretic culture of African Native Americans, whose very exis-

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

1973, 1113). David Elton Gray, for example, considers how the rabbit
trickster tales of both black and indigenous American oral traditions in
the Southeast might be a product of mutual cultural influence: Similar
tales in different traditions that are in contact are likely to influence
each other, creating new forms of the tales that do not have their origins
in a single tradition (2003, 104). Such cultural entwinement poses
interesting questions for how scholars have conceived black and Native
culture and identity, particularly when construed as discrete develop-
ments with little cross-cultural exchange.
Archaeological evidence also suggests that the contact between
indigenous Americans and Africans predated European colonization
(Forbes 1993; Van Sertima 1976, 1992). Thus, the depths of African
and indigenous American histories and the complexity of their cultures
may be greater than our current knowledge reflects. If archaeological
evidence points to cross-cultural interaction before contact with Euro-
peans, how have African values and cultural practices been retained in
the formation of African American culture? The work of Melville Her-
skovits (1958), John S. Mbiti (1970), and Albert Raboteau (1978) have
brilliantly illuminated the ways in which African slaves and their
descendants masked and preserved certain African values and customs
in America. Yet, evidence about African Native American exchange
before contact with Europeans raises speculation about what kind of
African culture survived the Middle Passage in slave memory and cul-
ture. Are African slaves and their descendants the only bearers of cul-
tural knowledge preserving precolonial Africanity in America? Or was
some preservation also owing to an already existing network of cultural
influence between Africans and Indians prior to the fifteenth century?
Similar questions can be raised about Native cultures that survived con-
quest: How much of the culture has been influenced, not only by west-
ern/Anglo peoples, but also by Africans traveling to the Americas?
These questions inevitably lead to methological considerations regard-
ing the formation and use of interpretive frameworks, and how their
objects of analysis are constituted.

Cultural exchange between Africans and indigenous Americans
occurred in European and Caribbean contexts as well, as both were
shipped to slave markets and plantations (Forbes 1993). Black Carib
communities (composed of Ebo, Efik, Fon, Yoruba, and Fanti-Ashanti)
and Island Caribs have been around since the early 1600s, migrating
from Saint Vincent to other islands in the West Indies and Central
America (Brennan 2003, 1315). For example, the French shipped two
hundred Natchez to Haiti in 1730, whose lives, interests, and cultures
became intertwined with slaves from West Africamainly from the
Dahomean region (1315). Common beliefs in the power of ancestral
spirits, herbal healing, and values of harmony and wholeness consti-
tuted a cultural lexicon of shared values and understanding among Indi-
ans and Africans outside North Americathe remnants of which have
survived in religions like Haitian voodoo.

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

one tradition by critics who are not sensitive to writers mixed cultural
heritages. In order to really understand the tradition from which [eth-
nically mixed] writers create their works, one must also examine their
parallel heritages without denying either one (2002, 19). Alice Walker
and Ann Plato are exemplary. Scholars have treated their works in
African American cultural criticism, while simultaneously downplaying
their Cherokee and Pequot cultural connections. Both Walker and Plato
have demonstrated significant regard for Native Americans and their
cultures in their works.
Alice Walker embraces her Cherokee and African heritages, and
Native American worldviews are apparent in most of her writings; yet,
few scholars have explored their impact on her critical thought and
imaginative productions. Except for Patricia Riley (2003), Madhu Dubey
(1994), and Daniel Turner (1991), who explore this angle, most scholars
working on Alice Walker have glossed over the importance of indigenous
ways of life to concentrate instead on her development as a writer and
activist. Barb Tracy of this anthology suggests, however, that full appre-
ciation of Walkers works cannot be had without analyzing her oeuvre
for indigenous values and worldviews. Certainly, the emergence of envi-
ronmentalist concerns in Walkers writings was underwritten (in part) by
her appreciation for Native ethics regarding the land-earth and its under-
lying ontology of humans as inextricably connected to the natural world.
Her critique of the African American appropriation of Christianity,
moreover, is informed by more than by a Marxian suspicion of religion
as an opiate of the masses. It is also supported by the ecohumanistic and
life-affirming beliefs of certain Native cosmologies. Cherokee, Lakota,
and los indios de Mexico figure importantly in Walkers second novel,
Meridian (1976), which explores historical (including genealogical) con-
nections between Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans
and makes a case for the vital role of Native spirituality, ancestral tradi-
tions, and sacred places in blacks struggles for justice. Her fourth novel,
Temple of My Familiar, also explores the possibility of Indian-African
cultural exchange before the fifteenth century and foregrounds many
similarities between the two peoples.
Scholars position nineteenth-century writer, Ann Plato, in the
African American literary tradition. Although she was of African
Pequot descent (Brennan 2003), critics tend to downplay her Native
heritage (in favor of an African American racial identity) and any influ-
ence it might have had on her writing. Because there is little information
about Platos life, scholars like Kenny J. Williams, who wrote the intro-
duction to her productions in the Shomberg Library of Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Black Women Writers Series, must rely on her writings for
biographical information. Platos poem, The Natives of America,
hints at her Pequot cultural background and raises questions about how
it might have affected her conception of nature, death, and the oral tra-
dition. In his overview of Platos life and in the mention of her poem,
however, Williams does not discuss Platos invocation of her Pequot
fathers spirit to tell the poetic persona the story of their peoples
demise. Informing readers of how to interpret the poem, Williams dis-
places the reference to Native suffering with the plight of blacks: In
some ways and with some obvious changes, the cruel oppression suf-
fered by the Indians could be transferred to the subjugated blacks
(1988, xlix). But isnt the whole poem (and not only one stanza) really
about Indians? Frances Smith Foster does a similar elision in Written By
Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 17461892,
but she (at least) allows that Plato might have been referring to both
Africans and Native Americans (1993, 20). Both critics assume that
Plato was thoroughly Christianized and do not explore how some of
her writing might be concerned with Pequot/Native American issues
and might express certain indigenous values of nature, human beings,
and orality.
Calling on her Indian fathers spirit to tell the story of their tribes
demise might be more than a poetic device by Plato. It might suggest
something about the impact of Platos African and Pequot background
on her work: namely, that she might have embraced ancestral spirits
and the mythic and oral tradition. Such beliefs, in turn, may reflect a
more cyclic ontology in which death is viewed as a transitional passage
into another state or form of being, instead of as the finitude of con-
sciousness. The poem also recalls Native life before the conquistadors,
when harmonious, cooperative relations with the land were possible.
Platos paternal spirit presents an idyllic scene that figures his people as
an inextricable part of the land along with the buffalo, mountains, and
prairies. For many indigenous peoples, their place of origin is a funda-
mental layer of identity, and losing connection to the land is akin to
social and spiritual death. The poem closes on a pessimistic note with
the spirit mourning the loss of place and the crisis of identity and mean-
ing for his (now dispersed) people. Plato figures place and ancestral
proximity in ways that should stimulate explication of her work for

indigenous American influences rather than eclipsing part of her her-
itage with another.
New sites of intertextual analysis and interpretive tools also open
up possibilities for theorizing African Native American literary aesthet-
ics and philosophies that are constituted not only by writers of dual
African Native American identity, but also by writers of singular cul-
tural heritage who signify on African American and Native American
traditions. Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and
Nettie Jones are just a few writers who signify on both literary tradi-
tions. Silkos Almanac of the Dead (1992) treats the interwoven histo-
ries of blacks and Indians and recounts the geographical displacement
and settlement of African slaves among indigenous peoples of the Amer-
icas. She explores similar cosmologies, mythic and oral traditions, and
concepts of time and land-place of Africans and indigenous tribes. For
her, cultural commonalities and centuries of comingling and intermar-
riage bind Africans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples in a
larger common (and cosmically constituted) destiny of international
uprisings. The black Indian character, Clinton, a figure connecting his-
torical memory to a transnational revolution of tribal consciousness, is
a testament to this history of red and black (erased but not silenced)
crossings. Other characters in the novel such as the Hopi Indian, travel
around the world meeting with other tribal peoples and planning inter-
national revolts. The groups share similar spiritual lexicons regarding
the roles of serpent gods (Da or Damballah, Odoun, and Quetzalcoatl),
prophecy, and ancestral power. For Silko, people of African and indige-
nous American descent are connected, not only through a shared his-
tory of white/western oppression and cultural similarities, but also by
larger, unseen forces and cosmic entities.
Other historical black writers, such as Zora Neal Hurston, Olivia
Ward Bush-Banks, John Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano, wrote about
Native Americans in their works (Young 2002). Indians first began
appearing in captivity, criminal, and slave narratives written by blacks
in the colonial period. Representations of Indians in the works of
Africans like John Marrant and Olaudah Equiano were notably differ-
ent from those of whites writing in these genres. Besides the sense of
shared struggle against white tyranny that united many blacks with
Indians, similar cultural practices and beliefs also contributed to a sense
of fellowship between them. Concerning the Mosquitos and his own
Ido background, for example, Equiano recalls that a few times they
offered to cut some trees down in order to build us houses which they
did exactly like Africans; by the joint labor of men, women, and chil-
dren . . . I do not recollect them to have any more than two wives. They
accompanied their husbands when they came to our dwelling, and . . .
then always squatted down behind their husbands as in Ibo customs
(Young 2002, 31). Olivia Ward Bush-Banks was a prolific poet, play-
wright, and essayist of the Harlem Renaissance who affirmed both her
Montauk and African American heritage in her work. She maintained
close connections with her Montauk origins after moving to Harlem,
where she attended tribal ceremonies in traditional dress and composed
a script, Indian Trails, or Trail of the Montauk, which portrays Mon-
tauk culture and life as it is and makes no apology for Native existence
in America (Guillaume 1991).
In the twentieth century, black newspapers and periodicals
reported Indian resistanceespecially the American Indian Movements
recapturing of Wounded Kneeto galvanize the black protest. Rhetori-
cal ingenuity in black journalism allowed journalists to interrogate the
dominant cultures version of history and dispel racist myths of indige-
nous peoples (Gourgey 2001). Indians were often referred to as first
Americans, which deconstructed ideologies of Manifest Destiny and
honored indigenous peoples as preexisting settlers. As the century and
struggle for justice wore on, black newspapers increasingly employed the
trope of memory to link black power to Native American insurrection.
The web of concern woven by African American and Native
American writers for the fate of each others peoples and correlative
appreciation for each others literary and oral traditions is a crossblood
tradition. We draw on Sharon P. Hollands notion of crossblood iden-
tity to underscore the parameters and dynamics by which this tradition
is constituted. Crossblood identity differs from multiracial categoriza-
tion as construed (and arguably constructed) by the U.S. Census
Bureau. Hollands concept recognizes choice of cultural alliance and
appreciation as the primary value of crossblood identities when written
proof of heritage is inaccessible. To identify as crossblood, in fact, is to
read the racial categories on the U.S. census as bogus and to consis-
tently cross the borders of ideological containment (2003, 259). As
explored above, some African American and Native American women
writers alliance with and appreciation for one anothers cultures con-
found our attempts to draw sharp distinctions between literary/oral and
other cultural traditions. Regardless of their racial and ethnic identifica-
tions, these writers demonstrate that literary and cultural borders
between these peoples are more porous and fluid than critics (other
than Jonathan Brennan [2002, 2003] and Sharon Holland [2003]) have
theorized. Crossblood aesthetics refers to both the textual practices of
(self-identified) African Native American writers like Alice Walker and
Nettie Jones and of writing that explores cultural connections and inter-
actions between people of African and indigenous American descent
like Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich. Mapping crossblood literary aes-
thetics between African Americans and Native Americans reveals the
syncretic, dialogical character of their cultural formation, exchange, and
development in American history, which critics of literature and philos-
ophy have elided. Many essays in this volume integrate traditional disci-
plinary methods to formulate unique interdisciplinary interpretive
frameworks for decoding the multiple levels of complex cultural play
between Native and black writers in America, and pave the way for
innovative hermeneutic possibilities for making a crossblood literary
aesthetic and tradition more apparent. Jonathan Brennan stresses that
attending to differences within these traditions is also important (2003,
3445). Issues of genre, historical period, language, and regional cul-
tural differences play a significant role in understanding the composi-
tion, structure, direction, flow, and authorial intention of textsboth
oral and written.
This volume provides an opening to theorizing crossblood aesthet-
ics by bringing together criticism on African American and Native
American writings for critical comparisons. Myth, ritual, linguistic inge-
nuity, storytelling/oral traditions, and the transgression of conventional
literary genres are typical features of both African American and Native
American womens literature and poetry. Indigenous and black Ameri-
can writers often share beliefs in the concept of identity as relational
and myth as ritual-processional and in continuity and fluidity between
flesh and spirit, mind and body, individual and society. Exploration of
mixed-race subjectivity and problematization of hegemonic racial cate-
gories and civil rights protest are also features of African American and
Native American literature. Issues of belonging and roaming are
common to both traditions and their innovations. For example, in this
collection, AnaLouise Keating observes that for black and Native writ-
ers, recovery from personal/individual and historical/collective trauma
extends to social responsibility: personal transformation engenders and
encourages outward efforts for more extensive social change. Individual
and communal survival is interdependent and mutually sustaining
rather than oppositional and strained by different interests. The com-
monalities explored here constitute points of analysis for a crossblood

literary aesthetic and for its philosophical underpinnings of African
American and Native American textual practice, including conceptions
of nature, human beings, community, social totality, time, history, art,
and beauty.
CROSS-FERTILIZING U.S. ETHNOCRITICAL

AND POSTCOLONIAL INTERPRETIVE PARADIGMS
Cultural Sites of Critical Insight also encourages readers to draw on

postcolonial literary theory while exploring the criticism on Native
American and African American writings in this collection. The mean-
ing and parameters of postcoloniality have been outlined by several
scholars. In this study we combine multiple definitions of the postcolo-
nial as a reference to the complex, multilayered matrix of economic,
political, social, and ideological structures of formally colonized peo-
ples, and the current global financial institutions and neoconservative
economic programs that undermine their struggles for sovereignty and
self-possession (Singh and Schmidt 2000; Dirlik 1997; During 1987).
Postcolonial also refers to writing that contests the trauma and legacies
of colonial domination and offers alternative visions of rebuilding cul-
ture from the ruins (Ania Loomba 1998; Fawzia and Seshadri-Crooks
2000). Such projects usually entail rediscovering cultural practices and
values and oral traditions that existed prior to colonial conquest, and/or
inventing new ones of self-affirmation and cultural pride that lie outside
Eurocentric cultural norms.
To qualify here, we are not proposing a postcolonial categoriza-
tion of African American and Native American literature, for techni-
cally, North American Indians have never been granted formal
sovereignty and have, since conquest, been subjected to the rule of the
U.S., Canadian, and Mexican governments. They have never regained
sovereign control over stolen ancestral lands. (See Arnold Krupat
[2000] for a discussion of this issue.) While this may be the case, post-
colonial literary theory nonetheless offers a rich depth of hermeneutic
concepts, which may illuminate certain (heretofore inconceivable)
dimensions and features of Native American literatures. Amritjit Singh
and Peter Schmidt observe several areas of commonality between U.S.
ethnic, cultural, and postcolonial critical discourses: deconstructing the
politics of whiteness and its genealogy, explicating the complexly consti-
tuted subjectivities of Third World women of color, and theorizing
transnational/diasporic traversals and connections (Singh and Schmidt

2000; see also Madsen 1999 and Owens 1998). They also believe that
interpretive paradigms of U.S. cultural studies are enriched by the
employment of postcolonial concepts to explore ethnic American cul-
tural productions. Drawing on a conception of borders as internal
stratification within an ethnicity or a nation and the ways in which cul-
tural differences may be used to define transnational connections and
tensions (2000, 7), Singh and Schmidt offer an example:
Consider the idea of borders as applied to Native Americans

in their interactions with others and with themselves. There
are over 500 recognized Native Americans within the U.S.
alone, with many registered members who do not reside
exclusively on a reservation; in what ways must our cur-
rent understanding of all the above terms be revised or dis-
carded when Native American cultural production is viewed
as central? Or to what degree may the necessity of borders
and transnational emphases be truly confirmedespecially
when debates about authenticity and identity and who
may claim to speak on behalf of tribal communities have
such huge consequences? (2000, 42)
There are several areas of overlap in the conditions of African

Americans and postcolonial peoples, the cultural productions of African
American and postcolonial writers and artists, and the critical dis-
courses engaging them. While African Americans did not endure territo-
rial colonization like Native Americans, Africans, Southeast Asian and
Australian aborigines, to name a few, they nonetheless experienced
internal colonization that included forced migration and dispossession,
slavery and economic exploitation, cultural repression, political disen-
franchisement, and genocide (Singh and Schmidt 2000, 20). It is more
difficult to pinpoint a historical date of formal independence for African
Americans than for Nigerians, Kenyans, Hindus, Algerians, and Philip-
pines, for example. Does the Emancipation Proclamation and end of
slavery constitute the beginning of African American postcoloniality?
Or do the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles? Whichever the case,
scholars observe how systemic oppression and structural violence
against African Americans share similarities with colonial oppression of
peoples outside the U.S. (Fleischmann 2000; Singh and Schmidt 2000;
Han 2004; Locke 1997; Du Bois [1903] 1996).
Black and Native writers who take up their peoples struggles in

their works share with many postcolonial writers several commonalities
of narrative and rhetorical strategy, ideological affinity, and aesthetic
creativity. Both give voice to the suffering of their peoples brought by
European modernity, like the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and
colonialism, world war and military occupation, the neoconservative
New World Order, and so on. Many also explore the conditions of
racial/ethnic liberation, wanting to heal the peoples spirit by countering
racist stereotypes with more humanizing images. The Signifyin Monkey
is the master trope of tropes of African American discourse. Like much
of the black vernacular theorized by Gates, it derives from the Yoruban
tradition of Esu-Elegba, mythic figures of writing, speaking, and inter-
pretation that survivved the Middle Passage and informed much of
African Diaspora expression. While Esu refers to textual discourse, the
Monkey has also evolved (by way of the Afro-Cuban figure of guije) to
mean the rhetorical strategies of textual composition. Taken together,
these figures manifest as satire, parody, irony, double-voicedness, magi-
cal realism, indeterminacy, ambiguity, chance, and uncertainty, to name
a few. Chinua Achebe has discussed aspects of his own writing along
similar lines (Williams and Chrisman 1994). The hybrid modalities of
such texts force a rethinking of Eurocentric/western literary standards
as the norm for measuring and appreciating the literary aesthetics of
other cultures. Tensions between nationalist and coalitionist approaches
to liberation, which are explored in both anticolonial and postcolonial
writings, also appear in the African American literary tradition. These
are just a few of the similarities between African American and post-
colonial literature. We encourage readers to think about the writings of
black American women authors discussed in this volume in a compara-
tive postcolonial framework, mapping areas of aesthetic, ideological,
and philosophical continuity and difference between African American
and postcolonial literary traditions.
Postcolonial, Native American, and African American literary crit-
icism all seek to uncover the rich literary histories of their people (usu-
ally originating in mythic and oral traditions) that existed before
European imperialism. Scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ann
DuCille, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby and Michael Awkward (among
others) have contributed to the unveiling of a black American literary
tradition and the establishment of a critical discourse on African Ameri-
can literary aesthetics. Some of these uniquely African American inno-
vations include the black vernacular, blues matrix, call and response
(such as in the black church and blues traditions) and riffing (in the
melodic progressions of jazz improvisation). Double-voicedness is
another feature of this tradition in which tension between the written
(Esu) and the oral (the Monkey) is played out in texts like Zora Neal
Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God. Oscillation between oral and
written voices and first and third person narration in this novel high-
light the play between Esu and the Monkey that characterizes much
black literature in the Diaspora. At the same time, this discourse inter-
rogates the hegemony of white/western metaphysics and standards of
literary appreciation in the explication of both African American and
white/western literature. African American literary criticism is as con-
cerned with reading (and deconstructing) white/western literature for its
racial constitution (Morrison 1992) as demonstrating the creative
genius of black writers. Postcolonial cultural criticism has also con-
tributed to this end. The work of Homi Babbha and Giyatry Spivak is
representative. Homi Bhabhas work explores Orientalism for its hege-
monic control over colonial peoples, as well as its generative possibili-
ties of opening seams of anti-colonial resistance. Concepts such as
hybridity and third space, for example, emerged from his work on
postcolonial cultures, which highlights the dialectic of human agency in
discursive and non-discursive practices of colonial subjugation, and has
contributed to the development of subaltern studies. These concepts
foreground the subjects instability, yet, also allow for appreciation of
its creative ingenuity through cultural production. Gayatri Spivaks
speculations on the subaltern explore how speech-agency of the post-
colonial subject is always interpolated, determined, and appropriated by
hegemonic discursive positions and practices before its arrival.
What postcolonial critics also share with black American literary
scholars is the appropriation of western methods of philosophical and
literary critique such as structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction,
and psychoanalysis, which, for better, has enhanced the critical scope
and evaluative depth of investigative projects in the field. It is worth
noting, however, that both African American and postcolonial criticism
also have come under fire for uncritically integrating western systems of
thought that are disconnected from the existential realities of black
masses and complicitous with neocolonial regimes of power and knowl-
edge (Ahmed 1992; Adell 2000; Boyd 2000; Awkward 1995; DuCille
1994). In keeping with the black vernaculars appreciation of language as
inventive and manipulatable, the texts as polyvalent and performative,

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

translating an oral tradition into writing, I would argue, Silkos use of
this direction entails a deeper ironic reversal of western epistemologies.
She encircles (and enfolds) the Hegelian dialectical pattern of history
within a larger Mayan prophesy (or cosmic history) unfolding accord-
ing to a cyclic pattern of birth-death regeneration. This casts European
history as merely one stage among others in the development of worlds
as forecast by the ancient almanacs. Thus, Europeans who had pro-
nounced Indians and Africans as being mere children (because of their
oral cultures) in comparison to themselves as accomplished scientists
and artists, are now revealed by Silko to be children with merely rudi-
mentary knowledge of the whole.
Other commonalities include foregrounding the limitations of
western aesthetic norms and exploring the relationship between place,
vision, and cultural dislocation in Native identity formation. An impor-
tant motif of Native writing is how separation from ancestral lands
wreaks havoc on multiple levels, including the personal through loss of
identity (or sense of belonging to a place) and lack of visionary guid-
ance. Like many others experiences of imperialism and colonialism,
Indians forced (or involuntary) migrations, enslavement, and ecological
exploitation have combined to affect an identity crisis and alienation of
vision. Land and people are interdependent, explains Simon Ortiz.
In fact, he continues, they are one and the same essential matter of
Existence (1998, xii). In contemporary Native American literature,
Robert M. Nelson observes that whoever wishes either to recover or to
sustain a healthy state of existence, then, must enter into some working
identity not only with the cultural tradition, but also with a particular
landscape (1997, 267). Recovery usually occurs in a circular plot
structure called honing in in which the alienated protagonist wanders
away from home, encounters visions and/or supernatural entities of per-
sonally transforming significance, and returns to the community rein-
vigorated by a sense of purpose and direction (Moser 1997, 28687).
As in many postcolonial literatures, mythic and oral traditions are
instrumental to this narrative movement. They depict, assert, and con-
firm the natural evolvementor the origin and emergenceof Native
people from the boundless creative energy of the universe, and remind
us that we have always lived here . . . as lands and waters and all ele-
ments of Creation before our human forms (Ortiz 1998, xiiixiv).
CRITICAL SCOPE
This collection is divided into three main sections, Transformative

Aesthetics, Critical Revisions, and Re(in)fusing Feminism. These
groupings are organized by analytical focus and are meant to be help-
ful in offering schemes for making cross-cultural connections and
comparative considerations of black and Native American womens
writing. Each section contains essays on work by at least one writer of
each cultural tradition. Readers will invariably encounter many other
connections between the writers and cultures besides those most appar-
ent in focus. For example, although the poetry of Luci Tapahonso and
Phillis Wheatley are discussed with different interpretive emphases and
are thus located in different parts of this collection, for example, they
are nonetheless connected by certain poetic practices. Both treat writ-
ten poetics as ritualistic or ceremonial calls. Wheatleys eulogies are
(written) enactments of certain African rituals of celebrating the dead
and death. Tapahonso infuses poetic verse with the Navajo oral tradi-
tion so that each reading of her poetry initiates ceremonial healing and
restoration. Emphasis on cultural recovery, healing, and wholeness
connect Ellen Arnolds reading of Linda Hogans work in Critical
Revisions and AnaLouise Keatings analysis of Paula Gunn Allens
aesthetics of self-recovery in Transformative Aesthetics. The woman-
centered politics of womanism, black feminism, and gynocentric cul-
ture are also discussed.
Part II. Transformative Aesthetics
Contributers to Transformative Aesthetics read Native American and

African American womens literature and poetry to identify the creation
of new literary and poetic forms, motifs, and techniques that testify to
unique experiences, visions of human possibility, self-recovery, and spir-
itual celebration. AnaLouise Keating uses a policitized conception of
aesthetics in showing how Paula Gunn Allens Grandmothers of the
Light (1991) draws on the oral traditions of gynocratic (woman-cen-
tered) tribal cultures as guides or ritual maps of self-renewal and heal-
ing for which Keating coins the term womanist self-recovery. Typical
of Native tribal storytelling traditions, Allens concept of self-recovery
spirals outwardly in ever-widening circles that connect the self to family,
tribe, ancestors, nature, the cosmos, and the Great Mysterious. Keating
identifies six forms of outward movement of healing toward whole-
ness in Allens emphasis on storytelling and initiates a long overdue dis-
cussion of the philosophical and aesthetic import of Native American
womens writing. Belief in the performative power of thought and lan-
guage in stories to affect healing at the individual, collective, and global
levels is a cultural value that Allen shares with the other Native Ameri-
can and African American writers explored here. Keating explains that
Allens project sets readers on a journey of personal self-transformation
that, founded on the metaphysics of interconnectedness, extends out-
wardly to embrace family, community, land, and cosmos in a larger web
of healing and restoration.
Keatings exploration of how Allen uses mythic and oral traditions
in a performance aesthetic of self-renewal foregrounds the differences of
indigenous epistemologies from western metaphysics. Allens project is
transcultural in that it celebrates a number of spiritual disciplines and
oral traditions and enables us to formulate complex systems of empow-
ering knowledge and alternative, holistic modes of perception without
eliding cultural particularities. In doing so, Keating points out, Allen
redefines Enlightenment concepts of the universal and the subject in
more expansive, open-ended terms that are founded on the meta-
physics of interconnectedness, which posits a cosmic, fluid spirit or
force . . . manifest[ing] itself as material and nonmaterial forms.
Keating continues with the pragmatic potential of Allens project
for healing and wholeness on the personal, communal, global, and
cosmic levels. In fact, this project is similar to others by Alice Walker
and Patricia Hill Collins, both of whom Keating also identifies as part
of the womanist self-recovery tradition. She draws on Walkers woman-
ism as a point of departure to show how Allens writing articulates an
indigenous womanist aesthetic of self-recovery. Keatings insights about
the conceptual continuities between African American and Native
American womens visions and activism encourage a rethinking of
womanism as a cross-cultural web of creativity and critique spun by
many writers outside African American literary traditions.
Whereas Keating concentrates on the transformative aesthetics of
Native mythic and oral traditions, Michael Antonucci examines the
blues poetics of Sherley Anne Williams, whose work has yet to be fully
appreciated for its critical contributions to the discourse on black music
and culture. Focusing on her Peacock Poems, he shows how she creates
a unique aesthetic blend of cathartic self-expression, historical testify-

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

how the conflation of memory with spirit and the repetition of sun
imagery and elegy in Wheatleys oeuvre indicate cultural preservation of
certain African values regarding nature and being. Some scholars have
interpreted Wheatleys poetry as an acquiescence to western values and
a negation of blackness, but she defies the view of Africans held by
Hume, Kant, and Hegel by privileging her own African conception of
memory as spirit and grace over the western conception of it as a reper-
toire of past events. The intricately interwoven relationship between
nature, humanity, and God in her poetry echoes the metaphysics of
interconnectedness in Paula Gunn Allens work as identified by Keating.
Repetitions of sun imagery and elegies in Wheatleys corpus of
writings also signal her transposition of African customs and values
relating to the cycle of life and death and project a view of (human)
beings that differs radically from her lettered contemporaries of philoso-
phy. Wheatleys poetics, West observes, cloak the Christian God in an
African conception of the sun as divine being, and thus preserve ani-
mistic emphasis on nature as an inspirited manifestation of the divine
principle. Repetitions of the continuity between death and the life-
giving sun, moreover, point to an African understanding of death as a
transition to a new life medium.
Part III. Critical Revisions
Essays in Critical Revisions explore African American and Native

American womens writings for their innovative and insightful revisions
of varying literary and critical traditions. Here, subalterns are shown to
speak back critically to proponents of psychoanalysis, feminism, and
Marxism and inscribe their own subjectivity in these critical traditions.
Drawing on African and Native American cultural traditions, they also
retell their peoples history to inspire a vision of black and red coalition
struggle.
Ellen Arnold reads Linda Hogans Solar Storms as signifying on
ecofeminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic discourses of individual, cul-
tural, and ecological recovery. In this reinsertion, Arnold explains,
Hogan seeks to heal the wounds of conquest by deconstructing the dis-
courses that serve colonial interests and indigenizing them. To indige-
nize them is to rewrite them within more complex contexts that include
tribal worldviews, but in ways that do not replicate the binary classifi-
catory schemes of western culture. Hogan presents the journey of per-

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

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

white/western feminists has been both productive and problematic. On
the one hand, they have worked together to achieve substantive gains
for women, poor people, and people of color, especially in the 1960s
and 1970s social protests era. On the other hand, Native American and
African American womens skepticism of feminism is born out of sev-
eral factors, including white womens reluctance to wage an all-out
attack against the racist capitalist patriarchy from which they (in part)
benefit. Additionally, many women of color find feminisms nearly
exclusive focus on gender and sexuality too narrow for the myriad
problems of racial and ethnic domination, colonialism structural vio-
lence, and poverty, and position themselves in more culturally appropri-
ate traditions such as womanism and gynocentric ideals. Many women
of color reject the narrow focus of much feminism by (ironically) infus-
ing their writing with their own ideas about language and literature,
social struggle, and wholeness. None of the next three writers discussed
in this section have identified with feminism or called themselves femi-
nists. Yet, their works have been read for woman-centered themes and
insights for various schools of feminist thought.
Toni Morrison distances herself from feminism and resists catego-
rization of her work in either racial or gendered terms. Despite this,
however, Morrissette observes that her work has been read for feminist
values and aesthetics by black feminist literary critics, who appreciate
Morrisons explorative depth into black feminine subjectivity. Morris-
sette takes an approach to Paradise that is similar to Antonuccis treat-
ment of Sherley Anne Williamss poetry by assessing Morrisons work
through her own critical commentary. She reads Paradise for contribu-
tions to black feminist literary criticism regarding its parameters, argu-
ing that Morrisons novel raises questions about what constitutes black
feminist literature and its defining features. Who and what are the sub-
jects of black feminist literature? And how are these criteria derived?
What is the relation of ideology to aesthetics in these standards? Debo-
rah McDowell, Barbara Smith, and Barbara Christian, to name a few,
have considered these issues. Morrissette shows how Morrison takes us
beyond some of the more traditional characteristics defining black femi-
nist literary criticism by using a self-described strategy of writing in a
race-specific yet race-free prose. Paradise reminds us that the critical
process of black feminist literary criticism must be fluid to the extent
of avoiding the Name, the Letter. Black feminism must avoid residing in
the letter of the law; it must reside in the spirit of the law, where imagi-
nation is supreme.
Maggie Romigh analyzes Navajo poet Luci Tapahonsos Leda and
the Cowboy within the context of western critical and poetic traditions
that have grown up around the Greek myth of Zeuss rape of Leda and
W. B. Yeatss treatment of it in Leda and the Swan. She shows how
Tapahonso draws on the gynocratic principles and oral traditions of her
own culture to recast Leda as a powerful supernatural agent who
restores harmony and balance to the world. Ledas supernatural agency
in Tapahonsos work is especially poignant, because poets and critics
have been so focused on Leda as a powerless victim and so intent on
expressing outrage for Zeus that they have neglected to treat the domino
effect of the violence and alienation generated by his assault. In Leda
and the Cowboy, explains Romigh, Tapahonso recasts Leda in Navajo
feminine vestige according to the traditional knowledge that sexual
unions between supernatural entities and mortals entail transferring
knowledge from the spirit world to the human realm. In traditional his-
torical Navajo society, women have not been systemically oppressed like
women in most western cultures, for patriarchy was not institutionalized
among the Navajo. In fact, Navajo culture is matrilineal, organized
according to a gynocratic principle and governed by childbearing
women (Allen 1991, xiiixiv). It is recognized that the nations lifeblood
depends on the mother/earth. Social roles in many historical Native cul-
tures were determined more by ones relationship to the spirit world
the gifts of creativity, hunting, craftsmanship, and so on, which are
bestowed by the ancestorsrather than on biological sex differences
(Allen 1986).
Drawing from her own oral tradition, Tapahonsos poem infuses
the poetic, critical tradition of Leda, poems with new directions for
healing, overcoming alienation, and restoring balance to the world.
Romigh reads Tapahonsos verse as a ritual and ceremonial restoration
of hzh (balance, harmony and beauty) to the universe that Zeuss
original violation disturbed. A similar performative poetics is also
explored in Michael Antonuccis interpretation of Sherley Anne
Williamss blues poems. Deliberately, skillfully, and beautifully,
Romigh explains, Tapahonso has used Leda and the Cowboy to
create a new story, with all the power of her own Navajo cultures old
stories, to look again at the Greek myth that became a famous Irish
poem, to transform that myth into a Navajo story set within the context
of her own matrilineal society, and to offer an answer to Yeatss poetic
question, Did she put on his knowledge with his power . . . ?
Margot Reynolds shows how early twentieth-century writer,
Zitkala-Sas (Yanton Sioux), treatment of the mother figure forms a
gynocentric justice song that protests imperial conquest and racist
patriarchal imagery of Indiansespecially Indian women. The work of

Zitkala-Sa has received little attention by feminist literary critics. She
uses the mother figure to critique imperial Christian patriarchy and
exposes how Euro-American conquest depended on destruction of
womens central role in tribal culture. Reynolds helps us understand
how Native womens struggle encompasses a broader range of con-
cerns and issues than the scope of liberal, socialist, and lesbian femi-
nism. For many women of color, feminism entails fighting an
imperialist patriarchy.
Reynoldss investigation of motherhood in Zitkala-Sas writings
reminds us of its primacy for women of other cultural traditions as well.
Oyeronke Oyewumi suggests that motherhood is perhaps even more
meaningful for women of African and Latin descent than sisterhood
(2003). Stemming from cultures that recognize the importance of multi-
ple mothers and co-mothers in communal life, the relational dynamics
of the mother-daughter bond for many women of color is transmutable
to other kinds of relationships outside the family (Collins 1990;
Oyewumi 2003). The maternal ethic, with its values of mutual support,
trust, and protectiveness and its practice of mutual nurturing, expresses
more authentic solidarity among women than the sisterhood that
they have felt in white womens organizations. To this mix of values and
practices, the maternal bond of Zitkala-Sas gynocentric prose articu-
lates a concern for justice, reparations, and cultural survival.
Gynocentrism is an indigenous feminism that focuses on womens
traditional primacy in tribal life and on oral traditions as a way of resist-
ing Euro-American hegemony and restoring self-governance. Gynocen-
trism as a framework for understanding cultures, their histories, and
collective knowledge, explains Reynolds, comprises a powerful song
in praise of Native worldviews. In this way gynocentrism shares certain
values and interests with black feminism as articulated by Patricia Hill
Collins. Both assert truths about Indians and blacks that counter West-
ern mythologies and are grounded in epistemologies that depart from
positivism and rationalism. Revering the mother figure, these traditions
esteem mother wit (practical/ethical and spiritual/cosmic) as an impor-
tant source of knowledge. Ethics and morality are approached pragmati-
cally and are conveyed in terms of individual responsibility to tribal and
ancestral traditions, the land, and the Great Mysterious, rather than by
reference to abstract a priori principles.
Part II
Transformative Aesthetics
2
Self-Help, Indian Style?
Paula Gunn Allens Grandmothers of the Light,

Womanist Self-Recovery, and the
Politics of Transformation
ANALOUISE KEATING
Like an individual, America can be whole only by going back to its

rootsall of them. My premise is this: the Native American story
and the holistic mode of thought it embodiessprings from the origi-
nal root in our homeland. The story is designed to move among the
strands of lifes web both within the individual and within the com-
munity, to restore balance and harmony.
Marilou Awiakta (1993)
Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Womans Sourcebook (Allen

1991) represents a startling departure from Paula Gunn Allens earlier
academic work in Native American studies. As in her groundbreaking
collection of scholarly essays, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Femi-
nine in American Indian Traditions (1986), Allen examines Native cul-
tures, mythic worldviews, and feminist themes. But in Grandmothers of
the Light, she employs a distinctly nonacademic tone and combines her
personal experiences and beliefs with theory, history, story, and myth to
construct a contemporary feminist, indigenous-based worldview, which
she invites readers (of any cultural/ethnic/racial background) to share.
Shaped by her belief in the magical power of thought and tar-
geted at a wide, multicultural female audience, Grandmothers of the
Light can easily be (mis)interpreted as a mainstream self-help book
heavily influenced by New Age thinking. (For definitions and discus-
sions of New Age thought, see Heelas 1996 and Aldred 2000.) And
indeed, Allen makes a number of claims that could strike many readers
as outrageous: she relies on her own spirit guides for information
31
concerning the stories she retells (1991, xiii); insists on the reality of the
spirits, the supernaturals, goddesses, gods, . . . holy people (xvii),
extraterrestrials (5), little people, and giants (6) she describes;
speaks respectfully of the channeled information she received from
the Crystal Woman (195); and asserts that the stories in her book,
when used as ritual maps or guides, enable women to recover our path
to the gynocosmos that is our spiritual home (xv). As she explains in
the preface, she has drawn from the vast oral tradition of Native
America to select twenty-one stories that have been personally empow-
ering for her; she believes that these stories can assist other women in
navigat[ing] the perilous journey along the path that marks the bound-
ary between the mundane world and the world of spirit (xiii). Outlin-
ing what she describes as the seven-fold path of the medicine womans
way (10), Allen suggests that the stories in her collection can teach
readers how to follow this path in a sacred manner.
But what can it mean to use indigenous stories as ritual maps, or
to follow the medicine womans way? Given the brutal history of
interactions between Native and non-Native peoples in the Americasa
history which Allen herself has explored in painful detail (1986, 1998)
how do we interpret this open invitation? Does Allen rely on sentimen-
talized Indian stereotypes in an attempt to pander to non-Native readers
who crave authenticity, certainty, and escape from their meaningless lives
(Vizenor 1994)? Has she succumbed to the plastic shamanism of Lynn
Andrews and other non-Indian women and men who make their for-
tunes through the commercial exploitation of indigenous spiritual tradi-
tions (Aldred 2000)? In other words, does Grandmothers of the Light
represent yet another version of what Allen herself has criticized as the
ongoing New Age cooptation and recontextualization of Native
thought (1998, 97)in this instance authorized, authenticated, and
essentialized by Allens family ties to the Laguna and Sioux?
I would suggest that, despite some apparent evidence to the con-
trary, Grandmothers of the Light cannot be dismissed as a New Age
self-help book that trivializes and commercializes Native spiritualities
and beliefs. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. While New Age self-help
generally reinforces the status quo, Allen attempts to transform it.
Building on her personal experiences and her extensive knowledge of
indigenous storytelling traditions, Allen uses these traditions to expose
and alter the dominant cultures epistemological-ethical system. Like the
intricate, holistic story Awiakta (1993) describes in my epigraph, the
stories in Grandmothers of the Light, drawn from the original root in
Self-Help, Indian Style? 33
our homeland, are designed to restore harmony and balance on

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

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

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

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

desses, the People, and the Ritual Tradition. Here Allen educates her
readers about the devastating impact that colonial conquest made on
specific tribal nations, ranging from the Aztec and Maya in the south to
the Lummi/Nootsak in the northwest. I want to underscore the impor-
tant role these historical accounts play in Grandmothers of the Light.
By including them in her book, Allen challenges her non-Indian readers
historical amnesia, thus making them accountable for the ways they
have benefited from the conquest.
Second, womanist self-recovery employs indigenous mythic figures
both to affirm each womans power and to critique the negative images
of female identity circulating in contemporary cultures. Allens mythic
women offer an important alternative to western gender roles. They are
not defined by their relationships with fathers, sons, husbands, or other
men. Nor are they defined by their biological reproductive functions.
Instead, they are fully autonomous, nonstereotypical creative beings. In
Grandmothers of the Light and elsewhere, Allen claims that Native cos-
mologies offer contemporary women empowering models of female
identity, models that counter the sexism and other forms of misogyny
found in Judeo-Christian socioreligious belief systems. Insisting that
relations between human women and supernaturals are as viable and
powerful in the present time as in days gone by (xvi), she uses indige-
nous stories to empower her readers.
Throughout Grandmothers of the Light, Allen retells a variety of
Native myths, exploring the central roles that female creatrix figures
such as the Keres Pueblos Thought Woman, the Navajos Changing
Woman, and the Cherokees Selu play in tribal cultures. My personal
favorite is Thought Woman, who uses thought and songrather than
biological reproductionto create the entire cosmos, including nature,
human beings, sociopolitical systems, literature, and the sciences:
Grandmother Spider, Thought Woman, thought the earth,

the sky, the galaxy, and all that is into being, and as she
thinks, so we are. She sang the divine sisters . . . into being
out of her medicine pouch or bundle, and they in turn sang
the firmament, the land, the seas, the people, the katsina, the
gods, the plants, animals, minerals, language, writing, math-
ematics, architecture, the Pueblo social system, and every
other thing you can imagine in our world. (Allen 1991, 28)
This creation story redefines feminine creativity by associating Thought

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

cal worldviews that entirely separate the individual from the commu-
nity. Thus in the preface to Making Sacred, Making True (her version
of the Navajo story of Changing Woman and White Shell Woman),
Allen contrasts non-indigenous cultures monotheistic beliefs with
indigenous cultures beliefs in multiple gods:
In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and

groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme
being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by
monotheism. Because of this, Changing Woman is often
spoken of alone in the literature of the bilagna, the white
people. But in the texts . . . singularity is sad and undesir-
able. Belonging to a peoplea community, a clanis a
necessity for all beings, human, holy people, animals, every-
one. (Allen 1991, 71; italics mine)
With this insistence on multiplicity, Allen offers readers both an

important alternative to the self-contained forms of individualism
described above, and a possible solution to the fragmentation of con-
temporary cultures. She models a relational individualism that meets
each persons specific needs for self-affirmation without severing the
individual from a larger whole. According to Allen, in gynocratic tribal
systems egalitarianism, personal autonomy, and communal harmony
were highly valued, rendering the good of the individual and the good
of the society mutually reinforcing, rather than divisive (1991, xiv). As
Allens emphasis on the value of personal autonomy and the good
of the individual indicates, she does not deny each individuals impor-
tance. However, by locating the individual within a larger social con-
text, Allen replaces oppositional, self-enclosed types of individualism
with a relational definition of selfhood that synthesizes the personal and
collective dimensions of each individuals life (Keating 1996).
Like other womanist self-recovery authors, Allen posits a rela-
tional individualism that balances the individual with(in) the commu-
nity. She explains that, identity is formed by context and is a function
of ritual purpose rather than of self-will or individuation (1991, 109).
Allens description of the medicine womans final stage, which she calls
The Way of the Wise Woman, illustrates one form this contextual,
relational identity can take: The sphere of her work has broadened far
beyond that of her personal, private self and of her familiar group; her
community extends to the stars (1991, 15). This Wise Woman is an

extremely powerful human being with a strong sense of her identity
both as a unique individual and as a member of the cosmos. She has
reflected on and learned from her personal experiences; as Allen
explains, she has developed true wisdom through gathering informa-
tion and experience and applying them in every area of her life (15).
She can recognize cosmic patterns, and she uses this knowledge to
enhance others lives.
Fourth, womanist self-recovery is transcultural. As I use the term,
transcultural indicates dynamic negotiations among diverse traditions.
Transculturalism does not ignore the differences among distinct cultures
but instead uses these differences as pathways enabling us to generate
highly complex forms of commonalities. Although each womanist self-
recovery writer roots herself in the indigenous beliefs of her particu-
lar geo-cultural location, she draws from other indigenous and
non-indigenous cultures as well. These negotiations among diverse tra-
ditions and beliefs enable womanist self-recovery authors both to vali-
date their words and to develop specific belief systems and practices
designed to meet contemporary needs. Allens work provides an espe-
cially useful illustration of this transcultural process.
Throughout Grandmothers of the Light, Allen makes connections
among a variety of distinct Indian and non-Indian belief systems. In her
introductory chapter, she insists that the ritual tradition is of ancient
and worldwide standing (1991, 8), defines tribal people globally, and
maintains that all oral literature shares a supernatural, psychic trait:
The oral traditions of all tribal peoplewhether Native

American, Hindu, Greek, Celtic, Norse, Samois, Roman, or
Papuanshould be understood as psychic literature. It can
only be comprehended adequately in terms of the universe of
power, for it speaks to the relationships among humans, ani-
mals of all kingdoms, supernaturals, and deities in a land-
scape that is subject to influences of thought, intention, will,
emotion, and choice under the kinds of conditions described
above. (1991, 22)
These cross-cultural, cross-species connections enable Allen to redefine

Enlightenment-based concepts of the universal in more generous terms
and to develop complex commonalities that do not ignore the differ-
ences among people (Keating 2000). By definition, the universal
should be all-inclusive; for example, if we talk about universal attrib-

utes of humankind, we should be talking about attributes shared by all
human beings. However, as a number of scholars have observed, all too
often the universal has its source in narrow, eurocentric definitions
which exclude far more people than they include (Cornell 1991; Moya
2000). Rather than represent a shared category embracing all people,
these pseudo-universals overlook the many differences among people.
Such restrictive concepts of the universal are not benign, for they dehu-
manize and in other ways delegitimize those who do not fit (Palumbo-
Liu 2002).
While some feminists (see for instance Butler 1989; Haraway
1989) have responded to universalisms potential dangers by rejecting the
concept itself, Allen and other womanist self-recovery authors adopt a
transcultural approach which enables them to reinvent the universal in
open-ended ways. Look for instance at her introduction to the second
section, Cosmogyny: The Goddesses, where Allen moves among the
cosmic (which she redefines as the Great Goddess); the intertribal (or
what she calls the gynocentric universe throughout the Americas); the
tribally specific (she discusses a variety of distinct tribal nations, includ-
ing the Cherokee, the Hopi, and the Navajo); and the personal (my
tribe, the Laguna Pueblo) (1991, 27). Throughout this section, Allen
talks in both general (universal) and particular (tribal) terms, associating
a variety of cultural traditions with a cosmic worldview (or what she
terms cosmogyny). By so doing, she draws connections among diverse
North American cultural traditions in ways enabling her to redefine the
universal in more expansive, open-ended terms. Similarly, in her discus-
sion of the oral tradition, she underscores the parallels between a variety
of spiritual practicesincluding The Tao, the Sufi Path, the Way of the
Madonna, the Quest for the Grail, the Good Red Roadto support her
assertion that spiritual discipline is the hallmark of any ritual path (9).
As I have explained elsewhere in more detail (Keating 2000a), these tran-
scultural negotiations enable Allen to explore their commonalities with-
out overlooking their differences.
Fifth, as this emphasis on commonalities might imply, womanist
self-recovery is inclusive, and addresses itself to a wide multicultural audi-
ence. As I mentioned earlier, Allen indicates that the path of the medi-
cine woman can be traveled by women of diverse cultural backgrounds.
According to Allen, her stories illustrate the great power women have
possessed, and how that power, when exercised within the life circum-
stances common to women everywhere can reshape (terraform) the
earth (1991, xvi; italics mine). Allens point here is not to imply that all
women are the same. Her emphasis on commonalities (which must not be
confused with sameness!) plays a crucial role in her political intervention.
More specifically, she attempts to create a broad-based movement for
social change. She believes that the sexism, racism, homophobia, and
other forms of social injustice experienced today are directly related to the
imbalance that occurred when patriarchal belief systemswith their hier-
archical, dominant/subordinate worldviewsreplaced gynocratic belief
systems (1991, xiv). Associating womens commonalities with a sacred
feminine power, she encourages readers to recognize and begin utilizing
an alternate, holistic mode of perception. As she explains in her most
recent collection of essays, Off the Reservation,
the urgent necessity that faces women and men who long to
encounter the greater, larger, more inclusive and therefore
more Whole and balanced sacred essence . . . is that we heal
the great sickness patriarchal thought has inflicted upon all
citizens of planet Earth, human and otherwise, and return to
the Feminine source of our being.
Let us begin that healing by acknowledging that if we
fail to empower the feminine within and outside of our-
selves, all of our attempts at righting the great destructions
of the past five or six thousand years will go for naught.
(1998, 9192)
Sixth, and perhaps most important for my argument in this essay,

womanist self-recovery relies on a metaphysics of interconnectedness
(Keating 2000b) that posits a cosmic, fluid spirit or force that manifests
itself as material and nonmaterial forms. I would suggest that indige-
nous teachings from many cultures (Cajete 2000; Cheney and Hester
2001; Forbes 2001; Mosha 1999; Semali and Kincheloe 1999; L. Smith
1999), recent developments in quantum physics and other branches of
science (Barabsi 2002; Bohm 1996; Macy 1991; Sheldrake 2003;
Watts 2003; Wolf 2001), and even my own experiences (Keating 2002)
confirm this relational, participatory worldview. But my point here is
not to argue that this spiritual-material essence really exists. Instead,
I want to point out some of the pragmatic, performative functions this
metaphysics of interconnectedness serves in womanist self-recovery
texts. On the personal level, the belief in a dynamic cosmic energy offers
those individuals who feel fragmented and self-divided a highly positive
self-image that affirms their personal power. As Ana Castillo explains:
Espiritismo, . . . [the] acknowledgment of the energy that

exists throughout the universe subatomically generating itself
and interconnecting, fusing, and changing. . . . offer[s] a per-
sonal response to the divided state of the individual who
desires wholeness. An individual who does not sense herself as
helpless to circumstances is more apt to contribute positively
to her environment than one who resigns with apathy to it
because of her sense of individual insignificance. (1994, 159)
Because she views herself as a vital part of a larger cosmic whole, the
individual Castillo describes attains a sense of her own self-worth and
power. This increased personal agency enables her to act and gives her
the confidence that her actions will be meaningful, useful, and successful.
On the collective level, the belief in a cosmic force generating all
that exists offers a theoretical framework for social change, a relational
framework connecting each individual with a cosmic whole. Those indi-
viduals who see themselves as integral parts of this cosmic whole recog-
nize their interdependence with others. This recognition fuels both the
desire for social change and the assurance that individual actionsno
matter how insignificant they may seemcan and do impact others.
Allens metaphysics of interconnectedness takes a distinct mythic
form. Whether she refers to it as thought, as female intelligences,
as language, or as mind, Allen posits a cosmic force creating, infus-
ing, and uniting all that exists. In Grandmothers of the Light and else-
where (1986, 1998), she associates this force with the oral tradition
shared by all tribal peoples. Rejecting ethnocentric anthropological and
literary descriptions of mythology as primitive belief systems, mystifying
falsehoods, or nostalgic retreats into an irrecoverable past, she main-
tains that mythic stories offer an alternative, holistic worldview. Thus in
Grandmothers of the Lights opening pages, for example, she describes
the oral tradition as a type of guidebook:
an apprentice medicine person becomes familiar with a

number of these stories because they act as general guides to
that special universe. They enable practitioners of the sacred
to recognize where they are and how to function, the entities
they might encounter, their names, personalities, and likely
disposition toward them, the kinds of instruction they might
gain from them, and how to explore the universe of power
to gain greater paranormal knowledge and ability. (1991, 3)
Allen equates myth with metamorphosis and change by defining

myth as a ritual mode of communication, a language construct
that contains the power to transform something (or someone) from one
state or condition to another (1991, 7). Focusing their thought and
channeling thoughts energy in specific ways, spiritual practitioners can
align themselves with this spiritual force and bring about material
transformationsranging from weather changes to physiological
changes in both humans and animals to bodily changes to earth
renewal [and] terraforming (making mountains, rivers, drainage plains,
and other geological features), and other activities too numerous to
mention (16). According to Allen, the ability to effect these transfor-
mations has its source in a holistic mode of perception that recognizes
and utilizes thoughts creative power:
Practitioners function by thought, using language, move-

ment, sound, painting . . . herbs, minerals, and repetitive
devices as foci for that thought. Most of all, they use their
ability to deal adeptly in supernatural realms to achieve their
objectives, depending on long training, familiarity with
Great Mysterious and its (their) ways, and contacts among
the supernaturals. The ability to dance, drum, chant dramat-
ically, or alter consciousness so that one can see amazing
things are of little use without the aid and protection of
some helpers from the other side. (1617)
To be sure, these references to supernatural realms and helpers

from the other side seem almost laughably naive when we read them
relying on only the rational mind and empirically based knowledge.
And indeed, Allen willingly acknowledges that this mythic worldview
defies conventional linear thinking, yet she insists on its validity:
In the ritual tradition, wholeness is the rule; in it chronol-

ogy ceases to function, though both temporality and dura-
tion play a fundamental role. Ritual affirms an order of
reality that secular materialists, logical positivists, and
deconstructionist postmodernists believe to be false, imagi-
nary, primitive, or impossible. Yet within the workings of
ritual, the impossible becomes the very probable, the imagi-
nary becomes the factual, the primitive becomes the sophis-
ticated, and the false becomes the actuality. Within the
ritual universe the entire matter of true/false is turned on its

head, and the dancers bring down the rain. (1991, 8)
In Grandmothers of the Light, Allen invites readers to participate

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

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

politics of change that is signified in my title? Transformation (as Im
defining the term because of course transformation has many mean-
ings) requires vision, motivation, and the desire for social justice. I
would suggest that Allen and other womanist self-recovery writers
attempt to embody this vision, this motivation, and this desire in their
texts andby extensionin their readers. Like the political writer
Moraga describes in my epigraph to this section, Allen and other wom-

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

porary debates concerning the universal. More specifically, it demon-
strates the possibility of inventing transcultural universals: new concepts
of the universal that move between commonalities and particularities
without denying the importance of either (Keating 2000a). And fourth,
because it synthesizes personal, political, and spiritual concerns, wom-
anist self-recovery gives us tools to achieve more inclusive activist com-
munities. We can insist on underlying commonalities that allow us to
create new connections (Awiakta 1993, 155) and work together to
transform our worlds.
Thanks to Gloria Anzalda, Renae Bredin, Angela Cotten, and Deborah A.

Miranda for comments on earlier versions of this essay.
3
Making the Awakening Hers
Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition

of African Spirituality to Christian Religiosity
ELIZABETH J. WEST
From the late eighteenth-century poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the spiri-

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

sive understanding of African spirituality in black womens writing. A
product of one of Americas deepest transgressions, Wheatley was nev-
ertheless shaped and defined by more than the slave system. She was
also influenced by the religious wave in colonial America that afforded
blacks an entry into the formal discourse of their humanity.

The Great Awakening of the mid-1700s has been recognized by many
scholars as central to African American Christianity and activism. In
contrast to the early Puritan theology maintaining that only a small
(and yes, white) elect would be saved in the final days, the Awakening
promised salvation to all and opened the floodgates to new groups of
converts. Blacks, who had for the most part been ignored, excluded, or
given incidental consideration in Puritan religious reflection, could
appropriate the language of Christian salvation to proclaim their
humanity and their rights in the eye of the divine authority. The Bible
became the written authority for African American calls for equality
and justice, as well as a guiding spiritual force for a disenfranchised
black population.
In the poetry of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley; the autobi-
ographical narrative of Olaudah Equiano; and the nonfiction writings
of Benjamin Banneker, Prince Hall, and Lemuel B. Haynes, we find that
people of African descent in America had begun to internalize and inter-
pret the Bible as their own by the end of the eighteenth century. In these
early writings there is an African American typology of Scripture much
like that of the Puritans a century before, which marks the beginning of
a tradition in African American arts and letters and political activism.
Interpreting their struggles in America as the reenactment of key biblical
stories of struggle and suffering, these writers gave historical and reli-
gious legitimacy to their cause. Phillis Wheatleys hallmark 1773 collec-
tion of poems (edited and reprinted by John Shields [1988]) exemplifies
the birth of a longstanding tradition of black writers who transformed
an Anglo-Christian discourse into a language of self-affirmation.
Wheatleys criticized poem, On Being Brought from Africa to Amer-
ica, illustrates this literary manipulation. Her use of understatement
and her seeming acquiescence in this poem leads many readers to dis-
miss it as self-denigrating. Her use of the word brought to represent
the horrific transportation of Africans to the Americas can be read as an
appeasement to her white audience. However, in its entirety, the poem
Making the Awakening Hers 49
asserts the place of Africans in biblical history and affirms their place at
the gates of redemption. With Wheatleys call to her Christian/white
audience to remember that Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refind,
and join th angelic train (Wheatley 1988, 78), she appropriates the
westerners myth that links blacks to the cursed Cain of the Genesis
story. But Wheatley also demonstrates her own interpretive astuteness
as she proclaims the salvation of blacks using the very story that whites
had employed to justify black enslavement. Wheatley knows that in its
entirety the story of Cain is a redemptive one, for he is ultimately
restored to the good graces of God. She therefore maintains that blacks,
like their presumed ancestor, Cain, will be similarly redeemed. Wheat-
leys discursive appropriation of Scripture is early in the history of Afro-
Christianity but not singular. Her contemporary, the black slave poet
Jupiter Hammon (1998) also emphasized Gods offer of redemption to
all, including Africans. In his poem, An Evening Thought: Salvation by
Christ with Penitential Cries, Hammon repeatedly asserts that God
alone is the source of salvation and that he extends his offering to all
peoples and nations. Hammon and Wheatley, and the countless black
interpreters of biblical Scripture who followed them, embraced the mes-
sage of spiritual inclusiveness born out of Americas Great Awakening.
Trusting their own abilities to interpret Scripture and history, they
adopted biblical stories and doctrine to tell the story of black experience
in America.
The evangelism of the Great Awakening struck a chord with the
spiritual sensibilities of many blacks in colonial America, both slave and
free. Colonial blacks were introduced to Christianity in significant num-
bers. Many were moved to conversion experiences that ultimately led
them to choose a Christian, and most often Protestant, denomination.
Though there were no black churches at the onset, and while blacks
were generally segregated or denied admittance in white churches, the
seed of Afro-Christianity had been planted by the end of the eighteenth
century: the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME)
Church in Philadelphia and black Baptist churches in the Southeast con-
firmed the beginnings of the black church in America (Franklin and
Moss 1994).

While scholars have recognized the Great Awakening as a pivotal event
in the history of African American religion, too often the influence of
traditional African cosmology in African American spirituality has been
overlooked. For more than a century before the Great Awakening,

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

revivalist ministers, especially Methodists and Baptists (Raboteau 2001,
18). At the close of the eighteenth century, black churches and congrega-
tions were springing up in the North and South.
Phillis Wheatleys 1773 collection of poems, a work that was
notably religious/spiritual in nature, marked a comprehensive medita-
tion on the African American formative experience of negotiating an
African worldview into a Christian framework. And as Katherine Clay
Bassard suggests, early black womens writing community begins with
Phillis Wheatleys seven-year correspondence with Obour Tanner, her
confidant and a fellow enslaved African woman (1996, 515). Wheat-
leys ongoing correspondence with Tanner, who lived in the neighbor-
ing state of Rhode Island, challenges the notion of some scholars that
she was isolated and removed from the experiences and conditions of
fellow slaves. Moreover, her friendship with Tanner suggests that the
community of black women writers was born in early America with
the likes of Wheatley and Tanner and perhaps black women whose
correspondences are yet uncovered, or worse, permanently lost. Their
correspondence suggests that black women (in life and in fiction) find
salvation more in each other than in the church. While Trudier Harris
insightfully points to the primacy of religion and community in con-
temporary black womens writings (1996), we must consider the legacy
that informed this contemporary practice. Black women surviving in a
community of women is no cultural accident, but rather a continuation
of an African-rooted cosmology that sanctioned community as sacred,
and as a result of gender divisions, empowered women to collectively
aid and support each other. Wheatleys efforts to maintain a relation-
ship with Tanner through letter writing, the only avenue available to
them, hints at her desire to remain connected to an African community.
Her greeting to Tanner as friend and sister in the seven extant letters
that Wheatley wrote to her, moreover, underscores the deep alliance
between the two despite the miles that separated them. Wheatleys own
poem entitled To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His
Works, Jupiter Hammons 1778 poem To Miss Phillis Wheatley,
and the now highly anthologized portrait of her by African American
artist Scipio Moorhead (S.M.) attest to the bonds that existed among
New England slaves in colonial America (Shockley 1988, 19). These
intertextual works also contradict simplistic historical glossing of
Wheatley as not concerned with the problems of blacks or the coun-
try (Franklin and Moss 1994, 94).
In her life and her poetry Phillis Wheatley represents the struggle
of early generations of African Americans to carve a meaningful spiri-
tual cosmology in a foreign, hostile land. She embodies the formative
experience of blacks reinventing the world through the convergence of
Anglo-Christianity and African spirituality. While it is tempting to read
her poetry as a submission of her African self to a dominant discourse
that privileged whiteness, Wheatleys poetry is the narrative of a young
African renegotiating an African self and worldview in an antagonistic
white Western cosmology. To salvage a self in this environment, Wheat-
ley, like Africans at large in America, was challenged with the task of
adopting a worldview that designated blackness to a realm outside of
humanity. Her success came from her intellectual shrewdness and a
strong sense of self-worth that survived the Middle Passage. Like other
Africans forced into bondage, Wheatley did not completely lose connec-
tions to her African roots. This connectivity, albeit held by the thinnest
of threads, is evident in her poetry, which represents one clearly aware
of ones African self.
In a number of her poems, Wheatley asserts her African identity,
reminding her white audience that she defies their presumptions about
blackness and humanity. She is African and literate, as she reminds
readers in To Maecenas. This poem, which serves as the prologue and
invocation for the 1773 collection, ties Wheatley and Africanity to both
history and intellectualism. With her reflection on the ancient poet, Ter-
ence, an African sold into slavery in Rome, Wheatley hints at her own
poetic genius with the similar circumstances of their lives. Like Terence,
Wheatley is a native African taken and made a slave in a distant land,
and like Terence, she masters the language and art of her non-African
captors. Recurring references to herself in her poetry as the Afric
muse, hints at a need to reassure herself that she can be both black and
literate and intelligent. This ongoing struggle for self-justification is lay-
ered with what is perhaps a more subconscious struggle to reorient her
spiritual cosmos. We cannot say with certainty that Wheatleys asser-
tions of African selfhood represent a conscious or deliberate struggle
against personal and national erasure. However, her writings do suggest
that at the very least in her subconscious mind, Wheatley attempted to
reconstruct herself in a way that would validate her and other Africans
in the Western cosmos.
More concretely, we find in Wheatleys poetry and correspon-
dences a connection to an African worldview that survived her Christ-
ian conversion. While many readers presume that the infusion of Greek
and Roman classics in her poetry is the result of the neoclassical influ-
ence in early American writing, I would posit that Wheatley was also
fascinated with the classics because she found meaningful parallels
between the mythological cosmos of this culture and that of her own
native Africa. Consequently, converging Greek and Roman classical
images with her poetic interpretations of Christianity may have served
as a means to whitewash, but salvage, her African memories. For
example, Greek and Roman representation of spiritual entities as gods
of natural forces was consistent with traditional African spiritual con-
cepts of nature. Hence, Wheatleys poetry expressing her awe at the
power of the sun, the moon, and other natural forces may have been
reflections on African spiritual concepts of nature. Similarly, her con-
stant call to the muses for artistic inspiration also may have been trig-
gered by memories of her native culture. While John Shields argues
convincingly that her [Wheatleys] grasp of the possibility of using the
sublime as a principle of freedom exceeds that of her predecessors and
anticipates Kant, English romanticism, and American transcendental-
ism (1988, 257), an exploration of the origins of Wheatleys notions
of the aesthetic must also look to the possible influence of traditional
African beliefs and practices. It is not unlikely that Wheatleys use of
her imagination to create new worlds (256) points to rituals of
African spiritual possession that she likely witnessed as a young child
in Africa. Spiritual possession is an act through which the subject, as
well as the community, enters a different or new realm, one that can
provide participants with a new way of seeing themselves and the
world around them. Poetry was clearly the medium through which
Wheatley was lifted to a new world, a world in which she could claim
her humanity and reflect on her African past. Wheatleys writings
demonstrate a negotiation of key African cosmological ideas and the
dominating rhetoric of colonial American Christianity. In particular,
she struggles to define the place of memory in art and life. She also
attempts to seat African notions of nature and being into Christian dis-
course and constructs a self that is centered not in her individuality,
but by her connection with community.
The centrality of memory to Wheatleys ontological orientation is
evident in her contemplations and as she engages in the act of remem-
bering. Her most evident conscious musing on memory is in the poem,
On Recollection. Here, she defines memory as both a source of cre-
ative inspiration for the poet and as a spiritual beacon that guides
humanity. Speaking of memory in the language of classical Greek,
Wheatley hails it as Mneme, immortal powr, and in her request for

mnemes artistic inspiration, Wheatley highlights the African concept
of reciprocity between spirit and human. Assist my strains, while I thy
glories sing (4), she pleads. This reciprocity of grace echoes the African
dynamic of spirit and human interdependence that Joseph M. Murphy
describes as a relationship in which the spirit bestows blessings onto
humans, but only as humans celebrate and acknowledge the greatness
of the spirit (1995).
On Recollection emphasizes the power of memory as it mani-
fests itself in dreams. In traditional African cosmology, spirits speak to
humans most often through possession and dream visions. Wheatley
echoes the latter as she connects the power of spirits and their message
transmissions to dream visions or prophesies:
Mneme in our nocturnal visions pours

The ample treasure of her secret stores; . . .
And, in her pomp of images displayd,
To the high-rapturd poet gives her aid,
Through the unbound regions of the mind,
Diffusing light celestial and refind. (910, 1316)
When the lessons of memory are heeded, memory, like traditional

African spirits, is a source of human empowerment and good fortune.
However, when memorys message is disregarded, misfortune follows.
In contrast to the Western construct of memory as a human act that
serves as a means to recount past events, Wheatley defines memory as a
life force. Residing within humans, memory guides and comforts those
who hear its message, but leaves desolate those who fail to listen:
Mneme, enthrond within the human breast,

Has vice condemnd, and evry virtue blest.
How sweet the sound when we her plaudit hear?
Sweeter than music to the ravishd ear,
Sweeter than Maros entertaining strains
Resounding through the groves, and hills, and
Plains.
But how is Mneme dreaded by the race,
Who scorn her warnings, and despise her grace?
By her unveild each horrid crime appears,
Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears.
Days, years mispent, O what a hell of woe!
Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know. (1930)
The power of memory in human fortune is painted as a double-edged

sword: memory, like most African spiritual forces, can both bless and
curse. Equally notable is Wheatleys portrayal of memory as a conduit
between worlds. It is not an image that Wheatley draws overtly, but
rather one that is intimated in her reflection of the swiftness of time
passing during her own first eighteen years:
Now eighteen years their destind course have

Run,
In fast succession round the central sun.
How did the follies of that period pass
Unnoticd, but behold them writ in brass!
In Recollection see them fresh return, (3135)
While On Recollection speaks to memorys grace and terror, the

poem, To the Honourable T.H. Esq; on the Death of his Daughter,
employs memory for its power of consolation. To this father who has
suffered the loss of a child, Wheatley recommends that he give himself
over to memory to counter the pain. While the poem ends with the usu-
ally offered elegiac promise of a meeting in the next world, Wheatley
first speaks of the consolation found in remembering:
While deep you mourn beneath the

Cypress-shade
The hand of Death, and your dear daughter laid
In dust, whose absence gives your tears to flow,
And racks your bosom with incessant woe,
Let Recollection take a tender part,
Assuage the raging tortures of your heart,
Still the wild tempest of tumultuous grief,
And pour the heavnly nectar of relief: (18)
While we can only speculate whether Wheatleys concept of

memory as spirit is born out of a conscious connection to her African
heritage, her musings on the nature and authority of memory remain a
powerful testament to the survival of African spirituality in the African
American psyche. Wheatleys conflation of memory and spirit do not
originate in the religious discourse of her Christian mentors. On the con-
trary, this concept is more likely the fusion of Wheatleys African her-
itage and her education in Greek and Roman classics. Memory as a
spiritual force that must be fed by human sacrifice or acknowledgment
bears greater resemblance to African spirituality than Christian theology.
The importance of memory in Wheatleys ontological view is also

evident in the act of remembering. Along with her cognitive negotia-
tion of memory, Wheatley engages in the act of memory as a means of
spiritual connection. Her frequent references to her own African ori-
gins, while read by some as a subversion of white authority, can also be
interpreted as remembering and reaffirming the African self. In a world
in which whiteness is validated and Africanity and blackness are
negated, Wheatley remembers with self-satisfaction that she is African
and that there is worth and humanity in Africanness. This memory act
is most striking when Wheatley interjects the self in poems where the
focus is not the self. The oft-anthologized To the University of Cam-
bridge, in New England illustrates this pattern. The poem, ostensibly
an admonishment and a reminder to the young, rising intelligentsia of
America, begins with a brief autobiographical reflection by the poet.
She reminds these great minds that she is but a humble African stand-
ing before them:
While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write,

The muses promise to assist my pen;
Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom:
Father of mercy, twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes. (16)
Following this self-reflection, the body of the poem reminds listen-

ers that no matter how great their worldly accomplishments, their ulti-
mate test is Gods final judgmenta measurement of their spiritual
achievements. On one level, this autobiographical reflection serves as a
biting proclamation of both Wheatley and Africans equal status before
God, but it also serves as a ritual of self-acknowledgement and self-
affirmation. Taking moments in her poetry to remember her African self
and its journey echoes a traditional African belief in the necessity and
power of remembering. Wheatley understandswhether consciously or
unconsciouslythat to remember is to render the spirit alive and whole.
We find further evidence of this insight in the poem of praise, To the
Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majestys Principal
Secretary of State for North America, &c, and the elegiac poem, To
His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor, on the Death of His Lady. Here
again, Wheatley engages in moments of remembering that seem outside
the focus of the poems. As is typical of her elegiac poetry, Wheatley
offers the Christian message of salvation and eternal life to console one
who has lost a loved one. Focusing on the message that death is not the
ultimate victor, Wheatley reminds this grieving husband that his lost
wife has been delivered into the eternal kingdom:
There sits, illustrious Sir, thy beauteous spouse;

A gem-blazd circle beaming on her brows.
Hauld with acclaim among the heavnly choirs,
Her soul new-kindling with seraphic fires,
To notes divine she tunes the vocal strings,
While heavns high concave with the music rings. (1924)
Wheatleys reminder to this man of prominence (emphasized by her

acknowledgment of him as illustrious Sir) that Christianitys promise
of eternal life leaves no room for grief would be otherwise typical of
eighteenth-century American elegies. However, in the closing lines of
this stanza, his grief seems remarkably unfit. Just as she presumes she
can advise the Cambridge scholars, Wheatley reminds this respected
figure that it is she, a simple African, who brings him this all-important
message: Nor canst thou, Oliver, assent refuse / To heavnly tidings
from the Afric muse (2728). The subversion of white male supremacy
does not lie far beneath the surface in this passage: given that the inter-
jection of a line calling attention to her African identity adds no mean-
ing to the elegiac theme, one can reasonably argue that Wheatley
constructs the contrasting image of her humble African self to the pow-
erful white male figure to highlight their equality before the ultimate
judgeGod. This subversive moment also shows her engaging again in
the act of remembering; it suggests that in an overwhelming cloud of
whiteness, Wheatley unapologetically claims a black space.
The brevity of Wheatleys self-reflective line in To His Honour
the Lieutenant-Governor is a striking contrast to the more revealing
self-reflection in the poem, To the Right Honourable William, Earl of
Dartmouth. This poem pays tribute to the Earl of Dartmouth, a British
official in the colonies who Wheatley presumes is a sympathizer to the
American call for freedom from British rule:
Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the

morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway: (14)
Whether he is, in fact, a sympathizer is of little consequence to the

poems secondary discourse. Wheatleys praise for Williams recognition
of the colonists rightful desire for freedom is tied to her secondary nar-
rative of the Africans rightful desire for freedom: Should you, my lord,
while you peruse my Song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom
sprung (2021). Here again Wheatley interjects the self (herself) into a
work whose purpose is seemingly unrelated to her own personal narra-
tive. The focal shift from the colonists and the Honorable Williams
love of freedom to Wheatleys love of freedom opens the discourse to
the self-reflective memory that follows:
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch d from Africs fancd happy seat:
What pangs excrutiating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parents breast?
Steeld was that soul and by no misery movd
That from a father seizd his babe belovd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but
pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (2430)
Overlaying her own personal narrative of desire with that of the

colonists desire for freedom, Wheatley makes an unmistakable plea for
the cause of enslaved Africans, positing both their humanity and their
equality. In addition to the more political argument suggested in these
lines, Wheatley engages in the spiritual act of remembering and affirming
the self. Her brief autobiographical reflection in this poem represents a
rare moment in her extant writings. Here she remembers her homeland
beyond the Western construct of a generalized paganism. She offers a
more personal vision of a happy homeland where her loving parents
were left devastated by her abduction. Wheatley may not have actually
seen her parents faces as she was taken from her home, but through
memory and imagination she reconstructs and relives this moment. The
image of her father, suffering the loss of his babe beloved quells the
colonial discourse that painted Africans as a people with no meaningful
past. This account of Wheatleys early life reminds readers of her sadness
then. However, despite the cruel fate she endured at being snatchd
from her happy home and the subsequent suffering of her parents, the
memory of her childhood consoles and confirms her.
In addition to the scattered reflections on memory in her poetry,
carryovers of African spirituality are evident in repetitions. In particular,
Wheatleys recurring use of sun imagery and the prevalence of elegies

among her poetic works point to traditional African concepts of nature
and being. The recurrence of sun imagery in Wheatleys poetry has been
noted by a number of scholars, and much has been made of the fact
that all that she is known to have recalled to her white captors about
her native land is the fact that her mother poured out water before the
sun at his rising (Shields 1988, 241). While one can make the simplis-
tic connection between Wheatleys familiarity with Greek classics and
the early American elegiac tradition to explain her frequent use of sun
imagery and the significant number of her poems that focus on death,
John Shields argues that
the animistic emphasis on death among the people of her

native Africa may help to explain Wheatleys celebration of
death in her numerous elegies . . . [and] the fetishistic
emphasis on material objectswhere in the case of sun wor-
shipers the focal point is, of course, the object worshiped
may have so pressed itself upon Wheatleys memory as never
to have been far beneath her conscious mind; this memory
may indeed have served her as a powerful source of consola-
tion. (242)
Evidence of this lay in Wheatleys indiscriminate reference to sun

imagery: in her elegies, religious contemplations, and musings on
nature, Wheatley found a place for sun imagery.
In light of the common belief among precolonial Africans that
nature is the manifestation of Gods power, Wheatleys preoccupation
with Gods most marvelous natural wonderthe sunis understand-
able. The sun is sacred: sunshine is one of the expressions of Gods
providence, as held by some peoples like the Akan, Ankore, Igbira,
Kpelle and Ila . . . The Akan call God the Shining One . . . One of the
Ankore names for God means Sun, . . . For the Igbira, the sun symbol-
izes Gods benevolence, an expression of His providence (Mbiti 1970,
53). The connection drawn by Mbiti between Africans conception of
the sun and Gods benevolence is evinced in Wheatleys three meditative
poems, Thoughts on the Works of Providence, An Hymn to the
Morning, and An Hymn to the Evening. Thoughts on the Works of
Providence is ostensibly a meditation on the Christian God; however,
Wheatleys conflation of Christianitys God and the god of her African
homeland whose being is manifested in nature (in particular, the sun)
demonstrates the religious duality that Wheatley negotiates. Wheatley
combines terms that predate Mbitis similar use by more than two cen-
turies: just as Mbiti speaks of the Africans concept of the sun as provi-
dential and benevolent, Wheatley opens with imagery of the rising sun
and suggests that this is the sign of Gods benevolence:
Arise, my soul, on wings enrapturd, rise

To praise the monarch of the earth and
Skies,
Whose goodness and beneficence appear
As round its centre moves the rolling year,
Or when the morning glows with rosy charms,
Or the sun slumbers in the oceans arms:
Of light divine be a rich portion lent
To guide my soul, and favour my intent. (18)
God, the monarch of the earth and skies, is the center, the sun, around
which all life revolves: Adord for ever be the God unseen, / Which
round the sun revolves this vast machine (1112). This Wheatley reit-
erates within the first half of this 131 line poem:
Creation smiles in various beauty gay,

While day to night, and night succeeds to day:
That Wisdom, which attends Jehovahs ways,
Shines more conspicuous in the solar rays:
Without them, destitute of heat and light,
This world would be the reign of endless
Night. (2934)
As the poem progresses, we find that Wheatleys meditation on provi-

dence is a reflection on Gods manifestation through nature. While the
sun is the central sign of God, all of nature signals Gods presence and
goodness:
But see the sons of vegetation rise,

And spread their leafy banners to the skies.
All-wise Almighty Providence we trace
In trees, and plants, and all the flowry race;
As clear as in the nobler frame of man,
All lovely copies of the Makers plan. (6974)
God is Almighty Providence, the Maker, who is ever-present in the

world. Implicit in this worldview of God is the assumption that all is
divine, for everything is a manifestation of God. He is not the God of

Western Christianity, who is the creator of all but an entity distinct from
his creations. Wheatley sees God as creator of and existing in everything,
and his salvation is thus granted to everyone. God, who is Love,
which is Natures constant voice, has made the wonders of nature to
nourish all, to serve one genral end, / The good of Man . . . (12728).
The significance of the sun is again made evident in Wheatleys
corresponding contemplations on nature, An Hymn to the Morning
and An Hymn to the Evening. Though the two works reflect on two
contrasting parts of the day, both highlight the sun as central and pow-
erful. Morning is marked by the gentle west wind, the songs of birds,
and the early shade and protection offered by trees:
The morn awakes, and wide extends her rays,

On evry leaf the gentle zephyr plays;
Harmonious lays the featherd race resume.
Dart the bright eye, and shake the painted
Plume.
Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display
To shield your poet from the burning day: (712)
This pastoral scene is interrupted, however, by the emergence of the sun

in the eastern sky. The powerful sun will become the overwhelming
presence in the day, nullifying the protection offered by the early shade:
See in the east th illustrious king of day!

His rising radiance drives the shade away
But Oh! I feel his fervid beams too strong,
And scarce begun, concludes th abortive song. (1720)
The quest of the king of day, the sun, over the gentle zephyr may
also be read as a subversive assertion of the might of the East (Africa)
over the West (Anglo) in Wheatleys cosmology. It is a trope that she
repeats again in An Hymn to the Evening, as she contrasts the west
wind and the sun of the east:
Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main

The pealing thunder shook the heavnly
plain;
Majestic grandeur! From the zephyrs wing,
Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. (14)
While the evening is painted as a magnificent showcase of artistry

Through all the heavns what beauteous dies are spread! / But the west
glories in the deepest red (78)it is still the sun that Wheatley paints
as the controlling force. God, or the sun, gives the light by which
humans make their way through each day and draws the sable cur-
tains of the night, allowing for human solace and rest (1112). Con-
trasted against the eastern sun, which answers human need at both
sunrise and sunset, is the deepest red of the West that perhaps is syn-
onymous with the deep red of human blood. The picture of a West that
glories in a deep red hue is not so distinct from the picture of a West-
ern society whose wealth and glory are tied to the spilling of African
blood across thousands of ocean miles.
A physical entity and a metaphor for her eastern home, the sun is
a medium through which Wheatley connects with Africanity. By care-
fully converging her African-rooted reverence for the sun with her
adopted Christian concepts of an omnipotent God, Wheatley maintains
a lifeline to African spirituality. This is exemplified in the elegy, On the
Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770. Here, as in her other
elegies, Wheatley grounds her consolation in the Christian language of
the eternally blissful hereafter, but she also draws on her deeply rooted
concept of the divine sun to explore the meaning of life and death.
Focusing on death and the sorrow of loss, Wheatley calls on sun
imagery as a metaphor for both life and death. The sun signifies the
warmth and brightness that fills our carnal existence, and it also signi-
fies the light of the hereafter. God, as light, prevails in the carnal and
the spiritual world. While death may bring darkness and sadness, it also
brings the light of eternity. Therefore, Wheatley can represent the death
of a well-known preacher and slave sympathizer, George Whitefield, as
both a sunset and a bright vision. She speaks of Whitefield himself as
the sun that will no longer rise: Unhappy we the setting sun deplore, /
So glorious once, but ah! It shines no more (910). This picture of
death as the fading light is later eclipsed by the final image of Whitefield
in heaven. In the eternal hereafter, Whitefield, the setting sun, has been
restored to a shining light:
But, though arrested by the hand of death,

Whitefield no more exerts his labring breath,
Yet let us view him in th eternal skies,
Let evry heart to this bright vision rise; (4245)
The repeated connection Wheatley draws between death and the life-
sustaining sun is indicative of an African cosmology that sees death as
simply an entry to a new life medium. Just as the memory of her mother
in Africa greeting the rising sun in the mornings connected Wheatley to
her African homeland, the remembrance of the suns central power and
its eastern location may have symbolized her ultimate return to her spir-
itual home in the bliss beyond this world.
The connectedness of nature, God, and humanity in Wheatleys
poetry suggests an African spiritual view that survived the Middle Pas-
sage and Anglo-Christianity. Wheatleys understanding of a physical
world that God has created as a manifestation of his greatness, echoes
an African understanding of humankind as intricately connected to all
that God has created. This extends to Wheatleys concept of human
connectedness, which is exemplified by the many poems in her collec-
tion that honor those she deems part of her extended family and com-
munity. Her overwhelming concern for her friends as well as those she
admires from afar who have suffered the loss of loved ones or have
themselves succumbed to death is exemplified by the fact that more
than half the poems in her 1773 collection are addressed to individuals.
While many scholars have painted Wheatley as a young black
woman isolated from the larger slave community and the dominant
white society, Wheatleys poetry and her correspondences suggest the
contrary. She felt a particular connection to whites who were sympa-
thetic or who she thought capable of being sympathetic to African
rights and humanity. Hence, her eulogy to George Whitefield focuses
more on the ideas of Whitefield than the man himself. He prayd that
grace in evry heart might dwell (20), she says of Whitefield, crediting
him with having indiscriminately called sinners to Christ:
Take him my dear Americans, he said,

Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid:
Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you,
Impartial Saviour is his title due: (3235)
Whitefields recognition of the Africans equality in Gods eyes renders

him part of Wheatleys spiritual community. Wheatleys many eulogies
serve to connect her to a community of Christians and reflect an African
worldview that maintains death as a human transition that must be
acknowledged and experienced by the community. In traditional African
societies, the individual does not face death alone, but rather is attended
by members of the community to help in the crossing-over experience.
The death must then be followed by ceremony that celebrates the life of
the departed and the entrance into the world of the spiritual. While her
eulogies may be read for their Puritan-influenced notions of deliverance
from suffering to the heavenly hereafter, they just as powerfully trans-
formed traditional African spiritual rituals into written form. Her eulo-
gies then represent a written enactment of the African celebration of the
deadagain, an act that calls on the community to remember and to
celebrate.

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

sons Beloved, the fictional account of a black woman and a black com-
munity healing from the wounds of slavery. Through memory, the
protagonist, Sethe, travels in and out of time and experiences reliving
the past not only to understand and break free of its evils, but also to
grow from the strength and good that it offers. Similarly, in Their Eyes
Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurstons female protagonist, Janie,
finds her way to God not by sitting in the fine house that her husband
has provided, but rather by going to the marshlands of Florida, close to
nature and the community that allows her the freedom of self-discovery.
The juxtaposition of Wheatleys poetry and fictional works by black
women such as Morrison and Hurston highlight the fluid and dynamic
presence of an African cosmology among Americans of African descent.
The central place of African spirituality in contemporary works by
black women writers demonstrates that blacks have maintained tradi-
tional African worldviews not by accident, but rather, as Wheatley
shows us, through survival strategies that validate the self in a world
that is designed to deny and destroy it.
4
Any Womans Blues
Sherley Anne Williams and the Blues Aesthetic
MICHAEL A. ANTONUCCI
Too often, the blues are understood as a predominately male, rural, and
Southern mode of expression. Examined in this way, the wide range of
geographic, social, and material conditions that converge to create this
foundational mode of African American cultural production become
conflated and compressed into a critical shorthand. Placed within this
framework, solo male musicians represent the quintessence of blues
artistry; the so-called Country blues is privileged over urban forms, such
as the East Coast blues; and blues modes associated with the South, like
the Delta blues, are regarded as more authentic when compared with
Northern iterations, like the Chicago blues. As a result, even when it is
recognized as something more than a particular form of African Ameri-
can folk music, the blues impact as an aesthetic and cultural force is
limited, diminished and obscured by this myopia.
These traditional (mis)readings of the blues were largely offset in
groundbreaking investigations into the blues roots of African American
cultural production offered by Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, and Hous-
ton A. Baker, Jr. In a quarter century of debate and dialogue, these writ-
ers and their allies traded riffs in a high-profile, high-stakes exchange
concerning African American music and culture. Through works such
as Blues People (1963), Shadow and Act (1964), and Blues, Ideology
and Afro-American Literature (1984), Baraka, Ellison, and Baker recog-
nize the blues as the taproot of African American cultural production.
Producing a complex set of discursive harmonies, along with Albert
Murrays Stomping the Blues (1976) and Richard Powells The Blues
Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989), these writers collec-
tively established the idea that a blues aesthetic underwrites the great
67
works by the giants of Black music, including Charlie Bird Parker,

Ornette Coleman, and Ma Rainey. Yet, despite its brilliance, this
extended critical jam session represents just one portion of the extended
conversation about the blues and African American cultural expression
that is present in the written, performed, and visual work thoroughly
grounded in blues tradition.
As such, works by Baraka, Ellison, and Baker form the ostinato,
or powerful bass line, which sustains a wider critical discussion of the
blues. The rhythms driving their celebrated exchange are accented,
articulated, and further contextualized in creative and scholarly works
by other blues practitioners. For example, blues poetry by Jayne Cortez
and Sterling D. Plumpp, studies by Julio Finn and Daphne Duval Harri-
son, and visual art by Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold also demon-
strate the blues broad capacities as an expressive mode, beyond and
away from its musical manifestations. This expansion is seen, in partic-
ular, through the work of female artists and writers such as Cortez,
Harrison, and Ringgold, who point out how the critical work of
Baraka, Ellison, and Baker, and others is informed by a masculinized
vision of the blues. Works by these Black women reference powerful,
but overshadowed, styles, in both their choice of forms and subject
matter, thereby engaging these critical conversations concerning the
mode and its impact on both African American and American cultural
production in a new way, especially when examining the classic blues.
When it is recognized as a complex cultural phenomenon, the clas-
sic blues demonstrate an unrivaled capacity to transform vast stretches
of the American cultural landscape. As a musical form, this sophisti-
cated blues style provided Black women vocalists such as Ma Rainey,
Sippy Wallace, Trixie Smith, and Bessie Smith with an expressive vehicle
that harnessed the visual, aural, and gestural frequencies of the blues.
As they performed and recorded these blues in the early part of the
twentieth century, these women professionalized and industrialized
Black music. As Baraka points out in Blues People: socially, the classic
blues and the instrument styles that went with it represented the Negros
entrance into the world of professional entertainment and the assump-
tion of the psychological imperatives that must accompany such a phe-
nomenon (Jones 1999, 8182).
Baraka goes on to claim that just as the wandering primitive
blues singers had spread a certain style of blues-singing, the perform-
ance of classic blues served as models and helped standardize certain
Any Womans Blues 69
blues styles (Jones 1999, 83). The influence of classic blues, and the
women who sang it, on African American music and other forms of
expression has also been explored by Hazel Carby and Angela Davis.
Poetic works of Michael S. Harper, Lyn Lifshin, and Al Young, among
others, furhter augments these scholarly investigations of htis blues
mode. In sketches of classic blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Alberta
Hunter, and Ma Rainey these poets affirm the fundamental claim
Powell makes in The Blues Aesthetic: If one is knowledgeable about
[Black] Americaits history, its traditions, its geography, its verbal and
visual codes, its heroes, its demons and its ever changing styles, and its
spiritual dimensionsthen one knows the blues (Powell 1989, 23).
While measuring the aesthetic and ideological imprint that classic
blues has made on African American cultural production and American
culture at-large, scholars should be more mindful of the work of Sherley
Anne Williams. Through her work as both poet and theorist, Williams
emerges as a central figure in ongoing conversations about the blues
and blues aesthetic. In her first volume of published poetry, The Pea-
cock Poems (1975), Williams explores both form and content of the
classic blues. Her poetic examinations of the classic blues gains an addi-
tional measure of definition when read in conjunction with The Blues
Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry. Through this founda-
tional essay on the relationship between the blues and African American
poetic traditions, Williamss readers receive a critical guide for reading
the Peacock Poems as well as her later blues poetry in Some One Sweet
Angel Chile (1982).
The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry begins by

by stating that: blues is essentially an oral form meant to be heard
rather than read: and the techniques and structures used to such power-
ful purpose in the songs cannot always be transferred directly to literary
traditions within which Afro-American poets write (Harper and Stepto
1979, 123). Williams discusses the wide range of Black poets who use
the blues as a medium for experimenting with form, voice, and lan-
guage. Citing works by Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Nikki
Giovanni, Williams ultimately contends that these poets provide exam-
ples that indicate how the blues and blues-rooted poetry confront
experience and evoke a powerful response in the listener because of
[their] direct relationship to concepts and events in the collective experi-

ence (131). Williams thus establishes an important platform for
discussing the blues aesthetic impact on African American cultural
production.
Reading Williamss own poetic engagement with the blues through
the critical lens she develops in The Blues Roots of Contemporary
Afro-American Poetry illustrates the call-and-response relationship
between the blues and lived experience. In The Peacock Poems,
Williams initiates this dialogue by undertaking an extended conversa-
tion with classic blues recordings by Bessie Smith. Drawing on the fun-
damental blues impulses of improvisation and appropriation, Williams
contacts the Bessie Smith legacy with a series of riffs in which the poet
works and reworks several of Bessies songs, beginning in the first sec-
tion of The Peacock Poems, every woman is a victim of the feel bad
blues, too. Throughout her first poem, Any Womans Blues,
Williams offers a response to the calls sent by Bessie in two of her
songs, Any Womans Blues and Empty Bed Blues.
Williamss version of Any Womans Blues conveys a bluesy
ambivalence that mirrors the sort of side banter associated with the per-
formance of the classic blues singer. This becomes evident in the poems
first line: Blues Is Something to Think About. In the parenthetical line
that follows, (the last verse of One-Sided Bed Blues), Williams casu-
ally contextualizes the poems opening line as a reworking of Smiths
Empty Bed Blues. The simulated stage chatter continues with the
third line in the form of an italicized, one-line statement, and this is
the way that shit come down. With these lines serving as her introduc-
tion, Williams delivers a six-line stanza that appears on the page as a
fractured version of a three line, a-a-a blues verse.
My bed one-sided
from me sleepin alone so mucha the time.
My bed one-sided, now,
cause Im alone so mucha the time.
But the fact that its empty
show how this man is messin with my mind. (1975, 11)
At the same time as answering Bessie Smiths call, Williamss poem

offers a studied contrast to Smiths blues. While Smith sings what may
be described as a boastful lament, My man aint actin right / He stays
out late at night / and still he says he loves no one but me, (A. Davis
Any Womans Blues 71
1999, 260) Williams speaks directly to the contradictions associated

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

the Bessie Smith legacy by referring to Bessies Empty Bed Blues, a
recording that was released in two parts.
With her second version of Any Womans Blues, Williams
extends the call she made in the first version of the poem, with a slight
variation. By beginning this reprise of Any Womans Blues where the
first poem formally leaves off, she demonstrates the modular or inter-
changeable structure of the blues. Williams recognizes the poems series
of six-line stanzas as fractured versions of the a-a-a rhymes found in
both Bessies Empty Bed Blues and the first version of Any
Womans Blues. Through her use of spacing and juxtaposition,
Williams conveys the poetic tensions that underlie this version of the
poem: its solitary, nocturnal scene is founded upon restless movement.
Working with the blues aesthetic and its impulse toward dynamic
oppositions, she fuses these fragments together to establish the poems
pensive mood, evident in lines from the poems first stanza, Soft lamp
shinin / and me alone at night, and I left many peoples and places /
tryin not to be alone. In the second stanza, she repeats the line, and
pursues this exploration of the blues aesthetic. Presenting her own vari-
ations on a staple blues image, the circle in the sun she concludes the
stanza by writing Whats gone can be a window / a circle in the eye of
the sun (1975, 25).
Williams once more demonstrates the flexibility that underlies the
blues aesthetic. Through this stock image, which identifies the round
and embracing structure of the blues universe, the poet identifies an
opportunity to resolve the hostile circumstances confronting her. Look-
ing through the sun circle, she seeks and seemingly arrives at a new van-
tage point, which becomes clear as she stitches the poetic blues quilt in
the fourth stanza.
These is old blues

and I sing em like any woman do.
These the old blues
and I sing em, sing em sing em. Just like any woman do.
My life aint done yet.
Naw. My Song aint through. (25)
In these lines Williams declares that the desperate sense of loneliness

that she experiences in the first version of Any Womans Blues is not
a debilitating or all-consuming condition. Instead, the old blues
Any Womans Blues 73
becomes her purchase on the blues process of introspection and self-

definition that she conducts throughout The Peacock Poems.
Williamss Any Womans Blues cycle reaches its crescendo with
Blues is Something to Think About, the final poem in the every
woman section of The Peacock Poems that completes Williamss reply
to Bessie Smith. The poems title recycles and recontextualizes the open-
ing line of the first Any Womans Blues, and the speaker of the poem
assumes the on-stage persona of a classic blues singer. In the poems first
six lines, the speaker counts off the time signature of this blues poem.
As this bracketed block of poetic text provides the one-two / one-two-
three-four, it also introduces the rhymed lines that compose the cycles
last stanza, which the poet describes as
A traditional statement about

a traditional situation
with a new response
Or,
another ending for
One-Sided Bed Blues (37)
As such, this count off stanza presents the poem as an alternative to

the heartache and hardship that Smith invests in Empty Bed Blues.
The poets claim is validated when the final stanza of The Blues is
Something to Think About is compared to the closing verse of Empty
Bed Blues. In her recording of the songs second part, the Empress of
the Blues cautions her audience against these sort of blues by singing,
When you get good loving, never go and spread the news / Yeah, it
will double cross and leave you with them empty bed blues (A. Davis
1999, 263). When compared with Smiths song lines, Williamss new
response to a traditional situation, becomes apparent in the lines
concluding the every woman section of The Peacock Poems.
Im lonesome now
but I bet not be lonesome long
Yeah, Im lonesome now,
but I dont need to be lonesome too long:
You know, it take a do-right man
to make a pretty woman sing a lonesome song. (37)
Giving her readers something to think about, these lines effectively

revise conventional readings of the blues that understand this expressive
mode as little more than a condition defined by hopelessness and

despair. Ultimately, the poem serves as preparation for the unexpected
incidents that compose the verse found in the volumes second section,
I never neva thought Id sing this song.
II
Williams intensifies her experiment to revise and reconfigure familiar

patterns in the blues impulse in the second part of The Peacock Poems.
She does this by conducting an extended study in repetition and differ-
ence throughout I neva, neva thought Id sing this song, interspersing
six distinct poems in the course of the section. The poems are arranged
in such a way as to create an extended variation on twelve bar blues,
demonstrating its powerful flexibility while respecting both its form and
content. The piece begins with The Peacock Poems: 2 followed by
two different versions of Peacock Poems: 1. variations of this motif
course through The Peacock Poems: 3 and The Peacock Song. In
this way, Williams effectively presents her work so as to respond to the
call she herself issues.
Just as she does in the Any Womans Blues cycle, Williams con-
ducts an investigation of the blues formal elements while working with
issues and situations drawn from lived experience. She remains commit-
ted to a tenet of the blues aesthetic: keeping it real, demonstrated in
the content of the peacock poems that compose the neva, neva
thought section. For example, in The Peacock Poems: 1 the poet
recalls a series of moments from her childhood, fashioning them into a
three-canto blues meditation on her familys life and labors in the cotton
fields of Californias Imperial Valley. Formally, the poem evokes the
blues through its use of alternately rhymed four-line stanzas. Contextu-
ally, the poem reconfigures the geography of African American experi-
ence, the first canto of 1, the trimming of the feathers, when
Williams describes the end of a working day at harvest time:
then. Us all be tired. I be thinking bout

the beans Mamma cook. Jack
come with the bus. Daddy take
the baby and Mamma drag the sack. (43)
Williamss use of the African American vernacular for the

speakers voice in The Peacock Poems: 1, further grounds the poem
Any Womans Blues 75
in blues idiom. Through her use of phrases such as Us all be tired

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

patterns of Black women.
The poet supports her investigation into these notions of progress
in formal terms by using a non-linear time sequence throughout the
peacock poems. For example, the early memories she presents in The
Peacock Poems: 1 may be understood as providing the poetic cycle
with a point of origin. At the same time, this poems title, which desig-
nates it as the first in the series, also appears to establish it as the cycles
formal point of origin. However, sequentially, 1 is the second peacock
poem that appears within the neva, neva thought section. Questions
regarding the cycles origins or starting point are further complicated by
The Peacock Poems: 2, which precedes 1 by two poems. Despite
being the first poem in this section of Williamss collection, 2 opens
with the line This aint the beginning; maybe its the end (1975, 41).
In this way, the poet breaks conventional chronology, setting her pea-
cock poems within a blues-rooted, cyclic-temporal sequence. Her exper-
iment becomes more evident in The Peacock Poems: 3, as the poet
explores these formal possibilities by situating 3 two poems after 1
in the sequence.
Read within Williams larger poetic experiment with blues time
and place throughout The Peacock Poems, the content of 3 extends
the poets riff on the blues cyclic time structure:
You know its really cold

when you wake up hurtin
in the middle of the night
and the only one you know to
call is the operator and she
put you through to the police. (48)
The situation confronting the speaker in 3 is both a cold and lone-

some blues and a summary of her present circumstances. In this sense
the poem is neither a beginning nor an end. It could be described as an
extreme case of Bessies Empty Bed Blues. Lost and far from home,
the speaker feels a lack of the intimate contact with those people and
places that she claims to have left behind in the second version of
Any Woman Blues. Yet, even so, her situation is not as dire and des-
perate as it would seem.
When the twelve poems comprising the second section of The Pea-
cock Poems is read as a variation on the structure of the twelve-bar
Any Womans Blues 77
blues, the deep blues that Williams lays out in 3 gains a measure of
resolution in the second version of The Peacock Poems: 1. This is
seen as the poet positions the 1 refrain just two poems after 3. In
this way it responds to the call that her speaker puts out in The Pea-
cock Poems: 3. As she does in the first version of 1, Williams
grounds her speakers circumstances and conflicts within a larger sense
of African American collective experience:
A ship
A chain
A distant land
A whip
A pain
A white mans hand
A sack
A stove
A corn husk bed
Couldnt bend Greagramas back.

Never lowered Gramas head. (57)
With these lines, the poet contextualizes the emotional and existential
despair she examines in 2 and 3. The heartbreak and loneliness she
expresses in this poem are examined against and grounded in historical
realities confronted by her ancestors. The resilience of Grama and
Grea grama, who emerge neither bent nor bowed by the harsh expe-
riences of slavery and its legacy, affirms the speaker and gives her
strength to continue. In this way the poet employs a time-tested blues
strategy. She seeks a greater sense of her own circumstances by interro-
gating these collective experiences and situations. Drawing on the
strength of her grandmothers, the speaker is able to sing a song, which
she neva, neva thought she would sing: a song with a power sum-
moned through the poets evocation of her female ancestors.
III
This song ultimately manifests as The Peacock Song, the final poem
in the second section of The Peacock Poems. Like the other poems in
the peacock cycle, it presents a variation on the standard a-a-b blues
lyrics. This is readily seen in its opening stanza, composed of eight irreg-
ularly broken blues lines, in which the speaker once again assumes the
persona of a classic blues singer on stage. As such, she furnishes the
audience with an account of her reasons for singing the blues, ground-
ing this testimony in the blues idiom by employing vernacular African
American dialect:
They dont like to see you with

yo tail draggin low so I
try to hold mines up high. No
one want to know where you go-
in til after you been and
even though I told em aint
nobody heard. How a peacock
gon speak: I got no tongue. (67)
With these lines Williamss speaker offers a set of observations on

the blues condition. By presenting the situation as one in which no /
one want to know where you go- / in til after you been, she addresses
the contradictory and seemingly impossible circumstances that converge
to inform the both/and proposition that sustains the blues. In this
way the poet directs her attention to the logic of the blues that would
seem to defy the reason inherent to the most basic thinking (for exam-
ple, I had to laugh to keep from crying or Been down so long, it
seems like up to me). Approaching the blues in this manner ultimately
leads the poet to ask the question, How a peacock / gon speak: I got
no tongue. As a result, Williams establishes a critical connection
between her classic blues singer persona and the peacock image that she
explores in the course of her poetic cycle. As she conjures the plumed
and beaded costumes that Bessie Smith and other classic blues singers
wore on stage, the poet seems to embrace the incongruity and ambigu-
ity that underlie the classic blues experience. In this way the poet moves
into the blues space where incongruity and dissonance is not simply tol-
erated, but promoted as a means of generating creative energy.
This is made especially evident when the condition of Williamss
peacock singerfundamentally mute and inarticulatebecomes further
compounded by recalling that the vibrant, colored feathers, which the
poet evokes throughout the cycle, is the distinguishing characteristic of
the male peafowl. This inherent gender discrepancy between the image
Williams sustains throughout the cycle and the female persona of her
Any Womans Blues 79
classic blues singer ultimately brings an additional layer of performance

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

was trying to make em feel
that I need a little heart
rubbin, soul scrubbin this is
real. But if Im a peacock
my featherss sposed to cover
all hurts and if you want to
stay one then you got to keep
that tail from draggin so mines
is always held up high. (67)
Contextualized within Williamss peacock imagery, classic blues

emerges as a musical form that is as complex as any in the Black music
continuum. Throughout her peacock cycle, the poet presents the classic
blues and their variations on the changing same as an expressive
mode fully grounded in the organic experiences of African American
life. Williamss poetry successfully makes this case by bringing attention
to the performative aspects of the classic blues as well as its incumbent
layers of intrigue. With these poems she asserts that the classic blues are
as unpredictably fluid as Robert Johnsons Delta blues or every bit as
voluble as the blues rooted-sound experiments of the Art Ensemble of
Chicago. Williamss peacock cycle delivers a set of detailed sketches of
the blues terrain. Her poetic renderings ultimately come into sharper
focus when read in conjunction with the poems in the lines converge
here, the final section of The Peacock Poems.
The verse Williams includes in lines identifies her speaker as
having gained a new perspective on her life and the events that have
shaped it. Poems found in this section of The Peacock Poems demon-
strate the greater sense of clarity the poet has attained in confronting
the emotional upheavals of the One-Sided Bed Blues and tracing the
complications of family through African American experience in the
peacock cycle. No longer a victim of the feel blues too and having
sung the song she neva, neva thought she would, the poet delivers the
volumes final set of blues-rooted poetry, effectively spotlighting the full
grandeur of her plumage. Williams continues to riff and generate varia-
tions on the established blues forms in poems such as Quartet, 1
Poem 2 Voices a Song and I Sing This Song for Our Mothers.
Through her use of blues conventions such as repetition, difference, and
call-and-response, in addition to a full-range of syncopated cadences,
Williams locates herself in the here and now of a bluescape. Poems in
Any Womans Blues 81
lines demonstrate a departure from the sense of spatial and temporal

displacement that cloud her speakers vision in the first two sections of
the volume.
The command of the blues that the poet demonstrates throughout
lines becomes especially apparent in Communion in a Small
Room, an extended commentary on the aesthetic possibilities of the
blues. Broaching a range of topics surrounding the economy of the
blues, including origin, exchange, and theft, the poem offers another
way of discussing the blues as an expressive mode. Communion pro-
vides a bookend to the conversation regarding blues and blues-rooted
expression, which Williams begins in the opening section of the volume
through her dialogue with Bessie Smith. This appears in the poems
opening epigraph, attributed to poet Michael S. Harper:
for sherley:
whose epigraph I stole
to make the bluesblue! (84)
The trajectory of Williamss The Peacock Poems may be understood as

transposing a blues-rooted conversation about poetics into a poetic con-
versation about the blues.
Williams opens Communion with the single line, I give it to
you Michael. Her speaker answers Harpers epigraph, effectively
returning the credit and attribution he had hoped to give back to her.
However, according to the poet, it is not enough to use the blues as a
vehicle in some form of literary game. After undergoing the transforma-
tion of the peacock poems, she cautions her interlocutor that using the
blues to perform literary parlor tricks, which she describes in the poem
as the soft explosive, wow! / the silent yesyes, speak, neither honors
the form nor authenticates the blues. But perhaps more importantly, she
says, That dont make it real (87).
Williams repeats the line, I give it to you Michael before more
commentary on Harpers epigraph: My / words but they dont answer
your / call. After repeating I give it to you Michael once more, she
explains that I am not, / your audience. / The line converge here,
spread. The poet suggests that theft is ultimately impossible within
the wide range of possibilities afforded by the blues. Occasionally, she
positions lines converge in a particular spot and then spread in
their own directions. Once again, she repeats I give it to you
Michael to underscore the spirit of generosity that is a foundational
element of the blues. She continues and further qualifies her conception
of the blues as common property: We live in that pattern, are / us
now; are all. The final line punctuates Williamss belief in the blues as
common currency of African American culture and experience: I give
it to you Michael (87).
Communion in a Small Room concludes with the poet deliver-
ing a one-word response to Harpers epigraph. After simply writing,
No, she goes on to qualify her response in a parenthetic statement that
effectively summarizes Williamss understanding of the blues aesthetic in
African American poetry and Black expressive culture at large:
That aint
Truth. It has always been ours:
Speech verifies communion
between living and living
quick and dead in this small room. (87)
Williamss final peacock poem stands as part of her tribute riff on the
classic blues. She provides both her audience and interlocutorsfrom
Bessie Smith to Michael S. Harperwith a means of refreshing common
assumptions that frame discussion of the blues, in terms of both forms
and content. By doing so, she recognizes the blues as something other
than a mode of African American folk music and offers her verse as a
revised approach for engaging this dynamic mode of expression.
Part III
Critical Revisions
5
Through the Mirror
Re-Surfacing and Self-Articulation in

Linda Hogans Solar Storms
ELLEN L. ARNOLD
Critical consideration of the work of Native American women writers is

often segregated within literary studies, examined primarily in relation
to work by other Native writers or ethnic women writers. However, as
Osage poet Carter Revard demonstrates in his essay Herbs of Heal-
ing, there is much to be gained by bringing Native writers into cross-
cultural literary conversations; the new regions of minority
literature, he says, are lands of plenty, filled with herbs of healing
that can restore silenced histories and perspectives to mainstream litera-
tures and criticism (1998, 162). By bringing Chickasaw writer Linda
Hogans 1995 novel Solar Storms into dialogue with Margaret
Atwoods 1972 feminist classic Surfacing, I hope to illuminate Hogans
complex project of cultural recovery and healing. Hogan praises
Atwoods Surfacing as one of the novels that carried the [feminist]
movement forward, but she also criticizes mainstream feminists ten-
dencies to turn to traditions other than their own, . . . attempting to
impose themselves into the world of old and complex spiritual tradi-
tions, simplifying and diminishing the religions they seek to gain
strength from (1986, xii). In Solar Storms, Hogan again pays tribute to
Atwoods novel in significant resonances of narrative structure, setting,
imagery, and theme; at the same time, Solar Storms expands Atwoods
important ecofeminist insights to include a postcolonial perspective,
providing a mirror to Surfacing that exposes and revises its appropria-
tion of Native traditions and its reinscription of Western culture/nature
dualisms.
85
Parallels between Solar Storms and Surfacing are myriad and com-
pelling. Both novels tell the story of a young womans return to a child-
hood home in Canada in search of a missing parent and healing from
personal traumas. Each alienated protagonist undertakes a journey into
wilderness that allows repressed memories and internalized self-destruc-
tive narratives to surface and be integrated into subjectivity, bringing
her into spiritual alliance with the natural world. Set in the early 1970s,
a period of environmental destruction accelerated by the damming of
Canadas rivers to produce hydroelectric power, both novels implicate
Western constructions of gender and nature that sustain national histo-
ries of violence against women and earth. Each traces this violence to
deeper dismemberments of mind and spirit from body that originate in
languagein the split of signifier from signified that also separates self
from other. Each explores this gap of alienation in terms and images
that echo modern psychologys assumption of a preconscious unity
with the environmentthe original union of the fetus with the
mothers body, the infants sense of continuity with environmentthat
is lost as the ego crystallizes out of an . . . undifferentiated matrix
(Berman 1990, 25). Jacques Lacan names this process the mirror
stage: the infant recognizes its image in a reflective surface or experi-
ence that provides the child a sense of itself as a body perceived as an
other by someone else. This moment of self objectification initiates the
emergence from the Imaginarythe presemiotic realm of identification
with images in which there is no sense of a unitary selfinto the sym-
bolic order of prescribed social/sexual roles. The acquisition of language
opens an irrevocable breach between the self as signifier and the image
of the self as a signified, sealing the self off from the Imaginary (1977).
The resulting split subject, as Terry Eagleton puts it, can never have
any direct access to reality and is doomed to an endless quest for lost
unity (1983, 167).
Both Atwood and Hogan acknowledge the emergence of self-con-
sciousness and its alienating effects in language, but refract the Lacan-
ian scheme through the perspectives of gendered and/or racialized
others and extend the mirroring process to include relationships with
non-human nature. Both posit the possibility of healing the wounds of
alienation and reexperiencing unity of self with world by plunging into
the gap that separates self and not-self, signifier and signified. For
Atwoods protagonist, this recovery occurs through a regressive experi-
ence that many critics term psychotic: the repressed material of her
Through the Mirror 87
unconscious mind pushes at her until it finally erupts, immersing her in

the Imaginary and freeing her (temporarily) from the naming, severing
powers of language and the discourses that define her as object and
victim. Hogan, on the other hand, suggests that a recovery of original
participation, of the experience of continuity with creation, can occur
within and through language. For Hogan, the processes of mirroring
that open the gap of alienation can also participate in closing it. In
retelling Atwoods journey of female recovery and reintegration from
the point of view of the indigenous people of Canada who haunt the
margins of Surfacing, Hogan brings to life the vital indigenous worlds
and living oral traditions that are silenced in Atwoods novel. Though
space does not permit a comprehensive comparison of the novels, by
exploring the two protagonists parallel encounters with water, mirrors,
and ancient Indian pictographs, I examine some of the ways Hogan
rewrites Western discourses about language and subjectivity reproduced
in Surfacing, making visible the complex web of interconnections that
link humans to world and signs to referent that Surfacing ultimately
denies.
SURFACING: THE SPLIT SUBJECT
Surfacing recounts the return of a young Canadian woman to the

Northern Quebec lake island summer home of her childhood, accompa-
nied by her lover Joe and their married friends, Anna and David, in
search of her missing father. The clues to his disappearance (and to the
unnamed protagonists mysterious emotional anesthesia)sketches of
ancient Indian rock paintings left by her fatherlead the narrator deep
into memory and self-confrontation. Her initial encounter with the lake
mirrors her alienation, the diminishment of her creativity and agency:
she stands shivering, seeing my reflection and my feet down through it,
white as fish flesh on the sand, till finally being in the air is more
painful than being in the water, and I bend and push myself reluctantly
into the lake (Atwood 1998, 72). Three days later, the narrator takes a
second, deeper dive into the lake in search of the pictographs her father
was cataloging. Originally painted on cliffs above the lake, the pic-
tographs have been submerged by the power companys damming.
Her fathers drawings at first seemed to the narrator lunatic,
evidence of his insanity. She is particularly disturbed by an unrecogniz-
able figureits body was long, a snake or a fish; it had four limbs or
arms and a tail and on the head were two branched horns, like an
animal viewed lengthwise, more human turned upright (Atwood
1998, 101). Marie-Francoise Guedon identifies this figure as Mis-
shipeshu, the Great Lynx or horned snake, a powerful water spirit rec-
ognized by the Ojibwas (1983, 94). An anthropological essay in her
fathers papers explains the pictographs as symbolic markers of the
abodes of powerful or protective spirits, reassuring the narrator with
academic prose breath[ing] reason (Atwood 1998, 103). Yet, she real-
izes her fathers obsessive measuring and charting have left a gap,
something not accounted for (104) that compels her to locate the
paintings. At this point, the narrators focus shifts: it was no longer his
death but my own that concerned me (107). She has begun to under-
stand that the fear that I wasnt alive, which drove her as a child to
pierce her skin with pen nibs and compass points . . . instruments of
knowledge, originated in her education into objective reasoning as the
only valid source of knowledge. The tiny wounds that stippled the
insides of [her] arms . . . like an addicts (112) write on her flesh the
history of her anesthetization, the legacy of the eighteenth-century ratio-
nalists her father so admired (34). Severed from her bodys knowledge
the intuitive, emotional identification with other living beingsshe is
also denied autonomy as a woman. (Even the weeds in her fathers
garden were burned, like witches for defying the patriarchal order
[77].) Her search for the pictographs becomes a quest for an/other
source of knowledge and power from which to exercise agency.
Poised for her second dive, the narrator sees, My other shape . . .
in the water, not my reflection but my shadow, foreshortened, outline
blurred, rays streaming out from around the head (Atwood 1998,
142), an image that links her to the pictographs and their mysterious
power. Now the lake reveals to her the potential for transformation,
and she plunges into her own shadow, her repressed memories, emo-
tions, and generativity. This time, the underwater world teems with
living fish, below which floats a darker discovery: It was there, but it
wasnt a painting. . . . It was below me, . . . a dark oval trailing limbs
(143). The god she seeks merges with the drowned body of her father,
and finally with the memory, submerged beneath an invented history, of
the aborted baby she sacrificed to the wishes of a married lover. She sur-
faces to a flood of memories and her first acknowledgment of complic-
ity, through her failure to resist, with the killersthe husbands,
doctors, hunters, sport fishermen, and developers who take life without
respect (146)and feeling . . . begin[s] to seep back into her body
(147). Accepting the forgotten Indian gods and their sacred places
. . . where you could learn the truth (146) as a gift from her father, the
narrator understands they are gods of the head, insufficient to protect
her. She must locate her deceased mothers gift to her as well: Not only
how to see but how to act (154).
Returning to the cabin, the narrator resumes her study of the
childhood scrapbooks her mother had saved. Previously, seeking
where I had come from or gone wrong, she had found her scrap-
book of paper ladies cut from magazines, images of the sterile roles
from which her father tried to avert her through education (but which
she, a commercial artist, continues to reproduce in her lifeless romanti-
cized illustrations of fairy tales). An earlier scrapbook contains her
drawings of brightly painted Easter eggs and laughing rabbits, grass
and trees, normal and greena vision of Heaven (Atwood 1998,
91) that denies the violence of the world war occurring in the back-
ground of her childhood, violence so exuberantly expressed in her
brothers drawings of explosions of red and orange, soldiers dismem-
bering in the air (90). Reflected in this archaeology of images are the
essential dualisms of Western culturethe splitting of body and mind,
creativity and destruction, nurturing and powerthat socialize chil-
dren into killers who objectify themselves and others and glorify vio-
lence or disguise it with discourses of reason and romance. Finally, the
narrator discovers the oldest scrapbook and in it, her mothers gift: her
drawing of herself as an unborn baby gazing out of her mothers belly
at a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail.
The Christian God she endowed with the advantages of the Devil
(159) merges with the Indian god of the pictograph, each refusing the
severance of human from animal, evil from good, power from emotion.
The narrator understands that to recover the true vision of the child,
who knows everything is alive (131), she must immerse [her]self in
the other language (159) of the animal body, which knows what to
eat without nouns (151).
In a ritualized act of animal intercourse with Joe, the narrator
imagines herself impregnated, her lost child surfacing within me, for-
giving me (Atwood 1998, 165). Though many critics interpret Surfac-
ing as a condemnation of abortion (for example, Alaimo 2000, 142), I
agree with Carol Christ that the abortion was wrong for her because
she did not choose it herself (1980, 52). That the abortion and
conception of new life are symbolic of the sacrifice and rebirth of the
narrators agency is supported by her awareness that the fetus is only a
possibility, perhaps not real (Atwood 1998, 197). The reclaiming of

agency enables the self-forgiveness that prepares her for her own
rebirth, a visionary experience in the womb of earth, which is framed
by two key mirror scenes.
The power of the mirror to entrap women as objects is evident to
the narrator as she watches Anna apply makeup with a compact: She
opens it, unclosing her other self . . . a seamed and folded imitation of a
magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an
imitation, the original nowhere (Atwood 1998, 169). By a similar
trick done with mirrors, the narrator herself was cut in two, made
nothing but head (109). Maneuvering her companions into leaving
her alone on the island, she grieves her parents deaths, crying finally,
its the first time, though she realizes she is watching [herself] doing
it (176). To rejoin head and body, she must act to close the distance
between specular image and somatic experience. She turns the mirror in
her parents cabin to the wall, resolving: I must stop being in the
mirror. . . . Not to see myself but to see. I reverse the mirror so its
toward the wall, it no longer traps me (18081).
Destroying or renouncing everything that identifies her as
humanmost importantly, the speech that divides us into fragments
(Atwood 1998, 147)the narrator submerges herself a third time in the
lake, leaving the false body of her clothing behind in a ritual act of
purification (183). Baptized in the multilingual water (184), she
merges with place: The animals have no need for speech, why talk
when you are a word. I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning. . . . I am
a place (187). Her subjectivity absorbed into a presemiotic state of
participation with her environment, she has access to the past (195).
Through visions of her parentsher mother in wordless communion
with jays; her father gazing at her with yellow . . . wolfs eyes,
become the irrational, animal thing he tried to keep at bay with
measurements and fences, not understanding that logic excludes love
(19293)and the dream that follows of the two of them paddling
away together, gone finally, back into the earth (194), the narrator
accepts their deaths and joins within herself their separate gifts, her
fathers reason and her mothers silent, embodied capacity to connect, to
love. Afterwards, sitting on the shore, she muses:
From the lake a fish jumps.

An idea of a fish jumps.
A fish jumps, carved wooden fish with dots painted on

the sides, no antlered fish thing drawn in red on cliffstone,
protecting spirit. It hangs in the air suspended, flesh turned
to icon, he has changed again, returned to the water. . . .
I watch it for an hour or so, then it drops and softens,
the circles widen, it becomes an ordinary fish again. (193)
The narrator resumes the power of human signification to name the fish
object or god. Symbol, sliding signifier, the fish in its essential existence
below the surface of water remains inaccessible to her, and language
remains the impermeable boundary dividing the real from representa-
tion, animal from human, unconscious from conscious mind. Though
she has re-identified emotionally with the lives hunted and fished for
sport, has made the crucial connection between their objectification and
her own as a woman, the animals represent for her the pure, indifferent
power of corporeality and instinct.
Reentering civilization, the narrator reexamines her reflection:
I turn the mirror around: in it theres a creature neither

animal nor human, furless, only a dirty blanket, shoulders
huddled over into a crouch, eyes staring blue as ice from the
deep sockets; the lips move by themselves. This was the
stereotype, straws in the hair, talking nonsense or not talking
at all. To have someone to speak to and words that can be
understood, their definition of sanity. . . . I laugh, and a
noise comes out like something being killed: a mouse, a bird?
(Atwood, 1998, 196)
The narrator again sees herself as other, the signifying I observing in

the glass a creature unable to signify. Knowing that if she refuses her
place in the symbolic order she will be named insane, she rejects the
animal in herself, caught in a solipsistic split subjectivity that casts the
natural world as the mute medium of her transformation. She reclaims
her humanity with a murderous laugh of self-recognition and reenters
[her] own time (197). If I go with him we will have to talk, she says
of returning to the city with Joe; For us its necessary, the intercession
of words (198). Communication will enable a kind of balance between
her logic and abstraction, and Joes furry body and inarticulate emo-
tion. Only the fetus, a time-traveler in symbiotic unity with the
mothers body, is whole in itself, containing both the gills of the fish (the
participatory power of the horned water god) and the word furrows
in the brain (197). The self-consciousness that language makes possible
remains for her what distinguishes humans from the animals, who
dont have pleasure (165) and have no need for speech. (187)
Atwood challenges the Lacanian claim that entrance into language
forever precludes the experience of original unity. Read not as psychosis
but as a carefully planned ritual of immersion (outlined in the anthro-
pological essay in her fathers papers), the narrators disintegration
reconnects her to a natural ground of power outside patriarchal dis-
courses that define women and nature as objects for consumption, and
allows her to construct a new narrative of self in alliance with the natu-
ral world in which she can refuse to be a victim (Atwood 1998, 197).
However, the indeterminacy of the novels ending serves to reinforce the
narrators split subjectivity and its roots in the boundary that is lan-
guage. Poised at the edge of the woods, she listens to Joe call her name,
considers the return to civilization, but does not reply. The novel ends:
The lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking and giving nothing
(199). The experience of original participation, the other language
that mediated her recovery of memory and feeling, are possible only
outside history, in the isolation of relatively untouched nature, not in
the bulldozed, diseased world that has been made by men (like Anna)
into an imitation of other places . . . themselves imitations (2324).
Even though the narrator has come to understand her victimization as
part of what Stacy Alaimo terms a matrix of domination formed by
capitalism, imperialism, sexism, and the exploitation of nature (2004,
141), the novel ultimately abandons nature to silence (142). Rein-
scribing the separation of nature and culture, Surfacing thus, as Alaimo
observes, becomes determined by the very matrix of forces it
denounces (142). In the process, Atwood also reinscribes the associa-
tion of Canadas indigenous inhabitants with a mute and threatened
wilderness, reproducing the objectification of both nature and Native
on which the colonization of the New World rests.
SOLAR STORMS: THE MULTIPLE SELF
Set in 197273 in the Great Lakes boundary waters region and northern
Quebec, home to indigenous Crees, Anishnabeg (Ojibwas), and descen-
dants of immigrants brought by the fur trade (including an invented
tribe Hogan names the Fat Eaters), Solar Storms gives voice to the
First Nations people who are nearly vanished in Atwoods text. Surfac-
ings single impoverished Indian family are unidentified by name or
nation and described in naturalistic, mythic terms: the father, wizened
and corded like a dried root, and the mother with her gourd body
appeared with their children on the lake every year in blueberry season,
condensing as though from air and disappearing . . . as though they
had never been there (Atwood, 1998, 86). The narrator only vaguely
acknowledges the violence of European colonization in her observation
that the government had corralled the others and put them some-
where else, and in her realization that they must have hated us
(8586). Absent from the novel is any reference to the groundswell of
cultural recovery and resistance that produced the American Indian
Movement and highly visible political actions in the U.S. and Canada
during the 1960s and early 1970s, in the midst of which Solar Storms is
set. Inspired by successful indigenous resistance to the James Bay Hydro-
Quebec Project (see, for example, Churchill 1993), Solar Storms rein-
serts living Native histories into North American history, seeking to heal
the wounds of conquest by deconstructing the discourses that perpetuate
colonialism and indigenizing themrewriting them within more
complex contexts that include tribal worldviews. Hogan thus resituates
Surfacings narrative of isolated individualism within a communal per-
spective that includes all the living inhabitants of specific place, effec-
tively relocating culture within nature. (See Arnold [2001, 2004] for
similar explorations of Solar Storms interventions into Western scien-
tific and religious discourses.)
Ecofeminist critic Patrick Murphy names Surfacing the first of
the current generation of ecofeminist novels to challenge the white
male canon of American nature writing by making associations between
the oppression of women and land (1995, 26, 31). Yet, in many ways
Surfacing remains within the American narrative tradition of the alien-
ated male hero who escapes to uninhabited wilderness for renewal
and self-discovery and returns, fortified, to civilization. On the other
hand, Murphy observes, Native American women write from a cultur-
ally based relationship with nature that is not alienated but inhab-
itory and calls into question the ontological authenticity of nature
writing based on Cartesian dualisms and alienation models of human-
nature relationships (126, 130). Hogan, like Atwood and post-struc-
turalists such as Lacan, locates alienation and the dualistic systems that
perpetuate it in language. The violence of Western cultures, Hogan
argues in Dwellings, is a result of the broken covenant between
humans and world that originates in abstraction, in the abyss

between signifier and signified. In tribal oral traditions, however, she
says, An object and its name were not separated. One equaled the
other (Hogan 1995, 5253). The words that separate us from contigu-
ity with the world can also return us to it, as Hogan spells out in her
essay Who Puts Together (1983, 172): The author puts together a
disconnected life through a step-by-step process of visualization, a
seeing that enables character and reader to understand the dynamic
interrelatedness in which all things exist and which heals (169). By
unify[ing] the inner and the outer (172), story can help humans redis-
cover the ability to see into the abyss between signifier and signified and
thus remake the covenant that binds word to world. In her memoir
Woman Who Watches Over the World, Hogan echoes: Words . . . are
the defining shape of a human spirit. . . . Without them, there is no
accounting for the human place in the world (Hogan 2001, 657).
Unlike Atwood or Lacan, however, for Hogan language is not exclusive
to humans, and the human place is co-constructed in all the lan-
guages of particular places.
Solar Storms traces the return of mixed-blood teenager Angela
Jensen to the boundary waters area in search of the mother who aban-
doned her. She also seeks her lost history, for which she, like Surfacings
narrator, has substituted a fabricated story. Raised in white foster homes
in the U.S., Angela locates her great-grandmother Agnes Iron through
stolen court records. At her birthplace, Adams Rib, she is awaited by
not only three generations of maternal grandmothers and a community
that has mourned her absence for eleven years, but also by the place
that holds her life (Hogan 1995b, 23). Resuming her birth name,
Angel, she finds herself traveling toward [her]self like rain falling into a
lake (26), suggesting a reunion of self and world that is not disjunctive,
like Surfacings narrators, but cyclical, like different forms of water
coming together. The linear narrative that occurs over a few days time in
Surfacing is in Solar Storms embedded within a full turn of the seasons
and a nonlinear structure that circles on itself, opening and closing with
the same memory: Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great grand-
mother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze (11); Even now
the voice of Agnes floats toward me (350). Told as a collective memory
in multiple voices, Solar Storms reorders and expands the key events of
Surfacing to tell a more contextualized and multifaceted story.
Angel is welcomed home by Agnes and Agness ancient mother

Dora-Rouge (descendants of the Fat Eaters), who began the process of
storytelling that called [Angel] home (Hogan 1995b, 48). From
them she learns parts of her personal story, histories of the environ-
mental devastation brought by the fur trade, and narratives that teach
her how to remake her place within this broken worldof the cre-
ation of the world by Beaver, of times when humans and animals
could talk and were bound by a covenant . . . that they would care
for one another (35). This ancient pact, broken by the pressures of
colonization, is kept alive in contemporary narratives as well, such as
the story of Agness life-long bond with the blue glacier bear she killed
to free from captivity. Having laid a groundwork that will sustain her
through the next stage of her re-creation, the two women send Angel to
Bush, who had helped care for Angels disturbed mother Hannah and
the infant Angel. A displaced woman of mixed blood, Bush inhabits the
borders between cultures, between water and land; a woman who puts
things together (Hogan 1995b, 95), Bush helps Angel piece together
the fragments of her life story. On Fur Island, navel of the world (22),
surrounded by a wilderness that is always watching, wanting indark-
ness stared [Angel] in the eyes; vines reach into the cabin, trying to
turn everything back to its origins (73)Angel moves with Bush
gradually back in time to the story of her birth.
Angels stay on Fur Island is framed by mirror scenes analogous to
those in Surfacing. When Angel first comes to Adams Rib, she is, like
Surfacings narrator, trapped in self-objectification: I cared only about
what I looked like, she recalls (147); I was nothing more than empti-
ness covered with skin (74). Similarly marked by self-made tattoos
crosses and a boys initials (26), signs of patriarchal historiesAngel
also bears scars inflicted by her mother. Soon after her arrival, she stud-
ies her face in Agness bathroom mirror:
Half of it . . . looked something like the cratered moon. I

hated that half. The other side was perfect and I could have
been beautiful in the light of earth and sun. Id tried desper-
ately all my life to keep the scars in shadows. Even then,
before the mirror, I tried not to see them, and I wondered
what Agnes saw, or Dora-Rouge, when they looked at my
angular cheekbones and large eyes, the red hair so unusual
above dark skin. (34)
Distanced from herself by the internalization of dominant cultural

values, Angel is further split by her mixed blood, the history of con-
quest written on her body. When a visitor questions her about the origin
of her scars, Angel accidentally cuts herself, and the sight and smell of
blood bring to the surface repressed, embodied memories of violence.
She retreats to the bathroom, where suddenly, I hit the mirror with my
hand, hit the face of myself. . . . Glass shattered down into the sink and
broken pieces spread across the floor. . . . I heard a voice yelling Damn
it! and it was me, my own voice, raging and hurt (52).
Afterwards, Angel cries for the first time. Like Surfacings narra-
tor, she is pushed by the emergence of submerged memories to an
expression of grief that allows healing to begin. But instead of turning
the mirror away to escape its constructions, Angel smashes her reflec-
tion, collapsing the gap between her internal self and external image,
between signifier and signified (I . . . hit the face of myself). The
shards of mirror in the sink hold broken reflections of my face
(Hogan 1995b, 53), reproducing her fragmenting. At the same time, the
iron-rich water that stains the sink red (and everything else at Adams
Rib) mirrors the blood she has shed, the blood that links her to her
people, to earth and water, holding those fragments within a larger con-
nectedness. Later, Angel recalls:
I began to form a kind of knowing at Adams Rib. I began to

feel that if we had no separate words for inside and out and
there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin,
you would see me. What would meet your eyes would not be
the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of
violence. . . . You would see the dust of sun, the turning of
creation taking place. (54)
Having broken through the surfaces that separate her inner and outer
worlds and divide her against herself, Angel opens to the processes of
re-creation.
In Bushs house, Angel has only a tiny pocket mirror in which she
continues to imagine what Id look like without scars. Eventually it
shatters as well, and finally, she recalls, I had no choice but to imagine
myself, along with the parts and fragments of stories, as if it all was
part of a great brokenness moving . . . toward wholeness (Hogan
1995b, 85). As I have argued elsewhere (Arnold 2001), the reduction of
Angels objectified reflection to smaller and smaller fragments results,

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

resistance to colonial and neocolonial exploitation requires that
women be restored to positions of power (1997).
Angel learns to conceptualize her personal history and identity in
terms of a larger history: My beginning was Hannahs beginning, one
of broken lives, gone animals, trees felled and kindled. Our beginnings
were intricately bound up in the history of the land (Hogan 1995b,
96). Hannahs body was a meeting place . . . where time and history
and genocide gather (101), her skin scarred by the signatures of tor-
turers (99), which Angel and her half-sister Henriet (11718) repro-
duce by cutting their own skins. This contextual knowledge (together
with the physical and emotional strength she acquires in interaction
with her environment) enables Angel to read her own scars as both a
record of violence and proof . . . that there is healing (125). Like the
protagonist of Surfacing, she redefines herself as a survivor. However,
for Angel this new narrative is not preparation for a return to human
society, but context for a passage deeper into wilderness, in the course
of which she steps outside [her] skin (159) to renegotiate the borders
of her self in relationship to the world.
In the spring Angel sets out with the three older women on a diffi-
cult canoe journey north to search for Angels mother, to return Dora-
Rouge to her homeland among the Fat Eaters, and to join the protest
against the dam project that threatens the land and its indigenous
inhabitants. Reversing the course of the fur traders south from Hudson
Bay into the Great Lakes, the women unravel time (Hogan 1995b,
170) and enter a place between worlds (177) that is neither beyond
history nor uninhabited, but rather an older world alive in the present
one. In this border world where everything merged and united (177),
Angel says, I came alive:
Cell by cell, all of us were taken in by water and by land,

swallowed a little at a time. . . . [N]ow the world was made
up of pathways of its own invention. We were only one of
the many dreams of earth. . . .
But there was a place inside the human that spoke with
land, that entered dreaming, the way that people in the north
found direction in their dreams. . . . These dreams they
called hunger maps, and when they followed these maps,
they found their prey. It was the language animals and
humans had in common. (170)
Angel learns new senses, becomes equal to the other animals (172).
She begins to dream of plants, suggesting to the older women that she is
a plant dreamer, a healer who can enter the dreams of earth to locate
medicinal plants (171). Not knowing their names, Angel identifies the
plants by drawing them, translating earths language with her body into
visual signs. Increasingly merged with the world, Angel now enters
moving water full of confidence: The water was cold and it was sharp
against my skin, as if it had blades or edges. But I swam. My arms were
lean and newly muscled (17374). As Angel writes earths dreams onto
paper, water inscribes a new history of strength and interconnection on
her body. Water and sky replace the mirrors our lives had fallen into,
and in them the women see themselves remade, wearing the face of the
world (177).
Hogan expands the mirror experiences of Surfacings narrator by
multiplying them until Angel mirrors and is mirrored by the world. Sim-
ilarly, she refracts the narrators dive at the site of the submerged pic-
tographs, breaking it into mirror parts as well. Angels passage through
the mirror precedes her discovery of ancient Indian pictographs on the
canoe journey. Her development of conceptual and embodied knowl-
edge of relationships between internal and external worlds guides her
immersion beneath the pictographs into a collective unconscious that
exceeds the boundaries of her own mind and body. The women come
first to drawings on rock said to have been painted not by humans,
but by spirits (Hogan 1995b, 178), signaling their entrance into a gap
in time (177). Hogans use of the word drawings removes the pic-
tographs from the realms of artifact and symbol and links them to
Angels plant drawings, suggesting that earth speaks through these fig-
ures as well. Later, the women find a painting of a wolverine with wings
that become visible in rain, transformed by water (like Angel) into a
creature at home in both earth and air. Here Angel dives into a mirror
world of trees and paintings submerged by rising water, where she
becomes both fish and water: I forgot to breathe, swimming as if once
again, as before birth, I had a gill slit . . . I remembered being fish. I
remembered being oxygen and hydrogen, bird and wolverine (179).
Angel enters an embodied memory of her own fetal development and
her shared origins with all forms of life in the creation of water.
A final configuration of paintings, reflected on the surface of the
water, include the lynx (Misshipeshu, the horned water god of Surfacing
in cat form). The lynx gazes down at itself, looking at its twin . . . as if
it could step away from stone, enter water, its own reflection, and come
alive, the way spirit meets matter (Hogan 1995b, 182), mirroring the
process that is closing the gap between Angels somatic experience and
specular image, between body and mind. In contrast to Western notions
that sever mind and body or declare them identical, Hogan understands
mind, spirit, and body to be interdependent processes within a system
that is already whole. Matter and spirit are mirrors to each other,
twinned (but not identical) aspects of a greater whole; spirit and matter,
mind and body, male and female are articulated out of wholeness by
surfacestime, mirrors, skin, wordswhich are, like Angels scars, sites
of both division and connection, destruction and creation. What are
perceived as dualities are kindred spirits (66) that long for reunion.
Coming together, they may give birth to something new.
Angels journey through water teaches her the languages, spoken
and embodied, that translate her split subjectivity and isolated individ-
uality into a fluid multiple positionality and an awareness of herself as
co-creator with the world. Even before departing on the canoe trip,
Angel realizes she is part of the same equation as birds and rain
(Hogan 1995b, 79). Her location of healing plants in dreams and her
union with fish and water beneath the pictographs are described in
terms of this equation: The roots of dreaming . . . are like the seeds of
hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together create ocean, lake, and
ice. In this way, the plants and I joined each other (171); I thought
of Bush . . . saying, Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, in her
dreamy way. When I was inside water, I understood how these simple
elements married and became a third thing (179). Angels entry into
earths language is not metaphorical but material, a transformation
(like the creation of water from its elements) that allows her to see
differently, to experience physically, cognitively, and spiritually her
interconnectivity with all of life. This shift of vision is reflected in
Angels plant drawings, which, like the childhood drawings of Surfac-
ings narrator, tell a perceptual history. Angels drawings, two of which
are reproduced in the text, do not represent an excavation of the past,
however, but the emergence of the past into present time, an old
world dawning new in Angels consciousness (189). The first is
sketched from above, from the perspective of objective vision (172),
the second, from the perspective of earth, tracing the underground
paths of growth that form new bulbs and connected tubers, splitting
and multiplying (188), visible only in inner vision. Angels healing lies
not in a suturing or balancing of severed binaries, but rather in learn-

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

herself as participant in an interconnected totality.
In contrast to Surfacingwhich, as Christ complains, fails to inte-
grate the narrators personal transformation with social action (1980,
49)Solar Storms concluding chapters follow Angels initiation into a
pan-Indian community united in defense of earth and life. When she
arrives at Two-Town Post, the center of dam resistance, Angel experi-
ences a final baptism (Hogan 1995b, 228) that marks her rebirth
from water (her inner journey) into community. Reminiscent of Surfac-
ings narrators third dive, Angel removes her clothes and steps out of
[her] rational mind, not out of language, but into an ancient story that
tells her how to live on land:
I held my breath past my own limit . . . I thought about how

Dora-Rouge had told me once about Eho, the old woman
keeper of the animals. She had been sent down to the mother
of water to bargain for all life, nearly swimming to her
death. She was the woman who fell in love with a whale in
the heart of water. . . . She drifted to where the world was
composed long ago in dark creation. Because of her, the ani-
mals and other lives were spared, but in the end, Eho could
not remain in water or with the whale of her loving. Soon,
back on land, she died. Now men and women were to be the
caretakers of the animals. (229)
Angel emerges from this dive to encounter her mother for the first time,
but the meeting is brief and futile, and Hannah dies soon afterwards.
The gifts Angel receives from her mother are inherited and communal:
through Hannahs blood, Angel receives the gift of plant healing prac-
ticed by her ancestor Ek (171); from Hannahs body, her own life and
her newborn half-sister, Aurora, who will be raised by many parents
(264) to know her world and not be severed from it (258); and from
her quest for reunion, the knowledge that we embodied the land
(228).
A third drawing reproduced in the text (Hogan 1995b, 256) visu-
ally brings these gifts together: an open page from Eks birch bark book
of plants shows diagrams of plant parts surrounded by symbols for
sun and moon which depicted the best times of day to gather the plant
and arrows indicating the parts that were useful for healing
(25657). Like Angel, the dissected plants are re-embedded within a
social history of relationship and mutual responsibility among earth,

sky, and humans. At Two-Town, Angel continues her study of herbal
medicine with tribal elders and contributes her personal gifts to the
resistance effort. In those days, Angel recalls, We were still a tribe.
Each of us had one part of the work of living. . . . All of us together
formed something like a single organism (262). Having come to
wholeness by fulfilling meaningful roles within the communities they
inhabit, Angel and Tommy (the young man who looks after the old
people at Adams Rib) can marry, two become one (350) without the
need to complete or balance each other. Solar Storms concludes, like
Surfacing, with the ambiguous suggestion that Angel is pregnant:
Something wonderful lives inside me, she tells Bush (351).
Hogans text alters the Lacanian scheme by fragmenting, passing
through, and dispersing it. Self-recognition occurs not just through the
medium of other people; full humanity (Hogan 1995b, 324) is possi-
ble only within natures gaze. As Angel puts it, We are seen, our meas-
ure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even by the alive
galaxy in deep space (80). For Hogan, everything [is] alive (81) and
experiences the gap of self-awareness that Atwood refuses to grant to
fish, lake, or trees. When sentience and agency are recognized every-
where, the subject realizes its existence in a fluid web of mutual con-
structions, and the gap between self and other, imaginary and symbolic,
signifier and signified, is filled with the voices of the world, telling our
interconnectedness into being. Thus Hogan levels the hierarchies of
humanism, implicating not only its anthropocentrism, but also post-
modern and post-structuralist gendered and ethnic critiques of human-
ism, which remain determined by the centrality of the human and deny
the perspectives of other beings in the universe. Like Surfacing, Hogans
text mediates between humanisms conception of a unified autonomous
self and post-structuralisms unstable, fragmented subject. But Angel
comes to claim and celebrate both her constructedness within language
and social/material relationships and histories, and her power to self-
define, so that by the end of the novel, she can say, Ive shaped my
own life, after all (346).
Angels subjectivity unfolds outward from a central locus of will,
emerging at the interfaces between body, self, and world. She comes to
wholeness in the ability to shift perspectives, to move back and forth
across the gap (which is also connection) between the interior experi-
ence of a self that is bounded by surfaces, and the exterior that is a
mirror to that self. For Hogan humans know the world not only
because we are connected to it through embodied processes of percep-
tion and exchange, but also because we are the world. When Angel
says, at the end of her journey, We are tree (Hogan 1995b, 351), we
are alive water (350), she is not identifying symbolically with nature,
but naming human equivalence within the natural world. The dust of
solar storms is materially present in human flesh as atoms . . . from
distant stars that have passed through stones and ferns and even
cotton (138). Like Surfacing, Solar Storms suggests an alliance
between women and nature born of a common history of objectification
and exploitation, but Hogans nature is neither Surfacings mute, indif-
ferent force, nor remote and passive wilderness to be preserved apart
from human habitation. Even back in the city, Angel knows that pave-
ment is only a thin shell on earth, the plants would outlast it and grow
over it again (341). Humans and their cultural constructions are held
within natureparticipants in natures ongoing cycles of destruction
and creation.
6
The Red-Black Center of Alice Walkers Meridian
Asserting a Cherokee Womanist Sensibility
BARBARA S. TRACY
While Alice Walkers name frequently appears in both African American

and feminist studies, little has been written of her identity as an African
Cherokee. However, this is not surprising as literary scholarship con-
cerning the works of any African Native American writers remains
minute. Despite African Native American historical studies emerging in
the early 1900s and a literary history of over 200 years, African Native
American literature has endured an either/or approach, a focus on one
or the other identity, stifling opportunities to discuss the rich syncretism
of multiple traditions and voices emerging in the works of African
Native American writers. In fact, little has been written to date about
African Native American literature, despite the noted presence of writ-
ers such as William Apess (African Pequot), Olivia Bush-Banks (African
Montauk), Langston Hughes (African Cherokee), Alice Walker (African
Cherokee), and many others. In 1998, a special edition of American
Indian Quarterly featured writings from anthropologists and historians
such as James Brooks and Circe Sturm. Many of the essays were later
collected by Brooks in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black
Experience in North America (2002). Sturm has since published her
complete study of African Cherokees in Blood Politics: Race, Culture,
and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (2002).
In 2000 Dartmouth held a symposium titled Eating Out of the
Same Pot, which featured many new and established voices in the
field, such as Brooks, Ron Welburn, Jack Forbes, and Theda Purdue.
However, only a handful of literary scholars presented at the sympo-
sium, and until the recent emergence of Jonathan Brennans books,
When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African Native American Literature
105
(2003) and Mixed Race Literature (2002), little work has been pub-
lished in this area of African Native American writing. James Brooks
comments that historians and ethnographers [were driven] toward
archives and/or field sites in the hope of recovering moments of alliance
between these victims of Euro-American expansion (Brennan 2002,
128). He also notes, however, that intellectuals have been slow to recog-
nize the complexities beyond mere analyses of multicultural commu-
nities or to engage in the ambiguities of cultural hybridity, especially as
seen from the perspective of the mixed descent people themselves [sic]
(Brennan 2002, 129). What better place than the narratives and fiction
of ethnically mixed peoples from which to recognize these complexities?
Jonathan Brennan calls for an examination of African Native
American writing within an interpretive framework combining both
African American and Native American critical theories. To read
through only one identity, he explains, leads to misinterpreting the
merging traditions that underlie the hybrid text (2002, 19). He sug-
gests that in order to really understand the tradition from which [eth-
nically mixed] writers create their literary works, one must also
examine their parallel heritage without denying either one (19). One
might also argue that indigenous identity is political or national, which
further complicates the discussion of culturally mixed identity. In exam-
ining Native American mixed-blood literature, it is equally essential to
engage a tribally specific perspective. Creek/Cherokee writer Craig
Womack explains:
In terms of a Creek national literature, the process had been

based on the assumption that it is valuable to look toward
Creek authors and their works to understand Creek writing.
My argument is not that this is the only way to understand
Creek writing but an important one given that literatures
bear some kind of relationship to communities, both writing
communities and the community of the primary culture from
which they originate. (1999, 4)
A balanced reading of Alice Walker and particularly Meridian

requires examination of her African and Cherokee, as well as feminist,
perspectives to relate more clearly to all of her communities. A careful
rereading of Meridian that listens for the multiple voices found in
Walkers identity demonstrates the ways in which Walkerin the shared
African and Cherokee tradition of call-and-responseanswers the call
The Red-Black Center of Alice Walkers Meridian 107
of John Neihardts Black Elk Speaks (1932) not simply as a womanist

(a term for African American feminists coined by Walker), but as a
Cherokee womanist.
Although Walkers participation in the civil rights movement is
central to her writing, particularly in the novel Meridian, her interest in
the continued violation of Native American civil liberties and treaties as
well as the struggle to regain sovereignty also threads a distinct pattern
throughout Walkers writing. Native American characters and values,
some more subtle than others, frequently appear. In her autobiographi-
cal works, she mentions her Cherokee great-grandmother Tallulah.
Although her use of the ubiquitous Cherokee grandmother may raise
concern, it also reveals what Ron Welburn found in his own African
Native American home, where it was common practice to publicly
embrace Black ethnicity while distancing, yet recognizing, Native Amer-
ican heritage (2002, 293). In 1979 Walker published Horses Make a
Landscape More Beautiful (1979), whose frontpiece begins:
For two who / slipped away/ almost / entirely: / my part

Cherokee / great-grandmother / Tallulah / (Grandmama
Lula) / on my mothers side / about whom only one /
agreed-upon / thing / is known: / her hair was so long / she
could sit on it; /
And my white (Anglo-Irish?) / great-great grandfather / on
my fathers side; nameless / (Walker, perhaps?) / whose only
remembered act/ is that he raped / a child: / my great-great-
grandmother, / who bore his son, / my great-grandfather, /
when she was eleven.
Rest in peace. / The meaning of your lives / is still / unfolding.
Rest in peace. / In me / the meaning of your lives / is still /
unfolding.
unfolding.
unfolding.
Rest in peace. / In me / the meaning of our lives / is still /
unfolding.
Rest. (1979, viiiix)
The poem trespasses upon an unspoken but known practice as

described by Welburn:
Most of us living on the Indian-Negro color line grew up

with mixed signals and coded information. Our elders had
learned to protect us from the ridicule and abuse they had
experienced as Indians or from which their parents had shel-
tered them. They instilled in us the sense that we were dif-
ferent from our peers; but that we were Indian or of Native
descent, when it was raised, was a covert issue. Why we
should live with such a covert identity was seldom explained.
(2002, 292)
As a result of her poem, Walker publicly experienced one possible

reaction from which Welburns elders hoped to protect him. In a 1984
review for the Richmond News Leader, K. T. H. Cheatwood criticized
Walkers exploration of her mixed ancestry, accusing her of trying to
pass from one identity to another in order to disassociate herself from
her African identity (Walker 1987, 8687). Several years later Walker
wrote:
But crucial to our development, too, it seems to me, is an

acceptance of our actual as opposed to our mythical selves.
We are the mestizos of North America. We are black, yes,
but we are white, too, and we are red. To attempt to func-
tion as only one, when you are really two or three, leads, I
believe, to psychic illness. . . . Regardless of who will or will
not accept us, including perhaps, our established self, we
must be completely (to the extent it is possible) who we are.
(82)
She further wrote that Cheatwood assumes an interest, on my

part, in being other than black, of being white. I, on the other hand,
feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that
nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and
its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find (89).
Walkers endeavors to explore and create a literature that recognizes her
ancestors risks much pain and criticism, but also it is one that makes
visible an often-overlooked shared history. The climate for African
Native American studies shares the rough terrain of Native studies.
Louis Owens describes such debates in the discourse: Not merely dis-
agreement . . . but more significantly a dynamic energy that brings life
to a kind of literature and literary debate that barely existed a quarter
century ago. . . . [V]irtually everything that is new and vital and exciting
in American literature is coming from the so called margins (1998,
xv). The recovery of early African Native American texts, the emer-
gence of new African Native American voices, and the prelude of
African Native American literary criticism, while rife with arguments of
identity, appropriation, sovereignty, and much more, invites an exciting,
vital discourse which joins and involves the voices of Native American
and African American scholars in a vibrant rediscovery of shared and
often intertwined histories.
Sharon P. Holland in her discussion of African Native American
literature states: finding a space, let alone a subjectivity, that embraces
both African and Native identity is also an endeavor to develop an
understanding of literature as a process of both emancipation and sov-
ereignty, as we are seeking the history and lives of people whose experi-
ence crossed the barriers of enslaved bodies and lands (2003, 260).
Jean Toomer, interestingly, named that space the Blue Meridian in his
poem by the same name. Toomer, a light skinned, mixed-blood man
whose origin still intrigues scholars, identified himself as the first man
of a true melting pot of America:
My own father likewise came from Middle Georgia.

Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood
mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish,
and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has
been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race
groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of
view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have
strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial
intermingling. (Bontempts 1971, 21)
Somewhat like Walker, Toomer also saw himself as a total of all his
ancestors. He continues, Without denying a single element in me, with
no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to let them function
as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony (21). In Blue
Meridian, he writes, Growing towards the universal Human being; /
And we are the old people, witnesses / That behind us there extends /
An unbroken chain of ancestors, / Ourselves linked with all who ever
lived (72). Alice Walker likewise reflects her awareness of this unbro-
ken chain of ancestors by writing from all parts of her identity.
While discussion of Walkers Meridian portrays the work as an

African American civil rights novel, Walker in embracing all that she is,
reflects also on Native American civil rights and the American Indian
Movement (AIM). As Patricia Riley clarifies:
In Meridian, Walker writes within an African Native Ameri-

can subjectivity that not only includes cultural elements from
her Cherokee and African American heritage but, addition-
ally inspired by Lakota (Sioux) culture and the heroic
endeavor of the Lakota people to retain their autonomy,
firmly links together the collective struggle for freedom
undertaken historically by Native American and African
American peoples. (2003, 242)
Walkers writing emerges out of the center of both civil rights and AIM
recognizing not only the struggles of the Cherokee people but of all
tribes.
Near the publication of Walkers Meridian, 1976, much was hap-
pening in Indian country, particularly regarding Cherokee communities.
It was: approximately 137 years after her ancestors survived the Trail
of Tears, which brought more than four thousand Cherokees to their
deaths (18381839); fifteen years after the TVA announced its inten-
tion to build the Tellico Dam and flood the Cherokees ancient burial
groundthe site of an ancient peace city and the center of Cherokee
history (1961); eight years after the birth of the American Indian
Movement in Minneapolis, and after the Bill of Rights was extended to
include Native Americans (1968); seven years after the Indians of All
Nations seized Alcatraz (1969); five years after W. W. Keeler became
the first principal chief of the Cherokee Nation (1971); four years
after AIM occupied the BIA offices in Washington, DC and the resulting
march known as the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972); three years
after the second Wounded Knee (1973); and one year after the result-
ing wrongful conviction of Leonard Peltier for the murder of two FBI
agents (1975); The book was published two years before the Ameri-
can Indian Religious Freedom Act passed at the same time that the BIA
established which American Indian tribes and nations would be recog-
nized as such (1978); and the year before Congress passed the Self-
Determination and Assistance Act (1975). Within this background,
Walker responds in Meridian to the call of John Neihardts Black Elk
Speaks.

As a Cherokee-African American woman, Walker speaks to John Nei-
hardts Black Elk Speaks in the tradition of call-and-response or what
Henry Louis Gates identifies as Signifyin, a system of language and
interpretation that he traces from Africa to the writings of present-day
African Americans. His theory for African American literature brings
much to light in understanding the echoes of John Neihardts Black Elk
in Walkers novel:
Writers Signify upon each others texts by rewriting the

received textual tradition. This can be accomplished by the
revision of tropes. This sort of Signifyin(g) revision serves if
successful, to create a space for the revising text. It also
alters fundamentally the way we read the tradition, by defin-
ing the relationship of the text at hand to the tradition. The
revising text is written in the language of the tradition,
employing its tropes, its rhetorical strategies, and its ostensi-
ble subject matter. (1988, 124)
Interestingly, Gates reads Walkers The Color Purple as signifyin upon

Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes were Watching God. He further posits
that this particular strategy demonstrates an act of ancestral bonding
that is especially rare in black letters (245). Walkers revision of Black
Elk Speaks demonstrates her deep feelings of ancestral connection to
Native Americans and particularly a respect for Black Elk himself.
Walkers selection of this particular text does prove problematic in
the ongoing discussion of its dramatic deviation from the actual tran-
scripts of the Black Elk interviews. In comparing the original transcripts
of the Black Elk interviews, many discrepancies appear between what
he actually said and the resulting publication, Black Elk Speaks. Ray-
mond J. DeMallies The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elks Teachings
Given to John G. Neihardt (1984) makes a close comparison of the
original transcripts versus the resulting Neihardt text. Interestingly, it is
the most quoted passages of Black Elk Speaks, including those used by
Walker, which DeMallie reveals as Neihardts poetic imagination. Nev-
ertheless, the Neihardt book remains essential to Walker and to many
disenfranchised Indians, especially in a time of relocation and cultural
revival. In his introduction to Black Elk Speaks, Vine Deloria, Jr.
(Standing Rock Sioux) explains that the most important aspect of the
book has been its influence upon the contemporary generation of young
Indians (1992, xiii). He writes that the book was essential for young
Indians who
have been aggressively searching for roots of their own in the

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

Wild Boy and changes his gender, but retains the meaning of his origin:
Long years ago, soon after the world was made, a hunter
and his wife lived at Pilot knob with their only child, a little
boy. The fathers name was Kanati (The Lucky Hunter), and
his wife was called Selu (Corn). No matter when Kanati
went into the wood, he never failed to bring back a load of
game, which his wife would cut up and prepare, washing off
the blood from the meat in the river near the house. The
little boy used to play down by the river every day, and one
morning the old people thought they heard laughing and
talking in the bushes as though there were two children
there. When the boy came home at night his parents asked
him who had been playing with him all day. He comes out
of the water, said the boy, and he calls himself my elder
brother. He says his mother was cruel to him and threw him
into the river. Then they knew that the strange boy had
sprung from the blood of the game, which Selu had washed
at the rivers edge. (Mooney [1900] 1995, 242)
The story of Kanati and Selu continues in the Cherokee explana-

tion of the origin and continuation of game and corn. In the story Selu,
who with Kanati takes responsibility for the creation of the second boy
and calls him son, teaches both boys the laws of respect, and we
learn the consequences of disregarding that respect. Also the story
speaks of being careful with children. Selu unknowingly has thrown
away her child when the game blood spilled into the river. As a result,
Wild Boy, who disregards the laws of respect, causes the community
hardship in attaining and maintaining its sources of food. Marilou
Awiakta, Cherokee writer and friend of Walker, teaches us in her book
Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mothers Wisdom that a terrible manifestation
of societys spiritual illness is violence, especially toward women and
children. Women represent the life-force; children ensure its continu-
ance. Any species that damages or brings ill to its life-bearers and its
children is doomed (1993, 190). Throughout Meridian, Walker sug-
gests that our future lies in our children, who like Wile Chile and her
disappearing brother are often thrown away, harmed, or disregarded.
Wild Child lives in a society that will not respond to her abandonment
or her needs and that cannot see that her abandonment will impact the
communitys future.
From her womanist sensibility, Walkers signification upon Wild

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

gives power to the narrators comments: Even before her death forty
years later the tree had outgrown all the others around it. Other slaves
believed it possessed magic. They claimed the tree could talk, make
music, was sacred to birds and possessed the power to obscure
vision. . . . So many tales and legends had grown up around The
Sojourner that students of every persuasion had a choice of which to
accept (Walker 1976, 4445). While commenting on the fictional
Sojourner, the tree and its powerful legends, Walker reveals what
Painter describes as a powerful need for these stories, I finally realize
Americans of goodwill deeply need the colossal Sojourner Truth: the
black woman who faces down a hostile white audience. . . . Truth is
consumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need her to have said
(Painter 1996, 28485). Similarly, Neihardts version of Black Elk and
the various versions of Sojourner Truth come together to create a much
needed symbol in The Sojourner tree which is immortalized in stories
passed down from student to student.
In addition, The Sojourner brings to mind a feminist sense of place
and emphasis on the land often found throughout Walkers work. In
Black Elk Speaks, he says much about sacred places, but most memo-
rable is the statement made from the top of Harneys Peak: Then I was
standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath
me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw
more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing
in a sacred manner the shapes of all shapes as they must live together
like one being (Neihardt [1932] 1992, 43). Through Black Elks
words, he not only emphasizes the sacredness of place, but also his
instructions to live together like one being. Walker in reply comments
on the land while acknowledging that to live together like one being
also means to acknowledge all the mixed-race parts of oneself.
Meridian, whose own name brings to mind geography, astrology,
time, and a center point, learns from her father and Feather Mae, her
paternal grandmother, the importance of place as they pass on their
spiritual connection with the Sacred Serpent Indian Burial Mound. As a
young woman, Feather Mae spends much time at the Sacred Serpent
Mound and eventually discovers an opening into the mound. Once
inside, she has her first physical response to the sacred place:
She felt as if she had stepped into another world, into a dif-
ferent kind of air. The green walls began to spin, and her
feeling rose to such a high pitch the next thing she knew she
was getting up off the ground. She knew she had fainted but
she felt neither weakened nor ill. She felt renewed, as from
some strange spiritual intoxication. Her blood made warm
explosions through her body, and her eyelids stung and tin-
gled. (Walker 1976, 57)
Meridian has a similar first experience in the mound. Her physical

experience is much like her grandmothers, but she also adds a vision to
her description: And in this movement she saw the faces of her family,
the branches of trees, the wings of birds, the corners of houses, blades
of grass and petals of flowers rush toward a central point high above
her and she was drawn with them, as whirling, as bright, as free, as
they (58). The Sacred Serpent becomes a connection between the three
generations.
Meridians visions continue through her life and are accompanied
by a sort of temporary paralysis. The experiences of both Feather Mae
and Meridian find several similar examples in Neihardts Black Elk
Speaks. Black Elks legs fail him as he slips into a vision at the age of
nine. During his collapse, he receives a vision that shows him the sacred
tree at the center of the nations hoop; the potential death and destruc-
tion of the tree, the hoop, and his people; and the hope found in the
buffalo. Meridian has her first similar experiences with temporary
paralysis in college as she sees a bluish light, until one day she loses her
sight and becomes sick. Upon losing the blue light and feeling of illness,
Meridian experiences paralysis (Walker 1976, 119). This state of paral-
ysis takes place throughout Meridians life when she exhausts herself in
human rights work and she requires renewal.
Walker signifies on John Neihardts Black Elk Speaks with the
sickness Meridian experiences in which she collapses in a state of paral-
ysis and experiences dreams or visions. In John Neihardts account,
Black Elks first vision came at the age of five when he heard voices and
saw two men come from the clouds to sing him a sacred song. ([1932]
1992, 1819) Meridians visions, similarly, start at the Serpent Mound
where she sees the images of her family.
While still living at home as a young girl, Meridian discussed the
Serpent Mound with her father, Mr. Hill. They interpreted their experi-
ences at the Sacred Serpent as a means of linking to the past. The link
finds father and daughter connected to one another, to the physical
place of the past, and to the ancestral spirits. Possibly because of his
experience in the mound, her father holds an acute interest in land and
Indians. His office walls are papered with images of Indians and maps
of Indian lands. He never clearly reveals his motivation for this interest
other than his affinity to the land and his recognition that Georgia once
belonged to the Cherokee. However, his mothers name is Feather Mae,
implying a possible Native tie. When Mr. Hill gives his land title to
Walter Longknife, a Cherokee wanderer passing through the area,
Meridian notices something familiar in the Cherokee mans face that
explains her fathers interests. She began to recognize what her father
was by looking at [Walter] (Walker 1976, 54). Here Walker may be
indicating more than a shared oppression: the possibility of shared
blood.
For whatever reasons her fathers interest began, his act of giving
the deed might seem like a parallel to white guilt. Yet, in an argument
with his wife about the roles played by Indians in the Civil War, Mr.
Hill replies, I never said that either side was innocent or guilty, just
ignorant. Theyve been a part of it, weve been a part of it, everybodys
been a part of it for a long time (Walker 1976, 55). Like Black Elk,
Meridians father sees a need for blacks, Indians, and those of mixed
blood to unite and support one another. The comparison between
African American and Native American experiences clearly appears
when Meridians familys land is taken by the government. Longknife
spends the summer on the land and then gives back the deed at the end
of summer when he moves on, reinforcing Native beliefs that land
cannot be owned. Ironically, and perhaps more to Walkers point, the
land is then stolen. The Indian burial mounds of the Sacred Serpent
and her fathers garden of prize beans, corn, and squash were to be
turned into a tourist attraction, a public park (56). The scene points
poignantly to the shared land issues of both blacks and Indians, neither
of whom are allowed to attain and keep land. The county courthouse
adds further insult when after offering a small payment, the family is
further warned, to stay away from Sacred Serpent Park which, now
that it belongs to the public, was of course not open to Colored (56).
Like Black Elks Black Hills and the Cherokees Appalachian Moun-
tains, the government takes the land with indifference to its sacred
meaning.
With the Snake Mound destroyed by tourists, The Sojourner tree
becomes Meridians new place to find peace of mind while she attends
Saxon College. The tree itself and the earth from which it gains strength
calls to the oral tradition of Louvinie, a black slave who is sought out
for her rich African stories and storytelling abilities, until one white
child dies of fright. As a result, her tongue is cut out at the root, but she
preserves her tongue and buries it at the base of a small magnolia tree,
which, by the time of her death twenty years later, is the largest tree of
its kind. It is thought to have had the power to hide many slaves and
later was the site of a yearly ritual, held to remember Fast Mary of
Tower Hall, whose pregnancy is legendary among the coeds who cele-
brate menstruation as the sign of having escaped pregnancy.
In the abandonment and death of the Wile Chile and the destruc-
tion of The Sojourner tree, Meridian conjures memories of the civil
rights movement and the American Indian Movement, of Sojourner
Truth and Selu, of the dreams of both Martin Luther King and Black
Elk. The pain and loss felt upon Kings assassination, and the series of
bombings, mob attacks, brutality, lynchings, and other murders of black
men, women, and children, are paralleled with the sorrow experienced
by Black Elk as he witnessed the murder of men, women, and children
by the U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee.
However, both Neihardts Black Elk and Walkers Meridian find
hope for their peoples. In Neihardts postscript, he tells the reader that
later he returned with Black Elk to Harneys Peak where Black Elk
speaks to the Great Spirit: I recall the great vision you sent me. It may
be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that
it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for
myself, but for my people: I am old. Hear me that they may once more
go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding
tree ([1932] 1992, 274). Near the end of Meridian, Truman Meridians
introduction to the voter registration movement and former lover,
notices a photograph hanging on Meridians wall among her collection
of letters from Anne-Marion, Meridians Saxon College friend. It shows
a huge tree stump with a finger-sized branch, barely visible. The accom-
panying note says: Who would be happier than you that The
Sojourner did not die (Walker 1976, 217).
Through the multiple voices found in MeridianLakota, Chero-
kee, African, and African Americanwe hear these texts, both oral and
written, speak to one another in a conversation that focuses on the mes-
sage found in Black Elks vision, Selus Wild Boy, and Sojourner Truths
work for social justice. These oral stories come out of histories that
dynamically evolve without end. This reading of Meridian requires dis-
covery and rediscovery, recognition of both identity and multi-identity
in an effort to bring cohesive wholeness that represents all of who the
author is. Walkers desire to speak in multiple voices and to harmonize
those voices is especially difficult when ethnically diverse voices are
silenced in favor of one voice. However, Walker successfully brings

together the voices of those ancestors found in her poem about Tallula
and responds to Neihardts Black Elk Speaks in a strong chorus as an
African Cherokee feminist who embraces and responds to the voices of
all her ancestors and recognizes all of their complexities.
7
Womanist Interventions in Historical Materialism
ANGELA L. COTTEN
Alice Walker has been a writer and activist for over forty years. Her
second novel Meridian (1976) deals with a broad range of subjects,
including: African American and Native American struggle, the
race/class/gender matrix underlying black feminine subjectivity, Chris-
tianity as an opiate of black consciousness, and the critical methods and
tactical problems of revolution in America. Of the latter, this paper
focuses more specifically on her treatment of Karl Marxs historical
materialism. Meridian is a historical novel interlaced with autobio-
graphical currents of Walkers activism in the South in the 1960s and
1970s. Through the life experiences of its titled protagonist, it narrates
both actual and fictional events of the civil rights and black power
movements and probes the concrete textures and nuances of African
American struggle. Meridian Hill navigates a maze of sexual and racial
inequality while finding her passion and a sense of dignity in civil rights
womanist activism. Her feelings of hope intertwined with bouts of
despair captures the experiences of many activists during that period.
Meridians reflection on the movements trajectory as a way of ascer-
taining lessons of value and preparing for struggle in the future was an
important moment for activists like Walker who believed that much
work still remained to be done. The novel conveys some of these les-
sons, one of which entails a more critical consideration of Karl Marxs
ideas for organized resistance taking place today.
One of Walkers major concerns in the novel is the utility of histor-
ical materialism as an analytic tool of contemporary social struggle,
including his conception of social totality and power. She shares certain
perspectives with Marx on alienation, agency, and revolutionary strug-
gle. Walker insists that infrastructural analyses are a necessary compo-
nent of emancipatory protest and signals the importance of Marxian
121
thought in varying ways in the novel. They depart, however, on crucial

issues of political economy, like the determining dynamics between polit-
ical forms such as the state, infrastructures, and ideology and what con-
stitutes capital and power in the modern body politic. The role of the
lumpenproletariat revolutionary struggle is another point of difference
between them. Her engagement with Marxs ideas yields insights on mul-
tiple levels. Walker presents a scenario of class, race, and ethnicity in
America that suggests the need to reconsider (even contemporize) histor-
ical materialism as a critical tool of revolutionary struggle. Her critique
of fundamental assumptions embedded in Marxs approach to history
and capitalism, moreover, and her recognition of the dialectical character
of white supremacy in America, suggest the need to rethink determining
relations between the state, economic infrastructures, and ideologies of
race in modern society. And finally, Walkers insistence on the facticity of
racialized-gendered bodies initiates an important discussion on how cap-
ital and power have evolved historically since Marxs time. Social class is
constituted by more than ones relationship to the means of production.
Walkers treatment of Marxs ideas enriches both the Marxian and
black radical tradition, which has treated Marxian philosophy since at
least W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Angela Davis,
Richard Wright, and Lucious Outlaw. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois
draws on black history to challenge some of Marxs writings on revolu-
tion. DuBois argues that Reconstruction was the historical moment in
the developing world system (Robinson 1983, 312). Racist ideology
foreclosed the unity between ex-slaves and poor whites which had pre-
viously emerged as a major revolutionary force in the Civil War, dis-
abling and weakening the Confederate cause. DuBois showed how
Marxs notion of the peasantry as a backward class (in contrast to the
bourgeoisie and proletariat) incapable of revolutionary consciousness
and action did not hold true on American soil. The revolution had been
brought about, not by the working class as Marx and Engels had postu-
lated, nor by the intellectual vanguard, as Lenin had necessitated, but
rather by a contradiction between the modes of production and the
social relations out of which black slaves and poor white people
emerged as a revolutionary force. They deserted the plantations and
Confederate armies in what Du Bois identifies as the General Strike.
The plantocracy was toppled, slaves were freed (nominally at least), and
Reconstruction was initiated, only to be undermined by racism. The
white working class that emerged after the Civil War could have helped
established a proletarian dictatorship in the South, but had no class
Womanist Interventions in Historical Materialism 123
consciousness, as Marx and Engels had anticipated. It scoffed at coali-

tions with blacks and undermined all possibilities of emerging as a revo-
lutionary force. As Du Bois points out, the material force of racial
ideology had been felt. Du Bois suggests that, while Marxian philoso-
phy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the
nineteenth-century despite some of its logical difficulties, . . . [it had to]
be modified so far as Negroes are concerned . . . [because of the] pecu-
liar race problem here in America (321).
Alice Walker continues Du Boiss critical engagement of Marxian
thought. She draws on Native and black American history to suggest
that Marxs conception of the determining relations between infrastruc-
tures, ideologies, and forms of governance in modern societies requires
modification in investigations of political economy in America so that
the ideological and state apparatus are recognized for their relatively
autonomous functioning in constituting social class strata and power in
the body politic. Her reading of American history suggests that we
acknowledge the dialectical character of ideology and admit the histori-
cal fact that while racial ideology has been the instrument and effect of
capitalist expansion, racial relations of ruling have morphed into some-
thing else in America since their origins in slavery. Ideology has been a
catalyst for creating and maintaining formidable political and social
institutions that determine social class strata since Emancipation. Rec-
ognizing the co-constitutive impact of ideology on modern social devel-
opment inevitably calls for rethinking Marxs conception of the relation
between capital and social class: the need to broaden conceptions of
capitalhow it operates and its effectsto include other social identity
markers like race, ethnicity, and gender as currencies of social class
positioning. This means, moreover, that analysis of social class cannot
be limited to explicating ones relationship to the means of production
but must also investigate how race and gender further stratify the gen-
eral class contradiction. This has always been a tenet of black feminist
and womanist thought: that the relations between interlocking systems
of oppression must be studied for how they serve as contexts and rein-
forcements of one another, because social class cannot be understood
apart from gender, racial, and ethnic power relations.
THE NECESSITY OF ANALYZING POLITICAL ECONOMY
Walker signals the necessity of infrastructural analyses in social struggle

throughout Meridian. Her activist characters debate the merits of
socialism in one scene. Anne-Marion reads the Communist Manifesto,

which she considered a really thought provoking work (Walker 1976,
120).
[Meridian and Anne-Marion] had lived and studied enough

to know they despised capitalism; they perceived it had done
well in America because it had rested directly on their
fathers and mothers backs. The difference between them
was this: Anne-Marion did not know if she would be a suc-
cess, Meridian did not think she could enjoy owning things
others could not have. Anne-Marion wanted blacks to have
the same opportunity to make as much as the richest white
people. But Meridian wasted the destruction of the rich as a
class and the eradication of all personal economic reserves.
(118)
Meridians senior thesis explains that capitalism tends toward excessive

accumulation of wealth for the ruling few, and argues that no one
should be allowed to own more land than could be worked in a day, by
hand. (118) A significant problem of todays social formation, Walker
is suggesting, is the lack of state regulations on market growth.
Walker and Marx concur that successful revolution requires
changes not only in the political form and ideological landscape, but
also in the material conditions and popular consciousness (McLellan
1971, 610, 4556). In fact, Walker suggests that lasting, substantive
changes cannot be gained by reforming the laws of civil society alone.
Change must also include seizure of the means of production by the
proletariat: To [Lynne and Meridian] this was obvious. That the coun-
try was owned by the rich and that the rich must be relieved of this
ownership before Freedom meant anything was something so basic to
their understanding of America they felt nave even discussing it
(Walker 1976, 173).
In these excerpts Walker signals the importance of analyzing polit-
ical economy in social struggles today and hence the relevance of
Marxs ideas as a guidepost. Historical materialism especially illumi-
nates the structural relations of class antagonism. Walker draws on the
histories of blacks and Natives in America to reinforce this contempo-
rary significance of Marxs writings on revolution, but then highlights
limitations of historical materialisms diagnostic capacity to suggest that
economic infrastructures do not determine class formations in the last
instance as Marx had theorized. Instead, she points out how non-eco-
nomic spheres like ideology (discourses and values) and the state have
functioned as co-constitutive forces of social formation in America, and
suggests that Marxs conception of power operations in the social body
(engendered in his conception of historical materialism) should be
reconceived for social movements taking place today. While Walker
agrees with Marx on key features of modern social development and
revolutionary struggle, she suggests that his conception of social totality,
capital, and the general class contradiction requires modification for the
method to explain accurately how power functions currentlyincluding
its increasingly sophisticated reorganization in successive stages of capi-
talist development.
THE LUMPENPROLETARIAT: PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES
The lumpenproletariat has no place in revolutions for Marx, but Walker

assigns it the significant role of mobilizing the masses. For Marx, this
groups abject positioning vis--vis the ownership and control of the
means of production determines their potential for revolutionary strug-
gle. According to David McLellan, Marx considers them drop outs of
society who [have] no stake in the development of society and so have
no historical role to play . . . They were at times reactionary since they
were willing to sell their services to the bourgeoisie (1971, 155).
Drop outs are not directly integrated into the capitalist system of pro-
duction. In The Class Struggles in France, Marx characterizes them as
a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the
crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, without a
hearth and home (154). In The Communist Manifesto he ventures fur-
ther in describing the group as an obstacle to revolutionary success: a
dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown
off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept
into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life,
however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue (154). Marx is reminded historically of those who sold their
allegiance to Bonaparte for wine skins and sausages in The Eigh-
teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. His denouncement of their loyalty
comes from a fundamental conviction that human consciousness and
choice are determined by conditions. Walkers existentialism counters
this view.
In contrast to Marx, Walker emphasizes the freedom of con-
sciousness to choose regardless of conditions by portraying the
lumpenproletariat in Meridian as a band of street hustlers, addicts, sex

workers, and grifters who transform into a capable, indispensible wing
of the struggle.
Tommy Odds had hung out every Saturday evening at the

pool hall on Carver Street, talking and shooting pool. He
had been playing with the niggers-on-the-corner for almost a
month before ever opening his mouth about the liberating
effects of voting. At first he had been hooted down with
shouts of Man, I dont wanna hear that shit! and Man,
lets keep this a clean game. (Walker, 1976, 13435)
Walker is careful not to romanticize the revolutionary potential of

fringe subjectivity. These characters are initially apolitical and apathetic.
Lack of class consciousness notwithstanding, the lumpenproletariat
have potential for commitment to revolutionary causes, because con-
sciousness is never determined solely by the conditions of its existence.
Walkers existentialist leanings, most clearly articulated in earlier works,
are apparent here as she treats consciousness as a for-itself (or transcen-
dence) exceeding the in-itself (immanence) of being human that makes
us free to choose and thus articulate values. Far from abject, this class
plays a vital role in revolutionary success.
By the end of the first month [Tommys] niggers-on-the-

corner liked him too much not to listen to him. At the end of
three months theyd formed a brigade called The Niggers-
on-the-Corner-Voter-Machine. It was through them that all
the derelicts, old grandmammas and grandpas and tough
young hustlers and studs, the prostitutes, and even the boozy
old guy who ran the pool hall registered to vote in the next
election. (Walker, 1976, 134)
Walkers conviction about the freedom of consciousness is indicated in

the signifying play between the anagrams structure of the lumpens
organization NOTC and the infinite possibilities of signifying the
groups identity. The anagram sequence remains constant but group
members signify on the numerous possibilities of the name. This con-
veys slippage between signifying structure and meaning, and a sense
that structures do not exhaust the range of possibilities for choosing
and reinventing the self.
What do NOTC mean? Asked the old grandmam-

mas who were escorted like queens down the street to the
courthouse.
Oh, it mean Not Only True, but Colored, the hus-
tlers replied smoothly.
Or, Not on Time, but Current, said the prostitutes to
the old grandpas, letting the old men dig on their cleavage.
Notice of Trinity, with Christ, the pool sharks said to the
religious fanatics, who frowned, otherwise, on pool sharks.
(13435)
There are infinite possibilities of identity or self-formation for nig-

gers-on-the-corner, which depend on context and rhetorical ingenuity.
Such signifying slippages indicate that human consciousness and action
are not completely restricted by the given, but create new avenues of
morphing and speaking.
AXES OF DOMINANCE IN MODERN SOCIAL TOTALITIES
Walker focuses mainly on Marxs early ideas, such as his identification

of modes of production as the major organizing principle of modern
society, from Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:
From the relationship of estranged labor to private property

it further follows that the emancipation of society from pri-
vate property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the politi-
cal form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their
emancipation alone was at stake but because the emancipa-
tion of the workers contains universal emancipationand it
contains this because the whole of human servitude is
involved in the relation of the worker to production, and
every relation of servitude is but a modification and conse-
quence of this relation. (Marx in Tucker 1978, 80)
Marxs pronouncement of varying relations of inequality as discrete,

mechanistic, and hierarchical is sometimes referred to as economic
determinism or vulgar Marxism. He distinguishes between the pri-
mary class contradiction and secondary social relations of ruling, like
gender and racial oppression and views the latter as symptoms of capi-
talism. By asserting the determining significance that class antagonism
has over other forms of dominance, Marx also implies that social class
position is primarily constituted by ones relation to the ownership and
control of the means of production. These ideas reflect a deeper concep-
tion of the determining dynamics of social totalities that influenced his
studies of political economy in Europe. Prior to the 1844 Manuscripts,
Marx had already formulated a conception of social totality in his Con-
tribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite

relations . . . of production which correspond to a definite
stage of development of their material productive forces. The
sum total of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which
rises a legal and political superstructure and to which corre-
sponds definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general . . . At a certain stage
of their development, the material productive forces of soci-
ety come into conflict with the existing relations of produc-
tion . . . Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the
change of the economic foundation the entire immense
superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. (80)
Here Marx is most explicit about how modes of production determine

in the last instance the governmental and ideological relations. Eco-
nomic infrastructures are the chief catalysts of social formations.
CONTESTING THE CRITICAL DIAGNOSTIC

OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Walker might agree with Marx that racial oppression is a consequence

of economic interests, but it cannot be reduced solely to the profit
motive alone. On the one hand, she believes that white Euro-American
imperialism is the original condition of black and Indian subjugation in
the Americas, a situation that historical materialism helps to illuminate.
But on the other hand, she does not believe that a social theory of eco-
nomic motive adequately accounts for the suffering and oppression of
African and Native Americans. This is apparent in several dialogues
between Meridians parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hill.
Other men run away from their families outright,

said her mother. You stay, but give the land under our feet
away. I guess that makes you a hero.
We were part of it, you know, her father replied.
Part of what?
Their disappearance.
Hah, said her mother. You might have been, but I
wasnt even born. Besides, you told me how surprised you
were to find that some of them had the nerve to fight for the
South in the Civil War. That ought to make up for those few
black soldiers who rode against Indians in the Western cav-
alry.
Her father sighed. I never said that either side was
innocent or guilty, just ignorant. Theyve been part of it,
weve been part of it, everybodys been part of it for a long
time. . . .
. . . The answer to everything, said Meridians
mother, is that we live in America and were not rich.
(Walker 1976, 5556)
In the first exchange, Walker frames black and indigenous oppression as

a consequence of Euro-American imperialism. Mr. Hills observation
refers to the invasion and destruction of African and indigenous cul-
tures wrought by Manifest Destiny. Reference to the Civil War recalls
the structural origins of black servitude in slavery and underscores how
black freedom hung in the balance of profit maximization, since the
war was a clash of interests between northern capitalists and southern
planters over which mode of productionslavery or industrial
capitalismshould continue in westward expansion. Blacks who rode
against Indians in the cavalry were called Buffalo Soldiers, which
alludes to Indian removal campaigns from lands considered economi-
cally profitable for whites. Finally, Mrs. Hills closing retort, punctuat-
ing the conversation with a totalization of history, emphasizes capitalist
development (and the profit motive) as the primary organizing principle
of modern social formations.
In Mr. Hills observation of Indians and blacks roles in this his-
torical march of greed, Walker hints that capitalisms success depends
on manufacturing false social antagonisms. Elsewhere in the novel
Walker frames social inequality and destruction as symptoms of larger
economic conditions: Most of the studentstimid, imitative, bright
enough but never daring, were being ushered toward Ladyhood every-
day . . . They [never] risk[ed] being raped in the rough neighborhood as
they attempted to discover the economic causes of inner-city crime, as
Anne Marion had (Walker 1976, 39).
Maintaining social discord, especially racial antagonism, is crucial
to capitalist domination on a large scale according to Walker (and
Marx). This is underscored in the states expropriation of the familys
farm, which is turned into a tourist park for whites only (Walker 1976,
56). Like Marx, Walker views the state as an instrument of private
interests that masquerades as a representative of the general will. It
manufactures discord among constituencies by erecting structures of
social privilege and inequality that undermine cooperative protest
among them. Marx observes a similar practice of the English and Irish
working classes. Ethnic antagonism was artificially kept alive and
intensified . . . by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. . . .
It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power (Marx
1972, 337). Walkers disdain for capitals high-jacking of the state is
further conveyed in the following pun on the state capitol: In the Cap-
itals museum of Indians [Meridian] peered through plate glass at the
bones of a warrior, shamelessly displayed, dug up in a crouch position
and left that way, his front teeth missing, his arrows and clay pipes
around him. At such sites she experienced nausea at being alive
(Walker 1976, 59; emphasis mine).
These two excerpts show how Walker concurs with Marx on
some of the constitutive dynamics of modern social totalities, as she
traces the origins of black and Native oppression in the U.S. Whether it
is bureaucratic machinations, social anomie, or racial mythologies that
are used to justify ethnic oppression, Walker suggests throughout
Meridian that economic infrastructures are significant engines of cul-
ture, effectively manipulating and controlling political, social, and ideo-
logical relations in the social body. Because historical materialism
illuminates structures and relations that seem disparate on the surface,
but which are actually more fundamentally connected in the core logic
of capitalism, it is a necessary critical tool of social struggles taking
place today.

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

not least among them is that of signifying on (and celebrating) the med-
icine mans visions and narrative. Regarding the absurdity of white
supremacy, Black Elks memories recall one of the most brutal assaults
by whites against Indians: the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of the
Lakota Sioux nation. Federal troops were forcing the Sioux from their
homelands and reassigning them to reservations to make room for
mining companies and migrating whites. During the campaign, soldiers
killed approximately 300 Indians, most of whom were women and chil-
dren. The Sioux were unarmed and emigrating reluctantly but peace-
fully. Investigations revealed that many Indians had been shot from
behind, and that the powder-burned bodies of many women and chil-
dren suggested that they had been fired upon at close range (Beasley
1995; Gonzalez and Cook-Lynn 1999). Again, what still stands out
about this massacre is the unnecessary and grotesque quality of the vio-
lence committed. Walker reminds us that non-white peoples are victim-
ized in ways that cannot be explained satisfactorily by appeal to
production and profit motives. Economic interests of westward expan-
sion might explain the trafficking of Africans, African Americans, and
Indians and the expropriation of their lands and resources. But it
cannot fully explain brutality that is born out of psychic investment in a
racist system. This idea is explored again in Walkers second collection
of short fiction, You Cant Keep a Good Woman Down (1981).
Elethia is a story about how slavery created a psychic need in
whites for dominance over blacks, which became a powerful determi-
nant of class structures, social relations, Jim Crow, and segregation in
the twentieth century. The story recalls a white restaurant owner who is
so obsessed with the era of slavery that he keeps the corpse of his
grandfathers slave, Albert Porter, in the restaurant window. The
owners portrayal of Albert as a loyal and deferent servant is nothing
like Alberts familys memories of him. Like Louvinie, Albert refused to
mediate the slaveholders will to dominance.
The old folks said he wasnt nobodys uncle and wouldnt sit
still for nobody to call him that either. Albert was born in
slavery and he remember that his mama and daddy didnt
know nothing about slaveryd done ended for near bout ten
years, the boss man kept them so ignorant about the law . . .
so he was a mad so-an-so when he found out. They used to
beat him severe trying to make him forget about the past and
grin and act like a nigger . . . But he never would. Never

would work in the big house as a head servant neither
always broke up stuff. The master at that time was always
going around pinching him. Look like he hated Albert more
than anythingbut he never would let him get a job any-
where else. (1981, 2930)
This is not a unique marketing strategy to increase patronage, for

Walker tells of the owners real designs: There had been many slaves,
and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slave
owners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people
were concerned. He adored them, of course. Not in the presentit went
without sayingbut at that time [of slavery], stopped, just on the out-
skirts of his memory: his grandfathers time (27).
While Walker agrees with Marx that the relations of private prop-
erty and class have played (and continue playing) a central role in
organizing modern social formations, she does not give primacy to eco-
nomic foundations in the context of class and race relations in America.
Ideologies of white supremacy, while invented in the eighteenth century
to rationalize and justify imperialism and slavery, have continued thriv-
ing in this century apart from economic considerations to have a signif-
icant impact on the social class structures of our culture through social
and economic policies. What had functioned originally as an instrument
of capitalist expansion has also historically produced a system of racial
castes that has continued to thrive beyond its original conditions in
slavery and become imbued with additional meanings of dominance for
many whites. Walker observes the dialectical development of the ideol-
ogy of white supremacy and how it has become a self-constituting struc-
ture of its own in North America: a relatively autonomous system of
values and cultural practices buttressed by social policies of contain-
ment and repression, which further stratify the general class contradic-
tion. Industrial development and capitalist growth were certainly
retarded by the rule of mob violence and lynching in the South in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as foreign and northern
investors were hesitant to develop in such an unpredictably explosive
and volatile social climate.
Lynching as an institution had several regulatory functions and
performative consequences. On one level, it was a backlash against
Emancipation, guaranteeing the exploitation of black labor and thwart-
ing black citizenship and economic advancement. On another level, it
was instrumental in displacing class antagonism between whites

through the assertion of white supremacy. It was a performative ritual
through which the plantocracy and white working class closed ranks
among themselves during Reconstruction, and the black body became
ritually exorcisedliterally and figurativelyfrom the body politic. The
dynamic of suture-and-mutilation lay at the heart of these effects.
Whites gathered together, sometimes traveling great distances from
other regions, to take part in a communal ritual of torture and dismem-
berment that had been advertised like entertainment venues. In fact,
many rituals were publicized as town picnics and community gather-
ings. A kind of sociopsychological suture unfolded between the planter
and working classes in some 5,200 (or more) rituals of white mobs
mutilating black bodies. Lynching was a kind of ritualized sociopolitical
exorcism. It operated as a ritual through which whites cleansed the
body politic of blackness and restored the (antebellum) order of white
rule. The Black Codes and Jim Crow were the legislative correlative of
lynching that both racialized crime, criminalized blacks, and reinforced
blacks abject status outside the national citizenry.
Walkers observation of the evolving nature of non-economic
spheres like ideology as co-constitutive broadens our understanding of
capital and how power operates in the modern social body in ways that
Marx could not have foreseen. Capital entails more than simply owning
property and controlling the means of production. There are other
breeds or species of capital like gender and race that also function as
currencies of social mobility and opportunity, as well as liability and
disadvantage.
I think there is probably as much difference between the life

of a black black woman and a high yellow black woman
as between a high yellow woman and a white woman. . . .
Ironically, much of what Ive learned about color Ive learned
because I have a mixed-race child. Because she is lighter-
skinned, straighter-haired than I, her lifein this racist col-
orist societyis infinitely easier. (Walker 1984, 291)
Identity markers of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality either facili-

tate or inhibit our access to avenues of social class mobility in similar
(though not identical) ways that wealthhaving or not having itopens
up or limits possibilities of multiplying its base. Because of this women
and people of color are even further marginalized from centers of power
and influence within the American proletariat. Hierarchies of gender,

racial, and ethnic dis/advantage further fracture the general class contra-
diction and splinter the proletariat. For Walker, then, ideology is both an
instrument of capital and a determinant of social class formation.
A word of theoretical caution about Walkers conception of
racisms evolution vis--vis capitalist expansion is important here. Her
conception is not the same as supersession in Hegels dialectic of history.
Racist ideologies and values are not a lingering presence of the negated
in its negated state, because ideology and correlative social policies are
more than non-substantial traces of the past anticipating the present
moment. They are co-constitutive with the state and market forces.
Having to negotiate ones way in the world in a body that is satu-
rated by racial mythologies makes a difference in ones social standing
(as a day-laborer, manager, or owner), which Walker illustrates in
another short story, The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff (1973). Living
in destitute poverty, the titled character travels to a government assis-
tance bureau to receive rations for her family. The kernel of this story
comes from the struggle of Walkers own mother to feed her family
during the Depression. Mrs. Walker was denied welfare relief because of
the bureau officers prejudice, which Walker recalls in In Search of Our
Mothers Gardens:
Humph said the woman, looking at my mother more

closely and with unconcealed fury. Anybody dressed up as
good as you dont need to come here begging for food.
I aint begging, said my mother, the government is
giving away flour to those that need it, and I need it. I
wouldnt be here if I didnt. And these clothes Im wearing
was given to me. But the woman had already turned to the
next person in line, saying over her shoulder to the white
man behind the counter with her, Imagine the gall of some
niggers in here dressed better than me! This thought seemed
to make her angrier still, and my mother, pulling three of her
small children behind her, and crying from humiliation,
walked sadly back into the street. (1984, 16)
This excerpt calls attention to the materiality of racist ideology as

a system of values and cultural practices. No longer simply an instru-
ment of imperialism, white supremacy has evolved into a constitutive
force of the American social formation through historical agents who
are heavily invested in maintaining some semblance of the caste
structure of slavery. In this story, it is a formidable obstacle of black

advancement that further stratifies the proletariat.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Walker shows how important it is to understand the intricate nature

and history of alienation and anomie in contemporary America in order
to mobilize the proletariat effectively for revolution and to implement
substantive structures of equality that guard against replicating old pat-
terns of servitude in the revolutionary aftermath. She suggests that his-
torical materialism is an indispensable critical tool of revolutionary
struggle that requires (at least) two conceptual shifts. First, Marxs con-
ception of the determining relations between infrastructures, ideologies,
and the state apparatus require rethinking so that relations of the latter
two are recognized for instances of relatively autonomous functioning
in constituting relations of power in the American social body. This
reconsideration enhances the methods diagnostic capacity to accurately
grasp how the social formationespecially regarding the proletariatis
fractured into a more complex structure since Marxs observations of
the working class struggles in nineteenth-century Europe. Namely, we
must treat the dialectical character of ideology as an instrument and
effect of capitalist expansion that has also evolved into a new constitu-
tive power since its original condition of emergence. It has been the cat-
alyst for creating and maintaining formidable institutions that stratify
our society by skin pigment (among other markers of social identity).
Recognizing the co-constitutive impact of ideology leads to theoretical
reformation in Marxs notion of the relation between capital and social
class. Social class can no longer be thought of exclusively as a function
of ones relationship to the means of production (whether one is a man-
ager or laborer) but must also investigate how racial and gender struc-
tural inequality further stratify the general class conflict. Social class
cannot be understood apart from gender, racial, and ethnic power rela-
tions: the relations between interlocking systems of oppression must be
studied for the ways in which they serve as contexts, reinforcements,
and masked strategies. Conceptions of capital and power need to be
updated, moreover, to explain how gender, race, and ethnicity function
interactively as currencies of social class advantage and disadvantage.
Part IV
Re(in)fusing Feminism
8
Both the Law and Its Transgression
Toni Morrisons Paradise and PostBlack Feminism
NOELLE MORRISSETTE
How can a writer of what Toni Morrison describes as race-specific yet

race-free prose be defined as a black feminist author? (1993a, 211)
Morrisons reference to her own practice in this phrase stands in contra-
diction to the themes and characters readily apparent in her body of
writing. From Morrisons first novel, The Bluest Eye, which gave voice
to the shared struggles of Claudia and Frieda MacTeer and Pecola
Breedlove to cultivate a sense of self-worth and beauty as young black
girls, to Sula Peaces quest to make [her] self, as a New World
woman, rather than be weighed down by the restrictions placed upon
black women (and perpetuated by them) in Sula, black feminist themes
and characters appear at the center of her works. Morrisons focus here
and elsewhere, on the lived experience of being young, black, and
female, provides ample material for black feminist criticism. Indeed,
Morrisons works of the 1970s and early 1980s were used as case stud-
ies for the newly developing field of Black feminist criticism. As Barbara
Smith, Deborah McDowell, and Barbara Christian discussed the param-
eters of the field and their collective goals, Morrisons novels The Bluest
Eye and Sula were constantly invoked to answer the questions, what is
Black feminist literature? and what is Black feminist criticism? In
fact, the debate between Smith and McDowell, encompassing several
years of Black feminist thought, raised but did not resolve the tension
that exists between black feminist criticism and black feminist literary
criticism.
Barbara Smith feels that the politics of feminism have a direct
relationship to the state of black womens literature, asserting that
139
criticism makes a body of literature recognizable (1994, 411). But

more than this, Smith observes, unlike the white feminist movement,
which was an essential precondition to the flowering of feminist liter-
ature and criticism, there is no political movement for black womens
experience. She asserts contentiously that until a black feminist criti-
cism exists we will not even know what these [black women] writers
mean (412). Equally contentious is Smiths claim that black feminist
criticism applied to a particular work can . . . expose for the first time
its actual dimensions (417). Her subsequent discussion, which focuses
on Sula as a lesbian novel and therefore a Black feminist work as
well, was countered by Deborah McDowell who found such an equa-
tion of lesbianism and feminism only approximate, and because of the
limitations it contained assuming an isolationist position (Smith 1994,
417; McDowell 1994, 432).
McDowell critiqued Smith of overgeneralizing to fit black
womens literature into categories imposed by an ideological position
that subsumes far more black women writers . . . than not into the
canon (McDowell 1994, 432). Raising the important question of the
relationship of black feminist criticism to literature, McDowell cautions
against reading literature as polemic, which runs the risk of reducing art
to a political viewpoint and depriving it of aesthetic consideration. She
writes, political ideology and aesthetic judgment . . . must be bal-
anced (433). However, a balance between ideology and aesthetics
may be impossible. As she herself asserts, she is against critical abso-
lutism (438). The demands of political ideology often work in tension,
not in tandem, with aesthetics, because ideology usually demands an
absolute position.
As the interchanges of Smith and McDowell suggest, there are
aspects of Morrisons writing that help to define her as a Black feminist
writer, as one who concentrates on and speaks through the lives and
struggles of Black women. But there are also ways in which her self-
described strategy of writing in a race-specific yet race-free prose has
led Morrison beyond some of these traditional aspects defining Black
feminism. In fact, Morrison has been transgressive within the discourses
of Black feminismand feminism in generalover the years of her
writing, particularly by incorporating racial ambiguity in combination
with class issues into her work. Paradise represents Morrisons greatest
transgression.
The specific features of Paradiseof laws and especially of
women who are both the law and its transgressionsuggest ways in
Both the Law and Its Transgression 141
which black feminist practices, critical and creative, can transform

themselves while continuing their exploration of American culture, his-
tory and society. By considering the ramifications of a postBlack fem-
inism, which can self-consciously address the problems that are
presented by defining itwhat constitutes black, feminist, and
how post functions in relationship to these termswe can begin to
understand how Paradises themes reflect a Black feminism that is
both the law and its transgression, and how the novel uses laws of
religion and community to express this complex, seemingly contradic-
tory relationship.
Morrisons refusal to be limited by resisting the terms of literary
criticism and her writing about outlaw women are similar. Although
the law of literary criticism is transgressed, it has to be part of the
process of interpretation. Placed in a productive tension, this relation-
ship of law and outlaw has lessons for a postBlack feminist prac-
tice that is both critical of its own process and creative beyond its own
named limits and terms. Morrison resists the vocabulary of literary crit-
icism as a dead language, petrified; Morrison would rather that readers
participate in the creative processthe process of embodying language.
When asked whether she agreed with critics who had called Par-
adise a feminist novel, Morrison responded, Not at all. . . . I dont
write ist novels. Explaining why she distances herself from feminism,
Morrison states:
In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagina-

tion, I cant take positions that are closed. Everything Ive
ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articula-
tion, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not
even closing the bookleaving the endings open for reinter-
pretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. I detest and loathe
[those categories]. I think its off-putting to some readers,
who may feel that Im involved in writing some kind of fem-
inist tract. I dont subscribe to patriarchy, and I dont think it
should be substituted with matriarchy. I think its a question
of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.
(Jaffrey 1998)
Paradoxically, Morrison herself is reductionist in describing feminism

as a matriarchal substitute for patriarchy. She has stated that she dis-
likes either/or formulations, and sees personality as more fluid
(Moyers 1994b), but her formulation here merely reinforces her
perception of ist ideology on the one hand, and aesthetic practices

on the other. With her dismissal of ist novels, Morrison steps away
from labels and from being categorized with other writers of her gener-
ation, particularly feminists, whether black or white. As Hilton Als
wrote in his recent profile of Morrison in the New Yorker, when asked
her opinion about the novels of one of her contemporaries, she said,
I hear the movie is fab, and turned away. (2003, 64) Alss question
seems a fairly obvious attempt to elicit Morrisons response to Alice
Walkers The Color Purple. But the message Morrison sends is clear:
she does not want to be grouped with other black writers simply
because she is black; she does not want to be classified as a feminist
just because she writes about women. It is wise to recall the controver-
sial critique of Morrison by New York Times reviewer Sara Blackburn,
who wrote that Morrison should transcend that early and uninten-
tionally limiting classification black woman writer and take her place
among the most serious, important and talented American novelists
now working (Blackburn 1973, 3) by abandoning the subject of
provincial black American life. Morrison asserts that she is already
discredited . . . already politicized, before I get out of the gate. How-
ever, she adds, I can accept the labelslike black and female
that are used to describe her work because being a black woman
writer is not a shallow place to write from. It doesnt limit my imagina-
tion; it expands it (Als 2003, 66). This comment should make clear
that there are themes and characters in her novels that can be read as
feminist and expansive. Rather, what Morrison resists is the reduction
and simplification that accompany the terms themselves. She points
out that while growing up,
[she] was surrounded by black women who were very tough

and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to
work and rear children and manage homes. They had enor-
mously high expectations of their daughters, and cut no
quarter with us; it never occurred to me that it was feminist
activity. (Jaffrey 1998)
Their activity, later . . . called feminist behavior, included confronta-

tion with the world at large over issues of equality, especially what
was going to happen to the children . . . the black children . . . her
daughters as well as her sons (1998). Morrisons objection to the ter-
minology applied to describe the lives and activity of black women orig-
inates in part in the absurdity of reclaiming them for a cause. These

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

outlaw categoryclearly, characters who place themselves or are
placed outside normative female behavior by their own preference
and/or by their struggles with what is seen as more mainstream culture.
But these women are not really free; rather, they are at odds with social
and jurisprudential laws, laws made by men, and are therefore defined
or define themselves in relationship to them. Many such outlaw women
appear in Morrisons recent novel, Paradise; they represent the culmina-
tion of Morrisons thinking about outlaw women, love, and God.

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

(Bouson 2000, 23840). Connie is a key figure for a postBlack femi-
nism, one that fits Morrisons standard of expansiveness: not just
national in scope, but global; not pure but fluid and complex, both
person and context. This post marks much more than a departure
from the 1970s moment that initiated the theoretical parameters of
Black feminist criticism. It encompasses the global experience of colo-
nialism and the self-consciousness of form that defines the postmodern.
Morrison has stated that she views her novels as inquiries, and
since Paradise explores lives shaped by race, gender, and the use of lan-
guage as a tool of oppression and death or conversely of freedom and
life, it is the obvious work to use for an inquiry into how black femi-
nism is at work in her writing. In Paradise Morrison explores the love
of God and the laws men and women inscribe and enact in his (or her)
name. The history of the township called Ruby is set in tension with the
commune (or coven, as it is called by Rubys second generation of
men) of women who live in the former convent. There are many outlaw
women in Paradise, more than there first seem to be, because although
the women of the convent surely fit the description, there are women in
Ruby who do as well. The very issues of racial purity, adultery, and
women that Patricia Best identifies are underscored in explicit and
implicit ways by the relations that Rubys men and women have not
only with each other, but also with the women of the Convent. The
towns women refuse to create progeny for Ruby. Soane, Deeks wife,
consumes an herbal concoction that serves as birth control provided by
Connie; Grace (Gigi) has sexual relations with K. D., the man who is
engaged to be married to Arnette; Arnette has an abortion in the sanc-
tuary of the Convent; and Connie has an affair with Deek. The women
of the Convent are identified as the source of Rubys impurities, the
outrages that had been accumulating all along . . . A mother was
knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged
infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed.
Brides disappeared on their honeymoons (Morrison 1998, 11) These
womenparticularly the women of the Conventare virtually defined
by their antagonistic relations with the law of Ruby, both at the begin-
ning and the end of the novel, when they are massacred by the men.
The question of how law and outlaw relate to Paradise is an
important one. Does Morrison suggest that paradise is outlawed, or
lawless? The novel shows how an African American community uses
the religious symbolism of Puritan theology and American civil religion
to form its ethnic identity (Fraile-Marcos 2002, 99). More than this,
however, Morrisons novel plays with the historical discourse of
preslavery America as Edenic, with its law seen as reflecting the gram-
mar of good order. As Morrison has said, America was this Eden . . .
perceived as uninhabited land . . . Puritans were trying to get their life
over here so that they could be disciplined and contained (Moyers
1994b). But Morrisons novel shows how Paradise is itself created out
of Gods grammar, and that grammar is therefore exclusionist. The
town of Ruby is the prime example of this. Ruby is figured as a refuge
from one lawthe law of white supremacy. But in making a space of
refuge, it creates another law that is almost private and exists inde-
pendently of white law.
The public-private distinction that is usually made, with law rep-
resenting open space and relationships representing the hidden and pri-
vate is hard to maintain in the town of Ruby. In fact, while law is what
defines the distinction between public and private, one must know both
in Ruby. The Oven, Rubys communal kitchen, is the emblem of this
refusal of a public-private distinction. Painstakingly transferred brick by
brick from Haven, where Rubys founding fifteen families had previ-
ously settled in Oklahoma, the Oven represents an altar to the purity of
the communitys women, a refuge from the white men and their laws of
justification who made black women their quarry:
Zechariah corralled some of the men into building a cook

oven. They were proud that none of their women had ever
worked in a whitemans kitchen or nursed a white child.
Although field labor was harder and carried no status, they
believed the rape of women who worked in white kitchens
was if not a certainty a distinct possibilityneither of which
they could bear to contemplate. So they exchanged that
danger for the relative safety of brutal work. It was that
thinking that made a community kitchen so agreeable.
(Morrison 1998, 16, 99)
The Oven is a symbolic and material space that both proclaims the
unity of the community and is meant to ensure the purity of its women.
This refuge creates the imperative of making the private public, with
women the focus of not just the communitys identity, but also its
purity. In fact, the Oven has a communal law literally nailed onto it.
Only no one in present-day Ruby can agree on what it says, much less
what it might mean. The law plays a key role in Morrisons exploration
and reconfiguration of womens narratives. Paradise, which Morrison
gave the working title of God and War, explores Gods law and con-
stitutional law; it also shows how these laws are tied to the American
history of migration. She ultimately shows how societies define them-
selves and others by concentrating on the exile not only of African
Americans but also of womenand not solely African American
women.
Because of this indeterminacy, Morrisons writing, especially in
Paradise, shows new theoretical directions for Black feminism. Morri-
son develops these concepts in her Nobel Prize speech, where she
describes,
an old woman. Blind. Wise. In the version I know, the

daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a
small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is
without peer and without question. Among her people she is
both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and
the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood
to places far away, to the city where the intelligence of rural
prophets is the source of much amusement. (Morrison
1997b, 26768)
When some young people come to question her, the answer to their
question
rides solely on her difference from them . . . : her blindness.

Old woman, one of them says. I hold in my hand a bird.
Tell me whether it is living or dead. . . . she doesnt answer.
She is blind, and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in
their hands. She does not know their color, gender, or home-
land. She knows only their motive. Finally she speaks: I
dont know whether the bird you are holding is dead or
alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands.
(26768)
Morrison applies the old womans meaning that whatever the case
. . . , it is your responsibility to language and writing: in choosing to
read the bird as language and the woman as practiced writer, Morrison
confronts her audience with the responsibility of exploring possibilities,
resisting routine inscriptions, daring to transgress the accepted wisdom
which has petrified into law. The question the children put to heris
it living or dead?is not unreal because [the old woman] thinks of lan-
guage as susceptible to death, erasure, certainly imperiled and salvage-
able only by an effort of the will A dead language is an unyielding
language content to admire its own paralysis (26768).
The idea of a rigid, stultifying language, susceptible to death, era-
sure, certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will,
illustrates the exclusionary, rigid language of the town of Ruby, espe-
cially as it is applied to women. Each of the chapters of Paradise is
devoted to a woman, some from Ruby, but mostly those who seek
refuge at the Convent. These women who come to the Convent are
imperiled, horribly scarred, and alone. Already outlaws, through the
process of joining Connie in a ritual exorcism that pairs body and spirit,
they become lawless. That is, the hybrid spirituality of the Convent
moves them to a nonalienated, nonhierarchical spiritual sanctuary
beyond the clutches of man-made religious and social law. But they are
not allowed to remain so: they are massacred by men from Ruby, bring-
ing them within the discourse of law once again. The specific features of
Paradiseof laws and especially of women who are both the law and
its transgressionsuggest ways in which black feminist practices, criti-
cal and creative, can transform themselves while continuing their explo-
ration of race and gender. Paradises themes reflect a black feminism
that is both the law and its transgression, using laws of religion and
community to express this complex, seemingly contradictory relation-
ship. The concept also helps to explain Morrisons resistance to labels
such as black and feminist.
Morrison refuses literary critical inscriptions as reductionist,
especially in the novel Paradise. In their hands, the bird is dead, or at
least its trajectory is restricted to the cage in which it has been placed (a
feminist cage, a black feminist cage, and so on). It is intentional that the
women of the Convent paint themselves rather than carve words into
their flesh. This painting suggests a new living language, one that is
transformativea passionate rephrasing of their inherited inscriptions.
From its opening line, they shoot the white girl first, Morri-
sons novel presents her reader with interpretive challenges (Page 2001,
63750). This transgressive use of language shocks us into attention,
forcing us to consider all of the possibilities. We never do learn which
of the women is that white girl; many readers have tried to answer
the riddle through class associations, picking either Pallas because she
is wealthy or Mavis because she is poor. Such racial indeterminacy
makes it difficult to maintain that Paradise is a Black feminist novel

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

Furrow of his Brow?
You cant be God, boy. . . .
Its not being Him, sir; its being His instrument, His
justice. As a race
Gods justice is His alone. How you going to be His
instrument if you dont do what He says? asked Reverend
Pulliam. You have to obey Him.
Yes, sir, but we are obeying Him, said Destry. If we
follow His commandments, well be His voice, His retribu-
tion. As a people Harper Jury silenced him. It says
Beware. Not Be. Beware means Look out. The power is
mine. Get used to it.
Be means you putting Him aside and you the
power, said Sargeant.
We are the power if we just
See what I mean? See what I mean? Listen to that!
You hear that,
Reverend? That boy needs a strap. Blasphemy! (87)
According to the second generation of Ruby, the younger generation

want[s] to kill it [the meaning of the Oven and its statement], change it
into something they made up (86). As with the story of the children,
the old woman, and the bird, there are generational issues.
As Dovey contemplates the antagonism, she wonders, Beware
the Furrow of His Brow? Be the Furrow of His Brow? Her own opin-
ion was that The Furrow of His Brow alone was enough for any age
or generation. Specifying it, particularizing it, nailing its meaning down,
was futile. The only nailing needing to be done had already taken place.
On the Cross (Morrison 1998, 93).
Because the inhabitants of Ruby nearly come to blows over how
to read and interpret the words on the Oven, it is clear that Morrison
wants to present interpretive issues both within and external to the
text. At stake is the very definition of the community, relying as it does
upon its relationship to the past for its present identity. As Philip Page
has pointed out, the younger generations interpretation of Be the
Furrow of His Brow points to a New Testament reading of God and
Christ, while the older generations Beware the Furrow of His Brow
is firmly grounded in an Old Testament reading (Page 2001, 638). The
younger generation, of course, seeks to combine their reading with the
black cultural nationalism of the late sixties and seventies that looked
to Africa for its roots of identity, thus turning their backs on the
emphasis that Rubys second generation places on the hardships of the
Old Fathers in America.
But as active interpreters, the women of Ruby have something
more to offer than their male counterparts. The town is named for a
woman who was among the Old Fathers and who suffered greatly; the
Oven is a testament to the purity and safety of their women; blind
Esther, who remembered the words nailed to the Oven, is remembered as
a kind of saint; but the women of present-day Ruby are more than icons
and sounding stones. As active interpreters, Patricia, Dovey, and Soane
offer mostly internalized, private assessments of the meaning of the
Ovens message and the generational antagonisms. These women are
almost exclusively of the second generation. Patricia is unwed because
she is too light in skin color, Soane is the mother of two sons who were
sent off to World War II and returned as dismembered bodies, and
Dovey is unable to bear children. These women ruminate on the mean-
ing of the towns genealogy and genesis, while resisting further procre-
ation. Their attitudes shape the Ovens meaning, tacitly and implicitly. In
fact, their attitudes and activities show that, although as icons of purity
Soane and Dovey are the law of Ruby, they are also the transgression.
The women residents of Ruby are transgressive especially by visit-
ing the Convent and being tolerant of the women who live there. As a
result, the very food of Steward Morganthe self-appointed second-
generation Old Father of Ruby and the leader of the ultimate massacre
of the Convents womenis seasoned with spices grown only at the
Convent. Soane, as mentioned earlier, purchases an herbal birth control
from the Convent, unbeknownst to her husband Deek Morgan, the
other self-appointed, second-generation Old Father and co-conspirator
in the massacre. Doveys interpretation of the Ovens wordsthat The
Furrow of His Brow was all that was necessarypoints to the toler-
ance and moderation of these women, who seem unsure of whether
they should infuse spirit into Rubys law or reject the law altogether.
Connie and the communal living that springs up at the Convent
offer an alternative to the rigidity of Ruby, to the words beaten in
iron that imprison the men and especially the women. Connie is the
great figure of the Convent who ultimately encourages self-discovery
and lawlessness in the women who seek refuge there, and her example
is followed by the other women. Their ability to pull together meaning-
ful aspects of various religious traditions (while simultaneously rejecting
these oppressive aspects) is an example of women creating a tradition
that does not ensnare them in dictates and rigid positions, but rather
encourages fluidity. Morrisons shaping of this alternative follows
directly from her stance on stultifying, dead language and the prison
house of terms like black and feminist.
Consolata, the surviving member of the now-defunct Convent,
was an orphan kidnapped from her native Brazil as a girl and raised by
the Portuguese order of Catholic nuns who stole her from her mother.
After initially embracing the Catholic teaching that polarizes the
impulses of spirit and body, Consolata learns that, while embracing the
Catholicism she is taught, she must infuse it with her native religion. In
fact, she uses it to keep Sister Mary Magna, or Mother, alive well
beyond her normal life span. The outsider woman of Ruby, Lone, a
midwife reputed to practice, nudges Connie toward this awareness by
giving her advice that made her uneasy. Consolata complains that she
did not believe in magic; that the church and everything holy forbade its
claims to knowingness and its practice . . . In my faith, faith is all I
need (Morrison, 1998, 244). Lone tells her, you need what we all
need: earth, air, water. Dont separate God from His elements. He cre-
ated it all. You stuck on dividing Him from His works. Dont unbalance
His world (244). Consolata comes to perceive that by following the
teachings of Mother Mary, she has divorced body and spirit. After her
affair with Deek, which ends with his rejection of her as uncontrollable
and whorish (she bites his lip and draws blood), she is a changed
woman who resolves to unite body and spirit once more. After prepar-
ing an exquisite meal, Connie invites the women to share in her teach-
ings and new-found discovery:
The table is set; the food placed. Consolata takes off her
apron. With the aristocratic gaze of the blind she sweeps the
womens faces and says, I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you
want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when
I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for. . . . If
you have a place, she continued, that you should be in and
somebody who loves you waiting for you there, then go. If
not, stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet
you. (262)
Not one woman leaves, finding that they could not leave the one place
that they were free to leave (262). The women find themselves in the
basement of the Convent, where they externalize their inner scars, artic-
ulating the unspeakable (Morrison1989) by painting their experi-

ences into their bodies silhouettes, drawn on the cellar floor by Connie:
In the beginning the most important thing was the template.

First they had to scrub the cellar floor until its stones were as
clean as rocks on a shore. Then they ringed the place with
candles. Consolata told each to undress and lie down. In
flattering light under Consolatas soft vision they did as they
were told. How should we lie? However you feel. They tried
arms at the sides, outstretched above the head, crossed over
breasts or stomach. Seneca lay on her stomach first, then
changed to her back, hands clasping her shoulders. Pallas lay
on her side, knees drawn up. Gigi flung her arms and legs
apart, while Mavis struck a floaters pose, arms angled,
knees pointing in. When each found the position she could
tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata
walked around her and painted the bodys silhouette. Once
the outlines were complete, each was instructed to remain
there. Unspeaking. Naked in candlelight. (Morrison 1998,
263)
Consolata guides them in the process of inscribing themselves as they

choose rather than accepting the larger communitys inscription of
themshe appears to lead them toward claiming and maintaining own-
ership of themselves, body and spirit. She spoke first, initiating the
loud dreaming (264) of all the women:
My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a

woman who teach me my body is nothing my spirit every-
thing. I agreed with her until I met another. My flesh is so
hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the woman
rescue me from my body again. Twice she saves it. When her
body sickens I care for it every way flesh works. I hold it in
my arms and between my legs. Clean it, rock it, enter it to
keep it breath. After she is dead I can not get past that. My
bones on hers the only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No dif-
ferent from the man. My bones on his the only true thing. So
I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like
bones. It is good, like bones. One sweet, one bitter. Where is
it lost? Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put
one over the other. Eve is Marys mother. Mary is the daugh-
ter of Eve. (263)
With this sermon, Connie puts Lones teachings into practice, humaniz-
ing Eve (temptress and whore) and Mary (immaculate virgin) by putting
the women in a mother-daughter relationship with one another. As
body and spirit are one, both acceptance and transgression of the law
appear to be one.
Out of this, the collective voice arises, the floodgates opened to
loud dreaming loud stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the
never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above the guttering
candles . . . and it was never important to know who said the dream or
whether it had meaning. In spite of or perhaps because their bodies
ache, they step easily into the dreamers tale (Morrison 1998, 264).
This process of giving voice to their interior thoughts shifts the Con-
vent, as life, real and intense, shifted to down there in limited pools of
light . . . The templates drew them like magnets (264). Pallas suggests
they shop for paint and colored chalk:
They understood and began to begin. First with natural fea-

tures: breasts and pudenda, toes, ears and head hair. Seneca
duplicated in robins egg blue one of her more elegant scars,
one drop of red at its tip. Later on, when she had the hunger
to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open
body lying on the cellar floor. They spoke to each other
about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn.
(265)
Significantly, Senecas self-mutilation is described as a transgressive kind

of writing: she entered the vice like a censored poet whose suspect lex-
icon was too supple, too shocking to publish. It thrilled her. It steadied
her (261). Transferred to her template, she is able to continue and
develop her articulation without damaging herself. And this is the
important part: the women are learning to step outside the way they
have been inscribed by the elite of Ruby to reinscribe themselves. The
other women also find that careful etchings of body parts and memo-
rabilia occupied them (265). With Consolata in charge, like a new
and revised Reverend Mother, feeding them bloodless food and water
alone to quench their thirst, they altered. They had to be reminded of
the moving bodies they wore, so seductive were the alive ones below
(265), so transformed were they by their relationship to Connie and to
their new capacity to inscribe themselves.
These transformations have consequences, however subtle. A cus-

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

Paradise can be read as a twice-told tale, to be read once for Rubys
judgment and a second time for a refutation of that judgment. What the
reader learns in between the two tellings of the massacre of the Convent
women is not just their names and histories, but what has driven the
men of Ruby to enact such violence upon these women. The reader
must then decide whether these women have truly diedonly the death
of the white woman is confirmedand where she would like the narra-
tive to end.
Such a circular conclusion to the novel will not surprise experi-
enced readers of Morrisons works. In creating interpretive problems
within the story, and more importantly outside the story, Morrison not
only heightens awareness of how meaning is made out of text, but also
emphasizes the importance of individual interpretation. She formulates
this role of the reader as interpreter, where the reader is seen in an inti-
mate embrace with the story: The Dancing Mind, as she calls it in her
speech (Morrison 1997b). The concept is at work and especially appar-
ent in the endings of her narratives: Nels circles and circles of sorrow
in Sula, Milkmans flying in Song of Solomon, Beloveds not a story to
pass on, and Jazzs I love the way you hold me . . . I like your fingers
. . . lifting, turning . . . Look where your hands are. Now. And here,
Paradises Convent women who, depending on the readers desires, are
either dead or still-living revolutionaries, are armed outlaws once again.
In the structuring of her stories, particularly this one, Morrison invites
readers to transgress the law of the single, authorized reading, be it
that of the tradition of the male-dominated Academy or of Religion
precisely because such authorized readings have tended to close off pos-
sibilities for all of us.
Morrison leaves it to her readers to discover and explore feminist
themes in her work. But she shows her readers that they must never do
so to the detriment of other themesbe they race, religion, or imagina-
tive expression. Instead of explicitly engaging such categories as black
and feminist, Morrison favors the complexity of narrative itself, the
interactions of multiple narratives, and, importantly, the readers
increased awareness of her role in constructing meaning from the sto-
ries. Morrison seeks this expansion through her emphasis on the equity
of man to woman, of reader to story. Indeed, the process she describes
of opening doors to all sorts of things is much like the stepping in
that Lone, the lawless woman of Ruby, teaches Connie, as a means of
balancing Gods world, wedding body and spirit. It is also the lesson
of the bird is in your hands, that language is what you make of it.
Morrisons approach to writing (and reading) has significant
implications for a postBlack feminist literary criticism. Itself transgres-
sive of category, her writing shows the importance of reflexivity, self-
consciousness, and collaboration of the characters and the readers of

her fiction. The women of the Convent participate in this collaboration
on the cellar floor where they actively construct as well as interpret the
acts that constitute and shape their lives, and emphasize their own inter-
pretations of their experiences. The reader, deciding its conclusion and
returning to the beginning of the novel, also participates in this actas
she interprets and pieces together the womens lives and the narrative
itself. Especially in the act of choosing the fate of the women by ending
or extending their lives at the close of the narrative, the reader must
consider the consequences of interpretation as a creative rather than a
reductive process, one which enables individual and collective change.
Indeed, the reader of Paradise must embrace multiple and contra-
dictory identities, ultimately realizing that exploring the very absence of
a unitary female identity or position opens doors. This act paves the
way for the method that might define a postBlack feminist critical
process. Since feminist processes are not unitary, processes of inquiry
need to consider how exploring the contradictions and gaps that char-
acterize multiple and diverse identities help show readers how they
know, heightening the processes of knowing a we that is black and
feminist (Springer 2002, 1061). Many would argue that Black feminism
is reflexive, self-conscious, and intersubjectively collaborative and that
it embraces multiple and contradictory identities, precisely because this
is the nature of black feminine subjectivitybeing both gendered and
racialized in a world that seems capable of dealing with one or the other
but not both. Morrisons act of signifying on language, religion, and
law has implications for new theoretical directions in black feminist lit-
erary criticism because she insists on the fluidity of the practice, to the
extent of avoiding the Name, the Letter. Black feminism must avoid
residing in the letter of the law; it must reside in the spirit of the law,
where imagination is supreme. This practice entails aesthetics and imag-
ination over and above name and letter; all-encompassing fluidity and
connectivity through dialogue and storytelling; and intimacy and world-
liness. Morrisons transgressions of certain Black feminist interpretive
paradigms show her work to favor a postmodern vision that can at
once step in as the reader takes responsibility for interpretation and
help to define a multiple and contradictory Black feminist weone
that is both the law and its transgression.
9
Luci Tapahonsos Leda and the Cowboy
A Gynocratic, Navajo Response

to Yeatss Leda and the Swan
MAGGIE ROMIGH
In 1992 Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso offered the first positive poetic
response to a question raised in William Butler Yeatss 1923 Leda and
the Swan. In his poem Yeats retells the ancient Greek myth in which
the god Zeus transforms himself into a swan and then rapes and
impregnates a young woman named Leda. Yeatss poem, with its themes
of subjugation and victimization, ends with an unanswered question:
Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent
beak could let her drop? (Yeats 1965, 21112).
There are many versions of the Leda myth, and these stories have
long become part of the European literary tradition. In some versions of
the story, Zeus transforms himself into a swan and seduces Leda. In
other versions he rapes her. In another, she mates with her husband in
the same evening, and two of the four children she later bears are sired
by Zeus while the others are the children of her husband. In still
another version, the children of Zeus are not from Leda but from
Nemesis, who attempts to escape Zeus by transforming herself into
many different animal shapes. Zeus, in the form of a swan, finally rapes
Nemesis when she turns herself into a goose. She leaves the egg that
results from this union with Leda, and Leda mothers the children who
hatch from the egg along with her own. In still another version, Neme-
sis pursues Zeus as they each change into various animal forms until she
finally catches him at the winter solstice and devours him (Yeats 1956,
837). These mythic stories have been depicted in literature, as well as
other forms of creative expression.
159
Though Yeatss Leda and the Swan is certainly not the first
poem to deal with this myth and the images that it conjures, to stu-
dents of English literature it is surely the most well-known of the Leda
poems. It was the first English poem, moreover, to deal with the
encounter between Zeus and Leda as a forceful rape. Since Leda and
the Swan was published, no critic, scholar, or poet has offered a
response without confronting the vital importance of Yeatss final ques-
tion. Ian Fletcher argues that A strong reason why the poem will not
let us rest are those questions: rhetorical? Expecting the answer, yes,
no, or dont know? Can one . . . resist answers, even ones that do limit
by fiat? (1982, 82). Scholars have analyzed and discussed the poem
ad nausium so that Fletcher felt the need to begin his essay with the
following: One more word on Leda and the Swan is three too
many has been apologetically or defiantly intoned by critics about to
commit three thousand. The brevity, force, ambiguousness, of Yeatss
poem continuously challenge, so I too join their number (82). Trow-
bridge writes that This question could not be translated as a declara-
tion, for the poem leaves the question open. It is a oracular question,
forcing the mind to think and the heart to feel, but baffling inquiry
(Trowbridge 1954, 12425). Perhaps it is a distinguishing mark of
this poems enigmatic greatness, Todd Davis writes, that the inter-
pretation of the question and the subsequent answers have been so
diverse (T. Davis 1997, 16). Throughout the critical discourse, how-
ever, there has been little consensus regarding how the final question in
this poem should be answered, and though many poets have responded
with their own Leda poems, only two have attempted to offer an
emphatic answer to Yeatss poetic question. One of these is Luci Tapa-
honso, who is the only poet to offer a positive answer.
Yeats published Leda and the Swan in three different versions
and in many different forms. When he published it for the final time, it
was as an introduction to a chapter of A Vision, the book that contains
the personal mythology that Yeats had developed throughout a lifetime
of searching for answers to fulfill his own spiritual longing. The chapter
that is introduced by Leda and the Swan is one that discusses Yeatss
belief that a cycle exists in which every two thousand years a powerful
and usually violent annunciation, a merging of the divine and the
human, takes place and creates major directional changes in history.
Yeats sees the rape of Leda by Zeus as one such annunciation. Through-
out this chapter he repeats the phrasing that All things are antitheti-
cal (Yeats 1956, 267300).
Luci Tapahonsos Leda and the Cowboy 161
How appropriate then that the first poet to offer an unequivocally

positive answer to Yeatss final question should offer a response that is
antithetical to the poem. That is exactly what Tapahonso does in her
poem Leda and the Cowboy. The themes of Yeatss poem are rape,
terror, subjugation, and victimization. By contrast, the themes of Tapa-
honsos poem are seduction, healing, and reestablishing balance and
harmony. In Yeatss poem Zeus is the powerful and indifferent rapist
while Leda is a helpless and terrified victim. In Tapahonsos poem Leda
is a powerful supernatural agent who seduces and heals a womanizing
cowboy, thereby returning him to a life of balance and harmony. There
are no victims in Leda and the Cowboy. Tapahonso is able is enfold
the poetic expression of terror in Yeatss poetry into her own poetics of
healing and overcoming alienation.
Perhaps it is the questions ability to force the mind to think and
the heart to feel that has inspired so many poets to respond with Leda
poems of their own. Some of these poems can be seen as direct
responses to Yeatss poem; still others offer alternative visions of Ledas
encounter with the swan. But, with the exception of Tapahonsos, all of
these poems view Leda through the lens of European culture. And,
almost without exception, the poets and the many critics who have
written about this poem tend toward answering Yeatss question nega-
tively. Because of the devaluation of women in much of Western culture,
Leda is almost always viewed as powerless. This makes Tapahonsos
poem, with its Navajo perspective and positive response, even more
intriguing.
To appreciate fully the ingenuity and contrast of Tapahonsos response

to both Yeats and the critical and poetic discourses that have emerged
over his poem, it will be helpful to review some of these other responses
to Yeatss Leda and the Swan. The first three Leda poems to follow
Yeatss Leda and the Swan were written by D. H. Lawrence. In the
first poem entitled Swan, Lawrence writes from the perspective of the
men cuckolded by this swan god: He is treading our women / and we
men are put out (2001b). Though this poem definitely seems to be a
response to Yeatss poem, it does not offer any answers to his question.
It merely provides a perspective that lies outside the vantage points of
either Leda or Zeus. In the second poem, entitled simply Leda, the
narrator seems to be Leda beseeching Zeus to come to her not with
kisses [or] caresses but with the hiss of wings / and the sea-touch tip
of a beak / and treading of wet, webbed, wave-working feet / into the
marsh-soft belly (Lawrence 2001a). This Leda likes the strangeness of
the swan form of Zeus. She appears to enjoy the bestial sexual possibil-
ities that his trans-speciation offers, but she mentions neither power nor
knowledge. The third of Lawrences Leda poems is entitled Wont It Be
Strange? This poem deals only with the supposed fathers reaction to
the imagined child of Leda born with webbed greenish feet and the
round, vivid eye of a wild-goose staring who squawks with a little
bird-cry (2001c).
Other poets have also responded to Yeats with Leda poems. In
Leda, Robert Chute portrays Zeus as a stalker waiting in the park to
attack an unsuspecting Leda who has worked late / at the library that
night (2001). Olga Broumas offers a poem entitled Leda and Her
Swan in which the narrator, as the swan, gazes with desire at Leda,
while a mysterious group called the fathers are lingering in the
background nodding assent and are nodding like overdosed lechers
(1977, 56). Robert Graves also addresses the lechery aroused by the
idea of rape. He writes of how his heart has lecherously mused upon /
That horror with which Leda quaked and has become pregnant as
Leda was, of bawdry, murder, and deceit (1958, 125). Carl Phillips, in
Leda, After the Swan, portrays Leda as confused, believing that she
recognized something more than swan but unable to describe just what
it is (2001). Peter Meinke moves far away from the myth as he describes
a statue of Leda and the swan scrawled with the phrasing, Helen
Goldberg is a good peece of ass (2001). He questions this Helen about
her encounter with her ungallant and poor-spelling lover: Id be willing
to bet / there was not a swan back then, either, / just a story that brown-
haired Leda / made up for her mother (ibid).
In Engendering Inspiration, Helen Sword contends:
So dramatic and memorable is Yeats sonnet that most twen-

tieth-century readers have come to think of it as the defini-
tive account of the Leda myth. Certainly, we cannot easily
imagine Leda and the Swan beginning in any other way
than with a sudden blow, an emphatic collision that col-
lapses the origins of Western civilization into a single, star-
tling moment of divine presence. (1995, 199)
Phyllis Stowell validates Swords observation when she begins her

poem Leda with: A SUDDEN blow: my student shudders (2001).
Stowells poem addresses the difficulties of teaching Yeatss Leda

poems in classes where female coeds have been sexually assaulted and
are still suffering psychologicallyperhaps even physically, as well. In
this poem both Leda and the students are powerless. Yet James Harrison
collapses Swords argument when he imagines not only a different begin-
ning, but also a beginning that pokes fun at the sudden blow. His
poem Ledas Version begins: A furtive blow, more like. Harrison is
definitely responding to Yeatss poem, but his Leda has gained only con-
tempt for Zeus rather than any kind of knowledge or power (1983, 84).
In Leda, Mona Van Duyn makes it clear that she is responding
directly to Yeatss poem when she includes, as an epigraph, a quote of
the final question from Yeatss Leda and the Swan: Did she put on
his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her
drop? (1971a, 12). Van Duyns poem then proceeds to answer the
question with an unequivocal opening line: Not even for a moment.
. . . Her body became the consequence of his juice / while her mind
closed on a bird and went to sleep (12). Further in the poem Van Duyn
writes of Leda: She tried for a while to understand what it was / that
had happened, and then decided to let it drop (12). Van Duyns Leda
cannot even begin to understand what has happened to her. She is trau-
matized into silence, deciding to drop the matter as Zeus had dropped
her and to move on with life.
Van Duyn wrote another Leda poem entitled Leda Reconsid-
ered (1971b). This time she responds to the entire cultural repertory of
Leda myths rather than responding to only Yeatss poem. She conjures
the remembrance of confusion between Leda and Nemesis with: And
now, how much would she try / to see, to take / of what was not hers,
of what / was not offered? / There was that old story of matching him
change for change, pursuing, and at the solstice / devouring him. / A
mans story. / No, she was not that hungry (Van Duyn 1971b). This
Leda recognizes Zeus in his swan form and decides to allow him to
have his way: to give up was an offering / only she could savor, simply
by covering / her eyes (7778). This Leda surrenders herself willingly
and receives pleasure but does not gain any power or knowledge from
the encounter.
II
Luci Tapahonso imagines an altogether different Leda myth from

Yeatss, a Leda who is outside of the European cultural context and so
different as to be unrecognizable in comparison to Yeatss Leda for most

readers. Very little criticism has been written about Luci Tapahonsos
productions. But as Paula Gunn Allen writes: No cultural artifact can
be seen existing outside its particular matrix; no document, however
profoundly aesthetic, can be comprehended outside its frame of refer-
encea frame that extends all the way into the depths of the conscious-
ness that marks a culture differentiating it from another (1992, 308). I
suggest that to fully appreciate Tapahonsos response to Yeatss poem,
her poem must be read not only in comparison to his, but also in con-
sideration of her own Navajo worldview.
Because Tapahonso was born and raised in the Navajo culture of
the American Southwest, her poem, though familiar in language, is
unfamiliar in its contextual assumptions. She says, Though I am now
in a predominantly English-functioning environment, I consider Navajo
language to be the undercurrent, the matrix which everything in my life
filters through (Bataille 1997, 79). In another interview, she explains,
most of the time I will see something, and I will think about what this
would be in Navajo, or is there an equivalent of this in Navajo?
(Binder and Breinig 1995, 122). Therefore, when Tapahonso first read
Yeatss Leda and the Swan, it was natural for her to envision a Leda
acting and reacting in accordance with Navajo values and customs.
In traditional matrilineal Navajo society, women have always held
far more power in their personal lives and clans than did their white
European and American counterparts. Traditionally, Navajo women
have owned all family land and livestock along with their own horses
and other personal property. Their property was then passed down
through generations from mothers to daughters. Navajo men owned
only their own tools, hunting equipment, and personal horses. When
couples married, the man moved into the matriarchal home of the
woman. The woman, along with her brothers, made all major decisions
regarding the couples children. The father was asked his advice out of
courtesy, but all decisions remained in the mothers hands. The mother
also approved of and made all marriage arrangements for the children.
Traditionally, women did not idle around, waiting to be asked to dance
as European women did. At ceremonial dances women picked their
own dance partners while the men waited to be chosen (Kluckhohn and
Leighton 1962, 1028). Assertiveness and autonomy were important
characteristics of Navajo women, which contrast sharply with white
Western conceptions of women as helpless and dependant.
The last three lines of Tapahonsos poem are: as he follows Leda

through / the stark beauty of the old stories, / he has already left his
own life behind (Tapahonso 1993, 22). These lines indicate that Tapa-
honsos Leda is a traditional Navajo woman. Only a traditional Navajo
woman, or at least one who retains strong vestiges of Navajo tradition,
would know the old stories well enough to lead someone else
through them. Tapahonsos Leda personifies Paula Gunn Allens gyno-
cratic principlefound in much Native American literature and oral
traditionswhich deals with the realities of a society governed by child-
bearing women (Allen 1991, xiiixiv). As a woman in a gynocratic
Navajo society, Tapahonsos Leda is completely in charge of her first
meeting with the cowboy. She is not the helpless victim depicted in
Greek mythology and Yeatss poem, or the flighty (but still helpless)
victim of the European literary tradition. She is certainly not a vulnera-
ble woman who allows herself to be sweet-talked, seduced, impregnated
(like Yeatss Leda) and then dumped as some readers of Tapahonsos
poem have suggested.
Tapahonsos poem is not an updated version of Leda and the
Swan. It is, in fact, the antithesis of Yeatss poem, in which Leda is the
victim and her children were Helen, the spark that ignited the Trojan
War, and Clytemnestra, murderer of her own husband. A violent act
begets generations of more violence in the fruits of its degradation. As
Yeats writes, A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall,
the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead (1956, 21112).
In contrast, Leda is the seducter in Tapahonsos poem. The conse-
quences of her union with the cowboy will be a healing restoration of
balance and harmonya mythic trope that is specific to many Native
American stories that deal with sexual encounters between humans and
spirits. According to Patricia Clark Smith, A male being may abduct a
human woman, or a female being may seduce a human man, but subju-
gation is not the dynamic of either event. . . . The ultimate purpose of
such ritual abductions and seductions is to transfer knowledge from the
spirit world to the human sphere, and this transfer is not accomplished
in an atmosphere of control or domination (P. Clark and Allen, 178).
III
There are still other observations to be made about Tapahonsos Leda

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

ral. Tapahonso has looked at the Greek Leda who has been raped by a
god and asked herself, What would this Leda be like if she were
Navajo?
Zolbrod also contends that
in Navajo thought, the nature of sexual harmony and the

way of achieving and maintaining it are central. Such har-
mony epitomizes the pattern of hzh (beauty, harmony, and
balance) manifest everywhere in the universe. It does not just
govern male-female relationships; directly or indirectly it is
reflected in the harmony of relationships between all sorts of
counterparts in the broad cosmic scheme: earth and sky,
night and day, mortals and supernaturals, summer and
winter. . . . Likewise when sexual imbalance or aberration
occurs, the breakdown of hzh is explained. (1997, 1011)
If Zolbrod is correct, then Zeuss rape of Ledaa sexual aberration

would create a lack of harmony in the Navajo cultural worldview,
which would require some type of ceremony to reestablish hzh and
recreate harmony in the world. It is clear that hzh is important to
Tapahonso. As Bataille explains, Tapahonso writes of hzh, beauty
that comes from a state of balance with all things living and non-
breathing (1997, 84). Through Ledas seduction Tapahonso wants to
restore balance and harmony to the world. Leda beguiles a womaniz-
ing cowboy who thinks he is seducing her, but she woos him away
from his life and back into the harmony and balance found in the old
stories of Navajo oral tradition (Tapahonso 1993, 22). Ledas seduc-
tion of the cowboy is a kind of poetic ceremonial healing of Zeuss
original violation.
When Leda enters the bar alone, she allows herself a moment to
become accustomed to the smoke-filled room. Then, in the first stanza,
Tapahonso makes it clear that Leda instigates her meeting with the
cowboy: it was easy enough, Leda saw him across / the damp just-
wiped barshe did nothing / but hold the glance a second too long.
Leda sees the cowboy, makes her choice, and deliberately maintains eye
contact long enough for him to become aware of her interest. Leda has
in fact called him over simply by holding the glance a second too
long (Tapahonso 1993, 21). It was easy, she continues. Sure
enough, as if she had called out his name, / he walked overa slight
smile and a straw hat (21).
In the next stanza, Tapahonso writes: Leda smiled and a strange

desperation / engulfed him. I have to leave, she said, / remembering the
clean, empty air outside. / He followed her . . . / and it was clear he
didnt know the raw music she lived (Tapahonso 1993, 21). Here the
cowboy is definitely not in charge of the events of the evening. He fol-
lows Leda, but the raw music that Leda has taken infrom her initial
violation by Zeusis unknown to and beyond the comprehension of the
cowboy. Perhaps it is the source of that strange desperation that he
feels. In the third stanza, Tapahonso illustrates the smooth-talking patter
with which the cowboy attempts to win Leda, but she also hints that he
is facing the unknown when she says, He thinks he is leaving for a
rodeo 400 miles to the north / in a few hours (21). By dropping this
one shoe, Tapahonso allows the reader to fill in the sound of the
other shoe dropping. He thinks he is leaving, but he is not.
In the fourth stanza, the cowboy continues the seduction game by
telling Leda that he has been searching for her all over town. Tapahonso
again lets her reader know, however, that Leda is fully in charge: But
Leda saw his straw hat and half-smile as he watched from the bar. She
is aware of the cowboy before he is aware of her, and, indeed, she
brings herself to his attention. Tapahonso gives the reader yet another
clue: He thinks he has done this many times before (Tapahonso 1993,
22). This cowboy is a womanizer who has made a habit of picking up
women, of seducing them with his words. Again, however, Tapahonso
creates the silence in which the reader can hear the sound of the other
shoe dropping: He thinks he has done this many times before (Tapa-
honso 1993, 22). But he hasnt. Though the cowboy has not yet recog-
nized it, this is something new, something different, something that has
never before happened to him.
In her closing lines, Tapahonso gives readers one last lead regard-
ing the one who holds power in this life-changing encounter: as he fol-
lows Leda through / the stark beauty of the old stories, / he has already
left his own life behind (Tapahonso 1993, 22). In Navajo thought, the
ancient oral narratives are considered extremely powerful: they are the
basis of most (perhaps all) healing ceremonies. As Zolbrod writes in his
foreword to Washington Matthewss translation of The Mountain
Chant: A Navajo Ceremony: The knowledge is then preserved by med-
icine men and other elders who reify the experience by way of the cere-
mony . . . This recreates the experience of the narratives action (1997,
x). When these Navajo customs and values are considered, along with
the last line of Tapahonsos poem (he has already left his own life
behind), we see that Leda uses the knowledge and power that she
absorbed from Zeuss sperm with the ceremonial healing power of the
old stories to seduce this cowboy so that he will leave behind the
roving life he has led, leave behind the rodeo he thinks he will attend,
leave behind his habit of seducing women, and leave behind his old
reality. She is leading him into a new (ironically ancient) reality, into a
dance with her to her raw music, and into the old stories that can
now become a part of his healing ceremony.
IV
In speaking of the literature of Tapahonso and Simon Ortiz, and of

American Indian literature more generally, Rader states, it either
invokes or literally performs a ritual (1997, 85). He continues: Often
in the poems of Tapahonso and Ortiz, their acts of poetic performance,
not only speak the ritual into being; the poems become the ritual just as
the ritual becomes that to which it refers (85). In Leda and the
Cowboy, Tapahonso is invoking and creating a rituala ceremony of
healing for both Leda and the cowboy.
What Leda chooses to take from the cowboy, whether she seeks
revenge for her rape, or whether she chooses to use him for her own
purposes and then carelessly drop him as the swan dropped her, is left
to the readers imagination. She could choose to devour him as, in one
form of the Greek myth, Nemesis devoured Zeus. Just as Yeats had left
his readers with a final question in Leda and the Swan, Tapahonso
also leaves the reader with the discursive question of what Leda will do
with the cowboy she has captured. Because of the weight placed on bal-
ance and harmony in the Navajo worldview in order for the world to
function properly, it is not likely that Tapahonsos Leda will seek
revenge for Zeus raping her. Instead, this Navajo Leda chooses to use
her knowledge and power and lead the cowboy through a ceremonial
healing process that will rebalance the scales of sexual power that were
disrupted by Zeus. She will heal what is broken within him so that he
will no longer be a seducer of women. She will restore hzh between
mortals and supernaturals, and she will restore hzh in the human
community, and she will restore hzh in both herself and the cowboy.
Bataille writes, By adhering to the old stories and songs, by
transforming them so that a new generation continues the beliefs, and
by chanting her poems as prayers, Tapahonso maintains that balance
(hzh) in her own life. Tapahonsos culture is dynamic and changing,
always in the process of being recreated using new forms and new sto-
ries (1997, 8485). Deliberately, skillfully, and beautifully, Tapahonso
has used Leda and the Cowboy to create a new story, with all the
power of her own Navajo cultures old stories, to look again at the
Greek myth that became a famous Irish poem, to transform that myth
into a Navajo story set within the context of her own matrilineal soci-
ety, and to offer an answer to Yeatss poetic question, Did she put on
his knowledge with his power . . . ?
Though the power that Tapahonsos Leda puts on is certainly
not the capricious power that Zeus abuses, she undeniably obtains
power and knowledge that she uses to induce positive change, to
reestablish hzh, and to overcome the terror of rape and sense of help-
lessness that she felt earlier as a victim herself. Tapahonso offers the
first unequivocally positive poetic response to Yeatss final question, and
her gynocratic, Navajo answer resonates: Yes, indeed, she did.
10
Mother Times Two
A Double Take on a Gynocentric Justice Song
MARGOT R. REYNOLDS
Mother, when I am tall as my cousin Warca-Ziwin, you shall not

have to come for water. I will do it for you. With a strange tremor in
her voice which I could not understand, she answered, If the paleface
does not take away from us the river we drink. Mother, who is this
bad paleface? I asked. My little daughter, he is a shamsickly
sham! The bronzed Dakota is the only real man. I looked up into my
mothers face while she spoke; and seeing her bite her lips, I knew she
was unhappy. This aroused revenge in my small soul. Stamping my
foot on the earth, I cried aloud, I hate the paleface that makes my
mother cry!
Zitkala-Sa, Impressions from an Indian Childhood
Between 1900 and 1902 Yankton Sioux writer Gertrude Simmons

Bonnin, aka Zitkala-Sa, published a series of autobiographical essays in
Harpers and Atlantic Monthly: Impressions from an Indian Child-
hood (1900a), School Days of an Indian Girl (1900c), An Indian
Teacher among Indians (1900b), and Why I Am A Pagan (1902).
The essays address her personal experiences with assimilation, espe-
cially the loss of traditional ways of living and the forced removal of
Native American children from their homes for education and western-
ization. Throughout her work, and especially in Impressions from an
Indian Childhood, Zitkala-Sa focuses on the figure of her mother and
on woman-centered Sioux traditions. Criticism on these productions
address the function of the mother figure from a biographical perspec-
tive, and consider only how Zitkala-Sas relationship with her mother
shaped her acculturation process. Few scholars have considered Zitkala-
Sas work from a Native American and feminist perspective. I want to
171
suggest that the mother figure and women-centered focus of her work is
what Native American and feminist critic Paula Gunn Allen describes
generally as gynocentrism: womens traditional primacy in Native
American tribes and womens literature (1992). Extending Allens obser-
vation, I will show that Zitkala-Sa, particularly her Impressions essay
(1900a), uses a gynocentric framework through which to interrogate
and expose the imperialist social practices and policies of the U.S. gov-
ernment. Her attention to Native womens domesticity represents a
powerful gynocentric framework through which she critiques imperial
patriarchy, records her peoples history, and preserves traditional values.
Drawing on the concept of double consciousness, I contend that
her domestic experiences or impressions in Impressions from an
Indian Childhood and the subsequent essays treatment of the symbol
of the mother construct a justice song that reworks patriarchal images
of Native Americans, and particularly Native women. I designate
Zitkala-Sas revision of imperial patriarchy as a justice song because it
fuses both Native American oral and western rhetorical traditions. She
offers a Yankton Sioux womans perspective on the experience of west-
ernization, while at the same time using this experience to establish how
gynocentrism resists colonial invasion. In other words, these domestic
impressions, like legend-based storytelling, beadwork, coffee making,
and preserving food, cyclically repeat a gynocentric refrain that can be
read as a song. This refrain refuses western notions of how Native
Americans ought to live, preferring instead the way of the mother.
Gynocentrism as a framework for understanding cultures, their histories
and collective knowledge, composes a powerful song in praise of Native
worldviews and life-ways. The gynocentric device of the justice song
reconsiders western notions of what constitutes proper education for
Natives, as Zitkala-Sa demonstrates when sharing her experiences with
beadwork. Thus, Zitkala-Sas persuasive melodic arrangement of her
own experiences illuminates the larger failures of western acculturation
practices that equate Native with savage.
Feminist and Native American literary scholars, such as Paula
Gunn Allen, continue to recover women writers, especially those that
draw on gynocentric traditions, to shift imperial patriarchal ways of
thinking and writing. In the introduction to her book, The Sacred
Hoop, Allen discusses this goal in the context of Native American
themes and issues that extol the sentiment: life is a circle, and every-
thing in it has its place in it (1992, 1). The themes that characterize
Native American living are that Indians and spirits are always found
Mother Times Two 173
together, that Indians endurethey are like the daisy in the crack of
concrete that persists, and that many traditional Native American tribes
are gynocratically influenced (2). Thus, Native Americans carry the
dream of thoughtful living, are ritual, spiritual, and woman focused
(2). Further, she claims that Native American philosophies are based on
social responsibility rather than privilege, the reality of the human con-
dition rather than merely power, equal distribution of goods, no puni-
tive measures as a means to control society and open discourse with
spirituality (3). These tenets of Native American philosophies are an
example of the ways in which cultural theorists can reenvision imperial
patriarchy and other oppressive institutions like racism. Allen demon-
strates the need for the recovery of Indian women like Zitkala-Sa to
both encourage women-focused writing and to demonstrate how femi-
nist Native American writers are instrumental in saving their gynocen-
tric tradition of a gender inclusive worldview (263). Moreover, with the
number of women writing critical analyses of women-authored texts,
the opportunity to map the possibilities of contemporary womens lit-
erature is limitless (263). These opportunities encourage a gender,
ethnic, and cultural inclusive worldview because they welcome discus-
sion of gynocentric traditions of Native American tribes rather than
storing them away as museum fixtures (79). However, such opportuni-
ties also run the risk of essentializing gender to forward ethnic and
racial primacy. This article thus will utilize Allens concepts and those
scholars who privilege gender, with this risk noted, and will consciously
deploy these subject positions. Allens recovery work extends beyond
literature because she sees Native American writers as they define
themselves and are defined by ritual understandings and by spiritual or
sacred ceremonial shapings (79).
ZITKALA-SA
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin is a Yankton Nakota (Eastern Sioux) who

is known by her pen name, Zitkala-Sa, which means Red Bird. She lived
from 1876 to 1938, and was a short story writer, cultural preserver,
essayist, orator, editor, musician and composer and political activist
(Giese 2001, 1). Zitkala-Sa wrote the first and only Native American
opera Sun Dance. She was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South
Dakota. Critic Dexter Fisher notes that she christened herself Zitkala-
Sa, Red Bird, when she had a falling out with her sister-in-law (1985,
203). In contrast, biographer Paula Giese contends that Zitkala-Sa may
have chosen the name to protect her job while she wrote critical essays
(2001, 1). She is the third child of Ellen Tate Iyohinwin (She Reaches
for the Wind) Simmons, a full-blooded Yankton Sioux, and a white man
named Felker. Little is known about Felker or his absence from Zitkala-
Sas childhood, and she does not mention her father in the autobio-
graphical essays. Biographer Roseanne Hoefel shares that Zitkala-Sa
was raised in a tipi on the Missouri River until she went to a
Quaker missionary school for IndiansWhites Manual Labor Institute,
in Wabash, Indiana at the age of eight (1999). Zitkala-Sa later went to
the Santee Normal Training School and in 1895 to Earlham College of
Indians. Additionally, she was a student at the Boston Conservatory
School and went to Paris in 1900 as a violin soloist at the Paris Expedi-
tion (Hoefel 1999).
In a series of autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1900, Zitkala-Sa describes her time on the reservation with
her mother in Impressions from an Indian Childhood. Similarly, her
time at Whites and the hardships of acculturation are discussed in
School Days of an Indian Girl. The subsequent essay, An Indian
Teacher among Indians, describes her work at the Carlisle Indian
School and how the school (and others like it) devalued Native Ameri-
can cultural traditions. The final essay, Why I am a Pagan, and later
The Great Spirit assert Zitkala-Sas return to her mothers Sioux tra-
ditions through activism for her people. Her other literary works
include editing for the American Indian Magazine and publishing works
like Oklahomas Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft, Exploitation of
the Five Civilized Tribes; Legalized Robbery; and The Soft-Hearted
Sioux, which generated much literary and cultural buzz about Native
American rights. These works published in Harpers and the Atlantic
Monthly point to Zitkala-Sas exposure to upper-class societies in
Boston and Paris. Although there is no documentation in her biogra-
phies, these publications were likely costly and geared toward affluent
white individuals who would have been piqued by curiosity of the
little Indian girl. However, the little Indian girl had plans to pub-
lish a collection of legends through Ginn and Company of Boston,
which was later reissued as American Indian Stories in 1921 (Giese
2001, 3). In each work, Zitkala-Sas activism on behalf of Native Amer-
ican rights demonstrates a woman committed to changing how Native
Americans were perceived and treated.
Many analyses of revisionist critics such as Paula Giese and
Dorothea Susag help to create a transformative place in which feminist
scholars can recover authors like Zitkala-Sa by valuing their (Indian)

life experiences and writings as significant cultural contributions.
Gieses biography of Zitkala-Sa counters the patriarchal, racist stereo-
type of the little Indian girl, who submits to colonial conquests
(Zitkala-Sa 1900b, 373). Zitkala-Sa had a the fastidious nature and a
renaissance-like ability to engage in life, a life that exemplifies activism
and conscious community interest. She is many things: Yankton
Nakota (Eastern Sioux), 18761938: short story writer, cultural pre-
server, essayist, orator, editor, musician and composer (she wrote the
first and only Native American opera Sun Dance), and political activist
(Giese 2001, 1). This revival by feminist and Native American literary
scholars calls attention to Paula Gunn Allens idea of Indian womens
primacy in Native American literature, in that the most important
theme is transformation and continuance (1993, 7).
In Zitkala-Sas essays, womens concerns are embedded in subtexts
of themes like the mother figure and spirituality. Notably, these themes
also situate race and ethnicity alongside gender. Zitkala-Sas produc-
tions are autobiographically influenced and fictively supplemented.
However, for this analysis, I will treat only the first essay of the series,
Impressions from an Indian Childhood. I am interested in how the
identity politics of Native American and western ideologies constitute a
context for understanding the complexity of Zitkala-Sas life as a west-
ernized Indian woman. In addition, examining tropes and dialogue as a
justice song with these strategies might contribute to establishing
Zitkala-Sas unique style of resistance as a model for radical politics.
Impressions from an Indian Childhood
The style of her essays is a sharp departure from other Native American
autobiographies. Rather than relating the story of her own life to a
western, Christian man, Zitkala-Sa creates her own written story. This
liberation from western infuence, including anthropologists, results in
an autobiography that demands attention as an independent creation
from a gynocentric Native American writer. Arnold Krupat notes that
Native Americans, unfortunately, remain the red sheep, as it were, of
the postcolonial, multicultural, multiethnic, world literature world
(Krupat 1994, 162). Although Krupats essay was written in 1994,
Native American womens literature like Zitkala-Sas is still the red
sheep of feminist literary investigations and excluded from the tradi-
tional American literary canon and classrooms. Native Americans are a
passing fancy that many non-Indians fantastically depict in all types of

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

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

the mother figure draws on gynocentric traditions, and subsequently
tribal ways of life before western contact. Allen writes of Native Ameri-
can traditions that often claim that your mothers identity is the key to
your identity (1992, 209). This key to identity through the mother
can be explored in the close relationship between Zitkala-Sa and her
own mother. In feminist terms, recovery of womens tradition to restore
a balance or equality in life takes on enhanced importance, especially
when a young female writer like Zitkala-Sa expresses her frustrations
about U.S. domination.
Zitkala-Sas concentration on communicating the impressions of
her biological mother is problematic because her tone and the symbolic
situation of her mother are veiled, in the sense that western cultural
expectations inhibit Native American free speech by perpetuating the
image of the savage Indian needing to be subduedZitkala-Sas own
educational experience speaks to this problem. In the essays she implies
that the missionary educators want to eliminate her mothers traditions,
her language, and the crucial bond between mother and child. Conse-
quently, the feminist critic must look closely to determine mother and
spirituality themes, as well as to find juxtaposed gynocentric allusions
that speak to the loss of the mothers traditions. When Zitkala-Sas
mother is introduced, she is characterized as sad and silent, with
expressions that formed her lips into hard and bitter lines as she goes
about her daily chores (1900a, 37). These images of her mother are not
joyous, nor do they send a message of peace; rather these images send
messages of grief, loss, and heartbreak that the mother deals with every-
day. Inherent in this initial description of her mother is sharp criticism
of a culture being raped of its gynocentric identity. The mother is sym-
bolized as a caretaker who fears that she may not be able to fulfill her
job to care for her tribes traditions, or to care for Zitkala-Sa. When
Zitkala-Sa asks why her mother cries, she answers, Hush; my little
daughter must never talk about my tears; and smiling through them,
she patted my head and said, Now let me see how fast you can run to-
day (37). In an act of desperate protection from the atrocities that
occurred against Native Americans, her mother encourages innocence
and freedom rather than bitter despair. This display also illustrates the
difficulty Indian mothers faced when they raised children in a vanishing
culture. However, the mothers attempts at encouragement are futile
because these emotions will come to Zitkala-Sa as a womans burden in
the form of her justice song.
This justice song that Zitkala-Sa creates out of respect for her
mother indicates the strong role that the continuance of tradition has in
Native American mother/daughter relationships. At the same time,
Zitkala-Sa situates her mother as a symbol that becomes doubled in the
sense that her literary style traverses both western and Native American
cultures, generating different signifiers depending on the ethnicity of the
reader. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, defines black
America in the twentieth century with his notion of double conscious-
nessthe idea that African Americans experience everything in this
world both as Americans and as black people (Coates 2004). Thus, as
a colonized individual, Zitkala-Sa writes as both a westernized Indian
and a Native American; similarly, when she creates a mother figure, she
uses both Indian and non-Indian signifiers in her narrative. The signifi-
cance of this doubled symbol of the mother might remain elusive with-
out the aid of a critical paradigm informed by Native American literary
traditions. For instance, the continuity of identity through mother is one
aspect of this doubled symbol where maintenance of this tradition
endures. As in western culture, Native Americans socialize their chil-
dren; however, one significant difference is that family history is not
always through the male line, as Christianity and other masculine-spe-
cific religions insist.
For Native Americans like Zitkala-Sa, who sought to distance
themselves from Christian patriarchal traditions that eschew the primacy
of mothers, naming your own mother (or her equivalent) enables
people to place you precisely within the universal web of your life, in
each of its dimensions: cultural, spiritual, personal and historical (Allen
1992, 209). Here a mothers identity is the way of looking at the world
through a mothers eyes. Thus, failure to know your mother . . . is fail-
ure to remember your significance, your reality, your right relationship
to earth and society (209). Velikova asserts that the absence of a name
or the singular autobiographical pronoun I in the essay demonstrates
Zitkala-Sas emphasis on the abstract rather than her own personal
details to draw attention to her activist work on behalf of Native Ameri-
cans (2000, 51). I emphasize Velikovas claim and extend Allens idea
that mothers are a key to identity to show how Zitkala-Sa gives her
mother no name to indicate a deep sense of loss in womens traditions in
the tribes. In this way, Zitkala-Sas responsibility to her mother, that is
her tradition of maintaining her mothers culture, sheds light on the dou-
bled sense of the mother that a western reader might otherwise miss. A
mother is not just a woman who bore a child, but a tradition whose
continuance signals part of a cyclical way of life. Life, for many Native
Americans, occurs cyclically, mimetically representative of naturethe
four seasons, gestation, menstruation, cosmology, and spirituality. Such
powerful conclusions and their significance can be more clearly eluci-
dated with the aid of a feminist literary investigation.
Another part of Zitkala-Sas justice song is the awareness of her
own position as a westernized Native American. This position is clari-
fied through dialogue that occurs between her mother and herself.
Zitkala-Sa recalls saying, Mother, when I am tall as my cousin Warca-
Ziwin, you shall not have to come for water. I will do it for you
(1900a, 37). Her mothers bitterness ensues, and with a strange tremor
in her voice which I could not understand, she answered, if the paleface
does not take away from us the river we drink (37). Through the
bitter tone of this parable and the knowledge that the land was stolen
from Native Americans, we can deduct that there will be no river to
drink from in the future. In a broader sense, the consequence of western
encroachment on Indian lands results in a discontinuance of gynocentric
tradition and the colonizers erasure of Indians. However, the mothers
response reflects the loss of a daughter where Zitkala-Sa would assume
a role of caretaker for her mother as her duty to her ancestral rite.
Zitkala-Sa writes about her inability to perform this rite in the
mother/daughter relationshipher awareness of her westernized posi-
tion is clear. Despite her positive efforts, the loss of tradition by forced
westernization inevitably distances Indian women like Zitkala-Sa from
their home culture. And, although this change marks her, she will go on
to build on her mothers traditions with new ones. Moreover, the clarity
of her inability to perform her duties as a young Yankton Sioux girl
manifests itself as a criticism of taking Native American children away
for a Christian education. This kind of reasoning begs the question,
who in their right mind would want western culture and its people if
they only offer death and loss of tradition? Zitkala-Sa answers this
question in these autobiographical essays by criticizing the loss of
Native American tradition in the impressions of a child who becomes
a Native American activist across the essay series.
Zitkala-Sas fervent message about the trauma and loss encoun-
tered by Native Americans when their children are sent away for Chris-
tian education can benefit from a discussion that contextualizes what is
at stake in losing tradition. Allens thoughts on traditionalism in the
essay, Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots in White Feminism, indicate
that the Native American sense of the importance of continuity . . .
runs counter to contemporary American ideals that eagerly prescribe

the casting off of traditions in the spirit of the colonial amalgamation of
the masses, where difference is deadly (Allen 1992, 210). This casting
off of tradition encourages a reinvention of the wheel, which in the
view of the traditionals [sic], rejection of ones culture . . . is the result
of colonial oppression and is hardly to be applauded as a valuable def-
inition of national identity (210). The contrast between having tradition
and not having tradition is simple. The Native American view, which
highly values maintenance of traditional customs, values, and perspec-
tives might result in a slower societal change . . . but it has the advan-
tage of providing a solid sense of identity and lowered levels of
psychological and interpersonal conflict (210).
When Allen highlights Native Americans having a slower societal
change, she references the colonialist idea that Native Americans are
unintelligent, unadvanced peoplesa view, which inspired (and justi-
fied) the rape of a land and a people by Christian missionaries and
international explorers. We now have public records that acknowledge
the indigenous of North America as intelligent with advanced cultural
structures. For instance, in World War II, the Navajo language proved
unbreakable to the Nazis. Despite political correctness, stereotypes fur-
ther create a double consciousness among Indians by repetitive negativ-
ity. This example relies on western standards but also illustrates that
Native Americans, such as Navajo, maintained their language despite
genocide. Thus when Allen merits the advantages of maintaining the
traditional ways of Native Americans through lowered levels of psy-
chological and interpersonal conflict, the western critic and reader can
better appreciate the tension of leaving tradition in favor of western
acculturation. For example: in Zitkala-Sas impression of Native Ameri-
can life and the appreciation of the difference afforded to non-white
racial and ethnic groups.
This tension of leaving tradition in favor of western acculturation
is marked repeatedly in Zitkala-Sas Impressions from an Indian Child-
hood, in moments where womens traditions are elevated as the best
part of home life. These moments are the refrain that make up the mes-
sage of Zitkala-Sas justice song. In the section entitled Legends,
Zitkala-Sa writes, I loved best the evening meal, for that was the time
old legends were told (1900a, 38). During this time of legend telling,
Zitkala-Sa implies that traditions and tribe secrets were shared. One
such example is Zitkala-Sas curiosity as she gazes at a grandmother
who has parallel lines on her chin, whereby the grandmother tells a
story of a woman whose magic power lay hidden behind the marks
upon her face (39). This type of cultural transmission recalls Allens
maintenance of the traditional elements of tribal life. Through a dou-
bled meaning of the oral tradition, a simple story is about both magic
and tribal history. Zitkala-Sas essays take on new meanings when femi-
nist criticism brings the gynocentric details from the margin to the
center. Moreover, the combined approach of feminist and Native Amer-
ican criticism clarifies symbols that can have different meanings for the
western and Native American reader.
The symbol of the mother in the essay also relates to how a young
Indian girls rite of passage persists in the text despite her removal from
her mother at the age of eight. Oftentimes, Zitkala-Sa will remark on
her childhood in reference to her spirit as a freedom valid only when in
her mothers land. This spirit that infuses her well-being helps her iden-
tify as a Yankton Sioux woman. The sections entitled Beadwork and
The Coffee Making express a refrain that signals the complexity of
becoming a woman. I view these examples through the intersecting per-
spectives of feminist, race, and Native American criticism. Zitkala-Sa
leads us to believe that womans jobs as beaders and as teachers of
beading taught lessons about life and womanhood. For instance,
Zitkala-Sas mother required [that her] original designs needed to be
symmetrical and characteristic of her tribes traditions (1900a, 40).
These seemingly trivial details of beading are important indicators of
values like consistency, honesty, and hard work. In addition, these
values aid in our contemporary understanding of Native American life,
where living a useful life is extremely important for the continuance of
tribal traditions. Part of becoming a useful member of society for a girl
was, impersonating . . . mothers in the ways of storytelling, conversa-
tion, and other skills characteristic of mothers (41). Thus, with her
mothers influences, a young Zitkala-Sa engages in individual responsi-
ble living.
Similarly, in Coffee-Making, Zitkala-Sa demonstrates how chil-
dren were respected as individuals, as well as respected members of a
community; in contrast, generally in western communities children were
to be seen, not heard. This type of respect characterizes why losing the
opportunity to maintain her mothers traditions is devastating. Zitkala-
Sa shows how she was respected as a child even after she incorrectly
made coffee for a guest. She says, but neither she [Zitkala-Sas mother]
nor the warrior, whom the law of our custom had compelled to partake
of my insipid hospitality, said anything to embarrass me. They treated
my best judgment, as poor at it was, with the utmost respect (1900a,

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

writing, reveals itself to the reader. As mentioned earlier, the Great
Spirit that Zitkala-Sa references frequently is emblematic of a whole,
integrated self. This game of chasing shadows, especially when Zitkala-
Sa reveals that I forgot the cloud shadow in a strange notion to catch
up with my own shadow, indicates coming together with her self or
her tribal nature, which elided her as a child as she made decisions to
turn away from tradition (1900, 41).
In the section entitled The Big Red Apples, Zitkala-Sa shows
the reader how she departs from tradition, from her mother, and from
life. This effort in her song constitutes the beginning of a cautionary
tale. She reveals, the first turning away from the easy, natural flow of
my life occurred in an early spring . . . my eighth year (1900a, 45).
Tonally bitter images of life as a westernized Native American replace
this departure from the easy, natural flow of life that signifies that
introduction to western culture strips Zitkala-Sa of her mother as a cor-
nerstone for identity at the tender age of eight. Zitkala-Sa follows this
harrowing reality with a check on what gynocentric living meant; she
says, at this age I knew but one language, and that was my mothers
native tongue (45). The importance of her mother tongue crystal-
lizes the idea that gynocentrically influenced tribal life is about a stabil-
ity of identity through the stability of culture. The brevity of this
sentence displays isolation both visually and orally. The orality of this
statement clues the reader in on the significance of this break from tra-
ditionthe emphasis on one language and mothers native tongue
clarifies the mothers importance. The diction is succinct, creating a
tonal effect equivalent to statements like I am an American or I am
a feminist, which, when expressed, are powerful. Additionally, this
statement marks Zitkala-Sas identity as an Indian familiar with the
power of differentiation. It is this brief statement that sets the tone and
perspective in the following essays, where diction coupled with recon-
structed dialogue with her mother paint a vivid, heartbreaking picture
of the effects of westernization on a young Indian girl. These effects,
like the privileged features of domestic life, recall the refrain of Zitkala-
Sas songthe mother. However, during this part of the song, Zitkala-
Sa persuades the reader that the negative effects of westernization are
too high a price to pay for belonging.
One way that westernization is portrayed negatively is when
Zitkala-Sa defines how her mother allows her to go away to the east for
schooling. Setting up a series of contrasts, Zitkala-Sa is not subtle in her

criticism of herself or what happened to her Native American identity.
Typical of a child, the young Zitkala-Sa recounts to her mother that her
friend Judewin is going to a more beautiful place than ours; the pale-
faces told her so (1900a, 45). Here the palefaces, or western white
men, are positioned as fanciful liars. Within this same conversation the
reader learns that her brother Dawees education in the east caused her
mother to take a farther step from her native way of living (45). In
addition, we are led to believe that Dawee, as a man who has influence
in this colonized, white world, is encouraging the Native American
mothers loss of tradition. In this moment when Zitkala-Sas identity
politics play out before the reader, we understand her mothers view
that little girls should not listen to white mens lies because it will
cause separation from tradition. The rhetoric Zitkala-Sa employs cre-
ates bitter distinctions between herself as a girl who had a strange
notion to catch up with her own shadow and the young woman who
looks back on her mothers views with remorse because she did not
follow tradition (45). Zitkala-Sas shadow in this context doubles as her
Native American identity. Upon this hindsight that her mothers tradi-
tion was better, Zitkala-Sa laments, Alas! They came, they saw, and
they conquered! (46).
Colonial conquest images take over the narrative in the form of
appropriated Christian images that reflect Zitkala-Sas criticism of
Christian education for Indians. She does this by recuperating images.
The most heavily critiqued images are the big red apples. Zitkala-Sas
friend Judewin tells her, of the great tree where grew red, red apples
where they can pick all the red apples we could eat (1900a, 46). The
missionized interpreter confirms Judewins statements for Zitkala-Sa,
promising, Yes, little girl, the nice red apples are for those who pick
them; and from this promise, the interpreter establishes the implied
work necessary to achieve salvation through Christianity (46). From
this exchange, scholars such as Martha Cutter have noted the dual
images inherent in Zitkala-Sas blend of Sioux and western tradition
(1994, 34). Cutter ascertains that Zitkala-Sas use of edenic imagery is
highly self-conscious, as she blends and layers traditional Christian
symbolism (the garden of Eden motif) with elements of Sioux cultural
and tribal lore in order to create a complex irony (34). On the big red
apples, Cutter eloquently surmises that most ironically, this edenic
world of the mother is already under siege, and it is white men who
play the serpent in Zitkala-Sas recasting of the Fall (34). Although this
claim captures the irony of race inherent in the passage, my emphasis
contextualizes this recasting of the fall as a way to situate Zitkala-Sa,
as a western-educated Indian, to deploy this imagery for her song. Thus
my analysis adds to the significance one pays to her and her vision as a
racialized agent. It is in the subtext, informed by feminist and Native
American criticism, where the metaphor of the fall is only a vehicle
through which Zitkala-Sa, the Native American woman writer, makes
her judgments about western, Christian colonial educational practices.
However, this analysis does not acknowledge the deeper uses of
such imagery as ways to upbraid these educational practices. For
instance, although attention is paid to the duality of these symbols,
what Cutter argues as an authentication of Sioux over Christian
motifs against their creators (white men) to critique the destruction of
Native American culture, she deploys an unconscious western gaze
when she interprets nature imagery as a pseudo-Eden (1994, 34).
Cutters argument is in the right place, but emphasizes a western inter-
pretation, which is inattentive to race and concurrent agency. For exam-
ple, she writes that Zitkala-Sa portrays a type of Edena world of
perfect peace and cooperation between humankind and nature, a world
where food is not earned by the sweat of the brow and language is not
distorted (34). The implication that food is not earned by sweat or
that perfect peace exists contradicts the apparent lack of peace of
Zitkala-Sas mother and demeans the food gathering that her family did.
Cutters claim that language is not distorted is unsubstantiated
because there is no way to know how language was before colonial con-
tact. Part of the rhetoric of Zitkala-Sas justice song encapsulates a sense
that the primacy of the mother not only recalls her historical moment
steeped in her mothers bitterness, but also the first moment of contact
between Natives and Europeans. Therefore, Cutters analysis, although
insightful, misses the significance of race in the essays where the mother,
nature, and spirituality are viewed in a holistic sense prior to any Euro-
pean contact. Additionally, this analysis does not foreground gynocracy
or any women-centered ideology Zitkala-Sa represents symbolically
through her mother. With the reversal of the fall, I would claim that
through tone, symbol, and diction, Zitkala-Sa makes a powerful state-
ment against westernizing children in Christian missionary schools,
showing that the transfer of a daughter to the hands of the colonial con-
queror is an unwise decision that will cause heartache. This transaction
between Zitkala-Sa and western culture illicits a sharp sense of loss of

Indian gynocentric traditions to white patriarchal traditions.
Zitkala-Sa begins the transition of leaving the the mother land
with a painful dialogue between mother and daughter. Her mother says,
my daughter, do you still persist in wishing to leave your mother?
and Zitkala-Sa replies, Oh, mother, it is not that I wish to leave you,
but I want to see the wonderful Eastern land (1900a, 47). This
exchange signals Mothers response when her son Dawee comes for the
answer:
Yes, Dawee, my daughter, though she does not know what it

all means, is anxious to go. She will need an education when
she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and
many more palefaces. This tearing away, so young, from her
mother is necessary, if I would have her an educated woman.
The palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen lands, have
begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education for
our children. But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in
this experiment. For her sake, I dread to tell you my reply to
the missionaries. Go, tell them that may take my little
daughter, and that the Great Spirit shall not fail to reward
them according to their hearts. (47; emphasis mine)
Mothers astute assessment of the missionaries intent belies the

weakening of her tradition. Tearing away Zitkala-Sa from her
mother is an experiment where suffering, dread, and loss are
worth a tardy justice, whereby the education of Zitkala-Sa will
empower her to speak out about stolen lands and stolen culture.
These phrases suggest a defeated, but resilient tone as Zitkala-Sa is left
alone to define her identity through a justice song that her mother
helps to create. The mother believes that the Great Spirit shall not fail
to reward the missionaries their due when Zitkala-Sa sings about the
mistreatment and abuse her people suffered. This tone suggests an
ambiguity that even Zitkala-Sa will be punished for leaving tradition,
but will fulfill her legacy in the context of her mothers traditions.
When she boarded the train she no longer felt free to be myself, or to
voice my own feelings; a sharp departure from the wild freedom
the reader appreciated at the beginning of the essay (47). Instead of
freedom the song issues a cautionary tale that asks for both justice and
remembrance of the mother.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Zitkala-Sas justice song in Impressions offers readers a vision of

Native living that respects the mother. To recover radical women writers
like Zitkala-Sa, we must ask what they offer contemporary readers in
conjunction with shifting patriarchal trends within literature. Gynocen-
trism is particularly significant for feminists and interested individuals
who theorize about reenvisioning our current capitalist, patriarchal way
of living. Gynocracies involve an egalitarian way of life where women
are foregrounded as those who hold power. These values and philoso-
phies correspond to an agenda that wants to amend the discord and
unhappiness brought about by imperial patriarchy and its means of
controlling people, particularly people of color and non-westerners. The
notion that imperial patriarchy, coercion by men to perpetuate mens
control, is the only or best way to live is a lie that many of us are forced
to live everyday. There is always the (joyous) danger in feminist scholar-
ship of destabilizing patriarchal ways of living. In pursuit of social jus-
tice, we, in the literary discipline, can embrace radical ways of writing
and living and subvert canonical writing in favor of gynocentric writing.
Thus, Native American women writers like Zitkala-Sa, who incorporate
gynocentric perspectives like mother, nature, and spirituality into their
writing, are significant when we consider how such work can be used as
model for transformative thinking that can reconceptualize imperial
patriarchy.
In Allens essay Angry Women Are Building: Issues and Struggles
Facing the American Indian Woman Today, she indicates that eradicat-
ing the popular patriarchal image of the Savage Indian, along with
imperialism and racism, are forces behind the recovery of gynocracies
(1992, 192). Moreover, drawing on the shared relationship of recovery
of women, both Indian and non-Indian, adds to the social justice dia-
logue of feminist and cultural theorist advocates. Allen charges the U.S.
government and other misogynists with high treason in their treatment
of women when she says that their revision of Native American life
devastated gynocentric conceptual frameworks and caused a retardation
of a complimentary society that inspired multiple ways of living (1992,
193). Consequently, when contemporary literary scholars gloss over
Zitkala-Sas works, they miss a whole sign system for activist work,
subversive writing, and gynocentric living. In fact, I would argue that
the limitations imposed on Zitkala-Sas work by academic practices of
canonization reduce discursive practices and foreground racism and
sexism in institutional practices. That is not to say that American litera-

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

figure, operate as justice songs in Native American womens literature,
as they articulate concerns of justice, reparation, and cultural survival
to a broader American public. There is no doubt that these Native
women writers demonstrate tremendous commitment to thinking
through and acting out their experiences. Whether or not these acts
bring justice, information, or exposure, women of colors works are cul-
tural sites of critical insight. In solidarity, the contributors to this collec-
tion humbly recognize the power of their insight and would ask readers
to imagine, for themselves, the rich ways that these women elevate our
lives.
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Contributors
Christa Davis Acampora is an associate professor of philosophy at

Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. She is the coeditor of A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal
Beyond Docile and Brutal and a coeditor with Angela Cotten of
Unmaking Race/Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the
Practice of Freedom, forthcoming from SUNY Press.
Michael A. Antonucci teaches in the English Department of Marquette

University. His research interests include African American literature,
Black music, and American poetics. He coedited with Garin Cycholl
Make Up on an Empty Space, an introduction and anthology of Ameri-
can poetry. Michael is also a founding member of the collaborative
writing collective, Jimmy Wynn Ensemble, in Chicago.
Ellen L. Arnold is an associate professor of American literature in the

English Department at East Carolina State University, where she teaches
courses in Native American literature, ethnic studies, and womens stud-
ies. She has published numerous articles on Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda
Hogan, and Carter Revard, and also has edited Conversations with
Leslie Marmon Silko.
Angela L. Cotten is an assistant professor of womens studies at Stony

Brook University. Her areas of research and teaching are political econ-
omy, race, and gender, as well as philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. She
has coedited an anthology with Christa Acampora, Unmaking
Race/Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of
Freedom. Currently, she is completing a book, A Question of Freedom:
Womanist Origins and Travels in the Works of Alice Walker, on the
critical discourse of womanism in Alice Walkers writings.
207
208 CONTRIBUTORS
AnaLouise Keating is an associate professor of womens studies at Texas

Womans University. Her books include Women Reading Women Writ-
ing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzalda, and Audre
Lorde; this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation
(coedited with Anzalda); and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Per-
spectives on Gloria E. Anzalda. AnaLouise is also the editor of
Anzaldas Interviews/Entrevistas and coeditor of Perspectives: Gender
Studies. She has published articles on critical race theory, queer theory,
Latina authors, African American women writers, and pedagogy.
AnaLouise is currently working on several projects, including a collec-
tion drawing on her personal experiences as a bisexual, light-skinned,
mixed-race queer to explore pedagogy, transformation, whiteness,
and race.
Noelle Morrissette is an adjunct assistant professor of English at Loyola

University-Chicago, where she teaches courses in African American,
African Caribbean, and American literature. Her research focuses on
feminism and black identity, law and literature, and African American
biography. She received her PhD in African American Studies and Eng-
lish literature from Yale University and is currently completing a literary
biography of James Weldon Johnson, entitled Critical Fictions: The
Prose Writings of James Weldon Johnson, 19011938.
Margot R. Reynolds is an instructor of literary, cultural, and queer

studies at the University of Central Florida. Her research traverses
American studies, Native American studies, and gender/queer studies.
Her current research treats Anita Looss Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and its relationship to queer theory, and the presence of ecofeminist pol-
itics in national feminist organizations. Reynolds comes from a mixed
Irish, English, Scottish, Quapaw, and Cherokee heritage.
Maggie Romigh is an independent scholar of mixed cultural heritage

(Scottish, Irish, French, English, and Cherokee), who works and lives in
the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the village of Roci-
ada, New Mexico. Her research spans several disciplinary concentra-
tions, including anthropology, literature, and Southwestern Studies.
Currently, she is focusing on the matrilineal culture of the Din
(Navajo) and its expression in literary and oral traditions.
Contributors 209
Barbara S. Tracy is an instructor of womens and Native American liter-

ature in the English Department at Southeast Community College in
Lincoln, Nebraska. She is a doctoral candidate specializing in minority
and mixed race literature at the University of Nebraska, and has
authored The Melungeons: An Annotated Bibliography: References In
Both Fiction and Nonfiction.
Elizabeth J. West is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State

University, where she conducts research and teaches with particular
interest in the intersections of gender, race, class, and spirituality in lit-
erary works. She has published essays and reviews in MELUS, South
Atlantic Review, South Central Review, Womanist, JCCH, and CLA, as
well as entries in the Oxford Companion to African American Litera-
ture. Her current book project examines the evolution of African spiri-
tuality in black womens writings and has been supported by a research
fellowship from the American Association of University Womenthe
award that also made this essay possible.
Index
abortion, 8990 Barringer, Sandra, 112

aesthetics Bassard, Katherine Clay, 51
and agency, 4 Bataille, Gretchen, 176
and balancing ideology, 13940 Bearden, Romare, 68
flexibility of blues, 7172 Beloved Woman (Cherokee), 35
of self-recovery, 1920 Best, Patricia, 145
agency, 121 black church, 49
healing and cultural recovery, Black Codes, 134
8586, 9698 black cultural nationalism, 15051
reclaiming, 9091, 15354 Black Elk, 11112, 11417, 13132
Alaimo, Stacy, 92 black feminine subjectivity, 121
alienation black vernacular, 15, 20
gap of, 8687, 9394 blues
healing from, 23, 121 a-a-a, 7072
language effects, 86, 9091 a-a-b, 7778
protagonal, 86 broader capacities, 6769
Allen, Paula Gunn, 16465, 17273, Chicago blues, 67
17577, 18182 classic, 69, 7880
Als, Hilton, 142 condition, 78
American Indian movement (AIM), country blues, 67
11, 93, 110, 118 Delta blues, 67, 80
annunciation, 160 East Coast blues, 67
Appess, William, 105 Empress of, 21, 73, 78, 8182
Appropriation and revision, 70, 172 Existentialist grounding of, 7577
discursive, 8586 masculinized vision of, 68
irony of, 4 matrix, 16
poetic, 16061, 16566 of motherhood, 71
Atwood, Margaret, 8591, 103 as poetic medium, 6970
Avila, Elena, 33 as survival kit, 71
Awiakta, Marilou, 33, 113 time and place, 76
traveling, 71
Bacon, Francis, 4 twelve-bar, 74, 7677
Baker, Houston A., 6768 bluescape, 80
Banks, Olivia Bush, 105 body and spirit (or mind), connection
Banneker, Benjamin, 48 between, 12, 15354
Baraka, Amiri, 6769 borders, 95
211
212 INDEX
Brandon, George, 50 Davis, Todd, 160

Brennan, Jonathan, 1056 death, 88
Brooks, James, 1056 cyclic ontology of, 9, 5557,
Broumas, Olga, 162 6263
Buffalo Soldiers, 129 and sun imagery, 6263
Deloria Jr., Vine, 111
Cain, 49 DeMallie, J., 111
call-and-response, 16, 20, 70, 1067, determining relations, 12223
111115 dialectic
Candomble, 14445 Hegels, 135
capital of ideology, 136
identity markers as, 134 discourse
reconception of, 13536 Anglo-Christian, 48
Carby, Hazel, 69 appropriating, 4849, 93
Castillo, Ana, 33, 41 deconstructing, 93
Changing Bear Maiden, 166 negotiating Africanity in Christian,
changing same, the, 80 5253
Changing Woman (Navajo), 3638 displacement
Cheatwood, K.T.H., 108 spatial and temporal, 81
Christ, Carol, 89, 102 double consciousness, 179
Christian, Barbara, 139 double-voicedness, 16
Christian religiosity, 47 dream/s, vision and memory, 54
African American, 48 dualism, 9091
negotiating African worship and, alienation of, Cartesian, 3
5153 culture and nature, 85
Chute, Robert, 162 spirit and body (or flesh), 12, 86,
Clifton, Lucille, 69 89, 144
Clytemnestra, 165 DuBois, W.E.B., 122, 179
Coleman, Ornette, 68
Collins, Patricia Hill, 20, 27, 45 ecofeminism
Coltelli, Laura, 176 a postcolonial perspective, 85
co-mothers, 27 ecohumanistic, 8
cooked people, 166 economic
cooperative antagonism, 79 infrastructure, 122, 124, 128,
Cortez, Jayne, 68 13031
Coyote, 166 determinism, 127
cross-blood aesthetics, 45, 12 Ellison, Ralph, 6768
identity, 11 Emancipation, 123
Crystal Woman, 32 Enlightenment ideology, 3739
culture Equiano, Olaudah, 48
cultural hybridity, 106 ethics/morality, 27
recovery, 18990 eugenics, 4
syncretic, 57 Euro-American, 27, 106, 12829
Cutter, Martha, 183, 18586 Eurocentric, 13, 15, 40
evangelical, 21
Da/Damballah, 10 existentialism/ist, 24
Davis, Angela, 12, 69, 71 Alice Walkers, 12527
Index 213
Expansion/ism, 5, 58, 97, 106, 123, historical materialism

129, 13136, 156 limitations, 12425
as tool of revolution, 121
feminism, feminist Hoefel, Roseanne, 174
African Cherokee, 11819 holistic knowledge, 4144
Morrison and, 14143 Holland, Sharon P., 109
Finn, Julio, 68 hozho, 16970
Fisher, Dester, 173 Hughes, Langston, 69, 105
Fletcher, Ian, 160 humanism, 103
Forbes, Jack, 105 Hume, David, 4
fragmentation Hunter, Alberta, 69
of culture, 3738 Hurston, Zora Neal, 47, 65, 111
of identity, 3738 hybrid
of self, 86, 96, 103 spirituality, 14445, 148
Fusco, Coco, 112 text, 106
Gage, Frances Dana, 114 identity

Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 111 indigenous, 106
General Strike, the, 12223 markers, 13435
geography, of African American sub- mixed-race (-blood), 1068
jectivity, 7475 multiple and contradictory, 157
Giese, Paula, 17374 politics, 18384
Giovanni, Nikki, 69 split, 23
Graves, Robert, 162 ideological minefield of cultural iden-
Gray, David Elton, 6 tity, 21
Great Awakening, 21, 4850 ideology
Second, 64 and aesthetics, 13940
Great Mysterious, 43 dialectical character of, 24, 133
Great Spirit, 19, 35, 118, 174, of race and the Civil War, 122
18384, 187 social class structures, 133
gynocentrism, 25, 173, 17778, Imaginary, the, 8687, 103
18384 improvisation and appropriation, 70
and black feminism, 27 indeterminacy
gynocracy, 19, 41, 188 and black feminism, 14748
gynocratic principle, 2526, 35, 163 of meaning, 12627
of narrative, 92
Hall, Prince, 8 racial identity, 14849
Hammon, Jupiter, 4849, 51 Indian removal, 12829
Harneys Peak, 115, 118 indigenous resistance, 93
Harper, Michael S., 69, 8182 individualism, 3738
Harris, Trudier, 51 relational, 38
Harrison, Daphne Duval, 68 rise of, 97
Harrison, James, 163 infrastructures, 121
Haynes, Lemuel B., 48 interlocking systems of oppression,
Hegel, 4, 135 92, 123, 136, 175
Helen of Troy, 165 irony, 4
Herskovits, Melville, 6 Iyohinwin, Ellen Tate, 174
214 INDEX
Jackson, Rebecca Cox, 64 memory

James Bay HydroQuebec Project, centrality of, 5355
93 as conduit between worlds, 55
James, C.L.R., 122 embodied, 99
Jim Crow/ism, 134 life force, 5455
Johnson, Robert, 80 and self-confrontation, 8788
Jones, Claudia, 122 as spirit, 55
justice, 27 as spiritual connection, 56
mestizos, 108
Kant, Immanuel, 4, 53 metaphysics of interconnectedness,
Keeler, W.W., 110 20, 4144, 63
knowledge Middle Passage, 52
holistic, 4144 mirror stage, 86, 95
supernatural, 43 mirrors, 9697
western, 44 power of, 90
Krupat, Arnold, 175 Misshipeshu, 88, 99
mixed-blood, 97
Lacan, Jacques, Lacanian scheme, the, literature, 106
8687, 92, 94, 1003 as sign of conquest, 96
Law Moorhead, Scipio, 51
Constitutional, 147 Morrison, Toni, 47, 65
Gods, 147 mother tongue, 184
of Ruby, 151 Moyers, Bill, 143
spirit of, 157 Murphy, Joseph M., 54
Lawrence, D.H., 161 Murphy, Patrick, 93
Lee, Jarena, 64 Murray, Albert, 67
Lenin, 122 muse/s, 53
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 166 African, 5253
Lifshin, Lyn, 69 myth
literary criticism as ritual mode of communication, 43
African Native American, 109
black feminist, 25, 13940 nature
post-Black feminist, 140 African spiritual concepts of, 53
little Indian girl, the, 17475 Navaho
Louvinie, 131 women, 16465
lumpenproletariat, 24, 12527 worldview, 16465
lynching, 13334 Naylor, Gloria, 47
Neihardt, John, 107, 11011, 114,
Manifest Destiny, 11, 75, 129 116, 118
maroons, maroon societies, 56 Nemesis, 159, 163, 169
Martin Luther King, Jr., 118 neoclassical, the, 5253
matrix of domination, 92 New Testament, 150
Matthew, Washington, 168
Mbiti, John, 6, 59 objectification, 9092
McDowell, Deborah, 13940 reinscribing Native, 92
medicine woman, 40 self-objectification, 95
Meinke, Peter, 162 Odoun, 10
Index 215
Old Fathers, 151 racial mythologies, 4

old stories, the, 165, 166 materializing in social class, 135
ceremonial healing of, 15255, racism, instrument and symptom of
16869 capitalism, 12730
Old Testament, 150 Rainey, Ma, 68
oral tradition (see also storytelling), raw music, 21, 16669
12, 2324, 40 Reconstruction, 122, 134, 144
Ortiz, Simon, 169 Revard, Carter, 85
ostinato, 68 riffing, 16, 20
Outlaw, Lucious, 122 Riley, Patricia, 110
Oven, the, 146, 14951 Ringgold, Faith, 68
Owens, Louis, 1089 romanticism, 53
Page, Philip, 150 sacred hoop, 11416

Painter, Nell Irvin, 114 Sacred Serpent, 11518
Parker, Charlie Bird, 68 salvage anthropology, 4
passionate rationality, 45 savage/s, 4, 178
peacock image, 7879, 80 Saxon College, 114, 11718
Philips, Carl, 162 self-consciousness, 92
pictographs, 8789, 99 self-help genre, 3335
place (land) self-recovery, 9496, 1023
between worlds, 98 womanist principles of, 35,
and blues, 75 4445
loss of, 18 Selu (Cherokee), 36, 11213, 118
merging with, 90, 9899 sharecropping, 75
and personal identity, 9 Shields, John, 53, 59
sacred, 89, 11518 Signifier
and time, 10 gap between signified, 86, 9394,
Plato, Ann, 8 103
poetic/s power of, 91
as ceremonial healing, 19 sliding, 91
performance in Native American twinned structure, 101
literature, 169 Signifying
post-black feminism, 17, 147 Monkey, 15
postcolonial condition, 13 practices, 7, 11115, 167
and African Americans, 1315 Smith, Barbara, 13940
and Native Americans, 1518 Smith, Patricia Clark, 165
postnativist (or postrealist), 1718 Smith, Trixie, 68
Powell, Richard, 67 social class, Marxian conception of,
precolonial contact, 6 123
public-private distinction, 146 social totality, 13, 125
purification ritual, 90 Sojourner, the, 11215, 131
Sojourner Truth, 11415, 118
Quetzalcoaltl, 10 South, Old and New, 75
spirit
rabbit trickster tales, 6 commodification of, 97
Raboteau, Albert, 6 and flesh, 12
216 INDEX
spiritual, the Trojan War, 165

alliance with nature, 86 tropes, 7, 15, 111, 175
concepts of nature, 53, 5962 Truth, Sojourner, 11415
emotionalism, 50 typology of Scripture, 48
possession, 5354
spirituality universal/ism, 3940, 109
African American, 4950, 64
banning African, 50 Van Duyn, Mona, 163
split subjectivity, 9192 Velikove, Roumiana, 179
Springer, Kimberly, 143 vernacular, African American, 78
Stewart, Maria, 64 visionary pragmatism, 45
storytelling, 23, 182 visions, 89, 11617
of Candomble, 144
as ritual maps, 32, 95 Walker, Alice, 8, 47, 10519
and self-recovery, 95 Wallace, Sippy, 68
Stowell, Phyllis, 162 Welburn, Ron, 105, 107
structural relations of class antago- westernization, 18082, 18485
nism, 124 wholeness (holism), 19, 25, 186
Sturm, Circe, 105 and healing, 15355
subaltern, 16, 22 as inspirited interdependence,
Sun Dance, 173 1001, 103
sun imagery, 22, 5963 matter and spiritual, 99100
and death, 6263 psychic, 23
supernatural, the, 4344, 16061 Wild Boy, 11214
Sword, Helen, 162 Wile Chile, 11314, 118
Symbolic, the, 86, 103 Womack, Craig, 106
womanism/ist, 33
Tanner, Obour, 51 aesthetic of self-recovery, 1920,
Teish, Luisah, 33 4446
Thought Woman (Keres Pueblo), 36, Cherokee, 107
177 Wounded Knee, 11, 110, 132
Toomer, Jean, 109 Wright, Richard, 122
Trail of Broken Treaties, 110
Trail of Tears, 110 Young, Al, 69
Transcendentalism, 53
trickster tales, 6 Zolbrod, Paul, 166, 168
ISBN: 978-0-7914-6979-8
90000 >
EAN
9 780791 469798

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Cultural Sites of Critical Insight

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Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American

State University of New York Press

2007 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced

For information, address State University of New York Press,

Production by Judith Block

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Cultural sites of critical insight : philosophy, aesthetics, and African American

And to Christas grandmothers

11 ON THE RES AND IN THE HOOD:

II. TRANSFORMATIVE AESTHETICS

12 SELF-HELP, INDIAN STYLE? PAULA GUNN ALLENS

13 MAKING THE AWAKENING HERS: PHILLIS WHEATLEY

14 ANY WOMANS BLUES: SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS

III. CRITICAL REVISIONS

15 THROUGH THE MIRROR: RE-SURFACING AND SELF-

16 THE RED-BLACK CENTER OF ALICE WALKERS MERIDIAN:

17 WOMANIST INTERVENTIONS IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

IV. RE(IN)FUSING FEMINISM

18 BOTH THE LAW AND ITS TRANSGRESSION:

19 LUCI TAPAHONSOS LEDA AND THE COWBOY:

10 MOTHER TIMES TWO: A DOUBLE TAKE ON A

Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies

Research in aesthetics and philosophy has generated insightful and

production and social and political theory. All contributors, moreover,

AFRICAN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

This collection encourages comparative investigations of African Ameri-

third, syncretic culture of African Native Americans, whose very exis-

anothers language, ceremonial rituals, beliefs, and worldviews (Price

of reevaluating ethnically mixed writers who have been positioned in

proximity in ways that should stimulate explication of her work for

monalities explored here constitute points of analysis for a crossblood

CROSS-FERTILIZING U.S. ETHNOCRITICAL

Cultural Sites of Critical Insight also encourages readers to draw on

transnational/diasporic traversals and connections (Singh and Schmidt

Consider the idea of borders as applied to Native Americans

There are several areas of overlap in the conditions of African

Black and Native writers who take up their peoples struggles in

inventive and manipulatable, the texts as polyvalent and performative,

In addition to subverting such narratives and resisting the violence of

This collection is divided into three main sections, Transformative

Part II. Transformative Aesthetics

Contributers to Transformative Aesthetics read Native American and

a unique aesthetic blend of cathartic self-expression, historical testify-

continues to be) antagonistic to blackness and Africanity. West shows

Part III. Critical Revisions

Essays in Critical Revisions explore African American and Native

catory schemes of western culture. Hogan presents the journey of per-

of Walkers writings tend to stress her connections to the African Amer-

Part IV. Re(in)fusing Feminism

Historically, Native and African American womens relationship to

patriarchal imagery of Indiansespecially Indian women. The work of

Paula Gunn Allens Grandmothers of the Light,

Like an individual, America can be whole only by going back to its

Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Womans Sourcebook (Allen

our homeland, are designed to restore harmony and balance on

traits, including the transgression of conventional literary genres; the

tentment and contribute little to fundamental structural reforms

Ge-Ological Locations, and Herstorical Circumstances of the God-