Yesterday I flew from Virginia to Oakland, from a 7 degree morning to a 55 degree evening, from east coast to west coast.
I'm here in California for the week (my university has a "February Break") to attend a Heyday "think tank" gathering on California Missions from an Indigenous perspective - be sure to order your copy of the latest News From Native California, which is a special issue, "Surviving the Missions" - click on the link to see a list of articles, poetry and news ... this is a phenomenal collection that is going to sell out fast...
and to give a reading at UC Santa Barbara, where Bad Indians is being featured in 200-student seminar this semester ...
and finally, to speak at UC Davis for their Social Justice Initiative Mellon Project event, "Indigenous Performativities" along with the brilliant Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori)!
Margo and I are enjoying a respite from the 7 degree weather we left in Virginia. Heyday has put us up at the lovely Berkeley Marina, and we spent this morning roaming the hills of Cesar Chavez Park above San Francisco Bay.
The Queen of California surveys her domain...
Walks With Egret
NOT Virginia anymore!
...And dang happy about it. What? No seven layers of clothing to go outside?!
Poetry videos have been around for quite some time now; I remember my first experience with them was some years ago at an AWP conference, when some conference organizer had the bright idea to pipe them into the elevators (which, conveniently, had small video screens). For four days I'd get into an elevator to go somewhere and find myself riding up and down a few extra times just to see the loop of new poetry set to visuals. I thought of it as "Image-ing" poetry, giving a poem a set of images to accompany the words, and to tell you the truth, I was not all that thrilled about it. After all, for me, the moment when a poem's image reaches out and runs goosebumps down my arms is a joy, and a sacred one, at that: in part, because the poet's choice of words, syntax, pace, tone, all combine to connect - zap! - with some long-lost, subconscious image of my own. If I have someone choosing the visual images for me, would that still happen? Wouldn't that limit my possible responses to a poem, force me to see what someone else has decided I should see? But years of exploring the connections between old photographs and documents in my poetry have given me another perspective on the inclusion of visuals in a poetic presentation. Much of what I wrote in Bad Indians has come directly from a photo or the handwriting of a priest or the textures in a tule mat - and, given the historical significance of some of these objects, I do want my readers to see some of them for themselves. In fact, I chose Heyday as my publisher in large part due to their willingness to work with me on making the book as multi-genre as possible, to give readers access to some of the materials I'd been able to lay my hands on, to tell the story on multiple levels. So when my university offered a "Digital Storytelling" training session before classes began, I was eager to sign up for it. Unfortunately other meetings took precedence, but I decided that it was now or never; I signed up one of my Fall courses for a workshop and crafted a vague-but-fun-sounding assignment. Then I began watching iMovie workshop videos on YouTube and playing with that application in my 'spare' time - hoping to have some level of understanding by the time my students hit that part of the syllabus (nothing like the potential for sheer embarrassment in front of a classroom as a spur to preparation!). I have a lot of interesting video footage and photographs from my June research trip to California, and some new poems/prose that might lend themselves to that kind of exploration... Given my time limitations to learn by playing around, I have temporarily put aside doing the video project I had in mind - something that requires a bit more skill than I currently possess - but I have attempted a "poetry video" using still photographs culled from my own collection, and Project Gutenberg. I figured out how to do a very basic audio recording and attach it to iMovie, and off I went - learning as I tried this and that. I'll be showing this to my Memoir writing class today, and my Native Lit course tomorrow. Baby steps though it may be, I'm excited to give them another way of image-ing texts and creating a kind of snapshot of their own learning.
This video poem is part of a series I've been working on called "Interviews with California Missions." My working summary goes like this:
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"In the summer of 2014 I traveled to
eight of the twenty-one California missions established by Franciscan priests
from Spain during what is now called the Mission Era, 1769-1823.My purpose was to interview these venerable
establishments in order to listen and scrupulously record for posterity their
side of the historical controversy concerning alleged roles in the murder of
tens of thousands of California Indians.Were these missions complicit in war crimes?Or were they, too, victims of Spanish
colonial greed and conquest?What
secrets did they tuck away in those adobe walls?My extensive research had not prepared me for
the raw truth of these mission voices; not only was I fortunate enough to learn
each mission’s secret name, never before revealed, but my sources seemed
relieved to give their testimonies at last."
Enjoy my first effort! And forgive my beginner's mistakes.
1. Like a universe at the center of a black, black hole: like the eye of a hurricane swallowing half the globe: like the round pupil in the eye of a deer: come get it, your destiny. Your restlessness unbound. 2. Like a hummingbird in salvia: green and turquoise abalone wings, flashes of ruby. Beauty is her work. Sweetness passes between beak and blossom: all that matters is here. 3. Heart bandit. Blue tiger of night. Moon-raider. All the papery hearts of moths flock to you; let them devour and be devoured by your swirling constellation of light.
or to keep earthquakes at bay, bring fish to your net,
make women fall at your feet or raise children from the dead.
There's only longing and fear and desire and grief in this world.
Get that through your head. No magic, no shortcuts.
Don't expect so much from St. John's Wort. It's just a flower.
Famous only to bees and a few migrant insects.
Likewise, peyote. Give that one lots of space and forget
that shaman shit you read. They lied. You know this,
but you prefer to pretend: quartz crystals capable
of healing cancer, mystical runes visible by the light
of a full moon spelling out the way home. Look, there's
no sacred star, no amulet to clutch when the monsters come.
Instead we have existential angst, the question why, serial killers
and bad TV shows about terrorists who are us. There are
no charms against lightning, I tell you. Wrong world.
Try the next one over. Take your hope and faith and
magical thinking and hit the road. Leave us our lightning rods,
our Prozac, our robotic remote controls -
that which we make, that which we control,
that which shall surely save us.
Deborah A. Miranda, 12/2012
Quickie Book Review:
This week I had the great good fortune to read Tslagi poet and artist Kim Shuck's new prose manuscript, Rabbit Stories. Here is the blurb I wrote for Kim, after I could finally put words together that didn't sound like crap after her beautiful weavings:
Subatomic particles. String. Knots. The water in London, San Francisco, Tar Creek. A coy Spider. The Dance of DNA. Chestnut Man's kiss. Songs made of strawberry soda. These are glimpses of the complex world in which a Tslagi girl/woman lives. Named "Rabbit Food," after a wild rose, the girl is accompanied through life by irreverent guardian and teacher Rabbit, "a creature of trick and pleasure." Kim Shuck's collection is tenderly constructed, finely woven in and out of Rabbit Food's lifetime as girl, young woman, new mother, and middle-aged artist. Rabbit Stories winds through waters layered with dream and memory, loops back around time with a wise/cracking humor. I couldn't put these stories down. They're singing in me now; it feels as if the DNA in my cells has been transformed by, as Rabbit would say, "a joy in craft and artifact." Brava!
Seriously: I sat in my chair after finishing Rabbit Stories, and honestly felt as if my cellular DNA construction had been rearranged. My body felt transformed. Even now, I don't feel like I can describe that sensation of reading (was it reading, or breathing in?) material that went so deeply into my psyche and changed - or rather, improved - who I am.
All of this doesn't begin to tell you what it is in Shuck's book that did this to me, or for me. There were no magic amulets, no Cherokee charms, no ancient grannies teaching secrets. The story is quite literally woven out of time - clearly, a young girl growing into womanhood, becoming a lover, becoming a mother, becoming an artist - but with a chronological orientation toward connections rather than linearity. In other words, we do not meet Rabbit Food, the main character, as a baby and then watch her grow into maturity. Rather, we come to know her through the human and planetary connections she feels, clusters of memories from various important moments in her life as a whole.
And none of this is narrated by Rabbit Food herself, but has an alternative point of view from her guardian and teacher that teaches us as much as Rabbit Food. Perhaps it starts with that name, Rabbit Food; it's the name of a kind of wild rose favored by rabbits, and using the literal translation rather than the more romanticized "Wild Rose" gives this story the deliciously unexpected pleasure of, well, reality. The world doesn't get much more real than intercontinental air travel over the pole to reunite with a lover, driving across the United States in an old car with a father who is somehow distant and lost, bathing a baby in the kitchen sink or a child absorbed by the mysteries of knots and string. Yet in Shuck's hands, this reality is narrated from the point of view of Rabbit. Yes, that Rabbit - Trickster, "a creature of trick and pleasure," - and Rabbit observes Rabbit Food all of her life, a constant loving and instructive presence whose main goal is to introduce and perpetuate "silliness" into Rabbit Food's life.
Now, define "silliness."
Merriam says: Having or showing a lack of common sense or judgment; foolish. foolish - fatuous - daft - dull - idiotic - fool - goof - ninny
Clearly, dominant culture doesn't think much of silliness. And there you have it: Rabbit's reason for being, the mission behind Rabbit's love for Rabbit Food. Rabbit teaches Rabbit Food to see beyond the reality given to her by the dominant culture. Rabbit turns it upside down for her, and she is able to understand that reality isn't "common sense" goals like money, career, advancement, ambition. In such a world, reality is the death of joy; in Rabbit's world, silliness is the key to wisdom. Thus Rabbit Food's real self, an artist whose work communicates an indigenous survivance in contemporary times, is in fact "fed" by Rabbit.
At certain points, in fact, it seems that Rabbit Food's capacity for "silliness" even surpasses Rabbit's; some of her creations are more complex than even Rabbit can bear for long, but Rabbit Food knows they are necessary. Throughout the story, Rabbit flirts with Spider, a female presence who has an important but less obvious role in Rabbit Food's education; sometimes I get the distinct feeling that Spiderwoman is who Rabbit Food is growing up to be, with her love of string and beads and knots and weaving.
At any rate, my stumbling words can't do this book justice. I don't have the ability to look at the world through Rabbit's sacred eyes. But Kim Shuck does it beautifully, and I can't wait until Rabbit Stories is out in the world for all to read. Watch for it at http://www.poeticmatrix.com/ in January 2013.
Someone once said that human beings are simply mobile containers designed by water in order to move itself from place to place.I like that image of us as walking water; it makes sense, since most of the human body is made up of H2O, and the surface of earth herself is about 74% water. Are we simply extensions of the earth, moving about independently, yet connected by the tether, or umbilical cord, of our shared composition?Of course, this analogy immediately presumes the earth as our mother, our origin, our parent, and we her wandering (and often wayward) offspring.
In one of my prose poems, "Lullabye," I try to imagine how being made of mostly water means having a deep relationship with the sea.
Lullaby
We belong to the sea. We are salt water walking on the land in soft containers called flesh. Chloride, sodium, sulfate swim in our veins, warm and elemental. Our bodies sway and swell in response to the tides of our oldest memory. The moon pulls the sea, the sea pulls us. So we are the sea, walking on two legs far away from the birthing waters. We travel wide plains, rest awhile beside icy streams, make shelters out of snow. Always, we seek water, wherever we go, look for lost relatives, pieces of our selves. We smell wetness beneath rock; we raise our faces to gray skies, mouths open; we welcome the fat drops with our thirst. We belong to the sea, we bear her dark green wishes and slippery strands of thought. Magnesium, calcium, potassium slide through our veins. We make love to each other, oceans aching to reunite; homesick, we ease our isolation with each other’s moist mouths, secret seeps, lonely seas meeting on our slick skins. We belong to the sea: she will make her claim on us again one day, demand our return, and this long separation will come to an end. She will ask us for her copper, her cobalt, her molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, iron, bicarbonate, bromide, strontium. We will leave our flesh behind us on the shore, husks that dry and turn to dust. We will slip back into the sea like a child going home, like boron to selenium, like blood finds its way back to blood.
Fragments of any place we live on for an extended period of time are transmitted into our flesh, blood, bones and teeth in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and these become the architecture that contains us. Our bodies record our relationship with place in several beautiful ways.Within that formula of H2O, we must remember that the mass of our human bodies is made up mostly of oxygen.
Our bones, for example, soak up the elements around us to renew themselves about every ten years; the isotopic oxygen ratios in the bone show the “signature” of where you’ve been. It’s a little like having your dog or cat “chipped” – a veterinarian with a scanner can tell at a glance where your pet belongs if it has somehow wandered off.
And our teeth are even better at chronicling our connection to the planet. Unlike bone, adult teeth never rebuild themselves; the elements present when they are initially formed stay in them for life, and so our teeth preserve the precise region in which we were born and raised. When Gloria Anzaldua says she travels from her homeplace “taking with me the land,” she isn’t speaking metaphorically. We carry particles from the place of our emergence deep in our bodies wherever we go, all of our lives.
Even our hair, whose growth is largely determined by the water we drink, tells the more recent stories. We drink water filtered through the geology of the place we live; each region’s water has its own unique oxygen isotope, and that geographic pattern braids itself into our hair as it grows.
All of this science is interesting to me not because of what it reveals, but because of what it confirms: the indigenous world view that human beings are not separate from the earth, from land and water but instead extensions of Earth. Different, yes; separate, no. The Earth is a living entity from which we are created through a process both pragmatic and mysterious. This is, I think, often interpreted as indigenous spirituality or religion, but a more accurate description might be that it is a world view, a way of ordering the world, the core of indigenous values, knowledge and ethics.
The diversity of indigenous cultures on the North American continent alone is staggering, yet this perception of human connection to the planet, to the earth, may be the one universal, pan-Indian commonality. The complex, intimate relationship between human and planet plays out in many ways through the images within indigenous poetry.
Ecological or eco-poetry is often defined as, ultimately, the loss of the individual self in favor of a network of inter-connected ecologies. Yet Native poetry celebrates all the same markers of humanity that other poetry does – falling in love, death, sensory and sensual experiences, grief, celebration, relationship. A Native world view allows for the difference between self and the elements that form us, but does not deny the deep connections between self and those same elements. What if we ARE Place?
Being able to hold both of these thoughts at once in one’s mind, and in one’s daily actions, is the work of thousands of years of indigenous experience. When North American was colonized by European powers, that world view took a severe beating; in many cases, whole tribes whose lives exemplified this way of knowing were killed, and in many more tribes, the bodies lived on without knowledge of these connections between earth and self. Many of us, ourselves, have forgotten how to be indigenous.
My strong tribal identity is tied to a specific place, California, and even more strongly to the Monterey Bay and Santa Barbara areas, where my grandparents were from. Over and over, my poems walk the landscape and geography of home, as if to visit with it, memorize it, talk with it. It seems so natural to me that I was surprised when my colleague Lesley said, “Place is kind of what you DO” – but immediately, that felt true. I think I’ve been re-learning how to be indigenous all of my life.
Perhaps this is where my poetic obsession with place comes from: my teeth; my bones. I used to be so embarrassed by my crooked “Indian” teeth, the result of an over-crowded mouth and poor dental care as a kid. Now I think of my teeth as my secret strength, a safe-deposit box, where I carry the essence of my homeland with me, always. In "Mnemonic," I think about what remains with us in our "bone memory" even as we travel far from our birthplaces.
I'd love to hear what other people/poets/writers/Indians are thinking about when they think of place and their relationship to it.
This essay owes inspiration to Lesley Wheeler's handout on Poetry of Place, as well as a blog by Amelia Montes
Mnemonic
I was born on the San Andreas Fault. I carry
that promise of violence and destruction down
the center of my body like a zig-zag of lightning.
