Whereas
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The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
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A beautiful, difficult collection of poetry. I've said before that I'm not the most confident judge of poetry, and that stands (there was definitely some stuff in here I didn't “get”), but once I figured out the author's style, this work mostly flowed for me. I kept tearing my little library receipt into smaller and smaller pieces so I could bookmark my favorite phrases and poems.
The first tear, and I think my favorite, was “Wahpanica,” about commas and poverty and the poverty of being denied your culture's language; she uses the word “comma” in place of actual commas, which was a cool way to pause, since few of these poems included punctuation.
I also saved several of the lines from the Whereas Statements, which centered around the United States' “apology” to indigenous tribes for like, everything that's ever been done to oppress those groups.
WHEREAS a friend senses what she calls cultural emptiness in a poet's work and after a reading she feels bad for feeling bad for the poet she admits. ... So I explain perhaps the same could be said for my work some burden of American Indian emptiness in my poems how American Indian emptiness surfaces not just on the page but often on drives, in conversations or when I lie down to sleep. But the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us anywhere but to rot. ...
Whereas I drive down the road replaying the get-together how a man and his beer bottle stated their piece and I reel at what I could have said or done better; Whereas I could've but didn't broach the subject of “genocide” the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as “conflict” for example; Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what's done and the knife of my conscience slices with bone-clean self-honesty; ... Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man's chair out from under him; ...
WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota, therein the question: what did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces. Until a friend comforted, don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together.
