Poets From The United States

"Whatever just happened, it would be related to other things that had happened, and finally the function of the stories would be to keep you from feeling that God had just dropped a rock on your head had been singled out in some way, which is really dangerous, because the stories remind you that this isn't the first time."

"Leslie Marmon Silko writes in her collection of essays, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit, about "The Indian with a Camera." Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo, and tourists have been pointing cameras at her all of her life, in one case, taking Leslie, who is mixed blood, out of a photo because she didn't look Indian enough. As an adult, Silko, who wrote novels such as Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead," and most recently, Gardens in the Dunes, is also a photographer. She said that this makes the tourists really uncomfortable. Why? Because she, as an artist, is turning her gaze on them. Indians are supposed to be the passive receivers of their gaze. The implications of an Indian turning her gaze, her sensibilities, on them, capturing their images, is a subversion, a reversal of the given order."

"I read Almanac of the Dead, and here were these ideas, these stories, this understanding of the relationship of the people of the SW to the land, and the immateriality of the political border to traditional cultures. It was not written to flatter or beguile. She did not pull any punches. It was written to show these connections between the seen and the unseen, the past and the future. By talking about the Yaqui, who live on both sides of the border, she highlighted another culture, like the Opata, who have claims that supersede current boundaries. It was a great relief to find her work."

"with a good story there is no end to the possibilities"

"I think what writers, storytellers, and poets have to say necessarily goes beyond such trivial boundaries as origin."

"(Why did you entitle the novel Ceremony?) S: That's what it is. Writing a novel was a ceremony for me to stay sane."

"...the best thing you can have in life is to have someone tell you a story; they are physically with you, but in lieu of that, since at age five or six you get separated from all of those people who hold you and talk to you, I learned at an early age to find comfort in a book, that a book would talk to me when no one else would. Or a book would say things that would soothe in a way that no person could."

"as a writer and as a person, I like to think of myself in a more old-fashioned sense, the way the old folks felt, which was, first of all you're a human being; secondly you originate from somewhere, and from a family, and a culture. But first of all, human beings."

"my process is mostly, not totally, subconscious, not conscious. The reason I write is to find out what I mean. I know some of the things I mean. I couldn't tell you the best things I know. And I can't know the best things I know until I write."

"in order to realize the wonder and power of what we share, we must understand how different we are too, how different things are. I'm really intrigued with finding out similarities in conditions, and yet divergences in responses, of human beings. I'm really interested in that. Without forgetting that first of all, before we can ever appreciate what's the same, we have really to love and respect and be able to internalize freedom of expression."

"It's generally double-edged. It seems with humor, there's always something beyond just the laughing that when you're laughing, you have to think beyond to greater considerations."

"It's simply splendid, and I can't stress too much how happy I am to have this book in the world."

"(How do you feel about the Bicentennial-do you have feelings about it?) LMS: Oh, I do, definitely, I have all kinds of things to say-I think it's one reason I'm very anxious to try to get the novel out during 1976. I just want to make sure that during this year when all of this sort of celebrating is going on, that Americans can be reminded that there are different ways to look at the past 200 years. I just want to make sure that beside all of the rhapsodizing about Paul Revere and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that Americans are reminded that this great land, this powerful nation they are celebrating was established on stolen land. It was the resources, the metals, the minerals, it was the water, it was the coal, that enabled those people who came to America to build this nation. In this Bicentennial year we should remember, we should remember that it was on this stolen land that this country was settled and begun. In Anglo-Saxon law, in common law, when something is stolen, no matter how many times the stolen property changes hands, in common law, that piece of property still belongs to the original owner. It doesn't matter whether the people take the stolen article in good faith. The property remains stolen. As long as this fact is acknowledged, then I'll be satisfied, and they can celebrate all they have done with this stolen land and the stolen resources and they can pat themselves on the back for the achievement. (1976)"

"True" representation is representation as best as possible. (Absolutely true representation is not possible because it is always only representation.) Then we can circumvent our own stereotype and, in a sense, not indulge in stereotyping. And I think that will produce better literature, and surprising literature, too. (To the Western mind this is the main thing in society.) And I think in a sense that Leslie Silko has done that; certainly, the stereotypes are not there."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's writing takes us into old worlds of consciousness inside the present, and inside ourselves."

"Certainly for me the most effective political statement I could make is in my art work. I believe in subversion rather than straight-out confrontation. I believe in the sands of time, so to speak."

"relationships. That's all there really is. There's your relationship with the dust that just blew in your face, or with the person who just kicked you end over end. ... You have to come to terms, to some kind of equilibrium, with those people around you, those people who care for you, your environment."

"The work of women of color arises out of the creative void in a multitude of voices, a complex of modes, and most of these women are quite aware of their connection to the dark grandmother of human wisdom...Leslie Marmon Silko reaches into unexplored realms, the gloom of what is long forgotten but that continues to nourish our love and our terror"

"the ease I have in writing?...It must come from being immersed in a community where every interaction reinforces a narrative vision of oneself and one's belonging. Narrative is the only way they keep track of all the rituals, all the hunting places, all the history, all of the chemistry. How you do this, how you make that, how you bend this. Nothing written down. All in the human memory and kept collectively. So that you'll go clear to the next village to ask some old woman how was it exactly that they used to do this. They used human brains for books. Because the information is stored in narrative, it's ordered completely differently than western European ordering of, like, technical botany or biology, by taking things apart. It puts things together and reinforces stories. So that one deer hunting story can contain valuable information in a number of different areas that you'd have to cross-catalogue."

"(Q: What's missing in contemporary writers?) A: They're disconnected. The sense of not being a part of anything. The anomie. It's the great malaise of the twentieth century. The autonomous, lonely little character-what Harold Brodkey wrote about. But language is so connected to other times and people. Words are so alive with other connections. It's almost as if some of the postmodern fiction, some of the experimental fiction, is trying to start a fire by dumping ice water on the wood. Something's a bit off because the medium, language, is connected historically. And yet the feeling of that poor individual, that disconnection. The only time you are connected is when you're writing and using language. (Q: So for you that connection is crucial-the connection with the external world and the connection with the whole history.) A: Absolutely. Otherwise you fall into this abyss where everything that's Other is completely irrelevant. It's almost a kind of death."

"(Q: When you saw that it was going to be an almanac, what difference did that make?) A: Then I started to think about the notion of time reckoned not with numerals and numbers, but what if you just talk about time as narratives, day by day. What happened that day is the identity of the day. More in the direction of what the Mayans thought. Once we did that, the editing went differently, and it became a whole different book. (Q: Your sense of time in the book is very non-Western.) A: The way time is computed in western European cultures is completely political. Colonialists always want time and history not to go back very far...Here [among Native American people], five hundred years is nothing. This is something that the Anglo-Americans, the invaders, the colonials, never want to face-in China or India or Africa-especially when there are native people who have an incredible spiritual connection to the very earth. Time is totally political-especially when they are on that mother ground and especially when it's such a short period of time, where somebody living today could have talked to somebody who had talked to somebody who actually was at the scene of some of these events. Then you completely miscalculate how well things are going."

"(Q: Why do you stay in Arizona?) A: Turn tail and run and go to some little Shangri-la? Ha! I am a part of this. You don't just run off and leave your land and your people and the animals and the trees. You stay here. Laguna has its problems-the reservation has unemployment, and they have suicides. But they have this wonderful culture and cohesion and history, and they have themselves. No matter how bad things are at Laguna, they're way better than here. But the truth is that somebody has to come over here and say, "Look, this is criminal. These policemen, these judges, these legislators in Arizona are criminals. The people shouldn't listen to them." I feel that way on a national level, too. When you find something like this, you have to tell about it. You just can't ignore it."

"all young writers should understand that even those things that we throw in the trash can are necessary to get us to where we want to be. (1994)"

"I am never far away from oral narrative, storytelling and narration, and the use of narrative to order experience. The people at home believe that there is one big story going on and made up of many little stories, and the story goes on and on. The stories are alive and they outlive us, and storytellers are only caretakers of the story. Storytellers can be anonymous. Their names don't matter because the stories live on. I think that's what people mean when they say that there are no new stories under the sun. It's true - the old stories live on, but with new caretakers. (1994)"

"The most radical kinds of politics are not in harangues given at stupid rallies. I mean the most earth-shaking kinds of shifts occur when language is plain truth. (1987)"

"The attitude of the white shaman is that he knows more about Indians than the Indians know. (1976)"

"From Leslie Silko we hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of contemporary Indian America rising above dull anthropological reports"

"Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is an extraordinary book, a work of immense creative power...a landmark in Native American literature-the Indian War and Peace."

"I was really fortunate because I was surrounded by generations of women. I never thought that women weren't as strong as men, as able as men or as valid as men. I was pretty old before I really started running into mainstream culture's attitudes about women. And because I never internalized the oppressor's attitude, I never behaved in a passive, helpless way. Instead of being crushed by sexism, I was sort of amused or enraged, but never cowed."

"This is my 763-page indictment for five hundred years of theft, murder, pillage, and rape. So is Almanac long? Sure, but federal indictments are long...And mine is a little more interesting reading than a straight-on legal indictment."

"...humor is sacred. Laughing is sacred. The world would become sterile and cold and die if there wasn't the clowning and the joking and the laughter. And that in order to have a perfect balance or harmony you have to have humor."

"When you grow up and look around you every day and say, "Oh, there is stolen property. It was ours and it was stolen," you're not nearly as quick to swallow the kinds of rationales that everybody else accepts. That's one of the tragedies of the United States - a sort of collective amnesia about the past"

"He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (p229)"

"The morning of the funeral an honor guard from Albuquerque fired the salute; two big flags covered the coffins completely, and it looked as if the people from the village had gathered only to bury the flags. (p240)"

"(There is an ongoing debate in the literary world regarding writers who attempt to write from a different cultural, racial perspective than their own. What are your thoughts on this?) LMS: That's been going on for hundreds of years. There are two thoughts I have on this. If this were the best of all possible worlds, which it isn't, then publishing wouldn't concern itself with pigeonholing and marketing to certain groups. There would be a level playing ground. Everyone would have the same chance of getting a novel published. If our education system would include education on different cultures and groups of people who are a part of the United States, you wouldn't have this. When people get excluded, that's when you have this sort of fragmentation and things being broken down into categories. It's a political problem. If there were many books by Pueblo people out there, for example, then we could say, "Let that guy publish that book on Pueblo culture or oral literature," because there's all these other books by Pueblo writers or people from that community that are out there so that there's an opportunity for people to see the difference between someone who's just pretending, someone who is trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of a culture, versus someone who is actually from there. The problem is in this country is that you have this political machine in the arts that suppresses Indian writers to take power away from the people. They have continued to publish books about Indians by non-Indians for political reasons. Non-Indians, generally, even if they've tried to be very sympathetic, can't help but replicate a worldview that is sympathetic to the political ends of the power structure. Yet you can't limit the freedom of the artist. We can't say, "You can't use your imagination." It's extremely difficult for a person to imagine themselves in the shoes, life and culture of someone else, but let's not put any limitations on what possibly could happen. We can't limit human beings and the human imagination. The reason there is so much strong feeling about, let's say, non-Indian writers writing about non-Indian subjects is because good Indian writers don't get published and bad white writers do. That's the problem. It's getting to the point, though, where there's enough good writing out there and there's gradually becoming more knowledge of Indian culture. Readers can now pick up a book by a non-Indian with a bad imagination and say, "This is crap." As long as certain communities are marginalized, it's a political act against them to allow a stranger to portray them. It's a part of suppression. Once there's an opening up and a political equality, a political power given to marginalized people, then it won't matter. I think we’re gradually getting enough good Indian writers out there that only the most brilliant imaginings by non-Indians of what it would be to be part of some other culture would get published. One example of such a work is a collection of poetry entitled Crazy Horse in Stillness by William Heyen. (2015)"

"What I would tell young writers is to put the focus on the work. You have to live doing it. You can't think that it's going to make you money; you can't think that it's even going to support you. You can't think like that because what you'll end up having to do is sacrifice your own ideas to fall in line with what they want you to do. (2015)"

"The writer's life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There's that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions. Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it's like working underground. It's not easy to get down there and it's not easy to get back. You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time. (2015)"

"the fact that people get twisted cuts across lines of skin color and culture. It has to do with who buys that authoritarianism."

"What can you do when you're writing about five hundred years and it just happens to be five hundred years of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter? What do you do when that's your task, and all these other people before you have cleaned it up, and you're the one that has to come and say, "No, the priests didn't come for God, glory, and then gold. The Church came here for money"?"

"The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (p189)"

"But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (p190)"

"The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much. (p211)"

"Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more. (p213)"

"If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. (p178)"

"He crawled deeper into the black gauzy web where he could rest in the silence, where his coming and going through this world was no more than a star falling across the night sky. He left behind the pain and buzzing in his head; they were shut out by the wide dark distance. (p154)"

"...Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects They see no life. They fear They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves..."

"Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time. (p168)"

"...feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together—the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds—celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise. (p169)"

""...as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together." (p215)"

"At some point when you're writing a novel, the characters really are more interesting and exciting than living people. That's one of the reasons people read novels. It's almost like you become seduced by your own making, except that I know damn well that even though I imagine so much, especially in Almanac, that it's not something completely separate from all of the past and all past stories and things I've heard."