"We Women Rooting into the Earth" or: Ethnicity and Gender in Wendy Rose's Poetry (Hopi)

By Christina Grabner, Undergraduate Student

Poetry Analysis of Ethnic, Ecological and Female Suffering, Survival and Therapy.

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Mother Earth and the Native American Woman: The Story of Female Suffering and Revenge

Chapter 2: Images of Ethnic Pain and Its Healing
Chapter 3: Singing, Dancing and Story-Telling as Acts of
Ethnic Survival and Individual Therapy
Conclusion
Bibliography


Introduction

Since I share Ralph Waldo Emerson´s definition of poetry as something “what will and must be spoken”, I principally investigate Wendy Rose´s poems as outlets of suppressed female and ethnic suffering. Moreover, quoting Hirsch, I will also regard her manifold literary work as a revealed “secret that can no longer be kept secret, a way of knowing.” (44).
It is an honour for a three-quarter European and quarter-blood American woman to enter the world of Hopi images and symbols through a hermeneutic-interpretative and cultural approach which sometimes also contains feminist views and traits.

To Hirsch a “poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said.” (ibid. 10). However, I attempt to interpret “Throat Song: The Rotating Earth”, “Loo-wit”, “To the Hopi in Richmond (Santa Fe Indian Village)”, “If I Am Too Brown or Too White for You” and “Story Keeper” by describing the mood they create with my own words and by “digging out” the major tribal images which connect them.

First, I concentrate on female images and the intimate tie between Woman and Mother Earth, among other things expressed by their shared suffering and revenge. Secondly, metaphors of ethnic pain and healing as contained in the above-mentioned poems will be investigated and last, but not least, I am going to prove that the authoress considers singing, dancing and story-telling as an act of ethnic struggle to survive, or rather a powerful medecine for the stricken tribe and the disoriented individual.

Every now and then, I also try to discover certain autobiographical hints and, especially in the third part of my paper, the therapeutic role of memory and oral tradition will be studied carefully.

Chapter 1: Mother Earth and the Native American Woman: The Story of Female Suffering and Revenge

Evening rise, spirit come,
sun goes down when the day is done,
mother earth awakens me
with the heartbeat of the sea.

(Indian traditional, unknown author)

It is a specialty of Native American writers to evoke spirituality and harmony with the cosmos, particularly of poets who sometimes “make it seem as if the very universe speaks and reveals itself through the[ir] mother tongue [or an adapted language, such as English].” (Hirsch 10). The song above is an illustrating example of this truth. And so is Wendy Rose´s poetry. When we read her throat song on the “Rotating Earth” or her praise of the volcano “Loo-wit”, the “Lady of Fire”, we feel that our planet and the poetical “I” are one, that Wendy Rose becomes the critical, sympathetic voice of our suppressed ecological system.
“As my fingers have pulled your clay / as your mountains have pulled the clay of me; / as my knees have deeply printed your mud, / as your winds have drawn me down and dried the mud of me;” (Heath 3145) is a daughter´s declaration of love to Mother Earth and a frank confession of unity and mutual understanding. The female “I”´s body parts and the visible “trunk and limbs” of the earth merge into one image of interdependence and interaction. The “clay” appears like the planet´s skin, the “mountains” seem to have “fingers” and the human “knees” and the earth´s “mud” create a print, when brought together.

Roche hints at Rose´s “depict[…ing] Indian women merging with mountains [cf. “Loo-wit”], growing from rocks, emerging from earth [cf. “Story Keeper”]. These are the kachinas, spirits of nature, and the ancestors that feature so prominently in Hopi mythology.” (n.pg.).

Since the poetical self is closely and sensually connected to the earth, she is able to utter spontaneously, “I always knew you were singing!” (Heath 3145). And it is this singing-Metaphor which we follow like a red thread through Wendy Rose´s poems. In the “Throat Song” it introduces the subsequent verse and recurs again in the final line, reinforced by “Oh” (ibid.). Singing, dancing and story-telling are particularly female rituals in the Hopi tradition and to Rose, our home planet is a dynamic being who rotates, moves, develops and even sings as out of joy to be alive.

Niatum points out that “[m]any Native American poets regard themselves as both distinct individual voices and voices that speak for whatever cannot speak […].” (xx), such as a volcano, the earth itself, dead Indians, animals, plants and waters. This is certainly true for Wendy Rose.
And Boas confirms that “the [Native Americans´] origin myths […contain a] mythical world [including] earth, water, fire, sun and moon, summer and winter, animals and plants [which] are [,without any exception,] assumed as existing [and alive]” (39).

This dynamism can be found in almost all of Rose´s poems. In the “Throat Song” we discover all realms of nature at once, as well as in the volcano-poem and the “Story Keeper”.
“[C…]lay”, “mountains”, “mud”, “stone”, “ash”, “rocky”, “earth”, “garnet”, “crystal”, “matrix” [including a very female connotation with its double meaning of “uterus” and “earth mantle/ground”], “tin”, “cave”, “rocks”, “underground”, “crystallize”, “fossils”, “dust”, “canyon rim”, “mesas” and “bones” refer to the mineral realm, whereas “flutes”,
“reeds”, “redwood bark”, “gourd”, “tobacco”, “cedar”, “huckleberry ropes”, “bark”, “Blackberries”, “twigs”, “fields”, “moss”, “shriveled like leaves”, “needles
burst yellow from the pine branch”, “pinyon and willow”, “rooting into the earth”, “pushing up like tumbleweed”, “sprout” and “flower” belong to the terrestrial flora. The animal-inhabited fauna is evoked by “beetles”, “the flutter of blackbirds”, “tiny serpents swim”, “blue wing tips”, “with feathers on their back”, “like beetle wings”, “the old animal dances”, “antelope and bear”, “prairie dog” and “lizard”.
Furthermore, human intrusion is integrated through “fingers have pulled”, “knees have deeply printed”, “Her children play games”, “the boot scrape”, “my people”, “prayed”, “remember”, “mouth”, “wrists”, “knee”, “my body”, “touch”, “begin to piece together / the shape”, “wanting the fit in your palm”, “working me around”, “braided in my hair”, “plastic combs”, “along would come someone / to stifle and stop the sound”, “artifacts discarded”, “task”, “heave”, “dig”, “with my fingernails”, “skin”, “blood”, “I promise I will find them”, “tongues”, “have built a new house”, “dance”, “our first Hopi morning”, “we women”, “our feet”, “our hair”, “our thoughts wandered”, “we closed our eyes against them”, “forgot”, “trusted us to remember it right”, “mapped the trails”, “footprints”, “painted”, “turned our backs”, “pushes away”, “under my hand” and “sun-dried greasy / gambling bones” (Heath 3145 ff.).
Moreover, Wendy Rose added a fifth level by often mentioning the four basic elements – water, fire, wind and earth – in action. The volcano Loo-wit “spits” fire, lava, ashes and revenge on the human race (cf. ibid. 3145 f.) who work hard to destroy her natural power by cunning “tricks” and their “Machinery” which “growls, / snarls and ploughs / great patches of her skin” so that she [Mount St. Helens] has to “crouch”, “trembl[…e]” and “shudder”. Civilized people take away her natural protection when they “pull […] the blanket / from her thin shoulder.” (ibid. 3146).
The element of water appears in the “mud” of the throat song, the “snow” in “Loo-wit”, the “window steam” of the Richmond Hopi´s “lamb stew cooking”, the “tin roofs / full of holes” which are not waterproof, “the rain [… they] prayed for”, the “world of
water” they “live in”, the “rain / below the mesas” and the “moisture / in […the settled Hopi farmers´] fields”, as well as in “the edge of the river”, “swim”, “blood”, “winter” and “clouded” of the poem “If I am Too Brown or Too White for You” and in the “Story Keeper”´s “melt”, “moisture” [which] seep[s] along […her] skin”, “frozen”, “floating”, “clouds”, “our feet becoming water” and “merges with the mud” (ibid. 3145 f.).

Another level which I want to name “cosmic” can be discovered through close reading which is at the same time an autobiographical hint at Wendy Rose´s academic training at a “white” university, because it reveals a certain scientific knowledge about our micro- and macrocosm. First of all, we find it in the image of “Rotating Earth” and secondly, in the “small movements atom by atom I heard like tiny drums” [my emphasis] (ibid. 3145).

The large number of the above-quoted images, similes and metaphors clearly demonstrates that the poetess identifies herself to a considerable degree with Mother Earth´s being doomed to destruction. She melts ethnic suffering, female suppression and the ongoing exploitation of our planet into one vision of shock, desperate rebellion and revenge.

Particularly in “Loo-wit” there is danger ahead. Her “bumpy bed”, her being “bound […] to earth”, “buttes / that promise nothing”, “Her children play[ing] games / (no sense of tomorrow)” and the sentence “it´s not as if they weren´t warned” are a menace in themselves. The reader expects disaster in the form of a natural catastrophy in which the mountain and all her surroundings will be completely destroyed. Nevertheless, the volcano-woman stands up against her fate and takes revenge, since “The way they do / this old woman / no longer cares / what others think / but spits her black tobacco / any which way / stretching full length / from her bumpy bed.” (ibid.). The “Lady of Fire”
has even the power to blacken the “snow”, turn winter into summer, shake off her children – plants, stones and human creatures – in a world where there is “nothing” left “to keep / an old woman home.” (ibid.).
Although one might have the impression that the earth gives up and surrenders to man´s cruel exploitation by dying, this is not more than a short-term illusion, for the volcano´s “slopes […] shudder” furiously, “stones dislodge” and after a gentle warning “With one free heand [sic.] / she finds her weapons / and raises them high; / clearing the twigs from her throat / she sings, she sings, / [even] shaking the sky like a blanket about her”. (ibid. 3146).

By personifying the “mountain of fire” and equipping her with female attributes Wendy Rose emphasizes that both – women and nature (plus natural tribes living in harmony with her) – have been brutally exploited almost to extinction, have stood up against their fate in rebellion and are determined to make man pay dearly for his crime by humiliating and killing him through natural catastrophies, such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, floods, draughts aso. asf.

Chapter 2: Images of Ethnic Pain and Its Healing

As Surratt and Mercer point out, Wendy Rose was born into “the borderland of two cultures with her life being the colliding point” (n.pg.), for her father was Hopi and her mother of white descent. During the years of her white education, she has gained a cultural victim´s hard experience of being regarded as different and humiliated as a “half-breed”.
“Wendy Rose […is] a chronicler of the sufferings of displaced peoples and biracial outcasts worldwide, she lives in many worlds at once.” (Roche, n.pg.). The same author also considers “her poems“ as “scars that talk and songs that heal.“ (n.pg.).

The poem “To the Hopi in Richmond” is full of such scars or ethnic pain images which cry to heaven for justice. The “boxcars” in which her tribe finally has to live is a metaphor of poverty and captivity. Only the cooking “steam” “unite[…s]” her “people” [- her] “pain” [my emphasis]. What a disgrace it must be for human beings grown up in the open nature in unison with mountains, stars, animals and plants to be shut in rusty waggons with “cracks and crickets” on the “floors” and “tin roofs / full of holes” through which the rain enters to transform the shabby setting into “a world / of water” (Heath 3147). The scene reminds the reader of the sad atmosphere of a refugee camp with its wretched huts.
Moreover, the poem serves as a link to past Hopi rituals, namely rain magic. The utterance “that rain you prayed for / thousands of years” clearly proves that the Santa Fe Indians used to practise rain-making charms to water their corn, bean, cotton and pumpkin fields (cf. Lindig and Münzel 125, 132 f.). Lindig and Münzel also describe in detail the Pueblo Indians´ sophisticated technique of building small “arroyos” to conduct water over the “mesas” (Heath 3147) into the valleys below to exercise floodwater farming (cf. 124).

Other striking images of pain are included in “If I Am Too Brown or Too White for You” (Heath 3148 f.). Even the title itself refers to an ambivalent existence in which an individual is torn between two cultures (“Brown” and “White”). (cf. Rose´s biography).
Although the “garnet woman” is “whirling” and has a “dream / in […her] mouth / [and] the flutter of blackbirds / at […her] wrists”, she is forced to develop “into precision / as a crystal arithmetic / or a cluster” (ibid. 3148). A garnet radiates in shades of red, brown and white and is therefore a perfect metaphor of a half-blood woman, such as Wendy Rose. Another confirmation of this can be gathered from the poetess´s own words which say that she “infuse[s … her] work with [… her] own li[f]e” (Niatum xviii).
In addition to this, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn defines “[ethnic …w]riting [… as] an act of defiance born of the need to survive. […] It is the quintessential optimism born of frustration. It is an act of courage. […] it is an act which defies oppression.” (ibid. xxi).
Do Wendy Rose´s poems defy oppression? I am absolutely convinced they do.

Even if the “garnet” chosen “from among polished [educated and civilized WASP] stones / more definitely red or white” [either real savages or truly civilized persons] “is blood frozen”, brutally “piece[d] together” by a stranger´s hand, so that “the fit in […the latter´s] palm / [is] perfect / and the image less / clouded, less mixed” and “work[ed ...] around”, it survives by its “small light”, “a tiny sun” (Heath 3148) which is “so pure” and never stops “singing” (ibid. 3149). Finally, there is still hope which defies extinction and the pain is cured by “singing”, whereas in the “Richmond” poem the almost forgotten power of prayer and rain magic is the metaphor of survival and therapy which can be found in the collective memory of the Hopi.
In the “Story Keeper” ethnic pain dominates the verse as “a wound to be healed” (Heath 3149). This injury derives from the tribe´s forgetfulness, their loss of an ancient powerful treasure of stories, ceremonies and knowledge which has now merely “melt[ed] into the cave [=hiding place] / of artifacts [=artificial objects without any
power] discarded [=obsolete, no longer used]” (ibid.). The formerly eloquent “tongues [have] shriveled like leaves” (ibid.) and been compelled to lead a forlorn “underground” non-existence which “crystallize[s] them” into “fossils […] frozen hard / like beetle wings” (ibid. 3150).

There is only one effective medecine to cure this “wound” of rootlessness, blindness and lost identity, namely “to find the stories now / and to heave at the rocks, / dig at the moss / […] / and fall within / soft and dark / to the blood” (ibid. 3149), even if it hurts and forces the individual Native American to exhume traumas and shadowy traits in his/her psyche (cf. Duran, Weatherford and Silberman).

Chapter 3: Singing, Dancing and Story-Telling as Acts of Ethnic Survival and Individual Therapy

Niatum states that “cultural tradition does not just exist in the memory [, but] exists in act, thought, speech” (xxii), in “The talking, the singing, the telling, the writing [which] pass on the voice to an anonymous audience and attempt to make a community. The poems do not withdraw to style, but project into life.” (ibid. xxvii).
Dances are also part of Native American traditional rituals which can help the individual civilization victim to trace her/his life back to its roots. This would result in the “renewal through connection with tradition” also referred to by Niatum (xxv) and in the dancing of “the old animal dances / that go a winding way / back and back / to the red clouds / of our first / Hopi morning.” [my emphasis] (Heath 3150).

This passage of the poem “Story Keeper “ also demonstrates that cultural traditions are not necessarily lost by genocide and assimilation – no, quite to the contrary, “Where [the poetical self] saw them last / they are still: antelope and bear / dancing in the dust, / prairie dog and lizard / whirling just whirling, / pinyon and willow / bending, twisting, / we women / rooting into the earth / our feet becoming water / and our hair pushing up / like tumbleweed” [my emphasis] (ibid.). The whole Stanza radiates of hope, restoration of self and re-identification in the sense of a rediscovered unison with nature and the universe, especially achieved by Native American women.

Additionally, three stanzas above, Wendy Rose stresses that “the task” [is] to find the stories now” (ibid. 3149), for the tribal tales and myths, orally handed down to the offspring by great-grandparents, grandparents and parents as they are, represent an abundant source of values and historical waypoints which assist the individual to define her-/himself to be able to live an independent life. Native American oral tradition serves
as a sort of psychotherapy which we could compare with systemic family therapy involving ancestors´ and ancestresses´ fates in the client´s conflict-solving process.
Or as Niatum considers the matter, “the faith of the grandparents lives on in ceremonies and prevents total alienation or acculturation” (xxix). Larson puts it as follows, “The ceremony of selecting significant experiences from my life and naming them is so far the most effective means of dealing with problematic experiences of which I am aware, and serves as a useful means of unifying the past and future with the present.” (62). And to him “writers [like Wendy Rose] are […the] conjunction of cultures” (66).

The fact that writing, dreaming and memory can cure a shattered psyche and preserve an individual´s self-awareness, respectively an ethnic group´s who has faced genocide, has already been mentioned by myself in a proseminar paper on the African-French novel Onitsha by Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio. In this novel of initiation these rituals are used by the protagonists to overcome real or symbolic death – Wendy Rose´s “songlessness” (Heath 3151) - and pass secret knowledge on to the next generation (cf. Grabner 15 f., 31).

If we search for traces of healing in Wendy Rose´s poetry, we will discover them in the “lines of transmission” (Boas 48), such as several short sentences which are repeated at least twice, e.g. “she sings, she sings”, “Loo-wit sings and sings and sings!”, “I always knew you were singing!” and “Oh, I always knew you were singing!”, or in the graphical interruption of her “Story Keeper”-verse which consists of tipis, as well as in lines referring to a sunny future for the Hopi, i.e. “I promise / I will find them [the stories]”, “even after so long: where underground / they are albino / and they listen, they shine, / and they wait”, or in the spring metaphor: “But spring is floating / to the canyon rim; / needles burst yellow / from the pine branch / and the stories have built a new house” [my emphasis] in the “interzones where identity is being discovered and compromises or composites being negotiated” (Heath 3145 ff., Larson 66).

A strong belief in the resurrection of tribal identity and the indestructibility of spirit and nature can also be gathered from sections, such as the following:
“around me always the drone and scrape of stone”, “the constant rattle that made of this land / a great gourd”, “Centuries of cedar”, “that rain you prayed for / thousands of years / comes now”, “remember”, “why the dream / in my mouth”, “giving birth / over and over” [refers to the eternal circle of life and death], “the evening sun”, “there is a small light / in the smoke, a tiny sun / in the blood, so deep / it is there and not there, / so pure / it is singing”, “The stories would be braided in my hair”, “the rattles would spit”, “the drums begin”, “the spin of winter, / the spiral of beginning”, “winding”, “whirling”, “twisting” [all circular movements], “the spirits / […] trusted us to remember it right”, “new”, “spin and sprout”, “the very song / keeping us alive”, “so the stories have been strong / and tell themselves / to this very day, / with or without us”, “The flower merges with the mud”, “we are the spirits, / we are the people, / descended from the ones / who circled the underworld / and return to circle again” and “I feel the stories / rattle under my hand” [my emphasis] (Heath 3145-3151).

In the eternity of natural rhythms nothing can get lost, for it recurs over and over again. Everything has to submit to constant change – the laws of transformation never stop bringing death and rebirth. So neither Mother Nature, nor the American Indian tribes, nor the female sex as a whole have to despair, for there is hope and renewal for everyone.


Conclusion


Gender and ethnicity are prevalent in Wendy Rose´s poetry. Whereever I looked, I have found critical and involved lyrical commitment to urgent topics, such as the misery of the Native American tribes, exemplified by the Hopi, in their process of healing long-neglected, burning psychological and ethnic wounds, the desperate struggle of the globe to survive and regain ecological balance and the female fight for equal rights in a still male-dominated world of capitalism, competition and exploitation – battles in which the poetess possesses a double voice, on the one hand as a woman, and on the other hand as a Native American who is one of Mother Earth´s children.

By highlighting paths leading back to her tribe´s roots and offering medecine in the shape of rituals, such as story-telling, singing, dancing and dreaming, Wendy Rose does not only use her “[p]oetry [as] a form of necessary speech” in a mainly political purpose, but also deliberately seasons her lyrical work with “magical potency” (Hirsch xii).

Her poetry “speaks out of a solitude to a solitude; it begins and ends in silence. [It] speak[…s] across time. [Her] poe[…ms] ha[…d] been (silently) en route […] until they reached me [who was …] willing to […] listen to […them].” (ibid. 4).
To me “[r]eading [Wendy Rose was …] a point of departure, an inaugural, an initiation.” (ibid. 2).

Bibliography

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Weatherford, Jack. Native Roots. How the Indians Enriched America. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991.