• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

varies from one part of the Navajo kachinas.) And it introduces a theme is to bring what he can learn from the nation to another, an important fact he will develop in later novels: the alien world into his quest for the Nava­ that leads Joe Leaphorn, Hillerman's clash between living Native Americans jo ideal — hozro, or internal and exter­ Navajo detective hero, to conclude that and Anglo archaeologists, who, it is nal harmony with one's surroundings. the suspected wolf is in truth a well- widely held in Indian country, are When Leaphorn witnesses a death, he read "Los Angeles Navajo," raised off nothing more than glorified grave rob­ may unplug the telephone and take a the reservation and unaware of narrow bers. drink or two; when Chee sees the local custom. In the middle 1970's, Hillerman horrors of his time — for instance, Hillerman abandoned Navajo coun­ introduced a second Navajo policeman Navajo drunks "sprawled in Gallup try for his next book. The Fly on the hero, Sergeant Jim Chee, who figured alleys, frozen in the sagebrush beside Wall, a political thriller. However, in in his next three novels: The Ghost the road to Shiprock, mangled like Dance Hall of the Dead, Hillerman Way, The Dark Wind, and People of jackrabbits on the asphalt of US High­ returns his readers to the little-known Darkness. Like Leaphorn, Chee is way 666" — he goes to a medicine world of the Zuni people of eastern intensely curious about white people man for catharsis, for, as Changing New Mexico, who each year honor the —belagdana, from the Navajo approx- Woman taught the Dine, "returning to Shalako, a bird spirit who brings mes­ irnation for "American" — and their beauty require[s] a cure." sages from their gods. A neighboring odd customs; at the University of New Despite their fictive differences, Navajo boy, trained to play the cere­ Mexico, he had "studied anthropolo­ however, Leaphorn and Chee behave monial part of the Shalako, has disap­ gy, sociology, and American literature almost identically in the tales of their peared at Zuni Pueblo, and it is in class. Every waking moment he respective series; one senses that Leaphorn's task to find him among the, studied the way white men behaved. Hillerman introduced the second char­ thousands of visitors who have All four subjects fascinated him." But acter only to avoid wearing out streamed in to watch the week-long Chee, from a rural background, is Leaphorn's welcome. Nowhere is this rituals — among them, again, a Navajo more traditional than Leaphorn, also more clear than in Skinwalkers (1987), Wolf and an army of stoned hippies. trained in anthropology and literature Hillerman's first novel after a long Hillerman's tale touches on many in­ at Arizona State University; along with silence in the early and middle 1980's, teresting elements, among them being his academic courses, Chee has for in which Leaphorn and Chee are the ancient hatred of Navajo for Zuni. years studied to become a hatathali, a brought together for the first time. (Many traditionalists still believe that a singer of the Blessing Way and other Again, the subject is witchcraft. Zuni has to scalp a Navajo before purifying rites. Leaphorn is an assimi- Chee, who has been undergoing initia­ being admitted into the closed religious lationist, seemingly content to live in tion rites to become a shaman of his fraternities of the Shalako and its allied two worlds, white and red; Chee's aim clan, is ambushed while asleep in his hogan — the traditional octagonal hut •BRIEF MENTIONS of the Navajo, its door always facing east to the sunrise—by a shotgun- YES, LET'S: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Tom Disch wielding, unseen assailant. Investigat­ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 112 pp., $8.95 (paper) ing the wreckage after the assault, Not yet 50 years old, Tom Disch has already had a remarkably varied career as a Chee stumbles upon a small bead of successful author of science fiction, theater critic of The Nation, and as a poet worked bone, the unmistakable weap­ who has managed to create interesting work in an age of dullness. His newest vol­ on of one bewitched, a "skinwalker," ume, Yes, Let's, is distinguished neither by its bulk nor by its range, but within who uses it to inject his or her "corpse his own special groove, Disch moves with the agility and force of a kick-boxer. sickness" into someone else and there­ Disch's groove lies somewhere between irony and whimsy, near the point by be freed of the curse. Chee turns to where both converge on the metaphysical. Some of his poems begin in a Leaphorn for help in solving the case, deceptively light vein, only to deliver a surprise punch. More than once his sci-fi and Leaphorn is only too happy to interest breaks through, never more memorable than in "A Vacation on Earth": oblige, for he harbors a deep hatred of "It is hard to believe / we have our source in this nightmare / tangle of vegetable witchcraft, which he considers to be a matter and stone, / that this hell is where / it all began." foreign aberration introduced to the Disch is quirky, unpredictable, and irreverent with a satire that is savage in its restraint. He is equally "unkind" to society's losers and to the winners who Navajo by Indians from the Great alternately despise and patronize them. He says of a derelict, "Not even the Plains. Leaphorn, a technician who angels who gather / Over the doorway of Citibank / To bathe in their tears — not obsessively keeps track of crimes on the even they / Can make you behave," and portrays a blindman's fantasy revenge Navajo reservation with colored map on the sighted: "I would kick / you when you weren't looking / more than once I pins — red for alcohol-related arrests, would be hideous / if you could see me / you would be so terrified / that you black for complaints of sorcery, and the would be glad you were blind." like — soon determines that the attack There is a tradition of this sort of writing in America among poets of an on Chee is part of a larger, geometric anarchist bent. One thinks of e.e. cummings and even more of Kenneth pattern of seemingly supernatural Patchen, but unlike Patchen (and like cummings) Disch is technically compe­ murders. tent as a versifier. His sense of phrasing in his relatively free verse is flawless, and his experiments in rhyme and rhythm put him in the first class of the so-called Skinwalkers showcases Hillerman's "new formalists." (TF) many virtues as a writer of detective fiction, chief among them being his 34/CHRONICLES LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED refusal to slip into the hard-boiled Thief of Time, named for the Dine alone, one might expect him quickly to cliches of the genre, the tough-guyisms phrase for "pothunter," centers on the run out of material. But he is working that make so many procedural un­ ongoing looting of archaeological sites away with the expectation of issuing readable. Instead, Hillerman writes in Navajo country — it is estimated that another Leaphorn-Chee mystery late with a kind a poetic movement that the reservation contains more than two in 1990. One might hope to see in it mirrors the graceful Dine language hundred thousand prehistoric sites, an Indian villain acting from his own itself: some many thousands of years old — motives, without an evil Anglo puppet and the international trade in stolen master behind him; one might want to He [Jim Chee] spoke in Navajo, artifacts. For its part. Talking God, read in it a stronger moral tale of the using the long, ugly, guttural whose title refers to the Navajo destructive forces of alcoholism, pover­ sound which signifies that yeibichai, the grandfather and leading ty, and cultural displacement in moment when the wind of life deity of all the gods and spirits, offers a Navajoland; one might wish to learn no longer moves inside a slighriy different take on the same large more in it of tribal political corruption human personality, and all the theme. outside the framing device of supernat­ disharmonies that haye ural murder. For all those grumblings, bedeviled it escape from the In this novel, Henry Highhawk, a about the strongest criticism one can, nostrils to haunt the night. half-NavajO curator, sends a Smithson­ ian lawyer her grandparents' remains, level against Hillerman's previous Hillerman's other strengths — his will­ dug up from a respectable New En­ books is his depiction of the Navajo ingness to treat the Navajo as people, gland churchyard, and suggests that reservation as a deserted wilderness. complete with shortcomings, doubts, they take the place of Indian bones in The place is crawling with people, irrationalities, and private demons; his the museum's display cases. Highhawk Dine and Anglo alike, and laced with admission that the Navajo government flees to the Navajo reservation to at­ busy towns and roads, thanks in large is as bureaucratized and corrupt as that tend a ceremonial dance and wait out part to a continuing Navajo baby of any large municipality, as witnessed his employer's anger. He winds up boom. by the recent power struggle between dead, of course. So, in an interesting Whatever the case, Tony Hiller­ Tribal Chairman Peterson Zah and twist, does an exiled Chilean dissident, man's newfound success is well de­ ousted former leader Peter MacDonald the victim of a psychotic hit man whose served; his readers get a whirlwind tour — loom large in the novel, which, like characterization marks some of Hil­ of a magical land, a dose of arcana and each of its predecessors in both the lerman's best writing to date.

Load more

  3

Copy Link