Curing Narratives: a Contemporary Poetics of Agency
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CURING NARRATIVES: A CONTEMPORARY POETICS OF AGENCY By MELANIE ALMEDER A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1999 Copyright 1999 by Melanie Almeder ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am greatly indebted to the support of my family and the inspiration of their many ongoing successes: Robert, the brilliant philosopher: Virginia, the brilliant teacher and rescuer of animals: Lisa, the wonderful healer and activist: Chris, the insightful brother and the guardian of environmental good health. I have had the good fortune to work with inspiring teachers and guides at the University of Florida. I only hope Elizabeth Langland knows her importance to her students: she is a model toward which we aspire: a brilliant scholar, an insightful, original, and lucid writer, and a gracious, generous human being. I thank her for all of her time and care. Phil Wegner. Malini Schueller. John Cech. and Sue Rosser have all been generous with their time and comments and have pushed this project toward more complexity and invention. I am grateful to them. I am indebted, as well, to dear friends who have made this project possible with their support, conversation, and affirmation. I am indebted to Lori Amy. bravest of brave, who carefully read chapters, offered rigorous critique, and is a model of fresh, meaningful living and writing methods. Angela Bascik. lucid theorist among us. storyteller, truth teller, discussed this business of "agency" until the ultimate agent himself. Alexander, arrived. Monica Beth Fowler, queen of cameos, patron saint of strays, has reminded me of the myriad day-to-day humor and generosity that heals. Anne Morgan, renaissance woman, angel incarnate, has helped me on every level imaginable and then some. iii Finally. I would like to dedicate the spirit of this work to Russo. dear friend, and in memory of his brother, in the hopes that w e continue to find ways to tell stories that might heal us through traumas into survival and into the good laughter of hearty rebellions. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT vii CHAPTERS 1 CURING NARRATIVE: MYTHOPOETICS AND AGENCY 1 Defining Agency as a Dynamic of Cure 11 The Novel as a Theater of Cure 13 2 NARRATING CURE. NARRATING AGENCY 17 It Has Never Been Easy: History and Disease 24 The Becoming Must Be Cared for Closely 30 Placing Tayo 46 The Sacrificial Geography of the Feminine 51 The Story Taking Form 64 3 YELLOW WOMAN AND MIGRATORY EMERGENCES 75 The World Was Breath 75 Curing Truth 35 Curing Narrative \qq Curing Violent Death 1 10 Curing History 1 14 4 YOU CANNOT JUST FLY OFF 124 Lineage and Disease 127 The Center is Flight 132 That Other Knowledge 1 35 The Word Enters the Body j 39 The Not-Mercy of Naming 145 v Conjuring Corporeality: Pilate 152 Sweet Intimacy and Song 161 Postmodernist Conjure 167 5 WHAT THE LIVING DESIRE 174 Genealogy and Imagist Dreaming 182 The Fire Between Them 197 Rape and Hunger 207 Ambivalent Daughters of Chango 213 The Not-Mamas of Relation 218 The Failure of Reading 223 6 SHAMAN AT THE BORDERLANDS 226 REFERENCES 244 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 251 vi Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CURING NARRATIVES: A CONTEMPORARY POETICS OF AGENCY By Melanie Almeder August 1999 Chairperson: Elizabeth Langland Major Department: English This project examines a series of contemporary American ethnic novels by women authors who import folkloric oral and performance rituals into their texts to heal diseased bodies. Despite their wide-ranging cultural and structural differences, the novels I examine—Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon . Leslie Marmon Silko 's Ceremony and - Storyteller . Cristina Garcia s Dreaming in Cuban , and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands have characters in common who are diseased because the}' have experienced cultural trauma. Because these novels diagnose larger "sick" cultural narratives through the diseased body, corporeal disease is as inseparable from mental illness as it is from the narrative structures of colonization, racism, sexism, genocide, and w ar. These novels attempt to write healing for both the diseased individual and for the diseased culture. And. importantly, healing then becomes inseparable from a radical refiguration of the body, of race, of gender, of history, of novel, and of the compelling question, to what vii degree can a character narrate or act upon her or his own cure to transform the narratives inhabiting her or him? This study offers a history of the folkloric. oral cures these writers use. In addition, this study archives the ways in which these writers construct genealogies of disease and cure and the methods by which they assess cures to discover which ones work the best to create, within very historically specific contexts, newly scripted agencies, the methodological frameworks for reimagining liberatory narratives. viii CHAPTER 1 CURING NARRATIVE: MYTHOPOETICS AND AGENCY This project examines a series of contemporary American ethnic novels by women authors who import folkloric oral and performance rituals into their texts to heal diseased bodies. Despite their wide-ranging cultural and structural differences, the novels 1 examine—Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon . Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and - Storyteller . Cristina Garcia"s Dreaming in Cuban , and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands have characters in common who are diseased because they have experienced cultural trauma. Because these novels diagnose larger "sick" cultural narratives through the diseased body, corporeal disease is as inseparable from mental illness as it is from the narrative structures of colonization, racism, sexism, genocide, and war. These novels attempt to write healing for both the diseased individual and for the diseased culture. And. importantly, healing then becomes inseparable from a radical reconstitution of the body, of race, of gender, of history, of novel, and of the compelling question, to what degree can a character narrate or act upon her or his own cure to transform the narratives inhabiting her or him? The narratives emerging from a post-genocide, post-colonial, post-slavery, exile American community hold in common a sense that a whole series of narratives have failed to save or to heal bodies. Furthermore, while these novels cross mam cultures and 1 represent hybrid forms of culture, they all cany the sense that disease is the result, initially, of the narrative logics of slavery, genocide, or war enacting through the body. In addition, disease persists because the right kind of story has not been written through the bodies to resist the disease logics. While there are poignant examples of the degree to which narrative could not save or cure a body in each of the narrative traditions and histories this study engages-the Flying Africans, the Talking Bones. Chango. Yellow Woman, to name a few- perhaps the most poignant example among them of a narrative failure to protect a body comes from turn-of-the-century Native American history. By 1 890. the Sioux had lost their hunting grounds, had been placed on reservations, and were starving and sick (Neihardt 230-231 ). They had witnessed mass genocide of all that was sacred: people, land, their culture, and the buffalo (Saver 19-20). During this time. Kicking Bear returned to what was left of Sioux lands to report to the once-famed white resistor Sitting Bull that he had founded a pan-tribal religion based on a voice he had heard in the wilderness (Saver 20). The voice instructed him that it would lead him to the spirits of dead Native Americans and to a world cleansed of white murderers (Saver 22). Kicking Bear traveled to the Paiute tribe and there was taken to see the "Messiatf-Christ himself. According to Kicking Bear in his report to Sitting Bull. Christ returned to earth as a Native American pointing to his scars and saying, "white men had treated (me) so bad. I went to heaven and came back as a Native American" (Brown 407). Christ promised that if the tribes learned the dance a dance that helped them commune with their slaughtered relatives and ancestors, they would be bodily lifted above the earth while Christ cleansed the earth of whites. Once cleansed, the earth w ould 3 be occupied by the Native American ghosts (returned to the living) and the contemporary Native Americans, who. by now. were completely conquered by the combination of white diseases, slaughter, and land-grabbing. What is striking about the history of the Ghost Dance is the way in which an increasingly alienated and despondent group of Native Americans took up the story of Christ and recomposed it for contemporary relevance and promise of resurrection. Furthermore, the narrative became a collective, pan-tribal resistance. Those tribal people killed by the whites would be healed, resurrected, and would reinhabit a just landscape. In most reports. Christ is not of one tribe, but is a representative "Native American." 1 The story provided a united resistance against and take over of white narrative as it positioned a pan-tribal identity of resistance. Furthermore. Ghost Dancing promised a narrative that, if well-sung and well-enacted, would not only render the dancers bullet- proof, but would also render the earth cleansed of the whites and their mining and land grabbing (Brown 407-409). It is a poignant story not only because it would become almost desperately pan- tribal, but because it was a revision of the Christian narratives which supported white genocide in the first place. It seems no small coincidence that Ghost Dancing came at the time that the great resistors, the Sioux, had their land parceled out and opened up to colonizers, at a time that seemed the end of resistance, armed or otherwise.