University of Cincinnati

Home , Adrienne Rich, Drawn to the Rhythm, Encouraging Words

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

To Happiness

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advance Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literatures of the College of Arts & Sciences

2008

Martha Elizabeth Tilton

B.S., Miami University, 1979 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 2002

Committee Chair: Don Bogen, PhD

ABSTRACT

This dissertation contains a manuscript of original poetry and a critical paper. The forty- nine poems divide into three parts—the sections differ in time, perspective, and tone and yet an energetic and hospitable voice knits them. The critical paper utilizes trauma and cartographic theories through which it argues that the repetitive gestures and the repetitive gaps in knowledge in Paula Gunn Allen’s poems and essays constitute evidence of Native American cultural trauma.

iii for Debbie, who’s so happy with surprises

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following publications in which some of these poems previously appeared:

JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association: “A Circle Portrait” New Orleans Review: “Switches from the Fig Tree” Schuylkill Valley Journal: “Old Maids” Southern Humanities Review: “Bulldogging, 1924” Southern Review: “When the Movers Took the Bed” Valparaiso Poetry Review: “Alto”

Thanks to my family: Debbie Fritz; Bonnie and Lawrence Tilton; Cameron, Courtney, Grayson Tilton and Zane Wilson. Thanks to those who offered encouraging words in hallways, in emails, and in margins of poems and who may be surprised to find themselves listed here: Michael Dumanis, Julianna Gray, Ariana Sophia Kartsonis, Cate Marvin, Nicola Mason, Will Toedtman. Thanks to faculty at the University of Cincinnati’s English department, who may have to kick me out to make me leave: Michael Atkinson, Stan Corkin, John Drury, Russel Durst, Wayne Hall, Lee Person, Jim Schiff, Lucy Schultz. A very special thanks to Jon Kamholtz. Finally, thanks that cannot express enough gratitude to Don Bogen for goading the poet, the poems, and the book.

Contents

Salt………………………………………………………………………………………...4

The Tail in My Pocket…………………………………………………………………….5

Hospitality…………………………………………………………………………………6

Clothes Moths……………………………………………………………………………..7

Some Questions about a Woman in her Garden…………………………………………..8

A Circle Portrait.…………………………………………………………………………..9

When the Movers Took the Bed…………………………………………………………10

Attack on the Weed………………………………………………………………………11

Helium……………………………………………………………………………………12

Ozarks……………………………………………………………………………………13

The Wash and Dry……………………………………………………………………….14

Sinkhole………………………………………………………………………………….15

We Are All Like Toadstools……………………………………………………………..16

The Bed We Make……………………………………………………………………….17

Sweet Tooth……………………………………………………………………….……..18

July…………………………………………………………………………….…………19

By Any Means Necessary………………………………………………………………..20

Winking Ann……………………………………………………………………………..21

II.

Bulldogging, 1924……………………………………………………………………….22

Old Maids…………………………………………………………………………….….23

Case Knife…………………………………………………………………….…………24

That Bastard……………………………………………………………………….….…25

Watercress………………………………………………………………………….……26

Plowing…………………………………………………………………………….……27

The Storeroom…………………………………………………………………….…..…28

Worry Lines…………………………………………………………………………...…29

Notions…………………………………………………………………………….…….30

Boy………………………………………………………………………………………31

Down-Facing Dog…………………………………………………………………….…32

1969………………………………………………………………………………….…..33

1:30 Matinee……………………………………………………………………………..34

Switches from the Fig Tree………………………………………………….……….…..35

III.

Alto……………………………………………………………………….……….…..…36

Heat Stroke………………………………………………………………….……...……37

Brush Me In……………………………………………………………….…………..…38

Coloring Our Orgasms……………………………………………………….……….….39

Dear Gertrude Stein……………………………………………………………………...40

Grizzly……………………………………………………………………………………41

My Procedure……………………………………………………………….……………42

From Alcatraz……………………………………………………………………………43

Night Ride………………………………………………………………………………..44

Playing Possum……………………………………………………………………….…45

A Riddle: No Telling………………………………………………………………….…46

At the Counter……………………………………………………………………………47

Twenty-Twenty………………………………………………………………………..…48

Some Trails Are Dustier than Others……………………………………………………49

Love in a Poem…………………………………………………………………………..50

When Our Boat Hit the Manatee…………………………………………………...……51

To Happiness…………………………………………………………….………………52

SALT

I want a box with a hinged lid, a box I can fit my whole hand into. I want to feel my coarse temper filtered through finger tips. Sea. Table. Road. Rock. Kosher. I want to overdo, to pucker you, to make the juices rise from all over the stove, drawn to over-seasoned places. I will raise your blood pressure. I will carry remnants in my pockets, surprises from the twenty pounds I broadcast melting pockmarks across our icy driveway. I will follow you as I do the trucks, forgetting my way, drawn to the rhythm of the fanning crystals nicking my bumper, eating my paint. Take me home before we freeze. Once inside, I will taste invisible powder on my tongue and track your waffled patterns across our hardwood floors.

THE TAIL IN MY POCKET

I wouldn’t have a bushy tail, not a fox’s tail, not the kind to brush before a party. When I picture my tail it’s hairless, waxed with jalapeño paste, chamois buffed, and if I didn’t keep it in my pocket, it would slice the air with all its swinging.

No wallflower tail for me. Instead, my tail would tap a Whiskey River two-step inside my pocket, insisting that I let it loose, let it go; but if I did, I’d find it threaded through empty belt-loops or shimmying the mike stand.

HOSPITALITY

I want no houseguests or in-laws living in my basement. No out-of-luck nephews sleeping in the spare room I use as an office. Visitors should leave our house before the local news comes on, even on New Year’s Eve when I might invite a few friends for dinner then shoo them on to someone else’s party.

Old folks moving in and peeing in our beds— Not Allowed. No moaning Lord Lord or playing dominoes at our table or pushing doors open with their walkers, their rubber stoppers tapping all night down our hallways. Blind men with no sons and no daughters will not spit tobacco juice into coffee cans while rocking on our front porch; they will not splatter their dribble on our wooden floors or climb the slow stairs to our garage apartment.

I don’t want them. I want it like this, with you and me, the dog, the cat all curling together in our quiet night. When the phone rings, we won’t answer it. When friends extend invitations, we’ll decline. No crowds at our funerals, no sympathy cards, no floods of casseroles left at our door.

CLOTHES MOTHS

I couldn’t forget you, but after three months I had some luck with the moths. The ravaged wool sleeve urged me to make changes. I took up arms. I sanded cedar blocks, releasing the smell of wet woods in my sweater drawers, then hung a strip of pine air on hooks in my closet. Wouldn’t the altitude make you light-headed? I crushed juniper needles until I felt like pawing at the shavings and blowing smoke from my nostrils. Our vacation on high Glacier trails switchbacked from the sackcloth. I shook loose the dark folds. I opened doors and let the light in, our summer out.

It got so cold I bought more wool, not merino from green New Zealand, but from New Mexico goats— those grazed on desert grasses. I wrapped myself in scratchy rashes and dared the invisible moths to chew their little holes.

SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT A WOMAN IN HER GARDEN

Why would a woman take off her shoes and air her hot feet in the roses?

What kind of a woman ignores her lover’s bright call from the house, pressing instead her cheek to the mulch, answering the smell of grasses going to seed?

Are those clippers in her leather holster?

When she strips the velvet from the sage and brushes her nose, her lip, her brow with its fuzz, does she smell the downy heads of babies?

Whose urine does she spray on the Jupiter’s Beard?

Does she love her dog, or does she love the lavender on his coat?

Is that sweat on her lip, or mucus?

Why would a woman lie like that— in her dark garden with her cat near the mint?

Down there in all those stiffening stems, does she pull at the root vegetables— the parsnips, turnips, yams?

And when she licks her rough fingers, can you see how she aches for beets bleeding in a bowl of Tasmanian honey?

A CIRCLE PORTRAIT

Lose a string of jobs, or days, and wonder how the same amount of alcohol that made you clever turned your witty words thick and ugly. Nurse the hidden beer you stow beneath the seat and drive the weaving streets alone in the churning town. Press your brow against the steering wheel. Admit defeat, and pray the usual prayer: get me home, I’ll never drink again. Then, fumble with the swaying lock, the spinning room, and grope the floor, recover equilibrium. Tomorrow, pull into the pony keg, and slip another pint beneath the seat.

Cruise the barrios, the littered streets, and roll your windows down to hear the swirl of families outside on rented steps. The children jumping rope on sidewalks thread a braid of jingles as they navigate their way into the looping games. Their mother unweaves the orange ribbon from her chair then twirls the plastic twine into knots. Cradle the quart between your knees and nod your head against the wheel. Imagine that you’re safely home and you belong to them. Tomorrow, pull the blinds and curtains closed, and slip a peek outside. Who’s watching you?

Thumb through old albums, photographs and records, and let nostalgia carry you away from bottles filled with cigarettes and piled so high you sneak them out into the garbage. Dial the phone and wait to see who answers: old friend, a lover, one who still recalls the way you used to be and knows it might be you who spirals down into the past. Scribble circles on legal pads and slur the circling lines to match your circling words, compose the empty circles into faces – tomorrow, pull a circle portrait out and slip the penciled noose around its neck.

WHEN THE MOVERS TOOK THE BED they left the pan full of change I kept beneath it. Emptying my daily pockets, I’d put wadded bills on the dresser and coins in the pan. I’d skim enough quarters from the stash to cover the cost of coffee, maybe a sandwich. Days of plenty outweighed days of want, and the pan grew heavy. On moving day, nickels sloshing like liquid on the floorboard with the turning of each corner, I hauled the pan to the grocer’s, shoveled handfuls of coins into the counting machine until the pan became lighter and my shoveling hand dark with penny dirt. My eyes fixed on the slot where things other than coins were spit out as if not worth counting. All those times on the golf course I borrowed a ball marker, and a dozen hid there in the pan. Aspirin, too, their crisp round edges worn smooth against the coins, now crumbled in my hands like the pains they soften in summer. Tokens exchanged for car washes, trips on the subway, bags of machine-dispensed balls. Watching the tokens pile up, I wondered what changed my plans, why I didn’t wash the car, take the train, go to the driving range. Pieces from Monopoly – the thimble and the terrier, a red hotel, a green house. I redeemed the coins for a voucher, the voucher for cash, then headed home, fiddling with the green house in my pocket.

ATTACK ON THE WEED

You work past the cobblestone border— the mortared stones—the grass I killed that borders the border that should derail you. You should turn back, head off into the yard, take your purple flower and live in the grass with the clover. Do that, you strong-headed weedy thing. Get out of my perennial bed.

You’re like the blue-eyed cat we shooed away, the cat that, in the night, slipped through the dog door, clawed open the Purina bag, then vomited on the white rug in our parlor, the cat that kept rubbing her body, leaving her film of fur on our welcome mat. She’s nursing her kittens in our laundry basket.

Mr. Weed, don’t get ideas. Don’t go spreading your runners like gray hairs surfacing behind my bent-over inspections. Don’t rub me with your tendrils. Don’t go throwing your irresistible bloom here in the meticulous.

HELIUM

Packing my holster loaded with helium, I waddled as if in a diaper, a wad of snuff beneath my tongue. Make it two holsters, each filled with helium, I waddled like a duck in a diaper, sounded like a duck when I inhaled the helium from my leather holsters. Six shooters of helium, I rose above the ground eating horehound candy and sucking on my helium, my orals working sucking, inhaling, candy, helium made me cartoonish. Who eats horehound anymore? Just something else to suck on while I floated in my helium haze, lifted by ballooning holsters. I’m a cowgirl hovering above the horehound ground, leather holsters strapped with a big buckle, helium riding high on my hips. I love the taste of air, draw it deep in my horehound lungs, hold it there, floating higher, lifting my holsters and shooting helium. I can control my rising and my falling depending on the helium I draw from my holsters and hold in my huge, huge lungs. I swallow helium deeper then squeak it. I am a helium holster holder hovering in a diaper holding horehound candy in my mouth. Floating holsters hold me. What I hold in my holster is invisible, but it floats me.

OZARKS

When you say Ozarks, I think of the poet who shot three holes in his heart. I think of the poet who loved him, whose first words were Oh and forever Oh, and who still writes about holes in the heart. I smell humidity and hear locust rattling blue in the Bodark tree, picture its fat green knobby apples. I feel pickup trucks gravelling the roads. I’m sitting in church when you say Ozarks, and I want to run from this air conditioning, touch the hottest, blackest skin, bury my nose in the hatband that smells of Ozark night and hold it in my hot lungs. My nostrils expand, and the tentacles of me wave out from this pew and wander the air the poet her hair his heart the Ozarks heaving with Arkansas.

THE WASH AND DRY

Lulled by the clicking scratch of buttons and zippers on glass, I watch your weathered shirt go around, and I taste the salt of your neck where I kissed it; tattered long johns, the ones that warm me by campfire, bring a mountain chill to the air; the stolen flannel shorts, the ones I wear to fetch the paper, go around, and I smell the Bay Rum still in the plaid.

Lost in the thump and slide of spinning senses, the load I carry out seems lighter than the one I brought in.

SINKHOLE

Big enough for a refrigerator, if we had an old one, or a washer.

We could feed it and watch it swallow

Poke it with a boot tip. Feel how deep and soft the belly.

the pink bike tipped on training wheels.

Cord off the basin edge, yellow it with caution:

Stop the daylilies – they’re following the lost garden.

WE ARE ALL LIKE TOADSTOOLS

Most mornings in this humidity, I wipe a wet chair and sit outside turning the big pages of the New York paper. The dog drapes the step. I try to see what he sees in the woods. Sometimes a deer snorts or a hummingbird visits the red in the garden. But mostly nothing but the dampening news until the sun startles the moss furring dense on the deck and we are all hustled to work by the chartreuse.

THE BED WE MAKE

Sleep in. It’s a good bed made up with high thread count sheets smoothed by breezes. Disregard the clock’s ticking. You can go to work with sheet marks embed- ded in your skin. Lie here with me. Let’s play hooky, turn the bed upside down, untuck corners until our coil and spring jostles the cats.

SWEET TOOTH

If I were the only girl in the world, you’d find another. She’d knock on our door, and if we were away, she’d leave home-baked breads spiced with orange; or a key lime tart, its sweet juices eating rings in the countertops we could never scrub out. The smell would sour our house, draw ants marching to that dollop of frosting on your mouth.

JULY

Illusions of relief languish like fevered impatiens, parched and outlasted, waiting for shade, cautious of spending too much energy on breathing.

But you, your skin cooled by a slip of cotton sheets, exhaled into an air-conditioned room and surrendered your vapor whisper that resonates through our middle age.

The unconditioned sanctuary breathed fine until the evening memorial swelled with so many radiating women— and the Muse choir sucked up the last good air to fuel some rocking African crescendo. When the mass of “amens” stoked the flames of a hundred disappearing candles, my skin melted to wax and blended with the sweat pooling at my shoulders like a collar; the lodgepole pine outside the window dropped a surprised cone, hopeful of new seed.

Drinking lemonade outside, I reminisce with your sister— but when a wayward chill startles the July heat, we hush— I wonder where you are, and if you’re warm enough.

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

I was in such a dark mood that when the panhandler in the hotel hallway asked for change, I wanted to hand her a roll of paper towels from my rented room and tell her to roll her weakness in a sheet and smoke it. I can’t explain this. I want to change it. I want to shuffle adjectives: make it a fat hotel, a paper hallway – a sentence, a column, a couplet. If this fails, I wanted to tell her, braid a string of cicada screams into a throbbing amulet and hang it around your neck until I follow you, begging for music like that. I sent her away, then joined the circus for a beer at the bar, the band playing for one among the bums.

WINKING ANN

Couldn’t show up in a polite limo at the capital rotunda — had to rumble in like laughter, like hilarity, on your silver Harley, your silver hair high and laughing. Your winking face, wrinkling face of Texas charmed Molly, Willie, Lyle, Lily, Lizzie, saluted all their ballsy shit-kicking. Roll out that Baptist pallet, Birdlegs, and tell us how the cow ate the cabbage.

My salty, sober sister, you were still funny whiskey-free, swinging your Tom DeLay piñata. Poor George, silver foot. We stomped our feet, cheered your confetti-sprinkled hair, felt laughter rumbling in our rotundas.

II.

BULLDOGGING, 1924

A final muscled twist of the horn and he falls, wrestled and wrangled, bulldogged to his back. His hooves assault the air for leverage and flail around, defeated by a loss of sturdy ground. A wild Wyoming wind bellows from the snorting, slobbering nostrils of the beaten bull while Foxy Hastings, Queen of the Cowgirls, shakes her stringy ringlets, wet with sweat and bull snot, and drives her boots deep into the dirt arena, deep into this rodeo, and, bracing herself against convention, raises a mud-caked hand. The weathered cowboy shifts his weight and squirms on the fence rail, then tips his Stetson brim in buckaroo salute. She rises, bruised and limping, slaps the mucus from her chaps, and Hippolyta’s unfolding shadow stretches across the ages from her jingling spurs; the shaken bull stands and stumbles, looks around, as if the world had lost its balance.

OLD MAIDS

Aunt Molly rolls pecans in her calloused palm like worry beads dropped from hickory trees. Her fingernails, tobacco stained the brown of river bottom, match the sorrel shells. I watch her while I blow my coffee, cooling it in an overflowing saucer, drink it, and chew the muddy residue.

Dogs and chickens stray the thorny edge of cocklebur; they lap up slop, or peck at scraps of scattered breakfast, and escape beneath a shanty porch to cluck and pant like worn-out womenfolk. The rhythmic creak and slam of sagging screens on tired doors makes domestic music: like the easy red-eye gravy hymns hummed by choirs of spinster women who, in afternoon, their laundry hung, circle my aunt, chew tobacco, spit some juicy streams, and shuffle faded tiles of dominoes as stained as donkey’s teeth. Beneath this canopy of hickory trees they look serene—only their hands are busy. But larger muscles twitch beneath the skin and grow more restless with each fading day. I try to figure out which one of them unleashed a whiskered bray, surprised the moon last night. I stroke my chin and fiddle with a bristle too wild to smooth.

CASE KNIFE

I spit on the whetstone and apply the blade. Hone in a circular motion—the swish, swish of metal on a gray rock.

A tip tipped up and silver along its edge; the steel grown thin, shaved by friction and circles. First one side, then the other, I move at instinctive angles, angles repeated on kitchen knives with a memory my body holds like the two-step I seldom dance any longer.

At the hardware store, I see the case of knives, their ivory handles and polished blades opened at seductive tilts, and I reach for the thinnest one. Lift the glass lid and take the yellow bone, like a deer antler— two blades: one for removing splinters, the other for balance, and slip its feather weight invisible in my pocket.

THAT BASTARD

That bastard. I knew he couldn’t do right. Ask him and he go screw it up and there I go fixing behind him always picking up his bastard slack. A woman cleaning up after. He goes on happy not knowing the messes I straighten the thanks I don’t get don’t ask for. He’s use to a woman after him. And him no beefcake, either. A long tall skinny-armed bastard of a boy so why he expects a woman to follow him I do not know. I have always liked them skinny, but this one could use some meat which with his slothfulness would probably just skip muscle and go to blubber and I’d have to find a way to carry that too while he moves blithely on, me hauling blubber like his mother who thinks he’s the shit. I will talk to that boy about his messing business, the fix he’s got me into right now. I told him, he said he would, looked like he did, now I see he don’t, and a beautiful day outside and me cleaning up his pile. Nex’ time I see him, I like to grab his nostrils and yank ‘em till they burn and bring his nose right down to mine.

WATERCRESS

He shrugged off limits. Out of season, he hunted deer, field dressed them for backstrap, then left the carcasses in the pasture so as not to waste his tags. Slipping through loopholes in barbed-wire fences, he watched for the game warden who caught him wading barefoot in the river after watercress. Lured off-path by an unruly hunger, (the way I hunt my own Calamata olives, the blackest licorice, tastes as old as the stones in the river) his gun and flask abandoned beneath a mesquite tree, he’d rolled his khakis in wet knots above his knees and stuffed his satchel with wet cress. His cold hands now smelling green, he carried the spray home to his wife who rubbed the bloom back into his shriveled feet and steeped him some tea from lemon and the watercress.

PLOWING

The rusting John Deere idles and wheezes, its metal bowl of a seat still warm from the farmer’s familiar spread.

He opens the slender pocket knife and tills the new dirt from each yellowed nail with the blade’s whetted tip as the silver line along the sharpened edge catches a quick glint of the sun waltzing in his furrows.

THE STOREROOM

They wore the uneven concrete seventy years smooth with traffic back and forth to the storeroom, where they kept the ordinary things: burlap bags swollen with the seasons’ cracked pecans, their vacant shells scattered across the floor; jars of peach and plum preserves, the year marked on the label in Grandmother’s handwriting; and a deep-freeze filled with winters’ venison and summers’cobbler. Folgers cans brim with nuts and bolts and washers and screws weighing down the receipts for twelve-gauge shotgun shells, a pair of boots from Harry’s, and last season’s deer tags. Seed packets of yellow squash, bluebonnets, and fat tomatoes are bundled together by rubber bands and wait for the warm soil’s turning.

We’ve swept the bare floors clean, closed and locked the door, but Granddaddy still whistles through the storeroom where I keep the ordinary things.

WORRY LINES

Steam rises from the compost heap my father feeds behind his house.

Beneath oak trees, he picks up sticks blown loose by the wind; his hands begin a familiar worry handed down from his father who wandered his pastures picking up sticks, breaking them in half, in half again, down to manageable size. Then he emptied the brown bottle hidden in the shed to liquor his worry under control.

My father’s mother snapped the ends from half-runners, unzipped the green strings along the bodies of the beans. She broke them in half, filled the metal colander, stretched the beans with bacon fat, watered them down the way she watered his liquor, boiled them on the cast-iron stove until steam curled the linoleum, blurring her Lord, Lord that now echoes in my father’s breath and fogs my own kitchen window.

I swipe a sleeve along the vapored glass and beads stream down.

NOTIONS

The first spot of blood surprised me but my mother nodded yes, this is it, and rigged the garter with the wadding. Now, you need a diversion; sewing has worked for me. Together, in the fabric store, shadowed by looming bolts of worsted wools we turned pages of Simplicity’s patterns, browsed illustrations of backward leaning women: one cinch-waisted sport model caught my eye, flipping her page-boy in my direction, while draping the jacket of her sailor suit over her angular shoulders. I was captivated by the shiny buttons on her coat, the little anchors that weighed her to the page. I wonder if she ever snipped the threads and sailed away from there, urged by a blustery Alberta clipper, past the zippers, beyond the bobbins and the spools and all the notions that kept her from moving so long.

BOY

I was not a boy and never thought I should have been. Six shooters rode in holsters on my bunched up diapers. I dressed in camouflage and slept with BB guns, rode a bike with a bar and a banana seat, wore the grass bare with my rough-housing. I abandoned a big-boy doll—left him naked to play football with my cousins. My brother bathed and dressed the doll; now he’s a man with a boy, and I’m boy-less. My brother’s boy wants to race me. Billy Fort was the fastest boy in my school. If I had been a boy, I’d have beaten him.

DOWN-FACING DOG

The smell of this room heating up with humming bodies my mother sat cross-legged before it was hip warned me that if I grew stiff I might get stuck in a chair need a hand to get out the window fogs with our exhaling my mother can outstand me on her head

I found my rounded shadow slouching toward the ground slumping toward my humpbacked grandmother my buttocks stretch for the sky my bare feet my bare feet the world goes upside-down overturns the corner table I see new from between my legs the bamboo shoot rooted the happy Buddha hanging his head the candle flame dripping the prism spinning the wrong-way-up grip the earth everything spreads lengthens my fingers toes heart this room these smells that bell that rouses me from corpse pose walk with the right-side-up

1969 was the white sands was the Moon we boot-printed a surface

New Mexico was duned was cratered we watched the Moon walk not in Carlsbad Caverns Cameron was nine we were Cloudcroft was a black and white TV was a crowd around it unlike the white sands where a small family sank the dunes swallowed footprints we brushed Earth

1:30 MATINEE

The curtain long and dusty (usher with rheumy eyes sed git yr feet off the seat) towheaded cousins ordered Hershey concessions and played with the edge of a silver dollar this is not a story of new quarters filled with copper

our grandmother saved

–silver coins in her cigar box (under my bed in a tin pan waiting for the rerun)

–she shifted the green chevy and bridged the distance between the cotton field and school bus fact is, she hollered

look after your brother and we watched from sprung velvet seats: Remember the Alamo looped off the reel, edges of film rattling in the projector booth and sliding to white on the screen

SWITCHES FROM THE FIG TREE thorny hedge & the path through it on the other side I called them a yard full of Mexicans a dark woman said he was a pretty boy then spit tobacco in a coffee can a blind man did the same on a porch my sweat-headed cousins moved his can we hid he swatted the air with his cane there have never been new houses here clapboard the color of bacon shaded dry goods store a slamming Wonder Bread screen we paid for a Coke from a case piled with cold opened the crimped cap like edges of crust lemon meringue & yellow linoleum peeling my shy brother switches from the fig tree (Jesus cursed the figs died) somebody lacked a number of teeth a cotton shift safety pins on her slip’s bosom an old man, thumbless

I carried one shoe looking for the other foot my lost brother

III.

ALTO

The composer whittles his quill, fills it with opera and writes me a note. “Sing it,” he says, but even the river quivers at my timidity. He sees the problem, coats the pen again, cups my chin, then inks my mouth into a perfect oval until my solo echoes from the hills on an opposite shore. A river of voices floods me, reaches for a high note, pulls it down and pounds it smooth against the bottom stones, then lets it bubble up, heavier with the weight of water. Soon, I’m orchestrating the chorus with a stolen baton; but I hold the low tones too long, enjoy their rumbling in my body, annoying the composer who blackens the oval closed with his laden quill. I lick the sticky silence from my lips and taste where the music was.

HEAT STROKE

If I could move I would follow the cottonwood shade. It teases the limestone like a lover’s feather. It doesn’t promise oasis. A stranger hikes alone but stops beside me to bathe his blistered feet, his single painted nail, in Roaring Springs.

I focus on his middle toe —remember it aqua, bony. I can’t look up. I lean toward the cool water, his opened canvas bag, watch him peel an orange, unfold it with his thumbs. The scent tickles me, it rallies the clouds, wakes the scorpions into flicking their tails and dancing sideways around me. I swoon for a dripping slice. He wipes his fingers across the vishnu schist. Petroglyphs shift.

Reds, purples, yellows unravel from canyon shadows, hiss against the scorching rocks. The desert is not for sissies.

BRUSH ME IN

I slip on the oily trail, skin my knee on purple and catch myself at the canvas edge. My boots are covered in morning orchid. Dawn hasn’t dried – I’m following the brush, not yet kicking up enough dust to attract attention here in the new Grand Canyon.

Blobbing some orange on my knee, I salve it, start again, slower. Now, my walking sticks pierce the tacky path left, right, pricking the weave so a discerning eye could trace me; but my steps make little noise, only the sucking of my boots in umber puddles.

Midday, I stop to escape the light that wisps across the gravel and steals the deeper hues. Thirsty, and all around me crusty, I peel a flake of pulpy yellow, a bead of sun dabbled on the cottonwood leaves, and chew until it juices me. Not satisfied, I pare another voluptuous leaf, but in its place a drape of fingers beckons from the tree. Stuffing my pockets with yellow and some green, I strip the cottonwood, release the swollen cluster clutched to a fleshy belly. I bathe in layers of bosom, scramble over flushed nipple, red stone. Brush me in and camouflage me succulent.

COLORING OUR ORGASMS

We grabbed a fistful of crayons and drew our orgasms on the white paper covering our table. I outlined floating sections of picket fences, filled them with orange, yellow, and green, pointing the tips.

You used blue to dot a tedious line across the table: This could take months, you said, blunting your crayon, but it’s worth it. A blip in your line, then a blue eruption, like a starburst.

Our friend’s zigzagging seismographic waves rippled then surged, surprising us with their vigor. Pointing to the multicolored crest, I asked When does this happen? Sometimes here…or there, she tapped with her red wax. Maybe both. The waitress gasped.

I peeled the paper skin from the crayon and colored a field of new grass. Behind my picket fence, I planted an oak tree and mossed it. In its shade, slow-eyed cows lowered to their bellies awaiting your blue storm.

DEAR GERTRUDE STEIN

I’ve been reading the Autobiography and want to say that I too have hiccoughed and so could not take my dinner or say my prayer, though I think it more likely that I hiccup because it shakes me. I don’t know when I will shake or when it will end, and so I am not bored. Gertrude, I have learned the cure for hiccups, but I will not tell you the remedy because it is sad to control them. It involves water and breathing and holding the nose, but it does not involve swimming. It may be the housekeeper who startles you in your Paris apartment, but here it’s the lover who frightened the hiccups from me. That was before I knew the cure, and that was better than using the water. I am not bored with the lover I cannot control, the lover who surprises the spasms from me.

GRIZZLY

I didn’t see her. The ranger glimpsed her first as she crossed the narrow fork at Highline Creek, and he forgot his nonchalance: “A bear —” he whispered, “a grizzly—off the trail, about a hundred yards away.” You thought he might be trying to scare us until he slung his pack aside, abandoning his camera.

We watched for streams of light to trickle through the pines and catch her blond hump and prove to us her imagined poise. I held my breath. You saw, with a shout, then leaned your head to mine, discerning her shifting shape in the mountain shade, distinguishing fur from fir and limb from limb – your vision seemed enough to carry us. I tried to spot a shift of order, a sway of branch, a shrub shaking. I couldn’t see her.

Later, we closed the tent against the night, secured the fly, for rain, we said, then zipped our sleeping bags together, squeezing out unspoken hollows. Something new and wild unmoored us. I pressed against your skin and sought your curves and angles, finding anchor in other familiar ways of knowing, warily moving forward, the way the grizzly growls before her instincts stir her on to sniff the glacier wind for ripe huckleberries.

MY PROCEDURE

Anesthesia. An armband with my name stamped blue on it. A blue gown flaps in back. Cold spray numbs my throat, and in a cold bed, Demerol asks impatient questions. Spell e-n-d-o-s-c-o-p-y. What flurries of nurses! Curtains blow hello gassy neighbors. Nurses encourage belching, hiccups. Everyone farts. IV in, lights out. Just swallow the garden hose. Key to locker eleven on a loopy band, I’m lost in a room mumbling my own mumbles. My nurse makes wobbly notes on a clipboard, tells me it’s over, that I’m pinking up. No polyps, no popcorn kernel hung up my throat. Am I queasy? thirsty? Ready to give up the bed? Swallow. Swallow. A tube threaded my long throat. Why does the word uvula come out of me? My stomach protests its own vital signs. No esophageal web as I e- xpected. I wonder where my procedure went, wave yoo-hoo to my nurse whose name I forget zig-zag stitched on her scrub pocket.

FROM ALCATRAZ

I hear a woman’s laughter filter across the bay —clear, like toasting goblets, as close as release, unreachable.

Picture bobbing yachts lit from within, portholes framing New Year’s Eve, silk stockings, seams that curve then dance to perfumed corners, touch the satin underside of an arm.

Wave tips carry the chime of ice in glasses until it melts, while ripples bear the high pitches, the bracelets’ jingles, rub them bearable.

Unbearable. The call of a soiree swing band drifts and swells, falls back until I think it’s gone, dissolved with the voices in the bay.

Untether me. Graze the black water with the back of your hand.

NIGHT RIDE

My boat’s ascending high on this water ride, conveyed by tractioned belts that thump beneath the bottom of the boat. I feel the rollers as they bump methodically against the strap lifting me to the darkened tops of trees. The park has closed, the summer people gone to hotel rooms or highways headed home; but I still hear the echo of their voices in these trees, the music of the carousel, calliopes. The rolling coaster lights reverberate against the leaves and leave me dizzy, leave me lizzy swirling, swaying in the tops of trees until my boat bumps up against the trough, the serpentine, and rights me, rights the seas.

PLAYING POSSUM

Pretend you’re dead. It takes practice. Press your lips together precisely. No puffing. No pouting. You might turn purple, some people do. Try to stay pink, please. No peeking. Your parents might protest this, might pay you a penny, poke you with a pencil, tickle your pinkie, promise you a puppy. Stay perfectly still. Permanently.

A RIDDLE: NO TELLING how long you took to notice my absence. I’m betting you were at the car wash, the wand waving in your hands like a divining rod. Your back was turned, your palms beating to a song on the radio when I finally skipped away.

You loved me only for my looks, oooohed and aaaahd when courting. You thought I’d reflect well on you.

My three moon-faced sisters came, too. We traveled everywhere together. We turned some heads but soon lost our shine to you. Your friends misused us. Once, under a streetlamp, your drunken friend unzipped his pants, wanted to know what I thought. I distorted the truth.

It got rougher, so I hit the road veering like crazy, finally free from you and my sisters. It’s hard to find work alone in this business (with my looks gone in the gutter), so I hang with the odd ones out by the railroad tracks, winking at low-riders. From the way their hydraulics lift, I know I’ve still got it, still got that glint that can spin the sun.

AT THE COUNTER

“More coffee, Toots?” the waitress asked, already filling my cup. I worried over menu combinations. My counter neighbor had settled in the seat beside me, folded her morning paper once from top to bottom, folded again across to make it small. “The usual,” she said.

I’ve tried to fashion squares like that; instead, my paper flopped around, like the buttered toast I dipped in eggs. My neighbor, her hair all staticked from her hat, sipped her coffee and read the news. “Looks like more snow,” she said; “I’m losing my touch…can’t tell seven degrees from seventeen.”

She swiveled her seat to take me in. “It looks like war, too, don’t you think?” Swallowing, I nodded, wishing I could fold a paper that smartly, snap a reply as electric as her hair.

TWENTY-TWENTY

As if my wearing eyeglasses makes me weaker, less intelligent. Americans are twenty-twenty. Twenty-twenty is perfectly white. Some boast better than twenty-twenty. Get perspective. Would I rather have twenty-twenty vision or have twenty twenty dollar bills in my pockets? Or be twenty? Or be two times twenty? Twenty-twenty is twice as strong, like the smell of turpentine on an old red rag— fresh turpentine right out of a shiny tin can, not from the can rusting rectangles on the workbench. Turpentine twenty-twenty strong enough to remove paint long ago dripped by now-dead homeowners. A newly opened can of astringent makes me light headed with happiness, with power—a can filled with twenty- twenty black men, woody smelling, South Carolinians riding in a truck bed tapping turpentine from a forest of tree trunks. Some people see a riot of triggermen in the pickup, but I smell the shavings, the sap, the kick air of turpentine in red work rag.

SOME TRAILS ARE DUSTIER THAN OTHERS so dusty that I’ve bogged down and need a push to get moving. So dusty I inhale earth up my nose and blow earth’s dark trails onto a red bandana. I move like an aging tortoise, and like the tortoise I carry dirt from the sea bottom. Some trails are long and travel so slow that a tree could spring from the dirt I blow on my bandana, if only that thundercloud would open and give us something to drink, something to wet our sprouts. Rain would settle the dust, would turn firm the ashy path, give me something to dig into. Thunder promises. The tortoise carries on no matter the course’s condition. Carries seeds of trees on her shell. Carries hope, as the thunder does. Moves ahead of the thunder without a push from behind, poking along with a token for the next forest growing in the seams etched like maps on her tortoise-shell back. I don’t think she knows what grows on her back. The tortoise tugs along, hears the thunder, does not worry about rain about progress about money about the horned toad spitting dark juice ahead on the road, just hunches her tortoise head deeper between her tortoise shoulders and carries her tree.

LOVE IN A POEM

It’s risky to put love in a poem like sending her out of the house under thundering skies walking with no umbrella embarrassing as if she didn’t know better than to show her nipples like this ecstatic in her clinging t-shirt wet shorts announcing such muscular thighs rain running into love’s shoes when the sun comes out love’s still far from home parading these public roads with her stringy hair love’s audacity startling motorists who swipe their wipers then glance into rearview mirrors to watch her leaving wet prints on a steaming pavement

WHEN OUR BOAT HIT THE MANATEE

It was not a mediocre surprise to any of us. It was huge. And I often wonder what the manatee thought of our scraping his back or his whatever with the bow of our boat, our banged-up rented boat with its trolling motor churning waves in the still bay. The manatee, or what I thought was a manatee, heaved us from the quiet water, then disappeared back to his nap on the bottom of the bay. It’s not as if you need a microscope to find a manatee, not the way you need a microscope to find a certain shaped cell or to see something you cannot see with unassisted eyes. They’re not microscopic. They’re huge. So why we didn’t see the manatee asleep in the water escapes me, even today. But what surprises me more is that we never saw the manatee, even when he raised the bow of our silver boat straight out of its brackish water with a swirl and a spray in no way mediocre. That was a show. What never showed was the manatee himself, just the sign of him disturbed on his lazy morning. Then silence. Everything silent but my screaming and cursing, my non-mediocre reaction to finding myself far from shore in a rented boat with someone so happy with surprises.

TO HAPPINESS

It’s your legs that surprise me most. Because you’re a state of mind, I thought your head might be your biggest part. What a bombshell—helmet-less, your wild hair flying as you pedal, sweat-plastered to your forehead.

You took that slick hill a little quickly. And I’m not sure it was a smart idea to ride with no hands. I lost sight of you around the bend, imagined finding you sprawled on the pavement all skinned up. I used to ride the brakes less; now, I watch for potholes, skittish squirrels.

Nice bike. Bet it cost you. That steel frame so retro, the lugged joints handcrafted, hand painted the color of sea foam. I want to run my hands along the tubing, feel the spray, touch the hide, your sweat-stained leather saddle.

Out of Cubero: Paula Gunn Allen’s Map of the World

Introduction

Severed by the ghost of a lost road off of old Highway 66 in New Mexico are two very large sandstone rocks—one the petrified body, the other the petrified head of the old giantess. Paula Gunn Allen, in her travels home and in her writing, returns time and again to this image of the giantess torn in two, the giantess whose head is “flung far from the torso” (Off The Reservation 102). This riveting figure of Allen’s old giantess split in two by the road captures the essence of what I want to address here: First, that Allen’s goddess image indicates a mind/body separation, a trauma we can trace throughout

Allen’s poetry and essays; second, that by figuratively mapping the severing road and also by literally and repetitively driving to and from her Cubero, New Mexico home along that same road, Allen not only reiterates a missed traumatic event but at the same time operates to heal the traumatic split by suturing together the old giantess’s separated parts.

According to Cathy Caruth’s work Unclaimed Experiences: Trauma, Narrative,

History, trauma is considered a “wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world—[it] is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event. . . . [instead, it is an event] experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivors” (Caruth 3-4 emphasis mine). Trauma theorists like Cassie Premo Steele argue that we cannot record or retell trauma in the usual, narrative way in which we remember other experiences precisely because trauma is not remembered; and because the event is not actually experienced, some theorists label it “a missed event” (Steele 2).

Caruth’s reading of Freud claims that trauma occurs because of “a lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is not simply . . . the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late . . . [it is] precisely the missing of this experience, that fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known” (62 emphasis in original).

Although the body experiences trauma, the consciousness, because of a lack of preparedness, misses it. And it is through repetition that the consciousness attempts to reconcile, to master, the missed experience. We cannot tell the story of trauma in our usual, narrative way; instead, we tell it through unconscious repetitions. And in order to receive this story, to heal the wound of which our repetitions tell, we need to read, hear, and consider these stories in new ways.

Because they are contemporaries, poets, essayists, academics, feminists, previously married and now self-identified lesbians, and friends—and because each has written extensively and intensely about coming to terms with her mixed heritage—I use

Adrienne Rich’s personal essay “Split at the Root” as a counter argument to Allen’s work and to help me foreground evidence of trauma I find riddling Allen’s texts.

A Map of Cubero

Because so much of Allen’s writing begins in Cubero before expanding to include a larger view, and because Allen so matter-of-factly declares, “We are the land,” it seems only fitting to set this study in motion by surveying the special place Paula Gunn Allen calls home (Jahner 316). In Cibola County, on the western slope of New Mexico, west of

Albuquerque on Interstate 40, on historic old Old Highway 66 and very near the

Continental Divide is Cubero, New Mexico, currently referred to in some Highway 66 travel logs as a ghost town (Reservation 188). Though Cubero is not now entirely uninhabited, recent photographs indicate that of the three businesses operating there during Allen’s childhood—businesses that developed to serve tired and hungry Highway

66 travelers—two of them, the old café and the motor court, are now abandoned and deteriorating. Only the Cubero Trading Post, once owned by Paula Gunn Allen’s father, remains open, although the only thing it currently trades is gasoline.

Elizabeth I. Hanson’s slim Paula Gunn Allen edition to Boise Sate University’s

Western Writers Series describes Cubero’s confluence of cultures as “a place of Hispanic influence and aggregate refugees; intermixtures of Navaho, Keresan, Shoshonean,

Tanoan, Zunian, and other Native American tribes and clans share space with old Spanish landholders and immigrant white settlers” (Hanson 5). Today, over half of Cubero’s population consider themselves Native American (Sperling’s Best Places). Google Maps’ current satellite image shows Cubero as a very sparse cluster of long, tin-roofed homes with dirt drives and a few scrubby-looking dark green trees. There is no visible town center, no recognizable neighborhood, no mowable lawns; there are only lone houses and long dirt roads leading to nearby Interstate 40 which at this location in New Mexico shadows historic Highway 66. From this satellite point of view, Cubero’s geography looks flat and dry and western; its color is overwhelmingly brown with the exception of the imposing Mount Taylor exploding surprisingly green from what looks like desert

(Google Maps). During a recent telephone conversation, when I questioned Allen’s reference to Cubero and this part of New Mexico as “beautiful,” because all I see from this map view is brown, she responded without any defensiveness: “it is brown. And the

56 adobe-plastered stone houses blend into the landscape. But try this,” she suggested,

“instead of looking down, look up at the sky. You’ve never seen a sky like it. Or look along the mesas at twilight” (Allen, personal interview). She says it takes her eyes about four to six weeks to readjust to Cubero’s colors, until her eyes can distinguish the differences in the browns, the ochre from the sienna. I’m surprised that this thought to look up rather than look down had not yet occurred to me, that I’d not yet considered shifting my landscape gaze to such a different perspective. But bringing her readers to new perspectives is one of Allen’s strengths; in her “The Lay of the Land” essay, for example, and in an attempt to bring to light woman’s erasure from a female-rich culture,

Allen traces her landmark mountain’s name-, gender-, culture-shifting history from the feminine and Indian “old Woman Mountain” to the masculine and Anglo “Mt. Taylor,” renamed after the Indian-fighting U.S. President, Zachary Taylor (Reservation 236).

Zooming out on Google’s map for a broader perspective, one sees a number of small village-like clusters of buildings and homes and the roads connecting them; this network of individual villages, including Cubero, compose the larger Laguna Pueblo

an allusion often found in Allen’s writing—a name and a people identified with the continuously inhabited, ancient, adobe-plastered stone structures and the village that still exists there. From this outsider’s close scrutiny, it’s hard to conceive of why anything or anyone would ever have converged here, but historians believe the ancestors of the pueblo still in existence near Cubero have occupied these Laguna homelands since at least 1300 A.D; Pueblo history teaches this inhabitance since “time immemorial”

(“Laguna Pueblo”). Visually, Cubero is just as Allen describes it—a few houses connected by a road, the highway, the deep arroyo cutting a swath through the dirt, and

57 the monstrously out-of-place Mt. Taylor. After seeing these aerial views, it becomes more understandable that landmarks such as the arroyo, the mountain, and the sandstone rock have such prominence in Allen’s life and work. The very idea of the “land mark” takes on new significance.

A Biographic/Bibliographic Map of Paula Gunn Allen

In 1939 and to the Cubero Land Grant in New Mexico, Paula Gunn Allen was born the middle of five children into a “confluence of cultures” and as a self-described

“multicultural event” to native New Mexican parents—her Lebanese/American father and her Laguna Pueblo/Sioux/Scots mother (Reservation 182). Published details of her birthplace conflict, however Allen confirms that though her parents lived in Cubero when she was born, she was literally delivered in Albuquerque’s St. Joseph’s Hospital because it was the closest available Catholic hospital (Allen, personal interview). Allen readily admits that this issue of birthplace—whether to respond with “Albuquerque” or “Cubero” when asked—has troubled her all her life. I argue that this dilemma regarding place signals an ongoing tension we’ll soon explore between the rooted and the rootless Allen.

Allen’s tension in leaving Cubero and returning to it began early. Though she attended kindergarten in nearby San Fidel and first grade in Cubero, at the age of seven she left home to spend five years at St. Vincent’s boarding school in Albuquerque, 40 miles east on Highway 66—far enough away from home to prevent her from returning to

Cubero other than on most weekends, holidays, and during the summers. When asked about this arrangement, Allen acknowledges she grew up feeling “like an orphan” living in the convent school and that she continues wrestling to overcome “the trauma” of being sent away from home at an age she feels was too young (personal interview).

It is in the back seat of a car traveling east on this road between Albuquerque and

Cubero, when she was five or six years old, that Allen first heard what remains one of her favorite stories, the tale of the “wicked giantess” as told by her great-grandmother:

“That’s the head and the body of the wicked giantess” began her great-grandmother pointing to the great boulders beside the road (Reservation 234); the story follows the adventures of a little girl who hunts rabbits by shoving long sticks down their rabbit holes; the rabbit-hunting girl in turn becomes hunted by a wicked giantess and escapes capture only by hiding from the giantess’s long stick in a hole of her own and praying to

Grandmother Spider for deliverance (236).

Thirty years after first hearing the story of the wicked giantess and the rabbit- hunting girl, Paula Gunn Allen learned that the uranium used in the first nuclear bombs was harvested from a spot very near the giantess’s severed sandstone body. During the following two decades, in the 1950s and1960s, the mining industry harvested obscene amounts of milled uranium oxide called “yellowcake;” at that time, the Jackpile Mine just outside Allen’s Laguna Pueblo home supplied most of the world’s yellowcake uranium.

In her essay “The Lay of the Land,” Allen addresses the uncanniness of this discovery:

Imagine: It was about the time that Grandma Gunn told me the story of Spider Woman and the little rabbit girl, give or take a year, that the bomb was detonated at Stallion Gate about seventy or so miles southeast of Laguna. It was sunrise that day, July 16, 1945, a sunrise that came earlier than the rising sun itself. It was the day the fourth world ended and the fifth world began. (237)

To my mind, it could certainly be considered a traumatic event when a woman who claims “We are the land” discovers not only that she/her land is the source for the uranium used in the first nuclear bomb but that she/her land is also the first wounded

59 recipient of its radioactive blast, an event so traumatic that it brings a sunrise before the sunrise, ends the fourth world, and ushers in the fifth.

Astute readers will notice the many different holes riddling Allen’s thirty-year spanning story of the wicked giantess—the rabbit hole, the hole the rabbit hunter hides in, the holes left by the removed uranium, the network of holes created by Jackpile Mine, the hole in the earth/body where the nuclear bomb detonated. Trauma theory refers to this idea of the hole, as we will explore in the following pages, as gaps in knowledge, loss of time, breaks in memory; and these are the signals we will trace through the body of

Allen’s work.

Returning to the Laguna Pueblo for one school year, Allen attended 7th grade at the mission school in nearby San Fidel, the village a stone’s throw north of the highway, just north of Cubero. But because she was homesick for her Albuquerque school friends, she returned to St. Vincent’s and lived with a network of extended family until her graduation from high school. She left Cubero again to attend one year at Colorado

Women’s College, but marriage and children derailed her course there; in 1966, at the age of 27 and after the birth of her twin sons—one of whom died at birth—and following her first divorce, she not only earned her BA in English from the University of Oregon but in 1968 she also earned an MFA in creative writing there. Allen returned to

Albuquerque, to the place of her primary and secondary schooling, and in 1975 at the

University of New Mexico she completed a PhD in American Studies with an emphasis on Native American Studies.

Allen traveled away from and returned home to Cubero from a series of increasingly prestigious academic positions: She taught at Fort Lewis College in

Durango, Colorado, the College of San Mateo, San Diego State University, San Francisco

State University (where she was the director of the Native American Studies Program), the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and the University of California at

Berkeley, where she was Professor of Native American and Ethnic Studies. She was

Professor of English, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at UCLA until her retirement in 1999.

During the more than 40 years in which she held the above positions, from the early 1960s when she entered the academy and through the present, Allen married and divorced twice before recognizing and identifying herself as lesbian; she bore four children and buried two; she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative

Writing Fellowship; she won a post-doctoral fellowship at UCLA in Native American

Scholars Fellowship program to study Native American women’s writing.

Poet, novelist, essayist, feminist, scholar—Paula Gunn Allen is a boundary- breaking writer, cultural critic, and public intellectual. She is the author of eight volumes of poetry: The Blind Lion, 1974; Coyote’s Daylight Trip, 1978; A Cannon between My

Knees, 1981; Star Child, 1981; Shadow Country, 1982; Wyrds, 1987; Skin and Bones,

1988; Life Is a Fatal Disease, 1996; one novel: The Woman Who Owned the Shadows,

1983; she has edited at least five anthologies of Native American literature and art: From the Center: A Folio: Native American Art and Poetry, 1981; Studies in American Indian

Literature: Critical Essays and Course Design, 1983; Spider Woman’s Granddaughters:

Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, 1990; Voice of

61 the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970, 1994; Song of the Turtle: American

Indian Literature, 1974-1995, 1996.

When asked which of poetry, prose, or critical writing is most important to her,

Allen responds,

They’re all artificial divisions. I do each in itself . . . but I suit the form to what it is I’m trying to do—to the purpose. . . . My form is determined by my purpose . . they’re all writing and that’s what I’m doing. I’m a writer. It’s like asking a seamstress if making dresses is somehow separate from making skirts and blouses. Sure, one has a waistband that’s separate and in the others one part is connected to the other, but it’s all sewing. (“Mesas” 21)

Allen’s analogy of writing as sewing will take on new significance later in this study, but for now let it suffice to say that Allen bristles at any attempt at categorization. Because she was born as a “cultural confluence” into the Laguna Pueblo community composed of numerous “‘officially declared’ tribes,” much of Allen’s creative and critical writing wrestles with the idea of herself as a “breed,” and therefore as occupying an unstable cultural position considered alien to both the Native American and white traditions found in Cubero (Hanson 6). An outsider to Native Americans because of her white blood and considered Indian by White society, Allen writes from the position of a person excluded from both and thus not only disenfranchised but “maimed by separation . . . she is both, and she is neither” (6). The language Elizabeth I. Hanson uses here, particularly the terms

“maimed by separation,” and the conclusion that Allen is “both and neither,” is language mirrored in Adrienne Rich’s self-descriptive lines: “ ‘Split at the root, neither Gentile nor

Jew, Yankee nor Rebel.’ I was still trying to have it both ways: to be neither/nor . . .”

(Rich 640). I argue that Rich has at least located the root of her disturbance, the split in her consciousness that though long denied she can now identify whereas Hanson’s

62 language in reference to Allen hints at evidence of trauma we’ll attempt to trace in the following pages.

Adrienne Rich’s “Split at the Root”

“Split at the Root” is an essay through which Rich probes into and begins to examine her long-repressed and family-hushed half-Jewish background. The daughter of a gentile mother and a Jewish father, Rich explores not only her literally split heritage but also examines what she calls the “split consciousness” of her Jewish identity (Rich 650). And although the word “Split” in her title certainly echoes in the traumatically split head and body of Allen’s old giantess, I contend that though Rich’s Jewishness and her family’s silencing of it eventually erupts in much personal conflict for her and for her family,

Rich’s “split” cannot be confused with the traumatic split we find in Allen’s writing precisely because Rich knows where to probe and what questions to ask in order to fuse her split.

In her opening paragraph, Rich admits that one obstacle in writing this story is to

“face the sources and the flickering presence of [her] own ambivalence as a Jew” (Rich

640). She questions, “Why now? Why . . . does this question of Jewish identity float so impalpably, so ungraspably, around me, a cloud I can’t quite see the outlines of, which feels to me without definition” (640). Although the spectral language Rich uses in this introduction, phrases such as “flickering presence,” “a cloud I can’t quite see the outlines of,” “without definition,” and words such as “float,” “impalpably,” “ungraspably,” indicate a nebulous understanding of her problem, Rich is able to name and articulate her wound; the degree of control she shows in articulating this wound becomes evident even

63 in her wordsmithing adjective-to-adverb transformation of “ungraspably.” In contrast,

Paula Gunn Allen’s trauma remains undisclosed and dislocated and makes itself known only through repetitive gestures and inarticulate stuttering.

The Missed Event/ “Missing”

In her book We Heal from Memory, Cassie Premo Steele teaches us:

scholars of trauma . . . define trauma precisely not as an experience or event but as the paradoxical structure of an experience that was missed, was not experienced. Trauma . . . marks the painful aftereffects of a violent history in the body and mind of the survivor. Hence, it is not the event itself . . . that determines whether it is traumatic; it is the way the survivor survives such violence by not experiencing it in the normal way we experience and remember. And while such violence is not and cannot be experienced consciously at the time, it nevertheless repeats itself later from the inside through dreams and repetitions. (2, emphasis mine)

Steele argues that trauma cannot be “recorded in the usual, narrative way we remember experiences” because it is not remembered (3). However, she suggests, “[t]raumatic memories are encoded not narratively but in images and feelings, both emotional and physical” (3). In other words, traumatic memories are held in the body rather than in the mind, and they erupt in the form of images and feelings, in fits and starts. Poetry, too,

“takes images, feelings, rhythms, sounds, and the physical sensations of the body as evidence” (3). For Steele, poetry becomes the vehicle through which poets leave traces and through which readers witness traumas.

I argue that Allen leaves traces of trauma in her poetry through her repetitions— not only in recurring images but in repetition of movements and gestures as she ventures away from the site of trauma only repeatedly to return to it. Remember, trauma is the result of a missed event, an event not experienced and, therefore, not held in memory.

Because trauma is a missed event, we can expect to find gaps, or holes, in memory where the event is not held.

Allen’s poem “Missing” provides examples, not only of the repetitious venturing from and returning to the site of trauma, but of the pain caused by these gaps or holes in memory. The title alone, “Missing,” alerts readers that we will not find something here.

What we do find, even in the first stanza, is terrifying:

all along seeing friends all distracted. come again, they say, smiling at the air beside my head. then I am out again, surrounded by the wet wet green, going in circles, finally lost, missing the way a hundred times stopping in panic, exhausted. (“Missing,” lines 1-13)

Allen’s duplication of the word “again” implies that this is not the first time this scene has occurred and serves to compound the speaker’s panic. The first thing we recognize as missing is the speaker’s body; she must feel invisible as her friends smile “at the air/beside my head” rather than smiling at the speaker’s body or face or eyes as they say their good-byes. Next, though Allen’s speaker is off “again,” she goes “in circles, / . . . missing the way/ a hundred times/”. Not only does the poem’s speaker miss her way, she misses her way a hundred times. Why, we might ask, would a person keep making the same mistake over and over? Why wouldn’t she try a different way before the hundredth time? Surely, this is a speaker in need of a map. In addition, the painful weight of all these compulsive, compounded repetitions simply begs for a witness. By the first stanza’s

65 conclusion, readers, too, are dizzied, panicked, exhausted with sharing/witnessing the repetitive images and feelings of an unremembered traumatic event.

Three stanzas of missing and holes follow the first. In stanza two, the speaker drives on, “. . . missing the holes in the highway / . . . I travel in a futile try to reach/ what is not there. /” (18, 21-22). Later, in stanza four,

I am missing solid places, all these holes: two thousand miles of them. pits in the highway. bowls. (42-51)

Missing “all these holes” allows for the speaker’s continued trip, a theme echoed in trauma theory…missing the traumatic event allows continued survival. The sign of trauma and the ongoing problems resulting from trauma becomes evident only in the repetition of the event, and this speaker repeats her missing for two thousand miles. On the other hand, when the speaker also admits “I am missing/ solid places, / ” we feel her complete emptiness—now, not only does the speaker miss the holes, she also misses solid places; and, if we miss both the holes and the solid places, we miss it all.

In the poem’s later stanzas readers learn that the speaker’s daughter is missing, her father is missing, and her mother is missing. Most troubling, however, are Allen’s echoing lines, “I am missing /” (42, 73). The despondence in these lines is haunting; and, because she repeats the line twice, I read this speaker as demanding a witness: “Listen to me: everything is missing, everyone is missing, I am missing. Find me.” “Okay,” we’re tempted to respond, “but we’ll need a map.”

Out of Cubero/GO HOME

When we lose something, it’s a good idea to map or retrace our steps to the point where we remember last having it, and I read in Allen’s work an attempt to do just that. Not only does Allen repeat images in her work, she also repeats gestures. It is through these repetitive gestures that we trace traumatic events held not in the mind but in the body and physically acted out in echoes of the event.

I suggest that Allen’s habitual moving away from and returning to her Laguna

Pueblo home are the symptomatic actions performed by survivors of trauma. Steele reminds us that the trauma survivor

returns to the skipped event of the past . . . [and] reenacts the ‘scene’ of trauma . . . This game of repetition often manifests itself as acts which are destructive to others as well as to the self. The survivor, who has no memory of the event, recognizes her problem only in the painful and repetitive actions of the present. (Steele 17)

As we trace these aftereffects of trauma, readers serve as witnesses who first listen, then begin to help the poet reconstruct “these skipped histories, claim them, and heal from them” (6).

Even as she describes what we might speculate as the “scene” of Native American genocide, Allen expresses the necessity of the witness in healing from it. In this return to the scene, Allen heaps her writing with the aftereffects of repetition:

We are the dead and the witness to death of hundreds of thousands of our people, of the water, the air, the animals and forests and grassy lands that sustained us not very long ago . . . the question that the writers face again and again, pose in a multitude of ways, answer in a multitude of ways is this: How does one survive in the face of collective death? Bearing witness is one solution, but it is singularly tearing, for witnessing genocide . . . requires that someone listen and comprehend. (“Answering The Deer” 143, 144, emphasis mine)

How, then, does Allen survive in the face of the collective death she describes here? She moves away from and returns home to it, again and again and again, as evidenced in her

67 essays and poems. In her poem “Heyoka, Coyote Tale,” Allen opens with her ongoing theme of things missing: “Alfonso’s house is gone. There’s/ a space where it used to be. .

. ./” (lines 1, 2). By the poem’s conclusion, however, Allen zeros in on what’s still present in Cubero before quickly leaving it:

. . .That house is still there, not fallen down ...... It’s on the road out of Cubero, just on the edge of the Laguna Reservation. We ride past it on our way out of town. (27-28, 31-34)

Allen’s speaker first points out the empty places, the vacancies, before leaving her hometown altogether; once again, she heads out of Cubero.

Allen moved to San Francisco where, in 1974, she wrote “The Last Fantasy: San

Francisco.” What initially strikes me about Part I of this poem is the gap of knowledge admitted in its opening lines:

In the inevitable city exactly how we came here or why we do not know but suspect each illusion led inexorably to the next . . . . (“The Last Fantasy” 1. 1-5)

The poem’s speaker has no memory of “exactly how we came here or why,” though it’s clear she tries to retrace her path…she “suspects” one thing led to another. This gap in knowledge provides us with traces of a traumatic event. Further, the speaker moves impulsively; she acts in the spontaneous, repetitive way associated with trauma survivors who have no idea why they keep doing these unexplainable things.

Part II of “The Last Fantasy: San Francisco” introduces us to Allen’s contradictory impulse to return home. Sitting in a San Francisco laundromat, the speaker tells us,

the crazy old woman on the bench beside me shouts GO HOME ...... GO HOME she commands . . . (2. 32-35)

Before our speaker can yet discern “how we came here or why,” she hears the all- capitalized, double command to “GO HOME…GO HOME.” It does not surprise us that

Allen twice repeats this line; by doing so, she simply underscores what Steele calls trauma’s “signposts,” “the intrusions and repetitions of the past upon the present” (Steele

7). In the poem’s concluding lines, the speaker’s response to the order, “GO HOME,” may offer witnesses our best “aha!” moment into the gap of Allen’s knowledge:

I would go home, crazy old woman, if I knew where that might be, or how. (“The Last Fantasy” 2. 53-55)

Here we learn that home, too, is missing, which poses quite a problem for a person who needs to return there, as Allen so repeatedly does. Once again, a map might help the lost

Allen locate her home and find her way back to it.

A couple of times in “Split at the Root,” Adrienne Rich, like Allen, indicates surprise and/or a lack of knowledge at the occurrence of certain events. The first instance takes place early in the essay and marks Rich’s first recognition that her father may have suffered as a lone Jewish student in a dominant WASP culture: “It was only in college . .

. that it flashed on me that there was an untold side to my father’s story of his student years” (Rich 641, emphasis mine). That this realization of a silenced experience occurs in adulthood, and that Rich describes the break onto her consciousness as a temporary

“flash” resonates somewhat with what we’ve learned about how trauma breaks into consciousness in fits and starts; Rich’s flash in consciousness separates itself from

Allen’s only in its lack of repetition. Later in the essay, Rich writes of herself that while still in college, “I found myself, at Radcliffe, among Jewish women” (645 emphasis mine). It seems surprising that a smart, Radcliffe-educated feminist positions her younger self so passively here; even at the time of her writing, Rich asserts no responsibility in having located herself among these Jewish women. As we’ll see in the next few paragraphs, Allen also “finds herself” in certain places and among certain people as if plopped there by forces beyond her control. For Rich, this powerlessness occurs only once; for Allen, it becomes a repetitive pattern her body visits upon her unsuspecting mind.

In her essay, “Looking Back,” Allen expresses dismay with the university system in which she holds a tenured faculty position, and out-of-the-blue she reveals:

“Tomorrow morning I intend to announce to my faculty that I am going to resign. I am somewhat surprised by my decision—” (Reservation 134). By now, the admission that her decision to resign surprises Allen should intrigue us. We might assume that a person who’s worked so hard for such highly regarded academic positions would have made some deliberate and careful decisions about resigning; we wouldn’t expect such a decision to come as a surprise. But, apparently out of nowhere, Allen quits her job. She writes further:

I am simply unwilling (and probably unable) to cope with the situation, the inanity, and the downright obtuseness of the university system, the people who compose it, the research-publication Ph.D. garbage bin that I find myself in. (Reservation 134)

Clearly, Allen is fed up with the university system. But of particular interest for our purposes here is her statement “the university system . . . that I find myself in.” On a positive note, by stating “I find myself” she is a far cry from her earlier statement, “I am

70 missing.” However, she avoids taking any responsibility for being in this place; she does not record the many competitive, calculated choices she exercised to bring herself to this point in her career. Because of her perceived powerlessness over circumstances, the words “that I find myself in” resonate in the lines from “The Last Fantasy: San

Francisco”: “exactly how we came here or why we / do not know.” Not only does Allen not know how she got here, but her decision to leave surprises her as much as her arrival.

What, then, is Allen’s solution to this predicament? “So I am quitting. Turning tail, I intend to run. Far. As fast as I can. Back to Cubero . . .” (135). She’s going “home.” The problem remains, however, that she still doesn’t know where home might be, or how to get there.

Mind/Body Split

Turning tail on the university and returning to Cubero link the two places, academia and home, the mind and the body, between which Allen burns up the road.

Because Allen is Laguna, a scholar of American Studies, a professor of English, a poet, and a writer, she faces some conflicting challenges—not the least of which is the fact that Native Americans, whose cultures depend primarily upon disseminating information and sharing tradition through oral histories, “usually do not express their ideas in print” (Natives and Academics ix). Academia, as we know, with its “publish or perish” mantra, seems in direct conflict with Native American preference in orality. In her essay, “Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” Allen addresses other conflicts many Native American scholars face in academia. In addition to orality vs. print, inquisitiveness, a quality highly valued among scholars, is often frowned upon in

Native American cultures. She writes,

One does not tell or inquire about matters that do not directly concern one. I was raised to understand that “street smart” around Laguna meant respecting privacy and modesty, and that to step beyond the bounds of the required propriety was to put myself and others at risk. One did not inquire about or tell about matters that were not hers or his to know or discuss. (“Problems in Teaching” 56).

One minds one’s own business, she asserts, particularly when it comes to educating outsiders about Native Americans; in questioning Silko’s writing of Ceremony, Allen poses that “certainly, being raised in greater proximity to Laguna Village than I, she must have been told what I was, that we don’t tell these things on the outside” (61, emphasis mine). Allen, then, becomes conflicted in teaching what Silko has written. Allen calls

“telling these things on the outside” “security leaks;” further, she writes that “telling the old stories, revealing the old ways, can only lead to disaster”—disasters such as the discovery of uranium, nuclear weapons, WWII, the Jackpile Mine, and water and land nuclear waste; and she remembers “being told that a person who told those stories might wake up dead in a ditch somewhere” (62). According to Allen’s interpretation of Native

American custom, personal and/or public disasters inevitably follow Native Americans who tell what they know.

As an academic and an educator, however, it seems to me that Allen is ethically responsible to share her knowledge with her students. To avoid this ethical slip, she chooses to teach only contemporary literature, “believing [she] might teach it and evade or avoid queries about arcane matters,” and thus avoid exposing Native American ritual and myth about which she should not tell (63). Avoiding this ethical slip seems to lead to what I consider an ethical lapse of another sort; Allen writes, “I have gone so far as to learn as little ritual or myth as possible in any particular detail to further buttress my defense against ethical violations” (63). To my mind, a scholar who chooses not to learn

72 so that she will not have to teach what she learns commits a moral breach equal to that of the Native American who tells what she knows.

Being caught in this double-bind between Native American ethical violations and academic moral breaches literally sickens Allen who writes:

In the classroom or before the keyboard, I find myself physically ill when I attempt to override those early lessons. My body, breed as it is, rebels against the very idea that such violations might proceed from me. (62).

Allen’s body rebels. In the classroom or before the keyboard, Allen’s body battles her mind, an image often used in discussing trauma theory. Remember, an event is considered traumatic when it cannot be held in the conscious mind; instead, the body holds the memory unavailable to the mind and enacts the event in the form of repetitive gestures or dreams. In Allen’s case, her body tells her mind what is not available for use.

This mind/body tug-of-war results in a split that Allen must eventually reconcile—her Native American body and her academic mind are split as thoroughly as the road-split head and torso of the sandstone giantess; and, I argue, Allen travels back and forth on this road—the road from home to the academy, the road between the body and the head—in an effort to stitch them together as one stitches together a split in the skin.

In her personal interview with Joseph Brucac, Allen addresses these splits:

My poetry has a haunted sense to it and it has a sorrow and a grievingness in it that comes directly from being split, not in two but in twenty, and never being able to reconcile all the places that I am. (“Mesas” 18)

Here, not only does Allen acknowledge that she’s split (and not only in two but in ten repetitions of two), but she also addresses herself as a multitude of places; this allusion to place probably strikes readers as an odd reference, but it certainly supports our idea that a

73 map may help in first locating and then charting those lost and seemingly irreconcilable places.

The Map

Several times in this study, I’ve mentioned that Allen needs a map: she needs a map in her poem “Missing” to help her find her way, to stop missing her way a hundred times, to find her daughter, her mother, her father, herself; she needs a map to navigate the road with all the holes; she needs a map in her poem “The Last Fantasy: San Francisco” to retrace how she got to that inevitable city, to locate her home and to find her way back to it; she needs a map in the university to find a new way of doing academic work; she needs a map to reconcile her Native American body and her academic mind; she needs a map to reconcile “all of the places” that she is.

In her Bruchac interview, Allen admits that she seeks a sense of being “securely planted;” she concedes that although she is balanced, she is not grounded: “I’m balanced,” she says, “but the thing is, I float. It’s fairly easy to shove me by the shoulders and knock me over. It’s not because I’m off balance; it’s because I’m not grounded.

That’s my body’s way of expressing what my poems also express” (4). I hear Allen’s sentiments echoed in Janice Gould’s study of mapping through poetry. In “Poems as

Maps in American Indian Women’s Writing,” Gould uses Allen’s terminology in relation to balance:

the world is out of balance . . . [and] the map or cartographic poem is a tool . . . to find our way toward balance. . . . We need maps to help us find our directions, to help describe and explain the kinds of spiritual and material terrain that we have walked through before and are walking through even now. Poetic cartography provides a way to imagine and claim those landscapes we know or remember in order to assert what we belong to, what is tied in at the deepest place in our psyches. . . . maps, then, provide tools for navigating one’s way across unknown

waters, lands, celestial realms, and mystic regions of dreams or nightmares or other possibilities. (23-24, 30, emphasis mine)

According to Gould, maps do at least two separate things: They claim what we know and they navigate what we don’t know. Maps help us claim a known point—like the North

Star in the night sky or magnetic North on a compass—from which to chart a course. For

Allen, this known point is Laguna: “Laguna to me is where you go when you’re going home. Laguna to me is where people are grounded” (Bruchac 5). Allen knows two things:

1) She’s not grounded, but 2) people in Laguna are; and for someone who is not grounded but wants to be, Laguna would be the place to begin.

Denis Wood claims in his cartographic book The Power of Maps that maps bridge what we know with what we don’t know, they link territories and their histories, and like recovery from a traumatic event, they reconcile the past into a present that we can know.

In “The Autobiography of a Confluence,” Allen maps her way in and out of

Cubero to bridge what she knows with what she doesn’t know; road by road, link by link, she attempts to draw herself out of fragmentation. From her childhood home, “North of the house I grew up in . . .,” she moves on to her grandmother’s house, “Just past my grandmother’s front door,” and further out, “next to my grandparent’s house, down the way past Mrs. Rice’s house . . .” (Reservation 183). In this detailed, frenzied way, Allen coordinates her territory as if it were under a magnifying glass—she retraces territories in order to make sense of the histories of names and people and roads and rivers and economies and their relations to the present. For example, Allen records how over the course of many years, old Old Highway 66 becomes Highway 66 which eventually becomes I-40. I-40, however, bypasses many of the landmarks Allen identifies along the

75 earlier more meandering roads. By documenting those places now inaccessible from I-40,

Allen reclaims histories and marks change.

Allen frantically maps her way out of Cubero, South to the Rio Grande, to the

Gulf of Mexico, West to California, East to “Texas . . .Oklahoma . . .the Plains . . . Ohio .

. . THE EAST” (184). Then back to Cubero. As soon as she reaches “THE EAST,” Allen starts all over again: “If you go right on the old highway out of Cubero, . . .” (185). For some reason, without even being narrated there, readers are yanked back to Cubero, wondering, perhaps as Allen does, how we got here and why. To savvy readers, it’s this lack of narration that signals a traumatic event. But it’s not as if we stay long in Cubero, for in the very sentence that takes us back there, Allen once again sends us straight out of town, down the old highway, and “out of Cubero.” I suggest that, by mapping so many things so meticulously, Allen charts her way to being grounded, to wholeness. Picture, for instance, a map with Cubero at its center: The more lines Allen draws out from the center, the more filled the map becomes with lines—lines that eventually blur together in their densities—and the less space Allen finds to fall through.

Adrienne Rich, too, maps and thereby claims the landscape of her split consciousness. She begins her essay, “sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter,” before backtracking, “But this begins, for me, in Baltimore” (Rich 640). Not satisfied that

Baltimore was beginning enough, she reaches further back to map some family history:

“My father . . . was from Birmingham, Alabama; his father, Samuel, was an immigrant from Austria-Hungary and his mother, Hattie Rice, a Sephardic Jew from Vicksburg,

Mississippi” (640). I’m reminded of watching a scent-tracking dog as I read “Split at the

Root” —initially there’s a seemingly random sort of running around, nose to the ground,

76 as the dog sniffs out the scent; once on its trail, however, the dog follows a predictable, purposeful pattern, slowing or stopping only as the odor demands a shift in attention. A number of tumbling paragraphs relating to the 1930s and early 1940s of her childhood opens Rich’s essay, but once she fixes onto the memory of her afternoon alone at a theater, at age sixteen, watching a newsreel of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Rich’s exploration becomes determined, and a chronological narrative emerges:

“Sometime in 1946, while still in high school, . . .” leads chronologically to “1947: I left

Baltimore to go to college in Cambridge, Massachussetts, . . .” and predictably on to

“1948: I come home from my freshman year at college . . .” (644, 645, 646). In addition to using dates as psychological landmarks, Rich tacks significant memories to specific locations like pins in a wall-mounted map: “I was married in 1953, in the Hillel House at

Harvard, under a portrait of Albert Einstein,” or “Sometimes in my thirties, on visits to

Brooklyn, I sat on Eastern Parkway” (649, 651). By mapping details such as these, Rich transforms a chronological outline into the story of the recovering of her split consciousness; and trauma theory suggest that it is through this very process of first articulation and then narration (and always in the presence of a witness—a listener, a reader, a comprehender) that our wounds begin to heal.

The final paragraphs of “Split at the Root” explicitly address the wound, and this progression from identifying, articulating, and finally narrating the story of her psychological injury allows Rich a painful yet healthy healing. In her penultimate paragraph, Rich writes, “I feel the history of denial within me like an injury, a scar . . .”

(655). In this sentence alone, Rich makes her healing explicit: Not only does she feel “the history of denial” and not denial itself within her, which already indicates a recovered

77 event, but the following simile “like an injury, a scar” confirms the healthy progression from an injury to its natural and healing scar. In one of the essay’s final sentences, when

Rich refers to herself as “the woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped bleeding,” readers thrill at the double meaning—does Rich write that she has “stopped bleeding” to indicate that she’s tackled this issue of her split consciousness after menopause (655)? Or does she mean that, having now painfully probed her injury, the wound has finally “stopped bleeding” and can now begin to heal?

Though each woman writes of being a “breed” or a “half-shikesa” and of wrestling with the aftereffects of cultural genocide, Adrienne Rich’s “Split at the Root” is an example of the progressive narration we identify with literature about trauma and does not contain the repetitive and non-narratable gestures we witness in Allen’s literature of

(an as-yet unnamed) trauma (Rich 650). Rich points to her wound whereas Allen cannot.

Through the painful act of writing, Rich debrides her wound whereas Allen, though she attempts to ineffectively stitch something back together, is unable to experience and therefore locate the source of injury and is consequently unable to arrest its repetitive reinjuring. Rich’s essay opens with a diffuse desire to fix in place the impalpable, ungraspable questions surrounding her Jewish identity, but by the essay’s conclusion, readers feel that Rich, though admittedly “limping with a cane,” has progressed in healing whereas we see no evidence of healing in Allen.

Right off the bat, Rich admits, “I’ve been on the track of this longer than I think,” and the very fact that Rich can identify a “this” and name it “this question of Jewish identity” suggests that she’s a far cry further along than Allen who has yet to name or acknowledge her wound and is thus destined to repeat the gestures associated with its

78 injury (Rich 640). Once Rich settles on her track, she moves narratively ahead; Allen, on the other hand, retraces rather than tracks; her movements are out and back rather than forward.

I read Paula Gunn Allen’s effort at mapping these many out-and-back movements as the attempt to stop her bleeding wound. In the poem, “Grandmother,” Allen’s references to Spider Woman’s web spinning reminds us that, when other measures are unavailable, emergency medicine urges using spider webs to clot a bleeding wound. Not only does “Grandmother” allow us another visual way to imagine how these blurring web-like lines can work at healing, it shows the poem’s speaker attempting to mend an injury. Although Allen’s poem is titled “Grandmother,” it becomes immediately clear that the poem’s Grandmother is Spider Woman, the world’s creator: “Out of her body she pushed/ silver thread . . .// Out of her body she extruded/ shining wire, life . . .// . . . weaving the strands/ of her body, her pain, her vision/ into creation . . .” (lines 1-2, 5-6,

10-12). Spider Woman creates the world—she weaves “light/ on the void” (6-7); but once her work is finished, she leaves the world in human hands. The poem’s final stanza not only shows humans at their work in the world, it also allows for another view of the hole we’ve learned to identify as evidence of trauma in Allen’s writings:

After her, the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life, memories of light and ladders, infinity-eyes, and rain. After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug and mend the tear with string. (14-19)

After Spider Woman disappears, women and men continue her creation by weaving artifacts—blankets into tales of life, memories. The poem’s speaker, however,

79 does not create as others do; instead, she spends her time mending the blanket’s tear.

Astute readers will find the word “tear” ambiguous—since it so closely follows the words

“rain” and “rain-bearing,” we could read “tear” as a “tear drop,” a physical sign of sadness or loss. But because the word even more immediately aligns with “mend” and

“string,” we also read “the tear” as a wound or a rip in the blanket’s body.

There is absolutely no evidence, no mention whatsoever in the poem’s linear progression, of the blanket’s wounding. Without so much as a stanza break to alert us, the poem glosses over what I consider a huge leap from the blanket’s creation to the blanket’s tear being mended. Trauma theory teaches us to slow down and poke around when we find evidence of this glossing over, these gaps, this absence of the wounding event. Secondly, the image of using string to mend the blanket’s tear echoes in Paula

Gunn Allen’s gesture of traveling back and forth to Cubero between the head and the body of her story’s wicked giantess—I picture her zigzag traveling as Allen’s way of suturing the giantess’s wounded body back together, just as the poem’s speaker mends the blanket’s tear with string. All this weaving, threading, spinning, suturing, writing, and mapping are Allen’s ways of mending a tear, of filling a traumatic void by using increasingly dense and repetitive lines.

Allen writes about the spaces inevitably found between all these lines: “My life is the pause. The space between. The not this, not that, not the other. The place that others go around. Or around about. It’s more a Mobius strip than a line” (Reservation 188). A

Mobius strip is a nonorientable surface, just as trauma is a nonorientable, unexperienced event, and this is precisely why Allen’s efforts to map the landscape of her trauma seems so endless.

Conclusion

Trauma is considered a missed event. Because the mind was unprepared for the event, the memory of it is held in the body rather than in the mind, thereby creating a mind/body separation that is intolerable to a whole person. The mind’s missing of the event initially allows for its continued survival; this survival, however, comes at the expense of an integrated whole. The body, in repetitive gestures, continues reciting the missed event in order for the mind to finally experience it and to reconcile this separation. But the mind remains unprepared for the wounding; therefore, these recurring gestures leave series of holes in the mind’s fabric and gaps in knowledge where the body’s efforts at duplicating the event occur. It is this ongoing cycle of the body’s repeated gesturing and the mind’s repeated missing of it that becomes destructive and that eventually demands an outside witness in order to heal.

This study has traced evidence of trauma in Allen’s work by identifying patterns in her body’s repetitive gestures and the gaps in her mind and in her writing where those gestures are not experienced. It has also foregrounded how Allen cartographically maps the wounded landscape of her trauma as she attempts to reconcile her mind/body separation.

At this point, the source of Allen’s trauma remains unclear and unarticulated, though this exploration has raised a number of possibilities based upon the images and patterns witnessed in her writing: Perhaps she was sent away from home at too young an age; perhaps she was “maimed by separation” from both Native American culture and

81 white society and feels forever destined to consider herself a “breed” and an outsider to each; perhaps Allen’s Native American body cannot endure her academic mind revealing all she knows; or perhaps the mind of the very woman who claims “I am the land” did not and cannot yet experience the memory that is held in her body— the body from which was harvested yellowcake uranium and upon which the resulting first atomic test bomb exploded and that, in 1945 Hiroshima, participated in the first atomic attack that forever mutilated the world.

By using Cubero as her center and mapping ever out of it, Paula Gunn Allen works to eliminate “the space between” by filling her missing places, the holes on the highway, the gaps in knowledge, the tears in the blanket of creation. And the more Allen travels the roads of her map, the roads in and out of Cubero, the more thoroughly she attempts to mend together the traumatized head and body of the sandstone giantess.

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. “Answering the Deer: Genocide and Continuance in the Poetry of American Indian Women.” Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Eds. Dean Rader and Janice Gould. Tucson: The U of Arizona P, 2003.

---. “I Climb the Mesas in my Dreams: an Interview with Paula Gunn Allen.” Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987, 1-21.

---. Life is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1997.

---. Off The Reservation: reflections on boundary-busting, border-crossing loose cannons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.

---. Personal interview. 14, 20 Oct. 2007.

---. “Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians. Ed. Devon A. Mihesuah. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: The John’s Hopkins UP, 1996.

Google Maps. October 9, 2007. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Cubero,+NM,+United+States+of+America&sa= X&oi=map&ct=title.

Gould, Janice. “Poems as Maps in American Indian Women’s Writing.” Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Eds. Dean Rader and Janice Gould. Tucson: The U of Arizona P, 2003.

Hanson, Elizabeth I. Paula Gunn Allen. Boise State University Western Writers Series. Number 96. Boise: Boise State University, 1990.

Jahner, Elaine. “A Laddered, Rain-Bearing Rug: Paula Gunn Allen’s Poetry.” Women and Western American Literature. Ed. Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski. Troy, New York: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1982. 311-326.

Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998.

“Laguna Pueblo.” New Mexico Magazine. October 11, 2007.

Rich, Adrienne. “Split at the Root.” The Art of the Personal Essay:An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present . Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Booksm 1994. 640-655.

Sperling’s Best Places. October 9, 2007.

Steele, Cassie Premo. We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldua and the Poetry of Witness. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: The Guilford P, 1992.