The
Remembered Earth
is one of the first collections of American Native writings, and was published
in 1979. The anthology has a wide selection of readings: poetry, critical and
personal essays, short stories, drawings, and photographs. The book is
organized geographically, but without continually referring back to the table
of contents the reader has no real way to gauge where he or she is at. Chapter
one of a novel in progress by Opal Lee Popkes is presented (177). Essays are
left to hang. N. Scott Momaday’s “The Man Made of Words” ends without
concluding, and in mid-sentence: “I believe that there are implications which
point directly to the” (172).
Most anthologies
I have read have a clear construction, or an overall purpose—a theme. I have to
give credit to Geary Hobson. His curricula vitae is pretty impressive, but The Remembered Earth seems to have been
slapdashed together. The anthology is a disjointed collection. This idea of
disjointedness though, seems to be a theme I’m coming across in many of my
readings for this class. I did not like Winter
in Blood right away, for instance, because of its nonlinear narrative. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows also
contains a nonlinear narrative, sometimes bouncing all the way back to creation.
I believe suggesting that the nonlinear narratives found in American Indian
writings are somehow directly related to the moment of postcolonialism can only
partly explain the feeling of disjointedness in the writing. It seems to me the
American Native has a more holistic and circular idea in regards to the concept
of time.[1]
Paula Gunn Allen’s poem “Hoop
Dancer” showcases this idea of circular time. She writes, “It’s hard to
enter/circling clockwise and counter/clockwise moving no regard for time,
metrics” (218). Here, the circle has no end and no beginning, and it does not
matter whether one moves clockwise or counterclockwise. The circle or hoop is a
complete whole, and she ends the poem, “…turning lines beyond the march of
years/ out of time, out of,/ time, out/ of time.” The concept of time seems
fluid in these lines, no beginning and no end.
The Native American cultural
conception of cyclical time directly comes into conflict with the Western
linear concept, the simple turning of a calendar page or the monotony of
watching a clock tick away the seconds. The moments in the past, for the
Native, seem to be just as existent as the moments in the present.
A typical
literature anthology is organized historically. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, for example,
begins with the Iroquois Creation Story,
moves forward in history to letters written by Christopher Columbus, and
continues moving forward historically until after World War II. The Remembered Earth is organized,
however, spatially, and although Hobson deals specifically with the time frame
of 1968-1970, Hobson writes how American Indian literature is “immeasurable”
(2) and “has to do with remembering, continuance, renewal.” I wonder how much my
own personal disconnect with the literature is connected with my own personal, Western
ideas of time.
The Remembered Earth is a long book.
Over four hundred pages, and thus able to showcase a wide breadth of Native American
literature. It was, however, published in 1979, and so a bit outdated. A new anthology
came out last year: Great Short Stories by
Contemporary Native American Writers edited by Bob Blaisdell, but the anthology
is only 144 pages long, is arranged chronologically, and Blaisdell’s introduction
describes the stories included in the anthology as “stereotypical.” Blaisdel lists
eleven anthologies published mainly in the 1980s and ’90’s in the introduction.
One is from as recent as 2008. The majority of these anthologies are edited by Native
Americans, and I think I will read those.
[1]
Dr. Means lectured on this in Native American Ethnohistory. I thought the
concept of cyclical time was interesting, but at the moment had not considered
trying to connect the idea to literary forms.
