Retold Stories, Untold Histories : Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko on the Politics of Imagining the Past [1 ed.] 9781443864527, 9781443849579

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Retold Stories, Untold Histories

TheatreUntold Noise:Histories: Retold Stories, TheKingston Sound ofand Performance Maxine Hong Leslie Marmon Silko on the Politics of Imagining the Past Edited by

By

Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner Joanna Ziarkowska

Retold Stories, Untold Histories: Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko on the Politics of Imagining the Past, by Joanna Ziarkowska This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Joanna Ziarkowska All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4957-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4957-9

Table of Contents

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter One Interrupting Historical Silences: In Search of a Language of Historical Articulations.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Chapter Two History in Photographic Images: Between Passive Poses and Creative Resistance.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Chapter Three Mapping the Past: Maps, Citizenship and National Boundaries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Chapter Four History as ReMembered: Memory, Imagination and Writing Histories.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Chapter Five History’s Genres: “How Do We Seize the Past?”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

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INTroductiON “What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me?” asks Jamaica Kincaid, an Antiguan-born writer. “Should I call it history? If so, what should history mean to someone like me? . . . Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and if so, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?” (620). Kincaid’s question, relevant for all colonized and marginalized groups, addresses the issue of the hegemony of historical representation, written from the perspective of the dominant culture, which efficaciously erases and silences people like Kincaid. Such history belongs to, reflects on and represents solely its writers, thus rendering the Other(s) either invisible or insignificant in the historical narrative. Retold Stories, Untold Histories concentrates on demonstrating how Kincaid’s question is addressed by Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko and why it is identified as one of the most critical themes in their writings. The rationale behind juxtaposing two writers from diverse cultural contexts originates in the fact that both Kingston and Silko share the experience of historical and cultural marginalization and, more importantly, devise similar methods of rendering it in creative writing. Maxine Hong Kingston, second-generation Chinese American, entered the literary scene in 1976 with the publication of the now canonical The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, followed shortly by the thematically connected sequel China Men. In 1989 Kingston published Tripmaster Monkey, which introduces the lively character of Wittman Ah Sing, who reappears in her autobiographical The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) and the recent I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011). Leslie Marmon Silko, of the Laguna Pueblo, debuted in 1978 with Ceremony, one of the most influential texts in the ethnic canon. In her later works, Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead (1991), Gardens in the Dunes (2000) and most recently The Turquoise Ledge (2010), she consistently focuses on Native American cultures and their reformulations in the contemporary context. Writing from the perspective of two distinct marginalized groups, Kingston and Silko share the view that the official version of national history may be seen as a narrative of misrepresentation and the exclusion of people who either greatly contributed to the building of the country or occupied the territory of the present United States long before its creation. In their texts, both

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writers engage in a polemic against a history that, using its legitimizing power as a scientific discipline, produces and perpetuates stereotypical images of Chinese and Native Americans and, more importantly, eliminates the two groups from the process of constructing the national narratives of origins that monitor and control the borders of what constitutes American identity. Despite apparent differences in cultural and historical contexts, Kingston and Silko share an enthusiasm for employing unconventional tools and sources for offering creative reconstructions of a past which had been silenced or repressed. Therefore, it is possible to trace the narrative strategies and discursive methodologies that the two writers employ to introduce literary discourse as a possible site for reconstructing and creating alternative versions of history, and through this creative act, assert the presence of their cultures in the American past. This approach to rewriting history, developed by Kingston and Silko, is present in the literary texts of ethnic writers representing culturally diverse marginalized groups, a fact which reflects its applicability emphasizing the connections and fluidity between the public discourse of official history and the private stories distributed at a micro level within ethnic communities.

Misrepresented Histories and Histories of Misrepresentation The histories that Kingston and Silko question, challenge and rewrite are often referred to as histories of absence due to their tendency of focusing on the cultural mainstream and its perspective, systematically silencing and erasing those occupying the cultural margins. The beginnings of the Chinese presence in the U.S., a theme often taken up by Kingston, is saturated by the image of an unwanted and unskilled Chinese laborer, unable and unwilling to embrace American values. As Huping Ling observes, the first historical analyses, exemplified by L. T. Townsend’s The Chinese Problem (1876; the title best illustrates the author’s approach to the topic) and S. L. Baldwin’s Must the Chinese Go? (1890), lacked methodological sophistication; their content was often brief and descriptive, and inevitably ideologically biased (460). The first more insightful scholarly work, Mary Coolidge’s Chinese Immigration (1906), was based on the analysis of local newspapers and public records, and demonstrated how the author approached her subjects as participants in, and creators of, culture rather than “coolie” workers devoid of cultural and historical backgrounds. Coolidge’s work, however, was not representative of scholarship on Chinese immigrants of the time which, with its overemphasis on the immigration experience, immigration policy and the

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anti-Chinese sentiments of the general public, offered a one-dimensional picture of the group. The 1960s and the development of the Civil Rights movement brought an important change in the approach adopted in the writings about the Chinese. Works from that time tend to look at the Chinese in a wider context and combine history with sociology, include the voices of the “common people,” and for the first time, introduce a feminist perspective to the study: Some examples include S. W. Kung’s Chinese in American Life, Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems and Contributions (1962), Gunther Barth’s Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States 1850–1870 (1964), and Stanford Lyman’s Chinese Americans (1974). On the other hand, the 1960s witnessed the emergence of another stereotypical term to describe Asian Americans, namely “model minority.” In January 1966, William Peterson published an article on Japanese Americans’ successful struggle to enter the American mainstream in the New York Times (20–21). The same year, a December issue of U.S. News & World Report featured Chinese Americans as another example of a “Success Story.” According to Keith Osajima, the year 1966 marked the birth of the image of Asian Americans as a “model minority” (449–58) which, apart from being another stereotypical label, served an important ideological goal. In 1966, at the peak of the Civil Rights movement, the protests of AfroAmerican communities were becoming not only more and more conspicuous but also openly militant. The characterization of Asian Americans as a model minority served the goal of contrasting them with Afro-Americans, who were described as everything but industrious, docile, well-mannered, hard-working and self-disciplined. Asian Americans were praised for “not complaining about or protesting against difficulties”; moreover, they dealt with their problems themselves instead of “burdening Americans with their needs by seeking government aid and welfare assistance” (Kim 177). The 1980s continued the changes initiated during the Civil Rights era and further explored the themes of the Chinese American population and its history, which had been either marginalized or completely ignored. Scholars began to see the Chinese American past in connection with social, economic and political conditions and to recognize its interconnectedness and influence on the shape of history. Similarly, some scholars began to concentrate specifically on countering Asian women’s exclusion from historical analysis. Notable examples include Chinese in America, Stereotyped Past, Changing Present, edited by Loren W. Fessler (1983), Judy Yung’s Chinese Women of America, A Pictorial History (1986); and Stacey Guat-Hong Yap’s Gather Your Strength Sisters: The Emerging Role of Chinese Women Community Workers (1989).

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Introduction

Unquestionably, the 1980s and 1990s brought an increase in perspectives in the study of Chinese Americans, and issues such as the anti-Chinese movement, Exclusion Acts and immigration experience ceased to be the sole focus of scholarly exploration of the subject of Chinese American history. As Reed Ueda points out, there are numerous aspects of Asian American history—historical demography, social structures of the Asian American population, the role and structure of the family, social psychology as well as political culture—that, for many years, remained terra incognita and are being explored only now (119–22). The rise in scholarly studies on Asian American history and diversity is by all means a positive change yet, as scholars and historians observe, it is not sufficient to erase the pervading image of a “coolie” worker from the general consciousness. Gary Okihiro notes that in 1992, still, the books that “fill[ed] most of the shelf space of Asian American collections” were those devoted to anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese movements, as if only this subject was the essence of the Asian presence in America. Sucheng Chan, in the introduction to her Asian Americans: An Interpretative History, acknowledges that a “good work of synthesis can be produced only when there is a sufficient number of sound monographs to serve as its foundation” (xiii). Due to the strong anti-Asian bias in the older works and the uneven quality of current scholarship, Chan admits that perhaps it is too early to attempt such an endeavor. However, as college and university students across the country express their interest in “a more ethnically diverse curriculum” (xiii), there is a compelling need for such a succinct history. The process of constructing more culturally sensitive Chinese American histories also exposed the problem of the selection and availability of sources. In his criticism of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore (1989), L. Ling-chi Wang draws attention to the fact that Takaki insufficiently “acknowledged tribute to researchers who have labored in the trenches in the past two decades of Asian American studies” (89, emphasis in the original). The choice of words is not coincidental here and illustrates the difficulty and laboriousness of the work done by scholars in looking for the presence of Asian immigrants in documents, archives and personal collections, often neglected and deemed unimportant. The recovery of the Angel Island poems illustrates the tedious character of examining such a record and “the near possibility of [its] disappearance without further trace” (C. Wong 10). In 1970 on Angel Island, park ranger Alexander Weiss noticed characters inscribed on the walls inside the wood barracks where Chinese immigrants used to be held. Concluding that the characters must have been left by the immigrants awaiting entry to the U.S. or deportation, he informed his superiors who, however, were not interested in his discovery. Believing in the importance of the discovery,

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Weiss contacted Dr. George Araki from San Francisco State University, who, together with photographer Mark Takahashi, examined and photographed the barrack walls. The writing discovered by Weiss turned out to be poetry written by the Chinese; poetry whose content greatly illuminates the picture of the Chinese immigrants (Lai and Yung 9–10). Another example demonstrates the need to redefine historical methodologies and the obvious benefits. Judy Yung, author of two books on Chinese American oral history, admits that in the process of looking for answers to questions concerning her identity, history textbooks failed completely (4). Yung was looking for the history of her ancestors in America and her special interest in Chinese women only made the task more difficult and arduous. Under such circumstances, while the voice of Chinese immigrants seems to have faltered when clashing with the mainstream construction of the past, oral history offers countless possibilities. “Oral histories,” writes Yung, “despite the drawbacks of faulty or selective memory and retrospective interpretations, added life and credence” to the study of Chinese Americans, allowing them to tell their own story from the bottom up (4). Yung’s 1999 book, Unbound Voice, which attempts to integrate Chinese American women’s history into the mainstream, uses oral history as its primary source of information. One of the main benefits of oral history is that it “allows ordinary folks . . . [to] speak for themselves, fill in historiographical gaps, and challenge stereotypes, as well as validate their lives” (511). Yung believes that conventional sources alone, “devoid of human voices and stories, would be equally incomplete, a skeleton without any flesh,” and thus the best approach to reconstructing history is one that combines the study of historical documents and oral history (512). Yung’s book demonstrates how much can be gained from a combination of conventional and alternative sources, especially in the reconstruction of the past from the point of view of a particular group. In early historiography on Native Americans, invisibility and misrepresentation emerged as the two major patterns of historical representation. The defining historical narrative was usually constructed as “the mythic tale of progress” (D. Morrison 11) in which the demise of the Indian population was a dire yet inevitable consequence of the forces of history at work. Native Americans, if mentioned at all, were presented as primitive, often appealing in their exoticity, and yet doomed to extinction due to their moral, social, religious and political inferiority. Thus, their gradual elimination was not only justified but also natural. When, in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the Native population was cast in the role of the “vanishing race,” an image used and reproduced countless times in years to follow.

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On the other hand, if Native Americans were included in the historical discourse of the nation, their representations were products of white fantasies rather than the findings of historical studies. As Michael Dorris, a Medoc writer, puts it, “for five hundred years Indian people have been measured and have competed against a fantasy over which they have had no control. They are compared with beings who never really were, yet the stereotype is taken for truth” (Dorris 100, emphasis in the original). Dane Morrison adds that “our histories have painted a picture of the first Americans that reflects a distorted impression of our own culture, tracing our own ambivalences and anxieties about carving ‘civilization’ out of the wilderness” (7). As in the case of Chinese American history, a noticeable shift in the approach to history writing took place in the 1960s with the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, which directed public attention to social and political issues raised by minority groups. According to Ellen Fitzpatrick, however, the change in perspective dates back to even earlier times, namely the 1920s and 1930s. Fitzpatrick links this shift with the effects of World War I and the overpowering sense of pessimism and insecurity that ensued. In consequence, “[m]any scholars,” Fitzpatrick claims, “challenged the fundamental leitmotif advanced by students of the American past who equated historical change with progress and advance of liberal democracy. They pointed instead to a darker, more sobering view of the trajectory of American history” (101). This shift was most noticeable in historical writing on Native Americans during the interwar years. The works that appeared at that time nurtured the ambition to reveal the “Indian side” of the frontier story. Some of the examples mentioned by Fitzpatrick include William MacLeod’s The American Indian Frontier (1928), Verner Crane’s The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (1929), Chapman Milling’s Red Carolinians (1940), Loring Priest’s Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865–1887 (1942) and the groundbreaking work of Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (1934). The insistence on depicting Native Americans as victims of history, however, while demonstrating a significant shift in the adopted historical perspective, did not develop a historical analysis that would escape the trap of producing another stereotypical and one-dimensional representation. The Civil Rights movement and the changes that it introduced into the way of perceiving American society prompted another generation of historians to include the experience of people who had previously been excluded, “incorporate the insights of other disciplines” and examine “fresh types of sources” (D. Morrison 15). In Native American studies, this new idea of pluralism in historical studies, christened the New Indian

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History by Robert F. Berkhofer, aimed “to see beyond traditional white prejudices and scholarly specialties so as to portray native peoples in their own right, acting for their own reasons in light of their own cultural norms and values” (“Cultural” 36). Some of the historians who have written in the spirit of the New Indian History are Francis Jennings, James Axtell, R. David Edmunds, Frederick E. Hoxie and Richard White, to mention just a few. Parallel to the emergence of the New History School was the introduction of ethnohistory into the domain of academic disciplines. James Axtell, one of the leading practitioners of ethnohistory, recalls that in the 1960s, when he was entering the academic profession, very few people dealt with the history of Native Americans. Those who did write about the indigenous people were mostly anthropologists, who relied on methodology known as ethnohistory, a combination of anthropology and history. The applicability of ethnohistory in the study of Native Americans soon proved fruitful and efficient, and publishing opportunities offered by journals such as Ethnohistory, the journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory, and William and Mary Quarterly, have contributed to the field’s development (Porter, “Imagining” 350). One of the reasons why ethnohistory became an attractive model for approaching Native American histories is that it takes as “its most proper subject culture as opposed to society,” and tries to perceive cultures as a “whole” with “all of their social parts and sub-codes” which “interact functionally and symbiotically to produce a single cultural organism” (Axtell 13). Such an approach to historical research allows us to seek answers not only in traditionally used “reliable written documents” but also in anthropology, archeology, sociology, religion, art and other academic fields. Furthermore, the presentation of tribes as agents of historical change rather than as passive subjects swept away by the “winds” of history helps avoid casting Indians in the subordinate role of victims, like for example in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Century of Dishonor (1881) or more recently in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). However attractive, the ethnohistoric approach did not solve all the problems stemming from unanswered questions about the methodology of historical writing. A case in point is the much-valued The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991) by Richard White. His widely acclaimed book, which examines Winnebagos, Wyandots, Seneca-Cayugas, Shawnees, Delawares and other tribes inhabiting the region, is seen as illustrating a shift in the study of Native American history (D. Morrison 10). However, while for some the book is a groundbreaking work, for others it is an offending

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example of how Indian history should not be written.1 For instance, Susan A. Miller (Tiger Clan/Seminole) claims that White, writing about tribes whose descendants are alive today, “ignores the people whose history he is examining.” This approach to the writing of history resembles the familiar pattern of extraction of Native resources such as timber and minerals by outside interests that give back nothing to the Native community and move on when the easy profits play out” (101). The example shows that even ethnohistorical works written by scholars dedicated to a more truthful presentation of Indian history do not solve the problem of devising a formula for writing about the Native American past that would be satisfactory for Indian and non-Indian historians as well as descendants of the examined tribes. Indeed, the debate over the shape of Native American history remains a fierce and heated one. Apart from a recurring postulation that American Indian history should “include Indians’ versions of events” (Mihesuah, Introduction 1) questions that have to be addressed are “Who is doing the writing? Why? And what do the subjects have to say about this?” (Wilson, “American” 23). Angela Cavender Wilson (Wahpatonwan Dakota) asserts that the field of Indian history is dominated by white, male historians who rarely care what the Indians have to say about their work. The most common product of such an approach is a non-Native perception of American Indian history rather than a true grasp of the Indian past. To achieve this, Wilson claims, it is not enough to put the Indians at the center of history; it is also necessary and ethically required to consult tribal and family historians (24). Writing Indian history inevitably engages the difficult issue of ethics. Non-Native historians are repeatedly criticized for instrumentality in their approach to tribal people and their culture, as well as an evident failure to consult Native Americans on their interpretations of history, not to mention the permission to use cultural materials. The project of producing Native American history written from and sensitive to Indian cultures also calls for a redefinition of historical methodology, which has traditionally privileged the immersion in empirical data whose findings are expressed in a progressive narration. However, concepts such as chronology, linear progress and written documentation are alien and irrelevant to many Native cultures. As Vine Deloria explains in 1 For The Middle Ground, White was awarded the following awards: the Francis Parkman Prize for best book on American history (1992); the Albert J. Beveridge Award for the best English-language book on American history (1992); the Albert B. Corey Prize for the best book on U.S.-Canadian history (1992); the James A. Rawley Prize for a book on the history of race relations in the United States (1992).

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God Is Red, “the idea of keeping a careful chronological record of events never seemed to impress the greater number of tribes of the continent” (98). Some of the tribes devised a method of winter counts or calendar sticks which indicated important events in a community’s life. However, the ultimate goal of such practices was by no means an attempt at an accurate record of past events (99). The preoccupation or, some might say, obsession with chronology and progress is an exclusively Western idea, the origin of which Deloria links with Christianity and its emphasis on a need to record the experiences of humankind. In tribal religions, on the other hand, important events such as the appearance of various folk heroes who brought sacred ceremonies “did not depend on history for their verification” (103). What was of great importance was the appearance of the hero and its consequences for the community rather than its location in time. If there is a point of reference in tribal stories, it is a geographical location rather than a date (Howe 164). A source most appropriate for reconstructing Native histories, oral tradition, also used in Chinese American historiography, is at the same time one of the most distrusted methodological tools. An often cited argument against the incorporation of oral history into the study of “history proper,” as many would call it, is its unreliability and temporal nature. This view remains valid only if one refuses to reject Western privileging of the written word over the spoken one. As Peter Nabokov explains, “memorized history . . . can preserve intimacy and locality over astonishing time depths. . . . It is called into being during and for interpersonal situations. It nurtures the family and community and cosmic continuities of which it speaks” (144). Although oral history is radically different from Western history and difficult to incorporate into a historical mode of writing, it must be included in American Indian history in order to “truly gain a grasp of the field” (Wilson, “Power” 101) and be considered reliable and representative by the Native population that is an integral part of it. Contrary to popular opinions, tribal stories which build up Native American oral history are not merely entertaining tales, or amusing pieces of fiction, but central components of tribal history, culture and identity. Moreover, even if they include details of past events which are necessary for a traditional reconstruction of history, dates are the least important, as the essence of the stories is that they are “transmissions of culture upon which our [Indian] survival as a people depends” (Wilson, “Power” 111). Angela Caveneder Wilson explains that the historical and mythical stories provide moral guidelines by which one should live. They reach the young and remind the old what behavior is appropriate and inappropriate in our cultures; they provide a sense of

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Introduction identity and belonging, situating community members within their lineage and establishing their relationship to the rest of the natural world. They are a source of entertainment and of intimacy between the storyteller and the audience. These stories, much more so than the written documents by non-Indians, provide detailed descriptions about our historical players. They give us information about our motivations, our decision-making processes and about how nonmaterial, nonphysical circumstances . . . have shaped our past and our understanding of the present. They answer many other “why” and “how” questions typically asked by the academic community. (“American” 24–25)

And indeed there were scholars who, having undergone a change in the way of perceiving stories, would fully embrace Wilson’s ideas. During the 1970s and 1980s, Julie Cruikshank worked with several elders from the Yukon Territory who were interested in documenting their memories and tribal stories. In the course of the interviews, Cruikshank grew to understand how crucial stories are not only to historical understanding but to cultural constructions (6–7).2 Robin Ridington recalls his experience with the Beaver Indians of the Prophet River reserve when he was doing fieldwork in 1964, an experience which dramatically redefined his views on writing Indian histories. Like Cruikshank, Ridington approached tribal members with the same set of fixed assumptions about what kind of information he wanted to extract from them. Naturally, he dismissed stories as they “were not the scientific data [he] required” (129). During conversations with a tribal elder, Japasa, Ridington grew to understand the function and importance of stories in the tribal worldview.3 2 In 1990 Cruikshank published a book which is the fruit of her interviews with the elders: Julie Cruikshank, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders (1990). 3 Contemporary life provides examples of how important stories are and the need for a wider recognition of this fact, especially in academic circles. In the 1980s, the hereditary chiefs of two Canadian tribes in northern British Columbia, the Gitksan and the Wet’suet’en, petitioned the British Columbia Supreme Court for a settlement of land claims in a case known as Delgamuukw v. British Columbia. The foundation of their argument was oral tradition: narratives, songs, dances. Tribal representatives argued that “these ancient traditions demonstrate linkages between people and place, that they are far more than literal history” (22). The initial decision of the court from 1991 rejected the argument, but in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada reversed this ruling claiming that “the laws of evidence must be adapted in order that this kind of evidence can be accommodated and placed on an equal footing with the types of historical evidence that courts are familiar with, which largely consists of historical records” (Cruikshank 6–7).

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Recent publications testify to the change that has occurred over the last decade in the approach needed to develop a culturally sensitive historical methodology. In an attempt to escape the trap of duplicating another story of Euro-American conquest, Indian and non-Indian historians concentrate on indigenous perspectives and ontologies to better understand the multi-layered processes that shaped relationships between natives and white settlers. The histories that are thus recovered not only facilitate understanding of the past but, more importantly, illuminate the present moment. As Philip Deloria asserts “[h]istory, for Indian people and for historians of Indian North America, does not simply revolve around abstract questions of identity, ‘what happened when’ issues, or ‘objective’ assessments of the past. Rather, every historical narrative has the potential to change lives and policies in the contemporary world” (4). Deloria’s important publications, Playing Indian (1998) and Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), pave the way for new approaches to indigenous histories and set the routes of new explorations.

Literary Histories Twentieth-century theoretical discourses deny history the status of a scientific discipline which, in an authoritative language of facts and dates, provides unmediated accounts of the past. As a product of a nineteenth-century positivist approach, history so conceived was based on a methodology of thorough immersion in empirical data in the form of written documents, which produced an objective account of past events. Nineteenth-century historians thus believed that as long as they remained true to the facts, history would produce knowledge about the past equal in precision and objectivity to other exact sciences. However, as Hayden White once pointed out, most of them “did not realize that the facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is—in its representation—a purely discursive one” (Tropics 125, emphasis in the original). Thus, White demonstrates that the work of the historian does not merely amount to recording facts; rather, it is implicated in and cannot be divorced from the processes of selection, organization and constructing a narrative, and these inevitably convey ideologically-influenced views on the shape and message of history. “What historical discourse produces,” writes White, “are interpretations of whatever information about and knowledge of the past the historian commands” (Figural 2, emphasis in the original). History then does not appear in its “pure form” but is accessible only by way of language and “our experience of history is indissociable from our

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discourse about it; this discourse must be written before it can be digested as history; and this experience, therefore, can be as various as the different kinds of discourse met with the history of writing itself” (Figural 1). Furthermore, this discursive construction of history invalidates the Enlightenment view of treating fiction as the antithesis of history. Unrestrained by the demands of realistic representation, fiction was seen to represent everything that history was not: an expression of the forces of imagination encapsulated in a literary form. However, what such a distinction ignored was the fact that both discourses, literary and historical, organize events into narratives, which inevitably involves the use of literary conventions. As White has observed, no given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a story.  .  .  . The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motif repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like—in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play. (Tropics 84)

No historical events are intrinsically tragic, comic, romantic or ironic, as White explains in his ground-breaking Metahistory. Instead, it is the historian who sees them as such and “emplots” them accordingly. This approach to historical discourse acknowledges that narrativity, previously strictly associated with fictional discourse, is in fact its most natural mode of representation and production of meaning. It is therefore unsurprising that the topic of narrativity in history has provoked extraordinarily intense debates which have engaged critics and historians representing diverse views. Whether rejected by the French Annales group as a non-scientific and ideological strategy, approached from a hermeneutical perspective by Paul Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer, embraced as a natural and efficient kind of historical explanation by, for instance, Louis O. Mink, or studied in all its manifestations as one of many discursive codes by, among others, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, narrativity allows to situate history among other non-historical discourses and reconceptualize it as an interdisciplinary endeavor. As H. Aram Veeser has observed, such an approach, enthusiastically embraced by New Historicists, “has given scholars new opportunities to cross the boundaries separating history, anthropology, art, politics, literature, and economics” (Introduction ix). These new opportunities are also explored in literature, which actively engages in and reflects on the debates on the constructedness of historical

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representation. One of the examples of writing which consciously questions the authoritative status of history and “revisits it imaginatively” is Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction.” In defining “historiographic metafiction,” Hutcheon explores the same topics that are of concern to historians: the discursive structure of history, the transparency of representation, objectivity and the neutrality of the presented material (A Poetics 92). The reconceptualization of history as undertaken in literature also serves revisionary, corrective and therapeutic purposes. For instance, in Testimony, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub assert that in the face of the “yet unresolved crisis of history” surrounding the Holocaust, “literature becomes a witness, and perhaps the only witness, to the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated, witness in the given categories of history itself” (xviii, emphasis in the original). Nancy J. Peterson, in Against Amnesia, examines writings of contemporary ethnic women in which the past is approached as a wound and trauma that can be healed by reconstructing history through literature and rectifying the harms caused by historical misrepresentation or a complete lack of representation. Peterson’s project exemplifies how contemporary shifts in theory of history allow marginalized people to reenter or enter for the first time, a field which in the past consistently refused to give voice to their perspective. Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko belong to this group of minority writers who discover that in order to narrate the stories and experiences of their lives and communities, it is necessary to adopt the role of a historian who would recover the lost histories and produce counter-histories informed by their unique perspectives. The strategies employed in the analyzed texts revolve around such tools of historical reconstruction as language, visual images, maps, memory and historical and literary genres which are artistically remodeled from intrinsically Western or Anglo-American inventions into sophisticated forms of alternative histories. Retold Stories, Untold Histories is thus divided into five chapters which examine each form of engagement in and intervention into the historical discourse. In chapter one the focus falls on the process of devising a language capable of articulating concerns about traditional historical representation. An attempt is made to illustrate this as a progression from silence, through the mastery of the skill of translation of minority and dominant languages to the act of appropriation of the dominant language and its subversive employment to produce counter-histories. The birth of historical consciousness and the recognition of the need to break the silences that envelop ethnic histories constitute the first step in a progression from silence to the formation of historical voice. Since Kingston’s and Silko’s

14

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protagonists often inhabit multilingual and multicultural spaces they are involved in the continuous processes of negotiating and “juggling” languages. Similar to the process of ethnic identity formation, which entails a balance between disparate cultures, the language of historical articulation is marked by both languages and emerges as a product of linguistic and cultural translations. The final stage of coming to voice in the historical debate is the conscious and deliberate act of language appropriation, which allows the writers to offer alternative interpretations of historical events. Chapter two, “History in Photographic Images,” examines photography as a tool for historical representation often used to serve the dominant ideology and how it is subversively reemployed by Kingston and Silko. However, their discussion of the use of photography as a tool of historical reconstruction does not conclude with the mere acknowledgement of “visual manipulation” on the part of the dominant culture, often the main theme in various analyses of photography’s participation in the creation of historical narratives. Instead, Kingston and Silko appropriate this Western technology to produce “counter-images” which are framed according to their needs and sensitivities. Since their approach to photography oscillates between a belief in its documentary value and a well-grounded mistrust, they neither uncritically embrace photography as a method of authorizing “their past” nor decisively reject it as ideologically suspicious. Rather, they transform photography into an effective strategy of resistance to stereotypical images of Chinese and Native Americans. Chapter three examines how Kingston and Silko employ the concept of maps and mapping space as an intervention into the narrative of national history. The theoretical framework for this discussion is provided by J. B. Harley’s analysis of the mechanism of the production of meaning in cartography. Regarding maps as a form of cultural text, Harley posits that like all discursive productions, maps are never “innocent” and are always implicated in the processes of asserting and exercising power. Turning theory into practice, Kingston and Silko appropriate and deconstruct the language and conventions of cartography to produce meanings alternative to the ones offered by Anglo-American maps. If traditional maps are used by empires to mark their territories, Kingston’s map depicts space as belonging to and shaped by the dispossessed, namely Chinese Americans who historically were forbidden to own land. Silko, on the other hand, deconstructs the concept of national borders, as her map illustrates their artificiality and inability to regulate and control the continuous and unrestricted movement of people and ideas. By demonstrating that, to a great extent, the production of meaning depends on the cartographer, both writers challenge the official version of history as the only legitimate one and suggest alternative trajectories of history’s spatial movement.

Introduction

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Chapter four examines the limitations and possibilities of memory as a strategy for recovering the lost, forgotten and suppressed histories. As an unverifiable source, memory is treated with suspicion and caution in historical studies. However, in the case of minority histories, large parts of which were unrecorded or erased, memory often emerges as the only recourse to the past. Kingston and Silko’s interest in and preoccupation with memory is to a large extent a manifestation of an “obligation” to remember the past which is imposed by the elders on younger generations. Thus, memory has to be protected from the forces of forgetting, regardless of the fact that success here can only be partial. In accessing the past through memory, its fallibility and unreliability may be seen as a hindrance to the project. On the contrary, since memory cannot fill all the gaps in an incomplete historical record, imagination is conflated with memory to produce meaningful narratives of the past. Thus, the issue of the veracity of such historical representations becomes marginal and it is the active engagement in the writing, rewriting and remembering of the past that gives agency to marginalized groups. In Chapter five, I analyze how Kingston and Silko adopt and transform one historical and two literary genres, the chronicle, autobiography, and novel, to again intervene in the master narrative. While it is generally acknowledged that ethnic literary productions depart from and escape the Western division into genres, I argue that these transformations are dictated by the search for a form that would become a vehicle for the dissemination of ethnic histories and at the same time encapsulate and remain sensitive to ethnic values and traditions. Western genres, as products of different histories and sensitivities, are unable to do so. By crossing and recrossing genre boundaries, not only do Kingston and Silko question the rationale behind constructing divisions between history and literature, fact and fiction, genres and authentic and inauthentic experiences but they also point to the fluid and unfixed character of concepts such as identity, ethnicity, narrative and memory.

16

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Interrupting Historical Silences

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Chapter ONE Interrupting Historical Silences: In Search of a Language of Historical Articulations In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (59). This powerful statement locates language at the core of the identity formation processes and identifies it as instrumental in the act of articulating one’s subjectivity. Anzaldúa also rightly points out that language acquisition is never a solely linguistic process: with language one acquires a culture, worldview and history. Speaking a language provides a sense of belonging to a community and becomes a declaration of allegiance to its other speakers. Being unable to speak a language, on the other hand, is a marker of difference and stimulates an exclusion process which clearly divides the world between “us” and “them” categories. Inevitably, language is entangled in practices of exercising power which give voice to one group while silencing another. As Trinh T. Minh-ha points out, language “partakes in the white-male-is-the-norm ideology and is used predominantly as a vehicle to circulate established power relations” (6). Patriarchal cultures classify speech, along with writing, as distinctively male attributes that women are not meant to possess and use as tools of self-articulation. Likewise, postcolonial critics claim that “[o]ne of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language” which allows for the establishment and preservation of colonial order (Ashcroft et al. 6). In the context of asymmetrical power relations, it is the language of the male/white/imperial center that becomes a medium through which concepts such as “truth,” “norm” and “reality” are defined. One of the most visible manifestations of such linguistic dominance is the act of bestowing new names on colonized people and places which results in linguistic and physical displacement of the original tenants.

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The recognition of the power-related implications inherent in the mastery of the language of the dominant group has not been lost on various marginalized groups in the United States. For the early twentieth-century immigrants the moment of language acquisition marked the beginning of life as an American—a life in a new country, culture and, as the subtitle of Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical Lost in Translation explains, “a Life in a New Language.” Mary V. Dearborn, in her study on gender and ethnicity in American literature by women, Pocahontas’s Daughters, emphasizes that speaking English, preferably without an accent, meant the possibility of full integration into American society. For such immigrant writers as Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska or Martha Ostenso, familiarity with English allowed them to insert their foreign selves into American rhetoric and expand the definition of an American so that they were no longer excluded (Dearborn 71–96). The situation is different, however, when the new language is at the same time the language of the oppressor. Joy Harjo, a Muscogee/Creek poet, addresses this problem in the 1997 anthology of literature by Native American women, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Many of us at the end of the century are using the “enemy language” with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves during these troubled times. Some of us speak our native languages as well as English . . . Some speak only English . . . because the use of our tribal languages was prohibited in schools and in adoptive homes, or these languages were suppressed to near extinction by casualty of culture and selfhood. (21)

However, instead of lapsing into silence, Harjo nevertheless chooses articulation even if in the “enemy’s language” since “to speak at whatever cost, is to become empowered rather than victimized by destruction” (21). Echoing Simon Ortiz’s seminal essay “Towards a National Indian Literature,” Harjo claims that the final product of this “reinventing” is a language that is no longer at the colonizers’ service, but carries emblems of Native cultures and emerges as an alternative to silence and an unwilling adoption of the vocabulary of the dominant group. A similar predicament of linguistic entrapments marks the experience of Asian immigrants in the United States. The population of the first Chinese immigrants consisted mostly of uneducated peasants fleeing difficult economic conditions in their country (Yin 12–16). Acquiring English quickly became a matter of necessity rather than choice and often, due to dramatic differences between English and Chinese, it was a long and laborious process. Asian immigrants’ struggles with English constituted a source of humor for generations of Americans. Chinese English became an

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object of ridicule because of its “high-pitched, sing-song tones, tortured syntax, the confounding of l’s and r’s, the proliferation of ee-endings and the random omission of articles and auxiliary verbs,” as illustrated by a popular cliché of Chinese laundry workers’ saying “no tikee, no washee” (Kim 12). For later generations of Asian Americans, like for instance Maxine Hong Kingston’s Wittman Ah Sing (Tripmaster Monkey), who is a fifth generation Chinese American, the relationship toward English is not devoid of ambivalence. It is not the lack of fluency in English that poses problems but the necessity to mediate between Chinese, often spoken at home, and English, the language of the public sphere.1 Hence, English, as the language spoken in a multi-cultural context, does not function as a finite store of grammar rules and vocabulary but undergoes a constant process of modification as it is marked by the ethnicities of its speakers. Historically, for Chinese and Native Americans, English is implicated in the mechanism of silencing and erasing subjectivity. American historical narratives are replete with images of “yellow peril,” “coolies” and “vanishing Indians” which endlessly perpetuate ethnic and racial stereotypes. Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko develop a keen awareness of both the important limitations and promising possibilities involved in the use of language that renders their groups invisible and inaudible in the first place but whose mastery facilitates participation in the mainstream culture. In an interview with Elaine Jahner, Silko expresses her belief in the vitality of English in the following words: “English is a bastard language, inherently open and expansive. I love its expansiveness and inclusiveness. . . . Look at the many people who have created a form of English that is their own . . . You can arrange and rearrange the language” (48). In a similar vein Kingston explains that when writing The Woman Warrior and China Men, she “was claiming the English language” to tell a story of Chinese Americans (Rabinowitz 72). Kingston’s and Silko’s agenda of illuminating their characters’ linguistic entanglements depends heavily on demonstrating how English, “the enemy’s language,” becomes altered and transformed when used in ethnically diverse contexts which, in the long run, leads to the conscious and deliberate use of the language as a tool of empowerment. The process of “marking English with difference” progresses gradually and takes place in several dimensions. First of all, it entails recognition of the superiority assigned to speech in Western culture, as elucidated by 1 According to Edna Paisano, in 1993 eighty percent of Chinese Americans spoke Chinese at home (qtd. in Cutter 228).

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Jacques Derrida in his early “Signature Event Context.” While in many non-Western traditions the relation of silence and speech is not always built on direct oppositions, in the American context it is, and the protagonists of Kingston’s and Silko’s works, in order to write themselves into American history, have to shed speechlessness as a synonym for passivity and invisibility and become articulate. Second, they have to situate themselves in relation to dominant English, “englishes,” to use Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s term,2 and “foreign” languages, such as Keresan and Chinese. Not only does this process involve appreciating bilingualism and biculturalism but it also calls for the mastery of translation between two different languages and thus cultures. The final stage demonstrates complete appropriation when “the enemy’s language” emerges as a vibrant medium for defining ethnic subjectivity and deconstructing a dominant historical discourse.

Historical Silences The silences that envelop the protagonists of Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Leslie Marmon Silko’s works take on different forms and are the result of manifestly discriminatory practices present in the culture. In Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, silence/speech dynamics reflect the ideological agenda of privileging articulateness over reticence as an expression of American individualism. Maxine, the narrator,3 receives her lesson on the superiority of speech early in her life when her silence is qualified as zero IQ and results in her “flunking kindergarten.”4 Her growing up is informed by differences in the cultural evaluation of silence: in Chinese culture, “silence had to do with being a Chinese girl” whereas in America speechlessness is equated with absence of intellect and personality (WW 150). The forces struggling to shape Maxine’s identity are her mother’s talk-story in Chinese, and a desire and anxiety to fit into the American context. In time, Maxine comes to the realization that “without the discursive power of language there can be no communication, no knowing, no identity, no self as a linguistically constituted 2 In Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin define “english” as a form of English transformed in the colonial context and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world. 3 Following the method applied in literary criticism of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men, I use “Maxine” as a reference to the textual figure, not Kingston herself, and treat the narrators of the two books as one character. 4 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (London: Picador, 1981) 164. Subsequent quotations marked WW.

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subject” (Goellnicht, “Father” 125), and learns how to mediate between her Chinese heritage and the American cult of individualism.5 Similarly, in Native American cultures, the relationship between speech and silence differs considerably from the Western pattern. Speech and silence do not stand in opposition but complement each other, as is expressed in N. Scott Momaday’s words: “one does not necessarily speak in order to be heard. . . . In the Indian world, a word is spoken or a song is sung not against, but within the silence” (Momaday, The Man 16). Thus, silence and speech are linked in a relationship that does not mirror the concept of binary oppositions. Moreover, as Paula Gunn Allen explains: Traditional tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic than not, and they are never patriarchal. . . . In tribal gynocratic systems a multitude of personality and character types can function positively within the social order because the systems are focused on social responsibility rather than on privilege and on the realities of the human constitution rather than on denial-based social fictions to which human beings are compelled to conform by power individuals within the society. (2–3)

Consequently, language avoids being implicated in practices of discrimination and oppression. Instead, access to language is granted regardless of tribal position or gender and the choice of not using it, of remaining silent, is not a marker of deficiency of agency. There are silences, however that, due to their special nature, have to be confronted and fought at whatever cost. These are historical silences which result in grossly limited participation in shaping the picture of American national history. Such silences, Kingston and Silko agree, have to be broken in order to forcefully reassert one’s right to historical representation which has been dominated by mainstream ideologies that, despite drawing a picture of multicultural America, are often aimed at preserving racial and cultural purity in defining the shape of American historical experience. While silences in The Woman Warrior are involved in the process of subjectivity formation in the gendered context of a mother-daughter relationship, China Men, a companion to Kingston’s first book, resists speechlessness in order to recreate the past of Maxine’s male family 5 My goal here is the exploration of one dimension of silence, namely historical silence, which does not exhaust the motif of speechlessness in Kingston’s works. For an extensive analysis of the silence motif see, e.g., King-Kok Cheung, “‘Don’t Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior” (163–189); King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (1993).

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members and, in a wider context, all male Chinese immigrants to the United States. Initially, the reconstruction process turns out to be virtually impossible to initiate. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine has to learn how to benefit from her mother’s never-ending and confusing stories; in China Men, Maxine has to deal with her father, who chooses silence as a strategy for surviving in America. According to Carol E. Neubauer, an important difference between the two books lies in the availability and abundance of material: for The Woman Warrior, Kingston possessed limitless material from her mother, whereas for China Men, all she had at her disposal was a silent father (18). Regardless of how many times Maxine bombards her father with burning questions about the past, all she ever receives in return is a refusal to speak: “You say with the few words and silences: No stories. No past. No China.”6 As David Leiwei Li points out, the father’s silence does not have its source in Chinese patriarchal culture but may be a result of “the exclusion law and the fever of the Red Scare that silenced Chinese Americans” (Li, Imagining 59). Fighting the father’s silence is thus less an expression of gendered subjectivity than it is a precondition for the formation of historically circumscribed American identity. The father’s insistence on continual silence has its sources first in the experience of discriminatory treatment brought about by his immigrant status, and second, in the inability to advance in the social hierarchy as a rightful citizen. BaBa’s American experience is one of economic exploitation, racial exclusion and finally emasculation, which even further emphasizes the perception of Chinese immigrants as a racial and cultural Other. The opening story of China Men, “On discovery,” is borrowed and adapted from an eighteenth-century Chinese novel, Li Ju-Chen’s Flowers in the Mirror, which King-Kok Cheung describes as “probably one of the first ‘feminist’ novels written by a man” (“The Woman Warrior” 113). The story features Tang Ao, who sets off for the Gold Mountain but, unexpectedly, is captured in the land of women and is forced to adopt female attributes. His bound feet, made up face, pierced ears and sewn lips, in contrast to the usual association with the dynamics of patriarchal cultures, become metaphors for the situation of Chinese men in America, where their masculinity is questioned, negated and ridiculed. On entering America the same transformation is experienced by BaBa who, separated from his wife, seeks contacts with white women. However, his awkward flirtation in broken English, “You like come home with me? Please?,” inevitably ends with humiliating refusals: “No honey. . . . No” (CM 67). 6 Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (London: Picador, 1981) 18. Subsequent quotations marked CM.

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The episode illustrates the mechanisms of exclusion—legislative bans on the entry of Chinese wives into the United States and anti-miscegenation laws—which created the image of Chinese men as emasculated and asexual. In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe demonstrates how these juridical practices produced a “technology” of simultaneous racialization and gendering of Asian American subjects, which oppressed Maxine’s father and other Chinese immigrants (Lowe 11). BaBa’s silence is doubly disturbing as it is an expression of his humiliation and, second, it contrasts sharply with his Chinese destiny to become a scholar. At the party organized to celebrate his birth, BaBa received Four Valuable Things: ink, an inkslab, paper and a brush, which were meant to become his future attributes. Interestingly, all four objects are inextricably connected with language, verbal expression and articulateness, which stand in sharp opposition to silence. In China, BaBa’s destiny was to become fluent in the art of words, but in America his education and learning are undervalued and ignored: despite his refined taste and artistic literacy, BaBa, unable to speak English, is perceived as one of many illiterate Chinese immigrants employed in laundries and gambling houses. The political and cultural consequence of BaBa’s silence is the absence of a historical voice narrating the Chinese American presence in the national history. As it is impossible to retrieve the voice of the constantly silent father, Maxine proposes her version of the past as a counter-text to the grand narrative of American conquest and expansion, which situates Chinese Americans in the position of undesirable (and yet economically indispensable) aliens. Her technique, so well developed in The Woman Warrior, is based on the affirmation of language, speech and stories which facilitate the transition from silence (and invisibility) to articulateness (and cultural and political participation). The story of Bak Goong, the great-grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains, who decides to go to Hawai’i in order to work on sugar cane plantations, demonstrates the mechanisms of breaking historical silence and reshaping American history. Bak Goong, lured by riches promised by the agents of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, leaves for Hawai’i to improve the impoverished life of his family as well as to satisfy his insatiable hunger for adventure. The great-grandfather, like Brave Orchid, Maxine’s mother, is a “talk addict” who uses stories as a source of strength, hope and consolation. Exhausted by the hardships of plantation work and frustrated with degrading conditions, Bak Goong resorts to stories as a source of comfort and consolation. Although his stories add color to the lives of other Chinese workers, they are not merely a form of entertainment. Bak Goong feels an urge to keep talking about

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life on the plantation as it seems to be his sole way of preserving his sanity in difficult conditions: “He needed to cast his voice out to catch ideas” (CM 101). The great-grandfather, unlike BaBa, has to give voice to his thoughts since silence threatens the erasure of subjectivity and, consequently, insanity.7 Bak Goong’s reliance on stories is a manifestation of heightened sensitivity to words and language. The great-grandfather finds pleasure in listening to other workers and distinguishing sounds and variations of different languages: “One group spoke the language so queerly that he laughed out loud. He imitated their thl sound blown out of the mouth with big, airy cheeks and spit. . . . Sputtering and spitting as he shouted out the four, which has that thl, he called out the rhythm for lifting and hauling” (CM 95, emphasis in the original). Therefore, it is Bak Goong who is the most severely affected by the ban on speaking during work imposed by the overseers: “Shut up. Go work. Chinaman, go work. You stay go work. Shut up” (CM 102). His frustration intensifies until, one evening, the great-grandfather decides to rebel against the silencing rule and tells his companion a story that inspires a rebellion. There was a Chinese king who was awaiting the birth of a male heir. When the baby boy finally came into the world, the royal couple, to their horror, discovered that the prince had cat ears. The parents decided to keep the fact a secret and the prince grew his hair long so that no one would see his shameful ears. After many years, the king, tired and frustrated with keeping the secret, went to a winter field and dug a hole into which he shouted his secret: “The king’s son has cat ears” (CM 117). In the spring, when the grass grew high and the wind blew through it, the people heard the words and discovered the royal secret. The men listening to Bak Goong were mesmerized by the story. The next day, they dug a large hole for themselves and finally broke their silences addressing their families and revealing their secrets: “Hello down there in China!”; “I miss you. What are you doing right now?”; “I’ve been working hard for you, and I hate it”; “I lost all my money again”; “I’ve become an opium addict” (CM 118). From the day of the “shout party,” Bak Goong ignores the silence rule and freely expresses his thoughts, knowing that in two years, the cane will grow high and the stories will be disseminated by the wind. Thus, the act of breaking the silence, apart from introducing a gesture of rebellion against the 7 In The Woman Warrior, the motif of silence as a marker of insanity is illustrated by the example of two protagonists: Moon Orchid, Maxine’s mother’s sister who, unable to defend herself verbally, dies in an asylum; and Crazy Mary, a Chinese girl from the neighborhood, who shares the fate of Moon Orchid.

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overseers and the imperialist power, becomes an active form of claiming historical recognition and voicing criticism of the oppressive system. The story about Bak Goong is preceded by Maxine’s recollection of her stay in Hawai’i.8 One day she visited an island which in shape resembled the hat of a Chinese worker and, to her surprise, it was indeed called Chinaman’s Hat. Interestingly, it is not only the name of the island that speaks about Chinese men’s presence: Hawaiian people have a name for the Chinese—Paké—“which is their way of pronouncing Bak-ah, Uncle” (CM 90). Maxine swam to the island, enjoyed its beautiful landscape and listened to the sound of the land: The land sings. . . . It’s a tribute to the pioneers to have a living island named after their work hat. I have heard the land sing. I have seen the bright blue streaks of spirits whisking through the air. I again search for my American ancestors by listening in the cane. (CM 91–93)

The song in the cane tells the story of how Bak Goong and other Chinese workers, despite attempts at rendering them as silent and invisible, left a permanent mark on the Hawaiian geographical and linguistic map. Alluding to American foundational myths, Maxine refers to Chinese workers as “pioneers” since she intends to honor their role in the history of “taming the wilderness” and building a country. A closing comment on the silence motif is provided by two parables, “On Mortality” and “On Mortality Again.” In the first story, a Taoist monk offers Tu Tzu-chun a unique opportunity to obtain immortality for the whole of mankind. In one of the tests that the man has to pass he is reborn as Tu, a deaf-mute woman, married to a simple villager. When the test is almost complete, Tu breaks the rule of silence after her husband deliberately injures her child. In the second story, Maui the Trickster, the Polynesian demigod, intends to steal immortality from Hina of the Night. To achieve his goal, he orders people and animals to remain silent and when complete silence descends on the earth Maui creeps up to the sleeping Hina and enters her body through her vagina. When Maui is tunneling out of the body with Hina’s immortal heart, a bird looks at this amusing sight and laughs. Hina is awoken and Maui dies inside her body. With these two seemingly unrelated stories from distinct cultures, Kingston passes several comments on the nature of silence: it is unattainable for human beings as much as it is unnatural. Despite deliberate 8 Maxine Hong Kingston and her husband Earl moved to Hawaii in 1967, where they lived for fifteen years. Hawai’i One Summer is a collection of essays in which Kingston describes her stay on the island.

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attempts it cannot be sustained and its elimination is depicted here as a universal desire. A similar conclusion is reached in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Storyteller,” a short story that gives the title to a collection of fiction, poetry and photographs. Silences that descend on the protagonists do not belong to the Native cosmology but are imposed by the force of historical circumstances: the politics of exploitation and cultural genocide. As one of the storytellers in the story explains, white men “only come when there is something to steal. The fur animals are too difficult for them to get now, and the seals and fish are hard to find. Now they come for oil deep in the earth.”9 “Compressed within these ominous words,” as Helen Jaskoski observes, “are 400 years of colonization through trade, religious conversion, and resource extraction” (Jaskoski, Leslie Marmon Silko 15). Cultural domination is established through a violent infliction of English and a ban on using Native languages. Boarding schools become institutions of oppression which operate as an intermediate stage before “savages” become civilized and integrated citizens. Silko’s description of the school is reminiscent of the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians whose founder, Captain Richard Pratt, proudly called it a “civilization mill” (Pfister 35).10 English is the only language allowed in the school and the inability, or worse refusal, to speak it brings about punishment. When the protagonist of the story, a young Yupik girl, persists in speaking her Native language, “The dormitory matron pulled down her underpants and whipped her with a leather belt because she refused to speak English” (S 19). Since the girl knows enough English to get by unpunished by her severe teachers, her refusal to speak English appears to be a deliberate choice, a conscious decision to manifest her insistence on preserving her ethnic identity as expressed through/in language rather than evidence of her inability to learn it. Indeed, the connection between language and identity is strongly emphasized in “Storyteller.” After years of forced assimilation, the Yupik language is no longer spoken in the girl’s village: “After all those years 9 Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York: Seaver Books, 1981) 22. Subsequent quotations marked S. 10 Aunt Susie, Susan Reyes Marmon, described in Storyteller, was a Carlisle graduate. On the boarding school experience, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction (1995); Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. E Keller and Lorene Sisquoc eds., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (2006); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Brenda J. Child, Margaret L. Archuleta eds. Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879–2000; and Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Families, 1900–1940 (2000).

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away at school, they [Native inhabitants] had forgotten how to set nets in the river and where to hunt seals in the fall. . . . They said the village was too quiet. They were used to the town where the boarding school was located, with the electric lights and running water” (S 22). Thus, the loss of language is synonymous with the loss of Indian identity and, in the long run, with a loss of a culture inextricably linked to traditional life, now given up because of the white man’s intervention. The consequences of the gradual elimination of the Yupik language are also illustrated in the opening prison scene with a Yupik jailer. In order to attract his attention, the girl yells some random words in English as the man chooses not to speak in his mother tongue: “The jailer was an Eskimo, but he would not speak Yupik to her. She had watched people in other cells, when they spoke to him in Yupik he ignored them until they spoke English” (S 18, emphasis added). The assimilated jailer is a product of a “civilization mill” and, apparently, in his treatment of Yupik prisoners he adopts not only the language of the white man but his methods of forcing people into speaking English. While the jailer believes in assimilation as the only possible and convenient solution (by adopting English, he can enjoy some portion of power), the girl represents a radically different attitude. In her story, the girl goes back in time to the mysterious circumstances of her parents’ death. Allegedly, the parents were sold poisonous alcohol. The storekeeper responsible for the crime remained unpunished and therefore the story lacks an ending. The girl finally completes her story by luring the storekeeper onto thin ice; he falls through and drowns. When a courtappointed lawyer tries to convince her that the storekeeper’s death was an accident and that she could not have killed him, the girl responds: “I will not change the story, not even to escape this place and go home. I intended that he die” (S 31). According to the girl, what the lawyer offers is another lie, a manipulation and distortion of the story, but her version cannot be accepted for two main reasons: it is steeped too much in Yupik belief in the power of stories and it is not in English. Unable to impose his logical explanation on the girl, the lawyer resorts to legal and medical discourses, pronouncing the girl both ignorant of legal procedures and insane: “Tell her that she could not have killed him that way. . . . She could not have planned that. . . . I will explain to the judge that her mind is confused” (S 31). In the girl’s story, there is no place for ambiguity, there is only the truth that maintains her identity and integrity whereas the lawyer, doing all he can to defend his client, has to ignore the girl’s perspective and interpret the event as mental confusion (Fitz 63). The insistence on telling her story is equivalent to a refusal to remain “historically silent” and an attempt to render her parents

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visible individuals in the history of oppression. Here, like in China Men, historical silence is demonstrated as absence from the grand narrative of history which adopts only one perspective. Kingston and Silko, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyvocality, endow historical discourse with a dialogic dimension and call for a politics of inclusiveness which more fully expresses the multicultural face of American society.

Linguistic Borderlands: English, Native Languages, and “Chinese English” In his 1905 lecture, The Question of Our Speech, Henry James criticized the immigrant population—the Dutch, the Irish, the Italian, etc.—for “playing, to their heart’s content, with the English language, or in other words, dump[ing] their mountain of promiscuous material into the foundations of the American” (James qtd. in Huang 129). Their “grunting, squealing, barking and roaring of animals” polluted the language and destroyed its beauty (129). Such insistence on the purity and centrality of standard English aims at marginalizing all languages which emerge at the intersections of the dominant and minority cultures. As a result of this linguistic clashing, all departures from standard English, all “englishes,” are classified as impure and abominable. “englishes” and foreign languages of ethnic minorities are unwelcome as they are confusing, puzzling, even threatening to the linguistic and political status quo, as Anzaldúa aptly demonstrates: “Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje, the subject of your brula. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified” (58). Her vivid example reminds us that linguistic intersections involving multiplicity of languages are sites of vibrant cultural productions and acts of resistance which dethrone English from its position of power. As protagonists of Kingston’s and Silko’s works often struggle with their bicultural origins, linguistic borderlands are inevitably the settings of many of their literary texts. Native and Chinese American characters inhabit a world where English is the dominant language and all its variants or other languages are deemed inferior to and unsuitable for mainstream discourse. In this situation of institutionalized (linguistic) inequality, some of Kingston’s and Silko’s protagonists apply two tactics of linguistic survival: one involves a flat refusal to accept English and all aspects of the dominant culture whereas the other is informed by unbridled enthusiasm for everything English. Neither ensures success and full participation in the cultural mainstream and both may lead to

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the loss of ethnic identity. There is a third group, however, who understands how linguistic/cultural survival can be ensured: it is through the skill of “juggling” English and minority languages that ruptures in the dominant linguistic/ideological system can be located and one’s bicultural identity preserved. Due to dramatic differences between the English and Chinese, for Chinese immigrants the necessity of learning English entails a change in conceptualizing the world. Chinese, as Linda Ching Sledge writes, is pictographic and homonymic, and unlike English, which is based on the Latin alphabet, heavily depends on visual symbols and specific contexts, “continually pointing away from the visible surface of linguistic signs to meanings lying deeper than the signs themselves” (Sledge, “Oral Tradition” 147). Therefore, English language lessons leave a Chinese student frustrated and disconcerted. In China Men, Maxine describes her mother’s engulfing sense of confusion when forced to learn English: The little h’s looked like chairs, the e’s like lidded eyes, but those words were not chair and eye. “Do you speak English?” He [the father] read and translated. “Yes, I am learning to speak English better.” “I am fine, and you?” My mother forgot what she learned from one reading to the next. The words had no crags, windows, or hooks to grasp. No pictures. The same a, b, c’s for everything. (CM 240, emphasis in the original)

Conceptually, the difference between the languages as well as American and Chinese realities is unbridgeable. The mother cannot associate sounds with letters and words with meanings, which creates a sense of linguistic and cultural isolation.11 Therefore, as her individual strategy of survival, she chooses not to enter the dominant discourse but to occupy its margins. At the opposite end of the spectrum there is Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Wittman is a fifth-generation Chinese American, raised in San Francisco and educated at Berkeley, who theoretically does not share the linguistic predicament of his immigrant ancestors. Yet, while it is true that Wittman’s mother tongue is English, Chinese and “the Chinese English” of Chinatown have had a profound effect on his identity formation. Wittman is immersed in Western culture, history and literature but at the same time he is trapped in a love-hate relationship with his Chinese heritage. When Wittman asks himself existential questions, he 11 In A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), Xiaolu Guo, a contemporary Chinese writer, in a convincing and humorous way, reproduces the process of learning English.

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relies on English literature to provide appropriate quotations—“To be, or not to be”—but at the same time, he is aware that his Chineseness is inseparable from himself as a person and an artist. “Chinese English,” despite its clumsiness and ungrammaticality, is a lively and exuberant language which is constantly undergoing a process of transition as its new users, recent Chinese immigrants, enrich and modify its grammar and vocabulary. It is the language that Wittman was born into and absorbs through his skin: Eucalyptus, pine, and black oak—those trees together is how you tell that you’re in Northern California and not Los Angeles. The last time he had walked along the ocean, he ended up at the zoo. . . . “Fu-li-sah-kah Soo.” He said “Fleishhacker Zoo” to himself in Chinatown language, just to keep a hand in, so to speak, to remember and so to keep awhile longer words spoken by the people of his brief and dying culture.12

Wittman speaks a cross-cultural language that is a mixture of the various social worlds in which he moves and it reflects how his bicultural heritage and ethnic identity are in a constant need of being negotiated in a multicultural context. And yet, Wittman is often embarrassed at his “Chinese English”: “Where does this diction come from out of his Chinese mouth that was born with American English as its own, its first language?” (TM 238). According to Jeanne R. Smith, “Wittman is much more willing to play with the language of the new Chinese Americans in his own head than he is to associate with them” (“Cross-cultural” 338). He claims to despise “Chinese English” since it is generally perceived as the language of kung fu movies, Charlie Chan and F.O.B.s, or in other words, of the “Oriental.” On the other hand, Wittman is well aware that the English that he speaks and claims as his first language can be and often is used as a tool in the marginalization of the less privileged, including Asian immigrants. It is at the Unemployment Office that Wittman discovers that English is not only the language of Shakespeare but, first of all, that it is an instrument of exercising power through which social hierarchies are established. The office is a site of practicing racial and social inequalities which are reflected in the privileging of English and the discarding of “englishes” as inferior. Immediately after crossing the threshold, Wittman is faced with strategic disinformation applied against the unemployed, based on their inability speak the dominant language fluently: 12 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Vintage International, 1990) 6. Subsequent quotations marked TM.

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“No information booth or posted instructions to help him out. . . . The unemployed, his fellow men, waited before windows marked A, B, C, and D, and 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30” (TM 224). Information is scarce, help is rarely provided and the office employees are unsympathetic to confused applicants. Equally unfriendly and intimidating is the official language of the institution: English. It is the language of formal and legal discourse which is deliberately made complex and thus unintelligible for non-native speakers. First, the applicants have to fill out an application form with convoluted questions of complex grammar: Number Four was “one of those negative subjunctive questions that if you stop to think about it too much, your brain gets confused, doubling back, turning around. ‘Was there any reason you could not have worked full-time each workday?’” (TM 233). Second, each applicant’s individuality is reduced to basic personal information, such as the first and last names or the date of birth, preferably, confirmed by “an official picture i.d.” (TM 228). Third, the applicants, instead of receiving help, are intimidated with the language of serious threats, absolute prohibitions, and legal consequences (spelled in capital letters): On the cover of the yellow handbook, there was a box around all caps: PENALTY FOR FALSE STATEMENT—UNDER THE LAW IT IS A MISDEMEANOR TO WILLFULLY MAKE A FALSE STATEMENT. CONVICTION IS PUNISHABLE BY FINE OR IMPRISONMENT OR BOTH. (TM 230–31)

A similar language is employed in a film, screened for the unemployed as a prerequisite for obtaining benefits, on how to prepare for a job interview. As Wittman bitterly observes, in a patronizing language of imperative sentences, the film offends and humiliates the viewers in every possible way: “Take a bath or shower, Trim nails and cuticles, Shake hands firmly. .  .  . Do wear clean linen. . . . BRUSH your teeth. COMB your hair” (TM 246). As a dominant and domineering language, the Standard English of government employees and legal documents is used to patronize, intimidate and belittle its less fluent users who thus seem more prone to succumbing to its power. In situations where Standard English asserts its power, it is resourcefulness that enables the less fluent and literate to devise strategies for dethroning the linguistic ruler. Mrs. Chew, whom Wittman meets at the Unemployment Office, serves as an example of strong and resourceful opposition to the domination of English. The elderly lady has been employed at the Fruitvale Cannery but, because of an injury of her right hand, she is unable to work. She excels at making the most of the

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social welfare system and attempts to profit from both the unemployment benefits and Workman’s Compensation that she is entitled to due to her injury. The intended action is, naturally, punishable by law, but not according to Mrs. Chew. After years of being “the exactest Chinese lady in the cannery,” she feels the government owes her the money (TM 228). At the same time, the character is by no means naïve enough to think that the government is willing to grant her the benefits and therefore, over the years, she devised a pattern of perfect answers to be provided at an interview, without even bothering to decipher their meaning, as she explains to the astonished Wittman: I teach you. Learn. You ready? Remember these ten answers: ‘No.’ ‘None.’ Number Two is not ‘No.’ The right answer is ‘None.’ Don’t forget, ‘None.’ That’s the tricky part right there. I start over, okay? ‘No.’ ‘None.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ Always answer like that. One more time, okay? ‘No.’ ‘None.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ (TM 231)

Mrs. Chew’s strategy, apparently effective as this is not the first time she has applied for the benefits, demonstrates how it is possible to outwit a complex formula devised to confuse and discourage applicants. Here, the discursive system is destabilized by its very language, thus revealing ruptures in a seemingly coherent structure. Mrs. Chew’s second subversive strategy involves accepting the role which the dominant system has cast her in, that of an innocuous elderly Chinese lady, speaking broken English. Wittman is convinced that Mrs. Chew does not need a translator but she insists on his linguistic help. When the government employee informs her that due to some legislative changes she may not obtain the money she is applying for, Mrs. Chew chooses to remain oblivious to the legal procedures and fake illiteracy: “‘Tell her I don’t understand English.’ She meant she didn’t like what she was hearing. . . . Sometimes if you act stupid, you get your way” (TM 232). Mrs. Chew acts according to the rule of Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, who claims that “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat” (Tzu). What Mrs. Chew, and eventually Wittman, rely on is the fact that representatives of the dominant system never bother to know their “enemy” and thus make a cardinal mistake in the “art of war.” Chinese American applicants, like Mrs. Chew, who need a translator to “do the English-speaking,” are perceived as “harmless” and invisible in the American social, political and economic context. Thus, unnoticed, ignored and unguarded, they follow their long-term strategy of relying

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on the fact that, for the majority of white Americans, all Asian people look the same and all Asian languages sound alike. Thus, when Wittman is required to provide a list of employers in order to preserve his right to the unemployment benefits, the Chinatown address is the obvious choice: Your contact is Woo Ping Sao or Go Wing Mao or Soo Hoo Ting Bao. If Unemployment were to say, “We can’t find that name in the phone book,” you say, “You must have looked under Sao. Sao’s not his last name. Woo is his last name. We put the last name in front, see?” And if they say they did look under Woo, you say, “Oh, it must be under Ng. In my dialect, we say Ng instead of Woo.” . . . Or you find some actual name in the Chinatown phone book, and when that king of tofu hears the white Government voice on the phone, he’ll say he doesn’t speak English.” (TM 249)

In China Men the same logic is applied in the operation of the gambling house where Maxine’s father works. Every month the police organized raids on illegal businesses and yet her father never got a record because “he thought up a new name for himself every time. . . . They [the police] never found out his real names or that he had an American name at all. ‘I got away with aliases,’ he said, ‘because the white demons can’t tell one Chinese name from another or one face from another” (CM 236). Thus, the “enemy’s” ignorance and unwillingness to learn about other cultures is turned into a practical method of strategic survival. As Wittman explains, “Outsmarting the government is our heritage” (TM 249). Linguistic dominance takes yet another form in the case of the Native American population. The belief in the inferiority of Native languages dates back to the days of “discovery” when, as Joy Porter explains, Columbus’s feeling of cultural superiority was so overwhelming that, not understanding the language of the people he encountered, he concluded that they had no conceptual language at all and expressed concern about the need to teach them how to speak properly (“Historical” 44). Later, this view, interspersed with the ideology of Manifest Destiny and policies of forced acculturation, slowly yet inevitably led to the elimination of Native languages. It is not surprising, then, that language loss is a recurring subject in American Indian literary productions. In his analysis of how the motif of language loss and lamentation is developed in Native literature, Frederick H. White distinguishes three phases: 1) a precontact phase with diversity of ancestral languages; 2) a transitional phase in which learning English was often an individual’s conscious choice; and 3) a modern phase characterized by a marked shift to English, in which the aspect of volition becomes marginalized due to the politics of forced assimilation (83). In Leslie Marmon

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Silko’s three short stories—“Lullaby,” “Tony’s Story” and “A Geronimo Story”—it is the last phase that receives the most attention. The protagonists of Silko’s “Lullaby,” like Kingston’s Wittman, inhabit a world of competing languages and cultures which is to a large extent reminiscent of Mary Louise Pratt’s “cultural contact zones.” According to Pratt, contact zones emerge as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (Pratt 4). The asymmetrical relation between the dominant and Native cultures is illustrated by the brutality with which English erased the Indian languages from the linguistic map of the United States. In the story, Chato who, apart from Navajo, speaks English and Spanish, identifies speaking English as one of the manifestations of power and believes that his linguistic competence situates him as a participant rather than the subaltern. At first, Ayah, Chato’s wife, seems to share this view and takes pride in her husband’s skill as well as in her ability to sign her name—a feat that Chato taught her. Knowing English creates an illusion of partnership in the Indian-white relationships; however, the power that Chato believes to hold is only illusory: when the white doctors try to take away Ayah’s children claiming that they have been infected with pneumonia, Ayah, with her rudimentary knowledge of English, signs the documents authorizing the removal of her children. The moment she learns about the consequences of her act, she tries to counterbalance the force of her signature with her spoken assurance of the children’s good health. Her spoken words in Navajo are confronted with her signature in English, and as the latter is the currency of truth in the white world the children are taken away. The event redefines her relationship with her husband: Ayah “hate[s] Chato not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name” (S 47). The children, Ella and Danny, are occasionally brought home for short visits, but during the last one Ella stared at her the way the men in the bar were now staring. Ayah did not try to pick her up; smiled at her instead and spoke cheerfully to Danny. When he tried to answer her, he could not seem to remember and he spoke English with the Navajo. (S 49)

Ayah’s tragedy is caused by the loss of her children as well as the loss of language and, as a consequence, Navajo culture: because in the future, there will be no one to pass on stories to, Ayah represents the last generation to remember traditional customs. The politics of language domination

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does not allow for the coexistence of different languages in the same area, and hence Navajo has to make room for English. As Silko demonstrates, proficiency in English does not guarantee survival in the white world; all it can do is create an illusion of partnership in white-Indian relations since the transfer of power never takes place. Chato’s voluntary interaction and cooperation with the white people do not guarantee preferential treatment since Chato’s social, political and racial position excludes him from equal participation in the discourse of power. Therefore, after many years of loyal work for a white employer, trilingual Chato is unfairly dismissed from his job, to which Ayah provides a bitter commentary: “All of Chato’s fine-sounding English talk didn’t change things” (S 47). Chato may speak the language fluently but his words will never have the agency of the words of the white doctors. The world that Ayah inhabits has been contaminated by alien elements and she herself has become entrapped in the white men’s discursive system, which turns out to be destructive for her and her family as well as the whole community and culture. Leon, a protagonist of “Tony’s Story,” entertains the same illusion of linguistic equality. The story begins on August 11, the feast of San Lorenzo, and its opening scene is an excellent example of Pratt’s “contact zone” where elements from different cultures and religions converge in one Indian village. The narrator of the story, Tony, meets Leon, his childhood friend, who has just come back from the army. The peaceful scene is interrupted when suddenly and for no apparent reason a white policeman physically attacks Leon. When asked to provide an explanation for this unexpected assault, the policeman remains silent, thus demonstrating his contempt for Leon and the Indian people gathered around him. According to Helen Jaskoski, the way the policeman is described and the violent manner in which he inhabits the space “links this character with other literary and cinematic types of pure evil” and turns him into a type rather than a particular person (Leslie Marmon Silko 41). His extreme violence is matched with the way he uses his language: to offend, abuse and demonstrate his absolute power: “I don’t like smart guys, Indian. It’s because of you bastards that I’m here. They transferred me here because of Indians,” “‘You made your mistake, Indian. I’m going to beat the shit out of you.’ He raised the billy club slowly. ‘I like to beat Indians with this’” (S 126, 128). When faced with the necessity of confronting the policeman, Leon and Tony represent two contrasting approaches to dealing with the overwhelming dominance of white culture and its language. Leon has served in the U.S. army and is firmly convinced that, as the policeman’s behavior is irrational and unjust, help should be sought within federal and state institutions according to democratic rules. After another assault, Leon

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turns for help to the governor, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the state police chief—all representatives of mainstream institutions—and, imagining himself as part of a democratic system, he sincerely believes in the promises of help that he receives. However, the system operates according to the law imposed by and for a dominant group and, therefore, cannot fulfill the verbal assurances given to Leon as this would result in a disruption to the system. Another tool that Leon employs in his confrontation with the policeman is his proficiency in English. Leon, unlike Tony, speaks English and believes he understands the mechanisms of the world where it is an official language. When the policeman stops and interrogates them on the highway, Leon says about Tony: “He doesn’t understand English so good” (S 126). As Jaskoski observes, “The response is well suited to appease a powerful adversary in a colonial context: it reduces the individual characterized as language-impoverished to a condition of immaturity . . . and implicitly plays into the paternalistic colonial paradigm” (Leslie Marmon Silko 46). Leon’s response demonstrates that even though he disagrees with the way he is treated by the policeman, he understands the mechanisms of survival in the mainstream world where illiterate Indians, like Tony, have to remain silent. Ironically, Leon does not envisage the fact that the policeman does not treat him as a partner but as another illiterate Indian who is “good only when dead.” Tony, who is skilled neither in English nor in the mechanisms of the white man’s institutions, sees the policeman as the embodiment of evil or witchery that can take on different forms and whose presence dates back to ancient times. In his dream he sees the policeman in a black ceremonial mask with a long bone pointing at him. The difference in perspective between Leon and Tony is enormous and it severely disrupts communication between the two friends. Leon wants to deal with the policeman in an “English” way whereas Tony resorts to traditional solutions and brings two arrowheads as talismans. In the final scene, Tony shoots the policeman and reassures a shocked Leon: “Don’t worry, everything is O.K. now. . . . It’s killed” (S 129). The final line of the short story announces the end of the drought and victory over witchery. Such an ending demonstrates the failure of Leon’s method of dealing with the discriminatory practices employed by the representative of the dominant system. Power inequity is inherent in the dominant structure and its institutions, and the ability to speak English does not help to ameliorate the situation. Leon cannot solve the problem with the policeman according to English rules: he speaks the language but can never master it and will always remain outside the discursive system that defines the concept of equality.

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The desired balance in between interaction with a dominant group, and preservation of one’s language and culture is illustrated in “A Geronimo Story.” In this story, as in “Storyteller,” Silko links the preservation of one’s language with a way of protecting identity and assisting cultural survival, this time, however, in a more humorous context. The text, as Fitz points out, juxtaposes two contrasting worldviews: the white logic of exclusion and building hierarchies, and the Indian logic of inclusion and equality, which “debunk[s] and deflate[s] the grand narrative of Manifest Destiny and of taming the Wild West by military conquest in the Indian Wars” (Silko 94). “A Geronimo Story” is a reminiscence of Andy, a Laguna Indian, who as a young man rode with his uncle Siteye and other Laguna Regulars to help the U.S. army track down Geronimo, an Apache leader. However, the mythical warrior appears to be impossible to capture, a fact which only the Indians seem to understand; the American soldiers insist on a futile search. For Siteye and other Laguna men the trip becomes a deer hunt whereas for Andy it is an initiatory journey, a passage into manhood and a lesson in the beauty of landscape and language. In this Geronimo hunt the Laguna Regulars accompany Captain Pratt and Major Littlecock, who become central to the story’s resolution. The choice of names is a brilliant example of Silko’s subversive play with the dominant discourse. Captain Pratt’s name13 immediately evokes Captain Richard Pratt, who is known in American history as the founder and headmaster of the Carlisle boarding school. Pratt advocated the complete elimination of Native languages and coined the infamous motto “Kill the Indian and Save the Man,” which expressed his educational goals in a nutshell. In Silko’s story, Pratt is bilingual, speaks Laguna as well as English, is married to a Laguna woman and, as Siteye observes, he is “not like a white man at all” (S 215). The other man’s name, when read literally, is nothing more than a sexual slur. The comic effect that Major Littlecock’s name creates is further enhanced by his exaggerated stiffness and formality. In the kitchen scene, Captain Pratt and the Laguna men are resting after a long and futile search for Geronimo. When Major Littlecock enters, his official tone and seriousness is contrasted with the friendly atmosphere of the room. Captain Pratt suggests that all the men should sleep in the kitchen, which is more comfortable than the barn. Littlecock turns pale,

13 According to Jaskoski, the name may also point to George H. Pradt (or Pratt), who accompanied the Marmon brothers when they came to Laguna in 1800s (Jaskoski, Leslie Marmon Silko 61). See also A. LaVonne Ruoff, “Ritual and Renewal: Keres Traditions in the Short Fiction of Leslie Silko” (1978).

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gives some poor excuse and tries to get rid of the Laguna men: “You boys won’t mind sleeping with the horses, will you?” (S 221). Andy recalls that “Siteye looked intently at Major’s face and spoke to him in Laguna: ‘You are the one who has a desire for horses at night, Major, you sleep with them’” (S 221). This is the moment when Pratt has to take sides and by falsely denying his knowledge of the Laguna language and refusing to translate, Pratt chooses to position himself on the side of the Lagunas. Littlecock knows that Pratt is lying but he is determined to save face. He lectures Pratt on the usefulness of knowing Native languages: “It is very useful to speak the Indian languages fluently, Mr. Pratt. I have mastered Crow and Arapaho, and I was fluent in Sioux dialects before I was transferred here” (S 221, emphasis added). Littlecock’s approach to language manifested in his choice of words—“to master a language”—is purely practical: mastering the language enables him to efficiently implement the policy of cultural and political extermination. As he reduces language to grammar and lexicon, he is oblivious to the words’ subversive potential, a point which challenges the claim that Siteye represents the subaltern who obviously cannot speak. Jaskoski compares Littlecock to ethnographers who approached Native cultures with the same instrumentality in order to preserve languages which “were being deliberately wiped out” through the institution of boarding schools (Leslie Marmon Silko 59). The opposite attitude to language is represented by Siteye, who takes advantage of his nephew’s participation in the Geronimo hunt and, by establishing a connection between physical locations and the stories they evoke, teaches Andy a lesson in culture as well as in the aesthetic beauty of language. The scene in the kitchen teaches Andy that “[a]nybody can act violently—there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words,” and how language can become a strategic instrument in power negotiations (S 222). In “Geronimo Story” it is the Indians who use language as a powerful and efficient weapon in an English-dominated world. As Sarah E. Turner observes, Siteye’s lesson illustrates “how language shapes the world, not merely reflects it, and how it represents an alternative discourse to the white man’s stories of Indians” (126).

Linguistic/Cultural Translations In Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman, referring to her immigrant experience, describes translation as a process which inevitably involves the loss of the original meaning, impossible to render in the second language:

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the problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified. “River” in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. “River” in English is cold—a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke. (106)

According to Hoffman, the process of translation boils down to compensating for losses and preserving the meanings of the original words at all costs. Inevitably, it results in the production of a text that is both emotionally and intellectually deficient. Salman Rushdie, however, while admitting that “something always gets lost in translation,” obstinately clings “to the notion that something can always be gained [in translation]” (17). Rushdie’s assertion allows one to view translation not as the one-directional rewriting of one language in another, but rather as a process which actively involves both languages and their cultures and whose final product is a result of mediation rather than an uneasy compromise. Rushdie’s assessment serves as the opening for Martha Cutter’s Lost and Found in Translation, an insightful analysis of the trope of translation in contemporary American ethnic writing. Cutter casts translation as an affirmative process which involves “transcoding ethnicity, transmigrating the ethnic tongue into English language, and renovating the language of hegemony” (1–2). The function of the translator, in Cutter’s analysis, exceeds pure translation and the synthesis of languages and cultures, “(A+B=AB),” but instead calls for mediation and the “emergence of new and unique cultural and linguistic formulations (A+B=C)” (2). The potency of Cutter’s theory is also appreciated by Kingston and Silko in their process of discovering the language of historical representations. Translation presupposes a confidence in languages and cultures which is essential in challenging dominant historical paradigms. To talk about the past in multiple voices one has to know their languages, and this appears to be the first condition of successful cultural translation. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine discovers that transfer from Chinese to English requires more than merely linguistic skills: I could not understand “I.” The Chinese “I” has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American “I,” assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; “I” is a capital and “you” is a lower-case. (WW 150)

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The comparison of Chinese and American “I”s indicates not only the conceptual differences but also to what extent they influence the construction of identity. Eventually, when Maxine discovers her “I,” it will be neither a Chinese concept nor an American one but instead the “I” will be the product of the interplay of both heritages. As languages are rooted in cultures, translation has to be made on both linguistic and cultural levels. In The Woman Warrior it is the American school which is presented as a site where such translation is inevitable since the inability to translate is synonymous with a failure in communicating one’s agency. In the American context, pupils are expected to be strong and self-confident and therefore they are asked to read and recite individually, one by one, so that their voices are clearly audible. At Chinese school, on the other hand, children chant the verses together and their voices blend into one sound, which diminishes the importance of individuality and privileges communal ties. As Maxine was brought up according to Chinese values she is unable to switch quickly to an American model that advances the ethos of individualism. This inability to “switch” from one language to another, which in fact is switching between cultures, results in enormous tension and later in Maxine’s silencing. Instead of identifying it as cultural confusion, Maxine’s American teachers misread her silence as lack of intelligence. The skill of quick and natural language/culture translation is perceived as a desirable feature in the Chinese American community. Maxine recalls a memory of her mother cutting off a part of the fraenum skin of her tongue. Maxine is confused as she does not understand the motives behind this gruesome action: “I [Maxine’s mother] cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything” (WW 148). In her own way, Maxine’s mother, like other Chinese immigrants, understands the power of the language of ghosts (Americans). This view is even further supported by the figure of Crazy Mary, who lived in Maxine’s neighborhood. On leaving for the United States, Mary’s parents left her behind in China and sent for her only when they had saved enough money for her passage. By that time, the girl had grown up and arrived in America as a twenty-year-old woman. Her arrival in the United States comes as a bitter disappointment for her parents as the girl is “linguistically useless”: “‘We thought she’d be grown up but young enough to learn English and translate for us.’ Their other children, who were born in the US, were normal and could translate” (WW 167, emphasis added). The girl exists “between worlds,” to use Amy Ling’s phrase: she no longer belongs to China but at the same time, her inability to translate from

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Chinese to English and back to Chinese restricts her from participating in the life of the community. Crazy Mary never improves and finally ends up “locked up in the crazyhouse” (WW 168). Eventually, as she demonstrates in the last chapter of The Woman Warrior, Maxine comes to terms with her bicultural heritage and becomes a skillful translator of cultures. “A Song For A Barbarian Reed Pipe” celebrates transcultural translation as an empowering act. The section features the first Chinese poetess from second-century China, Ts’ai Yen. Captured by the Southern Hsiung-nu (the Huns) in the year 195, she had an unhappy life among her kidnappers. Even giving birth to two sons did not soothe her pain and it was only after twelve years that Ts’ai Yen finally returned home. In order to cope with her separation from her family and village, Ts’ai Yen wrote “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” in which she told of her captivity and her feelings of alienation among foreigners. In China, this popular story is associated with feelings of isolation, passivity and even self-pity. Ts’ai Yen is utterly unhappy in her new land and she cannot accept her new situation. She is unable to assimilate into her new culture and she cannot develop an emotional bond with her sons, who do not speak Chinese. In her grief and despair she emerges as a passive, self-pitying victim. What is also very important is the fact that only when she returns to her motherland does she find happiness and peace. Kingston’s version, however, lacks the tone of grief that permeates the original story. When Ts’ai Yen hears the music produced by her captors, she is deeply disturbed and moved and the experience inspires her to compose a song. One day, the barbarians hear music coming out from Ts’ai Yen’s tent and her singing voice is so high that it matches the music of the flutes. Then miracle happens: “Ts’ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about wandering forever” (WW 186). In Kingston’s version, the abducted poetess succeeds in making a connection with her captors and finding an experience that they could share despite linguistic and cultural differences. As Kingston puts it, the song “translated well” (WW 186). Moreover, it is that ability to establish connections that Kingston emphasizes in her translation of the old legend. As Debra Shostak observes, in The Woman Warrior Ts’ai Yen “stands for the exile, the unwilling immigrant, who must learn to survive in the midst of a culture—and, importantly, a language—not her own” (243). Kingston incorporates Ts’ai Yen’s linguistic isolation to speak of her own history and the history of all Chinese Americans. The inability to speak a language leads to isolation, builds up walls between

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cultures and hinders coexistence free from biases. By significantly altering the meaning of the story and transforming Ts’ai Yen into a more active and self-aware protagonist, Kingston demonstrates that the Chinese American community is not doomed to cultural alienation. Ts’ai Yen proves that it is possible to communicate her feelings across language barriers, as Kingston does in her story about cultural resolution. It must be remembered that identity, like ethnicity, is not a fixed term but rather a constant process that undergoes transformations and alternations. Therefore, Kingston’s translation reshapes and updates the traditional Chinese story of Ts’ai Yen to talk about the Chinese American identity, an identity in flux, and even though it emerges out of two competing discourses, its birth is not a story of loss but of cultural production. Kingston’s transfer of Chinese and American meanings directly corresponds to Cutter’s formula presented at the beginning of this section: (A+B=C). For Kingston, the translation process ignores concerns about the authenticity of translation or faithfulness to the source text in order to fully concentrate on translation as an act of communication between cultures. In a 1977 review of The Woman Warrior, Jeffrey Paul Chan criticized Kingston for mistranslating the term kuei (into “ghost” instead of “white demons”), thus erasing its negative overtones (86). While David Leiwei Li agrees that Kingston’s rendition of the word ignores etymological history and the colonial context, he emphasizes that her translation achieves a different, perhaps more important, goal: “Kingston seems to suggest that history cannot activate itself and the act of translation should have to accommodate the interpretative interests of the translator as well as the interests of her imagined audiences” (Imagining 55). This adds yet another dimension to the understanding of the role of translator: he/she must demonstrate linguistic knowledge and skills, but more importantly, the translator is a cultural mediator and a postmodern historian who disrupts the grand narrative and replaces monologism with dialogism. Leslie Marmon Silko deploys her Native American version of linguistic/cultural translator, with similar goals in mind. Silko’s texts emerge from her Laguna Pueblo heritage, which has a fundamental impact on her artistic development.14 At the same time, Silko is well aware that she is writing about a culture and language that, first of all, has been irrevocably altered by the white man’s intervention and second, may seem foreign and unfamiliar for many of her Indian and non-Indian readers alike. Therefore, her writing is informed by the search for a medium of effective intercultural communication and a faithful rendition of the Laguna experience. At the heart of this project lies a strongly held belief 14 See the interview with Dexter Fisher (22).

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that such translation, linguistic as well as cultural, is attainable. The feat is achieved through the employment of the figure of a translator who functions as a mediator between traditional Laguna culture with Keresan as its Native language, and the contemporary world with English as the dominant language. Silko’s linguistic/cultural translators, exemplified by Betonie, a medicine man from Ceremony, Susan Reyes Marmon, Silko’s great-aunt described in Storyteller, and Yoeme and Lecha, keepers of the ancient almanac, from Almanac of the Dead, provide translations that operate as survival strategies in the contemporary context. Ceremony begins when Tayo, a mixed blood, returns home from World War II and is diagnosed by the army doctors as suffering from “battle fatigue.”15 Among the symptoms are hallucinations, insomnia, vomiting and fever which, as Ellen Arnold observes, are expressions of Tayo’s sense of estrangement from both Western and Laguna cultures (“An Ear” 72–73). Unlike Rocky, his cousin, Tayo never embraces Anglo-American values but at the same time, being a mixed blood, he is unable to fully connect with the Laguna community. His confusion has its origins in problems with self-definition but it is expressed on a linguistic level. During his sleepless nights, Tayo hears a man singing in Spanish . . . two words again and again, ‘Y volveré.’ Sometimes the Japanese voices came first, angry and loud, pushing the song far away, and then he could hear the shift in his dreaming, like a slight afternoon wind changing its direction, coming less and less from the south, moving into the west, and the voices would become Laguna voices, and he could hear uncle Josiah calling to him . . . But before Josiah could come, the fever voices would drift and whirl and emerge again—the Japanese soldiers shouting orders to him, suffocating damp voices that drifted out in the jungle steam. (C 5–6)

The Laguna, Spanish and Japanese languages merge into one incomprehensible and violent language in Tayo’s dreams, and when finally Tayo believes he can hear his mother’s soothing voice and is “about to make out the meaning of the words, the voice suddenly br[eaks] into a language he [cannot] understand” (C 6). Furthermore, apart from being immersed in the linguistic babble, Tayo’s reality is characterized by a separation of signifieds and signifiers; when Tayo looks at his name and the serial number on his name tag, he does not recognize them since “[i]t had been a long time since he had thought about having a name” (C 16). As Ellen 15 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1986) 8. Subsequent quotations marked C.

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Arnold phrases it, “For Tayo . . . language itself, as well as the identity it articulates, has been deconstructed” (“An Ear” 72). As Tayo’s condition deteriorates, it becomes clear that a cure must be sought outside conventional Western medicine and so Old Grandma decides to send for Ku’oosh, a traditional medicine man. The medicine man privileges the old ways through a rigid adherence to the traditional tribal practices and hence what he offers are unchanged ancient ceremonies. During the healing ritual, Ku’oosh “spoke softly, using the old dialect full of sentences that were involuted with explanations of their own origins” (C 34). Such strict adherence to the Native language, instead of healing, even further confuses and alienates Tayo, whose tribal “language was childish, interspersed with English words” (C 34). As Ku’oosh does not understand the significance of the changes brought about by the white man, his remedies prove ineffective: “‘There are some things we can’t cure like we used to,’ he said, ‘not since the white people came’” (C 3). Consequently, while it is true that Tayo needs a guide and a teacher of the old Laguna ways, he also needs a translator who would render the old ways effective and relevant in the contemporary world. Ku’oosh’s failure is attributed to his inability to make sense of the changing world and its values. Indeed, as a result of Anglo-American intrusion, the Laguna world has been altered irrevocably and drastically: “The fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants—all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name” (C 68). English threatens the survival of the Native worldview and language as “all the names for the source of this growth were buried under English words, out of reach” (C 69). Under such circumstances, as Martha Cutter suggests, a translator is needed to confront “this linguistic babble” (106). It is Betonie, a Navajo medicine man, who accomplishes the task of healing Tayo and translating the old ceremonies into a new idiom. What Tayo immediately notices is that Betonie speaks “good English,” knows Navajo and not only code-switches between the two languages but at the same time, endows his English words with a “special meaning” that is Native rather than Western. Thus, his linguistic translation introduces a perfect balance between the two languages—English ceases be the dominant “enemy’s language,” and the Native discourse is allowed to coexist with it on equal terms. Apart from bridging these distinct languages, Betonie’s translation acquires a cultural dimension. Unlike Ku’oosh, Betonie does not undermine the importance and inevitability of change—he is a man who attended the Sherman Institute and saw Geronimo on display at the

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World’s Fair in St. Louis.16 The ease with which he switches cultures and languages is exemplified by his hogan, the materialization of Pratt’s cultural “contact zone” where “a medicine man’s paraphernalia” lie beside “bundles of newspapers,” “piles of telephone books” and “layers of old calendars” (C 120). This demonstrates that Betonie sees tradition as an integral part of the modern world. Hence, the ceremony offered to Tayo which eventually leads to his healing is a translation of old rituals rather than their faithful repetition. Despite Indian people’s distrust of new ceremonies, Betonie believes that translation ensures their survival: The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done . . . But after the white people came, elements in the world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong. (C 126)

Awareness of the ongoing changes makes Betonie a perfect translator since, as James Ruppert claims, “he is able to translate Western and Native discourse spheres into new ceremonies and ceremonial visions” (“No Boundaries” 182). Betonie is a key figure in the process of Tayo’s healing as, first of all, by engaging directly with the world around him, he produces a linguistic/cultural translation and, second, he is the one who teaches Tayo how to become a cultural translator and master Western and Native discourses. The idiom of linguistic translation is also found in Storyteller, where the idea of translation is embodied in the rendition of Laguna oral tradition through a medium of the written word. The shift from one medium to another is by no means easy, which Silko is well aware of when she says that “there’s no way that hearing a story and reading a story are the same thing” (K. Barnes 72). However, that does not mean that the task is hopeless as Silko sees writing as an efficient medium for rendering stories: “I’m not trying to put them in a stable or lasting form. I write them down because I like seeing how I can translate this sort of feeling or flavor or sense of the story that’s told and heard onto the page” (K. Barnes 71). This belief in the possibility of translation was embraced and passed on to Silko by Aunt Susie, or Susan Reyes, Silko’s father’s aunt, who was of “the last generation . . . in Laguna, / that passed down an entire culture / by word of mouth / an entire history / an entire vision of the world” (S 6), and who was aware of 16 See Debo (410–17).

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“the communal changes that have increased the importance of writing stories down” (McHenry 107). Aunt Susie attended the Carlisle Indian School and Dickinson College and upon returning to Laguna, she worked for her community as a schoolteacher and a Keresan storyteller, and it is mostly through her appreciation of writing that she is remembered by Silko: From the time I can remember her she worked on her kitchen table with her books and papers spread over the oil cloth. She wrote beautiful long hand script but her eyesight was not good and so she wrote very slowly. ... She had come to believe very much in books and in schooling. (S 4)

In Silko’s recollections she becomes an embodiment of the imminent change brought about by the “European intrusion.” As Brewster E. Fitz observes, Aunt Susie “spoke and wrote from the perspectives of two generations, of two pedagogies, of two cultures—one oral, the other literate, one Laguna Keresan, the other Euro-American,” thus fueling the belief in the possibility of translation of the oral to the written which Silko adopts in Storyteller (10–11). Fitz opens his analysis of Silko’s fiction with an episode narrated in her “Books: Notes on Mixtec and Maya Screenfolds” from the Yellow Woman collection, an episode which can be identified as a major factor in Silko’s formation as a cultural translator. The essay concerns a serious argument between Grandma A’mooh, Marie Anaya Marmon and Aunt Susie over a book entitled Stiya, The Story of an Indian Girl published by the U.S. War Department in 1891. The idea for the book stemmed from a survey conducted among Indian boarding school graduates by the War Department, which revealed that Indian pupils well trained in the Western ways quickly and enthusiastically renounced them once they returned home. Thus the book, written by Carlisle teacher Marion Burgess, “exemplifies Carlisle’s battle with the tribe for the hearts, minds and labor of Native girls and boys,” as Joel Pfister ironically comments (63). In a brief summary of the book, Silko emphasizes the fact that the narrator, a young Pueblo girl, is repulsed and shocked by conditions of life in her tribal village: the smell of the food nauseates her, the Native language is “gibberish,” and the sacred ka’tsina dances are described as “lewd” (Silko, Yellow 162). “The Stiya character,” Silko writes, “has

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no affection for any family member; every aspect of Pueblo life is repugnant” and she “is filled by self-loathing when she remembers that she grew up in this place” (163). When the book arrived at the Mormons, Aunt Susie, a great booklover, read it first; but when Grandma A’mooh began reading it, “she became increasingly incensed at the libelous portrayal of Pueblo life and people” and decided that “the only place for the book was in the fire” (164). Aunt Susie, on the other hand, believed that “the Stiya book was important evidence of the lies and the racism and bad faith of the U.S. government with the Pueblo people” (164). She appreciated the value of the written word and saw the book as invaluable for future Pueblo historians. At the same time, she was also aware that it would be impossible to convince Grandma A’mooh of the book’s importance and, therefore, in order to save it she asked if she could keep the book for herself. As Silko explains, according to Pueblo etiquette, it was unthinkable for Silko’s great-grandmother to refuse the daughter-in-law’s request. As Fitz rightly points out, the incident demonstrates how Aunt Susie cleverly adopts an effective strategy of using oral tradition, that is Pueblo etiquette, in order to save the written word “with the intention of deflecting its power and using it against the culture in which it was written” (29). Thus, Aunt Susie demonstrates her mastery in both oral and written traditions and the treatment of translation and mediation as survival tactics. In her rendition of orality, Silko attempts to, as she herself puts it, grasp “a sense of . . . Aunt Susie’s sound,” and vividly recreates the character of oral tradition through careful attention to the language employed in the storytelling moment (K. Barnes 72). The translation of one of Aunt Susie’s stories is preceded by a description of the discourse which makes her a unique storyteller: Aunt Susie “had certain phrases, certain distinctive words / she used in her telling. . . . People are sometimes surprised / at her vocabulary, but she was / a brilliant woman, a scholar / of her own making / who cherished the Laguna stories / all her life” (S 7). Apart from the choice of words, which Silko identifies as crucial for successful storytelling, it is also the voice of the storyteller that gives shape to the stories. As the aural stimulus provided by the story­ telling event is impossible to recapture in the written version of the story, Silko describes how the voice of the storyteller changes in the course of the telling: “Aunt Susie always spoke the words . . . / with great tenderness, with great feeling . . . . there was something mournful / in her voice too as she repeated the words of the old man / something in her voice that implied the tragedy to come” (S 15). The complexity of the translation process is best observable in the intertextual comments which envelop Aunt Susie’s story about “the little

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girl who ran away” (S 7). Their function, apart from, as Bernard A. Hirsch phrases it, “evok[ing] the digressive mode of traditional storytellers and the conversational texture of their speech” (7), is to provide a cultural translation and eliminate possible confusion created by the readers’ insufficient knowledge of the Laguna culture. For instance, in the story the little girl asks her mother for “some yashtoah to eat” (S 8). The Keresan word denoting food is printed in italics, which suggests that Silko is well aware of its incomprehensibility for the readers. Therefore, she provides an italicized explanation of the word in an informal, conversational style which bridges the gap between the Laguna culture from the story and the contemporary, often non-Indian reader: “Yashtoah” is the hardened crust on corn meal mush that curls up. The very name “yashtoah means it’s sort of curled-up, you know, dried, just as mush dries on top (S 8, emphasis in the original).

The yashtoah word is one of many examples of such cultural translation; others concern the structure of a traditional Pueblo house, the name of the lake, or the method of carrying wood (S 9–11). Both Brewster Fitz and Anthony Mattina point out another feature of these intertextual passages, namely their precision and conciseness, which are reminiscent of glosses in footnotes in an ethnographer’s text (Fitz 14; Mattina 146–47). This does not indicate, however, that Silko intended to fashion her text based on ethnographic writing. On the contrary, Storyteller nurtures an ambition of circumventing the colonialist agenda inherent in early ethnographic discourse. In an interview with Larry Evans and Denny Carr, Silko passed an unfavorable comment on Elsie Clew Parsons, an American anthropologist who studied Pueblo tribes among others (14). It is not fluency in an Indian language which Parsons could boast of, and that Silko that produces an excellent translation, but the use of the English that can grasp the nature of Aunt Susie and her stories. As Silko explains: “I use translate in the broadest sense. I don’t mean translate from the Laguna Pueblo language to English, I mean the feeling or the sense that language is being used orally” (K. Barnes 71, emphasis in the original). Hence, Storyteller is an example of translation that operates on both linguistic and cultural levels which, according to Robert Warrior, functions as a bridge that allows “contemporary Indian people to peer backward and meet the eyes of those on the other side” (134). In her monumental novel Almanac of the Dead, Silko once again returns to the concept of translation as an alternative to the extinction

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of Native cultures and languages. The central text of the novel is the titular almanac which, as Silko explains, “refers to the Mayan almanacs or Mayan codices” (K. Barnes 82). Only three Mayan texts survived to modern times: the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices. Their names come from the cities in which they are kept and according to Daria Donnelly, Silko’s almanac is intended as “an imaginary companion to the actual codices which survived the post-Conquest destruction of the Mayan written culture” (247). For centuries, the almanac had been in the possession of indigenous tribes who, after the conquest, were forced to flee northward to escape persecution from European invaders. The last fugitives who carried the almanac understood that their survival was inextricably linked with the survival of the book and therefore, “three young girls and a small boy were chosen to carry the almanac North. The pages were divided into four parts. This way, if only one of the children reached safely far in the North, at least one part of the book would be safe.”17 In the novel, the history of the almanac is narrated by Yoeme, a Yaqui woman, and later by Lecha, her granddaughter, who becomes the keeper of the book. The surviving text of the almanac bears the mark of an infinite process of rewriting and translating. Like an intertextual web, the almanac is composed of different languages, glyphs, blank pages and ancient stories from different cultures, making it impossible to trace it back to its origins. To use Umberto Eco’s comment on his novel The Name of the Rose, the almanac is a book that “always speak[s] of other books” (20), or from yet another perspective, the almanac is a palimpsest, “a text . . . superimposed on another, which in fact is not concealed but allowed to be seen by transparency” (Genette qtd. in Rabasa 181). Indeed, the possible texts to which almanac may refer are numerous. Adam Sol points out that the title of Silko’s novel may suggest the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “an ancient text meant to instruct the dead on how to negotiate the various tests they must face on their way to the underworld” (33). Blanca Schorcht, on the other hand, claims that Almanac of the Dead may be read as a version of Popol Vuh, the creation story of the Maya (108). The surviving text of Popol Vuh, transcribed from a Quiché Mayan manuscript by a Dominican priest, Francisco Ximenez (1666–1739), was written in Spanish and a modified Latin alphabet, which are also languages of Silko’s almanac (Low 13, 16). The apparent allusion to the Mayan text may also reveal Silko’s intention of pointing out the long and often forgotten genealogy of 17 Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin books, 1992) 264. Subsequent quotations marked AD.

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Native texts (of which Popol Vuh is an example) which, as Lisa Brooks succinctly points out, provides the foundation for Native American literary, intellectual, and legal traditions (“The Constitution” 48–51). To provide yet another intertext, Yvonne Reineke also points to the novel’s similarities with Chilam Balam, the sacred books of the Maya of Yukatan (74). It is not only the Mayan culture, however, that provides the context for Yoeme’s notebooks. It seems that from the very beginning the book is a product of the fusion of pre- and post-contact elements, a point which is reflected in the material used to produce its pages: “thin sheets of membrane, perhaps primitive parchment the Europeans taught the Native Americans to make” (AD 246). Yoeme recalled that “the skins had been stretched and pressed out of horse stomachs, and the little half-moon marks were places the stomach worms had chewed” (AD 246). As Brewster Fitz notes, “horses were ‘transplanted’ to the New World by the conquistadors,” which means that Yoeme’s notebook is “made from a combination of precontact and postcontact materials” (183). Thus, the book is a product of the merging of elements from distinct cultures and eras, and its power lies in the flexibility to draw from different sources. The linguistic aspect of translation is embodied in the distribution of the word almanac in different cultures and eras. One of the pages of Yoeme’s notebooks reveals a linguistic history of the word: Sacred time is always in the Present. 1. almanakh: Arabic. 2. almanac: A.D. 1267 English from Arabic. 3. almanaque: A.D. 1505 Spanish from the Arabic. ... 7. Madrid Paris Codices Dresden. (AD 136)

Here, different versions of the word again invite readers to experience intertextual play. According to Paul Taylor, the word almanakh in the first item “is a translation into a local dialect of Greek ephemerides ‘daily’ with the sense ‘a diary, a record of days,’” which may become of critical significance in the light of the fact that Christopher Columbus used Ephemerides ab Anno 1475–1506 as the astronomical calendar on his “voyages of discovery” (44–45). The second and third items locate the word in Spanish and English, while the “A.D.” designation evokes the Christian conception of time, which is challenged by the

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sentence preceding the entry (Taylor 45). Thus, the almanac, like a palimpsest, is a text which is written over and over again and whose translation into another language doubles “the contexts and spheres of discourse [moving] from one cultural tradition to another” (Ruppert, “Mediation” 12). In this multidimensional context, the translator is faced with a difficult challenge. First of all, Yoeme’s notebooks are written in “broken Spanish and corrupt Latin that no one can understand without months of research in old grammars” (AD 174). Second, some sections of the almanac were lost and, if possible, “a replacement section” should be added. However, the text was written in a special code which protects its true meaning. Therefore, replacing the lost pages is not a matter of putting down “any sort of words” (AD 128–29). This explains why, when passing on the almanac to her granddaughter, Yoeme is so strict about the rules of translation: “I am telling you this because you must understand how carefully the old manuscript and its notebooks must be kept. Nothing must be added that was not already there. Only repairs are allowed, and one might live as long as I have and not find a suitable code” (AD 129). As Blanca Schorcht correctly observes, the difficulty of the task is not the reconstruction of the veracity of the past, or the faithful rewriting of the lost text. The difficulty, Schorcht claims, “is one of how to accurately present again the meaning of the part of the notebook that is lost,” or in other words, translate the text so that it remains relevant for its contemporary readers (137). Yoeme and Lecha fill blank pages with new stories that will ensure the continuation of the almanac. Yoeme’s contribution to the text is “Deliverance story,” the story of her miraculous escape from death during the 1918 influenza epidemic, and the Geronimo story which she narrates to her granddaughter. When Lecha writes down the stories on the pages of her notebook, she notices that the added text is “the first entry that had been written in English” and anxiously awaits her grandmother’s anger. Yoeme, however, is pleased with the introduction of English into the almanac as she believes that it is a sign of the text’s adaptability and its consequent survival. What appears to be necessary for the almanac to survive is its translation, which requires not so much its rewriting but simply its writing. The strength of the text, as the keepers of the almanac believe, is built up in its stories which, one day, will “bring all the tribal people of the Americas together to retake the land” (AD 569). The translation constantly invites the retelling of stories and “with each retelling a slight but permanent shift [takes] place” (AD 581), which “allows [the almanac] to flower and evolve in a new cultural context” (Cutter 112).

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Historical Appropriations In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin define “appropriation” as one of the key methods of “capturing and remoulding the language to new usages” in the context of postcolonialism (38). Appropriation may take on different forms and the authors of The Empire Writes Back point to its five main manifestations: 1) glossing (e.g., providing bracketed translations of foreign words); 2) the use of untranslated foreign words; 3) interlanguage (the employment of language as it is used by its learners, often with grammatical errors; 4) syntactic fusion (demonstrating how a marginalized language influences and transforms the dominant one); and finally 5) code-switching (switching between different languages) (61–76). The process of appropriation, with its richness of forms, may demonstrate how marginalized writers adopt “the enemy’s language” and at the same time devise strategies of resistance to its overwhelming dominance. Interestingly, appropriation can also be applied in the wider context of constructing and reclaiming historical representations. The idea presented in this section is based on appropriating, defined as displacing the meaning of words that, historically, either have distinctly negative/offensive connotations or were “reserved” for denoting culture-specific events. The first example concerns two terms: “gook,” mostly associated with an offensive word used in the context of the Vietnam War, and “Chinamen,” an unfavorable expression to denote Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century. The second example involves the terms genocide and, more controversial perhaps, Holocaust, which traditionally appears almost exclusively in the context of the Jewish extermination during World War II, but currently is beginning to be employed in the historiography of Native Americans. Both Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko enter a dialogue with the conventional usage of these terms, and by offering a different context for their application, they shift directions of historical signification. In The American Heritage Dictionary, “gook” is described as a derogatory term for a person of East Asian birth or descent.18 As Robert Lee explains The term “gook” has a long history in the American vocabulary of race and in the American imperial career in Asia and the Pacific. A bastardization of the Korean hankuk (Korean), or mikuk (American), it was used by Americans in the Korean War to refer to North and South Koreans and Chinese alike. The term also has links to “goo-goo,” used by American soldiers to describe Filipino insurgents at the turn of the century. (190) 18 “Gook,” The American Heritage Dictionary, 1980 ed.

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The word gained yet a different meaning during the Vietnam War. A recurring motif in novels and films on the Vietnam War is the invisibility of the enemy.19 As the Viet Cong fighters appeared to be invisible and indistinguishable from the civilian population, the only way of determining a victory or defeat on the battlefield was body counts and the “mere gook rule,” according to which any dead Vietnamese was counted as a dead enemy. The word did not die out with the end of the Vietnam War but resurfaced with double force during the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. Here again, the “mere gook rule” came into play when the ethnicity of victims rendered their deaths or injuries unimportant. In her 2003 The Fifth Book of Peace, Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of The Tripmaster Monkey, to whom Kingston devotes one chapter of her book, examines the frequency with which the word “gook” is used in James Jones’s From Here to Eternity: “Gook shirt.” “Gook shirt.” “Gook shirt.” “Gook shirt.” “Gook shirt.” “Gook shirt.” “Gook shirt.” Seven times Jones calls the aloha shirt a gook shirt. He wrote “gook” 30 times. “Gook waiter.” “Gook maid.” “God damn gook.” . . . James Jones names the people of Hawai’i: “the gooks,” “his Chinese shackjob,” “Kanaka maids,” “the gook maids,” “a gook beachboy,” “the gook waiter,” . . . “500 gooks . . . inscrutably alien.” (Melville in Moby-Dick: “God hates the inscrutable.”) . . . “A gook wife and hapa haole brats.” “Greasy Filipino wife.” “His wife is a gook, she don’t count.” (124–25)

The word, used as an element of everyday vocabulary among American soldiers, carries such pejorative connotations that “Wittman hated the book for being gook-filled” (124). Kingston’s appropriation of the word is a subtle play aimed at neutralizing its derogatory connotations. It has to be emphasized, however, that the process does not end with a complete elimination of its offensive character and it certainly does not mirror the evolution that the word “queer” has undergone. Nevertheless, Kingston’s appropriation of the word, by openly addressing the issue of its signification and distribution in public discourse, substantially decreases its power of historical signification. The narrator of China Men quickly learns that English, when used to express one’s identity, works on the basis of predefined categories in 19 Tobey C. Herzog strongly stresses the permeating feeling of the enemy’s invisibility, which even American advanced technology and military strategy could not defeat (50–51).

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which there is no place for “in-betweenness.” In the category of religion, the form that children at school are asked to fill out to obtain their dog tags does not offer more than two options: one is either Catholic or Protestant. Hence, young Maxine receives an O as her category, which other children identify as “Oriental,” and she herself interprets as “Other” because “the Filipinos, the Gypsies, and the Hawaiian boys were Os” (CM 268–69). Here, “in being issued dog tags, the Chinese children seem to be accepted into the fold of Americans to be identified and protected” while at the same time, they are taught that, linguistically and conceptually, there is no way of accommodating their Asianness (Simmons 136). The impossibility of being perceived as Asian and at the same American, so reminiscent of the predicament described by W. E. B. Du Bois and labeled “double consciousness,” returns with full force with the Vietnam War. Kingston is well aware of the word gook’s resonance in a time when one’s identity and allegiance are determined on the basis of skin color. The narrator’s brother, with his anti-war views, “gookish” criticism of capitalism and Asian features, is immediately suspicious and branded a Communist (CM 272). Refusing to escape the draft, however, he enlists in the military to be “a Pacifist in the Navy,” and his comment on the situation is ironic rather than bitter: “They’d send a gook to fight the gook war” (CM 276). Ironically, it is in the politically and racially biased army that the brother discovers his American identity. Although he is not verbally abused and called “chink or gook or slope or Commie,” his allegiance is constantly questioned by the company commander, who every day asks him the same question, “Where are you from?,” as if saying “Remember you’re not from Vietnam. Remember which side you’re on” (CM 279). The brother is constantly reminded that his national and political loyalty is challenged by his appearance and thus has to be verbally proved and validated on a daily basis. Ironically, when sent to Asia, and finally able to see his family’s place of origin, the brother discovers how American he is: in Taiwan, an old Chinese servant “scorn[s] him for speaking the wrong kind of Chinese” (CM 288), while in Hong Kong, he would like to visit his distant relatives but is afraid of being laughed at for not knowing local customs (CM 295). The “final proof” of his Americanness comes with the positive result of receiving high-level security clearance, which convinces the brother that, despite illegal immigration and Communists for relatives, “The government was certifying that the family was really American, not precariously American but super-American, extraordinary secure—Q Clearance Americans” (CM 291). The army experience emerges as instrumental in the formation of the sense of citizenship. Even though, the brother is seen by many as the Asian Other, his home is the United

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States. He never allows the word gook, now disarmed and disenchanted, to undercut his American identity. Analogous to the evolution of the word “gook” is the history of “Chinamen,” a word which was widely used to refer to Chinese immigrants. Once the term entered the English vocabulary, it immediately acquired a strongly negative meaning. In 1842, the Encyclopedia Britannica provided the following description: “A Chinaman is cold, cunning and distrustful; always ready to take advantage of those he has to deal with; extremely covetous and deceitful; quarrelsome; vindictive, but timid and dastardly. A Chinaman in office is a strange compound of insolence and meanness” (qtd. in Parillo 241). In An English-Chinese Phrase Book, published in 1875, apart from a list of phrases cataloguing harsh working conditions, one finds the expression “a Chinaman’s chance” meaning “no chance at all,” which aptly summarizes what kind of justice the Chinese could expect (Yin 32, 34). Lee Chew, in an autobiographical story about early twentieth-century immigrant life in America published in the Independent magazine, refers to his fellow Chinese workers as Chinamen and laments prevailing stereotypes about China and its inhabitants (Takaki 138). Finally, Kingston herself, in a collection of prose essays on her stay in Hawai’i, admits that since she associated the word with a racial slur, she was genuinely surprised that Mokoli’i Island was called Chinaman’s Hat by the locals: “That’s what it looks like, all right, a crown and brim on the water. I had never heard ‘Chinaman’ before except in derision when walking past racists and had had to decide whether to pretend I hadn’t heard or to fight” (Hawai’i 29). Why then, one might ask, does Kingston title her book on the history of Chinese men in China and America China Men? China Men was actually not the original title of the book. The original title, Gold Mountain Heroes, was intended to show respect for her brave ancestors and emphasize the connection between China and the United States, as the Gold Mountain is the name nineteenth-century immigrants used to refer to California (Yin 238). The downside of the idea, as David Leiwei Li points out, was a possible reinforcement of the stereotype of the Chinese as gold diggers (Li, “China Men” 483). Consequently, as a result of her editor’s advice, Kingston changed the title to China Men, “Chinamen,” thus overthrowing the tyranny of the Fig. 1. “Gold Mountain offensive overtones of the phrase. The original Heroes”seal from Maxine idea is retained in the form of a seal that is writ- Hong Kingston, China ten in Chinese and printed on the cover and the Men (London: Picador, opening page of every chapter of the book (fig. 1). 1981).

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In finding an appropriate title, Kingston devises a vocabulary with which to talk about Chinese immigrants in America as the existing one is racially biased and, to evoke the title of Hayden White’s essay, “burdened with history.” For David Leiwei Li, “the coining of China Men both acknowledges the historical insult of ‘Chinamen’ and reconceives it from a Chinese American perspective, making the term a proud symbol of its ethnic reality” (484). The transfer of meaning is also an example of cultural and historical translation and the shaping of the language, which becomes a synthesis of two worlds, capable of producing vocabulary that is distinctly Asian American. The example of Leslie Marmon Silko’s appropriation is closely connected with an attempt to pave the way for rereading early Native American history by introducing vocabulary traditionally reserved for a discussion of the extermination of the European Jewish population during the Second World War. As one can infer from Lilian Friedberg’s essay “Dare to Compare,” the employment of the term Holocaust in a context other than that of the Nazis’ Final Solution project, for many historians and intellectuals, seems to be a controversial and often emotionally charged issue. Moreover, as Friedberg postulates, confronting the American public with the concept of the genocide of the indigenous population “remains a terrible taboo registered in the ‘Don’t you Dare’ category of ‘Academic Do’s and Don’ts’” (357). Considerable resistance to the application of the two terms in this context is detectable across the political spectrum and in various spheres of public life. Ward Churchill, the author of A Little Matter of Genocide, provides the example of the 1992 Columbus quincentenary preparations when Lynne Cheney, the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, refused “to fund any film production which proposed the word ‘genocide,’ even in passing, to explain the subsequent liquidation of America’s indigenous population” (A Little Matter 4–5). A historiographic example is provided by Robert Berner, who, in his comment on The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide, edited by Rupert Costo and Jeannette Henry Costo, terms the use of the word genocide as “an example of the way the corruption of language and manipulation or even invention of historical fact go hand in hand” (65). Moreover, Berner believes that “[s]uch loose talk inevitably trivializes not only the murder of six million Jews but also the fate of real victims who died at places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee” (66). These examples clearly demonstrate the existing disapproval of using the word “Holocaust” in any context other than the Second World War and the history of European Jews. Interestingly, in the context of Native American history, all conditions for genocide to occur, as first formulated by Raphael Lemkin in his

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book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and adapted in the UN Convention, are fulfilled.20 While the text of the UN Convention renders the term “genocide” universal and applicable to various historical events, “Holocaust” seems to be more problematic. The word, which comes from the Greek holokausten and literally means “‘a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire, a whole burnt offering,’ was not really much used to refer to the mass murder of European Jews until the 1950s” (Cole 7). According to Peter Novik, the term entered American public discourse even later, in the 1960s, when during the Eichman trials American journalists needed a translation of the Hebrew word “shoah” (catastrophe) into English (133).21 Despite its semantic inappropriateness, as some scholars point out,22 Holocaust, usually capitalized, entered the vocabulary as the unique word denoting unique Nazi atrocities against European Jews. And yet, despite voiced objections, “holocaust” (often not capitalized) is deployed as accurately describing the fate of the indigenous population after the “discovery” of the New World. Apart from the abovementioned book by Ward Churchill, over the years there have appeared numerous titles which directly address American history as an example of “genocide” or “holocaust”: Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1990); David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1993); The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, edited by Annette Jaimes (1999); and Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: An Anthology of the American Indian Holocaust, edited by Marijo Moore (2006). As Pamela J. Kingfisher (Cherokee) observes, “There are arguments concerning our use of the word holocaust 20 Article 2 of the UN Convention on Genocide from 1948: “. . . genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” (Stannard 280). 21 While Lawrence Baron agrees that the word became associated with the mass murder of Jews in Europe in the 1960s, the topic itself entered public discourse much earlier than that, namely in the 1940s and 1950s. See Lawrence Baron, “The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960” (2003). 22 The Greek word denotes a burnt sacrifice and assumes a theological significance, and no such intention was held by the Nazis. See Sicher (ix).

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but, for me, one culture cannot own that word or that experience” (201, emphasis in the original). In Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, the vision of American history as a story of holocaust and genocide is shared by Clinton, the homeless Vietnam War veteran, and Angelita, a Mexican Marxist activist. These two protagonists deliberately emphasize the genocidal consequences of the “discovery” of the New World, thus illustrating the significance and magnitude of historical crimes committed against their people. Their ideologies, radical and revolutionary, are informed by assiduous attention to historical veracity, often verging on obsession, and are aimed at uncovering all political conspiracies. Clinton, the self-appointed leader of an army of homeless veterans, undertakes the task of recovering the history of the dispossessed and building a network of coalitions above racial and ethnic borders. Clinton spends a lot of time in public libraries and gradually, from his studies, there emerges a detailed and disturbing picture of the interconnectedness of power and historical discourse. Central to his project is a weekly program that Clinton broadcasts on a local radio station. It is during the research for his programs that he discovers an interesting connection between Native Americans and European Jews and establishes a discourse that depicts Western history as always marked by imperialist and genocidal agendas: “Lampshades made out of Native Americans by the conquistadors; lampshades made out of Jews. Watch out African-Americans! The next lampshades could be you!” (AD 415). It seems that what matters most for Clinton is the development of historical consciousness, the courage to face the past and, most importantly, give it its proper name. The direct allusion to the Holocaust reveals a correspondence between the Nazi and American policies of exterminating Jews and indigenous populations respectively. By placing the word in a different historical context, Clinton neutralizes its cultural specificity and transforms it into a term that reflects the racism inherent in all Western cultures. Likewise, Angelita La Escapía places a premium on historical veracity and respect for one’s past which can be achieved through the employment of appropriate, that is explicit and vivid, vocabulary. Her ideological involvement in the history of her tribe leads her to a Cuban Marxist school, where she discovers Karl Marx: For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of the Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. . . . [T]hey must reckon with the past because within it lay seeds of the present and future. They must reckon with the past because within it lay this present moment and also the future moment. (AD 311)

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What La Escapía finds relevant in Marx for her people is his preoccupation with the past: “This man Marx had understood that the stories or ‘histories’ are sacred; that within ‘history’ reside relentless forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice” (AD 316). An opposing view which diminishes history’s role is demonstrated by a Cuban Marxist, Bartolomeo, tried for “crimes against the people’s history.” Bartolomeo had somehow managed to exceed all the others in his disdain for history before the Cuban revolution. He ridiculed the indigenous people’s history as primitive and animalistic. When put on trial, he responds: “What history? . . . Jungle monkeys and savages have no history” (AD 525). His negative attitude to tribal histories mirrors America’s treatment of Indians in constructing narratives of the birth of the nation. In an emotional speech that Angelita delivers in defense of her tribal heritage, she lists all the examples of genocide in the long history of the indigenous peoples of America, thus endowing them with a significance that was never recognized in official history: Angelita . . . read the figures for the Native American holocaust: 1500—72 million people lived in North, Central, and South America. 1600—10 million people live in North, Central, and South America. 1500—25 million people live in Mexico. 1600—1 million people live in Mexico. (AD 530, emphasis in the original)

In the language of pure figures and dates, which not coincidentally is a discourse of traditional historical representation, Silko articulates the atrocities committed against North American people and presents her strategy of historical reconstruction that is based on devising a method of appropriation of both particular terms (holocaust, genocide) and a framework of discourse (chronicle). Angelita, like Clinton, believes in the necessity of preserving history and does not undermine the power of language which shapes historical representation. With these two protagonists, Silko seems to join the debate aimed at disentangling the word “holocaust” from its historical and, to a great extent, ideological significations. For Silko, the ethical aspect of the issue does not lie in the question of whether the term should or should not be used in the context of Native American history, but in the denial of the fact that this part of the American past is comparable to the European Holocaust.

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*** In her famous 1979 speech, referring to the dominant language, Audre Lorde stated that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (112). Trinh T. Minh-ha, in Woman Native Other, compares adopting language as “stealing” discourse from men” (44). What both these formulations indirectly imply is the futility or illegitimacy of assuming language that is not fully one’s own. Language is always caught between various ideologies, especially the “enemy’s language” in the post/neo-colonial situation. The view on language offered by Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko, on the other hand, offers a methodology of how to, after all, dismantle the master’s house and steal his tools without being caught. The appeal of this view is evoked by a belief in the generative potency of language which can serve many masters and subvert historically established orders. As Kimberly Roppolo succinctly states, “we [Native American writers and intellectuals] have . . . colonized English as much as it has colonized us” (303). Both writers accept the fact that the dominant language often oppresses representatives of their ethnic groups. This recognition, however, does not stop their literary productions, nor envelop them in silence but instead results in the proliferation of resistance and survival strategies. Successful language appropriation is a long and complex process. The initial step, fighting silences, is taken to assert one’s identity as a person of color, cultural and linguistic minority, or as an American, as much as to give voice to alternative versions of the past. Understanding that silences may be culture-specific phenomena, the two writers chose to employ them in the context of historical representations where the substitution of speech for silence equals challenging the grand narrative of history. Coming to voice entails balancing competing languages and providing linguistic/cultural translations. Kingston’s and Silko’s protagonists inhabit contact zones or linguistic borderlands characterized by diversity and multiplicity of languages and cultures, and where articulateness is a necessity in constant renegotiations of power. Living in many languages trains them in the much-needed skill of translation, balancing losses and gains, and mediating their bicultural contexts. The final stage is the moment of appropriation of the “enemy’s language” and using it for one’s own purposes. Interestingly, appropriation is a two-way process: the acquired language is marked with the new culture but at the same time it transforms its new users. In this

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model, American and ethnic cultures and their languages undergo constant changes mutually affecting one another. Kingston and Silko employ the motif of silence/speech/language dynamics as a viable plan to confront the historical absence of their communities. History, being a discursive construct, always employs a language and with it certain ideologies. In order to produce counterhistories that could enter a dialogue with the official history, Kingston’s and Silko’s protagonists have to first search for their ethnic/American identities, as expressed in language, and devise culturally marked vocabulary. Only then will their historical voices be heard.

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Chapter Two History in Photographic Images: Between Passive Poses and Creative Resistance In 1839 the technological boom of the nineteenth century gave birth to a new medium of representation, photography, which inaugurated “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Feared by some, admired by others, photography was an advancement in technology with a tremendous social and cultural impact. As a product of a chemical-mechanical process rather than the human hand, a photograph was a promise of a reliable and objective method of documentation, unmarred by human fallibility and subjectivity. As a tool of empirical analysis it achieved the feat of penetrating reality “deeply into its web,” and with the use of techniques such as close-ups and enlargement, illustrated another, previously unknown dimension of the world (Benjamin 263). Having stunned the public with a faithful representation of familiar and unfamiliar objects and landscapes, photography was thought to record the world “as it was.” It is this belief in the objectivity and faithfulness of representation that critics and viewers of photography often emphasize. In 1945 André Bazin wrote that the originality of photography lies in the process of its creation since, “for the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent,” that is, the camera (Bazin qtd. in Eng 38). Susan Sontag, over thirty years later, asserts that “[p]hotographs furnish evidence. . . . The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture” (4–5). Roland Barthes’s claim in Camera Lucida that photography constitutes a “certificate of presence” resonates with Sontag’s emphasis on the authenticating qualities of the medium. The connection between the photograph and the fragment of reality it represents is conceptualized by Barthes as unbreakable and termed lamination: “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both” (6). These authenticating qualities granted the

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photograph the status of a verifiable document, an unmediated rendition of reality. Indeed, the usefulness of photography in the intricate process of documentation was quickly acknowledged. As Christopher Lyman writes, photography became an excellent tool for recording the rapidly changing world and its conflicts. Photographers systematically appeared on battlefields as documentarists of epoch-making events, for instance Mathew Brady, who documented the American Civil War in photographic images (24). Photographers were hired to provide visual documentation of anthropological and survey expeditions. The twentieth century saw the emergence of photojournalism and photography meticulously recorded social, political and historical events. Thus, the introduction of photography into the field of history was seen as an inevitable process and a natural consequence of the prioritized status of the truthfulness of representation in historical studies. However, despite its promise of a faithful representation, the photograph is neither a transparent nor mimetic model of representation. By freezing its objects in time and locking them in a spatial frame, photography captures an element of the “real” as “it-has-been,” not necessarily as it is now. According to Roland Barthes, if the concept of “reality” presupposes the existence of some “eternal present,” the temporal “thishas-been” aspect of photography implies that the represented fragment of reality is no longer with us and “the photograph suggests that it is already dead” (Camera 79). What we experience then, according to Barthes, is the “mortifying effect” of photography, a failed promise to represent reality in its ever-presence (Camera 79). Furthermore, to accept the veracity of photographic representation is to remain blind to the presence of the “living agent” in the production of images, namely the photographer behind the camera. Implicit in the seemingly neutral process of the photographer’s taking photographs is the act of manipulation, aesthetization and reshaping of reality, which turns photography into a means of communication rather than representation. Regardless of whether this act is conscious or unconscious, well-intentioned or meant as a direct manipulation, it nevertheless transforms photography from a transparent representation into one of many possible constructed visual narratives about reality. In their project of reconstructing lost histories through the incorporation of photographic images, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko are well aware of the medium’s ambiguous status as a tool of (mis)representation. Their approach to photography is a dynamic combination of diverse and often contradictory interpretations which oscillate between a belief in its veracity and the complete distrust of its representational character. However, while Kingson’s and Silko’s works

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often document the process through which visual images become texts narrating a homogenous history of the dominant center and asserting its hegemony, equally important and conspicuous is the writers’ conscious and deliberate agenda of questioning the subjectively constructed narratives produced by photographic images. Both writers explore the applicability of photography as a document that, instead of authenticating discriminatory accounts of the past which erase the presence of marginalized peoples in the formation of nationalist discourse, attests to and celebrates ethnic histories which dissimulate multiple and diverse versions of the past. More importantly, Kingston and Silko define the role of photography in constructing family histories as integral parts of “history proper,” thus erasing the boundary between public and private histories as defined in traditional historiography. By interrogating the multiple functions of photography, they reinterpret the visual medium as a language of resistance and a site of emergence of counterhistories which reinscribe the presence of Chinese and Native Americans in the American historical narrative. However, what Kingston and Silko strongly emphasize is that, even when photography is appropriated and reinvented to serve the interests of marginalized people, the long history of its use as an Anglo-American tool of ideological subjugation and cultural objectification must be directly confronted. Otherwise, the stereotypical, patronizing and distorted representations of ethnic people will continue to circulate unchallenged in the cultural, social and historical spheres.

Abusive Photographers and the Unruly Photographed When the photographer is a representative of the political and cultural center, the final product, that is a representation of the photographed, runs the risk of subscribing to the dominant group’s prevailing, and often discriminatory, ideologies. Under such circumstances the dynamics of looking and being looked at through the camera often mirror the relationship of dominance and subjugation. Examining the ethical dimension of producing photographic images of Native Americans in late nineteenthcentury Canada, Carol Williams reaches the rather gloomy conclusion that “[b]etween parties of unequal status, looking was not an innocent act” (8). Such seemingly innocent and transparent actions as composing the frame, setting the background and placing the photographed subject in the center of the frame (or even more tellingly, off-center), may in fact be used as tools of disseminating racist/classist/homophobic ideologies which promote the view of the photographer’s culture. Thus,

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according to Williams’s assertion, photography, with its manipulative and disempowering potential, may easily be transformed into an instrument of constructing cultural and racial hierarchies, delineating the borders between the civilized and the primitive “us” and the Other. “To photograph,” writes Susan Sontag, “is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relationship to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power” (4). To photograph, then, means endowing the photographed object with a desired shape and erasing or covering its true nature. It may mean enhancing the beauty of the object or stressing its difference. Betty Bergland, in her discussion of photographs in immigrant autobiographies, draws attention to how Lewis Hine, a distinguished American photographer known for his interest in urban America, photographed immigrants at the unique moment of entering their new country (51). In Hine’s images, the people arriving at Ellis Island were, with astonishing consistency, always photographed in a moment of transition: arriving in boats, waiting on ships, on a gangplank or in the receiving hall of the immigration station. Such framing immortalizes immigrants in the middle of the passage from the Old World to the New. Since the photographs never extend their frame beyond the moment of transition, immigrants are represented as outsiders of the American social and historical context. Such photographs, as Bergland asserts, serve to signify the non-American, the racial and/or cultural Other (50). The need to acknowledge photography’s ability to construct and popularize ideologically saturated narratives is by no means absent from the cultural and historical contexts that receive attention in Kingston’s and Silko’s projects of narrating alternatively interpreted national histories. Both writers are well aware of photography’s role in the creation and perpetuation of images of their respective ethnic groups. Visual representations of China, Chinese immigrants and Native Americans, and the imagery that they employed, quickly established a mode for delineating the boundaries and forming the style of discourse used to define and express the nature of these particular examples of the cultural and racial Other. Interestingly, while Kingston and Silko repeatedly refer to photography’s infamous legacy of perpetuating racist stereotypes, their approach to visual representation also signals a recognition of its subversive potential, facilitating the construction of visual discourses aimed at expressing the characters’ fluency in the use of a medium historically used to oppress and subjugate. In an introduction to his examination of the politics of the representation of Asian Americans in popular culture, Robert Lee distinguishes six predominant images that monopolized American conceptions of and

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ways of talking about immigrants from Asia: the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook (8). As Lee rightly points out, these images, which consistently associate Asian immigrants with the alien, diseased body, were the result of specific historical moments, each of which constructed its own definition of who belongs with the “true Americans,” thereby effectively perpetuating stereotypical images whose influence is still detectable (8–9). In addition to numerous cartoons produced during the Anti-Chinese movement of the 1870s, literary texts (such as, e.g., Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee”[1870]) and nineteenth-century writings produced by Western missionaries who traveled to China, the strategy of popularizing such images relied heavily on photographic technologies. The intersections of photography and the construction of racist discourses in the Chinese context can be traced, according to Larissa Heinrich, to the nineteenth century and the arrival of medical missionaries from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and other parts of the world (74). “A leitmotif in medical missionary writings,” writes Heinrich in The Afterlife of Images, “is the recurring reference to the need for visual materials . . . for persuading potential patients, medical students, converts, and others in China of the superiority of Western medical techniques” (4). While drawings representing various diseases and body disfigurations did have a long history in medical writings, it is the invention of photography that transformed the limited circulation of such images into a large-scale operation, “generat[ing] and exchang[ing] images of Chinese pathology . . . with a scope, that would have been inconceivable before (Heinrich 13). In her captivating analysis, Heinrich refers to a phenomenon aptly termed as “the afterlife of images”—photographs taken with medical and instructive concerns in mind were later transported to other cultural contexts and effectively used to produce the idea of Chineseness as a pathology. Thus, seemingly objective portrayals of suffering human bodies, when transposed into a different cultural space and decontextualized, are transformed into ideologically saturated visual discourses. The story of photography’s involvement in the production of stereotypical images of Asian people has its interesting continuation in the context of nineteenth-century American immigration policy. With the introduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, immigration authorities were faced with the difficult problem of correctly identifying those Chinese who were eligible for entering the country. Photography, it was believed, was a perfect solution for putting an end to illegal immigration from China. Therefore, from 1875 through the 1920s, the federal government incorporated regulations concerning visual representation as an important component of immigration administration (Pegler-Gordon 53).

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As a consequence, by 1909, the majority of Chinese immigrants in the United States, as well as American citizens of Chinese descent, were required to prove their eligibility with photographic identity documents, which were systematically checked upon entry into the country and could be demanded by any immigration official (Pegler-Gordon 55). The initial enthusiasm for this form of surveillance was fuelled by, at that time, the unchallenged belief in the apparent objectivity of photographic representation, a feature whose importance and utility cannot be underestimated in view of the fact that, as Representative Thomas Geary (of California) observed, “all Chinamen look alike, all dress alike, all have the same kind of eyes, all are beardless, all wear their hair in the same manner” (qtd. in Pegler-Gordon 57). Thus, until 1917, when the same requirement concerning Mexican agricultural workers was introduced, the Chinese were the only group controlled via photographic documentation. Not only was the introduction of a photographic documentation requirement an expression of the discriminatory treatment of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, but so was the specific set of associations created by the style of photographs used for identity control. As Anna Pegler-Gordon explains, “identity photographs were strongly associated with criminality at this time, as prior to Chinese registration, suspected and convicted criminals formed the primary group of people being photographed by the state for identification purposes” (58). Photographic historians quoted by Pegler-Gordon point out that the nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in the ways of interpreting the role of portraiture photography: it was no longer respectable representatives of the middle class, interested in visually authenticating their superior economic and social status, who were photographed but, interestingly, it was criminals, prisoners and the urban poor who were placed in the frame of the camera (58). This newly acquired meaning of portraiture photography further exacerbated the tendency of imagining the Chinese as incompatible with the definition of Americanness. Interestingly, however, these attempts at controlling and containing Chinese immigration to the United States met with strong and effective resistance. The various strategies employed by the Chinese immigrants testify not only to their resourcefulness in dealing with oppressive legislation but, even more importantly, demonstrate their fluency in and thorough understanding of the language of photographic representation. As Pegler-Gordon observes, unable to repeal discriminatory legislation, they concentrated on choosing the ways in which they were portrayed in identity photographs. If Western clothes such as well-fitting suit jackets, starched shirts and elegant ties were emblems of respectability, they were often chosen by the Chinese immigrants and especially

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Americans of Chinese descent to emphasize their Americanness. In the case of Chinese women, the primary concern was highlighting their respectability and chastity so as not to be accused of prostitution (Pegler-Gordon 62). For instance, photographs of Chinese women submitted to immigration authorities often emphasized marital status denominators such as wedding rings, which were not typically worn in China then (Pegler-Gordon 65). With time, potential immigrants resorted to more extreme means of ensuring their entry. In the case of photographic documentation, the assumed objectivity of photography was supported by accompanying captions stating the names of applicants. It is thus the image and the caption that validated one’s identity. As was quickly discovered, captions were far easier to falsify and thus opened a new way of manipulating immigration documents. Apart from deliberate falsifications of the captions, some immigrants consciously took advantage of faded or worn out photographs of people whose appearance resembled their own (Pegler-Gordon 70). As Pegler-Gordon writes, “Although inspectors initially praised photography for providing detailed transcriptions of masses of supposedly similar faces, Chinese oppositional practices raised significant questions about the reliability of the photographic image as documentary evidence” (68). Ironically, in some cases, the introduction of photographic documentation in fact facilitated illegal immigration rather than blocked it. What predominates in the story of forced photographic identification is the fact that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans emerge not as passive victims of a technology that is used to discriminate against them but, on the contrary, they appropriate it to serve their own purposes. That the power to shape one’s representation is an effective instrument of control is equally well exemplified in the history of Indianwhite relations, which have often been marked by cultural misreadings. The representation of Indians, be it in writing or in images, has often been the product of white culture’s misconceptions about the indigenous peoples rather than an attempt at cultural communication. The majority of photographic representations of Indians in contemporary popular culture today reproduce this very nostalgic and romanticized picture of Indians as “the vanishing race” or “noble savages,” attired in feathered bonnets, moccasins and beaded belts. Roland Barthes, commenting on photography’s relation to reality, asserts that “in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there” (Camera 76). In the photographic moment, “photographic referent” is what Barthes defines as “not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (77, emphasis in the original). In photographs of Indians, there is a captivating image, yet there is no “photographic referent,”

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since the image represents its objects as they might have been but never were. Gerald Vizenor defines this phenomenon as “the simulation of the indian,” a perpetuation of the fantasy of a past that never existed (Fugitive 145). Nector Kashpaw, one of the protagonists of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, wryly comments on how the representations of Indians have always been staged, directed and, most importantly, controlled: They made a lot of westerns in those days. I never talk about this often, but they were hiring for a scene in South Dakota and this talent scout picked me out from the graduating class. His company was pulling in extras for the wagon-train scenes. Because of my height, I got hired on for the biggest Indian part. But they didn’t know I was a Kashpaw, because right off I had to die. “Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,” they directed. That was it. Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater. . . . Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well, from my dealings with whites, I would add to that quote: “The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse.” (122–24)

Indeed, the prevailing stereotypes about Native Americans such as these presented by Erdrich have supplanted more truthful pictures and become firmly established in the collective consciousness. During his trip to New Zealand, Michael Dorris, a Modoc writer, recalls a visit to a local gift shop where, to his great surprise, he found “perched in a prominent position on a shelf behind the cash register . . . an army of stuffed monkeys, each wearing a turkey-feather imitation of a Sioux war bonnet and clasping in right paw a plywood tomahawk” (98). The shop assistant explained that these souvenirs enjoyed immense popularity with tourists and Natives alike and that “[s]he herself . . . had played cowboys and Indians as a child” (98). It is this power of photography to (mis)represent reality that changed, using Vizenor’s terms, Indians into indians, “poselocked in portraiture, intaglio, photogravure, captivity narratives, and other interimage simulation of dominance” (146). As Richard W. Hill, Sr. has observed, not only did the invention of photography facilitate the promotion of distorting Indian images but also introduced a new dimension to Native stereotyping (140). Like their literary counterparts, photographic images of majestic chiefs and noble savages captivated the American imagination and created the myth of the West as “filled with drama and populated by Indians whose ‘savagery’ was either noble or picturesque, or in its hostility, seemed a terrific test of the hardiness of White manhood” (Lyman 29). To a large extent, the poses in which Indians were captured were dictated by technological

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shortcomings. The fact that early photographic equipment was cumbersome and bulky, and the development process remarkably slow, naturally privileged studio photographing, which created “the stoic stare of the silent savage” (Hill 141). Studio photographs had another important effect on the perpetuation of the stereotypes. By presenting Indians attired in war bonnets but immobilized in artificial poses, “[p]hotography brought the wild Indian into the safe confines of home, and in doing so tamed the savage beast” (Hill 141). Thus, from a technological as well as ideological point of view, the camera emerged as a perfect vehicle for representing those whose fate had been sealed in the nineteenth-century United States. The manipulative and aestheticizing gestures were not characteristic solely of photography meant as entertainment. Even scientists succumbed to the urge to shape the picture of Native cultures and to make them appear more melodramatic and appealing than they actually were at the turn of the century. During their 1917–1923 expedition organized to excavate the Zuni cities of Hawikku, Harmon W. Hendricks and Frederick Webb Hodge used photography as a means of documentation. An analysis of their work performed by Natasha Bonilla Martinez and Rose Wyaco reveals that while the photographs were intended to be documentary in nature, the images they produced raise numerous questions about their accuracy and authenticity. Many of them appear to have been staged. For instance, one of the photographs from a series on pottery-making presents a potter working on a rug under a tree with her tools and supplies around her. As the authors observe, “in ‘real’ life a potter would never work on a rug for fear that the mud and dirt would spoil it. She would more likely make pottery while seated, either inside at a table or on the ground near the doorway to her home, where she could keep an eye on domestic affairs” (Martinez and Wyaco 102). As Lyman observes, sacrificing the documentary function in the interest of aesthetic appeal and entertainment was a common practice among photographers hired on scientific expeditions. In the history of Native American photography Edward S. Curtis enjoys the title of the most controversial documentarist (or manipulator of the images) of Indian life. Best remembered for his extensive project, The North American Indian, Curtis, over the course of almost thirty years, visited more than eighty different tribes and took over two thousand photographs, all in a heroic attempt to document Indian life, record the oral tradition, legends and stories, and note down the biographies of the most renowned chiefs and warriors. His images tell the story of a magnificent world of people living in harmony with nature, of brave, strong and awe-inspiring warriors with lean bodies, of wise and profound chiefs, of experienced and powerful medicine men, and of women and children of

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exotic beauty. As inspiring as the images are and as passionate as Curtis’s enthusiasm undoubtedly is, these photographs show Indians as a dying race, immortalizing them at the very moment of their leaving the scene of history. In the 2001 Taschen Icons edition, the collection of Curtis’s photographs is preceded by Ella Higginson’s poem which states that: “. . . their quest / Is toward the shadows whence it was begun; / Hope in it, Ah, my brothers! there is none; / And yet—they only seek a place to rest. / So mutely, uncomplainingly, they go! / How shall it be with us when they are gone, / When they are but a mem’ry and a name?” (34). The picture accompanying the poem is Curtis’s most famous and widely reproduced image, whose telling title, “The Vanishing Race,” expresses the “thought that inspired [his] entire work” (Lyman 80). Undoubtedly, Curtis was fascinated by the cultures of the tribes he visited over the years while he was collecting the material for his work. However, his fascination did not prevent him from tampering with his images by enhancing or erasing certain qualities. He always meticulously removed any signs of modernity and often staged many of his photographs. In “The Vanishing Race,” a line of Indians crosses the murky foreground which, according to Curtis, symbolizes their present situation and the journey toward unknown darkness anticipates their tragic future. As Christopher Lyman asserts, the photograph is representative of Curtis’s liberal approach to the retouching of images and his emphasis on visual effect rather than ethnographic veracity (80). However, Curtis was not the only photographer who “tampered” with his negatives. In fact, such methodology was very much a product of the times. His photographs were intended as a presentation of real “Indianness” and if manipulation was needed to achieve this goal, its use was not only justified but also natural. Curtis, like his contemporaries, saw Native Americans as culturally static, and if they did change their poses, they ceased being Indians (Lyman 62–63). The effect, though, is an immortal stereotype of the vanishing race of brave warriors vanishing into darkness. Despite his strong commitment to the project at the cost of wealth, health and family, the negative effects of Curtis’s stereotypical presentation are profound. When Curtis died of a heart attack in 1952 at the age of eighty-four, his work virtually fell into oblivion. However, due to the widespread interest in Native cultures fostered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Curtis’s life project enjoyed a resurgence of popularity. Thus, generations of Native Americans have been consistently instructed that Curtis’s photographs best capture the essence of Indianness and set the standards of Indian representations. The exposure to Curtis’s images has not left Native Americans unscathed, as Lucy R. Lippard’s Partial Recall demonstrates. Lippard invited Native American

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artists and scholars to select photographs presenting Indians and share their impressions and critical comments. The collection contains thirteen essays and a photo gallery with a large number of photographs, and it is indeed striking how often Curtis’s name is mentioned in reference to the perpetuation of immortal stereotypes. For instance, Gerald McMaster in “Colonial Alchemy” recalls that throughout his childhood he believed that Curtis’s images were beautiful and presented beautiful people and more importantly, that they were true. Only later did he realize that the photographs spoke more about fantasy than about real people (77). As Lyman asserts, “Everyone loves the Edward Curtis Indians. On dormitory walls, on various campuses we find noble redmen staring past us into the sepia eternity along the poses of W. C. Fields and Humphrey Bogart” (11). The same concern is voiced by Gerald Vizenor, when he asks “Why would natives pose to create a portrait simulation, a pictorial image not their own, for photographic adventurists who later nominate their pictures as the real, and the ethnographic documents of a vanishing race?” (“Edward Curtis” 102, emphasis in the original). In an attempt to answer the question, Vizenor suggests that perhaps Curtis’s photographs create “a sense of native presence, a visual analogy” (102). If, following Barbara Maria Stanford’s argument, photographs often operate as an analogy for the “human desire to achieve union” with the Other, then it should be possible to see Curtis’s work as bridging the cultural gap (qtd. in Vizenor, “Edward Curtis” 103). This, however, is not the case. Curtis’s photographs are not mere images but rather texts deeply saturated by the ideologies of his time, class and social milieu. Therefore, Vizenor proposes the term “disanalogy” to better capture the dynamics of, using again Vizenor’s language, simulating indians. To conclude a discussion of photography’s engagement in the presentation of indigenous peoples on a pessimistic note, situating the photographed in the position of passive victims of colonialist technology would not do justice to the myriad ways in which Native Americans countered and challenged the mechanism of photographic stereotyping. As Christopher Pinney has rightly observed, “however hard the photographer tries to exclude, the camera lens always includes. The photographer can never fully control the resulting photograph, and it is the lack of control and the resulting excess that permits recoding ‘resurfacing,’ and ‘looking past’” (“Introduction” 7, emphasis in the original). In fact, Pinney suggests abandoning such readings of photography that insist on its colonialist and discriminatory power and instead opens the door for its reinterpretation and discovering “other histories” of photographic representation. Applying such logic to indigenous photography indeed produces interesting results and even Curtis’s project lends itself to surprising

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reinterpretations. As has been repeatedly noted, Curtis often paid his Indian models to pose and frequently provided them with traditional costumes. A closer analysis of images included in The North American Indian reveals that it is highly erroneous to see Native subjects as passive objects, unaware of the ideological content that their posing produces. For instance, the images of Navajo Yebechai dancers demonstrate that the ceremony was effectively sabotaged and considerably altered to secularize it and maintain Curtis’s position as an outsider to the Navajo culture who simply has no access to its scared rituals. Lyman and Vizenor point out that participants in the ceremony, most certainly paid to reenact it in an artificial context, performed the dance backward and the dancers’ rattlers were held in the wrong hands (Lyman 69; Vizenor, Native Liberty 202). The example clearly demonstrates that, contrary to what is expected, it is the Natives who control and dictate the conditions of the photographer’s participation in the reenacted scene. Not only is the photography deprived of its subjugating power but also, after close examination, it offers no ethnographic value, which for Curtis constituted an important rationale for conducting his project. An equally productive reinterpretation of the relationship between the photographer representing the cultural center and the dominated photographed is provided by an analysis of photographs taken during Curtis’s numerous expeditions which were not included in the final version of The North American Indian. Analyzing the rejected images, James Faris offers an interesting observation about a Navajo woman who frequently posed for Curtis’s photographs. Those which made their way into the collection represent her as the “Blanket Maker,” a sober, dour, sad and stoic women, richly bejeweled. In the unpublished image uncovered at the Library of Congress, the same woman is sitting in a relaxed position and her costume and jewelry are gone. Most importantly, however, is that her somber look is also gone, and she is smiling at the photographer. “If this smile,” writes Faris, “reflects Curtis’s relationship with his models, then he got on very well” (94). The Navajo woman’s photograph again implies a more complex relationship between the photographer and the photographed than that of the oppressive cultural colonizer and the subjugated colonized. The final argument to support Pinney’s claim is what can be referred to, in Heinrich’s words, as “the afterlife of images.” Michael Aird provides the example of photographs of the indigenous peoples of Australia taken at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these images, taken by the representatives of official government and professional photographers, are often racist and heavily influenced by the ideologies of the cultural center, they are nevertheless extremely important for Aboriginal people as they are appropriated into projects of documenting family histories (23–25). Even though indigenous models had little control over the way

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they were represented, their images become valuable for their descendants, who treat them as a source of knowledge about their family members. The stereotyping potential thus becomes neutralized and instead the reinterpretation of photographic images becomes a tactic of survival and a method of constructing tribal and national genealogy. Either as tools of manipulation or acts of subversion, photographs abound in Kingston’s and Silko’s works. In Silko’s Storyteller, they are an integral part of the text, which tells the story of her family and the Laguna culture. Since Kingston opts against including visual images, in her work the photographs assume the form of “prose images,” or to use Linda Hutcheon’s phrase, “the narrativized trappings of the historical archive” (The Politics 47). Both writers’ approach to photographic representation oscillates between a belief in its veracity and a deep understanding of the manipulatory potential inherent in the photographic act. On the one hand, photography is embraced as giving access to a past that remains unrepresented. On the other hand, Kingston’s and Silko’s discussion of photography acknowledges the role it historically played in the processes of control and subjugation of marginalized groups. Their point of departure is the image of photography as a Western invention employed at the service of the dominant ideology. However, the final product that emerges in the course of its appropriation and redefinition is photography that resists the master narrative and subverts the integrity of the Anglo-American fantasies about the Other.

The Search for Authentication Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men both take on the task of first discovering and then reclaiming the past. In the first instance, it is the past of the Chinese American women in Kingston’s family, and in the second, that of Chinese men in America who, analogously to women in China, are silenced and disempowered in the United States. Maxine, the narrator of the two stories, cannot turn to conventionally accepted sources, since first, there are no materials at her disposal which would fulfill the traditional criteria of reliability, and second, even if she can find accounts of the past in history books, they are usually written from the perspective of the white center and are therefore useless in the process of recovering her family history. An inability to rely on written material directs Kingston’s attention to the spoken word, which, unfortunately, in this case, also fails to offer answers since meanings are either lost in the intricate fabric of her mother’s talk story or are unobtainable due to her father’s persistent silence. Maxine can only guess at the

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meanings as they are never communicated in a straightforward way: “I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken” (CM 18). Therefore, her search for the past can only continue if she opens herself up to non-traditional and alternative sources. One such medium is photography, which Kingston considers highly important for her artistic imagination. In an interview with Kay Bonetti, she states: After college I thought that I was a painter because I always see pictures, and I see visions before the words come, and it’s always a secondary step to find words. So at one time I thought that I could go directly from picture to picture because when I write I want the readers to see the pictures. (33)

Since words fail to provide answers, photographs can be explored as potentially useful tools in the process of recovering the past. This approach is informed by a strongly held belief in photography’s ability to authenticate people’s identities and events. Photographs, in such cases, gain the status of a document and can give voice to a past which is unrepresented in words. Maxine’s search for the past originates in a profound feeling of insecurity. Her mixed, hyphenated identity needs defining and to do so she needs data that is not at hand. Maxine exists in a no-man’s land between two realities: her American school, with English as the official language on one side, and on the other, her mother’s talk-story conducted in Chinese, a world of ghosts and impossible stories with contradictory endings. In America, Maxine learns about her mother’s Chinese past, about how she was left behind when her husband left for the Gold Mountain (America) and what steps she had to take in order to reunite with him. There is, however, no corroboration of this story. The border between the “real” past and her mother’s imagination is blurred and cannot be clearly established. Every time the story is retold new elements are added, while others are omitted. The story takes on a life of its own, changing shape and developing in whichever direction it desires. Therefore, Maxine fails to tame her mother’s talk-story and is unable to distinguish what is real and what really happened from what is merely a figment of her mother’s imagination. There are just too many conflicting versions. What she desperately needs is some instrument of authentication. The confirmation of Brave Orchid’s accounts is provided by a metal tube brought all the way from China which includes a medical diploma and a photograph of the graduating class. The latter testifies that the distant reality, that is China, does exist despite being presented through the mother’s impossible stories. The picture achieves a feat that words

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failed to—it authenticates China in the American context. Even though the photograph provides access to only one event from the mother’s past, Maxine wants to make the most of it and hazards some guesses about her mother’s character, China and Chinese women in general: She looks younger than I do, her eyebrows are thicker, her lips fuller. Her naturally curly hair is parted on the left, one wavy wisp tendrilling off to the right. She wears a scholar’s white gown, and she is not thinking about appearance. She stares straight ahead as if she could see me and past me to her grandchildren and grandchildren’s grandchildren. . . . Her eyes do not focus on the camera. My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands—“Send money.” . . . She is so familiar, I can only tell whether or not she is pretty or happy or smart by comparing her to the other women. . . . My mother is not soft; the girl with the small nose and dimpled underlip is soft. My mother is not humorous, not like the girl at the end who lifts her mocking chin to pose like Girl Graduate. (WW 58)

What is significant in the scene of discovering her mother’s image is how well Maxine reads this photographic discourse and how many pieces of information she can extract from it. She finds meaning in what the photograph shows as well as in what remains outside of the frame. The image is a mine of ideas about the past and, as Agnieszka Bedingfield observes, its language is “compact and precise, introducing the characters’ personalities by crafty manipulation of the camera eye, which shuttles between the mother’s face and the faces of the other women in the picture” (“Striving” 240). No matter how little (or how much) the photograph communicates, it reduces some of the uncertainty Maxine experiences as a child suspended between the materiality of the American context and the solely discursive nature of the Chinese experience. It fixes China as a physical and real space, which further means that it validates her mother’s accounts about the past. The act of questioning Chinese narratives has been an integral part of Maxine’s method of survival in the search for answers regarding how to separate “what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese” (WW 13). Thus, for Maxine, the graduation photograph, despite failing to provide unambiguous answers and providing only a fragment of a bigger picture, constitutes irrefutable proof of her family’s roots in China, and her mother’s past. This extensive search for origins is an attempt to recover both the mother’s as well as the father’s past. Unlike Maxine’s mother, whose past is, to some extent at least, accessible through her talk-story, the father

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is enveloped in silences and a sense of withdrawal: “You say with the few words and the silences: No stories. No past. No China” (CM 18). Maxine, however, is never satisfied with her father’s constant refusal to talk about the past and she insists that it must come to an end as there are questions that need answering: You can only look and talk Chinese. There are no photographs of you in Chinese clothes nor against Chinese landscapes. Did you cut your pigtail to show your support for the Republic? Or have you always been American? Do you mean to give us a chance at being real Americans by forgetting the Chinese past? (CM 18)

Indeed, if there were photographs of the father in China, there would be fewer questions about the family’s past and self-definition would perhaps be less difficult. As Teresa Zackodnik puts it, Maxine’s father’s “denial of his past, in turn denies Maxine any notion of identity based upon her heritage and ancestral past” (57). In the search for the past and the attempt to interpret her father’s silence, Maxine develops a belief in the truthfulness of photographs and their credibility. Under such circumstances, a photograph constitutes irrefutable proof of past events and the people who inhabit the Chinese sphere, which in this American context remains a mystery. The lack of knowledge about the family’s history equals its absence and that, in consequence, disrupts the process of self-definition. The idea of photographs’ truthfulness and superiority over words has a long history in Maxine’s family. When the men left for the Gold Mountain, the women stayed in China and lived on the money sent by their fathers and husbands. But some of the men settled down in America and never returned. They either remarried or forgot their Chinese families and were less willing to send money. Maxine recalls that her father, after many years of living in America, still receives letters from his mother in China. However, is it really the grandmother who is sending the letters and asking for money?: His own mother wrote him asking for money, and he asked for proof that she was still alive before he would send it. He did not say, “I miss her.” Maybe she was dead, and the Communists maintained a bureau of grandmother letter writers in order to get our money. . . . For proof, the aunts sent a new photograph of Ah Po. She looked like the same woman, all right, like the pictures we already had but aged. (CM 242, emphasis added)

The passage demonstrates the necessity of proving one’s existence, an act which is made possible via the use of photography. For BaBa, the American father, the image of Ah Po settles the matter as he equates the

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reality the photograph presents with the fact of his mother’s presence in China. Maxine is likewise eager to find her father’s photographs from China in order to allow her to authenticate his past just as in the case of the graduation photograph from her mother’s past. If there is a photograph, it is accepted unquestioningly—it certifies existence. Echoing Barthes’s insistence on seeing a photograph as a “certificate of presence,” BaBa believes that a person does not exist unless he or she proves his or her being with a visual image. The photographs in Maxine’s family are endowed with the capacity to prove, to present factual evidence or stand as facts themselves. Everything that is located outside the frame of the photographs is doubted, questioned and mercilessly interrogated. It simply does not exist.

Invisible Railroad Workers, Cannibalistic Photographers and Colonial Ethnographers Both Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko explore the ways in which photography is employed at the service of dominant ideology to produce an official version of history. Such an interpretation equates photography with one of many discursive tools used, in the hegemonic language of the dominant center, to propagate a controlled and biased historical narrative of American progress. In China Men, Kingston interweaves the family’s private history with that of the building of the Transcontinental Railway. The full realization of Manifest Destiny, the project provided a fast and efficient way of traveling between the East and West coasts of the United States, and its impact on the further development of the country is unquestionable. Kingston, in her account of the building of the railway as seen through the eyes of Ah Goong, the great-grandfather, concentrates on the pivotal role that the Chinese workers played in the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Ronald Takaki estimates that in 1867 the Central Pacific Railroad employed around 12,000 Chinese workers, which constituted ninety percent of the entire workforce (Strangers 85). In her imaginary reconstruction of the project, Kingston meticulously describes the hardships and physical suffering of workers abused by their employer (exemplified by the 1869 strike of Chinese workers, including Ah Goong), and points to the incredible number of lives that the building of the railroad consumed. This indeed is the most eloquent and persuasive testimony to the China Men’s contribution to the construction, not only of the railroad, but of the whole country, a point of emphasis on which the entire text of China Men rests. Kingston depicts the events strictly from the Chinese point of view,

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with Chinese workers as the focus, and thus challenges the hegemony of the official version of this historical event, which does not do justice to the China Men’s contribution. When the gargantuan project is complete and when the unbreakable rock of the mountains is finally broken, a photograph is taken to commemorate the historic event. Here, Kingston alludes to the May 10, 1869 photograph taken at Promontory Summit, Utah, depicting the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. The completion of the building of the railroad is celebrated in numerous speeches: “The white demon officials gave speeches. ‘The Greatest Feat of the Nineteenth Century,’ they said. ‘The Greatest Feat in the History of Mankind,’ they said” (CM 144). Ironically, despite their enormous contribution to the project, not one Chinese worker appears in the photograph: “While the demons pose for photographs, the China Men dispersed. It was dangerous to stay” (CM 144). Ah Goong does not stay since he understands that the railroad was not built for him and other Chinese workers. The railroad is an American achievement and therefore the great-grandfather, excluded from the national category of a citizen, facilitates the country’s economic and social expansion but is forbidden to profit from it. As David L. Eng asserts, “Because of American exclusion laws against immigration, naturalization, miscegenation, and citizenship, the railroad he is building will not bridge the distance that separates Ah Goong from his family in a distant land” (61). In the national project of expansion, the role of China Men is not to populate the “barren landscape of the wild West with Chinese families but to build the national economic infrastructure supporting westward expansion” (Eng 61). Hence, the Promontory Summit photograph, while claiming to document history, in fact participates in the white man’s project of falsifying the past in order to erase China Men from the national history. Leslie Marmon Silko, in her discussion of photography as an instrument of subjugation, concentrates on the ways in which the camera breaches cultural codes and penetrates forbidden and intimate spheres. Her strong stance against the voyeuristic gaze of the photographer resonates with her scorn for the intrusive methodology of ethnological research insensitive to the ethical issues involved. In Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes, the camera is used to first appropriate and second, to consume photographed objects while the photographer is depicted as a violent intruder. In Gardens in the Dunes, the belief in Western culture’s superiority is epitomized by Edward Palmer, a botanist and artifacts collector. Edward’s great interest in rare plants inspires him to organize a botanical expedition to Corsica. Its main goal, however, is not examining the

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rare plants. Pretending to be an admirer, Edward intends to illegally obtain and later sell specimens of citron trees for profit. His disrespect for Corsican law protecting the endangered flora is a manifestation of his disdain for indigenous cultures and a pervading feeling of cultural and racial superiority. During his travels to remote parts of the world, Edward is obsessed with “discovering unknown” plants which he would be able to name and categorize. This power to bestow names, which Edward assumes as his right, is a colonial method of linguistically and culturally displacing Native people from their environment and claiming ownership of the land. During his journeys, it is the camera that becomes Edward’s attribute and the major research instrument. His concern about obtaining the best quality image of the photographed flowers is not accompanied by a desire to learn anything about foreign cultures. Edward, like a connoisseur of beauty, “savour[s] the sublime, luminous glow from the profuse orange-red blossoms that resembled shooting stars,” but once the photo is taken, the bulky equipment—the camera and the tripod—is carried by an indigenous helper.1 At the end of the expedition, the camera is transformed into a tool of deception, as Edward uses it as a cover for stealing samples of plants. He pretends to photograph the surroundings and when no one is watching him, he “seize[s] the twig knife and quick-quick-quick cut[s] the best citron twig specimens” (GD 317). In his grandiose scheme, the function of the camera is drastically redefined—the idea of documentation is substituted by that of providing a cover for illegal activities which, in this case, demonstrates Edward’s colonialist approach to people representing cultures different from his own. Hence, as Brewster E. Fitz asserts, rather than using the camera as a tool for objective documentation and thus possibly establishing a rapport with the indigenous population, Edward wastes the potential view offered by the lens and employs the camera as a tool of deception (217). Almanac of the Dead passes an even harsher judgment on photography and the manipulative potential that it creates. Here, the camera violates moral norms and the vulturous photographer is represented by a protagonist named David, an art college graduate. David is simultaneously involved in sexual relationships with Seese, the mother of his child, demonic Beaufrey, an international broker in torture pornography and snuff films, and Eric, his model. The dubious nature of the relationship among the four people appears to be unbearable to Eric, whose unrequited love for David leads him to suicide. 1 Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1999) 139. Subsequent quotations marked GD.

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David is the first to enter Eric’s room shortly after his death and the sight of the dead body, instead of inspiring grief, brings aesthetic pleasure. David immediately assumes the pose of an artist-photographer and, like Edward, sets up his photographic equipment with surgical precision: After discovering Eric’s body, David didn’t just snap a few pictures. He had moved reflectors around and got the light so Eric’s blood appeared as bright and glossy as enamel paint. . . . [He] had focused with clinical detachment, close up on the .44 revolver flung down to the foot of the bed, and on the position of the victim’s hands on the revolver. (AD 108, 107).

The suicide scene ceases to be a scene of tragedy but, through the introduction of David’s penetrating gaze, is transformed into an aesthetic event which, when appropriately enhanced with technological devices, can be immortalized on film and endlessly reproduced. Similarly, Eric’s body is defamiliarized, to use the Russian formalists’ term, and stripped of its human dimension through the well-designed process of extreme aesthetization: Among the spatters of bright reds and deeper purples, reddish browns and blacks, over a pure white, Seese caught a glimpse of the whole image. . . . In the center of the field of peonies and poppies—cherry, ruby, deep purple, black—there was a human figure. Seese could make out feet and legs. She thought it was a great idea—the nude nearly buried in blossoms of bright reds and purples. The nude human body innocent and lovely as a field of flowers. (AD 106)

Initially, when looking at the photograph, Seese appreciates David’s original composition of the image only because she is unaware of what she is observing. The moment she realizes what the photograph depicts, aesthetic pleasure is replaced by repulsion. Instead of admiring the kaleidoscope of colors, Seese imagines the last moments of her deceased friend. For Seese, in David’s art, beauty is conflated with blood and death; the camera, instead of facilitating artistic expression, is an instrument of abuse, and photographing becomes an act of violence. David, on the other hand, easily disassociates Eric, the person he knew, from Eric’s body, the prop. Eric once formulated a theory of visual representation which dismissed photography’s claim to mimetic representation and broke its connection with the represented reality: “The photograph was just a photograph. The photograph was only itself. No photograph could ever be him, be Eric” (AD 107). Clearly, David’s act of photographing the dead body is the application of Eric’s theory: the

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signifier becomes disconnected from the signified and achieves a separate status, which David would most likely define as art free from obligations to represent reality. However, David’s vision of art that feeds on blood and engages in cannibalistic acts says more about his reality than he would ever like to admit. Having satisfied his lust for artistic recognition, David falls prey to Beaufrey’s game of “permit[ting] gorgeous young men such as David to misunderstand their importance in the world” (AD 537). Beaufrey kidnaps and kills David’s son and produces lurid photographs of the child’s dismembered corpse. Upon seeing the photographs, David is driven to suicide and Beaufrey resumes the role of the cannibalistic photographer and calmly takes photos of David’s broken body, which he later sells. The photographs, their subject matter and the way in which they consume their objects thus become emblematic of a culture of what Silko calls Vampire Capitalists—“a society gone rotten under an ideology that . . . rewards egotism, manipulation, exploitation, and amorality” (St. Clair 211).

Strategies of Resistance: China Man with a Camera and Multiplied Geronimos While Maxine from The Woman Warrior places complete trust in photography as giving recourse to the past, the narrator in China Men, more aware of its ambiguities, expresses considerable skepticism towards photography’s veracity. The photograph in question presents BaBa’s mother, Maxine’s grandmother, who stayed in China and never joined her son’s family in America. For BaBa, his mother’s photograph presents the image of a real person, whereas for Maxine it is one of many possible representations of the concept of a grandmother whom she had never known and who never extended her presence beyond the parents’ stories. The image does not suffice to establish an emotional bond. Therefore, when she and her siblings look at the photograph, it is anything but convincing and they ask themselves if “maybe she’s dead and propped up” (CM 242). Moreover, looking at the image, the children experience Barthes’s “mortifying effect” since, despite the passing of time, the grandmother looks the same in all the photographs in the family album, unchanged and untouched by her old age. Thus, in the demanding and skeptical eyes of younger viewers, the photograph without its referent in China has no authenticating authority. Any photograph, Maxine muses, may give access to a portion of reality, yet, it is also a product of a photographer’s intentions and the meanings that it can acquire are numerous. It is silent and thus cannot defend or deny

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what it was originally meant to convey. Therefore, it cannot be trusted in all circumstances. This skeptical and cautious approach to photography is reflected in the chapter in China Men entitled, “The Wild Man of the Green Swamp.” The texts returns to 1975 to a newspaper story about a man who, after months of hiding in a Florida swamp, was arrested by the police. Through the help of a translator, it was discovered that the man came from Taiwan on a Liberian freighter. On the ship, he became homesick and wanted to return to his family but the officers sent him to Tampa Hospital. He escaped and found a hiding place in the swamps. Discovered and arrested by the U.S. authorities, the man hanged himself in jail. In the newspaper there was also a photograph of the “Wild Man” and Maxine recalls that in the picture he did not look very wild, being led by the posse out of the swamp. He did not look dirty, either. He wore a checkered shirt unbuttoned at the neck, where his white undershirt showed; his shirt was tucked into his pants; his hair was short. He was surrounded by men in cowboy hats. His fingers stretching open, his wrists pulling apart to the extent of the handcuffs, he lifted his head, his eyes screwed shut, and cried out. (CM 218)

The man was perceived by the police and the neighboring communities as potentially dangerous and therefore the intention of the photographer was to depict him as such. For Maxine he does not seem wild at all, but rather harmless and pitiful. From the detailed photograph, she weaves a different story, one not of madness but of alienation, which shows how meaning can be constructed differently depending on who is viewing the photograph. The story in the newspaper also reminds Maxine about another Wild Man, a black homeless man, whom she remembers from her school years. “The police had been on the lookout for him for a long time,” Maxine says, but for her and the other children at school it seemed strange as they “had seen him every day” (CM 219). Again, her interpretation differs from the dominant one. The discrepancies between the interpretations of the photograph arise from the multiplicity of points of view which depend on and arise from cultural, social, historical and racial positioning. As David L. Eng explains, the visual disjunction between what the narrator sees and what the dominant culture sees is caused by racial difference, which becomes “that privileged category through which a punitive reality is constructed” (48). Thus, since photography produces numerous and often contradictory meanings, it does not represent objectively a portion of the world; it only purports to do so. Rather, it signals the existence of many possible “realities” in which meaning is created according to different rules.

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In her story of Ah Goong, Kingston demonstrates how the Promontory Summit photograph effectively erases China Men from American official history. The story of BaBa, the American father, on the other hand, shows how, in turn, China Men quickly master the skill of using photography for their own purposes. BaBa discovers the potential of creating “photographic realities” and forging an American identity, which in the historical context of exclusion laws and discriminatory policies becomes his strategy of survival and resistance. After a tiring trip and many interrogations by “white demons,” BaBa finally arrives in New York. Now that he is in America, repeating the pattern present in immigrant autobiographies, he renames himself Ed and together with his three Chinese friends, Woodrow, Roosevelt and Worldster, he sets up a laundry business. The three companions work hard, make a profit and begin to enjoy a new sense of independence: “While the others returned to work in front of the laundry, Ed set a kettle to boil, unfolded his newspaper, lit a Lucky Strike, the brand he had chosen, and poured another glass of whiskey and a cup of coffee. Reading while drinking and smoking was one of the great pure joys of existence” (CM 62). The beauty of America lies in a newly-discovered ability to decide about one’s own life and unpunished disregard for all the rules that have arisen from thousands of years of traditions and customs. China and its women belong to a world of constraints which do not reach China Men on the other side of the ocean: The last one to finish eating did the dishes. . . . Ed scraped the dishes on to the tablecloth, which was layers of newspapers. . . . From the whistling tea kettle, he poured boiling water on them; the water was so hot, the dishes dried before his eyes. . . . Dishwashing just took common sense; women had made such a to-do about it. The Gold Mountain was indeed free: No manners, no traditions, no wives. (CM 62)

Ed’s construction of his American self begins when, on entering the United States, he sees the Statue of Liberty. The accompanying smuggler explains to him that “she’s a symbol of an idea” (CM 54). Ed is delighted with this explanation and immediately identifies with the new country and its people, who see “the idea of Liberty [as] so real that they made a statue of it” (CM 54). Liberty means freedom from the ties of Chinese tradition and a unique opportunity of forging a new identity and indulging in the richness of possibilities that America and money offer. This sense of impunity and empowerment shapes the story of Ed’s American life, which he narrates to his wife in the form of photographs regularly sent to China. Since his American life is often less glamorous

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than Ed would like to admit, decontextualized photographs emerge as an excellent tool of producing a story rather than documenting his immigrant experience: “Under the desk lamp, Ed did the accounts on his abacus and wrote down the profits in ledgers. Woodrow, who had bought a Kodak, with a part of his million, took a picture of him. ‘You can send it to your wife and tell her you study a lot,’ he said” (CM 65). The scene illustrates the moment when the status of a photograph as a metonymy for reality becomes destabilized and problematized, but this time it is a representative of the colonized who takes advantage of photography’s ambiguous nature. With a simple utensil such as a Kodak camera, Ed creates “realities” which he inhabits as a prosperous businessman in a democratic free-market economy country: In the spring, Ed sent his wife a picture of the four partners . . . laughing next to a Keep Off the Grass sign. He was wearing another two-hundred dollar suit . . . and a shirt with French cuffs, which closed with gold cuff links. For a winter picture, he sat on rock in Central Park in his new grey coat and jaunty hat and leather gloves lined with rabbit fur. (CM 67)

The clothes he buys are meant to minimize the distance between himself and other Americans and operate as denominators of the middle-class status to which Ed aspires. Other consumer goods that he accumulates are photographed and the photographs are sent to China as physical proof of his high social status and well-being. His wife cannot verify the truthfulness of his story since she has access to the images, never to “photographic referents.” Thus, the act of photographing becomes Ed’s method of self-creation as a successful American. Ed remakes himself as a “true American” with the very device which facilities his ancestors’ exclusion from the national history. Ed’s manipulation, however, while an apt example of deliberate manipulation of representation, serves a therapeutic function as well. In Ed’s photographed “reality” there is no place for backbreaking work, discrimination and humiliation; such aspects of his experience remain outside the frame of his amateur photographs. As Maureen Sabine observes, Ed produces photographs of his imaginary life in the United States since “[h]e cannot afford to look with the honesty and gritty realism of the documentary at the taunting of new immigrants” (95). In fact, America deprives people like Ed of any access to the very idea that it so stridently claims to embody: equality. The equality that Ed is allowed to experience is realized on the material level of consuming goods, but never in a socio-political sense, and never in a sense of being equal to white Americans. His expensive clothes will bring him momentary

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satisfaction but will never conceal his race. “Denied and restricted,” Teresa Zackodnik writes, “Ed attempts to create a life of freedom and success, a life as an American documented by photographic evidence,” evidence which he has been taught is the most reliable (59). This process of self-creation and self-preservation through photographic (mis)representation can also be interpreted as an act of resistance. Ed’s images create a site of opposition to the dominant discourse which never situates China Men among active participants in economic or cultural contexts. By taking his photographs in different areas of New York, Ed writes himself as inhabiting American space and thus authenticates his story of successful and integrated Chinese immigrants who seize the opportunities created by living and participating in a democratic society. As Susan Sontag has observed, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relationship to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power” (4). It is only in the act of taking photographs that Ed, standing not in front of but behind the camera, speaks from a position of power, framing and shaping his own representation. This strategy of resistance to the dominant discourse through the use of images has become an artistic signature of Leslie Marmon Silko who, in Storyteller and Almanac of the Dead, portrays photography as a technology and a form of expression that is boldly and creatively employed by her Indian protagonists. In Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, a collection of essays on Laguna Pueblo life, Silko debunks the myth of the Indian fear of photographic images as capable of capturing one’s spirit. She explains that, contrary to prevailing opinions, “The Pueblo people did not fear or hate the cameras or the photographic image so much as they objected to the intrusive vulgarity of the white man who gazed through the lens” (175). Clearly, Silko distinguishes between photography as a medium of representation and its user, the photographer, whose choice of frame endows the image with a particular meaning and may thus be used for promoting an ideologically saturated agenda. Not only does she assert that Indians do not discard images as a way of self-expression, but she also shows that they adopt and appropriate them in their own distinct way. Eric Gary Anderson brilliantly compares this appropriation to infiltrating Western technology, which was once employed to penetrate the indigenous population (64). An example of an photograph filtered through the “vulgarity of the white man” is a famous image depicting the glorious event, from the American point of view, of the capture of the (in)famous Geronimo, or Goyathlay. Geronimo, the chief of the Apache nation and leader of attacks against settlers in Arizona during the Apache Wars (1871–76),

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after a long chase by American soldiers, finally surrendered to General Nelson Miles, General Crook’s replacement, in 1886. Immediately after the surrender he was photographed and the news of his capture made the headlines. The photograph features Geronimo and his supporters as they are awaiting transportation to the prison at Fort Marion, Florida which would become their place of incarceration. The U.S. army’s most feared enemies are unarmed, accompanied by three armed and smiling soldiers. The message of the photograph is clear: the dangerous warrior has been captured and no longer poses any threat to the people. Here, photography is used as a tool of the army’s propaganda to celebrate its military victory and promote the image of subjugated and inferior Indians. In “A Geronimo Story,” Silko enters a dialogue with the imperialist representation of Geronimo circulated in popular culture and historical narratives alike. In the story, Andy is describing the U.S. army’s unsuccessful attempt to capture the infamous Indian law-breaker. However, in the text, the legendary warrior does not appear physically even once but is instead presented as a constant absence, eluding and outsmarting his pursuers. Evoked merely on a textual level he is, as Helen Jaskoski puts it, “present only in the tracings he leaves—his abandoned campsites (if they are his) and the stories told about him” (“To Tell” 91). During the journey, Geronimo’s existence is detected in the tension he creates by “not being” where he is expected to be. Hence, the rules of the chase become subverted and it becomes unclear who is chasing whom: “Captain told us that they were keeping all the horses in a big corral in the arroyo because they expected Geronimo any time” (S 219). In Silko’s story, the American soldiers engage in a never-ending pursuit which will never be fruitful, as the pursuing object disperses in the unfamiliar signification of the landscape and its people. Thus Geronimo, who is difficult to capture in person or in the photograph, becomes the epitome of survival and the preservation of Indian values, such as reverence for the landscape one inhabits. In Almanac of the Dead, Silko once again returns to the heroic figure of Geronimo and with the help of photography, disrupts the circulation of the image of a defeated Indian warrior, as present in the white man’s fantasy. In the novel, the failure in tracking Geronimo is just one of many manifestations of the white people’s culturally impaired perceptiveness: “Europeans suffered a sort of blindness to the world. To them, a ‘rock’ was just a ‘rock’ whenever they found it, despite obvious differences in shape, density, color, or the position of the rock relative to all things round” (AD 224). This blindness to the surrounding world is analogous to the indifference to the indigenous people who populate the territory and reinforces the belief that their identities are stable and fixed by

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nature, and thus easily captured within the frames of photography. The subversive use of photography grows out of the Anglo-American inability to see the differences and intricate connections between Indian people and the landscapes they inhabit. In their stories of Geronimo, Old Mahawala, a Mexican Indian, and Yoeme, a keeper of the ancient almanac, reveal that in fact there were three or four men who used that name but the U.S. soldiers, firmly believing in the authenticating effect of photography, remained oblivious to this disturbing fact: I have seen the photographs that are labeled “Geronimo.” I have seen the photograph of the so-called surrender at Skeleton Canyon where General Miles sits in the shade of a mesquite tree flanked by his captains as he makes false promises and lies. But the Apache man identified in the photographs is not, of course, the man the U.S. army has been chasing. He is a man who always accompanied the one who performed certain feats. . . . The man in the photographs had been promised safe conduct by the man he protected. The man in the photograph was a brilliant and resourceful man. (AD 129)

For Yoeme and Mahawala, the differences between the men are clear and easily noticeable. However, they never mention the men’s real names, thus implying that the issue of representation is too complex to be reduced to naming and categorizing according to Anglo-American standards. The way the name “Geronimo” expands to include more and more people destabilizes and challenges the Anglo-American system of representation in which one signifier is allocated to one signified. One of the Native protagonists, Wide Ledge, is intrigued by the photographing process and attempts to discover the rules governing the AngloAmerican technique of representing the world: Wide Ledge . . . had done a lot of thinking and looking at these flat pieces of paper called photographs. From what he had seen . . . the white people had little smudges and marks like animal tracks cross snow or light brown dust; these “tracks” were supposed to “represent” certain persons, places, or things. Wide Ledge explained how with a certain amount of training and time, he had been able to see “tracks” representing a horse, a canyon, and white man. But invariably, Wide Ledge said, these traces of other beings and other places preserved on paper became confused even for the white people, who believed they understood these tracks so well. Wide Ledge had actually observed a young soldier fly into a rage at the photographer because the solder said the image on the paper did not truly represent him. (AD 227)

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Wide Ledge’s reading of the photograph neutralizes and simplifies its language, breaking it up into smaller elements, “tracks,” which, as a result, become completely incomprehensible and unable to create a meaningful system of signification. His comment reveals the impossibility of producing a photograph which would be an unmediated rendition of the world. If even the white people cannot agree on the meaning of the “tracks,” how can they defend their truthfulness and the stability of the language of expression that photography employs? The existence of three or four Geronimos does not constitute the punchline of Silko’s joke on photography’s veracity. The climax of the story occurs when it turns out that all photographs ever taken of Geronimo, or rather the three or four men called Geronimo, came out with one identical face. The transformation of Geronimo into “Geronimos” demonstrates how the process of photographic representation entails confusion and interpretation, which in turn is always subjective. Identity, Silko seems to claim, cannot be encapsulated in a single name or a photograph which Anglo-Americans believe to be an accurate method of description. The Geronimo sequence reveals how the task of catching one Apache warrior transforms into an impossible quest which is both ridiculous and unreasonable in scope, and whose driving force turns out to be one man’s ambition for total control: “For more than fifteen years, five thousand U.S. troops, costing $20 million, had stomped through cactus and rock to capture one old Apache man more sorrowful than fierce” (AD 231, emphasis added). General Miles is prepared for everything but failure. The task of capturing Geronimo becomes for him a test of competence and courage and therefore his commitment to this mission reaches a level of obsession: “It was no secret General Miles wanted to do what his rival Crook had failed to do, namely bring in the ferocious criminal Geronimo and make the territories safe for white settlement” (AD 229). Thus, when Old Pancake, claiming that he is Geronimo, surrenders to the American Army just “for long enough to rest and fatten up,” the ambitious general does not listen to the voices questioning the identity of the captured Apache. Instead, he accuses some white people of cooperation with the Apaches. His stubbornness pays off, as three days after the glorious arrest of Geronimo and his band, “the president of the United States had sent a telegram to General Miles, rewarding him with another star” (AD 230). Thus, the project of capturing Geronimo, his body as well as his image, first expresses the politics of confining Indians within a controlled space, and second, reveals an ideologically informed agenda of promoting American military and political victories. The “Geronimos” story epitomizes the attitude of the white culture towards the colonized land and its people and is best summarized in Old

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Mahawala’s words: “The U.S. soldiers . . . had misunderstood everything . . . they had found in this land” (AD 224). The chapter in Almanac of the Dead presenting the Geronimo episode is titled “Mistaken Identity,” which naturally refers to Geronimos and their mistaken identities but also generally to all Native tribes, which were “lumped” by the white man under one term—Indians. Silko’s photographic multiplication of Geronimos destabilizes the popular representation of the Apache warrior and presents him not through his iconic recognizability but his resistance to being represented in any form. She subversively redefines the process of photographing from that of legitimization and authentication to one of confusion and elusion. Thus, according to Eric Anderson, Silko transforms photography into an efficient form of resistance: Silko liberates photography, in part by asserting the creative, subversive, intertribal capacity to enter into and alter processes of taking and reading photographs. . . . [S]he clearly sees Euro-American technology as one means of native resistance and sovereignty, part of a larger strategy of reverse-engineering set in motion by Indians and allies who expect to take back the land, in part by infiltrating and reclaiming the technologies of Euro-American colonialism. (74–75)

Not only does Geronimo escape historical handbooks and the written American versions of history, but he also escapes from photographs included in such handbooks. Apparently, there have been, respectively, American and Indian stories of Geronimo; however, it is Silko’s that can boast of flexibility of representation and a multiplicity of versions. Silko’s strategy of recovering Geronimo from the “indian simulations” resonates with other attempts of reinterpreting his well-known photographs as opposing rather that fitting into the story of defeat circulated in American history. Richard W. Hill, Sr., analyzing the photograph taken shortly after Geronimo’s surrender, observes that the Apaches are wearing pants, boots, vests and hats like the ones worn by their white counterparts. They are resigned and yet their faces do not express defeat, since they “fought long and hard for themselves, their families, their land, and their heritage” (156). Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee visual artist, suggests reading Geronimo’s posing for photographs as a unique act of resistance rather than a proof of his emotional and cultural surrender. While imprisoned at Fort Sill in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Geronimo sustained his family by farming and selling autographed pictures of himself, which was to a large extent a decision necessitated by the financial situation. In one of his photographs, most probably taken by Walter Ferguson in 1904 at the 101 Ranch near Ponca City, Oklahoma, titled Geronimo at

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the Wheel, Geronimo, accompanied by three Indians in traditional costumes with feathered headpieces, is wearing a suit and a top hat, and all are sitting comfortably in a car. As Durham explains, the image is captivating since this is not a scene one would expect when discussing “the most bloodthirsty Indian warrior of all time.” One would prefer to believe that Geronimo died on a battlefield or died of a “broken heart” in a Florida prison (57). The fact that Geronimo, during his years of captivity, earned money by selling autographed pictures of himself does not conform to general expectations of an Indian warrior’s behavior. The reality in the Florida prison was nothing like the myth: Geronimo was old, he did not have “a proper job” and so he needed money. However, Durham’s interpretation of the photograph insists that Geronimo continues to resist despite his situation: “In early photos Geronimo is so beautifully and belligerently at home in the chaparral, and he almost always has his rifle ready. . . . Later in the twentieth century, when he is not allowed a rifle on his chaparral, he puts on his hat, takes the wheel, and stares the camera down. This photo makes clear that no matter what had been taken from him, he had given up nothing” (57–58). The strategy of resistance that Durham describes involves seeing and describing Geronimo not as a bloodthirsty warrior in sepia color, a Vizenorian indian, but as an Indian; not a victim but an agent of history.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Visual History While Silko’s deconstruction of the image of Geronimo introduces an important intervention into the process of defining the dynamics of submission/resistance, it is her 1981 quasi-autobiographical Storyteller that best demonstrates the applicability of photography in rewriting the past and offering counter-histories. On the first page Silko explains: There is a tall Hopi basket with a single figure woven into it which might be a grasshopper or a Hummingbird Man. Inside the basket are hundreds of photographs taken since the 1890’s around Laguna. . . . It wasn’t until I began this book that I realized that the photographs in the Hopi basket have a special relationship to the stories as I remember them. The photographs are here because they are part of many of the stories and because many of the stories can be traced in the photographs (S 1).

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This introductory statement asserts that photographs cannot be ignored or separated from reading the text and serve as a visual complement to the written stories. In Storyteller, Silko employs different modes of expression—short stories, poems, personal commentaries and photographs, most of which were taken by her father, Lee Marmon.2 The visual images selected by Silko for her book, like words, tell stories, and the reader, in order to grasp the meanings conveyed in the stories, has to be an excellent reader/listener as well as a keen viewer, sensitive to photography’s nuances. After the introductory statement at the beginning of the book, the reader turns the page and encounters the first image. It is a typical family photograph featuring a man with a bushy moustache, wearing a suit; next to him there is a woman in a dark, elegant dress holding a baby on her lap. From the notes on the photographs added at the end of the book, the reader learns that these are Robert G. Marmon and Marie Anaya Marmon, Silko’s great-grandparents, and that the little child on the woman’s lap is her grandfather, Hank. A more rewarding insight into the Marmon family’s life is provided by the anecdote found in the notes accompanying the photo: Grandfather Hank “was named Henry Anaya Marmon but years later changed his middle name to the initial “C.” because at school the kids had teased him for the way his initials spelled out H.A.M” (S 269). The first photograph can thus be seen as the starting point, yet not the origin of the stories that later unfold. That is how far back in the past she can go, how much she remembers, and this is presumably the oldest family photograph in the Hopi basket. The images of great-grandparents provide the literal frame, a sense of chronology to “situate Silko in a continuous generational line of Laguna storytellers” (McHenry 104). She comes next and represents a new generation of storytellers, and yet she acknowledges the guidance of ancestors. However, the great-grandparents’ photograph is not situated at the beginning of Storyteller in order to pay tribute to the family. A keen observer notices that the man in it is white, while the woman is Indian, and thus the child is of mixed blood. Consequently, this image can be read as symbolizing the birth of a person of mixed ancestry whose identity 2 It is worth mentioning that, ironically, Lee Marmon learnt the skill of photography in the army. Thus, the dominant institution introduced him to “technology” which later helped to untangle the workings of the dominant discourse. In addition to Storyteller, Lee Marmon’s photographs can also be found in a collection of essays and photography by Native writers and photographers edited by John Gattuso, A Circle of Nations. Voices and Visions of American Indians (1993).

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is to be established as complex and difficult to define in contemporary America. Silko is well familiar with the issue of being of mixed blood and all the difficulties resulting from this fact. George Salyer, in his work on Silko’s fiction, mentions one of her childhood memories. She recalls one day when a group of tourists stopped on their way into Laguna and the Indian children were asked by the travelers to stand in a group and pose for a photograph—all the children except for young Leslie, who was told to move away as she did not look like a “real” Indian (10). Obviously, she would spoil the image of the Wild West the snapshot was meant to represent. This oppressive aspect of not being a pure Indian finds its expression in many of Silko’s works. To be of mixed blood means alienation from the community and often results in double discrimination. Not only is an individual rejected by the mainstream culture due to not being “white” but also he/she is treated as an outcast by his/her own group for not being Indian enough. However, being of mixed blood in Silko’s perspective does not stand for the annihilation or disgrace of Indians. On the contrary, Silko is proud of her white and Indian heritage and regards it as her strength rather than a disability. After all, Tayo, a mixed blood in Ceremony, stands for vitality and rebirth. Being of mixed ancestry symbolizes an empowering act of adaptation, a dialogue with a foreign culture which can and should be initiated and, most importantly, a revitalization and irreversible change that has already started and which the Indians should embrace in order to survive and progress. Echoing Gerald Vizenor’s celebration of mixedbloodedness, Silko embraces her complex ancestry and sees it as an inevitable and yet positive product of the interaction, often forced, with the cultural Other. The great-grandparents’ photograph thus becomes a visualization of this change, a beginning of a new chapter in Native American (hi)story rather than the end of an era. While Storyteller concentrates on Silko’s family and the Laguna Pueblo community, intertwining the level of the personal story and public history, the text places a great premium on delineating the complex web of relationships between the people and the landscape they inhabit. Beginning with her debut novel Ceremony, Silko’s writing is marked by a preoccupation with the landscape as a participant in the events she describes and a character in the stories she narrates. In the Laguna tradition, the land, instead of serving as a mere background, plays an important role in spinning the story of culture. It resides in the very center of the Laguna identity and therefore every story by and about the Pueblo people pays a great deal of attention to numerous aspects of the territory, documenting and meticulously describing its beauty and uniqueness. In her “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories,” Silko explains

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the differences between the Laguna and Anglo-American understanding of landscape, which is a source of numerous cultural misunderstandings: “A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view” does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory he or she surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on. (Yellow Woman 27, emphasis in the original)

In her most recent 2010 memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, Silko yet again returns to the theme of representing the people and the land as one entity whose histories are intertwined. “Human beings have lived along the Rio San José in north central New Mexico continuously for the past eighteen thousand years,” she writes in the opening section, entitled “Ancestors;” “When I think of the Pueblo people, I think of sandstone rainwater cisterns, and sandstone cliff houses” (17). In Storyteller, Silko’s preoccupation with situating the Laguna culture in the context of its physical location is expressed through a carefully and consistently established connection between narrated stories and the accompanying images, which serve as an illustration of, as well as a commentary on, the narrative. The inclusion of the photographs seems especially important in view of the fact that the majority of Silko’s readers may not be familiar with the landscape she refers to. Since appreciation of the stories rests on an understating of the territory, the visual material may function to bridge the spatial and cultural gap between the storyteller, here Silko, and the listeners, her readers. Thus, the landscape photographs serve more than a merely aesthetic purpose: the meaning of landscape can only be comprehended when it is seen. Likewise, traditional stories, so much steeped in Laguna geography, will not be fully understood without familiarity with the places they refer to: As an offspring of the Mother Earth, the ancient Pueblo people could not conceive of themselves without a specific landscape. Location, or “place,” nearly always plays a central role in the Pueblo oral narratives. . . . The precise date of the incident often is less important than the place or location of the happening. “Long long ago,” “a long time ago,” and “recently” are usually how stories are classified in terms of time. But the places where the stories occur are precisely located, and prominent geographical details recalled, even if the landscape is well known to listeners. (Yellow Woman 32–33)

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As an apt illustration, Silko provides the example of the Laguna Pueblo migration stories,3 which always refer to specific places—mesas, mountains, springs, cottonwood trees. She explains that perhaps it is not accidental that her people, when traveling from Laguna to Paguate today, always follow the same route which their ancestors took from the Emergence place. This is probably the best route to be taken when traveling by car, but perhaps there is the explanation that is neatly tied to the Laguna philosophy. If the people continue to visit the places mentioned in the Emergence and Migration stories, the landscape takes on the tremendous significance of being a link between “the ritual-mythic world and the actual, today world” (Yellow Woman 36). The photographs in Storyteller attempt to visually render this relationship, in which the stories cannot be divorced from images of places. It clearly demonstrates that as much as people are important in the creation and preservation of certain traditions, physical places provide a physical context and thus become inextricable from the people and their histories. Reading, for instance, the story of Yellow Woman (“Yellow Woman,” “Cottonwood”) and then looking at the photographs of the Laguna hills helps one realize the interconnectedness of stories and landscapes and the realities of the mythical as well as contemporary characters. An important Laguna location that receives special attention in Storyteller is Katsi’ma, a monumental mesa stretching from West to East. The photograph illustrating the place is connected with an event recounted later in the book. This family reminiscence dates back to 1908, “when the Smithsonian Institution / excavated the top of Katsi’ma, Enchanted Mesa” (S 198). Hired as the buggy driver for the archeologists, Grandpa Hank witnessed how the scientists carefully packed all the objects found on top of the mesa. Silko also recounts the old story about a blind woman and a little girl trapped on the mesa. She remembers that as a child her greatest interest was in whether the archeologists had discovered the bones of the two women. To her dissatisfaction, Grandpa Hank replied that the archeologists had packed everything into boxes too fast for him to see. Then he added: “You know / probably all those boxes of things / they took from Enchanted Mesa / are still just sitting somewhere / in the basement of some museum” (S 199). Apparently, what the story expresses is a lack of respect for and understanding of legends and, more importantly here, artifacts connected with the Pueblo culture. By describing this event, Silko touches upon the problem of ethnographic and anthropological practices and methods of representation. She seems to agree with Trinh T. Minh-ha and her harsh criticism of the 3 According to the Laguna Pueblo beliefs, the people emerged into the Fifth World but they always knew that they would have to travel and search before they found the place where they were meant to live.

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Western practices of ethnography and anthropology as “a conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ . . . in which ‘them’ is silenced” (67). Written in an authoritarian voice, anthropological works assign value according to Western standards, provide interpretations and ignore the object of the study. Silko’s Storyteller is an example of a text that, through its explanatory attempts, mediates between the Laguna and American discourses and remains respectful of and loyal to the Indian culture. For the archeologists, on the other hand, Indians are relics of the past to be displayed in museums, and therefore their approach in fact destroys the culture they claim to be preserving. However, the destruction is neither complete nor irreversible as the mesa is and will be a character in Laguna stories. The incident with the archeologists threatened the continuity of stories and memory but it did not destroy them. Thus, the image of Katsi’ma is meant to represent the perseverance and indestructibility of both the mesa and the Laguna culture, despite the often harmful interventions of the foreign cultures. In a gesture aimed at criticism of traditional ethnographic methodology, Silko combines stories and images to offer an alternative technique of presenting the Laguna Pueblo tradition, which would avoid the tendency of portraying Indians and their cultures as belonging to the past and thus irrelevant in a contemporary context. Following Linda Krumholz’s assertion that the crucial function of any ritual is to “communicate tradition” (68), Silko introduces her readers to the annual ritual of hunting, with a special emphasis on its evolution and survival. In an attempt to communicate its symbolism and significance, Silko commences by explaining, as in the case of the term “landscape,” what the very practice means in the Laguna context. The act of hunting carries an undeniably different set of associations for an Anglo-American than for a Native American. For the latter it is an established and ceremonial act with a revitalizing capacity rather than a feat for spectators or a form of entertainment. In Storyteller, the presentation of hunting can be observed on two levels. First of all, there is the ancient ritual of the Deer Dance and the stories that surround it. Silko recounts the legend, dating back to remote times, of a unique relationship between deer and hunters: In the fall, the Laguna hunters go to the hills and mountains around Laguna Pueblo to bring back the deer. The people think of the deer as coming to give themselves to the hunters so that the people will have meat through the winter. Late in the winter the Deer Dance is performed to honor and pay thanks to the deer spirits who’ve come home with the hunters that year. Only when this has been properly done will the spirits be able to return to the mountains and be reborn into more deer who will, remembering the reverence and appreciation of the people, once more come home with the hunters. (S 191)

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This ritual, which serves as a metaphor for the cycles of seasons, life and death, love and loss, is referred to in several poems, for instance, “Deer Dance/For Your Return,” “A Hunting Story” and “Deer Song.” The cyclical nature of the ritual provides spiritual sustenance and continuity and thus ensures the survival of the whole community. The ritual, although comprised of both life and death, love and loss, after all signifies and celebrates life and the promise of a rebirth. However, as much as the Laguna rituals belong to the pre-contact era, they have remained a living part of the present. Silko’s writing about the Deer Dance is not intended to recall a ritual now gone but present it as an element of contemporary life. Whether the Deer Dance still takes place in the Fall is of minor significance here—the meaning and wisdom of the ritual are preserved. Hunting, even today, is very much a part of the Laguna people’s lives; it is not only a ritual, but a skill or a way of life which is passed on from generation to generation. In one of the family reminiscences, Silko recalls the first time she went hunting with her own gun. “It was heavy and hurt my shoulder when I fired it and seemed even louder than my father’s larger caliber rifle, but I didn’t say anything because I was so happy to be hunting for the first time” (S 77). In this initiation story, Silko recalls that she did not get a deer that year but managed to spot a giant bear basking in the sun. Even today she cannot tell if the bear was real or imaginary, but undoubtedly, at that time, it evoked respect and awe in the young hunter. Aunt Alice, another family storyteller, introduces young Silko to a story about a Laguna girl, a fine hunter who used her wits to outsmart the dangerous giant Estrucuju. In the explanatory lines added to Aunt Alice’s story, Silko shows that: “You know there have been Laguna women / who were good hunters / who could hunt as well as any of the men” (S 82). The correspondence between the two stories is clear—Silko, as a young girl, was initiated into a ritual just as other girls and boys before her. This ensures that the custom never disappears. Textual renditions of the hunting ritual are accompanied by visual evidence of the ritual’s longevity and relevance. The first one is found after Silko’s account of her first hunting expedition, and it shows an old cabin in the forest, young Silko and her uncle Polly. On the porch there are bucks brought from the hunt. The image documents a crucial moment in the girl’s life and the community’s history—the initiation moment during which the young generation is taught the rules of hunting, and its meaning and significance. The image also reflects the flexibility of the ritual and its ability to change with the times—contrary to the expectations created by nineteenth-century ethnographic photography, the Deer Dance is situated in the contemporary context with the presence

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of twentieth-century technology, which Edward Curtis so meticulously removed from his images. Thus, Silko emphasizes that the ritual has not disappeared with the coming of white people but has instead evolved and, as a consequence, has survived. The second photo devoted to this theme conveys a similar message: it follows the “Uncle Tony’s Goat” story and shows Silko’s little sisters with the buck brought by Lee H. Marmon from the hunting season. The two girls are enthusiastically posing for the photograph, one of them sitting on the back of their father’s truck. The sisters are proudly touching the antlers but their body postures signal awe and respect for the killed animal called for in the traditional stories. The hunting sequence, including family history and Silko’s poetic pieces, together with the photographs, first carefully describes the Deer Dance as a process and then situates it in the contemporary context of Laguna life in the twentieth century. Silko’s use of photography in Storyteller demonstrates her awareness of the great extent to which contemporary culture is saturated with stereotypical images of Indians. The function performed by the visual images in the text is to counter the cliché of Indians as a perished tribe and present them in a contemporary context, and hence render them more as ordinary people rather than warriors and shamans in war bonnets and moccasins. The imagery of Storyteller vigorously rejects Curtis’s valorization of aesthetization over veracity. The photographs selected for Storyteller depict real people in everyday situations or against familiar Laguna landscapes.4 For instance, a photograph of Aunt Susie, one of the legendary storytellers in the Marmon family, shows her as a plump, elderly woman in a plain dress leaning against the fence, looking with love and devotion at little Leslie. There is no glory or splendor in this figure—the pose is relaxed and natural. The photographer seems to have captured the interaction between the aunt and the little girl rather than asked his subjects to pose. The following photograph is of another renowned figure—Grandma A’mooh, who passed on many Laguna stories. Again, she is shown with children, Silko’s sisters, at a kitchen table, reading from a book. The girls’ faces express interest and curiosity whereas the face of the old woman is marked with love, patience and devotion. Other Laguna people are presented in a similar way, and as engaged in everyday, 4 A similar method was employed by the editor of the collection Spirit Capture. Photographs From the National Museum of the American Indian (1998). Among the photographs from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which offer stereotypical representations of Indians, there are also more recent photographs presenting the young generation of American Indians in contemporary settings. The juxtaposition provides a context which places representatives of different tribes in the present moment rather than romanticize them as the “vanishing race.”

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mundane activities: there is Mr. Kaser, the Marmons’ neighbor, proud of his corn fields—that is why one can see corn plants in the background; and there is Mr. Ottapopie, a minister, standing in front of a Laguna store. Clearly, the emphasis is on presenting the Indian people as they are, not as they might have been or as popular culture would like them to be. Silko’s strategy of using photography is based on the belief that bridging the gap between past and present is indeed possible and translatable into the language of images. Combined with traditional stories and Silko’s musings about Laguna culture today, the photographs openly and articulately confront the fantasies produced by popular culture: Curtis’s indians are juxtaposed with Lee Marmon’s Laguna people. One of the photographs in Storyteller depicts twelve elderly men standing in a row in front of a small house. It seems that they are gathered here for a special occasion, as the majority of them are wearing name tags, unfortunately illegible to the viewer. Some of the men proudly pose for the photograph, while others nervously squeeze the rims of their hats. The note accompanying the image explains that these are the Laguna Regulars in 1928, “43 years after they rode in the Apache Wars” (S 272). There are no war headpieces, no feathers, nor riders heading towards the sunset. The myth of bloodthirsty Indian warriors is debunked when confronted with reality and what remains are contemporary Laguna people in the context of contemporary America. *** In Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes asks: “What is the content of the photographic message? What does photography transmit?” (16–17). The complexity of the answer seems to be located in the interpretative potential that every image produces. However, if not a literal and objective rendition of reality, photography can certainly be seen as its interpretation, an illustration of how the photographer imagines it, and how the viewer reads it. The appeal of photography lies in its seemingly present transparency and “the pleasure it arouses in viewers without creating any awareness of its act of ideological constructing” (Hutcheon, The Politics, 123). Thus, when composing racist images of Chinese immigrants and Chinatowns which, as K. Scott Wong observes, “actually reveal more about the observers than the observed” (3), the culture of the center does not see the act as ideologically inspired distortion and manipulation but as a representation of reality. Similarly, the decorative feathers, war headpieces, beads, leather costumes, etc. transform Indians into objects that bear markers of and comment on a dominant culture rather than the photographed Indians.

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In their discussion of photography, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko openly address the issue of (mis)representation. Well aware of photography’s danger as well as its potential, both writers explore the context in which visual images may reveal an alternative story from the one told by the dominant discourse. In her search for the past, Kingston turns to photography as a possible source of documentation, and yet she remains alert not to fall prey to photography’s fantasy of mimesis. Reality as described in the language of dominance excludes and discriminates against racial minorities, but Kingston’s protagonists learn how to create ruptures in this discourse. The camera is a tool of oppression but, as any technological gadget, it can be “tamed and appropriated,” and indeed China Men well master the art of illusion that photography creates. Silko, in her dialogue with Curtis’s legacy, repeats the same strategy. In Yellow Woman, Silko writes that “[t]he Indian with a camera is frightening for a number of reasons. Euro-Americans desperately need to believe that the indigenous people and cultures that were destroyed were somehow less than human; Indian photographers are proof to the contrary” (177). In Storyteller, this theoretical claim is put into practice: not only are photographs depicted as an integral part of the Laguna culture but they also present the world through the Indian lens. Gerald Vizenor once pointed out that “[t]he dominance of interimage simulations could be overturned by the pleasures of tricky virtual images rather than by cultural piety, pretensions, or substantive evidence” (Fugitive 147), and Silko clearly capitalizes on this tricksterish potential.

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Chapter Three Mapping the Past: Maps, Citizenship and National Boundaries As all historical events are situated in time as well as in space, maps provide a language of drawing connections between people, territories, and events. Used to “facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world” (Harley 3), maps, together with verbal documents, prove invaluable in examining how historically, the production and utilization of space stimulated or hindered development of societies. Interestingly, like photography, maps pose similar questions about accuracy and faithfulness in representing reality. As J. B. Harley observes, in Western culture cartography has traditionally been defined as a factual science, neutral, objective and detached from the subject it examines (35). Among many historians, the premise is that maps offer “a transparent window on the world” since they provide perfect renditions of reality (Harley 35). However, like other cultural productions, maps are neither created in an ideological vacuum nor remain unaffected by prevailing ideologies. Instead of mirroring the world, maps redescribe it, reflecting existing asymmetries of power. A map is not “a statement or proposition but a gesture—of celebration, glorification, or ‘privileging’” (Andrews 37). While a map is regarded as, first of all, a topographic source, Harley asserts that it also provides philosophical, political and often religious information about a period, that is, in other words, it reveals “what is sometimes called the spirit of the age” (46). In order to examine how the social rules of the period are translated into the cartographic idiom, Harley introduces iconography as a useful interpretative tool. Iconography, defined as a branch of art history which studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images, enables the uncovering of different layers of meaning in maps, from the literal and topographic to the symbolic. By employing the theory of Erwin

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Panofsky, a German art historian,1 Harley draws parallels between the processes of producing meanings in painting and cartography. According to Panofsky, in any painting we encounter three layers of signification: 1) a primary subject consisting of individual artistic motifs; 2) a conventional subject defined in terms of the identity of the whole painting as a representation of an event or an allegory; 3) a symbolic meaning with ideological connotations (47). In cartography, as Harley claims, meanings are produced in a similar way (Tab. 1). Table 1 Iconographical Parallels in Art and Cartography Art (Panofsky’s terms are used) 1. P  rimary or natural subject matter: artistic motifs 2. Secondary or conventional subject matter 3. Intrinsic meaning in content

Cartography (suggested cartographic parallel) 1. Individual conventional signs 2. T  opographical identity in maps: the specific place 3. Symbolic meaning in maps: ideologies of space

Source: J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) table 1.

At level one, maps employ conventional signs and symbols to denote, for instance, trees, mountains and settlements. Comprehension on level two requires a recognition of which specific place is represented on the map, e.g. a plantation in South Carolina, or the city of Boston. It is at this level that maps are most frequently used by historians. Finally, the third level, only recently explored in historical studies, involves maps’ symbolic or ideological meaning, which allows one to probe the mechanisms by which values and ideologies are inscribed in a cartographic image. As Harley writes, on this level “we accept that maps act as a visual metaphor for values enshrined in the places they represent,” and thus interpret them against the wider context of the societies and cultures that created them (47–48). In the process of map reading, an insightful historian examines all three contexts as tightly interwoven and providing both a topographical representation as well as an ideological message of a given historical moment. 1 Harley is inspired by two important works by Panofsky: Erwin Panofsky: Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939) and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955).

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If, as New Historicists claim, “literary and non-literary ‘texts’ circulate inseparably” (Veeser, “The New Historicism” 2), can a map then be treated as a text in the sense that other nonverbal mediums, such as photography, painting and music, are? J. B. Harley, in his theory of reading maps, provides an affirmative answer to this question. The point of departure in Harley’s theoretical framework is the assumption that maps, like any other texts, use signs to represent the world. They do not possess grammar but are nevertheless governed by a set of rules and conventions and their message is often expressed in the form of metaphors and symbols rather than factual statements. Maps, as part of a discourse that intends to persuade and convince, are never impartial and hence they can be conceptualized as inherently rhetorical images (Harley 37). “The reality of maps,” Harley writes, “is not an innocent reality dictated by the intrinsic truth of the data; they are engaging in the ancient art of rhetoric. Maps speak to targeted audiences, and most employ invocations of authority, especially those produced by government, and they appeal to readership in different ways” (37). Thus, maps as texts become inextricable from the context in which they were created and in which they are read: the cartographer’s intention, the historical web of other maps and, finally, changing social and political conditions (37–46). Harley’s theory is strongly informed by the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault’s emphasis on discourse and Derrida’s tactics of deconstruction are used by Harley to break the link between reality and representation that has historically dominated cartographic thinking. This eclectic approach offers an alternative epistemology to that of the scientific positivism fostered by the Enlightenment and still prevalent in historical studies, and examines how maps work in a society as a form of power-knowledge (152–53). For Foucault, discourse analysis focused on the discovery of rules governing discursive formations provides an approach to the question of how knowledge is produced and distributed in sociopolitical contexts. Knowledge emerges out of what is said and how it is said—“there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice; and any discursive practice may be defined by the knowledge that it forms” (Archeology 201)—and therefore it is implicated in the transactions of power. If a map is treated as a text, then naturally, it produces a discourse which immediately becomes a part of power relations. According to Harley, a cartographic discourse is a product of the application of two rules: 1) the “rule of ethnocentricity,” which legitimizes placing one’s territory at the center of maps’ cosmology, and 2) the “rule of the social order,” which governs the deployment of vocabulary/imagery appropriate for describing systematic social (in)equalities

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(156–58). Furthermore, power embedded in cartographic discourse can be viewed on two levels: internal and external. Internal power is derived from the omnipresent and universal knowledge that the map text constructs. Cartographers, when producing maps, in fact manufacture power-knowledge: they select information to be included, compile material, generalize about the landscape, and give a hierarchical shape to the image. All these practices appropriate, discipline and normalize the world (166). Internal power, while not generally exercised over individuals, nevertheless shapes the knowledge about the reality they inhabit, and as it pretends to be natural and universal, it usually passes unnoticed (166). When defining external power, Harley reminds us that “power is exerted on cartography”: map-making was usually commissioned by monarchs, state institutions, and land owners interested in promoting their own agendas. Moreover, “power is also exercised with cartography” (165, emphasis in the original). Monarchs, ministers and state institutions often employed mapping as a manifestation of power, military strength and control of populations. Therefore, not only do maps reflect the process of producing and exerting political, ideological and discursive power, they also become its active participants. Derridian deconstruction is also a useful tool in Harley’s theory as it calls for a deeper and closer reading of maps as cultural texts which create and organize ideological hierarchies. Maps “pretend” to be objective and scientific but a closer look, a deconstructive look, reveals ruptures in the structure and exposes its formation mechanisms. Consequently, a deconstructive strategy would concentrate on those aspects of maps that have been silenced, secreted or glossed over. A good example is reversing the direction of the conventional reading of maps in terms of the emphasis on the map’s margins rather than its center. For instance, typically, all decorative elements on European maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were treated as “inconsequential marginalia.” The deconstructive method, however, approaches them as instrumental in the cultural production of meaning, and allows one to see that, for instance, the appearance of Queen Elizabeth’s royal crest on the face of many maps, apart from its decorative value, signifies the control of the territory, both literal and symbolic, exercised by the monarch (Sanford 18). Inevitably, deconstruction reveals that what has been defined in a map as a cartographic fact is actually a symbol. Harley explains that his combination of Foucault’s and Derrida’s theories in map reading is not intended to invalidate previous practices of interpreting cartography. What lies behind Harley’s project is the enrichment of the approaches to maps which will sensitize us to their different, previously unexplored, nuances (168).

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Harley’s views on map reading, shared by Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Jeremy Black and Katherine Jones, enable looking at maps from an interdisciplinary perspective. Such a reading of cartography proves challenging not only in the study of history but also in other fields where meaning is produced discursively. Harley’s approach provides theoretical grounds for examining the intersections of map texts and literary texts since the two discursive constructs surely meet in the network of cultural productions. Exploration and utilization of space has dominated American literary imagination from the colonial times and cartographic discourse promises to make interesting contributions to the discussion. The use of maps in literary texts is not an uncommon practice. A map accompanying a literary text, like all maps, defines boundaries and effectively imposes geographic order. It helps one to grasp a sense of the space of the territory and offers a visual alternative to a textual description. Like typical maps, a “literary” map is assumed to be accurate and correct. Interestingly, however, concepts such as accuracy or precision of detail are indeterminable here as maps in literary texts usually represent places that do not exist in the real world—they lack physical referents (e.g., the detailed maps of the Middle-Earth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or William Faulkner’s map of Yoknapataphwa County). Thus, maps in literature illustrate Harley’s critique of the positivist approach which remains blind to the fact that in a postmodern world the connection between the signified and signifier is often broken. In their texts, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko shift their attention to maps which, as an integral part of historical discourse, erase the presence of Chinese and Native Americans as active participants in the narration of U.S. history. Physical space, defined as either one’s home or a site of ideological battle, is an important theme in both writers’ texts. In China Men, Kingston approaches American space as a territory to be won for her Chinese ancestors, an unknown territory that, when appropriated, becomes the site of emergence of Chinese American identity. In Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, physical locations, instead of serving as a background to the novel’s development, emerge as a locus of external forces that affect people and their history. Both Kingston and Silko approach cartography as a powerful tool for producing historical meaning; however, while conventional maps focus on arbitrary borderlines as manifestations of power relations consistently ignoring people who inhabit the divided space, their maps emphasize how space shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants. While both Kingston and Silko demonstrate intense interest in mapping American territory, their methodologies and ideological agendas differ significantly. Silko’s Almanac of the Dead is preceded by the “Five

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Hundred Year Map,” which schematically presents parts of the U.S. and Mexico (14–15). However, in drawing the map Silko is not interested in producing a faithful cartographic representation of the region. Her map disregards the rules of scale and, in the course of the novel, becomes a map of the story which leads to the erasure of the national boundaries which cartography seeks to impose. In this subversive re-employment of maps, Silko undoes the Western narrative of progress, and demonstrates how values embedded in the ideology of territorial possession are rendered meaningless in the native conception of history. Kingston, on the other hand, opts against using a cartographic image as an introduction to her China Men. However, maps and mapping become the book’s major textual strategy in redefining the historical role of Chinese immigrants. Kingston “departs” from China in a Western direction and gradually, place by place, with the use of imagery employed by the dominant group, claims the American space for China Men. Her project of “claiming America” is simultaneously launched on two levels, historical as well as territorial, and its aim is to redefine the concept of American citizenship that has continually excluded the Chinese. Hence, while Silko deconstructs mapping strategies to bring about the complete erasure of national boundaries, Kingston employs idioms of maps in order to serve the goals of those whose presence has not been marked on maps.

Claiming the Territory/Redefining American Citizenship In her seminal work on citizenship and Asian American identity, “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization,” Lisa Lowe applies a materialist approach to offer a critique of the institution of citizenship and its instrumental role in the mechanisms of exclusion. Historically, the project of imaging the American nation was informed by the idea of inclusiveness and equality; yet the concept which played an equally important, if not fundamental, role was that of homogeneity, whose immediate implications involved the existence of criteria for membership. From the nineteenth century onward, Asian immigration to the U.S. was seen through the negative picture of Asia as a site of manifold anxieties which “figured Asian countries as exotic, barbaric, and alien, and Asian laborers . . . as a ‘yellow peril’ threatening to displace white European immigrants” (4). Thus, effective protection measures were introduced in the form of immigration exclusion acts and naturalization laws, which provided the means of regulating the terms of participation in citizenship and

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the nation-state.2 Such was the impact of the exclusion rhetoric that Asian Americans, even as rightful citizens, “continue[d] to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation” and seen as “the foreigners-within” (5, 6). Paradoxically, however, Asian immigrants, while systematically excluded, “played absolutely crucial roles in the building and sustaining of America,” its capital as well as its ideology of inclusiveness (5). The apparent contradictions of Asian immigration, which Lowe calls “immigrant acts,” result in the emergence of “critical negations of the nation-state” and “Asian American cultural productions as countersites to U.S. national memory and national culture” (9, 4). The strength of such cultural productions is demonstrated by the ability to “disrupt the myth of national identity by revealing its gaps and fissures, and intervene in the narrative of national development that would illegitimately locate the ‘immigrant’ before history or exempt the ‘immigrant’ from history” (9). “It is through the terrain of national culture,” writes Lowe, “that the individual subject is politically formed as the American citizen: a terrain introduced by the Statue of Liberty, discovered by the immigrant, dreamed in a common language, and defended in battle by the independent, self-made man” (2, emphasis added). Considering the construction of citizenship and identification with the nation-state in China Men, it seems plausible to claim that Kingston would subscribe to Lowe’s view. In a 1980 interview with Timothy Pfaff, Kingston explained that in China Men she is “claiming America”: “In story after story Chinese American people are claiming America, which goes all the way from one character saying that a Chinese explorer found this place before Leif Ericsson did to another buying a house here. Buying a house is a way of saying that America—and not China—is his country” (14). The same year, Kingston repeated the idea to Arturo Islas and Marilyn Yalom by saying [My books are] a response to the kind of assumption that I came from Vietnam or that I came from another place—when I say I am native American with all the rights of an American, I am saying, “No, we’re not outsiders, we belong here, this is our country, this is our history, and we are part of 2 Elizabeth Archuleta offers an interesting analogy in her essay on border politics in the Southwest. The government’s racial profiling of “aliens,” done in the name of protecting American citizens from illegal immigrants, drug deals and, after September 11, terrorists, instills the identification of nonwhite people as posing a threat to the United States. “Even today,” Archuleta writes, “whiteness remains the unspoken and official meaning of the term ‘America’ and becomes a symbol that stigmatizes and marginalizes people of color by destabilizing their claims to citizenship” (116).

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“Claiming America,” as described and undertaken by Kingston, is a complex project developed on many levels and on various fronts. In the collective consciousness, as Lowe observes, Asian Americans are still perceived as “foreigners” while in fact they constitute an integral part of the American nation in a historical, political, social and cultural sense. In China Men, “claiming America,” among other manifestations, takes the form of claiming territory, namely countering the invisibility of Chinese immigrants on the historical map of the U.S. Kingston’s remark about the Chinese explorer resonates with the American narrative of discovery and conquest. If the discovery of the New Land is attributed to a white male, Kingston seems to be saying that in a parallel story a Chinese individual may be cast in the role of the explorer. As Lowe asserts, historically, the concept of the American nation was defined as a homogeneous entity and the American citizen as the antithesis of the Asian immigrant (4). Such a conceptualization of the nation, exemplified by Jeff Spinner’s definition, according to which “[t]he nation is an organic group of people possessing a unique culture” (141), displaces and alienates Asian immigrants from membership in the nation-state. In the texts of Maxine Hong Kingston, the ideological grounds for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from participation in the nation is the assumption that, due to their linguistic/racial/cultural difference, they are “inassimilable” and thus unable to become an integral part of this “organic group.” In China Men, when considering possible ways of going to America, BaBa, Maxine’s Chinese father and a village teacher, opts for a legal route and intends to apply for a visa. Other men, however, tease and ridicule his trust in the simplicity of the immigration process: “Huh. He thinks they make laws to search out scholars to teach them and rule them. Listen stupid, nobody gets to be classified ‘Scholar.’ You can’t speak English, you’re illiterate, no scholar, no visa. ‘Coolie.’ Simple test” (CM 47). When the father is interrogated by the authorities at the Immigration Station on Angel Island, fluency in English becomes a criterion for inclusion in the American society: “‘Can you read and write?’ the white demon asked in English and the Chinese American [interpreter] asked in Cantonese. ‘Yes,’ said the legal father. But the secretary demon was already writing No since he obviously couldn’t, needing a translator” (CM 60). Assuming that language can become a vehicle of culture, the

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Chinese, unable to speak English, will never integrate into the American society and contribute to the formation of “a unique culture.” Throughout China Men, Kingston demonstrates how important citizenship becomes when its denial is employed as the main method of exclusion. Longing for “Americanness,” Ah Goong, the grandfather building the Transcontinental Railroad, falls prey to a confidence man who poses as a “citizenship judge”: ‘I Citizenship Judge invite you to be US citizen. Only one bag gold.’ Ah Goong was thrilled. What an honour. He would accept this invitation. . . . The Citizenship Judge unfurled a parchment sealed with gold and ribbon. Ah Goong bought it with one bag of gold. ‘You vote,’ said the Citizenship Judge. ‘You talk in court, buy land, no more chinaman tax.’ Ah Goong hid the paper on his person so that it would protect him from arrest and lynching. (CM 141)

Kingston’s irony in phrasing the scene brilliantly demonstrates China Men’s situation in America: only when they pay money are they invited to a country where every day they are faced with the possibility of being arrested or lynched. The immigrants’ need for legal recognition is also echoed in the story of BaBa’s arrival at Angel Island. Here, Kingston demonstrates how immigrants crave citizenship, substituting its lack with participation in an “imaginary” community regulated by the laws of democracy. Once he arrives at the Immigration station, BaBa is greeted by the president of the Self-Governing Association, who “won his office by having been on the island the longest, three and a half years” (CM 55). Having paid the “dues,” BaBa is granted the right to vote and becomes an eligible member. As Helena Grice asserts, the irony of the scene lies in the fact that “none of the newly arrived men possess any of the benefits of democratic citizenship: as detainees they are neither free nor franchised, and the Self Governing Organization does not seem to contribute to the advancement of citizenship for its members” (191). The detainees’ recreation of a “micro state” reveals their need for official belonging and suggests that, by demonstrating their fluency in democratic mechanisms, they are ready to consciously embrace American citizenship. Finally, towards the end of China Men, Kingston narrates the story of Ch’ü Yüan, a fourth-century B.C. poet and the author of the elegy Li Sao. Ch’ü Yüan was unjustly punished by the king and banished from the kingdom. For a long time, he wandered in barbarian lands, until his death by drowning. “The Li Sao: an elegy,” as Helena Grice writes, demonstrates the disastrous consequences of state-sanctioned displacement (192): Ch’ü Yüan “had to leave the center; he roamed in the outer world

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for the rest of his life” (CM 250). Kingston’s opposition of center/outer world brings to mind Linda Hutcheon’s term “ex-center” (Grice 192). “The ex-centric, the off-center” is primarily defined “with the center it desires but is denied” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 60). The ex-centric person is thus someone who “finds him or herself at the margins of social, political and cultural life and his/her marginality is constructed in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality or social role, as defined in opposition to the center” (Grice 192). The state of being “ex-centric” becomes an apt metaphor for the situation of China Men in America. “Ex-centricness” is contested by Kingston by pointing out how its ideology depends on the questionable stability of the definition locating the center. Centers and margins are fluid rather than fixed categories and depend largely on the assumed perspective. Centers often become the loci of power, as for instance in the art of cartography in which even rudimentary maps privilege the center over margins. “Ancient Chinese diagrammatic representations of the universe,” as Rhonda Lemke Sanford explains, “consisted of a series of concentric rectangles and five directions: north, south, east, west, and middle,” and the central one represented the imperial palace; ancient Christians placed Jerusalem at the center of the world and in medieval maps Christ’s navel was positioned in the center (4–5). What American dominant discourse places at the center (of its domain) is a homogenous unity which pushes Kingston’s ancestors to the spatial/cultural margins. However, these centers and margins as presented in Western cartography are arbitrarily imposed and are more a reflection of how the state imagines its domain rather than how the state is actually structured (B. Anderson 164). Kingston’s interest in the repositioning of the center, margins and places of origin is signaled in the opening story of China Men. In “On discovery,” Tang Ao, a scholar, sets off to find the legendary Gold Mountain but is instead captured in the Land of Women where he is emasculated: his ears are pierced, his feet are bound, and he is forced to wear female attire. The story, which is frequently read as a metaphor for China Men’s emasculation and subjugation in America,3 offers interesting comments on Kingston’s spatial reorganization in the master narrative. The story, whose “once upon a time” beginning signals the convention of fairy tales, is concluded in a factual tone: “In the Women’s Land there are no taxes and no wars. Some scholars say that the country was discovered during the reign of Empress Wu (AD 694–705), and some say earlier than that, AD 441, and 3 See, e.g., Donald C. Goellnicht, “Tang Ao in America: Male Subject Positions in China Men” (1992), Debra Shostak, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fake Books” (1994).

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it was in North America” (CM 10). The reason for the mixing of imaginary and historical elements is explained in an interview with Marilyn Chin, in which Kingston draws an analogy between her China Men and William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain: When I was reading William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, and it ends at the Civil War, where Abraham Lincoln as a woman, with a shawl around her—the mother of our country—is walking on the battlefields, sort of tucking in the soldiers, I thought, wow, this is it. This is the way to write about America. . . . This is history, the mythic history. So I ran to the library and turned this one in, looking for volume two. There isn’t volume two; that’s it. That was when I thought, oh. I’ve got to write volume two. . . . So that’s China Men. (101)

Having located the source of inspiration for the book, Kingston’s strategy of reimagining the past and displacing centers becomes clear: if Williams depicts the origins of American history with “Red Eric,” father of Leif Ericsson, the first European to land in America, then Kingston moves the origin story back in time by five centuries and attributes the discovery to the Chinese. As David Leiwei Li explains, “What motivates Williams’s work to upset the norm of Anglo-Puritan historiography is the intention to restore other European elements in American culture in order to legitimize the presence of his people” (“China” 485).4 For Kingston, writing alternative versions of history is “the taking up of the abandoned claims for her Chinese forefathers” and a demonstration that “[t]he origin of America has its origin in our wishes, dreams, and reveries,” and like definitions of the center and margins, can be re-imagined and reformulated (Li, “China” 486). The same logic is repeated later in the text in “The adventures of Lo Bun Sun.” By alluding to a Western canonical text, Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Kingston exposes how the traditional story operates on an ideological level and demonstrates how the presumably fixed direction of progress and colonization can be changed. In Kingston’s story, a sailor named Lo Bun Sun5 is shipwrecked on a deserted island and, like Robinson Crusoe, he rescues a savage from a band of cannibals. The event immediately establishes the “colonial” hierarchy: “The poor man who might have 4 It is also worth noting that Williams was the son of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of Basque and Jewish origins. 5 Debra Shostak points out that the name is a parody of the way Anglo-Americans mock the English pronunciation of Chinese immigrants characterized by the substitution of “l’s” for “r’s” (246).

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been eaten fell to his knees. He lifted Lo Bun Sun’s foot and set it on his head. . . . ‘I nameyou Sing Kay Ng,’ said Lo Bun Sun, ‘because I saved your life on a Friday.’ ‘Sing Kay Ng,’ he pointed to the savage. ‘You name Sing Kay Ng. My name Teacher’ ” (CM 226). As LeiLani Nishime observes, the original story “depends upon the assumption that the sailor is white, so that it can plug into the myth of the Great White Adventurer civilizing the ‘native’” (74). Kingston’s version, however, features both characters as “natives,” destabilizing Western rationalization of colonialism based on “the inherent supremacy of European civilization and the barbarous wretchedness of the native” (Li, “China” 489). Not only does Kingston dispel the myth of the white explorer but she also repositions the geographical locus of progress: exploration and colonization come from the East rather than the West. The East-West direction is preserved in Kingston’s textual/cartographic reclamation of American territory/history. Consistently, the book’s chapters locate China Men’s presence in various geographical areas, testifying to their pivotal role in shaping the histories of these places. The beginning is set in China, where Kingston’s father is born and trained to be a scholar. The same chapter, “The father from China,” moves the readers West, in two probable versions, through the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans to America. “The great grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains” maps the Chinese presence in Hawai’i whereas “Alaska China Men” presents Kingston’s forefathers as far north as Alaska. “The grandfather of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and “The making of more Americans” feature China Men as integral, yet not necessarily integrated, elements of American life. Kingston introduces a kaleidoscope of uncles and other male family members whose individual histories helped transform America into “familiar” space. Finally, “The brother in Vietnam” takes Kingston’s brother back East, back to Vietnam, Korea and Taiwan, only for him to discover, as he watches “the real China pass by” from his ship, that his real home is in America. While traditional maps, as J. H. Andrews points out, dehumanize the landscape and erase individuals, Kingston’s map emphasizes an individual as the actual creator of space (Andrews 24). By visiting these distant lands, Kingston creatively maps the space as belonging to China Men in a geographic, historical and national sense. Moreover, Kingston’s map assists the formation of Chinese American identity that emerges from the identification with the territory. China Men as a textual/cartographic map does not intend to invalidate other maps representing the world; rather, Kingston believes that her map, like her version of American history, resurfaces as one of many in a babble of competing voices. A sense of direction, like historical truth, appears to be a tricky concept for Kingston. When talking about spatial

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movement, she admits that “[w]ith no map sense, I took a trip by myself to San Francisco Chinatown and got lost in the Big City” (CM 198). On another occasion she hesitates when referring to directions: “I have gone east, that is, west, as far as Hawai’i” (CM 89). Does this mean that the lack of a sense of space leaves one helpless and vulnerable, confused about directions, not sure where East and West is? On the contrary, Kingston seems to be saying that pinpointing the location is always a matter of the perspective one assumes and directions are never fixed but experienced individually, redefined and re-imagined. Early in the book, Kingston describes the Chinese villagers planning their trip to the Gold Mountain: The villagers unfolded their maps of the known world, which differed: turtles and elephants supported the continents, which were islands on their backs; in other cartographies, the continents were mountains with China in the middle mountain, Han Mountain or Tang Mountain or the Wah Republic, a Gold Mountain to its west on some maps and to the east on others. Yet the explorers who had plotted routes to avoid sea monsters and those who had gone in the directions the yarrow fell had found gold as surely as the ones with more scientific worlds. (CM 49)

Surprisingly, despite apparent discrepancies, all maps lead their users to their desired destinations. Gold Mountain, as Kingston claims, “was invented by China Men,” and therefore, as an imagined site, can be found on an imaginary map. According to Helena Grice, in China Men “real and imagined cartographies co-exist alongside real and imagined sites,” thus demonstrating to what great extent physical locations, nations and their histories, instead of operating as fixed points of reference, are imagined and imaginatively recreated in each generation (192).

Chinese Pioneers and Territorial/Sexual Conquest In “The adventures of Lo Bun Sun,” Kingston demonstrates that the logic of the Robinson Crusoe story rests on its racial structuring: the master, the explorer, the teacher has to be white (and male) whereas the savage has to be non-white, inferior and language-less. Only then is the myth of origins perpetuated as Western civilization’s master narrative. Kingston’s story, on the other hand, defies the logic of domination based on a biologically defined race: it is the Chinese who arrive first with the civilizing mission. In this way, Kingston complicates her strategy of reclaiming history and territory. She does not simply dismiss Western/American myths as marginalizing her forefathers and perpetuating the image of

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an American as white but decides to creatively appropriate these myths, thus neutralizing their ideological superiority. The scale of the project is reflected in the fact that Kingston interrupts the most important American narrative, namely the mythical conquest of the land. The aspect of territorial conquest that Kingston finds especially interesting is the metaphor of land-as-woman, frequently employed in colonial American imagery. As Rhonda Lemke Sanford observes, however, topographic images of women are an early invention and are not limited to the iconography of the New World. For instance, in England, “the most prominent images of woman-as-land are cartographic images of Queen Elizabeth I.” In 1598, a Dutch engraving featured European countries as parts of the queen’s body. “Juxtaposed on several countries,” Sanford writes, “Elizabeth’s body might be seen as a symbol of power or domination over these countries, but her body also becomes vulnerable to attack at many places—every cartographic inlet provides an orifice for invasion, or rape, as the name Europa, who was raped by Zeus, suggests” (55–56). Similarly, literary texts appreciated the potency of bodily imagery: in William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1611), the British princess, Imogen, stands for England, and metaphorically becomes a feminine landscape that is surveyed and mapped by Jachimo, a soldier in the Roman army (Sanford 24). It is in the writing about the New World that the image of land-aswoman and masculine explorer becomes a pervading one. The discovery of the New World presented a significant challenge to the Christian doctrine, and its cartographic representation required the construction of a new frame of the globe. Unlike ancient and medieval maps, with Jerusalem and Christ’s navel at the center, early modern cartography placed the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the image. “Such an aqueous center makes the viewer long for a more stable foothold,” and the New World promises to fulfill this longing (Sanford 54). When one considers the sexual connotations invoked by water imagery, it is not surprising that Columbus described the New World as “a land to be desired, and, seen, it is never to be left” (qtd. in Sanford 54). Moreover, it was not only the land that was to be desired. The late sixteenth century engraving by Jan van der Straet features Amerigo Vespucci and “America” as they meet for the first time. America, depicted as a naked woman waking up from a slumber, is contrasted with an attired, civilized navigator. “The discriminating viewer,” as José Rabasa asserts, “will, of course, see through the allegories and observe that America is a figurative feminization of the land, or even a sublimated representation of ubiquitous testimonies in New World accounts of erotic and voracious Amerindian women” (27, emphasis in the original). Indeed, the New Land and its sexually charged representation did promise a kaleidoscope of (close) encounters.

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American colonial and frontier history shows that the myth of landas-woman becomes one of the most cherished. The Lay of the Land, Annette Kolodny’s suggestively titled study of American literature and culture from 1584 to 1860, focuses on the figuration of land as a feminine entity (as Mother, Virgin, Eve, Temptress and the Ravished), and demonstrates how inherent it has become in the American consciousness. In her later book, The Land Before Her, Kolodny emphasizes that the experience of the frontier was radically different for men and women. Unlike women who attempted to domesticate America, men saw the uncultivated and, in their view, uninhabited land in terms of possession of a virgin continent through a sexual conquest (The Land 237). Interestingly, as Helena Grice rightly points out, in rendering the China Men’s experience in America, Kingston repeats both metaphors, that of male sexual conquest as well as of female tending of the land (186–88). Only the conflation of the two can represent the conflicting aspects of the male Chinese presence: their contribution to the building of the country which should theoretically make them equal to Anglo-American settlers, and their emasculation resulting from a restrictive and racially biased immigration policy. In China Men, the story of Ah Goong, the grandfather building the Transcontinental Railroad, evokes the metaphor of land-as-woman. Maxine narrates how the impenetrable rock of the Sierra Nevada Mountains is broken by dynamite, which the China Men plant while suspended in wicker baskets. One day, having witnessed the deaths of many basketmen, Ah Goong experiences grief mixed with a sudden sexual urge: [D]angling in the sun above a new valley, . . . sexual desire clutched him so hard he bent over in the basket. He curled up, overcome by beauty and fear, which shot to his penis. He tried to rub himself calm. Suddenly he stood up tall and squirted out into space. “I am fucking the world,” he said. The world’s vagina was big, big as the sky, big as a valley. He grew a habit: whenever he was lowered in the basket, his blood rushed into his penis, and he fucked the world. (CM 132)

As Rachel Lee asserts, Ah Goong’s ejaculation into American space is an expression of his frustration with the inability to legally define his place in the nation (151). Only by imagining American land as woman, “by raping it” (her), is he able to seize control of space and inhabit it as a rightful owner. Ah Goong’s symbolic intercourse with American space, apart from situating him as a participant in the frontier history, is also “a statement

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of racial protest” against the immigration and miscegenation laws that emasculate him (Eng 100). In the masturbation scene his penis becomes a site of oppression rather than the virility idealized in male discourse: no matter how strong the desire that clutches him and how big the world’s vagina, Ah Goong’s ejaculation does not end with conception. It is not Ah Goong who is “fucking the world” but, as Eng asserts, it is “the racist laws that ‘fuck’ the China Man and place him outside the sphere of social recognition” (101). His productive power, instead of being used to populate the “virgin land,” is “harnessed to build the railroad, whose paternity is then attributed to [white men] who appear in the photograph commemorating its completion” (100–1). Ah Goong’s desire for sexual possession of land-as-woman is also repeated in the story of Bak Goong, the great-grandfather, who arrived in Hawai’i together with other Chinese workers and was hired at laborintensive sugar cane plantations. Work on land—cutting down trees and planting sugar cane—is again portrayed in sexual terms: Bak Goong and his team brought the seed cane and a few bottles of rum back. The land was ready to be sown. They bagged the slips in squares of cloth tied over their shoulders. Flinging the seed cane into ditches, Bak Goong wanted to sing like a farmer in an opera. When his bag was empty, he stepped into the furrow and turned the seed cane so the nodes were to the sites, nodes on either side of the stick like an animal’s eyes. He filled the trenches and patted the pregnant earth. (CM 105)

Here, unlike Ah Goong’s unproductive masturbation, Bak Goong’s spilling seeds promises to bear fruit. Apart from the (sexual) pleasure implied in the transformation of foreign land, Bak Goong’s immigration experience is also portrayed as emasculating, which is signaled in Tang Ao’s opening story. Bak Boong’s approach to dealing with alienation, unfamiliarity and the hostility of the landscape is situated within the female tradition of domesticating the frontier described by Kolodny. Estranged from familiar sights and forbidden to articulate his sorrow, Bak Goong finds consolation in growing a garden: For recreation, because he was a farmer and as antidote for the sameness of the cane, he planted a garden near the huts. Planting as if in his old village, which was like this island in weather and red dirt, he even grew flowers, for which there was no edible use whatsoever. . . . To see his plants had grown and changed overnight gave him eagerness, a reason, and curiosity for getting out of bed in the morning. (CM 106–7)

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Here, in a manner reminiscent of frontier women, Bak Goong domesticates and tames the land, and visually as well as metaphorically transforms it into his. By relying on these metaphors of impregnation and cultivation of land, Kingston points to the process of the land’s transformation into a habitual/personal place which establishes China Men’s paternity of the American land. The same effect is achieved by the industrialization of the landscape. Of Ah Goong and other Chinese workers, Kingston writes: They built railroads in every part of the country—the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, the Houston and Texas Railroad, the Southern Pacific, the railroads in Louisiana and Boston, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel. They were the binding and building ancestors of the place. (CM 145)

In this statement Kingston confirms that living in and transforming space is enough to claim ownership of the land and call oneself a citizen. It was not citizenship certificates that turned China Men into Chinese Americans but the active role they played in transforming and shaping the American landscape. The opening lines of Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts read: “Citizens inhabit the political space of the nation, a space that is, at once, juridically legislated, territorially situated, and culturally embodied” (2). Kingston, in her redefinition of concepts such as nation and citizenship, addresses all aspects enumerated in Lowe’s statement. National identity is formed by different discourses and manifests itself in many forms. Kingston revisits American immigration policy and its consequences for the historical development of Asians in the U.S. as well as physical territory to demonstrate that all these sites are marked with China Men’s presence. The counter-narratives that emerge out of the submerged and repressed elements of American history become sites of alternative cultural productions. Kingston’s redefinition of “nation” and “citizenship” reveals that these concepts are broad enough to include America as a clearly defined territory and America as “invented” by China Men. The potency of China Men is that the book offers a counter-narrative of the nation “that continually evoke[s] and erase[s] its totalizing boundaries—both actual and conceptual—[and] disturb[s] those ideological maneuvers through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 300).

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Maps, Indians and Colonial America Leslie Marmon Silko’s map in the frontispiece of Almanac of the Dead and the way it challenges a traditional conception of map-making provides an interesting comment on the role maps played in the discovery of the New World and later in its exploration. In the hands of monarchs and their empires, cartography was a powerful weapon in territorial as well as ideological battles. Maps promoted colonialism and provided its legitimization in the transparent language of objective representation. According to J. B. Harley, “As communicators of an imperial message, they have been used as an aggressive complement to the rhetoric of speeches, newspapers, and written texts, or to the histories and popular songs extolling the virtues of empire” (57–58). In the web of various cultural productions, maps actively engaged in the colonial discourse, developing their own persuasive mode of expression. In colonial America, not only did maps transform the wilderness into familiar and orderly space but they also provided legitimization of the conquest. The meaning of cartography is derived from what it presents as much as what it chooses not to reveal. Unmarked, blank spaces on maps, often more articulate in their expression than words, signified the land’s availability and promised further exploration and expansion. The eradication of the Native population from maps “fostered the image of a dehumanized geometrical space” and thus resolved the moral dilemma implicit in seizing land. On the opposite spectrum of cartographic methodology was the renaming of places: names used by Indians were replaced with English ones which effectively erased the Native presence from the landscape and the language to describe it. As J. B. Harley writes, “Naming a place anew is widely documented political possession in settlement history. Equally, the taking away of a name is an act of dispossession” (178–79). This topographic colonialism and Anglicization of the land through the introduction of English names had a tremendous impact on the Native population: not only were they removed from their own land, but the unfamiliarity of place-names also turned them into aliens in their own home (Harley 181). Colonial cartography, as a part of the colonial agenda, became an effective tool for redefining the New World and enabled settlers to perceive the territory as legitimately theirs. One of the biggest ironies of colonial cartography is that, undoubtedly, Indians played a significant role in constructing the first maps of colonies. Indian cultures, although they did not produce cartographies in the Western sense, recognized spatial relationships formed in the

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world and produced visual renditions.6 Harley gives the example of John Smith, who in 1607 met an Indian who offered to draw the James River in sand. It can be thus assumed that Smith’s Map of Virginia (1612) “is fleshed out by several such encounters” (172). Such contributions to colonial map-making convince Harley that maps can be read as a text on cultural encounters rather than a history of discovery (170). The suggested approach, relatively new in historical studies, aspires to accommodate both systems of mapping space, both Western and Indian. Harley admits that, unfortunately, the Indians’ contributions to drawing colonial maps “did not serve them well in resisting the colonial appropriation of their lands” (178). Silko’s map, steeped in Native philosophies, offers an effective strategy of resistance that colonial Indians did not devise and erases boundaries imposed by the colonizers.

“The Five Hundred Year Map” Almanac of the Dead begins with a map entitled “The Five Hundred Year Map” (fig 2). It is not, however, a map drawn according to the rules of Western cartography. Its violation of cartographic conventions is not a result of Silko’s inability to properly employ this medium of representation. On the contrary, in an interview with Laura Coltelli, Silko reveals her profound understating of the ideological nature of maps: “Western European maps are used to steal Indian lands, to exclude, to imprison, to cut off, to isolate even segments of the human world from one another” (120, emphasis in the original). Silko’s map, therefore, while relying on the Western concept of cartographic representation, aims at producing a form that is free from ideological agendas and more accurately describes spatial relations between people and places. The map and the table of contents are the major framing devices in Almanac of the Dead. The names of the six parts of the book, “The United States of America,” “Mexico,” “Africa,” “The Americas,” “The Fifth World” and “One World, Many Tribes” encapsulate the competing nature of the coexistence of Western and Native systems of signification and categorization (Bell 17). The map does not cover all the areas signaled by the names of the book sections and concentrates on the Southwest, northern part of Mexico, the islands of Haiti and Cuba. The image itself, however, unlike in typical maps, is very schematic and highly compressed. 6 Jeremy Black mentions sand paintings and carvings as manifestations of a welldeveloped mental mapping (1).

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Fig. 2 “The Five Hundred Year Map” from Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin Books, 1992) 14–15.

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The outlines of the shapes of the United States and Mexico are vague curvatures that reach out past the page of the book. The borderline between the two countries takes the form of a straight black line, and while “Mexico” is written in boldface capital letters, “United States” does not appear at all. The map is not drawn to scale and distances between places are misrepresented: as Blanca Schorcht observes, “the distance between Tucson and San Diego seems much farther than the distance between Tucson and New Jersey” (126). This seemingly chaotic depiction of land appears “to expose the lack of connection between land and its representation in [Western] cartography” (Romero 628), which creates false, unnatural distinctions. Therefore, Silko’s map, informed by indigenous knowledge, emphasizes “the degree to which relationships among geographical features and locations supersede mere representations of their existence on the ground” (K. Johnson 107, emphasis in the original). Tucson, whose name is capitalized and printed in boldface, occupies a central position in Silko’s map. A short description that accompanies the map characterizes Tucson as “Home to an assortment of speculators, confidence men, embezzlers, lawyers, judges, police and other criminals, as well as addicts and pushers, since the 1880s and the Apache Wars” (AD 15). The city is seen as a convergence point of people, stories and historical forces. On the other hand, it is also a site of interaction of opposing worldviews, or a “contact zone” where cultures inevitably clash and redefine each other. Geographical distortion is not the only feature that excludes Silko’s map from a Western atlas. Typically, maps are expected to reveal names and locations of places, which the “The Five Hundred Year Map” fails to do. What is provided instead are the names of Almanac’s fifty-plus characters from different moments in history, including figures such as Geronimo and John Dillinger. Silko’s map, unlike traditional maps which dehumanize the landscape, presents people and their movements as inextricably linked to the land. Dotted lines finished with arrows crisscross the map showing the characters’ movement in time and space and their motives for relocation (e.g., “Seese seeks help”). Peopling the map with characters adds yet another dimension to the text of Almanac. Silko sees the novels’ narratives as inextricably bound to geographical locations and therefore she drew the map “as a ‘glyphic’ representation of the narrative. The ‘glyph’ shows how the Americas are ‘one,’ not separated by artificial, imaginary ‘borders’” (Coltelli 119) The map is a visualization of Almanac’s narratives, which stretch in time and space, and thus becomes a story itself. Furthermore, the map is not restricted to a geographical frame. Its title suggests a temporal dimension and hints at possible intersections of

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time and space. The five hundred years in which the whites have lived on the American continent is seen as the return of the “Death-Eye Dog” epoch during which “human beings, especially the alien invaders, would become obsessed with hungers and impulses commonly seen in dogs” (AD 251). The Reign of the Death-Eye Dog, known as Fire-Eye Macaw among Mexican Indians, manifests itself in a large number of Destroyers, also called Gunadeeyahs, exemplified by David, Beaufrey, Judge Arne, Menardo and others, who feed on blood and achieve sexual arousal by killing. Their arrival as well as their imminent destruction is foretold by the Prophecy included in the map. However, while the title does allude to the Western understanding of time and defines the “beginning” of America (around five hundred years ago Columbus “discovered” the New World), the map is not governed by it (E. Anderson 36). In fact, the narrative in Almanac exceeds the five-hundred-year-time span and Silko frequently diminishes the importance of five hundred years in the history of the world: “Five hundred years, or five lifetimes, were nothing to people who had already lived in Americas for twenty or thirty thousand years” (AD 631). In Yellow Woman, Silko admits that the notion of time in Almanac is derived from a conflation of the Mayan and Laguna notions of time.7 In Mayan culture, “time was a living being that had a personality, a sort of identity. Time was alive and might pass by, but time did not die” (Silko, Yellow 136). For the old-time people in Laguna, “time was round—like a tortilla; . . . There are no future times or past times; there are always all the times, which differ slightly, as the locations on the tortilla differ slightly. The past and the future are the same and because they exist only in the present of our imaginations” (137, emphasis in the original). The same logic is repeated in the construction of the ancient almanac which has been in circulation for centuries. There is no beginning to the book, and as long as it is (re)written by subsequent keepers, it will not be destroyed. As one of its entries says, “[s]acred time is always in the Present” (136). The almanac defies theWestern notion of dividing time into past, present and future. Similarly, when El Feo, one of the twin brothers, thinks about past times, he sees them as “living beings who roamed the starry universe until they came around again” (AD 313). Linear time, as Silko suggests, is unable to describe the range of phenomena that transcend the limitations of traditional methods of measuring time. 7 Caren Irr argues that Silko’s definition of time in Almanac resonates with Martin Heidegger’s The Concept of Time and his critique of linear time. Caren Irr, “The Timelessness of Almanac of the Dead, or Postmodern Rewriting of Radical Fiction” (1999). As incisive as Irr’s criticism is, I believe that Silko’s concept of time in Almanac is rooted in Native rather than Western philosophy.

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The simultaneousness and “present-ness” of time in Almanac is also reflected on the level of narrative tenses. In her in-depth analysis, Blanca Schorcht demonstrates how Silko skillfully shifts narrative tenses to illustrate the movement “back and forth between historical present and past tense/time” (123). There are sections which are written primarily in the past tense, “using the historical preterit to indicate the time and the world of the book in ways that are conventional to the novel form.” In other sections, however, present tense is used extensively, as in the opening of the book which begins with a description of Zeta cooking: “The old woman stands at the stove . . . Zeta smiles as she stares into the big blue enamel pot” (AD 19). The chapter titled “Bulletproof Vest” is narrated exclusively in the present tense: “Menardo sits . . . The gardeners are swimming . . . The vest’s gift wrapping slides from his lap . . .” (AD 317). The present tense concentrates on present states rather than past events, thus capturing the sense of “time as a tortilla.” As Schorcht observes, “It suggests that events are in progress and that the reader is a part of those events” (124). Additionally, it creates a sense of universal, mythical time that expands spatially rather than progresses from point A to B. Time in Almanac circulates, and so do stories; the tense switching contributes to the creation of spatial/temporal movement.8 By prefacing the text of the novel with a map which defies conventions of traditional cartography and creates new ones, Silko articulates her anti-colonial agenda. Her appropriation of the cartographic medium offers an alternative use for a map which does not envision land as “merely space to rule, delineate, and build over” (Romero 628). The Euro-American notion of land ownership and utilization is replaced by a more intimate relationship between land and people and history. Eventually, this fundamentally different approach to land proves fatal for the whites. As one Native character says, white people “had misunderstood just about everything . . . they had found in this land” (AD 224). Therefore, Euro-Americans remain oblivious to the signs which herald the fulfillment of the prophecy encoded in the titular almanac that “all tribal people of Americas [will] together retake the land” (AD 569).

“The People and the Land ARE Inseparable” 9 In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna author, writes: “We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea 1 9 The title of this section is taken from Silko’s essay on the interconnectedness of people and the land (Yellow Woman 85).

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that permeates American Indian life; the land (Mother) and the people (mothers) are the same” (119). The idea expressed by Allen, while indeed an underlying concept of Native identity, has become one of the most often repeated and frequently simplified aspect in popular writings about Native philosophies. The image of an Indian as “the Noble Savage,” fully comprehending and living according to the rules of nature, was a creation of early nineteenth-century America when romantic tendencies began to dominate the literary imagination (Berkhofer, The White Man’s 86). Later, in the era of the Civil Rights movement, a sympathetic approach to Native American history encouraged the depicting of Indians as “children of nature.” An interesting example of how the stereotype is effectively perpetuated in contemporary American culture is the 1972 poster made for an educational campaign by Keep America Beautiful, Inc. The poster features a close-up of the Cherokee actor, Iron Eyes Cody,10 who sheds a tear over the polluted land. The slogan printed at the top of the poster reads: “Pollution: It’s a Crying Shame,” and below the text states: “People start pollution. People can stop it” (Berkhofer plate 11). As Berkhofer asserts, “The effectiveness of the advertisement depends upon the use of two standard images of the Indian: the image of the stoic Indian (who never weeps) and the image of the Indian who respects nature and possesses an ingrained sense of ecology” (note to plate 11). If such a brave, taciturn Indian who, by definition, experiences a spiritual connection with Mother Earth, laments the pollution of the land, then the situation must indeed be serious. A more illuminating insight into Native ontology was offered with the emergence of the Native American Renaissance, heralded by the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968). The appearance of texts by Indian writers on the literary scene for the first time offered a Native perspective on the nature of the people-land connection and challenged simplistic stereotypes circulating in popular culture productions. Some of the notable examples include N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (1997), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977); Joy 10 In fact, shortly before Cody’s death in 1999, a Ph.D. student at UCLA, Angela Aleiss, thoroughly researched the actor’s background and discovered that his Native American identity was fabricated. In his autobiography, Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian, Cody stated that his mother was Cree and his father, Thomas Longplume Cody, was a Cherokee who appeared with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. For more information, see Edward Buscombe, ‘Injuns’! Native Americans in the Movies (2006). Berkhofer was not aware of Cody’s identity fabrication at the time of the publication of his book.

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Harjo’s poetry; Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001); and, most significantly, Simon Ortiz’s poetry and essays. Nowadays, the issue of the relationship with the land has become a part of larger context of land reclamation, water rights and ecological pollution, which directly affects many Native American tribes.11 In God Is Red, Vine Deloria, Jr. (Sioux), a distinguished historian and theologian, whose works promote a greater understanding of Native American cultures, discusses the traditional Indian religious views, particularly in relation to Christianity. In one of the chapters, Deloria writes about history as spatially defined: Indian tribes combine history and geography so that they have a “sacred geography,” that is to say, every location within their original homeland has a multitude of stories that recount the migrations, revelations, and particular historical incidents that cumulatively produced the tribe in its current condition. (122)

An illustration of the “sacred geography” is provided by Silko in her essay “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” Silko explains that Laguna migration stories always refer to specific places, such as mesas, springs and cottonwood trees, since these stories “are remnants from a ritual that retraces the creation and emergence of the Laguna Pueblo people as a culture, as the people they became, then continued use of that route creates a unique relationship between the ritualmythic world and the actual, everyday world” (Yellow Woman 35–36). Such “sacred geography” is recreated in “The Five Hundred Year Map,” which locates important, sacred places. There is Tucson, where characters from different historical moments are drawn to, and where Clinton, the leader of the homeless, leads his Army. The map also locates the appearance of the giant stone snake near the uranium mine on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation,12 and reveals the routes of armies led by the mythical 11 See, e.g., Fergus M. Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian. Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century (1996); Gerald Vizenor, Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Stories (1990); Donald L. Parman, Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century (1994); Sharon O’Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (1989). 12 Around 1979, the stone snake appeared near the Jackpile uranium mine on the Laguna Pueblo reservation, which Silko describes in Yellow Woman. In 1986, while still working on Almanac, Silko drew the mural of the snake on the wall of her rented office. As she explains: “Gradually, in 1988, I began to realize the relationship between the mural of the snake and the latter part of my novel. The snake in my mural is a messenger” (Yellow Woman 143–44).

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Twin Macaws of the Mayan legend, reincarnated in the figures of two brothers, Tacho and El Feo. Consistently throughout the book it is emphasized that events occur as a result of an ancient combination of their geographical location and moment in time. The approach that Silko adopted in drawing her map reflects the importance of the identification with the land which most Euro-American characters manifestly lack. In Almanac, white characters remain oblivious to the forces in which events are rooted. Overcome by the feeling of unearned superiority they see themselves as agents of change and fail to notice that the world is governed by a more complex rule of the interconnectedness of land, time and people. For Menardo, a Mexican mestizo who wants to pass for sanrge limpia, land is nothing more than a commodity to make a profit on. As a young boy, Menardo made the choice to deny his roots and fabricated a story of his white origins. His estrangement from his ancestry and the land culminates in the idea of constructing a mansion in a jungle architecturally resembling the Mayan pyramid in Chichén Itzá (Horowitz 59). Since Menardo has disconnected himself from the Mexican Indian culture he is unaware that his ambitious project blatantly desecrates a sacred temple. Likewise, the rejection of his ethnic heritage leads to his failure to decipher the message of his dream and heed the snake’s warning: “He struggles to remember the dream, but knows only somewhere in the dream there is scaly, black, reptilian skin” (AD 321). The price for Menardo’s betrayal of his culture, history and the land is a bizarre death in ridiculous circumstances. Another character, Leah Blue, a real estate developer, represents an extreme form of land abuse. Leah devises the audacious plan to build Venice, an upscale gated community in Tucson, Arizona. As the name suggests, Leah’s “dream-city plans revolve around water, lake after lake, and each of the custom-built neighborhoods [will be] linked by quaint waterways” (AD 375). The fact that Tucson is located in the desert poses no problems whatsoever: Leah intends to drain the area’s water supply by bribing Judge Arne. Her determination to disrupt and desecrate the land is equal only to her indifference to the Native tribes which will bear the consequences of water shortage. The apparent disrespect for land is also communicated in the name that Leah chooses for her project—Venice. As Ann Brigham observes, “This high-end subdivision creates its identity through a calculated, and incongruous, rejection of the locale,” as if European origins confirmed its superiority (314). Leah’s discourse of profit and exploitation is contrasted with the vision of the world outlined by Calabazas, a Mexican Indian, in which land is a concept that transcends Western notions of ownership and is anchored in “a fluidity” that actively engages the people who inhabit it “in a

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continuing process that depends on the ‘thousands of years’ of cooperation and alliance” (E. Anderson 38). It is Calabazas who clearly articulates the nature of the difference in the perception of land which Silko stresses in her map: We don’t believe in boundaries. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that. (AD 216)

Calabazas ridicules the artificiality of cartographic “imaginary lines” as forcefully imposed on the land and utterly inadequate in expressing its true nature. While they are employed as a Western tool for containing and controlling space, in fact they fail to control the movement of people and the spread of revolutionary ideas. Therefore, in an attempt to convey Calabazas’s idea, Silko draws the border between the United States and Mexico as a thick, perfectly straight line, which is more of a caricature than a cartographic representation. In two essays, “Fences Against Freedom” and “The Border Patrol State,” Silko writes that many times she has witnessed how the Border Patrol, while guarding the U.S.-Mexican border, misuses and abuses its power. While Silko well knows that borders and border patrolmen are nothing to laugh about, like Calabazas she asserts that “[i]t is no use; borders haven’t worked, and they won’t work, not now, as the indigenous people of the Americas reassert their kinship and solidarity with one another” (Yellow 122). Borders emerging out of “regulatory acts of racist, nationalistic surveillance” are seen as “symptomatic of a badly eroded system on the way out, frightening to encounter in the form of border police but possible to elude . . . and impossible to stop” (E. Anderson 35). Silko and Calabazas’s rejection of artificial boundaries gives rise to a strategy of resistance to hegemonic discourse. Despite borderlines, the free movement of people is unstoppable. Ultimately, it is not the movement itself that is striking but its direction. American imperial discourse insists on a linear progression along East-West lines reflected in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. As Patricia Nelson Limerick asserts, in the study of American history the insistence on defining the frontier as the idea that “runs almost entirely on an east-to-west track” leads to the glaring omission of important historical movements of other people (73). It is these other movements that Almanac focuses on: to survive the European invasion, the ancient almanac is carried north; a barefoot

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Hopi, who has been organizing multiracial prison riots all over the United States, a Korean American computer genius, Clinton and his Army of the Homeless, eco-warriors and many others march southward, while a “People’s Army,” composed of Indians from Central America and led by the twin brothers, marches northward toward Mexico. In the end, both groups inevitably converge in Tucson. Clearly, in Almanac, people do travel and migrate but never along the East-West line. As Arnold Krupat asserts, Silko’s insistence on a north-south, south-north directionality becomes her strategy of resistance in Almanac of the Dead. Not only is it a shift in the directionality of movement but also of history, which “in itself works as an ideological subversion of the hegemonic Euroamerican narrative, whose geographical imperative presumes an irresistible (‘destined’) movement from east to west” (The Turn 51–53). Instead of a history of progress, Silko offers a model of history that, first of all, emphasizes alternative loci of meaning and, second, as all characters and events, regardless of time, meet in Tucson, is cyclical rather than linear in nature.

Tribal Coalitions, Karl Marx and Native American Marxism The “Five Hundred Year Map” envisions a tide of change that will restore the pre-contact balance in the Americas: “Sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600. The defiance and resistance to things European continue unabated. The Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas. Native Americans acknowledge no borders; they seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands” (AD 15). The upcoming revolution is being prepared by various people and on many fronts: Angelita La Escapía and El Feo are gathering revolutionaries in Mexico, Clinton is building the Army of the Homeless, and Green Vengeance Eco-Warriors are ready to strike; even Destroyers, like Menardo, see how things are abruptly changing. The retaking of land is to be brought by a massive migration, a march of people from the south, beginning in Guatemala and Costa Rica then sweeping through southern Mexico and eventually reaching the United States. The people led by Tacho and El Feo will gradually reunite with smaller groups to the north and retake the land. The epitome of the resistance politics is found in the chapter entitled “Meeting in Room 1212.” Here, Silko envisions “a network of tribal coalitions” made up of revolutionaries representing diverse views. For instance, while the Hopi talks about “peaceful and gradual changes,” many react to injustice with anger and call for militant actions. This disparity of people and circulation of ideas with

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different degrees of radicality allows Silko to “create a truly improvised revolution supported by multiple peoples with multiple agendas” (Romero 634). By providing a model of cross-cultural and international coalitions dedicated to retaking the indigenous land, Almanac demonstrates how national borders are erased and rendered powerless to stop the spread of revolutionary ideas. Furthermore, as Romero points out, the concept of international tribal coalitions suggests that “a politics based solely on ethnicity and race denies past historical alliances as well as similar oppressions and spiritual beliefs experienced by indigenous people” (634). The international scope of Silko’s revolution is reminiscent of The Communist Manifesto’s final call: “Working men of all countries, Unite!” Larry McMurty, in his promotional blurb on the first page of Almanac of the Dead, leaves no doubts about where to look for the book’s sources: “If Karl Marx had chosen to make Das Kapital a novel set in America, he might have come out with a book something like this” (Sol 44). Undoubtedly, Almanac of the Dead directly engages Marxist theory; however, contrary to what McMurty suggests, Silko does not embrace Marxism uncritically. Daria Donnelly’s claim that, as much as Silko is indebted to Marx, she eschews his methodology seems to better illustrate Silko’s appropriation of Marxism (249). Almanac of the Dead invokes Marx in the Mexico sections, when Angelita La Escapía, an indigenous Mexican Indian, enters a Cuban Marxist school. For most of the time she is bored by the lecturers but when she hears about Marx, boredom is replaced by excitement: La Escapía had felt it. A flash! A sudden boom! . . . For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. The old-time people had believed the same thing: they must reckon with the past because within it lay seeds of the present and future. They must reckon with the past because within it lay this present moment and also the future moment. (AD 311) This man Marx had understood that the stories or “histories” are sacred; that within “history” reside relentless forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice. (AD 316)

Angelita falls in love with Marx the storyteller, the tribal man. What La Escapía finds relevant in Marx for her people is his stress on collective memory, storytelling, tribalism and preoccupation with the past. Thus, as Tim Libretti asserts, with the figure of Angelita, Silko situates herself in and asserts continuity with the Marxist tradition in U.S. literature (168). However, Marxism can provide a formal justification for the revolution as long as its “theories correspond to the ‘old-time’ Native American

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worldview” (Irr 235). Beyond that, as Angelita’s example proves, Marxism utterly fails indigenous people. In Almanac the significance of land is appreciated in almost every chapter. Land is also at the heart of Angelita’s struggle. As she forcefully asserts, “nothing mattered but taking back tribal land” (AD 517). Observing how other Marxist revolutionaries disrespect indigenous people, their histories and land, she comes to a realization that Karl Marx, his theory and people who call themselves Marx’s disciples represent three different categories and warns her people against the teachings of Cuban Marxists who only disgrace Marx’s name. Marxism as practiced by a Cuban, Bartolomeo, leaves “Angelita alienated from her Mexican Indian experience” (Teale 160). Bartolomeo finds tribal histories “irrelevant” and his struggle is one for power, not land. Angelita understands that she cannot forge a coalition with Marxists as what they believe is a far cry from what Marx the storyteller wrote in Das Kapital, and therefore she explains to her people: “Marxists don’t want to give Indian land back” (AD 519). Since land reclamation is at the core of their struggle, it is worthless to pretend that Indians and Cuban Marxists can co-operate. Thus, Silko shows that Marxist European totalitarianism and nationalism can never become an issue on the indigenous people’s agenda as, for them, the return of justice equals the return of the land. As Tamara M. Teale observes, “[b]oth capitalism and Marxism require exploitation of natural resources and industrial development of the earth, and thus, both conflict with the Native American way of life which holds the earth sacred” (157). By presenting Angelita’s ideological development, Silko demonstrates how close and at the same time distant Marxism is for Native American cultures and their politics. On the one hand, as Tim Libretti insists, understanding Native American literature as working-class literature “engenders a more complex Marxism, one that is more comprehensive to the operations of U.S. capitalism in its imperialist colonial practices” (167). The result is the creation of a theory that will more accurately present the heterogeneous character of the U.S. working class. But, on the other hand, the question of land repossession and the different ways in which Marxist and Native American discourses address it pose a significant challenge to “Marxist Native American” critics. As Winona LaDuke asserts, “Without addressing the history marked indelibly in the land, a history neither to be refuted nor ‘interpreted’ through ideological sophistry, no theory can be anchored. Since an unanchored theory must inevitably result in misunderstanding, it is to the history of the land that we must turn” (ii). In Almanac of the Dead, Silko’s revolutionaries are united by, first of all, their common goal and history, and only later by

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class. The return of the tribal lands to their original “owners” presupposes the return to the pre-industrial state, and since “Marxism is predicated upon capitalism for its very existence” (Churchill, “Marxism” 188) perhaps a strong union between the two worldviews can never be formed. To provide an interesting twist on the discussion of the revolutionary motif in Almanac, it is interesting to note how the book, suddenly and unexpectedly, acquired the quality of a prophecy. On January 1, 1994, less than three years after the book’s publication, the Zapatista National Liberation Army declared war on the Mexican government. As in Almanac’s prophecy, armed Zapatistas of Mayan descent took control of four towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas, where Silko’s indigenous army gathers to retake the land (Adamson 128). In an interview aired the next day, Silko was asked if she considered her novel a prophecy of recent events. By explaining that Chiapas was once an important point in Mayan geography whereas now it is the poorest site in Mexico, Silko observed that the Zapatistas’ fight can be connected to an indigenous struggle to retake land and acknowledged that her book, while not necessarily a prophecy, does addresses the issues which are brought to the table by Zapatistas (Adamson 129). Shortly after giving the interview Silko published an article in which she clearly expressed her support for the revolution (Romero 637). As Channette Romero observes, while the question of whether Silko’s book served as a catalyst for the revolution, also raised among literary critics, remains unanswered, the fact that “several of the revolutionaries read her text prior to the revolution” does effectively demonstrate how ancient beliefs and prophecies correspond to issues crucial to contemporary Native Americans (Collier qtd. in Romero 637). *** Nations, as political entities and imagined communities, are fixed with (imaginary) boundaries beyond which lie other nations, other communities. Therefore, defining a nation’s boundary is a political and ideological act. Maps, as graphic representations of the real world, were used extensively for the purpose of boundary-making. As products of the state’s ideologies, maps helped maintain the status quo, enforced power and operated as an effective tool of surveillance. Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko, fully grasping cartography’s ideological implications, approach maps as texts whose conventions can be subverted. As a result of this postmodern maneuvering, totalizing boundaries on Kingston’s and Silko’s maps are erased and maps themselves reveal weaknesses of the master narrative.

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Kingston situates cartography in the context of citizenship and the mechanisms of its denial. As China Men shows, historically, through the implementation of restrictive immigration laws, the Chinese were consistently refused participation in the nation while, at the same time, their contribution to its building was undeniable. The ideal of American citizenship, based on the idea of inclusiveness and equality, turned out to be unattainable for Asian immigrants, who, in the collective consciousness, signified the inassimilable Other, or in the language of immigration law, the “alien ineligible for citizenship.” Therefore, as “Asian” and “American” operated as mutually exclusive concepts, Asian Americans occupied the margins of national polity. To counter the invisibility of the Chinese on the national map, Kingston proposes a different one on which China Men appear as eligible American citizens, who side by side with Anglo-Americans contributed to the building of the nation. In subsequent chapters she maps the movement of Chinese immigrants and their process of becoming, or imagining themselves as, Americans. Moreover, to inscribe China Men in the history that rendered them invisible and insignificant, Kingston alludes to the myth of the frontier and applies its most common metaphors in presenting the historical situation of China Men, thus revealing its ideological underpinnings. Her project, imaginatively called “claiming America,” aims to conceptually reclaim both American territory and history as sites of national participation. Its final stage is arriving at the definition of “an American” that stabilizes the Asian/American opposition. Silko employs cartography to challenge the Western concept of nationalism. In Native American contexts, “nation” operates on a different level since its definition is based on people, historically and emotionally, tied to a specific geographical location rather than a political entity. Therefore, Silko’s map ignores national and administrative boundaries and violates rules of drawing to scale, which defeats the object of cartographic representation. Unlike typical maps, Silko’s concentrates on people who inhabit the space. Dotted lines that crisscross the image map the movement of the characters in space and time. As a result, the map becomes a narrative map of the text as it accurately marks all story lines and the location of their resolution—Tucson. Moreover, as Almanac reaches as far back in time as the ancient Mayan civilization, the map acquires yet another dimension, namely that of temporality. Both the map and the novel’s text render distinctions into past, present and future irrelevant as time is seen as cyclical. The element that seems to connect all the indigenous characters on the map is not national identity but land, land that was lost to European invaders over five hundred years ago. Silko’s concept of “nation” moves toward cross-cultural

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citizenship as it offers a unique opportunity to “avoid the exclusions contained within the mainstream Euro-American concept of nationhood from which it is derived,” and which Kingston’s China Men aptly illustrates (Romero 633). What Kingston’s and Silko’s reimaginings of cartography have in common is their reversal of the direction of Western history, which becomes an effective strategy of resistance to totalizing discourse. Kingston, by destabilizing the Western conception of the “explorer” as white and coming from the West, offers an alternative direction of colonial history whose agenda is perfectly anti-colonial. Similarly, Silko, by defying the rule of the East-West direction of progress, turns the axis of history in an alternative direction. Thus, they both effectively create counter-narratives of American history which are written from their group’s perspective. Their strategy of recovering alternative histories is reminiscent of San Juan’s “labor of the negative,” which problematizes “the eccentric” and productively “dovetails with the emergent strategies of resistance devised by all peoples of color to the US racial state and its hegemonic instrumentalities” (San Juan 562).

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Chapter Four History as ReMembered: Memory, Imagination and Writing Histories In the last decade, memory has become a site of frequent revisiting, emotional returns, therapeutic healing and historical archeology. Memory as a concept that caters for a wide range of phenomena is applied in fields as diverse as history, cultural studies, literature, experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis. The ubiquity of the term is ironically commented on in the opening line of Kerwin Lee Klein’s article on the emergence of memory: “Welcome to the memory industry. In the grand scheme of things, the memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as key word” (127, emphasis in the original). Klein’s criticism centers on the vagueness of the term and the marked tendency on the part of critics and historians to make sweeping generalizations in connection with memory and its productions. However, despite his initial concern about the term’s (too) wide scope of application, Klein admits that memory has become a powerful concept in historical studies, triggering an astonishing range of reactions and shedding new light on historiographic methodologies. In the past, memory was perceived as an antonym of history, entirely incompatible with historical methodology. “When historians began professionalizing in the nineteenth century,” Klein writes, “they commonly identified memories as a dubious source for verification of historical facts” (130). Memory, as unprofessional, unreliable and unscientific, offered no assistance in recovering the past. However, as Walter Benjamin noted in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (225). There are such fragments of the past, impossible to document with a historian’s precision, that can be recovered only through the work of memory. Likewise, private history, often undocumented and unrecorded, cannot be revisited without its help, as Vladimir Nabokov writes in his superb autobiography: “In probing my

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childhood . . . I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold” (10). The emergence of scholarly interest in memory in the 1980s did not necessarily entail its acceptance as compatible with historical discourse. One of the most influential texts on memory of the time, Pierre Nora’s introduction to the anthology Lieux de mémoire (1984), defines it as standing in fundamental opposition to history: [Memory] remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. (8–9)

Therefore, Nora concludes, “History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (9). Such a definite rejection of memory suffers from one major drawback, however. As Dominick LaCapra claims, rejecting memory as an enemy of history locks historians in a binary opposition in which the valorization of either of the elements produces unsatisfactory results. In the first case, historians’ vehement opposition to memory due to its unreliability leads to “a neopositivistic understanding of history as a dry and sober matter of fact and analysis” (16). Memory may thus serve the function of the “other” against which history defines itself. The reversed situation places memory in the same position as history, “or at least as history’s matrix and muse,” and induces the “fictionalizing if not mythologizing idea” that history is “insensitive to the tricks memory plays and to the reasons of those tricks” (16). While, obviously, memory is not history and history is not memory, the two do not have to be seen as mutually exclusive concepts. An alternative approach, suggested by LaCapra, instead of “antagonizing” history and memory, sees the latter as coming to history’s aid when facts fail to provide answers about the past. Relying on a psychoanalytical perspective, LaCapra assumes that our relationship to the past

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is defined in terms of transference—“the tendency to become emotionally implicated in the witness and his or her testimony with the inclination to act out an effective response to them”—and explains that the turn to memory emerged as a reaction to traumatic events of recent history (the Shoah) (11–12). Thus, memory takes over when historical analysis proves unprepared for capturing the traumatic experiences of the past. LaCapra’s model presents the relationship of history and memory as a mutual interaction with clearly defined respective functions. In this reciprocal relationship there are no losers; memory supports history when it fails to account for events that transcend historical discourse and, in turn, history “tests memory and makes it more accurate” (20). According to Klein, the model suggested by LaCapra is one of many possible theoretical frameworks which aim at explaining the growing interest in memory studies. Its insistence on the cooperative nature of the relationship between history and memory offers myriad possibilities for recovering histories and memories that have been deliberately lost, suppressed or pushed to the margins of private and national consciousness. Before the advent of postmodernism and the ensuing “crisis of representation,” the construction of meaning in history was a transparent process that relied on a simple distinction between “fact” and “fiction.” The historical discourse that emerged out of differentiating between real facts and imagined stories produced an illusion that the materials used for its construction were stable, coherent and, most importantly, objective. History was seen as imposing order on the often fragmentary information about the past, a linear narrative that explained the intricacies of historical processes. The meaning conveyed in historical writing was believed to be ideologically unaffected, and if it did create totalizing categories, the act was socially authorized. Such a methodological framework situated history as close or equal to exact sciences. One manifestation of such a powerful totalizing narrative is the construction of American history as a homogeneous and unified discourse. This national narrative insists that any possible differences that disrupt the structure must be incorporated, assimilated and neutralized. As a result, regardless of the manifest lack of cultural and historical uniformity, national history circulates in only one, official version. Therefore, as Nancy J. Peterson writes, for marginalized groups in the United States, American history has taken the form of “a monologic narrative of male Anglo-American progress that constructs others as people without history” (“History” 983). However, as Michel Foucault famously claims in Archaeology of Knowledge, the assumption of a structural unity and coherence of historical discourse is seriously flawed and inefficient in explaining the mechanisms of discursive formations. In

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disciplines that rely on historical methodology attention has turned away from “unities” to “the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity,” of “displacements and transformations of concepts” (4–5, emphasis in the original). The process of “de-totalizing” history, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term, was greatly accelerated by the obliteration of the essential distinction between history and fiction in the tropological theory of history proposed by Hayden White in Metahistory and developed in his later works. White’s conceptualization of historical narrative dramatically redefined the nature of historical discourse, pointing out that while not exactly the same, historical and literary discourses “are more similar than different since both operate language in such a way that any clear distinction between their discursive form and their interpretative content remains impossible” (Figural 6). The immediate employment of the new trends in historiography in literary texts was elucidated by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism, in which she demonstrated how contemporary literatures, by creating alternative histories, interfere in the totalizing structure of history and render it fragmented, discontinued, deconstructed. Unlike Frederic Jameson, who defines the postmodern situation as the “crisis in historicity” which condemns us “to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (25), Hutcheon perceives the resultant collapse of the “grand narrative” as a potent way of diminishing the distance between total history and the individual and creating space for a multiplicity of voices. For marginalized groups, this paradigm shift in conceptualizing historical knowledge allows for the creative application of memory as a powerful tool for recovering their lost and suppressed histories, at the same time offering an opportunity to critique the official version of the past. As David Palumbo-Liu asserts, “it is through memory alone, as the repository of things left out of history, that the ethnic subject can challenge history” (“The Poetics of Memory” 212). While Walter Benjamin and Vladimir Nabokov saw memory as a sudden flash which, for a brief moment, gives insight into the past, in Palumbo-Liu’s view memories are not only flickering images stored in the mind but can be reproduced as discourses. Ben Xu rightly points out that memories also take the form of stories and narratives “about the past that both shape and convey our sense of self” (264). Memory is thus a text that is continuously written and rewritten and its de-totalizing power lies in its ability to interrupt linear, conventional and monologic narratives, and introduce multiple perspectives and voices that demystify history’s claim to veracity. Memory may be flawed and unscientific but it certainly is closer to the individual experiences of which collective history is composed. It is .

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through the working of memory that the gap between private and public history has been bridged, which demonstrates that history is not an abstract idea but is created by and belongs to the people. In his influential essay, “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory,” Michael M. J. Fischer sees the employment of memory in ethnic autobiographical writings as one of the most conspicuous manifestations of postmodern productions. The important point that Fischer makes is that ethnicity, rather than being fixed and confined within the frames of once established definitions, “is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual” (195). This claim is supported by Werner Sollors in his much-quoted definition of ethnicity as “widely shared, though intensely debated, collective fictions that are continually reinvented” (xv). Ethnicity thus is not static and passively passed on from person to person but entails rediscovery and active participation. Implicit in this definition is constant change and transformation, and if ethnic identity is activated from memory, as Ben Xu claims, then by extension memory is in a state of flux and, through the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, constantly undergoes a process of modification in each generation as it is revisited and revised. This trans-generational aspect of memory brings to mind Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory.” Developed in relation to the children of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch’s notion can be effectively applied to describe other second-generation memories of traumatic cultural events as well as experiences of racial and cultural exclusion that go beyond the time span of two generations. In Hirsch’s definition, “postmemory” is situated between memory and history. It is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal and emotional involvement: “Postmemory is a powerful and very particular mediated form of memory precisely because its connections to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (22, emphasis added). Therefore, the past as recovered through memory, like in a postmodern narrative, will have multiple versions since it is recreated in each successive generation. These versions do not compete for the status of the real or true one; rather, they circulate as complementing and extending memory.1 1 Agnieszka Bedingfield proposes the term “trans-memory” to account for memory’s multiple dimensions. “Trans-memory” is similar to Hirsch’s “postmemory” since it includes the concept of transference from the older to the younger generation but it also explains linguistic and cultural adjustment, the translation into the language of “the present” required by the workings of memory (“TransMemory” 333–46).

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In this conceptual framework, memory is not expected to present facts, the more accurate the better; instead, it produces a version of the past that emerges out of mediation between how it was then remembered and passed on, and how it is now recreated. In the context of the recovery of ethnic histories, however, the function of memory is frequently misunderstood. Since ethnic histories have been silenced and excluded from the official version of the past, they are still usually unaccounted for in the discourse of white America, and oscillate between a curiosity and a complete mystery. Therefore, the general expectation is that an ethnic writer, as a “native informant,” will fill the missing gaps in the narrative of national history and present an accurate version of the past. As Donald C. Goellnicht observes, this type of criticism sees the ethnic novel “as being realistic (representational of the empirical world) and didactic (a tool to correct our knowledge of history)” (“Minority History” 287). However, in view of Fischer’s definition of identity and Xu’s and Hirsch’s concepts of memory, representations of the past created with the help of memory do not aspire to the status of documents as defined by positivist historiography; rather, they are imaginative renditions of a personally experienced past. A classic example of this kind of misunderstanding is the reception of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the ensuing literary debate it provoked. Criticism leveled at Kingston by her harshest judge, Frank Chin, rested on the assumption that every work of ethnic art “inevitably shoulders . . . the burden of representing the whole humanity of its people in culture and politics” which, as David Leiwei Li points out, is “a task no single work is capable of” (Imagining 52). In the context of Native American literature, a similar logic is repeated in the claims that only “authentic” Native writers articulate “authentic” Indian experience and recreate an “authentic” Indian past.2 Considering the dubious history of the term “Indian” and the impossibility of establishing clear criteria for determining who qualifies as “authentic” (Indian descent, blood quantum, tribal affiliation?), it seems that such essentializing practices prove counterproductive.3

2 See, e.g., Louis Owens’s “Beads and Buckskin: Reading Native American Literature” in Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (1998). 3 David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer, presents a more radical view on this issue. Due to the apparent futility of disputes trying to resolve whether a book qualifies as Native American literature or not, Treuer suggests eliminating the concept altogether and reading texts by Indian writers as simply “literature” (191).

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The Obligation to Remember If memory is one of the sources of one’s identity, like identity, instead of being a linear and stable narrative, it becomes a dynamic construction that adjusts to the changes experienced within and outside one’s self. Moreover, memories, whether seen as flickering images or textual structures, constantly undergo processes of transition through the dynamics of remembering/forgetting. On a communal level, memory’s function can be compared to a “storage device” where, according to Bruce Ballenger, cultural material is placed, usually in the form of stories, thus providing an individual with a sense of historical continuation (792). Forgetting is therefore often seen as an enemy of memory, and remembering becomes a necessity for telling a narrative of the self and culture, and ensuring cultural survival. However, since remembering and forgetting are implicated in the process of subjective personal selection, reverence for memory is often imposed on the young by the elders out of fear that the past will sink into oblivion. Thus remembering, instead of being a willful act and a part of a natural process, may become an uneasy obligation. For Maxine, the narrator of The Woman Warrior and China Men, remembering appears to be an intolerable burden. From early childhood she is told that being Chinese is inextricably linked to listening to and retelling “impossible” stories haunted by the Chinese past: “‘All Chinese know this story,’ says my father; if you are an authentic Chinese, you know the language and the stories without being taught, born talking them’” (CM 250). However, as Maxine is unable to relate the Chinese stories to her American reality, they become stories full of deformed shapes and incomprehensible concepts. Instead of enriching her narrative of the self, they confuse and upset her. Instead of going with the flow of the narrative, Maxine sees it as a threat to her sanity and tries to protect herself from her mother’s words penetrating her brain. Finally, she rebels against listening to and remembering the stories told by Brave Orchid, her mother: “I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories. You won’t tell me a story and then say, ‘This is a true story,’ or ‘This is just a story.’ I can’t tell the difference. . . . I can’t tell what’s real and what you make up” (WW 180). Yet the need to remember is incessantly stressed by Maxine’s mother, who ignores her adolescent rebellion and continues with her talk-story. Repeatedly, Brave Orchid shows her daughter the metal tube with her Chinese medical diploma and a photograph of her graduating class. With the tube comes a story of her school years before she joined her husband in America; the story offers more than simply memorized chronological events—out of postmarks, stamps and scrolls with ideographs

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and words in foreign languages, the mother conjures the image and “smell” of China: “When I open it [the tube], the smell of China flies out, a thousand-year-old bat flying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain” (WW 57). By introducing a ritual of retelling the story and thus “tending to” memory, Brave Orchid strives to instill respect and appreciation for the past in her daughter. The lack of such feelings toward the past inevitably leads to forgetting, as in the case of Ed, Maxine’s father, who shortly after arriving in America, deprived of (or free from) the narrative of memory, disregards all Chinese traditions and holidays and formulates a rule of “no manners, no traditions, no wives” (CM 62). In Maxine’s family, however, memory performs a far more important function than a living repository of stories, and its strategic application dates back to the early immigration era. When in 1882 the first Chinese exclusion laws were passed, the free flow of China Men coming to the United States was severely restricted. Between 1882 and 1943, virtually all classes of Chinese immigrants were barred from entering the United States. However, the children of American citizens, regardless of their birth place, were eligible for American citizenship. This loophole in the exclusion laws gave birth to the resistance technique of “paper sons” in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent “created fictive or ‘paper’ children whose kinship status could be used by individuals who otherwise would be denied entry.”4 When the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed almost all municipal records, the technique became even more popular (and effective). However, in order to be granted entry, one had to prove one’s ties of kinship beyond a doubt. Buying citizenship papers and acquiring a false identity was followed by the mundane process of learning a “new” family history, the topography of one’s “new” village and a long list of “new” neighbors and relatives. Sometimes, as Estelle T. Lau writes, “the amount of information became so overwhelming that would-be immigrants calculated their departure dates by the amount of time they thought they would need to memorize the material” (52). Hence, good mnemonic skills proved essential for outsmarting immigration officers and ensuring legal entry. During the interrogation at the Immigration Station on Angel Island, BaBa, Maxine’s father, is asked a number of tricky questions that put his memory to the test: “Then came the trap questions about how many pigs did they own in 1919, whether the pig house was made out of bricks or straw, how many steps on the back stoop, how far to the outhouse, how to get to the market from the 4 It is estimated that nearly 25 percent of Chinese individuals living in the United States in 1950 entered the country as “paper sons” (Lau 5).

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farm, what were the addresses of the places his grandfather and father and brothers and uncles had lived in America” (CM 60). For the father and his fellow immigrants, good memory of the fictive and fake past becomes a strategy for constructing a better future as American citizens. In Brave Orchid’s hands, memory becomes a manual of cultural survival, providing guidance and a warning against the dangers lurking on the streets of America, a “terrible ghost country” where everyday chores entail interactions with Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Teacher Ghosts, and Doctor Ghosts. As Maxine recalls, “From the fairy tales, I’ve learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them—business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye” (WW 50). Since, as this telling example demonstrates, the cultural knowledge that Brave Orchid passes on to her daughter is filtered through her fears and inability to understand her new country, instead of bridging the gap between elusive China and tangible America, it leads to confusion. Born and educated in the U.S., Maxine finds little guidance in her mother’s irrational stories which, according to what she is taught at school, should be dismissed as superstitions. As W. Lawrence Hogue has observed, “The exchange between mother and daughter is a clash between ontological systems, a clash between the mother’s nonrational, mythical system . . . and the daughter’s scientific system” (115). In time, however, Maxine learns how to creatively draw from her mother’s memory and talk-story and honor the obligation to remember. “Before we can leave our parents,” she says, “they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear,” which demonstrates that only as an adult woman and an artist can she approach her parents’ fragmented and confusing memories as a source of identity, artistic inspiration and historical continuity (WW 82). In her rendition of a Chinese story of the Woman Warrior, Maxine tells about the words of revenge carved on the warrior’s back so that she “will never forget” about the crimes committed against her family. Her mature appreciation of memory comes with the realization that forgetting, while inevitable and in her childhood seen as refuge from the haunting stories, must be defied through fierce determination. Therefore, while listening to her aunt’s story about her painful past, Maxine is reconciled with her role of the keeper of stories: “I did not want to hear how she suffered, and then I did. I did have a duty to hear it and remember it” (CM 203, emphasis added). Leslie Marmon Silko’s approach to memory is devoid of the highly ambivalent feelings experienced by Kingston. Growing up among storytellers and immersed in oral tradition, Silko fully depends on

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memory and storytelling as effective tools for preserving systems of indigenous knowledge and revisiting the past. As Silko explains, “the ancient Pueblo people depended upon collective memory through successive generations to maintain and transmit an entire culture, a world view complete with proven strategies for survival. The oral narrative, or ‘story,’ became the medium in which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and belief was maintained” (Yellow Woman 30). A story thus becomes a major vehicle for oral transmission. Like Brave Orchid’s talk-story, storytelling in Laguna culture is not merely a form of entertainment but, as Silko explains, it operates as a “historical record”: “Whatever happened, the ancient people instinctively sorted events and details into a loose narrative structure. Everything became a story” (31). Storyteller is “dedicated to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them” (S, the author’s dedication, unpaged). With these words, Silko elucidates the interconnections among memory, history and the present moment and demonstrates that for the past to be remembered, it has to be passed on to the next generation. For centuries, Laguna people had depended on the oral transmission of their history, a custom that was interrupted by “the European intrusion” and “the practice of taking the children / away from Laguna to Indian Schools.” As a result, the children were separated “from the tellers who had / in all past generations / told the children / an entire culture, an entire identity of a people” (S 6). The implications of this intrusion are significant and far-reaching: once the younger generations are not exposed to memory, an entire culture is threatened with extinction. Silko’s father’s aunt, Susan Reyes Marmon, referred to as Aunt Susie in the book, is remembered as the last in a generation “that passed down an entire culture / by word of mouth / an entire history . . . which depended upon memory” (S 6). Aunt Susie’s insistence on retelling stories demonstrates that she well understood the changing obligations of the storyteller, that is storing in memory a vast body of cultural knowledge. Realizing the inevitability of change and at the same time resisting it, Silko conceives Storyteller as a tribute to the oral tradition and an attempt to embody its characteristics in writing (B. Hirsch 1). Since in all oral cultures every individual is responsible for the preservation of the past, Silko willingly accepts her obligation to remember and retell the stories: As with any generation the oral tradition depends upon each person listening and remembering a portion

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and it is together— all of us remembering what we have heard together— that creates the whole story the long story of the people. I remember only a small part. But this is what I remember. (S 6–7)

Thus by acknowledging her humble and yet crucial role in the historical transmission of culture, Silko “is picking up—through her written storytelling—where her Aunt Susie left off” (McHenry 107) and situates herself in a long line of Laguna storytellers. Like Maxine, who with time ceases to rebel against having to remember the past, Silko depicts the acts of memory as harmoniously integrated in everyday life. The obligation to remember, instead of being an onerous duty, becomes a life philosophy, a way of life and an attitude of mind. In the Spirits section, according to the thematic organization of the book suggested by Linda Krumholz (70), Silko depicts the oppositions of life/death, gain/loss and remembering/forgetting as natural cycles. The photograph of Grandma A’mooh, Marie Anaya Marmon, another prominent storyteller in Silko’s family, accompanies a story that Grandma was told when she was a child. The story concerns an unpleasant event (as it appeared at first) involving the Laguna and the Navajo people. A group of Navajo stole some Laguna sheep and, after the ensuing chase, were captured by the Lagunas, who, surprisingly, instead of harming the thieves, inquired about the reasons for the theft. It was discovered that it had been hunger that drove the Navajo to this desperate act. The Lagunas then gave them some of the sheep and told them next time to ask and they would happily share the food with them. Silko concludes this old story with a description of a Laguna Feast: every year, on September 19, “Navajo people are welcome at any Laguna home regardless of whether they are acquainted or not” (S 210). While the event that gave birth to the celebration belongs to the distant past, the feast is held annually since the story about its origins is remembered by successive generations, and hence the ritual remains relevant and meaningful. The same logic is repeated in Silko’s letter to James Wright: “At Laguna, when someone dies, you don’t ‘get over it’ by forgetting; you ‘get over it’ by remembering; and by remembering you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our lives and loved us, as we have loved them” (The Delicacy 28–29, emphasis in the original). Thus, Silko demonstrates how through the work of memory “history is not a dead textual past but a living and tangible presence” (Krumholz 73).

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The Fallibility of Memory Although memory allows one to reenter the past creatively, it is not a reliable source of information in a traditional sense since, inevitably, its material is subject to forgetting, distortions, reformulations and, as Maxine phrases it, “twisting into designs.” It neither imparts incontrovertible facts nor establishes historical truths. While both Kingston and Silko rely heavily on memory as essential for their artistic projects, they nevertheless recognize its limitations and approach its material accordingly. In their works, memory is not reentered in a search for facts and dates which official history fails to offer; rather, discrepancies created by memory serve as reminders that the past itself is plural. This understanding of the unreliability of memory is a prerequisite for the project of the recovery of BaBa’s past. The imperfections of memory and the father’s consistent silence hinder any real progress in establishing the facts about his life in China. Therefore, Maxine begins her narrative by stating that “[m]y father was born in a year of the Rabbit, 1891 or 1913 or 1915” (CM 19). Later in the book, she gives yet another version which practically undermines the veracity of the first one, pinpointing the date of birth but completely changing its place: “In 1903 my father was born in San Francisco, where my grandmother had come disguised as a man” (CM 231). The multiplicity of versions and their contradictory contents reflect the scarcity of information and the father’s lack of interest in recording his past. Unable to narrate “pure” facts, Maxine illustrates the process of how they are remembered, at the same time bearing in mind that remembering, as much as it is about preserving information, is also a process of selection. When narrating the period of her father’s unemployment, Maxine recalls a situation where she and her siblings decided to deliberately provoke their silent father by misbehaving. The plan proved successful and, as a result, the enraged father frightened one of the girls into hiding. In Maxine’s story, however, it is unclear whether it was she or her sister who was hiding in the bedroom: He chased my sister, who locked herself in a bedroom. “Come out,” he shouted. But, of course, she wouldn’t, he having a coat hanger in hand and angry. I watched him kick the door; the round mirror fell off the wall and crashed. The door broke open and he beat her. Only, my sister remembers that it was she who watched my father’s shoe against the door and the mirror outside fall, and I who was beaten. But I know I saw the mirror in crazy pieces; I was standing by the table with the blue linoleum top, which was outside the door. I saw his brown shoe against the door and his knee flex and the other brothers and sisters watching from the outside

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of the door, and heard MaMa saying, “Seven years’ bad luck.” My sister claims that same memory. Neither of us has the recollection of curling up inside that room, whether behind the pounding door or under the bed or in the closet. (CM 246–47)

To authenticate her memory, Maxine offers some vivid details such as the shattered mirror and the brown shoe but, surprisingly, so does her sister. Thus, neither of the memories is more authentic or accurate. Instead, the fact that neither of the sisters remembers herself as a victim demonstrates how memory operates as a shield against unpleasant events which become repressed and forgotten. Remembering is never devoid of distortions since is it an inherently subjective process. The extent to which the subjectivity of memory affects the perception of reality is further explored by Kingston in Tripmaster Monkey. Here, memory appears as a powerful medium not only for recording realities but also for creating them. During a night party, Charley, one of Wittman’s friends, vividly recites the plot of The Saragossa Manuscript, an impressive film he has seen four times, each time discovering a new meaning. The multi-layered plot of the film is difficult to express in a few words and, in order to grasp its mood, Charley produces an elaborate and extraordinary story which “gets them [his audience] to be inhabiting the same movie” (TM 103). Wittman is thrilled by how the film’s meaning transmutes with subsequent viewings and wants to play his memory “against its trickiness and its thickness.” However, for years afterwards, he never managed to find the film: “Nor did he meet anyone else who had seen it. It will be as if he’d hallucinated that movie. . . . And Charley, who saw it four times in three nights, will not see the movie again. It will become his dream too. Some of those who heard the movie told at the fireside will think they’d seen it” (TM 103–4). Not only does Charley’s memory of the film become altered over time but also the memories of the people who listened to Charley retelling it become memories of actually seeing The Saragossa Manuscript. The “trickiness” of memory, then, is that it allows purely imaginary events and subjective impressions to pass for facts. While remembering is undeniably essential for cultural survival, Leslie Marmon Silko, like Kingston, is aware of the shortcomings of the process. In her critical reflections on memory, Silko reveals that memory fails in terms of its inability to produce intense images of the past. Although it is able to preserve a sense of historical continuity, the intensity of brief and fleeting moments escapes it. In a poem “Story From Bear Country,” Silko refers to a story about a young boy who gets lost and wanders into a country of bears. The poem, written from the perspective of an anonymous character who shares the experience of entering the bears’ country, juxta-

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poses the beauty and power of the animals and an irresistible urge to remain among them with less vivid images of life with people: “Their [the bears’] beauty will overcome your memory / like winter sun / melting ice shadows from snow. . . . / When they call / faint memories / will writhe around your heart / and startle you with their distance” (S  205–6). Since “faint” and “distant” memories of his or her humanness did not conjure up vivid images that could compete with the tangibility of the present moment, the character in the poem decided to take the risk of staying among the bears. Moreover, even though memory allows one to honor dead family members and save them from oblivion, it does not help one to have more than a fragmentary, incomplete image of them. In this sense, as Jadwiga Maszewska has pointed out, Silko’s project of documenting her past through memory and oral tradition is only partly successful (82). One of the photographs in Storyteller features Silko’s grandfather, Hank C. Marmon, and the accompanying text tells about his unfulfilled dream of becoming an automobile designer. In the school that he attended, the Sherman Institute, Riverside, he was discouraged from pursuing a career in engineering due to his Indian heritage and was trained to be a store clerk instead. Constructing his image from memory, Silko sees him as a man with a passion for cars who subscribes to Motor Trend and Popular Mechanics, or a coachman who drives tourists around the Laguna-Acoma area in a buggy. And yet, despite her respect and love for her grandfather, her memories and photographs do not help her know him better (Maszewska 83). As Silko writes in a poem dedicated to Hank Marmon, If I could see you clearly only once If I could come upon you parked in your truck sleeping in juniper trees by Otter lake Then we could gather fluttering darkfeathered dreams before they startle before they fly away. (S 196)

Here, Silko admits that there are truths that perhaps cannot be captured in memories, just as it is impossible to know Grandpa Hank in any definite way. While such a conclusion may seem pessimistic in tone, it does not render Silko’s project meaningless. Rather, Storyteller suggests that despite being a powerful force, memory, like history, will never access the past in an absolute way.

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Memory, Imagination and a Multiplicity of Histories The fact that there is no verifiable material at one’s disposal does not necessarily terminate the project of a search for the past. When family and ethnic history proves irretrievable from either traditional sources or from memory, imagination takes over to fill the gaps in the historical narrative. As Mary Warnock observes, “in recalling something, we are employing imagination; . . . in imagining something, exploring it imaginatively, we use memory” (76). The powers of memory are similar to those of imagination as both allow for the creative recovery of the lost, as shown in the opening story of The Woman Warrior. In a few ominous words, Brave Orchid unfolds a story of a Chinese aunt, doomed to oblivion by her family: “You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into a family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (WW 11). The No-Name aunt was a young woman, married to a man who shortly after the wedding ceremony immigrated to the United States. The aunt, leading the life of a “widow of the living,” got pregnant and refused to reveal the name of the child’s father, for which the enraged villagers punished her by raiding her house. After the raid, the aunt threw herself into a family well, taking the newborn baby with her. When retelling the story, Brave Orchid neither indulges in details nor provides the relevant context; the story as told to Maxine has solely one function—it is a warning for a girl who has just reached puberty. The No-Name aunt, however, intrigues Maxine, who feels dissatisfied with this brief account of the aunt’s betrayal. Having heard the story but being unable to obtain more details, Maxine feels haunted by the aunt’s ghost, who demands her compassion and attention. In order to save the aunt from oblivion and a miserable existence in the afterlife, Maxine produces possible scenarios of her aunt’s life: she imagines her as a martyr, a victim of rape, a “wild” woman aware of her sexuality or a spiteful suicide who contaminated the water in the village well. Providing alternative versions is not merely an exercise in imagination, though. In order to be remembered as a female relative, not the ghost of a drowned suicide, the aunt has to be imagined as a real woman: “Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help” (WW 16). Otherwise, she remains a nameless caricature of what happens to licentious women. Reconstructing the No-Name aunt’s life, Maxine attempts to situate it in the historical and cultural context of early twentieth-century China, or more precisely, the China that she knows from her mother’s stories. Thus, the aunt becomes a victim of, first of all, a patriarchal society in which “women did not choose,” and secondly, of the village’s difficult economic

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situation, which turns an act such as adultery into a crime. In such a context, the attack organized by the villagers is not dictated by viciousness but, as Kingston phrases it, is a result of “necessity,” their historical situation arising from years of feudalism. By reworking Brave Orchid’s brief mention of her female ancestor, Kingston attempts to “name the unspeakable” and anchor “impossible” stories about China in “solid America.” According to Yuan Shu, the fact that in providing the rationale behind the villagers’ attack, Kingston places more emphasis on patriarchal values than historical circumstances, and this bears important consequences for the reading of the No-Name woman’s story. Shu claims that by failing to explain the complexity of China’s political situation (the Opium Wars and the resultant economic crisis), Kingston speaks from the position of a first-world woman and instead of seizing the opportunity to educate the mainstream readers about China, she perpetuates stereotypes and fuels Orientalist discourse (208–9). However, it has to be remembered that the China reconstructed in Kingston’s story, rather than being a real place, is more a discursive space emerging from a blend of her mother’s talk-story and her own confusion and experience of being exposed to sexism in her family. The patriarchal China in which a woman with an illegitimate child is shunned by the community, and where “[i]t is more profitable to raise geese than daughters,” is Kingston’s attempt to offer an answer to the burning question of how to separate “what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is in the movies” (WW 45, 13). Yuan seems to expect a historical reconstruction of China based on in-depth research, whereas Kingston’s China is imagined and produced out of her parents’ memory and their rendition of the actual place. Another historical aspect that, as Shu claims, Kingston grossly neglects is the history of U.S. immigration policy. The No-Name aunt story begins in 1924 when “seventeen hurry-up weddings” were organized “to make sure that every young man who went ‘out on the road’ would responsibly come home” (WW 11). The date appears only once and most probably its presence is not even acknowledged by an uninformed reader. However, in the context of the history of Chinese immigration to the U.S., the year is of cardinal importance. That year, the Immigration Act was passed and one of its provisions prohibited the entry of “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” virtually halting the immigration of the Chinese wives of U.S. citizens (S. Chan 106). Thus, if read in the context of the restrictive exclusion laws, the aunt’s life ceases to be a unique story of a single tragedy and articulates the predicament of all wives of Chinese immigrants—their separation from and inability to join their husbands. Shu asserts that by merely mentioning the date once and not explaining its historical signifi-

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cance, Kingston again fails to present the aunt’s tragic fate as an indirect result of Western colonialism and U.S. institutional racism (210). While Shu is right that understanding the significance of the date situates the story in a wider context and allows the reader to see the figure of the aunt as, to some extent, representative of Chinese women, it is debatable whether Kingston fails to explore this motif. In an interview with Paula Rabinowitz, Kingston explains that “[a]t one time, The Woman Warrior and China Men were supposed to be one book” (69). Only later did she realize that women’s and men’s histories and their respective gendered voices differed too significantly to be merged into one text. However, even if separated, the two books tell a story of Kingston’s Chinese male and female ancestors and their Chinese American descendants. There are motifs that appear in The Woman Warrior to be later elaborated in China Men; similarly,5 the 1924 date is merely mentioned in the first book but in the second, which directly addresses U.S. immigration history, Kingston extensively covers the 1924 Immigration Act’s consequences as experienced by both men and women. The lack of clearly delineated historical background in The Woman Warrior reflects Kingston’s intention to honor her mother’s source of information, namely memory and talk-story, and to situate women’s stories in a feminist rather than sociohistorical context. The “No-Name woman” story is an imaginary reconstruction of the aunt’s life in China, one of many possible versions, and as such does not even aspire to achieve historical accuracy. As Amy Ling observes, “Where the ‘truth’ lies is not her [Kingston’s] concern; her delight is in the richness of possibilities and in her own creativity in imagining them” (172). While in the case of reconstructing women’s histories, Maxine has her mother’s memory and stories at her disposal, and writing the father’s history entails a complete reliance on the forces of imagination. The mother, “a champion talker,” revels in retelling Chinese stories whereas the father persistently refuses to answer Maxine’s questions about the past: “You fix yourself in the present, but I want to hear the stories about the rest of your life, the Chinese stories” (CM 18). Thus the father’s past, hidden in his “silences and few words,” can only be known as it is imagined by Maxine who, when constructing her version, is trying to situate it in the context of the history of Chinese immigration. For instance, when recounting BaBa’s arrival in America, she offers two contrasting versions to demonstrate both the need to supplement limited information and the plethora of possibilities offered by creative imagination. The point where 5 Maureen Sabine extensively explores the intertextual connection between the two books. Maureen Sabine, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life. An Intertextual Study of the Woman Warrior and China Men (2004).

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the two versions diverge is their degree of legality. Although Kingston admits, “I tell everyone he made a legal trip from Cuba to New York,” she is well aware that there might have been a different scenario in which her father, like many other China Men, “had to hide inside crates to travel to Florida or New Orleans” (CM 50). The illegal version, preceded by Maxine’s words “I think this is the journey you don’t tell me,” tells the story of how BaBa was smuggled in a wooden crate in the cargo hold of a ship heading for New York (CM 50). Her intention in imaginatively reconstructing the entry is not to expose her father’s criminal act, which he attempts to hide with his silence.6 Rather, as Carol E. Neubauer observes, Kingston “attributes the illegal version to her father, because she suspects correctly that many Chinese entered the United States illegally and uses her father’s case to document the dangerous and dehumanizing measures taken by those lacking official visas” (22). Concluding the illegal version with an image of BaBa safe and sound in New York’s Chinatown, Kingston immediately undermines its authenticity: “Of course, my father could not have come that way. He came a legal way, something like this,” and here follows an alternative story in which the father arrives at the Immigration Station on Angel Island, where he is kept “for an indefinite time” (CM 55). The second account, another imaginative speculation, features the father as one of the Chinese detainees and emphasizes the harsh conditions at the immigration station. Although this time the father enters the legal way and respects immigration laws, his sense of humiliation equals that experienced during his illegal journey. By describing the detention and interrogation procedures applied to all Chinese immigrants after 1900, Kingston again relates her father’s experience to the experiences of many China Men. Narrating both legal and illegal versions does not help resolve which one is more probable; what is achieved instead is the substitution of a lack of materials—her father’s silence—with an imaginative story based on the history of Chinese immigration to the United States. 6 In fact, providing two versions of her father’s arrival follows the tradition of keeping secret real personal information for fear of deportation. In her last book, The Fifth Book of Peace, Kingston describes how in a TV interview she revealed that her father had come to the US in an illegal way, smuggled on a ship from Cuba. The information was provided by her mother only after the father’s death: “. . . I told what my mother has been telling me since my father died. Now that he could not be deported, I told on international TV that he had been a stowaway on a ship from Cuba. Three times he stowed away in a crate, and twice was caught and jailed in New York Harbor. He was deported to Cuba, came back to the U.S., was redeported, and came back again. It wasn’t my father who came through Angel Island but my mother” (360).

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Furthermore, by merging the father’s story with the factual material, Kingston is destabilizing the fixed boundary between private and public history. The distinction between the “private” and the “public” is based on the premise that private history is subjective and non-representative and therefore non-historical, and it is public history, objective and related to processes affecting whole nations, that offers a more accurate picture of the past. At first, China Men appears to narrate a private history of the narrator’s family with an emphasis on the male relatives. In subsequent chapters, Kingston portrays her characters as unique individuals and demonstrates how meaningful their lives were in the wider context of the history of Chinese Americans. On the other hand, the use of honorific titles in the chapter names, such as “father,” “grandfather” and “great-grandfather,” instead of individual names suggests that “the narrator transforms individual family members into archetypes” (Cheung, Articulate Silences 123) and family histories into a larger historical narrative. Thus, Kingston demonstrates how her family members’ private and individualized stories cannot be separated from the public national history of America. Moreover, not only does Kingston claim that the two are closely connected but she also questions the rationale behind drawing the public/private distinction. In “The Laws” section of the book she provides a sample of what is traditionally perceived as objective public history. The chapter, filled with dates and legal terms, enumerates various U.S. statutes regulating Chinese immigration. Written from a biased standpoint and aimed at eliminating the Chinese from the social sphere, the laws offer a picture of the past as equally subjective as the one found in the individualized stories of fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the only difference being the adopted perspective. What is known under the label of scientific and verifiable history is in fact an interpretation, one of many possible, and its superior status is a result of ideological practices rather than its objectivity. By blending such categories as fact, fiction, history and memory, Kingston devises a form which allows her to narrate Chinese American history, notwithstanding the lack of conventional historical sources. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s works, the conflation of memory and imagination is presented as inevitable in the process of oral transmission. In Storyteller, Silko explains that the two concepts are integral parts of storytelling and, in fact, they “are not so easily distinguished” (S 227). According to two prominent storytellers in her family, Aunt Susie and Aunt Alice, introducing new details or descriptions to stories was a regenerative rather than destructive act and the alternations quickly became part of the story. Moreover, as Silko explains, “There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined these differing versions came to be” (S 227). This example of “metaimagination” testifies to the

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transformative nature of oral tradition which, in Paula Gunn Allen’s words, “is a living body,” accommodating itself to the changing world (224). The creative merging of memory and imagination results in the dissemination of numerous stories which circulate as simultaneously equally valuable and fully credible. Silko strongly emphasizes that the coexistence of conflicting versions was seen as a natural development: “I’ve heard tellers begin ‘The way I heard it was . . .’ and then proceed with another story purportedly a version of a story just told but the story they would tell was a wholly separate story, a new story with an integrity of its own, an offspring, a part of the continuing which storytelling must be” (S 227). As in the case of Kingston’s versions of her father’s arrival to the U.S., neither of the stories enjoys the status of a true or original one and it is the richness of these versions that constitutes the real power of storytelling. Silko demonstrates the mastery of this technique in her numerous rewritings of the Yellow Woman story. The traditional Yellow Woman, or Kochininako stories usually “involve a young woman who wanders away from the pueblo and either goes with, or is abducted by, a ka’tsina-spirit from the mountains. Sometimes she is killed by the ka’tsina or her husband; sometimes she returns to the pueblo with a renewed spirit, and the tribe benefits from her encounter” (Nelson and Nelson 121). According to Paula Gunn Allen, in many ways Yellow Woman “is a role model, though she possesses some behaviors that are not likely to occur in many of the women who hear her stories. She is, one might say, the Spirit of Woman” (227). In the context of the Keresan tradition, the story signifies the annual ritual of the coming of summer which “transfers the focus of power” held by two moieties whose “constitution reflects the earth’s bilateral division between summer and winter” (Allen 233). In Storyteller, Silko narrates two variants of the traditional Kochininako story in “Cottonwood Part One: Story of Sun House” and “Cottonwood Part Two: Buffalo Story” and its contemporary interpretation in a short story, “Yellow Woman.” The Yellow Woman of Silko’s story is a modern Pueblo woman who meets her mysterious lover on the bank of a river. Driven by an unknown sexual passion, she follows the stranger to his house. Since the story is narrated by the young woman herself, the reader is given insight into her thoughts and motives. Interestingly, the protagonist is familiar with the Yellow Woman tradition and on discovering the parallels between the situation she has found herself in and the one in the story, she feels uncertain about her own identity. This sense of confusion is only sharpened when she realizes that she is becoming a part of the Yellow Woman stories and that it is in fact impossible to say what is real and what is imagined, and where the boundary between the story and reality is drawn. The story ends with the woman returning to her

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family and devising another Yellow Woman story that would explain her two-day absence.7 Later in the book, in a comic poem entitled “Storytelling,” Silko blends myth, memory and gossip into a humorous revision of the Yellow Woman theme. The poem tells several stories from local gossip about contemporary Yellow Women and their sexual escapades, for instance the one about the summer in 1967 when “T.V. news reported / a kidnapping. / Four Laguna women / and three Navajo men / headed north along / the Rio Puerco river / in a red ’56 Ford.” The group was easy to locate, though, since all the F.B.I. and state police had to do was follow “their trail / of wine bottles and / size 42 panties / hanging in bushes and trees / all along the road” (S 96). Thus the poem playfully points out that the line between “eloping” and “being kidnapped” is often difficult to draw. The conclusion is provided by one of the “victims” of the kidnapping who unsuccessfully tries to convince her husband that she had indeed been abducted. Even though the husband refuses to give credence to the story and “moves back with his mother,” the woman seems to sympathize with his decision: “It was my fault and / I don’t blame him either. / I could have told / the story / better than I did” (S 98). What is striking about such a conclusion is that the Yellow Woman does not attribute her husband’s behavior to her infidelity but, interestingly, to her story’s failure to capture the imagination of the listener. Thus, Silko implies that what determines the value of stories is never their verisimilitude but their flexibility and the ease with which they adapt to changing situations. This dynamic nature of stories, apart from ensuring the preservation of Pueblo knowledge and belief, assumes critical importance in the process of reconstructing past events from a Native perspective. As N. Scott Momaday often repeated, when imagination is superimposed upon the historical event, it becomes a story (“The Man” 169). What is meant here, however, is not a story that serves solely entertainment purposes; instead, Momaday talks about the kind of story that is deeply invested with meaning. An illustration of his idea is found in “Tony’s Story,” in which Silko creatively recounts an event from the early fifties. The historical event as told by Silko is characterized by what official history is usually deficient in, namely, a personal and even intimate viewpoint. On Friday, April 11, 1952, two Acoma brothers, Willie Felipe, aged thirty-two and Gabriel Felipe, twenty-eight, borrowed their step-father’s pickup, bought two pints of Tokay wine and drove with their .30–30s from Acomita, New Mexico, toward Mount Taylor to hunt deer. Late 7 For more on the Yellow Woman story see, e.g., Helen Jaskoski, Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction, (32–40); Melody Graulich, ed., “Yellow Woman”/Leslie Marmon Silko (1993).

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at night the same day, they returned to Los Ritos, bought more food and wine and headed west to Grants. On the way, seeing the patrol car of Nash Garcia, a state trooper, they decided to turn back and return home since in the past Gabriel had been arrested by Garcia. Soon the brothers noticed that they were being followed by the patrol car. Gabriel stopped the car, and the moment Garcia stopped his he was shot by Willie with the .30–30. The Felipes hid the car and the body in a grove of pinyons and set it on fire. Two days later the brothers were arrested and charged with murder (Evers 247–48). The trial opened on September 22, 1952 in Santa Fe, and on October 17, 1952 the Honorable Carl A. Hatch, U.S. District Judge, sentenced the brothers to die in the electric chair. As a result of an appeal, the Felipes were transferred to the United States Department of Justice Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric examination. In the final report, Dr. George Devereux wrote that the killing was caused by the brothers’ belief in witchery, which had a psychotic nature. The new evidence gained the brothers a reduced sentence in the form of life imprisonment (Evers 250, 253, 256). The event, as Lawrence J. Evers points out, “stirred imaginations” from the moment the brothers’ confession was printed on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal (247). The press coverage was rather sensational in nature and failed to present the story in an objective light. The story of the Felipe brothers circulated in the area many years after the killing and resurfaced as fictions in Silko’s “Tony’s Story” and Simon Ortiz’s “The Killing of a State Cop.” 8 While Ortiz, twelve at the time of the killing and a resident of the reservation where it took place, might have remembered the publicity that the story had received, Silko’s knowledge about the event comes from her father’s retelling of the story.9 Both writers creatively reenact the events from 1952 and by situating the story in the Laguna Pueblo context provide a more personalized point of view which portrays the brothers as human beings rather than violent criminals, and “mitigates the reader’s response to the crime.” “Tony’s Story,” as an example of “counter-memory,” challenges the interpretation of the Felipe brothers’ act as offered by the police reports, court records and later the psychiatric testimony. As Helen Jaskoski writes, the story “asserts a stark and incisive critique of the power inequities of colonial structures” (Leslie Marmon Silko 41), which are exemplified 8 On Ortiz’s story, see Brewster E. Fitz, “Undermining Narrative Stereotypes in Simon Ortiz’s ‘The Killing of a State Cop’” (2003). 9 See, e.g., Per Seyersted, “Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko” (6); James C. Work and Pattie Cowell, “Teller of Stories: Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko” (37).

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by the U.S. public and government institutions such as the police, courts, state administration and the army. The one-dimensional story of the crime that emerges from documents produced by the colonial institutions and their representatives presents the brothers as intellectually deficient and socially immature “Indian boys” who, when under the influence, brutally murdered a law-abiding citizen and an exemplary state officer. The above explanation was embraced so enthusiastically and uncritically that neither the police nor the press identified additional factors. As Evers explains in detail, Garcia’s prior record with Indians and the resultant demotion to patrolman and transfer to Grants were blatantly ignored; secondly, the jurors, all white male Anglos, admitted to having followed the case in area newspapers, which must have affected their assumed impartiality; finally, as Dr. Devereux pointed out, the grammatical complexity of the confessions and the fact that the brothers did not comprehend many of the expressions used in the text strongly suggested that the confessions had been coerced and the Felipes had signed a document whose content they had not understood (249, 251–52). Silko’s story, on the other hand, enters the discussion from the opposite perspective and gives voice to the brothers, thus explaining the motive for the killing. The Felipe brothers are presented as two unrelated friends, Leon, an ex-serviceman, and Tony, a traditional Pueblo, who narrates the story. Tony’s traditional worldview is contrasted with Leon’s army experience and his participation in the “outside” world, which signals the gradual and yet inevitable penetration of the Laguna culture by external forces. While Leon perceives a state trooper as a representative of a democratic institution and wants to deal with him accordingly, for Tony the policeman is a witch. It is with the theme of witchery that Silko introduces a Native perspective to the story. Witchery, as defined by Silko, is an ancient concept that refers to a loss of balance and harmony in the world (Evers and Carr 17), which is symbolized by Leon’s participation in World War II and his alienation from Laguna culture. If at the beginning Tony only suspects that the trooper is a witch, the dream that he has shortly after the first confrontation serves as a confirmation of his fears: “That night I had a dream—the big cop was pointing a long bone at me—they always use human bones, and the whiteness flashed silver in the moonlight where he stood. He didn’t have a human face—only little, round, white-rimmed eyes on a black ceremonial mask” (S 125). According to A. LaVonne Ruoff, Tony’s dream “serves as a form of clairvoyance, a technique used by many pueblo tribes for detecting witchcraft or witches” (“Ritual and Renewal” 6). Ruoff further explains that according to Elsie Clews Parson’s descriptions of Pueblo Indian rituals, communities often appointed war captains who were authorized to eliminate witches.

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The war captains represent the twin heroes Ma’sewi and Uyuyewi and the “theme of the destruction of a witch by two young men is based on such exploits of these twins as their jointly killing two giantesses or Ma’sewi’s single-handedly drowning Pa’cayani, whose tricks brought drought and famine” (8). In Silko’s story, Tony, who recognizes the necessity of killing the witch, becomes a self-appointed Pueblo war captain. Thus, he saves the community from witchcraft and the resultant drought. The closing line of the story announces the formation of rain clouds and the end of the drought, which implies that the exorcism is complete and “the nature approves of Tony’s act” (Ruoff, “Ritual and Renewal” 8). Ironically however, Tony will not be judged by Keres or natural law but by the non-Indian criminal law, according to which his deed has only one interpretation. The fact that “Tony’s Story” is silent about the legal consequences does not imply that Silko is under the illusion that Tony will not be sentenced to death as William and Gabriel were. Rather, as Brewster E. Fitz has observed, “[t]he point of her text is . . . . to seek justice in written orality, to rely on ‘stories about witches’ to rewrite the cop-killer narrative in such a way that the Felipes’ conviction and Tony’s likely failure to escape conviction point the bone at the blindness of relying on a .30–30 or of relying on the courts to eliminate the violent or nonviolent abuse of power” (Silko 128–29). Silko’s story neither neutralizes the severity of the crime nor transfers responsibility for it to the unjust system, but it definitely gives a voice to those who are referred to in courtrooms as “Indian boys.” By adding one more version of a single murder case to the one already written in a legal language, Silko demonstrates how the mechanism of oral storytelling, in which none of the stories enjoy the status of truth, corresponds to the instability and arbitrariness of the “facts.”

Memory and Beyond In her 1996 novel Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood focuses on the highly publicized case of Grace Marks during the 1840s in Toronto. The historical sixteen-year-old Grace, and James McDermott, a stable boy, were accused of murdering their employer, Thomas Kinner, and his housekeeper. After a trial in 1843 which received extensive coverage in Toronto newspapers, James McDermott was convicted of first-degree murder and hanged while Grace Marks, as an accessory to the murder, was sentenced to life imprisonment (Michael 421). As Atwood writes in the “Author’s Afterword,” in collecting materials for the novel she relied on numerous newspaper articles from the time of the crime and penitentiary and court records.

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Unfortunately, not only did the so-called “reliable” sources fail to provide satisfactory answers to all questions but they also contained inconsistent information. Therefore, Atwood explains: I have of course fictionalized historical events (as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history). I have not changed any known facts, although the written accounts are so contradictory that few facts emerge as unequivocally “known.” . . . Where mere hints and outright gaps exist in the record, I have felt free to invent. (557–58)

Here, Atwood calls attention to two important issues connected with creative reconstructing of past events. First of all, Atwood points out how easy it is to confuse fiction with history, which in turn questions the grounds on which the distinction is made. Historical narratives, as Hayden White reminds us, are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences” (Tropics 82). Second, since, despite their privileged status, authentic written documents fail to be unambiguously clear and exhaustively informative, the gaps in the narrative can be filled with “invented” facts. An interesting question arises: if both “known” facts, belonging to the realm of history, and “invented” facts, belonging to the realm of fiction, are merged in one discourse, is it possible to distinguish one from the other? Moreover, what happens when fiction/invention “passes” as fact? The hegemony of authenticity and verisimilitude is directly challenged by Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey. As has been pointed out by numerous critics,10 Wittman’s stance on the issue of ethnic and historical authenticity is a response to Frank Chin’s criticism of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. In a series of articles, Chin accused Kingston of malicious misinterpretation of Chinese myths and legends and classified her writing as “fake,” in contrast to his “yellow” art that is steeped in “authentic” Chinese tradition. Tripmaster Monkey demonstrates how the category of (in)authenticity leads to the creation of a supremacist vision of Asian Americans which revolves around Orientalist fantasies. Nancy Lee, a novice actress and the object of Wittman’s deep admiration, shares her frustration at the racist treatment she receives at auditions: “They say, ‘You don’t look oriental,’ I walk in, they can tell about me. They read me, then they say: ‘You don’t sound right. 10 See, e.g., David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (65–69); Elliott H. Shapiro (5–28).

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You don’t sound the way you look. You don’t look the way you talk. Too distracting’” (TM 24, emphasis in the original). An Asian American actress can only be authentic in the roles of an oriental peasant or prostitute. Otherwise, her facial features and unaccented English “distract” and interfere with the reception of a portrayed character and resist the fixed definition of Asian Americans as formulated by a dominant culture. As Wittman observes, “History is embodied in physical characteristics, such as skin colors” (TM 312). Many of the characteristics which are defined as markers of Asian American authenticity do not exist in reality as they are constructs manufactured by popular culture and “perpetuated in society as signifiers of inferiority” (Lin 345). Wittman, who is constantly trying to defy the binary logic of authentic/fake, American/Other, real/invented, myth/history, emphasizes the dynamic nature of concepts such as identity, gender, ethnicity and history. Reminiscent of Fischer’s definition, Wittman’s concept of identity depends on transformation and performativity. Likewise, history as retold in subsequent generations is not limited by a list of facts and dates but altered by memory and imagination. When Wittman invites Taña, his new wife, to meet his parents, aunts and “fake” grandma PoPo, her attention is instantly caught by the memory village: It did not look like a stage designer’s model for a set. There were rows of houses with common walls, like railroad flats of New York, like shotgun apartments of the Southwest, except no doors from home to home. The rows were separated by alleys, which were labeled with street names. Two of the houses had thatch stick roofs that opened up; ladders led to lofts. The rungs were numbered; the adobe steps with only two-risers were also numbered, one, two. One of the houses had a brick stove; the next-door had two stoves. Toy pigs, numbered, lived inside the houses and walked in the alleys. The rich man’s house had a larger courtyard and more wings than the others, plus flowered tiles, and parades or boatloads of people and animals atop the horn-curved eaves. In the plaza was a well, and beside the well (where PoPo had fetched water) was the temple (where the men whistled at her and made remarks, and she dropped and broke her water jar, and the men laughed). Away from the houses was the largest building, the music building for the storage and playing of drums and horns. (TM 191–92)

The model is a relic of the exclusion era and a practical example of how the technique of “paper sons” operated in real life. Obtaining citizenship documents entailed the construction of a fictive identity and family history that had to be memorized and maintained over time. Since, as Estelle T. Lau points out, immigration officers interrogating prospective citizens demanded extremely detailed information, “paper sons”

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had to devise a method of memorizing an inordinate amount of material (38, 52). Therefore, maps and crib sheets were often drawn to facilitate the memorizing process and the memory village in the Ah Sings’ house is one of such useful devices.11 As Wittman explains to Taña who, as a representative of white America, is unfamiliar with immigration terminology, the memory village should have been destroyed as it reveals “immigration secrets”: “Should the I.N.S.—Immigration—raid the room, looking for illegals, they can take this model as evidence, and deport our asses” (TM 192). What is even more striking about this family heirloom, however, is that “It is not a model of anything” (TM 192, emphasis in the original). That is, the village as represented by the model never existed in real life: PoPo could never have fetched water from the well and she could never have been whistled at by the village men. Produced solely for immigration purposes, the story, told and retold “to give the immigrants the appearance of an authoritative historical identity” (Shostak 246), gradually became an integral part of family history. The irony here, as Kingston suggests, is that an invented fact deeply penetrated the official discourse of authentic documents and proved reliable enough to ensure American citizenship for generations of Chinese immigrants. The history produced by conflating facts and memory resembles an artificial construct, but so do traditional historical narratives, as Kingston claims, and neither of them offers a truer version of the past. Likewise, Leslie Marmon Silko, in her latest novel Gardens in the Dunes, explores the possibilities of merging factual and fictive material into a seamless historical narrative. Defined by Ellen Arnold as “a richly detailed and intensely researched historical novel” (“Listening to the Spirit” 162), Gardens is set at the turn of the twentieth century and offers a rich mix of themes and locations. The novel centers on the lives of two sisters, Indigo and Sister Salt, from the Sand Lizard clan who are separated and taken to different boarding schools. Indigo manages to run away from the school and is taken in by the Palmers, Hattie, a failed scholar, and Edward, a botanist. Persuaded by Hattie, who develops an emotional bond with Indigo, Edward allows the girl to accompany the Palmers on a tour to Europe. Meanwhile, Sister Salt, who also escapes from a reservation school, remains near Parker, Arizona, where she works as a laundry worker and, occasionally, a prostitute. In the end the sisters are reunited in the titular gardens in the dunes, which is an ancient 11 An example of a Chinese crib sheet, marking the number and location of all the buildings in the village can be found in Estelle T. Lau’s Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion (56).

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dwelling place of the Sand Lizard people. What unites all the motifs and places is the well-developed project of recovering a sense of historical continuity between Euro-American and Indian cultures whose traces are detectable in the remnants of pagan religions, many of which were based on matriarchal systems and the history of gardens and gardening. The trip to England and Italy provides Hattie and Indigo “with a greater knowledge of Old European religion, culture, agriculture, and horticulture” (Ruoff, “Images of Europe” 187). Unlike Edward, for whom history is a totalizing category to be approached scientifically, Indigo and Hattie are open to alternative ways of learning about the past. Their careful study of cultural artifacts, such as ancient stones and terra cotta in the garden of Hattie’s Italian professor, Laura Coltelli,12 and the old oaks preserved since the time of Celtic kings near Bath, resonate with the Foucaultian concept of archeology. In order to recover pre-Christian history, Hattie and Indigo do not limit the scope of their sources, thus applying archaeological methodology which “is a comparative analysis that is not intended to reduce the diversity of discourses . . . but is intended to divide up their diversity into different figures” (Foucault, Archaeology 177). The motif of the transcontinental trip in search of the suppressed histories such as the knowledge of matriarchal societies, female elements in Christianity and Gnosticism, echoes Toni Morrison’s concept of “archaeological site.” Morrison compares collecting memory from an African New World ethos to an archaeological process in which one is “digging” for what was written out of history or simply forgotten. “The exercise is also critical for any person who is black,” Morrison writes, “or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic” (191). For Hattie, marginalized as a woman and a woman scholar, excavating the archaeological site of female elements in the history of Christianity, a project that she had been forbidden to pursue within the walls of a male-dominated university becomes a discovery of her female identity and a liberation from social constraints. As Amy Regier has observed, while for Indigo the trip into the archives of Western history is a regenerating experience and offers a cultural interface between her world and the Anglo world, for Hattie it leads to the discovery of her repressed sexuality and constitutes a personal transformative event (151). Silko’s preoccupation with history is also seen in her meticulous construction of a historical background with numerous references to 12 As A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff explains, the character of Professor Coltelli is a tribute to Silko’s Italian translator and friend, Laura Coltelli.

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people and events from the past. The novel begins during the period of the Ghost Dance of 1890, initiated and led by the prophet Wovoka, or Jack Wilson, a Paiute, which spread among the Paviotso and Paiute of Nevada and into Oregon and California (Thornton, We Shall Live 9). In the book, Wovoka is seen by a gathering of dancers accompanying the awaited Messiah and the vision is disrupted by the appearance of soldiers. Indigo and her family take part in a Ghost Dance ceremony at Needles, California, which Silko bases on the one held at Kingman, Arizona (Arnold, “Listening” 167). When Indigo is separated from her family she is taken to the Sherman Institute, Riverside, California, the first off-reservation school for Indians in this state. It is the same school which Silko’s grandfather, Hank Marmon, attended and where he was instructed that Indians do not become automobile designers, as she writes in Storyteller (S 192). The passage describing Indigo’s school experience, similar to that found in “Storyteller,” serves as an illustration of some of the strategies of “civilizing” the Noble Savage adopted in all Indian boarding schools, for instance, the complete ban on speaking native languages. Hattie, the main Anglo-American character, is based on Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), whom Silko describes as “a great hero of mine” (Arnold, “Listening” 179). Finally, the book presents the history of gardening and as the characters travel from California to the East Coast and further to England and Italy, Silko revels in the detailed descriptions of Indian, Italian and British gardens. The tribe of the Sand Lizard people, whose last living representatives are Indigo, Sister Salt, and their mother and grandmother, is also vividly depicted. In the opening chapter, Grandma Fleet instructs the girls in the art of growing plants and collecting seeds and retells a history of the tribe, beginning with a mythical creation story: “The old-time people found the gardens already growing, planted by the Sand Lizard, a relative of Grandfather Snake, who invited his niece to settle there and cultivate his seeds” (GD 14–15). The description of the tribe and its history is characterized by the same attention to detail and historical authenticity found in the later part. The major difference is that, unlike the Ghost Dance or the Sherman Institute, the Sand Lizard tribe never existed. Silko admits that she had done some research on the Colorado River people and her imaginary tribe draws from their history. However, since her main goal was to present a tribe which is now completely obliterated, Silko feared that the employment of a tribe that died out as a result of contact with the white culture would inevitably necessitate addressing the causes of such genocide. As she explains in an interview with Ellen L. Arnold, she needed the “artistic and ethical freedom” to invent the tribe and its history and thus escape questions about ethnographic accuracy (“Listening” 172).

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The rationale behind the choice to invent the Sand Lizard people rather than use a real tribe is best explained in the novel’s conclusion. When Hattie’s marriage to Edward fails as a result of his dishonesty and corruption, she realizes how much she became emotionally dependent on the relationship with Indigo, who finally reunites with Sister Salt in the gardens in the dunes. This is the moment when Hattie discovers the seriousness of her situation: “What a fool she was! Indigo returned to the life and sister she had before she was taken away to boarding school. Hattie realized, oddly enough, she was the one who no longer had a life to return to” (GD 439). Hence, after being brutally attacked and raped, instead of sending for her parents, Hattie turns for help and guidance to Indigo and Sister Salt, who are preparing for another Ghost Dance ceremony. When her parents come and cause the breakup of the dancing, Hattie is angry and devastated, which demonstrates that she associates herself with the “Other” and the roles have been reversed. As Christina M. Hebebrand observes, Hattie, who at the beginning of the novel represents the oppressors, becomes closely dependent on Indigo, the oppressed (113). Moreover, Indigo’s contact with the white culture did not prove fatal to the Sand Lizard tribe (as it did to many Indian tribes); on the contrary, the cultural interaction enriched and strengthened it as Indigo brought new seeds that she had collected in the course of her travels. Thus, through the employment of an imaginary tribe, Silko suggests that power relationships, including those of a colonial/postcolonial nature, are relative and may easily shift. Furthermore, she offers an alternative historical trajectory, one that moves toward cultural survival and formation of alliances rather that annihilation. At the same time, by inscribing an invented fact into a well-documented historical background, Gardens in the Dunes demonstrates that “fictional narrative and historical narrative, or two forms of narration, are closely related forms of order-giving. Imperial history is just as ‘performative’ as Native literatures, . . . just as imaginative and affective” (Cummings 87). Providing an excellent illustration of Hayden White’s ideas on the nature of historical discourse, Silko shows how history is constructed and imagined and how its narrative structure challenges the illusive seamlessness of historical discourse. *** For Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko, engaging memory in the project of reconstructing the past is seen as both a necessity and a creative force. Ethnic identity, portrayed by Michael Fischer as constantly changing and negotiated in subsequent generations, emerges as a

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construct that is to a great extent shaped by history and its impact on individuals as well as whole communities. The ethnic past, however, is often erased from the official version of history as irrelevant for, and disruptive to, the construction of a unified national identity. Memory then becomes an efficient tool in historical archaeology since, by interrupting linear narratives and making room for multiple voices, “it allows for a narrative exploration of the past that rejects or circumvents positivistic assumptions about truth and history” (Singh et al., “Introduction” 18). In Kingston’s and Silko’s cultural contexts, the act of remembering is the result of communally imposed obligation rather than one’s choice. Remembering the past becomes a prerequisite for cultural survival and a historical continuity. Therefore, the elders expect the young to honor and comply with the obligation to remember, as within it lies the possibility of preserving the past as well as an investment for the future. Such an understanding of memory is reflected in the Native American oral tradition, which Silko attempts to creatively transcribe into the written word. Her role, then, is one of a traditional storyteller who by remembering and passing on a portion of cultural knowledge, contributes to a larger scheme of maintaining continuity and assisting survival. However, memory as a duty and an obligation to fulfill can easily become a hindrance in the identity formation process. Unlike Silko, whose concern is how to remember so that the material locked in memory remains relevant in the changing world, Kingston’s narrator has to first answer the question of whether she wants to remember at all. When memory becomes a crippling burden, it adversely affects one’s participation in the present. In Maxine’s case, the transformation of compulsive memory to a creative force coincides with her successful search for her Chinese American identity and coming to artistic maturity. Neither Kingston nor Silko, however, perceive memory as an unproblematic category with very wide applications in the writing of corrective history. Memory, subject to a process of selection, refashioning and censoring, often offers narratives that are highly fragmented, incomplete and subjective, which instead of rectifying historical records, even further complicate understanding of the past. Memory often produces multiple versions of a single event whose veracity cannot be tested. Similarly, memories, even if cherished and refreshed periodically, seem to be fading and dim when contrasted with the clarity of the present moment. Despite memory’s ambiguity and, at the same time, because of it, Kingston and Silko, understanding that the discourse of white America would not be able to convey the complexity of their multi-cultural identities, turn to memory as an alternative methodology of writing the past. They create a dynamic system of recreating the unrecorded past

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in which memory conflated with imagination allows for the creation of not only a past but its multiple versions, thus resisting the hegemonic status of the official version of history. Relying on memory and forming counter-histories becomes a political act through which they draw attention to the interrelation between power and history and undermine the hegemony of official historical discourse. Furthermore, by merging the factual with the fictive, Kingston and Silko underscore the discursive construction of so-called “objective facts” and demonstrate a practical application of contemporary theories emphasizing the narrativity implied in historical representation.

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Chapter FIVE History’s Genres: “How Do We Seize the Past?” The title of this chapter was inspired by a figure from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired British medical doctor, who sets out to write a biography of Gustav Flaubert. Having consulted countless sources, often providing contradictory accounts, Braithwaite is no closer to discovering the “truth” about his admired novelist’s past. History emerges as an elusive and malicious being, tempting the historian with stories it can offer yet denying access to them: “How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into a hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet” (14). Frustrated and disappointed, the amateur biographer thus declares: “We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be parliamentary report” (90). For Braithwaite the impossibility of getting history “right” is a debilitating experience which undermines the purposefulness of his research. The blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction and between historical and literary forms which transforms history into “another literary genre” invalidates the grounds of historical methodology, leaving a historian with unanswered questions. In their projects of historical recovery, Kingston and Silko do not share Braithwaite’s hopes of discovering one true version of the past. One of the reasons is that what has been circulated as a “true” history traditionally excluded people like Kingston’s and Silko’s protagonists. Thus, writing from the perspective of “people without history,” they do not search for one “truth” but instead probe into the past to recover histories that were silenced and repressed. Their methodology, premised on a discursive construction of both historiography and literature, produces texts which not

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only reflect but also actively participate in the recent reconceptualization of history as a culturally, textually and ideologically constructed process. At the same time Kingston and Silko, unlike Braithwaite, embrace the dissolution of genre boundaries as an empowering process that enables them to devise a narrative form that would most efficiently challenge the official version of history and encapsulate their culturally informed perspectives. The significance of the “disidentification from” traditional Western narrative forms and genres and the need to rearticulate “counterhistory in ways that permit the practices of subject and community not strictly governed by official mode” is emphasized by Lisa Lowe in her In Immigrant Acts (127). Using Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1943) as an example, Lowe demonstrates how extending European and American genre criticism to Asian American productions promotes an assimilationist model of identity, neutralizes their potentially subversive qualities and “institutionalizes” them as “a supplement or corollary to the ‘major’ tradition of Anglo-American literature” (43). America Is in the Heart is usually read as an Asian American version of the bildungsroman and a narrative of the protagonist’s development from uncertainty and immaturity to successful self-definition and immigrant assimilation. Such a reading, Lowe asserts, subordinates Asian American cultures on several levels: not only does the form itself structurally imply an integration and submission of individual particularity to a universalized social norm . . . but in privileging a nineteenth-century European genre as a model to be approximated, Asian American literature is cast as imitation, mimicry, the underdeveloped other. (45)

Reading the text as a bildungsroman obscures the fact that Bulosan’s narrator, as Lowe observes, is not uncritical of and blind to the exploitative and racist side of American democracy. The adoption of an alternative perspective, on the other hand, allows one to see the constitution of the immigrant subject as trapped between twice-colonized Philippine culture and the pressure to conform to American norms in all their complexity. To escape such “institutionalizing” practices, Lowe posits that Asian American literature should operate as “an oppositional site from which to contest the educational apparatus that reproduces and continues to be organized by Western culturalist, as well as developmental, narratives” (38). Lowe’s examples of texts that disrupt official regimes of narration and representation are Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dicteé (1982), Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993).

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The three texts, in their distinct ways—Dicteé with its images and structure of fragmentation, Dogeaters with its employment of gossip as an “unofficial” discourse, and Bone with its image of history as an archeology of space—reformulate historical and novelistic representations and excavate histories that have been erased and silenced. By rejecting linear narratives of development, be they personal or historical, these texts draw attention to alternative ways of producing meaning and suggest possibilities of devising forms that become a site of emergence of Asian American cultural productions. Lowe’s objection to a “standardized” reading of Asian American texts is also mirrored in criticism of Native American literature. In Other Destinies, Louis Owens uses the example of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn to demonstrate how the application of Anglo-American standards in reading and evaluating Native literatures ignores their culture-specific elements and silences the Native voice. When in 1967 Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, one of the jury members declared that “an award to its author might be considered . . . ‘the arrival on the American scene a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans’” (90). What this declaration clearly communicates is that Momaday, unlike his literary predecessors, for instance John Joseph Mathews or D’Arcy McNickle, was the first Native artist who could imitate and reproduce the discourse of the cultural center. As Owens explains, it seems that Momaday earned the label of “a matured and sophisticated artist” since his novel is “even at first glance recognizably modernist and thus deceptively easy for a New Critical approach” (91). However, Owens and many critics agree that the mastery of the novel does not manifest itself in how well it incorporates modernist techniques but in how it appropriates the discourse of the center to express the reality of the Other. Thus, applying Anglo-American standards to Native or Asian American literatures produces the same effect of, to use Lowe’s phrase, casting these literatures “as imitation, mimicry, the underdeveloped other” and constitutes “a form of academic colonialism” (Cox 4). In Other Destinies, Owens traces the development of the Native American novel as a process of transforming the genre so that it becomes a vehicle for effective cultural transmission. Since the Native American novel is based on oral tradition, primacy of community and tribal values, it inevitably departs from the European and American tradition of the genre. Furthermore, it is not only the accurate depiction of Indian cultures that such writing engages in but also the development of subversive strategies that effectively disrupt the discourse which has systematically silenced Native voices. As James H. Cox has observed, “The extensive effort that Native authors put forth to challenge historically specific

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narrative assaults on their identities, histories, and cultures is another characteristic that makes their novels a distinctive literary tradition” (8). An excellent example of such a novel is James Welch’s Fools Crow. Often described as the first Native American historical novel, Fools Crow refuses to reproduce the developmental narrative that traditional historical novels construct. It depicts the history of the Blackfeet people at the end of the 1800s and chronicles the massacre of the Marias River in 1870, largely ignored by historians (Schorcht 106). The hegemony of official history is displaced in the novel by adopting the Blackfeet perspective, which emphasizes the Marias River massacre as pivotal in understanding tribal history, rather than the Battle at Little Bighorn which has captivated the American imagination and remains a subject of countless historical monographs. Like Dicteé, Dogeaters and Bone, Fools Crow, by adopting an alternative perspective and modifying the discourse of historical representation, retrieves histories that, from the dominant culture’s point of view, have been deemed insignificant. By experimenting with different forms and genres, exhausting their potentialities and limitations, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko participate in the project of “disidentification from” Anglo-American genres in order to perform a cultural and historical recovery in a form that is sensitive to their culturally-specific material. The examples of the three genres that they appropriate, the historical chronicle, autobiography and novel, demonstrate how both writers adopt, modify and transform these forms to produce counter-histories that are narrated from and steeped in their respective cultural traditions. A chronicle, usually described as a non-narrative form of recording the past, becomes in Kingston’s and Silko’s texts a narrative of oppression and exploitation which destabilizes and intervenes in the discourse of official history and thus functions as a counter-chronicle. While their reworking of chronicle is usually ignored in criticism, the improvisation within the genre of autobiography and its conflation with other forms has provoked heated debates among critics. The way Kingston and Silko adopt the genre demonstrates their preoccupation with producing narratives that are informed by the primacy of community in the process of self-formation. Thus, by invoking the Derridian “law of the genre”—“a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (“The Law” 59)—they destabilize the category of autobiography as a linear, developmental narrative of a unified self. Finally, in calling attention to the constructedness of historical discourse, some of Kingston’s and Silko’s texts share many features with Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction. However, their project of producing counter-histories also calls for the reconceptualization of postmodernism so that the “issues of concern to women and

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minority writers are no longer seen aseccentric but as fundamental to the postmodern condition” (Peterson, Against Amnesia 11). The final effect of these interventions into the categories of genres is the production of forms that are marked by Kingston’s and Silko’s cultures.

Counter-Chronicles In his much-read essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Hayden White examines how a universal need to represent “real” events as a coherent, integral and morally meaningful whole is expressed in a preference for representing history in a narrative form. Such a model supports a “notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity” (10). As White explains, while there exist representations of historical reality which are non-narrative in form, it is history written as a story that is perceived as making sense out of things. As an illustration of the claim, White presents how, according to conventional conceptions, the annals and the chronicle, as non-narrative historical forms, fail to endow events with meaning and therefore do not qualify as “history proper.” The Annals of Saint Gall included in volume one of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, series Scriptores, provides the material for demonstrating the alleged methodological inferiority of the annals. First of all, as White explains, modern scholars point to the apparent naiveté of the annalist evident in his “refusal, inability, or unwillingness to transform the set of events ordered vertically as a file of annual markers into the elements of a linear/horizontal process” (10). Instead of stories “waiting to be told” we see a chronological list of dates. Moreover, the accumulation of entries informing the reader about events that have negative consequences for the community, such as “709. Hard winter,” “710. Hard year and deficient in crops,” “712. Flood everywhere,” “725. Saracens came for the first time,” imply that we are dealing with a culture that is “hovering on the brink of dissolution,” threatened by death, devastation, flood and ruled by basic needs of survival (11). There are no explanations of events either, for instance why the Saracens came, what caused the floods in one year and great crops in another. It seems that social events and natural events, as equally incomprehensible and unpredictable, are assigned the same order of importance. Furthermore, the whole account is not properly inaugurated, except for the title, Anni domini, which refers to the cylindrical system of recording events and placing them in time as experienced by humans, rather than in a mythic framework (12). Finally, the work does not provide a conclusion but simply terminates.

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A “higher” form of historical discourse according to historians, though still not its model representative, is the chronicle, here exemplified by the History of France of Richerus of Reims. Its superiority over the annals is demonstrated by its greater comprehensiveness and better organization of material into thematic sections such as a war, crusade or monarchy. However, like in the annals, the chronological arrangement of events is preserved and there is no closure or conclusion, which again deny the chronicle the status of genuine history (20). It seems that, as Frank Kermode asserts, since the process of “making sense” of the world is stimulated by “a need . . . to experience that concordance of beginning, middle, and end” (35), the annals’ and the chronicle’s failure to provide a clearly delineated compositional frame constitutes their most serious flaw. In his argument, however, White does not treat the two forms as “imperfect” histories but rather as “alternatives to . . . the fully realized historical discourse,” thus demonstrating his distrust of the unfailing ability of narrative to endow events with meaning and present them in a form that claims to be natural (10). Modern scholars see the annals and the chronicle as deficient in meaning since they look for fullness and continuity of events; the annalist, on the other hand, finds both solely in the sequence of the years, thus demonstrating that the act of recording itself is historically meaningful (13). Chronological recording, as White suggests, is not an inferior but simply a different kind of representation, marked by a lack of desire to rank events hierarchically. The criteria for establishing these hierarchies are culture-specific rather than universal and natural, as they pretend to be. Therefore, by facilitating the classification of events according to their (subjectively defined) significance, narrativity, traditionally associated with the imaginary, becomes a value, “the presence of which in discourse having to do with real events signals at once its objectivity, its seriousness, and its realism” (27). Thus, while White admits that narrativity is a pervasive, and perhaps inevitable form of historical representation, it is by no means natural and free from an ideological agenda. It is the procedure of reading the annals and the chronicle as alternatives to, rather than inferior forms of, historical representation that offers a theoretical framework for looking at the ways in which Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko explore and reinvent the historical genre of the chronicle. Kingston’s China Men and Silko’s Almanac of the Dead incorporate the chronicle as one of the forms of totalizing historical discourse in order to challenge and question its very foundation. Contrary to the conventional views on the genre’s inability to narrativize the past, as delineated by White, their chronicles, or rather counter-chronicles to better accentuate their subversive qualities, become productive forms of

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narrating histories of marginalized people who have been assimilated into a single course of history dominated by the West. These local histories, or les petites histoires, or counter-chronicles, disclose material that has been suppressed by the regime of official history and point to its (in)famous events. In Kingston’s China Men, the discourse of the chronicle appears, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the book as a chapter devoted to the history of the legislation excluding Chinese immigrants, entitled “The Laws.” In an interview with Timothy Pfaff, Kingston explains her motivation behind including a section that is entirely incongruous with the narrative style of her book: The mainstream culture doesn’t know the history of Chinese Americans, which has been written well. That ignorance makes a tension for me, and in the new book I just couldn’t take it anymore. So all of a sudden, right in the middle of the stories, plunk—there is an eight-page section of pure history. It starts with the Gold Rush and then goes right through the various exclusion acts, year by year. (15)

Realizing the extent to which the chapter might disrupt the structure of the book, she nevertheless opts for its inclusion in the belief that its educational value will outweigh structural imbalance. Interestingly, however, not only does “The Laws” expand the scope of historical material but also it allows for the juxtaposition of distinct discourses of historical representation. Unlike the poetic style of the text, the language of Kingston’s counterchronicle, covering the years between 1868–1978, imitates the hermetic jargon of legal documents. The quotation preceding the chronicle signals a shift in discourse, from literary to legal or, to use Hayden White’s terms, a transition from “discourse of desire” to “discourse of the real”: The United States of America and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from the one country to the other for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents. ARTICLE V OF THE BURLINGAME TREATY, SIGNED IN WASHINGTON, DC, 28 JULY 1868, AND IN PEKING, 23 NOVEMBER 1869. (CM 151)

The treaty is followed by a chronological list of later modifications and amendments, introduced to effectively stanch the flow of immigrants from China and reduce opportunities for acquiring American citizenship for those

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already residing in the country. Yet, despite the seriousness of the acts legalizing racism, “The Laws” is also characterized by a sense of irony arising from the unnaturally convoluted and repetitive language: “1884: Congress refined the Exclusion Act with An Act to Amend an Act” (CM 153). Thus, as Donald Goellnicht rightly notices, by imitating “the monological voice of authorizing History . . . the section uncovers both the dullness of this voice and its deafness to other, competing voices, those of the minorities suffering legalized discrimination” (“Tang Ao” 196). Furthermore, by exposing the dullness and repetitiveness of this discourse, Kingston questions the very meaningfulness of the language in which official history is written. China Men gives access to the past through two distinct discourses: the imaginary stories of Maxine’s great grandfathers, grandfathers, and uncles, and the “discourse of the real,” exemplified by the text of the restrictive acts. These acts, however, do not constitute “pure” history since they are available in an already interpreted form as products of the politics aimed at eliminating China Men from the social, economic and political spheres. When the two modes of representing history are juxtaposed, both fail to offer a transparent look into the past, an impossible feat, but it is the “discourse of desire” in the form of imaginary stories that allows a more meaningful view of the history of Chinese Americans, meaningful in the sense that it offers a history of the people rather than legal acts written in a dehumanized language. It is not for the purposes of authentication, as Linda Ching Sledge suggests, that Kingston writes her counter-chronicle of the Exclusion Acts. According to Sledge, having faced criticism about the lack of authenticity in The Woman Warrior, Kingston wrote “The Laws” to “balance the remaining chapters on ‘invented’ or idealized history with substantial documentary material” (“Maxine Hong Kingston’s” 6). That Kingston is not concerned with the objectivity of legal documents is manifested in the fact that the entries in her chronicle are preceded by brief, highly subjective comments. For instance, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court verdict pronouncing San Francisco safety ordinances as discriminatory is described as “a victory” and, indeed, it is a victory but, considering the laws’ racist agenda, only from the point of view of the Chinese community. Thus, Kingston is exposing a seemingly objective and non-narrative form of chronicle as a counter-chronicle and a narrative of American history which departs, however, from the “model of glorious expansionist epic.” Instead of presenting the American rise to power, Kingston fashions the historical narrative as a story about the birth of a system of exclusion and exploitation of the ethnic minority “whose contribution has been appropriated but legal status rejected” (Li, “China Men” 492), and which can boast of effective acts of resistance against discriminatory practices.

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While in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead the titular book itself constitutes an alternative history of the American continents, the novel also incorporates the discourse of the traditional chronicle form with a chronologically arranged list of dates, events and their main participants to dismantle the hegemony of the master narrative. These counter-chronicles are produced by Angelita La Escapía, an indigenous activist and former Marxist, and Clinton, an Afro-American Vietnam War veteran, who identifies himself as “Black Indian.” Their historiographies, produced in different parts of the world and yet sharing many similarities, serve many interrelated purposes. First of all, like Kingston’s counter-chronicle, they have the purely educational function of revealing to the people their own histories which had been silenced and suppressed by the narrative of Western progress. Second, they shift the emphasis from the center as defined from the mainstream perspective to the local and accordingly rearrange the importance of historical events. Finally, these texts are used to build communities that transgress national boundaries and call for creating trans-cultural coalitions, thus questioning the foundations of nation-states. Angelita presents her counter-chronicle during the trial of Bartolomeo, a Cuban Marxist, whose attitude toward indigenous histories highlights the necessity of retrieving the suppressed past. Bartolomeo sarcastically refers to Indian histories as “primitive animalistic tribalism” which “ha[s] to be cut out and burned like a tumor” since it represents the worst kind of nationalism (526). In defense of the past and as evidence against Bartolomeo, Angelita reads from a notebook in which she compiled a list of Indian and African uprisings from 1510–1945, which are usually omitted from Anglo-American history books. Following the convention of writing chronicles, each entry on Angelita’s list begins with the date of an event, followed by the name of the location and a brief description. Interestingly, however, the employment of proper names is characterized by a mixing of terminology referring to distinct concepts: 1536—Peru—Incas rise up against Pizarro and lay siege to Cuzco and set it afire. Rebellion spreads down Rimac Valley where Incas lay siege to Lima. 1538—U.S.A—Zuni Pueblo Indians kill the Moor, Esteban, sent by Spanish to scout the Grand Chichimecas for cities of gold. ... 1540—U.S.A.—Hopi Pueblo Indians fight and repel de Tovar and his men. (AD 527–28, emphasis added)

As Virginia E. Bell has observed, Angelita juxtaposes the names of nationstates, Peru, U.S.A. and later Mexico and Cuba, with the names of tribes

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Incas, Zuni, Hopi, formed according to alternative cultural and political criteria rather than those that lead to the creation of national borders. This dual list suggests that Angelita is writing her chronicle to trace in history and at the same time inspire revolts against nation-states imposed on the land as a result of colonization (Bell 21). What unites these disparate groups is the shared history of being enslaved by and rebelling against white colonizers as well as the possibility of a common future as a strategically formed community of revolutionaries. Similarly, Clinton’s counter-chronicle is meant as an educational and revolutionary project. Like Angelita, Clinton is acutely aware of the importance of familiarity with one’s history. Suppression of ethnic histories is perceived by Clinton as a long-term strategy of the white majority to subjugate the ethnic people of America: “Ignorance of the people’s history had been the white man’s best weapon” (AD 742). Thus, chronicling the past begins as a part of Clinton’s research on the intersections of African-American and Native American histories, research whose goal is to authenticate his invented ethnicity of “Black Indian” and to seek possible alliances to conduct a massive uprising led by the “Army of the Homeless” (Bell 23). Covering more than three hundred years from 1526 to 1862, the chronicle, influenced by the writings of Herbert Aptheker, a radical Marxist historian, again presents a long history of resistance to the Anglo-American colonizer and depicts African-Americans and Native Americans as partners in the struggle for freedom: 1526 Pee Dee River, South Carolina: Negro slaves rise up, flee to live with the Indians. 1663 Gloucester County, Virginia: Indians aid black and white slaves. ... 1708 Newton, Long Island: Indian and black slaves rebel and kill seven whites. (AD 742–43)

In tracing the history of rebellions, unlike Angelita, Clinton concentrates on the territory of the United States: he begins with Pee Dee River, South Carolina and ends with Yazoo City, Mississippi. His insistence on constructing an alternative history within the borders of the U.S. demonstrates that he is searching for the origins of his “Black Indian” identity in the American past, thus creating its genealogy. While arranging a chronological list of rebellions follows a model of traditional historiography with a linear development of events, Angelita’s and Clinton’s counter-chronicles introduce an interesting modification. Both were conceived as texts, as written records of resistance; however, once read, they begin to circulate in oral form. The audience gathered

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at Bartolomeo’s trial carefully listened to Angelita’s reading and “the names and dates had touched off a great deal of excitement among the people, who immediately added dozens of other uprisings and rebellions that had occurred in that region alone” (AD 532–33). Thus the chronicle, completed and extended by orally transmitted stories of resistance, shifts to a different medium, that is an oral narrative, to more effectively serve the purpose for which it was originally conceived, namely educating and inciting people to action. Likewise, the information included in Clinton’s written counter-chronicle is disseminated via the spoken word. In a series of radio programs based on his research, Clinton educates people on alternative trajectories of American history and tries to connect with other dispossessed groups. After the failure of the “Army of the Homeless,” Clinton heads for Haiti to search for the spirits of his African ancestors, but before his departure, he promises the Barefoot Hopi, an organizer of multiracial riots, that he “would spread the word among the brothers and sisters” of the revolution (AD 747). Thus, Angelita’s and Clinton’s chronicles reverse the direction of Western development from orality to literacy, pointing to the existence of alternative models of evolution in history. Moreover, both chroniclers demonstrate an understanding and mastery of different methods of producing histories: not only do they produce counter-chronicles in written form and according to the rules of this historical genre, but also, recognizing the specificity of cultures that do not privilege writing, they easily transform it into oral form. Finally, it is essential to demonstrate how Angelita’s and Clinton’s texts address the problem of the chronicle’s inability to offer neither a clearly delineated beginning nor a sense of closure. The first events opening the counter-chronicles, due to their anti-white character, most probably were not properly recorded and stored in the master narrative. In all probability, they were accessible to Angelita and Clinton in the form of oral narratives activated in memory or, if recorded at all, through unconventional and, according to the standards of historical methodology, unreliable sources. If either of the writers of the counter-chronicles discovers an earlier example of a rebellion against colonization, it will immediately be added to the text, thus expanding its time span. Therefore, the beginning of the texts cannot be fixed in time; rather, they change as ethnic memory gives access to an even more distant past. The ending, on the other hand, is not included in the text of the counter-chronicles as there is yet no conclusion to the history of oppression. Instead, the conclusion is being drawn as Angelita is organizing the “March North” from Chiapas and Clinton is forming a network of coalitions across national borders. Thus, their counter-chronicles, in accord with Almanac’s philosophy, produce history that is not steeped in the past but instead looks into the future.

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Autobiographies Even before Roland Barthes deconstructed the major assumptions underlying the genre and Paul de Man declared the death of autobiography, the task of formulating its definition had never been an easy one. “We have no anatomy of the autobiography,” writes James Craig Holte, commenting on the immense diversity of autobiographical forms (28). While the term itself appears to be self-explanatory and unambiguous, “the description of (graphia) an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (auto-)” (Misch 3) in fact poses a considerable challenge for theoreticians of the genre. Early critics pointed to the concept of individualism or clearly delineated self as the most relevant in the discussion on the autobiography. For instance, Georges Gusdorf identified a “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” as a precondition for autobiographical writing (29). In a similar vein, James Olney wrote about “the isolate uniqueness” that is “the primary quality and condition of the individual and his experience” (Metaphors 21), thus pointing to a human impulse to become separate from others as the origins of an autobiographical act. A French theoretician, Philippe Lejeune, the author of a very popular and widely quoted definition, postulated that the autobiography is “a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality” (qtd. in L. Anderson 2). Later, dissatisfied with his definition, which proved inadequate in distinguishing between the autobiography and the autobiographical novel, Lejeune expanded his theory with the concept of le pacte autobiographique between the author and the reader under which the former is bound to offer an accurate account of his life. What all these theories had in common was the insistence on seeing the self as stable and unified. Moreover, as feminist and postcolonial critics have pointed out, early theoreticians of the genre, such as Georg Misch, Georges Gusdorf and William Spengemann (Smith and Watson 5), restricted their interest to the lives of great men—Saint Augustine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams—and completely ignored texts produced by representatives of minorities, whose experiences differ significantly from those of white males. Thus, after years of considerable neglect, autobiographies, diaries, memories and testimonies written by women and minorities have become a site for “thinking about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern critical theories” (Smith and Watson 5). New and alternative perspectives quickly led to critical reformulations of the genre and the coinage of new terms which emphasize the genre’s connections with gender, sexuality, class and performativity: Domna C. Stanton’s authogynography, Leigh Gilmore’s autobiographics,

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Sidonie Smith’s autobiographical manifestos and Françoise Lionnet’s autoethnography and the theory of métissage are just a few examples.1 For ethnic minority writers, the autobiography became an effective and powerful medium of self-expression relatively early, that is at the beginning of the twentieth century at the peak of mass immigration to the United States. Despite an abundance of material, however, for many years ethnic autobiographies remained unrecognized and neglected in scholarly circles, which certainly reflected the inferior social position of their authors (21). With the emergence of ethnic studies and scholarship in the 1970s, ethnic autobiography, mirroring the history of women’s autobiographical writings, rose to prominence as an important form of literary production. The first critics who pioneered the theoretical studies of the genre, William Boelhower, James Craig Holte and James Olney, had a large amount of material at their disposal, which has accumulated for sixty years. Paradoxically, as Jerzy Durczak has observed, the interest in ethnic or “bicultural” autobiography was accompanied by the process of a gradual loss of its distinctiveness and many of the works dealing with immigrant/ethnic experience were classified as mainstream American literature (Durczak 23). In recent years, however, it seems that the genre is thriving again, energized by publications by writers from different ethnic groups who rediscover the form, transgressing and redefining its boundaries. In order to see how Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko appropriate the genre of autobiography, and engage in the debate concerning its shape, it is first necessary to consider the long history of Chinese American and Native American autobiographical writings. Such a retrospective strategy will demonstrate that Kingston and Silko, by reinventing the genre, refer not only to its Western tradition but also to an impressive amount of material produced by representatives of their ethnic groups. While it has often been repeated that autobiography is a distinctly Western genre and as such does not belong to the Chinese literary tradition, autobiographical writings comprise a large part of Chinese American literature in English. Borrowing James Olney’s phrase, it can be said that Chinese American writers “entered into the house of literature through the door of autobiography” (“Autobiography” 15). Quite understandably, the early Chinese autobiographical writings in America were produced not by the most representative members of the immigrant population, 1 See Domna C. Stanton, “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” (1984); Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (1994); Sidonie Smith, “The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities, Politics” (1991); Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989).

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which mainly consisted of uneducated peasants, but by the privileged few, travelers, foreign students, scholars or diplomats. Keenly aware of the prevailing misconceptions of the Chinese, or any other Asian culture, these first autobiographers, or “ambassadors of goodwill” (Kim 24) as they liked to be seen, attempted to bridge the gap between the East and West and plead for tolerance, which in effect produced a highly idealized picture of Asia. Examples of such writings include Lee Yan Phou’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887), Chiang Yee’s A Chinese Childhood and a work by the best-known explicator of China to the West, Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (1937). The next phase in the history of Chinese American autobiography in the United States is represented by writings of second generation Chinese Americans, whose unique cultural situation had a direct effect on the content of their literary production. Unlike their parents, the second generation, born and educated in the United States, could not refer to China as their home and look to it as an alternative to their lives in America. At the same time, however, due to their distinctive racial characteristics, they were often perceived as “foreign” and “alien.” Thus, the prevailing motif of the second generation autobiographical writings was “a profound compulsion to belong to mainstream culture [and] the struggle to enter the larger society” (Yin 119). Such was the desire to secure a place in the American mainstream that the descriptions of Chinese customs and ideas included in the texts are in essence a critique of everything Chinese and a glorification of American culture. For instance, a notable example of the genre and the first financial success, Padre Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendants (1943), is described by Kim as a “sincere,” yet “humiliating book” (63). Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945, 1950), quoted by Maxine Hong Kingston as an important inspiration (Hoy 62), emerges as a more mature work, as the dilemma of living in two distinct cultures remains unresolved. Wong struggles to be an obedient Chinese daughter but at the same time values American respect for individualism. Unlike Lowe, Wong strongly accentuates the positive aspects of her Chinese identity and provides lively descriptions of Chinese family life. The trajectory of the Chinese American autobiography changed dramatically with the era of the Civil Rights movements. As Yin has observed, the key cultural phenomena of the decade, such as the struggle for racial equality, the rise in ethnic pride and consciousness, the birth of feminism and the anti-war movements, had an enormous impact on Chinese American literature. Moreover, the Immigration Act of 1965 led to a further diversification of American society and greatly increased the number of immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Southeast Asia, affecting the ethnic composition of Asian American communities. Autobiography, often mixed

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with other genres, emerged as a prolific form to express the complexity of these changes, successfully encapsulating the narratives of identity quest, ethnic awakening and for Chinese, and Asian American women writers generally, gendered strategies of identity formation. Some of the examples of Chinese American autobiographical writings and improvisation on the genre, apart from Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, include Chuang Hua’s Crossings (1968), Eleanor Wong Telamaque’s It’s Crazy to Stay Chinese in Minnesota (1978), Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), and the bestselling Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (1999) by Adeline Yen Mah. Even long after the autobiography received scholarly attention as a literary genre, Native American autobiography was treated as either a contradiction in terms or a form of writing associated with the field of ethnography and anthropology rather than literature. However, more recent scholarship, offered by critics such as William Bloodworth, H. David Brumble, Arnold Krupat, Kathleen Mullen Sands, Hertha Dawn Wong and Robert Warrior, examines how the reconceptualization of the genre has enabled the establishment of a tradition of Native American autobiographical and non-fiction writing. Indeed, a rethinking of the Western definition of autobiography is necessary to even initiate a discussion about the employment of the genre in Native American literary productions. The notion of an individual life as a linear story and the cult of individualism are concepts not necessarily shared by Indian oral cultures. As David Murray explains, “Individuals in an oral culture have no context for the conception of autobiography which has been developed in literary cultures, and which depends on a set of interrelated common assumptions about the nature of self, its relation to history, its relationship of authorship to a text, and the concept of authenticity and authority which goes with it” (67). On the other hand, Gerald Vizenor challenges such views and points to the simplicity of the binary thinking of Western individualism/Indian community: “Indian, tribal people, are more individual than contemporary whites . . . [In reference to] this idea that so many interpreters of Indian life story and autobiography have, that . . . Indians are communal, that they couldn’t write autobiography because it is antithetical to their being of essential communal experience. Now, what rubbish!” (Binder and Breinig 156). Vizenor’s comment clearly demonstrates that autobiography should not be seen as totally incompatible with Indian cosmologies. Rather, the genre, when reformulated and adapted to the Native perspective, emerges as a form that aptly expresses complex issues of identity formation in relation to community. According to Hertha Dawn Wong, the beginnings of Native American autobiography can be traced to as early as the pre-contact era. Opposing

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the views of earlier critics, for instance Sands and Krupat, Wong proposes extending the definition of the genre in order to include non-written forms such as coup tales, oral personal narratives, drawings on tipis and pictographs, and to thus see them as cultural texts which provide narratives of individuals as integral parts of communities. To emphasize their non-written and performative form, Wong suggests the somewhat awkward term communo-bio-oratory (community-life-speaking), since “its roots reflect the communal and often oral nature of early Native American oral expression” (Wong, Sending My Heart 20). The nineteenth century inaugurated a phase marked by the proliferation of non-fiction Native American writings and the autobiography is one of the most frequently chosen genres. It is represented by two main kinds of writings: “as-told-to” life histories, solicited, translated and edited by EuroAmericans, and autobiographies in English written by Indians. Since for Arnold Krupat, one of the leading theoreticians of the genre, “the principle constituting the Indian autobiography as a genre is the principle of original bicultural composite composition,” it is the first form that can be classified as an example of “Native American autobiography,” in contrast to the latter, referred to by Krupat as “autobiographies-by-Indians” (For Those 31). Inherent in the idea of autobiography as a product of collaboration is the problem of unequal status between the teller and the collaborator: at what point does editing become rewriting, mediation become manipulation and autobiography become, in fact, biography? As Kathleen Mullen Sands has observed, in the case of nineteenth-century collaborative works, due to the unavailability of transcripts of the collecting process such issues will unfortunately remain unresolved (40). One of the earliest examples of “as-told-to” autobiographies is The Life of Black Hawk, a story narrated by Black Hawk, translated by a mixed-blood interpreter Antoine LeClaire and edited by John B. Patterson in 1833. A better-known and extensively analyzed work is Black Elk Speaks, collected by John G. Neihardt. Julie Cruikshank’s Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (1990) in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned serves as a contemporary example of ethically edited, scholarly and community-based collaborative work. The second form of autobiographical writings that emerged in the nineteenth century testifies to the gradual transition from orality to literacy and the growing importance of English as the language of self-expression. The earliest written autobiography by an Indian is thought to be the 1768 execution sermon by Samson Occum, published in 1982 (Wong, “Native American Life Writing” 133). The next were William Apess’s Son of the Forest (1829), George Copway’s The Life, History and Travels of Kahge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life Among

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Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). The beginning of the twentieth century introduced a very prolific writer, Charles Alexander Eastman, and his two important works, Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), which are examples of how Eastman adapts the form of conversion narratives to depict his journey from “savagery to civilization.” The tone of enthusiasm for the white culture is reminiscent of the second-generation Chinese American autobiographical writings and their protagonists’ struggle for acceptance. American Indian Stories (1921) by Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), an educator and political activist, is more critical of the white culture’s “civilizing” practices and represents an example of a mature Native voice of Indian rights. The contemporary period has witnessed a proliferation of life writings in many various forms and addressing a great number of issues. Encouraged by the popularity and literary success of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and his later autobiographical works The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names: A Memoir (1976), these autobiographical writings serve as excellent examples of Indian appropriation and transformation of the genre. Apart from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981), the most notable examples include Gerald Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990), Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath (1992) and Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001). Considering the fact that Maxine Hong Kingston was not directly responsible for the choice of the label under which her book was marketed and sold, that is “non-fiction” (Kingston qtd. in S. Wong, “Autobiography” 147), the history of the critical reception of The Woman Warrior has a truly ironic overtone. Kingston’s publisher’s decision to publish the book as autobiography, informed more by marketing strategy than a concern for genre classifications, provoked a fierce debate on a wide variety of issues, from the concept of authenticity in autobiographical writing, to ethnic writers’ responsibility to their communities, to intersections of genre and gender and the shape of ethnic American literature.2 While the book was generally enthusiastically received, it was instantly rejected by some Asian American critics, including Frank Chin, Jeffrey Chan and Ben Tong, who accused Kingston of appealing to white audiences by fuelling Orientalist discourse. The criticism leveled at Kingston by her most vocal opponent, 2 For a more detailed analysis of the Kingston/Chin/autobiography controversy, see: Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiographical Controversy” (1998); David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (44–62); and Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (29–70).

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Chin, was manifold. According to Chin, Kingston, by distorting and improvising on Chinese myths and legends, created an inaccurate portrayal of China and depicted it as a backward and patriarchal country inhabited by superstitious people. Most importantly, however, Chin objected to the choice of autobiography as a form of Asian American literary expression. Identifying autobiography as a form of Christian conversion narratives, Chin classified The Woman Warrior as “fake” writing steeped in Western tradition (11). In response, Kingston published “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers,” an excellent and witty summary of the best as well as most offensive reviews, in which she openly stated that she felt neither obligated nor in a position to represent authentic Chinese American experience and function as a voice for the entire ethnic community: “Why must I ‘represent’ anyone beside myself?” (101). As for genre distinctions, in an interview with Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Kingston pointed out the presence of autobiographical tradition in Chinese literature in the form of poetry, in which poets and monks wrote about themselves and their spiritual development in the first person. To reject this tradition as well as Asian American autobiographies written in English as “not legitimate” and fake is an act of arrogance (43). In the same interview, Kingston describes the preoccupation with genre purity as damaging to the reading as well as writing processes in which the borders between categories become blurred and the idea of classification itself emerges as artificial: [W]e have a land of fiction and there is a land of nonfiction; there’s a border in the middle. Well, what I’m doing is making that border very wide, and I am taking into consideration I am writing about real people and these real people have powerful imaginations. They have minds that make up fictions constantly, and so if I was going to write a true biography or an autobiography I would have to take into consideration the stories that people tell. I tell the dreams that they have and then when I do that, that border becomes so wide that it contains fiction and nonfiction. (35)

The classification problem, as she mischievously states, affects all her books. China Men was once classified as California history, The Tripmaster Monkey was reviewed in a jazz magazine, and The Fifth Book of Peace, in which some chapters are fictional and some autobiographical, and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, written in free verse and continuing the story of the characters introduced in her previous texts, will definitely pose a challenge to anyone attempting to delineate genre boundaries. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller did not inspire such conflicting emotions. On the contrary, as Hertha Dawn Wong has observed,

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unlike Ceremony, which over the years had acquired a canonical status,3 Storyteller, for a long time, was virtually ignored (Sending My Heart 187). This may have been due to the fact that most of the stories and poems included in the collection were reprinted from other sources. Another possibility is that the book poses a serious problem in terms of classification and criticism. A collection of short stories, poems, family reminiscences and photographs, Storyteller escapes easy definitions. Even the unusual shape of the book, which brings to mind a family album or a scrapbook, signals that it does not conform to publishing and literary norms. The form, however, precisely expresses Silko’s belief in the possibility, and often necessity, of breaking genre boundaries in order to convey her message or grasp a sense of the narrated story: “What I’m interested in is . . . getting the story across. And I’m not particular how it’s done” (Barnes 79). In another interview, Silko admits that when she teaches creative writing classes she often instructs the prospective writers that it is the story that matters and “some of these boundaries between genres are illusory” (Pett 113). Thus, it seems that on the matter of genre distinction and application, Kingston and Silko in fact speak with one voice, emphasizing the rich possibilities that the crossing of genre boundaries offers. Analyzing how Kingston and Silko employ and reinvent the genre of autobiography leads to an interesting observation about the similarity of the narrative strategies used by both writers. While, undeniably, The Woman Warrior and Storyteller differ significantly in subject matter, form and cultural background, the two books exhibit similar patterns in terms of the structuring of the text, the introduction of a dialogic mode of narration and the establishment of a relationship of “composite authorship.” Kingston’s and Silko’s reworking of autobiography produces texts which are informed by their ethnic traditions and which demonstrate how the unified self is created as a result of an interaction with other community members and how the issues of self-representation and self-inscription are inevitably entangled with identity politics and the rewriting of history.4 3 In the January 1986 issue of ASAIL (Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures), Ceremony was quoted as the most frequently taught novel. In 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998, Silko’s novel was the book most often mentioned by the several hundred inquiries and applicants to the American Indian Literatures Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for high school teachers (Roemer 10). 4 While I do not include this aspect in my argument, it also has to be acknowledged that Kingston’s The Woman Warrior participates in a discussion on the interconnections of genre and gender. For a critical summary see Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002).

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From a Western perspective, fragmentation of narration signals a loss of continuity, a disruption of chronology and, on a discursive level, an emergent rupture of the text. In autobiography, it indicates an incomplete and fragmented self, still in the process of formation and somehow unable to bring it to an end. Fragmentation, however, as Kingston and Silko demonstrate, does not necessarily carry purely negative connotations and signify loss and disintegration, but instead can be used as a narrative technique which offers an alternative, non-linear structure of self- and history writing. Kingston divides her Woman Warrior into six sections: “No Name Woman,” “White Tigers,” “Shaman,” “At the Western Palace,” and “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Likewise, Silko’s Storyteller is characterized by non-traditional textual construction, also manifested in the visual design of the text: there are no chapters, titles, or headings; only different kinds of spaces and indentations suggesting structural divisions. According to Linda Danielson, despite the lack of chapter divisions the book can nevertheless be divided into six thematic sections: “Survival” (pages 1–53), “Yellow Woman” (54–99), “Drought” (100–155), “Rain” (156–86), “Spirits” (187–211) and “Coyote” (212–67) (“Storyteller” 327–55). The final effect achieved by Kingston and Silko, however, is not that of structural disintegration but, surprisingly, the portrayal of the self as defined in relation to community, tradition and ethnic history. As Rocío G. Davis has observed, the episodic structure of The Woman Warrior can be compared to the short story cycle that has been successfully used in ethnic autobiographical writing to emphasize the constructedness of ethnic identity and its formation as an element of a bigger whole (46). Indeed, the suggested analogy seems very appropriate since the arrangement of short stories as a cycle implies a logical and thematic connection between the stories, despite the lack of linear narration. Similarly, the structure of The Woman Warrior is only seemingly disjointed. Each chapter of the book is devoted to the life stories of Maxine and other female members of her family. All stories are connected with two female archetypes: the No Name woman and Fa Mu Lan, the legendary woman warrior. As Maxine shares the story of her growing up trapped “between two worlds” Chinese and American cultures, the two women become models of two possible life scenarios for a woman in Chinese and American societies. Thus, Moon Orchid, the abandoned wife, becomes a contemporary reincarnation of the No Name woman, whereas Brave Orchid is fashioned as brave Fa Mu Lan. Maxine’s narrative of self-discovery concludes when she embraces the identity of the woman warrior and comes to terms with her ethnic past as narrated by her mother: “The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar” (WW 53).

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Likewise, Storyteller’s fragmented structure only simulates chaos; on closer examination, it becomes evident how Silko establishes connections between seemingly disjoined parts. Throughout the book, in subsequent stories, reminiscences, poems and photographs, Silko weaves the story of a long line of storytellers in her family. Thus, as the next in line, she performs the ritual of storytelling in writing and, considering the performative nature of the storytelling process, it is only through the episodic structure of the text that she manages to produce a cyclic design and situate the written narrative in three dimensions, “the mythical, the historical, and the immediate,” which, according to N. Scott Momaday, are three unifying voices of the oral tradition (170). For instance, this unity of voices is manifested in a series of the Yellow Woman stories and the simultaneous circulation of the ancient and contemporary versions which become conflated and regenerated in each storytelling moment. Furthermore, the photographs are also arranged to suggest a temporal unity of past and present. By providing a visual commentary on stories and poems, they transfer the stories from the historical to the immediate dimension. The first and the last photographs, on the other hand, provide a compositional frame and produce a cyclical design: the opening photograph, the oldest in the collection, features Robert G. Marmon and Marie Anaya Marmon, Silko’s greatgrandparents, whereas the closing one shows a representative of the younger generation of storytellers, that is, Silko herself. The Woman Warrior and Storyteller are also characterized by a departure from the model of the autobiographical subject as singular and monologic. Kingston and Silko, by incorporating narrative voices of different generations, acknowledge the familial and cultural influences on their personal and artistic formation and construct their discourse as dialogic and polyvocal in Bakhtinian fashion. Although Bakhtin posits in The Dialogic Imagination that the genre of the novel provides the best example of dialogic discourse, it seems that his theory is useful in relation to Kingston’s and Silko’s texts. While the application of dialogism is not uncommon in criticism on Silko, few critics have pointed to its relevance for The Woman Warrior. The notable exceptions are King-Kok Cheung, Lee Quinby and Leslie Rabine.5 Indeed, The Woman Warrior is infused with a double-voiced discourse which allows for promoting a dialogic approach and shifting of perspectives. Initially, the two voices, Maxine’s and her mother’s, are presented as 5 See King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (1993); Lee Quinby (125–145); and Leslie Rabine (85– 107).

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competing (yet inseparable); as much as the mother insists on “talkingstory,” the daughter resists listening to the narrative. This antithetical positioning of the two voices is illustrated in the opening chapter in which the mother tells the story of the No Name woman as a warning, whereas the daughter retells it in a few alternative versions, thus distorting its original meaning and ignoring the mother’s explicit prohibition to repeat it. The mother’s voice that invokes China penetrates Maxine’s narrative of coming to maturity and fills it with a tone of anger (“Then I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported”) and resignation (“Even now China wraps double binds around my feet”) (WW 49). In time, however, as Maxine embraces her bicultural identity, the voices, instead of competing, begin to cooperate with each other to continue and develop the tradition of talk-story. In the last chapter, Maxine tells the story of a Chinese poetess, Ts’ai Yen, and openly acknowledges its dialogic discourse and her acceptance of the role of the familial “historian”: “Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, when I told her I also am a story-talker. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (WW 184). Here, Kingston also problematizes the issue of authorship. In a traditional autobiography there is one author who narrates a process of achieving a unified self. Maxine, on the other hand, directly asserts that the material from which she constructs her identity is not solely hers but belongs to the whole family and the community, and is shared by all representatives of the ethnic group. Thus, the process of identity formation becomes, in Bakhtin’s words, “the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s belief system in someone else’s system” (365). Considering the performative character of oral tradition, the choice to read Storyteller in the context of Bakhtin’s theory seems a natural one.6 By including the voices of two generations of storytellers, Grandma A’mooh, Grandma Lillie, Grandpa Hank, Aunt Susie, Aunt Alice and others, Silko presents her text as polyphonic and reminiscent of the storytelling process which invites multivocality and active participation. In one of the first stories, not only does Silko include the voice of Aunt Susie, but she also attempts to recreate her discourse, describing the way she spoke and applying her favorite phrases. In another episode, Silko recalls talking with her neighbor, Nora, whose children brought a copy of her poem, “Laguna Coyote.” Nora compliments Silko on the 6 See Arnold Krupat, “The Dialogic of Silko’s Storyteller” (1989) (55–68); Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1994); and McHenry (101–120).

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rendition of the Laguna story and adds: “We all enjoyed it so much / but I was telling the children / the way my grandpa used to tell it / is longer” (S 110). Here, Silko creates a storytelling event in which her voice is joined by the voice of Nora’s grandfather offering a different, longer version, and Nora herself, for whom the reading of the poem is an opportunity to share stories with her children. The politics of inclusiveness is not limited to the community members: “Uncle Tony’s Goat” is a story told to Silko by Simon Ortiz, an Acoma poet, and one of the poems in the book, “Toe’osh: A Laguna Coyote Story” is dedicated to Ortiz. As Lynn Domina points out, the inclusion of Ortiz’s story does not constitute a theft “because the story already belongs communally to Silko” (59). This “exchange” encapsulates the essence of the storytelling moment when stories are shared by and freely circulated in the community. Like Kingston in The Woman Warrior, Silko complicates the seemingly simple question of authorship. However, Silko’s gesture toward her “co-writers” is even grander: she openly acknowledges that the narrated stories do not belong to her in the sense in which Storyteller is copyrighted to her. She “self-consciously, rejects the egocentric posture of the modern author in favor of what could be defined as an ecocentric orientation and attempts a culturally determined heteroglossia in which her text serves as transmitter rather than originator of voices and meanings” (Owens, Other Destinies 169). Thus, as Linda Krumholz has observed, the autobiographical “I” in Storyteller has been replaced by the figure of a storyteller (65) who, by defying a Western concept of ownership, perceives stories to be verbal/written texts to be circulated, not possessed. According to Georges Gusdorf, as quoted above, the cultural precondition for autobiography is a pervasive concept of individualism, the awareness of the singularity of each individual life. Clearly, the criterion proves inapplicable in the case of Kingston’s and Silko’s autobiographies since the integrity of the selves they describe cannot be divorced from the integration and cooperation with other individuals in a communal or social context. The model developed by Kingston and Silko resonates with Caren Kaplan’s concept of “out-law” genres, informed by Derrida’s “law of genre,” which emerge at the boundaries of traditional genres. “Out-law” genres link personal histories with their communities and can function as a “cultural autobiography” which “deconstructs the individualism of autobiography’s Western legacy and casts the writing and reading of out-law genres as a mode of cultural survival” (213).

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Historiographic Metafiction and Postmodern Histories In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon does not provide yet another definition of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon relating to various forms of cultural productions. Rather, Hutcheon intends to articulate a “poetics” of postmodernism, “a flexible conceptual structure” in which postmodern productions, regardless of which field of cultural endeavor they represent, are always “contradictory” in nature, always “resolutely historical” and “inescapably political” (ix). Acknowledging the diversity of postmodern forms, Hutcheon privileges and restricts her analysis to the novel genre, more specifically to one form which she calls “historiographic metafiction.” As defined by Hutcheon, “historiographic metafiction is characterized by theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) and the rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5, emphasis in the original). Hutcheon’s category significantly departs from classic historical novels which sought to “ease the ontological tension between historical fact and fictional invention, and to camouflage if possible the seam along which fact and fiction meet” (McHale 152). Embracing recent changes in the field of historiography, exemplified by the works of Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Louis O. Mink and Catherine Gallagher, historiographic metafiction, while admitting that the past cannot be ignored or forgotten, refuses to grant it the status of truth and instead explores plural truths. There is no aspiration for mimetic representation; rather, fiction, a discursive form, just like history, is “offered as another of the discourses by which we construct our versions of reality” (40). Thus, analyzing historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon concentrates primarily on its deconstructive function. To demonstrate the wide applicability of her term, Hutcheon includes writers from different traditions and cultures, novels from Latin America and Europe, e.g. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemizo Cruz. However, with regard to British and North American practitioners of historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon focuses mostly on white writers; ethnic writers, if included at all, are only briefly mentioned, e.g. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Moreover, Hutcheon fails to accentuate the difference in perspective from which these texts approach the postmodern production of counter-histories. David PalumboLiu, in relation to Asian American literature, voices these concerns by saying that

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While appreciating the ways that postmodern and postcolonial criticism can help break up outmoded perspectives on literary studies in order to comment upon ethnic literatures, Asian-American literary and cultural criticism must recognize as well the historical and theoretical differences that complicate such literatures if it is to better understand its own location within contemporary cultural politics. Scholars of ethnic literature today should pause over its new centrality in postmodern culture. If the movement toward the wholesale embrace of these discourses entails as well the abandonment of the very material histories that have shaped ethnicity in importantly different ways, then one should at least directly address that elision and argue for its legitimacy. (“The Ethnic as ‘Post-’ ” 166–67)

Therefore, as a response to Palumbo-Liu’s statement and in an attempt to explicitly acknowledge this quality of ethnic texts, Nancy J. Peterson proposes the term postmodern histories, which aims to “emphasize the possibility of working toward a theory of postmodernism that problematizes, but does not deny, historical reference” (Against Amnesia 10–11). Kingston’s and Silko’s texts serve as interesting examples of how to exploit the tension between historical and literary narratives without denying the significance of historical recovery. Much of the controversy surrounding The Woman Warrior was provoked by Kingston’s revision of the Fa Mu Lan myth from sixth-century Northern China. In the original story, Fa Mu Lan is a young girl who is rather disinterested in women’s chores and unready to marry. To protect her old father from the draft, she dresses up as a boy and joins the warriors going to war. She becomes a brave and respected warrior and, after many victorious battles, comes back home in glory and resumes her domestic duties. Now she is ready to embrace her female identity and her role in a Chinese rural society. In the original version, as Debra Shostak observes, Fa Mu Lan epitomizes “filial piety, humility, and loyalty to her community” (242) as well as the maturity needed to embrace the submissive role imposed by centuries of tradition. Kingston’s version, however, while it invokes the figure of Fa Mu Lan, is an entirely different story. In the “White Tigers” section of The Woman Warrior, Kingston introduces a girl who lives with a couple of old sages and is taught the difficult skill of self-control which will one day help her lead armies into battles and win. After years of intensive training, the girl becomes a skillful warrior and a charismatic leader of armies. During the day she is a courageous warrior who wins battles; however, at night she leads the life of a wife and a mother to a baby son. Having won many wars, Kingston’s Fa Mu Lan returns to her village and family and to her female role as an obedient daughter. There is another Chinese legend

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stitched almost seamlessly into the fabric of Kingston’s story. Before going to the first battle, Fa Mu Lan visits her parents, who carve on her back words of revenge for all the crimes against the villagers. This motif is a direct allusion to the legend of General Yue Fei, a well-known national hero in the war against the Jin invaders during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279). According to the legend, Yue Fei had his back carved with words of loyalty and patriotism: jing zhong bao guo, “Be loyal and avenge your nation” (Hunag 151). It is important to note that in China, General Yue Fei is a respected and worshipped national hero and his legend is still very much alive. The question which arises, then, is whether Kingston’s conflation of the two myths, the two heroes—a female one and a male one—is merely a demonstration of how “[h]istory becomes a text, a discursive construct upon which fiction draws as easily as it does upon other texts of literature,” or whether it constitutes a more meaningful act (Hutcheon, Poetics 142). The story of Fa Mu Lan is constructed as a possible response to a confusing message about the role and value of women in Chinese culture as presented by Maxine’s parents. Maxine openly admits to her confusion about the ideal model of femininity to aspire to: on the one hand, her mother instructs her on how to be an obedient daughter and wife, and on the other hand, she teaches her the song of Fa Mu Lan and tells that she would have “failed if [she] grew up to be [a] wife or [a] slave” (WW 25). Incessantly, Maxine tries to solve the puzzle of how to satisfy her parents, who show her their disappointment at her not understanding what it means to be a good Chinese daughter. Since “[f]eeding girls is like feeding cowbirds,” even girls with “straight As at school,” a logical solution seems to be transforming into a boy: “I went to college—Berkeley in the sixties—and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam” (WW 48, 49). Indeed, Maxine cannot become a boy, but Fa Mu Lan in her story certainly can be brave, courageous and widely respected like a man. The beginning of the “White Tigers” establishes a tradition of women as warriors and inventors of martial arts: It was a woman who invented white crane boxing only two hundred years ago. . . . Recognizing the presence of great power, she asked the spirit of the white crane if it would teach her to fight. It answered with a cry that white crane boxers imitate today. Later the bird returned as an old man, and he guided her boxing for many years. Thus she gave the world a new martial art. (WW 25)

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Later in the story Fa Mu Lan confronts the powerful baron responsible for the draft of her brothers who confines a group of “whimpering women” in a locked room. The swordswoman sets them free but none of them is identified as a lost daughter. In Maxine’s imaginary story, the ending has a truly subversive tone: “Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army.  .  .  . They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When the slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys” (WW 47). Clearly, Kingston is building a tradition of female heroism, extensively relying on the figure of a male hero since, from what she is taught about Chinese culture, there is no other idiom to talk about bravery and agency than with the use of male attributes. Thus, reworking of the myths is not a destructive process but rather leads to the creation of new ones, informed by the formation of gendered subjectivity and female agency. Kingston’s revision of the Fa Mu Lan and Yue Fei myths was most ardently criticized by Frank Chin, who provides in one of his essays, as he claims, an accurate version of the woman warrior myth, in English and Chinese, and asserts that “myths are, by nature, immutable and unchanging because they are deeply ingrained in the cultural memory, or they are not myths” (29). Chin seems to resist the concept of cultural, ethnic or any identity and memory as in flux, changing and evolving with time. Even the Fa Mu Lan myth, which he claims to reproduce in an authentic form, circulated in many versions as part of a tradition of oral transmission of stories (Huang 151). Moreover, the reading of The Woman Warrior offered by Zhang Ya-Jie, a Chinese professor, reveals how Chin is in fact confusing two distinct categories. At the beginning of her essay, voicing Chin’s criticism, Professor Ya-Jie admits that the book did not appeal to her since it considerably distorted Chinese myths and history. However, while listening to a lecture on Kingston’s book by Amy Ling and the ensuing discussion between students, she realized that The Woman Warrior is “an American story, not Chinese” (104). Indeed, as Kingston explains in an interview with Paul Skenazy, in order to convey the complexities of her bicultural identity and the difficulties inherent in its articulation, she revises the material that she has at her disposal and creates a historical continuity between ancestral China and America: “I take the old myths and I play with them, show how the myths change. And when they change here in America, they become American myths” (131). By transforming classic myths, Kingston, echoing Hutchinson, implies that there is no essentialized and transcendent concept of historical and legendary knowledge; they are all human constructs available in a textualized form and her Chinese American myths are yet other texts which enter the scene.

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Continuing the artistic project of The Woman Warrior and China Men, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey also creatively exploits the potential of conflating Chinese and Western texts to articulate the compositional nature of American identity. The novel’s protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth generation Chinese American, a Berkeley graduate in the 1960s, a liberal arts major, a poet and a playwright. Most of all, Wittman defines himself as an American, which because of his Asian facial features is a common cause of consternation for his white interlocutors. Despite his family’s long history in the United States, Wittman’s skin color immediately classifies him as non-American and “alien,” and hence he is frequently either asked where he comes from or is complimented for his good English. The Civil Rights movement in which, according to Wittman, the leading role is played by African-American activists, does not ameliorate his situation. African-American influence on popular culture, which for Wittman is a source of admiration and envy, sharply contrasts with Asian American artists’ lack of articulation and only promotes a binary vision in which “Americans are either white or Black” (TM 307). The discriminatory practices of pigeonholing Asian Americans as “alien” locks them indefinitely in the “model minority” discourse, which renders them both silent and invisible: “I [Wittman] can’t wear that civil-rights button with the Black hand and the white hand shaking each other. I have a nightmare—after duking it out, someday Blacks and whites will shake hands over my head. I’m the little yellow man beneath the bridge of their hands and overlooked” (TM 307–8). Thus, Wittman’s artistic, communal and, most importantly, personal project is, to use Kingston’s phrase, “to claim America” for Chinese (and Asian) Americans and to devise an idiom that would convey the multicultural face of American identity. The protagonist’s name, Wittman Ah Sing, becomes an illustration of how, through the merging of Chinese and American elements, a new American identity is formed. A clear reference to Walt Whitman, “an American bard,” and his most well-known statement, “I sing the body electric,” the name signals Wittman’s search for an America built on cultural plurality and inclusiveness, the vision that Whitman shares in Leaves of Grass and articulates as the necessity of “enclos[ing] old and new for America is the race of races” (713).7 Thus, Wittman’s name encapsulates the inclusiveness and equality that are inherently American concepts and recurrent themes in national literature. On the other hand, as Jennie Wang has observed, Ah Sing may also refer to Norman Asing, a naturalized 7 For an extensive analysis of the presence of Walt Whitman in Kingston’s novel, see James T. F. Tanner, “Walt Whitman’s Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book” (1995).

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U.S. citizen, who served as a spokesman for his community. In a letter to Governor Bigler of California, published in the Daily Alta California in 1855, the year Whitman published Leaves of Grass, Asing protested against racism and the exclusion of the Chinese (Wang 102). Thus Wittman, conceived in the tradition of American democracy, becomes a spokesman of the common people, the marginalized and excluded. These two possible sources, Whitman and Asing, while derived from different cultural and historical contexts, are compatible with each other and jointly create a name which “represents a new model of cultural assimilation in which [while] crossing the boundary from the ethnic minority community into the mainstream of American society . . . one does not have to deny one’s cultural heritage in order to create one’s individual self identity” (Wang 108). The conflation of Chinese and American myths, texts and histories becomes Kingston’s viable and long-term strategy for “claiming America” and constructing a new American identity. In the first chapter of Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman is featured as a liberal arts graduate and a poet who is literally steeped in Western literature, art and culture, the heritage that he perceives as belonging to him as much as to the white majority. Strolling through the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wittman “juggles” quotations from Shakespeare, Rilke, Kerouac, Tolstoy and many others. Elliott H. Shapiro, in an attempt to record the spectrum of intertextual allusions, produces a long list of names and titles: Dickens, William Shakespeare, Swift, Yeats, Tennyson, Whitman, Maugham, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Frost, Williams, Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, Defoe, Rimbaud, Wilde, Twain, Rilke, Spenser, Woolf, Stein, Thoreau, Pearl Buck, and Tolstoy, [and as for films], Olivier’s Hamlet, The Seventh Seal, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, Rebel without a Cause, Cleopatra, The Longest Day, The Lady from Shanghai, The Maltese Falcon, Vertigo, West Side Story, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Wizard of Oz and The Treasure of Sierra Nevada. (13)

This excess of references signals Wittman’s fluency in the languages of high as well as low culture and demonstrates that he is “at home” in this intricate intertextual network. As Shapiro has observed, Kingston’s project of “claiming America” does not depend solely on claiming Chinese American history as “an integral component of American history.” What she is also claiming is “the right to appropriate American literature, and the literatures that feed into it,” whenever she (and Wittman) finds them useful for her (his) artistic project. Familiarity with Western literature and culture, however, will not provide Wittman with the idiom to inscribe his self into mainstream American

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As much as he knows and enjoys the books that he quotes and alludes to, he is aware of their racist undertones, their authors’ racist views or their “targeting” of an implied reader who is invariably white: “Dear reader, all these characters whom you’ve been identifying with—Bill, Brooke, and Annie—are Chinese—and I am too.” The fiction is spoiled. . . . “Call me Ishmael.” See? You pictured a white guy, didn’t you? If Ishmael were described—ochery ecru amber umber skin—you picture a tan white guy. Wittman wanted to spoil all those stories coming out of and set in New England and Back East—to blacken and yellow Bill, Brooke, and Annie. A new rule for imagination: The common man has Chinese looks. (TM 34, emphasis in the original)

Being unable to “spoil” Western stories, Wittman decides to overthrow the regime of identifying whiteness with humanity by mixing them with Chinese myths. In writing his play, Wittman relies on three Chinese classical texts: Lo Kuan-chung’s The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Wu Ch’eng-en’s Journey to the West and Water Margin, attributed to Shih Nai-an. However, similarly as in The Woman Warrior, Kingston does not repeat these texts verbatim; rather, she approaches them liberally, updating and transforming them to comment on American issues. As Jeanne Rosier Smith demonstrates, Kingston’s revisionist approach allows her to create new models of identity and community, effectively confronting harmful stereotypes of Chinese Americans, and through Wittman invent a new kind of visionary art (Writing Tricksters 56). All three classical Chinese myths are being revised in Tripmaster Monkey and each revision serves a different purpose. In Journey to the West, Monkey the trickster is an irresponsible, irreverent, fun-loving and mischievous creature, capable of transforming into seventy twoshapes, who accompanies the monk Hsuan Tsang to India to bring back the Buddhist scriptures. Kingston uses Monkey as a metaphor of the transformative nature of identity, which has to adapt to the changing environment and is not stable or fixed. A formula for defining Asian American identity as a choice between Chinese and American heritage is not applicable here—Monkey has seventy-two transformations and so does Wittman: “I am really: the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of the Monkeys” (TM 33). Since Wittman can indeed instantly adapt to the changing situations and is constantly redefining his self, it is difficult to pigeonhole and classify. Thus, his mythic significance as “Tripmaster Monkey” is his ability to blast the common stereotypes of Chinese Americans. The second intertext, The Water Margin, a story about 108 Chinese outlaws who are victims of a corrupt

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system, becomes a part of Wittman’s play and an inspiration for building a cohesive and active community which, unlike the “model minority,” is also a rebellious group which rejects the role of victims in history. The staging of the play, which brings together Wittman’s friends, neighbors, parents, a retired band of musicians, actors representing different ethnicities and complete strangers, redefines the concept of an artist from an individual to a community member. Wittman’s art is not a product of his individual artistic vision but materializes as a collaborative effort of people who contribute different stories. Therefore, the “I” of an individualist becomes the multiple “I’s”/“We” of the community: “We used to have a mighty ‘I,’ but we lost it. . . . We are the grandchildren of Gwan the Warrior. Don’t let them take the fight out of our spirit and language. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I-warrior win the West and the East and the universe” (TM 319). Finally, in retelling The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the revolt of Liu Pei and his mentor, Ch-ko Liang, against the military dictatorship of Ts’ao Ts’ao, Wittman explores and revives the Chinese tradition of talk-story and subversive use of language. His improvisation of the heroic story does not promote the militant model of a communal activist but concludes with a call for a non-violent yet active fight for equality. Most interesting, however, is the final effect that the play produces: conflating Chinese and American sources, the play escapes the trap of Orientalist discourse of the “East meets West” type and, instead, as Wittman himself asserts, “There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey In the West” (TM 308, emphasis in the original). Thus, Kingston records the creation of an American identity that does not necessitate forsaking one’s ethnic heritage. In Wittman’s imaginative play, American and European texts converse with Chinese ones in a discussion on the shape of American identity. Their equal status and contribution to the creation of Wittman’s play suggests that a formula for conveying multicultural American identity is based on forming coalitions and encouraging inclusiveness. Perceiving a Chinese American past as integrated into and inseparable from the American present finally allows Wittman to “spoil” Western stories and see that the face of America has Chinese features: Picture extreme close-ups of the following cowboys: Roy Rogers. Buck Jones. John Wayne. John Payne. Randolph Scott. Donald O’Connor, if Francis the Talking Mule counts as a western. Chinese eyes. Chinese eyes. Like mine. Like yours. These eyes are cowboy eyes with which I’m looking at you, and you are looking back at me with cowboy eyes. We have the eyes that won the West. (TM 314)

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In “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers,” Kingston declares: “I am an American. I am an American writer, who, like other American writers, wants to write the great American novel” (97). The statement encapsulates the aims of Kingston’s project of “claiming America,” which she consistently supports in her subsequent works. Kingston heavily relies on her Chinese heritage and Chinese history, which she approaches imaginatively and liberally. The final product, however, is not a narrative about Chinese and American histories that converge at some point in time and leave each other unaffected; rather, using Martha Cutter’s equation, (A+B=C), Kingston produces a narrative of identity, culture and history that is uniquely American and does not entail compromising ethnic heritage. Leslie Marmon Silko clearly expressed her distrust of postmodernism in a review of Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Beet Queen.8 In the review, although Silko praises Erdrich for her “dazzling” prose, she characterized the book as “an outgrowth of academic, post-modern, so-called experimental influences” (178). “Postmodern, self-referential writing,” Silko writes, “reflects the isolation and alienation of the individual . . . [and] is light-years away from shared or communal experience that underlines oral narrative and modern fiction” (178). Ascribing to N. Scott Momaday’s claim that in Native tradition “language is sacred” (The Man Made of Words 16), Silko pronounces postmodern self-referentiality as unable and inappropriate to convey the uniqueness of Native experience. Ironically, however, while Silko dissociates herself from postmodernism, even her 1977 Ceremony contains elements of postmodern philosophy, as Susan Pérez Castillo has observed (292). Almanac of the Dead, published five years after The Beet Queen, leaves no doubts as to its postmodern influences. For instance, Caren Irr sees Almanac as a new form of political art whose creation is called for in Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (225); Daria Donnelly focuses on Silko’s attention to marginality and partiality as a manifestation of a postmodern agenda (249); and Adam Sol, applying Edward Mendelson’s concept of “encyclopedic narrative,” claims that Silko’s novel bears resemblance to recently published works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace (24). From yet another perspective, Almanac’s resistance to the totalizing discourse of official history and its insistence on a re-evaluation of and dialogue with the past in the light of the present suggests parallels with historiographic metafiction, or postmodern histories. In revisiting the past, Almanac of the Dead employs historical 8

 he review was originally published in Impact/Albuquerque Journal Magazine, T 8 Oct. 1986: 10–11. Reprinted in SAIL 10.4 (1986): 177–184. Subsequent quotations come from the SAIL reprint.

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figures, which is also a characteristic feature of the classical historical novel (Cuddon 166). As Georg Lukács explained in his extensive analysis of the genre, Walter Scott’s great historical personalities, for instance, were representatives of “an important and significant movement embracing large sections of people” and always appeared in the narrative in their majestic grandeur (38). However, when historiographic metafiction uses the personages of history, “they are open to being attacked for inaccuracies, lying, slander, or simply bad taste” (Hutcheon, The Politics 76–77). In Almanac, it is Maximilian, the emperor of Mexico in the years 1832–67, and his wife Charlotte, who come under scrutiny. Ferdinand Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, became Emperor of Mexico when Napoleon III sought to extend French imperial power. Believing that the appointment had a popular base and assured of French support, Maximilian and his wife Charlotte were crowned in Mexico City on June 10, 1864. However, with limited knowledge of Mexico’s political situation, Maximilian antagonized his supporters and for too long remained ignorant of his government’s dramatic financial situation. A series of careless moves on Maximilian’s part, together with the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico, inevitably led to the slow collapse of the empire. In 1866 Empress Charlotte went to Europe to seek help from Napoleon III and the Pope, all in vain. In 1867 Maximilian and his troops, abandoned by Europe, were besieged by Benito Juárez, his chief opponent, and on June 19 the emperor died before a firing squad. In Almanac, this story is narrated to Alegría Martinez-Soto, a promising architect, in the form of a family history by her father, a Mexican diplomat, who claims that the Martinez-Sotos had descended from royalty—Emperor Maximilian’s cousins. For Alegría’s father, the fall of Maximilian is depicted as a tragic moment in the history of his family and the entire country, which under the rule of the Martinez-Sotos might never had lost a portion of the territory in the North to the United States (AD 487). “When noble individuals fell from high positions,” he explained, “the correct term, the only word adequate, was tragedy” (AD 487, emphasis in the original). Clearly, Alegría’s father, to use Hayden White’s terminology, “emplots” Maximilian’s story as Tragedy, which depicts history as “an eternal return of the Same in the Different” (Metahistory 11). The fall of Maximilian returns as his wasted opportunity and unfulfilled desire to “reign as a monarch of Mexico.” However, as White explains, Tragedy is merely one of four possible modes of emplotment and creating meaning in history, the three others being Romance, Comedy and Satire. As an alternative to Alegría’s father’s Tragedy, Silko offers another version of Maximilian’s history, emplotted as Satire, which views human existence “ironically, in the atmosphere generated by the apprehension of the ultimate inadequacy

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of consciousness to live in the world happily or to comprehend it fully” (Metahistory 10). In this alternative version, European powers send young and inexperienced Maximilian and Charlotte to a country where they are not welcome. The hostile atmosphere of the new home only aggravates the relationship between the emperor and his wife. Maximilian regains the potency that he had lost during the sea trip in the arms of black women but he is banished from the empress’s bedchamber and sleeps on a billiard table. In the exotic atmosphere and the hot climate of Mexico, Charlotte becomes agitated and disquieted: “She kept trying to get maids and servants to kill the flies and spiders crawling and flying through the royal apartments” (AD 215). When she finds clutches of spider eggs on a sofa, she becomes hysterical and gives strict orders to the servants to kill all insects in the palace. However, “the Indians and mestizos refused to kill insects in the palace or the gardens because spirits would be offended” (AD 215). It is not only the people but the world of animals as well that plots against the royal couple that turns their existence into a grotesque chase after crawling insects. Eventually, the fall of Maximilian, which in Tragedy is the result of a change in European alliances beyond his control, originates in Satire through his own decision to “execute chambermaids for spiders and flies found in the royal bedchamber” (AD 215). The story of the Mexican rulers emplotted as Satire can be read as a history of colonial enterprise with a subversive ending. Maximilian and Charlotte arrive in Mexico as representatives (not agents, though) of European imperial power and expect to be treated accordingly, while at the same time they remain insensitive to Mexico’s culture and people. Maximilian is an “impotent” ruler since he refuses to acknowledge the limits of the power conferred upon him by European governments. His short and unsuccessful reign becomes a story of cultural blindness which characterizes all colonial history and which another character in the novel simply terms as “blindness to the world.” By filtering the narrative through the Mexican perspective, Silko positions Maximilian and Charlotte as the Other and depicts their behavior as irrational and incomprehensible. As Linda Hutcheon explains, in historiographic metafiction, historical figures are often depicted as the “ex-centrics, the marginalized, the peripheral figures” (A Poetics 114). What Root, a drug dealer, remembers from a history lesson about Maximilian and Charlotte is the color plate of the royal couple “in their gold and jewel-crusted regalia as emperor and empress of Mexico. Blond and blue-eyed, they had been surrounded by legions of short, dark soldiers and honor guards” (AD 215). The composition of the picture, with Maximilian and Charlotte in the middle of the crowd of dark bodies creates a sinister atmosphere: their whiteness, which in the European context is a marker of superiority, here makes them

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incongruous with the environment, and thus vulnerable. Whiteness, then, as Renae Moore Bredin has observed, is represented as the terrified rather than the terrifying, as it often was in colonial history (243). Thus, Silko demonstrates that, like Kingston, she rejects a concept of essentialized, total history that produces “true” accounts of the past. Instead, following Hayden White’s theory, Silko sees the past as a text that is endowed with meaning and shaped by a historian. In her most recent novel, Gardens in the Dunes, Silko “revisits critically” the events of the 1890 Ghost Dance movement among the Paiute Indians. Interestingly, apart from Silko, many Native American writers have imaginatively employed the motif of the dancing ceremony performed to restore the pre-contact order, including Louis Owens, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor and Sherman Alexie. In his essay “The Ruins of Representation,” Vizenor writes about this resurgence of interest in the nineteenth-century religious movement as a “new ghost dance literature”: “The tribal characters dance with tricksters, birds, and animals, a stature that would trace the natural reason, coherent memories, transformations, and shadows in traditional stories. The shadows and language of tribal poets and novelists could be the new ghost dance literature, the shadow literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance” (“The Ruins” 27–28). Considering the fact that Vizenor defines survivance as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of Native stories . . . [which] are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Manifest vii), a “new ghost dance religion” can be seen as a form of dialogue with history in which Indians were often rendered as passive victims of change, and a literary revitalization project that constitutes one of many forms of cultural survival. Gardens in the Dunes resonates with Vizenor’s call to renounce tragedy and victimry in its treatment of the Ghost Dance religion. The text offers an interpretation from an exclusively Native perspective which often, due to its controversial treatment of historical material, contrasts sharply with the official accounts. The historical text that Silko openly challenges in her novel is the one produced by James Mooney, an American anthropologist, The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee. The literary and ideological strategy of Silko’s reinterpretation of the Ghost Dance is the reversal of the binary logic proposed by Mooney in his text: while Mooney sees the Ghost Dance as advancing Indian assimilation to the white culture and thus emphasizes its conciliatory dimension, Silko portrays it as an act of resistance to the American colonization. In Mooney’s interpretation, Indians benefit from the Ghost Dance since it brings them closer to civilization. In Gardens, on the other hand, Native tribes become cultural winners since they move away from Anglo-American influences.

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A religious and social movement among western American tribes known as the Ghost Dance began around 1870 and emerged as a response to severe demographic losses and cultural collapse. It originated in western Nevada near the Walker River Indian Reservation, but the 1890 movement covered a wider area, including a central portion of the western United States, and involved a larger number of Indian tribes. The first Ghost Dance was initiated by a Paviotso man named Wodziwob, while the key figure of the second phase was a man from the same tribe, Wovoka, or “The Cutter,” also known as Jack Wilson. In 1886 or 1887, Wovoka experienced a vision in which he was told to instruct his people in how to perform a special kind of dancing that would bring back their dead ancestors. The underlying principle of the Ghost Dance doctrine heralded the unification of all Indian tribes, living and extinct, the regeneration of the earth and the harmonious coexistence of all people. As Russell Thornton observes, sources provide different answers to the question of whether the white people were included in the vision or if they were to be destroyed (We Shall 6–7). As far as the rituals of the Ghost Dance are concerned, there were many variations, for instance some tribes danced for several days, others for only one; some tribes danced around a tree or pole that had been decorated beforehand; often, special costumes and facial painting were added as the movement spread from tribe to tribe. One common feature for all ceremonies was that the Ghost Dance was always a circle dance. Both Ghost Dance movements lasted merely a few years, suppressed by the authorities and gradually abandoned by Native people as “ineffective.” In the case of the Sioux Ghost Dance, the movement was brutally quelled on December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee, where over three hundred Sioux, mostly old people, women and children were killed. Gardens in the Dunes revisits the second wave of the Ghost Dance movement in the American Southwest among the Paiute Indians. The events are presented through the eyes of Indigo, an Indian girl from the Sand Lizard people, who participates in the ceremony at a moment when the Southwestern tribes are suffering from severe population losses, poverty, hunger and cultural annihilation. Like the other Indians gathered for the dancing ceremony, Indigo and her family embrace the Ghost Dance religion as a promise of hope and rebirth. The aim of Silko’s literary dialogue with the Ghost Dance is the construction of the movement as a revolutionary and subversive impulse which ensures the continuation of Indian cultures, and celebrates the Native worldview. That Silko is not interested in historical veracity is signaled in her construction of the Sand Lizard tribe. The Sand Lizard people are a mixture of Silko’s literary imagination and research done on the Colorado River people. Since her main goal was to present a tribe on the brink of extinction, she feared

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that the employment of a tribe that died out as a result of contact with the white culture would inevitably necessitate addressing the historical causes of such genocide and, obviously, counter the revolutionary message included in the text. As she explains in an interview with Ellen L. Arnold, she needed the “artistic and ethical freedom” to invent the tribe and its history, and thus escape the questions about ethnographic accuracy” (172). Therefore, Silko’s reasons for a literary recreation of the Ghost Dance are manifold, but not necessarily historical. The gesture of rejecting historical material is most visibly manifested in Silko’s dialogue with one of the most famous texts on the Ghost Dance, namely James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee. Interestingly, Silko’s intention to challenge Mooney’s account is signaled in her previous novel, Almanac of the Dead. In one of the concluding chapters featuring the Holistic Healer Convention, one of the prophets of the upcoming revolution, Wilson Weasel Tail, addresses the issue of Mooney’s “misguided” text (here Silko disguises Mooney as Moody): Moody and other anthropologists alleged the Ghost Dance disappeared because the people became disillusioned when the ghost shirts did not stop bullets and the Europeans did not vanish overnight. But it was the Europeans, not the Native Americans, who had expected results overnight; . . . Moody and the others had never understood the Ghost Dance was to reunite living people with the spirits of beloved ancestors lost in the five-hundred-year war. (722)

According to Silko, Mooney/Moody misunderstands the Ghost Dance on many levels; however, the most serious flaw in his interpretation is that he pronounces it ended. Considering the fact that Almanac culminates with the march of people who “seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands,” then, indeed, the text’s message is that the Ghost Dance has just begun. When, in 1891, James Mooney proposed an extensive analysis of the Ghost Dance to the Bureau of Ethnology for the Smithsonian, in a meticulously researched book he intended to demystify the figure of Wovoka, the “messiah,” as he was often referred to, to interview him and thus offer a more objective perspective on the entire movement. As Regier observes, Mooney was also interested in emphasizing the non-violent character of the Ghost Dance, an aspect that, after the massacre of, or, using the nineteenthcentury terminology, the battle of Wounded Knee, was rarely explored and often doubted (137). His three-year study of the Ghost Dance movement among Native American tribes led him to the conclusion that Wovoka’s original message was peaceful and conciliatory in nature, encouraging assimilation with the white culture rather than open resistance.

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From the introductory chapter, Mooney is intent upon demystifying the Ghost Dance movement and underlines its universal character as an understandable and predictable human reaction to any crisis. Mooney begins by pointing out the existence of a paradigm of civilizational collapse and the predictable reaction to it found in various cultures, observable on many social levels: “The lost paradise is the world’s dreamland of youth. What tribe or people has not had its golden age, before Pandora’s box was loosed, when women and nymphs and dryads and men were gods and heroes?” (657). In times of crisis, people turn to their gods and deities for help, comfort and hope. Moreover, in cases such as these, the need for a leader or a prophet becomes even more crushing, which explains why average, common individuals suddenly acquire the status of messiahs or cultural heroes. For Mooney, this pattern transcends cultural and racial contexts, and allows him to introduce the idea of the Ghost Dance as non-violent and harmless to the whites. If, as Mooney writes, “the doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and . . . the Indian Ghost Dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing to all humanity” (657), the distance between Anglo and Indian cultures becomes minimized and Indians themselves receive a more human face. In order to authenticate his ethnographic theory of the Ghost Dance as non-violent, Mooney returns to the movement’s source; that is, the vision experienced by Wovoka and the prophet himself. Mooney succeeded in arranging an interview with Wovoka in January 1892 in the Mason valley settlement. Throughout his description of the meeting, Mooney emphasizes Wovoka’s connections with the white culture: his English name, white man’s clothes and haircut and familiarity with the EuroAmerican code of conduct, thus stabilizing his identity and removing him from the mythical context in which he exists in the stories retold by Indian tribes. In the course of the interview, Wovoka emphasizes that his religion is one of peace, that he encourages people to “be good and love one another, have no quarrelling, and live in peace with the whites” (722). When asked directly, he confirms his belief that “it was better for Indians to follow the white man’s road and to adopt the habits of civilization” (722). The description of the prophet corresponds with the presentation of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance offered in the next chapter of Mooney’s analysis. While there are differences when it comes to the rituals, the unifying element of the Ghost Dance among all tribes is its anti-war character: “Do no harm to any one. You must not fight” are the instructions found in the text of the message delivered to Wovoka by God (782). Considering the figure of Wovoka and his message, Mooney reaches the following conclusion:

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The career of every Indian has been warpath. His proudest title has been that of warrior. His conversation by day and his dreams by night have been of bloody deeds upon the enemies of the tribe. . . . The thirst for blood and massacre seemed inborn in every man, woman, and child of every tribe. Now comes a prophet as a messenger from God to forbid not only war, but all the savors of war . . . and his teaching is accepted and his words obeyed by four-fifths of all warlike predatory tribes . . . . Only those who have known the deadly hatred that once animated Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee, one toward another, and are able to contrast it with their present spirit of mutual brotherly love, can know what the Ghost-dance religion has accomplished in bringing the savage into the civilization. It is such a revolution as comes but once in the life of a race (783)

Clearly, the logical apparatus that Mooney is applying in his analysis is the binary logic of savagery and civilization. Such a framework of presentation allows us to see the Ghost Dance as “revolutionary” in the sense that it is a giant step in the process of assimilation into the white culture, all this in a non-violent and peaceful way. Silko’s text rejects this assimilationist framework and reverses the binary logic in which it is the colonized who, defined by their agency, actively disrupt the colonial trope. In the novel, the Ghost Dance is never a vehicle for promoting assimilation with the dominant culture; rather, because of its selective syncretism, it ensures the preservation of Native identity and culture, enriched and transformed by foreign elements. As Joy Porter has pointed out, “in Gardens the focus rests with the irrepressible force of native resistance to the imposition of all things non-Indian” (“History” 57). The central motif in Silko’s reenactment of the Ghost Dance in Gardens in the Dunes is the recognition of the ancient connection between the people and earth, in both a physical and metaphorical sense. During the ceremonial dancing in Needles, the dancers “were moving from right to left because that was the path followed by the sun” (26). It is not only the direction of dancing, however, that is of great importance, but the movements themselves, whose function is to emphasize the unity between the people and their environment. As Indigo observes, the dancers “drag[ged] their feet lightly along the ground to keep themselves in touch with Mother Earth” (27). As the ceremony progresses this touch becomes more and more intimate; it becomes a gesture of love and tenderness: “They danced slowly, careful to trail their feet gently to caress Mother Earth” (465, emphasis added). The songs sung by the dancers, which Silko borrows from Mooney’s ethnographic text, celebrate the beauty of landscape and, combined with the dancers’ movements, invite the earth

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to respond: “Indigo felt the Earth’s breathing through the soles of her feet” (30). Moreover, it is in nature where one should look for the signs that the dancing is effective: “the wind was increasing; clouds moved rapidly across the sky . . . [and] the snow seemed to fall faster—a sign that Messiah and his family were on their way” (28, 464). The dancing, then, manages to recreate the ancient connection of the people and earth, broken and interrupted by the intervention of the white man. According to Amy Regier, the fact that the Ghost Dance reestablishes the balance between people and earth, even if only for the brief time of the dancing, is of extreme significance since, as Gardens repeatedly demonstrates, the landscape of the Southwest had been irrevocably altered by industrialization and destruction of the ecosystem (141). In Silko’s interpretation, however, the Ghost Dance ceremony is not derived from Native cultures only. Her presentation of Wovoka as prophet signals the incorporation of Christian and Gnostic elements into the Native narrative of the sacred dance. The dancers gathered near Needles to witness the return of Wovoka, who is accompanied by Jesus, wearing a white coat with red stripes and moccasins, the Holy Mother, and their eleven children. In an interview with Arnold, Silko confesses to her fascination with Gnosticism and the idea that, as she puts it, “there are lots of different Jesus Christs, and the Jesus of the Messiah of the Ghost Dance and some of the other sightings of the Holy Family in Americas were just as valid and powerful as other sightings and versions of Jesus” (164). Repeating the biblical story, the coming of the Messiah, is again caused by (white) people’s sinful mistreatment of the earth. Interestingly, it is Jesus who insists on punishing white people, never the Indians. This visionary scene of the coming of the Messiah abounds in examples of how Silko interweaves Christian and Native stories into one fabric of the Ghost Dance narrative. As a kind of tribal version of the biblical story about manna from heaven, the Holy Mother opens her shawl and distributes orange squash blossoms among the hungry dancers; moreover, it is Jesus who instructs people on the importance of dancing, which will lead to the earth’s purification and reconnection with the dead ancestors. In this way, as Porter has observed, the Ghost Dance is not presented as an adoption or a mechanical repetition by Indians of a wholly alien religion, but instead it is presented “as a lived example of superior native spirituality whose impulse is to include rather than exclude, to expand relationships, broaden community and to foster positive reciprocal connections between land, plants, animals and peoples, regardless of heritage” (“History” 61). Indeed, Silko’s version of the Ghost Dance is a religion of inclusion which erases racial boundaries and establishes connections between various marginalized groups. The gathering near Needles is attended by Indians

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representing different tribes, and also there are Mormons among its active participants. According to Garold Barney, at that time the Ghost Dance became increasingly popular among the Mormons, who were also awaiting the coming of the Messiah and believed that “the American Indians represent the descendants of the lost tribes of the House of Israel” (2–3). In Gardens, not only are the Mormons accepted to the ceremony without hostility, but they also experience the coming of their ancestors and are blessed by the Messiah. Moreover, suppressing the initial feeling of fear at seeing white people among the dancers, Indigo observes that “painted with white clay and wrapped in white robes, the Mormons looked like all the others” (29). This vision of ideal understanding, above and despite racial and cultural boundaries, is further enhanced by the dissolution of linguistic differences. To Indigo’s surprise, the Messiah’s message is understood by all the dancers regardless of the languages they speak. The Ghost Dance ceremony and the appearance of the Messiah in Needles lead to the introduction of the pre-Babel universal language, “the language of love which all people can understand because we are all the children of Mother Earth” (32). Thus, the ceremony becomes a phenomenal act of unification in which distinct groups are able to communicate, and yet manage to preserve their differences. Boundaries, whether physical, temporal, linguistic or cultural, seem ineffective and artificial when discussing Silko’s Ghost Dance. After escaping from the Sherman Institute at Riverside, young Indigo accompanies Hattie and Edward Palmer, the Anglo-American couple, on their trip to England and Italy. This international travel, however, is not merely a prolongation of Indigo’s separation from her sister. Instead, it becomes an enlightening experience of tracing mythical interconnections between Old European and Native American cultures, at the same time following the eastern movement of Wovoka, Messiah (Jesus Chirst) and his family. In the course of the journey, Indigo and the Palmers visit a Corsican village famous for its apparition of the Blessed Mother on the wall of a local school. While for Edward the episode is yet another example of primitive superstitions, for Indigo it becomes a confirmation that “the farther east they traveled, the closer they came to the place of the Messiah and his family” (321). As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that the connections between Old Europe and Native America are by no means coincidental, and the presence of the spirit of the Ghost Dance can be detectable on both continents. As David L. Moore points out, “The western and southern hemispheres join in mythic conspiracy to pre-empt the colonial project” (111). Once more, in a celebratory tone, Gardens draws a vision of Native cultures as defying geographical, political and cultural divisions.

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Finally, the culmination of the Ghost Dance ceremony at the end of the novel challenges Mooney’s claim about the movement’s failure to fulfill Indian hopes for the regeneration of Native culture, and its consequent disappearance. Even though the last gathering of the dancers is disrupted by soldiers, the ceremony does not prove ineffective. Prior to the night of the Ghost Dance, Hattie suffers a brutal attack and rape. When she discovers the livery stable of her perpetrator, she sets it on fire, and the fire spreads to the entire town of Needles: The next morning a line of blue-gray smoke still rose above the town . . . and they [Indigo and her sister] got to watch the white town burn to the ground. Or maybe it was only the town dump—they didn’t know until they flagged down the mail wagon and loaded their belongings. The driver said it was no joke—half the town of Needles burned that night, though no one was hurt. (473)

In this ironic conclusion of the Ghost Dance, the destruction of the white people (or white people’s property) does not come at the hands of Indians, but is caused by Hattie, a representative of the privileged group, who herself experiences the oppressive character of the culture she is a part of. The Sand Lizard sisters, on the other hand, return unscathed to the ancient gardens, and their exposure to foreign cultures and their influences only facilitate the survival of their culture, less fragile than it would seem. Thus, Silko’s Ghost Dance becomes a metaphor of survival whose main components are cultural syncretism and selective adaptation. In this celebratory reinterpretation of the movement, however, Silko never addresses the questions lurking in the closing scene of the novel: while the Ghost Dance movement ensures survival thanks to its cultural inclusiveness, the Sand Lizard culture endures since the sisters return to the ancient gardens and enjoy relative separation from the white world. The questions to what extent this separation is possible at the beginning of the twentieth century, and what its loss will entail, remain outside Silko’s literary dialogue with the Ghost Dance.

Toward Hybridity? The presence of the ongoing activities of transformation, adaptation and appropriation, observable in Kingston’s and Silko’s texts, raises the question of whether the concept of hybridity, extensively employed in postcolonial studies, may offer a useful theoretical tool to approach these texts which also, directly and indirectly, address the issue of

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colonialism/postcolonialism. Many critics have pointed to the hybrid forms that Kingston and Silko employ; however, these analyses were more concerned with postmodern experiments with genres rather than exploring the potential of postcolonial theories in an attempt to arrive at literary theories sensitive to and ingrained with specific ethnic contexts.9 Tracing the meaning of the word to its biological origins, a hybrid is defined as a cross between two different species, and the process of hybridization presupposes the existence of pure and authentic originals prior to the creation of the third form. In the colonial context, hybridity was an expression of racist ideology which operated as a strategy of stabilizing and preserving the status quo and provided scientific justification for the racial, cultural and social superiority of the colonizers (Loomba 145–46). In postcolonial studies, the word is generally used to denote anti-colonial strategies which challenge and undermine its original meaning, and “hybridize” Western discourse to affirm diversity. For instance, Homi Bhabha, author of the most influential definition of the term, sees hybridity as an integral part of the colonial system. Relying on Franz Fanon’s theory, Bhabha perceives colonial identities as always in a state of flux and agony, caused by the realization that the whiteness that the colonial subject was taught to desire is in fact unattainable. The term, as defined by Bhabha, can be seen as an empowering force since it “displays the necessary deformations and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (The Location of Culture 112), and thus challenges the seamlessness of colonial discourse. However, hybridity is also a term of widespread dissemination whose meaning is constantly revised and expanded by various critics. While for some hybridity stands for a pluralistic approach to literary and cultural studies, for others, it is a bizarre modification of the melting pot ideology.10 The disparity of views demonstrates the controversy involved in the usage of the term and since hybridity becomes entangled with issues such as immigration, diaspora and global power relations, disputes over its signification will not be quickly solved. The question about the possibilities and limitations of postcolonial studies is also extensively discussed in the field of Asian American literature. The recent change in the direction of Asian American studies is to a great 9 See, e.g., Hsiao-Hung Chang, “Gender Crossing in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey” (1997); A. M. Regier, “Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing, Transatlantic Travel, and Modernist Arson in Gardens in the Dunes” (2005). 10 See, e.g., Henry B. Wonham, ed., Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (1996); and David Palumbo-Liu, “Theory and the Subject of Asian American Studies” (1995).

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extent a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which seriously affected the demographic composition of Asian American communities, the majority of which are currently foreign-born. Lisa Lowe’s seminal study, Immigration Acts, situating Asian immigration, exclusion and the development of the U.S. nation-state and economy as a site of contradictions, marked the beginning of examining Asian American cultural and social formations from a global perspective. Supporting this shift toward a global vision, Malini Johar Schueller calls for abandoning national goals, like Kingston’s “claiming America,” and encourages addressing questions that postcolonial Asian American studies raise: transnationality, “migrancy, global diaspora, flexible citizenship, and neocolonial relations between decolonized homelands and the U.S.” (170). While a postcolonial perspective conceived in such terms offers a possibility of accounting for ongoing cultural processes, it also has its limitations. As Sau-ling C. Wong has observed, participation in this transnational movement and migrant identity might be restricted to the particular social class which has not been forced to immigrate and is economically equipped to preserve the bonds with the home country. Thus, the negative effect of the transnational perspective or denationalization is that “certain segments of the Asian American population may be left without a viable discursive space.” Therefore, Wong, using Kingston’s phrase, asserts that “claiming America,” defined as establishing Asian American presence in the context of “the United States’ national cultural legacy and contemporary cultural production” (“Denationalization” 137), should not be erased from the cultural agenda. The need for the reformulation of Asian American cultural studies is articulated in Lowe’s groundbreaking essay, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity,” later included in Immigrant Acts. Lowe points out that Asian American literature is most often read “vertically” along the line of generational conflicts. This suggests that Asian American culture, “the ways it is imagined, practiced and continued,” is stable and transmitted from one generation to another in an unchanged form (64). A more accurate model presents Asian American culture as “partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented,” and all its components are differently articulated by each individual. Therefore, in her analysis, Lowe stresses heterogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity as vocabularies appropriate for describing Asian American cultural formations before and after 1965. In Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston addresses the issue of the heterogeneity of the Asian American community, which is no longer composed of people sharing the same goals and points of cultural reference. An illustration of the internal differences and contradictions inherent in the term “Asian Americans” is offered in the “tunnel” scene:

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Heading toward him from the other end came a Chinese dude from China, hands clasped behind, bow-legged, loose-seated, out on a stroll—that walk they do in kung fu movies when they are full of contentment on a sunny day. As luck would have it, although there was plenty of room, this dude and Wittman tried to pass each other both on the same side, then both on the other, sidestepping like a couple of basketball stars. Wittman stopped dead in his tracks, and shot the dude a direct stink-eye. The F.O.B. stepped aside. Following, straggling, came the poor guy’s wife. . . . “Ho sick, la. Ho sick,” she said. . . . Mom and shamble-legged kid were each stuffed inside of about ten homemade sweaters. . . . The whole family taking a cheap outing on their day offu. Immigrants. Fresh Off the Boats out in public. Didn’t know how to walk together. Spitting seeds. So uncool. (TM 5)

Here, Kingston directly questions the validity of “racial lumping by skin color” (Li,  Imagining  71). While it is indeed true that Wittman and the F.O.B. family share the same ancestral origins and thus can all be classified as Chinese Americans, the gap between their cultural and social realities is unbridgeable. In fact, there is no interaction between Wittman and the Chinese family: they pass each other in silence, avoiding any physical contact. Moreover, the scene is emotionally charged and endowed with detectable tension on the part of Wittman, for whom the encounter is an unsettling experience. What Wittman fears is that despite his apparent Americanization, in the minds of the white majority he will be equated with the F.O.B. As David Leiwei Li has observed, “the tunnel becomes Kingston’s luminary image of a barriered passage, the orientalist discursive given of Asian American racial foreignness, that neither party can possibly escape. The consummate irony of the tunnel is that while it traps both the immigrant and the native-born within the stifling space of sameness, this space is actually where their incommensurable cultural differences are most pronounced”  (72). The scene convincingly demonstrates that generational differences are not the only ones which have to be taken into consideration when defining the Asian American community. The closing scene of the novel provides a telling commentary on Lowe’s concept of heterogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity: the people who aid Wittman in staging his play are a multicultural and multigenerational group whose heterogeneity dismantles essentialized notions of community since, as Wittman asserts, “Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it” (TM 306). While the entry of postcolonial theory into Asian American studies reflects social and cultural changes which need to be accounted for, in the field of Native American literature the issue seems to be more controversial. Recent developments in Native American studies have revealed the complexity of

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the question as well as the problematics of constructing a Native literary theory that would include the historical and cultural specificities of Native literary productions. For instance, Arnold Krupat admits that despite the historical specificity of the colonization of the American continent, postcolonial theory can be applied to the reading of Native American fiction. Drawing from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s analysis of the African novel, Krupat draws parallels between the developments of African and Native American literature (The Turn 30–40)11. Likewise, Louis Owens, a Choctaw/ Cherokee writer, sees postcolonial theory as a useful tool in the reading of Native writings. In his analysis, “urban centers and academic institutions have come to constitute a kind of diaspora for Native Americans who through many generations of displacement and orchestrated ethnocide are often far from their traditional homelands and cultural communities” (“As If” 11–12). Such a perspective connects Native writings with the “diasporic” and “migrant” aspects of postcolonialism. Therefore, Owens is bitterly critical of the conspicuous omission of Native literatures from important postcolonial studies: Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, and Bhabha’s Location of Culture are all silent on American Indian literary productions. Elvira Pulitano’s 2003 Toward a Native American Critical Theory constitutes an attempt at creating a methodology for the study of Native literatures, which draws heavily from postcolonial studies and even more from poststructuralism, which is seen here as a fitting paradigm for theorizing mixed-blood identities. However, the harsh and consistent criticism that Pulitano has received from Native American intellectuals demonstrates the numerous complexities involved in the sometimes indiscriminate application of Western theory to the study of texts originating in and shaped by alternative epistemologies.12 On the other hand, there are critics who express their reservations about the theory’s relevance to Native writing. The concern that is most often voiced is that Native critical theory should be capable of rendering the voice of Native American literature as unique and derive its origins from tribal traditions and, even more importantly, which rely on and draw from the plethora of Native texts written in the nineteenth century, seen as the beginning of Native theoretical discourse. As Womack states, “Native literatures deserve to be judged by their own criteria, in their own terms, not merely in agreement with, or reaction against, European literature and theory” (165). The dispute then involves not only the question of 11 See Sharon Holm’s criticism of Krupat’s approach in her “The ‘Lie’ of the Land: Native Sovereignty, Indian Literary Nationalism, and Early Indigenism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony” (2008). 12 See Weaver, Womack and Warrior’s American Indian Literary Nationalism (2005), a very strong and persuasive response to Pulitano’s book.

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the relevance of postcolonial theory but also the shape and methodology of Native American critical theory. The question of terminology may similarly pose problems. As Krupat has asserted, “contemporary Native American literatures cannot quite be classed among the postcolonial literatures of the world for the simple reason that there is not yet a ‘post-’ to the colonial status of Native Americans” (Turn 30). Likewise, Owens writes that “America never became postcolonial” (“As If” 14). Voicing similar concerns, Amy Kaplan suggests that the notion of postcoloniality does not apply to the history of American imperialism in which the United States predominates in a power relation often called neocolonial (17). Gerald Vizenor, to convey the difference in postcolonialism “here” and “there,” suggests the term “paracolonial” (Manifest 105). Advancing the argument, Jace Weaver offers yet another term, “pericolonialism” in which “peri-,” from Greek, is defined as “around,” “through,” beyond,” “having an intensive force.” “‘Pericolonialism,’ therefore,” Weaver writes, “acknowledges the thorough, pervading nature of settler colonialism and marks it as something that, for indigenes, must be gotten around, under, or through” (Weaver, Womack, Warrior 39). A collection of essays addressing postcolonial issues in the American context, Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt’s Postcolonial Theory and the United States (2000), while acknowledging the complexity of the problem, suggests the term postcolonial as the most useful and appropriate. However, not one Native critic was invited to contribute to the collection, which sharply narrows the scope of the project. Although Silko never directly expressed an interest in postcolonial studies, her Gardens in the Dunes offers ample material for postcolonial readings: Edward’s involvement in the colonial enterprise, his anthropological approach to indigenous cultures, the forced migration of the Native tribes and even the motif of the hybrid gladiolus, which in the book signifies adaptation and survival. Considering the closing scene in the novel, however, it seems that Silko is placing emphasis on different issues: When the girls first returned to the old gardens the winter before, Grandma Fleet’s dugout house was in good condition but terrible things had been done at the spring. . . . Strangers had come to the old gardens; at the spring, for no reason they slaughtered the big old rattlesnake who lived there; they chopped down the small apricot trees above Grandma Fleet’s grave. . . . Today Indigo and Linnaeus ran ahead of the others with the parrot flying ahead of her. At the top of the sandy slope she stopped and knelt in the sand by the stumps of the apricot trees, and growing out of the base of one stump were green leafy shoots. Who knew such a thing was possible last winter when they cried their eyes sore over the trees? (GD  476)

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In the old garden, Indigo also plants “foreign,” hybrid gladiolas whose seeds she brought from her transatlantic travel with Hattie and Edward. Surprisingly, not only do the flowers grow in the dry terrain, but they also prove to be a valuable source of food. Silko’s descriptions of landscape, whether she writes about the familiar Southwest or distant Alaska, are always informed by its particular regenerative capability and the way in which people become a part of this process. Thus, what is significant in this last passage is not so much the image of the blooming hybridized flowers but the simultaneous rebirth of the garden and the Sand Lizard tribe which, applying nature’s adaptive skills, will survive. The sisters, despite the loss of cultural guidance and exposure to foreign cultures, manage to rebuild their lives based on the values of the Sand Lizard people. Indigo thus becomes an apt metaphor for cultural survival and adaptation: she mimics the ways of her guardians and appropriates those elements of white culture that she finds useful but never succumbs to it. Thus, it is the concepts of positive transformation of land, people and cultures and adaptation, rather than hybridity, that seem to be a more appropriate idiom for approaching Silko’s and many other Native texts. Hybrid forms, Owens’s “breeds and mixedbloods,” Vizenor’s trickster mixedbloods and Silko’s Tayo from Ceremony, are manifestations of the ongoing processes of adapting to change, appropriating of new mediums and searching for new forms of cultural transmission. As Linda Brooks explains, “the hope for transformation and adaptation, for survival within the land, lies within the regenerative ability of the land itself. And it is stories that make meaning of those changes, allow experience to be translated into expression. It is a literature [Native American literature] that gives life to the words, solidifies them in landscape, allows them to be gathered and carried on” (“At the Gathering” 243). *** The current debate in Asian American, Native American and multi-ethnic literatures generally has been, to a large extent, dominated by the issue of how to theorize these literatures and, in the words of James H. Cox, not commit the act of “academic postcolonialism.” Ethnic literatures grow out of, depend on and are steeped in diverse literary and cultural traditions, and the application of Western concepts, standards and philosophies, while often producing interesting critical analyses, might prove insufficient to examine texts which are informed by specific political, ethnic and cultural realities. In the search for appropriate theoretical tools, Donald C. Goellnicht posits that the strategy of turning to ethnic

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texts themselves enables us to see them as not only works of fiction but also as “theoretically informed and informing,” “theoretical fictions” or “fictionalized theory” (“Blurring” 341). Drawing from critics such as Barbara Christian and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Goellnicht articulates the need for reformulating the very concept of “theory,” defining it as inherent to certain forms of ethnic literatures and, most importantly, deriving it from ethnic traditions (342). Considering Kingston’s and Silko’s preoccupation with their respective cultural heritages and histories, and their conscious and judicious choices with regard to narrative forms, it can be claimed that their texts may be seen as “theoretically informed and informing.” Their redefinition and “deconstruction” of genre boundaries are effective methods of, first, developing strategies that locate ruptures in the dominant discourse, allowing for the introduction of alternative discourses, and second, devising a form that neither mimics nor merely reproduces Western genres but rather manages to encapsulate their culturally informed perspectives. This process of inscribing ethnicity and culture into the narrative form parallels the process of language reinvention and appropriation, examined in the first chapter. As both Kingston and Silko arrive at the creation of a “third” space—language and literature that become sites of cultural and literary productions, alternative to but not necessarily opposing those of the mainstream—it seems that they have discovered the medium through which the cultures, histories and stories of their people can be told.

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Conclusions In the passage quoted at the beginning of the Introduction, Jamaica Kincaid poses a question about her relation to history as it is written from an Anglo-American perspective. Kincaid feels alienated from the mainstream historical narrative in which she, and people “who look like her,” are depicted as the background to the unstoppable march of progress of Western civilization. In this narrative, events such as Native American genocide, racist anti-Chinese laws, slavery, Japanese internment camps and many others are erased and glossed over. As Kincaid writes, “In almost every account of an event that has taken place sometime in the last five hundred years, there is always a moment when I feel like placing an asterisk somewhere in its text, and at the end of this official story place my own addition” (626). Kincaid’s text illustrates the historical importance of adding an asterisk to the official version of history and demonstrates how the act extends beyond its obviously corrective function. Adding an asterisk becomes an act of empowerment and one of the prerequisites for the process of asserting agency. The contemporary destabilization of historical discourse caused by postmodern and deconstructive theories transforms literature into a site of the emergence of alternative, unofficial histories, or counter-histories. This transformation of an objective scientific discipline, as history used to be seen, into a textually constructed and thus unstable structure allows marginalized people to offer historical narratives that the mainstream has omitted, occluded or silenced. Despite, and because of, the unavailability of traditional historical sources, it is in literature that ethnic writers revisit the past and thus fill the gaps and intervene in the practice of deliberate omissions of official history. Not only does the strategy of narrative and historical reconstruction allow for telling the “Other side” of history, but it also provides further impetus to examine how the process of identity formation is activated in historical consciousness. Retold Stories, Untold Histories examines the historicist dimension of the works by Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko. Kingston and Silko entered the literary scene in the 1970s when their first works were published, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in 1976 and Silko’s Ceremony one year later, and since then they have exhibited an unfaltering interest in repressed and underrepresented histories of their ethnic groups. This analysis concentrates on five areas in which historical

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reconstruction takes place: language, photographic images, cartography, memory and the point of intersection of literary and historical genres. While Kingston and Silko come from disparate cultural and historical backgrounds, and their reconstruction projects are inevitably motivated by different goals, the strategies that they employ share striking similarities. These parallel methods for dealing with the past may point to their universal rather than culture-specific character and thus encourage comparative readings of texts from different ethnic cultures. Historical articulation would not be possible without breaking the silences that envelop the past. Silence and the mechanisms of silencing occupy a central position in ethnic and feminist as well as postcolonial studies, and have been subject to extensive critical analyses. Chapter one explored a historical dimension of silence, its consequences and the qualities of the language which emerges as an alternative to reticence and a tool for rewriting history. In the works of Kingston and Silko, historical silence renders their protagonists as (silent) objects rather that (articulate) subjects of history and results in the kind of narrative described by Kincaid: written about but without ethnic people. However, the concept of historical articulation cannot be condensed in a two-stage process of breaking silence and projecting voice. In Kingston’s and Silko’s texts, the protagonists are situated in “linguistic borderlands” and are therefore engaged in a constant process of negotiating between home language, be it Keresan, Navajo or Chinese, and English. What this entrapment between two languages entails is the ability of linguistic/cultural translation, that is moving the ideas and values of one culture into a new context. In the course of the translation process, not only is the source language remodeled but also English, the dominant language of the U.S., becomes marked by the values of the source culture. The product of these translation practices is a language that tests itself in the powerful act of appropriating historical discourse for creating counter-histories. In producing alternative versions of the past, not only do Chinese and Native Americans confront its verbal discourse but they also have to challenge history as narrated in photographic images. Historically, photographic technology was often used for producing ideologically informed messages and thus fabricating an image of history. Chapter two presented how Kingston and Silko address the problem of the objectifying gaze of the dominant culture and depict it as having historical consequences. Whether completely erased from the image or immobilized in artificial poses, Chinese and Native Americans become obliterated from history as active participants. However, as Kingston and Silko demonstrate, the language of photography can be well appropriated by those whose images it has distorted. Both writers explore the visual

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medium as a subversive strategy based on the seemingly transparent relationship between the image and reality. Kingston depicts the act of manipulating photography as a therapeutic act of, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “self-fashioning,” that is constructing one’s identity and public persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards, thus minimizing one’s inferiority. Silko relies on the same complexity of the relationship of photography to its referent, and deconstructs photo­ graphic discourse which depicts Native Americans as vanishing Indians and tamed Noble Savages. As a response to the legacy of voyeuristic ethnographic photography, exemplified by the images produced by Edward S. Curtis, Silko incorporates in her works photographs of contemporary Indians and their communal life, thus juxtaposing the reality of American Indian experience with the white man’s fantasy about it. Both writers approach photography as an effective strategy of countering cultural, social and historical invisibility and misrepresentation. In representing the spatial dimension of history, Kingston and Silko turn to maps as another form of historical discourse. While they remain within the area of interest of conventional cartography—marking new territories and delineating national boundaries—they approach the subject from Chinese and Native American perspectives and thus the respective messages that they produce interrupt the historical narrative of the traditional East-West progression. By playing with and redefining the concepts of center and margins, Kingston and Silko point to different trajectories of historical development and map alternative loci of historical meaning. Moreover, by depicting people as an integral part of the mapped space they defy the cartographic rule of depicting space as not affecting and unaffected by people. “Mapping the Past” thus demonstrated how cartographic discourse so conceived becomes a strategy of destabilizing official history, which justifies acts of territorial conquest, colonization, exploitation and dispossession of land. The discussion of memory that Kingston and Silko engage in addresses the problem of the limitations of and obstacles to the project of reconstructing ethnic past. Deliberately erased and silenced, ethnic histories were never properly recorded in verifiable, written documents and therefore some of their parts are irrevocably lost and can only be recovered through memory work. Thus, Kingston and Silko turn to memory as a store of cultural knowledge which allows a glimpse into the past and allows them to fill the gaps in a historical record. However, memory, when treated as a fluid concept that is subject to the forces of forgetting and altered and remodeled with each retelling, emerges as an unreliable source of information. Yet the fallibility of memory does not put an end to the project of historical reconstruction. Rather, Kingston and Silko, unable to

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rewrite the ethnic past according to historiographic rules, conflate fact, memory and imagination into a discourse that, even though it does not guarantee the veracity of presentation, does offer historical insight and understanding. Thus Kingston and Silko illustrate the discursive constructedness of both fact and fiction, and locate the points where historical discourse becomes indistinguishable from literary discourse. The meaningfulness of reconstructing history does not lie in attaining the highest degree of veracity but in the act of its conscious rewriting. In reconstructing the ethnic past in literature, the issue of the appropriateness of Western literary genres appears to be a burning one. If, in order to become effective strategies of resistance, Western mediums of representation, such as photography or cartography, have to first undergo a process of appropriation and remodeling, it seems that the same rule applies to literary forms. While the practice of disregarding generic conventions is neither new nor limited to ethnic literatures, the way Kingston and Silko improvise on and conflate genres is distinguished by a search for a form that would convey the necessity of rewriting the past from the ethnic perspective. By reworking the genres of the chronicle, autobiography and novel, Kingston and Silko demonstrate how the discourses of literature and history often become superimposed, thus defying the logic of their ostensibly antithetical relationship. This search for a form invested with a culture-specific character is also a manifestation of a refusal to interpret and evaluate ethnic texts according to Anglo-American standards and conventions, and a need for devising a language of not only historical but also literary and critical productions. The importance of reconstructing the past goes beyond the corrective and revisionary function of filling the gaps of historical records. As ethnic writers often refuse the role of “native informants” for the white mainstream culture, their revisiting of the past often acquires a personal rather than strictly historical dimension. In Kingston’s and Silko’s texts, knowing, embracing, cherishing and rewriting one’s history is pivotal in the process of identity formation and asserting agency as active participants in constructing versions of the past. Interestingly, the strategies employed to achieve this goal, similar in the texts of both authors, invite readers to trace them in the works of other American writers and thus facilitate the defining of methodologies of historical reconstruction. Examples are varied and numerous: LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation (2010), or from another socio-historical context, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). These writers, and many others, using techniques present in Kingston’s and Silko’s works, demonstrate how public and personal history is created, breathed in and lived on a daily basis.

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Index

241

IIndex

Aird, Michael 74 Allen, Paula Gunn, 21, 127, 156 Anderson, Eric Gary 87, 91, 112, 125, 130, 180 Anzaldúa, Gloria 17, 28 Archuleta, Elizabeth 109n2 Arnold, Ellen 43–44, 131, 163, 165, 183, 184, 190, 205, 208, 214 Ashcroft, Bill, 17, 20, 52, 214 Atwood, Margaret 160–61 Axtell, James 7

Chin, Frank 142, 161, 185, 195 Churchill, Ward 56–57, 134 Cody, Iron Eyes 127 Coltelli, Laura 121, 124, 164 Columbus, Christopher 33, 50, 56, 116, 125 Cox, James H. 171, 216 Cruikshank Julie 10, 184 Curtis, Edward 71–74, 99–101, 221 Cutter, Martha 19, 39, 42, 44, 51, 200, 204

Bakhtin, Mikhail 28, 189, 190 Barnes, Julian, 169, 187 Barnes, Kim 45, 47, 48, 49 Barthes, Roland 12, 63–64, 69, 79, 83, 100, 180 Bazin, André 63 Bedingfield, Agnieszka 77, 141n1 Bell, Virginia 121, 177–78 Benjamin, Walter 63, 137, 140, 180 Bergland, Betty 66 Berkhofer, Robert 7, 127 Berner, Robert 56 Bhabha, Homi 119, 211, 214 Bonetti, Kay 76 Brigham, Ann 130 Brooks, Lisa 50, 216 Bulosan, Carlos 170 Carr, Denny 48, 159 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 170 Chan, Jeffrey Paul 42, 185 Chan, Sucheng 4 Cheung, King-Kok 22, 155, 189 Chew, Lee 55

Davis, Rocío G. 188 Dearborn, Mary V. 18 Deloria, Philip 11 Deloria, Vine 8–9, 128 Derrida, Jacques 12, 20, 105, 106, 191, Domina, Lynn 191 Donnelly, Daria 49, 132, 200 Dorris, Michael 6, 70 Durczak, Jerzy 181 Durham, Jimmie 91–92 Eco, Umberto 49, 131, 192 Eng, David 63, 80, 84, 118 Erdrich, Louise 70, 200, 203 Evans, Larry 48 Evers, Lawrence 158–59 Faris, James 74 Felipe, Willie and Gabriel 157–59 Felman, Shoshana 13 Fischer, Michael 141–42, 162, 166 Fitz, Brewster 27, 37, 46–48, 50, 81, 158, 160 Fitzpatrick, Ellen 6

242 Foucault, Michel 12, 105–106, 139, 164 Geronimo 44, 51, 83, 87–92, 124 Gilmore, Leigh 180 Goellnicht, Donald 21, 112, 142, 176, 216, 217 Grice, Helena 111–12, 115, 117 Gusdorf, Georges 180, 191 Hagedorn, Jessica 170 Harjo, Joy 18, 128 Harley, J. B. 14, 103–7, 120–1 Hebebrand, Christina 166 Heinrich, Larissa 67, 74 Hill, Richard 70–71, 91 Hine, Lewis 66 Hirsch, Bernard 48, 146 Hirsch, Marianne 141–142 Hoffman, Eve 18, 38–39 Holte, James Craig 180–181 Hogue, W. Lawrence 145 Hutcheon, Linda 13, 75, 100, 112, 140, 172, 192, 194, 201–2 Irr, Caren 125n7, 200 Islas, Arturo 109 Jahner, Elaine 19 James, Henry 28 Jameson, Frederic 140, 200 Jaskoski, Helen 26, 35–38, 88, 158 Johnson, Keli Lyon 124 Kingston, Maxine Hong China Men 1, 6, 19, 20n3, 21–22, 24–25, 28–29, 33, 53–55, 75, 76, 78–79, 80, 83–86, 107–15, 117–19, 135–36, 143–145, 148–49, 153–55, 174, 175–76, 196; Hawai’i One Summer 25n8;

Index Kingston, Maxine Hong (continued) The Fifth Book of Peace 1, 53, 154n6, 186; The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts 1, 19–24, 39–42, 75, 77, 83, 142–44, 151–53, 161, 176, 183, 185–96, 198, 21; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book 1, 19, 29–33, 53, 149, 161–63, 186, 196–99, 212–13 Klein, Kerwin Lee 137, 139 Kolodny, Annette 117–18 Krumholz, Linda 97, 147, 191 Krupat, Arnold 131, 183–84, 214–15 LaCapra, Dominick 138–39, 192 LaDuke, Winona 134 Lau, Estelle 144, 162 Laub, Dori 13 Lee, Rachel 117, Lee, Robert, 52, 66 Lejeune, Philippe 180 Li, David Leiwei 22, 42, 55–56, 113, 142, 213 Libretti, Tim 133 Limerick, Patricia Nelson 131 Ling, Amy 40, 153, 195, Lionnet, Françoise 181 Lippard, Lucy R. 72 Lorde, Audre 60 Lowe, Lisa 23, 108–10, 119, 170–1, 212–13 Lukács, Georg 201 Lyman, Christopher 3, 64, 70–74 Marmon, Hank 93, 96, 150, 165, 190 Marmon, Lee 93, 100 Marmon, Maria Anaya 46, 73, 93, 147, 189, Marmon, Robert G. 93, 189 Marmon, Susan Reyes 26n10, 43, 45, 146 Maszewska, Jadwiga 150

Index Martinez, Natasha Bonilla 71, 201 Marx, Karl 58–59, 131–133 Mattina, Anthony 48 McHenry, Elizabeth 46, 93, 147, 190 McMaster, Gerald 73 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 17, 60, 96 Momaday, N. Scott 21, 127–28, 157, 171, 185, 189, 200 Mooney, James 203, 205–7, 210 Moore, David 57, 203, 209 Morrison, Dane 6–7 Morrison, Toni 164, 192 Murray, David 183

243 Roppolo, Kimberly 60 Ruoff, LaVonne 37n13, 159–60, 164 Ruppert, James 51 Rushdie, Salman 39

Palumbo-Liu, David 140, 193, 211 Pegler-Gordon, Anna 67–69 Peterson, Nancy 3, 13, 139, 173, 193 Pfaff, Timothy 109, 175 Pfister, Joel 26, 46 Pinney, Christopher 73–74 Porter, Joy 7, 33, 207, 208 Pratt, Mary Louise 26, 34–35, 37–38, 45 Pulitano, Elvira 214

Sabine, Maureen 86, 153n5 Sands, Kathleen Mullen 183–84 Sanford, Rhonda Lemke 106–7, 112, 116 Schorcht, Blanca 49, 51, 124, 126 Schueller, Malini Johar 212 Shostak, Debra 41, 113n5, 163, 193 Shapiro, Elliott 161, 197 Shu, Yuan 152–53 Sicher, Efraim 57n22 Silko, Leslie Marmon “A Geronimo Story” 34, 37–38, 88; Almanac of the Dead 1, 43, 49–51, 58–59, 80–83, 87, 88–91, 107–108, 120–25, 129–32, 134, 174, 177–79, 200–201, 205; Ceremony 1, 43–45, 94, 128, 187, 187n3, 200, 216, 219; Gardens in the Dunes 1, 80–81, 63, 165–66, 203–4, 207–10, 215; “Lullaby” 34; Storyteller 1, 26– 27, 34–38, 43, 45–48, 75, 87–88, 92–101, 146–50, 155–57, 159, 165, 185–89, 190–91; “Storyteller” 26, 37, 165, 188; The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir 1, 95; “Tony’s Story” 34, 35, 157, 158, 160; Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. Essays on Native American Life 46, 87, 95, 96, 101, 125, 128–29, 146, 156, 157, 188, 189

Rabasa, José, 49, 116 Rabinowitz, Paula 153 Regier, Amy 164, 205, 208 Reineke, Yvonne 50 Romero, Channette 124, 126, 132, 134, 136

Simmons, Diane 54, 185 Skandera-Trombley, Laura 186 Sledge, Linda Ching 29, 176 Skenazy, Paul 195 Smith, Jeanne 30, 198 Smith, Sidonie 180

Nabokov, Vladimir 9, 137, 140 Ng, Fae Myenne 170 Neubauer, Carol 22, 154 Nishime, LeiLani 114 Nora, Pierre 138, 190–191 Novik, Peter 57 Olney, James 180–81 Ortiz, Simon 128, 158 Owens, Louis 171, 191, 203, 214–16

244 Sol, Adam 49, 132, 200 Sollors, Werner 141 Sontag, Susan 63, 66, 87 Spinner, Jeff 110 St. Clair, Janet 83 Stanton, Domna C. 180, 181n1 Takaki, Ronald 4, 55, 79 Taylor, Paul 50–51, 157 Teale, Tamara 133 Thornton, Russell 57, 165, 204 Turner, Sarah 5, 38 Vizenor, Gerald 70, 73–74, 94, 101, 183, 185, 203, 215–16 Wang, Jennie 4, 196–97 Warnock, Mary 151 Warrior, Robert 48, 183 Weaver, Jace 215 Welch, James 172

Index White, Frederick 33, 71 White, Hayden 11–12, 56, 140, 161, 166, 173–75, 192, 201, 203 White, Richard, 7, 8n1 Williams, Carol 65–66 Williams, William Carlos 113 Wilson, Angela Cavender 8–10, 184 Womack, Craig 214, 215 Wong, Hertha Dawn 183–84, 186 Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia 4, 212 Wovoka (Jack Wilson) 165, 204–9 Wyaco, Rose 71 Yalom, Marilyn 109 Ya-Jie, Zhang 195 Yin, Xiao-huang 18, 55, 182 Yung, Judy 3, 5 Xu, Ben 140–41, 185 Zackodnik, Teresa 78, 87