English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

11 October 2005

Leon Stennis

Leslie Marmon Silko Is Quite a Storyteller

Before today’s readings, I was thinking about the fact that, with the exception of Maria Sabina, we really have not heard, at least in a full-fledged way, Native American stories from Native American authors. Even Maria Sabina’s story was told to someone else who transcribed it for publication.

That changed with Leslie Marmon Silko: Storyteller. As it turns out, Silko, a mixture of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, white and possibly Cherokee is quite a storyteller.

In the book she draws upon the collective memory of Great Grandma Amooh, Grandpa Hank, Aunt Susie, and Aunt Susie’s daughter, Bessie, to tell stories about her family.

Although the Native American stories that Silko tells in the book are interesting, especially with them coming from a Native American, Silko sometimes wonders if even she does them justice:

Saturday morning I was walking past Nora’s

house

and she was standing out side building a fire in

her oven.

I stopped to say hello and we were talking and

she said her grandchildren had brought home

a library book that had my “Laguna Coyote”

poem in it.

We all enjoyed it so much,

but I was telling the children

the way my grandpa used to tell it

is longer,” Yes, that’s the trouble.

with writing,” I said,

“You can’t go on and on the way we do

when we tell stories around here.

People who aren’t used to it get tired” (110)

Silko’s comments reveal some of the difficulties that writers translating, transcribing and interpreting literature from oral cultures have, including Silko when telling stories about her own Native American culture and heritage. Nevertheless, Silko did a remarkable job with the eight short stories, original poems, anecdotes, and excerpts from letters, personal reminiscences, notes of family history, photographs by her father, and retelling of traditions.

One of Silko’s stories that I think is particularly interesting is “Yellow Woman.” Based on traditional abduction tales, “Yellow Woman” involves a kachina, or mountain spirit, kidnapping and seducing a young Pueblo woman on her way to get water. The woman realizes that her liaison with the man, a cattle rustler, is in fact a reenactment of the “yellow woman legend.” Eventually the young woman becomes aware of her active role in the community and returns to her family where she hopes that the story of her relationship with man will be passed on or repeated as a new saga among the stories in the oral tradition. “I decided to tell them that some Navajo had kidnapped me, but I was sorry that old Grandpa wasn’t alive to hear my story because it was the Yellow Woman stories that he like to hear best,” the woman says (33).

As Jerome Rothenberg said in the preface to his writings in the Seneca Journal,

“When the book first came out, America was going through a spell of Indianisomo. Not for the first time & likely not the last.” That statement resounded as I read through “Shaking the Pumpkin: Songs and Other Circumstances from the Society of the Mystical Animals,” “Salamanca a Prophecy” and “Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry.” I thought that if he is speaking a proliferation of literature about Native Americans he is certainly correct. And it is true that that was not always so.

When I read “Shaking the Pumpkin: Songs & Other Circumstances from the Society of the Mystical Animals” I was struck by the title and the importance of animals in early Native American culture. Sometimes we forget how close the Native American was to nature, of which animals are a part. The sounds of the songs and language here seem to reflect that closeness to nature, the high regard for animals, etc. Then I wondered if any of today’s anthologies are willing to step down from their ivory towers to carry pieces like this.

In “Total Translation: An Experiment in Presentation of American Indian Poetry” Rothenberg said he still has a problem with the word “tribal” when it comes to referring to Native Americans, even though he mostly substitutes the word “primitive.” If Rothenberg is sensitive to American Indian cultures, values, music, languages, and traditions after working in the field of ethnopoetics for over 30 years certainly caution should be the watch word for newcomers to field, be they scholars or students. On translations, he advises:

“The more the translator can perceive of the original

- not only the language but, more basically perhaps,

the living situation from which it comes &, very much

so, the living voice of the singer – the more of it he

should be able to deliver” (92).

Rothenberg offers other good points too, like how to handle elements in the original works that are not translatable literally, how to deal with the problem of not knowing the language, and when and when not to stick with the translation as given.

The “A Poem of Beaver” poem in “Salamanca a Prophecy” was quite interesting because, again, it showed how much animals were a part of early American tradition and beliefs. For example, the speaker in the poem recites what he thinks it is like to be a beaver. He says:

The beaver in the poem of the Baal Shem

is being born

he is the generative part of man

the cock hair

the low intelligence erupting

changes what we are

the soft becoming

hard the cold one

hot

It seems that the speaker in the poem closely identifies the life of the beaver closely to that of man, especially, perhaps, that of the early Native American.