Heart Berries: A Memoir(29)

What of the body, Wahzinak? What of your skin—that pine, and then the winter willow beneath.

What of the hair, Wahzinak? When you cut it, was it because he touched it? That is a type of mourning, too. Or was it the manner of the touch? How much of your movements do I contribute to a lack of love or the manner of it?

There is the sentiment that love is radical, from the very radicals you walked with. They say, now, that hate is the absence of love. It’s poster fodder. I follow the logic to death.

What of death, Wahzinak? It’s not the absence of something, but a new thing. I would never resurrect you, but I know your sons, my sister, and I often will you in our sleep. You told us it was dangerous to travel in our dreams. I know.

What of your death, Wahzinak? Was exacting hunger a type of satiation? The waist and hollow stomach in your soil—is that what you wanted? I died hungry that day. Everyone’s stomachs were thrown into your cedar box—all your children, still your responsibility.

I hold my baby’s head to my chest. The skin is the same as kissing a narrow stream, and even his hair feels perennial, without roots, just moving. Life is a running thing without roots for me. I’ll take his stomach when I die, and throat, and he’ll spend his life receiving better parts that I have not split.

Do you know the reservation received your body like Christ or the Holy Ghost or the Father?

Tsel th’í:thomé.

Tà:l

Th’í:lsometsel

Are you Perpetua in the den? Was I the infant you tore from your chest, before you walked toward the lion? Mother, can I know my inheritance now?

Is the fall of man your story, Wahzinak? Not that you were born to a green world and trespassed, but were you born into the blood? Were you the corporeal manifestation of a spirit world—your leather jacket and brown body and fist—holy?

God foreordained Eve’s transgression. He didn’t see you, though. You were stealthier than Eve. So stealthy, there is no text of you—until now. You were folklore and rumor, and there is a myth a man took, like the apple, but of your person.

If the fall was purposeful, then so are your transgressions. If there were no fall, there wouldn’t have been an incarnation. To ascend there must be a dark, a descent. Is that why, Wahzinak, our fathers were prisoners? My brother doesn’t talk about it. I do.

Tsel th’í:thomé.

Tà:l

Th’í:lsometsel

What of Salvador, your lover, Mother? I found his words in the underground presses and in old newspaper clips, and in photos, with brown, rotting edges. Your limbs are there, beneath his. You hadn’t risen yet.

You were just there turning water into wine for men.

Salvador wrote, “Que viva Wounded Knee!” And you wrote him back. He said his best weapon was his mouth and laughed. Governor Rockefeller commuted his death sentence, and prolonged yours.

Both of your mouths, weapons. Both of you, writing from boxes. You, from your island; Sal, from a box in Attica. That’s how love works for a spirit like you: a determined torture. Who could fault you? Did you come from misery?

What of your mother’s body, Wahzinak? Her olive seed and the red hill earth beneath. How many times did she hold you back from the other side of the door?

Do you know you left us hungry, Wahzinak? We exacted hunger like you. When we were children, you came home and fed me bruised bananas—was that transubstantiation? Did you see my sister’s eyes, like Eve’s at the gates of the garden?

“What do my eyes look like?” I asked. I couldn’t see.

What of my body, Mother? Do I write from pain, like Hildegard?

What of my body and the women who’ve left? My citrine and the bark beneath.

When you met the serpent, who was my father, what did his eyes look like? He painted you a drum. From his box, he wrote that he could not take care of you. What provocation to a spirit like you.

Do you remember when you banished the serpent, Mom? That we all waited by the door, with weapons in our hands?

In the root of my mind, which is contained like our old house, and formed just so, I see you lying down against the concrete and my father standing above you. I walk backwards up the steps, knowing my feet like I never did. Do I forgive you both? We shine brighter in heaven. You are formless to me now. But, still, your pine and winter willow are in my body. As are my grandmother’s olive seed and red hill earth.

I am leaving your body in the earth, Mother. My words lay still like shadows on the page, but they are better than nothing. Better than your formless looming and the dead men who left you. I lament and lament the beginning until the end, where your red hands are waiting. Did you foreordain heaven before you died? Was I there on your chest, or did you hold me from the door.





afterword

by Joan Naviyuk Kane

Q: What has been your experience as a writer and reader within the general field of Native memoir? Most specifically, can you delineate your choices to write intimately, honestly, lyrically, compellingly?

A: Joy Harjo and Elissa Washuta’s memoirs were in my periphery as I was considering writing one myself and—I considered the memoirs of Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday and Linda Hogan when I thought about my aesthetic. When I look at these books the distinctions are clear; the voices are present and impactful; different, obviously. And then I saw the literary criticism, or lack of, and these books were being mishandled to essentialize Indigenous people’s art. Not so much Elissa’s book—and people could stand to write about it more because her work is fascinating and cerebral and new—but the genre-marketing of Native memoir into this thing where readers come away believing Native Americans are connected to the earth, and read into an artist’s spirituality to make generalizations about our natures as Indigenous people. The romantic language they quoted, or poetic language they liked––it seemed misused to form bad opinions about good work.