Heart Berries: A Memoir(32)
Q: There are several images in the book that do the work of expressing “without formulating,” such as: “A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lighting haunted me.” How does this series of images foreshadow the consciousness at work in the book?
A: These images felt jarring to write as one sentence—I was torn, but they’re all the indicators that my power was in something destabilizing, that was electric and white, that would not let me be, that was pressing and could not be contained—it was a matter of time. I was so terrified of myself and the things I saw, and my mother was right there the whole time, telling me to let it be—let it exist within me and stir, and maybe women experience this—thinking refrain is admirable, when cut loose is what it needs to be.
Q: As Native writers, and particularly as Native women writers, our lives are literally and mythically born(e) through catastrophe, innocence, and destruction. You ask, early in the book, “How could misfortune follow me so well and why did I choose it every time?” How does this inform your content and context?
A: When I read this I feel the compulsion to literally look back, because misfortune is always here behind me.
Q: You say, too: “In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.” How do you write pain into phenomenological circumstance?
A: I think pain is presented as good for us—that we can even identify it. Before, it was a secret. In my mother’s time it was a secret burden, and women were admired for their ability to ignore, to be silent, to be selfless. They were the backbone of every significant movement in our history because they were not cast to the front. Now we can speak it, and that’s true healing, not a problem—to admit there is some constant pain.
Q: In the chapter “Thunder Being Honey Bear,” you write, “I avoid the mysticism of my culture. My people know there is a true mechanism that runs through us. Stars were people in our continuum. Mountains were stories before they were mountains. Things were created by story. The words were conjurers and ideas were our mothers.” In conversation about this work, you said, “everyone in our lives exists right now.” I’m interested in the way the words “true mechanism” enmesh themselves with the metaphor of language as an extension of the fabric of the lived world. How do you work within—or without—these figurative suggestions?
A: This ties into the images I saw when I was a child—the spinning wheel. Beholding myself was facing the wheel—which literally appeared to me. It didn’t feel mystical—it felt like an image that came to me, an abstract part of my identity’s collage or composition, and I believe that is also how I regard my culture. We spoke the world into being. Mountains were stories before they were mountains, especially where I’m from, especially when my name translates to Little Mountain Woman. Having the name introduced the question of if I, or the mountain, came first. Which do I regard as origin or speaker, and I think those questions definitively answer the nature of the people I grew up with.
Q: Your book presents so many dimensions of motherhood, both from your perspective as a daughter and as a mother: “Even Mom’s cynicism was subversive. She often said nothing would work out.” You present pessimism differently than cynicism, as irony that has to be lived rather than merely understood, right? How does this reconcile with your mother’s operating principles?
A: She was hilarious in that she dedicated herself to the betterment of Native people but never believed in it. She discouraged herself from believing things could be better, while working toward it. I guess she didn’t want to jinx healing. Being cynical when people were so desperate for altruistic, new age, good time healing—it was a funny thing to watch that still brings me joy.
Q: The way in which you interrogate the failures of conversation is grounded in imperative and observation, like when you write: “Mom, I won’t speak to you the way we spoke before. We tried to be explicit with each other. Some knowledge can only be a song or a symbol. Language fails you and I. Some things are too large.” What can you say about the function of ritual language by contrast?
A: My mother needed the poetry of biblical work; she needed an epic when I tried so hard to show her the truth in explicit language. Instead of saying, “Larry touched me,” she needed to hear about the death in his presence—that he was a ghost. She would have heard that and known the depth of the pain her boyfriend caused me, and she wouldn’t have been defensive about it. Somehow, saying things explicitly was never enough—we never found language. Had I told her that she was my Jesus, and that now I need her to wash me from sin—that’s something my mother would understand—poetry, because reality was not real to her. I had always thought she was evasive, but I believe now that the more I tried to create finite parameters, realities, truths, messages—the more I tried to do that, the more she misunderstood. We both wanted something abstract from each other, and those desires aren’t fulfilled by plain language. Plain language does not serve love.
Q: Later, you say, “I preferred abandoned over forsaken—and estranged to abandoned. I loved with abandon. It’s something I still take with me. Estranged is a word with a focus on absence. I can’t afford to think of lack—I’d rather be liberated by it.” What are the ways in which you construct absence or departure as possibility?