“Where in the body do i begin?” Revisiting Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS
In the discourse of law, whereas signals a recitation of pertinent, contextual information in a formal or contractual document. A whereas statement is introductory, typically preceding legislation, but represents non-binding language. Whereas sets and subsequently “calls you to the table,” however, the information it establishes is non-essential, and not commensurate to the operative provision of a contract, resolution, proclamation, or legislative bill.
Whereas prepares you for an action.
But, what happens if the action never follows?
Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas was written in response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Signed by Barack Obama in 2009, Long Soldier reminds us that “no tribal leaders or official representatives were invited to witness and receive the Apology on behalf of tribal nations,” and that, “President Obama never read the Apology aloud, publicly.” The resolution opens with a statement of acknowledgment — “To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States” — and proceeds with a series of statements that begin with the word “Whereas.”
The poems in Whereas cope explicitly with the fact that language is an instrument of force, the deployment of which has material, real time consequences.
The United States’ endless series of broken treaties, its duplicitous and coercive responses, and officious apologies to Native peoples all betray just how effectively language can arm hegemony. The near poetic level of precision extant in the language of the 2009 apology renders it a consummate example of a settler-colonial move to innocence, allowing space for mild recognition, while simultaneously displacing accountability. The word genocide is never used. In 2010, the apology was carefully folded into the Defense Appropriations Act, more like a secret than an admission.
This book, however, also hinges upon another apology, this one from Long Soldier’s father. She writes, “I turned to him when I heard him say I’m sorry I wasn’t there sorry for many things / like that / curative voicing / an opened bundle / or medicine / or birthday wishing / my hand to his shoulder / it’s okay I said it’s over now I meant it / because of our faces blankly / because of a lifelong stare down / because of centuries in sorry;”
This concept of “curative voicing,” which truth be told, knocked me out upon first read, points us to the flip-side of linguistic violence: the language of healing. Language requires care. It requires purpose and human organization. Language bears intention, both implicit and manifest. Language chosen with care and with precision can be imposed as readily as it is felt. It can be wielded or given freely. Long Soldier’s poems seem to advocate for the latter: writing faith and restoration into being, while honoring those innumerable who have been or are being written off, out, or quite literally apart.
In recent years, neuroscientists are beginning to confirm what most of us have always known: a true apology is given and received physically and can be tracked through the body. The tug behind your belly button or the loosening of great, salt tears can now find antecedents in chemically illuminated maps of the brain. Still, for an apology to illuminate a body, whether individual or geographical, it must be sincere. It must be followed by an action. A certain human intelligence grows up around apologies, based in experience, in lifetimes of met or unmet expectations for change or reconciliation. The “centuries in sorry” Long Soldier refers to, convey the duplicity, cruelty, and real loss of life that can result from a dishonorable apology. “Curative voicing,” in turn, illustrates the miraculous, life-saving potential of a sincere one.
Long Soldier has described Whereas as a project of constraints: to employ an almost exclusively first person speaker, to anchor her historical inquiry in the current moment, or at least in living memory. These tactics, as well as the central figure of her daughter, bring the experience of being a Native person in a settler colonial nation into the present tense and into the future. Predominant cultural and historical discourses in the United States like to relegate Native experience to the realm of the nostalgic, regrettably uncommon artifact. Long Soldier actively rejects that insidious, hegemonic impulse, and grounds the reader in her individual experience as a writer, educator, daughter, and mother of the Lakota nation. There is no danger of spokespersonhood, instead the opening of a small, but deeply generous window to the real, the now, and the great what’s-to-come.
