Jun 30, 2021
I Have Questions: Learning About Indigenous Studies, Lesson 5
This month has been an incredible gift. To learn about Indigenous people in the United States is to learn a more complete historical, cultural, and social narrative of the United States itself. (See: Lesson 1) So far, I have prepared myself (somewhat) to read literature by delving into early history (Lesson 2), current news coverage (Lesson 3), and current events (Lesson 4).
History and news cocoons new learners by giving us facts to hold onto. What they do not do is prepare us for some of the messiness in which creative non-fiction and other forms of literature abide. This week, I’m going to confront my own desire to know. Where does that reach its limits?
I picked up Shapes of Native Non-Fiction edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. The collection begins with a meditation on the vessel of the creative non-fiction essay. Both editors point out that the shape of a vessel is neither coincidental nor incidental: it collaborates with its creator to take its shape deliberately based on its purposes. Neither editor argues that Native non-fiction understands the essay exclusively in these terms. Instead, this mode of creating and reading dovetails with how, culturally speaking, many Indigenous folks understand the interplay between creator, created object, and their purposes.
To be honest, this is and is not new to me. On the one hand, I have been taught to understand the genres of writing as distinctive, even if those distinctions can be blurred at times. Poetry is poetry unless it is a prose poem. The essay is an essay with so-called essay attributes. On the other hand, as a scholar of Black and Arab American literatures, I know that people of color shift the nature of a genre to suit their purposes. James Baldwin, for instance, uses the essay to indict, cajole, convict, convince, remember, wonder…. all of this is more than the genre typically called for which used to be argumentation. See also Cathy Park Hong and Roxanne Gay and Kiese Laymon.
I am not surprised by the premise of Washuta and Warburton’s introduction. I am surprised by how much I needed to be reminded that another literary tradition would require me to shift my understanding.
Learning is a consistent embrace of humility.
The entire collection is powerful, but two essays struck me in particular: “Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer— And Maybe to Myself,” by Stephen Graham Jones and “To the Man Who Gave Me Cancer” by Adrienne Keene. Both asked me to reckon with how much I should seek to know or understand from the writers themselves.
Jones’s essay takes the form of advice. Selfishly, I always want to know how to write and read better. This essay provided a list of seventeen “rules” for aspiring Indian writers (and ostensibly for Jones as well). Jones begins by contextualizing the writers in their contemporary moment, reminding them that — despite what colonial minded marketers say — this is not the Native American Renaissance. Jones enjoins writers to pay attention to the tradition. The rest of the putative rules push for complexity in both the work and the thinking about the work.
For me, as a non-Native Black reader, many of the rules dovetail with what I already know as a writer. They also align with what I instruct my students to think about when reading literature by non-white people. Jones foregrounds the multi-dimensionality of Indigenous folks, insisting that the writers allow themselves to be as they are, rather than a caricature of themselves for, among other pitfalls, supposed “positive representation” or a United Colors of Benneton/We Are The World diversity schtick.
Jones’s essay also forecloses the possibility that anyone should seek to know something concrete about Indian cultures from Indian writers. Certainly, they may provide facts or bits of history or the truth of emotion. However, no Indian writer can be tasked with providing “the Native perspective.” This is a farce, a deliberate lie, one in service of settler colonial aims. The desire to know definitively assumes that knowledge is a thing to be acquired and retained rather than an expansive place in which to sit and be in community with others.
Keene’s “To the Man Who Gave Me Cancer” is an example par excellance of how Jones’s rules might look in prose. (I don’t know whether the two writers are actually in conversation. I make no claims about whether one follows the other.) Keene’s essay is part-memoir and part-meditation on the experience of cancer. I was initially attracted to this essay because of my previous knowledge of Audre Lorde’s writing on the same subject. Keene, like Lorde, refuses a narrative that resolves itself with some version of cure. This defies the typical narratives about cancer which understand it in military terms, usually using metaphors like invasion or beating it.
Keene ties her contemporary experience to her ancestral memory, linking her medical procedures to the stress of living in the wake of settler colonialism. The cancer functions as an instance of trauma upon the body. It is acute in terms of the trauma she has experienced at the hands of a man carrying a carcinogenic STI. It is also more wide-ranging in terms of the way cancer has impacted her matrilineal line. Keene points out that a disease with such an impact on women would not be allowed to fester in a matrilineal society. She notes that she and other women would be protected.
On the one hand, Keene provides intimate details about her body and mind: how she relates to her uterus; her biopsy and surgical experiences; her feelings of hurt, isolation, and violation. Yet, Keene is careful to remind us that there is so little we can know about her because we are at the grace of her pen: what she allows us to know. This much is evident in the use of roman numerals to separate the sections. Keene reminds us that this essay is crafted, shaped, created in a vessel that can hold both its vulnerability and inscrutability. Absolutely brilliant.
I came to these essays with a desire to know more, to delve deeper. And, I reached a limit. A rightfully placed one. Creative non-fiction, as a genre, permits a degree of knowledge, but nothing so concrete and wholesale so as to seduce a reader into believing they simply know enough or know the truth or understand it all.
The brilliance of these essays is that they confront the limitations of knowledge itself. What it means to know is to not know.
