Author Interview: Gerald Vizenor
The writer and scholar on the magic of haiku, understanding Native storytelling, and the process of survivance
I can easily recall the first time I ever read Gerald Vizenor. I was in Nickels Arcade, sitting inside a cafe, with my hands securely wrapped around a copy of The Heirs of Columbus — the pages gave a light crack as the binding casually acknowledged my need to have the book completely open. As I did this, the book became more and more disheveled. I was dog earing pages — a sin, I now realize, and hope to never commit again — highlighting passages, starring words from tongues that were not my own, and at moments I even acquiesced to putting the book down in order to sit, reflect, sip coffee, and make a few illegible notes before diving back into the text. I was fixated beyond the point of politeness. My brain, in many ways, knew what was happening before I, the curious reader sitting in that cafe, had any clue of what was truly going on. The chapters were piling up and with each new installment of the story those preconceived tenants of Western Literature were one by one collecting their items and abandoning the space of my brain with a “too-da-loo” followed by a “I think we should still be friends.”
We all have those writers who take much of what we have accepted, or appreciated as the givenness of the world, and completely invert it. I can think of a few who have done this for me. But I can’t think of any who firmly took hold of my literary roots only to then supplant them with something new, something necessary. All accomplished within a single cup of coffee. With Vizenor, words like survivance, terminal creeds, trickster, and postidian are not just a sound we make with our mouth or a set of symbols we assemble on a page. His writing breathes, it walks around, it flirts with you, it sings, it dances (well), it accompanies you even after you believe yourself to be done with it, and when you are confused it reappears — never in the same way. Last week I was fortunate enough to share some of my inquiries with Gerald via email. His responses, much like his writing, delighted me in unfamiliar, helpful ways.
Gerald Vizenor will be participating in two public readings this week. On Thursday (22nd) at 7 PM, there will be a staged reading of his epic poem Bear Island. That event will be taking place at Keene Theater in East Quad. On Friday (23rd) at 6:30 PM, Gerald will deliver the 2018 Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. Lecture in the apse of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Literati Bookstore will be on hand to sell books.
One of my favorite stories of yours is “Ice Tricksters.” I assume you’ve most likely discussed it at length throughout your career, so instead of focusing on the character of Almost, I’d prefer to mention the Native who bobs up and down when he walks in his over-sized trench coat in the middle of summer as a means to understanding the process a writer must undergo when writing tricksters into their stories. The playful, mischievous, and comedic presence of these characters often frees them from those forced sociological strictures which surround them — I’m thinking specifically of the dominate forces which accompany manifest manners and at various times, terminal creeds, depending on the trickster and book we are speaking about. But how does a writer manage those characters whose very presence within a story is meant to produce the unmanageable?
The Ice Trickster was carved from a block of lake ice, stored in straw over summer, and then melts away in an ice sculpture contest on the reservation. Trickster figures are almost real, and melt away in the best native stories. The lake ice cracks and thunders in the winter, waves in the summer, and the natural course of the seasons and native stories are not binary structure. Native stories, lake ice, and the tricky cut of words and visions are created by chance, not by the fate and philosophy of grammar, or the dedicated structures of commercial stories. Native stories are not liturgy, and even creation stories change with experience and perception. The closure or narrative denouement is a familiar structure, of course, but termination is a style more political and commercial than visionary. The best native stories were visionary, not reductive, promotional, or deductive.
As a lover of poetry, haikus have always terrified me. I find their turns to be a little too potent. I say this, not to downplay or make light of the craftsmanship necessary to produce such a short, yet powerful, trio of controlled lines. I think they’re actually quite magical. The struggle I have whenever I read a haiku is accepting that the writer was able to creatively imagine the natural rhythm of a fabricated or witnessed environment and then place such an imagining into a carefully selected syntax. Even saying “place” sounds misleading because upon writing the haiku, the lines themselves become the essence of what was creatively perceived. Such a statement becomes even more complicated when we begin to consider the production of tribal dream songs and their spiritual cadence. How do you understand these imaginative transitions within haikus? Are they as much about creativity as they are about spiritual inhabitation?
I write about original haiku and native dreams songs in my recent book Favor of Crows. Yes, wise crows, clever beaver, tricky bears, praying mantis, cocky kingfishers, coyotes, shy moccasin flowers, and the entire natural world favors the concise images and perceptions of haiku over the heavy schemes and philosophies of grammar and most other poetic styles. Haiku is intuitive, a concise imagistic tease of nature, and a meditation on natural motion. The creation of a haiku image is an intuitive association, not a dead simile. There is a poetic sense of motion, the natural motion of the seasons, in haiku and native dream songs. Many Anishinaabe dream songs create a sense of totemic presence, the vision and memory of birds, animals, and other creatures in natural motion, and the same can be said about the traces and perceptions of original haiku. Kenneth Yasuda writes in The Japanese Haiku that haiku is an aesthetic experience, and the sense of a “haiku moment” is eternal. “Every word, then, in a haiku, rather than contributing to the meaning as words do in a novel or a sonnet, is an experience.” That imagistic moment is natural motion in a haiku scene. “With a large bird above me, I am walking in the sky,” is the translation of an avian vision of an Anishinaabe imagistic singer.
I once studied under a Native American Studies professor — who shall remain nameless — that always suggested that arguments based off of an authentic versus artificial identification model were doomed to fail because they relied — almost willfully — on quotas of one’s practicing traditionalism. Instead of following the authentic versus the artificial identification model, this professor believed that insider and outsider perspectives are best suited for discussing one’s capacity to identify as or better comprehend Native identity. So it’s not so much that one dresses a certain way, or eats a certain type of food, or speaks a certain type of language. The significance in either identifying as or attempting to better understand what it means to be a Native is based in the approaches one takes when thinking about Native people. How does this school of thought relate to your creative writing?
Popular culture, casino jargon, rez clichés, turquoise jewelry, beaded moccasins, powwow vests, and other common signifiers are too easy to play in the game of insider identities. The heart of individual character and communal recognition is actually in the tease of native friends and families. Native identity is a union, not a mere declaration or material connection. Family histories and genealogical documents are obviously principal sources of native singularity, but the originality of native recognition and identity emerges with associations, totemic, cultural, literary, and the tease of friends. The seams and creases of identity are significant to me as a writer, the traces of union, and sense of presence in stories, a presence that is not revealed by celebrity, place names, or by the gossip theory of outsiders.
The courtroom scene in The Heirs of Columbus always makes me laugh while reading it. The back and forth of multiple characters talking past the judge, and the legal scene with a discussion of animals as witnesses creates the sensation of participating in a marvelous legal ceremony — the judge is priceless, in my mind. What drew you to write the scenes and testimony of Memphis de Panther in the “Bone Courts” chapter?
The unusual characters in “Bone Courts” are witnesses at a hearing on the rights of animals, the repatriation of native human remains and medicine pouches. Memphis de Panther had never been in a courtroom, and as a native witness she declares that she is a panther. Beatrice Lord, the federal Judge, questioned her name, and Memphis purrs at the bench. Here are selected scenes from The Heirs of Columbus, first published twenty-seven years ago to ironically celebrate the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus.
“Memphis de Panther, would you explain to the court the sense of animal identities that shamans much endure in their visions,” said Judge Lord.
“We were created by mongrels,” said Memphis.
“Yes, mongrel evolution,” said Judge Lord.
“No, evolution is a highbred delusion, we were created by a trickster mongrel who disguised the outside of creatures with skin and hair, beaks and ears, but we are animals on hold with interior visions,” said Memphis.
“Could you repeat that please?” asked the judge.
“We are animals disguised as humans,” said Memphis.
“Would that be a shaman?” asked the judge.
“The shaman has no disguise,” said the panther.
“Really, but shamans are feared,” said Lord.
“The animals are feared, not the shaman,” said Memphis.
“So, we are animals in disguises then?” asked the judge.
“Yes, and the shaman heals the animals with stories in our blood, not the masks we wear as humans, the mask dies, the stories endure,” said the panther. She licked her right paw and stared at the spectators in court.
“Would you say that the notions of animal identities, but not human disguises, of course, are what make medicine pouches sacred to the tribe?” asked Judge Lord.
“No, the disguises are sacred,” said Memphis. “The animals are stories in our blood, and stories have power to heal, and the power to heal is comic and has never been sacred.”
“Memphis, who is the animal in your blood?” asked Lord.
“The panther,” she said, and purred.
“But you don’t look like a panther,” said the judge. Lord studied her face and tried to imagine the ears and paws of a panther as the witness, but only her golden eyes and nocturnal eyeshine warned the court.
“Show me your panther,” the judge insisted.
“Imagine me as a panther, the rest is natural and wild in the cities,” she said, and purred so loud that the bench vibrated. The mongrels outside in the park near the courts building barked at the panther who came loose from a human. The heirs saw the panther, but the judge and lawyers and most of the spectators demanded too much from science, cold reason, and human disguises to see the eyeshine of animals in stories.
“No real panther would bother with a courtroom,” said Lord.
“The trouble with humans is they believe their disguises are real, but not imagination, or their dreams,” said the panther. “Once there was a real crossblood who was caught by a vision in the city, and he saw himself in mirrors as a bear, when he looked up from the sink he saw a bear, a dangerous vision that forced him to abandon his human disguise and become the bear in his blood, or else he would be dead in the mirror.”
For the past year and a half I’ve found the word survivance leaving my mouth more than ever before. I’ve also found myself reading more Native writers than I did in previous years. I don’t need to talk about how the state of publishing for Native writers is often quite dismal and difficult — we are both aware of such a fact. Yet, readers are fortunate enough to be getting books like Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries. I am undoubtedly missing numerous titles and I don’t wish to commit myself to the fallacy of believing three particular pieces makes an intricate whole. But postindian warriors have continued the practice of survivance in startling, innovative ways — Graywolf Press’ forthcoming anthology of poems, New Poets of Native Nations, may have some of the most compelling and unique Native writers who have yet to be popularly read. How does the current state of survivance strike you as a writer whose work is in conversation with all of these other writers? Where do you see the process of survivance headed?
Natives were cornered in the narratives of monotheism and discovery as mere victims. I refused to accept any notions of native closure or convenient cultural victimry, and created the new meaning of an old word in French and English to reveal the outcome of native resistance and create stories of survivance. Victimry is an enterprise of dominance, and native survivance is the ethos and highlight of endurance. Native survivance is an active sense of presence over historical absence, manifest manners, and the dominance of cultural simulations of victimry. Native stories of irony and resistance create the continuance of survivance.
