Thursday, April 10, 2014
Foust on Caprivity
I found this piece by far the most challenging of all the assigned reading. Yes, I could see the device used to move from section to section (repeating the last line of the preceding section in the first line of the one that followed). I could see that several narratives were being conflated, and that the figure of Mary Rowland, a white woman taken captive by native Americans (and so an inversion of the "norm" of native Americans being actually and metaphorically enslaved by white men) kept recurring, along with the idea that a captive fears learning to love his or her captors. I could tell that the "I" was a Native American raised on a reservation. Beyond that, and perhaps it is b/c it is late and I am reading the piece on my Iphone, I felt like the piece was asking me to do a momentous task of engaging with it, one that felt almost beyond me. I know it is important that I do it, and it feels like whining to say that it feels like too much work. But I found piece significantly more inaccessible than the others. And so I ask myself why the author made this choice, knowing some readers would not stick with it? Some of it, I'd guess, has to do with the reasons behind language poetry--you can't accurately represent a fragmented world in tidy, syntax-ordered language. And, as Audre Lorde said, his tools will never dismantle the master's house. Why should the oppressed have to use the language and syntax of the oppressor? I understand the impulse, but as with language poetry, the result requires more than I can, sometimes, muster. That doesn't matter, of course-- all art breaking new ground has to encounter resistance like mine. A piece like this encourages its readers to grapple with larger questions about art--must it communicate? have "meaning?" Was perhaps making me feel shut out and excluded the point of the piece, a way of replicating the way Native Americans have been marginalized, excluded, and held captive? Is the author's deliberate "difficulty" and refusal to engage in conventional narrative a way of protecting himself from not loving his captors? In this way the piece is like postmodern art-it stimulates the viewer to think about larger issues precisely because of the way it thwarts convention.
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Hi Rebecca, I think you are onto something when you say "fragmented." I like what Loryn says about this piece -- that it's prismatic. Or like a crystal held up to the light and all you see are the reflections hitting each wall as you turn it. But good question: why? I think (my reading) it's addressing the native american diaspora -- that tribes have been moved and "captured" on reservations which now (for various reasons) they cannot leave. When you ask the question about "the language of the oppressor" I will have to disagree. Native American languages are dying out. Native American children are educated in english, not their own tongue. This is what he means by "the language of the enemy" and he's referring to the historical practice of disavowel/erasure of this language. I know you all know this, so I'll stop here. I don't think so much that the writer is trying to be difficult, I think he may be trying to write about something that is very difficult to explain or tackle and he is using this form (successfully or unsuccessfully, depending on how you see it) to express that. Hope this helps!
ReplyDeleteI don't think he is "trying to be difficult" either.I did not mean that, but I do think he was trying not to use the conventional means of expression, perhaps for political reasons, or just because conventional expression is inadequate to the task, and that the RESULT is difficult and may drive some readers away. And that is OK too--art for art's sake. But if a writer's objective is communication, if you want to be read, then it could be an issue, as it has been with Language Poetry for example. I really like the idea that the structure is prismatic and reflects the diaspora.
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