Somatic Communication: Motherhood and Transference in Layli Long Soldier’s Poetry

Abstract

Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection of poetry, WHEREAS, has been primarily framed as a defiant counter-discourse to the allusive 2009 federal apology to native communities, particularly her poems addressing the document directly. Little attention, however, has been given to Long Soldier’s unpredictable aesthetic choices as she translates her experience of motherhood, daughterhood, and womanhood through a subjective female lens, which equally emphasize the gravity of this unapologetic federal document. I argue that Long Soldier reinvents lyrical prose and visual poetry through what I call thought-music—the poet’s mode of accessing and translating her inner dialogue using alternative punctuation, inventive forms, and white space or ‘functional white’ [White, Orlando (2015), ‘Functional White: Crafting Space & Silence’, The Poetry Foundation, 3 November, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/functional-white-crafting-space-silence]. In doing so, she interrogates the body’s modes of receiving and transference, and composes ‘embodied geographies’ [Goeman, Mishuana (2013), Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press]; poems tethered to mental and physical intimacies as a mother and Lakȟóta language learner within her community. The poet’s punctuation, typographical architecture, and white space construct a somatic perspective, suggesting that communication is physical, contrary to the colonial rhetoric in the federal apology.

Keywords:

• Layli Long Soldier
• contemporary poetry
• motherhood
• Lakȟóta
• indigenous poetry
• postcolonialism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 President Obama also reversed the U.S. decision against the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people, accepting it on the condition that it was non-binding, which is why, as Lakȟóta historian Nick Estes asserts, there is a non-binding aspect in the apology itself (Long Soldier 2018).

2 My thesis ‘The Kinetic Poetics of Sherwin Bitsui, Natalie Diaz, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Layli Long Soldier’ (2021) explores this concept. Not to be confused with various forms of media-based kinetic poetry (digital poetry, holopoetry, video poetry, etc.), I use kinetic poetics to address how movement can be examined in text-based aesthetics in poetry.

3 In ecopoetic studies, ‘somatic’ has also been used by Matthew Cella and Petra Kuppers. Cella defines the ‘ecosomatic paradigm’ as one that ‘assumes contiguity between the mind-body and its social and natural environments and is also used foregrounding the dialectical relationship between the individual subject and its ecological context’ (2013: 573). Kuppers offers the term ‘eco soma’ as an alternative to ecosomatic, primarily in reference to performance art that connects ‘with materials, objects, and sites that one’s moving body meets’ (2022: 1).

4 WHEREAS is split into two parts: PART I: THESE BEING THE CONCERNS, with a set of titled poems, and PART II: WHEREAS, which includes three sections, (1) Whereas Statements, (2) Resolutions, and (3) Disclaimer. Each ‘Whereas Statement’ mimics the federal document’s preamble by beginning with the word ‘Whereas’ and ending with a semicolon; the ‘Resolutions’ section reframes phrases from apology’s ‘Resolution’; and the ‘Disclaimer’ section rewrites the document’s own ‘Disclaimer’.

5 According to a Lakȟóta/English dictionary edited by Buechel and Manhart, iyotan is the suffix translated as ‘most’ (2004: xx), while David Little Elk’s song called ‘Iyotan Cilak'un,’ is translated as ‘you’re the only one for me’ (Little Elk). Iyotan cila kun has also been translated as ‘I think the most of you’ (Young Bear 1994: 88) or a simplified ‘I love you’ (Ager 1998-2020), while mičhúŋwiŋtku (Lakȟótiyapi Forum 2019) or cunwitku, means ‘daughter’ in the Buechel’s Lakȟóta Dictionary (Buechel and Manhart 2004: 457).

6 As she writes in the third section: ‘the uterus does its cleaning through blood a methodical machine / washes itself new baby gone the mother left’ (38, original spacing).

7 The daughter’s friends say ‘she just fell, she’s bleeding!’ (66), an echo of the line ‘Babe I’m bleeding’ (37) in ‘Left’ when the speaker is having a miscarriage, adding a layer to the cycles of mother-daughter experience.

8 ‘Embodied’ may seem contradictory to Long Soldier’s role on the guest faculty at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets, along with other Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) alumni. However, Ginsberg explains that the name of the school was ‘[…] a joke. Because […] Kerouac’s dead, so he’s disembodied, so to speak’ (Schumacher 1992: 128). Anne Waldman—co-founder of the school along with Allen Ginsberg—and Arthur Sze set up a collaboration in which IAIA fellows could participate in the Naropa summer institute sessions.

9 See Marjorie Perloff’s critique of Olson’s three-part explanation of Projective Verse as ‘merely pretentious, […] to convince the reader that the argument in question is proceeding logically or that, at the very least, it is highly complex’, and her breakdown of the sources Olson reframed (1973: 291).

10 A syntactical inconsistency or incoherence within a sentence, a deviation from one construction to another.

11 Though culturally distinct, this interestingly evokes the concept of past-future for the Aymara (of the Andes Mountains in Bolivia) which contains the word nayra or ‘eye’, evoking the past seen in front of them and the future behind them (Gonzales 2012: 167).

12 Trask writes, ‘There is far too little discussion of our responsibilities [..] to our nations, to our families, to our communities, and to our world. Rights without responsibilities are the way of imperialism and colonialism, not the way of Native America’ (Trask 1999: 88).

13 These verbs are counterpoints to the sexist roles enforced on young native women in colonial boarding schools: ‘cook roast beef’, ‘eat white bread’ and ‘start a family not an education’, as Esther Belin writes in her poem ‘Euro-American Womanhood’ (1999: 20).

14 In Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, polychronography is defined: ‘[…]To name measurements of time reflexively and make awareness of multiple flows incantatory. […] To embed personal events within human and more-than-human temporalities. […] To use sounds as connectives across temporalities. To body time. […] Polychronography recognizes and enacts multiple understandings of temporality […]’ (Russo and Reed 2018: 55–56).

Additional information

Funding

With the support of the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship.