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

Oglala Lakȟóta poet and visual artist Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection of poetry, WHEREAS, has been widely discussed as a rebuttal to the allusive 2009 Congressional Apology to Native Peoples of the United States, a ‘joint resolution’ obscured within the 1,000-page National Defense Reauthorization Act. Little attention, however, has been given to Long Soldier’s unconventional aesthetic choices when translating her experience of motherhood and community from a subjective female lens, which equally emphasize the gravity of this unapologetic federal document. The ‘apology’ in question, which inadequately attempted to address centuries of physical, cultural, and psychological violence in the name of colonial conquest against indigenous people, was barely made known to the wider public. President Barack Obama, who signed the document on December 19, 2009, made no announcement or delivery of the apology, and although it was eventually read in front of five tribal leaders, ‘there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes in the US’ (2017b: 57), as Long Soldier points out.¹ Most critics have therefore focused on the parts of the collection which are in direct response to the apology, framing it as a reactionary counterstatement to the government’s rhetoric of denial regarding its systematic exploitation perpetuated since the earliest days of colonization. For instance, both Jill Darling’s book Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures (2021) and Crystal Alberts’s review in Studies in American Indian Literatures (2018) neglect Long Soldier’s intricate contemplation of motherhood, womanhood, and relationship to community, bypassing the poet’s universe of visual arrangements. Eric Falci’s analysis in The Value of Poetry similarly frames Long Soldier’s collection as a resistant countertext to the ‘obfuscating abstractions’ of the government’s legalese (2020: 78), while Jaussen, Gray, and Balkun’s A Companion to American Poetry (2022) and Sarah Dowling’s Translingual Poetics (2018) both take on much the same argument: the collection as a refusal of the federal apology’s apathetic conventions, its ‘non-delivery’ (Long Soldier 2018), and language which utterly fails to acknowledge the extent of colonization.

There is no doubt that the poems in WHEREAS which squarely confront the federal apology and history of colonial violence deserve this critical attention. However, Long Soldier’s visually engaged, somatic exploration of motherhood, womanhood, and daughterhood deserve more inquiry, including her ‘Obligations’ poems featured in New Poems of Native Nations (2018). I argue that these poems, no less politically inclined than the rest of the collection, reinvent lyrical prose and visually dynamic poetry through what I call thought-music: the poet’s mode of accessing and translating her inner dialogue using inventive punctuation choices, forms, and white space. Thought-music—one aspect of what I have termed kinetic poetics in my doctoral dissertation²—refers not simply to a kind of rumination, but rather to a form of ‘necessary thought’, to use poet Frank Bidart’s term, in which the poem is ‘the mind in action’, as well as what the mind resists, that which has ‘irritated’ thought ‘into being’ (Bidart 1983: 22). This is, I suggest, one of Long Soldier’s modes of interrogating her somatic experiences by recreating the forms, spatial dimensions, temporality, and syntax of her thought processes. In doing so, she composes a linguistic architecture tethered to mental and physical intimacy as a woman, mother, and Lakȟóta language learner. Long Soldier’s thought-music and stylistic innovations thus offer an alternative to Walter Ong’s notion, quoted by Anishinaabe poet and critic Gerald Vizenor, that writing (as opposed to speech) does not ‘well up out of the unconscious’ (Ong 2002: 81). Ong believes that ‘writing is governed by consciously contrived, articulable rules’, while ‘[…] thought is nested in speech, not in texts […]. The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word […]’ (73). While poetry is indeed chiefly written to be spoken, I intend to show that Long Soldier breaks these ‘articulable rules’ in rendering her subjective physical and emotional experiences of womanhood and motherhood, evading the ‘thing-like repose’ that Ong distinguishes.

Firstly, I will discuss some of the poems in WHEREAS which complicate motherhood through the poet’s somatically inclined punctuation choices and spatial dynamics. Then, I will investigate Long Soldier’s poems which use representative forms to translate the poet’s experience of motherhood, womanhood, and daughterhood individually and communally, in conversation with what Michelle Raheja (Seneca) calls ‘visual sovereignty’ (2015: 29) and what Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) describes as ‘embodied geographies’ (2013: 204). These poems draw the reader back to the body and its acts of transference, often in relation to historical and present colonial violence; their stark contrast to the federal apology’s non-delivery contribute to the political implications of the collection.

Reflections on Motherhood: Punctuation and Spatial Dynamics

Before exploring how Long Soldier’s visual and punctuational aesthetics manifest in her poetry in more detail, I will briefly elaborate on the term ‘somatic’ in context. While Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy use ‘somatic poetry’ to label a genre of expression through ritualistic healing, specifically Amazonian Quichua people’s ‘multimodal works of art that draw upon the body’s interconnectedness with the larger world’ (2012: 24), I use the word not as a genre, but as a descriptor of how the body affects language and how language affects the body in poetic expression.³ In conversation with this interrogation is poet and critic Thom Donovan’s essay ‘Somatic Poetics’, which suggests the term refers to, among other definitions, ‘[t]he body, as a form, becoming written’ (2011). Donovan uses the example of CAConrad’s ‘(soma)tic poetry exercises’, prompts for poets involving sticking a penny under one’s tongue for example, and ‘(Soma)tic Midge’, his 7-poem cycle’ in which he immersed himself in a different colour each day. Long Soldier’s somatic attention, however, does not require, as Conrad specifies, ‘nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit’ or the ‘spirit of things’, the latter of which Conrad does not elaborate on (Baus 2011). Rather, Long Soldier’s use of punctuation and white space mark the body’s receptivity in and of itself, and this attention to the body’s language, as Donovan suggests, ‘becomes written’. In Long Soldier’s work, this often seems to occur as thought-music, a translation of her reflection on the way the body can be transformed by language and vice versa.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave poet Natalie Diaz writes, WHEREAS gives ‘grief’ and ‘absence’ a ‘presence, […] a body to wonder’ (2017), quoting Long Soldier: ‘If I’m transformed by language, I am often / crouched in footnote or blazing in title. / Where in the body do I begin’ (61). One can begin, then, with the body or forms that manifest in the body, a dynamic that makes Long Soldier’s text leap from its boundaries. Long Soldier’s punctuation choices and white space thus provide this physical ‘presence’ as Diaz notes, in conversation with a range of experimental poets before her, such as bp Nichol, Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Meyer, or Amiri Baraka. In fact, Nichol, not unlike in Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, wanted to get away ‘from the word having a specific association’, to play in such a way, as poet Bill Bissett adds, so that words are not ‘stranded in particular thought syndromes’ (Bissett 1967). The lineage linking Stein to Long Soldier is also relevant in terms of punctuation or lack thereof, as Stein was grateful to Mina Loy for not insisting on adding commas to her 1925 manuscript of The Making of Americans (1933: 162). Long Soldier’s punctuation and spatial dynamics also contribute to the current sphere of visually and syntactically innovative poets such as Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez, M. NourbeSe Philip—particularly her making ‘a space for the body’ (Fehskens 2012: 408), through silences, syllables, and minimal punctuation in Zong! (2011)—Diné poet Orlando White, Rushika Wick, Danez Smith, Koniag descendant Abigail Chabitnoy, Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, among others.

Firstly, to understand how the physical manifestations of an earnest apology reveal themselves, Long Soldier’s first ‘Whereas’ statement in Part II⁴ makes a claim for physical gestures as a conductor of an apology’s sincerity:

WHEREAS when offered an apology I watch each movement the shoulders high or folding, tilt of the head both eyes down or straight through me, […] what is it that I want? To feel and mind you I feel from the senses—I read each muscle, I ask the strength of the gesture to move like a poem. (61)

For the poet, a sincere apology has a palpable reverberation, it involves a somatic shift. The lack of punctuation in the lines ‘each movement the shoulders / high or folding’ or ‘tilt of the head both eyes down’, exemplifies Long Soldier’s thought-music; the signals of a sincere apology are unbarred by punctuation, they are streamlined and spontaneous, just as thoughts are not controlled by the rules of written symbols. The visceral gesture of an apology ‘moves like a poem’, turning gestures into events to be ‘read’, and turning poems into events that are physical.

Long Soldier also replaces punctuation with white space to articulate affective gestures, particularly moments of maternal transference. One example is in the thirteenth ‘Whereas’ poem, which takes place at a ceremony for the first Diné poet laureate, Luci Tapahanso. It begins with a reference to Long Soldier’s daughter: ‘Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as a mother to teach what it is to be Lakota, / therein the question; what did I know about being Lakota?’ (75). This initial question is exemplary of what poet James Wright referred to as a poetic ‘occasion’, a convention in traditional Irish poetry in which the poem itself is a response to a question, allowing ‘listeners of any kind to accept some of the music’ of the poem (Wright 1986: 45). Long Soldier’s question ‘what did I know about being Lakota?’, to which the poem is the answer, seems to be triggered by two simultaneous occasions: the larger occasion of the reprehensible federal apology and the more personal occasion, the ceremony to honour Tapahonso, during which Long Soldier is confronted with the responsibility of transferring the Lakȟóta language to her daughter.

The poet then pursues Tapahonso’s thought that language is a form of reaching, or ‘motion’ (75). Thus, in a somatic response to statistics that ‘native languages are dying’ (75), the poet rocks her daughter back and forth, saying iyontanchilah michuwintku, meaning ‘I think the most of you, daughter’, or ‘I love you, daughter’ in Lakȟóta, although the translation is not provided.⁵ Echoing this description of physical rocking is Long Soldier’s unpredictable line jumps:

[…] I listen as I reach my eyes into my hands, my

hands onto my lap, my lap as the quiet page I hold my daughter in. I rock her back,

forward, to the rise of the other conversations

about mother tongues versus foster languages, belonging (original spacing, 75).

The jump seems to typographically recreate not only her rocking back and forth, but also the pauses in her thought process. Her lap becomes a supra-textual page to hold her daughter, thus their bodies become the poem (‘my lap as the quiet page’). As Joy Harjo said in an interview with Long Soldier, ‘Poetry is the closest step to beyond language, beyond the words. You absolutely need the words, but you employ language in poetry in a way that’s kinetic, spiritual, and sensual’ (Harjo 2017). Indeed, Long Soldier’s textual representation of intimate, internal dialectics, ‘mother tongues’, and body language suggest ‘an ongoing, aleatory arrivance’, in Moten’s words (2016: 132); a rocking movement repeated by mothers before her and after her.

In the poem’s final line, the reader arrive at a gap between words instead of punctuation:

My hope: my daughter understands wholeness

for what it is, not for what it’s not, all of it the pieces; (76)

This white space or in-line caesura between ‘all of it’ and ‘the pieces’ challenges, as Long Soldier describes in the poem, Derrida’s post-structuralist notion that a word is defined by what it is not, alluding to the inherent gap in language in which the definition of ‘mother’, for instance, is postponed by a chain of signifiers. Rather, Long Soldier’s gap suggests the poet is reaching for the idea of ‘wholeness’, for what it is, an acknowledgement of her identity despite the linguistic and cultural ‘pieces’ due to colonialism. Like her line jumps, the white space makes the reader teeter between the words. Diné poet Orlando White calls this crafting of white space ‘functional white’ (White 2015); this tension in the pause between text and thought invites a silence, one that recognizes both the power of what can be expressed, and what remains unsaid by the federal government.

Long Soldier’s refusal to adopt the norms of English punctuation—which the federal apology so meticulously weaponizes—is again coupled with motherhood and learning Lakȟóta in her poem ‘Waȟpánica’, a Lakȟóta word ‘translated into English as poor’, or ‘more precisely to be destitute to have nothing of one’s own’ (Long Soldier 2017b: 43). In this poem, the comma as a sign dissolves, and the word ‘comma’ takes its place. The poet’s friend suggests that the ‘comma’ can ‘tip a phrase into sentimentality’, and in response, Long Soldier uses the word itself as a mode of thought-music, to ‘disassemble mechanics comma how to score sound music movement across the page’ (44). This mechanism essentially allows her to more viscerally approach the notion of ‘Waȟpánica’.

The poet notes that ‘Waȟpánica’ could mean being financially poor: ‘candy-stained mouths a / neighbour girl’s teeth convenience store shelves Hamburger Helper a dog’s matted fur […] those children playing in the carcass of a car mice on the floor- / board my sweeping hantavirus […]’ (44). Financial poverty is linked to children here, the potentially hazardous environment they are raised in, and a mother’s way of coping. ‘Waȟpánica’ also indicates a child lacking physical intimacy: ‘it’s true a child performs best when bonded with a parent before the age of five closely comma intimately’ (44). Finally, ‘waȟpánica’ is ‘language poor’: the poet must ‘write to see it comma how I beg from a dictionary to learn our word for poor comma in a language I dare to call my language comma who am I’ (44). The word ‘comma’ removed from its sign takes on a function of its own, revealing the anxiety of not being able to ‘speak’ her ‘mind’, and exacerbated by having to read a dictionary in order to learn Lakȟóta, a language the U.S. government tried to erase. In giving ‘comma’ equal footing with the other words, the poet is able to lay bare the polysemic manifestations of poverty from a mother’s perspective without ‘tipping a phrase into sentimentality’, as the friend suggests. Exploring ‘waȟpánica’ without punctuation therefore bridges ‘experience and expression’ (Ortiz 2019: 38); it decelerates the poem to integrate the connection between physicality, the thought process, and the text. ‘Comma’ becomes the pulse of ‘what we do possess’ (Long Soldier 2017b: 44, my emphasis) despite these facets of poverty.

In Long Soldier’s three-part poem ‘Left’, the reader learns implicitly that the narrator has experienced a miscarriage. In the first section, she translates her loss again by removing commas and using unbridled lineation:

yet the baby was gone by the time they checked truth is

a scopic rod pried it showed nothing my head turned to left

away from the black screen […]

I roll over even now my head to the left

the direction of beginnings black mark of the first letter: left, I still ask

When did I?

Where did I?

Lose

baby. (37)

Here, the word ‘left’ is firstly the direction away from the ultrasound, from which the poet diverts her gaze; secondly what is left or remaining, which is the woman herself⁶; and thirdly, the left margin of a page where a text begins. As poet Ross Gay says, ‘we forget that poems actually come out of bodies, and are expressions of bodies’ (Gay 2013: 143). Here, the body wades in the aftermath of a jarring, incomprehensible loss, which is interpreted in the mind and translated to the page as thought-music: the poet’s aposiopesis—the breaking off of speech in her unfinished questions, ‘When did I? / Where did I?’—followed by her contrapuntal typography, the choice to align ‘Lose’ at the extreme right margin of the page, as if the loss was mentally beyond grasp.

In the second section of ‘Left’, the comma is again absent, and full stops are placed within words, rather than between sentences: ‘a baby’s not a foetus at eight weeks it’s an embryo webbed hands eyelid folds / still I say baby soft like a poet two even syllables as.in. ti.ny bo.dy. or I.was. / evenly bent in two perhaps it’s just spotting’ (38). The spondee—two syllables of equal stress—in the italicized word ‘baby’, is visually echoed and emphasized by the syllabic divisions of words using full stops, forcing the reader to keep time with the subsequent spondees (‘as.in ti.ny bo.dy’ etc). Simultaneously, the poet’s own body becomes a spondee: a twoness of pain as she was ‘evenly bent in two’, and a twoness of body, a woman and a miscarried baby. The jarring full stops similarly evoke drops of the blood, which the narrator initially convinces herself is only ‘spotting’. Long Soldier’s functional punctuation, to echo White’s ‘functional white’ (White 2015), thus asks the reader to more acutely consider the body, to unanchor the notion that bodies—and the bodies of poems—are fixed entities. Both carry, release, transmit, and reach beyond themselves; they are, as Mishuana Goeman attests, ‘uncontainable’ expressions (2013: 106).

Even more, Long Soldier’s ‘Left’ is far from apolitical: during the six-year period after the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, ‘physicians sterilized perhaps 25%’ of indigenous women of childbearing age, potentially more, who were often given the procedures under ‘pressure or duress, or without the women’s knowledge or understanding’ (Theobald 2019). The shadow of mass sterilizations, as well as other projects of officially sanctioned genocide (or as the apology’s euphemism has it, ‘ill-conceived policies’), such as forced assimilatory education which for decades affected mother–child relationships in indigenous families across the United States, all underline the tension in Long Soldier’s typographical rendering of being ‘evenly bent in two’ (38).

Another of Long Soldier’s ‘Whereas Statements’ provides an alternative use of punctuation: the forward slash. The mid-line forward slash has been frequently used in poetry in recent years (Hanif Abdurraqib, Zoë Brigley, Raymond Antrobus, Christopher Soto, Holly Pester, Natalie Linh Bolderston). Brigley points out that her inspiration for the slash was Natalie Diaz’s poem ‘Hand-Me-Down Halloween’ published in When My Brother Was An Aztec (2012) (Brigley 2019). While one reviewer called her slashes an ‘exciting’ typographical move, Diaz responded that ‘they aren’t meant to be exciting. I hope they make the readers’ eyes uncomfortable, that they physically and musically express the disjointed, jagged experience explored in the poem’ (Diaz 2012). Long Soldier’s slashes are similarly purposeful, marking a moment in which the poet’s role reverts to the daughter rather than the mother. She begins with a lucid memory, ‘WHEREAS I heard a noise I thought was a sneeze’ (65), which was in fact her father crying. Her father, once a ‘terrible drinker’ (65), offered his sincerest apology, which indirectly reiterates what the federal apology lacked:

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 open bundle / or medicine / or birthday wishing / my hand to his shoulder / it’s ok 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; (65)

Her father’s body language during his apology—‘He pinched his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes. He wiped’—exemplifies sincerity for the poet, as quoted in the beginning of this section (61). Robert Frost attempted to pinpoint sincerity in his notebook: ‘[…] it is probably nothing more than your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves. Miraculously’ (Faggen 2006: 456). Here, daughter and her father’s ‘highest liveliness’ seems to escape through the list separated by forward slashes: ‘curative voicing / an open bundle / or medicine / or birthday wishing / my hand to his shoulder’ (65). In each ‘open bundle’ between the slashes, clarity replaces the absent or ‘dead’ self.

The use of slashes as opposed to line breaks have multiple effects here; firstly, they slow the reader down, each slash hitting the brakes, mimicking the broken speech of her father crying. Secondly, they suggest temporality, as a hand on a clock: what if, for example, the innumerable degrees of colonial violence had not occurred, then perhaps inherited domestic trauma, including alcoholism and the poet’s worry of passing on the Lakȟóta language to her daughter, might not have occurred. The slashes therefore propel the poem forward, but also shift its gears chronologically back through generational transference. Long Soldier’s slashes are thus charged with this dual emotional surge; the present domestic ‘sorry’, and the historical ‘centuries in sorry’.

Finally, Long Soldier again elaborates on generational transference in her sixth ‘Whereas Statement’, in which her daughter desperately tried to hold back her tears after a fall,⁷ and instead of crying, she ‘feigned a grin’ (66). The mother realizes that she herself had a nervous reaction to laugh rather than release her true feelings upon reading the apology’s distorted version of colonial genocide: ‘the arrival of Europeans in North America opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples’ (66). Paul Valéry discerns that there are actions which ‘modify ourselves, to dispel a kind of interior discomfort’. He counts ‘laughter, tears, and cries’ among these internal modifications that ‘constitute an elementary language, for they are contagious’ (Valery 2014: 228). Indeed, her daughter has inherited this emotional displacement: ‘My daughter’s quiver isn’t new— / but a deep practice very old she’s watching me;’ (66). It is because of this final unpunctuated sentence that the chilling realization can occur for the reader as it did for the poet; the transference of emotional repression to her daughter is reenacted in the poet’s continuous thought-music. Long Soldier’s unrestrained cadences and use of white space show a desire to map her consciousness and physical awareness as a woman and mother without conforming to syntactic conventions, even if the process requires going upstream.

Maternal and Communal Kinetics: Embodied Shape Poems

Along with punctuation choices and spatial dynamics, many of Long Soldier’s poems take on symbolic shapes which often, as I will discuss here, interrogate motherhood and womanhood. I explore these as embodied poems,⁸ echoing Ross Gay’s notion that ‘poems are embodiments, […] they pointedly address the fact of bodily forms in time and space’ (2013: 147), whereas colonial discourse is concerned with compartmentalising, regulating, or discounting bodies. I also use ‘embodied’ to evoke Mishuana Goeman’s theory of ‘embodied geographies’, a way of ‘(re)mapping the Americas as Indigenous land, not only by rethinking dominant discipline in narratives but also critically examining how we have become a self-disciplining colonial subject’. She asks: ‘How might our own stories become the mechanism in which we can critically (re)map the relationships between Native peoples and communities?’ (2013: 12). Long Soldier’s forms allow for language to become such a mechanism, because they imply a cartography of the body and its relationships to others. This is parallel to ‘embodied practices’ as defined by poet and scholar of Cherokee descent, Qwo-Li Driskill: actions ‘that restore cultural memory to our bodies and communities’, a way of learning that ‘happens through our bodies, through embodied practice, through doing’ (2015: 57). By implying bodily presence in textual forms, Long Soldier parallels Ortiz’s notion that poetry is ‘a way of touching’ (2019: 38) and as Diaz notes, ‘one of the myriad ways language touches’ (Diaz 2020). This embodiment differs from Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’, which suggested—mostly by paraphrasing Pound and Williams—a poetics grounded in breath and physiology⁹ and rooted in Robert Creeley’s statement that ‘form is never more than an extension of content’ (Olson 1997: 240). In fact, Long Soldier herself notes Creeley’s claim is something she does not ‘completely relate to’. For her, as a visual artist, ‘[s]ometimes form comes first. Sometimes a shape comes first. There is no content; the content is yet to come’ (Long Soldier 2017a). Form can proceed language, then, in the same way that somatic communication can proceed, or replace, verbal communication. Thus, beyond the representational, graphic focus of many twentieth-century concrete poems, Long Soldier foregrounds body, motherhood, and community from which the poems take form.

Among Long Soldier’s shape poems which exemplify the ‘new spatial imaginaries’ Goeman calls for—the shape of a hammer using words from the federal apology, or of an eagle, disrupting the nationalism attached to the symbol—is ‘Dilate’, relating again to a mother’s experience. The first section (excerpt below) describes a baby’s first glance, a preverbal gesture:

she arrived safely   mid-spring she   scrunched her brow

an up-look to her father. There’s a turning  as pupils dilate

as black vernal suns slip  into equinox. This was

we never forget her

first act (35).

The poem may first appear shapeless, but in its full form it resembles an open eye and the ‘turning’ or widening of a pupil as it absorbs the world. The space that breaks the phrase ‘mid-spring she scrunched her brow’ emphasizes the pause before the inquisitive motion of the newborn’s eye, while the anacoluthon¹⁰ beginning with ‘this was’ and ‘first act’ serve as parentheses around ‘we never forget her’, a line which can be thus understood independently. The line ‘an up-look to her father’ highlights the eye’s instinctual mechanism to gaze towards the parent, inferring that our primal effective communications are physical. The poet’s suggested eye form implies both the mother’s memory or mind’s eye and the child’s eye, complexifying the poem’s embodied expression.¹¹ Regarding the line ‘as black vernal suns slip into equinox’, Sicangu Lakȟóta elder Victor Douville has noted that the vernal equinox traditionally initiates a series of four ceremonies to welcome the new life of spring, which might be relevant to this ‘mid-spring’ birth and the ‘turning’ pupil (Drake 2016). Long Soldier’s matrifocal spatial arrangement is therefore somatically intimate as well as politically relevant; the poem reiterates the lack of physical presence, let alone eye contact, of the federal apology. The poem is also its own textual ‘equinox’, a ‘(re)mapping’ to use Goeman’s word, of an exterior and interior ‘embodied geography’ within the colonial state, which indigenous women continue to endure despite centuries of injustices (2013: 204).

In the second section of ‘Dilate’, the embodied poem forms the shape of a pregnant belly:

    All is experienced

          throu

            g

            h

            the

          body

    somebody told me.

As an eye typographically dilates above, here a belly seems to swell. As Theodore Spencer writes of E.E. Cummings, Long Soldier’s typographical iconicity displays ‘the smallest possible gap between the experience and its expression’ (Tartakovsky 2009: 217), here the experience of both a pregnant body and an unborn body. The letters ‘g’ and ‘h’ are silent but still take up space, suspending the softness of the vowel, or even evoking the tones a baby experiences in the womb. The reader is asked to allow the word ‘through’ to literally resonate throughout the body. Here, White’s ‘functional white’ meets poet Arthur Sze’s notion of ‘painting the white’; Sze, who instructed Long Soldier at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) describes white space as an ‘active’ ‘counterpoint to sound’ which shifts our attention from the black ink to the white page (2004-5: 211), in this case accentuating the shape of the womb.

In both of these sections of ‘Dilate’, the text’s typography enacts the word ‘dilate’ itself, occupying more space on the page. In a conversation with Rachel Zucker, poets Natalie Diaz and Roger Reeves discussed their desire to occupy textual territory as a response, in part, to having been denied the right to occupy physical, geographical, spiritual, and legal space, just as Diné activist Kim Smith calls for ‘taking up as much space as possible’ regarding an indigenous presence in environmental legislation processes (2020). Gay believes this is linked to privilege, depending on ‘who has the privilege to neglect the fact of the body, and who doesn’t’ (2013: 147). Long Soldier does not neglect the body nor disembody language in ‘Dilate’, whose forms literally dilate, asserting a powerful sense of physical ubiety. The sequence also presents language as physical; it is the first communication felt in the womb and can create—particularly in the case of the federal government’s non-apology—a visceral response.

A final example is the ‘Obligations’ series for which Long Soldier laser-cut poems on diamond shapes, combined to form two wall-sized star quilts. They were featured in an exhibition she curated at the Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota (2017-2018) in collaboration with Clementine Bordeaux and Mary Bordeaux, entitled ‘Responsibilities and Obligations: Understanding Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ’ (see Figure 1). The three curators explain that the Lakȟóta expression ‘Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ’ is often glossed as ‘all my relatives’, yet the phrase has been ‘(mis)appropriated as an all-encompassing idea of inclusiveness’, rather than ‘an engaged framework and set of values guiding land-based interaction’ (Bordeaux et al. forthcoming). They also ‘prioritize female voices’ which have been underrepresented, and Long Soldier’s poetry quilts were particularly inspired by a series of interviews with women in the Lakȟóta community, which were available on audio loop in the exhibition.

Figure 1. Image from the Racing Magpie website (www.racingmagpie.com/mitakuye-oyasin-exhibit).

Following Gerald Vizenor’s notion that ‘the problem in American society is [it’s] a rights society, not a responsibility society’ (McLeod 2001), also claimed by Kānaka Maoli feminist and activist Haunani-Kay Trask,¹² Long Soldier’s ‘Obligations’ counter colonial ‘rights’ rhetoric with communal responsibilities that configure multiple, polyphonic navigations. Two of Long Soldier’s poems in the series, including ‘Obligations 2’ below, were printed in New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich:

As we

embrace resist

the future the present the past

we work we struggle we begin we fail

to understand to find to unbraid to accept to question

the grief the grief the grief the grief

we shift we wield we bury

into light as ash

across our faces (2018: 28)

The poem sustains a formal complexity in its use of ‘functional white’ (White 2015), allowing for many triangle shapes to cohabit the space. The parallel placement of the antonyms ‘embrace’ and ‘resist’ initiate two divergent paths with multiple combinatorial possibilities that reconvene in the last line, ‘across our faces’, suggesting the body is a shared site of communication. All the words bear equal sonoric and textual weight within the diamond, to ‘fail’ is just as valid and possible as ‘to understand. This non-hierarchical geometry harmonizes with the epigraph at the beginning of WHEREAS: ‘No word has any special hierarchy over any other’ (2), Arthur Sze’s comment in a lecture at IAIA. The interrelational diamond shape is also dominated by verbs, echoing Long Soldier’s introduction to ‘Part II’ of the collection: ‘I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live’ (2017b: 57). Relationships are not formed of nouns but verbs; the verb-centred responsibilities of ‘mother’ and ‘friend’ convey a committed presence that can be continuously enacted and reimagined.¹³

The keystone of the poem is the sixth line which repeats ‘the grief’, emphasizing in unison that grief is the unavoidable common denominator that everyone must undergo. As Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson attests, grief can arise from, among other factors, ‘forms of political recognition and misrecognition,’ what she calls ‘citizenships of grief’ (2008: 255). Long Soldier’s polyvocal ‘Obligations’ subvert these ‘citizenships of grief’ the misrecognition and colonial dictation over sovereignty in the federal apology, which is made glaringly clear in the apology’s disclaimer: ‘Nothing in this Joint Resolution—(1) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or (2) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States’ (‘S.J.Res.14—111th Congress' 2009). The prismic diamond shape therefore proposes an alternative to the federal resolution by embedding a form of ‘visual sovereignty’, what Michelle Raheja defines as framing ‘more imaginative, pleasurable, flexible’ visions of indigenous ‘intellectual and cultural paradigms’ (Raheja 2015: 29) In fact, Long Soldier redirects the deceitful ‘signs announcing FREEDOM or DEMOCRACY’ in the apology, words which, as John Berger writes, are used by invaders ‘to confuse local populations, […] about who is governing whom, the nature of happiness, the extent of grief, or where eternity is to be found’ (2007: 28). The poem’s lozenge, or ‘embodied geography’ remaps grief, responsibility, community, and transference; inspired by past and present Lakȟóta women, the pattern provides a textual and physical polychronography¹⁴ (Russo and Reed 2018: 55) of female history, possibility, and futurity. Even more, Lakȟóta star quilts, which are made ‘for special occasions’ (Long Soldier 2017a), have wielded their own political agency: after Barack Obama’s 2015 speech in Watertown, South Dakota, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota artist DeVon Burshiem presented him with a star quilt, to which she had stitched ‘NOKXL’, meaning ‘No Keystone XL Pipeline’, a decolonial, environmental protest embedded in a culturally significant gesture (Johansen 2016: 126).

Long Soldier’s poems serve as politically charged investigations of the body, motherhood, and womanhood through both her visual configurations and what I have termed thought-music, using punctuation, white space, line breaks, and syntactical choices. Joy Harjo notes that birth is a beginning, but every beginning is also an ending. Harjo calls this transition ‘honouring the becoming’, understanding that one can ‘make it through despair’ (Harjo 2020). Rather than insisting on a determined ‘resolution’, as did the federal non-apology, these poems translate the capacity to ‘honour the becoming’, somatic revelations and thought processes that simultaneously end and begin.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

With the support of the Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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).