Terry Tempest Williams asks, I came to
finding my voice through the pain and suffering of those I love most -
how do I deal with that? What do I do with that knowledge?
This is
precisely the dilemma I faced from the very beginning, when writing
about the California Missions became the focus of my work, both
scholarly and poetic.
My “successes” in life (tenured teaching position,
house, car, children’s college, health care, publications, the
attention and respect of publishers, universities, other scholars and
poets) have come about mostly through the fact that I write about and
research California Indian history and experiences. And most of those
histories and experiences are not pleasant “legends” or warm, fuzzy
memories. Most of them are about death by horrible disease or murder,
the fragmentation of family relationships, self-destructive responses to
trauma, the abandonment of children, exile and/or homelessness,
displacement, loss of language and culture – and more, all at the hands
of another people whose blood also runs in my veins.
Is it any
wonder that I am reluctant to claim any of my successes as such? That I
am so careful to always look over my shoulder at what might be coming
up behind me? That I dream about sleeping on a bed of bones carved with
the words of another language? That I feel guilty for profiting from
telling the stories of my ancestors in the missions? That I shrink from
compliments about my writing? That this writing comes so hard, takes
so much out of me?
So when I heard Terry Tempest William speak at Lee
Chapel, on the Washington and Lee University campus, her questions
about “voice” resonated down to my bones. She spoke about her new book,
one that she had thought would be about voice, finding voice, and said
those words: I came to finding my voice through the pain and
suffering of those I love most - how do I deal with that? What do I do
with that knowledge?
I went to bed that night thinking, it’s a
responsibility. It’s a debt, this gift, and I must repay it by carrying
the responsibility of giving voice to those who could not speak. Isn’t
that the answer? Isn’t that the way to assuage my guilt at earning my
living from the tortured cries of my beloved ancestors and relatives?
To accept it as a charge, not a gift?
But I
wasn’t satisfied. It felt, not wrong, but incomplete. Too easy. And
not enough. I know that often in those liminal moments between
wakefulness and sleeping, revelation slips in, so I asked (myself, the
Universe, the Ancestors): but what more is it? and perhaps because
Terry’s achingly honest vulnerability had created a receptivity and
openness that hadn’t been there before, the response came back almost as
if it had been waiting for me to ask:
It’s not
that you’ve found your voice through the pain of others. It’s that
their voices found you.
I opened my hand and put that thought inside it,
closed my fist around the warmth of the truth, and slept.
When I
woke up, I remembered a dream I’d had twenty years before. Early on in
my adult writing life, when I was about thirty, soon after the poem “I
Am Not a Witness” came to me, I dreamt that I was part of a group of
Indian people being used in an experiment. We were locked up in a dark,
crowded space together. Huge wooden doors slammed shut, and we beat
our fists against them, splintering the wood into our flesh, but unable
to escape. No windows, no light, just wives, sisters, brothers,
husbands, uncles, babies, toddlers, small children, grandmothers,
grandfathers, aunts, in-laws – trapped – while the scientists watched
from one-way windows in their white lab coats. In the dream, I knew we
were inside a mission; the experiment was to see how much of what our
ancestors had experienced was stored in the cells of our bodies. In the
dream, I opened my mouth. A scream came out. A horrible, broken
scream came out of my throat. But it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t my
scream. It was someone else’s scream, the scream of an ancestor, coming
from my own throat.
When I awoke in the dark, damp with sweat and
panic, I had not uttered a sound. But my throat hurt, scraped raw. My
voice, when I tried to speak, was hoarse and dry; my vocal cords
scratched and strained.
Not my voice. Her voice.
The voice
of an ancestor, joining mine. Singing with mine – making a song,
collaborating in a song for multiple voices.
I don’t
mean this in some new-age, “channeling,” Seth-like explanation. I’m not
sure how I mean it. But if time is, indeed, spiral and
happening all around us all the time, then there must be places where
people separated by chronology touch as the spiral curves inward. I
know that my sister Louise is one of those people, one who dreams, who
listens, and acts for the Ancestors. We are conduits, but not mindless,
robotic tubes through which something is delivered. That would be
possession. That would be someone else controlling me, dictating to
me. And that is not what I feel happening as I write.
What I
feel as I write is this: a door opens inside me, a door like one of
those between hotel rooms, with locks on each side. I must unlock my
side. Someone – the Ancestor wishing to speak – must unlock her side.
We must both stand, willingly, in that threshold.
If I am
afraid or unwilling or unable to unlock my side, then she will attempt
to come as a dream. Of this I am certain. Once, during a time of
denial about writing, I dreamt of a bear attempting to knock down the
door to get into my bedroom! She was a beautiful bear, and I loved her
rough brown fur and long claws and dark eyes even as I barricaded the
door against her.
The stories I tell with this voice that is both
mine and the voices of others are, in fact, a lot like bears. Beautiful
and admirable, glossy and strong. Wild and unpredictable and full of
fierceness, scarred, in pain.
Maybe
that’s why I’ve always been a turtle. I have to be able to withdraw
into a protective shell at times, rest, then stick my head back out for
the next round. A turtle is a good form to have; a hard shell into
which one may retreat is a necessary tool in this work.
Am I
constructing a story that lets me off the hook of survivor’s guilt?
Perhaps. But what I like about the “revelation” I had the night after
Terry Tempest Williams’ talk is not that it somehow removes the
responsibility of bearing witness for my Ancestors, because it does not -
I owe my very existence to their tenacity, their willingness to be Bad
Indians rather than Dead Indians. What I like is how I see that the
Ancestors are undefeated after all: not dead and silent in the ground,
under pavement, in museums. No. The Ancestors are alive and kicking –
kicking that door down, insisting on telling their stories, still making
songs, still bearing witness themselves. They are not victims, needing
my help. If anything, I am the needy one! I am in dire need of their
wisdom, their direction, their Coyotismo, their survivance.