s.penkevich > Books: identity‎ (13)

‘Poetry and modern fiction have long been examined through different lenses, where its consequences have resulted in standardized parameters of how to interact, engage, or view the work itself—as determined by the Western literary canon. As Indigenous writers, shouldn't we be the ones empowered to make those decisions for ourselves and define what our writing is or isn’t? The way that we tell stories is completely different from what the Western literary canon considers or defines “stories” . And so, I encourage all Indigenous writers to question any authority others may have over their work and begin to define and build the Indigenous literary canon for themselves.’

‘You are the reason // I always listened to You told me whole stories in pieces and sometimes I would get lost in the way you speak. Your hushed tones and soft inflection had me listening closely always afraid I wouldn’t hear or understand. But I always did. From the pieces of memory I have left I have made your stories whole.’

‘If I had to be angry at anyone, it would be America for causing the circumstances that gave way to my adoption. Like in the story, the narrator starts interrogating who's responsible for her circumstances, and it is America…America's responsible for the generational terror that it's given to Native people. And we're still here dealing with their genocidal policies. Our existence is protest because America has tried to kill and dismantle every part of our culture and being, starting with the actual killing of our people, and then onto the reservation and boarding school era of family separation, dislocation, and relocation. So, if there is a culprit, if there is a “person” responsible—--it's America at large.’

‘After my father left my mother and went to oklahoma, my father spent the majority of my life looking and looking and looking for me. He looked for me in my sister, he looked for me in my brother, he looked for me in my mother, he looked for me in the phone book, and when he found me, he looked for himself in me.’

‘When the Indian Wars began to go cold, the theft of land and tribal sovereignty bureaucratic, they came for Indian children, forcing them into boarding schools, where if they did not die of what they called consumption even while they regularly were starved; if they were not buried in duty, training for agricultural or industrial labor, or indentured servitude; were they not buried in children’s cemeteries, or in unmarked graves, not lost somewhere between the school and home having run away, unburied, unfound, lost to time, or lost between exile and refuge, between school, tribal homelands, reservation, and city; if they made it through routine beatings and rape, if they survived, made lives and families and homes, it was because of this and only this: Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.’

‘It felt like the brewery had been transformed into a big wet tank that was waiting for Carral and I to decompose within it: a rotten, reeking Garden of Eden.’

‘Her skin was soft, softer than I remembered, as if she was rotten too, a fallen Eve. Under us I could hear the apples rumble. Not a real sound, but a sort of internal buzzing, like how you can imagine hearing nails and hair growing or buds opening.’

‘The women feast on the poor man’s flesh, And chew each bone whilst it is fresh, So the two women can become one with a kiss.’

‘dozen, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers are out there, mining your personal information, worming their ways into your life, looking for ways to mock, humiliate, or worse, endanger you. You come to regret everything you’ve ever shared about yourself…because the trolls will find them.’

‘Do you know what it's like to pitch a book and be told they already have an Asian writer? That they can't put out two minority stories in the same season? That Athena Liu already exists, so you're redundant?’

‘Eastern fatalism, oh yes—the Russians have it; we’re in worse shape, we, actually, are neither here nor there, Europe has managed to infect us with the raving fever of individual desire, faith in our personal “Yes I can!”—however, we never developed a foundation for such faith…our Ukranian “I can!” helpless and alone. Amen.’

‘But the fact was, when you lived a life, under any name, that life became entwined with others’. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you, and you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that.’

‘But just when she’d thought that her world was expanding beyond the suffocation of adolescence and into a new environment, she found that the boxes into which she was expected to fit—whether for race, sexual orientation, or politics—seemed to be making her world narrower.’

All his life the water at forest’s edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey’s corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decrepit wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.

Entitled Ugarte, it was about a series of moments in the life of Juan de Ugarte, a bureaucrat in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata at the end of the eighteenth century. Some (mainly Spanish) critics had dismissed it as Kafka in the colonies…

If he clings to the one who no longer is, and to her alone, then he loves a dangerous fantasy. It will lead to sickness and distress, perhaps horror.

Yet another woman felt authorized to furnish me with her protection. I was a fragile man, therefore, and visibly so.

I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No.

Atlantis--A Lost Sonnet

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Make of a nation what you will
Make of the past
What you can—

There is now
A woman in a doorway.

It has taken me
All my strength to do this.

Becoming a figure in a poem.

Usurping a name and a theme.

(from Anna Liffey)

Ireland was a country with a compelling past, and the word ‘woman’ invoked all kinds of images of communality which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word ‘poet’…I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.

Once

The lovers of an Irish story never had good fortune.
They fled the king's anger. They lay on the forest floor.
They kissed at the edge of death.

Did you know our suburb was a forest?
Our roof was a home for thrushes.
Our front door was a wild shadow of spruce.

Our faces edged in mountain freshness,
we too our milk in where the wide apart
prints of the wild and never-seen
creatures were set who have long since died out.

I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky.
To listen for our own death in the distance
Take my hand. Stand by the window.

I want to show you what is hidden in
this ordinary, ageing human love is
there still and will until

an inland coast so densely wooded
not even the ocean fog could enter it
appears in front of us and the chilled-
to-the-bone light clears and shows us

Irish wolves. A silvery man and wife.
Yellow-eyed. Edged in dateless moonlight.
They are mated for life. They are legendary. They are safe.

I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of a Saturday evening.Why try to renew which had been broken and look for paths that have been blocked off long ago?

The piece seems simple technically, but it’s hard to get the expression right. Play it just as it’s written on the score and it winds up pretty boring. But go the opposite route and interpret it too intensely, and it sounds cheap.

Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women’s colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. They then devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools.