Language and Whereas

It is difficult for me to fully express my love for Whereas. Love may not even be a sufficient word for how I feel when I read this work. Enamored, awestricken, humbled all might be better words to describe what I feel about this masterpiece of a book! Long Soldier’s Whereas explodes language and conceptions of language in new and impossible ways. There is an examination of, conversation with, condemnation of, and at times recreation of language used in past and present to inflict violence and maintain theft by the U.S. government on indigenous persons and lands. I found myself specifically drawn into the section titled Whereas Statements. Particularly the instances which speak of language explicitly. For instance,

If I’m transformed by language, I am often
crouched in footnote or blazing in title.
Where in the body do I begin; (61)

My eyes left me, my soldiers, my two scouts to the unseen. And because language is the immaterial I never could speak about the missing so perhaps I cried for the invisible, what could not see, doubly. (65)

Whereas this alters my concern entirely— how do I language a collision arrived at through separation? (70)

Man that last question gives me chills. The concept of how to “language” something as in how to craft words from senseless violence, to make speech from the speechlessness of a moment/a history. Language is at the heart of this work. Legalese, stolen language, the language of apologies (and non-apologies). Long Soldier navigates language within this book by crafting pieces that show the potentials of language as well as to expose its flaws, the moments when it cant be used or trusted.

I also noticed that throughout the book I felt as though space was its own element within each piece. Whether it was the taking up of space through prose poetry or leaving blank spaces through the omission of words/phrases, this book creates space for what has previously and effectively been cast to the margins. Take for instance the poem 38 (pages 49-53), closing out the first section this poem outlines and details a violent event that had been given no space. Physically, within the book, this poem takes up many pages which is one mode of demonstrating or creating the space for something of importance, something necessary. Each line is a single sentence set apart from the rest, they can stand alone and force the reader to sit with each line no matter the brutality there must be a pause, a space, between one statement to the next. The line that I most had to contend with while reading this poem was “This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” Grappling with the continued reality of the hypervisibility of violence against Black bodies and the seeming progress made on behalf of Black folks as a force that takes up space in this country, a tool that is used to contribute to the invisibilizing of the violence against Indigenous bodies within this space.

I want to refrain from stating that this book somehow “fills in the blanks” of American history because I feel that to say that would not be giving full credit to this work, yet there are moments where the concept of filing in the blank space is made apparent. For example, on page 83 their are literal blank spaces in a federal document made by the omission of words and placement of brackets. The words that fill these blanks appear on page 85 after a poem about the near impossibility of full repair or reparations for Native persons due to the lack of roots to repair. The image given in that poem is that of a root canal, the pulling of a tooth from its root, never able to grow back because it’s all been stripped away. The words on page 85, the ones that fill in the blanks on page 83 make up what might be called the tenets of a culture. This creation of blank space with in the federal document made me think of the emptiness of such words, the very foundation of America is built on these empty words and inactions. While the words on page 85 demonstrate what makes a culture they are nonspecific, which adds to this notion of emptiness. Making me question what are the customs, the beliefs, the traditions, and where have they gone? “Everything is in the language we use” (51).