I found throughout Whereas that Layli Long Soldier is trying to disrupt the English language. I think his book first investigates how language creates binary/rigid constructs, ideologies, and then sends the entirety of the book trying to dismantle it. For example, the books opens with “Now/make room in the mouth/for grassesgrassesgrasses.” Seemingly this acts an opportunity to allow the reader to uniciate the word in their actual mouths and minds, but this unciation acts as a disruption of atypical languages. She uses repetition of grasses, both to create a sound of wind passing through or a whisper longing to heard aloud (that what I hear and see as I read this poem), but also as an attempt to ready us into the ways in which our mouths (the tools in which language is used to be constructed) are going to actively deconstruct language simply by reading the poems.
The next poem that I think effectively does this is “leftist.” She break a part a simple sentence that defines what a leftist is, but I think she is essentially picking a part this identity construct that white people inhabit to show how this construct is also problematic and ensues oppression on indigenous bodies. A leftist is still a participant in the political spectrum of American ideology, violence, and capitalism; as result, I think Long Soldier is demonstrating how this “person” or identity should also be deconstructed in order to dismantle oppressive systems.
This particular poem is followed by the poem “I,” which I think furthers the dismantling of language. The poem uses a series of definitions of the word “I,” I think Long Soldier is invested in shedding light on gender binaries and how they are constructed within language through the identification an egoic “I.” She writes, “a vowel/a speaker/referring/to himherself.” The use of “himherself” is indicative of the ways in which Lakota language rarely uses pronouns, and is considered a gender/identity neutral language. Long Soldier is attempting to blend gender identities by creating a symbionce of how these identities, when considering the self (I) aren’t separate, but relational and dependant. I am reminded of a ying/yang influence that Long Soldier is trying to shed light on though the blending of this particular word, and once again she does it with the intention of deconstructing language that is contingent upon the oppression of indigenous and natives peoples.
Hi Mia!
ReplyDelete"She uses repetition of grasses, both to create a sound of wind passing through or a whisper longing to heard aloud (that what I hear and see as I read this poem), but also as an attempt to ready us into the ways in which our mouths (the tools in which language is used to be constructed) are going to actively deconstruct language simply by reading the poems."
That's such a good point about what Long Soldier is bringing up about orality through "grassesgrassesgrasses." It makes me think of the commas poem (hehe) where she talks about what really matters to her is the rise and fall of the voice, more than where a comma is placed. And how this insistence on the power of the voice is both a tribute to oral indigenous languages and also a condemnation of the fact that the "apology" was never even read aloud, just tucked away into a bill that had nothing to do with indigenous reforms or reparations.
In the poems you illustrate here the disruption is so purposeful on every level. Later in the book, she is derivative and deeply riffing. These are great techniques for positionally, tone and theme.
ReplyDeleteYour comments on the repetition of grasses throughout as an offering to verbalize and consider both the orality of the work and as a method to bring us to our "tools" of deconstruction of language" is astute. "All is experienced through the body" (35). We have to feel embody this change to synthesize it,and enact it, purging our tissues/organs/self of the violence served by language.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the repetition of grasses offers us a way to consider wholeness and our individual identities within the whole. She asks in "look," a poem that also deconstructs through offering the words line by line, why we pull apart the whole. She later states:
"I understand the need to define as a need for need for stability. That I and you can be things, standing understood, among each other."(27) Language becoming a way we find some sort of stability in naming and defining an yet this effort of understanding ourselves through language seems futile in some regards as later on 75 she says "I am reminded of the linguistic impossibility of identity." Thank for the response! This book is incredible!