Red Willow People

mandy — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Imagine evening as a woman, wind as a friend, and every part of nature as an organ in the human body. You have now entered the landscape of Devreaux Baker’s newest collection of poetry, Red Willow People. The colors are red, white, yellow and the green shade of clay. The light is supplied by lines from poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca. The smell is sage, cedar, and pinyon pine. These poems are the story of a region, specifically Taos and the Southwestern area of the United States. They are also the story of a people, all the different clans of the Navajo (Dine’). The collection captures the essence of both the region and the people while exploring the universal themes of transformation and rebirth.

“Change wants to work her mantra into each being’s heart,” Baker notes in the poem “The Nest,” one of my favorite poems in the book. Baker describes trees as lungs, rocks as bones, and rivers as veins in the beginning of the poem. As the poem continues we see life examined through the lens of middle age, the change an individual body goes through, and at the same time the change nature goes through as Baker’s neighbor cuts down 100-year-old trees so the leaves won’t fall on his house.

These kinds of observations can be seen throughout many of the poems, full of the small and big mishandling that humans do to nature. Observations of birth and rebirth are also throughout many of the poems. At the end of “The Nest,” Baker’s calves and thighs become a nest for a little baby bird that the mother bird drops into her lap. It reminded me that even as we age and even through all the changes of this earth, there is constantly new life beginning again. And we can protect that life.

The books starts with the series of poems about the Spider Woman, a part of the Dine’ creation story who also teaches the people about weaving. It ends with a poem about coming home, a journey that took many lifetimes... “about burning all the way back to ash and then it was about becoming water, that simple.” That encapsulates this collection. Beautiful images of nature and the Southwestern landscape fuel the simple story of birth and rebirth. I always want to know what the relationship of the writer is with indigenous nations they are writing about, so I was curious about how Baker created her work which relied heavily on Dine’ myth and culture. I believe it’s literary territory that needs to be respected in a serious way, especially if you aren’t from that group of people. I think she told her story honestly in Red Willow People and showed respect for a culture that clearly inspired her greatly.

Written by: Maleka Fruean, January 25th 2011

My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Sharon Doubiago

Wild Ocean Press

I find memoirs difficult to criticize, especially when the content is personal and intimate. The first volume of author and poet Sharon Doubiago’s memoir, My Father's Love, feels like an open wound, the scar tissue scraped off to allow for belated healing. My Father's Love is a detailed account of Doubiago’s childhood, tragically defined by sexual molestation by her father, and willful ignorance by her mother.

This is an engaging book, thanks to Doubiago’s poetic and honest language, fastidious fact checking, and pages of photographs to give a visual to the people in her early life. She traces her family tree back to its American roots, finding common threads that run throughout her family genealogy and her own life. This is not a short book, running over 400 pages, and yet Doubiago makes it all a coherent account. I turned each page, not to find out what happens next, but to get to know the young Sharon from the photographs.

Engaging with this story became confusing for me. Why do I read this book? Is it for myself, or for Doubiago? It’s not for entertainment or education, and there’s a bit of guilt involved in what sometimes feels like an invasion of privacy. Memoirs as a genre walk a fine line between voyeurism and empathy, exhibitionism and honesty.

Memoirs can be notoriously bad, exemplifying “navel-gazing” and self-promotion. However, a good memoir can be sublime. My personal favorites are Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (admittedly a fictionalized memoir), and Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home. These are books that restore my faith in the memoir, so often challenged by poorly written, self-congratulatory schlock (I don’t need to name a recent “rogue” publication). My Father's Love, a heart wrenching read with a grim ending, evokes disconcerting emotions and questions, and demonstrates what a memoir is capable of.

Doubiago brings up weighty issues such as patriarchy, class discrimination, and false memory, as well as the pervasive problem of familial sexual abuse. The issue of false memory plagued me while reading her account, as she describes the resistance to her claims from her family, and even in her own mind. I too wanted her memories to be false, for her young handsome father to have never betrayed his daughter, despite the truth. One of Doubiago’s greatest accomplishments with this book is showing how complex memories can be, as she exposes her own process of remembering.

After finishing My Father's Love, I started thinking about the role of memoirs. Why is it important as women to tell our stories? And why, as women, is it important that we read each others' stories? Perhaps it is a cycle, and through telling and listening, reading and writing, a memoir becomes complete.

Written by: Claire Burrows, December 30th 2009