The Power of the Word; 103; Ancestral Voices

Transcript

BILL MOYERS: THE POWER OF THE WORD September 29,1989 Ancestral Voices

BILL MOYERS: I'm Bill Moyers. Every so often, I hear voices in my head, voices of people I can't see. I can hear my grandfather Joseph's voice, and he's been dead since I was five years old. And my great-grandmother -the one whose husband left Tennessee and went to California in search of work and never came back -it's her voice I hear talking about what it was like on that broken-down farm, raising the children alone, trying to explain to me, her great-grandson, that she did what she did because she had to do it to survive.

Now, I'm no mystic, and I don't believe in reincarnation. And I don't think I'm crazy, although I've been in journalism long enough to plead insanity. I do believe our memories are filled with ancestral voices that our imagination calls up as we yearn to discover our past. This is one reason I like the poets you're about to meet. Their poetry is about many things, like other poets, but sometimes when they write, it's not their voices we hear, but voices of ancestors long

gone.

[voice-over] Joy Harjo comes from Oklahoma, a member of the Creek Indian

tribe, the first child of a Creek father and a mother who is Cherokee and French.

Mary Tallmountain was born in an Athabascan Indian village on the Yukon

River, not far from the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Garrett Hongo is a Japanese

American born in Volcano, Hawaii, who grew up in Southern California.

They have come to a poetry festival at Glassboro State College in New Jersey

to share poems that evoke ancestral voices, ancient voices still speaking.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: I'll read you something that I wrote about our foods.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Mary Tallmountain now lives in San Francisco. She was in her mid-50s when she published her first poetry.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: [Glassboro] This one is called "Good Grease."

[reading] The hunters went out with guns

at dawn.

We had no meat in the village,

no food or the tribe and the dogs,

No caribou in the caches.

All day we waited.

At last!

As darkness hung at the river

we children saw them far away.

Yes! They were carrying caribou!

We jumped and shouted!

By the fires that night

we feasted.

The old ones clucked.

sucking and smacking.

sopping the juices with sourdough bread.

The grease would warm us

when the hungry winter howled.

Grease was beautiful,

oozing,

dripping and running down our chins,

broken hands shining with grease.

We talk of it when we see each other

far from home.

Remember the marrow

sweet in the bones?

We grabbed for them like candy.

Good.

Gooooood

Good grease.

BILL MOYERS: You wrote of spending much of your life in violent revolt. Against what?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Against being taken out of my own society, my own culture. I was six at that time, and tuberculosis was rampant in the Arctic region, and most everybody was terminally ill. My mother was terminally ill. And so the government doctor and his wife asked to adopt me, and that was-caused quite a furor in the village, so they were able, finally, to adopt me when I was three.

BILL MOYERS: Why did it cause a furor?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Well, it hadn't been done. It was-it was a rare.

BILL MOYERS: In that little village?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: In that little village.

BILL MOYERS: For-

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: A hundred people. On the Yukon River, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and 120 miles west of Fairbanks. It was a Tar-it's a rare place yet.

BILL MOYERS: -and the native Indians didn't want to give up one of their own to whites.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: No. No. Even a girl.

BILL MOYERS: "Even a girl"?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Even a girl. They-if I had been a boy, they just definitely would not have given me up, but being a girl, they could do it.

BILL MOYERS: And SO you did go with the couple who adopted you?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: That's right. At that time, as a child, 1-I was really sad because I was leaving them. I thought, "Well, you know, I'm going to the outside, I'm going to see something new." I was excited, because I loved new things, and children love new things, of course. And yet on the other hand, I wanted to be in my own place. So then finally when the truth became visible, and I was on the ship going out, it was-it-I couldn't get it back. I couldn't get that village back. It was still there on the bank of the river where I had left it, and my brother was there, and my mother was there. And my relatives were all there, everyone was there.

And immediately, there was nobody. Of my own flesh with-with me.

BILL MOYERS: And what happened when you got out?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Well, I made a few friends. It was-it was just before school started, and then after school started, for some reason, I was put on the stage in the middle of summer, in my parka and my mukluks and my velvet mittens, and a knit cap. I had everything that you would have in the wintertime going down the river. And then the children thought I was a thing.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: When I started writing letters to the little girl that of humor, somebody that they could laugh at and point fingers at. And so I just rebelled. I got very angry then. This is when-this is when I can first remember the anger starting.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: [Glassboro] "Indian Blood."

On the stage I stumbled,

my fur boot caught

on a slivered board.

Rustle of stealthy giggles.

Beandaaga' made of velvet

crusted with crystal beads

hung from brilliant tassels of wool,

wet with my sweat.

Children's faces stared.

I felt their flowing force.

Did I crouch like goh

in the curious quiet?

They butted to the stage,

darting questions; pointing.

Do you live in an igloo?

Hah! You eat blubber!

Hemmed in by ringlets of brass,

grass-pale pale eyes,

the fur of daghooda-aak

trembled.

Late in the night

I bit my hand until it was

pierced with moons of dark

Indian blood.

[beendaaga' mittens

goh rabbit

daghooda-aak caribou parka]

BILL MOYERS: You bit them?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm. Until the blood ran.

BILL MOYERS: You remember that?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm. I certainly do.

BILL MOYERS: Remember the feeling-

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: -that drove you to do that?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: I remember the anger. And I know-I can't help remembering it, because it was probably one of the worst things I ever did to myself, was bite the hands.

BILL MOYERS: How old were you?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Six. When these children began to laugh at me, yes, I was six.

BILL MOYERS: When did that terrible anger pass?

lived inside me. And I keep journals, intensely long journals, and so I just used those journals to write to this little girl. And it became a love affair between myself and my little girl. My little child. Me. And I was a white woman speaking to the little Indian child whom she had neglected so long.

BILL MOYERS: And what did you talk about?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: We talked about, first of all, how she looked and how beautiful she was, and how sad it was that we had to part for so long. I spent a lot of time apologizing to her because I had not-because I had neglected her so long.

BILL MOYERS: So you weren't in your native culture, and you weren't accepted in your new culture.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: That's right. And when I went back, I was not really actually accepted in my old culture.

BILL MOYERS: Fifty years later, when you went back to this little village.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Yes. I can't blame them-50 years later is a long time.

BILL MOYERS: Did they think you had become white?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Yes, they thought so. And I must have looked pretty white to them, just as I looked very Indian to the children outside.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: I went back 50 years later, and at that time-and I was able to write some poems that amounted to something. The first one I wrote when I went back up there was called "The Figure in Clay."

Climbing the hill

When it was time,

Among sunken gravehouses

I filled my fists with earth

And coming down took river water,

Blended it,

Shaped you, a girl of clay,

Crouched in my palms,

Mute asking

To be made complete.

Long afterward

I buried you deep among

Painted masks.

Yet you ride my plasma

Like a platelet,

Eldest kinswoman.

You cry to me through smoke

Of tribal fires. I echo the primal voice,

The drumming blood.

Through decades waiting

Your small shape remained.

In morning ritual

You danced through my brain,

Clear and familiar,

Telling of dim glacial time

Long perilous water-crossings,

Wolf beasts

Howling the polar night,

Snow flowers changing.

Now watching you in lamplight,

I see scarlet berries

Ripened, your

Sunburned fingers plucking them.

With hesitant words,

With silence.

From inmost space

I call you

Out of the clay.

It is time at last,

This dawn.

Stir, wake. Rise.

Glide gentle between my bones,

Grasp my heart.

Now, walk beside me. Feel

How these winds move, the way

These mornings breathe. Let me see you new

In this light.

You-

Wrapped in brown,

Myself repeated,

Out of dark and different time .

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN:

Every morning I talk to my matrilineal forebears. They're in a picture about this big -there's my grandmother, and two aunts, and my mother -and I go there and speak with them, every morning. And they-they go with me throughout my days. I know about the dead being within the living. I know them. I feel them. They are right here. They are right here. This is called "A Song for My Mother."

Owl spoke gravely of winter.

I walked out with you

to see whether ptarmigan

nd snowshoe rabbit

had turned white.

Sky wore a purple mantle,

With you I saw through snow,

and rough backs of malamutes,

your shadow against the

silver spike of moon.

You slid Salmon to the table raised the fishknife,

and your hands honored

the holiness of all things.

Always do this with care,

you said, and the knife

traced a flashing crimson

stripe along the

soft white belly, baring

massed luscious eggs.

I looked into a million faces

afterwards, but found

none like yours, none anywhere.

I stood different, knowing.

So I went the alien ways

but held my life with you apart,

gripped tight, my soul

waited, wrapped in

the cloak of your strength.

BILL MOYERS: You said you've carried on a conversation with your-with your matrilineal-the women in your past.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm. Every morning I have that. I speak with them every morning. Grandmother and the two-the two aunts, and my mother.

BILL MOYERS: What do you talk about?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: We talk about each other. We talk about me, what I'm doing right now, and how my spirit is going on, what is happening to it, here, in this place. And I lay before them my problems. They are the women that I speak with.

BILL MOYERS: What do you remember most vividly about your mother, Mary Joe?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Her hands.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Because they dealt with fish, which are a holy creature.

BILL MOYERS: And your mother's hand, you see your mother's hands working with fish even now?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Yes. Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: Describe it, what did she do?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Oh, she picked up the flummus, and

BILL MOYERS: The what? The-

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: -that is- that's the stone knife that she had. They're-now they're made of metal, but at that time they were stone. And she had the salmon laying on a table, nailed to a table there, when it had been brought in, and she had laid in on the table and-with its belly up. And she just drew a line down there, and there were the eggs.

BILL MOYERS: The eggs in the salmon.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: You did a poem-

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: I think there's a poem in there about her hands.

BILL MOYERS: -''The Hands of Mary Joe." Would you read that?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yes.

Her hands lift and tend King Salmon

Cherish the skin of her child

Light as willow buds,

Always do this with care,

Thread a needle's invisible eye

In dim flickering lamplight

Fingers weave patterns

In violet and amber beads

The brown pearl hands

Etched with tiny lines

Curled into little cups.

Stiffened, yet with

Delicate touch,

Draw a comb of tortoise shell

Through dark-silvered hair.

Hands that flowed in rhythms

Smooth as riverdrift

Attuned to daily music

Of her hidden life

Now lie folded in her lap

Trembling minutely

The hands of Mary Joe

Await

The approaching silence.

BILL MOYERS: I love this poem, "Matmiya." It says, "For my grandmother." Is that her name?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Yes. Mm-hmm. Matmiya. Grandmother.

BILL MOYERS: What does that mean in English?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mountain.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, mountain.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: Read that one for me. Your grandmother is mountain.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN:

I see you sitting

Implanted by roots

Coiled deep from your thighs.

Roots, flesh red, centuries pale.

Hairsprings wound tight

Through fertile earthscapes

Where each layer feeds the next

Into depths immutable.

Though you must rise, must

Move large and slow

When it is time, Oh my

Gnarled mother-vine: ancient

As vanished ages,

Your spirit remains,

Nourished,

Nourishing me.

I see your figure wrapped in skins,

Curved into a mound of earth

Holding your rich dark roots.

Matmiya, I see you sitting.

BILL MOYERS: "my ... mother vine," what a wonderful image that is. Entwined in your life. Thread a needle's invisible eye

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Mm-hmm.

In dim flickering lamplight

BILL MOYERS: All the years you were gone from the village, did you have in your mind, did you hold in your mind a sense of it as an ideal place, like a lot of us our childhood origins?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Oh, of course. It was my roots. It still is my roots. The river-I could close my eyes this moment and be sitting on the bank of the river, and I can see that river going by. And I can see the clouds, the way they were, great, immense white clouds making shadows on the river and on the long land, the long land just stretches out and out and out. The land, only the land was home. And the animals. You see, those dogs howl at night. They're like my wolf. They howl during the night, and it's haunting. That's what I remember.

BILL MOYERS: Does the muse come as the wolf?

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Yes. The muse comes in everything that I do.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me about the wolf.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: About the wolf! Oh, you mean how did I find the wolf?

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: Oh, he came to me in the hospital. I had been having a very bad bout with cancer, and I was sitting sort in half-dark, night, and just wondering where I was going to get a comfortable seat, and all of a sudden I just realized that there was a wolf somewhere here. And I looked around, and the wolf was under my bed. It was one of those tall hospital beds. And so I quickly got some--pen and pencil-pencil and paper, and put it on the table, that little table there, and I scribbled this poem out at night, and he shuffled his feet. I heard-I felt his paws shuffle down there. And I knew, then I knew he was there. So I'm sure he helped me write it. But he's here now. He's always here. He's right here between us, or at my side somewhere.

MARY TALLMOUNTAIN: [Glassboro] "The Last Wolf."

the last wolf hurried toward me

through the ruined city

and I heard his baying echoes

down the steep smashed warrens

of Montgomery Street and past

the few ruby-crowned high rises

left standing

their lighted elevators useless

passing the flicking red and green of traffic signals

bying his way eastward

in the mystery of his wild loping gait

closer the sounds in the deadly night

through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks

I heard his voice ascending the hill

and at last his low whine as he came

floor by empty floor to the room

where I sat

in my narrow bed looking west, waiting

I heard him snuffle at the door

and I watched.

he trotted across the floor

he laid his long gray muzzle

on the spare white spread

and his eyes turned yellow

his dotted eyebrows quivered

Yes, I said.

I know what they have done.

GARRETT HUNGO:: [Glassboro] I have a great affection for the poems I

heard this morning, and I'm real privileged to be here. Normally, I have to talk: a lot more to explain things, not just facts, but a feeling, a sense of having to remember, being charged with an assignment to remember that one remember, that one carry culture, that one works to acquire culture.

In our society, we assume that we absorb it by osmosis. That means we watch TV.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Garrett Hongo will soon be moving to Oregon to direct the creative writing program at the University of Oregon.

GARRETT HUNGO:: So I want to read this poem for my compadres here at the podium, and it's a poem of memory, and it's a poem of directive, a directive that I was given when I was a child. And it's the first poem I've written-I wrote. There's some things in it-well, I won't-it's about my grandfather. "Issei: First Generation Japanese American."

[reading]

An old man turning pages of books

Left to right. He reads backwards,

Up and down, kanji and kana script,

Over and over again. He does not see

The old words any more. The meanings

Lost, he pauses on a page and curls

His fingers, surrounding one lone

Character in the cradle of his hand.

He turns, knowing that I watch him

And pity the sleep in his eyes.

This is your name, he says,

We take it from son of prince.

Kaoru is your name.

It's the first time I'd ever heard my Japanese name spoken, and of course, one never forgets something like that.

GARRETT HUNGO:: My grandfather was educated in Japan. He was born in America, in 1899, but he was sent back to Japan for his education. So the day after Pearl Harbor, he was arrested and taken down for questioning in Honolulu, and in a sense was disappeared for a short time. This is not an uncommon story among Japanese Americans, and it was very painful to them, and a source of humiliation.

When I was a child, I'm the oldest-I'm his oldest grandchild, he would sit down after dinner every night with his bourbon and tell me that story, about how he was arrested and questioned by the FBI, and how they tried to trick him into betraying his "true identity."

BILL MOYERS: They thought he was a spy.

GARRETT HUNGO:: That's right. And he was obsessed with the wrong that he felt needed to be righted, and he was also obsessed that the story had to be told. So he'd tell me the story, and he said, "You learn language." He spoke English-broken English, because he was educated in Japan. And then he spoke a Hawaiian kind of pidgin English. "You learn language good. Learn speak like hakujin - like what Americans. You tell story. Kids remember that kind of thing. I remember.

GARRETT HUNGO:: [Glassboro] This is his poem.

In the back room of the plantation store,

Kubota drinks a strong Puerto Rican rum,

chases it with the dried flesh of cuttlefish,

and sings an old song he learned

in a cardroom back in Hiroshima.

He sings purple wine, and red plum blossoms,

blossoms skittering in the rough wind

from off the Sea of Japan,

blossoms that swirl like snowflakes

falling on the soft muzzles of deer

grazing under willow trees in the public park.

He corks the last bottle,

slides it on the shelf

behind the pistols and ammo,

and steps out into the warm cloak

of a tropical night in Laie.

He laughs and lights a cigarette,

breathes out a wreath of smoke

for his funeral, fifty years away,

scents the air with the acrid incense of tobacco,

and blesses the wind that will scatter his ashes.

BILL MOYERS: The images of your ancestors, they run through your poems so vividly. I mean, for example, you talk about your father in these poems. Tell me a little bit about him.

GARRETT HUNGO:: He lost a lot. He lost our place in Hawaii. He lost his hearing. He lost even the power of speech, because he was increasingly hard of hearing as he aged that we had to communicate in ways without words, and still enjoy each other's presence. My father was a silent man. In a way, he was laconic. He was disenfranchised, in a sense, because the language that he spoke was Hawaiian pidgin English, and the language we lived in in Los Angeles was not that language. He'd lost that. And he'd been made, as many are made, to feel somewhat ashamed of his speech. Somehow it inspired me, that what he couldn't say, or would not say, I had to say.

BILL MOYERS: Were you ever able to tell him that?

GARRETT HUNGO:: I wrote the poems.

BILL MOYERS: And did he read them?

GARRETT HUNGO:: Oh, yeah, he read every one.

BILL MOYERS: He did.

GARRETT HUNGO:: Yeah, yeah.

BILL MOYERS: This is a vivid portrait of him, in "Winning." Is that-that's a real scene? Did that actually happen?

GARRETT HUNGO:: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stuff like this, he'd do this kind of stuff all the time for me.

BILL MOYERS: Read it to me.

GARRETT HUNGO:: [reading]

It's Gardena, late Saturday afternoon,

on Vermont Avenue, near closing time

at the thrift store, and my father's

left me to rummage through trash bins

stuffed with used paperbacks, 25 cents a pound,

while he chases down some bets

at the card clubs across the street.

The register rings up its sales-$2.95,

$11.24, $26.48 for the reclaimed Frigidaire and

a girl, maybe six or so, barefoot,

in a plaid dress, her hair braided

in tight cornrows, tugs at the strap

of her mother's purse, begging a few

nickels for the gumball machine.

She skips through the check-stand,

runs toward the electric exit, passing

a fleet of shopping carts, bundles

of used-up magazines, (Ebony and Jet)

stacked in pyramids in the far aisle,

reaches the bright globe of the vendor,

fumbles for her coins, and works the knob.

My father comes in from the Rainbow

across the street, ten hands of jacks

or Better, jive-draw, a winner

with a few dollars to peel away

from grocery money and money to fix

the washer, a dollar for me to buy

four pounds of Pocket Wisdoms, Bantams,

a Dell that says "Walt Whitman, Poet

of the Open Road," and hands it to me,

saying "We won, Boy-san! We won!"

as the final blast of sunset kicks through

plate glass and stained air, firing through

the thicket of neon across the street,

consuming the store, the girl, the dollar bill,

even the Rainbow and the falling night

in a brief symphony with candied light.

BILL MOYERS: How long after that event happened did you write that poem?

GARRETT HUNGO:: About half of my life away. I might have been 12 when the event happened, and 24 when I wrote the poem, but not much older than that.

BILL MOYERS: So a poem is a carrier of memory for you, isn't it?

GARRETT HUNGO:: You realize that you don't remember, that you need the poem in order to remember, that you need to return to the places. And you can return to them physically, or you can return to them in a poem.

GARRETT HUNGO:: [Glassboro} This poem is called "O-Bon, Dance for the Dead."

I have no memories or photograph of my father

coming home from war, thin as a caneworker,

a splinter of flesh in his olive greens

and khakis and spit-shined Gi. shoes;

Or of my grandfather in his flower-print shirt,

humming his bar tunes, tying the bandanna

to his head to hold the sweat back from his face

as he bent to weed and hoe the garden that Sunday,

while swarms of planes maneuvered overhead.

I have no memories of the radio that day,

or the clatter of machetes in the Filipino camp,

the long wail of news from over the mountains,

or the glimmerings and sheaths of fear in the village.

I have no story to tell about lacquer shrines

or filial ashes, about a small brass bell,

and incense smoldering in jade bowls, about the silvered

blackface of Miroku gleaming with detachment,

anthurium crowns in a stoneware vase.

the hearts and wheels of fire behind her.

And though I've mapped and studied the strike march

from the north shore to town in 1921, though I've

sung psalms at festival and dipped the bamboo cup

in the stone bowl on the Day of the Dead,

though I've pitched coins and took my turn

at the taiko drum, and folded paper fortunes

and strung them on the graveyard's hala tree;

Though I've made a life and raised my house

oceans east of my birth, though I've craned

my neck and cocked my ear for the sound of flute

and shamisen jangling its tune of woe-

The music nonetheless echoes in its slotted box,

the cold sea chafes the land, and swirls over gravestones,

and wind sighs its passionless song through ironwood trees.

More than memory or the image of the slant of gray rain

pounding the thatched coats and peaked hats

of townsmen racing across the blond arch of a bridge.

more than the past and its aches and brocade

of tales and ritual, its dry mouth of repetition,

I want the cold stone in my hand to pound the earth,

I want the splash of cruel or steaming water to wash my feet.

I want the dead beside me when I dance, to help me

flesh the notes of my song, to tell me it's all right.

BILL MOYERS: "I want the dead beside me when I dance, to help me flesh the note of my song, to tell me it's all right. " What's all right?

GARRETT HUNGO: That they are the dead, that they're not the living, that these people who I've treasured and these lives which were exemplary and are exemplary to me, these presences which I don't enjoy as I enjoy yours, are still somehow present, you know? There there are, notwithstanding, that they have a force in my life, they have an authority that they lend to my craft. They have a living flesh they can add to my own. And it's a magical belief. It's a primitive religion. But it's something for me as a poet that's crucial.

GARRETT HUNGO: [Glassboro] I'm going to end with this last piece. It's a story for me of renewal, of regeneration and of reconciliation, finally, of resurrection, not of the body, but of the spirit. The spirit of poetry, the spirit of compassion, the spirit of pity in the universe. "The Legend."

In Chicago it is snowing softly,

and a man has just done his wash for the week.

He steps into the twilight of early evening,

carrying a wrinkled shopping bag

full of neatly folded clothes,

and for a moment, enjoys

the feel of warm laundry in crinkled paper,

flannel like against his gloveless hands.

There's a Rembrandt glow on his face,

a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek

as the last flash of sunset

blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.

He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,

and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor

in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,

dingy and too large.

He negotiates the slick office

on the sidewalk by his car,

opens the Fairlane's back door,

leans to place the laundry in,

and turns for an instant,

toward the flurry of footsteps

and cries of pedestrians,

as a boy -that's all he was

backs from the corner package store,

shooting a pistol, firing it

once, at the dumbfounded man

who falls forward,

grabbing at his chest.

A few sounds escape from his mouth,

a babbling no one understands

as people surround him

bewildered at his speech.

The noises he makes are nothing to them.

The boy has gone, lost

in the light array of foot traffic

dappling the snow with fresh prints.

Tonight, I read about Descartes'

grand courage to doubt everything

except his own miraculous existence.

and I feel so distinct

from the wounded man lying on the concrete,

I am ashamed.

Let the night sky cover him as he dies.

Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven

and take up his cold hands.

JOY HARJO: [Glassboro] I'm going to start out with this poem called "Vision," and it's an older poem, and I wrote it-I was watching a rainbow outside.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Joy Harjo has left Oklahoma and now lives in Arizona. When she writes, she says she is often guided by the voice of an old Creek Indian within her.

JOY HARJO: Here goes. "Vision."

The rainbow touched down

"somewhere in the Rio Grande,"

we said, And saw the light of it

from your mother's house in Isleta.

How it curved down between Earth

And the deepest sky to give us horses

of color,

horses that were within us all this time,

but we didn't see them because

we wait for the easiest vision

to save us.

In Isleta the rainbow is a crack

in the universe. We saw the barest

of all life that is possible,

Bright horses rolled over

and over the dusking sky.

I heard the thunder of their beating

hearts. Their lungs hit air

and sang. All the colors of horses

formed the rainbow

and formed us,

watching them.

BILL MOYERS: You said this morning that you discovered your language came from a different place from the folks you were growing up around. What was that place?

JOY HARJO: Oh, I guess you would call it a mythic place, that mythic place, that river, I suppose ultimately that is within all of us. And it's tapped by the artist. I mean, you could hear it today, you know, at the performance, you know. You can hear people pulling into that incredible rich source.

BILL MOYERS: You said that when you write, an old Creek Indian enters the room and stands over you.

JOY HARJO: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: Is that right?

JOY HARJO: Sometimes. I think: my muse, you know, what you call the muse takes different focus, and I felt this presence.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever feel the presence of ancestors, of grandparents, of great-grandparents, identifiable?

JOY HARJO: Oh, sure I do. I mean, you might think I'm crazy

BILL MOYERS: Oh, no. No.

JOY HARJO: -but I think: now on it-I don't care, that's all right. But I feel the presence of those other worlds which interact. I mean, I have a sense of all those worlds being very viable, and very, very alive. And what happens in a poem, what's-you know, it didn't happen in the beginning, because in the beginning when I was writing poetry, a poem had definite limits, you know, a poem had-I started out knowing definitely what I wanted to begin and end with, or one particular image that I wanted to stay with. And since then, I feel like my poems have become travels into the other space.

BILL MOYERS: I certainly can see many worlds in your poems. Different worlds.

JOY HARJO: Well, that's how it is, and there's no end. I don't see time as linear. I don't see things as beginning and ending. I mean, that's-a lot of people have a hard time understanding Native people and understanding the Native mind. I think: to understand the Indian people, to understand the Native mind, you have to understand that the world is understood very differently. The world is-you know, there is not just this world. There's a layering of others. Time is not-time is not divided by minutes and hours, and everything has presence and meaning within this landscape of timelessness.

BILL MOYERS: It's a way of seeing. It's seeing these worlds that converge, and then making a record of it.

JOY HARJO: [Glassboro] This next poem is one of those poems that's hard to read because it's so close. Of course, with poetry it's always so close. It's called "Autobiography."

We lived next door to the bootlegger, and were lucky. The bootlegger

reigned. We were a stolen people in a stolen land. Oklahoma meant

defeat. But the sacred lands have their own plans, seep through fingers of

the alcohol spirit. Nothing can be forgotten , only left behind.

Last week I saw the river where the hickory stood; this homeland doesn't

predict a legacy of malls and hotels. Dreams aren't glass and steel, but

made from the hearts of deer, the blazing eye of a circling panther. Translating

them was to understand the death count from Alabama, the destruction

of grandchildren, famine, of stories. 1 didn't think I could stand it.

My father couldn't. He searched out his death with the vengeance of a

warrior who has been the hunted. It' s in our blood.

Even at two I knew we were different. Could see through eyes of strangers

that we were trespassers in the promised land. The Sooner State glorified

the thief. Everyone and no one was Indian. You'd best forget, claim a

white star. At three my mother told me this story:

God decided to make people. He put the first batch in the oven, kept

them in too long. They burned. These were the black people. God put

in the next batch. They were uncooked, not done. These were the white

people. But the next batch he cooked just right, and these were the Indian

people, just like you.

By then I was confused.

At five I was designated to string beads in kindergarten. At seven I

knew how to play chicken and win. At fourteen I was drinking.

I found myself in a city in the Southwest at twenty one, when my past

came into focus. It was near midnight. We were walking home and

there he was, curled in the snow on the sidewalk, that man from Jemez.

We had all been cheated. He hid his shame beneath the cold downy

blanket. We hid ours in poems. We took him home where he shivered

and cried through the night like a fighting storm, then woke in the

morning, knowing nothing. Later 1 would see him on the street, the

same age 1 am now. It was my long dark hair that cued his daughter,

the chill, the songs. And 1 talked to him as if he were my father, with

that respect, that hunger.

I have since outlived that man from Jemez, my father, and that ragged

self I chased through precarious years. But I carry them with me the

same as this body carries the heart as a drum. Yesterday there was rain

traveling east to home. A hummingbird spoke. She was a shining piece

of invisible memory, inside the raw cortex of songs. I knew then this

was the Muscogee season of forgiveness, time of new corn, the spiraling

dance.

JOY HARJO: I think what part of my lesson in this life has been and what it is, is to recognize myself as a whole person. I've had to take what has been to me a symbol of destruction and tum it into a creative--tum it into creative fodder, so to speak.

BILL MOYERS: So many of your poems begin with fear

JOY HARJO: Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: -and end with love.

JOY HARJO: Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: Would you read this one for me, "I Give You Back"? Such a beautiful poem.

JOY HARJO: What I'm touching on in this poem is a fear that includes generations of, you know, of warfare, generations of slaughter, massacre, and I'm thinking especially in terms of America

BILL MOYERS: Read it to me.

JOY HARJO: Okay. "I Give You Back."

I release you,

my beautiful and terrible

fear. I release you. You are my beloved

and hated twin, but now, I don't know you

as myself. 1 release you with all the

pain I would know at the death of

my daughters.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the white soldiers

who burned down my home, beheaded my children,

raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.

I give you back to those who stole the

food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold

these seeings in front of me and I was born

with eyes that can never close.

I release you, fear, so you can no longer

keep me naked and frozen in the winter,

or smothered under blankets in the summer.

I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.

I am not afraid to rejoice.

I am not afraid to be black.

I am not afraid to be white.

I am not afraid to be hungry.

I am not afraid to be full.

I am not afraid to be hated.

I am not afraid to be loved,

to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.

You have gutted me, but I gave you the knife.

You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

You held my mother down and raped her,

but I gave you the heated thing.

I take myself back, fear.

You are not my shadow any longer.

I won't hold you in my hands.

You can't live in my eyes, my ears, my voice,

my ears, my belly, or in my heart my heart,

my heart my heart.

But come here, fear.

I am alive and you are so afraid

of dying.

BILL MOYERS: Did it work?

JOY HARJO: I suppose it does. I think-yeah.

BILL MOYERS: I know it does. Did it for you?

JOY HARJO: It did. I-think it did, and it does. I mean, I don't think-if it continues. I guess what I'm having to learn is to make fear an ally, instead of a-you know, again, it's like taking this destructive force and trying to at least understand it in some way, take it in to myself.

BILL MOYERS: Let me ask you a question of poetic construction.

JOY HARJO: Okay.

BILL MOYERS: You have the line, "You can't live in my eyes, my ears, my voice, my belly, or in my heart, my heart, my heart, my heart." You repeat that four

times.

JOY HARJO: Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: Did you do that-why did you do that? Was it a designed construction?

JOY HARJO: Well, it mimics the heartbeat.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, sure.

JOY HARJO: You know.

BILL MOYERS: Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum.

JOY HARJO: And I don't know if I did it consciously. I mean, now I can look at it and say, "Well, that's what it does," but-I don't know what other poets will tell you, but you don't always know what you're doing.

BILL MOYERS: Why do horses keep appearing in your poems? They're everywhere, wonderful horses of all shapes and sizes.

JOY HARJO: Well, they showed up. You know, they showed up, and they're very much-they're very much present. I guess what I finally linked it to was, I was driving in my little red truck, from Albuquerque to Las Cruces, and somewhere halfway between, I was-I saw-there was a horse who appeared to me, just this--you know, and this incredible horse. And I could smell the horse, and I could see it at the side of my vision. And this horse was a very old friend, someone I hadn't seen in a long time. You know, it might sound crazy, I don't know how to-any other way to explain it, but that's what happened, and I had tears running down my eyes, because it was so good to see this horse that I hadn't seen in years.

JOY HARJO: [Glassboro] This next poem is called "She Had Some Horses," and I get asked more about this poem than any other poem that I've written, and I have the least to say about it. So, "She Had Some Horses."

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.

She had horses who were skins of ocean water.

She had horses who were the blue air of sky. She had horses who were fur and teeth.

She had horses who were clay and would break. She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long pointed breasts.

She had horses with full, brown thighs.

She had horses who laughed too much.

She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.

She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.

She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.

She had horses who were much too shy, who kept quiet

in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.

She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.

She had horses who said they weren't afraid.

She had horses who lied. She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped

bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."

She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept their voices secret and to themselves. She had horses who had no names.

She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.

She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who

carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.

She had horses who waited for destruction.

She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.

She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.

She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her

bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved, She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

BILL MOYERS: You said today you didn't like to talk about that poem, "She Had Some Horses."

JOY HARJO: Uh-huh.

BILL MOYERS: Why is that?

JOY HARJO: I suppose the poem to me is made out of probably more subconscious stuff than it is conscious, in some sense, though people always ask me, you know, "What do the horses mean?" You know, what-who are the horses? And you know, well, I see the horses as different aspects of probably any person, probably within anyone, you know. We all have, you know, herds of horses, so to speak. And they can be contradictory, I suppose. And that's a part of me. I end the poem, "She had some horses she loved, she had some horses she hated. These were the same horses." And that probably comes out of dealing with the contradictory elements in myself, as I certainly feel them, you know. And at times it's been warfare, and sometimes it's been open warfare.

BILL MOYERS: Sometimes mine are a thundering herd of antagonisms.

JOY HARJO: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Taking me right over the cliff. This is, interestingly enough, one of my favorites, and it's different from those you read today, so if you don't mind, we'll close with this one.

JOY HARJO: Okay.

BILL MOYERS: This is one of the first of yours that I read. It's called ''Skeleton of Winter," and I like it very much. You remember that one?

JOY HARJO: Mm-hmm.

These winter days

I've remained silent

as a whiteman's watch

keeping time,

an old bone

empty as a fish skeleton

at low tide.

It is almost too dark

for vision

these ebony mornings

but there is still memory,

the other-sight,

and still see.

Rabbits get torn under

cars that travel at night

but come out the other

side, not bruised,

breathing soft

like no fear.

And sound is light, is

movement. The sun revolves

and sings.

There are still ancient

symbols

alive

I did dance with a prehistoric horse

years and births later

near a cave wall

late winter.

A tooth-hard rocking

in my belly comes back,

something echoes

all forgotten dreams,

in winter.

I am memory alive,

not just a name,

but an intricate part

of this web of motion,

meaning: earth, sky, stars circling,

my heart

centrifugal.

BILL MOYERS: "I am memory alive."

JOY HARJO: Mm-hmm.

BILL MOYERS: That's what you are.

JOY HARJO: That's what we all are.

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Transcript

Transcript

Series: The Power of the Word

Episode Number: 103

Episode: Ancestral Voices

Contributing Organization: Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group (New York, New York)

AAPB ID: cpb-aacip-76668c41067

If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip-76668c41067).

Description

Credits: : Moyers, Judith Davidson
: Haba, James
Editor: Moyers, Bill
Producer: Grubin, David

AAPB Contributor Holdings: Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group
Identifier: cpb-aacip-648d7e5ceeb (Filename)
Format: LTO-5

Citations: Chicago: “The Power of the Word; 103; Ancestral Voices,” 1989-09-29, Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-76668c41067.; MLA: “The Power of the Word; 103; Ancestral Voices.” 1989-09-29. Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. April 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-76668c41067>.; APA: The Power of the Word; 103; Ancestral Voices. Boston, MA: Public Affairs Television & Doctoroff Media Group, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-76668c41067