Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2002
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 4, Fall 2002, pp. 289.
Abstract
Linda Hogan's memoir is centered in stories, beginning with the story of the book's title. In a museum shop Hogan bought a clay woman, "her stomach attached to an orange globe earth," that she had mailed to her home. The figurine arrived with broken legs and, Hogan reports, "she began to fall apart in other ways." Like the clay woman, Hogan has fallen apart in many ways, yet she is also watching over her own world and, by association, the wider world of those who share her heritage, her experiences, or her geography.
Hogan comments, "I sat down to write about pain and ended up writing about love," but until the story is complete the love is hard to discover. Hogan examines the events of her "unremembered, broken life," probing the way each event and person has affected her understanding of the world. As the stories accumulate, the past seems less horrific against the ultimate wholeness Hogan gathers from the broken pieces.
The earliest event occurred when, at the age of twelve, Hogan entered into a common law relationship with an older man. Subsequent chapters are built around teenage drinking to "lose the memory of everyday"; the Chickasaw history of the Trail of Tears; the painful effort to break through the silence of her mother and later of her adopted daughters who, separated from their Sioux society, suffered the "soul loss" of extreme detachment. Throughout her account Hogan links her own experiences with Chickasaw history, attaching her daughters' story, for example, to that of children lost in the Indian boarding school system. In other chapters she focuses on a trip she takes with her father to their ancestral Oklahoma home and on her own struggle to deal with the effects of fibromyalgia, a debilitating neuromuscular disease. She suffers the most devastating physical and psychological trauma after a fall from a horse that apparently dragged her. In the process of recovery, Hogan finds she has gained more than she lost.
The reader who struggles to justify the muddle of events of a life will find inspiration and guidance in Hogan's work. Although the book moves from Germany across much of the United States, Hogan's life has been centered in her ancestral Oklahoma home and her present physical house in Colorado. The reader familiar with the history and literature of the region will find numerous points of connection in The Woman Who Watches Over the World.
Comments
Copyright 2002 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln