Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 66-67.
Abstract
It is hard to review Gerald Vizenor, especially when writing something of your own, because he zooms into the creative imagination and his words transpot whatever it is you're writing.
In other words, his words have a fracturing factor which makes a magic of language. Vizenor is generative. He forms and splices, even in the critical essays of Fugitive Poses.
Vizenor's writing releases words. Those usually kept in their places in the dictionary and the dominant way of thought, but which are alive, words still on the building-meaning block and wished to be loosed to roam again. This is Ghost Dance writing that returns the language to eat prairie grass and provide food and shelter, reason and story. Even when the buffalo is not your culture, you can major in the presence and absence of the scene. Because even if for you it was corn, and that gone too. But blessed, spoken and speaking corn in the historical aspect that was provider and generator of story and fodder by which it sustained. We each have our each. Vizenor lays out the map: we can walk in the alcoholic, erased, angry, hurt after world that is at its bare field an energy force that continues to create and remain alive in a changed but changing force nonetheless.
Vizenor sets us on the regenerative path through Native critical theory. When does this man, writer, traveler, lecturer, academic, have time to read all those books that are necessary for scholarship? Twenty-nine pages at the end of the book are notes. His book is a camp ground of many voices. A get-together. A literate powwow.
There are five essays: "Penentative Rumors," "Wistful Envies," "Literary Animals," "Fugitive Poses," "Native Transmotion." Vinzenor's concerns are descriptives of Indians, the real and the simulated.
Fugitive poses are the stereotypes and depictions of Indians by the dominant culture. Indigene is the true presences of the indigenous of a continent.
While still in "Tragic Wisdom," the introduction, he defines his other terms. He gives us a vocabulary lesson:
varionative: "an uncertain curve of native antecedence; obscure notions of native sovenance and presence."
penenative: "the autoposer, the autobiographical poseur, or the almost native by associations and institutive connections."
sovenance: "that sense of presence in remembrance, that trace of creation and natural reason in native stories; once an obscure noun, the connotation ... is a native presence in these essays, not the romance of an aesthetic absence or victimry."
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln