epigraphs

The words that come before all else

In Haudenosaunee traditions there are the “words that come before all else.” It is a thanksgiving address and the words “and now our minds are one” repeat throughout, drawing us together so that we can proceed through the event or discussions in a way that puts aside ego and self and considers the community. And for books, epigraphs are something like that. They are the words that an author puts at the very front, and they shape the entire book.

I’m in that stage of the book, thinking about the cover and acknowledgements (which were harder than I thought but more about that in another post) and the epigraph. And I landed on two quotes:

stop writing about Indians
she told me again
only louder as if
I was hard of hearing
you have to allow authors
their subjects, she said
stop writing about
what isn’ t in the text

which is just our entire history

graduate school first semester: so here I am writing about Indians again, by Cheryl Savageau

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

Orphans of God, Written by Mark Heard © 1992 Ideola Music/ASCAP

The first is a poem that I came across last year. There’s a poem by Sherman Alexie, How to Write the Great American Indian Novel, in which he concluces that “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” Alexie has been credibly accused of a number of sexual improprieties and although I liked the sentiment I wanted to quote somebody else and I asked Twitter for alternatives. Somebody suggested this poem by Savageau and it’s not quite the same but it is breathtaking.

Over and over she writes about what isn’t plainly there, the presence of Indigenous people and over and over the teacher tells her to stop it. This is our entire history, as she says and my book points this out again and again, asking you to look for us, notice us, see us in the absence. If the land is in fact empty, why? Where did we go? Because there is a story there that explains it.

The second quote is from an artist that I came to admire after he died. By the time I found out who Mark Heard was he was already gone, he died rather young of a heart attack. I belonged to a mailing list called the Orphans of God and I don’t even know how I found them but they were a group of people on a listserv (now you know I’m old) who talked about theology and music and life.

The lyrics are appealing in their lostness and there’s a certain romanticism to it until you start to dig down into what he’s actually saying in this song. The orphans of God are not those who resist the dominant narrative, they're the result of it. An impoverished and destitute faith that could have been so much more. And that too is woven into the book, the loss of contemporary Christianity, the loss of what it could have been because it chose hierarchy and domination over relationship. We’ve bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths .. and we’re out in the streets with a lump in our throats.

So these two quotes, that I hope lead people to read the entire poems (for Heard was certainly a poet) capture the book so perfectly. The invisible presence of Indigenous people and the impoverished faith of western Christianity. And maybe, together, if Christians start to wonder what good news we might have for them we can truly become kin.

Ambe