Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Between the Grasses and the Sentence
Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS
I began this series of commentaries with David Herd’s attempt to find a path through the largely legalistic language of the modern border. Layli Long Soldier covers similar conceptual territory in her brilliant new book Whereas (Graywolf, 2017), but she comes at the border, as it were, from the inside out. Writing from the position of an indigenous (she is Oglala Sioux) addressee of the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, Long Soldier considers the affective impact of this empty statement as it participates in a long history of linguistic obfuscations and justifications of theft and genocide.
I began this series of commentaries with David Herd’s attempt to find a path through the largely legalistic language of the modern border. Layli Long Soldier covers similar conceptual territory in her brilliant new book Whereas (Graywolf, 2017), but she comes at the border, as it were, from the inside out.