Natasha Balwit

Natasha Balwit is an editorial fellow at CityLab.

- Natasha Balwit
- April 26, 2017
The Language of Apology in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas

Andrew Harnik / AP

Whereas I went one day to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and the pharmacy was closed, and I decided a book of poetry was the next best thing to medicine;
Whereas the book I selected was Layli Long Soldier’s collection titled Whereas;
Whereas in January of this year, President Trump signed an order to expedite the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and, as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote,

For roughly four hours after these orders were issued, they only existed online in an image from an Associated Press photographer. That version was missing at least a page, and some words were so blurry as to be non-parseable.

Whereas poems can be made to peel apart language, and language can be made to flail, to strike, to obfuscate and blur, or to shift responsibility and blame from one party to another;
Layli Long Soldier’s collection is a direct response to the official “Apology to Native Peoples” on behalf of the U.S. government buried quietly in the 2010 defense appropriations bill. At the time, the apology attracted little notice; President Obama signed it without fanfare or ceremony. Long Soldier pays close attention to its language, dividing her book into sections whose titles are borrowed from the apology: “These Being the Concerns,” “Whereas Statements,” “Resolutions,” “Disclaimer.”

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The Whereas Statements lay bare the realities and contrasts of Long Soldier’s life and her role as an Oglala Lakota poet, mother, and daughter. There are moments of beautiful intimacy, connection, and forgiveness; there is also an awareness of separation, and acknowledgement of the difficulty (sometimes, impossibility) of repair. A sense of withholding runs throughout, as Long Soldier recalls things she thought, but did not say; wanted to do, but didn’t; saw, but only across a gap in time or space. She holds her forgiveness carefully separate from the apology even as she uses its words in her poems, and interrogates the ways the official apology offers recognition for the government’s actions without truly accepting responsibility for them. In one poem, she finds a microcosm of the political relationship between the United States and Native people in her own extracted tooth: “I don’t share this to belabor suffering … Yet at the root of reparation is repair. My tooth will not grow back ever. The root, gone.”
The language in the Whereas Statements is formal, with Lakota words woven in, and sharp, clear details punctuating Long Soldier’s wandering thoughts. Long Soldier tells stories about her family and people she has met, recounts fragile and dangerous conversations, and tangles with the language of history; for instance, she returns in many of the poems to the phrase grassesgrassesgrasses, in reference to the story of a trader who, when told the Dakota were starving, replied “let them eat grass.” She contrasts the deliberate, restrained, and arguably duplicitous language of the official 2010 apology with the way her father apologized to her—tearfully, humanely—for not being there during her childhood over a breakfast she cooked him as an adult. In the Resolutions, she reconstructs the language of the apology, shaping words into boxes, drawing lines between them or scattering them across the page. Below are fragments from the beginnings of some of the Whereas Statements:

WHEREAS I query my uneasiness with the statement, “Native People are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” … Whereas I remember that abstractions such as “life,” “liberty,” and “happiness” rarely serve a poem, so I have learned it best not to engage these terms anyway. Yet I smash head-on into this specific differentiation: the Creator vs. their Creator. ...

WHEREAS I tire. Of my effort to match the effort of the statement: “Whereas Native People and non-Native settlers engaged in numerous armed conflicts in which unfortunately, both took innocent lives, including those of women and children.” I tire

Of engaging in numerous conflicts, tire of the word both. Both as a woman and a child of that Whereas. ...

WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and the plates. ...

WHEREAS I sipped winter water cold-steeped in pine needles, I could taste it for days afterward, I taste it now. When I woke alone gray curtains burned in sunrise and down my throat to the pit, a tincture of those green needles changed me. When should I recount detail, when’s it too much?
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- Natasha Balwit
- April 17, 2017
Ada Limón’s ‘State Bird’ and the Two-Body Problem

Stevo Vasiljevic / Reuters

“Confession: I did not want to live here,” begins Ada Limón in her poem “State Bird.”“Not among the goldenrod, wild onions or the dropseed, not waist high in the barrel- / aged brown corn water,” describing the land around the old tobacco weigh station in Kentucky where her speaker lives now with someone she loves. She has left other homes behind for this new place, presumably for someone else’s sake, and she’s not quite lamenting, nor is she regretful. The land she describes is rich, beautiful, and strange. She picks out the details—million-dollar racehorses, “tightly wound round hay bales,” the bedroom doors—and paints them with the affection that comes from intimacy, and some of the clarity that comes from estrangement.
I did not want to live here in D.C.—or, to be honest, anywhere I’ve lived since I left home for college—but I am young and I live on shifting ground. Since I was 17 I’ve made plans in increments no longer than a year or two, moving into a dorm then out, passing through communal houses in Cambridge where I went to school and D.C. where I came for a fellowship at CityLab. I miss the smell of piñon smoke and the mud, dust and sage surrounding my family’s home in New Mexico, and the round mountain faint and present like a moon visible in the afternoon, and even the dry air that cracks my skin. But life at this age is a balancing act and a series of choices, and I’m moving to Chicago at the end of the summer.
“The two-body problem is impossible,” nodded a friend back in Boston when I told her my boyfriend, already long-distance, had accepted a job in the Midwest. He’s from the Bronx, I’m from the West, and we both owe our mothers to come back someday. In between we have our separate ambitions and obligations. Right now, my vocation is flexible; my long path leads home but I’ll bend it for a while in a direction we can share. When the stakes are higher for me, and lower for him, he’ll do the same. We adopt what we can of each other’s hopes, and give up the ones we can spare.
Maybe it’s not the two-body problem, but the one-body problem that haunts us: every person alive has just one body, with an internal compass whose needle swings variably to point to home or companionship or duty or something else, and one limited life.
“But, love, I’ll concede this:” Limón finishes,

whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird,
the loud, obvious blur of song people point to
when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.
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Natasha Balwit

The Language of Apology in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas

Ada Limón’s ‘State Bird’ and the Two-Body Problem