[As I’ve detailed at
length here and elsewhere,
to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m
proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and
celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and
Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous
Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring
individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other
perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On two very distinct but equally
cross-cultural late 19th century literary works.
William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is
probably one of the most controversial, and definitely in many quarters one of
the most reviled, novels of the last fifty years. The most obvious and
certainly one of the most central reasons for the
attacks which the book has received from African American writers and
historians and scholars (among other critics) is that Styron focuses the
psychology and passion of his fictionalized Nat Turner on a teenage white girl,
ignoring potential (if ambiguous and uncertain) evidence for a slave wife of
Turner’s and greatly extrapolating this relationship with the white girl from a
few minor pieces of evidence in the historical record. Yet having read at
length the critiques on Styron, including those captured in a book entitled Ten Black Writers Respond, I have to
say that an equally central underlying reason for the impassioned attacks on
the book is the simple fact that Styron, a white novelist (and a Southerner to
boot), had written a novel in the first-person narrative voice of this complex
and prominent African American historical figure.
The issue there is partly one of authenticity,
of who does and does not have the ability to speak for a particular community
and culture. To me, while there may well be specific reasons to critique
Styron’s choices and efforts in this novel, on that broader issue I believe
that one of, if not the, central goal of all fiction should be to help readers
connect to and engage with identities and experiences and communities and
worlds; seen in that light, Styron’s novel is, at least in its goals, hugely
ambitious and impressive. But it pales (no pun intended) in comparison with a
similar, entirely forgotten novel from nearly a century prior: William Justin
Harsha’s Ploughed Under: The Story of an Indian
Chief, Told by Himself (1881). Harsha, the son of a prominent preacher
and pro-Indian activist and himself an impassioned advocate of Native American
rights, published this novel anonymously, and since it is narrated (as the subtaitle
suggests) in the first-person voice of a Native American chief, his project
represents an even more striking attempt to speak from and for an identity and
culture distinct from the author’s own. The novel is long and far from a masterpiece—it
features in a prominent role one of the least compelling love triangles I’ve
ever encountered—but in this most foundational stylistic and formal (and
thematic and political) choice of Harsha’s, it is to my mind one of American
literature’s most unique and amazing efforts.
And yet was it necessary? Just a
few years later, Paiute chief and leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins would publish
her Life Among The Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims
(1886), a work of autoethnography and history and political polemic that, like
all of Winnemucca’s life and work, makes clear just how fully Native American
authors and activists and leaders could and did speak for themselves in this
period (as they had for centuries, but with far greater opportunities to
publish and disseminate broadly those voices than at any earlier point).
Winnemucca, like the
Ponca chief Standing Bear whose lecture tour inspired Helen
Hunt Jackson’s conversion to activism and like numerous other Native
American leaders (including Inshta
Theamba, also known as “Bright Eyes,” who wrote the introduction to
Harsha’s novel), spoke and worked tirelessly for her tribe and for Native
American rights more generally, and her book illustrates just how eloquent and
impressive her voice was in service of those causes. Although her individual and
cultural identities became, in both her life and the text, quite complicated as
a result of her experiences as a translator and mediator between her tribe and
the US army and government—complexities that are the focus of the Winnemucca
chapter in my
second book—such complications are, if anything, a further argument for the
value of hearing and reading her own voice, rather than trying to access it
through intermediaries or fictional representations.
Everyone should, indeed, read
Winnemucca’s book, and if we had to choose one Native American-focused text
from the decade to cement in our national narratives, I’d go with hers without
hesitation. But we don’t, and we don’t even necessarily have to decide whether
her voice is more authentic than Harsha’s narrator’s, or Jackson’s Ramona’s
and Alessandro’s, or Theamba’s. There may be some value in that question,
but to me the far greater value is in reading and hearing as many voices as we
can, from this period and on these issues and in every other period and frame,
to give us the most authentic understanding of the whole complex mosaic of
American identity. Next nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts, responses, or other
Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?
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