This section goes on to enact the journey of mother and daughter toward recovering language: “I listen as I reach my eyes into my hands onto my lap, my lap as the quiet page I hold my daughter in....” Long Soldier’s attempt to recover her mother tongue and the sense of belonging that should come with its return is neither simple nor easy.
“Waĥpániĉa” both explores and tries to unpack a Lakota word the poet is striving to understand, with the poem becoming another variation on compositional resistance in which Long Soldier draws attention to the syntax of emptiness/spiritual poverty/absence via the creation of the poem:
The occasion for writing the poem is absence, in this case her husband’s, and the poet discovers that despite the gulf between herself and true inhabitation of her native tongue, the act of writing poetry is an act of community-building: “When I write comma I come closer to people I want to know comma to the language I want to speak.”
Coming closer to the people the poet needs to know involves recovering ancestors, specifically those for whom there was no justice. In “38,” the subject is the thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln. “To date,” Long Soldier writes, “this is the largest ‘legal’ mass execution in US history.” “38” disavows the inclusion of poetic language, and any hint of lyricism, as if unadorned statement alone can begin to approach (but certainly not contain) what happened or what needs to be understood:
This means they were exiled....
When the Dakota people were starving, as you may
remember, government traders would not extend store
credit to “Indians.”
One trader named Andrew Myrick is famous for his refusal
to provide credit to Dakota people by saying, “It they
are hungry, let them eat grass.”
When settlers and traders were killed…one of the first to
be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.
When Myrick’s body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.
There’s irony in their poem.
There was no text.
“Real” poems do not “really” require words....
Is there irony in the fact that Layli Long Soldier has written a book of poems in the “foster language of the dominant culture” when the “real poem,” as per her definition here, is action as opposed to written or oral speech? Yes and no. Long Soldier asks us to read Whereas as action that performs an act of violence on the language, the language that is the collection’s medium. With this in mind, the collection and the poet require the reader to be in some sense a co-creator, and at times, a co-destroyer, implicated in a history of ignorance and/or silence.