In Buffalo Girl, one of the names for hunger is grief. Contending with loss of familial history, the placement of one’s self within a familial landscape, and the lack of available memory is a trauma unlike any other. Cyclical grief allows one to move beyond a subject, sure, with the implicit understanding that the subject will be revisited. Richard Gross writes in The Psychology of Grief:
The DPM [Dual Process Model] depicts grieving as a cyclical rather than linear and stagelike process, with the mourner repeatedly revisiting the loss and its associated emotions, striving to reorganize the relationship to the deceased, and taking on new roles and responsibilities necessitated by a changed world.
In this way, the through-line of Red Riding Hood, the wolf, and the constant invocation of inviting danger only to deny it is genius. Stark crafts the cycle of mourning through complicating, altering, and changing this core myth while the poems of Buffalo Girl continue to confound within the available artifacts of this family’s paradoxically distant-intimacy.
Ongoing during the time of writing this is a genocidal campaign against Palestinians, unending terrors afflicted to Sudanese and Congolese, and millions more individuals who all have names and eradicated families who will all someday be asking questions like who am I? who am I in relation to you? where do I belong? what happened to my family? what were my grandparents like? what did my cousin look like when they were my age? do I have cousins still alive? I hope that literature is available to them then as they have already used literature to document the crimes against their humanity. May we all live a life doing as much as we can to help those mend such immense suffering.
