Hi.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Layli Long Soldier's collection "Whereas"
opens with an epigraph.
No word has any special hierarchy over any other."
Growing up in a Miwok family, the sentiment was new to me.
Our language was only used when English came up short.
I held both languages, but they were not equal.
There was a tugging, a jerking, the sense
of being knocked off kilter.
I saw this struggle and successful navigation
reflected in "Whereas."
As I moved through the book, a new balance was found.
In this way, I better felt my languages weight.
Long Soldier's use of the page caught me, the tumbling,
the crossed out, the erased, the succinct, the subsumed.
In this way, "Whereas" speaks to the [INAUDIBLE] [? peeving ?]
sense of the unfamiliar.
We are forced into a precarity, a vulnerable state
of disconnected distance between communication, between words
and the actions which have been promised to follow.
Long Soldier shows us that to live alongside precarity
requires more than railing at those who forced us
onto these ledges, though I must admit, that seems useful too,
and I would never argue against it.
Precision in the face of precarity
is what makes this collection of poetry an honor to read.
In one poem, the speaker states, "I
want to be correct in my languageness."
This care, this devotion to respecting
the heft of the written, spoken, sung word
reminds us language does not always
have to be hollow or legally evasive, evasively legal.
Instead, Long Soldier has us knock against it,
has us consider the solid presence reverberating
against our momentum, and so we have
been given a chance to witness, to participate, to jump out
of the circle and find our own bond to language
so that we may jump back in once again, taking all
that we have learned with us.
Thanks.