"Like melody or witchcraft": Empowerment through Literature

I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?

Emily Dickinson

[I]t is not so easy. There are no roads through, no paths known, no maps or directions... Who knows where to step, how to find wholeness? It's not that we have lost the old ways and intelligences, but that we are lost from them... all the elements of ourselves and our world are more than can be held in words alone; there is something else beyond our knowing.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw)

I love these quotes from two of my favorite poets, in large part because the two women seem engaged in a dialogue that crosses time, space, and cultural distances.¹ Dickinson asks the student's eternally anxious question; Hogan replies with the teacher's eternally unsatisfying "answer." I am often on both sides of this conversation—sometimes on the same day, in the same hour. I understand Emily Dickinson's desire to grow—to open, to receive, to accept, to actively integrate, to begin to construct originality—as well as her fear that creative growth may be something that is not teachable, not "conveyable" from one person to another. Like my students, I sometimes worry that learning to make song (poetry)—like witchcraft!—may be something selectively innate, inborn, genetic even, possibly mutated, something bred in, or out. Even though I want answers, I also understand Linda Hogan's caution that some kinds of knowledge, some forms of information or direction, cannot be captured in words or taught using words—even, if we are blessed enough to still speak them, the most sacred words of our native language. There is a knowing that cannot be held in words alone—like melody or witchcraft. Are there some things we cannot teach? Or, to put it another way: Are there things we cannot learn? There are times when it feels like that—not only with "normal" topics like math or composition, but keenly felt abstracts like racism, oppression, justice. As a female, queer writer of color, I want to argue that intangibles like "melody or witchcraft" (interesting choices, Emily!), or as Hogan calls them, intelligences, are in fact inherent in all of us, perhaps just deeply hidden or needing the right language to be brought out. Literature—poetry, fiction, narrative nonfiction, personal essay, mixed genre, and bent boundaries—is that language for me? Maybe melody cannot be "carried" or "conveyed" from one being to another—just scooped up like a sack of flour and given to someone else—because that knowing is, somehow, already within. In the passage quoted above, Hogan goes on to say that "they [the old ways] are always here, patient, waiting for our return to their beauty, their integrity, their reverence for life."² What if these knowledges, always here, can be evoked from one being to another—in a moment of resonance?

When tuning a drum, you lean down with your face right over the drumhead and hum the note you want the drum to hold, while adjusting the sinews on the back of the drum that tighten or loosen the drumhead accordingly. I learned this not as a young Indian girl in traditional training but as a junior high student who bucked her counselor's advice to take typing or accounting and followed, instead, a powerful yearning toward tympani and snare (where tradition is lacking, perhaps the body remembers). I have since discovered that it is the same for any drum, though, whether symphonic or Native, machine or handmade. Tuning a drum is a whole-body effort—foot, leg, diaphragm, lungs, breath, lips, hands—because you must stand with your feet firmly planted, knees bent a little to keep the body's energy open, humming and simultaneously tapping the drumhead with a stick or finger. And as you hum out into the drum, tap the drumhead, and...