Telling Our Daughters

There is a certain power that is compelling in the narrative of a storyteller simply because the spoken word is so immediate and intimate. It was the desire to translate that power into printed words that led me to write A Good Journey.

Simon Ortiz, preface, A Good Journey

"To Insure Survival," which is often published as a freestanding poem, was also published in A Good Journey as the final movement of a much longer narrative, "Notes For My Child" (54-59). The first part of this longer narrative records the interior monologue of a father-to-be, beginning in the early morning of July 5, 1973, and moving through the taxi drive, the admissions procedure, the waiting room, and eventually to the birth of a daughter. Around the same time Simon Ortiz was writing this poem in celebration of the birth of his daughter Rainy Dawn, my own first daughter, Erin Carlisle, was born. But because it was 1976 and a C-section delivery, I wasn't present in the delivery room to welcome her into her new life. Even if I had been there I suspect I wouldn't have known what to do, what to say.

About a decade later, in 1987, on a whim I applied to, and was unaccountably selected to participate in, an eight-week NEH Summer Seminar on American Indian Verbal Art and Literature. Near the end of the seminar the director, Larry Evers, passed around a sheet of paper containing the names of a dozen important Native American poets, and each seminar participant selected one of those poets for a half-hour presentation. Since I was indisputably the most ignorant of all the seminar participants (having read only two Native American novels and a driblet of poetry prior to the seminar), I had absolutely no basis for selecting one poet over another, and so I simply accepted the one left for me: Simon Ortiz.

Later that week I read A Good Journey from cover to cover, mesmerized by the motion of the language but unsure what I could possibly say about this work that would matter to my colleagues. As a fellow father, I finally homed in on his poems about his children, in particular his birthday song to his daughter in "To Insure Survival." The poem seemed to me to be the very form of my own unsaid, unarticulated feelings about my own first daughter's birth, some of my own unfinished business. Had I been witness, I thought, would that I were moved to such words.

About a decade later, in 1996, I watched my second daughter emerge into the world of air and light. It was a terrifying moment: she came forth, howling, first a pale blue (I thought, Good lord, a Pict!) and then, suddenly and with no perceptible period of transition, bright red (I thought, Good lord, whose child IS this?), and eventually, after I cut the umbilical chord and she had buried herself in her mother's chest, she transformed into the pale complexion she wears to this day. Watching my daughter come forth triggered a sudden and certain memory of the opening lines of Simon's poem, in which his narrator describes the transformation of colors of his own daughter during her birth, changing from "blue, to red, / to all the colors of the earth" (58). So I wrote to Simon, asking his permission to use those lines as part of my own daughter's birth announcement, and of course he said yes.

Then, as now, I read "To Insure Survival" as a dramatic monologue that is part emergence story, part introduction to Acoma traditions, part survival lesson, part prayer, and all love song. In stanza 1, cast in the present tense, Ortiz's narrator insures that the first story his child ever hears is the old story of the People's, and every new person's, natural identity with the land. In this case, the narrator fuses the image of enduring rock with the name of the newborn child, Rainy Dawn, by comparing her emergence to

a stone cliff at dawn...