Indios by Linda Hogan (review)

Linda Hogan is a Native American poet. She is also a master story-teller, playwright, novelist and an environmentalist. Her book Indios is an expression of all these traits compressed together, which gives the reader a novel experience. Is it a long dramatic monologue, written in blank verse? Is it a novella with such meaningful gaps that the reader becomes the author, and through imagination is able to create for herself the long painful story of the indigenous tribes of America? Or is it the voice of the environmentalist who, with a deep urgency, appeals to the ‘civilized’ colonizer not to destroy nature and the indigenous knowledge system of a tribe that had, till then, taken care of both man and nature?

Hogan dedicates her book to all aboriginal women who, she is sure, know the story of the captive woman accused of killing her children. This story resonates with the echo of the Greek mythological story of Medea as told by Euripides. Yet it is Hogan’s own individual creation because she has successfully distilled an old local story through the famous Medea myth, and thus has made its appeal universal. She does not stop here. Rather, she subverts the story of Euripides and saves Medea and the captivated aboriginal woman from a false stigma.

Indios is a dramatic monologue – the stage being the prison cell and the prisoner speaking to a journalist named Clare Finley. The style is as successful as that of Browning, but while Browning stuck to the English Romantic twilight of the Victorian era, Hogan’s voice echoes round the world wherever colonization has affected and almost erased the identities of the indigenous inhabitants. She successfully includes the interviewer’s reaction in the story of Indios in an indirect manner. When Indios says – “Life hasn’t hardened me here” (3) the reader imagines the face of the interviewer awestruck by the still lingering beauty of the prisoner. Like Medea, Indios too is an exceptional woman. She would not plead for innocence. She has indeed committed murder, but she has not killed her children.

At this point we hear the voice of Indios subverting the famous Medea myth retold by Euripides, which of course is patriarchal in tone. In Euripides, Medea is the enchantress who kills her children. The story of Indios also reverberates with other local myths like that of a legendary Hispanic beauty who marries a ranchero and kills her own children, or the myth of Pocahontas, the Virginia Indian who saved and married a captive named John Smith and then converted to Christianity.

Levis Strauss showed how myths of different countries are enjoined by expressing the elementary structures of the human mind. All the above mentioned myths reveal woman as the betrayer who leaves her own people to marry an outsider. She falls outside the category of the normal, for she is an enchantress and even capable of killing her own children or refusing to return to her own tribe. When the symbolic discourse of a myth turns to rational discourse in the form of written words, its dynamism is marred by the hegemonic ideology of the society of which the writer is a member. In the western patriarchal paradigm, it is the story of the deviant woman. But Hogan’s writing subverts this tendency and shows how, in all these myths, the women are destroyed because of their love for their husbands and their children. Indios is a tragedy turned inside out. It is the strong and tragic woman’s voice that holds center stage, a reversal of her role in world famous tragedies where women remain as shadows to the male counterparts dramatizing their fall.

Hogan’s use of myth helps her transcend the single voice. The single voice of Indios merges with all the voices of Native Americans, especially the women. As the colonizer is attracted to the gold mines, she too is innocently attracted to the ‘golden man,’ i.e. the white skinned male. This is her flaw. To the colonizer she is exotic, but at the same...