Seeds of Change: Critical Essays on Barbara Kingsolver

The White Imagination at Work in Pigs in Heaven

The White Imagination at Work in Pigs in Heaven Jeanne Sokolowski Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently quiet or perpetuating ruthless violence. —Harold Fromm While I started out to learn about Indians, I ended up preoccupied with a problem of my own. —Jane Tompkins hough Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998) is the one work in her oeuvre that critics and reviewers recognize as overtly postcolonial, Kingsolver’s interest in internal colonization dates back to her novel Pigs in Heaven (1993). Postcolonial critic Jenny Sharpe has written abouttheintersectionofpostcolonialstudiesandglobalmulticulturalism , noting how the multiculturalism of the 1960s and1970sdrewuponthe“anticolonialwritingsofThirdWorld liberation movements to suggest . . . the disenfranchisement of racial minorities” as a mode of contemporary colonization (114). This “internal colonization” model allowed minorities to separate the experience of European immigrants from slaves and the conquered (114). The critical investigation into modes of neocolonialism reflects the persistence of colonial attitudes and policies. However, as scholars such as Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark and Anne Anlin Cheng in The Melancholy of Race remind us, the impact of racism, colonialism, and imperialism is perpetuated not only in the psyches of their victims but also in the ongoing guilt of the oppressors. Morrison’s proposition for examining the Africanist presence in the writing of white authors involves “avert[ing] the critical gaze from the racial object to the T Jeanne Sokolowski 158 racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers ” (90); this redirection also characterizes my strategy for approaching Kingsolver’s representation of Native American characters. Kingsolver’s novel Pigs in Heaven demonstrates how educated Anglo writers and thinkers struggle with the legacy of colonialism, racism, and prejudice in the United States.TheproblemPigsinHeavenaddressesishowtoproceedinanationpermeated with these memories and, in the eyes of many Native Americans, including novelist and critic Louis Owens, still engaged in a colonialist project. As Owens states in his essay, “As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory,” America never became postcolonial ; even today, he writes, the “indigenous inhabitants of North American can stand anywhere on the continent and look in every direction at a home usurped and colonized by strangers” (14–15). Kingsolver’s novel deals withtheadoptionofNativeAmericanchildrenoutsideofthetribe,apractice that elicits from some accusations of neocolonialism and that underscores the difficulty of forging a collective future that neither punishes white Americans for the sins of their fathers nor deepens the gulf between ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Kingsolver enters this difficult territory in which she challenges herself, and her readers, to imagine the future of whiteNative relations. For Euro-American authors, the choice between keeping quiet or perpetuating the problem, to paraphrase Harold Fromm, can fail to satisfy; Kingsolver’s choice to confront this aspect of life in America deserves recognition as an honest attempt at coming to terms with American history. By approaching the question of how the white imagination functions in Pigs in Heaven, I am suggesting that Kingsolver’s fictional treatment of cross-racial adoption evokes the American government’s treatment of Native people and demonstrates how the colonial experience in the American context continues to affect those who were colonized while also influencing the colonizer, tracing the colonial legacy to its contemporary manifestations .1 The plot of the novel is this: Taylor Greer takes her adopted Cherokee daughter, Turtle, to Hoover Dam, where Turtle alerts her mother that she has seen a man (the mentally disabled Lucky Buster) fall into the spillway. He is rescued and Turtle’s role wins her a spot on the Oprah Winfrey show, where the mother-daughter duo are spotted by Cherokee lawyer Annawake Fourkiller, who suspects that the adoption was not on the up-and-up. Fourkiller, particularly sensitive to the issue of external adoption of Indian children because of the fate of her twin brother, Gabriel, tracks down Taylor 159 The White Imagination in Pigs in Heaven and confronts her. Taylor responds by taking Turtle and fleeing Arizona, leaving her boyfriend, Jax, behind. Meanwhile, Taylor’s mother, Alice, is having problems of her own: upon hearing of Taylor’s plight, she finds this a good excuse to leave her TV-obsessed husband, Harlan, and joins Taylor and Turtle on the road. When Alice finally learns more about Annawake Fourkiller’s position on adoption and her history of loss, she decides to journey to Cherokee country in Oklahoma, reuniting while there with her cousin, Sugar, who has married into the tribe. In the meantime...