Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (review)

Marilou Awiakta. SeIu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1993. $19.95. Since the publication of Abiding Appalachia in 1978 and Rising Fawn and the Fire Mystery in 1993, East Tennessee native Marilou Awiakta has been compiling an impressive publication record of poetry and essays. Some of that work forms the nucleus of the three dozen poems and three dozen essays which are interwoven to make SeIu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom. Her name is pronounced "say-loo," and in Cherokee legend SeIu is Grandmother Corn. Her gift to the people, maize, is the gift of herself. She embodies the spirit of giving—self-sacrifice, reverence and respect for life, harmony, and the balance of nature. She is the essence of civilization, for agriculture is its foundation. The complexities which attend civilization, including what we call science and technology, are natural extensions of her gift. But ironically these very gifts can become dangers, threatening the very survival of humanity. To seek the Corn-Mother's wisdom is to seek natural balance, to enable that which is life enhancing not to become life threatening. Marilou Awiakta's book is not just another survival manual or compendium of Native American ecobabble . It has the mystic, metaphorical range of Waiden woven to our contemporary needs. Awiakta describes the book itself as a double-woven basket, an apt description of a work which unites Native American lore, personal narrative, humor, history, poetry, autobiography, politics, science and technology, ecology, gender issues, and philosophy. Such weaving requires patient readers with poetic hearts. Nor can they be passive; they must join in making the book work for them. In section two, "Killing Our Own Seed," Awiakta envisions "children following behind us adults, holding up their baskets. Was this insane and bitter harvest all we'd have to offer them?" The book offers a resounding "No!" As Selu's body was the basket from which the first maize poured, so this book is the basket from which the better harvest is to come. The young must be nurtured, Awiakta says, and the "hand that rocks the cradle" must not be robbed of children, shamed by sexual exploitation, famished by economic deprivation, or denied access to political power. In section three, "When the People Called Earth Mother,'" Awiakta exposes the horrible consequences of reductionist thinking. Life becomes an "it." The family becomes an "it." The sacred self becomes an "it." To call earth "Mother" is to acknowledge life's abundance at all levels. Survival depends on the very words which spring from our hearts. Section four, "Our Courage is Our Memory," is a very personal section. It 61 lacks the fervent urgency of the other chapters, because here Awiakta speaks in the circle of friends. It is an intimate glimpse of the pattern of her own life and work. Here aesthetics and activism unite, a generous model for any who would follow Awiakta's lead. Section five returns to the central message of the book. Here key words in chapter headings are "survival," "memory and wisdom," "balance and healing," "cooperation and harmony." This is Awiakta's pattern for the future, summed up in the concluding story of Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock, whose study of corn genetics resulted in the discovery of how genes "jump." lust when we think we have everything under control, Nature surprises us. Similarly, "all the boxes and labels society forces people into explode in a vision of a great, shining web of peace and creativity," Awiakta says. "The CornMother engenders dreams." And no one is excluded from the dreaming. Men and women, youth and elders—all are included in and empowered by this book. That is its greatest virtue. The very forces which have called this book into being, which make it necessary, are themselves Selu's gift. Ironically, the corn, like the civilization it symbolizes, contains within itself complex forces of destruction and survival. Marilou Awiakta the poet delights in this interplay of paradox and ambiguity. She knows the same basket can both give and receive, must both give and receive if it is to fulfill its purpose. So it is with this basket her book. "I offer you...