Griever: An American Monkey King in China by Gerald Vizenor (review)

160 Western American Literature Griever: An American Monkey King in China. By Gerald Vizenor. (Normal: Illinois State University, and Brooklyn: Fiction Collective, 1987. 238 pages, $8.95.) Reading Gerald Vizenor one begins to feel the fun of ambivalence. In Earthdivers, his finest book, Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, and now Griever, Vizenor specializes in the difference between what appears to be and what is; he persists in pointing out that the world is not what we see, nor does it have to be left the way we find it. If authority isout for its own good—as it often is— authority should be tickled into laughing at itself. If we are confused by his work, our mistake is that we bring our own cultural assumptions about the truth of the established order into Vizenor’s world. But Vizenor will not limit himself to our imaginations. His earthdivers, frantic contemporary trickster figures, simply re-imagine the world. They turn established orders inside out and deconstruct foundations. His Griever is an earthdiver who seeks liberation by dismantling the established order of the Republic of China. Even though Griever isn’t entirely successful, he isnot defeated. Ashe puts it: “We were lost and asked [the Chinese] to make a map in their heads to tell us where they were so we could find out where we were. They know where they are, but we are in the air.” And that isthe joy of Vizenor’swork. The important thing is not to subdue the people who think they know where they are, but to keep them off balance by not taking them as seriously as they take themselves. Griever will not be overcome by reality, but will stay up in the air away from the foundations, savoring delicious ironies where nothing is sacred. All who would not be defeated can take heart from Vizenor, the work and the man. A blue-eyed Chippewa mixedblood, a tribal person with a strong belief in his own individualism, he knows that the ultimate truth may be made up of so many conflicting truths that the ultimate truth may indeed be false. But that of course is not a reason to keep from believing. His message is simple: “Imagination liberates the mind.” DEXTER WESTRUM Ottawa University Heart of a Western Woman. By Leslie Leek Durham. (Pocatello: Blue Scarab Press, 1986. 72 pages, $8.00.) Leslie Durham’s characters are all women, depicted in varied stages of personal emancipation from the bonds of a destructive and stifling patriarchal tradition. Spiritual and psychic independence begin where roads end. Kinship with wilderness, from its broadest expanse to its finer details, is seen as the only way for women to find themselves as individuals and continue to survive. The ...