The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir by Linda Hogan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2 6 7 alienation may for Kittredge be an essential element in any honest account of experience, it need not, and indeed must not, mark the end of the human story. Instead, he imagines a new set of stories that will give voice to the gen­ erosity that has always been as much a part of our genetic makeup as greed. For Kittredge, “The yearnings built into our DNA, which evolved in wilderness, are for us the imperishable world” (244). Tapping this “imperishable world” reminds us that we continue to inhabit a commons we share with all of nature. “Citizens using a commons,” he affirms, “can always reinvent their stories— for the common good, or otherwise, unfortunately” (237). Kittredge then closes his book on a note of qualified optimism: “We must relearn the arts of gen­ erosity,” he writes on his final page. “Generosity is the endless project” (276). By asking his readers to join him in creating stories that he needs as much as they do, Kittredge strives to present even the most intensely personal interludes from his own life not as isolated particulars but as stages in an ongoing dance. That we leave the book with the sense that the next step is ours demonstrates the extent that Kittredge has drawn us into the imperishable world of the commons. The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir. By Linda Hogan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 207 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Stephen Tatum University of Utah, Salt Lake City The title of Linda Hogan’s powerful memoir refers to a clay woman folkart figure she purchased in a museum gift shop during a trip to Mexico, a black­ haired bruja with a dress of stars who flies above a pumpkin colored globe, attached to it by her stomach. When this modeled “flying soothsayer” finally arrives in the mail, she discovers it has been broken in several places (17). Although she repairs it, over the succeeding months it keeps cracking or falling apart— no matter how much glue and care she devotes to it. For Hogan, the broken form of “the woman who watches over the world” figure allegorizes not only the personal and tribal history of pain and fragmentation which she richly recounts in these pages, but also that “something between us and earth [which] has broken” (18). For Hogan, as her inclusive “us” here suggests, our shared human fate as “broken” people who inhabit a “similarly broken world” is to search restlessly for “a sense of meaning and relationship” (14). This searching is made more difficult because we are “lost” from “the old ways and intelli­ gences,” by which Hogan means both “the private landscape inside a human spirit” and, to quote from her previous nonfiction collection Dwellings (1995), “the terrestrial intelligence that lies beyond our knowing and grasping” (14, 11). Having strayed from our original covenants with the land and its animals, and having for the most part lost an embodied or corporeal sense of spirituality, the problem is that there are now no certain roads, paths, maps, caims, or directions 2 6 8 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMMER 2 0 0 2 by which those who have survived can guide others in their restless search for right being and dwelling in the world, which for Hogan will always involve, as we see in this memoir as well as in Dwellings, a recovery of mythopoetic think­ ing or “sacred reason.” Still, Hogan suggests, one way to begin the reparative process for an individual, a family, and a culture is through the “field of healing” that the work of memory and storytelling can produce (15). In the eleven essays that make up this memoir, Hogan interweaves memo­ ries of her past and her family with the larger history of the Chickasaw people, various world mythological stories (particularly those treating human emer­ gence), brief reflections on writers and philosophers (e.g., Charles Eastman, Gaston Bachelard), and stories about places and animals. An overarching motif of searching (for a mother, for the truths of American history, for health) is grounded— as those familiar with Hogan’s other writing will readily notice— by images of...