Simon Ortiz’s Poetry of Crisis Ordinariness: Spiritual Uncertainty during a Rosebud Reservation Winter

… the gloomy dark, a winter that has entered the spirit. I do not know. / I have never known. / I may never know. … the galaxy shifts / … / and we will never quite know.

—Simon Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning¹

How does Native spirituality feel to a speaker struggling through a bleak Rosebud Reservation winter? “[L]ike sexuality, religion and spirituality also constitute intimate domains of feelings where ‘traumatic events’ are collectively processed and made meaningful, especially in colonial contexts,” Joanna Brooks explains.² Her concern with spiritual experience in a time of trauma is part of a shift within Native religious studies away from theology or abstract beliefs and “towards close analysis of lived practice.”³ This perspective offers a useful standpoint for considering Simon Ortiz’s (Acoma Pueblo) poetry collection After and Before the Lightning. The title is a Lakota phrase referring to the beginning and end of prairie winters.⁴ This poetic account expresses the experience of Native spirituality in a difficult context: the harsh Northern Plains winter, the speaker’s distance from his Southwest home and traditions, the everyday trauma of continuing colonization, and also modern secular culture that questions the possibility of spirituality itself.

The resulting structure of feeling that the poems present is spiritual uncertainty as the speaker struggles to reconcile belief and experience. Reflecting on the life that falls between autumn and spring, Ortiz depicts spiritual liminality as the poems engage the two meanings of the term apprehension: the act of conceptually grasping something but also the feeling of anxiety because of uncertainty. My argument is that spiritual apprehension in the first sense never fully reassures the speaker’s apprehension in the second. In spite of the book’s structure of hope and promise of spring renewal, the speaker’s experiences of spiritual misgivings during a Rosebud Reservation winter are not resolved. After and Before the Lightning is marked by a probing experiential investigation of this spiritual problematic as well as a challenge to generic expectations for a hopeful conclusion. What makes the book’s spiritual journey distinctive is Ortiz’s unflinching and unresolved exploration of the disjuncture between belief and experience and the resulting difficulties in sustaining belief.

The spiritual uncertainty described takes places within a specific historical context. In her essay “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Lauren Berlant uses the term “crisis ordinariness” to describe “traumas of the social that are lived through collectively” and that create “the heightened perceptiveness” of the historical conditions one is living through as a group.⁵ Seldom is anything dramatic reported in After and Before the Lightning, only the day-to-day struggle to make sense of what people, and the speaker himself, are experiencing. The culturally and historically astute quality of Ortiz’s writing creates the heightened perception of everyday spiritual experience that results from “the loss of the freedom to be unconscious about the internal limits to their sovereignty.”⁶ That is, the speaker is forced into a questioning selfconsciousness because the usual framework for apprehending experience can no longer be unconsciously invoked. The resulting necessity of finding new ways of apprehension gives impetus to this poetry of crisis ordinariness. Traditional spiritual assumptions are no longer givens in this uncertain world, even as the speaker strives to reclaim them. Berlant explains, “Amidst the rise and fall of quotidian intensities a situation arises that provokes the need to think and adjust, to slow things down and to gather things up, to find things out and to wonder and ponder. What’s going on?”⁷ This is the key question for this book, its structure of feeling.

This essay’s first main section sets forth the various contexts that shape the spiritual uncertainty the speaker experiences. Each of the sections that follow explores a section of the book. Rather than a pattern of struggle and resolution, the analysis finds themes and variations: efforts to connect quotidian experience to the cosmos, the harsh conditions of everyday life, the problem of making sense of these experiences and conditions, and, again, the...