In this Book
- Bone Light
- Book
- 2009
- Published by: Red Hen Press
summary
In Bone Light, Orlando White's debut volume, he explores the English language from a Diné (Navajo) perspective. He invites us to imagine that we, as a people—all people in this imaginary country called the United States—are speaking an Indigenous language and that the English language exists merely as a remnant of the colonial past.
Despite its tenuous existence in this re-imagined present, English remains a danger to Indigenous thought, as it threatens to impose an alien worldview through its vocabulary and syntactical maneuvers. Historically, English was used by non-Natives to document Indigenous cultures; against this historical backdrop, White also writes to document, but he works to create something more beautiful than harmful. He does not attempt a critique of the English language; he works with it and against it to gain a better understanding of its peculiarities and limits, creating a relationship through these sometimes humorous, sometimes irreverent acts of exploration.
Throughout Bone Light, Orlando White approaches the English language as if he has just encountered it, as if it were a mysterious set of symbols. Focusing on the particles of the language, the punctuation marks, the letters, the spaces between words, he turns them a while in his hand like strange inexplicable artifacts from a lost world, then sets to work, refashioning them into something he can use.
Table of Contents
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- To See Letters
- pp. 13-14
- The i is a Cricket
- pp. 16-17
- Bone Light
- pp. 18-19
- Fill in the Blank
- pp. 20-21
- Ats’íísts’in
- p. 22
- Light Bulb Eye
- p. 23
- Circle Shape
- p. 25
- Bleach Ink
- p. 27
- Human Clock
- pp. 28-29
- From Skin to Bone
- pp. 30-31
- Blank Circle
- pp. 32-33
- On the Zero’s Eye
- p. 34
- Skin of a Letter
- p. 35
- Square Lips
- pp. 38-39
- Imperative
- pp. 40-42
- Images of Myself
- p. 43
- Blank Skull
- p. 46
- Lower Case i and j
- pp. 48-49
- i Without j
- p. 50
- i Next to j
- p. 51
- Ars Poetica
- pp. 54-55
- Meditation
- p. 59
Additional Information
ISBN
9781597093781
Related ISBN(s)
9781597091350
MARC Record
OCLC
867795093
Pages
64
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No