Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures

7. “Keep Wide Awake in the Eyes”: Seeing Eyes in Wendy Rose's Poetry

kathryn napier gray “Keep Wide Awake in the Eyes” Seeing Eyes in Wendy Rose’s Poetry In her most recent collection of poems, Itch Like Crazy, Wendy Rose imagines a fleeting connection over space and time with her European great-great-grandfather: “Andrew MacInnes, You Look West Just at the Moment I Look East” (43–44). This title grasps the ambiguity and ambivalence of the line of vision between Rose and MacInnes, and we are left to consider the possibility that they are, at once, looking at and beyond each other. In the three MacInnes poems, and in the other ancestral portraits included in this collection, which take the form of photographs and poems, Rose uses ambiguous eye contact, momentary glances, and lines of vision in an attempt to engage with a European lineage. Previously, Rose has used the analogy of seeing to consider the potential and limits of her American Indian heritage: I have not been exposed to oral traditions and this has been a big gap in my upbringing. It’s like growing up with bad eyesight and being given glasses as an adult. You missed a lot and you’re aware of it, and this has something to do with how you interpret the new, sharp world around you, but you can never go back and re-grow your life with good eyes. You can see, finally, but your interpretation of what you see will always be influenced by the years you didn’t see clearly.1 Only recently, in Itch Like Crazy, has Rose employed this analogy of looking and seeing to help her engage with her European heritage, and in this essay I initially focus on the ways in which Rose constructs lines 7 130 “Keep Wide Awake in the Eyes” of vision with her European ancestors across geographical and historical limits. Following this, I trace alternative ways of seeing and looking in Rose’s earlier work by interrogating the ways in which prevailing ideologies from anthropological and museological contexts, as well as sites of cultural performance, are met and challenged by an altogether different seeing eye/I. The central concern of this study, therefore, is to track the poetic I/eye across continents and time to reveal the strikingly consistent nature of Rose’s poetry as she embraces European, Native American, and transnational experiences of violence, trauma, and recovery . In an interview with Carol Hunter in 1983, Rose defines her mixed heritage along paternal and maternal divisions. Rose’s father is Hopi, and her mother is part Miwok, part Scots, Irish, and German: “When I think of my father’s people, I think of living, breathing, working, surviving , strong people in the face of whom I am weak. When I think of my mother’s people, I think of confusion, tragedy, death, fragmentation , bones, and things that are gone forever. I look back at my mother ’s heritage, and forward at my father’s” (83). Certainly, the majority of Rose’s poetry to date has focused on Native American heritage and experiences, and this remains a continual source of influence. To a lesser degree, perhaps, Rose also acknowledges a Western, European heritage. In interviews and autobiographical essays she describes her Catholic upbringing, for example, and in “Neon Scars,” specifically, she describes her search for the MacInnes clan tartan at the Frensco Highland Games. From this experience Rose concludes: “This is not the heritage I would have picked–-to be the daughter of the invaders. It is not where my sympathies lie. Searching the grounds, I found my clan” (258). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has taken Rose some time to fully engage with her European lineage in her poetry, but in Itch Like Crazy Rose finally does “look back” at her European heritage and begins to engage with the conflict implicit in the fact that “the colonizer and colonized meet in my blood” (“Neon Scars” 258). The opening two poems of Itch Like Crazy characterize the experience of the colonizers and the colonized, European travelers and American kathryn napier gray 131 Indians; like MacInnes and Rose, one group looks west, while the other group looks east. “Imagine it like this” traces the haunting and difficult journey of early colonial travelers from Europe who “faced the cold wind” and sailed west (3); the ships are spotted on a distant horizon in a companion poem, “It happened that we were...