Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures

8. Anamnesiac Mappings: National Histories and Transnational Healing in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

rebecca tillett Anamnesiac Mappings National Histories and Transnational Healing in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead Generating some notable critical hostility upon its publication in 1991,1 Leslie Marmon Silko’s contentious novel Almanac of the Dead has since been hailed as “a radical, stunning manifesto” that offers a graphic, brutal, and highly political analysis of America and the Americas at the turn of the twenty-first century.2 Confronting the willful amnesia that pervades contemporary U.S. society regarding the history of settlement and of subsequent Anglo-Indian relations, Silko offers an anamnesiac consideration of the trauma of contact and a celebration of the significance of memory in the face of cultural assimilation and of the power of remembrance to heal individuals, communities, and nations. Published to coincide with the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus ’s “discovery,” Almanac is an abrasive indictment of five hundred years of colonialism, inhumanity, and genocide in the Americas, where Silko provocatively claims that “the Indian wars have never ended.”3 Alluding to Karl Marx’s image of Europe haunted by the specter of the oppressed , Silko populates the Americas with the ever-present, inescapable souls of millions of slaughtered indigenous peoples and African slaves, “spirits that never rested and would never stop until justice had been done” (424). By tracing the unavoidable presence of the dead, Almanac exposes the carefully elided history of American settlement, illustrating the direct links between the multiple legacies of that history and U.S. society and social policies at the close of the twentieth century. 8 rebecca tillett 151 Yet Silko’s “America” is truly transnational, refusing accepted “national ” geographies and histories in order to illustrate the complex cultural and colonial relationships within the Americas as a whole and between the “New” World and the Old. To this end Almanac erases all borders: between time and space; between history and geography; between living and dead; between forms of oppression; between nationstates ; between continents. As a result, Silko’s characters are firmly hybrid: transcultural and transnational, they inhabit an inter-national space of possibility. Yet this approach has drawn criticism: while celebrating Silko’s “fearless[s] assert[ion]” within Almanac of “a collective indigenous retrieval of lands stolen through colonization” (89), the Dakota critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has nonetheless been highly critical of Silko’s focus upon multiculturalism and pan-tribalism — that is, the incorporation and inclusion of all, regardless of ethnicity, who would adhere to a worldview that recognizes, celebrates, and respects their fellow humans and the natural world. In this sense Cook-Lynn suggests that Silko’s approach mirrors that of Gerald Vizenor, “the feeling that ‘whoever wants to be tribal can join the tribe’” (85). She maintains that such an approach effectively works against tribal sovereignty; in CookLynn ’s terms, Silko’s focus upon “cosmopolitanism” erases a much needed (and hard fought for) focus upon tribal “nationalism” (78). In many ways her point is highly valid: the battle against persistent and highly prevalent popular understandings of Native Americans as apolitical and ahistorical is ongoing and far from resolved, and concepts of tribal nationalism, indeed perceptions of national tribal consciousness, have been hard-won. I would argue, however, that Cook-Lynn’s is nonetheless too swift and simplistic a dismissal of Silko’s analysis of the transcultural, and of her consideration of the complex ways in which oppressed peoples are interconnected, which ultimately runs the risk of shortsightedness. The call for a more engaged tribal nationalism among Native American fiction writers is an increasingly problematic position to take, given that some of the most tribally oriented, or tribally engaged, writers — for instance , Gerald Vizenor and Wendy Rose, to name but two — are also 152 Anamnesiac Mappings those who are adopting increasingly transcultural and transnational approaches . Ultimately, Cook-Lynn’s dismissal of Silko’s emphasis upon the effects and impact of transcultural oppression fails to recognize the key premise of Almanac: the role and power of the imagination within bothstoryandhistory.Inherassertionoftheprophesied“disappearance of all things European” (Almanac map legend), Silko addresses a particularly insidious form of colonialism: unhealthy and ultimately hostile Euro-American worldviews. Thus, in her essay “Fifth World” she states that “the prophecies do not say that European people themselves will disappear, only their customs” (125). In this sense Silko clearly engages with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s assertion that the decolonization process is not only political or land-based but, crucially...