Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics

4: Performance, the Individual, and Feelingful Iconicity

122 Introduction In the previous chapters, I have focused largely on poetic devices in Navajo and on the representation of language in such poetry. In this chapter, I turn to an analysis of how Navajo poets actually perform their poetry before audiences. I am concerned with how Laura Tohe, a Navajo poet, connects both to audiences and her own past through the feelingful attachments evoked through and by her performances. I am interested in understanding and analyzing the role of the individual and the individual articulation of a life story in Navajo poetry performances. In particular , I focus on three performances of the putatively same poem, “Cat or Stomp,” by Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem. The other two are oral performances that I recorded. I argue that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the relationship between linguistic and narrative constructions of self and identity within the constraints and opportunities particular mediums and contexts provide. I will also discuss the attachments that people (poets) bring to bear on aesthetic practices, what David Samuels (2004b:11) has insightfully termed, “feelingful iconicity.” Instead of focusing on a unified Navajo style, I want to engage the individual performers and performances and the ways such performances reverberate through Navajo ethnopoetics. It is in looking at individual performances that I believe we can better understand Navajo discursive practices, the locus of which is the individual (see Sapir 1927, 1938; Friedrich 1986, 2006; Johnstone 1996, 2000; Sherzer 1987). FOUR Performance, the Individual, and Feelingful Iconicity Poetry is performance. Laura Tohe, interview with author performance, the IndIvIdual, and feelIngful IconIcIty 123 Recently, Deborah House (2002) has attempted to examine “narratives of Navajoness.” Yet her analysis of them is often superficial with respect to their poetic details. This chapter and later chapters, by contrast, take a discourse-centered approach to these performances (Sherzer 1987, Urban 1991). In so doing, I look at several key discursive features employed by Tohe in her performances of “Cat or Stomp.” I pay particular attention to Tohe’s shift from using “Diné” in the written version and “Navajo” in the oral versions. By focusing on such a narrow alternation and the framework in which it occurs, I hope to call into relief the relationship between the individual performer and the context of performance (Brenneis and Duranti 1986, Bauman 2004; Bauman and Briggs 1990). I show what careful attention to the poetics of these performances can and do suggest about the actual real-time production of “narratives of Navajoness .” I intend to establish “narratives of Navajoness” not as abstractions but, rather, as on-the-ground discursive productions. Following on the work of Sapir (1921), Hymes (1981), Friedrich (1986), Sherzer (1987), and Barbara Johnstone (1996), I also argue for understanding language and the performance of poetry as an aesthetic practice locatable within individuals. I look then at language as artistic and creative (see Johnstone 1996:180–181). Language is produced and circulated, creatively and artistically, by individuals, individuals who are often—but not always (see Silverstein 1981)—attuned to their language production. Navajo poets, as poets, are self-consciously aware of their poetic productions and of language as artistic and creative. In focusing then on the felt connections to language, the performances and contexts of the use of language through poetry to tell “a story,” and on the individual artistry of the performer in the creation of that story, I hope to show how “narratives of Navajoness” are actually produced and circulated. Feelingful Iconicity and Apachean Poetics Focus on the individual has been a hallmark of some of the more sensitive research on Apachean poetics (Basso 1996; Samuels 2004b). Here I draw attention to the work of Basso (1996) on Western Apache placenaming practices and of Samuels (2004b) on Western Apache musical 124 chapter four practices. Basso (1996) shows how Western Apaches can use place names to evoke and circulate a “moral landscape.” The place names connect to specific narratives that allow Apaches to focus both on the words of the ancestors who named the location, but also the events that happened at places and the moral ramifications of those events on their own lives. Central to Basso is how an individual’s life history is implicated in the use of such place names. Another feature is the feelingful evocation of language through place names. More recently, Samuels (2004b) has shown how the...