Image as Text, Text as Image: Quilts and Quiltmaking in Eric Gansworth's Mending Skins

"Piecing" means the sewing together of small fragments of fabric cut into geometric shapes, so that they form a pattern. The design unit is called the block or patch; "patchwork" is the joining of these design units into an overall design. The assembled patches are then attached to a heavy backing with either simple or elaborate stitches in the process called quilting. Thus the process of making a patchwork quilt involves three separate stages of artistic composition, with analogies to language use first on the level of the sentence, then in terms of the structure of a story or novel, and finally the images, motifs, or symbols—the "figure in the carpet"—that unify a fictional work.

Elaine Showalter

"Piecing and Writing"

In The Location of Culture Homi Bhabha writes of "interstices," which he defines as "the overlap and displacement of domains of difference" (2). He suggests that in these spaces "the intersubjective and collective experiences of 'nationness,' community interest or cultural value are negotiated." Various art forms, such as visual art and literature, can be interstices in society which depict a certain overlap of cultures and a "displacement of domains of difference."¹ Bhabha writes, for example, of artist Renée Green and her "'architectural' site-specific" piece in which she presents spaces in a museum as a work of art (3). Green focuses on the attic, which is higher and can be associated with heaven, and on the boiler room, which is lower and can be affiliated with hell. She also includes the stairwell, which becomes an "interstitial passage." Bhabha explains:

The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, become the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.

(4)

In his novel Mending Skins, Eric Gansworth (an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation who grew up in the Tuscarora community in western New York) presents a similar type of cultural hybridity through the interrelationship of visual art and text.² With its emphasis on quilts and quiltmaking, his novel can be associated with Green's stairwell as an interstitial space that mediates binaries such as Native/non-Native, image/text, and oral/written. In this essay I demonstrate how Gansworth negotiates this space by incorporating Native and non-Native influences, image as text and text as image, as well as both oral and Western approaches to writing.

Quilting Themes and Metaphors in Eric Gansworth's Mending Skins

"Seeing" is embedded in the philosophical outlook of many American Indians; to think is to envision a wide variety of relationships. In his book The American Indian Mind in a Linear World, Donald L. Fixico writes that "Indian thinking" is "seeing" from the viewpoint that "all things are related within the universe" (1). He explains that "[s]eeing" involves "visualizing" how certain entities are interrelated not just with one another but within a broader context (2). He also suggests that "[s]eeing" includes "mentally experiencing the relationships between tangible and nontangible things in the world" and in general (3). This concept of envisioning associations is significant in analyzing a novel that includes both literal images and images suggested by words, as in the case of Gansworth's Mending Skins. The patchwork quilt, in particular, is an important image in this literary work in terms of "seeing" a variety of complex relationships.

Throughout the novel Gansworth presents themes of quilts and quiltmaking. The text opens with "A patchwork dedication" (v), it is sectioned into parts and chapters that include names with quilting themes, it incorporates metaphors associated with sewing and quiltmaking, and some of the characters, such as Shirley Mounter, are quilters. In the dedication, Gansworth acknowledges those individuals who have been important in...