Notes on Rose, Saenz, and Abbey

I will give a few comments on each of the writers named above, to supplement our in-class discussion, on which hopefully you already have notes!

Wendy Rose
Rose's poem "Long Division: A Tribal History" reveals the various dimensions of hybridity (a theme that, as the author introduction states, is important to Rose). She integrates a tribal history into a geographical/ecological history and creates an interlocutor, someone non-Native, to whom she declares, "It's our blood that gives you / those southwestern skies" (lines 20-21). She causes us to wonder how political needs and desires shape place. By "shaping place," I mean our perception of it (the "beautiful southwestern skies," so well known to all migrant residents of the southwest as well as to tourists). Her solemn poem indicates that the Native person's life is an integrative, hybrid, but in some senses sacrificial one (she states that Native people's struggles are blood struggles, that they are "harpooned with hope" -- a provocative line, indeed). At the close of the poem, she writes "I suckle coyotes / and grieve" (lines 27-28). She provokes us to ask, who are kin in this place? What constitutes a family? What constitutes a history, a permanance, a future?

Benjamin Alire Saenz
We had a great deal to say about Saenz's short essay in class. We discussed concepts of marginalization in regard to texts and landscapes. If there is a "body," there is typically a "margin." We troubled over the term "exile" and the ways in which the permanence of physical markers, monumental landmarks like mountains, for example, can alternately soothe a person and create a sense of belonging or can remind one of one's distance from the "body" and the reality of one's marginal status, one's exile. In class we theorized that "exile is a place where no one knows you." This place-ification of exile itself is profound, I think. We considered ideas of "borderlands" and we learned a great deal from students in our class about life in a borderland zone and the effects (on self, on family) of the physical and geopolitical boundaries that are borders. We discussed borders as violent incursions into land and we examined the differences between natural boundaries (which sometimes double as geopolitical boundaries) like rivers and other "technological" boundaries (like fences or train tracks). In regard to Saenz himself as depicted in his essay, we wondered how the existence of the border affected him mentally. He was called upon, eventually, to acknowledge the "occupation" -- of himself, of the domain where he lived and worked, of his culture. He solemnly realized that we no longer let the landscape determine who we are, the collectives that bind us. As people, particularly those in borderland sites, our lives are increasingly determined by "artifacts" (passports, papers, IDs, other documentation). We asked each other in class what the "physicalized" border does. Does it offend? Excite senses of home or belonging? Engender feelings of fear/excitement/triumph? Reinforce desire? Remind us of the poles of travel or confinement? Borders and fences, in the end, are falsely clear lines, especially in contrast to the dynamic nature of other natural borders like rivers.

Edward Abbey
Abbey discusses the universal right of "self defense against attack" and applies this concept to the American wilderness. He sets up a distinct protagonist/antagonist structure (with the three-piece-suited businessmen as gangsters). Ultimately, he feels that the destruction of the American wilderness is a businessman's pursuit for money, a pursuit that totally ignores the reality that Abbey stresses, that this wilderness "is our ancestral home." But who is the "we" and how is the "wilderness . . . our ancestral home"? Abbey introduces the idea of "eco-defense" at the end of his short essay. What is "eco-defense" and, in his estimation, how is it justifiable? It is "unauthorized but fun," he writes. What is his rhetorical strategy in this brief essay, his approach to calling to action those who wish to defend nature as a universal home?