The genre of autobiography has been redefined, reformulated and
transformed by recent theoretical and practical approaches.
Poststructuralism destabilized a neat distinction into genres,
feminist criticism pointed to the absence of women’s texts in the
study of autobiography and postcolonial studies emphasized issues
such as hybridity and the absence of the essentialized self. Along
with such innovations in the development of the theory of
autobiography, there came a strong distrust of the unquestionable
authority of the narrating self and the seamlessness of the
narrative representation. Thus autobiographical writings expand
their scope of interest and cease to be associated with
representations of the male selves only. As Linda Anderson observes,
autobiography has become the text of the oppressed or culturally
excluded since it demonstrates a potential for representing a
particular marginalized group through one’s personal experience
(Anderson 104). In ethnic literatures, autobiography emerges as a
very popular genre which addresses such issues as
self-representation, identity formation and history rewriting.
However, it is important to point out that ethnic autobiography
strays significantly from its traditional laws and instead offers a
blend of distinct modes of expression.
This essay sets out to analyze Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman
Warrior and China Men and Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Storyteller, which are often characterized as autobiographical
and serve as good examples of how many similarities there are
between the techniques employed by the writers who come from
different cultural backgrounds. Such similarities point at some
universal and general features of ethnic improvisations on
autobiography. Interestingly, autobiography is an important stage in
the development of both Asian American and Native American
literatures.
Brief Historical Perspective
Asian immigration to the United States between 1840-1924 was
prompted by active recruitment of labor for plantation, railroad,
mining or field work. The temporary nature of Asian immigrants’ stay
in America and the fact that they were mainly laborers whose time
was taken up by hard work did not afford opportunities for literary
expressions. There are some poems by unknown authors in Chinese
carved into the walls of the barracks on Angel Island, where
immigrants were held before being allowed to enter the Unites
States. There are also fragments of letters and diaries in Asian
languages which survived until the present but apart from these
exceptions, little is known about lives of Asian immigrants from the
end of the nineteenth century (Kim 23). The absence of the early
life writings is also explained by the fact that autobiography does
not belong to the Eastern literary tradition. As Elaine Kim
explains, “in China and Korea, writing and literature were the
domain of the literati, who traditionally confined themselves to
poetry and the classical essay” (24). To write autobiography was an
unthinkable deed for a scholar as it would constitute a material
proof of his egoism and overweening pride. The first Asian
autobiographical writings in America were produced by
representatives of the privileged social groups such as travelers,
foreign students, scholars, or diplomats. Since for the American
public the Chinese, or any other Asian culture, remained in the
sphere of the exotic, these first writings performed the task of
explaining the differences and bridging the gap between the East and
the West. As Kim puts it, such writers saw themselves as
“ambassadors of goodwill” (24) and therefore, understandably, their
literary productions offered a very limited view of Asian cultures
and instead of countering superficiality of presentation present in
American perceptions of the East, they provided entertaining and
exotic descriptions of customs and ceremonies. The examples of such
writings are Lee Yan Phou’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887),
Chiang Yee’s A Chinese Childhood or, by the best known
explicator of China to the West, Lin Yutang, My Country and My
People (1937).
The first financially successful books by Chinese Americans which
can be classified as autobiographical are Padre’s Lowe’s Father
and Glorious Descendants (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth
Chinese Daughter (1945, 1950). Lowe’s book, although it provides
descriptions of Chinese customs and ideas, it is in essence a
critique of everything Chinese and glorification of the American
culture. Obviously, the derogatory elements included in the
descriptions of Chinese neighborhoods and people imply that the
author chooses to identify with and embrace the American values
rather than Chinese. As Kim concludes her analysis, Father and
Glorious Descendants is a “sincere” and yet “a humiliating book”
(63). In this context, Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter emerges
as a more mature work as the dilemma of living in two distinct
cultures remains unresolved. Wong struggles to be a filial Chinese
daughter but at the same time values American respect for
individualism. Unlike Lowe, Wong strongly accentuates the positive
aspects of her Chinese identity and provides lively descriptions of
Chinese family life. In contemporary Chinese American literature,
autobiographical writings remain to occupy a prominent position, and
are often adopted by women writers. One of the established trends
includes the focus on and examination of the mother-daughter
relationship in the context of autobiography, for example Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Amy Tan’s The
Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen’s God Wife (1991) or
Gish Jen’s Typical American (1992).
The study of the development of Native American literature also
reveals the conspicuous presence of autobiography. Importantly, it
is the postmodern reformulation of the Western essentialist
understanding of the self that initiated the discussion of Native
American self-writing in the context of the theory of autobiography.
Previously, some scholars claimed that indigenous peoples were too
primitive to have a sense of the self and be able to represent it
through writing; others believed that autobiography is a genuinely
Western invention and therefore, Native Americans were not
interested in practicing it as they shared their stories orally
(Sweet Wong 126). However, there is also a third group of critics
such as Gretchen Bataille, Kathleen Mullen Sands, David Brumble III,
Arnold Krupat and Hertha D. Sweet Wong who, although they recognize
autobiography as a Western form, they still argue that it is
practiced by Indian writers who modify and reformulate the genre
introducing new cultural dimensions.
The development of Native American autobiography comprises three
main stages: the early period with coup tales, self-examinations,
self-vindications, educational narratives, and stories of quests for
visions and power and pictographic drawings; the transitional period
with collaborative life histories as well as written
autobiographical narratives and finally, the contemporary period
with written autobiographies in many innovative forms (Sweet Wong
126-127). Collaborative life histories were the first printed forms
of autobiography intended for the American public. Their
characteristic feature is that usually, a writer/editor, consciously
or not, performs a cultural translation and includes a subjective
evaluation. The earliest example is The Life of Black Hawk, a
story narrated by Black Hawk, translated by a mixed-blood
interpreter Antoine LeClaire and edited by John B. Patterson in
1833. Another famous example is Black Elk Speaks written down
by John G. Neihardt, and from more contemporary examples No
Turning Back: a Hopi Indian Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds
(1964) by Elizabeth Q. White narrated to Vada F. Carlson and Life
Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders
(1990) by Julie Cruikshank in collaboration with Angela Sidney,
Kitty Smith and Annie Ned. The 1768 execution sermon by Samson Occum
is believed to be the earliest written autobiography by an Indian
(Sweet Wong 133). The next were William Apess’s Son of the Forest
(1829) and George Copway’s The Life, History and Travels of
Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847). Among Indian women writers from this
period best remembered are Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and her Life
Among Piutes: their Wrongs and Claims (1883) and
autobiographical essays of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-©a) also
known for her collection of Lakota legends and political activism.
The beginning of the twentieth century introduces a very prolific
writer, Charles Alexander Eastman and his two important works
Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization
(1916), which are the examples of how Eastman adapts the form of
conversion narratives (Sweet Wong 138). The contemporary period
witnesses a proliferation of life writings in many various forms
encouraged by the popularity and literary success of N. Scott
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and his later
autobiographical works The Way To Rainy Mountain (1969) and
The Names: A Memoir (1976), which serve as excellent examples
of Indian transformations of the genre. Other examples of
autobiographical writings include Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Storyteller (1981), Gerald Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes:
Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990), Diane Glancy’s
Claiming Breath (1992) or Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches
Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001) to name just a few.
Undoubtedly, the writing of the self remains in the scope of
interest of Indian writers and Indian autobiography enjoys immense
popularity.
The Trap of Classification
The apparent popularity of ethnic autobiographies as a means to
promote ethnic literatures has also its downsides. Any ethnic work
is tied down by public’s expectation on its main goals: on one hand,
to address the problems of identity and on the other, to view one’s
personal dilemmas arising from existing in a bicultural background.
Consequently, ethnic novels which do not concentrate on the identity
issues might be, and often are, ignored by many American readers.
Helena Grice points out that by valuing ethnic works (mostly Asian
American works but also other ethnic literatures) predominantly as
autobiography “is one way in which these texts are routinely
devalued as literature: autobiography has traditionally been
regarded as an inferior form of fiction and other literary genres”
(Grice 81). Ethnic literatures do not exhibit a stable and fixed
structure but instead are in a constant flux, actively trying to
find new and more efficient forms for expression. The dynamic model
of ethnicity is well expressed by Michael Fischer when he points out
that ethnicity is “something reinvented and reinterpreted in each
generation by each individual” (195). What is more, new voices
appear on the literary scene, for example the recent emergence of
Thai American writing and thus the identity debates bring new
conclusions. Helena Grice believes that in view of such facts,
“assigning texts to a particular genre” fails to take account of
such dynamics and does not demonstrate how writers “adopt, adapt
abandon certain generic categories” (84). Genre is never as stable
as it promises to be and neither is the boundary that claims to
define it, as Jacques Derrida reminds us in his “The Law of the
Genre” (203-204).
A
classic example of genre problem is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior. Alfred A. Knopf’s decision to publish Kingston’s
book as “autobiography” resulted in that fact that the Library of
Congress classified the book as “United States–Biography” (Goellnicht
343). Apparently, the justification of this decision was the
popularity enjoyed by previous Chinese American authors and their
autobiographical works, namely Lowe’s Father and Glorious
Descendant and Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter. The
Woman Warrior, with its even more confusing subtitle, Memoirs
of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, did wreak “the shift in perspective
in autobiography” (Davis 42) to an unimaginable extent. Shortly
after the publication of the book, Kingston was faced with very
severe criticism on the part of Benjamin Chang, Jeffrey Chan and
Frank Chin. Chin’s attack on The Woman Warrior was based on
his division of genres into real –these which are based on Confucian
heroic tradition and Asian fairy tales, and fake– works emerging
form Christian and Western traditions. Kingston, by using
autobiography –a fake form– shuns her communal responsibilities as a
writer and is a pure example of seeking popularity at all costs.
Kingston repeatedly refused to accept the so-called communal
responsibilities and seemed less bothered by the confusion resulting
from numerous attempts at classifying her works. In an interview
conducted by Eric J. Schroeder in 1996 she seems satisfied that her
works break through categories (216).
Fragmentation and the Lack of the Authoritarian Voice
In traditional autobiographies the narrative of the self usually
takes a form of a linear journey from point A to B, from innocence
to maturity and experience, from a spiritual struggle to conversion
and final coming to terms with one’s beliefs. This structure
introduces the metaphor of spiritual or personal development as a
journey where progress emerges as the desired objective and hence
the success of autobiography relies on the ability to express this
transformation. Ethnic autobiographies reject a linear development,
which is also true for Kingston’s and Silko’s life writings. The
most striking feature of the narrative structure in ethnic
autobiographical works is fragmentation. To prevent the forming of
value judgments in case of these works, one has to emphasize that it
is by all means a different literary device than the one from the
Western literary tradition. Fragmentation in modernist fiction, for
instance in T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland or Virginia Woolf’s
Waves, reflects disintegration or separation of an individual
psyche, and introduces a sense of isolation and confusion together
with a lack of a clearly defined point of reference. In postmodern
writings, fragmentation reflects the mistrust of the presumed
stability of language, the loss of authority as such and that of the
‘master narratives.’ In Native American and Chinese American (and
generally Asian American) literatures fragmentation carries a
different set of connotations and introduces a different set of
cultural values.
Kingston and Silko write about the problems of co-existing on the
borders of worlds. For the narrator of The Woman Warrior, it
is the interplay of the world of China known only from her mother’s
talk-story and the world of the mainstream America. For Silko not
only is it the clash of American and Laguna Pueblo cultures but also
the dilemma of being of mixed-blood and thus fully belonging to
neither of the two worlds. However, the fragmentation that is
employed in the two writers’ works does not express confusion or
chaos. A lack of linear, developmental structure is not a
shortcoming but instead, it corresponds to an episodic nature of
memory in which the autobiographies are so deeply ingrained. As
Rocío G. Davis observes “[t]he organization of the discrete
narratives reflects the authors’ attempts to control a series of
fundamental memories, to understand their significance with regard
to personal formation and self-representation, beyond the dictates
of causality” (46).
The decision to discuss both The Woman Warrior and China
Men, although the latter is often classified as either biography
or nonfiction, is not coincidental. Kingston states several times in
numerous interviews that originally the two works were “conceived as
one huge book” (Rabinowitz 69). It was only later that she opted for
a division into two separate works based on gender. If the labeling
of The Woman Warrior as autobiography is in so many ways
debatable, the same label attached to China Men may appear
even more so. However, the idea behind the two books is the
construction of an identity that would cope with difficulties
arising from belonging to two distinct and, in many ways,
conflicting cultures. To construct a stable identity, the narrator
has to come to terms with her Chinese heritage, Chinese past, and
also Chinese American past; to do that she has to stabilize her
relationships with both the mother and the father. To answer
questions about one’s place in America, it is inevitable for the
narrator to reconstruct her family’s early years in the Gold
Mountain. The key to this conceptual problem is the inevitable
figure of the silent father. Therefore, the claim that China Men
is a logical thematic continuation of The Woman Warrior is
valid and further suggests that it may be treated as “the second
part” of the autobiography.
The structure of the two books reveals that Kingston bases her
strategy on a cycle of short stories which, in view of the
fragmentariness of narrated events, seems an appropriate choice.
Rocío G. Davis rightly points out that “[c]ycles emphasize breaks,
beginnings and rebeginnings, episodic structuring of lives and
selves” and “present the narrator’s process of memory as non-lineal,
associative, non-temporal, fragmented and incomplete, making
structure and content mutually reinforcing” (my
emphasis, 46). The Woman Warrior is divided into five
sections: “No Name Woman,” “White Tigers,” “Shaman,” “At the Western
Palace” and “A Song for A Barbarian Reed Pipe.” The first story,
probably most often anthologized, features the narrator’s no name
aunt who, for giving birth to an illegitimate child, is doomed to
oblivion by her family. The first story commences the narrative of
women in Maxine the narrator’s family and sets the tone for the
identity discussion. The “White Tigers” section is an improvisation
on the legend of Fa Mu Lan and introduces a figure of the woman
warrior who becomes the no name woman’s counterpart. The third part
unfolds the story of Brave Orchid, of the narrator’s mother in China
where she is a pioneering doctor and scholar. “At the Western
Palace” continues the story of the mother in the United States. In
this section, Brave Orchid is juxtaposed with her shy and helpless
sister Moon Orchid and the two women become a telling example of two
different attitudes to life: the woman warrior and the no name
woman. The last section comprises the story of the reconciliation
between the mother and the daughter and, subsequently, between two
cultures. In this part Kingston refers to a historical figure of
Ts’ai Yen, a poetess captured by barbarians and again, by
improvisation, she adds her meaning to the well known story.
Although the five stories appear to be merely a selection of free
associations, they constitute a thematic unity integrated by the
figures of the woman warrior and the no name woman. The episodic
structure of the narrator’s memory allows her to improvise on the
well-known versions of myths, legends and family stories, to fuse
memory, history and imagination. The common factor for all the
sections is the narrator’s discourse which clearly situates her in
the context of her maternal cultural tradition.
Similar strategies were employed in the history of men in Kingston’s
family. The fragmented structure of The Woman Warrior is
preserved in the style that blends fantasy, history and imagination.
The father, unlike the figure of the mother, continuously refuses to
give accounts of his past: “No stories. No past. No China” (China
Men 18). Thus, what the narrator offers here is a collection of
possible stories of Chinese American men from her family. In
China Men Kingston pursues the subject of reclaiming American
history, nationality and citizenship, a claim which exercises
immense influence on the choice of the material. The arrangement of
the book resembles a map and the history of men is presented in
terms of their presence in various geographical areas: “The father
from China,” “The great grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains,”
“The grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains” or “The American
father.” By tracing the presence of male family members, Kingston
toys with the idea of the frontier and, as such, reasserts China
men’s claim to American citizenship and American history. Similarly,
as in The Woman Warrior, the episodic structure
encourages a blend of fact and imagination. Kingston interweaves the
(hi)stories of her father, uncles and grandfathers with
improvisations on Western and Eastern myths by finding parallels and
a common ground which justify their use. The best example is the
opening story of Tang Ao captured in the land of women whose goal is
the metaphorical presentation of forced feminization and humiliation
of Chinese males in America.
The common feature of the two books is Kingston’s fascination with
discovering possible versions of one event the example of which is
found in the first story of The Woman Warrior. The No Name
Aunt is deprived of her name and life in the memory of her family
members. The narrator receives a very limited access to the story,
in fact, what the mother gives her is merely the warning not to
disclose the secret: “You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about
to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself.
She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all
brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (The Woman
Warrior 11). This meager and scant information is treated in the
most creative way in order to reconstruct the possible version of
the aunt’s story. Having no traces of the aunt’s life and being
unable to inquire after it, the narrator turns to imagination to
fill the missing gaps in the stories. The aunt may be a strong
female figure who consciously refuses to reveal the name of her
lover; perhaps a passive and intimidated peasant woman who
obediently agreed to have sex with a strong and commanding man; a
romantic person who lost good judgment when faced with true love; or
simply a spiteful lunatic who drowned herself in the drinking water
well. The same strategy is employed when Kingston attempts to
reconstruct her father’s coming to America. This time, having
nothing but her father’s silence at her disposal, she toys with
numerous possibilities of legal and illegal ways of entering the
United States. What Kingston offers is a multiplicity of versions,
which never assert their truth content. The goal of this strategy
may be twofold: either the narrator is making guesses herself and
simply does not know the answer or she does know the answer but
chooses not to reveal it in order to protect her father from
“immigration ghosts.” Consequently, the multiplicity of versions may
have one additional feature: that of preserving family and communal
secrets. By including variant stories about the lives of men and
women in her family, Kingston tries to validate these people’s
experience into that of her own. Their presence makes her
acknowledge that her identity, her “I” originates in other’s rich
stories. Therefore, at the end of The Woman Warrior she
admits that “[t]hat is a story my mother told me not when I was
young, but recently, when I told her I also am a story-talker. The
beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (The Woman Warrior 184).
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller amazes by its fragmentation
which only seemingly appears chaotic and disorganized. The structure
of Silko’s autobiography lies at the core of the Laguna Pueblo
tradition. Storyteller, a concise collection of short
stories, poems, family reminiscences, memories and photographs, is a
successful attempt to render the fundamentals of the Laguna life.
The unifying themes of the book are the figure of the communal
storyteller, the strong bond of people with the land, the cyclical
nature of time, and the sacredness of ceremonies. Although the book
is not organized into chapters, Linda Krumholz argues that it can be
divided into six thematic sections: “Survival,” “Yellow Woman”,
“Drought,” “Rain,” “Spirits,” and “Coyote.” The “Survival” section
presents stories as an indispensable element for the culture to
survive in the changing world; “The Yellow Woman” improvises on the
traditional story of Kochininako and redefines the women’s roles and
sexuality; the “Drought” and “Rain” sections reproduce rituals of
the Pueblo tradition such as the Deer Dance; the “Spirits” part
presents the cycles of death and life and the meaning of
transformation while the “Coyote” chapter thematically returns to
the first section and, in a humorous way, emphasizes the importance
of stories (Krumholz 70-71). The process of reading within the
thematic sections reveals the mechanisms of simulating oral
tradition: the same stories are retold in various ways (poetry,
short story, photography) and from different perspectives (the old
timers’ and more contemporary one). Silko thus demonstrates that her
story cannot have a chronological structure because it is a story
continuously retold and altered by the community.
In one of the opening reminiscences, Silko asserts that “the oral
tradition depends upon each person / listening and remembering a
portion / and it is together – / all of us remembering what we have
heard together – / that creates the whole story / the long story of
the people. / I remember only a small part. / But this is what I
remember” (Storyteller 6-7). Here she introduces the idea
that governs both her culture and the structure of her book:
fragmentation. Silko’s writing derives from oral tradition and is a
communal phenomenon that cannot exist without the people who told
these stories. In Storyteller there is no solitary voice that
retells stories; there is a gathering voice that is the product of a
community to which it is indebted and which recognizes and respects
this interdependence. In her autobiography, Silko unfolds the (hi)story
of distinguished storytellers in her family, Aunt Susie, Aunt Alice
and Grandma A’mooh. She situates herself in a continuous
generational line of Laguna storytellers, or as McHenry puts it: she
“is picking up . . . where her aunt Susie left off” (107). However,
as she invents her own voice and style, she is less an imitator and
more a resourceful continuator. The importance of tradition is
emphasized by the opening of Silko’s unconventional autobiography
which does not establish a distinct and independent “I,” but instead
explains a relationship between stories and photographs found in a
Hopi basket in the family house. Therefore, in the case of Silko’s
and Kingston’s, the multiplicity of voices justifies a suggested
spelling of the name of the genre with brackets, as (auto)biography,
which better expresses the interconnectedness of “I” and those who
helped to shape it.
Storyteller
is often read in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of
polyvocality and dialogic discourse (Cf. Arnold Krupat, Elizabeth
McHenry). Storyteller is shaped as a polyphonic text and
Silko takes “great pains to acknowledge and insist that even her own
voice is a product of many voices” (McHenry 109). The polyphonic
quality of the text comes out when Silko reconstructs a multiplicity
of voices by faithfully repeating the stories as she heard them
(“This is the way Aunt Susie told the story.” Storyteller 7)
and when she adds her own versions to the heard ones (as the “Yellow
Woman” variations). The versions may vary in details often quite
significantly, and the point of the multiplicity of stories is their
simultaneous coexistence without any claiming one as “true,”
“superior” or in any conceivable sense, a “better” story. The
question of truthfulness is never an issue in the Laguna Pueblo
storytelling. What is more important is how captivating a story is,
how well it is told and what effect it has on the audience. One of
the renditions of The Yellow Woman story concludes with words: “My
husband / left / after he heard the story / and moved back in with
his mother. / It was my fault and / I don’t blame him either. /
I could have told / the story / better than I did”
(Storyteller, my emphasis 98). The responsibility for a
“failed” story is solely the storyteller’s so to produce a
satisfactory one, it is necessary to produce many versions. As Linda
Krumholz observes “[f]or Silko . . . the fragmented narrative and
multiplicity of voices represent an accretive, communal and dialogic
creation of meaning and truth in which meaning and truth are
conscious and negotiable constructs, neither fixed nor
indeterminate, but restricted by moral limits conveyed in stories”
(69).
Silko, just like Kingston, is also preoccupied with reclaiming the
American past through a storytelling of her own. “A Geronimo Story,”
one of the short stories from Storyteller, enters into a
dialogue with the established version of the history of Geronimo and
the popular culture renditions of his life. Silko toys with the
absence/presence opposition and subverts the definitions of chasers
and the chased. Geronimo eludes his pursuers, metaphorically in
language and literally in the army’s inability to trace him. The
story is accompanied by the photograph from 1928 presenting the
Laguna Regulars of the Apache Wars. Again, Silko plays with the
mechanisms of Indian stereotypes: a photograph of warriors should
feature them wearing warbonnets and traditional costumes, and
necessarily on horses. Silko’s “warriors” are elderly men, nice and
smiling and readily posing for a photograph.
(Auto)biography
Obviously, in the case of Kingston’s and Silko’s autobiographical
works, it is impossible to talk about the genre in its traditional
form. And indeed, the focus of such a discussion should not be on
how much the two writers depart from the laws of the genre but
instead on how they modify and, by introducing culture specific
elements, enrich and develop it. And it seems that innovations
observed in Silko’s and Kingston’s works are present in other ethnic
autobiographies. Thus, it is possible to say that the restructuring
of autobiography is by no means a new phenomenon but rather an
already established trend in the theoretical debates. Maureen Sabine
makes such a general comment by saying that “[c]urrent
autobiographical theory is more inclined to see self-representation
as a complex synthesis of personal history, private fantasy, and
compensatory fictions embedded in a larger family, social, or ethnic
narrative” (3).
The transformation of the genre is based on the addition of other
genres as much as showing that the boundaries dividing literature
into categories may be crossed and reestablished. Kingston relies on
a cycle of short stories which allows her to emphasize the
mechanisms of constructing an ethnic identity and invalidate the
stability of chronology and sharp distinctions between fact and
fiction. Whenever she lacks factual material, she turns to
imagination to continue the talk-story initiated by her mother.
Similarly, Silko, as a storyteller, experiments with many ways of
self-expression and therefore, her work may pose further
classification problems. In Kingston’s and Silko’s autobiographical
writings, there is no hierarchy that would place fact over fiction,
myth or imagination. In both cases, this strategy of demeaning the
fact/fiction binary comes from the tradition of storytelling and
talk-story. Consequently, their works, apart from being interesting
examples of ethnic autobiographies, are also cultural texts unspoilt
by didacticism or by the so-called responsibilities of an ethnic
writer.
The ethnic autobiography as cultural text is closely related with
cultural mediation, with ethnography and anthropology. Trinh T. Minh-ha
shuns the practices of Western anthropology by defining them in
terms of “a conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ . . . in
which ‘them’ is silenced” (Minh-ha 67). Written mostly in an
authoritarian voice, many anthropological works still place values
according to the Western standards, and provide interpretations that
tend to ignore the very object of the study. Silko’s Storyteller
is an example of the text that, through its explanatory attempts,
mediates between the Laguna and mainstream American discourses.
However, the two discourses are not juxtaposed to show them as
competing. Silko does not perceive the American discourse as “pure”
or “untouched” but as already changed by the influence of minority
cultures and thus multilayered and mixed. Linda Krumholz refers to
Silko’s book as an “autoethnographic text” in which the “colonized
merge their discourse with the colonizer” in order to take back the
power of self-representation while addressing both (or more)
communities as audience (65) Storyteller is not a text of
exclusion, the author uses words from her native language but
provides explanation for their meaning so that a non-native reader
would not experience a sense of estrangement while reading the text.
In the process of explaining her culture, Silko employs photographs
accumulated in the Hopi basket over the years. The fundamental idea
governing the worldviews in Laguna Pueblo context is the
inextricability of people from the land they belong to. To
understand the stories which are full of descriptions of places,
Silko includes visual images to help minimize the distance between
the readers and the landscape which for many might seem unfamiliar.
Elizabeth McHenry calls these photographs “the imaginative heart of
the text” (103). Bernard A. Hirsch argues that photographs help
Silko actively engage the reader in the storytelling ceremony (154).
The arrangement of the photographs is not accidental; it complements
the thematic sections set by stories, poems and memories. As a
storyteller and explicator of her culture, Silko seeks to do away
with one of the stereotypes perpetrated by the popular
representations, namely the one concerning Indians’ fear of being
photographed. In a collection of essays on Laguna life, Yellow
Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, Silko writes: “The Pueblo did
not fear or hate cameras or the photographic image so much as they
objected to the intrusive vulgarity of the white men who gazed
through the lens” (175). The embodiment of this idea is the very
Hopi basket with photographs taken by Silko’s father, Lee H. Marmon,
and by some anonymous Laguna photographers. Photography, Silko
claims, is as much a part of the Laguna tradition as storytelling,
and its appropriation by the Indians shows their adaptability to
change which is a motif often omitted in nostalgic representations
of indigenous peoples. Photographs which are not uncommon for
autobiographical writings, are seen by Silko as complementary to
words and are used as a useful tool in the process of transforming
oral tradition into a written form.
Considering how much writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie
Marmon Silko transform the genre of autobiography, one may conclude
that it is indeed a ‘vigorous’ genre which is currently being
rediscovered and continuously redefined. Ethnic autobiographies make
their own use of trends of redefining genres and thus discover a
method of destabilizing the relations of power in the mainstream
discourse.
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