Customer Reviews

The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"As an Indian woman," Linda Hogan writes in her haunting new memoir, "I have always wondered why others want to enter our lives, to know the private landscape inside a human spirit, the map existing inside tribal thoughts and traditional knowledge. It is a search, I think, for a sense of meaning and relationship" . I discovered Linda Hogan through her "sister writer" , Brenda Peterson. Hogan is a Chicksaw poet, novelist, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "This is a book about love," she writes. "It didn't begin that way. I sat down to write about pain and wrote, instead, about healing, history, and survival. The work revealed to me that there is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples" (p. 16). Hogan's writing here is confessional and painfully honest.

In her memoir, Hogan travels her personal geography of having an "illegal," sexual relationship as a twelve-year-old-girl with a man twice her age --"it was love and it was also wrong," she admits , surviving alcohol, adopting two children with "attachment disorders" , attempting to understand her mother ("Silence is my Mother"), and sufering a closed-head injury and amnesia. Along the way, she offers us huge lessons about hope, forgiveness, and healing.

Linda Hogan is an authentic voice who deserves our attention. I read her 207-page book slowly, in a single sitting, and in awe. When you've finished this heart-moving memoir, then go to its back cover, and make a note to also read the writers included there who praise this book--Brenda Peterson, Barry Lopez, and poet Joy Harjo.

G. Merritt

The West has been vanishing almost since it was first inhabited by Europeans, and as a Native American writer, Hogan is devoted to the recovery of what has been nearly lost -- in particular, the culture and history of Native American tribes. This collection of personal essays, part memoir, argues that history lives, often unacknowledged, in our bodies. The catastrophe of shattered Indian cultures lives on, generations later, in the shattered lives of so many descendants of those tribes.

Hogan is of Chickasaw descent, her ancestors inhabitants of what is now Tennessee and Mississippi, forcibly relocated over 100 years ago to the "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma, a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears. Her father an Army sergeant, she spent her first years in Germany, and in later years lived in Colorado. It was a difficult childhood, including a teenage "marriage" to an older man, a silent mother terrified of other people, her father often absent. She writes of her own alcoholism and adoption of two Lakota sisters, both deeply scarred emotionally by a history of severe child abuse.

Hogan's book is an account of her emergence from the "dark underworld" of her early life and the discovery of her own humanity and capacity for love. There is the love for her troubled daughters and the love she learns to feel for her parents, in particular her father, who grew up as a cowboy and whose world forever made cowboys and horses appealing to her.

There is much about pain in Hogan's story -- physical, emotional, spiritual. There is the pain of cultural genocide, and its aftermath in the scourge of alcoholism, poverty, domestic violence, and child abuse. There is the pain of her own troubled life and that of her daughters. There is also the pain of a debilitating physical condition, fibromyalgia. Finally, there is a near fatal accident when she falls from a runaway horse, causing a head injury and fractured pelvis and requiring many months of recovery.

Besides her own story, there are illuminating ruminations in this book on memory, dreams, lost souls, horses, the body, landscapes, identity, and myth. You put the book down after the last page with a sense that you have been on a long, deeply experienced personal journey. Hogan makes reference to Andre Dubus, another writer whose life was abruptly changed by an accident. As a companion to this book, I'd recommend his collection of essays, "Broken Vessels."

A few years ago, I had a phase where I read memoirs seeking insights into how to live a full meaningful life. To my innocent surprise, I instead found that many people write their memoirs as versions of the lives they WISH they had lived rather than the real thing.

"The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir" by Linda Hogan is much more than the real thing. This memoir is a kind, loving, forgiving and nakedly honest look at a life; the hopes and dreams encapsulated in one Native American woman's reflective survey of history and its intersection on her unique life. Whether she's talking about her tabooed love affair as a twelve year old girl, the unavoidable coldness of her mother, her own struggle with her adoptive daughters, her horse accident and subsequent convalescence -- Hogan locates herself within a greater context: the world of family, friends, direct and indirect ancestors and the legacy of a difficult and brutal American history.

This book is not meant to be rushed through but savored. It's small enough to read in a single sitting, but the lessons, explorations and stories deserve the luxury of time. Read a chapter and come back to it later. It's a real treasure.

Linda Hogan tells a beautiful story of pain, love, life and healing. Literally, weaving her life story together, a story that anyone can relate to comes to the surface. This book is not just "another biography" told so that people can sympathize and feel sorry for the author. Instead, it is one of those rare books that pulls you into the authors' life and teaches you something about yourself.

Sometimes detached from herself, Hogan lets you into her life, her pain and makes you realize that pain and hurt is not always what breaks you, but is what makes you stronger. A fine, beautiful book and a definate must read.

As the title implies, this momoire arises form Linda Hogan her own perspective to tell the history of her tribe, her family and her own self. It is indeed a very impressive work for me. Many details and many depictions attract me very much, and I am going to illustrate some of them that impress me most.
Drunken is a very serious problem for Hogan¡¦s family and relatives. By the description, we gradually realize that to drink is a way to elude from the painful history. ¡§I was drunk, not an alcoholic,¡¨ their reason is that ¡§the drunk wants to lose the memory of every day.¡¨ ¡§It was an escape from the pain of an American history.¡¨ For them, so many memories are unacceptable and the solution they can do is to escape from it. The Indians are the Natives of the States. But the invaders occupied most of their land and even made law to restrain the Indian territory. It is very ridiculous event.
One thing that shocks me very much is about ¡§the Sand Creek Masacre.¡¨ It is a very painful thing for the Native people, but the Whites choose to make fun of the deathes. It reveals all the horrible history. Besides the history of the Native and the tribes, Hogan also explores herself and confesses herself to the readers. I believe this book is absolutely a good one to read and you will get more by your own reading.

In this memoir, Hogan attempts to reveal not only an individual memory but the geography, and the history that is common to all human spirits, in particular, to Native American people. With the dominant image of broken things, such as the woman clay (broken body), the broken earth, and the fragmented Native American past, Hogan's inherited gene, blood, and cell from her families and tribal culture could make her become a witness to the whole journey of memory. What she sees, feels and interprets are a part of the past, the present, and the future. Her female body seems to be as vulnerable as the land and as Native American history. The trauma, physical or emotional pain, and wounds of an individual here are identical with those of tribal history so as to reconstruct the geography of Native American world and to get the healing. ¡§It wasn't healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world¡¨(16). Because some matters are too sharp to be memorized, through elements and creatures of nature, Native people are able to regain the life-giving power and continue the generations. From another aspect, I am curious about the remedy of love toward the pain, whether it is presented inwardly or outwardly. It seems that Hogan does not regard love as the only therapy to conquer all the sufferings. At least, it is not the love only existed between human beings.

A memoir is never a Native American tradition. But one of the reasons for Linda Hogan to create this memoir is to show her young clan people how she survived her life, which hopefully can motivate them or protect them from going astray. Replacing the common chronicle way to edit a memoir, Hogan used falling, forgetting, and forgiving as three major strands to weave her own story. Meanwhile, the natural objects and the tribal past were also interweaved into as colorful and impressive patterns.
From the broken clay woman sent by the museum gift shop to the stranded loon by the oil spills, Hogan associated the tribal people¡¦s situations as broken and stranded as them, such as Navajo uranium miners whose bodies changed and mutated. Moreover, those historical traumas like the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Relocation Act, etc. quickened Native Americans¡¦ falling. Hogan herself as an urban Indian was not exceptional and sometimes her cross-cultural case was more confused especially as what she said, ¡§for myself, being one of those people who survived, my tribal identity has always been chasing after me, to keep its claims on my body and heart ¡¨ (27). Thus her loving a grown man twice her age and her later alcoholic addition became her hidden worlds.
But Hogan said, ¡§Hidden worlds are only a door we pass through beneath the difficult earth surface world¡¨ (50). Then the journey from Europe to America was her first time of reflection. ¡§Like water, I rush toward a destiny, a balance, a harmony. I call it sea level¡¨ (33). So we see the description about how she rose up from her drunken falls to look for her own sea level. Also for fulfilling the sense of loss, Hogan adopted two daughters, but found it difficult to build the intimate mother-and-daughter relationship because the two Lakota girls were the victims of their birth mother who herself was in predicament too.
Years later, the physical trauma ran parallel with the emotional ones. Especially the accident of falling from Mystery, the ungentle horse, made her suffer from amnesia for a while, but meanwhile ironically made her and her family more closer. As Hogan said, ¡§Life sometimes emerges from pain¡¨ (48) and ¡§life sometimes comes out of tragedy¡¨ (49). Thus from her amnesia¡¦s forgetting, Hogan seemed to gain back her life. Her rebirth resulted in her hearty forgiveness. Standing in the middle of her life, Hogan would be willing to embrace the whole world in a more open-minded attitude.
After piecing her broken parts together to render a fresh self who can bravely face this outside world, Hogan left an interesting question for her young tribal people and even us to think more deeply. For fifty some years, she has been watching over this world and she has already recorded what she observed in this memoir. By reading this memoir, Native Americans of younger generation are expected to absorb some wisdom to solve the remaining problems because ¡§¡§memory is a field full of psychological ruins,¡K but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says ¡§I remember,¡¨ all things are possible¡¨ (15).

In Hogan¡¦s Memoir, I see Hogan¡¦s compelling attempt on retrieving not merely an individual but a communal and collective memory of Native American people whose existences had been obliterated by the dominant History and represented as simply silence and blankness. Like the broken clay woman who connects to the lands by ¡§her very body, the very same clay,¡¨ Hogan is the woman who watches over ¡§the injured world¡¨ with a broken soul and memory (17, 21). Hogan juxtaposes the inner landscape of a human spirit and the outer landscape of the Mother Earth to exemplify the correspondence and rhythms of human souls with the natural world, and further to demonstrate Native Americans¡¦ worldviews of perceiving the world as an oneness full of interconnected organic beings. The pain of the human soul and human body parallels with the pain of the lands for the loss of the lands shears off Native Americans¡¦ attachment to the earth, the places. To Hogan, the devastation of the lands corresponds to the destruction of the minds. Only with a sense of place, there comes a sense of history, a sense of identity. The outward landscape, the Mother Earth and all the elemental beings are the fountains of healing power never stop flowing out unless the interconnectedness and balances is destroyed. Thus, Hogan finds ¡§[her] doctors become earth, water, light, and air. They [are] animals, plants, and kindred spirits¡¨ (16). Through interrogating the interior geography inside a human spirit, Hogan intends to restore and recollect the whole exterior natural landscape of the Mother Earth comprising all the coexistent elements as water, land, fire, light, stone, and animals.

Hogan divides The Woman Who Watches Over The World into several sections and each section she gives it a general image to present it; moreover, each section represents the different periods of Hogan's and Native Americans¡¦history and the situations she and Native Americans confront. The memoir is not just Hogan's memory of her life, but also concentrates tribal history into the memoir. The memoir contains the circular feature that is quite important and common in Native American writers' works. In the first section, Hogan describes that human body as a map and life is like a geographic lesson. Through the journey of life, human beings use their bodies to feel and realize the sorrow and happiness of life.
From the clay woman that she bought, Hogan indicates the deep and intimate relation between Native Americans and the earth. Then, in the following sections, she uses many natural elements to represent the conditions of her/ Native Americans¡¦lives and describe the destruction of Native American's original society in different periods. The title of each section not only presents Hogan's own problems but also the social problems that Native Americans have to deal with under the domination of white people. So, the basic belief¡Xthe community is more important than individual that Native Americans believe supports the progress of the memoir. In the end, Hogan reinforces human beings¡¦association with the earth through their touch of stone and their return to the earth with bones. I do appreciate this concept because it reveals that how harmonious relationship that human beings can have with nature. Native Americans live with the earth and then return to the earth after their death. No one can really distinguish where life begins and where life ends. Life is a circular; even though pain always comes along with life, life still goes on.

As a white 48 year old women I now realize how ignorant I have been to indigenous peoples of America. It left me yearning for more knowledge. This book expanded my mind. It is well written and easy to understand. Very straight forward.