death came into my house
by Daniel Swenson
my house was not always like this. listen, come close.
I was seventeen the day that death came here.
and it was good before then because I was not aware
of things or many things, I should say, and the way that
I was not aware was that I could feel with my whole heart
the way I wanted to. the heart knows what it wants
my mother had told me and I felt
like wind on ice, and I had never thought this momentum to stop.
I remember well his voice, and the way
I realized his eyelashes stretched on forever and against my breastbone
and things were good and I was good and
I was seventeen and the whole town that I lived in was at my door
and they told me how they were new there
and how they saw me in the lamplights at midnight with him and oh
what thoughts they had of me and oh they brought a sense of
this to me and my house.
they told me names for who I was and who I am and what this meant
and oh what history my family had in this town and oh
how they hated to see me here, as though I had never been here
or if I had been, how abhorant it was to be, or to be seen.
I grew vines around my veranda
and from then on I was beach glass all shaded and smooth,
widdled and made
undone from what I was and what I would come to be. Something to be
collected by this town, worn around their necks,
to ward off evil. an evil I was. death had come to my house.
****…***
I wrote this piece with mixed feelings. I wasn’t sure what my role was, memorizing and reading King’s story. What are the histories involved in white settlers appropriating and re-telling indigenous stories? Once a month a group of friends and I get together to trade clothes and drink wine and read from something that we’re working on. I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded with some brilliant and smart artists and writers so I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to read to them my re-imagining of King’s story of evil coming into the world. I wrote it in a lot more succinct and deliberate way the piece but while I was on the Canada Line to my friend’s I began to re-write it in verse-poem form. The idea and meaning behind my relational understanding of evil or the introduction or realization of it was made knowable (or tellable) to me by reading it through the lens of an introduction to heteronormativity. Thinking in terms of a time when I was not aware of what my queerness meant in the world was perhaps a time that I could relate to King’s ‘pre-evil’ time. I still feel complicated with this story and welcome feedback/criticisms on it.
Works Cited
King, Thomas. “I’m not the Indian You had in Mind.” Video. Producer Laura J. Milliken. National Screen Institute. 2007. Web. April 04/2013. http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2012/03/im-not-the-indian-you-had-in-mind/
Oswald, Ramona Faith, Libby Baiter Blume, and Stephen R. Marks. “Decentering Heteronormativity: A Model for Family Studies.” 2005.
Good morning Daniel, a powerful story, thank you. I would love to hear this story, to see you tell it: for my reading to meet your telling. You have created layer upon layer of powerful images: home, death, sex, evil slipping into your home, naming, erasing,wrapping yourself in vines, coming undone, being …. oh my goodness. yes, a most powerful piece of telling. And, your question:
“I wasn’t sure what my role was, memorizing and reading King’s story. What are the histories involved in white settlers appropriating and re-telling indigenous stories?”
I think you answer this question yourself, later in this passage, when you say:
“The idea and meaning behind my relational understanding of evil or the introduction or realization of it was made knowable (or tellable) to me by reading it through the lens of an introduction to heteronormativity.”
I asked for this exercise with a number of different expectations, the most important to me was that students come to experience the power of a story in context with the moral of this particular story: Once told, you can never take a story back. When you say you discovered a relational understanding of evil through this project, I take that to mean you have understood how powerful the telling of a tale is in terms of understanding yourself and your place in the world. An understanding you clearly seem to be eager to enlarge and embrace intellectually and creatively – not that these two skills should be considered separately, the goal is to bring them together, to balance creativity and critical thinking, to work them together.
As for “taking” and “using” an Indigenous story for our purposes (and all that has involved in the past, which we will discuss in the future), well, in this case King clearly offers us the story, he tells us to “take it” – and King, I think, is a wise educator, always a teacher, so I followed his advice, took the story and used it to teach, and I have learned a great deal about teaching by using the stories King tells.
But, Daniel, your questions remain extremely important and should not be put on the shelf just because I can so easily justify for myself the taking of someone else story, in this instance. Thank you.
My favorite lines:
“They told me names for who I was and who I am and what this meant
and oh what history my family had in this town and oh
how they hated to see me here, as though I had never been here
or if I had been, how abhorant it was to be, or to be seen.”
Again thank you, it is a real pleasure to be working with you.
Should I tell you why those are my favorite lines? Or, do you already know?
I’m so glad you took those lines out. I put them in to illustrate what Jasbir Puar in her book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) calls Homonationalism. She doesn’t quite parse out its relationship to indigineity, but rather, leaves an open-ended call for future research which Scott Lauria Morgensen (a personal hero of mine) explores in his phenomenal paper “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities” (2010) (http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/16/1-2/105.abstract). The idea that queers, especially in their process of coming out, are implicit in an erasure of just where it is they are coming out–how an imagined nation state of queerness operates in a sort of globalization, industrialization, and as Morgensen positions, colonization. I wanted to parse out the difference between my family’s supposed history being rewritten or made unknowable by my queerness vs say, Canadian settler colonialism and making indigineity a thing of the past (as academics like Andrea Smith have been pointing out for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neg-Rlbi764)
I’d be interested in why you like the lines 🙂
Works Cited
Morgensen, S. L. “SETTLER HOMONATIONALISM: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16.1-2 (2010): 105-31. Print.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.
Smith, Andrea. “Andrea Smith: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.” YouTube. YouTube, 23 Apr. 2011. Web. 06 Feb. 2014.