Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Kathy Whitson

Gerald Vizenor, a Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, has already contributed significantly to the body of Native American literature. Now we have two more volumes from him - Dead Voices, a novel, and Summer in the Spring, a volume of Anishinaabe lyric poems and stories that he has edited and interpreted. Like much of Vizenor's earlier work, these volumes find their energy in the retelling and reshaping of trickster tales. In his introduction to Summer in the Spring, Vizenor suggests that the stories constitute a "new tribal hermeneutics." That Vizenor continues to rework the trickster tales is testament to both the richness of the tribal tales and to his abundant imaginative and hermeneutic powers.

Subtitled "Natural Agonies in the New World," Dead Voices establishes polarities between the aboriginal cultures and their values and the "values" of the New World. Vizenor draws contrasts between the "treeline" and the city, between the eye and the ear, between the oral and the written, between the "wordies" and the non-wordies, between the clean of soap and natural body odors, and, of course, between "dead voices" and five voices - those voices that still have their stories. He also contrasts the community of the tribal world where the protagonist, Bagese, always speaks with the plural pronoun "we," with the isolation of the frame narrator who uses the singular pronoun, "I."

The novel uses a framing device that echoes the thematic polarities. The first and last chapters are narrated by an academic, Vizenor-like character, and the heart of the novel is given over to the voice(s) of Bagese, an ancient tribal woman. Within the frame, the novel is developed around the convention of a seven-day, seven-card wanaki game (the narrator says "the word |wanaki' means to live somewhere in peace, a chance at peace") wherein the protagonist moves from experience to experience in the shape-shifted forms of a bear, a flea, or squirrel, a mantis, a crow, a beaver, and a trickster. Vizenor's use of a shape-shifting narrator allows him to explore any number of issues, each time with a startlingly fresh perspective. The shape-shifting Bagese grieves over several "natural agonies in the new world," including the pollution of the environment by a chemical civilization, the educational system, the imprisoning childcare system, the fur trade, and the diminution of the animal kingdom by civilization. The chapter on the fleas is rich indeed. The attitudes of the fleas mirror the different tribal attitudes toward the European invasion of the continent and surely comments as well on those who allowed themselves to be put on exhibit in shows such as the Wild West Show. One suspects that the allegory runs deeper than the casual reader might recognize. There is a price to be paid, however, for the use of multiple, shape-shifted narrators: the novel loses its narrative impulse and fictive appeal and reads more like a moral allegory.

One of the triumphant ironies of the book is that the tribal woman warns all along of the dead voices of the wordies, that once the eye is privileged over the ear, once the oral tradition yields to a literate tradition, then the stories cease to have life and the voices become dead. But Vizenor and his frame narrator affirm that the publication of the stories invests them with another life, one that arcs out in a pattern that the merely oral word could never achieve, and thus that the medium of the wordies, publication, is subverted and pressed into service by the tribal people who have five voices and five stories. In the same way, the novel shows that the animals of the wild who have been hunted and shunted off their land have found a way to accommodate themselves and adapt to the cities. Whereas they were once able to survive only in and beyond the treelines, they now are thriving in the cities. This plot parallels the encroachment into the world of the published word by the tribal people.

At the heart of the novel is the ability to transform, to shape-shift, and that seems to be the moral of the tale as well. In order to survive, crossbloods and tribal people must shape-shift to ward off the deadening magic of those wordies who would turn tribal culture into nothing more than artifact, something to be recorded quickly before it disappears completely.

Dead Voices is a powerful book that warns all cultures of the dangers of abandoning tribal and natural values. Above all, Dead Voices celebrates survival. The last utterance of the tribal woman, Bagese, and of the frame narrator, is "We must go on."

In Dead Voices, Vizenor reworks Anishinaabe tales by placing them in a Western genre - the novel. But in Summer in the Spring, he edits and interprets many of the same narrative kernels in the tribal art forms of a century or more ago - the lyric poem, the pictomyth, and the story.

The lyric poems are lovely, often cryptic - with deeper meaning hidden within the cultural context of the poems. For example, the following short lyric embeds the wonderful trickster story of the dancing ducks: