The Space Grasses Take Over — The Writing Revolution of Indigenous American Poet Layli Long Soldier
In July 2022, I entered the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in the United States. On the form where I was asked to list three choices for my writing advisor, I wrote Layli Long Soldier’s name in all three spaces, making it clear that it had to be her. From her eyes, I could tell she was the kind of person who would always be exacting with herself, someone who would never stop looking, even inside a finished poem, for a crack through which she might enter again.
I was very fortunate to become her advisee, and to be challenged by her.
In class, Layli asked me to read aloud every poem I had written. After I finished, her first question was always: “Where do you think it can be revised?” She would go on asking: How was every word in every line chosen? How did I decide on the tense? How did I decide where to break the lines? How did I control the rhythm? Had I found the most precise blank space in the pause between one word and the next?
When we discussed a poem of mine titled “Wound,” she said, “The final sentence is too beautiful, too smooth. Don’t let it become so self-evident. It has to be sharper, as if it truly creates a wound for the reader, open enough to make them uncomfortable, rather than allowing them to recover comfortably. Let’s think about how the last sentence might be changed.” When we discussed “Hole,” she asked me about the final two lines:
Your silence is already mine
My hollowness embraces yours
“What would be the difference in sound, meaning, and resonance if these two lines switched places and became the final line?” When she asked these questions, her brows were always furrowed. And her eyes were not looking at me. She was staring intently at the lines of the poem. Her own questions had led her into a genuine state of creation. On the shared screen during our class, she silently moved through my lines. She changed one word, deleted it, replaced it with another. She read the lines aloud again and again, testing the changes in sound and rhythm, continually experimenting with different possibilities.
Layli often fell into deep thought, unafraid to leave a large blank of silence in our class. She could not let herself off the hook. She could not stop pursuing absolute precision. Even when what she was facing was not her own work. She could not help treating everything as creation.
After class time had already gone over, she said, “Show me one more poem that matters to you.” I brought out a poem I had written for my mother. I said that this poem mattered to me because I did not care whether it was a poem or not, and yet I could not not write it. The subject frightened me. I could only write it by instinct, but I did not have the ability to revise it or make choices. My emotions were too strong; they affected my judgment. Layli said, “Why resist what you long for? Don’t avoid emotion, and don’t forget that the blank page we write on is the freest place in the world.”
Then, gently, she said: Don’t censor yourself! Don’t hold back, say it and let them sit there.
Later, I wrote to Layli: “I hadn’t realized that avoiding intense emotion was precisely how I was avoiding what mattered to me. I had been too concerned with how to write the materials and subjects I felt capable of handling, but I neglected the fact that I should enter those emotional memories that make me cry and tremble. Perhaps the emotions closest to the struggles of my own life are the world I should bravely face. Thank you for unexpectedly returning me to a state of solitude, where I must not only relearn the form of poetry, but also re-enter the deepest places of life and memory, where there are not yet names.”
After studying writing with Layli for half a year, I finally began reading her poetry collection Whereas. I wanted to know: in the place she considered the freest in the world, what had she left there that mattered to her?
Now
make room in the mouth
for grassesgrassesgrasses
This opening poem in the first section of the collection ends with three uninterrupted clusters of “grasses,” presenting the lushness of grass overflowing in the mouth. When one recites “grassesgrassesgrasses,” the tip of the tongue lightly touches the lower teeth; the airflow rubs against the sharp edge of the teeth, creating turbulence, mimicking the hissing friction of blades of grass. The incantatory sibilance of “grasses” forms a field of sound, wrapping the speaking “I” from the outside inward. I cannot swallow this word, because its meaning has been undone by its sound. Simply by reciting these three lines, my body is subdued by Layli: she asks me, without my knowing why, to open a space in myself and hold in my mouth a grass I do not understand. What kind of grass is this?
At the heart of the collection is a poem titled “38.” It describes a trader named Andrew Myrick, who, in 1858, as the U.S. government swallowed Dakota land, leaving Indigenous people unable to hunt and forced into famine, said a now infamous sentence: “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
When Myrick’s body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.
There’s irony in their poem.
There was no text.
“Real” poems do not “really” require words.
I have italicized the previous sentence to indicate inner dialogue, a revealing moment.
By turning a metaphor into an actual act, thirty-eight Dakota people rose up against colonial violence. Layli sees their act of revenge—their strenuous effort to erase injustice and reverse the relation of power—as a poem. She is not only narrating the resistance of the warriors; she is also resisting the established imagination of “poetry.”
By order of President Lincoln, thirty-eight men were sent to the gallows, becoming the largest “legal” execution in U.S. history. The hanging took place on December 26, 1862, the day after Christmas. That same week, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This was included in a biographical film about Lincoln, while his execution of Indigenous people had long since been forgotten by history.
The “irony” in the poem therefore has two layers of meaning: I make you fall into the hell you wished upon me. The first layer of irony lies in how “grass” moves from metaphor into reality, reversing the power relation between you and me. Yet I, who executed you, was also executed by him. This is the second layer of irony: above you and me, there remains a higher power. Who, then, can execute him?
The grass Layli stuffs into our mouths asks us to wonder: when Indigenous people deprived of the right to survive fight back against state violence, if they have broken the law, what exactly have they violated? Who made the law? How do we see the irrationality of the law? How do we dismantle the frame of moral judgment in order to look at an act and a poem?
“There was no text.” This line tells us that the poem Layli wants to write is not simply the words she has written down for us to read. Even though we receive the event and its meaning through words, we must cross over this paradoxical narrative frame, cross beyond words, and connect directly with the act Layli describes and the spirit behind it. We must live inside poetry without text, inside real resistance and action.
But Layli refuses to let us worship her beliefs, so she positions those beliefs as “inner dialogue,” as a revealing moment within herself. She refuses to create a new authority of speech. She refuses our trust and allegiance. She refuses to incite our emotional identification. She carefully avoids using her power to speak and write to dominate the very object she opposes. She has no desire simply to condemn Lincoln and America to death in return.
To hold violence in the mouth, unable to spit it out and unable to swallow it. The space taken over by grasses asks us to remember the weight of violence.
The second section of Whereas consists of a series of poems in which Layli imitates the resolution of apology issued by U.S. President Barack Obama to Native Americans on December 19, 2009. Taking the first word of that apology document, “Whereas,” as the opening of her poems, she takes apart the authority of official language and exposes the hollowness of reconciliation when apology is stripped of responsibility. One of the poems goes like this:
WHEREAS I heard a noise I thought was a sneeze. At the breakfast table pushing eggs around my plate I wondered if he liked my cooking, thought about what to talk about. He pinched his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes. He wiped. I often say he was a terrible drinker when I was a child I’m not afraid to say it because he’s different now: sober, attentive, showered, eating. But in my childhood when things were different I rolled onto my side, my hands together as if to pray, locked between knees. When things were different I lay there for long hours, my face to the wall, blank. My eyes left me, my soldiers, my two scouts to the unseen. And because language is the immaterial I never could speak about the missing so perhaps I cried for the invisible, what I could not see, doubly. What is it to wish for the absence of nothing? There at the breakfast table as an adult, wondering what to talk about if he liked my cooking, pushing the invisible to the plate’s edge I looked up to see he hadn’t sneezed, he was crying. I’d never heard him cry, didn’t recognize the symptoms. I turned to him when I heard him say I’m sorry I wasn’t there sorry for many things / like that / curative voicing / an opened bundle / or medicine / or birthday wishing / my hand to his shoulder / it’s okay I said it’s over now I meant it / because of our faces blankly / because of a lifelong stare down / because of centuries in sorry;
Layli enters the emotional memory that makes her cry and tremble, describing an intimate apology in her own life. In childhood, facing the disappearance of an alcoholic father, that “doubly” invisible thing meant, first, being unable to see the reason for her father’s disappearance, and second, being unable to understand her own fate. She needed to remain blind in order to survive: a blank response to pain, a way of paralyzing violence with blankness. What wish can one have toward a father’s absence? What wish can one have toward the love a father could not give? What wish can one have toward one’s own powerless self?
She decides not to pursue accountability from her father or from herself, but simply to live in the present moment of eating breakfast together. But her father’s sudden tears and apology cause the “I” who originally held the initiative—the one making breakfast and searching for a topic—to instantly lose her center of gravity. The previously fluent narrative breaks apart, fractures, becomes disordered, unable to form complete sentences. Short phrases are separated by slashes, like quick, tense breaths. They become interpretations of “sorry”: sorry is a curative voicing; sorry is an opened bundle between them; sorry is medicine; sorry is birthday wishing.
It is precisely because father and daughter have sincerely faced wrongdoing and reconciliation that their faces go blank. After all, apology and reconciliation are difficult and painful things. When we read the final phrase, “centuries in sorry,” we finally understand that Layli is placing the father’s absence beside the absence of the U.S. president, the absence of home, and the absence of justice. The semicolon at the end is a wound she has made, open enough to make us uncomfortable. When the relationship between father and daughter expands into the relationship between America and Indigenous people, that blank space where nothing can continue suggests that the apology longed for still does not exist, that regret and atrocity are still ongoing, unresolved…
In the final poem of the collection, Layli writes:
Nothing in this book—
(1) authorizes or supports any claim by the United States against Layli Long Soldier; or
(2) serves as a settlement of any claim against Layli Long Soldier by the United States,
here is grassesgrassesgrasses
That sound which undoes its own meaning appears once again. It undoes its own construction, making visible the void of communication. Even slight grasses possess the force to strike against emptiness. Layli’s most exquisite craft lies in using silence and blank space to strike, turning the same image and sentence pattern through several layers, lyrical and sharp. Every word choice tightens the gears of the poem. And her vehicle hurls itself, with all its force, against the systemic violence and cultural erasure inflicted by the United States on Indigenous peoples.
At the end of “38,” Layli writes:
Sometimes, when in a circle, if I wish to exit, I must leap.
And let the body swing.
From the platform.
Out
to the grasses.
The freest place in the world is not a place where everything can survive. It is a place where one leaps out of the cycle of collective violence, refuses domination, lets the body leave the execution platform of the gallows, gathers momentum, and jumps into the grasses where one is left to grow or perish on one’s own. Layli asks us to make room in the mouth for grasses. Grasses are the malice of history. They are the warriors’ resistance for survival. And grasses are also her writing revolution, her political action. She wants self-expulsion, self-exile: to take the grasses of history and tread them into grasses of her own. To continue the resistance of history, to make it her own resistance, to let grasses take over space.