Anthony K. Webster’s Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics is an insightful and engaging examination of his titular topic. Webster employs an ethnopoetic and discourse-centered approach to demonstrate how Navajos today use poetry to “reckon identity.” He argues that their “emplacing and empowering” poetry helps us focus on real people in such a way as to avoid “the false dichotomy between ‘language’ and ‘culture’” (223).
Early in his work, Webster shows that many Navajos today do not speak their traditional language, or only speak a few common words and formulaic phrases. Although most contemporary tribal members consider Navajo an inherently superior, poetic language (also more spiritual), it has become largely inaccessible for them. Nonetheless, the poetic tradition, many of the sensibilities and structures, and even some words (such as place names or common phrases) from Navajo are retained and help add “feelingful associations” to the poetry in English today.
One of Webster’s key points is that contemporary Navajo poetry in English (written) is distinct from traditional oral poetry, such as chantways, as being more equivalent to hane’, meaning story or narrative. Still, he recognizes a continuum between oral and written poetry and offers details of such formal overlaps, including: breaking into song, code-switching (like jinni—a formulaic story phrase meaning “it is said,” and place names), temporal conjunctions as openings, four as a recurrent trope, along with devices such as parallelism, onomatopoeia, and ideophony (the focus of an entire chapter). Webster focuses on ideophony to such an extent because he finds previous perceptions of it political, as implying a simplistic language (and mindset). Conversely, he argues that these sound effects help distinguish a fragile Navajo poetics positively.
Some of the specific ways contemporary poetry in English evokes “Navajoness” are through the formal poetic devices (above), the strategic use of Navajo language, and the frequent use of “we” to invoke a sort of “imagined community” of both the current tribe and the ancestors. The poetry (seen as stories simultaneously) can also take on the authority of tradition, partly through “feelingful uses of language” (98). Perhaps because of this invocation and sense of tradition, Webster finds that while code-switching (using Navajo in key moments during poetry in English) is very common, bilingual uses of Navajo are very rare in poetry (though more common in colloquial speech). He also points out that the implied valorizing of a “purer” form of Navajo language as used in poetry connects to Navajo nationalism (120).
The second half of Webster’s book turns to specific performances by a contemporary poet, Laura Tohe. Webster spent one-and-a-half years on the Navajo reservation recording poetry and absorbing life in Navajo country, thereby enhancing his interpretive process. Although he refers briefly to other poets he encountered, recorded, and interviewed during his fieldwork, such as Luci Tapahonso and Rex Lee Jim, he only analyzes in depth the work of this one poet—Tohe. These analyses of her public performances are compelling and astute, offering transcriptions in ethnopoetic style of both the poems (though most are also published) and personal interviews with the poet. Webster demonstrates the power, effect, and beauty of her poems persuasively.
Although Webster often offers helpful, contextualizing snippets of conversations, encounters, and experiences he had while in Navajo country, and he demonstrates ample familiarity with both the contemporary culture and the large body of published work on the Navajo, he gives little attention to his actual fieldwork process in this book. Given that doing fieldwork in Native American communities today is difficult and indicative of important issues in our field such as intellectual property rights and the ethics of ethnography, one would have appreciated a bit more attention to how Webster was able to carry out a year and a half of fieldwork with the apparent cooperation of the community. His success as a fieldworker begs for more foregrounding of his process.
In one of the few places where he does allude to his fieldwork experience, Webster offers Tohe’s view of him (part of her introduction to a poem during a performance at his university): “Tony . . . was / everywhere that we went / and . . . almost like my own personal stalker,” she jokes; he was there so long that “we started to call him our in-law” (192). Such intriguing details of his consultant’s view of him are glossed over, used mainly to explain the purpose of introductions (to performances) rather than to give insight into his fieldwork. More such examples and deeper discussion of them and his ethnographic process would have been welcome.
Nonetheless, Webster’s project is to analyze Navajo poetry and poetics, and he does so compellingly. One of Tohe’s poems that Webster analyzes in detail focuses on the momentous Long Walk, a Nineteenth-century forced removal of Navajos from their homeland to Fort Sumner, during which many Navajos suffered and died. But, as her poem celebrates, they also ultimately prevailed in winning a unique, eventual return home. Tohe (like other poets), invokes “we” repeatedly to emphasize the collective importance of the Long Walk to her community. Not only do poems like this reaffirm identity through poetic storytelling, but they are also used to educate the greater community, he argues, about Navajo history and the more general experience of the “other” in American culture. He writes: “This is the identity work of telling and re-telling, imagining and reimagining histories” (184).
Tohe works well as the exemplar poet to prove Webster’s points about the function and also the form of Navajo poetry. Tohe is also an academic (associate professor at Arizona State University). Indeed, although Webster presents poetry as widely appreciated by many Navajos, most of the performances he tapes and analyzes occur at places like Diné (tribal) College, writing retreats, or other educational arenas. But Webster anticipates this concern and asserts that most Navajos know their poets, and that the poetry is performed as well in public venues and on KTNN (the radio station and “voice” of the Navajo Nation). He believes poetry actively shapes and reflects Navajo identity today, while demonstrating awareness of the importance of voice and narrative in the process.
Webster’s writing style is adept and fluid, and his thoughtful, carefully researched work is well worth the attention of folklorists, particularly those with interests in poetics and Native American culture.
--------
[Review length: 1047 words • Review posted on October 20, 2010]