Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation: Problems of Representation in Pigs in Heaven

Abstract

B a r b a r a K i n g s o l v e r ’s C h e r o k e e N a tio n : P r o b l e m s o f R e p r e s e n t a t i o n in P ig s in H e a v e n K a t h l e e n G o d f r e y ‘“ You have the option of whiteness, but Turtle doesn’t. I only had to look at her for about ten seconds on TV to know she was Cherokee’” (Kingsolver, Pigs 279). Annawake Fourkiller’s statement in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven (1993) suggests both the significance the United States places on skin color and the discrimination that many people of color have difficulties evading. In this novel, Kingsolver, whose politicized consciousness is evident in much ofher work, explores an issue that only a few Anglo women writers have attempted to address in fiction: the condition of Native peoples in the contemporary United States.1Like Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Helen Hunt Jackson in their respective time periods, Kingsolver displays sympathy for American Indians and even outrage at the continuing difficulties they face, pointing out dis­ criminatory practices that have caused pain and disruption in tribal lives. However, despite her politicized sensibility, Kingsolver’s depiction is undercut by authorial and rhetorical practices which commodify, ritu­ alize, and idealize the Cherokee.2 In spite of her argument that Americans should consider themselves one nation regardless of ethnic differences, her novel unintentionally demonstrates how entrenched oppressive practices are in the U.S. psyche and in its power structures. Certainly Anglos should be active in attempts to eliminate prac­ tices and ideas oppressive to American Indians. Part of this process involves examining how fictional constructions of the ethnic other reflect the author’s worldview, society’s continuing and evolving preju­ dices, and individual relationships to issues of race. The work of schol­ ars such as David Spurr and Henry Louis Gates has been crucial in help­ ing critics see and understand the damage that can be effected by even carefully constructed representations of the other. These critics provide a lens through which the messiness, the tension, the prejudices, and the dangers still present in the politics of representation become apparent. David Spurr and other postcolonial theorists have identified and described Eurocentric rhetorical devices that impair portrayals of those who have been colonized: idealization and exoticization, for example. In The Rhetoric of Empire, Spurr includes citations from both European 260 WAL 36.3 Fall 2001 and American writers, although little of his work deals directly with imperialist discourse associated with the Native populations of North America. Still, many of his criticisms can be applied to depictions of Native peoples who remain colonized on reservations. Like Helen Hunt Jackson and other female Anglo activists, Kingsolver responds directly to issues she deems important. In an inter­ view with Donna Perry, Kingsolver was asked if she resented being labeled a “political writer.” She replied, “Of course not.” The Bean Trees, to which Pigs in Heaven is a sequel, is “a catalogue of everything I believe in. I’m only going to write a book if it’s addressing subjects I care about” (in Perry 154). In Pigs in Heaven, Kingsolver attempts to subvert the historical, asymmetrical power relationships between those of “other” races and European/Western cultures by creating a text in which she rep­ resents Cherokee Indians speaking for themselves (albeit through an Anglo author’s subjectivity). However, the inherent difficulties in Kingsolver’s reformist project in novels such as Pigs in Heaven is made clear by Rey Chow, who has argued that “our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold onto an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’ which is a not-tooinnocent desire to seize control” (141 )• A pursuit of authenticity reflects this desire to be “non-duped” and reveals the bind that Anglos repre­ senting the “oppressed” cannot escape: in seeking to represent...