Mapping Intergenerational Diné Beauty: Reading Hózhǫ́ in the Poetry of Tacey M. Atsitty

Abstract

Mapping Intergenerational Diné BeautyReading Hózhǫ́ in the Poetry of Tacey M. Atsitty Michael P. Taylor (bio) and Elena Arana (bio) The songs and memories of our ancestors continue to reverberate in these contemporary stories and poems; they bridge worlds and restore beauty within all things. —Sherwin Bitsui, Foreword to The Diné Reader Esther Belin (Diné) begins her introduction to The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature with a concise but comprehensive timeline of Diné (Navajo) literary history: “Time immemorial, jiní. Time immemorial is where these stories transpired—carrying constellation chill and sparkle, drama and tragedy, hope and laughter” (Belin et al. 3). Belin’s declaration of Diné literary origins serves both as a testament to the endurance of Diné stories and as a recognition of Diné creation and Diné bizaad (the Navajo language) as the regenerative cultural, epistemological, and spiritual sources from which Diné literatures have continued to adapt through generations of removal, relocation, and return. Contemporary Diné writers often locate their work within a similar intergenerational timeline. When defining poetry, for example, Tacey M. Atsitty locates her poetic origins at Creation: “Poetry is language, and language is what was used to form this world” (“Just a Poet”). Because the creative and cultural processes of the Diné world and worldview have been so forcefully disrupted by settler colonial strategies of land appropriation, resource extraction, assimilation, and outright genocide, the perennial purpose of Diné literatures continues to be, as Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) explains, to “bridge worlds and restore beauty within all things” (Foreword xvi). [End Page 337] Put another way, Diné literatures seek, enact, and embody hózhǫ́ the fundamental aesthetic, philosophy, theoretical framework, spiritual practice, and sociopolitical statement of Diné literatures, particularly poetry.1 It is an understanding of hózhǫ́, for example, that reconciles Luci Tapahonso’s poetic juxtapositions of home and exile (Fast 191–95). As poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, Laura Tohe writes of the enduring, diverse, ever-adapting understanding and embodied practice of hózhǫ́: In Beauty it was begun.In Beauty it continues. In Beauty, In Beauty, In Beauty, In Beauty. (“In Dinétah” 104) Tohe’s poetic repetition of capitalized Beauty, or hózhǫ́, serves as a call to move beyond documenting and marveling at the particular craft of Diné poetics and to place hózhǫ́ at the center of all Diné-specific critical and literary inquiry.2 This article turns to Atsitty’s 2018 debut collection of poems, Rain Scald, to assert hózhǫ́ as an analytical and theoretical apparatus through which Diné poetry manifests its distinct cultural, rhetorical, and national sovereignty while, at the same time, informing the ways we read and engage distinct and shared literatures across all Indigenous nations.3 Near the beginning of Rain Scald, Atsitty offers a four-part poem entitled “Ach’íí’.”4 Each part of the poem delicately sutures the ostensibly contradictory realities of being Diné in the twenty-first century—suicide and survival, uranium-induced illness and communal care, Christian conversion and Diné ceremony—into a cohesive individual and collective identity. The poem concludes with memories of Atsitty’s father leaving home as a foster child in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Indian Student Placement Program:5 Dad says he remembers the first time he died,that long bus ride when they took him [End Page 338] to Utah for school. He had been memorizingland formations: an angel the size of his hand disappeared, and after that he was so emptyfrom crying and so full of rememberingrocks, he just fell asleep. (Atsitty, Rain Scald 7) Describing her father’s first removal from his home and homelands, Atsitty shares her father’s strategy for survival: the traditional practice of memorizing the land. Klara Kelley and Harris Francis (Diné) describe this practice of land memorization as cognitive mapmaking and wayfinding that is grounded in oral stories that have kept the Diné connected to Creation and to Diné Bikéyah (“People’s Sacred Lands,” or Navajo homelands) since the Diné first emerged into the current world (85–86). Atsitty poeticizes her father’s childhood removal from home and his land- and story-based mapping that would enable his...