Presence in the Book

Abstract

Presence in the Book Gerald Vizenor (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Native dream songs are forever in the clouds, and once more the empire wars are underway. The lilies and daffodils are in bloom, and at the same time we hark back to the stories of shamans that war never ends, since evil, envy, greed, and predatory vengeance never end. The last empire war started with a royal murder, and the next world war of resentments and revenge starts with the fiery purge of books and libraries. —Gerald Vizenor, Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade (2020) "I AM IN THE BOOK," pronounced Edmond Jabès in The Book of Questions. "The book is my world, my country, my roof, and my riddle. The book is my breath and my rest. . . . I have followed a book in its persistence, a book which is the story of a thousand stories as night and day are the prow of a thousand poems. I have followed it where day succeeds the night and night the day, where the seasons are four times two hundred and fifty seasons," wrote Jabès. Native American authors are in the book and reveal the trouble and timely tease of books, or as Jabès commented, "the torment of the books." Natives are in three leagues of torment in the books, as the misnamed natives of discoverers, colonists, and counterfeit histories, the grandeur of the noble savage, and the critical tease and creative literary art by native authors. The gossip theories of race and betrayals of nations were denounced in the first books by native authors in the eighteenth century, and later ethnographic monographs were rightly mocked, and the rush of cultural models were deconstructed as ironic native stories of survivance. Cristoforo Colombo misnamed natives the Indians, and Amerigo Vespucci described natives as "worse than heathens; because we did not see that they offered any sacrifice, not yet did they have a house of prayer." Puritan John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared natives "enclosed no land, neither have they any settled habitations, nor any tame cattle." Critical literary memories are the future of books, the very nature and presence of printed books in the familiar world of libraries, timely ironies, and poetic perceptions of the colophon, deckle edge, and cover art. The reminiscences of printed books are not present in the future tense of computer technology or the algorithms of [End Page 43] artificial intelligence. The primary perceptions of the actual books are hardly realized on the internet or ebook readers. Click for larger view View full resolution "The books have voices. I hear them in the library," wrote Diane Glancy in Designs of the Night Sky. "I know the voices are from the books. Yet I know the old stories do not like books. Do not like the written words. Do not like libraries. The old stories carry all the voices of those who have told them. When a story is spoken, all those voices are in the voice of the narrator. But writing the words of a story kills the voices that gather in the sound of the storytelling. The story is singular then. Only one voice travels in the written words. One voice is not enough to tell a story. Yet I can hear a voice telling its story in the archives of the university library. I hear the books. Not with my ears, but in my imagination. Maybe the voices camp in the library because the written words hold them there. Maybe they are captives with no place else to go." Almost Browne, a native philosopher, always heard more than the voice of the author in a book. He heard the traces of dream songs, the seasons of hearsay, and the crowds of natives who created, enhanced, and mocked the books in libraries. Almost was born in the back of a rickety station wagon almost on the White Earth Reservation. Almost "signed and inscribed books in the name of Jesus Christ, Vine Deloria, Crazy Horse, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare" in the trickster novel Chair of Tears. "Many book buyers were curious about the...