Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride by Sy Hoahwah

2023; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nai.2023.0010

2332-127X

Molly McGlennen,

Archaeology and Natural History

Reviewed by: Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride by Sy Hoahwah Molly McGlennen (bio) Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride by Sy Hoahwah University of New Mexico Press, 2021 ancestral demon of a grieving bride is a thrilling book of poems by enrolled member of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma Sy Hoahwah. In the book’s back matter, Ojibwe poet Heid Erdrich muses that Hoahwah “has perhaps invented Comanche goth,” and I would have to agree—as skeletons rattle and serpents slither throughout the collection in haunting ways. But even this simile might be too limiting, as Hoahwah’s poems deftly defy neat categories and metaphorical allusions. Ancestral Demon, in many ways, meditates on the act of mourning and memorialization. What is mourned is inherited. The substance of memory is the conjurer’s trappings. “Oh ancestral demon,” Hoahwah writes, “may my lamentation become verbal sorcery” (12). Gothic allusions are not just referenced, however; Hoahwah mines them to expand a poetic world built from a multiplicity of myths, personal history, and Indigenous tribalographies. In it, we find bloody rivers, corpses, hexes, fangs, sacrifices, and something called a “raccoon-witch-cannibal-monk” (31). Viscera and decay preoccupy many poems, but this is not to suggest that there are only visceral connotations being made. Hoahwah’s collection is also prophetic: “Birds don’t fly here, / but there is the sound of wings. / . . . I carry sad omens” (28). Throughout, one follows a poetic map on Comanche terms, a map where night journeys and dreams orient the reader, even while eerie revenants creep up from behind: “Upwind, a tomb of antlers / asked my shadow for its hide / to lay a needle on its groove, / to hear its music” (18). Inscribing this complicated topography, Hoahwoah’s poems embrace a landscape known and loved, one that is also marked by violence and loss. In his poem “It’s Been 145 Years; I Am Still Surrendering to Ft. Sill,” Hoahwoah writes, The Quohada went one way, the Kiowa another.The Cheyenne even another way.We’re all cutting off fingertips, leaving trails of direction.The moon is the body and the funeral (9). In one of his most poignant poems, one dedicated to Charles Simic, Hoahwah channels the starkness of the Yugoslavian poet-émigré to illuminate [End Page 95] the embodied and residual effects of displacement. Via poetic cartography, Hoahwah guides the reader toward the hauntings of surrender, and of survival: We’ve all been chased to this genocidal beauty once or twice,Surrendering at a fast-food table with free Wi-Fi. . . .We’re unable to tell the differencebetween the glow of smart mapsand campfires of all who are closing inwith ATM cards and 4G in hand. For Hoahwah, personal and ancestral history, inheritance, and epigenetic trauma reside in the very body itself, the one that speaks aloud in his poems, and the one that proclaims at the end of “It’s Been 145 Years” that “there is no sanctuary in the subdivisions we edge closer to / with our bowstrings cut” (9). In what might otherwise be characterized as yielding, Hoahwah’s poems seek to challenge confident Western worldviews through which neat binaries can be chopped to pieces. Throughout the collection, Hoahwah makes generous offerings despite “What is Left” (29) and despite the “Last Comanche Allotment at the Edge of the World” (26), saying “I am the cutoff, / the stump” (24), asserting that “I carve my name / on the moon’s teeth” (29). The collection is filled with gestures such as these that deconstruct the normative categories that erect settler colonial power over Indigenous lands and bodies. “The offerings,” Hoahwah says, “—dead spiders, hummingbirds, / and crispy sun-soaked leaves raked out of cemetery lawns,” (24) become the altars for mourning and memorialization but also for the potential for immense beauty and connection. Perhaps in this Comanche gothic poetics, the miraculous survival is the “butterflies released by the breath of a vampire” (47), the way Indigenous collective memory holds to the lands and its people, the way one remembers and protects Indigenous patrimony, foiling the dreams of archaeologists. Throughout his profoundly imaginative collection, Hoahwah illustrates the fallout from terror from his own Indigenous perspective, the...