Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from “An Emissary of the Between-World” an interview by Katie Bacon with author Louise Erdrich (©2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group). Erdrich, of French, German, and Ojibwe ancestry, is the author of several novels, two children’s book, and a memoir.

Bacon: Could you talk about the role humor plays in Ojibwemowin, the language spoken by your mother's tribe? And what about the role it plays in your fiction?

Erdrich: Ojibwemowin is a marvel; the more I know the less I know I know. Words are constantly in a state of flux and invention, and a fluent speaker can inject humor into any subject or situation. For instance, a friend of mine in describing a baby's frustration over not being nursed combined nishka (angry) and dodosh (milk) to make a word that translates as "milk rage"—nishkadodosh. I'll always be a beginner in this language, as it is surely one of the most complex on earth. As for humor in my fiction, I hope it's there. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor—that's how people maintain sanity.

Bacon: How has learning Ojibwemowin changed the way you think about English?

Erdrich: For one thing, I've noticed English is extremely gender-based. There is no his or her in Ojibwe. English doesn't have the flexibility of true spoken Ojibwe. Because it has been written and scrutinized and coded a person can't (or people usually don't) make up words right on the spot, as can happen easily in a language based on oral tradition. But English is also a big, gobbling, greedy, thorny language, and a gift to writers because it absorbs all comers and yet retains its most ancient self.

Bacon: Do you feel any pressure to write about certain themes because people think of you as a Native American writer? As more Native Americans have begun publishing books, do you feel freed in any way?

Erdrich: Anything I write about comes from inside and not outside pressure. Nothing works on paper unless I feel absolutely compelled to write it, and some of what I write as a consequence may work politically and emotionally, or it simply may not.

I do feel pleased that many other Native people are writing books, extending the view of what a Native person is, and introducing the idea of tribal literature. Not "Native" literature, but literature based in one tribal vision. For instance, Ojibwe literature is very different from Lakota, or Zuni, or Santa Clara Pueblo, or Ho-Chunk, or Mesquakie literature. Each is based in an extremely specific tradition, history, religion, worldview.

Bacon: You return to the same characters over and over again, looking at their lives from different perspectives, telling their stories in different ways. Do your characters ever surprise you?

Erdrich: Yes, I am often surprised. I have no explanation for why my characters continue on with me beyond the fact of my own consciousness. It must contain these people—at all ages, in situations that become accessible to me over time. Fifteen years isn't long for a writer to continue with her characters. I'm working on one big continuous novel anyway. All of the books are part of it.

Bacon: In your books you have written about love of God, of music, of land, of children, of culture, among many other kinds. If one thing could be said to tie your work together, would it be the myriad forms of love?

Erdrich: I wouldn't mind that being said, although one could also point out that the work is also tied together by the unity of place, or by the failure of love to solve people's lives, or by the desperate wish to be back in our parents' arms, or to be home, or by the dreadful and persistent longing to know why we are on earth.

Bacon: Do you see yourself as a "re-storier" for the Ojibwe—a reclaimer of narratives that were never written down or were drowned out?

Erdrich: The Ojibwe have been telling stories through and in spite of immense hardship, In fact, Ojibwe narrative has grown rich and subtle on the ironies of conflict. But these are the narratives Ojibwe people tell among themselves, and in Ojibwemowin. I wouldn't even begin to think of myself as a "re-storier" in that sense. I write in English, and so I suppose I function as an emissary of the between-world, that increasingly common margin where cultures mix and collide. That is in fact where many of my stories occur.

Primarily, though, I am just ,a storyteller, and I take them where I find them. I love stories whether they function to reclaim old narratives or occur spontaneously. Often, to my surprise, they do both. I'll follow an inner thread of a plot and find that I am actually retelling a very old story, often in a contemporary setting. I usually can't recall whether it is something I remember hearing, or something I dreamed, or read, or imagined on the spot. It all becomes confused and then the characters take over, anyway, and make the piece their own.