The Edges and the Centres

• Published in: C magazine (1992) 2015-10 (127), p.22
• Main Author: Linklater, Tanya Lukin
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artists; Poetry; Translations; Writing
• ISSN: 1480-5472; 1923-3795

I am reminded of Richard and Nora Marks Dauenhauer - poets, scholars, linguists - and their Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature series featuring side-by-side Tlingit and English translations. They expand our understanding of poetry to include an unearthing of cultural and personal stories, oddly resembling anthropology. I am compelled by the space between the Tlingit and English - visually on the page and otherwise. I am also reminded of Zora Neale Hurston's gathering of African-American folk narratives through her anthropological work in the South, which are activated in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God ( 1937) and others. I am reminded of artist Glenn Ligon's appropriation of Hurston's writing in his text paintings, the repetition of stencilled lines from her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" on gallery walls, canvases and doors. He repeats the lines "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" and "I do not always feel colored." Colloquial language, folk narratives, orality. Ligón also took Gwendolyn Brooks' collection of poetry To Disembark (1981) to title and frame his exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian in 1993. To disembark is to land, to come ashore, to arrive, to step out of, to perch, to touch down, to settle. Within the context of slavery, it is a forcible landing, a violent settling. Ligón enters into a relationship with the complex experiences of being black in America and histories in their gendered, racialized, and sexualized iterations through research into an African-American literary canon largely obscured. By bringing language into his visual practice through repetition and other means, Ligón invites viewers to face histories and experiences of African-Americans that are discounted and often invisible. Similarly, the construction of a "classics" of Tlingit oral literature is an attempt to canonize orality with stories told from the experiences of Tlingit people and through the Tlingit language.