RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

31
—wind, shake
stiff thorns of cholla, ocotillo
sometimes I get stuck in thickets— (17-19)
As a white male from California, where cholla cacti and ocotillo shrubs grow, he
acknowledges his personal distance from the ideals toward which he writes. The phallic
imagery of the North American thickets in which he occasionally ―get[s] stuck‖ identifies
the place from which he writes and asks his readers pardon for any unconscious
reifications of phal-logo-centrism his text performs. He wants to celebrate and live in a
feminine world of wave-forms, but he knows that his cultural heritage and subject
position choke his path with biographical and conceptual brambles.
Snyder spent his youth learning from the working class, bohemians, natives, and
Asians, but he returned to the U.S. to raise his children, writing and teaching about these
―Other‖ cultures. His Beat-era ethos of ―yabyum‖ (20) practitioner from Kerouac‘s
Dharma Bums and the fact that he married three times are significant biographical
thickets. Snyder‘s poetic interest in Native American culture embroiled him in a bramblelike
controversy surrounding white shamanism during the 1980s. Native American
authors Leslie Marmon Silko 20 and Geary Hobson 21 ―polemically shook their fists at him
20 Silko critiques Snyder for claiming land in the Yuba River watershed as he does in
―Control Burn‖ despite his reinhabitory ethics because the ―legal title still remains with
the Maidu people‖ (215). She posits that Turtle Island is possibly worthy of a Pulitzer
Prize, ―but unless Snyder is careful, he is headed in the same unfortunate direction as
other white pioneers have gone, a direction which avoids historical facts which are hard
to swallow‖ (215).
21 Hobson identifies false shamanism through the sketch of a middle-aged Anglo-
American ―shaman‖ he heard in ―the southern part of a southern state,‖ who exclaimed at
a poetry reading: ―‗I AM GERONIMO!‘ in a squeaky falsetto‖ (100). Hobson describes
these non-Indian imitators as the makers of ―Tantra-like day-glo art superimposed on