General Anthologies

09-4-0354

Dauenhauer, Nora Marks. Life Woven with Song. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000. 140 pp. ISBN 0-8165-2005-4, $29.95 (cl); 0-8165-2006-2, $16.95 (pb).

The Lukaax.ádi (Sockeye clan) woman from Alaska invites us to feast on "slices" of herself in the form of prose, poetry, and plays elegantly and skillfully carved to nourish our spirits. The girl shaped by the territory near Hoonah "feeds" us slices of her life as daughter, grandchild, mother, lover, friend, grandma, writer, and culture worker steeped in Northwest Coast Tlingit tradition, living today. Her offerings, from the loving dedication to the striking pose on the back cover, are organized with passion and purpose.

The prose plays with the definitions of "salmon": the fish, the clan, and the woman. The "Egg Boat" subtly conveys the girl-child’s initiation into cultural agency and empowerment by her elders. The autobiographical essay anchors her simultaneously in mythical, historical, and contemporary relations. Her spirit soars in the poetry. In it she is freed to regale us with insights, longings, jarring juxtapositions, tantalizing tastes, emotions, sights of distant places, people, and events that situate her work in a very special juncture of time and place. While the "real life work" of this Tlingit speaker has been the faithful translation of stories from the Elders, the Raven plays included in this collection were crafted as performance showcases. She animates Raven, the "negative," the "amoral re-arranger" in three plays as the final verse of this outstanding weave of "songs." I highly recommend this book.

—Marlene Atleo _(Ahousaht First Nation, Nuu-chah-nulth)
University of British Columbia

09-4-0355

Kumar, Amitava. Passport Photos. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000. 290 pp. ISBN 0-520-21816-7, $48.00 (cl); 0-520-21817-5, $17.95 (pb).

Kumar constructs what he terms a "forged passport" in opposition to "that which is demanded by the state and . . . the traditional academy." Defining aspects of "immigritude," Kumar searches for a "new poetics and politics of diasporic protest" and writes about immigration in two ways. First, he returns the metaphor of the border to what he terms "the material reality of barbed wire fences, entrenched prejudices, and powerful economic interests" that regulate immigration. Second, he argues for a refinement of the metaphor, a transformation and creation of "new assemblages" of form, readers, and communities.

Rich in postcolonial theory, fictional narratives, photographs, illustrative poems, and valuable critical insights, Kumar’s book explores a number of issues. He ruminates about how names can and have become detours, on how our origins are not quite fixed, on the politics of naming, on the political geography of postcolonial history, on borders that distance and discriminate, and, most importantly, on a truth that emerges not from words spoken or books read but from "the lines of chalk around dead bodies."

Passport Photos captures well the personal lived experience of immigrants. Kumar’s style, however, sometimes distances the reader. For example, by labeling illegal immigrants "the bravest," the prophets who know "the reality of our world decades before the Californian suburbanite will ever get the point," or insisting that whenever Indians identify their culture, the non-Indian always utters "curry," Kumar ironically does what he critiques: He overgeneralizes and narrows the account. Even his conclusion seems a broad assumption. Kumar cleverly documents the questions posed by symbolic migration, but offers few answers.

—Elaine R. Ognibene
Siena Colle