Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Metafor, sa.2, ss.87-106, 2017 (Hakemli Dergi)
Native American Autobiographical Practices: Louis Owens - A Temporally and Spatially Constructed Subjectivity
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence .
As Adrienne Rich equates language and naming to power, and silence to oppression and violence, likewise Louis Owens in Mixedblood Messages remarks on the impossible odds against which the American Indian peoples struggled to have a voice in a world where they were denied not only a voice but also presence. In this ongoing struggle against oppression, the Native Americans have finally wrenched for themselves a niche from which to reclaim their visibility and existence. This site of liberation is the Native American literary canon, the creation of which Louis Owens rightfully acclaims a collective project. In the American Indians’ fight against domination and obliteration, their strongest foe was the status of invisibility accorded them by the American meta narrative. Therefore, the American Indian Literature is an act of resistance against the mainstream which has deemed them non-existent and inarticulate.
In analysing the hegemonic relationship between the Native Americans and Anglo-Americans, Owens posits that the ultimate goal of the colonisers is not only to use the absent Other to promote their own ideology, but eventually and actually to replace the colonised, and in this way become entitled to his/her land, as well as his/her selfhood. According to Owens, the foremost objective of the Anglo-American is to take the place of the vanishing Indian since “the Euramerican [is] suffering from Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit, or not-at-homeness ‘that torments the colonizer…”’ . Then, Owens argues the deepest desire on the part of the coloniser is to be born afresh in this new landscape. The purity which was lost in conquering the coveted land can only be reclaimed and the Euramerican can only be redeemed in his own eyes through this act of rebirth. And when born again, the coloniser shall be reborn not only in the image, but in the person of the Other, who already has an innate relationship with the land.
In addition to its reclamatory essence, unison and inclusion that characterise Native American traditions have their reflection in the autobiographical practices by American Indian authors. Furthermore, Indian American autobiographical writing, through stylistic hybridisation and the inclusion of visual, textual and critical materials creates its own form alongside an inclusive and enriched content. One of the final works of Louis Owens, I Hear the Train provides us with a striking example of such a multifaceted autobiographical text. Uninhibited by Western constraints of linear temporality, the fragmental time provides the author with the freedom to construct the self as part of the larger whole that is the family, the community, and the land. In the process, what is created is a multi-textured text, which is all-inclusive, and one that resists separation, since in Native tradition separation amounts to the loss of selfhood.
Key words: autobiography, self-writing, Native American, American Indian, space, land, earth, temporality, time, identity reclamation