Astrid Lorange Reads Layli Long Soldier

At Meanjin Quarterly, Sydney-based poet and scholar Astrid Lorange is on the brink of a new, "massive" project that promises to look at poetry that takes legal documents as its source material. With a new project comes a heap of reading; and Lorange shares some of that reading in this piece, her aim "to set out some of the texts that have acted most urgently and intimately." What follows is a thinking-through of work by Layli Long Soldier. An excerpt:

I’m especially interested in the law as the foundational language of the nation state—the vernacular of sovereignty. Poetry offers one way to read this language critically, to read it, as it were, as ‘artificial’ language (in the way that Veronica Forrest-Thomson means, that is, as language that draws attention to its own becoming). So the poems I am reading, the poems that turn the language of law and nation as material for transformative critique, are a kind a ‘re-membering’. As David Scott calls it: the ‘putting back together aspects of our common life so as to make visible what has been obscured, what has been excluded, what has been forgotten.’

Poetry as a critical re-membering of how the law comes to be and what history comes to obscure, exclude and forget, is a counter-archival practice, a rereading of official archives and received histories as ‘art, fiction, and fabrication’ (Motha and van Rijswijk). In other words, by reading the law and history from the position of the poet, we might perceive more fully the fictionality of the archive, and in what may feel like a counter-intuitive move, stake a truth claim about the operations of both law and history.

An example—in Layli Long Soldier’s incredible book of poems Whereas, she tells the story of the Dakota 38 (‘38’), a group of thirty-eight men who were executed by public hanging on the order of Abraham Lincoln and following the Sioux Uprising. The poem is composed in a series of sentences, each separated by a paragraph break. It begins: ‘Here, the sentence will be respected.’ In what follows, Long Soldier makes it clear that this poem is not a ‘creative’ work as much as a the treatment of history in the form of a poem. The sentences build on each other, bearing witness to both the history they ‘re-member’ as well as the formation of that history as its own collection of sentences:

The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas.

This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the preceding sentence, I italicize “same week” for emphasis. (49)

Long Soldier goes on to describe, sentence by sentence, the way the settler-colonial state used the flexible, violent law to seize the land, starve its inhabitants and then sanction the mass execution of those implicated in the Uprising: ‘As treaties were abrogated (broken) and new treaties were drafted, one after another, the new treaties often referenced old defunct treaties, and it is a muddy, switchback trail to follow. // Although I often feel lost on this trial, I know I am not alone’ (50). The poem’s reflexive sentences show how the retelling of history relies on the reading and rereading of history’s incomplete and volatile texts. They also show how the act of writing a poem can both re-member this history and reveal the impossibility of such a task. The poem is then also a poem about how we can tell stories ‘that cannot be told, yet must be told’, to cite M NourbeSe Philip.

Read the entire entry: "What I’m Reading – Astrid Lorange."