In popular culture, the love song is frequently a shared anthem — think of Sara Bareilles’s 2007 hit “Love Song,” — or perhaps, if you’re a fellow millennial, try not to think of all the house parties where this played side by side with “Hey There Delila” and “Irreplaceable.” The love song is specific, intimate, and yet, also commercial and an invitation for self-insertion. The love song is the ode’s more marketable cousin. But it’s also a tool for revolution. In the tradition of the Filipino kundiman, a love song can blend political desire alongside personal desire. Like Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, the love song may also engage with a nonlinear space, or, as Natalie Diaz describes, “the Love Poem is a place that’s not the future. It’s not the past. It’s not now. It’s a place that can’t be confined in that way because, in some ways, it’s the ecstatic.”
It’s this ecstatic space that Kenzie Allen’s debut collection reaches for. Cloud Missives is a poetry collection that engages with commercial images of Indigenous women and how these manufactured images replace living women with costume and voyeurism. These are poems, love songs and odes that are as much about desire and lineage as they are about the audience’s perception of such desire and lineage. In “Love Song to Banish Another Love Song,” Allen writes “What I thought fit me / only fit the outline of fear” as she reaches for a self who exists beyond explication, beyond the audience. Through the love song, Allen introduces an Indigenous speaker who listens to La Traviata, who travels to Lisbon and Norway, who has, herself, taken on the role of scholar and observer:
I was not ready to want you,
but now I am.
On the day you came, I lived a pale blue
dream in which I spoke perfect French.
Now my tongue is my own again,
past and present the same, sweet thing.
None of these identities are incongruous.
As Allen attempts to redress popular images of Indigenous women in “In Which I Become (Earth Mother),” “(Pocahontas),” and “(Tiger Lily),” the parenthetical indicates room for self-insertion, but for whom? The assumed white audience or for a Haudenosaunee poet crafting a lineage in the shadow of blood quantum? For whom do we perform the authentic or inauthentic self, and how might such a performance of our exotified selves become more than persona? Perhaps the most direct solution is to address the self, as Allen does in “How to be a Real Indian.” The speaker instructs:
Let the woman who had your name and died
before you were born come into your body and speak the wisdom,
let her Grandmother Willow you.
There is a real woman who shares the speaker’s name and there is the anthropomorphized tree from Disney’s 1995 animated film Pocahontas, and they both inhabit the body, one performing the action of the other. To modify the franchise image, to corrupt the commercial with the reality of the speaker, makes clear that what Allen’s collection modifies is not lineage but focal point. As the poem continues, it becomes difficult to tell which instructions signal authenticity (“Talk about quantum / as though trying to find a way to name yourself”) and which relish the possibility of a continuous sense of self (“Eat fry bread every day of your life if you can.”). The “Real Indian” is obviously manufactured, but Allen’s poem poses the more interesting question of, by whom? Who sells the speaker the image of herself? How much of that image is made piecemeal, digestible to everyone else?
Allen’s poems confront what it means to inhabit an identity such as this, in a nation that demands scrutability, a measurable bloodline, in order to talk about lineage, about homeland, about the literal earth where we bury our loved ones, Allen returns again and again to the body. In “Breaking Ground,” the first poem of the section titled “Pathology,” she writes:
What did I think to find
of my own history? Some reason
for my battered form? What of the memory
I carried, the almost-end of me,
arms to break, to lay me in the ground.
It comes easier outside myself,
the story I give
to the buried,
If the physical body is tied to cultural and genetic memory, then the body also carries the consequences of having to invent, not just a personal narrative but “the story I give to the buried.” Is this also a kind of disinterment? In poems like “Breaking Ground,” it’s impossible to ignore the implications of the section title, “Pathology.” “Breaking Ground” introduces a violent innovation (‘groundbreaking’ being the ideal of the pioneer) which Allen deftly links to disturbance and displacement, a precursor to the nation’s self-ordained Manifest Destiny, perhaps nodded to by the next section’s title, “Manifest.” An occupation of the land becomes an occupation of the body, a demand for labor.
This is most clear when Allen invokes the collective “we,” in “Central Nervous System,” a poem whose epigraph cites a protest call from the Occupy Wall street movement, while also listing the physical condition of the collective:
We flinch, we fetal, we shrimp round the radiator,
we know the epicenter by the shock,
we know the limits by the scale of a grimace.
We know it doesn’t end there.
Though Allen describes a shared condition, she resists any simplification towards a fabled universal human experience. Consider how Allen rejects absolutes in “Forensics,” how she instructs the reader to recognize her unknowability, to “Write ‘possible /limp;’ do not be precise / with more than measurement.” When she reiterates “Do not imagine a face where there is none,” she’s emphasizing the limitations of how much knowing we can impose on one another. In a collection that engages with persona, these two poems hint at a larger discussion regarding the ethics of persona and the appropriation of another’s experiences. On one hand, there is the question of “realness” as Metta Sama frames in her conversation in Los Angeles Review of Books. Sama explains, “Art places us inside of our bodies. Whether we use those bodies to practice the subliminal, the persona, the pointillism, the abstract, the memoir, we enter in our body and engage from within our bodies.” But that realness, the autobiographical can be dismissed as observation without craft. Or it can be exploited as a way to partake in the artist’s body, to ‘try on an experience,’ so to speak. On the other hand, what does it mean to offer the audience a body which is not ours? It’s hard to forget incidences when poets (often white, often a man) take on personae (often a person of color, often a woman) in order to do what exactly? Titillate? Empathize? While the motive is less clear, the effect is frequently the obfuscation of real experiences in favor of imagined observations. And even beyond the literary hoax, the borrowing of race as metaphor can still be harmful.
As a mixed-race woman, I grew up only with mixed race characters who died, a trope I did not recognize until Paisley Rekdal’s “Appropriate” named the “tragic mulatto figure” for me. Obviously, I don’t die because of the metaphorical use of my live experience, but I certainly may be a little more fatalistic for it. And I think this impact on the psyche is also recognized by Allen’s work. In “Determination of Racial Affinity,” Allen’s speaker consults the anthropological worksheets, compares “caveats of origin,” for the three-race model:
They don’t say it starts in the skeleton, in fragments of fragments
and the .002 gram that could be user error
or could mean your ancestors carried you down the river
in the cradleboard of everything.
Nothing mentions variability,
and how every time you look at that skull of hers, it changes.
How you can’t pull off your own skin
and ask your body questions.
I can’t help but relate, attempting to compare my nose to my mother’s, my cousin’s. I want proof I belong to the culture I grew up in. But if we demand the empirical measurement of authenticity, are we not interrogating our ancestors through a set of guidelines (collected by whom? for what purpose?) uninterested in offering belonging? Allen places the speaker’s body outside of these metrics, though the desire for easy adherence to a standard is there, “we can’t be certain, when only bone remains.” I’m curious about the space Allen is writing into — a space where the story is equally part of the body, weighted like bone.
Allen’s is a different sense of hybridity than mine, but for writers keenly aware of the white gaze, her collection offers a generous possibility — to give back to the reader the desires of the reader, and in doing so, make room for one’s own. These odes, these love songs, we might be listening in, but they’re geared toward a more intimate audience. When Allen writes in “Red Woman,” “The words sound better / when I don’t speak them at all, so they tell me,” there’s a clear sense that “better” is judged not by the speaker but by a “they” who supplements the speaker’s speech. This is a speaker who must parse desire from desirability, or, what it means to navigate a necessary persona when yours is a skin others are so fond of trying on. The audience becomes a kind of repetition, a constant voice — “they say … they say” — but the poem pivots by having the speaker return language to an audience who would pin her in the past tense of “what it would have been like”:
They ask me to wash my hair in the river.
To see what it would have been like.
Smile, they say. Those braids are dangerous. They say,
Where are you walking so late at night.
Because the persona (and the actions that the audience demands of her) becomes distinct from the speaker’s interiority, the poem is able to dismiss an outsider’s appetite for performed identity. As the reader (an audience both outside of and aligned with the othering audience of the poem), we must confront the elements of fetish and veiled violence in the last couplet as if they are our own. Allen’s collection seeks to calibrate an audience attuned to irony and misinformation, a correction that’s necessary before she can say anything in earnest. In doing so, she also resists the eurocentric demand to explain Oneida culture to an audience not of the Oneida Nation. If Allen can invoke Grandmother Willow and Tiger Lily and Indiana Jones without introduction, then the audience must also accept Skywoman and her ongoing lineage where “The world at my back names me and so do I.”
When Allen invokes ancestral work in “Elegy Against Elegy”:
as more than story.
A teaching:
extinction is not an Indigenous word.
This story goes on.
The reader must make the leap (a physical gap within the text) from what’s inherited to a present action and the question “What will you give back?” The audience becomes accountable. If we are to engage with Allen’s relationship with the land, with history, with the future, we must question our own colonial relationships to land and nation.
I live in the southeastern United States. All summer, little flags denote an ongoing war between the dead and whatever is a landscape. I say landscape. I mean to separate signifiers of the land’s utility from the land itself. In this case, the collection of July flags representing opposing states, opposing histories. This is a practice I’m borrowing from a friend who recommended the work of anarchist activist-scholar Mohamed Abdou who states, “Land is a spiritual subject, not an anthropomorphized object of utility.” Lately, I’ve noticed local garden centers distinguishing between native, non-native and invasive plants, where non-native means of European origin and invasive means tropical and virulent. I wonder if the difference between domestication and cohabitation is a healthier way to think about how I might move towards a better relationship with my position as a colonial immigrant. Each morning I say thank you to the sampaguitas (they make me feel at home). There are two black racers in the backyard who wait each day for me to fill a shallow dish I call the snake pool. The garden perpetuates eurocentric aesthetic but also cuts down on my trips to the grocery store. It saves me from one or two uncomfortable conversations every week. This is where I am now. It takes a lot of time to belong somewhere, in part because where is a term to denote place, but place is social and economic and geographic.
When Allen writes, “Bought my voice in the institution / so far off-res I must be / an apple.” she is talking about place, how she must locate herself within an academy centered on Western thought. The apple is a cultivated fruit that reads as American but originates from central Asia. Perhaps the best way to seem from a place isn’t to be from a place, but to be what a nation imagines — American as apple pie. But if we are going to engage with signifiers, then we must also invoke the poison apple, the bad apples, the apple that falls close/far from the tree. Allen leans into these apples in “Letters I Don’t Send,” a sequence that explores what it means “at last to become the villain,” to “talk about bad apples / like we each know one intimately.” I’m interested in the expansive claiming of archetype, which is another way to say “this story goes on.” In rejecting the borders previously observed by cartoonish portraits of Indigenous peoples, Allen makes room for the love song.
Allen’s collection materializes the possibility of a past and a future that refuse to center colonial values while also acknowledging that she, too, has grown up with a self-image shaped by eurocentric aesthetic. Within Cloud Missives, each poem is necessary. Each is insistent, “a song against the song of our demise.” Each a lyric towards a more possible future.
[Published by Tin House Books on August 20, 2024, 120 pages, $16.95 paperback]