Multiplies when Touched
Review of The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote (USA: Counterpoint, 2019)
By Sharmini Aphrodite
My mother often told me a story when I was a child. A boy is raised to manhood, and he leaves the village for some faraway country. When he returns, it is with a princess that he has married. The village and his mother first greet his arrival with joy, but then it becomes clear that the boy now thinks himself above them: the princess, her wealth, his newfound worldliness—all of it has turned his head. He is now ashamed of the people and land in which he has been raised. At the story’s climax, the heartless child kicks his mother down a hill. The sky thunders. The boy has angered the spirits, and he and his wife are turned to stone.
This morality tale, known as “Si Tanggang,” is common in the Nusantara region, though it has many variations. The moral is the importance of filial piety and of loyalty to the land and people of one’s birth. But in one version that centers on the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia, the tale has another dimension. The boy, when raised to manhood, leaves the jungle. When he returns, he has imbibed the customs of Malaysian-Malay society to modernize and “better” himself. In this version, he refuses to wear his loincloth. But the same thing happens in the end. He turns his back on his mother. He turns his back on his people. He is turned to stone.
The author of The Beadworkers, Beth Piatote is a scholar and writer; she is Nez Perce from Chief Joseph’s Band and an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Her new novel is a mixed-genre collection, comprising a playscript, verse, and short stories, which contests settler-colonial imageries, returning autonomy to what Piatote calls “indigenous politics and aesthetics.” While reading The Beadworkers, I was reminded of “Si Tanggang,” and of the thread that loops its way through indigenous peoples worldwide. Although the indigenous people of Sabah (the land of my mother’s ancestors) did not face the violence that European colonization brought on Native Americans, some things are shared, as they are with indigenous people in many parts of the world. Among these things are the fraught waltz between Christianity and ancestral belief, and—above all—the persistent fear of disappearance that lies at the heart of the Orang Asli version of “Si Tanggang.” This fear is tied deeply to the loss of language.
In The Beadworkers, readers encounter a voice that naturally modulates between English and Nez Perce, the author’s native tongue. It begins with a poem that weaves Nez Perce with English, titled “Feast I”:
Kú·s
First taste of life
Not air but water, carried
By our mothers…
A reader with no understanding of Nez Perce would have to rely on contextual clues, and if that fails, allow themselves to be carried on the river of rhythm. “Feast I” primes the reader for what they can expect in The Beadworkers. It speaks about returning and giving thanks to the land that you come from. Genealogy is expressed not as linear chronology, but as a continuous process of dialogue (“in new dresses with baskets woven/ by grandmothers’ hands and songs/ we carry, we are carried/ to return again, give thanks again/ return these songs”). Even the single line “we carry, we are carried” reflects an ongoing relationship: the fact that we are never outside this cradle of history.
Given that Piatote’s use of Nez Perce is not accompanied with explanatory gloss, it is likely that there will be readers who will find this collection frustrating to read. However, one does not necessarily have to understand a language to derive something from it—I know only a few words in my own mother’s tongue right now, but it is calming for me to hear it spoken. And for those who understand Nez Perce, this lack of accommodation to a wider audience is an authorial nod in their direction, a declaration that this is a collection that was carved with them in mind.
Two other poems, “Feast II” and “Feast III,” comprise the first section of The Beadworkers, titled “wé·tes wax̣ waqí·swit / land and life.” “Feast II” is a collection of vignettes, whereas “Feast III” takes the form of a short story. Like “Feast I,” both explore the relationship between its characters and nature. “Feast II,” in particular, feels especially fluid. It moves between genres, using vignettes—all headed with titles in Nez Perce—to present the reader with both a formal reading of history (one of the articles from a land treaty written in 1855 is replicated) and more personal perspectives, written colloquially:
He was from a Salmon Tribe over that way, over to the coast.
And his tribe got terminated.
I don’t know why, but the folks around there stopped. Maybe it was a dark time for them. But they gave up the Salmon Ceremony, all of them. Except this one guy.
Also included are retellings of traditional stories, one involving the perennial Native American character of the Coyote. The first third of “Feast II” is written completely in Nez Perce, emphasizing, once again, the fluidity in language. By mixing historical accounts with personal narratives, “Feast II” contests a “settler-colonial” perspective of history, a perspective in which myth and fact are treated as binaries. Here, there is no distinction between what one might construe as myth, and what is presented as fact. Someone in the present can speak to their ancestors as if they were only behind a door, or find strength in a visitor from a past life, once again held up to the light:
That man and that elk knew each other from a long time ago; they met in dreams and sweat, blood and forest
The vignettes in “Feast II” emphasize interrelatedness and community, progressing from isolation (signaled by the singular pronoun “I”) to community by the end of “Feast II’” (which uses the collective pronoun “we”).
Piatote’s writing also reiterates connections between poems: “Feast II” ends with water coming back to the drought-lands of California, an image revisited in “Feast III,” which begins with water that “coughs from the mouth of the hand pump, smacking the floor of the metal bucket.” “Feast III” follows a widow named Mae, living in the dreamworld of grief after her husband’s death. History moves like a stream through her personal memories. Particularly poignant is the description of residential schools set up by colonial governments. Native children were often forcibly taken from their homes with the aim to integrate them into a European way of life. Unsurprisingly, these schools were rife with abuse. But in the present, Mae is not alone; the women in the reservation where she now lives take care of her in the private language of familiar food: “smoked salmon and dried venison all winter.” Like the narrative in “Feast II,” what begins as personal sorrow makes way for communal healing.
The second section of The Beadworkers, titled “Indian Wars,” is more straightforward. In two stories, characters relay their experiences living amid the various struggles of history. The stories are told in third-person, with elements of traditional storytelling, such oral narration and native symbolism. The latter is particularly effective in the portentous opening of the first story, “The News of the Day”:
The mirror fell off the wall, and Marcel knew that his father was dead in another country.
In the second story “Fish Wars,” there is a similar sense of being caught up in the largeness of history. The narrator is a child worrying about her family—her parents have had a fight, and she wakes up one morning to find out both of them and her brother gone. Later, she discovers that her father was arrested for trespassing on his own land, for “fishing in [their] river, where [they have] always fished.” A child’s voice is one that is often difficult for an adult author to shape; it can easily veer into a false sense of naivety, but Piatote manages the voice quite well. The child-narrator is aware of her history, but does not possess the awkward prophet-like wisdom that so many child-characters seem to have. She is simply there, both a witness and a participant, watching the world move around her, wondering what she will do next.
Like other Native American authors, Piatote is invested in personal histories and the interweaving of these histories with the larger history of her people. Piatote experiments with different ways to create communal identity, from her use of the collective “we” in the Feast sequence to establish a communal perspective, to the use of the second person “you,” which in later stories is used to invite the reader into community with the speaker. In both cases, the reader is enfolded into a conversation about history. What drives the writing in The Beadworkers is a sense of absence; of language, tradition, or community. This absence exists because of the violent and deliberate erasure of Native American and First Nations people in colonial—and present-day—United States and Canada. Many generations of children—sent off to residential schools where they were forbidden to practice their customs or speak their language—have passed down this trauma of absence.
The disappearance of language is an especially troubling aspect of the loss. A 2012 article told me that only 100 people could speak my mother’s tongue in its purest form. It is a heavy thing to know, one that spurs a hunger for preservation, even if all that is available is scraps. In the story “Falling Crows,” Piatote also touches on similar concerns. Here, a character, who has recently lost his limbs, receives tapes in which his relatives speak in their native language, which he does not understand. The ending is both hopeful and sad, as the character, having fallen asleep listening to the recordings, wakes up to his “mismatched limbs and remembers that this is what life is now.” Although the tone is despondent, he feels “like he is floating, or riding a great river.” It is the feeling of homecoming.
The final section of The Beadworkers is a retelling of the ancient Greek story of Antigone. The story of Antigone centers around her desire to properly bury her brother Polynices, a desire that leads her to act against the decree of her uncle, Creon, who refuses to allow Antigone’s brother to be buried or mourned. Antigone’s punishment of live burial causes the downfall of Creon’s household: his son, who loves Antigone, kills himself out of grief, and Creon’s wife commits suicide in turn. The fatalism of Sophocles’ tale works well in Piatote’s hands: Antigone is now Antikoni, a Nez-Perce Cayuse woman. Instead of being refused the burial of her brother, Antikoni here is refused the “warshirt of Ataoklas,” “brought forth of [her] grandmother’s labour.” Instead of being returned to the tribe, Ataoklas’ warshirt “is to be stored in a gleaming vitrine, while his selfsame body disarticulates beneath the floor.” The man responsible for this decision, as in the original Antigone, is a family member: her uncle, the museum director, Kreon. In Kreon’s eyes, keeping Ataoklas’ belongings in the museum is a way to preserve history, and to maintain a good relationship with those who fund the museum. He urges Antikoni:
Think upon our warrior chiefs: Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Captain Jack, Joseph.
Imprisoned and tortured they were, in those days.
I have learned from my bosses,
To smile at our losses,
And hold an unforked tongue.
Piatote is careful not to simplify Kreon’s character—he too loves his history, and believes that his actions will ensure that Ataoklas’ “name will be spoken with awe.” Piatote’s narrative dramatizes the ethical dilemmas surrounding heritage conservation. On the one hand, the museum preserves and even deifies; on the other, it essentializes and keeps artefacts away from the children and grandchildren of their makers.
There is no easy ending to Antikoni’s story. Like her namesake, Antikoni departs this life after she is found guilty of stealing what belongs to her. She is “buried alive” in a different way, suspended among the murmurs of trapped history. In Piatote’s script, Antikoni appears on a screen on stage, suspended over the audience, declaring:
And here I shall remain, along with the dead
My life as theirs, suspended, just as that of my kin
Who find no comfort in grief, whose grief can never begin
These moving lines capture what it means to mourn a history that is denied you. It is impossible to pray for something that you are not permitted to name.
Antikoni’s tale ends The Beadworkers, bringing to a symbolic climax the injustices suffered by the Nez Perce tribe. Piatote’s work, however, is not completely lacking in hope. The collection begins, after all, with the motif of water, a regenerative substance that funnels its way through the earth and endures. Indigenous history, so often seen as a dead thing, relegated to the past, is alive in Piatote’s writing: it speaks through the Fish Wars of the recent 1960s and 70s and in the decidedly contemporary setting of “netí·telwit / human beings.” If the wounds of history are still present, then so is the body, and so is the chance to keep it alive. In the final scene of “netí·telwit / human beings,” Antikoni’s on-screen image multiplies when touched. It spreads to fill a 3x3 grid, then a 4x4 one. The image of Antikoni hovers on-screen for a moment more, and then, with a final drumbeat, disappears. Yet the thing about images on-screen is that all it takes to resurrect them is a touch.
Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Sabah and raised between the cities of Singapore and Johor Bahru. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Golden Point Awards, Australian Book Review Jolley Prize, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her art writing has appeared on So-far and Contemporary HUM.