Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Of Thee I Sing: A Semiotic Review by Scott Andrews
Scott
Andrews has been so gracious so many times as a guest poster on The
Weekly Rader, that we are considering renaming the blog The Bi-Weekly
Andrews Or, perhaps, the Don't Dread Scott. We'll work on that and get
back to you.
In
our ongoing interest in the intersection of politics and early
childhood education, we feature a particularly smart review of President
Barack Obama's new children's book. In keeping with the focus of TWR,
Andrews also considers the semiotics of this text.
President Barack Obama’s new book for children, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters,
made headlines lately – it is more accurate to say that the Fox News
headline made headlines. His book briefly discusses several famous
figures from American history, presenting them as heroes. Among those
featured is Sitting Bull, the famous leader of the Lakota. Fox News
caught a good round of criticism for its “fair and balanced” headline
about the book: “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General.”
When
it was pointed out that Sitting Bull did not kill General Custer, Fox
News revised the headline to say “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who
Defeated U.S. General.” Never mind that Sitting Bull was too old to
participate in the Battle of Little Big Horn.
There
was much snickering from the Left at the contortions Fox News is
capable of in finding ways to criticize Obama. What I haven’t heard yet
is discussion of the image accompanying the passage about Sitting Bull.
Illustrator
Loren Long portrays Abraham Lincoln and Billie Holiday in a fashion
reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton, in warm colors and with curved,
stylized figures. We see Lincoln and Holiday among other humans, doing
things they are famous for – speaking and singing. We see Jackie
Robinson swinging a bat. We see Albert Einstein staring into the
heavens. We see Cesar Chavez speaking to migrant workers.
However,
Sitting Bull is literally the Earth itself. His cheeks and nose are
hills. His eyes are two bison. His eyebrows are trees. His forehead
is an orange sunset. Although Sitting Bull is described as healing the
“broken hearts and broken promises” of his people, we do not see any
Indians.
Seeing the image of Sitting Bull as Real Estate is surprising in this context. A book like Of Thee I Sing
is intended to remind us of famous, admirable people from American
history – to make them visible to us again. It is odd, then, that in
this act of remembrance, Sitting Bull is not present. In the book’s
time machine, we travel back to see Abraham Lincoln speaking to his
fellow Americans. In the time machine of our imagination, the book
takes us back to see Billie Holiday singing, perhaps in a night club,
among musicians. It is unclear that we have entered the time machine to
visit Sitting Bull. Are we looking at his spirit in today’s
landscape? Or have we traveled back to the western Plains in the
1800s? If so, where is Sitting Bull? Where are the people he led and
healed?
This
image is created in the tradition of “The Vanishing Indian.” American
mythology has been deeply conflicted about the original inhabitants of
the continent since Day One of Contact. Americans have hated Indians
and they have loved Indians. But, strangely, in both cases the Indian
disappears from view.
The
side of the American psyche that hated Indians wanted to clear them out
of the way of westward expansion, even if that meant killing them all. Thus the Indian became, for many decades, the ubiquitous villain of
American popular fiction and Hollywood Westerns. In contrast to the
bloodthirsty savage, the American hero could look that much more heroic –
and could be justified in killing Indians.
The
side of the American psyche that loved Indians romanticized and envied
them, and yet still imagined the Indians absent from the path of
westward expansion. In American literature, sometimes the Indians
disappeared voluntarily, because they did not want to live like their
new neighbors. Sometimes the Indians disappeared tragically, perhaps
from disease or even from hearts broken by the damage done to their
communities. This passing was lamented by some Americans, and it was
sometimes used to critique the American greed or violence or prejudice
that so harassed Indians. But hardly ever in the American imagination
did this critique result in the Indian not disappearing.
Sometimes
what the American psyche hated about the Indian was also what it
loved. The Indian Hater oftentimes justified his hatred by seeing the
American as civilized and the Indian as savage. The task of transforming the landscape into European-style agricultural
and urban landscapes was seen as a process of conquering nature. Since
the original inhabitants of the land needed to be removed before the
land could be transformed, the Haters equated Indians with the land or
nature. Both needed to be conquered. They were not merely obstacles to
expansion, but as “nature” they were the opposite of “civilization.”
In his survey of Indians in American literature, Savagism and Civilization Roy
Harvey Pearce says that the Indian became an important symbol “for
what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be” (5).
Meantime,
the Indian Lover also equated Indians with the land or nature, but this
time that was seen as a good thing. Many times the Indian Lover had
grown tired of his own society. Like the Hater, the Lover associated
“civilization” with European-style society, but unlike the Hater he saw
“civilization” as corrupt or decadent. Pearce describes this as a type
of “primitivism -- the belief that other, simpler societies were somehow
happier than one’s own” (136). The Indian Lover saw “nature” as the
opposite of “civilization,” as pure and noble. He saw the Indian as the
Noble Savage, and in so doing he also equated the Indian with nature.
However,
despite his admiration for Indians, the Lover could not bring himself
to live with them permanently or imagine a role for them in his
society. Apparently, just because you love something doesn’t mean you
want to live with it. And so even those writers who loved Indians
rarely ever ended a story with the Indian characters still around – they
either died or faded into the landscape, headed further West, making
room for the tide of Americans.
I do not know Loren Long,
but I imagine he really likes Indians, or at least the idea of
Indians. And I bet he is a very nice man and a talented artist. But
depicting Sitting Bull not as a human talking to other humans (like
Lincoln) or singing with other musicians (like Holiday) has implications
beyond the artist’s intent. It potentially relieves Long or his
audience of depicting an uncomfortable truth – drawing the bodies of
Indians whom we can guess will suffer and possibly die at the hands of
American soldiers, who will become the victims of those “broken hearts
and broken promises.” The words beneath the image beg the question: Broken by whom? As written and drawn, the audience gets to avoid
uncomfortable answers.
Such
an illustration also traps Sitting Bull in a non-human dimension.
Unlike Lincoln or Holiday, Sitting Bull (and possibly by association
every Indian) becomes a transcendent, supernatural being. Not a human.
Of
course, it is better to have an Indian in the book than not. But it
would be nice to have an Indian who lives on the ground like a human
rather than in the ground like a specter or ghost.
Scott
Andrews is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and
he teaches American and American Indian literatures at California State
University, Northridge.
No comments:
Post a Comment