american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

90 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
who pretends to own / the earth and sky.” Trapped in the postcolonial
world (“the bag”), they fight until they make a hole, then fall to the
earth though they are “not aware of falling.” Once they have punctured
the “bag” of colonial rule, they land “somewhere near the
diminishing point of civilization” where schoolchildren are “learning
subtraction with guns.” When the speaker imagines creation and created
world this way, she does not—as Goodman points out about
another Harjo poem—show “nostalgia for a mythic Native American
past before the Europeans stepped onto the continent” (50). The
poem does not simply reject Western culture and its creation myths;
instead, Harjo re-imagines the colonial encounter as one that can be
reinvented and redeemable through imagination. Moreover, “every
day” the creation of the world is “reenacted” by us and is thus
ameliorable by us because “we” are not captive agents incapable of
acting outside the “bag.”
The final third of the poem has a critical change in voice similar to
the sestet of an Elizabethan sonnet. This three-stanza resolution gives
a “solution” for the problems of colonialism and the world created by
it. The poem’s chantlike repetition suggests a building optimism. The
two lines that signal the change indicate that imagination is both
divine force and human product: “The imagining needs praise as does
any living thing. / We are evidence of this praise.” Even though imagination
is a transformative force that helps children shun violence
(“children put down their guns”) and all people take on a compassionate
community-based ethos (“We imagined tables of food for
everyone”), imagination’s products (“story” and “song”) are unable
to “translate” either “the full impact of falling” or “the power of rising
up.” Imagination, then, is the primary means to developing and sustaining
community, but imagination must be acted upon, set in
motion by people who have the potential to fall and to rise up—
imagination requires acting agents. The poem thus carves out space in
the world where imagination can flourish. Even though imagination
can be transformative, it alone does not comprise the world in which
we live. Stories and songs cannot describe the “full impact” of colonization.
Without this void, this undefined space, imagination is a nonstarter.
There has to be some space that is always undetermined, even
by imagination; this is the space in which imagination must operate.
The poem ends with the notion that “the imagination”—notably a
collectively held single imagination—“speaks with / us,” “sings with
us,” and “loves us.” The community’s relationship with “imagination”
is reciprocal; people give to imagination and receive from it
acceptance and compassion. “A Postcolonial Tale” thus sets in motion