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Title: Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir
ISBN: 0393050181
Author:
Linda Hogan
Publicate Date: 2001-06
Publish: 2001-06
List Price: $24.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $11.95
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $4.89
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| Customer Review: |
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1: They did not teach this is high school
As a white 48 year old women I now realize how ignorant I have been to indigenous peoples of America. It left me yearning for more knowledge. This book expanded my mind. It is well written and easy to understand. Very straight forward.
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2: Very theraputic
I read this book in a class about violence in society. it really brought home the nessesity for violence but a productive way to turn it into a positive thing in your life and still have good energy surround you. this book especially hit home with me because i have experience with foster children that can't bond. it really helped me to understand how to deal with that. Plus Linda Hogan Rocks!!
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3: Book Review
Life is a journey form fragments to wholeness. Hogan's memoir tries to reveal her steps and processes of having harmony in her life. She divides her memoir into eleven sections with various topics to express her different experience of life. Each part of her personal experience is the part of life journey, though in the journey, no absolutely direction is shown to tell her when to go or what to do. In "Geography: An Introduction," Hogan says there is no maps of direction in life, even she wish to direct her life to others by saying "This way," (14) but she couldn't. From receiving the broken pieces of the clay woman named "The Woman Who Watches over the World" that she bought in the museum, Hogan starts to illustrate her journey of broken past in "Water: A Love Story," which narratives how she falls in love with a sergeant army in German, and how she decides to come back to America by through the sea. Then she says "through our time life-times it is water that sustains us, water that is the human substance, the matter of cells"(31). In her years of falling, Hogan concludes "falling isn't always bad. Sometimes it is better into world" (66). As the topics go, readers seem to have steps to penetrate Hogan's inner floating. From piecing the following topics together, including "Silence is My Mother," "Fire," "Dreams and Visions: The Given-Off Light," "Span: Of Time and Stone,???? ????Mystery,???? ????Bones, and Other Precious Gem,???? and ????Phantom Worlds,???? we gradually finish the journey made by Hogan's personal events by the topic steps she gave us. Reading Hogan's memoir is like playing jigsaw puzzle, which is the game from fragments to wholeness. The process of the play jigsaw puzzle is like the process of facing many events in journey life. As she describes herself from the broken past to the harmony in the living world, Hogan's memoir also reveals the situation of Native American today. Therefore, it is not only a memoir of self, but a reflection of her tribes.
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4: History, Healing and Survival
Hogan????s memoir is a book not only ????about love???? (16), but about ????healing, history, and survival???? (16). In this memoir of eleven chapters, the idea of history dominates the whole work in which Hogan retrieves not only her personal history but the communal history. The ????space-time???? relationship becomes a unifying force for each chapter to construct a unified whole and present a ????a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples???? (16). For Hogan as a Native American, history, no matter personal or tribal one, is present in geography, no matter a spiritual or spatial one. First of all, Hogan tries to relate her ????self-telling???? to the young people on reservations and thus connect her personal history with the history of the continent since ????I can lay a human history out before me and hold a light to it, and in that light is the history of a continent???? (14). She then identifies herself and the world with the clay woman, ????the Woman who Watch Over the World???? since she, the clay woman and the world/land are all broken. And the historical traumas are revealed and shown in human bodies and the land in itself. Thus, by retrieving the history of her physical pain, emotional suffering, and early inarticulateness inherited from her mothers, she presents us a suffering history of her tribe in this continent. By exploring both the personal and tribal history, she displays a map/path for herself and the young tribal men to pursue after her. It is then a map/path of healing. By healing, she means the power of words and the cure of nature. She offers a history of three generations of women in her family, herself, her mother and her two adopted daughters, who, because ????the destruction of the body and land have coincided in history???? (62~63), have been or are, in a way or other, voiceless of their emotional, physical, or spiritual sufferings. Thus, the power of storytelling/words is significant for her to deal with her personal problems and recognition of self-identity in the tribal community. Moreover, after years of experiences with pain, she finds her cure relies on ????earth, water, light and air???? (16). Its significance can be seen when several elements in nature are used to entitle six out of the eleven chapters. Finally, what unifies all these treads presented in the memoir into a spider web, separate but of the same direction, is the power of tribal survival through which personal survival is also attained. It is only because of a quest into her haunted past and tribal hardships can she find a power to refresh her spirit and a meaning for her life. Thus, with the presentation of both traumatic histories and ways of healings, she positions herself and establishes her subjectivity in a tribal world that, in turn, survives in face of possible genocide. And it is this urgency of survival, no matter personal or tribal, that makes the memoir and the Naitve American literature extraordinary to the Euroamerican literature.
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5: A great memoire of Linda Hogan
As the title implies, this momoire arises form Linda Hogan her own perspective to tell the history of her tribe, her family and her own self. It is indeed a very impressive work for me. Many details and many depictions attract me very much, and I am going to illustrate some of them that impress me most.
Drunken is a very serious problem for Hogan????s family and relatives. By the description, we gradually realize that to drink is a way to elude from the painful history. ????I was drunk, not an alcoholic,???? their reason is that ????the drunk wants to lose the memory of every day.???? ????It was an escape from the pain of an American history.???? For them, so many memories are unacceptable and the solution they can do is to escape from it. The Indians are the Natives of the States. But the invaders occupied most of their land and even made law to restrain the Indian territory. It is very ridiculous event.
One thing that shocks me very much is about ????the Sand Creek Masacre.???? It is a very painful thing for the Native people, but the Whites choose to make fun of the deathes. It reveals all the horrible history. Besides the history of the Native and the tribes, Hogan also explores herself and confesses herself to the readers. I believe this book is absolutely a good one to read and you will get more by your own reading.
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