A Review of Michael Wasson’s Swallowed Light — December 21, 2022 by Beatrice Szymkowiak
Swallowed Light is the first full-length collection by Nimíipuu poet Michael Wasson and expands his work published in the chapbook This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017).
The first poem of the collection, “Aposiopesis [or, the Field between the Living and the Dead],” introduces the reader to a haunted poetic space, a field harrowed by settler colonialismthat has carved bodies into bones, into a hunger, an “urge to pray” for flesh to bloom back, for “human life / to reenter / as if through / a door / broken.” From there, the collection seems to conjure a myth of creation and resurrection, against the cutthroat myth of America and its manifest destiny. Seemingly subverting the Holy Trinity of missionaries into the realities of assimilation, displacement, and genocide, the collection is organized into three parts.
Part I invokes a father-figure, capitalized into the “Father Above,” with “the full-bellied monster of His land” in the poem “Testament #90.” In many instances this figure looms like the god of Christianity, the (land)lord of settler colonial power. It is a god who thrives to create (assimilate) mankind to his own image, and whose reflection ripples through the centuries, fracturing Indigenous people’s culture, body, and identity, including Indigenous fatherhood. The poem “Self-Portrait as 1879–1934” denounces this doctrine of assimilation through its consequences:
How his skin felt of scratched chalk-
board with each new written version of him now so American: his name sparing his one blood-
red life. & see your mother kneeling at this quiet cage of crushed windows that held the last image
of her black hair.”
In this first part, the history of America is seen through centuries of broken mirrors that the speaker strives to piece “back together through / the night until no one forgets” (“Portrait with Smeared Centuries”). Wasson’s mastery of line breaks, particularly salient in these poems, emphasizes the cracks in the glass, the fractured identities.
Part II alludes to a son figure, who is just “a Boy and his Mother Play[ing] Dead at Dawn,” as the title of one poem describes. This filial figure suggests a move of the collection toward exploring further the legacy of settler colonialism. It is a legacy of erasure, in part carried out through linguicide, as the recurring images of maimed mouth, tongue, lips and throat strikingly denote. Part II especially underlines this erasure in “the Exile,” a poem about boarding schools, where the boy is “what song fills [his] throat with the color of carved-out tongue.” However, hope might also reside in the boy’s throat, when words in Nimipuutímt, first budding in the English lines of the collection, finally take over in “Paq’qatát Cilakátki,” a poem entirely written in Nimipuutímt. This poem directly follows “the Exile,” like a response to boarding schools, a reclamation of Indigenous language, culture, and identity. In an interview with Peter Mishler for LitHub, Wasson explains: “[Nimipuutímt] is the most charged and electric version of a ghost’s vibration inside a lexicon my body carries. It’s a history that I’m to hold. ” His statement points toward an Indigenous legacy sustained through language and body.
The speaker of the poem “Self-Portrait as Article I [I]. [Treaty with Nez Percés, 1855]: Cession of Lands to the United States,” seems to reclaim this legacy by subverting the language of treaty to assert: “In the year of their lord, this eleventh day of June, I enter the boundaries of my body.” In this body/land/language, the speaker incorporates ancestors and their history, as if answering the prayer for the resurrection of the dry bones suggested by the poem “Ezekiel 37:3” from Part I.
Part III introduces the idea of holy ghost(s), explicitly referred to in the title of the poem: “A Poem for the Háawtnin’ & Héwlekipx [The Holy Ghost of You, the Space & Thin Air].” There is a climactic quality to this section, a blossoming, as the speaker expresses in “Self-Portrait toward a Fugue [No. __ in __ b Minor]”:
I step into the wreckage—to find the other side of me blooming toward you
Blooming corresponds to a surrendering, an opening up of oneself, but it is double-edged. The surrendered body in Part III, emerges as a site of violence and violation, but also of possible reconciliation between body and bones, dead and living, settler colonial aggression and Indigenous persistence. Wasson’s diction and ambiguity underlines the difficulty of this reconciliation; when one stands “with a gun the size of American centuries that has already entered [their] boyish body” (“World Made Visible”). However, in the poem “On the Aggrieved,” the speaker insists: “Look / in the mirror .... Feel / how the rain might slow into snow & your breath / brightens from the dark held in your mouth.” One could think of the holy ghost as the breath that carries one toward and through life.
Swallowed Light tells a story of creation and resurrection through the ravage of settler colonialism. In his incisive and stunning lines, Wasson seems to answer the injunction made by the speaker in the very last poem of the collection, to tell the story about “breathing to find / your way home.” The breath, the body. The breath, the word. The breath, the ghosts. The “swallowed light.”
