Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

by Linda Hogan

Book Overview

I sat down to write a book about pain and ended up writing about love, says award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan. In this book, she recounts her difficult childhood as the daughter of an army sergeant, her love affair at age fifteen with an older man, the legacy of alcoholism, the troubled history of her adopted daughters, and her own physical struggles since a recent horse accident. She shows how historic and emotional pain are...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393323056
• ISBN13: 9780393323054
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Life sometimes emerges from pain

In this memoir, Hogan attempts to reveal not only an individual memory but the geography, and the history that is common to all human spirits, in particular, to Native American people. With the dominant image of broken things, such as the woman clay (broken body), the broken earth, and the fragmented Native American past, Hogan's inherited gene, blood, and cell from her families and tribal culture could make her become a witness to the whole journey of memory. What she sees, feels and interprets are a part of the past, the present, and the future. Her female body seems to be as vulnerable as the land and as Native American history. The trauma, physical or emotional pain, and wounds of an individual here are identical with those of tribal history so as to reconstruct the geography of Native American world and to get the healing. ¡§It wasn't healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world¡¨(16). Because some matters are too sharp to be memorized, through elements and creatures of nature, Native people are able to regain the life-giving power and continue the generations. From another aspect, I am curious about the remedy of love toward the pain, whether it is presented inwardly or outwardly. It seems that Hogan does not regard love as the only therapy to conquer all the sufferings. At least, it is not the love only existed between human beings.

Going on life with nature

Hogan divides The Woman Who Watches Over The World into several sections and each section she gives it a general image to present it; moreover, each section represents the different periods of Hogan's and Native Americans¡¦history and the situations she and Native Americans confront. The memoir is not just Hogan's memory of her life, but also concentrates tribal history into the memoir. The memoir contains the circular feature that is quite important and common in Native American writers' works. In the first section, Hogan describes that human body as a map and life is like a geographic lesson. Through the journey of life, human beings use their bodies to feel and realize the sorrow and happiness of life. From the clay woman that she bought, Hogan indicates the deep and intimate relation between Native Americans and the earth. Then, in the following sections, she uses many natural elements to represent the conditions of her/ Native Americans¡¦lives and describe the destruction of Native American's original society in different periods. The title of each section not only presents Hogan's own problems but also the social problems that Native Americans have to deal with under the domination of white people. So, the basic belief¡Xthe community is more important than individual that Native Americans believe supports the progress of the memoir. In the end, Hogan reinforces human beings¡¦association with the earth through their touch of stone and their return to the earth with bones. I do appreciate this concept because it reveals that how harmonious relationship that human beings can have with nature. Native Americans live with the earth and then return to the earth after their death. No one can really distinguish where life begins and where life ends. Life is a circular; even though pain always comes along with life, life still goes on.

The woman who writes a gift to the world...

A few years ago, I had a phase where I read memoirs seeking insights into how to live a full meaningful life. To my innocent surprise, I instead found that many people write their memoirs as versions of the lives they WISH they had lived rather than the real thing. "The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir" by Linda Hogan is much more than the real thing. This memoir is a kind, loving, forgiving and nakedly honest look at a life; the hopes and dreams encapsulated in one Native American woman's reflective survey of history and its intersection on her unique life. Whether she's talking about her tabooed love affair as a twelve year old girl, the unavoidable coldness of her mother, her own struggle with her adoptive daughters, her horse accident and subsequent convalescence -- Hogan locates herself within a greater context: the world of family, friends, direct and indirect ancestors and the legacy of a difficult and brutal American history.This book is not meant to be rushed through but savored. It's small enough to read in a single sitting, but the lessons, explorations and stories deserve the luxury of time. Read a chapter and come back to it later. It's a real treasure.

Thought-provoking essays by a fine Native American writer

The West has been vanishing almost since it was first inhabited by Europeans, and as a Native American writer, Hogan is devoted to the recovery of what has been nearly lost -- in particular, the culture and history of Native American tribes. This collection of personal essays, part memoir, argues that history lives, often unacknowledged, in our bodies. The catastrophe of shattered Indian cultures lives on, generations later, in the shattered lives of so many descendants of those tribes.Hogan is of Chickasaw descent, her ancestors inhabitants of what is now Tennessee and Mississippi, forcibly relocated over 100 years ago to the "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma, a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears. Her father an Army sergeant, she spent her first years in Germany, and in later years lived in Colorado. It was a difficult childhood, including a teenage "marriage" to an older man, a silent mother terrified of other people, her father often absent. She writes of her own alcoholism and adoption of two Lakota sisters, both deeply scarred emotionally by a history of severe child abuse.Hogan's book is an account of her emergence from the "dark underworld" of her early life and the discovery of her own humanity and capacity for love. There is the love for her troubled daughters and the love she learns to feel for her parents, in particular her father, who grew up as a cowboy and whose world forever made cowboys and horses appealing to her.There is much about pain in Hogan's story -- physical, emotional, spiritual. There is the pain of cultural genocide, and its aftermath in the scourge of alcoholism, poverty, domestic violence, and child abuse. There is the pain of her own troubled life and that of her daughters. There is also the pain of a debilitating physical condition, fibromyalgia. Finally, there is a near fatal accident when she falls from a runaway horse, causing a head injury and fractured pelvis and requiring many months of recovery.Besides her own story, there are illuminating ruminations in this book on memory, dreams, lost souls, horses, the body, landscapes, identity, and myth. You put the book down after the last page with a sense that you have been on a long, deeply experienced personal journey. Hogan makes reference to Andre Dubus, another writer whose life was abruptly changed by an accident. As a companion to this book, I'd recommend his collection of essays, "Broken Vessels."

Not just the usual bio!

Linda Hogan tells a beautiful story of pain, love, life and healing. Literally, weaving her life story together, a story that anyone can relate to comes to the surface. This book is not just "another biography" told so that people can sympathize and feel sorry for the author. Instead, it is one of those rare books that pulls you into the authors' life and teaches you something about yourself. Sometimes detached from herself, Hogan lets you into her life, her pain and makes you realize that pain and hurt is not always what breaks you, but is what makes you stronger. A fine, beautiful book and a definate must read.