issue ii: authors in queer american literature - paula gunn allen

Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen was born in 1939 to a Lebanese American father and a Laguna-Sioux-Scotch mother, “[b]ut for Paula her ethnicity was derived from exposure and experience of the Pueblo culture. This culture is a female-centered culture which is where Allen derived many of the ideas for her poems” (Paula Gunn Allen). We first met Paula Gunn Allen in a Native Women Writers class, where we read Grandmothers of the Light. This powerful book is what Allen calls a source book for women to learn the medicine woman’s path. Allen has a profoundly feminist perspective in this book, but we were surprised about the lack of lesbian acknowledgement. Beth Brant helped me to understand why this might have been; Brant explains: “when one is a Native lesbian, the desire to connect all becomes an urgent longing. Faced with homophobia from our own communities, faced with racism and homophobia from outsiders who hold semblances of power over us, we feel that desire to connect in a primal way” (Brant 945). Although one may long to break the silence of homophobia and racism, these are factors that lead to barriers for getting published. Homophobia within Native culture leads to a particular barrier when writing on traditional women’s paths that may have affected Allen’s content in Grandmothers of the Light.

Through social justice movements (Women’s, Lesbian, Gay, and Civil Rights), one can see how one movement can judge its constituency for being involved with other movements; for example: the Women’s Liberation’s exclusion of lesbians or homophobia within the Civil Rights movement. Paula Gunn Allen could be expressing this sentiment in her poem Some Like Indians Endure: dykes “like Indians / they do terrible things / to each other / out of sheer cussedness / out of forgetting / out of despair” (Allen 11). Allen begins her poem illustrating how she has “it in [her] mind that / dyes are Indians” because “they were massacred / lots of times / they always came back / like the grass / like the clouds / they got massacred again” (9). Readers can see Allen’s compassion of the universality of oppressions through this poem and other works. For example, Allen has written similarly on the people of South Africa: “When I think of the South African people, I always think of the native American people. Because we’ve lived with apartheid” (Allen 428). Adrienne Rich has depicted Allen’s poetry as “essential reading for the white poet/woman/lesbian/feminist who wants a larger and truer vision than white culture alone can offer” (Paula Gunn Allen). Being able to find similarities through oppression, Allen is able to create community that strengthens our voice to break silence through different movements.

Exploring further into Paula Gunn Allen’s work, we have been able to find work that fulfills my first expectations of her. Although many people consider themselves open-minded and aware of aspects of our privilege, this experience proves to me that sometimes we can overlook our own privilege in many aspects of our lives. We expected Allen’s work to be what we were familiar with. When it proved otherwise, we were hesitant to appreciate the work fully until we learned more about her and native women’s experiences.