[In the following essay, Jaskoski locates Allen's poem “Grandmother” within traditional Pueblo traditions and mythology.]

“GRANDMOTHER”

Out of her own body she pushed
silver thread, light, air
and carried it carefully on the dark, flying
where nothing moved.
Out of her body she extruded
shining wire, life, and wove the light
on the void.
From beyond time,
beyond oak trees and bright clear water flow,
she was given the work of weaving the strands
of her body, her pain, her vision
into creation, and the gift of having created,
to disappear.
After her
the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,
memories of light and ladders,
infinity-eyes, and rain.
After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug
and mend the tear with string.

—Paula Gunn Allen

The editors of W. W. Norton's New Worlds of Literature reprint Paula Gunn Allen's poem “Grandmother” with a reading of the poem as referring to the speaker's grandmother: “[T]he speaker is mending the rug that, apparently, the grandmother created?” (265). The plain sense of the text, however, tells us that Grandmother (the Spider) weaves “the strands / of her body … into creation” (not rugs) and that it is “the women and the men” who weave blankets “after her” (in both temporal and imitative senses). This more literal reading accords with interpretation of the poem in light of the author's Keresan (Laguna)¹ tradition. According to Keresan origin myths, Ts'its'tc'i• na• k'o, creatrix and great mother, often identified in English translation as Thought-Woman or Thinking Woman, is also known as Grandmother Spider. Thinking Woman/Grandmother Spider creates things by thinking of them and naming them.²

Jahner has read the poem within this context of traditional myth, emphasizing the expression of “continuity with mythic creation” (324). The poem also draws on other elements of traditional Pueblo Indian cultures, such as the Hopi and Tewa; examination of this background in relation to the particular statement of “Grandmother” demonstrates that the poem asserts change as well as continuity, evolution and growth as well as preservation. The central trope for the subtext of change is the blanket as representative of androgyny.

The poem refers throughout to traditional Pueblo practices and in particular to the division of labor that assigned weaving and storytelling to men and the construction of houses to women. The speaker of “Grandmother” maintains that both women and men weave, which is contrary to Pueblo custom; the speaker also equates weaving with storytelling, another activity assigned to men.³ On the other hand, the “tales of life” created by weaver-storytellers construct “memories of light and ladders,” a reference to traditional Pueblo housing construction, which provided entry into multistoried condominium dwellings by means of ladders to rooftop entries. Pueblo houses and fields belong to the women of the clan (James 40), and women traditionally were the builders of houses, as an early Spanish traveler noted (Benavides 33, 121). The old construction methods exist now only in reconstructed “memories” of ancient ways; European-style construction practices have prevailed since late in the last century (Yava 165).

Hence the speaker of the poem weaves change as well as continuity into her statement. While daughters and granddaughters maintain the linking of family and clan, and weavers and storytellers show how earthly existence connects with the invisible world of myth, women and men also weave themselves into changing roles in the community. Men have become housebuilders; women now participate in weaving and storytelling.

It is essential to this reading to distinguish between speaker and author. Elsewhere, especially in The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen asserts a centrality of women to American Indian cultures, and it is tempting to assume—as Bannan does—that the speaker is a woman. The speaker of “Grandmother,” however, is emphatically ungendered or androgynous. Grandmother Spider, female Great Mother, is the archetypal progenitor for weavers, who were traditionally male. Now, according to the poem, a further evolution in the process of creation sees both women and men as weavers, storytellers, and builders of the houses of memory. The poem's speaker takes the place of the Grandmother who “disappeared” after completing her work of creation; the speaker sits on the blanket (creation) to “mend the tear” in it—an activity that may be read as reweaving the gap caused by both the disappearance of grandmother/creator and the erasure of women from the creative activities of weaving and storytelling. The woven blanket is itself a figure of androgyny, composed of warp and weft, in which neither can predominate and both must be literally interlocked.

The complex of spider-weaver-poet and the blanket as metaphor for androgyny also makes this poem a bridge that connects Euroamerican and American Indian poetic traditions through its echoes of two other works. In “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” Whitman, preeminent celebrator of the androgynous self in American literature, also parallels the creations of spider and poet. On the other hand, the blanket as a figure of androgyny is the core metaphor in a traditional Pueblo poem collected by Spinden: The Tewa “Song of the Sky Loom” opens and closes with invocations to Mother Earth and Father Sky; the body of the poem parallels warp and weft with white light and red light, dawn and sunset, falling rain and standing rainbow. In traditional Pueblo and other southwestern cultures, each of these natural elements—rain, light, and so on—is gendered, so that the blanket, itself an image of the coming rainstorm, metaphorically weaves together into a seamless whole the balancing opposites of male and female.

Paula Gunn Allen's “Grandmother” celebrates the traditional arts of Pueblo communities through the voice of the individual speaker and the speaker's vision of change within continuity, of adaptability and inclusiveness within rigid structures of balance and complementarity. To understand both the surface structure and the deeper meaning of this poem requires “cultural literacy” in Laguna/Pueblo traditions, that is, some acquaintance with the appropriate mythical/cultural references (just as comprehension of a poem referring to angels requires some knowledge of the Judeo-Christian tradition). Paradoxically, when such specific cultural backgrounds are located, the poem can be placed in a trans-gendered, trans-cultural context of world literature, echoing the voice of a nineteenth-century American Romantic man, as well as the ancient magical songs of the earliest dwellers on the continent.

Notes

1. Keres is a linguistic category: Keresan languages and dialects are spoken at several of the New Mexico Indian pueblos, including Laguna, home of Leslie Silko and Paula Gunn Allen. Allen's maternal great-uncle, John M. Gunn, collected and translated Keres history and literature (Gunn Schat Chen; Allen The Sacred Hoop282-283).

2. Boas prints stories of Ts'its'tc'i• na• k'o creating by thinking and naming (7) and identifies her with the Spider (222, 276). Silko opens her novel Ceremony with a poem telling how Thought-Woman thinks the world into being, including the story about to unfold in the novel. Parsons asserts that Spider “is the universal mother” (192).

3. See Helen Sekaquaptewa for discussion of men and weaving in another Pueblo community, the Hopi; also see Benavides for division of labor in traditional culture. Babcock's essay explores a similar situation of recent entry by women into traditionally male activities; her essay connects pottery making with storytelling.

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. “Grandmother.” New Worlds of Literature. Ed. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1989. 264-265.

———. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Babcock, Barbara. “At Home No Womens Are Storytellers: Potteries, Stories, and Politics in Cochiti Pueblo.” Journal of the Southwest 30 (1988): 356-389.

Bannan, Helen M. “Spider Woman's Web: Mothers and Daughters in Southwestern Native American Literature.” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. 268-279.

Benavides, Alonso. The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides 1630. Tr. Mrs. Edward E. Ayer. Chicago: Privately printed, 1916. Albuquerque: Horn and Wallace, 1965.

Boas, Franz. Keresan Texts. Part 1. Publications of the American Ethnological Society vol. 8. New York: American Ethnological Society, 1928.

Gunn, John M. Schat Chen: History, Traditions and Narratives of the Queres Indians of Laguna and Acoma. Albuquerque: Albright and Anderson, 1917; New York: AMS, 1986.

Jahner, Elaine. “A Laddered, Rain-bearing Rug: Paula Gunn Allen's Poetry.” Women and Western American Literature. Ed. Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1982. 311-325.

James, Harry C. The Hopi Indians: Their History and Their Culture. Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1956.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion. 2 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1939.

Sekaquaptewa, Helen. Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa. Ed. Louise Udall. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1969.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking, 1977.

“Song of the Sky Loom.” Songs of the Tewa. Ed. and trans. Herbert J. Spinden. Santa Fe: Sunstone, 1935. 94.

Whitman, Walt. “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” Leaves of Grass. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. 450.

Yava, Albert. Big Falling Snow: A Tewa-Hopi Indian's Life and Times and the History and Traditions of His People. Ed. Harold Courlander. New York: Crown, 1978.