WHEREAS

The poem “WHEREAS” by Layli Long Soldier is part of a longer, continuous section within the book of the same name. The subsection in Part II in which the excerpt appears is entitled “(1) Whereas Statements.”

“WHEREAS” is comprised of 20 stanzas of unrhymed free verse. Stanzas one through four and six through nine are long-lined couplets, with a tercet—or three-lined stanza—at stanza five. The following eight stanzas are monostiches: one-line stanzas. The final three stanzas are blocks of prose poetry without line breaks, comprised of varying length sentences. Every stanza in the poem ends with a semicolon.

The book entire, and this poem in particular, responds to a quietly introduced 2009 U.S. Senate resolution that undertook an apology to Native American tribes for historic violence and mistreatment.

In stanza one, a “blue-eyed man” (Line 1) “enters the discussion” (Line 2), which has already begun. In stanza two, he waves his beer bottle and declares, “at least there was an Apology” (Line 3) to the supposedly learned group. The man keeps “cool” (Line 2); “his “work-weary lips” indicate exhaustion from a job in which he does a good deal of speaking, rather than manual labor. They are teachers, perhaps.

The speaker enters the poem in the third stanza, where she “sit[s] there painful in [her] / silence” (Lines 5-6). The informal wardrobe of the man—“short sleeves and khakis” (Line 2)—the beer, and the outdoor setting all contribute to what the speaker refers to as “the American casual” (Line 6). She feels herself in the middle of this scene. She is “glued to a bench” (Line 6). The reader feels as though the speaker has been lured and trapped by this “circle” (Line 4). The air carries an electric charge, like a bug zapper.

In stanza four the speaker introduces language of the aforementioned “Apology” (Line 9). She feels she is “like a bird darting from an oncoming semi” (Line 9)—the truck as the discussion of the resolution among these learned people and their dismissive attitude toward it. The speaker remembers—her “mind races to” (Line 9)— a piece of the exact wording from the document, wherein white settlers “did stir conflict with nearby / Indian tribes” (Lines 10-11), but, according to the document, peace prevailed and all parties benefited.

The speaker assumes what can be taken as a contemplative pose, then stands and exits the scene without comment. The group must endure “a / static quiet” (Line 13). She leaves them to their discomfort.

In her car, the speaker second-guesses her actions (or inaction). She thinks she “could have said or done better” (Line 15); she could have pointed out, for example, that the word “’conflict’” (Line 17) is a thin linguistic veil for “genocide” (Line 16). Her own “conscience pierces / with bone-clean self-honesty” (Lines 18-19): She must live with her silence, even if she regrets it.

In the first monostich (single-line stanza), the speaker refers to the interaction at the backyard gathering as “a stirred conflict between settlers and Indian” (Line 20). Here, the speaker draws a parallel between the objects and subjects of the so-called official “Apology” (Line 9), and herself—a member of a Native American tribe—in relation to the “blue-eyed man” (Line 1) and the other non-Native people in the circle. The people at the gathering stirred up “conflict” (Line 20) by failing to acknowledge the so-called apology as weak and nonapologetic. In so doing, they reenact a kind of erasure of the living Native American in their “midst” (Line 6), recalling genocides of the past.

In the following monostich, the speaker confesses she “didn’t want to explain anything” (Line 21). She struggles with this inertia, potentially because an explanation is what is usually expected of her, and what she has likely supplied as a Native American among “settlers” (Line 20). The onus has probably fallen on her to explain and defend; perhaps it has fallen to her to make non-Native people feel better about history and their relationship to it. However, the fact of an official apology, however insufficient, points to the need for one.

The final six monostiches envision another outcome for the gathering. Instead of demurely raising “a curled hand to [her] mouth” (Line 12), the speaker, in her fantasy, kicks the “chair out from under” (Line 22) the beer-swigging man. She pictures the man falling over, drenched in his own alcohol. The speaker lets the scene unroll in her head; it is “slow-motion delightful” (Line 24).

Her hand at her mouth, in this revisionist history of events, is not a gesture of discomfort or timidity, but a pause. The hand at her mouth indicates a decision-in-progress: Shall she kick the chair over or not? With the line, “Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t” (Line 26), the speaker takes back her autonomy, her sovereignty. This, too, is part of the memory of the stirred “conflict” (Line 20) of the evening. An apology that offers no contrition may be met with silence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t inspire and perpetuate its own violence within that silence.

In the final prose poetry section that follows after this moment, the speaker is on her way to the airport with some other shuttle passengers. She explores ways in which non-Native Americans use passive behavior and language to distance themselves from Native Americans and to dehumanize them, even as they appear to demonstrate concern. Traffic thickens as departure gate times near. The harried shuttle passengers, the poem suggests, see sympathy as the limit of their responsibility, and use language as a pretense, rather than as a tool to help forge a path to empathy and reparation.

The second-to-last stanza demonstrates yet another uncomfortable encounter the speaker had with a non-Native woman. The woman recounts to the speaker a news story about a house that burned, presumably on a reservation, and the children who died in the fire. The woman explains this was something of an awakening for her since, as a younger woman, she was largely unaware of the plight of Native communities, since “nobody talked about them” (Line 52). Here, the speaker offers still another instance of the awkward situations in which she has been thrust due to others’ ignorance—even when unintentional.

The last stanza gives a voice and actions to the term “whereas.” She explains that because “whereas [is] a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector” (Line 58), it has offered her a seat at its proverbial table and asks her, “What do you mean by / unholding?” (Lines 61-62) The speaker considers and offers that “unholding” means not obliging well-intentioned but mistaken people with answers they are seeking from her. In essence, this is the overarching message of the poem.