Somatic Communication: Motherhood and Transference in Layli Long Soldier’s Poetry

Abstract Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection of poetry, WHEREAS, has been primarily framed as a defiant counter-discourse to the allusive 2009 federal apology to native communities, particularly her poems addressing the document directly. Little attention, however, has been given to Long Soldier’s unpredictable aesthetic choices as she translates her experience of motherhood, daughterhood, and womanhood through a subjective female lens, which equally emphasize the gravity of this unapologetic federal document. I argue that Long Soldier reinvents lyrical prose and visual poetry through what I call thought-music—the poet’s mode of accessing and translating her inner dialogue using alternative punctuation, inventive forms, and white space or ‘functional white’ [White, Orlando (2015), ‘Functional White: Crafting Space & Silence’, The Poetry Foundation, 3 November, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/functional-white-crafting-space-silence]. In doing so, she interrogates the body’s modes of receiving and transference, and composes ‘embodied geographies’ [Goeman, Mishuana (2013), Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press]; poems tethered to mental and physical intimacies as a mother and Lakȟóta language learner within her community. The poet’s punctuation, typographical architecture, and white space construct a somatic perspective, suggesting that communication is physical, contrary to the colonial rhetoric in the federal apology.