#The Last Mojave Indian Barbie

[abellinthecupboard]

The Last Mojave Indian Barbie

Wired to her display box were a pair of one-size-fits-all-Indians stiletto moccasins, faux turquoise earrings, a dream catcher, a copy of Indian Country Today, erasable markers for chin and forehead tattoos, and two six-packs of mini magic beer bottles—when tilted up, the bottles turned clear, when turned right-side-up, the bottles refilled. Mojave Barbie repeatedly drank Ken and Skipper under their pink plastic patio table sets. Skipper said she drank like a boy. Mojave Barbie secretly hated the color of her new friends' apricot skins, how they burned after riding in Ken's convertible Camaro with the top down, hated how their micro hairbrushes tangled and knotted in her own thick, black hair, which they always wanted to braid. There wasn't any diet cola in their cute little ice chests, and worst of all, Mojave Barbie couldn't find a single soft spot on her body to inject her insulin. It had taken years of court cases, litigation, letters from tribal council members, testimonials from CHR nurses, and a few diabetic comas just to receive permission to buy the never-released hypodermic needle accessory kit—before that, she'd bought most on the Japanese black market—Mattel didn't like toying around with the possibility of a Junkie Barbie. Mojave Barbie had been banned from the horse stables and was no longer invited to dinner, not since she let it slip that when the cavalry came to Fort Mojave, the Mojaves ate a few horses. It had happened, and she only let it slip after Skipper tried to force her to admit the Mojave Creation was just a myth: It's true. I'm from Spirit Mountain, Mojave Barbie had said. No, you're not, Skipper had argued. You came from Asia. But Mojave Barbie wasn't missing much—they didn't have lazy man's bread or tortillas in the Barbie Stovetop to Tabletop Deluxe Kitchen. In fact, they only had a breakfast set, so they ate the same two sunny-side-up eggs and pancakes every meal. Each night after dinner, Mojave Barbie sneaked from the guesthouse—next to the tennis courts and Hairtastic Salon—to rendezvous with Ken, sometimes in the collapsible Glamour Camper, but most often in the Dream Pool. She would yenni Ken all night long. (Yenni was the Mojave word for sex, explained a culturally informative booklet included in Mojave Barbie's box, along with an authentic frybread recipe, her Certificate of Indian Blood, a casino player's card, and a voided per capita check.) They took precautions to prevent waking others inside the Dream House—Mojave Barbie's tan webbed hand covering Ken's always-open mouth muffled his ejaculations. One night, after drinking a pint of Black Velvet disguised as a bottle of suntan lotion, Ken felt especially playful. Ken was wild, wanted to sport his plastic Stetson and pleather holsters, wanted Mojave Barbie to wear her traditional outfit, still twist-tied to her box. She agreed and donned her mesquite-bark skirt and went shirtless except for strands of blue and white glass beads that hung down in coils around her neck. The single feather in her hair tickled Ken's fancy. He begged Mojave Barbie to wrap her wide, dark hips around him in the “Mojave Death Grip,” an indigenous love maneuver that made him thankful for his double-jointed pelvis. (A Mojave Death Grip Graphic How-To Manual was once included in the culturally informative booklet, but a string of disjointed legs and a campaign by the Girl Scouts of America led to a recall.) Ken pointed his wooden six-shooter and chased her up the Dream Slide. The weight of the perfectly proportioned bodies sent the pool accessory crashing to the patio. Every light in every window painted itself on as the Dream House swung open from the middle, giving all inside a sneak peak at naked Ken's hard body and naked Mojave Barbie gripping his pistol, both mid-yenni and dripping wet. Ken was punished by Mattel's higher-ups, had his tennis racket, tuxedo, Limited Edition Hummer, scuba and snorkel gear, aviator sunglasses, Harley, windjammer sailboard, his iPad and iPhone confiscated. Mojave Barbie had been caught red-handed and bare-breasted. She was being relocated—a job dealing blackjack at some California casino. On her way out the gate, she kicked the plastic cocker spaniel, which fell sideways but never pulled its tongue in or even barked—she felt an ache behind her 39 EE left breast for her rez dog, which had been discontinued long ago. Mojave Barbie tossed a trash bag filled with clothes and accessories into her primered Barbie Happy Family Volvo, which she'd bought at a yard sale. The car had hidden beneath a tarp in the Dream House driveway since she got there. She climbed through the passenger door over to the driver's seat, an explosion of ripped vinyl, towels, and duct tape. She pumped and pumped the gas pedal, clicked and clicked the ignition, until the jalopy fired up. Mojave Barbie rolled away, her mismatched hubcaps wobbling and rattling, a book of yellow WIC coupons rustling on the dash, and a Joy Harjo tape melted in the tape deck blaring, I'm not afraid to be hungry. I'm not afraid to be full. Mom and Dad Barbie, Grandma Barbie, Skipper, and Ken stood on the Dream House balcony and watched Mojave Barbie go. Grandma Barbie tilted at the waist whispering to Mom Barbie, They should've kept that one in the cupboard. Dad Barbie piped in, Yep, it's always a gamble with those people. Mom Barbie was silent, hoping the purpling, bruise-like marks the size of mouths circling Ken's neck were not what she thought they were: hickies, or, as the culturally informative booklet explained, a “Mojave necklace.” Skipper complained to Ken that Mojave Barbie had flipped them off as she drove out the wrought-iron gates, which, of course, locked behind her with a clang. Ken fingered the blue bead in his pocket and reassured Skipper, Mojave Barbie was probably waving goodbye—with hands like that, you can never be sure.

— Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012)

[ct-multifandom]

I don’t usually make posts like this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-intellectual junk lately, and I really think we need to put the word “pretentious” up on a shelf until people learn what it actually means.

It doesn’t describe someone who likes artsy-fartsy deep meaning media. People who are pretentious are fake. They’re posers trying to be sophisticated and unique, not like other girls. They pretend to only like stuff they think will make them sound cool when they talk about it. They want to act like they know something you don’t, and they want attention for it.

By definition, if you genuinely enjoy something, you can’t be pretentious. If it resonates with you, and you analyze it, and you don’t care what people think, that’s the polar opposite, actually. If you love obscure experimental prog music, if you watch underground high concept indie films through English teacher eyes, if you spend hours in a modern art museum reading each piece as a vessel for storytelling, if your backpack’s full of poetry books that inspire you, if you play underrated games that were someone’s passion project, if you have an interest in studying the classics or the masters, you are not pretentious.

Of course, some people just don’t like some stuff, and that’s fine, but that’s not what this is about. Don’t let anti-intellectuals shame you for enjoying things just because your interests are inaccessible to them, because they refuse to be brave and put effort into critical thinking. You’re not stuck up for refusing to overlook the craft of artists.

[drjacquescoulardeau]

NATALIE DIAZ – WHEN MY BROTHER WAS AN AZTEC – 2012

 This is an important collection of poems from an Indian woman. Important because it is poetry. Important because the poet is a woman. Important because the poetess is Indian. But we do have to get into it a lot deeper.

 The opening poem that gives the title of the collection is describing this brother as a pure Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli, performing Aztec human sacrifice, morning after morning, on his own parents, ripping their hearts out of their chests over and over again. The poem also introduces another theme at the end:

 “My parents gathered

what he left of their bodies, trying to stand without legs,

trying to defend his blows with missing arms, searching for their fingers

to pray, to climb out of whatever dark belly my brother, the Aztec,

their son, had fed them to.”

 This sacrificial dismembering will come later with another meaning than this Aztec ritualistic perspective. And it is this crossing of an old heritage and a more recent curse that is essential in this poetry.

 The first part is centered on the author’s vision. Her menstrual periods are seen as a metaphor of alienation as a woman, as an Indian and as a human being. This alienation of the Indian human being is then evoked as a legless man in a wheelchair. It is clear that this leglessness is the result of the colonial genocide of John Wayne’s movies. And yet the survivor, “the Injun That Could” survive in fact as a “Guy No-Horse” after the passage of the cavalry and you cannot be surprised by the fact the cavalry is running in his veins, in his blood, in Indian blood shed to the ground by cut up bodies trampled by the horses of General Custer and consorts, many consorts. Rivers of blood.

 A legless woman can then intervene and this leglessness is the result of having committed the sin of accepting to be deculturated in order to be acculturated into the white skin of a soulless Indian. The worst crime is then not to kill millions of Indians, but to force the survivors out of their culture (no dancing, no drums, no music) into the white culture (short hair, proper clothing, brush your teeth, use the toilets, speak English, think normal, that is to say submissive and humbly crawling on the moral floor of the White God’s religion and principles). Be poor and rejoice in the great salvation God will provide you with after your death, of hunger if necessary.

The present curse is phenomenal. Grandmothers have danced the legs of the people off. Indians live in permanent dimness. Indian history is nothing but a collection of debris collected in some museums for the entertainment of white people. Indians went through a genocide that is unrecognized and unrepaired. Indians have to stop talking, meaning their languages, because “language is a cemetery.” The only hope of Indians is in tribal dentists who will restore the teeth of Indians and then teach them to bite back and bite first. Don’t expect anything but devouring biting molasses on the white side. Bite first and you may have some future. This collection can be summarized in these four words: BITE BACK! BITE FIRST!

 So imagine Mojave Barbie meeting with white Ken and she “peek[ed] at Ken’s hard body and naked Mojave Barbie gripping his pistol, both mid-yenni and dripping wet.” A famous Yenni has become more than infamous on January 17, 2017: “The FBI has been looking into allegations that Jefferson Parish President Mike Yenni sent sexually explicit texts to a 17-year-old he first noticed at a high school function last year, in the middle of Yenni’s successful 2015 campaign for one of the region’s most powerful political offices.” The poem becomes then very explicit about how Mojave Barbie was abused and guess who is expelled? Or are we speaking of mids, mid-grade marijuana?

 The life on the reservation is then described, touch after touch, to reach the blackmailing of white entrepreneurs towards Indian starving workers to start shoveling on an infrastructural project across a field that reveals itself to be a cemetery of Indian babies and infants. The Indians then refuse to work anymore and they are rejected morally as lazy, and Indians are rejected as barbaric since they bury children, infants and babies in baskets. Then the only thing left for Indians are prayers understood as being oubliettes, deep chasms in which Indians can starve to death and be completely forgotten. These oubliettes will come back twice more.

 The second part concerns the ordeal of the author’s brother, the Aztec of the title. His drama is that he got addicted to methamphetamine. She attempts to penetrate his psychology and she describes the supportive love he can enjoy till his death. She captures the hallucinating fake vision he experiences, the fact that life is for him some kind of disguise of human beasts that are just some Halloween parade. This brother reenacts the Indian alienation by embodying, impersonating Judas, the traitor, and his thirty silver pieces, and he becomes the Judas of the Indian people in the very Christian reference the disguise carries.

Twenty years ago the brother was a normal teenager. But Indian alienation came bringing the brother’s addiction that brings the Indian dedication to death that leads the brother to destroying all sources of light (lamps, bulbs and others) and the parents out of love and support accept to turn their home into the funeral pyre of their own son in order not to embarrass him, though he is destroying the family temple, the only thing that should be sacred to him. That naturally leads to the evocation of Thais: “Thaïs was a famous Greek hetaera [a type of prostitute in ancient Greece] who lived during the time of Alexander the Great and accompanied him on his [colonizing] campaigns. She is most famous for instigating the burning of Persepolis. At the time, Thaïs was the lover of Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander's generals. It has been suggested that she may also have been Alexander's lover, on the basis of Athenaeus's statement that Alexander liked to "keep Thais with him", but this may simply mean he enjoyed her company. She is said to have been very witty and entertaining. Athenaeus also says that after Alexander's death Ptolemy married Thaïs, who bore him three children.”

 And the contact between the brother and this Thais, or rather the fire she represents since she is “an ember” that makes the brother “hard” and tonight he is going to “love [whatever he may think of] into blaze” and into “ash.” In the morning the “fields too will go to smoke.” And the brother like some “lamp-lit moths” will die but “gleaming with sex.”

 This meth-addicted brother splits his own father into two different fathers, “one who weeps” and “the other who drags his feet down the hall.” And “the audience” can only dream the “doves [her] brother made disappear” may come back “like angels” to take her brother to the other side of this life, as psychopomps they are. But for the time being the brother is coring “not just an apple but the entire orchard, the family, even the dog.” This apple metaphor is going to come back with another meaning.

 The author calls then Antigone to her help, “the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta,” and this Antigone “is the subject of a story in which she attempts to secure a respectable burial for her brother Polynices, who by decree of the uncle Creon is not to be buried or even mourned, on pain of death by stoning.” And this ancient metaphor is crossed with Jesus after his resurrection and the holes he has in his palms. The stigma in the right hand is a chasm in which the brother drops a knife and a candelabra, whereas he licks the stigma in the left hand and finds it “tastes like love.” Explicit though morbid metaphor. Then Antigone does not bury her brother but the horses the white European settlers and their cavalry have brought to America, thus symbolically getting rid of the whites. But that is another oubliette for Indians:

 “We aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten.

Come, pretty girl. Let us devour our lives.”

The ultimate curse of Indians devouring themselves by accepting to be buried in the Christian oubliette of Jesus’ stigmata.

 Then the brother can finally be buried, and yet he comes back as a revenant, a ghost, a haunting presence the author will never be able to get rid of.

 “My brother finally showed up asking why

he hadn’t been invited and who baked the cake.

He told me I shouldn’t smile, that this whole party was shit

because I’d imagined it. The worst part he said was

he was still alive. The worst part he said was

he wasn’t even dead. I think he is right, but maybe

the worst part is that I’m still imagining the party, maybe

the worst part is that I can still taste the cake.”

 Speaking of Post Traumatic Genocide Stress Syndrome, this is a fabulous demonstration of how the damage of a genocidal trauma is inerasable in the mind of a victim, not to mention a collective victim.

 The third part is the author after her brother’s death. She explores her lesbian orientation and brings all types of metaphors together.

 Love is like eating an apple and she wants to be that apple in order to be devoured by the woman she loves. To be cored out of love, because of love, submissive to this voracious love.

 Love is war and the scene ends with her mouth on her lover’s thigh ready to bite and devour the person she loves. Loves is some cannibalistic war. If I accept what some psychiatrists say about drug-addicts, that they are cannibals to the people who try to help them, she has transferred the main characteristic of her meth-addicted brother onto herself in her lesbian love orientation.

 No surprise that love is like an oubliette in which you get lost. And this oubliette is of course also a symbol of Indian alienation through genocide and colonization, Christianism and drug addiction. Can love regenerate this alienation?

 Love is fire in the middle of the night and this love is reduced to ash at sunrise in the morning like so many lamp-lit moths.

Love then leads nowhere. The tongue with which she loves, with which she speaks is heretic in all the hateful rejection it contains, rejection of the dominant faith and rejection by the dominant faith. And her heart is like a red dress, the red dress of desire and prostitution. Love cannot be permanent and can only be some kind of episodic adventure.

 Love is her Indian alienation and she loves in direct descent from her great grandmother who got her legs amputated, who, as we have seen, danced herself legless, who got amputated when the white victors imposed a total ban on dancing and drum playing. Then the tongue was the heretic of this rule because Indians could still sing.

 Love is a mouth, which is a cathedral, with a vaulted ceiling, and its maxilla and mandible are the flying buttress of this cathedral. And this mouth of love is embodied in a zoo lion who out of boredom devoured a member of the audience who woke him up. Love is taming the devouring other into a cage but if you wake it up you will be devoured because love is a mouth against a thigh, ready to bite, and the lover has learned how to bite back and to bite first. And this mouth, this devouring love is also the fate of Indians in the hands of the cavalry and at the same time the future of Indians in their own hands when they have finally learned how to bite back and bite first.

 A beautiful poetry of liberation for Indians who can only get out of the PTGenocideSS if they find the tribal doctors who will teach them to bite back and bite first. This call for liberation and historical healing can only come from a woman because Indian women have lived two traumas, first to be reduced to inferior women among Indians though historically they were equal in their tribes, and then to be reduced to surviving slaves in the post-colonial American society that is still entirely living on this colonial – and slavery – heritage.

 It will take many people, voices, heretic tongues and tribal doctors to finally push aside this heritage of slavery and genocide in the psyche of whites, blacks and Indians equally, because they all share the traumas, as victims or as victimizers, and of course as descendants of victims and victimizers.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU