JUNE 1997
RANT RAVE REVIEW
A SELF, DIVIDED
Reviewed by Mark Newman
Outlaws, Renegades, and Saints:
Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreedby Tiffany Midge
Greenfield Review Press
Greenfield Center
New York 12833104 pp.
$12.95
Literature comes from people, not from movements or schools or salons. Our age, though it is definitely one of mass villages and mega decisions, finds its hurts, still, in individual places. Tiffany Midge takes us to her instance: cultures merge in her chromosomes, and fight not over her body, but within it.
The problem in Midge's world is immediate.
She wars with herself. But she does face the Sioux part of her legacy with
tenderness and respect, and she sets it out for us to witness. In a subsection
of a fictional diary, she relays the actions of a gifting circle within
a reservation:
. . .Ruby Savior gives Mary & Victor Red Wing a beaded cradleboard for their new arrival
Mary & Victor Red Wing give Scarlett Comes At Night their
family's secret frybread recipe . . . (p. 33)
The trading activity is both homely and
beautiful. Where power shuns, humility can flourish.
Midge writes less generously of her father. We sense his genius behind family "moves" and cruel speech. Does he consider himself a failure? His erraticism suggests he is at sea in the heart of North America. A draft-card burner in school, a man choosing inter-ethnic marriage, we picture him as torn himself: part 60's liberal, part cowboy wannabe. Midge saves sharp images for him, and he seems to be the one she reaches to in "Seven: The Eternal Wait for a Happy Ending" (p. 87).
The book progresses from childhood to
maturity and from puzzlement through anger to attempts at reconciliation.
Midge's strongest quality -- humor -- rises as plentifully as prairie grass:
. . . I came across a delivery service promising redemption. I ordered life to go with pepperoni, olives and a happy ending. It's been well over twenty years,and I'm still waiting (p. 59).
A sense of irony helps, clearly. She survives
and achieves in part from the strength that irony gives. Unlike James and
Ida of her "June, 1971" diary entry, she will not serve "a
life term in Walla Walla for murdering a store proprietor and his wife,"
nor conceive a child during visiting hours there (p.37).
Some of her best poetry shows when Midge takes a persona, shoulders the costume of her people and acts out. "Rodeo Queen" (p. 74) is one such example. But much comes from the authenticity of pieces like "Cowboys & Indians" (p. 44), the migratory "Highway Robbery" (p. 63), and "Even the Outlaw's Daughter Gets the Blues" (p. 78). Her skill here raises the book that important notch above memoir or social document.
It is my luck that I have heard Tiffany
Midge read several of these pieces. A show it is. This is not "eye"
poetry first; it finds its entry most sharply through the ear. Read it aloud.
Better yet, read it to someone else. Then, see if America is quite the same.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997