Sukdu’a
My Chada¹ told stories.
Some of them were true.
To be fair, they were true,
and his lies were the truths
he wouldn’t speak.
His daughter, my mother, never lies. She left him
and his stories on a shelf.
She raised me far from his
shadow. She wanted me
to live unhaunted by the spirits his silences birthed.
Then, none of us knew the ghosts
that live in the margins around
story. That absence leaves
its own trace. You can see it in the pale between
my freckles. In your pause before asking
where I’m from. My pause
before I say, I’m from here. My pause
before I say, the opposite of exotic. Pause
between my other self and my other
self.
You can find my Chada’s stories in places like this.
In museums, in libraries, on cassettes and online catalogs.
I did. I listen to his voice trapped in filmy recordings
and imagine resurrection is like this:
One form of data becomes a new form
living in clouds.
I listen to the stories Chada shared. My favorites
are not his. They are stories he only transcribed.
He learned them one way, he told them another.
The distance between the learning and the telling
is a lie every writer accepts.
My favorite, the one I want most to be true,
is the sukdu’a about Ggugguyni and how stories began.
Before I tell it to you, I want you to know
the crow’s wing hovers around the story’s edge.
When Chada wrote Ggugguyni, the gurgle-breath
Raven names herself with, another translated
it as crow.² The translator meant crow while
I know what Chada meant. He meant Ggugguyni.
This is what a taboo is—one form is said
and another is meant. Crow for raven. for child.
Taboos are difficult to document
when no one will speak them.
This is the story I heard. (I will abridge the work
and present it as commentary to avoid the appearance
of academic plagiarism. I know I haven’t started
telling it yet. Taboos are a cousin to copyrights.)
I am still learning to tell this story.
Once the Dena’ina sang. Our song keeps
our time. Di ya du hu. This is how we order
ourselves
and our days.
Once Ggugguyni in her human form
walked by the river. She left her right eye
behind as a lookout. The eye saw Dena’ina
draw near and it called to Ggugguyni.
Ggugguyni cried to the Dena’ina, Don’t touch
but watch! She tossed her eye into the air
three times. It looks out for your luck, she said.
She sang to the people, Ch’I’ushi, Ch’I’un,
We’ve found a wonder. Then, she left.
Later she returned in disguise to spy. She heard
the Dena’ina sing her song and tell her story.
This pleased her vanity. She returned again³
disguised with more stories and songs. She loved
to hear about herself: how clever, how foolish,
how gifted with stories.
What I like about this story is that it moves
from one point to another and it’s easy
to identify the moments of change
and their catalysts.
What I like about this story is Ggugguyni moves
from bird form to human form the way I want
to move to the opposite of other.
What I like about this story is that the body
becomes what it needs to be to tell its story
and be heard.
¹ Nouns: tricky things. Imagine I take this man and sunshine him until his corona reads grandfather. Or I scry his darkline for truth. Either way, I’d find a man-shape stretch- and-shrink depending on the sun’s angle and distance. You may call him what you want. Chada, grandfather, uncle, Peter. I name him because he would not name himself.
² Note the shifting referent. Have you ever been outside on a truly cold day? Say -40? An excellent point of reference. -40 Celsius is the same as -40 Fahrenheit. If you are outside on a truly cold day and you look across a yard or a road, you’ll note the aspens waver without wind. A scientist once told me the lack of humidity in the atmosphere changes how I perceive the tree’s winter form. I’m not a scientist. What I hear is that the unsaturated, unimpeded air demonstrates the possibilities for distortion.
³ Once I thought of time as a line and of myself as a fish on a hook.
Now I know time
is an agreement to order
the pause
between breath
and voice.
