Louise Halfe free essay sample

In 1990, she made her first appearance as a poet in Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada. Her other works include Bear Bones and Feather which received the Canadian Peoples Poet Award and Blue Marrow which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The Crooked Good is her latest novel which has just been published. In January of 2005, Halfe was named Saskatchewan’s poet Laureate. She currently lives in Saskatoon with her husband and has two grown children. (McNally Robinson) â€Å"I write because I love. I write for the survival of self, my children, my family, my community and for the Earth. I write to help keep our stories, our truths, our language alive†. (qtd. in Anthology 396. ) This quote describes how Louise Halfe uses all four common elements of native literature in her writings. I have chosen to discuss two of the elements she frequently uses, Spirituality and Orality in relation to three of her poems: My Ledders, She Told Me and The Heat of my Grandmothers. We will write a custom essay sample on Louise Halfe or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Orality is used widely in Halfe’s poetry. In My Ledders she writes as if it were being spoken, using phonetic spelling. It is written in the form of a letter from a native woman to the Pope. She starts the poem â€Å"dear pope i no, i no, you dired of my ledders i couldn’t let dis one go i dought you could do somedin ‘ bout it. † (403) Halfe also uses the repetition of words to express orality. In She Told Me, ‘she always told me’ is used through out the poem to describe Native legends or old wives tales that were passed down to her by her mother. â€Å"She always told me never to eat the guts of animals while I was pregnant or the baby would be born with a rope around the neck† (398) Another example of how Halfe uses storytelling and oral traditions is in her poem The Heat of My Grandmothers. Here Halfe tells the story of her Grandmothers’ life, marriage, birth and the death. In all three of these poems, Halfe intersperses the Cree Language with English, which again shows oral traditions and her need to keep her culture alive. I also feel that it shows her struggle with living in a white society and being a native person. In My Ledders, she says â€Å"years ago you stopped nohkom and nimson† as well the words ‘isistawina’, ‘matotsan’, and ‘kimoti’. (403-404). In She Told Me, Halfe says â€Å"Astam, we are leaving astam do not stay† (398) and in the first verse of The Heat of my Grandmothers â€Å"The old man calls my Nohkomak, a bunch of bitches, pisikwatisiw. † (405) The element of Spirituality is a main theme for Louse Halfe. This is shown greatly in her poem The Heat of my Grandmothers. Here Halfe describes intimacy and love in the first verse â€Å"yes I took painted warriors molded their sinew thighs into my flesh† (405) and in the second verse â€Å"that winter in our teepee the smoke couldn’t hide the fragrance of muskeg tea and juniper we mixed between our bodies. (406) This poem also shows her connectedness with nature when describing the deaths of her grandmothers’ husbands: â€Å"called magpie, crow and raven to clean his body† and â€Å"wailed till the buffalo sweat melted his skin into the prairie grass. † (406) Spirituality is also used in the poem She told me. Halfe describes the menstrual cycle as the moon and the power that women have during this time in the line â€Å"never to walk over me while I was in my moon or they would die from my power†. 398) Furthermore, in this poem she talks about spirits in the line â€Å"to put the food away at night to cove the dishes or the spirits would crackle and dance whistle in our ears and drive us mad† and â€Å"take a willow branch and gently whip the spirits out of the house†. (398) The Spirituality in My Ledders speaks of how it is not right to steal native ceremonies and customs. In this poem, a native woman is writing a letter to the Pope, asking how he would like it if her people performed Holy Communion without the understanding and respect of the bread and wine. I don’t dink you like it if I dook you gold cup and wine pass it ‘round our circles† and â€Å"I haven’t married you jeesuz and I don’t kneel to him cuz he ain’t my god†. (404) How the white men lack understanding of the native rituals, tobacco and the sweat lodge is shown in the verse â€Å"dese men, pope don’t know what tobacco mean, what suffer mean†. (404) By using spirituality and orality in her work, Halve shows us how sharing her history, language, traditions and her connectedness to the earth can help in healing others and past injustices. â€Å"I don’t tell the story, I share the story.