THINKING ITS PRESENCE: THE RACIAL IMAGINARY

Elissa Washuta’s My Body is a Book of Rules and Erika T. Wurth’s Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, are two Native texts that approach the idea of location and identity in radically different ways – but which ultimately speak to same sense of finding home. Wurth’s novel, which is in traditional narrative form and in first person, looks at location from the outside in; the novel is framed by the main character’s attempt to resist the place that forms her communal and familial location, but from which she ultimately can’t, and doesn’t want to, escape. Washuta’s memoir of essays about identity, sexuality and bi-polar disorder, also written (primarily) in first person but in a series of different forms, looks at location from the inside out, with the narrator looking for ways to connect with her home and her body, but ultimately finding that she must leave to do so. This panel will offer readings from both books, and a discussion on how form affects perceptions of identity and location in (these and other) Native texts.