The Colors of Nature by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2011-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

My sister’s gift to me one Christmas was a set of magnetic tiles for the refrigerator, in Ojibwe or Anishinabemowin, a language closely related to Potawatomi. I spread them out on my kitchen table looking for familiar words. The more I look, the more worried I get. Among the hundred or more tiles, there was but a single word that I recognize. Megwech—“Thank-you.” The small feeling of accomplishment that the months of study had yielded evaporated.

I remember paging through the Ojibwe dictionary she sent, trying to decipher the tiles, but the spellings didn’t always match and the print was too small and there are way too many variations on a single word and I was feeling that this was just way too hard. The threads in my brain were all knotted and the harder I tried the tighter the knots became. The pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb of course: “to be a Saturday.” Pfft—I put down the book with the anger of frustration. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I flipped more pages. All kinds of things seemed to be verbs ... my finger finds: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” and my finger rests on wiikwegama: “to be a bay.” Things I know with considerable scientific certainty to be nouns and adjectives are presented here as verbs. “Ridiculous!” I rant in my head, “There is no reason to make it so complicated. No wonder no one speaks it. What a cumbersome language, impossible to learn, and more than that—it’s all wrong. A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing; a noun and not a verb.” I was ready to give up this struggle. I’d learned a few words, done my duty to the language that was taken from my grandfather. Oh, the ghosts of the missionaries in the boarding schools must have been rubbing their hands in glee at my frustration. She’s going to surrender, they said.

And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm, to my finger and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore, and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun, only if water is dead. When “bay” is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But wiikegama, to be a bay, the verb releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall—and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday .

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