WHEREAS

“WHEREAS” by Layli Long Soldier is part of the first section of Part II (“WHEREAS”) of her book of the same title. The section includes a number of “Whereas Statements,” one of which comprises the text of this poem. Long Soldier’s debut full-length collection was published by Graywolf Press in 2017.

Written in unrhymed free verse, “WHEREAS” is an example of documentary poetry in that it interacts with and responds to a primary source—The Native American Apology Resolution of 2009—to both document and question historical, contemporary, and personal events in poetic form. The resolution—S.J. Res. 14—was passed as part of a larger defense appropriations bill signed by President Barack Obama in December 2009. The White House issued no public announcement about the resolution.

The poem uses some the language and diction of the Senate bill to consider the history and ongoing nature of violence to Native Americans in the United States. Diction, syntax, and form combine to interrogate how language is used to obfuscate and erase, as well as to communicate.

Poet Biography

Layli Long Soldier is a poet, essayist, and artist. She is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Her collections of poetry include the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection WHEREAS (2017), winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. Long Soldier earned an MFA with honors from Bard College after earning her BFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Additional accolades include a Whiting Writer’s Award (2016), a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, and in 2015, a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Long Soldier served as poetry editor for Kore Press and worked as a contributing poetry editor for Drunken Boat. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Long Soldier has stated she tries very hard to avoid nostalgia in her work. In a March 30, 2017 interview with Krista Tippett for the podcast On Being, Long Soldier said the following:

[Of] the WHEREAS pieces […] I’ve often said that I felt like this was a project of constraints. So when I sat down to work on this response, there were a lot of constraints that I placed on myself. And one of those was that I wanted all of the pieces to be written, number one, through first person, “I” But number two, all of them had to be within living memory. I did not want to jump back a hundred years.

The poem, “WHEREAS” places the speaker in a contemporary setting in which the apology is discussed by non-Native American people in the presence of a Native American. The speaker grapples with the language of the official document, as well as with the spoken words of her “scholarly” (Line 4) colleagues.

Long Soldier’s work appears in the anthologies New Poets of Native Nations (2018) and Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations (2019).

Poem Text

Long Soldier, Layli. “WHEREAS.” 2017. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Each of the 20 unrhymed stanzas of the poem “WHEREAS” begin with the word “Whereas,” followed by a specific action. Combined, the first 17 stanzas relay a narrative of an informal gathering—perhaps a backyard barbecue—where the participants are sitting in a circle. A man drinking a beer mentions the “Apology” (Line 3). The speaker keeps quiet and feels uncomfortable. She knows the other people in the group stare at her. In the fourth stanza, the speaker recalls actual language of the official document in question, which acknowledges “conflict” (Line 10) between Native Americans and European settlers while insisting, as well, on the existence of peaceful relations between them.

The speaker leaves the group and proceeds to question and regret her own silence around “the subject of ‘genocide’” (Line 16)—a subject the speaker asserts the Apology is “rephrasing as ‘conflict’” (Line 17). In a series of one-line stanzas, the speaker considers the “stirred conflict” (Line 20) between herself and the other people at the gathering, and the fact that she had no impulse to talk about it. She fantasizes a scene in which she, instead of saying nothing and leaving, topples the beer-drinker from his chair, and enjoys it.

The final three stanzas are set apart from the initial gathering both in setting and in the way they are written: These stanzas are blocks of prose poetry written in sentences of varying lengths. The first takes place as the speaker is in a shuttle to the airport. Well-intentioned but incorrect women ask her questions, thinking they already know the responses she will give them. This makes them “comrades” (Line 30).

In the penultimate stanza, the speaker recalls a woman who told her all about a frightening news program she saw and “how she never knew until then / [Indians] could feel” (Lines 55-56). The last stanza of “WHEREAS” focuses on the point of using the term “whereas” and personifies it by describing how whereas “sets the table” (Line 58). Whereas asks the speaker a question—such a rare occurrence that the speaker feels obliged to respond: “What do you mean by / unholding?” (Lines 61-62) The speaker considers the question as the poem ends.