“N 21* 18’ 28” W 157* 48’ 28”
Some of We
and the Land That Was
Never Ours
We are. We of all the small ones are. We are all. We of all the / small ones are. We are in this world. We are in this world.” (9-11)
Spahr begins this poem, and all the poems in this book, with latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. These coordinates are at once mere information, they tell us nothing of human conditions, nothing of volition’s direction and biological inertia. If everything were to move, if everything were to change, the coordinates would still refer to the same place. As indices, they do no more than indicate. Once the location is indicated the orientation of the speaker towards the location is given--it is to a certain, “We” a, “Land that Was Never Ours”.
This itself seems an all at once simple assertion, but the poem immediately begins with complicating the notion of We. As soon as a first first person plural unity is established, she undermines it with a disparate alternative We. The first assertion is an affirmation of relational unity, “We are all.” yet it is immediately followed with “We of all the small ones.” There are two We’s and yet they are not contradictions--because We is a mental organization of entities, is essentially a categorizing of people according to some imagined mutual valence, most We’s are only exclusive in appearance. A.K. Ramanujan writes that this failure is for, “As anthropologists like Franz Boas pointed out earlier in the century, race, language and culture are three independent variables. Neither is any of them pure and single in itself, though the labels, black, brown, yellow or white, Caucasian, Mongolian or Dravidian are used as if they were pure and singular entities...” (116-117)
She is communicating the nature of We as simultaneously valid and subjective--a construct, sure, but a construct based on similarities abstracted from something very real, i.e.: “Some of we are eating grapes.” (11) versus, “Some of we let ourselves be all the grapes to be eaten together.” (11) These conditions are criteria for a We, they are properties of reality abstracted to create categories. Yet, this togetherness is not a unity, but an amalgamation. Some of the We are eating grapes and some of the We are being the grapes that are eaten. As Audre Lorde said, “There is a mistake that a lot of us make: the belief that we can all merge into one gigantic unit. It just doesn’t happen that way. There is a difference between unity and amalgamation, and that difference is enormous.” (9)
This relationship between togetherness and the individuals that make togetherness possible is used throughout the poem as a template for showing the global social problem of inequality. Not only are some being consumed and some are consuming, as she writes of the grapes, but, “Some of us are sparrows picotant with our hand...Some of we are pecking back... We are pecking at our hand... Some of us are flying at our hand.” (13) This is a metaphor for activism, not the contrived lifestyle activism so typical to a mimetic western population, but an expression of natural frustration with being controlled. The hand is reminiscent of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the unifying dimension of economic activity that is supposed to "hold" our (notice that Our of the We) collective interests "above" all else. Spahr's explanations at the end of the poem make this much more clear, “Someone was feeding sparrows, making them perch on the thumb and eat out of the hand if they wanted any food. The sparrows preferred to eat on the ground... I thought about who owned what, and divisions.” (15) This problem of division and of control, especially resource control as a way to control people, is especially relevant to contemporary Hawaiian conditions.
Ramanujan, A.K. “Some Thoughts on ‘Non-Western’ Classics: With Indian Examples” The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan ed. Dharwadker. Delhi: OUP, 2004
p.116-117, Text.
Winter, Nina. “Interview with the Muse: Remarkable Women Speak on Creativity and Power.” Berkeley, California: Moon Books, 1978.
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