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QUEEQUEG'S COFFIN
Indigenous Literacies & Early American Literature
By BIRGIT BRANDER RASMUSSEN
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4935-8
Chapter One
Writing and Colonial Conflict
The indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico were not surprised when the Spanish arrived with their paper and ink. They had a similar, centuries-old tradition of writing on agave bark paper, amatl, to keep records. As in Europe, such literacy was not widespread. Scribes, tlacuilo or amatlacuilo, were a distinct professional class, serving the elite as scribes generally did in Europe. Because the manuscripts of Mesoamerican peoples resembled European scrolls, they attracted the attention and interest of the Spanish. Indeed, the earliest reaction on both sides seems to have been philological curiosity. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, for example, worked with Mexica students at Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, compiling indigenous histories, translating them into alphabetic script, and teaching Mexica students how to write in Spanish.
Sahagún used native scribes and employed parallel texts in Spanish and alphabetized Nahuatl. He gathered information through dialogue and conversation. Thus, Sahagún and his fellow workers created a site of linguistic and semiotic exchange where different forms of writing inter-animated each other on the pages of the manuscripts they produced. In the Florentine Codex, alphabetic and pictoglyphic Nahuatl writing were "part of a dialogue" that was linguistic, oral, and textual. Nahuatl speakers in the process acquired alphabetic literacy, which they subsequently used to produce some of the earliest alphabetic texts written in the region.
Indigenous people in North America also lived in a literate universe of documents, contracts, and public signs. Jesuit priests observed and sometimes used these established systems of writing in early missionary efforts. For example, Sbéastien Râle noted that the Abenaki of Maine communicated via pictography "as well as we understand each other by our letters." Likewise, Barthélemy Vimont wrote that the Montagnais at Quebec recorded missionary teachings with "certain figures which represented for them the sense of some clause." Boasting of the eagerness with which his Abenaki students took to Catholic teachings, Father Gabriel Druillettes stated in a report in 1652 that they "wrote out their lessons in their own manner.... They carried away this paper with them to study their lesson in the repose of the night." Abbé J. A. Maurault, who edited Druillettes's report, added in a footnote that he had noted similar activity among other native Woodlands people: "We often saw during our instructions or explanations of the catechism that the Indians traced on pieces of bark, or other objects very singular hieroglyphs." According to Maurault, the students would then spend the night studying "what they had so written, and in teaching it to their children or their brothers. The rapidity with which they by this manner learnt their prayers was very astonishing."
Regardless of whether seventeenth-century missionaries were bragging about the eagerness of children to learn the gospel or attempting to translate it into indigenous scripts, such accounts testify to the existence of already established systems of literacy in the Northeastern Woodlands. As in central Mexico, these non-alphabetic, indigenous forms of writing remained viable in the area long after initial contact. Almost a century later, Joseph-François Lafitau documented the continued and ubiquitous use of such "hieroglyphic" marks not only for private purposes but also for public notices and other forms of communication. For example, Lafitau described how warriors on war expeditions would strip the bark from trees and use a specially prepared waterproof ink to leave messages for other, separate groups following behind them. Upon returning home, warriors might similarly debark trees to create a surface on which to post an account of their exploits. The fact that warriors traveled with waterproof ink and produced numerous public postings suggests, along with accounts of children taking private notes on birch bark, that literacy was common and not limited to certain privileged classes, as in Mesoamerica. The Northeastern Woodlands can then be understood as a site of widespread literacy used for public and private purposes.
We can surmise the extent of such literacy based on a brief passage in The Jesuit Relations from 1636, which reveals that the Huron had a word that meant "to write." Jean de Brébeuf uses the verb "ahiaton" to exemplify one class of conjugations in a discussion of Huron grammar. The existence of a word for writing is significant because societies name practices with which they are familiar. Equally important for understanding indigenous literacy in the region is the fact that the verb can be conjugated for all subject positions, indicating that "to write" was a common and familiar practice in Huron society. Brébeuf discusses at length the difficulty of talking about phenomena with which the Huron are not familiar. He requests permission to translate "the Father" as "our Father" in his missionary work because the Huron insist on indicating relation when using the term "father." If the missionary use of a word like "father" must accommodate Huron linguistic practices, and if a word for "to write" exists with a full range of conjugations, writing must have been a practice familiar to the Huron, not needing special translation or linguistic invention. Conjugations for the subject positions I, you, he, they, and we indicate that this activity was practiced by all, or many, members of society.
The use of hieroglyphic writing was not limited to the Huron. Algonquin people throughout the Northeastern Woodlands employed similar forms of writing, as did indigenous people west of the Great Lakes, along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far south as the Choctaw homelands in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. In the sub-Arctic region, indigenous people also used forms of hieroglyphic writing to communicate and to record information. Evidence of similar forms of writing has been found across the hemisphere, from the Andes to what is now Panama. Indeed, such hieroglyphic writing appears to have been widespread throughout pre-Columbian America, and petroglyphs suggest its antiquity.
European newcomers to the American continents thus found the indigenous people writing on birch bark and in screenfold books, in public and in private, on matters both sacred and profane. The diversity of literary expression and the textual implications of a confrontation between different literate cultures constitute an important and neglected aspect of early American studies. How did we lose sight of this heritage and come to believe, as many do, that Europeans encountered a hemisphere without writing? The answer must be found in the complex history of colonialism. As a consequence of the struggle over territory and resources, Europe and its descendants in the Americas developed a "possessive investment" in writing as a marker of reason and civilization. Its purported absence in areas where Europe established colonies often served as a justification for conquest. Indigenous forms of writing eventually came to be defined as pictures or mnemonic aids, while alphabetic script, by contrast, has become nearly synonymous with "writing." However, such a narrow understanding of writing diminishes the literary diversity of colonial America and perpetuates the legacies of cultural imperialism.
Like the marks on Queequeg's coffin in Moby-Dick, indigenous forms of writing reveal something important about the textual, about the colonial process, and about the semiotic exchanges that took place when different cultures came into contact and conflict. Europeans initially marveled at, and catalogued, indigenous forms of writing, and America's native people likewise observed and engaged the literary culture of Europe. We can recover the dialogic potential of these early interactions by recognizing indigenous ways to record and transmit information as writing and by taking seriously the internal logic of such non-alphabetic writing systems. This chapter rejects the common historical equation between alphabetic script and "real writing" and advances a definition of writing that better comprehends the full diversity of America's literary heritage. Recognizing the colonial process as one shaped by the conflict between different cultures of literacy in turn allows us to tease out the ways in which dialogic, and sometimes reciprocal, exchanges shaped colonial literature and subsequent settler literature written in the Americas. The literature of the hemisphere thus appears as a vast and rich tableau in which the inter-animation between different forms of writing plays an important role in shaping literary production.
"The Science of Reading These Inscriptions": Writing and the Legacy of Colonialism
Lafitau referred to the Algonquin scripts he observed as "hieroglyphics, writing, and records," but writing soon became a vexed and contentious terrain. In the centuries that followed, other terms emerged—such as pictography—that reflected a different understanding of indigenous American scripts and implicitly questioned whether these "hieroglyphs" should be considered writing at all. Yet it seems clear that numerous indigenous communities used conventionalized systems of graphic marks capable of recording and communicating specific and detailed information. These marks could be read by others who were not present at the time of their production, so they were not simply mnemonic in nature. Rather, they functioned as systems of writing.
Historically, however, the term "writing" has been reserved primarily for alphabetic and syllabic scripts. "Pictographs" have been either classified as "forerunners of writing" or dismissed as "limited, dead-end means of communication." American indigenous texts that are non-alphabetic have thus fallen outside the boundaries of literary study because they have not been considered "real" writing. Philologists and linguists have generally defined writing as recorded speech and posited the alphabet as its best and most complete form.
This definition of "real writing" as recorded speech, actualized alphabetically, is deeply ingrained in the Western scholarly tradition. However, it is somewhat misleading. Alphabetic writing does not capture speech; it captures some elements of speech and leaves out others, such as intonation. Familiarity with the conventions of a given writing system and its relationship to speech and culture can blind us to gaps between arbitrary signs (like letters), meaning, and pronunciation. Non-native students of English are often confounded by the divergence between its spoken and written forms. Nor is there ever a single and fixed relationship between alphabetic letters and sounds. For example, the letter "a" represents different sounds in Denmark, the United States, and, for that matter, any other country that uses the Roman alphabet. The relationship between writing, speech, culture, and scholarship is far more complex than immediately apparent, and indigenous American writing systems have not been well understood by scholars of writing. To consider what constitutes writing, and what is at stake in such definitions, we must come to terms with longstanding assumptions about writing, as well as the history of colonialism, out of which such ideas have emerged.
A brief survey of the terms that organize scholarship on writing enables us to critically engage basic definitions and understand their colonial underpinnings. Scholars have generally distinguished between two overarching types of writing—namely, glottographic and semasiographic writing. Glottographic, or sound-based, writing uses graphic signs to represent spoken language. It is subdivided into phonographic and logographic writing. Phonographic writing, such as the alphabet, consists of arbitrary signs that refer to linguistic micro-elements such as syllables, vowels, or consonants. When signs represent whole words, they are called logographs. In English, the symbols "&" and "%" are examples of logographic signs. The signs can be arbitrary (e.g., "&") or they can be phonetic similes, like using the image of an eye for the concept "I." In practice, phonographic and logographic forms of writing are often combined. An example would be a sentence such as, "Save $$$! 25% off the original price."
Semasiographic writing, on the other hand, uses graphic signs to refer to larger chunks of information such as ideas or concepts and combines these signs to create narrative. This term pairs the Greek words semasia (meaning) and graphikos (to write) to account for writing systems that graphically represent meaning without reference to sound. Such forms of writing are also called picture, idea, or word writing. The relationship between graphic sign and meaning can be iconic or it can be arbitrary and conventional, as is the case with musical and mathematical notations. Iconic writing is often used in "brainteasers" such as rebuses and pictogram puzzles. A picture of an eye may represent an eyeball, the act of seeing, or the pronoun "I." Sometimes, when a picture of an eyeball means "eye," the relationship between sign and signified can be understood across linguistic boundaries, a potential advantage in linguistically diverse environments such as the precolonial Americas. At other times, when a picture of an eye represents the pronoun "I," familiarity with the language in which the two are homonyms is necessary to interpret the graphic sign correctly.
Like glottographic writing, semasiographic scripts may use arbitrary signs to refer to concepts via a conventionalized code. In mathematics, for example, numerals, letters, and specialized signs such as "+" are conventionally understood as numbers, things, and actions such as "add." In public spaces such as airports, semasiographic signs for restrooms, telephones, and baggage often appear alongside alphabetic writing in multiple languages. Airports represent a site where phonographic and semasiographic forms of writing coexist in our contemporary world. Nonetheless, scholars have historically theorized glottographic and semasiographic writing as distinct and temporally separate forms and posited as superior writing that represents speech, with alphabetic writing at the pinnacle.
Because alphabetic writing uses a relatively small number of signs that combine to represent an almost infinite number of sounds, scholars have traditionally considered it more efficient and accurate than all other forms of writing. Semasiographic forms of writing, on the other hand, has generally been theorized as "forerunners of writing," an earlier stage in the development of full-fledged sound-based writing (see figure 1).
These categories and distinctions may, however, say more about our limited understanding of non-alphabetic forms of writing than about the scripts themselves. Only a few decades ago, for instance, Mayan writing was presumed to be entirely semasiographic. As deciphering has progressed, we have learned that it combines purely phonetic and logographic elements.
The pictorial elements of what Garrick Mallery called "Native American picture-writing" may have blinded philologists to the possibility that these scripts can also combine phonetic and logographic elements. This would indeed make them similar to the Egyptian script to which Lafitau and others implicitly compared them: hieroglyphics. Egyptian hieroglyphs employ a number of signs that seem to represent animals or natural objects, such as reeds. Despite their superficial appearance as mere images, such "pictures" represent sounds rather than objects. For example, two successive "reeds" stand for the vowel "e." Likewise, a simple representation of a hand stands for the sound "t," and what appears to be a naturalistic representation of a lion stands for the sound "l." Other signs are logograms that stand for ideas or words. While European thinkers had known about Egyptian hieroglyphic writing for centuries, a crucial breakthrough in deciphering came only in the early nineteenth century with the realization that the script was not only pictographic, but also phonographic. Even when such crucial insights initiate deciphering of a script, it can take decades or more for deciphering to proceed. While Diego de Landa correctly perceived a phonetic basis to what he called the "Maya alphabet" as early as 1566, he misunderstood the nature of the script, which was syllabic rather than alphabetic. Various misperceptions obstructed attempts at deciphering well into the twentieth century, until scholars began to unravel its syllabic nature.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from QUEEQUEG'S COFFIN by BIRGIT BRANDER RASMUSSEN Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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