The Walam Olum: An Indigenous Apocrypha and Its Readers

Abstract

In the mid 1990s several prestigious literary journals published experimental poems by Araki Yasusada, a Hiroshima survivor. The revelation that the author was an invented persona caused a minor scandal. Not only were the poems, in the view of some critics, aesthetically unworthy of the venues in which they appeared, but the poems and accompanying biographical and translator's notes carried evidence, obvious in retrospect, that they could not have been from their purported time and place. When such a “transparent hoax” succeeds, it provides grounds for a critique of the politics of its reception (Owen 36). Perhaps that was an aim of the Yasusada hoaxer: to provoke recriminating discussions about “identity politics and its relationship to poetic taste” (Chang et al. 34), the “New Multiculturalism,” and “the current disciplinary demand” (Perloff 32). “[W]hat we crave, after all,” concludes the sinologist Stephen Owen, decrying the actual “provinciality” behind the apparent openness of “contemporary culture” to cultural otherness, is “only the simulacrum of our own fantasies” (36).1