Like a pregnancy, only a little more macabre

Each step I go along this journey to self-publish The Summer of Pomba Gira feels uneasily like the third trimester of a pregnancy. I feel heavy and wishing this phase was just over and done with. This is coupled by an uneasy feeling that my baby might emerge with three heads, two of which didn't show up on the ultrasound. I feel as ill-equipped for this authorship thing as I did for motherhood. Will I be ready? What will happen? Will it change my life forever? Will my readers like it, get it, or will they be hurtling tomatoes at me in the streets?

I'm reminded of this great episode of Northern Exposure, called Thanksgiving. In it, the local Native people have developed a tradition of throwing tomatoes at the white people. Joel, an outsider to the tradition, gets hit with a few and is indignant, wants to know why. They explain that tomatoes look like blood but don't hurt anybody, and it's better than tire irons.

On my better days, I imagine it will be a best-seller (ha!) and that I'll get calls to be interviewed by all of the major network news hounds. Of course, I will eschew them all, Oprah or Anderson Cooper, in favor of going on the Jerry Springer show so long as no one in the audience brings tomatoes. No, seriously, I'll give an exclusive interview to Geraldo Rivera, because he's not gotten to break a big expose story since the days when he was live on TV and he said he'd find the hidden treasure of the gangsters, but instead found an empty room. That's got to suck, so I'd give him the opportunity to break the great news story.

On the ultimate fantasy days (as if Geraldo just weren't enough!), somebody reads the book and decides it would make a great movie. They buy the movie rights and opening night is in Brazil (read it and you'll know why, read it especially if you're a movie maker) and I get to fly over to Brazil for the opening, where their tomatoes are much softer. In that version, when it opens in Hollywood, I get to make a request of who sits with me at dinner, and it would be Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

More fun than that, though, the whole thing takes over like wildfire, with women all over hosting Pomba Gira parties for each other! Maybe I'll post what you'll need to do your own Pomba Gira party someday. The major players will want advertising associated with the movie. Except I somehow don't imagine a Burger King glass set coming out of this book. I'd probably pay money to see that happen. The one great fortune of writing a book this way out there is that there is NO WAY Disney will ever touch it.

Like pregnancy, this feels much like exposure, and therefore vulnerability. I've got a semi-normal little life, or at least, I float that idea out there for the general viewing public. I have a career and a family and my own little quirky bubble of reality that's changed when you give birth to a three headed child. That sort of thing happens.

I think my mother was right, I should have been a casino dealer. That was her career aspiration for me, which she astutely cultivated right around the time I was old enough to write. It was her subtle hint, I expect. I completely dashed her hopes and went an entirely different career route, but ultimately, one safer than writing.

My not-nearly-so-good days customarily come after re-reading the story, after drilling it into my head, as it were. On those days, I consider the NDN community reaction and I think: silence. Most people wouldn't view silence as anything terrifying, but this kind of silence I know, and I know full well what it means. This isn't the silence of peace and solitude, but a deafening silence, veritable fjords of silence. This is the silence of "you are dead to us" because of breaking the unspoken taboo.

There's a Cherokee story of the Uktena I've been thinking about for the better part of two years. I suspect it's part of some mid-life crisis I'm encountering, dancing with my shadow and experientially re-creating Jung's individuation process. The Uktena was a serpent created of magic to kill the Sun, except that it failed in that duty and went on to terrorize the Cherokee people. It was said to have the body of a snake, except it was the diameter of a tree trunk. It had antlers on it's head, wings that enabled it to fly - since it couldn't be easily categorized, it belonged to the three worlds, above, this and below, and therefore was something to be avoided. That and to approach it could cause madness, as it would seep its thoughts deep into your head and convince you that your family had been destroyed.

So, there are many versions of the Uktena story, but the one I keep coming back to is where the Shawano medicine man is captured by the Cherokee people. They want to kill him, but he convinces them instead to let him go after the Uktena. He does this, and it's a really long story, so I won't get into it here- but he brings back from them a glowing crystal that was in the center of it's head, and he's allowed to live and stay among the Cherokee. The crystal is said to bring great prosperity to the people. The remainder of the story doesn't focus on the great prosperity of the people and what that looked like, and it's only recently, in this third trimester pregnancy of the book about to be birthed, that I thought about how odd that is.

The rest of the story goes on to talk about how the Shawano comes back with a small snake with glowing red eyes growing out of his head. It never sleeps, even when he does, it's awake even after he dies and they bury him. The people, upon seeing this snake growing out of dude's head when he returns, they kind of avoid him, keep a respectful distance, but are rightfully just a wee bit afraid of him. They say it came about because one drop of blood of the Uktena crossed the fire line and touched him on the head, and that the snake sprang forth from that.

As I said, for two years I've mulled this story over, and typically consider the whole snake growing out of the head thing as a cautionary tale, don't go up against some seriously wicked magic, because it's just not worth it. No good deed goes unpunished. However, it struck me as odd that the story focuses on this and not the prosperity of the Cherokee people that ensued after the Uktena was defeated. Granted now, that would stick out in people's memory, but it's a teaching story, isn't it? Or it could be.

Then it occurred to me today, that the reason the Shawano had a snake growing out of his head at all was because he faced off with something the people themselves wouldn't. He was touched by the blood of something, had a direct experience of something that was terrifying and awful, which he battled and overcame. Like all of our direct experiences, something like that makes its mark on us. The Cherokee of old would have known this, understood it perhaps better than we do today. So why fear it so greatly? I'll delve into the realm of speculation here - that glowing eyed snake growing out of his head served as a constant reminder to them of the battle they elected not to go into themselves that day.

Putting it back to my experience of writing and publishing this story, there's not a lot in it I haven't experienced myself, although the story concepts are metaphors for the experiences I've had. I've fought a lot of personal, internal demons or monsters - faced off with them and on some level, feel I've won, and if that leaves it's mark as a snake growing out of my head in the form of a novel called The Summer of Pomba Gira, then so be it. The only difference here is that no one asked me to go into that battle, I did it all on my own. However, some of the themes of it are relevant to more people than just me. So if the story is the snake growing out of my head, and people distance themselves from me for it out of distain or fear, it won't change the fact that the glowing red eyes will remain alert, when I sleep. It won't go away once I die, the slow death of community silence or otherwise. Perhaps that little snake in the original story was to serve as a reminder of the battles we elect not to face in our own lives. No one likes to see someone's fought a battle they've yet to fight, heard they've gone the places they've yet to go, and certainly, don't remind us of it with the snake growing out of your head presence!

This is no bragging rights moment here, I don't mean it in any holier-than-thou way. I mean it as a call to action. When I re-read and drill into my head the aspects of the story I imagine would be most likely to offend, hit a community nerve and cause drama in my staid little life, it's around really serious topics: Internalized racism, internalized sexism, substance abuse, trauma, cross cultural interaction and communication, what historical injustices we've had done to us, and what we've let it do to us, family conflict, letting our stories die, etc. If even one of those is your/our Uktena, go head to head with it and come out of it alive, little snake growing out of your head or not in the end. Don't let it terrorize you, and don't slam or silence to death those who've decided to go for the challenge.