Sky Hopinka is a Poet

 

this is my final for my 2023 intro to comp lit class

Sky Hopinka’s film I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is a practice of liberation and decolonization with, through, and of literature. I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is proof of cinema as a medium of poetry and the ways in which film-poetry can be used to free thought and bodies from marginalization. Hopinka’s film reclaims and restructures Native american identity through a process of dislocating written language from its original medium and/or discipline. This practice centers emotion to actively push towards the liberation of all Indigenous peoples from the totalizing rule of colonialism. I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become foregrounds a confrontation of language with experience and investigates the subsequent impacts on language and literature that comes from this encounter of the mind and the body.

In her 1977 essay Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde writes: “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us… There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves… there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real” (38-9). Lorde posits that our liberation requires self-determination. We must undo the dominant eurocentric modes of history, and thus reframe literature and literary disciplines, to center experience and the body as opposed to the mind. Self-determined identities already exist, yet they have been buried by hegemony and its approach to history and literature. 

We must remind ourselves that much of what we observe, even often what we experience, is a result of intentional thought enacted through violent domination with the goal of upholding the power of whiteness and patriarchy. We must free the seeds of independence from their buried status in constructed environments. This requires a transformation of thought and its documentation that inverts the prevailing notion of ‘I think, therefore I am’ to “I feel, therefore I can be free” (38). Only poetry can do this because of the medium’s emotional and bodily engagement with language. Language has the power to dominate or to liberate. Lorde writes that we must reframe the way  we engage with language and literature in order to excavate the “ancient and hidden… [the] incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling,” and thus reshape/reclaim history and culture (36). It is through poetry, a literary medium that does not aim to explain but to express and reckon with “revelatory distillation[s] of experience,” that we release the hidden but inherent tools of self-determination (37). Lorde’s call for the reconstruction of language and literature through poetry is manifested in Sky Hopinka’s cinematic works.

There is a density to I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become that seems to be a result of the blending of superimpositions of history, academia, ‘science’ upon the emotive, the poetic, the expressive. Language, in Hopinka’s piece, is fused with what is felt rather than used to convey what is noticed. Language in Hopinka’s piece, thus, takes on more than just linguistics and becomes expressions of experiences in the visual as calligrams, found footage, and obscured/abstracted video documentation of nature and humanity, and in the auditory as music, field recordings, and oral performances.

 I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become’s first 28 seconds presents an excerpt of Paul Radin’s 1923 text The Winnebago Tribe. Radin was an anthropologist in the early 20th century. His writings utilized fieldwork and oral stories from Indigenous individuals to facilitate his study of the religious and linguistic practices of Native american communities. The Winnebago Tribe and other anthropological texts produced by Radin were created with the purpose of explaining the ways and states of being of a multiplicity of Indigenous peoples to white america in the colonialist-state’s own terms. These texts reduced Native americans to a monolith which could be engaged through the imagination, but never the body, of white america. Radin robbed Winnebago individuals of their words and time for the intellectual profit and assumed superiority of the white Academic. He turned individuals’ collective tribal identity into a book title, rendering subject into object, rendering the body into the mind. 

Hopinka’s appropriation of Radin’s written language is a reclamation of the speech and bodies of his ancestors. The excerpt of Radin’s academic literature that Hopinka’s film opens with discusses the Winnebago tribe’s conception of death that is in opposition to prevailing american notions of an afterlife. Radin’s text says “it was not the vision of a Road of Perfection to be rewarded by eternal peace and happiness in heaven but… a return to earth.” While these words are the language and thinking of Radin, they are the feelings and experiences of members of the Ho-Chunk Nation - which Hopinka and the Winnebago tribe now belong to. Hopinka re-forms Radin’s writing into a calligram of the Effigy Mounds, translating the anthropological study into a poem. He returns the words of his ancestors to the earth through his poem’s shape which resembles what lies upon the grounds belonging to the Ho-Chunk Nation.

This calligram is underscored by a recorded performance of Sacred Harp, a community singing practice traditional to the rural american south. This audio-visual intersection makes clear Hopinka’s dedication of this film to his community. In an interview with Erin Joyce, Hopinka recalls experiencing frustration upon realizing that all the Native studies courses at american academic institutions were geared towards white students. He explains that I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is in many ways an inversion of the discipline of Native studies so as to “tell stories directly to the Indigenous audiences [that Hopinka] felt were being left out of the conversation.” 

The booming voices of the Sacred Harp singers carry over to the film’s second sequence which features dancers at a Naimuma powwow. The image of the dancers, the sounds of their jingling clothing, and the calls of the powwow emcee are abstracted in Hopinka’s integration of this footage into his film. The footage’s visuals are presented in their negative image, rendered to favor the interpersonal movements of the bodies that make up the powwow’s community. The superimposed swirling colors which seem to resemble the northern lights further abstract and poeticize the footage. The powwow’s audio is absent at this moment but appears later beneath a black screen which features a transcription of the 1940s radio show ‘Hello Americans.’ 

Hopinka takes this singular piece of footage and manipulates it to isolate its medium specific qualities. The singular moment exists as a multiplicity of ideas and experiences when contextualized within his film. The contorted visuals ask viewers to feel rather than observe what they witness. The powwow’s audio beneath the language of ‘Hello Americans’ speaks to the idea that the past is refracted in the present, and that, simultaneously yet inversely, contemporary emotions and experiences form the historical. Here, Hopinka’s cinematic-poetic practices mirror Lorde’s notion that “there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom” (39). Hopinka’s deliberate muddling of video through poetic-dissociative techniques allow his cinema to resemble a dream. From here, the film’s audience, who Hopinka has explicitly stated is primarily his personal as well as (inter)national Indigenous community, is given space to reshape and claim elements of these narratives for intimate and collective self-determination.

The motif of dancing lights is present in the majority of the film subsequent to its introduction in the Naimuma powwow footage. These sequences are punctuated by the body and voice of Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet Diane Burns in the form of an archival recording of a live reading of Burns’ work. Beneath images of dancing lights, Burns is first heard reading her poem Sure, You Can Ask Me a Personal Question. Her image joins her voice shortly after, but is soon absorbed by the return of dancing lights. This piece in its original literary form is about the interpersonal experience of being stereotyped. The piece of literature in the form of audio-visual recorded spoken word that has been incorporated into cinema, however, finds an expansion of meaning through the displacement and relocation of its language into another medium. The same language now speaks to the feeling of existing within historical and/or tactile worlds that used to be intimate and have become foreign through colonialism.

Burns’ image converges with that of the dancing lights as she sings the words “I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own. If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya way ya hi ya way ya hi yo.” These lyrics are repeated intermittently throughout the movie; they are adopted by the voice of a contemporary artist as well as by written language through the transcription of the Burns’ words which are superimposed on the film’s other visual sequences. Hopinka permits the coexistence of these temporally and/or spatially divided sounds and visuals. The belief that the creation of the present happens through specific actions that (re)shape and (re)claim the past. Hopinka actively embodies this idea through the process and in the document of his film-poem. 

I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is proof of film’s ability to accomplish and transcend literary goals of liberation. Through this film Sky Hopinka emerges as a poet. With this identity he creates a resonant exploration of experienced history. He reclaims Indigenous voice, identity, time, and space as through his art-practice’s alignment with Lorde’s conception that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into ideas, then into more tangible action” (37).

Bibliography:

Hopinka, Sky. “I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become.” Vimeo, Sky Hopinka, 14 May 2016, vimeo.com/166668647. Accessed 11 Dec. 2023.

Joyce, Erin. “Sky Hopinka Is Tired of Explaining Everything to Non-Natives.” Hyperallergic, 6 Feb. 2023, hyperallergic.com/798442/sky-hopinka-is-tired-of-explaining-everything-to-non-natives/.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, Calif. Crossing Press, 2015.

Personal statement/note: 

In this paper I use terms like We, Our, and Us to reference a collective of people with a shared identity insofar of such identities’ status as marginalized under colonialist and eurocentric systems of being. I use this language not to reduce the multiplicity of identities and individuals that create the collective We to their status of marginalized. I do not use this language to equate my experiences as a white woman to that of Lorde as a Black woman nor to that of Hopinka as a Native man. I rather use this language to call upon a history of violence that makes it necessary to work holistically, targeting the hegemonic roots of domination and centering individuals and histories that (have) face(d) interlocking marginalization, in order to truly free anyone. I also want to acknowledge that I hold a very specific power in writing this essay, in being able to write about these works and identities through what they attempt to reject. This is a contradiction that will always be somewhat present in academic writing from white students about art and expressions from people of color. I hope that my genuine belief in and care about these practices will come through in my paper. I hope I have been able to infuse my analyses and reason that have become writing in a privileged and academic space such as Oberlin with real emotion emanating from what I feel and have felt. In writing this paper, I have constantly confronted the challenge of writing through the personal, and thus acknowledging the specific framework that I have constructed as a result of my identity’s relationship with its temporal and geopolitical context/conditions, and actively centering experiences and perspectives from people of color. I have made the decision to write alternating between the first person and the (distinctly speculative and not omniscient) third person. I choose to write in the first person when discussing Lorde, as she and I share identities that are rooted in gender and sexuality, and also because her language is catering towards a larger and more diverse audience which is clear in her use of the terms We, Us, and Our. I choose to use the third person when writing about Hopinka, as he constantly expresses that his work is not for white audiences. He works through personal meanings and expression and aims to communicate with other Native individuals without having to explain himself or cater to other, more specifically white, identities. I use the third person in these analyses as not to claim his experiences or expressions. I may think that I know them, but I will never be able to feel them, and thus I do not. I have been deliberate and contemplative with my word choice, but I also understand that in coming from my privileged position, as a white student afforded the financial and temporal luxury of engaging with literary analytics at an institution like Oberlin College, I will never be fully aware of the real impacts that my language has, or the ways in which it might misrepresent specific individual or collective identities that I do not hold. I understand that the position from which I write this paper forces my overextension of the conclusion I draw and the simplification of works I write about here. At the same time, I think that it is important to be able to discuss works from artists such as Lorde and Hopinka. I have made a serious attempt to balance analysis, a practice that has its flaws but I believe can be used to aid liberation, and the goal of self-determination of people of color that is independent from whiteness. I acknowledge and understand that because of my identity, the conclusions I draw about art and artists of color inherently clouds the aforementioned goal of total autonomy. I have spent as much time as permitted by the due-date of this assignment thinking about the ways in which I can be analytical through my privileged status as a white american student without repeating and reinforcing the exact practices that the arts/artists I apply analysis towards aim to dismantle. I have decided that my best approach is to use analysis as a means for creating extraliterary questions rather than as a means to draw conclusions. I write all of this, this whole preliminary note, to say that my language and my analyses will be fundamentally misrepresentative in some ways. I hope this paper can be thought of not as drawing conclusions but as a forever malleable working through of art, literature, and history. I invite anyone reading this paper who feels misrepresented to become a contributor to this paper. I hope that I can do justice to the works and even more so to the experiences and feelings that I write about in this paper.