The poem “Minnehaha” by Tyehimba Jess is complicated and has many layers of context. First, it is an ekphrastic poem, meaning it responds to another work of art. In this case, the poem is responding to a bust done by the sculptor Edmonia Lewis in 1868 of the character Minnehaha, who is the lover of the main character, from Henry Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha in an effort to separate ‘American’ literature from that of Europe. He used Native American myths as content for his story, reducing it to a tool used in a game of ego, and also mixed in European and Christian values. It’s a textbook case of cultural appropriation, and all of it was done while the atrocity that was the Trail of Tears was happening. Edmonia Lewis, who had African and Native American ancestry, was an expatriate sculptor living in Rome when she sculpted her bust of Minnehaha. Through turning Minnehaha into a tangible piece of art, Lewis reclaimed Minnehaha and reinfused her character with veracity lost when Longfellow first wrote the character.
Jess takes all of this surrounding context and expertly crafts it into a poem where the bust of Minnehaha itself is the speaker of the poem. The first sentence sets the tone immediately, “What part of me is mine that was/not mined from the mind of poets,/artists rewriting the past blow/by blow till it’s pulverized past the barely recognizable?” (ll. 1-5). Through the use of “mine”, “mined”, and “mind” diction and craft is very present in this poem and reinforces the idea that it is a bust that is talking. Also, the use of the percussive ‘p’ and ‘b’ sounds in “part”, “poets”, “past”, “blow by blow”, “pulverized past”, and “barely” all mimic the sound of chiseling through marble. All of these techniques make the poem able to be felt and make the abstract idea of rewriting history physical and shows that abstract ideas do, in fact, manifest. This is seen again in the lines, “…History/is their favorite lie. I found/my face buried in its would-be/pages, then excavated by/a native who fled the country” (ll. 16-20). Through the specific words of “buried” and “excavated” the action required to create a sculpture is maintained while also serving as a metaphor for how the bust works to reclaim Minnehaha and have history kept true. The poem ends with “I’m her stone arrow/her refusal to bow. I wear/her chisel-sharp aim as my crown.” (ll. 24-6). The bust of Minnehaha makes her purpose clear as the tangible representation of Lewis’s expression. The bust takes on a life of its own and becomes forever separate from the misrepresentation of Longfellow. Truly, Jess executes a masterclass in ekphrastic poems and further cements the bust of Minnehaha as the true representation.