The influence of the first people of any area is often present in place names, sometimes family names. In the general culture, beyond the fight against slurs, there’s the horror of appropriation and embarrassing grammar. Sometimes, beyond woo-woo and performative uses of leafy incense, dead bird parts and other totem objects, there might come the perception of this other way of being, this other way of life beyond that of the dominant culture. For multi-cultural people, the presence of personal culture in their life can be a frictive experience, and reviews of Power tend to emphasize that aspect of the novel, along with the coming-of-age modernization of the hero’s journey. A literature course that includes this work might also include a list of two dozen binary considerations as essays topics; the novel hoists these with ease –- for our ways of being include dates versus seasons and how we view the land.
While Hogan’s novel has a plot based on true events, and a symbolic array of characters, the considerations of the work extend into a view of environmentalism that Hogan handles with a deft use of elegiac language: “It’s the way she lives in the place where Cuban lizards climb trees and plants look enough like gold in the deep shade and slant of afternoon sun that the Spanish believed there were riches here, in this place that is now darkening with storm and smelling of rain”( 17). In the best hurricane sequence since Zora, the novel proceeds to lay out the multiple symbols, characters and events that propel the narrative. Of note is the re-occurrent and apparitional appearance of four women who are ‘walking slightly above the ground as if they are gliding and have no feet”(24). These women appear, together or singly, throughout the novel, and they are both literal and symbolic figures of ancestry, of a way of being at odds with the culture of cars and casinos.
Lest the reader fear for their air conditioning, Hogan almost spoonfeeds this ancient world perception to the reader, as it is everpresent in a manner that is deemed lyrical or beautiful on dust jacket blurbs. Perhaps an academic would note this as setting, but Hogan’s work endeavors to give voice to nature, to force the reader to perceive how it would be to live with that awareness: “The frogs are loud this morning”(102) or when visiting the town “A few trees stand, alien and foreign, in a ground that not long ago was all theirs. The ground belonged to them and the marsh birds and the possum. I believe they are surprised to be alive at all, those lonely trees, and nothing in the world acknowledges them”(115). The sense of the living world, of life forms beyond our own having birth on our shared earth is more than mere plot mechanics, it is a perception steeped onto every page.
With the effects of climate crisis being now daily news, Power’s now nearly quarter century of existence as a publication highlights aspects of our awareness that are overdue for overhaul. It might be that the reader has recently come to some speculation about how we experience time, and maybe how the land upon which we live begs us to reconsider our ways of being, if we would only listen.
