In class several days ago, we performed a reading of the Night Chant, a traditional Navajo song. It was a beautiful experience, frankly. The lines of the song reverberated through the class, and the actual structure of the song seemed to have little in common with either traditional western poetry or song.
Except that doesn't seem to be entirely true. Rather, "Night Chant" seems almost a precursor to modernist literature. The repeated lines, the propelling rhythm, and the mixture of optimism and deep-set melancholy present in the song are all heavily reminiscent of the works of poets and authors like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Even the invocation of the gods and presence of the supernatural is in alignment with modernist authors.
T.S. Eliot famously said, defending modernism, "Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." Yet American Indians had been using the "mystical method," and making art through it, far before the Western world. I'd like to close with a line from Night Chant that reminds me heavily of another famous literary chant, T.S. Eliot's "This is how the world ends" koan from The Hollow Men. The Night Chant line is similarly preoccupied with endings, but in a more hopeful and upbeat fashion:
"In beauty it is finished.
In beauty it is finished."
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