had been a more ambitious projecttakes its name from a poem by Walt Whitman that Olsen draws on for the novel's epigraph:
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 | | Lament for the aborigines. . .
A song, a poem of itself
the word itself a dirge. . .
(Race of the woods, the landscapes free and the falls!
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
Yonnondio! Yonnondio!unlimn'd they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fadesthe cities, farms, and
factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through
the air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.
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Yonnondio's
title and epigraph, invoking a vanished American Indian culture, link it not only to ''Requa I" but to the essays Olsen was also writing in the sixties and seventies, essays that simultaneously theorized the effects of silencings in writers' lives and that pay a special respect to writers who have rescued the otherwise invisible and silent lives of others from oblivion. As Olsen says toward the conclusion of
Silences,
it was "an attempt, as later were 'One Out of Twelve,' 'Rebecca Harding Davis,' and now the rest of this book, to expand the too sparse evidence on the relationship between circumstances and creation." (262). For Olsen, creativity is a human gift accorded to most of us; the "circumstances" of gender, of race, and of class-"the great unexamined"
(Silences
264)are what deform and impede its expression.
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At the end of the 1971 talk for the Modern Language Association that became the second chapter of
Silences,
Olsen called on those present to join her in the task of reclamation; her emphasis on women as writers, as readers, as teachers marks her deepening response to and her growing importance for the feminist criticism and culture taking shape during the seventies:
|
| | You who teach, read writers who are women. There is a whole
literature to be re-estimated, revalued....
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