Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas” carefully examines language and what it could do. The book even starts with the sentence “No word has any special hierarchy over any other” by Arthur Sze. Throughout the book, Long Soldier explores how words, sentence structures or even commas could convey meaning. As a person writing in a second language right now, I could relate to being “language poor” and losing meaning in translation. Replacing words of one language to words of another language often takes away the poetic beauty of what I meant to write, or even worse, makes what I am trying to say incomprehensible. Her meticulous analysis of the meaning, sound, and nuance of words reminded me of Italo Calvino’s “Exactitude”- selection of precise words matter in expressing the exact meaning.

This examination at the first part of the book lays the groundwork for Long Soldier’s response to “the Apology’s delivery… language, crafting, and arrangement.” Instead of focusing solely on the content of the apology, Long Soldier disintegrates the language of it. With her “Whereas” poems, Long Soldier explores the double meaning of the word “whereas” by using the legal term to document her inner life, and converses directly with the apology. Moreover, the way she dwells on the usage of certain words or phrases, such as “opened a new chapter” or “both” exposes how certain word choices could shadow the violence of a historical fact.

Throughout the text, Long Soldier also comments on the naivety of people who are unaware of the Dakota 38, or the existence of the apology. Her note on the Fourteen-Year-Old Girl’s comment on the online article, and her explanation of the Dakota 38 in “38” presupposes that the audience, or the listener, is completely ignorant about this issue. It is disturbing how this is probably true- I did not know about the Dakota 38 prior to reading this text as well. “Whereas” exposes that past occurrences continue to influence the present, and that ignorance could contribute to the violence as well.