Nora Naranjo-Morse: An Introduction
by Darlin Neal Maureen Fern

Tewa Pueblo poet and potter Nora Naranjo-Morse was the second-to-last reader in our Poetics and Politics series. The unrelenting standing-room-only popularity of the series over the course of the semester has caused us to question the nature of audience. We have wondered what needs and values have been finding expression through these Native American writers. After reading the poetry and viewing the photos of Nora's sculptures in Mud Woman and then spending much of a day with her, many from the class asserted the desire to "be Nora." As a consequence, we are left to wonder what it was about Nora in particular that attracted people so strongly not only to her art, but also to her person and lifestyle.

On a simple level Nora holds an enviable position. She comes from a family of artists; her mother and three of her sisters are also potters. She stands solidly on the foundation created by her marriage, her children and home. She has said this foundation has "made [her] flourish" and allowed her to "follow [her] heart." Certainly, many of us dream of such a foundation and the freedom it allows, but Nora's presence brought much more to us than envy. In "'A New Mexican Rebecca': Imaging Pueblo Women," Barbara Babcock writes that "an Indian mother shaping Mother Earth..is..something of a bourgeouis dream of an alternative redemptive life, as well as an imagistic transformation of an unmanageable native into a manageable one." Nora may well represent for us dreams of an "alternative redemptive life"--with the assistance of her husband she shaped and built her own adobe home. She nurtures her work into being with the love she might give to her twelve year old twins, and though she feels a loss at letting each piece go, a loss she compares to sending grown children out into the world, at this point in her career, she has choices about who she will sell to. She says she wants buyers to come into her home and see the place and the person the work comes from. While we may be attracted to a life filled with family and work that is loved--a life in which we go to the earth for art, for sustenance, for prayer and worship, Nora does not only speak to us of possible redemption and she certainly does not allow herself or her work to be seen as that of a "manageable native," or for that matter a "manageable" woman, artist or anything. Within and between the two worlds Nora sees herself caught up in, she is struck by imbalance. Through her art she tries to awaken us to that imbalance as well as to ways of seeing that may bring us unique combinations which will result in new balances.

During her visit, Nora asked us to consider two different images--one, an image of a Baptist church, steeple and, cross pointing skyward, an emphasis on ascension--the other an image of a Kiva, entrance and ladder barely noticeable from where they peek out above the clay earth. Here the religious emphasis is on descent, on going back inside the earth.

These are images that caused Nora "great conflict" when she was a child. For most of her childhood, Nora's father was a Baptist minister at Taos Pueblo, but she never felt comfortable with Christainity. Instead she felt "guilty when [she] walked into church." She rejected that guilt. In response to the church's call to salvation, she asked herself, "Aren't I good now?" and that rejection of guilt and that belief in herself, resulted a sense of the disequilibrium of one being caught up in two worlds. A search for balance between the world of her Pueblo tradition and the world of modern values is what drives Nora's life and art. Ironically, she credits her father as being the person who influenced her to push boundaries. He was orphaned at nine and despite the fact that he was taken in by the community, Nora sees him as always being a loner--this rebel who jumped trains to pick potatoes outside of town as a child. Like her father, she sees herself as being both on the inside and outside of two different worlds.

She spoke of her struggle to find balance, again and again, whether the topic was religion, children, tradition or the modern world. At one point when speaking of her work, Nora held her womb with those deft hands. She asked, "Doesn't it have to start here as this motion, this turbulence, this feeling that's just happening?" She made circular motions up from her stomach and heart as she spoke. For some things, she told us, there are no words, only utterances. You get the feeling that a turbulence begins in Nora when she questions boundaries--boundaries that define the place of a woman, a Native American, her mixed blood children--a turbulence that circles out from her heart and womb through her hands and into her pottery when words are not enough, into her poetry when images and shapes are not enough. The result is art that satirizes and critiques post-colonial worlds. The rebellious nature she inherited from her father causes her to reject the boundaries that cultural expectations place on her art as well. With her mother she gathers clay as Santa Clara women have done for generations, but her resulting pieces are not stereotypically "Santa Clara." She questions the nature of Southwest Art. "Is the idea of what it's supposed to be new? Is it somebody else's idea of what it should be?" She says what makes her art "valid" is "because I care so much for it. It comes from a true part of me. I do it. I nurture it--that's what's okay about it. If there's a crack on a piece I'm there with it. I'm committed." She adds that this is what the clay spirits care about, this integrity.

It was a conflict for her to let go of "judgment" that told her she "should" make things like her mother, stop worrying that she is not only a traditional Pueblo woman, but also a woman in modern society. She "eats sushi, married Greg Morse and had half breed kids." But she also holds "knowledge of something real and deep and important." Nora brings these things together for us in her art. While in some traditional sense, she may remind us of connections to the earth and each other, with her poetry and with mother earth she also shapes comical images of Indian kids growing antennas from their heads, of Pearlene, the feminist figure of Nora's alter ego, images that mock the worlds we live in, that mock us all.

 Something that does not come out strongly in the laughter and satirical medicine of Nora's work at this point is anger. She says she feels she has been muffled in a sense because of assimilation. Now she is "starting to let [her]self feel angry." If she keeps the feeling down, it "will make her sick." With Mud Woman she felt a closure. Clay is soft, malleable. Now she wishes to work with metal--a "confronting, hard, almost inpenetrable" substance. Again, she says she seeks balance. This time a balance between her female and male sides. She is soft and nurturing but also aggressive and strong. Right now she feels empowered.

In the class transcript that follows Nora discusses her family, her pottery, her poetry and home. We hope that after her visit with us she felt a sense of completion, that sense of covering the "soft spot" on the baby's head which she says to her is a sense of covering what she had been for a period of time. She left something of herself behind with us. She told us "at some point you have to be a role model." She is one. Through her life and work, she wants to remind all of us that we have choices. She did this for many of us. Nora said there "Really is a strong human connection that we share (no matter what color). Invisible cords connect us all. I really believe that." She opens our eyes to ways of laughing at the world's crazy and necessary imbalances, then tugs us toward recentering.