Louise Erdrich’s Indian Boarding School: The Runaways is a poem that describes certain aspects of freedom and a wish to escape, as experienced by young girls attempting to leave a boarding school. Not only does the poem appear to describe a present desire for freedom, but it also contains meditations on the nature of memory, trauma and the desire for escape. In particular, throughout the poem, Erdrich makes use of complex and multi-layered imagery in order to demonstrate the complexity of a desire to return home, even if such a journey involves confronting past trauma. In this sense, the work is both a poem of attempted escape and also a meditation on the impossibility of ever being able to get away from the traumas of the past.
The first stanza of the poem employs imagery that clearly describes the desire to return home, and shows at the same time the way in which this desire is mediated by the traumas of a previous life. The opening lies of the poem suggest both that the speaker of the poem is intimately related to their own experience of home, and also that they irrevocably separated from this same idea. The poem begins, “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep. / Boxcars stumbling north in dreams / don’t wait for us […]” (2019). By opening the poem with the word “Home,” Erdrich draws direct attention to importance of home for the poem, and also establishes a clear sense of direction towards which the rest of the line is moving. At the same, however, this sense of direction is contradicted in the second half the line, as it appears that this same home is somewhere that is only accessible in the dreams of the speaker, meaning that they are inevitably prevented from reaching it. This simultaneous sense of intimacy and impossibility is also made clear in the next line. On the one hand, it appears that the box cars present in the dreams of the speaker actually exist, but at the same time it is also clear that they remain out of reach of the speaker, and that they will not take them to the destination to which they wish to travel.
The traumatic nature of this imagery is made clear in the following lines of the stanza, “The rails, old lacerations that we love, shoot parallel across the face and break […]” (2018). On the one hand, this imagery refers directly to the real train tracks along which a person may travel were they ride of the box cars that elude the speaker. To describe them as lacerations, therefore, both enables the reader of the poem to visualize the railway lines, and also to understand them as a kind of scar on the countryside. At the same time, however, in the following lines, these scars take on a more personal quality, “Riding scars / you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross” (2019). According to these lines, home is clearly related to scars and to trauma, presumably the traumas of childhood. Despite this however, it is these very scars, on a subjective level, which enables the individual to find their way home. Likewise, it is also these scars that motivate the speaker to seek home in the first place. In this sense, the imagery of the poem combines a desire to return home with the idea that home itself is inevitably constituted by suffering and loss.
The following stanza of the poem moves from the expansive psychic space of the desire for home to a much more claustrophobic situation experienced by actual runaways in a boxcar attempting to escape. Erdrich writes, “[…] We watch through cracks in boards / (2019). On the one hand, this imagery functions in order to draw attention to the clear actual claustrophobia experienced by the individuals attempting to run away. This description of a physical space, however, transitions into a description of subjective experience on the lines “as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts / to be here, cold in regulation clothes” (2019). The repetition of “rolling” one either side of the caesura draws attention to the physical appearance of hills as a train passes them. The line break on “hurts” initially suggests that the hurt is a kind nostalgic feeling. However, the enjambment on “to be here” immediately draws attention to the physical entrapment of the speaker. As with the previous stanza, therefore, Erdrich’s creates an effect by using imagery to oscillate between subjective and objective landscapes.
The final stanza of the poem continues this theme, as it describes the runaways being forced to clean the pavement as a form of punishment. Erdrich writes of the girls as “[…] remembering / delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves” (2019). In this way, Erdrich suggests that the humiliation of the work that the girls are forced to do again causes them to recall their previous lives. However, the description of these “injuries” as being delicate also suggest that they remain attached to their previous lives, even though these lives may have been traumatic and damaging.
In conclusion, therefore, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways is a poem that explores a desire for home alongside the nature of personal identity. Throughout the poem, Erdrich expresses these themes with imagery which refers both to the speaker’s subjective surroundings and to their internal world. It is a mastery of this imagery that enables Erdrich to simultaneously express the difficulty of trauma and the capacity for this trauma to define one’s desire for escape.
- Erdrich, Louise. “Indian Boarding School.” Poetry Foundation. N.D. Web. Accessed 17th March, 2019.
