Bees in Transit by Linda Hogan
"Bees in Transit" by Linda Hogan is a poignant poem that reflects on the historical and cultural trauma experienced by the Osage people, particularly focusing on the suffering of Osage women during the early 20th century. The piece draws inspiration from the Osage murders related to land rights and oil wealth, which left profound scars on the community. Through vivid imagery, such as beehives covered in sheets and abandoned possessions, Hogan evokes a sense of loss and displacement, paralleling the plight of the Osage with that of the bees, symbolizing resilience amidst turmoil.
The poem captures the unsettling transition from a once-thriving community to a state of bewilderment and sorrow, highlighting the disconnect between modern civilization and the spiritual awareness of past injustices. As the bees navigate a world filled with confusion, Hogan expresses a deep empathy for both the land and the people, emphasizing the fragile connection that binds them. The themes of boundary and belonging resonate throughout the work, calling attention to the struggles of indigenous people in reclaiming their narrative and place within a rapidly changing environment. Overall, "Bees in Transit" serves as a powerful reflection on memory, loss, and the desire for connection to home.
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Bees in Transit by Linda Hogan
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1983 (collected in Seeing Through the Sun, 1985)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Bees in Transit: Osage County” reflects Hogan’s interest in the so-called Osage murders, which were researched by the Osage scholar Carol Hunter. Hogan based her first novel, Mean Spirit (1990), on this work. The novel is set in Oklahoma during the 1920’s, soon after the discovery of oil on the allotment lands of the Osage people, and provides a fictionalized account of the lives of Osage landowners who were murdered, most probably for their oil rights. By the novel’s end, the Osage people were abandoning their former town life and the white world, leaving behind the luxuries they had purchased with their oil money. A major theme of the novel is the suffering of the Osage women, some of whom were courted by white men interested only in their land rights and some of whom were murdered outright.
The suffering of the Osage women is also depicted in Hogan’s poem “Bees in Transit: Osage County,” first published in the volume Seeing Through the Sun. This poem begins with the image of “a hundred white bedroom chests/ being driven to the county dump,” a reminder of the possessions that the Osage left behind. Like these white chests, beehives draped in white sheets are transported by truck away from their home and abandoned. “The air is filled with workers/ on strike,” and the cold air meets the smoke of a brush fire. Green Osage oranges fall, “hitting earth/ where dark women, murdered for oil/ under the ground/ still walk in numbers/ through smoky dusk.” As the author Helen Jaskoski has noted, this work displays Hogan’s feeling for history in the light of her spiritual awareness: Prompted by the spirits she sees, she is unwilling to let past evils be forgotten, even as she watches the current bewilderment of the bees. The bees form “a lost constellation,” seeing Hogan again and again through “compound eyes” and “in the confusion of a hundred earths/ and rising moons.”
Hogan says of the bees, “Desertion’s sorrow has not yet touched them,” but, like the Osage people, the bees feel the air “growing death cold.” Meanwhile, “there is no place to go at dark/ when the air fills up with sirens and suicides” and all the bewildering trappings of modern civilization. This new world is unaware of the spirits, “gray women wavering above the amber heat/ of brushfires/ and a thousand porchlights.”
The poem ends with Hogan’s wish that she could tell the “noisy bees/ there is a way back home.” She adds that “there is nothing more than air between us all,” expressing her sorrow and empathy for the landless Osage people. This final line ties the poem in with another of her interests: namely, the existence of boundaries between people or between people and nature, something against which Hogan has struggled all of her life. The presence of this theme is heightened when the poem is read in the context of Seeing Through the Sun, where “Bees in Transit: Osage County” appears in a section titled “Wall Songs.”
Bibliography
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Anderson, Eric Gary. “Native American Literature, Ecocriticism, and the South: The Inaccessible Worlds of Linda Hogan’s Power.” In South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, edited by Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.
Arnold, Ellen L. “Beginnings Are Everything: The Quest for Origins in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” In Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality, edited by Kristina K. Groover. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.
Balassi, William, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, eds. This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.
Bleck, Melani. “Linda Hogan’s Tribal Imperative: Collapsing Space Through ’Living’ Tribal Traditions and Nature.” Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 11 (Winter, 1999): 23-45.
Bonetti, Kay. “Linda Hogan.” In Conversations with American Novelists: The Best Interviews from the “Missouri Review” and the American Audio Prose Library, edited by Kay Bonetti, Greg Michalson, Speer Morgan, Jo Sapp, and Sam Stowers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Cook, Barbara J., ed. From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2003.
Hegarty, Emily. “Genocide and Extinction in Linda Hogan’s Ecopoetry.” In Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction, edited by J. Scott Bryson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002.
Hogan, Linda. “’A Heart Made Out of Crickets’: An Interview with Linda Hogan.” Interview by Bo Schöler. Journal of Ethnic Studies 16 (Spring, 1988): 107-117.