Rex Lee Jim’s ‘Mouse that Sucked’: On iconicity, interwoven-ness, and ideophones

This article explores the ways that Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim uses ideophony in one of his poems. I argue that Jim’s use of an ideophone in its myriad forms (from nominalized noun to independent ideophone to verb stem) creates an interwoven-ness across lines that evokes an iconicity of sound and sense. I begin by describing something of the grammatical structuring and uses of Navajo ideophony. I then turn to a discussion of contemporary written Navajo poetry that uses ideophony and especially Jim’s poetry. I follow this with a discussion of the use of Navajo ideophony in literacy education and in competing views about the appropriateness of using ideophony in Navajo written literature.