Assignment 6

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)

Following is an interesting excerpt from a longer essay by Kenneth Lincoln that will provide you with some insight into current Native American writing:

“With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out the smokehole (as in resistance to other modern verse innovators, Whitman, Williams, Sexton, or the Beats). Parodic antiformalism may account for some of Alexie's mass maverick appeal. This Indian gadfly jumps through all the hoops, sonnet, to villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky. "I'm sorry, but I've met thousands of Indians," he told Indian Artist magazine, Spring 1998, "and I have yet to know of anyone who has stood on a mountain waiting for a sign." A reader enters the land of MTV and renascent AIM: a cartoon Pocahontas meets Beavis and Butt-head at the forest's edge, Sitting Bull takes on Arnold Schwarzenegger at Wounded Knee '73. The Last Real Indian has a few last words.

“A stand-up comedian, the Indian improvisator is the performing text, obviating too close a textual reading: youngish man, six-foot-two or so, born in 1966 at the height of hippie nativism, from Wellpinit, Washington, now living in Seattle and taking the fin de siecle literary world by storm (an Indian Oscar Wilde?). After a century of benign neglect, Indian literature has hit an inflationary spiral with six-figure book deals and million-dollar movies. New York publishers have been humping this sassy, talk-back satirist as the last essentialist hold-out, a commercially successful Crazy Horse of mass marketing breed Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, not just anybody, but thirteen-sixteenths lood, according to his poetry: "I write about the kind of Indian I am: kind of mixed up, kind of odd, not traditional. I'm a rez kid who's gone urban" (Indian Artist). What kind of an Indian is this?—a photogenic black mane of hair, dark-framed bifocal glasses, high-school class president, bookworm nose broken six times by bullies (he reminisces), English lit college degree from Eastern Washington State (after passing out as a pre-med student in his anatomy class, twice). His work is wizened with poetic anger, ribald love, and whipsaw humor. The crazy-heart bear is dancing comically, riding a wobbly unicycle, tossing overripe tomatoes at his audience. "This late in the 2Oth century," the poet says in Red Blues, "we still make the unknown ours by destroying it." His firecat imagination plays tricks on the reader, for our supposed good, for its own native delight and survival. "You almost / believe every Indian is an Indian," the poet swears to Marlon Brando.

“Artistic grist and ironic survival are inseparable in this verse, tracing a short lifetime of basketball (a team captain "ball hog" in high school), beer, TV, rez cars falling apart, pony dreams, fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) babies, and fancy-dancing drunks. "You call it genocide; I call it economics," Custer snorts. A warm-up for fiction and the movies, poetics are wrapped up in the politics of native poverty , torqued metrics, and ethnic protest: dime store Indi'n princesses and back-alley vision questers, 7-11 heroes and Vietnam vets, Marlon Brando and Crazy Horse. No insurance CEO or village doctor, Alexie has the near fatal, comic bravado of surviving an everyday rez, where every day is a blow to the stomach and a blaze of understanding. Being Indian means you're hanging on for dear life, hanging in there with catastrophic humor, kicking back at sunset, staggering through the '49 to dawn, laughing your ass off and on again (the short fiction says), and accepting that bottom line of your neighbor's butt next to you, misplaced, displaced, re-relocated into the present Red reality, so real that it hurts. So unreal in its hurtful beauty, so surreal that it makes you blink and smile to see another dawn. "How do you explain the survival of all of us who were never meant to survive?" It's a long walk from Sitting Bull bearing "hard times" to Charlie Blackbird "surviving." Alexie takes to Internet chat rooms for essential defenses of native sovereignty and intercultural access to America' s power structures, particularly publishing and the movies.

“So, from Momaday's visionary form, through Welch's shamanic rhythm, here's a surreal trickster savage in two-dimensional poetic cartoon. Rather than close reading or parsing the lines, his work elicits charged reaction, critical gut response, positive or negative argument. Reading Alexie's work triggers a recoil from the shock of Indian reality, like looking into the Sun Dance sun, going blind, and slowly regaining sight, stars and blackspots and sunbursts floating across the field of perception, so you know it's your perception, anyway, at last, of reality: "whiskey salmon absence," the poem "Citizen Kane" ends. Firewater, relocation, vanishing American. The images, concretely charged as Pound's Vorticist objects, are loaded in disconnections: the poison where food swarms, desperate homing, the absence that starves Indians to death. "Rosebud" is not a child's movie sled but a desperately poor Sioux reservation in the Dakotas.

(from: "Futuristic Hip Indian: Alexie." From Sing With the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)

“This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” (pp. 584-93)

This is a deceptively simple story. Victor, a reservation Indian, needs to travel to Phoenix, Arizona, to claim the body of his father. Without a car or money for transportation, he applies to the reservation tribal council for help. They give him $100, not enough for a round trip, and suggest he find a friend who owns a car. He manages to find an old childhood acquaintance, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who has a car and is willing to help if Victor will take him along. The heart of the story is their round-trip journey to Phoenix. What appears to be a rambling, on-the-road narrative becomes an exploration of the relationship between these two men within the context of their Native American heritage and history. We learn, through frequent flashbacks, about the childhood relationship between the two men. Thomas Builds-the Fire has always been a storyteller that no one wanted to listen to, something of an embarrassment to his deracinated fellow Native Americans, including Victor. Thomas was always chided for thinking too much, and, as Victor soon discovers, it is a trait he has not lost. Thomas’s thoughts focus on his identity and his history as a Native American, on the glory before and the degradation and humiliation after the coming of the white man.

Victor is uncomfortable with these reminders of who he is but, at the same time, powerfully drawn to them. During the Fourth of July fireworks of their childhood, it was Thomas who remarked on the strangeness of Native Americans celebrating the independence of those who had reduced them to utter dependence. Victor’s embarrassment as Thomas, the “crazy Indian storyteller,” flirts with Cathy, the Olympic gymnast, dramatizes vividly how skewed his perceptions are. Cathy likes Thomas. Victor’s growing respect for Thomas is apparent in the scene that follows, when he apologizes for the childhood beating.

By the time they return to the reservation, Victor’s feelings toward Thomas have altered more profoundly than even he realizes. “Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy storyteller who talks to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine trees,” he thinks. “Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas even after all that happened. It was cruel but it was real.” Before they part, Thomas asks victor to listen to one of his stories sometime in the future. Victor agrees with a wave of his arm and departs. Tomas drives home and enters his house, then “heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.” Surely that story will tell of Victor’s and other Native Americans’ new willingness to hear Thomas’s stories of their past and future.

We can surmise that the “This” of the title refers to the entire symbolic meaning of Victor and Thomas’s journey. Victor’s new openness to Thomas’s stories suggests hope for the future. Indeed, Victor’s attempt to make up for the shame he feels over his attitude toward Thomas is revealing. In giving Thomas half his father’s ashes, he seems to be not only honoring Thomas’s sense of tribal ties but also signaling his own new awareness of them.

The tone of the story is worth examining for the way in which Alexie infuses his serious theme with a great deal of humor. The humor begins in the very first scene, with Victor’s appearance before the tribal council. The council’s response to Victor is the patronized “Now, Victor,” as though they are addressing a child. When Victor is embarrassed to be seen talking to Thomas at the Trading Post, the narrator dryly remarks, “Victor felt a sudden need for tradition.” Thomas tells a very funny story about the two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors and about his dream of standing by the Falls in Spokane. Much of the humor arises from the inability of both Thomas and Victor to be somber about themselves and their very serious concerns.

The unintrusive and natural way in which the social/political theme runs through the narrative helps create a tone of comic seriousness. Victor’s treatment by the tribal council suggests the way in which the Bureau of Indian Affairs has reduced Indians to powerlessness and treated them like children. Thomas’s remark on the Fourth of July celebration is a casual, matter-of-fact observation. So too his comment to Cathy about the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics: “Sounds like you all got a lot in common with Indians.”

Finally, the omniscient narration is largely unobtrusive and non-judgmental, though at a number of points the narrator makes quiet but oracular comments. He interrupts the story of the fireworks celebration to comment that “Years later, they would need much more.” The story about Thomas’s attempt to fly concludes with the admiring comment: “Everybody has dreams of flying. Thomas flew.”