FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Sherman Alexie's cultural balancing act
by Harry VandervlistSherman Alexie is an unusual name for someone whose Native ancestry is part Coeur d'Alene, part Spokane. Ask Alexie where his surname comes from and he'll tell you "I have no idea." Then he'll admit he makes up a different story every time. "What's interesting though," he says, "is what my forebears' name, before the name Alexie came along, meant in their own language." Well, what did it mean? "It meant, `I have no idea.'" And Alexie flashes his wide dazzling smile and waits. He waits just that exact beat of time that comics know to wait. Truly, Alexie could be the best Native North American late- night TV host ever. His turn of humor moves brilliantly from self-deprecation to the exposure of uncomfortable truths. At readings he can make audiences laugh, then squirm, then laugh again at how cleverly they were made to squirm. And this is only a sideshow of Alexie's real performance, which is a literary one.
Indian Killer, Alexie's most recent novel, turns a corner from the picaresque humor of his earlier book Reservation Blues: "the story of an all-Indian Catholic rock and roll band." The new book is partly a murder mystery about an unknown killer in Seattle. Since the victims are all scalped and marked with a traditional sign, the perpetrator becomes known in the press as the Indian Killer. Meanwhile, we learn the story of John Smith, a reservation child adopted by a white family who now longs for the heritage he feels was stolen from him. For most of the novel, Alexie lets us wonder about the links between the murders and the stories of Smith and his (mostly very angry) Native acquaintances. The result is a space in the novel, a space easily filled with the reader's own preconceptions.
John Smith's story touches on a key social issue for Alexie. "Native children who are taken from their parents and given to white couples for adoption are called 'lost birds.' I wanted to tell the story of one of these lost birds. John Smith is struggling to find any connection with anything. He's definitely going mad." For Alexie, the kind of "adopting out" that Smith experiences is another kind of murder: "It's not just physical murder, but the social and cultural killing of First Nations people."
Indian Killer is a well-crafted and extremely angry novel. "Reviewers called my earlier books dark and depressing, and I thought, 'You want dark and depressing? I'll show you dark. You'll look back with fondness at the light-heartedness of the last two books.'" Though Alexie does not say so himself, this may be a case of an author finally taking control of a career that's accelerating success surprised him. Alexie took his first poetry-writing class "because I fainted in anatomy class and the writing class fit my schedule." He moved rapidly from never having seen a poem by a Native person, to writing some himself, to publishing a volume called The Business of Fancydancing.
After one adulatory New York Times review, the agents started calling. "They asked me, do you have a fiction manuscript? And I said, 'Um, yeah,' because they could get me a really good deal. And then I wrote it." That book, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, began to develop characters who appear in Reservation Blues. The success has not slowed down yet: the international magazine Granta named Alexie in 1996 as one of the Best Young American Novelists. The days of presenting himself as a five-foot two Indian basketball player who just happens to write are over.
Attractive and funny, Alexie is a strikingly brilliant person with a scholarly knowledge of U.S. and Canadian Native writing. He has definite opinions on the way to achieve social justice for Native peoples. "If you [white people] want justice, campaign for the immediate honoring of every treaty signed. Of course that would mean a lot of you would have to move. A lot of money would be given up and the country would radically change."
He has the charm and confidence of a spokesman and leader, but lives out a cultural balancing act every day. "The way I'm received at home is pretty split. I was an eccentric mouthy little thing at seven. Now I'm an eccentric mouthy bigger thing." He may laugh at himself but Alexie never forgets something his mother told him: "She never taught me Salish, but she said English will be your best weapon. It will save you. And it has."
(Harry Vandervlist spoke to Sherman Alexie
at Toronto's International Festival of Authors)
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