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Sherman Alexie Article
Sherman Alexie Article
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JOHN
NEWTON
ShermanAlexie's Autoethnography
or ShermanAlexie,1993was a famousyear.His workhaving first appeared in book form a year earlier, with a poetry chapbook, I WouldStealHorses,and a fatter collection
of poetry and fiction, TheBusinessof Fancydancing,in 1993
he published three full-length works: a volume of poems, Old Shirts
and New Skins, a book of short stories, The LoneRangerand Tonto
Fistfightin Heaven,and a further book mixing up both genres, First
Indian on the Moon. From the same year, Arnold Krupat's paper
subsequently published as "Postcoloniality and Native American
Literature" highlights, indirectly but succinctly, the originality of
Alexie's work. "I'm not aware," says Krupat, "of any Native American writer working today who has not declared some kind of
indebtedness and / or allegiance to the narrative primacy of the oral
tradition" (171). Sherman Alexie appears on cue, the exception
which such a remark perhaps inevitably anticipates: "People keep
asking me how my work is influenced by the oral tradition," he
observes in an interview with John and Carl Bellante. "I always
say, 'Well, my writing has nothing to do with the oral tradition,
because I typed it'" ("Sherman Alexie" 14). But the timeliness of
his project goes deeper than this. It isn't just that he contravenes
this seemingly plausible outline of a dominant Native American
mode, but also that his work disturbs just as explicitly a number
of the most fundamental assumptions that shape the broader context out of which Krupat is speaking-namely those cluttered demarcation debates of the late eighties and early nineties around the
postmoder and the postcolonial.
LiteratureXLII,2
0010-7484/ 01 / 0002-0413
Contemporary
? 2001 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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N E W T O N * 415
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tion-that energize the writing of anti-imperial resistance. To keynote this reading of Alexie, however, I have preferred Mary Louise
Pratt's less familiar coinage, autoethnography:
"If ethnographic texts
are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their
(usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the
others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations" (7). Pratt describes anti-imperial texts which
stare down directly the ethnographic project, and indeed there are
times when Alexie's poems come close to being autoethnographic
in this quite specific sense. But the term responds, too, to a broader
application wherever "colonized subjects undertake to represent
themselves in ways that engagewith the colonizer's own terms" (7).
Where the colonizer's discourse is at its most racist, its stereotypes
at their most vicious and demeaning, is where Sherman Alexie's
poems set the root of their anticolonial self-fashioning. And it's this
I wish to highlight in Alexie's work: his fearless determination (in
the words of an unlikely ally, N. Scott Momaday) to "go into the
enemies' camp" (qtd. in Lincoln 159), and to tackle the construction
of indigenous identity there,on precisely that ground which has
been most destructive of it.3
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N E W T 0 N * 417
ity. This drama appears in capsule form in the third of the "Indian
Boy Love Songs" from The Business of Fancydancing:
I remember when I told
my cousin
she was more beautiful
than any white girl
I had ever seen.
She kissed me then
with both lips, a tongue
that tasted clean and unclean at the same time
like the river which divides
the heart of my heart, all
the beautiful white girls on one side,
my beautiful cousin on the other.
(56)
In establishing whiteness as a measure of desire, the subject translates the history of colonialism into a kind of internalized racism. As
another poem notes, "There is nothing as white as the white girl an
Indian boy loves" (Old Shirts 86), while the uncertain taste of the
cousin's kiss confirms a troubling ambivalence which, for Alexie,
inevitably marks postcontact identity.
The hero of this fraught romance is typically figured in these
texts as displaced-that is, in the wrongplace, given what he knows
of colonial history. In the narrative poem "Tiny Treaties," in First
Indianon theMoon, the speaker is hitchhiking at night in a blizzard,
"on my way back home from touching / / your white skin again."
Here, as so often, the subject appears through the lens of what
W. E. B. Du Bois called "double-consciousness" (5), viewing himself as the unseen drivers see him, "my hair long, unbraided, and
magnified / in headlights of passing cars." Specifically, he imagines himself as he might have appeared to his white lover:
I waited seconds into years
for a brake light, that smallest possible treaty
and I made myself so many promises
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ity," also from First Indianon the Moon, pushes this contact history
back to 1676 and the ur-captivity of Mary Rowlandson.
1.
When I tell you this story, remember it may change: the reservation
recalls the white girl with no name or a name which refuses memory.
October she filled the reservation school, this new white girl, daughter
of a BIA official or doctor in the Indian Health Service Clinic. Captive,
somehow afraid of the black hair and flat noses of the Indian children
who rose, one by one, shouting their names aloud. She ran from the room,
is still running, waving her arms wildly at real and imagined enemies.
Was she looking toward the future? Was she afraid of loving all of us?
2.
All of us heard the explosion when the two cars collided on the reservation road. Five Indians died in the first car; four Indians died in the second. The only survivor was a white woman from Springdale who
couldn't remember her name.
3.
I remember your name, Mary Rowlandson. I think of you now, how necessary you have become. Can you hear me, telling this story within uneasy boundaries, changing you into a woman leaning against a wall beneath a HANDICAPPED PARKING ONLY sign, arrow pointing down
directly at you? Nothing changes, neither of us knows exactly where to
stand and measure the beginning of our lives. Was it 1676 or 1976 or 1776
or yesterday when the Indian held you tight in his dark arms and promised you nothing but the sound of his voice? September, Mary Rowlandson, it was September when you visited the reservation grade school. The
speech therapist who tore the Indian boy from his classroom, kissed him
on the lips, gave him the words which echoed treaty: He thrusts his fists
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you and me staring into the West of our possibilities. For now, you are
wearing the calico dress that covers your ankles and wrists and I'm wearing a bone vest wrapped around a cotton shirt, my hair unbraided and
unafraid. This must be 1876 but no, it is now, August, and this photograph
will change the story....
(98-99)
Once more the lovers find themselves trapped in an ongoing transference of the past ("Nothing changes.... Was it 1676 or 1976 or
1776 ... ?"), powerless to extricate themselves from the structure
of enmity that conquest imposes. Nor, in the construction of their
identities and desires, can they wean themselves off the images
furnished by colonial history. Changing the story-a repeated refrain and strategic ideal in Alexie's work-is a question of trying
to step outside this loop, with its specular certainties and binary
antagonisms.
But exiting this colonial story is an undertaking fraught with the
most fundamental ironies of (post)colonial writing. In "Captivity,"
the white woman as teacher and muse brings the "Indian boy"
(of the "love poems"?) the invasive, paradoxical offering of poetic
language. It is, we are reminded, the language of the enemy, as
embodied ("heavylightness")in Shakespeare, from the first act of
Romeoand Juliet.The star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare's play are,
in part, a conventional figure of transculturalmesalliance (Lubiano
221). But as the Shakespeare text performs its accustomed colonial
function, as mask of conquest, or hegemonic "speech therapy," it
reminds us that a Native American literature in English is also oxymoronic and star-crossed, historically inapt.
Captivity, then, comes in myriad guises-a white boy in a
chicken coop, "an Indian in a Bottle," "the iron bars ... painted
on your U.S. government glasses" (99-100)-but wrapped around
them all is the metastory of colonialism and literary form. To operate the tools of the invader's literary culture is inevitably to work
in a kind of imprisonment. But Alexie is unafraid to confront this
problem head-on: it is autoethnography's chosen ground. Advisedly, therefore, the text takes its stand inside the racist imaginary
of the Puritan captivity narrative. For Alexie, what Andrew Ross
calls the "politics of appropriation" implies not just a sampling of
European styles but a fastening on to those idioms and forms in
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N EW TO N
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4. Ross writes: "[T]his politics of appropriation, for so long exclusively the discursive
preserve of the colonizer, has more recently been crucial to groups on the social margin,
who have preferred, under certain circumstances, to struggle for recognition and legitimacy on established 'metropolitan' political ground rather than run the risk of ghettoization by insisting on the 'authenticity' of their respective group identities, ethnic, sexual,
or otherwise" (xi).
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Washingtonand Oregon and you get six pine trees and a brand-newChrysler
Cordoba.I knew how to make and break promises.
"No," I said and paused. "Give me a Cherry Slushie, too."
"What size?" he asked, relieved.
"Large," I said, and he turned his back to me to make the drink. He
realized his mistake but it was too late. He stiffened, ready for the gunshot
or the blow behind the ear. When it didn't come, he turned back to me.
"I'm sorry," he said. "What size did you say?"
"Small," I said and changed the story.
(183-84)
The buddy-movie image of the Masked Man and his Faithful Indian Companion locked in their perpetual cartoon punch-up highlights the queasy intimacy of the transcultural play of recognitions
which makes this counterdiscourse possible. "I know that game,"
the narrator confides. "I worked graveyard for a Seattle 7-11 and
got robbed once too often. The last time the bastard locked me in
the cooler. He even took my money and basketball shoes" (181).
Abjectly though the clerk is presented, the narrator's part in this
endless feud is made possible only by a sympathy for him that
dates from his own stint on the far side of the counter: "Acne scars
and a bad haircut, work pants that showed off his white socks, and
those cheap black shoes that have no support. My arches still ache
from my year at the Seattle 7-11" (181).
The combatants are bound together by a shared experience and
a shared image-repertoire: as if they had grown up watching the
same movies, their common array of stereotypes keeps alive their
ritualized conflict. Thus to rewrite the buddy relation as a fistfight
does not in itself undo the hegemonic work of the invader's mythology. Asked about the experience of watching Westerns as a
child, Alexie replies: "I rooted for the cowboys just like everyone
else. When we played cowboys and Indians on the rez, only the
unpopular kids played Indians" ("Talking"). If he also has a poem
called "My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys" (First Indian 1024), a vacillation or ambivalence remains; the story's interchangeable feuding couples fistfight not only on the screen but in the Native subject's divided consciousness.
Changing the story, then, is not to be achieved by the binary
inversions of any straightforward politics of identity. Focused as
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Alexie's career of the later nineties is marked by a diversified output and a sense of expanding possibilities. On the one hand, there
are the increasingly sustained excursions into prose fiction, in ReservationBlues (1995) and the bulky, plot-driven IndianKiller(1998).
Also of notable strategic interest is the production of Alexie's first
screenplay, SmokeSignals (1998). Jennifer Gillan's instructively titled essay "Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie's Poetry"
identifies cinema as a kind of locus classicus for the complicated
politics of identity in which Alexie's work deals. For Alexie to
plunge headlong into the celluloid matrix (a film treatment of Indian Killer has also been proposed) might well appear to be the
inevitable conclusion of his consistent determination to join issue
with American mass culture. At the same time, however, there has
been no obvious slackening of his commitment to verse, with The
Summerof Black Widows(1996) being his thickest volume to date,
and in many ways his most ambitious.
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Do you take the bread and wine
because you believe them to be the body and blood?
I take them, as other Indians do, too
because that colonial superstitionis as beautiful
as any of our indigenous superstitions.
(108)
No less unusual in Alexie's work, Sasquatch, as the object of a sacred, or at the very least secret knowledge ("N" who once was
chased by a Sasquatch "refuses to speak of this even now" [104]),
structures an affiliative network organized not in terms of the contemporary reservation but of the deep history of the tribe:
We tell these Sasquatchstories
because we are SpokaneIndian.
We are Spokane
because our grandparentswere Spokane.
Our grandparentstold Sasquatchstories.
Our grandparentsheard Sasquatchstories
told by their grandparents.
In this way, we come to worship.
(104-5)
And yet at the very heart of Alexie's Sasquatch folio-at the moment where the poem comes closest to saying directly what the
are offered not the gravity of tribal
speaker himself "believes"-we
orature but the solemn truth of a video clip:
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readings [which] can so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energies of postcolonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them" (7). In
context there is no denying Slemon's point. Unfortunately, however, this perception has tended to function as the leading edge of
a systematic binary inflation. The postmoder and the postcolonial
(Pomo and Poco as they are known to their familiars) tend to come
across here like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, slugging away in a
ritualized turf war whose stakes from some angles might in fact
appear rather trivial. The protagonists, of course, are stereotypes:
a postcolonialism global and homogeneous, and a version of postmodernism which tends to mean (in this debate) simply that which
allows no political agency.
By the time we get to Sherman Alexie, however, these binary
discriminations are clearly untenable. Instead, a residual politics
of recovered authenticity (Slemon's "important recuperative
work") is played out deconstructively on the terrain of the global
popular, where Sasquatch rides with the Lone Ranger and Tonto,
the poet scans the aisles for effect, and a superstitious cleaving to
"referentiality" is simply another primitivist cliche-grist to the
mill of Alexie's autoethnographic parody. All that Alexie's poems
reclaim is the Native American's own alienated image-the Indian
viewed by the white Other in the headlights' (or the cinema's) spectacularizing glare. His ethnographic rewrite is not preemptive: he
cannot set the terms of this narrative exchange. Nor, in any positivist sense, is it recuperative: he has no older story with which to
supplant it. Instead, the image is reclaimed by Alexie as image,thick
with its history of use and abuse, the banality and trauma which
are fused in its "heavy lightness," and which prime it for redeployment in the long siege of postmoder decolonization.
Universityof Canterbury
WORKS
CITED
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