Voice of the New Tribes

Profile: Sherman Alexie


Voice of the new tribes


A native American, Sherman Alexie was raised on a reservation, where his family still live. Taught by Jesuits, he became a songwriter, comedian, poet and film-maker and was hailed as one of the best young American novelists. His work subverts ideas of the nobly suffering Indian and often presents the hard reality of urban life

Duncan Campbell
Saturday January 4, 2003
The Guardian


In Reservation Blues, the first novel by the native American writer Sherman Alexie, one of the main characters explains that "when any Indian shows the slightest hint of talent in any direction, the rest of the tribe starts expecting Jesus".
While the rest of the tribe on the Spokane reservation in Washington state may have had slightly more modest expectations, they can hardly have anticipated that the talented if somewhat sickly and eccentric Alexie child would become a bestselling novelist, fellowship-winning poet, prize-winning short-story writer, stand-up comedian, recorded songwriter and independent film director by the time he was 35. Alexie has achieved all that and more, even becoming surely the first native American ever to have been physically embraced by a serving president of the United States (Bill Clinton) and told, "Sherman - you're fucking funny!"

He has been hailed as the "Richard Wright of the American Indians", denounced as being "septic with unappeasable anger" by Time magazine and become the joint winner in 2001 with Richard Ford of the Malamud short story prize. Granta and the New Yorker have both placed him on lists of best young American writers.
The son of a Coeur d'Alene native American father and a Spokane native American mother, Alexie was born hydrocephalic and was not expected to survive a brain operation in infancy. One of six brothers and sisters, he grew up on a reservation of 1,100 people, where most of his family still live. His father held a string of blue-collar jobs, such as logging and truck driving, albeit often curtailed by alcoholism, and his mother worked on the reservation as an addiction and youth counsellor. Taught to read by his father by the age of three, Alexie eventually left the reservation for an outside high school where he and its mascot were the only native Americans, but where a better education was available. By now a healthy and athletic six footer, he became a basketball star; he still plays three times a week.

His early literary influences were traditional. "It was 99% white: Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Stephen King, Walt Whitman, the kind of literary education any Indian kid can get at a very bad public reservation school," says Alexie, sitting in his small office in Seattle, where he now lives. "Part of my education was through my dad, who loved genre fiction - Mickey Spillane, Zane Grey - and the JFK assassination books. I was the youngest JFK conspiracy buff in the world: a five-year-old 'rez' kid re-enacting Dealey Plaza with my Lego."

The notion that native American literature might exist was not addressed. "Indians are poor so our culture is poor American culture - television and National Enquirer and movies. It wasn't until I got to college that anyone showed me anything written by an Indian."

The native American writers he now admires remained unknown to him until he was in his 20s: Adrian Louis, Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, James Welch. "I didn't know until I was 21 of Leslie Silko's Ceremony, which is probably the book of native American literature." (Alexie refers to himself as an Indian and says, only half in jest, that he only uses the term native American, which he considers a guilty liberal expression, in "mixed company".)

Having spent much time with doctors as a child, he planned a medical career and specialised at school in science and maths. But after two years at the Jesuit Gonzaga university in Spokane and three fainting spells in human anatomy class he changed course. He eventually graduated in American studies from Washington State University in Pullman, one of the 7% of native Americans to graduate from college, less than half the national average.

If doctors were an early influence, so were Catholic priests. They feature heavily in his work, from the dashing and romantic Father Arnold in his first novel, Reservation Blues, to the huge and strange Father Duncan in Indian Killer, his darkest and most controversial work.

"I love Jesuits. They are the rock'n'roll stars of the Catholic church. I love their mysticism, their social and economic politics. I love their poetic streak and their rebelliousness." He still attends church, irregularly. He says that Washington, where he lives, "is the least church-going state in the country. Part of the reason [I attend irregularly] is that I get recognised at church and it can hardly be a sacred experience when people are whispering about you. But I still am heavily Catholic- and Christian-influenced"

After finishing his studies, he worked briefly as an administrator on an educational exchange programme before becoming a full-time writer. He was first published in 1992 by the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, Hanging Loose. Bob Hershon, one of the magazine's editors, who spotted Alexie's work and published his first poem, "Distances", says, "he just submitted some poems. But we soon started thinking - this kid is really good. Since then he has gone from being a promising young writer to being a phenomenon. He really is one of a kind."

Alexie has since written two novels and 12 collections of poems and short stories. He has also been the world heavyweight poetry bout champion, where you have to pluck a word from a hat and create a new poem three times running, at the Taos poetry festival in New Mexico. He has also worked as a stand-up comedian. In his writing, the native American characters are not particularly stoic or noble or tragic, as they have often been portrayed in 20th-century American literature. They may be gay intellectuals or thwarted basketball players, middle-class journalists or elderly movie extras, boozy rock musicians or alienated construction workers, or reservation girls whose cars only go in reverse because all the other gears are broken.

One of his short stories, "Dear John Wayne", describes a fantasy affair the actor had with a Navajo film extra. In the story, Wayne, whom Alexie portrays as a thoughtful feminist, tells his sons: "I often close my eyes and try to put myself into a woman's shoes. I try to think like a woman. I try to embrace the feminine in myself. Do you know what I mean?" "No," said the boys.

Reservation Blues, his first full-length novel, told the bitter-sweet tale of a dysfunctional native American band called Coyote Springs, stumbling their way from bar-room to record company and back again, along with a side story that involves the blues musician Robert Johnson and a talking guitar. His second novel, Indian Killer is about a native American boy taken at birth against his mother's wishes for adoption by a white family in Seattle. Later, the boy abducts a white child and there is a series of violent murders. The book received many laudatory reviews. One critic enthused: "Not since Richard Wright's Native Son has a novel by a minority writer so devastatingly indicted an entire society and laid bare with merciless candour the racial hatred festering at the centre of it." But it also attracted, from Time magazine, the judgment that Alexie was "septic with his own unappeasable anger".

He laughs. "The gall of Time! I got a T-shirt with the quote on it. I loved the reaction. In some masochistic way, I love the really violent reviews more than the good reviews. I worried about being manipulative, especially when I wasn't a parent then. But there was an Indian kid being kidnapped and a white kid being kidnapped. Everyone failed to see any ambiguity. It's sold by far the least of all my books. Indians didn't like it. It was the book that was hardest to write, that gave me the most nightmares, that still, to this day, troubles me the most because I can't even get a grasp on it. It's the only one I re-read. I think a book that disturbs me that much is the one I probably care the most about."

Scott Malcomson, who wrote the recent One Drop of Blood, the American Misadventure of Race, is one of Alexie's admirers: "The weird thing, in a way, is that he has become such a popular Indian writer, yet he doesn't play the traditional Indian roles - the spiritually superior role, or the nobly damned plains warrior. He is so true to himself, especially when he's changing his mind, that he offends a lot of people." Malcomson says he thinks the closest literary parallel is with the Latino writer Richard Rodriguez: "They are both tremendously funny and observant narcissists, exacting and intimate in their prose. They have a profound interest in looking at ugly things. Neither was ever interested in selling positive images, as far as I know."

Within the native American world, Alexie inspires both great affection and resentful dismay, with critics objecting to his unflattering portrayal of native American society. Musician Jim Boyd, the 46-year-old winner of last year's Nammy (the native American music award) for his CD, AlterNatives, met Alexie 10 years ago at a folk festival and has collaborated with him since. "People know exactly what he stands for and they either love him or hate him for it," says Boyd. "On the reservation, we have our little secrets. Sherman has gone against that and sometimes the truth hurts. A lot of things he writes about just weren't out there before. But a lot of the things he talked about needed to be said. I really admire him for that. And because he does everything - he writes novels and songs and poems and he's a comedian - he's an inspiration, especially for kids."

Perhaps the most familiar images of native Americans are cinematic. Alexie has tried to redress the balance by writing screenplays for Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing, which he also directed. Elvis Mitchell, in the New York Times, described Smoke Signals as "a show-offy exercise in suffering". But Evan Adams, who acted in both films, argues that "Sherman has managed to almost single-handedly dismantle the popular and populist image of the American Indian. He's given us a voice."

Alexie has ambivalent feelings about westerns such as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), which he describes as "probably the most anti-Indian movie", but reserves his most damning criticism for last year's Windtalkers, directed by John Woo, which was based on the true story of native Americans in the second world war who used their language to communicate commands that the Japanese could not decode. It starred Nicolas Cage. Alexie says, "I don't think there's ever been such a failure of imagination going from the idea to what ended up on screen. "

He now lives in Madrona Valley in Seattle, a gentrified area in what was once a mainly black neighbourhood known as the Central District. In his short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven in 1993, he wrote that "Indians can reside in the city but never live there." But he no longer believes that. "You believe things at the time you write them. I believed that then!" He laughs.

"I was much more fundamental then. What changed me was September 11: I am now desperately trying to let go of the idea of being right, the idea of making decisions based on imaginary tribes. The terrorists were flying planes into the buildings because they thought they were right and they had special knowledge, and we continue to react. And we will be going to war in Iraq soon because we think we have special knowledge - and we don't. We are making these decisions not based on any moral or ethical choice, but simply on the basis of power and money and ancient traditions that are full of shit, so I am increasingly suspicious of the word 'tradition', whether in political or literary terms."

While over 60% of native Americans now live in urban areas, very little of their literature deals with this experience. The Toughest Indian in the World, his collection of short stories, was almost exclusively urban and white collar. "I want to be a white-collar American Indian writer because that's what I am now."

Alexie is conscious that he has a voice few native Americans possess, at a time when attention is focused on them as it has not been for years. The growth of casinos, which are now permitted on their land, has created a bubble of money which has made some powerful politically. It has led, too, to a growth in the number of people claiming native American blood, now 2.6m, up from 1.8m only a decade ago, although still less than 1% of the nation.

"I have enormous cultural power now and it's all out of proportion to the number of books I actually sell," he says. "Because of my ethnicity, my age, the times we live in, I have power." But he is angry at what he sees as the hypocrisy around him. "The arrogance of this country to have a Holocaust museum, to point out the genocidal sins of another culture is amazing. [American general] Philip Sheridan, who was the Colin Powell of his day, said, 'We should kill Indian children because nits make lice.' President Andrew Jackson said, 'Let's kill the Indians.'"

There is much in Alexie's writing about sex and, in particular, sex between white people and native Americans. In The Business of Fancydancing, his collection of poems and stories, he writes that "Indians are an endangered species."

Alexie met his wife, Diane, at an academic camp for native American children where she was working as a site coordinator and he was the judge in a writing competition. They each made a conscious decision to marry a fellow native American. Does he expect his two young sons will follow suit? "Of course, we would prefer it. But the only thing I can be assured of is that they will probably partner with people who like books. Maybe that's the new tribe."

He says he has always argued that non-Indian artists doing Indian work should certainly enjoy success, "but I think, for instance, Tony Hillerman's work [mystery novels set around reservations] should be classified as what it is - colonial literature... I think there's an arrogance amongst white Americans about their relationship to the oppressed people that prevents them from seeing themselves as coming from a position of privilege."

A theme that runs through Alexie's work is alcoholism, not least because there was much of it in the family. Many theories have been advanced as to why alcoholism has done such damage to native Americans; they are more than three times more likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver than white people, four times more likely to die in an alcohol-related accident and three times more likely to be murdered or commit suicide.

"The two groups of people I have been around who drink the most are poor whites and poor Indians. Often the definition of what alcoholic is depends on how much you are paying for your drinks. I think it's a combination of poverty and despair, but the way we so willingly fell into it, and still do in such large numbers, makes me think there must be something inside our culture that made us so willing to fall apart that way."

Alexie himself gave up drinking 11 years ago. "I think far fewer people are drinking themselves to death. I used to call it the symptom of a disease called poverty and political oppression and believed that if you dealt with the oppression people wouldn't need to drink, but I don't think that's true any more. I think the one thing you have to do before anything else is sober up."

When President Clinton was still in the White House in 1998, he invited Alexie and a small group of others to take part in a televised "Dialogue on Race" forum. "He said, 'Sherman, before I was president, the only thing I knew about Indians was that my grandmother was part Cherokee.'

Later on, I was asked if Indians were part of the national dialogue on race. I said 'No, the only time white folks talk to me about Indians is when they tell me their grandmothers were part Cherokee.' As the show wore on, I thought 'Oh, my God, I gave the president shit - the president!' Afterwards I was scared and tried to hide - and he came across to me and grabbed me by the shoulder and leaned in close to me and said 'Sherman, you're fucking funny!'"

Alexie mainly votes Democrat, or for a candidate of the left. He says, "My family, like most Indians, were socially conservative. We give our money to Democrats because they protect us, but we live very Republican lives - pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-life, homophobic, racist. The average rez Indian is more racist towards black people than the average small-town white person."

His parents, brothers and twin sisters are still on the reservation, most of them having worked for the casino or in the reservation administration. His sisters are considering opening a beauty parlour there. One brother is about to start college for the first time at 38, to Alexie's delight. An older sister died in a mobile-home fire, an event that is a viscerally haunting theme throughout his writing. In his poetry collection, First Indian on the Moon, he writes:

Fire
follows my family
each spark
each flame
a soldier
in the US Cavalry..."

He visits every month. "The people who hate me there now are the people who hated me when I was seven... In any small town, eccentricity is viewed as suspicious. In a tribally-controlled small town, eccentricities are viewed with much more suspicion."

Although his family life is a frequent subject of his writing, his folks are proud of his achievements. "I have done some heavy-duty stuff about my family, and it can be very painful. But if I give a reading in Spokane near my rez, my mom, dad and all my siblings will be in the third row and they'll laugh along and cry along with stories about them."

In 1996, Granta included Alexie in its Best of Young American Novelists issue, along with Jonathan Franzen, among others. Granta editor Ian Jack, who was one of the judges, made the decision on the basis of Reservation Blues. "I can't speak for my fellow jurists, but I suspect that they, like me, liked his work because it had something to tell us. Native American life, life on the reservation, is a pretty under-described experience. I knew nothing about it. OK, I could have read non-fiction about it but I suspect it would mainly, if not entirely, have been by non-Indians, if I can use that word. Fiction, if it's any good, should persuade you of individual and inner lives. Alexie's book wasn't sanctimonious or pious or a piece of political pleading - it introduced you to characters who were native American and made them as complex and odd as everyone else. The charge might then be that we picked him for non-literary reasons. To which I'd say: (a) he is a good writer - inventive, vivid; (b) it isn't impure or unliterary to like or admire novels because they bring you news - Zola down a coal mine, Dickens in a slum, Tom Wolfe in Wall Street. Alexie told me about things I hadn't thought of before, this must also be true of many people in the USA."

So who will write the Great Native American Novel? "It won't be me," says Alexie. "It will be the next generation, some amazingly gifted Indian kid out there now is getting bombarded with images and with possibilities and will write Portrait of An Indian as a Young Man - or Woman, will write our Moby Indian. I can't wait."

He still writes and lives at a driven pace as though making up for generations of indifference and indignity. In the spring a new collection of short stories will be published in the US, in the autumn a new collection of poems and a biography of Jimi Hendrix. There is also a memoir which will trace his own family from a much-decorated grandfather who died in the second world war in Okinawa through to his own sunny young Seattle sons.

"I'm a narcissist, as all artists and writers are, but how can you be of service? Looking at what's available in the native American world, no one has written that multi-generational epic, no one has really talked about the changes in our lives. My mother's mother sat on the knee of Chief Joseph [the Nez Percé leader who surrendered in 1877 saying "I will fight no more forever"]. She went from Chief Joseph to space shuttles before she died and no one's really talked about that in the Indian world."

Sherman Alexie