All Rage and Heart

I have written about, and included several things about Sherman Alexie on this site. He still is my single most favorite Author, poet, muckraker, and story teller. Here is an interesting article published in THE GUARDIAN recently. It seems that the British Isles have been invaded yet again.

All rage and heart


Sherman Alexie grew up on an Indian reservation and went on to become a bestselling novelist, comic and screenwriter. He hopes to produce 'the great American Indian novel'

Maya Jaggi
Saturday May 3, 2008
The Guardian


Sherman Alexie combines his successful writing career with stand-up comedy. His siblings, with whom he grew up on the Spokane Indian reservation in the east of Washington state, are surprised people find him funny, he says. "I was always the depressed guy in the basement. But I've borrowed their sense of humour and made it darker and more deadly - a weapon of self-defence. Being funny you win hearts quicker; people laughing are more apt to listen."

He is speaking in a bistro in his "adoptive hometown" of Seattle, the Pacific city named after a 19th-century Suquamish chief now revered as a guardian of nature. Alexie, in some 10 volumes of poetry plus novels, short stories, screenplays and songs, has been at pains to deflate just such romantic myths, whether steward of the earth, stoical warrior, shaman or savage, still projected on to the country's roughly two million Indians - a term he prefers to what he sees as the guilt-ridden liberal coinage, Native American. In his comic and touching screenplay Smoke Signals (1998), the visionary storyteller in plaits and government-issue specs, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, says Spokane Indians were fisherfolk not warriors, unable to fit the heroic image of Hollywood's Dances with Wolves: "It's not Dances with Salmon," he points out.
Smoke Signals, adapted from stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and directed by Chris Eyre, won the Sundance festival audience award and is still, Alexie insists, the only feature film "by and about Indians" to have had a major distribution deal. While it takes place on a dirt-poor "rez" on the Idaho border, Alexie's later fiction is largely set in urban Seattle, where he lives in a gentrifying black neighbourhood. "I like being the pale one," he jokes.

Now 41, Alexie was one of Granta's 20 best American novelists under 40 in 1996, and was among the New Yorker's 20 best writers of the 21st century. Some critics have suspected that his literary territory (his titles are often flagged with "Indian" or "reservation") may have inflated critical sympathy. While James Buchan in these pages described his latest novel, Flight, as a "short-winded epic", it was praised in the New York Times as a "narrative stripped to its core, all rage and heart".

Flight is set on the underside of "sanitised and computerised" Seattle, amid destitute drunks, child-abusing foster carers and "kid jail". The teenage narrator Zits, an Irish-Indian "half-breed" with bad skin and no parents, meets a terrorist named Justice. Zits plans a shoot-out at a bank, but is hit by a guard's bullet and time-travels into other lives, including a child at Little Bighorn in 1876, a flight instructor betrayed by a would-be suicide pilot, and an Indian wino who turns out to be his father. Alexie has worked with charities for the homeless, yet the novel, although trenchant, seems less confrontational than earlier work. September 11 changed him, Alexie says, by revealing the lethal "end game of tribalism - when you become so identified with only one thing, one tribe, that other people are just metaphors to you".

That insight informs his first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, published here next month. It was a US bestseller and won the 2007 National Book award for young people's literature. With illustrations by Ellen Forney, it is his first book to explore his own childhood condition of hydrocephalus (about which he has narrated a documentary, Learning to Drown, also out next month). The autobiographical teenager, Arnold Spirit, is a budding cartoonist born with water on the brain, or "too much grease inside my skull - like my brain was a giant French fry". He survives an operation at six months (as did Alexie) with persistent physical problems for which he is bullied at school. But his talents help him realise that, though a Spokane Indian, he also belongs to other tribes, including basketball players and bookworms.

Alexie had epileptic fits until he was seven, but was spared "a shunt or constant brain surgery". He grew to be a 6ft 2in high-school basketball star (he still plays), and thinks his seizures may have presaged his artistic life. "The lights would pop, then I'd rise out of my body and be able to fly off anywhere I wanted," he recalls. "There's a surreal euphoria; the synapses are misfiring, so the memory banks are flooding your head. I'd get to feel like a superhero for a couple of minutes."

He lost nine members of his extended family, mostly in alcohol-related deaths - including his elder sister, when he was 13, in a "drunken trailer fire". Along with deaths from cancer were those from "cirrhosis, diabetes, a couple of car wrecks and a murder - poverty deaths". Although the book began as part of a family memoir, he fictionalised his childhood "because I didn't think anybody would believe it ... I didn't want to write a triumphant, American dream book that mythologised me."

He was born in 1966, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian. His mother was a social worker and quiltmaker, his father a "randomly employed, blue-collar alcoholic" and "war orphan". His paternal grandfather had died in Okinawa during the second world war, when his father was six, and his grandmother a few months later of tuberculosis. "My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room." But he disappeared on drinking binges. "You always knew they were coming: he was never violent, but short-tempered. It wasn't a violent house, but a violent reservation." Alexie's work returns constantly to fraught relations between fathers and sons, anger and forgiveness, yet his father was also "funny and tender; he never missed a basketball game".

Alexie's maternal grandmother was a "traditional storyteller, and my dad was an alcoholic liar who loved books: genre stuff - westerns, mysteries, true crime, conspiracy theory. I loved my dad, so his obsessions became mine." Spending long periods in hospital, Alexie learned to read at the age of three. Stephen King's Carrie (1974), about a high-school misfit with telekinetic powers, revealed to him the "eventual power of being an outsider: that which makes you a freak when you're 12 makes you magical when you're 24".

He dreamed of leaving the reservation, and became the sole Indian at the "very white" high school in Reardan, a nearby farming town. Yet, he says, "I could reach across boundaries and find things that joined us together: books and basketball." After dropping out of pre-med, he went to Washington State University in Pullman, where he was taken with Frantz Fanon and "leftist revolutionary rhetoric; I started believing that every moment of my life was about being oppressed". But a teacher gave him a poetry anthology that included Leslie Silko, James Welch, Adrian Louis and Joy Harjo. "It was the first time I'd seen anything creative by an Indian," he says. "Everything else was archaic, loincloth literature. But they combined the day-to-day desperation of being Indian with the magic of being alive, in poems about powwows, broken-down cars, the food we eat, basketball. It was a revelation."

A self-professed "recovering alcoholic", Alexie was on "a crate of beer a day" at college, partly out of "terror at leaving the rez". But at 23 he stopped drinking - a decision bolstered when his first poetry book was accepted for publication. "It was arrogance," he says, but "I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. The mess my father was, it broke my heart. I didn't want to break an Indian kid's heart." He married Diane Tomhave, having resolved to wed a fellow Indian. "My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage," he says. They have two sons: Joseph, aged 10; and David, six. "They don't get punished for being dreamers, as I did among my peers."

His first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), tracked an aspiring Indian rock band. He named the slimy New York record producer George Wright after a 19th-century colonel who set out to pacify the north-west tribes. In his second novel, Indian Killer (1996), John Smith, adopted into a white family as a newborn, kidnaps a boy as a serial killer stalks and scalps white men in Seattle. While some critics compared Alexie to Richard Wright, Time magazine thought the novel "septic with unappeasable anger". Though Alexie has pointed out that Smith was himself kidnapped - rather like Australia's stolen generation - he has also distanced himself from the book, the violence of which he now views with "overwhelming disgust". It will be reissued in the US later this year with an author's afterword. "It's a very fundamentalist, binary book, the product of youthful rage," he says.

Rage at blatant prejudice also surfaces in The Business of Fancydancing (2002), a film he wrote and directed, and which flopped. Its gay Indian hero, Seymour Polatkin, is a Seattle writer lauded by metropolitan critics but slammed in the Indian press, partly for feeding off reservation stories. Leaving aside his sexuality, says Alexie, "he's a slightly exaggerated autobiographical version of me - with more regrets". The tensions reflect criticisms Alexie himself has faced, for portraying Indian life negatively, or simply for leaving the reservation (only 1% of native Americans go to college). "Plenty of people saw my leaving as a betrayal," he says. "I felt guilty, but I've forgiven myself, and most of my reservation has." He has not, however, made another film. He fell out with director Chris Eyre after the success of Smoke Signals, and though he says they have since been reconciled, "the momentum has gone".

His fame has inspired others, and he has used it to chastise what he calls "Indian poseurs", including frauds and hoaxers. "It comes down to their claims of authority," he says. "I don't care what people write about, but I get distressed when people so identify that they think they become something they're not. You hear Barbara Kingsolver saying: 'I feel Indian in my bones.' My wish is that we call it what it is: colonial literature. My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror."

He is completing his family memoir, about his father and grandfather in the army who fought for a country that, as he says elsewhere, had tried to kill them for years. He has struggled with it because "so much is about my dad", who died four years ago of alcohol-related kidney failure. "I've forgiven him - and it's hard to keep writing about someone you've forgiven."

Thomas Builds-the-Fire is to reappear in a mystery novel, which Alexie hopes will be the "great American Indian novel that examines everything in our world". It is set in a reservation casino, though he sees much-vaunted sovereignty as "simply a tax loophole that allows us to act like capitalist pigs. Our isolation has damaged us. Ironically, reservations saved the tribes but killed the individual. I'm for sovereignty of the self."

Inspirations

Carrie by Stephen King
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Little Big Man directed by Arthur Penn
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
Basketball

****So hell, now we have to share Sherman with the entire world! I am sure the British are blown away by his raw, emotional, and muscular style.

Glenn