Sherman Talked with Smiley

April 27, 2007, Sherman Alexie was interviewed on the Tavis Smiley program on PBS; following is a transcript:

Tavis: Sherman Alexie is an award-winning writer, poet and filmmaker who "The New Yorker" named as one of their twenty writers for the twenty-first century. As I mentioned at the top of the program, his 1998 film, "Smoke Signals," received the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. His new book is his eighteenth and it is called "Flight." Earlier this week, the book received a glowing review in "The New York Times." That might be an understatement. Sherman, nice to have you on the program.

Sherman Alexie: Thanks. Great to be here.

Tavis: You saw that "Times" piece, I presume?

Alexie: I read it last night on the internet and I whooped and woke up the house. You know, my sons were, "What's wrong with daddy?" Nothing, nothing at all (laughter).

Tavis: The timing of the release of this book, given what the subject matter is about, a particular youth and violence, the timing of this book coming out relative to what happened at Virginia Tech here recently was a little eerie, huh?

Alexie: It was an awful coincidence. You know, it's a book about a kid who decides that his only alternative is to get two pistols and shoot up a public place. So what had happened last Monday actually coincided with the first day of my book tour and I was in Virginia at Tidewater Community College which is about two hundred miles south of TCU.

So I was actually in the state where it was happening reading the book in public for the first time, so there was a series of awful coincidences. Also because the book is heavily influenced by Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" and has an epigraph from him.

Tavis: He passes away.

Alexie: And he passes away the next day, so it was a tragic week and, you know, the coincidence of art and the things we think about and obviously, you know, the society I was looking at, the violence, the lack of options for youth, the fact that we've been in a war for years now and the way it's affecting my sons. I really wrote this book to talk to my own sons who keep asking me - they're nine and five - why we are in this war. So I wrote this parable as a way of trying to answer that question.

Tavis: Tell me how one answers that question for a nine and a five year old.

Alexie: I mean, part of it, you know, my nine year old asked me once, "How come they sound the same on both sides?" There were people arguing on television and we were watching it. He said, "How come they're saying the same things?" The way I told him is that people justify almost anything, any action, with political words, with rhetoric, so I started writing a book that looked on both sides of all sorts of violent moments in American history.

Little Big Horn, for instance, where the Native Americans are traditionally seen as the oppressed people rising up in victory. But at a certain point that day, after the battle was won, the Native Americans committed atrocities. They mutilated bodies and they tortured survivors to death. So at what point do the oppressed become the oppressors? That's the way I try to talk about it with my son. This is certainly not a book he can read yet, but it's a way of talking about and showing both sides of any conflict.

Tavis: I want to go in a minute here into your own childhood. Speaking of your own sons, I want to go back to your childhood. Before I do that, tell me more about what the text is about, the story line here.

Alexie: Well, it's about a fifteen year old orphan kid named Zits. That's what he calls himself because he has a horrible condition that marks him. When he's fifteen years old, he's been through a series of foster homes, is orphaned, disillusioned, displaced and ends up in jail where he meets a kid named Justice who, through a series of sort of brain-washings and manipulation, convinces Zits that, in order to bring his parents back to life and to make his world whole again, needs to go out and actually shoot people.

It's a very perverted sense of justice by a kid named Justice. So Zits does this and, as he does it in a bank, he's also shot and killed by the security guard. But as he dies, he becomes unstuck in time like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim and ends up traveling through time to Little Big Horn, to political activism in the 1970s.

He ends up in the body of a flight instructor who teaches a terrorist how to fly a plane and he also ends up in the body of his own father who had abandoned him when he was a baby years earlier. Through these journeys, he learns the meaning of violence, the meaning of American violence, and starts looking for alternatives to his own violent impulses.

Tavis: I like it and I hear the distinction you make between violence and American violence. We have our own particular and unique brand of that. Talk to me about what you think that brand is, that American flavor of violence is.

Alexie: Well, it's an incredibly contradictory thing because we're talking about a country that is democratic, you know, that is a republic, that does have the amazing documents called the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. But in the original incarnations, very few of us were included in that. In fact, lots of us were killed and enslaved and genocided in order for that country to exist and to grow.

So there's always this huge dichotomy between what the country stands for now and what it's always stood for and the distance between the way it actually was and is. So as a Native American, you know, I'm walking around with a constant sense of the genocidal history of this country. Even as I love my country, I'm also aware that it actively tried to eliminate all of my ancestors.

Tavis: I'm glad you said that, Sherman, because I've read a number of critiques of your work and obviously, when your work is critiqued, in part you are being critiqued. One of the criticisms I know - I'm not surprising you with this - one of the criticisms that's been levied at you by those who take exception to your loving America is that you in fact love this country.

Many of these critics ask, "How could you, given what this country has done to your people, first and foremost, how could you love America?" You always make a point of making the point that you love this country and some people have a hard time trying to juxtapose that reality.

Alexie: Well, I give it the Most Improved Award. That's sort of the way I talk about it (laughter). You know, maybe we'll have a ceremony, a telethon. The United States, the most improved country. But I think about the country in terms of generations. Certainly the country it was seven, six, five generations ago was not the country we live in now.

So when I say that I love my country, I love the fact that many men and women over the generations have worked hard and given up their lives sometimes to make sure that we're all included now in those original documents. It's a constant struggle. So when I say that I love my country, I love the fact that we've always struggled for equality and people have always risen up.

In my own life, I mean, I grew up on a Indian reservation in extreme poverty and now I travel the world telling stories. That doesn't really happen in other countries. Somebody like me does not rise up out of my circumstances to get a book reviewed in "The New York Times." It just doesn't happen. So I have to look at my own personal experience as well.

Tavis: Tell me what it was like, to your point now, growing up on that reservation.

Alexie: Well, my mother was more traditional. She was a singer and dancer. My father was a randomly employed blue collar alcoholic. All the stereotypes you want to think about reservation Indians, you know, he fit into most of them. But he was also a basketball player, so I grew up in a pow-wowing basketball environment.

It was, on one level, really beautiful. A lot of storytelling, a lot of songs, a lot of family togetherness. On the other, there was a lot of absence and loss by my father's alcoholism and the fact that what little money we did have, he was often spending on booze.

Tavis: You talked about the fact that you as a child, for most of your life for that matter, have been an insomniac. How did that start?

Alexie: Well, I really think it was because, when my father would leave on binge drinking, he'd be gone for days or weeks. A couple of times, he was actually gone for a few months. I would wait for him. I wouldn't want to go to sleep in case he came back home, so I would stay awake waiting for him. Then once he did get back, I wouldn't want to go to sleep because I'd think he'd leave.

So in a sense, I think I'm still an insomniac because I'm still waiting for my father to come back. He passed away four years ago, so he's never really coming back. I'd hoped that the insomnia would go away after his funeral, but it hasn't. It's still here. I'm still waiting for him.

Tavis: How has that experience - if I'm getting personal, let me know - how has that experience impacted your being a father? You talked at the beginning of this conversation very lovingly about your two sons that you've referenced two or three times now. How has the experience of having that kind of a father on that reservation impacted your being a father today?

Alexie: Part of it is simply keeping my kids away from all those negative things I saw growing up on the reservation. I'm very proud to say that my sons, my Native American sons - their mother is also Native - have never seen a Native American take a sip of alcohol. Not one sip. They've never seen it, which makes them sort of almost like circus freaks, in a sense. "Come see the Native American youth who have not seen an intoxicated Native American." I'm really proud of that.

And I'm also there. I travel with my book career, but when I'm not traveling on these book tours, I'm home constantly. I'm at their schools. I'm on their field trips. I'm involved in every aspect of their lives. I'm at their baseball games. I drive them to school. I tell them bedtime stories. So I'm very focused on being present for all the small moments of life.

Tavis: How do you respond to persons who say that in your writings when you characterize persons on a reservation as an alcoholic, as was the case in your own family, that you yourself are buying into the stereotype of Native Americans?

Alexie: It's not a stereotype. Alcoholism among Native Americans is a cold, damp reality. I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober since 1991. My father was an alcoholic who never sobered up. My mother was an alcoholic until seventeen years ago. My older brother and my little sister are currently alcoholics. When you talk about my aunts, uncles, cousins, first, second and third, grandparents, you're talking about five people who are currently not drinking.

Tavis: For those who don't know what the stereotype is even based on, why so much drinking on the reservation?

Alexie: You know, I think alcoholism is a symptom of poverty, desperation, loneliness, and it's a way to medicate pain. You know, I've always joked that I wish we could pump antidepressants into the reservation aquifers and perhaps we'd have less alcoholism. But I really think it is a way to self-medicate. In the absence of other more positive ways to deal with your pain, alcohol is cheap and easy.

Tavis: Do your boys have any sense of who daddy is becoming and what daddy has become?

Alexie: This trip more so. They're a little older now, so they're quite aware of it. I get recognized in Seattle a lot, our hometown, so they've learned how to deal with it in the same way their mother does. When I get recognized, they all turn heel and run (laughter), so they're learning how to get away from it.

Tavis: (Laughter) They're smart in that regard.

Alexie: Yeah.

Tavis: The new book by Sherman Alexie is called "Flight." It is his eighteenth book and everyone from "USA Today" to "The New York Times" is raving about what he has done in this book called "Flight." As we said earlier in our conversation, the timing of the book, given what it's about, is propitious on the one hand and a little eerie on the other hand, but I'm sure it's a read that you will enjoy. Again, the new book from Sherman Alexie, "Flight." Sherman, nice to have you on the program.

Alexie: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Glad to have you. I'm going to be in Seattle. I'm doing an event there. Maybe I'll holler at you this weekend. Well, you won't be there. You'll be on the road.

Alexie: No, I'm here. We're switching places (laughter).

Tavis: You stay here. I'm going to Seattle this weekend.