Review: Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians
Sherman Alexie had already
published four collections of poetry by the time he gained national attention
in 1993 by winning the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of
Fiction for the short story collection The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight
in Heaven. In 1996, he was named as
one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in recognition for his first
novel Reservation Blues. Two years later, he won the Audience Award at
the Sundance Film Festival for the screenplay of Smoke Signals.
In all, Alexie has published eighteen books and
screenplays in sixteen years, making him one of the most prolific writers
working in the United States today. But his multi-genre talents don’t stop there. He’s also collaborated on an album with
musician Jim Boyd and turned his hand at film directing, too. And in his free time? He does a spot of stand-up comedy as well.
*
While much of Alexie’s earlier work
explores small-town life on the Spokane Reservation where he grew up, the stories
in Ten Little Indians (2004) focus on the lives of Indians who’ve
gravitated to Seattle. Alexie
himself is Spokane Indian, a term he prefers to the politically correct
‘Native American’ and ‘Indianness’ is central to everything he writes. In this collection, however, the characters
are less ethnically strident: being Indian is only part of who they are.
In
The Search Engine, nineteen-year-old Corliss regards herself as being somehow
different from other members of her tribe: she is solitary and bookish in a
communal society of blue-collar sensibilities.
When she comes across a book of poems by the previously unheard-of
Spokane Indian Harlan Atwater, Corliss believes she has found a kindred spirit
at last, and sets off on a quest to track him down. What she finds, of course, is not what she
expected, for Atwater is Indian in DNA only. In the end, as in so many of
Alexie’s stories, both characters are left to struggle with the question ‘What
is Indian?’
In
numerous interviews, Alexie has discussed the way the focus of his writing
changed after September 11, 2001. Where
much of his earlier work was tainted with an antagonistic ‘them and us’
tribalism which examined the minutiae of Native American adversity, the stories
produced after that date incorporate a broader, more universal view of the
human condition. And although his protagonists
are still almost exclusively Indian, their personal traumas are not defined by,
nor the result of their ethnicity. They
are human beings first, and Indian by accident of birth. It is this breaking down of old tribal
affiliations – affiliations that encourage an unwavering sense of righteousness
– that differentiates this collection from Alexie’s previous books.
Two
stories, Can I Get a Witness and Flight Patterns, deal explicitly
with the after-effects of 9/11. In the
former, a middle-class Spokane Indian woman is having lunch in a Seattle
restaurant when a suicide bomber walks in off the street and detonates the bomb
strapped to his chest. She emerges from
the rubble seemingly unscathed and confesses to her would-be rescuer that she
had been longing to be released from her life by just such a ‘suicide by
inertia’.
At its centre, the story criticises America’s
indulgence in the ‘grief porn’ which flowed out of the media after the 9/11
tragedy, and questions the way that those who died were treated as saints and
heroes. When the woman suggests that
some of the victims ‘did deserve to die’ and that there may be a wife or a
daughter who ‘thanks God or Allah or the devil for Osama’s rage’ her rescuer refuses
to listen and tells her repeatedly ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ It was tribalism which caused men to crash
planes into the twin towers and it was tribalism which prevented Americans from
asking why anyone could possibly want to do such a thing. When George W. Bush said to the world ‘You’re
either with us or against us” he not only stifled debate, but he also laid down
the rules for membership of his tribe.
By refusing to listen to the woman’s blasphemous suggestions, the man who
came to her rescue is protecting his place within that tribe.
Redemption, in
both senses of the word, is the theme of another story in the collection. In What You Pawn I Will Redeem, we meet
Jackson Jackson, a homeless Spokane Indian man who finds his grandmother’s
stolen dance regalia on display in a pawnshop window. Believing that the theft of the precious
regalia sparked the cancer from which his grandmother died, Jackson sets out to
reclaim it and wonders if by doing so he might also bring his grandmother back
to life.
Alexie
has spent his career smashing apart Indian stereotypes and creating, instead, characters
which are challenging, honest and complex.
Each of his collections has opened up a world that few in his white
readership have seen, worlds full of humour and poignancy, rage and atonement. Despite its title, however, Ten Little
Indians is the first book he’s published where being Indian has been
incidental.
Comments