Review: Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians
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.
This review was first published on
The Short Review in 2011.
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