Review: Sherman Alexie's War Dances
It
is often only at the end of a writer’s career that it becomes possible to see
how their work has developed, how the focus has narrowed or expanded, how the
writer’s thought process has shifted. In
the sixteen years since Sherman Alexie won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best
First Book of Fiction for the ground-breaking and controversial short story
collection Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), he has
published a further seventeen books including poetry, novels and short
fiction. Thanks to this
rapidly-expanding catalogue, we are able to witness Alexie’s development in
almost real time.
From
the very start, Alexie has explored the question of what it is to be ‘Indian’
in contemporary America, both on and off the Spokane Reservation. Ten Little Indians (2003), however,
began to shift away from the antagonistic cultural tribalism of earlier
books. Ethnicity was no longer the
controlling force in the lives of his characters. They were people first, Indian second. War Dances moves one step further, and
for the first time Alexie has included two stories in which ethnicity is merely
implied.
‘The
Ballad of Paul Nonetheless’ chronicles the adulterous pursuits of the
protagonist alongside the disintegration of his marriage. Unable to express himself except through the
borrowed emotion of popular music, the feckless Paul is made mute before his
wife. Alexie is a feminist, and imbues
his female characters with emotional strength, wit, and intelligence, regardless
of their race. His male characters,
however, are fickle and much less self-aware, led by the twin urges of
aggression and sex. White men,
particularly, are portrayed as inept, foolish, and at times, malign. Although this is never stated, in Alexie’s
world, Paul is undoubtedly white.
The
title story is a mourning song for both the narrator’s father and the narrator
himself, an elegy for Sherman Alexie Sr, and Sherman Alexie the son. Struck by an inexplicable deafness in one
ear, the narrator ponders his own mortality while grieving the loss of his
father. The most obviously
autobiographical of the collection, the story centers on Alexie’s childhood
hydrocephalus and his father’s alcoholism, and offers an intimate glimpse of
the author’s personal fears and regrets.
‘I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me’
(63), the narrator says in a deeply-moving tribute to a much-loved father.
There
is, unfortunately, one major historical inaccuracy which upends Alexie’s
frequent arguments about authenticity and the portrayal of Native American
characters by non-Native writers. In the
flash fiction piece, ‘Looking Glass’, Alexie places the Bear Paw Mountains, the
setting for the Nez Perce’s famous 1877 surrender, in Idaho instead of neighboring
Montana. Alexie would be quick to
question the credibility of any white writer who made such a basic error. This aside, the stories and poems in this
collection are emotionally complex, lyrical, irreverent, and experimental. At times they are both achingly funny and
heart-rending. With this book, Alexie
makes one more step on his way from being a great Indian writer to simply being
a great writer.
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