Texts by and about Natives: Commentary
15. Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing
Born in 1966 to the Spokane and Coeur d’ Alene tribes, Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the reservation northwest of Spokane, surrounded by troubles of his own, his tribe, and his society. He was born a hydrocephalic and his brain was shunted and drained, yet he was able to read a Superman comic at age two. Although he polished off his school’s entire library by age eleven, Alexie hardly was secure with his unusual body, his close but alcoholic family and neighbors, and the poverty of the reservation. He left reservation schools to graduate from tiny Reardan (Washington) High School, home of the Indians, where Alexie captained the otherwise all-white basketball team. His own alcoholism cost him two academic beginnings, at Gonzaga University in Spokane, and at the University of Washington, but an encounter with Indian poets at Washington State University gave him a way of speaking for himself, and, very quickly, a wider audience. Remarkably, Alexie has published fourteen books, starting in 1991 when he was twenty-five with The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses. He has been responsible for two films based on his life and writing, Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancy Dancing (2002). His work has won the highest awards; Alexie was nominated for the PEN Hemingway award for best first book (1993) with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and he won a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award the same year. In 1995, the British magazine Granta named him a Best Young American Novelist and the Before Columbus Foundation gave him the American Book Award for his first novel, Reservation Blues. His stories and novels are published by Atlantic Monthly Press and his novel Indian Killer (1996) was named a New York Times Notable Book. What is remarkable about Alexie is that his writing output is matched by his presence in public. Alexie serves on national advisory boards and he gives readings all around the country—winning a national slam poetry festival for three years in a row and making his own readings into combinations of stand-up comedy and heartbreak, all delivered seemingly impromptu except for the poems he recites from memory. Alexie meets countless admirers on tour, at universities and bookstores; in his wake, he leaves them remembering him as personable, hilarious, and unforgettably talented.
Still, reading or watching Sherman Alexie, one waits for an inevitable moment of distance, a time when one knows that Alexie’s writing is his own, the property of Alexie’s own trauma and humor, his own place, his own body. As an unusual, bookish child, Alexie would have been on the outs on any playground, in any community. As a mature writer, Alexie still distrusts comfortable company. Like Edward Abbey, Alexie is known for “offending” somebody, sometimes everybody, in his audience at least once, somehow. While expressing gratitude for them, he will let his primary commercial audience, the white middle-aged woman, know how far she is from knowing what life is like on the Spokane reservation. He will fight back at Ian Frazier’s The Rez, or at any white who generalizes about the Indian’s culture, or at any Indian who assumes that all Indians are the same, or at any observer who assumes too much about Alexie’s own imagination.
Sherman Alexie is as human and as incarnate a poet as our language has. Ironically, as with any self-revealing human, one can never know one’s way around him. He keeps a reader asking questions in a way one would ask questions of any very bright human who is known for passing quick judgments. One reads Alexie ready for anything. One feels pleased when included in the story after Alexie has taken the reader around and around. As Jim Welch makes comedy within tragedy in Winter in the Blood, so Alexie writes what a white reader can laugh at only after being let in on the dark humor. The reader can laugh with him, the way one can laugh at the sad or morbid, when one is made intimate with it. This distance and intimacy makes his language always refreshing, his stories continually remarkable to read.
There are clearly several audiences for Alexie; he has had remarkable changes in his situation. His work has made him wealthy, but he remains tied to the reservation. He writes poems grounded in hundreds of years of Indian tradition and language, but he writes some of them as sestinas, villanelles, and sonnets. He is on home turf, and on common ground and shaky ground. As his latest movie, The Business of Fancydancing, shows, an artist can become increasingly isolated as his books salvage parts from the community’s history. The audience member who hasn’t lived in the book’s milieu may cheer while skeptical readers back home witness themselves being scrutinized. As Alexie continues to entertain some readers, he says he can find himself more and more distant from the very unentertaining conditions of his earlier life and from the present lives of Indians, the people to whom he most wants to speak. “Books are the way we will destroy ourselves,” Alexie contends. “They represent a greater threat than the cavalry” (DeRamirez 1999:58).
Even so, Alexie urges himself and other Indian writers to stay intent on the truth of what it is to be Indian. The great popularity of many Indian and part-Indian writers’ works, such as Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, James Welch’s Fools Crow, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, is a mixed blessing. Alexie urges readers to assume nothing about the reservation life from any one book, but to believe the story as it is told by individuals from separate reservations, separate families, and separate lives, who attest to how each person in the group called Indian and human has lived through so much.
Born in 1966 to the Spokane and Coeur d’ Alene tribes, Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the reservation northwest of Spokane, surrounded by troubles of his own, his tribe, and his society. He was born a hydrocephalic and his brain was shunted and drained, yet he was able to read a Superman comic at age two. Although he polished off his school’s entire library by age eleven, Alexie hardly was secure with his unusual body, his close but alcoholic family and neighbors, and the poverty of the reservation. He left reservation schools to graduate from tiny Reardan (Washington) High School, home of the Indians, where Alexie captained the otherwise all-white basketball team. His own alcoholism cost him two academic beginnings, at Gonzaga University in Spokane, and at the University of Washington, but an encounter with Indian poets at a Washington State University gave him a way of speaking for himself, and, very quickly, a wider audience. Remarkably, Alexie has published fourteen books, starting in 1991 when he was twenty-five with The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses. He has been responsible for two films based on his life and writing, Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancy Dancing (2002). His work has won the highest awards; Alexie was nominated for the PEN Hemingway award for best first book (1993) with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and he won a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award the same year. In 1995, the British magazine Granta named him a Best Young American Novelist and the Before Columbus Foundation gave him the American Book Award for his first novel, Reservation Blues. His stories and novels are published by Atlantic Monthly Press and his novel Indian Killer (1996) was named a New York Times Notable Book. What is remarkable about Alexie is that his writing output is matched by his presence in public. Alexie serves on national advisory boards and he gives readings all around the country—winning a national slam poetry festival for three years in a row and making his own readings into combinations of stand-up comedy and heartbreak, all delivered seemingly impromptu except for the poems he recites from memory. Alexie meets countless admirers on tour, at universities and bookstores; in his wake, he leaves them remembering him as personable, hilarious, and unforgettably talented.
Still, reading or watching Sherman Alexie, one waits for an inevitable moment of distance, a time when one knows that Alexie’s writing is his own, the property of Alexie’s own trauma and humor, his own place, his own body. As an unusual, bookish child, Alexie would have been on the outs on any playground, in any community. As a mature writer, Alexie still distrusts comfortable company. Like Edward Abbey, Alexie is known for “offending” somebody, sometimes everybody, in his audience at least once, somehow. While expressing gratitude for them, he will let his primary commercial audience, the white middle-aged woman, know how far she is from knowing what life is like on the Spokane reservation. He will fight back at Ian Frazier’s The Rez, or at any white who generalizes about the Indian’s culture, or at any Indian who assumes that all Indians are the same, or at any observer who assumes too much about Alexie’s own imagination.
Sherman Alexie is as human and as incarnate a poet as our language has. Ironically, as with any self-revealing human, one can never know one’s way around him. He keeps a reader asking questions in a way one would ask questions of any very bright human who is known for passing quick judgments. One reads Alexie ready for anything. One feels pleased when included in the story after Alexie has taken the reader around and around. As Jim Welch makes comedy within tragedy in Winter in the Blood, so Alexie writes what a white reader can laugh at only after being let in on the dark humor. The reader can laugh with him, the way one can laugh at the sad or morbid, when one is made intimate with it. This distance and intimacy makes his language always refreshing, his stories continually remarkable to read.
There are clearly several audiences for Alexie; he has had remarkable changes in his situation. His work has made him wealthy, but he remains tied to the reservation. He writes poems grounded in hundreds of years of Indian tradition and language, but he writes some of them as sestinas, villanelles, and sonnets. He is on home turf, and on common ground and shaky ground. As his movie, The Business of Fancydancing, shows, an artist can become increasingly isolated as his books salvage parts from the community’s history. The audience member who hasn’t lived in the book’s milieu may cheer while skeptical readers back home witness themselves being scrutinized. As Alexie continues to entertain some readers, he says he can find himself more and more distant from the very unentertaining conditions of his earlier life and from the present lives of Indians, the people to whom he most wants to speak. “Books are the way we will destroy ourselves,” Alexie contends. “They represent a greater threat than the cavalry” (DeRamirez 1999:58).
Even so, Alexie urges himself and other Indian writers to stay intent on the truth of what it is to be Indian. The great popularity of many Indian and part-Indian writers’ works, such as Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, James Welch’s Fools Crow, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, is a mixed blessing. Alexie urges readers to assume nothing about the reservation life from any one book, but to believe the story as it is told by individuals from separate reservations, separate families, and separate lives, who attest to how each person in the group called Indian and human has lived through so much.