Friday, October 13, 2017

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie


 
What is the purpose of a genocide museum? (page 296)
• Elicit the horror and have the hope that it not happen again, therefore, it can be anywhere/everywhere.
• When there is a need for a memorial to remember those of the genocide, it can be anywhere/everywhere.
• When the story is unknown or made invisible, it needs to be in the place where it happened
• A memorial/genocide museum for Native Americans could be in DC, or at a location where a genocide happened, like Wounded Knee.
• Powerful message that you don’t really matter
• Environmental damage and ensuing genocide

What is he so down on “pow wow Indians”?
• Is identity formed as part of a pow wow, but only there, not living the life out of pow wow
• Is there a cost issue?  Can’t afford
• Are you just “posing”?
• The reservation “Indian” is the stereotype, so it sells books.
• Why does he even feel he is not “Indian” enough? Or why do other “Indians” not think he is enough?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

1. In writing this memoir, Sherman Alexie told his sister that there would be a lot of blank spaces. "But I like the blank spaces." What do you think he means — why does he like blank spaces? What might they signify for him?
• He has some bad memories and maybe he can believe a better story than what he remembers
• There are some things he can’t/won’t tell
• “An Indian’s wealth is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.” (wealth is what you give away, a real Indian has more trials and tribulations and pain)
• “We lived in a small house, so there was no escape from the goddamn racket of her loneliness.”

2. Follow-up to Question: Alexie also says, "This book is a series of circles, sacred and profane." Again, what do you think he means? What are the circles — and which are sacred and which profane?
• The rape story keeps circling back
• The U.S. destruction of indigenous land and culture (salmon chapter, uranium mining)
• “Listen. I don't know how or when/ My grieving will end, but I'm always/Relearning how to be human again.”
• “Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.”
• “This is who I am. This is who I have always been. I am in pain. I am always in pain. But I always find my way to the story. And I always find my way home.”
• “Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don't know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write "I don't know" one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.”

3. Alexie takes an entire book, some 400 pages, to talk about his mother. So … in less than 400 pages … how would you describe Lillian? Talk about those traits that are both admirable and not so admirable, or just plain awful. Does she generate sympathy? Did your feelings toward her change during the course of reading the memoir?
• She did a lot for other people, so does generate sympathy
• She did stop drinking and become sober
• She is a product of her history, too
• “You know," I said to my sister later at the funeral. "I think Mom is telling the truth about losing us. We're never going to know the exact details. But there's too much real pain in this story for it to be a lie."
My sister nodded. She agreed. But what did we agree to? Jesus, we as adults were grateful that our mother had probably told us the truth about endangering us as children. How fucked is that?”

4. Follow-up to Questions 3: How did the process of writing this memoir — and grappling with some memories he says are so painful he almost did not include them — affect Alexie's understanding of his mother? Does he find peace by the end? If so, in what way?
• He finds peace, I understand where you are coming from, but that’s not the same as forgiveness
• When you have parents that are not the parents you want or need, then you probably never find peace, as you grieve not getting your needs met, and have to flip your understanding after people tell you that you should know that they loved you because…
• “Thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.”
• “I realized that my mother had not taught us the tribal language because she knew her children would not be strong enough to carry the responsibility of being the last fluent speakers. She protected us from that spiritual burden. She protected us from that loneliness.”
• Some people THINK in Salish, even though it is English language.
• Language is the last holdout, gem, that people get to hold on to.
• His mother was a fluent speaker (that’s pretty recent), and eventually the “only.”

5. At times Alexie moves the book's focus away from Lillian and back to his own childhood: his medical emergencies, high school years, mental health problems. Talk about those years. What did you find particularly moving or remarkable about his background?
• Medical emergencies
• Kids were mean to him (they through the moccasins in the river)
• “You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.”
• “There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.”
• “So we must forgive all those Who trespass against us? Fuck that shit. I’m not some charitable trust. There are people I will hate even after I’m ashes and dust.”
• “I often wonder why I am the one who remembers all the pain?”
• The juxtaposition of all these different relationships build a quilt.

6. Reviewers make much of the humor in You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. Did it make you laugh as you read it? What in particularly did you find funny.
• He does stand up comedy in real life.
• We did see humor – it made craziness bearable and hardships, too.

7. What is the significance of the book's cover photo?
• His mother is 17 and that’s his sister
• broken frame represents fractures and breaks in the family
• “And the tombstone will never answer. Because the dead have only the voices we give to them.”

8. The book includes 160 poems. Do you have a favorite? Do you find that the poems illuminate the narrative? If so in what way? Or do you find the poetry distracting? Consider the times that the author broke out of a poem into prose, then back into poetry again. Is there anything in particular that seems to prompt the changes from one mode to the other?
• “Poetic prose” and “prosey poetry”
• Story is told in prose and poetry, and the poetry is written just like a story, so it’s hard to tell the difference
• Genocide is a favorite poem

9. What have you learned about life on an Indian Reservation? What insights have you gleaned from this memoir into Native American culture? Did anything especially surprise you, impress you, delight you, anger you, or sadden you?
• Reminders of the horror of conditions
• Complete disregard by U.S. for history, life, or repercussions (uranium mining, salmon)
• Lousy land, not original places they lived, but it did allow communities to stay together
• “What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.”
• “In the indigenous world, we assign sacred value to circles. But sometimes a circle just means you keep returning to the same shit again and again. This book is a series of circles, sacred and profane.”
• “My mother and grandmother’s conversation doesn’t belong in the cloud.   That old song is too sacred for the Internet.”

POEMS

Sibling Rivalry
Yes, my mother was a better mother
To my sisters and brothers,
But they were better children
Than me, the prodigal who yearned
And spurned and never returned.”
“Do you understand how one small dog—afraid of the wolves who had attacked him and those who would attack him anew—might stand on his hind legs, might evolve in a moment, so he could run away and never return?”

Self-Exam
Dear audience, please stand if you were raised
By a terrible mother. Okay, okay,
Approximately half of you. So I'd say
That terrible mothers are commonplace.
Just like terrible fathers. So let's mourn
For the children who never knew childhood.
Our grief is justified. Our anger is good.
I won't blame children for childish scorn.
But there comes a day when a broken child
Becomes an adult. On that day, you'll need
To choose between the domestic and wild.
You'll need to escalate war or declare peace.
I tell you this because I'm the kid, mother-stung,
Who became a terrible adult son.
And I'm to blame for that. I made that mess.
Because I am the Amateur of Forgiveness.”
 (p. 220-224)

Quotes
“If it’s fiction, then it better be true”

“Vulnerability hangover”

“If Heaven ain't filled with gender-swapping Indians," I said, "then I don't want to go there.”

“But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.”

“What about me?” I asked. “Am I mean?” “You aren’t mean to me with words,” she said. “You’re mean to me with your silences.”

“I TEND TO believe in government because it was the U.S. government that paid for my brain surgery when I was five months old and provided USDA food so I wouldn’t starve during my poverty-crushed reservation childhood and built the HUD house that kept us warm and gave me scholarship money for the college education that freed me. Of course, the government only gave me all of that good shit because they completely fucked over my great-grandparents and grandparents but, you know, at least some official white folks keep some of their promises.”

“I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.”

“Dear wife, I'm sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I'll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.”

“Dear friends, my brain— Unpredictable as it was—is even more unpredictable now. But thank God for all of the ways in which we compensate For our deficiencies. In order to play Ping-Pong—in order to make it Through this crazy life—I needed somebody to step in and take  The next shot. So let’s call this a Ping-Pong prayer. Let’s call it A Ping-Pong jubilation. I am not alone in this world. I am not Alone in this world. I am not alone in this world. I am not alone In this world. I will never be alone, my friends, and as long as I am Alive to be your teammate, neither will any of you.”

 “I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.”

 “We shuffled past white customers who stared at us with hate, pity, disgust, and anger—the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Indian Apocalypse.”

“I didn’t yet know that romantic heroes—famous and not—are usually aimless nomads in disguise.”

“Reardan High School is located in the whitest and most conservative county in Washington. Thirty-six years after those white conservative kids in Reardan unanimously elected me freshman-class president (after Alexie transferred there from the rez school previously attended), I wonder how many of them voted for (the racist, sexist, homophobic, and immoral) Donald Trump. How many of their parents and siblings voted for Trump? How many of my former teachers voted for Trump? Trump won 72% of the Lincoln County vote… Of the dozens of Reardan folks I still know, I am aware of only five who are vocal and active Democrats.”

“How do I make sense of this? How is it possible that I, the lifelong indigenous liberal, became so popular – so loved and loving – in that conservative community? How did I become captain of the basketball team, prom royalty, and president of the Future Farmers of America?”

“Was it because I was had a killer jump shot and spin move on the basketball court? Was it because I was once handsome and slender enough to be called pretty despite all my real and perceived scars? Was it because I could publicly speak my mind with quick wit and honesty? Was it because I was so book-smart?…”

“So perhaps I was the beneficiary of a white small town’s honest meritocracy. I was good at everything that a Reardan kid was supposed to be good at… So maybe that made my indigenous and liberal identities of secondary importance to those white kids and their parents. But I wonder if my race would have been more of an issue if I’d been a non-athlete. If I’d been only an average student. If I’d been plain or overweight or socially awkward. Or if I hadn’t been such a natural diplomat.”

“I was the best, or among the best, in the school at nearly every academic and extracurricular activity, so it was demonstrably impossible for anyone in Reardan to think of me as inferior to any of those white kids. I think I overwhelmed most overt or latent racism with the sheer force and size of my abilities.”

“But was I also accepted because it’s difficult to be actively racist, sexist, or homophobic on a one-to-one basis? It’s hard to be anti-Indian when an Indian is sitting next to you in a classroom. Though I did learn it’s pretty easy for a white conservative father and mother to be vocally anti-Indian when their daughter is dating a rez boy like me.”

“But, damn, after high school and college, and a decade into my very public and leftist artistic career, the town or Reardan asked me to be the grand marshal for their Community Day parade. I said yes, of course, and proudly rode on a mule-driven wagon through town while waving at so many of my old friends and teachers. How did that happen? How did all of those future Trump voters – all of those folks willing to validate and empower that rich man’s bigotry – come to celebrate the poor brown boy who grew up in their white town?”

“I know the answer has a lot to do with basic human decency, and also with the seductive nature of fame, but I think the answer has most to do with compartmentalism. It’s easy for a white racist to fall in love with and accept one member of a minority – one Indian – and their real and perceived talents and flaws. But it’s much tougher for a racist to accept a dozen Indians. And impossible for a white racist to accept the entire race of Indians – or an entire race of any nonwhite people…”

I have lost track of the number of times a white person, hilariously thinking they were being complimentary, has said to me, “But, Sherman, I don’t think of you as an Indian”. Throughout my rural and urban life, among white conservative and white liberals, I’ve heard many other variations on that same basic sentiment.
          “Sherman, you’re not like other Indians.”
          “Sherman, you’re a credit to your race.”
          “Sherman, you barely seem Indian”.
          “Sherman, I don’t think of you as being Indian, I think of you as being a person.”
          “Sherman, you’re not a Native writer. You’re a writer.”
          “Sherman, I don’t see color. I see the person inside.”

“All of these statements mean the same thing: “Sherman, in order to fit you and your indigenous identity into my worldview, I have to think of you as being like me – as being white like me.”

“I suspect that some of my white friends, if they are reading this, don’t recognize themselves as a person who has said racist things directly to me – who cannot even recognize the racism present in such statements.”

“In being friends with white people, I’ve always had to live entirely inside their circle of experience – inside their white world. And my white friends have rarely, if ever, spent even a moment in my indigenous world…”

“So at Reardan High, I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was – and still am – great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white worked means that I am white – or more white than Native…”

“But here I must also indict the strange anti-Indian racism of many Native Americans who have, over my nearly-twenty-five-year literary career, sought to discount, discredit, and demolish me as a writer and as an indigenous person. These are the Natives who, like white racists, mistakenly attribute my success to my perceived whiteness. These are the Natives who cannot believe that a reservation-raised boy could ever become the man I am.”

ADDITIONAL NOTE:
It has come to light that Sherman Alexie has been accused of sexual misconduct. At this book group and other book groups, we have discussed this inside and out. The summarize, three significant points need to be kept in mind.
• No one is a saint or perfect. No one.
• Many role models we learn about have a blemished past, and it is never discussed when they are white (Abraham Lincoln, George Washington).
• We can (and need to) keep separate the “art” and the “author.”