My Mother knew words that will never be spoken again.
June 25, 2017 4:24 PM   Subscribe

Sherman Alexie (his website) speaks about his mother and the world.

"Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don’t see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there’s only one escape hatch ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety."
posted by Deoridhe (22 comments total) 47 users marked this as a favorite
 
*sobs*
posted by Annika Cicada at 4:52 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


This was such a great profile. I've never read any of Alexie's stuff, but I'm looking forward to reading Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven.

And Anne Helen Petersen posted a few bits from her interview that didn't make it into the finished piece. 1, 2, 3.
posted by asterix at 5:22 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


I was just coming in to post this and am glad to see it already here! It's a really great profile. I've been a fan for 25 years.
posted by spitbull at 5:23 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


Thank you for posting this--I too am a huge Sherman Alexie fan. I often teach his short story, What You Pawn, I Will Redeem. It's a small, perfect, funny-serious gem that makes me cry at the end, every time I read it.

A pox on all those assholes sending him death threats. I'm not surprised but I'm disgusted.

For Alexie, there are two groups responsible for Trump’s win: those who yearn for an America that never existed, and those who yearn for an America that can never exist. “You can’t have Sweden here,” Alexie said. “It’s much smaller and really white — and has real problems with racism. I mean, Seattle is Sweden! Extremely liberal, progressive, and very white, with a strong undercurrent of racism."

I'm looking forward to reading his new memoir.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 5:36 PM on June 25, 2017 [33 favorites]


hurdy gurdy, oh jesus that story, it's perfect.
posted by PinkMoose at 6:08 PM on June 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thanks for the link, hurdy gurdy girl. That story is powerful stuff.
posted by the thought-fox at 6:47 PM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]


I really enjoyed listening to him speak on Fresh Air recently.
posted by amanda at 7:14 PM on June 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


I heard someone read "Do you know where I am?" on Selected Shorts many many years ago and thought it was one of the best stories about marriage I'd heard. I think it's the only time I've tracked down an author I'd heard on the show. He became one of my favorites after that.
posted by bongo_x at 10:23 PM on June 25, 2017


Everything I read by Alexie is a gut punch. I think it is made more painful by the fact that as the punch is coming I am laughing.
posted by Literaryhero at 10:30 PM on June 25, 2017 [5 favorites]


He was interviewed on Writers & Company a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty interesting. He said that at 50 he was feeling his mortality, because that's old for an indigenous person in North America, given their mortality rates. He also explained matter-of-factly that reserves are very dangerous places for women, an issue that is sort-of / sort-of-not getting in attention in Canada.
posted by My Dad at 11:04 PM on June 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


For those that didn't make it to the end of the profile (which is really good, and worth reading), here's the poem it ends with:

"My mother was a dictionary.

She knew words that have been spoken for thousands of years.

She knew words that will never be spoken again.

I wish I could build tombstones for each of those words.

Maybe this poem is a tombstone.

My mother was a dictionary.

She spoke the old language.

But she never taught me how to say those ancient words.

She always said to me, "English will be your best weapon."

She was right, she was right, she was right."

posted by nikoniko at 12:31 AM on June 26, 2017 [17 favorites]


Thanks for posting. This was tremendous.
posted by olopua at 7:27 AM on June 26, 2017


What You Pawn, I Will Redeem

Holy shit.
posted by The Bellman at 9:01 AM on June 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thank you so much for sharing this!
posted by Flippervault at 9:12 AM on June 26, 2017


I've been following Sherman Alexie around ever since moving to Seattle. A book reading at Elliott Bay Book Company, spotted on Ballard Ave, someone said he'd just checked his kid in when I was working a shift at Children's ER. One time he was holding court at the Hi-Life, lingering around a dinner table of 10 which provided a pleasant soundtrack of belly laughs erupting as my wife and I ate dinner. I think he lives in my neighborhood, but that might just be something he said on KUOW because he likes to make fun of white bread chicken-raising Seattle liberals like me.

I've worked on Indian reservations for a couple summers during school. Met all the people, went to the Pow-wows and sweat lodges with all the other earnest young college students destined for future upper middle class lives of stability. Yet never did I really talk to anyone about ..you know, "what it's like...to be Indian...what it feels like." Indians are famously guarded and as 22 year old idealistic white dude, I'd never felt (justifiably) as much of a tourist as I did on the res.

This is why Alexie is such a fucking treasure. To be able to write so entertainingly and poignantly about the real experiences of being Indian, not the "Great Spirit/Brother Moon" shit but the tragedy, the comedy, and the magic of being a philosophical outsider in your own damn country.

Now I'm one of those upper middle class former idealists living in Seattle and am fortunate enough to have forged some more natural relationships with Native People in my circle, socially and professionally. But I'd still never start the conversation about "what's it like, you know..." because of course they're just normal people like me and not the Tragic and Noble People my ancestors killed. But of course they are that too and it's fucking hard to reconcile white liberal guilt with being just a decent and curious person who makes real friendships with people I was raised to think of as Other.

Anyway, Sherman Alexie is a preciously important person who writes humbly and from his huge heart. He first makes me laugh, then cry, then most importantly think. I am grateful and hope he blesses us with many more years of writing.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:32 AM on June 26, 2017 [11 favorites]


A poem Alexie published early this year:

Autopsy

Last night, I dreamed that my passport bled.
I dreamed that my passport was a tombstone
For our United States, recently dead.
I dreamed that my passport was made of bone—

That it was a canoe carved out of stone.
“But I can’t swim,” I said. “I will drown
If I can’t make the shore. I’ll die alone
In the salt. No, my body will be found

With millions of bodies, all of them brown.”
I dreamed that my passport was a book of prayers,
Unanswered by the gods, but written down
By fact checkers in suits. “There are some errors

In your papers,” they said. Then took me downstairs
To a room with fingernails on the floor.
I dreamed that my passport was my keyware,
But soldiers had set fire to the doors,

To all doors—a conflagration of doors.
I dreamed that my passport was my priest:
“Sherman, will you battle the carnivores
Or will you turn and abandon the weak?

Will you be shelter? Or will you concede?”
Last night, I dreamed that my passport was alive
When it entered the ICU. It breathed, it breathed,
Then it sighed and closed its eyes. It did not survive.

©2017, Sherman Alexie
posted by allthinky at 10:10 AM on June 26, 2017 [11 favorites]


The beginning to the story about his father in The Lone Ranger and Tonto
During the sixties, my father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians. Because of that, how could anyone recognize that my father was trying to make a social statement?
is such a perfect piece of writing. It's smart and funny and says a whole lot with very few words.
posted by riruro at 3:01 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm a sixth grade ELA teacher in NC, and every November during NA history month I teach selections from Absolutely True Diary. My administration told me I couldn't, but I can't not. His literary worth is incredible to my students; it dovetails in so perfectly with our Q1 unit on figurative language its like he wrote it to be taught in middle school. Beyond Wonder, The Giver (I know...), and Among the Hidden my kids think his work is the best work.

Loved this reading!
posted by Snowishberlin at 3:45 PM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


At the May 14th U2 concert in Seattle, during the time between opening the venue and the show starting, quotes from Sherman Alexie and other important writers were scrolling up the right side of the screen. It was very moving for me to read those.
posted by Altomentis at 8:06 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


I ripped through half of his new memoir today after dinner. If you are thinking about reading it, do; it's a beautiful mix of poetry and prose and a consistent gut punch- complex and heartbreaking and funny and brutal.
posted by charmedimsure at 11:47 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


“When people consider the meaning of genocide, they might only think of corpses being pushed into mass graves. But a person can be genocided — can have every connection to his past severed — and live to be an old man whose ribcage is a haunted house built around his heart. I know this because once I sat in a room and listened to dozens of Indian men trying to speak louder than their howling, howling, howling, howling ghosts.”
Good lord, that's incredibly powerful and evocative writing.

Thanks so much for posting this wonderful profile. It's much better than the review of his book in the New York Times this week, where they completely missed the point of his writing style and complained that his repetitiveness was egocentric.
posted by zarq at 6:28 AM on June 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


I love Sherman Alexie. I mean, I love his prose and I love his poems (I just finished his latest book) but mostly I love Sherman Alexie because his writing gives me permission to be angry, to be full of rage. I'm not a rez kid like him but reading his words give me permission to be outraged at what my grandfather suffered, what my father lost, and what, culturally, I'll never get back.

My son just graduated from high school and there was a road rage incident as we left the Don Haskins Center and my dad saw it and when we got home he told me, "You need to get that Sioux blood under control." Note, he did not say Lakota but Sioux.

I'm full of rage and only Sherman seems t [ understand that.
posted by blessedlyndie at 1:58 AM on June 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


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