Poetry Friday: Sherman Alexie

It’s time to explore the poetry of my new home—much as I went to Carl Sandburg to see Chicago through a poet’s eyes, I must find some Inland Northwest poets to help me understand this land.  And so, where else to start but with a son of the people whose land this is, who have possessed and been possessed by it for many centuries, long before my great-grandfather homesteaded here or my car rolled up with boxes in the back to make a home.  If you know Sherman Alexie, you know what we’re probably about to dive into.  And if you don’t know Sherman, a native man from the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribe, born on the Spokane Indian Reservation at Wellpinit, well, buckle up.  Whatever else it may be, ahead of us we can certainly expect to be confronted by truth.  From his collection, The Summer of Black Widows, this is “The Powwow at the End of the World”:

“I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.”

Sweet, terrible fire.  And words I need to hear.  There is something reminiscent here of many great poems I’ve read, including some I’ve discussed here—Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” occurs to me, and Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again“—but of course it is also entirely its own, hot with the passion that has boiled in him all his years.  As challenging as it can be to confront, it’s also important to face his relentless demands that forgiveness not be cheap, that injustice be met not with platitudes but with redress and righteousness, that the only way to do good is to undo evil.  The imagery is powerful for me because it pairs the very tangible and real—the solidity of the dam at Grand Coulee, the shattered reactors at a broken Hanford—with the fantastic and the mythical—an Indian woman (and there is something deeply powerful, I think, in his insisting that it be a woman) titanic enough that the weight of her shoulder can shatter acres of concrete, a salmon charged with lightning who calls the tribes home for the dance that ends time.  I find that I encounter these juxtapositions often in the work of Native American writers—I think culturally (at least in many tribes) they are better able to see the unreal through the lens of the real, especially seeing something numinous and immanent in the natural world around them.

There is something communal about his anger, the feeling that a whole community, a whole nation, must be restored by this amazing chain of events.  But there is also something so personal—the salmon must come to him, who waits alone in a secret place.  He alone will see the lightning bolt which falls at his feet and no one else’s—when the lost ones come home, they will come to him.  And for me that only enhances the power of the piece—this is a lament in broad strokes for what the Spokane people lost and deserve to have restored to them, but it is grounded in the very personal accounting Sherman feels of what the broken tribe costs him, and of what America owes him personally to make this right.  I enjoy, too, that the piece ultimately dwells on the elation of reunion, the exuberance of dance and ancient stories—ultimately what will satisfy this outcry is not the scent of burning towns or the vision of oppressors brought low.  It’s not about revenge in the end for him: it’s about what will be restored, not about what will be destroyed.

It would be easy to tune him out, I suppose—to say that this is all big talk but in the end not very realistic.  But I think we have to grapple with the enormity of what Sherman wants us to see, whether or not we really think we could do all he demands, breaking apart the structures of American society in his people’s valleys and plateaus and leaving them to dance.  He recognizes this is apocalypse—that the justice he is demanding can only be depicted in the context of a final day, of the judgment and conclusion of this living, standing at the threshold of what will follow.  It doesn’t mean his pain is imaginary, nor that we can pretend that justice is unimportant until some last call where we can hurriedly set things right before we are called to account.  The rhythms of his verse surge up against us again and again like waves, like salmon who will not be denied the river no matter how the falls rage them backwards.  They will swim until they are victorious or perish in the attempt.  I can feel that strain in his verse, and that determination.  I’m glad I’m having to wrestle with it, what it means and what it will mean in the future—and especially what I may have to do about it.  Poetry should unsettle us, and this poem certainly unsettles me, even as it introduces me to a home it is not ready to welcome me to.  I am grateful for that, and for Sherman, tonight.

“I am not a Navajo; it is not given to me to do these things.”

What’s most remarkable about what La Farge is doing in Laughing Boy, in my opinion, is that he’s able to make the character of Slim Girl so compelling.  This is, after all, an emotionally detached young woman, whose love is at least 31% conniving, who resists displaying weakness as much as she can, whose life is so full of secrets that even I, the reader, can’t be positive what she does when she goes to town (though as I indicated previously, I am almost certain she works as a prostitute in some fashion).  It’s hard enough in the 21st Century to be able to get inside the head of a character like that—for a man, not of her race or generation or social class, writing in the late 1920s, to be able to do it as well as La Farge does is impressive.  I won’t call his performance flawless, but it’s certainly gripping.

The quotation used as this post’s title begins a remarkable internal monologue that I think is a great example of this.  She has taken up the art of weaving, a traditional Navajo skill, as a way of reaching out to her young husband (who is a skilled silversmith).  But she was raised in a boarding school, and has no real feel for the art.  She has made and destroyed numerous garments, eternally disappointed at her poor workmanship.  Finally, at the point where this monologue begins, she had leaped into weaving, inspired by a particular artistic vision and desperate to make it visible to the man she increasingly loves.  And now she is standing back from the blanket, which is yet another shoddy, half-realized creation.  Her thoughts pivot wildly between ideas.  She is struck at how easy it was for her Mother and yet how tough it is for her.  She thinks her husband will love her anyway because he is devoted to her.  She thinks he will leave her.  She remembers being praised for her drawing skills at the school.  She laments that her husband would not appreciate drawing, only weaving.  She wonders if perhaps he could accept drawing.  She then confronts the two plainest, most irreconcilable facts: she is an untalented weaver whose work will never satisfy her, and yet she feels a deep and irresistible urge to weave because weaving is part of the Navajo life inextricably.  This frustrates her so that she shouts “No use.  God damn it to hell!  God damn me!  Chindi, mai, shash, Jee Cri!”  (The italics are in the original.)  You can’t imagine how jarring this is until you’ve read a lot of 1920s novels…the appearance of what would today pass as relatively mild profanity leaps off the page with abandon.  I love that La Farge wants us to be this close to her—that he’s unafraid of letting her be coarse and angry and helpless because he trusts us to stick with her.  This is the most adventurous Pulitzer winner I’ve read so far, I think, and yet in some ways it is so mildly domestic and hopeful.

Yes, domestic and hopeful.  Laughing Boy comes home to her anger, and sees the poorly executed weaving.  And he quietly steps forward, wordlessly picking up a curry comb, and begins to slash at the weaving fiercely.  Slim Girl thinks for a moment he is trying to rip it apart, but she stands back, silent.  Eventually he steps away, and she can see how his comb has torn loose the nap of the wool, softening and blurring all the lines, pulling the wool together into a smooth surface.  Her weaving is beautiful.  It is just as she had hoped it would be.  And he turns to her, and says “I am not telling you a lot of things.  I am just letting you see something.  I think you understand it.”  This was an unbelievably beautiful moment for me.  La Farge tricks me as a reader—he lures me in with the harsh realism of her anger, only to show me that the blanket will not be a symbol of failure but of grace.  Laughing Boy’s restraint is such a luminous expression of his masculinity—he is a Navajo man, and (as far as that society is depicted in this novel, at least) there was never going to be an emotional conversation.  He does for her what he can, showing her the truth without condescending to her, allowing her to draw her own conclusions about what it means to be Slim Girl, what it means to be Navajo.  Because he says so little, that brief exchange says a lot to me; works on a lot of levels.

There’s a lot more to say about this novel, but it’s late, and I’m getting to like it well enough, anyway, that I’d rather not give it all away.  I think this book could still be a very solid YA novel (at least in the context of a middle or high school curriculum, if not just a pleasure read) even today, and I find La Farge’s depiction both of the relationship of a young married couple and of a changing native society to be really nuanced and authentic.  It’s still a novel from 1930, so there is still a bit of a sepia glow to it—the emotional parts can easily become a bit sentimental, the descriptions of the landscape can feel a bit too florid, etc.—but it is holding up well for me.  It’s crossed the threshold from being “surprisingly inoffensive about the Navajo for its time” past “surprisingly inoffensive about the Navajo” to “surprisingly sensitive to Navajo ways of understanding and being”.  I am not a Native American, of course, much less a member of the Navajo: it may be that La Farge’s depiction is still insufficiently accurate or fair.  But from what I’ve read and learned about the peoples of the Southwest, I feel like I can trust him more often than not, and that trust combined with two characters I am growing to love makes this a great read.  If you can find it at your local library, give it a shot—it’s not long, and I think it may surprise you too.