Oh, this was a good one. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The title says it all. This is an autobiographical novel written by a Native American man who grew up on a reservation but went to high school at a very white town outside of the reservation. The Neland Women's Book Club faced it head on.
As a boy, Junior is a smart runt reminiscent of Owen Meany from John Irving's novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany. Intelligent, basketball-playing, stuttering, lisping, small and prone to seizures, Junior does not fit in. His best friend, Rowdy, is a big kid who is abused by his father and protective of the smaller, picked-on Junior.
During his first week of high school, one of Junior's teachers pulls him aside and tells him he MUST get off the reservation. Junior's extremely poor parents somehow scrape together the tuition to send Junior to Reardan, where he is the lone Spokane at the school.
This is a book about a young man straddling two cultures, as the title suggests. He sees the pros and cons of both sides, and the author tells truth about both cultures. The novel is full of humor and reality. Any teen who has felt like the odd man out will relate to the character. Parents will be a bit concerned about the all-too-honest treatment of a 14-year-old boy's life--the kind of vulgar humor and curiosity about sexuality that is likely the hallmark of that stage of a boy's life.
Still. This story is so full of honesty. What it is like to be left out. What it is like to have your wildest dream come true, even when there is a price to pay. And most of all, what do you do when you don't fit in at home or away? Alexie's story is at heart an immigrant story. Junior enters a strange new land. He is renamed Arnold (his given name, which no one at home has ever called him); he has to learn new ways and a new way of speaking. He has to learn the expectations and traditions of a completely new culture. At the same time, he must switch back to the reservation, a homeland loaded with its own expectations and alienation. Junior is looked at as a traitor, betraying his tribe.
This is the same sort of experience that many others experience--mission kids who switch between the "home culture" and the mission field, children of poverty who want to get higher education, or immigrants who come from poorer countries and somehow have to straddle the expectations of people back home and the realities of a whole new culture.
One part that was hard for us, as a church book club, to read was the short description of Junior's thoughts about Christianity and what it has done to Indian culture. He describes how the whites brought Christianity and intolerance; that the missionaries brought expectations of how the Indians should behave in all areas of life, which in turn made Indian culture less tolerant. Given that our denomination's mission agency was once called the Heathen Mission Board, and it originated in Native American missions, we don't have a lot of self-righteousness to stand on. We have been part of the problem in trying to make everyone look and act like white Europeans, even as we try to bring the news of all-encompassing love and forgiveness. So it behooves us to have some humility when we look at the not-so-lovely view of Christians in the book.
Thankfully this is a brief moment in the novel. Like the rest of the book, it is honest.
I ended up listening to this one on CD because all the library print versions were out. In some ways this was wonderful, as it was read by the author, and I completely enjoyed his cadence and personality. On the other hand, the actual book has great illustrations that illuminate the story, and I will probably re-skim this book just to see the illustrations.
In fact, I fully expect to buy a copy of this book in spite of the fact that I've already listened to it. I look forward to sharing it with my son. I'll also be looking for more work by Sherman Alexie.
No comments:
Post a Comment