The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

First Line: I was born with water on the brain.

 

Based on the author's own experiences, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Junior has the strength of purpose to stop attending the reservation school and transfer to an all-white school over twenty miles away in order to get a better education. There's are many "optional extras" included in the curriculum at Junior's new school because the only other Indian there is the school mascot.

~

With the addition of the drawings of Ellen Forney, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has the power to break your heart and make you extremely angry.

The watershed moment for Junior is when a white teacher at his reservation school states, "The only thing you kids are being taught is how to give up." Junior sees the truth to this-- he and his classmates are being taught from the same textbooks as their parents for one thing-- and since he's a long way from wanting to give up, he finds the strength of purpose to break away from the life he was destined to live. 

This isn't the first book I've read by Alexie, and I've enjoyed every one, even though he often stirs me to anger. Alexie addresses many commonplace facts of life on the reservation. For instance, Junior tells us, "I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two funerals." When people live in a place with no hope, is it surprising that many of them give up?

But there are also moments of laughter and joy in describing a life well-lived, for example, or when Junior learns the history of homosexuals in his culture and he exclaims, "Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!"

If I hadn't read Sherman Alexie before, this book would have been an eye-opening experience. As it is, it's a beautifully written diary of a brave young man as well as an exposé of the shameful way one race treats another.

Read it. Ignorance is not bliss.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

ISBN: 9780316013680

Little, Brown & Company © 2007

Hardcover, 320 pages

 

Young Adult, Standalone

Rating: A

Source: Paperback Swap

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

Title: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Author: Sherman Alexie
ISBN: 9780802141675, Grove Press, 2005
Genre: Short Stories, Native American Fiction
Rating: B

First Line: Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories written by one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie. Alexie's writing can be very powerful and beautiful, and it has the added bonus of taking us out of our comfort zones and letting us see "how the other half lives" in the United States. Alexie is a Spokane Indian, and his writing has been formed in part by growing up on the reservation.

Growing up in central Illinois, I had no clue about reservations, other than knowing that the governmental policy always seemed to be one of placing reservations on worthless pieces of land. It wasn't until I moved to Arizona and could drive to places like Chinle or Page that I realized that there are indeed countries within the United States. The Navajo Nation is a nation. It has its own police force, its own language, and-- unlike the rest of Arizona-- observes Daylight Savings Time. The trials many Navajo face just to have enough water for themselves and their livestock on a daily basis are trials that you and I would never put up with. We deserve better. (Hopefully I didn't lace that last bit with too much sarcasm.)

We need writers like Alexie. Not only does he possess story-telling magic, he reminds us that we need to take off our rose-colored glasses from time to time and take a much closer look at America. There's work to be done. This collection of short stories contains the seeds of future films and books. It spans several years in his development as a writer, since some were written when he was nineteen:

So why am I telling you that these stories are true? First of all, they're not really true. They are the vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain wrong. But in trying to make them true and real, I am writing what might be called reservation realism.

I would imagine that, if all writers were completely honest with us, they'd have to say that what they write is often biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and just plain wrong. Sometimes you need to do some (or all) of those things to get your point across. Although these stories aren't as strong as his novels Indian Killer or Flight (both of which blew me away), I'm glad I read these stories. They are good, and they show the evolution of a very gifted writer.

[Source: The Poisoned Pen Bookstore.]

Review-- Flight

Title: Flight
Author: Sherman Alexie
ISBN: 9780802170378/ Black Cat, 2007
Genre: Fiction
Rating: A+

First Line: Call me Zits.

I first became a fan of Sherman Alexie when I watched the film Smoke Signals. The fandom intensified when I read Indian Killer. Now that I've read Flight, I may just graduate to waving his books in the faces of everyone I meet, exclaiming, "You gotta read these!" Alexie is a powerful, imaginative writer with a talent for making readers see other people, other cultures, in a whole new--and very real-- way.

Everyone in Flight calls the main character "Zits", and if you wonder how Zits thinks of himself, he'll tell you:

I'm a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

Zits is half Indian, half Irish. His alcoholic father took off when he was born. His mother died when he was six. His aunt kicked him out when he was ten after he set her boyfriend on fire. (Don't feel too bad for the boyfriend; he was a pedophile.) Now he's fifteen. He's been in twenty foster homes and twenty-two schools. He has barely enough clothes to fit in a backpack. He's a throwaway kid, and he wants revenge, so one day he takes a gun and walks into a bank...and begins a series of adventures in time travel. No time machine for Zits; the gun is the catalyst for his stints as a mute Indian boy during the Battle of the Little Big Horn, an FBI agent, an Indian tracker, an airplane pilot instructor, and his own father. His desire for revenge rapidly becomes an ongoing lesson in empathy.

The book had barely begun when I fell for Zits hook, line and sinker. What did he say? Something that every passionate reader will understand:

I bet you a million dollars there are less than five books in this whole house. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

Alexie's skilled pen makes Zits anything but a throwaway kid in the reader's mind. I empathized with this lonely young boy, my heart broke when his broke, I became angry when he did. As Zits time-traveled, his attitude began to change, and I found myself hoping with all my heart that he no longer thought of himself as worthless; that someone somewhere would see how valuable he was.

What better thing can you say about a writer than that you were totally involved in what happened to his fictional character? That, for a short period of time, you were transported miles away from your comfort zone and confronted with people totally alien to you, and that you began to care, to get angry, and to be compelled to do something?

Which books have you read that affected you in the same way?