Writer Sherman Alexie offers a unique perspective on America.

ust after Sept. 11, 2001, a pickup truck sporting an American flag pulled up alongside American Indian writer Sherman Alexie. The driver leaned out his patriotic window to yell angrily at him, “Go back to your own country!”

“I was laughing so hard that the truck was already at the next corner before I could catch my breath to respond, ‘You first!’” Alexie recounted. “It wasn’t a hate crime so much as a crime of irony.”

Along with such insights into what fuels the acidic humor of Alexie’s work, he offered commentary on the hypocrisies of both conservatives and liberals, driven by his characteristic restless, surgical wit during his speech at the Salt Lake City Downtown Public Library last Saturday.

Attesting to Alexie’s appeal even among an overwhelmingly white population like Salt Lake City, every available ticket to the lecture had been reserved by a week in advance, and every seat in the library’s auditorium was filled Saturday night—as well as nearly every available chair in the additional viewing room, which was set up with a video feed.

Every seat was filled, that is, up until Alexie delivered, pacing up and down the auditorium stage in a way that accentuated both his anger and athleticism, a barrage of superbly stinging comments such as, “Christianity, as we Indians see it, is cannibalization of a zombie.”

Among other things, Alexie’s lecture taught me that terminal velocity for your average sanctimonious Salt Laker is reached with the following formula: one mention of the existence of America’s history of genocide, one of two references to the mentality of President Bush Jr. and exactly three uses of that certain particularly magical word.

Alexie is just as widely seen as a problem as he is a genius, and in his childlike frankness it’s easy to see that he knows he’s playing a sort of literary Dennis the Menace to the Mr. Wilsons in the Republican and Democratic parties.

Not to mention the fear he inspires in the heart of the liberal critic. A reviewer from Bookslut.com refused to attend the signing for his novel Indian Killer, sharing the widespread ambivalence over its plot, in which an American Indian serial killer scalps his white victims.

Alexie was raised on the Spokane Indian Reservation and attended a predominantly white high school (“I was the only Indian—except for the mascot,” he said), then won a scholarship to Gonzaga University, where he played basketball.

“Whatever the percentage of Indians your college says it has, it’s actually about 10 percent of that,” Alexie said. “The box-checking tribe is the largest in college.”

Thrust into the solitary role of playing the token “good minority,” Alexie left college well-educated in the workings of stereotypes and virulent reactions to their transgression.

This transgression is the heart of his writing. Simply giving voice to American Indian narrative modes challenges the linear organization of fiction in the European tradition.

At every turn considered a freak, “too ambitious for the reservation and too Indian everywhere else,” Alexie says of himself, “I’m a liberal, but I don’t come from the liberal elite.”

He describes fundamentalism as a primary source of evil, defined by the belief in “only belonging to one tribe.” Alexie asserts that “we all belong to many tribes,” and that his primary tribal affiliation is with bookworms, and his secondary is with basketball players.

This plurality of affiliations is threatening to fundamental American social categories, which rely on singularity and mutual exclusion. Identification with more than one category is seen as contradiction, and Americans hate contradictions, Alexie said.

Sept. 11 terrified our nation because it was a contradiction of American invulnerability, explained Alexie, and “We tremble in the presence of contradiction.”

He spoke about the difficulties facing minorities after the attacks, when “every beige American prayed after the second plane hit, ‘please don’t let them be brown, please let them be Norwegian terrorists.’”

A particularly American contradiction has been flaunted in the faces of American Indians, as the U.S. government repeatedly insists it cannot allow the invasion of sovereign nations by other countries which illegally seized their land.

Another sickening contradiction is that American Indian tribal sovereignty is now expressed only in terms of complete assimilation into the American capitalist system through casinos and the sale of cigarettes and fireworks.

Alexie railed against the indulgence of liberal elitism, insisting that “wars and peace protests both are mob behavior,” that watching television is a valuable tool for cultural education available to outsiders and that the vegan lifestyle valorizes class privilege—“imagine getting to choose exactly what you eat all the time.”

Alexie pointed out the current moral quandary faced by liberals: In order for George W. Bush to lose the election, prospects for political stability in Iraq have to get even more bleak.

I realized while watching Alexie in person for the first time that the habit he has of turning to his audience with a wide gesture and asking, “Did you know that?” is in many ways a mirror of his literary gesture.

To read Alexie is not to learn new things about unfamiliar societies, but to learn how you know those things that are most familiar to you. It’s a lesson on how you can know your own culture through its exploitation of others—did you know that?

“We all want our narrative to be everyone else’s,” Alexie recognizes, but ending racism depends on a refusal to be fundamentalist—in “treating each day as a new situation and each person as a separate being.” Contradiction is familiar country for Alexie, not only as part of an ethnic minority in America, but as an artist.

Confronting racism is a challenge for which literature is particularly well-suited because, as Alexie said, “Art is the place where contradictions come together in really cool ways.”
rachael@red-mag.com