A World of Story-Smoke: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie

Abstract

Songwriter, film-maker, comedian, and writer of prose and poetry, Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, about 50 miles northwest of Spokane. The reservation (approximately 1,100 Spokane Tribal members live there), where the effects of what Alexie chooses to call an on-going colonialism still asserts its painful presence, is central in Alexie's fiction, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and Reservation Blues (1995). Presented as a demarcated space of suffering, Alexie's fictional reservation is a place where his characters are tormented by collective memories of a genocidal past, of cavalry-approved hangings, massacres, and small-pox-infected blankets. It is a haunted place where faint voices ... echo[] all over (Reservation Blues 46) and where dreams ... [a]re murdered ... the bones buried quickly just inches below the surface, all waiting to break through the foundations of those government houses built by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Reservation Blues 7). Although some of Alexie's characters leave the reservation and enter the urban space in his second novel, Indian Killer (1996), the experience of growing up, as Alexie puts it in the interview, firmly within borders, continues to affect the characters' lives, especially their emotional lives. Inevitably when dealing with ethnic literature, it is impossible not to be self-conscious of one's own position. As a European white female scholar, I felt compelled to raise questions of perspective, including those of nationality, ethnicity, and gender. Within this context of self-reflection, the interview touches upon issues such as the desire for a pure or authentic Indian identity and the critical demand for the genre American Indian literature. One of the most intriguing aspects of Alexie's fiction is his use of the comic. Although the subject matters in Alexie's fiction are morally and ethically engaging, the same texts are often ironic, satiric, and full of humor. As the characters in a caricature-like manner stagger across the reservation, between drinking the next beer and cracking the next joke, the reader is often invited to laugh along with them, even at them. Alexie's artistic vision thus mixes humor and suffering in a manner that for me resembles what Roberto Benigni does in his film Life is Beautiful or Art Spiegelman in his graphic novels, Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Such a comparison becomes all the more justified in the light of one of Alexie's most provocative comments in the interview, his parallel between the Indian and the Jewish Holocausts. Alexie's texts can be considered trauma narratives, and the interview explores his views on trauma and the thematization of suffering. Although trauma does silence, and suffering does exist without expression in language and without metaphysics, the moment pain is transformed into suffering, it is also transferred into language. This enables the traumatized person to remember, work through, and mourn the lost object. Given the inarticulateness of many of Alexie's characters, I also suggest that Alexie's narratives call attention to the inherent difficulties of representing suffering. The characters are muted by the traumas of hatred and chaos, loss and grief danger and fear, and cannot--except in a few rare cases--articulate their suffering. Instead, they tend to resort to self-destructive behavior, including violence and substance abuse. Thus, while Alexie's narratives demonstrate the need to give suffering a language, they also call attention to the inherent unsharability of suffering. In the interview with Alexie, I was particularly interested in his views on trauma and his thematization of suffering. While in Alexie's early fiction, the reservation is a geographical space of borders and confinement, in his more recent fiction, The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) and Ten Little Indians (2003), the reservation changes its ontology and becomes a mental and emotional territory. …