"Humor Is My Green Card" A Conversation with Sherman Alexie

Abstract

381 World Literature Today "Humor Is My Green Card" A Conversation with Sherman Alexie Joshua B. Nelson Sherman Alexie?poet, novelist, short-story author, screenwriter, film director, Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, comedian, and more?visited the University of Oklahoma campus in March as the 2010 Puterhaugh Fellow. It was an exciting time for OU as well as for Alexie. Just before he arrived, he learned he won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for his latest short-story collection, War Dances, and while he was here, he was honored with the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award. War Dances, like his recent poetry collection Face, continues the stylistic innovations and penetrating insights he introduced with the publication in the early 1990s of his first short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and his poems in The Business of Fancydancing. In the prolific interim, he has published several other story collections, three novels, numerous collections of poetry, and a novel for young adults (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) that won the National Book Award. In our conversation, he spoke of the pragmatics of Indian politics, the commercialization of art, his engage ment with his critics, Sarah Palin, and much more with characteristic humor, acumen, and abandon. The following is an excerpt of our conversation. Joshua B. Nelson: In your mind, what makes War Dances what it is? It seems to be doing something that not very many people are doing stylistically, in terms of form. Sherman Alexie: It's old-school, actually; it's nothing new. War Dances is really a lot like my first book, The Business of Fancydancing, which was also a combination of stories and poems but reser vation-centric. So you could think of War Dances as the urban equivalent of The Business of Fancy dancing. I think that subject matter was exciting to people because at any given point, somewhere around 70 percent of Natives live off-reservation. And yet our literature doesn't reflect that. Those amazing urban Indian stories are not being told, and I think War Dances makes a gesture toward that. So because there aren't many of us, because we don't have a huge body of literature, I think when one of us does something new it still feels revolutionary in the context of an art form that's thousands of years old. JN: You also do some other sort of smaller genre inclusions, almost like readers' guides. You do a little bit of lit crit, a little bit of art crit. I'm inter ested in what you are up to there. I think, for instance, of "Fearful Symmetry," of the critical engagements you've got there. You talk about an escape fire in that story and of writing about writer's block as a way to get back to writing. I'm wondering if you're maybe doing a little bit of escape-fire setting with your engagement with criticism. SA: Honestly, that never even occurred to me. But it's like in therapy when your therapist says something and you're like, "Yeah, you're right. Subconsciously, I must have been doing that." Because it makes perfect sense. I mean, it was a story about escaping. JN: And using up the fire before it gets to you. SA: Yeah, using the fire to protect yourself from the fire, which is what English is all about for me. I think of Adrian Louis's line of poetry about Eng lish hanging Indian tongues on its belt. What is the Joy Harjo title, Reinventing the Enemy's Language? Yeah, that story is definitely part of such a tradi tion. Especially talking about cinema, which is where all the negative imagery, all the inaccurate Editorial note: For more on Native languages, see Mary Linn's assessment on page 56. imagery of Native Americans, comes from. So for a Native to be working in that genre is far more ironic, far more ludicrous than an Indian writing books. You know, writing an honest, truthful story about an experience but also satirizing myself and my process in it, with a capitulation to...