Civilizations rise and fall. A goal of the current administration is to eliminate support for most individuals, particularly those who require food and other support, to lean in to the rich, and deny rights to anyone unable to pay for them. The rationale seems to be that if a person cannot be rich, they don’t deserve assistance.
I just finished In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. I usually read a book in a few days, but this memoir took longer. Where was the wisdom I was seeking? I was afraid for a long time that it would not come. I was doing NaNo during those weeks too, so I was writing my own angry story and struggled to know how to rate Machado’s until the last entries raised it up for me. “Dream House as Memory.”
Machado is brilliant and her writing is important. There is an element of revenge here but also of documentation. I believe her. She did not have to work so hard to prove her experiences to me.
“It’s not radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity.”
She did not need to prove that abuse is also possible between women lovers, I understand that. I have seen abuse. The seduction and gaslighting she so deliberately documents through her own experience and popular culture with an episode of Star Trek and Alice’s adventures. Readers must be forgiven for thinking again and agin: Why is she still there? Why does she come back? Again? Though Machado fails to fully explore the why, the answer is common enough. We believe the abuse is what we deserve.
The last entries saved this book for me. I was impatient throughout the second hundred pages, but she writes so well—I make this judgement as a writer. She is brilliant. I nearly did not finish because I disagree that queer abuse is different. From inside all abusive relationships are the same. It is only details that differ. It is strong relationships, constructive and kind relationships that [should] matter, and this is merely a sketch here. I wish she had the perspective and distance to tell me more of that story.
Perhaps in time she will.
I have tried to stay away from making political comments here. (Readers “unfollow” every time I do.) But Prince Andrew.
This is not about the disastrous interview on the BBC where the royal admitted to being “too honorable” but with no memory of abusing a child. I did not watch the interview. I cannot avoid the excerpts.
This is more basic. (My grandfather was born in England and his son, my father, was an historian. I had more than my share of British history as a child.) I will set aside just for now the immorality of British behavior in the world. My immediate anger is reserved for the assumption that anyone is born royal. The concept of royalty is at its base both immoral and unAmerican. Nobility and aristocracy are notions that rely on a simple, magical concept: God chose these people to be better than the rest of us.
Is it possible for an American to believe this?
While my country is obsessed with the individual, powerful people in my country are nevertheless earnest in their support of inherited rights.
I tried watching Merlin yesterday on Netflix because the series is leaving that streaming platform next month. So cute. Arthur is a spoiled brat, Merlin is initially magical without effort (I assume this changes as the series progresses), and all the young women look alike. The music is spritely and everything is charming and funny. Young adult fare. I paused the show when Merlin is put into stocks and fruit is thrown at his head. This was treated as comic relief. (I could hear my father sigh, his patient explanation of what happened when a person’s head was locked into stocks. No one would have wasted edible food and stones would have been throw. People sometimes died in the stocks.)
Every Disney princess film plays to this assumption of privilege by birth. Fathers are significant in most of these films, the choice of female villains is misogynistic, and the assumed beauty and inevitable ascendancy of the heroine are damaging to the character of impressionable children. How to reconcile American “rugged individualism” with the concept of royalty?
It cannot be done. It should not be attempted.
I have been thinking a great deal about the presumptions of power. About how we view the rich and powerful. About the Puritan faith that worldly success reflects God’s favor. That seems entirely counter to the ideals upon which our nation was later founded. (And which we have repeatedly failed to make manifest. What we believe is right vs. how we behave.)
Andrew apparently thinks he did well in the interview. He thinks his explanations and noblesse oblige were enough to excuse the photo with his fingers on the bare midriff of his accuser, his tour of the palace enough to excuse his lack of empathy, his precise memory of pizza and his four days spent in the mansion of convicted child molester excused because sex “is a positive act” for men.
But no. This is about power and the presumptions of power.
I have tried to recall if my father every called me, as so many fathers have, “princess”? Perhaps. I recall him calling me, in rare and precious incidents, “daughter-of-mine.” It felt likely an honorary title, that I had earned that designation. As a nation we are founded on the principle that each person earns their way. Yet here we are rewarding torture as if it were comic relief. Making birthright preeminent rather than accomplishment. Admiring bullies and power over decency and righteousness.
We should do better. We should feel determined to do better.
The sky is pink in the east this morning.
There is a scene early in Grand Canyon (1991) where the car of an immigration lawyer, Mack (played by Kevin Klein) dies in a neighborhood he doesn’t know. He calls for a tow, but in the meantime a group of young men begin harassing him. Danny Glover’s character, Simon, shows up and calmly begins his job, asking about the car, hooking it up to his truck. Then he takes aside Rocstar, the leader of the young men. “Am I talking to the right man?” Skip ahead in the video to about minute 4 to find the scene. The really good part begins with Simon saying, “Man . . .”
Simon : I’ve gotta ask you for a favor. Let me go my way here. This truck’s my responsibility, and now that the car’s hooked up to it, it’s my responsibility too.
Rocstar : Do you think I’m stupid? Just answer that question first.
Simon : Look, I don’t know nothing about you; you don’t know nothing about me. I don’t know if you’re stupid, or some kind of genius. All I know is that I need to get out of here, and you got the gun. So I’m asking you, for the second time, let me go my way here.
Rocstar : I’m gonna grant you that favor, and I’m gonna expect you to remember it if we ever meet again. But tell me this, are you asking me as a sign of respect, or are you asking because I’ve got the gun?
Simon : Man, the world ain’t supposed to work like this. I mean, maybe you don’t know that yet. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without having to ask you if I can. That dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything is supposed to be different than it is.
Rocstar : So what’s your answer?
Simon : You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.
Rocstar : That’s what I thought: no gun, no respect. That’s why I always got the gun.
It’s a great film, truly, but if you haven’t ever watched it or haven’t watched it recently, you might assume the story is dated. Stop for a moment, and consider the metaphor working here. [Or better, consider it an analogy, and also be sure to read the first comment below.] A weak person demands respect. Imagine Kim Jong Un is playing the part of Rocstar. A weak actor in a powerful world, striding to bully his way into respect. His position on the world stage makes more sense. [It’s far from moral, but understandable.]
That works, doesn’t it?
Now go the next step. Trump as Rocstar, accustomed to having what he wants by pushing others around? Maybe, except like Kim Jong Un he’s never had to reach for power, it has always belonged to him, a self-promoting, entitled person from the day he was born.
Try this: Maybe see how the concept of leverage and threats plays out with the abuse of any power, with the assumption that a right to act is automatic when there is the capacity to act. I can, therefore I should?
Surely not.
The way I see the lesson: The world is not supposed to work this way. Power is not supposed to trump liberty and justice for all. We are supposed to be better than that. Because we have the strength does not mean it’s moral to bully others. Just because we can.
Or, as my husband likes to joke: Didn’t you ever go to Sunday school? Or Temple, or the Mosque, or to your room for failing to listen to your parents explain why you should be forgiving and kind to others.
Surely someone taught us better?
I hear the voices saying, no, they didn’t. Some people do not operate that way and that’s why the rest of us cannot either. I think we might be wrong there too. We were all taught to behave ethically, only some of us find that inconvenient. Some of us did not listen at all. Some of us even believe our reasons or excuses for our deplorable actions. We get away with things we shouldn’t and then decide that getting away with evil makes it okay.
Getting away with it does not make it right.
The Grand Canyon is bigger than we are, grander in every way. Grand beyond our capacity to comprehend. It was born long before we were and should live long after we are gone. It should humble us, engulf our egos, and allow us to regain perspective.
Book Scales by Quint Buchholz (1991)
So now it’s Junot Díaz accused of abusive behaviors toward women.* I wish I could say I was surprised.
Karina Maria Cabrera wrestled with how to respond to the news, with how to reconcile her own ugly experience with Diaz and her indoctrinated impulse to make excuses for him, and to resent the accuser who called him out. In “The Reckoning: What Junot Díaz Teaches Us About Internalized Misogyny” she writes:
“I had to reevaluate my anger towards Clemmons and examine why I wanted—for even a brief second—to justify Díaz’s actions. I told my mom about wanting to write about my reaction; she metaphorically clutched her pearls and said ‘No. Don’t do that! If you do, you better say he was very respectful towards you. Don’t add flames to the fire.’
“That’s when it clicked: The root of the issue is in the way women are wired to think. It is a systematic modus operandi that has been passed down to us from generation to generation. . . .
“As a child, I did not always feel protected, because we were taught to ‘save face.’ But I want my daughter to feel protected, and I want her daughter to feel empowered, and I want her daughter to feel invincible. If that means going against the grain and saving ourselves instead of saving face, then that’s exactly what we should do.”
Today, we can tell our stories and the stories can be believed. We are willing to hear voices and read beyond the chosen perspectives I was offered as a child.
As a student, the only novels ever assigned to me were written by men. Anne Frank was still part of the public school canon, but all the fiction was by white men such as Hemingway, Goldman, Twain. This barely changed in graduate school. A college class on African Arts (literature, music, visual art) gave me Things Fall Apart, but my MFA program gave me the excellent short stories of Ron Carlson and Stuart Dybek. I had to find women such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dorothy Sayers, Alice Munro, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison on my own. A student gave me Middlemarch. There is an enormous list of authors, men and women of many races, ethnicities, nationalities, and sexual orientations I can recommend. My shelves (and I have thousands of books) represent a huge range of perspectives, but I hope there is nothing bigoted or deliberately cruel pressing up against my favorites.
At the top of this post there should be an image of great authors representing a range of voices instead of merely the ones I was taught. I tried to find such a collage of authors. I searched a thousand images and mostly found composites of author images are white and male. (For composers too.) I nearly chose Virginia Wolf in the midst of 29 white men. Where is George Elliot? Where is Jane Austen? Linda Hogan? Le Guin? Erdrich? Shields? Silko? Or in alphabetical order—Atwood, Byatt, Chopin, Cisneros, Drabble . . .
We need more. More voices. Unheard voices.
Some much-praised authors wear thin. As a woman I find that my existence barely registers in the brilliant novels of Cormac McCarthy. I read the Border Trilogy and that was enough. Some authors are so hostile toward women, I have avoided their work altogether. Juno Díaz was one of those. I did try. My impression was not so unreasonable. I felt my existence demeaned. I set it down. Don’t I already get that every day of my life, everywhere I look?
Sometimes it is possible to see it coming.
Recent news of Alexie’s abuse of women, confirmation by no less than Joy Harjo that complaints have been ongoing for years, and especially his semi-apology should not surprise anyone either sheers. It is clear in his memoir that his perception of suffering is entirely selfish. At no point in this memoir does he reveal any depth of appreciation for the suffering or pain of anyone but himself. Despite his skill as a writer, I do not understood the apparent widespread “love” of this memoir. His short stories are often brilliant and that is why I have slogged through his earlier unfortunate novels.
“Believe me, believe me, believe me.” Ever since I read Sherman Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, the song has been running through my head. You could find it on YouTube, but if Dusty Springfield’s voice doesn’t come right up out of your memory, best to leave it alone. You may find yourself walking in time to the tune for the next few days. Maybe that isn’t so bad. It’s a great old song.
Alexie’s memoir is likely to stick around in my head for a while too. I don’t have much in common with Alexie since he is an “urban Indian” and a man and fifteen years younger than I am. He was raised poor and on a reservation and, while I was raised on a dirt road with open ditches and poverty all around me. My parents chose that house because the schools were good. My father was also an alcoholic. Maybe. But he worked and brought home his paycheck. We always had milk in the house, even if it was powdered. He died. I loved him very much. We have that in common. But I am a woman and a mother and faithful to my marriage. I often blame myself for my parenting mistakes. We might have that in common. Sherman blames his mother.
The memoir offers short vignettes, longer scenes, words cut into lines and stanzas that sometimes are poems and sometimes have other business. It began strong, but ultimately this book does not reveal the wisdom of hindsight or the generosity of objectivity or compassion. This is thrashing. This is struggle. This is aggressive self defense.
I loved Sherman’s first collection of short stories. My friend Kathie Werner lent me her ARC and we invited him to talk to my high school students and to read in Cannon Beach based on that book. We are a largely rural and poor community. Alexie and his bride stopped off for these events on the Oregon coast before completing their journey home after their honeymoon in Hawaii.
Disclosure: I should mention that I have read his books, that my friend teaches The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which has considerable connection to Alexie’s real life, that when I was teaching literature I taught his short stories, and this author made my husband cry. I bear a grudge concerning that last. It is unfair, probably, but I have not forgiven Sherman Alexie any more than he has forgiven his mother. But then, Alexie is not in my family. I was not raised in poverty, but my husband was. I am not always a kind person, but my husband nearly always is. So I am a skeptic when it comes to Sherman Alexie. I am a fan, but I do not trust him.
The strength in this memoir is the writing itself, which is sometimes brilliant and occasionally even humble and honest. Too often he is defensive. Mostly he is churning with guilt and anger and not managing any forward movement. He is eager to label himself bipolar. He expresses tremendous guilt and resentment for his estrangement from his mother, for not speaking to her for days and weeks and even years at a time. But he blames her for it. Like many children of bad fathers, he blames his mother for his sad childhood. As a woman and a mother myself and not his, I find that bizarre. I take it too personally, you might think. I am a feminist and a class warrior. I am also weary of people who hold their mothers responsible for all the sorrow in their childhood.
Big message here: Everybody’s mother dies. None of us is perfect.
Alexie’s mother stopped drinking when he was a little child and struggled to support her children and her husband. She also moved onto the living room couch, a move she explains as a step up from memories of being crowded in bed with siblings. At least sleeping on the couch, on a succession of couches, she did not have to share. Alexie accepts and even defends this explanation. I wonder that he never considers the likelihood that she no longer wanted to sleep with her drunken husband, that she did not want to take a chance on another pregnancy? That while she may have still cared for Sherman Senior, she was not willing to sleep with him stinking of “alcohol and vomit and piss and shit”?
Sherman Alexie is an aggressive and angry man. He cannot stand outside himself in order to see his experiences fairly. He has suffered in his life, he has suffered terribly, and perhaps that is why he is quick to anger and quick to exact revenge for any real or imagined slight. My impulse is to call his attacks in this book “counting coup” but counting coup is honorable, a show of courage and skill. These attacks are self-justifying, snarky, and often unfair. Sometimes they are not even skillfully written.
I was still young when I first met him, and Alexie was much younger with several books of poetry and only that first collection of fiction when he told my students he wrote prose for the money. If he didn’t need to sell his work he would stick to poetry. That might be the major difference between us.
Like his mother, I am a quilter. My father died in 1986 and my mother died in 2007, a week after graduation from my MFA program. After my mother died I grieved. Everything went dull and even my writing withered for a time. My husband and I had cared for her in her last five years. When she apologized to me: “I was mean to you” I responded with absolute sincerity that she never was. But she was. She did hurt me. She bullied me and criticized and was an imperfect mother. She was also kind and helpful and supportive in most ways. It took some time after her death for me to appreciate that this is the best anyone might hope for.
According to this memoir, Lilian Alexie could be kind and supportive but also verbally combative and abusive. When Alexie’s good friend died his father played hoops with him for hours. When, days later, he was still crying in his room, his mother opened his door and told him to snap out of it. He took his father’s action as proof of love and his mother’s as proof of cruelty. But which one got him out of bed?
Once or twice a year, Lilian would take it into her head to vacuum in the middle of the night. According to Alexie, this was completely inconsiderate and unbearable since woke everyone in the house. One night, because he was the strong kid willing to stand up to his mother, Alexie got out of bed, grabbed the vacuum and threw it out the door. Alexis here, as in nearly every scene, is the hero of his story. When I read this vignette, I sided with his mother. Who else ever bothered to vacuum? Who else was working, supporting the family, cooking and cleaning? She is the one who stayed. Alexis ran away and has never really returned. He might at least credit her for her willingness to remain with her family, even if chooses to question her motives.
Immediately after her husband died, Joan Didion wrote her memoir: The Year of Magical Thinking. After a lifetime of journalism and research, Didion did what she had always done. She reported with objectivity and poetry about her experience. The result is truthful and beautiful and a powerful exploration of loss and death.
Alexie has not done so well. He is too angry and guilty, eager to assign blame and to score points on every person who ever hurt his feelings. He is angry at the man who abused him as a child (me too). He wants everyone in the audience to admire and cheer him, not just most. He is also angry at the SW Native American woman who called him out for his claim to be the voice of all Indians. It was a claim he made in my classroom when he was still in his twenties and later speaking on a panel of people about shared issues of people of color. If Sherman Alexie is to be believed, his suffering is the worst, his people have suffered the most, no one else knows the sorrow he has seem. No one but he has the courage to say it. Only he can tell truth. These feelings are not entirely unjustified, but they get in the way. He has been angry for all this time.
I was put off that he quoted liberally from another Native American author without once naming his source, or even revealing that his rant was not in his own words but the borrowed words of another. The man has an amazing memory, but even I recognized long passages from Vine Deloria.
He claims his mother was the last Spokane fluent in the language, but that he never learned a single word of that language. I mentioned that to my husband, who found both claims unlikely. For a while in the 1970s, my husband was one of a handful of fluent speakers of Puget Coast Salish. During a reading he said a name to Sherman Alexie, the name of a Spokane Indian, and my husband pronounced it perfectly. Sherman walked close and demanded, “What did you say?” but my husband would not repeat it. “I have some naked pictures of your mother,” Alexie said. “I would like to see them,” my husband said. His mother had recently died. Two men wounding each other.
I have been paying attention since. Sherman Alexie and I have several mutual friends and acquaintances. Perhaps he is a wonderful father and devoted (if unfaithful) husband, but he was a neglectful son and he is not a man to tangle with unless you are prepared to bleed. None of us is perfect and most of us have a list of actions we are not proud of, but Alexie might do better to comes to terms with his own failures and his particular cruelty while criticizing his mother for similar behavior.
Like most memoirists, Alexie concedes that his version of events may not parallel versions told by others. Mary Karr warns at the beginning of Liar’s Club that her memories are not the same as her sister’s and mother’s. Mary McCarthy offers a similar disclaimer in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. In his case, Alexie seems to allow for considerable stretchers. His is a memoir of personal convenience, occasionally confessional, but more often on the attack.
Alexie wrote this book and saw it published in the two years following his mother’s death at 78. He also had brain surgery. All of this is too quick. Unlike Didion, he does not have a lifetime habit allowing him to stand apart from his experience in order to tell his story objectively. He does not even try. These are powerful words, considerable rambling, some poetry, and some prose broken into lines and stanzas in a pretense of poetry. There is self-justification and enough fury and blame to waste what little insight this brilliant author might otherwise have shared.
Alexie declares himself an “urban Indian” in a way that is defensive and tough. He had a hard life and survived to move away. He has kept himself strong by keeping apart. There is a lot more guilt here. He needs to forgive his mother. More than that, he needs to forgive himself before he can recognize that he owes her more than forgiveness. She let him out.
He claims he is deliberately repetitive. He claims a lot of things here.
If readers take Alexie at his word, they might find a touching if erratic story of a heartbroken son struggling to come to terms with the death of his “complicated” mother. This book was promoted as a memoir about Alexie’s mother, about grief and family and loss and forgiveness. I found it mostly about getting even.
On the last page: “I don’t know how or when / My grieving will end, but I’m always / Relearning how to be human again.” I speak from experience: The grieving does not end, and the year or so after that loss there is almost no sense to it at all.
My advice to readers: Do not read this or his awful novels. Read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian which is a circuit of stories. Read the short stories and the poetry. Let Alexie come back in twenty years and write about his mother. At the least he may find some kindness. Maybe the truth isn’t funny, and Alexie wants that sharp wit like a stick to poke us. Maybe tenderness makes us vulnerable. It requires a difference sort of courage than a streetlight.
Believe him?
Like too many powerful men, he used his position and power to abuse women. This is how it goes. Men are abused, most often by other men, and then they take out their pain on women, and too often, we women accept it. It’s what we have been socialized to do.
I saw an on-air interview of Alexie with with Tavis Smiley where they talked about his memoir. They were soft-spoken and charming, but I found it impossible to believe either of them. Then Smiley himself was yanked from the air in response to accusations of abuse.
Who do I believe? Sometimes I trust my impressions. I trust my gut. I refuse to blame myself. And I prefer, when I get right down to it, reading authors who seem not to hate me.
*Junot Diaz Accused of Misconduct, and Responds, “I Take Responsibility for My Past”. “On Saturday, the Sydney Writers’ Festival said that Diaz had withdrawn from his remaining scheduled appearances at the event. The organizers emphasized their committment to providing a ‘supportive and safe environment for our authors and audiences alike.’ They noted the line in Diaz’s recent New Yorker essay—’Eventually the past finds you’—and stated, ‘As for so many in positions of power, the moment to reckon with the consequences of past behavior has arrived.’ “—Publishers Lunch
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 