“They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as
gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew
out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten.
Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”
Tommy Orange’s bracing debut novel There There (published
June 2018) sets to reclaim the modern ‘Indian’ narrative (or to use the
politically correct term ‘Native American’), which has been hijacked by white
historians’ sanitized, faux-heroic tales and Hollywood’s binary portrayal of
the persecuted Natives as either stoic side-kicks or dreadful savages. Not that
Mr. Orange in this process of reclamation through stories perfectly delineates
the so-called ‘Indianness’. If anything, the author’s reflection on ‘being
Indian’ (using overlapping stories of 12 different characters) is punctuated
with a sense of bewilderment and obscurity. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you
what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us
here, right now, right in this kitchen”, a grandmother tells her teenage
grandson in the novel, which (as with any fraught identities) echoes ambivalent
feelings (scattered throughout the narration) when it comes to defining the
Native Americans’ plight in the ‘land of dreams’.
There There opens with a devastating prologue which laments
the blood-soaked history of Indians made possible by the Western invaders. The
prologue sharply remarks how these maimed, dispersed, mocked, cheated, exiled,
and neglected people were forced to define and re-define their identities for
centuries amidst the relentless assault waged by the winners’ wrongful
historical accounts. Orange’s righteous fury glows throughout this essay,
referencing to white America’s plethora of atrocities and subjugation tactics
directed towards the continent’s indigenous population.
Then the book jumps to introducing us a group
of loosely connected Native American residents from Oakland, California. This
largest cast of Indians – young and old, poor and middle-class, male and
female, naïve and worldly, alcoholics and master-degree holders – are all
preparing (for various reasons) for the national
powwow at the Oakland
Coliseum. The fates of these diverse voices gradually converge at the single
point of Oakland powwow. The powwow of 21
st century America itself
represents the ambivalent, evasive identity of an ‘Indian’, while the
characters struggle with ways to see themselves as an ‘authentic Indian’.
Orange’s narrative is free from mythologization,
sentimentality, stereotypes, and one-note sadness. On the outset, the
characters’ lives are beset with familiar issues (inflicted upon universally
among indigenous population by the victorious colonial powers) like alcoholism,
unemployment, underemployment, criminality, depression, and alienation. But the
way Orange empathetically reflects on these problems brilliantly touches upon
the pain of a history and a community, long suppressed by falsehoods. The
novel’s primarily introduced character Tony Loneman has fetal alcohol syndrome
(due to his pregnant mother’s drinking), which he calls ‘Drome’. “It’s the way
history lands on a face” Orange writes, absorbingly relating the bitterness of
the present with the subjugation of the past. Thomas Frank is a half-white,
half-Indian character, who struggles to reconcile with his dual identity. The
author sharply draws this inner conflict like this: “You’re from a people who took
and took and took and took. And from a people taken”.
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| Tommy Orange |
Dene Oxedene, who tries to honor his ethnicity and his
late-uncle by committing to an oral-history project, comments: “the reason no
one is interested in the Native story in general, it’s too sad, so sad it can’t
even be entertaining, but more importantly because of the way it’s been
portrayed, it looks pathetic, and we perpetuate that, but not, fuck that,
excuse my language, but it makes me mad,
because the whole picture is not pathetic, and the individual people and
stories that you come across are not pathetic or weak or in need of pity, and
there’s real passion there, and rage….” In fact, Orange’s individual tales
shatters the usual trajectory of ‘Indian’ narrative as demanded in Oxedene’s
meaningful lecture. Of course, these ostracized individuals’ plights are laced
with a note of sadness, yet Orange imbues a distinct mix of humor, rage, and
plaintiveness that it collectively offers a powerful, multi-layered ‘present
tense’ statement on the native life. If some stories could perpetuate wooden
stereotypes about a group of people then, Orange seems to say, the rightful
tales can also render the truth of experiences, often brushed aside by ignorant
historians and those with power.
There There delivers great emotional impact as it
accelerates towards the terrifying and tense climax. Nevertheless, the novel
doesn’t veer into melodrama, filled with mawkish reunions and eleventh-hour
epiphany. “Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies
even now”, writes the author in the incendiary prologue, and the truth of those
words is sorrowfully (and literally) demonstrated in the quick-cutting final
chapters. The unaddressed morbid effects of the abusive, genocidal, racist
history of a nation keeps revisiting even in the seemingly joyous 21st
century gathering, but still Tommy Orange withholds hope in the complex present
tense identity of the American ‘Indian’, who keeps on overturning the
preconceived notions through their challenging stories. Overall, There There is a blistering
examination of what it means to be a Native American who is “alive, modern, and
relevant.”
