From Mea Culpa to Me Too

I am teaching Sherman Alexie’s collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in my Native American literature class the week the sexual harassment scandal breaks. Feeling as if I must come clean by acknowledging these developments, I photocopy the Jezebel article, much of which is screencaps of Litsa Dremousis’ Twitter feed. It’s less an article than the echoes of a blown whistle.

I fear the weight that the allegations will throw over our 80-minute seminar, so I write “Jezebel” mysteriously as the fourth and last agenda item for the day. By postponing the inevitable, I put myself in the position of dissembling, of running the first hour of this class as if all is normal. We begin, as has been our pattern for this book, with making little plot maps on index cards for each story we have read, seeking to understand their mechanisms of climax, resolution, and revelation.

Then we take all the cards for all the stories we’ve read and sort them into piles or continuums. If this whole exercise sounds like a thinly disguised plot review, you are not far off: sometimes even my upper-level English classes feel like an exercise in dragging reading comprehension out of half the class by sheer force of will.

But this kind of slow, deliberate tracking of connections can yield insights that my most voracious and adoring previous readings did not. Just last week, thanks to our index cards and chronologies, I had arrived at a new theory, aligning details that had escaped me on all those other readings: Jimmy, James Many Horses from “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” is the baby James from “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation,” the child thrown from the window of a burning house by his father Frank Many Horses onto his head and raised by the man who almost caught him. I didn’t know it was possible for my love of either story to increase, but as these two stories snapped into alignment, they both lifted my heart a little more. In “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother,” the narrator maintains faith in his son James’ prescience even after years of muteness suggest he has been terribly brain-damaged in his fall, thus walking an ambiguous line between fatherly pride and delusion. Though he reports that James begins speaking, finally, at age six, the other characters and the reader don’t quite know whether to believe him. Bring the story alongside “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” though, and the father’s faith is proved merited. Jimmy’s inability to shut up is not just a fatal flaw but a miraculous gift wrested from the world’s cruelty.

After last Thursday’s elation, here I am on Tuesday with the Jezebel articles stacked guiltily face down on the desk behind me. After we finish the plot maps, we work together to sort the cards. I have tried to come up with a few new prompts for each meeting, asking things like: Who is narrating? What’s the overall chronology? Which stories are most hopeful?

Today one of my students offers the question, “Which ones have female characters?” We bend over the cards. Strong and well-developed female characters like the Aunt in “The Fun House” or Norma in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” and “Somebody Kept Saying Powwow” are rare, but women do at least appear in most of the stories. I propose we try the Bechdel test: does this story have two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man?

Not one story passes.

Now I get an inkling of it: perhaps Alexie was always just as advertised. The male narrators and main characters in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven are alcoholic, emotionally inarticulate when it matters, and occasionally terribly cruel.

In the story, “Amusements,” the narrator Victor places an incoherently drunk Spokane man on a roller coaster and leaves him vomiting under the gaze of laughing white carnival-goers and hostile security guards. The story ends when Victor flees into a hall of mirrors and feels the sensation of “the folding shut of the good part of [his] past.”

Victor knows he is lost to himself because he saw Dirty Joe in need of care and betrayed him instead. Somehow this clarity of self-reflection produced hope in me and my students that Victor would find his way back to goodness and become the man he knows he could be.

Alexie’s ability to write a character capable of such self-conviction allowed us to imagine that Alexie lived in that goodness, but he never promised us that, did he?  I am reminded of Fuckhead, the narrator of Denis Johnson’s famous short story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” who turns to the reader at the last sentence, and, in the place where the narrative structure begs for a moment of revelation, tosses out, “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

I have been this ridiculous person through more than a decade of teaching and loving Alexie. (I nearly deleted this metonym, this habit of writing “Alexie” when I mean “Alexie’s work,” but I really do mean I loved Alexie, don’t I?)  I feel as if I have betrayed my students by holding this man and his work out to them.

At last comes the moment to hand out the article. I let the class read, and then invite my students to reflect with me upon what the revelations mean for teaching Alexie’s work in the future. Should I stop?  Should I replace these books with books by writers who have not exploited, intimidated and held back female colleagues?

My students are not all that upset. They show a strong willingness to separate the work from the man and quickly present literary-historical significance as an argument for continuing to teach Alexie’s work. They are disappointed but not surprised. One student conflates the allegations of harassment with rape allegations and makes the same argument anyway, as if rape is all she ever expected from a public figure.

I leave the classroom disappointed by the discussion. I’m the only one in agony, and my students are not going to wrestle this out for me.

Alexie’s fall strikes home for me because in some ways I wound up here—a white Americanist generalist who leapt eagerly to teach the Native American literature class when my dean was on the point of mothballing it—because of Alexie. He was the only Native American writer I read as an undergraduate. Over the years, he led me to others. I first read an Alexie story in an MFA-style fiction workshop my Junior year. Void of contexts like indigenous history or the Native American Literary Renaissance, he was presented to us as exemplary for his humor, his breath-straining titles, his pitch-perfect tonal control and ironic distance in the post-modernist bad boy tradition of Donald Barthelme, Denis Johnson, and my own professor. In retrospect, it is no surprise that the advisor who slapped my ass at my thesis reading and handed me off seamlessly to the MFA director who groped half the cohort chose Alexie to be in his boys’ club.

The creeps all know and support each other.

As I teach first-year composition that afternoon, the lesson is related to source documentation for research papers. But facing me from the back wall of the classroom are colorful fair copies of the list poems my students wrote in response to a moment near the end of Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I was so proud of their poems; students from my other classes couldn’t resist coming to read them. Now I want to tear them down. They’re inspired by that moment where Arnold says:

     I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American      immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. And the tribe of cartoonists…

He goes on for fourteen “tribes.”  The “I realized” that starts off this passage signals a moment of revelation: Here Junior sums up what he now knows. It’s a moment freighted with meaning, as in, it unfolds with all the subtlety of a fourteen-car freight train. And I was okay with that. I valued this book as a teaching text because it has so many soapbox moments, ready-made thesis statements that invite students to assemble constellations of other text evidence around them to produce their own readings of the novel: rich and infinitely varied.

This passage had been making a liar out of me for years. I encouraged students to engage with it and write their own list poems in response because the poetic form is approachable and can produce such good results, but I was deeply skeptical of what’s going on in the passage itself. Junior’s declaration serves as a profoundly unradical moment, like the traditional marriage at the end of a Shakespeare comedy that re-contains all those wild flights of cross-dressing and female empowerment. No one ever faced genocide for loving salsa, but Alexie’s list places identities with profound social consequences–Spokane identity; poverty–on par with chosen and unstigmatized categories like being a cartoonist or a basketball player or a “tortilla chips-and-salsa lover.”

There are many moments when Alexie’s novel challenges its readers about racism, classism, systemic injustice, and cultural appropriation. My white students especially often seem to experience the “tribe of” passage as an olive branch extended to them by Alexie after so much uncomfortable prodding. I mistrust it because it’s placating.

And yet. Alexie’s long list is a vital reminder that identity is intersectional and no one should be reduced to a single identity marker. In its eagerness to welcome everyone into a “tribe,” Alexie’s poem opens up space for readers to think of themselves as having multiple identities, too, and to dream of living in a world where all those identities are honored.

When I asked my students to write their own list poems in response, they shone. Using the stem, “I belong to the tribe of,” they proclaimed their struggles, their heritage, their politics, sexuality, and dreams. I have room to teach just one novel in the yearlong first-year writing sequence and I used The Absolutely True Diary because, though it’s about a high-schooler, I have found no book that better mirrors the alienation and precarity of venturing into the world as a low-income, first-generation college student. This book had a power to call my students forward to trust me and each other with sacred parts of themselves. Every year, someone came out. Every year, I learned something lovely about my students. This year, I found an unfamiliar word–philomath, lover of learning–in a student’s list and learned that I belong to this tribe, too.

Alexie called forth this beauty from my students, and all the while, he wasn’t worthy of their trust. He wasn’t safe.

Another conversation about Alexie’s misdeeds occurs organically in my Literary Criticism class at the end of the day. Students in that class had read Alexie with me as first-years up to two years before, had had this experience of letting Alexie help us forge a classroom community of mutual care. Their agonized groans and stricken expressions mirror my own reactions. Like me, they’d been carrying an idealized Alexie in their hearts like a friend, perking their ears to his new work and bringing me news items and radio stories about his career. And now this. They feel the news has taken something from them.

I am still wrestling it out that night with my husband on the long, dark, and icy drive home from our weekly martial arts class in Marquette. I sent him the audiobook of Alexie reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian early in our friendship, just as it tipped over into courtship. I dropped that book in the mail like it was a guidebook to my values, a window into my life’s work. I believe that education can be a ladder to our dreams. I believe that people can love each other across their differences. He took to the book as I hoped he would, laughed through it with his daughter, perhaps even understood what I meant by sending it to him. So the rural college professor courted the Detroit steelworker.

There are still fifty miles of dark road ahead of us, and the conversation churns, seeming only to roil up new regrets. He expresses sorrow for what we lose in Alexie as a model for craft and skill if the world turns its back on him. We are skating the thin ice of a marriage across political difference, the libertarian and the left-of-liberal. His media feed algorithms have spent the past few weeks telling him that Me Too is a witch-hunt, but I can’t blame him for wanting to snatch Alexie back from its flames. I wish I could, too. Or, rather, I wish Alexie hadn’t deserved this fall. Is there any way this isn’t true? he asks. I asked myself that, too. I am awaiting the investigative piece from NPR; I am awaiting a statement from Alexie, but I am not optimistic.

Our conversation circles outward in anecdote and analogy. I recall academic mentors whose behavior toward me or my peers had veered into sexual harassment. As we speak, there’s an awaiting tension in me, a nearness to an abyss. I want my husband to see Alexie’s behavior as a big deal. A failure to do so would feel like a failure to have my back. I feel this way even though I have continued to maintain politeness and even honor some of the harassers in my own life for the kind things they did for me when they weren’t groping me. But tonight, after Alexie, during Me Too, it feels important to set them all beyond the pale.

As a rhetorical technique, “How would you feel if this affected your wife, mother, daughter, or other female property?” is a load of nonsense, an appeal to empathy pitched for the fatally narcissistic. But in the arc of a lifetime, a man can learn a lot from daughters. I know that the experience of raising two daughters alone helped my beloved grow into the beliefs and convictions that made him feminist in all but name long before we met.

“Would you study martial arts with someone you couldn’t trust to teach the girls?” I ask.

In this shared martial arts world, we both recognize how it narrows women’s opportunities when some teachers can only safely mentor men. And from those teachers, he is firm, even men should turn their backs.

And this is our answer, isn’t it?  A clear answer can still be a painful one. My mind is already running over my bookshelves and long lists of possible replacement texts for my first-years, but the community we will build around those texts is an as-yet unknown alchemy. I still feel trapped by my Alexie quandary, by the car and the darkness and the road that demands attention and could turn slick and perilous at any moment.

Giving up on talk, we turn to an audiobook, picking up where we left off with Louise Erdrich reading her recent novel, LaRose. My Native American literature class read it some weeks ago, but I’m revisiting it now with him. In a few minutes we come to a passage that I think of as one of the tenderest descriptions of love ever penned. In it Wolfred imagines how he will care for the body of LaRose, his wife:

He closed his eyes, saw himself mixing a little mud up with his fingers. He would touch her face, smear the mud across her cheeks, down her nose, across her forehead, the blunt tip of her chin. He didn’t want his beloved to be hurt in the next life, by men, the way she had been in this life.

In imagining the gesture, Wolfred maps the treasured facial features he plans to obscure and recalls a past gesture when he strove unsuccessfully to prevent the girl LaRose’s rape by the fur trader Mackinnon. In LaRose’s adulthood, the two built a beautiful life despite the way the traumas of rape and family violence marked and stalked her. Wolfred’s love understood, acknowledged, and was utterly and tenderly present for her trauma.

Sometimes we aim far, far too low with our lessons.

I once had a flashback in my husband’s arms. I gritted my will and wished it away. It would pass; we would make love. My will and willingness remained even if my mind’s eye had, briefly, betrayed me.

He took his lips from mine and asked if I was all right. I crushed myself closer into his arms, stunned, seen.

Later, afterwards, cooing and wondering, I asked him how he’d known. “I don’t know. I just felt your energy change,” he said.

I still think back on this moment in awe. What allowed him to feel the cold lightning of that other moment running through my blood?  The empathetic leap involved nearly denies the possibility of articulability; the twice-naked intimacy of the setting makes it yet more difficult for me to write of it, but I know I must try because I walked this earth for more than thirty years without imagining that I might be granted such care from this lover who asked for–who gently invited–my whole heart, wounds and all.

Our public conversation lags somewhere behind, out in the realm of establishing the basics of good bedroom manners like enthusiastic consent and ungrudging mutual responsibility for birth control and sexual health. It’s still seeking a negative peace, a no-rape truce between the sexes. This, of course, remains vital work, but it is triage work.

What if I asked more of the books I gave my heart to?  Instead of hoping only to see badly-behaving characters like Alexie’s Victor eloquently crucify themselves, what if I sought out texts that model tender and generative relationships?  I know they’re out there, a stealthy canon of tenderness, a library of ideas for how to be more than self-aware of being toxically masculine. Erdrich contributes one image in LaRose as Wolfred lives out his 19th-century clerk’s version of masculinity. Today’s luminous queer poet Danez Smith expresses similar nurturance in their poem, “Principles,” when they write:

      Oh lords, above us and within
      let us be useful to our neighbors
      & tender their wounds.

Smith’s words are the prayer of my heart. Not all our stories need to be of men with demons imperfectly held at bay. Some few might even teach us how to be, as Smith puts it, “more bandage than blade.”  For all that is wrong in this world, not all our forebears are monstrous. Some are tender, and we might yet learn to walk in their ways.
 
 
Coda

Soon it will be two years since February, 2018, when Me Too broke over Sherman Alexie. That February 28th, he issued a statement painting Litsa Dremousis as a jilted ex-lover, but admitting, in regards to his many other accusers, “There are women telling the truth about my behavior.”  He apologized to people he had hurt, and then he went quiet.

In an interview with Time in 2012, Alexie was invited to ponder, “Why… are there not more Sherman Alexies?”   By this the interviewer meant, why are there not other wildly successful Native American writers, a younger generation coming up behind?  Alexie did not take the opportunity to praise any lesser known writer. Instead, he quickly raised and then dismissed the idea that racism in the publishing industry was to blame.  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “Publishers would die if a manuscript came flying into their offices that reminded them of me or Louise Erdrich . . . They would be dancing. But it just hasn’t happened, and I don’t know why.”  This swift dismissal of the talents of other native writers came from a man who, by NPR’s account, solicited manuscripts from at least one up-and-coming indigenous poet as a prelude to soliciting sex, and who claims to “have no recollection of physically or verbally threatening anybody or their careers,” a nicety of phrasing that still admits the possible veracity of numerous accounts of such threats.

I could not continue to hold out Alexie to my students, nor ask them to buy forty copies of his book every spring.  It was easier, at the last, to turn my back on Alexie the man than it was to give up the Absolutely True Diary.  I had to mourn the way my students and I lived with the book and used it to help us know each other. At some very fundamental level, this is what fiction is for: practice caring about a character; learn to care about your neighbor.  This is the idealistic contract that brings me to work each day. In the end, these communities of readers are just another wider and more diffuse circle of trust that Alexie chose to violate. I wonder, as I so often do of violators, if he ever saw the beauty that was possible in that circle.

My first-year students and I now read Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson.  I try not to think of this text as a replacement for Alexie’s novel. It has its own entirely different strengths, among them a brave portrayal of a teenaged mother with ambivalent feelings towards her son who comes to terms with her new role and finds power in her identity in the Caribbean diaspora.  All of this takes place in a near-future dystopian Toronto plagued by drugs and healthcare inequality but enriched by resilient, cooperative multi-ethnic neighborhoods seeking to forge a new life in the ruins of the shattered old economy. I am still learning to guide my students down the many rich avenues for discussion that this book opens.

When my Native American literature class comes around again on its two-year cycle this spring, I will teach it without Alexie.  There, I don’t think I’ll miss him much. How could I, with a canon and a contemporary scene so rich? I will have Silko and Erdrich, of course, and also the life-affirming, intricate poetry of Margaret Noodin. I will have Rebecca Roanhorse’s post-apocalyptic novel Trail of Lightning with its tough female monster hunter and Stephen Graham Jones’ working-class werewolves in Mongrels, and the historiography of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and essays by Tiffany Midge in her inimitably titled collection, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s.  There will even be Antíkoni, Beth Piatote’s contemporary play that reimagines Antigone through the lens of Nez Perce characters considering the indigenous remains in museum holdings, just published this October in her collection The Beadworkers. Who needs another Sherman Alexie when there are so many other voices, writers who remake language, worlds and genres with a brilliance and courage that makes more room for all of us to live inside?