Avoiding a Single Story

I probably should have called this post “Why I Still Teach Absolutely True Diary, Part 3.” As I noted in Part 1 of that post, one reason my students and many of my colleagues have taken Alexie off their syllabi is because Absolutely True Diary has become so famous that it threatens to become a “single story” of what it means to be a Native American in the 21st century. Debbie Reese believes that Alexie has “harmed the growth” of Native American books for young people. Her concern is that his books “feed mainstream expectations.” She goes on to say, “Alexie's books don't give readers the depth of understanding that they need to know who we are, what our histories have been, what we face on a daily basis, and what gives us the strength to carry on.”

Reese is speaking her truth here, and I respect her for it. We need her voice. However, in light of the challenge to avoid a single story, I have to question her pronouns—whom does she include in her “we” and “our” and “us” and whom does she exclude? Alexie’s book seems to be all about what his character faces on a daily basis, and what gives him the strength to carry on. It’s a story of a boy who feels like he needs to leave the reservation in order to develop the academic talents he values, and that he sees as necessary to his survival. In our discussions about his choices, my students and I talk about the relative reliability of a narrative that calls itself an “absolutely true diary,” and how defensive that sounds, and are reminded, especially after reading Mike Cadden’s “The Irony of Narration in the Young Adult Novel,” that all first-person accounts are somewhat unreliable, or at least limited.

We also read Junior’s story against Alexie’s mixed media poem, “Tuxedo with Eagle Feathers,” where he objects to what I might call cultural essentialism as a framework for identity. In that work, he says “I wasn’t saved by the separation of cultures; I was reborn in the collision of cultures.” In writing his free-form sonnet, he asks, “If I find it pleasurable to (imperfectly) mimic white masters then what tribal elders have I betrayed? If I quote Frost from memory faster than I recall powwow songs, then what blank or free or formal verse should I call mine? I claim all of it; Hunger is my crime.” Junior is similarly hungry, and his decision costs him; he grieves the situation on the reservation, the disparity of opportunity, but, like Alexie, he ultimately finds a blend of cultures, a blend of traits to be what enables him not only to survive, but to thrive.

If I’m reading the subtext of Reese’s objections correctly, it’s this assimilative stance that she finds most harmful to her project of promoting a kind of literary nationalism, wherein her “we” has a more monolithic view of what it means to be Native American. But I think Alexie’s blended approach is a stance that today’s teenagers benefit from having as a viable option. So many of our students are living between two or three or more cultures; Alexie’s book presents one model of how an identity can be negotiated under those circumstances. My syllabus contains other models: both Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost, for instance, more than suggest that an assimilationist stance is a betrayal that can be alternately ridiculous, morally damaging, or dangerous. Interestingly, a student related a story about a Chinese-American girl she nannies for who hated the ending of American Born Chinese, asking “why can’t he be both? Why does he have to choose?” This is a person who needs another type of story, one more like the one Alexie offers. We also read Thomas M. Yeahpau’s X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape. While Yeahpau also addresses assimilation, he sees it as more of a tragic loss, a decimation of a culture that is taking its young people down with it. That book runs on irony and grief, and my students find it hard to like, mostly because it doesn’t end on a hopeful note, and they aren’t sure what to do with Yeahpau’s deeply grim humor. The book demands that readers “better recognize,” like the character Marlon, that growing up angry and without positive role models is hard, but that losing respect for your cultural traditions can mean losing the best part of yourself. In the end, though, facing your responsibilities in a changed and changing world is better than the alternative of disappearing into a fog of drugs and alcohol. And still, you will always be a little haunted by what you leave behind.

In the end, I will keep on teaching these books because I believe that kids develop their identities in dialogue with the models their cultures make available to them. And I think the more models, the better. While these books contain hard lessons with painful consequences and often ambivalent messages that we have to talk through, I don’t want us to only offer books full of well-behaved teens making good decisions, wherein “good” has a single, adult-determined definition. To me, the “danger of a single story” is fast becoming the danger of single critical or cultural perspective, a single way of thinking about an issue that devolves into a right and a wrong way of being in this complicated world. I see my job as a professor as an opportunity to provide an array of lamps that light the way into many possible futures.