Why I Still Teach Absolutely True Diary, Part One

I understand why many people have stopped teaching Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. Many of my students, most of whom are going to be high school teachers, feel that his behavior toward women makes teaching his books unacceptable. They cite good reasons: first, that young readers tend to take the authors of their favorite books as role models; second, that Alexie's book is so widely taught that it threatens to become a "single story" of what it means to be Native in the twenty-first century, and there are other books that are just as good; third, that removing it from the curriculum is a just punishment for Alexie's bad behavior; and fourth, that removing it helps them stand in solidarity with the MeToo movement and show students that this is an accessible form of activism and staying true to one's values.

But other students disagree. They cite good reasons as well: first, that it is possible to separate an artist from his or her art, and second, that if we are to eliminate all work from all writers who have behaved in ways anyone finds objectionable and even abhorrent, we'll have to eliminate a lot of texts that express important truths about what it means to be human.

We also did some research on what Alexie was actually accused of, and that generated some interesting perspectives. In particular, we read the NPR article slowly and critically, with the contextual understanding that, of the nine women the reporter interviewed, he or she likely chose the experiences that made the best (meaning most condemnatory) stories to include in the article. In each of the cases reported in that article, Alexie is accused of making an advance, being rebuffed, trying again after the woman said no, and then, when he is rebuffed again, walking away. We dug in to those scenarios, asking what metanarratives enabled and normalized the patterns of behavior. How many stories had they experienced (and loved) where the male is the initiator of physical contact, the woman is frightened and/or coy at first, and then the man pushes until the woman says a more definitive yes or no? In other words, to what degree are we all complicit in enjoying, perpetuating, and occasionally enacting that story of the way romance is "supposed" to go? Do we know of counternarratives? Do we enjoy and enact them freely? And in the end, would we have, after being uncomfortable with the way a man behaves in public, gone to that man's hotel room in private? And had another sexual encounter with him subsequently, as the woman admits to doing? It seems that while Alexie behaved boorishly, he did not rape or intentionally threaten the women, even though at least one of the women felt threatened (but not threatened enough to walk away in the lobby of the hotel). In our discussions, I expressed that I want women to be empowered, but that starts with understanding what ideologies have shaped their expectations, and knowing their own limits and desires as well as expecting men to know theirs. And while no woman or man deserves to be assaulted, I asked them to consider (and perhaps reject) the analogy to the way insurance companies handle traffic accidents--the accident may have been 90% the fault of one of the drivers, but the other 10% may not be so clearly defined.

We went on. It seems clear that the women in the report were star-struck by Alexie's offer to read their work and help them get it out in the world--they developed "personal relationships" with him on that basis. Nowhere does the article suggest that these women were offering payment for this mentoring work; they just complained when it wasn't forthcoming. This is a problem in several respects. Clearly, Alexie was using his star power to enact high school fantasies. Just as clearly, these women were expecting him to donate his time to advance their careers, so might we say that they were trying to use him as well? We had recently read Anya's Ghost, where Elizabeth Standard is willing to put up with her boyfriend Sean's infidelity because being known publicly as his girlfriend was worth it to her. Eeuw...but how different is the case of women who cultivate a personal relationship for professional reasons? This is a toughie, because while Alexie was using sex as a commodity, the women were thinking about time, expertise, and star power in a similar way, but while the former is considered a despicable act, a failure of the latter is chastised as being somehow unfair and uncharitable. Again, I ask my students to reflect on what metanarratives inform this distinction.

My questions are never aimed at trying to tell my students what to think. Instead, I try to drill down to the point where, as Merleau-Ponty says, their spade turns because they've hit ideological bedrock. In this case, I want them to dig deeper into the ways in which stories--whether they are the stories told by authors, journalists, activists, political pundits on the right or the left, their parents, or their friends--affect how they think and make choices about how their personal values will influence their pedagogy. For my purposes, critical conversations bent on considering as many sides of a story as we can come up with helps us make a distinction between education and indoctrination into a particular position. In the end, I want them to own their choices, and our discussion of the Alexie case enabled us to lay out the stakes so that they could provide compelling rationales for their decision to include or not include The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian in their curriculum. And that affordance is one reason why I will continue to teach it.