Why I Still Teach Absolutely True Diary, Part Two

As I mentioned in Part One of this blog post, teaching Alexie’s work enables me to have difficult, uncomfortable, important, and relevant conversations about art, artists, stories, and ideologies. But that’s not a good enough rationale on its own for teaching this particular book. Another reason I will continue to teach The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is because of the words and pictures on the pages.

Some of my students argued that there were other books that were better or just as good at representing Native American culture. Perhaps. But I read A LOT of YA literature, and I have never found a clearer, more accessible articulation of the concept of “intersectionality” in both its original usage, and the ways some people seem to be using it now. The term was first used in 1989 by Kimberle Crenshaw to underscore the overlapping effect of cultural forms of oppression. Discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, disability, and/or poverty don’t just add up; they have a multiplying effect on both experience and expectations for people who inhabit marginalized subject positions and identities. Arnold Spirit, Jr., expresses it this way:

“But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances. Or choices. We’re just poor. That’s all we are.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it.” (Alexie 13)

Look at what he does rhetorically: he begins with a totalizing summary of the problem (“We’re just poor. That’s all we are.”), but then he breaks it down into a spiraling list so that readers can see clearly how the problems build on each other—how they intersect. This chapter comes early in the book, so that we have a context for talking about structural intersectionality when Junior experiences violence differently than the white students at Reardon, political intersectionality when we see his interactions with Mr. P., and representational intersectionality in Mary’s fate, Junior’s various interactions with Penelope, and his final scenes with Rowdy.

But Alexie also gives us something that other texts don’t—he just as clearly shows readers how whiteness is intersectional in a completely opposite way. Recently, I have heard people using the term intersectionality to refer to the benign concept that we are all amalgams of various subject positions. In the words of Walt Whitman, we “contain multitudes.” This strips the term of its political exigency for sure, but it’s revealing in that it shares a structural similarity to the original usage of the term. Alexie shows readers, again very clearly and accessibly, how the multiplying effect of oppression is structurally similar to the multiplying effect of privilege. Using the same rhetorical pattern of starting with a totalizing summary and then breaking it down into its discrete factors, he writes of the white students at Reardan:

“And let me tell you, we Indians were the worst of times and those Reardan kids were the best of times.

Those kids were magnificent.

They knew everything.

And they were beautiful.

They were beautiful and smart.

They were beautiful and smart and epic.

They were filled with hope.

I don’t know if hope is white. But I do know that hope for me is like some mythical creature:

(Alexie 50-51)

From this point, I can go all psychoanalytic-y and say that whiteness is a master signifier that, if deconstructed, can be stripped of that status as an unrealizable ideal and instead be drawn into the chain of signifiers as one among equals, rather than a screen against which other identities are deviant. And the thing is, Alexie does just this: he shows us the cracks in the façade of whiteness. He individualizes and humanizes Penelope, Gordy, Roger, and Coach, not to defend their privilege, but to show us how to consider difference ethically rather than as a zero-sum game of totalized winners and losers.