SHEILA
BARE Reviews
What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned by Sherman Alexie
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2013)
The Ludic and the Lamentable: “Equal
parts joy and hurt” in
Sherman Alexie’s What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned
If, like
me, you have grown to expect and enjoy Sherman Alexie’s wit and dark humor in
his many works, then his new collection of poetry, What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned will not disappoint. And if I can summarize Alexie in one word,
that word would have to be irreverent. We see this throughout his new collection by his
use of juxtaposing the sacred with the profane and crafts it into “equal parts
joy and hurt” (23). The mash-up of
words, images, and forms in Alexie’s hand result in poetry that is at once
ludicrous and mournful, something perhaps, the coyote trickster himself might
have invented.
A good
example of this juxtapositioning is the way in which Alexie plays with
form. The high form sonnet, for instance, in Alexie’s creation often does not look and
sound like a typical sonnet. Here, fourteen
lines and iambic pentameter have gone the way of the dodo. He hints at the form through the title, as in
“Sonnet with Slot Machines”; or he otherwise numbers each stanza, fourteen of
them containing differing number of lines and are often in free form, which can
be seen in “Hell.” In a number of
“sonnets,” Alexie does not bother to delineate the stanzas but rather writes in
free form altogether. A whole section of
the book is dedicated to “sonnets” alone.
Content
follows form in the way in which Alexie juxtaposes images and ideas. Returning to “Sonnet with Slot Machines,”
Alexie fuses gambling as tradition, with the slaughter or “murder of mammals”
and the “economic sovereignty for indigenous peoples!” with the “slot machine
ritually murder[ing] the gambler’s soul” (32).
After noting what the average patron gambles per night, and then
calculating that to a monthly and then a yearly equivalent, the speaker tells
us, in the Alexie form of the sonnet, “12.
O trust me, I’m trying to find the poetry in these numbers. 13.
Wait, here it is, make the ‘b’ silent, and pronounce it ‘nummer,’ as in ‘remove sensation,
especially as a result of cold or anesthesia, as in ‘remove emotion.’ 14. If
you punch a kid once, then he’ll cry.
If you punch a kid once an hour for a year, then he’ll learn how to make
the fists feel like flowers” (32). If
casinos and slot machines provide for native sovereignty and allay the poverty
of some natives in their reservations, then it is also equally true that
gambling as an addiction anesthetizes and therefore prevents the addict from
any feeling. Given the well-rehearsed
history of the U.S. nation-state’s genocide of Natives (“murder of mammals”)
and of stealing (as in “slot machines”) their land, it isn’t a reach for the
reader’s imagination to apprehend that what is being anesthetized here is the
pain of history. To “find the poetry in
these numbers,” then is to remember this painful past.
Perhaps
an Alexie invention, the “monosonnet interrupted” is also a mash-up of the
fourteen- line sonnet interrupted between the octave of the first stanza and
the sestet of the last stanza by free form verse. Alexie’s “sonnet” is a “monosonnet” because
the lines in the octave and sestet contain only one word per line. In “Monosonnet for the Martriarchy,
Interrupted,” rhythm can best be found in the free verse than within the
stanzas: “When / A / Woman /Asks / You /
To / Owl / Dance /,” the first stanza tells us, “(O, O, O, O, the owl dance,
two steps forward, one step back, O, O, O, O listen to the drummers attack that
drum, O, O, O, O [. . .]),” (30). Here,
the reader can almost hear or at least imagine the “O”s in the poem
representing a beat of the drum.
Linguistic choice and content echo and mirror one another.
In
“Monosonnet for Colonialism, Interrupted,” this auditory playfulness is
replaced with a playful image within the free form stanza and a reference to
music in the sestet: “Yes / Colonialism / Created / George / Custer / And /Andrew
/ Jackson // [. . .] // But / Colonialism / Also /Created / Miles / Davis,”
reminding us that history is “equal parts joy and hurt” (42; “Powwow Ghazal,”
23). The free form verse that
interrupts, marries the “genocidal maniacs,” of the first stanza—without which
there “would not have [been] action-adventure movies like Die Hard”—with an “improvisational and highly American olio of
poetry, film, and comedy” through the figure of Emily Dickinson (42). “I am a man who loves cinematic gunfire and
American poetry, if not equally, then with parallel passion,” the speaker tells
us. He then continues to note that he
has “considered writing an action-adventure movie about Emily Dickinson” and
that he has designed a poster and a tagline: “The poster features an actress
[think of the latest and greatest young and muscular American actress] dressed
in a tattered white gown while holding a large automatic pistol at an acute
angle to the ground. The movie is called
Emily. And the tagline, the little phrase that will
sell the movie to millions, is ‘Her Life Stood a Loaded Gun’” (42). Here, the first line/title of one of
Dickinson’s best-known poems is then used to redefine the introverted and
reclusive poet into someone bold and brash.
Poetry and high culture is also juxtaposed with popular culture (also
read as low culture) through cinema, and anyone even vaguely acquainted with
the American poet, Dickinson, cannot help but snicker at the juxtaposition of
images. Introverted recluse turns badass
in Alexie’s hand.
Alexie’s
ludic play of words continue in the juxtaposition of words in “Powwow Ghazal”
(23). Students of poetry will probably
recognize the poetic form “ghazal,” a song/poem from South Asia that invokes
the panegyric and celebratory and/or the elegiac and mournful. In Alexie’s hand, the play of words cannot be
missed in the poem’s title, invoking both the Native American “Indian” and the
Indian from South Asia. Both the powwow
and the ghazal are, of course, forms of performance or repertoire; as songs and
dances, they are embodied performances and part of the repertoire of
culture/cultural memory. But the act of
writing and/or recording, however, brings in the notion of archiving and an
invocation of Western epistemologies and the Western anthropologic and colonial
project.[1] In other words, this “production” of culture
in the colonial project, becomes a product to be consumed for Western audiences
to ascertain the “knowability” of the “other” and perpetuates the exoticization
of the other. The other thus becomes an
object of analysis, stripped of subjecthood/personhood. The archive privileges western thought by
privileging writing over embodied performances of the putatively “uncivilized”
others. But as ghazals are traditionally
self-referential as they include in the final couplet the poet’s name,
signature, or any reference to the poet, then rather than an outside observer
looking down into his/her/hir object of analysis, what we have, instead, is the
voice of a tribal member recording and describing a ritualistic, ceremonial
performance. Instead of an “object of
analysis,” what we have is the rendering of the speaker’s subject, a rendering
of subjecthood. In Alexie’s ghazal, his
subjects come to life. The performers in
this powwow perform in the present tense: they “spin,” “talk,” “sing,” and
“dance” (23-24). There is also the use
of gerunds: the fancydancer is “weeping!
The girl is going insane with drums;” “That nostalgic Indian is wearing
blue suede shoes” (23). It is clear,
these “Indians” are not from a distant past; they have not disappeared as the
myth of the “disappearing Indians” would have us believe. They are alive and they are performing their
culture and they enact their history through this powwow. If assimilation is the name of the game in
the colonial realm, there is also reciprocity.
If the non-native has appropriated the natives’ culture, then we have in
the “nostalgic Indian” appropriating white culture through his performance of
Elvis (who, as it turns out, was appropriating black culture in his
dances). Note that the only “nostalgic
Indian” is the one who is yearning for a product of “white American
culture.” If nostalgia is a wistfulness
for a static past, then the only static past in this powwow is Elvis. Though the colonial project is a tragic tale
to tell, there is also “equal parts joy and hurt” as we see in this depiction
cultural survivance (23). The drummers
are both “kids” and “elders” so that culture and tradition are handed down
through the generations (23). In this
way the production of knowledge, culture, and tradition are circulated
throughout the tribe by the tribe’s elders and bearers of culture. Finally, if the performance is a re-membering
of the past, a suturing of history into the present, then we have history
coming alive with every performance, a reiterative act. In every powwow, in every recitation of the
ghazal, history is not relegated to the past, but rather comes to life. Equally important, the intellectual and
artistic property of cultural performance belong to this native poet.
“Equal
parts joy and hurt,” to use Alexie’s own words, best describes this
collection. In the juxtapositioning of
the sacred and profane, Alexie has brought together a painful national and personal
history—there is also the pain and suffering from the loss of his father and
his sister juxtaposed with anger from an inability to reconcile these
relationships—with his signature dark humor and irony. Though he has “stolen” forms from the high
culture of poetry, wherein Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas to name
just a few, make a cameo appearance, he has also skillfully “earned” his craft
as writer and poet.
[1]
See Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham and London: Duke UP.
2003.
*****
Sheila Bare is an independent scholar and a life-long student. Lately, she has been studying Buddhism. When her nose is not in a book or in a cooking pan, you may find her on a yoga mat or out for a run. And there are those days when she tries to write. Best to stay away from her during those times. Unless, of, course you bring with you a good bottle of wine and talk about books. She was raised by two parents and now lives somewhere on planet earth.
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