This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.
Tommy Orange, There There
We’ll start today with that heavy quote because There There by Tommy Orange is a heavy book. It’s brilliant. It’s eye-opening. But it’s heavy.
There There was put on my reading list as part of a mass addition of Authors of Color. With everything that has been going on recently, I’ve become aware that I have too long allowed myself to be one of the people on the above-mentioned yacht, mostly unaware of the struggles of the people in the water and my own position of privilege aboard the ship. As I’ve opened myself up to the message of Black Lives Matter and other similar movements, I have come to see some of the ways in which I’m part of the problem. One thing that stood out to me, as a reader, is the fact that I have read an embarrassingly small amount of literature written by People of Color. I counted. Of the over 500 books I have listed as Read on Goodreads, just over 30 of the authors were People of Color.
So, a few weeks ago, I did some googling and found lists of must-read books by Black authors, Latinx authors, Arab authors, East Asian authors, and Indigenous authors. If you haven’t done this exercise, I’d encourage it. It was enlightening to see the mountains of rich literature that I’d been previously unaware of. There There was one of my finds.
This book centers around one event – the Big Oakland Powwow. In little vignettes, we’re introduced to a huge cast of characters who are all tied to the powwow in some way. There’s Tony Loneman, a twenty-one year old drug dealer of Cheyenne heritage living with fetal alcohol syndrome. Dene Oxendene is an aspiring documentary maker who is trying to capture stories of Native people. There’s Edwin Black, a biracial man who never knew his father, is battling an internet addiction, and is pushed by his mother into an internship helping with the powwow. There are Opal and Jacquie, two middle-aged sisters dealing with the fallout of their childhood involvement in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in the 1970s. The character list is extensive. Those are just a few. The way that Tommy Orange is able to weave the strands of all of these lives together, to get them all to that powwow, is masterful.
He really succeeds in giving each character a different voice. In fact, when I first read a portion narrated by Tony Loneman, I was a little put off by the excessive swearing. It seemed like every other word was a curse, and I started to get annoyed. “Does this author not know any other words?” I wondered. As I continued reading, I realized that the character didn’t know any other words. Tony Loneman, a drug dealer, raised by his grandmother, someone whose IQ measured extremely low due to fetal alcohol syndrome – he cursed a lot. When the author shifted to another character’s point of view, the vocabulary changed. It added authenticity to the voice of each character.
The book starts with a prologue, and there’s an interlude as well. These sections are filled with short essays on issues in the Native community at large and in the community specific to Oakland. These were some of my favorite bits of writing. It’s the kind of prose must take tremendous effort to write, but Tommy Orange made it seem effortless.
Orange addressed several themes in There There: suicide in Native people, addiction, the search for identity, gun violence, privilege, and what it means to be Native.
On suicide:
“Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better that leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we’ve made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths…or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.”
On identity:
“…Anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian.”
There’s so much more there, and it was the first time I’ve ever heard a Native American story told by an actual Native American. For so long, these people have had their story told by other people, by history books written by white scholars, by elementary school students playacting the First Thanksgiving, by Hollywood movies in which the powers that be cast Johnny Depp (of all people) to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger. It was moving, in itself, to hear a Native American story told by someone whose story it is to tell.
Okay, there are going to be spoilers from here on. If I’ve convinced you, go read There There, and then come back.
The culminating event, the Big Oakland Powwow, is marred by tragedy when Octavio, Tony, Charles, and Calvin all try to rob the powwow. In the interlude, Tommy Orange lets us know that that’s where this is going, so we watch it happen like a car crash you see coming but can’t prevent. Orange shifted through the points of view as Dene, Bill, Orvil, Tony, and others got shot, so it was like watching each one of them fall. You’d think that after one death scene it would be like beating a dead horse, but Orange managed to make each death impactful.
I think it was also poignant that most of the deaths were accidental. Octavio, Tony, Charles, and Calvin weren’t intending to kill the people at the powwow. They just wanted the money. They got into a fight among themselves and the passersby were caught in the crossfire. This seemed to me to be a symbol for the deaths of Native Americans as a whole. In some cases, the U.S. government absolutely committed active, unapologetic genocide against Native Americans. But there were other times when it seems like the lives of Native Americans were collateral damage, caught in the storm of bullets simply because they were in the way.
This quote, in particular, broke me:
“Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.”
I’ll leave it there.
