"It all blends together. It's the way in which cruelty can be everyday ordinary to spectacular - but that it's a constant possibility. So that her unpredictable nature, her amazing beauty, and magic combined with her ability to be so mean."
Sherman Alexie
These articles, Facebook posts and audio clips and interviews with Sherman Alexie are so moving, beautiful and painful. It's like poetry, song, prayer or listening to birds in the trees. I may not get every message being shared but can feel the intensity, urgency, and importance of what's being communicated. I don't even know what my own thoughts or feelings are yet but I'm struck by many things:
- how rare it is to hear men speaking so openly about their complicated relationships with the past, their parents and themselves.
- the tangle of emotions and insights and reflections which feel startling, generous and unpredictable and which are stirred in me.
how those of us parenting with ACEs have been parented, almost always, by those with ACEs. And working to change things for our children and the future also means we often revisit the past, as well. We may start reflecting on our own experiences as children and eventually, we wonder what it was like for our grandparents and parents when they were children.
If you have time to listen to the audios, I recommend doing so.
Here are some excerpts from two articles recently published on KUOW. One is The honest eulogy Sherman Alexie didn't give his mom by Bill Radke and Jason Pagano or in Sherman Alexie's heartbreaking reason for pausing his book tour. laughed.
I have been sobbing many times a day during this book tour. I have sobbed in private and I have sobbed onstage.
I have been rebreaking my heart night after night. I have, to use recovery vocabulary, been retraumatizing myself.
Last week, I fell ill with a terrible head cold and had to cancel events in Tulsa and Missoula. But I also fell ill with depression. I medicated my head cold. I quickly healed from that simple malady. But I couldn't medicate my sadness—my complicated grief.
I sobbed and sobbed, and then I got on another airplane and continued my book tour.
But then, in the fifteenth or twentieth hotel room of this summer, I dreamed.
In this dream, I entered the movie, Smoke Signals, and became Victor Joseph as he ran through the night to save a woman injured in a car wreck. I ran through the desert night. I ran through fire and the memory of fire. I ran until my feet bled. I ran until dawn. I ran until I collapsed exhausted to the road.
In the movie, the collapsed Victor Joseph reaches toward a vision of his dead father. But it is a hallucination. Victor is actually reaching toward a highway construction worker.In my dream, I am the one fallen to the road. And I reach toward a vision of my dead mother. But she is also the highway construction worker. And she is holding a sign that says STOP.
I think the meaning of that dream is obvious.
It means I am supposed to stop this book tour. Because of the short notice, I'll still perform at my gigs in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco this month. But I am cancelling all of my events in August and I will be cancelling many, but not all, of my events for the rest of the year.
Dear readers and booksellers and friends and family, I am sorry to disappoint you. I am sorry that I will not be traveling to your cities to tell you my stories in person.
But I will be writing.
When I told Diane, my wife, about my mother's ghost and about my plans to cancel so many events, she said, "Maybe it's your mother taking care of you from Heaven."
"Maybe," I said.
"But I think it's probably your subconscious taking care of the rest of you. I think it's probably you being a good mother to yourself. You are mothering you."
So here I am—the son and the mother combined—who needs to take a big step back and do most of my grieving in private. My memoir is still out there for you to read. And, when I am strong enough, I will return to the road. I will return to the memoir. And I know I will have new stories to tell about my mother and her ghost. I will have more stories to tell about grief. And about forgiveness.
"I tried to present the full complex portrait of her. I don't spare myself either. Cuz at some point... she was a bad mother for many, many years. But at some point, as I became an adult, I chose to continue to be a bad son. At some point, I was equally responsible for the pain in our relationship. Whether that was at age 18 or 28 I don't know, but at some point, I was equally culpable for the things that went wrong inside our relationship."
Sherman Alexie
Would you mind reading the eulogy you delivered at your mother's funeral?
Yes. Here it is.
“I said my mother and I had a difficult relationship. We weren't always kind to each other. So it's good to hear how kind she was to some of you. But it hurts too, to hear that she mothered some of you better than she mothered me. And it was also good to hear how mean she was to some of you too. I knew the mean Lillian maybe better than all of you. Maybe even better than my brothers and sisters. My mother was good to people and she was mean to people and sometimes she was good and mean to the same person at the same time. Anyhow that's all I really have to say. I am not a traditional Indian. You all know that. I don't sing or dance or do the ceremonies. I don't pray like other people pray. I just talk. So I'm really going to miss talking to my mother. I am really going to miss her voice.”
You put that in the book. But then you seem really — in the book — very uncomfortable about that.
I didn't tell the truth. I mean, I just glanced off the truth. I looked at the truth with my peripheral vision. I didn't give her the eulogy that was honest and completely accurate, and didn't give her the eulogy she deserved. I mean, this book is that eulogy. I gave the simplest possible version, the gentlest possible version of a eulogy. And it wasn't honest about the heights and depths of knowing Lillian Alexie and being her child. I didn't do that — the extremes. And I spend most of the memoir trying to tell the honest eulogy.
Why do you say not honest in leaving out the extremes?
I didn't talk about the time she threw the can of pop and hit me in the head and knocked me out. I didn't talk about the time she left me on the porch to sleep with the dogs. I didn't talk about the ways in which she quilted for three days straight to finish the quilt so that we would get our electricity back in the middle of winter. I didn't talk about the hours and hours she would spend working with the elders, working with kids, working with drug and alcohol addicts. I didn't risk the judgment of my fellow tribal members in trying to tell the full story of this human being. I failed as a son. I failed as a eulogist. I failed as a human being in that moment.
"My mother was industrious, and my father, on the other hand, was a random alcoholic. So when you talk about the very act of proving love, my mother did it time and time again and my father was completely unreliable and yet I've spent most of my literary career canonizing him and writing about him and believing that he was the primary source of my storytelling. But in working on this memoir I've realized that that's not true... my storytelling, my connection to the past, my intensity, my discipline, my soul, my anger, my rage, my everything intense about me that creates the storyteller is primarily from my mother."
Sherman Alexie
Such an important part of this book is the connection you make between rape and legacy. Are you are you comfortable revealing the part that played in your family?
Well, just to speak in larger terms, when you're talking about Canada and the United States, when you're talking about the most vulnerable group of people — that is indigenous women — who are subject to the most oppression, the most violence, the most sexual violence — my mother was not spared from any of that. My big sister is the child of a rape. So my mother was raped, and my sister Mary was conceived by that. But also, my mother was conceived by rape.
[My mother’s] rapist, I'm not related to. And my mother's biological father was a rapist too; I also won't reveal his name. It's not the fault of his children and grandchildren. It was his crime. And my mother — in telling her story, in talking about her life — apportioned it to her children. We all have different parts of her life story. Different versions. And I'm the only sibling that she told that she was the biological child of a rape. My sister didn't know that. My brothers didn't know that. She never said that to them. She only said it to me, and she told that to me in my teen years. Looking back, I think it was her damaged way of asking me to be a better man.
I think it was her dysfunctional way of warning me about how Native women are treated and how Native men and non-Native men can treat Native women. I think it was her way of talking about her pain. She knew I was leaving. I was gone from the reservation already. I was going to a white high school, and she knew I was going to live this larger life. And I think it was her way of telling me to honor women. And I also think in some ways it was her way of wanting to be remembered.
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