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Looking forward to more from Tommy Orange
By Derryll White
Orange, Tommy (2018). There There.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
– James Baldwin.
Tommy Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. The story he tells, of belonging and not belonging on land traditionally inhabited by his people, is one that will sound familiar to Canadian First Nations people.
‘There There’ is clearly an overtly political book without being polemical. Therein lies Tommy orange’s brilliance, laying out the narrative of memory, history and identity clearly, demanding comprehension of the individual, personal fact of being indigenous.
After the first paragraph of ‘There There’ the reader knows that there is an intelligent, inquiring and humorous mind at work. The writer makes his intent immediately present. Tommy Orange states that silence is not silence, it’s just not speaking up. He is speaking to an Indian audience, but he is really addressing all of us – Caucasian, First nations, Oriental mid-Eastern – black, white, brown, red or yellow. Get involved, ask questions of the story and of the exploiters behind the story. What is not funny is doing nothing. The author demands an attempt at understanding the world each of us functions in.
The energy of the characters never slackens and the story itself constantly moves forward. The chaos at the end mirrors the intent at the beginning of the book. I look forward to more from Tommy Orange.
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Excerpts from the novel:
HISTORY – In 1621 colonists invited Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. Massasoit came with ninety of his men. That meal is why we still eat a meal together in November. Celebrate it as a nation. But that one wasn’t a Thanksgiving meal. It was a land-deal meal. Two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. Two hundred Indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison.
URBAN INDIAN – Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. We didn’t get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought our families and powwows, our dances, our beadwork.
INDIAN – But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which makes us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.
TIME – “We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse. We shiver. We struggle for release, for sustenance and we die the death of field mice.”
HISTORY – “You gotta know about the history of your people. How you got to be here, that’s all based on what people done to get you here. Us bears, you Indians, we been through a lot. They tried to kill us. But then when you hear them tell it, they make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest. There were bears and Indians all over the place. Sister, they slit all our throats.”
CHANGE – “There’s not some special relationship between Indians and alcohol. It’s just what’s cheap, available, legal. It’s what we have to go to when it seems like we have nothing else left. I did it too. For a long time. But I stopped telling the story I’d been telling myself, about how that was the only way, because of how hard I had it, and how hard I was, that story about self-medicating against the disease that was my life, my bad lot, history. When we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. We try to help, try to make the world around us a little better. It’s then that the story begins.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.