Sherry Chandler

The badges of poverty

Here is a snippet of a Sherman Alexie poem I came across in my reading yesterday that seems to me to make an argument for decent universal health care. It’s from Face (Hanging Loose Press, 2009). I apologize in advance for chopping it up so much.

Scarlet

. . . She makes my coffee and I want to know

Why in this new age of dermatology,
She suffers this morbid case of acne.

. . . This scarred woman forces me to remember

That my skin was nearly as pocked and razed.
I once counted forty-four zits on my face,

But I was poor and health care was shitty.
I didn’t live in a first-world city.

So why does this woman look like this?
She’s uninsured and untreated I guess,

Like so many others, but her poverty
has brutally tattooed her. I’m sorry,

But there’s nothing comforting I can say
To a Hester painted with a different “A.”

. . . What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?

Ted Kennedy died yesterday. There is nothing in their lives that I know of that would link Sherman Alexie and Ted Kennedy, except maybe this. Alexie grew up in need of universal health care and Ted Kennedy spent the last months of his life trying to see to it that we got universal health care.
__________
Read also today, “The Lowering” by May Swenson:

Take this flag, John Glenn, instead of a friend;
instead of a brother, Edward Kennedy, take this flag;
instead of a father, Joe Kennedy, take this flag;

The Business of Fancydancing

Sherman Alexie. The Business of Fancydancing. Hanging Loose Press,

Perhaps as much as direct warfare, as much as devastating diseases like smallpox and influenza, it was European trade goods that destroyed the Indigenous Nations of the Eastern Woodlands. Easy availability of European cloth, tools, and jewelry caused the Woodland peoples to forget their traditional crafts and to give up their sharing ways. Desire for trade goods caused them to give up their subsistence practices of taking only enough from the land. Desire for trade goods set off the “Beaver Wars” that set nation against nation. Desire for trade goods caused them, in competition with white commercial hunters like Boone, to kill off the abundant game found west of the Appalachian range.

In Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), Meredith Mason Brown quotes one native American who told a Jesuit priest:

The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short, it makes everything.

And so, the Eastern Woodlands peoples, the Iroquois Federation, the Algonquian speakers (including the Shawnee), the Southeastern Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, moved ever westward, along with Boone and his ilk, in search of fresh hunting territory. Until the forests were no more. Until Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in May, 1830, and a way of life was destroyed forever.

The worst of all the trade goods was alcohol.

So why do I write all this as preface to talking about The Business of Fancydancing? What do the Woodland nations have to do with Sherman Alexie, who is Spokane from the far northwest?

Because this sort of thing was repeated over and over as Manifest Destiny took its toll.

Am I committing the sin of lumping all Native Americans together as one culture. Probably. But I think they are one culture in that they were all given the choice by advancing European settles: assimilate or die. Live on a reservation or die. The Business of Fancydancing is all about what life is like among a people that you might say we’ve kept in a detention camp for a couple of centuries.

It is a portrait of amazing resilience and great degradation.

I’ve seen the collection called “heartbreaking” but that would imply pity and I don’t think Alexie is asking pity for his people.

The humor is caustic. Take “Reservation Love Song”

I can pay your rent
on HUD house get you free
food from the BIA
get your teeth fixed at IHS

I can buy you alcohol
& not drink it all

The Business of Fancydancing is Alexie’s first book, a mixed bag of stories and poems, though the stories are more like prose poems than Alexie’s later fiction. And the poems are often narratives, tiny stories. So one might say this collection is working at the edge where the difference between poem and short story blurs.

Alexie works with a recurring group of characters: Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who holds the law at bay with the idea of a gun, Lester FallsApart, Seymour, Father. Buffalo Bill makes a couple of appearances:

Evolution

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation
right across the border from the liquor store

Crazy Horse is all over the place, especially in the section called “Crazy Horse Dreams”

War All the Time

Crazy Horse comes back from Vietnam
straight into the Breakaway Bar,
sits down at the same table
he was sitting at two years earlier
when he received his draft notice.

The whimsey of these poems, their magic realism, makes me laugh with delight at the same time that I feel great pain and anger and the prick of the satiric point that the dominant culture reduces all indigenous peoples to a few iconic movie Indians.

The tension between tradition and the temptations of European/American culture remain, and fancydancing has become just another way to hustle cash for alcohol:

The Business of Fancydancing

. . . Money
is an Indian boy who can fancydance
from powwow to powwow. We
got our boy, Vernon Wildshoe, to fill our empty

wallets and stomachs, to fill our empty
cooler. Vernon is like some promise
to pay the light bill, a credit card we
Indians get to use.

Sherman Alexie wrote and directed a film also entitled The Business of Fancydancing, which addresses the same themes. Film and print are, however, too very different art forms and seeing the movie is no substitute for reading the book, especially in this case when the “plots” are totally different.

Colonialism and the missonary position

In the DVD commentary track, Sherman Alexie says he’s surprised that no cirtic had addressed “The Business of Fancy Dancing” as a musical. The fact surprises me too because the movie has pageantry, dancing (fancy and otherwise), and gorgeous music. (See Swil Kanim.) Add to that mix Sherman Alexie’s poetry and you have one powerful film, a “visual poem” to quote Gary Glazner.

Here is Alexie talking about his concept of poetry in this film:

I was interested in making a movie about a writer and a poet specifically. The movies I have seen about writers are rarely about their work and you never see or hear the poetry. They are always about the poet’s life and never the poems. I wanted to make a movie that really featured the poems as well as the poet. So in my film you have performance of the poems; you see the poet doing the poems in bookstores and at readings on stage. It also has poems in voice over montages of images and it has poems up on the screen as epigraphs. I wanted to have words, images and stanzas be very much a part of the movie. I tried to think of the movie itself in terms of stanzas, that it was one long poem. Each edited section was a stanza itself; I moved them around, juxtaposing ideas and images. I thought of them as separate units during editing that I could move around and change the meaning based on the arrangement. There is still a story to be told, a narrative. Most mainstream movies are narrative-driven and I wanted this film to be at least as much lyrical as narrative.

I have just recently watched another film about a poet — “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle”. Both films feature a lot of poetry, both use humor to address painful subject matter, both use cinematic techniques that remind you that this is film and tell a somewhat nonlinear story. But where “Francydancing” left me feeling sad but somehow enriched, “Mrs. Parker” merely left me feeling depressed.

Part of that may be class prejudice. Hard to feel sad for some one who is at the top of the heap. Though now I think of it, Alexie’s poet protagonist is at the top of that same heap and I can feel both his sorrow and his joy in that accomplishment. Part of it is no doubt performance. Though Jennifer Jason Leigh won awards for this role, I never got beyond the mannerisms and the fact that this was Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker. Alexie’s actors are performing closer to home, doing a lot of improvising and using their own biography. Easier to seem authentic perhaps.

Maybe it’s the artistic vision. Wit distances, and Dorothy Parker was a wit. But Alexie is also a poet of wit.

So what was it that made me like “The Business of Fancydancing” so much more? Maybe it comes down to artistic vision and the writer/director’s ability to pull us into the life of his characters.

And whence my post title? When asked by a journalist how he came to be named Polatikin. Alexie’s gay poet protagonist says he doesn’t want to discuss colonialsim and the missionary position.

Speaking of wit.

Sherman Alexie does Colbert