Sherman Alexie - This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona
This Is What It Means to Say
Phoenix, Arizona, by Sherman Alexie, is a quirky,
humorous, heart-rending short story from Alexie’s collection of short
stories/novel The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven. Like other
stories from the collection, this story focuses on the importance of
forgiveness and community within an environment of broken dreams, broken
community, and self-destructive behavior.
The
picture that the narrator provides of the reservation on which Victor lives is
not a pretty one. We see that the
environment is one of poverty (“Who does have money on a reservation, except
the cigarette and fireworks salespeople?”) and alcohol abuse (“The only real thing
he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams.”). The sense of
community on the reservation has been lost (“Whatever happened to the tribal
ties, the sense of community?), a fact that is highlighted by the fact that
Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the resident storyteller of the reservation, is someone
that “nobody wanted to listen to” (288).
As
Benedict Anderson has shown in his seminal book Imagined Communities, communities (in most of his explanation,
nations) are “imagined,” in that they are defined and held together by unifying
narratives that assist the varying members of a community in seeing themselves
as inextricably linked to their fellow citizens. It would follow, then, that we can see the
fact that Thomas (and his stories) is ignored as a sign that a certain sense of
community, a shared feeling of belonging, has been lost in the community under
discussion here. As we see, for Thomas
to be ignored is “like being a dentist in a town where everybody has false
teeth” (288).
That
this community is obviously falling apart does not mean that it has completely fallen apart, for Thomas, though ignored
by all others, does not fall beneath the weight of such a futile and seemingly
useless task and “profession.” As he
tells Victor, “Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue
to tell the stories” (299). Thomas is
something of a martyr in this story, as well as something of a Cassandra
figure, doomed to tell the future (or even just the present), while nobody
listens to him. His very hope and
courage are an affront to his fellow community members, who, jealous of his
conviction, mock him and beat him. “They
hated Thomas for his courage, his brief moment as a bird,” we read. “Everybody has dreams about flying. Thomas flew” (297).
What
is most important, however, in regard to this specific story under discussion,
is that Victor, faced with little room for decision, needs Thomas’s help in
order to recover his father’s body and belongings. This trip in itself is of course important,
for it is clear that Victor’s relationship with his father is, at best,
ambivalent (he hasn’t seen him in years, and has barely spoken to him), and to
embark upon a journey (a quest? An important “Indian” symbolic act?) to
(re)claim his father is in itself a cathartic and important act.
It
is in this journey that the power of Thomas’s storytelling becomes clear, for
through his remembrances of Victor’s father and his providing of the
information that Victor’s father has asked Thomas to “watch out” for him, he
offers Thomas the chance to forgive his father and see him in a different
light:
Victor was quiet
for a long time. He searched his mind
for memories of his father, found the good ones, found a few bad ones, added it
all up, and smiled (296).
Thomas’s most important lesson that he shares,
however, relates to the need for the
community to “take care of each other,”
which he does by providing Victor with assistance, forgiving Victor for his
earlier cruelty as a young man, and providing Victor with a space to forgive
himself and his father and to ask
Thomas for his forgiveness. As is clear from Victor’s thoughts toward the
end of the story, this lesson sticks:
Victor was
ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to
the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with
anybody was a bottle and broken dreams.
He owed Thomas something, anything.
As is clear from this text, Alexie puts great stock in to
the role of the storyteller as one who maintains the sense of community for a community, and who speaks from a
moral standpoint for the community. This
self-reflexive writing also presents the idea that a storyteller’s duty is to
provide a community with a sense of the holy, a sense of something greater than
themselves, and to tell a tale that raises the mundane to something much
greater. We see, for instance, how
Thomas tells Victor what he plans to do with his half of the cremated remains
of Victor’s father, and how he tells Victor, “your father will rise like a
salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home. It will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a
rainbow. He will rise, Victor, he will
rise.” It is, of course, no coincidence
that Victor plans to deposit his half of the ashes in the same place, but that
before hearing Thomas’s description of the mythical nature of the event, he had
seen it differently, he “didn’t imagine [his] father looking anything like a
salmon . . . thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something” (300). Thomas’s value here is that he shows Victor
that “nothing stops,” and that his actions are much bigger, much more
important, than “letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use”
(300).
Works Cited
Anderson,
Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Response to Today We Will Not Be Silent, by Victoria Lena Manyarrows
Response to Today We Will Not Be Silent, by Victoria Lena Manyarrows
Today We Will Not Be Silent, by
Victoria Lena Manyarrows, acts, as Mr. Farmer points out, as a “forceful
declaration.” By establishing a
connection between the distant past, the recent past, and the present, the
speaker develops an understanding of a historical, and ongoing, struggle,
placing herself, and others like her, into that struggle as forces of
resistance.
When
the speaker declares that “we will not be invisible or silent,” it is as
first unclear who this “we” really is.
It quickly becomes clear, however, that this “we” is a vast group of
people, held together not by their inherently shared qualities, but by their
shared resistance to (and suffering under) the colonization, genocide, and
exploitation of the United States class of (white) power.
The
first connection to the (distant) past that we see is in the reference to the
“pilgrims of yesterday,” which establishes a connection between the first white
settlers in North America and those in power in North America today. This act of connection continues with the
recent past, making a connection between the Native people of the US and the
citizens of Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador, all countries that
have suffered under the yoke of oppressive military meddling by the United
States (see the Contras in Nicaragua, the CIA-supported military takeover in
Chile and the subsequent 17-years of dictatorship, the CIA organized coup in
Guatemala in 1954—which led to an over 30-year civil war, and the US support of
the military junta during the civil war in El Salvador, which was characterized
by the murderous tactics of death squads and mass murder). By making such a strong connection (and one
that is characterized by the US meddling in foreign
affairs), the speaker establishes the US government within the US as a similarly foreign
power, responsible for genocide and “elimination” of the Native/original
population.
The
poem also references geography and the physicality of the land, ignoring, in a
way, the arbitrary and artificial borders established by the European powers,
in order to make the case that there is little difference between the people of
the “Americas,” who have all been oppressed by the European people and their descendants.
Such
preoccupation with the geography of the Americas is not unique in this poem .
Much of Manyarrow’s poetry shows a similar concern for the geography of the
American continent and makes a metaphorical connection between this geography and
the essential unity of the continent. We
see, for instance, how in America/Love
Song to the Native Lands, Manyarrows describes geography in a sensual,
sexual language, describing her desire to demonstrate her love for the Americas:
America
my
native land
will
you ever know how much i love you?
(Manyarrows 9)
Works Cited
Manyarrows,
Victoria Lena. "America/Love Song To The Native Lands." Hurricane
Alice 10.2 (1994): 9. Humanities
International Complete. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
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