The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Since Banned Books Week is September 27 through
October 3rd, our book club decided to read banned books this month. I started
looking through lists, which are long and varied, and quickly found one I’ve
been meaning to read for a while – The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Warning: There are spoilers in the second half of this
review, but I don’t believe they will take away from your enjoyment of the
book. However, I will let you know when the spoilers are about to start.
I was under the mistaken belief that it was a
biography, but quickly realized it was a novel. However, when I read the
material at the end from the author, I found the book is largely based on his
real experiences. Seems like it’s part-time fiction and part-time non-fiction.
As I was explaining to my husband the other night,
just because something shows up in non-fiction, doesn’t mean it isn’t fictional
literature. Good fiction also makes the reverse true as well, just because it is
fiction doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot of truth in a book.
Arnold Spirit is the main character and he’s a goofy
looking little guy, by his own statement, who was born with too much spinal
fluid in his brain that had to be vacuumed out. He survived the surgery but did
have some brain damage that created some anomalies in his body. Forty-two teeth
is one anomaly that he claims was caused by this. One eye is near-sighted and
one eye far-sighted, so he wears thick lop-sided glasses. He also had seizures
regularly for the first few years of his life. Then there was the stutter and
the lisp.
The author paints this picture in the first person
with a huge dose of self-deprecating humor for Arnold. You can’t help but love
this 14-year-old who is so funny right off the bat.
Then he sucker punches you with something sad, but
often told in a matter-of-fact way. It’s an emotional roller coaster to be sure,
but it’s Arnold’s life, and maybe was Sherman’s life? It gets a little
confusing, so we’ll stick with Arnold.
Arnold draws cartoons which appear in the book. “I
think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny
little lifeboats.”
Arnold lives on the reservation in Spokane. This is
definitely a 14-year-old boy so imagine everything that goes with that is in
this book. I imagine that may be why the book was banned in some places, but it
isn’t gratuitous or overly specific, just mentioned.
Arnold also imagines what his parents would be if they
had the same opportunities people off the reservation have. “Given the chance, my
father would have been a musician.” His father is an alcoholic who goes on
benders and disappears on the family, but he’s also there for a lot of
important things and totally supports Arnold. Arnold appreciates him for
everything he is able to do and doesn’t seem to hold against him what he isn’t
able to be. It’s quite a forgiving and amazing dynamic. For example, his father,
while on a bender, saves a five-dollar bill for Christmas, and Arnold knows how
hard that must have been.
Then one of Arnold’s teachers tells him that in order
to succeed he needs to leave the reservation. “Jeez, it was a lot of pressure
to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden of my race, you know? I was going to
get a bad back from it.” But he makes up his mind to go to Reardan, the rich,
white farm town school that “sits in the wheat fields exactly twenty-two miles
away from the rez.”
***Spoilers Below***
It isn’t easy, transportation isn’t reliable, and the
people on the rez feel like he has abandoned them, but Arnold is smart and he
makes it work. Life goes on, and there are many lessons to be found from it.
He goes up against Rowdy in basketball, which he is
surprisingly good at. There’s a basketball game where he gets a concussion then
one where he defeats his best friend Rowdy who is on the other team, and at the
end of the game, when he should be celebrating, he looks at the defeated team
from the rez and feels like shit because, that was all they had, and he had
taken it from them with his rich white friends.
His sister runs away and gets married, then dies in a
fire. His grandmother gets hit by a drunk and dies. His godfather Eugene is
killed by his friend Bobby in a drunken fight over the last drink a bottle of
wine. Then Bobby hangs himself with a bedsheet.
“I blamed myself for all of the deaths. I had cursed
my family. I had left the tribe, and had broken something inside all of us, and
I was now being punished for that. No, my family was being punished.”
Then he goes back to school and a teacher is incredibly
rude to him, and the entire class gets up one by one and drops their book on
the floor and walks out in protest. “It
all gave me hope. It gave me a little bit of joy.”
He starts making lists of things that give him joy.
Like I said, this is a roller coaster ride, and it was
over way too fast. I highly recommend it.
This book is so sad, and so funny. Through it all, the
teacher takes you inside the story and makes you feel it instead of just
telling it to you which makes a great book.
“When it comes to death, we know that laughter and
tears are pretty much the same thing.”
