I think it was a therapist who gave me the line, a family therapist who was, she said, quoting someone else. When a mom or dad loses a child, she said, the rest of us simply need to look the other way for five years, minimum. We need to forgive anything and everything. Such is the ferocity of the loss of a child.
Not long ago, Sherman Alexie, certainly among the most prominent Native writers in America, lost his mother. He'd lost his father years before, but his father--quiet, unassuming, often not around-- was not so forceful an influence in his life. His mother's presence, on the other hand, filled every last room of the home, crowded out everything else even after he'd moved away.
Alexie's new memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, is a scorching indictment of her abuse--for that's what it was. I can't begin to count the times I wanted to look away from what Mr. Alexie earnestly determined to show me. The raw emotion on just about every page made me think Alexie should have waited five years to say what he does throughout. It hurts to read this book.
That his mother and her husband didn't know how to love their children is achingly obvious. For three long years, Alexie and his mother, a all-night quilter with a vicious tongue, didn't speak a word to each other. Today, he claims he doesn't remember why, nor does he remember how the silence finally broke. What he claims not to be able to forget is sitting beside her in a car in perfect silence--time and time and time again, saying absolutely nothing.
While he was on tour with this book, Alexie kept seeing ghosts of his mother's presence, so many and so vivid that he fell into a black hole of depression that forced him to cancel numerous appearances. I'm not surprised. To hear him read his work--he reads the Audible version--is almost as painful as what he's left the reader to stumble through on the page. Alexie hates his mother; it's that hate he puts under the microscope to examine and confess by way of 78 sketches and 78 poems, in commemoration, I guess, of his mother's 78 years.
There were times--plural--when I thought I'd quit reading. I'd had enough. There are moments in abundance when I would have preferred him simply to have gone outside into a woods or open field somewhere and just howled.
I can't help but think of Dutch Calvinists as being slaves to guilt. After all, I am one. Garrison Keillor claims Norwegians and other flavors of dark-visaged Minnesota Lutherans do it better than anyone else. But Jews claim when it comes to dark introspection, they'll take second-place to no one. In You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie becomes the Superman of guilt.
But he has reasons. As a child, he was sick, subject to seizures, a runt in a warrior culture. His father was hardly there, never had a job, drank for a living. His mother, among the last Native speakers in the Spokane community, was, to others, as great a hero as a horror. By any measure, she was not a good mother.
Halfway through high school, Alexie seemed to realize that the rez school he'd been attending would basically rob him blind. On his own, he opted out and walked away from what for him should have been and still is, home. He went to town, to the white people's school, where he became something he never was and would never have been on the rez, a hero and athlete. He went to a school where he was the only Indian.
He has good reasons for guilt.
He's a man gifted with words, who has performed beautifully and thoughtfully for a largely white readership. To paraphrase the Bible, Sherman Alexie is not so much in his world as he is of it; and that uneasy positioning creates a tightrope that makes life treacherous. The sub-title here is telling: "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian." What's inside the man is soft, but he wishes it wasn't, so he rages--at everything, at his mother, at the rez that raised him, at the holy hell he came from, and the white world he lives in as "an urban Indian."
All that having been said, at the end of this year I'm sure I'll find it difficult to name a single title that affected me as deeply and taught me as much as You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. I wish I could say I liked it. It was, throughout, painful. I wanted to read the book to know something of what it is like to grow up the way Alexie did, and that's exactly what I learned, in sadness and awe.
But then, a man or a woman--any reader--can learn a great deal from a sorrowful howl in the night. I certainly did.
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