First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow
the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to
the newest.
Some books are more uncomfortable to read than they should be,
and while I acknowledge the typical therapist’s command to “own my feelings,” I
can’t help believing that it’s not just me this time.
The 1930 Pulitzer Prize went to Laughing Boy, a novel set almost entirely in the early 20th
century universe of the western Navajo nations. It’s a generally unremarkable coming-of-age story
involving the titular young man, a man with a penchant for horses, jewelry making, and
the occasional interesting wager. At a days-long tribal event he meets another
young Navajo, Slim Girl, and the attraction soon grows. Slim Girl, though,
isn’t quite the type one brings home to amá.
Having been taken from her tribe as a child and raised in one of the
American-run “Indian schools,” she remains ensnared between the proverbial two
worlds, a situation which drives the novel’s central conflict. (Such schools, by
the way, are historically accurate. Pioneered by Christian missionaries, the
idea of removing the “native” from Native Americans soon bore the imprimatur of
the Bureau of Indian Affairs and lasted, sadly, until the 1970s.)
Laughing Boy ebbed
from the pen of Oliver La Farge, an uppercrust-ian born in New York and raised
in Rhode Island. Oliver’s father was an architect, his grandfather claimed fame
for stained glass, and the family tree was not without the occasional
Commodore, Governor, and Plymouth Colony resident. Oliver unsurprisingly graduated
from Harvard. Twice.
When I first picked up Laughing
Boy I had what I imagined was a relatively conventional thought: Is this going
to be just another pseudo-ethnographic novel written from a decidedly white
point of view? One that, because of the time and culture in which it is set, I might even find slightly embarrassing?
I then did something I can’t imagine ever having done a
couple of decades ago: I checked the author’s bona fides. I realized even while checking that it was an odd thing
to do, but also realized in the same instant that today’s world demands that we
think this way; if a white male wants to write a book about a different culture,
we wonder immediately whether he has the right to do so.
And then came the important thought, the one we’re not even
supposed to think (though many do), a thought much less conventional: Is it just me, or have we reached a point
where a white male can’t discuss anything non-white without his point of view
called into question?
I’m pretty sure it’s not just me. In fact, I’m damned sure
of it. I recall having a discussion following George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. At the time I was part of an online media team that focuses
on political and social issues. The team was “diverse” (to use the modern and,
to my mind, somewhat cryptic, terminology) and there were a variety of
opinions. The part of the discussion that most adheres, however, came from an
African-American in the group, who informed me that I “couldn’t possibly
understand” what Trayvon Martin had gone through because I “wasn’t black.” While
my ability to understand might suffer restriction, in reality his comment
wasn’t at all about that; it was a way of shutting down my opinion, a way of
telling me that not only were my opinions automatically invalid, but that I
should perhaps reconsider even having
an opinion in the first place. And If I did, I should at least have the decency
to refrain from speaking it aloud.
Where does one take a conversation from there?
Examples abound: Men are routinely chastised for having an
opinion on abortion or wages; heterosexuals for not having lived in constant
fear of being outed; whites for never knowing what it feels like to be followed
around a convenience store. And if someone does attempt a cross-cultural
thought? Well, such people may suffer instruction, commanded to “check their
privilege at the door.”
Laughing Boy isn’t
the only Pulitzer book that’s made me feel this way. I also recently read The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s
brilliant epistolary novel. Reading it wasn’t a totally comfortable experience,
though, since modern culture has implanted a sadistic homunculus, one that
suggests I might not even have the right to enjoy it or, if I do, that I’m
probably enjoying it for all the wrong reasons—as if such a thing were
possible. In some ways my experience with The
Color Purple was even worse than with Laughing
Boy because Alice Walker is black, female, and bisexual, a constant
meta-reminder that I am so very much not
any of those things. So even if I think I understood her book, how can I know
if I did, or if she would think I did, or even if my thoughts are any longer
valid on this inevitably larger social scale?
I get that I am, inarguably, privileged. I know this. As Pearl Jam once wrote in an otherwise forgettable song about white, male Americans, I “won the lottery" when I was born. But this idea that I need to
somehow “check my privilege” (and, no, I’m not making up that phrase), or that
my opinions and emotions are irrelevant because of it, strikes me with the
greatest irony; those who dismiss me with such simplicity are merely exerting
their own privilege, one self-proclaimed and, worse, one that builds walls.
There’s another unintended consequence here, one that is subtle
yet impactful, one that accepts—in fact, relies upon—that a reading experience exists in the space between the reader and the author. Given that those spaces
have changed—culturally, historically, politically—it is fair to say that the
book, too, has necessarily changed. Were I Native American (or, perhaps, the
even more au courant “First Nation”), the experience of reading Laughing Boy would be different than it
is for me now. Were I living in 1929 and
reading the book’s first edition the experience would again be different.
This has always been true, of course. Anyone who has gone
back to a favorite book decades later knows that even personal histories change
a book’s meaning. But it feels different, amplified somehow, to enter a reading experience with these
changes foisted upon you by others.
I much prefer the days when I could sit down to read a book
without having all those ghosts in the room with me, but I fear they’ve settled
in for a good long stay….
Read since last post:
- The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)
- Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge (1930)
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2007)
Currently reading:
- The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk (1952)
- The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
- Honey in the Horn, H.L. Davis (1936)
Count: 29 read; 58 to go
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