True Story

I think Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian would make a great Christmas present. The bloke I've asked to review the book isn't as impressed as this old woman though. Look out for his review, due out in StarTwo in the next few weeks.

The power of walking away

TOTS TO TEENS
By DAPHNE LEE

Our columnist has  a Hallmark moment on a bus thanks  to a funny,  touching book about surviving  the greatest odds.

NINE more days before Christmas! I have yet to buy a single present and I seriously doubt much shopping will get done before the 25th. In fact, I’ve told my friends that we’ll skip the presents this year. Not for the children though. Even if I have to forego sleep and spend the next eight nights fashioning picture books out of manila card, crayons and string, my kids will get Christmas presents.

I know I’m supposed to recommend books for Christmas, but how can I when I don’t know what’s in the bookstores? I’m planning a trip to check them out – planned to go this week, but ... are there really 24 hours in a day, really seven days a week? You could have fooled me!

I bussed down to Singapore a couple of weeks ago and spent part of the five-hour ride reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown ISBN: 978-0316013680).

Much of it made me laugh aloud and I wept through some bits too. In the end, I felt, in a totally corny, Hallmark Movies way, that my life, which I spend a few minutes every day complaining about, wasn’t that bad after all.

I considered buying it for several “ungrateful” teenagers I know and immediately felt ashamed because I’m always grumbling about adults who use books to make a point. Okay, so I do this often enough, but I guess my intentions are usually subtler than that. I like books that seem like they might provoke thought – about anything, but especially about things other than what the reader is accustomed to contemplating, or in ways that are unusual or, at any rate, different from the norm.

Many of the teens I know spend all their time complaining about life, their friends, their families, their lack of opportunities, how they don’t live in the United States (really!), and the temptation is to tell them stories (lies, really) of walking miles to the nearest school and how we read by the light of jars filled with fireflies. 

The temptation to scream, “You don’t realise how good you’ve got it!” is great.

I don’t know what sort of difference a book like Alexie’s would make to the way these teens feel and think about their lives. At the very least, (one hopes) it would make them realise that not every American teenager lives a charmed (read: The O.C.) life. 

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the 2007 US National Book Award, is written from the point of view of 14-year-old Arnold Spirit (Junior to his friends and family), a Native American-Indian kid who lives on a Spokane reservation. His family, like all the families on the “rez”, is poor. His parents are alcoholic, but loving and well meaning. His sister used to be the smartest kid in school until she dropped out and stopped speaking. Junior’s best friend is abused by his father and is himself violent.

Junior loves to draw. He draws to express himself; he draws to understand life, celebrate it and rage about it; he draws to distance himself from and also to confront his fears.

The book draws on Alexie’s own experiences as an American Indian living on a reservation. Like the author, Junior leaves the reservation to attend an all-white school. 

No matter how difficult and hopeless life is for him at home, it’s something he is used to and comfortable with, so his decision to leave is a huge and scary step that leads to all kinds of developments and changes.

Following his National Book Award win, Alexie, in an interview with The Seattle Times, said, “It’s just astonishing. It’s all because 27 years ago, I went up to my mum and dad and asked if I could leave the rez school, and they said yes.”

I think the reason I liked this book so much is that it’s about escape, and I believe in running away from your problems – no, not in a cowardly, I-refuse-to-try way, but simply because, sometimes, it’s a matter of survival. There are moments when life’s difficulties are so insurmountable that the only option is to walk away from them, and that’s okay. It doesn’t necessarily make you a coward or a quitter.

Give this book to someone (or many people) this Christmas for Junior’s silly jokes; his flashes of insight; his despair that doesn’t quite do him in, but instead makes him angry enough to walk out and keep on walking; his pictures (by Ellen Forney) that, in their simplicity, give most profound shape to his fears and hopes and dreams.