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This book presents an assortment of Native American characters from different backgrounds with one thing in common - they don’t live on a reservation. They are urban, and trying to figure out what exactly that means to them. What does it mean to be Native if you live surrounded by white people and white culture and colonialism? Are you Native because of your blood? How much? How do you know if you feel native enough?
The characters are all heading toward a big event - an urban powwow in Oakland, California. Some of them are helping to organize it, others are dancing or playing instruments or meeting family they barely know or just attending. But life under colonialism takes a toll, and things don’t end well.
I really enjoyed the characters here, and I wish I had gotten to know more about them. Some of the teenage/young adult boys blended together in a way that was hard to follow, but that might have been on purpose. Some of the connections between characters seemed a little far fetched, but connection is a theme of the book so it worked. The writing style is very stream-of-consciousness, which is very much not my thing, but if you like it this is an incredible example. I really did not care for the ending, but it did feel appropriate to the story. Certainly a book I appreciate having read, but I won’t be reading it again. ( )
The first pages of this debut novel are a sociological prologue, a red hot scythe through the myths of this country’s relationship with Native Americans. They show Orange to be a tremendously gifted writer and are my favorite part of this book. The fictional story that follows was less compelling for me but I’ll be quite interested in following Orange’s future development. ( )
When I started this book, I thought that instead of a novel, it was a series of short stories that might have some link that would be revealed as I got deeper into it. It took a few chapters to see that the characters’ stories were related in ways — by blood or circumstance — that came more into focus, all moving toward one event — The Big Oakland Powwow — that would irrevocably change many lives. From the arresting prologue to the violent and abrupt (to me) end, Tommy Orange engaged me with his crisp writing, exposing some problems facing Native Americans, in this case, Urban Indians, as he calls them. ( )
There, There is portrays the lives of several "Urban Indians" living in Oakland CA. They are all associated with an upcoming powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. Ultimately we see that their lives are intertwined in ways even they are unaware of. The ending a horrific but somewhat hopeful and beautifully written, like a dream.
I wasn't sure I liked the book at first. Each character was presented separately so I had forgotten about them by the time they came up again. But by the last 100+ pages you know them and have maybe begrudgingly developed some empathy for them. They are all deeply flawed, broken people. It is a sad story. ( )
This one takes a little bit of effort but it's worth it in the end.
It's sad and it has a lot of characters (that I wish I was more careful about remembering in the beginning) but it all ties together by the end at the Big Oakland Powwow. I like to read books about people who have a completely different life experience than I do and this certainly fits that bill.
It makes me feel bad that I know so little about Native American history/culture and how I have spent virtually no time at all in my life thinking about how native people experience present day America. This books has a compelling plot but mostly I feel like its purpose is to shine a light on how we are so good at ignoring the origins and aftermath of the white man coming to America.
Characters here do not notice connections that might offer meaning even though they tell endless details. For those of us who may want literature to confirm human journeys, (or even reject them), this is boring stuff.
There There signals an exciting new era for Native American fiction. Orange lends a critical voice that at once denudes the reality of cultural genocide while evoking a glimmer of encouragement.
The network of characters in There There proves dizzying, but the multivocal nature of the book is a purposeful, intelligent strategy. It offers a glimpse of an interconnected life, a world in which small stones don’t just sink to the bottom of the sea but change tides.
The idea of unsettlement and ambiguity, of being caught between two worlds, of living a life that is disfigured by loss and the memory of loss, but also by confusion, distraction and unease, impels some of the characters, and allows the sound of the brain on fire to become dense with dissonance. Orange’s characters are, however, also nourished by the ordinary possibilities of the present, by common desires and feelings. This mixture gives their experience, when it is put under pressure, depth and a sort of richness.
Here's the thing about There There, the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orange: Even if the rest of its story were just so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading.
If There There is at times an angry and demanding book (keeping track of the characters’ relation to one another is a challenge in itself), it is also a humane one.
If anything, there’s too much intrigue here to truly do justice to them all, but what remains is the fierce drive “to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive.”
True, “There There” is also a sad book — devastating, actually. It’s also entirely unsentimental about it, and that exquisite mix of unflinching anger and sadness and humor is the source of its power.
As a reader whose family gatherings revolve around my community’s local pow-wow every year, it was particularly difficult to see this setting used as the backdrop for such violence, especially considering young Indigenous men are the ones who ultimately enact it. Will non-Indigenous readers see this scene as evidence that we’re dysfunctional? That our men are inherently violent? That our peoples’ problems are all our faults?
Everything about “There There” acknowledges a brutal legacy of subjugation — and shatters it. Even the book’s challenging structure is a performance of determined resistance. This is a work of fiction, but Orange opens with a white-hot essay. With the glide of a masterful stand-up comic and the depth of a seasoned historian, Orange rifles through our national storehouse of atrocities and slurs, alluding to figures from Col. John Chivington to John Wayne. References that initially seem disjointed soon twine into a rope on which the beads of American hatred are strung. (Whoever is editing this year’s collection of “The Best American Essays,” please don’t pass over this prologue just because it’s in a novel.)
The propulsion of both the overall narrative and its players are breathtaking as Orange unpacks how decisions of the past mold the present, resulting in a haunting and gripping story.
The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force.
Tommy Orange's first novel is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. There There is a multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. A glorious, unforgettable debut.
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In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times. --Bertolt Brecht
How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it? --Javier Marias
Dedica
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For Kateri and Felix
Incipit
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The Drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six. Earlier that day my friend Mario, while hanging from the monkey bars in the sand park, said, Why's your face look like that?"
Citazioni
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Just like the Indian Head test pattern was broadcast to sleeping Americans as we set sail from our living rooms, over the ocean blue-green glowing airwaves, to the shores, the screens of the New World.
Plenty of us are urban now. If not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet. Inside the high-rise of multiple browser windows. They used to call us sidewalk Indians. Called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples. An apple is red on the outside and white on the inside. But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.
They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.
...we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread—which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.
This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.
“Why do we got names like we do?” I said. “They come from old Indian names. We had our own way of naming before white people came over and spread all those dad names around in order to keep the power with the dads.”
I wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum policies on modern Native identity, and the literature written by mixed-blood Native authors that influenced identity in Native cultures. All without knowing my tribe. Always defending myself. Like I’m not Native enough. I’m as Native as Obama is black. It’s different though. For Natives. I know. I don’t know how to be. Every possible way I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong.
We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.
And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?
If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.
We won’t have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don’t know those people, we don’t even know people who know those people, we’re once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don’t like and repost and then, and then it’s like it didn’t happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we’re used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he’s there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won’t know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near.
BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were the nested Russian grandmother doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a thousand different kinds of possibilities, a million heads or tails, flip-shine on a spun coin. Before you were born, you were the idea to make it to California for gold or bust. You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were hiding, you were seeking.
You didn’t think of any of the tapping or knocking as drumming until you actually started drumming many years later. It would have been good to know that you’d always done something naturally. But there was too much going on with everyone else in your family for anyone to notice you should probably have done something else with your fingers and toes than tap, with your mind and time than knock at all the surfaces in your life like you were looking for a way in.
You walked into the room and, just as you did, they started singing. High-voiced wailing and howled harmonies that screamed through the boom of that big drum. Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.
As for your mom’s side, as for your whiteness, there’s too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub.
I don't know WTF any of this is about. - You're not supposed to, she said...That's the way this whole thing is set up. You're never supposed to know. Not all the way. That's what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can't know. That's what makes us keep going.
Your limp is practiced. An articulate limp, which says something about the way you've learned to roll with the punches, all the ways you've been fucked over, knocked down, what you've recovered from or haven't, what you've walked or limped away from with or without style - that's on you.
She wants to stop time, have more time to pray, to prepare. But all time has ever done is to keep going.
Ultime parole
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And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he'll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing.
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The characters are all heading toward a big event - an urban powwow in Oakland, California. Some of them are helping to organize it, others are dancing or playing instruments or meeting family they barely know or just attending. But life under colonialism takes a toll, and things don’t end well.
I really enjoyed the characters here, and I wish I had gotten to know more about them. Some of the teenage/young adult boys blended together in a way that was hard to follow, but that might have been on purpose. Some of the connections between characters seemed a little far fetched, but connection is a theme of the book so it worked. The writing style is very stream-of-consciousness, which is very much not my thing, but if you like it this is an incredible example. I really did not care for the ending, but it did feel appropriate to the story. Certainly a book I appreciate having read, but I won’t be reading it again. (