今日喜获一称号:果冻妹

这段时间脑子里总是常常闪过过去某些时间段中的片段或场景.

我评选出它们中间让我最感慨的是...大家都叫我Chichi时的感觉.

我很想念做Chichi时的日子.

这是一本小说的读后感.这份作业做得过头了...因为我误解了老师的意思.老师是想带动学院论坛气氛,我却忘了论坛这事,完全按平时作业感觉写了.

结果小题大做.

但是,这本书比较特别.书写得一般.主要是他的种类有些特别.当代北美印地安人作家不多.这位作者的书算是productive的了.自己以前对印地安人了解甚少,现在对他们兴趣多了很多.我想到种族.他们的没落让我想到传统文化的丢失.我想到中国.传统文化丢失这件事越想越觉得很可怕,却又似乎无法避免.这是人类的悲剧.

这篇作业我一开始没敢直接发到论坛,怕它的长度吓到大家.于是就发给老师说了我的担忧.果然老师说"you're right".听老师的话,我等了一周, 今天我很得意地把它发到论坛上了.最近看很多人好象都在用"雷"这个词,我也不知道这词具体用法是怎样的,不知道是不是我这也算"雷"一下论坛.可是我怎么一听到"雷"就想到雷世贵老师呢.我最近好象老师想到他.可能是政治学得有点多.索性,在这里也轰炸一下自己的地盘.

The novel that I’ve read is called Reservation Blues. The author Sherman Alexie who was born in Spokane, Washington has written many literary works, and most of these works recount the stories of Native Indians. Reservation Blues was written with his habitual humor, but I find it difficult to laugh because it seems that each joke in the story hides a certain bitter sentiment behind it.

 

The story begins with a black man Robert Johnson who flees from his master and gets lost on the Spokane reservation. With the guitar he brings there, the protagonist Thomas Builds-the-Fire and two local bullies Victor and Junior establish a music band Coyote Spring which soon gets popular. Later, the Indian Warm Water sisters Chess and Check from Flathead reservation join them. The members of the band then experience a lot of things together and finally receive an invitation of a big record company in New York City when they are in the poorest condition. I won’t tell you the end, but it is not a rags to riches story.

 

By pure coincidence, I’ve just read an article called “The Sound of Change—Poor and isolated, Cuba is crumbling. Can music save it?” from the magazine Time (Vol. 172, No23/2008), written by Nathan Thornburgh. I suddenly find a kind of similarity between what has been described of today’s Cuba and what I’ve read in Reservation Blues. In the article, a Cuban singer named Oscar Munoz, sees his band’s mission as “defending the Cuban sound”. Both authors suppose a way of the people’s self-salvation by traditional culture—music, just like one comment from the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota who plays a role a little bit like a prophet in Reservation Blues: “Music is a dangerous thing” (page 12). Now I would like to talk about two questions in the book which interest me: firstly, how to explain the phenomenon of reiteration in the story? Secondly, what is happening between Indians and white people?

    

Reiterations and repetitions are everywhere in the book, continuously from resemblance of general situations to resemblance of specific scenes, from identical sentences to same single words. Firstly, reiterations reveal people’s fear. They prefer to stay in their routine but safe life and are afraid of change. At the beginning of the book, Johnson arrives at the reservation and tries to communicate with local people, but nobody would talk to the stranger. According to me, it is this fear of change that urges the destruction of the band at last for they believe that the band has changed and they must desert it. Unfortunately, people are indeed changing in spite of their fear. In the story, the author makes every member of the band have astonishingly similar families. Nearly all their parents drink because they have all suffered changes in the life, which leads to different family tragedies. The typical one is the story of Thomas’s father Samuel. Drinking allows these “lost souls” to avoid pains in life, but delivers their sufferance to their younger generation, and the younger generation once again sheds tears for similar sufferance.

 

Secondly, ceaseless repetition is a way of remembering. Thomas, the only one in the band having an Indian family name, “Builds-the-Fire”, is no doubt an important figure who feels it is his duty to defend Indian traditions. That’s why he is made the lead singer—which is emphasized many times in the novel, though he doesn’t have the best voice. He always repeats his stories. On page15, “Thomas repeated stories constantly. All other Indians on the reservation heard those stories so often that the words crept into dreams”. Repeating these stories is a way to remember and hand down Indian traditional culture. Music is the same. Constant rehearsals of traditional Indian songs have the power of penetrate people’s insensible souls and help them to remember their traditions. People used to dance with the band and it became a semi-religious ceremony which annoyed the Catholics because it presaged the renewing and recovery of the people. Just like what is commented in the article concerning Cuban music: “during the economic crisis following the Soviet collapse, music was the one thing that held the island together, a common passion for both revolutionaries and reactionaries”. More precisely, in the novel, the most important type of music they play is “blues”. Blues originated from African-American communities in the U.S and are sung for self-expression and in the story. It is precisely the black man, Robert Johnson, who brings the guitar to the Indians. On page 22, the guitar announces:  “The blues always make us remember” and on page 174, blues are described as “ancient, aboriginal, indigenous”—“created memories for the Spokanes”, “lit up a new road”, “churned up generations of anger and pain”.

 

A part from the phenomenon of constant repetitions, similarities and reproductions, I’m also interested in how the author deals with the relationship in life between Indians and white people. What do they look like in each other’s eyes?

 

The main Indian figures’ attitudes are influenced by similar reasons, while white figures all have different visions and motivations in the book— they embody different groups of whites who have different ideas. Chess is somewhat radical and thinks that “she hated Indian men who chased after white women; she hated white women who chased after Indian men” (page 81); Junior likes to hang out with white women because “Junior knew that white women were trophies for Indian boys. He always figured getting a white woman was like counting coup or stealing horses, like the best kind of revenge against white men” (page 233). However, I have to note that there is a common explanation for their idea: they have been hurt once. Chess’s grandmother was a little white and she hated to be Indian and finally hurt the family by leaving her grandfather; Junior’s attitude towards white women is changed because he was hurt by his first white girlfriend Lynn. The white figures in the book are different, but also typical: the two white cops and Sheridan are typical white plunderers towards Indians. For them, Indians are just a kind of tool for making their own benefits because they are an inferior race. Lynn and Wright both feel guilty towards Indians because Lynn hurt Junior by refusing a half-breed baby and Wright is tortured by his guilt of having killed so many Indians in the war. They are indeed guilty, but they seem to be powerless because the former must obey her family and the society and the latter must listen to his boss and can only cry before his wife’s grave. Father Alnold and Father James are both kind white men who really want to help the Indians, but both are fooled by their white fellow people (by leaders with political intentions and for Father James, by his own nieces). Betty and Veronica are two white women of the young generation. They don’t reject the Indians and even worship them and appreciate their features and culture. However, they cannot integrate neither because hate and fear is deeply planted in the mind of Indians.

 

Concerning cultural invasions, three kinds are mentioned in the novel. The first is an invasion by religion through the sermons of the priest: “as a lead singer, as a priest, he could change the shape of the world just by changing the shape of a phrase” (page 36). The band is supposed to take over as the “lead singer” and protect Native culture. The destruction of the band in the end is no surprise since everything which may sustain or revive their traditional culture is always destroyed without mercy. Destruction as a habitual method is the second means of cultural invasion. On page 146, Thomas recounts what he has seen when he was nine: “I went to church one day and found everybody burning records and books”; “These are the devil’s tools! the white Catholic priest bellowed as his Indian flock threw books and records into the fire”. The third means is more direct: threats. When people do not want to listen to the priest, missionaries threaten the audience with black boxes. People then become quiet and full of fear because they are told that the boxes contain smallpox which may kill them quickly. Faced with such forms of cultural invasion, some Indian reactions are depicted by the writer in a satirical way. People who do not believe in Christianity challenge the church more directly. For instance, when the music band is at the top of their career, Thomas says in the interview that “I think we’d all be better off if we put more rock music into our churches…we need to be loud so God can hear us. What’s louder than rock ’n’ roll?” (page 159). In another conversation with Chess, he argues about the Wounded Knee slaughter: “All those soldiers killed us in the name of God, enit? They shouted ‘Jesus Christ’ as they ran swords through our bellies” (page 167). Lester, who doesn’t have so many stories as Thomas does, simply expresses his attitude by calling his three dogs “the Father”, “the Son” and “the Holy ghost”. People who do believe in Christianity are embodied by the Warm Water sisters. They are also confused, just as Checker is confused, which is quite ironical: “But did God want me to fall in love with his priest?” (page 149). Finally, even Father Alnold has shown his uncertainty: “You do know that Jesus was Jewish? He probably had dark skin and hair”(page 141).

 

To conclude, important themes constantly reappear in the novel, they represent the Native people’s fear of change and also a call to preserve traditions and tribal culture. The confrontation of Indians and whites are carefully handled by the author without radical expressions but showing how the two peoples see each other and illustrating the cultural invasion. According to the Time’s article, Oscar’s band also split up and most of its members have moved from Cuba. As fear is useless, both Cubans and Indians had better change. Music is just a weapon; the fundamental changes need to begin with the mind, just like Big Mom’s advice in Reservation Blues: “You can change your mind”. I think that is what Sherman Alexie would say after the whole story so that the dancer of the Cuban band doesn’t need to say “To be Cuban is to be tired” and Checkers doesn’t need to say “Sometimes, I hate being Indian”. If music is a weapon, so is literature.