Should authors write about communities that they themselves do not belong to? I can see both sides. On the one hand, a writer should be free to write about anything they want, and we, the readers, get to decide if it’s good or not. Lionel Shriver, an author I admire, feels this very strongly. Although I didn’t find her cherrypicked anecdotal examples in that speech entirely compelling, I completely agree that authors should have the right to offend anyone.
At the same time, there has been such a long history of colonizers using the colonies as a colorful backdrop for their white-centric novels that it’s been thrilling to hear and read the voices of the formerly voiceless writing richly authentic books about their own communities. Too, the publishing industry is still far from diverse, with the majority of published books having white authors (95%, according to the New York Times), and the heads and editors of major publishing houses being heavily white. Debut authors who are white get larger advances than well-known black authors. And often, there is an implicit quota for books by and about non-white communities. (see the NYT link for lots of infuriating details). Non-white authors simply have not and do not get the kind of exposure that white authors do. Their stories are therefore largely told from the perspective of the dominant white Western perspective.
Fuller’s novel ticks every uneasy box here. The author is white, photogenic, was born in England and grew up in colonial Rhodesia as a child of privilege among comfortably racist British expats. She met her white American husband in Zambia and moved to Wyoming, where she is captivated by the Native Americans around her. This novel, Quiet Until the Thaw, is set in and among Sioux Indians on a reservation in Wyoming.
Fuller is an excellent memoirist. Her first book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, described her childhood in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia of the 1970s — the white-owned farms, the black nannies and cooks and field workers, the war in which her parents fought against Zimbabwean independence, and the drunken expat lifestyle — in a clear-eyed, honest, often shocking way. The racism and colonialist entitlement of the white minority was acknowledged, and did not seem toned down to make herself or her family look better to modern readers. The book also had a dark, wry humour. She has written several more memoirs (which I haven’t read), and Quiet Until the Thaw is her first novel.
And it is about Oglala Sioux. Says the author:
“The Rez and the people who live there made sense to me on a blood and bone level”
Alexandra Fuller, in the introduction to this novel.
Did the Sioux feel a similar connection with Fuller during her three-month stay in an Oglala reservation, an implicit bonding with this author whose own life, background and history has been so different? I wasn’t able to find a single comment or review by a Sioux or other Indian of this book, which is somewhat telling.
The novel follows two cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, who are brought up by their grandmother Mina Overlooking Horse. Rick’s father is dead, his mother is drug-addicted , and You Choose’s parents are an itinerant white cowboy and a sore-hearted Indian mother.
“You could have chosen not to be born now.” [Mina] says this to You Choose whenever he winds himself up to whining pitch, which is often. “You could have been born when you had a chance to hunt buffalo, and live the way of All Our Ancestors.”
(Do Sioux Indians really refer to their relatives as ‘All Our Ancestors’, or ‘Closest Immediate Relation’? Such are the questions that come up through the novel.)
Setting the birth of the cousins in 1944 allows Fuller to trace the history of the Indians over a good part of the 20th century. The cousins are sent off to the ‘Indian boarding schools‘ set up by the government to force assimilation of Indian children. On the rez (reservation) they live in tar-paper lean-tos with no electricity. They are drafted in the Vietnam War, but You Choose manages to avoid it with a diagnosis of diabetes. Rick returns grievously injured, minus an eye and with skin that ‘has the stretched shiny appearance of melted plastic’.
Rick spoke little as a child, less as an adult, and now speaks not at all. He sets up camp in a tepee out in a meadow, and inevitably, his calm silence and the weed he grows make him the equivalent of a medicine man. Meanwhile You Choose wanders around Canada in an alcoholic and drug-induced haze until he finally returns to the Rez, becoming a corrupt tribal leader tending towards violence. By 1972, both men become part of the American Indian Movement and the second standoff at Wounded Knee.
Fuller writes in short chapters (some only a few paragraphs long) which jump back and forth in time. The chapter about Rick’s return from Vietnam in 1966 is followed by his grandmother Mina’s death, and then the backstory of Mina from 1904-1966, then her funeral, then her own history at an Indian boarding school. The jumps are quite naturally done, as if following a train of thought. Towards the end of the novel, the short chapters become extremely short.
Despite the entire novel being about the Indians, they are described with a detached remoteness: the reader never really hears Rick’s own reason for his lack of speech, for example.
Fuller’s dark humour and appreciation for the absurd comes through here as well.
When he was knocked completely unconscious for a week, came out of it, rode six seconds on a saddle bronc in Reno before smacking himself out again on the arena fence, Mina said: “It’s hard to tell why he doesn’t just shoot hisself and be done with it.”
The history of the Sioux in the last century is effectively woven throughout the main story, and this was the most enjoyable part of the book. For example, when Rick is in hospital recovering from his Vietnam injuries, a nurse reads him the story of Billy Mills, the unknown long-shot American runner who won the 10,000 meters in the 1964 Olympics.
“Look, he’s Indian too”, said the nurse. [..] “A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Did you know him?”
“Yeah,” Rick Overlooking Horse said. “We ran together.”
[..] Billy Mills was the fastest Indian in the world and even he couldn’t outrun the officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs when they came for him and for all the kids between the ages of six and twelve that boreal chorus frog-singing August afternoon in 1952.
The ridiculously complicated rules and regulations made by the US government about and for the Indians are featured in a sometimes sardonic, sometimes sad tone. To belong officially to a tribe, Indians need a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. Most Americans can marry anyone, but
Under the laws and bylaws of the US Department of the Interior, there is no choice for Indians: They must either watch themselves disappear drop of blood by drop of blood, or they must marry their cousins, which is the same as driving a stake through the heart of a Lakota.
Intermittent chapters are devoted to ancient Indian philosophy, but to me it sounded forced and more authorial than Indian.
It takes an Indian amount of knowing to understand that rocks are grandfathers, plants are nations.
It takes an Indian amount of holiness to understand that thunderclouds are not only beings, but Higher Beings.
I think Fuller has made an honest attempt to write about a community that appeals to her, and her anger over their treatment is sincere. She is a clever, funny, and original writer, and I will look out for her other memoirs. That said, for a novel about Indians I’d pick Louise Erdrich or Sherman Alexie over Fuller, because their Indian characters are warm, living, imperfect humans whose lives and actions are embedded in their communities and history.
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