Theodore
C. Van Alst, Jr. Sacred Smokes.
University of New Mexico Press, 2018. 162 pp. ISBN: 9780826359902
https://unmpress.com/books/sacred-smokes/9780826359902
Intriguing
are the ways in which one's subjective perception of the content or spirit of a
book may match or fail to mesh with the dominant hook by which it is summarized
and marketed. In the case of Sacred
Smokes, the University of New Mexico Press stresses the selling point of a "story
of a Native American gang member in Chicago." With such a cue, a potential
reader might be tempted to begin making comparisons between Sacred Smokes and Tommy Orange's smash
hit novel, There There, published in
2018 within two months of Sacred Smokes,
which centers on a cast of mostly deracinated, dysfunctional Natives in
Oakland, California, and, on the whole, obsesses on the idea of 3D-printed
firearms. However, such a superficial comparison would miss the mark since Sacred Smokes contains a great deal more
depth, energy, and vitality.
Theodore
Van Alst, Jr.'s work is a raw, torrid Bildungsroman about tough city kids and
adolescents in the 1970s and 80s, sometimes focusing on a fraught relationship
between a father and longhair son--for example, "Old Gold Couch" is a stone
classic that will, if there is justice in this world, become anthologized and
taught. With humor and pathos, Van Alst ponders inheritance and habits,
friendship, masculinity (toxic and otherwise), rebellion, and forming a code of
conduct. He considers what it means to be working class and Indian in "the city
of big shoulders," to quote Carl Sandburg's poem, "Chicago." There is much
laughter here among the reader and characters, as we often hear Teddy "laughing the stormy, husky, brawling
laughter of Youth," again Sandburg's words. In many ways, as I hope to
show, Benjamin Franklin is a much more apt comparison point for this
entertaining story of self-improvement and growth. The tone, style, and
sentiment of Sacred Smokes, however, are more reminiscent of Chicago writer Nelson
Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm; Walk on the Wild Side), Harlan Ellison, Junot
Díaz, Bret Easton Ellis, and Stephen Graham Jones, whose short fiction Van Alst
collected and edited for The Faster
Redder Road. Although Ben Franklin might be seen as an odd figure to
compare with Van Alst, he was something of an ally to American Indians since,
in the 1780s, Franklin praised the manners and customs of New England Indians,
contrasting them with the ubiquitous chicanery of exploitative American
settlers in "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America."
Sacred Smokes is incredibly
funny and compelling, and its voice is lively and freely digressive, almost
always in a good way. It is vibrant and vital, brimming with confidence and
brio. These are apparently the author's life stories which, while they may be
embellished or fictionalized, seem to be derived from his impoverished
upbringing in Chicago. Sacred Smokes
could be called a story cycle, or a novel, but it has the heart of a memoir. It
has no evident political agenda; it just tells amazingly funny, surprising,
heartbreaking, and sometimes violent stories with a sense of the joy of
storytelling--and of living. It is
somehow both hard-boiled and emotional, hilarious and poignant. One punchy
story ends, and immediately the eye is caught by the
opening line of the next, pulling the reader further. This is a great CHICAGO
book, one that recollects the edgy 1970s and 80s, the street-fights and
shenanigans at Pottawattomie Park, and gang fashion
fetishes to die for, perhaps literally. Van Alst elaborates the semiotics of
gang sweaters, which were bright, outrageously colorful varsity-style cardigan
sweaters, in two categories of "war sweaters" and "party sweaters," which
became war trophies. The narrator explains: "back then those cardigan-style
sweaters were the shit--they were everything. Those were your colors" (18). Sacred Smokes shares the Nelson Algren
vibe in its romantic celebration of those on the margins of society as the salt
of the earth, and its depiction of those in power as grotesque, greedy animals.
For example, older gang members who had done time were likely some of the best
people the narrator had ever known, even up to the present. The book seems to
implicitly echo Sandburg's challenge: "Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
alive and coarse and strong and cunning" (Sandburg 14-15). Another innovative aspect
that merits mention is the novel's striking use of unorthodox typography and
gothic fonts and crown icons when referring to gang names, which are often
turned upside down. The University of New Mexico Press must be praised for the book's
design by Felicia Cedillos, which is hip and contemporary; the cover painting
in the leger art tradition is by Blackfoot artist, Lauren Monroe.
Sacred Smokes,
although undoubtedly a great work of contemporary Native American literature,
extends and updates some enduring tropes and traditions in American literature
and culture. It is actually quite Benjamin Franklin-esque,
which, again, might seem like a surprising comparison to make about an edgy,
"gang-related" work of Chicago fiction, but hear me out. In this book, the
protagonist rises from poverty and urban squalor through initiative and hard
work. Through his father and other figures, such as his employer at a local
Italian restaurant, Teddy learns diligence and practical skills, eventually
lifting himself out of poverty through his intelligence and willpower. We
should note that the author is a success story, an associate professor and the
Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana, and a former
Assistant Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale
University, among other distinctions. This book is not a vindictive
gripe-fest about oppression and racism. In the book, racial antipathy flows in
multiple directions; thin-skinned white readers, though I doubt they are
reading Transmotion, might whine that,
with a couple of exceptions, every white or "whiteish" character in this book is
of poor character, avaricious, repellent, grotesque, and usually worthy of the
scathing, on-target satire, beating, or bullet he receives. But this is, after
all, a book that begins with an epigraph from the report of an Indian agent in
1854, writing that the Blackfeet (Sihasapa) band of Sioux, from whom Van Alst
seems to be descended, along with the Honepapas (Hunkpapa), were "continually
warring and committing depredations on whites and neighboring tribes, killing
men and stealing horses. They even defy the Great White Father, the President,
and declare their intention to murder indiscriminately all that come within
their reach. They, of all Indians, are now the dreaded on the Missouri" (Van
Alst, n.p.). However, white people are also seen as a group who generally live
well, who saw something they wanted, and took it; growing up working-class,
Teddy is envious, and wishes to have what they have. At the same time, he does
not paint the world as one that categorically denies success and its trappings
to people of color, though it presents special challenges to them. Rather, the
world of this book is somewhat Nietzschean; the world is indifferent, and can
be absurd, but individuals who exhibit drive, intelligence, and the Will to Power
find ways to improve themselves. In frigid Chicago, dwelling in a marginal
neighborhood, Teddy would often dream of the "warm air at night" of the West
Coast, we are told in "Push It" (114). He imagines the trio of characters in
the Nicholas Ray film Rebel Without a
Cause famously played by James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood, at the
Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles:
these kids could
be make-believe parents too someday, less than zero parents, sure, but they'll
have kids of their own, and they'll live in nice houses, ones with year-round
azaleas and pools and tiled roofs, and they'll have that warm air at night and,
shit, well I want that too, how the fuck is it these people get that, claim
that, own that, like it was left at their doorstep and they just had to take
it, no questions asked? Where and what,
after all, is justice but someone taking some goddamn initiative any goddamn
way? (115, my emphasis)
It
is a bit Nietzsche and quite Franklin in the sense that Teddy learns the
lessons of thrift, diligence (Industry), innovation, and reading habits that
are counseled by Franklin in his Autobiography and in his iterations of Old Richard's Almanac. Teddy first
learns a lesson the hard way in "Old Gold Couch" when he neglects to do his
chore, washing the stacks of dishes in the sink, day after day, until this
negligence finally prompts his father to do something shocking and drastic. The
lesson sinks in. (This story also includes a wonderful allusion to Gordon
Lightfoot telling stories "from the Chippewa on down about the big lake they
call Gitchigoomi" (8); the pop culture references are wide and knowing).
Continuing
the Franklin theme, in "Lordsprayer" the protagonist's father tasks Teddy with
memorizing "the Lordsprayer" before he can go out, and the experience of being
given a new challenge, and using one's abilities and ingenuity to meet the
challenge and reach one's desired end is another life lesson from dear ole dad,
who, though often drunk and undemonstrative, yet conveys some bits of wisdom
and advice to his son over the years. Thanks to his "lesson in memory," in the
future, Ted is able to memorize swatches of critical theory, such as the
excerpt from Vizenor's Manifest Manners
he memorized decades later (anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism), which becomes a
meta-commentary on the book we are reading: "Postindian autobiographies, the
averments of tribal descent, and the assertions of crossblood identities, are
simulations in literature; that names, nicknames, and the shadows of ancestors
are stories is an invitation to new theories of tribal interpretation" (qtd. in
Van Alst 32). Germane to Sacred Smokes,
Vizenor also writes in Manifest Manners:
"The Postindian simulations and shadows counter the dominance of histories and
the dickered testimonies of representations; at the same time, trickster
stories, transformations, and the shimmers of tribal consciousness are heard in
the literature of survivance" (63).
Like
Ben Franklin and Sherman Alexie, Teddy always has his nose in a book, an avid
reader who thirsts for knowledge, as seen in "Great America." (One story is
about the tragedy of a friend's illiteracy.) In "Blood on the Tracks/No Mas,"
Teddy shows how he learned lessons of thrift from his father, who gave him a
dollar a week. By necessity, he learns how to stretch nickels and dimes, and
when pennies aren't going far enough, he takes a job at an Italian restaurant
and works his ass off. He learns how to cook all kinds of things, which is a
lesson he applies daily in cooking for his family, the narrator says, and he
boasts that, decades later, he even pleases Martha Stewart with one of his scrumptious
sangies (sic). In "Push It," Teddy embodies the American virtues of innovation and
entrepreneurship. After hitchhiking to New Orleans with a friend and becoming
stranded temporarily, while hanging out in a bar, a "handsome white man" with a
heavy New Orleans accent asks him what he's up to. Teddy says nothing much, he's
broke. The man asks if he has any skills, and Teddy replies that he paints
faces. The man gives Teddy a twenty-dollar bill. Teddy buys the face paint,
hits the streets, works hard, makes a hundred bucks, and gives the handsome
white man forty in thanks for his twenty-dollar loan. "I knew you be good for
dis. Good job, bwai" (122). Even though we see Teddy intermittently drinking
and occasionally snorting lines, he yet embodies Franklin's virtue of
temperance in the sense that he rejects the cannabis haze that many of his young
peers often settled into, wishing to be more present and motivated.
Given
that Sacred Smokes and There There were published within a few
months of each other and are both about urban Indians, it is impossible not to
compare their relative merit here. There
There does not compare favorably to Sacred
Smokes, although it has been widely acclaimed by follow-the-leader book reviewers
and perpetrators of "book-chat," as Gore Vidal put it. Although readers I know
and respect, both Native and non-Native, have privately noted their
disappointment in discovering a gap between the novel's merit and its critical
accolades, it would seem this assessment is an "incorrect" view that usually
remains unuttered and that editors fear to publish. Relentlessly dark,
contrived, and weak in characterization, this Oakland novel is notable mostly
as a critical and commercial triumph for a new Native American writer, not for
literary or aesthetic excellence. Its author seems to have been unaware of much
of the rich history of Native American literature that preceded his bestseller.
When he was writing it, despite the fact that N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), the famous
novel that kicked off the Native American Renaissance, is partly set in Los
Angeles, and several later novels by writers such as Vizenor, Alexie, Janet
Campbell Hale, and Louise Erdrich had urban settings, Orange believed
that the urban Indian experience had never been portrayed in literature, "as
far as [he] could tell," as Orange told Mother
Jones last year. The novel fortuitously benefitted from, first, good
timing: its publication was contemporaneous with the decline of the #metoo-ed Sherman
Alexie--who is referenced in Sacred Smokes
as the subject of a talk given by the grown-up narrator at a Native American
Literature Symposium panel in the presence of his Aunties. Second, There There benefitted from marketing
savvy and major-press muscle: a bright orange and yellow cover reminiscent of a
traffic cone matches the memorable moniker "Tommy Orange," which is a great brand
name like Tommy Hilfiger, Orange Julius, or Billy Collins. Such branding was
instilled in Orange growing up in an embarrassing way: "I very much knew I was white
because my mom is white. She has orange hair, her last name is Orange, we had
an orange van at one point," Orange told the CBC. Of course, it is not nice to
make fun of someone's name, but this is Transmotion
and I am liberated to do so by the spirit of Gerald Vizenor with his precedent
of, among many other satiric depictions, mocking Ojibwe AIM leader and cocaine
dealer Clyde Bellecourt as Coke De Fountain in his 1988 novel, The Trickster of Liberty (111-113).
The trickster spirit of
Vizenor similarly flows through Sacred
Smokes. Just as the media in the
early 1970s tripped over themselves to glorify and cover the "right on" actions
of AIM, a group that Vizenor criticized at length, so today does the media, focused
on identity politics but fairly ignorant of questions of literary quality, bend
over backwards to hail There There as this new
literary sensation. Blazoned on the cover are two BIG feathers (natch) that
clearly signify "Indian" to the potential book buyer noticing stacks of the
book in an airport or Barnes & Noble; and an-easy-to-remember title that
makes facile reference to both Radiohead and Gertrude Stein but connotes an
urban Indian's yearning for Indigenous land that was expropriated and covered
up with pavement and railroad tracks. Although There There is well-plotted, it is ultimately a workmanlike, nihilistic
novel with little in the way of a redeeming message. It seems as influenced by
an episode of 24 as much as any
literary work (though The Brief and
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao sometimes comes to mind), with everything
closing in suspensefully on the Oakland pow-wow. The novel's cast is just as
ill-fated as the crew of the Pequod in
Moby-Dick, but less memorable in that
some of its multiple dysphoric narrators and characters can sometimes blend
together. There There is premised in
tragic victimry, to use Gerald Vizenor's phrase, giving many white and other
non-Native readers the opportunity to submerge in guilt and despair over how
fucked-up these urban Indians are, and really, how degrading life is in general.
That
sense of tragic victimry critiqued by Vizenor, who is quoted early in Van Alst's
book, is exactly what is elegantly avoided in Sacred Smokes. There There
makes the reader feel bad, but many of its readers want to feel bad, as in Lo, The Poor Urban Indian! Yet the literati
so wanted a replacement for Sherman Alexie. But this kind of thinking, of there
being a place for just one special
American Indian writer known to the mainstream, is insidious and ignorant, when
currently there is a boon of talent including Van Alst, Tiffany Midge, Erika T.
Wurth, and Natalie Diaz, to mention just a few. This raises the question, why
is a so-so book such as There There
enjoying mega success with Knopf, while Van Alst's markedly superior Sacred Smokes was published by a
Southwestern academic press? Though it has received awards such as the Tillie
Olsen Award for Creative Writing, in comparison its audience is much smaller
and more reliant on word of mouth. Unquestionably, it deserves a much wider
readership.
Overall,
Sacred Smokes is an inspirational
story that is simultaneously raw and poignant and, in an odd way, an
instructive tale illustrating the virtues of diligence, innovation, and
applying one's native talents. Theodore Van Alst, Jr. has created an exciting,
compelling, and major work of literature.
Michael
Snyder, University of Oklahoma
Works
Cited
CBC
Radio. "'I grew up knowing what I was, was a conflict': Tommy Orange writes
about challenges facing 'urban Indians.'" Unreserved.
21 September 2018. www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/are-we-in-the-midst-of-a-new-native-renaissance-1.4831702/i-grew-up-knowing-what-i-was-was-a-conflict-tommy-orange-writes-about-challenges-facing-urban-indians-1.4832186.
Franklin,
Benjamin. Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin. 1793. Ed. Frank Woodworth Pine. New York: Henry Holt, 1916. www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm.
---.
"Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America." 1784. Founders Online. National
Historical Publications and Records Commission. founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-41-02-0280.
Oatman, Maddie.
"The Stars of This Stunning Debut Novel Are a Long Way from the Reservation." Mother Jones. May/June 2018. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2018/06/tommy-orange-there-there-native-americans-oakland-urban-indians-1/.
Orange,
Tommy. There There. New York: Knopf,
2018.
Sandburg,
Carl. "Chicago." 1914. Poetry. Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago.
Vizenor,
Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on
Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
---. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a
Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.