Salon’s recent debasement of American literature as represented by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth is hilarious reading for Americans who are people of color, especially in my view American Indians. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the giants of American literature aren’t worthy of such an honor, I am in agreement with Salon that these American giants are “insular and self-involved.”
They are, but what’s worse — they are fearful, fearful of writing about and engaging in race. Europeans, Asians, Africans, American people of color, and virtually everyone else sees how truly pathetic American discourse on race has become. Derrick Bell’s passing reminds us how far Americans have to go before they can confront the undeniably racialized origins of the United States. Derrick Bell, who would have fit in well in the pantheon of Nobel winners (in either literature or peace), talked about race in a way most white Americans simply will not do. Americans was colorblindness, they want neutrality, and they certainly don’t want comeuppance.
American literature, or what Salon views as a canon or sorts (exclusively white authors), is weak on race. Probably the best novel on race by Salon’s stable of worthy-ish writers is Roth’s The Human Stain. It’s good, but it’s not really a direct engagement on race. First, it’s set on campus at a liberal arts college, maybe the whitest place around, and a frequent safe ground for American writers. Second, it’s not really about race. It’s about a white guy who finds out he’s black. And he suffers horribly for it. That’s the best Americans can do?
Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich have been writing about race for decades. They confront the question of race head on. They’re honest about it, especially Alexie. Americans are racists. So are American Indians, and blacks, and Latino/as, and Asians. We all are, and American literature runs from that reality, trying to avoid it, or cover it up. Derrick Bell didn’t run from it. He dealt with it. Alexie writes about Indians in white communities, Indians who sold out to join white America and how they can’t go back home, and Indians who hate whites so much they kill them. Erdrich writes about mixed race people of every stripe you can find in the northern plains. She adds the element of gender that’s beautiful and powerful and nasty.
America’s “canon,” the people Salon deems worthy of discussion, just don’t do any of these things. Maybe they wouldn’t know how. The Nobel committee will award the Prize to someone like Alexie or Erdrich, just as they did Toni Morrison in 1993. And the American literary establishment will spend the next two decades wondering why no American has won. Really.
Turtle Talk 
i disagree, if such award was extended, then tim giego and russell means would cry foul and make a big issue they were deserving too, which is certainly not the case.
so, deny all four parties!
russell means…..now come on!
well for one, they’ve lived it, well sherman has. and seen it first hand, never read erdich becasue i just have’nt…..but alexie over means…..alexie hands down.
Sherman’s “Indians who sold out and can’t return to rez land” must include me, i was adopted by the “hated whites,” now a commercial jet pilot with no former wives who were beat up. And, no kids without fathers, no drug/drinking offenses, and donate 51% of my gross monthly income to worthy individuals…….living in MEXICO !
This weekend while driving from San Diego to Tucson, a family having a recent lost, had settle up a car wash at Home Depot in El Centro to earn money for the funeral. As I donated without taking time for my car wash, i drove away thinking, Russell Means would never work for money, he’d only complain the government failed its responsibility for burial.
oh, almost forgot, i’m visiting San Carlos Apache and Dine this week,,,,,just to see friends who never left! Guess Sherman was wrong about Indians like me……. Sherman, Erdich, Means, and publicity seeking tim Giago, NO Noble awards in their life time!!!
Thank you, Matt, for calling attention to those among us who are creating literature that is being read and taught and anthologized as American Indian literature and as American literature. Erdrich and Alexie are gifted storytellers and deal with issues that span the vast range of experiences of indigenous peoples today. And they have created a wide path for the hundreds of other American Indian writers, storytellers, and poets to walk along, as we tell the stories of who we are.
That is not a good summary of The Human Stain. Its protagonist, Coleman Silk, is an African American who, at the suggestion of a boxing mentor in his youth, pretends to be Jewish as it is then easier for him to gain access to certain arenas that way (first boxing, and later academe). He continues the facade even when doing so costs him his career, and ultimately, his life. The novel is a classic narrative of passing, and is perhaps based on the life of a Louisiana Creole, Anatole Broyard, who chose to live in New York rather than endure segregation in the South. Silk is a talented person of color whose path to exercising his talent involves a certain type of transgressive deception, only he goes too far. It’s a great book about race in the United States, and your comments on it lead me to believe that you haven’t read it. (Silk knows he is African American; it’s others who don’t know.) In fact, Roth often deals with a new sort of Jewish identity as white people in the United States in books such as Portnoy’s Complaint. Jews were not often viewed as such in Europe as they are, of course, a people from the Middle East, whose holy books (Torah and Talmud) are set there and were written there. Jews are also a tribal people, removed from their lands, who have wandered ever since, trying to keep up their ethnic identity, a situation in many ways similar to that of Native Americans, only Jews have dealt with the issue for a longer period of time. When I read Native authors such as Mohawk elder Tom Porter, for example, I see a theme common in Jewish literature, viz., how to keep a people’s identity when many feel pressure to assimilate. As for Roth, I think he has a good eye for perceptions of race in the United States, even though that’s not usually a major theme, but he limns quite well the process of Americanization in communities that choose not to carry on their older traditions, something of relevance, I think, to Native People. Also, like Sherman Alexie, Roth is quite funny. Now, I do think that both Roth and Alexie are Nobel material, and I hope that occurs for both, but I won’t hold my breath. Sherman Alexie is a true great, but if he were not to get the Nobel, another Native writer worthy of it is surely Leslie Marmon Silko. (By the way, thanks for your page, which I read quite regularly.)