One Stick Song (review)

One Stick Song by Sherman Alexie. Hanging Loose Press, 2000

Nine years have passed since the warm reception of Sherman Alexie's first collection of mingled very short stories and poems, The Business of Fancydancing (1992), which was also published by Hanging Loose Press. One Stick Song is similar in nature, with respect both to genre blending and voice. Poetry, as he reminds us in the first piece, "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me," is still the result of an equation in which Anger is multiplied by Imagination (20). And, as from the first time he employed this equation, it remains an oversimplification. What he fails, or perhaps refuses, to factor in is the element of irony, wit, or humor that makes it all palatable, or if that is too weak a word, endurable. Alexie's poetry (and his fiction, generally) follows an equation that reads more like this:

In this equation, as I am employing it, I intend the definition of wit that pertains to "the ability to perceive the incongruous and to express it in quick, sharp, spontaneous, often sarcastic remarks that delight or entertain" (Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition). The comedy generated by such wit is ironic in nature and satiric in application; it aims to correct or respond to folly or injustice by way of ridicule.

Some literary mathematicians may protest that my amended formula should take on a more direct form: P = W(AI). But I am inclined to stay with my formulation (P = AI/W) because I am convinced that Alexie's often razorlike wit, while it draws attention to the pain, almost always acts to alleviate it, to make it bearable. In his memoir, "The Warriors," which begins, "I hate baseball," Alexie teases the notion of a reservation Little League team called the Warriors: "Indians recognize irony when we see it. During that summer, irony played third base" (42, 44). The upshot of Alexie's wit is not always what we could describe as funny or laughable, but it is usually comedic. Can something be comic without being funny? Absolutely.

If they are familiar with Alexie and his writing, readers who open the book to the thirteen-page "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me" will most likely tell themselves, "That sounds like Sherman all right." Self-abnegation is not his strong suit. But I would argue that Alexie exploits himself (more than he does his tribe or the reservation) for a worthy cause: see me as I actually am; see us as we actually are. That some other Indians, including other writers and members of his own tribe (perhaps even of his own family), do not appreciate what they are seeing is almost inevitable, and Alexie does not apologize for what he sees and says. Being Sherman Alexie means never having to say you're sorry. "Never apologize," John Wayne barks to a young cavalry officer in one movie, "it's a sign of weakness."

Alexie has many bones to pick, one of which concerns the issue of the mixed-blood: "If a book about Indians contains no dogs, then it was written by a non-Indian or mixed-blood writer" (21). Directly or otherwise, Alexie takes a measure of delight in denigrating mixed-blood writers--as if they had some control over the fact of their birth. "The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me" moves in loose, achronological fashion: a PEN panel on Indian writers in 1994, a hard winter on the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1976, a KISS concert in 1977, suffering a racial slur at a stoplight in Seattle in 1995, forming a "reservation doowop group" in 1978. In the midst of the "autobiography" he offers "An Incomplete List of People I Wish Were Indian." The autobiographical piece ranges from that list to page-long stories of the sort some call "sudden fiction."

Similar in length but more narrative in construction is "The Warriors," a sort of memoir in which Alexie...