There, There by Tommy Orange, and: Where the Dead Sit Talking by ...

[Pages:5]There, There by Tommy Orange, and: Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (review)

Jeremy M. Carnes Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 31, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2019, pp. 237-240 (Review) Published by University of Nebraska Press

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Tommy Orange. There, There. Alfred Knopf, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-52552037-5. 294 pp.

Brandon Hobson. Where the Dead Sit Talking. Soho Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-6169-5887-9. 273 pp.

Jeremy M. Carnes, University of Wisconsin?Milwaukee

The legacies of settler colonialism continually mark the bodies of Indigenous peoples. As Tommy Orange writes, "[I]t's the way history lands on a face" (16). In the recent novels by Tommy Orange and Brandon Hobson, characters are marked by these settler-colonial legacies. There, There opens with Tony Loneman noting, "The drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six" (15). When he was told that he had fetal alcohol syndrome, six-year-old Loneman connected his face with that final syllable, "drome." Similarly, Hobson's Sequoyah was burned by hot grease at eleven, an accident at the hands of a mother dealing with alcoholism. As common as it is to blame mothers in these situations, Hobson, through Sequoyah's mother, gives voice to the problem at hand. After seeing his mother get sick when drunk, Sequoyah remarks, "Those people you're with are poisoning your drink." His mother responds, "It's normal. . . . [I]t's how it is for everyone" (3). As much as she is explaining the effects of alcohol to a son too young to understand, she is marking her alcoholism as itself inescapable. However, both Hobson and Orange couch issues of alcoholism and substance abuse within the larger narrative of settler-colonial violence.

Tommy Orange's There, There is multigenerational and multiperspectival in a vein similar to the novels of Louise Erdrich. Yet, as much as Orange tells the stories of the characters in his novel, he tells the story of the city of Oakland, one of many American cities where Native individuals were relocated at the hands of termination era policies of the 1950s. In fact, the title even comes from a famous Gertrude Stein quote about the city, "There is no there there," which Orange deconstructs through one of his characters, likening it to the Native dispossession of land and identity. Each of the lives around Oakland lead, throughout the novel, to the Big Oakland Powwow, though their paths there are varying and circuitous. From Edwin Black, who applies for an internship with the powwow at the urging of his mother in an effort to get him out of the house he has walled himself away in, to Dene Oxendene, who is follow-

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ing in his uncle's footsteps to film the stories of Native individuals in the Oakland area, each character is given a rich and complex history that relies equally on their identity as Indigenous peoples and on their urban locales.

The twelve characters of There, There offer a robust and complex picture of life in Oakland, and Orange does not shy away from all of the problems that brings. The quotidian details of these lives include the hopefulness of love, the complexities of familial relationships, and the deep sorrow of loss. Each character is marked by their own story and their family's history, some of which center around Oakland and others that connect the city with various reservations across the country. We see the effects of the close-quarter living on Alcatraz Island during the occupation of the American Indian Movement on both Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and her sister Jacquie Red Feather. We glimpse how poverty can affect a family's outlook on life, on personal worth. All the while, Orange makes clear that what connects these people is nothing more than the fact that they are living. In their own situations, the decisions they make might not be the best ones, but they are living. They might not treat those around them with the respect they deserve, but they are living. They might be giving and giving and giving so much that it is slowly killing them, but they are living. Orange's most pointed strength in this novel is his ability to engage our sympathy while also contemplating what actions can signify, both positively and negatively, for the rest of the community, whether the family community or the larger communities across Oakland itself.

While Orange's novel provides a complex commentary on Indigeneity and urbanity through the characters and situations he weaves, he compliments this point by including an essay-style prologue and interlude that breaks up the fiction of his story with the reality these fictionalized lives are based in. The inclusion of this very different genre next to the fictionalized story gives the novel a specific kind of weight, particularly through the ways in which urban Natives have been disconnected from tribal homelands, whether of their own volition or not. Orange uses this space to put a point on issues like blood quantum, mass media representations of Natives, the importance of powwows, and the ways in which urbanity has been largely misunderstood in relation to Native lives. As he writes in the prelude, "Urban Indians were the generation born in the city. We've been moving for a long time, but the land moves with

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you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth" (11). Thus, throughout There, There Orange works to rewrite dominant conceptions of urban Natives, complicating both their assumed assimilation (on the part of the US government) and their connection to tribal nations, beliefs, and practices.

In a markedly different vein from Orange's novel, Brandon Hobson's Where the Dead Sit Talking focuses on Sequoyah, a young Cherokee boy who is placed in the foster care system after his mother is put in jail. The novel is retrospective; it is told by an older Sequoyah as he thinks about his time with the Troutt family in 1989. Harold and Agnes Troutt, who live in rural Little Crow, Oklahoma, have two other foster children living with them: the eccentric thirteen-year-old George and the more reclusive seventeen-year-old Rosemary. Rosemary and Sequoyah end up connecting over their shared Native background. Rosemary is Kiowa. She introduces Sequoyah to books like N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain. However, what I find refreshing about this novel is that it does not try to be something it is not. Rather than an awakening novel where a young Cherokee and a young Kiowa become closer to their identities as Native individuals, this book focuses on the problems that teenagers face in an especially tumultuous time in their lives, and Rosemary's and Sequoyah's tumult is only magnified by their placement in the foster care system and their own familial traumas.

While Where the Dead Sit Talking can seem perhaps a bit melodramatic at certain moments, this is what I think gives the novel noted depth. The characters, Sequoyah and Rosemary particularly, are not simple or one-dimensional but carry the baggage of their pasts and their struggles of their own self-definitions with them in each interaction. Occasionally this means that a seemingly happy encounter between the two becomes a moment of tension or of teenage anger and angst, but these turns are never left without a grounding in the experiences built around the backstories of these characters. Furthermore, like Orange, Hobson complicates what it means to be Native simply by telling a story that mirrors the experience of so many Native youth in foster care. Like the experiences of urban Natives, the experience of foster care is not divorced from the stories of real people, even if the tale told by Hobson is itself fictional.

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However, while it is easy to praise both novels for their ability to get past the grandiloquent representations that often plague contemporary literature, it is important to note that the realities depicted in each novel are neither easy to consider nor easy to consume. Discussions and representations of substance abuse, (gun) violence, suicide, and physical or emotional abuse are engrained within the fabric of these stories. While both authors, it seems, would argue that these issues are inherent to contemporary life, especially contemporary lives under the rule of a settlercolonial government, the difficulties readers may have approaching this content must be noted. In fact, it is precisely because these issues are rooted in living fact, are a part of individual and communal testimony, that engaging with the content can become a retreading of these traumas. Knowing that this content forms much of the backbone for both stories is the right of every reader.

Jeremy M. Carnes is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin?Milwaukee. His research explores the various ways comics depict temporality. Using both queer theory and critical Indigenous theory, he argues that the comics form carries radical possibilities for the queering and decolonization of both time and history.

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