Sherman Alexie: Wicked Goodness of the Blues
If American rappers were disposed to deliver critical humor
to the ears of the world, they would appropriate (steal) as much from Sherman
Alexie as they do from James Brown. They
would give a reciprocal salute to Alexie’s “borrowing” of Robert Johnson, “Cross
Roads Blues” and “Preaching Blues” to specify Africanist presence in our
vernacular imaginations. In the novel Reservation
Blues (1995), Alexie voiced the nexus of the gifts of black folk with
Spokane/Coeur d’Alene lore, thereby teaching priceless lessons about
multicultural humor. The Japanese manga artist Akira Hiramoto was equally
multicultural in Me and the Devil Blues
1: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson (2008),
and his book was soul-disturbingly successful if one puts actual history under
erasure. The transnational aesthetics of
his gesture do not fit as nicely within the parameters of American experiences
as do Alexie’s transcultural articulations.
Hiramoto’s textuality falls a bit short in negotiating the wicked
goodness of the blues that is a touchstone in Alexie’s writing.
Alexie recognizes
that in contemporary American life dancing with the Devil is the first step
toward eternal salvation. He is not crippled
by double or triple consciousness. He freely engages the African, the European,
and the Asian. He maximizes certain possibilities of blues critique that
emerges when the ethos behind the music is touched by indigenous common sense. He redirects the streams that flow in the
blues/jazz poetry of Sterling D. Plumpp.
We can laugh outside the barrel with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Flight, and Indian Killer, but we ought
to attend as well to his short stories. In the collection War Dances (2009), for example, “Breaking and Entering” and “The
Senator’s Son” demonstrate Alexie’s mastery of conceptualizing and rendering “story,”
an art that surpasses the writing of competent fiction. His quest for precise
language in “Breaking and Entering” makes for rewarding reading; in “The
Senator’s Son,” he plays the racial “dozens” by defamiliarizing “motherf___” as
“fatherf_____.” Thus, he translates a peculiar Africanist ritual into a
political instrument. It might be argued that Alexis re (w) raps certain
aspects of the vernacular and injects them into the literary body of the
multicultural biotext. By laughing with skeletons, Alexie uses the wicked
goodness of the blues to enhance moral dimensions of tragicomic discourses.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
May 6, 2014
