Tommy Orange, 2018
I picked this out of a Little Free Library box because it was one of the books it seemed like all my colleagues were reading during my stint as a high school English teacher. It wound up reminding me a bit of A Visit to the Goon Squad: once again we have a set of interrelated characters and we hopscotch around from one focal character to another and also backward and forward in time. What unites the characters is that they’re all of at least partially indigenous ancestry, and they all live in (or have lived in) Oakland, California. In a meta moment, Orange has a character explain a film project that is also the project of the novel itself: “That’s what I’m trying to get out of this whole thing. All put together, all our stories. Because all we got right now are reservation stories, and shitty versions from outdated textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.”
As I mentioned during the last election season, for some time now the Republicans have leaned heavily on selling the notion that Democrats = cities and cities = terrifying—that whatever problems you might have in your trailer park or soulless suburb, you’re better off than you would be crossing into a nightmarish hellscape like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, or, yes, Oakland. “This other story” that Orange tells about urban indigenes echoes the Republicans’ litany of urban ills. Alcoholism, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, absent parents, spousal abuse, armed violence, suicide… the Oakland of There There is, as its characters would say, hella bleak. This in turn reminded me of The City & The City, because I’m in Oakland all the time, walking down a lot of the same streets Orange name-checks in the book, but my Oakland is not this Oakland. My Oakland is the Temescal farmers’ market, Millennium Restaurant, the Oakland Museum, the Coliseum to OAK shuttle. Two cities, crosshatched with each other. In the Miéville novel, the citizens of the each city were trained not to notice the other city but knew intellectually that it was there. In this one, as in real life, the existence of an indigenous community in Oakland would come as a surprise to most. After all, we are taught that the original inhabitants of this continent were basically wiped out. And that those who do survive don’t live in cities. And that if they do live in cities, the cities are places like Albuquerque and Oklahoma City, not Oakland.
The premise that Oakland is home to a community of indigenous
people got me wondering how many people we’re talking
about.
It’s worth noting that the book is not talking about people
indigenous to the Oakland area; in fact, the first inhabitants of
the area, the Hokan speakers, were pushed out by newcomers
from the Central Valley circa 500 CE, and it is these newcomers,
the Ohlone (and specifically the Chochenyo) who are generally
designated as the indigenous people of the East Bay.
Rather, the main characters in the novel are Southern Cheyenne
(as is the author).
In any case, up and to the right there is the Census Bureau’s
demographic breakdown of Oakland from shortly after this novel
was published.
Indigenous people are represented in pink.
Note that this pie chart does not classify “Hispanic” as a
race, so that pink slice includes a significant number of
immigrants indigenous to various parts of Latin America; if you
specify “Non-Hispanic Native American”, the pink
slice shrinks to a quarter of its depicted width.
That’s one out of three hundred inhabitants.
It goes to show the dialectic at the heart of so many stories about
the indigenous people of what became the U.S.: understandably, many of
them tend to push the theme that “We weren’t wiped out!
We’re still here!”
And yet you can’t really escape the impact of a genocide that
took place on this kind of scale.
A Fish Called Wanda
John Cleese and Charles Crichton, 1988
This was Ellie’s pick for movie night the last time I was in Portland. She hadn’t seen it before, but I had, back in the ’80s—it felt like kind of an event, as the first big movie with Monty Python alumni in it to come out after I had learned about Monty Python. This time around I was struck by how ’80s it felt, which I guess I wouldn’t have been able to be struck by at the time. I dunno—you know how a lot of ’80s music has that distinctive cheap and hollow sound to it? There’s something about this movie that had the same sort of feel to it for me.
Anyway, I chuckled a few times, but as the movie wrapped up I did find myself wondering how it had become so beloved. One review cited Kevin Kline’s (Oscar-winning!) performance, calling it “the most inspired comic performance of my lifetime—he’s just dazzling to watch, with every impulsive action minutely choreographed”. I dunno, I guess I missed the nuances. He just seemed broadly obnoxious to me. Another review rattled of a list of funny elements:
“eccentric people behave in obsessive and eccentric ways and other, equally eccentric, people do everything they can to offend and upset the first batch”
relatedly: “meanspiritedness”
“people are appealed to on the basis of their most gross and shameful instincts, and surrender immediately”
“providing […] characters with venal, selfish, shameful traits and then embarrassing them”
“a pet […] is crushed by a falling safe”
So there you go, I guess. For years I have been grumbling about comedies whose primary joke is “Ha ha, aren’t these people awful?” and wondering who these comedies are for. Apparently the answer is pretty much everyone except me.
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