The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Banned Books Week)

Everybody on the rez calls me a retard about twice a day. They call me retard when they are pantsing me or stuffing my head in the toilet or just smacking me upside the head.

I'm not even writing down this story the way I actually talk, because I'd have to fill with stutters and lisps, and then you'd be wondering why you're reading a story written by such a retard.

Do you know what happens to retards on the rez?

We get beat up.

At least once a month.

Yep, I belong to the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.

Budding cartoonist Arnold Spirit, better known as Junior, was born with too much fluid in the brain, or water or grease, as he likes to explain. He is regularly picked on, even by guys 30 years older to him. But his best friend Rowdy saves him from all the bullying and even gives the bullies some of his own blows in retaliation. Now Junior wants to leave the troubled school that he attends on the reservation and instead join the all-white farm school where there are no Indians, barring the school mascot. His decision isn't received well by anyone but his own parents. His fellow Indians have almost ostracized him, his best friend isn't talking to him anymore, and the students at his new school are either vividly staring at him, completely ignoring him or laughing at him. To make matters worse, his ambitious writer-wannabe sister has quit school and moved to the basement of their house, refusing to get out of the house. And now Junior's trying to get his life in order.

I've been seeing The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian around for quite a while. Each time I come across a review of the book, I am intrigued but then a short while later, I forget about it. I remember it was Sheila's review that first introduced me to this book and convinced me that I had to (someday) read it. Banned Books Week was just the perfect excuse for me to finally read this book and join the club of those who read and raved about this title. Both the cover and the title of the book screamed out quirkiness.

I started reading this book last weekend, and before I knew it, I had turned a lot of pages. The narrator, Junior, has a magnetic voice that was hard to ignore. He joked a lot and knew how to look at the sunny side of things, even when he was sad. And yet during those sad times, if I looked closely, I could see the sadness that was splitting him, the sadness that he was struggling to express. Junior's life is no cakewalk. He has a family that appears to be falling apart, which is no news in the reservation, where every family has deep cracks in its facade and foundation. The kids all carry the anger of their generations on their shoulders, the parents drink most of the time, and education doesn't have any importance. To top it, they hate Whites and renounce any association with them. Of course, the Whites don't like them any better.

So it was no surprise that when Junior joins the white school, the Indians have given up on him and go out of their way to ignore him. Junior walks into his new school expecting to be bashed right from the word go. He associates huge basketball players with bullying and when a potential fight turns in a direction he didn't at all expect, he begins to revisit his beliefs and assumptions.

My first impression of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was that this book is freaking funny albeit in a self-deprecating manner, the saddest kind of humor. It is also very innocent and has a thread of melancholy underlining the humor. Junior is disappointed with the low-class status invisibly meted out to the Indians on the reservation, but he doesn't get all preachy on the reader. He is intelligent enough to understand that there is a lot of racism against the Indians but that the Indians he know don't strive to improve their situation either. He wants his best friend to join him, but cannot even get him to talk to him. Worse, a lot of tragic things do happen and each time, Junior felt broken but mans up. I felt terribly sad for Junior but proud of him for how he handled the events.

I did feel though that too many things were going wrong for him. And at some point, it felt cliched, though Junior does say that the reservation has a high probability of tragedy. Other than this minor issue, I found the book a wonderful read. There were a lot of illustrations scattered through the book. Junior occasionally shared his thoughts on a lot of matters via cartoons. He also drew illustrations of the people he knew and shared some part of their personality. I loved these pictures, because they were really funny, even when they were not meant to be.

I don't get why this book is even banned. Well, I don't get why any book is banned, but this is a book that speaks teen angst in a non-Holden manner, and also has a lot of teen problems covered. Sure, there are a few profanities, and some sexual references, but nothing out of the ordinary in a teenager's world for this book to deserve a spot on the pyre. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was also a really quick and fun read, with a protagonist one would find hard not to like.

I borrowed this book from my library.

Book ban's violent face

I started writing this post in a totally different direction from where it ended up. So I split it up into two posts and decided to go with the one that was raging in my head at the moment of writing.

Honestly, the very idea that there are banned books seems so ridiculous to me. Fine, there are books you wouldn't want your 10-year old child to read or see included in the curriculum, but how long does one hope to keep the blindfolds on the child's eyes? That's not to say that they will not get the book one way or the other. Remember Dolores Umbridge and The Quibbler edition that she banned? Banning something doesn't really meet the eventual goal for controlling access, instead it usually has the opposite effect. What's needed is a healthy discussion of the offending topic.

What if there is no avenue for that healthy discussion?

In countries like the US, we have one side favoring the ban of a book and another side protesting it strongly. The book either gets banned or not, and there will be a lot of talk around it. The ban may be repealed, overturned, reinforced, etc. Usually that's it. In several other countries, books with sensitive content, are received with violence. Say, the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and Lajja by Taslima Nasrin (a book that's high on my wishlist), were followed by a lot of violent protests by people who were offended by passages in the book. I don't even think all those protesters read the book. Most likely, they were swayed by opinion. Both books were banned by many governments. Both authors received death threats.

I've always felt that the attitude of the protesters was, to put it mildly, intolerant, and when the government follows with a ban, it only encourages that attitude. The widespread violence, burning of public property and effigies definitely disturb the peace of a country. Is it worth keeping a book in publication at the risk of more violence? Or should the people be pacified and the book banned, only increasing the possibility that it can happen again? Banning a book also makes more people curious, and they get the book by some means, usually illegitimate. And then more protests follow from both sides of the war.

The Satanic Verses controversy even has its own Wikipedia page. I myself heard of Salman Rushdie for the first time only after the protests over his books. I can only imagine what life would be life for those authors, to live under the threat of assassination (not even murder) every minute. If something in a book offends you, why not just throw the book at the wall, or rant for a minute? Why threaten the author or ban it? Why make it a national or international phenomenon?

Rape is NOT porn and Speak is certainly NOT pornographic!

This post was totally unplanned. But I was ranting so much today and could hardly focus that I wanted to pen it down. Once I did that, I wanted to put it up and see what you guys think.

If you have been following the latest goings-on in the literary world, you would have heard about this. You know we are close to the Banned Books week (Sep 25 to Oct 2). And every year, we keep hearing of more and more titles on the list for sundry reasons like sexual content, profanity, violence, and many others. The only reasoning I can strive to understand is "unsuited to age group", but even then, there are so many books I think the age group in question has to read from the banned lists. This is very subjective - why not let parents and teachers be the best guide here?

As readers, we try to do the very opposite - read the books that are banned and get the word out. I mean, if you look at the list, there are so many books that you loved and probably cannot understand why they had to be banned. To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, etc. The same books get banned over and over. Anyone surprised by the Harry Potter books in the list? Apparently, reading that series can make us witches or wizards or actively interested in the occult. How did they know that I would start a witchcraft organization and spend half my time doing murderous or horrifying spells on innocent people?

And the latest controversy to really irate me, and this time really make me blow my top is Wesley Scroggins' move to ban Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. And no, it's not for just profanity, sexual content, yada yada (which I wouldn't consider valid anyways). According to him, Speak is all about soft pornography. What a scandal! Tell me one person who got sexually excited reading that book and I will put duct tape on my mouth for a week. Speak is about speaking of a rape. It shows how hard it is to open up, how much it can affect you, how people around you may never guess, and how it can happen again. It asks girls to speak about it and not be silent. It asks teen girls to be strong. For ignorant people like Scroggins, Speak is about porn. All my life, I have been sick and tired of reading about the stigma of rape - how the woman is blamed and ostracized, how many women commit suicide because they can't live with the shame. Are we condemning today's teens to a similar way of life?

Laurie Halse Anderson has responded in her blog here. If you have read this book, please share your thoughts on it. This is one book that shouldn't get banned - instead it should be made widely available in school libraries.