“I want to be an antidote and not a placebo”

A conversation with Sherman Alexie, 2004

At the age of 37, Sherman Alexie is a celebrated novelist, poet, screenwriter, movie director, performance artist and an occasional political columnist for The Stranger. He’s also married, a father of two and has lived happily in Seattle since the early 1990’s. Unlike the title of his latest collection of short stories, Ten Little Indians, Alexie is a towering 6’ 3” and spend much of his freetime on the basketball court.

I spoke with Alexie in the midst of a whirlwind tour of 27 bookstores, college campuses, theatres and libraries from Wisconsin to Texas, New Mexico to Montana. Reviews of Ten Little Indians have been glowing: “Fluent, exuberant and supremely confident…a slam dunk collection” wrote Publisher’s Weekly; “Comedy, pathos, heartfelt characterizations, and agendas transformed into thoughtful narratives: Alexie’s strongest book in years,” crowed Kirkus Reviews; “warm, revealing, invitingly roundabout…Alexie writing at this winsome best” purred the New York Times.

This last review caused the Seattle author some consternation: “The New York Times called me winsome. I don’t think I’ve ever in my whole life been described as ‘winsome.’ I’m struggling in an existential crisis about ‘winsome.’”

I conversed via telephone with Alexie in Los Angeles, where he was staying at the Chateau Martmonte — “the Belushi heroin overdose hotel,” he reminded me. “Doesn’t that make you a little superstitious?” I asked him. He laughed. “My big vice these days is Diet Pepsi. What, am I going to die of an aspertain overdose?”

Christian Martin: What is your new collection of stories about?

Sherman Alexie: White-collar Indians who are good at their jobs and clumsy at love. I wanted to get away from the dysfunctional model of Indians. The idea of being socially dysfunctional is getting boring. I wanted to get into more details, like “how’s the marriage?”

I was talking one night at a college recently, and somebody asked about “Indian identity” for the 9,000th time. I was so bored by the question. I don’t wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, “I’m an Indian brushing my teeth.” When I meet another Indian, we don’t say, “Hello, Indian!” I don’t ask my Indian friends, “So how’s your fight for sovereignty going?” Instead I ask, “How’s your wife? How’re your kids? How’s your boyfriend? How’s your girlfriend?” The thought occurred to me that I wasn’t writing in that way. I’ve been writing in an unrealistic fashion, so I thought “I’m going to start writing like Indians really live.”

CM: Your last book, The Toughest Indian in the World, was also a collection of short stories, many of them about Indians in the mainstream — off the reservation and in the big city. Is the new book a sequel?

SA: It’s an amendment. My switch started with Toughest Indian and it’s now in full swing with Ten Little Indians.

CM: The Indians in your new book are more functional then?

SA: Oh yeah, their lives are good. Their lives are so good they can have existential crises. They can worry about traveling too much for their jobs or their relationship with their mother, that kind of stuff. They get out of bed in the morning and go to work and try to figure out their lives from there. Even though they’re still very Indian, they’re more immersed in the world that we’re all familiar with.

CM: Many of the stories in Ten Little Indians deal with 9/11 and its ongoing aftermath. I’m thinking of “Can I Get a Witness?” and “Flight Patterns” in particular. Not having seen these events dealt with in fiction yet, I’m wondering how you knew it was time to begin probing their various meanings?

SA: I started writing them immediately after 9/11. On 9/12, I was starting to get pissed off at the news coverage, how they started talking about how 2,500 “heroes” and “innocents” died in the Twin Towers. On 9/12, I started thinking, “We don’t know these people! At least one of them has to be a total evil fuck. There’s somebody who died that day who’s wife is really happy he’s gone.” By canonizing all those people, we dehumanized all of them. In their deaths, they aren’t human beings. They’re made into symbols. They all become equals, so that the worst of them ended up having the same value as the best of them.

CM: These ideas are where the main character in “Can I Get a Witness?” is coming from?

SA: Yeah. The idea that all that 9/11 proved is what fuckheads we are. All around.

CM: That same character, on 9/11, is on the 60th floor of the Columbia Center staring out the window “waiting for her plane to come” so she might commit “suicide by inertia.” Where did that come from?

SA: I was at a lunch with a friend of mine who’s a lawyer in a big building downtown, and I was looking out his office window. I saw Boeing Field and thought, “Wow, you can really see the airplanes up in the sky.” I wondered if anybody in the Twin Towers actually saw the airplane coming. There must be somebody who saw it, though we’ll never know. I thought how terrifying that must’ve been. At some point, you must’ve been able to make eye contact, right? Somebody was standing at a window and saw the plane coming. Did they see the face of the pilot? I was standing at the window thinking of these things — because it’s my job to think of these things — and when I started writing the story, I saw the character at the window.

CM: But in her particular case, she welcomes that end. She says, “The thing is, the biggest thing is, ever since the Trade Center fell down, I’ve been hoping it would happen to me.”

SA: When people are unhappy, they think those thoughts. What better way to commit suicide than to have somebody kill you?

CM: The same story ends out in the crowded streets of Seattle with a comprehensive listing of all the faceless stranger’s hidden guilts: adultery, racism, cruelty to others, abandonment, failures, sins. It’s a very heavy passage. What’s going on there?

SA: That thought came to me at a public performance when I was talking about the Trade Towers and terrorism. It was one of those Orange Code days or Red Code Days or whatever — “high terrorist alert today!” — and I was pissed off. Nobody is paying any attention to this, right?

Well, I was giving this reading at a Wild Oats organic food supermarket and I was riding the elevator with an old couple. The lights in the elevator went out when we were on it and they freaked! They though terrorists were bombing! And I thought, “They’re not going to bomb an organic food store in Seattle, Washington!”

What is this paranoia doing? What does it mean? It means nothing! The chances of any of us being killed by a terrorist are minuscule. You have a better chance of winning the lottery. So I said to the women in the audience that night, “Your chance of being killed by a terrorist are so small, but the chances of being killed by your lover or husband are pretty damn good.” They should have a color-coded alert in wedding chapels. We’re much more endangered by the people we love than some random terrorist.

CM: Are we’re all in that anonymous crowd with our horrible secrets and guilts?

SA: Exactly. We all fail each other. To deny that turns you into some senator or representative. That kind of moral hypocrisy really plays itself out in terms of, like, William Bennett. Talk about a fucked up man! A million dollars in gambling debts or whatever — that’s fucked up. There’s no raging alcoholic who spends eight million dollars on booze.

CM: In an interview with the New Yorker, you said Indians “seek literature that cheers us in some way, that acts as an antidote, rather than an examination.” But you also said that you’d rather be a cultural investigator than a cultural cheerleader. Can you be both investigator and antidote?

SA: You hope that by investigating you become a real antidote. Maybe a better way to put it is that I want to be an antidote and not a placebo.

CM: There are many sadnesses in these stories — leavened with much humor, strength and grace to be sure — but nearly every story has some really heartbreaking element to it. And yet, in the author’s photo on the cover, you are totally cracking up. What gives?

SA: I don’t think the stories are heartbreaking. Here’s an experiment to try: read the last paragraph of every story in a row. I think, in the end, the general feeling of the stories for me is one of acceptance and an embrace of the moment. A sense of the characters saying, “This is my life.”

CM: And the photo on the back of the book?

SA: Well, the stories are also damn funny! Even the saddest moments are funny. But also, that photo is a very conscious effort on my part to counteract previous images of me and Indians in general. It’s rare to see a photo of an Indian laughing like that.

My friends who know me best have said that these stories sound more like the person they know than my previous work, and that the photo is more like the person that they know than any other previous photos.

CM: Did you sit down and say “OK, I’m going to write stories that are more like me”?

SA: I sat down to write stories that were more consistent with the kind of life I live. And so, necessarily they ended up sounding more like…me.

CM: Are Americans currently living in a comedy or a tragedy?

SA: Human beings have always lived in both simultaneously. I think, considering the president we have [George W. Bush], it’s more like living in a comedy right now. It’s hilarious! It’s amazing to me how anybody can take him seriously. I’m looking forward to ten or twenty years from now when people will look back and laugh their asses off.

CM: So, you’re confident that we’ll have the opportunity in twenty years to look back?

SA: Oh yeah. This is all minor stuff. Human beings tend to look at things in microterms. But if you measure history in one hundred year segments, everything’s been a steady improvement. If you look at things in ten year segments, it feels like a rollercoaster. But we’ll survive Dubya like we survived Clinton and we survived Reagan. Dubya is a minor league figure. I mean, think of Warren Harding. Does anybody talk about Warren Harding?

CM: You’ve been no-holds-barred in your criticism of the Bush Administration and the War on Iraq, writing that “there is honor and grace in treating an illegitimate president and his immoral administration with riotous and ridiculous contempt.” With so many outspoken celebrities getting crucified by the media, are you nervous about the repercussions of your contempt?

SA: No! Sure there’s been death threats and hate mail, but I don’t sell enough copies to be an economic hit. And frankly, anybody worried about that is an asshole. You say what you believe. I’m perfectly willing to accept any repercussions. I couldn’t live with myself by remaining silent. So, if my career suffers for whatever reason, that’s fine because I won’t be suffering as a moral human being. As an artist in a capitalistic society, I might suffer, but that’s miniscule compared to being a human being in a moral universe. And trust me, I will choose what I think is moral and feel good about that. In other words, you not going to hear an apology from me because I’m worried about paying the rent.

CM: How serious is the threat to free speech in America today?

SA: Nobody is really in any danger of losing their free speech. It’s just politics and the mood of the country. It’ll change. It’s already changing. All this information about the lies that we were told is starting to come out already. Usually it takes ten years for that to happen, but in this rapid information age the lies are getting flushed out. I think most people in this country are much more media savvy then we used to be. Dubya is going to have hell-to-pay the next election. Which I think he’ll still win, but the firestorm for 2008 is going to be huge. I think that in 2008, we’re going to have a real liberal president.

CM: You also wrote that “If the math works out — if more terrorists than Americans are killed in the next few years — then George W. Bush will enjoy high approval ratings.” Why do you think this holds true no matter how many of his deceptions are exposed?

SA: There’s a breaking point. There’s a point past which the lies will collapse under their own weight. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next year, but it will definitely happen in the next four. Same thing happened to Clinton. The collective weight of his lies collapsed his presidency.

CM: In an interview with Geov Parrish, you said that Bush “has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. It’s the un- and under-educated who speak in moral absolutes. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental” and “the average person who’s worked a graveyard shift in 7–11 has more intellectual imagination than G.W.” Imagine that Bush was to read Ten Little Indians. What would you hope that he would get out of it?

SA: He’d say, “I don’t get it.” He’d be like an 18-year-old college freshman trying to figure out Hemingway: “I don’t understand.”

CM: Do you think Laura could try to read it to him like a bedtime story and patiently explain it to him?

SA: Well, I think Laura’s a Democrat. She grew up as a Democrat, was a registered Democrat her whole adult life, until she met what’s-his-name. Dub. I think we have a closet Democrat sleeping with our president.

CM: Are you optimistic for the future?

SA: I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic. The United States has always slowly and surely improved in all ways. And that’s going to continue regardless of idiot presidents or nymphomaniac presidents.

CM: Politicians don’t have much to do with it?

SA: Nah. Politicians have so little to do with what’s great about a country. Politicians are like the third wave of consumers for Pet Rocks. There are always reacting to trends. They never start them.

CM: Who starts them?

SA: Citizens. Farmers in Iowa. Black kids in Harlem.

CM: Iowa and Harlem are where the future of America is being determined then?

SA: Yep. That’s exactly right.