There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Indigenous Immigrants

North and South America are inhabited almost exclusively by displaced persons. The story of each person is unique but their commonality is an experience of lostness often expressed through a sort of transcendentalist attachment to ‘the land.’ Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is My Land’ captures either a hope or an ideology depending on how it is interpreted. But it is also a restatement of Walt Whitman’s ‘Self’ who is the displaced and replanted part that speaks for the the whole: "It is you talking just as much as myself... I act as the tongue of you.”

The Urban Native American is a special category of displaced person however, first because of his forcible removal from wherever he came from, but more importantly because his dispersion among other displaced persons leaves him without an historical cultural community, and therefore without a self. Immigrant Scots, or Russians or Italians don’t identify as former Europeans. But Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Sioux only possess any substantial cultural weight as Native American, a designation forced by circumstances. What they share is only displacement, not history, or language, or religion or social traditions.

So neither Guthrie nor Whitman speak for the Native American. And neither, in a sense, does Tommy Orange. Rather he speaks about individuals whose commonality is a lack of commonality - except for finding themselves fetched up together in Oakland California as a sort of desert island for the dispossessed. Each story is unique, genuinely unique, because the cultural connection among them is this invented category of Native American.

“We are the memories we don’t remember,” says one of Orange’s characters. What is shared is a vacuum. For these people “Everything is new and doomed.” Even their identity which has been imposed by the dispossessors. The irony implied by Orange’s use of the famous quote about Oakland “There is no there there,” is doubled in these stories. Stein meant that what she remembered of her childhood in Oakland had been obliterated. For these Native Americans the problem is not displaced memory but an absence of it. One can only hope that Orange’s ‘tongue’ is as effective as Whitman’s in creating a coherent community in which to be oneself.

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