My Shaman Sherman

Matthue Roth

Before I became religious I used to write stories. When I became religious I kept writing them, but I didn’t know how to write about the Jewish stuff. They were about the science fiction geek part of me and the punk part of me and the insecure straight boy hanging out with gay girls part of me.

My friends told me that my first novel should be a straight-up Orthodox novel—so that I could be the definitive voice of “the Orthodox experience” and sell a million copies. I agreed, but I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t writing about being Orthodox. I was living this life that consumed every second of my time and every third thought. Every time I checked the clock, it was time for a different prayer. So why wasn’t I writing about it?

Only I was writing about it. I’d fill up pages and pages describing prayer, every thought that went through my head, all the things I hated about this world and wanted to ask God about, but I didn’t know how, so I just took God’s word for it that everything would wind up okay. I wrote about the power of ignoring your needs in favor of God’s needs, the beautiful pain at the end of a day–long fast, the delicate unsureness of standing in the middle of the street and blessing the new moon. I’d take about 20 pages to get past the scene where the main character got out of bed and prayed. And it was meaningful. But who in the world wants to wade through 20 pages before your protagonist leaves the house?

That’s when I started reading Sherman Alexie.

Sherman Alexie is an American Indian writer. He ’s known for being exactly that—mainly because there aren’t many Native American literary fiction writers in mainstream publishing, and he was sort of appointed by default.

He got into my mind accidentally. I went to a reading where he was surrounded by 100 white people, listening to him be the Voice of the Native American, telling us about his culture. At the end, someone asked him a question about that very thing—about being the Voice of the Native American—and he went werewolf.

“You people don’t understand what it’s like,” he told us. “I’m not writing so you’ll understand what it is to be an Indian. You’ll never understand. I’m writing because you don’t understand, and reading my books is the only way you’re ever going to realize that.”

I read. I read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, his first book, where he tells us that Indians call themselves Indians and not Native Americans, contradicting everything I’d ever learned about Indians in my 12 years of public school. I read the part where the main character, Victor, a stand-in for Alexie himself, tells us how white people are grossed out when they hear their parents having sex, but how it was reassuring for him because it meant his parents weren’t fighting. It was a million things like that. He wasn’t writing about the Indian experience. He was writing about himself.

Then I read his other books. Compared to his later work—which is still about Indians, but Indian blues musicians, Indian time travelers and, yes, Indian punks—Lone Ranger is Indians for White People 101. My favorite short story of his is “Ghost Dance,” a tale about the Indian soldiers at Little Bighorn turning into zombies. It might be about Indians, but it’s so entirely about him—his geekiness and his anti-authoritarianism and his angry rioty zest. As he wrote in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part–Time Indian: “If you’re good at something, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”

Alexie wasn’t writing about “every Indian’s experience” and he wasn’t trying to. He’s just this person who happens to be a lot of things—Indian, thinker, queer advocate, zombie fan—and his writing encompasses all of it. He’s not the definitive Indian writer any more than he’s the definitive zombie writer; he’s just Sherman Alexie. And that might be the most profound statement he could make.

I had thought I was going to write the definitive Orthodox novel. Instead, what came out was Never Mind the Goldbergs, a novel that’s a combination of my God obsession and my love for punk and riot–grrrl music and my freak streak. It’s not the definitive Orthodox novel.
But thanks to Mr. Alexie, that’s the last thing I’d want to write.—Matthue Roth