How to Write the Great American Indian Novel by Sherman Alexie: A Postcolonial Reading

“In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.”

The Native American experience explored through postcolonial theory can become problematic for various reasons, the most prominent being that as an indigenous, displaced population they have never witnessed a post-colonial era. They cannot, as a colonised population, boast of a national movement, culture or space. The recent emergence of a genre of literature titled “Native American Literature” is witness to the fact of their continued oppression.

 The poem “How to Write the Great American Novel” by Sherman Alexie can be considered symbolic of a displaced peoples’ unconscious search for a material representation, a symbol of the integration and the unity of the Native American culture and its people. The poem begins with a powerful imagery. Alexie describes the Native Americans as ‘tragic’. They are tragic, their history is tragic. This is not only because they have been exploited, their lands stolen and their people killed, their image itself has been murdered. They have been defined through postcolonial representations, their image created in terms ascertained by the colonial, deprived of their power to (re) define themselves. This has caused the mass production of stereotypes relating to Native Americans, especially in and through popular culture. This is exactly what Alexie expresses when he talks of sensitive heroes that must be half-bred, necessarily from a tribe that herds and breeds horses; their women beautiful and exotic comparable only to the great plains of America herself. He also explicitly expresses his attempt at exposing this tendency of the coloniser to stereotype beautifully in the lines-

  "If the interior Indian is male, then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man."

We also witness, in the poem, the construction of the natives of America the same way the Orient has been constructed. As students of postcolonial literatures this is an eye-opener. The construction of the unknown red skinned Indians as similar to the the construction of the Orient as effeminate and a place of spirituality, mysticism and sexual exoticism. This further increases what Homi Bhaba has termed ambiguity. When the west claims that the east is exotic, mysterious and sensual and when they themselves turn around and constructed similar representations for the indigenous inhabitants of a country which is, geographically and otherwise, located very much in the West, the subject positions of the east and west and their binary fail to hold stable positions.

The next part of the poem reveals to the reader that these constructed images are not reality. Murder, suicide, rape, alcoholism, these are the realities. Taking a cue from Franz Fanon’s work on postcolonial identities in “Black Skin, White Masks”, these social issues facing the Natives can be considered a result of the trauma of said inability to define their own identities.This has further lead to an inability to form a stable identity of the ‘Native American’ leading to a disintegration of their identity and culture. This confused identity can also be the result of hybridity at play. The Native American is both the oppressed and living among, sympathising with and being interpolated into the ideologies of those that oppress him/her. This plight of the half-breed that Alexie constantly brings to the reader’s attention is not just ideological or figurative. 

The half breed that Alexie writes of is very much a physical reality as well. The Native Americans are minorities in their own land, a culture that is slowly dying out, a ‘breed’ of people going extinct, hence, half-breed. Though Alexie calls for forgiveness and understanding (what choice have they now?), it is in a tone one cant help but read remorsefully. This is largely due to the closing lines that follow which tell us that the great American Indian novel will only achieve ‘Greatness’ when a white person writes it, writes it because the Native will be no more. It expresses the gripping fear of the Native American people, that their identity will be completely wiped out, figuratively and otherwise, and they will no longer be the ‘Natives’ of America, their land.