Honestly, as an adolescent I buried my nose in the works of Lousia May Alcott or Oscar Wilde while encountering Y.A novels in my Literature classes. At that age, I found these works rudimentary and completely crude. But then again I never experienced essentially the brokenness these writers composed from. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Dairy of a Part-TIme Indian ate away the hardened shell of my biased heart. In his exquisitely crude language, Alexie spins the tale of a “damaged” stuttering Indian boy who shatters the stagnant customs of the reservation, or “rez”, by accepting his nomadic spirit. Caught in the unpredictable storm of the “rez” between the raging mad drunks and poverty-stricken families, Arnold Spirit Jr. is the prime example of the abject. Having severe surgery as an infant due to cerebral spinal fluid, being “susceptible to seizure activity”, and having a stuttering lisp, Junior is casted by most of the tribe as a freak. He suffers from being beaten by thirty year old triplets to everyone calling him a retard. Except, of course, his close and dearest friend, Rowdy who protects him. Until at least Junior “betrays” the tribe by transferring from the “rez” school to Rearden, a white-school just outside of the Reservation.
In this daring, nomadic move, Junior unintentionally shatters his friendship with Rowdy and faces immense ridicule on both sides of the fence. On the “rez” he is branded as a traitor, but at Rearden he is a stranger, an alien, in stranger lands. Throughout the novel he struggles, both internally and externally, with the concepts of “absolutely true” and “part-time”. Within his year at Rearden, Junior is able to transcend, for the most part, past his ethnicity, however at the “rez” it eats away at his mind. He experiences racism both at Rearden and the “rez” that deeply impacts him, leaving him questioning his identity. For example, within the novel there are drawings created by Junior, cartoons he draws to in an effort to better understand the world around him and its complications. In one of these depictions he questions who he is during a basketball game at Wellpinit as a Rearden player and at the Rearden game. In the first he is dressed as the devil with a tail and horns dribbling the ball while words of hatred are shouted at him like “white lover”. The latter, he is dressed as a saint with a halo glowing around his head along with words of encouragement and excitement. Both attain a cartoon thought bubble with the words “Who am I?” A question frequently repeated through the novel during his transition as he tries to understand if he could really be “absolutely true” on one side of the fence and only “part-time” one the other.
Thankfully in this novel, the abject ascends from his abjectness to “normalcy”, or it is at least implied. Junior confirms his identity as a nomadic Indian and accepts where his roots come from. However, turning the last page of Junior’s tale, the readers find themselves slight depressed by having to leave Junior and Rowdy as they rebuild their friendship during a game of hoops. Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, states in the foreword, “Some times we meet a character and we fall so hopelessly in love with him or her that we want to be that character, no matter how tough they have it,…As I read this book, I wanted to talk like Junior, walk like him, and draw like him”(6). Many would agree, myself included, with Zusak’s statement. Alexie created a world in which adolescence is congruently portrayed. A world not heavily overlaid with mystic elements. There are no lunar creatures, sparkling blood-suckers, nor deathly mazes. Alexie tore down the boundaries between reality and fiction to allow the readers a close encounter with his protagonist. A protagonist who, at the beginning, couldn’t win or get anywhere no matter what he did, finding solstice in his drawings and his grandmother. He delivers, as Zusak says, a tale of “a young boy from an American Indian reservation” and asks him to tell his story (7).
In this almost diary format, Alexie gives the reader much more in the internal struggles of his character, who he dearly loves himself. As to the world, in the context of Adolescent Literature, Junior is a significant figure. The first person perspective portrays Alexie’s understanding of what adolescences is without any layers or constructs to hide behind. The issues Junior faces such as the stereotypes associated with his ethnicity, the raw and clear understanding of addiction, and poverty are met with his ironic matter-of-fact language. In just the issues addressed in this novel, the readers comprehend the suffering and brokenness his is faced with. Basically, the fact that Junior is Indian qualifies him, in society’s eyes, to be nothing and unimportant. And yet, in his diction, or word use, mingled with his drawings, Junior finds an outlet to process the hurt, or as he says “to get the world to pay attention”. This is where Alexie found my praise and respect. Alexie is careful to articulate Junior’s internal processing specifically for the readers, who may live differently and never experienced such hardships, to reach an understanding. According to Clare Bradford, the “text operates as a site where meaning is negotiated by readers who bring their own cultures and languages to the act of reading” (Unsettling Narratives 15). While turning the pagers, the readers are participating in Junior’s journey of identity and accepting where he came from. By this participation, readers reach their own self-evaluation of “who am I” through the lens of their own culture and language.
During this self-evaluation, Alexie gives his adolescent readers an example of how they may deal with their own very different issues. Junior, struggling against being the invisible Indian, becomes their mascot. As we read, we want to be like him with his “damaged brain”, stuttering lisp, and majorly skinny frame. We want to internally process things as he does, drawing it out as well as express it in his own crude language. Alexie suggests that the nature of adolescence, a time of immense turbulence and misunderstanding, is learning “who am I”. As Junior and his friends, both on the “rez” and Rearden, comprehend who they are. Each come to their own conclusion through different processes: Gordy discovers his identity through knowledge; Rowdy comes to his own conclusion with his fists; Penelope through bulimia. Each character finds and latches on to a fix for their pain as their circle the drain of childhood. However, there are a few implications in the view of adolescence in this way.
In Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood, Alexie explains the representation of adolescence in his novel, “When I think of the poverty-stricken, sexually and physically abused, self-loathing Native American teenager I was, I can only wish, immodestly, that I’d been given the opportunity to read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”…I can’t speak for other writers, but I think I wrote my YA novel as a way of speaking to my younger, irredeemable self” (2). These imaginative turbulent teens, Junior, Rowdy, Gordy, and Penelope are speakers to other turbulent, seemingly irredeemable teens in reality. But what is the implication of representing such turbulence to readers who have not experienced the same kind of turbulence? Zusak said it best, “we want to be that character”. Readers want to experience what their most loved characters experienced. And yet, Alexie allows the readers to participate in Junior’s experiences without having to do so in real life.
Therefore, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is viewed as controversial. Over the years this novel is one of the most challenged book due to its profanity (Junior’s crude language) and the sexual references (. Personally, before reading this novel, due to the controversy my expectation of the novel mimicked Mrs. Gurdon’s view in Darkness too Visible. However after gorging the captivating story of Junior, my view changed. The profanity and sexual references constructed in this novel isn’t any different than what is seen on television shows; shows parents allow their children to watch. The issue of the radical nature in this novel isn’t in the profanity or sexual references, it is the issue of abjection of Native Americans. In his humor, Alexie ironically points out the stereotypes surrounding Indians and the oppression they receive from their white counterparts. A remind to America of its theft of land and life.
Banned YA 