My 6th Aspen Words 2021 longlist read! I feel like it’s gonna be cutting it close to get this whole longlist read, but I am doing my best. This is my third novel by Erdrich. I read The Round House before joining starting this blog, years ago now, so I don’t have an official review of it here, but I do have some quick notes I added on Goodreads and the main point is that it was heartbreaking, over and over. But also, with Erdrich’s amazing writing to deliver the emotional blows with such eloquence. And then just a year or two ago I read Future Home of the Living God, which was such a fascinating premise, with Erdrich’s signature writing, but just wasn’t quite as “right” for me as a reader. It was, however, the first time I had listened to an audiobook of one of her books and Erdrich read it herself, spectacularly. So, I knew that I planned to “read” this one that way as well. And that was 100% the right call – Erdrich’s oral story-telling cadence and voice is, in my opinion, the perfect medium for delivering/taking in her writing.  

The Night Watchman is historical fiction, but based on part of the life of Erdrich’s own grandfather, who, in the 1950s, worked as a night watchman at a factory and also was the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee. He was in that role when the government attempted to “terminate” his tribe, and led the fight against that legislation. This fictional interpretation of his role in that effort is told alongside some main other characters from the tribe, including Patrice, a young woman who works at the local jewel bearing plant and is working through growing up herself, while searching for her sister who has gone missing. In addition, we focus quite a bit on Wood Mountain, a young man who is also coming of age while trying to find out who he is, what he wants from life, and who treasures his connection to the land/his people. Plus, a few extra character POVs, including Barnes (a teacher and Wood Mountain’s boxing coach), Vera (Patrice’s disappeared sister), Valentine (Patrice’s friend), Millie (a grad student whose research helps with the fight against the termination bill), and a number of other short perspective spotlights added throughout.  

So, let me just start with this: Erdrich is a glorious narrator. Aided by her own voice, there is a flow to her writing that is quietly powerful, making this slow-paced story seep into your pores as you make your way through it. Also, her ability to create a setting, a sense of place, not just physically, but spiritually, in space and time, is something truly special. I was transported not just to the location of this story in the United States, but also emotionally and in a sort of metaphysical way that I cannot explain. Masterful.   

Other than that, I just want to mention the story itself, which obviously is one close to Erdrich’s heart. This is a book where I highly recommend reading the Afterward – the depth of involvement from her family, friends, colleagues and her own emotional depths is profound. Likely in part because of that, but also because, as I’ve come to notice, such strong personal investment emanating from Erdrich’s words is a cornerstone of all her novels, you can tell on every page how much pride she has in the strength and resolve of her people and culture. In this case, she is able to illustrate with lyrical gravity how important the land is to her Indigenous family, and how broad the effects of white US governmental colonization of her people and their land has been. Her demonstration of how profound the devastation that the theft of land, language and culture has been, not just through statistics (which are equally horrific to look at), but through individual stories and examples is so affecting. Each perspective, from Thomas (the character modeled after her grandfather) fighting against termination to Patrice’s mother Zhaanat keeping the old ways alive to Mille’s attempts to use her education to bring awareness/evidence to Roderick’s (the ghost of Thomas’ friend from childhood) haunting, and myriad other side characters, we are given a new and unique way that Indigenous life is indelibly marked by the centuries of forced erasure their culture(s) has(ve) faced…sometimes overcome and often succumbed to. 

This novel, as with all Erdrich’s works, provides an insight of magnificent proportions into the history of Indigenous people in the US and the constant struggle for recognition, support, individuality and more after centuries of mistreatment and condescension at the hands of the selfsame country/government (so, therefore, white people). The pacing is, perhaps, a bit slow, but the development of the story deserves the time spent on it, because while the plot matters, the people it gives voice to matter more.  

I want to end with Erdrich’s own words, the last passage in her Afterward: “Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.” She speaks here to both the colonizers and the Indigenous peoples they’re attempting to remove and, for me, it really captured the heart of the story. A lament and a celebration all in one. What an impression this one leaves on a reader.  

“But every so often the government remembered about Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians […] They solve us by getting rid of us.” 

“So it comes down to this […] the neutral strings of sentences in the termination bill. We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun, and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and fought in four or five deadly United States wars. But at last we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words.” 

“There weren’t enough jobs. There wasn’t enough land. There wasn’t enough farmable land. There weren’t enough deer in the woods or ducks in the sloughs and a game warden caught you if you fished too many fish. There just wasn’t enough of anything and if he didn’t save what little there was from disappearing there was no imagining how anyone would get along.” 

“You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.” 

“The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.” 

“Without warning, they threw you down. That’s how it was to live with them. […] He had striven to in every way to be like his teachers. And every boss. He had tried to make their ways his ways. Even if he didn’t like their ways, he’d tried. He’d tried to make money, like them. He’d thought that if he worked hard enough and followed their rules this would mean he could keep his family secure, his people from the worst harms, but none of that was true.” 

“...anyone who took on and tried to sweepingly solve what was called the “plight” or the Indian “problem” had a personal reason.” 

I made myself a goal for this year to be better about keeping track of which reviewers bring books to my attention/convince me to pick them up, so that I can give credit where it’s due in my reviews. Unfortunately, this book was put on my radar prior to this goal. So, I cannot properly thank whoever convinced me to put it on my TBR. In all actuality, I haven’t really seen many reviews for this novel, even considering the number of awards it’s won/been short and long listed for. And that’s too bad, because in both topic and written execution, it’s significant and expressive. 

August left her homeland (Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains, in Australia) and family ten years ago. After her sister disappeared, she lost her connection to the land and the people and ran to the other side of the world. But when her grandfather dies, she returns for his burial. Grappling with grief and the bittersweet homecoming, August finds out that their home at Prosperous is about to be repossessed by a mining company. After hearing about a book her grandfather was writing, a book meant to remember and pass on the language and culture of his people, August decides to search for it in an attempt to reconnect with her ancestry and save her home. 

I’m just going to start by reiterating the last line of my opening paragraph here: in both topic and written execution, it’s significant and expressive. This is a passionately lyrical, introspective exploration of a young girl coming to terms not only with her own life/losses, but also the way that the losses of her ancestors are carried forwards intergenerationally. Although this story is specific to the Australian continent, the general theme of cultural theft and dispossession and forced assimilation that colonizers forced on Indigenous populations is universal in both geography and experience. The historical aspects woven through, about the ways everything was stolen from the Indigenous tribes in Australia to start, juxtaposed with the current-day ways that that dispossession is still being enforced/supported, and the impossible red-tape standards for preservation (in a real sense, not in a performative “museum” way), is affecting and eye-opening and (again), applicable to many (all) non-Australian colonized indigenous lands as well. But the true beauty in these pages shines not though that universal pain, but in the specific lives of the characters like August and her cousin Joey, who are finding their voices and exercising their rights to reclaim what is theirs, the power in knowing and owning your own history, so that there is an intergenerational pride within them, alongside that intergenerational trauma. It’s an individual glance at a reckoning what must happen on a worldwide scale.  (Honestly that entire intergenerational theme, both the difficult and the uplifting, gave me vibes of The Deep, though the writing and story-structure are very different, and if you like one, I’d definitely recommend the other.) 

The story itself was told in three perspectives. First, August’s (present-day) timeline and narration. Second, a historical letter from a religious leader who helped found Prosperous (a “good” colonizer/missionary) who realizes, much too late and only when his own life is affected/in danger, how wrong his outlook/goals/lifework was. And third, the dictionary that August grandfather, Albert, was writing. And personally, that was by far my favorite perspective. The letter was important for context, a rounding out of the history of the land and the horrific treatment of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. And I loved August’s personal journey and reckonings, but the writing for her part had a cadence and, for lack of a better term to describe it “way,” to it that both took me awhile to adjust to and for some reason, at least for me, kept me at arm’s length from her in some ways. That actually fits her character’s emotional state, and as I read further, and she opened up simultaneous to me getting more accustomed to the writing, that changed a little. But there was still a distance throughout, at least for me. But Albert’s sections…those sections blew me away. It was a mix of dictionary and oral history (yes, I know this was written, but it had a vibe or oral telling to it) and poetry that I just could not get enough of. Albert introduces the reader to his language, the meanings of individual words, through cultural stories/practices/myths, personal connection to the words within his life, and the moments that touched him deeply that he associates with each. Albert’s dictionary was just so perfectly reflective and instructive and elegiac and moving.      

I was so impressed with this novel. There is such a rich exploration of such complex topics within the lingual framework of some of the most unique, stylistic writing I have ever read. It’s a slow-paced read, meant for connection and reflection and calling for recognition and bring to account from readers, but it is absolutely worth the effort.     

“...there was a lot to remembering the past, to having stories, to knowing your history, your childhood, but there is something to forgetting it too.” 

“In my language it’s the things you give to, the movement, the space between things.” 

“The family trees of people like us are just bushes now, aren’t they? […] Someone has been trimming them good.” 

“Life and death have finality, limbo doesn’t; no one wants to hear about someone lost. Someone that just went and disappeared altogether.” 

“Whenever I’ve cried in my life it’s always come when I start singing. I could never hold a tune but that isn’t the reason we try something, not perfection. Perfection is just someone’s little opinion at the end of the day, and there isn’t much that man makes that is perfect anyway.” 

“There was a war here against the local people. In that war the biggest victim was the culture, you know? […] culture has no armies, does it?” 

“I think I noticed that your pop and I could do good things together. That our love could bounce off the world and I was that age, I guess. I was open to him and I knew straight away that he loved me, that he wouldn’t put me down.” 

“She thought about how every family has its own special language. Its own weird sense of humor that’s stuck in the past.” 

“...our descendants must take the post. Claim that space where shame lived, where things were lost, where we were kept away from our culture.” 

“August felt there, felt effortlessly at home, felt as if a vibration were being shared between the three generations of women. Felt as if she might laugh that way, on Prosperous, after everything, after death and theft and secrets and lies and the muddied water, and the diesel and the blood – after all that – she felt as if she was home. Belonged.” 

“It’s all precious in the end! It’s like there are never enough details left. I wanted everything back. Fingerprints, photos, every story, nights that were longer. A right time to die? To be separated? There isn’t, August. It hurts all the time, it hurts to lose someone, doesn’t it?” 

“She’d realized then the purpose of their history class where they’d been mentioned like important footnotes, just like the purpose of the museum, how it felt like a nod – polite and reverent and doused in guilty wonder – of a time that had now passed. Past or passed she thought as she followed the arrow to the archaeology collections.” 

“August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful. Not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artifacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now, to tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all. All the hidden pieces were being put back together, she wanted to say.” 

“People so scared of not having everything [...] that our people are gunna have nothing.” 

“There was an expanse behind her; their lives meant something, their lives were huge. Thousands of years, she thought to herself. Slipped through the fingers of careless people.” 

“To be isolated is to be unable to act. That’s what we were – isolated – from our family, from our language, from our cultural ways, and from our land.” 

“When August was a little kid she couldn’t rely on the certainty of even a day. She thinks now that that’s why she needed to control the things around her, the things she ate, the things she said. She tried to keep herself and her life small and manageable. Much like a poem. The condensing of the wide, unknowable past that runs right up behind them. She doesn’t do that anymore. Her life isn’t a poem; she knows it’s a big, big story. Her people go all the way back to the riverbank, and further, after all – the river and what happened at the river was a time traveler, their story has no bounds in time. She and Joey learned it’s the grandkids that inherit everything their ancestors did before. They carried the past with them, though they never knew. All the years that she had been adrift and tethered at once amounted to something, though. She’d rediscovered her family an who she truly was because of who they truly were.” 

 

This is the 5th book of the Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist 2021 that I’ve gotten to. I’m a third of the way through the list now! This is one I definitely was planning to read anyways, having read and been so freaking impressive by both Freshwater and Pet, so it’s nice that it overlapped with a longlist contender. Of note, I must say that this one is unequivocally topping my shortlist predictions list so far. 

The title for this one says it all: this is the story of Vivek Oji’s death. But it is also the story of Vivek Oji’s life. The life that he struggled to make reflect who he truly was. (For the record, Emezi uses he/him pronouns for Vivek throughout book and, towards the end, writes that he is ok with either he/him or she/her pronouns, so this review will reflect that.) The novel opens with Vivek’s mother finding his dead body carefully wrapped on their front porch. As the novel continues, we see more of Vivek’s life unfold: being raised by a mostly-not-there father and a “compassionate but overprotective” mother, of struggling through mental health crises and separation from reality during adolescence, of having/losing/re-finding a closest relationship with his cousin Osita, of exploring and truly discovering who she was with daughters of other Nigerwives (her mothers’ friends – a group of foreign women all married to Nigerian men), and of the complex lives and relationships of his her closest friends and relatives. This is all set within the context of a grieving mother trying to find out what happened to her son, a set of friends trying to do their best to protect and love Vivek both during and after her life and the ever-present and over-whelming gender and relationship expectations that are so arbitrary and deeply ingrained into society. 

Ohhhhhhhhh my freaking goodness the emotions. I mean, everyone said it. Everyone who read this one said it hit like a ton of bricks. And it’s not that I didn’t believe them. It’s just…I do not have words to describe how even thought I knew that, and even though the ending is literally in the title of the novel, I was still knocked the f*** over by this book. I’m crushed. I loved it. Emezi’s way with words, the way they are able to convey so much, with such feeling, in so few pages, is just…it’s just special. I’m not an own voices reviewer in any way, but still feel like I so truly and deeply felt what Emezi conveyed in these pages, what Vivek experienced as far as a disconnect between who he was as a person and who society saw him as and expected him to be. Plus, the juxtaposition of that internal struggle with the revival she found when the daughters of the Nigerwives (and eventually Osita, as well) loved her, all of her, inclusively. There is a section right at the end where Vivek (Nnemdi) speaks to her acceptance of the risks she took, the choices she made to live as herself, the knowledge that something terrible and unfair could happen, but that it was worth it, to live her truth. And it was one of the most affecting parts for me, that need to accept such a terrible potential risk to just…live completely. 

Speaking of affecting parts, the other aspect of this novel that most deeply got me was the choices Vivek had to make as far as who he shared his truth with. There are definitely a few aspects of my life where I can relate, at least in a small percentage, to this. Not being sure that the people closest to you, like parents, will accept certain pieces of you OR thinking in any way that there are things about you that make your friends ashamed – and all as a result of the aforementioned arbitrary societal standards – it’s beyond difficult. And there is nothing so heartbreaking as the depth to which those choices affected where and with whom and to what extent Vivek was able to show herself to others, especially to many closest to her, because of the ways it would have caused everyone involved unimaginable pain. In this vein, the second to last chapter, the last from Vivek’s mother’s point of view, was such a gift. It was a gift to Vivek, in such a major way, to become their beloved child no matter what. It was a gift to trans/non-binary people, a recognition of who they are, as they are. It was a gift to the reader, to soften the incredibly heavy emotional blows the book brought upon us. And, importantly, it’s a gift to family and friends of trans/non-binary people who are still alive today. It’s a gift to show them, show us all, that they still have a chance to truly know their loved ones before it’s too late, before they lose someone they should have loved and protected all along and have to live with that tragedy and regret. 

Emezi’s eloquence, their story-telling, their ripping open of the fabric we think makes life and re-weaving it into something deeper, bigger, better, is just astounding. Every single book they’ve written has been awe-inspiring, challenging, absolutely unique, and completely shattering. There is a wisdom and gravity in their words that is matched by few, but it’s also always balanced with a truly great story as well. Vivek and his cousin Osita are such compelling and real characters; their struggles are both individual and universal. And every one of the side characters, from Vivek’s mother to his each of his friends to the man on the market who saw Vivek walk by and admired her hair…they’re all so real. Despite some incredibly high expectations, I am coming out of this book totally, brilliantly, devastatingly awed.           

“Fresh starts were good; that separateness was where you could feel yourself, where you could learn who you were apart from everyone else.” 

“I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?” 

“...people don’t react well to their power being beaten out if them.” 

“It was how he always did nowadays, pushing her aside gently, not listening to her. Sometimes it felt like he had stopped listening to her years ago, and she just hadn’t noticed. Like they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping.” 

“Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it.” 

“I know what they say about men who allow other men to penetrate them. Ugly things; ugly words. Calling them women, as if that’s supposed to be ugly too. I’d heard it since secondary school, and I knew that night was supposed to make me. Less than a man – something disgusting, something weak and shameful. But f that pleasure was supposed to stop me from being a man, then fine. They could have it. I’d take the blinding light of his touch, the blessed peace of having him so close, and I would stop being a man. I was never one to begin with, anyway.” 

“They were girlfriends, yes, but who could they even go and say that to? And if you didn’t tell other people, was it real or was it just something the two of you were telling yourselves?” 

“How could he be gone when he’d overtaken us so completely while he was here?” 

“That was why they’d kept it from their parents, to protect Vivek from those who didn’t understand him. They barely understood him themselves, but they loved him, and that had been enough.” 

“You can chase the truth, but who could avoid the moment of hesitation when you wonder if you really want what you’ve been asking for?” 

“But his shame couldn’t overcome his fear; his secrets kept a padlock on his throat.” 

“We didn’t see him and we failed.”