You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie

It was good to read Sherman Alexie's work again, and I feel even more privileged that not only did I read his book, but I went to the final stop of Alexie's book tour at Kepler's Bookstore. Here is a link to my sister's blog where she tells about that tour, and its cancellations:

http://janettekok.blogspot.com/2017/07/signs.html

Jan links to the open letter Alexie wrote, explaining the cancellation of most of his bookstore stops. I wrote in my email about it to my family: He often in the talk, and in the book -- which I'm halfway through -- talks about NOT believing, not having faith, not being religious, not believing in the afterlife, or ghosts, or spirits, of being secular. Yet, he canceled most of his book tour because he received so many signs from his now passed-on mother that she wanted him to stop, that he couldn't ignore them any longer and he did stop.  Plus, he writes many stories that include the afterlife and spirit world. During his talk he said he believes in "interpreting coincidence whatever way you want to." I feel like he "doth protest too much, methinks." I think he IS religious and does believe but does not want to profess it even to himself. But that's just my theory and we never know what's going on in people's hearts and minds. At any rate, I enjoyed his talk and I enjoy his writing.

I sat next to and chatted with a woman named Julia at the author event. When somehow it came up that both my parents had died earlier this year, she said the book might be hard for me, since it has so much about death, and in particular Alexie's mother, her death, and their relationship. I found, though, that was not true. I did not get overly emotional while reading the book.

It seems kind of weird to say I "enjoyed" the book. That's a funny word - enjoy. To me, it carries the implication that whatever it was you enjoyed, made you laugh, and smile, perhaps clap, and somehow it brought merriment into your life for that period of time you were enjoying it. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me did make me laugh -- a lot! -- it's true, but it was not what I'd label a funny book. It felt like Alexie laid bare his soul, and he used humor as he was doing it. In one part of the book he writes about his use of humor. His friend asked him why he was so much less funny when they (Alexie and this friend) were alone than when he was with others. Alexie told him that he uses humor as an armor, and that the fact he is less funny with his friend actually shows he loves his friend more.

I did definitely enjoy the funny parts. As I am wont to do, I read some of them aloud to my husband. Alexie is also profane, which, I must admit, almost always makes me laugh. In one story, "Performance" (page 182), Alexie tells of speaking to an audience of eight hundred during a fund-raiser for salmon restoration.

    "Salmon," I said "are the most epic fuckers in the animal kingdom."

    The audience, crunchy-assed liberals one and all, laughed but not with the abandon I wanted to hear...

    "So, honestly," I said, unafraid of being even more inappropriate, "When we celebrate salmon, we are celebrating fucking. And I don't think we celebrate fucking enough. In fact, forget salmon for a minute. Let's talk about our mothers and father. I mean--have any of you ever thanked your parents for fucking and conceiving you? And I don't mean thank them all cute and poetic like, 'Oh, I light this ancestral fire in tribute to you for my human creation.' No I mean have you ever looked your mother and father in the eye and said, 'Thank you for fucking me into existence.'

    The audience laughed louder. I knew I'd won over a few more of them. But I wanted to win all of them. So I went stuntman.

    "In fact," I said as I pulled out my cell phone and held it close to the microphone. "My father is dead. But I'm going to call my mother right now."

He goes on to describe the call, and telling his mother "thank you for fucking Dad and conceiving me." She laughed, and when he asked what she thought of that, she said, "I think you sound like you're drunk. Have you been going to your AA meetings?" Alexie exults in the laughter as a "celebration of my mother."

The end pages are from a photo of Alexie's wedding quilt that his mother made.

The book is very much about his mother. Lilian Alexie was a conundrum. She vowed, when Alexie was 7, that she would never drink again for the sake of her children, and she kept that promise, making their home safe, at least relative to others. Yet she was often cruel, very cruel, to Alexie and the other children. Alexie is working out his feelings through his memories. It sounds trite, but he is processing his mother’s death.

I read or heard somewhere that when a person goes through trauma, part of the healing is to make the event that caused the trauma into a story. People who have PTSD or something similar are not able to do that – they continue to live the trauma without getting it into a different part of their mind that putting it into a story enables. I think Alexie is going through that healing process of making stories about his life with his mother, and her death. During the talk, Alexie said it had been too fast. He said he wrote the book too quickly after his mother died, and it was published too quickly after that. He must still be going through this healing process. He definitely seemed raw during that talk – he opened up several times with personal revelations, he cried at times, he seemed bruised and hurt.

Alexie uses both the prose and the poetic form in this book. I read every word. I had no desire to skim and skip, the way I do sometimes. Through the engaging (another word that doesn't feel quite right) stories and poems I learned more about the Spokane Indians and other Native Americans than I knew before. I vaguely remember reading in history textbooks about Indians that lived by rivers and were fishermen. But Alexie writes that the Spokane Indians were, and are, people of the salmon. I had no idea the salmon were so important to them. They worship the salmon. Maybe not the way we worship God -- and Alexie's mother went to a Christian church -- but still some form of worship. Alexie writes (in "God Damn, God Dam," page 132) how the Grand Coulee Dam stopped the wild salmon in the upper Columbia and Spokane Rivers. I didn't know that. I also like the poem he wrote called "Communion," page 135:

we worship

the salmon

because we

eat salmon

He writes of visions of salmon, his mother and father as salmon. Salmon appear over and over.

I learned much, too, of the "culture of rape" in Indian reservations. As any book about Native Americans must, it includes many stories of the ruin caused by alcohol, including the alcoholism of both his mother and his father, his older sister, and many others in his family and community. He writes, too, of many times he has felt the cruelty of racism, and his confusion about the election of Trump, especially considering that the region of the nation Alexie comes from, where his beloved friends and schoolmates live, was heavily in favor of Trump.

I remember thinking, when Julia, the woman at the author event, was telling me that I might find reading this book difficult in light of my parent's deaths, that I wondered if the book ended with a note of hope, the way I felt Ruined had, making me able to read it without going into despair. As I ask myself that question now, it's a different kind of hope, I guess. I felt hope with Ruin because the author kept her faith. Alexie certainly professes not to have kept a faith, yet somehow the book does not lead to a burden of unhappiness or hopelessness. Maybe part of it is Alexie's joy coming through. At the author event he said that he feels his life is a miracle. All he went through, and he has a wife he loves, who adores him, and two sons he loves. Through it all, there is reason for hope.