Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
PRUEBAS, cilt.1, sa.2, ss.14-42, 2020 (Hakemli Dergi)
This article proposes that initially using the tools of visual representation, and later literature, photography, ethnography and media, the white society has posited the American Indian as the Other and through this mirror image consolidated its own identity, while the representation of the Native American by the white world has continuously been compromised by an ideology of dominance and hegemony. This bifurcated view in its turn has resulted in the creation of a multiplicity of stereotypes and fake/ false representations of the indigenous population, which have no bearing on the realities of the Native Americans living today in the United States.
The dire necessity of upsetting these fixed categories and the disruption of these unreal markers of identity inform the work of one “postindian warrior” adamant in procuring change in the fields of both politics and representation; Gerald Vizenor. According to Vizenor, the solution to the ongoing dilemma of politically loaded false representations is by means of trickster stories -which he renames tricky stories- that is by way of corrective humour, since only through the corrective acts of re-naming and re-representing, the false representations and simulations will be disrupted and Native American peoples will gain sovereignty over their own representations and selfhoods.
Sherman Alexie on the other hand, in his attempts to disrupt the stereotypical mainstream representations, ironically becomes a figure of controversy as the communal motive behind his work of deconstruction is commonly misconstrued and misunderstood. Yet, read in the light of Gerald Vizenor’s theories, it can be argued that Sherman Alexie intentionally plays with recent stereotypes of Native Americans, bringing them to the fore, only to subvert these false representations, and in the process recreates authentic subjectivity positions that are communally informed. Consequently, what Alexie exemplifies is closely related to what Vizenor elucidates textually, that is the deconstruction of the stereotypical Indians that are still current in contemporary literature, as well as films and various media. Then, Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian becomes a prime example of such deconstruction, which can be read according to Vizenor’s theories, especially his trickster discourse. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by means of the depiction of extremes, the two dimensional nature of the stereotypes are clearly underlined, and Alexie through the re-employment and emplotment of the stereotypes with subversive intent underscores the fixity of the constructs and thus contests their validity.
Consequently, the narrator in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian never falls prey to despair, or melancholy or nostalgia, nor allows himself be victimised by either the white or Native American community. Neither does he give in to inner colonisation, accepting and assuming the artificial pose of the victim. The hardships and pain he manoeuvres by way of drawing cartoons and laughter. Then this positive outcome can be attributed to creativity, humour, adaptation, and flexibility, all of which are the qualities of the traditional trickster. As Vizenor puts it; “The shimmers of imagination are reason and the simulations are survivance, not dominance; an aesthetic restoration of trickster hermeneutics, the stories of liberation and survivance without the dominance of closure” (Manifest Manners 14). Hence the narrator in Alexie’s text disrupts the manifest manners plaguing both the white and the Indian worlds, breaking the constructed notions of Indianness current in both communities, and never lets himself be confined by artificial categories in his path towards success and survivance, which he achieves through humour and creativity.