University Place

There There: A Reading by Tommy Orange

– My name is Conor Moran. I am the director of the Wisconsin Book Festival. It is my distinct pleasure to stand here tonight to introduce Tommy Orange, his National Book Award long-listed novel “There There.” It is– If you’ve been reading the literary press or book Twitter or really anything, you should know about this novel. You’ve been hearing about his work and we’re absolutely lucky that we have. My answer to the question, what class would you teach if you were a professor has always been debut novels, and this is the reason why, books like this. Books that push you out a window and jump out after you and are maybe your parachute on your way down. Doesn’t really. If you saw me finishing this book crying in the breakroom, you might not think it was, but nonetheless. This book is emotional, it is energetic, it is devastating, as I said to him, in the best possible way. I mean that as a true recommendation, please buy it. And Tommy, I just want to say thank you for this book and thank you for being here tonight. Everyone, Tommy Orange.
(applause)

– Thank you, Conor, for that introduction, and thank you all for comin’ out. So I met with high schoolers at Nicolet High School, and they were asking me what were my favorite parts of the novel, and that’s not something that, I don’t have a category of favorite. And then I met with a terrific group of grad school students this afternoon and they were asking about who came out and when and thinking about what I would read tonight, I thought I would read parts that were very early and strong pieces, to me, that made me want to keep writing. So that’s what I’m going to read. I was thinking maybe I would read one or two, and then if there’s questions, I’m happy to answer those if they’re related to the thing that I’m reading. Or if nobody wants to ask questions, I’ll just keep going, so…

So the first part’s from the prologue.
(clears throat)

This came out, I mean, this came out of me. I wrote this very early on in the process of writing this novel. Parts of this. And one of the first things that convinced me that what I was doing, I should keep doing, was we brought, I was working at the Native American Health Center in Oakland, and we were working under a suicide prevention grant, and my wife was the project director. And we were bringing together Native authors, and I was certainly not an author. You know, I was very much, heavily that. But my wife was the project director, and she had heard parts of this and these, a lot of these kids grew up in the city and she thought it would be a good fit and I was more scared than I’d ever been to read in front of kids. I’ll always be more scared of kids.
(laughter)
Specifically like middle school to high school.
(laughter)
Anyway, I read some of what this used to be, and it exists in a different way now. And they were really moved by it and that really told me that, like, what I’m doing matters, if it matters to them, so…

They used to call us sidewalk Indians. Called acidified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees. Apples. An apple is red on the outside and white on the inside. But what we are is what our ancestors did, how they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do. Feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us. When they first came for us with their bullets, we didn’t stop moving even though the bullets moved twice as fast as the sound of our screams. And even when their heat and speed broke our skin, shattered our bones, goals, pierced our hearts, we kept on, even when we saw the bullets and our bodies flailing through the air like flags, like the many flags on buildings that went up in place of everything we knew this land to be before. The bullets were premonitions, ghosts from dreams of a hard, fast future. The bullets moved on after moving through us, became the promise of what was to come. The speed and the killing, the hard, fast lines of borders and buildings. They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder. They fired their guns into the air in victory, and the strays flew out into the nothingness of history’s written wrong and meant to be forgotten.

Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now. Urbanity. Urban Indians were the generation born in the city. We’ve been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. An urban Indian belongs to the city and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form, chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise, doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars, are these not of the earth? Were they shipped in from Mars? The Moon? Is it because their process manufactured or that we handle them? Are we so different? Were we, at one time, not something else entirely? Homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-Bang quantum theory.

Cities form in the same way that galaxies. Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the Redwoods and the open hills better than any other deep wild forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls. We know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even frybread, which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original. Everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere. (clears throat)

So this is another character that was early in the characters that came over the six years that it took to write the book. There was the prologue parts, Tony Loneman, Opal, and Orville, came out in a pretty, pretty clear, and convincing way to me that there was more to them. (clears throat)

Tony Loneman. The Drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six. Earlier that day, my friend Mario, while hanging from the monkey bars in the sand park said, “Why does your face look like that?” I don’t remember what I did. I still don’t know. I remember smears of blood on the metal and the taste of metal in my mouth. I remember my gramma Maxine shaking my shoulders in the hall outside the principal’s office, my eyes closed, her making this “pshh” sound she always makes when I try to explain myself and shouldn’t. I remember her pulling my arm harder than she’d ever pulled it and the quiet drive home.

Back home, in front of the TV, before I turned it on, I saw my face in the dark reflection there. It was the first time I saw it. My own face, the way everyone else saw it. When I asked Maxine, she told me my mom drank when I was in her. She told me, real slow, that I have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. All I heard her say was ‘drome, and then I was back in front of the turned off TV, staring at it, my face stretched across the screen, the Drome.

I tried, but couldn’t make the face that I found there my own again. Most people don’t have to think about what their faces mean the way I do. Your face in the mirror, reflected back at you. Most people don’t even know what it looks like anymore. That thing on the front of your head, you’ll never see it, like you’ll never see your own eyeball with your own eyeball, like you’ll never smell what you smell like. But me, I know what my face looks like. I know what it means. My eyes droop like I’m (censored) up, like I’m high. My mouth hangs open all the time. There’s too much space between all the parts of my face. Eyes, nose, mouth spread out like a drunk slapped it on, reaching for another drink.

People look at me and look away when they see I see them see me. That’s the Drome, too. My power and curse. The Drome is my mom and why she drank. It’s the way history lands on a face, and all the ways I made it so far, despite how it has (censored) with me since the day I found out there in the TV, staring back at me like a (censored) villain. I’m 21 now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t, though. The way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach, getting drunk in there. Drunk (censored) baby, not even a baby, a little (censored) tadpole thing hooked up to a cord floating in a stomach. They told me I’m stupid. Not like that, they didn’t say that, but I basically failed the intelligence test. The lowest percentile, that bottom rung. My friend Karen told me they got all kinds of intelligences. She’s my counselor, I still see once a week over at the Indian center. I was at first mandated to go to after the incident with Mario in kindergarten.

Karen told me that I don’t have to worry about what they try to tell me about intelligence. She said people with FAS are on spectrum, with a wide range of intelligences. The intelligence test is biased and I got strong intuition and street smarts, that I’m smart where it counts. Which I already knew. But when she told me, it felt good, like I didn’t really know, until she said it like that. I’m smart like, I know what people have in mind, what they mean when they say they mean another thing. The Drome taught me to look past the first look people give you, find that other one right behind it. All you got to do is wait a second longer than you normally do, and you can catch it. You can see what they got in mind back there. I know if someone’s sellin’ around me. I know Oakland. I know what it looks like when somebody’s tryin’ to come up on me, like when to cross the street and when to look at the ground and keep walking, and how to spot a scaredy-cat too. That one’s easy. They wear that like there’s a sign in their hands. The sign says come get me. They look at me like I already (censored) did some (censored), so I might as well do the (censored) they’re looking at me like that for. Maxine told me I’m a medicine person. She said people like me are rare and that when we come along, people better know we look different because we are different, to respect that. I never got no kind of respect from nobody, though, except Maxine. She tells me we’re Cheyenne people, that Indians go way back with the land, that all this was once ours, all this.

Must not have had street smarts back then. Let them white men come up over here and take it from ’em like that. Sad part is, all those Indians probably knew, but couldn’t do anything about it. They didn’t have guns, plus the diseases. That’s what Maxine said, killed us with their white man’s dirt and diseases. Moved us off our land, moved us onto some (censored) land you can’t grow (censored) on. I would have hated it if I got moved out of Oakland, ’cause I know it so well, from west to east, deep east and back, on bike or bus or BART. It’s my only home. I wouldn’t make it nowhere else.

Sometimes, I ride my bike all over Oakland just to see it. The people, all its different hoods, with my headphones on listening to MF Doom, I can ride all day. The MF stands for Metal Face. He’s my favorite rapper. Doom wears a metal mask and calls himself a villain. Before Doom, I didn’t know nothin’ but what came on the radio. Somebody left their iPod on the seat in front of me on the bus. Doom was the only music on there. I know I liked him when I heard the line, “got more soul than a sock with a hole.” What I like is that I understood all the meanings to it right away, like instantly. It meant soul, like having a hole in a sock gives the sock character. It means its worn through, gives it a soul. And also like the bottom of your foot showing through to the sole of your foot. It was a small thing, but it made me feel like I’m not stupid, not slow, not bottom-rung.

And it helped because the Drome’s what gives me my soul, and the Drome is face worn through. My mom’s in jail. We talk sometimes on the phone, but she’s always sayin’ some (censored) that makes me wish we didn’t. She told me my dad’s over in New Mexico, that he doesn’t even know I exist. “Then tell that (censored) I exist,” I said to her. “Tony, it ain’t simple like that,” she said. Don’t call me simple. Don’t (censored) call me simple, you (censored) did this to me. Sometimes I get mad.

That’s what happens to my intelligence sometimes. No matter how many times Maxine moved me from schools I got suspended from for getting in fights. It’s always the same, I get mad and then I don’t know anything. My face heats up and hardens like it’s made of metal, and I black out. I’m a big guy, and I’m strong. Too strong, Maxine tells me. The way I see it, I got this big body to help me since my face got it so bad. But that’s how looking like a monster works out for me. The Drome. And when I stand up, when I stand up real (censored) tall, like I can, nobody will (censored) with me. Everybody runs like they’d seen a ghost. Maybe I am a ghost. Maybe Maxine doesn’t even know who I am. Maybe I’m the opposite of a medicine person. Maybe I’m gonna do something one day, and everybody’s going to know about me. Maybe that’s when I’ll come to life. Maybe that’s when they’ll finally be able to look at me, because they’ll have to.

Any questions? (laughter) I think I was just wanting to write what I didn’t, wasn’t finding to read, and wanting to represent the people I come from and the stories that I knew were part of the place that I came from. There’s like, virtually no Oakland novels, and I couldn’t find any novels that were talking about Natives in cities. So it came out of, like, not seeing something there and wanting to represent something that I, you know, an absence. So the Gertrude Stein quote, “There is no there there”, a lot of people have used it to sort of talk down about Oakland and that it has no character, and now it’s like, in the media, and this administration’s like, using it for weird reasons. (laughter)

So I saw the quote, I found the quote when I was researching for the book, to see what other authors had to say about Oakland, and it wasn’t much, and it’s part of what went into writing the book. Wasn’t much about urban Indians, and wasn’t much about Oakland in the literature, and so I knew the quote was going to work in somewhere. And I had some bad ideas for titles that were related to the quote. But she’s talking about her home, her childhood home was developed over, and she went back to it, and in her book, “Everybody’s Autobiography,” she has somebody asking her, why don’t you write about Oakland, and she says, “There is no there there.” And she’s talking about how her home is not recognizable ’cause it was developed over. So these are Native people living in the city, tryin’ to figure out a way to belong there and feel like they belong there and feel like they belong in being Native, and figuring out the there there of their home environment. He asked about a line at the end of the prologue section that I wrote, that says the land is everywhere and nowhere. Being Indian is not about returning to the land, the land is everywhere and nowhere. So this is related to the urban Indian experience, and–

This idea that there’s no land to go to, to be a real Indian. You can still be a real Indian and live in the city, and that’s still land too, and you can belong to where you are from. I know it can be problematic if you get into sovereignty and land rights and people having– Certain tribes are still where they always were, and that’s a different type of land to talk about. But the context for me is just about not seeing city spaces as part of the land, and the only way to be a real Native is to be out in the wilderness, or on the res, or… Basically a lot of things that a person, a native from the city can’t be. It’s just an answer to that. Most people in this country don’t tend to know about Native people being–
(laughter)

That in every major city there’s an Indian center and there’s an urban Indian community. ‘Cause it started in the ’50s, and it’s been like that from a long time. So if you’re Native, you probably know what’s goin’ on, and if you don’t, why would you sort of thing, or if you don’t have a Native friend. You know, the nature of that is a convenient– There’s sort of a convenient narrative among the general American about not knowing that Natives are around.

Or like, “That was so long ago, why are you bringing it up?” “I had nothin’ to do with that.” But those people do have to do with the narrative that continues, for example, celebrating something horrific, like Thanksgiving or Columbus Day parades. You have to understand the horrific nature of watching somebody parade about some awful (censored). It’d be like, in Germany, if things had gone different and there were people parading about killing Jews. And like, “Oh, the Jews aren’t around anymore.” Or like, you know, this is part of our country’s foundation. In Germany, they acknowledge what they did. They have memorials to say what they did. We do the very opposite. We seal it with gravy. I did a lot of storytelling work in Native communities and in voiceless communities, teaching non-writers how to write personal narratives, and then teaching ’em digital video editing software, and teaching ’em to make these short films. So I did a lot of this work and learned to respect people’s stories and not, in any way, try to take them for my own purposes. So I never would’ve felt right basing fictional characters on other people. You earn your life and experience and pain and story. And to use it for your own purposes, to me, just never felt right. So these characters are completely fictitious, and the person that they resemble the most are me.

You know, it was craft-based first. I love books that do that. Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine” is kind of an obvious one, but books that also make, thread all the stories together, like Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin,” was the first book that I noticed that he’s doing something where there’s a whole bunch of voices and you learn somewhere in the middle that they’re all totally connected. I think singular third-person, god-like narratives are kind of old-fashioned. I’m like, way into– I think you’re seeing it in TV shows and you’re seeing it in books more and more often. And I think it’s more true to life. Like, we have to experience a whole bunch of different voices with a whole bunch of different opinions, and we have to try to make a singular sense of it for our own personal narrative. So for the reader to have that experience in the novel makes sense for me, and I like it. It’s one of the, probably, the biggest complaints that I’ve gotten from people about this novel, is like, it’s too many characters. And that’s, you know, that’s the kind of reader that I am, and I wanted to write to other people that like that kind of reading experience.

So, from the beginning, before I even had the idea for the novel, I knew I wanted to write that kind of novel. Didn’t do well in school. Didn’t much care. Lot goin’ on at home. Everyone just kind of keeping their heads above water. Parents fighting all the time. You know, and my dad’s Native. My mom’s white. She embraces Christian evangelical, he was Native American Church member, and did ceremony all the time, which her group of Christian– They met in the tepee, the Native American Church ceremony. But she got saved in front of the TV in Oklahoma. (laughter) In the glory days of televangelism, if you can ever call them anything with glory. (laughter)

Anyway, school was, you know, nobody pushed me in any particular way, nobody said anything particularly nice about me being a good student or having any capacity or potential. And eventually got kicked out of high school. I knew I was good at sports, I liked playing sports. I played roller hockey on a competitive level, nationwide, sponsored by a company, and like, you know, I was into that ’cause I knew I was good at that. Became a musician and, sort of, by the time I fell in love with fiction in, oh, I was like, 24, when I was working at a used bookstore, I’d seen through sports and music, if you put in hours, then you’ll see results. And with writing sometimes, it’s like this mysterious, or art just in general, like, the muse visits you or, you know, inspiration, only when inspiration hits can you do anything. And for me, I just came from like, work hard at something and put in the hours no matter what, and something will happen. So I sort of took to writing.

I knew I was way behind everybody who knew. When they were three, they read their first novel. I just knew I was way behind and I worked really hard to try to catch up. There’s an AA meeting in the novel. And one of the characters who’s leading the AA meeting is saying they’d like you to believe that Indians have some special weakness to alcohol. And he makes the statement that like, “There’s no special relationship between Indians and alcohol.” It’s what’s affordable and legal and available.

There’s nothin’ else to it. They’re people that are oppressed and going through what you’ve gone through, and wanting to make it better, it’s right there. Like, if heroin was legal and available, it probably would be that too. It’s people tryin’ to cope. And this idea that, like, we have a weakness to alcohol is very condescending and does not take into account history. And so much of the narrative and the stereotype around Native people does not take into account what our people have had to go through. And so, trying to dispel these easy, dismissive narratives, convenient white narratives, who don’t want to look at what happened, because it makes this country look shameful.

Just tryin’ to speak to some of that. You know, every school I went to, there was maybe one other Native kid, not including my sisters. And then, you know, to compound that complexity and loneliness, around Native communities, I’m not necessarily seen as Native. You know, I’m half Native and half white, and that’s a whole thing, that’s a whole statement. You talk to different Native people and they’ll have different opinions on what it means and how much is necessary to be enough.

It’s a lot to manage. I was lucky enough to grow up on a street of kids and families, all biracial. So I didn’t feel invisible in that sense, I felt like we’re all like, you know, different things, trying to figure it out, and my dad was really good about instilling in us a really solid base of like, know who you are. And it was stronger than the white side. My mom, there was nothing to speak of on the white side. There’s no cultural things to get passed down. It’s a mix of Irish and Italian, and you know, it’s like Scotch-Irish and Swiss-Italian, and south of France. No stories or anything.

So experientially, if anything, I felt like I was more Native. But then, you know, depending on what neighborhood I was in in Oakland, I was thought of as Mexican or Asian, or just not white. But I dunno. So it’s a confusing and complex experience, and it’s different in every community. In Asian communities, you all have your own complexities and layers, and in Native communities we do too. He’s asking if this idea of, so when people were relocated or chose to relocate or came after the wars, came to urban areas like Oakland, but it’s also every major urban area you can imagine, they all became hubs for relocation. And eventually, people ended up tryin’ to go back to their roots, where they originally came from, and became a very inter-tribal situation. There’s inter-tribal centers all over the country. And the urban Indian experience is very inter-tribal because of the nature of it. You have all Native people wanting to get together in one place because you’re Native, but you’re comin’ from different tribes. You’re having kids who are two or three different tribes and they have to figure out what that means.

And certain Natives went back to reservations to try to sort of reconnect with what that means, to greater or lesser effect. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good. Did that have an effect on me, is the question. So me and my, one of my sisters, sort of have diverging narratives in that same way. I never felt like I needed to go back. I became a part of the urban Indian community and felt very much embraced. And like, we were a thing. And my connection to being Cheyenne was going back there with my dad. When we were younger and having a connection to my dad, and for my sister, it was, she did feel that pull to go back and sort of become legitimate or authentic by– She’s not fluent in our language and she’s working to help revitalize our language program, and she lives where my dad grew up, or nearby. And so, which one of us is more Indian? It depends on which Indian you ask. (laughter) I don’t think we should be doin’ it like that. But you know, it’s a question that a lot of Native people think about.

So, this was gross. (laughter) But I pulled two spider legs out of my own leg. And it was pretty (censored) up, and I was like, I got to include this. I’m not just going to deal with this. (laughter) I can at least use this for the novel. You know, I called my dad, ’cause like Orville and his brothers, it’s like, this seems Indian. And I Googled it for weeks just tryin’ to find anything. And he said, it’s a very simple answer, like my dad always has.

“Sounds to me like somebody witched ya.” I was like, okay. (laughter) And what do I do next, wait for disaster? Yeah, so that happened, and we had the spider legs, and we were like, showing people ’cause we were so crazy. There was like, that bend in the leg, and it got skinnier at the end. It was unmistakable, spider legs.

And then at some point, we had like, a lot of people over, and I had saved ’em on, like a napkin, and somebody threw it away on accident. (laughter) So I have no proof left, but that’s where– I mean, it works as a theme because there’s a sort of a spider web structure and there’s references to the spider web as home and trap. It happens to work within the book’s themes as well, but the actual idea to include that was just because it happened to me.

Well, this idea of sad makes me sad, when people think that it’s sad. Because, it’s a lot of Native people’s stories. And I think it’s sad what this country has done to a people. So to hear that it’s sad is reductive, of something horrible that’s happened to people who have actually, despite everything, have survived and have retained beauty and honor and dignity. So whenever I hear that this novel is sad, it feels very dismissive of the power of story and narrative. She’s asking if I like the audiobook. (laughter) I just, that’s the way to sum up for everyone. Yeah, so I was able to be a part of the process, and, I was very happy that they, mostly, were Native cast. And the main character who reads, like, the prologue and the interlude and several characters, Darrell Dennis, he’s a First Nations guy. He’s on a TV show about a guy trying to make a documentary about urban Indians. So when I found out that biographical fact, you know, it was like, it was a, “Yeah.” Immediately, I was okay with it, even if his voice was terrible. I didn’t even hear his voice and I was like, he has to do it. (laughter)

No, I think they did a terrific job. I was able to listen to parts of the audiobook. I listened to most of it. And it was– I had a really cool experience of, because it was somebody else performing it and I’d been away from it for so long on the page, I was able to appreciate it as a piece of, you know, as a piece of work, and that was a good experience. The first three years of writing was just sort of in a vacuum. And I read to my wife on our back porch.

She’s my toughest critic, so I would only read her stuff that I knew was ready to be read, otherwise it would be destroyed. (laughter) So going into the program, I knew exactly– I had the vision for the novel and I knew exactly what I wanted for it. I learned a lot of great tools in the program, and worked through. You know, got to see people’s responses and got to work through some authority issues because that’s part of, I think, any MFA program, is you’re working with published writers. And sometimes, you know, depending on the writer or the teacher, they’ll act like they’re the authority, instead of an authority. And so you have to, as a student, if they’re not being transparent about that, you have to work through that and find where you know it to be true. Or else you’re going to end up writing a book that’s not you. It’s like, being guided by somebody else. So writing in a community of other Native writers was probably the most impactful part. I feel like I was part of a community, and didn’t have to explain myself, and felt very supported, and people came from similar backgrounds. Billy-Ray Belcourt wrote a book, if you like poetry, “This Wound is a World.” He’s a First Nations guy. He’s young, I think he’s like, 24, and he won like, one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in Canada.

Tommy Pico is a poet from, I think the Kumeyaay tribe near southern California. He’s super talented and modern, and he’s a poet. Layli Long Soldier put out a really important book called, “Whereas.” Very powerful. More poetry. I’m hoping that the success of people like me and Therese Mailhot’s books and all these people that I’m referencing have been, you know, acknowledged in a serious way. I’m hoping that will lead to more authors having, you know, a way in, and that publishers will see that we’re being respected and selling.

And that will mean more voices, ’cause there’s not enough. Thank you.
(applause)