Indians Diverted Desire in Ten

¶ … Indians

Diverted desire in Ten Little Indians

The name of the short story collection Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie takes its name from a politically incorrect children's nursery rhyme also made famous by Agatha Christie's drawing room mystery novel of the same name. Like the nursery rhyme, in Christie's novel, the guests are mysteriously eliminated, one by one, in bloody and ingenious fashions. Sherman Alexie's tales attempt to eliminate stereotypes about Indians, one by one, by depicting Indians who are Republicans, who work in eccentric occupation in Alexie's native Seattle like forest rangers, who are failed high school athletes, and even 'mixed breeds' who are more African-American affiliated than tied to their native past. However, in this collection of short stories, which itself is ironic in its structure because it contains nine rather than ten stories of thwarted individuals, sex and sexuality is always displaced rather than directed towards its original object of desire.

Consider the old hero Jackson, the homeless Indian of "What you Pawn I will Redeem." This aging man seems to conform to stereotypes, in that he is homeless and likes to gamble, but he is does so over the course of the tale mainly to win back what his people have lost -- symbolized by his grandmothers' powwow uniform, hanging in the window of a local pawnshop. Jackson is an alcoholic, because, he suggests, he is unhappy and lacks a future, and also about the oppression of his people, but this sense of valorous resistance at times seems at times like an excuse. The diabetic policeman who stops him as Jackson lies on the train tracks in a stupor says, "you've never been this stupid," in other words, you have never been this drunk before. "It's my grandmother," the Indian says, "She died." The policeman, taken aback states, "I'm sorry man. When did she die?" And Jackson responds "1972," suggesting that the mourning like the robe has become a kind of displacement, an excuse rather than the real thing or real love. The Indian never wins back the clothing, even while he wins money, he compulsively gives it away, drinks it away, and squanders even the first ten dollars on the pretty woman who sells him the scratch off ticket that brings in his first taste of largess. Jackson's uncle also symbolizes the futility of understanding. This man "went to prison forever, you know," for a brutal crime. Cut off from sexual desire, his loved ones, and his people, his uncle, "always wrote these long letters. Like fifty pages of tiny little handwriting. And he was always trying to figure out why he did it. He'd write and write and try to figure it out. He never did. it's a great big mystery."

Desire, and feeling passion in a world where desire only seems to lead to futility, because the society denies the identity of even the most successful Indian, causes Indian people to divert their desires into other, often ineffective ways. Jackson turns to gambling and drink, his uncle to murder. The scholarly heroine of the library set tale, entitled "The Search Engine," turns to books and literature, for the "huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death," in a fashion that suggests this spinster has diverted her sexual desires into words and literature with a ferocious appetite. She feels ignored, so resolves not to allow books to go similarly ignored. "What happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?" she wonders.

Frank Snake Church of "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church," diverts his frustrated desires into basketball. Both Corliss and Church are incapable of expressing love, for a man or for a parental figure, thus they divert their impulses into things and games rather than the actual, potentially hurtful world of desire. Their diverted aims are rooted in a fear of failure, or as one character that nearly becomes the victim of a terrorist attack, muses, "we're all failures." as, even when "carrying the woman," a fellow victim of the terrible bombing, the saver "walked among these sinners, the obese and the vain, the intolerable and the selfish, the liars and thieves, the wasteful and the avaricious. And wasn't he the greatest sinner? Wasn't he more dangerous to the people who loved him than any terrorist could ever be? Forgive me, God, oh, forgive me, he thought as he carried this other exploded woman. If he could save her, he hoped he might be saved." By saving a woman, he man hopes to save his own sexuality, his own desire and drive to live and to achieve something higher. The short story's title "Can I get a Witness?" suggests the need, religious, cultural, and sexual for a connection with another person, a witness in the religious and judicial sense to one's own humanity.