Throughout There There by Tommy Orange, alcoholism runs rampant in the Native American community. No matter their past, alcoholism unifies their struggles, serving as an out from the hardships they face. As a result, characters’ lives are significantly altered.
The first character explored by Orange, Tony, was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or what he refers to as the “Drome”. His distorted appearance is a result of his mom’s addiction while she was pregnant. Now, he is 21, reflecting on what that has done to him. He “can drink if [he] wants” yet feels that he “got enough when [he] was in [his] mom’s stomach (Orange 16). Because his mom turns to alcohol when she was enduring tough times, he is born with physical and mental disabilities. These disabilities alter how he views alcohol, but more importantly, they change what he is able to achieve. Tony takes an intelligence test and scores in the bottom percentile (16-17). His performance, a result of his disability, limits the opportunities that are made available to him. Tony knows this is due to his mother’s actions. When he talks to her on the phone, he tells her “you fucking did this to me” (19). His mother’s battle with alcohol has had a drastic impact on the quality of a life Tony can lead, creating a cycle of struggle.
Jacquie Red Feather too suffers from alcoholism. When processing the loss of her daughter, Jacquie has a flashback to Veho, a trickster spider her mother warned her about. Veho symbolizes the “white man who came and made the old world watch with his eyes,” a time when Natives would give up their land, homes, and traditions until “the needle, the bottle, or the pipe are the only things in sight” (106). Similarly, she feels that the doctors have taken her baby away from her, despite the baby being born over 2 months early. Jacquie proceeded to spend the “next 6 years stomaching a fifth of whiskey a night” (106). Needing an avenue to help her grieve, she turned to alcohol just like other Natives had in the past. Her alcoholism leads to her being unalert on the job, causing a bus to crash. After the wreck, she is ordered to take a course at the Indian Center, where she achieves a certificate of sobriety through an online course, despite continuing to rely on alcohol. Jacquie Red Feather attempts to process the loss of her daughter and the flashbacks it brings by turning to alcohol, costing her a job while being unable to seek meaningful help.
Alcoholism and its effects are repeatedly visualized throughout There There by Tommy Orange. Characters face the harsh impacts of alcohol, whether it be a physical and mental disorder, or an incapacity to work.
I definitely agree with you that Tommy Orange meant to highlight the multidimensional effects that alcohol has had on the Native American community. I think he takes it a step further too and applies alcoholism amongst the Native American community to the home versus trap idea. When Jacquie is at her conference and has to decide between having a drink or not, she recalls that her mother used to call a spider's web both a home and a trap. Jacquie applies this idea to her alcoholism, reasoning that if she was a spider, then "home was to drink. To drink was the trap" (148). Jacquie has been so alienated from her community, losing her mother and daughter and being separated from her sister that she resorts to alcohol to feel normal within herself. However, the physical and psychological dependency she develops on alcohol have her trapped as a result.
ReplyDeleteOpal, Jacquie's sister, applies their mother's home and trap idea in another way. Opal recalls that her mother wouldn't let her or her sister kill a spider, because "spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap" (239). Opal spends the entire novel trying to prevent her grandsons from learning about their culture, as identifying oneself as a Native American opens one up to potential prejudice. For Opal, stories are where Native Americans find their home, being comfortable with their heritage and identity, but also traps Native Americans within a "world for Native people not to live but to die in" (242). Native Americans become dependent on stories to get in touch with their identity but doing so results in their persecution, and thus, stories are both a home and a trap.
In short, alcohol is just one example of how Native Americans are subjected to a society they cannot succeed in. Centuries of persecution have pushed them into cycles you mentioned in your blog post, and they now live in a constant dichotomy of home and trap.
Alcoholism is a consequence of the trauma Native Americans experienced in the past. Many characters became alcoholics because people related to them are alcoholics. Jacquie Red Feather did not drink until she moved to Alcatraz. She then saw drunk people everywhere and started abusing alcohol with her young peers. Thomas Frank drank because his father was an alcoholic. These children finally grew up to understand the pain in themselves and their history but did not know how to solve them. That is when and why they started abusing alcohol.
ReplyDeleteWe are no longer able to fix the root of the problem as the root has grown to thousands of branches of problems. Taking lands from the Native Americans led to mistreatment of Native Americans, which led to trauma and discrimination, which led to alcoholism, suicide, and poverty, which led to lost jobs and unfortunate children, which led to more discrimination and poverty. The cycle continues until it wore Native Americans out. Suicide is as severe as alcoholism in the Native American community. We can never understand the pain that Native Americans have been through. What we could do, as the first speaker of the "Keeping Them from Harm" conference said, "we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who'll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest." (105)
I thought your post detailing the depiction of alcohol in the novel was completely correct in its analysis of the impact alcohol has on Native American communities. I briefly mentioned it in class, but I watched a movie, Wind River, that exposed to me the harsh reality of drug and alcohol addiction among Native communities. The dire economic situation for many people living on reservations leads to an air of hopelessness, and the depressive conditions, along with a potential lack of identity, make it very easy to fall into dangerous vices. This is developed in There, There as you mentioned, and I believe that addiction among Native American's is not nearly talked about enough. The same can be said for many struggles faced by these communities, but there is a much larger focus on addiction in general in America, without acknowledging how disproportionately it affects those who are Native or live on reservations. Specifically in Wind River, however, it takes a similar view to Orange's, where it shows the affect alcohol abuse has on the youth of the community, rather than only displaying those who are addicted, and thus directly affected. In some situations, addiction and substance abuse can have a lasting affect far past those who are using, the example Orange gives being Tony. Overall, your post did a very good job touching on a major theme in the book, and one unfortunately not often discussed in our current society.
ReplyDelete