Recognized Metaphor
The author states a metaphor, and then comments upon the metaphor by confessing his recognition that it is more metaphorical than it may seem. This is not something that usually happens in writing. A simile is generally recognized for being metaphorical. That the author feels compelled to clarify suggests the reader should be paying close attention:
“Growing up on the rez, I’d often felt like a prey Animal, like a carnivore’s easiest meal. But that fear was more metaphor than real.”
Paternal Grandmother
Susan Alexie is the author’s grandmother, his father’s mother, whom he never knew. She is known only through a photograph and conceptual ideas passed along by family members. The photograph is especially resonant, drawing him towards her more than so other unknown family members existing only in two or less dimensions:
“in that old photo, my grandmother appears to be looking at something or someone out of frame…Whom is she looking at? And what is that expression on her face? Bemusement? Suspicion? Irritation? Shyness? She is the indigenous Mona Lisa.”
“Eulogy”
In addition to being a standard prose memoir, the book is also peppered with Alexie’s verse. One such poem is simply titled “Eulogy.” It is in memoriam to his mother; specifically, to her place as one of the last remaining members of the tribe capable of fluently speaking in her indigenous language:
“My mother was a dictionary.
My mother was a thesaurus,
My mother was an encyclopedia.”
The Father
Alexie reserves one of the most artful and tragic metaphors for use in describing his father. It is a portrait in sadness, an offering in a one simple statement of a world possibilities that might have been, but that was absolutely never going to be:
"My father was a failure. Worse, he was a brilliant boy—a star athlete, classical pianist, and jitterbug dance champion—who turned into an inert man—into inertia itself.”
“Ancestry”
Another poem in the memoir is “Ancestry” and it is a commentary in verse of a subject that is very much taken up elsewhere within the primary prose section. The subject is the prevalence of rape on reservations. The conclusion drawn by the poet in the middle of his verse is as shocking as it tragic:
“Rape is
Our ancestor
Rape is
Our creator.
Rape is
Our Book
Of Genesis.
Rape is
Our Adam & Eve.”
