What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

Three years ago (yes, that long ago) I sent you the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. If you remember—and hopefully enjoyed—it was the story of a girl, Jeanette, who is caught between two worlds, the world of evangelical Christianity and the world of her nascent lesbian sexuality. She must choose to which she wants to belong. It is one or the other. She cannot be both Christian and lesbian, not at that time, not where she lived.

The novel I’m sending you this week, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by the American writer Sherman Alexie, plays out a somewhat similar conflict. Junior, the protagonist, a teenage Spokane Indian, lives on a reservation in Washington State. It’s a lousy place. Most of the adults are poor, miserable alcoholics, and most of the kids are poor, miserable and on their way to becoming alcoholics. Junior decides one day to switch schools. He’ll leave the school on the rez and go to the high school in Reardan, the small farming community just down the road. But there’s a hitch: Reardan is an all-white school. The only other Indian there is the school mascot. And many on the rez see Junior as a traitor to his people for leaving. But Junior feels that if he stays, a part of him will die. He goes ahead and starts attending Reardan High School.

True Diary is a very funny book in a sad sort of way. The prose, simple and effective, is aimed at teens. The story will speak to any reader, teen or adult. It asks difficult questions. How do you get on with life when your life really sucks? What keeps you going when the going gets tough? Alexie’s answer is that earthly salvation depends on one’s spirit, on the ability to find inner resources to endure and overcome adversity. But there is a cost to every battle, even the ones that are won. So Junior does well at Reardan High, but he’s also now living in a white world and leaving behind the Indian self he knew. Unlike Jeanette’s dilemma in Oranges, which demands an exclusive choice, Junior’s dilemma is less radical. It’s not a question of one identity or another, but of two identities uncomfortably merging, white and Indian, hence the title: a part-time Indian. In saving one part of himself from dying on the rez, will another part of Junior die in the white world?

It would be nice to think that one day Junior will stop being tormented by these perceived existential opposites, that his Indian self will be enriched by becoming a little bit white (whatever that might mean) and his white world will profit by becoming a little bit Indian (whatever that might mean), until there is no longer any friction between the two worlds. It’s good, after all, to be something only part-time. Part-time Indian, part-time white, part-time writer, part-time father, part-time this, part-time that—isn’t that just another way of saying that Junior has grown into a normal, 21st-century hybrid human being, a rich world unto himself, varied and complex but still whole?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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