~George Yerid, Class of 2023
A poverty-stricken boy fights hardships for an education
“Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.”
~Robert H. Schuller
I didn’t exactly expect to write a wordy essay about The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the book I finished reading recently, but I did expect to write something absurdly time-gobbling. At least the book was somewhat short. In all honesty, Diary did show me that poverty and hope can shape a teenage boy into someone who takes every opportunity he can to pull himself towards his dream, leaving poverty, being a famous, skilled cartoonist, and saving his family while telling it all with sarcastic honesty. Junior’s story is inspirational and heartbreaking, and made me see how hope in the cracks of life can have a life-changing effect.
Poverty is seemingly unbeatable. In the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Arnold pushes against the weight of the world as his family’s poverty has been just another setback to vanquish. As a Native American living in the Spokane River reservation in Washington, Arnold, his family, and almost every other person living in the reservation is poverty-stricken. The book describes how he tries to escape his poverty by moving to a new school located outside the reservation land. Furthermore, the school consists of mostly white ethnicities. Arnold Spirit Junior, Junior for short, often has to walk or hitchhike 22 miles to and from school due to his family’s lack of gas money. Again, he often laments that poverty is a great divide, making his life overwhelmingly harder.
It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it. [Why Chicken Means So Much to Me, Pg. 13].
This single paragraph worth of text proves the existence of the vicious cycle of being Native American and being stuck in a state of poverty. He has even referred to himself as “half homeless”. Junior’s loathing towards poverty itself fuels him to chase the small glimpses of hope. Junior refers to himself as “a poor-ass reservation kid,” and he yearns to “escape the reservation;”furthermore, he believes he can make a better life for himself as a cartoonist off of the reservation land, away from poverty. Junior dreams of leaving the reservation and the poverty that it walks hand-in-hand with. Junior scorns poverty and claws for a way out.
Poverty drags down Junior’s life and spirit, but hope counteracts its effects.
Hope is a ticket to better places. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, hope provides a respite from crushing life circumstances and becomes yearning for a better life. Arnold fights for hope against the everpresent poor qualities of his life and reservation surroundings, setting his heart on escaping the lazy education of the rez school is the last glimmer of hope left for him, even if it means facing hardships. Arnold has fought through many challenges in his young life brought on by his medical issues and many uncaring, mean characters around him by maintaining his hope.
“You fought off that brain surgery. You fought off those seizures. You fought off all the drunks and drug addicts. You kept your hope. And now, you have to take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope.” [“Hope Against Hope, Pg. 43].
Arnold has found a source of hope trapped within his cartoons, written on the page with emotion and the sense that there is something in this world he is good at. “I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.” [“The-Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club”, [Pg. 6]. Arnold has been beaten down over the first fourteen years of his life, as he claims that hope for me is like some mythical creature, but he has retained his hope for better and brighter futures outside of the rez; furthermore, he believes those opportunities were opened with his cartoonist skills and fighter’s spirit as well as his grandmother stating They’re going to respect you now. Hope is like a key to the city, opening the door to infinite possibilities.
A blunt message hits the theme home harder. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian showed me that being unflinchingly honest, even when it shows a vulnerable side of the narrator, can be the easiest way to show a theme. Reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was like being hit with an arrow made of sarcasm to the chest, as the reader learns about the narrator’s medical and social issues and sees him confronted with grief. Each emotion displayed is delivered in unfiltered, blunt honesty with writing and cartoons. I approached this book with a rather open mind, expecting a conventional, 240 page piece of prose. lt might even be a little outdated, given the use of Indian, a somewhat unaccepted word in society. I expected to fly through the book in less than two hours. However, as soon as I got through the first five pages and heard Junior call himself the word ret*** unflinchingly half a dozen times and seen some of his cartoons, I certainly wasn’t in for a regular text. Junior’s straightforward honesty and humble sarcasm delivered every message straight to the heart.
Until the unifying end, this book chucked each theme at you right in the feels like a fastball and hoped you’d catch it. This book showed me that not all volumes of prose literature have to follow a template of providing a filter for things like language or racism, as Diary reads like you’re stuck behind the wheel of a breakneck-pace race car without brakes. The themes in this book were from a horror saturated childhood, like poverty or grief or sadness. In Junior’s pendulum of blunt expression, each message hit as if I was reading a sledgehammer.
The book has power. The power is a bullet. Junior’s obtuse storytelling and unfiltered thoughts and words give every theme from his poverty and cruelty stricken childhood the power to tell a moving story, an ability I neither knew nor cared about before I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Give it a read, because it hits as hard as any of the rock songs I know.
Poverty, hope, and bluntness—a direct line to a reader’s memory.
