In this month's post, political science professor Aaron Shreve recommends Tommy Orange's debut novel, There There (2018). Check it out:
I need to read more fiction. I read a lot, but hardly ever fiction. I really didn’t think about addressing this problem until I left grad school. So now, when classes end for the year, my summer reading is mainly comprised of fiction. The first piece of fiction I read this summer was Tommy Orange’s There There.
Orange tells the story of Native peoples living in Oakland and navigating modern urban America. There are a dozen vivid characters whose lives are more connected than they know and will forever change at the Big Oakland Powwow. Dene recently received a grant to fund a documentary about Native peoples in Oakland. He will interview attendees of the Big Oakland Powwow. Opal and Jaquie are half-sisters who are still dealing with the aftermath of their mother taking them to the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1970. Orvil is Jaquie’s teenage grandson living with Opal. He plans to dance at the Big Oakland Powwow, a first for him.
One of the major themes in There There is the life of urban Native people. Most of Orange’s characters live in Oakland. The urbanity further complicates their lives. There are less Native-specific economic, health, and social resources in cities than there are on many reservations. Many of their fellow Oaklanders don’t know that Native peoples live in cities. Many of the younger characters’ have few formal connections to their culture. Their parents and grandparents hesitate to pass on their traditions. Also, the urban landscape evokes what Native peoples have lost. The title, There There, is a reference from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography. Stein lamented that the rural Oakland of her childhood had become so unrecognizable that she wrote “there is no there there.” Similarly, Orange observes that the land and way of life Native peoples once knew is gone. He writes “for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s become developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.” However urban Native peoples have learned to live in cities and make it their home. Orange writes “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step of our assimilation…But the city made us new, and we made it ours.”
Orange punctuates There There with accounts of brutal violence inflicted on Native peoples that defines their history since European colonists arrived in North America. The Prologue recounts how early colonists would decapitate Native people and display the severed heads or kick them around as balls. The ending is similarly brutal and jarring. The final scene at the Big Oakland Powwow is absolutely devastating and unforgettable. There There is not exactly the quintessential beach or summer read, but it should be required reading.
With novels like There There and authors like Orange out there reading more fiction will not be a problem and will be a pleasure.
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