In her memoir Everyone’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein recounts being asked how it felt to return to the place where she grew up. The truth of it was that the Oakland she found bore little resemblance to that which she had known, the rate and scale of the city’s development far outpacing her imagining. “There is no there there,” she wrote, finding urban progress to have long buried her image of the city, with no amount of digging able to bring it back. Because Stein is speaking not of the hesitant remembrance of the long-term absent, that strange period of confusion as one re-calibrates their bearings, rather the complete loss of her childhood home. The place has ceased to exist, whatever made Oakland Oakland to Stein scrubbed from the land forever.
Taking the title from Stein’s quote, Tommy Orange’s debut novel There, There applies a similar sentiment to the Native American experience in contemporary America. Told from a multitude of perspectives, the work is a tapestry of voices that forms a picture of indigenous life in Oakland, California. This structure can be tied to the role of Dene Oxendene, one of the book’s characters who is granted funding to collect the stories of American Indian people around the city. Each chapter begins with the name of the person focused on there, allowing the novel to read like a carefully arranged archive, specific and highly personal stories curated to tell a loose, community-based narrative.
Though maybe community is the wrong word, or at least could be taken as such. Because the stereotypical impression of an Indian community is as condescending as it is reductive, flattening the people into permanent mourners or warriors who band together through some profound sense of belonging, a group sage and wise and vaguely mystic, as though permanently tapped into the very essence of history and nature itself. Through a chorus of voices that spans several generations, Orange fights homogeneity and cultivates humanity, breathing air into the flat representation of indigenous people, inflating them into their full, 3D shape once more.
With this in mind, the relevance of Stein’s quote is brought into relief. Which is to say, Orange’s title is a lamentation of sorts, though not quite of the manner one might expect. The cliched perspective would like to imagine it as a plaintive evocation of a land now lost, a desire to return to the spiritual harmony of bygone eras where man and beast and earth itself lived in sympathetic peace. A sensation born of some spirit in the bloodline, something that persevered throughout the persecution and war and disease and famine, a sense of history and belonging burned within the soul of a people now and forever. Indeed, for whatever reason, it seems almost necessary from a white perspective to imagine such a thing. Perhaps it is easier to live with violence if you know the victims possess the character to endure it? Or maybe we need to project a transcendental form of identity to compensate for some fundamental lack within our own history, like some quaint, far off proof that higher meaning is possible, and we are not alone.
But the characters here have not lost their land, because their land is urban Oakland. People who “came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest.” Rather, it is the spirit that is being lost. The sense of identity and belonging that we like to ascribe. Indeed, Tommy Orange could be said to have flipped the white expectation, the “no there there” referring to personal and communal Indianness, and not the stage upon which this can be enacted. There, There is map of reactions to this, ranging from the apoplectic to apathetic—a web of characters trying to figure out how to square their own view of their heritage with that of those around them, as well as the world at large.
Some, such as janitor Thomas Frank and young Orvil Red Feather, find a drumbeat within their hearts, pounding out a longing to more fully immerse themselves within their ancestral culture. However, Orange complicates things by delving into the idea of performance and invented identity. Yes, Orvil finds healing magic within powwow music, but then his brother finds the same within Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, and the other in the arrangements of Beethoven. And, when Orvil films himself dancing in traditional clothing, the act is a half-satisfying tug-of-war between holy and phony, an attempt at realisation rather than realisation itself. Still, Orvil perseveres, determined to dance at the upcoming Powwow where the novel’s characters converge, and finds value within his quest. Because a Native search for meaning is much like any other, a process of belief and faith that depends not on some sacred arrangement of sounds and rituals but rather the commitment to the cause. Identity need not be a binary presence or absence, but something to be discovered, nurtured, or dropped.
Gertrude Stein’s passage containing the “there there” quote continues along such lines. “It is a funny thing about addresses where you live.” she writes. “When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity […] then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” Which is to say, Indianness is not something inherent and inviolable at the core of all things, nor is it something that can be eradicated forever. Rather, it is the product of what is remembered, and what is not. There can be a there there, Tommy Orange seems to say, and one defined not by white fantasy, but the Natives themselves. It is just a case of remembering.
There, There is out now via Harvill Secker (UK) and Knopf (US).