Paul Boccaccio

This book is mostly about sex and farts. In all their austere nobility, Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz have plumbed the depths of American Indian fart jokes and bawdy fireside tales and have compiled them into an easily accessible form, so all the world’s people who can read English good can partake of true American Indian culture. And, because I am actually a ten year old in my head, I thought it was hilarious.

I suppose it’s impossible to know how honestly these stories reflect pre-colonized Native American culture. It’s like the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (about which I know absolutely nothing; just sayin). Does your act of observation change the subject, and thus skew the result? Does the lonesome tree make a noise when it falls? Does a bear crap in the woods? (A lot of science happens in the forest, apparently. ) Added to all that, I have to consider the biases of the editors. So I’m not sure if what I’m reading is truly a cross section of Native American myth, as it stood in their culture, or if it’s merely a modern interpretation of their stories. I’ll assume the editors have done their duty in scholarship, and these are true distillations, mostly because I don’t have the schooling to claim otherwise, though I found their retelling lacking at points in authentic flavor.

Even so, the more I read other cultures’ myths, the more I’m struck by the similarities between peoples. The same characters show up on different continents, in stories sung by warring or impossibly distant tribes, in other languages, and they do the same things. With some variation, of course, and different names, but it’s like reading accounts of the same historical event from different perspectives, in the same way you and I would talk differently about a person we both knew.

There’s a trickster god in most pantheons, but he’s especially important in Native American and African stories (though of course Loki and Hermes make a decent showing as well). He’s a god of paradoxes. The trickster is generally a fool, and he performs the duties of his office well. He cracks jokes, bumbles around, and humbles the wise. He generally takes himself very seriously; he’s greedy, selfish, and sometimes intensely powerful. In these stories, the trickster—usually Coyote or Raven—creates the world and then travels it and invents the institutions we know of now like the sun and moon, the tides, fog on the sea, etc. But he’s also a lecherous moron, as proven by a third of this book devoted to Coyote tricking ladies into bed.

These stories are light, for the most part, but not flippant. They’re warm and simple, like family in-jokes. Many have a morality tales sort of sub-text, but they usually don’t preach; they’re full of enjoyment in simple pleasures and lessons without dumbing down human experience to represent “noble savages.” This is hard to do, and Erdoes and Ortiz have done it well.

I’ve never read anything by Octavia Butler, but some list or other recommended her, and Kindred was checked out of the library, so I picked up the Lilith’s Brood trilogy omnibus, in which Dawn is the first book. I figured I’d test her out, and if I liked Dawn, I’d be probably enjoy Kindred as well. Kindred is supposed to be a better book, so I have something to look forward to, because I liked Dawn quite a bit.

Butler’s style is trim without feeling spare. She writes the way I would like to, with few, well-placed modifiers, so it doesn’t feel like sterile reporting. Her characters speak well enough on their own, so she doesn’t have to constantly pepper every conversation with “he said, she said, he said, she said.”

She writes about grief and otherness in a particularly beautiful way. The way Lilith, the main character, is dramatically repulsed by her first interactions with the aliens reveals much about her character and, more importantly, the human heart. Because we aren’t likely to face a planet crippling holocaust followed by an alien invasion, but we are likely to hate our neighbor, whether because he’s different, or because he has things we want. I don’t buy the “we only hate what we don’t understand” doctrine; we hate what infringes on our ability to acquire what we desire. Which helps the planet-crippling-holocaust scenario along, but [unfortunately|fortunately] doesn’t do anything for the intrusive aliens.

Here’s an example of a particularly well written section, albeit one which breaks from her usual smoothness, rhythm, and flow. I like it too much not to include it. I’ll try not to give too much away, but an important, deeply sympathetic character has just brutally died. “It,” in the first sentence, is Nikanj, an alien who has grown close to Lilith.  Also, I didn’t add the ellipses; they’re in the text.

It gave her . . . a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or . . . tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling.

Extinguished.

A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.

Broken.

Gone.

Dead.

and later, comparing her feelings to the alien’s:

Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair—an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.

Butler transmutes human pain, and lets us see it through alien eyes. It’s the same pain. As uncomfortably “other” as these creatures are, they still maintain a sympathetic human core, which enables Butler to bring the reader along with Lilith as she changes to understand them better. Lilith loves specific people, as everyone does, while maintaining a general mistrust toward the aliens as a species. That, of everything else in the novel, is profoundly insightful.

That’s enough for tonight. I’ll save reading the next book in the trilogy, Adulthood Rites, for another day.