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Jeff Spanke

Magnificent Things and Terrible Men: Teaching Sherman Alexie in the Age of #MeToo

The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have each cast light on the prevalence of sexual harassment

in a variety of media industries. In this piece, I reflect on a college YAL seminar in which my students

read Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The class discussion quickly

became focused on Alexie himself and his surrounding accusations and subsequent admission of

sexual misconduct. This piece seeks to catalog our conversation in hopes that as teachers, we may

come to our own conclusions about silence, voice, choice, and when we can or should ever judge

characters in art by the character of the artist.

The Smell of Something Fishy

By my third semester teaching young adult literature at my mid-sized, midwestern university, I had begun to solidify not only my general

course design and syllabus but also my ability to navigate the oftentimes unnerving and complex discussions that predictably follow in the wake of some of our more disturbing or challenging texts. In any given semester, Sherman Alexie’s (2007) award-winning novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, has provided a pleasant respite from the other more contemporary and controversial books that comprise the fodder of our weekly three-hour seminar. Whereas other texts on the syllabus may invite unforeseen tangents or trigger responses that I might not anticipate, I had, to that point, taken solace in the clearly charted (albeit undeniably choppy) waters of Alexie and Part-Time Indian.

After all, Alexie, at least within the pantheon of young adult literature, has seemingly emerged as a genre convention unto himself: an artist both uniquely distinct from, yet inextricably linked to, his art, culture, readers,

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and resonance. He “may not be a household name,” writes Neary (2018), “but he is one of the country’s best known Native American poets and writ-ers, with a charismatic personality and a large following.”

In other words, whenever I taught that particular book, I traversed the strange waters with relative confidence in what lay ahead. And that, I suppose, is where our story begins: appropriately enough, with “water on the brain” (Alexie, p. 1).

Minutes into class, though, I realized that I should have brought an umbrella.

In retrospect, we all probably should have paid more attention to the radar that night, for the subtle claps of distant thunder and fresh smell of fish in the spring air certainly portended the stormy climate of our impending gathering. It was March 2018. Alexie Day. Part-Time Indian.

When I started planning my latest version of the course in November 2017, I had no idea that not even two months into our spring semester, Sher-man Alexie would be accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct and harassment. Looking back, it seems fittingly, albeit tragically, poetic.

As 2017 wound to a close, Time named as its “Person of the Year” not a particular individual, but rather “The Silence Breakers” (Zacharek, Dock-terman, & Edwards, 2017): those brave women who, after years of suffering in the closets of their sexual oppressors’ construction, exorcised their own demons and reported those who systemically and habitually wronged them.

With the once-mighty male media pillars of Weinstein, Cosby, Spacey, and many, many others tumbling to their rubbled demise amid the crisp cries of #MeToo and Time’s Up, so did our class take up the trials of Alexie’s Spokane, part-time protagonist.

Only on this night, for the first time ever, we never got to Junior. Instead, we spent the entirety of our three hours unexpectedly focused

on Alexie himself. My students just didn’t want to talk about the book. Not this time. Not when its author had shamefully joined the ranks of men who use their power to leverage personal pleasure. My students wanted to talk about silence. And choice. And voice. And what really happens when time is up for artists who taint their art.

Unmapped Reservations

“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose,” asks actress Molly Ringwald in an April 2018 New Yorker piece in which the now-adult reflects on her teenage roles in three 1980s John Hughes films. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?”

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After watching her film, The Breakfast Club, for the first time with her then-10-year-old daughter, and after seeing the fear and disgust on her child’s face upon witnessing her character endure persistent sexual harassment by the very boy with whom her character romantically ends up at the end, Ring-wald concedes that “if attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic—and I believe they are—it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes” (Ringwald, 2018).

Laban (2018) extends on this sense of artistic accountability (and subse-quent betrayal) by noting that “the #MeToo and Time’s Up Movements have proven that magnificent things can be created by terrible men; I’ve already reckoned, many times, with finding out that someone whose work I admire is an abuser in his spare time.”

In the same New Yorker piece, though, Ringwald (2018) suggests that when faced with this sense of betrayal, or the realization that the cir-cumstances of art’s production might conflict with always evolving moral standards, rejecting the product altogether is perhaps not the most liberat-ing means of reconciling the reality of the moment. “Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art,” she offers. “Change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgressions and barbarism, so that we may gauge how far we have come, and also how far we need to go.”

Three of my students agreed with Molly Ringwald. The rest—20 English and Creating Writing and Education majors—de-

fied passionately any implication that we can ever responsibly (some said “morally”) distinguish artist from art.

“I hate Harry Potter now,” one student exclaimed. “Those books de-fined my childhood, but I can’t ever read them again because of what J.K. Rowling did.”

This student continued to explain that what the British author “did” was defend the casting of actor Johnny Depp in an upcoming Fantastic Beasts movie, an adaptation of Rowling’s Harry Potter spin-offs. “Based on our understanding of the circumstances, the filmmakers and I are not only comfortable sticking with our original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies,” Rowling released in a controversial statement.

While Johnny Depp has not yet been accused of sexual harassment, his ex-wife publicly released a sworn declaration following their divorce in which she claims that “during the entirety of our relationship, Johnny Depp has been verbally and physically abusive to me” (quoted in Freeman, 2017).

And so, as the deluge continued into the evening—it was, indeed, pour-ing outside—my students and I sat restless in our increasingly stuffy, window-

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less room, closed books in hand, and had what I would rank as among the most raw, uncomfortable, unresolved, yet strangely revealing conversations that I’ve ever encountered as a teacher.

“So should we just never expose ourselves to anything ever again?” asked one of my students, the sole vocal representative from the small group of three who felt “we shouldn’t censor art in the name of advocacy.” When no one responded, the student continued, “And why does YA get this kind of scrutiny but canonical texts don’t? Or musicians? Or sports? Or our clothes or cars or computers or . . . whatever?!”

She emphasized sports with a certain piercing vitriol whose reference was as brilliant in its brevity as it was clear in its concision. She wasn’t talk-ing about tennis.

“And isn’t dismissing things we don’t like really just privilege in dis-guise? Shunning the uncomfortable just so we don’t have to think about it?”

The rest of the class shuttered at the word “privilege,” as well as at the not-so-subtle accusation that their refusal to support Alexie or his ilk somehow constituted apathy or elitism. Or fascism.

And so the conversation went. Twenty against three, each side fighting for the rights of women, the

victims of abuse, and the preservation of free speech. No one denied that, at one time, Alexie’s contribution to the world of young adult literature seemed to matter. At least to someone. “He wrote a damn good book,” one student acknowledged. “It changed my life when I first read it and I’ll always be grateful for what it did to the way I viewed myself and my writing. But we need to move on now.”

At one point, I made my only contribution to the discussion. I held up my tattered copy of Part-Time Indian, its pages aged and worn, adorned with fading annotations. I flipped to a random section where I had previously underlined one of several obscure passages.

“This sentence,” I said. “I marked that this is a good sentence. It’s illus-trative without being complicated and literary without being lofty. It’s funny and gritty and I think really does a good job of bringing out the character. Just Good Writing, I wrote in the margins. Right here.” And I show them the page, marks and all. “This was a good sentence last year, right?” And they nod. “It was good when it was written and it was good yesterday.” The class agreed. “Is this not a good sentence anymore?”

A few students said decisively but respectfully, “No.” Three others flashed that same nervous toothless smile that often masks guilt.

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“There are other good sentences,” one of the 20 rebutted. “In other books. Ones that are just as good. Or better.”

“But is this book worse now than it was before we came to class tonight? Does it mean less?”

Some nods, mostly stares. Then my final question. “How many of you feel like this book should no longer be on the syl-

labus? In a college class on young adult literature, should I ever teach this book again?”

Twenty against three. No, yes, respectively.

We left class a few minutes early that night. No real reason other than we were tired. And maybe all a little sad: jaded, perhaps, by the scars that trail exposure and growth.

The three-hour storm had flooded the parking lot with nearly six inches of standing, muddy, lukewarm March rain. With my shoes drenched and my dress pants wet up to mid-calf, I drove home in the dark, confusion in my heart and still, water on the brain.

On Peace Treaties

I don’t know if I’ll ever teach Alexie again. Maybe I shouldn’t. There are other books with better sentences. Different authors who haven’t been accused of sexual harassment but who are weaving bolder, more incisive and intricate tapestries of underrepresented lives. And I can’t quite seem to embrace the thought of continuing to support a man whose actions defy the scope of my pedagogical aim. As a privileged, white, cishet male professor, I am acutely if not painfully aware of the power I inevitably wield whenever I step into a classroom, and thus am nothing if not sensitive to the fragility of that space and the imperative to treat that power and that space and the people therein with the respect and humility and awareness they all deserve.

His actions disgust me. As a man, a husband, a father, and, yes, a writer-of-sorts in my own right. I won’t ever have a beer with him or shake his hand with any degree of earnest collegiality. I recognize the fact that not knowing him grants me the luxury of saying that. Still, I’ve no desire to ever hear him read in public, and his signature would mean nothing to me if scribbled on the inside of one of his covers.

But he didn’t design those covers. Or edit his books. Or market them. Or work in the stores that sell them. And he was never a lonely kid whose life was changed by reading himself. He isn’t the only one with stocks and

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stakes in his brand. Other people lose when I refuse to buy his books, I tell myself as I near my exit on the way home from class.

And I’m not Native American. Or, for that matter, young anymore. Maybe I can’t understand.

I’ve never known poverty myself, or abuse or marginalization of any real, systemic kind. I’ve never lost anyone to addiction, and other than my goofy name, I have no real concept of what it’s like to be different in ways that don’t have, in themselves, some sort of social capital.

So maybe I’m not really in a position to say whether or not we should teach these books again. Maybe I should leave that to someone a little more qualified, who was actually once touched by Alexie’s words in some way other than intellectual. Maybe it’s not my fight, and I should just teach the stuff I want and think is good and damn the rest of the mess of it. Or maybe we all should just grow up and accept that people are flawed—even the 20 saints in my class—and that bad men sometimes make good things and we like those things and need them and that we shouldn’t and can’t just pick apart everything in the world because then we’d all just end up cold and lonely and bitter and bitchy and bored and sad.

And maybe that’s just an excuse. Cognitive laziness to avoid cognitive dissonance. That nagging sense of privilege that nullifies the process of ne-gotiating discomfort so I can sleep when I get home. Not my problem. The man wrote good sentences.

Maybe. And maybe that’s how I should teach this book in the future, with an

eye toward the cracks in the lens, as opposed to simply through it. But what happens when Alexie goes away? Maybe next semester my

students will see his name on the syllabus and balk at such an insensitive inclusion. And maybe on Alexie Day we spend three hours discussing the darkness of privilege and power and publishing, and maybe 20 more students demand that I never teach the book again. But maybe, like the storm that soaked my socks, those discussions and memories will dissipate as organically and with as much mercurial urgency as they spawned.

How long before my students will forget about Alexie or what he did or can no longer even distinguish his tarnished legacy from amid the wreckage of other punctured vessels sure to wash ashore? There will be others. Power breeds predation. How long before they’ve never heard of him?

How can we interrogate the works of the world’s Alexies without sup-porting the Alexies themselves? What does support mean anyway? Can we read Alexie without supporting him? Should we? Do the immoral/unlawful actions of artists preclude such work, or as teachers, can we find space to

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honor the integrity of creations while still acknowledging the flaws of the creators? What do we risk when we can’t or don’t even try? Where do we draw the line between creating safe spaces in our classrooms and pretending the outside world isn’t dangerous?

Sherman Alexie is just one man. And his books, in themselves, are really nothing more than inked pages with maybe some good sentences sprinkled throughout. Yet even though my class and I never actually discussed his book, we never really did anything other than discuss the book. Not in terms of plot or nuance or character or climax, but rather how the book now operates in the shadow of its author’s public stumble. How does it matter, what does it represent, why do we read, how do we teach, when do we abstain, and what makes a conscious, critical, civically minded consumer? As Ball and Forzani (2009) suggest, “to provoke discordant thinking or errors in logic and argument intentionally would seem odd, if not downright irritating in many situations” (p. 499). And yet, my latest version of Alexie Day confirmed for me as a teacher that “decisions about what to do are not appropriately rooted in personal preferences or experiences but are instead based on profession-ally justified knowledge and on the moral imperatives of the role” (p. 500).

Our non-book-talk actually turned out to be the most important of its kind, not because it ignored the contents of this specific story, but precisely because it cut to the core of the role of language and art in our lives. In opting not to engage with the text, our class became a text unto itself: a narrative not too dissimilar to the one we read for that night. Competing histories, conflicting values, minority voices, power and privilege and hope and loss, all coalescing for a precious moment in the social construct of school. Yes, through their frustration, my students reminded me that I can always point to other books to discuss. But that night’s class also reminded me that our frustration might be the point of discussing books.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t worry about them. The 20 and the 3. And me, too.

References Alexie, S. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. New York: Hachette

Book Group.

Ball, D. L., & Forzani, F. M. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(5), 497–511.

Freeman, H. (2017). JK Rowling has defended Johnny Depp’s casting in Fantastic Beasts: Is it time we moved on? The Guardian. Dec 16. Retrieved from https://

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www.theguardian.com /society/2017/dec/16/jk-rowling-johnny-depp-fantastic-beasts

Laban, M. (2018, March 20). Why Sherman Alexie’s sexual misconduct feels like a betrayal. Electric Lit. Retrieved from https://electricliterature.com/why- sherman-alexies-sexual-misconduct-feels-like-a-betrayal-fe3055e035e7

Neary, L. (2018, March 5). “It just felt very wrong”: Sherman Alexie’s accusers go on the record. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018 /03/05/589909379/it-just-felt-very-wrong-sherman-alexies-accusers-go-on-the-record

Ringwald, M. (2018, April 6). What about The Breakfast Club? Revisiting the movies of my youth in the age of #MeToo. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-hughes-pretty-in-pink

Zacharek, S., Dockterman, E., & Edwards, H. S. (2017, December 18). The silence breakers. Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2017- silence-breakers/

Jeff Spanke is a former high school English teacher and current assistant professor of English at Ball State Univer-sity. He teaches courses in young adult literature, rhetoric and composition, introduction to English education, and English teaching methods. His current scholarship exam-ines the various social constructions of teachers, students, and learning with a focus on the intersections of resistance

and vulnerability in the education process.

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