You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie

It was good to read Sherman Alexie's work again, and I feel even more privileged that not only did I read his book, but I went to the final stop of Alexie's book tour at Kepler's Bookstore. Here is a link to my sister's blog where she tells about that tour, and its cancellations:

http://janettekok.blogspot.com/2017/07/signs.html

Jan links to the open letter Alexie wrote, explaining the cancellation of most of his bookstore stops. I wrote in my email about it to my family: He often in the talk, and in the book -- which I'm halfway through -- talks about NOT believing, not having faith, not being religious, not believing in the afterlife, or ghosts, or spirits, of being secular. Yet, he canceled most of his book tour because he received so many signs from his now passed-on mother that she wanted him to stop, that he couldn't ignore them any longer and he did stop.  Plus, he writes many stories that include the afterlife and spirit world. During his talk he said he believes in "interpreting coincidence whatever way you want to." I feel like he "doth protest too much, methinks." I think he IS religious and does believe but does not want to profess it even to himself. But that's just my theory and we never know what's going on in people's hearts and minds. At any rate, I enjoyed his talk and I enjoy his writing.

I sat next to and chatted with a woman named Julia at the author event. When somehow it came up that both my parents had died earlier this year, she said the book might be hard for me, since it has so much about death, and in particular Alexie's mother, her death, and their relationship. I found, though, that was not true. I did not get overly emotional while reading the book.

It seems kind of weird to say I "enjoyed" the book. That's a funny word - enjoy. To me, it carries the implication that whatever it was you enjoyed, made you laugh, and smile, perhaps clap, and somehow it brought merriment into your life for that period of time you were enjoying it. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me did make me laugh -- a lot! -- it's true, but it was not what I'd label a funny book. It felt like Alexie laid bare his soul, and he used humor as he was doing it. In one part of the book he writes about his use of humor. His friend asked him why he was so much less funny when they (Alexie and this friend) were alone than when he was with others. Alexie told him that he uses humor as an armor, and that the fact he is less funny with his friend actually shows he loves his friend more.

I did definitely enjoy the funny parts. As I am wont to do, I read some of them aloud to my husband. Alexie is also profane, which, I must admit, almost always makes me laugh. In one story, "Performance" (page 182), Alexie tells of speaking to an audience of eight hundred during a fund-raiser for salmon restoration.

    "Salmon," I said "are the most epic fuckers in the animal kingdom."

    The audience, crunchy-assed liberals one and all, laughed but not with the abandon I wanted to hear...

    "So, honestly," I said, unafraid of being even more inappropriate, "When we celebrate salmon, we are celebrating fucking. And I don't think we celebrate fucking enough. In fact, forget salmon for a minute. Let's talk about our mothers and father. I mean--have any of you ever thanked your parents for fucking and conceiving you? And I don't mean thank them all cute and poetic like, 'Oh, I light this ancestral fire in tribute to you for my human creation.' No I mean have you ever looked your mother and father in the eye and said, 'Thank you for fucking me into existence.'

    The audience laughed louder. I knew I'd won over a few more of them. But I wanted to win all of them. So I went stuntman.

    "In fact," I said as I pulled out my cell phone and held it close to the microphone. "My father is dead. But I'm going to call my mother right now."

He goes on to describe the call, and telling his mother "thank you for fucking Dad and conceiving me." She laughed, and when he asked what she thought of that, she said, "I think you sound like you're drunk. Have you been going to your AA meetings?" Alexie exults in the laughter as a "celebration of my mother."

The end pages are from a photo
of Alexie's wedding quilt that
his mother made.

The book is very much about his mother. Lilian Alexie was a conundrum. She vowed, when Alexie was 7, that she would never drink again for the sake of her children, and she kept that promise, making their home safe, at least relative to others. Yet she was often cruel, very cruel, to Alexie and the other children. Alexie is working out his feelings through his memories. It sounds trite, but he is processing his mother’s death.

I read or heard somewhere that when a person goes through trauma, part of the healing is to make the event that caused the trauma into a story. People who have PTSD or something similar are not able to do that – they continue to live the trauma without getting it into a different part of their mind that putting it into a story enables. I think Alexie is going through that healing process of making stories about his life with his mother, and her death. During the talk, Alexie said it had been too fast. He said he wrote the book too quickly after his mother died, and it was published too quickly after that. He must still be going through this healing process. He definitely seemed raw during that talk – he opened up several times with personal revelations, he cried at times, he seemed bruised and hurt.

Alexie uses both the prose and the poetic form in this book. I read every word. I had no desire to skim and skip, the way I do sometimes. Through the engaging (another word that doesn't feel quite right) stories and poems I learned more about the Spokane Indians and other Native Americans than I knew before. I vaguely remember reading in history textbooks about Indians that lived by rivers and were fishermen. But Alexie writes that the Spokane Indians were, and are, people of the salmon. I had no idea the salmon were so important to them. They worship the salmon. Maybe not the way we worship God -- and Alexie's mother went to a Christian church -- but still some form of worship. Alexie writes (in "God Damn, God Dam," page 132) how the Grand Coulee Dam stopped the wild salmon in the upper Columbia and Spokane Rivers. I didn't know that. I also like the poem he wrote called "Communion," page 135:

we worship

the salmon

because we

eat salmon

He writes of visions of salmon, his mother and father as salmon. Salmon appear over and over.

I learned much, too, of the "culture of rape" in Indian reservations. As any book about Native Americans must, it includes many stories of the ruin caused by alcohol, including the alcoholism of both his mother and his father, his older sister, and many others in his family and community. He writes, too, of many times he has felt the cruelty of racism, and his confusion about the election of Trump, especially considering that the region of the nation Alexie comes from, where his beloved friends and schoolmates live, was heavily in favor of Trump.

I remember thinking, when Julia, the woman at the author event, was telling me that I might find reading this book difficult in light of my parent's deaths, that I wondered if the book ended with a note of hope, the way I felt Ruined had, making me able to read it without going into despair. As I ask myself that question now, it's a different kind of hope, I guess. I felt hope with Ruin because the author kept her faith. Alexie certainly professes not to have kept a faith, yet somehow the book does not lead to a burden of unhappiness or hopelessness. Maybe part of it is Alexie's joy coming through. At the author event he said that he feels his life is a miracle. All he went through, and he has a wife he loves, who adores him, and two sons he loves. Through it all, there is reason for hope.

Ruined by Ruth Everhart

It took me a while to psych myself up to read this book. I felt I needed to prepare myself to handle it. I read about Ruined a while back when it first came out, and I even read an excerpt of the beginning pages. That excerpt, in fact, was why I waited until I felt ready. My aunt read it and told me I should, and I knew I would eventually. I finally did.

Ruined is a memoir. Ruth Everhart was Ruth Huizenga, and she went to Calvin College, where I also went, and grew up in the Christian Reformed Church (the CRC), which I also grew up in (although my dad was a chaplain in the Air Force so my experience was quite different). The crucial event in her memoir happened in my graduating year at Calvin, 1978.

It was...I don't know what to call it...strange? funny? odd? eerie?...to read her descriptions of her life at Calvin and in the CRC that were so familiar to me. Reformed worldview. Synod. Marchienne Rienstra. The White Rabbit. Grand Rapids. Bob Dylan. Names like Huizenga, Hoekstra, Terpstra, John Timmerman. Calvinettes.

The main reason I waited until I felt ready was that the book starts with a moment by moment telling of a night in November, 1978, in a house in not such a good neighborhood of Grand Rapids, where Ruth lived with 4 of her best friends from Calvin, that was broken into by two young black men. The men held the girls at gunpoint for 4 hours, and they raped and robbed them. It must have been incredibly hard for Ruth to write it.

Another reason I hesitated to read this book is I knew from what I read about the book that Ruth left the CRC. I wondered how bitter she was toward it, and how she would portray it. I figured people failed her and since those people are the church, the church failed her. It made me wince, thinking of that. I know the people -- the church -- have failed me, too. I stuck with it. She didn't. I was afraid to learn why.

I was right. It was tough to read that night's story. The writing is vivid. You feel you're there with Ruth, feeling the confusion and fear, the cold gun on her temple, the rapist's hands and lips on her body, hearing his voice, and the voice of his "leader," as the girls called the other perpetrator. You feel the carpet and bare floor where the men forced all the girls to lie, your mind echoes the prayers and Psalms Ruth tried to think of as she struggled to survive what was happening.

The church did fail Ruth. People like ministers and chaplains, college administrators and others, who might have been a source of comfort and healing, were not. Ruth looks back on them now with mercy and understanding. She is not harsh or blaming towards them.

As she describes her life after that night, and the thoughts she was working through, her biggest struggle was trying to understand how God could let this happen to her. It's the question of how there can be evil in the world if God is in control. And that belief that God is in control is a big part of the Reformed worldview. Ruth describes that view this way:

Here's the Reformed worldview in a nutshell, meant to be ingested in one swallow. The sovereignty of God means that God is supreme and rules over all. Nothing can happen apart from God's will. Total depravity means that we are sinful in every part of our being. Redemption means that despite our sinfulness, God loves us and saves us. Well, some of us anyway--the ones who are elected to salvation, which is referred to as limited atonement. Predestination means that God has already chosen the people who will choose Him. Perseverance of the saints means that once a person is saved, then you're chosen, and so are your children. That's called "covenant theology," although there's more to the covenant, of course. Still the family package is the spoonful of sugar that makes the whole system go down.

I just asked my brother and another minister for recommendations on books about the Reformed worldview. I want to study it more and learn more about it so I can write about it. When I went to Calvin and started learning about the Reformed worldview, it was life-changing for me. I felt like walls were falling down in my brain. To see it written in this way, not really bitter or sarcastic, but not what I'd consider super flattering, takes me aback. Why do we need a "spoonful of sugar" to make it go down? I think it's sweet already.

From this worldview where, like we often say, "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” (Abraham Kuyper), Ruth extrapolates:

But the idea that everything is preordained meant ... that God's finger had hovered over the map of greater Grand Rapids, passing over the neighborhoods of Eastown and Heritage Hill in ever-narrowing circles until it landed on our roof. Alexander Street.

Tap tap. This house. These sleeping women. These are the ones who will get raped tonight.

What an awful thought. No wonder Ruth struggled so hard and so long with this belief. No wonder we all do. Later in life Ruth goes to seminary in the Presbyterian denomination. There she writes about "theodicy," the problem of evil in the world. In the book, she writes:

I wish I could say I definitively solved the problem of theodicy. But I was unable to reconcile God's sovereign power and the image of God in humans. At least I was unable to reconcile the conundrum like a mathematical formula. Each side of the equation was necessary and gave life comfort and meaning, though the two sides appeared to cancel each other out. But both sides are real and necessary. On the one side, God is all-powerful and loving, and God's will prevails. On the other side, humans are made in God's image and can exercise their will to make choices that matter, which God allows.

Ruined also contained information and thoughts about the CRC's "women's issue" -- the question of allowing women to serve as ministers, elders and deacons. How well I remember, and still see evidence of, this struggle. Ruth talked about one Synod meeting where this question was discussed. While at Calvin I sat in the Fine Arts Center building where Synod met, and I watched the men of Synod having this discussion. One man said the change was like a big ship turning -- it goes slowly, and takes a long time. Boy, did it. And it's still an issue. Less now, but by leaving it up to each congregation it has taken years and years. In my own church, where I have been a member close to 40 years, I am just ending my term as the first woman elder in my congregation.

I think often of those years where I tried to work within the church to change the way women were perceived and considered for serving in the various roles of the church. During those years my daughter grew up and became an adult. I felt I needed to stay in the church because there was so much more to it than that one issue. I loved -- and still love -- the members of my church family who, even when they disagree with me on this issue, love me back, and helped me and my family in times of need.

But Ruth left the church without losing her faith. She went on to find a home in the Presbyterian church, which still has the Reformed background like the CRC. But she found this church welcomed women. The first pastor she knew at that church was a woman. The day she and her husband visited, the congregation voted for a woman to become their pastor. Ruth was joyfully astounded that all these people would actually vote in favor of having a woman minister. Ruth went on to become a pastor herself in the Presbyterian denomination. I can't help but wonder if I should have done that -- left the CRC for a denomination that welcomes women in this way --, both for myself and for my daughter's sake. At least I wonder what my life would have been like if I had.

Ruth called the book Ruined because that is how she felt after she was raped -- ruined. Ruth writes about the sexual-shame paradigm, about how she and her friends felt so much shame at being raped that they even contemplated not reporting the crime. At the end of the book she writes a letter to her daughters and includes a memory of reading an article about the gunman who went into an Amish schoolroom. He tied up the little girls and may have had plans to rape them but he ended up not doing that and killing them by shooting each one in the head, execution style. One father was quoted as saying his daughter had escaped "a worse fate." Ruth's reaction to this was visceral.

I did feel sorry for this father and the loss he had endured. But I didn't understand him. Or maybe I did. Maybe that was the problem...Could a parent think his child's survival was second to anything? Was he suggesting that his daughter's perceived bodily purity was more important than her retaining breath in that body?...[Would he] prefer his daughter dead over damaged? What is this alleged "worse fate"? ...

Imagine saying such a thing about another injury--a broken bone or a punctured lung. Are those fates worse than death? ...

The truth is that women who have been sexually violated have the same intrinsic value as women who have not been sexually violated. Period. Another human cannot damage a woman's sexual self and by doing so destroy her life.

Daughters, don't believe the lies! You are more than your virginity. You are more than your sexual history. You are more than what happens to you. You are immensely valuable.

Amen.