Is it religion, or is it culture? "Escape from the Dysphesiac People" by Brandon Hobson, Best American Short Stories 2021

Bart Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity asserts that it is difficult to talk about Christianity taking the place of native Roman religions, because Romans never thought of their beliefs relative to the gods as what we would call "religion." It was a set of commonly received, commonly accepted, commonly practiced customs. What we would call religion and what we would call secular life were all rolled up together so you couldn't tell which was which. I wonder, if were we to find some long-lost tribe of people somewhere on the hills around Rome who somehow never got the message that the empire had come to an end, and I had the chance to speak with these people, how easy I would find it to celebrate their Roman "culture." Especially if it involved killing chickens to tell the will of the gods or some other superstition. 

I have a hard time with some Native American literature, because often, the culture that is being celebrated, kept alive, and revived in it seems to me to have the same undivided blend of religion and culture. It's all jumbled together. "Harmony"--a frequent subject in American Indian* lit-- means not just erasing the lines between the self and nature, but between the sacred and the secular. I haven't read a ton of Indian lit. I took a class as an undergrad, something like "Intro to Native American Literature," that included plenty of Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo. I enjoyed it. Alexie's an ass sometimes, but he's funny. Silko's novel Ceremony especially stuck with me for a while after reading it. Of course, as an agnostic, I found it hard to accept some of the spiritual aspects of it, but in a figurative sense, the notion of the world as a giant, interconnected spider web in which damage to one part damages the whole resonated with me. 

In Brandon Hobson's "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," I felt a similar simultaneous attraction and repulsion at once. It's a fairly simple story, although because the language of the white people in it is intentionally bizarre (they are all dysphesiac, i.e. they suffer from dysphasia, or a brain malfunction that impedes the language center of the brain), it may not seem simple. The dysphasia is symbolic. To a Cherokee boy taken from his home and thrown into an Indian school/work reformatory, their language must have seemed nonsensical, and so dysphasia becomes an exaggerated means to express how disorienting their talk was for the boy. It's also an effective image for how the talk of white people trying to "civilize" Indians was so hypocritical as to be meaningless. The very notion of killing the Indian to save the child is itself oxymoronic; you can't save something by killing it. So the image of a civilization that speaks only babble works well. Karen Carlson does a great job in her post on this story of explaining how the talk of politicians can be dysphesiac. That's the meaning of the word in this story: talk so empty it fails to be coherent.

The boy is taken at age fifteen. It is probably in the 1950s, although it might have been earlier. We are hearing the story from the boy now as an old man telling it to his grandchildren. A "Dr. Estep"--about whom we are told nothing, but who seems to likely be a counselor of some sort--has recommended he tell the story. (One irony of the name "Estep" here is that both of the two possible origins of the name refer to someone who dwells in the East, while the boy saves himself by following a magical trail west.) The old man stresses that his story is not really as much about the trauma he endured as it is about how he escaped. He says it is not "a mélange of distorted events," which is helpful exposition, actually, because in my first read-through, that's what it seemed like. 

While in captivity, he is contacted by the ghosts of his elders. He sees visions of them, mostly suffering. Many visions seem to be of the "Trail of Tears," on which his ancestors were forced to move from their native homes in the southeast of the United States to Oklahoma. They were sent there by President Andrew Jackson, who makes his presence still felt in the narrative through characters named Jackson and also Carl, who is Andrew Jack's son. (We never see Andrew Jack.) 

His ancestors teach him the way to escape, to follow a spirt trail of cherry blossoms out of the dead lands to find the Pleiades, their home. He learns about the importance of harmony, which is what the Tsalagi (a word with several meanings, the most simple of which is the name the Cherokee give their own language) is all about. He sees ancestors spirit travel and change into animals. And eventually, he runs. His real escape isn't just getting away. It's meeting Tsala (a form of the word Tsalagi). His reconnection to the language is the real cure for the babble-talk of his captors. 

Of course, I don't have to take any of the spiritual events literally. And it's actually possible to separate the story's focus on true and harmonious language as distinct from empty and incoherent language without reference to any of the spiritual elements.

I'm sure many indigenous people today don't believe the "religion" handed down to them is literally true, just as many Jews and Christians believe their traditions in a more metaphorical sense. But, well, some sure do seem to take it pretty literally. Some really do seem to believe they can literally commune with their ancestors, or that spirits are traveling through nature. I can, of course, choose to personally read these things metaphorically and leave others to read them how they will, but there's something about reading this kind of literature that leaves me struggling to know how I should take it. What's the message for me, assuming I'm never going to try to commune with my ancestors, because I don't believe they're still around? How do I look at Native American beliefs in general, or the specific Cherokee beliefs as they are presented here, when I know I don't think any of them are right in more than a very watered-down sense?

Am I wrong to feel like this story is pushing religion on me? Or if not on me, then on the "grandchildren" listening to it. Am I misunderstanding the beliefs presented here and insisting on thinking of them in a Western sense? Maybe, but then that seems to be to be treating Cherokee beliefs as something too precious and coddled to be treated how I would treat a story with religious overtones from a different belief system. How would I take a Jewish novel if it seemed to be telling me that the future of Judaism lay in following the Torah? Even if it seemed like there was some wiggle room for not believing everything in the Torah was a literal fact? What would I think of a short story about a kid who was taken from her parents and put in a foster home but survived because she trusted Jesus? That's kind of how I feel when I encounter a story like this. I feel conflicted, because a story like this that tries to restore and maintain a link to ancestral tradition is both asking to keep alive a culture (which seems noble and worthwhile to me) and also a host of "religious" ideas that do not. Again, it seems there's no way to avoid this, because the culture in question didn't separate the religious and secular into distinct realms.

Of course, religious ideas can be helpful to people and give them strength to endure hardships even if the beliefs are not true. Some contemporary Indians doubtlessly think of the old ways as true "up to a point," that while their ancestors aren't literally alive, they still survive through us, their descendants, and so in a sense, they're still here to guide us. There must be "reformed" Indian spiritual beliefs (to use an analogy to Judaism, although "reformed" is an unfortunate word to use in relation to a story of a child who was sent to a brutal "reformatory.") 

A short story like "Escape" uses what might be called "magical realism," which blends elements of fantasy with elements of realism. One need not literally believe in magic to write magical realism. It could all be meant symbolically or as a colorful exaggeration of the natural. Nobody believes that incest will really cause a child to be born with the tail of a pig, but it still works in a novel about a twisted family history. And that's how "Escape" might work.

But it just doesn't feel like that. The boy's experience is intense, like the experience mystics have of God. His passing it on to his grandchildren feels evangelical. It's hard to reinterpret that in an intellectualized way, like, "Even though we don't believe that humans actually inhabit the bodies of eagles, the moral is that we should treat all nature as if it had cognition." Or such. It feels like a belief so intense that to make it abstract would be to make it nothing.

Ultimately, the story is from the grandfather to his grandchildren. It's for them, not for me. I'm listening in on a story meant for others, and maybe it doesn't need to resonate for me. 

I still liked--or perhaps admired--the story, but you can like a story without thinking it's going to become something you treasure and store up for moments when you need it. 

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This wasn't a literary analysis. I wanted to do one, to point out how I noticed that there were pictures of tanks and planes in Jackson's home for boys but that in home of the old spirit the boy comes across, the pictures had been taken down. I wanted to trace the emerging symbols of home that broke through. I wanted to investigate the mystery of bathrooms and what sinister happened in them. (I'm sure everyone who's been to a school like this probably learned to fear bathrooms, where human cruelty and deviance seem for some reason to shine forth the brightest.) But ultimately, I think the most honest way for me to write about this story is to admit that I have a hard time allowing its magic to come alive for me. And that's okay. There are plenty of stories written for literary muggles like me. 

*One of the things I discovered in my Native American lit class was that many Native Americans are fine calling themselves Indians. In fact, many prefer it. An important indigenous news source is called "Indian Country Today." In what seems to be an extremely healthy relationship with history, a lot of Indians feel that although the name represents the mistake of early colonizers who thought they'd arrived in India, that flawed name is the name that came, and it's important to remember this error. I've used Indian/American Indian/Native American/Native/indigenous interchangeably here.