reading notes

A Native Narrative
by Thomas King
ISBN: 0887846963

This is another one of those books that I’m not sure how to talk about because I want to find the right way to tell you to go read it, right now, because it is worth your time.

This is a nonfiction book — the content was originally delivered for the Massey lectures in 2003 — but it is all about stories. King is a storyteller, and in this book he demonstrates the way in which stories shape our perceptions of the world.

From creation stories (he offers a retelling of both the Native story of the woman who fell to earth and story of Genesis from the King James version of the bible) to stories about duck feathers, basketball games, treaties, and the legal disappearing of Indians, King illustrates how stories create a framework for understanding the world around us. When he talks about evil coming into the world as a story in Silko’s Ceremony, he warns us: “you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.”

King interrogates methods while offering them up for display. He is sarcastic, comforting, and humorous. He notices that you, his imagined audience, “have already leaned over to a friend and whispered, Platitude. Platitude, platitude, platitude. Thomas King the duck-billed platitude.” He is bringing you along, lulling you with the repetition, with the world being carried on the back of a turtle and being “turtles all the way down.” Oral traditions, written words, public and private: they all count, he tells us, they all go into making us who we are. He is building a case, anecdote by anecdote, of how stories are all we have.

In doing so, he plants the seeds of responsibility. For we are responsible not only for the stories we tell and the stories we listen to, but for the stories we choose to believe. He builds up, with his fierce and funny mind, to not letting anyone off the hook, when he explains why he doesn’t tell a certain story out loud, because he winds up weeping:

…for the world I’ve helped to create. A world in which I allow my intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of comfort and pleasure. And because knowing all of this, it is doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my despicable behaviour, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell myself the story of my failure as a friend, as a human being, than to have to live the story of making the sustained effort to help.

Then he really lets the hammer drop, repeating the refrain we’ve now heard for the fifth time: “don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”

King is brilliant. I can imagine myself buying a stack of these books and giving them away to people I care about, because I have yet to come across a better explanation of the power of stories, and a better inducement to pay attention to that power. Highly recommended. Go buy two. You’ve heard it now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 10:02 pm and is filed under nonfiction.