The Joy of Reading and Writing Superman and Me Response
The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
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"The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me"
--An Essay by Sherman Alexie
I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Uncomplicated plenty, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I retrieve which villain he fought in that result. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic volume. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years sometime, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington land. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to observe some minimum-wage job or another, which fabricated u.s. eye-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. Nosotros lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fearfulness and government surplus food.
My father, who is ane of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball game player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch'southward Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Conservancy Army and Value Village. When he had extra coin, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital souvenir shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my male parent built a prepare of bookshelves and shortly filled them with a random array of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam State of war and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an agonized devotion, I decided to dear books equally well.
I tin can call up picking up my begetter'due south books earlier I could read. The words themselves were mostly strange, simply I all the same recollect the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for beingness inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the Usa. My family's house was a paragraph, singled-out from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the due north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our business firm, each family unit member existed as a carve up paragraph but nonetheless had genetics and common experiences to link the states. At present, using this logic, I tin run across my changed family unit as an essay of seven paragraphs: female parent, begetter, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother.
At the aforementioned fourth dimension I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked upward that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In ane panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the moving-picture show. I cannot read the words, but I assume information technology tells me that "Superman is breaking downwardly the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, "Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, as well float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking downwards the door." One time again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking downwards the door." In this way, I learned to read.
This might exist an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early historic period and advances quickly. He reads "Grapes of Wrath" in kindergarten when other children are struggling through "Dick and Jane." If he'd been anything but an Indian male child living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the 3rd-person, as if it will somehow boring the pain and brand him sound more modest about his talents.
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A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed past Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily footing. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian instructor asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived upwards to those expectations within the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen confab songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their not-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted past a non-Indian developed only would slug information technology out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to neglect in the non-Indian earth. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied past non-Indians.
I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the dark, until I could barely go on my optics open. I read books at recess, then during tiffin, and in the few minutes left afterward I had finished my classroom assignments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the paper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the schoolhouse, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post function. I read junk mail service. I read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had simply one purpose. I was trying to salve my life.
Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a author. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, brusque stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach artistic writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories and novels. Writing was something across Indians. I cannot retrieve a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. In that location must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They take read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. And then in that location are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the dorsum rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. "Books," I say to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am big-headed. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.
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