Okla Hannali

by R.A. Lafferty

"This curious and wonderful tall tale contributes to the apocalyptic revision of American history that began with Little Big Man and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Kirkus Reviews.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Native American, Novels, Literature, Historical

221 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.

Reviews

[Lisa Lieberman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first book of Lafferty's, recommended by my friend Martin. Opening it, I was immediately immersed in the world of the Choctaw storyteller who narrates the history of the Indians' destruction, over the course of the nineteenth century. The tragedy is always foremost, and yet the tale is not so much a funeral elegy as a joyful remembrance of the life of these peoples, in all its wondrous contradictions.

Lafferty, a white man of Irish heritage, grew up in Oklahoma and served in the South Pacific during World War II. He loved languages and knew how to listen, even if he could not resist interrupting from time to time to share an irreverent anecdote of his own. That impulse comes across in Okla Hannali, which reads more like a conversation than a straightforward narrative, skipping in and out of the title character's head, telescoping decades into a single, poignant detail, embodying evil in a ghost.

A serious story that never takes itself too seriously. I wonder if it would have been published today, a story purporting to offer an Indian perspective on American history but written by a white author. We're probably on safer ground, discussing Lafferty's science fiction, but I'm very glad I read this book.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started reading Okla Hannali after a writer-friend told me it was one of his favorite Lafferty books. I grew up in Oklahoma, I'm part Cherokee, I'm sympathetic to what he's trying to do, and I like most of Lafferty's stuff. But I didn't get far with this one. It's written as a pseudo-historical tall-tale, in what purports to be Choctaw conversational style, which comes across as, well, gibberish. I couldn't get interested in the characters or their story. Caveat lector.

For a successful novel about Indians in Oklahoma, I recommend Larry McMurtry's ZEKE AND NED, about the Cherokees after their forced resettlement into eastern Oklahoma. Not preachy and very nicely done.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This can be taken as a blanket recommendation of R.A. Lafferty en bloc, but the historical novel Okla Hannali is certainly among his best. It tells the story of the extended family of Hannali Innominee from the trail of tears during the administration of the 'devil of the Indians', Andrew Jackson, to the end of the 19th century. Vivid, funny, stark and tragic all at once. I had a longer review of this that I managed to lose, so I'm posting this as soon as I can before I backtrack and lose this one too. I also recommend Lafferty's
The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney
Past Master
Fourth Mansions
The Devil is Dead/Archipelago/More than Melchisedech
The Flame is Green/Half a Sky
Arrive at Easterwine
The Fall of Rome
The Reefs of Earth

Short story collections
Strange Doings
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Ringing Changes
Through Elegant Eyes
Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?

[Ivan Stoner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A core element of this sort of quasi-anthropological fiction is offering the reader a visceral sense of another time and another culture. Ulysses does it for Dublin in 1904, Mary Renault does it for Ancient Greece, Patrick O'Brian for the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy. It's a history that involves not cataloging of events, or detachedly describing what That Age involved, but rather conveying through a personalized account what a different time and way of thinking were like on an experiential level. Science fiction and fantasy greats become greats because they succeed at this.

So how can Lafferty possibly hope to write at that level of intimacy about Native Americans who were transported to and lived in Oklahoma before he was born? Well that's an interesting question.

Lafferty grew up in heavily native Oklahoma in the 1920s with Choctaw playmates and classmates. He lived in Indian country throughout his life. He was also an obsessive reader and polymath and appears to have read almost literally every primary document concerning native Americans in Oklahoma during the 1800s (court records, treaty accounts, biographies, interviews, depositions, etc).

So Lafferty knew Choctaws, and was learned about Choctaws. But can we take him seriously as a conveyor of a personal 19th century Indian experience? Count me skeptical. Still, at least one eminent Cherokee historian (Geary Hobson) has held up Okla Hannali as an "excellent fictional rendering of American Indian views (and in this case more particularly, the Choctaw view) of American history and Indian Territory during the last century," so what do I know?

What I can verify is that Lafferty succeeds totally in conveying a version of a culture and mentality that ring totally true and truly different. The main character, century-spanning Okla Hannali is huge, frank, multi-talented, funny, pragmatic, fatalistic, dogmatic, hard working. The Choctaw were/are farmers, and they approach life like farmers. Crops fail? Keep working, add another rose bush to the front walk. Hannali operates in a scene of unimaginable tragedy, but doesn't approach it that way. After being relocated to Oklahoma he gradually builds a huge, multifarious house and gathers an enormous multi-generational, multi-ethnic family around him.

A quality of Lafferty's writing is a sense of fable, or tall tale. This quality carries over to his non-fiction work (in which I include Okla Hannali even if parts of it are not, strictly, nonfiction). At times it's hard to tell when Lafferty is exaggerating, and he definitely delights in exaggerating -- ("Hannali had now attained his majority. He was the best farmer in the Choctaw country. He was a mule man, a corn man. He was now in actual charge of all the Innominee production.").

This all lends an air of unreality to the narrative, which is effective and is intentional in some sense--although it's not like Lafferty crafted it for this book, it's just how he writes. I can't imagine any experience more unreal than being an Indian in those times. A Laffertian telling might be the only way to capture the mixture of absolute horror combined with phlegmatic living of lives as cultures crash into one another.

A couple of final notes:

(1) I was reading the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant at the same time I read this. It's hard not to feel proud of Abe Lincoln's Union reading that book. Okla Hannali is not written like a tragedy, and I think it's better for it, but it's impossible to escape the unrelenting vicious brutality engaged in by the US government. Even the goddamn Civil War was used as a free ranging excuse to butcher and exterminate Indians by both sides. The enormity of these events cannot be overstated, and Okla Hannali presents them unstintingly. It's also worth noting just for context that Lafferty was no bleeding-heart academic with an agenda of highlighting oppression. He was a rock-ribbed conservative, WWII combat veteran.

(2) I think Okla Hannali is probably the most accessible Lafferty book I've read, but as a result it lacks a lot of the wonderful wildness and bizarre sidethinking of his other work. It's not at all my favorite. But still good.

[Daniel Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

No time for a real review. Read it this past summer and only just realized I'd never updated this reading status on Goodreads. I'm writing a little about the novel in a paper for English Literature right now, comparing it (and Lafferty's short stories 'Narrow Valley', 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay', and 'Days of Grass, Days of Straw') with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as regards their respective ecological visions.

I'm actually glad I didn't rate it right away because I might have given it four stars. As I'm reading back over passages for this Eng Lit paper, I'm realizing this is definitely a five-star work. It wasn't *as* rollicking, wild, and adventurous as Lafferty's 'speculative fiction' novels, yet it *was* all those things, and in good measure - just not in quite the same register as the other novels. It's funny, rambunctious, grotesque, beautiful, powerful, and wise, just as you'd expect from Lafferty. But it's narrated at a more stately pace than the other novels (true to its self-proclaimed mode of 'epic'). It is stitched together by a variety of approaches, from tall tale passages to lists of names to gripping action sequences to 'straight' historical narration to 'magical realist' episodes and more. But it is more tightly held together by the concern to write a work of history than are Lafferty's SF novels. That is the element that made it slightly more 'dry' at times for me than most of Lafferty's other novels, but it is also the element that gave the work its total effect: it was moving. It is one of the few novels that had me feeling rather profoundly emotional as I finished the last word and closed the book. It covers a hundred years, the whole 19th century, and you feel the solemnity of that by the end. Yet it is, as I've said, full of wry wit and sometimes outrageous humour. Though it is not always as scintillating as I prefer Lafferty, the prose is yet possibly the most 'perfect' or 'flawless' I've seen Lafferty write. He seems to never make a false move in choice of words and cadence and so on in this novel.

I think subsequent reads are also going to yield its rich spiritual resources for a better view of life than the then and modern USA often cultivate. And this, of course, also makes it a world novel, an important contribution to international literature.

It's great. I love it. Read it.

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a weird book, even by Lafferty standards.

At one level, it is a true story. That is, it is the true - as true as an Oklahoma white man could get - story of the Choctaw nation from around 1800 to 1900, including the great removal, the civil war, the destruction of the Native American (Lafferty, writing in the early '70s, says "Indian") peoples, and a great deal more. It is carefully, deeply, and exactingly researched - as far as I can tell. Certainly it has been praised by NA people for its truth.

But at another level, it's a vast and at times hilarious tall tale, whose hero is Hannali Innominee, a Choctaw whose life coincides with the 19th Century. Hannali is born in the Okla Hannali "district" of the Choctaw nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes inhabiting the Deep South before whites came along. He is born to a Catholic full-blood Choctaw family, who maintain their faith despite seeing a priest come through perhaps once every five or ten years.

Hannali rises to fame and power in the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), is ruined, and rises again, though never so far as he did before. In the end, he and his family and his people have become, for all practical purposes, white men.

That isn't much detail, because everything is so intertwisted and wound that I can't give _this_ detail without explaining _that_ and then _that_ would entail explaining _those_ other three, which...

But it's a helluva good read. Trust me, okay?

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okala Hannali is by R.A. Lafferty, known for his science fiction. This is an historical novel about the epic life journey of a Choctaw man born about 1800. This is my new favorite book.

[William Korn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Until now, my experience of R.A. Lafferty has encompassed his science fiction, mainly his short stories. Those were wild, strange, outrageous, whimsical, often satirical, and usually extremely funny. I stumbled across this novel completely by accident, and I'm so glad I did.

Set mainly in the "Indian Territories" (which eventually became Oklahoma), this historical novel tells of the rise and fall of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and other tribes exiled from the South in the early 1800s and sent on the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory. Reviewers of the book who presumably know whereof they speak say that Lafferty's research of the time was comprhensive. This history is seen through the life experience of the totally fictional Hannali Innominee, a very much larger than life full-blood Choctaw, and his strange, wild, outrageous, etc. family.

All of Lafferty's writing characteristics mentioned above were present in this book, but added to them was Lafferty's obvious love of his subject matter and his protagonist. I've always found Lafferty's writing escellent, but with the love added it has become wonderful. I've given five stars to this book only because I'm not allowed to give it more. I will absolutely keep this book and read it again as many times as I can get adfditional joy from it, which will probably be forever.

As for the historical aspect of the book, all I can say is that I now have a strong desire to learn more about these people and their time.

[Marty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written as part history, part myth this book engages the reader throughout. Lafferty employs an interesting writing style, changing the readers' perspective on events to align with the characters personalities. Though not as critical of the Trail of Tears as I was expecting, both the miseries and the triumphs of the displacement are described in a manner not seen in the history books.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okla Hannali is one of the most important books in American literature. It tells the story of the Choctaw Indians from roughly 1800 to roughly 1900, encompassing their social structure in Mississippi at the beginning of the 19th century, the Trail of Tears and the removal to "Indian Territory" (modern day Oklahoma), the rebuilding and regrowth of their society after the Trail of Tears, and their near extinction during the Civil War. It tells all of these stories through the life of Hannali Inominee, a fictional buffalo bull of a man who is really a composite of the qualities and characteristics of several Choctaw men Lafferty knew when he was growing up.

The novel is told partly in a Choctaw ramble--a conversational tone with sentences running into each other. While that sounds difficult, the language feels so natural that it is easy to adjust to and follow. This book is sometimes uproariously funny, sometimes devastatingly sad, and sometimes just beautiful. If you can finish this book without both chuckling and crying, you are made of stronger stuff than I.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me a while to get into this book as it wasn't quite what I expected it to be. There was not a central plot point to the book that I latched onto, which is usually the hook to keep me coming back for more day after day. As such, it took me two months to get through this shortish book.

It read more like a series of short stories, not even always in chronological order. Many of the stories did not strengthen the main characters or seem to move the story along. But they were entertaining, none-the-less. And despite not having a concrete plotline to strap yourself onto, it ended up being a book worth reading. It was the last quarter of the book that really brought it home and made it count. Not a happy book, not dramatic. But it was touching, real, humorous, and philosophical. There are parts that I will not soon forget and ideas that will stick with me for good.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really great book with lots of vivid characters, language, and humor. While it does tell the story of the titular Hannali, the book also sets his life against the backdrop of 19th century US history, with particular emphasis on the removal of Native Americans from the Southeast and their relocation to Oklahoma. This well-crafted combination of fact and fiction makes all of the events in the novel more poignant and sad at times, given the reality of what actually happened. Still, the tall tale-style portrayal of Hannali injects a lot of life and humor into even the darkest portions of the text.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really enjoyable mixture of tall tale and straight-forward history (of the removal of the Choctow Nation to the Indian Territory). Hannali Innominee's life sounds less fantastical than the actions of the US government. Despite the seriousness of the subject the book is actually really humorous in many sections. I loved the oral history feel of some of the anecdotes and I think it's pretty clever to utilize the tall tale from the perspective of the Native Americans.

[Patrick Pottorff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best novel I have read in a long while. It's best described as the antithesis of Blood Meridian. Similar subject matter and time period... but humanistic and earthy where that book was nihilistic and pretentious.

Lafferty's prose is simultaneously poetic, coy and mythic. There is humor, even in the dark moments. Actually especially in the dark moments. And ultimately it is a tragedy. Yet who knew that a book about the elimination of a civilization could be so full of joy and vigor?

[Ryan Petty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary historical novel of the Choctaw and Cherokee removal to Indian Territory. Lafferty was a very good science fiction writer who lived and worked in Tulsa. This is one of only 2 historical novels he wrote. I'm well versed in the history of Indian Territory / Oklahoma, and often recommend this book personally.

[Printable Tire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hannali was a bulky boy, a Choctaw chuckler. And that is a thing that must be understood before we go on. Other peoples laugh or smile, some giggle. The Choctaws chuckle. An Indian agent, of a little later date, tells of a row of Choctaws sitting on a log for an hour, all as blank-faced as though they were dead. Then one of them began to quiver and shake, another, and still another. And all of them quivered and chuckled till they shook the leaves off the trees. They were the chuckling Choctaws.

They may have remembered a joke they heard the day before, or a week before; they may not all have been chuckling at the same thing. But it is a thing that distinguishes the Choctaws from other people, that they will sit silent for a long time, and will then begin to chuckle as though they would rupture themselves.

When very young, Hannali would sit on the black ground and chuckle till it was feared that he would injure himself. Whatever came over him, prenatal witticism or ancestral joke, he was seldom able to hold in his glee. In all his life he never learned to hold it in.

What did he look like? An early story tells it. Once when he was very small, Hannali was found in the company of an old she-bear. Papa Barua tried to get the boy away from her and was badly mauled. Then Mama Chapponia had to come in and smooth things over. She explained to the she-bear that this was not a bear cub however much it looked like one. It was Chapponia's own child and the bear made a mistake. You had but to snuffle the boy to tell that he was not a bear. They both tried it, and they both doubted the test. Hannali smelled like a bear cub and he looked like one. In a short time he would come to look like a great hulking he-bear.

The old she-bear remained around the farm for years, until she died, and became an intimate of the family. When the brothers would call to Hannali, "Your mother is looking for you!" he never knew whether they meant Mama Chapponia or the she-bear until they chuckled.

[Luke Dylan Ramsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A/A+

This book was very hyped up for me (mostly by Reddit but also by various articles about Lafferty) and I have to say the book exceeded my expectations… it’s super fun to read while also being a bit of a tearjerker at times. I especially loved the Choctaw dialogue with its unpunctuated sentences that all run together, I thought that aspect of the book was super well done and helped me figure out who was talking, at times (though there are plentiful dialogue tags).

I tried to get my grandma (who generally likes historical fiction better than other types of fiction) to read this as it was free on Audible and she sadly bounced off it… I think the short summaries at the beginning of each section threw her off, as did the generally tongue in cheek and tall tale-esque storytelling style, which were some of my favorite aspects of the book.

Overall I really love how wide ranging this book is, how massive its scope is, and how the native Americans in this book are portrayed very delicately… you can tell that Lafferty grew up around and probably spent a good amount of time with Native Americans as an adult (easier to do if you live in Oklahoma).

The action in this book is also very well done, and I really liked that the focus of the narrator was occasionally drawn away from Hannali. The book is in some ways a biography of Hannali but also a general depiction of Native Americans in and around the Oklahoma area.

There’s a lot to love here. The book is somehow both goofy and serious, sentimental and slapstick. It’s definitely more than a bit different than the other stuff I’ve read by Lafferty. His short stories are more straightforwardly sci-fi and funny; they rarely go for the heart like this book does. The other long form book I’ve read by him (Apocalypses) is probably equally absurd but more experimental (which isn’t to say that this book isn’t experimental, it is (in some ways), just not as much as Apocalypses).

Anyways, if you’re a fan of Lafferty I would suggest checking this book out ASAP; it’s probably one of his best. If you’re a fan of historical fiction and can stomach a less serious approach, you’ll probably greatly enjoy this book. Fans of literary fiction will find a lot to love too, I’d say.

[Helen Fleischer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A personalized telling of some very grim chapters in US history Like a saga, but heartbreaking.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only non-science fiction work I've read by Lafferty. His voice is no different, though this time writing about the Territory Indians before and after the Civil War. A great fact-based novel.

[Lin Floyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like all of Lafferty’s work this is full of humor and darkness in equal measure, seasoned with a touch of magic.

[Ricky Foos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Otherwise Conservative Lafferty apparently had a sympathy with native Americans that many of his fellow conservatives didn't share. This is a wonderful story about the history of the Choctaw Indians.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written tall tale of a larger than life Choctaw whose life evokes the vitality and eventual erosion of tribal life in the 19th century. Quirky and charming.

[siejay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lafferty's take on the displacement of Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and others to "Indian Territory", told through a life of a 19th century Choctaw named Hannali.

[Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course, the authors one non-science fiction book is his most popular.