There There

by Tommy Orange

Opal is large. If you want to say bone-structure-wise that’s fine, but she’s big in a bigger sense than big-bodied or bone-structure-wise. She would have to be called overweight in front of medical professionals. But she got big to avoid shrinking. She’d chosen expansion over contraction. Opal is a stone. She’s big and strong but old now and full of aches.

Overweight

Fina’s eyes could bite.

Eyes could bite

it turns out that who you spend time with ends up mattering more than what you do with that time.

Time together

He’s in the middle of the middle, where you can only be when you can’t be anywhere.

In the middle

I know guns are stupid. But that doesn’t mean they don’t make you feel in control when you’re holding one.

Guns are stupid

kept on feeling white while being treated like any other brown person wherever I went.

White or brown

plain and simple entropy, or was it atrophy, or was it apathy?

Entropy apathy atrophy

walking the way you walk is a way of subverting the straight-postured upright citizenly way of moving one’s arms and feet just so, to express obedience, to pledge allegiance to a way of life and to a nation and its laws.

Stride

as for your whiteness, there’s too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You’re from a people who took and took and took and took.

Whiteness

Most addictions aren’t premeditated. You slept better. Drinking felt good.

Addictions

To drink enough but not too much for a drunk was like asking the evangelical not to say the name Jesus. And so playing drums and singing in those

The State

James had given himself a title: Director of Special Projects for the

Dir of Spec Projects

State of Eternity. James was a Christian. You are not. But he was just crazy enough to make sense to you.

State of Eternity

You pray a prayer in your head to no one in particular about nothing in particular. You clear a way for a prayer by thinking nothing. Your prayer will be the hit and the song and the keeping of time. Your prayer will begin and end with the song.

Prayer

The woman behind him is saying something, but it can’t matter what.

Saying something

movies Pi and Requiem for a Dream—which Dene would say is one of his favorite

Movie refs

This unflinching stare into the void of addiction and depravity, this is the kind of thing only a camera can keep its eye wide open for.

Movies

He’s still letting the content direct the vision. Which is not just another way of saying he’s making it up as he goes along. Dene walks through the black curtains out into the powwow.

Content driving vision

Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears.

Distraction?

Before she can even think to pray, she has to believe she can believe. She’s making it come but also letting it come.

Praying

molten silence.

Phrasing

“Grandma, you know. You know they’re there.”

Title ref

“You have to dance like birds sing in the morning,”

Dance like birds

I very much wanted to write modern Native characters who transcend and transgress what has been written by Natives and non-Natives who fail to represent Native people as living now, as relevant.

Modern Natives

Place is an important aspect to everyone’s

Power of Place

I’m doing my best to accept and love exactly what it means to live right now, as who I am. I don’t want to be in another time.

Now

There There highlights the tension between upholding stereotypes versus celebrating heritage, between assimilation as genocide versus the idea that we all contain multitudes, so to speak, and also that there is value in recognizing our similarity.

Messages

Normal has for too long meant average white.

Normal(gentrification)