There There

by Tommy Orange

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. Dene wants to tell him it’s what happened to Native people, he wants to explain that they’re not the same, that Dene is Native, born and raised in Oakland, from Oakland. Rob probably didn’t look any further into the quote because he’d gotten what he wanted from it. He probably used the quote at dinner parties and made other people like him feel good about taking over neighborhoods they wouldn’t have had the guts to drive through ten years ago.

The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.

And so what we could do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories. She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.

The trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief.

The internet is like a brain trying to figure out a brain.

thinking with it. I find out that the same neurotransmitter related to happiness and well-being supposedly has to do with your gastrointestinal system. There’s something wrong with my serotonin levels. I read about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants. Would I have to take antidepressants? Or would I have to reuptake them?

Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.”

That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.

“So? We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”

Time only seems to have skipped, or to have sped by without you when you looked the other way. That’s what Opal had been doing. Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears.

TO: Music has played an absolutely major role in my life. It was my first love, creatively speaking. I listen to music every time I write. I don’t have any specific musicians I can say I love. I love so much music. Most of all, I love what music has done and continues to do for me and all of humanity.