Living on the Borderlines
Stories
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
"Michal's debut is thoughtful and generous, capturing the fraught experience of being Native American in the modern U.S." —Publishers Weekly
Both on and off the rez, characters contend with identity as contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples; the stories "cross bloodlines, heart lines, and cultural lines, powerfully charting what it is to be human in a world that works to divide us" (Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness).
In Living on the Borderlines, intergenerational memory and trauma slip into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother's silences, a man contemplates what it means to preserve tradition in the wake of the "disappearing Indian" myth, and an older woman challenges her town's prejudice while uniting an unlikely family.
With these stories, debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Indigenous.
"A beautiful window into understanding Indigenous worldviews . . . This book is an unapologetic contemporary perspective of the truth of healing through Indigenous storytelling." —Sarah Eagle Heart, CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy
"Enlightening and thought-provoking, Michal's stories are a pleasure to read and absorb." —Booklist
"Melissa Michal writes . . . with a power that will make you want to read and reread these stories." —Brooklyn Rail
"A hauntingly beautiful collection of stories of contemporary women and girls who live in the spaces between the reservations and traditional Indigenous territories and rural and urban communities . . . a stunning achievement." —Nikki Dragone, visiting assistant professor of Native American studies, Dickinson College
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in Michal's mixed debut feature the people of the indigenous American community: those who live on and off the reservation, those who are deeply concerned with preserving a collective memory, and those who have lost touch with their cultural origins. In "The Long Goodbye," there's Nala, whose elderly grandmother's deteriorating mental state is likely a direct manifestation of an adolescence spent in an assimilation school. In "A Song Returning," when Mia discovers a cache of her recently deceased mother's letters to Gabriella, the daughter she had to give up for adoption, she becomes determined to find her youngest sister. Mia then makes a reappearance in "Nothing but Gray," in which Gabriella goes to visit her birth family and both parties discover neither is who they hoped the other would be. The author can be a bit heavy-handed with her intentions, and so her best and most effective stories are the ones where she is able to explore the effects of intergenerational trauma in more subtle ways, such as "The Crack in the Bridge," in which a woman can't stop seeing muskrats everywhere she goes, and "Phillip," in which the town outcast takes in a young Native girl. Though uneven, Michal's debut is thoughtful and generous, capturing the fraught experience of being Native American in the modern U.S.
