|
unhinged
|
#110 from 'you don't have to say you love me'
'after being psychologically and physically tortured by our missionary teachers - by all of those cruel white women and men - and after finding little solace at home from our native parents and grandparents who'd been tortured in the same way we indian kids are hungry for any tenderness from anybody.
we fall in love too easily.
we get pregnant too young.
we run away with strangers.
then we run away with other strangers.
or we fall in love with the same boy or girl who was tortured alongside us. we spend our lives with the person who has the same scares in the same places we make love with the person whose open wounds snap into ours like lego pieces. and then of course we rage at our neediness.
we might turn racist and sexist and homophobic - turning against those people as powerless as or more powerless than us.
we hate power.
we hate weakness.
we hate all white people.
or we fall in love with all white people.
or we fall in love with the white liberals who want to heal us.
or we fall in love with the white conservatives who want to hurt us again.
we reenact the racist torture and salvation in our beds.
we cry in the arms of white people.
we cry in the arms of other indians.
we boast and brag.
we insist our damage is greater than all of the damage suffered by all of the other damaged people. we are the gold medalists in the genocide olympics. or maybe just the silver medalists. or maybe we just win the bronze because custer was only 25 percent as bad as hilter.
in response to our generational pain, we indian kids become addicted to torture - to the memory of torture. or wait no maybe we are addicted to gentleness - to gentle white people.
hello my name is sherman and i am addicted to white people.
or maybe after centuries of being tortured by white civilization i am addicted to those white folks who will reward me for being indian. i am addicted to those white folks who will not torture me.
does any of this sound like love?'
- sherman alexie
|
171001
|
