Charlestown resident Justine Parezo will review There There by Tommy Orange [NY: Knopf, 2018] on Tuesday, October17, 2023 at 7 PM in the Auditorium.
This is not an easy read. At the same time, it is a read that is well worth the effort. Its characters and their experiences have been populating my brain since I made their acquaintances.
The title There There comes from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography. “The trouble with Oakland, “she laments, “is that there is no there, there.” She said this after returning to Oakland, her childhood home. The there that she remembered and longed to see again was no longer there.
Oakland is the setting for this novel by Tommy Orange. “No there there” is one of the main themes throughout the book. There is no there in Oakland, and no there in the broad expanse of land once populated by Native People.
The story is almost Dickensian, in that the path of many characters unexpectedly cross. But sometimes they don’t, and one is left wondering why, that is, until the Big Oakland Pow Wow. The end result is a tapestry of people from a common ancestry now living in a very different world from those who came before.
This is the story of Native people, each striving to find themselves and live their lives in an urban setting that is changing beneath their feet. The picture of the natives who populated the plains and forests and lived off the land is incongruous with the natives who populate these pages. As historically, those natives were driven from the lushness of their lands to less desirable habitats, the city that has been the home of the urban natives pushes them to less desirable locations, making way for the more affluent. Their instinct for survival leaves them prey to self-defeating life-styles, as they try to navigate the challenges of the working poor.
This is the story of rising above the way they are seen by others to finding their true selves to reshape the views of others. There, there, we must remember, are also words of comfort and reassurance. Together in that tapestry there is hope for a future that is better than the pains of the past
American author Tommy Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations of Oklahoma, was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Resident Justine Parezo, a retired teacher, is a former member of the Residents’ Council who is active in several Charlestown groups.