Tommy Orange,

There There
(2018)
Tommy Orange
• B.1982. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.
He was born and raised in Oakland, Cal.

• There There (2018) is his debut.

• Won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard
Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the American Book Award.

• “My dad was born and raised on a reservation in Oklahoma. He didn’t speak
English, or even see a white person, until he was 5 years old. I grew up in
Oakland. My mom is white, and we lived near her side of the family. I hardly ever
saw other Native people”

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-orange-thanksgiving-history-20171123-st
ory.html
• Indian heads as trophies 
OBJECTIFICATION
• “Thanksgiving” tradition 
commemorates “successful massacres” (5)
– “Massacre as prologue” (8)  VIOLENT
PAST
• “But the city made us new, and we made
it ours” (8)
• “An Urban Indian belongs to the city,
and cities belong to the earth […]
Being Indian has never been about
returning to the land. The land is
everywhere or nowhere” (11)  FUTURITY

Prologue
We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to
be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet
facts about the realities of our histories and
current state as a people. We have the sad, defeated
Indian silhouette, and the heads rolling down temple
stairs, we have it in our heads, Kevin Costner
saving us, John Wayne’s six-shooter slaying us, an
Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts
in movies. We have the litter-mourning, tear-ridden
Indian in the commercial (also Iron Eyes Cody), and
the sink-tossing, crazy Indian who was the narrator
in the novel, the voice of One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest. We have all the logos and mascots.
The copy of a copy of the image of an Indian in a
textbook. All the way from the top of Canada, the
top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America,
Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered
image. Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins.
Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the
Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both
before we could even vote as a people—which, like
the truth of what happened in history all over the
world, and like all that spilled blood from
slaughter, are now out of circulation (7)
Analysis
1. (Plot)

2. Setting (time and place)

3. Structure

4. Narrator(s)

5. Characters

6. Symbols A little gift

7. Themes https://open.spotify.com/p
laylist/6AnMiCR4258U8RhHOD
8. Style zJxF?si=e16315a2760b403
The title
1. Radiohead, “There There”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AQSLozK7aA

“Dene puts his headphones on, shuffles the music on his phone, skips several songs and stays on
“There There,” by Radiohead. The hook is ‘Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there’.” (29)

2. Gertrude Stein on Oakland in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

“what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes
write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” (Stein
298)

“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” (Orange 37)

3. (Patronizing) expression: calm down (as if soothing a child)

Setting https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/o
aklandcitycalifornia
Structure
• Prologue: “In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. /
About dark times” B. Brecht (3)

• Part I: Remain – “How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or
is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you
will only show me when I am least expecting it?” J. Marías (13)

• Part II: Reclaim – “A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post,
it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is
surely cohesive”. G. Stein (79)

• Interlude – “What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with
our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.” C. Baudelaire (136)

• Part III: Return – “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them”. J. Baldwin
(157)

• Part IV: Powwow – “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is
nursed in darkness.” J. Genet (227)
 Structure
1. How would you define the structure?

2. Is there a connection between the form of the novel (structure) and

the content of the novel (themes)?
3. Can you use a simile to define this structure?

4. What is the function of the prologue and the interlude?

5. What is the CLIMAX of the novel?

Characters/Narrator

1. Who is the 2. Do
3. What are
main characters 4. Who is the
their
character in bear any narrator?
differences?
this novel? similarities?
Orange, on the novel’s structure
Before I knew what I wanted There There to be about, I knew I wanted it to be from an
array of different voices. The first year of writing the book was just about attempting
different voices, seeing what stuck to the page, which voices seemed like they could go
longest and strongest. Some came early on, for instance Opal Viola Victoria Bear
Shield, Dene Oxendene, and Tony Loneman, others came late and fast, for instance I
wrote the Thomas Frank chapter in 2016 and it came out in a ten day flurry (or fury?)
of sorts. The biggest challenge for me was doing the work to braid the characters'
lives in a convincing way that earns the title of novel, so that it wasn't just a
collection of linked stories trying to call itself a novel. Colum McCann's structure of
Let the Great World Spin was a big influence for me. Also Bolaño's Savage Detectives. I
wanted the momentum to build and for all of the characters to come together at the end
in a way that had a palpable arc, and in a way that seemed inevitable.

https://liberalarts.du.edu/news-events/all-articles/qa-tommy-orange-author-there-there
https://prezi.com/p/dkvvdikze
8ti/there-there-character-map
/
Orange, on the novel’s structure
Of course, making it work and successfully braiding, or webbing, the thing was
difficult. I knew I wanted it to be a novel and not a collection of stories calling
itself a novel. I didn’t think of a web while writing it. That sort of came about
of its own accord. Maybe like making an accidentally cohesive mosaic. Not that I
wasn’t putting in the work to make it cohesive. When you work with complexity and
chaos that you do your best to wield, sometimes unintended patterns emerge.

Regarding spiders, well, when I was researching, I came across this idea of miles
of web in a spider’s body. There was just so much potential for metaphor there. And
then, like one of the characters in the novel, I too pulled spider legs out of my
own leg. It was crazy.

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13835114/tommy-oranges-novel-there-there-is-a-gripping-po
rtrait-of-oakland
Orange, on his characters
I did a lot of research throughout; it’s an essential part of my process, whether it’s
historical or about some random thought or word choice one of my characters makes. One of
the biggest influences was time spent in the Oakland Native community over all the years
I’ve lived and worked in Oakland.

In coordination with the youth services department at the Native American Health Center,
we took youth to Alcatraz and had elders — who’d been on the island at the time of the
occupation — tell their stories. This was a powerful experience. But I wondered what the
children on the island would have experienced. There were a lot of disillusioned families
that came out of the civil rights movement then. Most of the chapter about Alcatraz is
completely made up, but the power of witnessing young people hear stories of that time
from people actually there was definitely a big influence on my thinking toward that
particular chapter.

https://liberalarts.du.edu/news-events/all-articles/qa-tommy-orange-author-there-there
Symbols

Spiders
Mirrors and
Powwow (Veho and Braids Blood
reflections
spider legs)
Powwow and braids
“We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling
strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’d
been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been
coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia,
beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed” (162)
Symbols: Powwow
I’d found out about powwows in Oakland by working in the community. I worked on a
powwow committee at one point. A shooting at a powwow seemed to me to represent
something which had already happened to us, which could be seen on the page, in a
novel, as happening now.

Powwows are intertribal. A whole bunch of different tribes coming together to

celebrate in one single event, each bringing their own kinds of regalia and songs and
dances. This is also the urban Indian experience. There are many people that come from
many different tribes all trying to figure out what their identity means to them.
Urban Indians also rarely have a chance to be together as a community, our lives don’t
necessarily intersect, but powwows are one way we do that. It just made sense to me
that this is where all these lives would intersect.

https://liberalarts.du.edu/news-events/all-articles/qa-tommy-orange-author-there-there
Symbols: Spiders
C&I: One thing in the book I was really obsessed with was the spider legs coming
out of a lump in a character’s leg. Did that come from a real-life incident or
family folklore?

Orange: No, it happened to me. I didn’t really understand it, and I couldn’t find
anything on the internet, any answers. I asked my dad what he thought, because it
seemed like an Indian thing to happen. He didn’t have any answers for me. He said,
“It sounds like somebody witched you.” So I was just kind of scared of that answer.
And then there were some other spider things that started happening in the novel at
that point. This was maybe 2013 or ’14, and I had nothing else to do with it, so I
figured, why not use it in the book?

https://www.cowboysindians.com/2019/07/author-interview-tommy-orange/
Mirrors
“THE DROME FIRST CAME to me in the mirror when I was six. Earlier that day my friend Mario,
while hanging from the monkey bars in the sand park, said, “Why’s your face look like that?” […]

Back home, in front of the TV, before I turned it on, I saw my face in the dark reflection
there. It was the first time I saw it. My own face, the way everyone else saw it. When I asked
Maxine, she told me my mom drank when I was in her, she told me real slow that I have fetal
alcohol syn-drome. All I heard her say was Drome, and then I was back in front of the turned-off
TV, staring at it. My face stretched across the screen. The Drome. I tried but couldn’t make the
face that I found there my own again. […]

People look at me then look away when they see I see them see me. That’s the Drome too. My power
and curse. The Drome is my mom and why she drank, it’s the way history lands on a face, and all
the ways I made it so far despite how it has fucked with me since the day I found it there on
the TV, staring back at me like a fucking villain” (15-16)

Tony Loneman
Symbols: mirrors and reflections
“Being Native and Urban Indian is so much about disappearance. Not seeing ourselves
in the world. There are almost no representations of us on screens that aren’t
racist or historical or both. Seeing ourselves on screens is important, or in
mirrors, trying to find who we are there, if we can’t find it anywhere else. The
books opens with the representation of us on a screen — the Indian Head Test
Pattern — and I wanted it to run as a theme throughout having to do with
representation and self reflection in regard to identity”

https://www.cowboysindians.com/2019/07/author-interview-tommy-orange/
Themes
For how many years had I been dying to find out what the other half of me was? How
many tribes had I made up when asked in the meantime? I’d gotten through four years as
a Native American studies major. Dissecting tribal histories, looking for signs,
something that might resemble me, something that felt familiar. I’d made it through
two years of grad school, studying comparative literature with an emphasis on Native
American literature. I wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum
policies on modern Native identity, and the literature written by mixed-blood Native
authors that influenced identity in Native cultures. All without knowing my tribe.
Always defending myself. Like I’m not Native enough. I’m as Native as Obama is black.
It’s different though. For Natives. I know. I don’t know how to be. Every possible way
I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong (71-72)

Edwin Black
Themes
Back in my room I put my earphones in. Put on A Tribe Called Red. They’re a group
of First Nations DJs and producers based out of Ottawa. They make electronic music
with samples from powwow drum groups. It’s the most modern, or most postmodern,
form of Indigenous music I’ve heard that’s both traditional and new-sounding. The
problem with Indigenous art in general is that it’s stuck in the past. The catch,
or the double bind, about the whole thing is this: If it isn’t pulling from
tradition, how is it Indigenous? And if it is stuck in tradition, in the past, how
can it be relevant to other Indigenous people living now, how can it be modern?
(77)

Edwin Black
Themes
”You know how much I work. How late I come home. I got my route and the mail
doesn’t stop coming just like the bills don’t. Your phones, the internet,
electricity, food. There’s rent and clothes and bus and train money. Listen, baby,
it makes me happy you want to know, but learning about your heritage is a
privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about
your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get
just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part
of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because
you’re Indian” (119)

Opal to Orvil Red Feather

Themes
The chip you carry has to do with being born and raised in Oakland. A concrete chip, a slab
really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. As for your mom’s side, 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. And from a people taken. You were both and
neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the
water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub. (216)

Later you remember your mom saying to take drugs was like sneaking into the kingdom of
heaven under the gates. It seemed to you more like the kingdom of hell, but maybe the
kingdom is bigger and more terrifying than we could ever know. Maybe we’ve all been speaking
the broken tongue of angels and demons too long to know that that’s what we are, who we are,
what we’re speaking. Maybe we don’t ever die but change, always in the State without hardly
ever even knowing that we’re in it. (224)

Thomas Frank
Themes
We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal,
something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our
jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t
very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each
other.

We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling
strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’d
been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been
coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia,
beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed (135)

Interlude
Themes
“I just don’t feel right trying to say something that doesn’t feel true.” “That’s what I’m trying to get
out of this whole thing. All p together, all our stories. Because all we got right now are reservation
stories, and shitty versions from outdated history textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is
just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.”

“I just don’t think it’s right for me to claim being Native if I don’t know anything about it.”

“So you think being Native is about knowing something?”

“No, but it’s about a culture, and a history.”

“My dad wasn’t around either. I don’t even know who he is.

My mom’s Native too, though, and she taught me what she could when she wasn’t too busy working or just
not in the mood. The way she said it, our ancestors all fought to stay alive, so some parts of their
blood went together with another Nation’s blood and they made children, so forget them, forget them even
as they live on in us?”

“Man, I feel you. But then again I don’t know. I just don’t know about this blood shit.”

Dene Oxendene, to Calvin (149)

Themes
Almost all I know about my birth mom is that her name is Jacquie Red Feather. My
adoptive mom told me on my eighteenth birthday what my birth mom’s name is and that
she’s Cheyenne. I knew I wasn’t white. But not all the way. Because while my hair
is dark and my skin is brown, when I look in the mirror I see myself from the
inside out. And inside I feel as white as the long white pill-shaped throw pillow
my mom always made me keep on my bed even though I never used it. I grew up in
Moraga, which is a suburb just on the other side of the Oakland hills—which makes
me even more Oakland hill than the Oakland hills kids. So I grew up with money, a
pool in the backyard, an overbearing mother, an absent father. I brought home
outdated racist insults from school like it was the 1950s. All Mexican slurs, of
course, since people where I grew up don’t know Natives still exist. That’s how
much those Oakland hills separate us from Oakland. Those hills bend time. (197-198)

Blue
Themes
“You could do worse than Paul.”

“I should go back then?”

“Do you know how many Indian women go missing every year?” Geraldine says.

“Do you?” I say.

“No, but I heard a high number once and the real number’s probably even higher.”

“I saw something too, someone posted about women up in Canada.”

“It’s not just Canada, it’s all over. There’s a secret war on women going on in the world. Secret even
to us. Secret even though we know it,” Geraldine says. She rolls down her window and lights a smoke. I
light one too.

“Every single place we get stuck out on the road,” she says. “They take us, then leave us out here,
leave us to dim to bone, then get all the way forgotten.” She flicks her cigarette out the window. She
only likes a cigarette for the first few drags.

“I always think of the men who do that kinda thing like, I know they’re out there somewhere—” (202)

Geraldine, to Blue
Themes / ending
Tony is back on the field. Every hole is a burn and a pull. Now he feels as if he might not
float up but instead fall inside of something underneath him. There is an anchor, something
he’s been rooted to all this time, as if in each hole there is a hook attached to a line
pulling him down. A wind from the bay sweeps through the stadium, moves through him. Tony
hears a bird. Not outside. From where he’s anchored, to the bottom of the bottom, the middle
of the middle of him. The center’s center. There is a bird for every hole in him. Singing.
Keeping him up. Keeping him from going. Tony remembers something his grandma said to him when
she was teaching him how to dance. “You have to dance like birds sing in the morning,” she’d
said, and showed him how light she could be on her feet. She bounced and her toes pointed in
just the right way. Dancer’s feet. Dancer’s gravity. Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind
sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn’t going anywhere. And
somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he’ll always be, even now it is morning,
and the birds, the birds are singing. (290)

Tony Loneman
Style
• The purpose of repetitions

• Storytelling quality?

• Conversational style

• Alternance of registers

https://aadl.org/aa_news_19341215_p1-miss_st
ein_states