45 pages • 1 hour read
Night of the Living Rez
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Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma
Night of the Living Rez is deeply concerned with the idea of inheritances. In some instances, inheritances are given in good faith, as in the case of the money the grandmother leaves for Dee in “Half-Life.” More often than not, though, what these characters inherit are the traumas borne by previous generations. Sometimes, this trauma takes the form of repeated losses: Paige miscarries her child in “In a Jar,” and it’s then revealed in “Food for the Common Cold” that Paige’s mother also lost a child. Substance dependency is another form of inherited trauma: David quite literally inherits his mother’s cigarettes in “Smokes Last,” and Bedogi is born with his mother’s methadone addiction in “The Name Means Thunder.” Many of the characters also inherit their daily living spaces from their parents: Dee, Fellis, and Paige all live with their parents for most of the collection. For Dee, this experience of occupying the same spaces as the generations that came before and reliving their traumas creates a feeling of entrapment—that he is stuck in a cycle he might never escape.
Dee first articulates this feeling of entrapment in “Half-Life,” when, after using his grandmother’s money to buy drugs from Meekew, he reflects on his grandmother smirking at him and realizes, “It had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with me. How did I get here, and how do I get out?” (195). Dee is unsettled not by the smirk itself but by the idea that his grandmother already knows what is in store for him in the rest of his life. Reflecting on his own entrapment in a cycle of buying drugs and then searching for money, he realizes that if this is a cycle, it has happened before, and those who have seen others go through it already know how it will end for him. Dee ends “Half-Life” still very much struggling with his benzodiazepine dependency but aware he alone can orchestrate his escape from these cycles.
Night of the Living Rez never offers any definite answers about whether it’s possible to fully escape these cyclical traumas. In “The Name Means Thunder,” an older Dee reveals that he does, eventually, leave the reservation; even in this brief anecdote, though, his focus is still on the people he left behind, and he wonders if he’d be happier if he’d never left at all. The fact that the collection ends on a story from Dee’s past—a story about a foundational trauma for him and every member of his family—seems to indicate that Dee is never fully freed from his traumas. The collection ends with Dee/David watching his nephew’s funeral basket burn, as it “smoldered and collapsed as the sun one day will, its core blasting out to a great silence not unlike the one huddled around the orange-red coals dimming in the woodstove” (278). This image of absolute annihilation is undoubtedly grim; Bedogi’s death has left the family empty, bereft. But the dying sun/burning coals in this closing image are contained by the family’s woodstove and created by the family’s ceremony for the dead. This aspect of the image suggests that while Dee’s traumas cannot be escaped, they can be survived, and even contained, by the rituals of his heritage and the proximity of family.
Violence as an Expression of Masculinity
Through his formative years, David is surrounded by violent men. Sometimes this violence is trivial, almost casual, as in the case of the “battle” game he plays with Tyson and JP in “Smokes Last,” in which he and Tyson invariably end up bloodied and bruised by JP. Often, though, this violence comes in moments in which the men is his life struggle with emotions they don’t know how to cope with. In “Food for the Common Cold,” David first witnesses Frick’s violence against his mother when she confronts Frick about his dead daughter, and he’s so consumed by his emotional response that he takes her by the wrists, hurting her. Later, he watches Frick attempt to sexually assault Paige in “Night of the Living Rez.” The masculinity that is modeled for David is one characterized by silences, repressed emotions, and sudden, violent outbursts that only work to create more silences.
David, by and large, does not express his masculinity in this way as a child. Outside of throwing rocks at the racist men in “Smokes Last,” David only observes the violence of the men around him. This changes in “Safe Harbor.” In one of the collection’s more arresting acts of violence, Dee/David drives so recklessly after his mother’s epileptic episode that he injures himself and ends up in the hospital. Dee/David describes the wound as a “great rupture” (139), but this is more than just a rupturing of skin. In this transitional moment, the violence that David has internalized as a child also ruptures out of him. As discussed in the analysis of “Safe Harbor,” Dee/David doesn’t know how to cope with the twinned traumas of seeing his mother’s seizure and hearing her lose her memory of him. He copes the only way he’s been taught how—through violence, this time inflicted on himself.
Dee resorts to violence through the rest of the collection, assaulting Meekew in “Get Me Some Medicine” and punching Fellis later in the same story. The impulse to violence never fully makes sense to Dee, though; in “Earth, Speak” he wonders why Fellis chooses to physically punish Daryl in the way he does. The women in Dee’s life have modeled an alternate mode of coping with emotional pain—dialogue (as explored in the analysis of “Food for the Common Cold”). As Dee’s life progresses, his internal dialogue begins to articulate abstract emotional states that he can’t quite fully describe, though he still tries to. When reflecting on his absence from Frick’s funeral, for example, he says, “I should have gone…it would have made something I cannot name not so lonely” (267). This movement toward the internal verbalization of emotions he can’t quite conceptualize suggests that, by the end of the collection, Dee is beginning to use language to cope with his emotional responses.
The Role of Memory in Constituting Personal and Communal Histories
Memory, both personal and tribal, is continuously at risk in Night of the Living Rez. In “The Blessing Tobacco,” David’s grandmother can no longer remember who he is; in “Safe Harbor,” David’s mother momentarily suffers from the same problem. Penobscot tribal memory is endangered in “Earth, Speak,” as Dee and Fellis rob the museum to liquidate the artifacts inside. The white film crew in “Night of the Living Rez” poses the threat of documenting Penobscot life through a white lens, creating a representation and record of the culture as false as the films the boys are made to watch in school.
Growing up in a culture where history and memory are tenuous and subject to change, David quickly learns about the powers of invented memory. His grandmother’s projection of her dead brother’s identity onto him in “The Blessing Tobacco” is initially unsettling, but by the end of the story, David begins to embrace it. In inventing his own false memories of his great-uncle, he finds a connection to the past that was previously unavailable to him and, in this connection, invents a male role model who models a healthier, less threatening masculinity than Frick does. In this way, inventing memory is a healing process for David.
Memory is again at risk in “The Name Means Thunder.” The story’s narrative structure sees Dee narrating events that happened to David. Dee becomes an unreliable narrator of David’s past, struggling to remember whole sections of the story, such as the moment in which Bedogi dies. These omissions raise questions about the story being told (i.e., how and why did Bedogi die?), but Dee’s narration is not concerned with whether the narrative is satisfying, only whether it is “honest.” Dee’s mother takes a different approach to the process of remembering Bedogi’s death. When she finds her son holding her dead grandson, she says, “‘This didn’t happen, this didn’t happen, not like this,’ and she says it until it’s made true for the story” (276). Here, “made true for the story” is a turn of phrase that raises questions: Made true for whose story? Clearly not the story Dee is telling. Perhaps this is the story that she will tell the police to save David from incrimination. Or maybe this is the story that she will tell the family and the rest of the community to lessen the impact of this trauma. For David’s mother, an invented history can be a way of mitigating trauma so the next generation might have less of a burden to bear.
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