Identity Problems: A Literary Criticism of the Flamethrowers Novel by Rachel Kushner and There There Novel by Tommy Orange
When it comes to duplicating identities from the past that long dead, it can be terrifying besides providing recent exploration into the nature of social change. Historical fiction may seek to retell and reconfigure the past through overcoming its transitory and transient nature. However, these stories can attract positive attention to the difficulties experienced by identity movements that have been historically burdened. Besides, these stories can amend the concealment of their major counterparts. Novels by Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Tommy Orange’s There There approach the history of feminism in a precise way, sighting a range of feminist artists of the times that have been forgotten through appeasing and amending their past dispossession.
Tommy Orange’s There There has used characters who are wildly distinct; however, they all have a typical apprehensive relationship to the way cultural identity is intersected as Native Americans and the characters’ personality. For instance, Edwin Black, Orvil Red Feather, and Blue are each portrayed as being worried that they are not native enough, or they feel that they are native in the wrong ways. They are seen trying to reconcile what they believe about “being native enough” with the idea of what it means to be part of the native society. Tommy Orange postulates that when a character tries to discover their more substantial cultural identity can help the understanding of whom they are from a personal point of view.
Throughout the text, Orange seems to be portraying that the characters are trying to make sense of who they are, both within the native American community and outside it. The argument that Orange is putting across is that a person needs to discover his or her identity within the broader cultural context, and this will help this person to identify and understand himself or herself at a personal level.
Similarly, Rachel Kushner is an artist who is associated with the second wave of feminism with the overt forms of masculinities of those who are concerned with the future. The Flamethrowers gathers young Italian fascists and New York feminists and entrenches them in an intellectual bundle of time. To be sure, she places the two movements in a counter position and also portrays the way violence was used to silence the main figureheads of the two groups. Hence, the novel does use artists of both historical times in the same way Tommy Orange describes as the attempt to throw the various figures into the present-day life.
The Flamethrowers contemplate feminine identity the way it exists outside the multilateral model of race, class, and gender, thus tackling the concept of feminism in a more old-fashioned way. This style constrains the ability of the novel to transform norms politically and reproduces what Rachel Kushner describes as the “earlier feminist” chauvinistic and heterosexist segregations. Rachel Kushner says that intersectionality is essential in describing the stability of all social movements. To fully understand this, Rachel Kushner advises that one has to use a new “political grammar” defined as one that can transform how feminism uses narratives as a means of empowerment. In cases where western feminists are keen on the political grammar of their storytelling as portrayed in the novel the Flamethrowers. She says, “If we can highlight reasons why that attention might be important, then we can also intervene to change the way we tell stories.” (268).
Rachel Kushner transfigures her traditional criticism of the textual into a wide variety of episodes in the novel The Flamethrowers, where Anna is portrayed as being voiceless. The textual that carries Anna’s name is extremely difficult to cite since its reality is disjointed. Still, the author’s text may be assumed to recover the documentary, thus providing fresh access to Anna’s story. Although Kushner claims that a radical spirit may be used in various monologues in the novel, but it is only Anna who doesn’t have such a voice of the revolution. One is only identified by the first name when they don’t have an identity. One might argue that the Flamethrowers struggles to give Anna the character and the voice she’s justified to have, and so she contrived as the novel tries to understand her silent words. Kushner writes:
“She smiled at me, but in a way that let me know yes, she was pregnant, and that she didn’t much appreciate being stared at” (273).
In another phrase, Kushner writes:
“She wove through the crowd in her poncho, her same sincere smile, which said, “I have nothing to protest. I’m here to be here” (277).
On the same note, in the novel There There, Orvil Red Feather, who is fourteen years old, is barred from learning about the Indian heritage of his family by his caretaker and a great aunt named Opal. His aunt believes that it is a privilege for one to learn about his family ad that their families don’t have such kind of opportunity. Opal is portrayed in the novel as being very careful to impress upon his nephew and his brothers Loother and Lony, arguing that little is known about the native culture, described as being original, of the present day. Tommy explains that a lot of the native culture only exists because, through the ways, traditional people make scrapings that were left to them by their white oppressors. Opal tries to conceal the difficulty of navigating through a traditional culture whose roots cause pain, ostracism, and trauma, but Orvil is attracted to the regular part of his identity. Orvil can learn about traditional customs and memorizes traditional dances through w the internet. Orvil can get some old ceremonial objects from his aunt’s closet, and he, with his brothers, arrange to attend an upcoming Oakland powwow secretly. Strangely, Orvil realizes that his leg had an itchy bump that was full of spider legs. However, he is not aware that when his aunt was a young girl, she found the same thing on her body. He says:
“But his leg. The lump that’s been in his leg for as long as he can remember, as of late, it’s been itching. He hasn’t been able to stop scratching it” (328).
The spider legs are used to symbolize how their cultural identity is a part of them in a phenomenon described as “for better, for worse,” even when it is kept hidden. So the appearance of the spider legs is symbolic in the sense that Orvil is always ready to appreciate and embrace cultural heritage that he has been denied all these years. In this respect, Opal’s mother taught her that spiders symbolize both traps and homes. Thus, through the novel, spiders are used as symbols for both good and evil concerning family and lineage. However, Opal enunciates only the wrong side of the spider, whereby she sees Veho, the trickster of the spider in Ronald, who is her uncle. Later Opal finds the spider legs soon after leaving her uncle’s place, and this was both a trap and a home for Opal and her sister after their mother’s death. Finding the spider legs in her body symbolizes the act of bringing her more connection to her cultural heritage than before, besides bringing her close to all sorts of danger. Therefore the spider is a symbol for peace, risk, and connection that may be found in a home setting as well as in the community.
The chair of the Indian Center’s Powwow committee by the name Blue seems not to know who her parents are. This fact keeps questioning her cultural identity. For the most part of her life, she had been called crystal since she had been adopted at birth by her white parents, and this enabled her to live a life of affluence in the suburbs of Oakland. However, when she attained the age of eighteen, his adopted mother managed to reveal the identity of her birth mother, and at this point, Blue embarked on a journey to discover who she was. It is this journey in search of her Cheyenne identity that led her to Oklahoma, where she was able to marry a native, which led to her being given a native name. However, due to the abusive nature of her husband, she was forced to fly back home to Oakland. We must appreciate here that Blue’s journey in search of her identity was a painful one, full of trauma, however rather than make her run away from her heritage, it helped her to discover it. Her commitment to her culture and heritage is demonstrated by the fact that even in Oakland, she still finds time and devotes her love and energy for the native community in Oakland. In Blue, we see a character who is approaching her native identity as an extension of her personality.
The issue of identity is also well illustrated by figure Edwin, who, despite being black, had been raised by a white mother, and he was oblivious of who his native father was. We see him searching for the hints of the identity of his father, but his attempts seem futile. His failure to establish his character makes him kind of a failure in life, and he chooses to live a life of seclusion where he lives in his mother’s home, avoiding the outside world and life. He spends most of his time on the internet, and with this, he can make a connection with his father named Harvey through Facebook. After confirming his relationship with his father, Edwin immediately cuts off communication with his father because of the fear of what the real connection might be like.
When we meet this character Edwin in the novel, we discover that he had been constipated for a week. This constipation is a metaphor that is representative of the ways Edwin had been holding himself form the world and around him, which had left him culturally constipated. It had also starved him of his identity. This is the instance where Edwin now applies for a job at the Powwow committee, begins to care for himself as well as eating healthy. His life takes very positive turns, and he seems to be progressing well. This implies that when we embrace our cultural or personal identity, our lives are no longer constipated, but they turn out for the better.
However, several sophisticated layers of conflict appear in Tommy’s novel there there. The main center of conflict anchors around the plot itself and which is the scheme to rob the big Oakland powwow of its money prize. Besides, conflict arises when the native culture resisted all the attempts the white colonialism made through forced to assimilate the political identity.