Porcupines and China Dolls by Robert Arthur Alexie
Theytus Books
Released: Spring 2009
Page Count: 306 pp.
Robert Arthur Alexie explores the lives of the People, a First Nations group living on a reserve in the North West Territories, as they finally deal with the deep, painful scars that are left over from years of sexual abuse in the residential school system in his book Porcupines and China Dolls.
Through rich, multi-faceted characters, poised social comment, and simple, articulate writing, Alexie creates a raw portrait of a community trying to look to the future when all they can do is think about their secret pasts.
Alexie organizes his story into three parts. The first, Dream World, takes the reader into the residential school system. He gives us every angle. We see the parents mentally dying as they are forced to drop their kids off at the mission school, where they will not see them again until the holidays. We see the boys and girls get their hair cut off, forced to throw away their own clothing for uniforms of tennis shoes and black pants, and then put to bed in rows and rows where they sleep until the bell wakes them up in the morning. Sisters died; brothers were taken into the showers in the middle of the night. Alexis doesn’t spare his reader one image.
In the second part, The Awakening, the kids from the residential school are all grown up and spend hours in the local bar drinking and flirting into the late hours of the night. In the morning, they wake up from their one-night-stands and do it all over again. Alexis uses simple, repetitious details in the first few chapters of this section, which highlights the monotony of their lives.
The story focuses on James and Jake, two orphans from the residential school, who are unemployed, 40-something, drunks. They go to the bar every night and sleep with as many women as they can because that’s what real men do, right? When Jake reveals he was sexually abused in the residential school, however, the whole community changes. Others start coming forward and the town starts dealing with all those years that were lost at the hands of the mission school system.
Anger, resentment, hurt and fear seethed and stewed within the pages of Alexie’s story until it all finally came to a head for his characters during a healing workshop held in a local community building. This section of the book is filled with fantastic hyperbole as James, Jake and the Chief fight the demons that have haunted them since childhood in front of the entire town.
The characters in this book aren’t painted to be heroes. They aren’t perfect, and Alexie doesn’t try to make them out to be anything else but themselves. He writes in a plain, but never boring, fact-of-the-matter tone that really works to give his text authority.
Porcupines and China Dolls is a must read for anyone who is looking for a deep, dark look at the life-long affects of the residential school system. With powerful writing, Alexie exposes the demons that the People and probably many other First Nations people have lingering inside them from growing up in a residential school.
Reviewed by Taryn Hubbard
