The Bingo Palace

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”

Louise Erdrich’s writing is like my life. I am going along through the mundane motions of the everyday, as I do with her characters, when out of the blue comes this breathtaking moment. If I read too fast I will miss it. I often go back and reread a beautiful poetic paragraph or phrase having almost slid right by it in the pace of her prose.

She shows me how I pass right by entire cultures, not even noticing their presence. In The Bingo Palace she takes my hand and shows me a Native American culture in the backyard of my childhood to which I was totally ignorant. She walks me into lives for whom colonial greed has passed down oppression and despair.

She shows me the struggle in the life of her character Shawnee, her determination to make a life for herself free from the reservation. Show shows me the raw brutal interweaving of marriage and divorce and children that can be found anywhere in the world, but in this book she paints it with a background of lost symbol and tradition. She offers up the details of heritage, the “jingle dress..original to Chippewas, given to a Mille Lacs man by women who appeared to him in a dream, moving to their own music.” The details of a ceremonial feast “corn soup, fry bread, Juneberry pie and bangs with jelly, Tripe soup, boiled meat, plates of sliced cantaloupe and water melon.” All of the tastes and sensory details of a culture which refuses to die.

And I ask myself her question. How could I possibly presume to understand the heart of a person, and the dynamics that shape their struggle? Can I, as she suggest, find the compassion to at least try?

So I slow down as I read this book, one of many by Louise Erdrich which I have enjoyed. I watch carefully as her protagonist Lipsha struggles, not only with what he wants, but with who he is. I watch him long for a vision, an experience which will ground him in his native culture, define his role in the context of his history. I quietly hope for him as he also manages the impulse to love. I feel his confusion about whether he lives in a culture within a culture, or one completely outside. Lipsha knows no other way to engage with the world than looking outward from the web of relationships that gave him birth and life.

Opening myself to this story is a small attempt at trying. While I find Lipsha’s history and tradition to be far afield from mine, I relate to his internal strife. I understand his desire for purpose and belonging that come from taking your place in the tribe. I relate to his confusion as the ground of his culture sways beneath his feet. And I, too, try to address the questions: what do we keep, what do we let go, and what, if anything, do we try to bring back? Questions in the heart of us all.