Respond to Julie's post "Flight" by Sherman Alexie

Thanks Julie for this post. It also reminded me Sherman Alexie's novel "Flight". The main character -Zits had the madness on his own father, because his Indian father abandoned him. I want to read Zits’s embodiment as his father through the lens of Native trauma theory because American Indian historical grief is widely understood to be transmitted intergenerationally and this situation has a thematic relationship to Alexie’s recurring exploration of fathers and sons, abandonment, and the complexities of forgiveness.
Initially Zits does not know he is inside his father; he simply wakes up on the ground staring at a rat and vomiting blood. He realizes he is a street drunk, a loser whose belly is torn apart by booze. When a “pretty white” couple approach him and he asks them if he is white (he’d most recently inhabited the body of the white flight instructor), they tell him he is Indian: “I look down at my dirty T-shirt, emblazoned with a black-and-white photograph of the Apache warrior Geronimo and the ironed-on caption FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492” (Flight, 132). Appearing soon after the 9/11 attacks, this popular T-shirt expresses many American Indians’ perspective of having been invaded, terrorized, and colonized and the patriotism of American Indians in their struggle to retain their land, lives, and culture. But the grief and rage that result from Indians’ awareness of the ongoing reality of colonization and the dominant culture’s denial of it are registered in this man’s drunken state. Zits/the man is disgusted by the good Samaritans’ compassion and tells them “it’s all your fault” and “white people did this to Indians” (Flight, 136). Zits tells us, “I don’t even know if I believe that. But this fifty-year-old guy wants to blame someone for his pain and his hunger....This homeless guy’s anger is even stronger than my anger. And anger is never added to anger.
It multiplies”  (Flight, 136).
After being punched in the face by the woman’s partner, the man/Zits awakes, aware that he is in an alley in downtown Tacoma. As he “shambles” out of the alley, his bloody face horrifies the people on the street: “‘I want some respect,’ I say. I read this desire for respect and understanding as a direct expression of disenfranchised grief—the sense that no one recognizes or cares about the suffering of Native people.
After that, one man on the street was him a story about his family and pulled out a photo. Zits realizes, "It is me, the five-year-old me. The five-year-old Zits. The real me” (Flight,150). Confused, he looks into the side-view mirror of a nearby truck: “I stare at my bloody reflection. I am older than I used to be. I am battered, bruised and broken. But I know who I am. I am my father” (Flight, 150). Zits realizes he’s staring into the face of his betrayer—the man he should kill—but “what satisfaction is there in killing a man who wants to die?”(Flight, 151).Zits asks the questions he has always wanted to ask his father: “Why did you leave me, why did you want to carry a photograph of me but not me?” (Flight, 152). These are questions his father/the man doesn't want to answer: “I can feel him fighting me. He doesn't want to remember the day he left me” (Flight, 152). But Zits forces his father to remember and learns that his father was not only sexually molested but cruelly ridiculed by his own father to believe he was utterly worthless: “My father wants to weep. He wants to cry out for his father. He wants to be forgiven, to be loved. But if he speaks he will only be ridiculed again. He will only be diminished”  (Flight, 155). Now inside his father’s memories at the hospital where Zits’s mother is giving birth to him, he realizes, “My father cannot be a participant. He cannot be a witness. He cannot be a father” (Flight, 156). Zits understands that his father has been so damaged by abuse that he does not have the strength or confidence to raise his own son and perhaps fears that he will inflict the same abuse on him that he received from his father.Zits is now a witness to his father’s abuse and understands why he was abandoned, there is hope that he can forgive his father, perhaps find relief from his own suffering.