Where the Dead Sit Talking Brandon Hobson Reviews
Where the Dead Sit Talking is a dark, twisting, emotional novel about a teenage Cherokee male child confused in the foster care system. Sequoyah has moved around to many homes, sometimes living in shelters while waiting in the in-between, not ever plumbing fixtures in where he is placed. And then he is placed with the Troutts who have ii other foster children, Rosemary and George. Similar him, Rosemary is all the same another American Indian child in the foster care organization, trying to connect to a home.
The novel holds a hard dialogue on intergenerational trauma, the effects of separating children from their Nations, and the perilous outcomes if nosotros do not make urgent changes to the systems forcing American Indians to assimilate and disconnect. This may be set in the past, but the same cycles be today, showing that we have non yet learned the necessary lessons to interrupt the trauma.
Melissa Michal: What was the origin of the novel?
Brandon Hobson: It started with thinking about my previous piece of work experience in social work. I worked for about seven years with delinquent and deprived kids and saw a common theme of a struggle with identity and a tendency toward obsession that I constitute really fascinating. At the same time, I too knew I wanted to write something from my Native culture. So I knew, having worked with Native kids in both delinquent and deprived environments, that that was an avenue that I wanted to explore, specifically with my tribe which is the Cherokee nation. So I wanted to focus thinking about Indigenous youth in the foster care organization. So that'southward kind of where information technology all started. And the idea of "What is home?" is the important question I wanted to brainstorm with.
Then many of these kids struggle with that question of not knowing where their home is, because and then many of these kids are shuffled around from shelter to shelter from foster placement to foster placement. And so they don't know where they're going to be that next night and so along. And so that question also goes back to the historical significance of the Trail of Tears which is i of the worst events in U.s.a. history which when people were removed from Georgia and Northward Carolina, people were faced with that very question, "What is abode?"
MM: Describe for me your writing process getting into that kind of mindset, going to the places that those foster children take gone mentally. Sequoyah is very disconnected in this way.
BH: I heard his vocalisation. Sequoyah's phonation is really potent in my head. It may have been a culmination of a lot of the youth that I have worked with, I think. Which at times it can sound very unsafe. It tin can besides sound, I hope, very wounded. There may exist a fine line between what sounds dangerous and what sounds wounded.
MM: Was Sequoyah always the main character? Did Rosemary change over the class of writing the novel?
BH: I knew early on that I wanted to have him look dorsum at this short time that he was with the foster family and talk about her influence on him. And that's where I retrieve the novel gets a little bit obsessive or where the novel talks most his obsessive behavior and why is Sequoyah telling this story. A large part of that has to do with Rosemary dying in front of him. I'm non so much interested in the idea of writing near her death as much as I was interested in his fascination with her. Because of them beingness the only Indigenous foster kids in that home.
I worked for well-nigh seven years with delinquent and deprived kids and saw a common theme of a struggle with identity and a tendency toward obsession.
He'south also exploring identity issues with his gender and with his overall advent. In 1989 not many boys wear eyeliner to schoolhouse. I certainly call up it's way more accepted at present then in 1989. Sequoyah is a little more androgynous which I wanted him to be. So I retrieve early on I didn't desire to focus so much on her expiry every bit her impact on him. Both internally and externally. Not only the way she looked but the way she dressed and the way she talked. He felt very much, as did she, that they were continued on another level that he could communicate with her on some other level, through the mind. There was some college level of connexion between them.
MM: Sequoyah's focus on death becomes an obsession after meeting Rosemary. Where do you call up this comes from for him?
BH: I don't know if it's just death. I recall it just some otherworldliness, is what it feels like to me. Non and then much decease as other consciousness. I feel like he can communicate with her. Mayhap not so much just what we recollect about death, simply the idea of some other worlds, another consciousness that exists out in that location that perchance works in terms of communication. He felt very strongly. And she does too when she beginning meets him. She says "I knew you were supposed to come here." In a way I retrieve she was expecting him. And all of that exists on another alternate universe. Or at least that'southward how they both feel. I'k more interested in the emotional than the logical.
MM: Why prepare the novel in a past time menstruation versus a more than contemporary time period?
BH: A lot of that was simply considering it was my memories of being young and being a teenager in the '80s. I wanted it to exist pre-cell telephone. For example, Rosemary she goes missing for a while. Before cell phones a lot of times people would just be, "Where are they?" I remember a couple of times my mom would just go out and drive and await for me earlier the cellphone when I was a teenager. That'due south when the missing becomes harder to discover. With iPhones now you can find pretty much find anyone chop-chop.
A lot of the music and pop culture that are mentioned in the book are the '80s like the movie Rain Man is most an autistic homo and George is autistic. That was out at that same fourth dimension and role of that was filmed in Oklahoma. I remember when that was filmed hither. And so there was a connection between that in the movie, the brotherly relationship, y'all know, George and Sequoyah struggling through that. So there were a lot of things that mirrored what was happening in terms of the '80s. And band names as well. George memorizes lyrics and band names at a time when mayhap people paid more than attention to liner notes, the idea of the mixed tape and writing down lyrics. So it's a pre-jail cell phone, pre-net time. George is writing his novel, just he's writing information technology on a main difficult bulldoze.
MM: What other writers/artists influenced your techniques in this novel?
BH: James Welch was a big influence. Diane Glancy. Those are two Native influences on me. Don DeLillo stylistically has always been an influence on me. More currently Ottessa Moshfegh and Laura van den Berg. Those are two young women writing right now who are astonishing and two of my favorite writers that are currently writing. N. Scott Momaday has always been a huge influence as well.
MM: Is there any question or something about the novel that yous accept wanted to talk well-nigh, but no one has asked you?
BH: Ultimately information technology's a story of abode. A lot of people don't ask near the identity issues. A lot of people aren't asking enough about Sequoyah'south identity, exploring his gender bug and trying to decide you lot know I think that's a big question that teenagers ask, "Who am I? What is my identity?" So while he's exploring his Native identity he's as well a piddling bit androgynous. I only don't know if that's beingness written nearly very much, the question of androgyny specially in Native youth. We desire to suspension through the stereotypes of how non-Indigenous people run into Indigenous boys or girls also. I basically didn't desire it to be just a stock Native grapheme that falls into stereotype.
We want to intermission through the stereotypes of how non-Indigenous people come across Indigenous boys or girls every bit well.
MM: I wonder if that's why people aren't asking you, though. You lot practice avert those pitfalls. And so those kinds of stereotypes and pitfalls can so lead themselves to those questions of identity more and so.
BH: There's been a lot of talk well-nigh identity. But most people only inquire how disturbed he is and how dangerous. They tend to think he's a bad, bad person and that's he'south a super psychopath and that sort of confuses me equally to why people would just automatically assume that.
MM: I think I got where the book was coming from. I too understand it at a dissimilar place because I have felt information technology equally a Native adult female. There's a certain amount of rage and grief that you get through as a Native person that they haven't gone through.
BH: It makes him a cross of all of that teenage rage and angst that may run across as more than I intended. Maybe I could take made him more than empathetic. I don't know. I mean, again, it comes out of a identify of a lot of my experience dealing with delinquent and deprived youth.
MM: I wonder if that gets stereotyped a lot, also. And this is a rounded grapheme that has emotions and feelings and experiences that arise out of being in the foster care system, being Cherokee, being androgynous, and kind of exploring his identity in those kinds of ways. That'southward a lot of intersections in the '80s to manage.
BH: I promise that I pulled it off. It is a lot.
MM: I think that this last part of our interview is important to include. To be honest, I didn't assume him dangerous. I saw him as broken and traumatized.
BH: Yes.
MM: And there were energies that were interacting with him and he was picking up on negative energies that just were keeping him from a positive identify.
BH: Yeah. That'south how I desire him to exist taken.
Source: https://electricliterature.com/in-where-the-dead-sit-talking-a-native-american-teen-searches-for-home/
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