You can’t erase who you belong to (Penobscot Indian Island Reservation and Overtown (fictional Old Town), Maine; 1960s to 2015): Genealogy and genetic testing are hugely popular. People want to know their heritage, ancestors – where they come from. A concept that’s been around since the 1800s, used in an entirely different way by governments to dictate, erase, and weed out who can claim their Native identity to live on a tribal reservation.
In fiery storytelling, Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit explodes, sometimes quietly simmering and when you least expect it with emotional firepower that astonishes you how powerful prose can be.
Talty’s “blood quantum” meets the minimum mandates decided by Federal and state laws – 25% – to be “enrolled” as a “citizen” of an American Indian Nation. In this story, the Penobscot Nation, where the author lived on the reservation until he was eighteen. Does that mean he feels any less Penobscot than someone whose blood is 50%, 85%, 100% Penobscot? What does it mean for a government to regulate who you’re supposed to be?
Drawing on his Penobscot experience and educator work (assistant professor at the University of Maine in Orono and a collaboration with the Institute of American Arts college in Santa Fe), Talty has written a rare novel about a relatively unknown Indigenous tribe he puts the calculated, highly controversial blood test through the ringer. He wants to teach us and make us feel the devastating consequences of historical and cultural trauma passed down through generations used in a centuries-old racial campaign to root out Native peoples.
Fire Exit is “a book for humanity” about the “soul’s responsibility to love.” Like himself, he’s created a narrator and major character, Charles Lamosway, who is white and 25% Penobscot. Charles also lived on and now off the reservation.
Night of the Living Rez, the author’s debut story collection, caught on fire winning numerous literary awards. The National Book Foundation recognized Morgan Talty as one of the “5 Under 35” for “what it means to be Penobscot” today and “what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.” His debut novel honors the same mission.
Fire Exit sometimes reads like a story collection, printed words from the oral storytelling tradition of the First Americans, with one big difference: a crystal-clear plot that drives the storytelling stated in the opening lines:
“I wanted the girl to know the truth. I wanted her to know who I was – who I really was – instead of a white man who had lived across from her all her life and watched her grow up from this side of the river.”
The girl is Elizabeth, his daughter, who doesn’t know Charles is her biological father. Not by his choice, but by her mother Mary’s he still loves.
The novel also reads like a memoir, screaming authenticity, intimacy, and all-out frankness. Talty doesn’t want us to pigeonhole it, a goal he achieves.
The daily lives of the Penobscot characters are layered with grief, sorrow, addictions (alcoholism, substance abuse, cigarette smoking), violence, and crushing truths. They are the legacy of a grim pursuit to eliminate the Penobscot Nation and culture that settled in America 12,000 years ago. Citing the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, we’re also being told the fight for full sovereignty persists.
Day-to-day eking out a life is gloomy, and yet the prose punctuates daily existence with a transcendent sentence or two that elevates us to beautiful philosophical and existential wisdom offering a higher perspective to view the human condition. To lives that have gone “separate ways,” yet “forever held together by the invisible rope of having experienced each other.” Characters do separate from each other. By legal force, divorce, desperation, and other reasons such as becoming pregnant by a white man whose heart and soul belong to the Penobscot Nation.
That’s Charles’ sad, lonely, and empty life story.
Now in his fifties, he’s taking stock of a life of loss and heartbreak that could have had “promise.” Obsessed with righting the wrong he agreed to, but mourning for twenty-three or four years. He’s determined to tell Elizabeth, against Mary’s headstrong wishes, his blood and past runs through hers.
Imagine watching your child grow up without you? Without knowing you even exist? Not because you’re an orphan or victim of some natural disaster, but a human one because you’ve been lied to all her twenty-some years.
You cannot separate out being Penobscot without another lifeblood: the land, the woods, and the Penobscot River. The prose isn’t just atmosphere, it’s one with the Penobscot people.
The prose, then, is a visual map in two ways. One is psychic, the other physical. It lets us visualize the loves and losses of: a Penobscot man pining away for a woman and his child from across the river; a beloved Penobscot stepfather; a white mother who “married in” Charles works hard at loving, alienated for the past twenty years and now descending into the throes of dementia; and an older friend, an alcoholic on his third marriage because of it but doesn’t want to quit (Charles has). The map expands beyond the land and the waterways to the present-day Indian Island reservation to include the wellness center, community center, residential school, and church, central to Penobscot life. There’s also a bridge that crosses over to the fictionalized town of Overtown.
The profound crossing over is Charles’ dramatic change of heart and mind convinced Elizabeth should no longer be denied knowing “the part of her she doesn’t know belongs to her.”
Talty occasionally drops a Penobscot word into the storytelling. It’s intentional, as efforts are underway to save the language from extinction, to make sure this aspect of the culture isn’t lost. As a teacher and writer, Talty is also spreading the word. There’s a Penobscot dictionary at the back of his story collection. One word that speaks to the tension of belonging is sheejin, translated for us as non-Native. Another is a word his mother called him, gwus, or little boy, and a word the Penobscot culture believes in, Goog’hooks, or evil spirits.
You could say evil spirits have infected the characters in this story. The ending seems doom and gloom. Yet, it exits seemingly on a higher note, demonstrating the past matters.
Just like the risks and benefits of DNA testing, you’ll see both. Readers may be inclined to choose one over the other, but will sense a potential opening to helping someone in dire need figure out where they belong.
Lorraine