Our family was ritual-less: we practiced the ritual of violence.”īy the time the second funeral occurs, the distance the memoirist craves from kin has offered her opportunities for recovery. He had no memory of what we called the Red Road, no African spirituality of the Orishas of West Africa. Buchanan says she resents her “grandfather’s weak, bitter struggle with manhood. This hollowed-out family, Buchanan explicitly asserts, is the result of cultural theft.
This family is in crisis, divided and faltering, unable to touch, even, in ways that suggest warm belonging. The first funeral, tense, quiet, eerie, sets up the conflict at the heart of the book. Uninhibited and crass, they cuss, fight, and fumble more often than they catch the ball. Shonda’s family, the subject of this stunning memoir, is wild. Her aunt, like one out of three Native American women and 20 percent of Black women, is raped, and “her body was a scar, because she’d been ripped open like a pig hanging from a spit on a tree.”įunerals bookend this narrative the characters, Shonda’s mother, fathers, aunties, grandfather, siblings, and cousins, curse their way through each family gathering. In her mother’s city home, “he thin brown carpet is worn down to the color of a deer’s trail” in the woods. At once Indigenous, Black Female, Speculative, Feminist, Womanist, Urban, Southern Gothic, and counter to the Tragic Mulatto stereotype in American literature, stage, and film, Black Indian is a quintessentially American narrative.Įven descriptions of decay and violence sing with Buchanan’s poetic voice. Her work honors the complexity and diversity of these Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.
Award-winning poet Shonda Buchanan honors multiple literary traditions in her breathtaking new memoir, Black Indian.Īn educator, freelance writer, and literary editor, Buchanan is a culture worker with deep, decades-long engagement in communities of color.
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