“Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie (Literary Review)

It is hard to believe that a superhero-like guy who is able to break all the boundaries surrounding his life is an American Indian offspring. In fact, this ordinary guy is the person who deserves to get title “Superman” because of his capability to leap high and fly to his own sky to live much more properly.

In his Superman and Me, Alexie describes his life condition through sentence “We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards.” Well, though his family incapability to let’s-so-call-it provides an adequate prosperity to his early childhood (it can be seen in sentence “We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food”), the young Alexie could break the fence covering his freedom and walk one step forth from powerlessness.

The interesting part is when he tried to learn to read. Though the word “paragraph” was the thing he never knew before, he tried to present the whole universe as his own essay. “A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly” was what he could say about his childhood’s prodigy. What was he going to say and tell, then? By acknowledging that an Indian boy living on the reservation grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third-person? Was it because of the racial prejudice, or ethnic differentiation by non-Indian towards an American Indian offspring?

It cannot be denied that racism, not only towards Afro-Americans, is also happened to Indians. “We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid…As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians” was the fact that ethnic differentiation is happened. Luckily, for a child like Alexie, he did not only stand up and watch all those wrong things happened to him. Instead, he refused to fail and did hard works to gain success. Just like any other superhero movie, it was ended with a cliché happy ending. Alexie could save his own live and be a better person in his future. However, this superhero’s journey is still a long way to go. There are hundreds or maybe thousands Indian child who is unable to leap high and break every single boundaries to live in equality. And maybe this is Alexie’s duty to save them; this is all the people in this world’s duty to save their own live.

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