My review of Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo at INDenverTimes.
There are few stories as foundational to American identity as the epic revenge tale. From the genocidal Indian haters of early American frontier novels, to the sidewalk vigilantes regurgitated by Hollywood every month or so, nothing seems to bring in the public like righteous vengeance.
The stories are all reasonably similar. A quiet everyman — and this genre has traditionally been the bailiwick of men — is going about living a quiet life, when he returns home one day to find that some portion of his family has been butchered and the women viciously raped by Indians, urban malcontents or some other assortment of bad guys. Much frothing at the mouth ensues, followed by a monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance, ending in the righteous extermination of said bad guys, usually attended by some buckets of blood.
It’s a narrative that recurs with such frequency in American letters that one is, at times, a little afraid for the sanity of American culture, particularly given that the bad guys are almost exclusively dark-skinned, while the good guys are almost always, well, not. In fact, the tale originates with the likes of Robert Montgomery Bird and Judge James Hall as a way of framing an argument for the wholesale extermination of American Indians and has been used as similar justification throughout America’s long history of racial warfare.
Emma Pérez’s award-winning historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory falls within the tradition of this kind of revenge story, but only in the way that, say, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls within the tradition of detective fiction. It’s a delightfully playful deconstruction of the narratives used by Anglo-Americans to justify colonization, a deadly serious rumination on the consequences of that colonization, and, not least by anyone’s standards, an explosive adventure tale.
The rest.
There are few stories as foundational to American identity as the epic revenge tale. From the genocidal Indian haters of early American frontier novels, to the sidewalk vigilantes regurgitated by Hollywood every month or so, nothing seems to bring in the public like righteous vengeance.
The stories are all reasonably similar. A quiet everyman — and this genre has traditionally been the bailiwick of men — is going about living a quiet life, when he returns home one day to find that some portion of his family has been butchered and the women viciously raped by Indians, urban malcontents or some other assortment of bad guys. Much frothing at the mouth ensues, followed by a monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance, ending in the righteous extermination of said bad guys, usually attended by some buckets of blood.
It’s a narrative that recurs with such frequency in American letters that one is, at times, a little afraid for the sanity of American culture, particularly given that the bad guys are almost exclusively dark-skinned, while the good guys are almost always, well, not. In fact, the tale originates with the likes of Robert Montgomery Bird and Judge James Hall as a way of framing an argument for the wholesale extermination of American Indians and has been used as similar justification throughout America’s long history of racial warfare.
Emma Pérez’s award-winning historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory falls within the tradition of this kind of revenge story, but only in the way that, say, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls within the tradition of detective fiction. It’s a delightfully playful deconstruction of the narratives used by Anglo-Americans to justify colonization, a deadly serious rumination on the consequences of that colonization, and, not least by anyone’s standards, an explosive adventure taleThere are few stories as foundational to American identity as the epic revenge tale. From the genocidal Indian haters of early American frontier novels, to the sidewalk vigilantes regurgitated by Hollywood every month or so, nothing seems to bring in the public like righteous vengeance.
The stories are all reasonably similar. A quiet everyman — and this genre has traditionally been the bailiwick of men — is going about living a quiet life, when he returns home one day to find that some portion of his family has been butchered and the women viciously raped by Indians, urban malcontents or some other assortment of bad guys. Much frothing at the mouth ensues, followed by a monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance, ending in the righteous extermination of said bad guys, usually attended by some buckets of blood.
It’s a narrative that recurs with such frequency in American letters that one is, at times, a little afraid for the sanity of American culture, particularly given that the bad guys are almost exclusively dark-skinned, while the good guys are almost always, well, not. In fact, the tale originates with the likes of Robert Montgomery Bird and Judge James Hall as a way of framing an argument for the wholesale extermination of American Indians and has been used as similar justification throughout America’s long history of racial warfare.
Emma Pérez’s award-winning historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory falls within the tradition of this kind of revenge story, but only in the way that, say, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice falls within the tradition of detective fiction. It’s a delightfully playful deconstruction of the narratives used by Anglo-Americans to justify colonization, a deadly serious rumination on the consequences of that colonization, and, not least by anyone’s standards, an explosive adventure tale.
