Archived Editorial for 02/12/06

Writers Outed
by Rebecca Brown

I've been getting a slew of emails re: an article entitled: “Navahoax” researched & written by Matthew Fleischer, & printed in the LA Weekly, in which he exposes who the writer calling himself Nasdijj really is, & the complicated life he has lived along with his wives & grown daughter. It made for a sad yet fascinating read.

I feel the need to join the fray because I've posted, & enjoyed, several powerful & imaginative guest editorials by this author calling himself Nasdijj, plus I interviewed him, as well as reviewed all of his three-volume “memoirs.”

In the wake of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club Choice (a million+ copies bought) of James Frey's memoir of alcoholism, drug abuse & redemption in A Million Little Pieces (which I haven't read &, after scanning the book description on Amazon.com, won't because it's just not my cup of tea), & the subsequent outing of said author for including facts, names & scenes that were not strictly true, I watched Oprah's show where she nailed James Frey to the wall before a panel of literary experts, publishers, the studio audience & all of us in tvland. Did anyone else notice Oprah's body language? Was she ever mortified! She could hardly bring herself to look at the “deluder”, hiding her face with her hair & everso high collar.

The uproar re: truth in writing has, once again, exploded on the scene. Seems every generation there's one of these panics of outraged indignation.

I remember the furor in the '80s over Tuesday Lobsang Rampa & his series that began with Third Eye which, when I read it back then, gave me much inspiration. It didn't matter a whit to me if it was a “true memoir”, or a work of fiction. Reading about the outing of this Canadian, I thought of a British movie from the late '50s(my teen years) starring Dirk Bogarde & John Mills called The Singer Not The Song. Contrarian that I am, I usually live by the axiom: “it's the song, not the singer.”

While the writer who calls himself Nasdijj always treated me like a “lady,” for the past two years, his mass mailings have been unkempt tirades against literary agents & publishers — anyone who questioned his verisimilitude, for that matter — contained so much unfettered vitriol & way too many expletives that I ceased all correspondence with him.

So this is all about passing off a story as “the truth,” which is what memoirs are supposed to be; the probable, & certainly not annotated, cobbling together of ideas from other minds, memoirs & stories, & the teller of “memories” as “the real McCoy.” — the son of a drunken abusive White cowpuncher & a drunken Navajo reservation mother.

Truth, as Merriam-Webster instructs, is the quality or state of being true, as in:
a) originally: loyalty, trustworthiness
b) sincerity; genuineness, honesty
c) the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality; conformity with fact
d) reality, actual existence, certainty
e) agreement with a standard, rule, etc.; correctness, accuracy
That which is true & in accordance with fact or reality
a) an established or verified fact, principle, etc.
b) a particular belief or teaching regarded by the speaker as the true one
Truth suggests conformity with the facts or with reality, either as an idealized abstraction or in actual application to statements, ideas, acts, etc. Veracity, as applied to persons or to their utterances, connotes habitual adherence to the truth. Verity, as applied to things, connotes correspondence with fact or with reality. Verisimilitude, as applied to literary or artistic representations, suggests a degree of plausibility sufficient to induce audience belief. Antonyms are falseness, falsity, fake.

Had he published as a fiction writer, would any of this have mattered? For those in the know, the 2004 PEN/Beyond Margins Award is given to writers who excel in multicultural contributions. One was given to this writer passing as a Native American penning his “memoirs,” & it smacks of misrepresentation — a scam.

Scam (again from Merriam-Webster) means to mislead, delude, swindle, trick, cheat, lie, outwit, fool, rob, defraud, deceive, not play fair, victimize, hoax, betray, beguile, take advantage of, impose upon, entrap, ensnare, hoodwink, play one false, gull, cozen, dupe, lead astray, bamboozle, fleece, humbug, circumvent, falsify accounts, pass off, con, take for, finagle, palm off, buffalo, bilk, fake, gyp, pull a fast one, play for a sucker, snooker, hustle, sell a gold brick to, string along, take for a ride, snow, put one over on, take in, sail under false colors, lead on, jive, fast-talk, pull the wool over one's eyes, flimflam, play upon, make a monkey of.
Deceive implies the often deliberate misrepresentation of facts by words, actions, etc., frequently to further one's ends. To mislead is to cause to follow the wrong course or to err in conduct or action, although not always by deliberate deception. Beguile implies the use of wiles & enticing prospects in deceiving or misleading. To delude is to fool someone so completely that what is false is accepted as being true. Betray implies a breaking of faith while appearing to be loyal. See also disappoint, evade, misstate, salt a mine, stack the deck.

As long as the person calling himself Nasdijj — a name which is “gibberish” in the Navajo language as I understand it from Irvin Morris, one of the people Matthew Fleischer interviewed, who is “[a] full-blooded Navajo [&] a professor of literature [&] Navajo studies at Dine College in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation...[&] is among the world's foremost authorities on Navajo culture”, — as long as the writer stayed on track with the subject at hand, I felt I could encourage his contributions to my site because he does have a superb way with words.

As to the inaccuracies re: Navajo life represented in this writer's works, as mentioned by Professor Morris, they would still have raised red flags about the writer's veracity & sources.

The lack of acknowledgements for gleaning ideas from true Native American authors & their stories is discourteous & reprehensible. In this regard, Sherman Alexie adds his unimpeachable voice & comments about this “Navahoax”.

For the rest of us ignoramuses, we'd have still been none the wiser, & for that, I am sorry.

By the way, the outed Tim Barrus did have his say, & the LAWeekly printed his blustering attempt at damage control.

So why does this matter?
Are the emotions we felt when we read this writer's words any less potent, poignant, now we're privy to the story of his “real” life?
Would his words have been the less powerful had they been put forth as fiction?
If a writer lies about who he/she is, does it matter if they're writing fiction?
Why does it matter more should they present what they've written as having really happened?

A memoir is supposed to be, is accepted as the person's “take” on their life, as opposed to a biography which usually gives a chronological history of the who, what, when, how & why of someone's life. So if the major events in a book that's proffered as a memoir to a literary agent, to a publisher & to the reading public actually flows from the writer's imagination (& cribbed from others'), as in it never happened: no such parents, brother, grandparents; no such dwelling in no such place, nor actually happened: as in no such sons dying of FAS(Fetal Alcohol Syndrome) or HIV/AIDS — what is the reader to get from such a “memoir”? Why not just write it as a powerful novel, & why take on the day-to-day persona of the protagonist?

It surely speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the cutthroat industry of publishing that such obviously talented writers feel the need to resort to misrepresentation & embellishment just to get published, while other writers spew out vacuous yarns (often with the aid of their students) with little merit & less literary skill, & have them published two, three, four times a year.

I wonder how many of our faithful readers sent money to this writer calling himself Nasdijj (his blog still begs for donations) for his noble efforts to give comfort & aid to the lost immigrant boys with AIDS he said were in his & his wife's care. & just because of our umbrage over all this outing, of having the wool pulled over our eyes, should we ignore his voice, bellowing in the wilderness, reminding us of the desperate plight of these children & the social institutions that are caring — or not — for the lifestyle & diseases killing these young souls?

When the scales of history are balanced; at whose feet will the greatest charge be laid?

Rebecca