Please see my editorial re: the outing of this writer calling himself Nasdijj.


Geronimo's Bones
Nasdijj
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345453913

A Memoir of My Brother and Me. About the love between two brothers, that saves them from being destroyed by the migrant farming world in which they grew up.

Born to migrant parents -- his white “cowboy” father & his Navajo alcoholic mother -- Nasdijj knows little of American 1950s conformity. He is busy working the harvests in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington & North Carolina, where despair & death are familiar.

Nasdijj has only love & forgiveness for his hard-drinking, hard-living mother & after her death, the brothers are left in the care of their ill-tempered father. They rarely attend school, & together they pick the equivalent of a man's worth in cotton, tobacco, tomatoes, peaches, & anything else.

Nasdijj is back!

It was with great anticipation that I opened Geronimo's Bones. I knew that I would follow my best beloved author into the crazy, dangerous world of his beginnings, about which he would write in poetic & soul-searing honesty. While he has offered glimpses of his childhood in his two earlier books: The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams & The Boy and The Dog Are Sleeping, I knew he was now going to tell his own story. True to his way, he remembers through his love for his brother, Tso & how that brother gave him solace & purpose.

For someone with Fetal Alcoholic Syndrome, reading & writing are almost impossible, yet these two boys did just that...

“...We could and we did teach ourselves to read. We had to. There were no other options. Reading was a matter of life and death. When I am teaching children how to read, I tell them this. Reading is a matter of life and death. There is a deathly serious part of any child, buried under layers and layers of the deadening cuteness society assigns to childhood, that wants to believe it, that does believe it: Reading is a matter of life and death. The beauty to it unfolds when the child asks when does he begin and how. When do we begin and how?” (Page 6)

Learning to read Nasdijj is to learn to listen, all over again, to the raw & lyrical language of the heart & the soul. He will give you visions & stories which will move you to tears, to sighs, to gulps, to goosebumps ... & to the cracking open of you safe heart. This man writes about love without an ounce of sentimentalism, in vivid, lilting language in the rhythms of a master storyteller.

Geronimo's Bones is Nasdijj's homage to his brother, Tso (The Smarter One), whose very presence saved him, making him survive to become the writer we've all learnt to love.

So, come pick cherries with the Chippewa, join the carnival, remember a father, hear the stories of a mother, borrow a Corvette, make the drive West, search for a new life, meet a grandmother who gives spiritual anchorage, make pilgrimage to Geronimo's burial site, go to jail, see two brothers make it to adulthood in the '60s, & finally, get to know the rescuing power of children.

Geronimo's Bones, a profoundly healing memoir, will take you into these brothers' two worlds -- the white one where they find meanness of spirit & paucity of hope, & the Navajo world where they find their soul, & learn to “walk in beauty”. Here we join in in the adventures of youngsters in a time not yet bound by political correctness, when a boy learns how that love for his brother keeps him sane & honorable; keeps him going; keeps him from destroying himself the way his parents destroyed themselves. Nasdijj & Tso bury the age-old tale of Cain & Abel, & bring forth a new story from which we may step forward & walk in beauty, even as our hearts bleed.

Gripping, illuminating & hopeful. Read it & weep, & then know you've read something that will shine in your mind for the rest of your life.
(04/25/04)

Rebecca