Healing Humor

I knew The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven had definitely made it to my top-ten books after I finished reading the first story. I find myself drawn to this book over and over again. I think I must have read the introduction at least five times. And I’ve laughed every single one of them.

This collection of stories has some sort of powerful magic, indian magic. It touches places within me that no book had ever touched before. Yet it is not one of those dreadful books Kafka talked about, the kind that “wound and stab us”, that “affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide”. This is not one of those books. Or, now that I think about it, maybe it is. Maybe it does wound me, maybe it wounds me terribly, with unparalleled force. But at the same time, it offers what none has ever offered before, something both ordinary and extraordinary, even magical: humor. Healing humor.

Now, now… there’s hundreds of thousands of books that offer nothing but humor. Surely I cannot mean that this one is the first one, the only one. I don’t, and I do. Alexie’s humor is not merely satirical or parodical. It does not convey the truth, it does not exaggerate reality, it does not wish to hide the pain. Perhaps it does, but it goes beyond all that.

In Alexie’s words, “Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds”. Oh, I love that metaphor. I love it because it implies that even the best sense of humor in the world is not strong enough to ease the pain accumulated by millions of people for hundreds of years. It won’t stop the pain, and it won’t stop the devastation of the land, of the culture, of the soul. But it can save us all by allowing us to heal, by offering just enough time to sit down and begin to forgive. The mere possibility of forgiveness is already enough of a gift, because it allows one to hope in situations where there’s no room for hope anymore.

The pain will not go away, but the wound will not be infected. Perhaps the wounds will remain open for hundreds, for thousands of years, forever. But they will not be infected. And we’ll survive them all. If that’s not powerful magic, I don’t know what it could be. And I don’t think Kafka was so lucky as to ever encounter a book like this one.