Due Anishinaabe nella Grande Guerra: storia, arte e occasioni mancate in Blue Ravens di Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Vizenor’s Blue Ravens, showcased in the book’s subtitle as a “historical novel”, tells the story of Basile and Aloysius Beaulieu, two Anishinaabe brothers from the White Earth reservation who are drafted in the American Expeditionary Force to serve in the Great War. Based on careful historical research and in part of Vizenor’s own extended family history, Blue Ravens features a cluster of chapters devoted to the combat experience of the two brothers and though it would be a stretch to describe it as a “war novel”, the narrative deals with themes and issues often found in war stories. In particular, the novel follows the traditional tripartite pattern of war stories, with part of the novel devoted to the pre-war experience, a rite-of-passage middle featuring the experience of combat, and a final section devoted to post-war recovery. In Blue Ravens, this third part sees the two brothers achieve artistic success as, respectively, a writer and a painter, as they mix as peers with the crowd of expatriates and Modernist visual and literary artists of post-war Paris. Though it provides in many ways an interesting and uncommon portrait of two Indians finding a sort of new emotional and artistic home abroad, the narrative is weighed down by Vizenor’s often tiresome philosophizing. His ventriloquist tirades nearly obliterate the subjectivity of his narrator (Basile), and, even more problematically, his depiction of the war, and of his Indians’ participation in it, skirt many of the thorniest political problems his own narrative both implicitly and explicitly raises.