The Heirs of Columbus

"The Heirs of Columbus is so irreverent; I love it. Vizenor retells the story of Columbus but in Vizenor’s version Columbus is part Mayan and part Sephardic Jew. The plot of the novel involves attempts by several of Columbus’s descendants to reinter his remains. It has elements of a heist story. His alternative history of colonization undermines the narrative of victimization. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Vizenor is a very innovative writer. The way he tells his story puts pressure on the notion of a stable narrative. He’s also a scholar and a lot of his scholarship is in conversation with his fiction. So he is not just re-appropriating the story of Columbus, he is also reshaping the way stories are told. In an influential essay he wrote that we “need new pronouns that would misconstrue gender binaries, that would combine the want of a presence in the absence of the heard, a shadow pronoun to pronounce memories in silence, in the absence of cotribal names and nouns.” He’s really thinking about the trickster and the possibilities for play within the English language and ways to take on even the grammar of the literature of dominance. The trickster figure is all over, in the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and in Stephen Graham Jones. Anytime you see coyote in a native novel, that’s a trickster. In the literature, the trickster is deployed in different ways. So sometimes a trickster shows up to interrupt the narrative by breaking the fourth wall. Sometimes they show up in the work of somebody like Vizenor to ask us to rethink nativeness."