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Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 27 - Because Russian Guys Are Not Always Geniuses
Explanation and Analysis—Grief Shower:
In Chapter 27, Junior's mother has an intense emotional reaction to seeing him after they find out that Mary has died. Junior uses a simile to make sense of the moment:
Well, my mother quit slapping me, thank God, but she held on to me for hours. Held on to me like I was a baby. And she kept crying. So many tears. My clothes and hair were soaked with her tears.
It was, like, my mother had given me a grief shower, you know? Like she’d baptized me with her pain.
Of course, it was way too weird to watch. So all of my cousins left. My dad went in his bedroom. It was just my mother and me. Just her tears and me.
Junior compares his mother's tears to the water used during a baptism. In many Christian traditions, babies and other new initiates are baptized—either dipped in or sprinkled with water—as part of their induction to the religion. Exactly what the water represents varies a little from one branch of Christianity to another. Most often, it symbolically cleanses the initiate's soul of sin and establishes their eternal relationship to the Holy Trinity. Many Christians believe that a person must be baptized in order to go to heaven when they die.
Baptism has a fraught history among American Indians like Junior's family. One major part of the history of colonization in the Americas is the forced conversion of American Indian people to Christianity. European missionaries settled among American Indians and not only preached their own religions but also campaigned against Indigenous spiritual traditions. They sought to baptize as many American Indian converts as possible. While they claimed that they were saving souls, they used violent and manipulative persuasion tactics and did permanent damage to countless American Indian communities as generations of people grew up learning that they needed to be saved from their "sinful" culture of origin. Junior grows up a two-hour drive from Cataldo Mission, the oldest Pacific Northwest mission that is still standing today.
In light of this history, Junior's simile says something important about the experience of growing up in this community. Junior's mother is "baptizing" him with her tears, which Junior figures as a distillation of her pain and grief. She is not cleansing him, but rather inducting him into their own "religion," grief. Junior has now lost, in short succession, his grandmother, his father's best friend, and now his sister. He comments on the relentlessness of funerals on the reservation. Loss and grief are constant on the reservation, in a way none of Junior's classmates in Reardan can understand. This loss and grief are propelled by a violent history of colonization that has rendered everyone on the reservation vulnerable to trauma and premature death. Junior's mother cries on him as if to welcome him into a life where communal grieving, as uncomfortable and ugly as it is, is the only thing that keeps people going. She is teaching him that their community is oriented around grief in much the same way that a Christian community is oriented around faith.
Related Themes:
