Ball Pit Blues: On Tiffany Midge's "Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's"

Tiffany Midge | Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s | Bison Books | May 2021 | 216 Pages

In his foreword to poet Tiffany Midge’s new book of short essays, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Geary Hobson writes, “Native American people have generally been portrayed by the dominant culture as being entirely without the least vestiges of humor.” He continues, “Indian humor continues to the present day and, I strongly believe, grows more potent and deadly with each generation.” Hobson, a Cherokee scholar from Oklahoma, is himself an essayist, poet, and critic, and Midge (Standing Rock Sioux) also embodies these categories (to the extent that they’re useful), often all at once. While the jacket cover bemoans the lack of a Native woman David Sedaris, positioning Midge as the antidote to this supposed lack, it’s better to leave Sedaris out of it and let Midge shine on her own. Because she does.

Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s takes its title from an interaction Midge recounts having in a dream with her dying mother:

“There are many versions of the scenes that take place in my head—a dying mother instructs her daughter with her last wishes—but the one I remember the most is poached from a meme making the rounds online” […] “‘I want my remains spread at Disneyland,’ my mother says. ‘But I don’t want to be cremated. Just leave my parts.’” […] ”We were two Indian women, laughing until our bellies ached, spitting death right in the eye.”

Grief and mothers are ever-present elements throughout the collection, which includes 50 essays in under 200 pages. The book’s embrace of grief allows for an expansive range of humor that includes satire, dry wit, Twitter, and inside jokes not here for white consumption. Moving sentences like, “My mother was worth far more than a hank of her hair. She was worth my spine. My eyes. My womb,” are just as at home in these pages as ones like, “The crucial difference between having children versus having pets is that when your sister’s cat gets run over by a car, you can say things like ‘She was never very bright.’” This range is one of the book’s greatest strengths, keeping the reader both entertained and emotionally engaged.

Tonal range, however, is not the only way in which this work is multifaceted. Topically, the essays cover familial and community loss, community theater, cultural appropriation and stereotyping, pussy hats, and the #NoDAPL protests. A satirical essay about the latter titled “Thousands of Jingle Dress Dancers Magically Appear at Standing Rock Protector Site,” which first appeared in Indian Country Today in 2016, is followed immediately by “Satire Article Goes Viral on Day of 2016 Presidential Election Results.” This is essentially an explainer essay in response to the fact that so many readers did not understand the original not to be real. “The majority of the general population is functionally illiterate when it comes to Native Americans and First Nations people,” Midge writes. “And if the entertainment industry thrived in our depressed and harrowing era of war, back when Hitler rose to power, it occurs to me that artists and creators are critically necessary now more than ever. Especially humorists and writers of satire.” The phrase “now more than ever” is its own satire, which shows the deft layering of Midge’s humor. But she also brings in a layer of welcome earnestness to the despair of, for example, willful neglect of the earth and climate change and terrifying fascists like the 45th president. “Perhaps the thousands of jingle dress dancers appearing like pan-Indian angels of mercy was a fiction that all of those tens of thousands of people who responded to my article needed to hear,” she writes. “Perhaps the dancers represented hope in the midst of so much disillusionment. My takeaway was that people can’t discern what is real and what is false, like ‘fake news,’ for instance.”      

“I’ll keep writing, practicing my mode of resistance and activism. And when the people feel despair, think of the jingle dress dancers—real or imagined—appearing across the landscape. Think of them as a blessing. We need it.” 

Midge also brings her poetic sensibilities to scenes of visiting her German-descendant father, who she visits in Thailand, with poetic lines like “my clothes stuck to me, the morning lush as rising cream,” and “There are places on this Earth so magical that they have the power to irrevocably alter your DNA—re-sequence your helix coils until you resemble a large egg or the fine, soft down slick on the face of an orchid.” Simultaneously, she skillfully and insightfully reckons with whiteness in her own family: “He is my learned father, my genetic sire, fingerprint of all my thoughts, every breath’s spectacle. He is an unabashed imperialist.” […] “He is a firm believer in a superior race, and nothing I can ever say or do will save him.”

 The absurdity of whiteness, and especially white feminism, as manifest in Wonder Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, Rachel Dolezal, and even pumpkin spice lattes, are fodder for some hilarious snark. It’s no secret (or maybe it is, considering how much people still seem to idolize and pedestal-ize her) that Margaret Atwood is problematic. Still, the whiteness of feminism in The Handmaid’s Tale is apparent. In “An Open Letter to White Women Concerning The Handmaid’s Tale and America’s Historical Amnesia,” Midge takes exactly as few words as she needs to point out that sterilization, sexual violence, and incarceration are weapons used against Indigenous women in real life. And a book/TV series that pretends it’s only horrible when it happens to white women is, well, flawed. “I don’t have the luxury or the class status to use appellatives like ‘pussy’ or ‘nasty,’” Midge writes in “Why I Don’t Like ‘Pussy’ Hats.” “They’re not re-claimative terms for someone like me.” “‘Pussy’ hats are not transgressive. ‘Pussy’ hats are an emblem, a tool of privilege.”

This line is nothing if not true, but it also touches on where the collection falters. Namely, the essays “Wonder Woman Hits Theaters, Smashes Patriarchy” and “Jame Gumb, Hero and Pioneer of the Fat-Positivity Movement” rely on gender essentialism for some of their humor, which reads a bit stale at best. The jokes in these essays are satirical, but using genitalia as a punchline in the latter essay grates a little.

That said, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s hits most of its notes. Midge’s voice embraces the inherently interwoven nature of humor with grief and anger, joy and profound love—of family in every iteration; of place and all its rough edges and soft spots; of language and its malleability. As Hobson notes in the foreword, this collection is “guaranteed to funny you up like wildfire.” May we all burn like her.