Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country

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Mr. Powers sees beauty and he often describes beauty in his writing: "An egret flew just over my shoulder and skimmed the water so close and I thought there was no way a body could be so close to the edge of a thing and stay there and be in control. But the tips of its wings skimmed along the water just the same. The egret didn't mind what I believed, and it tilted some and disappeared into the glare of the gone sun and it was full of grace." I am 18,” said the boy, “quite capable of doing what I want to do,” he added with emphasis and a certain vehemence in his tone. The other quibble I have is that any Iraqi point of view whatever is very much missing from Power's account. He has an Iraqi interpreter character, and speaks of buying food in local markets, but doesn't use those opportunities to give an insight into what it may have been like for the locals. The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns.

CRANE MURDOCH: That’s the question I open up the book with, right? I don’t know if I want to spoil it for all of your readers. I’m happy to comment on it though. Not to disappoint people, but I realize the answer is both so many things and is also incredibly simple. There are all of these theories that come out through the course of the book. Like Lissa’s daughter Shauna says, “She’s just an addict, she’s trading one addiction for another.” I think and Lissa thinks there is some truth to that. She was trying to fill this time and try to find a distraction for herself that was healthy. Over the course of searching for KC Clarke, she found so many reasons for why she was doing it. Ma, you just don’t understand. Staying here will restrict my growth. I want to see the world outside, I want to do big things in life, I want….to be a MAN not a BOY!”, said the boy with an anger that was beyond the mother's comprehension. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Sierra about Lissa. I learned that Lissa has an extreme empathy for people who are discarded in society. Lissa’s story is complicated, but it also reflects the experiences of many people in her community. Sierra linked up with Lissa because of her unique perspective on the oil boom, along with her statuses as an outsider not living on the reservation and an insider who grew up in the reservation’s community. Simultaneously Sierra reported on the investigation of KC within the politics of the reservation, and the crimes related to the oil boom. She also did a deep dive into the history of the reservation. When I asked her about how she pieced the book together, she responded, “It was an interesting project where it required these very different forms of reporting, kind of wrapped up into one. And it required some kind of compartmentalization in that sense. This is the part where I’m totally in Lissa’s life, this is the part where I’m doing all of this historical and archival research, and this is the part where I’m investigating how this really happened. And I like all of those things.” Much of the novel draws upon Powers's experience serving a year as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, from February 2004 to March 2005 after enlisting in the Army at the age of 17. After his honorable discharge, Powers enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University, where he graduated in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. He holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. [4] [5] In Al Tafar it is difficult to know who your enemies are. Bartles thinks about the kids to whom they throw candy today they may be fighting in a few years.

Beyond the Book

This book is a detective story, and a good one, that tells what happens when rootless greed collides with rooted culture. But it's also a classic slice of American history, and a tale of resilience in the face of remarkable trauma. Sierra Crane Murdoch is a patient, careful, and brilliant chronicler of this moment in time, a new voice who will add much to our literature in the years ahead. With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic. The Yellow Birds is a fictionalised account of a young American soldier’s experiences while on a tour of duty in Iraq in 2004. That this book has been published and is getting a wide readership is important because any and every account, in whatever medium, which underlines the absurdity of war is needed urgently until the sending out of young men to fight senseless wars becomes a thing of the past. I think what was happening to me as a reader, was that I felt the author was speaking SO loudly to me. It just was too much. Was I being too sensitive as I was reading the story? Then it was spring again in all the spoiled cities of America. The dark thaw of winter fumbled toward its end and passed. I smelled it reeking through my window during that seventh April of the war…

I need to be a man and what better way to become one than to go fight for my country,” said the boy in a tone that brooked no argument. With regard to the autobiographical elements of the novel, Powers says: "The core of what Bartle goes through, I empathised with it. I felt those things, and asked the same questions: is there anything about this that's redeeming; does asking in itself have value? The story is invented, but there's a definite alignment between his emotional and mental life and mine." [6] Plot [ edit ] Lissa Yellow Bird cannot explain why she went looking for Kristopher Clarke. The first time I asked her the question, she paused as if I had caught her by surprise, and then she said, "I guess I never really thought about it before." For someone so insatiably curious about the world, she is remarkably uncurious about herself. She is less interested in why she has done something than in the fact of having done it. Once, she asked me in reply if the answer even mattered. People tended to wonder all kinds of things about her: Why did she have five children with five different men? Why had she become an addict and then a drug dealer when she was capable of anything else? Powers has said that the novel took him about four years to write. [5] He also comes from a military family as "his father and grandfathers both served, and his uncle was a Marine." [6]MARTIN: Can you talk to me about the “why?” You ask this question in the book: why is Lissa so driven to find these lost people that don’t have anything to do with her? Michiko Kakutani included it as one of her 10 favorite books of 2012 and called it: "a deeply affecting book that conveys the horrors of combat with harrowing poetry. At once a freshly imagined bildungsroman and a metaphysical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory." [11] The theme of inter-generational violence and inter-generational trauma was something that came up a lot in my conversations with Lissa and her family members. I wanted to be very cautious that I wasn’t taking a frame and placing it on their family. But it was something that her family talked about a lot. Lissa’s mother is a social worker and a professor. Her uncle, who helped raise her, is one of the foremost scholars on decolonization theory. Powers was 17 when he joined the army and what I'd really like to have read is his diary from that time or some other such personal account of his tour of duty. Soldiers managed to blog from Iraq in the early years and that first hand reporting was amazing. It wasn't trying to be literature, it was just about telling it as it happened. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.