The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
by Nasdijj
Book Description
Nasdijj’s critically acclaimed, award-winning memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, took the literary world by storm. “An authentic, important book,” raved Esquire. “Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect.” Now, this celebrated Native American writer has given readers a powerful, brave, and deeply moving memoir of the unconditional love between a father and a son.
Eleven-year-old Awee came to live with Nasdijj carrying a brown paper bag containing all his belongings, a legacy of abuse, and AIDS. But this beautiful, loving, and intelligent little boy also had enormous hope for his new life. The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is the heart-rending but also joyous story of this untraditional little family, filled with love and laughter, but also with great pain, as Awee became progressively more ill.
Nasdijj writes about their motorcycle trip to see the ocean for the first time, about baths and baseball, about Awee’s “big brother” Crow Dog, and his dog, Navajo, but also about the brutal realities of reservation life and the challenges of dealing with a sometimes hostile medical establishment that often lacks the knowledge to treat pediatric AIDS. In the end, Nasdijj must find his own way of alleviating Awee’s suffering—and of helping him maintain his dignity in the face of a disease that gradually robs him of himself.
By turns searing and searching, lyrical and raw, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is ultimately transcendent—for in the end Awee got what he wanted most in his short life: a real dad.
Amazon.com
Three decades old and counting, the worldwide AIDS epidemic has touched millions of lives. It has also yielded a sorrowful library of memoirs and tributes, among the most memorable entries in which is this compelling portrait of a child born into illness and determined to beat it.Born of a Navajo mother, Nasdijj met 11-year-old Awee while still mourning the loss of his own son. "AIDS had knocked him out," Nasdijj writes. "But Awee was a fighter. He always got back up again." Determined to help Awee in that fight, Nasdijj recounts the miseries of dealing with indifferent doctors and Indian-agency bureaucrats ("Anglos," he writes, "would never tolerate the kinds of limited options Indians have to live with every day"), of seeking avenues of relief from pain that lead into back alleys and other tortured lives, of finding reasons for hope against an ever-stronger enemy--one of whose most powerful guises, he tells us, is loneliness. "Why would anyone sane adopt a child with AIDS?" Nasdijj writes, answering his own question: "Because one comes to you. Because you can." This tragic, beautifully written memoir encourages us all to do more. --Gregory McNamee
About the Author
Nasdijj was born in the American Southwest in 1950. His grew up partly on the reservation—his mother was Navajo—and partly in migrant camps around the country. He has been writing for more than decades, making ends meet by reporting for small-town papers, teaching, and migrant labor. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and winner of the Salon Book Award. “Nasdijj” is Athabaskan for “to become again.” He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Keywords: The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping, Books, Nasdijj, Nasdijj, Awee, Navajo Indians, Biography, AIDS (Disease) in children, Biography / Autobiography, Biography & Autobiography, Ethnic Cultures - Native Americans, Personal Memoirs, Literary
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