A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris
"A Yellow Raft in Blue Water" is the debut novel by Michael Dorris, which explores the intertwined lives of three Native American women: Rayona, Christine, and Ida. The narrative begins with Rayona, a fifteen-year-old girl of mixed heritage, who grapples with her identity and experiences prejudice after moving to a Montana reservation to live with her grandmother. Throughout her journey, she learns valuable lessons about acceptance, self-sacrifice, and personal integrity, ultimately gaining confidence in her place within her community.
Christine, the second narrator, faces her own challenges, including a complicated relationship with her emotionally distant mother, whom she views as "Aunt Ida." Her quest for acceptance leads her down a tumultuous path of promiscuity and substance abuse, but she finds a sense of peace as her life approaches its end. The third perspective, Ida, reveals a family secret that complicates her identity, as she navigates the roles imposed upon her by her family for decades.
The novel delves into themes of identity, resilience, and the mother-daughter dynamic, resonating with diverse readers who connect with the characters' struggles and triumphs against a backdrop of poverty and abandonment. Through their experiences, Dorris highlights the strength and independence of these women, offering a poignant look at their lives and relationships.
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A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris
First published: 1987
The Work
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorris’ first novel, chronicles incidents in the lives of his three women narrators. Readers have embraced the book, finding the story to be a compelling look at mothers and daughters. The novel opens with Rayona, a fifteen-year-old girl who is part Native American and part black. When her mother moves her to Montana to stay with her grandmother on a reservation, Rayona’s mixed heritage makes her the target of prejudiced teens, damaging her already fragile self-esteem.
Eventually Rayona leaves the reservation and meets an understanding couple, who invite her to live with them. In Sky and Evelyn’s modest home, Rayona feels accepted and begins to value commitment, self-sacrifice, and honesty as prime ways to define oneself. By the novel’s end, Rayona develops the confidence and self-respect she needs to function in the tribal community and to be accepting of its diverse members.
Rayona learns to accept Christine and Ida, the other two main characters. Early in Christine’s story, her sense of identity is complicated by an emotionally distant mother, who insists on being called “Aunt Ida.” Christine’s belief that she started life “in the hole” sends her on a quest for acceptance that leads to promiscuity, alcohol abuse, the fathers of her two children, and, finally, a fatal illness. As her life is ending, she moves toward harmony with herself, finally content simply to be Christine, a woman defined by the love of a good friend and forgiving family members.
Ida’s story weaves together the autobiographies of all three women. During her teen years, her identity is negated by a family secret: She is not Christine’s mother but her half sister. Ida’s father and aunt, Christine’s biological parents, persuade Ida to pretend the baby is hers, saving the family from embarrassment. Ida’s true sense of self is obscured by the roles she plays and the tales she has been spinning for forty years. As her story closes, she is tentatively considering an honest relationship with Rayona.
That Rayona, Christine, and Ida are Native American women struggling with poverty and abandoned by most of the men in their lives motivates their strength and independence. Diverse readers have identified with the three’s emotions and experiences.
Bibliography
Broyard, Anatole. “Eccentricity Was All They Could Afford.” The New York Times Book Review, June 7, 1987, 7. Broyard observes that in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water Dorris describes a dying culture. The reviewer also notes that there is not much conventional plot but that the book’s women are beautifully realized, and that the real movement of the novel lies in the way the three versions of their story comment on and harmonize with one another.
Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. A gathering of interviews with Dorris and his wife that have appeared in various sources since the late 1980’s. The interviews also cast light on the values—literary, ethical, spiritual— that inform the couple’s work. Indispensable to any serious study of either writer.
Cowart, David. “ The Rhythm of Three Strands’: Cultural Braiding in Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.” The Journal of the Association for the Studies of American Indian Literature 8 (Spring, 1996): 1-12. Explores the symbolism of the braid in Dorris’s novel as portrayed in the joining together of the lives of Ida, Christine, and Rayona through the common cultural bond they share.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Multiple Perspectives.” The New York Times, May 9, 1987, p. B13. Kakutani notes the similarity in narrative method between this novel and The Beet Queen and comments that a strength of Dorris’s novel is its depiction of elusive states of mind through tiny details. Kakutani’s observation that the men in the novel are either sex objects or cads seems surprisingly off the mark.
Lesser, Wendy. “Braided Lives Under Big Sky.” The Washington Post Book Week, May 31, 1987, 5. Dorris’s style is seen as a matter of pressing down on the prosaic until it yields its own poetry in a sharp observation of reality. The mundane, through cumulative effect, becomes the marvelous. Dorris, Lesser comments, also creates a number of good minor characters.
MacCurtain, Austin. “In Free Fall.” The Times Literary Supplement, March 11, 1988, 276. MacCurtain observes that the device of multiple narrators gives density and richness of texture to the story. Its themes emerge without an omniscient authorial voice. Yet the high literary polish of the narratives may distort the terms in which such people see themselves and tell their stories.
Morris, Adalaide. “First Persons Plural in Contemporary Feminist Fiction.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11 (Spring, 1992): 11-29. Focusing on Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, as well as Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983) and Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field (1983), Morris explores the attempts of the authors to combine two philosophies in order to create a feminist political alliance that crosses generations, race, class, age, and sexual preference.