In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story.Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.

This assignment was extremely eye-opening. It’s not hard to argue that the person who is telling a story and how they tell it changes the story itself and how it is received. By following the assignment directions, I saw the difference in reception of the story “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England” change and shape the reception and interpretation of the story. I read the story silently by myself, read it out loud to my roommate, and had another roommate read the story out loud to me. Each time reading changed the story and shed a new light on the effects that changes in medium can have on translation.

The first step of the assignment was to read this story silently to myself. This story made a certain amount of sense. I immediately categorized it as a fairy tale or folk tale after seeing that, in the beginning, the syntax really confused me. I got the general meaning of the sentences, but got lost in each individual sentence and was distracted from the main story many times, and at times had trouble vizualizing exactly what was happening. The ending, also, didn’t really resonate with me as much as I thought it would—I think because of how much I was slowed down by syntax. As Thomas King writes in “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial”, “Non-Natives may, as readers, come to an association with these communities, but they remain, always, outsiders” (King, 189). I felt like an outsider looking in at this story. This culture isn’t my culture, and I had assumed even before reading that this story would not fit into my traditional “modern western” idea of a story and its plot. I could clearly see that this story was meant to be told out loud, as King alludes to in Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.

While reading this story out loud to my roommate, I knew that I would get really into telling the story. I had already pictured how I might read it out loud, and I was right about many of the choices I would make. I found that I was being very physical, I gestured almost every sentence. There are a lot of physical descriptions, and the way that the story is set up there are many  repetitive space descriptions within the story. For one example from many, discussing spears, the story reads, “Handlebar so big,” (73). With this, I gestured with both of my hands out. Once read aloud, it becomes more obvious that this tale was meant to be read out loud to another person.This made such an alarming difference in my understanding of the story as opposed to when I just read it silently. It felt more like a performance of a meaningful play, or something similar—which could possibly be tied into feeling as an outsider.

When I had my other roommate read the story aloud to me, I was shocked at how different an interpretation I had of the story even after hearing it twice. My other roommate had been present for my reading, and she isn’t white—she wanted to be the one to read the story, and believed that as someone who hasn’t benefitted from white privilege, she might be able to give a different interpretation of the story. I think that, when hearing the story from another person, you feel a sense of community within the characters and their communities. You can see the emotion of the characters and their values.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.