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<\/a>A not-too-sharp photo of the Rosetta Stone taken on my first day in Europe.<\/p><\/div>\n
This story of the two twins\u00a0presents a perplexing a challenge to what is arguably the most powerful embodiment\u00a0of Western civilization: the written word. The most famous artifact housed in the British\u00a0Museum, the Rosetta Stone, contains the key to understanding an entire civilization. It is through the written word that Hammurabi manages to assert control over his newly conquered dominion. The writings of Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle survive to this day and continue to be studied by scholars the world over, championed as the fountainhead of Western thought. Latin, though a dead language, continues to thrive on paper and weaves together the various cultures of Europe into the singular conglomerate, a European mega-cultural complex. The Bible binds billions of believers to a common faith for millennia with a text that has remained relatively unchanged since AD 325. The written word and its promulgation is responsible for stasis and change, power and dissension, belief and disbelief. Does the suggestion that all written word is somehow insidious, that it is somehow inferior to the spoken word, undermine the legitimacy of Western culture as a civilization?<\/p>\n
It is unmistakeable\u00a0that\u00a0Robinson’s\u00a0narrative mirrors the Biblical account of Adam and Eve:\u00a0there exists a forbidden truth that, once discovered, can bring harm into the world. Furthermore, it is through disobedience that the dissenters are exiled from Eden, reinterpreted as North America in Robinson’s story. It is ironic that this story, which attempts to cast Western written tradition in a critical and negative limelight, inevitably references one of the most influential texts in Western culture. It is also important to note that in this Indigenous account of good and evil, Robinson\u00a0has positioned\u00a0his people\u00a0as the good guys, much in the same way that Christian\u00a0settlers\u00a0see themselves as the morally upright race ordained to educate the heathens. Yet what makes his story different is that his Eden was not left barren; the Indian people continue\u00a0to live in\u00a0paradise. They are the unfallen people. Perhaps Robinson wants to provoke the audience to re-examine the basis and legitimacy of the story that serves as the moral beacon of the Western world.<\/p>\n
Robinson’s adoption of the forbidden tree narrative\u00a0demonstrates that the boundaries delineating oral and written tradition is rather porous and allows for the osmotic interchange of ideas and genres. Just as Western anthropologists attempt to crystallize\u00a0the Aboriginal oral tradition into static anthologies rendered understandable and palatable to the Western audience, Robinson does the reverse by thawing the Biblical narrative of evil entering the word and contextualizing it in an Aboriginal perspective, giving prestige to the Aboriginals and employing the narrative as a\u00a0defence to justify their claims of belonging to this land. We can learn a lot about this repurposing and repackaging of narratives if we investigate the underlying motives involved in their appropriation.<\/p>\n