Enigmas and Laughter (Assignment 2:4)
Yet Lutz and Wendy Wickwire help us to see that, practically speaking, we’re not dealing with a simple static dichotomy of monomyth vs polymyth but with fluid, changing, constantly renegotiated contact zones, meetings of horizons in which different (but perhaps not wholly incommensurable) stories meet. Values and outcomes are always somewhat complex and unclosed to begin with: as with the adoption of pre-Christian stories and practices into instantiations of the Christian mythos, or the mixture of Christian and courtly values in medieval romance, or indeed the European elements in post-contact stories of North-West coast Indigenous peoples. These cases are not to be dismissed (as post-contact stories were by anthropologists) for not fitting the type, but rather valued as ambiguous places of intersection displaying the extraordinary complexity of belief.
Ambiguous or, to use King’s word, enigmatic. These are areas of imperfect understanding and (as Chamberlin would point out) constant contradiction (115). Perhaps they carry the good news that we don’t have to be—can’t be—entirely consistent. Can only one story really be sacred and true?
There’s a story about a little girl who asks her mother where they came from. The mother replies, “God made us on the seventh day of creation.” The girl, still unsure, asks her father the same question. His answer—“We evolved from apes.” Now she’s more confused than ever. She goes back to her mother and says, “You told me that God made us and Dad said we evolved from apes. I don’t understand—which one’s true?” “They’re both true, honey,” her mother responds, “your father’s just talking about his side of the family.”
A resolution and no resolution at all. Chamberlin would have us see that we can and do believe in both, and that this isn’t just a result of muddled thinking. In fact, sometimes it can be the result of humour and irony. Lutz notes that Indigenous storytellers often use humour and irony to “challenge and reorder hierarchies of power” (13). Maybe what King is doing is using humour to point out the radical contingency of the stories we live by, the telling of them, and even the analytical models we use to discuss them. They didn’t need to be this way. And changing the telling or the valuation can have genuine transformative power. Laughter, which may be as close to a cultural universal as it gets, may be a potent means of finding common ground. At least, being able to laugh at ourselves may have a certain value.
“Like Harry Robinson’s story about the stolen paper and the accounts of literate indigenous prophets, this suggests a prior history of literacy (a first fourteen chapters, if you will) among Salish peoples. It’s not that literacy (and thus history) was absent before colonization but that native traditions of literacy were different from those of the newcomers—and so unrecognizable to them. This conclusion is well borne out by Courtney MacNeil’s comments, which we read earlier this term, on how oral and literate practices are inevitably intermixed in a culture.”
I find especially poignant Carlson’s suggestion, quoted by Dr. Paterson, that “literacy is part of a broader genre of transformation stories” for the Salish peoples (61). This is not merely to say that transformation might fit into the category of literacy (significant though that is) but to propose that writing participates in a more expansive activity of transforming the world. The Salish Transformers, as I imagine, etched new and lasting meanings and forms on the face of reality—Transformers stories thus imply a powerful literacy in the enduring relationships between Salish peoples and their homelands (transformations being both written and readable). Our (and other) acts of writing, meanwhile, can represent comparable (if much more minor) transformative inscriptions.
And, finally the last quote from this most wonderful Blog:
“Perhaps it would be an appropriate revision to suggest that settler populations have historically displayed a certain illiteracy, one encapsulated in the mythology of the terra nullius, the empty land or blank page. The failure to recognize the presence of anything readable may be the most extreme act of illiteracy. Part of our task may become an awareness of alternative literacies, an awareness not geared toward decoding or explanation as toward mutual respect and acknowledgement.
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2:4 – Dichotomous Thinking and Thomas King
f I had to come up with another reason, though, for King’s strange inconsistency, I might say that King is pointing out how easy it is to fall into these binaries, even after we have been told to be cautious of them. It is very difficult for us humans to ‘de-binarize’ our thinking; we need look no further than one of the most prevalent dichotomies – male/female – to see just how troubling these binaries can be and how difficult it has been for those who identify as non-binary to try to dismantle them. Thus, perhaps King is also demonstrating that no matter how aware we are, we are still prone to this kind of thinking: it is a process of unlearning that we must embark on consciously and over a prolonged period of time. I would add as a final comment that not every culture seems to tend towards binary thinking, but the one in which we find ourselves most certainly does, and so it is our duty to be critical of how we organize the world.
Blog 2:4 :: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
King is doing a few things by setting these two stories at ends with each other. First, he is showcasing how these two ideologies have shaped history. He is, of course, representing beliefs that are in some way contrary with each other, because when we view how these two worldviews interacted with each other in our past, the result was one worldview assuming dominance over the other, and attempting to control them “for their own good.” The dominance of one group over another is not an idea that is formed in Charm’s story of creation, but is rather built on over and over again throughout the many stories in the Bible. Here, King is comparing the worlds of these two culture’s spiritualities and the world that makes up our history.
Second, King is breaking from the colonial norm of assuming one truth and embracing the complex nature of the world that lives outside of our minds. It is a colonial mindset that finds co-existence of opposing views discomforting. After all, where in the Biblical story all truth and all power points towards god, in the story of charm, life is permeated with cooperation and harmony.
Dichotomies are a colonial construct. Believing that there is an inherent, mutually exclusive opposition between states of being (rich/poor, white/black, strong/weak, right/wrong, etc.) is a way that colonial mindset boils down complex ideas into easy to understand bites that let us to make what feels like meaningful statements about the world. As King puts it “we trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas.” (25)
We have ideas about how the world is black and white that we have been taught to embrace as soon as we start learning the English language. As young children we learn all about male and female, boy and girl, and yet there is no standard in grade-level education where students are expected to develop a broader understanding of the differences between gender identity, gender expression, sexuality, and sex, and how the many variations along the spectrum between boy and girl, male and female, are expected to fit in to what we know.