Answering question 1: 

Reading “Godzilla vs. Post-Post-Colonial” brought to mind the Odyssey and issues of translating English from the Homeric Greek: much has been written and debated of the historic and linguistic incongruities of the poem, a strange amalgamation which calls into question the identification of Homer as a single individual. In the early twentieth century, scholar Milman Parry examined in detail the poem’s extensive use of fanciful epithets for gods and humans alike, markers which are linguistic rather than thematic or narrative in purpose, “created to meet the demands of the meter of Greek hoeric poetry” (Knox 15). The discovery of this epithetical system led to the groundbreaking understanding of the Homeric works as orally improvisational rather than textually fixed. And according to Homerist David Bouvier in his examination of this issue, Greek civilization was predominated by speech, and the transmission of culture and history occurred orally (59). This is “the common complaint…of oral literature that has been translated in English” that Thomas King is writing of, that “we lose the voice of the storyteller…and the interactions between storyteller and audience” (186). What is lost in adapting Homer not just to text, but to English?

Harry Robinson’s “Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England” is, as a textual work made for speech, seeking to suture the link between storyteller and listener. In its strange syntax, as with the (prescriptively) grammatical nonsensicality of “and he eat right there” and the extensive use of sentence fragments, it forces the reader to present the narrative orally. I found it difficult to read it silently to myself; its fragmentary nature made me double-back and re-read, to make sure I was scanning the text properly. Like the Beat poets and modern slam poetry’s emphasis on the synthesis between poet and audience, in the collective disillusionments of the poetic environment and employment of audience reactions for emphasis and emotional catharsis —- as with the great “Say No” by Olivia Gatwood and Megan Falley, an example as well of a bond between storytellers — Harry Robinson is “re-creating at once the storyteller and the performance” (King 186).

Only when I read Robinson’s piece aloud to a friend, and had them read it back to me, did I grasp a full understanding of it. There is no textuality to Robinson’s work beyond orality. The rhythms, often harsh, with jarring sentence fragments as with “They want to have a queen. Got to be a woman” (Robinson 2005), the voices of Coyote and King brought to life through speech – this is all only understandable through telling the poem, and that requires a voice and an audience.

It is an aural/oral piece, and through its being written in English but demanding of its reader the oral finesse of Indigenous storytelling and community, it acts as a direct rebuke of the linearity evoked by the label of “post-colonial literature,” what King describes as the term’s implication of a “sense of progress in which primitivism gives way to sophistication” (185). KIng’s preferred term here is interfusional: Indigenous orality in the language of the colonizer. Keith Thor Carlson in “Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History” writes of “literacy…as a colonial weapon capable of inflicting damage by relocating the sacred from local control and into the public domain” (43), and it is through this understanding of the colonialism of literacy that we must understand what Robinson is doing through this fusion of text and voice, Indigenous history and colonial, assimilative language.

Reading Robinson also brought me to thinking again of Indigenous author Alicia Elliott and her “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground,” which I analyzed in one of my earlier blog posts: “culture lives and breathes inside our languages,” she writes, writing of how colonialist Canadia “fought so hard to make us forget them” (51). The term “post-colonial,” writes King, “is hostage to nationalism” (185), and perhaps this is what Elliott is (indirectly) pointing towards: an understanding of modern Indigenous literature as “post” colonialist erases Indigeneity through a lens of literacy. The problematics of hierarchically positioning literacy over orality are still evident to this day, as with the denigration of Africa as the “oral continent” and thus more “primitive”; in his Orality and Literacy, philosopher Walter Ong presupposes that literacy follows from orality, calling it a “shift” and emphasizing the importance of “comparing successive periods with one another” (2). This is what King warns against in his critique of the term “post-colonial,” and this dichotomous, sequential thinking is what a work like “Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England” challenges.

The “written word” has long been considered to carry a greater sense of authenticity than speech; but with Robinson, I found the authenticity in the speech, in my connection to the listener or the storyteller. Coyote and others found life in our voices (though this in itself is a problematic idea – I am not Indigenous). That is why Robinson is so unique. When I read the story aloud, and listened to it being read to me, this was not pure literacy – this was interaction, a destruction of the boundary between literacy and orality.

Works Cited

“An Introduction to the Beat Poets.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147552/an-introduction-to-the-beat-poets.

Bouvier, David. “The Homeric Question: An Issue for the Ancients?” Oral Tradition, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 59-61. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51578/pdf.

Buthelezi, Mbongiseni. “Debunking the myth that orality trumps literacy in Africa.” The Conversation, 8 Oct. 2015, https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-myth-that-orality-trumps-literacy-in-africa-47422.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality About Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines, edited by Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson, University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 43-72, https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2020wc/files/2020/02/Orality-and-Literature-.pdf.

Elliott, Alicia. “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.” The Malahat Review, 2016, pp. 47-54, http://www.malahatreview.ca/excerpts/197files/elliott.pdf.

Gatwood, Olivia, and Megan Falley. “National Poetry Slam Finals 2014 – ‘Say No’ Olivia Gatwood, Megan Falley.” YouTube, uploaded by Poetry Slam Inc, 31 October 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5GxVJTqCNs.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. Routledge, 2002, https://oportuguesdobrasil.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/ong_walter_j_-_orality_and_literacy_2nd_ed.pdf.