Monthly Archives: July 2014

My assigned pages (322-334) are the closing pages of the third volume (west/black) and the beginning of the last (North/blue).

This time around, it was Hawkeye’s turn to tell the story. He tells the story about the Old Woman who “dug a big hole . . . and falls through that hole into the sky” (King 329) According to Jane Flick’s “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water, “Old Woman” is a reference to Star Maiden/Star Woman who is a figure in Blackfoot stories, and also a “Cherokee creation story” (Flick 161). In that story, after Star Maiden was digging “under a tree in her father’s special garden . . . she created a hole through which she fell from the sky to the earth below” (Flick 161). After doing some additional searches on the internet, and on the UBC Library archives, Star Maiden seems to be a reoccurring figure in stories from many Native Americans and First Nations communities. For instance, a Shawnee story titled “The White Hawk” found in Indian Nature Myths, tells a story about Waupee, the White Hawk, and the Star Maiden (Cowles 65-73).

I’m not going to lie, When Louis, Ray, and Al entered Latisha’s Dead Dog Cafe, I thought they were references to Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, and Al Green. I was of course, very mistaken. (A perfect example that reading aloud the story is a very different, and important reading method as opposed to just reading the story with our eyes). As Flick writes in her article, this is a reference to Louis Riel. Riel was a Métis leader who founded the province Manitoba, and played a large role in two major resistance movements again the Canadian government in 1869-1870—the Red River Rebellion and North-West Rebellion (Stanley). As alluded by the three characters in King’s story—Louis, who was a poet and Al, who was a priest—the politician himself was engaged in priesthood and writing poetry during different parts in his life. Before Riel spent most of his life fighting for and preserving Métis‘ rights, culture, and land rights, he was “given a scholarship to study at a Sulpician school in Montreal” at the age of 13 (Stanley). He excelled in his course of studies, but he left the seminary before he could complete it. One of the poems have been published on National Post in 2009 when Riel’s notebook was auctioned.

In Stanley Marche’s article, he also summarizes Riel’s current status and image succinctly: “The new poems from Louis Riel reflect a more complicated vision of our history than the tired and Manichaean division into conqueror and conquered . . . He is uniquely Canadian and uniquely mysterious. I can think of no other political figure, from any country, who means so many different things to such a diversity of people. A hero to the Metis, he also figures on the T-shirts of Toronto hipsters. Chester Brown, comics artist and Libertarian party candidate, picked Riel as the subject for a “comic-strip biography” and he could not have chosen a more complete cipher. The ultimate rebel and traitor, Riel was also a father of Confederation. An insane man given to bouts of bizarre and deluded religious enthusiasms, he is nonetheless an idol to many Catholics.”

– Kayi Wong

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During my first reading, Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water immediately reminded me of two other literary works: Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, and Harry Robinson’s story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, which we read for our last unit. It reminded me of Pynchon’s novel for more superficial reasons: both novels are embedded with allusions on every page—historical, cultural, mythological, pop culture related, etc. The fact that both stories are interwoven with other stories illustrate the idea that stories are not autonomous entities. As for Robinson’s story and King’s novel, both stories emphasize the multiplicity of truths, stories, histories—that there are no singular or universal voice that construct them. Like Robinson’s story, King demands multiple voices in his storytelling.

After reading through Dr. Paterson’s Lesson 3.2 notes, my understanding of “narrative decolonization” is the rebellion against colonial narratives through the manipulation (or revision) of dominant colonial narratives. This is a complex concept, and a challenging novel, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I misinterpreted both writers’ intent. However, the experience of reading and combing through this novel was extremely enriching, and I am more than willing to make the attempt at solving this puzzle. At this point of the course, there is nothing I resonate more than this quote from one of our professor’s blog posts: “. . . now I know there are many other ways of coming to knowledge and the urge to dichotomize is a Western way of knowing, it is not universal, not natural or human nature: it is ‘our nature’. The same can be said for the desire to establish universal categories” (Paterson). Keeping this in mind, I will discuss the acts of narrative decolonization King is doing with Green Grass Running Water.

King uses numerous narratives of domination and conquest: “European American origin stories and national myths, canonical literary texts, and popular cultural texts” (Paterson). There are the biblical references to the creation story, Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and the biblical, omniscient God. There are the references and “adaptations” of Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, Lone Ranger; though I am skeptical about using the word “adaptation” since it can establish the hierarchy of origins between the stories and characters.

In Green Grass Running Water, King completely disregards the narrative tradition of using a linear narrative, a narrative arch, or a singular narrator/voice to tell his story about these characters. There is also not a singular narrator, protagonist or hero/heroine in the story. For me, this echoes Robinson’s story about the Coyote that stories and histor(ies) cannot be constructed by a singular voice/perspective/character, which I have briefly discussed in a previous blog post. And because of this necessity of acknowledging a multiplicity of voices and lives, a universal truth could never be possible. I think that what King is trying to establish here is that there is not only no universal truths between the binary voices of the colonizers and the oppressed, but also that there are different voices, communities, and lives within the colonized. As “I says” states to Coyote in the last section of the novel: “[t]here are no truths Coyote . . . Only stories.” (King 391). And this might be a good place to add that although there’s a “I” in the novel, the I is not the narrator because “I” is portrayed as another character, and not the narrator of the story. An evidence of this is that King writes “I says” and not “I say”. This is not only a rebellion against the traditional English grammatical rules, but also reiterates that every “I” (and ultimately, each of us) is just another character in a story, just another piece in the puzzle (the puzzle being the truth and the world we live in). That “I” is no different from the self-proclaimed GOD in the novel who tries (and fails) to establish himself as the authority of truth, because no one is the proprietor of truths.

Moving forward, let me attempt to dissect how the four old Indians act as another form of narrative decolonization. At first glance, they seem like characters that are made up of contradictions, and they are. However, just like many other parts of the novels, King is not trying to create contradictory subjects, but simply that, that is what stories and truths are made up of—multiple pieces of truths and stories (which at times, disagree with one another). In the story, the four Indians, sometimes referred by other characters as the “four old Indians”, are Robinson Crusoe, Lone Ranger, Hawkeye, and Ishamel. These four characters, whose names are more widely known from their English canonical literary texts, are not only not Indians in their “original” stories, but they come from stories that have oppressive portrayal of Indians. In King’s story, they make up one of the three distinctive narrative threads in the novel, and are the escaped patients from the mental institutions run by Dr. Joe Hovaugh. One one hand, King’s characterization of these four characters could be a portrayal of how this oppressive fictional characters (who also saw themselves as saviours of the world) belonged in “mental institutions”, challenging the mental and intellectual capacity of colonial oppressors. On the other hand, this portrayal could symbolize how these four Indian figures have been driven to a mental institution in the first place as a result of colonization and the a lifetime of being indoctrinated with colonial narratives of domination and conquest.

When King disregards the linear narrative tradition, he also disregards western literary tradition of telling stories with a traditional dramatic structure. The story ignores elements of literary structures such as climax, conclusion, denouement. Instead, he employs a circular storytelling method, where the story ends where it initially began. More distinctively, the various narrative threads in Green Grass Running Water starts off separately and merges and diverges again throughout the story. The story flows like running water. For instance, while the four Indians’ narrative thread started off as its own chapter, the storyline merges in the forth volume as the four characters join the Alberta narrative, during Lionel’s birthday. By manipulating the western narrative traditions, King is in a way taking ownership and control of the colonization that has been done unto him—an act of decolonization through narrative construction.

In the story, Alberta’s family while crossing the border, are robbed of their sun dance head dresses by the American custom authorities, and these sacred items were also later found to have been trampled upon by those in charge. This type of incidences are common forms of colonial violence the federal governments inflict on the Native communities, in both the states and Canada. And this is where another act of narrative decolonization comes in in King’s novel. Just as the sacredness of their traditions have been mocked and trivialized, King satirizes cultural artifacts and religious beliefs, which can be found in canonical western literary texts, and the biblical creation story respectively, that are deemed as sacred from the colonial perspectives. There is Moby Jane, who is the gender subverted character of the canonical Moby Dick. And in the reference to the Adam and Eve story in Paradise, King takes a satirical spin on it: “That would be nice, says First Woman, and all sorts of good things to eat fall out of that Tree. Apples fall out. Melons fall out. bananas fall out. Hot dogs. Fry bread, corn, potatoes, Pizza. Extra-crispy fried chicken” (King 40). These are examples of how King revises and disturbs the sacredness the various symbols in colonial texts, and myths, to reflect how Native traditions have been abused by colonial domination.

In the opening of this blog post, I write that I’m approaching this text as a puzzle, but I must correct myself. If Green Grass Running Water is really a puzzle, it would not be a two-dimensional one. It would be a three or four dimensional puzzle that is made up of pieces, and threads of different materials, lengths, and colours, one that interweaves infinitely.

-Kayi Wong

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“[T]he imaginative writer is finding his identity within the world of literature itself” –Northrop Frye (240)

As Linda Hutcheon writes in the introduction in The Bush Garden, between 1950 and 1970, there was substantial progress in the quantity and quality of Canadian literature and Canadian criticism, and additionally, also a large difference in that knowledge about literature and criticism (Frye xiii). One significant player during this development is Northrop Frye, who was a writer, critic, teacher, and editor. According to Hutcheon, he had a “fine sense of his audiences—both the one he knew and the one he wanted to create, in Canada, for poetry” (Frye xii). Frye had a very specific approach to his criticism, and also was known for his openness about his method of review and evaluation, and for his “generosity and a respect for the act of creation” of writers (Frye ix).

As noted by Hutcheon, Frye has been a public voice and activist in the protest of the “stereotyping of Native peoples”, and in “Canada’s history of destroying, not preserving, indigenous cultures” (xvii). As Frye himself states, “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteeth-century literary conventions” (236). With Frye’s active commentary on the cultural and racial tensions in Canada at that time, it is no surprise that he brought the political position and cultural representations in the works of a particular Canadian poet and prose writer to the attention of his readers.

Duncan Campbell Scott was a prominent literary figure in Canada in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. He wrote poetry, and prose fiction, but as Frye highlights, Scott was also, albeit less well known as, the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, which enacted policies that assimilated First Nations people in Canada at that time. Frye also noted that Scott’s works possesses a “complicated cultural tension [that] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive”, as he “writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Debussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan” (Frye 221). By bringing attention to and connecting the themes and subjects in Scott’s literary works with Scott’s political inclinations and power, Frye is creating a connection between a writer’s own experiences, and a writer’s subjects and objects in their writing, an approach to literature with which Frye himself actually disagrees.

As Frye exemplifies, Canadian literature, in contrast to British and American literature, has always been the treated and consumed with inherent ties to Canadian history, culture, and environment. Frye states that this “historical bias”, which existed for writers, readers, critics, and editors alike, has caused the improbability for any Canadian writers’ literary work to be experienced independent of its social, historical context, and associations (233).

If Frye questions the truthfulness of “the notion that the literature one admires must have been nourished by something admirable in the social environment is persistent”, what was the critic’s intention in highlighting the cultural collision in Scott’s works, and his political role in the assimilation of Native people (218)? As evident in other parts of his essay, the notable critic is adamant about the idea that a writer’s life experiences contribute less for his/her writing than most would like to believe. As Frye illustrates, while Canadian writers are compelled (whether subconsciously or by editors and publishers) to use “distinctively Canadian themes”, the Canadian setting would not be more than a novelty, as the real life experience of a writer is ultimately less influential to his/her writing than his/her reading experience, and literary development (234). As Frye humorously notes (I read this as one of his “quiet humour” (xi)), if a writer’s literary life is based on his real life experiences, he/she would eventually run out of things to write about (236). Frye believes strongly that the forms of literature is an “autonomous” being, in that they can only exist within literature itself (234). This resolute attitude towards literature, and writing is what makes is Frye’s observations about Scott’s background so peculiar, and “irrelevant” (Paterson).

So does the responsibility lie sole in the writers, publishers/editors, or readers for a literary work of a Canadian poet or writer to be freed from the writer’s social, political, cultural, biological background? Is it possible for this “Canadian” consciousness and/or imagination, which are embedded in the writers’ and readers’ minds, to be isolated to any degree, if at all?

-Kayi

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