1] 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 charac- ters 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 “Coy- ote 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.
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This is such an interesting topic to respond to. I read this piece once aloud and the second time, I decided to record myself. Here are some interesting observations 1) It is a challenge to read this piece silently to yourself 2) there’s a circular rhythm of speech within the piece 3) It is hard not to add words of your own to the story while reading it. The most interesting observation is that through reading this piece of literature out loud, I almost felt like I was imitating the way an Aboriginal person speaks.
It’s almost as if there is a metronome ticking away during my reading session. The words follow a circular rhythm, and it keeps the reader going. Whether or not this style of speaking is intended, the image that I had in my head was of the Chief in Pocahontas. I know this is a problematic image, but I thought that it was interesting that I had that image in my head even though I knew it was problematic. So, I was trying to find a scene where the Chief was speaking to link here, but I could not find a satisfactory one, I’ll just add this link here for now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUFJnmXeeoM, but though my search, I noticed that the way Pocahontas speaks and the way the Chief speaks is quite different. Pocahontas speaks in a way that is more familiar to us, while the Chief speaks in phrases. Though this is not an analysis about Pocahontas, I thought that since we are analyzing speech syntax, it would be interesting to bring up here.
In my reading, since the syntax of the text was much different from my day to day speaking, I unconsciously added words in various places, or I changed the words, just to make it fit the pattern of stories that I am more familiar with.
The other thing I noticed was that I began questioning the story. In my previous blog, I spoke about how I used to take stories and believe them whole-heartedly, especially if they were Aboriginal stories and especially if they’re told by an elder. However, when the story is written on paper, I started questioning the “facts” that I could decipher and wondered if they were true. Which I think is rather interesting because I have been taught to always question what I learn, and most of what I learn is in the written form, and so when I start to learn stories from the Aboriginal culture, I start to question the facts that they claim. For example, the book that is called “black and white” could be that it is an expression to describe a piece of document that binds parties “black and white”, but in the story, it is called “black and white” because the people that wrote it, one of them was black and one of them was white. So I thought that was really interesting. Perhaps it is because I’m coming into contact with these stories in setting that is asking me to be critical. Perhaps it is because of the format of the story. But it is an interesting observation that I made in myself.
Hi Qihui,
Thank you for your thought provoking description of what happened when you read the story out loud. I find it interesting that you could hear the circular rhythm in the story when it was read out loud. Do you think that maybe the way certain genres are written are specifically made to be read out loud? These stories were originally told orally, and perhaps that method of speech and the speech patterns are stuck into the style of writing. I also find it interesting that you felt as if you were imitating an Aboriginal person when you read the story out loud. Do you think would felt this way because you were in the mindset that this is a First Nations story, or because there are specific styles of Aboriginal writing that reflects the oral history of their stories?
Charlotte