3.7

“…A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation… ”  -Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 148. 

My assigned section of GGRW: Start “Babo Jones sat in the Staff Room [19]” End “A white man,” said Norma …..”…” [30]

Babo Jones is a reference to Herman Melville’s character Babo in  Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno.” Babo is the leader of the slave revolt on board the San Dominick (Flick 145). When Amasa Delano boards the ship he believes that everything is going according to plan; however, he is unaware that there has been a revolt on board, in which the slaves, under the direction of Babo, rose up and slaughtered the majority of the crew (New York times).  Babo pretends to be Captain Cereno’s devoted servant, but in fact, he is closely monitoring Captain Cereno’s movements.

Sergeant Cereno refers to Captain Cereno in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” While it appears that Cereno is acting autonomously, Cereno is in fact, under the command of his “servant” Babo (Flick 146).

The “Pinto” refers to a horse with a “piebald” coat. It is also the name of a model of Ford automobile. Flick notes that Pinto horses are prominent in the drawings of the prisoners who were held at Fort Marion (146). Flick also notes that there may be a play on the word “Pinta” which was the name of Columbus’s ship. This may explain the link between the Pinto car and the puddle of water. Babo imagines that the “Pinto looked a little like a ship” (King 27).

Jimmy Delano is most likely a reference to Columbus Delano, a lawyer and politician, who worked as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). Flick describes how Delano defended the Bureau of Indian Affairs against charges of mistreatment of the Native Americans in the Red Cloud Agency in South Dakota in 1875 (146).

Martha Old Crow : She is a medicine women who also appeared in King’s Medicine River (Flick 146).

George Morningstar: A reference to George Armstrong Custer. Custer was a military captain during the Sioux Wars. He achieved notoriety for leading an outnumbered infantry into battle against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Custer and all of his men were killed (Encylopedia of World Biography). To cite the Encyclopedia entry on Custer: “Custer was a man so paradoxical that he could fight corruption in the Indian Bureau to the disservice of his own carrier, yet also order a charge to kill Native Americans.” Custer was given the name “Son of the Morning Star:” by the Arikaras in Dakota (Flick 146). George’s comment “Right…And I’m General Custer” (384) makes this allusion to George Armstrong Custer quite evident.

John Wayne is referenced frequently throughout King’s novel. John Wayne was an iconic Hollywood actor featured in numerous Westerns. He has come to epitomize the glamourized Cowboy figure of the Hollywood Western. Flick tells us that Native Americans have boycotted his films in the past due to the discriminatory portrayal of Native Americans (147). In an interview with Playboy in 1971, Wayne reveals some troublingly racist, sexist and homophobic assumptions.

The Lone Ranger is a prominent figure in the American literary and filmic imaginary. The Lone Ranger is portrayed as a masked man, who has a devoted “Indian” companion named Tonto.  He has served as the hero of numerous films, western books, radio productions and television series.

Ishmael : The name of a character in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.The opening line of Moby Dick has become one of the most iconic in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.” (Flick 143).

Robinson Crusoe : Refers to the hero of Daniel Defoe’s now iconic novel Robinson Crusoe published in 1719. Flick draws the connection between Crusoe’s shirt: “the one with the palm trees,” (King 9) and Defoe’s desert island story.

Hawkeye : Apparently borrowed from Native American culture, Hawkeye is a name that circulates in American “frontierest” literature and film. He is the hero of numerous Hollywood features.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

(*All of my other research sources are linked directly into the text!)

3:5.

Question # 4

One of the instances of King’s “narrative decolonization” that I found particularly interesting was the sequence in which Changing Woman encounters Ahab, the protagonist from Moby Dick. The passage ambles in King’s non-linear fashion; he weaves references from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into the Coyote narrative, to produce a dream-like sequence in which Western literary texts are split open, stretched apart and disassembled.  The narrative follows Changing woman, who (as is outlined in the introductory material to this lesson) is a figure which will be unfamiliar to a non-First Nations audience. The passage thus constitutes an encounter: a re-imagining/re-assembling of Western and First Nations stories and cultural frameworks. By imbedding Changing Woman within a comic perversion of Moby Dick (one of the hallmarks of the Western literary canon) King disorients the ideological scripts that police the precincts of Western cultural and artistic achievement. The violence of the whale hunt seems to symbolically encode the violence of western imperialism, as well as the violence of white male privilege. King writes:

“And everyone grabs their spears and knives and juicers and chain saws and blenders and axes and they leap into little wooden boats and chase whales. And. When they catch the whales. They kill them” (195).

King draws a linkage between the European imperial project (whale hunting as one expression of this project) and the institutionalized racism and sexism that permeated the canonization of certain works of Western literature. The exchange between Ahab and Changing Woman clearly illustrates this: “We’re looking for the white whale, Ahab tells his men. Keep looking.  (…) Black whale? yells Ahab. You mean white whale, don’t you? Moby-Dick, the great male white whale? That’s not a white whale, says Changing Woman. That’s a female whale and she’s black (196).”

It is difficult not to miss the highly charged racial and sexual politics **(click on link for a discussion of the intersection between settler colonialism and patriarchy)  of this exchange. Positing Changing Woman as the spokesperson for silenced discourses  (those belonging to women and non-Europeans)  King injects the story of the oppressor with the voices of the oppressed.

Another instance of narrative decolonization is the sequence in the realist story, in which the narrative line cuts between scenes of characters all watching the same Western (pages 214-221).  The Western, featuring John Wayne, replete with its images of charging cavalry and ‘Indians’ on horseback, serves as a frame through which King filters the experiences of his characters. The clichéd archetypes presented in the pop culture genre of the Western, seem hollow and sterile in comparison to the vibrantly complex and psychologically nuanced characters that King has created. This tension between the Hollywood version of “Indian-ness” and the lived realities of First Nations people is central to King’s commentary and to his textual decolonization.  I referred in my discussion of Moby-Dick to the violence of white male privilege. In this particular passage, we find a different kind of violence: the violence of having one’s identity subsumed into hollow stereotypes, and commodified as a product in the entertainment business.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.