{"id":40,"date":"2020-03-09T23:59:19","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T06:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/?p=40"},"modified":"2020-03-10T00:24:45","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T07:24:45","slug":"assignment-35-a-narrative-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/2020\/03\/09\/assignment-35-a-narrative-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Assignment 3:5 – A Narrative Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

For this assignment I chose to answer question four, which inquired into the ways in which King’s work in Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> is a form of decolonization. I believe that the two ways in which King engages in narrative decolonization in\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> are through the use of Indigenous patterns and structural story elements. The second way is through the blending and reiterating of previous characters from both Indigenous and settler narrative traditions in a manner which comments on these portrayals and creates a new understanding of the cannon of colonial literature.<\/p>\n

The use of Indigenous patterns and story structure should be considered a form of decolonization because in the way it disables the prioritization of western colonial hierarchies and story structure forms. When reading\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> I was struck by the ways it resembled another book that could be seen as a form of literary de-colonization,\u00a0Black Leopard, Red Wolf<\/em>, which could best be described as a fantasy novel rooted in African history and culture.\u00a0Black Leopard, Red Wolf <\/em>challenges the way novels about Black diaspora are conceptualized. In an interview<\/a> the author, Marlon James states: “I certainly enjoyed writing a lot of the tropes of medieval fantasy, but I also enjoyed upending them. So yeah, there\u2019s fairies, there\u2019s witches, there\u2019s immense evil, there\u2019s heroes, there\u2019s shape-shifters. But a lot of the African mythologies deliberately upend those tropes, because they\u2019re not European stories.” In this way, both books use narrative structures and convention that exist outside the Eurocentric setter colonial hierarchy. In Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> this is shown through the use of the medicine wheel as the paradigm which the book structures itself in. In settler-colonial fiction, a similar structure might be the the life of Jesus. The importance of these structures is that they subconsciously shape our larger mythologies. Even if someone never interacted with the bible, they would likely understand elements and symbolism from it as it is prevalent in many of our stories. One example narrative pattern where a character dies and then returns, which is a reiteration of the death of Jesus. By removing these patterns and replacing them with Indigenous structures and patterns, King is able to eschew the colonial understandings of the world, and create a structure devoid of the narratives of the settler-colonizers.<\/p>\n

Through the re-iteration of characters with ties to Indignity from both settler-colonial and Indigenous traditions King in an Indigenous narrative challenges the settler-colonial literary culture which controlled the portrayal of Indigenous characters to support western colonial hierarchies. In the reoccurring representations of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial narrative forms, Indigenous People are placed in specific narrative archetypes which serve to further marginalize them. For instance, they are often used to bolster white narratives, rather then existing in their own narrative structure. This is something which is touched on in the documentary\u00a0Reel Injun<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>which examines the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been represented by Hollywood. It also covers some of the portrayals of Indigenous people that King also addresses such as Hawkeye.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Both the documentary and\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> deconstruct settler depictions of Indigenous people by forcing readers to examine the blatant falseness inherent to these portrayals. By using characters (at least in name) from previous works, King is able to build off of previous narrative contexts while also emphasizing the previous artifice inherent in settler-colonial portrayals of Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n

The addition of a figure such as Coyote, who is a figure of purely Indigenous conceptualization forces the canon of North American literature to address what has been absent (or forcibly removed) from its storytelling traditions, which are the stories and characters created by the first people to live on this land. It also adds these characters into the meta-narratives of Indigenous lives.<\/p>\n

Ultimately both of these methods of decolonization serve to subvert and re-orient the reader to understand the previous role that settler narratives have played in their understanding of story, and through story, life.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

\u201cA Conversation With Marlon James and Victor LaValle.\u201d Vulture<\/i>, Feb. 2019, https:\/\/www.vulture.com\/2019\/02\/marlon-james-and-victor-lavalle-have-a-conversation.html.<\/p>\n

Diamond, Neil, director.\u00a0Reel Injun<\/i>. Domino Film Ltd., 2010, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=htyEJSEZYNU.<\/p>\n

King, Thomas.\u00a0The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative.\u00a0<\/em>Peterbough:<\/em>Anansi Press. 2003. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For this assignment I chose to answer question four, which inquired into the ways in which King’s work in Green Grass, Running Water is a form of decolonization. I believe that the two ways in which King engages in narrative decolonization in\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water are through the use of Indigenous patterns and structural story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69985,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69985"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/sophiedafesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}