After having read both “Listening to Ghosts…” and “Rhetorics
of Survivance...,” by Malea Powell, and then skimming back over the last three
short stories in Thomas King’s The Truth
About Stories…, I realized that in a few short paragraphs King, in his “A
Million Porcupines Crying in the Dark,” imparts to the reader the origin of,
reasoning for, and necessity behind the concept of rhetorical survivance. Because of its
relationship to this concept and the aforementioned articles, I would like to
include it in full:
What Native writers discovered, I believe, was that
the North American past, the one that had been created in novels and histories,
the one that had been heard on radio and seen on theatre screens and on
television, the one that had been part of every school curriculum for the last two
hundred years, that past was unusable, for it had not only trapped Native
people in a time warp, it also insisted that our past was all we had.
No present.
No future.
And to believe in such a past is to be dead.
Faced with such a proposition and knowing from empirical
evidence that we were very much alive, physically and culturally, Native
writers began to use the Native present as a way to resurrect a Native past and
to imagine a Native future. To create, in words, as it were, a Native universe.
(King 106)
In such a short amount of space, King perfectly
outlines not only the necessary specifics concerning rhetorical survivance, but
he also alludes to the origin and reasoning behind the concept of rhetorical sovereignty
as well, as he lists several examples of how stories being told about Native Americans
essentially removed them from the contemporary world by rooting them in a
stereotypical, inaccurate, or falsified version of their past that seemed to
signify their nonexistence in the present. Thus, the origin of, reasoning for,
and necessity behind the birth and utilization of both concepts in order to use
writing to reclaim their past, present, and future. Therefore, with this
passage, King also displays the interconnectivity of both rhetorical
sovereignty and survivance.
This passage became more relevant to me the second
time I read over it, especially after having read Powell’s “Rhetorics of
Survivance,” for the material she covers in the article and the words she
writes herself were illuminating. For instance, in relation to the first part
of the passage, Powell quotes Captain John Mason as saying, “They sought to cut
off the remembrance of them [Indian Peoples] from the earth” (402). While
reading this, I realized how truly revolutionary the concept of survivance was,
being that it represents a way that Native Americans are fighting back against
not only the physical genocide of their people, but also the genocide of their
history, culture, language, and even their very presence upon this land. I also
realized that simply writing was an act of survivance in and of itself. For what
better way to reclaim your past, present, and future than to share your
stories, theoretical ideas, historical knowledge, and contemporary
understandings of the relationship between the past and present? King’s book is
a physical example of rhetorical survivance, as well as sovereignty, as is
Powell’s articles. This is why she states in “Listening to Ghosts” that, “My writing
has always been an attempt… To insist upon an existence, a voice. To write
myself and my body into comprehensible space” (12). For with each word she
writes, she asserts her existence.
This brings me to another aspect of the readings
that I found interesting: the use of the English language as a tool of
resistance. I find this interesting because although English is the language of
the colonizer, like many other colonized peoples, Native Americans have adopted
it as a means through which they may gain agency. For example, in his essay “The
African Writer and the English language,” Chinua Achebe writes:
Those of us who have inherited the English language
may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may
go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included
many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial
arrogance and prejudice which may yet set the world on fire. But let us not in
rejecting the evil throw out the good with it.
He then says later in the essay, “I have been given
this language and I intend to us it” (Achebe 11). After reading Powell, it
would seem that she shares a similar sentiment, as she quotes “Native scholars
Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird,” saying, “We’ve transformed these enemy languages,”
before stating herself, “To reinvent ourselves in English is, then, for many of
us already alternative. We are all already alternative” (20). Like Achebe,
speaking from the indigenous perspective, regardless of the use of English, is
already an alternative act, as the language used and work produced will undoubtedly
concern and confront the issues of what it means to be living under a colonial,
neo-colonial, or paracolonial state. And as an example of this, Powell presents
Charles Alexander Eastman’s From the Deep
Woods to Civilization, as she writes, “It’s a trickster move that Eastman
makes when he drops these ‘innocent’ remarks on his journey from the ‘deep
woods’ to ‘civilization,’ remarks that clearly reveal Eastman not only as not
helpless in the face of civilization, but also as purposefully using its tools
in order to continue an indigenous struggle against Euroamerican imperialism”
(425). And these quick little remarks, almost like side notes, are also a
staple component to King’s writing as well.
For instance, within his stories and throughout his
story telling King “drops” several of these “innocent remarks.” He does so when
he says, “Though the border doesn’t mean that much to the majority of Native
people in either country. It is, after all, a figment of someone else’s
imagination” (102), while alluding to the border between the U.S. and Canada.
And of course, he’s absolutely right! He also does this to devastating effect
when he writes:
In the end, all Cooper is doing here is reiterating
the basic propagandas that the British would use to justify their subjugation
of India, or that the Germans would emply in their extermination of Jew, or
that the Jews would utilize to displace Palestianans, or that North Americans
would exploit for the internment of the Japanese, or the the U.S. military and
the U.S. media would craft into jingoistic slogans in order to make the
invasions of other countries – Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq – seem reasonable,
patriotic, and entertaining to television audiences throughout North America.
(105)
In these excerpts King is not only taking jabs at
colonial practitioners and their practices around the world, he is using what
Chinua Achebe would call a “world-wide language” as a tool with which he can
both respond on behalf of the various oppressed and colonized peoples
throughout history, as well as express himself and put into writing that which
is often not written about, spoken of, or even accepted as truth. And yet, it
is so. It is writing from an alternative perspective, and thus it’s interest to
me. For it amazes me how many atrocities in the world are so little spoken of
or given the attention they deserve. And so I can agree with Powell when she
says that “For me, this is the most exciting component of ‘alternative
discourses’ – telling a story that mixes worlds and ways, one that listens and
speaks…” (12).
But before I end this, I would like to touch on one
other thing quickly; that as I read through this literature and theory I am
more and more amazed at the ability of Native peoples to endure the hardships of
living under or within powerful states whose only interest concerning
indigenous peoples have seemed and still seem to be that of annihilation,
whether through physical genocide or cultural genocide in the form of
assimilation. But more than that, it is their will to speak out that I admire
most, and their ability to maintain their culture among the aggressive dominating
culture of the U.S. So I would like to end with one more quote from Powell; one
that speaks to this, and to the nature of survivance: “It is the ability of
indigenous peoples to consume and not be consumed, ‘to remain other within the
system’ that has seemingly assimilated us, which maintains our ‘difference in
the very space that the occupier was already organizing. This is survivance.” (20).
No comments:
Post a Comment