Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions (review)

Thomas King's work has long deserved a book-length study such as this one, which examines his stories, novels and children's books, and radio scripts in careful detail and with considerable theoretical nuance. Some of the pleasures and the pitfalls of the enterprise perhaps can be summed up by considering the image on the book jacket: a photograph of Thomas King taken by himself. A big drum sits beside him. So does a movie poster composed of a closeup of a young Native man with the heading 'Navajo' in big letters, and in smaller ones, 'he has his eyes on your heart.' King wears a bolo tie and a cowboy hat, not to mention a Lone Ranger mask. Draped over what look to be heat pipes above is what looks to be buckskin, although it could also be styrofoam packing material. King has situated himself 'in between' cultures and in between the binary opposites of race and nation and so does this book.

However, it isn't easy unpacking images this complex. King, part Cherokee, Greek, and (Swiss) German (not Navajo) is not geometrically positioned at the middle of two opposites either in the picture (or in life). He is a sort of Indian dressed as a sort of cowboy in a problematic indoor locale with one authentic-looking artefact (the drum) and a not so authentic one (the movie poster). A mask is designed to conceal one's identity; here it is also a symbol of a famous white fictional hero. And of course I could go on.

An academic book is supposed to be serious and comprehensive, and so in analysing comic texts as 'counter-discourse' this one is up against the impossible task of convincingly pretending it can analyse an inherently unstable message. I cannot pretend I did a better job than these authors in my work on King. What follows then is just a quick glance at the pitfalls of trying to analyse 'trickster discourse' using Western 'rational' discourse. The authors often situate King as 'a Native writer speaking back to racist conventions,' which is, of course, over-simplified, particularly if one assumes the racist conventions are those held only by whites. In the analysis of The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, some of this comes out, as the character Tom is played as mixed-blood, teased for being too white by Gracie Heavyhand and Jasper Friendly Bear, who sympathetically try to 'Indianize' him. King, as the author of the script, gets away with writing himself a part playing 'straight' man to Gracie and Jasper while simultaneously skewering white racism and complaining about being treated as white by Native people who take their identity for granted.

Another example of the problem is the analysis of King's use of Cherokee headings in Green Grass, Running Water, which is seen as cultivating an '"in-group" of readers who are familiar with this Native language.' But, as he says in an interview with Peter Gzowski, a friend had to help him get these headings right and, further, the 'in-group' of Cherokee readers is minuscule. The out-group includes nearly everyone, Native and non-Native alike. The problem is that the assumptions embedded in analytic prose prove just as strong as the stereotypes one might be using to oppose them: we might want King to be a Native author to stabilize our white selves, but he refuses to be positioned in any way that will allow a fixed identity to be imposed on him, which in turn makes us even more determined to get to the bottom of what he's up to. The authors helpfully quote Judith Butler to imply that what King's work does is 'to establish a kind of political opposition that is not a "pure" opposition' - but plumbing the depths of the impurity is a task of necessity always left unfinished. Although it is impossible to 'get to the...