Shouldering the Burdens of History: The Parrot as Postcolonial Satirist in Gary Barwin's Yiddish for Pirates

The back-cover copy for Yiddish for Pirates (2016), a novel by the Jewish-Canadian writer Gary Barwin, identifies it as, among other things, "A post-colonial satire."¹ Given its harsh and playful critique of atrocities against Jewish and First Nations people by the Spanish Inquisition and Spanish imperialism circa 1492, as well as its unflattering portrait of the New World's Ur-colonist, Christopher Columbus, this label seems eminently suitable. Reviewers of Barwin's novel, which was shortlisted for Canada's top fiction prizes, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, are less inclined to dwell on satire per se than to emphasize its exuberant mix of slapstick, stand-up, literary allusion, and Jewish humor. Some, like the Globe and Mail's reviewer, catalogue its generic indeterminacy,

It doesn't conform well to any category or trope of literature, but instead makes a place as a fresh, new thing that draws from sea shanties and Talmud, history and fantasy, romance, adventure, linguistics, fashion, and the adventure serial of the early days of movies.²

"Satire" doesn't even make that list, nor the Quill & Quire reviewer's comparable description of Yiddish for Pirates—as "an enthusiastic, frequently over-the-top mash-up of 15th- and 16th-century European history, Talmudic and Kabbalistic Jewish lore, swashbuckling pirate narratives, and fart jokes"³—although here at least the humor gets a sniff.⁴ Satire's absence, despite the back-cover prompt, is not entirely surprising: satire has a long history of being misrecognized or misinterpreted, of being denied or identified as something else.⁵ Indeed, "postcolonial satiric novel" would be a more accurate label, recognizing satire as a mode operating within the novel's broad generic contours; as "a borrower of forms,"⁶ satire has been called "the cuckoo bird of the literary genres because it lays its eggs in other birds' nests."⁷ Satire is frequently associated with birds and other animals—it has also been likened to a porcupine, a wasp, and especially a satyr, the hybrid goatman identified with satire through a false (but longstanding) etymology.⁸ Critics Edward and Lillian Bloom encapsulate satire's supposed corrective and warning function in the image of "a sea gull impaled on a pier to warn off other gulls."⁹ While that gruesome metaphor also captures satire's representational violence—how its demeaning distortions are so often said to "attack" or "wound" its "targets" or "victims"¹⁰—Barwin's novel invites us to consider the question of the animal not as a metaphor for satire's targets or its sharp bite but as its perpetrator and delivery vehicle—as the voice that deploys satire's "militant irony."¹¹ That is because every word of Yiddish for Pirates comes from the mouth—or rather the beak—of a garrulous, multilingual, irreverent five-hundred-year-old African Grey parrot named Aaron.

When a human writer makes a nonhuman animal the first-person voice of his satire, what impact does this device have on its meaning and referential resonance? And in what way can a parrot's perspective be a postcolonial one? Drawing on insights from animal studies scholarship, satire theory, and postcolonial theory, this essay seeks to understand the unique forms of satiric distance and proximity, and the moral grounding and authority, that Aaron achieves as a function of his questionable animal otherness—questionable because some of his most notable qualities include his highly anthropomorphized identity, his honorary Jewishness, the dexterous excess of his Yiddish-inflected wordplay and standup-style wisecracks, his contemporary-sounding sensibility and cultural references, the human intentionality and agency of his plot-furthering actions, and especially his combination of flying-above-it-all distance from and in-the-fray involvement with the foibles and horrors he witnesses. As a bird Aaron gains an exemption—critical and satiric detachment—from the very human violations and violence the novel exposes; man's inhumanity to man cannot reasonably be pinned on him. He may incidentally satirize other birds, particularly seagulls, which he calls...