Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature

1. Language, Resistance, and Subjectivity

Notes to chapter 1 on pages 232–34. 19 when languages collide in mid air when past and present explose in chaos and the imaginings of the past rip into the dreams of the future —Jeannette Armstrong, “Threads of Old Memory,” from Breath Tracks 1 Language, Resistance, and Subjectivity The first encounters between colonists and Indigenous peoples generally involved the exchange of words—the names of people, places, objects—and are emblematic of the central importance of language in colonization. Relations of colonial power were constructed through language . Place names were used to claim ownership, to define, and to make connections between the Old World and the New; language was used to divide tracts of land, producing boundaries between one group of people and another; the language of disciplines such as ethnography and anthropology was used to objectify and classify colonized peoples; and the language of treaties was frequently used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. Usually colonizers did not learn the languages of Indigenous peoples, but in British settler colonies English (and, in Canada, English and French) were constituted as national languages. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o puts it in Decolonising the Mind (1981), “the domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised.”1 Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to imagine Indigenous peoples as merely passive and powerless objects of colonial rule, or the imposition of English as a sign of the voicelessness of the colonized. Mary Louise Pratt uses transculturation, a term borrowed from ethnography, to refer to the interpenetration of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures in what she terms “the contact zone,” a social space where “disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.”2 Pratt notes that, while colonizing groups are always conscious of the effects of colonization upon the colonized , they are often blind to the extent to which marginalized people in- fluence metropolitan modes of thought and representation; and if Indigenous peoples were obliged to speak the language of the oppressor, they did not necessarily speak as the oppressor spoke but developed strategies of resistance and self-representation whose subversiveness often went unrecognized by colonizers. A crucial problem in postcolonial theory lies in how resistance is to be understood —as a collision of force and counter-force, as it appears in the lines from Jeannette Armstrong’s poem “Threads of Old Memory” that begin this chapter; or as the more dialogical and transformative process suggested in these lines from the same poem: …I glimpse a world that cannot be stolen or lost only shaped by new words joining precisely to form old patterns a song of stars glittering against an endless silence.3 Armstrong’s image of “new words / joining precisely to form old patterns” gestures toward the transformative possibilities of language and the capacity of marginalized peoples to use the language of colonizers for their own purposes. In a related manner, Homi Bhabha characterizes colonial mimicry as a mode of covert and subtle resistance where the colonized, in the act of seeming to replicate the speech of the colonizers, produce texts “almost the same but not quite.”4 Bhabha sees this “not quite” quality as metonymic of cultural difference, and as capable of undermining colonial authority through its very ambivalence, which defies hegemonic control. If resistance is theorized as simply a force to counter colonialism, however, the formulation runs the risk of locking resistance into colonial binaries, so that the margins merely replace the centre and thus reinscribe relations between colonized and colonizers as inevitably and always antagonistic. Moreover, such a binary view assumes that cultures and languages are fixed and immutable, whereas all cultures are engaged in constant processes of change as they adapt to circumstances and events. The difficulties of theorizing resistance according to a binary scheme are evident when we examine a text such as This Land Is My Land (1993), a picture book written and illustrated by the Canadian Cree artist George Littlechild . The title of the book refers to Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era song “This Land Is Your Land,” which is far from an unproblematic expression of 20 When Languages Collide patriotic love for country but (especially in...