Comeback of the
boomerang – Thomas King’s
Short stories in the context of anthropological gaze and
linguistic aporia
Sarbani Banerjee
University of
Western Ontario, Canada
Abstract
My paper examines how Thomas King has tampered with the
Received Standard English in his writings, while making the language bear the
burden of his unique communal experiences and perspectives. I explore the
function of his hybridized broken English that opens up a dialogue between the
‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ in a postcolonial context. King evinces that the
Eurocentric value-additions have resulted in rampant vulgarization of a vast
repertoire of indigenous customs, beliefs and idioms. In that light, I study
the involvement of anthropology as a discipline with questionable intentions
that has romanticized and fossilized the live reality of the indigenous
‘Other’.
I trace King’s position amid two opposing tendencies – of
retrieval of a ‘pure’ pre-colonial past with the aid of native languages by
dissociating them from English, and of reaching out to the global audience with
the medium of ‘english’. Subsequently, I discuss the various features of King’s
writings, such as maintaining gaps of silence, employing untranslated
indigenous words and dealing with interchangeable dualities, which draws on
Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘aporia’. The tussle between content and form
creates an open-endedness, impeding every kind of presuppositions that
facilitate a ‘smooth’ Western readership.
Can the
indigenous groups practice the same exclusivity within the scope of a
radicalized ‘english’ that they previously used to enjoy in their respective
aboriginal dialects? I argue that broken English/‘english’ can play the role of
mouthpiece for these communities, and become an even more efficient medium for
carrying the testimony of violence than the almost-defunct indigenous tongues.
Keywords: Broken English, Thomas King, postcolonial,
anthropology, indigenous, aporia
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