Session II: Original Voices: Transgression, Orality and Indigenous Writers

Julie Barak (Mesa State College, Grand Junction CO): “Forgive Us Our Trespasses…: Transgression and Forgiveness in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum"

Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum opens with two fearful transgressions. Faye Travers “reache[s] out of [her] untested rectitude” (269) to steal a traditional Ojibwa drum from one of her customers, and her lover, Kurt Krahe, manufactures the accident that kills his daughter Kendra and her boyfriend, Daven Eyke. These undiscovered crimes against the civil and moral code eventually force Faye Travers to open herself up to the mysteries of other trespasses – translations that batter borders between cultures, dreams and desires that erase the scrim separating the living and the dead, events that blend Indians and whites, animals and humans, and break down barriers between reality and myth.

Only when her characters break through the fragile but binding webs they’ve spun to contain the contradictions and stave off the confusion in their lives, and forgive not only their own trespasses but also those of others, can they navigate the interstices – the Zwischernraum, as Krahe calls them – heal and move on.


Jonathan Steinwand (Concordia College, Moorhead MN): "Transgressing Modernity: Trauma, Memory, and Postcolonial Gothic Ecology"

Both gothic and postcolonial traditions of literature transgress boundaries and limitations imposed by secular modern authority. At stake are the enchanted spaces, times, people, and competing systems of sacred authority. As the logic of secular modernity assigns enchantment to the realm of the irrational, myths invested with alternative authority become repressed. Through the traumas resulting from such repression or outright oppression, enchantment returns sometimes in twisted and distorted forms through monsters, ghosts, and haunted memories.

With the recent publication of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the connection between the gothic and the postcolonial becomes more apparent as both traditions witness the survivance of enchantment despite the rule of secular modernity. The postcolonial gothic brings the two traditions together not only in such established works as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Fred D’Aguaiar’s Feeding the Ghosts but also in recent works that will be the examples used for this study: Robert Barclay’s Melal, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale. With these examples, we will see how the postcolonial gothic challenges the disenchanted world of secular modernity by offering a postcolonial gothic ecology which reconciles those traumatized by modernity’s insensitive incursions into local ecosystems with their local communities through their enchanting connections to their local place.

Joseph Towle (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN): "Críticos incómodos: La novela Muertos incómodos"

The novel Muertos incómodos (falta lo que falta) written by Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II represents a new type of novel in Latin America. The novel first appeared in installments in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada one chapter at time between December 5, 2004 and February 20, 2005 with both writers alternating writing the chapters; Subcomandante Marcos the first and subsequent odd chapters and Taibo writing the even chapters, all of which were made available to the public in each Sunday print and online edition for twelve consecutive weeks.

It is within this context that the authors began to pen their new literary experiment and by no means would it be immune to scrutiny and critique. Critiques came from Carlos Monsivaís and Homero Aridjis as well as from professors in the United States, such as Glen Close and Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, Ilan Stavans. Muertos incómodos marks a sharp break from traditional structures of the novel, yet the manner in which the novel has been critiqued by the aforementioned critics is done from a Western, Eurocentric paradigm. Since this novel originated from Latin America and its logic stems from non-Western and non-European frameworks it will be more useful, as Susan Brill de Ramírez maintains in Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (1999), to not use western interpretive theories to analyze non-western cultural productions, but instead to consider the relationship between orality and writing and the novel’s otro modo de pensar.