"He was so badly in need of community and of love all of a sudden right at that moment inside the shop" (56). I've decided to pen this entry as I am reading the text. And somehow, it's offered extremely interesting results. While reading the opening of the story, my immediate reaction was to connect the racism against Lowe to the racism against the Chinese shopkeeper in Crick, Crack Monkey.  Here we see the other side of the slate, the human being subjected to Tantie's ravings and internalized racism. As in Mootoo's piece, the reader experiences the protagonist's sexual ambiguity and confusion. Lowe experiences trauma over his imprisonment and rape by Cecil as well the burning of his shop and the murder of his dogs. His life thus far has been a grande farce, hidden behind the facade of his wax moustache. Failing with assimiliation and a service industry life, Lowe desires to create a space of his own culture, a Chinese community replete with meeting halls and schools, within Jamaica. But first he must address the cultural memory of shame: "It seemed as if nothing could be as bad as that, as bad as being sent to this bondage by your own" (45). Shipped in crates and barrels, stripped naked, branded, raped, ridiculed, and forced to work 20 hour days for next-to-no pay, Lowe's people have faced constant degradation. Set in 1893, the Black slaves have achieved emancipation, but the Asian immigrants, the indentured, have arrived to replace them. But their languages, including Hakka and Cantonese, have been forgotten; the men speak in "island" talk. How is Lowe to create this commuity, this Pagoda, when both his heritage and his self-assurance have been consumed by the conqueror? Are his dreams, his father's dreams, strong enough to conquer this othering?

The introduction to the collection penned by Ford-Smith prepares the reader for the following testimonials. Lamenting the impossibility of producing the texts in phoentic patwah, Sistren agreed to publish the stories in a mixture of patwah and English, so as to broaden the readership. Ford-Smith's introduction recognizes the resistance inherent within the domicile...the women who speak, oppressed and violated by fluidly constructed race, sex, and class systems, rebel within the domicile, the internal, which often expands to the external. The women have been strong enough to appropriate the misappropriation of Ni as Nanny; alienated from external political resistance, the women create a politicized resistance from their domestic spaces.

Greg Sarris's article, "Reading Louise Erdrich: Reading Love Medicine as Home Medicine," becomes at once a piece of recognition. Here he associates the "internalized oppression" of his Miwok and Kashaya Pomo genealogy with Erdrich's Chippewa. Framed by images of family, some lost and reclaimed, Sarris's critical piece reflects his desire to share the "pain" of the conquered. His attempts to do so through Love Medicine provoke him to self-critique; he questions his feelings of association with Erdrich's piece. Is he as guilty of generalizations as he accuses Gunn Allen and Standiford of being? He witnesses the mass generalizations of critics who refuse to address their reciprocal investment in the material they are reading, critics who only read from the monologue, creating conscious or unconscious assumptions based on their own biases. These critics refuse the dialogue, the double-voiced exchange offered by a reading of another's writings. They reject their involvement in a textual conversation across time and space, forgetting the necessity of particularization. But, my question is, must everything be particularized? One of the greatest upsets in the postcolonial classroom is a Westerner admitting to "relating to" a piece by the "Other." If we, as outside readers, are refused relation to the text, why should we read at all? Granted, Sarris claims that he is not trying to sink criticism's battleship; he is not trying to state that critics should be working behind the counter at the local Denny's. Rather, they should merely admit their investment in their reading. Sarris alleges that an inteview with a shaman or tribal leader from the group the critic is discussing would draw the critic into the "present," not just the "present tense." I do, indeed, find the dialogue between reader and orator/writer important; I was actually hoping that Sarris would evaluate the problem of testimonial pieces transcribed through another (and the other's biases) and then translated into another language. What sort of dialogue is commencing here? Why does Sarris merely confront the dialogue between reader and author? He assumes that textual exchanges taking place between transcribers and authors who have written in Indian have been documented and studied, but critical evaluations in English have been not. But current testimonials, especially those of Latin America (Reyita, I, Rigoberta Menchu), show a lack of documented exchange between the orator and the transcriber, between both individuals and the translator. Perhaps Sarris should have mentioned this issue, this major inquiry he merely writers off as original bicultural compositions (122). I agree that "readers must consider the worlds of both the Indian speaker and the recorder-editor," but of equal importance is the transcriber of the testimonial text.

Tekahionwake (E. Pauline Johnson). "A Red Girl's Reasoning" (1893) and selected poems (1895). - Although this piece appeared 14 years after the release of Ibsen's A Doll's House, Johnson's short story is MUCH more controversial, considering the race and class prejudices involved.  Nora indeed leaves her husband's Victorian home, denying the mores of her class to forge an independent life, but it is Christie who shuns European racism and bastardization prejudices and remains true to her own beliefs (and retaining independence by not returning home to her family). The title of Johnson's poem, "A Red Girl's Reasoning," is exactly that....reasoning. Reason. Supposedly a white man's trait springing from the age of "enlightenment." The ability to reason, unemotionally, through a situation. Indeed, at the end of the story, when Charlie begs for Christie (Christianity, Christ) to forgive him and return as his "relic" or possession, she scorns his desperation, as Nora Helmer scorns Torvald's pleas of Victorian morality, religion, and family. She buries the "vengeful lie" within herself...that she cannot love him because of what he has done...but even if she continues to love him, as the text alludes to the "vengeful lie in her soul" (259), reason overpowers her emotion. Charlie, throughout the text is effeminized, despite Christie's smallness and soft features. It is Charlie who cries through thick "wet, boyish lashes; Charlie with the "girlish mouth" (257); Charlie who ironically sees Christie as "simple-minded," when it is he who cannot see beyond his European ancestry of possession. But no longer is she contained within his penetrating gaze, "when once her whole world lay in their blue depths" (258). No longer is she his "little girl wife" (as Nora is no longer Torvald's "little spendthrift" and the narrator of Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" is no longer John's "blessed little goose").

Johnson makes it clear in the beginning of the story that Christie is merely an embellishment to Charlie's "relic-hunting craze . . . as a man he consummated his predilections for Indianology by loving, winning and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who himself had married a native woman some tewnty years ago" (252). As long as Charlie is loving and doting, Christie reciprocates; however, when he succumbs to the laws of white morality and mocks her, she returns him with a vengeance (which is so damn refreshing after reading story after story of cowering women). In 1893, of course, Charlie is not only destroyed by the publicized "illegitimacy" of his wife, but doubly screwed by the fact that she has now left him (again, as Torvald was distraught when Nora left him. Torvald never intended to force Nora from the house, but to sequester her in a room, away from the children...as Rochester did to Bertha). His greatest shame arises from the Victorian recognition that a man was no longer a man if his wife chooses to up and leave him.  Social status negated. The hypocrisy of Charlie's companions is evident in Mrs. Stuart's tradition of brushing up "her etiquette and English once a year at Ottawa" (253)--what nationality is she? French, I'm guessing...de trop. As much as the French and English have differed on religion....Catholicism vs. Protestantism...I suppose they merge somehow on the idea of legitimacy.

Like Christie, the heros/heroines of the poems are heroic, sacrificing themselves for others. "Dawendine" presents a young girl who, after the death of her brother, sacrifices her virginal self to his slayer for the peace of her village. "Wolverine," too," is a poem of sacrifice and irony. Showing two acts of kindness, "Wolverine" is shot down for merely approaching the white faction, who in their ignorance misread his intent. Too, "The Cattle Thief" reveals the perpetual hypocrisy of the white man as he guns down an old, starving man for "encroaching" on land that has been taken from him. "A Cry from an Indian Wife" reminds me of Tori Amos' "Home on the Range: Cherokee Edition," in which she sings of the Cherokee bride left behind on the Trail of Tears as her brave "was shot yesterday." Here, the woman's voice is ambivalent...torn between loving him for going into battle and begging him to stay. I am currently enrolled in the American Indian Studies graduate seminar at the Newberry Library. In our next month's meeting we will be reading more Johnson, and analyzing her texts based on literacy (what impact did the forced "alphabet" have on her and her people?) and authorship (is she writing for the collective community? Passing about her "talking stick" in order to create not a mere dialogism but a multivoiced narrative?).