Literature and I don't see much of each other these days, but I was curious to hear about the fate of Lloyd Jones's Mr Pip - not that I'd read it of course. As it turned out, like the America's Cup and the Rugby World cup, Pip got pipped, but in the lead up to the announcement I read an article in the DomPost by one Selina Tusitala Marsh, a 'lecturer who specialises in Maori and Pasifika literature', about how the book was colonialist white male tosh that promotes 'the primacy of Western book culture over indigenous oral culture'.
Now, while this sort of language is like a red rag to a bull for me, Marsh makes a pretty persuasive argument. She identifies numerous examples of Jones' outsider perspective in his narrative, which is told from a 13 year old Bougainvillian girl. Some of these gaffes are embarrassingly obvious.
For me though, Marsh's deconstruction of Mr Pip is just as Western in outlook as Jones' own perspective. Indeed, this sort of player hatin' academic sniping strikes me as nothing more than one part of western culture ragging on another, rather than a genuine indigenous viewpoint. I'd be more interested in hearing a Bougainvillian having a crack at Jones for misrepresenting them, or indeed hearing from any pasifika person who had never set foot in a western academic establishment.
Posted by stuart at October 22, 2007 8:55 AM