Nice white birdie you.

 Hello everyone, last time we read each other, we were talking about rather funny stuff. Today we have to keep on talking about some of the topics which appear in The Rez Sisters related to gender.

Now, we are going to have a look at some sad stuff, that is, violence against women. In the play, violence against women appears mainly in two different ways, and it is embodied by Emily Dictionary and Zhaboonigan.

As we have seen already, these women are oppressed as women and as natives. And that is what the reader receives from these two examples.

Emily Dictionary left her home after ten years of being daily beaten by her alcoholic husband. Emily is mistreated in two ways, the first is quite obvious, she has been beaten for years, day after day. But, the fact that her husband is an alcoholic is a way of oppression and violence as well. This alcohol abuse is a way of escapism due to the cultural collision. This man has been driven to alcohol abuse because he (note, by “he” I mean not just him as an individual, but also as a group of native men), after being deprived of his cultural identity has not been provided with a new one. This alcohol abuse and the cultural collision on males is much better depicted in Highway's play Dry lips ougtha move to Kapuskasing (1989).

This is an example of how these women have to fight in two different fronts, as women in a male dominant culture and as natives in a post-colonial land. In her essay called “Three Women's texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), Gayatri Spivak, argues her idea of feminism and imperialism from Homi Bhabha's notion of “not quite/ not white”, to her new “not quite/ not male”.The point she makes is that this emerging feminist individual excludes the native woman, as she puts it, “as the female individualist, not-quite/not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what it is at stake, the “native female” as such (within discourse, as signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm.” (897)

The second act of violence depicted here has already been mentioned, that is Zhaboonigan's rape. This rape has a double meaning, the first one is the actual physical rapes and sexual violence in general terms, that native women have been suffering. Indeed, we also talked about being based on a real crime.

Its second reading is as an allegory of all of the abuses inflicted in native culture by western culture. Zhaboonigan who is mentally disabled embodies the native culture, who is abussed by the dominant white culture. The native girl is abused by a bunch of white boys, which comes to represent the endemic violence of the colonizer over the colonized.

Nanabush and Zhaboonigan

I know this is some sad stuff, but it's even sadder to know that it is happening. So, what do you think of rape as a representation of coloniamlism?