Although Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach were written by authors of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, the two novels share a common theme of ancestral languages that are lost to the texts’...
moreAlthough Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach were written by authors of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, the two novels share a common theme of ancestral languages that are lost to the texts’ protagonists. In Chorus of Mushrooms, the Japanese immigrant parents of Muriel, or Murasaki, have built the identities of their entire family on the rejection of the Japanese language and culture; in Monkey Beach, the First Nations Haisla community of Kitamaat, in which the protagonist, Lisamarie Hill, lives with her family, is almost thoroughly westernized, and hardly anyone speaks Haisla. Remarkably, in both novels the ancestral language may be seen as medium of accessing the true identity of the protagonists, as the translation of tradition into English turns out to be but an approximation, far from sufficient to convey all intricacies of the respective non-white cultures.
in: TransCanadiana. Polish Journal of Canadian Studies, 6.2013, Ed. Agnieszka Rzepa & Ewelina Bujnowska
