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‘Making Paper Talk: Writing oral narratives in Indigenous Australian and Canadian contexts’ Michael Jacklin Sydney University (Australia) In
her contribution to the collection Talking
on the Page: Editing Aboriginal Oral Texts, Canadian First Nations
scholar Kimberly Blaiser argues that “the relationship between the oral
tradition and the written word, between story telling and story writing
and reading, informs all contemporary encounters with Native
literatures.” At the same time she recognises “that the oral can never
be fully expressed in the written.” Her comments agree with those of
scholars from a range of fields, including
oral historians Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer in the
same collection, who detail how “at each stage of the recording and
documentation of oral literature, something gets lost as the dynamics move
from the performance to the printed page.” Yet the attempt to convey an
approximation of the oral experience upon the page is a goal which
underlies most if not all collaborative Indigenous life writing. Decisions
regarding the translation of spoken voice to printed page often seem to be
the prerogative of the editor, the collaborator responsible for the
written outcome of the narrative exchange, but, as this paper will
demonstrate, the process is seldom completely attributable to one
participant. While a final decision must be made at some point, in many
cases that decision is reached only after negotiation between all parties,
extending to include family members of the Indigenous narrator on the one
hand and colleagues and professional consultants to the editor on the
other. Recalling Jerome McGann’s argument that textual production issues
through just such “complex networks of communicative exchanges,” the
tendency of assigning editorial choices exclusively to the writing partner
may be tempered with the recognition, as in other aspects of collaborative
writing, that shared and overlapping involvement and investment by all
concerned contribute to the various forms in which Indigenous voices reach
the page. |