Lost & Found: The Rabbits
May. 12th, 2011 13:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyTan, Shaun. Lost & Found. New York: Scholastic, 2011.
This was probably not the book to pick up to read when I was exhausted; any infelicities in the following are, even more than usual, entirely my fault, and as always, I welcome corrections and comments.
The Rabbits (1998). Words by John Marsden, art by Shaun Tan.
Shaun Tan's art is far, far more intelligent and perceptive than Marsden's text.
This is an sf-nal metaphorical story about the colonization of Australia. From the beginning, Tan's art does a wonderful job of, not just evoking, but depicting the differences between the native and indigenous perspectives on land, space, its usage: is the first panel (new to this edition) the ocean the rabbits are sailing across, or the land to which they are impending by night? A timeless scape of a wetland becomes, in the next page, a tiny watering hole against a vast desert landscape. In the next page, the water birds that stalked the wetlands are dots against the vastness of the blue sky, itself bifurcated by the crimson rocks.
When the rabbits come, they begin imposing their mathematics and their divisions and their science on the landscape almost immediately. Very quickly, it becomes hard to find the native creatures at all, in their own land. The native creatures fight back; the rabbits win. The rabbits steal the children. Might makes right, a building in the rabbits' new inhuman city proclaims. Tan brilliantly and deftly depicts the strategies of Empire, its information retrieval and its abstractions, the workings of the archive state, the all-seeing eye and the omnidirectionality of control. Who will save us from the rabbits? the final page asks, a rabbit and a native creature sitting across from each other at a dead watering hole under an ashen sky. The land is devastated. The stars have no answer.
Marsden's afterword says that he was inspired to write this story after reading a book about Tecumseh, who was Native American, which is just all kinds of fail. That is, actually, a not entirely dissimilar move to that made by Tan himself in The Arrival--universalizing a distinctly North American, U.S.-ian experience into the paradigm of a very particular story--but Marsden doesn't have Tan's excuse (need) of defamiliarizing the story he wants to tell so that he can tell it. Australia and the United States (the former British colonies) are completely different except in that they both involved the British and settler-colonialism and the deaths of millions. Those similarities aren't enough to justify Marsden's homogenizing move; Australia had terra nullius, whereas both the British and the early American government made treaties with many, many Indian tribes, all of which they systematically and deliberately later infringed, revoked, altered, ignored. Differences matter; effacing them is not the right strategy, not in this context.
I had problems with Tan's afterword too, in all honesty. His statement that The Rabbits "is a story of universes colliding: one culture driven by a powerful technology that transcends nature (much like our own), and another whose spirit is embedded in an ancient ecology" recapitulates a fistful of problematic tropes and stereotypes about Natives vs. Settlers, all of which people like Charles Mann and even Jared Diamond have, at least for the Americas and by extension, for everywhere, disproven--and I'm sure there's many, many indigenous writers whose works in these categories I simply don't know about.delux_vivens's post stories is relevant here. This is a very common move in my U.S.-ian experience, using tropes of Native harmony with nature to get the dominant settler culture to embrace environmentalism, but the truth is way, way more complicated. Humans change themselves and their lifeways or their environment to better their lives; it's part of what makes us human, and our preference is always to change the environment as much as possible, if at all possible. Indigenous peoples are/were no exception to this principle, and that fact needs to be much better recognized, because it has revolutionary implications for a lot of issues.
sanguinity has a very good point too, lots of them actually, in Settler Colonialism and the Imagined Indigenous Viewpoint; that's what this is, an invocation of an imagined indigenous viewpoint by two people who are, to different extents, part of the dominant settler culture in their native country.
I kind of agree withdeepad when she said, in in On Casting the Net of Imagination, that history will always be more horrible than (science) fiction. One of the most disturbing experiences I've ever had as a reader was the dawning horror of slowly figuring out that Octavian Nothing, vol. 1 wasn't alternate history, but set in our own world. Kindred would, I think, be a corollary to this. I think the power of The Rabbits--and it is powerful--lies in its visuals rather than in the sfnal elements of those visuals, which is another compliment to Tan, especially since this is such an early work. But fiction is fiction; the millions who died in Australia and around the world as part of European colonizations were as real as you and me.
Ascoffeeandink pointed out in her review, Marsden is wrongheaded in another way too: there was no a priori reason for those colonizations. Sure, manifold justifications, but no biological imperative, no necessity to that history, only brute dumb contingency, human greed and monstrous inhumanity, and regimes that preferred to export people abroad rather than create more just societies at home. This too-simple understanding of history feeds into Marsden's other foundational problem, which is, to borrow a term Tom Lamarre uses to talk about the works of Tezuka Osamu and wartime anime and manga in Japan, "speciesism": rendering discourses of racial differences as differences between species. In this case in particular, the speciesism is subtly authorizing the rabbits' colonialism as "natural"--in reality, rabbits breed like rabbits because they have an innate biological imperative to do so, and equating that biological imperative with the entirely voluntary decision by Europeans and Euroamericans to colonize other parts of the world is just wrong, wrong, wrong, and also subtly seeks to absolve the culpability of the colonizers in that decision: They couldn't help it; it's their nature! No.
I do think the final panel (Tan's image, not Marsden's words) is asking the, or at least a, right question: what the fuck do we as a unity do now, now that these things are done and cannot be undone and we can only move on? How do we do that? On to where? But continuing to repeat racist, hegemonic stereotypes that are just plain wrong, on so many levels, aren't going to yield the full grasp of our mutual history that we need to do that effectively.
But on the other hand, I do agree wholeheartedly with Tan when he says,
This was probably not the book to pick up to read when I was exhausted; any infelicities in the following are, even more than usual, entirely my fault, and as always, I welcome corrections and comments.
The Rabbits (1998). Words by John Marsden, art by Shaun Tan.
Shaun Tan's art is far, far more intelligent and perceptive than Marsden's text.
This is an sf-nal metaphorical story about the colonization of Australia. From the beginning, Tan's art does a wonderful job of, not just evoking, but depicting the differences between the native and indigenous perspectives on land, space, its usage: is the first panel (new to this edition) the ocean the rabbits are sailing across, or the land to which they are impending by night? A timeless scape of a wetland becomes, in the next page, a tiny watering hole against a vast desert landscape. In the next page, the water birds that stalked the wetlands are dots against the vastness of the blue sky, itself bifurcated by the crimson rocks.
When the rabbits come, they begin imposing their mathematics and their divisions and their science on the landscape almost immediately. Very quickly, it becomes hard to find the native creatures at all, in their own land. The native creatures fight back; the rabbits win. The rabbits steal the children. Might makes right, a building in the rabbits' new inhuman city proclaims. Tan brilliantly and deftly depicts the strategies of Empire, its information retrieval and its abstractions, the workings of the archive state, the all-seeing eye and the omnidirectionality of control. Who will save us from the rabbits? the final page asks, a rabbit and a native creature sitting across from each other at a dead watering hole under an ashen sky. The land is devastated. The stars have no answer.
Marsden's afterword says that he was inspired to write this story after reading a book about Tecumseh, who was Native American, which is just all kinds of fail. That is, actually, a not entirely dissimilar move to that made by Tan himself in The Arrival--universalizing a distinctly North American, U.S.-ian experience into the paradigm of a very particular story--but Marsden doesn't have Tan's excuse (need) of defamiliarizing the story he wants to tell so that he can tell it. Australia and the United States (the former British colonies) are completely different except in that they both involved the British and settler-colonialism and the deaths of millions. Those similarities aren't enough to justify Marsden's homogenizing move; Australia had terra nullius, whereas both the British and the early American government made treaties with many, many Indian tribes, all of which they systematically and deliberately later infringed, revoked, altered, ignored. Differences matter; effacing them is not the right strategy, not in this context.
I had problems with Tan's afterword too, in all honesty. His statement that The Rabbits "is a story of universes colliding: one culture driven by a powerful technology that transcends nature (much like our own), and another whose spirit is embedded in an ancient ecology" recapitulates a fistful of problematic tropes and stereotypes about Natives vs. Settlers, all of which people like Charles Mann and even Jared Diamond have, at least for the Americas and by extension, for everywhere, disproven--and I'm sure there's many, many indigenous writers whose works in these categories I simply don't know about.
delux_vivens's post stories is relevant here. This is a very common move in my U.S.-ian experience, using tropes of Native harmony with nature to get the dominant settler culture to embrace environmentalism, but the truth is way, way more complicated. Humans change themselves and their lifeways or their environment to better their lives; it's part of what makes us human, and our preference is always to change the environment as much as possible, if at all possible. Indigenous peoples are/were no exception to this principle, and that fact needs to be much better recognized, because it has revolutionary implications for a lot of issues. sanguinity has a very good point too, lots of them actually, in Settler Colonialism and the Imagined Indigenous Viewpoint; that's what this is, an invocation of an imagined indigenous viewpoint by two people who are, to different extents, part of the dominant settler culture in their native country. I kind of agree with
deepad when she said, in in On Casting the Net of Imagination, that history will always be more horrible than (science) fiction. One of the most disturbing experiences I've ever had as a reader was the dawning horror of slowly figuring out that Octavian Nothing, vol. 1 wasn't alternate history, but set in our own world. Kindred would, I think, be a corollary to this. I think the power of The Rabbits--and it is powerful--lies in its visuals rather than in the sfnal elements of those visuals, which is another compliment to Tan, especially since this is such an early work. But fiction is fiction; the millions who died in Australia and around the world as part of European colonizations were as real as you and me. As
coffeeandink pointed out in her review, Marsden is wrongheaded in another way too: there was no a priori reason for those colonizations. Sure, manifold justifications, but no biological imperative, no necessity to that history, only brute dumb contingency, human greed and monstrous inhumanity, and regimes that preferred to export people abroad rather than create more just societies at home. This too-simple understanding of history feeds into Marsden's other foundational problem, which is, to borrow a term Tom Lamarre uses to talk about the works of Tezuka Osamu and wartime anime and manga in Japan, "speciesism": rendering discourses of racial differences as differences between species. In this case in particular, the speciesism is subtly authorizing the rabbits' colonialism as "natural"--in reality, rabbits breed like rabbits because they have an innate biological imperative to do so, and equating that biological imperative with the entirely voluntary decision by Europeans and Euroamericans to colonize other parts of the world is just wrong, wrong, wrong, and also subtly seeks to absolve the culpability of the colonizers in that decision: They couldn't help it; it's their nature! No. I do think the final panel (Tan's image, not Marsden's words) is asking the, or at least a, right question: what the fuck do we as a unity do now, now that these things are done and cannot be undone and we can only move on? How do we do that? On to where? But continuing to repeat racist, hegemonic stereotypes that are just plain wrong, on so many levels, aren't going to yield the full grasp of our mutual history that we need to do that effectively.
But on the other hand, I do agree wholeheartedly with Tan when he says,
At the end, the question of reconciliation is left open to the reader as it is in the real world: The future, as always, remains undecided.I do know, however, that what shape "reconciliation" and "the future" may take cannot be determined one-sidedly, not and have any validity.