Thomas King Not Just the Essay

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King asks his readers to consider the authority of the author. For minority groups, especially those who have suffered the degree of persecution that native groups have, there are complex questions about who has the right to speak for others in the community. Especially for authors like King, whose ancestry is so mixed (as is the case for so many American Indian and First Nations writers, artists, and activists), there is always the question of whose story precisely he is telling.

Mistry, an Indian writer from Asia, takes up many of the same themes as does King, for both are the inheritors of fractured heritages, the scions of peoples who have been displaced and damaged by history. Mistry, a member of a religious minority that has been threatened by Islam, also addresses the question of what it means to belong.

"Squatter" presents a story within a story as the narrator tells two boys a pair of tales, one about a cricket player (a successful intercultural transplant) and the other an Indian man named Sarosh who cannot make himself over into a "real" Canadian after ten years in the New World. Or rather, he has almost become a Canadian except when it comes to one of the most private acts of humanity. The boys who are the auditors in the tale-within-a-tale first encounter Sarosh in a position of being "depressed and miserable, perched on top of the toilet, crouching on his haunches, feet planted firmly for balance upon the white plastic oval of the toilet seat … having "no choice but to climb up and simulate the squat of . . .

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Indian latrines," because "no amount of exertion [while sitting] could produce success" (153).

Sarosh desperately wants to see himself as a successful immigrant, a man who has been able to negotiate the complexities of becoming a new man for the New World. But his body refuses to cooperate: It will not let him forget that some borders can never be successfully negotiated.

By telling the story of Sarosh to the two boys in his story, Mistry is reminding his readers that one of the most important duties that any citizen of the world has is to listen to the stories of other people. The way in which we bring people out of undeserved invisibility is by hearing their tales.

Using Paul Headrick's model for evaluating prose, I have examined how both of these authors have forced me to reexamine how the process of storytelling and different types of claim to authorship are as important as the explicit content of the stories. For in underlying the importance of telling a story, these authors are also reminding the reader that storytelling is always a duet, with the reader determining whose story to listen to, which story to believe. I did not know that I had to do such a self-analysis to understand how stories are told. I have heard stories all my life and so did not know that there remained important things for me to learn about….....

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