The Politics and Poetics of Thomas King’s Textual Hauntings

Résumé 0

This paper analyzes the use of the Indian ghost motif in Thomas King’s writings within the framework of postcolonial criticism about spectral narrativity, and in the light of both Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and Derrida’s notion of spectrality. King outlines a politics and poetics of haunting that wholly contradicts Canada’s alleged ghostlessness, as expressed not only by pioneer Catharine Parr Traill in her famous 1833 statement about the complete banishment of ghosts and spirits from a ‘too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit’, but also by Earle Birney, who concluded his poem ‘Can. Lit.’ asserting: ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts/we’re haunted’. Unlike other instances of the genre, King’s textual hauntings are never horrific because the presence of spectral Native figures in his novels and short stories does not include any malevolent or macabre elements. Yet the subversive humor which often pervades these mysterious appearances and other fantastic manifestations in King’s poignant scenes of magic realism becomes an amazingly effective strategy to revise colonial history and raise important issues concerning the present day lives of Natives in North America, such as stereotyping, cultural appropriation and commodification, sovereignty, environmental degradation and territorial claims.