Hybridity in Kiss of the Fur Queen

1. Cultural Hybridity and Kiss of the Fur Queen: or “what the fuck are Indians doing playing . . . Chopin?”

2. . . . the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid. . . . . Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name of the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority.) • (Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture 111)

3. Hybridity in Kiss of the Fur Queen • Enforced initiation into what Althusser calls the apparatuses of state power. • Initial self-representation as cultural mimic (Jeremiah) and as resister (Gabriel) • Hybridized cultural forms mark the possibility of resistance and indigenous renewal.

4. Residential School as a “state apparatus” • Louis Althusser, a structural Marxist, suggested that the power structures of the state reproduce themselves in naturalized forms . . . • Schools • Churches • Work/time relationships • Social relationships penetrated by state power (Marriage, eg.)

5. In other words, the school (but also other State institutions like the Church, or other apparatuses like the Army) teaches ‘know-how’, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’. All the agents of production, exploitation and repression, not to speak of the ‘professionals of ideology’ (Marx), must in one way or another be ‘steeped’ in this ideology in order to perform their tasks ‘conscientiously’ – the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology (its ‘functionaries’), etc. (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays np)

6. Ideological State Apparatuses in Fur Queen • The residential school, where the church and school structures are intertwined. • Reshapes the Okimasis brothers (51-53) • Hair • Language • Sexuality (this is NOT to suggest that homosexuality is caused by sexual abuse!)

7. According to postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, “hybridity is the name of [the] displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes the dominant discourse to split along the axis of its power to be representative, authoritative. Hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification—a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority. (LOC 113)

8. Initial Contact with Western Forms • Latin mistranslated • Paralleled scenes with Jeremiah and Gabriel 41 &144-145 • Art becomes translated from strictly Western terms to a frame that includes aboriginal perspectives. • Diff. b/w Jeremiah’s interpretation and Gabriel’s.

9. Jeremiah is initially merely a repeater of Western cultural output, what Bhabha calls a “mimic,” one who is “almost the same, but not quite” a reflection of the colonizer. • He clearly positions himself within one of the most socially privileged expressions of Western culture—Classical music---in an attempt to become European • Positioning of concert hall vis. the bars of North main: an outpost, a “fort” that Jeremiah seeks to enter. • Implicated clearly in the violence perpetrated against Aboriginals (107)

10. “. . . Jeremiah was put on his guard: was it because this young—and undeniably Indian—girl confronted him with his own Indianness, which his weekly bus sightings of the drunks on North Main Street had driven him to deny so utterly that he went for weeks believing his own skin to be white as parchment? He had worked so hard at transforming himself into a perfect little “transplanted European” --- anything to survive.” (124)

11. The settler thinks “They want to take my place,” while the native’s fantasy involves the reversal of roles. The second stage of identification produces an irrevocable split: the native is forced into a double consciousness that sees attempts at “being like” the settler culture only in terms of a fresh ambivalence: “You’re different, you’re one of us” becomes, for the native, not an affirmation of kinship but a marker of estrangement from both original and settler culture (LOC 44-5).

12. As an incomplete reflection, the mimic is an ambivalent, ultimately destabilizing reference point for the colonial will to power, since it is a forced representation that nevertheless can only frustrate the dream of representational presence through its stubbornly “partial” presence. • Think of the residential school and its renaming of the children, an attempt at physical and theological mimicry.

13. He had tried. Tried to change the meaning of his past, the roots of his hair, the colour of his skin, but he was one of them. What was he to do with Chopin? Open a conservatory on Eemanapiteepitat hill? (215) • Alienated from Aboriginal culture (eg. 243)

14. Jeremiah’s winning concert performance, is a pivotal moment in beginning his struggle for the image, his “survivance” in the terms of Vizenor: • Misrepresented (211-212) • “white knuckles” • Yet . . . The performance is hybridized:

15. Jeremiah played the Northern Manitoba shorn of its Gabriel Okimasis, he played the loon cry, the wolves at nightfall, the aurora borealis in Mistik Lake; he played the wind through the pines, the purple of sunsets . . . . Jeremiah clung to the ivory until his knuckles equalled them in whiteness. These weren’t keys on a piano but a length of curved, peeled spruce, the handlebar of a sled. Mist rose, silence paralysed the air. (213-214) -- repetition of opening sequence, iteration of his father’s own success (214)

16. Ultimately,Jeremiah rejects the form: • Goes into “purgatory” where he can see the “towering silhouette of the dark concert hall” (221) • Reconnects with an aboriginal identity • Only after encountering the trickster (230-234) • A scene repeated with Amanda (252)

17. Gabriel and Hybridity • Begins with his own very Western art form • Rewrites it (236) • And again, with Jeremiah