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NIKOLA TUTEK
19, Ondaatje moved to Montreal, Quebec, and become a Canadian. He wrote
Running in the Family from the point of view of a Canadian who became an
outsider in his country of birth and is trying to reconstruct his childhood,
while simultaneously admitting that any form of objective reconstruction is
impossible. Ondaatje’s value to Canadian culture is obvious; besides being an
internationally recognized Canadian author, Ondaatje has also opened the
door to other cultures which would likely otherwise have remained closed
for most Canadian readers. We could claim that Ondaatje is both an outsider
and insider in both Sri Lanka and Canada and, finally, why would we? Not to
mention questioning Ondaatje’s right to appropriate elements of any culture
he used in his writing. Ondaatje’s life and his work include many examples of
both cultural appropriation and assimilation, and, as such, they disclose the
relativity of both terms.
Secondly, sometimes a view from out-ness is regarded as the most precious
for the observed culture. In connected to this, Oszkar Roginer’s seminal work
Jugoszláviai Magyar irodalom terei analyzes the work of Hungarian minority
authors from ex-Yugoslavia who wrote about typically Yugoslav themes
and places, for example, verses on Tito’s greatness, and poems about places
like Sarajevo and Montenegro. All these themes were largely, if not entirely
unknown to authors in Hungary. Here we can detect a certain degree of cultural
assimilation; the ethnic Hungarian writers in question were Yugoslav citizens,
but wrote about other cultures in their own minority language. How do we
even define the idea of in-ness or out-ness in this case? Kalman Dudas wrote
about the Croatian city of Split in Hungarian: “... a végs6 csend; alattalam,/
százados ataraxiából/nem lázad Dioklécián.../de mintha zene rémlene —/
Mestrovié csarnokából?"" Is this cultural appropriation followed by cultural
assimilation? In my opinion, this and similar examples only prove how vague
and ephemeral the idea of cultural appropriation in literature really is, and how
cultural appropriation can enrich a culture without hurting another one.
Thirdly, Ziff and Rao note another important feature of cultural appro¬
priation: “[cultural appropriation] can be viewed as a multidirectional phe¬
nomenon.” They continue: “cultural appropriation can be constructed to have
a complementary opposite: cultural assimilation.”” This will be of great impor¬
tance in the analyses of both short stories, and especially in understanding
10 Oszkár Roginer, Jugoszláviai Magyar irodalom terei, Zenta, VMMI, 2019, 190.
In my translation from Hungarian: ...the ultimate silence; alas, under it/Diocletian does
not revolt/from centuries old ataraxy.../but as if music could be heard —/reaching out from
Meëtrovié’s hall?” Dudas’s verses contain all the usual elements which are susceptible
of cultural appropriation: a language not spoken by the majority in a depicted place,
(possibly over-) usage of local names, and verbalized emotional involvement. While Dudas
was a Yugoslav citizen, this example points towards cultural assimilation rather than
appropriation, but it simultaneously defies both.
Ziff — Rao (eds.), Borrowed Power, 5.
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