Seite 76 [76]
OCR
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 appropriation: “[cultural appropriation] can be viewed as a multidirectional phenomenon.” They continue: “cultural appropriation can be constructed to have a complementary opposite: cultural assimilation.”” This will be of great importance 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. + 74 +
