L’écriture rouge de Sherman Alexie : l’exemple de "The Sin Eaters"
If the bodies of Native American individuals seem perpetually tormented and exploited, they constitute means of rebellion when they are transformed into the testimony of a witness – into the body of work of the writer. One can read Sherman Alexie’s collection of short-stories, The Toughest Indian In...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Hovedforfatter: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Français |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2005
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | If the bodies of Native American individuals seem perpetually tormented and exploited, they constitute means of rebellion when they are transformed into the testimony of a witness – into the body of work of the writer. One can read Sherman Alexie’s collection of short-stories, The Toughest Indian In The World (2001), as scattered bodies regaining shape on paper and forces through his angry red ink. The short-story “The Sin Eaters” constitutes its central nerve with a macabre allegory which links the holocaust to the genocide of the Native American tribes. This apocalyptic tale depicts, in an undetermined moment in time, the removal of Native Americans and their imprisonment in an underground military complex, from the point of view of a boy named Jonah. Though it portrays psychological and physical torture, the short-story manages to produce a truly emancipating knowledge. Putting in the wake of the aesthetic aspect of writing an epistemological questioning on the estrangement undergone by ethnic minorities in the United States nowadays, Alexie reflects on some of the greatest interrogations of philosophy and literature. After analyzing the implications of the chaotic temporality of the short-story, I endeavour to study how disfigured bodies altered into the narrator’s body of work betray both the oppressors’ and the victims’ respective languages of power. I then concentrate on the demystifications undertaken by Alexie’s writing of recollection which demonstrates that, by saying the Other, one becomes Oneself. |
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