Pauline Melville´s The Ventriloquist´s Tale, written language, orality and Amerindian voices

Oral and written language or “The parrot and Descartes” in Pauline Melville´s The Ventriloquist´s Tale.

                               Miguel Nenevé – University of Rondonia – Brazil

                               Ana Clarissa Nenevé – Influx School - Brazil

Pauline Melville is a Londoner writer born in Guyana, the Amazonian region close to the Brazilian  border, in the " parched savannahs that belong to the Indians on either side of the Kanaku Mountains north of the Amazon" as the narrator of The Ventriloquist´s Tale tells the reader. In this work we propose to  explore the presence of Amerindian voices in her novel the Ventriloquist´s Tale and discuss their counter-discourse to a homogenizing view of  Amerindians in South-America presented by scholars of several fields. We want to argue that the novel satirizes the studies on Amerindian people which try to look at them from outside and try to publish "the truth" in  about them based on data. Trusting more in the oral language than in the written text the novel, and the author herself, seem to criticize the written language  and the  "Cartesian" representation of  Amerindian World. The reader can realize a defiance of easy classification and categorization of  Amerindians. "Where I come from, disguise is the only truth." and the measures used by rationalists do not work.  The "scientific" language to describe them must never be trusted, because "all writing is fiction, "even writing that purports to be factual, that points out the date  of  man ´s birth and the date of his death." For our argument we will use the concept of counter-discursive practice as proposed by Bill Ascroft, Helen Tiffin and Diana Brydon among others.