In his introduction, John Balcom makes the point that simply resisting the dominant culture doesn't necessarily define who one is. In the opening story, Topas Tamipima's The Last Hunter, the hunter in question kills a buck muntjac, only to have it confiscated by an ethnically-Chinese policeman at a check-point. This is clearly symbolic of the Aboriginal situation as a whole, and brings into focus the point Balcom is making.
That all Taiwanese Aboriginal literature to date has been published in Chinese only highlights the irony of the situation. It is true that a couple of writers have published bilingual editions (in Chinese and their mother language). But Balcom quotes one writer, Rimui Aki, a teacher of the Atayal language, as saying that there simply isn't an audience for works written in her native tongue, though she does sometimes communicate with friends in it on the Internet.
The issues of identity and loss of rights are again highlighted in some strong poems by the blind Paiwan poet Monaneng. In one, I Don't Really Know, the speaker describes collecting traditional vegetables to offer the ancestors at harvest time, only to be told by the Forestry Bureau that they had been purloined from an area that was its property.
Another, The Hundred-Pacer Snake is Dead, refers to the Taiwan snake that is lethal before you've taken 100 paces after being bitten. The speaker sees it in a bottle of medicinal wine, with a label "Aphrodisiac" attached. He goes on to imagine a man in the big city strutting through a red-light district proud of his new-found virility, only to have it satisfied by "the descendent of the hundred-pacer snake, a young Paiwan girl."
This book, smartly produced by Columbia University Press, will put Taiwan's indigenous writers on the map for a new class of reader, namely people from outside Taiwan who don't even know there are Aboriginal people living here at all. Locally, it may go some way to correcting the image of the Aboriginal people themselves, up to now more often associated with their music than with communication by means of pen and paper. The irony is, of course, that after the Taiwanese, the indigenous people themselves are the least likely to read these translations. But on the evidence of these texts, they have enough other worries to keep them busy and occupy their minds.
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