Alternatives:: myth, translation and the native informant in Pauline!Melville's The 'Ventriloquist Tale'

Postcolonial scholars have demonstrated the way in which colonial discourse used translation of the 'primitive' in constructing modernity. Pauline Melville's 1997 novel The Ventriloquist Tale addresses this colonial legacy vis-h-vis Amerindian communities in Guyana. Melville provides an English translation of the indigenous Macunaima myth and in doing so, demonstrates the various modes and functions of the native informant in translating indigenous experience. Melville foregrounds the ultimate untranslatability of indigeneity by constructing the indigenous figure of Macunaima as an embodiment of the act of translation and the competing discourses of endogamy and exogamy. The text produces a variety of 'alter/natives' that destabilize notions of fixed indigeneity.