Intertextual Inscription of Diasporic Identity in Ondaatje's The English Patient

hrough Julia Kristiva's intertextuality, this study explores the diasporic version of identity in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient - the text that is based on Ondaatje's inspiration from other literary and non-literary texts: Rudyard Kipling's Kim, Herodotus' The History, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and the story of Gyges and the Queen. This theoretical inscription locates the source of the expression of the meaning of the text: either the author or the text per se. It argues the intertextual narration of Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan living in Canada, about the fragmented identities of the diasporas in the post-World War II milieu. This intertextual approach highlights the politics working behind the location of the characters, their (dis)placement from/to their origin and their identity in the post-WWII time. The framing of these intertextual discourses helps understand the contexts of diaspora characters as well as diaspora writers.

TRANSLATION AS IMPERIALISM: THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

In this article translation is not only confined to the linguist, but also to all strategies that represent a language to another language. The way James Fenimore Cooper translated the Indian language to English in the novel The Last of The Mohicans shows a representation of ethnic harassment manipulation of language. Cooper's translation build up the suggestion that Indians can only communicate only like children. The Indians are portrayed to only communicate by playing with their voice, music, gesture, and using the third-person pronoun to exchange dor the first-person or second-person pronoun. This harassment is correlated with the policy of Indian removal at that era