Susan Price’s Ghost Dance (1994, henceforth Gd) begins with a brief introduction of the narrator, a learned cat that walks around an oak tree by a lake somewhere far away – when the cat walks one way, it sings songs, as it walks the other, it tells stories. After this, the cat’s story begins: ”I tell (says the cat) of the Northlands, where, in the long, dark winter, the white snow falls out of the black, black sky. Soft, silent it falls through the branches of the pines and birch, and mounts, thin flake on thin flake, until the snow lies ten cold feet deep, and the silence is frozen to the darkness.” (Gd, 1).

    The fairy tale beginning formula which introduces the setting – often a distant place – here situates the story in the Northlands which from Price’s British perspective may seem distant but is not that far away from all of us. Although the Czardom in the novel is never explicitly referred to as Russia, those readers who know anything about the country’s climate, location and titles of former rulers will be able to recognise the clues. The story-world shares several other features with the real world of some obscure past: there are countries called England and Denmark outside the Czardom, and reindeer people, or Lappish people living in the Northern parts of the Czardom. While ”Lappish” as a name of an ethnic group referring to the Sámi people is now considered a derogatory term, the terms "Lappish” and “Lapps” were earlier commonly used of Sámi people and appear both in studies of shamanism (see Eliade 1972, 15) and Nordic mythology (see Ellis Davidson 1973, 30–31; Simpson 1973, 170–171).

Apart from the names of the countries and the peoples and the description of the climate of the Northlands, historical accuracy is not the aim of the novel or its predecessors, The Ghost Drum (1987) and Ghost Song (1992) – the first of which was awarded the CILIP Carnegie Medal in the UK in 1987. The Ghost World novels form a loose trilogy: although the novels are situated in the same fictional world and share some characters, the plot-lines do not form a chronological continuum.

Ghost Dance, subtitled The Czar’s Black Angel, is an allegory of colonialism and its environmental and cultural effects; it is a story about a transgender shaman girl who sets out to spell the Czar, God on Earth, to stop the destruction of the Northlands and the people living there. Unlike several feminist fairy tale rewritings, the novel is not a retelling or novelization of any specific tale but a montage that combines and reframes formulas, motifs, settings, names and characters from the Russian wonder tale tradition, Nordic mythology, an Ojibwe legend and representations of Northern shamanism in anthropological accounts and mythological studies. The common factor of the source texts is that they are all associated with the North: Russia, Scandinavia, (Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 2010:17) and Canada or the Northern parts of the United States.

     In this paper, I will argue that while the strategy of freely combining and recontextualising earlier stories or parts of them may successfully function as a feminist poetics of rewriting, in terms of ethnicity the cross-cultural intertextuality is a more problematic issue.

    By a feminist poetics of rewriting I am here referring to textual strategies such as metafiction, intertextuality and irony that are applied to rewrite, challenge or question conventional gendered discourses in earlier texts and traditions. The feminist poetics in Ghost Dance is Western in its notions of literary texts and use of source texts: all kinds of elements (unless protected by copyright) can be combined freely to suit the author’s purposes. The poetics is explicitly addressed in the novel in the use of metafictional frames that highlight the text as a rewritten, literary fairy tale.

     In Ghost Dance, the framing narrative of a scholarly cat telling the story is clearly a reworking of Alexandr Pushkin’s prologue to his fairy tale poem “Ruslan and Ludmila” (1828), which introduces a learned cat as the source of the stories:

   A green oak stands by the shores of a bay. Around the oak is a golden chain, and day and night a learned cat walks round and round on the chain. As he walks to the right, he sings a song; as he walks to the left, he tells a story. … And there I sat, drinking mead. I saw the green oak by the sea, and sat beneath it as the learned cat told me his stories. Some of these I remember, and I will tell them now to the world. (In Bayley 1978, 13.)

This passage is reformulated in Price’s novel as follows:

     In a place far distant from where you are now grows an oak tree by a lake. Round the oak’s trunk is a chain of golden links.

     Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually. As it walks one way, it sings songs. As it walks the other, it tells stories. This is one of the stories the cat tells. (Gd, 1.)

The passage is not an exact citation (which might be due to the translation of Pushkin; this is Jane Dalley’s 1978 prose translation), but it is very close to the original. To introduce the cat as a narrator in Pushkin and Price serves as a metafictional device to remind readers that what (Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 2010:1) follows is a piece of fiction, or, more precisely, a fairy tale. Employing a cat as a narrator has a distancing effect – both distancing the readers from the story and distancing the external narrator and the author from the source cultures of the stories. As literary writers, both Pushkin and Price are cultural outsiders to the oral traditions they are borrowing from. In relation to Pushkin’s fairy tales, John Bayley (1978, 11) suggests that Pushkin made no claims to authenticity and cared little what his sources were “provided that he could adapt them to his purpose”, while in her study of Pushkin’s “Tale of the Tzar Saltan”, Janina Orlov (2005, 152–154) concludes on a more positive note by arguing that Pushkin deliberately plays with generic conventions and creates

his own “poetic mythology”. I would suggest that the same concerns Price who combines the Russian influences freely with elements from other traditions. Although adapting folklore material to new purposes in literary works is a common phenomenon, the “Ruslan and Ludmila” intertext in Price explicitly highlights the fact that the author, as her literary predecessor, Pushkin, is creating her own literary universe which is inspired by folklore but also removed from it. What is at stake is not authenticity but literary concerns about themes and aesthetic visions.

This kind of poetics is emphasised at the end of Ghost Dance when readers are invited to retell or rewrite it themselves:

    If you thought [this story] tasty, then serve it to others.

     If you thought it sour, sweeten it with your own telling.

     But whether you liked it, or liked it not, let it make its own way back to me, riding on another’s tongue. (Gd, 217.)

Circulation and reinterpretation of tales is here seen as the common process of story telling, and while this might seem a feature typical of oral story telling, it is, in fact, a central idea of Western literary aesthetics. The poetics and, at the same time, the politics of rewriting are summarised in the cat’s notion: “If you thought this story sour, sweeten it with your own telling.”

Reinterpretation or deconstruction and reconstruction of tales are viewed both necessary and acceptable – in Price’s text this is partly done for feminist purposes.

 It does not matter where the stories come from – and, in terms of cultural appropriation, this is the key issue. As Deborah Root (1996, 19) notes, “within Western aesthetics other cultural traditions have been assigned the role of artistic resource, to be harvested pretty much at the pleasure of the colonizers”. My aim here is not to deem this kind of use of resources as morally or politically unacceptable but to consider the implications of cross-cultural intertextuality on the

representation of gendered and ethnic identities in the novel. (Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 2010:1 9)

In terms of gendered discourses, the strategy of rewriting any stories as pieces of fiction is appealing – there are innumerable stories that, from the feminist perspective, might be sweetened. Sometimes to be able to rethink gendered structures in one’s own culture it may seem a good choice to look for sources in other cultures. Ghost Dance challenges conventional ideas and discourses of gender through the characters of the witch and the shaman – each symbolic character in Price’s text is inspired by non-English traditions and texts.

 First, the novel is a feminist reworking of Russian wonder tales, constructing the witch, Baba Yaga, as a woman of power. In Russian wonder tales Baba Yaga is sometimes a cannibalistic ogre, elsewhere a helper of a brave heroine or hero, but not the sympathetic mentor and foster-mother she is in Price’s text. In Ghost Dance, Baba Yaga is replaced by a community of female witches and shamans that live in huts on animal legs – even in characters’ recollections of stories they have heard. The female protagonist in the novel, Shingebiss, is a young witch in training, guided by her foster grandmother. As a revised Baba Yaga, Shingebiss reflects the radical feminist rewritings of witches that turn the stock characters into representations of more complex persons who have feelings and histories and view witchcraft as matrilineally inherited. The radical feminist discourse of witches is, according to Diane Purkiss (1997, 21-22), popular among both contemporary wiccas and feminist fiction writers and also, as John Stephens (2003) writes, in contemporary children’s fantasy.

 In this discourse, old and ugly witches are replaced by wise sages, healers or, in Ghost Dance, shamans. Shingebiss and her shaman grandmother are sympathetic outsiders whose way of life – which is, significantly, in harmony with nature – offers an alternative to the fictional totalitarian Russian czardom in the storyworld, the czardom representing any kind of totalitarian regime. The main plot in the novel concerns Shingebiss’ quest to spell the Czar and stop the destruction of the land and the indigenous people – the new Baba Yaga in Ghost Dance is the compassionate witch or woman who in radical feminist and later eco-feminist discourses is the preserver of life and nature. Thus she also serves as an environmentalist character that challenges the colonialist practices of capitalist – in Ghost Dance also patriarchal – societies.

 Second, turning the fairy tale witches into shamans and borrowing from anthropological accounts of shamanism has appeal from a queer theoretical perspective. In Judith Halberstam’s (2005, 6) framework 10 Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 2010:1) of queer time and space “queer” refers to “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” – the queer organizations thus challenge conventional ideas of gender and sexuality. As characters who live outside ordinary people’s organizations of time and space the

shamans fit into Halberstam’s notions of queer – they live in houses that move, live for 300 years, have their own knowledge system and community and they do not reproduce but adopt children. Moreover, queer time and space is also reflected in the shamanic ability to cross and blend boundaries between worlds and identities. As an example of this, the transgender shaman occurs frequently in anthropological accounts of shamanic traditions – among others, Barbara Tedlock (2005, 250) mentions the widespread phenomena of shamanic “gender switching, bending, blending or reversing”. In Ghost Dance Shingebiss is a reflection of these traditions.

     With upraised wings [the gyrfalcon] dropped from the sky into the snow, and turned into – what? Too small for a man. A boy? […] A lad – or a girl. A girl, or a lad, who had dropped out of the tree – or out of the sky. A lad, or a girl, alone, so far from any camp or settlement - and dressed, in this cold and darkness, as if for a stroll on a summer evening. […] The stranger came closer and, in the light reflected from the snow, they could see the face of their own people. But it could have been the face of a pretty boy or a handsome girl. (Gd, 3–5.)

 In this scene, focalised through a group of Lappish hunters, the initial uncertainty of what the bird has turned into and the repeated hesitation between interpreting “the figure” as a lad or a girl highlights Shingebiss’ exceptionality from the perspective of the hunters. Whereas the hunters recognise Shingebiss’ ethnicity – she is “one of their own people” – they cannot decide on her gender, for her face could be that of “a pretty boy or a handsome girl,” a feminine boy or a masculine girl. Shingebiss’ gender remains a mystery also to readers until the following scene where her grandmother refers to her as “my little daughter” (Gd, 11). Later when she is travelling far from home among people from different ethnic groups she is interpreted as a boy because she is cross-dressing, or wearing the typical shaman clothing, and carries weapons with her. The ultimate form of portraying a masculine identity occurs at the end when Shingebiss apparently changes also her sex when she becomes the First Shaman, Loki – although this is uncertain, because in Nordic mythology Loki (Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 2010:1 11) himself is a god that can change his sex. As a transgender character Shingebiss challenges the fixed, conventional notions of femininity and masculinity – she is an example that it is possible to blend the boundaries of gender and the notions of normative behaviour and ways of life.

While Price changes Schoolcraft’s “true meaning of the tale”, it is ironic that, according to the Ojibwe critics Lois Beardslee (2007) and Barbara Potter (2007), Schoolcraft’s theme is not the theme of their version of the story in the first place. Their story is not about self-reliance but about a friendly game between Shingebiss and the North Wind. Beardslee (2007, 408) comments that “Schoolcraft remains an unshakable, unquestionable source into the present amongmany non-Indian readers and ’scholars’[…] While the information recorded is invaluable, it should be put into the context of an era of conquest during which Native Americans were depicted as childish and incapable of managing the resources of their territories within the scope imagined by the conquerors”. Price does not represent Shingebiss as childish and incapable – quite the contrary – but her version is, again, an outsider’s version of the story. The legend of Shingebiss is here appropriated for feminist and environmentalist purposes. Whatever meanings the Ojibwe themselves associate with their story are not considered relevant. The Ojibwe voices are silenced in the sense that, according to the kind of feminist poetics cited above, what matters is the artistic vision of the author who borrows stories by others to weave her own, new literary creation.

Although Price is freely borrowing and rewriting stories from several other cultures and traditions, the novel cannot be labelled simply as a form of cultural appropriation, or a text ignorant of the effects of colonialism. Ghost Dance explicitly questions colonialist discourses and stereotypical representations by addressing colonial power and the way it works through language and discourse. The novel as a whole addresses the ways in which words and power are linked and how words can be used to manipulate others, whether they are lies, (14 Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning 2010:1) spells or mere play.

     This play is sometimes self-conscious and ironic (as in the cat narrator’s use), sometimes serious and tragic (as in the Czar’s use) and other times necessary for purposes that are seen as morally acceptable (as in Shingebiss’ magic use of words). The novel also plays with multiple focalisation which allows different perspectives on Shingebiss. In the above examples involving other characters’ notions of Lappish witches, the narrative shows how stereotypes about the Lappish people develop, as stories that “spread, up and down the road”. The novel shows that the truth is not what is at stake but who is in the position to define the truth – a telling example of this is the Czar who manipulates reality by creating and repeating discourses that are false but become to be perceived as true because of his social status. The paranoid Czar’s worldview is shown to be distorted, yet his gaze can be characterized as what David Harvey (1996, 284) describes as the Western “imperial gaze” that maps “the world according to its own needs, wants and desires”. In Ghost Dance, the Czar’s imperial gaze defines the truth because God on Earth is infallible.

Bibliography

Bayley, John. Pushkin’s fairy tales. Translated by Jane Dalley. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1978.

Beardslee, Lois. “Review of Shingebiss: an Ojibwe legend (by Nancy Van Laan)”. In A Broken Flute: the native experience in books for children edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007, pp. 408–409.

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