The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys
To read children's books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to read texts produced within a pattern of imperial culture. Works of the past, such as Tom Brown's Schooldays, The Water-Babies, and The Secret Garden, readily disclose the imperial ideologies that inform them. Thus, Hughes's depiction of schoolboy life at Rugby is framed by imperialism, not merely because Rugby's régime constitutes a training-ground for imperial adventures, as in the case of Tom's great friend East, who leaves the school to join his regiment in India, but also because the conceptual world in which the boys are located comprises two parts: home and abroad, center and margins, as Hughes's depiction of the tribe of Browns demonstrates: "For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, [the Browns] have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands" (13). In The Water-Babies, Kingsley's mobilization of imperial ideologies is distinguished by its convergence of categories of race and class. When Tom climbs down the wrong chimney to arrive in Ellie's room and catches sight of himself in a mirror, he sees "a little ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth" (19). Here, the grime of the chimney, a signifier of Tom's lowly position within the domestic economy, is mapped onto the blackness of peoples colonized by British imperialism.1 Conversely, Tom's ascent to the middle class is coterminous with his transformation into a white imperial man: "[he] can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth" (243-44). And in The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett represents India as a space marked by disorder, danger, and sickness, so that Mary's return to Britain restores her to physical and psychic health (see Cadden; Phillips).
In these texts, the lands and indigenous peoples "out there" in the far reaches of the British Empire are "Othered" in order to produce and sustain an idea fundamental to colonial discourse: that Europe [End Page 196] (and, in these three texts, Britain) is the norm by which other countries and peoples are judged. Not that the process of "Othering" is an unproblematic one—indeed, colonial discourse is shot through with anxieties concerning what Peter Hulme calls "the classic colonial triangle, . . . the relationship between European, native and land" (1). Thus, for example, discourses of Christianity, some of which promote the equality of all people as children of God, frequently clash with colonial discourse, which promotes the superiority of white over colored peoples, and so validates the appropriation of land (see Bradford). Nevertheless, despite their moments of uncertainty and their occasional resistance to dominant ideologies, colonial texts are by and large organized through such binary oppositions as self and other, civilized and savage, white and black.
Postcolonial texts are marked by a more complex and contradictory set of discursive practices, some of which this discussion seeks to identify and analyze. Although the post of postcolonial is sometimes read merely as a temporal marker separating a period of colonial rule from the time after it, many theorists have pointed to the cultural and historical differences that are concealed by such a monolithic term, and to the fact that in countries with colonial histories (such as North America, South Africa, India, Australia), the consequences of colonial rule are played out in contemporary struggles over power and especially over land (McClintock 9-14; Dirlik 503-4; Ghandi 1-5). Accordingly, my use of the term postcolonial recognizes the shifting and uncertain significances that attend references to the imperial project.
A feature common in newly independent states after colonialism is what Leela Ghandi terms "postcolonial amnesia" (4), in which painful events of the colonial period are "forgotten." After Australia achieved nationhood in 1901, for example, there followed what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner described in 1968 as "a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale" (25), an eloquent silence regarding Aborigines and the violence and dispossession that they endured following white settlement. Most Australian children's texts produced in the first few decades of the twentieth century omit Aborigines from accounts of Australian history or reconfigure historical events to produce stories of white heroism and black savagery, thus positioning child readers to see themselves as citizens of a white Australia and the inheritors of a tradition of pioneer endeavor. Such strategies seek to elide aspects of the past in order to produce a new national identity. But the past is not so easily forgotten, especially by peoples formerly [End Page 197] colonized. For as Edward Said notes, interpretations of the present frequently involve the rereading of the past in an attempt to discover "whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms" (Culture and Imperialism 1). The colonial past is variously rehearsed, reinscribed, and contested in postcolonial children's texts, and it is increasingly a site of tension, producing different and conflicting significances. There are two reasons for this: first, the influence of subaltern writing, which seeks to recover the voices of colonized people and tell their stories; and, second, the fact that strategies of silence and forgetting merely repress colonial memories, the recovery of which is frequently painful and confrontational.
Tropes of journeying and travel are prominent in postcolonial texts, many of which rehearse, reexamine, and parody the historical journeys of colonialism. In this discussion I consider two British texts: Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (first published in 1964) and Penelope Lively's The House in Norham Gardens (1974), books as far apart from each other as can be imagined but that thematize aspects of the relations between empire and colonies. As instances of "the Empire writing back," I have selected two Australian texts, Pat Lowe and Jimmy Pike's Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen (1997) and Tohby Riddle's Royal Guest (1993), and a New Zealand text, Paula Boock's Sasscat (1994). In all five texts, characters undertake journeys to or from Britain: the Oompa-Loompas, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, travel from Loompaland to the imperial center, located in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory; in The House in Norham Gardens, fourteen-year-old Clare becomes obsessed by the journey of her anthropologist great-grandfather to New Guinea in 1905. Both Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen and The Royal Guest focus on visits by Queen Elizabeth to Australia, and in Sasscat, Win, a young New Zealander, travels to London, and her sister, Sass, dreams of becoming an astronaut. These journeys rework the themes of place and displacement that are so common in postcolonial literatures (see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 9), but the ideologies of the five texts are far from uniform. For although postcolonialism might seem to be invested with notions of progressivism and transition to a brave new world, in fact postcolonial texts display the heterogeneity of postcolonial cultures, with their traces of colonialism, their mix of complicitness with and resistance to colonial ideologies (Hodge and Mishra xi-xii), and their spasmodic irruptions of neocolonialism. [End Page 198]
As Bob Dixon pointed out in his groundbreaking work Catching Them Young (1977), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory works as "aparadigm of imperialism" (110), with Willy Wonka exercising imperial power over the colonized Oompa-Loompas.2 Dixon is quite correct to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as adhering to the ideologies of nineteenth-century novels of colonial adventure, but there are important distinctions to be made: Dahl wrote Charlie in the 1960s, well after the disintegration of the British Empire; and though the heroes of Haggard, Marryat, and Henty travel from Britain to the strange and barbaric lands "out there" in the empire and back again to the safety of Britain, the Oompa-Loompas are brought from their home in Loompaland to work in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Dahl's version of the journey thus involves the displacement of colonized people and their mass transportation to the imperial center, to be commodified as cheap labor. Indeed, the Oompa-Loompas signify two kinds of displacement: they displace the local workforce sacked by Willy Wonka, and they themselves are displaced from Loompaland. Dahl sidesteps the first kind of displacement by treating workers as mere cogs in Willy Wonka's machine, not as people and even less as individuals. And the Oompa-Loompas' displacement from their homeland is elided through Dahl's representation of Loompaland, in whose jungles lurk dangerous creatures such as hornswogglers, snozzwangers, and whangdoodles, and where the Oompa-Loompas can find nothing but green caterpillars to eat. In this way, Dahl constructs the home of the colonized as a place characterized by absence and poverty (specifically of cacao beans), so that the Oompa-Loompas' voyage to Willy Wonka's factory, smuggled in "large packing cases with holes in them" (68), is an insignificant price to pay for the privilege of working for Willy Wonka and of being supplied with cacao beans and alcoholic beverages such as butterscotch and buttergin.
Dahl's treatment of the Oompa-Loompas exactly conforms with Edward Said's description of the ways in which the West has rationalized colonial processes with claims that colonized people were "provided with order and a kind of stability that they haven't been able . . . to provide for themselves" (Culture 23). Within this fiction of Western benevolence and generosity, colonized peoples are represented as recipients of largesse; homogenized and robbed of individuality, they exist as a discursive figure, "them" as distinct from "us," whose duty it is to appreciate the magnanimity with which they have been treated. Such a "leap to essences and generalizations" (Culture 24) effectively elides [End Page 199] the variety and specificity of colonial experience, suppressing, for example, the histories of colonized peoples sold to the slave trade or exploited as cheap labor in various parts of the British Empire. Willy Wonka's Oompa-Loompas are effectively enslaved, but through the mediating figure of Willy Wonka, Dahl positions children to read their enslavement as reward and privilege.
This strategy can be seen most clearly in the episode in which Willy Wonka relates the story of his discovery and "liberation" of the Oompa-Loompas. The children and adults who are taken on their tour of the factory first see the Oompa-Loompas from a distance, in a narrator-focalized sequence. The following exchange serves as a transition to Willy Wonka's first-person narrative:
"Oompa-Loompas!" everyone said at once. "Oompa-Loompas!"
"Imported direct from Loompaland," said Mr Wonka proudly.
"There's no such place," said Mrs Salt.
"Excuse me, dear lady, but . . ."
"Mr Wonka," cried Mrs Salt. "I'm a teacher of geography . . ."
"Then you'll know all about it," said Mr Wonka. "And oh, what a terrible country it is. . . ."
(66)
Whereas Mrs Salt is incontrovertibly an adult, Willy Wonka, an "extraordinary little man" (57), his face "alight with fun and laughter" (57), is attributed with qualities intended to persuade child readers that he is one of them, aligned with them against adults (and specifically teachers) such as Mrs Salt. The contrast between Mrs Salt and Willy Wonka is an epistemological one as well: whereas Mrs Salt knows theory (the "facts" of geography), Willy Wonka's knowledge is based on his practical experience of Loompaland. Through these strategies, Willy Wonka is established as a figure who speaks authoritatively to implied child readers about the Oompa-Loompas and their land.
Wonka's depiction of the Oompa-Loompas (66-68) proposes a series of oppositions between himself (as ideal and idealized imperialist) and his colonized workforce. Wonka is, first of all, knowing, whereas even the leader of the tribe of Oompa-Loompas is unable to understand anything beyond his physical symptoms of hunger. Contrasting values attach to place: Wonka's pride in the glories of his factory, compared with the Oompa-Loompas' readiness to leave their homeland. Wonka is an adult, the Oompa-Loompas perpetual children; Wonka an amused observer, the Oompa-Loompas objects of his colonizing gaze. Above all, the Oompa-Loompas are promoted to child readers [End Page 200] as ideals of how colonized peoples should behave toward their imperial lords: they are satisfied, hardworking, and grateful; moreover, they never forget their colonial place, wearing the clothing that marks them as primitives: "They still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle. They insist upon that" (68). Racialized and objectified as Others, the Oompa-Loompas are thus distinguished from the book's implied readers, who are positioned as "normal" subjects, citizens whose clothing and way of life mark them as being at home in Britain in a way the Oompa-Loompas are not. Dahl's representation of colonized peoples suggests, by inference, that native peoples who turn against imperial rule, or who reject the subservience modeled by the Oompa-Loompas, contravene a model of social and imperial interactions naturalized as correct and appropriate. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, produced in the decade following a dramatic increase in the migration of West Indian, African, and Asian people to Britain, and six years after the anti-black riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham, thus proposes a social and economic structure that treats colonial workers as unskilled and poorly paid factory fodder.
In its promotion of colonialism, its homogenization of the colonized, and its strategies of Othering, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory harks back to texts of the nineteenth century; in contrast, Penelope Lively's House in Norham Gardens displays many of the tensions and uncertainties of postcolonialism, within a complex and subtle narrative. Both texts play with what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the "contact zone," the "space of colonial encounters" (6) where colonizers and those colonized meet and negotiate relations of power and influence. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory promotes the idea that colonial hierarchies are maintained "at home"—that is, in Willy Wonka's factory—just as they were "out there" in Loompaland. The House at Norham Gardens, in contrast, sets one contact zone against another through its shifts in time and place, between 1970s Britain and colonial New Guinea. Clare Mayfield, the protagonist of the novel, lives with her two great-aunts in an Oxford house that constitutes a time capsule of imperialism, for it is filled with the objects and records of Clare's great-grandfather, an anthropologist who "went to queer places and brought things back" (21). Clare discovers in the attic a tamburan, a carved shield from New Guinea, and becomes absorbed by the historical and cultural significances of this object, finally donating it to the Natural History Museum, where it is incorporated into the collection named after her great-grandfather. The tamburan is the central symbol [End Page 201] within the novel's exploration of cultural and historical difference, a strand of meaning that intersects with two others: Clare's own sense of becoming an adult who is both like and unlike her fourteen-year-old self, and themes of aging, physical change, and death, centered on "the aunts."
Within its contrapuntal organization, The House in Norham Gardens circles around symbols and ideas connected with space and time. The house itself, a nineteen-room Victorian marooned among new buildings and old buildings converted into flats, is remote from modernity, since Clare's aunts live quietly in their library, reading and observing; the house is replete with the past in the form of old photographs, china, books and a lavatory "in brown mahogany with the bowl encircled in purple flowers and a cistern called 'The Great Niagara'" (18). While the narrative chronologically follows a few months (from winter to spring) in Clare's life, a series of flashbacks at the beginning of each chapter traces the process of colonization in the New Guinea village from which the tamburan originates: the coming of Europeans to the village in 1905, the destabilization of an ancient culture, the destruction of forests, the loss of cultural identity, the tribe's journey to modernity. Or, rather, this is how the narrative represents colonization, and the how of Lively's representation discloses the limitations of the epistemology on which it relies.
Whereas Dahl's treatment of the Oompa-Loompas trumpets the inferiority of the colonized, Lively's depiction of the New Guinea tribe is tinged with regret and nostalgia, as can be seen in the first of the novel's descriptions of the valley:
There is an island. At the heart of the island there is a valley. In the valley, among blue mountains, a man kneels before a piece of wood. He paints on it—sometimes with a fibre brush, sometimes with his finger. The man himself is painted: bright dyes—red, yellow, black—on brown skin. . . . The year is 1900: in England Victoria is queen. The man is remote from England in distance by half the circumference of the world: in understanding, by five thousand years.
(7)
The island, the valley, the mountains, the kneeling man, are objects of a Eurocentric gaze that describes and evaluates them in relation to their remoteness from England. The narrative itself, implying the existence of a knowing observer, inscribes the valley, and the painted man, [End Page 202] as vulnerable to the encroachment of modernity. At the same time, the mobilization of a temporal contrast ("The man is remote from England . . . by five thousand years") enacts avast and unbridgeable gap between the narrator and the painted man. In its authoritativeness, its knowingness, its emphasis on difference, this passage mobilizes the discursive strategies of Orientalism, which, in Said's terms, defines itself through "the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations" (Orientalism 40) through which it orders the study of the Orient. In Lively's descriptions of the village, the New Guinea tribesmen are represented, in their pre-colonized state, as living in a coherent and ordered society—they "celebrate the mystery of life with ritual" (37). But their culture is defined and fixed through its difference. They have "known no influences, learned no skills" (37)—that is, they have known no influences and learned no skills defined as such by the narrator, whose knowledge and ideological stance are naturalized as normative.
The system of knowledge invoked here is that of anthropology-more specifically, the model of social anthropology prominent in 1974, when The House in Norham Gardens was published. The following comments by the Australian anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw describe how anthropology was mobilized in Australia to "manage" what was commonly called "the Aboriginal problem," but they refer more broadly to the uses to which it was put in former colonies: "From its establishment as a university based discipline there was an underlying, unstated moral task associated with studies of [indigenous] culture. This was that anthropology would supply expert knowledge about that culture that would be used to develop appropriate policy. . . ." (22). In exactly the same way, Lively's description of the New Guinea tribe constructs an "expert knowledge" of what is in the best interests of the tribe. Here is the final episode in the story of the tribe's colonization:
Houses are built for the tribe, and roads. They learn how to drive cars, use telephones, tin-openers, matches and screw-drivers. They are given laws that they must obey: they are not to kill one another and they must pay their taxes. They listen to the radio and they make no more tamburans, but their nights are rich with dreams. The children of the tribe learn how to read and write: they sit at wooden desks with their heads bent low over sheets of paper, and make marks on the paper. One day, they will discover again the need for tamburans, and they will make a new [End Page 203] kind of tamburan for themselves, and for their children, and their children's children.
(165)
The underlying assumptions of this passage are that Western laws will prevent bloodshed ("they are not to kill one another") and that the members of the tribe will embrace the icons of the Western lifestyle (houses, cars, telephones, tin-openers). If their entry into modernity precludes the making of tamburans, the gift of literacy will eventually enable the children of the tribe to "make a new kind of tamburan," but this will be possible only because of their deployment of Western systems of knowledge.
This story of colonization intersects with a series of dreams in which Clare observes the tribesmen seeking the return of their tamburan. As her dreams increase in urgency and intensity, they symbolize Clare's own groping after subjectivity; more important for this discussion, they expose the error of her great-grandfather in taking the tamburan from the tribesmen, who had at first believed that their European visitors were tribal ancestors. Significantly, Clare seeks a solution through an appeal to anthropological knowledge. Her Ugandan friend John Sempebwa is established within the text as an authority on native peoples: he is himself, he says, a "detribalized African" (75); moreover, he is a student of anthropology. When he tells Clare that the New Guinea tribes "stop making tamburans . . . as soon as they've jumped into the twentieth century. . . . They seem to forget how, or why they did it" (99), the principle of cultural discontinuity is promoted: that colonialism has effected a decisive split from the traditional culture of the painted man who created the tamburan. Clare's conclusion that "If it can't be where it belongs, then a museum is the best place" (169) implies that there is no longer any "where," so that the museum, and the disciplinary formations of anthropology, become custodians of the object and its cultural meanings.
Lively's representation of the New Guinea tribe is, of course, a far more progressive representation of colonial relations than that encoded in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But twenty-five years after its publication, its faultlines are clearly visible. The New Guinea tribesmen (and the figures of Clare's dreams are, true to the phallocentric traditions of anthropology, always male) are consigned to the past of primitivism; the sense of loss and regret that permeates Lively's depiction of the tribe enacts the meaning, implied throughout the novel, that the painted man represents the true and authentic culture of the [End Page 204] tribe, a culture preserved only through anthropological knowledge, and specifically by museums. In Lively's descriptions of the colonization of the tribe, the New Guineans are attributed no agency, no capacity for reflexivity or adaptability, but wait passively for the return of the ancestors. Gillian Cowlishaw's summary of anthropological models of the 1960s and 1970s is strikingly close to the mood and tone that permeate Lively's depiction of the tribe: "The metaphor of destruction became intrenched, fixing the complex, ongoing events of colonisation into a one way process of collapse to which the appropriate response is passive sorrow" (25). The novel is thus caught between its contestation of the imperial past (exemplified by Clare's great-grandfather) and its privileging of modernity as a dynamic, protean, complex state that, paradoxically, needs primitivism as its opposite term, objectified as the embodiment of stillness, simplicity, and fixedness. The House in Norham Gardens concludes with Clare looking intently at her aged and beloved aunts and realizing that what she is doing is "learning them by heart," memorizing them against the time when they are dead. For the New Guinea tribesmen, on the other hand, there are dreams, but no memories; there is a dim consciousness of tradition and a nostalgia for it, but the culture is incapable of adapting and transforming itself.
In Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen, written by Pat Lowe and illustrated by Jimmy Pike, colonization does not effect a rift of memory; instead, traditional knowledge, tested against the land of its production, constitutes a proof of tribal identity in contemporary Australia. Jimmy is "a Walmajarri man," from the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia; Pat, his wife, "comes from England." The conjunction of histories and traditions exemplified in the partnership of Jimmy and Pat allows for broad comedy based on contrasted modes of speaking and thinking, but Jimmy and Pat is a hybrid text in other respects as well. It is at once a tract on land ownership in Australia and an illustrated book; its implied readers constitute a combination of older children, adolescents, and adults; its narrative combines the standard English of Pat with the Creole used by Jimmy in conversational exchanges; its illustrations draw on traditions of Aboriginal art but depict aspects of contemporary life. In these ways it exemplifies "transculturation," the term used by Pratt to describe how colonized and formerly colonized people engage in negotiations between their own culture and that of their colonizers (6).
As I've noted, an important line of resistance to earlier literary and [End Page 205] cultural studies of colonialism is embodied in subaltern studies, described by Leela Ghandi as "an attempt to allow the 'people' finally to speak . . . and, in so doing, to speak for, or to sound the muted voices of, the truly oppressed" (2). Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen alludes to the dispossession experienced by Aboriginal people, but its insouciance and subversive wit are anything but muted. On learning that the land of his people is regarded by kartiya (white) law as Vacant Crown Land, Jimmy invites the queen to prove her ownership by one concrete and decisive test: that she knows where to find water in "her" desert. The queen agrees to travel to Walmajarri country, and after a long search she concludes that she is indeed unable to locate any waterholes and that the land belongs to "the Walmajarri mob" (29).
In The House in Norham Gardens, tribal knowledge and traditions are represented as failing to survive colonization, so that they can be preserved only within systems of Western knowledge; in Jimmy and Pat, in contrast, Western epistemologies are pitted against the ancient and continuous traditions of the Walmajarri, whose knowledge is based on the land itself and on ritual journeys undertaken over many thousands of year s. The nostalgia that informs Lively's depiction of the New Guinea tribe derives from an Orientalist emphasis on the primitive nature of their culture, which is quarantined in a past that is discontinuous with modernity. The Aboriginal culture promoted in Jimmy and Pat combines traditional beliefs and knowledge with elements of contemporary Western culture: Jimmy and Pat's letter asserting Walmajarri ownership of the land makes the sly suggestion that the queen "may be glad to get away from [her] family for a while" (9); the Walmajarri people follow their traditional journey in a Suzuki and a Toyota. This hybridity is a marker of a set of cultural forms at once fully Aboriginal and selectively modern.
Jimmy and Pat displaces colonial hierarchies through its juxtaposition of standard and Aboriginal English and its mobilization of intertextual references. Here, the queen meets Jimmy and Pat at their desert camp:
Then a door in the [helicopter] opened, and out stepped the Queen of England.
Jimmy and Pat walked forward to greet her. Jimmy held out his hand while Pat tried to do a curtesy in her King Gees.
"Hello old woman," said Jimmy, and Pat gave him a hard nudge in the ribs. [End Page 206]
The Queen took Jimmy's hand. "How do you do?" she said, with her gracious smile.
"Do what?" Jimmy asked Pat.
"She means how are you going," Pat explained, on tenterhooks in case either of them said the wrong thing.
Jimmy turned back to the Queen. "I'm right," he said.
(12)
For Australian readers, this episode evokes the newsreels, photographs, news reports, and verbal commentaries that have always surrounded royal visits to this country. In particular, it recalls the iconic moments when the queen emerges from car, plane or train, to be greeted by her Australian subjects. Usually, such moments are pictured within the broader context of a watching crowd or a line of dignitaries awaiting their turn to be blessed by the royal presence; here, the queen walks alone into the desert, so that the book's implied readers are interpellated as the observers of a scene at once familiar and strange. The queen enacts the rituals of royal visits through the "gracious smile" that strategically ignores Jimmy's "Hello old woman" and through the greeting "How do you do?," but in taking the final "do" as a transitive verb, and responding "Do what?," Jimmy subverts the queen's reliance on a formulaic phrase intended to maintain social hierarchies and insists on locating speech within a context of interpersonal relations.
Jimmy Pike's illustration of the camp where the trio sleep deploys an aerial perspective (figure 1). For all its apparent artlessness, this picture subverts hierarchies of power and race through its positioning of the queen, in her swag,3 placed alongside the figures of Jimmy and Pat in their shared swag, and against the white ground of the page. If the queen is at the same level as Jimmy and Pat within a democracy of desert life, she is allowed a signifier of royalty in the tiara that is placed neatly by her, but this is not the only sign that distinguishes her from her companions: her two corgis sleep near her, while Jimmy and Pat's hunting dog sleeps at Jimmy's feet; and her high-heeled shoes, so inappropriate to desert use, invite comparison with the serviceable footwear of Jimmy and Pat. Pike's deployment of a limited number of forms and participants is a feature common in traditional art, which "[uses] a minimalist system of classification to establish a complex network of connections that in Western traditions is associated with metaphor" (Hodge and Mishra 96). In this picture, the key elements are the human and animal participants, seen within a set of relations that [End Page 207] displace Western notions of social status. The figure of the queen is smaller than those of Jimmy and Pat, suggesting that despite her tiara she is young in the ways of the desert and in need of the guidance of her companions.