The danger I want to draw attention to resides not in the inscription of the
alter/native meta-text as such, but in the specific employment of this meta-text
under the sign of the authentic to exclude the many and complex voices [Ö]
(p.76)Griffiths notices how in the texts he has studied ëwhat is implicit is
that any single narrative strand [Ö] resists the idea of a unified
construction of history or placeí (p.81).
Griffiths examines how critics should undermine ëthe myth of
authenticityí and ëits authority over the subjected whilst simul-
taneously recognizing the crucial importance of recovering a sense of
difference and identityí:
the discussion being articulated across the boundaries of the discourses of the
dominant and the dominated is not (as colonial texts suggest) between the pure
and the tainted, or (as the white myth of the authentic suggests) between the
tainted and the recovered pure, but between two orders of the impure. They
therefore dismantle the order of the dominant by uncovering its own construc-
tion, and refuse to be replicated as an ëotherí in a reversed binarism which
leaves the dominant intact, or which, indeed, in an important sense, calls it into
being.^ (p.83)A strategy of resistance is conducted ëthrough texts which show that
the voice of authority is itself a production of hybridizationí (p.83).
ëThe Myth of Authenticityí (1994) is a crucial essay since it
demonstrates the degree to which
the narrative of the indigene is being constructed within the larger disabling
narrative of the oppressor, and how in our own times the position of the
ëliberalí voice and even, in certain cases, the voice of direct resistance is
seduced towards an acceptance of an overdetermined narrative of authenticity
and indigeneity which overrides the complex actualities of the social and
political condition [Ö] (p.84)The ëoverdetermined narrative of authenticity and indigeneityí
typified by the models of ëWomaní and ëNationí are overridden by
difference, and this is exemplified by the complex and often hybrid
representations of identity offered to readers by the poets under
discussion. Likewise, post-colonial criticism has moved away from
essentialist modes of nationalism that seek to transcend disunity and