The Silence of the Lambs: Childhood Disabilities, Gender Ambiguities, and Postcolonial Detectives in Keri Hulme’s <em>The Bone People</em> and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s <em>Sense of Snow</em>

Abstract

Miss Smilla is every bit tropical she is polar.-Peter Hoeg1In this essay, I try to account for unlikely affinities between Keri Hulme's The Bone People, published in New Zealand in 1984, and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, published in Denmark in 1992. Both novels explore hybridity, in part, through figure of single female surrogate parent of a symbolically or partly orphaned child. Hulme's Kerewin Holmes is a half Maori and half Pakeha woman who adopts mute boy Simon, and Hoeg's Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit and half Danish woman who fosters deaf boy Isaiah, whose deceased father and alcoholic, often absent mother are both Inuits. Isaiah becomes deaf after enduring multiple untreated ear infections, to point where he couldn't hear a thing (Hoeg 497). Both adult protagonists confront difficulty of engaging in multiple forms of translation between cultures and individuals, partly through figure of an abused boy whose care they have assumed. Both writers invoke a kind of subaltern, effectively postcolonial child, and threat of violence, with Hulme focusing on putative aphasia and silence and Hoeg on deafness and silence, to address manifestations of postcolonial trauma. They also depict truncation of childhood a disturbing feature of postcolonial condition. Simon was victimized by both his original European father and his adoptive Maori father: bruises often cover his cheekbones after he had been struck hard and repeatedly across his face (Hulme 115). Isaiah has dormant in but infecting his body a parasite that eventually would have killed him, another metaphor for violent invasiveness of colonialism.Both writers treat colonialism infantilizing, but also disruptive of social categories, including age norms and expectations regarding family, intimacy, and gender roles. Smilla remarks, I'm thirty-seven years old. Fifty years ago that was a full lifetime in Thule. But I've never grown up (Hoeg 474).2 In both cases, children make adult women confront their own though less explicitly with Hulme. Smilla claims that crying carries [men] back to their childhoods, but book is full of dislocations of age, culture, family, and place (Hoeg 10). Smilla's father leaves when she is three, and Smilla repeatedly reflects on her mother's disappearance (40, 106, 140), while Isaiah's Inuit mother leaves him generally unsupervised.With children forced to act uncomfortably like adults and adults acting uncomfortably like children, characters seem to inhabit multiple ages simultaneously in both texts. In Smilla, Isaiah is frequently depicted beyond his years, partly to reflect unnatural accelerations and dislocations of colonialism. In The Bone People, Joe similarly says of Simon, a shipwreck survivor who does not know his own age, One minute he looks about five, and next he acts though he's ten times old (Hulme 510). Smilla often makes comparable remarks, describing herself abstractly as if there were someone else inside you, someone more naive but also more tenacious (Hoeg 465). Smilla also iterates Simon's habit of incessantly talking to himself if he were another person. Smilla puns about way children get under your skin: As always when an adult becomes transparent, inside him steps forth, and she then teases Tork about the bicycle you never had when you were a child (484-85). But both Smilla and Kerewin are sensitive about their roles surrogate mothers: sounding if she could be Kerewin, Smilla asks, So what if I've never had a of my own? (128). Smilla ponders, How did Toenail know I didn't have any children? [. . .] The world is always wondering why a single, defenseless woman, if she's in my age group, doesn't have a husband and a couple of charming little toddlers (28-29). In both novels, reconstituted or chosen family serves a kind of rejoinder to colonialism that often dissolves family lineages. …