Place And Identity In Who Am I? The Diary Of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937

Anita Heiss (1968-) is one of the Aboriginal writes who have made a great difference in Australian contemporary literary world. She is also the first Aborigine that has gained a PhD in Communication and Media at the University of Western Sydney. As a prolific female writer, Heiss has worked across a range of areas:poetry, non-fiction, commercial women’s fiction, social commentary and so on, extending her reader’s knowledge and understanding of contemporary Aboriginal life in Australia. Her historical fiction Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 tells the story of the "Stolen Generation" under the certain historical background of Australia. From the eyes of a ten-year-old Aboriginal girl Mary, the novel has adopted the diary form that brings to light the tense historical relations between the Australian Aborigines and the white people in the 20th century. With the narration of an innocent child, the novel is an epitome of the Aborigines losing and seeking for their Aboriginal identity under the dominant white culture and the assimilation policy.Through the simple and unadorned language of the novel, this paper tries to take a close look at the texts and explore the physical and linguistic displacement of the Aboriginal people in the novel, and make a study on how they search for an identity after they have been taken away from their traditional culture and live forcedly in the white world, and in the end find a place for themselves in this white dominant society. By means of a careful reading of the novel, the paper discusses the loss of the Aborigines’ identity and the reconstruction of the hybridized new one around the time when the assimilation policy has become an official policy in Australia.Chapter one of the paper is a brief introduction to Anita Heiss, her novel Who Am I? and a literature review. A summary of the studies that have done at home and abroad is presented, which followed by the methodology the paper employs and the main structure of the rest of the paper. Chapter two first points out the difficulties for the Aboriginal girl Mary to locate her place after her physical and language displacement. Being not able to blend into the white society or go back to her own, and caught in the white hegemonic discourse and dominant culture, Mary has been marginalized and become "the other". This chapter analyzes the loss of the Aboriginal identity resulted from the displacement. The connection between place and identity has been attached great importance in chapter three since either the tangible location or the language that can represents a certain sense of place is playing a crucial role in the construction of identity. This chapter also has its focus on the process of Mary seeking for an identity, making it possible for the ideological transformation of the protagonist from the perplexity of finding a place to the attempt of trying to be white, and then to another loss of self-identity from being alienated. Chapter four explores the reconstruction of a hybridized identity of Mary and the other Aborigines, as it has been realized that both accepting the white culture and sticking to the traditional Aboriginal culture might be the possible solution for the identity searching. The last chapter is a summary to the whole paper, which reviews the studies and discussion in the former chapters, and reemphasizes the close connection between place and identity when the latter is being constructed, which decides the hybridity of the reconstructed Aborigines’identity, and the reconstruction of a hybridized identity will be more meaningful in the more accepting modern world and a multicultural context both in Australia and in China.