the angel in the tent

I've begun to read Margaret Atwood's The Tent, described generically on the inside book cover as "a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays." From the pieces I've encountered, I get the sense Atwood's playing up the wise-and-cunning-writer-as-witch persona again, in snappy and sometimes rehashed blog-like entries about supporting the young ("I'll fling encouragement at them like rice at a wedding. They are the young, a collective noun, like the electorate"), the perils of having a publicly acclaimed voice ("my voice attached like an invisible vampire at my throat"), and retellings of the stories of Salome and Helen and Horatio, Hamlet's friend and reluctant storyteller. As always, she's at her best when being ominous -- as in the title piece where a "you" insists on writing on the walls of her paper tent (reminiscent of Kobo Abe's titular character in The Box Man) despite the howling of predators outside -- and whimsical, as in "Plots for Exotics": ("From an early age I knew my ambition was to be in a plot. Or several plots -- I thought of it as a career. But no plots came my way. You have to apply for them, a friend of mind told me. He'd been around, though he hadn't been in any plots himself, so I took his advice and went down to the plot factory").

Though some of the pieces seem rather unfinished, or self-indulgent, or repetitive -- making me wonder if they'd have made it through to publication if Atwood weren't, well, Atwood -- some are wonderfully sharp, as in the pages where the persona takes on the guilt of being descended from colonizers. This makes me think of the Ifugaos in Baguio, dressed up in their woven skirts and headdresses for the tourists:

As for them, our capital cities have names made from their names, and so do our brands of beer and some but not all of the items we fob off on tourists. We make free with the word authentic. We are enamoured of hyphens, as well: our word, their word, joined at the hip. Sometimes they turn up in our museums, without hats, in their colourful clothing from before, singing authentic songs, pretending to be themselves. It's a paying job. But at moments, from time to time, at dusk perhaps, when the moths and the night-blooming flowers come out, our hands smell of blood. Just the odd whiff. We did that, to them.

But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? Is that them, landing in their illicit boats, at night? Is that them, sneaking in here with outlandish hats, with flags we can't even imagine? Should we befriend them or shoot them with arrows? What are their plans, immediate, long-term, and will these plans of theirs serve us right? It's a constant worry, this we, this them.

And there you have it, in one word, or possibly two: post-colonial.