Swallow the Air Literary Elements

Coming-of-age (Bildungsroman); Young Adult fiction

Aboriginal communities in Australia; Wollongong, Sydney, Darwin.

First-person narration by Australian aboriginal teenager, May Gibson.

Mood varies according to the events and circumstances but is pervasively realistic. The tone of the novel, on the other hand, often adopts an anti-realistic stylistic technique of manipulating descriptive language for the purpose of presenting the familiar in ways that distance the reader through alienation. The effect is to produce an instability that mirrors the emotional state of the narrator.

Protagonist: May Gibson. Antagonist: System colonialist racism toward Australia’s indigenous people

The major conflict involves May’s attempts to connect to her past and aboriginal origins and the obstructions to this goal made by efforts to erase that past.

May’s discovery her aboriginal tribe (Wiradjuri) has been driven from the land they once occupied, dispersed across the country and are in danger of losing their cultural connectedness to future generations.

“Mum’s stories would always come back to this place, to the lake, where all Wiradjuri would stop to drink. Footprints of your ancestors, she’d say, one day I’ll take you there.” The lake she writes about here is non-existent by the time May sees it. The lake which has become mere dust is metaphorical foreshadowing of May’s discovering that the culture of her tribe has also dried up and disappeared.

N/A

N/A

Imagery is pervasive throughout the book, beginning with the very opening lines: “I remember the day I found out my mother was head sick. She wore worry on her wrists as she tied the remaining piece of elastic to the base of the old ice-cream container. Placing her soft hands under my jaw so as to get a better look at me, Mum’s sad emerald eyes bled through her black canvas and tortured willow hair.”

Paradise Parade is paradoxically named. It is not simply that it is not a paradise, but it is the opposite of a paradise. It is characterized as being a boulevard of broken dreams covered with a patina of scum.

An example of a specific technique of parallelism is used to describe the state of housing projects. Asyndeton is quick repetition of descriptive words lacking the usual use of conjunction to link them together: “People never leave places like this, they stay the same – same neighbours, same friends, same shops, same small-town bullsh*t.”

“Who’s gonna speak for ‘em little fellas.” Within a colonialist system of oppression by invaders over native inhabitants, the most powerful tool is not force, but propaganda which convinces both sides of their respective position relative to the other. That the aboriginals refer to themselves as the “little fellas” demonstrates the effectiveness of this metonymic technique of psychological warcraft.

Water takes on a mystical quality in the cultural heritage of the aboriginal tribes. This quality is indicated through the use of personification: “Issy says that the lake works like a heart, pumping its lifeblood from under the skin. She says there are many hearts, and with them, many valves and veins.”