GRGR(16) Plot Summary

[rj]

Peter Petto
> The Russian soldiers found a new sport: hunting down the ethnics 
> like wild game, sometimes one at a time, sometimes by the hundred.

There are distinct echoes of the Herero massacres and the Holocaust in
this passage. (340.6-25)

Galina's dream (340-341) succinctly symbolises the whole cultural
carpetbagging theme I think. She has noticed too that it is the
non-verbal spaces of tribal communication in which resistance to the
program of linguistic imperialism is being wrought (like Dzaqyp Qulan's
silences also, which speak worlds to Tchitcherine, and like the lesson
of the ajyts later, and like that cheesy pidgin of Tchitchy's mom and
dad). Galina sees that, as an agent of this program of "education", she
will also eventually destroy the indigenous culture. The town she is
ostensibly building is also the town she will crush:

" -- it is herself, her Central Asian giantess self, that is the
Nameless Thing she fears. . . . " 

best