Being Prey

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By the same token, the narrative self is threatened when its story is taken over by others and given an alien meaning. This is what the mass media do in stereotyping and sensationalizing stories like mineóand when they digest and repackage the stories of indigenous peoples and other subordinated groups. As a story that evoked the monster myth, mine was especially subject to masculinist appropriation. The imposition of the master narrative occurred in several ways: in the exaggeration of the crocodile's size, in portraying the encounter as a heroic wrestling match, and especially in its sexualization. The events seemed to provide irresistible material for the pornographic imagination, which encouraged male identification with the crocodile and interpretation of the attack as sadistic rape.

Although I had survived in part because of my active struggle and bush experience, one of the major meanings imposed on my story was that the bush was no place for a woman. Much of the Australian media had trouble accepting that women could be competent in the bush, but the most advanced expression of this masculinist mind-set was Crocodile Dundee, which was filmed in Kakadu not long after my encounter. Two recent escape accounts had both involved active women, one of whom had actually saved a man. The film's story line, however, split the experience along conventional gender lines, appropriating the active struggle and escape parts for the male hero and representing the passive "victim" parts in the character of an irrational and helpless woman who has to be rescued from the crocodile-sadist (the rival male) by the bushman hero.

I had to wait nearly a decade before I could repossess my story and write about it in my own terms. For our narrative selves, passing on our stories is crucial, a way to participate in and be empowered by culture. Retelling the story of a traumatic event can have tremendous healing power. During my recovery, it seemed as if each telling took part of the pain and distress of the memory away. Passing on the story can help us transcend not only social harm, but also our own biological death. Cultures differ in how well they provide for passing on their stories. Because of its highly privatized sense of the individual, contemporary Western culture is, I think, relatively impoverished in this respect. In contrast, many Australian Aboriginal cultures offer rich opportunities for passing on stories. What's more, Aboriginal thinking about death sees animals, plants, and humans sharing a common life force. Their cultural stories often express continuity and fluidity between humans and other life that enables a degree of transcendence of the individual's death.

In Western thinking, in contrast, the human is set apart from nature as radically other. Religions like Christianity must then seek narrative continuity for the individual in the idea of an authentic self that belongs to an imperishable realm above the lower sphere of nature and animal life. The eternal soul is the real, enduring, and identifying part of the human self, while the body is animal and corrupting. But transcending death this way exacts a great price; it treats the earth as a lower, fallen realm, true human identity as outside nature, and it provides narrative continuity for the individual only in isolation from the cultural and ecological community and in opposition to a person's perishable body.

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