When Bone Talk was first published, I was surprised to find many teachers comparing it to the 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe. It is a fair comparison I guess because both stories are 'first contact' narratives. But writing Bone Talk, I wanted to turn that first contact narrative around. I wanted to see the world from the eyes of the othered.

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   But most of history is written by the colonizer. Thus the voices of the colonized are hard to hear, as I realised when I began researching Bone Talk and struggled to find any records of my indigenous characters' voices.

 

   Rereading Robinson Crusoe, I wondered if young readers read it as a rollicking adventure, as I did when I was a child. I wondered if they were aware of the contexts of the novel.

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   Like many, the part I best remember of Robinson Crusoe is the last third of the book. Indeed, the book can be quite dull in parts (sorry!) until that final third, when our castaway finally meets Friday, a man of unidentified Caribbean origin (Crusoe names him Friday and refuses to call him by any other name). 

It is Crusoe's relationship with Friday that was the indelible reason for the book's success. What we all forget is that the first part of the book is driven by tales of slavery. 

 

   Crusoe's ship is attacked by pirates near Morocco and he is enslaved by a Moor. After two years, he escapes with the help of a boy named Xury, who inexplicably agrees to become Crusoe's slave. En route to Brazil, Crusoe sells Xury – the boy who practically saved his life – to a Portuguese sea captain. The captain promised 'to set the boy free in ten years if he turned Christian'. Which was good enough for Crusoe. 

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   In Brazil, Crusoe buys a plantation and becomes a slave owner. Other plantation owners approach him to go as their representative to Guinea in Africa to buy more slaves, offering him 'an equal share of Negroes, without my providing any part of the stock'. The only thing that upset Crusoe about this arrangement was that he had a plantation to look after ... and he spends the next paragraphs on administrative detail about leaving his business in the care of his colleagues.

 

When he finally sets off, he writes: 'We had on board no large cargo of goods, except such toys as were fit for our trade with the Negroes, such as beads, bits of glass, shells, and odd trifles, especially little looking glasses, knives, scissors, hatchets, and the like.'

 

   Like many readers of my time, I accepted many aspects of the book without asking any questions. Defoe was articulating the world view of 1719, a world of the civilized versus the savage, of imperial power extracting wealth from ignorant peoples and faraway places. 

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   Robinson Crusoe was written in another time, another place but I believe that it is a story we still need to examine today. Not for castaways and adventure, but to learn about the world that came before ours, and to realize that we must scrutinize and challenge our own.

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