Do not shoot, it shouted

`Do not shoot, it shouted `I am a B-b-british object!. These are the first words spoken by the main character Gemmy in the novel Remembering Babylon. Gemmy Fairley enters the environment of a distant Australian settlement having spent 16 years of his life living with the aborigines. He has lost contact to his past British background, to his language and cultural identity. In the Scottish settlement his past identity begins to reconstruct itself piece by piece, word by word. He struggles with familiar English words until whites avert their eyes, seeing in his search for simple sounds a sign of impairment or worse, of treason. In any case, it is a mark of otherness that subverts the settlers own identity. Gemmy compels them to ask themselves "Could you lose it? Not just language but it. It." (40) 16 years ago Gemmy was a "British object", he was still a boy until British seamen heaved him overboard near the coast of Australia sometime in the middle of the 19th century. Then he became an aboriginal object. Gemmys presence in the village makes the hardest men among them harder still. His indistinctness, his being neither one thing nor the other, in age, culture or appearance, his different consonants and different vowels seems more than imbecilic to the settlers, it seems monstrous. If his existence can be resolved at all in their minds it is that he must be a "blackfeller" disguised in white skin, a dangerous emissary of the outback. In unmasking themselves from the illusion of cultural objective truth, they would make progress and elevate the human nature. In the closeness of the settlers Gemmy tries to find his language and core identity, "It was as if the language these people spoke was an atmosphere they moved in. Just being in their proximity gave him access to it." (14) Gemmy believes that the words spoken by the settlers are the key to his lost language, and if he only c...