A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 7
Rembrandt's serving maid occupies the spot Velazquez gave to
the disciples. She is far off in the background to the left, perhaps
suspecting nothing. Both she and Christ, who looms up large and
ghostlike on the right, are potent silhouettes. In the foreground,
also faceless, is a nearly invisible figure : a pilgrim crouching down
in sudden recognition. But at the center of it all, as in a mirror, there
is a face. It is drawing back, twisted with astonishment. It belongs
to the other pilgrim - and to us.
Ghandl's poem, like Rembrandt's painting, or Velazquez's, takes
the form it does because that is the form its author gave it. It has the
human poignancy it does because that poignancy is something its
author had learned to perceive and communicate. The images and
themes of which it is made are largely materials he inherited - and
along with these components, he inherited a narrative and visionary
grammar for putting them together. He could, however, have built
them into a vastly different structure - a more sentimental structure,
for example, or a colder one, with a lower emotional charge - just
as any fluent speaker of a language can assemble a cluster of words
into sentences with very different values.
Pokhodsk is farther from Hlghagilda than Leiden from Seville. It
is an overgrown mission station, trading post and neolithic village
near the mouth of the Kolyma, which empties into the East Siberian
Sea, three thousand rough and windy miles north and west of Haida
Gwaii. There in the summer of 1896 a Yukaghir woman told several
stories to a listener willing, like Swanton, to take dictation. I do not
know her Yukaghir name, but a royalist Russian missionary had
given her another : Ekaterina Rumyantsev. Her listener was a Russian political activist, anthropologist and novelist named Vladimir
Germanovich Bogoraz.3
Ekaterina Rumyantsev had not only a Russian name ; she had
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considerable exposure to Russian colonial culture. She therefore
told her stories to Bogoraz in the Russian language. And some of
Bogoraz's research in Siberia was funded, like Swanton's work in
Haida Gwaii, through the American Museum of Natural History in
New York, at the instance of Franz Boas. The stories Rumyantsev
had learned in Yukaghir and told to Bogoraz in Russian were, for
this reason, ultimately published not in Leningrad or Moscow but
in New York, in Bogoraz's English translation.
In the absence of an actual transcription, there is no hope of appraising Rumyantsev's skill or stature as a mythteller, and no hope
of studying her work and Ghandl's together on equitable terms.
But one of her stories has something important to tell us, even
when reduced to English prose. Side by side with Ghandl's poem, it
shows how the same events and characters can be assembled very
differently by different human beings, just as the same figures can
be grouped very differently in different painters' paintings and in
different people's dreams. This is Rumyantsev's story as rendered
by Bogoraz : 4
There was a family of Tungus. They lived in a tent. They had three
daughters. The girls, when going to pick berries, would turn into female
geese. In this form they visited the sea islands. One time they flew far-
ther than usual. On a lonely island they saw a one-sided man. When
he breathed, his heart and lungs would jump out of his side. The Geese
were afraid and flew home.
After some time, they had nothing to eat, so they went again to the
sea islands for berries. Wherever they chose a spot on which to alight,
One-Side appeared and frightened them away. At last they found a
place full of berries. They descended and laid aside their wings. They
picked so many berries that they could hardly carry them all. They
went back to the place where they had left their wings. The wings of
the youngest daughter were gone. They looked for them a long time. At
last, evening came and the sun went down. It grew very dark. The two
elder sisters reproached the youngest one : "Probably you have taken a
liking to One-Side, and you have asked him to hide your wings. Now
remain here alone and let him take you !"
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a story as sharp as a knife
She almost cried while assuring them that their suspicions were
unjust. "I have never seen him and never thought of him." They left her
and flew away. She remained alone.
As soon as they were out of sight, One-Side appeared carrying her
wings. "Well, now," he said. "Fair maiden, will you not consent to marry
me ?" She refused for a long time. Then she gave in and said, "I will !"
"If you are willing," said One-Side, "I will lead the way." He took
her to his house. It was the usual house, made of wood, with a wooden
fireplace. He proved to be a good hunter, able to catch any kind of game.
Still he had only one side, and with every breath his heart would jump
out. They lived together for a while, and the woman brought forth a
son. The young woman nursed the infant. But One-Side did not want
to stay at home. He would wander about all the time and bring back
reindeer and elk. They had so much meat that the storehouses would
no longer hold it. He was a great hunter. He hunted on foot on snow-
shoes, for he had neither reindeer nor horses for traveling.
One time he set off to hunt as usual. Then his wife's sisters sud-
denly came and carried the youngest sister and her little son off to
their own country. The small boy, while carried on high, shouted, "O
father ! O my father ! We are being carried by aunties to their home,
to their home."
One-Side ran home as fast as he could, but he came too late. They
were out of sight. Only the boy's voice was heard far away. Then he shot
an arrow with a forked head in the direction whence the voices seemed
to come, and the arrow cut off one of the boy's little fingers. One-Side
found the arrow and the finger and put them into his pouch.
Then he started in search of his boy. He walked and walked. A
whole year passed. Then he arrived at a village. A number of children
were playing sticks. He looked from one to another, thinking of his boy.
There was one poor boy who was dressed in the poorest of clothing. His
body was mangy, and his head was bruised and covered with scars.
First, One-Side paid no attention to him, but when he finally looked
at this boy, he saw that the little finger on his left hand was missing.
He snatched the finger out of his pouch and placed it beside the hand,
and indeed it fit ! The poor boy was his son ! "Whose boy are you ?"
asked One-Side.
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"I am mamma's boy."
"And where is your father ?"
"I have no father. I used to have one, but now I have none."
"I am your father."
The boy refused to believe it and only cried bitterly. "If my father
were alive, we should not be so wretched, mother and I."
The elder sisters had married and made their youngest sister a
drudge in the house.
"Why is your head so bruised and scarred ?" asked One-Side.
"It is because my aunts order me to enter the house only by the back
entrance, and every time I try to go in by the front entrance, they strike my head with their heavy staffs."
"Let us go to your house."
They arrived at the house. The boy went ahead and One-Side fol-
lowed him. They came to the front entrance. As soon as the boy tried
to go in, his eldest aunt jumped up and struck him with her iron staff.
Then the woman saw the boy's father and felt so much ashamed that
she fell down before him.
He entered the house. They hustled about, brought food of every
kind, and prepared tea. They ate so long that it grew very late and it
was time to go to bed. On the following morning after breakfast, he
said to his brothers-in-law, "Let us go and try which of us can shoot
the best with the bow ! You are two and I am only one."
They made ready their bows and arrows and began to shoot at
each other. The elder brother-in-law shot first, but One-Side jumped
upward, and the arrow missed him. The second brother-in-law also
shot. One-Side jumped aside and dodged the arrow.
"Now I shall shoot," said One-Side, "and you try to dodge my ar-
rows." He shot once and hit his elder brother-in-law straight through
the heart. With the second shot he killed his other brother-in-law.
Then he went back to the house, killed his wife's sisters and took home
his wife and son.
One time he set off as usual to look for game. When he was out of
sight of his wife, he took off the skin that disguised his true form and
hung it up in the top of a high larch tree. He became a young man,
quite fair and handsome, just like the sunrise. He went home and sat
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a story as sharp as a knife
down on his wife's bed. While he was sitting there, he was about to
take off his boots. The woman began to argue. "Go away from here !
My husband will be here soon, and he will be angry with me. He will
say, 'Why have you let a strange man sit on your bed ?'"
"I am your husband," said he. "Why do you try to drive me away ?"
"No," said the woman. "My husband is one-sided, and you are like
other men."
They argued for a long time. At last he said, "Go and look at that
tree yonder. I hung up my one-sided skin on it." She found the tree
and the one-sided skin, and now she believed him. Then she caught
him in her arms and covered him with kisses. After that they lived
happier than ever.
*
Ghandl's poem about the hunter who married his prey has been
spared the indignities visited on many works of indigenous oral
literature. It was transcribed in the language in which it was spoken,
and it has quietly been travelling the world since 1905 in Swanton's
admirably faithful prose translation. In that form it is also the subject
of a sensitive, close study by the poet Gary Snyder.5 It is nonetheless
a literary work that we have only just begun to understand.
I have been calling it a poem and a piece of spoken music. That
is because I hear in it resonant textures and densities, and vividness
and shapeliness and clarity that, for me, define the terms I want to
use. I cannot tell what terms to use for Rumyantsev's story, because
Bogoraz's translated paraphrase is all that now remains.
Some things, nonetheless, can be known about the story on the
basis of the paraphrase alone, just as some things can be known
about a painting on the basis of a poorer painter's copy or a second—
hand account.
The paraphrase can tell us, first of all, that the list of narrative
ingredients is very much the same - almost uncannily the same - in
Rumyantsev's story and in Ghandl's. The ingredients are very much
the same, but they are differently assembled by two very different
cooks, one of whom has learned the European fairytale custom of
serving happy endings for dessert. "The same story" has become
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two wholly different meals for the mind. That much is clear, though
in the one case we can still attend the feast - because we have the
actual text - and in the other we can only read the menu and collect
the empty plates. There is no supper at Pokhodsk because no one
took dictation - just as, in the legacy of Velazquez, there was once
no supper at Emmaus because vandals, in whose hands the treasure
rested, chose to have the painter's vision blotted out.
Digesting the sense of the world - of which we are made, and to
which we return - is just as essential to life as digesting its physical
substance. The mythteller's art is as old, universal and vital as that of
the cook. The congruences between these tales told by Ghandl and
Rumyantsev are reminders of that fact. Drawing on this old, shared
recipe - as dormant in its way as Luke's abbreviated version of the
supper at Emmaus - and adding some significant resources of his
own, Ghandl could construct a work of art that can stand beside the
paintings of Rembrandt and Velazquez or, I think, beside the sonatas
of Haydn and Mozart. It is a work of music built from silent images,
sounding down the years. It is a vision painted indelibly in the air
with words that disappear the moment they are spoken.
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Bear's eye from the housepole of Naagha Hliman Xhunandas (House of the Cas—
cading Elk Hides), Ttanuu. The pole is now in four sections at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
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3 * The One They Hand Along
PeoPle dePendent on hunting and foraging are
almost always mobile, while gardeners and farmers stay put and
build towns. In Haida Gwaii, as elsewhere on the Northwest Coast
of North America after the last glaciation, this rule ceased to hold.
Shellfish are there for the taking twice each day when the tide recedes - and salmon, halibut, cod, herring, eulachon, sealion, seal
and other species pass like an edible calendar along the open coast
and through the maze of inshore waters. In precolonial times the
Haida planted no crops,1 and yet they lived, like wealthy farmers, in
substantial towns. The rich tradition of Haida art and oral literature
is simultaneously rooted in the powerful social forces of the village
and in the hunter's acutely personal relations with the wild. It is
also rooted in the constant presence of the sea. Manna falls only
rarely from the heavens ; it emerges daily from the waves. And the
primary realm of the gods, in Haida cosmology, is not celestial ; it
is submarine.
This vision is a part of the complex intellectual ecology of the
North American continent - not by virtue of any political union
engineered by Europeans, but through physical proximity and centuries of cultural exchange between the Haida and their neighbors,
both human and nonhuman. Ideas are widely shared and thought is
sometimes deeply rooted. This does not, however, mean that Haida
literature, philosophy and art are entirely joint and anonymous tribal
creations. The dwelling place of culture, as the linguist Edward Sapir
tried often to explain to his anthropologist colleagues,
is not in a theoretical community of human beings known as society. ...
The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals
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and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one
of these individuals may unconsciously abstract. 2
Franz Boas (1858-1942), who was John Swanton's mentor and
the father of American anthropology, taught by contrast that "Ethnology ... does not deal with the exceptional man ; it deals with the
masses." 3
The writings of many ethnographers, both popular and scholarly,
are well supplied with sentences in the form "The Haida believe
that..." or "The Navajo believe that... ." Perhaps not all such sentences are altogether false, but it is certain that no such sentence is
ever entirely true. What people think, and what they believe, from
moment to moment and day to day, is for each of them to say or not
to say, as each of them may choose. Many people choose to speak
instead of what they remember or what they imagine. Some choose
not to speak at all, or not to speak to those who ask too many questions. If we come to the study of culture by way of literature and art,
we have an advantage : we can generally be sure that what we are
studying is something someone has actually chosen to say. What
one poet says is not necessarily what another poet would say, nor
what the poet's neighbors would say if asked what they believe. We
know, however, that Ghandl had listened to earlier Haida poets, as
well as to the world, and we know that those who knew him chose
to listen to him too, even in very difficult times. His knowledge and
skill as a mythteller are remembered in the Islands even now - and
