Remapping Places: Storytelling and Identity in Momaday’s House
Made of Dawn and Mamang Dai’s Legends of Pensam
Khandakar Shahin Ahmed
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Dibrugarh
University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India.
ABSTRACT
In the novels, Legends of Pensam and House Made
of Dawn, by
foregrounding natural factors as a way to envision place, Mamang Dai and
Momaday respectively propose that human identity and culture may essentially be
constituted by their local bioregion rather than by national or other more
common bases of identity. Both the novels foreground the oral storytelling
traditions of the respective natural communities and the stories testify their
oral cultural history of places and beliefs. Legends of Pensam and House
Made of Dawn are manifestations of bioregional history to relocate
identity in a life-place, i.e., a bioregion is not simply a geographical
terrain rather it is essentially a terrain of consciousness which shapes the
faith and culture of a particular community who dwells in that terrain.
KEYWORDS
Northeast Indian Writing, identity, storytelling
…we realise the need to identify ourselves
again as belonging to a particular place, a community; and some signs for this
lie with our stories. (Dai 2005: 4)
Home is the region of nearness within which
our relationship to nature is characterized by sparing and preserving…. Human
homecoming is a matter of learning to dwell intimately with that which resists
our attempts to control, shape, manipulate and exploit. (Grange 1977:136)
In Legends of Pensam and House
Made of Dawn, by
foregrounding natural factors as a way to envision place, Mamang Dai and
Momaday respectively propose that human identity and culture may essentially be
constituted by their local bioregion rather than by national or other more
common bases of identity. Both the novels foreground the oral storytelling
traditions of the respective natural communities and the stories testify their
oral cultural history of places and beliefs. Legends of Pensam and House
Made of Dawn are manifestations of bioregional history to relocate
identity in a life-place, i.e., a bioregion is not simply a geographical
terrain rather it is essentially a terrain of consciousness which shapes the
faith and culture of a particular community who dwells in that terrain. Mamang
Dai and Momaday reconstruct the oral stories of animistic principles of the
Adis and Kiowas respectively who live mindfully and sustainably in their place.
Being adherents of the animistic faith, they believe in co-existence with the
natural world along with the presence of spirits in their forests and rivers.
Rituals, myths, legends, beliefs and daily living patterns of Adis and Kiowas
evolve in a bioregional attachment with the place and oral circulations of
these cultural markers in the community through generations constitute
aboriginal identity:
Bioregionalism is not a new idea but can be
traced to the aboriginal, primal and native inhabitants of the landscape. Long
before bioregionalism entered the mainstream lexicon, indigenous peoples
practiced many of its tenets. (McGinnis 2)
Aboriginal narratives can be viewed as
manifestations of cultural memory to revisit oral history of a community and
thereby reconstructing and relocating identity in its life-place. It is
pertinent to assert that our understanding of human place is largely
conditioned by the political interventions of appropriating its history and
normalizing set of discursive formations as essential to locate individual’s
identity. Ideologically and politically generated “cultural artifacts”
(Anderson 6), instead of a community’s bioregional association with a place,
are considered to be the yardsticks to map a place and control communities of
people. This in fact leads us to the vexed questions nation-state and
nationalism and how memories of the past are regulated in cultural and academic
practices to attain a desirable loyalty and allegiance of people for the sake
of governance. This is a prevalent practice in the erstwhile colonies. Together
with this, aboriginal history and sense of place underwent the process of
coercion due to the intrusion of colonial modernity. Its manifestation was
realized in how oral history and heritage, animistic faith and biotically
determined faith system were replaced by documentations, institutionalized
laws, and politically sanctioned geographical boundary. A complete new set of
discursive practices were put in circulation to normalize whatever was thought
to be not normal:
We can demonstrate that, in the face of the
unknown, Europeans used their conventional intellectual and organizational
structures, fashioned over centuries of mediated contact with other cultures,
and that these structures greatly impeded a clear grasp of the radical
otherness of the American lands and peoples. (Greenblatt 54)
Colonial modernity in its manifestations to
normalize and restore order in the Aboriginal places marked the negation of
oral cultural memory and sense of life-place as something obsolete and
irrational.
Therefore, it can be rightly asserted that one
of the significant temporal markers of postcolonial condition is the formation
of nation-state which is not only sanction and normalization of a spatial
construct by means of the forces of print-capitalism, but at the same time it
is also a tacit re-orientation of the globe in terms of the binary of colonial
and postcolonial. This framework attributes ‘colonialism’ as the determining
trope of history i.e. non-European places and cultures can be comprehended only
in terms of a relation to the “Euro-centered epoch that is over (post-), or not
yet begun (pre-)” (McClintock 403). In this sense world’s multitudinous culture
are marked either by a retrospective subordinate relation to linear European
time or by the apparatus of the nation-state. This temporal division of
colonial and postcolonial to map the globe is an inevitable silencing of
aboriginal spatial memory. Hence the emergence of aboriginal writings from the
different places of the globe is an attempt to restore their oral past, sense
of place and reconstruct cultural identity by transcending the politics and
limits of the binaries of colonial and postcolonial. This desire to transcend
is a reclaiming of the fact that aboriginal place and culture have always
already been there. Storytelling in this context is the potential medium to
revive and relive oral traditions and thereby relocating aboriginal identity as
rooted to its life-place. Aboriginal stories are not politically or
ideologically tempered artifacts; rather storytelling is inextricably fraught
with the lived experience in a place and how cultural practices, rituals and
beliefs evolve in relation to the environment, landscape and natural diversity
of that place. Oral storytelling tradition is not confined to a temporal
journey in memory but contiguously it is a process of specialization of memory
to relocate aboriginal identity. The essential inseparability of place and
memory (in the form of oral traditions) facilitates an altogether alternative
way of remapping aboriginal places as bioregions. The idea of bioregion defies
the idea of place as a geographical terrain and instead of that bioregional
ethics conceives a place as a terrain of consciousness.
Mamang Dai’s Legends of Pensam and
Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn testify how storytelling is
a potential bearer of cultural memory to make sense of a geographical location.
Both the works bring to the fore essence of oral storytelling as manifestations
of cultural memory rooted to a place, and in fact spatialization of oral
stories marks the reconstruction of aboriginal identity. Bioregional memories
of Adis in Legends of Pensam and Kiowa tribe in House
Made of Dawn are reflective of the limitations of mapping a place as a
political boundary grounded by a history of invented memories. However,
bringing together of two texts from different locations and contexts requires
some justifications. It is not erroneous to say that our perspective and
understanding of a place is conditioned by the epistemological categorization
of the globe under several heads like: the stratification of first, second and
third world, demographic categorization in terms of religion and above all the
colonial intervention to divide the globe into Europe and the rest. From the
vantage point of these categorizations the bringing together of the above
mentioned texts will seem untenable. However, we may try to remap the globe in
terms of human community’s rootedness to its place. The sense of
rootedness to a location’s environment and landscape are inseparable entities
of faith and rituals of natural aboriginal communities. This is, in fact, an
alternative way of remapping a place. This paper seeks to study Mamang Dai’s Legends
of Pensam and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn from
this stand point.
Aboriginal narratives
like Legends of Pensam and House Made of Dawn chart
the inextricable relationship between life of the individual and the life of
the land. The way the land holds the people, in the same degree the people also
hold the land to the core of their living. The reciprocal relationship marks
the evolving of a cultural history of lived memory. Oral storytelling of the
aboriginal communities, therefore, is an alternative way of understanding a
place. It is, indeed, a resistance to, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
observe in The Invention of Tradition, the ‘invented
tradition’:
‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of
practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a
ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of
behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with
the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish
continuity with a suitable historic past. (Hobsbawm 1)
Hobsbawm and Ranger’s argument is relevant
here to understand the apparatus of the aboriginal narratives. For instance,
Indian durbar was attributed with false ceremonial rituals as part
of ‘invented memory’ of the past to create a new sense of identity which would
put in practice a new set of power-relations between the ruler and the ruled.
The durbar “whose status as “tradition” was a total
fiction-was said to be a great ceremonial pageant designed to be implanted in
the Indian memory though it served the British colonial authorities to compel
Indians to believe in the age-old history of British imperial rule” (Said 178).
In contrary to the propositions of an ‘invented tradition’, aboriginal
narratives envision a place and its past as a bioregional history. This
reciprocal relationship between a natural community and its landscape is the
first principle of any aboriginal narrative.
Mamang Dai in Legends of Pensam and
Momaday in House Made of Dawn, by moving away from the
existing and given arbitrary political constructs of nation and state, creates
an alternative and parallel culture in favour of those that emerged from a
biotically determined framework, primarily based on natural communities. Both
novels capture the bioregions of the Adis of Arunachal and Kiowas of Walatowa
and their practice of animistic faith that is woven around forest ecology and
co-existence with the natural world. For the aboriginal natural communities
dwelling in their bioregion means to immerse into a place, to be completely
engaged to the sensory richness of environment. Their life is determined by the
natural factors and their close association with the place and its nature
shaped their faith, culture and history. This bioregionally determined life and
culture of the Adis and Kiowas put forward an alternative approach to map their
place and identity, which is essentially a moving away from the trajectory of
nation state and forces of print capitalism. It is pertinent to assert that for
these aboriginal communities their bioregion is their ‘life-place’— a unique
region definable by natural rather than political boundaries with an ecological
character capable of supporting a unique human community:
Bioregionalism is a body of thought and
related practice that has evolved in response to the challenge of reconnecting
socially-just human cultures in a sustainable manner to the region-scale
ecosystems in which they are irrevocably embedded. (Aberley 14)
Storytelling, as bearer of aboriginal history,
is a living medium of tracing the origin of aboriginal people as natural
communities. Stories of how Adis and Kiowas evolve as aboriginal communities
associate them with natural entities i.e. like different living organisms of
nature they are also born in spiritual design of nature. Both Mamang Dai and
Momaday trace the oral lineage of their origin to a state of ‘nothingness’. The
state of ‘nothingness’ stands for a memory and a location which are unmediated
by political or ideological ‘invention of tradition’. This rootedness in the
natural landscape of a place should be the base, as recollected by both the
authors, for mapping the place and locating the identity of the aboriginals:
From nothingness we have come to be born under
the stars, and almighty Donyi-polo, the sun and the moon, whose light shines on
all equally, is the invisible force that guides each one of us. (Dai 2006: 57)
Do you see? There, far off in the darkness
something happened. Do you see? Far, far away in the nothingness something
happened. There was a voice, a sound, a word — and everything began. (Momaday
85)
However, this birth of natural communities
were “never written down” (Momaday 86) and, hence, compartmentalization and
redistribution of geographical locations with the advent of colonial modernity
and its aftermath of nation-state formation completely posited aboriginal
spatial-cultural history as negations to justify the newly invented memory of a
place. In this context, it can be rightly said that writings like Legends of
Pensam and House Made of Dawn are a part of cultural
urgency to retrieve and relive the oral cultures thereby remapping the place of
aboriginal communities. The role of a rhapsodist or a storyteller in an
aboriginal community is a significant one as he/she is the bearer of oral
cultures through generations.
In Legends of Pensam, Hoxo
listens to the stories of cultural practices and spiritual beliefs from the
rhapsodist who “along with the dancers have arrived at the crucial point in the
narration of their history where they will ‘travel the road’” (Dai 2006: 50).
Abel, in House Made of Dawn, was familiarized with Kiowa history by
his grandmother:
The stories were old and dear; they meant a
great to my grandmother… It was a timeless, timeless thing;
nothing of her old age or of my childhood came between us. (Momaday 84)
Revolving around the myths, legends and
tradition the Adis, Legends of Pensam relives that part of
history which is yet unexposed. The inseparable relationship between the land
and its culture is indicated at the very beginning of the novel:
In our language, the language of the Adis, the
word ‘pensam’ means ‘in-between’. It suggests the middle, or middle ground, but
it may also be interpreted as the hidden spaces of the heart where a secret
garden grows. It is the small world where anything can happen and everything
can be lived; where the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in
calm or stormy weather; where the life of a man can be measured in the span of
a song. (Dai vii)
This in-between space indicates that as
members of distinct communities, human beings cannot avoid interacting with and
being affected by their specific place or bioregion. For the Adis their
identity is essentially a bioregional identity, a lived experience is
association with nature rather than an arbitrary attribute. In narrating the
myths and legends of the Adis Legends of Pensam can be read as
the bioregional history of that tribe:
Like the majority of tribes inhabiting the
central belt of Arunachal, the Adis practise an animistic faith that is woven
around forest ecology and co-existence with the natural world. (Dai xi)
The numerous stories of Adis in Legends
of Pensam points to the myths and rituals of indigenous people as
models of bioregional narratives that reflect and maintain sustainable
relationships between humans and their natural environments. Adis believe that
all agents of their bioregion are the abode of spirits. The trees, forest,
lake, river, as believed by the Adis, bear spirits of either healing power or
evil design. For instance, the myth of Birbirik, the water serpent, is in
circulation but “no one, for generations now, remembered the name of the first person
who had seen it, but the event was fixed in their collective memory” (Dai 09).
On a night of heavy rain, a fisherman, who was all alone with his nets by the
river, heard a rushing sound as the water pated, and when he looked up at the
tree he was sheltering under, he saw a serpent with a head with horns coiled up
in the branches looking down at him. He then ran for his life. He never
recovered from the effects of that terrible vision and died within a year of
wasting illness. Besides this there are other things or agents which represent
certain good or evil values; for example, the tooth of a tiger and a wild boar
are symbols of luck and success, whereas the aubergine plant growing into a
size of a tree, with small poisonous-looking flowers and long bloated fruit,
becomes a ghostly tree that creates psychopathic behaviour in people who come
under it. These myths and rituals locate the Adis in the moral
space of defining relations and incorporate natural entities into their sense
of moral community. Moreover, these practices and beliefs reflect a careful
attention to the natural and cultural histories of the Adi bioregion, offering
knowledge of local flora, fauna, weather and cultural practices that grew out
of those local biological contexts.
However, the bioregion of the Adis and their
animistic faith were threatened by the advent of the British colonizers.
In Legends of Pensam Mamang Dai charts the circulation of
colonialist discourse of modernity and its manifestations in the form of
development and compartmentalization between human and natural, rational and
irrational. As part of the colonial frontier to penetrate the eastern part of
the globe the British undertook the construction of “mysterious Stillwell road
that wound through Asia like a giant serpent, meandering more than a thousand
miles across three countries…. No other road in the world had taken as high a
tool of human lives as this one; it had been dubbed ‘a-man-a mile road’” (Dai
40). The Adis could not come to terms with the endeavour of the Migluns, what
they called the British, as Adis are not in a position to envision their
location in terms of a watertight compartmentalization of human and nature. The
Adis did not create their place of survival by means of exploiting the natural
world but it is a ‘life-place’ for them which rather evolve with their
animistic belief and faith. The notion of a route to move around or a boundary
to demarcate things is essentially realised in a sustainable way which refers
to the practice of living within the ecological limits of a place in a manner
that can be continued by future generations with no deleterious impact on the
environment:
The villages ran into each other and only a
tree, a rock or a narrow stream cutting across the path marked the loose boundaries.
(Dai 74)
The intrusion of modernity in the form of
colonial enterprise vitiated the ecological base of the Adis as a natural
community. For them “it was unimaginable, what the migluns were trying to
achieve.” The question of animistic faith and life-place is ignored as
something limited to rural and pastoral concerned only with agrarian issues.
The colonisers did not take into account the bioregional faith of the Adis in
their natural environment, instead the life place with all its agents have been
associated with sinister implications and projected as a barrier to
development:
One officer wrote in his notebook: ‘the forest
is like an animal. It breathes all around us and we never know when it will
suddenly rise up like a green snake out of decaying vegetation or descend on us
like a mantle of bats reeking of blood and venom. The trees are enormous and
sinister. They stand all around us and you can feel them looking down and
waiting. One fears to move… It is a terrible war and I wish I had never come to
record such terror and suffering. (Dai 52)
Therefore, to diminish the ‘terrible’ and
‘sinister’ the migluns did not hesitate to use dynamite. Here, it is not simply
a question of destroying the ecology; rather more pertinently it is damaging
the bioregional faith of the Adis as something obsolete and insular. This is
evident when the old headman sighs: “They think we are a village of horror, but
it is not true!” (Dai 55). The faith of the Adis guarantees a sustainable
coexistence of man and the animistic world and this coexistence shapes their
history and cultural identity. The advent of colonial modernity jeopardized the
edifice of Adi bioregion both as a geographical terrain and as a terrain of
consciousness:
But the big trees were brought down. The
spirits of our ancestors who dwelt in these high and secret places fell with
the trees. They were homeless, and so they went away. And everything had
changed since then. (Dai 42)
The assault on the animistic faith of the Adis
has created a condition of ‘homelessness’ for them. It is not that they are
removed from their location but the location is stripped off its specific and
unique sense of ‘life-place.’ It can, therefore, be asserted that Mamang Dai in
Legends of Pensam challenges the notions of universal truths and
values of development, progress and rationality by foregrounding the fact that
for an aboriginal community like the Adis human existence is indivisible with
landscape in which it takes place.
In House Made of Dawn, Momaday captures the
Kiowa community’s inseparable relationship with Walatowa landscape. For the
Kiowas their place is not merely a geographical territory; rather it is a
spiritual domain of consciousness where components of the natural world create
a life-place of animistic faith. A separation from this place of faith leads to
spiritual sickness, uncertainty and alienation. In the novel Able, the
protagonist, oscillates between the rootedness of his aboriginal heritage on
the one hand and the call of the white modern American society. His divided
loyalty leads to a state of homelessness. Momaday through the predicament of
Abel brings to the fore that Native American aboriginal way of life is
essentially rooted to its place. It is a reciprocal relationship between the
land and its people. The Kiowas trace their origin as a sun-dance culture and
“they do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way
of life” (Momaday 52). It is through Abel’s struggle to come to terms his
identity that House Made of Dawn remaps the place of Kiowas by
means of a journey through cultural memory manifested in numerous oral stories.
Abel’s return to Walatowa from the war
in The Longhair section of the novel fails because “he had
tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not
say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old
rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it” (Momaday 53). Abel’s
inability to speak points to his loss of “old” tongue, which is indicative of
his dissociation with the past oral traditions and stories as well:
And yet it was there still, like memory, in
the reach of his hearing… Had he been able to say it, anything of his own
language — even the commonplace formula of greeting Where are you going” —
would once again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb. Not dumb —
silence was the older and better part of custom still— but inarticulate.
(Momaday 53)
Abel’s struggle to come to terms with his
place indicates that unlike politically or ideologically constructed subject
positions, aboriginal identity is essentially a matter of rootedness to its
place. Walatowa as the life-place of Kiowas has a spiritual bearing in the life
of the community forming a set of animistic faiths of natural governance. The
Kiowas believe that the way their land holds them in the same way they are also
attached to their land. This reciprocal relationship, as Able recollects the
oral story, is understood in terms of spirits of ‘eagle’ and ‘snake’. At Walatowa
the hold of the land (and the reciprocal human willingness to be thus held)
manifests as the “snake spirit” of the land, while the human ability to hold
the land (and the reciprocal willingness of the living land to be thus held)
manifests as the “eagle spirit”.
Abel’s predicament testifies the intervention
of the outer forces into the life-place of the Kiowas, i.e., the advent of the
white colonizers and the intrusion of colonial modernity attribute Kiowa oral
culture with sinister associations to be negated as if sense of a place begins
only with arrival of the whites. Abel’s grandmother tells him how their
aboriginal community considers their language having a spiritual attachment to
its place. Cultural reality and beliefs of Kiowas exist orally in a language which
evolves from the bioregional attachment of the people to its place. Therefore,
Abel’s grandmother believes:
The word did not come into being, but it was. It
did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and
the silence was made of it. (Momaday 86)
For Abel’s grandmother “words were medicine;
they were magic and invisible” (Momaday 85). However, the white man’s use of
the language has completely stripped off the spiritual essence of Kiowa way of
communications. Abel makes sense of his grandmother’s story on ‘word’ as he
notices how colonial modernity exploited language as a tool of constructing
realties to eradicate the oral past and dispossess the Kiowas from their
life-place:
In the white man’s world, language, — and the
way in which the white man thinks of it — has undergone a process of change… He
has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him.
He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language—for the Word itself— as an
instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return.
(Momaday 85)
The sermons of the Priest of the Sun are
primarily retellings of the stories and origin myths of the Kiowa. Momaday uses
the character of the Priest of the Sun to tell the stories of the Kiowa, stories
that represent the heritage from which Abel feels impossibly far at this
moment. Abel says, “he had lost his place… he had known where he was… now he
was reeling on the edge of the void” (104). The retelling of the Kiowa myths
and the predicament of Abel testify the fact that Walatowa is the life place
for aboriginal culture which seek sustain itself with its own bioregional ethics.
Therefore, it can be rightly asserted that Mamang Dai’s Legends of
Pensam and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn testify
how storytelling is a potential bearer of cultural memory to make sense of a
geographical location. Both the works bring to the fore essence of oral
storytelling as manifestations of cultural memory rooted to a place, and in
fact spatialization of oral stories mark the reconstruction of aboriginal
identity.
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