Bhutan - Folktales of Bhutan

Country: Bhutan               
Book: Folktales of Bhutan
Author: Kunzang Choden
Publication Year: 1994
Genre: Folklore

Dangbo..o..o Dingbo..o..o.. there was a country high in the Himalayas that had a rich oral tradition and a mythology all its own. Yet this mythology was in many ways universal to that found in the countries far below.

Tse ni – Delay.

Wherever in the world humans have settled, they have told tales to entertain, educate and inform. Greek myths. Nordic sagas. First nation Australian visions of the Dreamtime. The mythic tales found in Genesis and Indian Vedas. We have been telling stories for millennia.

Bhutan, like any other society, has its own mythology. Transmitted through the still isolated and largely rural country by the oral tradition, the collection of folktales and legends published by Kunzang Choden sees many of these stories told outside of the country for the first time. And yet they are redolent of similar tales told the world over.

In reading through the collection of short tales, the obvious analogue that one can’t help but mention is that of Aesop’s fables. Like Aesop, many of the tales feature animals. Tigers and leopards. Chickens and foxes. An entire army of frogs (which is the collective noun for  a group of frogs).

Yet there are elements of those stories that deal with the human inhabitants of Bhutan that feel more like tales from the Arabian Nights. Or parables found in the gospels of the New Testament.

The former, at least, is understandable, given Bhutan’s location high in the Himalayas, with China, India and Pakistan is close proximity. As isolated as Bhutan is, the legends Choden retells feature visitors and explorers who find themselves wandering into the mountain Kingdom. Cross cultural fertilisation is inevitable, however isolated a country might be.

Then again, many experiences are universal to the human sphere, no matter how isolated a place might be. The desire to love, marry and raise children. The need to survive and thrive. Joseph Campbell showed in his academic work how many of the same sorts of stories are universal the world over. 

 
All cultures, for instance, seem to have a story equivalent to the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, where a character is swallowed by a fish, whale or other aquatic creature. Though in landlocked Bhutan, the closest analogue to Jonah seems to be The Girl who was Swallowed by a Python. The girl cuts her way free in the way that other captives free themselves by a variety of methods.

Perhaps it reflects a time when we were smaller creatures and more likely to be eaten by snakes or large fish. Perhaps it is a deep seated desire to return to the womb.

Indeed, if you want something truly universal, the Bhutanese refer to their country as, Drukyul, which is thought to mean, Land of the Dragons. Which are the subject of mythological tropes from China to Turkey and England and Wales.

Many of these tales reflect morality tales we find in Buddhist and Christian tracts. Like the man who finds a large piece of turquoise and swaps it for a horse, then swaps the horse for a bull, then a ram, rooster and finally a song. It’s the woman who swallowed a fly in reverse, but just as silly. Yet the story reflects the message of anti-consumerism found in both religions.

The Tiger and the Frog has some features of The Frog and the Scorpion. Although in the Bhutanese version, the frog gets the better of the tiger. A boy goes to buy a cow, but is attacked by a Sinpo, a flesh-eating spirit, which has some of the same features as Jack and the Magic Beanstalk.

Other stories are more baffling . Like, The Princess with Three Breasts, where the titular (yes, I went there) Princess marries a man with a hunchback. They are thrown together by a blind man and both the husband’s hunch and the princess's third breast burst in the collision and they live happily ever after. It’s a love conquers all metaphor perhaps. Or the idea that any personal disadvantage or handicap can be overcome by meeting the right person. Something like that.

There is also the weird and supernatural. Like the disembodied goat’s tale that helps to feed its mistress (Hans Christian Andersen would be proud). Or the various ghosts that feature in the stories. Here it feels like we are leaning more towards the stories told by Scheherazade during the 1001 Nights. Frogs don’t quite turn into princes in these Bhutanese tales, but frogs and princesses do have business with one another, like any good folk tradition.

The Bhutanese are thought to be of Mongolian decent and like the characters in Galsan Tschinag’s Blue Sky trilogy (see: Mongolia), the trials and tribulations of goat and sheep farming are reflected in these stores with just as much focus placed on the importance of dung as seen on the West Mongolian plain.

Obviously there is a lot of local flavour and regional variation to these stories, but the same tropes are found again and again across the world. Some of these stories wouldn’t be out of place in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron. Or in West African folklore. Or Incan ritual.

For a country of just 600,000 people, living in the rarefied atmosphere of the Himalaya, these stories have been preserved remarkably well via the oral tradition. New ways of storing data to greater and greater capacities make us lose something of ourselves. When there is no reason to store information in our own brains, we lose the ability to retain even a tiny fraction of what we were once capable of holding in our minds.

As we have externalised the function of the gut to the frying pan and oven, we have externalised the function of the mind to the smart phone. So too, maybe, have we externalised our imaginations to film and TV screens. The old ways of retaining information are slowly being lost. The stories found in Folktales of Bhutan are a window into one of the last places where these traditions endure. A Shangri-La of memory. A place to which we can dream of returning.

Kunzang Choden

Samoa - Where We Once Belonged

Country: Samoa               
Book: Where We Once Belonged
Author: Sia Figiel
Publication Year: 1996
Genre: Fiction

Sia Figel’s 1996 novel, Where We Once Belonged, holds the distinct honour of being the first book published in the United States written by a female Samoan author. The honour is also somewhat dubious. Rather like Octavia E Butler being the first American women of colour to publish a work of speculative fiction (1977’s Patternmaster), it is depressing how recently it happened.

Where We Once Belonged is on one level a simple coming of age tale. It uses a traditional Samoan storytelling technique, su'ifefiloi, which, as I understand it, involves sewing or weaving together different parts (the word derives from the weaving together of a garland of flowers). In employing this technique, Figiel attempts to counter the lazy stereotypes of western anthropological studies of Samoa and the sexualisation and fetishisation of Pacific island women n general (“Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!’”).

In another sense, the novel conforms to storytelling techniques found throughout the world, some of which we have already discussed in this project. In following the story of thirteen year old Alofa Filiga, as she navigates the pitfalls of puberty and village life within Samoan society, we are harking back to other tales of village and small town living. In A Grain of Wheat in particular (see: Kenya), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o weaves together the parallel narratives of his villagers to give a comprehensive overview of events during and in the years following the Mau-Mau Rebellion.

Ngugi’s, however, is a simple act of narrative prose storytelling. Figiel weaves poetry into the various tales that hang together on a central stem (though there are various examples of prose/verse mixtures used in western literature, of which Dante’s Vita Nuova is perhaps the best example).

But this is also a form of expression seemingly more widely used in Pacific island writing than would perhaps be allowed in other parts of the world. In considering the academic work of Epeli Hauʻofa (see: Tonga) and Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa (see: Fiji), we have read collections of essays that include pauses for poetry between the weightier academia in a way that one wouldn’t find in the work of Noam Chomsky, say. Indeed, Figiel and Teaiwa released an audiobook together of poetry and song (Terenesia) in 2000. Another link in the chain that takes us from Hauʻofa to Teaiwa and on to Figiel.

Other universal themes rear their heads. Sexual awakening. The male gaze. Christianity and its scapegoating of women for being the objects of male lust. The cruel and cliquey nature of adolescent children and young women. The ghost of colonialism that casts a long shadow, as it does everywhere, with the fetishisation of the Pacific called out in its references to Gauguin, but also Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent time living on Samoa during his three year voyage among the islands of the Pacific.

There is an irony that western travellers saw the Pacific islands as some kind of prelapsarian idyll, full of dusky maidens, unaware and unashamed of their nakedness. Then the missionaries arrived, bringing with them Christianity and concepts of original sin that destroyed Eden in the process. 

 We see its toxic after-effects throughout Where We Once Belonged. Alofa being ostracised because a man looks lustfully at her in church: Idle gossip: Demonisation of those on the fringes of village society: People casting the first stone left, right and centre. Like the inhabitants of Salem, Massachusetts, sin and satanic influence are conjured in the collective imagination and punished with the shaving of Alofa’s head. Yet the usual male indiscretions take place, powered by patriarchal rule, with no repercussions (see: Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia and most of the rest of the Reading the World project for further examples).

All in all, Where We Once Belonged is a decent enough novel. Unique yet universal. Employing stylised local narrative techniques, but weaving in themes and methods that are used the world over and which have probably been in development since the birth of oral storytelling.

This is not the last Samoan book we shall encounter in this journey, I am sure. There is the work of Albert Wendt, for a start, whose name floats above these Pacific island entries like a shearwater flitting from island to island. And as we return to these places in future journeys, we are bound to find Samoa in the backwash of other Pacific island shores.

Sia Figiel

 

Fiji - Sweat and Salt Water

Country: Fiji           
Book: Sweat and Salt Water
Author: Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa
Publication Year: 2021
Genre: Essay /Poetry/Academia

We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood. —Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa

If Epeli Hauʻofa (see: Tonga) and his pioneering anthropology gives us a bird’s eye view of the Pacific islands and their peoples, Teresa Teaiwa academia zooms in on the issues facing the nations of the region.

Published in 2021, four years after Teaiwa’s untimely death at 48, Sweat and Salt Water collects  together a number of her most influential essays, organised into sections covering Pacific Studies, Militarism and Gender and Native Reflections. Through these essays, Teaiwa drills down into discussions of the history and problems in defining Pacific Studies, the challenges teaching the subject and in engaging students, as well as the consequences of western colonisation and the stain, cultural and environmental, left by US and UK nuclear testing in the region.

What is refreshing about Teaiwa’s writing is she is never afraid to insert herself and her lived experiences into her writing. The great problem with much academic writing, especially that written by western academics, is it tends to be written from ivory towers, where subjective opinion is presented as objective fact. Yet academic research is a moveable feast, continuously beieng reassessed and evolving as new data come to light.

As Teaiwa refers to Howard Zinn in her essays, I will once again make reference to Zinn’s idea that history is an infinite chain of events. To tell any story, historic or fictional, one must cherry pick from those events in order to weave a coherent narrative. How one chooses which events to focus upon is a subjective process decided by demographics and upbringing. How you tell a story depends entirely on where you come from.

As such, a US historian writing about the Vietnam War will have a very different opinion on those events than a Vietnamese academic. A European historian will write about 19^th century colonialism from a different perspective than the descendents of the people who were subject to its brutality and oppression.

As we have discussed before in this project, there has been a plaintive cry amongst western commentators in recent years that “they are erasing our history.” This is a disingenuous attempt to preserve the western narrative that European colonialism was all japes and good fun and no-one really got hurt (“at least no-one that mattered”, to paraphrase Douglas Adams) and everyone was delivered to Christ, so what are you bleating about anyway? Mention slavery or the massacre of indigenous populations and you are “doing this country down” as if it needed any help. By “erasing our history” what they really mean is: Asking the victims of those events how they feel about them.

Teresa Teaiwa was born in Hawai’i to an African-American mother and a father from the Banaban people of Kiribati. She grew up in Fiji, studied in Washington DC and California and was teaching in New Zealand at the end of her life. She assimilated  “European political thought from Plato to Marx.“ She therefore had a rich matrix of cultural vectors from which to approach the history and politics of the region. She didn’t have the (white) privilege of separating herself from those issues.

While Teaiwa‘s writing is academic and professional, almost to a fault, there is often an undertone of irony and cynicism at institutionalised attitudes to the Pacific region and its population. If you live it, you attitude will be much different from those who pronounce on the lives of others without experiencing them , or, in many cases, even visiting the places on which you presume to opine. A little sarcasm and world weariness is entirely appropriate. It is genuine. It is honest.

‘Bellwether’ is a photographic project by my friend, John Harrison, for which I have contributed a number of pieces of writing over the last few years. The project focuses on three Lancashire towns (known as the ‘Three Towns’) in Northern England. John takes portraits of people in the area to show how they live, work and relax. I coined the term, Bellwether (employed it, more accurately), to refer to those places on the margin of British life. They seem peripheral to the national consciousness, but when taken as a collective of similar sized towns across the UK, they have a greater population than any city other than London. What happens there is a microcosm for what will eventually happen everywhere.

The Pacific is similar, though on a much greater scale. There are somewhere in the region of 20,000 islands across the world’s largest ocean. Like Great Harwood or Mold or Ross-on-Wye, the islands of Kiribati, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea are Bellwether nations for what is to come for the human race. Climate change will effect these places sooner than New York, Paris or Beijing, as they slowly disappear beneath the rising waters. We should look at how the world, how the dominating colonial countries of Australia and New Zealand, treat these countries and ask ourselves if we will be treated any differently when the time comes. These s/pacific n/oceans, as Teaiwa refers to the militarisation of the region, should worry us all.

While the Bellwether towns of Britain are separated by rivers and motorways and hills and mountain ranges, the Pacific Bellwethers are separated only by the ocean. The distances between them are on a whole other scale, but they are, in an important sense, almost claustrophobically close. If it snows in Ross-on-Wye, it might be raining in Great Harwood. When oceans levels rise in Kiribati, they will rise everywhere, and not just in the Pacific. The islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean will feel in too.

There is a kind of wave-particle duality about the islands and the people of this region. Epeli Hauʻofa was born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan parents, but worked for much of his life in Fiji. Teresa Teaiwa was born in Hawai’i but grew up in Fiji. In making her representative of Fiji, it is an unsatisfactory compromise. The easy choice would be to place her in Kiribati, but I would be doing so merely to meet a quota and tick off another country. What I have learned (or think I have learned) so far is that no one in the Pacific region entirely belong to one island or nation.

As this project progresses, I hope individual writers will spread out like a heat map charting the rise of global temperatures to cover most of the region. The western toxic obsession with categorising and pigeonholing of everything leads me to place the authors I read to one country or another. But like a series of unobserved particles passing through the notorious double slit experiment, if we wait long enough, they will form an interference pattern on our memory and imagination. Hauʻofa spreads out from Tonga; Teaiwa from Fiji. Subsequent writers will overlap with them and fill in the gaps. Needless to say that like Nigerian science fiction, or the rich literature of Trinidad and Tobago, the island nations of the Pacific will be the subject of a longer essay at some point in the future.

I feel like I have said very little about Teaiwa’s actual writing here, but that’s ok. These sketches do not conform to any set format. The best writers, the best thinkers and their ideas are the ones that set off a cascade of thoughts in the mind of the reader that lead them to unimagined places.

This can have unintended consequences of course. But as Howard Zinn reminds us, experience and influence vary from person to person. We cannot control how others react to internal stimuli, merely try to ensure our own reactions to the world are constructive and not self-deluding. Teresa Teaiwa is not someone who seemed to suffer much from delusion, but was grounded in the world, region and discipline in which she lived and worked.

There are some writers on this journey for whom I will read one or two books and never return to them after I am done (though I would never be so gauche as to tell you who they are). Teresa Teaiwa is not one of those writers. Like We Are the Ocean (see: Tonga), the title essay of which begins with Teaiwa‘s words quoted at the start of this piece and from which this collection takes its name, Sweat and Salt Tears is a work to which I will refer to whenever I return to the literature and thought from the region. Further collections of Teaiwa’s writings are planned for release.  They are most welcome. Anyone interested in the region could do worse than start by reading We Are the Ocean and Sweat and Salt Tears. Like the Pacific itself, they should be propagated far and wide.

Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa