Mwanamizi: a prologue about storytelling.
One way I might this, the story starts with... a dinner party. And a goddess.
As a personal reward for having completed something, I was able to spend the long weekend at a storytelling camp in a local wood.
My friend Marion Leeper gave me a lift back from the wood. She is a very thoughtful and knowledgeable storyteller and the central figure in the Cambridge scene. Somewhere around Royston, I started telling her about this writing project. “You should definitely weave some Vietnamese folktales in,” she said.
“Well yes, I know I should, but the fact is that all the stories which have been important to me through all this aren’t from Vietnam. They’re from all over, mostly from the Mediterranean.” I thought a bit: “And all the important dreams I had, and the scary ones, some of them were in forests, but they were never in those forests, where I was actually working.”
“Maybe you had enough to be scared of there already.”
“Yes, and enough to do…” Again, I thought for a bit, and then I began to talk about what was really bothering me.
That morning, under the ash trees, I’d begun to read through the old notebooks I’d brought with me, to piece together the start of my own story of working on the saola. It was strange to see the memories, which I held separate in my head, coming together into a single timeline. I was looking back at 2005, which I remembered as a time when I was looking for a conservation mission and generating huge amounts of thought and text about what conservation should be about. It was also a time when I was toying with the idea of taking myself seriously as a storyteller. I knew that but I had thought of these as two strands that grew independently of one another and, that when I moved to Vietnam, the second one, the storytelling, was severed. Reading back to a particular weekend in 2005, I find it wasn’t like that at all. The strangest thing about the reading was that I noticed certain strands of thinking that I had thought were engendered years later, by specific events, appearing in the course of random musings in my notebooks.
The… self-affirming explanation for this is that, by methods mundane or mysterious, I’m tapping into something trans-temporal; that these are ripples running back from the future or variations on persistent themes. The more disturbing explanation is that it’s confirmation bias or, even worse, ‘manifestation’ in the popular New Age sense; that I only saw what I expected to see or walked into traps I’d made myself, perhaps for the sake of a story.
Did I dream up all my drama at dinner parties before I ever went to the forest? Did I ever really go to the forest, or to Vietnam, at all?
So I spoke to Marion about these correspondences across time and she mentioned a quote that she encountered in her own education:
The kinds of nets we know how to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch.
Elliot W Eisner
Which, maybe isn’t saying anything new, but it struck me. The fish I’ve caught myself have mostly been already dead and from my own fish tank in my childhood room. I caught them with a little green net with a long handle.
However, while animal traps provide the metaphor that I always come back to, I also need another one here. Maybe it’s more like the forms supposedly hidden within a block of wood or stone which the sculptor then finds with his tools. That’s a good story and I wonder if it’s true.
Anyway:
2005: This is the winter after the summer when I completed my MSc in ‘Applied Ecology and Conservation’ at UEA and when Hannah and I got married. We moved back near to Cambridge because of the conservation opportunities there and I got a part-time job on the ‘Precautionary Principle Project’ at FFI. I returned to angsting over what to do with my life. I was back to looking for a threatened species to do a PhD on; just as I had been before applying to UEA. At that time, I had come to understand that the strategy of committed conservationists there was to find a species that happened to have some quirk of its breeding ecology that made it interesting for evolutionary theories of kin selection. Studies on this kind of thing within the Zoology Department should throw up important information that would help with population viability analysis or habitat suitability assessments to help keep the species from extinction. People kept asking me what interested me, or whether I had an existing connection to any place or conservation project. I’d grown up in London, was bad at making connections and anyway the question amazed me. Would a general deploying a soldier ask what interested him? Surely the question was what needed to be done?
By 2005, though, it was bothering me more that the conversations I was having weren’t about threatened species at all.
24/02/05. Meldreth, Cambridgeshire. From notebook.
The rain is lashing the skylight and it’s hard to write because my fingers are numb. This is my one free day of the week and I feel I’ve wasted it. Motivation is so hard to ride and little tasks so easy to get lost in. There is a dead fox on the L-moor, lying on the edge of the swelling ditch with its nose underwater. Its tail is slim as a lizard’s; black and curled under its roe-black legs. Men in orange coats are burning the thorn scrub; bonfires stretching upward, very red in the February rain.
26/02/05. Meldreth, Cambridgeshire. From notebook and memory.
We had a huge talking dinner party last night. I made an overcomplicated vegetable lasagna from an Antonio Carluccio recipe, making the pasta myself on the machine my Nonna had given me. Hannah made chocolate mousse. Rosie and Joseph and also Sally F came down from Cambridge in Anna’s car. Sam and Tim came up from King’s Cross but Jon was coming straight from a meeting in Bristol and got held up, so they didn’t get to chat New Caledonia on the train. I’m not sure how Rufus and Tom M. got there.
Sam is still here, sleeping on the air mattress. We went to bed after 2am and now it’s just past 8. The birds are singing conversationally, settling in for the day’s business. I could do with a lie-in because I have a storytelling competition tomorrow but I’m still buzzing from our own late night conversations. It went so well! I successfully blew the small talk out of the water at the beginning and we talked about the world.
I read out to everyone the quote about environmentalism needing enthusiasm and daring. Rosie responded straight away with “actually, I totally disagree.” The last thing conservation needed, she said, was more passionate rebels on personal quests to save the planet; it was time for us to buckle down and be pragmatic. We should aim to be accepted as part of the way things function, like sanitation. For that, we needed people who were prepared to sit down and do the paperwork, not make speeches. The CBD isn’t really a pointless talking shop at all. Sure it’s boring, but it’s hugely increased spending on conservation.
I said that I suppose that is the only real measure of success we have but that I felt some nostalgia for the days when WWF still raised money with plastic panda-shaped boxes in garden centres. ‘Do you know how much the Chinese government spends on pandas?' Rosie asked, with laughter in her voice but none in her eyes; ‘there are thousands of people starving in China.’
Professional conservationists seem to hate pandas. In fact it’s hard to believe they’re real animals and not just ciphers for our skewed priorities. Nonetheless, there is presumably a ‘wild’ where you can see them, just like wild reindeer or buffalo; it’s just hard to visit and far away.
Tim mentions the ‘fury’ within the Labour group on Essex county council over the alleged pet scheme of Lord Hanningfield, the council leader, to import two Giant Pandas to Essex and to use council tax funds to do so. Rufus and Tim eventually get into a heated political discussion which leads to Rufus referring to the latter afterwards as ‘that Labour party guy.’ It shocks me because I still haven’t given up on thinking of Tim as a botanist; neither has Sam.
Sam is just the same as ever. Still a zoologist, enthused by strange creatures; he doesn’t hate pandas! We talk about solenodons and Hulitherium, moa and orang pendek and Puerto Rican parrot; and we talk also about egrets and coal tits and cranes. And thylacines, of course. Honestly, it’s good to get a break from all the Cambridge conversations about property rights and sustainable trophy hunting and biodiversity offsets and oil expansion in the Arctic; the kind of things I talk about with Rosie and Jon. Jon was visibly moved when Sam talked about the giant Caribbean owls that now are lost. Jon is hardly a Vulcan, he went into raptures over the chocolate mousse; it’s just reassuring to see that the loss of a single species still has that power, after all the cataloguing Jon and I did; after all the work he’s been doing since. His meeting in Bristol was with Rio Tinto Exploration.
When Jon comes into a room, even our high-joisted barn loft, his spirit seems to fill it. His expansiveness, his confidence, scare me but he’s not immune to cynicism. It seems unlikely that the cynicism I’m seeing in conservation is just part of a British suspicion of conviction. Rosie says that people are busy and don't seem to have time to enter into huge, far-reaching, ethical debates about the purpose of their work and life all the time. She enjoys it as much as I do but enjoyable isn’t the same as important.
Who are these thousands of people starving in China because the funds are all blown on pandas?
After dinner, I put a candle in the middle of the floor and told three stories; auditioning them for the competition tomorrow. They all liked Mwanamizi best; or at least my telling of it. As for the story itself, they all agreed with Tim who first said that he was disturbed by the implication that she’s only property, who can be owned or stolen.1 Tom suggested that she might be better off with the sultan than with this cold old beggar-man who shows no glimmer of love for her. I had only silence to say about their love. I don’t think I can tell the story without that; all the power is in it, and in the wordlessness of their last exchange which is only her tears and his song.
O listen, master, unto me
My wife I carved from yonder tree.
I carved her well, with zeal untold,
And decked her out with fetters gold.
She existed neither in the wood nor in his mind. Was she a tree or his dream? Was she even a woman at all? Perfectly carved, did she nag? Or slump? Or shit? It’s easy to talk about power but what we own of the world. He owns only the golden charm that made her alive for him. Or did it make her his? Or bring her close? Telling a story, carving a dream, it’s not a one-way process, not Promethean. Or perhaps ‘Promethean’ is exactly what it is because Prometheus was a trickster and didn't create from nought2. Who is being carved?
What had the sultan ever done? He was a man who wanted; a king burning within the rightness of his own needs. I also want. If I want to hear a story I will sing it; wood and story answer me. If I feel trapped in my cold palace, I will find a woman, tree or work of art, and have that thing as a clue to an escape. That’s the sultan, and isn’t that me? That’s why I have to be silent about the relationship between Mwanamizi and Makame in his little house.
Well then Sam woke up and we had breakfast and talked more about Caribbean Pleistocene faunas and I think we went for a walk to Five Fools Meadow. Sam was getting seriously involved in his work on the Yangtze River Dolphin.
27/02/05 Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham. From memory.
The Young Storyteller of the Year Awards were held as part of an Arts Council funded hiring fair at a theatre in Birmingham. My slot was at 15:50, near the end, but the day began at 11 and so I had to take a fairly early train.
During the interval, Helen, the MC who had sent me the email, came and asked me where my story was from.
“Tanzania.”
“Tanzania. So, have you been there?”
“Never.” It had not occurred to me that this might be a relevant concern.3
“So, was there something about the place that grabbed you?”
“The story grabbed me.” That was true.
That seemed to be enough, and certainly it was all I could give her. There was a note of apology in her introduction which she countered by saying: ‘but Nick’s a sensitive guy.’ She had only just met me but she seemed to have picked up on something; perhaps the way the story had impressed me.
I got on stage wondering what on earth had possessed me to think I could enter a national competition as a complete unknown and amateur and what on earth had possessed the organizers to let me do so. I supposed they had a free slot. I was shaking and I held that shaking down in all my muscles as I faced the audience. I think the story liked that.
Here is the story:
Once there was a man, an old man, a beggar man. His name was Makame and he lived out beyond the village in a little lonely house. And when he went out in the morning the house felt empty and when he came back in the evening the house felt empty and he thought to himself: I have no wife in my home to bid me farewell; I have no wife in my home to bid me welcome. So he took his knife and he went out into the bush and he found a blackwood4 tree.
In that tree, with his knife, he found a woman. Opened her shoulders from the trunk, swept the wood from her belly and thighs, picked out the curls of her hair and smoothed down the great lids of her eyes.
And then, only then, did he sever her feet from the roots. And he placed a golden charm around her neck. And she opened her eyes and held him in her arms.
And she, who had been a tree, became his lover and his wife. He brought her home to live with him in the little hut and he called her Mwanamizi, the child of the root5, and they lived together in happiness. Or if it was not happiness, then they knew nothing better; they lived together in peace.
In the day, he would work in the little fields and in the evenings she would sing to him and cook for him, and he would stroke her hair and where the songs came from, I do not know for no man had heard them before or since.
And that old man, who had been ready to die in his lonely little house: now he worked like a young man again. With the extra that he earned, he bought jewels for his wife: golden bracelets and anklets and a heavy gold chain. But always she wore the little charm about her neck.
And then the fire went out in the house of the sultan.
And the sultan sent a maidservant to the village to ask for fire. And the first house she came to was the little house of Makame but Makame was not at home. The maidservant went in and saw the woman, Mwanamizi, sitting silent in the firelight. The maidservant ran back to the sultan’s palace and told him that, alone in the house of the old beggar-man was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. So the sultan went down to that house with his soldiers and they took Mwanamizi from the fireside and they dragged her back to the sultan’s palace to be a new wife for the sultan.
In his palace, the sultan used promises and threats, sweets and clothes, poems and kisses to lure his new wife to the couch but Mwamamizi wanted only to stand at the window. Outside the window was only the dusty street and the sultan could not imagine what the woman was looking at. Then he heard the singing:
O listen, master, unto me,
My wife I carved from yonder tree.
I carved her well, with zeal untold,
And decked her out with fetters gold.
These ornaments and jewels fine,
Oh give them back, for they are mine
And, Mwanamizi, let me go.6
Under the window stood the old beggar-man and the sultan’s beautiful new wife was looking down only at him. ‘Oh throw him down the trinkets, if that is what he wants,’ said the sultan, ‘and come back to the couch!’
But Mwanamizi did not want to throw down her jewellery and, when the sultan insisted, she began to cry. Now he felt he was getting somewhere; she never had cried before, no matter what he did. ‘Go on, throw them down to him so he will leave us alone!’ So she took off the heavy chain from about her neck and she threw it down to her old husband, but the old man went on singing.
O listen, master, unto me,
My wife I carved from yonder tree.
I carved her well, with zeal untold,
And decked her out with fetters gold.
These ornaments and jewels fine,
Oh give them back, for they are mine
And, Mwanamizi, let me go.
‘Go on, the rest as well!’ Mwanamizi wept but she threw down her golden anklets and bracelets and Makame caught them and he put them in his bag, but still he went on singing. All that was left was the first little gold charm about her neck and this she refused to part with. But the sultan went on shouting and the beggar went on singing:
O listen, master, unto me,
My wife I carved from yonder tree.
I carved her well, with zeal untold,
And decked her out with fetters gold.
These ornaments and jewels fine,
Oh give them back, for they are mine
And, Mwanamizi?
Let me go.
And she unclasped the chain from her neck and she threw it down to Makame in the street below. And from her feet the roots went down, and from her fingers, the boughs went up and they broke the roof of the sultan’s palace.
And the old man went home with his bag and silently buried the golden charm back in the dust of his floor.
That’s the story.
There was only one performance after mine; a three-woman performance of Jason and the Argonauts. It was carefully put together, almost a play rather than a story, with choreographed actions and copious jokes. The three young women were a group with a name although all of them had also told stories independently. Having got the story off my chest, I wondered if it was possible that I could actually win the competition. It occurred to me that I had no idea whatever about the criteria the judges would use. I didn’t know what was good storytelling; I only knew what got me fired up.
Looking back on it, I’m mostly impressed with my own chutzpah and then I doubt that. I wouldn’t apply to be a sanitation engineer on the basis of chutzpah, still less a doctor. And I had really no idea then how much free chutzpah being male, white and well-educated won me. The women, and also the African men, that I met in conservation circles in Cambridge certainly gave me little reason to imagine I had any such advantage but, of course, they were the ones who had made it there.
I did not win, this lady deservedly won with her telling of Ivan the Pea, but in the corridor afterwards, as I leant against the wall, a famous storyteller came up to me and told me he liked my story. I think he is shorter than I am but I remember him looming over me. He was wearing black, as I’d seen him wear on a Welsh stage telling the dark story of another goddess and another necklace, which I’d re-told to my friends in Five Fools Meadow by a fire on Halloween; also as I’d seen him when he told the Epic of Gilgamesh in an Oxford backroom, shaking carob pods over his head as scorpion claws. He was the first professional storyteller I’d ever seen and definitely still my favourite. I was rather in awe.
“I liked your story,” he said, “but I felt there was something missing.”
Rosie’s ‘total disagreement’ had been intense, but this was another level. I’d like to think I met his gaze. “Yes,” I said, thinking of the silence which covered the questions of ownership that had disturbed my friends, “I think there’s more to it. Something to do with the fact that she is a tree.”
“Yes!” he said, “And the sultan is looking for firewood.”
I stared at him, “That would be.. a horrible story,” I finally said. I wasn’t used to being outdone in darkness and I wasn’t sure I didn’t like it.
He shrugged to indicate that, yes, indeed it would be. “Where did you find it?”
Time to come clean: “I found it in a book called ‘Black Tales for White Children.’” It had been on a shelf in Hannah’s family’s seaside holiday house one summer but, the next time I looked for it, someone had thrown it out.
“Well then you can probably do what you like with it because it’s been Bowdlerized for children. Look for the truth that’s been covered over.7 I mean you could just end with ‘and that night there was a big fire in the sultan’s palace’ and leave it at that…”
That’s all I remember. Getting back from Birmingham was more of a challenge. I had a long cold wait in Royston where I got talking to the only other person on the platform, a guy who was not afraid to walk over the tracks. I don’t remember what we talked about. I was still feeling very pumped.
28/02/05. Meldreth again.
I slept all morning. Later in the day, I wrote this:
‘You did not knock.’
‘A king goes where he will.’
‘And finds nothing he does not expect when he gets there. What do you want? I have nothing left to give you and nothing you can take.’
‘There are still three things you can give me.’
‘And they are?’
‘First of all, your forgiveness.’
‘ My heart is old and, after all I have undergone these last few months, the breath that could give you that would be my last. What are the other things?’
‘Your knife, sir; and a lesson. In carving wood.’
‘What would you do with those?’
‘Take them and leave my palace. Leave all the things and the people I own as tools of my desire. Go out into the forest with the tools and the skills to find a tree.’
‘You think it is so easy to find her? I led a long and lonely life first, and that was no guarantee. Do you think it is a man who makes a woman? A woman makes a man! You think I can teach you to find a shoulder in the grain, to know what is waste wood and what is her? My own flesh now is the waste and she is cutting away to release me; perhaps she cannot let me go. Bury me among her roots and then, if you like, burn us both. Go back to your palace. Be a king. Running away from the things that torture you is not an impressive sacrifice.’
<silence>
‘You had one sensible thing to say; now say it.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘There, do you feel it now? The pain of her knife on the skin you conspire to define? It cuts both ways. You already had the power to make a woman out of a tree or a tree out of a woman but your dreams are not your servants. You shape and are shaped.’
I suppose he walks back to his broken palace and the long land breathes behind.
And then, some months later, I start writing this kind of thing:
02/01/06 Camberwell, London. The chopping board is a screen for the section of a tree’s life, I can see the straight grain rushing towards me. It’s weird to think of trees as slow, upward rivers but even weirder to think of straight-edged tiles abstracted from that flow. From that flesh, I should say. A squirrel might make ribbed and rotting pockets, scrape by scrape; that’s different. What does a man see when he polishes a flat plane of wood? The chopping board has a message but it doesn’t hand me the message because it is dead. I’m the king here; my people have the knives and saws. Hannah moans from out of her cooking.
All the way up to:
17/11/15 Kaev Seima, Cambodia. The wood of the table is polished slick to serve. Anyone will serve if you take a chainsaw to them; no matter how banal your purpose.
OK, thanks for reading! On Monday I’ll post something to explain where I think I’m going with all this.
I have to comment here from 2023. I don’t think I even thought to connect this at the time with the then-popular idea that the best bet for conservation was to ensure local people had stable property rights to land and natural resources. If it had crossed my mind, I’d probably have thought it insulting to explicitly equate this ‘person’, who obviously couldn’t be owned, with land, which obviously could.
A version of the theft of fire was one of the other stories I told that night. I forget what the third one was.
In fact that isn’t even true. It was probably collected in what is now South Sudan or Kenya.
i.e. Mpingo Dalbergia melanoxylon. The tree species wasn’t specified in the text I had. However, at the time, FFI had a programme called SoundWood that focused on this tree and others around the world that are vulnerable to exploitation by their use in making musical instruments. It was a tree from the area that was good for carving and it was the only one I knew about. I was maybe a little dubious that it was OK to do this, especially as it sounded like I was emphasising her skin colour. Not that anyone has skin that is clarinet-black.
Or so the text says. Google it and you find that it’s the Swahili word for ‘hermit crab’. And now you also get this story in the same version I found it, as recorded by Capt. Chauncey H. Stigand OBE FRGS FZS (1877–1919). For a long time, I couldn’t find it again.
Mrs Agnes Stigand, the captain’s mother, helped him out with the songs.
Well, he said something like that. It might have been more nuanced.