Paris Nam Đông 2: Goddesses and Vengeance
On the 15th of July 2008, I was back in Khe Tre town, this time with Nikolas, the anthropologist from Sweden who was working on ethnography of the Katu. Both of us were in the early stages of our PhDs and both of us had been scrabbling together funding from here and there. I finally had a big proposal in the works and was using some current money from the American Museum of Natural History to work with Nikolas on community mapping methods. For Nikolas, it was just a chance to do more fieldwork. In particular, while I was looking for information on the saola, he was interested in a forest goddess, or perhaps a pair of twin goddesses. Her/their name was Komorbarr, which literally means 'two girls' or, possibly possibly, it means ' girl two': the other woman. Her/their favour was sought by hunters and, though married, she could be jealous. Nikolas compared her to Artemis but Artemis is terrifying. Among the panoply of terrifying spirits of the Katu forest, Komorbarr seemed noticeably benevolent. She was celebrated at, and invited to, the feast of game in the men's house, the guorrl and, through her, the whole forest was invited too.
In Quang Nam we'd been used to staying in the guorrl houses ourselves but here they were concrete, government built and used for official functions, not petitioning spirits or putting up guests. We had to stay instead in the guesthouse in the nearby district town.
The guesthouse was a powerful, pastel-coloured concrete affair, clearly a municipal structure on a larger scale than the guorrl. It squatted by the river bridge across the road from the market. Above the river bridge was a billboard with an image of a diseased pig. The pig's body sent off blue and red vibrations as the masked nurse injected it with the advertised product. Behind the billboard, a lonely coconut palm with an exploded head and, behind her, the market rooves with their silver turbans twinkling. And then, of course, the mountains. Mountain behind mountain, arms folded and fading to bronze.
In the market there was a dark and greasy dive where we had dinner and a giant plush paint mascot danced with children on the telly. Farmers with backwards caps bent low and shovelled in rice. In the guesthouse garden, though there was place for coffee. Stainless steel tables with slippy red crepe cloths which rucked up under my hand as I wrote. I would write there alone about whatever came into my head or talk with Nikolas and Sơn mostly about plans and permissions but sometimes about what we'd been told and what it all meant. This year, before the conference in Paris, I roll back through Nikolas' notes. In amongst statements like
"When govt give land to ethnic minorities some family big many members get a lot of land."
and
"[collecting] rattan is more stable [than trapping], [with trapping] maybe no animal for whole month"
you find:
"in dream of hunter, she moves, when you catch an animal she is close to you. Moves between dreams of hunters."
and this is the one highlighted in yellow.
For the Paris conference last month, Nikolas and I worked on a paper together. As we discussed it, he mentioned an insight which doesn't fit with what we've written yet. Both of us, he said, went there as hunters. We were both hunting our quarries through the words of actual hunters (which I suppose makes us 'meta-hunters') and we were both using the pronoun 'she' for the thing we were hunting. He could have said 'they' and I could have said 'it' but we both chose 'she'. I used 'it', of course, in public but not in my own notebooks. "Buffalo, in the incredible light,” I write “kick up sand between the scratchy grasses," and then suddenly: "What does she want of me?" Comparing my private writing with Nikolas' ethnographic notes, you might not know who was chasing the goddess and who was chasing the beast. You probably would guess that, like all the Katu hunters we spoke to, both of us were men and neither terribly worried then about our material wellbeing. Still, there's not much we can do about that; every creature leaves a particular trail.
The second speaker in Paris is Dr Kari Telle from CMI, Norway. She tells a story, so of course I sit up and pay full attention. Here is the story in brief, it is from Lombok, in in Indonesia. There lived a princess a long time ago in a kingdom by the sea whose name was Mandalika. She was both good natured and beautiful. Her beauty and good nature were dangerous because men fell in love with the flick of her hair. The princes of every kingdom wanted her and they could not all have her. Tensions, as they say, were mounting. People spoke of war.
The princess had to choose a husband but the prince that she chose would immediately attract the envy and rage of every other prince. None could withstand that. It may also be that she did not want to choose but the story doesn't say. I expect, under that kind of pressure, it was impossible to even be sure. So she took advice far older than our species, she set tasks for her suitors so that she might be fairly won. Unfortunately, all the suitors completed all the tasks. She couldn't stop them coming for her all together, all at once. So she let it be known that she would make her announcement in the month of white porridge on a certain high cliff. From that cliff, before the assembled princes, she threw herself into the sea and was killed.
Every year, it is said, she comes back. Through her dying she has found a way to come back not to any one prince but to everyone. In the 1970s, an anthropologist observed the huge beachside parties where the reef would be black with people waiting for her with their baskets. "Pubic hair!" one would shout suddenly and then everyone would start silently stuffing their baskets with the worms that swarmed out of the coral.
Delicacy, fertilizer, oracle and, of course, aphrodisiac, the seaworms are a bounty for every direction. So the princess is one of the good girls, a bountiful one. In the 1990s they were already using her name for a market but it has gone into overdrive now. The whole coast was renamed in her name and earmarked as a 'special economic zone'. Villages have been relocated, hotels built, cliffs resculptured and, of all the ludicrous things, a motorcycle racetrack has sprawled over a headland. A district chief claims the track is the princess herself, manifested again so that men can come from all over the earth to compete for her favour once more.
It looks, at first glance, like an utter mythic blunder, mythic dyslexia, is dysmythia a thing? How could she possibly appreciate being dragged back from her afterlife into the same thing that prompted her suicide? "As we all know", Dr Telle says, "no female spirit from this region is completely benevolent." Nikolas and I exchange glances though it turns out later that he's heard her differently. He thought she was saying the princess truly was omnibenevolent but that he disagreed. Either way, we’re sure long shadows are unfolding.
The first day in Nam Dong at the guesthouse table, my knuckles ruck up its slippy, bloody cloth and I write whatever comes into my head; a practice I have. I am stressed; my breath dives in great wodges, either for the oxygen that will get me through or just to stretch out my constricted chest. My gaze skitters over the tiles and my jaw aches. I am desperate for a coffee but the hour for coffee has past. For now, I write about the things I saw from the sleeper train that took me home and then back here. Pineapples planted in sand, those buffalo among the scratchy grasses and a beautiful piece of hand-sculpted wood on the tin roof of a railside shack. On the sleeping compartment's annoying TV there was a documentary about Moby Dick, the book I'm still reading. I'm two thirds of the way through and the clouds just continue to build.
Ahab is a figure of demonic pride; Melville calls it 'fatal pride'. OK technically it's Ishmael who says that but we all know what Melville thinks. He thinks the captain's going down and his whole ship with him. Indigenous hunters too. Wild wizards too. Nervous, loving fathers, careful craftsmen, banner-waving mobs, the lot. Everyone but the storyteller left swirling in the eddies and that's only for the sake of the tale. We know this and there's a deep thrill in contemplating it. Monkey versus Buddha in the high courts of Heaven, it's going to get nasty from here.
And here's what I write in my notebook back in 2008: "My position is simple: I am on Moby Dick’s side." Yes, I had read the first mate's thoughts as he came to understand that he would never see his little boy again and yes, though not yet a father, I cried as I read. I still wrote: "that is not the point." They should draw back in reverence, they should drop their harpoons. If they don't then, well, they are going to get what's coming to them. I remembered the stories I had written at primary school, full of anacondas swallowing arrogant headmasters. Or, more allegorically, the spirit of Nature, with a T. rex head, poundimg the silly unliving shit out of the cackling nonsense-devil that was everything humans had made. That devil's limbs were made made of buildings and ended in nothing while the tree-limbs of Nature were literally red-clawed. They were ludicrous claws of the kind only found in sloths, therizinosaurs and comic books. They stuck out of the ends of the trees.
GK Chesterton said that children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. As an adult I know I'm on the ship with the rest of the crew, enjoying the mountain of flowers and fruit with the other monkeys, staring out of the windows of one of those whirling skyscraper-legs with the head of the beast that I once cheered for coming down from the clouds. I'm in the village whose hunters have angered the hills and I shared in the meat. I’m drifting in a hollow little husk on the ocean with something huge rushing up from beneath. I'm obsessively checking my ankle for a loop of rope though I know by the time I can feel it, I’ll already be down to the squid-haunted cold. We all are, right?
Assuming you know this story, I want you to hold that story in mind while do my best to sketch out another.
OK, as I said, I was rooting for Moby Dick, for Nature. I wanted to be his prophet even though he would not care; because, in fact, he would not care. But, at least since Oxford, I had less power to see the world as I wanted it to be. I was trying to talk up this great inhuman thing but I was also remembering how wrong Melville had been about the whale's "eternal defiance." That illusion took just decades to dissolve. What if inescapable justice is just as illusory?
What if the pride is justified? What if we roll on to the end of the universe like this and beyond the end of time, subjugating or devouring all in our wake with a lazy, smug confidence that remains forever unharpooned. The occasional Ahab rides it like a surfboard and we all enjoy the ride. Loose coils of rope turn out to be safety hazards and are prudently stowed. The ships get bigger than whales then bigger than planets till no prey can escape them and none can fight back. Lots of us end up in the water but others still captain the ships.
I know it seems ridiculous but a lot of ridiculous things turn out to be true. Speakers on the Earth side are so sure that we can't escape to Mars that they are willing to call Musk an idiot; something that just seems aggressively counterfactual, to be honest. Are we really the cleverer ones because we know such dreams can't come true. Moby Dick isn't actually God. Not even Gaia is God; certainly in the Greek stories she brought tremendous chthonic vengeance up onto Zeus and even left him hamstrung but it Zeus still won out in the end. Or rather he kept winning without any end. Who says we can’t if we’re clever - or the captains at least? It feels wrong but a lot of things feel wrong and still happen. Are they trapped in the idea of progress or are we perhaps trapped in a story of retribution?
In the seminar room in Paris, I see an image on Dr Telle's slide of a handful of worms, jade-green and finger-pink. The name 'Medusa' is coughed up into my mind, closely followed by 'Sedna,' another one with a bloodrush in it. I want to know, disgracefully, what princess Mandalika will do when she's pushed beyond her limit and her escape route is blocked. I want to see vengeance, or at any rate consequences. Yet, if I hold the story more dispassionately to paste my Greek names on, I come up with quite different names. Helen would be an obvious one, also Penelope. Daphne, perhaps? Women who hardly escape unscathed but women who do escape nonetheless, tricksy women who know where they are walking and do not laugh often. Why was I thinking of gorgons?
I stopped being obsessed with the red teeth and claws that the little boy loved, or with volcanoes and storms. As a teenager, I became swayed by the stories of gentle creatures which simply all died: the passenger pigeon, Steller's sea cow and now the saola. They have deep dark eyes that express no resentment but also don't speak. I can handle the accusations in house, they don't need to get involved. Coffee-dark eyes, undrinkable, always receding.
In Nam Dong I write about these eyes and then find that I'm writing about two arms reaching forward towards me, through my forehead and into the base of my brain. I can't remember what this felt like, I can only read myself calling it an invitation to dance. I did not accept the invitation but surfaced out of the trance or the vision or the daydream and then wrote "they killed them. They killed them all." I think about a rope round my ankle again, this time of strong cable which cuts deep.
And later I wrote: "I do lots of stuff. I have lots to do."
So I guess I continued to do stuff and she continued to recede. And I want to say 'and wasn't that the perfect retribution?" but that's just trying to make it all about me.
.