November Remembered

On my way back from church this morning
I saw cherry trees blossoming by the wayside
their small pink faces opened out to the cold
I pointed them out to you
and when I turned back
you had cherry blossoms in your hair.

A week ago, I saw a photograph someone had taken of a cherry tree in bloom. Instantly I conjured up for myself the brilliant blue of our November skies over the pale brown of newly harvested fields. In some places the bright yellow sunflower would be blooming fiercely like a Van Gogh painting come alive. I've never thought of it before but November must be the prettiest month in our hills. There is the blue vanda that flowers in this month and even shabby roadside houses are transformed by the blue clusters tied to young trees in the outside yard. I love to describe the month of November to newcomers and strangers. They have no equivalent to our colours and flowers. European cities are cold and bare in November. The trees that were ochre, yellow and russet two months ago are  leafless now. A dark rain has left the streets puddled and dangerous for pedestrians. The sun has long gone and become a distant memory that will be recalled only in the new year. Nature has closed shop and is going into hibernation.

Back in high school, I could not grasp the concept of animals going into hibernation during the winter months. To think of bears and smaller animals sleeping through the winter sounded like something that a Disney movie had made up. I'm a believer now. Hibernation, the state of inactivity in animals and metabolic depression makes absolute sense in the context of light deprived peripheral territories such as the north of Europe. Predictably life slows down and, strange though it might sound, the dark months bring people closer together as they find they have more time to sit around family dinners or simply spend time with friends. In Vienna several Christmas markets  sprout up as early as mid-November. The markets sell food, hand-made goods and Christmas goods. Big areas are decorated with lights and fairy tale themes. In the darkness, the lit up markets and recreated landscapes from Hans and Gretel are every child's dream come true.

Beautiful but very far from our blue-skied month. I close my eyes and think of Novembers past; how the sky would get so blue that it hurt your eyes to look at it, and the cherry trees that made pink blobs upon the forest cover. Many years ago, we climbed Japfü in the month of November, starting our walk after midnight. It was a moonlit night and the leafless trees near the summit appeared ghostly in the light of the moon. At the rest house the dew fell from the roof to the ground in great drops. And in the early morning we reached journey's end and Kohima lay below us like a jewel, tin roofs glinting in the sunshine. It had been worth every bruise in our aching backs.

I don't expect to climb Japfü again in this life. I share my memory of November in my beloved land because nostalgia has swept over me at the sight of that photograph of a cherry tree in bloom. But Japfü beckons younger hearts and legs and backs. Don't disappoint her. Do the journey in November: your memories will tell you did the right thing.


Originally published at www.easternmirrornagaland.com

The narratives silenced by war: the Barkweaver project of peoplestories and folktales

"Of the many narratives silenced by war, the folk tales of the Nagas suffered a long period of being silenced. This was because folk tales require certain settings in order to be told. The Naga war with India, after military operations began in 1956, destroyed the settings for oral narratives. One may not think that something as simplistic as a folk tale would need to be approached with ritual and ceremony in order that its narration might take place. But it does. The folk tale belongs to eras of relative peace in the village community..."

Read more at "The North East Blog"

We want Per!

He reminded me of a hobo, the same hungry look, piercing eyes and four-day-old stubble. Such a jagged quality to him. I thought to myself, oh my, Tom Waits' voice probably looks like that. Sort of smoked, dragged in sand and hung out to dry in an unkind northerly wind. True to form, he shouted out raggedly, "Shut yer mouth!" to the trumpeter introducing the band, Rik og Berømt (Rich and Famous), to the eager audience. It was a rough joke of the type that the band was used to.

I sat expectantly on the edge of my chair: this promised to be more than just another concert of jazz music. The band got underway and they played two songs before Per, the Tom Waits of the evening, got on stage. To my surprise he swung into a romantic number and caught me completely off-guard. Oh he tried to look the part, he had donned a suit like the rest of the band, but he still managed to look unkempt. Wonderful! If I closed my eyes, I could picture a young Frank Sinatra hitting those notes as Per serenaded his audience effortlessly. In the middle of love song, he sprang offstage, sidled up to a blonde and sang close to her ear while still holding the mike.

I however, was a trifle disappointed with his smooth voiced renditions. At the end of the second set, voices went up, "We want Per, We want Per!" and Per came back with gusto to sing a repertoire of songs that were more suited to him. In the middle of another song, he jumped offstage, and sat amongst his cronies, sipped from a glass of beer and then sprang back onstage and continued singing. It was so nonchalant it totally changed my way of looking at concerts. Why shouldn't a singer do just that? Why shouldn't he embrace the audience as Per had just done and make them feel he was also one of them? The rest of it went marvellously well.

The concert came to a close an hour past midnight. The night was no longer young. The ships on the harbour outside were unmoving and autumn rain had left the city streets puddled and gravelly. And a salt wind blew into my face as I walked home. It was just what I needed to end the night with.

Dreams

Listening to a very interesting talk on dreams by Mark Virkler. He says that we spend one third of our lives asleep and that stuff happens to us in dreams, communication is going on while we dream. I want to find out more about this.

The Angamis always say, 'Listen to your dreams,' when they need to take an important decision in their lives, be it marriage, a new business enterprise or travels. Why should that stop being relevant to us in this day and age?

Abandon ship!

I got to chapter 14 of a new novel I was writing when it began to feel all wrong. It wasn't writer's block, it was something much more serious. The story was weighing my spirit down so surely that I began to think, perhaps I should not continue. The more I thought of that, the more the heaviness lifted from me.

I believe that books have souls, oh not in the same way as humans have, but there is definitely something of the soul of a book that passes into the souls of readers and I certainly wouldn't want to give my readers the weighted experience that I had before I abandoned it. I have begun two other new story/books after that and  there is no going back to the old one.

If a book does not offer faith, hope and love or one of these three, it probably should not be written. That's just me speaking. 

A Terrible Matriarchy revised

Very good learning experience this. I am revising A Terrible Matriarchy for the second edition. Nagaland University has it on its syllabus for English Major students as a compulsory paper. Yay! I am editing grammatical mistakes and happy to get an opportunity to revise and edit again. I do subscribe to the school that believes in revision. It is a synonym for improvement and why should anyone have anything against that. That last sentence is  not a question.:P. 

Cultural theft vs. the gift of other eyes

Some years ago a plainsman came to the village of Khonoma in Nagaland. He made the acquaintance of an old woman who was a healer and a herbalist. Badgering her for many days and offering her a sum of money that was very large for a simple village dweller he made her part with the secrets of her herbal knowledge.

In a separate incident, a female research scholar from a state in eastern India gleaned a lot of information on Naga women. This took place in the nineties. The focus of her study was the physical and mental problems that Naga women endure in the midst of a political conflict. The scholar sent out questionnaires to several educated people in Nagaland without revealing her intentions. She then used that information to promote herself as an expert on Naga women and was invited to international seminars where she represented the case of women in conflict situations with special reference to the women of Nagaland. By virtue of the knowledge she received from the questionnaires, she made herself an authority on Naga women.

In yet another case, a woman from Vancouver has been regularly traveling to Nagaland to bring back Naga artefacts to sell at a huge Vancouver fair each year. Museums in Europe pay high prices for Naga artefacts sold by non-Naga traders. Cultural theft of Naga lore, that is the treasure of native wisdom, and theft of Naga crafts is happening at many levels.

Cultural theft is a big issue that has not been addressed yet in Nagaland because people are not aware that theft is taking place. Even today, Nagas readily part with their handicrafts and information on their culture because they do not realise that it is being traded for money in an economically global world or for intellectual rewards in the academic world.

It was saddening to see that a writer from another Indian state was used by the department of Art and Culture to write a volume of Naga folktales. The said volume was published by a Delhi-based publishing company funded by the government of Nagaland. I consider that as cultural theft aided by our own government. It is ludicrous to think that a writer from North India could do a better job of writing down the folk tales of the Nagas than the Nagas themselves.

It is equally preposterous to conclude that a non-Naga scholar could represent Naga women and advocate their pain better than Naga women scholars. These are thefts going on without checks. The whole question of cultural theft came to me when I was invited to an exhibition on the Nagas entitled, Jewels and Ashes. It is being held from January to June 2012 in Vienna's Museum for Volkekunde. It is a remarkable collection of Naga jewellery, and material objects of the Nagas by Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Furer Haimendorf. The anthropological collection was done in the late 1930s as well as after the Second World War. Haimendorf was well known to the native population and he paid handsomely for the items he was buying from the villagers. At the exhibition, Haimendorf's collection was supplemented by other museum collections in recent years.

Could the items in the exhibition be considered items of cultural theft? I asked myself. The answer was no. The original collectors had taken immense care to set up an archive for the Naga collection. In the intervening period, the cultural objects have been given legitimacy and new status and identity in Europe. The caretaking of these items by the museum made spiritual repossession possible by its former owners. Added to that, they have increased in value by being imbued with the gift of other eyes. Viewed by other eyes and deemed valuable and artistic by other eyes, they have received new life and become more than just cultural objects.

I observed that the museum's attitude to the objects was completely different from the previously mentioned cases of theft: for the museum, the exhibits are culture-carrying artefacts which should be displayed properly so they can point back to the culture they came from. It elicited deep appreciation in their Naga owners and reinforced the desire to protect the cultural treasures that they still have. It also eliminated the sense of shame that frequently plagues cultures that have been colonised in the past. There are several things that the Vienna exhibition achieves. The foremost is giving visibility to a remote mountain region as Nagaland was referred to at the 2008 basel exhibition. The interest taken in Naga culture by European audiences is becoming contagious. It greatly helps Nagas to try and understand their own cultures and look with new eyes upon their culture. It is an action that participates in a significant way in putting back value into that which was devalued by colonisation.

Cultural theft in the Naga case, has all been about people taking our knowledge and the opportunities that go with it. Beginning with the Naga exhibition at Museum der Kultur in basel, that is being turned around to some degree. The basel and Zurich exhibitions of 2008 gave great visibility to the Nagas. And now, the Austrian media has featured the 2012 Vienna exhibition prominently, with carefully balanced interviews and good reporting. It prioritised the opinions of the owners of the cultural objects and the knowledge that goes with them.

On the items in the museum, some are objects of art carefully wrought by hand. To me it means that people had the time to sit and create things with their hands, that there were long periods of peace where they could exercise the expression of their creative talents. This is such important information because it disproves the stereotypical image of the Naga as the incessantly feuding, bloodthirsty, barbaric head hunter, primarily preoccupied with battlesport. The objects in the museum which have come from a region which is stereotyped even among the Nagas themselves (as the last region of headhunting and barbarism), actually show great artistry and craftsmanship. I love that the exhibition opens up these other  levels of Nagahood. It challenges the onlooker to look at the Nagas beyond the confines of stereotypes. There is more to them than the headhunting. There is more to them than a long drawn out political conflict. There is more to them than the festivals that draw in tourists once a year.

This challenging of stereotypes is another point that distinguishes the exhibition from cultural theft. In the cases of cultural theft, the thief perpetuates the stereotypical ways of looking at Naga culture. It allows room only for the thief's representation and makes no room for the voice of its authentic owners. Fifteen years ago, I was acquainted with a group in Meghalaya who were intending to patent both their botanical wealth and their folklore. Nagaland has no such strategy yet, but the threat of theft is more than real. Closing our cultural borders to outsiders is a strategy that will seem strange to us. But there are few alternatives for protecting our knowledge from those who are using it unscrupulously. In a manner of speaking, they are stealing from our children because they are staking claim to knowledge that legally belongs to our children.

Cultural theft is a generational crime. It is not much different from stealing a priceless heirloom that has been in the family for generations. But it is worse than that because it is actually stealing from the future and creating confusion about ownership. It is an insidious crime because it uses the assistance of government machinery to legitimise it. In the name of research, non-Naga scholars are continuing to commit cultural theft. Naga culture needs all the protection it can get so that the next generation is not doomed to having their culture dictated to them by an 'expert' from another state.


Originally published at The North-East Blog and Eastern Mirror Nagaland