A story as sharp as a kn.., p.43
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 43
his uncle picked him up
and put him in a box.
He tied it with cords.
He took him far out to sea, they say.
And then he put him overboard.
And again his uncle was pleased,
and he paddled home.
After drifting awhile,
[ 3.1 ]
he felt himself washing ashore.
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When he was just getting ready to burst the box,
he heard two women speaking lovely words to one another.
One was saying,
<<
And he heard her,
and he did not burst the box.
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The two women lifted up the lid,
and they helped him out.
Cloudwatcher's elder sister said,
<<
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and I'm the one who is going to marry him.>>>
Then they took him home.
They took him into their father's house,
and they treated him well.
When they had offered him something to eat,
he went outside.
He walked through the town for a while,
and then he went into the middle house.
Eagle skins were hanging there.
He took down one with lovely feathers,
170
and then he put it on.
He moved his wings.
He almost sailed through the doorway.
He stopped himself by grabbing onto the frame.
He took the skin off right away.
Then he went back to the house of his father-in-law.
His father-in-law was saying,
<<
just the way it does when there is someone else inside.>>>
He was the mother of the town, they say.
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Next day early in the morning, he heard an eagle scream. [ 3.2 ]
He went outside to look, they say.
There was something set up in front of the house.
Eagles were perched on it in a row.
They were calling each other
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and sharpening their talons.
Then they went out hunting.
Later in the day, they came back in.
Some of them were carrying spring salmon.
Others were carrying red snapper.
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Others had humpback whale.
Again the next day, early, he heard them
[ 3.3 ]
calling in front of the house.
He told his wife he wanted to go hunting too.
She spoke to her father, they say.
And her father said,
<<
one I used to wear when I was young.>>>
He brought out a box.
He pulled out one with lovely feathers,
and he gave it to his daughter,
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and he said to her,
<<
the little thing sticking out nearby.>>>
Then he went out with them, flying.
[ 3.4 ]
He brought in part of a humpback whale.
He flew home ahead of all the others,
and they brought in many kinds of things.
His father-in-law was pleased with him.
Then they cooked the whale.
When the food was served,
they led in an old woman, shaking with age.
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They said to her,
<<
And she did that very thing.
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He flew with them again the following day.
[ 3.5 ]
He was starting to get used to it.
And he brought in the jaw of a whale.
In his other claw, he carried a spring salmon.
He flew home ahead of them all.
They brought back many kinds of things.
And again when they served the whale,
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they brought the old woman in,
and she drank the whale broth.
Next day, when he went out with them again,
[ 4 ]
he touched whatever it was that was sticking out.
And he grabbed hold of it, they say.
He flapped his wings awhile, holding steady.
Then it drew him down beneath the waves.
Another eagle seized his wings.
When that one too was about to go under,
one of them carried the news to the town,
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that he had done what he had done.
As she sharpened her dulled talons,
the old woman said,
<<
my grandchild's husband has hold of ?>>>
Her wings were like dry branches.
She flew low.
She flew there crookedly.
She teetered through the air.
There were five of them still above water
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when she arrived.
When the last was just going under,
she grabbed hold.
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After she flapped her wings for a time,
she started to pull them back up to the surface.
They came up in a line.
The thing he had hold of broke loose at the bottom.
He brought it up with him, they say.
They said, <<
away from where people will go for their food.>>>
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He took it way out to sea, they say.
Then he picked up a spring salmon
and part of a humpback whale.
He flew back with them in his talons.
He had killed the thing that frightened them, they say.
It was a horseclam spirit-being, 6 they say.
Later on, when he had lived with his wife for a while, [ 5 ]
he went to see his uncle's town, they say.
He flew there dressed in the skin of the eagle.
He perched for a while at the edge of the town,
and he saw his uncle come out of the house.
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Then he flew away.
The next day, early, he flew there once again.
He picked up a humpback whale
and dropped it in front of his uncle's house
while the people were still sleeping.
Then he perched on a dead tree at the edge of town.
After a while, someone came out.
He called them to the whale, and they came.
His uncle claimed the whole thing for himself.
He stood up on top of the whale.
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Then the eagle flew.
He flew around above his uncle.
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They laughed at him.
<<
they said.
And again he perched on the tree.
He sat there awhile,
and once again his uncle claimed the whale.
He stood there and declared it.
Then the eagle flew a second time.
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He grabbed his uncle by his overgrown topknot 7
and carried him away.
After he had carried him awhile,
his uncle knew the eagle was his nephew.
<<
<<
You'll be the one who marries my wife.
I will give you the town.>>>
When they had flown some ways further,
he said the same thing to his nephew once again.
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And when they had flown further awhile,
his nephew dropped him in the open sea.
Then he flew landward.
He went to his uncle's town.
There he married his uncle's wife.
He came to own the town, they say.
His uncle too became a spirit-being in the sea, they say.
So it ends.
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*
Myths are doorways between realms. The journey between worlds
is one of the most basic mythic themes. Gilgamesh, Persephone,
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Eurydike and Orpheus, Odysseus, Cuchulain, Christ, Mohammed,
Satan, God and countless other named and nameless creatures of
the mythworld make such visitations. Some of the best-known have
no other role to play, no other duty to perform, except to make these
journeys that connect and yet keep separate the worlds within the
world.
It is often claimed, by people out of touch with the tradition, that
oral literature is learned and transmitted through memorization.8 It
isn't. Oral literature is the apogee of language. It is acquired over a
lifetime the way language is acquired : as an open-ended lexicon of
images and events along with a grammar enabling these elements
to assemble themselves into units of ever more complex and self—
integrated meaning. Those larger units of meaning are the narrative
macromolecules we tend, rather vaguely, to speak of as episodes,
scenes, acts, stories, cycles of stories. The smallest story is a single
sentence. It might, like a proverb, be memorized, but memorization
and recitation are, in the end, as antithetical to literature as petrifica—
tion is to life. There is no literature left in a memorized story, just as there is no wood left in petrified wood. Its form is preserved, but its
place has been taken ; its growth has been stopped. Like sentences but
more so, the larger molecules of narrative are journeys. Not guided
tours to be repeated on demand, and not random progressions, but
journeys. Memory, of course, is essential to the process but not the
essential means by which it works.
Each performance of a myth also involves another journey, where
the visitor is us. Through the doorway of the story, we, the listeners, step into other worlds beside, behind, within our own. Both in
the myth and out of it, the reason for such voyages is learning, not
by rote but by experience. That is why the myths take mythic form.
Knowledge is digested when experience occurs, and in order for
experience to happen, a story must unfold.
The story that unfolds in Ghandl's poem is full of well-known
themes, as a sentence may be full of well-known words. A story is,
indeed, a sentence : a big sentence saying, or revealing, many things
that a full list of its components cannot say. Here there are themes
that are familiar in many Native American literatures. Some of them,
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again, belong to a lexicon of images that is close to worldwide. One
is the theme of the hero who is cast adrift in a box and thereby travels between worlds.9 Another is the theme of the old shaman who
subjects potential sons-in-law to a series of lethal tests - though
here of course the sons-in-law are nephews. Another is the theme
of the group of brothers who are killed, one by one, in competition
with some adversary, until the last of them succeeds.
Often in such stories the successful hero finds his brother's bones,
spits medicine upon them and restores the dead to life. Ghandl chose
not to include a resurrection scene in this poem. Only one brother
out of ten lives long enough to fill his social role and so (by implication) to bear children. One out of ten is a Haida literary convention
- but it is also the rate of survival Ghandl and Skaay and Xhyuu
and Sghiidagits had experienced first hand.
Ghandl doesn't resurrect the nine lost brothers - but unlike
Xhyuu, he does redeem the town.
Both poets work with mirror images. In Xhyuu's poem, the chain
of eagles rescued from the sea is answered by the chain of human
beings who are dumped there. In Ghandl's poem, the uncle, like the
clam, is carried out to sea. The uncle's career as a shaman is ended,
and his new life as a spirit-being begins. Like those who hunted
bears with dogs, the uncle may start now to work through other
shamans. Ghandl does not say. He tells us only that the last surviving nephew does indeed finally take his uncle's wife and assume his
uncle's place as headman.
Why the difference between Ghandl's poem and Xhyuu's ? The
great anomaly in Ghandl's own life, after all, is his survival. He is
there, while others aren't, to tell the story. And he is not the headman of a wholly vacant town.
*
Readers of European classical literature are likely to notice a certain
resemblance between the poem of the Nine Nephews and a larger
and more famous work : the Odyssey. In both we have a hero - a
survivor - who is washed up on an island and effectively reborn :
re-equipped by the headman of the place after forming an alliance
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with his daughter. In both we have a pack of murdered suitors. And
in both we have a problem of succession which the re-empowered
hero solves when he comes home to take revenge. Both works end
with a striking act of dislocation. In the case of Ghandl's poem, the
hero plants his uncle far at sea. In Homer's poem, the hero plants
his oar far inland. And both these heroes - the tenth nephew and
Odysseus - are powerfully identified with eagles.10
There are differences, of course. In the matrilineal system of the
Haida aristocracy, where a succession is involved, the suitors must
be brothers of the hero, and the hero is expected to marry his own
aunt. In patrilineal Greece, this cannot happen. Telemakhos cannot
succeed his father by marrying his mother. (Other myths remind us
what would happen if he tried.) And there is no real succession in the
Odyssey. Odysseus returns and so succeeds himself. To that extent,
he plays a double role, counterpart not just to the tenth nephew but
also to the uncle in Ghandl's poem.
Matrilineal succession is not, of course, a guarantee of overt ma—
triarchal rule. It can be quite the opposite. The passive strength and
visibility of Penelope, the prize, in Homer's poem, and the voiceless
anonymity of her counterpart in Ghandl's, throw light on outward
social norms - and literary norms - in the two cultures. It is fair to
say, however, that for its own time and place, neither is a realistic
portrait of a normal woman's life.
Other differences between the poems are linked to the difference
in length. Ghandl's is 300 rather short lines long and highly eco—
nomical. The Odyssey, at 12,000 hexameters, is rich in picturesque
details, flashbacks and delays. Allowing for all that, it is still possible to map one poem against the other in intricate detail. There
are features repeated in parallel, features augmented, diminished,
inverted. If the two poems' skeletal structures are treated as musical themes, it is easy to show, step by step, how either one can be
transformed into the other.
What such comparisons depend upon, however, is not the myths
themselves ; it is the ways in which the myths are worked and handled
by these particular artists. If we put Xhyuu's work in place of Ghandl's,
for example, though parallels continue to exist, the elegant relations
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disappear ; the web of transformations vanishes. I venture to think
that if we practiced comparative mythology in honest terms - working with full original texts instead of summaries in translation - we
would find that the whole system of comparison disintegrates unless the human element is fully factored in. We cannot compare two
myths in the abstract. All we can ever compare are embodiments,
versions, performances of myths. If these performances are summaries, we are certain to learn more about the summarizer's mind
than we do about the people and the cultures who provide him the
material he condenses and reworks.
*
As usual with Ghandl's work, the poem of the Nine Nephews has
some vivid human touches. When, for example, the tenth nephew
washes ashore,
page 403:
Ghudaay ghaal lla sttakkabdastlxidyaay dluu
lines
ga jaada sting gutgha kihlguulas lla guudangas.
151-156
Han siiwusi,
<<< Yan*ghaqattsi, ghuda gayttsisghaawaghan. >>>
Gyaan lla guudansi,
gyaan gam ghudaay lla sttakkabdasghangasi.
When he was just getting ready to burst the box,
he heard two women speaking lovely words to one another.
One was saying,
