Dissertations tend to go their way to a dusty death, and so I was amused recently when I opened a copy of my circa 2000 vintage writings and found them utterly obscure to me. Did I really write this? I wondered. And if I did, what possible contribution did it make if even I, the author, can scarcely interpret it ten years on? My wise professor had advised me that if I wanted my work to have a longer shelf life, I should stick to the descriptive facts. A certain amount of linguistic theory did have to be mixed in, because that is what the culture of science demands, but I viewed the theory part as the proverbial curl in the pig’s tail. I do not value it much now, nor do I think it made any lasting impact. My factual descriptions of Tuvan sound structure, on the other hand, led to many practical projects such as the online talking dictionary of Tuvan, the iPhone Tuvan talking dictionary application, and a printed Tuvan–English dictionary that was distributed free to schools in Tuva to help Tuvan kids master English. All of this may seem like a long departure from Shoydak-ool, but I would like to think that my contributions will help maintain the ancient art of Tuvan storytelling for many speakers to come.
ALTERNATIVE CREATION MYTHS
In 2005, I began working in India with peoples known as “tribals,” who reside below the bottom of India’s socially rigid caste system. I was lucky that Greg Anderson, whom I had worked with for years in Siberia, persuaded me that a change of language and climate might inspire us. And so we set off to investigate what Greg had described as “some of the craziest” languages on Earth. Greg, being the scholar he is, had digested every bit of published literature that existed on these languages. For me, it was to be a sudden baptism into a whole new type of language, and a feast of complex words.
In Orissa state, on the Bay of Bengal, we met members of the Ho community, who have a distinct language and culture. Numbering perhaps as few as one million (small, in the context of the billion-plus Indian population), the Ho live as a scattered diaspora across portions of eastern India. Their ancestors settled here long before the arrival of the Aryan and Dravidian peoples who now dominate them. To this day, the Ho and other tribals are referred to as adivasi, India’s first peoples.
While in India, I heard many stories that stuck in my mind. One self-taught scholar I met, K. C. Naik Biruli of the Ho people, did not fit the image popular in India’s press of an uncivilized tribal. Neatly dressed and speaking fluent English, K. C. narrated for us an ancient Ho creation story in his own tongue, then expertly translated it into English. He also demonstrated the Ho alphabet, a spectacularly bizarre writing system that has not yet gained wide use among his people nor been accepted into worldwide technology for writing on computers.5 Thus even when the Ho language is written down, it is written mostly by hand. Happily, this means Ho stories must be passed on almost solely by word of mouth, infusing them with vitality.
Few cultures I have encountered celebrate and revere the spoken word as deeply as the Ho people do. Their word kaji means “to say” or “to speak,” but it also means “language” and “word,” as well as “to scold.” Kaji is wonderfully flexible, combining into more than 150 words describing what you can make happen through speech, or what linguists call “speech acts.” The basic idea of speech acts is that words are not just ephemeral sounds conveying meaning. They can also perform actions in the real world, just like a hammer, a pen, or a hand. The classic example is the statement “I now pronounce you man and wife.” The words themselves, apart from their meaning, actually make something happen in the world: Two people are married by the force of that particular speech act (provided, of course, that the person making the statement is authorized to do so).
The Ho language builds upon kaji to express more than 150 acts that you can perform by speaking. Peeking into the marvelous Ho dictionary written by Jesuit scholar Father John Deeney, we find many amusing examples, mostly describing unkind speech behaviors:
kaji-ker
to tell another’s faults
kaji-boro
to scare or intimidate by verbal threats
kaji-giyu
to shame or embarrass someone by one’s words
kaji-pe
to strengthen or encourage someone by one’s words
kaji-rasa
to bring joy by one’s words
kaji-topa
to try to cover up one’s mistakes or defects by one’s words
kaji-ayer
to tell beforehand, to prophesy
kaji-koton
to say something that obstructs, for example, an arrangement for a marriage or a preparation for a feast6
Clearly, the Ho are acutely aware of the power of words to discomfit and blame. The profusion of kaji expressions admonishes Ho speakers to choose words carefully so as not to inflict harm. Otherwise their hearers, by using kaji words, will be able to efficiently describe and report what they have done, thus assigning responsibility for many types of negative speech. These concepts can all be expressed in English, too, and it’s fun to think of one-word equivalents in addition to the ones given above, so here goes: to bad-mouth, to harass, to shame, to hearten, to exhilarate, to foretell, to backpedal.
The Ho vocabulary, as sampled in Deeney’s dictionary, is truly a bottomless well of knowledge about Earth, humans, the acoustic environment, social relations, hunting, plants, myth, history, and all manner of technologies. One choice entry found on the very first page—pertaining to silkworm cultivation—will suffice to show the expressive power and rich information capacity of a single Ho word:
aasar—A bow and arrow; to make in the form of a bow, e.g., the rope stretched across the two ends of an arched stick of the tiril tree to which rope silkworm cocoons are attached when it is almost time for the moth to emerge; to attach silkworm cocoons to this.7
Readers are urged to browse Deeney’s Ho dictionary, or any other well-written and ethnographically informed dictionary, to fully experience the efficiency of information packaging that can be found in vocabulary.
On a more positive note, the Ho celebrate the power of language to charm, regale, and entertain. They devote enormous efforts to telling, memorizing, and retelling their myths, many of which have never been written down, recorded, or translated. Over endless cups of cardamom tea, K. C. narrated a radical alternative creation myth. As the Ho like to tell it, drunkenness, sexuality, and shame are God’s gift to the first man and woman. These behaviors, divinely instigated, led humans to reproduce and populate the Earth. It’s an interesting twist on the biblical Adam and Eve tale, where God made shame and sin an eventual certainty.
The Bible relates that God placed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve could not resist Satan’s temptation to eat its forbidden fruit. In an inversion of the biblical creation story, the Ho claim that temptation and original “sin” are not from Satan, but are gifts from God. And the original sin, as they tell it, led not to being cast out of the garden and condemned to hard labor, but to a golden age of universal peace, harmony, and fecundity on Earth.
Here is the Ho creation myth, “The Story of Past Times,” as K. C. told it:
Once there was old man Luku and old woman Lukumi.
They two were alone on Earth.
There were forests and mountains everywhere.
There were beautiful springs, with fruits, flowers, leaves, trees and stones.
Old man Luku and old woman Lukumi were very happy eating fruits in the trees.
They two had no sinful thoughts in their minds.
As for clothes, they didn’t have any on their bodies.
God thought, “If they stay like this, there will be no more generations.”
So God came down, and taught them how to make liquor from grass seeds.
They drank liquor in a cup made from leaves of the sar-fruit tree, and got drunk.
Then their minds felt another type of joyful thoughts;
About coming together as man and woman.
They started copulating, a
nd felt shame and arousal.
So they covered each other up at the waist with tree bark.
Ten months later from Lukumi’s body, a boy child was born.
In this manner, they bore seven boys and seven girls.
Thus they spread us humans on this Earth.
It was a Golden Age at that time.
There was no cheating, quarreling, cruelty, nothing bad.
There was no cold or starvation, fever or sadness.
The people remained in joy, happiness and peace.
This is called paradise.8
As K. C. narrated the story, a local group of Ho schoolchildren clustered around. Most of them could not read and write their Ho tongue, and they seldom heard it spoken at their boarding school. Raised to be modern citizens of India, speaking English and Hindi, they nonetheless listened eagerly to the ancient tongue. They felt proud of their Ho heritage, pleased to know that it could offer a tale racier than any Bollywood flick.
What is the value of such antiquated myths in the modern world? Every creation story is an attempt to make sense of the universe and mankind’s place in it. We may be indifferent to the passing of the drunken Ho creation myth. But if it fades, we lose as rich a world of possibilities as we ever could have inhabited, or even imagined.
K. C. Naik Biruli, a Ho orator, demonstrates the use of the Warang Chiti writing system, 2005.
A final twist in the story of Ho is the fractious debate over how it should be written. Alphabets are among the most politicized of human creations, and many small language communities find themselves locked into standoffs about how to write the sounds down on paper. For the Ho, their writing system, called Warang Chiti, invented by the revered pandit Lakho Bodra, has a mystical dimension. The first letter is the sacred symbol Om, chanted in meditation. It has no use whatsoever in the writing system, but bestows on the alphabet a sacred character. What follows Om is a collection of the most motley and odd-shaped symbols imaginable, including one that resembles a bolt of lightning and another that could be male genitalia. Those among the Ho who espouse this unique alphabet are fiercely proud of it. For them, each letter has its own mythology, signifying by its shape and sound the wailing of a newborn child, for example, and that same child when a bit older toddling and falling, or bodily functions such as vomiting. Others signify the sound of a tree falling, the shape of a plow, or a leaf cup from which to drink home-brewed liquor, as in the Ho creation myth. Each letter symbol tells a story, and together they relate an entire worldview. Some Ho thus consider writing sacred and believe that anyone using the letters should abstain from certain foods such as tamarind.
The world’s oddest alphabet may turn out to be a barrier preventing Ho from entering the digital age. Or, with proper positioning, it could continue to provide a unique look and source of pride. Working with Greg Anderson and script specialist Michael Everson, we’ve petitioned the Unicode Consortium, the body that decides which scripts can be written on computers worldwide, to include Ho symbols. I imagine a day when the odd Ho letters will be as commonplace as Japanese kanji and will carry the most sacred and trivial of messages across the Internet.
A STORY MAP OF THE WORLD
As languages fall into forgetfulness, stories, songs, and epics approach extinction. We stand to lose entire worldviews, religious beliefs, creation myths, technologies for how to cultivate plants, histories of human migration, and collective wisdom. But it is not too late to record and sustain these rich traditions.
Imagine a story map of the world, one that identifies the hotspots where stories survive as a vital and wholly oral art form. Such a map would be a kind of inverse pattern to a world literacy map. In the places where literacy is most entrenched, memory has atrophied and almost no one memorizes or retells oral tales anymore. Yet at the fringes of the literate realm, deep pools of living memory remain. In the world’s remaining oral cultures, unwritten stories still thrive. They change and evolve in an unbroken chain of narrative and memory.
Such story hotspots are as special as they are increasingly rare. Efforts to listen to and record small languages and their story traditions deserve our urgent attention. This must be accomplished while the elderly storytellers are still talking. If tales fall into disuse without being documented, we won’t even know what we are losing.
Orality, the virtuosity of verbal art, is deeply disrespected and neglected in modern society. Any report on Third World development will trumpet high rates of illiteracy as a key indicator of stunted progress and will challenge policymakers to stamp out illiteracy. Policy and literature on human development routinely fail to recognize high percentages of orality, however, or to celebrate the verbal arts as an indicator of an intellectually and artistically accomplished society.
Acquiring literacy does open new doors for development, but what is the trade-off if ancient oral cultures are jettisoned, entire histories and moral codes wiped from memory? Why can’t the two systems coexist? If we can overcome our bias toward literacy and appreciate the creativity and beauty of purely oral cultures, we will open a door to entire new vistas of the world and humankind’s place in it. That door, still ajar in 2010, may soon close forever. Elderly storytellers around the world are eager to share their tales, generous with their wisdom, playful with their metaphors. Let’s take the time to hear the stories, and be enriched.
{CHAPTER EIGHT}
BREAKING OUT IN SONG
It has become evident that practicing one’s cultural heritage and speaking one’s heritage language promotes self-esteem in young people.
—Harold Napoleon
SONGS MAY BE nearly endangered as stories, and though people will never cease singing, local musical traditions often struggle to survive. Global culture cuts two ways: it may stifle local creativity by bringing hugely admired genres that outpace older ones in popularity, but it may also provide the seed for new creativity and give little-heard singing styles a new, global audience. Ethnomusicologists around the world are racing the clock, just as linguists are, to record and help revitalize the numerous ways of singing that may still be found. Many of the endangered language communities I describe in this book have song styles that are utterly unique and equally endangered. Sometimes songs can outlast the languages that spawned them; they may be all that remains of an ancient culture.
Once my dissertation was defended and I earned my Ph.D., I could hardly wait to begin traveling again. I was lucky enough to get a generous research grant from the Volkswagen foundation, based in Germany. Those funds gave me carte blanche to organize as many expeditions as I wished over five years to explore southern Siberia and Mongolia’s smallest, most hidden tongues. Flush with grant money and a sense of discovery, I hastily assembled my dream team in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.1 Together in the dead of winter, we set off on what would be the craziest, scariest expedition I have ever had. Our destination, Tofalaria, one of the most remote, inaccessible, and godforsaken places on Earth. What I would witness there would change me forever.
The Trans-Siberian Railway wends for more than 5,700 miles across one of the most boring landscapes imaginable. If you spend three, four, or even six days riding the train, which slugs along gently at a speed of about 40 miles an hour, you can literally see nothing but birch trees and grass all day long. Most of Siberia is a vast water world, a swampy delta, the mushy ground interspersed between some of Earth’s largest rivers, the Yenisei, the Ob, and others. Underneath, not so very far down, lies permafrost, which is now melting and will fill our atmosphere with more methane than any other polluting source on the planet. So potent is the methane from melting permafrost that in midwinter you can take an ax, walk out onto a lake that has a foot-thick cover of ice, chop a slit in ice, and light a match over it. You’ll produce an enormous whoosh of flame that shoots out of the ice as the methane burns.2 Siberia is both literally and figuratively Earth’s coldest hotspot.
I landed in Krasnoyarsk, where I met the rest of my team—which included Greg Anderson,
one of the leading experts on Siberian languages, and Sven Grawunder, an expert on phonetics and making recordings of obscure languages, along with a native Siberian guide and a driver. March was not the ideal time to trek into the backwoods of Siberia, and we waited three shivering days at the local hotel in Nizhneudinsk until the weather cleared. We whiled away the time playing cards, buying supplies, and drinking tea. While waiting at the airport, we noticed that our recording equipment was beginning to malfunction in the cold, so we cut up our thermal socks to sew little coats for our video cameras.
We finally made the bone-chilling, one-hour flight in a decrepit Soviet-era plane and landed on a meadow in Alygdzher, the largest of the three Tofa villages. No one was expecting us, of course, so we hitched a ride on a cart into town and ended up at the local clinic, which had a small guesthouse out back. We shared the space with a young Russian couple who had come to evangelize the natives. They were kind and generous and even put on a little celebration for my birthday.
News of our presence in the village spread so fast that we did not even have to seek out speakers. People began to point out to us who were the elders, and where they lived. Not all of them would speak to us, though. One fled from his house as we approached, one shut the door in our faces, and another was so painfully shy that she simply stared down at the floor.
At last, two elderly sisters, Galina and Varvara Adamova, welcomed us into their tiny log house, bare except for two beds and a small wooden chest containing some crusts of bread. I had seen Siberian poverty before, but this was true deprivation. There was no warmth or food, no blankets or pillows, nothing but two beds with dirty mattresses and a single wooden bench in the kitchen. Next to the stove, on the floor, lay a Russian New Testament, a gift from the missionaries. Varvara had put it to good use, carefully tearing out pages one by one to roll homemade cigarettes with mahorka, the cheap tobacco that elderly ladies in Russia like to smoke. Galina, the younger of the two, could barely stand upright, and leaned on a walking stick. Neighbors told us that in the 1950s she spent five years in a Stalinist labor camp for some minor infraction—no one could remember what. Somehow she survived that horror, and though she returned home with ruined health, she became a promoter of Tofa cultural identity. She and her sister were photographed in the 1980s sitting on the backs of reindeer dressed in traditional costumes they had sewn themselves. That photo became iconic, reprinted in books and calendars about native Siberians.
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