The Epic World 0367252368, 9780367252366

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T H E E P I C WO R L D

Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and v­ iolence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional c­ elebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or n ­ ationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to religious traditions and/or to peoples who have largely “stayed put”; the tendency to reimagine and retell stories in new ways over centuries; and the imbrication of epic storytelling and forms of colonialism and imperialism, especially those perpetuated and glorified by Euro-Americans over the past 500 years, resulting in unspeakable and immeasurable harms to humans, other living beings, and the planet Earth. The Epic World is a go-to volume for anyone interested in epic literature in a global framework. Engaging with powerful stories and ways of knowing beyond those of the predominantly white Global North, this field-shifting volume exposes the false premises of “Western civilization” and “Classics,” and brings new questions and perspectives to epic studies. Pamela Lothspeich is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research centers on the Indian epics in modern literature, theatre, and film.

T HE ROU T L E DGE WO RLDS THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim THE FAIRY TALE WORLD Edited by Andrew Teverson THE CELTIC WORLD: THE TOKUGAWA WORLD Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao THE INUIT WORLD Edited by Pamela Stern THE ARTHURIAN WORLD Edited by Miriam Edlich-Muth, Renée Ward and Victoria Coldham-Fussell THE MONGOL WORLD Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope THE SÁMI WORLD Edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD Edited by Xinru Liu, with the assistance of Pia Brancaccio THE WORLD OF THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH Edited By Robert H. Stockman THE QUAKER WORLD Edited by C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon Grant THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE WORLD Edited by Kyle H. Keimer and George A. Pierce THE ANGKORIAN WORLD Edited by Mitch Hendrickson, Miriam T Stark and Damien Evans THE SIBERIAN WORLD Edited by John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson and Vladimir Davydov THE CENTRAL ASIAN WORLD Edited by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves THE EPIC WORLD Edited by Pamela Lothspeich

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Worlds/book-series/WORLDS

THE EPIC WORLD rsr

Edited by

Pamela Lothspeich

Designed cover image: Rustam Slays Isfandiar, The Metropolitan Museum of Art First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Pamela Lothspeich; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Pamela Lothspeich to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lothspeich, Pamela, editor. Title: The epic world / edited by Pamela Lothspeich. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023003806 (print) | LCCN 2023003807 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367252366 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032424996 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429286698 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Epic literature—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.E65 E6665 2023 (print) | LCC PN56.E65 (ebook) | DDC 809.1/32—dc23/eng/20230505 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003806 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003807 ISBN: 978-0-367-25236-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-42499-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28669-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

CONTENTS

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ix xi xii xx xxi

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgment Note on Transliteration Introduction Pamela Lothspeich

1

PART I:  WAYS OF READING EPICS

13

  1 A Critical Race Studies Approach: Race and Racecraft in Apollonius’s Argonautica15 Jackie Murray   2 A Postcolonial Studies Approach: From Fanon’s Revolutionary Literature to Glissant’s Relation Sneharika Roy   3 An Ecocritical Approach: Early Modern English Epic Possibilities Chris Barrett   4 An Affect Studies Approach: Reading Non-Normative Masculinities in Homer’s Iliad Melissa Mueller   5 A Network Approach: Tracking Female Power in Seven Epic Narratives Pádraig MacCarron, Máirín MacCarron, Sílvio R. Dahmen, Joseph Yose, and Ralph Kenna

v

30 45

60 74

— ​ C o n t e n t s —​

PART II: A SAMPLE OF ANCIENT ITERATIONS (THE BEGINNINGS – CIRCA 1000 CE)   6 The Epic Bible: Authority and Identity in the Face of Adversity Shawna Dolansky and Sarah Cook

89 91

  7 Gilgamesh and Tiamat Abroad: (Mis-)Reading Mesopotamian Epic Karen Sonik

104

  8 (Re)Inventing an Epic: Reading the Tamil Cilappatikāram across Time Morgan J Curtis

118

  9 Sri Lanka’s Mahāvaṃsa, the Great Chronicle Kristin Scheible

133

10 The “Epic of the Anglo-Saxons”: The Many Cultural Streams of Beowulf María José Gómez-Calderón

146

11 Ecological Imperialism in Vergil’s Aeneid 160 Laura Zientek

PART III: RECASTINGS AND INNOVATIONS (CIRCA 1000 – 1850 CE) 12 Sunjata Fasa and the Oral Epic Tradition of Mali Kassim Kone

173 175

13 Osiris Reborn: The Arabic Epic of Sīrat Sayf Ibn Dhī Yazan and the Prophetic Königsnovelle Helen Blatherwick

189

14 From Oghuz Khan to Exodus: Lineage, Heroism, and Migration in Oghuz Turk Tradition Ali Aydin Karamustafa

201

15 A Battle of Equals: Rustam and Isfandiar in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Shāhnāma Behrang Nabavi Nejad

215

16 The “Hindu” Epics? Telling the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Premodern South Asia Sohini Sarah Pillai

230

17 Trickster as Epic Narrator in the Malay Hikayat Hang Tuah Sylvia Tiwon 18 Connecting with Ancestors: “Imported” and Indigenous Epics in Southeast Asia Adrian Vickers vi

245

257

— ​ C o n t e n t s —​ 19 Epic Contestations: What Makes an Epic in Multi-Ethnic China? Mark Bender

272

20 Whose Epic Is It, Anyway? Gesar and the Myth of the National Epic Natasha L. Mikles

285

21 Ode to Mongolian Heroism: The Oirat Epic Jangar Chao Gejin

299

22 Placation, Memorial, and History in Japan’s The Tale of the Heike and Beyond Elizabeth Oyler

312

23 Guaman Poma’s Epic Letter: A Complex Salvo against Spanish Colonialism in the Andes Scotti M. Norman

326

24 Human Owls and Political Sorcery in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan340 Martín Vega 25 An “Epic of Sorts”: Gaspar de Villagrá and His Impossible Epic of the New Mexico Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez

356

26 Gender Performance and Gendered Warriors in Albanian Epic Poetry Anna Di Lellio and Arbnora Dushi

369

27 Slavic Oral-Traditional Epic in the Ottoman Ecumene Robert Romanchuk

382

28 Empire and Resistance in South Slavic and Romanian Oral Epic Poetry Margaret Hiebert Beissinger

396

PART IV: NEW FORMS AND FOUNDATIONAL STORIES (CIRCA 1850 – PRESENT) 29 “It Shall Be Ruled by Swallows”: The Epic of the Zulu King Shaka Phiwokuhle Mnyandu

413 415

30 Lithoko: Continuity, Change, and the Future of South Sotho Praise Poetry 430 David M. M. Riep 31 “Man Is the Center”: Centripetal Power in the Malagasy Epic Tale of Ibonia444 Hallie Wells and Vony Ranalarimanana 32 In Service of Authenticity: Epic in Central Africa under Colonialism Jonathon Repinecz

vii

458

— ​ C o n t e n t s —​ 33 Female Leadership and Nation Building: The West African Epics Yennenga and Sarraounia 471 Mariam Konaté 34 “The Return of Rome”: Empire, Epic, and Twentieth-Century Italian Imperialism in Africa Samuel Agbamu

484

35 Empire and Resistance in Kazakh Oral Epic: The Case of Sătbek Batyr 498 Gabriel McGuire 36 Tolstoy’s War and Peace: National Novel-Epic on Page, Stage, and Screen Julie A. Buckler 37 Ecocriticism and Indigenous Anti-Epics of China Robin Visser

512 527

38 Anti-Epic as National Epic: Uses and Misuses of Epic in Argentina’s Martín Fierro 541 Nicolás Suárez 39 To Keep the Sky from Falling: The Epic of Indigenous Environmentalism in Brazil Tracy Devine Guzmán

556

40 An Epic Struggle in Mesoamerican Indigenous Literatures: Recovering Written Forms of Expression Arturo Arias

573

41 The African/American (Heroic) Epic: Lee’s Do the Right Thing as Critique, Comedy, Caution Gregory E. Rutledge

586

42 Listening for Epic Sound and Seeing White Supremacy in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle Alexander K. Rothe

604

Index

620

viii

FIGURES

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5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

15.1 15.2

15.3

18.1 18.2

An example of a network for distinct nodes, a-h, each connected by edges. 75 Degree distributions for two networks with 1,000 nodes and the same average degree. Panel (A) shows the degree distributions for a random network, and Panel (B), for a complex network. 77 The social network of the Iliad. The size of each node corresponds to how many connections each character has. 80 The degree distributions for networks in the seven epics. Note that the scale on the horizontal axis in Panel (A) is different from the others. In most cases, there are a few characters with very large degrees skewing the distributions to the right. 82 Rustam Shoots Isfandiar in the Eyes, from a manuscript of the Great Ilkhanid Shahnama, circa 1335, Tabriz, Iran. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (1958.288). 222 Rustam Shoots Isfandiar in the Eyes, from a manuscript of the Shāhnāma produced for Muhammad Juki, 1444–1445, Herat, Afghanistan. The Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK (239, folio 296r). 224 Rustam Slays Isfandiar, from the Shāhnāma of Shah Tahmasp, attributed to Qasim ibn ‘Ali, circa 1525–1530, Tabriz, Iran. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (1970.301.55, folio 466r). 225 Relief from the Shiva Temple, circa tenth century, in the Prambanan complex, Java, Indonesia. It depicts the Ramayana episode in which Rawana fends off Jatayu after abducting Sita. Photo by Jessica Kerr. 259 Painting in the wayang style depicting a scene from the Ramayana. Rama, accompanied by his brother Laksamana, fighting off a demon threatening a hermitage (top), and Rama and Laksamana turning the demon upside down (bottom), while turban-wearing hermits and demons look on, circa 1940, Pan Seken, Kamasan, Bali, Indonesia. The Australian Museum (E074171). Photo by Emma Furno. 260 ix

— ​ F i g u r e s —​ 18.3

24.1 24.2

24.3

34.1 36.1 36.2 37.1 37.2 38.1 38.2 39.1 41.1 41.2 41.3 42.1 42.2

Painting in the wayang style depicting the heroes of the Mahabharata. The Pandawa brothers stand to the right of the tree (from left to right): Darmawangsa, Arjuna, Bima, Nakula, and Sadewa, with their crouching servants, while Krishna and other allies stand to the left of the tree, circa 1900, Sabug, Kamasan village, Bali, Indonesia. The Australian Museum (074209). Photo by Emma Furno. Map of the basin of Mexico circa 1519, at the arrival of the Spanish. Wikipedia. Horned owl, from The Florentine Codex Book 5, folio 7r, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy (Med. Palat. 218). By permission of the Ministerio della Cultura. Further reproduction by any means is prohibited. Horned owls (top left and top right) with death figures in the underworld, from The Codex Borgia, 42. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Italy. By permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The ruins of Carthage on the Byrsa Hill, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Tunis, Tunisia. Getty Images. Scene from the pop opera Pierre, Natasha & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012) being performed at the Tony Awards in 2017.  Getty Images. Still from Sergei Bondarchuk’s film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–1967), depicting a procession of the Smolensk icon before the Battle of Borodino. Map of Aba and Huangnan on the Tibetan Plateau. Map courtesy of the author. Map of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Map courtesy of the author. The Fight between Martín Fierro and the Indigenous Chief, illustrated by Carlos Clérice (Hernández 1879, 22). Wikipedia. Still from Fernando Solanas’ Los hijos de Fierro (1978) showing former police officer and Peronist militant Julio Troxler in the role of Fierro’s eldest son. National Progress for Sale: “The Amazon is a Gold Mine.” Sal and his sons, Pino and Vito, standing beneath the “HEROES” legend at Sal’s pizzeria in a still from Do the Right Thing (1989). Ella dropping wisdom on the dead Radio Raheem. Smiley, the “HEROES”-destroyer. Nineteenth-century Wotan in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1856). Getty Images. Jake Angeli, “QAnon Shaman,” in garb reminiscent of costuming in Wagner’s Ring cycle, protesting Donald Trump’s election loss, in Phoenix, AZ (November 3, 2020). Getty Images.

x

263 343

344

345 487 521 523 530 534 545 551 562 594 600 600 615 615

TA B L E S

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5.1 5.2 20.1

The network properties of seven epics. Representation of female epic characters in social networks. Gesar’s birth in the three versions of the epic.

xi

81 84 288

C O N T R I B U TO RS

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Samuel Agbamu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He holds a PhD from King’s College London, with a thesis on ancient Roman and modern Italian imperialism in Africa. He has also worked as a high school Latin and Classics teacher. Arturo Arias is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Merced, and was a Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) at Princeton University in Fall 2019. He has published Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives, Volumes 1 (2017) and 2 (2018), Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960–1990 (1998). Chris Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where her research and teaching interests include early modern English literature, especially Spenser and Milton; poetry and poetics; ecocriticism; and geocritical approaches to literature. Her published works include Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as articles and essays on, among other things, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, butterflies, dragons, and ether. Her research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Collection, and the Lilly Library. Margaret Hiebert Beissinger teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on oral epic, Balkan Romani music-making, folklore, traditional culture, and folktale. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania (1991), and co-edited Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community (1999), as well as Manele in Romania: Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music (2016). She is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore. xii

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ Mark Bender is Professor of Chinese literature and folklore at The Ohio State University. Bender’s interests include oral traditions and material culture in multi-ethnic China and poetry of the environment from the borderlands of Asia. Helen Blatherwick is a research associate and teaching fellow at SOAS University of London, UK. Her publications include Prophets, Gods and Kings in Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan: An Intertextual Reading of an Egyptian Popular Epic (Brill, 2016) and various  articles on Arabic popular epic and Islamic legends. She has also co-edited two special issues, on “Arabic Emotions: From the Qur’an to the Popular Epic” (Cultural History,  2019) and “The  Qur’an in World Literature” (Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 2014). She is currently working on a project on the representation of emotions in various genres of premodern Arabic literature.  Julie A. Buckler is Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She works on the literature and cultural life of nineteenth-century Russia and on the legacies of the imperial period. Buckler has published two award-winning books: The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2000) and Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityscape (Princeton, 2005). She has co-edited two collections of essays: Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern, 2013) and Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (Wisconsin, 2018), and is currently co-editing the first-ever Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel. Sarah Cook is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia and a contract instructor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on the source critical study of the Torah, and her dissertation (in progress) is entitled “When Texts Dwell Together: Editing Strategies in the Torah.” Her research interests include translation in the ancient world, ancient Israelite material culture and text production, and gender and identity in the ancient Near East. Morgan J Curtis is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. They received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School in 2018. Their research focuses on literary culture and production among Jain, Buddhist, Shaiva, and Vaishnava communities in South India, with special attention to questions about the relationship between aesthetics, moral development, and sectarian interactions. Sílvio R. Dahmen is a professor at the Physics Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2006, he became a fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation and has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Würzburg, the Technical University Berlin, Coventry University, and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His main interests are in the application of physics to the humanities, mathematical physics, and history and popularization of physics. Tracy Devine Guzmán is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami where she founded and co-coordinates the Working Group in Native American and Global Indigenous Studies. She is the author of Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence (UNC Press, 2013); xiii

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ and is working on a comparative, intellectual history called Transcontinental Indigeneity: Linking the Americas and the Global South. Anna Di Lellio is an expert on Kosovo, where she has worked as an international administrator, a professor, and a researcher. She currently lectures on international relations with a focus on gender and security in New York City, at New York University and The New School. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and a Master’s in Public Policy from NYU. She is the author of several articles and book chapters, and The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). She is the co-founder of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative. Shawna Dolansky is an associate professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her current research interests are in gendered historiography and iconography of the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical Israel, as well as the intersections among myth, history, fact, fiction, and imagination, in ancient and contemporary worldviews. Arbnora Dushi is a research advisor at the Folklore Department of the Institute of Albanology in Pristina, Kosovo. She holds a PhD in Philology from the University of Pristina. She completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Turku, Finland. The oral tradition, memory studies, and oral history are the focus of her research projects. She is the author of several articles and book chapters, and Homo narrans: rrëfimi personal gojor (Homo narrans: oral personal narrative) (Pristina: The Institute of Albanology, 2009). She is the vice-president of the International Ballad Commission and a corresponding member of the Finnish Literature Society. Chao Gejin is Director of the Institute of Ethnic Literature and Professor of Ethnic Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, PRC. He is Editor-in-Chief of Studies of Ethnic Literature, President of the China Ethnic Literature Society, President of the China Association for Mongol Studies, and Honorary President of the China Folklore Society. As a folklorist and literary critic, he focuses on folkloristics and literature, particularly oral traditions. His publications include Oral Epic Traditions in China and Beyond (Routledge, 2021) and Poetry of the Epic (Aman tuuliin shüleg züi) (Ulanbaatar, 2020). María José Gómez-Calderón is a lecturer at Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. She specializes in English medieval and renaissance literature, medievalism, and cultural studies. Her research focuses on the reception of the medieval matter in both canonical literature and contemporary popular genres and media. She has published on the representation and adaptation of Beowulf in film and comics, and on the internet. Ali Aydin Karamustafa is a historian of the Ottoman and Safavid worlds. His research focuses on oral and written traditions concerning origins, conquest, legitimacy, and rebellion, which were produced and circulated by political communities from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He received his PhD from Stanford in 2020 and is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. xiv

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ Ralph Kenna is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Coventry University, UK. His research concerns the fundamentals of phase transitions and critical phenomena in statistical physics, as well as applications to socio-physical complex systems, including those embedded in epic and mythological narratives. Mariam Konaté is Professor of African American and African Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Her work examines the lives of women of African descent in Africa and the African diaspora. Her current research project explores the experiences of Continental African immigrants in the United States. She also studies the relevance of absent fathers to African American women’s heterosexual dating experiences and the issue of skin bleaching among Africans. Her research in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies focuses on the impact of the oral tradition on African, African American, and Caribbean literatures and cinemas. Kassim Kone is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the State University of New York, Cortland. A specialist in Mande culture and West Africa, his research focuses on African language, history, folklore, religion, ethnomusicology, and art. His many publications include a monolingual Bamana dictionary, More than a Thousand Mande Proverbs in Bambara and English (West Newbury, MA: Mother-Tongue Editions, 1996), and, with Ilyas Ba-Yunus, Muslims in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006). Pamela Lothspeich is Professor of South Asian Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her books include Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia, co-edited with Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022). Her current book project is on the Radheshyam Ramayan and the theatre of Rāmlīlā. Máirín MacCarron is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at University College Cork, Ireland. She is a medieval historian, and her research interests include gender history, with particular interests in medieval queens and women in religious life, computus (the medieval science of time reckoning and calendar construction), and social network analysis. Pádraig MacCarron is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His background is in physics, and his PhD dissertation (Coventry University) analyzes social networks in literary narratives. He is interested in a wide range of applications of complex networks from primate networks to attitude-based networks. Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez has published the books P. Galindo: obras (in)completas de José Díaz; The Textual Outlaw: Reading John Rechy in the 21st Century; Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo: Cinco estudios sobre Gaspar de Villagrá; With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships across the Centuries, a scholarly edition of Gaspar de Villagrá’s Historia de la nveva Mexico; Gaspar de Villagrá: Legista, soldado y poeta; Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature; La voz urgente: antología de literatura Chicana en Español; and Rolando Hinojosa y su “cronicón” Chicano: una novela del lector. xv

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ Gabriel McGuire is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Nazarbayev University in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, where he teaches classes on world literature, folktales, and the oral literature of Central Asia. His research focuses on the oral literature of the Kazakhs and on the intellectual history of folklore study in Soviet Kazakhstan. Natasha L. Mikles is an assistant professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, where she teaches courses on Tibetan and Chinese religion in their newly created Religious Studies major. She has published in several major journals in the fields of Tibetan Studies and Religious Studies, including Material Religion, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, and Culture & Religion. Beyond these articles, Natasha is also developing a monograph based on her original translations and research on King Gesar’s journey to hell and the epic’s participation in Tibetan Buddhist culture. Natasha currently serves as the editor for The Journal of Gods and Monsters. Phiwokuhle Mnyandu is Lecturer of African Studies and World Languages and Culture at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is interested in the intersection of the Zulu language and technology. He is the author of South AfricaChina Relations: Between Aspiration and Reality in a New Global Order. He is the co-author (with Wilfred David) of African Humanomics: Economics and the Human Good. He co-edited Pan African Spaces: Essays in Black Transnationalism. He is also the author of 502 Zulu Verbs and 251 Zulu Verbs. Melissa Mueller is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she has taught since 2007. She is the author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (Chicago 2016), co-editor of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Bloomsbury 2018), and series co-editor of Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms for Edinburgh University Press. She is currently finishing a book called Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading. Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics at SUNY at Buffalo. Her research and publications focus primarily on Hellenistic poetry, race, ethnicity, and racecraft in ancient Greek and Latin literature, and the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. She is co-president of EOS: Africana Receptions of the Classics, and serves on the editorial boards of Classical Philology, Religion Compass, and Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry. Along with Rosa Andujar and Elena Giusti, she is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race (forthcoming). Behrang Nabavi Nejad holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Victoria (2017) and MAs from the University of Toronto, and Bangalore University, with a focus on Persian art. She has taught courses on Islamic art and architecture, world art history, contemporary Canadian art, and graphic novels at the University of Victoria, Capilano University, and Columbia College, Vancouver (Canada), and has been a research fellow at Simon Fraser University (2019–2020). Her research examines the manuscript illustrations of the Persian national epic, the Shāhnāma through an intertextual analysis of the pre-Islamic written sources and contemporary historiographies. xvi

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ Scotti M. Norman is Professor of Material Culture and Archaeology at Warren Wilson College. She is an Andeanist archaeologist, whose research focuses on the sixteenth-century revitalization movement known as Taki Onqoy in the Central highlands of Ayacucho, Peru. Elizabeth Oyler is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on medieval narrative and performing arts, particularly the Tale of the Heike, Japan’s emblematic war tale. Her publications include Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), as well as articles and book chapters about war tales, the noh drama, and related arts. Sohini Sarah Pillai is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious literature, and her area of specialization is the Mahabharata and Ramayana narrative traditions with a particular focus on retellings created in Hindi and Tamil. Sohini is also the editor, with Nell Shapiro Hawley, of Many Mahābhāratas (State University of New York Press, 2021). Vony Ranalarimanana is Artistic Director of Nouvelles Scène Madagascar, a multidisciplinary artistic research laboratory. She is a performing artist working in theatre, slam, and dance and holds Master’s degrees in both Communication and Anthropology from the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar, and the University of Reunion Island. Jonathon Repinecz is Associate Professor of French and Global Affairs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His first book, Subversive Traditions: Reinventing the West African Epic (Michigan State University Press, 2019), won the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award of the American Comparative Literature Association. While remaining committed to West African, especially Senegalese, cultural studies, Repinecz’s research interests have expanded to include Central Africa, with a focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is currently working on projects in that country related to colonial history and to contemporary narratives of genocide. David M. M. Riep received his PhD in art history at the University of Iowa and conducted field research among South Sotho populations in southern Africa between 2003 and 2010. In addition to his ongoing research on South Sotho art and history, he is interested in exploring the multidisciplinary topics of cultural formation and identity, as well as concepts of continuity and change in global art production. Presently, he serves as Associate Professor of Art History at Colorado State University and Associate Curator of African Art at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. Robert Romanchuk is Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic at Florida State University. He has published Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North (2007) and numerous shorter studies. He is preparing a critical edition of the Byzantine written epic Digenis Akritis in its Old Slavic translation for Cambridge University Press. Alexander K. Rothe is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Humanities at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in Historical Musicology in 2015. His xvii

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ research interests are music performance studies, Wagner studies, and new music and diversity. He is currently writing a book on the afterlives of 1968, global politics, and stagings of Wagner’s Ring cycle in divided Germany. Rothe’s research has been published in The Musical Quarterly and Current Musicology, and supported by research grants from the Fulbright Program and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Sneharika Roy is an associate professor at the American University of Paris, France, where she teaches Comparative Literature. Her book The Postcolonial Epic (2018) bridges classical and postcolonial scholarship, tracing the emergence of a new form of postcolonial epic from the classical models of Vergil and Valmiki to the postcolonial texts of Melville, Walcott, and Ghosh. She is also a contributor to the MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh and to Le Dictionnaire des littératures de l’Inde (DELI), an encyclopedic project on Indian literatures. Gregory E. Rutledge is a former attorney and the author of The Epic Trickster in American Literature: From Sunjata to So(u)l (2013), primarily specializes in African American literature, epic performance and race, critical race theory, and Afro-futurism. His current book projects include a study of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, excavation of Afro-Korean Connections (Fulbright Awardsupported), an anthology of prison writings, and a novel. A publisher of law reviews, literary criticism, fiction, poetry, and visual art, and a community volunteer, he holds a joint appointment in the English Department and Institute of Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Kristin Scheible (PhD, Harvard) is Professor of Religion and Humanities at Reed College and a scholar of South Asian Religions. Her research focuses on ­rhetorical strategies employed in Pali and Sanskrit texts, especially in Pali historical narrative literature (vaṃsa). She is currently researching the prolific use of ­agricultural metaphors in premodern Indic literature. Her first book, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History (Columbia University Press, 2016), explores the work-like dimension of the fifth-/­sixth-century Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa and destabilizes the dominant reading of this text as a political charter. Karen Sonik is Associate Professor of Art & Art History at Auburn University, specializing in Mesopotamia. Her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the American Philosophical Society; the American Council for Learned Societies; and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East (with Ulrike Steinert, 2023); Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World (2021); Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (with Steve Tinney, 2019); and The Materiality of Divine Agency (with Beate Pongratz-Leisten, 2015). Nicolás Suárez holds a PhD in Literature from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a former scholarship-recipient of DAAD, CONICET, and the Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre. His book The Work and Life of Sarmiento in Cinema (2016) received an award from the National Contest of Studies on Argentine Cinema. He received the Best Essay Award by a Graduate xviii

— ​ C o n t r i b u t o r s —​ Student from the LASA Film Section, and the First Prize in the Domingo Di Núbila Essay Contest. He directed the short film Centauro (Berlinale, 2017) and co-directed the feature film Hijos nuestros (Mar del Plata, 2015). Sylvia Tiwon is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of literature, gender, and decoloniality. Her work includes Breaking the Spell: Colonialism and Literary Renaissance (Leiden 1999) and Trajectories of Memory: Excavating the Past in Indonesia, co-edited with Melani Budianta (Palgrave, 2023). Martín Vega is Assistant Professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at Scripps College. He specializes in Nahua literature and culture from the pre-Hispanic period to the colonial period. Adrian Vickers holds a personal chair in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he leads the Asian Studies Program. He has carried out extensive research in Southeast Asia, particularly Bali, and his best-known works are Bali: A Paradise Created (Penguin, 1989); A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and the award-winning book co-authored with Julia Martínez, The Pearl Frontier (Hawai‘i University Press, 2015). Robin Visser is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research specialties are modern Chinese and Sinophone literatures, environmental studies, and urban cultural studies. Her book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia University Press, 2023), analyzes modern literature on the environment by Han Chinese and non-Han Indigenous writers in China and Taiwan. Her earlier book, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke University Press, 2010), analyzes Chinese urban planning, architecture, fiction, cinema, art, and cultural studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hallie Wells is an independent scholar and editor whose work addresses intersections of poetics and politics, including conceptions of free expression in Malagasy slam poetry performance. She holds a PhD in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Joseph Yose is an analytics consultant at Minitab Ltd. and a visiting researcher at Coventry University, UK. His main interests are in complex networks, as well as the application of Statistics and Mathematical methodologies in solving real-world problems. He has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Coventry University. Laura Zientek is Associate Dean of Graduate and Special Programs at Reed College. Her research focuses on Roman epic poetry, natural philosophy, and the environmental humanities. Her most recent publications include an edited volume, Lucan’s Imperial World: The Bellum Civile in Its Contemporary Context (2020), as well as articles on poetic descriptions of gold mining in Latin epic and tragedy, and an analysis of agriculture in Roman poetic cycles of war and peace. xix

A C K N OW L E D G M E N T

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The editor’s work on this volume was supported by a National Humanities Center Fellowship funded in honor of Robert F. and Margaret S. Goheen in 2019–2020.

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The transliteration of original languages in non-Roman scripts into Roman script varies across chapters, depending on the authors’ preferences and the conventions in their fields. However, the use of diacritics is consistent within individual chapters, and generally minimal, for ease of reading.

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I N T RO DU C T I O N

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Some of the world’s oldest and longest stories passed down orally and preserved in writing are epics. Gesar, Manas, La Galigo, the Mahābhārata, and Sīrat al-amīra Dhāt al-Himma are among the longest epics, while Mesopotamia’s Gilgamesh is often considered the oldest, at around 4,000 years old. It is tantalizing to wonder what kinds of stories on grand themes were being told in even earlier periods of human history. Was war a given? Did people of one group hate other “outside” groups? Were victors’ bloody stories of vengeance and retribution commonplace and used to edify and entertain? We cannot be sure, even for much of recorded human history. We struggle to understand historical circumstances and life on the ground, even with reference to old epics that have survived to the present. The Epic World is about a mode of storytelling known as “epic,” which is to say it is about power, history, genealogy, and mythmaking. This volume approaches the subject of epic as a loose, organizing principle, not as a hard-and-fast category— as one way to think about bold and often lengthy narratives about extraordinary human experiences and struggles, across time and geography. Epic is often typecast as a monument to ancient winners, but it has deep relevance to the present moment, as a record of not only which peoples and stories have survived, but also as a reminder that many have been lost. This point only becomes more palpable in epics of recent centuries, ones that telegraph the devastations of colonial and imperial regimes and economies. Epic stories, like those discussed in this volume, may be in verse, prose, or some combination. They may be written or oral, or both. They may be told, sung, or enacted. They may be in old or new media. They may be signed or unsigned, and the work of a single author, multiple authors, or countless authors. They may have attributed authorship, or be considered the product of an entire culture or nation. Perhaps more than any other storytelling genre, epic is about power, and not just because many epics tell stories of courageous warriors and massive battles. Epics are cultures’ deeply meaningful “big” stories that tell us who wields power and DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-1

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— ​ Pa m e l a L o t h s p e i c h —​ why; they justify that power and make it seem normal and right. Like many other interpreters of epic, I suspect that many epic stories have a kernel of historical truth, one that can be remembered if not positively recovered. That is, their truthfulness falls short of “empirical” history. Epics are curated stories of the past. Reflecting the social and political hierarchies of their respective times and places, many epics are male-dominated stories of combat and plunder. Many are also composed, written, and sung by men. Further, epics typically venerate members of one ingroup while masking the inhumanity of their violence and stripping others of their humanity. But is it really possible that one group is inherently good, while another is inherently bad?1 Oftentimes, epics revel in the macabre, while sidestepping the human consequences to those left behind. As an example, in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, surveying the ­carnage on the battlefield with other grieving women at the end of the war, Queen Gandhari tells Lord Krishna: The earth, muddy with flesh and blood, is almost impassable with arms still grasping swords and heads still wearing earrings. The blameless ladies, never previously accustomed to misery, miserably force their way through the fallen brothers, fathers and sons who litter the earth. (Vyasa 2009, 590) This excerpt, from Book 11, “The Women,” details the sorrowful aftermath of the war. But like many epics, the Mahābhārata gives more space to exalting war heroes than giving vent to the grief of their mothers, wives, and children. Epics generally have relatively little to say about the anguish of women who, for the most part, do not start wars but nonetheless suffer their consequences. Epic is a genre that has, to some extent, fallen out of favor in the Anglophone academy and in the Euro-American world.2 Recent scholarly neglect of epic is ironic, given that so many humanities and social science disciplines today are thoroughly grounded in critiques of power, many of them drawing deeply from the well of ideas of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, despite their insular focus on the histories and circumstances of Europe and North America. At the same time, many ordinary citizens of the world have “forgotten” the epic roots of their own cultures. Why? Epic storytelling is slow. It is repetitive. It is didactic. It is not familiar and immediate like that of novels and films, although novels and films can themselves be epic, but these are often not taken as seriously as more conventional epics, especially written ones. Epics not only tell us about structures of power in the past; the way we read epics today tells us much about power in the present, and this alone is a compelling reason to study epics and rethink the epic genre. What brings the works discussed in The Epic World together is their similar narrative scaffolding (structures), shared thematic concerns, connections to oral storytelling, and broad scope, if not lengthiness. But these are not absolute criteria; what brings them together most importantly and urgently is their statements on power. What are the stakes of The Epic World? Boiled down, epics present us with a choice between massive geopolitical domination and more peaceful alternatives. There is no reason we must accept the heroic epic’s path of subordination and combat as normative, and respond to it with ever-escalating militarization. We need not accept 2

— ​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​ the hegemonic and often toxic masculinities enshrined in many epics as normative. (Occasionally, epics do feature female heroes and often have strong female characters. See, for example, Chapter 26 on Albanian epic poetry by Anna Di Lellio and Arbnora Dushi, and Chapter 33 on West African epics by Mariam Konaté.) There is an ongoing need to broaden our definition of what we mean by epic so that it equitably includes all literatures and cultures of the world. Moreover, the long entanglement of “Classics,” a field invented in the eighteenth century, with white supremacy (Poser 2021), and the primacy of the epic genre in that field, speaks to the need and urgency of the matter. Many chapters in this volume are concerned with the materiality of epic conquest, not just its literary metaphor, in that they cite historical events and precedents that have directly led to gross, inhuman inequities and harms in our contemporary world, or point to mythological ones to justify the same. Some chapters are about the modern reception of epics, and how they have been used to justify imperialist conquest. What The Epic World is not about: the study of words, or rather, philology for philology’s sake, as a self-reflexive, text-facing exercise for a small group of experts and their fields. My hope is that The Epic World will work to expose structures of power and destabilize the false premises of “Western civilization” and “Classics,” by bringing new questions and perspectives to epic studies. With the rise of authoritarianism, nativism, and ethno nationalism in many parts of the world, self-serving cohorts are refashioning ancient stories and glorifying select cultures to serve hateful, exclusionary political ends. In the United States, we can plainly see this with the nativist, white Christian nationalists who appropriate the monikers, symbols, and trappings of medieval Europe and ardently glorify the ancient Greeks and Romans, thinking of them as the purportedly natural white ancestors of all European and Europeandescended peoples. In fact, in Chapter 1, Jackie Murray expands on the construction of whiteness and how the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as “white.” Yet, this tendency—to revere the ancient Greeks and Romans and ascribe whiteness to them—is hardwired into the educational system in the US, and circulates freely in its popular culture. All of its greatest ideas and arts—philosophy, medicine, mathematics, music, drama, and on and on—we are falsely led to believe—have derived from a blip on the map of Europe, a tired myth that has long been used to prop up white supremacy.

THE POWER TO THEORIZE EPIC Etymologically, the word “epic” is derived from Greek epikos, itself derived from epos, meaning “word” or “song,” and Latin epicus, and it has deep roots in those oral and written literary cultures. The word in English (formerly, “epick/epik/epike/ epique”) dates to at least the sixteenth century (Oxford English Dictionary 2023). Since then, the word has been applied to other oral and written forms around the globe, and many people do associate epics with very old stories about male heroics that come to define nations, cultures, and civilizations, enshrining their most cherished values and ways of knowing. As a literary category, however, “epic” has its own history, one ensconced in discourses emerging from Euro-American cultures about what constitutes “great” literature. In the Anglophone academy, there is the usual obsession with classical 3

— ​ Pa m e l a L o t h s p e i c h —​ Greek and Roman epics and reverence for later European ones. Additionally, there is also scholarly attention to a gamut of subvarieties of epics: national epics, epic romances, epic novels, epic film, epic theatre, epic melodrama, and so on. However, much of the scholarship on epic in English is grounded in white Euro-American literary forms and theoretical frameworks. The irony of my stating this is not lost on me, a white scholar-editor based in the United States. The title of The Epic World, so named to be searchable and made legible to consumers in the global publishing economy, also participates in this history of an idea grounded in European soil. Yet it is hoped that readers will be sympathetic to the manner in which the word is used in this volume—as a matter of convenience first, but also strategically, in an effort to redefine what the genre means and to make it more inclusive of all literary cultures globally. Of critical importance, the term “epic” gained saliency in the period of white colonial expansion and exploitative, extractive capitalism, when other ancient stories of heroic, truth-telling deeds presented a challenge to the primacy of European ones. Thus, it became common for white colonists/imperialists/capitalists/Orientalists to discredit these stories by associating them with mythology, and stories about “our less civilized selves” in the case of Indo-European epics, and “less civilized others” in the case of the rest. It is “our” (white, European-descended) stories and “our” interpretations of stories that have been the most institutionalized, disseminated, and heralded. Even in the field of “Classics,” Euro-American scholars have long ignored works whose authors they deemed to be not sufficiently “white,” such as Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, a Greek epic from the third century BCE, the subject of Chapter 1 (Jackie Murray, personal communication). A long list of white, mostly male scholars of the Global North have theorized epic, drawing primarily on European examples. Some, such as Georges Dumézil, a French scholar of comparative Indo-European linguistics and mythology, saw a kinship between epic and mythology, positing that epic was an intermediary form between myth and history. Also drawing on European examples, others have contrasted long epics with shorter ballads and romances. Still others have thought of the epic as the novel’s ancient Other. The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1999) and the Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), each in his own dialectical way, took that tack, postulating that the generic successor and even antithesis to the premodern epic was the modern novel. Indeed, the novel has come to be associated with the material conditions of ­modernity—print technology and print culture, universal education, nation formation, global capitalism, and so forth. This view purports to leave the epic in the generic dust, relegating it to a meandering, massive tale of the ancients. But as I have suggested, epics are not dead, and they still have relevance even as they continually reappear in ever new guises and forms.

THE “PROBLEM” OF ORALITY For the vast majority of human history, knowledge has been conveyed orally, yet we in predominantly white institutional spaces are conditioned to be suspect of oral knowledge. We are led to believe it is slippery, error-riddled, and impermanent— the preserve of less-educated peoples and less-developed cultures. Thus, despite the 4

— ​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​ r­ elatively recent scholarly interest in oral epics and theorizing about oral literature, the Anglophone academic world has tended to define and silo the epic genre in ways that downgrade oral epics, which are foundational and central in many parts of the world. Of course, many epics were originally oral and only later written down; some have endured in both written form and in performance (theatre, music, film, etc.). Some epics have been subject to vigorous debate as to whether they began as oral or written literature, and the extent to which they were “edited” and amplified over time. This is the case, for example, with the Mahābhārata (Fitzgerald 2003; Hiltebeitel 2005; Brodbeck 2011; Adluri and Bagchee 2014), although most scholars subscribe to the diachronic or “oral-to-written” theory, and accept the text’s gradual expansion. In many academic circles, written epics are still generally considered more prestigious than oral epics, sometimes referred to as “folk epics,” implying their popular/popularist status. There is also a gendered hierarchy within the academic study of languages and literatures. Women are often expected and encouraged to study modern and perhaps early-modern languages and literatures, while men, the “serious” scholars, are left to study classical works in the more difficult ancient languages. Then too academic culture, in which white cishet male scholars still predominate in the ancient literatures, often dismisses and second guesses the ideas of those who do not fit the normative mold. The association of oral epics with “low” culture operates through the same entrenched bias that led white interpreters to conclude that cultures that preserved their knowledge and histories through oral communication lacked an understanding of history, if not a history itself. As the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel notoriously wrote of Africa, “it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it — that is in its northern part — belong to the Asiatic or European World” (2001, 117). The racist, colonial idea that Africans lacked a “historical sense” and were in capable of producing epics on par with those of Europe has of course been roundly refuted by African and other scholars, many of whom are discussed or cited in the chapters on African epics in the present volume. Incidentally, a lack of historical writing (and consciousness) was also a charge Orientalists leveled against India—a charge that has also been thoroughly discredited (Thapar 2013).3 Even among the oral epics of the world, there is the imposed logic of a cultural/ racial hierarchy, with much more attention and resources being paid to the study of white and perceived-as-white oral epics in comparison with all other oral epics. For instance, the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University contains thousands of hours of audio recordings and many transcriptions of South Slavic oral poetry and song from the Balkans, collected by Milman Parry in the 1930s, and his student Albert Lord in the 1930s and early 1950s. (The collection also includes materials relating to “women’s songs,” Albanian and Greek oral works, and Greek shadow puppet theatre, among other items.) A generative outcome of Parry and Lord’s work is that it has inspired much new research into oral epics elsewhere, to some extent challenging the primacy of written epics (Jensen 2017), yet nothing remotely comparable to this spectacular archive exists for the oral heroic poetry and song in other parts of the world, in Africa and Asia, for example. The Balkans are only about 257,400 square miles or 5

— ​ Pa m e l a L o t h s p e i c h —​ around the size of South Sudan, while Africa is about 11,724,000 million square miles (Britannica 2023), although as contributor Kassim Kone notes in Chapter 12, is home to countless oral epics. Even so, relatively few of Africa and Asia’s oral epics have been studied by scholars outside of those regions. Significantly, Parry and Lord theorized that the oral epics of the Balkans were as though modern equivalents of the Iliad and Odyssey, and could help us understand the oral roots of Homer’s epics, pointing us back to the presumed primacy of the latter. Parry and Lord also greatly contributed to the field of epic studies by developing the oral-formulaic theory based on their fieldwork in southeastern Europe. This influential (though not universal or uncontested) theory, elaborated upon by John Miles Foley and others, holds that oral epic poetry follows its own internal logics and entails its own special language. It is the patterning of words, phrases (including an array of epithets), verses and passages—the formulas and formulaic expressions that Lord examines in The Singer of Tales (1960)—and the use of conventional metrical frameworks that enables oral poets to spontaneously compose and sing or recite for extended periods of time. It also allows for personal flourishes and improvisation based on the audience’s reception and the poet’s whims. Many parts of the world have old oral epics or both written and oral ones, and they may be intertwined, as in India, for example, but again, it is the written forms that have drawn the most scholarly attention. Working with texts—handwritten manuscripts and printed books—grants a certain status to philologist-scholars. They can “own” the texts and interpret them unimpeded, whereas they cannot do this in the same way with oral epics because they are always subordinate to the living storytellers/experts who preserve, transmit, and explicate them. This is perhaps one reason philologist-scholars are more inclined to study “dead” written texts than living oral ones. But also, oral epics are in some ways more difficult to study than texts due to their temporality and mutability; they require live attendance and must be electronically captured (recorded) for further reflection and study. We in the elitist, hierarchical, and predominantly white Anglophone academy tend to see power, authority, and brilliance in single minds and single-authored written treatises. Yet with much epic literature, as with many forms of cultural and scientific production, knowledge is the collective product of innumerable people, created collaboratively through dialogue, toil, and contestation, and passed down intergenerationally.

OPENING UP EPIC; BREAKING DOWN THE CANON Given the birth of the English term “epic” in the era of white colonial/imperialist cartographies and ecologies, and the xenophobic bent of much epic literature, there is an opportunity to consider old and new epics from the standpoint of liberatory analytic frameworks. Beyond the obvious need to open up the canon in the field of epic studies, or better, break down the exclusionary notion of canon altogether, there is also the need to utilize the theoretical tools of disciplines that confront and contest hegemonic power structures through social-justice frameworks—postcolonial studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, transnational feminisms, queer studies, disability studies, etc. Scholars and activists in these disciplines, in a multitude of ways, have worked to disrupt monolithic 6

— ​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​ conceptions of identity and “normalcy,” binaries of gender and sexuality, global hierarchies based on supposed differences in civilizational development and authority, and social hierarchies relating to race, ethnicity, gender, and class. These disciplines are critically important to the study of epics, a genre that not only displays unbridled power, but also boasts of it and basks in it. To understand how power works in epics, accounts of the past that typically make no effort to conceal their embellishments and excesses, we have to think about markers of social capital, and the effects of power on people with “marked” bodies. It is hoped that The Epic World prompts readers to think through epic power structures and identity in new ways, through the modalities of embodied difference, intersectionality and spectrum. The goal of The Epic World is to make a humble intervention toward de-imperializing the field of epic studies. By this, I mean removing the imperialist “ground” that illegitimately upholds the literature of the white or rather, perceivedas-white, classical Greco-Roman world as hegemonic, superlative, and exemplary. I also mean making the field more just for its scholars and their subjects, and making the field less grounded in white Euro-American stories, aesthetic values, and ways of knowing. The goal is greater cross-cultural understanding and empathy. Here, I am reminded of Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee’s remarks on how to read and analyze foundational texts outside of one’s own cultural experience in their chapter titled “Paradigm Lost,” playing on the title of John Milton’s seventeenth-century epic Paradise Lost. Addressing “outside” cultural interpreters (here, German scholars of the Bhagavad gītā and the Mahābhārata), they write that “the task of interpretation is much more complex [than a narrow concept of scientific method]. It requires qualities such as patience, sympathy, maturity, and intellectual and personal humility” (2014, 444). The 42 chapters of The Epic World approach epic in different ways and tell different stories, but thematically, they may be grouped into roughly three categories (with some overlap), although this is not the basis for the organization of the volume, which I discuss in the following section. Many chapters deal with epics as conventionally understood, that is, as celebratory tales of conquest. They speak of heroes backed by some combination of military strength, astute strategy, and moral mission, whose actions are normalized to seem benign and honorable even when they are not. These stories quite literally “control the narrative,” relaying events from the standpoint of the victors and effectively silencing their opponents. Sometimes, the victors have greater material resources and social capital. Sometimes, they are fighting a just fight, but it is not always clear that they have a stronger moral compass or even better ideas than their opponents. Not all of the chapters are from the standpoint of the winners. Some tell stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered. In this regard, we may think of them as “anti-epics,” and some contributors to this volume explicitly refer to them as such. The authors of these stories expressly reject the paradigm of “might makes right” and the xenophobic elevation of some supposedly superlative cultures over others. They recount and respond to painful histories and diabolical harms their peoples have faced. Here again we see the “exceptionalism” of white agents. A number of these chapters tell stories of white settlers’ brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples, and others, of European people’s ruthless treatment of those in the formerly colonized world. 7

— ​ Pa m e l a L o t h s p e i c h —​ A third category of chapters in The Epic World considers how epics of the past (as they were or as they appear in new reworkings) have been utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. These include situations where colonial regimes identify themselves with the supposed Roman greatness and glory, and appropriate Greco-Roman tropes coded as white to rationalize their conquest. These also encompass situations where modern states anachronistically and triumphantly link epic stories, ones mostly about conquest, to “official” national histories, in ways that are exclusionary and chauvinistic. Conveniently, epic is deployed to justify the subordination and expulsion of minoritized racial and ethnic communities and other “outgroups.” For those ethnonationalists who subscribe to such a move, “national epics” are closely linked to, if not coterminus with, national history.

SOME LIMITS TO THIS STUDY The story of epic in this volume is necessarily an incomplete and partial one. The Epic World makes a gesture toward global coverage; it includes many non-hegemonic, nonEuropean literatures that have often been ignored in histories and surveys of the epic genre published in English. But inevitably, some epic enthusiasts will be disappointed that the volume does not have chapters on well-known epic and epic-adjacent works such as the Odyssey (circa eighth century BCE); Pharsalia and Thebaid (first century CE); El cantar de mio Cid (twelfth century); La divina commedia (fourteenth century); Orlando furioso (sixteenth century); The Rape of the Lock (eighteenth century); Moby-Dick (1851); and The Waste Land (1922). However, these and other such works have been amply covered in previous studies and addressing too many of them here would give disproportionate weight to European and North American epics.4 As another caveat, although some chapters in The Epic World do discuss epics in modern media like opera, film, and TV series, due to space constraints, the volume as a whole does not give expansive treatment of epics in these forms or in fantasy/ speculative fiction in print and digital media such as animation and video games.5 One volume, even a volume of this size, also cannot possibly be truly culturally equitable because, in addition to space constraints and the editor’s own biases and limited vision, the world and academic institutions themselves are not equitable. This project is subject to the same kinds of power hierarchies and material inequities stated or alluded to in the epic stories in this volume. The fact is that the EuroAmerican academy is an institutional complex that throws more resources at those epics deemed white than those of all of the rest of the world combined, if we take faculty hires and course offerings at universities and colleges into account. There is not a lack of stories and knowledge systems in the rest of the world, but rather a lack of human capital and resources—tenure-track faculty lines, publications, library holdings, classes, and so forth—connected to epics beyond those of Europe and North America. The creation and amplification of knowledge in academic institutional spaces happens through mechanisms of institutional gatekeeping that often work to replicate power and privilege: competitive hiring, reviews toward tenure and promotion, the peer-review process at journals and academic presses, etc. My work on this volume has brought me into cultural worlds and academic disciplines about which I  know very little. It has also opened my eyes wider to the gaping disparities in 8

— ​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​ institutional support for white Anglophone literature and culture, and those of the rest of the world. As Edward Said remarked about the massive “scientific surveys” French scholars wrote about Egypt following Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1798, They are a meter square and all across them is written the power and prestige of a modern European country that can do to the Egyptians what the Egyptians cannot do to the French. I mean there’s no comparable Egyptian survey of France. To produce knowledge, you have to have the power to be there and to see in expert ways things that the natives themselves can’t see. (Said and Jhally 1998) In the same way, we in the Euro-American professoriate, in particular, have disproportionate power to generate knowledge about the world. We have the luxury to be there and to see, thanks to generous resources, including internal and external grants, and, what is more, command of English and initiation into the exclusionary labyrinth of academic publishing. I pause here to reflect on an issue of cartography and naming. Why is it that we continue to speak and write of “the West” and of “Western” things (capitalized) when Said and so many others have already thoroughly debunked “the East” and “Eastern” as empty signifiers in any geographic or cultural sense? They are convenient terms, but as Kwame Anthony Appiah notes, “the very idea of the ‘west,’ to name a heritage and object of study, doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century” (2016). Yet many still cling to the terms “the West” and “Western.” Is it to underscore the presumed political, economic, and intellectual exceptionalism of the predominantly white nations of the world? Naming something “the West” only further reinscribes “the East” and brings to the surface the old Orientalist dialectic of spiritual East/materialist West, premised on the existence of an abject East.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE EPIC WORLD This volume is organized into four broad sections: Part I: Ways of Reading Epics; Part II: A Sample of Ancient Iterations (The Beginnings – circa 1000 CE); Part III: Recastings and Innovations (circa 1000–1850 CE); and Part IV: New Forms and Foundational Stories (circa 1850 CE – present). Chapters within each Part, are organized geographically, moving roughly from epics of Africa eastward around the globe to those of Europe.6 The first five chapters, those in Part I, are designed to incorporate theory, method, and narrative. That is, each chapter explores a critical apparatus or theoretical framework that can be used to analyze and interpret epic literature. To illustrate this, the authors of these chapters consider one or more examples of epic literature, applying their particular approach. Parts II–IV follow a chronological progression and are divided into three broad historical periods, mostly out of convenience and not to suggest a tripartite “classical/medieval/modern” division. Organizing chapters in three periods is helpful in allowing us to see some notable patterns across history. The works from Asia 9

— ​ Pa m e l a L o t h s p e i c h —​ and Europe discussed in the six chapters of Part II have all survived to the present in large measure because they were committed to writing in an early period. As with other early books, it was the technology of writing, on clay and stone tablets, papyrus, palm leaves, birch bark, parchment, etc., with inks and powders made from pigments, minerals, and other materials, that was key to their preservation over the centuries. It is also clear that early epics with longevity (durability) tend to be those of peoples who “stayed put” in one geographical area over time and/or are tied to a religious tradition that has persisted to the present.7 Epics from Parts III and IV encompass a much wider swath of geography and stories, both oral and written. Their geographic range is Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The epics discussed in the 17 chapters of Part III include new stories, refashioned old stories, and oral stories committed to writing. A significant development in this period was the turn toward vernacularization in some parts of the world. This is the period when writers in South Asia, for example, largely abandoned the ancient sacred language of Sanskrit and started using regional literary vernaculars for the transmission of knowledge, religion, history, and literature. A similar development happened with Latin in Europe. The 14 chapters in Part IV give examples of oral and written epics, as well as epics in performance, including in film. What is notable about Part IV is that many stories from this period deal with invasion and genocide during European imperialism and colonization of much of the world, sometimes from the position of the aggressor and sometimes from the position of the oppressed. It is particularly in the epics of Part IV that we see the crushing machineries of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and racism. Following the adage that “history is written by the victors,” the legendary history of epic is often the story of winners in the spoils of battle. But sometimes it is the story of those relegated to less-than-full humanity and citizenship, and to living or wandering homeless and stateless.8 Their stories, these anti-epics, may not be visible in the canon of “world literature” or written down, but they are critically important. To reiterate, it is hoped that this volume will bring renewed attention to a mode of storytelling about power and powerbrokers, proclaimed heroes often privileged by their race, ethnicity, gender, and other markers of social status. Epic is one of our oldest, most revered forms of storytelling. Although for a brief historical moment, it seemed the novel had dethroned and “unmanned” the epic, making it irrelevant. But just as power is ever present, so too the epic is continually reborn in new guises— in the epic novel, the epic film, the epic animated series, the epic video game, etc. Simultaneously, in the present moment there is an urgency to critique the old epics that wound and hurt, and to imagine new stories, new anti-epics that tear down old hegemonies and build new, more generous, compassionate worlds.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editor wishes to thank the contributors to the volume, especially Gregory E. Rutledge, Robert Romanchuk, Mariam Konaté, Margaret Beissinger, Mark Bender, Jackie Murray, Sohini Sarah Pillai, Shawna Dolansky, Sarah Cook, and Arturo Arias, for their many helpful suggestions, insights, and advice, as well as Melanie Magidow for her editing work on the Introduction. 10

— ​ I n t r o d u c t i o n —​

NOTES 1 Inversions of epic morality are also possible. In India, for example, many followers of the Dravidian movement have seen Ravana as the hero and Rama as the villain of Valmiki’s Rāmāyaṇa (Richman 1991). 2 I use the term “Euro-America” as a shorthand way to capture not only Europe, especially western Europe, and North America, but also all predominantly white, Europeandescended settler-colonial places (e.g. Australia and New Zealand) and cultures. 3 On debates around whether China has an epic tradition, see Chapter 19 by Mark Bender. 4 On epics in the United States, see, for example, Phillips (2012). 5 On epic films (most made in the United States), see, for example, Santas et al. (2014). 6 Chapter 5 concerns epics from various regions, so I have placed it last in Part 1. 7 There are, of course, exceptions. The Hebrew Bible, which Shawna Dolansky and Sarah Cook discuss in Chapter 6, for instance, has certainly traveled and endured. 8 In a study confined to Greco-Roman literature, David Quint refers to epic losers as wanderers, but only in a generic sense: “To the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering” (1993, 9).

WORKS CITED Adluri, Vishwa, and Joydeep Bagchee. 2014. The Nay Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2016. “There is No Such Thing as Western Civilization.” Guardian, November 9. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/westerncivilisationappiah-reith-lecture​. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, and edited by Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press. Britannica. 2023. “Africa,” “Balkans,” and “South Sudan.” https://www.britannica.com/place/ Africa; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkans; https://www.britannica.com/place/SouthSudan​. Brodbeck, Simon P. 2011. “Analytic and Synthetic Approaches in Light of the Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata and Harivaṃśa.” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 19, no. 2: 223–50. Dumézil, Georges. 1973. From Myth to Fiction: The Saga of Hadingus. Translated by Derek Coltman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fitzgerald, James L. 2003. “The Many Voices of the Mahābhārata.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 123, no. 4: 803–18. Harvard University. “Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.” Edited by David F. Elmer, Stephen Mitchell, and Gregory Nagy. Accessed November 11, 2022. https://mpc.chs.­ harvard.edu/. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2001. Introduction to The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree. Kitchener, 14–127. Kitchener, ON: Batoche. Hiltebeitel, Alf. 2005. “On Reading Fitzgerald’s Vyāsa.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 125, no. 2: 241–61. Jensen, Minna Skafte. 2017. “The Challenge of Oral Epic to Homeric Scholarship.” Humanities 6, no. 4, 97. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/4/97. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lukács, György. 1999. Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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— ​ Pa m e l a L o t h s p e i c h —​ Oxford English Dictionary. 2023. “Epic.” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=En tries&q=epic. Phillips, Christopher N. 2012. Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Poser, Rachel. 2021. “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” New York Times Magazine, February 2. Quint, David. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Richman, Paula. 1991. “E. V. Ramasami’s Reading of the Rāmāyaṇa.” In Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, 175-201. Said, Edward, and Sut Jhally. 1998. Edward Said on Orientalism. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. Santas, Constantine, James M. Wilson, Maria Colavito, and Djoymi Baker. 2014. The Encyclopedia of Epic Films. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Thapar, Romila. 2013. The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vyasa. 2009. The Mahābhārata. Abridged and translated by John D. Smith. New York: Penguin Classics.

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PART I

WAY S O F R E A D I N G E P I C S

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CHAPTER ONE

A C R I T I CA L R AC E S T U D I E S A P P R OA C H

R AC E A N D R AC E C R A F T I N A P O L L O N I U S ’ S A R G O N AU T I CA

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Jackie Murray

The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius (third century BCE) is the only complete epic composed in Greek or Latin after the Iliad and Odyssey and before the Aeneid to survive antiquity. It is also the only surviving Greek version of the myth of the voyage of the first Greek ship, the divine Argo, and the adventures of its crew of Greek heroes, the Argonauts, who sailed around the world on the quest for the Golden Fleece. The theme predates the Homeric epics – in the Odyssey, for example, Circe mentions the Argo – and the fragmentary remains of lost “Argonauticas” and treatments in a range of poetic genres testify to its popularity. The myth provided the basis of the foundation myths of many Greek settlements in the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Europe, and Africa. The Argonauts’ adventures in foreign lands and their encounters with foreign peoples offered justifications and rationalizations not just for the existence of Greek settlements in regions previously occupied by other peoples but also for how the ancient Greeks achieved these settlements, whether through negotiation or violence. The myth itself resonates with modern colonial narratives. Despite recent interest in how Apollonius’ Argonautica relates to contemporary Ptolemaic royal ideology and questions about the construction of identity in contemporary Greco-North African cultural milieux (Stephens 2003; Claros 2021), as far as I am aware, the role of “race” in the epic has not yet been the focus of any study. This dearth has everything to do with the fraught history of the relationship between the study of race and the study of ancient Greece. The toxic controversy in the late 1980s and 1990s over Martin Bernal’s Black Athena intimidated a generation of scholars away from exploring race in antiquity with anything approaching the theoretical sophistication of other disciplines, e.g., Francophone studies. Meanwhile, structural and systemic racism in the discipline of Classics played no small part in shutting out scholarly influences from African American and Black Studies. This chapter aims merely to start the conversation about race in the Argonautica by first laying out a critical race studies approach. Drawing primarily on Barbara and Karen DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-3

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— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ Fields’ theorizing of racecraft (Fields and Fields 2012), I analyze three episodes in the Argonautica where race is operating. Specifically, the focus will be on the episodes where the Argonauts kill herders: (1) the massacre of the inhabitants at Cyzicus in Book 1; (2) the conflict with the Bebrycians in Book 2; and (3) the murder of the Libyan herder Caphaurus in Book 4. Of all the people the Argonauts clash with, herders are the only group the heroes consistently treat with dehumanizing violence. Herders are also the only group whose conflict with the Argonauts is figured as a monster-slaying on the model of the Labors of Hercules. I argue that this discourse of monstrosity racializes the herders and by extension the indigenous populations they represent by offering a mythological justification for the dehumanization, enslavement, and extermination of indigenous populations that accompanied ancient Greek colonial settlement around the world.

RACE, RACISM, AND RACECRAFT Beginning with race: it is a commonplace assumption that the ancient Greeks were white. However, this assumption is premised on a false understanding of race. It cannot be underscored enough that the shape racial categories take is not ontologically independent of the historically contingent social, religious, and economic demands for a rigid oppressive social hierarchy. First, the racial concept of whiteness applied to the ancient Greeks was not something the ancients would have understood. It was born at the dawn of modernity, out of the largely Anglo-American settler-colonial ideology that the English used as a social mechanism to unify the disparate ethnic groups of the British Isles in the Americas. In the absence of a common religion, shared phenotypical features, i.e., whiteness became the crucial criterion for establishing a racial hierarchy. Our modern racial conceptions required the particular historical circumstances of the Enlightenment to come into being. It needed the sentimental and philosophical commitments to human equality and the condemnation of slavery to clash with the proto-capitalist economic and social imperatives of an imperialism that relied on slavery even more than before (Horne 2020; Murray 2021; Kennedy 2023). Prior to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, other logics and ideologies justified treating certain groups of people as if they were unworthy of full human dignity, people who, without consequence, could be subjected to the violence inherent in slavery, apartheid, and genocide. Out of this notion that shared phenotypical features could serve as criteria for a racial hierarchy, “Race Science” emerged as a field within the Natural Sciences, essentially as an authoritative discourse to settle the debates about who could and could not be enslaved. Today, theorists of race emphasize race science’s function as a tool or technology for naturalizing social conflict in physiognomic or phenotypical differences. In antiquity somatic features played little to no role in determining whether a group was by nature superior or inferior. Races are products of historical contingency. What remains stable through time about race is that one group is presumed to be quintessentially human and others are deemed in some way to be non-human or subhuman. It is not a coincidence that the very physiognomic features that prevailed among those trafficking and enslaving Africans in the Americas became indicators of full humanity, and by contrast, the very physiognomic features that distinguished the vast majority of the people who were at the time being trafficked and enslaved became the indexes for an 16

— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ inferior human being who was made by nature to be enslaved. These “findings” of race science, i.e., the existence in nature of a superior white race and an inferior black one, gave license to many slaveholding intellectuals not only to defend enslaving Africans but also develop an ideology that rooted the rightness of slavery itself in the precedent of slavery in Greek and Roman societies. For example, Thomas Jefferson, in Notes of the State of Virginia, arguing that the natural and scientifically established racial differences between blacks and whites were a huge obstacle to the abolition of slavery, cites the famous statement about slavery from the Odyssey: “Half of his excellence broad-seeing Zeus removes from a man, whensoever the day of slavery overpowers him” (Odyssey 17.322–23; Jefferson [1785] 1982, 142). The prima facie meaning of these verses is that no one is born less than fully human and so born to be enslaved, but that it is the process of being captured and enslaved that robs a person of human dignity; this hardly supports an argument for natural slavery. Nevertheless, to explain away its true meaning, Jefferson claims, “the slaves of which Homer speaks were white.” He reasons on with further reference to the “precedent” of classical antiquity: Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people … Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture. (1982, 143) So, according to Jefferson, the “white” and “black” races have always existed in nature, and the Greeks and Romans, who were white, made the mistake of enslaving members of their own race. From Jefferson’s point of view, the corollary is that the ancients should have only enslaved people of the inferior race, i.e., people with black or dark skin. The ancient Greeks may have considered themselves superior to non-Greeks, and some Greeks to other Greeks, but what they certainly did not do was see themselves as part of a superior white race. Whiteness connoted femininity, i.e., inferiority, and foreignness, i.e., uncivilized barbarity (McCoskey 2002; Kaufman 2021). The historical reality is that white skin did not signify racial superiority, and black skin did not signify racial inferiority. Among men, skin color signified nothing about who was the natural master and who was the natural slave (Snowden 1983; Thompson 1989; McCoskey 2012, 2021; Dench 2019; Murray 2021; Kennedy 2023). Belief in the whiteness of the ancient Greeks persists even in the face of indisputable evidence. This is because whiteness itself as a modern racial concept relies heavily on the symbolic power of the ancient Greeks and Romans notionally embodying the purest form of white civilization (Bernal 1987, 1–2; Rankine 2006, 67; Greenwood 2010, 3; Keita 2011; Orrells et al. 2011, 1–18; Barnard 2018, 5–21; Malamud 2019, 4–5). Accordingly, attempting to deconstruct to the whiteness of the ancient Greeks and Romans is inherently dangerous. For, either one is retrojecting modern racial 17

— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ significance to the skin color of historical figures or mythological characters and thus re-instantiating our modern white supremacist ideology, or one is undermining a very volatile and violent ideology. If the violence of the former is to be stopped, the danger inherent in the latter must be faced. A critical approach to race requires shifting the focus away from race as a collection of descriptors, such as skin color, nostril width, hair curl etc., to the power dynamics and the authoritative discourses that produce clearly defined social groups that (1) attribute to themselves full humanity while withholding it through various means from another group or groups and; (2) claim the right to prevent their humanity from being alienated while denying that right to another group or groups. In other words, in situations where there is unequal recognition of human dignity in a power dynamic, race is likely happening. Under this conceptualization, race happens in overt processes of dehumanization, such as slavery or genocidal violence, as well as more mundane denials of human dignity, like double standards regarding adequate living standards. Race also comes with a collective belief that the groups in the dynamic have metaphysical traits that effectively guarantee or negate the full humanity of their members, exposing the members of the racialized group to dehumanizing violence.1 So, when looking for race and racism in the ancient world, physical features, geographical origins, or cultural attributes are not as crucial or salient as dehumanizing oppressive power dynamics among groups.

RACECRAFT Barbara and Karen Fields have conceptualized racecraft as the various processes by which a given racial hierarchy is instilled, justified, naturalized, and perpetuated in a society’s collective understanding. Racecraft they figure as a kind of witchcraft that harnesses social, civic, and political, legal, religious, and cultural epistemic resources to convince and perpetuate the belief that a racial hierarchy exists in nature. Racecraft generates and sustains racial ideologies through rational, violent, emotional, experiential, and imaginative modes of acquiring knowledge (Fields and Fields 2012, 16). As a means of perpetuating division and inter-group hatred, racecraft can use the terror of overt dehumanizing violence and acts of war and atrocity just as well as “the practical, day-to-day actions to reproduce a pervasive belief in the existence of natural distinctions between the groups” (Fields and Fields 2012, 18–19). Miranda Fricker’s view of hermeneutical injustice ties in very closely with Fields and Fields’ theorization of racecraft. Fricker theorizes two kinds of injustice: “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” She calls the two types testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when the knower is not granted due credibility. In contrast, hermeneutical injustice happens when the knower cannot make their social experiences known because of a gap in the collective interpretative resources. The gap arises because the knower’s experience lies on the margins or outside of the hegemonic understanding of the social world (Fricker 2007, 1).2 Systematically oppressed groups are also hermeneutically marginalized, and, more importantly, they are not permitted to participate in the creation of collective knowledge vis-à-vis social experiences that directly affect them. They are prevented from contributing their perspective on situations 18

— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ and events, especially when “the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation, perhaps indeed where they have a positive interest in sustaining the extant misinterpretation” (2007, 152–61). A crucial aspect of racecraft involves controlling the interpretive frames around oppressive power relationships to render the inherent violence morally unproblematic. Racecraft is a suitable theoretical frame for understanding the relationship between heroic epic and ancient constructions of race. In most ancient Greek communities, the heroic epic was held in high esteem and was an authoritative source of collective knowledge, beliefs, and ideologies. Moreover, epic centers the perspective of the dominant group in the mythical world, the group with whom the ruling elites identified (some even claimed descent from the heroes). Accordingly, epic is the perfect vehicle for creating and reinforcing a collective belief in the naturalness of social hierarchies in the real world.

RACING THE ARGONAUTICA The Argonautica readily lends itself to a critical race studies approach. The epic is an ethnography and geography of the Greek world in verse. The voyage takes the heroes through all three ancient continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and along the way, the cultural peculiarities of different peoples are described. Moreover, the Argonauts are presented as purveyors of Greek culture; they build altars and shrines to the Greek gods, especially to Apollo, the god most closely associated with founding new Greek settlements (Hall 2002, 125–68). However, the Argonauts are not conquerors, a distinction setting them apart from the heroes of Homeric epics. They never sack the cities of other heroes they get into violent conflicts with, much less abduct and enslave their women and girls, whereas these aspects of conquest are central to the Iliad and Odyssey. With Jason in charge, the heroes are bearers of Greek culture; they dress well and approach the foreign heroes they meet on equal terms and with diplomacy first––even when they encounter a community ruled by a woman. The Argonauts treat herders differently. They always have violent clashes with them, and in all three cases, the heroes treat the herders with less human dignity than they would give other heroes.3 The racial dimension of the Argonauts’ treatment of herders is established in their first violent interaction with the inhabitants at Cyzicus, where they fight a group of herders and a group of heroes.

THE EARTHBORN EPISODE As the Argonauts approach the Symplegades, the narrow mouth of the Bosphorus Strait that separates the Sea of Marmara from the Black Sea, they arrive at an island connected by a narrow isthmus to the Phrygian plain on the mainland to the south with two harbors. Two distinct groups of people inhabit the region; one group (The Earthborn) dwells in caves on the island, and the other (The Doliones) lives in a city on the isthmus and the plain. In his initial topographical and ethnological introduction to the episode, the narrator forecasts that the Argonauts will massacre both groups and that later at the exact location, the descendants of Neleus will found the Greek settlement that existed in the poet’s day and then says, 19

— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ Those who live in the surrounding territory call the island the “Mountain of Bears,” and it is inhabited by the violently aggressive (ὑβρισταί) and wild (ἄγριοι) Earthborn (Γηγενέες), who were a great wonder (θαῦμα) to behold for their neighbors. They each waved around in the air six mighty arms, two out of their shoulders and four from below attached to their terrifyingly enormous sides. The isthmus and plain on the other side are inhabited by men (ἀνέρες), the Doliones. Ruling over them was the hero (ἥρως), Kyzikos, the son of Aineus, whom Ainete bore, the daughter of glorious Eusoros. Furthermore, although the Earthborn were terrifying, they did not harm them in any way because of Poseidon’s protection. For from the beginning, the Doliones were his offspring. The Argo rushed there, pressed on by the winds from Thrace, and Fair Harbor received the swift ship. At this location, the heroes loosened the small anchor stone, according to Tiphys’ instructions, and left it under a spring, Artacie Spring. They chose a different stone, a heavier one that suited their needs. Later on, following an oracle of the Far-Shooter, the Ionian descendants of Neleus dedicated that first stone as a holy offering, as was proper, in the sanctuary of Jasonian Athena. (Argonautica 1.941–60)4 The topography described above evokes Odyssean episodes: “Fair Harbor,” where the Argonauts initially moor, alludes to the “Fair Harbor” of the friendly Phaeacians (Odyssey 6.263–67), and “Artacie Spring,” where they leave the Argo’s anchor, alludes to the “Artacie Spring” of the hostile Laestrygonian monsters (Odyssey 10.107–08). These topographical allusions thus set up an expectation that the Argonauts will receive similarly contrasting welcomes from the different inhabitants of the region (Clauss 1993, 150–60). With this discourse of monstrosity, the toponyms help to align the Earthborn with the Cyclopes of the Odyssey, who in that epic are the literal manifestation of the monstrous metaphysics of the racialized herders enslaved to Odysseus on Ithaca (Murray 2021). Just like Homer’s arrogant and lawless (ὑπερφιάλων ἀθεμίστων) Cyclopes, who lived in caves on the mountain peaks with their flocks (Odyssey 9.110–20), Apollonius’ violently aggressive (ὑβρισταί) monsters lived in a wild state (ἄγριοι) on the peak of the Mountain of Bears. They are also “a wonder to behold” (θαῦμα) for the people living in the region, just like Polyphemus, who was a “monstrous wonder to behold” (θαῦμ᾿ ἐτέτυκτο πελώριον, Odyssey 9.190). The contrast between the two groups living in the exact location further reinforces the epic racecraft. Unlike the Earthborn, who are not referred to as men, the humanity of the Doliones is stressed by the emphatic position of ἀνέρες “men” in the Greek text (Argonautica 1.947–48). The narrator refers to them by their proper name, Doliones, and calls their king a hero (ἥρως, 1.949). The similarities between Cyzicus and Jason in looks and age are highlighted (Argonautica 1.972). Just as with the Earthborn, the toponyms which associate the Doliones with the friendly Phaeacians of the Odyssey, who lavish hospitality on Odysseus, prepare the reader for the lavish welcome the king and his people offer the Argonauts. The Doliones even join the heroes in setting up an altar to worship Apollo Ecbasios, their king providing the wine and sacrificial animals (Argonautica 1.961–69). 20

— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ Trouble starts the next morning when the Argonauts follow Cyzicus’s advice to move the Argo from Fair Harbor to Blockade Harbor. Some heroes climb the Mountain of Bears to see what routes they can take into the Black Sea, while others, including Herakles, stay on the ship. According to the narrator, the sight of the Argo in the harbor provokes the Earthborn to rush down the mountain, hurling boulders. The scene recalls other monstrous beings from the Odyssey, the Laestrygonians who hurl boulders down onto Odysseus’ ships (Odyssey 10.118–24; 9.480–480). Odysseus claims explicitly that the Laestrygonians do not look like men but like giants (οὐκ ἄνδρεσσιν ἐοικότες, ἀλλὰ Γίγασιν, Odyssey 10.120), and that they kill his men as if they were spearing fish (Odyssey 10.118–24; Clauss 1993, 160). The allusion is strengthened by a simile comparing the Earthborn attempting to blockade the mouth of the harbor to men trapping a sea monster (Argonautica 1.985–91).5 The Odyssean subtext of the scene reinforces the discourse of monstrosity that is explicit in the narrator’s confident speculation that the goddess Hera, who hates Herakles, probably reared the Earthborn to be one of his Labors (δὴ γάρ που κἀκεῖνα θεὰ τρέφεν αἰνὰ πέλωρα / Ἥρη, Ζηνὸς ἄκοιτις, ἀέθλιον Ἡρακλῆι, Argonautica 1.1006–007). When the rest of the heroes join the fight, the ensuing massacre of the Earthborn prompts an extended simile that characterizes the Argonauts’ treatment of the Earthborn as a dehumanizing atrocity. Apollonius writes, And as when woodcutters throw down long timbers, recently felled by their axes, in a line along the edge of the sea, so that by absorbing moisture they can receive the strong pegs, thus at the narrows of the white-capped harbor they were laid out one after another, some in heaps dipping their heads and chests into the salt water while they stretched their lower limbs out on the land; others, conversely, rested their heads on the sandy shore and their feet in the deep water, both groups become prey for birds and fish alike. (Argonautica 1.1003–11) The simile image of the corpses becoming food for birds and fish evokes the vivid picture at the beginning of the Iliad of a battlefield littered with unburied corpses being defiled by dogs and birds (Iliad 1.1–5) and, with it, the theme of dehumanization. The image concretizes Achilles’ destructive wrath in that initial programmatic scene and points to his depraved treatment of Hector’s corpse. Later the two heroes meet on the battlefield, where Hector suggests that the victor of their fight allow the body of the defeated to be properly buried. Achilles’ response racializes their relationship: Just as faithful oaths don’t exist between lions and men, and wolves and lambs don’t have sympathy for one another in their hearts but perpetually think evils against one another, so you and I can have no friendly feelings, and there will not be any oath between us, at least not before one of us falls and slakes bloodthirsty Ares the stout enemy. (Iliad 22.261–67) Homer’s gods allow the Greeks a great deal of latitude in the Trojan War, but they draw the line at the dehumanization of Hector’s body. Achilles sneers at Hector’s suggestion that there is an honorable way for heroes to kill one another, declaring 21

— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ that he does not regard Hector as the same kind of human being as himself. Then, after slaying Hector, he makes good on his promise to desecrate his body. Robbing Hector of his human dignity, Achilles drags his corpse behind his chariot around the city’s walls for days. By denying another hero the chance for a proper burial, Achilles has gone too far. Heroes must recognize the humanity of other heroes, even on the battlefield. However, the potential critique of the Argonauts’ treatment of the Earthborn that the allusion suggests is countered by the way the Argonauts treat the corpses of Cyzicus and the Doliones, who are explicitly identified as heroes. Cyzicus and the Doliones clash with the Argonauts, mistaking them for a Pelasgian army of Macrian men, who, according to the scholia (the ancient comments that accompanied the manuscripts), were the Euboean Greeks who eventually colonized the region. After their battle with the Earthborn, the Argonauts sail all day in good weather, but at night, they are driven back by a storm. In the darkness, they fail to recognize that they have landed where they departed. Most of the Doliones die in the battle, including Cyzicus, their king, whom Jason slays. Nor was Cyzicus going to return home––beyond his fate––to his bridal chamber, and marriage bed. Mortals are never permitted to escape fate; a great net is spread all around. Instead, as he turned, Jason rushed straight at him and struck him in the middle of his chest, and around the spear, his bone shattered. Cyzicus fulfilled his destiny as he slumped down in the sand. So, I guess he assumed he was free of bitter destruction on the very night that fate snared him into fighting the heroes. Many others helping him were slain too. Heracles killed Telecles and Megabrontes; Acastus killed Sphodris; Peleus slew Zelys and Gephyrus, the swift as Ares; and Telamon of the great ashen spear cut down Basileusa; Idas, in turn, slew Promeus; Clytius Hyacinthus; and the two Tyndaridae slew Megalossaces and Phlogius; and Oeneus’ son, after them, took down bold Itymoneus and Artaces, commander of men—all of whom to this day the inhabitants glorify with heroic honors. The rest retreated and escaped, like a flock of doves escaping swift-winged hawks. Down into the gates, the noisy throng rushed. Immediately the city was filled with wailing for their retreat from the mournful war. At dawn, both sides recognized their deadly and irrevocable mistake. Hateful grief seized the Minyan heroes seeing Aineus’ son Cyzicus in front of them, laid low in the dust and bloody. For three full days, they mourned; the Dolionian people also lamented, tearing out their hair. However, after marching three times around the body in their bronze armor, they laid him in his tomb and held games, as was proper, on the Leimonian plain, where to this day, that tomb lies heaped up for later generations to see. (Argonautica 1.1030–62) The battle at Blockade Harbor and its aftermath confirm the racially determined way the Argonauts treat the two groups, the Doliones and the Earthborn. Under normal circumstances, Cyzicus and his people would be on “high alert” against hostile landfalls from Greece. However, when the Argonauts first arrive, the king obeys a prophetic warning not to attack them (Argonautica 1.969–71). When the Argonauts return at night unexpectedly, the Doliones have resumed their usual security protocol. So, both groups, the Earthborn and Doliones, attack the 22

— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ Argonauts as they would any other Greek invaders. However, only the aggression of the Earthborn is attributed to some source of implacable hatred. Cyzicus and the Doliones are rendered innocent victims of chance, and the whole disaster is an awful tragedy. Furthermore, because the Doliones are heroes, they receive the heroic honor of having their names mentioned along with their slayers and are appropriately buried. The racecraft takes care of moral qualms about the Argonauts’ dehumanizing treatment of the dead Earthborn. By definition, monsters do not deserve to be treated with the same human dignity as heroes.

THE AMYCUS EPISODE The Argonauts’ next violent conflict occurs at the beginning of Book 2, the boxing match to the death between Polydeuces (Pollux) and Amycus, the king of the Bebrycians. The Argonaut hero’s boxing match with Amycus is a staple of the Argonautic myth (Cuypers 1997, 11–12), and in most versions, after Polydeuces defeats their king, the Bebrycians have a battle with the Argonauts in which they end up being massacred. Depicting Amycus as a herdsman modeled on the Cyclops was common and provided material for spin-offs in comedy and satyr plays. The Amycus theme was especially popular in Italy and Sicily, where poets and ancient geographers had identified the home of the Cyclopes. The Sicilian comic playwright Epicharmus and the pastoral poet Theocritus treated the theme. It also shows up in art on Sicily connected to Dionysus and satyrs. Thus, Apollonius was following the tradition of depicting Amycus as a herder. He writes, There were the cattle stalls and sheepfolds of Amycus, the intimidating (ἀγήνορος) king of the Bebrycians, one of the most insolent men (ὑπεροπληέστατον ἀνδρῶν), whom the Bythinian nymph, Melie, bore once upon a time to Poseidon Genethlius after she shared his bed. This man even imposed upon his potential guest-friends the outrageous law (ἀεικέα θεσμόν) that nobody should depart before competing against him in boxing. He had slain many of his neighbors, and at that time, he came straight to the ship and, in his arrogance (ὑπερβασίῃσιν), asked the purpose of the voyage and who they were. “Listen, you sea-rovers, to what is fitting for you to know: it is my law that no foreigner who approaches the Bebrycians may set out from here on their voyage without first raising his fists against mine. Therefore, choose the best of your crew and stand him right here to contend with me in boxing. If you disregard and trample on my laws, be sure that a mighty necessity will pursue you with loathsome consequences.” So he shouted at them haughtily. As they listened, savage anger seized them (τοὺς δ᾽ ἄγριος εἰσαΐοντας / εἷλε χόλος). However, the threat especially struck Polydeuces, who stood up immediately as the champion of his companions and addressed him. “Stop now. Don’t display to us your wicked violence, whomever you claim you are. We will submit to your laws as you have declared them. Willingly, I agree to face you right now.” So he spoke without deference, and Amycus whirled his eyes and glared at him, just like a lion wounded by a javelin whom men in the mountains surround. Although the crowd traps him, he no longer cares about them, but he only eyes that one man who first struck but did not subdue him. (Argonautica 2.11–18) 23

— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ When Amycus confronts the Argonauts here, they have already trespassed into his sea space and are about to land near his herds. From his perspective, their actions appear to be the prelude to a raid, and however unreasonable his laws governing foreigners may seem, as the sovereign with jurisdiction over his own territory, Amycus should have the right to impose them upon the Argonauts.6 The narrator, however, pushes readers to side with the Argonauts with a discourse of monstrosity that justifies denying Amycus his sovereign right to defend his territory from invaders.7 Amycus’ genealogy makes him the half-brother of the Cyclops Polyphemus, the archetype of the monstrous lawless herder. Precisely because herder (read Cyclops) and king are antithetical in the epic racecraft, the narrator describes Amycus as out of line in his behavior. He is “intimidating” (ἀγήνορος); he is “one of the most insolent men” (ὑπεροπληέστατον ἀνδρῶν); he approaches the Argonauts “in his arrogance” (ὑπερβασίῃσιν); and he demands they submit to his “outrageous law” (ἀεικέα θεσμόν). Amycus’ emotional state in this initial confrontation is conveyed through a simile that metaphorically ascribes a bestial nature to him. When Polydeuces angrily agrees to his challenge, Amycus acts like a wounded lion that recklessly intends to strike back, only considering the man who struck him and not the others with him. The simile foreshadows his defeat by pointing out that even if Amycus somehow manages to defeat Polydeuces, the Argonauts are still stronger in numbers. Accordingly, he should not dare to impose his laws on the Argonauts.8 One of the Argonauts voices the fundamental governing principle among the heroes: might makes right. Just think what they would have done in their puny strength if some god had brought Herakles here. I bet that when that man came to us, the boxing contest would not have happened. Instead, when he came to declare his laws, Herakles’ club would have made him forget right away his intimidating antics and the laws he was speechifying. (Argonautica 2.145–50) Moreover, to make the heroes appear innocent and to cloak the naked violence of their behavior, the narrator frames the conflict as monster-slaying: To look at, they were not at all alike in build or nature. On the contrary, the one [Amycus] seemed to be the monstrous offspring of deadly Typhoeus or even of Gaia herself, like the kind she bore in the past when Zeus angered her. The other, Polydeuces, was like a heavenly star whose beams are the loveliest when it shines through the dusky night. The son of Zeus was like that, his first beard still growing, his eyes still bright, but his courage and strength were full-grown like those of a wild beast. (Argonautica 2.37–45) This simile makes Amycus and Polydeuces members of different and hostile races. Metaphorically, Amycus has the monstrous essence of Earthborn Typhoeus or his son, and Polydeuces, the divine essence of his actual father, Zeus. The boxing match, thus, reenacts on the human plane the gigantomachy, the cosmic battle between the gods and the giants, justifying the murder of Amycus in terms of the established 24

— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ divine order. The analogy forces readers, who must side with Zeus, to side with Polydeuces and hate Amycus. In the battle that ensues after Amycus’ death, the narrator treats Amycus’ men somewhat like heroes. Except for the first Bebrycian murdered by Castor, the rest are memorialized along with the Argonauts who slay them. However, the imagery keeps the racial hostility centered: And as when on a wintery day, gray wolves, by eluding keen-scented dogs and their shepherds, attack and terrify countless sheep in their pens, they search for which one to dash upon first and carry off, surveying many at once, while the sheep just throng together from all sides, falling over on one another—so the Argonauts grievously terrified the arrogant (ὑπερφιάλους) Bebrycians. And as a great swarm of bees is smoked out from within a rock by shepherds or rather by beekeepers, and, of course, for a while, they buzz and rush about wildly all together in their hive. However, when the sooty smoke suffocates them, they dart forth far from the rock, so the Bebrycians no longer remain steadfast, but instead, they scatter into Bebrycia to report the doom of Amycus. (Argonautica 2.123–34) Here the simile depicts the racial hostility between the Argonauts and herders as the “natural” hostility between predator and prey. The wolves attacking sheep, of course, recalls Achilles’ reply to Hector’s requests that they agree to behave honorably to one another after one of them is slain. In the second simile, as if carried away in a stream of consciousness, the narrator begins by equating the Argonaut heroes with shepherds but then corrects himself. He changes the image to beekeepers. An analogy between heroes and shepherds would not only have been a gauche disruption of the imagery of the previous simile likening the Argonauts to wolves that eluded shepherds, but it also would have blurred the consistent racial distinction established in the epic between the heroes and shepherds. The second simile shifts the analogy to honey production, producing a comparison between the massacre of the herders and an essential aspect of Greek civilization, much like the way the massacre of the Earthborn was compared to shipbuilding. Heroes murdering herders and raiding their flocks are rendered both “natural” and “civilized” through this comparison. Both similes suggest that the Argonauts had a predatory intention when they landed near Amycus’ herds in the first place.

THE CAPHAURUS EPISODE The previous conflicts took place on different ancient continents, Europe and Asia, respectively; this final conflict between the Argonauts and a herder takes place on the third continent, Africa, near the historical site of the future Ptolemaic settlement named after Berenike II (246–221 BCE), the queen who ruled Egypt and Cyrene at the time Apollonius finished his epic.9 After the Argonauts had carried the Argo for twelve days and nights over the Libyan desert, they finally set the ship down at Lake Triton. Being very thirsty, they run around looking for a spring until they finally reach the tree of golden apples tended by the Hesperides nymphs and guarded by a monstrous serpent. The Hesperides nymphs, singing a beautiful lament for 25

— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ the serpent, vanish into dust when they see the Argonauts approach. Eventually, Orpheus gets the nymphs to reappear to ask them how to find fresh water. The nymphs point out the spring that Herakles discovered when he came there the day before to slay the serpent and rob the golden apples. Hearing that Herakles may be nearby, several Argonauts decide to search for him. Among the heroes who run off searching for Herakles is Canthus, whose death in Libya has already been announced as fated when he was introduced at the beginning of the poem in the Catalogue of Argonauts (Argonautica 1.77–85). Here, in Book 4, the narrator notes, Canthus, the destructive Fates seized you in Libya. By chance, you found some flocks grazing, but a herdsman was looking after them. As you intended to lead them off to your needy companions, he slew you with a stone to protect his sheep. He was, after all, no low-life (ἐπεὶ οὐ μὲν ἀφαυρότερός γ’ ἐτέτυκτο), but Caphaurus, the grandson of Lycorean Phoebus and the noble maiden, Acacallis. Although she was his very own daughter, Minos exiled her to Libya at some point because she was carrying the heavy offspring of the god. Nevertheless, she gave birth to Pheobus’ glorious son, whom they call Amphithemis and Garamas. Amphithemis later slept with a Tritonian nymph, and she bore him Nasamon and mighty Caphaurus, who at that time slew Canthus in defense of his sheep. However, he did not escape trouble at the hands of the heroes as soon as they learned what he had done (οὐδ’ ὅγ’ ἀριστήων χαλεπὰς ἠλεύατο χεῖρας). When they found the corpse [of Canthus], the Minyans took it up and brought it back. They buried him in the earth, mourning him. The sheep they led off for themselves. (Argonautica 4.1485–501) In this final instance, the Argonauts behave as they always do; they murder the herder and leave his body to rot. To them, a dead herder is not worthy of the same human dignity they would grant to another hero.

CONCLUSION This study set out to apply a critical race studies approach to the episodes in the Argonautica where Greek heroes get into violent conflicts with herders. The close readings show that the Argonauts operate in a mythical world where a racial hierarchy allows them to treat herders as if they were monsters. The framing of the Argonauts’ violence against herders as monster-slaying is racecraft. By figuring herders as monsters, i.e., not human enough to deserve the dignity of a proper burial, moral questions are taken out of consideration. A fuller treatment is needed to explore how the narrator’s persona complicates this use of monster-slaying as racecraft, especially in the last episode where not only do the Hesperides nymphs show sympathy to the monstrous serpent and offer a very hostile framing of Herakles’ Labor, but also the narrator distances himself from the heroes’ racism by treating Caphaurus as if he were a hero. In any case, the racism of the Argonauts toward herders indicates that the Argonautica shares the same racial imaginary observed in the Odyssey, where the monstrosity of the Cyclopes reflects the monstrous metaphysical nature of the 26

— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ enslaved herders on Ithaka (Murray 2021). It is worth considering further to what extent the social values of the mythical world of this epic reflect or even transfer to the real world of Apollonius’ readers.

NOTES 1 My definition of race draws on the work of Sheth (2009), Allen (2012), Omi and Winant (2014), Heng (2018), Bonnett (2022), Loïc Wacquant (2022), Fields and Fields (2012) (on racecraft), and Fricker (2007) (on epistemic injustice). For similar applications in Virgil, see Giusti (forthcoming), and in ancient dance Andújar (forthcoming). For my fuller discussion, see Murray (2021). 2 Note similar theorization in Lorde ([1984] 2007), Spivak (1999), and Collins (2000). Decades earlier, Anna Julia Cooper wrote about the silencing of Black women’s voices in the male-dominated discussions of racial uplift in A Voice From the South ([1892] 1990, 5). 3 Even when Jason mutilates the corpse of Medea’s brother, another hero, he does it as part of a misguided expiatory ritual and not as an expression of sadistic furor aimed at dehumanizing the other hero (Argonautica 4.452–81). 4 All translations of the Argonautica are my own, and are based on the Loeb text edited by William H. Race (Rhodius 2008). 5 The actions of the Earthborn subtly provide the etymology of the harbor’s name, Χυτός (“Blockade”). 6 Amycus’ assessment of the situation is, in fact, correct: the Argonauts do raid his flocks at the end of the episode (Argonautica 2.143–44). 7 Note that Cyzicus is not really criticized for being ready to attack anyone who lands in his territory or even for attacking the Argonauts when they return to his territory unexpectedly. 8 Other similes emphasize the Argonauts’ superior strength or intelligence: Argonautica 2.70–75; 2.79–84; 2.86–89. 9 Several historical Greek colonial settlements were located near the lake, and many, including Cyrene, the oldest Greek kingdom in Africa, traced their foundations either to this Argonautic adventure or to Heracles’ African adventures.

WORKS CITED Allen, Theodore W. 2012. The Invention of the White Race. 2nd ed. New York: Verso Books. Andújar, Rosa. Forthcoming. “Geography.” In Imprints of Dance in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Z. Alonso Fernández and S. Olsen. Madrid: Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Apollonius Rhodius, 2008. Argonautica. Edited and translated by William H. Race. Loeb Classical Library 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barnard, John Levi. 2018. Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Bernal, Martin. 1987–2006. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vols. 1–3. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bonnett, Alastair. 2022. Multiracism: Rethinking Racism in Global Context. Cambridge: Polity Press. Claros, Yujhan. 2021. (Post-)Classical Coloniality; Identity, Gender (Trouble), and Marginality/Subalternity in Hellenized Imperial Dynastic Poetry from Alexandria, with an Epilogue on Rome. PhD diss., Columbia University. Clauss, James J. 1993. The Best of the Argonauts: The Redefinition of the Epic Hero in Book 1 of Apollonius’s Argonautica. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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— ​ J a c k i e M u r r a y —​ Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Cooper, Anna J. [1892] 1988. A Voice From the South. New York: Oxford University Press. Cuypers, Martine. 1997. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2.1.–310: A Commentary. PhD diss., University of Leiden. Dench, Emma. 2019. “Race.” In A Cultural History of Western Empires in Antiquity, edited by Carlos F. Noreña, 202–21. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Italy: Verso. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Giusti, Elena. Forthcoming. “Rac(ializ)ing Dido.” In Proceedings of the Virgil Society. Greenwood, Emily. 2010. Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Jonathan M. 2002. Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heng, Geraldine. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horne, Gerald. 2020. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Jefferson, Thomas. [1785] 1982. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Kaufman, Jay S. 2021. “Race and Science.” In A Cultural History of Race: In Antiquity, edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey, 67–82. Vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Race. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Keita, Maghan. 2011. “Believing in Ethiopians.” In African Athena: New Agendas, edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, 18–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, Rebecca Futo. 2023. Ancient Identities/Modern Politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lorde, Audre. [1984] 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Clarkson Potter/ Ten Speed. Malamud, Margaret. 2019. African Americans and the Classics Antiquity, Abolition and Activism. London: I. B. Tauris. McCoskey, Denise Eileen. 2002. “Race before ‘Whiteness’: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt.” Critical Sociology 28: 13–39. ———. 2012. Race: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism.” In A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity, edited by Paul Cartledge and Carol Atack, 137–55. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Murray, Jackie. 2021. “Race and Sexuality.” In A Cultural History of Race: In Antiquity. edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey, 137–56. Vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Race. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge. Orrells, Daniel, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, eds. 2011. African Athena: New Agendas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rankine, Patrice D. 2006. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sheth, Falguni A. 2009. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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— ​ A C r i t i c a l R a c e S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ Snowden, Frank M., Jr. 1983. Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stephens, Susan A. 2003. Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Hellenistic Culture and Society Series 37. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, Lydia A. 1989. Romans and Blacks. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 2022. “Resolving the Trouble with ‘Race.’” New Left Review 133: 67–88.

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CHAPTER TWO

A POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES A P P R OA C H

F R O M FA N O N ’ S R E V O L U T I O N A RY L I T E R AT U R E T O G L I S S A N T ’ S R E L AT I O N

rsr

Sneharika Roy

“Postcolonial” approaches to epic existed long before the emergence of postcolonial studies in the late twentieth century. The idea that political power, or pouvoir as the twentieth-century French theorist Michel Foucault would later call it, is legitimized through culture and knowledge, or savoir (1995), is a fundamental postcolonial premise, articulated by the discipline’s leading intellectuals such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. But this postulate is an ancient one. For example, the Foucauldian interplay of pouvoir and savoir is already at work in classical Sanskrit epic, which deploys the literary prestige of kavya poetics in the service of a monarchical ideology of rajya (Pollock 2006). It is equally visible in the harnessing of translatio studii (the cultural glamour of antiquity) to buttress translatio imperii (the imperial ambitions of successive European polities in medieval and Renaissance Europe) (Le Goff 1997). Nonetheless, the cognizance that political domination can be made to seem natural by the creation of authoritative forms of knowledge, determined by implicit rules or “discourse,” is central to understanding the problematization of power that characterizes a postcolonial perspective. Thus, a postcolonial approach to epic does not entail simply considering the genre as an ensemble of themes or conventions (travel through quests or conquests, heroic mortals, divine intervention, warfare, etc.) that may lend themselves to postcolonial study. A postcolonial perspective takes on its full hermeneutic and heuristic force when epic is considered either as a discursive artifact of empire, where empire is to be taken in its broadest sense as an emanation of institutional power that perpetuates itself through the ideologically justified subjugation of specifically designated groups; or when it is seen as a socially symbolic act of insubordination, even insurrection, on the part of such groups who contest the implicit or explicit discursive “rules” that mark out their marginalization in the first place. Postcolonialism includes both postcolonial literature and postcolonial theory. Postcolonial literatures clear a space in our imaginations and in literary canons for those texts critically engaging with experiences of colonialism or neocolonialism 30

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-4

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ from the perspective of colonized or formerly colonized peoples. Though postcolonial literary and theoretical texts emerge in the second half of the twentieth century, any text that questions ideologies of exceptionalism or gives voice to the voiceless has affinities with postcolonial studies, if not a claim to being postcolonial. Still, periodizing postcolonial studies is important. The weakening of European powers in the aftermath of the devastation of World War II paved the way for the decolonization movements that swept across their colonies in Africa and Asia, leading to the birth of independent postcolonial nations. But political decolonization did not suffice; the task of psychological decolonization, already brought to life by freedom struggles, had only just begun. This is where the work of postcolonialism – that of “decolonizing the mind,” to borrow Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memorable expression – begins. Some of postcolonialism’s key canonical theorists include Edward Said, Homi Bhabha Gayatri Spivak, Edouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Achille Mbembe. All of them are Third-World intellectuals who migrated to First-World centers of academic power, where they transposed the European intellectual legacy – Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists, the post-structuralists – to Third-World subjectivities and social relations. Propelled by the critical energies of Marxism, postcolonialism undertakes a critique of colonialism and global capitalism as modes of economic and ideological production that sustain Euro-American imperialism. Galvanized by post-structuralist insights about workings of power through knowledge systems, postcolonialism attends to the acts of self-determination and resistance on the part of those populations who have been partially or completely silenced in authoritative or hegemonic accounts of global history. Postcolonial thought does not limit its scope to a retrospective critique of European colonialism heralded by the Age of Discovery. A postcolonial intervention is both an exposé of forms of domination that derive their ideological energies from discrimination, and an affirmation of alterity and cultural difference. Perhaps the first explicit mention of epic in postcolonial theory appears in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) by the Martinican Francophone anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s concepts of the colonial “odyssey” and a “revolutionary literature” prefigure a postcolonial approach to epic in important dialectical ways, even though the genre is not his explicit focus. The first part of this chapter focuses on Fanon’s notion of a colonial “odyssey” as a discursive regime that legitimizes the illegitimate project of colonialism. But Fanon also conceives of this colonial odyssey as a kind of textual unconscious, which in its very acts of historical distortion and suppression leaves unspoken psychological residues of colonial anxiety and illegitimacy. This ambivalence, as we will see in the second part of the chapter, opens the possibility for a “revolutionary literature,” which can undo the colonial odyssey’s systematic dehumanization of the colonized subject. Fanon’s insights have had a formative influence on postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Édouard Glissant. Their theories will then be put briefly into practice in the third part of the chapter through two postcolonial readings of epic traditions. We will see how postcolonial investigation reveals Virgil’s The Aeneid to be a text whose overt celebration of Roman imperialism is undercut by covert ironies and subversive non-Roman voices. We will also observe how postcolonial analysis can help us examine a work, even when it does not explicitly deal with EuroAmerican colonialism as its subject matter. From a postcolonial prism, Karthika 31

— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ Naïr’s Until the Lions (2015), a contemporary epic retelling of the Mahabharata, emerges as a critique of precolonial and postcolonial forms of power wielded in the name of purity (of caste, of gender, of Aryan and Hindu essences). These examples of textual analysis are typically postcolonial in their attentiveness to the representation of the Other. Though necessarily selective and partial, they aim to equip readers with a toolkit to embark on their own postcolonial interpretations of epic.

THE COLONIAL ODYSSEY AND ITS UNCONSCIOUS ANXIETIES Though scholars have traditionally cast the epic as the instrument of the powerful (Bakhtin [1981] 2006; Bowra 1945), it is Fanon who explicitly associates the genre with colonialism. Fanon’s central preoccupations are the internalization of racial inferiority, Black nationalism, revolutionary consciousness forged in violence and cultural renewal, and the dangers of neocolonialism. Though epic is not his principal concern, he nonetheless inaugurates the major premises of a postcolonial approach to epic in “On Violence.” This celebrated essay appears in The Wretched of the Earth, a work produced in the thick of the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria: The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: “We made this land.” He is the guarantor for its existence: “If we leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages.” (2004, 14–15) We see that colonialism is not just about the territorial conflict involved in the making of empires; it is also a struggle over representations in the making of history. Fanon’s contribution to a postcolonial approach to epic lies in his scrutiny of the political and cultural legitimacy that epic discourse confers to the colonial project. Epic clothes colonial violence in cherished European values of Humanism, “the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty” (2004, 11). Its heroic impulse creates a distorted, one-sided representation of history in which the colonizer is the origin and normative standard of civilization, so that precolonial history is either expunged or relegated to the “Dark Ages.” If the colonizer is cast as harbinger of forward-looking modernity and the “innovative dynamism of colonial mercantilism,” the colonized are but “listless beings,” seemingly passive and incapable of progress (2004, 15). Fanon’s notion of the colonial odyssey powerfully underscores the constructed nature of historical and literary representations: the colonist “has fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject” (2004, 2) as a degraded figure, divested of any capacity for self-determination. Such demeaning depictions of the colonized would later be termed “Orientalist” by Edward Said. Said argues that since antiquity, European civilization has defined itself against an antithetical, dehumanized, often Muslim, imaginary Other of an imagined Orient. Said uses Dante’s (2003) representation of Muslims in the Inferno (circa 1307) as “an instance of the schematic, cosmological inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension” ([1978] 2001, 69). As a PalestinianAmerican scholar of literature, Said seeks to understand how sociological and even 32

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ literary representations of Arabs as inherently inferior and backward provided the ideological underpinnings of nineteenth-century British and twentieth-century American foreign policies. In Orientalism, a work published in the aftermath of the Palestine War which resulted in the exodus of massive numbers of Arab Palestinians from their homeland, he argues that colonial and neocolonial intervention was “justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact” (2001, 39). The Foucauldian pairing of knowledge and power is therefore central: “[k]nowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient” (2001, 40). Such is the cultural authority of Orientalism as a body of knowledge created by Europeans and Americans that it “exclude[s], displace[s], and makes supererogatory any such real thing as the Orient” (2001, 21). Fanon’s colonial odyssey and Said’s concept of Orientalism thus expose the constructed nature and political agendas that underwrite the Manichean representations of imperial heroes and Others. As a practicing psychiatrist, Fanon is sensitive not only to the false sense of racial inferiority induced by such self-glorifying epic narratives, but also to the colonizer’s repressed anxieties about the illegitimacy of the colonial enterprise. As he asserts in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a work that reflects his experiences with French metropolitan racism in the 1950s, “the Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man, enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation” (2006, 44). These disavowed fears find expression in what his epic narrative unconsciously reveals: “The history he writes is not the history of the country he is despoiling, but the history of his own nation’s looting, raping, and starving to death” (2004, 15). The colonial odyssey and Orientalism – as Fanonian and Saidian designations for colonial and neocolonial discourse – can thus be seen as typified by their symbolic resolutions of the internal tensions of imperialism. This brings us to one of the most potent tools of postcolonial analysis, “reading against the grain.” Inspired by Marxist and post-structuralist reading practices, postcolonial scholars read against the grain by zeroing in on absences, latent tensions or contradictions, and blind spots that often prove to be extremely important in structuring the text’s fundamental assumptions about the nature of truth and reality. Reading against the grain of epic texts allows for a more nuanced reading of imperial epic as simultaneously asserting and undermining imperial claims to supremacy. As we will see in our analysis of representations of the Other in The Aeneid later on, behind every statement of authority is a disavowal of anxiety, which points to the colonizer’s awareness of the illegitimacy of the colonial project. One variant of reading against the grain is a “contrapuntal reading.” In Culture and Imperialism, Said proposes a contrapuntal, rather than just anti-Orientalist, reading of imperial histories. He draws his inspiration from European classical music’s notion of counterpoint in which various themes “play off one another.” Similarly, the “cultural archive” can be read “not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” ([1993] 1994, 51). Unlike Said’s Orientalist critiques that can force us to look for East-West relationships of power, contrapuntal readings can function more elastically within and across a microdiversity of spaces, languages, and colonial hierarchies. An illustrative example is Karen Thornber’s contrapuntal use of the term transculturation to refer to ways in which “fascinating amalgams of resistance, 33

— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ collaboration, and acquiescence” were produced not just between Asian and so-called “Western” literatures, but also between Asian literatures themselves, in the first half of the twentieth century (2009, 1). In fact, there existed a complex “intra East-Asian literary contact nebulae” among “imperial Japanese, semi-colonial Chinese, colonial Korean and Taiwanese, and informally colonial (i.e., occupied) Manchurian literary worlds” within the Japanese empire. Similarly, Michelle Hamilton has argued that while crusader-writers “were beginning to construct the Orient as Other,” medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Christian writers in Andalusian Spain offer us a contrapuntal, “alternative construction of what it means to be Western” (2007, 5, 3).

A REVOLUTIONARY EPIC LITERATURE Said’s emphasis on the competing claims of other histories leads us to Fanon’s idea of a revolutionary literature written of, by, and for the dissenters. In “On National Culture” (1961), Fanon recognizes the necessity of a revolutionary narrative and of counter-representations to the imperial archive. Such a literature is neither a slavish imitation of colonial literature (first phase of national culture) nor a nostalgic representation of a precolonial past uncontaminated by colonial contact (second phase). A revolutionary literature is born in revolution (third phase), in the actual movement of a people through history to reshape and determine their place in it. Fanon boldly asserts that the first two phases of the native intellectual’s relationship to national culture are inauthentic. By first being “authentic” to the European culture that he has assimilated, the Europeanized intellectual is alienated from the “reality” of popular mobilization. Then, by striving to be “authentic” to indigenous culture (for example, shunning shoes from Paris for Muslim babouche slippers), he lapses into exoticization, thus divorcing himself from the progressive present of the people who have moved on, while he is stuck in the past and in cultural “knowledge frozen in time” (2004, 161). It is only by existentially seeing such quests for authenticity as forms of bad faith and by confronting, rather than eliding, his distance (cultural but also economic) from “the people” that the intellectual comes to the lucid realization that “the existence of a nation is not proved” by a static vision of “its culture,” but in a dynamic relationship to the present, “in the people’s struggle against the forces of occupation” (2004, 159). From this struggle springs a revolutionary literature. It gains its authenticity not by being true to mental constructs of pure, unchanging European or indigenous cultures, but by dialoguing with the lived reality of intercultural contact and technological transformation. Fanon thus anticipates a specifically postcolonial approach to epic that reconceptualizes the genre’s vocation as one that complicates concepts of cultural purity and authenticity – the very grounds on which epic traditionally derives its generic integrity and social significance. Like Fanon, the US-based Parsi-Indian critic Homi Bhabha explodes the edifice of ethnic purity. In his 1990 essay “DessimiNation,” he makes clear his suspicion of “genealogies of ‘origin’ that lead to claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority” (2008, 225). Instead of “the monumentality of historicist memory,” he asks us to imagine the nation from the margins of a “minority discourse.” From the vantage point of the marginalized Others in the nation, “national culture” and “the people” – both eminently Fanonian preoccupations – emerge as “contentious, performative 34

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ space[s],” in which “the homogeneity of cultural experience” is undercut by “otherness or alterity” (2008, 227). In “The Commitment to Theory” ([1989] 2008), he further asserts that imperial and postcolonial chauvinism rely on a “strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic” (2008, 52). While this is not a direct reference to epic, it can nonetheless be read as a compelling redefinition of the genre in postcolonial shorthand. Like Fanon and Said, Bhabha is interested in conquests over representations. The archaic and the mythical bestow an authority that “negates” the ground-conditions of struggles over cultural meaning that play out between traditionalist demands for stability and new cultural imperatives (2008, 52). He explains that the nation, when conceived as a temporal process, is marked by a constant interaction between a “nationalist” pedagogy of institutional containment (where meanings have been stabilized in previous nativist versions of national identity) and a “performative” pedagogy propelled by a revisionary impulse (where unexpected meanings can be unlocked through new interpretations) (2008, 219–28). Between permanently stabilized cultural meanings and the performative revision of authoritative accounts lies the transitional, translational, interstitial “Third Space” (2008, 53–55). But this Third Space is not a space; it is a temporality of revisionary energy and a potentiality of infinite unlocked possibilities. In contrast to Bhabha who hardly alludes to epic, the Francophone Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant thinks constantly and creatively about the genre. As a native of a tiny island in the Caribbean, whose history has seen the violence of native extermination and slavery, as well as the vibrancy of intercultural mixing or creolization, Glissant sees epic as far more than a genre. For him, it is an existential mode of survival and self-inscription in the world, bearing “the responsibility for the word in every community” (1999, 221). His conception of epic is dialogic, working in tandem and tension with tragedy, lyric and politics. It must be understood within the broader system of his thought, resting on the “root-identity” and the “relation-identity.” A “root-identity” represents “the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root” (1997, 14). It characterizes both Euro-American and postcolonial forms of ethnocentric nationalism (1997, 14) and would become the foundation for Glissant’s views on traditional epic’s exclusionary energies. It is viscerally intolerant of “a fundamental relationship with the Other,” the basis of a relation-identity. Inspired by the rhizome (theorized by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), which is a network of roots where no one predatory rootstock dominates (1997, 11), the relation-identity becomes the cornerstone for Glissant’s formulation of postcolonial epic as a mode of Eurocentric critique and postcolonial liberational praxis. In Faulkner, Mississippi, Glissant distinguishes between “excluding epics” on the one hand, and “concluding and participatory epics” on the other (1999, 221–22). Excluding epics like the Iliad, the Old Testament, and Kalevala foist their sense of cultural exceptionalism and “universality” on others; concluding, participatory epics deconstruct homogenizing universalism by celebrating creolization and relation (1999, 222). He sees William Faulkner’s sagas of the Deep South as an epic of the “difficult Relation,” a bridge between imperial root epics and postcolonial relation epics (1999, 223). In Faulkner, the epic closure of linear genealogies and successful foundation is belied by the unspoken tragic disclosure of Native American land despoilment, slavery, and miscegenation, figuratively cast as a family curse of 35

— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ “damnation” (1999, 143). Provocatively, he argues that Faulkner does not silence Black voices. Since “one cannot write or reveal for others,” “it is only fitting, simply, that they enter their own history” (1999, 163). Faulkner thus defers this historical task to the works of postcolonial writers such as Alejo Carpentier, William Styron, Gabriel García Marquez, and Toni Morrison (Glissant 1999, 254–55). Glissant’s fine-grained and comparative readings of epic texts exemplify a postcolonial approach to the genre. Glissant, like Fanon, promotes the transformative energies of a revolutionary literature. But neither give center stage to the woman, a task Gayatri Spivak undertakes. (However, Fanon, like Spivak, is acutely sensitive to the condition of the peasantry; to this, Spivak adds a concern for indigenous tribes prey to internal colonialism.) From a postcolonial feminist perspective, the woman is a figure marginalized both in epic and in nationalist struggles, where female oppression is made subordinate to the global condition of colonial oppression. In her 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak uses the term subaltern to designate women discursively silenced in colonialist archives, nationalist ideology, and the neocolonial discourse of development. Though “subaltern” refers to the industrial proletariat in Marxist theory, Spivak deliberately chooses a diversity of cases – the archetypal female who immolates herself on her dead husband’s funeral pyre in Hindu scripture, the nineteenth-century Queen of Sirmur, a twentieth-century middle-class freedom fighter, and the Third-World female laborer found in development theory – to illustrate the heterogeneity of female subalternity. These women’s accounts are written by men purporting to speak on their behalf in the name of patriarchal benevolence. In reality, these men silence female subalterns by overwriting the women’s voices with their own. The female subaltern experience only appears under patriarchal erasure, co-opted into colonial and postcolonial systems of political economy and gendered exploitation. Even First-World and Third-World feminists are not exempt from critique because their interventions in global forums increase their own cultural capital, entrench the disparities between the Global North and South, and leave the subaltern by the wayside.

THE AENEID: IMPERIAL DOMINION AND SUBALTERN DEFIANCE Let us now turn our attention to how these postcolonial concepts can make us more attentive to the interplay of power and knowledge in two kinds of epic – an imperial epic from antiquity (The Aeneid, circa 19 BCE) and a contemporary postcolonial rewriting of the Mahabharata (Until the Lions, 2015). By doing so, we enact two classic strategies of postcolonial interpretation: the deconstruction of a master-text of European conquest and the critical appreciation of a counter-narrative of subaltern resistance against forms of monolithic domination. The Aeneid is an epic retracing Rome’s foundation through the adventures of Aeneas, the ancestor of all Romans. Here, two basic postcolonial interrogations could be: How does this text glorify Roman exceptionalism, making Roman domination appear natural and legitimate? And, how, despite this chauvinism, do non-Roman voices nonetheless undercut the apparent legitimacy of Roman dominion? 36

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ Epic studies already give us useful critical concepts that we can turn to postcolonial ends, namely, translatio studii (the transfer of culture and knowledge) and translatio imperii (the shift of political power, in this case from Greece to Rome). Thus, Virgil borrows from Homeric epic to give his patron Augustus Caesar a culturally prestigious genealogy harking back to Aeneas, a Trojan character from the Iliad whom Virgil transforms into the ancestor of all Romans. Edward Said would argue that The Aeneid stages a confrontation of East and West through the allegorical representation of the Roman Aeneas (forefather of Augustus) and Queen Dido of Carthage (a powerful Phoenician colony located in modern-day Tunisia and Rome’s arch-enemy). A postcolonial approach alerts us to the fact that Rome’s historical victories that have been built on violence go hand in hand with its victory over representations. The physical violence of Rome’s military pre-eminence is legitimized by the ways in which the epic justifies Aeneas’s incursions into Carthage and Latium as a “colonial odyssey.” Fanon teaches us that the colonial odyssey is above all a temporality, a teleology in which one culture marks itself out as the be-all and end-all of all civilization. Virgil makes the Roman suppression of Carthaginian and Latin identities natural through the evolutionary time-scheme of the prophecy in which it is Rome alone that is predestined for greatness. Thus, Jupiter foretells that Romans are “destined to plunder Libya” (Aeneid 1.26) and that Aeneas “will wage / a long, costly war in Italy, crush defiant tribes” and “found the rule of law” (Aeneid 1.314–15, 317). Aeneas’s role in the fall of the Carthaginian Queen Dido and the rival Latin prince Turnus appears ratified by the Fates, a higher power above question or critique. Moreover, Aeneas is associated with civilizational ideals: he will “bring the entire world beneath the rule of law” (Aeneid 4.289). In contrast, Dido is characterized by her Oriental decadence, to which Aeneas temporarily succumbs. Jupiter disapproves mightily of the couple whom he perceives to be wallowing in “obscene desire” and “abject thralls of lust,” “oblivious to their kingdoms” (Aeneid 4.243–44). David Quint shows how The Aeneid thus becomes a striking premodern textbook example of Orientalism. In his study of the description of Aeneas’s shield (a convention called “ekphrasis”), he examines the clash of civilizations between Egypt, led by Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and Rome, represented by Augustus. (Like Carthage, Rome’s earlier North African rival, Egypt also represents the Orientalized East in the Roman imagination.) The naval Battle of Actium is at the very heart of the shield, with Augustus and his fleet facing Antony who commands “the riches of the Orient, troops of every stripe” as well as “that outrage, that Egyptian wife!” (8.804, 8.808). Though Said is not cited, Quint’s reading of this ekphrastic description is quintessentially Fanonian in its emphasis on temporality and Saidian in its focus on EuroAmerica’s monopoly over historical representation: “Virgil’s epic depicts imperial victory as the victory of the principle of history―a principle lodged in the West, where identity and power are transmitted across time in patrilineal succession― over the lack or negation of historical identity that characterizes the ever-changing, feminized nature of the East” (1993, 30). Dido’s representation as the inherently debased Oriental prefigures that of Muslims in the Christian epics such as “The Inferno” in The Divine Comedy (circa 1320), The Song of the Cid (circa 1207), and Paradise Lost (1667–1674). 37

— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ Despite the patently negative representation of the Orient, Fanon’s and Bhabha’s insights serve as reminders that imperial arrogance can also hide anxiety and fears of illegitimacy. Carthage is not a Gomorra-like den of sin, but in fact a threat to Rome’s economic, military, and even cultural hegemony: it is “a rich city trained and fierce in war” (Aeneid 1.16) whose architectural accomplishments Aeneas jealously marvels at (Aeneid 1.528–30). Juno wishes Carthage “would rule the nations of the earth” (Aeneid 1.20), thus bringing it into direct competition with Rome’s imperial aspirations. And Dido is far from being a passive Oriental. When she and her kingdom are on the verge of destruction, Dido utters a final curse, conjuring “an avenger” (in whom Roman readers would recognize Hannibal) to wage war on Rome (Aeneid 4.779). The curse is performative in that it verbalizes what it enacts. Bhabha would note that it opens a hybrid Third Space in which official historical meanings are recontextualized and rearticulated as a pocket of subaltern insurgency. Dido’s curse is thus a disruptive subaltern counter-narrative to Aeneas’s colonial odyssey and Rome’s teleology of imperial glory. As Quint argues in a contrapuntal reading, she is akin to other vanquished victims who pronounce defiant curses like Polyphemus in The Odyssey and Adamastor in The Lusiads: These voices of resistance receive a hearing, as the epic poem acknowledges, intermittently, alternative accounts vying with its own official version of history: they are the bad conscience of the poem that simultaneously writes them in and out of its fiction. (1993, 99) A postcolonial reader, trained in playfully reading texts against the grain (which, as we may recall, is a radical strategy that involves going against what the text explicitly states to tease out what it isn’t saying and perhaps cannot say), may go even further. The epic can be considered ambivalent, if not aporetic. Glissant may argue that the grandiose prophecies typify the root-identity, highlighting Roman exceptionalism and obscuring the violence, violations, and ignorance that underwrote Rome’s foundation: Aeneas transgresses foreign hospitality (by betraying Dido), unintentionally or intentionally desecrates human bodies (Polydorus and Turnus respectively), and, despite his privileged access to divine knowledge, misinterprets it (he repeatedly mistakes Rome’s exact location in the prophecies) or misses the point (he does not understand the historical import of Vulcan’s engravings on his shield). From this provocative angle, either Virgil is overplaying his hand by making ideological demands of political propaganda that strain even the limits of epic, or he is slyly inscribing a critique of Roman imperialism through irony and elegiac lament for the fallen in his work.

UNTIL THE LIONS: PREMODERN OTHERIZING AND SUBALTERN SONG Postcolonial epic tends to explicitly cast itself as a subversive counter-history to the imperial archive, dethroning colonial heroes and unearthing microhistories of subaltern resistance. Representative examples include Pablo Neruda’s Canto general ([1950] 2000) in Spanish, Édouard Glissant’s Les Indes ([1965] 1985) in French, and 38

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) in English, all of which critically revisit Europe’s mythologized discovery of the New World. To underscore the supple nature of postcolonial perspectives, let us, however, look at a somewhat counter-intuitive example: Karthika Naïr’s Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, written in English. A  gender-, caste-, and ethnicity-fluid rewriting of the Mahabharata, it is equally permeable in its generic identity (mixing verse and poetic prose). Naïr’s text can be placed in a long line of engagements with the Mahabharata, which has been the source of infinite local retellings, musical and dance performances, television adaptations, and modern reinterpretations (notably Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Sutra, to which it is indebted). A typical postcolonial investigation of Until the Lions could be three-pronged, asking: Which dominant historical representations does the text challenge? Which counter-representations of identity or difference does the text propose? And finally, how should Naïr’s location as a writer outside India (she is based in Paris) inform our understanding of her retelling of a sacred Indian text? Unlike the Orient/Occident encounter in The Aeneid, Until the Lions via the Mahabharata centers on the internecine war within the Kuru clan in ancient North India. The epic builds up to the war between two families of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, over the imperial throne of Hastinapur near contemporary Delhi. Gayatri Spivak highlights the “colonialist function” of the Mahabharata, in her reading of “Draupadi” (2006), a Bengali short story set against the armed Naxalite (Indian Maoist) insurgency against the government. The epic, she contends, burnishes the “cultural credentials” of the Indo-Aryans (an ethnolinguistic group whose arrival in India is dated to circa 2500 BCE), justifying their oppression of indigenous tribes (2006, 251). She also insists on the Mahabharata’s patriarchal, if not misogynistic, dimension since male power appears to be glorified by an epic text vested with religious authority (2006, 251–52). It is against this hegemonic system of male Aryan self-representation, reinforced by the elite status of Sanskrit, that Naïr’s text chafes. In Sanskrit, an elaborate and prestigious form of ornate courtly poetry (kavya) is harnessed to a celebration of imperial power (rajya) in Indian epic (Pollock 2006). This is a quintessentially Foucauldian case of cultural knowledge (savoir) perpetuating political domination (pouvoir). Until the Lions offers a contrapuntal reading of Vyasa’s authoritative Mahabharata written in Sanskrit. Structured as a series of monologues spoken in the first person, it literally gives voice to the unsung subalterns: the foot-soldiers, the aristocratic queens, and low-born concubines, the tribal Other, the feminine side of the divinity Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu), and a dog. Until the Lions contests the triumphalist version of the epic story, excavating the muffled echoes of those silenced: “bards will sing / only victors’ odes – psalms of the dead don’t greet spring” (Naïr 2015, 173). All the narrators, except the padavit (foot-soldier) and the dog, are women or gender-switchers. As ancient protagonists, their quarrel is not with British colonialism. It is with the forms of discrimination and domination found in the canonical Sanskrit version of the Mahabharata. To be fair, Vyasa’s version in fact consistently emphasizes the tragic waste of the Aryan aristocrats’ war, but popular receptions of the epic such as the TV serial in the late 1980s (Chopra 1988-1990) focus on its characters’ moral and martial heroism, disregarding much of the text’s dark irony. It is also undeniable that the often questionable actions of the high-born characters are justified in the name of the 39

— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ complex ethico-religious creeds of dharma (righteous duty) and karma (the metaphysical tenet according to which actions in one’s life have repercussions on future lives). The padavit points out that the war (yuddha) waged on the land (bhoomi) of Kurukshetra is legitimized by its factitious significance as “a glorious war” (Naïr 11), “a sacred compact, a dharma / yuddha” (2015, 10). It is also a caste-compliant “karma bhoomi” on which “Compeers / alone can fight.” Male martial honor, moral purity, and caste purity are inextricably bound: “sidekicks / may kill each other but not kings” (2015, 11). It is therefore not a clash of civilizations but a clash within a civilization that explodes an apotheosized notion of purity, a root-identity, in the name of which power is perpetuated. More strident subaltern attacks on the glorification of a caste-stratified Aryan polity come from within it. We are reminded that Queen Satyavati, matriarch of the khastriya (warrior caste) Kuru clan and herself a khastriya princess, was nonetheless adopted by the nishada (non-Aryan tribes of fishermen and hunters). Satyavati’s handmaiden privileges subaltern affiliation over Aryan caste-based filiation by hailing her queen as a “fisher- / girl who rose to queen” in “a casteridden regime” (2015,  91). Naïr also gives the handmaiden, left anonymous in the original epic, a name – Poorna. This typical postcolonial strategy of naming serves to affirm the existence of the otherwise silenced subaltern. A critique of the Aryans’ internal colonialism comes to the fore in the monologue of Hidimbi, the tribal demoness (rakshasi) and temporary wife of the Pandava prince Bheema. She rejects the Aryans’ Orientalizing representation of indigenous tribes as primitive and inferior: “We rakshasas labelled / bloodthirsty, savage, take fewer / lives than royals” (2015, 153). We thus see that the otherizing dynamics of Orientalism are not limited to European colonialism. As the Indologist Sheldon Pollock has pointed out, cases of “Orientalism” as a Manichean devalorization of the Other are not limited to the modern era but can be also found in the Orient in the premodern period (1993, 77). A nonhuman subjectivity is articulated by the dog Shunaka (the only character Naïr invents, though an unnamed dog exists in the epic), who embarks on a sharp critique of man’s ecological imperialism: “we take no masters. / We claim no terrain. But men / kill and kill again, / scorch the rivers, rape the earth / and deluge jungles / with death, all to prove manhood” (Naïr 2015, 47). But Naïr reserves the most acerbic attack on dharma to Krishna’s female incarnation Mohini. In a move typical of postcolonial literature, Naïr reveals the schizophrenia of the subject with most power, Krishna himself. Mohini rages against Krishna: “a curse on your dharma that changes shape and colour / and size to suit the wearer your mutant bootless justice and / your lethal cosmic song a curse a curse a curse on you” (2015, 194). Mohini’s curse, like that of Dido, represents the resurgence of a counter-narrative of resistance repressed in the hegemonic text. The padavit, Hidimbi, Shunaka, and Mohini do not merely challenge an Aryan masterideology, but reveal that its very conditions of existence rest on their exclusion from (or rather within) it. Such diverse female characters – Aryan queens and princesses, a tribal queen, maids, female sex slaves, a gender-fluid god – all correspond to Spivak’s term “subaltern,” and designate the internally differentiated female condition as one of patriarchal oppression, discursive silence, and yet insurgent self-affirmation. Sauvali, the concubine of the Kaurava king Dhritarashtra, says in her “bedtime story” to her son: 40

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ When the king decides to rape me or my kind, no one will use the word rape. The word rape does not exist in the king’s world. This body is just another province he owns, from navel to nipple to eyelid, insole to clitoris. (2015, 119) Here, Naïr deploys the traditional analogy between land and the female body as subject to arbitrary male ownership and submits it to ironic postcolonial scrutiny. The irony is amplified through a dispassionate enumeration of body parts that subverts the fetishizing convention of nakha-shika (description from the nails all the way up to the head), typical of Indian courtly literature or kavya. Sauvali is not subservient, but insubordinate: “But even the king cannot own a thought, nor a conscience – nobody can” (2015, 119). Though she is powerless to stop the colonization of her body, she reclaims the right to her own narrative and her own self-representation. But Spivak might also argue that Naïr represents a classic case of the Third-World intellectual producing knowledge in Euro-American centers of power. By speaking on behalf of subalterns (there are implicit analogies with contemporary forms of discrimination against indigenous Adivasi tribes, women, and gender-variant Indians), the argument goes, Naïr in fact accumulates cultural capital on the international literary market. Critics like G. N. Devy may further add that Naïr’s use of the English language perpetuates Anglophone imperialism while silencing Indian mainstream (margi) and local (desi) languages (2009, 19). While this is true of any Anglophone author published by an international publishing house, one may counter that Naïr’s diasporic location also gives her the liberty, even relative impunity, to desacralize epic scripture that has been blatantly politicized by the Hindu Right. For example, in 1990, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party organized a Ram rath yatra (Ram’s chariot journey), drawing heavily from the mythological imagery of the other great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, to enflame Hindu-Muslim tensions. Driven by an ideology of Hindu chauvinism (Hindutva), they sought to justify the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque reputed to be built on the site of the birthplace of Ram, the protagonist of the epic. Vigorously undermining the ethnic absolutism of the Hindu Right, Until the Lions constructs an alternative national imaginary that does not alienate its internal Others, embodying instead one of the “national antinationalist histories of ‘the people’” (2008, 54) that Bhabha imagines. Naïr also inscribes the alterity of regional versions of the Mahabharata within the canonical Sanskrit version. This too should be read against the right-wing–motivated ban on A. K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” (2001), at the University of Delhi in 2011. This essay earned Hindutva ire for describing alternative, regional, and subversive versions of the canonical Sanskrit text. Naïr transgresses and “contaminates” such Hindu nationalist essentialisms by incorporating: regional and folk variations from Himachal Pradesh (where Hidimbi is worshipped as a goddess), koothu folk theatre and epic traditions like Peruntevanar’s Parata vempa found in Tamil Nadu, and Jain retellings which, for example, condemn Krishna to a sojourn in hell for his misdeeds. In addition, all the subalterns “speak” through apostrophe (a direct address to a listener). Apostrophes such as “Listen. Listen” (Naïr 2015, 19) and “So begin” (2015, 44) enact what they enunciate, opening a performative Third Space. This “enunciatory present” is “a liberatory discursive strategy” because it makes possible “a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects 41

— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ of their history and experience” (Bhabha 2008, 255). Counterpointing The Aeneid and Until the Lions from a postcolonial perspective can also be productive. If epic has endured as a socially symbolic act, it is because it functions as an allegory to the present. Virgil’s celebration of Aeneas is a coded commentary on Augustus’s stature while Naïr’s sensitivity to the suffering and resilient self-affirmation of premodern Others is an allegorical plea for a poetics of Relation in the face of intolerant rootidentities in India and terrorism abroad.

CONCLUSION: A “NEW LANGUAGE” FOR A “NEW HUMANITY” Let us return to Fanon and the initial premises of this chapter. From a postcolonial vantage point, imperial epics such as The Aeneid “fabricated” a representation of a dehumanized colonized subject (Fanon 2004, 2) that came to stand in for reality. But residues of the colonized subject’s realized or unrealized acts of resistance can be discerned through postcolonial readings against the grain that foreground colonial ambivalence via-à-vis its authority. In contrast, in its revolutionary and postrevolutionary forms, epic ushers empowering counter-representations, portraying “a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity” (2004, 2), but come with a caveat: such texts, inevitably produced by, in, and for Euro-American audiences structurally reproduce the disparities between the First and Third Worlds that they seek to contest. Despite its own internal contradictions, of which its scholars are acutely aware, postcolonial criticism offers us an exciting array of powerful and provocative investigative tools. Concepts such as the colonial odyssey, Orientalism, and the root-identity help us to pinpoint representations that legitimize imperial violence; interpretative practices like reading against the grain, contrapuntal histories, and subaltern agency allow us to highlight alternative narratives and silenced subjectivities; and notions such as the Third Space and a poetics of Relation give us a new language to explore modes of discursive resistance and ways of dialoguing with, rather than dominating, cultural difference. Throughout this chapter, emphasis has been laid on the synergies between postcolonial and epic studies. This may give the deceptive impression that epic is a central postcolonial preoccupation. But epic has a more ambivalent significance for ­postcolonial studies. On the one hand, as a genre of imperial conquest, epic represents a subterranean antithetical Other against which postcolonial theory articulates itself (Fanon’s critique of the colonial odyssey, Said’s stress on The Inferno’s antiMuslim Eurocentrism, Bhabha’s deconstruction of authority exercised in the name of the archaic). On the other hand, the contemporary literary output of Neruda, Carpentier, Glissant, Walcott and Naïr, among others, testifies to epic’s remarkable capacity to respond to postcolonial preoccupations with contrapuntal readings of imperial history, subalternity, and performative cultural identities. But the amazing variety of epic across histories, cultures, and subjectivities has yet to be fully tapped. Postcolonial critiques of power can be extended to queer epic, ecological epic, multimedia and digital epic. The postcolonial emphasis on marginalized literatures can also help displace the superstar texts of epic. Much academic space still needs to be cleared for those epic narratives that tend to be bypassed due to a more regional, local, or tribal anchorage or due to the choices 42

— ​ A P o s t c o l o n i a l S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ of hegemonic Euro-American and nationalist scholarship. The difficulty involved in straddling antiquity and contemporaneity has also resulted in epic and postcolonial scholars speaking in silos rather than in conversation. Yet, both groups share common ground in their scrutiny of the problematization of power that lies at the heart of a postcolonial approach to epic. Finally, a particularly fertile terrain for dialogue between epic and postcolonial scholars would be our comparative use of the term “epic” itself. Can we find alternative, contrapuntal terms to be used in tandem, and perhaps in tension, with “epic,” a word derived from Greek and developed in relation to European texts for foundational works? Non-European heroic narratives emerged within their own rich aesthetic traditions and have their own lexicon (often multiple, inter-related terms) for epic. How much more exciting and enlightening it would be to enrich the one-way terminological traffic and use the Sanskrit categories kavya or itihas or the West African Mande term tariko, itself derived from the Arabic tarikh, when exploring texts produced in these cultural geographies? In Chinese and Japanese traditions, the absence of a lexical counterpart to epic can also bring fresh comparative perspectives. They remind us that certain cultures of aesthetics are more lyricand romance-centered, perhaps demonstrating the generic obsession with epic to be specific only to certain literary histories. Attending to diverse critical theories can dislodge and defamiliarize our reading habits: The tendency to see the vanquished as more heroic than the victorious – a quintessential postcolonial preoccupation – in the Japanese gunkimono aesthetics can take our readings of world epics in alternative directions (Mori 1997, 82). It is perhaps time to decolonize and diversify the generic epithet of epic.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. [1981] 2006. “Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, Homi. [1989] 2008. “The Commitment to Theory.” In The Location of Culture, 28–56. London: Routledge. ———. [1990] 2008. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In The Location of Culture, 199–244. London: Routledge. Bowra, Cecil Maurice. 1945. From Virgil to Milton. London: MacMillan & Co. Chopra, B. R., dir. and prod. 1988–1990. Mahabharat. 94 episodes. India. Dante. 2003. The Divine Comedy, Volume I: The Inferno. Translated by Mark Musa. New York: Penguin. Devy, Ganesh N. [1992] 2009. After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. “On Violence” and “On National Culture.” In The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, 1–62 and 145–80. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2006. “The Woman of Colour and the White Man.” In The Fanon Reader: Frantz Fanon, edited by Azzedine Haddour. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, 33–45. London: Pluto Press. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

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— ​ S n e h a r i k a R o y —​ Glissant, Édouard. [1965] 1985. Les Indes. Paris: Édition du Seuil. ———. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1999. Faulkner Mississippi. Translated by Barbara B. Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hamilton, Michelle M. 2007. Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Le Goff, Jacques. [1964] 1997. La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval. Paris: Flammarion. Mori, Masaki. 1997. Epic Grandeur: Toward a Comparative Poetics of the Epic. Albany: State University of New York Press. Naïr, Karthika. 2015. Until the Lions: Echoes of the Mahabharata. Noida: HarperCollins. Neruda, Pablo. [1950] 2000. Canto general. Madrid: Cátedra. ———. Pollock, Sheldon. “Deep Orientalism: Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj.” In Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, edited by Carol A Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, 76−133. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India. Delhi: Permanent Black. Quint, David. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ramanujan, Attipat K. 2001. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramajunan, edited by Vinay Dharwadker. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward. [1993] 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. ———. [1978] 2001. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. [1988] 1999. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Revised as “History.” In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 198–311. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. [1987] 2006. Translator’s Foreword to “Draupadi.” In In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 245–56. London: Routledge. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey. Thornber, Karen Laura. 2009. Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinse, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Virgil. 2010. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin. Walcott, Derek. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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CHAPTER THREE

A N E C O C R I T I C A L A P P R OA C H E A R LY M O D E R N E N G L I S H E P I C POSSIBILITIES

rsr

Chris Barrett

John Milton spent decades waiting to write his epic poem Paradise Lost. He was delayed, in part, due to the demands of his various careers as educator, polemicist, and political revolutionary, championing the Parliamentarian cause in the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century.1 But even before then, he had put off writing the epic because he was not ready to do it justice; plus, he was not always certain of the subject for this ambitious poem. When Milton finally set out to write this vaunted epic, he discarded the Arthurian material he had initially considered, deciding instead to write a 10,000-word poem about a garden.2 Of course, saying Paradise Lost is about a garden is a little like saying the Iliad is about a horse, but it is worth attending to the centrality of the lushly detailed Eden of the poem, as an on-ramp for thinking about the intimate, intricate relationship of epic and environment in this period. In order to encapsulate a lifetime of thought about politics, liberty, and spirituality in a poem, Milton turned to the form of the epic and dedicated long swaths of it to the richly rendered flora and fauna of an irrepressibly biodiverse Eden. Seeking to tell a story about how to live in this world, Milton combined the epic with an extensive meditation on environment and on human responsibility to the non-human world. Paradise Lost was certainly not the first epic to evince a profound engagement with what we might today call the ecological. Indeed, the epic has long been sung in the key of green, with significant characters, major episodes, and indispensable structural elements intertwined with the world beyond the human.3 Gilgamesh and Enkidu seek trees from a forbidden forest. Hanuman carries a mountain with life-saving herbs to resuscitate heroes Rama and Lakshmana fallen in battle. Odysseus wanders the vast seascape of the Mediterranean for years. Beowulf’s dramatic encounters with non-human beings unfold within built and natural environments. The Sunjata highlights the centrality of hunting to identity and daily practice. The Popol Vuh offers a window into the creation of human and

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-5

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— ​ C h r i s B a r r e t t —​ animal living beings. Edmund Spenser’s 1590s The Faerie Queene activates landscape and topography as allegorical avatars of the virtues and vices its knights struggle to navigate. This chapter considers how, as a genre, the epic invites ecocritical examination, and looks at two particular examples offered by early modern English epic, Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene. Given the timeliness of ecocritical investigations in the twenty-first century, when the urgency of attending to environmental crises cannot be deferred, one might wonder why I turn in this essay to works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we date the present era of anthropogenic climate change to the sixteenth century, when the plantation and the systems of labor and exploitation subtending it took root, then the early modern epic offers a window both on the representation of these environmental interactions, and on environment’s imbrication with matters of ethics, politics, and economics. The early modern English epic reveals this entanglement of environment with structures of oppression. At the same time, it demonstrates the willingness of early modern literature to explore what Diane Kelsey McColley defines as ecological language: “Language that represents connected beings in responsive and connected words,” language that appears in the works of several poets (Milton included) who “developed a practice of attentive empathy that counters allegorical, mechanical, instrumental, and commercial appropriation” (2007, 9). The early modern English epic offers examples of this acknowledgment of non-humans, and does so in a genre poised to offer room to critique human practices of environmental interaction. At the same time, the early modern English epic can seem untroubled by, or even reliant on, the regimes of violence that govern extractive and exploitative postures toward environment and subtend supremacist logics within human society. The contrasting revelations of ecocritical readings of Renaissance English epics—that of the conscription of environmental representation into systems of exploitation and abuse, alongside the acknowledgment and even celebration of communitarian ties across radical difference—lead me in this essay to return to Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene, as particularly rich sites for exploring the epic genre’s ecocritical possibilities. In the coming pages, I first provide a brief overview of literary ecocriticism, noting its particular resonance in understanding the epic, a genre well-suited to offering us speculative ecologies—new ways of understanding the interdependence of human and non-human phenomena. I then examine two illustrative case studies in Renaissance epic, each of which highlights, at different moments, both the discomforting and salutary insights of ecocritical exploration. The epic of the early modern period reimagines what the emplaced relationships (good, bad, and ugly) among the human and more-than-human beings might be, and it does this work of reimagining by redefining some of the key constituent elements of the epic, including the legitimization of heroic violence in its preoccupation with national formation, and the uses of artifice to reflect on representation itself. In the first specimen case I turn to, Paradise Lost, the matter of heroic violence is both undercut and underlined at sites of environmental representation; in The Faerie Queene, metapoetic interludes often align with the poem’s most overt reflections on the continuity of human and non-human life. Both poems reflect the epic’s profound availability for ecocritical reading, and the urgency of grappling with both the unsettling and the hopeful possibilities of this interpretive practice. 46

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ECOCRITICISM, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND THINKING THE EPIC ECOCRITICALLY The European Renaissance epic’s imbrication with the ecological operates on several levels, and its most frequently cited characteristics create opportunities for ecocritical exploration to refract different aspects of the genre. For example, by many accounts the epic often centers on narratives involving travel or quest over vast terrain, culminating in an account of a place (a homeland, a country); among ecocriticism’s originary emphases has been the study of place, a phenomenon constituted by relations and transactions among beings who are not exclusively human.4 Similarly, as a genre centered on questions of individual and communal obligation (that is to say, on matters of heroes and larger-scale communities, like nations and empires), the epic explores the work of personal and collective worldmaking, practices at the heart of critical engagement with the more-than-human. With its preoccupation with national origin and human navigation of the world shaped in part by supernatural or preternatural forces, the European epic as elaborated from Greco-Roman through early modern instantiations registers both anthropocentric narratives and the insufficiency of those narratives to account for the ways community is organized. As a result, an ecocritical exploration of this sub-genre defamiliarizes the too-familiar oppressive systems of hierarchy and belligerence toward “others” that form so much of the history the epic seeks to legitimate. By laying bare how constructed and contingent the narratives and ideologies undergirding devastating historical events and systems of Euro-American imperialism and extractive colonialism are, the ecocritically read epic denaturalizes these narratives and ideologies, revealing them and pointing to other modes of living and knowing. Finally, because it typically possesses a significant cultural cachet, the epic is understood to encompass the most important workings and structures of the world it renders—and those workings have consistently throughout human history been tied to the experience of environment. The epic indexes the enmeshment of the human among the morethan-human, from the dawn of early agriculture, several thousand years BCE, to the Anthropocene, the relatively recent geologic period in which human activity has had a significant effect on global ecology, including generating the current climate crisis. This is not to say that an epic text is necessarily an environmental(ist) work per se, nor to suggest that ecology and environment have been stable cultural constructs across place and time.5 On the contrary, an ecocritical approach creates possibilities for thinking with the paradigms of different culturally contingent contexts, in order to better understand the ways literature and environment interplay. The energy of that investigation might be presentist in its goals (that is, seeking to read texts as engines for better conceptualizing the challenges of this moment), or even activist in its approach (that is, seeking to combat with textual interpretation the ills of this moment), but the ecocritic has many methodologies with which to interpret the representation of the more-than-human world. Certainly this is not the case for all ecocritical approaches, or for all of ecocriticism’s history. The early years of ecocriticism as a field (the late 1970s and the 1980s) saw much interest in American nature writing, often without an interest in investigating the masculinist, racist, or imperialist structures and thought undergirding some of that writing. And while scholars working in American Studies initially shaped much 47

— ​ C h r i s B a r r e t t —​ of the early academic discourse on ecocriticism, those in various other disciplines are now doing work on environmental humanities in emphatically interdisciplinary ways (Deloughrey and Handley 2011, 20–21). In any event, literary study plays a potentially essential role in ecocritical work: as Rob Nixon notes, the “slow violence” of environmental calamity requires new modes of representation, including writing (2011, 15), and out of this urgency come branches like ecofeminism, eco-queer studies, and ecomaterialist approaches, which elaborate the environmental justice efforts that have dovetailed with many (though historically not all) practices of ecocriticism. Literary ecocriticism, in the words of one of the field’s pathbreaking figures Cheryll Glotfelty, “takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies” and focuses on “the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1996, xviii). Greg Garrard, meanwhile, defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship of the human and non-human” (2012, 5), and Carl Phelpstead suggests that the term cosmocriticism might helpfully supersede ecocriticism, in drawing attention to phenomena beyond the strictly earthly (2018, 613–31). These definitions point to ecocriticism as a capacious category of diverse theoretical, practical, and methodological efforts, and ecocritical studies vary widely. Much contemporary ecocriticism is motivated by an understanding that the patterns of human behavior with regard to the ecosphere are unsustainable, with the climate emergency and the too-numerous concomitant social, political, and economic injustices it amplifies and creates all making clear that serious, significant change in planetary conceptualization and activity must be made. To that end, humanities-based scholars of environment are increasingly attending to the ways environmental racism and injustice impact communities in differential ways, with particular peril or injury attaching to Indigenous communities and communities of color.6 This commitment to thinking the long intertwining of environment and oppression continues beyond literary ecocriticism and into the environmental humanities more broadly. Anthropology, history, theology, history of science, religious studies, geography, gender and sexuality studies, history of art, critical race studies, psychology, philosophy, law, and more disciplines have all developed programs of study centered on the environment and its cultural representations and constructions. Tending toward the interdisciplinary and willing to interrogate the provisionality of its own working vocabularies and premises, the environmental humanities broadly seek to answer the urgent ecological challenges of the present moment by bringing to bear the work of knowledge-making across fields. Matters of global scale require a wholeof-mind response, and the environmental humanities, building on eco-centered work within disciplines, invite practitioners to think in novel ways about how we come to understand ourselves, our ways of knowing, and our resources for existing with/ in environment. To understand the Anthropocene fully, we might profit from examining the cultural materials that accompanied, emerged from, and in many ways worked to concretize the structures (often oppressive) that facilitated this geologic era’s existence. In this regard, the Renaissance epic emerges as a particularly valuable specimen for investigating the relationship of epic and ecology in the service of the Anthropocene’s foundational systems. Many terms have been introduced in recent years to clarify the nature and start date of this period of anthropogenic changes to the global ecosphere: the Plasticene, Capitalocene, Algoricene, and more.7 Each 48

— ​ A n E c o c r i t i c a l A p p r o a c h —​ of these terms is useful, but for my purposes here, the most apt term might be the Plantationocene, which dates the present Anthropocenic moment as having begun in the sixteenth century, when European powers imposed systems built on slavery to optimize extractive and monocultural agricultural practices.8 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epic accompanies the early period of the Plantationocene era, which is to say that the genre long associated with the legitimization of state violence found new life amid the construction of an intercontinental network of violent economies, with ramifications felt powerfully today. The English epic in this early modern period reflects and refracts white settler colonialism in the Americas, with its attendant genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of African people, in ways that are varyingly complicit, critical, or ambiguous—but which, in keeping with the very purpose of the term “Plantationocene,” reflect the impacts of specific parties, who exploited and profited from the labor of enslaved persons. Some English colonial activity was explicitly connected to environmental challenges: deforestation of the English countryside was among the reasons touted for undertaking overseas ventures (Nardizzi 2013, 11). And the list of those environmental challenges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resembles our own in many ways, as McColley notes, in identifying “deforestation, air pollution, confinement of rivers and streams, draining of wetlands, overbuilding, toxic mining, maltreatment of animals, uses of land that destroy habitats and dispossess the poor” as among the problems attested to by the period’s literature (2007, 2). The Renaissance in Britain gestated early forms of environmental injustice, racism, and oppression that are still with us in new forms, in ways traceable in the history of environmental ideas. The Renaissance epic, ecocritically considered, also points to the contested nature of the epic itself in the period. In the early modern period, the genre was newly debated and theorized across Europe: writers produced and read new translations of classical epic, and they produced their own literary critical accounts of them and experiments in the form. The epic’s subject, narrative, and form, its relationship to history, its tonal register(s), its representation of a hero, and its treatment of place all invited theorization and reflection, especially among the authors interested in appropriating the epic’s longstanding cachet for nationalistic purposes. That explicit grappling with the working of the epic itself makes the epics of the early modern period unusually clear documents of their own conceptualization; having been written amid a ferment of interrogations of the form, the Renaissance epic meditates on its own strategies of representation, and how those strategies depict and deform their subjects. As such, its worldmaking agenda, read with a willingness to foreground the ecological, presents a rich opportunity to think about the relationship between literature and environment: consciously innovating and redeploying conventional generic markers of the epic, the English epic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revised its European cousins and Greco-Roman analogues, experimenting in the process with conceptualizing a range of speculative ecologies. I propose this somewhat accounts for the plasticity of the genre in the period. The epic, just like any genre, is definitionally aspirational, never existing in a state of purity. Yet in the English Renaissance context, epic becomes an especially capacious term, with authors remaking its generic components to think environment and narrative together. In the pages that follow, I consider two of those epics. 49

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PARADISE LOST AND THE ECOLOGY OF VIOLENCE By the time Milton was writing Paradise Lost, England’s colonial endeavor was fully underway in the Americas, and Milton’s epic reflects how ingrained those exploitative practices’ subtending ecologies had become. An ecocritical study of the poem can provide deep insight, critiquing those practices, and posit alternate possibilities, even while the text itself seems to endorse them. For example, Satan famously assumes at the end of Book 2 the role of a mercantilist opportunist or conquistador, in flight toward the newly created earth. In the invocation at the start of Book 3, alliteratively linked to the end of Book 2, the narrative persona (an avatar for Milton himself) laments his loss of sight, and thus the unmaking of the world’s interrelated natural phenomena: “Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn, / Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, / Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine” (3.42–44).9 This proximity of appetitive destruction with the sumptuous and often arrestingly gorgeous description of the Edenic and planetary environment troubles the reader, but even more explicitly unsettling is the poem’s willingness—after several thousand lines trumpeting the importance of spiritual liberty—to excuse the enslavement of actual persons. In the final Book 12, archangel Michael explains to Adam that some “Nations will decline so low / From vertue” that they will lose their inner, spiritual liberty and become deprived “of thir outward libertie” (12.97–98, 100). As an example, Michael urges Adam to …Witness th’ irreverent Son Of him who built the Ark, who for the shame Don to his Father, heard this heavie curse, Servant of Servants, on his vitious Race. (12.101–04) Rehearsing the story of Ham, disgraced for having seen his father Noah naked, Michael promulgates what was in the Renaissance a common racist excuse for enslaving African persons based on the Bible: because Ham was cursed to be servant to his brothers, so his descendants, ostensibly Africans, are to be servants. This defense of slavery requires the story of Noah, who is not named in this passage, nor in the related lines at 115–20, when he is called “the Patriark…who scap’d the Flood.” Instead, “the Ark” and “the Flood” identify this paragon, which is to say that a natural disaster identifies him and the practice of slavery his story purportedly justifies. In order to account for slavery, so essential to the plantation economy of the Americas, Milton needs to cite a predecessor (the authors of the Bible), to explain this environmental and human catastrophe. Although Milton sought to portray a salvational ecology in his work, his veiled allusion to the forced labor of enslaved persons, on which the Plantationocene is built, prompts us to engage in a reckoning of environmental racism—one that reflects vast human injustices and inequities then and now. The large-scale, epoch-shaping violence of colonialism and slavery haunts Paradise Lost, as a dimension of the glorified violence that haunts the European epic. There is perhaps something paradoxical in this strand of epic—foregrounding 50

— ​ A n E c o c r i t i c a l A p p r o a c h —​ the (often literally) visceral vulnerability of the body, while also claiming status as among the most elevated forms of cultural production. Yet, this insistence both on the injurious materiality of violence and on a heroism built on the infliction of this kind of damage—especially in war—becomes part of the early modern English epic, though in ways that from an ecocritical approach critique the epic’s commitment to celebrating mass violence. Renaissance epics scrutinize the legitimating and legitimated violence so familiar to the genre and so foundational to the world in which environmental injustice continues to thrive; an ecocritical reading reveals the terms of that scrutiny. The costs and suffering of war would have been familiar to many of the period’s epic writers, themselves witnesses to war. Indeed, the English civil wars of the mid1600s make it hard to find a seventeenth-century epic writer unacquainted with the precarities of wartime life. John Milton was himself a foremost exponent and defender of the Parliamentarian cause, composing much of Paradise Lost while under house arrest after the Restoration of Charles II, but he was far from the only writer to experience such personal upheaval. Abraham Cowley was a teenager when he wrote his unfinished Biblical epic, the Davideis (circa 1637), in the years immediately preceding the war’s outbreak, which sent him in and out of exile for decades. William Davenant’s unfinished historical epic Gondibert (circa 1651) was drafted and published in the aftermath of the war, while he was abroad and/or in prison. Lucy Hutchinson, who may herself have witnessed some of the civil wars’ fighting, published part of Order and Disorder in 1679, fifteen years after her husband, a signatory to Charles I’s death warrant, died in prison. (Indeed, Order & Disorder itself indexes, in ecological terms, the costs of war driven by social inequality, combining Puritan social critique with environmental perspicacity; the poem notes famously, for example, that in the ocean “every greater fish devours the less / As mighty lords poor commoners oppress” [2001, 2.251–52].) Because of their own proximity to war, many early modern English poets were willing to index and acknowledge the social and environmental costs of this kind of violent contestation. Moreover, their epic poems often overtly linked the human suffering in war to the ecological devastation it caused, drawing connections between environmental and human costs of conflict. Among those costs was deforestation, already a troubling matter in everyday life before the civil wars accelerated the crisis. Wood was essential to virtually every aspect of life, but, as Vincent Nardizzi points out, the price of wood skyrocketed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the result of a resource crisis (2013, 10–12). Deforestation revealed how tightly social and environmental health were tied together. The reasons for the despoiling or reduction of these forests are as entangled with warfare as so many ecological crises in the modern era are. The creation and maintenance of England’s suddenly ascendant, swiftly dominant navy—central to military and colonial endeavors alike—required immense numbers of oak, pine, and other trees; furnaces consume vast amounts of wood materials to produce iron, especially for arms; in order to fund her wars in Ireland, Elizabeth I was obliged to sell parts of her royal forests (Barton 2017, 6–7). The civil wars only intensified the awareness of the finitude of natural resources, with both royalist and parliamentarian forces felling forests for war and shipbuilding (McColley 2007, 100). So acutely did the struggles of the War and Interregnum make plain 51

— ​ C h r i s B a r r e t t —​ the urgent problem of deforestation, that a high-profile movement to plant and re-forest Britain launched in the mid-seventeenth century, led by people like John Evelyn, seeking a way to meet the needs of the country. In this context, Milton’s epic poem about a tree in the middle of a passionately verdant garden full of arboreal majesty positions itself as a document of the imbrication of violence and environment, and turns the epic’s fascination with war into a meditation on ecological damage. Like so many early modern European epics, Paradise Lost gestures at its classical analogues and an array of intertexts; among its most important interlocutor works are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Lucan’s Pharsalia, all of which center warfare. Yet in Book 9, the narrative persona invokes three of these epics in order to dismiss them, in comparison with his own work, skeptical of the machinery of conflict. The subject of the poem is Not less but more Heroic then the wrauth Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu’d Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d, Or Neptun’s ire or Juno’s, that so long Perplex’d the Greek and Cytherea’s Son; (9.14–19). Indeed, the narrative persona acknowledges being “Nor skilld nor studious” of “Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem’d,” preferring the “higher Argument” of “Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung (9.28–42). The narrator’s claim of not being “skilld” in representing warfare was taken somewhat at face value for centuries by critics who read Book 6’s extensive account of the war in heaven as being indecorously comic and failing to render precisely the heroic actions of battle so constitutive of epic poetry. Milton’s poem renders the battle between the unfallen angels and the fallen angels (some of whom sing epic songs about their own fall at 2.546–50) as a burlesque of epic glory, full of pointless injury and indeterminative action. It’s all a bit of an embarrassment, really: undignified, with scenes of silly surprise and passing humiliation. The improbable weaponry of the battle, though, is worth attending to, given its revelation of early modern epic’s interrogation, in ecological terms, of the genre’s martial priority. Satan, having been wounded by Michael and made to feel pain for the first time, recovers quickly, because Milton’s angels “Cannot but by annihilating die” (6.347). As night falls, Satan makes a plan: to devise “more valid Armes, / Weapons more violent” (6.438–39) than the rebellious angels previously had at their disposal. Satan’s goal is not to defeat the enemy, but rather unheroically to inflict pain—and so he turns to subterranean natural resources. In a passage that recalls the expanding mining efforts of the period, Satan and his fellows delve in the bowels of the earth to uncover the makings of cannonry and gunpowder: “Part hidd’n veins diggd up (nor hath this Earth / Entrails unlike) of Mineral and Stone, / Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls / Of missive ruin” (6.516–19). Raphael, relating the story to his auditors Adam and Eve, decries those engines made of earth’s entrails, suggesting that if humans ever invent such weapons, it will be the product of malice 52

— ​ A n E c o c r i t i c a l A p p r o a c h —​ and “dev’lish machination,” designed “to plague the Sons of men / For sin, on warr and mutual slaughter bent” (6.504–06). In the rebellious angels’ efforts, extractive mining becomes part of an insidious effort to cause injury that itself will not be dispositive of the war’s outcome. Yet the environmental impact of this conflict is not limited to these cannons. Momentarily stunned by the firing of these weapons, the faithful angels regroup and seek yet more powerful weapons in the arms race, weapons likewise drawn from the earth: hills and mountains they pluck from their seats, upturn, and hurl as projectiles (6.639–46). That is, in response to the mining, the faithful angels undertake an aggressive terraforming, upending mountains to turn into projectiles they hurl at their foes. The parody of epic combat accomplished in this sequence requires an environmental medium: to critique the dignity of martial violence, Milton turns to the alterations such violence makes in the terrain. Those landscape interventions convey the ridiculousness of the combat: warfare’s ecological havoc drains its epic heroism, reducing it to a glamorless contestation. Further, what finally moves the Father to dispatch the Son to end the fighting is the apparently perilous effect of the weaponized heavenly environment. The Father, evincing concern about the state of the battle, declares that “no solution will be found” because Warr wearied hath perform’d what Warr can do, And to disorder’d rage let loose the reines, With Mountains as with Weapons arm’d, which makes Wild work in Heav’n, and dangerous to the maine. (6.694–98) War’s weaponization of the environment poses a threat, even in heaven, with costs that must be limited. When the Son rides to victory, among his first commands is that “the uprooted Hills retir’d / Each to his place,” and that heaven’s “wonted face renewd, / And with fresh Flourets Hill and Valley smil’d” (6.781–84). The victory of good over evil looks very much like an act of environmental restoration. The evisceration of the dignity of warfare comes in Book 6 of the poem’s twelve books, and while it undoes centuries of epic’s association with heroic battles, it does set something else at the center of the new epic mode Milton is forging from the materials of older texts. An ecocritical reading of the poem evaporates the valor of war out of Book 6, but, as a hexameral poem, dilates in Book 7 the opening verses of Genesis that imagine the creation of the world in sumptuous detail, attending even to the fleetingly ephemeral motions of newly wrought creatures (the way the lion made of earth shakes dirt from his mane) and to the fabulously minute aspects of their appearance (the butterfly’s varied colors). In short, Paradise Lost hinges on militancy superseded by awe, a shift from the deflation of war to the elevation of tending the more-than-human. In this way, Milton’s poem reshapes the epic, moving to its center a willingness to engage with the environment and non-human as subjects. Reading the epic ecocritically invites us to revise our expectations of what gets represented in epic contexts, as well as how it is represented. Ecocritically interrogating the nature of epic creates opportunities for exploring the nature of representation itself. 53

— ​ C h r i s B a r r e t t —​

THE FAERIE QUEENE, TREES, AND THE REPRESENTATION OF ECOLOGY AND INJURY The word “epic” comes from the Greek for word or song, appropriately enough given many epics’ origins in oral performance and transmission. Even epics composed on the page tend to invoke a legacy of song, referring to their own narratives as verbally alive: “I sing of arms and the man,” or “Sing, Heavenly Muse.” Meanwhile, “ecology” also has its own discursive etymology, coming from the Greek words for household (oikos) and for word or reason (logos). At the core of both these terms is the act of articulation, the work of speaking aloud, on the way to making song and world. An ecocritical engagement with the epic can explore its narrative worldmaking in ways attentive to the power of place and environment, ways that make visible the protocols of narrative representation itself. Such an effort, moreover, is often aided by the epic’s repertoire of formal markers. Though these markers vary across epics of different cultures and periods, those of the English Renaissance include some staples. Among them, for example, is the use of epic simile, with its frequent and elaborate comparison of human and non-human subjects, insisting on a kind of representational traffic between the two. The voyage to the underworld, too, might be definitionally ecological, involving as it does the encounter with an alternative place, just beyond the usable and commodifiable realm of human society—or, in an era of expanded mining to support incipient industrialization, into the heart of a commodifiable world.10 Invocations to the muse recall the artifice of the epic, while attaching to it the need for trans-species (if we can think the muses and other avatars of cosmic and chthonic power in species terms) cooperation for its realization. Early modern epic poets adopted and innovated these elements, using them to assert at once inclusion among these works of high stakes and cultural cachet, as well as their own determined willingness to upset generic expectations. Renaissance epic poets challenge the genre’s boundaries in acts of rebellious citation of other texts, and through their metapoetic labors, reveal the centrality of place and environment. Let me look ecocritically at one such element, a particularly resilient trope, to understand how the early modern English epic probes the edges of representational potential. This trope appears importantly in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the first three Books of which were published in 1590, and Books 4–6 in 1596. An epic romance allegory, the unfinished poem follows, in each of its six completed books, the adventures of a knight or knights, all of whom represent a particular virtue (Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, etc.), as they traverse a frequently allegorical landscape. The poem offers no shortage of overtly metapoetic episodes inviting ecocritical analysis; here, though, I would like to focus on an episode from the first book of the poem, the case of Fraudubio and Fraelissa, by way of exploring one moment in which the poem leverages the representation of environmental elements, in dialogue with other epic poems, to confront the vexed and vexing protocols of representation itself. Among The Faerie Queene’s many intertexts is Virgil’s Aeneid. The meeting of Book 1’s hero, avatar of holiness the Red Cross Knight, with a sadly transformed Fraudubio in the second canto offers, in the trope of the talking, bleeding tree, a clear citation of Virgil’s epic. In Book 3 of The Aeneid, Aeneas recounts his landing 54

— ​ A n E c o c r i t i c a l A p p r o a c h —​ in Thrace, where he offers sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of securing divine favor for his quest to found the new Troy. In the process of preparing the sacrifice, he uproots a myrtle, which immediately begins to bleed: as rendered in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, “…from that first tree’s severed roots / drops of black blood drip down. They stain the ground / with gore” (Virgil 1971, 3.37–39), and when Aeneas pulls additional shoots in an attempt to find the cause of this, “a lamentable voice returned to me: / ‘Why are you mangling me, Aeneas? Spare / my body. I am buried here...’” (3.51–53). The myrtle shoots turn out to be part of the unlucky Polydorus’ restless resting place, having once been, before growing into this grove, the spears that murdered him. Having been sent by Troy’s King Priam with payment to Thrace, under an agreement that would ensure Polydorus’ protection in the event of Troy’s fall, Polydorus was nonetheless betrayed by the Thracian king, who killed his charge, seeking Agamemnon’s favor. Recovering from the horror of the dialogue, Aeneas gives Polydorus an appropriate burial and then takes his fleet elsewhere, leaving Thrace, “a place where friendship was profaned” (3.79). In Spenser’s version of this trope, the bleeding, talking tree has a different etiology, but one still rooted in betrayal.11 Having separated from his lady Una, Red Cross finds himself in the company of Fidessa, later revealed to be the duplicitous witch Duessa; wandering together, they seek respite from the heat of the sun beneath two trees. When Red Cross tears a branch from one of the trees, it begins to bleed and speak, self-identifying as Fraudubio, “once a man…now a tree, / Wretched man, wretched tree” (Spenser [1596] 1978, 1.2.33.3–4), and urging Red Cross to learn from his mistake in having trusted a beautiful-seeming sorceress. That sorceress, the metamorphic tree explains, had changed both Fraudubio and his former love Fraelissa, whom he abandoned in pursuit of the witch, into these arboreal shapes, and while Red Cross hasn’t yet connected the dots, the reader knows that witch is the same Duessa/Fidessa presently traveling with the knight. Red Cross, unable to find a way to help tree-bound Fraudubio and Fraelissa, plunges the bleeding branch into the ground, closes up the wound in the tree as best he can, and sets off, still unaware of Duessa’s identity. Red Cross’s encounter with the tree, in Spenser’s telling, echoes episodes in numerous other epic works, but it has resonances, too, with early modern arboriculture manuals, which describe the removal of tree branches as a kind of wound, often one that bleeds. In company with these texts, the Red Cross Knight’s treatment of Fraudubio’s wound and severed limb offers a sort of burlesque of careless grafting or planting of cuttings. In this light, Fraudubio’s treeness appears in the narrative foreground, insistently vegetative and notably under-served by the Red Cross Knight’s haphazard care. A routine epic episode becomes a troubling moment of environmental damage: while Aeneas finds a way to tend to myrtled Polydorus, the Red Cross Knight walks away from these trees, heedless of their instruction. Of course, Virgil’s Polydorus is himself a vector of environmental pollution. His murder makes Thrace a place sullied by betrayal, and thus inhospitable to Aeneas and the future new Troy. In Virgil’s account, human faithlessness causes perverse verdancy, turning spears into myrtles with a voluble posthumous spirit, and transforms a vibrant location into one in which only death can be observed, in funereal rites. Spenser’s version of the bleeding tree preserves this sense of unwarranted growth, with Fraudubio and Fraelissa appearing as the only trees on a plain, suffering the 55

— ​ C h r i s B a r r e t t —​ heat of the sun where vegetation ordinarily would not thrive. In both episodes, the human and vegetal are intimately intertwined, even to the point of their material interchangeability, but their intimacy is the product of human intervention in the non-human world: anthropogenic activity deforms the local ecology—and injures the participant humans in the process. Indeed, the sense of damage haunts these epic tropic episodes of transformed trees: bleeding as a sign of on-going bodily harm, these trees report in an eerie human vernacular the experience of acute pain. The allegorical project of the poem suggests that this is itself a document of allegory’s limitations: these arboreally embodied cautionary tales only sometimes succeed, and the narratives they convey only sometimes instruct (e.g., Red Cross Knight fails to learn the lesson from Fraudubio, despite being in a dangerously similar situation). Projecting this metamorphosed voice onto a tree, Spenser’s poem suggests that its narrative itself might fail its reader and that the injury to meaning is perhaps as acute as that to Fraudubio’s barky skin. The imminent materiality of the tree serves to remind the reader that pain felt among the non-human exists on a continuum with pain as felt among humans, and reading the epic ecocritically foregrounds this interdependence. For so many epic poems, the price of the epic “song” is hurt, environmentally realized across human and vegetal bodies alike. Yet Spenser’s Faerie Queene complicates a simple association of narrative with ecological harm. The Fraudubio episode might suggest that narrative is itself enabled by human infliction of pain on human and more-than-human subjects, but another episode from the last of the completed books of the poem, published in 1596, provocatively imagines that narrative exists independently of such damage. In Book 6, Calidore comes across a shady spot in which he finds the Graces and a hundred ladies dancing to the pipe-playing of pastoral poet and Spenser alter-ego Colin Clout. Unable to hide his curiosity, Calidore moves into the glen to greet this crowd, but his presence disrupts the dance, and these mythic figures flee before him, leaving him alone with Colin, who breaks his pipe in disappointment. There are endless ways to uncover the allegorical nuance of this episode, but let me offer this one. Amid the trees, unproblematically healthy and unafflicted by the perverse narratives of acquisition and exploitation that haunt their metamorphic counterparts, a kind of verse thrives: a pastoral interlude within the epic project, in which song unites human and more-than-human parties in a dance that leaves no insidious trace, no groaning bleeding trunks to call out to epic heroes. Instead, the epic venture suspends itself temporarily, to play host to another mode of being and representing, a lyric interim in which trees create the occasion for encountering different modes of narrative—not cautionary or harrowing, but rather generative if fleeting, and every bit as metapoetically self-referential as their soberer counterparts. Here the trees are not damaged into song, but rather, they are sites of different singing. It is worth noting that this singing, however, follows Book 5’s remarkable bloodiness, an intrusion of the epic’s militarism and violence, playing out in an emphatically colonialist context: a thinly veiled version of Ireland under English oppression. It is a context Spenser knew well: the poet had worked in the service of Lord Grey, a particularly brutal administrator of English colonial rule in Ireland, where the racially othered Irish were often subject to profound violence. Indeed, in another work, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser reflects that employment, and makes the case explicitly for atrocities such as tactical starvation—an instance 56

— ​ A n E c o c r i t i c a l A p p r o a c h —​ of environmental weaponization—in subduing resistance. This background emerges distinctly in The Faerie Queene, in which the fictive counterpart of Ireland is routinely described as “salvage.” Before the trees of Book 6 might be the site of a restorative suspension of the logics of occupation of exploitation, the hero of Book 5, Arthegall, spends twelve cantos of verse administering graphically described, intensely violent “justice” in episodes that recall the logics of intertwined racism and ecological warfare so practiced in the early-modern English occupation of Ireland, and so tactically deployed across the Atlantic in Caribbean plantation practices. Book 5 is often paired with Book 2 of the poem (both appear as the middle book in the initial publications of the poem, and the Book 2 virtue of Temperance is the private version of the virtue that in its public instantiation is Book 5’s Justice), and the same sense of environmental colonial injustice obtains in it. In the climactic episode of Book 2, the Knight of Temperance Guyon destroys, with disturbing excessiveness, the Bower of Bliss. The Bower is rendered in terms that make clear its allusions to the Americas, and the text at once seems to present a celebration of colonial violence while also suggesting a certain discomfort with the environmental, as well as the bodily, impact of colonialism.12 To return to the tropic trees, my point here is that while The Faerie Queene might be bracketed by an arboreal sequence in which human and environmental transactions in the first and last books of the poem are first problematized and then recuperated, the ecological legacies of colonial oppression sit at its heart. The epic’s invitation to ecocritical exploration makes possible a reckoning with the ways environment is conscripted into the valorizing representation of imperialism. It also makes possible the imagining of an ecological discourse that sets aside those longstanding markers of the genre, and instead posits a differently epic project.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have endeavored to show how an ecocritical lens can productively make visible structures of human violence and large-scale exploitation; it can open up space to critique those structures, and at the same time illustrate alternate, more equitable possibilities for human and non-human collective existence. In the case of Paradise Lost, an ecocritical reading can center the non-human and environment as subjects of epic narrative, deflating the European epic’s traditional exaltation of militant valor. In a poem that seems to stubbornly rehearse racial and species-based supremacies, an ecocritical reading mobilizes the elements in the text that seek less injurious modes of regarding and interacting with the extraordinary bio/diversity of the world. An ecocritical reading of The Faerie Queene similarly attends to the poem’s elaborate scenes of imperialist endeavor and invocation of a martial epic tradition. This vexed, vexing environment nonetheless offers avenues for recuperative interpretive practices: an ecocritical reading acknowledges The Faerie Queene’s colonialist dreams alongside the critique the poem itself affords, while also tracing in the digressive, enormous text alternative practices of living in a world full of human and other beings. Leaning into the poem as allegory—a mode of continuous interpretive labor—an ecocritical reading reflects on the nature of narrative itself in order to propose the possibility of stories less rooted in violence, and more capable of branching into wonder and even awe. 57

— ​ C h r i s B a r r e t t —​ My readings of these two specimen cases from early modern England point to the ways ecocritical exploration of the epic can help readers investigate the work of representation itself. With its long history, global span, and immense variety, the epic invites readers to explore and challenge how stories of communities and collectives are told. Ecocritical analysis not just reveals the ways human society and environment have always intertwined, but also empowers the creation of new narratives about and realities for our collective futures, in a moment in which such imagination is dearly, urgently needed.

NOTES   1 The English civil wars that ran from the early 1640s to the early 1650s pitted King Charles I and royalists against Oliver Cromwell, Parliament, and their supporters. From the 1640s onward, Milton wrote prose tracts/propaganda and conducted foreign correspondence in support of the Parliamentarian cause. Parliamentarians ruled England from 1649 until 1660, when the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Milton was briefly imprisoned and then lived out the rest of his life under house arrest.  2 See Lewalski (2000) for the definitive treatment of Milton’s life. All quotations from Paradise Lost are from Milton ([1674] 2023).   3 The word “green” here is usefully metonymic, but certainly not comprehensive, and like any symbol, can be as limiting as it is illuminating. See Cohen (2013) for reflections on thinking ecologically with many other colors.   4 See Doreen Massey’s formulation of place as “a particular moment in…networks of social relations and understandings” (1994, 4–5).   5 For the valences of the words “environment” and “ecology” in early modern and contemporary contexts, see Alston (2016) and Nardizzi (2017).   6 For examples, see Adamson, et al. (2002), Alaimo (2010), and Wenzel (2019).   7 For consideration of some of these terms, see Haraway (2016).   8 The term “Plantationocene” was offered by Donna Haraway in 2014, as part of a conversation with panelists Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nils Bubandt. That discussion appears in Haraway et al. (2016).   9 For more on Satan as colonizer in Paradise Lost, see Evans (1996). 10 For coal mining in Renaissance literature, see Borlik (2011) and Duckert (2015). 11 The trope of a talking, bleeding tree appears in other earlier epics, which were sources for Spenser (e.g., the wood of the suicides in Canto 13 of Dante’s Inferno, and myrtle-bound Astolpho in Canto 6 of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso). 12 For more on this episode and coloniality, see Greenblatt (1980, 157–92); for more on the conscription of the landscape and especially de/forestation into English colonial practice in Ireland, see McColley (2007, 105–06).

WORKS CITED Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. 2002. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alston, Vermonja. 2016. “Environment.” In Keywords for Environmental Study, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David Pellow, 93–96. New York City: New York University Press. Barton, Anne. 2017. The Shakespearean Forest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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— ​ A n E c o c r i t i c a l A p p r o a c h —​ Borlik, Todd Andrew. 2011. Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures. London: Routledge. Bushnell, Rebecca. 2003. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. 2013. Prismatic Ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. 2011. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth Deloughrey and George B. Handley, 3–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duckert, Lowell. 2015. “Earth’s Prospects.” In Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, 237–67. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, J. Martin. 1996. Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll. 1996. Introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, xv–xxxvii. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. et al. 2016. “Anthropologists Are Talking—About the Anthropocene.” Ethnos 81, no. 3: 535–64. Hutchinson, Lucy. 2001. Order and Disorder, edited by David Norbrook. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lewalski, Barbara K. 2000. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McColley, Diane Kelsey. 2007. Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell. New York: Ashgate. Milton, John. [1674] 2023. Paradise Lost. In “The John Milton Reading Room.” Edited by Thomas H. Luxon. https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/. Munroe, Jennifer. 2008. Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. New York: Ashgate. Nardizzi, Vincent Joseph. 2013. Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2017. “Environ.” In Veer Ecology, edited by Lowell Duckert and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 183–95. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phelpstead, Carl. 2018. “Beyond Ecocriticism: A Cosmocritical Reading of Ælfwine’s Prayerbook.” The Review of English Studies NS 69, no. 291: 613–31. Spenser, Edmund. [1596] 1978. The Faerie Queene, edited by Thomas P. Roche, Jr. New York: Penguin Books. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2019. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. New York: Fordham University Press. Virgil. 1971. The Aeneid of Virgil. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A N A F F E C T S T U D I E S A P P R OA C H

R E A D I N G N O N - N O R M AT I V E M A S C U L I N I T I E S IN HOMER’S ILIAD

rsr

Melissa Mueller

“This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story,” writes Alice Oswald in her Introduction to Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (2011), the first part of which records the names of the dead in the order in which Homer’s epic has them killed off. Oswald’s Memorial levels the playing field between the Iliad’s heroes and its minor characters. By giving each death equal attention, it undermines the very premise of the Iliad, whose warriors value their posthumous legacies (or “everlasting reputation,” aphthiton kleos) even more than they value their own lives. If all are memorialized as a list, there is no additional distinction for having fought and died bravely. A translation, or excavation, of the Iliad such as Oswald’s in this way invites us to reconsider some of the Iliad’s other minor elements. What would it mean, for example, to read the Iliad not for the outsized feelings of its heroes—not for the anger, grief, and longing of Achilles—but for the ordinary, humdrum affects that leave no visible trace on the poem’s plot? What if we were to read the Iliad for its descriptive passages rather than its action-packed story (in so far as these can be kept separate)? Offering one possible response to these questions, the present chapter considers two marginal episodes that address the role of non-normative masculinities in Homer’s epic: Thersites’ rebuke of Agamemnon (leader of the Achaean expedition against Troy) in an assembly scene in Book 2, and the rescue of the Trojan prince Paris by Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of sexual love and sensuality) in Book 3. Thersites is a distinctly nonheroic character, as he lacks both the noble pedigree and the physical appearance that the Iliad’s ancient audience(s) would have expected from a Homeric warrior and king. And yet, at the beginning of an assembly, he voices blunt criticism of Agamemnon. For this disruption, he is both beaten and reprimanded by Odysseus, king of Ithaca. Swelling then appears on Thersites’ back, marking the spot where the scepter landed. I argue that the graphically rendered description of his welt frames the entire episode, representing a sort of abrasion on the otherwise smooth “skin” of the Iliad’s narrative. I take inspiration here from Sianne Ngai’s subtle analysis of how bodily affect intersects with racism and social oppression in Nella Larsen’s novel, Quicksand. 60

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-6

— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ In the second part of the chapter, I turn to the duel between Paris and Menelaos in Book 3 of the Iliad. Paris’ radiant beauty and his instinctual recoil from Menelaos are both vividly rendered, even though they are clearly out of alignment with the Iliad’s martial ethos. I suggest that the detailed description of Paris’ clothing performs essential affective work by modeling for Homer’s listeners/readers how to read, i.e., how to make sense of and evaluate, speakers in an assembly, and soldiers on the battlefield.1 And in my attention to description, I am indebted to work, such as Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, that encourages us to look “at textual surfaces rather than trying to see through them” (2020, 57). As Zhang argues, if one reads at a more localized level, on a smaller scale, one begins to notice what is most “salient” about description: the “particular textures, determined by varied aspects of language, syntax, phonetics, rhythm, imagery, and so forth—all the elements that tend to be grouped under that elusive and old-fashioned term style” (2020, 54). Postcritical approaches to literary texts have reanimated interest in things like description, affect, and form, allowing us to analyze the style of poetic works alongside their historical and political valences.2 These minor episodes, while contributing to the Iliad’s atmosphere, also help us understand how an “ideal” reader, i.e., one who does not question the inherent worth of military success and honor, will feel sympathy for and attachment to characters who dress and act like a proper Homeric warrior, while disapproving of (and disliking) those who do not. Their affective judgments, which are modeled on those of internal witnesses, reinforce, in turn, the social and genre norms tested by the deviant behaviors on display. The “aesthetics of description” thus combines with an implicit understanding of generic norms to elicit the desired response from readers. It is no accident, I contend, that these two episodes featuring flagrant examples of non-heroic behavior appear early on in the epic, where they are well positioned to influence readerly expectations for what follows. When similar scenes of duels and assemblies occur later on, readers will have already honed their intuitive sense of what ancient Greek epic, as a genre, values. At the same time, however, because affect is not prescriptive, readers have a certain leeway to engage with the “modeling” sketched above on their own terms. The Achaean onlookers in the assembly scene of Book 2 are both annoyed by what they witness and entertained. Laughter diffuses their irritation. Likewise, an ancient reader might find herself intrigued and enchanted by Paris, while at the same time seeing him for the failed epic hero that he is.

AFFECT AND GENRE IN THE ILIAD Brian Massumi’s foundational work treats affect as autonomic, involuntary, and unconscious.3 Always potential, emergent, and indeterminate, “affect” is a notoriously difficult term to pin down, but in the work of the theorists with whom I engage in this chapter, it occupies a somewhat distinct realm from “feeling” and “emotion.” While the latter two terms are generally used to describe more active states of cognition, affect can be associated with the preperceptual forms of what might later register as a “feeling.” An affect may be only barely felt, “the subtlest of shifting intensities,” while its remit remains large (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 2). Megan Watkins has observed that affect is often thought to be “autonomous and ephemeral,” but that even something fleeting can leave a lasting impression, a meaningful 61

— ​ M e l i s s a M u e l l e r —​ residue (2010, 169). Affect also has a strong materialist component. In the wake of the poststructuralist and deconstructionist privileging of language and discourse, the “turn to affect” has also “returned critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter,” and to materiality more generally (Clough 2010, 206). Literary critics have in turn sought to capture how these impersonal, mostly invisible, forces shape literary texts from the inside out, affecting the behavior of characters as well as how readers respond to them. Sianne Ngai’s (2005) reading of “irritation” in the Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand, provides the basis for my own understanding of this affect in the Thersites episode in Book 2 of the Iliad. But first, I venture a few thoughts on how the Iliad itself implicitly theorizes both genre and affect. “Epic” as a generic term does not map easily onto the earliest stages of Homeric poetry, when bards and rhapsodes performed portions of the Iliad and Odyssey without the aid of a written script. The longer Homeric poems (the Iliad and the Odyssey) did not fully emerge as works of “epic” until a fixed version of their oral-performance traditions had been committed to textual form, some time in the sixth-century BCE.4 As Richard Martin reminds us, “genre” as such “is a tool for scholars and librarians” (2005, 15). But even before their entextualization, a fluid understanding of epic must have guided both the production and the reception of these Homeric poems. It is this notion of genre as “implicit poetics” that will help us constitute the horizon of expectations for readers of the Iliad. Greek epic, in this regard, refers to “a total social event including audience interaction …and not just the ‘text’ we might want to cull from it” (2005, 16). As part of this “social event,” we may also include the affects and emotions that the Iliad elicits from its readers. Let us, then, briefly consider the Iliad’s exemplary emotion: anger. Early on in Book 1, Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition against Troy, taunts Achilles, the premier Greek warrior, by telling him that he will take his captive girl, Briseis, with his own hands so that Achilles “may learn well / how much greater I am than you” (Iliad 1.185–86). As he hears this challenge, Achilles is overcome with distress, [...] and within his shaggy breast the heart was divided two ways, pondering whether to draw from beside his thigh the sharp sword, driving away all those who stood between and kill the son of Atreus, or else to check the spleen within and keep down his anger (cholon). (Iliad 1.188–92)5 Achilles has just made up his mind to draw his sword when the goddess Athena descends from the sky and grabs him by his fair hair. She urges him to suppress his anger. A moment like this shows us clearly how Achilles’ anger is represented as a subjectively felt emotion. His anger, moreover, is within Achilles’ control. He is capable of deciding whether or not to follow through with violence. His anger very nearly overpowers him, but Athena is there to keep him in check, and to remind us that the anger that rises up from within can be kept within the confines of the body; this emotion is neither porous, nor contagious, in the way affects often are.6 “Rage,” or mēnis, is the very first word of the poem, signaling in syntactic terms its programmatic importance to the action of the Iliad. In contrast to this epic-defining 62

— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ emotion, the affects such as irritation and eroticism that I examine below are ambient and impersonal, their importance to the narrative measurable not in terms of how they shape a particular character’s action (or inaction), but for their subtle effects on the poem’s audiences (both internal and external). The abrasion, for example, that Odysseus’s beating leaves on Thersites’ skin will translate into a feeling of irritation in the onlookers at the Achaean assembly, while Paris’ sudden retreat to a fragrantly scented bedchamber (in the midst of a battle scene) underlines his antiheroic, anti-epic status within the Iliad. The Iliad does in fact seem to embrace a distinction similar to the one posited by contemporary affect theorists who understand emotions as subjective states of embodied cognition, in contrast to the more diffuse, depersonalized status of affects. In the Greek context, epic has been called a “super-genre” because of its capacity to incorporate other poetic traditions (Martin 2005, 17). Thus, when we look at characters such as Thersites and Paris, neither of whom fits the masculine ideal of the Iliadic hero, it may be useful to consider their “shortcomings” in terms of genrealternatives. Thersites, as I argue below, functions as an iambic character, one whose rough, unpolished, and impolitic way of speaking appears rash and off-the-mark within the Iliadic assembly, but perfectly at home in Greek “blame poetry” (i.e., iambic verse).7 Paris, for his part, cuts a very different figure, with his exotic apparel and alluring appearance. His effeminacy is harshly criticized on the battlefield,8 but would be praiseworthy in Greek choral lyric, where the gifts of Aphrodite (grace, eroticism, beauty) are celebrated, rather than denigrated. As we consider these (by Iliadic standards) non-normative forms of masculinity, we will want to bear in mind that “genres can only be defined and articulated in a contrastive system with other adjacent or opposed genre categories” (Foster, Kurke and Weiss 2020, 14).9

THERSITES’ “IAMBIC” IRRITATION In a chapter of Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai describes Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand (2002) as “infused with a strange ‘irritation’—a minor, low-intensity negative affect—at virtually all of its levels” (2005, 174). The atmosphere of “offishness” that emanates from Helga Crane distances her from other characters in the novel and also has a somewhat alienating or “irritating” effect on the reader. A biracial woman whose birth parents are both deceased, Helga struggles to find a place where she truly belongs. She moves from Alabama to Chicago to Harlem, and even to Denmark, where she lives for several years with her maternal aunt’s family. Initially, she finds herself enchanted by each new “home.” But it is only a matter of time before the familiar feelings of restlessness and intense annoyance return, forcing her to move yet again. When the novel opens, Helga is about to leave Naxos, the southern boarding school for Black students where she has been teaching for the past several years.10 Because Helga herself does not analyze her changes of mood, and no explanations are provided to the reader, irritation becomes, in Ngai’s words, “the index of a more general affective opacity at work throughout Quicksand” which operates “at the level of discourse as well as story, and at the level of reception as well as internal structure and form” (2005, 175). Critics have interpreted Quicksand’s refusal to disclose the causes of its heroine’s persistent irritation and recurrent bouts of depression through the rubric 63

— ​ M e l i s s a M u e l l e r —​ of repression. Many readers, as Ngai points out, understand “the novel’s emotional blank spots as a sign of Helga’s ‘unacknowledged sexuality’.” However, Ngai pushes back against this, arguing that, “in fact, the lack of precipitating causes for Helga’s restlessness seems in keeping more with the logic of irritation than with that of repression” (2005, 179). And irritation itself hovers somewhere between the body and the mind, between soreness and mild anger: “Whether ‘irritation’ is defined as an emotional or physical experience, synonyms for it tend to apply equally to psychic life and life at the level of the body—and particularly to its surfaces or skin” (2005, 184). This focus on the epidermal, on the outer layer of the protagonist’s experience, enables Ngai to identify irritation as one of the novel’s primary affects. The text’s descriptive language is meaningful in and of itself—there is no need to assume that every detail functions as a symptom of a deeper malady.11 Through its recurrences, moreover, irritation comes to play a key role in delineating the novel’s social and political entanglements, making visible, in particular, the heavy toll of racism. The racism directed against Helga manifests metaphorically as irritation amplified to the extreme. As Ngai argues, irritation powerfully communicates the sort of discomfort Helga experiences in her own skin. One of Helga’s most distinctive traits is the capacity to feel her own emotions alongside the negative affects emanating from others who are reacting to her presence. Irritation, for Helga, is where her own self-loathing intersects with the hostility of her social environment(s). When, for example, she makes an unannounced visit to her uncle’s residence in Chicago, she is greeted by his new wife, Mrs. Nilssen, who bluntly tells her that she must never come again. Mrs. Nilssen is white. Helga herself is biracial (her father is Black, her mother white). As Helga later processes this painful rejection, we are told that she understands and even sympathizes with Mrs. Nilssen’s point of view: “She saw herself for an obscene sore in all their lives, at all costs to be hidden. She understood, even while she resented. It would have been easier if she had not” (Larsen 2002, 32, my emphasis). That Helga is the one to generate this image of herself as an “obscene sore” speaks to the pernicious dynamics of racism. Racism inverts the positionalities of aggressor and aggrieved, ascribing responsibility to the victim for the emotional injury she sustains. Helga thus visualizes the ugliness of what she has experienced as an open sore “in all their lives.” Mrs. Nilssen’s words are a common source of shame, one that both Helga and her white relatives want to keep hidden. As the plane of intersection between individuals and the worlds they inhabit, skin is uniquely positioned to speak to how bodies unconsciously absorb and respond to affect. Helga translates her feelings of shame into the image of the “obscene sore,” in this way framing racism both as society’s open secret and as a disfiguration of her own body. Homer’s Iliad is a very different work from Quicksand, but Ngai’s reading of that novel’s dominant affect provides us with tools to make sense of the annoyance provoked by Thersites’ disruption in Iliad 2. In particular, I want to draw on Ngai’s understanding of how political and social oppression wear down individuals, metaphorically erupting, in Helga’s case, as a painful sore on the body’s surface. Thersites belongs to a lower social class than the man he rebukes. And his rejection of heroic norms of speech and comportment positions him as a distinctly antiepic character. His otherness (comparable to Helga’s “offishness”) feeds the social 64

— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ frictions that escalate into violence, leaving a welt on Thersites’ skin—a more than metaphorical “sore.” Thersites’ iambic posture, his comically debased appearance, and his disorderly verbal style present a ridiculous spectacle for the Achaeans who have gathered to debate their next wartime moves. Thersites’ criticism of Agamemnon is not so different from the charges Achilles brought against Agamemnon in Book 1. Yet, Thersites’ speech causes irritation in Odysseus—whose response circulates this affect more broadly. We are made to feel how “off” Thersites’ intervention is. By attending to affect, that is, we get a better sense of how the irritation to which Odysseus gives voice reinforces his audience’s “affinity” bias: Thersites has neither the demeanor nor the rhetorical style of an epic hero. His very name, in fact, echoes the Greek word for “boldness” (thersos/tharsos). Thersites “connotes blame poetry” and the “boldness” of the blame poet (Nagy 1979, 260). The Iliad thus leverages a negative affect like irritation—and the mental and physical abrasions to which it gives rise—to impart a felt understanding of the aesthetic differences between itself and iambic (blame poetry). Odysseus uses Agamemnon’s scepter to herd the less noble members of the army to the place of the assembly, while relying on verbal persuasion to direct the kings (basileis). Once everyone has found a seat, “Thersites of the endless speech,” who is said to know “many words, but disorderly; / vain and without decency,” takes the floor (Iliad 2.212–14). His speech-act is described as a form of “scolding”: kolōiaō (to scold, 2.212), a word that belongs to the iambic rather than epic genre. In the same line, Thersites himself is called ametroepēs, “unmeasured with his words,” and in the next line, he is a man who “in his mind knew many disorderly forms of speech” (epea…akosma te polla, 2.213), but who speaks “recklessly” and “out of turn” (ou kata kosmon, 2.214), with the goal of stirring up strife among the kings. Thersites’ aggressive and disorderly style of speaking, which elicits derisive laugther, marks him as a representative of blame poetry, the deformed, shameful foil, as epic would have it, to the regal speech of the Homeric heroes.12 In appearance, too, Thersites is remarkable for all the wrong reasons: This was the ugliest man (aischistos) who came beneath Ilion. He was bandy-legged and went lame of one foot, with shoulders stooped and drawn together over his chest, and above this his skull went up to a point with the wool grown sparsely upon it. Beyond all others Achilleus hated him, and Odysseus. (Iliad 2.216–20) The description of Thersites’ physical appearance is unparalleled in the Iliad. “It would be difficult to imagine a figure more physically remote from the heroes he abuses,” writes N. Postlethwaite; he concludes that “Thersites is everything a hero is not” (1988, 125).13 We have, in this way, been more than adequately prepared for Thersites to deliver a rebuke that sounds like no other speech in the Iliad. Thersites blames Agamemnon for his insatiable greed, asking him, sarcastically, if it is “still more gold” that he wants: “Your shelters are filled with bronze; there are plenty of the choicest / women for you within your shelter, whom we Achaians / give to you first of all whenever we capture some stronghold” (Iliad 2.226–28). There 65

— ​ M e l i s s a M u e l l e r —​ are echoes here of the charges Achilles had made against Agamemnon in Book 1. When Agamemnon threatens that he will return Chryseis to her father only if he is compensated with a similar “prize,” Achilles chides him, reminding him that all the plunder from earlier raids has already been divided and distributed. Achilles, moreover, rebukes Agamemnon for always claiming more than he has earned: Always the greater part of the painful fighting is the work of my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty yours is far the greater reward, and I with some small thing yet dear to me go back to my ships when I am weary with fighting. (Iliad 1.165–68) According to Achilles, Agamemnon generally takes the lion’s share of the plunder for himself. Thersites’ speech, however, goes one step further in presenting Agamemnon’s behavior in its most debased form. Just as in iambic “blame” poetry, where avarice and excessive lust are the source of many insults, here, too, Thersites depicts Agamemnon as a tyrant whose appetitive desires govern his actions. A threat to the generic integrity of epic, Thersites must be forcefully silenced if the assembly is to function as a forum for political debate. Because his aim is to arouse laughter (geloiïon ti, 2.215), it is clear that Thersites does not deliver his speeches in the spirit of deliberation. In his response, Odysseus takes a two-pronged approach, using both rhetorical and physical violence. First, he puts Thersites in his place by branding him the “worst” of the Achaeans (aischistos, a word that can be translated both as “ugliest” and as “most immoral”). Odysseus also threatens to strip him of all his clothes and drive him with blows back to the ships. Next, Odysseus takes his scepter (the scepter he has borrowed from Agamemnon) and beats him. The entertainment value that Thersites had hoped to be able to provide with his verbal rebuke of Agamemnon ends up being produced instead by the spectacle of his own body (i.e., by Odysseus physically beating him). The sight of this spurs laughter in the rest of the assembled Achaeans: “[T]hey laughed over him happily” (Iliad 2.270). But it is Thersites’ own reaction—or perhaps we should say the reaction of Thersites’ body—that speaks most eloquently.14 In place of the words Thersites might have spoken, had he not been silenced by pain, we have the narrator’s detailed description of his body’s autonomic responses. After Odysseus has “dashed the sceptre against his back and / shoulders,” causing him to double over, “a bloody welt (smōdix) stood up between his shoulders under / the golden sceptre’s stroke” and Thersites sits down again, frightened and shedding tears (Iliad 2.265–69). As mentioned already, Odysseus strikes Thersites with Agamemnon’s skēptron (scepter), an object whose illustrious pedigree enhances the authority of whoever holds it. Odysseus uses this tool of speechcraft to silence Thersites with physical force, a gesture whose perverse irony would not have been lost on Homer’s audience. For his part, Thersites reacts viscerally. He doubles over in pain, in a movement whose reflexive reaction is paralleled by that of the snake in Book 12 that arches itself backward as it writhes its way free of its eagle-predator’s talons (Iliad 12.205). The same verb, idnöomai (to bend oneself, double oneself up, esp. for pain), is used of both the man and the snake, underlining that this is the body’s instinctual response. And at the same moment as he doubles over, the welt 66

— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ appears on Thersites’ back and tears drop from his eyes. With our attention being drawn to these surface-level phenomena, it is appropriate to note that skin lesions and swellings almost never occur as a result of battle injury—these are not heroic wounds. The welt (smōdix) is out of place in the Iliad. Only one other time is a skin lesion mentioned in this epic, during a scene of wrestling between Odysseus and Ajax in Book 23. Thersites’ suffering awkwardly straddles the mind-body divide, just as the rhetoric of irritation did in Larsen’s Quicksand. We are never told what he is feeling, whether it is shame, anger, humiliation, or some combination of the three. The only affect explicitly mentioned is the irritation felt by those watching—and it is their feeling of annoyance that readers find juxtaposed with the swelling of Thersites’ skin. But unlike his skin lesion, their annoyance (achnumenoi, 2.270) quickly dissipates, giving way to mocking laughter. Whereas Achilles’ rage fuels the entire plot of the Iliad, drawing both divine and mortal actors into its orbit, Thersites’ iambic abuse of Agamemnon rebounds on the speaker, merely adding another lump to his already misshapen body—and offering a brief moment of entertainment for those witnessing his failed speech-act. Thersites’ physical appearance is described only to evoke distaste: instead of “hair,” he has sparse “wool” (lachnē) on his head. This same word is used for the woolly fleece that Nestor slips on his back at Iliad 10.134. There is no other character in the poem who is described as “bandy legged” (pholkos, 2.217) or “pointy headed” (2.219). Only Hephaestus shares the condition of physical disability with Thersites (2.217), and he is ridiculed for his limping gait by the other gods on Olympus (1.597–600). The silencing of Thersites’ unruly speech and the verbal and physical abuse of his body represent epic’s successful banishment of iambic, the genre devoted to bodily excess, insult, and abuse. A temporary roadblock within the heroic arc of the Iliad, Thersites’ challenge is easily diffused by Odysseus. Readers are in this way encouraged to enjoy the spectacle along with the rest of the assembled Achaeans. But the generic stakes of this minor episode are not so easily dismissed. When Odysseus threatened to strip Thersites of his clothes, he was, in effect, threatening to remove the very adornment that affirms Thersites’ status as part of the human community. Such nudity, combined with his sparse covering of “woolly” hair, would have made Thersites all body, rendering him barely recognizable as a man, let alone a hero. In contrast, the descriptive space allotted to Paris’ clothing in Book 3 conjures the opposite end of the affective (and generic) spectrum. Paris is a “godlike” man, a human whose base desires and animality have been sublimated into extreme culture (music, dancing, aestheticism). As we move, then, from Book 2 to Book 3, we leave behind Thersites’ iambic disruption and approach something that resembles the eroticized, sensuous atmosphere of Aphrodite’s realm. In this regard, Book 3 takes us back in time, beyond the narrative frame of the Iliad, to the very inception of the Trojan War, and the original theft of Helen. The atmosphere of the final part of the book is reminiscent of the original beauty contest for which Paris was the judge.15 But Book 3 also presents the epic’s first formal battle scene, starring Helen’s two “husbands” who meet in a single-combat contest that is meant to end the fighting once and for all, by determining which of them will be awarded Helen as his wife. 67

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PARIS’ AESTHETICS: A LYRIC INTERLUDE IN ILIAD 3 At the start of Book 3, Menelaos rushes at Paris, just like a lion who prepares to feast on his prey even though the dogs and hunters try to brush him off (Iliad 3.23–26). For his part, as soon as he sees Menelaos, Paris is paralyzed with fear (Iliad 3.30–31): “But Alexandros the godlike when he saw Menelaos / showing among the champions, the heart was shaken within him.” He immediately shrinks back into the Trojan army: As a man who has come on a snake in the mountain valley suddenly steps back, and the shivers come over his body, and he draws back and away, cheeks seized with a green pallor; so in terror of Atreus’ son godlike Alexandros lost himself again in the host of the haughty Trojans. (Iliad 3.33–37) Paris’ body reacts, succumbing to shivers and “green pallor,” before his mind can grasp what has happened, a situation familiar from Thersites’ doubling over in pain, and from those theoretical characterizations of affect as preperceptual and autonomous intensities. This is not an emotional response that Paris can modulate. It is visceral. His brother Hector scolds Paris: “Surely now the flowing-haired Achaians laugh at us, / thinking you are our bravest champion, only because your / looks are handsome, but there is no strength in your heart, no courage” (Iliad 3.43–45). Hector continues, further denouncing Paris as a delight to his enemies but a source of shame to the Trojans (Iliad 3.51). Commenting on allusions to Paris’ prior sexual “conquest,” Nancy Worman has remarked that “the centrality of the lover’s role to Paris’ type insures that even his encounters on the battlefield will have a tincture of the bedroom” (2003, 51).16 Nor is battle a situation in which Aphrodite can be of any help to Paris, as Hector tells him: “The lyre would not help you then, nor the favors of Aphrodite, / nor your locks, when you rolled in the dust, nor all your beauty” (Iliad 3.54–55). Hector’s shaming of his brother here suggests even more explicitly that Paris’ cowardice is a consequence of his special relationship with Aphrodite. Hector’s disparagement is aimed as much at the goddess as at her protégé. And the fact that Paris admits the truth of his brother’s words increases the likelihood that “Homer’s audience is intended to accept them as correct.”17 As if to reinforce Hector’s critique, at the very moment that Menelaos seems poised to claim victory, Aphrodite intervenes. She scoops Paris up in a cloud of mist and carries him to the safety of his bedroom. As Hélène Monsacré has noted, Paris “is the only hero removed from the area of combat and placed in his thalamos (‘bedchamber’)” (2017, 11). Within the spatial logic of the Iliad, the thalamos is a female-gendered zone. Fragrantly scented, and filled with soft linens, it has distinctly feminine associations. It is “not the place for a man, especially during times of war, and especially in the middle of the day” (2017, 11).18 Our sense here is of two worlds, two worldviews and genre-inflected sensibilities, colliding in the figures of Menelaos and Paris. Menelaos is the stereotypical epic (i.e., Iliadic) hero, dressed to fight and mentally and emotionally outfitted for this duel. The sight of Paris rouses him: “Making his way with long strides out in front of the 68

— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ army, / he was glad, like a lion who comes on a mighty carcass” (Iliad 3.22–23). His hunger for battle is compared to that of the beast who, “chancing upon the body of a horned stag / or wild goat,” is pleased to have found his kill and “eats it eagerly” (Iliad 3.24–25). By contrast, Paris, though he is “godlike,” is neither dressed for nor emotionally prepared to enter battle.19 He is not armed like the other Homeric heroes. He wears a leopard skin around his shoulders (Iliad 3.17), and in his hands he carries his bow and arrows, a sword, and two throwing spears. In his commentary, M. M. Willcock describes Paris’ equipment as “abnormal,” remarking also that “later in the book (330–38) he puts on the full armour of the Homeric hero” ([1978] 2001, 216).20 Martha Krieter-Spiro points out that the leopard skin has been seen as a marker of Paris’ “marginality”: “The speckled (ποικίλη) skin of the leopard underscores Paris’ striking appearance, his soft, almost feminine beauty” (2015, 20). She mentions also the lines from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite where “swift panthers” are among the retinue of animals following Aphrodite as she makes her way from her birthisland of Cyprus to Troy (2015, 71). The works of “very golden Aphrodite” that this hymn will celebrate are mentioned in its first line: “Tell me, Muse, of the works of golden Aphrodite, the Cyprian” (HHAphr. 1). This is a goddess who incites desire in the gods, men, and beasts of land, sea, and sky. Aphrodite “tames” the men and animals who fall under her sway (HHAphr. 3–4). Paris’ leopard-skin poncho in the Iliad (3.158–60) contains a hint of Aphrodite’s animal-worshippers, but the scene in the Homeric Hymn, where Aphrodite makes love to Anchises on a bed of animal skins, further develops this aspect of her sexual agency. Not only does Aphrodite, a goddess, assume the likeness of a virginal girl in order to satisfy her desire for a mortal man, but she does so in the virtual company of the animals who, equally entranced by her, have followed her to Mount Ida. In this sense, Aphrodite is the embodiment of wild, untamed desire. Her power genuflects to no known social norms, and her power can be felt by all manner of creatures, human and non-human. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite celebrates the capacity of eros to transgress, causing gods and goddesses to fall in love with mortal men (Zeus with Ganymede, Aphrodite with Anchises). It is to this kind of “place” that Paris will retreat when he is swept up by Aphrodite from the battlefield, at the point where Menelaos has gained the upper hand in battle. Within Iliad 3, the character of Paris attracts detailed and lush descriptions, which activate our awareness of his body, his clothes, and his aesthetic sensibilities. Whereas the description of Thersites is designed to elicit disapproval, Paris’ scintillating mien is pleasing to the eye. But it is also starkly out of place in the Iliad. And Aphrodite’s verbal evocation of him makes this abundantly clear. The goddess, disguised as an elderly woman, a wool-worker from Helen’s household in Sparta, appears before Helen as she is on the tower and urges her to return to Paris: He is in his chamber now, in the bed with its circled pattern, shining in his raiment and his own beauty; you would not think that he came from fighting against a man; you would think he was going rather to a dance, or rested and had been dancing lately. (Iliad 3.391–94) 69

— ​ M e l i s s a M u e l l e r —​ Paris does not appear like a man who has come from “fighting against a man” because he has not, in fact, been fighting. Aphrodite engulfed him in mist and whirled him away before Menelaos could strike a fatal blow. And now, with this description, the goddess tries to rouse Helen’s desire for the man for whom she abandoned Menelaos. With its devotion to eros, to beauty, and to all things delicate and shining, lyric poetry (particularly in the hands of poets such as Sappho and Alcman) celebrates the realm of Aphrodite. The atmosphere of erotic lyric clings to Paris, whose delicacy resonates as a thing of shame and embarrassment in Homer’s martial epic. Paris is “shining in his raiment and his own beauty” (Iliad 3.392).21 He lies now in bed, in a “perfumed bedchamber” (3.382) where, having wrapped him up in “thick mist” (3.381), Aphrodite had earlier deposited him. He looks like a dancer rather than a warrior, as if he had been on his way to the dance floor, only to have mistakenly stepped onto the battlefield instead. As she returns to the bedchamber where he awaits her, Helen compares Paris negatively to Menelaos: There was a time before now you boasted that you were better than warlike Menelaos, in spear and hand and your own strength. Go forth now and challenge warlike Menelaos once again to fight you in combat. But no: I advise you rather to let it be … (Iliad 3.430–34) Rather than defending himself, Paris expresses the intensity of his desire for Helen which is stronger even, he claims, than when he first led her out of lovely Lacedaemon: “Never before as now has passion enmeshed my senses” (Iliad 3.442). And he leads her to bed. We are told that as they are making love, Menelaos ranges “like a wild beast” up and down the army, still searching for Paris (Iliad 3.449). Both Paris and Helen challenge the epic norms around gender and genre-inflected behavior, Paris because he is a connoisseur of female beauty and choral dancing, and because he wears a flamboyant cape, and does not demonstrate any “natural” affinity for the masculine sphere of battle, and Helen because she resists the passive role of Paris’ lover that Aphrodite imposes on her. Her masculine tendencies are played up even more by Sappho, who, in fragment 16, says that Helen moves freely between households and husbands, choosing (as Sappho famously puts it) to follow Paris over the sea to Troy, abandoning her parents, her child, and her husband. Helen’s mobility, autonomy, and capacity to decide for herself what is most beautiful and precious (kalliston) are all fully masculine attributes in an ancient Greek context.

CONCLUSION In making sense of Paris’ effeminate, eroticized persona within the Iliad, we have kept our focus on affect and genre. It would, in many ways, have been easier to follow Hector’s (or Helen’s) lead in simply branding Paris a “failed” martial hero, just as it might have been simpler to accept Odysseus’ condemnation of Thersites’ disruption. But if we consider Paris and Thersites strictly on the Iliad’s own terms 70

— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ of epic masculinity, we notice only the traits they are missing (e.g., martial valor, orderly speech, a certain physique). We have instead looked at these absences as differences that are meaningful markers of affiliation with poetic genres that are adjacent to epic. What the Iliad deems a failed character is often a character whose quirks and deviations from the norms of epic masculinity are entirely appropriate in another poetic context. As a protégé of Aphrodite, a man whose sartorial choices highlight his marginality, and who trembles with fear at the sight of Menelaos, Paris falls far short of the epic ideal of masculinity. And yet he is a consummate lyric hero. The Iliad establishes its own genre-based expectations by exposing its readers to characters and episodes that resonate, in ways we have explored, as distinctly nonepic. Whereas the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon in Book 1 introduces us to the main protagonist and his supernatural rage, the following two books pull back from both the man and his anger. Not much seems to happen in the episodes we have considered from Books 2 and 3. We have come no closer to resolving the Trojan War. A duel that was intended to end the fighting once and for all turns into an erotic diversion. An assembly that was meant to allow the Achaeans to ratify a plan of action is temporarily hijacked. Both episodes immerse the Iliad’s readers in affects and poetic scenarios that are, at best, tangential to Homeric epic. As such, however, they help us hone our readerly sensibilities, providing seemingly light entertainment and a “break” from Achillean wrath as we gear ourselves for the more serious epic fare to come.

NOTES   1 I use the term “reader” as shorthand for any audience member engaged in making sense of the Iliad, whether through text or performance.   2 On critique and “postcritical” reading practices, see especially Felski (2015), Anker and Felski (2017), but also Best and Marcus (2009).   3 See Massumi (1995, 2002).   4 On this evolution from oral composition to textual script, see Nagy (1996).   5 I cite here and elsewhere in this chapter from the translation of the Iliad by Richmond Lattimore (Homer [1951] 2011), using his book and line numbers.   6 See especially Brennan (2004) on the transmissibility of affect.   7 See Telò (2020) on the “rough” texture of Archilochus and Hipponax.   8 See especially Ransom (2011).   9 See also Farrell (2003, 387–89), referenced by Foster, Kurke, and Weiss (2020). 10 As Thadious M. Davis explains in his notes to Quicksand, Naxos is a fictionalized institution, a fusion of two places where Larsen had worked and studied: the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where Larsen was a nurse, and Fisk Normal High School in Nashville, Tennessee, where Larsen was a boarding student (2002, 138n2). 11 See, for example, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ Introduction for a history of “symptomatic” reading, i.e., a critical approach that assumes that “the most significant truths are not immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible” (2009, 4). As a counterpoint, Best and Marcus propose what they term “surface reading,” an attempt to understand the complexity of “surface” features of a text. 12 As Gregory Nagy has argued, Greek epic aligns itself with praise poetry by characterizing Thersites as “most hated” to the two best of the Achaeans (Achilles and Odysseus): “Thersites is the most inimical figure to the two prime characters of Homeric Epos precisely because it is his function to blame them” (1979, 60).

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— ​ M e l i s s a M u e l l e r —​ 13 Thersites’ social status is left somewhat vague by the Iliad, even though in other literary sources, he clearly belongs to the nobility (Elmer 2013, 93–94). But one sign of his lower social standing is that we are never told who his forefathers are. 14 For disability-studies informed readings of the Thersites episode, see Brockliss (2019) and Christensen (2021, 370–77). 15 Book 3 opens with the “clamour and shouting” of the Trojans, a sound that is compared to the noise that cranes make when escaping the wintertime and heavy rains as they “clamorously wing their way to the streaming Ocean” (Iliad 3.5). We are sensitized from the beginning to sounds, as well as sights, and launched into a narrative that sustains itself through similes and elaborate descriptive passages. 16 On Paris’ non-normative masculinity, also see Arthur (1981), Ransom (2011), and Warwick (2019, 7–8). 17 Howie (1977, 220). 18 On the gendered semiotics of scented, fragrant rooms, see Monsacré (2017, 69). 19 The adjective theoeidēs (οr variants thereof) is used of Paris multiple times in this scene, e.g., at 3.16, 27, 30, and 37. 20 What follows, in Iliad 3.330–38, is a typical arming scene. 21 Compare Worman (2003, 105, on 3.392): “Aphrodite’s portrait of the love object explicitly emphasizes Paris’ shimmering appearance.”

WORKS CITED Anker, Elizabeth S., and Rita Felski, eds. 2017. Critique and Postcritique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Arthur, Marylin B. 1981. “The Divided World of Iliad VI.” Women’s Studies 8, no. 1–2: 21–46. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1: 1–21. Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brockliss, William. 2019. “Out of the Mix: (Dis)ability, Intimacy, and the Homeric Poems.” Classical World 113, no. 1: 1–27. Christensen, Joel. 2021. “Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer.” Classical World 114, no. 4: 365–93. Clough, Patricia T. 2010. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 206–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Elmer, David F. 2013. The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Farrell, Joseph. 2003. “Classical Genre in Theory and Practice.” New Literary History 34, no. 3: 383–408. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foster, Margaret, Leslie Kurke, and Naomi Weiss. 2020. Introduction to Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, edited by Margaret Foster, Leslie Kurke and Naomi Weiss, 1–28. Vol. 4 of Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song. Leiden: Brill. Homer. [1951] 2011. The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howie, J. G. 1977. “Sappho Fr. 16 (LP): Self-Consolation and Encomium.” In Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 1, edited by Francis Cairns, 207–35. Liverpool: ARCA 2. Krieter-Spiro, Martha. 2015. Homer’s Iliad: The Basel Commentary. Book 3. Translated by Benjamin W. Millis and Sara Strack. Edited by S. Douglas Olsen. Boston: De Gruyter. Larsen, Nella. [1928] 2002. Quicksand, Edited by Thadious M. Davis. New York: Penguin Books.

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— ​ A n A f f e c t S t u d i e s A p p r o a c h —​ Martin, Richard P. 2005. “Epic as Genre.” In A Companion to Ancient Epic, edited by John Miles Foley, 9–19. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31: 83–109. ———. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Monsacré, Hélène. 2017. The Tears of Achilles. Translated by Nicholas J. Snead. Center for Hellenic Studies, Hellenic Studies Series 75. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nagy, Gregory. 1979. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1996. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oswald, Alice. 2011. Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad. London: Faber and Faber Limited. Postlethwaite, N. 1988. “Thersites in the Iliad.” Greece & Rome 35, no. 2: 123–36. Ransom, Christopher. 2011. “Aspects of Effeminacy and Masculinity in the Iliad.” Antichthon 45: 35–57. Telò, Mario. 2020. “Iambic Horror: Shivers and Brokenness in Archilochus and Hipponax.” In Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models, edited by Margaret Foster, Leslie Kurke and Naomi Weiss, 271–97. Vol. 4 of Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song. Leiden: Brill. Warwick, Celsiana. 2019. “We Two Alone: Conjugal Bonds and Homoerotic Subtext in the Iliad.” Helios 46, no. 2: 115–39. Watkins, Megan. 2010. “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 269–85. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Willcock, Malcolm M., ed. [1978] 2001. Iliad, Books I–XII, by Homer. London: Bristol Classical Press. Worman, Nancy. 2003. The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Zhang, Dora. 2020. Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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CHAPTER FIVE

A N E T W O R K A P P R OA C H

T R A C K I N G F E M A L E P OW E R I N S E V E N E P I C N A R R AT I V E S

rsr

Pádraig MacCarron, Máirín MacCarron, Sílvio R. Dahmen, Joseph Yose, and Ralph Kenna Over the last two decades, a new area involving complex networks has emerged on the research landscape (Newman 2009). Scholars in this field take quantitative methods from mathematics, complexity science, and statistical physics, and apply them to study large interacting systems in a range of contexts. A large system of interacting entities is often referred to as a complex system. The principles underlying complex systems are that (1) a small change to the initial conditions can have large effects on the system. This often makes it impossible to predict the future state of a system with a high level of accuracy, e.g., weather systems; (2) the individual particles of a complex system may not provide much information about the entire system. For example, the properties of a single water molecule are vastly different to, and provide little information about, the behavior of a river. Similarly, observing a single bird provides little information about the behavior of a flock of birds. The structural characteristics associated with this overall system are known as emergent properties. A complex network is a specific type of complex system—one in which you have specifically defined interactions (known as edges) between the entities in the system (known as nodes). These include systems within social contexts such as networks of people and scientific contexts such as the neural networks that control the brain. They include networks from the real world like power grids and theoretical models such as idealized random graphs. Any such network is a set of nodes connected or linked by edges. An example of a simple network is given in Figure 5.1. This has eight nodes connected together by eleven edges. The total number of connections a node has is known as its degree. In Figure 5.1, for example, node a has a degree of four. Networks were originally studied as part of a branch of mathematics called graph theory. While graph theory has been applied to social networks since the 1930s (Moreno 1934), its potential for analyzing large complex systems, social or otherwise, did not emerge until a half-century later (Watts and Strogatz 1998). In a social network, nodes represent people, and the edges are interactions between them. Here we apply complex network methods to epic literature. 74

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-7

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Figure 5.1  An example of a network for distinct nodes, a-h, each connected by edges.

But what can network analysis reveal about epic literature that cannot be determined through the traditional analytical toolkits used by philologists and comparatists? In this chapter, we explain how network analysis, with its powerful research methods developed for the analysis of big data in the “hard” sciences, can be applied to shed light on epic literature in ways that are not possible through conventional readings of texts. The toolkit of network science, we argue, provides a new means to generatively compare epics from different cultures and time periods. Gender is a perennial topic in global epic studies, despite the widespread lack of female representation in this genre, either as authors or as literary subjects; hence, we consider whether network analysis can uncover “hidden” female authority in the texts themselves. Although theorizing in gender studies rightly questions the normativity and justice of a strict gender binary, and proposes instead a spectrum of gender that reflects gradation and fluidity, for the purposes of this essay, we speak of “male” and “female” figures to illustrate the applicability and usefulness of network analysis in epic studies. Network analysis could also be fruitful in studies that challenge the gender binarism itself, or explore gender intersectionally, taking into account other factors such as race and ethnicity. In the same fashion as complex systems, stories can be seen as “emergent properties” of cultures. In the comparative spirit of this volume, we use network methodologies and social network analysis to compare the representation of characters marked as female by conventional cultural standards in seven epic narratives from different cultures and time periods. We extract the social networks in these narratives, and use network analysis to uncover the varying degrees of power and autonomy wielded by female characters in these stories. Historically, there have been various attempts to distinguish between different types of narrative literature. For example, Martin Nilsson (1932) distinguishes between divine and heroic mythology, while William Bascom (1965) identifies three different types of prose narratives—folktales, myths, 75

— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​ and legends—genres common to virtually all cultures. However, the distinctions between these are often blurred. As a result, we do not take any particular classification and choose a range of narratives that span millennia. Specifically, we analyze gender in five ancient epic narratives: the Maya Popol Vuh (undated); the Greek Iliad (circa eighth century BCE) by Homer; the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge (circa ninth century CE); the Old English Beowulf (circa tenth century); the Icelandic Laxdæla Saga (thirteenth century); and two more recent fantasy epic narratives in English, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings ([1937–1949] 1995), by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the first five books of the series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2011) by George R. R. Martin. We apply network measures to quantitatively identify which characters have the most access to critical information in these works, reading their access as a sign of influence in their respective story worlds. Our analysis shows that while male characters have the most influence overall, female characters have relatively more influence in the Laxdæla Saga than they do in the other works—a finding that corroborates a “traditional” comparative, narrative analysis of the works. The Laxdæla Saga is also the work with the greatest core number of characters, in part because it takes place over a longer period of time. But tellingly, its social network is more similar to modern social networks in the real world than those of the other works.

SOCIAL NETWORKS Early studies of social networks often used graphs that were completely random or completely regular (i.e., each node has the same number of connections) to model a social system. While complete randomness or complete regularity has the advantage of being mathematically tractable, it is not reflective of social reality or even of physical reality. This was demonstrated more than two decades ago when Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz (1998) compared three different types of real-world networks. They examined a power-grid network, a social network of movie actors, and a neural network of a nematode worm, and found that all have topologies that are neither random nor regular. Instead, they have complex topologies. In these complex networks, on average, any two nodes can be linked together through a surprisingly short chain of edges. The average number of steps between any two such nodes is known as the average path length. In sociology, this is connected to the famous notion of “six degrees of separation.” In 1967, Stanley Milgram performed an experiment in which he measured chains of acquaintanceships by sending letters to 160 random people, asking them to forward the letters to someone who could ultimately send them to a particular individual, and found that only six steps are needed to link anyone to anyone else on average (1967). On Facebook, the average path length is measured as four, demonstrating the highly connected nature of online social networks (Backstrom et al. 2012). Another network property known as the clustering coefficient demonstrates that if a node is connected to two other nodes, there is a high probability that those nodes are also connected; for example, if you know two people, there is a high probability they will also know each other. However, in random networks, this probability turns out to be almost zero. Further to this, in complex networks, the average degree (number of connections as mentioned above) a node has provides almost 76

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Figure 5.2  Degree distributions for two networks with 1,000 nodes and the same average degree. Panel (A) shows the degree distributions for a random network, and Panel (B), for a complex network.

no information about the highest degree or overall variation in degrees in complex networks. The distribution of the degrees of the nodes in this case is said to be “heavy-tailed”; they tend to be noisy, unlike the symmetrical distributions of a random graph. As an example of this, Panel (A) in Figure 5.2 shows the distribution of the number of connections a node has in a randomly generated graph with 1,000 nodes. The distribution is symmetric with most nodes having a degree close to the average (50) and none being over 20 connections away from the average. Panel (B) shows the distribution for a complex network (note that the vertical axis is on a log scale here to account for the larger range of values). Here we observe that most nodes have a much lower number of connections than the average, and there is a high probability for a node to have only a single connection here. However, there is a low, but finite, probability for a node to have almost over 200 more connections than the average in this network. In other words, in the random network (A), most nodes have a degree close to the average and this decays evenly at either side. In the complex network (B), however, the average degree tells us little about the degree a randomly picked node will have, with there being a high probability for a node to have a much lower degree than the average, and a small probability for a node to have a degree significantly larger than the average. Therefore, as in a complex system, knowing the properties of an individual node in that system provides little information on the global properties of the system. Methods for analyzing this type of distribution give rise to different classes of complex networks (Amaral et al. 2000). Since its conception, complex networks have been applied to a wide range of areas from archeology (Knappett et al. 2008) to zoology (MacCarron and Dunbar 2016). Within a range of fields, it has been observed that social networks have different properties when compared to complex networks (Newman and Park 2003). Social networks tend to have higher than normal clustering coefficients compared to other complex networks, and they also have a property known as assortativity. This is the idea that people tend to be connected to people similar to themselves. One measure 77

— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​ of this is their number of friends, i.e., their degree; popular people are more likely to be connected to other popular people, but the same is found in other properties when the data provides them, such as age, ethnicity, and religion.

THE EPICS AT HAND Returning to the epics at hand—the Popol Vuh, the Iliad, the Táin Bó Cuailgne, Beowulf, the Laxdaela Saga, The Lord of the Rings, and the ongoing series A Song of Ice and Fire—we first provide some background on the works before explaining how we applied network analysis to them. The Popol Vuh is a collection of myths of the K’iche’ people in Central America.1 They were first recorded in writing (in Spanish) in the early eighteenth century by Francisco Ximénez, a Dominican friar. The protagonists of many of the epic tales are the twin brothers Jun Ajpu and Xb’alamke. The Spanish translation by Adrián Recinos [1947] (1960) is the one used here. Of the characters with an identifiable gender, 24.5% of them are women. The Iliad, which along with the Odyssey comprises the two hegemonic Greek epics, takes place over a period of a few weeks during the final year of the Trojan War.2 Much of the story focuses on the hero Achilles and his initial refusal to fight for the Greeks against the Trojans. The translation by E. V. Rieu (2003) is the one used here. Only 9% of the characters are female. The Táin Bó Cúailnge (hereafter Táin), meaning “The Cattle Raid of Cooley,” is an Irish epic that survives in three manuscripts from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It describes the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Connacht, led by Queen Medb and her husband Ailill Mac Cáta, in an attempt to obtain a magical bull. It mostly focuses on the boy hero Cúchulainn and his single-handed defense against the invaders. The story is thought to take place in Ireland’s pre-Christian past, probably around the first century BC, but was first written down around the ninth century. We worked from the modern translation by Thomas Kinsella (1969), which is a compilation of the two versions with additional stories explaining the lead-up to the cattle raid. The majority of the characters in this story are male, but Queen Medb is a dominant figure, as we shall see, and 15% of the characters are female. The epic poem Beowulf survives in a single codex (handwritten book) from the early eleventh century, but the poem may have first been written down as early as the eighth century (Bloomfield 1970; Frank 2007).3 In the poem, Beowulf, a Geatish hero, engages in three major battles against monsters. He vanquishes Grendel, a monster who had been attacking the mead hall of the Danes; defeats Grendel’s mother; and dies following his injuries in slaying a dragon. We used Kevin CrossleyHolland’s translation of the poem (1999). This is the smallest data set of the seven we examined, and 16% of the characters are female. The Laxdæla Saga tells of the people in an area of western Iceland from the late ninth to the early eleventh centuries. It tells the story of a few generations and ends in a tragic love triangle between Guðrún and two friends. It is one of the few narratives here that focuses more on female protagonists. We use the translation by Jane Smiley (2000). Female characters are 22% of those with identifiable genders. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy story by J. R. R. Tolkien comprising three separate books first published in the 1950s. It follows the story of a group of adventurers 78

— ​ A N e t w o r k A p p r o a c h —​ who set out to destroy “the ring of power,” a weapon created by the evil lord Sauron. It is set in a fantasy world with many different creatures and takes place over a large mythical world known as “Middle-earth.” The characters are predominantly male (90%), as has been observed before, and will be discussed below. A Song of Ice and Fire is a modern fantasy series by George R. R. Martin. It is set in a fictional feudalistic society. Martin places both male and female characters in positions of power and details their struggles to rule. The series is as-of-yet unfinished, and here we focus on the first five books, the total released to date. Here, 19% of the characters are female.

APPLYING NETWORK ANALYSIS TO EPICS To understand the representation of society and relationships in these works, we first carefully read each text and recorded every time two characters interacted in any way—physically, verbally, or are otherwise in the same company. Essentially, we recorded all types of relationships from those with passing acquaintances to spouses. We then plotted the distributions and compared the structures of the social networks in each epic to determine to what extent the epics were similar to one another. We focused on the properties of the protagonists and characters in central positions to show their importance in the presented social networks. We also recorded hostile links when two characters meet in combat and distinguished them from non-hostile interactions. There are many battles in these narratives, and we would miss many interactions if we don’t acknowledge this second type of link. We also “weighted” the strength of each link by adding one to its weight each time it occurs in a new chapter or section. This allowed us to illustrate the difference between pairs of characters who are well-acquainted and have strong ties, and those who merely interact once in the story. The networks we created can be seen in, for example, the Iliad in Figure 5.3. Here, the social network comprises hostile and non-hostile interactions. The size of each node is related to the number of connections they have (from 1 to 106); the larger the node, the greater the number of connections. The central cluster contains most of the main characters, with the Trojans being on the lower left of the central cluster and the Greeks on the upper right of the cluster. The tightly bound cluster on the far right is a group of Nereids, sea creatures who are connected to the main network by Thetis, Achilles’ mother. While such visualizations can be interesting to observe, they ultimately only give an overall impression of the network rather than precise details. If we wish to understand the actual workings of the network, we have to analyze the network properties embedded in them more deeply. The Iliad is one of the larger networks, with 724 nodes. On average, each character in this text interacts with around seven other characters; this is the average degree (all values are reported in Table 5.1). There are a small number of steps, on average, separating two characters in the Iliad with an average path length of 3.42; however, the longest actual chain is 11 steps. As can be seen in Figure 5.3, there are densely connected regions in the center of this network corresponding to the core members of each faction. Within these, there are a large number of triads (groups of three characters, all connected). This gives a relatively high clustering coefficient of 79

— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​

Figure 5.3  The social network of the Iliad. The size of each node corresponds to how many connections each character has.

0.42, and this is over 500 times larger than what a randomly connected graph with the same number of nodes and edges would have. The Iliad has an assortativity coefficient of almost 0. In real social networks, this tends to be a small positive number indicating that people prefer to interact with those relatively similar to themselves. Finally, we looked at the degree distribution shown in red in Figure 5.4 (B). The average number of connections is 7.42; however, we see that the majority of the characters have a number of connections between 1 and 40. There are then ten characters with a degree from 50 to 106. We analyze this type of distribution in more detail below. Moving out from this specific example, we now turn to a global analysis of all of the epics under consideration. The core network properties of each of these texts are shown in Table 5.1. The number of nodes in each network is given by N, and the number of links, by L. The average number of connections (degree) each node has is given by ‹k›, and the average number of steps separating each pair of characters (the average path length) is given by ℓ. If ℓ is small (the minimum value is 1) and the clustering coefficient C (the propensity for neighbors of a node to be connected) is large (the maximum value is 1), the network is said to be a “small world.” The maximum number of steps separating two characters (known as the diameter) is ℓmax, and finally, the assortativity is r. The assortativity is the likelihood for characters to be connected to people with a similar number of connections, and it ranges from –1 to +1. A negative (disassortative) value means, on average, that characters do 80

— ​ A N e t w o r k A p p r o a c h —​ Table 5.1  The network properties of seven epics.

Network

N

L

‹k›

ℓ

ℓmax

C

r

Popol Vuh

106

409

7.72

2.80

6

0.51

–0.32

Iliad

724

2686

7.42

3.48

11

0.42

–0.08*

Táin Bó Cuailgne

449

1270

5.66

2.80

8

0.69

–0.34

Beowulf

74

167

4.51

2.38

6

0.56

–0.12

Laxdæla Saga

338

894

5.29

5.01

16

0.44

 0.19

Lord of the Rings

265

892

6.73

2.90

7

0.53

–0.20

A Song of Ice and Fire

1,786

14,478

16.21

3.33

11

0.66

–0.03*

N is the number of nodes in the network, L the number of edges, ‹k› the average degree, ℓ the average path length, ℓmax is the diameter, C the clustering coefficient, and r the assortativity. *

The error in the assortativity is larger than the value, so the network is neither assortative nor disassortative.

not associate with characters like themselves. A positive (assortative) value means, on average, that characters do associate with others like themselves. A value with an asterisk means the error is larger than the value so it is neither assortative nor disassortative. We observe that the networks vary substantially in size, with Beowulf being the smallest with only 74 characters, and the first five books of A Song of Ice and Fire being the largest with 1,786 characters. The latter also has the largest number of interactions, which in turn leads it to have an average degree more than twice as high as the network with the next highest degree; the full distributions are shown in Table 5.1. The average path length in each case is quite low, and clustering coefficient is high, indicating that all the epics are small worlds. The diameter is the largest possible shortest path between any two characters. This gives an idea of how much time or how many generations are in the narrative. The Icelandic Laxdaela Saga has the largest diameter at 16, and this is because the story takes place over a large period of time so a character at the beginning is highly separated from a character introduced near the end. The clustering coefficient in each case is close to 0.5, indicating if a character interacts with two others, there is a one in two chance that those two characters also interact with each other. Finally, the assortativity tells us that the Laxdæla Saga is the only narrative that is purely assortative, with both the Iliad and A Song of Ice and Fire being mixed, and the remainder being disassortative. This means characters in them tend to interact more commonly with characters who have a highly different degree, a property distinct from the real social networks in Newman and Park (2003). We next analyze the degree distributions in the works; there are three classes of degree distributions typically observed in complex networks (Amaral et al. 2000). These are power-law distributions; exponential family distributions; and hybrids of the two (power law with an exponential tail). Real social networks are typically found to belong to the second category (Amaral et al. 2000; and MacCarron et al. 2016). The first of these, power-law distributions, are frequently observed in empirical data. 81

— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​

Figure 5.4  The degree distributions for networks in the seven epics. Note that the scale on the horizontal axis in Panel (A) is different from the others. In most cases, there are a few characters with very large degrees skewing the distributions to the right.

In a power-law distribution, most characters have a very low degree of interaction, but a small number have an exceptionally high degree, and these tend to hold the network together. The second, exponential family distributions, are similar, but such networks decay faster and are less reliant on high-degree characters—that is, their removal does not fragment the network. The final category is a combination of the two, and it is commonly found in large non-social complex networks. Figure 5.4 shows the degree distribution for each of the seven networks. Classifying these networks according to which distribution they belong to is often challenging due to the sample size and inherent noisiness of empirical data (Clauset et al. 2009). In Panel (A) of Figure 5.4, we observe that the distributions of the Táin and Beowulf are remarkably similar. There is statistical support for them to belong to the same distribution in the second category, though there is support for the Táin to belong to the third also. In Panel (B), the Iliad and Laxdæla Saga are shown and belong to different distributions. The Iliad is most likely from the third family with Laxdæla belonging to the second. Panel (C) in Figure 5.4 shows the Popol Vuh and Lord of the Rings. Initially, they behave similarly, but Lord of the Rings has seven characters who have much higher degrees (i.e., the seven on the right of the figure) than anyone in the Popol Vuh. This is partly because there are more characters, and it is a much longer story allowing the characters more time to increase their degrees. 82

— ​ A N e t w o r k A p p r o a c h —​ Both distributions are well described by the third class of distributions. Finally, Panel (D) of Figure 5.4 displays the degree distributions for the first five books of A Song of Ice and Fire (ASoIaF). This is the largest of the stories, and therefore, characters have the largest degrees, with four interacting with more than 200 other characters. This distribution is well fitted by the second category and shares the same specific distribution as the Laxdæla Saga. From the structure of the social networks, we observe that the Laxdæla Saga has properties similar to those of real social networks. The next closest is A Song of Ice and Fire, though its assortativity is lower than what is typically observed (for further details, see Gessey-Jones et al. 2020). The network of the Iliad also has properties similar to those in real social networks, though its degree distribution does not come from the second family of distributions as in real social networks.

THE ROLE OF FEMALE CHARACTERS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS One measure of a character’s importance in a social network is their degree, that is, how many other characters they interact with. Another measure of a character’s importance in a network is what is known as the “betweenness centrality,” a property relying on all the network information rather than just one local node. To find the betweenness centrality of a character, first the shortest path between all pairs of characters is calculated; a character with a high betweenness centrality lies on many of these paths. Therefore, if information is passed between any two nodes in a network, a character with high betweenness is likely to lie on a path between those two nodes, so the flow of information would have to pass through that node. This means that a character with a high betweenness is central to the structure of the network. For example, in the network of the Iliad in Figure 5.3, on the right the cluster of Nereids is linked to the rest of the network through a single node (Thetis). A path going from one of the Nereids to any non-Nereid will therefore have to pass through Thetis, giving her a large betweenness centrality value. In each of these networks, we examined the role of female characters in the network by calculating their betweenness centrality and quantifying the number of interactions involving female characters. We looked at how many female characters are in the ten highest betweenness nodes for each text, and to facilitate comparison between texts with different numbers of characters, we looked at the number of female characters in the set of the top 10% highest betweenness characters. The results are summarized in Table 5.2. Here, the first and second columns indicate the number of nodes and the number of female nodes in each network, respectively. Sometimes, however, it is not possible to identify the gender of a character as when a character is just named but no further information is given. There are only six of these in Laxdæla Saga but 84 in Lord of the Rings. They tend to have a very low number of connections though (far less than the average degree, and often only 1). The next column identifies the percentage of female characters (with the number in parentheses) in the top 10% of betweenness centrality. The fifth column reports the number of female characters in the highest ten betweenness characters in the network. The final column gives the percentage of interactions involving at least one female character. 83

— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​ Table 5.2  Representation of female epic characters in social networks.

Network

# of nodes

# of female nodes

% (#) of female characters in the top 10% of betweenness centrality

# of female characters in the top 10 highest betweenness centrality

% of interactions involving female characters

Popol Vuh

106

 12

10% (1)

1

13.3%

Iliad

724

 32

10% (4)

2

10.0%

Táin Bó Cuailgne

449

 35

23.1% (6)

3

21.6%

Beowulf

74

 8

0 (0)

1

17.5%

Laxdæla Saga

338

 74

21.1% (7)

4

30.4%

Lord of the Rings

265

 17

0 (0)

0

  4.4%

A Song of 1,786 Ice and Fire

294

9.8% (15)

2

21.2%

Note: The Táin and Laxdæla Saga have the highest proportion of central female characters, as well as the highest number of interactions involving female characters.

One of the narratives with the strongest representation of female characters is the Táin, with Queen Medb as one of its main characters. Of its top ten characters ranked in order of betweenness centrality, three are female. Among the top 10% of characters in order of betweenness, almost one quarter are female. In total, 21% of the interactions in the Táin’s narrative involve female characters. Contrast this with Beowulf, which has only one female character in the top ten ranked by betweenness, and no female characters in the top 10% betweenness characters. Moreover, only 17.5% of the interactions in Beowulf involve a female character. The Laxdæla Saga also has a strong representation of female characters. Taking the top ten characters ranked by betweenness centrality, four of those are female, and of the top 10%, over one fifth are female. Over 30% of the interactions in the Laxdæla Saga involve female characters. Unsurprisingly, Lord of the Rings has one of the lowest representations of female characters, with none in the top 10% of betweenness, and less than 5% of the total interactions involving female characters. Finally, the first five books of A Song of Ice and Fire are only slightly better and still predominantly male, with two of the top three characters in order of betweenness being female. Of the top 10% of highest betweenness characters, about one tenth of them are female, with two female characters in the actual top ten. Similar to the Táin, over 21% of interactions involve female characters. The Iliad also does not have many high betweenness female characters, with two in the top ten. One tenth of the 10% highest betweenness characters are female, and less than 10% of the interactions in the story have a female character. This is similar to the Popol Vuh, 84

— ​ A N e t w o r k A p p r o a c h —​ with just one female character in the top 10%; however, that character has the highest betweenness in the network. In total, 13% of the interactions in the Popol Vuh involve a female character. It is interesting to note that the epic with the highest number of interactions involving female characters, the Laxdæla Saga, is also the one with a social network most similar to real social networks. We can thus perhaps infer that this text best represents a real society. It may, however, be a surprise to readers that this is a text from the Middle Ages. One might have expected A Song of Ice and Fire to perform better in our analysis of these measures. However, our analysis bears up the work of literary scholars in their examinations of Martin’s depictions of women. For example, Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun has argued that his female characters are frequently silenced and discarded and their “value depends mainly on their marriageability” in Martin’s patriarchal world (2019, 6). The dearth of female characters under the betweenness centrality metric is especially interesting in this case, as in Beowulf, the Iliad, and the Táin, the ruling elite all are in the top characters when ordered by betweenness. Similarly, betweenness centrality is often the measure that reveals women’s underlying role in society (Prado et al. 2020). In contrast, women are far better represented under this measure in some of the much older epics, specifically the Táin and the Laxdæla Saga. Queen Medb to some extent skews the analysis in the Táin as she is such a dominant figure, and in many ways subverts the norms of medieval Irish society (Oxenham 2016); however, she is not the only female character who features in this regard in the story, in what may reveal a certain social reality. Perhaps the most significant difference between the works of Tolkien and Martin, and the older epics examined here are that Tolkien and Martin are self-consciously creating fantasy worlds influenced to some extent by their differing understandings of “medievalism”; in contrast, the authors of the others attempt to reflect on and capture their people’s imagined and heroic past. It would, however, be reading too much into all these texts to make bold claims about the extent to which they represent the views of their societies as a whole. We can, however, challenge uncritical assumptions about female representation in ancient sources vis-à-vis modern texts. It is telling that of the seven texts that we examined, the two most recent perform quite poorly when it comes to their representation of women.

CONCLUSIONS Network analysis is still a relatively new tool. Here, we have applied it to seven different epics, the oldest and newest being thousands of years apart. This approach has allowed us to quantitatively compare their narratives in a powerful new way that is different from traditional methods of comparative textual analysis, for example, identifying common themes or motifs. This is also different from more low-level quantitative approaches, which depend on such processes as merely counting characters, events, or words; indeed, the additional mathematical analysis sets our work apart. For example, it would be difficult to determine betweenness centrality by any other means, and it is a very potent indicator of influence within a network. The network-analysis approach is especially useful in a comparative textual study focused on critical issues like gender representation. In our analysis of seven epics utilizing this approach, we determined that the Táin and Beowulf have social 85

— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​ network structures that are similar to each other. The Iliad, the Popol Vuh, and Lord of the Rings also have network structures that are similar to each other, as do the Laxdæla Saga and A Song of Ice and Fire. However, two of the oldest epics, the Iliad and the Laxdæla Saga, stand out as having structures that are most similar to those of real-world social networks. Our study also illuminated that interactions involving female characters in these texts vary from 5% to 30%. It is notable that the text with the lowest representation of female interactions is from the twentieth century, while an early Scandinavian text, the Laxdæla Saga, has the highest representation of female interactions. The relative lack of female influence (and female interactions) in Lord of the Rings is confirmed by the fact that no female character occurs in the top 10% of characters ranked by betweenness centrality. By contrast, in the early Irish Táin, one quarter of the characters in the top 10% for betweenness are female. Our exploratory analysis of certain global properties in a sample of epic texts from different time periods and cultures reveals a range of literary representations of female characters, and challenges assumptions about the oppression of women in ancient and modern societies, and about a teleology of progress on gender. In our study, we applied network analysis in an exploratory way to make comparisons across a handful of epic narratives. However, there are other quantitative, big-data methods that can be used to explore critical issues within a specific narrative, and this can be especially helpful with a “long form” like epic literature. For example, a method known as “community detection” finds cluster of characters that are tightly connected together in social networks. Applying this method to the Iliad successfully identifies the Greek faction and the Trojan faction without knowing any information about the characters other than whom they interact with (MacCarron 2014). For the sagas of the Icelanders, it shows which sagas have the largest narrative and conceptual overlap with each other (MacCarron and Kenna 2013). For the Táin, it not only separates the Ulster faction from the invaders from Connaught, but also isolates a cluster of Ulster exiles who fought with the Connaught army (MacCarron 2014). Again, without having any information on the characters, these methods can successfully identify the faction they belong to. This is an exploratory analysis using novel techniques. We have shown that we can quantitatively compare the social worlds portrayed in different narratives and quantitatively analyze the role of female characters. We show that the two modern texts perform poorly regarding the representation of women, and the Icelandic Laxdæla Saga is the only narrative that is both similar to real-world networks and has a more even distribution of male and female characters in both positions of power and standard interactions.

DEDICATION We dedicate this chapter to Professor Ralph Kenna who died in October 2023. Ralph was a pioneer in applying complex networks to mythological and epic narratives in order to quantitatively compare them. His connections brought this team together; he was a wonderful mentor and friend, and is deeply missed. 86

— ​ A N e t w o r k A p p r o a c h —​

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors of this chapter are further developing their methodology to analyze women’s roles as connectors in the collaborative project, “Women, Conflict and Peace: Gendered Networks in Early Medieval Narratives,” supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2018-014). Pádraig MacCarron’s work is also supported by the European Research Council (802421). The authors would like to thank Julia Hillner for her helpful comments on this chapter.

NOTES 1 For more on the Popol Vuh, see Arturo Arias’s chapter in this volume. 2 For more on the Iliad, see Melissa Mueller’s chapter in this volume. 3 For more on Beowulf, see María José Gómez-Calderón’s chapter in this volume.

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— ​ Pá d r a i g M a c C a r r o n e t a l . —​ ———, and Robin I. M. Dunbar. 2016. “Identifying Natural Grouping Structure in Gelada Baboons: A Network Approach.” Animal Behaviour 114: 119–28. ———, Kimmo Kaski, and Robin I. M. Dunbar. 2016. “Calling Dunbar’s Numbers.” Social Networks 47: 151–55. ———, and Ralph Kenna. 2012. “Universal Properties of Mythological Networks.” EPL (Europhysics Letters) 99, no. 2: 28002. ———. 2013. “Network Analysis of the Íslendinga Sögur–the Sagas of Icelanders.” The European Physical Journal B 86, no. 10: 407. Martin, George R. R. 1996. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Press. ———. 1998. A Clash of Kings. New York: Bantam Press. ———. 2000. A Storm of Swords. New York: Bantam Press. ———. 2005. A Feast for Crows. New York: Bantam Press. ———. 2011. A Dance with Dragons. New York: Bantam Press. Milgram, Stanley. 1967. “The Small World Problem.” Psychology Today 2, no. 1: 60–67. Moreno, Jacob Levy. 1934. Who Shall Survive?: A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations. Washington, DC: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company. Newman, Mark. 2009. Networks: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— and Juyong Park. 2003. “Why Social Networks are Different from Other Types of Networks.” Physical Review. E, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics 68, no. 3: 036122. Nilsson, Martin Persson. 1932. The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oxenham, Helen. 2016. Perceptions of Femininity in Early Irish Society. Studies in Celtic History Series 36. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Prado, Sandra, Sílvio Renato Dahmen, Ana Bazzan, Máirín MacCarron, and Julia Hillner. 2020. “Gendered Networks and Communicability in Medieval Historical Narratives.” Advances in Complex Systems 23, no. 3: 1–14. Recinos, Adrián. 1960. Popol Vuh: Las antiguas historias del Quiché. 4th ed. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Smiley, Jane. 2000. The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection. London: Penguin. Tolkien, John R. R. [1937–1949] 1995. The Lord of the Rings. New York: HarperCollins. Watts, Duncan J., and Steven Strogatz. 1998. “Collective Dynamics of Small-World Networks.” Nature 393, no. 6684: 440–42.

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PART II

A SAMPLE OF ANCIENT I T E R AT I O N S (THE BEGINNINGS – CIRCA 1000 CE)

rsr

CHAPTER SIX

THE EPIC BIBLE

AU T H O R I T Y A N D I D E N T I T Y I N T H E FAC E O F A DV E R S I T Y

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Shawna Dolansky and Sarah Cook

Why don’t we tend to think of the Hebrew Bible as an epic? Perhaps because “epic” connotes a mix of legend and myth against a semi-historical background, and in many parts of the world today, people still think of the Hebrew Bible as something beyond that - as “history” or “truth” or “sacred text.” Within the last two hundred years of biblical scholarship, however, it has become increasingly clear that the Hebrew Bible is a construction of a particular place and time that draws on a long oral and written prehistory, as well as a multiplicity of authorial perspectives and historical and geographical situations. Editors brought the pieces together to forge a national identity and consciousness through careful selection, framing, and emphasis on particular themes. In terms of form and substance then, this makes it not much different from other “epics” of the ancient world (e.g., Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid). As central as epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey have been within Euro-American culture, the Hebrew Bible is one of the most influential and foundational epics for many of the religions, cultures, societies, and worldviews of billions of people around the world today. Like other epics, the Hebrew Bible is, inevitably, about power. It includes stories that champion certain factions of ancient Israelite society, recording negotiations for authority throughout the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The composition of the epic was also highly influenced by power dynamics in the larger region, both in terms of when the various source texts that make up the Bible were written, and the time period in which they were gathered together into their present form. The texts that we now view as the Hebrew Bible were compiled by a group of exiles, intent on re-establishing their political power and identity in the region of Persian Yehud1 after having been exiled by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. This means that the ways in which power and authority are delineated and defined in the biblical texts ultimately dovetail with identity politics, as those who redacted and disseminated the Hebrew Bible used the stories, and the threads they wove through them, to define themselves, their ideals, values, and beliefs, in an attempt to avoid their cultural and national dissolution and assimilation. Epics, as Pamela Lothspeich writes in the Introduction to this volume, “tell us who wields power [in society] and DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-9

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— ​ S h a w n a D o l a n s k y a n d S a r a h C o o k —​ why; they justify that power and make it seem normal and right.” The redactors of the epic narrative in the Hebrew Bible justify their own authority by asserting control over Israelite identity. At the same time, they claim power for the defeated and oppressed nations of Israel and Judah through the belief that their communal identity as inheritors of a covenant relationship with YHWH2 will ultimately vindicate them. The national epic at the heart of the Hebrew Bible curates the literary legacies of ancient Israel and Judah in a selective final form that serves the needs of the people compiling it. Thus, the making of Israelite epic is simultaneously an act of enshrining a noble past, explaining the present, subverting their political situation, and setting an ideal forward for the future. Although modern scholars often place great importance on distinguishing between such genres as “myth” and “history,” the ancients were not so concerned. Homer’s epics, full of mythical interactions between gods3 and humans, were a source for later historians like Thucydides, just as the Hebrew Bible served as a source for Josephus’ history of the Jewish people. Within the Hebrew Bible itself, motifs that we would refer to as mythological are re-worked to reflect historical events in ways first explored by Frank Moore Cross in his classic Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973, 23–29). Cross’ analysis brought to light how “the remembered past is represented and shaped by inherited discursive forms, investing the constitutive events of the past with mythic significance” (Hendel 2005, 100). The central example of this is the older Canaanite combat myth, featuring the defeat of chaos by a reigning warrior deity. This defeat is not only understood to have occurred in the distant past, but to recur every time the deity’s people are threatened with destructive forces, natural or otherwise. Thus, “in its epic discourse, Israel combines the mythic and the historical in such a way that its collective past takes on the authority of sacred myth” (2005, 103).4 Hendel argues that the characteristics of epic discourse, which he draws out by comparison with Homeric epic, inform the representation of the past throughout the Primary History (the narrative contained in Genesis through Kings), noting the persistent principle of dual causality in which God and humans are both involved in, and responsible for, the unfolding of events in the world in complementary ways. Certain language and content may denote “epic material” within the biblical corpus. Susan Niditch, for example, pays special attention to the role of heroes in Judges and in Samuel, to the primacy of war and the roles of women as mediators and prizes in militarily negotiated relationships between men (2005, 281–85).5 The importance of politics and the forging of a national and cultural identity, “roles often ascribed to epic,” are central themes in the biblical narrative as well.6 Niditch further notes “the subversive quality and potential ‘political explosiveness’” of the stories in Judges and Samuel, pointing out that the narrators also fall back on tropes from elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Exod. 15, Psalms, and prophetic literature in particular) that depict God as the protagonist in the multi-generational drama that is the story of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah (2005, 285–86). Whereas Niditch focuses on narratives in Judges and Samuel that display markers associated with epic literature elsewhere in the ancient world, we are broadening the discussion to argue that, in fact, the final combination of the source texts that comprise the biblical books from Genesis through Kings – the Primary History – was compiled and redacted as a kind of Israelite epic. Like other epics, the Primary 92

— ​ T h e E p i c B i b l e —​ History has a long oral and written history in the form of sources that constituted independent narratives; myth and history intertwine to provide a sacred quality to the past; war plays a central role; and national and cultural identities are reflected and reinforced in this literature. And, like other epics, the Primary History is the deliberate product of a particular place and time, for a particular purpose. Thus, while applying the label “epic” to this corpus is a conceptual construction on our part, it is one that allows both for comparison within a genre on the one hand and for us to think of the Primary History as a deliberate product of the particular group who collected, collated, copied, and disseminated it on the other hand. Thinking of this vast expanse of very diverse literature as a coherent epic also encourages us to notice the choices the compilers made in selecting these literary pieces, and in the recurring themes and characterizations they included and emphasized as a way of creating and enforcing group identity. Different political, historical, and social factors influenced the ways in which the multiple authors, collectors, redactors, and recounters of the narratives, laws, poetry, and prophecy that comprise the Primary History recorded and framed the final contents. In thinking about the final collection as “epic,” the focus herein will be on what the final redactors were concerned about: forging and maintaining a foundation for a future for the scattered groups of Judeans in exile. They attempted this by tying together records of their pasts into a coherent narrative framed by a common identity in a shared ancestry and communal covenant led by one single God: a god who they portrayed as ruling the whole world rather than just their particular polity. Now that the people were scattered and exiled, this was a crucial component of the narrative framework, one that had been missing from many of the individual parts that made up this new whole.

OVERVIEW OF THE HEBREW BIBLE The Hebrew Bible is known within Jewish communities as the Tanakh. This term serves as an acronym that indicates the traditional divisions among the texts of the Hebrew Bible. The texts are divided into three categories: Torah (torah),7 Prophets (nebi’im),8 and Writings (ketubim).9 These categories are artificial and were applied to the texts some time after their composition. The Primary History, which provides a comprehensive narrative from the origins of the world through to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah and exile of its inhabitants, includes all five books of the Torah and the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings which are considered, according to the traditional divisions, to be part of the “Prophets” section of the Tanakh. This core of the biblical narrative, Genesis through Kings, was compiled and disseminated between the fifth and third centuries BCE. It was forged then as a national epic that combines myth, history, law, prophecy, and poetry – the literary legacy of a people over a 500–1000-year period, in a selective final form that curates those literary pieces in order to serve the needs of the people who compiled it. The books of the Primary History, when taken together, recount a coherent narrative from the time of creation up to the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, with a focus on their inhabitants as the descendants of Abraham and inheritors of his covenantal relationship with the god YHWH. For this reason, these biblical books will be our focus in this discussion of the Hebrew Bible as epic literature. 93

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THE PRIMARY HISTORY The Primary History tells the story of the birth of a people, and the rise and fall of dual kingdoms inhabited by those people. Beginning with the creation of the world and emphasizing both the ultimate power and transcendence of the god YHWH, as well as his personal care for the moral and physical well-being of his human creatures, the narrative as a whole continues swiftly to focus on the lives of Israel’s ancestors.10 In Genesis 12, Abram (also known as “Abraham”) is introduced as the patriarch divinely chosen to leave his homeland in southern Mesopotamia and to journey to a land that YHWH promises to his family in perpetuity; the promise is known as a “covenant,” meaning that there are mutual obligations between the parties, in this case, Abram and his descendants, and YHWH (Freedman 1964). The family takes care to marry among its close relatives for the initial generations as YHWH’s covenantal promises of land, wealth, divine protection, and innumerable progeny are passed patrilineally from Abram, to Isaac, to Jacob. Jacob earns the name Israel and passes the covenant to his twelve “sons”;11 their descendants will be the “children of Israel” (translated “Israelites” in most English renderings of the Bible). The Israelites soon find themselves removed from their promised land and come to be oppressed as slaves in Egypt for 400 years. YHWH, however, continues to acknowledge that they are his people and his covenant relationship with their ancestors is invoked in a demonstration of his supreme power as YHWH frees them from the clutches of the largest and most prosperous empire of the day: the Egyptians. His goal is to bring them back to their promised land, but first, the divine pledges of protection, prosperity, progeny, and property are rendered conditional with a formal covenant ceremony, complete with theophany, sacrifice, feasting, and solemn oath-taking. In Exodus 20, YHWH spells out the ten things that the Israelites must do in order to maintain his favor and ensure his continued patronage. The story continues with the eventual conquest and settlement of the promised land, and the still later rise of a united monarchy under David and Solomon.12 This is followed by a divided set of kingdoms, Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. The authors, however, make clear that both kingdoms share a common identity as the children of Israel and the people of YHWH, as emphasized in their shared ancestry among the descendants of Jacob’s sons. That is, from the perspective of the compilers of the texts, pivotal events such as the conquest of the land, the rise of the monarchy, and the construction of Solomon’s temple are all relatively late developments in the nation’s history. This literary arrangement underscores the point that Israel constitutes a people not limited to its historical territory and longstanding monarchies, and it can survive without its temple and armies. A simple equation between people or nation, on the one hand, and the state and land, on the other, is therewith radically severed. (Wright 2009, 444; 2020) This observation is central to understanding the motivation of the postexilic compilers of the Primary History. 94

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THE SOURCES UNDERLYING THE PRIMARY HISTORY The texts that make up the Primary History are themselves composed of older sources and documents. The oldest source material in the Hebrew Bible are poetic songs: the Song of Deborah and the Song of Miriam (also called the Song of the Sea). The antiquity of both these originally oral compositions is evident in the use of archaic verbal forms and vocabulary (Cross and Freedman 1975, 33; Hendel and Joosten 2018, 102–03; Leuchter 2019). The Song of Deborah celebrates the victory of Deborah and Barak over the army of the Canaanite general, Sisera. Whenever it was composed, it reflects a premonarchic context, mentioning the tribes who join Deborah and Barak in battle and decrying those who do not (Judg. 5:14–18).13 In addition to shorter poems, the Primary History contains longer narrative sources that were combined over time. The first set of sources are limited to the Torah and are best understood using a theory known as the documentary hypothesis.14 Julius Wellhausen popularized this hypothesis with his 1878 work Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels.15 In Wellhausen’s presentation of the hypothesis, the five books of the Torah are made up of four different sources known as J, E, P, and D (Wellhausen 1883).16 At least some version of the documentary hypothesis remains popular among source-critical scholars of the Hebrew Bible today (Baden 2012; Friedman 2019). To date, the four-source model is the most compelling explanation for the various doublets and contradictions, as well as concomitant changes in style, vocabulary, themes, and emphases, throughout the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Each of the sources brings a unique contribution to the epic. In the J source text, the author expresses a keen interest in female characters unparalleled in any of the other sources. Genesis 16 depicts a conflict between Sarai (Sarah) and her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar. After bearing a child for Sarai’s husband, Abram (Abraham), Hagar slights her mistress Sarai and then flees to the wilderness of Shur when Sarai becomes angry with her.17 A messenger of YHWH appears to Hagar and urges her to return to her mistress. Hagar declares that the messenger is ’el ro’i, approximately, a “seeing god” (Gen. 16:13).18 The place name is henceforth known as be’er laḥay ro’i to commemorate Hagar’s epithet for God (Gen. 16:14). This story not only demonstrates a concern for interactions between women, but also depicts a woman (an Egyptian woman at that!) giving YHWH an epithet that also becomes a toponym. These acts of attributing an epithet to God and naming a place are otherwise reserved for male characters in the biblical narrative. Overall, the J source narrative offers unique insight into female characters and their central roles in their families. The E source features an emphasis on prophets and prophecy. In Genesis 20, Abraham tells Abimelek, king of Gerar, that his wife Sarah is his sister out of fear that he might be killed to allow a local to marry his beautiful wife (Gen. 20:11).19 God intervenes to right this deception, appearing in a dream to Abimelek and insisting that he atone for the wrong he has done in taking Sarah as a wife by applying to Abraham, a prophet. Abraham prays on Abimelek’s behalf to clear him of wrongdoing, and Sarah is returned to Abraham. The two dwell in the land of Gerar, enriched by the payment for Abraham’s services as prophet (Gen. 20:14–16). This portrayal highlights Abraham’s status as prophet, a title he receives only in this source. 95

— ​ S h a w n a D o l a n s k y a n d S a r a h C o o k —​ The P source text stresses covenants (Hebrew berit), or treaties made between God and humans that stipulate rights and responsibilities on both sides.20 The P source covenant between Abraham and God in Genesis 17 positions Abraham as a treaty partner with God and stipulates what Abraham will do as a sign of that covenant. The first feature of this covenant is that God gives Abraham and his wife Sarah new names. Abraham was previously called Abram in the biblical narrative and now receives the name Abraham, while Sarai will be known as Sarah.21 The second feature of this covenant is God’s commandment that Abraham and all the male members of his household be circumcised. In the future, young boys who are part of Abraham’s household will be circumcised on their eighth day of life. This covenant portrayal of Abraham shapes his interactions with God throughout the P source narrative. The D source is slightly more complex due to its connection to texts outside of the Torah. Though included in Wellhausen’s classic articulation of the documentary hypothesis, modern source-critical scholars recognize that the final author of the D source is also responsible for the compilation of materials in the books of Joshua through Kings. Martin Noth first argued that the D source material in the Torah, which is largely confined to Deuteronomy, frames the ensuing narratives in Joshua through Kings. He called this larger work the Deuteronomistic History. The author of this work used an older set of laws as the core of the book of Deuteronomy, composed a prologue to the book, and then compiled existing sources to recount a history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah up to the time of King Josiah (639–609 BCE) (Noth 1957). The law code incorporated into the book of Deuteronomy sets the tone for much of the narrative. This law code stresses the elimination of Canaanite forms of worship (Deut. 12:2–4) and the worship of YHWH “in the place that YHWH your god will choose from all your tribes to place his name there to dwell” (Deut. 12:5) (Weinfeld 1992, 324). In compiling the narrative in the books of Joshua through Kings, the Deuteronomistic historian uses this law code as the standard by which he declares the kings of Israel and Judah as either good or bad. Even in describing King Asa of Judah, who is otherwise evaluated as a good king (1 Kings 15:11), the historian must remark “but the high places were not abolished” (1 Kings 15:14). No king, according to the standards of the Deuteronomistic historian, can be wholly good without destroying the high places (Albright 1957; Nakhai 1994).

PUTTING IT TOGETHER: EPIC AND IDENTITY The placement of the source narratives alongside one another offers a dynamic portrait of biblical characters. The J source portrayal of conflict between Sarah and Hagar provides insight into family conflict that the P source promise of progeny in Genesis 17 cannot match. Abraham in the E source, in turn, is a prophet whose intercessory abilities are absent in both the J and P source narratives. The combination of sources creates a multivalent portrait of biblical characters and events. Despite contradictions, doublets, and differences in style, tone, and emphasis, when read together the Primary History becomes a cohesive narrative that details the history of a god who is concerned for the well-being of those who worship him, who guides them and who promises them property, progeny, prosperity, and protection. 96

— ​ T h e E p i c B i b l e —​ This god can appear to his people and intervene on their behalf whether they are in the wilderness of Shur, the kingdom of Gerar, Pharaoh’s clutches in Egypt, or the land of Canaan. Unbounded by spatial constraints, the reader sees that YHWH has appeared to his people and intervened on their behalf throughout history. Their god is always in control. Though he may punish his followers for failing to keep the terms of the covenant, he never destroys them. This message, particularly well-suited for the postexilic existence of the conquered and scattered children of Israel, is the thread that binds the epic; the portrayal of an unbreakable bond between a god and his chosen people. The significance of the combined narrative is evident in our postexilic biblical texts. In Nehemiah 9, the people who have returned to Judah (now Persian Yehud) assemble on the last day of a festival. The Levites leading the ceremony invoke YHWH as the god who created the cosmos, changed Abraham’s name, brought the people out of Egypt, subdued the inhabitants of Canaan so that the people might settle there, and gave them over into the hands of the peoples of the lands when they failed to obey his commandments (Neh. 9:6–30). The recounting of this narrative prompts the people to pledge obedience to the Torah of God (Neh. 10:30). The events that the Levites recount are familiar: they are naming some of the major events of the Primary History. This acknowledgment of the events of the Primary History unites the people who have returned to Yehud and confirms them as a national community that worships YHWH. Further, this defines YHWH as a god who has been an active player in the history of his people through a series of disasters, covenants, and promises of protection. This identity of Israel as a people, connected by dual ties of common ancestry and a shared divine covenant relationship, is crucial for the compilers of these texts. This is because, while all of these stories and many of the laws and ideas contained in the Primary History have their roots in the monarchical period of Israel and Judah, the Primary History itself is a product of the final circumstance of the story it tells. The kingdom of Israel falls to Assyrian invasion in 722 BCE. The people are scattered, and the ten tribes are “lost.” The kingdom of Judah succumbs to Babylonian authority in 586 BCE. The people are exiled; a weak and vulnerable minority expected to assimilate to the larger social, cultural, political, and religious norms of the larger populations among whom they now found themselves. Like other nation-states before it, Judah was swallowed by the great Babylonian empire. And yet, the exiles held onto a collective identity long enough that, when the Persians took over in 539 BCE, these Yehudites were permitted to return and rebuild Jerusalem and its environs. Persian colonialism was benevolent, and cultures maintained their minority identities. And, it seems, in the case of Yehudites whether in the greater Persian diaspora or back in Jerusalem, this identity as a nation was nurtured and developed into a transnational peoplehood, precisely at the time in history when one would have expected such identity to dissolve under the pressures of assimilation and the acknowledgment of the inferiority of YHWH and his people to the greater empires and the gods of their conquerors (Collins 2017). The compiler(s) of the Primary History detail(s) the story of Israel with religious and cultural customs, as well as the authors’ political, social, and economic realities and memories. And, most importantly, the entire narrative of the Primary History is 97

— ​ S h a w n a D o l a n s k y a n d S a r a h C o o k —​ tied together and framed by the concept of covenant. As observed by Wright in the context of prophetic writings, Emphasis on the direct covenantal relationship between YHWH and Israel lent support to the notion that the state and nation are not one and the same. Their insistence that the people and its deity could survive when its king was deported, and its Temple destroyed laid the groundwork for the writing of the history of the nation in relation to its deity and the codification of laws in the form of stipulations of a covenant between Israel as a whole and YHWH. (Wright 2009) The “children of Israel” are all the fictive descendants of common ancestors, and it is this people’s covenant relationship with the particular god YHWH that is emphasized, elaborated, and fulfilled as the larger semi-historical plot unfolds. Historiography takes a back seat to theology, and older and disparate stories of the past are pressed into the service of forging a national identity as the people of YHWH, whose entire story can be explained in terms of their adherence to this god’s commandments. Covenants with different, smaller purposes in the grand scheme of Israel’s story appear throughout the narrative, demonstrating the use of older sources and also the existence of the covenant concept within the larger cultural environment out of which the Primary History emerged. For example, Noah’s covenant with YHWH in Genesis 9:9–17 is one in which humanity will never again be destroyed by floodwaters, despite their continued corrupt behavior. Abraham’s covenant with YHWH promises that Abraham will have innumerable descendants (Gen. 17:5–6). In 2 Samuel 17, King David is given an eternal covenant promising that there will always be a descendant of his on the throne of Judah. In light of later historical events, however, this latter covenant is modified in 1 Kings 8:25, in which YHWH explains to David’s son Solomon that the royal covenant is, in fact, conditional on the behavior of later kings in conformity with YHWH’s commandments. And this parallels the main thrust of the central covenant in the entire Primary History: the Sinai covenant. It is in the scenes at Sinai that the Israelite people are informed that their covenants are conditional, and here that YHWH, through the prophet Moses, tells the Israelites what they must do to maintain YHWH’s blessings and avoid his curses. The commandments of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 are elaborated into hundreds of laws and legal principles that occupy much of the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And in the midst of these, in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28–30, the authors introduce the idea that history is just; that cause and effect in real time are determined by the people’s adherence to those laws. This is the notion of theodicy that God’s justice would be served in accordance with whether or not the children of Israel individually and collectively followed his commandments. The people themselves, and not the power of their god, would determine their futures, just as their past actions had led to present circumstances. According to this notion, reward and punishment are rendered over generations – cleverly explaining why bad things happen to good people in a worldview that had not yet developed the notion of reward and punishment after death – and simultaneously excusing the historical reality of defeat and

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— ​ T h e E p i c B i b l e —​ exile of a people who belonged to the most powerful of the gods.22 At the core of this principle of theodicy is the notion that the people were themselves responsible for their collective fate – an existential responsibility intended to empower them even in defeat and exile. The theme of a people protected by a god unbounded by time and space, who offers them a covenant that promises property, progeny, prosperity, and protection, has inspired communities throughout history and led them to conceive of themselves as participating in this divine covenant. At the annual Passover Seder, Jews recount the story of the Exodus to their children to enforce a communal identity across space and time, and to imagine themselves and their present circumstances – of diaspora, of anti-Semitism, of assimilation to majority host cultures – in its light. Similarly, in every film account of the Exodus, heroes and villains take on dominant characteristics of contemporary protagonists and antagonists: Cecil B. DeMille’s Moses voices the political rhetoric of freedom from (communist) oppression even while he quotes Jesus from the New Testament, in The Ten Commandments (1956),23 and Spielberg’s Moses is a late twentieth-century teenage rebel in search of a cause, who finds one when he discovers his true identity in The Prince of Egypt (1998).24 If a primary characteristic of the epic genre is the defining of power dynamics, authority, and identity, then the Bible remains a significant living and dynamic epic in our society today, able to be interpreted and reinterpreted to align with the sensibilities of diverse audiences across space and time.

CONCLUSION The compilation of texts from diverse places, times, and perspectives, as well as the story arc, oral origins, and use of composite sources are elements that we could categorize and use to compare the Hebrew Bible’s Primary History with other wellknown epics from the ancient world. But it is particularly how the narrative from Genesis through Kings negotiates and constructs issues of power and identity that offers strong arguments for understanding this central part of the Bible as epic. As in the compositions of Homer and Virgil, stories from the past are used to define identity in the authors’ present; however, a comparison highlights some important differences. Greek and Roman epics enshrine the values and virtues of peak moments of national consciousness and project them onto a glorious past. The Hebrew Bible is compiled, preserved, and promoted at precisely the opposite moment, when the nation is on the verge of extinction. Genesis through Kings is forged in the shadow of first Assyrian, then Babylonian, and finally Persian domination, by a people who have become an exiled and subjugated minority, disenfranchised from their homeland. Older stories, collected and redacted, serve to define a subversive minority of flawed human beings whose glorious past and future, though marred by human limitations and oppressed and governed by other more powerful states, are at the same time elevated through association with a powerful deity who rewards and punishes according to a higher covenant theodicy. This central theme of the biblical epic argues against appearances that their covenant relationship with the god of all in fact makes their tiny, scattered nation the powerful one, biding its time and

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NOTES 1 Yehud is the Persian name for Judah, used after the Persian conquest of the Babylonian empire. During this period, the people become known as “Yehudites” rather than “Judahites.” 2 The consonants YHWH are also known as the “tetragrammaton” (four letters). These are the four consonantal letters of the god of Israel’s personal name as it is rendered in the Hebrew Bible. The pronunciation of the tetragrammaton is debatable, as, although the Israelites called their god by name, early Judaism developed a taboo against pronouncing it. English translations of the Hebrew Bible render the tetragrammaton as “LORD.” 3 In keeping with the way in which scholars discuss gods in the ancient world, we use the lower-case “god” when referring to one god among many. When we refer to the god of Israel, we follow the modern convention of using an upper-case letter: “God.” 4 Hendel acknowledges that the term “epic” on its own doesn’t quite capture the entirety of discursive styles and genres employed throughout the Hebrew Bible (2005, 104–07). 5 Cross was the first to use the term “epic” to describe “Israel’s religious expression.” Though perhaps his sense of “epic” vs. “history” is outdated, he does note that “Epic in interpreting historical events combines mythic and historical features in various ways and proportions” (1973, viii). 6 Niditch points out the inclusion of genres such as lament, verbal art and performance, the interplay of poetry and prose, and of oral and written compositions (1996). 7 The Hebrew term torah means “instruction.” The word “Torah” is widely used even in English-speaking circles to designate the collection comprised of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. 8 Included in the “Prophets” category are Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi. 9 The “writings” include Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. 10 Note that Genesis 1 and 2–3 offer two different creation stories by different authors, with very different perspectives. In Genesis 1, the author presents a creation that begins with light and culminates in the creation of humanity (male and female). In Genesis 2, the author begins with YHWH creating a human, placing him in a luxuriant garden, and then trying to create a “corresponding strength / help” for him (Friedman 2001, 19; Trible 1973). The compiled version of the Primary History combines these visions of God into a multifaceted and all-powerful (though not necessarily monotheistic) figure. 11 Ten sons and two grandsons, actually. 12 Up until this point in the narrative, much of the prehistory of Israel before the monarchy is likely fictive. Although the stories may rely on older oral precedents, the existence of written sources prior to the ninth century BCE is dubious, and while scholars differ enormously on when the various biblical sources were composed, most would agree that very little if any of the biblical writings precede the ninth century BCE. The existence of a Davidic monarchy in the tenth century is also hotly contested, as is more recently the

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— ​ T h e E p i c B i b l e —​ notion of a common ancestry and identity between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah (Fleming 2012). Monuments and contemporary texts from the larger ancient Near East in the late tenth and ninth centuries begin to corroborate aspects of the accounts of the histories of Israel in Judah from those points onward, including the defeat of the northern kingdom at the hands of Assyria in the eighth century and the exile of the people of Judah in the sixth. 13 The Song of Deborah describes the tribes who participated in the muster as: Ephraim, Benjamin, Makhir, Zebulun, Issachar, and Naphtali. The writer reprimands Gilead, Dan, Asher, and Meroz for failing to attend. It is likely then that the names and number of tribes varied according to the earliest sources available, only to be consolidated in later texts to the more familiar list (as in Gen. 49 and Deut. 33). 14 Alternatively, one might take a supplementary approach to the composition of the Hebrew Bible. See Person and Rezetko 2016, and Olyan and Wright 2018. 15 Early English-language contributors to the hypothesis include Driver (1898) and Carpenter and Harford-Battersby (1900). 16 Each of these sources, especially J, E, and P, might be considered as a “proto-epic” on their own given their own rich history of composition and inclusion of earlier sources (written and oral) (Sanders 2014). 17 This kind of surrogate motherhood is common in the Genesis narratives. See also Leah’s servant Zilpah as her surrogate (Gen. 30:9) and Rachel’s servant Bilhah as hers (Gen. 30:3). 18 The Hebrew is mal’ak which literally means “messenger.” Biblical messengers of God (commonly translated “angel”) should not be confused with our own modern, winged conceptions of angels (Friedman 1997, 12–13). 19 Note that in combining sources and narratives in the ways in which the redactors did, by this point in the epic version, Sarah is in her nineties. 20 Biblical covenants are part of the larger ancient near eastern vassal treaty tradition (Altman 2004). The first P source covenant with humans is between God and Noah in Genesis 9:9–11. Though we see similar promises and stipulations of rights and responsibilities in Genesis 12:1–3 (J source), the agreement between God and the human party (Abram) is not referred to as a covenant here; it is only in the Priestly version of YHWH’s promises to Abraham in Genesis 17 (see below), and in the later retelling of this event, in the P text of Exodus 6:5, that God’s promises to Abraham and his descendants in both sources are subsumed under the Priestly concept of “covenant.” This is how they will be understood henceforth, after the combination of J and P together. 21 It is likely that an editor emended texts before and after Genesis 17 to ensure that they had the proper forms of Abram/Abraham and Sarah/Sarai, reconciling traditions with slightly different names for these ancestors. Thus, in our examples from Genesis 18 and  20, Abraham and Sarah are simply called by those names throughout (Friedman 2003, 56). 22 Exodus 15:11 offers this perspective in early poetry: “who is like you among the gods, YHWH?” 23 Adele Reinhartz (2013) has written extensively on the ways in which Bible movies express the norms and anxieties of the times in which they are made and seek to demonstrate that the social and political views they espouse are biblical in origin, even as they have been translated and modified enormously to fit present contexts unimaginable to their ancient authors. 24 A major difference between the script for Prince of Egypt (1998) and the biblical text is the centrality of Moses’ revelation in the former that he is in fact a Hebrew, reflecting our modern obsession with identity politics. No such revelation occurs in the Torah.

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— ​ S h a w n a D o l a n s k y a n d S a r a h C o o k —​

WORKS CITED Albright, W. F. 1957. “The High Place in Ancient Palestine.” In Volume de congrès, international pour l’étude de l’Ancient Testament, edited by P. A. H. de Boer, 242–58. Vetus Testamentum Supplements 4. Leiden: Brill. Altman, Amnon. 2004. “The Role of the ‘Historical Prologue’ in the Hittite Vassal Treaties.” Journal of the History of International Law 6, no. 1: 43–64. Baden, Joel S. 2012. The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Carpenter, J. Estlin, and G. Harford-Battersby. 1900. The Hexateuch According to the Revised Version. 2 vols. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Collins, John J. 2017. The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Cross, Frank Moore Jr. 1973. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———, and David Noel Freedman. 1957. Studies in Yahwistic Poetry. Grand Rapids, MI: Willian B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Driver, S. R. 1898. An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament. 8th ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Fleming, Daniel. 2012. The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Freedman, David Noel. 1964. “Divine Commitment and Human Obligation.” Interpretation 18, no. 4: 419–31. Friedman, Richard Elliot. 1997. The Hidden Face of God. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. ———. 2001. Commentary on the Torah. New York: HarperOne. ———. 2003. The Bible with Sources Revealed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. ———. 2019. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: Simon and Schuster. ———, and Shawna Dolansky. 2011. The Bible Now. New York: Oxford University Press. Hendel, Ronald. 2005. Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. “The Exodus in America.” In Found in Translation, edited by James W. Barker, Anthony Le Donne and Joel N. Lohr, 155–78. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. ———, and Jan Joosten. 2018. How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Leuchter, Mark. 2019. “The Song of Miriam between Memory and History.” JHS 19, no. 4: 39–48. Nakhai, Beth Alpert. 1994. “What’s a Bamah?” Biblical Archaeology Review 20, no. 18–19: 77–78. Niditch, Susan. 1996. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. ———. 2005.“The Challenge of Israelite Epic.” In A Companion to Ancient Epic, edited by John Miles Foley, 277-87. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Noth, Martin. 1957. Überlieferungsgeschichtliche studien. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Olyan, Saul M., and Jacob L. Wright, eds. 2018. Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew Bible. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies. Person, Raymond F., Jr., and Robert Rezetko, eds. 2016. Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press. Reinhartz, Adele. 2013. Bible and Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Sanders, Seth L. 2014. “What if there Aren’t Any Empirical Models for Pentateuchal Criticism?” In Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings, edited by Brian Schmidt, 281–304. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature.

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— ​ T h e E p i c B i b l e —​ Trible, Phyllis. 1973. “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread.” Andover Newton Quarterly 13: 74–81. Weinfeld, Moshe. 1992. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Wellhausen, Julius. 1883. Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. 2nd ed. Berlin: Druck und Verlag von G. Reimer. Wright, Jacob L. 2009. “The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible.” Prooftexts 29, no. 3: 433–72. ———. 2020. War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

G I L G A M E S H A N D T I A M AT A B R OA D

( M I S - ) R E A D I N G M E S O P O TA M I A N E P I C

rsr Karen Sonik

European interest in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and its environs) was aroused in the early nineteenth century. This was spurred in part by the striking artifacts collected in the region by the antiquarian and traveler Claudius James Rich (1787–1821), who had served as the East India Company Resident in Baghdad, as well as by the stirring memoirs Rich published on his experiences ([1815] 1818). In the mid-nineteenth century, excavations undertaken near Mosul uncovered Neo-Assyrian Period (circa 911–612 BCE) royal sites and their sensational contents. Among the excavators were the British Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894); the French Paul Émile Botta (1802–1870); and the Assyrian Hormuzd Rassam (1826–1910), who was born and raised in Mosul. Their early excavations uncovered, alongside stunning monumental sculptures and reliefs, thousands of clay tablet fragments bearing cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing. Upon their decipherment, some of these tablets would become sensations in their own rights as they were revealed to be parts of epic poems and complex narratives. This chapter takes up issues pertaining to the definition, (mis-)interpretation, and appropriation of Mesopotamia’s epic narratives, taking as case studies the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (SB Gilg.) and Enuma elish (Ee), the so-called Babylonian Epic of Creation, from Europe’s nineteenth-century (re-)discovery of Mesopotamia through to the present day.

GENRE TROUBLES: DEFINING MESOPOTAMIAN EPIC? Epic is an ambiguous genre term, particularly when applied cross-culturally to narratives emerging from different traditions and serving an array of different ends. The comparative literature scholar John Miles Foley described it as “the mastergenre of the ancient world,” capable of functioning in such diverse spheres as the cultural, political, historical, religious, mythological, and didactic (2005, 1).1 But the question of how to further refine the term for consideration in cultural frameworks that diverge widely from those of, for example, ancient Greece is a vexed one (Martin 2005, 9). 104

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-10

— ​ G i l g a m e s h a n d T i a m a t A b r o a d —​ Deriving from the Greek epos, “song” (or “word,” “poem,” “story”), epic as a genre term has been prominently shaped by the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey (Nagy 1999, 21–22). Its key features are frequently identified as length (long, though a more useful designation for Mesopotamia may reference “scope”), style (somewhat ambiguously characterized as “high”), and theme (“heroic”), so that epic is frequently defined as a “long poem in ‘high style’” or straightforwardly equated with heroic poetry (Gregory et al. 2016, 101). But such notions, while persistent and pervasive, have long been challenged by scholars analyzing poetry, oral as well as written, originating beyond the bounds of the Greek and Roman worlds (Lord [1960] 2000, 6).2 In the scholarship on Mesopotamia, which yields one of the earliest written corpora of literary narratives extant from the ancient world, the term epic has been relatively broadly applied (Sasson 2005, 220–21) if only loosely defined. Like many other common genre terms (such as myth, hymn, and incantation), epic has no precise parallels in the languages of ancient Mesopotamia (Sonik and Shehata, forthcoming). The Standard Babylonian (SB) Gilgamesh Epic, written in a literary dialect of Akkadian, is traditionally attributed to the scholar and exorcist Sin-leqi-unninni and dated to the late second millennium BCE. It is the most widely known, as well as the best preserved, of those Mesopotamian narratives today characterized as epics. Its designation as such is based on its status as a “long narrative poem of heroic content…[which is further possessed of] the seriousness and pathos that have sometimes been identified as markers of epics” (George 2010, 1).3 One might add to these considerations the expansive scope and prominent status of the SB Gilgamesh Epic—and other narratives so termed, such as Enuma elish—within the culture(s) in which they circulated.4 Narratives about Gilgamesh date back to at least the Ur III Period (circa 2112– 2004 BCE) in Mesopotamia (Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi 1993, 101–3), and they circulate throughout the ancient Near East for a span of some two thousand or more years (George 2003, 4; Beckman [Hittite Gilgamesh]; Arnaud 2007, nos. 42–45 and George 2007b [Ugaritic Gilgamesh]). At the same time, however, how the extant written narratives originated and/or circulated, the role of orality in these processes, and the degree to which they were known among ordinary peoples—as opposed to scribes and scholars—remain very unclear (George 2003, 21).5 Some of Mesopotamia’s narratives had explicit oral presentations, but the modes of this orality are notably diverse (Delnero 2012, 2015): Enuma elish, for example, was reportedly spoken aloud in front of the Babylonian god Marduk (i.e., his cult statue) during the akitu (New Year) festival,6 but there is no evidence that this or any other Mesopotamian narrative underwent any sort of uncomplicated transformation from an oral original to a written form.7 The application of contemporary English genre terms like epic to Mesopotamia’s literary corpus is thus not unproblematic.8 It establishes groupings of ancient compositions that may not have been thus differentiated, potentially obscuring, in the process, important relationships that we might otherwise observe. At the same time, a vital function of contemporary scholarship on the ancient world is cultural translation, the casting of ancient peoples, their works, and their worldviews into terms that we might understand.9 105

— ​ K a r e n S o n i k —​ The application of commonly used genre terms permits modern scholars to organize literary compositions in ways that facilitate analysis both within and across corpora—and within and across cultures. The designation “epic” may map only imperfectly onto ancient Mesopotamian literary forms, but it establishes a common starting point for further definition, investigation, and refinement. It also straightforwardly and accurately signals that the compositions so designated are likely of a certain sort: namely, they are long(ish) narratives compelling in their style, scope and subject matter (often involving heroic characters and extraordinary events), and potent emotional content and effects. In taking up the topic of epic in Mesopotamia, my chief concern in this essay is less with classification than with methodology: I am interested in how nineteenthand early twentieth-century priorities, interests, and modes of literary analysis have shaped ongoing approaches to and (mis-)interpretations of some of Mesopotamia’s best-known narratives. The discussion below explores these issues.

NINETEENTH- AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENCOUNTERS WITH MESOPOTAMIA When British and French archaeologists began excavating ancient Mesopotamian sites in the mid-nineteenth century, they uncovered large numbers of clay tablets and other artifacts bearing cuneiform, the wedge-shaped writing system used to record diverse languages across the ancient Near East. These include the isolate Sumerian, the Semitic Akkadian, and the Indo-European Hittite. Attempts at deciphering the newly discovered texts proceeded apace, with researchers finding particular success in the translation of Akkadian: already in 1857, scholarly efforts—particularly those of the Irish philologist and clergyman Edward Hincks (1792–1866)—had proceeded so far that the British Royal Asiatic Society deemed Akkadian to be understood.10 As a result of these efforts, our knowledge (if still rudimentary and incomplete) of some of the most important surviving works of Mesopotamian literature dates back nearly to the beginnings of the European re-discovery of Mesopotamia itself. Among these works are two Akkadian epic narratives, Enuma elish and the SB Gilgamesh Epic, both initially known from fragmentary versions found in the “library” of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at the royal capital city of Nineveh.11 Enuma elish, discovered during the 1849 excavations at Nineveh led by the English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, was translated and garnered significant scholarly and public attention for its seeming connections to the Bible in the second quarter of the nineteenth century (Smith 1876; Gunkel 1895). Fragments of the SB Gilgamesh Epic were recovered at the same site in 1853 during excavations led by the archaeologist Hormuzd Rossam, who was born in Mosul (on the opposite bank of Nineveh) and had worked together with Layard. In 1872, the translation of the SB Gilgamesh Epic was presented by the English Assyriologist George Smith (1840–1876) to extraordinary (and eventually worldwide) public interest. In 1873, Smith journeyed to Nineveh to seek additional portions of the fragmentary narrative, a task in which he—quite remarkably—succeeded (Smith 1875). At the same time as these extraordinary works of ancient Mesopotamian literature were being re-introduced to the world, several important developments were underway: 106

— ​ G i l g a m e s h a n d T i a m a t A b r o a d —​ 1 Mesopotamia itself was more generally assimilated, however marginally and contingently, into the story of “Western civilization,” and its cultural products were instrumentalized to this end (Sonik 2021b and 2022). 2 More specifically, a (or, arguably, the) chief value of ancient Mesopotamia’s narratives was established as based in their perceived relationships with the Bible.12 3 This period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a burgeoning interest in scientific classification and organization that shaped approaches to and interpretations of, among many other things, Mesopotamia’s visual arts and literature (Sonik and Kertai, forthcoming; Sonik, forthcoming). 4 This same period witnessed a simultaneous fascination with and derogation of works of fantasy and fairy tales. This development is critical for Mesopotamia’s epic narratives due to their “fantastic” elements (e.g., battles with monsters and other extraordinary characters and events).13 How these developments shaped both the initial and ongoing reception and interpretation of Mesopotamia’s epic narratives is elucidated in the following section.

THE RECEPTION OF MESOPOTAMIAN LITERATURE The SB Gilgamesh Epic was introduced to the English-speaking world on December 3, 1872, by its first translator, George Smith. Read before the then-recently founded Society of Biblical Archaeology, it caused an immediate sensation.14 Of particular interest to its scholarly and popular audiences was its account of a (Babylonian) flood story that drew immediate parallels with that in the Book of Genesis. The existence of a relationship between the Bible and Mesopotamian narratives was rapidly established as central to the latter’s significance. Some scholars sought, in Mesopotamian materials and excavations, proof of the Bible’s veracity (Delitzsch 1903; Chavalas 2002; Finkel 2014, 85–87), while others understood the Mesopotamian narratives more specifically as the foundations for the Bible—and/ or for the world’s folktales more generally (Jensen 1890, 1906; Zimmern 1901). But regardless of the position taken by individual scholars, the study of Mesopotamia was closely entangled with the study of the Bible in the early decades of the field, and Mesopotamia’s narratives were defined by their instrumentality: they were mined for information serving ends beyond themselves—rather than valued as autonomous literary works valuable and worthy of study and appreciation in their own rights. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century, even as scholarly and public interest in the relationships between Mesopotamian and biblical narratives was being established, new (and soon-to-be very influential) approaches to narrative were under development by scholars studying folklore and fairy tales. Works by the Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp (1895–1970), the Danish folklorist Axel Olric (1864–1917), and the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne (1867–1925) focused especially on the delineation of narrative form and classification (Olrik 1908; Aarne 1910; Propp [1928] 1968). Aspects of such approaches would ultimately be applied to biblical and Mesopotamian narratives, as through the Gattungsgeschichte or “Form Criticism” applied to the Old Testament by the German scholar Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932).15 107

— ​ K a r e n S o n i k —​ Gunkel’s works, including his 1905 Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit and his 1917 Das Märchen im alten Testament, are noteworthy for their reflection of both the key developments noted above. In Schöpfung und Chaos, for example, Gunkel undertook an extraordinary consideration of the motif of Chaoskampf (struggle against chaos) in relation to acts of creation (Sonik 2013a): he not only identified the motif in the Book of Genesis but also contextualized it within the framework of Mesopotamian narrative, going so far as to locate its origins in the recently discovered and translated Akkadian epic, Enuma elish. Later, in Das Märchen im alten Testament, Gunkel drew explicitly on developments in the scholarship on folktales for his striking investigation of familiar folktale motifs in the Old Testament (Rogerson 1987). Gunkel’s interest in recognizing formal similarities among narratives deriving from diverse cultural contexts reflects some of the larger concerns of his age as pertaining to the analysis of both biblical (Carus 1901; Wood 1909; Frazer 1919) and other narratives (Propp [1928] 1968; Greimas 1966). But such works also functioned, if unintentionally, to further establish Mesopotamian narratives as ancillary to biblical narratives—as well as to diminish, in the pursuit of typology and the identification of formal similarities with other works, their (and other narratives’) unique features, coherence, and difference. The idiosyncratic elements of individual stories and characters were deliberately flattened, their complexities obscured or set aside (Sonik 2009, 2021c, forthcoming). The rising interest in folk and fairy tales in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Europe shaped not only the types of approaches that were applied to Mesopotamian (as well as biblical) narratives but also the reception of these. Such stories, even as they grew in general popularity, were often assigned to the sphere of children (Silver 1999, 6; Levy and Mendlesohn 2016, 32), and their contents and fantastic elements—in short, the sources of their great public fascination— were disparaged as unsophisticated. The consequences of such attitudes to fantastic characters (such as fairies and monsters) and extraordinary plot elements for ancient narratives were taken up by no less than J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), the renowned Anglo-Saxon scholar and so-called “father of (modern) fantasy.” In his remarkable 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien challenged the scholarly derogation of the Old English epic Beowulf (circa seventh to tenth century CE) on the basis of its fantastic elements. He observed particularly that while “correct and sober taste” might attribute “‘genius’ to the author [of Beowulf], it cannot admit that the monsters are anything but a sad mistake” (Tolkien 1936, 13). Tolkien went on to challenge the idea that Beowulf’s monsters—among its other extraordinary characters and events—represented “an inexplicable blunder of taste,” arguing that they were, rather, “fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness” (1936, 17). Tolkien’s lecture, which successfully reclaimed Beowulf as a legitimate object of scholarly study and as a powerful work of art in its own right, highlighted then-current (scholarly) attitudes to narratives and elements deemed fantastic: they were regarded as wild, primitive, even childish, and, worse, in bad taste. The epic (and other) narratives of ancient Mesopotamia, which were (re-)discovered, translated, and interpreted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were full of such elements. 108

— ​ G i l g a m e s h a n d T i a m a t A b r o a d —​ The reception and (ongoing) interpretations of Mesopotamian epic narratives have been potently shaped by the developments outlined above. Individual characters and plotlines have been stripped to their bare bones and assimilated to basic types—for example, Enuma elish as “Chaoskampf narrative”—and mined for any information they might offer on biblical and other better-known narratives. Because of their early establishment as ancillary to the biblical narrative and their (seeming) resemblance to the stuff of fantasy and/or fairy tales (Edzard 1994), they have rarely been fully plumbed as unique, coherent, and sophisticated compositions in their own rights. Among the consequences of this for contemporary research into Mesopotamian literature is the predominance of intertextual analysis—a vital area of research, to be sure, but one that looks outward, beyond the bounds of any individual narrative.16 In the next section, the SB Gilgamesh Epic and Enuma elish are explored as case studies. I briefly consider some of the new issues and interpretations that emerge when we analyze Mesopotamia’s narratives and their plots, with particular attention to the characters therein, as autonomous and unique constructs—when we attend, in other words, to their individuality and difference.17

RE-THINKING MESOPOTAMIAN EPIC: CHARACTERS AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURES If the literary landscape of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of influential theorists who sought to assimilate characters and narrative events to specific types, other approaches to literary analysis offer potent alternative (fine-grained and individual) ways of reading and understanding narrative. An important 2003 study by Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, offers one such approach (2003, 1–11).18 Describing narrative meaning as “tak[ing] shape in the dynamic flux of attention and neglect toward the various characters who are locked within the same story but have radically different positions within the narrative” (2003, 2), Woloch trains his gaze on individual (and especially minor) characters and the character spaces that they occupy within a narrative. A focus on the individual (major and minor) characters of Mesopotamia’s epic literature reveals narratives that are strikingly rich and complex in their structures, characters, and meanings. The narrative Enuma elish, commonly described as a creation or combat narrative and sometimes explicitly as a Chaoskampf, serves a clear political function.19 Through its account of how a young and vigorous hero-god, Marduk, patron of the city of Babylon, ascends to divine kingship over many more venerable and established deities, it explains the rise to eminence of Babylon itself.20 The (seeming) essentials of the narrative, and the means by which Marduk gains his kingship, are familiar from other Sumerian and Akkadian narratives centered around other divine young heroes: the brash young god agrees to fight—and successfully defeats—a terrifying monster (or monsters).21 In the case of Enuma elish, Marduk ascends to kingship after battling and slaughtering the female “monster” Tiamat, and he ultimately structures the cosmos from her body parts. This account of Enuma elish is popular and convenient, and therefore widely disseminated; it is also attractive, corresponding to a number of popular tropes (hero battles and defeats monster; evil woman is destroyed). But is it accurate? 109

— ​ K a r e n S o n i k —​ It is not. Tiamat is no mere monster; indeed, it is not clear that she is any sort of monster (Sonik 2008, 2009). The beginning of Enuma elish finds Tiamat peaceably mingling her waters with those of the male Apsu in a primordial mating of two elemental (liquid) bodies: this (sexual) act generates the first two gods, Lahmu and Lahamu. Lahmu and Lahamu mate in turn to produce the next gods, and this process continues until there are so many gods that Apsu—the divine forefather—plots the death of his own children (or at least the noisy ones) in order to get some sleep. Critically, when Apsu presents his plan to Tiamat, she refuses to join him, horrified by his plan to destroy what they have created (Ee 41–46).22 Without Tiamat’s help, Apsu fails in his attempt to kill his children: he is instead overcome by the god Ea, necessarily one of Apsu and Tiamat’s descendants. Ea uses magic to lull Apsu to sleep prior to stripping him of his attributes, slaying him, and founding his dwelling on (or in) Apsu’s watery corpse (Ee 60–77). And it is in Apsu that Marduk, Ea’s extraordinary child and the ultimate hero of the narrative, is born. It is only after the slaying of her mate that Tiamat is persuaded to take up Apsu’s cause against the noisy and active gods. This change of mind, notably, is precipitated by other of her children who are likewise disturbed by the noise of the other gods, and who reproach her both for failing to defend her mate and for failing to protect their interests (Ee 111–20). Thus accused of being a bad “wife” (or mate) and “mother,” Tiamat turns against the noisy gods who slew Apsu: she takes a new consort, Qingu (a god?), and gives birth parthenogenetically(?) to monsters (Sonik 2009). But if Tiamat is the mother of monsters, she is also the mother of (all) the gods, making the battle of Marduk against Tiamat (and Qingu) resemble less a battle between hero and monster(s) and more a battle over political succession (Sonik 2008 and forthcoming). And if Tiamat is ultimately slain by Marduk, in the same manner as other hero-gods slay monsters, she is no yet cosmic outsider or Other; she is the foremother of the gods themselves. And later, though the male Marduk may structure the cosmos, he does so using the raw matter of her body. Attention to the details of Tiamat’s character development—or, better, her ­metamorphosis—over the course of the epic reveals that the tidy summary of Enuma elish so often circulated is false in every way that matters. Attention to the epic’s individual characters, even the minor ones (Apsu, for example, is disposed of within the first seventy lines of the epic), further reveals important details of narrative structure and meaning. Fundamental, not incidental, to the narrative is the brief early episode in which the god Ea slays Apsu, founds his dwelling (also called the Apsu) on Apsu’s corpse, and, together with the goddess Damkina, generates the hero-god Marduk in the Apsu. It establishes a type of structural parallelism, in which the primary episode (Tiamat vs. Marduk) is both continuous with and amplified by prior action (Apsu vs. Ea)—and through which the narrative of Enuma elish is revealed as carefully plotted and tightly interlocking. The SB Gilgamesh Epic is the longest and most complex of the narrative works to survive from Mesopotamia, as well as the most extensively studied. Despite this, the corpus of scholarship analyzing it remains miniscule in comparison with the ancient Greek and Roman epics, and many of its details remain to be elucidated. This brief discussion focuses, as the analysis of Enuma elish above, on several points pertaining

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— ​ G i l g a m e s h a n d T i a m a t A b r o a d —​ to character and characterization—and their significance for our understanding of the epic’s narrative structure and meaning. Running some three thousand or more lines across twelve clay tablets, the SB Gilgamesh Epic functions (among other roles) as a poignant and sophisticated exploration of what it means to be human. It follows the glorious and harrowing arc of its eponymous central character, Gilgamesh (king of the city of Uruk), from his impetuous and irresponsible youth through to the extraordinary deeds he accomplishes with the aid of Enkidu, his beloved companion, and, following the tragedy of Enkidu’s death, his lonely and bitterly bought maturity and wisdom.23 The epic, befitting its vast scope, encompasses many other characters who have, due to their seemingly (or comparatively) minor status, rarely been accorded the attention they are due. But if, as Woloch suggested, narrative meaning “takes shape in the dynamic flux of attention and neglect toward the various characters who are locked within the same story but have radically different positions within the narrative” (2003, 2), what have we missed in our failure to attend? In considering this question, I would like to briefly focus on a single (female and seemingly minor) character from the opening of the epic: Shamhat (SB Gilg. I–II). When closely examined, she offers fresh insights into the epic’s structure and meanings, as I’ve discussed in another context (Sonik 2021c).24 Shamhat, a sacred prostitute from the city of Uruk,25 plays a significant role in the opening events of the SB Gilgamesh Epic: she initiates the wild man Enkidu— created by the gods in the wilderness to be a match and companion for the otherwise peerless Gilgamesh—into civilization through her engagement of sexual intercourse with him. Subsequently, Shamhat teaches the formerly feral Enkidu to wear clothing and to eat (bread) and drink (beer), inculcating him into the lifeways of the city and preparing him for his entry into Uruk, where he will at last become the beloved companion and match of Gilgamesh.26 Shamhat’s role in the epic has often been (mis-)characterized as nurturing and maternal—as have the roles of most of the other female characters in the epic (Harris 2000, 120–28). But such a view obscures important points about Shamhat’s character, her relationship to Enkidu, and the narrative overall (Sonik 2021c). Shamhat, following the sexual intercourse that has severed Enkidu from his herd and initiated him into the company of human beings, looks closely at him and recognizes him as possessed of godlike beauty (SB Gilg. I 207). This beauty denotes Enkidu’s proper place in the world: he belongs in a city. (The city in Mesopotamia is where civilized humans, their kings, and their gods dwell, while physical beauty is associated with social status.)27 But this episode also highlights Shamhat’s striking visual acuity, her ability, shared with other of the female characters in the epic, to see and to know what others do not.28 Shamhat at this point asserts her agency, guiding Enkidu to a shepherd camp—a transit point between the wilderness where he was born and the city of Uruk for which he is destined. Here, he may learn to be and behave like a civilized human—by wearing clothing and eating and drinking the comestibles of urban life, such as bread and beer. In analyzing Shamhat’s relationship with Enkidu, two points are particularly relevant: (1) her social status as a prostitute, an explicitly urban denizen who yet stands outside normative family and other social structures, and (2) the totality of her

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— ​ K a r e n S o n i k —​ actions with respect to him, which encompass her sexual relations with and accurate visual perception of him, in addition to her tutoring of him (e.g., to wear clothing; eat/drink urban foods). Stripped of gendered misconceptions and thus regarded, Shamhat’s position with respect to Enkidu emerges not as one of mother to child but rather as one of fitting guide to a stranger entering a strange land. Shamhat’s position as guide to Enkidu, indeed, heralds Enkidu’s own later position as guide to Gilgamesh as the two heroes sojourn through the wilderness (Sonik 2021c, 794). Shamhat, who is at once an exemplary representative of the urban life to which the increasingly civilized Enkidu aspires and one of the city’s most transgressive denizens, is an excellent match and conductor for Enkidu, the former homo ferus undergoing metamorphosis into homo urbanus, as he navigates the brave new world into which he has been initiated. In the same manner, the transgressive Enkidu will in turn prove an excellent match for and guide to the peerless Gilgamesh—­transgressive in his own right (SB Gilg. I 29–98)—as the two heroes depart Gilgamesh’s city of Uruk for a journey through the wilderness (where Enkidu was born and raised) to the legendary Cedar Forest (SB Gilg. IV–V). Thus read, the SB Gilgamesh Epic, as Enuma elish, demonstrates a deliberate doubling: a structural parallelism in which a major narrative episode, i.e., Enkidu’s guidance of Gilgamesh, is presaged and amplified by earlier action.29

CONCLUSION Excavations of the ancient cities of Mesopotamia have yielded a rich literary corpus including a number of works designated as epics—often notable for their length and/ or (elevated) style, scope and/or (heroic) themes, and emotional contents and effects. The analysis and interpretations of these remarkable compositions have been both shaped and hindered by the early history of Near Eastern studies, which established Mesopotamia and its cultural products as ancillary to biblical studies, as well as by later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trends in literary analysis. The latter promoted an emphasis on typology—the assimilation of narrative structures, events, and characters to types—with a concomitant elision of difference, as well as a derogation of fantastic characters and events. As we look to the future of the study of Sumerian and Akkadian literature, it is vital not only that we attend to things that relate these compositions to each other (and to, for example, biblical and other narratives) but also that we closely attend to each narrative as autonomous and unique. Close attention to individual characters, whether major or seemingly minor—as in the case of Tiamat from Enuma elish or Shamhat from the SB Gilgamesh Epic—also offers a potent corrective to some of the misconceptions established in early scholarship on Mesopotamia, as well as striking new insights into the structures and meanings of some of the best known and most powerful of Mesopotamia’s ancient epics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This chapter was completed during my stay at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2021–2022), supported by the Hetty Goldman Fund. 112

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NOTES 1 For a related definition of epic, see Toohey (1992). 2 See also contributions in Konstan and Raaflaub (2010). 3 For other concise descriptions of the Gilgamesh Epic, see George (2003, 3; 2007, 45) and Michalowski (2010, 7–8). 4 Ancient epics are sometimes characterized as “charters for group identity” (Foley 2005, 1). There is no clear evidence for such functioning in Mesopotamia. 5 Among unresolved questions are (1) to what degree were people literate in various historical periods? and (2) what sort of literacy did they possess? “Functional literacy” may well have been high in many periods (Veldhuis 2011), but it was likely insufficient to access specialized technical or scholarly works (including written narratives). 6 For the ritual use of Enuma elish, albeit attested in the Seleucid Period see PongratzLeisten (1994); and Bidmead (2004). 7 Even lullabies “were probably not recorded in writing [by scribes] as they were sung by Babylonian women, but reshaped and adapted to a large extent to fit into the matrix of the literary genre of incantations” (Wasserman 2003, 182). 8 For some of the problems inherent in applying foreign genre terms to the Mesopotamian literary corpus, see Vanstiphout (1986), Michalowski (2010), and Sonik and Shehata (forthcoming). 9 I have explored the significance and shortcomings of cultural translation elsewhere; see Sonik (2021a, 40–42). 10 Credit for the decipherment of Akkadian, long attributed primarily to Rawlinson, is more recently attributed to the Reverend Edward Hincks (1792–1866); see, for example, Cathcart (2011). 11 Mesopotamia’s ancient (Sumerian and Akkadian) narratives are remarkable for their composite nature: many are (re-)constructed from multiple versions potentially varying in date, place of origin, and content; see Sonik and Shehata (forthcoming). I argue elsewhere (Sonik, forthcoming) that, for the purposes of narrative analysis, we ought to treat the composite texts holistically to the degree possible. 12 Similar issues attended the reception of Mesopotamia’s visual arts (Kertai 2021; Sonik and Kertai forthcoming). 13 Mesopotamia’s monsters are not primarily creatures of fantasy and fairy tale (Sonik 2013b). 14 The founding, purpose, and early history of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, “born at a meeting held on November 18, 1870,” is described in Legge (1919). 15 See, for example, Mihelic (1951) on the influences of the Folkloristic School and of Near Eastern archeology on Gunkel’s work. 16 See, for example, contributions in Shehata and Sonik (forthcoming). 17 This is despite the peculiar composite nature of much of Mesopotamian “literature”; see note 11 above. 18 Woloch’s emphasis is the novel, but his book begins with a case study on the Iliad—an apt analysis for the present study on Mesopotamia’s epic literature—and its characters. 19 The entwining of such narratives with political events and purposes is not uncommon in Mesopotamia; any political roles do not detract from the narrative’s other functions. 20 The dating of the Enuma elish remains contested, but it is commonly attributed to the late second millennium BCE. 21 On the narratives Ninurta and Azag (Lugale), Anzu, Labbu, and Girra and Elamatum, see Walker (1983); Lambert (1986); and Sonik (2009, 2013b). 22 Line numbering and edition from Lambert (2013, 3–146). 23 This does not include Tablet XII, which fits uneasily into the narrative arc, e.g., George (2003, 728–35). It also does not highlight Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality, which is

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— ​ K a r e n S o n i k —​ sometimes mischaracterized as the central purpose of the epic: the latter is, I would argue, only a part of the overall narrative and mostly interesting for how it is conducted (i.e., alone). 24 For a corresponding exploration of the epic’s primary characters—Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba—see Sonik, forthcoming; for related studies of these characters in the Sumerian narratives, see Gadotti (2023); Katz (2023); and Sonik (2023). 25 The precise nature of Shamhat’s profession, and the existence of sacred prostitution g­ enerally, is a contentious issue: for summary and references, see Sonik (2021c, 781 note 18). 26 Enkidu on his deathbed (SB Gilg. VII 101–61) first curses and then blesses Shamhat in terms supporting her identification as a prostitute. 27 On civilization and urbanism in Mesopotamia, see Sonik (2013b); and Tinney and Sonik (2019). On physical beauty and social status, see Sonik (2021c, 787, note 57). 28 Striking perceptual acuity is evinced also by Ninsun, the scorpion-women, Shiduri, and Uta-napishti’s woman; see Sonik (2021c). 29 On thematic and other parallelism in the SB Gilgamesh Epic, see Sonik (2020).

WORKS CITED Antti, Aarne. 1910. Verzeichnis der Märchentypen: Mit Hülfe von Fachgenossen Ausgearbeitet. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakalemian toimituksia. Arnaud, Daniel. 2007. Corpus des Textes de Bibliothèque de Ras Shamra-Ougarit (1936–2000) en Sumérien, Babylonien et Assyrien. Sabadell: Editorial Ausa. Beckman, Gary. 2019. The Hittite Gilgamesh. Atlanta, GA: Lockwood Press for the American Schools of Oriental Research. Bidmead, Julye. 2004. The Akitu Festival: Religious Continuity and Royal Legitimation in Mesopotamia. Gorgias Near Eastern Studies Series. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Carus, Paul. 1901. “The Fairy-Tale Element in the Bible.” The Monist 11, no. 3: 405–47. Cathcarat, Kevin J. 2011. “The Earliest Contributions to the Decipherment of Sumerian and Akkadian.” Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 1: 1–12. Cavigneaux, Antoine, and Farouk N. H. Al-Rawi. 1993. “Gilgameš et Taureau de Ciel (šulmè-kam) (Textes de Tell Haddad IV).” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale 87, no. 2: 97–129. Chavalas, Mark W. 2002. “Assyriology and Biblical Studies: A Century of Tension.” In Mesopotamia and the Bible, edited by Mark W. Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger Jr., 21–67. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Delitzsch, Friedrich. 1903. Babel and Bible: Two Lectures on the Significance of Assyriological Research for Religion, Embodying the Most Important Criticisms and the Author’s Replies. Translated by Thomas J. McCormack and W. H. Carruth. Chicago, IL: The Open Court Pub. Co. Delnero, Paul. 2012.“Memorization and the Transmission of Sumerian Literary Compositions.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71, no. 2: 189–208. ———. 2015. “Texts and Performance: The Materiality and Function of the Sumerian Liturgical Corpus.” In Texts and Contexts: The Circulation and Transmission of Cuneiform Texts in Social Space, edited by Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger, 87–120. Berlin: de Gruyter. Edzard, Dietz Otto. 1994. “Sumerian Epic: Epic or Fairy Tale?” Bulletin of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies 27: 7–14. Finkel, Irving L. 2014. The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. New York: Anchor Books. Foley, John Miles. 2005. Introduction to A Companion to Ancient Epic, edited by John Miles Foley, 1–6. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

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— ​ K a r e n S o n i k —​ Mihelic, Joseph L. 1951. “The Influence of Form Criticism on the Study of the Old Testament.” Journal of Bible and Religion 19, no. 3: 120–29. Nagy, Gregory. 1999. “Epic as Genre.” In Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community, edited by Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus and Susan Wofford, 21–32. Berkeley: University of California Press. Olrik, Axel. 1908. “Episke love i folkedigtningen.” Danske Studier 5: 69–85. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 1994. Ina šulmi īrub: Die kulttopographische und ideologische Programmatik der aktīu-Prozession in Babylonien und Assyrien im I. Jahrtausend v. Chr. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Propp, Vladimir. [1928] 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott. 2nd ed. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Rich, Claudius James. [1815] 1818. Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon. 3rd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. Rogerson, John W. 1987. Introduction to The Folktale in the Old Testament, by Hermann Gunkel, translated by Michael D. Rutter, edited by David M. Gunn, 13–18. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Sasson, Jack M. 2005. “Comparative Observations on the Near Eastern Epic Traditions.” In A  Companion to Ancient Epic, edited by John Miles Foley, 215–32. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Shehata, Dahlia, and Karen Sonik. Forthcoming. How to Tell a Story: Surveying Contemporary Theories and Methods of Mesopotamian Literature. Leiden: Brill. Silver, Carole G. 1999. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, George. 1875. Assyrian Discoveries: An Account of Explorations and Discoveries on the Site of Nineveh, During 1873 and 1874. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle. ———. 1876. The Chaldean Account of Genesis, Containing the Description of the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, the Times of the Patriarchs, and Nimroud; Babylonian Fables, and Legends of the Gods; from the Cuneiform Inscriptions. 4th ed. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle. Sonik, Karen. 2008. “Bad King, False King, True King: Apsû and His Heirs.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 128, no. 4: 737–43. ———. 2009. “Gender Matters in Enūma Eliš.” In In the Wake of Tikva Frymer-Kensky, edited by Steven Holloway, JoAnn Scurlock and Richard Beal, 85–101. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. ———. 2013a. “From Hesiod’s Abyss to Ovid’s rudis indigestaque moles: Reading Chaos into the Babylonian Epic of Creation.” In Creation and Chaos: A Reconsideration of Gunkel’s Chaoskampf Hypothesis, edited by JoAnn Scurlock and Richard Beal, 1–25. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. ———. 2013b. “Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Supernatural: A Taxonomy of Zwischenwesen.” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 14: 103–16. ———. 2017. “Emotion and the Ancient Arts: Visualizing, Materializing, and Producing States of Being.” In Visualizing Emotions in the Ancient Near East, edited by Sara Kipfer, 219–61. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 2020. “Gilgamesh and Emotional Excess: The King Without Counsel in the SB Gilgamesh Epic.” In The Expression of Emotions in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, edited by Shi-Wei Hsu and Jaume Llop Raduà, 390–409. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2021a. “Art/ifacts and ArtWorks: De-Colonizing the Study and Museum Display of Ancient and Non-Western Things.” In Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World, edited by Karen Sonik, 1–82. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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— ​ G i l g a m e s h a n d T i a m a t A b r o a d —​ ———. 2021b. “The Ancient Near East: Western | Non-Western.” In Art/ifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World, edited by Karen Sonik, xxix–xl. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2021c. “Minor and Marginal(ized)? Re-Thinking Women as Minor Characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 41, no. 4: 779–801. ———. 2022. “The Distant Eye and the Ekphrastic Image: Thinking Through Aesthetics and Art for the Senses (Western | Non-Western).” In The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East, edited by Kiersten Neumann and Allison K. Thomason, 530–57. New York: Routledge. ———. 2023. “Awe as Entangled Emotion: Prosociality, Collective Action, and Aesthetics in the Sumerian Gilgamesh Narratives.” In The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East, edited by Karen Sonik and Ulrike Steinert, 487–524. New York: Routledge. ———. Forthcoming. “Characterization and Identity in Mesopotamian Literature: The Gilgamesh Epic, Enuma elish, and Other Sumerian and Akkadian Narratives.” In How to Tell a Story: Contemporary Approaches to Mesopotamian Literature, edited by Dahlia Shehata and Karen Sonik. Leiden: Brill. ———, and David Kertai. Forthcoming. “Between Science and Aesthetics in the NineteenthCentury Public Museum: The Elgin Marbles, The Chain of Art, and the Victorian Assimilation of Assyrian Sculpture.” In The Reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II: Architecture, Iconography, and Text, edited by J. Caleb Howard. Leuven: Peeters. Sonik, Karen, and Dahlia Shehata. Forthcoming. “Mesopotamian Literature: Theories, Methods, and Issues of Sumerian and Akkadian Narrative Analysis.” In How to Tell a Story: Contemporary Approaches to Mesopotamian Literature, edited by Dahlia Shehata and Karen Sonik. Leiden: Brill. Tinney, Steve, and Karen Sonik, eds. 2019. Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. 1936. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Folcroft, PA: The Folcroft Press, Inc. Toohey, Peter. 1992. Reading Epic: An Introduction to the Ancient Narratives. New York: Routledge. Vanstiphout, Herman L. J. 1986. “Some Thoughts on Genre in Mesopotamian Literature.” In Keilschriftliche Literaturen: Ausgewälte Vorträge der XXXII. Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Münster, 8.-12.7.1985, edited by Karl Hecker and Walter Sommerfeld, 1–11. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Veldhuis, Niek. 2011. “Levels of Literacy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, edited by Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 68–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Christopher. 1983. “The Myth of Girra and Elamatum.” Anatolian Studies 33: 145–52. Wasserman, Nathan. 2003. Style and Form in Old-Babylonian Literary Texts. Leiden: Brill. Woloch, Alex. 2003. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wood, Irving F. 1909. “Folk-Tales in Old Testament Narrative.” Journal of Biblical Literature 28, no. 1: 34–41. Zimmern, Heinrich. 1901. Biblische und babylonische Urgeschichte. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

(RE)INVENTING AN EPIC

R E A D I N G T H E TA M I L C I L A P PAT I K Ā R A M AC RO S S T I M E

rsr Morgan J Curtis

This is an elegant, but comparatively little known composition, one of the five ancient Tamil poems, being a romantic story like ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ and not rising to the dignity of an epic. It is often obscure, sometimes very tedious; but it is full of genius. —G. U. Pope (1897, 141)

The Cilappatika¯ram is one of the literary masterpieces of the world: it is to the Tamils what the Iliad is to the Greeks—the story of their civilization. —R. Parthasarathy (1993, 2)

Despite being considerably different in scope, length, and style than the “Sanskrit epics” the Maha¯bha¯rata and the Ra¯ma¯yaṇa, a variety of South Indian texts composed in classical Tamil1 over a considerable period of time, beginning in probably the fifth century CE, have been labeled as “epics.” The Cilappatika¯ram by Ilanko Atikal is the oldest extant (and possibly oldest ever) long narrative written in Tamil, a South Indian language that is among India’s six classical languages along with the likes of Sanskrit and Kannada. Its literary history spans approximately two thousand years. When pioneering scholar U. V. Swaminathaiyar published an edition of the Cilappatika¯ram (The Tale of an Anklet, circa fifth century), based on his review of a number of manuscripts and commentaries in 1892,2 the text was reportedly not well known among either Tamil or European scholars of Tamil literature.3 In the first quotation above, missionary and scholar G. U. Pope offers his tempered assessment of Swaminathaiyar’s first published version, questioning the story’s fitness for the designation of “epic” and highlighting the complex and sometimes perplexing nature of the narrative. As the second quotation shows, however, within one hundred years, the Cilappatika¯ram’s reception seems to prove Pope’s estimation of it incorrect. It rose rather quickly to the “dignity of an epic” in the minds of many scholars and Tamil people, even commanding a place of central importance in the rhetoric of Tamil

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-11

— ​ ( R e ) I n v e n t i n g a n E p i c —​ political movements. R. Parthasarathy’s comment speaks to the text’s status as an important piece of literature and to the place it has come to occupy as a national epic of sorts. In this case, “national epic” does not signal an epic that represents the essence of a current nation-state but rather an epic that represents a unified Tamil country in the past and hope for the same in the future. Although this text was relatively little known over a century ago, it enjoys considerable popularity in Tamil Nadu today. Statues of the main character, Kannaki, and the author, Ilanko Atikal, stand near statues of figures such as Mohandas Gandhi on Marina Beach in the city of Chennai. The story lives on in a multitude of adaptations produced by authors and artists in Tamil Nadu and beyond. Within a relatively short period of time, scholars, historians, and political figures elevated the Cilappatika¯ram to the extent that it became a formidable cultural force, one that fueled debates about history, literature, identity, religion, and their interactions. Important works, the “great” texts, often deal with issues of power in their contents but also exist within extra-textual networks of power through domains that we have come to classify as political, religious, and the like. In this essay, I will look briefly at the Cilappatika¯ram’s reception history to show its operation in networks of power across time, highlighting how consistent contestation marked its journey to its current level of popularity and arguable status as a national epic. Though not an exhaustive examination, I begin with the time period close to the text’s composition and move to the contemporary moment, looking at literary, scholarly, and political receptions of the poem.4

THE CILAPPATIKĀRAM’S NARRATIVE, STRUCTURE, AND STYLE The Cilappatika¯ram opens with an introductory preface that narrates the conditions of its composition and its contents. In this opening, the merchant Cattan, who has just witnessed the climactic events in the story, implores Ilanko Atikal to compose a literary work about them. In the course of the conversation, they disclose the three main themes of the text: We shall compose a poem, with songs, To explain these truths: even kings, if they break The law, have their necks wrung by dharma; 5 Great men everywhere commend Pattiṉi of renowned fame; and karma ever Manifests itself, and is fulfilled. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 21) As such, the poem declares its concern with educating its audience with lessons critical to living in the world. The Cilappatika¯ram explores its themes through thirty sections of verse, song, and prose, divided across three books or long chapters, each named after the city in which the primary actions take place. These cities, Puhar, Madurai, and Vanchi, are the capitals of the three ancient Tamil kingdoms of the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras, respectively. 119

— ​ M o r g a n J C u r t i s —​ Generally believed to have its inspiration in an existing oral tradition (Hart 1976, 341; Zvelebil 1992, 32), the Cilappatika¯ram tells one version of the story of Kannaki and Kovalan. At the opening of the Cilappatika¯ram’s main story, Kannaki marries Kovalan, the son of a prominent merchant, and they begin a happy life together. After some time, Kovalan leaves her for Madhavi, a dancer, eventually returning penniless. At Kannaki’s insistence, they journey to Madurai to sell one of her paired anklets and regain their fortune. Bad omens abound on their arrival, and even the river Vaiyai near the city is troubled: Called Vaiyai; Of overflowing fertility, she is the royal banner Of the Pa¯ṇṭiyanˍ . As if she knew beforehand The coming troubles of Kaṇṇaki, with the holy robes Of fragrant flowers she covered Her body, and held back the flood of tears That filled her eyes to the brim. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 138) When Kovalan enters the city, a goldsmith frames him for the theft of one of the queen’s anklets, and the Pandyan king orders Kovalan’s execution. In response to her husband’s unjust murder, Kannaki enters the city and confronts the king in his palace, proving her husband’s innocence by showing the king the difference between the two anklets. When she arrives, the gatekeeper announces her arrival to the king, comparing her—by negation—to a series of fearsome goddesses: She is not Koṟṟavai, the goddess of victory With the fierce spear in her large hand, Standing on the buffalo’s neck that spurts Continuous blood from its open wound. She is not Aṇaṅku, the youngest sister Of the seven virgins, who made Śiva dance. She is not Ka¯li who lives in the dreadful forest. She is not Dūrga who tore apart the broad chest Of Da¯ruka. Pent up with hatred and anger At the loss of her husband, she stands At the gate, a golden anklet in her hand. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 187–88) Upon being made to face his error in judgment, the king dies on the spot, with his queen following after him. Am I a king? I listened to the words of a goldsmith! I alone am the thief? Through my error I have failed to protect the people Of the southern kingdom. Let my life crumble in the dust. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 189) 120

— ​ ( R e ) I n v e n t i n g a n E p i c —​ He dies with these words. Leaving the palace, Kannaki rips off her left breast and burns down the city of Madurai with the assistance of Agni, the god of fire. The city’s deity explains to her that the suffering she experienced resulted from Kovalan’s pastlife karma and ends the fire. Fourteen days later, Kannaki ascends to heaven in a chariot with her husband in his own divine form. In the third and final book of the text, the Chera king launches an expedition to the Himalayas to retrieve a stone and set up a shrine to Kannaki in her goddess form, Kannaki-Pattini. In the process, he defeats northern armies, capturing their kings and making them carry the stone for Kannaki’s image on their heads. Having returned home, he establishes a temple to Kannaki-Pattini.

PREMODERN TEXT AND RECEPTION In order to consider the early history of this text, it is helpful to know a bit about how it relates to other pieces of Tamil literature, including others often labeled as epics. No term from the Tamil literary theoretical materials clearly translates into “epic,” but a few other categories of Tamil literature are often rendered as such, including long narrative poetic works indicated by Tamil terms such as ka¯ppiyam or ceyyuḷ. Missionary Constanzo Beschi, when discussing ka¯ppiyam and ceyyuḷ as epics in his 1730 Latin text on the literary dialect of Tamil, notes that “these compositions… do not follow the rules prescribed by the Latin critics” (112), thus showing that they were already understood to be epics of a different sort. Parthasarathy, who authored the most recent English translation of the Cilappatika¯ram, asserts that “epic” can provide at least some utility in thinking about the text since “ka¯ppiyam bears a family resemblance to the epic” (1993, 315). Others, like David Shulman, more definitively assert that these works are “usually wrongly called epics” (2016, 98). These differing assertions about the text vis-à-vis the label of “epic” indicate dynamics that are important to attend to when thinking about the Cilappatika¯ram. As I will discuss a bit more below, it shares few features with European epics, but the term “epic” does provide some utility in helping understand the status of the text and how people relate to it. The Cilappatika¯ram refers to itself as a poetic composition (ceyyuḷ) with songs, while the later theoretical and commentarial literature describes and labels it in a variety of ways (Parthasarathy 1993, 301). In one popular later classification, the Cilappatika¯ram belongs to a category of texts called the five great poetic works (aimperuṅka¯ppiyam), which also includes the Maṇimēkalai (circa sixth century), Cīvakacinta¯maṇi (Cīvakaṉ, The Wish-Fulfilling Jewel, circa ninth century), Vaḷaiya¯pati (circa ninth or tenth century), and Kuṇṭalakēci (circa ninth or tenth century).6 Many scholars have pointed out that this designation, which echoes a similar designation in Sanskrit (maha¯ka¯vya), provides limited utility in understanding the texts (Zvelebil 1974, 130; Richman 1988, 158–60; Varadarajan 1988, 155); nevertheless, these works of narrative literature tend to be discussed as a group. The tradition considers many of these long poetic narratives to be pairs, including the Cilappatika¯ram and the Maṇimēkalai, where one text is seen as a response to the other in some way, usually by offering an alternative religious vision (Monius 2001, 61). Resources for understanding the Cilappatika¯ram’s popularity or reception around the time of its composition are minimal to non-existent, with even the earliest 121

— ​ M o r g a n J C u r t i s —​ minimal commentary on the text likely coming from a few centuries later. Reading it alongside the Maṇimēkalai, however, offers some clues. The tradition has come to take these two texts as “twins,” and a connection between them is drawn at least as early as Atiyarkkunallar’s commentary in the twelfth or thirteenth century (Monius 2001, 68). The preface and epilogue of the Cilappatika¯ram, which many scholars believe to have been written later (Parthasarathy 1993, 7), support the relationship between the two works. Cattan, identified in the opening of the Cilappatika¯ram as the witness to events in the story, bears the same name as the author of Maṇimēkalai, and the epilogue states: Here ends the Cilappatika¯ram. It ends, in truth, With the story of Maṇimēkalai. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 277) As such, this poem, written maybe a century later, is sometimes considered the second half of the earlier one, though the stories differ in critical ways. At the end of the Cilappatika¯ram, the lives of almost all of the characters have changed substantially. This includes Madhavi and Manimekalai, her daughter by Kovalan: Ma¯tavi heard of your lover’s [Kovalan’s] death, Of your agony, and of the people’s outrage towards her. She lost heart. She went to the sages To live under the bo tree, gave away her wealth, And entered a nunnery. Did you hear that, friend? And did you also hear, friend, Of the renunciation of Maṇimēkalai? (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 260–61) The Maṇimēkalai picks up the story after this renunciation and follows Manimekalai as she advances along a Buddhist path. As Anne Monius discusses in some detail, the later work not only carries forward the story of the Cilappatika¯ram, but also recasts several aspects of it toward explicitly Buddhist ends (2001, 65–77). This overtly Buddhist agenda already stands in contrast to the more obscured worldview of the Cilappatika¯ram, which, though perhaps written by a Jain, does not assert such strong religious or sectarian commitments.7 More specifically, for example, the Maṇimēkalai puts forward a different view of karma (2001, 70–72) and, relatedly, of Kannaki’s status as a deity (2001, 70). In the Maṇimēkalai, Kannaki explains to Manimekalai that she will be reborn at the end of her time as a deity to continue working off her karma (Cattanar 1992, xxvi 34–41). In light of changes such as this, the later text can be read as “a response of sorts” to the earlier one (Monius 2001, 76). As with the modern adaptations that we will see later, the relationship between these putative twins is more complicated than just having multiple versions of the same story and shows one significant early way in which the Cilappatika¯ram’s version of the story of Kannaki was challenged and reworked to a different end. 122

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COLONIAL ERA REINTRODUCTION Early European study of the literatures of India—and therefore the early identification of any piece or genre of such literature as “epic”—is of course deeply embedded in the colonization of India and related missionary projects. Although the complexities of this process lie beyond the scope of this study, the dynamics at play necessarily relate to the issues at hand. Returning to the late nineteenth century when the Cilappatika¯ram and other relatively obscure Tamil works were made available to a large audience due to manuscript projects and the printing press, Pope serves as a useful guide to begin considering the Cilappatika¯ram’s reception at that time. Partially to fuel their conversion efforts, Christian missionaries learned and often mastered Indian languages, and, as Eugene Irschick notes, they played a critical role in progressing the study of Tamil language and culture (1969, 276). Pope contributed to the study of Tamil language and literature significantly enough to earn him his own statue on Chennai’s Marina Beach. Despite his opinion about the Cilappatika¯ram being insufficiently “epic,” his issue was with the Cilappatika¯ram in particular, not Tamil literature in general, as can be seen in his markedly different assessment of the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi.8 Pope refers to it as “the greatest existing Tamil literary monument” (1893, xli), as “at once the Iliad and the Odyssey of the Tamil language,” and “one of the great epics of the world” (1893, xlii). Although he does not explicitly name the criteria by which he makes these contrasting assessments, the Cilappatika¯ram differs from the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi in key ways that might account for Pope’s assertions. The Cīvakacinta¯maṇi’s story portrays one central, heroic figure, Civakan: a man on a journey to take his rightful place as king. The Cilappatika¯ram, on the contrary, focuses primarily on the journey of a woman, who, even though she becomes a goddess, largely disappears from the story well before its end. As many have found notable, the Cilappatika¯ram concerns itself centrally with merchant families rather than royalty or priests (Varadarajan 1988, 91). In one fairly common assessment, Zvelebil describes the Cilappatika¯ram as being “nearer to the life of the people” and as “comparatively realistic,” (Zvelebil 1974, 133). This is as compared to the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi in which “the supernatural mingles freely with the natural” and the hero is “a perfect man” (1974, 137). These features, in addition to the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi’s much greater length, might well have made it seem a more viable candidate for “epic” in the original European generic sense. 9 Beyond these differences in the texts, there is evidence to suggest that the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi was known and much admired—at least among Christian missionaries who engaged with Tamil literature—before the publication of Swaminathaiyar’s edition of either that work or the Cilappatika¯ram. Jesuit priest Beschi composed a lengthy narrative poem in Tamil called Tēmpa¯vaṇi (The Jewel of Fragrant Beauty 1726), itself revered and sometimes referred to as an epic (Caldwell 1856, 90; Zvelebil 1974, 162). That work, focused on the Christian story of Joseph, was inspired by the literary qualities of the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi (Zvelebil 1974, 160). This continues the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi’s already influential trajectory; as Monius notes, “At the level of form, of poetic structure and narrative framework, the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi establishes a set of conventions for long ‘epic’ narratives that all subsequent medieval works...follow” (2004, 139). Beschi clearly knows of the Cilappatika¯ram as 123

— ​ M o r g a n J C u r t i s —​ he both cites it by name and excerpts it in his works. Bishop Robert Caldwell, in his pivotal 1856 publication on Dravidian grammar, called the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi “the most celebrated poem written by an avowedly Jain author” and “a brilliant romantic epic” (2004, 84), but does not mention any of the other four great poetic works. Since he mentions other pieces of Tamil literature like Kampan’s Ra¯ma¯yaṇa (2004, 87), perhaps he was unfamiliar with (or unmoved by) the Cilappatika¯ram. Despite its apparent popularity in certain circles and several incomplete attempts to publish a version of the text (Zvelebil 1995, 171), Swaminathaiyar lists the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi, along with the Cilappatika¯ram and the Maṇimēkalai, among the works of Tamil literature unknown to him and his teacher before his efforts to locate and edit their manuscripts (1994, 370). During his work to produce the first complete edition for publication, he, too, became enthralled by the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi, stating, for example, “I realized that this was the touchstone against which one should rub the merit of all classical Tamil poetry” (2:376). He does not shower the Cilappatika¯ram with the same sort of praise, though he comes to see it as an important work, as I will discuss below. Despite all of this, the Cilappatika¯ram did not re-enter an environment in which the story of Kovalan and Kannaki was unknown, even if its particular version was not widespread. A poem called Ko¯valaṉ katai (Story of Kovalan), attributed to Pukalenti (twelfth or thirteenth century), but likely produced well after his time (Noble 1990, 107), tells another, quite different version of the story of Kannaki and Kovalan. Various stories go by that name, but in the one studied and translated by Noble (1990), Kannaki is an incarnation of the goddess Kali, who comes to earth to kill the Pandyan king (1990, 127). Before the reintroduction of the Cilappatika¯ram in the nineteenth century, people in both India and Sri Lanka had read and recited versions of this story (Nevill 1888, 16). Noble states that the first publications of it in the mid-nineteenth century, likely also based on an oral tradition (1990, 108), “played a significant role in the transmission of the Kaṇṇaki-Ko¯valaṉ story during the twentieth century” (1990, 122–23). This brief look at the literary or scholarly milieu of the colonial mid- to late nineteenth century shows something of the world into which Swaminathaiyar and others made Tamil literary works more widely available. It demonstrates, in part, that the classical version of the Cilappatika¯ram, though never entirely forgotten, re-entered a world in which other texts were greatly admired and other versions of the story of Kovalan and Kannaki already had an audience. Of course, there were political factors and stakes that related to this scholarly milieu and the broader reception trajectories of these works, especially those related to movements for independence from British colonial rule.

THE CILAPPATIKĀRAM AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS In Swaminathaiyar’s autobiography, published serially from 1940 to 1942, he reflects on the importance of the Cilappatika¯ram: It was after Cīvakacinta¯maṇi and Pattuppa¯ṭṭu [The Ten Songs] began circulating in Tamilnadu that the Tamils cultivated the enjoyment of such ancient Tamil literary works and felt proud about them. When Cilappatika¯ram followed, 124

— ​ ( R e ) I n v e n t i n g a n E p i c —​ everyone realized the greatness of ancient culture of Tamilnadu, and the splendour and extent of Tamil arts and culture. Scholars and scientists were overjoyed when their eyes were opened to those unseen and unknown treasures. (1994, 2, 493) Indeed, the Cilappatika¯ram and Kannaki became key sites for negotiating or asserting a particular kind of South Indian past, but that negotiation has entailed consistent contestation. During the course of the fight for independence from British colonial rule, especially in the early twentieth century, movements emerged that sought to represent the specific political goals and ideals of people in South India, particularly those who were not of the Brahmin caste (Irschick 1969, xiv). Fueled in part by the relatively newly popularized distinction between the family of the languages from the northern and southern parts of the country—Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, respectively— groups in South India sought to make clear how different their culture and history were from North India (278). Groups such as the Justice Party (founded 1916) and the Self Respect League (founded 1926) formed around political goals, including moving for a separate Dravidian or Tamil state (Irschick 1969, xvi) and organizing against Hindi as India’s national language (Ramaswamy 1997, 58–60). Historical and political arguments, bolstered by newfound literary sources, served to amplify this dichotomy and to show either that North and South India had once been both different and completely independent of each other or that they had been inseparably entwined for thousands of years. Along with other newly reintroduced literary works like the early poetic anthologies, the Cilappatika¯ram found itself on both sides of this debate. Often referred to as a national epic because of its depiction of unity between three Tamil kingdoms and rich details about Tamil life (Zvelebil 1974, 134; Parthasarathy 1993, 344), in many ways, the Cilappatika¯ram was one among a handful of texts uniquely suited to be shaped to and deployed in these political movements. This is evident in N. Subramanian’s assessment of it, by way of example: The story moves from Puha¯r in the Chola country to Madurai, capital of the Pandyas and thence to Vañji of the Cheras. In encompassing the whole of Tamil country in its epic sweep, it has posited a cultural integrity for the Tamils, and through Ilango¯, it may be said without fear of serious contradiction, Tamil nationalism got its first expression; and what an expression, inspiration, and example it has been! (1981, 23–24) Sumathi Ramaswamy, in her study on Tamil-language devotion,10 points out how the Cilappatika¯ram, among other Tamil texts, became “exemplars of the ‘secular,’ ‘­egalitarian,’ and ‘chaste’ essence of true and pure Tamil culture, free from the influences of Sanskritic Aryan Brahmans with their priestly ways” (1997, 74). The text provided proof for the rich cultural and literary heritage of South India, which supported claims for future independence. It even reportedly played a role in ­determining the border between Tamil Nadu and neighboring Andhra Pradesh (Krishnan 2015). 125

— ​ M o r g a n J C u r t i s —​ Arguments against this view of the Cilappatika¯ram came from people both outside and within Tamil-oriented movements. Historian Ramachandra Dikshitar, ­himself a Tamil Brahmin, published the first full English-language translation of the Cilappatika¯ram, along with an extensive introduction, copious footnotes, and informational appendices, in 1939. He sees the text as a critical source of historical information on a variety of discrete topics and makes the following claim about the status of the interactions between North and South India: The life described in the Śilappadika¯ram is generally permeated by Aryan concepts and Aryan religious ideas. … It is evident that the Tamil imagination has been from early times influenced by Aryan culture. It can be safely asserted that in the Śangam age11 the original Tamil culture was transformed into a synthesis of Sanskrit and Tamil elements. (Dikshitar 1939, 64) While he asserts that there was once a Tamil culture separate from Sanskrit, Dikshitar claims the two had already melded by the time of the text’s composition, which he joins others in dating to the second century. He bolsters the argument with examples of intertextual references and dedicates one of the appendices to Sanskrit words found in the text (Ilanko Atikal 1939, 404–08). Dikshitar does not see the synthesis of northern and southern features as a cause for concern, but that was not the case for everyone who came to similar conclusions about the presence of Sanskritic elements in the text. E. V. Ramasami (also known as E. V. R. or Periyar [“The Great One”]) was a prominent figure in non-Brahmin politics. Known for his inflammatory takedowns of Sanskrit works like Valmiki’s Ra¯ma¯yaṇa (Richman 1991), he did not see Tamil literature as above critique. In a 1951 speech, he argued vehemently that the Cilappatika¯ram exhibited Sanskritic or northern influence, and this provided reason for him to dismiss the text along with the Sanskrit epics and other texts on dharma (Ramasami 1974, 1266–67). He  ­further expresses concerns with campaigns to elevate the Cilappatika¯ram and paints a picture of the poem as an agent of deceit: If you ask how the Cilappatika¯ram is structured: obscene superstitious belief, with Sanskrit ideals as its true meaning, a thing possessing a structure of fine Tamil, it’s like a courtesan (tevaṭiya¯ḷ). That is to say, as a courtesan is decorated for looking at, but if you look inside, the inside is entirely full of deceit, the whole body diseased, and she’s seen as surviving by cheating men with her lines of bangles; it’s just like that, this Cilappatika¯ram. (Ramasami 1974, 1267)12 His reading of the poem as overly imbued with Sanskrit ideals and pro-Brahmin sentiments leads him to assert that the text is not a good choice to represent Tamil culture. Interestingly, although he clearly means to address the historical text, several of his claims do not comport with the events in that version. With regard to his reading of Valmiki’s Ra¯ma¯yaṇa, Richman notes that he “atomizes the text and reassembles its events for his own purposes” (1991, 192), and a similar dynamic might be at play here with the Cilappatika¯ram. Since multiple versions of the story 126

— ​ ( R e ) I n v e n t i n g a n E p i c —​ of Kannaki were in circulation, it is difficult to know whether Periyar deliberately ­misread the ­classical text or based his assessments on modern versions that claimed—often strategically and falsely—to be true to the “original.” At any rate, this puts Periyar at odds with a considerable number of figures who “bracket elements of Ilanko’s ­rhetoric and ideology that they tend to identify as Aryan importations” in order to hold the text up as a “symbol of Tamil identity and power” (Cutler 2003, 300). Kannaki, too, becomes a central part of the political reception and ­politically inflected adaptations of the Cilappatika¯ram. Reflecting on the contemporary popularity of Kannaki, including in political movements, Jacob Pandian says she “serves as a metaphor to conceptualize the Tamil heritage of justice and the ideals of Tamil linguistic and cultural purity” (1982, 179). These views of Kannaki tend to focus on her virtue as a wife (kaṟpu), particularly her insistence on seeking justice for her husband. Building on his concerns about the Cilappatika¯ram and its role in shaping and serving as a representative of Tamil culture, Periyar levels criticism against Kannaki as a possible role model for Tamil women. He asserts, for example, that she is someone who killed innocent people while saving Brahmins and quietly put up with her husband’s dalliance (1974, II:1267–68). In the Cilappatika¯ram, however, Kannaki actually instructs Agni to spare not just Brahmins but also “­virtuous people, cows, faithful wives / old people, and children” (Ilanko Atikal 2013, 21.53–54). More recently, politician and Dalit activist Thirumavalavan has echoed Periyar’s sentiments, stating that “Kannagi is more a symbol of male domination than a symbol of chastity!” (2003, 60). He also criticizes the reinstallation of the very statue of Kannaki noted in the introduction to this chapter, drawing a through-line from events in the Cilappatika¯ram to the present: Only men have been involved, right from the creation of the Kannagi epic, to the carving of her statue from a rock brought from the Himalayas, to building a shrine in her memory, to the erection of the statue on the Marina Beach during the Second World Tamil Conference in 1968, and now, to demanding that her statue be reinstalled in the same place! It appears that then and now, any woman has not supported this woman! (2003, 59–60) Here, he references the fact that J. Jayalalitha, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, oversaw what turned out to be a temporary removal of the statue of Kannaki. Although officially moved because it was hit by a truck, Jayalalitha apparently associated the statue, which was “pointing an accusatory hand toward [her] legislative building,” with her own political troubles (Holt 2016, 238). The move was seen as a deliberate sleight to her opponents, including M. Karunanidhi, who had built an association with both Kannaki and the Cilappatika¯ram in part through his writing of the script for Poompukar (1964), a film based on the Cilappatika¯ram, among other endeavors (Holt 2016, 240; Noble 1990, 269–71). He reinstalled the statue during one of his own terms as Chief Minister. Thus, we can see how in recent times the Cilappatika¯ram has served as political currency or a mediator of sorts, playing a role in the negotiation of power for these political actors. 127

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TELLING AND RETELLING THE STORY The modern popularity of the text—and of the general story of Kovalan and Kannaki—extends beyond the borders of Tamil literature and politics. Contemporary retellings and translations of the story abound in a variety of media, including comic books, television serials, and plays, not only in Tamil but also in many other languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Malayalam, and English. The practice of retelling or recasting popular pieces of literature has a long history in South Asia, as it does in other parts of the world. These versions can be useful for understanding the reception of and reaction to the texts and stories they tell. The modern adaptations of the Cilappatika¯ram serve a variety of purposes, both explicit and otherwise. On one level, the adaptations do make this story, written in notoriously difficult classical Tamil, more widely available. On another level, since the versions can vary substantially from the historical text, they can advance a particular worldview or sentiment using the familiar language of the characters and elements of this popular story.13 Not surprisingly, as with the political reception of the text, Kannaki serves as an important site of revision or amplification in many of these adaptations. Brenda Beck conducted a comparative study of several written and oral versions, both old and contemporary, finding that most had a similar core story but that they varied on specific issues and events, like the relative importance placed on Kannaki’s chastity and her “god-like qualities” (1972, 25, 31). Śiñjinīyam (Anklet, 1990) is a modern theatrical adaptation in Sanskrit by A. S. Subbukrisha Srowthy, who seeks in part to highlight Kannaki’s version of wifely devotion, which he considers difficult to find in Sanskrit literature (1990, vi). Appropriately, then, scenes are added that enhance the audience’s sense of her commitment to her husband. Some of these versions entirely skip the events of the final book of the Cilappatika¯ram. Kasthuri Sreenivasan’s English play The Anklet (1982) ends at Kannaki’s confrontation with the king, perhaps as part of his desire to strip the story of the supernatural elements (1990, ix). Meena Kandasamy, an author, translator, and activist working on issues related to gender and caste, retells Kannaki’s story in her poem “Ms. Militancy.” Particularly striking here are the changes she makes to Kannaki’s suffering in waiting for Kovalan to return and her experience after the burning of Madurai. In the first comparison below, the excerpt from the Cilappatika¯ram reflects the calm sadness of Kannaki’s waiting, whereas the excerpt from Kandasamy’s piece shows a less romanticized version. Kaṇṇaki was heartbroken. No anklets sounded On her small, graceful feet. No girdle Blazed over her mound of love wound In a soft, white garment. No vermilion Rouge was painted on her breasts. Except For her bridal pendant, she wished for no ornament. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 43) She thought she was dying—ants crawled under her flaking skin, migraines visited her at mealtimes, her tender-as-tomato breasts 128

— ​ ( R e ) I n v e n t i n g a n E p i c —​ bruised to touch, her heart forgot its steady beat. Floundering at forty, she twisted safety pins into spirals, chewed on pencil-ends, tore down calendars, became a hurricane about the house. That wetness, with its lunar reek, never came. (Kandasamy 2011, 36) Since only the next stanza mentions that Kovalan has returned, I read this first stanza as happening in his absence. As such, this Kannaki does not experience the sudden transformation into rage upon learning of her husband’s death; it has been there all along. Kannaki’s experience after the burning of Madurai also differs in tenor and emotion, giving Kannaki a different ending and different kind of redemption. Along the bank of the Vaiyai in flood, she wandered Unconscious of night or day. Sad And inconsolable, unaware when she fell Into a ditch or climbed a slope, she walked Step by painful step up the sacred hill Of Neṭuvēl who swirls the long, fierce spear That ripped open the sea’s bowels, scooped out The mountain’s heart, and routed the demons. In the shade of a grove of flowering kino trees, She cried: “O! I am a great sinner.” … Thus passed fourteen days. Indra, Lord of the immortals, with other gods, Thought that day to be right for worship, Praised the glorious name of this revered woman, Rained unfading flowers upon her, and adored her In a heavenly chariot, by the side of Ko¯valaṉ Slain in the royal city, Kaṇṇaki her hair Thick as forest, ascended to heaven. (Ilanko Atikal 1993, 206) Watching that breast sprout back from its roots, the lone woman learnt to outgrow her loss. When the scars no longer showed and the faraway sea could be smelt between her legs, she dissolved in a mist of aftersmoke. (Kandasamy 2011, 36) In the excerpt from the Cilappatika¯ram, Kannaki is delirious with grief and pain before the god Indra comes to take her away. By contrast, Kandasamy ditches the apotheosis altogether and gives Kannaki a new, non-divine ending. Doing so gives Kannaki an opportunity to heal from both the physical and the emotional trauma she experienced, without the added burden of divinization or reunification. More than that, Kandasamy’s focus on Kannaki’s bodily suffering and healing, on her 129

— ​ M o r g a n J C u r t i s —​ most human aspects, reads as a possible response to the ways Kannaki has served as a political symbol (as argued by Thirumavalavan) or metaphor (as pointed out by Pandian). Here, finally, Kannaki is not a goddess seeking justice; she is just a woman.

CONCLUSION Our journey through moments in the Cilappatika¯ram’s reception ends where it began, with a claim about the text’s epic status. What does its reception history as briefly examined here tell us about its epic-ness? Despite its undeniable popularity in Tamil Nadu, for many, it has still not received the place it deserves among the world’s great epic works. When it comes to the Cilappatika¯ram, the label “epic” tells us more about the spheres of power in which the work continues to move—or does not yet move—than it does about the formal qualities of the text or its contents. Utkarsh Patel, who teaches Comparative Mythology at Mumbai University and wrote the 2018 novel Kannaki’s Anklet, opens his introduction to the work as follows: Ask anybody in our country to name the epics, and they would say Ramayana and Mahabharata. Ask them for another, and in all probability, they might say Iliad and Odyssey, but definitely no other Indian epic. But India has more than Ramayana and Mahabharata and one of them is the Tamil epic, Shilapadikaram, or The Tale of the Anklet. (Patel 2018, ix) For some, to posit that this is or is not an epic is to ultimately try to answer the question of whether or not this is a great book, a piece of literature worthy of an audience the world over, worthy of standing on a bookshelf next to one’s favorite translation of the Odyssey or the Sanskrit Maha¯bha¯rata. Parthasarathy and Pope, with their differing assessments of the Cilappatika¯ram cited in the opening, appeal to basically the same claims as Patel. This signals that conventions for asserting the merit of a piece of literature—by comparisons to the Iliad and the Odyssey, for instance—have not changed as much as has the particular place of the Cilappatika¯ram over time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Francis Clooney, Alesha Ignatius Brereton, Sohini Pillai, and Jonathan Ripley for their feedback on drafts of this chapter, and the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute for the grant that supported my research on modern versions of the story.

NOTES 1 Classical Tamil here is a catchall for the varieties of the language used before the nineteenth century. It differs in important ways from modern Tamil, which was standardized around the time of this cutoff. 2 Definitively dating any of these texts is difficult and highly controversial. The dates I use here represent the best scholarly consensus at the time of writing. 3 Full English translations include those by V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar (1939), Alain Daniélou (1965), Ka. Naa Subramanyan (1977), and R. Parthasarathy (1993).

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— ​ ( R e ) I n v e n t i n g a n E p i c —​ 4 For the purposes of this essay, I largely ignore the premodern and modern commentarial reception of the text, though this is, of course, another critical part of its reception history. 5 Dharma (Tamil aram) takes a variety of meanings across time and context but here can best be understood as virtue or moral duty. 6 Both Maṇimēkalai and Kuṇṭalakēci are named after their primary female characters. 7 Adjudicating this text’s potential religious or sectarian affiliation and worldview is beyond the scope of this chapter. Important here, though, is the fact that it was probably nonBuddhist in orientation (Monius 2001, 188, n. 51). 8 The Cīvakacinta¯maṇi by Tiruttukkatevar follows the adventures and multiple marriages of Civakan, and is still “widely honored by the Tamils as one of their great works” (Ryan 2005, 1). 9 The 3,145 multi-line verses (some 15,000 lines, per Caldwell 1956, 84) of the Cīvakacinta¯maṇi make the Cilappatika¯ram and Maṇimēkalai seem slight at 5,730 and 4,758 lines, respectively. 10 Ramaswamy offers “language devotion” as an alternative analytic to “linguistic nationalism” to understand particular practices around and orientations toward the Tamil language (1997, 5–6). 11 “Cankam age” refers to the era of the earliest extant Tamil poems. 12 Translations from the original, E. V. Ramasami (1974), here are my own. 13 Many of the modern works discussed here also have specifically political implications and their authors often have political motivations. Close analyses of versions of the story told by prominent political leaders, including Chief Minister Karunanidhi, can be found in other sources (Noble 1990).

WORKS CITED Beck, Brenda E. F. 1972. “The Study of a Tamil Epic: Several Versions of Silappadikaram Compared.” Journal of Tamil Studies 1: 23–38. Caldwell, Robert. 1856. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages. London: Williams and Norgate. Cattanar. 1992. Maṇimēkalai. 4th edition. Tinneveley: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society. Cutler, Norman. 2003. “Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture.” In Literary Cultures in History, edited by Sheldon Pollock, 271–322. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dikshitar, V. R. Ramachandra. 1939. Introduction to The Śilappadika¯ram, by Iḷanko Atikal. Translated by V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, 1–74. London: Oxford University Press. Hart, George L. 1976.“The Relation between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature,” in Dravidian Literature. Vol. 10 of A History of Indian Literature. Fasc. 2. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Holt, Amy-Ruth. 2016. “A Secular Tamil Saint? Karunanidhi’s Use of Divine Imagery in Dravidian Politics.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 9, no. 2: 226–48. Ilanko Atikal. 1939. The Śilappadika¯ram. Translated by V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1965. Shilappadikaram: The Ankle Bracelet. Translated by Alain Daniélou. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. ———. 1993. The Cilappatika¯ram of Iḷaṅko Aṭikaḷ: The Tale of an Anklet, An Epic of South India. Translated by R. Parthasarathy. Translations from the Asian Classics Series. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. Cilappatika¯ra mūlamum arumpata uraiyum Aṭiya¯rkkunalla¯r uraiyum. Edited by U. V. Caminataiyar. Chennai: Ṭākṭar U. Ve. Cāminātaiyar Nūlnilaiyam. Irschick, Eugene. 1969. Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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— ​ M o r g a n J C u r t i s —​ Kandasamy, Meena. 2011. Ms. Militancy. Delhi: Navayana Publishers. Krishnan, Sairam. 2015. “How a 2,000-Year-Old Epic Influenced Tamil Nadu’s Boundaries.” Scroll, August 23. https://scroll.in/article/743099/how-a-2000-year-old-epicinfluenced-tamil-nadus-boundaries. Monius, Anne E. 2001. Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. “Love, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Disgust: Śaivas and Jains in Medieval South India.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 32, no. 2–3: 113–72. Nevill, Hugh. 1888. “The Story of Kovalan.” Taprobanian (February): 16–22. Noble, Sally. 1990. The Tamil Story of the Anklet: Classical and Contemporary Tellings of ‘Cilappatika¯ram.’ PhD diss., The University of Chicago. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1987. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Parthasarathy, R. 1993. Introduction and Postscript. In The Cilappatika¯ram of Iḷaṅko Aṭikaḷ: An Epic of South India, translated by R. Parthasarathy, 1–16; 279–369. Translations from the Asian Classics Series. New York: Columbia University Press. Patel, Utkarsh. 2018. Kannaki’s Anklet. Mumbai: Indus Source Books. Pope, G. U. 1893. The Na¯laṭiya¯r or Four Hundred Quatrains in Tamil. Delhi: Asian Educational Services. ———. 1897. “The Lay of the Anklet—A Review.” The Siddhanta Deepika or the Light of Truth 1, no. 6: 141–43. Ramasami, E. V. 1974. Thoughts of Periyar E. V. R.: Speeches and Writings of Periyar E. V. Ramasami. Edited by V. Anaimuthu. Vol. 2. Tiruchirappalli: Thinkers’ Forum. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 1997. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970. Studies on the History of Society and Culture 29. Berkeley: University of California Press. Richman, Paula. 1991. “E. V. Ramasami’s Reading of the Ra¯ma¯yaṇa.” In Many Ra¯ma¯yaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, 175–201. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1988. Women, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist Text. Foreign and Comparative Studies, South Asian Series 12. Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Ryan, James D. 2005. Introduction to Cīvakacinta¯maṇi: The Hero Cīvakaṉ, the Gem That Fulfills All Wishes, translated by James D. Ryan and G. Vijayavenugopal, 1–18. Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing Company. Shulman, David Dean. 2016. Tamil: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sreenivasan, Kasthuri. 1982. The Anklet: Based on Shilappathikaram. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Subbukrisha Srowthy, A. S. 1990. Śiñjinīyam. Madras: A. S. Pavaki Srinivasan. Subrahmanian, N. 1981. An Introduction to Tamil Literature. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Swaminathaiyer, U. V. 1994. The Story of My Life. Translated by Kamil Zvelebil. Vol. 2. Madras: Institute of Asian Studies. Thirumaavalavan. 2003. Talisman, Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation. Translated by Meena Kandasamy. Kolkata: Mandira Sen. Varadarajan, Mu. 1988. A History of Tamil Literature. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Zvelebil, Kamil. 1974. Tamil Literature. A History of Indian Literature Series 10; Dravidian Literatures, Fasc.1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ———. 1992. Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature. Handbuch der Orientalistik Series 5. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1995. Lexicon of Tamil Literature. Handbuch der Orientalistik Series 9. Leiden: Brill.

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CHAPTER NINE

S R I L A N K A’ S M A H AˉVA M · SA, T H E G R E AT C H R O N I C L E

rsr

Kristin Scheible

The Mahāvaṃsa is a massive poem that chronicles both royal and religious lineages on the island of Lanka, known as Sri Lanka today. It is also an open-ended chronicle, periodically extended to bring it up to date, especially during campaigns of Buddhist reform to reflect, produce, or legitimize changes in power. Its first thirtyseven chapters, comprising almost 3,000 metered verses, were composed in the fifth or sixth century within the Mahavihara monastic complex outside the city of Anuradhapura, by a Buddhist monk named Mahanama. The proem, the eulogistic verses that open the text, asserts that it is a retelling of an already ancient story, a strategic (and aesthetically pleasing) etiological narration of the rise and primacy of the Buddha’s sāsana (dispensation, religion, teachings) on the island of Lanka. Covering extensive narrative ground, with a cast of characters that spans historical and non-human dimensions of the Buddhist world, this epic chronicle has been read, recalled, and used for its epic force by monks, kings, colonists, scholars, politicians, the public, and even movie producers. As both text and idea, it continues to be an animating, explanatory substratum for the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist movement today. After positioning the Mahāvaṃsa within its literary environs, and considering its source and rationale, we will turn to the story that elevates the text to epic proportion. Narrative structures internal to the text proclaim its epic aspirations, while accreted readings, references, and reliance on this text attest to its enduring, epic power.

EPIC GENRE: SITUATING THE MAHAˉVAM · SA There are many epic contenders in the extensive, premodern South Asian literary milieu. Authoritative versions and localized variations of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata epics come swiftly to mind; their prominence saturates the literary landscape and eclipses regional epics that narrate alternative stories. For practical and comparative purposes, the heuristically useful characterization “epic” could be used DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-12

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— ​ K r i s t i n S c h e i b l e —​ to translate various genres of first-millennium Sanskrit literature: purāṇa, “ancient” compilations of legends, genealogies of gods and places, theology and more; itihāsa, “narrative of the way things were” (Pollock 2003, 44); mahākāvya, “great poetry,” where mahā—as in the English “great”—can refer to size, scope, and quality all at once; or vaṃśa, genealogical texts of kings, gods, and communities. Homing in on Buddhist material, the second-century Buddhacarita, a Sanskrit mahākāvya extolling the life of the Buddha, was written by the court poet Ashvaghosha for an erudite and court audience. As this narrative “blueprint” inspires, directly or indirectly, multitudes of other literary, artistic, and ritual explorations of the Buddha’s life story, it is certainly an important South Asian epic. If we shift our survey to Sanskrit-adjacent literature composed in Pali, a canonical language particular to Buddhism, we might lose the epic linguistic authority of Sanskrit, the “language of the gods” (Pollock 2009). But we gain the legitimating force of Pali’s proclaimed status as mūlabhāsā (root, or original, language), in a middle Indo-Aryan script Prakrit, “ecclesiastical (written) koine” (Collins 2003, 650) employed in the “canonical” corpus of the Buddha’s teachings, the Pali tipiṭaka (“three baskets,” the Pali Buddhist canon written and preserved by the southern, mainstream branch of Buddhism that has come to be known as the Theravada), and extracanonical texts. Ensconced in the Khuddaka nikāya (Minor collection) within that Pali tipiṭaka, and culminating in a collection of 547 jātakas (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives), is the Vessantara jātaka, which could also be considered “epic.” It narrates the penultimate life of the bodhisatta (pre-Buddha, living through many lifetimes perfecting virtues on his way to becoming the Buddha) as the king Vessantara, who gives away everything—money, wife, children, kingdom—fulfilling the pāramī (perfection) of dāna (generosity). As it is significantly longer and more polished than other jātakas, and has circulated in a variety of forms independent of its canonical provenance, it has inspired countless artistic representations, and become exceedingly popular throughout Southeast Asia. Thus, it certainly shares qualities with other works designated as epics. Also, several scholars, including Steven Collins, have discussed the “shared story-matrix” of the Rāmāyaṇa and Vessantara jātaka (2003, 658). Moreover, King Vessantara holds a type of translocal authority and appeal that the heroes of the Mahāvaṃsa do not hold. Interestingly, Vessantara is considered a historical, not solely legendary, king in the Mahāvaṃsa. The Mahāvaṃsa in our sights is composed in verse like courtly Sanskrit mahākāvyas; it is composed in Pali, the scriptural language of the Tipiṭaka, though it is extracanonical. Is it an epic? Because of its size—the original installment is almost 3,000 verses in thirty-seven chapters, without the cumulative additions through ­history—historic scope, and literary content, Sri Lankan Buddhists and scholars alike consider the work to be an epic. In his History of Ceylon, S. G. Perera designates the Mahāvaṃsa both mahākāvya (great work of poetry) and a Mahaviharan purāṇa (legend) (1959, 50). Its most celebrated translator Wilhelm Geiger, comparing it to the earlier “primitive epic” Dīpavaṃsa, says the Mahāvaṃsa, “proves itself to be a perfect epic” with its “enlarged and finished style,” romances, and legends ([1912] 1993, 26). But the genre moniker that best explains its scope and content is right in its very name, vaṃsa (chronicle, lineage, and literally, bamboo), of which it is both great (vast, comprehensive) and great (exemplary, beautiful). Frequently translated as “history,” especially by early scholars and Orientalists eager to find recognizable 134

— ​ S r i L a n k a ’s M a h ā v a ṃ s a , t h e G r e a t C h r o n i c l e —​ structures of authority in Asian sources, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists with euhemeristic aspirations, vaṃsa conveys a simultaneous sense of singular lineage, organic growth, and periodic nodes that strengthen and define the line.

EPIC SOURCE While the Mahāvaṃsa was composed near what was then the seat of the monarchy and the center of political and cultural production in Sri Lanka, the story was not original. The proem (opening verses) of the Mahāvaṃsa itself announces the work’s reliance on earlier texts; it declares that it has resolved the faults of the earlier literary endeavors, and refers to an older version, “made by the ancients” (porāṇehi kato). This might be a reference to the fourth-century Dīpavaṃsa, or the no longer extant Sinhalese (or Eḷu, Old Sinhalese) Sīhaḷaṭṭhakathā, or it might not point to any text at all, but instead to stories in oral circulation (porāṇehi kato can also mean “performed by the ancients”). The precise sources for the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa might evade identification, but that both texts explicitly claim to revise older material in their first few verses (Dīpavaṃsa I.4; Mahāvaṃsa I.2) illustrates the importance of extending, building upon, and growing a focused narrative to ancient poets. The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa are related, likely sharing some manifestation of urtext, because whole story cycles are repeated (sometimes almost verbatim) in both texts. The Mahāvaṃsa, however, has eclipsed the earlier (and admittedly less refined) Dīpavaṃsa in the Sinhalese imaginary.

ORAL/AURAL ORIGINS AND TRANSMISSIONS The proem of the Mahāvaṃsa’s antecedent, Dīpavaṃsa, preserves an explicitly oral dimension. The vocative form suṇātha me, “Listen to me!” or “Listen!” that peppers the eulogistic first few lines, is a direct and urgent command to honor and savor the story that will be told. Only if you listen up might you be counted among the virtuous, as signaled in the proem: Listen to me! I will relate the vaṃsa of the journey to the island of the Buddha and the coming of the Bodhi Tree and the relics, the collected traditional teachings, and the coming of the sāsana to the island and the coming of the King [Vijaya]. Listen to me, honoring [this vaṃsa] abounding in countless qualities, delightful, calming, producing joy and gladness. Applying great attention, listen up all to this vaṃsa; I will explain the coming of the lineage. This extolled praise-text [thuti] is indeed praised by many, tied together as if all kinds of flowers [in a garland]. Listen! This praise-text of the island is honored by the virtuous, extolled by the greatest, this very one in truth well-explained through the noble ones, which is new, which dwells upon the most meritorious vaṃsa (lineage), which is incomparable. (Scheible 2016, 25–26) If constructing a “textual community” (Stock 1983) constitutes the work of an epic, surely the Pali vaṃsas qualify. The Mahāvaṃsa asserts continuity with the epic 135

— ​ K r i s t i n S c h e i b l e —​ imperative of the Dīpavaṃsa and other source texts for its epic construction. Even in the process of extolling its own virtues in the fourth verse, the proem critiques the older text and commends the new one with the reinforced imperative, “Listen to this one,” and it still points to auditory appreciation: Having paid honor to the pure Saṃbuddha of the lineage of a pure race, I will explain the Mahāvaṃsa, referring surely to its diversity of varied content. That [vaṃsa], even though made by the ancients, was here told in too much detail, there exceedingly brief, and contained countless repetitions. This [vaṃsa] avoids the faults of that one; [it is] easy to grasp and bear in mind, producing anxious thrill and serene satisfaction, and [it is] handed down through tradition. Listen to this one, causing anxious thrill and serene satisfaction, in this way the grounds for producing anxious thrill and producing serene satisfaction. (Scheible 2016, 32) In its very proem, the Mahāvaṃsa articulates specific reading instructions to cultivate a desired and ethically charged transformation in the hearer, namely, through the epic’s ability to engender an initial aesthetic shock called saṃvega (“anxious thrill”), and concomitant pasāda (“serene satisfaction”). The last verse of the proem is echoed in a refrain verse concluding each chapter, “Here ends [the number of the chapter, followed by its title], made for the anxious thrill and serene satisfaction of good people” (2016, 33). Collins reminds us of the oratorical utility of repeating such phalaśruti (“fruit of the hearing”) lines throughout the text: Public recitation of a text, like a sermon, resembles a dramaturgical performance as much as (perhaps more than) the static lines-of-text model of ‘reading a book.’ The dynamics of closure, in this perspective, are more than just a general point about texts providing ‘the sense of an ending’ which life (or death) cannot. They are quite literally moments in a (ritual) performance. (1992, 242–43) One is also perpetuating a pattern of transmission in the act of reading/hearing. That each chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa ends with this refrain creates something like narrative nodes that, like the bumpy joints of bamboo (vaṃsa), serve to hold the massive epic together.

EPIC STORY The Mahāvaṃsa’s content also suggests that “epic” is an appropriate descriptor. The work begins with a mythologically saturated establishment narrative starring  the authoritative Buddha himself, amidst a cast of yakkhas and nāgas (classes of nonhuman beings): yakkha is frequently translated “demon” and nāga, “snake-like being,” and both are seen as indigenous inhabitants of Lanka. The first chapter narrates the Buddha’s three visits to the island, synchronized with the Buddha’s biography. Nine months after he gained full Awakening to become the Buddha (“Awakened”), and knowing that the island will be “a place where the sāsana would 136

— ​ S r i L a n k a ’s M a h ā v a ṃ s a , t h e G r e a t C h r o n i c l e —​ shine (Mahāvaṃsa I.20),” the Buddha miraculously travels from Lake Anottata far away in the Himalayas to prime the land of Lanka to be a fitting future receptacle for his sāsana. He first terrifies the yakkhas, setting fire to their land; once subdued, he places them on a mirror island and intervenes in an impending war between the nāgas. The Buddha then establishes in the refuges and precepts (so, he converts) eighty million land and sea nāgas, and sanctifies various sites with his presence. Opening the epic’s narrative with the Buddha’s authoritative presence buttresses the claims of the proem that this is a compelling, affectively strategic story of preordained belonging. After chapters on Buddhist conciliar history, the Mahāvaṃsa moves into three discernable epic cycles within the broader epic. The “Vijaya through Pandukabhaya” cycle (Chapters 6–10) links the Buddha and all of his authoritative force with the Sinhala Kingdom founded by Vijaya, whose very name means “victory, conquest.” On his deathbed, the Buddha surveys all he has done and then addresses Sakka (lord of gods): Vijaya, son of king Sīhabāhu, is come to Laṇkā from the country of Lāla [north India], together with seven hundred followers. In Laṇkā, O lord of gods, will my religion be established, therefore carefully protect him with his followers and Laṇkā. (Geiger 1993, 55) Vijaya has his own colorful provenance in India; his father and mother were siblings, children of a lion and a princess. His father secured temporal rule by slaying his grandfather, the lion, who had been threatening the kingdom. Vijaya was firstborn of 16 pairs of twin sons, but he was “of evil conduct” and intolerable, although he amassed a following of 700 men and their families. Ultimately, Vijaya was exiled to Lanka and consecrated by the Buddha’s proclamation. He takes a local yakkhini as a consort who helps him overpower the other resident yakkhas, later sending her and her two children away so he could marry a proper Pandu princess from India. Vijaya then ruled “in peace and righteousness” for thirty-eight years, establishing the right environment for the Buddha’s sāsana to flourish in the future. The second epic cycle in Chapters 11–20 parallels the narrative arcs of the first establishment chapter (the Buddha’s three visits) and the first epic cycle (Vijaya) by deliberately recentering the Buddhist world in Lanka. This second cycle introduces Devanampiyatissa, whose consecration as king was accompanied by miraculous eruptions of jewels and long-buried treasures in the land and sea due to his accumulated merit. Thinking that he might please his friend, the king Dhammasoka (the Mauryan emperor Ashoka who ruled what is now much of India from 268 to 232 BCE), by gifting him these jewels, he initiated an exchange. Dhammasoka sent the missionary monk Mahinda, formally introducing institutional Buddhism organized around the saṅgha (monastic community), as well as a cache of Buddha relics, most importantly a scion of the Bodhi tree, the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment in the present state of Bihar in India. The planting of Bodhi saplings and the building of vihāras (monasteries) and thūpas (monumental memorial mounds) are done to mark the physical and symbolic transplanting of the dhamma and sāsana from India to the island. 137

— ​ K r i s t i n S c h e i b l e —​ With 861 verses, the third epic cycle in Chapters 22–32 (more than a quarter of the original installment of the Mahāvaṃsa) comprises “[t]he ‘Duṭṭhagāmaṇī epic,’ as we may suitably call it,” which “becomes an entirely independent poem” (Geiger 1908, 19). In 2015, it was even adapted into an epic film, Maharaja Gemunu. In short, the regional prince Dutthagamani seizes the opportunity to overthrow the Chola king Elara, of the powerful South Indian Tamil dynasty by that name. Previously, Elara had invaded Lanka and ruled Anuradhapura for forty-four years, “with even justice toward friend and foe (Geiger 1993, 143).” Dutthagamani, however, affixes a Buddha relic to his spear, defeats Elara, and begins a campaign of Buddhist building projects, including the Mahathupa (“great stupa”), the Ruwanwelisaya that had been prophesied by Devanampiyatissa and Mahinda in the past. An unlikely hero, the novice monk Sonuttara, travels to the subterranean nāgaloka (nāga abode; nāgas are known to steal and hoard treasures) to battle a nāga and steal a portion of the Buddha’s relics to enshrine in the stupa. After reigning from 101 to 77 BCE, Dutthagamani dies an ardent and honored supporter of the dhamma and the saṅgha. The first thirty-seven chapters conclude with a litany of kings.

POWER STRUCTURES AND STRUCTURING POWERS: IDEOLOGIES AND “WORLD-WISHES” Indologist Ronald Inden suggested replacing “conceptually overloaded terms as myth, ideology, and worldview” with terms like “world-wish,” to explain the worklike “transformation of heterogeneous life- and world-wishes into more coherent and stable world accounts and, in some cases, visions,” which were “crucial to the practices of disciplinary orders” (2000, 23). Power structures within the Mahāvaṃsa that are recognizable to a twenty-first-century audience as “ologies” and “isms” were not necessarily those that most concerned the textual community responsible for the epic. Recalling the reading instructions and the intended audience circumscribed by the proem and reiterated at the close of each chapter, we can infer that the main purpose of this epic was to engender faithful adherence to a particular lineage and doctrine in personal and collective ways. This epic is no mere historical chronicle; it is a Heilsgeschichte, a theological and ideological argument about sacred history, what Bardwell Smith explained as “the sacred history of a people destined with a sacred mission, namely, to maintain the purity of the Dhamma in a world of impermanence and self-seeking” (1972, 32). It was composed in a politically and religiously charged environment, as a reminder of and argument for royal patronage by a then-minority monastic institution, the Mahavihara. The central structuring power in the text, its world-wish, was a practical one voiced in a particular time and was certainly arguing for the central importance of Buddhist identity. Both the context and content of the epic reveal the importance of identity. The epic is in Pali, the language of the tipiṭaka, and “the texts in Pali which have survived until modern times…are exclusively derived from the Mahavihara monastery in Anuradhapura, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka,” the very monastery responsible for the Mahāvaṃsa (Collins 2003, 650). And the content of the very first chapter is all about transferring the light of the dhamma from India to Lanka, effectively recentering of the Buddhist world, a paradigmatic recentering that is repeated with 138

— ​ S r i L a n k a ’s M a h ā v a ṃ s a , t h e G r e a t C h r o n i c l e —​ Vijaya’s immigration to, Mahinda’s conversion of, and Dutthagamani’s rescuing of the island. An episode in the Dutthagamani epic exemplifies the primacy of Buddhist identity. Dutthagamani expresses extreme remorse after slaughtering so many on the battlefield and experiences apathy in the face of what should be a victory celebration. This episode echoes the narrative trajectory of both the exemplary cakkhavattin (“wheel-turner,” universal monarch) emperor Ashoka of India who, in his edicts, expressed remorse for having slaughtered so many beings in his Kalinga campaign, and the Buddha himself who, as a bodhisatta just prior to his renunciation, had experienced disinterest in his court dancers. When Dutthagamani grieves the many lives lost because of his actions, the saṅgha sends him eight arahants (“worthy ones,” perfected beings) to console him: From this act of yours there is no obstacle to the way to heaven. In this world the Lord of Men has killed only one and a half human beings. One was steadfast in the Refuges, and the other in the Five Precepts; the remainder, like beasts, had bad character and wrong views. But in many ways you will cause the buddhasāsana to shine, therefore, Lord of Men, remove the perplexity from your mind. (Scheible 2016, 184) The distinctions are clear, and they are on religious terms: one was a full Buddhist who took refuge in the Buddha, the dhamma, and the saṅgha, while the other was a half human who had taken the five precepts (not to kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, or get intoxicated), a requisite step in becoming Buddhist. All other victims, according to the omniscient arahants, are not only not Buddhists, but are like beasts, and able to be sacrificed for the greater good, the sāsana. It is almost impossible to read the Mahāvaṃsa without seeing the power structures of race, class, and religion at play. However, current interpreters, especially those not from Sri Lanka, must be careful to remember that vantage points are particular; we bear witness through lenses ground down by our own biases, expectations, worldwishes. In the case of interpreters unable to read Pali of the Mahāvaṃsa, awareness of the biases, expectations, and world-wishes of a decidedly colonial mediation in the form of translation and academic interpretation is paramount.

EPIC EVOLUTION: COLONIAL AND NATIONALIST INTERESTS We have so far been focused on the first thirty-seven chapters of the Mahāvaṃsa composed by Mahanama of the Mahavihara, but that is only one node that invites pause in the ongoing narration of this mytho-historical epic. The most celebrated translator of the epic was Wilhelm Geiger, who, in the process of preparing his 1912 translation, named the next section of the narrative Cuḹavaṃsa (“lesser vaṃsa”). While it has become common practice to imagine these texts as separate, betraying overreliance on this early translator’s good faith editorial decision and choice of titles, some scholars now “prefer to continue the indigenous practice of referring 139

— ​ K r i s t i n S c h e i b l e —​ to the whole work as the Mahāvaṃsa or Great Chronicle” (Collins 2003, 653). Beginning with Chapter 38, set in the fourth century, and up to the 1815 arrival of the British, many hands working concurrent with periodic reform movements in the twelfth, thirteenth, and eighteenth centuries contributed to this extended Mahāvaṃsa. Geiger was not the first European to encounter the Mahāvaṃsa. In 1809, Sir Alexander Johnson, Chief Justice of the British Colony in Ceylon, sent various manuscripts, including one of the Mahāvaṃsa, back to England for translation and publication. Indologist Eugène Burnouf prepared a translation of it in 1826, but it was in Latin and not widely read, though perhaps this enhanced its reputation as the Ceylonese epic among erudite classicists. In 1833, Edward Upham, a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, enthusiastic Orientalist, and book collector, published a very problematic version, criticized by scholars and translators alike for its imaginative missteps. And in 1837, Ceylon Civil Service officer George Turnour (1799–1843), who had been born in Sri Lanka, translated the first 20 chapters into Sinhala with the help of monks and then into English (Harris 2006). The image of dusty caches of palm leaf manuscripts, forgotten by unappreciative or undereducated monks, waiting to be saved by the discerning eye of the colonial treasure hunter titillated European cultural appreciators. Turnour claims to have “rediscovered” “rare and important manuscripts,” most significantly the Mahāvaṃsa, in Mulgirigala, although colonial secretary of Ceylon Sir James Tennent reported that “being written in Pali verse, its existence in modern times was only known to the priests, and owing to the obscurity of its diction it had ceased to be studied even by the learned among them” (1860, 314). Tennent wrote about Turnour’s acumen for translation in a eulogistic footnote: Interpreting in its largest sense the duty enjoined on him, as a public officer, of acquiring a knowledge of the native languages, he extended his studies, from the vernacular and written Singhalese to Pali, the great root and original of both, known only to the Buddhist priesthood, and imperfectly and even rarely amongst them…So zealous and unobtrusive were the pursuits of [Turnour], that even his immediate connexions and relatives were unaware of the value and extent of his acquirements till apprised of their importance and profundity by the acclimation with which his discoveries and translations form the Pali were received by the savants of Europe. (1860, 313) Turnour’s translation impressed Orientalist readers, who were eager to find historical value in the Mahāvaṃsa, with its “ring of truth” and a seemingly accurate chronology of kings recognizable to Euro-American historians that had been missing in South Asian contexts up to that point. Euhemeristic readings explained away the mythological hyperbole to render a form of recognizable history for colonial consumers primed by the “classics” of western Europe. The “long lost chronicle...thus vindicated the claim of Ceylon to the possession of an authentic and unrivalled record of its national history (1860, 315).” Meanwhile, the epic rolled on, however not catalyzed by monastic caretakers as in the distant past. Colonial interference moved from interpretive (through 140

— ​ S r i L a n k a ’s M a h ā v a ṃ s a , t h e G r e a t C h r o n i c l e —​ translations and study) to productive (through commissions and patronage). In 1871, the British colonial Governor Hercules Robinson commissioned Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Pandit Batuvantudave to produce an extension to include the ingīrisi (the English), thereby textually inserting themselves and providing an epic rationale for their authority. This move is consistent with the colonial zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century, where keen Orientalists working in Ceylon and in Europe had a hand in shaping Sinhalese Buddhism through the translation and study of texts like the Mahāvaṃsa, producing something of a cultural backwash effect. In 1875, the truth-seeking Theosophical Society was co-founded by American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and Russian esotericist Helena Blavatsky; they formally took Buddhist precepts in 1880 in Ceylon, and began a productive venture building schools and helping to revivify, and reform, institutional Buddhism on the island. At about the same time, the Pali Text Society “was founded in 1881 by T.W. Rhys Davids ‘to foster and promote the study of Palī texts’,” according to the Pali Text Society’s website as of the time of publication of this volume. With such a long history of colonialization—almost 450 years of occupation and influence from the Portuguese beginning in 1505, through the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and the British occupation beginning in 1796 and continuing to 1948, when Ceylon was granted independence as dominion within the British Commonwealth—it is understandable that the Mahāvaṃsa has been used as a viable resource for autonomous, authentic identity construction for Sinhalese Buddhists in the post-colonial period. In 1972, Ceylon became fully independent as the Republic of Sri Lanka; it was then embroiled in civil war from 1983 until 2009, and ethnic violence and tension continue to this day. However, as Neil DeVotta cautions, [A] vast majority of Sinhalese Buddhists have not read the Mahavamsa; but the text occupies such a central place in their collective raison d’etre that they are intimately familiar with it. Indeed, without appreciating the extent to which the island’s Buddhists have internalized and embraced the Mahavamsa as sacred and indisputable history, it is impossible to comprehend the passion with which Sinhalese Buddhists relate to Sri Lanka, the impetus for political Buddhism on the island throughout the twentieth century, and the implications for the ethnic conflict and conflict resolution. (2007, 5–6) At the outset of his eleven-year presidency, J. R. Jayawardene’s government announced in 1978 their intention to produce another update of the text to be called Mahāvaṃsa, nūtana yugaya (new era), picking up the narrative after Yagirala Pannananda’s composition that extended to 1935, a work Steven Kemper refers to as “a further step in the textualization of Sinhala identity” (1991, 96). Notably, the narrative style was also updated “on the model of The University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, which itself looked to the Cambridge History of India” (1991, 181). Utilizing a colonial-era structure and style, the authors framed what was in reality a nationalist extension, using Pali for the synoptic verses and vernacular Sinhala and even English in some chapters for the prose. 141

— ​ K r i s t i n S c h e i b l e —​ Where the exercise of power and patronage gave the Mahāvaṃsa its central focus, politics in the Mahāvaṃsa, Nūtana Yugaya has been reduced to one chapter standing between others on architecture and mass communications, and treated as a matter of administration, not the exercise of power…Even the chapter on the Buddhist sāsana was written by a layman, not a monk… (1991, 182) While the focus on power may have shifted, the very act of continuing the epic in this way, in Sinhala for Sinhala readers, was an overt power move linked to overt political circumstances. The idea for the Mahāvaṃsa, nūtana yugaya evolved alongside the new 1978 Constitution. Chapter II, Article 9 states: The Republic of Sri Lanka shall give to Buddhism the foremost place and accordingly it shall be the duty of the State to protect and foster the Buddha Sasana, while assuring to all religions the rights granted by Articles 10 and 14(1)(e). (Constitution [1978] 2023, 3) The aforementioned articles guarantee freedom of religious thought and practice, but Article 9 makes Sinhalese Buddhism supreme. An editor of this extension covering 1936 to 1977 explained to The New York Times that it would ‘Seek to avoid the controversy that surrounds the 1936 updating, which covered more than a century and is now seen as sycophantic toward the British rulers of the day…’ Asked if there were heroic passages in the updated Mahavamsa to compare to the magical deeds of the original, Mr. Abeygunawardana said: ‘Oh, no. This is a government project. We only give the facts and figures. We do not want to arouse the sentiments of the people.’ (Mydans 1988) The dynamic narratives and characters of the first installment of this epic, however, continue to “arouse the sentiments” of many Sinhalese. Before the 2009 defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the group advocating and fighting for a Hindu Tamil homeland in northeastern Sri Lanka, during the violent quartercentury-long civil war that devastated the new republic and cost tens of thousands of lives, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa (ruled 2005–2015) was explicitly compared to Dutugemunu (Dutthagamani), and valorized as the exemplary conqueror of Tamils in the past. As DeVotta writes, “Toward the end of 2006, a massive cardboard cut-out of Rajapakse was even erected at the junction at Maradana, Colombo, proclaiming, ‘Our President, Our Leader; He is Next to King Dutugemenu’ (2007, 9).” In December 2015, the Sri Lankan government announced the continuation of the Mahāvaṃsa with a new chapter to cover 1978 to 2010, including “details of the island’s armed conflict” and examining “the presidencies of J. R. Jayawardene, Ranasinghe Premadasa, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa” (Tamil Guardian 2015). Rajapaksa, who has been compared to Dutthagamani and is on the list to be written into the extended Mahāvaṃsa, has also served as Prime Minister in three separate stints, the most recent being from

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— ​ S r i L a n k a ’s M a h ā v a ṃ s a , t h e G r e a t C h r o n i c l e —​ 2019 to 2022, although he was ousted from office by civil unrest and protest against his corruption. Beyond this one character, there are countless examples from news sources, journal articles, books, creative works, and social media to illustrate the persistent use of the Mahāvaṃsa to galvanize Sinhalese nationalist sentiment; the Mahāvaṃsa is even a hashtag on Twitter.

CONCLUSION: EMIC, ETIC, EPIC Scholars have amply documented the enduring impact of the Mahāvaṃsa on the political and social domains of Sri Lankan life. Richard Gombrich asserts that “the Mahāvaṃsa is the charter of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism” (1988, 141). H. L. Seneviratne refers to the dominant Sinhalese Buddhist understanding of the island’s history as the “Mahāvaṃsa view” (1997, 6), while Tessa Bartholomeusz refers to it as the “Mahāvaṃsa mentality” (2002, 21). Citing Elie Kedourie’s argument that “nationalism [is] essentially a European phenomenon, carried around the world by colonial circumstances,” Steven Kemper critically discusses “the way ancient practices have been transformed by nationalism in a society dominated in turn by the Portuguese, Dutch and British” (1991, 6, 3). Citing anthropologist Marshall Sahlin’s work, he further explains how the hegemony of Buddhism in the history of Sri Lanka has made the Buddhist chronicles a ‘dominant site of symbolic production, which supplies the major idiom of other relations and activities.’ The vocabulary of unity, heroes, and sacred places ‘bathes in a celestial light of religious conceptions’ an array of relations and activities not themselves religious – the relationship of the Sinhalas as a people, of Sinhalas and their government, and of the people [not all of whom are Sinhala and/or Buddhist] of Sri Lanka at large. (1991, 222) Following Gunawardana, anthropologist Stanley Tambiah attributes the chauvinism of the Sinhalese nationalist ideology rooted in “language, race, and religion” as having “been virtually constituted in the last hundred years or so,” and shaping contemporary “bourgeois culture”: Theories of race stemming from Europe, together with formulations that conflated ‘Aryan’ as a language group with the speakers of the language as an ‘Aryan race,’ made their impact in the course of the nineteenth century on certain Sinhala literati who in turn forged the modern Sinhala consciousness… This was exemplified by Dharmapala, the father of the so-called Protestant Buddhism, among others: The Dutthagamani-Elara episode in the Mahavamsa was used by him retrospectively to celebrate the Sinhala Aryans of yore (“uncontaminated by Semitic and savage ideas”) who had never been conquered and to champion the rights of Sinhala Buddhists as an underprivileged group under colonial and Christian domination. (1992, 131)

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— ​ K r i s t i n S c h e i b l e —​ We have seen how the Mahāvaṃsa is an epic in continual production, not just in terms of chapters but as an enduring site for the construction of Sinhalese Buddhist identity. Successive interpreters representing various communities (Sri Lankan and colonial; politicians and scholars) add to the accreted meanings and uses of this multivalent text. Considering the utility of the etic term “epic” as fitting nomenclature, we might recall emic categories for the genre and stress that vaṃsa is an organic, productive, and comprehensive term unto itself. In exercising our best-intentioned hermeneutical strategies and epic taxonomies, we ought to keep in mind the particular, active, and even intellectually colonial sense of Orientalism introduced decades ago by Edward Said. He explains Orientalism as an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains. ([1978] 1994, 12) Even if we reject that his label of Orientalism pertains to our consideration here of the applicability of the term “epic” to the Sri Lankan Mahāvaṃsa, we do need to be aware that this foray into the life of this text creates and maintains some structures of power while challenging others. Is “epic” a category that belongs to “our” world, that we apply superfluously to a text that is working in its own way? In hindsight, we see that the early scholars’ interests, priorities, biases, and world-wishes determined how they evaluated their source material, and we see the translation of the term vaṃsa as “history” reifying those same interests. What interests do I highlight, and what do my hermeneutics add or obfuscate in the succession of interpretations of this epic? It remains to be seen if, and how, readings of the Mahāvaṃsa might begin to decolonize, and if calling it an epic impacts its power.

WORKS CITED Bartholomeusz, Tessa. 2002. In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka. London: Routledge Curzon. Collins, Steven. 1992. “Nirvāṇa, Time, and Narrative.” History of Religions 31, no. 3: 242–43. ———. 2003. “What Is Literature in Pali?” In Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, edited by Sheldon Pollock, 649–88. Berkeley: University of California Press. The Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. [1978] 2023. https:// www.parliament.lk/files/pdf/constitution.pdf. DeVotta, Neil. 2007. Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology: Implications for Politics and Conflict Resolution in Sri Lanka. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington. Geiger, Wilhelm. 1908. The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa and Their Historical Development in Ceylon. Translated by Ethel M. Coomaraswamy. Colombo: Cottle. ———, trans. [1912] 1993. The Mahāvaṃsa: Or, The Great Chronicle of Ceylon New Delhi: Asian Educational Series.

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— ​ S r i L a n k a ’s M a h ā v a ṃ s a , t h e G r e a t C h r o n i c l e —​ Gombrich, Richard. 1988. Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. New York: Routledge. Harris, Elizabeth. 2006. Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, Missionary and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka. New York: Routledge. Inden, Ronald, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, eds. 2000. Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kemper, Steven. 1991. The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mydans, Seth. 1988. “Sri Lanka Chronicle Gets Gingerly Updating.” New York Times, March 31. Perera, S. G. 1955–1959. A History of Ceylon. 2 vols. Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon. Pollock, Sheldon. 2003. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Said, Edward. [1978] 1994. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Scheible, Kristin. 2016. Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History. New York: Columbia University Press. Seneviratne, H. L. 1997. “Identity and the Conflation of Past and Present.” In Identity, Consciousness, and the Past: Forging of Caste and Community in India and Sri Lanka, edited by H. L. Seneviratne, 3–22. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Smith, Bardwell L. 1972. “The Ideal Social Order as Portrayed in the Chronicles of Ceylon.” In The Two Wheels of Dhamma: Essays on the Theravada Tradition in India and Ceylon, edited by Gananath Obeyesekere, Frank Reynolds and Bardwell L. Smith, 48–72. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books. Stock, Brian. 1983. The Implications of Literacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1992. Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tamil Guardian. 2015. “Sri Lanka to Update Buddhist Chronicles with Recent Presidents’ Reigns.” December 26. Tennent, James. 1860. Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical, and Topographical with Notices of its Natural History, Antiquities and Productions. London: Spottiswoode and Co. Turnour, George, ed. [1837] 2016. The Mahawanso. Colombo: Central Cultural Fund.

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CHAPTER TEN

THE “EPIC OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS”

T H E M A N Y C U LT U R A L S T R E A M S O F B E OW U L F

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María José Gómez-Calderón There seems to be a universal consensus among specialists in Old English literature on the excellence of Beowulf on many levels. This poem, many feel, epitomizes the Anglo-Saxon corpus and reveals the interaction of the different cultural traits comprising it. As Andy Orchard explains, Beowulf, built as it is from old stone, remains a memorial to ages already old when their shared story was first told, representing as it does the conflation of the oral and the literate, the secular and the Christian, the inherited and the innovative, the native and the imported that is the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon literature as a whole and especially that which is preserved in Old English. (2013, 157) Written in Old English, Beowulf is a heroic text dealing with the exploits of its eponymous protagonist. The narrative features some of the traditional motifs of the genre: adventures, travels, fights, and victory celebrations, but it is the stories of famous battles that stand out the most. The plotline mainly revolves around the warrior Beowulf and how he protects his community from the attacks of outsiders, three monstrous creatures, at two different stages in his life. The action takes place in military and courtly contexts, in the vague “old days” of early Germanic history, that is, prior to the migrations of Anglo-Saxons into England in the fourth to sixth centuries. The poet frames the story within the aristocratic ethos and social conventions of a glamorized continental past far removed from its contemporary Anglo-Saxon audience, and imbues it with nostalgia. The text is divided into two sections that correspond to the hero’s youth and old age. It starts in medias res—that is, in the middle of the action—describing the ravages the monster Grendel has been inflicting in King Hrothgar of Denmark’s hall for twelve long years. This cannibal giant attacks every night, systematically killing and devouring the king’s thanes, and so the realm is in shambles. Beowulf, a foreign, young champion in the service of the neighboring King Hygelac of the Geats (in southern Sweden), sails off to Denmark with the purpose of helping Hrothgar. 146

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-13

— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ The  hero manages to kill the monster, but soon afterward Grendel’s mother, a ghastly creature of the lake, comes to avenge her fallen son. Beowulf seeks her in her underwater lair and slays her with a magical sword, thus terminating the monstrous threat for good. Having gained Hrothgar’s gratitude, treasures, and renown, Beowulf returns home to Geatland. After a gap of fifty years in which he rules the Geats honorably, the second part of the poem narrates his last stand against a third monster, a frightful dragon. This beast, who has laid undisturbed in his cave guarding a hoard of treasure for centuries, is infuriated when a piece is stolen from it. The now the elderly King Beowulf faces him in combat. With the sole (yet late) help of one of his retainers, the hero finally kills the wicked creature at the cost of his own life, thus leaving his people leaderless. The poem closes with Beowulf´s funeral and omens of the Geats’ destruction at the hands of their enemies. Beowulf also includes digressive episodes dealing with other topics of the Germanic heroic tradition—as, for example, the first Danish King Scyld Scefing, or the Battle of Finnsburh, waged between Frisians and Danes—and is interspersed with references to other motifs of this legendary repertoire. All of this builds up a complex net of interconnected and tangential narratives that is as rich as it is elusive for a modern readership unfamiliar with the poem’s cultural background. It most certainly catered to the literary tastes of its Anglo-Saxon audience, yet, most surprisingly, Beowulf spins around a protagonist that is not attested in any other literary or historical medieval source, whether British, continental, or Icelandic.1 The poem seems to be an original insular creation, but, curiously enough, neither the AngloSaxons nor England as a national entity is properly mentioned in the text.2 Preserved in one single copy in the Cotton Vitellius A. xv codex (tenth century), Beowulf has proved appealing for generations of readers.3 The manuscript, now held at the British Library, presents Anglo-Saxonists with many codicological uncertainties that make it demanding to read and translate. As a piece of early medieval art, it features the prosodic conventions of Germanic alliterative verse. The use of figures of speech like variatio, formulas, litotes, parallelisms, epic epithets, circumventing kennings, and the constant employment of elaborated compounds and archaisms, along with the twisted syntax of lines of uneven length, results in a textual reality quite distant from modern poetic standards.4 Nevertheless, and somehow against the odds, Beowulf is among the very few works of early medieval origin that average English readers have some knowledge of. Even more tellingly, it is still the only Anglo-Saxon text continuously translated and adapted, being also reliably saleable in the global cultural market. From its origins, the poem was considered a literary masterpiece and, in modern times, has been appropriated by authors and artists working in various genres and popular media, and consequently has moved beyond the academic circles to which other medieval texts are circumscribed. The various novels, films, comics, games, and musical works inspired by Beowulf, as well as a large amount of internet sites where aficionados discuss it, bear witness to the poem’s present-day popularity. Interestingly, this is a phenomenon that not only occurs in English-speaking countries but also manifests around the world (Gómez-Calderón 2010; Forni 2018).5 My contention is that the main reason for Beowulf’s endurance and attractiveness today is its reputation for challenging the claim that classical Greco-Roman works laid the epic foundations for “white” Europe. Invoking Germanic legends, Beowulf depicts 147

— ​ M a r í a J o s é G ó m e z - C a l d e r ó n —​ the barbaric Middle Ages idealistically, as a time of authenticity, moral dignity, and adventure that suits contemporary popular readings of the Northern European past. The following sections of this essay assess the cultural processes that eventually canonized Beowulf as the paradigmatic ancient English epic.

RECOVERING BEOWULF Beowulf was first edited in 1815 by the Icelandic scholar Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin. There is earlier evidence of its existence, as it had been previously described as “tractatus nobilissimus” (most noble treatise) in Humfrey Wanley’s catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Antiquæ Literaturæ Septentrionalis Liber Alter […] (1705, 218), and moreover, Sharon Turner had already published a partial translation of it into modern English in 1805. But it was not until the appearance of Thorkelin’s edition that there was widespread public awareness of the poem. The fact that Beowulf had long passed undetected by antiquarians for many centuries probably added a romantic aura to it, and perhaps explains why nineteenth-century Britain was so eager to claim it as a national treasure unearthed after ages of oblivion. At this moment, the rediscovery of Beowulf opportunistically connected with a general interest in the revitalization of the Saxon past within the British imperial and nationalistic agenda. The Anglo-Saxon matter was no novelty at the time: the precedent of Anglo-Saxon Christianity for the Anglican Church had already been invoked in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation to legitimize their breaking away from the Catholic Church, and later, Whig discourse popularized a proparliamentary revisionist view of the Anglo-Saxon heritage in its articulation of the myth of the Norman Yoke. This flattering reading of the national past attributed to the English people an innate, racialized sense of dignity and love for individual and political freedom that allegedly had manifested itself in the form of self-governing institutions from time immemorial. This freedom-loving spirit, rooted in an “AngloSaxon-Teutonic tradition,” had always opposed the later Norman-French imposition (Horsman 1981, 7). By the early nineteenth century, it was commonly accepted that Britain’s essence was primarily white, Germanic, and Protestant. The hegemonic weight of this definition of Englishness was such that it effectively erased other constituent, sub-ethnic identities—Scottish, Welsh, and Irish—in the service of constructing the Britain’s self-image. This was obviously an outcome of the imperialist and white supremacist mindset of the period. It was not only to shape internal policies but also to drive her colonial expansion. Eventually, it prompted the ruling elites of white settler colonies, who emerged as nations after the disintegration of the British Empire, to maintain an identity of white Anglo-Saxonness even after their independence from Britain. In tune with this racialized logic, the British population, “isolated” from continental Europe, embraced the study of Beowulf, an ancient relic of European heroism, feeling vindicated that they too had a prestigious epic, even if non-classical. However, with the very same racially biased logic, other Germanic countries also claimed it as part of their legacy; after all, the text dealt with the exploits of a Norse hero framed in the shared Germanic legendary universe. Attempts to appropriate Beowulf as the icon of a pristinely racial, linguistic, and cultural heritage is a critical phenomenon which Tom A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder refer to as the various 148

— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ British, German, and Scandinavian “take overs” and “coming backs” of philological studies (1998, 1–55). Therefore, advancing knowledge of Beowulf became a patriotic enterprise for the British, as many advocated its reading to promote national virtues. Sharon Turner even rebuked his contemporaries for having neglected their duty so long: ... our antiquarian patriotism may be blamed that, when so much labour and money have been applied to print, at the public expence, so many ancient remains, and some of such little utility, we should have left this curious relic of our ancestors to have been first printed by a foreigner, and in a foreign country. (1836, 287) Thus, Beowulf was considered the carrier of an Anglo-Saxon heroic spirit that, having first traveled from continental Europe to the British Isles in the Age of the Germanic Migrations, continued its glorious advance with European colonization. Along these lines, the United States would claim Beowulf too out of a desire to racially affiliate itself with the first Englishmen’s devotion to freedom (Niles 1993; Mora and Gómez-Calderón 1998). Ultimately, and for similar reasons, most Englishspeaking countries would claim the poem as part of their shared medieval cultural heritage. Beowulf was a treasure in which white populations of the Global North took pride. As a result, Beowulf entered the canon of English literature. Nevertheless, its privileged position has been contested from different quarters and on different grounds every few years. Disapproval has sometimes been based on purely aesthetic aspects; not without humor, one scholar points out that “the archetypal English poem sounded rather like the rumbling of a sack of potatoes being emptied” (Eagleton 1999, 114). At other times, the reasons for its dismissal from the canon have been of a philological order, mainly on account of the assumed discontinuity of the AngloSaxon cultural and literary traditions after the Norman Conquest of 1066. In fact, the peculiarities of the Old English literary corpus are the reason why handbooks, anthologies, and histories of English literature often include very few Anglo-Saxon works. The consequence is that, in a kind of reverse movement to its former canonization, the perceived “alterity of Anglo-Saxon literature” (Amodio 2014, 335) has caused the study of Beowulf to be progressively eliminated from the English Studies curricula of colleges and universities since the mid-twentieth century.

BEOWULF IN ITS LITERARY TRADITION Beowulf stands alone as a unique text within the Anglo-Saxon literary corpus. Many of the questions concerning the text’s date of composition, its geographical provenance, and its authorship and reception context(s) remain an object of debate. Scholars have placed its origins at various moments in the long span between the seventh and the early eleventh centuries. Likewise, although the manuscript is written in the West Saxon dialect, some experts consider it a late copy of an earlier text now lost, which may have been of East Anglian or Northumbrian origin. In the nineteenth century, there was an entrenched critical debate about the genesis of the text. Some scholars believed in the “song theory” (liedertheorie), claiming that the work was 149

— ​ M a r í a J o s é G ó m e z - C a l d e r ó n —​ the combination of earlier shorter songs composed by a series of early poets (scopas) who reshaped the text over years of oral transmission before it was finally copied down on parchment in its present form. Some other experts, however, defended its organic composition as the work of a single author. Although the former theory was ultimately discarded in the light of thorough textual re-examination, the idea that Beowulf began as oral literature still has its proponents. The interconnected questions of the authorship, date, and provenance of Beowulf are also linked to the central debate about whether the text was of pagan or Christian origins. Early interpreters, influenced by nineteenth-century pan-Germanism, believed that the Christian elements in the poem were later interpolations that distorted its original pagan spirit, an idea no longer endorsed today. Modern critics consider that Beowulf   ’s “antiquarian” recreation of a pagan heroic ethos combines an admiration for the Germanic legendary past with a message that the heroes’ obsession with fame and earthly glory is something futile, which is consistent with a Christian mindset. Most tellingly, the references to the divine in the text are always in the singular, in opposition to the polytheistic character of Germanic paganism, and all of them are vague enough as to allow for a Christian interpretation. Besides, the poet’s negative comments on the Danes’ sacrifices to the pagan idols support this reading: Hwilum hie geheton æt hærg-trafum wig-weorþunga, wordum bædon Þæt him gast-bona geoce gefremede wið þeod-þreaum. Swylc wæs þeaw hyra, hæþenra hyht; helle gemundon in mod-sefan. Metod hie ne cuþon, dæda demend, ne wiston hie Drihten God, ne hie huru heofena helm herian ne cuþon, wuldres waldend. (Beowulf II.175–84a)6 At times they pledged honors to idols, prayed explicitly that a soul-slayer would lend them assistance against the country-wide disaster. Such was their way, the hope of heathens; they minded hell in their heart of hearts; they did not recognize Providence, the arbiter of all things done; they did not know the Lord God, nor did they even know to praise heaven’s helm, the master of magnificence. There is also controversy about whether the poem grew out of a monastic or a courtly milieu. The first theory posits that only a monastic context would explain the composition of such a complex text blending Christian lore with the Germanic and classical epic traditions.7 Nevertheless, the second line of enquiry links Beowulf with a courtly background, and justifies its origins by reference to the eleventhcentury Anglo-Saxon politics, when England had been incorporated to King Cnut the Great’s vast Scandinavian empire. The text’s remarkably positive presentation of the Norse peoples could have served as propaganda by promoting a flattering image of the king’s Danish ancestry (Kiernan 1995). Be it as it may, it would have been rather incongruent for Anglo-Saxons to praise Scandinavians in a poem produced between the eighth and tenth centuries, when the Viking Invasions were ravaging 150

— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ England. Likewise, another unsettled question raised by the poem is its possible didactic function: Beowulf could have served as a sort of “mirror for princes” book (speculum principis) for the younger members of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, much in the same edifying way as Homer’s epics were used in the classical world. For the past two centuries, Beowulfian scholars have dealt with all these questions from very different critical approaches, ranging from classical philology to psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. The many readings of the poem have been in tune with the prevailing cultural winds of the moment, as Ian Duncan puts it: Thus we have had, variously, Beowulf as epic (timeless genre of heroic aspiration); Beowulf as Christian allegory; Beowulf as the foundation of a uniquely “English” tradition of sensibility, fortuitously excavated on the eve of historic nationalism; Beowulf as sophisticated meditation on the glamour and fatal imitations of an old Germanic pagan ethos; and so forth. (1987, 117) In fact, much of what is published about Beowulf is just speculative: its unconventional nature—even within its own literary corpus—is such that, as it has been remarked, it is always challenging to participate “in the contentious world of Beowulf scholarship, where much is written and little is believed” (Neidorf 2018, 229).

BEOWULF AND THE EPIC TRADITION Even the categorization of Beowulf as epic is a slippery field. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his influential lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” includes epic among the things Beowulf was thought to be and, in his opinion, what it was not: “primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an epic” ([1936] 1976, 54). He declared the poem as “heroic elegiac” (1976, 85) instead. As several scholars had done before him, Tolkien assessed Beowulf with the standards of the Greco-Roman tradition, a mold in which it did not fit, as the poem responds to and represents Germanic cultural modes. To begin with, the text does not fit the Homeric pattern strictly in that it excludes direct intervention of the divinities in human actions. However, the poem has much in common with the Homeric epics in that it articulates an extended account of a protagonist’s heroic exploits. The main narrative, presented from the viewpoint of an external narrator, is interspersed with sections of dialogue in which the characters speak directly, often recounting their past achievements. Beowulf dispenses with the proverbial invocation to the Muse in Greco-Roman epics, but nevertheless it begins with the “Hwæt” exclamation that characterizes Old English heroic poetry. Besides, even though it is not divided into proper “cantos,” the text has numbered series (fitts), and the storyline is structured around episodic adventures starting without a proper introduction to the action, like in the classical tradition. On the contrary, the plot contains a series of conventional epic motifs that comprise, variously, heroes’ quests and travels to dangerous lands, extraordinary battles with imposing enemies, and solemn greetings and farewells. The poem features ­traditional topoi like a visit to the underworld (this katabasis episode takes place in 151

— ​ M a r í a J o s é G ó m e z - C a l d e r ó n —​ Beowulf’s descent to the monsters’ lair to kill Grendel’s mother, II.1492-1589), and offers several examples in which the ekphrasis convention materializes in detailed descriptions of armor and armies (for example, of war gear in II.1030-43, and of the magic sword of the giants owned by the monsters in II.1557- 62). There are also courtly scenes of the exchange of gifts, with warriors boasting about future deeds in banquets and celebrations, and often animated with lofty speeches and the recitation of poems celebrating former deeds of war. Importantly, the poet states from the very beginning that he is concerned with glorious achievements in days of old: Hwaet, we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum þeod-cyninga þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. (Beowulf I.1–3) Yes, we have heard of the greatness of the Spear-Danes’ high kings in days long past, how these nobles practiced bravery. In this Germanic setting, the concept of heroism spins around the central motif of the loyalty bond between the warlord (þeoden) and his band of retainers, within a system of alliances and obligations that cements social cohesion. The leader’s search for glory and fame (lof) shapes his life, and the honor he gains depends on his acts of courage (þrym, ellen). In anthropological terms, the early Germanic society evoked in the poem is a Bronze Age “honor-shame culture,” in which the warrior’s prestige depends on his military prowess, and thus, the glory the warlord gains on the battlefield reflects on his people. This heroic ethos demands that the lord, be he a mere tribal chieftain or a king with a large realm, should be the first in battle and that his men be ready to die for him. Most importantly, in case he falls, they should avenge his death. The booty captured in battle is distributed by the leader, who is variously termed a “bestower of gold” and “giver of treasure” (goldgyfa, sincgyfa, beaggyfa, bryttan-þeoden, beaga brytta, goldes brytta). This gold has economic and enormous symbolic value, marking the social status of the men that receive it according to the courage shown in battle. The protagonists of Beowulf belong to the social elite. They are scions of illustrious families whose authority is maintained by continuously fighting for the benefit of the community. The poem’s epic stance is especially concerned with the way heroes exercise power over their lifetime. Thus, Beowulf spends his days in campaigns of conquest or avenging feuds in which his honor is tested, and from which his community prospers. His position, and the dignity and decorum with which he uses it, guarantees the fame he gains for posterity. For the pagan Germanic mind, a man’s reputation is the only kind of immortality one can achieve. In this patriarchal logic, Beowulf’s is “a men’s world” where women are not suited to fight and gain power in the way men are. The only exception to this rule is Grendel’s mother, but even in this case, the she-monster has no name of her own and is just described in relation with her son. In this scenario, females are relegated to a secondary position as companions, wives and mothers, queens, and peace-brides, always in the service of men’s political designs, and symbolically restricted to the inner space of their lords’ halls. 152

— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ The social milieu presented in the poem is conservative regarding class issues too. Military aristocratic values are at the core of the text as Beowulf glamorizes the relationship between the leaders and the people. The ideal early medieval social order depends on the assumption that the upper class guarantees not only the stability and prosperity, but also the very survival of the community through violence. In turn, the social group is defined along ethnic, national, and political lines that, as loose as they might seem, are clear enough for the characters in the text and the poem’s audience to distinguish between “us” and “the others.” Beowulf draws on the cosmic conflict between good and evil as embodied respectively by the community’s hero and their antagonists, fierce outsiders that can only be kept at bay by force. In keeping with the epic genre, the poem approaches this eternal fight with utter moral seriousness and solemnity: Beowulf’s martial virtue of courage makes him stand above ordinary men and prevail against terrible enemies. Most importantly, Beowulf confirms the hero’s moral imperative to fight for the group, something that distinguishes the epic genre from the folktale, the legend, and merely heroic stories, with which it shares many thematic aspects. As John Hainsworth puts is, “the common factor is that heroic poems celebrate, affirm, and confirm something; they do not, as epic can and does, explore and question at the same time as they celebrate” (1991, 6). Seen from this perspective, Beowulf’s three encounters with monsters become the critical moments when the validity of the heroic ideal is tested. The protagonist’s ethical choices configure him as the model of warrior leadership. Unlike religious heroic Anglo-Saxon poems such as Andreas or Guthlac, Beowulf deals with political and territorial conflict, not with spiritual warfare, but he is concerned with the defense of the right order of the things. The hero always fights for good. This is defined according to the parameters of the cultural matrix from which the text emerged, a hybrid Anglo-Saxon culture with its particular blend of pagan and Christian traditions and the fusion of Germanic and Latinate cultural heritages. The fact that the monster Grendel hates the human social order, symbolized by the king’s hall, marks him as an outsider: he is a lonesome creature deprived of lord and friends. The topic of the exile is a relevant one in ancient Germanic poetry: the outlaw is a wretched, lordless man who is prey to rivals. Grendel is said to be a descendant of the biblical Cain, the first murderer and exile, and this links his monstrosity with the root of evil according to Christian beliefs. Additionally, Grendel’s race assimilates him to the wicked creatures of the pagan Germanic tradition: he is a troll, a zombielike, cannibalistic giant, analogous to the draugr of Icelandic sagas. Similarly, the dragon represents evil as he participates in the Christian and pagan traditions simultaneously. He evokes the idea of Satan for a Christian audience, and is equally regarded as a cruel destructive beast in Germanic legends. His greed for gold makes it impossible to use the treasure to cement human bonds in the courtly ceremonies of gift-giving. For his part, Beowulf is portrayed as the defender of good; although the text implies that chronologically he could not have been a Christian, his honorable and moral behavior vindicates him to the poem’s Christian audience. In the bipartite structure of the text, the hero’s battles with the three monsters correspond to his rise, confirmation, and fall, and punctuate his evolution from a promising warrior to a leader, and eventually to a king accountable for his people’s welfare. The idea that the perfect monarch must combine the virtues of sapientia et fortitudo (wisdom/prudence and strength) has been identified as the overarching 153

— ​ M a r í a J o s é G ó m e z - C a l d e r ó n —​ theme of Beowulf (Kaske 1958). Thus, in the end the ideal of heroism becomes the question at stake: Beowulf’s tragic fall completely affects our understanding of the work, posing the question of how much self-sacrifice and how much unnecessary bravado there is in his last stand. He is heirless and elderly, and his insistence on facing the formidable dragon single-handedly could be considered as an act of foolish arrogance (ofergyd): Nis þæt eower sið ne gemet mannes nefne min anes, þæt he wið aglæcean eofoðo dæle, eorlscype efne. (Beowulf II.2532b–35a) It is not your undertaking, nor is it in the ability of anyone but me alone that he pit his strength against the trouble-maker, do a manly deed. Although Beowulf has been read as a Christian allegory, in which the protagonist is a Christ-like figure whose death serves a greater purpose, it is not so evident in the text that Beowulf’s tragic demise brings about advantages for the Geats. It is rather the opposite: he kills the dragon, but his leaderless people are said to be doomed. The poet indeed works within a long literary tradition, exploring the tensions of the Germanic heroic ethos with a blend of admiration and disenchantment. The elegiac, melancholy tone of the final lines fills the reader with nostalgia for a time of heroes that were not, after all, good enough to preserve their ideal world. A sense of transience pervades the conclusion. Beowulf’s end precipitates the collapse of his race in spite of him having been an exceptional man, as the poet claims: cwædon þæt he wære wyruld-cyninga manna mildust ond mon-ðwærust, leodum liðost ond lof-geornost. (Beowulf I.3180–82) They say that of worldly kings he was the most benevolent of men and the kindest, most generous to his people and most honor-bound. Suspended between history and legend, Beowulf speaks of heroes as aspirational models for later audiences, and so the story of the old days worked for the AngloSaxons as a cultural construct and social fantasy, much in the same way the chivalric world of romance did in later periods. The epic narrative of Beowulf is recognizably early medieval but, at the same time, a-temporal and universal. It is suited to continual adaptation in new cultural contexts because it deals with an eternal conflict, one between a hero and his monsters. The deeds of courage that were so appealing to Anglo-Saxon audiences are still enticing for modern ones. Beowulf, the champion who single-handedly fights against evil and embodies the martial virtues of loyalty, honor, and courage, continues to fascinate audiences in the present moment. As a matter of fact, this poem greatly worked to reify the barbaric Middle Ages into a hospitable age suited to moral tales for contemporary popular audiences, and 154

— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ to build a romanticized image of the Anglo-Saxons and the Northern European past. This idea is ultimately embodied in the stereotype of the Germanic warrior, which, as an icon of white, militaristic masculinity, is recast as the “medieval action man” of popular fiction. Increasingly, reductive adaptations of early medieval epic poetry for popular audiences which were in vogue from the neo-Gothic period of the eighteenth century to the Romantic period of the nineteenth century, constructed the Germanic Barbarian as the northern parallel of the Enlightenment’s Noble Savage. This cliché was later reassessed in the Victorian Age and given a more aggressively imperialist interpretation that has remained central in the political imagery ever since. Eventually, white supremacist ideologies, both European and American, appropriated the figure to encourage the rhetoric of the Global North’s racial and cultural excellence. This specific reading of Beowulf is prominent in its more recent adaptations in popular genres and new media as contemporary recastings exploit the character of Beowulf as the epitome of belligerent Euro-American heroic masculinity.

BEOWULF AND THE POPULAR EPIC IMAGINARY: THE NEO-BEOWULFS Today, Beowulf is a work of great cultural prestige, and the long list of translations into modern English and other languages attest to this. It is also thanks to the patina of classic literature that it has moved from the center to the margins of the canon in the form of popular “revisitings” (Osborn 1997). These appropriations draw on the audience’s familiarity with the classic, regardless of how shallow their knowledge is, and coexist with the new readings that the text receives in learned circles and that produce the cultural phenomenon that some critics have termed as “the postmodern Beowulf ” (Joy and Ramsey 2006). The latest popular Beowulfbased projects join a long list of works that have created a tradition of their own, a “Beo-universe,” that generates and provides context and feedback for the next work, each one of them a postmodern medievalism case study. As Joe Grixti says speaking of literary classics, ... The constant revisiting and repackaging of these texts in order to present them as new products capable of appealing to a new (or forgetful) generation of audiences can be seen as an important indication of the extent to which these adaptations have been subsumed by the demands of consumer culture. (2009, 459) The neo-Beowulfs in popular genres and new media reflect the refashioning of the poem to fill a narrative niche. Since the reformulation of a fabulous Germanic past is as enjoyable for modern audiences as it was for its original Anglo-Saxon audience, the international success of this classic-turned-into-commodity is observable in the increasing number of products related to it. In the framework of what we might call “medieval barbarian” narrative formulas, Beowulf reappears to respond to the tastes of the globalized postmodern audience by exploiting cultural clichés. Apart from inspiring children’s literature and parodies, the poem has sparked the imagination of contemporary authors producing neo-Beowulfs of the most variegated nature. Just in the last fifty years, Beowulf has resurfaced, somehow predictably, in historical adventure 155

— ​ M a r í a J o s é G ó m e z - C a l d e r ó n —​ novels, like Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1976)—later adapted into John McTiernan’s film The 13th Warrior (1999)—or Frank Schaefer’s Whose Song Is Sung (1996). In fact, there are many Beowulfian prose reworkings going back to the midtwentieth century, with titles like W. H. Canaway’s The Ring-Givers (1958), and novels ranging from John Gardner’s existentialist Grendel (1971) to McKinley Hill’s cyberpunk True Confessions of a Dumpster Diver, or, Faster thru the Biofractal (2000) to Maria Dahvana Headley’s staunchly feminist The Mere-Wife (2018).8 In the terrain of science-fiction, Beowulf has spawned narratives like those in the first two novels of the Heorot series (Niven et al. 1987, 1995), and inspired television miniseries like the Sci-Fi Channel’s Grendel (Lyon 2007). Even popular shows like Star Trek and Xena: Warrior Princess have devoted episodes to the poem, featuring “Heroes and Demons” (Landau 1995); and “The Rheingold,” “The Ring,” and “The Return of the Valkyrie” (Fawcett 2000), respectively. A more recent television series, Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (Dormer 2016), however, was not very successful, even though it appeared in the wake of other acclaimed shows inspired by early medieval history like Vikings and The Last Kingdom—in turn based on Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories novel saga (2004–2020)—and the (pseudo-) medieval-themed fantasy series Game of Thrones adapting G. R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novel saga. Likewise, the poem has been appropriated in films such as Beowulf, the Legend (Baker 1999), Beowulf and Grendel (Gunarsson 2005), Beowulf (Zemeckis 2007), Outlander (McCain 2008), or No Such Thing (Hartley 2001). Cartoons like Grendel, Grendel, Grendel (Stitt 1981), based on Gardner’s novel, and more faithful animated renderings like Kulakov’s Beowulf (1998) popularize the epic for younger audiences. There are also many examples of comic books and graphic novels featuring Beowulf (Basari and Caesar 1940–1941; Hinds 2000; García and Rubín 2013). Likewise, creators of board games and videogames have approached the poem with products like Beowulf: The Legend (Knizia and Howe 2005). And on the internet, we can find many creative fandom sites where Beowulf admirers contribute sequels, prequels, poems, etc. (Gómez-Calderón 2010). In the field of music, although Beowulf’s imprint is a minor one, we can still find works like the rock operas Beowulf: A Musical Epic (Davies and Wylie 1974), Beowulf: A Rock Musical (Pickering and Cole 1982), and the more traditional opera Grendel (Goldenthal et al. 2006), premiered at Los Angeles Opera. Interestingly, very few of these cultural products identify their source as an Old English verse epic. However, they all appeal to international audiences by exploiting symbols and themes from Beowulf, glorifying ancient Germanic culture as the site of true heroism and adventure. These low-brow cultural representations resort to self-referential conventions of the early medieval: popular literary works like Poul Anderson’s The Last Viking trilogy (1980) and Giles Kristian’s Raven novels (2010–2012); films like Richard Fleischer’s Hollywood classic The Vikings (1958), an adaptation of Edison Marshall’s 1951 novel, Valhalla Rising (Refn 2009), and The Northman (Eggers 2022); and videogames and comics along the lines of the aforesaid titles. These works celebrating the barbaric Germanic past through their constructions of idealized white masculine heroism are now consumed globally, due to the power of Euro-American capitalism and the dominance of British and American multinationals in the worldwide entertainment market. The elements

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— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ that characterize turn-of-the-century popular renderings of Beowulf, namely, the protagonist’s courage, the sense of belonging in the group, the mysterious nature of terrible monsters, and the idealization of the past are the same ones that have always fascinated readers.

CONCLUSION Beowulf was once the epic of the Anglo-Saxons; later, it became the epic of Britain and other predominantly Germanic nations, and even of other English-speaking countries that developed mainly out of white settler colonialism, like the United States, Canada, and Australia. Nowadays, Beowulf is among the most popular epics from Europe’s early Middle Ages. The internationalization of neo-Beowulfs, which are in a constant dialogue with the Anglo-Saxon source, has transformed the highbrow poem into a product for the masses, and this phenomenon is indicative of the way “rediscovered” literary traditions often operate in the postmodern world. Today, the various versions and adaptations of Beowulf exist side by side with the original text, which are all continually being reassessed from disparate critical perspectives, which, in turn, shapes the next popular appropriations. For example, the conflict between the hero and the monsters has been read as an analogy for European imperialism in postcolonial critiques, and the fight for land between the two orders of existence has been analyzed as a sign of humangenerated ecological crisis in ecocritical readings (Niven et al. 1987; Baker 1999); the trope of female monstrosity has been critiqued as a misogynist canard in feminist analyses (Headley 2018), and so forth. All of this academic discourse ultimately “trickles down” and finds its way into popular understandings and forms of Beowulf. The critical question today then is how should we read Beowulf, not whether we should read it all; although the poem is over a millennium old, it is still enticing, and still very much here.

NOTES 1 There are analogues for Beowulf in the Germanic, Celtic, or Finnish literary repertoires, but none of them mentions a character with the same name or story. 2 King Offa of the continental Angles is mentioned in Beowulf I.1949. 3 The manuscript was formerly part of Sir Robert Cotton’s collection. It is also known as the “Nowell Codex” after its previous owner, or simply as the “Beowulf Manuscript.” 4 The term variatio refers to the stock phrases employed for lexical variation in the successive statements of the same idea in contiguous lines within a poem. Kenning is the complex metaphorical circumlocution typical of ancient Germanic versification. 5 For example, the earliest Beowulf-based comic was Italian (Basari and Caesar 1941), and one of the latest graphic novels with international distribution to date is Spanish (García and Rubín 2013). 6 All quotations from and translations of Beowulf are from Fulk (2010). 7 There are specific connections between Beowulf and Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Statius’s Thebaid, among other classical works. 8 Headley is also the author of one of the most recent (and polemic) translations of the poem, Beowulf: A New Translation (2020).

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WORKS CITED Amodio, Mark. 2014. The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Anderson, Poul. 1980. The Last Viking trilogy [The Golden Horn, The Road of the Sea Horse, and The Sign of the Raven]. New York: Zebra Books. Baker, Graham, dir. 1999. Beowulf, the Legend. USA. Basari, Enrico, and Kurt Caesar. 1940–1941. Beowulf: Il vittorioso. Rome: AVE. Canaway, W. H. 1958. The Ring-Givers. London: Michael Joseph. Cornwell, Bernard. 2004–2020. The Saxon Stories series [13 novels]. New York: HarperCollins. Crichton, Michael. 1976. Eaters of the Dead. New York: Knopf. Davies, Victor, and Betty Jane Wylie. 1974. Beowulf: A Musical Epic. Toronto: Leap Frog Records. Dormer, James, prod. 2016. Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands. 13 episodes. UK. Duncan, Ian. 1987. “Epithaphs for Æglaecan: Narrative Strife in Beowulf.” In Beowulf, edited by Harold Bloom, 111–30. New York: Chelsea House. Eagleton, Terry. 1999. “Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling.” Review of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. London Review of Books 21, no. 22. Eggers, Robert, dir. 2022. The Northman. USA. Fawcett, John, dir. 2000. “The Rheingold,” “The Ring,” and “The Return of the Valkyrie.” Season 6, episodes 7-9. Xena: Warrior Princess. USA. Fleischer, Richard, dir. 1958. The Vikings. USA. Forni, Kathleen. 2018. Beowulf’s Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film. New York: Routledge. Fulk, Robert D. 2010. The Beowulf Manuscript: Complete Texts and the Fight at Finnsburg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. García, Santiago, and David Rubín. 2013. Beowulf. Bilbao: Astiberri. Gardner, John. 1971. Grendel. New York: Knopf. Goldenthal, Elliot, Julie Taymor, and J. D. McClatchy. 2006. Grendel [opera]. Gómez-Calderón, María José. 2010. “’My Name Is Beowulf’”: An Anglo-Saxon Hero on the Internet.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 5: 988–1003. Grixti, Joe. 2009. “Pop Goes the Canon: Consumer Culture and Artistic Value in Screen Adaptations of Literary Classics.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 4: 447–67. Gunarsson, Sturla, dir. 2005. Beowulf & Grendel. Canada. Hainsworth, John Bryan. 1991. The Idea of Epic. Berkley: University of California Press. Hartley, Hal, dir. 2001. No Such Thing. USA. Headley, Maria Dahvana. 2018. The Mere-Wife. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2020. Beowulf: A New Translation. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Hill, McKinley. 2000. True Confessions of a Dumpster Diver, or, Faster thru the Biofractal: A Cyberpunk Version of the Beowulf Legend. Bloomington: 1stBooks. Hinds, Gareth. 2000. The Collected Beowulf. Cambridge, MA: TheComic.Com. Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joy, Eileen A., and Mary K. Ramsey, eds. 2006. The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. Kaske, Robert E. 1958. “Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of ‘Beowulf.’” Studies in Philology 55, no. 3: 423–56. Kiernan, Kevin. 1995. “The Legacy of Wiglaf: Saving a Wounded Beowulf.” In Beowulf: Basic Readings, edited by Peter S. Baker, 195–218. New York: Garland. Knizia, Reiner, and John Howe. 2005. Beowulf: The Legend [board game]. Alton: Esdevium. Kristian, Giles. 2009–2011. The Raven trilogy [Blood Eye, Sons of Thunder, and Odin’s Wolves]. London: Bantam.

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— ​ T h e “ E p i c o f t h e A n g l o - S a x o n s ” —​ Kulakov, Yuri, dir. 1998. Beowulf. UK. Landau, Les, dir. 1995. “Heroes and Demons.” Season 1, episode 11. Star Trek: Voyager. USA. Lyon, Nick, dir. 2007. Grendel. USA. Marshall, Edison. 1951. The Viking. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young. Martin, George R. R. 1996–2011. A Song of Ice and Fire series [5 novels]. New York: Bantam. McCain, Howard, dir. 2008. Outlander. USA. McTiernan, John, dir. 1999. The 13th Warrior. USA. Mora, María José, and María José Gómez-Calderón. 1998. “The Study of Old English in America (1776–1850): National Uses of the Saxon Past.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 97, no. 3: 322–36. Neidorf, Leonard. 2018. “The Archetype of Beowulf.” English Studies 99, no. 3: 229–42. Niles, John D. 1993. “Locating Beowulf in Literary History.” Exemplaria 5, no. 1: 79–109. Niven, Larry, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. 1987. The Legacy of Heorot. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1995. Beowulf’s Children. New York: TOR. Orchard, Andy. 2013. “Beowulf.” In The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 137–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborn, Marijane. 1997. “Translations, Versions, Illustrations.” In A Beowulf Handbook, edited by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, 341–72. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pickering, Ken, and Keith Cole. 1982. Beowulf: A Rock Musical. New York: Samuel French. Refn, Nicholas Winding, dir. 2009. Valhalla Rising. Denmark. Schaefer, Frank. 1996. Whose Song Is Sung. New York: TOR. Shippey, T. A., and Andreas Haarder, eds. 1998. Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Stitt, Michael, dir. 1981. Grendel, Grendel, Grendel. Australia. Tolkien, J. R. R. [1936] 1976. “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics.” Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture. In An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, edited by Lewis E. Nicholson, 51–103. 5th ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Turner, Sharon. 1805. The History of the Manners, Landed Property, Government, Laws, Poetry, Literature, Religion, and Language of the Anglo-Saxons. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme. ———. 1836. The History of the Anglo-Saxons: Comprising the History of England from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest. 6th ed. Vol. 3. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans. Wanley, Humfrey. 1705. Antiquæ Literaturæ Septentrionalis Liber Alter […]. Vol. 2 of Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archæologicus, edited by George Hickes. Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano. Zemeckis, Robert, dir. 2007. Beowulf. USA.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM I N V E R G I L’ S A E N E I D

rsr Laura Zientek

In the first book of the Aeneid of Vergil (also spelled “Virgil”), the god Jupiter promises to grant “empire without limit” (imperium sine fine, Aeneid 1.279) to Aeneas and his descendants.1 Aeneas’ line, says Jupiter, will lead to “a Trojan Caesar” (Aeneid 1.286), whose power will extend through all the lands and whose name, Julius, will look back to Aeneas’ own son, Iulus (Aeneid 288). Vergil composes a poetic narrative in which past and present overlap: Vergil’s Rome overlays the Trojans’ settlement in Italy, the emperor Augustus lurks in the figure of Aeneas. The Aeneid conveys a world in layers in which the poet weaves myth, history, and ideology into a rich and complicated epic poem for Augustus’ Rome that keeps place and space at its heart, provides a fruitful target for ecocritical interpretation, and refigures the existing myth of Aeneas to justify the consolidation of Roman imperial power in a single family. Vergil composed the Aeneid in Latin between 29 and 19 BCE while writing under the patronage of G. Cilnius Maecenas, a friend and advisor of Augustus, the new first citizen (princeps civitatis) of the Roman state.2 Augustus came to power after a series of bloody civil wars, which began in 49 BCE with the factional conflict headed by Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great and which, with intermittent moments of truce, lasted until 30 BCE. Augustus was both the adopted son and biological greatnephew of Caesar, and took up his cause and armies after Caesar’s assassination. The wars ended with Augustus establishing himself as the sole ruler of the Roman empire with influence far surpassing the surviving bureaucratic offices of the Roman state. With a goal of lifting Rome from the mire of civil conflict, Augustus and his advisors instituted a program of cultural renewal in which art, monument, literature, and even legal doctrine were designed to promote Roman power and a morally defined set of Roman values. The Aeneid, composed during Augustus’ first decade as princeps and under the patronage of Maecenas, certainly represents effects of this program of refoundation. For Vergil, epic is monument in the form of poetry. The Aeneid describes the mythical journey of the Trojan Aeneas as he leaves the conquered city of Troy, on the northwest coast of present-day Turkey, with a 160

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-14

— ​ E c o l o g i c a l I m p e r i a l i s m i n V e r g i l ’ s A e n e i d —​ group of refugees in search of a new home. Aided by his divine mother, Venus, and other gods, he undertakes an odyssey westward through the Mediterranean before ultimately reaching Italy, the new homeland promised to him by Jupiter, the king of the gods. Though Vergil initially casts Aeneas as a refugee (“a fugitive because of fate,” Aeneid 1.2), upon making landfall in Italy—first at Cumae north of the Bay of Naples and later at the mouth of the Tiber River—Aeneas takes on the role of the Roman epic hero—a proto-Roman colonist and conqueror—who must forge alliances with the people already living in Italy or defeat them in battle. In this guise, Aeneas is an exemplary hero for Augustan Rome and so also a representation of the legacy of its imperial power. The Aeneid was Vergil’s last poetic composition, following a series of pastoral Eclogues (circa 42–38 BCE) and a collection of four books of Georgics (circa 37–29 BCE). The Aeneid follows in the literary tradition of earlier Greek epics (from the Iliad and Odyssey to Hellenistic era compositions such as Apollonius of Rhodes’ third-century BCE Argonautica), as well as early Latin epics (such as Ennius’ secondcentury BCE Annales and Lucretius’ mid-first-century BCE De Rerum Natura), and comprises 9,896 lines of verse in dactylic hexameter, the genre-defining meter of Greek and Roman epics.3 Vergil worked within a literary environment in which the educated poet (doctus poeta) demonstrated his own skill and the depth of his knowledge through complex moments of intertextuality. The Aeneid earned nearly immediate acclaim in Roman literary circles, at least in part due to the support of Augustus himself. Among Vergil’s immediate literary successors in the Augustan era (27 BCE–14 CE), epic poetry seemed to be the self-conscious aspiration for poets: I was preparing to put forth arms and violent wars in a serious rhythm, with a subject assembling in accordance with the meter. The shorter verse was equal: but Cupid is said to have laughed and stolen away a single foot. (Amores 1.1–4) Ovid, in his collection of elegiac Amores (16 BCE), blames his erotic muse for his avoidance of writing epic: Cupid has stolen away one foot from the meter of each elegiac couplet, disrupting the hexametric conventions of epic and thus, apparently, the narrative and thematic content as well. Ovid would go on to compose his own epic poem, Metamorphoses, two decades later, by which time Vergil’s Aeneid was already well-known and held up as a new standard of the genre in Latin literary circles. The body of scholarship on Vergil and his poetic accomplishments—let alone the larger literary, cultural, political, and artistic trends of the Augustan era (Zanker 1990)—is massive and ever-expanding. Scholars have written on everything from Vergil’s literary predecessors and successors to the connections between Vergil’s lived experience of Roma and Italy (Hardie 1992; Adler 2003), and have applied a wide range of theoretical lenses to the analysis of Vergil’s text. The application of ecocriticism—literary analysis with an environmental focus—is more recent in its influence both in Vergil studies (Leach 1988; Saunders 2008; Armstrong 2019) and in the various interdisciplinary fields that study the ancient world (Schliephake 2017b; Hunt and Marlow 2019). Attention to the natural world and human interactions 161

— ​ L a u r a Z i e n t e k —​ with it is not new, and in fact can be seen in fields as diverse as geography, ethnography, pastoral, natural resource use, natural philosophy, and landscape. The analytical framework of ecocriticism and the field of environmental humanities, however, introduce an approach that unites these various disciplines and prompts a renewed critical questioning of how modern readers understand ancient ideas about nature, the environment, and humanity (Holmes 2017; Schliephake 2017a). Studying material from the ancient world through the lenses provided by modern ecocritical theories also further clarifies and develops those theories, especially as they pertain to inquiries about how humanity experiences and interacts with the world around us. Many ecocritics work on modern material and acknowledge the ancient world as simply the source of certain literary traditions, one temporally foreign and disconnected from the questions and anxieties of our contemporary world (Garrard 2011, 37–44). But in ancient Roman culture, as in many cultures that are spatially and/or temporally distant from our own, we can find familiar anxieties about natural disasters and anthropogenic interference in the environment, right alongside culturally rooted questions about human exceptionalism and pollution. Approaching the extant evidence about ancient literature and culture from an ecocritical perspective reshapes our knowledge of the past while also productively complicating the theoretical approach itself. And because epic poetry in the Roman tradition was such an expansive genre, it provides fertile ground for this kind of investigation. This chapter’s analysis of the Aeneid does not focus on the role of the epic hero, the literary precedents to Vergil’s poem, the depiction of divinity, time, and space, or even the backdrop of poetic patronage in an imperial system. With awareness of these issues and through the lens of ecocriticism, however, this chapter critically approaches Roman imperialism and decenters the narrative of the hero as an inheritance from the Homeric and Alexandrian epic traditions. The traces of the Augustan ideology present in the Aeneid, as well as the adoption of the Aeneid as a kind of national refoundation story during the Augustan era, yield productive questions about how extensively this ideology permeates the poem’s narrative. In Aeneid book 8, Aeneas journeys upriver from the mouth of the Tiber to the future site of Rome; in Vergil’s narrative, we can see a co-opting of the landscapes of Italy within the larger context of his poetic cosmos to reify the narrative of deterministic Roman imperium.4 Aeneas’ divine mandate to travel west to Italy also presages subsequent imperialist expansion in ancient Rome, as well as much later colonization from a European center to Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The literary Aeneas and historical Augustus model the exploitation and self-justification of imperialist beliefs and practices of later centuries. Even beyond Vergil’s authorial intentions, the Aeneid’s popularity with Augustus himself and its early widespread publication in the Roman world anticipated its impact.

THE RIVER TIBER IN THE AENEID In my ecocritical analysis of the river Tiber in the Aeneid, I draw on several main sources of information: the topographical circumstances of the river, its environmental context, its geopolitical significance during Vergil’s own lifetime, and Vergil’s literary depiction of it. The river itself rises in the Apennine mountains north of 162

— ​ E c o l o g i c a l I m p e r i a l i s m i n V e r g i l ’ s A e n e i d —​ Rome, flows more than 400 km (about 250 miles) south through north-central Italy, and drains into the Tyrrhenian sea on the west coast of the Italian peninsula near Ostia.5 The waters of the Tiber’s tributaries, including the Nar and Anio, increase its volume, as does rainfall from heavy storms so that the Tiber discharges 68.8–178 cubic meters of water per second on an average day, but has been recorded to discharge 3,367 cubic meters per second during significant floods (Campbell 2012, 309–10). Flooding has also affected low-lying areas of Rome, despite numerous drainage and water-distribution projects undertaken by the city (Aldrete 2006, 10–90). The Tiber’s current enabled communication and the movement of goods and people southward through the Tiber valley, though movement upriver could be particularly onerous. The port at Ostia brought produce and merchandise to Rome from around the Mediterranean, but transporting those goods from Ostia to Rome met the challenge of a strong opposing current and a narrow, meandering course (Campbell 2012, 316). Several ancient authors note that goods were transported along this route by means of barges that were pulled with ropes, by workers standing on the banks (Propertius 1960, 1.14.1–4; Seneca, 1977, 13.4), suggesting that for unencumbered travelers, traveling by road could be faster than the three-day journey by river (Meiggs 1960, 289–98). The Tiber’s presence and impact on its local environment, as well as its centrality to Rome’s trade network, have their mirror in Ennius’ second-century BCE poetic depiction of the river as “the first over all (Italian streams)” (omnibus princeps, Annales 63). Vergil, writing more than a century later, also emphasizes the Tiber’s power, calling it “the horned river, ruler of the waters of Italy” (corniger Hesperidum fluvius regnator aquarum, Aeneid 8.77). Vergil’s substitution of regnator (ruler) for Ennius’ princeps (first person/leader) deliberately maintains the distance between landscape and politics. Ennius’ use of princeps comes from the middle years of the Roman Republic when the state was governed by annually elected consuls, a senate, and other magistrates; by the time Vergil was composing the Aeneid, the Roman state was in a transitional period between Republic and Empire. The Senate granted the title Princeps to Augustus, and the word would soon come to mean something more like “emperor.” Vergil’s Tiber, then, holds sovereign power—but does not parallel Rome’s first emperor. The Tiber is a touchstone in the Aeneid, even before Aeneas reaches Italy. The poet metonymically associates Aeneas’ arrival in Italy with the name and topography of the Tiber (Aeneid 1.13–14, 5.82–83, 5.797), and connects the river with surrounding arable land and the future settlement Aeneas will establish (Aeneid 2.781–82, 3.500–1). Once Aeneas reaches Italy, however, three moments in the text provide a focal point for an ecocritical analysis of the Tiber: reflections on the catabasis narrative in book 6 (Aeneas’ journey into the underworld), the arrival at the mouth of the Tiber in book 7, and most importantly, Aeneas’ journey up the river itself in book 8. As bookends to the catabasis narrative in book 6, Vergil situates the Tiber as a toponymic representative of Aeneas’ subsequent battle against the Italians in the Sibyl of Cumae’s prediction: “I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with copious blood” (Aeneid 6.86–87). Later, Aeneas hears his father Anchises’ shade (ghost) describe Rome’s great future from his perspective in the underworld, toward the end of which Anchises exclaims over the grave of Augustus’ late heir, Marcellus: 163

— ​ L a u r a Z i e n t e k —​ “what a funeral you will see, Tiberinus, when you flow past a recently-built tomb” (Aeneid 6.873–74).6 Even before the narrative reaches the site of the Tiber itself, the river is identifiable with Rome’s topography and local landscape, with past wars that lead to the existence of Rome, and with a death in the imperial family contemporary to Vergil’s composition of the poem that put the imperial succession into question. Vergil introduces the Tiber’s stream and local environment at the point when Aeneas and the Trojans accompanying him arrive at the mouth of the river. Favorable winds allow their ships to make landfall, but before reaching shore, the poet gives Aeneas’ perspective of the river: And here Aeneas looks out from the sea onto a huge forest, through which the Tiber with its lovely river, yellow in color from abundant sand, with swirling eddies bursts forth into the sea. Around and above it, varied birds familiar to the banks and streambed of the river were charming the air with their song and flitting through the grove. He orders his companions to bend their course and turn the prows towards land and, happy, he enters the shaded river. (Aeneid 7.29–36) Vergil’s representation of the Tiber here reflects the river’s volume and its powerful current, as well as the build-up of silt that made harboring at Ostia such a challenge (Campbell 2012, 316). Vergil neatly skips over this problem, noting in passing that the Trojan ships moor at a grassy mound on the riverbank (Aeneid 7.105–06). Further, the poet even characterizes the Tiber and its landscape—despite the historically documented challenges of river-travel in this area—as welcoming and pleasant to Aeneas and his fellow Trojans looking for a place to settle. One mode of examining this pleasant landscape is to apply an ecocritical lens to the pastoral elements in Vergil’s epic scene.7 As Diana Spencer writes, because “landscapes...become central to elite cultural production and consumption at Rome during a time of great change (the late Republic and early Principate),” the literary construct of a scene of a charming landscape (locus amoenus, “pleasant place”) provides “Romans a new way of thinking about their relationship with the land” (2010, 10–11). A typical locus amoenus might include blooming and fragrant plants, trees providing shade, running water, a pleasant breeze, and even non-threatening wildlife. Vergil’s introduction to the Tiber checks many of these boxes: winds bring Aeneas’ ships to shore, the river’s water rushes but is still pleasant, the trees of the grove cast shade on the river, and songbirds fly from tree to tree. These birds, in fact, of many species yet part of the Tiber’s coastal ecosystem, simply by their presence make this landscape something like a photonegative version of an infernal landscape in book 6. Before Aeneas undertakes his catabasis, Vergil describes the entrance to the underworld in great detail. The cavern and lake called Avernus are more of a locus horridus (“horrific place,” Bernstein 2011): There was a deep cave, immense in its vast yawning, rocky, protected by a black lake and the shade of the woods,

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— ​ E c o l o g i c a l I m p e r i a l i s m i n V e r g i l ’ s A e n e i d —​ above which no birds at all could hold a course with their wings without danger: such terrible breath poured itself forth from dark jaws and carried itself to the vaulted skies. Hence the Greeks called the place by the name Aornos. (Aeneid 6.237–42) In this landscape, the breeze is an appalling breath, the shade is gloomy, the water is dark and still, and no birds traverse the space. Even the name, Avernus, is given a folk etymology, from the Greek ἀόρνος (aornos, birdless). And while this landscape is defined by its simultaneous quiet and emptiness, it still marks a narrative excursus in which Aeneas will become an audience stand-in while he witnesses the future greatness of Rome. The Tiber landscape at the beginning of book 7 looks ahead to that future greatness in a different way: by seeming to welcome Aeneas in as a settler and as a proleptic representation of Augustus’ imperial power. Vergil’s evocation of pastoral images and language in his characterization of the Tiber continues during Aeneas’ upriver journey in book 8, establishing an intratextual link between the river’s environment and its position as vehicle and agent of Trojan settlement/proleptic Roman imperialism in the text’s narrative. Aeneas does not know to travel up the river until he falls asleep on the bank and the river’s anthropomorphic god speaks to him in a dream; in setting this scene, Vergil evokes pastoral elements in his landscape again: It was nighttime and through all the lands deep sleep was holding the tired animals—every type of bird and flock—, when Father Aeneas reclined on the bank under vault of the chilly sky, troubled at heart by mournful war, and gave rest at last throughout his limbs. (Aeneid 8.26–30) As in the first view of the Tiber in book 7, the scene is peaceful: the darkness of night seems to embrace birds, livestock, and even Aeneas himself as he sleeps, and the chilly night sky recalls the chilly shade of the forest at the Tiber’s mouth. Of note here, however, is Aeneas’ epithet: father (pater). Rather than identifying Aeneas by his place of origin (Trojan), his most notable characteristic as epic hero (being dutiful), or even a reminder of his need for a home for his people, the word “father” unlocks different layers of meaning. Within the context of Aeneas’ own life, he is father to Ascanius, also called Iulus; but since the poet establishes from the beginning of his epic that Iulus—and thus Aeneas, too—will be progenitor to his contemporary rulers of Rome, the Julian family, “father” looks beyond the scope of the poem to Augustus as well. Moreover, because the Senate awarded the title “father of the fatherland” (pater patriae) to Julius Caesar in 45 BCE,8 calling Aeneas “father” links mythical and historical leaders even more firmly. Thus Aeneas, about to speak to the god of the Tiber and receive his aid in traveling upriver to the site at which the city of Rome would eventually sit, seems to point Vergil’s readers toward a Rome specifically characterized as Julian.

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DIVINE MANDATE, DESTINY, AND AENEAS’ JOURNEY Aeneas’ dream of Tiberinus, the god of the river, draws together pastoral elements, intratextual allusions to Aeneas’ catabasis, and establishes another divine voice giving a mandate to Aeneas’ journey and eventual settlement in Italy. The epiphany of Tiberinus to Aeneas begins with a description of the god’s appearance: To him the god himself of the place, Tiberinus with lovely water, aged, appeared to lift himself up from among the poplar leaves (delicate linen was covering him with a grey-green mantle, and shade-growing reeds were covering his hair). (Aeneid 8.31–34) The anthropomorphic depiction of a river god is not unusual: that he wears linen garments (plant-based, of course!) and is clothed in the reeds that grow along the banks of the river serves to establish a firm connection between god and place. Vergil even repeats the characterization of the river as “lovely” that he established at Aeneas’ first glimpse of the river. The god could seem to have the appearance of an older man, as Roman depictions of river gods were often bearded and horned. A fourth-century CE commentator on the Aeneid, Maurus Servius Honoratus, notes that the mention of horns reflected that rivers “imitated the lowing of cattle” (Aeneid 8.77.1). He also suggests two alternate theories: by depicting the river as a “senior” god, Vergil was either referring to the color of the river’s foam, or the “respect” that should be accorded to it (Aeneid 8.33.1). Presumably, the foaming waters would give a white “cap” to the silty, yellow waters (Aeneid 7.31) of the river’s stream; on an anthropomorphized Tiberinus, foamy waters might look like white hair. With this epiphany, Vergil depicts a river incarnate, given a form made comparable to human while still surrounded by its larger environmental context. While Tiberinus’ appearance emphasizes his riverine origins and adopted anthropomorphic form, the message he conveys to Aeneas underscores the trope of Roman power and imperium present throughout the poem. Tiberinus seems to understand and reinforce the same divine mandate for Aeneas’ resettlement of Troy in Italy that Jupiter speaks into being in book 1 (mentioned above): that Aeneas’ descendants—the Romans—will have an “empire without limit” (Aeneid 1.279). The river god commands Aeneas, “look for Laurentine soil and Latin fields: here you have a destined home” (Aeneid 8.38–39), before instructing Aeneas to look for a portent embodied by a white sow and her thirty piglets as a sign of his descendants’ prolific future (Aeneid 8.42–48). Vergil notes that the Tiber is “a river most dear to heaven” (Aeneid 8.64); Tiberinus’ words and instructions, then, align with the goals and intentions of more powerful gods such as Jupiter and Venus. Before urging Aeneas to wake, Tiberinus explains how he will help Aeneas accomplish this leg of his destined journey to resettle Trojans in Italy and sow the seeds of the future greatness of Rome. Because Vergil puts these instructions—and shortly afterward depicts the actions he describes—in the mouth of the river, he creates a verbal analog to the welcoming riverine landscape at the beginning of book 7. Echoing Vergil’s characterization of “the god himself of the place” (Aeneid 8.31), 166

— ​ E c o l o g i c a l I m p e r i a l i s m i n V e r g i l ’ s A e n e i d —​ Tiberinus tells Aeneas that “I myself will lead you with banks and a straight stream, so that you, carried by oars, may traverse the river’s opposing current” (Aeneid 8.57–58). Since the Tiber’s currents are notoriously swift and difficult to navigate in this portion of the river, Tiberinus’ words seem to imply that the journey will take a great deal of effort, even if the course is clear. In the subsequent journey upriver, however, the river actively makes Aeneas’ journey easier, seeming to open the way and erase as many obstacles as possible: Through the night (as long as it is) Tiber calmed its swollen stream, and the silent wave flowing backwards thus paused, so that he was smoothing out the water’s surface in the manner of a placid lake and a calm pool, in order that there would be no struggle for the oars. Thus they hasten on their journey undertaken with cheers following: fir keels daubed with pitch slide through the shallows: even the waves are amazed, the forest, unaccustomed to the far-flashing shields of men and of painted ships afloat, also marvels. They wear themselves out for a night and day at the oars and traverse the long meanders; they are covered by various kinds of trees, and they cut through green forests on the calm water. (Aeneid 8.86–96) Despite Tiberinus’ own warning that Aeneas and his crew would be rowing upstream against the current, in practice, the river pauses its typical and characteristic flow and makes Aeneas’ journey much easier. As opposed to three days spent dragging a ship up the approximately thirty kilometers between Ostia/the mouth of the Tiber and Rome/Pallanteum, Aeneas and company can move quickly, glide through the water, and make their journey in the space of a day and a night. The river Tiber, acting in accord with the will of the gods, becomes a guide, a mode of transportation, and the link between Aeneas and his destination upriver: Pallanteum, the future site of Rome. The becalmed river and easy upstream journey allude to Aeneas’ descent to the underworld at Avernus in book 6 once more, and therefore renew the connections between Aeneas, his journey and knowledge, and Roman imperial identity. As with the Tiberine and Avernian landscapes characterized by the presence or absence of birds, however, this moment of intratextual allusion presents a narrative echo in landscapes as different as a photograph from its negative. When the river reverses the course of its current, he “smooth[es] out the water’s surface in the manner of a placid lake and calm pool” (mitis ut in morem stagni placidaeque paludis / sterneret aequor aquis, Aeneid 8.88–89). Key to the allusion are the words for the lake (stagnum) and pool (palus), as well as the verb of calming (sternere). In book 6, the Cumaean Sibyl explains to Aeneas about Charon, the ferryman who conveys the souls of the dead across the river Acheron to the underworld proper, and about the confluence of underworld rivers with the Acheron: “You see the deep lakes of Cocytus and the Stygian pool” (Cocyti stagna alta vides Stygiamque paludem, Aeneid 6.323). The close proximity of stagnum and palus in both passages indicates some measure of 167

— ​ L a u r a Z i e n t e k —​ similarity in the subject matter of each passage. That the Tiber displays the same types of still pools as the Cocytus, and the same marshy quality as the Styx seems to imply infernal qualities on the river. Sterneret, in particular, highlights the unusual flow of the river by employing the same verb for the laying-out of corpses by killing blows on the battlefield to a water deity’s influence on his natural element.9 Tiberinus and Charon even wear the same kind of garment: a mantle (Aeneid 6.301, 8.33). Where the underworld landscape and the garb of the figure who controls movement over the Acheron are gloomy, decaying, and generally horrible, however, the Tiber landscape is fresh and green as is figure who governs transportation on the local waters. The locus horridus of the infernal landscape contrasts clearly with the idyllic Tiberine environment. The allusion, then, speaks to the narrative purpose of Aeneas’ two journeys across the still waters of a river: to witness a parade of information about the future greatness of Rome and to cement the idea of Roman greatness as a destined thing both within the minds of the poem’s readers and through the application of Augustan ideology to poetic landscapes. The conceit of Roman imperium is present throughout Aeneas’ upstream journey, through the impact of individual words to the juxtaposition of Trojan ships with the Italian environment. In Tiberinus’ prediction that Aeneas will traverse its waters (superes, Aeneid 8.58), and the poet’s confirmation that the Trojan ships complete their journey (superant, Aeneid 8.95), both utilizing the verb superare, with its double meanings—“to traverse a natural space” and, more commonly, “to conquer, overcome”—seed ideas of Roman conquest into the Trojan’s journey up the river. Likewise, Tiberinus’s prophecy of Iulus/Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, establishing a city at Alba (Ascanius...condet...Albam, Aeneid 8.48), and his dive back into the river (se condidit, Aeneid 8.66) pick up on Vergil’s transformative use of the verb condere— literally, “to dig a foundation, establish,” but here “to bury the sword” (James 1995)—that draws a direct connection between the Tiber’s movement, Aeneas’ future, and Roman conquest. On the level of narrative image, Vergil creates a pathetic fallacy in his Tiberine landscape when “the waves are amazed, and the forest, unaccustomed to the far-flashing shields of men and of painted ships afloat, also marvels” (8.91–93). The landscape’s amazement at biremes (ancient warships with two rows of oars on each side) crewed by men in armor both exaggerates the vision of a primeval or untouched Italian landscape and looks ahead to the battles Aeneas will fight against the Italians in order to establish a new homeland for himself and his people. Even the people Tiberinus names as Aeneas’ future allies, Evander and the residents of Pallanteum, are colonists to Italy (Aeneid 8.50–54). Like Aeneas, Fate brought Evander to Italy (Aeneid 8.333–36); Vergil emphasizes the Augustan ideology of imperium centered around Rome and its environs (Nicolet 1991, 189– 94) in his reiteration of the divine mandate that brings Evander and Aeneas to the future site of Rome.

VERGILIAN RETROFUTURISM AND THE IMPERIAL NARRATIVE Voyages upstream, like Aeneas’ on the Tiber, employ their narrative structure to introduce “issues of temporality” (Jones 2005, 93); they immerse the reader in memories and allusions to the past. The narrative of Aeneid 8 provides a striking 168

— ​ E c o l o g i c a l I m p e r i a l i s m i n V e r g i l ’ s A e n e i d —​ demonstration of Vergil’s diachronic topography, where the river’s course sets out a spatial echo of the time between Rome’s mythic past and Augustan “present.” Vergil composed his poem during the early Augustan era; his narrative looks back more than a thousand years from his time, to the legendary past directly following the Trojan War. Within the universe of his poem, Aeneas flees Troy after its destruction by the Greeks, and sets out to find a new homeland for the other Trojan refugees in his fleet; repeatedly gods, their human mouthpieces, and even divinely crafted objects give Aeneas information about his future and simultaneously present to Vergil’s readers a parade of Rome’s greatest historical heroes, leaders, and battles that culminates with Augustus. In the underworld in book 6 and at Pallanteum in book 8, the poet creates the ­impression of layering past, present, and future over the same places (Pandey 2018, 120). Aeneas’ journey up the Tiber concludes when he reaches the settlement of Evander’s Pallanteum, built in the same space that Rome would later occupy. The poet’s consciously proleptic introduction of Pallanteum occurs from the perspective of Aeneas and the other Trojans sailing with him: The fiery sun had ascended the circle of the sky when from a distance they see city walls and a citadel and scattered roofs of homes, which now Roman power made equal to the sky, but at that time Evander was master of the impoverished settlement. (Aeneid 8.97–101) Evander and his people came from Arcadia, on the Greek Peloponnesian peninsula, and, like Aeneas, came to build a new settlement. Pallanteum is established enough to have city walls and a citadel, its central architectural feature, but Vergil quickly establishes that this ancient city cannot be compared to the Rome of his own time: Pallanteum lacks resources. Augustan Rome, indicated precisely by the adverb “now,” seems nearly divine in its ascent to the heavens. What is more, the past-tense verb “made equal” indicates that from the poet’s perspective, the glory of Rome has been thoroughly accomplished. In the narrative that follows Aeneas’ arrival in Pallanteum, Vergil composes a richly nuanced vision of this proto-Rome by noting the locations of sites that would be recognizable to his Roman readers, while Evander guides Aeneas through the space. The future of Rome almost seems to haunt its own past. While there is much to be made of the poetic proximity of past and future (Kondratieff 2014, 196–99), the Capitoline Hill is a particularly evocative example: From this place [Evander] led [Aeneas] to the Tarpeian seat and the Capitoline, now golden, of old bristling with overgrown thickets. Even then frightful awe of the place terrified the fearful countryfolk, even then they trembled at the wood and rock. “This grove,” he said, “this hill with its leafy summit a god inhabits (which god is uncertain); the Arcadians believe that they have seen Jupiter himself … ” (Aeneid 8.347–53) 169

— ​ L a u r a Z i e n t e k —​ During the Augustan period, the Capitoline housed the monumental temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Jupiter the best and greatest), which long had been a repository for victory trophies and dedicatory offerings to the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva). The accumulated dedications and wealth became so great that by 179 BCE some had to be relocated to other sites (Livy 2018, 40.51.3). The original temple burned down in 83 BCE but was rebuilt to an even greater height and with greater expense in 69 BCE (Tacitus 1925, 3.72; Dionysius 1937, 4.61.4). Vergil’s Evander hints at the presence of Jupiter even before the construction of the temple; given Jupiter’s promised “empire without limit,” his presence in this proto-Rome continues to center Roman and Augustan ideology in this specific place. The poet also provides an exaggerated contrast between a seemingly primitive past and glorious future, noting that the Capitoline was overgrown with vegetation then, but “now golden.” As with Jupiter inhabiting the Capitoline before the construction of his temple, the golden age imagery brings the past into the present as well. Vergil attributes a golden age (Aeneid 8.324–25) to the reign of the god Saturn even before Evander’s arrival, but this phrase works intratextually to evoke the vision of Rome’s future described to Aeneas during his journey to the underworld in book 6: “Augustus Caesar, born of a god, will establish a golden age” (Aeneid 6.792–93).

CONCLUSION Vergil’s juxtaposition of the ancient past with his own present is part of the Augustan project of cultural renewal and refoundation that uses an epic narrative to center the power of the Julian family. What is proleptic to the reader is prophetic to the characters. Vergil’s choice of genre for the Aeneid and the form of the epic itself look backward to its own literary tradition and forward as part of Augustus’ program of cultural renewal. Prior to the publication of the Aeneid, the second-century BCE poet Ennius was the reigning master of the epic form in Latin, notable both for being the first Roman poet to apply Greek metrical forms to Latin epic and for being considered somewhat old-fashioned by Vergil’s day. Not only did Ennius model his epic after the Homeric poems by using dactylic hexameter, he even claimed to be a reincarnation of Homer via the transmigration of souls. Vergil’s contribution to the genre of epic, then, is a contemporizing reboot of a literary tradition stretching back two centuries in Latin and at least 800 years in Greek. He looks back to the literary form established by the Homeric poems and to the mythological figure of Aeneas present in the Iliad and in Rome’s own foundation legends. By composing a new narrative of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy and establishment of the people who would become the Romans, and by constructing metapoetic bridges between Aeneas and the actions of Augustus, Vergil writes a new foundation story for Rome in the form of epic. Even beyond the journey to the underworld in book 6, the arrival at the Tiber in book 7, and the upstream journey in book 8, the concentrated attention to place and to environment stands as a consistent motif through which to analyze the Augustan ideology of destined imperium in the Aeneid. The Aeneid does not mark the origins of ancient Roman imperialism, but does represent in literary form the consolidation of that imperial power and authority to one man—Augustus—and his successors. The influence of this imperium was never neutral and must be interpreted through the social, political, religious, and 170

— ​ E c o l o g i c a l I m p e r i a l i s m i n V e r g i l ’ s A e n e i d —​ economic patterns of its own time. Its legacy, however, includes the ongoing harms of European imperialism and colonization of the Americas and the Global South in the last five centuries. The exemplary nature of this most Roman of poems, then, requires the same critical gaze: beyond the ambiguity of the poet’s intentions (negative or positive) toward Augustus, we can observe the impact of the Aeneid as an early paradigmatic example of the damage wrought on both human and nature by vast and growing imperial powers.

NOTES 1 All translations from original Latin texts are my own; my translation of the Aeneid is based on Vergil (1969). For a complete translation of the Aeneid, see Vergil (2009). 2 Augustus was a title for the man born Gaius Octavius granted by the Roman Senate in 27 BCE, following his defeat of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. 3 Ancient literary critics such as Aristotle called hexameter the “heroic meter,” and noted its superlative “sedate and stately” nature as being both appropriate for and a marker of the epic genre (Poetics 1459b). While Aristotle was looking back to the Homeric poems, subsequent Hellenistic and Roman epic poets adopted the hexameter accordingly. 4 On Roman imperium, see Davies (2020, 157–59) and Mattingly (2011, 23). 5 Ostia Antica, the port of Rome during the classical period, is now several kilometers inland due to addition of alluvial deposits at the river’s mouth. 6 Marcus Claudius Metellus died in 23 BCE. 7 Ecocriticism can apply to pastoral literature, but has a much broader purview (Buell 1998, 647–49; Buell 2011, 102–3; Garrard 2011, 37–65). 8 The Senate would also grant the title pater patriae to Augustus in 2 BCE, 17 years after Vergil’s death and the posthumous publication of the Aeneid. 9 Sternere occurs most often in battle sequences, describing the sprawl of a defeated fighter on the battlefield 25 times; twice Vergil uses it for describing the killing of an animal, and five other times for the calming of the Tiber’s waves.

WORKS CITED Adler, Eve. 2003. Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Aldrete, Gregory S. 2006. Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Armstrong, Rebecca. 2019. Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernstein, Neil W. 2011. “Locus Amoenus and Locus Horridus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 5, no. 1: 67–98. Buell, Lawrence. 1998. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3: 639–65. ———. 2011. “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends.” Qui Parle 19, no. 2: 87–115. Campbell, Brian. 2012. Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Davies, Sarah H. 2020. Rome, Global Dreams, and the International Origins of an Empire. Leiden: Brill. Dionysius of Halicarnassus. 1937. The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Books 3–4. Translated and edited by Earnest Cary. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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— ​ L a u r a Z i e n t e k —​ Garrard, Greg. 2011. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Hardie, Philip. 1992. The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Brooke. 2017. “Forward: Before Nature?” In Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by Christopher Schliephake, ix–xiii. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books Hunt, Ailsa, and Hilary Marlow, eds. 2019. Ecology and Theology in the Ancient World: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic. James, Sharon L. 1995. “Establishing Rome with the Sword: Condere in the Aeneid.” The American Journal of Philology 116, no. 4: 623–37. Jones, Prudence J. 2005. Reading Rivers in Roman Literature and Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kondratieff, Eric J. 2014. “Future City in the Heroic Past: Rome, Romans, and Roman Landscapes in Aeneid 6–8.” In Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity: Remains and Representations of the Ancient City, edited by A. Kemezis, 165–228. Leiden: Brill. Leach, Eleanor Winsor. 1988. The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Livy. 2018. History of Rome, Books 38-40. Translated and edited by John C. Yardley. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mattingly, David J. 2011. Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Meiggs, Russell. 1960. Roman Ostia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nicolet, Claude. 1991. Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Ovid. 1961. Amores. Edited by E. J. Kenney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pandey, Nandini B. 2018. The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Propertius. 1960. Sexti Properti carmina. Edited by Eric A. Barber. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seneca. 1977. L. Annaei Senecae dialogorum libri duodecim. Edited by Leighton. D. Reynolds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saunders, Timothy. 2008. Bucolic Ecology: Virgil’s Eclogues and the Environmental Literary Tradition. London: Duckworth. Schliephake, Christopher. 2017a. Introduction to Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by Christopher Schliephake, 1–15. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———, ed. 2017b. Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Spencer, Diana. 2010. Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tacitus. 1925. The Histories, Books 1–3. Translated and edited by Clifford H. Moore. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vergil. 1969. P. Vergili Maronis opera. Edited by Roger A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2009. Vergil: The Aeneid. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zanker, Paul. 1990. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Translated by Alan Shapiro. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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PART III

RECASTINGS AND I N N OVAT I O N S ( C I RC A 1 0 0 0 – 1 8 5 0 C E )

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CHAPTER TWELVE

S U N J ATA FA S A A N D T H E O R A L EPIC TRADITION OF MALI

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Kassim Kone

The Mande epic Sunjata fasa (Sunjata’s praises), also called Sunjata and Sundiata, is found in some form in many West African countries that were once part of the Mali Empire (circa 1235–1670 CE). The geography and culture of the former Mali Empire is still known by its descendants as “Mande,” and indeed, many people now use Mali and Mande interchangeably, as I do in this chapter. (The term “Mande” came to be more widely used than “Mali” in the nineteenth century after Arabs and Europeans adopted the Fulani people’s rendering of Mande as Mali.)1 Although the eponymous epic of Sunjata is ostensibly about Sunjata Keyita (also spelled “Keita”) (circa 1217–1255), the founder of the Mali Empire, it is likely older since it encompasses other kingdoms, kings, generals, and clans (kabilaw) prior to and instrumental in the founding of the empire. Sunjata Keyita was born with the royal name “Konatey,” like his father, who is still remembered as Nare Magan Konatey. He came to prominence after defeating Sumaworo Kante in 1235. The kings of many smaller kingdoms helped Sunjata defeat Sumaworo Kante, who was known as a powerful sorcerer-king and went by the epithets, “the Magician” and “Blacksmith King.” One year after the battle, in 1236, the same kings consecrated Sunjata emperor at a gathering in Kurukan Fuga, in present-day western Sudan, although some scholars place Sunjata’s consecration in Daka Jala (Cissé and Kamissoko 1991, 9). After gaining power, Sunjata took on the name “Keyita,” from the Malinke words: kɛ: legacy, succession; and ta: take, and inaugurated it as his clan’s, i.e., the Konatey’s new royal name. But some members of the Konatey clan never took on the name Keyita, and to this day, Konatey and Keyita are considered mutually interchangeable. At its core, Sunjata fasa tells of the genealogy of the Keyita dynasty, Sunjata’s biography, and his meeting with various kings in Kurukan Fuga. Methodologically, this chapter focuses on Sunjata fasa as relayed in oral sources— in an African phenomenology of lived time. Euro-American historiographers, by contrast, tend to construct West African history in terms of their own preoccupations, with “exact” chronologies and “documentable” facts about dominant figures, DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-16

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— ​ K a s s i m K o n e —​ royal lineages, centralized states, political relations, etc. Some even accuse contemporary African historians of rewriting history as an act of vengeance against European historiography, and do not give African precolonial history the credit it deserves because of their prejudice against orality. The oral nature of African epic traditions is a major source of Euro-American scholars’ dismissal of them, which they often dub as “folklore.” Beyond the Qur’an, Africa does not have a tradition of written scripture, but instead relies on oral poets and witnesses to transmit and preserve sacred knowledge and stories. African oral epics utilize centuries-old formulas and narratives, which are transmitted from generation to generation. They convey history and cultural values through carefully organized, edifying performance programs. Together, these constitute an “archival tradition” different in scope and purpose from popular traditions like folklore and legends (Niane 1962, 5). If all oral African epics were written down, they would fill up an untold number of books. They are vitally important resources when it comes to reconstituting African history in writing. As Amadou Seydou said, those who write African history today are in many ways analogous to historians of Renaissance Europe who reconstitute the history of European antiquity from hearsay, popular oral stories, and limited written accounts (1969). The fact that Africa did not use writing to record its past should not be perceived as a lack of historical consciousness or historical record-keeping in Africa. Writing is effective in recording historical events, but it does not guarantee the preservation of historical truths. While the Global North believes in the written word more than the oral one, speech predominates in traditional Africa. Oral literature is permeated with “subjective” social concerns and hidden agendas, but so too is written history, as Hayden White noted (1987). The imperialism of writing is such many believe what is not written down is incidental and ephemeral, whereas in Africa, what is essential to humankind is traditionally communicated in speech. There may be lapses in oral history too, but this is either intentional or due to the failure of someone’s memory (Seydou 1969). Like folktales, African epics contain wisdom and ethical teachings. But they are more wide-ranging in their themes, cover a broader range of time, and contain much genealogy. They are challenging for cultural outsiders to understand because they contain both literal and much figurative material. It is as if they have veils covering over much popular wisdom, cultural secrets, and past events. Historian bards, the jɛliw or griots of the Mande, have a saying, which implies that historical content should not be completely unveiled: “An ka dᴐᴐni fᴐ ka dᴐᴐni to an kᴐnᴐ” (Let us say a little, and keep a little inside unsaid). There is also a practical jurisprudence aspect to this—in order to maintain social harmony, certain aspects of history must be left untold. This also alludes to the fact that the oral record sometimes leaves off embarrassing or controversial information about Mande emperors and kings.2 The epic of Sunjata, for instance, sidesteps historical figures of the Mande Empire such as Mansa Sakura, a slave who managed to usurp royal power. The same is true for Mansa Musa or Kanku Musa, perhaps the wealthiest person in human history. Mansa Musa had a massive amount of wealth in the form of gold. Another controversy surrounding Mansa Musa stems from the fact that he was the son of a Keyita princess rather than of a male member of the Keyita lineage. Mansa Sakura and Mansa Musa are examples of figures who have been hushed in oral historical 176

—​ S u n j a t a F a s a a n d t h e O r a l E p i c T r a d i t i o n o f M a l i —​ record. This is similar to how sensitive historical documents are sometimes officially “sealed” for many years in Euro-American contexts (1969). In its theoretical framing, this chapter on Mande epic seeks to de-reify the categories of “culture” and “history,” and elucidate the presence of historical narratives in quotidian life in Mali. I place emphasis on ruptures in Mande social and political life, when critical ideas are restated or renegotiated by reference to the past and the exigencies of the present. Oral traditions are not fixed, immutable records of the past, which impose charters and rules on people in the present but rather a living resource through which people actively address and cope with contemporary concerns. Oral tradition is flexible enough to make room for existential demands. Meaning is in usage, not in essence. Also relevant here is the way in which stories concerned with the past are reformulated in the present to fit into and explain the prevailing social and spatial order. In actuality, talking about the past is principally a means to negotiate social and political relations in contemporary contexts (Thornton 1980, 157–84). The Mande epic Sunjata fasa offers a window into Mande history and culture. It explains the founding of the Mali Empire and some of the relationships between its various clans. The great emperor and epic hero Sunjata dramatically expanded his kingdom but devolved power to those he conquered, diffusing royal power across his empire, and strengthening it in the process. He effectively united many peoples across western Africa, integrating them into a highly organized clan-based political and social system. Below I explore passages from the epic, explaining how those from within the culture understand their highly symbolic lines. But as framing for this discussion, I first reflect on the significance of orality in quotidian Mande life, and provide some cultural and historical context for the epic.

THE SOCIAL FIELD OF ORAL TRADITION IN MALI The oral tradition in Mali enters almost every social context: in relationships between Islamic and non-Islamic people, between Mande-speaking and non–Mande-speaking people, between rulers and jɛliw genealogical bards or griots), and so on. They also enter into contexts surrounding marriage alliances, relationships with ancestors, secret societies, craft associations, and totemic identifications across clans, ethnic groups, and modern geographic boundaries. They even enter into everyday joking relationships between friends, often in a cathartic capacity. The Mande people have a rich tradition of oral epics (maanaw) that recount their common ancestral history. These epics relate the name(s) of their common ancestor(s) and the history of their various clan names (jamu), which each has their own familial praise lines (fasa). Mande epics are therefore historical accounts interwoven with the actions and interactions of ancestral figures. Subjects include wars, conflicts, reconciliations, alliances, and interclan marriages with many stories shaped by what is known as a “joking relationship” (sanakunya) between various parties. Many stories concern what is called “settle-mutuality” (sigiɲᴐgᴐnya), and “marriage-mutuality” (furuɲᴐgᴐnya), or rules to be observed between neighbors and marriage partners, respectively. And many such stories about human relationships are in a humorous vein (Pâques 1954; Zahan 1960; Jackson 1982). There are also many sacred myths and legends about blood bonds, political alliances (jo), marriage 177

— ​ K a s s i m K o n e —​ partnerships, and totemism in past human, animal, and plant domains (tana) (Pâques 1954; Zahan 1960; Jackson 1982), and in historical accounts of previously shared neighborhoods, etc. These relationships forged in the ancient past are more significant to many Mande than any formal alliances in the present, and the former are often invoked to explain the latter. The joking relationship or sanakunya, mentioned above, is an important concept that involves playfulness between people from the same extended families, clans, or ethnic groups who already know each other or who are meeting for the first time. “Joking” relatives might call each other names such as “bean eater” or “slave,” and exchange language that would be considered abusive in other contexts. While individuals may joke with each other, families, clans, and ethnic groups have an obligation to help each other in times of distress and to maintain harmony. They should also provide hospitality, share food, form alliances, and be open to intermarriage (except when the nature of the sanakunya prohibits intermarriage). The socially cohesive practice of sanakunya was found in the earlier Ghana Empire, although Sunjata Keyita and his generals made it a formal institution in the Mali Empire (Cissé and Kamissoko 1988, 145n). Sunjata decreed it an official practice in 1236 and promoted it in every land that came under his domination. Making his decree even more operational, the Mande developed joking relationships with other (non-Mande) ethnic groups in western Africa. For example, among the Wolof of Senegal, people known by the patronym Njay developed joking relationships with Mande people known by the patronyms Konɛ, Jara, Kanute, and Togola. Senagalese named Jop paired with Mande named Tarawele, Jabatey, Watara, and Senagalese named Fall paired with Mande named Kulubali. In modern times, sanakunya still shapes peoples’ relationships, transforming outsiders into insiders across national boundaries. In the Sunjata fasa, those named Jara, Kanute, Kone, Konde, Konte, Kanute, Njay, and Togola are fictional characters, but to many Mande, they are the real uncles and aunts, i.e., ancestors, of contemporary Mande royal family. Sanankunya appears in many stories about war and peace, and quarrels and reconciliations. It is a sacred institution particularly since many joking relationships find their source in myths about the Mandes’ ancestors, whom the Mande seek to appease and appeal to when taboos are violated, quarrels erupt, and blood has been spilled. Thus, sanankunya is also an instrument of social order, in stories that vacillate between play and seriousness, and between the profane and the sacred. Its primary objectives are the establishment of peace and social cohesion, and the reduction of conflicts between generations, social groups, and ethnic groups. The joking relationship helps build bridges in times of social and political crisis.

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS OF THE EPIC OF SUNJATA Prior to the rise of the Keyita imperial family, the Mande people lived in a geographic area stretching from the Atlantic coast in West Africa to the southern Sahara desert. The homeland of the Mande was a region known as “Wagadu” that once belonged to the Kamara clan in the time of the Ghana Empire (circa 300–310 CE). The Mande Kingdom and later Empire came to prominence after the Ghana Empire temporarily fell under the yoke of Almoravid Muslims from Morocco, who destroyed its capital city, Kumbi Saleh, in 1076 CE (Magassa 1992, 23). Today, people who claim Mande 178

—​ S u n j a t a F a s a a n d t h e O r a l E p i c T r a d i t i o n o f M a l i —​ descent live in the nations of Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, the Gambia, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, and in small pockets in several other countries of West Africa. As a linguistic and cultural group, the Mande are now one of the most populous ethnic groups in West Africa. Even across national boundaries, the Mande share many social conventions, cultural traditions, and economic and political structures, although they inherited some of these from their former colonizers, the British, French, and Portuguese. Many other ethnic groups and subgroups claim some degree of Mande ancestry and share many of their cultural beliefs and values, which are encoded in the epic of Sunjata. Charles Bird and Martha Kendall encapsulate the shared culture of these groups when they write: The modern people who trace their ancestry to the Mande, the Mandinka, Maninka, Malinke, Mandingo, Manya, Bambara, Dyula, Kuranko, and Wangara, are dispersed throughout the West African savannah, from the Gambian coast in the west, eastward to Ouagadougou in Upper Volta, and from the Mauritanian border in the north to Abidjan in the South...All share sociocultural values defining kinship, political organization, and economic activities. (1972, 13) When Sunjata Keyita was anointed emperor at Kurukan Fuga, he made decrees on the proper relationships between the rulers and the ruled, men and women, various ethnic groups, and artisan or occupational clans (sometimes referred to as “castes”), humans and the environment, and others. Together, these decrees became known as “the Mande Charter” or the “Kurukan Fuga Charter,” and are essentially a Mande constitution. The Mande refer to the gathering at Kurukan Fuga as “The Oath of the Mande” and “The Partition of the World”: Twelve kings stuck their spears into the ground before Sunjata as a sign of their submission to him. He then asked each king to pull out his spear, signaling that every king at the gathering would remain a king and continue to administer his people according to their local traditions. Sunjata’s decision that all kings would remain kings over their territories entailed a devolution of power that solidified his kingdom. Sunjata also distributed land, defined property rights, established the rights and responsibilities of various groups, ratified treaties, formed alliances, codified relationships between citizens and non-citizens, and laid out various social prohibitions, some of which still obtain between Mande tribes today (Niane [1962] 2006, 78). Many of the edicts relating to humans and the environment concerned hunting, since most emperors and kings were hunters, and all warriors were hunters. Hunting is an activity that transcends the ethnic, religious, and class affiliations (Bird 1972; Cashion 1984; Cissé 1994). Mande hunters organize themselves into tight-knit hunting societies. These societies, Bird argues “are in fact a mechanism for assimilating the diverse peoples of a particular region into a workable suprasocial unit” (Bird 1972, 276–77). In this social arrangement, hunters’ loyalties are first and foremost to one another. Seniority in hunting appears to be paradoxical in that it is not determined members’ age, but when they joined the hunting society (Cashion 1984, 312; Kone 1997). Perhaps most importantly, Sunjata Keyita divided the Mande into 33 clans, each with many subgroups. He mandated that there would be sixteen “quiver-carrying” or warrior clans who are called nobles or “the free-born” (hɔrɔn); four artisan clans 179

— ​ K a s s i m K o n e —​ ( ɲamakala or ŋara naani); a blacksmith clan (numu); a Kuyate historian-bard clan (jɛli); an Islamic bard clan (funɛ); five Islamic clans (Cissey, Ture, Janey, Beretey, and Kuma); five royal clans descended from Mamuru; and three dependent guest clans (slaves, sᴐmᴐnᴐ or nomadic fishermen, and Qur’anic school children). Up to the present day, Mande people still identify by these clans. Of great importance was the task Sunjata assigned to the jɛli. He requested that they be the eyes, ears, and thinkers of the Mande, and through their poetry, songs, and speech, guide the Mande people (Burama Sumano, public communication). The epic of Sunjata revolves around the 33 Mande clans; each clan has its own epic poems, songs, and stories within it. Although the epic is fully dedicated to Sunjata Keyita, clans claim certain passages of the epic as exclusively their own. The epic also includes 333 songs that Sogolon Konte, Sunjata’s mother, allegedly composed and sung on his behalf. Moreover, Sunjata’s generals voluntarily gave up their praise poems, and asked that they be converted to poems in praise of Sunjata’s attributes. Given the participation of all of the clans and so many individuals, the epic binds together all the people who lay claim to Mande ancestry in West Africa. It is as though a cultural umbrella connecting many people now separated by national borders drawn by Europeans in the nineteenth century.

JƐLIW AND JƐLIKAN: TELLING THE EPIC OF SUNJATA The jɛliw or griots of the Mande people keep their ancient history alive by regularly telling and singing passages from it at various social and family events—naming ceremonies, weddings, funerals, and so forth. Jɛliw remind the living of their past. They recount the shared past of the Mande people and remind the members of each clan and family lineage of the great deeds of their ancestors. They also tell their listeners that they are as worthy as their forebearers because they carry their essence within them. Their forebears may be from ancient times, but they are not superior, since in essence the dead and the living are the same. In this way, Mande ideology may be characterized as essentialist. For jɛliw, recounting history consists of awakening a sleeping world to its past. The jɛliw relay Mande history to arouse pride in their listeners about their ancestors prompt them to contemplate the glories of their past, and in exchange, they receive gifts from their patrons. The Mande do not expect bards to provide them with historical evidence or dates. Instead, they rely on them to give meaning to their lives—to explain how everyone relates to one another other, as families, clans, and ethnic groups. The complex network of social and political relationships established among the Mande over the course of centuries has allowed many West African people to feel like relatives with each other. Oral history draws lines or demarcations between different ethnic groups, but it also transcends them and brings people together. The idea is that the people of the Sahara, the savanna, and the forest are all in constant dialogue with each other, whether as friends or foes. Instead of a temporal orientation with dates, the Mande people put their faith in a spatial orientation; they want the jɛliw to tell them where they, the patrons, come from. The Mande conceptualize history as a succession of movements through space: through settlements, wars, trading arrangements, marriages, and other forms of exchanges and encounters. For them, time is less important than space. The jɛliw compress time in their stories. 180

—​ S u n j a t a F a s a a n d t h e O r a l E p i c T r a d i t i o n o f M a l i —​ Sunjata fasa is built around polylithic figures whose meaning comes through their relationships with others in their social orbit, with whom they are intertwined. An intersubjective understanding of history is part of Mande identity. “Identity is a byproduct of interrelationships,” and the “lifeworld is primordially a social domain,” noted anthropologist Michael Jackson (1996, 27). Variations in the epic when performed by different families, clans, ethnic groups, and in different regions reflect the polylithic identities of the Mande people. Each variation reflects some aspect of a given family, clan, ethnicity, or region. The epic of Sunjata is an assemblage of smaller epics centered on founding families, clans, and important historical actors. In Sunjata fasa, there are many backstories that explain how toponymic names were created, and how major events came to pass, for example: Senkari Jata Konate, bolokari Jata Konatey, kunbakari Jata Konatey. Jata Konatey who breaks arms, Jata Konatey who breaks legs, Jata Konatey who breaks heads. These are praise lines for Sunjata Keyita, but they were initially composed for Fakoli Dumbiya, with his name in place of Sunjata’s. Fakoli was a general in Sunjata’s army, and a nephew of Sumaworo Kante, Sunjata’s nemesis. Fakoli defected from Sumaworo Kante’s army after the latter abducted Fakoli’s wife. Fakoli then joined Sunjata to fight his uncle. Through his association with Sunjata, Fakoli gained repute, but Sunjata himself is praised in the epic. Every major lineage or clan is recognized in the epic, but often they recognized indirectly, to the extent that Sunjata endorses them and “appropriates” their stories, making them his own. Short performances of Sunjata fasa typically focus on the part of the epic that concerns the family, lineage, or clan of the patron. Long performances generally concern many or all of the 33 Mande clans. Sunjata Keyita and other leaders of ancient Mali successfully reorganized Mande society and brought together people of different social and ethnic backgrounds. They forged relationships between clans, ethnicities, and occupational groups within and between kingdoms of the Mande Empire. This effectively cemented the vast territory of the Mande into an early federation. The consolidation of vast territories under the Mande is not analogous to the rise of nation-states in Europe, which were forged on the basis of perceived national languages, literatures, histories, etc., and driven by print capitalism and state-funded education. Rather, the Mande Empire was comprised of many small independent nations glued together by real and imagined ties—through marriages, myths of blood relationships, shared clan names across time and space, and, perhaps most importantly, sanakunya. The Mande Charter created at Kurukan Fuga forged a Malian identity that has survived eight centuries and continues to transcend borders. The Sunjata epic tradition mixes songs, myths, and historical events, with both interclan and intraclan orientations. Notably, bards convey their stories in a distinctive poetic style known as jɛlikan (literally, “jɛli language”). According to Barbara G. Hoffman, jɛlikan contains simple syntactical structures and obscure, enigmatic phrasings, which are left up to the jɛliw to explain and interpret for nobles (1990). But this is their power: the jɛlikan’s deceptively simple verses mask deeper meanings 181

— ​ K a s s i m K o n e —​ and realities. Of all the Mande performance genres, the oral epic is considered the most powerful, and the most laden with dangerous force ( ɲama). Thus, jɛlikan is critically important (Kone 1997). Unlike “ordinary” colloquial language, jɛlikan is usually restricted to noun phrases. As Hoffman explains, Examples are ‘Simbo ni Salaba,’ ‘Gasine ni Gasineka,’ ‘Tukuru ni Dayida.’ These are conjoined noun-phrases, not complete sentences; there is no formal predication upon the subject, and therefore to many listeners, the phrases sound nonsensical. The predication is performed not with verbs and objects, but through the interaction of the griot and noble in the performance context. (1988) Jɛli songs and poems are somewhat like the short lyric poems or odes in classical Greek. The odes of the fifth-century Greek (Boeotian) poet, Pindar, were reportedly difficult to understand and appreciate, as they were multi-layered and used obscure language: They were written in an artificial and complicated vocabulary and were full of illusions which we can often understand only with the aid of voluminous commentaries, and they switched from narrative to personal praises...Pindar’s poems owed their success to the magnificence of their imagery [and] to the nobility of their religious and moral ideas... (Hatzfeld 1966, 140) Some folklorists have described jɛlikan as archaic language that is difficult to translate and nothing more than mnemonic devices (Jansen et al. 1995, 11). But this is a misunderstanding; jɛlikan mostly only has a mnemonic capacity when used to map genealogy or the relationships between various Mande clans. Although jɛliw may rely on mnemonic devices to help them remember lines, many lines are not mnemonic at all, but instead serve as powerful proverbs coded in metaphor. For example, a jɛli might say “Kata ba naani, Kara Kata ba naani ani solasegin wɔɔrɔ,” which literally means, “Four thousand [measures] of potash, four thousand suicidal [measures] of potash and six retreats of the cavalry.” The griot’s audience, however, interprets this line as: “With four thousand hardened warriors and four thousand others willing to die, the army’s cavalry will retreat six times only when they are commanded by a foolish general.” The idea behind this metaphor-filled proverb is that an effective commander is able to think of different battlefield strategies as needs arise. Such metaphorical language actually constitutes the backbone of jɛliya (bardship) and occurs frequently in the jɛli’s repertoire of songs, praises, and epics. Once a jɛli masters the metaphorical use of jelikan in all of these genres, he is not only considered a ŋara (virtuoso) but can also lay claim to the title of kumala (master speaker). The Mande people are exposed to words of the jɛliw (plural of jɛli) from birth. Verses (here with a mnemonic purpose) are often screamed into the ears of babies on the day they are baptized. Growing up, hɔrɔnw (nobles) get used to hearing jɛlikanw, which do not have an “ordinary” meaning, and which often are in praise of their ancestors. Upon hearing the lines in performance, young hɔrɔnw may tremble. They 182

—​ S u n j a t a F a s a a n d t h e O r a l E p i c T r a d i t i o n o f M a l i —​ may become captivated, moved, scared, or shaken to the bone. Although young hɔrɔnw may not understand the deeper import of jɛlikanw without interpretation by experts, they know that the lines themselves resuscitate the spirits of their ancestors within them. Jɛlikan is especially important aesthetically and religiously to hɔrɔn (noble) and ɲamakala (artisan) clans. For instance, many ɲamakala feel they have direct ties to Mecca. They often claim ancestry directly to companions of the Prophet Mohammed or to ancestors who made the pilgrimage to Mecca several centuries ago. Jɛli themselves consider Surakata Bunu Maliki, Prophet Muhammad’s own bard, blessed by the Prophet with linguistic skills, as their own ancestor.3 Although the ancestral link between the jɛliw and Surakata cannot be substantiated, many Mande believe that jɛlikan is divinely inspired. To justify gift-giving to jɛli and express their gratitude for jɛlikan, they often say: “Hali an kuntigi, Ala ka nɛma bɛ a ye, ko ni jɛli ye a da waga, i k’a datugu.” (Even our leader [the Prophet Mohammed], Allah’s peace be upon him, said that when the jɛli open their mouth, you should close it [by giving them a gift].) This popular belief supports the jɛliw’s claim that their ancestor received gifts directly from the Prophet for doing similar bardic work.

THICK DESCRIPTION OF AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF JƐLIKAN A major challenge facing anthropologists, linguists, folklorists, and historians of Africa is how to decode the mnemonic expressions of jɛlikan. Each expression has deep meaning and cultural significance. Many of these mnemonic expressions derive from Soninke, or, more likely, proto-Soninke languages, which are older than Mande languages. Soninke is still spoken in much of West Africa and was the language of the Ghana Empire. For example, most jɛli praise their patrons by calling them “sisawanɛ,” understood by some but not all, to mean the top person in the trade. This expression of praise literally means “a horse that outruns other horses” in Soninke, although most people who receive this praise do not understand Soninke. Many jɛli have years of formal education in regional training centers. But even they often use jɛlikan as mnemonic devices without knowing their literal meanings, which is a trade secret. The following is a brief example of jɛlikan sung for the Kɔnɛ: Kɔnɛ! Jara! Sankaranka! Dala komoba ani Dala jibamin. Ni Kɔnɛ tɛ kɛlɛ min na, ni Kɔnɛ muso den tɛ kɛlɛ min na, o kɛra fɛlɛbolo gansan ye! Konɛ! Lion! Inhabitant of the Sankaran! Great Mooing [Buffalo] and Big Thirst-Quenching [Buffalo]! When an army does not have a Kɔnɛ or the son of a woman from the Kɔnɛ clan, that army is just a game-hunting party! Although this expression of praise for the Kɔnɛ is brief, it is an epic story on its own, and an important plot element in the epic of Sunjata. It thus requires a “thick” interpretation. Sunjata Keyita’s mother, Sogolon, was from the Kɔnɛ clan in the land of Sankaran. Legend has it that two Tarawele brothers, Turamakan and Gankejan, brought Sogolon to Sunjata’s father, King Nare Magan Kɔnfata, to be his new bride. But the hunters themselves have a backstory. 183

— ​ K a s s i m K o n e —​ Turamakan and Gankejan Tarawele are hunters sent by Domɔgɔ Jara, the king of Do in the land of Sankaran, to get rid of a very aggressive and deadly buffalo that has made life unbearable in his kingdom, preventing people from tending their farms, going about their occupations, and traveling within the kingdom. The said buffalo is not an ordinary one. It is in fact Do-Kamisa (Kamisa from Do), the king’s older sister in disguise. Previously, the king slaughtered a bull and shared it with the descendants of the royal family but neglected to set aside a portion of the meat aside for his sister Kamisa. The king’s negligence angered Kamisa because it cast doubts on her royal blood. King Domɔgɔ Jara apologized and tried to make amends by offering Kamisa a ram as compensation. But Kamisa refused the offer, and their relationship soured even more. Kamisa then decided to punish her brother and the people of his kingdom. Kamisa was well-versed in sorcery and could shapeshift at will. She took on the form of a buffalo that was invincible to metal-tipped arrows. In her buffalo form, Kamisa began to attack the people of her brother’s kingdom whenever they ventured outside of their villages. In response, Domɔgɔ Jara invited famous hunters from his own kingdom of Sankaran and other kingdoms, promising them gold and a bride if they could slay the buffalo. But none was successful. Kamisa killed dozens of hunters before the brothers Turamakan and Gankejan intervened. Turamakan and Gankejan consult diviners and offer sacrifices before setting out to Domɔgɔ Jara’s village of Do to slay the buffalo. As they approach Do in the late afternoon, they see an elderly woman carrying firewood. The brothers greet her and offer to help her to carry the wood. At first, she adamantly refuses, but they insist until she agrees to let them carry the wood, walking in front of them until they reached a small hut on the outskirts of the village. Before the brothers leave, they share some of their food provisions with the woman, who initially refuses it. The Tarawele hunters’ devotion and respect toward the elderly woman move her. So she tells Turamakan and Gankejan that she knows why they are in Do and that she herself is in fact Do-Kamisa—and the invincible buffalo of Do, which has killed dozens of hunters. She goes on to say that due to their kindness, she wants to offer them her life, and will instruct them how she may be killed in her buffalo form. After killing her, she says, the king will give them a bride of their choice as a hunting trophy. From among the girls offered, they are to select an ugly, hunchbacked girl, who would actually be Do-Kamisa’s avatar. She would ultimately give birth to Sunjata, heir to the Mali kingdom—the future emperor of Mali. Do-Kamisa then gives the brothers several protective items they should use to slay her: the shaft of a distaff, a twig, a stone, and an egg. She tells them where she will be in her buffalo form, and instructs them how to use the items. They are to replace the metal tip of an arrow with the shaft of the distaff, the only weapon able to pierce her skin and kill her. Once she is struck, she will no longer recognize them and will seek to kill them. So they should run away from her and when they get tired, throw down the twig which will turn into a thick forest. After clearing the forest, she will eventually catch up with them. When they become exhausted, they should throw down the stone, which will become a mountain, to again slow her down. But having cleared the hurdle of the mountain, she will again resume the chase. By the time she

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—​ S u n j a t a F a s a a n d t h e O r a l E p i c T r a d i t i o n o f M a l i —​ catches up with them, the hunters will have covered a great distance and be resting. As she approaches, they should throw down the last protective item, the egg, which will become a large lake. All of this comes to pass, just as Do-Kamisa predicts. In the final leg of the saga, by the time Do-Kamisa reaches the lake, she has lost a lot of blood. After crossing the lake, she stops to drink water from the lake to quench her thirst, mooing loudly four times. Hearing her loud mooing, the Tarawele brothers turn around and see the buffalo take a drink, then moo several more times before kneeling down and dying. Turning back to investigate, they see that Do-Kamisa has died in her buffalo form. The hunters praised Do-Kamisa for her nobility, for keeping her promise, and for being the source of their own fame. This is why, in the passage cited above, they greet Do-Kamisa with the lines of praise: Kɔnɛ! Lion! Inhabitant of the Sankaran! Great Mooing [Buffalo] and Big ThirstQuenching [Buffalo]! When an army does not have a Kɔnɛ or the son of a woman from the Kɔnɛ clan, that army is just a game-hunting party. The brothers continue to praise Do-Kamisa for many more verses, in what is an important passage dedicated to the Kanute, Konɛ, Konde, Konte, Jara, Togola clans, and many others, all of them interrelated. It is on this occasion that Turamakan and Gankejan take an oath that a Tarawele would never cause a Kɔnɛ to bleed again until the end of time. Also, Gankejan praises his younger brother Turamakan so much that the latter says, “Brother, if you had been born a jɛli, no one could have refused to offer you gifts (I jɛbaga tɛ).” Through a clever play on words, however, “no one could have refused to offer you gifts” (Ijɛbaga tɛ) can also be taken as Jɛbagatɛ, as well as Jɛbatɛ and Jabatey, and in fact, these became patronyms of a new artisan clan, with Gankejan as their founding ancestor. This story is significant for it illustrates how nobles sometimes “migrated” into artisan clans. With almost all family names or clans, one can find Mande people with both noble and artisan backgrounds, which works to mitigate the hierarchical structure of the Mande “caste system.” Resuming the narrative, Turamakan and Gankejan subsequently announce the death of the buffalo to King Domɔgɔ Jara of Sankara by showing him the tail of the dead animal. The king then pays them in gold and invites them to choose a bride from among the young women of the kingdom. After the maidens assemble before them, the hunters choose the ugly hunchback Sogolon, Do-Kamisa’s incarnation. A roar of laughter erupts in the assembly, and everyone mocks the Tarawele brothers, which in turn establishes a joking relationship between the Kɔnɛ and Tarawele clans. The story of Do-Kamisa (Do-Buffalo) is the earliest known account of there being a joking relationship between the Kɔnɛ and Tarawele clans, and of a noble family “migrating” into an artisan clan. The sanakunya jo (joking-relationship oath) between the two clans is still taken seriously by many people, including the Mandeka people, who tend to be highly educated. Further, this story explains how Turamakan was the sababu (cause) of Sogolon Kɔnɛ becoming a Mande queen and the mother of the Emperor Sunjata Keyita.

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CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A HISTORY OF MALI UNENCUMBERED BY EURO-AMERICAN DISTORTIONS Imperialist Euro-American historiography adheres to its own theories, methodologies, and standards of what constitutes “real” and legitimate history. It puts its faith in writing, dates, chronologies, royal successions, state formations, hegemonic actions, etc. Given the Global North’s domination of much of the world, first through colonialism and then through postcolonial imperialism, it has been emboldened to apply its own biased lens and denigrate as illegitimate oral forms of historical record-keeping. Enchantment with the written word, first on paper and then in print and electronic formats, has fostered this deeply engrained Eurocentric attitude. In their historical writings, those who trace their ancestry to Europe have by and large exaggerated their own cultures’ virtues and promoted their own lands as the seat of knowledge, precision, and truth. Euro-American historiography has pretensions to being scientific and objective, yet it is often disingenuous and misleading. Often, it tells incomplete and discontinuous stories, and worse, falsehoods disguised as truths. As Seydou observed, this is not history. It is metaphysics (1969). African history is oral. It contains myths and legends that may be allegorical and contains exaggerations and embellishments that neither the epic historian nor the audience necessarily believes to be true. The story of Do-Kamisa shapeshifting into a buffalo is one example of an embellished historical account. If we do not take into account myths and legends, with all of their multi-layered symbolism, we cannot write history. The epic form provides an analytical and narrative framework to explain how societies came into existence and continue to exist. The Mande oral epic of Sunjata fasa is not simply a collection of old stories about ancient people. It is a form of historiography that is alive and dynamic. It is produced with warm breath and spittle, and used in the here and now to resolve the social and cultural exigencies of life, unlike the bulk of oppressive, imperialistic historiography in the Global North that is “dead” to the reader, for it only exists in written form on the cold faces of paper and screen. Colonial and now neo-colonial agendas continue to silence caretakers of Africa’s oral epic forms, refusing to accept them as valid and invaluable sources of history. Writing African history is not easy. It requires a methodology that is sensitive to and reliant upon orality, and takes into account the full dimensions of African ways of knowing. It necessitates avoiding imperialist-minded historians’ biases and errors, especially their omission of the psychosocial and psychocultural dimensions of African history. This approach is not easy, for it requires historians to have a working grip on their subjects’ oral history, the treasury of their deeply held cultural values and ideologies, expressed symbolically in verse and enigmatically through stories. Understanding the deeper meanings of mnemonic words and expressions in jɛlikan, as discussed above with reference to the Mande epic of Sunjata, is another hurdle for the unabashed scholar of African history. But the pursuit of a truthful telling of African history is well worth the effort and a reward in and of itself.

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NOTES 1 The Fulani are an ethnic group found in almost all West African countries. 2 An emperor is considered a king of kings. 3 In addition to these claims, the artisan clan garanke claim that they are the heirs to Walali Burahima, the cobbler of the Prophet, while the funɛ claim they are the descendants of Fisana, the historian of Islamic events during the Prophet’s lifetime. All of these claims are intended to religiously sanction the various groups, although the Qur’an itself does not make such distinctions among people (Zemp 1966; Hoffman 1988, 1990; Conrad 1992; Conrad and Frank 1995).

WORKS CITED Bird, Charles. 1972. “Heroic Songs of the Mande Hunters.” In African Folklore, edited by Richard M. Dorson, 275–93. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. ———, and Martha Kendall. 1980. “The Mande Hero.” In Explorations in African Systems of Thought, edited by Ivan Karp and Charles Bird, 13–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cashion, Gerard. 1984. Hunters of the Mande: A Behavioral Code of Worldview Derived from the Study of Their Folklore. 3 vols. PhD diss., Indiana University. Cissé, Youssouf Tata. 1994. La confrérie des chasseurs malinkés et bambara: Mythes, rites et récits initiatiques. Ivry: Éditions Nouvelles du Sud. ———, and Wa Kamissoko. 1988. Des origines à la fondation de l’empire: Traditions de Krina aux colloques de Bamako. Vol. 1 of La grande geste du Mali. Paris: Editions Khartala. ———, and Wa Kamissoko. 1991. Soundjata, la gloire du Mali. Vol. 2 of La grande geste du Mali. Paris: Éditions Khartala. Conrad, David C. 1992. “Searching for History in the Sunjata Epic: The Case of Fakoli.” History in Africa 19: 147–200. ———, and Barbara E. Frank, eds. 1995. Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hatzfeld, Jean. 1966. History of Ancient Greece. Revised by André Aymard. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hoffman, Barbara G. 1988. “Mande Jeliw and the Structuring of Power.” Paper presented at the 31st Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Chicago, IL, October 27–31. ———. 1990. The Power of Speech: Language and Social Status among Mande Griots and Nobles. PhD diss., Indiana University. Jackson, Michael. 1982. Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1986. Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky. Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution Press. ———, ed. 1996. Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jansen, Jan, Esger Duintjer, and Boubacar Tamboura. 1995. L’épopée de Sunjara d’apres Lansine Diabate de Kela. Leiden: Research School CNWS. Kone, Kassim. 1997. Bamana Verbal Art: An Ethnographic Study of Proverbs. PhD diss., Indiana University. ———. 2001. “Review.” In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature and Performance, edited by Ralph A. Austen. African Studies Review 44, no. 1: 156–58. Magassa, Hamidou. 1992. “Bambara-Mandingo Islamization through the Western Sudan Empires and Kingdoms (Religion and Culture Relationships).” Paper presented at the Work­ shop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, May 2-4.

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— ​ K a s s i m K o n e —​ McIntosh, Roderick J. 1998. The Peoples of the Middle Niger: The Island of Gold. Williston, VT: Blackwell Publishers. Niane, Djibril Tamsir. [1965] 2006. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett with extra material by David Chappell and James A. Jones. Essex: Longman. ———. 1962. Recherches sur l’empire du Mali au Moyen Âge. Conakry: Institut National de Recherches et de Documentation. Pâques, Viviana. 1954. Les Bambaras. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Seydou, Amadou. 1969. Interview. Un certain regard. Directed by Ange Casta. Thornton, Robert J. 1980. Space, Time and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania. New York: Academic Press. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Zahan, Dominique. 1960. Société d’initiation bambara. Paris: Mouton. Zemp, Hugo. 1966. “La légende des griots malinké.” Cahiers d’études Africaines 6, no. 24: 611–42.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

OSIRIS REBORN

T H E A R A B I C E P I C O F S Ī R AT S AY F I B N D H Ī YA Z A N A N D T H E P R O P H E T I C KÖ N I G S N OV E L L E

rsr Helen Blatherwick

Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan (The Adventures of Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan) is one of a group of medieval Arabic popular epics that have their origins in oral storytelling; originally orally composed and in circulation in some form by the twelfth or thirteenth century, they were also transmitted as written texts from the fourteenth century onwards. Sīrat Sayf, which was popular in Egypt and parts of North Africa, is set in legendary pre-Islamic times and tells the story of how a Yemeni king, Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, leads his people on a reverse exodus into Egypt (then an arid wasteland), is responsible for the diversion of the Nile to its current course, founds Egypt, and goes on to conquer a proto-Islamic empire. The story is set against the background of a war waged upon Sayf by Sayf Ar’ad, the King of Abyssinia (roughly equivalent to modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti), in an attempt to avert predictions that a Yemeni king will bring about the destruction of the Abyssinian Empire. In an earlier study (2016), I have suggested that the variant currently available as a print edition may have an intertextual relationship with the Prophetic Königsnovelle, an Egyptian “discourse form” that was in circulation in the Greco-Roman period (332 BCE–395 CE) and which gave expression to deep-rooted, specifically Egyptian ideas of kingship, power, and fitness to rule (2016, 266–83). This possibility is of interest for several reasons. At a general level, there has been a longstanding truism that “Islam wiped out all that came before.” Although this idea may not have been taken as an a priori truth, it is only relatively recently that meaningful attempts have been made to explore the cultural continuity of pre-Islamic ideas and identities in AraboIslamic literature. This is especially true of the Arabic popular epics, which are very under-researched, and many of which (such as Sīrat Banī Hilāl or Sīrat ʿAntar) are held up as exemplars of “Arab” ideals and identity. In this context, the presence of an “Egyptian” dimension in a text that presents itself as an “Arab” narrative is evidence of a multivocal, dialogic, aspect to the text, which thus becomes a space in which the voices of both the Arab invaders and the indigenous Egyptians can be heard. At a more pragmatic level, investigating the possiblity of an intertextual

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-17

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— ​ H e l e n B l a t h e r w i c k —​ relationship between Sīrat Sayf and the Prophetic Königsnovelle can also add to our understanding of the narrative construction of Arabic popular epics, as well as the storytelling techniques used by their author-narrators. In this chapter, I build on my previous work and explore the possibility of the continuity of “Egyptian” identity in Sīrat Sayf from a different angle, through a comparative reading of two variants of this popular epic: the manuscript Sīrat al-malik Sayf Dhū’l-Yazan, which dates from 1736 and is held in the British Museum under the catalog name “Ms BM 4274 Or.” (henceforth “the manuscript”), and the printed text (first published in Cairo in 1877 and presumed to be based on an unidentified earlier manuscript or manuscripts). Although the plots of these two texts remain consistent in their early stages, they diverge quite significantly in the later stages of the narrative, to an extent that it is sometimes hard to see how they can be telling the same story. By comparing the intertextual echoes of the Prophetic Königsnovelle discourse in both variants of Sīrat Sayf, it is possible to analyze the extent to which they are each individually informed by it. This approach also allows one to explore the boundaries of narrative flexibility in the sīra, the ways ideas of kingship are conceptualized, and the extent to which Sīrat Sayf can be read as being a continuation of a much older, culturally specific, Egyptian narrative form.

SĪRAT SAYF AND THE SĪRA GENRE Sīrat Sayf is one of a number of Arabic popular epics (or sīras). The term sīra does not have an analogy in English: it literally means “a going,” from which is extrapolated the meaning “way of conduct” or “way or life” (Heath 1996, 254, n. 4). Thus, “sīra” can be used to refer to a number of genres that are treated as separate in EuroAmerican literary culture: “romance,” “epic,” or “biography” (most famously in the case of the sīra nabawiyya, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad), but there is always a sense that a sīra is an exemplar, the telling of an extraordinary life that bears emulation (Reynolds 2010, 395). Having said that, the more “epic” sīras are not simply accounts of the lives of their heroes, but address wider issues such as the struggle of the social unit (for example, the tribe) to maintain its integrity against internal and external threats (Connelly 1986; Blatherwick 2016, 13–16). As mentioned above, the sīras as we now know them are thought to have come into being between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries CE, although the manuscripts that have survived mainly date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are believed to be of oral origin and have traditionally co-existed as both written and oral traditions, with each author-narrator’s telling constituting an individual variant.1 The genre is performative, and sīras are traditionally either read from a manuscript prompt or orally composed by a rāwī (narrator, reciter). In both cases, the relationship between the rāwī and his audience is interactive, and audience response is an important element of the storytelling experience, helping to shape the story.2 This interactive, fluid aspect means that variants can differ extensively in length, plot, and content while remaining within the narrative boundaries that define each sīra. It also means that, although these narratives are set in the past and recount the deeds of ancient heroes, the various manuscripts and printed texts we have give us snapshots of popular ideas about identity, history, and behavior in a particular time and place (al-Abnūdī 1989, 40). 190

— ​ O s i r i s R e b o r n : T h e A r a b i c E p i c —​ Within the genre, Sīrat Sayf (which was traditionally read out rather than orally composed) is characterized by its preoccupation with magic and the fantastic. Unlike some sīras, which are based in a “real-world” tribal setting, Sīrat Sayf inhabits legendary prehistory and abounds with jinn, sorcerers and sorceresses, magical talismans, and fanciful creatures. It is thought to originate from stories about the historical Yemenite, Himyarite leader Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan (ruled 531–579 CE), who freed Yemen from the Abyssinian, Axumite occupation of the Arabian Peninsula in the late sixth century, just before the birth of Islam. These stories traveled to Egypt with the Yemeni Arabs who settled there after the Arab conquests (Norris 1989; Chraïbi 1996; Canova 2012). To my knowledge, nearly all of the cataloged manuscripts date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but references to Sīrat Sayf in other works indicate that it was in circulation in Egypt in a recognizable form by the mid-fourteenth century. It seems to have died out as a performative tradition in Egypt in the nineteenth century, but one variant is still available in print (Sīrat al-malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan fāris al-Yaman 1407 AH [1986 CE]).3 Intertextual references to ancient Egyptian myths and legends are woven into the fabric of Sīrat Sayf at a very deep level of the text, in theme and characterization. At the most fundamental level, their influence can be seen in the discussion of kingship and the qualities required of a good ruler that lies at the heart of the sīra. The text discusses the ruler’s ability to control and wield power through exploring the friction between the (social) forces of order and chaos, expressed in the text as a struggle between the (chaotic) female and the (ordered) male. Sayf must learn to master these forces and hold them in balance, so that under his rule the forces of innovation and tradition can be harnessed to work together, keeping society from lapsing into either stagnation or chaos. This dualistic worldview, which is expressed symbolically through gender-based conflict and gender confusion, corresponds to a conceptualization that has been identified as characteristically ancient Egyptian and is found, for example, in “The Contendings of Horus and Seth,” one of the core Egyptian myths (Lichtheim 1976, 214–22). However, the presence of an ancient Egyptian intertext is perhaps most overt in the central climactic section of the sīra, in which the Nile is diverted to flow through Egypt, allowing Sayf and his people to settle the previously arid wastelands. The accounts of this provided in both the manuscript and the printed text, as mentioned earlier, find meaningful parallels in a particular Egyptian discourse, the Prophetic Königsnovelle. After providing brief summaries of the Nile Diversion episode as told in the manuscript and the printed text, this chapter will go on to explore these intertextual links.4

THE DIVERSION OF THE NILE IN MS BM 4274 OR. The Nile diversion episode as recounted in the Sayf manuscript is relatively short, comprising thirteen folios, i.e., 26 handwritten pages. The episode begins when Sayf’s city is besieged by an army sent by the Abyssinian king Sayf Ar’ad and its inhabitants are forced to flee. Sayf is distraught, but is visited in his sleep by a disembodied voice that tells him not to despair because God will grant him a better city in a new land. The next day, Sayf gathers his people, and his army of humans and jinn, and leads them out into the wilderness. They travel for days until they have run out of water and fear for their lives. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Sayf, one of 191

— ​ H e l e n B l a t h e r w i c k —​ his wives, Takrur, and their infant son have been abducted by a jinn and abandoned in the desert to die. Takrur takes refuge in the shade cast by a pyramid and prays for deliverance, upon which the heavens open and the rains form a lake. Two days later Sayf, who has been searching for water for his people and is near death from dehydration, stumbles across her refuge. Once revived, he declares the oasis will be the Muslims’ new home, and he and his people settle there. Meanwhile, Sayf Ar’ad has been informed by his spies that Sayf and his people have set up a new home in the desert to the north. Driven by his fear that Sayf will be the one to fulfill the ancient predictions and bring about the destruction of the Abyssinian Empire, he resolves to strike first. He comes up with a plan to divert the Nile by digging out a new channel so that it will flood the valley where the Muslims have settled, drowning them (thereby providing an origin story for the Nile cataracts, a series of rapids that lie between Khartoum and Aswan). One of his viziers, Bahr Qafqaf al-Rif, who has secretly converted to Islam, flees by night to join his brothers in faith and warns them of Sayf Ar’ad’s plans. His arrival is immediately followed by the arrival of a messenger who brings a warning of another threat: a sorcerer called Bahram, who rules a nearby city, has determined to oust the Muslim newcomers. It emerges that Bahram has ordered one of his jinn servants to secretly abduct the Muslim heroes one by one, until now only one remains: a powerful jinn called Abu Yad. On Sayf’s orders, Abu Yad infiltrates Bahram’s city and frees the Muslim captives, bringing them home unharmed. Sayf then launches a retaliatory invasion, capturing the enemy sorcerer and seizing his city, which he finds to be full of untold riches. Now that the immediate threat has been neutralized, Sayf asks his son Misr to order his jinn servants to carve out a channel for the impending flood waters, to channel them northward from the cataracts to the Mediterranean Sea. Using magical means they are able to achieve this in only a few days, after which everyone climbs a nearby mountain for safety. News arrives that Sayf Ar’ad has unleashed the deluge upon them, and soon the valley is submerged. After a while the waters subside, flowing away in the pre-prepared channels, and the people descend from the mountain. The vizier Bahr Qafqaf al-Rif tells them the new river will flow on its current course until the end of time, and they taste the waters, which are as sweet as honey. King Sayf builds the city of Misr on the spot, and his sorcerer-advisors create protective talismans to guard it, carved with legendary stories and accounts. Several of Sayf’s wives and companions build cities, cultivate land, and establish treasuries in other areas, bringing order to the land. Sayf sets up a taxation system and establishes his authority over the people, from the cataracts in the south to the Mediterranean Sea in the north. Finally, he undertakes the first ever Hajj pilgrimage, introducing the tradition among his people. As for King Sayf Ar’ad, when he discovers that his endeavor has failed and has instead facilitated the Muslims in establishing a new kingdom, he is furious. His advisors tell him that they have a new plan: they will create a talisman to prevent the annual flood of the Nile. The magicians enter their enchanting house and create a stone statue of a woman, which they inscribe with talismanic names and words of power and cast into the river. When the anticipated annual Nile flooding does not occur, Sayf’s people come to him, concerned. The king deputizes his son Misr to investigate the issue, and he discovers that the only way to counter the enchantment is to sacrifice a girl of noble birth to the waters. Appalled, Misr tries to find another 192

— ​ O s i r i s R e b o r n : T h e A r a b i c E p i c —​ solution, but there is none. The episode ends with him contemplating the waters of the Nile sadly, and being approached by a noble who offers up one of his daughters. She is sacrificed to the river, and that night the waters begin to rise. The floods last for a week, and then the waters ebb. The narrator tells us that the annual sacrifices continued until the Arab conquests of Egypt.

THE DIVERSION OF THE NILE IN THE PRINTED EDITION The account of the Nile diversion episode in the printed text adheres to the same basic structure, but is quite different, and also much longer, at 120 pages. As with the manuscript, it begins with the destruction of Sayf’s city and his decision to lead his people into the desert in search of a new home, followed by the story of God’s provision of a lake for Takrur and her reunion with Sayf. However, once the Yemenites and their Muslim allies, both humans and jinn, are settled in their new home in Egypt, the story takes a different turn. Sayf is told by his advisors about a nearby city which is ruled over by a magician called Nut who claims to be immortal. Outraged by this blasphemy, Sayf leads his army in an expedition against Nut, kills him, and takes his city. In contrast to the manuscript account, at this point Sayf Ar’ad does not unleash the waters on the Muslims. Instead Sayf, concerned that the lake where they have settled does not provide enough water to meet his people’s needs, decides that he needs to find a source for more water. One of his advisors reminds him of the prophecy that he will divert the Nile. This requires a number of magical objects, all of which either he or his three sons have already acquired during their adventures, with one exception: a particularly powerful and terrifying jinn, al-Rahat al-Aswad (“The Black Devourer”), who was imprisoned by Solomon in an iron column in ancient times. Once they have retrieved him, the Muslims begin carving out a course for the river. Al-Rahat al-Aswad breaks up the cataracts using an enchanted pick, and the army helps dig out the river channel, while Sayf, carrying an assortment of talismans, leads the waters north on his magical emerald steed. All is going well at first, but suddenly Sayf and his army are surrounded by chaos: lightning flashes, terrible shrieks ring out, and bolts of fire rain upon the Muslims like spears. Despite the chaos, the Muslims continue north, taking heavy casualties. As they approach the city of Misr, Sayf suddenly finds that he is unable to move forward. He is approached by a stranger, who is accompanied by Sayf’s eldest son, Dummar. Without speaking, the stranger draws a sword and strikes Dummar’s head from his shoulders, then throws it on the ground in front of the king. He brings out Sayf’s three other sons in turn, all of whom meet the same fate. Sayf is overcome with grief and, in the ensuing confusion, the army splinters into groups, some digging out the Damietta and some the Rashid branches of the Nile delta. The situation is resolved when a magician called Saysaban appears and confesses that he is responsible for the chaos and that the beheading of Sayf’s sons was in fact an illusion. Foreseeing that his fortress would be flooded by the diversion of the Nile, Saysaban had constructed an enchanted brass cow which he placed in Sayf’s path, and which he would not be able to pass. But, he tells Sayf, following a dream visitation he has converted to Islam, and now wishes to help Sayf and join him on his journey north to the Mediterranean. Once the diversion of the Nile is completed, Saysaban ensures that the Nile will remain in its current course by creating a Nileometer (thereby providing an origin 193

— ​ H e l e n B l a t h e r w i c k —​ story for the historical Nileometers, structures used since ancient Egyptian times to measure the Nile’s water level and clarity during the annual flood season) and placing the magical, talismanic Book of the Nile inside it to ensure the continued flow of the waters (and also deter crocodiles). As with the manuscript account, the episode concludes with the Nile’s first annual flood.

SĪRAT SAYF AND THE PROPHETIC KÖNIGSNOVELLE As is clear from the summaries above, the two variants correspond in their overall structural framework, and in the progression of events: in both cases, the episode begins with the Muslims being forced out of their home city and includes the stories of Takrur’s plea to God for aid, and of the Muslims settling at her oasis. Both also describe the Muslims going to war with the pagan rulers of the lands they have settled in (Bahram and Nut respectively), how the Nile is diverted when they are defeated, and include the Muslims instituting talismanic control of the Nile, which then floods for the first time. However, there are also some glaring differences. The most obvious of these is the fact that the conflict between Sayf and the Abyssinian King Sayf Ar’ad is presented as the direct cause of the Nile’s diversion in the manuscript but is completely absent from the printed text. In the manuscript, the waters of the Nile are unleashed upon the Yemenites by Sayf Ar’ad in an act of destructive intent, whereas in the printed text, Sayf leads the waters up the course of the riverbed in a creative act. There are also differences in how the two variants address the theme of invasion. In both variants, Sayf defeats an indigenous group in the lands he has settled (and unwittingly invaded) before the diversion of the Nile: the short episode in which Sayf attacks the city of King Nut in the printed text mirrors the manuscript’s war against Bahram in its structural placing, but it is a much less prominent plot component. (It also is clear that these are both symbolic defeats over pagan peoples: Nut is the name of the ancient Egyptian sky goddess, and Bahram al-Majusi is “Bahram the Zoroastrian.”) Furthermore, during the later encounter with Saysaban in the printed text (which could be read as metaphorically depicting the Arab invasion of Egypt), the reality of war is written out of the story: the noise and chaos of the battlefield remains, and people are injured and die, but there is no actual battle, and Saysaban joins the Muslims voluntarily rather than being defeated. Yet, there is an interesting dichotomy in the fact that the printed text ostensibly depicts Sayf as a benevolent founder-figure in its account of his diversion of the Nile, while simultaneously describing him as, in fact, invading (albeit unwittingly) Saysaban’s lands and threatening to destroy them by diverting the Nile. This leads me to a second dimension to the theme of invasion as depicted in the manuscript, the characterization of Sayf as a defender of his own lands against foreign aggression. During the section of the story that deals with the diversion of the Nile, Sayf Ar’ad attacks the Muslims by digging out the cataracts, following which they are also attacked by Bahram. As is clear from the summary above, the narrator gives his account of Bahram’s capture of the Muslim notables, Abu Yad’s recovery of them, and the ensuing battle a lot of focus in the manuscript, and there is a similar tension between the idea of Sayf as an invader of Bahram’s lands and a defender of his own people against Bahram’s attacks as is found in the encounter with Saysaban in the printed text. However, once the war with Bahram is won, the narrator returns 194

— ​ O s i r i s R e b o r n : T h e A r a b i c E p i c —​ to the theme of the Abyssinian invasion, and when Sayf Ar’ad finally unleashes the Nile, Sayf again takes on the role of defender (although it is worth noting that, as with the printed text, no actual battle takes place). Another key difference between the two variants, which will be discussed later, and which will not be clear from the summaries provided above, can be found in the role played in the manuscript by the jinn Abu Yad, who is the son of two of Sayf’s main allies, Aqisa and Ayrud. He has a counterpart in the printed text, in the person of Ufasha; but Ufasha is not even born until the very end of the Nile diversion episode. Finally, there are intriguing differences in the part played by Sayf, the ostensible hero. In the printed edition, he is key to the action throughout, but in the manuscript his son Misr comes into the foreground: he is consulted by his father at every stage, and it is Misr’s jinn servants who carve out the course for the river, and Misr who provides the solution when the Nile does not flood. In addition, Misr is identified with Egypt through his actual name, Misr being the Arabic name for Egypt. Overall, the plots of the two Sayf variants are clearly quite different, to the extent it is hard to see how they can be telling the same story. However, when you look at these two different tellings in the light of the Prophetic Königsnovelle pretext, it becomes clear that in the very places where these two variants seem to diverge so widely, they actually share some key elements. The Prophetic Königsnovelle dates from the Greco-Roman period of Egyptian history and gives expression to a specifically Egyptian conceptualization of power and statehood. It is thought to have developed out of two earlier narrative forms which were important in Egypt for some 2,000 years, from the Middle Kingdom (circa 2030 to 1650 BCE) up until Greco-Roman times: the Königsnovelle and the Chaosbeschreibung. According to John Dillery, The Königsnovelle is “a story built around a legendary king who struggles to preserve Egypt and native rule against external enemies, often assimilated ‘Easterners’ or the Hyksos,” while the Chaosbeschreibung is Not a genre in its own right, but a mode of presentation, or, as it has been usefully called recently, a ‘discourse,’ one that focuses on the hardships that befall Egypt when native rule is lost, and which also has a ‘messianic’ component that envisions the restoration of Egypt. (2005, 390–91) The Prophetic Königsnovelle revolves around a pattern according to which Pharaoh receives a prophecy of a coming invasion that will bring disaster to Egypt. When this arrives, he goes out to do combat, but either flees before battle or is diverted from his purpose, and hides in a remote area while the invader descends upon Egypt. After some time, the Pharaoh, or his descendant, returns to expel the invader and restore order to Egypt. There is also a characteristic tension in Prophetic Königsnovelle texts between the image of Pharaoh as a defender of Egypt against foreign invaders and Pharaoh as an invader, which has been related back to ancient Egyptian ideas about the legitimacy of a ruler: Pharaoh, the defender of Egypt, is appointed by the Gods, so if an invader is able to take the throne, then he must logically enjoy their favor. The Prophetic Königsnovelle is closely entwined with Osirian rituals and religious ideas, which are central to ancient Egyptian religion, and has been described as a “striking 195

— ​ H e l e n B l a t h e r w i c k —​ instance of the connection between historical experience and the cultural construction of meaning” (Assmann 2002, 409). Examples of Prophetic Königsnovelle can be found in texts that recount the invasion of Egypt by the Persian king Cambyses in circa 525 BCE, and the expulsion of the Hyksos, who ruled Upper Egypt from c. 1725 to 1575 BCE (Zotenberg 1883; Charles 1916; Jansen 1950; Pritchard 1969, 232–34; MacCoull 1993; Herodotus 2008, 3: 1–17). As mentioned above, the most obvious plot difference between the Sayf variants addressed in this chapter relates to the actual diversion of the Nile: in the manuscript, this is the result of an act of aggression by a hostile enemy, while in the printed text, it is quite the opposite. The key issue here, in terms of an Egyptian intertextual presence, is the concept of the king’s control over the waters of the river. Throughout Egyptian history Pharaoh has been inextricably entwined with ideas of control over the Nile – not just in terms of military control, but also in more symbolic terms. To some extent, Pharaoh is the Nile, because he is the living incarnation of the god Osiris, who is identified with the Nile and its cyclical floods. Thus, for example, extant texts about the expulsion of the Hyksos recount how Pharaoh Kamose led an expedition force north up the Nile to destroy the capital city of the Hyksos, and present an image of the savior Pharaoh, Osiris in earthly form and rightful ruler of Egypt, sailing at the head of his fleet to liberate his lands from the invader and unite Upper and Lower Egypt. Control of the throne of Egypt is symbolized by control of the Nile waters, and once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that although there are differences in plot between the two Sayf variants, they are using the same concepts, themes, and imagery to tell the same story, albeit in different ways. Furthermore, both include the tension between the idea of invading ruler and defending king that is characteristic of the Prophetic Königsnovelle. Having said that, it does appear that the Prophetic Königsnovelle subtext is more overt in the manuscript: the war for Egypt is actually fought in this account, both when the Muslims go to war against Bahram, and in their defense of their land against Sayf Ar’ad’s aggression, whereas it is largely written out of the printed text. Another significant element in both texts is the trope of the abduction of members of the Muslim contingent during their respective conflicts with Bahram and Saysaban. The abduction and murder of the children of kings and nobles appears to be a characteristic of accounts of the invasion of Egypt by the Persian king Cambyses (Jansen 1950; Dillery 2005). Although the Cambyses accounts differ on who was captured and executed, and by whom, they all follow a pattern according to which the invaders undertake an initial invasion, following which the sons of nobles from one side, or nobles or mercenaries, are captured and often paraded in front of the enemy, and then slaughtered in front of them, presaging the total defeat of the enemy. Reading its intertextual presence into the bizarre episode in the printed text in which Sayf’s sons appear to be brought before him and slaughtered makes the presence of this otherwise very strange and unusual plot element meaningful. It also finds a parallel in the abduction of the Muslim heroes by the magician Bahram in the manuscript. No one is actually killed in either variant, but it seems more than co-incidental that both mirror Cambyses in including this trope. The final intertextual relationships that will be discussed here pertain to the characterization of the jinn Abu Yad, King Sayf, and his son Misr. These cannot be related directly to the Prophetic Königsnovelle pretext, but instead can be read as drawing on 196

— ​ O s i r i s R e b o r n : T h e A r a b i c E p i c —​ older mythology, notably, in the case of Abu Yad, the myth of “Seth and Apopis.” In the manuscript, Abu Yad is an important figure: he infiltrates the enemy camp to rescue the captured Muslims, and captures Bahram during the ensuing battle, thereby winning the war. In the printed text, the role played by Aqisa and Ayrud’s son, named Ufasha here, is superficially very different, not least because, as mentioned earlier, he is not even born at this point of the story. Instead, Ufasha plays a key role in the final third of the printed text, in which Sayf embarks on an expansionist campaign to conquer the worlds of humans and jinn, during which he performs exactly the same narrative function that Abu Yad does in the Nile diversion section: defending Sayf and his allies, and acting as the instrument through which the defeat of enemies is made possible. Both Abu Yad and Ufasha are immensely powerful, and in the printed text we are told that this is because Ufasha was born with a miraculous third hand, formed of blue steel, which grows out of his chest (Sīrat Sayf 3: 411–12). Inscribed with talismanic names, it gives him magical powers, and can be removed and transformed into any object he pleases – usually a sword. The motif of the third hand does not occur in the manuscript; however, it cannot be coincidence that the name Abu Yad means “father of the hand.” There are no other examples, to my knowledge, of this motif in Arabic popular literature. However, it does find a parallel in the “Seth and Apopis” myth. In this myth, Seth, the ancient Egyptian god of chaos and disorder, in his aspect as the harnessed powers of chaos (as opposed to his unbridled chaotic aspect), destroys the serpent Apopis, who lived in the celestial Nun, or Nile, and represented the primeval forces of the universe. Each day, as Ra’s sun-boat crosses the skies, Apopis tries to obstruct it. This leads Ra to order Seth to defend the sun-boat from Apopis with his detachable foreleg (Rundle Clark 1993, 208–12). Over time, the ancient Egyptian word for foreleg came to take on the meanings “strong arm,” “strength,” and “scimitar,” and myths often refer to Seth’s arm instead of his leg (Griffiths 1960, 34; te Velde 1967, 86). The characterization of Abu Yad/Ufasha provides a plausible example of the persisting intertextual traces of ancient myths still at work in these two late-medieval popular epic variants in a way that thematically and conceptually accords with the older pretexts. Abu Yad/Ufasha’s characterization as the defender of the king and the forces of order does not just create coherence between the two sīra variants, but is consistent with the characterization of Seth in the ancient myth. In fact, one can arguably only fully appreciate the deeper thematic resonances at work in the individual variants when one understands the potential significance of Abu Yad’s name and Ufasha’s third hand. The presence of a wider Egyptian mythological pretext likewise allows the reader to reconcile the different roles played by Sayf and his son Misr in the two variants; in the printed text, Sayf is presented as an Osiris-like founding father, who brings the waters of the Nile and civilization, while his son remains in the background. In contrast, in the manuscript, it is Misr who is instrumental to the diversion of the Nile and foundation of Egypt, and his characterization can be read as broadly drawing on ideas of Horus, the living son/aspect of the dead/inanimate Osiris, who takes on his father’s mantle and avenges his murder by Seth in “The Contendings” (and it may be relevant here that in the Prophetic Königsnovelle accounts, the defeat of the Hyksos was at some level equated with the overthrow of Seth). Such additional echoes from older ancient Egyptian mythology support the premise that the Prophetic Königsnovelle may indeed play an intertextual role in Sīrat Sayf. 197

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CONCLUSION It seems incontrovertible that when the Nile diversion section of Sīrat Sayf is read through the Prophetic Königsnovelle, the intertextual relationship between the two variants of this popular epic becomes clearer. If one reads both texts as being informed by the Prophetic Königsnovelle at conceptual and thematic levels, the apparent incongruities between the two are reconciled. For example, there is no actual contradiction in the fact that in one Sayf leads the waters north through Egypt in a triumphal march, while in the other the waters are unleashed upon him by his enemy in an attempt to destroy him. Both texts give expression to the same underlying concept: that rightful kingship is inextricably linked to the control of the Nile waters, which in turn demonstrates fitness to rule. The tension between the idea of the king as invading conqueror and Osiris-like founder of civilization, and between invasion and liberation, that is expressed in the Prophetic Königsnovelle texts is the same tension that we find at work in each Sīrat Sayf narrative, but is also present in the way the two variants can be seen to relate to one another. At the risk of being overly reductionist, the Sayf (and Misr) depicted in the manuscript falls more into the category of “invading king,” whereas in the printed text, the violence of invasion is downplayed and Sayf is presented more as a founder-figure. This tension can even be seen when it comes to the king’s exertion of magical control over the river at the end of the section: the manuscript illustrates this through its more visceral story of the annual flood sacrifice as a defense against foreign intrigue, while the printed text instead opts for the foundational, creative act of placing an ancient Egyptian book of magical knowledge in the Nileometer as a talismanic protection. If the two variants of Sīrat Sayf are read alongside the Prophetic Königsnovelle, it thus becomes clear that they can, in fact, be considered to be consistent retellings of the same story. This possibility becomes even more plausible when one also takes into account the Nile diversion story as told in three other manuscript variants of Sīrat Sayf discussed in an article by Aboubakr Chraïbi (1996) in all of which the Nile diversion is, as in BM 4274 Or, caused by Sayf Ar’ad’s destruction of the cataracts in an attempt to drown the Muslims. Peter Heath has said of Sīrat ʿAntar that “beneath the seeming multiplicity of its episodes and events, the Sīra tells only one story—or more precisely one series of stories” (1996, 68), an insight that seems to hold true for the narrative construction of all the sīras. On the basis of the comparison undertaken here, it seems that this principle may likewise hold true for the relationship between the different variants of Sīrat Sayf: the narrators may vary in their treatment of plot, but they remain consistent in their use of theme, subtext, and symbolism, and in the underlying epic truth of the story they are narrating. However, this is not to negate the extent of the differences between the two variants. It seems clear from looking at the texts addressed here that long-established Egyptian ideas about kingship, power, and the legitimacy and fitness of rulers to wield power have persisted in the popular imagination up until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is also clear that in the printed edition Sayf is presented as a founding king rather than a conquering ruler as he is in the manuscript. Just as the Prophetic Königsnovelle is a response to the cultural trauma inflicted by external threat and foreign rule, and an expression of the fears surrounding the loss of integrity of the socio-cultural unit, Sīrat Sayf   ’s account of the foundation of Egypt can be read as a veiled reworking of the historical event of the Arab conquest 198

— ​ O s i r i s R e b o r n : T h e A r a b i c E p i c —​ of Egypt, a cataclysmic event that introduced an Arab, Muslim ruling class and led to widespread transformation in all aspects of Egyptian society, religion, and culture over the following centuries. In BM 4274 Or., and also in the variants discussed by Chraïbi, the reality of invasion and conquest is evident in the text, although the narrator has flipped the narrative so that the historical lines between conqueror and conquered are blurred: the audience primarily identifies with the Muslims, who have here become proto-Egyptians rather than invaders. In accordance with the ideas of legitimacy to rule expressed in the Prophetic Königsnovelle, Sayf is the rightful ruler of Egypt because he is able to take the throne, but the tension between the legitimacy of the incumbent king and that of the invading conqueror is at work in the text. The printed text, however, takes a different approach, in which the audience relates to Sayf as the founder of Egypt, rather than an invader. The reality of the Arab conquests becomes more distant in this account of Egypt’s legendary history. It is tempting to consider the possibility that the change in the portrayal of Sayf from conquering hero to founder-king in the printed text, which effectively comprises the living tradition of this sīra, might reflect a changing vision of how the story is told and understood over time. However, the manuscript (or manuscripts) that form the basis for the printed text may simply have been chosen at random. Whatever the case, whether the printed edition demonstrates a later evolution of the story or is simply an alternative variant, Sīrat Sayf has effectively lost its multiplicity of form. The living tradition of the sīra represented by the printed text is nowadays one in which Sayf’s power and legitimacy are derived from his status as founder-king, a fact that is highlighted throughout the text in the repeated predictions made by various characters that it is his destiny to divert the river Nile to flow north through previously barren lands and found a proto-Islamic Egypt.

NOTES 1 For more on the history of the genre, see Norris (1989); Chraïbi (1996); Heath (1996, 3-43); Madeyska (2003); Reynolds (2010); and Canova (2012). 2 For more on performance practices, see Lane (1860, 391–425); Connelly (1986); Slymovics (1988); Reynolds (1995); Kruk and Ott (1999); and Ott (2003). 3 For a plot summary of the printed text variant of Sīrat Sayf, see Lyons (1995, 3, 586–641). 4 For amplification of the ideas in this paragraph, see Blatherwick (2016, 57–61, 139–200, 256–62).

WORKS CITED ʿAbd al-Raḥman al-Abnūdī. 1989. “Sīrat Banī Ḥilāl bayn al-shāʿir wa’l-rāwī.” In Sirat Beni Hilal: Actes de la 1ère table ronde intenationale sur la geste des Béni Hilal, part 2, edited by Ayūb ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 39–46. Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Édition, Institut National d’Archéologie et d’Arts. Assmann, Jan. 2002. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Times of the Pharaohs. Translated by Andrew Jenkins. New York: Metropolitan Books. Blatherwick, Helen. 2016. Prophets, Gods and Kings in Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan: An Intertextual Reading of an Egyptian Popular Epic. Leiden: Brill. Canova, Giovanni. 2012. “Sayf b. Dhī Yazan: History and Saga.” In Fictionalizing the Past: Historical Characters in Arabic Popular Epic, edited by Sabine Dorpmüller, 95–105. Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

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— ​ H e l e n B l a t h e r w i c k —​ Charles, R. H., trans. 1916. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu. Translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text. London: Williams and Norgate. Chraïbi, Aboubakr. 1996. “Le roman de Sayf ibn dî Yazan: Sources, structure et argumentation.” Studia Islamica 84: 113–34. Connelly, Bridget. 1986. Arab Folk Epic and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dillery, John. 2005. “Cambyses and the Egyptian Chaosbeschreibung Tradition.” The Classical Quarterly 55, no. 2: 387–406. Gwyn Griffiths, J. 1960. The Conflict of Horus and Seth from Egyptian and Classical Sources. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Heath, Peter. 1996. The Thirsty Sword: Sīrat ʿAntar and the Arabic Popular Epic. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Herodotus. 2008. The Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield, edited by Carolyn Dewald. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Jansen, H. Ludin. 1950. The Coptic Story of Cambyses’ Invasion of Egypt: A Critical Analysis of its Literary Form and its Historical Purpose. Oslo: Jacob Dybwad. Kruk, Remke, and Claudia Ott. 1999. “‘In the Popular Manner’: Sīra-recitation in Marrakesh Anno 1997.” Edebiyat 10, no. 2: 183–98. Lane, Edward. 1860. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: Written in Egypt during the Years 1833–1835. 5th ed. London: John Murray. Lichtheim, Miriam. 1976. The New Kingdom. Vol. 2 of Ancient Egyptian Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lyons, Malcolm C. 1995. The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-telling. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacCoull, Leslie S. B. 1993. Coptic Perspectives on Late Antiquity. Aldershot: Variorum. Madeyska, Danuta. 2003. “Delimitation in the Early Sīrah.” Oriente Moderno 22, no. 2: 255–75. Norris, Harry T. 1989. “Sayf b. Dī Yazan and the Book of the History of the Nile.” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 7: 125–51. Ott, Claudia. 2003. Metamorphosen des Epos. Sīrat al-Muğāhidīn (Sīrat al-Amīra D̲ āt al-Himma) zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, Universiteit Leiden. Pritchard, James B., ed. 1969. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reynolds, Dwight Fletcher. 1995. Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2010. “Epic and History in the Arabic Tradition.” In Epic and History, edited by David Konstan and Kurt A. Raaflaub, 392–410. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Rundle Clark, R. T. [1959] 1993. Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt. London: Thames and Hudson. Sīrat al-malik Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan fāris al-Yaman. 1407 AH (1986 CE). 4 vols. Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Thaqāfiyya. Sīrat al-malik Sayf Dhū’l-Yazan, Ms BM 4274 Or., British Museum, London. Slymovics, Susan. 1988. The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press. te Velde, Herman. 1967. Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion. Translated by Gertrude E. van Baaren-Pape. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Zotenberg, H. 1883. Chronique de Jean, Évêque de Nikiou: Texte Éhiopien. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

F RO M O G H U Z K H A N TO E X O DU S L I N E A G E , H E R O I S M , A N D M I G R AT I O N I N OGHUZ TURK TRADITION

rsr Ali Aydin Karamustafa

The epic history of the Oghuz Turks1 is typically portrayed by scholars as consisting of two ambiguously related cycles: the story of the mythical ruler Oghuz Khan2 and The Book of Dede Korkut. (This vagueness is largely due to the fact that both traditions bear the title Oghūznāme or “The Book of Oghuz.”) These two components of the tradition have regularly been viewed through distinct “civilizational” lenses, though, and have seldom been convincingly brought together in a comprehensive historical or cultural framework. Most scholars who study Turkish epics seek to distill a native national spirit from the supposedly alien elements of Persian and Arab civilizations, usually understood as Islamic and urban and thus deeply inimical to Turkish culture.3 This approach has often led to a disproportionate focus on the purportedly less Islamic Book of Dede Korkut as the primary text of Oghuz epic and thus a particularly faithful rendering of tribal Turkish culture. This chapter offers a fresh framework for Oghuz popular traditions and historical consciousness by focusing on the continuity between these two cycles and also suggesting that a third set of narratives, concerning the trans-Eurasian westward migrations of the Oghuz from roughly 1000 to 1400, should be understood as a concluding episode of Oghuz history. Although not circulating in epic form, this thread, or rather final episode, was transmitted over the centuries in sketchy fragments and recounted a violent westward exodus out of Inner Asia prompted chiefly by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. This study offers an overview of three phases of the epic’s development, giving special attention to the overlooked migration narrative, and shows how the epic flourished in each phase according to particular historical circumstances.4

OGHUZ KHAN AND HINTS OF AN EPIC TRADITION The legend begins with Oghuz, the common ancestor of all Turks and Mongols who  lived several thousand years before the time of the Prophet Muhammad. He was a descendent of Japheth, the son of Noah who had inherited the lands of DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-18

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— ​ A l i A y d i n K a r a m u s t a f a —​ Central Asia (typically torkestān in the Persian of the early texts). A child of prodigious strength and skill, Oghuz was born Muslim in a society of unbelievers. In a dream, the newborn told his mother that he would refuse her milk unless she accepted his faith, to which she acquiesced. He gave himself the name Oghuz and grew into a great warrior, later demanding that his wife embrace Islam as well. When she refused, he married another woman, and then another, until the third finally accepted his religion. Oghuz’s father, Qara Khan, was angered by his son’s apostasy and gathered his relatives to avenge this betrayal. Oghuz and his followers emerged victorious from the ensuing clash after killing Qara Khan and his lot, while some of those defeated retreated eastward and would become the ancestors of the Mongols. Subsequently, Oghuz became Khan, embarking on a vast campaign of world conquest and domination. This account depicts an ancient pre-Islamic setting in the Inner Asian steppe, but evidence for the tradition’s popularity only surfaces when it was circulating as an Islamization story in the Mongol period. The above version was elaborated by the minister of the Mongol Ilkhanid Empire in Iran (1256–1335), Rashid al-Din Fazlollah Hamadani (died 1318), in the beginning of his immense Persian-language Jāme‘ ol-tavārīkh (The culmination of chronicles) and constitutes the earliest dated and longest text in the Oghuz Khan corpus. This story demonstrates the shared origins of the Mongols and the Turks and gives them a common Muslim ancestor, an important priority for the newly Islamized Mongol ruling class. Soon after, another Mongol historian, Hamdollah Mostowfi, penned a shorter version of the same story in his Tārīkh-e gozideh (1330). In the post-Mongol era, the narrative was widely adopted by Turkic dynasties in an effort to claim a noble lineage linked to Abrahamic figures, as well as a legacy of world conquest and dominion. An important update to the story took place in the court of the Timurid Empire, which reigned over much of Iran and Central Asia in the fifteenth century. In the 1420s, Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi wrote his Ẓafarnāmeh (also spelled “Zafarnāma”), in which he revised the details and chronology of the Oghuz Khan legend. His approach became the dominant model across the Persianate world, including in the Ottoman, Aq Qoyunlu, Safavid, and Shaybanid states. For instance, it served as the key source for the story in one of the most widely copied Persian histories, Mirkhvand’s Rawżat al-safā (The Garden of Purity, 1497). Rashid al-Din’s seminal formulation also continued to be copied in Anatolia, Iran, and Central Asia over the following centuries.5 Although its religious and political message surely suited the needs of the Mongol elite, the emergence of this tradition in the Mongol era cannot be principally attributed to political motives. For the Persian-speaking historians of Ilkhanid realms, the account was one component of a profound intellectual effort to understand the arrival of the Mongols as a part of a larger “Turk” phenomenon: Rashid al-Din began his chronicle with the rather urgent update that the Peoples that are known as ‘Turk’…have scattered by means of invasion in all of the lands of China, India, Kashmir, Iran, Rome, and the Levant in strength, glory, and dominion and have taken control of most of the countries in the settled parts of the earth. (1995, 40) 202

— ​ F r o m O g h u z K h a n t o E x o d u s —​ What follows are several hundred pages ambitiously attempting to systematically classify all the Turco-Mongol peoples of the steppe. The evidence indicates that Mongol historians drew upon an active epic tradition. The hundreds of names and vignettes in Rashid al-Din’s account concerning Oghuz Khan’s conquests and progeny are too detailed to suggest anything but an extensive base of well-elaborated written and oral sources. This author notes that no comprehensive book of Turkish or Mongol origins has been drawn up and that he obtained much of his information from “esteemed storytellers and transmitters” (1995, 41). Meanwhile, his contemporary from Mamluk Egypt, Ibn al-Dawadari (died after 1336), describes in one of his chronicles how Oghuz lore is preserved by Turks who play a popular stringed instrument called the qopuz (1990, 55). Mostowfi also evokes an oral tradition by adjusting the names according to the accounts he heard, for instance, modifying Dīp Yāqūī to Dīb Bāqū (1983, 562), and by adding entirely new elements to the story (1983, 563). Two other early texts also evoke a tradition spanning well beyond the Mongol court; one is a twenty-one-folio fragment of Uyghur-script verse containing a preIslamic version of the Oghuz Khan tale located in the Bibliotèque Nationale of France (“Le livre d’Oughouz,” supplement turc 1001), and the other, the so-called Uzunköprü Oghūznāme, four folios of masnavi verse in eastern Turkic from a now lost anthology last known to have been consulted in Turkey in the 1930s (Orkun 1935). Their linguistic character and the use of Uyghur script in the former have led some scholars to believe that these two fragments originated in Ilkhanid realms (Sümer 1967, 364; Binbaş 2010), although it is difficult to pin down the origins of the Uyghur-script fragment beyond a general fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Mongol-Çağatay linguistic context (Ağca 2016, 61). We can add to these an early fourteenth-century collection of proverbs from the lands of Golden Horde bearing the title “The Words of the Oghūznāme, known as the Ancestral Proverbs,” referencing the “prophetic” figure of “Oghūz Ātā” as described by Evrim Binbaş (2010). Studying similar traditions in the former lands of the Golden Horde, Devin DeWeese (1994, 501–2) also concludes that tales of Oghuz Khan emerged in an Islamizing framework independent of Rashid al-Din’s account. The prominent role of poetry in the early texts and the key components of heroic conquest and etiology conform to the features of a classic epic tradition. After the Mongol era, however, there is little evidence to suggest that the tradition continued to circulate orally save for certain areas of Inner Asia and Iran (Karamustafa 2022, 7–12). It instead came to feature as a historical note in Persianate historiography, where it was integrated into an expanding and inclusive Iranian legendary framework. It is well known that the tenth to twelfth centuries witnessed the growth of the Shāhnāmeh (also spelled “Shāhnāma”; The Book of Kings) tradition in new Persian through both the seminal text of the Ghaznavid poet Ferdowsi (also spelled “Firdausi”; died circa 1020) and a range of spin-off traditions sometimes called the Sistan epic cycles from the eleventh century onward. Although this trend was a continuation of pre-Islamic Iranian oral tradition, it took place under the aegis of Eurasia’s Turkish elite that came to power after the year 1000. As Shāhnāmeh-writing expanded under Mongol rulers in Iran (Sims 2006, 269), the periodization, characters, and storylines from the epic also came to be incorporated into other storytelling traditions (Rubanovich 2012, 33) and 203

— ​ A l i A y d i n K a r a m u s t a f a —​ historiographical works (Melville 2012, 193–94). This trend spread far to the west; the Armenians of fourteenth-century Erzincan (today a city in eastern Turkey) yearned for a Shāhnāmeh-style epic poem in their language (Pifer 2021, 171), and the fifteenth-century Ottoman court institutionalized the office of the şehnāmecī (Turkish, “Shāhnāmeh writer”) to render the exploits of the sultan in heroic Persian verse. What was at stake went beyond literary form and entailed the adoption of Iranian epic time on par with “Islamic religious time” (Bashir 2014, 534). Oghuz Khan came to be integrated into this Iranian framework. Rashid al-Din opens his history of the Turks by comparing those vanquished by the Mongols to the cruel king Zahhak of Persian legend (1995, 32). Mostowfi strengthened these parallels, portraying the Oghuz Turks as the Turanian antagonists of the Iranian epic: The kingship of the line of Japheth son of Noah remained among the progeny of Oghuz for nearly one thousand years. In the time of Fereydun,6 his son Tur fought a great battle with them [the descendants of Oghuz], and nobody was spared. (1983, 562) The same author also remarks that “Some consider Oghuz Khan to be Afrasiyab, but there is no basis for this,” referring to the legendary king of Turan and the main antagonist of the Shāhnāmeh (1983, 562). Such parallelisms were not new; Afrasiyab in particular had been likened or equated with many Turkish rulers already in the pre-Mongol era.7 Yazdi’s Ẓafarnāmeh takes the parallels in a more complimentary direction: It is said that the son of Japheth was a contemporary of Keyūmars̱ . He is the first of the Turkish kings and Keyūmars̱ the first of the Iranian kings, and he discharged the practice of khān-ship and the custom of the guardianship of the world in Turkistan. (Yazdi 2009, 44) Yazdi explicitly equates legendary Turkish and Iranian kingship, an approach he replicates when noting that “Oghuz Khan was among the Turkish kings as Jamshīd was among the Iranian kings,” abandoning Mostowfi’s comparison to Afrasiyab for a more flattering association with the Iranian hero (2009, 49). We even see Ferdowsistyle couplets in Yazdi’s description of Oghuz Khan’s exploits: Together they arrived at the hunting field / no choice left for Oghuz but battle. The two armies clashed in such a way / that from iron sprang forth flame. (2009, 49) This was the comprehensive incorporation of Oghuz Khan into the Shāhnāmeh tradition.8 Given how one seventeenth-century writer from Khwarizm portrays Shāhnāmeh-oriented claims of descent among the Turkish Seljuqs as a form of arrogance, this development could be interpreted as a de-popularization of the Oghuz Khan tradition (Abu’l-Ghazi 1996, 206). He remained important as an ancestor conferring political legitimacy and a noble lineage linked to ancient Abrahamic and 204

— ​ F r o m O g h u z K h a n t o E x o d u s —​ Iranian figures, but with a diminished relevance in the oral realm. Although the movement of Oghuz pride among the elites of the Kara Koyunlu, Aq Qoyunlu, and Ottoman dynasties of the fifteenth century continued to pay a cursory homage to Oghuz Khan in their court chronicles (Flemming 2018, 228), by this time Oghuz had become an ancestral figure whose story was no longer related in any great detail.

THE DEDE KORKUT CYCLE The next phase in the Oghuz epic’s development is encompassed in The Book of Dede Korkut, a literary tradition that left behind the ancient pre-Islamic past and took up the early Islamic period. This is a prosimetric epic cycle recounting the exploits of the Oghuz tribe (divided into the factions of the Inner and Outer Oghuz) and their clashes with the infidel on the ambiguously located frontiers of the Islamic world. These stories belonged to a tradition of popular performance, which circulated from the fourteenth to at least the sixteenth centuries in the lands of Anatolia, Iran, and parts of Inner Asia. Dede Korkut is a charismatic wise man who councils the Oghuz nation and recounts their exploits, while their sovereign is the great Bayandur Khan, the “Khan of Khans.”9 Rather than the themes of lineage, etiology, and world conquest, which characterize the Oghuz Khan narratives, the tales of Dede Korkut recount problems of heroism, kinship, and marriage within the community of the Oghuz. Valor in this epic tradition is linked to the key frontier values of raiding and fighting the infidel. For instance, the inexperienced Uruz makes the following complaint to his father, Kazan Beg, in one of the cycle’s coming-of-age tales: “When have you ever taken me to the infidel frontier, swung your sword, and cut heads?” (Tezcan and Boeschoten 2018, 98). Recurring, too, are taunts to the infidel uttered in rhyme: Why do you praise your spear, cursed infidel? / It is no match for my shepherd’s crook. Why do you praise your arrows, infidel dog? / It is no match for my hazel slingshot! (2018, 245) These Oghuz exploits held great popular appeal in the post-Mongol era. The warrior ethos of the epic evokes the values of holy war, which permeated the political discourses of the states that formed along the former Byzantine frontier in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Darling 2000). All the same, the tradition was not referenced in court histories from the period and apparently had limited appeal among the political elites. John Woods has obliquely linked The Book of Dede Korkut to the politics of the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty (1378–1501) and its claim to rule by dint of its descent from Bayandur Khan. Woods has demonstrated how echoes of the epic cycle and the dynasty’s ideology can be discerned in elite Aq Qoyunlu and pro-Aq Qoyunlu Ottoman sources, despite their authors’ outward preference for an Oghuz Khan-oriented genealogy (1999, 177–78). The likely sixteenth-century date of writing of the tradition’s two longest manuscripts shows how it continued to circulate well after the Aq Qoyunlu period, as does evidence referencing the tradition from Ottoman sources from the period (Sümer 1967, 368–70, 409). 205

— ​ A l i A y d i n K a r a m u s t a f a —​ The Dede Korkut tradition has been subject to the prevailing civilizational logic of the fields of Turkish and Islamic studies, which has emphasized the cycle’s supposedly “pre-Islamic” Turkish character by dint of the semi-nomadic lifestyle of its tribal protagonists. This line of reasoning considers the tradition to have been condemned to irrelevance in the face of the Islamic political and cultural sensibilities (also frequently described as Islamicate or Arabo-Persian) cultivated by postMongol dynasties (Barthold’ 1962, 5; Sümer 1967, 363, 371–76; Lewis 1974, 9, 18; Woods 1999, 181–82). Accordingly, the tradition has been viewed as an isolated window to an otherwise inaccessible Oghuz past. Scholars agree, however, that the cycle’s Aq Qoyunlu context was layered over an original core regarding the animosities among rival Turkic factions in tenthand eleventh-century Khwarizm and Transoxiana in Central Asia (Sümer 1967, 370–74; Reichl 2012, 687–95). Given that extensive Islamization had already taken place in these regions by this time, it is inconsistent that the origins of the tradition should be considered pre-Islamic. Any early modern listener would have surmised that the Oghuz lived several hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad based on Dede Korkut’s traditionally given age of three hundred, coinciding nicely with Oghuz conversions to Islam in the tenth century (Golden 1992, 213). In fact, the theme of Islamization is an important component of the tradition—namely, that Dede Korkut facilitated the Islamization of the Oghuz via the key personage of Emen who voyaged to Mecca (Tezcan and Boeschoten 2018, 65, 254; Əsker, Şamil, and Əsker 2019, 63). The recent discovery in Tehran of a third manuscript of the tales dating to the eighteenth century (Əsker, Şamil, and Əsker 2019), in addition to long-known oral fragments of the tradition surviving in twentieth-century Anatolia (Gökyay 1973, cdliii), further shows the hollowness of assuming the tradition’s incompatibility with Islamic societies. Apart from very sporadic hints at an older, possibly pre-Islamic setting (the reference to “Becene Dogs,” for instance, may recall ninth- and tenthcentury Oghuz conflicts with the Turkic Pechenegs), all signs point to the tales of Dede Korkut originating, circulating, and being put to writing in exclusively Islamic contexts. Attempts to portray the tradition as pre-Islamic stem from nothing other than the unfounded belief in the incompatibility of nomadic and Turkic Inner Asia with Islam (and more precisely, an unreasonably narrow notion of what constitutes true Islamic belief, practice, and culture).

THE OGHUZ EXODUS FROM INNER ASIA The Dede Korkut epic was the second and last of the oral traditions regarding the Oghuz, but Oghuz historical consciousness did not end with these tales. A final episode of Oghuz history, found across a range of historiographical and narrative sources nearly all written in Turkish, complements the tales of Oghuz Khan and Dede Korkut. This episode recounts a migration out of Central Asia, typically from Khorasan and with a special focus on the city of Merv, where in a series of turbulent invasions, Mongols pushed out a group of Oghuz tribal leaders who then fled to Azerbaijan and the lands of Rum.10 This account does not constitute its own epic tradition, but appeared in longer historical works as a sidenote or preface. In fact, it was frequently detached from the earlier Oghuz corpus and stood as a 206

— ​ F r o m O g h u z K h a n t o E x o d u s —​ self-contained origin story in dynastic accounts and warrior-hero narratives. The difficulty of positioning the migration episode vis-à-vis other traditions has caused it to be overlooked, and its various iterations have yet to be brought together for further study. One of its earliest iterations is found in an important strand of fifteenth-century Ottoman historiography written in Turkish. Certain histories of the Ottoman house (typically titled Tārīḥ-i āl-i ‘Os̱ mān), such as one anonymous work and the chronicle of Oruç Bey, state that the grandfather of Osman Ghazi (the founder of the Ottoman Empire) was Suleyman Shah, chief of the Oghuz people (oghūz ṭayfasī) and ruler of the city of Mahan in Khorasan.11 The atrocities of the Mongol invasions forced him and his followers, who were, the story notes, already Muslims, to flee westward where they led a life of religious warfare (ghazā) in the lands of Rum (“Recueil d’ouvrages” 4r–5v; Oruç Bey 1973, 20). Interestingly, the anonymous history asserts that the Oghuz of Khorasan shared descent with the eighth-century Abbasid hero Abu Muslim, showing how early Ottoman narratives experimented in a wide-ranging legendary repertoire. Other histories, such as a work written by one “Ruhi,” mention a similar narrative in passing (1989–1992, 375). An even more elaborate early rendition of the Oghuz migration is found in the Jām-e Jam-āyīn, the chronicle by Tabrizi author Ḥasan Bayati commissioned by the Ottoman Prince Cem in 1481 (Atsız 1949, 378–400). Remarkably, this text offers a genealogy based loosely on Rashid al-Din’s Oghuz Khan lineage but interwoven and annotated with a wide range of oral traditions concerning the history of the world from biblical times until the Ottoman period (Bayati brushes past Oghuz Khan himself, noting that his story is already quite well known from the Oghūznāme). The source includes the most detailed account of any Ottoman source regarding how Oghuz ancestors came to rule over the city of Mahan, as well as their relationship with a variety of Arab, Persian, and Turkish dynasties (Atsız 1949, 390–93).12 The narrative emphasizes the service of the Oghuz to the Khwarizmshah dynasty in Iran and Central Asia before recounting how Mongol depredations forced Kizil Bugha (four generations before Osman) to leave Iran first for Azerbaijan and then the city of Ahlat on Lake Van. These early Ottoman accounts indicate the wide circulation of a Khorasanto-Rum narrative in the fifteenth century, demonstrating that it was not merely a literary trope, but rather an account elaborated in a variety of ways and in reasonable detail. Other important Ottoman historians such as Şükrullah and Karamani Mehmet Pasha also mention the Mongol invasions and a flight from Iran or Ilkhanid lands as the starting point of Ottoman history, although usually only giving it the briefest of mentions. A similar pattern is found in the hagiographic literature of the period, where oral and written narratives have figures such as Ilyas Baba and Hacı Bektash Veli fleeing Khorasan for the lands of the Rum in the wake of the Mongol invasions. In the sixteenth century, these narratives mostly faded out of Ottoman official discourse, where more weight was given to the already preponderant strategy of anchoring the early history of the empire in the political context of the Seljuqs of Rum (Yınanç 1979, 334; Tezcan 2013, 394–95).13 But the migration narrative continued to surface in a range of sources, attesting to its oral circulation, perhaps in former Aq Qoyunlu lands in particular. Bayburtlu Osman’s enigmatic late sixteenth-century Ottoman chronicle, Tevārīh-i cedīd-i 207

— ​ A l i A y d i n K a r a m u s t a f a —​ mir’āt-i cihān, which still associates the “Oghuz nation” primarily with Bayandur Khan and the descendants of the Aq Qoyunlu, reproduces two parallel migration stories from Rum to Khorasan, the first for Oghuz-Bayandur migrants of the Aq Qoyunlu and the second for the ancestors of the Ottoman dynasty: Osman Gazi’s father was Ertughrul and his grandfather Suleyman Shah, who fled the land of Turkistan after the lawless interregnum of Changiz Khan and came, conquering and subduing the lands of Khorasan and Iraq. From there they went to Ahlat and Adilcavaz and founded a settlement for themselves. Because of this discord, they did not take up residence there and instead went with four hundred families and fifty thousand warriors to Rum. (Atsız 1961, 288–92) A similar example from the same period is the Sharafnāme of the Kurdish official Sharaf Khan Bidlisi (circa 1600). Also a product of the culture of the OttomanSafavid borderlands, this text closely follows Bayburtlu Osman’s narrative and specifically names the city of Merv in Khorasan (which he calls “Mahan-e Marv”) as the homeland of Ottoman forebears. As in Ḥasan Bayati’s account, Sharaf Khan shows them to have been in the service of the Khwarizmshahs (Bidlisi 1860, 2:8). This text recounts in some detail the cruelty of the Mongols in Iran and Khorasan. Roughly a century later, the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi’s (died 1682) recounting of Azerbaijan and the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands shows that the narrative had maintained its currency. This version, which Evliya reformulates on several occasions, is striking for its emphasis on the bond between the Ottomans and Aq Qoyunlu ancestors. On the latter, Evliya writes: They accepted Islam [upon receiving] the letter of [the Umayyid Caliph] Abdülmelik while they were still a Tatar people. Eventually, owing to the hardship wrought by the Hulagu Tatars [i.e., the Mongols] who had not accepted Islam, [the Aq Qoyunlu] ultimately left the land of Māhān in Transoxiana with the ancestors of the Ottomans and with the Danishmendids and the Chobanids. They settled in the land of Azerbaijan and ruled over the city of Ahlat, Erzurum, Diyarbakır, Irak, and Fars. There are nine of them in total. They are called bey, bay, or shah, and Sultan Uzun Hasan, the Bayındır Shah, is one of them. They are also close relatives to the Ottoman house. (2006, 4:99) On at least three occasions, his account specifies Bayandur Khan as the great uncle (i.e., the brother of the grandfather) of Ertughrul, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, although he does not make clear whether or not this Bayandur Khan corresponds to that of Aq Qoyunlu royal lineage (2006, 4:94, 4:98, 4:99). Not only does Evliya blur the lines between the Ottoman and Aq Qoyunlu houses, but also he depicts the Seljuqs of Rum as the weakened remnants of an extinguished line rather than conferrers of legitimacy (2006, 7:272). Evliya avoids the term “Oghuz,” which he regards as saddled with connotations of rural naivete. He further describes all of the Turkish rulers of post-Mongol lands in Anatolia and Iran as “Tatars,” a term conventionally used for the Mongols: “cümle Tatardırlar” (They are all Tatars) (2006, 4:99). 208

— ​ F r o m O g h u z K h a n t o E x o d u s —​ The final outcome of the written and oral traditions that Evliya was clearly attempting to negotiate is a strikingly original narrative with a pro-Aq Qoyunlu slant. His repeated assertion, as seen in the above passage, that the Turkish peoples of Central Asia converted to Islam upon invitation by letter from the Umayyad Caliph Hisham ‘Abd al-Malik (ruled 724–743) recalls vignettes from Bayburtlu Osman and the Dede Korkut tradition, among other sources, which recount how the Oghuz converted to Islam in the time of the Prophet via direct correspondence or emissary. Evliya performs a similar syncing of Turco-Mongol and Islamic time in a comical account of how the Prophet sends a doctrinaire messenger named Mu’azz ibn Jabal to Changiz Khan in Islamic calendar year 61 to invite him to convert to Islam. Although the account has the Mongol ruler eventually converting, he objects vehemently to the concept of circumcision: “Was God unaware of this ‘extra meat’ when he created humanity?” (2006, 7:240). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts show the migration narrative circulating in Anatolia and Iran, although the protagonists are universally described with a new label: Turkmen.14 Only half a century after Evliya’s death, the Afsharid ruler of Iran, Nader Shah (ruled 1736–1747), sent a letter to his Ottoman counterparts emphasizing the shared heritage of the Ottoman and Iranian Turks: In the time of Changiz Khan, my ancestor was the brother of the forefather of the Ottoman house who had earlier come to Anatolia, and when their father Suleyman Shah drowned, my ancestor went to Iran. By dint of this, I bear proximity to the Ottoman sultans via relations of descent. (Şemʾdani-zade 1976, 60) Another version of the letter includes the formula that “the leaders of the Turkmen tribes, who had left the land of Tūrān15 and migrated to Iran and Anatolia, were all of one stock and one lineage” (Koca Rağıp Paşa 2003, 25). Nader presents a more synthetic version now shorn of any recognizable Aq Qoyunlu elements and following the Ottoman-Safavid binary of Anatolia and Iran. Still, the narrative maintains the key feature of a Mongol-era dispersion of a collection of Central Asian ancestors of closely related lineage and shows the persistent significance of the figures of Ertughrul and Suleyman Shah. The nineteenth century brought variations on the theme of Mongol-era Turkmen migration and showed its longevity in the oral realm and outside of the Ottoman sphere. The introduction to an anonymous history of the Ayrumlu tribe of northwestern Iran from the late nineteenth century states: According to the judgment of historical chronicles and the accounts of the Ayrumlū elders, the Ayrumlū tribe is of the Turkmen people. The Changizid Hulagu Khan relocated them and had them reside in greater Syria…the sovereign and son-in-law [of Changiz], Timur, did not think it expedient that an ancient Iranian tribe be in the lands of Rūm, [and so] he forced them to migrate and brought them to Yerevan. (Mohammad n.d., 1v) Here, the theme of Changizid migration is layered over with a story of forced displacement during the Timurid period, events from roughly half a millennium prior. 209

— ​ A l i A y d i n K a r a m u s t a f a —​ Like Nader Shah’s account, this episode suggests the phasing out of an Islamization narrative and perhaps an increased blurriness regarding Central Asian origins, although the formulation “ancient Iranian tribe” is compatible with the Khorasan narrative. This passage echoes Evliya’s references to Hulagu Khan and suggests his enduring importance in historical memory not as the destroyer of the Caliphate but as a displacer of Turkish tribes. A parallel to the migration narrative is found in the origin stories of the legend of the bandit-hero Koroghlu, written in prosimetric form in the nineteenth century, having circulated orally across Anatolia and Iran since the seventeenth century (Karamustafa 2020, 489–92). The two major manuscripts in the tradition, from Tabriz and northern Iran, relate somewhat divergent accounts of the protagonist’s origins. The northern Iranian manuscript begins, “The origins of Koroghlu’s lineage are from the Teke Turkmens…[his father] in those times was the stable-master for the King of Turkistan, that is, Sultan Murad” (Sadeq Beg 1834, 1v). The injustices of the sultan soon prompt Koroghlu to flee westward to Azerbaijan, where he eventually settles in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands. The Tabriz manuscript, on the contrary, prefaces Koroghlu westward flight differently: Storytellers and transmitters tell the tale thus: the Turkmen nation has been a large nation (el) since ancient times; they have countless well-known tribes and clans among them. There are three tribes, of which one is called the Teke, one the Yomut, and one the Celali, and these Turkmens come originally from the land of Rūm. Shah Ismail Safavi and Nader Shah had them migrate from Rūm over time and settled them between the frontiers of Herat and Merv (Merv-e Shahjahan) all the way to the frontiers of Mazanderan. (Azərbaycan folkloru külliyati 2010, 2:49) Subsequently the story follows the northern Iran manuscript, with Merv and Mazandaran serving as the legendary lands of origins, although this time the protagonist’s flight to Azerbaijan is attributed to the cruelty of the Safavids. Some other details, for instance, the inclusion of the Yomut, a Turkmen tribe from the Mangyshlak area, reinforce the notion of Central Asia origins. The Tabriz manuscript, then, may represent an inversion of historical memory: Koroghlu’s westward voyage re-enacts the centuries-old exodus from Turkistan to Rum, while the account of the forced migrations of the Turkmen people to Khorasan reflects the later strategy deployed by Iranian rulers to repopulate and strengthen the Safavid and Afsharid frontier in Central Asia.

CONCLUSIONS ON AN EPIC HISTORICAL FRAME It would be inaccurate to speak of a broader Oghuz epic which integrated the oral traditions of Oghuz Khan and Dede Korkut, or even of a tradition that brought only one of these with a well-elaborated version of the migration narrative. Still, it must be noted that Rashid al-Din included an extensive segment on Dede Korkut in his chronicle (2005, 66–74) and also related the migrations of the Oghuz from an initial base in Marv (2005, 95–96), although in the form of a heroic conquest in the preMongol era. Very similar in structure is “The Genealogy of the Turkmens,” written 210

— ​ F r o m O g h u z K h a n t o E x o d u s —​ by Abu’l-Ghazi Bahadur Khan in Khwarizm in 1659, known mainly as a later iteration of Rashid al-Din’s genealogy but containing original material on the history of the Oghuz tribes in the time of Dede Korkut (Abu’l-Ghazi 1996, 207–18). Abu’lGhazi also recounts the dispersal of the Oghuz “in all directions” from Transoxiana and Khwarizm, prompted by internal conflict in the pre-Mongol era (Abu’l- Ghazi 1996, 199–203). Both of these accounts of the Oghuz dispersion are distinct from the westward exodus narrative though, suggesting that the latter represents a consolidation of several historical layers including the scattering of the Oghuz tribes of Transoxiana in the eleventh century, as hinted by Woods (1999, 27). Only later would these migrations be codified as a single, Mongol-era event. Other texts also permit us to imagine a more integral Oghuz historical consciousness, albeit a hazy one. Rashid al-Din’s Mamluk contemporary Ibn al-Dawadari describes Oghuz Khan and elements of the Dede Korkut stories as both belonging to the Oghūznāme, a book brought into Mamluk realms after “the emergence of the Tatars from their lands” (khurūj al-tātār min bilādihim) (Graf 1990, 51, 55–56), referring to Turkish speakers. In the sixteenth century, the three epic phases were brought together again in a cursory fashion and inserted into the lineage-oriented account of Hasan Bayati (Atsız 1949, 378–400). It may be that the Mongol period was a unique historical moment in which stories of Oghuz Khan and Dede Korkut were merged into a common oral and written tradition, and that this tradition was best preserved in Aq Qoyunlu realms where the Oghuz migration narrative was also commonly told. At the very least, these sources point to a long-term engagement with a cast of legendary Oghuz characters and events which could be brought together as needed according to political and historical circumstances. The migration narrative, elaborated in the Ottoman and Aq Qoyunlu contexts, was eventually incorporated into a post-Oghuz conception of the past, after the Oghuz identity lost its appeal as a feature of historical memory. Judging by when the narrative was rebranded as a triumphant Turkmen arrival into Rum and Iran, this change must have taken place by the seventeenth century. By then, Turkmen tribes in Ottoman and Safavid lands had become increasingly peripheral to the structures of early modern empires, namely, large standing armies and stricter cash-based tax regimes. It is therefore unsurprising that the narrative featured in popular traditions that challenged imperial power, as we find in the Köroğlu epic. The Oghuz, who had once ruled a universal empire, became the Turkmen opponents of the political structures that they had helped to construct. The historical significance of the migration story should be further explored, as the themes of trauma and displacement among Turkmen tribes may illuminate aspects of Anatolian and Iranian history. What impact did such historical memory have, for instance, on the early Safavid movement, where it may have fueled a sense of injustice and a desire for the restitution of an imagined order of times past? Did the circulation of such narratives play a role in sixteenth-century Turkmen migrations from Anatolia to Iran, or affect the historical sensibilities of Turkmen tribes in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands? How can we understand their lasting connection, material or imagined, to Khorasan and Inner Asia? On the whole, the political value and function of Oghuz epic narratives reflect the increasing growth of the early modern Eurasian state vis-à-vis its often-Turkic tribal 211

— ​ A l i A y d i n K a r a m u s t a f a —​ military base. The narratives of Oghuz Khan, which likely originated in a much older and pre-Islamic Inner Asian context, were well suited to the exigencies of the Mongol universal empire, and later became a fixture of the Persianate historiography of Turkic dynasties who drew upon the Mongol legacy. The Dede Korkut tradition navigated the Islamic frontier of Inner Asia, later superimposed onto the frontiers of Rum, flourishing in the fragmented post-Mongol landscape but rarely taken up by early modern dynasties. The consolidation of the large-scale, bureaucratic Eurasian states eventually brought about the need for new storytelling traditions in the oral realm. In this transition, the tribal exodus out of Eurasia became codified as one of the final acts of Oghuz history.

NOTES   1 Oghuz Turks are the largest sub-group of Turkic peoples. In this chapter, “Turkic” indicates a broader and more inclusive category, whereas “Turkish” more narrowly applies to the Oghuz Turks. In the second millennium CE, the Oghuz mainly lived in the Middle East and western swathes of Inner Asia around modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and today are chiefly in the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkmenistan. Oghuz is spelled “Oğuz” in western Turkish.   2 He is called “Oghuz Kagan” in eastern Turkic. I use Khan for consistency.   3 See, for example, Reichl (2011), where he writes that in the Turkish epic, “Two areas of foreign influence can be distinguished, the Iranian and the Arabian” (683).   4 Space does not permit for this study to delve into the origins of Oghuz epic traditions, which surely pre-date the Mongol period.   5 See Binbaş (2010) for a thorough overview of the stories of Oghuz Khan.   6 A Persian hero in the Shāhnāmeh.   7 The most well-known example is the Qarakhanid dynasty of Transoxiana (999–1211), called “Āl-i Afrāsiyāb” in sources from the period (Golden 1994, 214).   8 The Soviet folklorist Korogli also suggests that the two epic traditions were already intertwined, pointing to a range of Turkic elements and characters in the Shāhnāmeh, including Qarakhan (son of Afrasiyab) and Krukhan (referenced twice as a relation of Afrasiyab) (1983, 117–59).   9 This name is typically rendered “Bayındır” in modern Turkish. I opt for “Bayandur” to adhere to the spelling in the sources of the period at hand and for consistency. 10 Rum, or Rome, was the nearly universal term in the pre-modern Islamic world for the former Byzantine lands of Anatolia. 11 Others could be added to this list; for instance, the Ṣelātīn-nāme of a historian named Kemal from the time of Bayezid II, although I was not able to verify its details based on Yınanç (1978, 175). The Düstūrnāme by Enveri (composed 1465) likely also drew upon this model. 12 Mahan (spelled either māhān or māḥān) was clearly a narrative element that had long circulated in the oral tradition, as the author confuses or blends the town in Khorasan with another of the same name either in the vicinity of Kerman or Hamadan. 13 We are likely missing fifteenth-century sources, which would have established a clearer link between Oghuz Khan narratives, The Book of Dede Korkut, and Oghuz migration stories, as deduced by Woods (1999, 176–77). 14 This term, coined as early as the eleventh century, refers to Islamized Turkish tribes but retains connotations of unruliness and uncouthness (Karamustafa 2020). 15 Turan was a conventional term for Inner Asia.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A B AT T L E O F E Q U A L S

R U S TA M A N D I S FA N D I A R I N I L L U S T R AT E D M A N U S C R I P T S O F T H E S H AˉH N AˉM A

rsr Behrang Nabavi Nejad

The most celebrated example of epic work in the Persian language is indubitably the Shāhnāma (also spelled “Shāhnāmeh”), or “The Book of Kings,” composed by Abulqasim Firdausi (also spelled “Ferdowsi”; 940–1021 CE). Completed in 1010, it comprises anywhere from fifty to eighty thousand couplets, depending on the manuscript. The Shāhnāma fits within the genre of Persian epic, which may be defined as narrative literature of heroic essence, written in prose or verse. This lengthy epic narrative tells of the struggles of kings, heroes, and fantastic creatures in a pre-Islamic past in a collection of interconnected stories. In composing his Shāhnāma, Firdausi incorporates various oral and written sources relating to Persian kings and heroes, both mythological and historical, into his versified narrative. Modern scholars divide the narratives in the Shāhnāma into three sections: mythical, heroic, and historical. This essay explores the highly significant episode of Rustam and Isfandiar, from the “heroic” part of the Shāhnāma. The aged, peerless hero Rustam, from the family of Sistani lords, is considered the most celebrated and mightiest hero of Iran, and a great defender of the Persian throne. The young crown-prince to the Persian throne, Isfandiar, represents the royal status quo and a protector of the Zoroastrian religion. Under exceptional circumstances, Rustam is forced into a battle with his crownprince, Isfandiar. The tragic outcome of this battle is due to the intercession of a supernatural bird, the Simurgh. In this chapter, I analyze this episode on the level of narrative and image (especially compositional arrangement), to argue that the equal power balance between the rivals as proposed in the text has been translated into a balanced compositional arrangement in visual art that is distinctive to the Ilkhanid dynasty (1256–1335) and their successors in pre-modern Iran. I further argue that this episode presents us with a unique model of epic literature, one that does not have recourse to an implicit hierarchy between epic combatants. In this episode, the outcome does not depend on a hierarchy between the epic combatants, and whose “victor” is not necessarily implicitly morally right and culturally superior, as often is the case in epic literature. Although there is an implicit social hierarchy in the epic, such that Isfandiar is “above” Rustam in social standing, DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-19

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— ​ B e h r a n g N a b a v i N e j a d —​ still, the two rivals share a parallel character development. Rustam and Isfandiar are in fact “equals,” for both possess luminous glory (farr) as defined in the Zāmyād-yašt chapter of the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism. This point is reinforced in the many paintings of the episode in illustrated manuscripts produced between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.

THE SHAˉHNAˉMA AND ITS SOURCES For over a millennium, since its composition, the Shāhnāma has had an immense impact on Persian society and culture, especially its art, and has greatly shaped Iranian national identity. To compose his Shāhnāma, Firdausi consulted several written sources and oral narratives regarding the events and characters he chose to highlight from the Persian past. While there is textual evidence of a tradition of epic narration in Iran from the pre-Zoroastrian era (Omidsalar 2011, 34), there are references in the Shāhnāma to ancient (Indo-Iranian) kings and heroes, whose ordeals are preserved in the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrianism.1 A recurring theme in both sources is the notion of kingly and Iranian glory, farr, which is the subject of a chapter in the Avesta, called “Zāmyād-yašt,” and established as a requirement of kingship throughout the Shāhnāma. Another major source for the poet of the Shāhnāma was the Pahlavi or Middle Persian work known as Khudāynāma, an official chronicle of Iranshahr recorded between the fifth and the seventh centuries (2011, 37). Prior to Firdausi’s Shāhnāma, the epic stories of kings and heroes were recorded in written accounts, all called “Shāhnāmas.” Among these, a Shāhnāma composed in prose for an official under the Samanids (819–999 CE), Abu Mansur ibn ʿAbd al-Razzaq (died 961), by a group of Zoroastrian scholars in 958 is recognized by scholars as a vital source for Firdausi. A young poet, Daqiqi (circa 932–977), first versified a part of the Abu Mansuri Shāhnāma in a thousand couplets. Firdausi then incorporated Daqiqi’s couplets into his Shāhnāma (Shahbazi 1991, 34–38). The earliest surviving manuscripts of the Shāhnāma date to almost two hundred years after its composition (Khaleghi Motlagh 2008), and the first known illustrated copies date from around 1300 CE. However, illustrating the stories of the Shāhnāma was a well-established tradition in Iranian visual culture that preceded the composition of the text by Firdausi (Simpson 2013, 82). During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, excerpts from this work featuring some of its most popular characters decorated the surface of walls and objects. The beginning of Ilkhanid (Mongol) rule (1256–1335), however, marks the rise in popularity of the Shāhnāma and the creation of illustrated manuscripts of this magnum opus of Persian literature. Under the command of their fierce leader Genghis Khan (circa 1162–1227), the Mongols started a vast military campaign across Central Asia, establishing their rule in Iran, as the Ilkhans, in 1256. They soon adopted local practices in administration, religion, and the traditions of royal authority and kingship. The Mongols’ programs to revive Persian culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are an indication of their commitment to rebuild the country they had mass-destroyed to establish themselves in Persia. The style of the illustrated manuscripts they patronized suggests the influence of Chinese objects and paintings, which were popular and circulated widely in the Ilkhanid dynasty based in present-day Iran. The fact that 216

— ​ A B a t t l e o f E q u a l s : R u s t a m a n d I s f a n d i a r —​ Mongol noblemen were mainly illiterate and couldn’t access the written text may also be a reason the illustrated Shāhnāma was so popular in this period (Hillenbrand 2004, 1–2). The Shāhnāma also functioned as a vehicle to promote Persian heritage and identity at a time when the new Mongol rulers of Persia needed to identify with the Persian past to legitimize their rule. For them, the Shāhnāma may have served a didactic purpose, giving them insight into the character and deeds of the ancient Persian kings (Hillenbrand 2003, 137, 154; Askari 2016). During the golden age of Persian painting, which started with the Ilkhanid rule and flourished under the subsequent rulers, the Timurids and the Safavids from the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries, this epic account was frequently illustrated, more than any other text in Persian literature (Grabar 2010, 91). As a result, hundreds of illustrated volumes of this text have survived, but even this is probably only a small part of the corpus of the illustrated Shāhnāma manuscripts. The rulers and royal members of the court frequently commissioned manuscripts of the Shāhnāma, with the aim of expressing their wealth and stability, or out of concern for the legitimacy of their rule. The popularity of the Shāhnāma among the rulers of Persia largely stems from its concentration on the ideas of kingship, royal authority, and legitimacy. These notions were no doubt critically important to the rulers, who employed the Shāhnāma to obliquely publicize their political and dynastic goals (Melville 2006, xxii). Hence, the collection of stories in the epic, with its central theme of a conflict between the countries of Iran and Turan, was utilized as an ideologically charged vehicle, to deliver a message each time it was produced. Following the royal models, commercial productions of the Shāhnāma also enjoyed popularity among the public and were sold in the market to individuals for their personal use and pleasure. Although the production of illustrated manuscripts of this “Book of Kings” has declined in recent centuries, the printed text, with its heroic narratives and characters, continues to hold a vital position in Iranian life and culture. Influenced by the style and popularity of the Shāhnāma, poets began to compose other epic accounts narrating the adventures of other famous kings and secondary heroes of this epic in the following centuries. The closest in date is the Garshāspnāma (The Book of Garshasp), by Asadi Tusi, completed in 1066. It narrates the stories of Garshasp, the ancient Iranian hero who is only briefly mentioned by Firdausi. The Farāmarznāma (The Book of Faramarz), another heroic epic, recounts the adventures of Faramarz, Rustam’s son, in India. The fascination with epic narratives and the popularity of the Shāhnāma as a book of kings inspired the composition of the accounts of the lives of kings with emphasis on their heroic deeds as a distinct genre in Persian literature. A panegyric prose epic called the Zafarnāma (also spelled “Ẓafarnāmeh”; The Book of Victories), completed in 1425, recounts the life events of Timur (ruled 1370–1405), based on historical facts recorded by its author, Sharaf al-Din ʿAli Yazdi. Following the Persian tradition, the Mughal rulers of India also recorded their biographies or commissioned their court historians and ministers to write the histories of their lives. These biographies, all in prose, record historical events while embellishing the rulers’ heroism. Following the tradition of Persian painting facilitated through the migration of Persian court painters to the Mughal royal workshop during the sixteenth century, these Mughal biographies are illustrated and show a synthesis of Persian and Indian visual styles. 217

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THE THREE PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS IN THE EPIC OF RUSTAM AND ISFANDIAR The origin of Rustam as an epic type dates to Indo-Iranian time, roughly the third to second millennium BCE, and probably was derived from an early Indo-European type (Bahar 1997; SkjærvØ 1998, 163). Rustam plays a central role in the heroic section of the Shāhnāma as the mightiest hero. In his significantly long life of about six hundred years, he serves seven kings. His lineage in the epic narrative is complex; he belongs to the Sistani family of heroes who ruled over Sistan, a historical region in the eastern part of contemporary Iran, as subordinates of the Kayanids (also called “Kayanian” in English) kings. Through his mother, he descends from the serpent-king, Zahhak, who ruled tyrannically over Iran for a thousand years. Rustam’s father, Zal, is raised by the wondrous wise bird, the Simurgh, who becomes the guardian of Zal and his family. The Simurgh saves the life of Rudaba, Zal’s wife, while giving birth to Rustam, and later, saves Rustam during his tragic battle with Isfandiar (Shāhnāma I: 151–53; III: 184–87).2 Rustam’s legendary fame is due to his physical strength and military prowess in confrontations against the enemies of Iran, demons, and sometimes even Persian kings. As with his lineage, Rustam’s personality is complicated; despite being a cavalier, he deceives his rivals from time to time to secure his triumphs and fame as a warrior, and he openly disagrees with kings of whom he disapproves, including Gushtasp, the father of the crown-prince, Isfandiar. Throughout the Iranian national epic, Rustam is identified by various epithets such as “with a strong body” (tahmtan), “the trickster or son of Zal” (Datsān) (Davis 1999), and “the crown-bestower” (tāj-bakhsh) (Davidson 2013b). His chosen weapon is the ox-headed club/mace (gurz-i gāv sar), the hereditary weapon of his family of heroes from the time of Faridun, and a symbol of heroism and justice (Doostkhah 2012). His armor is the tiger skin (babr-i bayān), and he rides his legendary steed, Rakhsh, that never leaves his side.3 As part of his heroic endeavors, Rustam overcomes seven ordeals, haft khwan, while rescuing the king Kavus and his army from the white demon’s prison (Shāhnāma I: 210–22). These heroic trials establish the young hero’s role in the narrative and enable him to effectively replace his father (Omidsalar 2001). Confronting Rustam in this episode is Isfandiar, the Kayanid crown-prince, the son of king Gushtasp, and grandson of Luhrasp. His name is mentioned briefly in the Avestan and Middle Persian sources, but his legendary story is given full elaboration in the Shāhnāma, where he is depicted as a prince, a warrior, and the protector of Zoroastrianism, the religion that emerged during the reign of Gushtasp. Isfandiar is born while his father is in exile in Rum, and marries Katayun, a daughter of Caesar (Shāhnāma III: 40).4 One of Isfandiar’s qualities is that, like Achilles, he is invincible, except in one spot. But while Achilles’ undoing is his heel, Isfandiar’s is his eyes. Similar to Rustam, Isfandiar possesses bravery, strength, and combat skills, and demonstrates his ability to protect the kingdom of Iran through victories during his own seven ordeals. But Isfandiar has an uneasy relationship with his father, the king of Persia; earlier, Gushtasp accuses him of plotting against him, out of desire for the throne, and thus imprisons him. However, when a repentant Gushtasp asks his son to protect the kingdom and defeat Arjasp, the Turanian king who has imprisoned and enchained Isfandiar’s sisters, Isfandiar does not refuse him. So, on the orders of 218

— ​ A B a t t l e o f E q u a l s : R u s t a m a n d I s f a n d i a r —​ his father and on his promise of the throne if he should defeat the enemy, Isfandiar releases his sisters from the Turanian prison of king Arjasp (Shāhnāma III: 101– 34). After a victorious return from Turan in Central Asia, Gushtasp reneges on his promise to give Isfandiar the throne. Instead, the father sets his competent prince on yet another venture, postponing his enthronement till after his successful return. His task is to capture the greatest hero of Persia, Rustam. In this way, together, Isfandiar and Rustam represent two heroic types in the Shāhnāma, one who follows society’s rules for warriors, and one who breaks them from time to time (Davis 2011, 27). The combat of the two heroes makes one of the climaxes of the Shāhnāma, and we shall return to it shortly. The third influential character who advances the story of Rustam and Isfandiar is a wondrous bird, the Simurgh. As mentioned, she is the adoptive mother of Zal, Rustam’s father. Zal and the Simurgh are introduced earlier in the Shāhnāma during the reign of the Pishdadian king, Manuchehr. Zal is born with demonic features, dark skin, and white hair, and thus is abandoned by his father, Sam, the lord and hero of Sistan, who interprets his son’s appearance as a bad omen (Shāhnāma I: 97). The fantastic bird, the Simurgh, then finds the infant, raises him as her own child, and teaches him her sorcery and wisdom. When Zal is a young man, his remorseful father pleads for his return. Initially, Zal is reluctant, but is convinced to go after the Simurgh gives him two of her feathers as symbols of her protection and divine fortune, farr, which have the power to summon her whenever he is in danger. Subsequently, as relayed in the Shāhnāma, Zal summons the giant bird twice, once at the birth of his son, Rustam, whose massive size as a baby complicated his delivery,5 and once when Rustam is mortally wounded during his combat with Isfandiar. Throughout Kayanid rule, Zal plays an influential role as an advisor and military general, whose intellect and political acumen surpasses even his heroism in battle, toward protecting the Iranian kingdom from antagonistic forces. The Simurgh is a mythical bird of ancient Iran and is mentioned in both the Avesta (as Mərəyō saēno) and Pahlavi sources (as Sēnmurw). There are two references to the Saēna in the Avesta, once in the chapter “Rašn-yašt” (X:17), as a bird responsible for scattering the seeds of all plants that live on a tree in the middle of the Farākhkart Sea (Darmesteter [1880, 1883] 1972, 173; Doostkhah 2012, 400), and once in the chapter “Farvardīn-yašt,” as one of the Iranian men whose inner power (fravashi) is praised (Darmesteter 1972, 203–19). The Pahlavi sources introduce the Simurgh with similar functions as in the first reference in the Avesta (Anklesaria 1956, 147; Farnbagh Dadagi 2006, 87). Although references to the Simurgh in Avestan and Pahlavi literature are divergent in the Shāhnāma, the bird is introduced as the tutor and guardian of Zal and his descendants, and incorporates the features of a bird, a wise advisor, and a healer. In Persian mystical writings, the same bird represents the notion of the divine, and the king of birds. The finest example of Persian mystical poetry, in which the Simurgh represents the divine being, is that composed by Fariduddin Muhammad Attar Nishaburi (died 1221) in his versified account, Manṭiq al-Ṭayr, or as it was originally titled, Maqāmāt-i Ṭuyūr, conventionally translated as The Conference of the Birds (Attar 2011). In this masterpiece of mystical literature, Attar narrates the mystical journey of birds in search of the Simurgh, the obstacles that they face along the way, the withdrawal of some and the destruction of others, and finally accomplishing the path and attaining the Simurgh’s 219

— ​ B e h r a n g N a b a v i N e j a d —​ presence by only thirty of these birds, sī murgh (thirty birds). The whole account of Manṭiq al-Ṭayr is a conversation between the birds, mainly between the hoopoe, the wise bird who answers the philosophical questions and the complaints raised by the rest of the birds.

THE STORY The battle of Rustam and Isfandiar is among the three most tragic and lengthy episodes of the Shāhnāma. Upon his successful return from his seven exploits culminating in the defeat of the Turanian king, Isfandiar awaits succession to the Iranian throne as his father has promised. Yet, the malevolent Gushtasp, who has been informed by his adviser that his son will die in his final task, tells his son he must complete one last trial before gaining the throne: enchaining and imprisoning the potent hero, Rustam, for being arrogant and disrespectful to the king. At first, Isfandiar opposes the order, reminding his father of Rustam’s remarkable achievements in protecting the kingdom over many years of service, but his yearning for the throne prevails, so he departs to Sistan to confront the great hero. On this mission, Isfandiar is accompanied by his vast army. His brother Pashutan and his own sons including Bahman are also part of his entourage. In Sistan, Isfandiar sends his son Bahman to deliver the order of the king to Rustam, commanding the hero to surrender himself, with a promise to give him full protection from any harm after his enthronement. Rustam finds the proposal contrary to his integrity and principles of chivalry. Deferring the offer, he instead invites the prince to be his guest before they both depart to the court to discuss and negotiate the matter with the king. Isfandiar rejects his invitation, and any proposal that disregards the kingly order. Rustam then makes every possible effort to convince Isfandiar to withdraw from battle. Zal and Pashutan warn the warriors of the lethal consequences of their battle, should they continue. Yet, all warnings fall in vain: the aged hero and the young prince embark on a single combat and fight for a day, at the end of which Rustam is heavily injured. The victorious Isfandiar demands submission, but Rustam asks for an overnight reprieve to heal his wounds with a plan to continue fighting the next morning. The reprieve is granted. Back with his family, the disheartened hero considers escaping overnight, but his father, Zal-i Zar, intervenes by summoning the fantastic bird, Simurgh. The wise bird heals the wounds of Rustam and his horse with her magic feathers. While questioning the hero’s decision to fight with Isfandiar, Simurgh reveals to Rustam the secret prophecy that whoever kills the nearly invulnerable Isfandiar will live in misery and pain both in this life and the afterlife. Out of her love for the descendants of Zal, the Simurgh instructs Rustam to fashion a double-headed arrow from the branches of a tamarisk tree (gaz) and target Isfandiar’s eyes, as his eyes are the only vulnerable part of his body. The bird then asks Rustam to first appeal to the Persian prince to end the fight, and to only proceed if he refuses (Shāhnāma III: 187). The next morning on the battleground, Rustam pleads with Isfandiar to end the fight and even says he will follow Isfandiar to court but the haughty prince insists on chaining the old paladin. This compels Rustam to act as advised by the Simurgh, and he shoots the deadly arrow into Isfandiar’s eyes. Surrounded by his brother and son, with his last breath, Isfandiar blames destiny, and the tricks of Rustam, Simurgh, and Zal for his death, and entrusts his son’s education, Bahman, to Rustam (Shāhnāma III: 135–201). 220

— ​ A B a t t l e o f E q u a l s : R u s t a m a n d I s f a n d i a r —​ Rustam, as promised to Isfandiar, watches over Isfandiar’s son, Bahman. Later, as Firdausi narrates, Rustam’s life is ended by the trickery of the hero’s half-brother, Shaghad. After Bahman ascends to the Iranian throne, he attacks Rustam’s homeland of Zabulistan, seeking revenge for his father’s blood. He kills Rustam’s son, Faramarz, and enchains Zal. As the Simurgh warned, misery remains with the one who killed Isfandiar, even after death. The battle of Rustam and Isfandiar is also narrated by the founder of “the Philosophy of Illumination,” (hekmat-i ishrāq) Shahab al-din Suhrawardi, in his treatise, ʿAql-i Surkh (The Red Intellect). In his account though, it is the light of the Simurgh that makes Isfandiar blind, and there are no real arrows involved. Zal prepares armor of polished iron for Rustam to wear, and covers his horse with polished mirrors, and then sends them to the battlefield facing the Simurgh in the sky. Once Isfandiar approaches and faces them on the battleground, the rays of the Simurgh reflect on Rustam’s armor and his horse’s mirrored coat, dazzling Isfandiar’s eyes. Mistaking the piercing light as an arrow wounding his eyes, the prince falls to the ground, vanquished by the Persian hero (Nasr [1373] 1994, 234; Suhrawardi 1999, 28).

THE ILLUSTRATIONS Illustrating the Shāhnāma, whether its individual stories or the book as a whole, has been part of the artistic tradition of Iran, even before its composition by Firdausi, with illustrated manuscripts surviving from the early fourteenth century (Simpson 1979). The story of Rustam and Isfandiar has been illustrated in several manuscripts of the Shāhnāma, including royal commissions and commercial productions. A close analysis of the illustrations portraying the conclusion of the story, Isfandiar slain by Rustam, reveals that contemporaneous creators and audiences of this story likely considered the two rivals as equal powers. The visual similarity in the composition and arrangement of the elements suggests the formation of a visual type for depicting this episode of the national epic through many centuries of the art of illustrating the Shāhnāma. The illustrated manuscripts of the Shāhnāma commissioned by kings or members of the royal families mostly remained in royal libraries and were inherited by the succeeding kings and dynasties. They were received as symbols of wealth, and conferred status to a dynasty or a ruler. The illustrated manuscripts themselves probably inspired the design of subsequent illustrated copies, as they were probably consulted by directors of projects who designed the illustrative programs of the manuscripts. This would explain the repeated use of a similar composition for the final moment of this episode. One of the earliest visual depictions of this story (Figure 15.1) is an illustration from the Great Ilkhanid Shāhnāma of the fourteenth century (Grabar and Blair 1980), attributed to the patronage of Abu Sa’id (ruled 1316–35), the last Ilkhanid ruler (Soudavar 1996). This horizontal band of painting, stretching over six columns of text, shows the two warriors in a conventional fourteenth-century composition. It is divided in half by a chinoiserie landscape, with elements that were assimilated into the visual vocabulary of Persian painting after the Mongol conquest; a tree trunk in the background and a shrub positioned exactly between the bodies of the two horses of the warriors divide the picture plane into two almost 221

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Figure 15.1  Rustam Shoots Isfandiar in the Eyes, from a manuscript of the Great Ilkhanid Shahnama, circa 1335, Tabriz, Iran. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (1958.288).

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— ​ A B a t t l e o f E q u a l s : R u s t a m a n d I s f a n d i a r —​ symmetrical halves. The illustration itself depicts the exact moment Rustam fires the deadly arrow, as his arms are still raised in a shooting position. The arrow has pierced Isfandiar’s eyes, while his body is leaning forward but still seated on his horse. Except for Isfandiar’s bodily position, there is no indication that the aged hero has triumphed. This balanced, almost symmetrical composition was repeatedly used to illustrate this battle scene in subsequent manuscripts. Two of the three Shāhnāma manuscripts prepared for the bibliophile Timurid princes, produced between the 1420s and 1444, include similarly composed illustrations. The Timurid brothers most probably discussed the illustrative program of their Shāhnāmas, as they corresponded on literary matters as adults (Sims 1992, 44). Although the illustrative programs of their manuscripts do not have much in common, they all illustrate the story of Rustam and Isfandiar in similar ways. Baysunghur’s Shāhnāma, dated 1430, is preserved at the Gulistan Palace Library in Tehran (Semsar [1379] 2000, 106). In this manuscript, the illustration of the story shows Rustam and Isfandiar in conversation before the battle. The warriors are seated, shaking hands, and surrounded by their men, including a musician. The other two manuscripts produced for Muhammad Juki, 1444–1445, in Herat (Brend 2010), and for Ibrahim Sultan, 1420s or early 1430s, in Shiraz (Melville and Abdullaeva 2008), both depict the exact moment of the story as in the Ilkhanid copy: Rustam has just shot the deadly arrow into Isfandiar’s eyes, the hero’s eyes are bleeding while he is still mounted. In both paintings, the warriors are mounted on their steeds and fully armed. Their positioning within the picture plane does not suggest any form of hierarchy in rank or power. While the Herati illustration (Figure 15.2) reveals the details in landscape with rocky formations, and the two armies and their standards in the background, the Shirazi manuscript (Ms. Ouseley Add 176, folio 282b, The Bodleian Library) follows the compositional simplicity of its provenance. Similarly, the full-page illustration of this episode in the Safavid manuscript of Shah Tahmasp (1525–1535) shows a comparable compositional arrangement with minor variances, but unlike the three former examples, Rustam and his steed occupy the right half of the painting while Isfandiar is painted on the left (Figure 15.3). It also shows a slightly later moment in the story when Isfandiar’s brother, Pashutan, rushes to his side, blaming Rustam for his deed. He is represented as a figure on foot, located between the two steeds (Canby 2014, 271). In yet another painting that was once part of a manuscript of a Shāhnāma produced in Shiraz circa 1560, the same arrangement is used to depict the warriors, but the scene is crowded by the presence of two armies in the background and possibly the close companions of the warriors in the foreground. There are more examples of illustrations of this scene from the large corpus of the illustrated Shāhnāma manuscripts that adhere to this compositional arrangement.6 Other parts of this story have also been illustrated. For example, all four of the royal manuscripts discussed above include paintings of the two warriors in single combat before the final act: folio 291b in the Muhammad Juki’s Shāhnāma, folio 280b in Ibrahim Sultan’s Shāhnāma, and folio 461v in the Tahmasp’s Shāhnāma.7 A painting mounted on the Istanbul album (H.2152, folio 48a) circa 1400, housed at the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, depicts the scene, The Simurgh Healing Rustam and his Horse, Rakhsh, with resonations of the visual traditions of

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Figure 15.2  Rustam Shoots Isfandiar in the Eyes, from a manuscript of the Shāhnāma produced for Muhammad Juki, 1444–1445, Herat, Afghanistan. The Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK (239, folio 296r).

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Figure 15.3  Rustam Slays Isfandiar, from the Shāhnāma of Shah Tahmasp, attributed to Qasim ibn ‘Ali, circa 1525–1530, Tabriz, Iran. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (1970.301.55, folio 466r).

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— ​ B e h r a n g N a b a v i N e j a d —​ Muzaffarid and Jalayirid paintings (Lentz and Lowry 1989, 63; Roxburgh 2005, 98). Because of their large size and vivid compositions, Thomas Lentz and Glenn Lowry associate these paintings with Timur’s patronage, and possible use during Shāhnāma recitations, or Shāhnāma-khānī (Lentz and Lowry 1989, 60). Recitation of the stories of the Shāhnāma by a professional storyteller (naqqāl), for public or private audiences, was an old tradition, probably dating back to before the composition of the text. In this album painting, the scene of The Simurgh Healing Rustam portrays the exact moment when the bird treats the hero’s wounds, with Zal, Rakhsh, and Rudaba, his mother, at the scene. The tradition of illustrating Shāhnāma manuscripts continued well into the nineteenth century. A nineteenth-century illustration from a copy of the Shāhnāma at The Free Library of Philadelphia (Ms. Lewis 0.58, folio 322r) shows the scene Zal summoning the Simurgh to restore Rustam. Here the figure of Rustam, with his long black beard, narrow waist, Qajar dress, and decorated belt and sword, was inspired by the many life-size paintings of the Qajar ruler, Fath ʿAli Shah (Simsar 1937). With the advent of lithography, illustrated copies of the Shāhnāma were produced in Iran and India. The first lithographed copy of the text, published in Iran in 1848 and illustrated by Mirza ʿAli Quli Khui, includes an illustration of our story (Samadi [1388] 2009, 143). To no surprise, the illustrator has utilized the same balanced compositional arrangement to depict the final moment of this combat. It is reasonable to conclude that, at this point in the history of Persian painting, there was a conventional compositional style for depicting the two protagonists, Rustam and Isfandiar, that placed them as equals in balanced compositions.

CONCLUSION The battle of Rustam and Isfandiar is a battle of equal forces. Both warriors possess the luminous glory (Avestan xvarənah, Pahlavi xwarrah, and Persian farr) that is a well-established concept in ancient Iranian ideology. The Avesta (Aštād-yašt I and II) records two types of glory, both generated by Ahuramazda, the creator in the dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism: Iranian glory (farr-i Īrānī) that belongs to all worthy Iranians (Darmesteter 1972, 283–84; Doostkhah 2012, 481) and royal glory (farr-i Kīānī) that is a requirement of kingship. Glory, it was believed, was a tangible essence that would leave its possessors once they departed from the path of truth. As recorded in Zāmyād-yašt chapter in the Avesta (19:34–38), glory abandoned Jamshid, the king of Iran, in the form of the bird Vāreghna, three times when he spoke falsely. The first time, Mithra, the deity of justice, then Faridun, the next king of Iran, and finally Garshasp, the exalted hero, received his glory (Darmesteter 1972, 293–94; Doostkhah 2012, 490–91). These three recipients of glory in Zāmyād-yašt bear comparison with the three personages in the story of Rustam and Isfandiar. Many personalities are engaged in the development of this story in the Shāhnāma: Gushtasp who wickedly orchestrates their deadly combat; Katayoun, Isfandiar’s mother, who objects to the evil plan from the beginning; Pashutan, the wise brother of Isfandiar, Bahman, his young and inexperienced son; and Rustam’s family members, Zavara and Faramarz, whose actions only exacerbate the situation. However, the main characters are the two protagonists, who both possess luminous glory. Isfandiar is a legitimate prince who, like Faridun, has kingly glory through his connection to the lineage of Persian kings. 226

— ​ A B a t t l e o f E q u a l s : R u s t a m a n d I s f a n d i a r —​ Rustam also has glory on account of his ancestry. He is a descendant of Garshasp, who received kingly glory from Jamshid (Miskub [1353] 1974, 67). The outcome of the struggle between these two combatants, though, is deter­mined by a third force, the Simurgh, in alliance with Rustam’s father, Zal. The Simurgh, who is associated with rašn, the Zoroastrian deity of justice, owns the glory and protects the descendants of Zal under the shadow of her glory. Thus, the bird is comparable to Mithra, the first recipient of farr in the Zāmyād-yašt. The Simurgh is aware of Isfandiar’s glory and warns Rustam of the torment following his murder. The tragic end of this story is a failure for both parties as this is not a battle between good and evil, but between two virtuous protagonists. The compositional arrangement repeatedly used over five hundred years to visualize the final moment of this battle represents an equal power balance between the two heroes. The Shāhnāma is an epic narrative of many battles and combats, and this compositional style has been used in illustrating many single combats in various manuscripts of this text. Yet, in most scenes of defeat, vivid visual elements indicate the supremacy of the victor over the vanquished. To exemplify, the heavily illustrated manuscript of Shah Tahmasp (with 258 paintings) includes many single combat paintings in its illustrative program. Some demonstrate striking visualizations of the moment of defeat and bloodshed, and degrade the loser dramatically. Some examples are The Combat of Rustam and Kamus (folio 271r) and The Seventh Exploits of Isfandiar: Slaying Gurgsar (folio 439v), both preserved at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Canby 2014, 222 and 267), and several illustrations from the episode of ‘the Joust of Rooks.’ The final moment of the battle between the two Persian heroes has been illustrated without those visualizations, thus conveying a strong sense of balance. As the three personages involved in this epic episode inherited the luminous glory from their Avestan predecessors, the power structure established in the epic narrative of Rustam and Isfandiar is a balanced one and continues to be perceived as such in medieval and pre-modern Iranian society, as reflected in the art of the book.

NOTES 1 Zoroastrianism developed circa 1200–1400 BCE and became the state religion of the great Persian empires from the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE. 2 All citations from the Shāhnāma are based on Firdausi [1394] (2015), edited by Khaleghi Mutlaq. 3 There are numerous manuscript illustrations showing Rustam in his famous outfit, with his horse, Rakhsh. See, for example, Rustam Sleeping While Rakhsh Fights the Lion, 1515– 1522, Tabriz, Iran. The British Museum (1948,1211,0.23). 4 “Rum” here refers to the lands and empires west of Persia (generally Asia Minor and parts of Europe). 5 Once he arrives at the scene, the Simurgh instructs Zal to have a wise man cut the side of Rudaba (Rustam’s mother), take the giant baby out, and stitch up her side. She then instructs him to prepare a medication to heal her wounds, and save the lives of both the mother and child. 6 See, for example, fifteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrations in The Metropolitan Museum (2016, 176; 1975.192.26). 7 For the Great Ilkhanid Shāhnāma illustration (33.60 at Nelson Gallery), see https://art.nelsonatkins.org/objects/12951/rustam-and-isfandiyar-a-page-from-the-great-ilkhanid-mong.

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WORKS CITED Anklesaria, Behramgore Tehmuras, trans. 1956. Zand Ākāsīh: Iranian or Greater Bundahišn. Bombay: Rahnumae Mazdayasnan Sabha. Askari, Nasrin. 2016. The Medieval Reception of the Shāhnāma as a Mirror for Princes. Boston: Brill. Attar, Farid al-Din. 2011. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. Rev. ed. London: Penguin Books. Bahar, Mehrdad. 1997. Az ustura tā tārīkh [From myth to history]. Tehran: Cheshmeh. Brend, Barbara. 2010. Muhammad Juki’s Shahnamah of Firdausi. London: The Royal Asiatic Society. Canby, Sheila. 2014. The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp: The Persian Book of Kings. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Darmesteter, James, trans. [1880, 1883] 1972. The Zend-Avesta, parts 1-2. Sacred Books of the East Series, vols. 4, 23. Edited by Friedrich Max Müller. Westport, CT: Clarendon Press. Davidson, Olga. 2013a. Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings. Boston: Ilex Foundation. ———. 2013b. “Rustam the Crown-Bestower.” In Comparative Literature of Classical Persian Poetics, edited by Olga Davidson, 47–66. Boston: Ilex Foundation. Davis, Dick. 1999. “Rustam-I Dastan.” Iranian Studies, special issue, The Uses of Guile: Literary and Historical Moments, 32, no. 2: 231–41. ———. 2011. “The ‘Shahnameh’ as World Literature.” In Epic of the Persian Kings: The Art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, edited by Barbara Brend and Charles Melville, 23–30. London: Tauris. Doostkhah, Jalil, trans. 2012. Avesta. 16th ed. Tehran: Murvarid. ———. 2012. “Gorz.” Encyclopedia Iranica. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gorz. Farnbagh Dadagi. 2006. Bundahišn. Translated by Mehrdad Bahar. 3rd ed. Tehran: Tus. Firdausi, Abulqasim. Shāhnāma. [1394] 2015. Edited by Jalal Khaleghi Mutlaq. Tehran: Sukhan. Grabar, Oleg. 2010. “Why Was the Shahnama Illustrated?” Iranian Studies, special issue, Millenium of the Shahnama of Firdausi, 43, no. 1: 91–96. ———, and Sheila Blair. 1980. Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hillenbrand, Robert. 2003. “The Arts of the Book in Ilkhanid Iran.” In The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353, edited by Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni, 134–67. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ———. 2004. “New Perspectives in Shahnama Iconography.” In Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings, edited by Robert Hillenbrand, 1–7. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Khaleghi Motlagh, Djalal. 2008. “Dastnevis-e Now-yafteh az Shahnameh-ye Ferdowsi.” Nameh-ye Baharestan 13–14: 209–78. Lentz, Thomas W., and Glenn D. Lowry. 1989. Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century. Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Melville, Charles. 2006. Introduction to Shahnama Studies I, edited by Charles Melville, xix– xxvi. Cambridge: The University of Cambridge. ———, and Firuza Abdullaeva. 2008. The Persian Book of Kings: Ibrahim Sultan’s Shahnama. Oxford: Bodleian Library. Miskub, Shahrukh. [1353] 1974. Muqadama-yi bar Rustam va Isfandiar [An introduction to Rustam and Isfandiar]. Tehran: Franklin. Nasr, Sayyid Husayn. [1373] 1994. Majmuʿa-yi muṣanafāt-i Shaykh-i Ishrāq [A collection of treatises written by Shaykh-i Ishraq]. Tehran: Pazhuhishgah ʿUlum-i Insani va Mutaliʿat-i Farhangi.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE “HINDU” EPICS? T E L L I N G T H E R A M AYA N A A N D T H E M A H A B H A R ATA I N PREMODERN SOUTH ASIA

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Sohini Sarah Pillai

The Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, two Sanskrit poems that were composed and compiled by the early centuries of the Common Era, are often labeled the “Hindu epics.”1 The Rāmāyaṇa of Valmiki narrates the story of the exiled warrior-prince Rama and his journey to rescue his wife Sita from the demon-king Ravana. Attributed to the sage Vyasa, the Mahābhārata focuses on the catastrophic war between two sets of paternal cousins belonging to the Bharata dynasty: the five Pandavas and the one hundred Kauravas. Given their heroic subject matter and massive lengths (about 24,000 verses for the Rāmāyaṇa and 100,000 verses for the Mahābhārata), it is no surprise that many scholars—the first of whom may have been the nineteenthcentury German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1975, 1053)—have referred to these ancient Sanskrit narratives using the contested and deeply Eurocentric term “epic.” As John Brockington remarks, it is “worth asking from the start whether designation of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa as ‘epics’ affects our understanding of them, generating expectations derived from ideas about the Iliad and Odyssey” (1998, 1). David Shulman argues that when we use the term “epic” for the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, We are dealing with external, analytical definitions that remain rather at variance with the Indian tradition’s own view of these works. For in India, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa have always been placed in different classes: the first is ‘itihāsa’ [history]…while the second is ‘kāvya’ [belles lettres]. (2001, 21–22) John D. Smith, however, justifies using the term “epic” for the Mahābhārata by asserting that “the question to be asked is not, ‘is this the correct genre to be assigning this text to?’ but rather, ‘is comparison with other texts within this genre fruitful?’” (2009, lxvi). Like Smith, I find “epic” to be a productive category for comparing the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata with other long verse narratives. Not only are there multiple 230

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-20

— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​ compelling modern comparative studies of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata and other “epics” such as the Iliad and the Odyssey (e.g. Doniger 1999; Pathak 2014), but comparisons between these Sanskrit poems and other texts that we now classify as “epics” have been made as early as the eleventh century. Finbarr Flood notes that in the Persian Ādāb al-mulūk (Etiquettes of kings, 1026–1027 CE), “Alexander the Great keeps company with both the great warriors of the Mahābhārata and Shāhnāma (the Persian national epic), in a transcultural congeries of heroic personalities and deeds,” and that “around the same time, the great Indologist al-Biruni makes an explicit comparison between the Pandava brothers of the Mahābhārata and the heroes of the Shāhnāma (as indeed later Indo Persian writers do)” (2009, 251).2 In this chapter, my primary goal is not to question the categorization of these two ancient Sanskrit poems as “epics,” but to question the use of the label “Hindu” epics for the larger Ramayana and Mahabharata narrative traditions in premodern South Asia.3 No one can deny the importance of the Hindu religious tradition in the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. An incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu—Rama in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Pandavas’ advisor Krishna in the Mahābhārata—plays a vital role in the narrative of each text. The Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata also both contain a plethora of materials on Hindu myths, rituals, and theologies. But what about the innumerable South Asian narrative poems that tell the stories of these “Hindu epics”? Between 800 and 1800 CE in South Asia, countless Ramayanas and Mahabharatas were composed in Assamese, Bhasha (Old Hindi),4 Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and many other languages. While several of these tellings pay homage to and follow the basic storylines of their ancient Sanskrit counterparts, each of these poems is a unique and innovative composition that is in no way a simple word-for-word translation of the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata. This chapter introduces readers to the remarkably diverse world of premodern South Asian Ramayanas and Mahabharatas that were composed in languages other than Sanskrit in order to demonstrate how the categorization of these narrative traditions as the “Hindu” epics is inadequate and misleading. I begin by examining tellings by Jain, Muslim, and Sikh poets. I then turn to Ramayanas and Mahabharatas by Hindu authors in regional languages. These tellings display a multitude of different social, political, and religious concerns. In my conclusion, I discuss the implications of calling the Ramayana and Mahabharata narrative traditions the “Hindu” epics in contemporary South Asia.

RAMAYANAS AND MAHABHARATAS BY JAIN, MUSLIM, AND SIKH POETS It is revealing that one of the earliest Ramayanas, the Dasaratha jātaka (Past birth story [in the time of] Dasharatha), is not a Hindu text, but a Buddhist one. Produced around the second century BCE in the transregional Buddhist language of Pali, the Dasaratha Jātaka presents Rama as an earlier incarnation of the Buddha whose sister-turned-wife Sita is never abducted by Ravana. In fact, Ravana never even makes an appearance in the story (Thapar 2013, 215–16). 231

— ​ S o h i n i S a r a h P i l l a i —​ The absence of a violent confrontation between Rama and Ravana is also a major feature of many Ramayanas composed in the transregional languages of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha by followers of Jainism, a religious tradition focused on the principles of nonviolence and asceticism. In the earliest of these works, Vimalasuri’s fifth-century Prakrit Paümacariya (Deeds of Padma), both Rama (known to Jains as Padma) and Ravana are depicted as pious Jain laymen. Ravana’s only flaw is his lust for Sita, and this is why, in accordance with the Jain ideal of nonviolence, he is slain by Rama’s younger brother Lakshmana and not by Rama as he is in Valmiki’s Rāmāyaṇa (Ramanujan 1991, 35). Several Jain Ramayanas were also composed in the regional languages of Kannada (Aithal 1987) and Bhasha (Clines 2020). Two recent studies by Adrian Plau (2018) and Gregory Clines (2022) highlight the diversity of Jain Ramayanas in Bhasha. While Clines demonstrates how Jinadas’ fifteenth-century Rām rās (Story of Ram) is an entertaining yet educational text that has the potential to speak to both Jain and non-Jain audiences, Plau reveals how Ramchand Balak’s seventeenth-century Sītācarit (Deeds of Sita) transforms the traditional Ramayana narrative by shifting the focus to Sita’s life and depicting her as a satī, an ideal Jain laywoman. The Jain Mahabharata tradition begins with Jinasena Punnata’s eighth-century Sanskrit Harivaṃsapurāṇa (Legend of the lineage of Hari), and continues with several other tellings in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Kannada, and Bhasha well into the seventeenth century (De Clercq 2009). Two of the oldest Mahabharatas in a regional language—Pampa’s tenth-century Kannada Vikramārjunavijayaṃ (Victory of heroic Arjuna) and Ranna’s eleventh-century Kannada Sāhasabhīmavijayaṃ (Victory of bold Bhima)—are by Jain poets. Sheldon Pollock describes these Kannada poems as “double narratives” because they compare the poet’s courtly patron (Arikesari II for Pampa and Satyashraya for Ranna, both of the Chalukya dynasty) with one of the Mahabharata’s heroes (Arjuna, the middle Pandava and a skilled warrior, in Pampa’s poem, and Bhima, the strongest Pandava, in Ranna’s text) (2006, 360–63). Pollock (2006, 425–26) and some other scholars of Kannada literature (Pierce Taylor 2020; Lorndale 2021) have noted the lack of Jain religious concepts in the Vikramārjunavijayaṃ and the Sāhasabhīmavijayaṃ, especially when compared to the poets’ other explicitly Jain compositions: Pampa’s Ādipurāṇaṃ (Legend of the first [Jina]) and Ranna’s Ajitapurāṇaṃ (Legend of Ajitanatha). Others, however, have observed Jain ethics in these Kannada Mahabharatas that reflect the Jain identities of Pampa and Ranna. Kambalur Venkatesa Acharya has shown that like Jinasena Punnata, Pampa expresses a discomfort with polyandry by having the princess Draupadi only wed Arjuna, instead of all five Pandavas as she does in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (1981, 258–59). D. R. Nagaraj suggests that Ranna’s “spiritual propensity to doubt and distrust violence led him to elevate the status of Duryodhana,” the Kauravas’ leader who is usually seen as the villain of the Mahabharata (2003, 346). Finally, R.V.S. Sundaram and Ammel Sharon point out that both “Pampa and Ranna give little place” to the Hindu deity Krishna in their poems (2018, xiii). When we turn from Jain tellings to Islamic ones, we also find much narrative diversity. Shankar Nair explains that For roughly a century during the height of Muslim power in predominantly Hindu South Asia—coinciding with the reigns of the emperors Akbar, Jahāngīr, 232

— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​ and Shāh Jahān from 1556–1658 CE—Muslim elite of the Mughal Empire patronized the translation of a large body of Hindu Sanskrit treatises into the Persian language. (2020, 1) One example of this is the Razmnāma (Book of war), a Persian translation of the Mahābhārata commissioned by Akbar in 1582. Najaf Haider reports that the Razmnāma commences with praise of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha “rather than the traditional Islamic formula of invoking Allah (bismillah)” (2011, 119). Yet as the Razmnāma continues, Audrey Truschke observes that the poem “repeatedly refers to a monotheistic Islamic deity, who sometimes replaces individual Hindu gods but more commonly appears alongside them” (2020, 123). She elaborates “that Mughal thinkers introduced Allah, both using that term and others, into the Mahābhārata in order to acculturate the epic for a predominantly Muslim audience” (2020, 123–24). While Akbar also commissioned a Persian translation of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, the most widely circulating Persian Ramayana in premodern South Asia was the seventeenth-century Mas̱ navī-yi Rām va Sītā (Tale of Rama and Sita) of Sadullah “Masih” Panipati, a follower of the Sufi Islamic tradition. Dedicated to Akbar’s son Jahangir, this mas̱ navī (a lengthy narrative poem in rhymed couplets) focuses on the love story of Rama and Sita. Prashant Keshavmurthy notes that Masih identifies “himself as a Sufi master or pīr, and as a mujtahid or authorized practitioner of Islamic legal interpretation (ijtihād)” and presents Rama as “a proto-Muḥammadan prophet” (2018, 10,  23). Supriya Gandhi details how Masih compares Rama to Adam, and Sita “to Maryam, mother of the Islamic prophet Jesus, in her chastity” (2014, 321). The Mahabharata and the Ramayana also have a place in Sikhism, a religion founded on the teachings of Guru Nanak (1469–1539). Elements of both of these narratives are incorporated into the Dasam granth (Tenth book), a controversial scripture that is not accepted by all Sikhs, which is attributed to the tenth Sikh leader, Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708), and primarily composed in Bhasha. As Robin Rinehart has shown, multiple Mahabharata characters (including the eldest Pandava Yudhishthira) make an appearance in the Gian prabodh (Awakening of knowledge) portion of this text (2011, 28) and Rama is described as Guru Gobind Singh’s ancestor in the Bacitra nāṭak (Wondrous drama), an autobiographical account of Guru Gobind Singh’s life (2011, 53–54). The Dasam granth also contains a telling of the Ramayana entitled the Rāmāvatār (Descent of Rama). Yet while the Rāmāvatār presents Rama as an incarnation of Vishnu, this composition concludes with the statement: “the Puranas [Hindu mythological narratives] speak of Ram, and the Qur’an of Rahīm [Allah], but I don’t believe in either of them” (Rinehart 2011, 30), suggesting that the author of the Rāmāvatār does not consider Rama to be an important theological figure. In the seventeenth century, we also see the production of the Bhasha Ādirāmāyaṇ (Primordial Ramayana) of Harji, a leader of the now essentially extinct Mina sectarian Sikh community. Hardip Singh Syan asserts that the depiction of Rama in the Ādirāmāyaṇ as a householder-turned-ascetic modeled on Harji’s father Miharvan is quite unlike the Rāmāvatār’s portrayal of Rama as a strong warrior, loving husband, and illustrious sovereign who resembles Guru Gobind Singh (2013, 166–71). 233

— ​ S o h i n i S a r a h P i l l a i —​ The Sītācarit, the Razmnāma, the Rāmāvatār, and the other compositions discussed thus far exemplify why “Hindu” epic cannot be used as a blanket term for premodern South Asian Ramayanas and Mahabharatas. To call these narrative traditions, the “Hindu” epics obscures the complex and fascinating ways in which Jains, Muslims, and Sikhs have told the stories of Rama and the Pandavas to reflect different values within their own religions.

RAMAYANAS BY HINDU POETS A common assumption in the study of South Asian literature is that most premodern Ramayanas in regional languages by Hindu poets are bhakti (devotional) texts focused on praising the divine Rama and his salvific actions (Brockington 1984, 260; Narayana Rao 2001, 165; Richman 2008, 10). One telling that is frequently used to support this claim is Tulsidas’ sixteenth-century Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas (Lake of the Deeds of Rama). Heidi Pauwels explains that “the major point of Tulsīdās’s work is expressing and preaching devotion to Rāma....Thus the work concentrates less on narrative and more on glorification, and it exploits every possible occasion to sing Rāma’s praise” (2008, 33). Nowhere is this more evident than in the prologue to the poem in which Tulsidas extols the power of Rama’s name in detail. At one point, he tells us: Ram took human form for his followers’ sake, and by suffering hardships, pleased the holy. But, spontaneously repeating his name with love, devotees become abodes of bliss and blessing. Lord Ram liberated one ascetic woman,5 But his name reforms millions of wicked minds. (Lutgendorf 2016, 59) A similar bhakti attitude is found in Eluttacchan’s sixteenth-century Malayalam Adhyātmarāmāyaṇam (Esoteric Ramayana). Rich Freeman observes that Eluttacchan presents Rama as an “empowered godhead incarnate in this world, and teaches the simplistic path of repeating his sacred name as fulfilling all earthly desires and leading to liberation” (2003, 173). But not all Ramayanas by Hindu authors share the same devotional outlook as the Rāmcaritmānas and the Adhyātmarāmāyaṇam. William Smith argues that this is the case for three tellings from the eastern region of South Asia: Madhava Kandali’s fourteenth-century Assamese Rāmāyaṇa, Krittibasa’s fifteenth-century Bengali Rāmāyaṇa, and Balaramadasa’s sixteenth-century Oriya Jagamohanarāmāyaṇa (World-enchanting Ramayana). Smith asserts that while “the bhakti spirit is all pervasive” in the Rāmcaritmānas, in the Ramayanas of “the three eastern poets it is weak, uneven, or absent” (1988, 102). Pollock adds that the Assamese poem “carries not a hint of devotionalism” (2006, 428). Along with Abhiramakamakshi’s fifteenth-century Sanskrit Abhinavarāmābhyudaya (New chronicle of Rama), Molla’s sixteenth-century Telugu Rāmāyaṇam, and Venabai’s seventeenth-century Marathi Sītāsvayaṃvara (Sita’s bridegroom choice), Chandrabati’s sixteenth-century Bengali Rāmāyaṇa is one of a handful of premodern 234

— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​ Ramayanas by women (Gibbons 1979; Tulpule 1979, 401; Dev Sen 1997). Mandakranta Bose and Sarika Bose observe that while Chandrabati identifies Rama as Vishnu’s incarnation, “it is hard to take the poem as an affirmation of faith” since it “contains none of the constant reminders of Rāma’s divinity studded throughout other Rāmāyaṇas” like Tulsidas’ Rāmcaritmānas (2013, 31). Bose and Bose go on to show how Chandrabati (much like Ramchand Balak in the Sītācarit) “has dislodged Rāma from the legend’s ideological centre and turned it into Sītā’s story” (2013, 39). As Anne Monius points out, often in modern scholarship on premodern South Asian literature “the study of the courtly and the political proceeds independently of the religious, and vice versa” (Forthcoming). Several regional Ramayanas, however, challenge this notion that courtly/political and religious/devotional literature were on two parallel yet separate trajectories. Consider Kampan’s twelfth-century Tamil Irāmāvatāram (Descent of Rama). There are moments in this South Indian Ramayana in which Rama is profusely praised as the ultimate godhead. One example is a lengthy eulogy by the demon Viradha in which he tells Rama: The world finds many, many gods to praise but the highest give their devotion to no great god but you, for those on the path know that Brahmā [a Hindu deity] riding his wild goose and all the other gods that the Brahmins pray to are, without you, nothing! (Hart and Heifetz 1988, 49) Expressing devotion to Rama, however, is not the sole project of Kampan’s Ramayana. It is important to recognize that the Irāmāvatāram is a mahākāvya, an ornate multi-chapter narrative text replete with poetic figuration. Despite the fact that in Sanskrit mahākāvya literally means a “long” or “great poem,” today mahākāvya is frequently termed “court epic.” Like several other regional Ramayanas, including eight in Telugu alone (Narayana Rao 2001, 166–67), the Irāmāvatāram makes courtly patronage claims with Kampan praising a local ruler, Cataiyappan of Tiruvenneynallur, roughly after every thousandth verse. Eknath, the author of the sixteenth-century Marathi Bhāvārthrāmāyaṇ (Essence of the Ramayana), and Ramdas, the composer of two seventeenth-century Marathi Ramayanas, are both remembered as Vaishnavas (Vishnu devotees) and sants (poetsaints). But Shankar Gopal Tulpule notes that while Eknath “is sometimes called the Tulsīdās of Maharashtra…apart from their being contemporaries and saintly persons, there is little similarity between the two as poets” (1991, 149). Tulpule argues that Eknath’s poem reflects his opposition to the rise of Muslim rulers (1991, 148). Similarly, Pollock observes that Ramdas likens Rama’s enemy Ravana to the Mughal emperor and devout Muslim, Aurangzeb (1994, 287). Imre Bangha asserts that Vishnudas’ fifteenth-century Bhasha Rāmāyaṇkathā (Ramayana story) is an allegory for the prowess of the poet’s patron, Dungarendra Singh of Gwalior, whose sovereignty was unsuccessfully challenged by the sultans Hushang Shah of Malwa and Mubarak Shah of Delhi. Bangha claims that the 235

— ​ S o h i n i S a r a h P i l l a i —​ Rāmāyaṇkathā’s “message is political rather than religious” (2014, 370). Ronald Stuart McGregor, however, suggests that “Rām may have become to some extent an object of devotional worship for Viṣṇudās, for the text as extant stresses the benefit of hearing the story of Rām, and the need to call upon Rām’s name” (1984, 37–38). Allison Busch describes Keshavdas’ seventeenth-century Rāmcandracandrikā (Moonlight on Ramachandra) as the first Bhasha “experiment with the Sanskrit mahākāvya (courtly epic) style” (2011, 45). Indeed, as Danuta Stasik notes, several chapters of the Rāmcandracandrikā “are dominated by very evocative, fine descriptions of courtly life” (2009, 121). Yet Busch explains that “although the Rāmcandracandrikā is suffused with the exemplary royal themes that the Valmiki Rāmāyaṇa epitomizes, it is at the same time a powerful work of bhakti literature” (2011, 45). Keshavdas’ devotion to Rama and his name is captured in the opening invocation of the Rāmcandracandrikā: The poet Keśavdās keeps repeating every day the name of Rāma, Without any fear of [the poetical flaw of] repetition. His figure confers the power of becoming invisible, His virtues [confer] the power of becoming huge, Devotion towards Him confers greatness; His name confers liberation. (Cavaliere 2020, 56) As this brief (and by no means exhaustive) survey has shown, while devotion to Rama is a major component of multiple premodern tellings by Hindu poets, we cannot simply categorize all regional Ramayanas as Hindu bhakti compositions. Not only does this generalization marginalize tellings that do not prioritize devotion, such as those of Madhava Kandali and Chandrabati, but it also obfuscates the multidimensional projects of Ramayanas with both religious and courtly features like the Irāmāvatāram and the Rāmcandracandrikā.

MAHABHARATAS BY HINDU POETS While premodern Ramayanas in regional languages are often presumed to be Vaishnava devotional texts, premodern Mahabharatas in regional languages have been generalized as non-religious, courtly narratives. The insistence on the absence of religiosity in regional Mahabharatas composed in courtly contexts is emblematic of the current larger scholarly trend that relegates devotional/religious literature and courtly/political literature in premodern South Asia to mutually exclusive worlds. In his extensive and influential study of South Asian literary cultures, Pollock describes the Sanskrit Mahābhārata as “premodern India’s most sustained and profound discourse on power” (2006, 223–24), and asserts that “in vernacular narratives, the boundless universalizing Sanskrit tale was refitted onto the perceptible, traversable, indeed governable world of regional political practice” (2006, 397). Some regional Mahabharatas by Hindu poets certainly do engage in political spheres. Francesca Orsini has shown how Bhim Kavi in his fifteenth-century Bhasha Ḍaṅgvaikathā (Story of Dangvai) “overturns” the traditional Mahabharata narrative for his unnamed chieftain patron who may have been in the service of the Jaunpur Sultanate or the Suri Empire (2015, 337). 236

— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​ In this poem, the Pandavas join forces with the Kauravas (their mortal enemies in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata) and wage war against Krishna in order to save a local king named Dangvai. Orsini demonstrates that “the values that the story embraces are those of subordinate chiefs of limited means, who have to negotiate between the call of honour and the reality of subordination” (2015, 337). M. R. Joshi argues that Shridhar’s eighteenth-century Marathi Pāṇḍavapratāpa (Power of the Pandavas) “imitates and follows” the Ramayanas of Ramdas and presents the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas as an allegory for the war between the Muslim Mughals and the Hindu Marathi-speaking warriors known as the Marathas (2004, 372). Nannaya (eleventh century), Tikkana (thirteenth century), and Errapragada (fourteenth century) are collectively known as the kavitrayamu (trinity of poets) who together composed the Telugu Mahābhāratamu. Nannaya dedicates a large chunk of the prologue to his portion of the Mahābhāratamu to describing how the Chalukya king Rajarajanarendra commissioned a Telugu Mahabharata (Narayana Rao and Shulman 2001, 50–61). Pollock points out that like the Kannada Mahabharatas of Pampa and Ranna, the fifteenth-century Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit (Deeds of the Pandavas) of Vishnudas (who also wrote the Rāmāyaṇkathā) is a “double-narrative” in which Vishnudas’ patron Dungarendra Singh is likened to Bhima (2006, 395). Pollock also pointedly states that both Nannaya’s and Vishnudas’ Mahabharatas are “entirely untouched by religious concerns” (2006, 429). But along with these Mahabharatas with political messages, we also find several regional tellings that are suffused with Vaishnava devotion. Shrinivas Ritti points out that in the fifteenth-century Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī (Essence of the Bharata story in Kannada), Kumaravyasa identifies himself as a devotee of Viranarayana, a local form of Vishnu in Karnataka, and states that he is telling the Mahabharata out of “the urge to narrate [a] Krishna-kathā [story] which Krishna himself would appreciate” (2004, 362). As I noted in the beginning of this chapter, Krishna plays a key role in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. Not only is he the Pandavas’ maternal cousin and closest advisor, he is also the bestower of the famous Bhagavadgītā (Song of the Lord) sermon. Yet unlike Rama in Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, Krishna is not the protagonist of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. The Sanskrit Mahābhārata primarily focuses on the Pandava princes, not their divine mentor. Kumaravyasa’s telling, however, is just one of several regional Mahabharatas that revolve around Krishna. Krishna has a pronounced presence in two Malayalam Mahabharatas: the fifteenth-century Bhāratamāla (Garland of the Bharata) of Shankaran and the sixteenth-century Bhāratam of Eluttacchan, the same author of the devotional Adhyātmarāmāyaṇam (Harindranath and Purushothaman 2005). Petteri Koskikallio and Christophe Vielle report that the twelfth-century Sanskrit Jaiminibhārata (Bharata of Jaimini), which has “an explicit tendency towards Kṛṣṇa [Krishna]-bhakti” (2001, 67), was retold in Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, and Telugu (2001, 71). While William Smith states that “devotional ideals do not affect” the narrative of Saraladasa’s fifteenth-century Oriya Mahābhārata (2001, 103), Bijoy Misra notes that Saraladasa was likely the first poet to identify the local deity Jagannatha of Puri with Krishna and explains that this text “has made Puri a prime center of the Vaishnava faith” (2007, 142). Moreover, there are multiple devotional Mahabharatas that also make pronouncements of courtly patronage. Peruntevanar’s ninth-century Tamil 237

— ​ S o h i n i S a r a h P i l l a i —​ Pārataveṇpā (Bharata in veṇpā meter) is the earliest extant telling of the Mahabharata in a regional language. While Peruntevanar claims a royal patron who has been identified as Nandivarman III of the Pallava dynasty, Venkatesa Acharya shows that Peruntevanar also presents his Mahabharata as “a drama of the ubiquity of Tirumāl,” a distinctly Tamil form of Vishnu (1981, 71). In the beginning of his sixteenthcentury telling, Rama Sarasvati describes King Naranarayana of the Koch dynasty as a “great friend of the Vaiṣṇavas” (William Smith 2001, 93) who ordered him to tell the Mahabharata in Assamese. Smith adds that Rama Sarasvati emphasizes in his text that the Pandavas are only able to survive the many hardships they face because of their “profound faith” in Krishna (2001, 105). Much like Kumaravyasa, the fifteenth-century Tamil poet Villiputturar and the seventeenth-century Bhasha poet Sabalsingh Chauhan both announce that they are only telling the Mahabharata because of Krishna’s presence in the narrative. In the prologue to his Tamil Pāratam (Bharata), Villiputturar proclaims: I do not perceive the excellence of the Mahābhārata in the great language [Sanskrit] praised by the foremost, great, hidden Vedas [ancient Hindu scriptures], the sages, the gods, and others. But I agree to utter this out of my desire for the deeds of the eternal Madhava [Krishna], who appears intermittently in it. (Gopalakrishnamachariyar 1963, 29)6 Similarly, Sabalsingh Chauhan states in the opening preface to his Bhasha Mahābhārat: I cannot comprehend any of the mysteries of the deeds of Hari [Krishna], but I will summarize some of it in Bhasha and thus sing what was told by that great sage Vyasa, knower of the deeds of illustrious Bhagavan [Krishna]. (Ramlagan Pandey 2014, 10) Both Villiputturar and Sabalsingh Chauhan place Krishna at the center of their Mahabharatas. Like his Tamil predecessor Peruntevanar, Villiputturar begins the majority of the fifty chapters of his Pāratam with an invocation to Krishna. He begins his third chapter, for instance, by praising Krishna as the supreme deity using his markedly Tamil name, Mayan: The primordial one of the rare, hidden Vedas is Mayan with the discus, the one who is the color of a dark cloud, the one with lotus eyes, the one who is the hero of Lakshmi [Vishnu’s consort], the one who is the god of gods. Bowing, we worship his two lotus feet. (Gopalakrishnamachariyar 1963, 220) 238

— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​ A closer examination of the Pāratam, however, reveals that this Krishna-centric text is also a mahākāvya that utilizes many of the same tropes, imagery, and forms of poetic figuration used in Kampan’s Irāmāvatāram. Also like Kampan, Villiputturar praises a local patron, the chieftain Varapati Atkontan, at different intervals in his poem. The overall devotional ethos of Sabalsingh Chauhan’s Mahābhārat strongly resembles that of Tulsidas’ Rāmcaritmānas, and these two Bhasha compositions are thus often compared to each other (McGregor 1984, 195). Sabalsingh Chauhan’s poem also resembles the Marathi Ramayanas of Ramdas in that all these tellings refer to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. But instead of condemning Aurangzeb like Ramdas, Sabalsingh Chauhan repeatedly praises him in the Mahābhārat. In the sixteenth book of his telling, Sabalsingh Chauhan describes himself performing the Mahābhārat in the presence of Aurangzeb and a king named Mitrasen: Sabalsingh told this Mahabharata in Bhasha about when Lakshmi’s lord descended and gave protection. King Aurangzeb, lord of Delhi, rules and there Mitrasen, lord of the earth, is delighted. Before these kings of men, Sabalsingh Chauhan sang and composed. (Ramlagan Pandey 2014, 1146) While his great-grandfather Akbar is celebrated in India today for fostering religious pluralism through actions like commissioning the Persian translation of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Aurangzeb is remembered by many as a violent tyrant who persecuted non-Muslims. Sabalsingh Chauhan’s claim that he presented his bhakti Mahabharata to this famously pious Muslim emperor therefore challenges modern popular perceptions of Aurangzeb. The Mahabharatas by the Hindu poets Eluttacchan, Kumaravyasa, Peruntevanar, Rama Sarasvati, Sabalsingh Chauhan, Saraladasa, Shankaran, and Villiputturar thus all dismantle the common conception that premodern regional Mahabharatas are primarily non-religious compositions. Yet as we saw with regional Ramayanas, the use of the “Hindu” epic label conceals the immense diversity of Mahabharatas by Hindu poets, especially tellings that are uninterested in expressing Vaishnava devotion, such as the poems of Nannaya and Vishnudas, and Mahabharatas with both political and religious concerns like the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat.

CONCLUSION The discussion of South Asian Ramayanas and Mahabharatas in this chapter has been restricted to poems composed between 800 and 1800 CE. But if we turn to tellings that were produced in the past two centuries, we find an equally varied array of Ramayanas and Mahabharatas in the forms of performance traditions, poems, short stories, novels, television serials, films, and comics. Their creators include women, Muslims, Jains, and members of caste-oppressed and Indigenous communities (Richman 1991, 2008; Hawley and Pillai 2021). 239

— ​ S o h i n i S a r a h P i l l a i —​ Increasingly over the past century, however, Hindu nationalists in India have vehemently insisted that these narrative traditions are exclusively Hindu. In the eighties and early nineties, Hindu nationalists campaigned to destroy a sixteenth-century mosque that had supposedly been constructed by the Mughal emperor Babur by first destroying a Hindu temple that marked the presumed birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya in North India. This resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque on December 6, 1992, and the deaths of several hundred people in subsequent communal riots throughout South Asia (Hess 2020). In 2011, A. K. Ramanujan’s pioneering essay “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation” (1991) was removed from the history syllabus of Delhi University because Hindu nationalist groups were offended by several of the tellings discussed in the essay (Dharwadker 2012). More recently, in 2019 and 2020, Muslims have been beaten with rods, thrown off moving trains, and had their throats slit by Hindu mobs for refusing to chant “Jay Śrī Rām” or “Victory to Rama” (Geeta Pandey 2019; Bose 2020). After the passing of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, a controversial bill introduced by the current Indian government that has left many Muslim citizens stateless, Hindu rioters accompanied by policemen attacked Muslims protestors in Delhi while screaming “Jay Śrī Rām” (Shroff 2020). Pamela Lothspeich notes that “while politicians have been more eager to take advantage of the Ramayana, manipulating it to serve their ends, creative writers have been more drawn to the incredible literary richness of the Mahabharata” (2009, 214–15). But in recent years even some seemingly benign modern Mahabharatas have not escaped the scrutiny of Hindu nationalists. In 2016, Mama’s Boys, a short film that depicts the Pandavas’ joint wife Draupadi as a modern, sexually assertive woman was taken down from YouTube after a group called the Hindu Sena complained to the police that “Akshat Verma and the team of Mama’s Boys have deliberately and maliciously acted intending to outrage religious feelings of Hindus by insulting its religion and religious beliefs by making fun of its religious book” (Geeta Pandey 2016). As I have argued throughout this chapter, the label “Hindu” epic conceals the multiplicity of the numerous Ramayanas and Mahabharatas by Jain, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu poets that have been composed in South Asia for the past two thousand years. The different ways in which Ramayanas and Mahabharatas have been appropriated and censored by Hindu nationalists in the past four decades, however, demonstrate why it is problematic to categorize these narrative traditions as the “Hindu” epics in India today. But what then should be the alternative to the “Hindu” epics label? If we call these narrative traditions the “Indian” epics or the “South Asian” epics, this still ignores the multitude of tellings that have been produced in Southeast Asian languages including Burmese, Filipino, Javanese, Indonesian, Khmer, Thai, and Vietnamese.7 The designation of “the Indian/South Asian” epics also leaves out other lengthy verse narratives that either are from South Asia (such as the Tamil Cilappatikāram) or are beloved in South Asia (like the Persian Shāhnāma).8 Even designating these tellings as “Ramayanas” and “Mahabharatas” (as I have done throughout this chapter) privileges the ancient Sanskrit poems attributed to Valmiki and Vyasa. Clearly, finding an encompassing category for these massive and diverse narrative traditions is an ambitious (or dare I say “epic”?) task. 240

— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Anurag Advani, Alex Ciolac, Gregory Clines, Morgan Curtis, and Priya Kothari, for their valuable suggestions on this chapter.

NOTES 1 I use italicized “Rāmāyaṇa” and “Mahābhārata” to refer to the Sanskrit poems attributed to Valmiki and Vyasa, respectively, and the same terms without italics and diacritics for the Ramayana and Mahabharata traditions more generally. For detailed introductions to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, see Goldman and Sutherland Goldman (2004) and Fitzgerald (2004). 2 On the Shāhnāma, see Behrang Nabavinejad’s chapter in this volume. 3 The term “Hindu” has a complicated history. John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan explain that “early travelers to the Indus Valley, beginning with the Greeks, spoke of its inhabitants as ‘Hindu’ (Greek indoi), and by the sixteenth century residents of India themselves had begun to employ the term to distinguish themselves from ‘Turks’” (2006, 10). 4 Many scholars use “Avadhi” and “Brajbhasha” to designate regional dialects of the North Indian vernacular language that is often referred to as “Old Hindi.” I prefer the term “Bhasha” (bhāṣā, literally: “language”) because it is the name used by many of the poets themselves including Jinadas, Sabalsingh Chauhan, Tulsidas, and Vishnudas. 5 This is a reference to Rama freeing Ahalya, the wife of a sage, from a dreadful curse. 6 All translations from the Mahabharatas of Villiputturar and Sabalsingh Chauhan are my own. 7 On Southeast Asian Ramayanas and Mahabharatas, see Adrian Vickers’ chapter in this volume. 8 On the Cilappatikāram, see Morgan J Curtis’ chapter in this volume.

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— ​ T h e “ H i n d u ” E p i c s ? —​ Keshavmurthy, Prashant. 2018. “Translating Rāma as a Proto-Muḥammadan Prophet: Masīḥ’s Mas̱ navī-i Rām va Sītā.” Numen 65, no.1: 1–27. Koskikallio, Petteri, and Christophe Vielle. 2001. “Epic and Puranic Texts Attributed to Jaimini.” Indologica Taurinensia 27, 67–93. Lorndale, Timothy. 2021. “Avatāras, Goddesses, and Kauravas: Reading the Old Kannada Sauptikaparvan as an Alternative Ending to the Mahābhārata.” The Journal of Hindu Studies 14, no. 3: 301–25. Lothspeich, Pamela. 2009. Epic Nation: Reimagining the Mahabharata in the Age of Empire. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lutgendorf, Philip, trans. 2016. Tulsidas: The Epic of Ram, Vol. 1. Murty Classical Library of India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGregor, Ronald Stuart. 1984. Hindi Literature from Its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Misra, Bijoy M. 2007. “Orissa: Shri Krishna Jagannatha; The Mushali-parva from Sarala’s Mahabharata.” In Krishna: A Sourcebook, edited by Edwin F. Bryant, 139–61. New York: Oxford University Press. Monius, Anne E. Forthcoming. “Rethinking Medieval Hindu Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hindu Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagaraj, D. R. 2003. “Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture.” In Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, edited by Sheldon Pollock, 323–82. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nair, Shankar. 2020. Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia. Oakland: University of California Press. Narayana Rao, Velcheru. 2001. “The Politics of Telegu Ramayanas: Colonialism, Print Culture, and Literary Movements.” In Questioning Rāmāyaṇas: A South Asian Tradition, edited by Paula Richman, 159–85. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———, and David Shulman, trans. 2002. Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Orsini, Francesca. 2015. “Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” In Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield, 327–58. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. Pandey, Geeta. 2016. “Mama’s Boys: An Irreverent Take on India’s Mahabharat.” BBC. September 14. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-37340277. ———. 2019. “Jai Shri Ram: The Hindu Chant that Became a Murder Cry.” BBC. July 10. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48882053. Pandey, Ramlagan, ed. 2014. Śrīsabalsingh Cauhān Kṛt Mahābhārat: Manohāriṇī Bhāṣā Ṭīkā Sahit. Varanasi: Rupesh Thakur Prasad Prakashan. Pathak, Shubha. 2014. Divine Yet Human Epics: Reflections of Poetic Rulers from Ancient Greece and India. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University. Pauwels, Heidi Rika Maria. 2008. The Goddess as Role Model: Sītā and Rādhā in Scripture and on Screen. New York: Oxford University Press. Pierce Taylor, Sarah. 2020. “Digambara Jainism and the Making of Old Kannada Literary Culture.” In Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jainism, edited by John E. Cort, Paul Dundas, Knut A. Jacobsen, and Kristi L. Wiley, 342–52. Leiden: Brill. Plau, Adrian. 2018. The Deeds of Sītā: A Critical Edition and Literary Contextual Analysis of the Sītācarit by Rāmcand Bālak. PhD diss., SOAS University of London. Pollock, Sheldon. 1993. “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2: 261–97. ———. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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— ​ S o h i n i S a r a h P i l l a i —​ Ramanujan, A. K. 1991. “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” In Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, 22–49. Berkeley: University of California Press. Richman, Paula, ed. 1991. Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———, ed. 2008. Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rinehart, Robin. 2011. Debating the Dasam Granth. New York: Oxford University Press. Ritti, Shrinivas. 2004. “Mahābhārata in Early Kannada Literature.” In Mahābhārata: The End of an Era (Yugānta), edited by Ajay Mitra Shastri, 353–66. Shimla: India Institute of Advanced Study. Shroff, Kaushal. 2020. “Delhi Violence: Cops Shouted “Jai Shri Ram” with Armed Hindu Mob, Charged at Muslims.” The Caravan, February 25. https://caravanmagazine.in/conflict/ delhi-violence-cops-shouted-jai-shri-ram-with-armed-hindu-mob-charged-at-muslims. Shulman, David. 2001. “Towards a Historical Poetics of the Sanskrit Epics.” In The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit, 21–39. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Smith, John D., trans. 2009. The Mahābhārata. New York: Penguin Books. Smith, William L. 1988. Rāmāyaṇa Traditions in Eastern India: Assam, Bengal, Orissa. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. ———. 2001. “The Burden of the Forest: Two Apocryphal Parvans from Vernacular Mahābhāratas.” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 54, no. 1: 93–110. Stasik, Danuta. 2009. The Infinite Story: The Past and Present of the Rāmāyaṇas in Hindi. Delhi: Manohar Books. Sundaram, R. V. S., and Ammel Sharon, trans. 2018. Ranna: Gadāyuddham--The Duel of the Maces, edited by Akkamahadevi. Delhi: Manohar Books. Syan, Hardip Singh. 2013. Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth-Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Thapar, Romila. 2013. The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of North India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Truschke, Audrey. 2020. “A Padshah Like Manu: Political Advice for Akbar in the Persian Mahābhārata.” Philological Encounters 5, no. 2: 112–33. Tulpule, Shankar Gopal. 1979. Classical Marāṭhī Literature: From the Beginning to A.D. 1818. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ———. 1991. “Eknāth’s Treatment of the Rāmāyaṇa as a Socio-Political Metaphor.” In Rāmāyaṇa and Rāmāyaṇas, edited by Monika Thiel-Horstmann, 139–52. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Venkatesa Acharya, Kambalur. 1981. Mahabharata and Variations: Perundevanar and Pampa; A Comparative Study. Kurnool: Vyasaraja Publications.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TRICKSTER AS EPIC N A R R AT O R   I N T H E M A L AY H I K AYAT H A N G T U A H

rsr

Sylvia Tiwon

The tongue has no bones. —Malay proverb

Set during the Melaka Sultanate (circa 1400–1514 CE), the Hikayat Hang Tuah (The Tale of Hang Tuah) is considered one of the most celebrated literary works in the Malay language. (Hang Tuah, “the fortunate one,” is the eponymous hero at the center of the work.) Yet, this work has also been subject to much debate about whether it should be considered a work of epic literature. In his Introduction to the authoritative Malay edition of the work, Malaysian scholar Kassim Ahmad is almost apologetic when he writes that the work is an epic, albeit a “simple” one in comparison to the “great epics” of ancient Greece (1966, xv).1 Even so, the work is often referenced as such, as evidenced by the title of the English translation of Ahmad’s edition: The Epic of Hang Tuah (Salleh and Robson 2010). Those who argue against calling the work an epic note that the genre is grounded in European ideas and contexts, and therefore question why it should be embraced at all, especially given the history of European (Dutch and British) colonization and cultural imperialism in the region.2 However, the appropriation of “epic” as a term and an idea—and the identification of the Hikayat Hang Tuah as an exemplary Malay epic—can also be seen as a liberatory move that disrupts the colonial taxonomy. Strategically employing “epic” in postcolonial contexts, I show in this chapter, can open up space to complicate hegemonic, Eurocentric ideas about the genre, while allowing for richer engagements with Malay literary works. The protagonist of the Hikayat Hang Tuah, the Melakan sultan’s trusted servant, is an exemplary hero who embodies Malay epic values of courage, loyalty, and service to king and nation.3 But as I show, Tuah is also a trickster figure, who is both clever and sexually alluring, if necessarily “desexed” and domesticated, and whose calculated antics and heroic feats occasionally threaten the sultan’s own suzerainty and sexual potency. He is thus a potentially disruptive figure. In what follows, I first provide some background on how the work moved DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-21

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— ​ S y l v i a T i w o n —​ from manuscript to printed page, and how the story unfolds and is structured. I then explore Hang Tuah’s role in episodes about the sultan’s infatuation with two princesses, Tun Teja and Raden Emas Ayu Galuh. Overall, this chapter explores the dynamic intertwining of epic ideals and battles of wit and physical prowess in a traditional work of Malay literature.

TEXT, CONTENTS, STRUCTURES Ahmad worked with a manuscript owned by Tengku Ibrahim, a member of the Kelantan royal family, dated 1878 CE (1295 H in the Muslim calendar), transliterating it from Jawi script into Roman script.4 In the published edition, Ahmad divides the story into two major parts, “The Battles” (Perlawanan) and “The Journeys” (Pengembaraan). The first part is by far the longest, comprising eighteen chapters and 338 pages, while the second part only contains ten chapters and 152 pages. As Ahmad explains in his Introduction, it is quite likely that the two parts were composed by different hands since the second part, “The Journeys,” shows a more liberal use of words and phrases of Arabic or Persian origin than the first, pointing to its Sufi character. Hang Tuah’s mission to see the face of the emperor of China and the sultan of Rum (the former Byzantium Empire), for example, is strongly reminiscent of the Sufi desire to see the hidden face of God, as expressed in many Sufi works, including those of the Malay-Acehnese poet, Hamzah Fansuri, who lived in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries CE.5 Nevertheless, the two parts were combined by an anonymous compiler in 1878, and form a fairly cohesive whole. The first part of the Hikayat Hang Tuah, “The Battles,” introduces Hang Tuah as the heroic protagonist and the king’s loyal servant. It also provides a foundation narrative about the descent of the Malay kings from the heavens (keinderaan) to a hill called Bukit Seguntang in South Sumatra. The hill is the mythical center from which all earthly Malay kings originate and the center of their power. Malay royal power is figuratively structured in the form of a mandala, with the king at its center and his power radiating outward and drawing everything into its “forcefield.”6 The king’s very presence generates the governing hierarchy and brings security and prosperity to the realm. He guarantees the earth will be fertile and the markets prosperous. He attracts traders (dagang) and scholars (santri) from other parts of the archipelago and beyond, thereby ensuring the vitality of the Malay world. The first part also describes the founding of the Melaka Sultanate in the fifteenth century. This Muslim dynasty developed Melaka into a rich and powerful entrepot. For over a century, the Melakan sultans controlled trade, including the lucrative spice trade, through the Straits of Melaka, ushering in the early modern era in Southeast Asia (Reid 1993). The second part of the Hikayat Hang Tuah, “The Journeys,” follows the hero as he embarks on a series of missions to spread the fame of Melaka, form trading alliances, and generally serve as the sultan’s ambassador. Although the coming of the Portuguese—referred to as “feringgi”—is prefigured in the first part, the second part tells of the fall of the Melaka Sultanate to the Portuguese in 1511, and the subsequent takeover by the Dutch (wolanda) and their Malay allies, in the early seventeenth century. By this time, the Sultanate has diminished and Hang Tuah retreats to the remote northern regions of the peninsula, away from the powerful networks 246

— ​ T r i c k s t e r a s E p i c N a r r a t o r —​ of trade. The epic ends with an aging Hang Tuah traveling upriver to become the chieftain of forest dwellers, and the suggestion that he continues to live: “[P]eople say that Si-Tuah is not dead” (Ahmad 1966, 491).7 Like many traditional Malay compositions, both oral and written, the Hikayat Hang Tuah is anonymous, although it was likely composed by multiple authors over many generations. Conventionally, such works are attributed to an unnamed “owner of the tale” (yang empunya cerita). While its author(s) are unnamed, the authorial voice “lives” on in the text and becomes animated whenever someone recites the work, casting its spell (pesona) over the audience. However, the “genie of the tale” does not fully emerge until the second part of the epic. Traditional performances throughout the archipelago are often accompanied by burning incense and making small offerings of food and flowers. This is done to summon the power that is said to live in the story and to ensure that the release of this power through performance will bring no harm, i.e. that the performance will be selamat (safe). While the first king and his consort produce offspring, the center of the Malay world at Bukit Seguntang becomes a point of distribution for the rulers of the various kingdoms in the Malay world, ensuring the expansion of the originary mandala. This includes the island of Bentan, which is eventually folded into the Melaka kingdom centered on the Malay peninsula. In the ideal order of Melaka, everyone has an apportioned place in the kingdom’s social hierarchy, and is marked by title, occupation, and place of residence. Everyone is also subject to sumptuary regulations, which help maintain the social order. Those who dine with the king at his banquets are seated according to their rank and partake of food in the order of their rank. This is a social convention we see repeatedly throughout the text. There are episodes in which this elaborate order appears to break down; these, however, are short-lived and do not lead to the total dissolution of the Malay world represented by the mandala. Rather, they are a means to re-energize what is potentially a static structure of power by replenishing its sacred power (daulat). At especially significant ceremonial meals, for example, at the conclusion of a major diplomatic mission, the banquet is capped off by a ritual involving dance, intoxication, and merriment, in which even the king joins. Then, the highly organized social hierarchy is momentarily inverted. In one instance, an important minister is described with his bottom up, waving his legs in the air to the glee of all present. The next morning, the street stalls are filled with drunken attendees who can barely manage to drag themselves home. While the momentary dissolution of the hierarchy signals a renewal of energy, it also discloses a point of vulnerability, for the bawdy carnivalesque is actually the realm of the trickster. Hang Tuah himself often joins in the revelry at the invitation of the king or his prime minister, but usually either pretends to drink from the cup that is being passed around or uses a potion to protect himself from the intoxicant, knowing that he must stay alert to ward off danger. In this way, the trickster becomes the only one imbued with true consciousness, a still center of power in a dizzying maelstrom. The epic itself opens quite simply, after the usual Muslim invocation of Allah, with the declaration “this is the story of Hang Tuah who was deeply loyal to his lord and offered him great service” (1966, 1). The 2010 English language edition offers a more expansive description of the hero’s character, emphasizing his purportedly Malay values: “This is the legend of Hang Tuah, a mythical hero and champion of 247

— ​ S y l v i a T i w o n —​ the Malays, a knight who served the King of Melaka with exemplary loyalty which shaped his life, endowing it with purpose and meaning” (Salleh and Robson 2010, 2). The theme of Hang Tuah’s loyal service to the king indeed undergirds the entire work and solidifies his stature as an epic hero. The courage and wisdom he displays in service to his lord is a narrative thread that runs through the entire work.

THE MANY NARRATIVE STRANDS OF THE HIKAYAT HANG TUAH After the description of the genealogy of the Malay kings mentioned above, the story of Hang Tuah proper begins (1966, 18). Unlike mythic royal characters who are generally introduced from their birth, Hang Tuah is introduced as a young boy, the son of Hang Mahmud and his wife, Dang Merdu. The generic titles of his parents, Hang (male) and Dang (female) mark them as commoners, subjects who must labor to fulfill their social destinies within the mandala. One day, they hear the news that a new king has been installed in Bentan and decide to move there to make their living, running a small food stall. However, after Hang Mahmud makes the decision to move to Bentan, he has a dream in which a full moon descends from the sky and casts its radiance upon his son—a motif borrowed from accounts of royal births. Hang Tuah is thus no longer an “ordinary” child. When Hang Mahmud tells Dang Merdu of his dream, she bathes and perfumes the boy, dresses him in white, and feeds him turmeric rice and an egg (symbols of high status and fertility), while invoking the souls of ancestors in a ritual of rebirth that echoes the birth and royal investiture ceremonies of the primordial king of Seguntang, Sang Sapurba (18–19). By the time he is ten years old, the preternaturally precocious Hang Tuah has mastered twelve languages, and studied martial and esoteric arts from the best teachers in the archipelago. Even as a youth, he proves his mettle in battle. While bravery (berani) is Hang Tuah’s main distinguishing feature, his penchant for trickery (tipu) especially elevates him to an epic hero in the Malay world. Even as a youngster, he tricks pirates from the Majapahit Empire, causing them to be deceived by their own eyes: thinking they see only a group of children, the thugs attempt to kidnap Hang Tuah and his mates while they are playing on the beach.8 The children, however, easily disarm the attackers, and shoot their legs with arrows, thus preventing them from running away. Eventually, they chase the pirates off, and sail on to Singapore, where their victory over the Majapahit marauders is celebrated by the inhabitants of this Malay region, who have had many skirmishes with Majapahit. News of their heroics ultimately reaches the ear of the king of Melaka (1966, 20–24). In this episode, the pirates’ vulnerability is revealed: they rely solely on sensory perception, which makes sense in everyday life; however, here it makes the pirates defenseless and stands in their way of grasping the deeper truth in which the power of the trickster is rooted.9 Back in Bentan, Hang Tuah becomes aware of his family’s low social position one day when he accompanies his father to the palace and hears his father declare his servitude (berhamba) to the prime minister (bendahara). Despite his humble beginnings, Hang Tuah forms friendships with four other boys, and together, they form a “minor” mandala with Hang Tuah at its center. In a sense, the story of this 248

— ​ T r i c k s t e r a s E p i c N a r r a t o r —​ “lesser” mandala of commoners supplements the story of the royal mandala, and drives the whole narrative. Yet, Hang Tuah’s mandala complicates the royal mandala with which it is intertwined. Hang Tuah quickly becomes the king’s most trusted courtier, and is granted untrammeled access to the palace “as though there were no doors to keep him out” (1966, 37). With the palace opened up to him, Hang Tuah the trickster enters the palace, where he engages in antics and tests the king’s royal power. More importantly, the narrative emphasizes the importance of speech as the trickster’s words become the king’s words (barang kata Hang Tuah kata rajalah), and the commoner’s words have the power to override royal decrees: “Even if the king wished to kill someone, if Hang Tuah vowed that the person would not die, that person would not die” (37). Once a close relationship between Hang Tuah and the king is established, Hang Tuah in effect becomes the sole narrator and string-puller of the story. After every episode, the king demands that Hang Tuah narrate events back to him, so periodically we get brief recaps of what has just transpired, in the hero’s own words. After Hang Tuah reports to the king and his court, such episodes usually end with the king expressing his pleasure or amazement as well as his gratitude to his loyal servant. Revealing the great trust he places in Hang Tuah, at one point the Melaka king says, ‘Come Tun [Hang] Tuah, sit below the Prime Minister, we wish to hear the account of Malay kings from ancient times’… So Tun Tuah told the story to the entire court. And the King was exceedingly pleased to see how he told it with his melodious voice, his sweet countenance, and his fluent tongue. (1966, 197) In another early episode, Hang Tuah tangles with the Majapahit emperor (betara) and his representatives, with whom trickery frequently comes up. Trouble begins when the Majapahit prime minister sends men to wreak havoc in a marketplace near the Melaka palace, in an attempt to slay the Melakan prime minister. During the commotion, Hang Tuah and his companions heroically drive off the marauders and save the prime minister after his own retainers flee. Stories of the exploits of the youth and his four companions subsequently reach the ear of the king, who commands his prime minister to narrate what happened in the marketplace, ostensibly to establish the veracity of rumors he’s heard from other sources. He does so, but eventually also summons Hang Tuah to the court so that he may relate the events to the king himself (28–38). The sequence of events in this episode—the prime minister’s description of the event followed by Hang Tuah’s account of the same—is a pattern that appears in other places in the work. This is just one of many clues pointing to the oral roots of the Hikayat Hang Tuah. In fact, the whole manner in which the epic unfolds, with repeated elements, “digressive” backstories, epithets, formulaic passages, hints at the oral kernel of the written and subsequently printed tale. Further, the epic’s embedded oral tags give it the patina and authority of tradition. At the same time, however, they threaten to undermine the epic’s legitimacy as a historical work. The epic reaches deeply into the mythic and popular—into remembered and halfremembered storylines—subverting the work’s claims to historicity. But even though mythic and popular imaginings creep into the tale, the anonymous author(s) of the 249

— ​ S y l v i a T i w o n —​ Hikayat Hang Tuah also create space for the figure of the trickster. He is at the heart of the epic, constantly affirming and upholding the authority of Melakan kingship, the basis of the tale, at the very moments it is contested. The story that bears Hang Tuah’s name weaves together many narrative strands, in ways that at first glance seem disruptive. But this seeming incoherence is by design: it is these various “incongruent” narratives that knit the work together, by continually opening up new permutations of tipu. Hang Tuah is endowed with a sweet voice and countenance, and an eloquent tongue (lidah fasih) to recount the glories of the Malay kings, and to defeat the enemies of Melaka. In a real sense, the Hikayat Hang Tuah is not merely an epic tale about a hero in the service of his king, it is also a tale told by Hang Tuah himself. And, as its primary narrator, Hang Tuah understands very well the tenuous line separating loyalty (setia) and treachery (derhaka). The common expression for addressing the king is “berdatang sembah,” meaning “[I] offer obeisance,” but in one critical early episode, when the king is about to send him on a dangerous mission, Hang Tuah offers the king advice, which he knows is contrary to the king’s orders when he utters the phrase: “sembah derhaka” (my offering is a treasonous one; 1966, 37). The potential for derhaka underlying obeisance becomes even clearer to us when we realize that Hang Tuah is not in the royal presence at the behest of the king but instead of his own initiative. He himself requests an audience with the king in order to challenge his decree to send forty young men into exile, which he deems both unthinking and unjust (37–38). As both the protagonist and teller of the tale, Hang Tuah does not simply represent the conflation of loyalty to the king and treachery to the king’s enemies, which is always a possibility in royal contexts; rather, he also disrupts conventional epic logic that presumes the hero should maintain a distinction between the two. It is when Hang Tuah runs deep into trickster territory that the epic begins to rein him in and try to domesticate him. This is the case, for instance, when Hang Tuah battles the Javanese warrior Kertala Sari who comes to Melaka to raid the treasuries of its traders and nobles. Ostensibly, this episode concerns the looting of wealth; however, it has a deeper symbolic meaning; after Hang Tuah kills Kertala Sari, he slices off his penis. In the morning, local residents encounter the robber’s mutilated corpse and slice off other parts of his body to offer as evidence to the king. Confronted with multiple body parts and multiple explanations of what happened by various claimants, the king becomes confused and wonders what combination of evidence and narrator will lead to the truth? The bendahara explains that the body parts alone are not enough to determine who killed Kertala Sari. But when Hang Tuah arrives bearing both Kertala Sari’s kris (sword) and his penis, the king realizes that only Hang Tuah can clear up his confusion, which he does (1966, 334–37). The severed penis is as though a battle trophy he offers to the king, but it also symbolizes Hang Tuah’s figurative castration and the limits of the trickster’s power in the epic. In order for Hang Tuah to continue as narrator of his story, he must be desexed, a theme I shall return to later in this essay.

“BRILLIANT” WOMEN AND A “DESEXED” TRICKSTER Historically, kingly power (kesakten, daulat) has been represented by radiance in the literature of the archipelago. In a much-cited essay, Benedict Anderson observes 250

— ​ T r i c k s t e r a s E p i c N a r r a t o r —​ that the kesakten (power) of Javanese kings is often depicted as a comet streaking through the skies or a brilliant drop on the king’s manhood ([1990] 2018, 31–32).10 However, in her aptly titled work, The Flaming Womb, Barbara Andaya notes that Anderson leaves out the critical role of “light-bearing” women like Tun Teja, one of the sultan’s consorts, whose name “Teja” means “the red glow of the sky at dusk” (2008, 1–10). These women, she argues, are “king-makers” whose wombs emit a powerful radiance. There are three women who play central roles in some of the epic’s most significant episodes about power. All have names with connections to light or radiance. The first is Tun Teja from the kingdom of Inderapura.11 The narrator describes her appearance in tropes of light: she is as brilliant as the full moon, flashing so powerfully no one can bear to look upon her for too long (Ahmad 1966, 90). The king first sends an emissary to ask for her hand in marriage but she rejects him, pointing out to her father and eventually to the sultan of Inderapura that she is only the daughter of Inderapura’s prime minister, thus not a true royal and unfit to be a queen (92–93). But even so, the power of her radiance overrides her mere social birth and links her to the mythical king-making woman, Ken Dedes, in the canonical Javanese book of kings, Pararaton. In an earlier episode, the author(s) of Hikayat Hang Tuah make an explicit connection between Tun Teja and Ken Dedes. This occurs when a Javanese noble leaves his homeland to seek protection from the Malay sultan after facing an injustice by the king of Lasem. As the noble relays, this king of Lasem has kidnapped his daughter Ken Sumirat and forcibly married her. (“Sumirat” also means radiance.) Recounting the affront, the noble explains, in a clear reference to the Ken Dedes story, how Ken Sumirat was traveling to meet him accompanied by her handmaidens and a kebiri (eunuch), when her carriage was waylaid by the king of Lasem, who demanded to know who was inside the carriage. Just then a breeze swept away the curtains of her carriage, revealing her brilliance, and the king fell madly in love with her (1966, 39–40). This plot element alludes to a similar one in the Pararaton, when the wind lifts the skirts of the princess Ken Dedes, revealing the light from her womb shining upon her thighs. Returning to the story of Tun Teja, after the radiant woman declines the sultan’s proposal, her parents and even the king of Inderapura and his consort try to coax her into accepting his marriage proposal, but she persists in her refusal. In a departure from social conventions, Tun Teja rebukes her parents, reminding her father, the prime minister, of established tradition (adat), which disapproves of marriage between people of unequal stations. She tells him, “Look at you, Father, even though you are an elder statesman in the land of Inderapura, you have not taken into account the sayings of the ancients” (92). Eventually, her parents give up, and tell the Melakan emissaries that there is nothing more they can do since she, “the owner of the body” (yang empunya tubuh), will not relent (93). The wording here, which stresses that her female body is not subject to the will of the king or her parents, underlines her supernatural quality. In an effort to help the sultan get over his infatuation with Tun Teja, the Melakan prime minister recommends that the king seek the hand of a certain Majapahit princess in marriage instead. This serves as a segue into a second episode in which the sultan becomes infatuated with a “princess of light.” Hang Tuah is then sent as 251

— ​ S y l v i a T i w o n —​ an emissary to the Majapahit court to propose a match between the sultan and the emperor’s daughter, Raden Emas Ayu Galuh, whose name has a connection to radiance, and is linked to Galuh Candra Kirana (“Moonlight”), the light-bearing woman of the Javanese Panji cycle of tales. Even before Hang Tuah’s impending visit, the emperor and his powerful prime minister, Gajah Mada, discuss the Melaka Sultanate’s propensity for trickery (tipu, daya, muslihat) and stratagem (main, helat). To thwart Hang Tuah and test his bravery, they send a band of thugs who run amok and attack him after he disembarks and is making his way to the palace (1966, 98–102). The English word “amok” is, of course, a loan word from Malay, where it is used to describe the unpredictable actions of attackers who have lost full consciousness of what they are doing. In Malay, such assailants are said to have mata gelap (“darkened eyesight”). With their conscious minds clouded and overtaken by desperation, they resort to ostensibly unplanned and uncalculated destruction and violence. Using the strategy of amok enables the Javanese ruler to hide his hand. He feigns shock at the attack on Hang Tuah and gratitude for his survival when the Melakan emissary arrives in his court unscathed. After receiving him, he tries to bait Hang Tuah by asking him to describe how he survived an attack by sixty men running amok. The trickster, however, refuses to grant the Javanese ruler any satisfaction, saying “it was but children playing in the market that caused the commotion among the people, as I saw it” (1966, 102), in a prime example of Malay “silat lidah” (literally, a “tongue fight”). The ruler has no response to Hang Tuah’s witty remark. Next, the Javanese emperor orders Gajah Mada to prepare accommodations for the Melakans in his own compound. Privately, Hang Tuah reminds his companions that they must remain cautious because Gajah Mada “has many tricks,” and will continue to try to find ways to humiliate Melaka in order to reject the Melakan sultan’s proposal (103). Hang Tuah eventually wins the respect of the Javanese emperor and his men, who then accept the proposal and invite the Melakan ruler to Majapahit. This means that the sultan himself must enter the dangers of the Javanese court. Just as the sultan is about to embark on a voyage to bring back the Javanese princess as his bride, the Melakan prime minister again brings up the potential for trickery on the part of the Javanese court: I have heard that the Lord Gajah Mada has many tricks and much knowledge. When you carried the letter, did he not order the thugs to run amok? What mischief! Had it not been for you, wouldn’t we have borne great shame? (1966, 116) To this, Hang Tuah replies that he pays no heed to Gajah Mada’s trickery for no one has greater knowledge of trickery than he himself (117). The following segment in the epic, from the lead-up to the royal wedding to the wedding ceremony itself, with all of its pomp and pageantry, is threaded through with even more plots against Hang Tuah, meant to humiliate the sultan of Melaka and Malay cultural identity itself. Invariably, the Malay hero manages to outwit the Javanese, thereby gaining the admiration of the emperor of Majapahit, as well as increasingly valuable gifts, including the right to tax goods moving through riverine 252

— ​ T r i c k s t e r a s E p i c N a r r a t o r —​ systems on Majapahit holdings in the Malay world. But the greatest reward he receives is the title of “laksamana” (commander or general), which allows him to sit and eat with the high nobility of the courts, just one level beneath that of the emperor and the prime minister (1966, 137). This gift is a double-edged sword and a form of trickery, however, for by conferring this title upon the Malay warrior, the emperor of Majapahit pre-empts the Melakan sultan, who had been playing with the idea of granting his loyal servant the coveted position himself (117–18). In other words, by elevating Hang Tuah’s status, the emperor has diminished the sultan’s power. After granting Hang Tuah this illustrious title, the Javanese emperor and Gajah Mada continue plotting to kill him. In retaliation, Hang Tuah plays a highly insulting trick on the Javanese: he and his companions break into the ruler’s secluded “forbidden garden” (taman larangan), into which the king is the only male allowed to enter. This is where the king freely bathes and engages in sexual relations with his consorts and concubines. Upon breaking into the garden, Hang Tuah and his four Malay companions plunge into the scented pools, pick copious amounts of flowers, and string them into extravagant arrangements which they wear on their heads as they sing, recite poetry, and tell jokes (1966, 159–60). It is worth noting, however, that at this time, the royal pleasure garden is completely devoid of women— an anomaly in comparison to what we usually find in other “forbidden-garden” narratives. This point is relevant to a discussion of the trickster and kingly sexuality, for in breaching the sanctity of the forbidden garden, Hang Tuah reveals the vulnerability of kings and turns their transgression into a spectacle. Yet even before this episode, Hang Tuah tested his powers of trickery against the Javanese emperor and his prime minister, and emerged victorious. Once the emperor asked him to tell the story of his exploits and of the greatness of kings of old. Secretly, the emperor and Gajah Mada are plotting to trick Hang Tuah and take his sword from him. While Hang Tuah narrates his story, he becomes overcome by the spell of his own recitation, and for a rare moment loses consciousness (khayal). The thug appointed by Gajah Mada to nab the sword immediately notices, and stealthily withdraws Hang Tuah’s sword from its scabbard and hides it under the carpet beneath the king’s thigh. Shaking off the effects of the spell a moment later, Hang Tuah feels for his scabbard and, realizing that it is empty, understands at once what has happened. In retaliation, he quickly nabs the sword of Gajah Mada, who is himself still under the spell of the recitation, and places it in his own scabbard (1966, 146–47). When Hang Tuah’s story comes to an end, the Javanese king, confident about the success of his trick, asks to see Hang Tuah’s sword. Hang Tuah then produces the sword in his scabbard, which Gajah Mada immediately recognizes as his own. The king then asks Gajah Mada to see his sword, and the nobleman has no choice but to acknowledge that they have both been out-tricked. Shamed, the king declares that he was only joking, to which Hang Tuah responds that there’s no fault in the lord playing tricks on his servant, but he should refrain from trying it again because once a Malay has drawn his sword, he must kill someone or at least cause great bodily injury (1966, 148–49). The sexual overtones of the whole contestation and the symbolic nature of the swords are clear; the stakes are such that Hang Tuah must win this battle of wits to 253

— ​ S y l v i a T i w o n —​ reaffirm the masculine power of the Melakan king who is there to marry the Javanese princess. Part of the ensuing marriage ceremony involves a procession through the main street of the kingdom, where all the women—mainly those from the common folk—drop everything and rush to witness the couple. Leaving behind husbands and children, they run into the streets, bare breasts swaying, clothes threatening to come undone, in a sexual exuberance that could easily be directed at the trickster but is now focused exclusively on the Melakan sultan. Despite his marriage to the Javanese princess, the sultan’s desire for Tun Teja has not waned. Hang Tuah is very much aware of this and decides it is time for him to win her for the sultan in order to get back in his royal good graces. In the meantime, Hang Tuah has lost the king’s royal confidence (and free access to the palace) after courtiers jealous of his influence spread rumors (fitnah) that Hang Tuah has abused his privilege by engaging in adulterous relations (zinah) with a palace concubine. These verbal tricks ensnare the gullible sultan after the envious courtiers plant clothes stolen from Hang Tuah in the women’s residence. Relying on his senses, the ruler is unable to see through the illusion and thus makes a misguided decision. In any case, Hang Tuah’s mission to win Tun Teja for the sultan of Melaka proves to be a complicated challenge. The great storyteller has little trouble gaining the trust of the sultan of Inderapura, who is still open to the marriage alliance. When the trickster visits his court, the sultan asks Hang Tuah to tell him of his exploits in Majapahit and how he got the emperor’s daughter to marry the Melakan sultan. He even offers Hang Tuah a woman from Inderapura to be his wife, but Hang Tuah rejects the offer, saying it is not good for him to be married. It is actually Tun Teja herself who poses the greatest obstacle to Hang Tuah. She adamantly refuses the marriage offer, reminding everyone of the importance of social equality in marriage. So Hang Tuah first carries out a convoluted stratagem which involves his gaining the trust and motherly affection of an older woman who used to be Tun Teja’s wetnurse (inang), and win the approval of Tun Teja’s many handmaidens by liberally giving them gifts of expensive textiles—which Tun Teja of course sees and desires. He dresses himself in sumptuous clothes of many colors, and dances to music to make himself as attractive as possible to the light-bearing woman. Almost in desperation, and running out of tricks, he begs the wetnurse to tell Tun Teja that he himself desires the princess. The terrified woman cannot refuse him but also cannot bring herself to utter these words to Tun Teja. Tun Teja suspects the wetnurse is holding back, so after many days and much coaxing, finally convinces her to reveal her “secret”: Hang Tuah wants Tun Teja for himself. Angered, Tun Teja orders the wetnurse’s mouth to be scrubbed with a coconut husk. Returning home with her bloodied mouth, the wetnurse is met by Hang Tuah who is deeply sorry for the pain he has caused. He cleans her wounds and applies balm to them. Realizing that his plot has failed, Hang Tuah resorts to magic to make Tun Teja fall in love with him. The magic is successful and so he is able to sail back to Melaka with her and her entire retinue of handmaidens. By now, Hang Tuah the trickster has clearly gained the upper hand. With all of his plotting and scheming in this and many other episodes, Hang Tuah is reminiscent of the many tricksters in Malay folktales, commoners who use stratagems and come up with inventive ways to break through barriers between them and a king or sultan’s women or daughters, and do actually engage in sexual 254

— ​ T r i c k s t e r a s E p i c N a r r a t o r —​ relations with them.12 On board the ship, Hang Tuah pulls back the protective curtain to the room in which Tun Teja is secluded but he refrains from touching her. Instead, he casts a spell that turns her affections away from him and toward the sultan. When they reach Melaka, she agrees to marry the sultan (1966, 205–06). The full threat that the trickster poses to the kingdom is fully realized not through Hang Tuah but rather through his companion, Hang Jebat (1966, 286–307). Later Hang Tuah is again betrayed by envious courtiers, who are for a second time spreading rumors that Hang Tuah is consorting with royal concubines. Again falling prey to these rumors, the sultan orders the prime minister to kill Hang Tuah. But the prime minister only pretends to kill Hang Tuah, secretly sending him away instead. Then, Hang Tuah’s companion Hang Jebat becomes incensed when he hears that his dear friend has been executed and plots to take revenge against the sultan. Now, he too takes on the role of the trickster: using a sweet voice and invoking his storytelling powers, he soothes the sultan who is grieving the loss of Hang Tuah, and simultaneously makes all the women of the palace desire him. But unlike Hang Tuah, he does not hold back. He occupies the palace and asserts his privileges as king. By the end of the episode, the sultan comes to his senses and learns that Hang Tuah is alive, so he summons him to the palace and orders him to kill his companion who has been with him through thick and thin. Hang Tuah then obediently kills Hang Jebat. This heart-rending scene is perhaps the most well-known one in the Hikayat Hang Tuah. It not only pulls on the heartstrings, more fundamentally, but also exposes an irony that ensures the preservation and prosperity of the Malay world: in the end, the sultan is shamed but regains his suzerainty; Hang Tuah is vindicated but loses some of his trickster power.

CONCLUSION Set before the colonization of Melaka by European powers, The Hikayat Hang Tuah, with roots in oral storytelling, invokes Melakan history but moves into the realm of myth to tell of the resilience of Malay culture and the power of the Melaka Sultanate. As I have shown, the epic is instructive about the delicate balance of power that obtains between the trickster and the sultan in the Malay epic world. At the end of the work, however, the precarious balancing act eventually breaks down when history intervenes and the great Malay archipelago falls to colonial powers. Nowadays, in the postcolonial period, the epic is rarely performed orally, but it has been captured in the silence of print. This has effectively suppressed the trickster’s voice, but just as Hang Tuah does not really die in the story, so too his voice still haunts his hikayat, ready to be reanimated with each new reading of it.

NOTES  1 In this chapter, I cite Ahmad’s 1966 edition of the Malay text, but provide my own translations of it.   2 For a counterargument against Malay use of the term “epic,” see Maier (2004).   3 In this chapter, I use “king” and “sultan” interchangeably.   4 Malay manuscripts from this period generally use a modified Arabic script called Jawi. Modern Malay, however, is written in Rumi, or the Roman script.

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— ​ S y l v i a T i w o n —​   5 The Acehnese are an ethnic group from northern Sumatra. For more on Sufi influence in Malay literature, see Braginsky (1975).   6 The mandala is an important concept in Buddhist and Hindu traditions, which both had Malay adherents before the advent of Islam in the twelfth century. Often depicted as a circle, it is used to describe Javanese and Malay concepts of kingly power. For the mandala in Southeast Asia, see Tambiah (2013).   7 “Tun” and “si” are forms of address for non-royal individuals. “Si” denotes not only a commoner but also a degree of familiarity.   8 The Majapahit Empire (circa 1293–1527 CE) was a Hindu-Buddhist polity based in Java, and the traditional rival of the Melaka Sultanate. It reached its zenith in the fourteenth century, when the story of Hang Tuah takes place.   9 The failure of the Majapahit men can be linked to the Sufi idea of the illusory nature of sensory perception, known as “waham” in the poetry of Hamzah Fansuri Al-Attas (1970). 10 This essay has become the standard work on the subject of kingly power in the archipelago. 11 Inderapura (also spelled “Indrapura”) was a Malay Sultanate on the coastal region of West and South Sumatra. 12 Editors and translators of Malay folktales often “sanitized” stories they considered too bawdy for a general readership. But Gartenbert (1986), with a Preface by Amin Sweeney, includes translations of oral Malay tales that have not been cleaned up. Bawdy trickster tales were also popular in the Sulu Sultanate (1405–1915 CE), in the southern region of present-day Philippines, many featuring the character si Posong (Eugenio 1982, 337–38).

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Kassim, ed. 1966. Hikayat Hang Tuah. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naguib. 1970. The Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press. Andaya, Barbara. 2008. The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. [1990] 2018. “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.” In Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, 17–77. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Braginsky, V. Y. 1975. “Some Remarks on the Structure of the ‘Syair Perahu’ by Hamzah Fansuri.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 131, no. 4: 407–26. Eugenio, Damiana L., ed. 1982. Philippine Folk Literature: An Anthology. Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines. Gartenberg, Gary. 1986. Malay Tales. Oakland, CA: Peripatetic Press. Maier, Hendrik M. J. 2004. “An Epik That Never Was an Epic: The Malay Hikayat Hang Tuah.” In Epic Adventures: Heroic Narrative in the Oral Performance Traditions of Four Continents, edited by Jan Jansen and Hendrik M. J. Maier, 112–27. Münster: LIT Verlag. Reid, Anthony. 1993. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Salleh, Muhammad Haji, trans., and Rosemary Robson, ed. 2010. The Epic of Hang Tuah. Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 2013. “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3: 503–34.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

C O N N E C T I N G W I T H A N C E S TO RS “IMPORTED” AND INDIGENOUS EPICS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

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Adrian Vickers

There are epics aplenty in the large and diverse region of Southeast Asia. If we understand the term to cover poetic texts—including oral forms—that deal with myths of vast scope telling of divinities and semi-divine heroes intervening in human life, then epics are everywhere throughout both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. The many hundreds of languages and cultures of Southeast Asia mitigate against single shared forms, but there is clear evidence of the transmission of narratives and even poetic forms across the lands and waters of this cross-roads of Asia. The best-known epics are Southeast Asian versions of the Indian classics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Their themes of heroes venturing across earthly and cosmic spaces accord with the many indigenous tales known particularly throughout island Southeast Asia, found in both written and oral form. These narratives connect the world of human experience to other worlds, and deal with how people cross over different domains and forms of existence. The difficulties of researching in multiple languages and a variety of field sites across eleven different nation-states mean that it is hard to date these epics, especially since analytical overviews of the pre-modern literatures and poetics of the region as a whole are almost non-existent. Surprisingly, however, one set of epics is shared in a variety of media across almost all of the region, the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.1 They are found in almost all of the mainland except among the Viet peoples who make up the ethnic majority of Vietnam, although the now-Muslim Cham minority of Vietnam and Cambodia has versions of the story of Rama. Likewise, these Indic epics reach their limits in the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, and Timor Leste, where there are still traces and suggestions of narrative connections. Scholars of Southeast Asia based in Europe and North America have inevitably drawn on their understandings of European epics to understand how the existence of formulae is vital to composition and variation within local orally transmitted forms (Collins 1998, 25–38). At the same time, studies of Southeast Asian epics have helped to provide more encompassing definitions of the epic as DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-22

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— ​ A d r i a n V i c k e r s —​ a “supergenre” of long poetic narratives in a way that illuminates all epic literature, including the Homeric tradition. This research shows that an epic can exist in a multiplicity of forms that survive across large periods of time. Further, such research shows that oral and written forms can co-exist as part of the same epic phenomenon (Jensen 2017). The Indian epics came into Southeast Asia around 700 CE, carried by traders and scholars who took part in exchanges between the region and South Asia. The arrival of the epics formed part of the process by which Hinduism and Buddhism became localized or integrated into practices based on ancestor and spirit worship. Local chiefs found ways to connect with deities from South Asia, and so became kings, queens, princes, and princesses to provide new forms of legitimation, just as their ancestors residing in high mountain places were connected with gods such as Shiva and Vishnu. The Indian epics were an important part of that localization, since they provided vehicles to explain the nature and actions of divine forces in the world, as well as providing exemplars of kingly and heroic conduct that could be integrated into existing martial practices and state formation. By looking at the South Asian epics in relation to indigenous Southeast Asian ones, we can see how the former were reshaped by local interests and forms, just as the indigenous epics were influenced in some cases by the widespread knowledge of the Indian epics. It is important that both the South Asian and indigenous epics are found in different religious communities; that is, there is nothing exclusively “Hindu” in the former or “animist” in the latter as some assume, since they circulate and are still current for Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and others across Asia.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN RAMAYANAS The Ramayana is the most widely known of the Indian epics in Southeast Asia, with many versions and adaptations in literature and the visual and performing arts, through most of the region, with the exception of Vietnam and the Philippines.2 The oldest known written form in Southeast Asia is the Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa, a poem written in the Old Javanese (or Kawi) language—using Indian kāvya metrical forms from Sanskrit, with stanzas of four lines based on patterns of long and short syllables—dated to the ninth or early tenth century. Its central Javanese origins are attested by the reliefs presenting the story on the tenth-century Prambanan temple, a temple dedicated to the god Siwa (Shiva) (Figure 18.1). Other major antiquities of Southeast Asia, such as the temples of the capital city of Angkor, depict important episodes from the Ramayana. The starting point for the narrative is the exile of king Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Laksamana from the kingdom of Ayodhya, as the result of his step-mother’s scheming. The core story of the abduction of Rama’s queen, Sita, by the demon king of Lanka, Rawana, is the common feature of all these versions, but around them alternative accounts, back stories, and variations have sprung up. Although there are lengthy treatments of the Ramayana, it is most commonly known as a series of key episodes. Stories of Rama’s monkey allies quickly became popular, with the monkeygeneral Anoman featuring as a powerful trickster-like figure (Vickers 2012). The story of Sita’s theft by the demon-king Rawana is a well-known episode, especially since it is the starting point for Rama’s lengthy quest for her return. The narrative of 258

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Figure 18.1  Relief from the Shiva Temple, circa tenth century, in the Prambanan complex, Java, Indonesia. It depicts the Ramayana episode in which Rawana fends off Jatayu after abducting Sita. Photo by Jessica Kerr.

how Rama created an alliance with the monkey-king Sugriwa, with his vast monkey army, and killed his unjust brother Bali is another frequently presented episode. However, the war between Rama’s monkey army and Rawana’s demon army is one of the major foci of attention in Southeast Asian presentations of the story. The image of Rama and Sita as an ideal couple is a common one in many parts of Southeast Asia, but undermined by the idea that Rama doubted Sita’s loyalty. One of the major sub-stories presented in various forms in Bali is the testing of Sita, where she throws herself into a funeral pyre only to be rescued by the god of fire, Agni, while other divinities and heavenly priests look on. Although this conclusion to the story is in Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, it largely fades out of subsequent retellings of the story in the early modern and modern periods of South Asia, illustrating the ways that local concerns shape both the selection of and emphasis on the many versions of the main story. Separate “back stories” of Anoman, Rama, and Rawana are also found in Java and Bali. The Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa is an adaptation of the Sanskrit narrative poem Bhattikāvyam (seventh century), while the version of the story found on the Prambanan reliefs is based on a prose narrative derived from the Valmiki Rāmāyaṇa. This is the first indicator that alternative versions of the story were in circulation at more-or-less the same time. The variety of forms of the story shows how the process of adaptation to local society worked, as different aspects of the narrative were most likely selected based on contemporary social and political conditions (Acri et al. 2011). Over the next 1,000 years, the Ramayana was realized in Java and the neighboring island of Bali in diverse forms, and from there, it spread to other islands of present-day Indonesia. The circulation of literary forms is not necessarily the prime means by which the epic narrative has spread. 259

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Figure 18.2  Painting in the wayang style depicting a scene from the Ramayana. Rama, accompanied by his brother Laksamana, fighting off a demon threatening a hermitage (top), and Rama and Laksamana turning the demon upside down (bottom), while turbanwearing hermits and demons look on, circa 1940, Pan Seken, Kamasan, Bali, Indonesia. The Australian Museum (E074171). Photo by Emma Furno.

The best known of these forms for conveying the narrative is the wayang kulit or shadow-puppet theatre, but the Ramayana has been portrayed in other forms which span rod-puppet theatre, scroll paintings, dance theatre, and mask theatre, as well as in temple reliefs, paintings (Figure 18.2), and other literary forms, such as the modern Javanese Serat Kanda and Rama Keling. In the mid-twentieth century, a new dance-drama form of the Ramayana was created by Javanese and Balinese choreographers for performance in the temple of Prambanan, a performance that has continued into the twenty-first century (Sedana and Foley 2020). The Old Javanese Rāmāyana draws on Indian poetic models and metaphors, including teachings on statecraft and the running of a kingdom. Several passages deal with this topic, notably Rama’s advice to his brother in Sarga 3: 260

— ​ C o n n e c t i n g w i t h A n c e s t o r s —​ 54.  …You should guard the code of noble conduct and keep it in your mind; Adhere to the precepts, keep the scriptures in view at all times, And follow all the words of the holy books — this is what brings happiness. 55.  Temples, hostels and religious foundations should be kept in good order; Gold is to be increased — store it up to pay for what is good; Enjoy it any way you will, and give pleasure to the people — These are what is called Religious Duty, Material Welfare and Sensual Pleasure. (Robson 2015, 72) The text is full of many set scenes, such as love scenes, and most notably battle scenes, such as in the climactic struggle between monkeys and demons in Sarga 20: 23.  The battle of the demons and monkeys was very terrible and loud, Attractive to watch, equally wild and neither inferior in heroism. Because of their valour and courage in fighting and uttering war-cries, The sound was frightening in the extreme, terrifying as it filled the whole sky. 24. Jambumālī advanced in order to renew the fight, a great hero who would never retreat: He wore full dress because of his many services fighting in the past, famed for ferocity, without equal; His sword was exceedingly sharp, as he overwhelmed the monkeys and stabbed them with his dagger, Bāyuputra [Hanuman] advanced to finish him off, so that he was felled and fell on a big mountain. (2015, 495) In between are descriptions of scenery, including particularly beautiful ones of Rama in the mountains, such as this one from Sarga 16: 14. Raghūttama [Rama] became all the more delighted when he climbed the mountain, And looked at the lovely woods, fresh and cool, and their leafy trees; Their fruits were ripe, hanging in beautiful bunches, while many more were half-ripe, Their flowers in full bloom, falling in abundance on the ground. 15.  Lovely coral trees were in bloom as if they had decked themselves out, And the breeze was soft, it blew over them or had just ceased; They moved only softly, as if coming to greet him, And the soft humming of the excited bees could be considered their speech. 16.  And the deodar pines were fragrant, purely and gently filling the air;… (2015, 385–86) The Hikayat Seri Rama, an important text in classical Malay literature, was written before the first part of the seventeenth century, and was copied not only in the present-day peninsular area of Malaysia, but also in southern Thailand, southern Sumatra, and West Java. It devotes more space to the “villain” Rawana than the 261

— ​ A d r i a n V i c k e r s —​ hero Rama. While it has affinities to Valmiki’s text, researchers have found links to Indian oral versions of the story, especially those from South India and Kathakali performances (Ikram 1980; Richman 2021). These links open up interesting possibilities for understanding the dispersal of the story. There may have been multiple points of entry for mainland Southeast Asian versions of the story, some arriving from Java by sea, and others entering overland from India via Myanmar and spreading down into Thailand. Thus, the Thai version could be the product of interaction between a Javanese-influenced Malay version on the one side, and Burmese forms that were exchanged through prisoners of war in pre-modern conflicts between Thailand and Myanmar, on the other. As yet, too little research has been carried out on other old versions like those of the Mon community to indicate their position in this dispersal. The epics have great cultural depth in Southeast Asia. The presently ruling Chakri dynasty of Thailand, founded in 1782, took on the title of “Rama” as one of their royal names at the end of the eighteenth century, demonstrating the importance of the epic to this Buddhist country. Ramayana murals decorate parts of the old palace of Bangkok, as with the palace of neighboring Cambodia. The stories themselves were known in much older versions than the Thai literary form, the Ramakien (dating the late eighteenth century in its current form) since Ramayana scenes are present in the temples of Angkor Wat, dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries. Similarly, in Laos and Myanmar, the Ramayana is a core part of literature, theatre, and visual arts. In both cases, the narrative is referred to as a “Jataka,” a term otherwise used to refer to stories of the lives of Buddha. Of the different versions, the Burmese literary Rama Thagyin dates to the eighteenth century, while the Lao Phra Lak Phra Lam most likely took its present form in the nineteenth century (Sahai 1996; San San May 2014). In the Southeast Asian context, the Ramayana presents several ideals or models that help to explain its popularity. However, on further examination, some of these turn out to be complex both in terms of their ethical and moral positions and in terms of their narratives themselves. Rama is the ideal of the handsome kingly warrior, and he and Sita provide an image of the royal couple, essential to the nature of kingship. Nevertheless, he is a king in exile, and they are a couple separated for the majority of the story. The nature of the quest to find Sita is more important than images of their reunification, which are hardly ever depicted in the various ways of rendering the story. They are usually only shown as a couple just at the point that Rawana and his followers trick Sita and separate them. Likewise, as already mentioned, Rama makes Sita go through a test of her loyalty. His killing of Bali is also ethically questionable. The overall narrative force is one of struggle at various levels, physical and moral.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN MAHABHARATAS The Mahabharata does not quite have as wide a dispersal as the Ramayana, but its dissemination in the region has a similar antiquity (Figure 18.3).3 Once again ancient temple reliefs of Angkor and central Java attest to the fact that many tales connected to the heroes, the Pandawa brothers, and their ancestry were known in different forms all over Southeast Asia from at least the ninth or tenth century CE. 262

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Figure 18.3  Painting in the wayang style depicting the heroes of the Mahabharata. The Pandawa brothers stand to the right of the tree (from left to right): Darmawangsa, Arjuna, Bima, Nakula, and Sadewa, with their crouching servants, while Krishna and other allies stand to the left of the tree, circa 1900, Sabug, Kamasan village, Bali, Indonesia. The Australian Museum (074209). Photo by Emma Furno.

There are no surviving written forms of Mahabharata tales from ancient Cambodia, but there is a wealth of versions in poetry and prose from Java and Bali, particularly in the form of many kakawins (poems in Sanskrit meters) written between the tenth and twentieth centuries. Not all the books of the Indian Mahabharata are known in Southeast Asia, but versions focus on stories of origin from the first book, the Adiparwa, or the wandering of the Pandawa brothers and their families in exile, culminating in the great battle between the Pandawas and their cousins the Korawas, found in the Old Javanese epic poem, the Kakawin Bhāratayuddha, completed in 1157 CE. This great war is over the kingdom of Astinapura, to which the eldest Pandawa brother, Dharmawangsa, is the rightful heir, but of which he has been robbed through a trick of the Korawas. The struggle is a great tragedy, as family members and beloved mentors must take sides with one or the other faction, leading to the deaths of the mentors of the Pandawas, as well as their estranged half-brother, Karna. Krishna, their cousin, is their chief ally, and it is through his role in the great war that Krishna is mainly known in Southeast Asia. The Javanese and Balinese versions of narrative episodes of Vyasa’s Sanskrit Mahābhārata deal separately and collectively with the Pandawa brothers. In the Kakawin Arjunawiwaha and other such works, there are stand-alone stories of the middle brother, Arjuna, telling of his asceticism and his additional marriages, during his thirteen-year exile in the forest for breaking a vow to his brothers (albeit for a noble reason). In Southeast Asian versions of the Mahabharata, Arjuna represents an idealized version of a princely hero, and the epitome of a handsome warrior, and in many ways parallels Rama. After performing asceticism, Arjuna struggles with the god Siwa, who disguises himself as a rustic hermit. Just when it looks like he will be defeated by Arjuna, Siwa gives the hero an arrow of great power. The second brother, Bima, plays an important role as a cultural hero, paralleling that of Anoman, with whom Bima is linked through iconography and legends of their shared paternity from the Wind God, Bayu. In many Southeast Asian retellings of the story, Bima performs a variety of quests to obtain the liquid of immortality. These quests show Bima interceding between the worlds of gods and men, fighting either with deities or with underworld or underwater dragons/serpents. Bima’s quest for the elixir of immortality is found, for example, in the narrative Nawaruci or 263

— ​ A d r i a n V i c k e r s —​ Dewa Ruci, and involves his underwater struggle with a naga (mythical serpent), and an encounter with the supreme deity, who bestows secret wisdom on Bima. Bima is also the protagonist of a separate narrative in which he rescues his stepfather and step-mother from purgatory and brings them to heaven. In this story, he fights the gods. Stories of both Arjuna and Bima feature conquests of demons. So too does the Sudamala tale of their twin younger brothers, Nakula and Sadewa, which tells of their exorcistic encounter with the goddess Durga in her destructive aspect. The Adiparwa, like other parwas or prose Books of the Mahabharata, probably preceded other written forms of the epic in Java and Bali.4 The parwa narratives that were known in Bali before modern times were the Adi-, Wirata-, Udyoga-, Bhisma-, Asramawasa-, Mosala-, Prasthanika-, and Swargarohana-parwas. There are only hints, in the form of fragments of texts and the appearance of narratives, of the other books (Zoetmulder 1974, 68–100). P. J. Zoetmulder, drawing together scholarship in the field, dated the earliest of these texts, the Wirataparwa, to 996 CE, and three other early Old Javanese texts, the Adiparwa, Bhismaparwa, and Uttarakanda (a prose version of part of the Ramayaṇa) to circa 1000 CE, that is, during the reign of the same king who patronized the composition of the Wirata-, Sri Dharmawangsa Teguh Anantawirkramotunggadewa (1974, 96). Dharmawangsa’s son-in-law, Erlangga (Airlangga), was the son of a king of Bali, so it is likely that at the same time that Darmawangsa ruled in East Java, these texts derived from the Indian epics were known in Bali. The Adiparwa provides a host of interwoven sub-narratives that connect with stories of origin, centered on the genealogy of the Bharata clan. Key themes include the relationships between the tribe of warriors and kings (those of the ksatriya caste) and that of priests (those of the brahmana caste); the role of heavenly and underworld figures, notably the semi-divine eagle, Garuda, and his nether-worldly cousins the nagas. Like Bima, Garuda goes on a quest for the elixir of immortality, and has to fight the gods for it. A recurrent theme of the Adiparwa narratives is relationships between ancestors and descendants, and obligations of the latter to the former. These narratives, like the story of Bima, also involve movement between the human world and the afterworld. As with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata is widely depicted in the arts, and in Java and Bali chiefly in the shadow-puppet theatre. The proliferation of textual and visual versions of parts of the Mahabharata in Java and Bali since the tenth century is a tribute to the importance of the narratives in different social and political contexts. Given the paucity of evidence for their earlier realizations, it is not until the visual and textual evidence thickens in Bali in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we can get a sense of the full range of transformations of the Mahabharata. In Bali, besides the traditions found in the written parwa and kakawin genres of text, there is a host of other narrative forms. These include performed versions of the epic, found not only in the major form of shadow-puppet theatre, the wayang parwa, but also in dance-drama forms, notably the parwa, a theatrical that seems to have largely died out before the twenty-first century. According to oral histories, parwa was a recent, late nineteenth century, genre, developed as a version of the classic romance dancedrama gambuh by puppeteers in political exile (Bandem and deBoer 1981, 88–90). In the 1930s, the main performances of parwa were of the stories of the (aborted) “Rape of Subhadra,” in which Arjuna rescues his future wife from the demon-king 264

— ​ C o n n e c t i n g w i t h A n c e s t o r s —​ Niwatakawaca; “Garuda Stealing the Amerta or elixir of immortality”; and the “Journey of the Brahman Astika to Hell to Rescue his Grandparents,” who have been trapped there because they have no descendants. Other narratives documented in Bali were the “The Death of Bhoma” (the subject of a separate kakawin); the story of Bharata’s mother, Sakuntala; and “The Churning of the World Ocean,” an origin story from the Adiparwa best-known from its representation at Angkor Wat. Some of these episodes appear in other Balinese dance-drama genres, such as baris and arja (De Zoete and Spies 1938, 293–94). The status of Arjuna, Bima, and others as cultural icons has survived to the present, in revered stories that demonstrate the blending of Hindu and Muslim cultures in Java. One Javanese manifestation of the iconic status of the heroes is the naming of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno (ruled 1945–1967), after Karna. Then too even many ordinary Muslim citizens from Indonesia have “Hindu” names like “Krisna.” Both the Indian epics present similar themes. The journey or quest element is one of the strongest of these themes, and this includes narratives of wandering in the forest, moving between kingdoms, and returning to lost kingdoms (Astinapura in the Mahabharata and Ayodhya in the Ramayana). Movement between the human realm, the divine realm or heaven, and the underworld or undersea world is an important part of these stories. Such tales of movement create a sense of cosmic geography that is related to actual geographic sites in Southeast Asia where the tales are told; for example, the Siamese capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya. Both epics emphasize the clash between heroes and their enemies—rival princes, demonic forces and other underworld creatures, and occasionally even the gods themselves. Moreover, among the various beings encountered in these travels, priests and divine or semidivine figures often intervene in cosmic processes to impel or resolve key storylines.

EPICS ORIGINATING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA While there are Indian epics that continue to circulate in written forms and performances, there are also local epics of unknown antiquity with no connections to the Indian epics, which are chiefly known through oral sources, and hence are less well-documented than their Indian counterparts. They share features in common with the Indian narratives that suggest cross-overs between the two forms from an early period, or at least that both are grounded in the same perceptions of the world and the place of humanity in it. Of the written local epics, probably the longest is the vast La Galigo of the Bugis people of South Sulawesi. Like the Indian epics, it was written down on palm leaves in a script called lontara originally derived from South Asian orthographic precedents. Despite the great length of the La Galigo—the longest manuscript runs to 2,851 pages and only covers one-third of the estimated total text—the written version includes summaries, which were perhaps originally intended as memory aids for performers of oral versions. As Sirtjo Koolhof, one of the chief researchers on this epic, has said of the written manuscripts, they are only “fragments” of the text, and exist as monuments of the story—not necessarily to be read, but to preserve traces of sets of traditional knowledge (1999, 364). Like the Indian epics in Southeast Asia, the La Galigo is never presented or performed as a complete story, but rather in the form of key episodes that are chosen to suit different ritual and social contexts. 265

— ​ A d r i a n V i c k e r s —​ The La Galigo contains origin narratives connecting what it calls the “Upperworld” with the “Middleworld” of humans. A key part of these origin stories is the descent of the deity Batara Guru to the Middleworld, to create human beings so that the deities can be worshipped by them (1999, 368). Batara Guru (“Divine Teacher”) is also the name given to Siwa in Javanese and Balinese narrative and ritual practices, pointing to one immediate cross-over between “imported” and “local” epics. Batara Guru’s grandson, Sawerigading, is the major protagonist of the La Galigo. Key episodes involve him wandering between different realms, especially to “Cina” (identified as one of the Bugis kingdoms) where he meets his predestined wife, and traveling on a ship that sinks, turning him into the ruler of the underworld (1999, 371). As Koolhof shows in his analysis of the text, it is a vast “encyclopedic” account that maps out domains, kinship relations, social mores, and ethics. In local Southeast Asian epics, the quest usually involves a search for a lost or separated love-partner, and includes the acquisition of magical objects or powers. Such narratives involve tales of ancestry, sometimes with detailed genealogies, and the founding of islands and other natural forms. From the extensive documentation of anthropologists, it is clear that these kinds of epics have a ritual nature, even when they come from predominantly Muslim societies, as in Sumatra and Sulawesi (Effendy 1997; Koolhof 1999). Their telling often involves making offerings or performing other kinds of ceremonial and theatrical action, as with the telling of the Indian epics in Southeast Asia. Sumatran examples of such tales include the Bujang Tan Domang and Radin Suane, named after their chief protagonists. Both are oral epics of unknown age written down by scholars in the late twentieth century. The Bujang Tan Domang is a story of the Petalangan, an inland people from the Southeast of the island, connected to the larger region of Riau via rivers. Despite being the work of an upland people, the epic has a distinctly maritime flavor, also found in Radin Suane, and connects the origins of clan leadership to the kingdom of Johor, on the Malay Peninsula. The only major study of this epic is by Tenas Effendy, who shows how the story involves teachings on morals and ethics, and revolves around humans encountering other kinds of beings (1997, 33). These elements are, he says, indicative of narrative forms found through the core area of the ‘Malay’ world, namely East and West Sumatra and the islands off the coast. Important to those are ancestral narratives, which set out the founding of specific communities and larger domains that are connected to a lineage. Mapping out such connections in time and place involves identifying marital relations. All these elements are found in the Bujang Tan Domang, the hero of which visits various human and spiritual realms. In the latter, he encounters his parents, in a way that is similar to certain episodes in the Mahabharata. The Radin Suane is a tale told over two nights. It comes from the hinterland of West Sumatra. In his documentation, transcription, and translation of the story, William Collins identifies its basic theme as a quest, carried out across land and sea (1998). The narrative is impelled by heroic battles and involves the protagonists having to deal with ghosts and other non-human beings. This epic also includes detailed explanations of social norms and ways of acting. For example, like the Old Javanese Ramayana, the Radin Suane provides a picture of an ideal realm and ruler, for example, in Canto 12:

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— ​ C o n n e c t i n g w i t h A n c e s t o r s —​ So that the community was stable, So that the village was unified. Once authority was held by a generous king. Looking at the town of Tanjung Larang, People are all in accord… Everyone obeys. The war chiefs agree on their honor, The gamblers agree on lucky fighting cocks, Women agree on their forest gathering, Commands are agreed to at their mention. It is complete and sturdy in the community. Young men push forward their good looks, Young women push forward their pretty looks. (Collins 1998, 61) The poems dwell at length on the appearance and character of warriors and women who are part of the narrative, such as this description, reminiscent of how Bima is presented in the Indonesian versions of the Mahabharata: There was indeed another warrior, Big and tall swaying his head, Big and tall swinging his arms. Like a rooster walking along a stick, Like an elephant walking on a field dike. His hands and feet were massive, The hair on his right hand grew up his arm. (1998, 83) The Radin Suane is filled with descriptions of battle, including the battle by the eponymous hero’s younger brother, as in Canto 223: Although he was amidst great weapons, With a little hop, Like a jungle fowl opposite a decoy, Like a tiger in a hamlet, He imitated a grasshopper in the morning, As if it were no bother, As if it were no trouble. Just when a sword approached, The sword became a dance scarf. Just when a spear approached, The spear became a gleam of light. Small arms sounded like falling bamboo, Large arms went off at intervals. The cannon fired in a group, Three barrels flared one after another,

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— ​ A d r i a n V i c k e r s —​ Lurching like red elephants, Roaring like a Garuda… Who does not know Radin Alit? As though possessed by demons, As though reaching a heat of rage, With a yelp he shouted, Shattering twelve ditches… As though possessed by demons, He flared from face to forehead, His chest was like molten bronze. (1998, 260–61) So too on their journeys, the hero and his brother include lengthy catalogs that provide a picture of different aspects of the landscape, cultivation, and social objects, so as when Radin Suane visits a royal bathing place, in Canto 62: He saw the ships at the landing stage. You want to hear about it? There were many junks there, Foreign widuk and foreign wangkang. Foreign ‘split cucumber’ prahus. Baluran junks with compounded masts, Kerinici with single masts, Schooners with slanting masts. (1998, 111) These kinds of catalogs are typical of all kinds of local epics, and display their worldencompassing qualities. These Sumatran epics have equivalents in various parts of the Philippines, especially the South. Nicole Revel has provided painstaking documentation of tales of islands in the Sulu Sea and of the larger island of Mindanao in the Philippines. In the latter, the epic form is known as ulaging and is centered on the heroic figure, Great Agyu. This too is an “ensemble of long episodes of distinct narratives, making up a constellation around Agyu and a panorama of the life of his kins and affines, the Immortals in the Calm Realm, Nalandangan” (Revel 2011, 188). Revel shows how these epics deal with accounts of the bravery of warriors and the closeness of family relations. Relationships with the divine are also explained, particularly when his sister, Tabagka, marries a deity (2011, 190). The Kudaman epic comes from the island of Palawan. This is one of the few that is presented in long form. Reminiscent of how the Radin Suane is performed, it is recited over six nights (2011, 204). Revel identifies marriage relationships and social rules around these; and relationships between humans and invisible beings, who include deities, as among the key themes of this and the other epics she has studied in the Philippines. Kudaman deals with the relationships between semi-divine heroic figures and their multiple wives. It involves conflict with enemies from outside, quests necessitating travel between different lands, and explanations of objects of magical power that can affect human-divine relations. In the Philippines, as in Sulawesi and 268

— ​ C o n n e c t i n g w i t h A n c e s t o r s —​ Sumatra, epics found in the highlands reveal a genealogy of circulation and variation of motifs and ideas coming from lowland areas and other islands (Revel 1996). The other epics that Revel and her collaborators have documented are those of the nomadic sea people of the Sulu Sea, known generally as Sama Dilaut. Their sung narratives, called kata-kata, involve stories of a hero on a quest for his wife, which takes him to the divine and underworld/underwater realms. Revel emphasizes the sacred nature of these narratives, the ritual character of their recitation, and their efficacy in shaping human destiny (Revel 2011, 194). These epics are a way to connect with ancestral spirits and make offerings to them. In this, they are very similar to the long, sung chants of various inland peoples of the island of Borneo. The Ngaju of Kalimantan has mythic stories in both sung and spoken forms which tell tales of creation via heroic figures (Schärer 1963). The Iban of Sarawak, West Malaysia, have long ritual chants that narrate journeys between earth, heaven, and hell, starting from the longhouse, and centered on heroic ancestors (Masing 1997). These epics from Sumatra, Sulawesi, Borneo, and the Philippines are perhaps the closest in form to those from western Europe, the ones best known to English speakers. There are many other extended narratives that originate from Southeast Asia, and that share some, but not all, of the conventional features of epics. The best-documented and most widely dispersed of these local epics are the Panji stories. Originating in Java, Panji stories are found throughout most of Southeast Asia, with the exception of the Philippines and Vietnam. These are also narratives of the quest for a lost love, and involve martial displays and marital scenes. However, their emphasis on palace or royal locations, and their relative lack of supernatural elements, especially journeys to the upper- or underworlds, mean that Panji stories might better be termed “romances” than “epics” (Vickers 2005). Similar tales of wandering heroes are widespread. One important Javanese example is the Serat Centhini, a very long interwoven narrative of heroes who move over the island of Java. The tale was written in the early nineteenth century by prince Mangkunegara, future ruler of the court of Surakarta, Central Java. It tells of the founding Islamic dynasties of Java from which the court was descended, and in its published form stretches to twelve volumes. Given that this is a compilation of different adventures, it is hard to describe it as an “epic” in the same sense as the other works discussed above. Nevertheless, it is truly encyclopedic, providing rich catalogs of everything from food to sexual practices (Santoso et al. 2006). Another form of narrative with epic inflections is that of Jataka. These are the tales of the lives of Buddha, and so while they are shorter stories, in total they add up to a vast body of linked narratives. These stories are best-known in the Theravada Buddhist areas of mainland Southeast Asia, but the ancient reliefs of temples such as Borobudur on Java attest to their wide distribution from at least the ninth century. They chiefly are of South Asian origin, but in mainland Southeast Asia, the term “Jataka” is more liberally applied to other kinds of stories, including Panji tales. In mainland Southeast Asia, there are some relatively recent literary works— going back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century—that present other varieties of epic poems. The longest of these is the Thai story of Khun Chang and Khun Phaen. Although it does not have the same epic elements as the works described above— quests, journeys, and tangles with spiritual forces—and centers on a love triangle, 269

— ​ A d r i a n V i c k e r s —​ it is a long poem of epic sweep, situated in legendary history, with references to historical Thailand (Baker and Phongpaichit 2010). Other similarly long Thai poems such as the nineteenth-century Phra Aphai Mani epic poem of Sunthorn Phu remain unstudied by English-speaking scholars.

CONCLUSION Epic is a broad category in Southeast Asia. At its core are long narratives in poetic form, some with meters of Indian origin and others with indigenous couplets employing parallel constructions and formulae. What links the various epic forms of Southeast Asia is their ability to connect audiences to their ancestors, even today. These epics locate human communities both in a local context and in the infinite cosmos. Epic performances are displays or enactments of forms of power because of this ability. They deal in various beings, objects, realms, and great spiritual moments, crossing time and cosmic space. The performative efficacy of these epics bridges religions and ethnicities. At the same time, these epics also build and perpetuate systems of knowledge. Performers of epics are people who wield knowledge on behalf of their communities. As evolving compilations of all kinds of narratives, ethics, philosophies, and ideologies about the past, present, and future, epics have played key roles in Southeast Asian cultures for thousands of years.

NOTES 1 As in Sohini Pillai’s chapter in this volume, I use italicized “Rāmāyaṇa” and “Mahābhārata” to refer to the Sanskrit poems attributed to Valmiki and Vyasa, respectively, and the same terms without italics and diacritics for the Ramayana and Mahabharata traditions more generally. 2 Many of the major figures in the Southeast Asia Ramayana tradition have slightly different names than in the Sanskrit sources, for example, Laksamana (Lakshmana); Rawana (Ravana); Anoman (Hanuman); and Sugriwa (Sugriva). 3 Many of the figures in the Southeast Asia Mahabharata tradition also have slightly different names than in the Sanskrit sources, for example, Pandawa (Pandava); Korawa (Kaurava); Dharmawangsa (Dharmaraja or Yudhishthira); Bima (Bhima); Sadewa (Sahadeva); Bhisma (Bhishma); Siwa (Shiva); Bayu (Vayu); and Wirata (Virata). 4 The Mahabharata is traditionally divided into eighteen Books called parwa (parva in Sanskrit), and the Ramayana into seven Books called kāṇḍa. Valmiki’s South Asian Rāmāyaṇa is in verse.

WORKS CITED Acri, Andrea, Helen Creese, and Arlo Griffiths, eds. 2011. From Laṅkā Eastwards: The Rāmāyaṇa in the Literature and Visual Arts of Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press. Baker, Chris, and Pasuk Phongpaichit. 2010. The Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Bandem, I. Madé, and Fredrik Eugene deBoer. 1981. Kaja and Kelod: Balinese Dance in Transition. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Collins, William A. 1998. The Guritan of Radin Suane: A Study of the Besemah Oral Epic from South Sumatra. Leiden: KITLV Press.

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— ​ C o n n e c t i n g w i t h A n c e s t o r s —​ De Zoete, Beryl, and Walter Spies. 1938. Dance and Drama in Bali. London: Faber and Faber. Effendy, Tenas. 1997. Bujang Tan Domang: Sastralisan orang petalangan. Jakarta: École française d’Extrême-Orient. Ikram, Achadiati. 1980. Hikayat Sri Rama: Suntingan naskah disertai telaah amanat dan struktur. Jakarta: Penerbit Universitas Indonesia. Jensen, Minna Skafte. 2017. “The Challenge of Oral Epic to Homeric Scholarship.” Humanities 6, no. 4, 97. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/4/97. Koolhof, Sirtjo. 1999. “The ‘La Galigo’: A Bugis Encyclopedia and Its Growth.” Bijdragen tot de Land-, Taal- en Volkenkunde 155, no. 3: 362–87. Masing, James Jemut. 1997. The Coming of the Gods: An Iban Invocatory Chant (Timang Gawai Amat) of the Baleh River Region, Sarawak. 2 vols. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Revel, Nicole. 1996. “Kudaman: An Oral Epic in the Palawan Highlands.” Oral Tradition 11, no. 1: 108–32. ———. 2011. “Heroic Characters as Models of Leaders in Philippine Oral Epics.” In Индонезийцы и их соседи: Festschrift Е.В. Ревуненковой и А.К. Оглоблину, edited by Maria V. Stanyukovich, 186-208. Saint Petersburg: Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera). Accessed February 27, 2021. https://lib.kunstkamera.ru/ files/lib/978-5-88431-141-1/978-5-88431-141-1_16.pdf. Richman, Paula. 2021. “Ravana Center Stage: Origins of Ravana and King of Lanka.” In Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, edited by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha, 97–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robson, Stuart, trans. 2015. The Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa: A New English Translation with an Introduction and Notes. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Sahai, Sachchidanan. 1996. The Rama Jataka in Laos: A Study in the Phra Lak Phra Lam. 2 vols. Delhi: B. R. Publishing. San San May. 2014. “The Ramayana in Southeast Asia: (3) Burma.” Asian and African Studies Blog. British Library. Accessed August 31, 2020. https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-andafrican/2014/05/the-ramayana-in-southeast-asia-3-burma.html. Santoso, Suwito, Fendi Siregar, and Kestity Pringgoharjono. 2006. The Centhini Story: The Javanese Journey of Life. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Schärer, Hans. 1963. Ngaju Religion: The Conception of God Among a South Borneo People. Translated by Rodney Needham. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Sedana, I Nyoman, and Kathy Foley. 2020. “Report: Indonesian Ramayana Festival at Prambanan (2012).” Asian Theatre Journal 37, no. 1: 228–45. Vickers, Adrian. 2005. Journeys of Desire: A Study of the Balinese Text Malat. Leiden: KITLV Press. ———. 2012. Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali 1800–2010. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing. Zoetmulder, P. J. 1974. Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

E P I C C O N T E S TAT I O N S W H AT M A K E S A N E P I C I N M U LT I - E T H N I C C H I N A ?

rsr

Mark Bender

Since about 2004, the People’s Republic of China has become deeply engaged in the Intangible Cultural Heritage program of UNESCO, and more recently, the government has radically increased funding for the preservation of “excellent traditions” (youxiu chuantong 優秀傳統) as part of the government’s vision for the revitalization of Chinese culture. Among the items that have been approved by UNESCO, and by similar programs within China, are heritage traditions described as “epic” (shishi 史詩) in Chinese. These approvals have in some instances not only engendered debate over cultural ownership (as in the case of the Jangar/Jiang’ge’er 江格爾 epic claimed by both Mongolia and China), but also allowed for a wider application of the term as local communities compete for recognition (and the benefits that accrue) of their heritage items.1 The term “epic” has gained a sort of cultural cachet in China, with the renewed attention on traditional oral and written mediums and appearance of film and digital versions. This more inclusive range of the idea of epic among international scholars today, the Chinese case included, is useful in creating worldwide dialogues between poetic narrative traditions of cultures around the world (Blackburn and Flueckiger 1989, 2–4; Ready 2019, 152–56; Honko 2000). Yet when European and American scholars first considered pre-modern Chinese literature in the early twentieth century, they did not see a literary category analogous to their definition of “epic,” based as it was on the Homeric model. Over the last century, the recognition of previously unknown or understudied local narrative traditions (especially in border areas since the 1950s) has allowed greater understanding and appreciation of a host of long narratives in verse or prosimetric format. As a result, China has clearly emerged as a land with an abundance of epic and epic-adjacent traditions. In the following pages, I will chart the development of the idea of epic in China, offer several cases that suggest the widening parameters of what “epic” can mean in Chinese and international contexts, and introduce the term “epic-adjacent” for certain prosimetric forms uniquely categorized by Chinese terminology.

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-23

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THE IDEA OF EPIC IN CHINA The idea of epic being a part of the Chinese literary tradition is relatively new. Chinese intellectuals in the New Culture Movement of the 1910s, which merged into the paradigm-shifting May Fourth Movement (1919 to the late 1930s), set about re-evaluating traditional Chinese literature under challenge by the “modern” forms and content of works produced in Europe, the United States, Russia, and Japan. The prevailing literary categories of the “West” – the novel, short story, spoken drama, and free verse poetry – had no exact counterparts in the elite literary traditions of China that for two thousand years centered on classical poetry, regarding vernacular narrative as mere entertainment. Thus, Chinese scholars of that era began to feel their nation lacking in cultural capital in comparison with powerful countries abroad. Yet, as foreign influences grew (often via translations), scholars turned their attention to Chinese vernacular literature, which included an overlooked wealth of long and short fictional prose narratives (xiaoshuo 小說), prosimetric narrative, and local operas. One Euro-American category that caused vigorous debate was “epic” (Lin 2010; Yin 2013). Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 was among the first to discuss various meanings of “epic” in a 1904 article published in a new literary journal, but did not weigh in on whether China had such a genre (Zhang Taiyan 2013). Hu Shi 胡適, an intellectual, philosopher, and literary historian noted explicitly in his 1928 work, History of Vernacular Literature (Baihua wenxue shi 白話文學史), that China does not have a tradition of “epic” (gushi shi 故事詩 literally “narrative poem”) as in the West (Hu 2012). In an unpublished manuscript of about the same time, Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (2013), a well-known literary historian, poet, and philosopher, likewise discussed the aesthetics of traditional Chinese literature in comparison with those of European literature, including the idea of epic, also translated as “shishi” or poem of history” (Chao 2013, 28–29). Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958), 鄭振鐸, who would emerge as a leading scholar of Chinese prosimetric narrative traditions, initially agreed with the assessment that China had no epics, but later suggested that China’s many long narrative poems (xushi shi 敘事詩), which were just coming to serious scholarly attention, were in some ways comparable to European epic models, and offered the tanci 彈詞 (“plucking rhymes”) chantefable tradition as an example (Zheng Zhenduo 1927, 14; 1987, 348–83; Idema and Grant 2004). In this way, Zheng was ahead of his times in claiming that the term “epic,” as conventionally understood according to the Homeric model, is too narrow to account for long, non-European, narrative poems. Zheng went on to write an influential history of vernacular literature (suwenxue 俗文學) in China, taking into account oral, oral-connected, and tradition-oriented written traditions, the longest of which he generalizes under the term “speaking and singing literature” (jiangchang wenxue 講唱文學), which corresponds reasonably well to the international idea of prosimetric literature (Zheng Zhenduo 1987, 9–13; Mair 1997, 371).2 In the ensuing decades, Chinese scholars continued to debate their country’s literary history, while scholars outside China began to more earnestly apply the term “epic” to many long narrative forms worldwide. During the 1950s, carrying on impulses of the New Culture and May Fourth movements (that had been interrupted by decades of war and revolution), literary scholars and government cultural workers

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— ​ M a r k B e n d e r —​ embarked on large-scale government-sponsored projects of ethnic identification.3 By the end of the decade, teams of academics and students had surveyed communities in China’s vast borderlands and collected large amounts of oral, and sometimes written, folk literature (Hung 1985, 1–10; Zhang and You 2020, 5–16). Since the nineteenth century, scholars outside China had been aware that long narratives in verse or prosimetric forms existed among Tibetans, Mongols, Kirghiz (also spelled “Kyrgyz”), and other peoples of China’s north and northwest and Central Asia. These narratives, which typically center on the exploits of martial heroes such as King Gesar (whose exploits are chronicled in both Tibetan and Mongol traditions), are in some ways akin to the Greek and other European epics, which set the parameters for epic studies in the nineteenth century (Foley 1993). The big surprise in the cultural surveys of the 1950s was the recognition that many ethnic groups in southwest China had long oral or oral-connected written narratives often sharing more in common with ancient Mediterranean mythical accounts of creation such as The Epic of Gilgamesh or “Genesis” in the Bible, than the heroic narratives of the northern steppes and Tibetan Plateau. Thus, in the following decades, Chinese scholars appropriated the term “epic” and came to categorize these works as the northern “heroic epics” (yingxiong shishi 英雄史詩) and the southern “creation epics” (“chuangshi shishi” 創世史詩, literally “epics of creating the earth”) (Yang and An 2008, 20–29; Wu 2011, 179–81; Renqindao’erji and Lang 2016, 003–012). By the 1980s, epic studies had become a key part of ethnic literature studies in China. For instance, several scholars in The Institute of Ethnic Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan minzu wenxue yanjiusuo 中國社會科學院民族文學研究所) in Beijing have done extensive work documenting and researching epic traditions from ethnic minority cultures in China’s borderlands and even set up long-term epic studies field sites where living epic traditions are studied in real time. Among these scholars are Rinchindorji/ Rinqindao’erji 仁钦道尔吉, Chao Gejin 朝戈金, Lang Ying 郎櫻, and Yang Enhong 楊恩洪, who have studied northern heroic epics including the Tibetan epic Gesar, the Mongol epic Jangar, the Kirghiz epic Manas, and Bamo Qubumo 巴莫曲布嫫, who has studied the southern creation epic, the Yi (Yizu 彝族) Book of Origins (Hnewo teyy in Northern Yi romanization). This interest in epics of China’s ethnic minorities along the borderlands has also worked to refocus attention on the vast array of oral and oral-connected narratives that scholars like Zheng Zhenduo brought to scholarly attention in the cultural movements of the early twentieth century and, as in the case of the Arab sira described by Reynolds, has “no exact parallel in European literatures” (1995, 5). Such traditions were mostly products of local Han cultures, many delivered in prosimetric formats accompanied by musical instruments that were popular in urban settings in eastern China, and in some cases favored by women. The long narrative styles performed today often feature highly stylized gestures and speech registers with parallels in some Chinese theatre traditions. Certain forms are delivered to the beat of bamboo or metal clappers or small drums, others with stringed instruments, and others (especially certain storytelling styles in Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Beijing) are delivered as speech, with only occasional singing or chanting. As a whole, these nearly 300 performance traditions (and their written correlates) are classified by a special Chinese term “quyi” 曲藝, which is sometimes 274

— ​ E p i c C o n t e s t a t i o n s —​ translated as the “art of melodies,” but should be understood as a body of narrative styles delivered with varying degrees of singing and/or musical accompaniments. Many of these traditions, especially the long prosimetric narrative ones, can be gathered under Zheng’s term “speaking and singing literature,” which seems a clearer description in English than quyi. Some recent scholars have considered the use of the term “epic” to describe some of these traditions. For instance, in a review of Lauri Honko’s Textualization of Oral Epics (2000), Vibeke Bordahl problematizes the key criteria of length with regard to open-ended traditions of oral storytelling and antiphonal folk song exchanges from many parts of China, suggesting that the term “epic” could apply to the longer forms (2002, 316–18). Anne McLaren, who has authored a study on Ming dynasty (1368–1644) “oral traditional” chantefables recovered from a grave in the Yangzi Delta, has also employed the term “epic” to describe long folksong traditions (many about fictional love affairs) once common in rural areas in the delta region (McLaren 1998; 2022, xvii–xix; McLaren and Yu Zhang 2017, 21–22). In what follows, I will utilize the terms “speaking and singing,” as well as “epicadjacent” for this distinct body of narrative traditions, which have a long history of native development and sometimes links extending back across the Silk Road to India and the Middle East. The term “speaking and singing” is very much in current use by many scholars within or without China, while “epic-adjacent” acknowledges that many of these traditions could fit into a wider definition of epic, including the parameters of power proposed by Pamela Lothspeich in the Introduction.

NORTHERN HEROIC EPICS Chinese scholars recognize three great epic traditions from the northern Chinese borderlands and the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, Gesar (also spelled “Geser”), Jangar, and Manas.4 Probably the best-known outside Asia are the narratives relating the exploits and adventures of King Gesar, a divine hero incarnated on earth to protect the Buddhist teachings (Karmay 1993, 234–36). International research on Gesar goes back to the early nineteenth century, and the epic has attracted scholars from Germany, France, Russia, the United States, Mongolia, Japan, and elsewhere (Heisseg 1996, 90–92). In Tibetan versions of the story, Gesar appears first as a weak, physically disabled herd boy named Joru, but later wins a great horse race in which he displays his martial valor and transforms into a super-hero. He becomes the leader of his kingdom with a retinue of 80 warriors, 30 generals, and deities that include three celestial elder sisters, and uses his cunning and military prowess to battle and conquer demons, monsters, and evil doers in rival kingdoms. His loyal flying horse takes him on adventures to many places such as the kingdom of Hor (thought to be in eighth-century Tang dynasty China) and Persia. After pacifying realms near and far, he finds it is necessary to descend to the underworld to rescue his wife and mother, before returning to the heavens. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Gesar epic, which is likely the longest epic in the world, has flourished in numerous ways outside traditional epic channels, including in folk tales, proverbs, religious iconography, film, digital media, and electronic games (Thurston 2019, 117). 275

— ​ M a r k B e n d e r —​ In Mongol versions of the story, King Gesar is referred to as Geser Khan (and is very different from the character in Tibetan versions). Here Geser Khan battles a twelve-headed monster (manggus) who has captured his wife, Lady Aralu Gowa. Such battles between heroes and multi-headed mangguses and other monsters are stock elements in dozens of other Mongol epics, including Jangar, and in epic and epic-related ballads and folk stories of the Daur（Dawo’erzu 达斡尔族), Oroqen (Elunchunzu 鄂伦春族), Evenki (Ewenkezu 鄂温克族), and Hezhen (Hezhezu 赫 哲族) ethnic groups in the northeast China and Russian borderlands. The imakan (yimakan 伊瑪堪) ballads (or short epics) of hunter-heroes (mergen), once popular among the Hezhen (China’s smallest official ethnic group), are especially well known and often contain motifs from longer epics, such as battles against monsters, trips to the underworld, and shape-shifting characters (especially female characters who turn into kori, or “divine eagles”) (Wang 2013, 1–2). The eponymous epic Jangar seems to have evolved in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries in what Chao Gejin calls the Oirat Mongol epic center in northwest China (Chao 2001, 402–03). The epic, which has been transmitted in oral and written forms, concerns the exploits of an ahistorical king, Jangar, who lives with his beautiful, capable wife Agai Xabtala in a grand palace in an ideal place called Bomba. Much of the action concerns Jangar and his twelve super-warriors who, when not clashing with manggus, indulge in lavish feasting. The epic Manas, which is sung by bards (manaschy) of the Kirghiz ethnic group in China, Kyrgyzstan (where it is regarded as a national epic), and other parts of Central Asia, charts the exploits of Manas, an ancient warrior-king (Reichl 1992). Rivaling Gesar in length, the documented version by singer Sayaqbay Qaralaev (1894–1971) “is nearly twenty times longer than the Homeric epic Iliad,” with over 500,000 poetic lines (Jumaturdu 2016, 288–89). Scholars claim the epic is at least one thousand years old, having originated from funeral laments sung in praise of the deceased hero. The epic is part of a larger body of Turkic epics relating stories of martial heroes, history, and love affairs, some of which are performed by Uighur dastan epic singers in Xinjiang and other epic singers along the Silk Road (Reichl 2019, 51–54).

CREATION EPICS OF THE SOUTHWEST AND SOUTH When teams of young researchers were dispersed across parts of southwest and south China to collect folk literature in the late 1950s, they documented dozens of oral and oral-connected long narratives from many of the ethnic groups that were undergoing identification and categorization in a project of census and ethnic identification across China – a project that had never been attempted in modern times on such a vast scale. In multi-ethnic Yunnan, groups of student researchers led by faculty participated in “going to the people” (dao minjian qu 到民間去) type collecting strategies that had been practiced in a limited way since the May Fourth Movement era decades earlier (Hung 1985, 10–12). These enthusiastic young cultural workers spent time in the rural communities learning elements of local culture first-hand, interacting daily with local tradition bearers and bi-lingual translators. The results of this multi-site fieldwork were the basis of what has grown to be a canon of epic poems that have been repeatedly published in Chinese translation since the late 1950s (Wu Zhongyang and 276

— ​ E p i c C o n t e s t a t i o n s —​ Tao Lifan 1984). Similar texts were also collected in Guizhou, Guangxi, Sichuan, and border areas with ethnic minority populations. In ensuing years, more epics have come to light, especially during the revival of ethnic studies after the disruptive Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and the launching of other massive folklore collecting projects in the 1980s and 1990s, and again in the early 2000s, the latter under the influence UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) programs. When published, the epics of ethnic minorities typically appear in Chinese translation, or occasionally in bi-lingual, or even multi-lingual versions (Bender 2019, 67–72). This body of texts now comprises a new genre of Chinese language literature. A few have been translated into English, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and other languages, by both Chinese and foreign translators (Walker 1995; Bender 2019, 68). As recently as 2019–2020, Yunnan People’s Publishing House in Kunming issued a seventeen-volume series of epic poems from Yi, Dai (Daizu 傣族, Bai (Baizu 白族), Naxi (Naxizu 納西族), Hani (Hanizu 哈尼族), Wa (Wazu 佤族), Lahu (Lahuzu 拉祜 族), and other ethnic groups in Yunnan province. The series was issued in English, the result of painstaking work by teams of Chinese scholars (who made the first drafts in English) and foreign native speakers of English (who polished in those drafts). This initiative, featuring epics from the southwest, is part of a soft-power push to make China’s diverse cultures available to global audiences. Similar epics collected in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and translated into English include the Zhuang 壯族 creation epics Buluotuo 布洛陀, the Zhuang epics of fraternal feuding entitled Hanvueng Goose King and the Ancestral King, the Yao (Yaozu 瑶族) creation epic (featuring an eponymous female creator) Miluotuo 密洛陀, the Yi epic Book of Origins (Hnewo teyy), and the Hmong Oral Epics (Miaozu shishi 苗族史詩) (Zhang Shengzhen et al. 2002; Bender 2011, 244–275; Pan Qixu and Han Jiaquan 2012; Wu Yiwen and Jin Dan 2012; Holm and Meng Yuanyao 2015; Bender et al. 2019). As noted, many of the long narrative poems collected in the southwest concern the creation of the sky, earth, the various plants, and animals – and humans. The epics share many motifs among each other and with the fragmented myths in ancient Chinese historical records. In some cases, such as Miluotuo and Hmong Oral Epics, female creators play crucial roles in the creation, similar in ways to the goddess Nu Wa of the ancient Chinese myth. Prevalent motifs and themes in the Southwest epics include the sky and earth coalescing from an indistinguishable mix of elements, after which the sky (made of lighter elements) and the earth (made of heavier elements) are separated by some sort of supernatural force. Then, either a particular creator or their emissaries go about creating the sky and all its celestial features, land and waterways, and, ultimately, the various lifeforms of land and water. At some point, the earth begins to overheat (in an eerie prescience of our contemporary situation) and life is nearly extinguished. This happens because too many suns and moons were placed in the sky. To remedy this situation, a hero typically appears who searches among the shrubs and trees for a perch from which to draw his bow and shoot down the offending celestial orbs, leaving but one sun and moon – though so frightened, he must ply them to return. They do so in turns, so today the sun appears in the day, and the moon at night. Sometime later (epic time is flexible), the earth is re-populated, sometimes with intervention from powers in the sky. After life returns to earth, another generation of proto-humans arises and somehow angers the sky god or thunder god, and a deluge floods the earth. The survivors (sometimes 277

— ​ M a r k B e n d e r —​ a brother and sister) escape the rising waters in a giant calabash or other vessel, then procreate after the water recedes. The offspring, however, may be abnormal in shape (possibly retribution for violating the incest taboo) and often unable to speak. Once the secret of speech is discovered, the offspring utter different local languages and lead their respective descendants to seek out ideal places within the regional landscape to dwell. The niches range from the fertile river bottoms uphill to the highest points that allow cultivation, reflecting a sort of ethnic/social hierarchy determined by elevation within the landscape, which is still observable today. Some epics unfold by incorporating many of these structural themes in a kind of “eco-genealogy” in which the origins of land, plants, animals, and humans are linked together (Bender et al. 2019, lxxx–lxxxii). One example is the Book of Origins (Hnewo teyy), a ritual text that circulates orally and in written form among Nuosu 諾蘇 ritualists and folk singers in southern Sichuan and northern Yunnan provinces.5 In this epic, sometime after the great burning is ended by the archer Zhyge Alu, red snow falls from the sky and transforms into the twelve snow tribes (literally “offspring” or “sons”) (Bender et al. 2019, lxxi). These groups of lifeforms, which are metonymic for the flora and fauna known to the ancient Yi, are categorized in the epic as those beings “without blood” (that is, plants) and those “with blood” (that is, animals). Similar content is found in the Miao/Hmong epics from southeast Guizhou province, where Butterfly Mother (Mais Bangx) and other ancients are worshipped in cyclical community rituals that involve wooden drums and sacrifices of water buffaloes (Bender 2006, xxvii–xxviii; Wu and Dan 2012). Each traditional village has a sweet gum tree that is worshipped as a shrine to Butterfly Mother, who laid the twelve eggs from among which the culture hero Jang Vang (as well as dragons, elephants, Ji Wei bird, etc.) hatched. Many motifs from the epic, including butterflies and the Ji Wei bird, are included in Miao embroidery and silverwork. The epics are sung antiphonally between two pairs of singers (male or female duos) in a call-andresponse format in which the respective singers display their knowledge of the epic content.

THE “EPIC-ADJACENT” SPEAKING AND SINGING TRADITIONS Of the nearly three hundred styles of professional storytelling (predominantly in the Han local cultures), the majority of these so-called “speaking and singing” traditions had percussion and/or stringed musical accompaniment, and several were in forms and formats that could be bundled under a generous definition of epic, including some prominent forms that survive today. These epic-adjacent forms, which are either prosimetric or mixtures of song, narration, and dramatic voices, include those connected to Buddhism and Chinese folk belief traditions, often called “precious volumes” (baojuan 寶卷) or telling scriptures (jiangjing 講經), which may have antecedents in prosimetric “transformation texts” (bianwen 變文) used in the introduction of Mahayana Buddhism from India as early as the Tang dynasty (Mair 1989; Berezkin 2017, 3–5). A body of lengthy prosimetric written narratives, some called tanci 彈詞 (literally “plucking rhymes”), were popular forms of vernacular 278

— ​ E p i c C o n t e s t a t i o n s —​ fiction among elite women in the lower Yangzi Delta during Late Imperial times, though over time have had diverse audiences (Guo 2015). In the late eighteenth century, a young woman named Chen Duansheng 陈端生 wrote one of the longest prosimetric works in Chinese literature. The tanci plot is that of Meng Lijun 孟丽君, the daughter of an upper-class family in Yunnan. Meng escapes from an arranged marriage by disguising herself as a young scholar and after many twists and turns in the plot passes the imperial exams and is made a prime minister. In a famous scene, she finds herself in the marriage chamber with none other than her former maidservant, who was left behind in Yunnan to marry in her stead. Other lengthy tanci narratives were written and edited by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and versions of many seem to have been adapted for oral performance by professional storytellers of the day. The exciting realm of current professional storytelling embodies the living tradition of the “singing and speaking” traditions. In the “straight” storytelling (shuoshu 說書) styles of Yangzhou, Suzhou, Beijing, and Sichuan, a single storyteller, often equipped only with a large folding fan (wielded to represent a sword, a letter, an umbrella, etc.) and an “awakening block” (xingmu 醒木) struck on the storytelling table to focus audience attention (Blader 1983). Stories, modified by generations of performers, yet re-created at each telling, traditionally could last up to a year (today a two-week form is typical) when told for an hour or two in a session held in a dedicated story house or marketplace. The narration, in both speech and the occasional song, involves complex shifting between voices of the narrator and individual characters cast in role types similar to Chinese opera, and includes special registers for revealing thoughts of characters and narrator asides. Stories also incorporate parts of prose literary classics like Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi 三國 演義), Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳), accounts of the hero Yue Fei 嶽飛, and Chinese histories, with some modifications in accordance with the needs of the storytellers. A related form of living professional storytelling called Suzhou tanci 蘇州 彈詞, current in the areas around Suzhou and Shanghai, and xianci 弦詞 in Yangzhou, is performed with stringed instruments in the same story houses in the Yangzi Delta as the straight storytelling.6 Though delivered using similar basic gestures and verbal registers as the straight storytelling, tanci/xianci is usually performed by a duo (often a man and a woman) who sit facing the audience in high-backed chairs on a low storytelling stage, with a narrow table between them. The lead plays the three-stringed banjo (sanxian 三弦), and the assistant plays the Chinese lute (pipa 琵琶). Through a mix of narration, singing, and moving or lively dialogue, the pair tell serial stories of love affairs between “gifted scholars and talented beauties” (caizi jiaren 才子佳人), with drama-filled plots that include “cross-dressing” characters, domestic intrigues, suspicious deaths, bickering servants, human frailties, and other stock features that keep audiences listening. Northern China has various styles of orally performed and written drum ballads (dagu 大鼓 and guci 鼓詞, respectively), that  are long prosimetric narratives with linked episodic plot structures similar to southern styles and classified by Chinese scholars as forms of speaking and singing traditions (Wan 2020).  Though facing

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— ​ M a r k B e n d e r —​ overwhelming competition from electronic media, dozens of professional storytellers are still active today, especially in Suzhou, Shanghai, and Yangzhou.

CONCLUSION: ONGOING EPIC STRUGGLES IN CHINA Around 2004 researchers in the People’s Republic of China began to seek out traditional heritage forms that corresponded to UNESCO’s definition of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and the state encouraged local communities to vigorously compete for funding and recognition of their local heritage traditions as part of a large-scale cultural revitalization project by the government to promote “excellent traditions” that reflect well on the nation and contribute to a healthy society. The ICH experience differs between countries and involves a complex landscape of implementation and actors (Noyes 2015, 299–305; Seeger 2015, 131–32). Yet, the experience in China, as in many other places, has entailed not only the process of documentation of critically important forms, but also the commodification of local culture and often the recreation and branding of heritage (Zhang and You 2020, 16). Several of the northern epic traditions discussed above, Jangar, Gesar, Manas, and the imakan verse narratives of the Hezhen, have received ICH recognition as “epics” in the present heritage contexts. Along with these well-known epic traditions, other local traditions have been put forward for recognition, which has caused disagreement over generic classifications and raised further issues about commodification. That said, in recent years, especially after the rise of the ICH programming and government-sponsored heritage agendas, there has been a rush by local governments and tourist agencies to invoke the term “epic.” The term has taken on an awesome significance among the Chinese public, and a host of local ritual and performance traditions are now popularly branded as “epics.” Such branding may increase local governments’ soft power in their bids for ICH status, and promote the commodification of local culture through ethnic/local/ecological tourism, such as the newly invented song and dance show based on the Women’s Script (nvshu 女書 tradition) tradition of Jiangyong county 江 永縣, Hunan, that has been billed by promoters as an epic performance, and includes a body of prosimetric stories shared by local women in the gendered script form (Idema 2008; He 2021, 382–86). Certain controversy has occasionally erupted over the mis-application of the term “epic.” Around 2010, the King of Yalu (亞魯王 Yalu Wang) “epic” suddenly came under debate (Bender 2014, 82–85). This living tradition of rituals featuring strong narrative component about the mythical King Yalu was “discovered” in villages in the Ziyun 紫雲 county area of mountainous Guizhou province. Questions soon arose on how to classify the phenomenon – was this a ritual cycle, an “epic,” or a “myth-epic” (shenhua shishi 神話史詩)? An epic research field site was set up by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and the local government culture office made great plans for introducing the epic poem to the world. A local folk literatus named Yang Zhengjiang 楊正江 collaborated with local donglang 東郎 ritualists, local cultural bureau officials, and Yu Weiren 餘未人, vice-president of the Chinese Folk Artists Association (Zhongguo minjian wenyijia xiehui 中國民間文藝 家協會) to create an elaborately printed Miao (romanization) and Chinese version of the tradition based on portions sung by different ritualists. Following common 280

— ​ E p i c C o n t e s t a t i o n s —​ practice in the refinement process of folk narratives in China, the editors wove the pieces together into a narrative master text that serves on one level as a monument to the local oral tradition, though on another level obscures the affective power and episodic and context-sensitive use of the narratives in performance. Though still controversial, the term “epic” has stuck. As I have argued, a more expansive definition of “epic” combined with greater appreciation for literary and performance traditions from ethnic minorities along China’s borderlands and the “epic-adjacent” traditions of the Han local cultures has the potential to expand the world vista of epics. A wide variety of performance styles and narrative content, with rich ethnic and gender diversity among its composers and performers, mark this complex heritage of long narrative poems and prosimetric works that are communicated by performance and/or writing. While language and cultural barriers exist for those outside China to appreciate this vast corpus, an inclusive, global conception of “epic” and other such generic categories is a step in the right direction to give long overdue recognition to this aspect of China’s cultural heritage.

NOTES 1 Terms not given with Chinese pinyin romanization are presented in the respective romanization systems of Mongolian, Hezhen, Northern Yi, etc. 2 The “speaking and singing” genres are also called shuochang wenxue 說唱文學, using the same English translation. The categories of classification refer to oral composition and performance; written texts that are somehow connected to oral performances (either showing features of oral performance, or as prompt books used before or during oral deliveries); and texts written in the style (actual or imagined) of oral performances for reading (Honko 2000, 4–9; Foley 2002, 38–53; Bender and Mair 2011, 7–10; Ready 2015, 43–45). 3 China presently recognizes 56 official “minzu” 民族 (ethnic groups). The Han (Hanzu 漢 族) is the majority, with over 90% of the population. There are 55 “shaoshu minzu” 少數民 族 (ethnic minority groups). See Mullaney (2010) for information on the process of ethnic identification in the 1950s and thereafter. The term Zhonghua minzu 中華民族 (“Chinese nation”), dating to the Republican period of the twentieth century and revived in the PRC, incorporates all peoples within China’s border and their descendants worldwide. 4 The northern heroic epics Jangar and Gesar are discussed in two other chapters, by Chao and Mikles, respectively, in this volume; thus, I devote more space to the southern creation epics in this chapter. 5 The Nuosu, numbering over 2.3 million people, are the largest subgroup of the official Yi ethnic group of southwest China, which numbers about nine million (Bender et al. 2019, xxvi–xxix). The Miao (Hmong) also number around nine million in China and like the Yi have dozens of subgroups, some of which extend into Southeast Asia. 6 For detailed descriptions of professional storytelling and storysinging in the areas of Yangzhou and Suzhou-Shanghai, see Børdhal (1996) and Bender (2003). The local term pingtan 評彈 encompasses both styles of narrative delivery.

WORKS CITED Bender, Mark. 2003. Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2006. Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou, China. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.

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— ​ M a r k B e n d e r —​ ———. 2011. “A Tradition-oriented Yao Creation Epic.” In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, edited by Victor Mair and Mark Bender, 244–75. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2014. “King of Yalu in Mashan, Guizhou: An ‘Epic’ in Contemporary Contexts.” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Genres 33, no. 1: 82–93. ———. 2019. “Co-creations, Master Texts, and Monuments: Long Narrative Poems of Ethnic Minority Groups in China.” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Genres 38, no 2: 65–90. ———, and Victor Mair. 2011. “I Sit Here and Sing for You.” In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, edited by Victor Mair and Mark Bender, 1–12. New York: Columbia University Press. ———, Aku Wuwu, and Jjivot Zopqu. 2019. The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Berezkin, Rostilav. 2017. Many Faces of Mulian: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Blackburn, Stuart H., and Joyce B. Flueckiger. 1989. Introduction to Oral Epics in India, edited by Stuart H. Blackburn, et al., 1–11. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blader, Susan. 1983. “Yan Chasan Thrice Tested: Printed Novel to Oral Tale.” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Genres 12, no. 1: 84–111. Børdahl, Vibeke. 1996. The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. ———. 2002. “Epic and Asian Folklore.” Asian Folklore Studies 61, no. 2: 311–20. Chao, Gejin. 2001. “The Oirat Epic Cycle of Jangar.” Oral Tradition 16, no. 2: 402–35. ———, ed. 2013. Zhongguo shishi xue duben [Study volume on Chinese epics]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehuikexue chubanshe. Foley, John Miles. 1993. Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Guo, Li. 2015. Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Heisseg, Walther. 1996. “The Present State of the Mongolian Epic and Some Topics for Future Research.” Oral Tradition 11, no. 1: 85–98. He, Yan. 2021. “Jiangyong Women’s Script in the Era of ICH: Channels of Development and Transmission.” Asian Ethnology 80, no. 2: 367–89. Holm, David, and Meng Yuanyao. 2015. Hanvueng: The Goose King and the Ancestral King, An Epic from Guangxi in Southern China. Leiden: Brill. Honko, Lauri. 1998. Textualising the Siri Epic. FF Communications 264. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica. ———. 2000. “Text as Process and Practice: The Textualization of Oral Epics.” In The Textualization of Oral Epics, edited by Lauri Honko, 3–54. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hu Shi 胡適. 2012. “Gushishi de qilai” 故事詩的起來. [Origin of stories]. In Zhongguo shishixue duben 中國史詩學讀本 [Study volume of Chinese epic studies], edited by Chao Gejin 朝戈金, 19–23. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Hung, Chang-tai. 1985. Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918– 1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Idema, Wilt. L. 2008. Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women’s Script. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———, and Beata Grant, eds. 2004. “Plucking Rhymes.” In The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, edited by Wilt L. Idema and Beata Grant, 717–83. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center.

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— ​ E p i c C o n t e s t a t i o n s —​ Jumaturdu, Adil. 2016. “A Comparative Study of Performers of the Manas Epic.” The Journal of American Folklore 129, no. 513: 288–96. Karmay, Samten G. 1993. “The Theoretical Basis of the Tibetan Epic, with Reference to a ‘Chronological Order’ of the Various Episodes in the Gesar Epic.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 56, no. 2: 234–46. Lin, Gang. 2010. “20th Century Exploration of the ‘Issue of the Chinese Epic’.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 4, no. 1: 32–54. Mair, Victor. 1989. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction in China. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. ———. 1997. “The Prosimetric Form in Chinese Literature.” In Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives in Prose and Verse, edited by Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl, 365–86. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer. ———, and Mark Bender, ed. 2011. The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. McLaren, Anne E. 1998. Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. Sinica Leidensia Series 41. Boston, MA: Brill. ———. 2022. Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and Local in Chinese Regional Culture. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. ———, and Emily Yu Zhang. 2017. “Recreating ‘Traditional’ Folk Epics in Contemporary China: The Politics of Textual Transmission.” Asian Ethnology 76, no. 1: 19–41. Mullaney, Thomas. 2010. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noyes, Dorothy. 2015. “From Cultural Forms to Policy Objects: Comparison in Scholarship and Policy.” Journal of Folklore Research 52, no. 2–3: 299-313. Pan Qixu 潘其旭, and Han Jiaquan 韓家權, trans. 2012. Buluotuo shishi (Zhuang Han ying duizhao) 布羅陀史詩（壯漢英對照 [The epic of Baeuqloxgdoh: Zhuang/Han bilingual text]. Nanning: Guangxi renmin chubanshe​. Ready, Jonathan L. 2015. “The Textualization of Homeric Epic by Means of Dictation.” TAPA 145, no. 1: 1–75. ———. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts. Oxford: University of Oxford Press. Reichl, Karl. 1992. Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structure. New York: Garland Publishing. ———. 2019. “Oral Epics Along the Silk Road: The Turkic Traditions of Xinjiang.” Chinoperl: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 38, no. 1: 45–63. Renqindao’erji 仁欽道爾吉, and Lang Ying 郎櫻. 2016. Zhongguo shishi 中國史詩 [Chinese epics]. Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang wenyi chubanshe. Reynolds, Dwight Fletcher. 1995. Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Seeger, Anthony. 2015. “Understanding UNESCO: A Complex Organization with Many Parts and Many Actors.” In UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Lisa Gilman, 131–42. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thurston, Timothy. 2019. “The Tibetan Gesar Epic Beyond Its Bards: An Ecosystem of Genres on the Roof of the World.” The Journal of American Folklore 132, no. 524: 115–36. Walker, Anthony. 1995. Mvuh Hpa Mi Hpa: Creating Heaven, Creating Earth: An Epic of the Lahu People in Yunnan. Bangkok: Silkworm Books. Wan, Margaret. 2020. Traditional Literature and the Transmission of Culture: Chinese Drum Ballads, 1800–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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— ​ M a r k B e n d e r —​ Wang, Weibo, trans. 2013. The Yimakan Epics of Hezhe Ethnic Minority in China. Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe. Wen Yiduo 聞一多. 2013. “Shishi wenti” 史詩問題 [The question of epic]. In Zhongguo shishixue duben 中國史詩學讀本, edited by Chao Gejin 朝戈金, 28–31. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Wu, Bing’an. 2011. “Chinese Creation Myths: A Great Discovery.” In China’s Creation and Origin Myths: Cross-cultural Explorations in Oral and Written Traditions, edited by Mineke Schipper, Ye Shuxian, and Yin Hubin, 177–96. Leiden: Brill. Wu Yiwen 吳一文, and Jin Dan 今旦, eds. 2012. Miaozu shishi 苗族史詩 / Hxak hlieb [Hmong oral epics]. Translated by Mark Bender, Wu Yifang 吳一方, and Levi Gibbs. Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe. Wu Zhongyang 吳重陽, and Tao Lifan 陶立璠, eds. 1984. Zhongguo shaoshu minzu minjian wenxue zuopin xuanjiang 中國少數民族民間文學作品選講 [Selected papers on Chinese ethnic minority folk literature]. Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe. Yang, Lihui, and Deming An. 2008. Handbook of Chinese Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yin, Hubin. 2013. “The Paradigm Shift of Epic Studies in China.” In Xian dai she hui zhong de min su chuan tong 现代社会中的民俗传统 [Folk Traditions in Modern Society], edited by Pekka Hekamies, Jian Sun, and Vibeke Børdahl, 126–39. Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe. Zhang, Lijun, and Ziying You. 2020. Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zhang Shengzhen 張聲震, Guanxiong Meng 蒙冠雄, Yonghong Lan 蓝永红, and Zhenglu Lan 蓝正录, eds. 2002. Miluotuo guge: Zhongguo yaozu Bunu zhixi 密洛陀古歌：中國 瑤族布努支系 [Miluotuo ancient songs: Chinese Yao ethnic group, Bunu branch]. 3 vols. Nanning: Guangxi minzu chubanshe. Zhang Taiyan 章太炎. 2013. “Zhengming zayi shishi” 正名雜義·史詩 [Miscellaneous meanings: Epic]. In Zhongguo shishixue duben 中國史詩學讀本, edited by Chao Gejin 朝 戈金, 1–2. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe. Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸. 1927. “Yanjiu Zhonguo wenxuede xin tupo” 研究中国文学的新途 径 [New breakthroughs in the study of Chinese literature]. Xiaoshuo yuebao 研究中國文 學的新突破 [Short story monthly] 17: 14. ———. 1987. Zhongguo suwenxue shi 中國俗文學史 [History of Chinese vernacular literature]. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

W H O S E E P I C I S I T, A N Y WAY ? GESAR AND THE MYTH OF THE N AT I O N A L E P I C

rsr

Natasha L. Mikles

Called at various times the “national treasure of Tibet” (Shambala Publications n.d.), “the highest treasure of Tibetan literature” (WindhorseTour n.d.), and the “Tibetan national epic” (Kapstein 2007, 358; Linde 2009, 138), the epic of Gesar of Ling is widely praised as an emblematic gem of Tibetan culture. Telling the story of the hero King Gesar’s rise to power and his eventual defeat of evil forces threatening his kingdom of Ling (Gling in Tibetan), the Gesar epic is a living tradition that continues to be publicly performed to this day. For this reason, the epic has been the subject of significant national and international preservation efforts aimed at safeguarding its unique contribution to oral literature. These endeavors include the extensive transcription and publication of episodes performed by individual bards— putting many epic bards in state employ through Chinese government agencies like the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (Zhongguo minzu shiwu weiyuanhui in Chinese)—the Chinese government sponsorship of Tibetan cultural festivals related to King Gesar, and its 2009 inscription on the UNESCO-sponsored Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO). Such preservation efforts, however, have brought to the forefront issues of national identity, political sovereignty, and cultural representation. These preservation efforts have largely been led by the government of the People’s Republic of China, which many Tibetan observers view as an occupying or, at the very least, an oppressive force in Tibetan regions. When the Gesar epic and other treasures of Tibetan culture are preserved as Intangible Cultural Heritage under the sponsorship of China, it naturalizes China’s claim to Tibetan regions, while also challenging indigenous ideas of Tibetan “nationhood.” Beyond these competing claims to political and cultural sovereignty laid bare in the epic’s UNESCO designation, however, the Gesar epic complicates privileging the contemporary nation-state as the foundational unit of scholarly focus, which has generally been the norm in much of epic studies. The Gesar epic thrives in Tibetan-speaking, Tibetan-influenced, and non-Tibetan cultural regions across the Himalayan Plateau and beyond, including Ladakh, Mongolia, Bhutan, Baltistan, Nepal, Sikkim, and western China. The current debates DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-24

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— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ surrounding the preservation of the Tibetan “national epic” as a Chinese document ultimately mask the extent to which the Gesar epic exists, and has always existed, as a transnational narratological phenomenon. Despite claims implicit to the category of “national epic” that Gesar represents the “heart” of the Tibetan nation, global Gesar literature reveals a hero wearing dozens, if not hundreds, of guises; to name but a few, the character Gesar appears variously as a Buddhist hero, a Muslim hero, a symbol of environmental consciousness, evidence of Tibetan vitality under the Chinese government, and a paragon of Tibetan national resistance. This challenge to the concept of “national epic” is further enhanced by Gesar’s precarious position within Tibetan circles, where central Tibetans from the regions of Üd (Tib. Dus) and Tsang (Tib. Gtsang)—the political center of the Dalai Lamas—have generally taken little interest in the epic. The more one looks at the Gesar epic in detail, the harder it is to see Gesar as a “national epic” for anyone at all, forcing a critical examination of the category of “national epic” itself. The issues surrounding the Gesar epic, its widespread designation as the “national epic” of Tibet, and its eventual inclusion on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage as a Chinesesponsored tradition, therefore, provide an important case study to examine both the fundamentally political and relatively modern nature of the “national epic” concept itself, as well as how various cultural stakeholders in an epic tradition can become either intentionally or unintentionally obscured by Euro-American analytical categories and the role of organizations like UNESCO in international heritage politics.

THE GESAR EPIC: AN INTRODUCTION The Gesar epic tells the story of the warrior-king Gesar as he rises to power, defends his kingdom from evil forces, and gains significant spiritual and financial treasure. The epic is prominent in many Himalayan communities, but especially in the eastern Tibetan communities of Kham (Tib. Khams) and Amdo (Tib. A mdo), roughly contiguous with the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Qinghai, respectively. As with most oral literature, determining a specific origin date for the Gesar epic is difficult. Some scholars hypothesize that the epic took shape in the centuries after Tibet’s “Age of Fragmentation” with the fourteenth-century CE rise of the Pakmodru (Tib. Phag mo gru) monastic principality and related literature that glorified the ruling Lang dynasty (Tib. Rlangs) (Rlangs a myes byang chub ’dre khol 1974; FitzHerbert 2016, 300). Other scholars place the epic’s origins earlier, in the disrupted Age of Fragmentation itself, identifying in the epic a distinct nostalgia for the glories of the earlier, seventh- to ninth-century CE Tibetan Empire (Forgues 2011). Yet, other scholars point to a more international origin, arguing that the name “Gesar” is related to the title “Caesar” and noting that in some early texts, King Gesar is referred to as Gesar of Phrom or Gesar of Khrom (Stein 1959, 107–14).1 Similarly, understanding what the Gesar epic looked like in its pre-published form is also impossible to determine with any certainty. An interpretation prevalent in Gesar scholarship is that the epic underwent a process of “buddhicization”: i.e., the belief that King Gesar reflects some sort of pre-Buddhist shamanic prototype that slowly became incorporated into the Buddhist pantheon (Stein 1956; FitzHerbert 2007). However, with no published texts of the epic before the seventeenth century CE and little concrete knowledge of Tibetan religious life before the arrival of Buddhism 286

— ​ W h o s e E p i c I s I t , A n y w a y ? —​ (and writing) in the eighth century CE, such an interpretation relies largely on assumptions and conjecture. While King Gesar certainly shares characteristics with mountain deities and other indigenous divine figures who scholars have argued were themselves incorporated into Buddhist cosmologies, the first published narratives of the Gesar epic from the seventeenth century already portray him as a compatriot of the Buddha Padmasambhava (Rdzogs sprul padma rig ’dzin 1980; Tashi Tsering 1981). More importantly, the very narrative of “buddhicization” itself relies on an academic construction of “Buddhism” that privileges Indian developments and makes divisions between transnational “world religions” and local “folk religions” (Masuzawa 2005). These questions of origins aside, the Gesar epic is a massive, sprawling collection of narratives considered to be a “living” epic—with new episodes being continuously performed and added today. Despite this “living” status, certain well-known narratives are generally considered to form the “heart” of the epic. In most versions, King Gesar is born to a Naga princess who has been made consort of the Tibetan warlord Senglon (Tib. Seng blon); oftentimes, Gesar’s birth is arranged by the Buddha Padmasambhava, who inspires a deity to incarnate in the human realm in an effort to defend Buddhism in Tibet from demonic forces. After a painful childhood as a deformed and sickly child, Joru—as Gesar is now called—is exiled with his mother through the machinations of his evil uncle Throthung (Tib. Khro thung). While in exile, Joru learns that his father Senglon has planned a horse race and the winner will become king and marry the most beautiful girl in Ling. After catching and training the magic horse Kyangbu (Tib. Kyang bu), Joru enters the race as a surprise competitor. Though mocked for his deformity and his horse’s lean appearance, Joru wins the race, transforming himself into the glorious hero Gesar and his horse into an exuberant red stallion. He rules Ling graciously and expertly; subsequent episodes generally follow a pattern of Gesar discovering the nefarious plots of demonic kings nearby and then detailing his efforts to destroy them through martial prowess, cunning deception, and magical aid. Generally, epic episodes are performed (or published) independent of one another, so that determining a “single” chronological or authoritative narrative is difficult after the initial episodes detailing Gesar’s rise to power. Certain episodes, however, are more popular than others, including Gesar’s battle with the giant of the North, the destruction of the kingdom of Jang, and the rescue of his captured wife from the three demon kings of Hor. Across the episodes, King Gesar is generally revered as both a model of spiritual power and a paragon of “heroic masculinity,” as Geoff Barstow has termed the intersection of qualities highlighting his power in battle, prestige in society, and dominance over the natural world around him (2017, 142–43). However, since there is no “standard” version of the epic, each telling produced in bardic performance or composed by an author may portray King Gesar and his world differently to reflect their specific environment and the expectations of their audience.2 The wide range possible in the Gesar epic is especially evident when considering the story of Gesar’s incarnation into the human world in three versions published in English—(1) one translated from a late nineteenth-century Tibetan source composed and edited by Ju Mipham Gyatso (‘Ju Mi Pham rgya mtsho) and his disciple Gyurmé Thubten Jamyang Drakpa (‘Gyur med thub bstan ‘jam dbyangs grags pa) (Kornman 2012); (2) one translated from a German translation of the 1716 Mongolian publication 287

— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ produced in Beijing (Zeitlin 1927); and (3) one based on the author’s memories of his Ladakhi grandparents’ performances at home (Khan 2017; see Table 20.1). Space does not permit a full re-creation or even substantial analysis of these sections— which vary in length from a few paragraphs to whole publications of more than 150 pages—but each of them has been roughly summarized below. Each telling highlighted below reflects specific local concerns. (1) is composed by a prominent Buddhist practitioner who is deeply invested in connecting King Gesar to the Table 20.1  Gesar’s birth in the three versions of the epic.

(1) Nineteenth-century Tibetan Version

(2) 1716 Mongolian Version

(3) Present-Day Ladakhi Version

The Buddhist deity Avalokiteśvara begs the Buddha Padmasambhava to intercede in Tibet, which has become oppressed by demonic kings suppressing Buddhism. After a variety of mystical meetings and tantric rituals, Padmasambhava calls the deity “Joyful to Hear” into existence from the primordial ultimate mind. This deity receives Buddhist empowerments from a variety of Buddhist divine figures and is convinced by Padmasambhava to incarnate as Gesar, along with a host of other divine beings, who will take form as his invisible protectors or as members of his court. He then incarnates as Gesar in the womb of Gedzo, a Naga princess, who Padmasambhava arranges to acquire through deceptively polluting the ocean where the Nagas live and then himself providing the solution and demanding a reward.

The Buddha tells the father of the gods, Kormuzda, that one of his sons must incarnate in 500 years to protect human society, which will have fallen into disarray. Kormuzda forgets and the Buddha must destroy part of his kingdom to remind him of his promise. The firstborn and second-born sons refuse to go, but the thirdborn son Tagus agrees to incarnate, along with thirty of the lesser gods to assist him. Tagus is incarnated in the womb of Amurtsheela, who is the daughter of a neighboring prince captured in battle and brought to Ling.

Ling Sonam sees a powerful black-and-white yak fighting for six consecutive days. On the seventh day, he uses a sling to kill the black yak, thus saving the white yak. The white yak becomes human and explains that he is the king of the gods who was locked in combat with the Lord of Hell. He grants Ling Sonam a wish, and the man wishes for the divine king to send one of his sons to become rule the land of Ling. The god agrees and sends eighteen lesser gods to assist his son. All of the god’s sons refuse to go, but the youngest finally agrees after he is threatened by a falling boulder. He incarnates in the womb of Grog Zang, who is the wife of Ling Sonam.

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— ​ W h o s e E p i c I s I t , A n y w a y ? —​ continued power of Buddhism in Tibet. (2) is a Mongolian rendition, and here we can see Gesar’s ties to indigenous Mongolian deities who remain popular despite Mongolia’s adoption of Tibetan Buddhist practices. The Ladakhi telling discussed in (3) shows the unique trope of fighting yaks, which may reflect the livelihood of Ladakhi listeners. While certain songs or sections may be presented by amateurs, the Gesar epic is generally performed by specialized bards (Tib. sgrung mkhan) who sometimes experience a form of inspired revelation or possession similar to that undergone by spirit mediums in the Himalayan region. The path to becoming a Gesar bard is different for each singer, and many traits overlap between bardic “types”; it is hard, therefore, to identify a watertight typological model.3 Some bards may look into a bronze mirror, blank paper, or other device as if reading from a book to recite the tale (Tib. Pra phab), while others learn the epic via listening to other bards (Tib. Thos sgrung) or through careful study of a written text (Tib. Don sgrung). Perhaps the most wellknown and well-studied bards are the so-called “visionary” bards (Tib.’Bab sgrung), whose ability to tell the epic commences with a severe physical illness that acts as an initiatory event and often involves visions of Gesar’s court of heroes and events from the narrative. Upon being healed, such bards are able to recite either all or parts of the epic through inducing a state of possession. Local Buddhist institutions often are called upon to heal the bards’ illness through blessings and purification rituals, as well as to provide a public affirmation of their status as a Gesar bard. During the course of their lifetime, such bards will continue to receive inspiration to tell differing episodes. When they are compelled to recite what is usually considered the “final” episode of the epic—in which King Gesar descends to hell to save his mother or other close female companion, generally known as The Great Perfection of Hell (Tib. Dmyal gling rdzogs pa chen po)—the bard is believed to only have a few years left to live. In recent fieldwork, many eastern Tibetan villages had a local narrative about a bard dying after a public performance of The Great Perfection of Hell; as the epic comes to an end, so does the bard’s life. In performance, the Gesar epic is sung in what ethnomusicologists call a chantefable style of performance—rapidly chanted prose sections alternated with long, extended songs. The songs tend to follow a specific structure, where the singer identifies themselves, as well as detailing the place, time, and circumstances of composition, and each character sings their own particular melody such that the songs of Gesar’s wife Drugmo (Tib. ’Brug mo) always follow the same melody. Almost all of the epic singing is done in Tibetan, which belongs to the Tibeto-Burmese language family, though the singing is generally performed in whatever local dialect of Tibetan the bard and his audience speak. During performance, bards generally wear special clothing that is ritually constructed and blessed as part of producing the performative arena (Mikles 2020), and most contemporary performances are held at local festivals, in urban auditoriums or other large venues. Recent research in Qinghai and among exile Tibetans living in the mountain town of Dharamshala, India, reveals that many Tibetans have some distrust for contemporary bards, believing a significant proportion to be frauds aiming to capitalize on the Chinese government’s interest in Gesar and its significant financial resources dedicated toward preserving the epic tradition. Indeed, FitzHerbert has hypothesized that many of these traditional festivals may have constructed a tenuous connection to the Gesar epic in order to gain access to government resources (2007, 295–97). 289

— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ In academic scholarship and anthropological presentations, the Gesar epic is interpreted almost exclusively as a Tibetan cultural product. Unpacking this phenomenon involves deconstructing the term “Tibet” so that there is a distinction between Tibet as a multivalent, non-unified cultural conglomeration based roughly on the Himalayan Plateau (TibetCL) and Tibet as a sovereign political entity commonly identified in contemporary parlance as the “nation-state” (TibetNS). These appellations, TibetanCL/TibetanNS, which are my own creation, help to mediate the disconnect between the contemporary political situation and the historical spread of culture. While TibetNS as a singular, ethnic “nation” is a relatively modern development, TibetCL has undoubtedly had significant influence in the Himalayan region. It is entirely likely, therefore, that the Gesar epic spread to Bhutan, Baltistan, Ladakh, Mongolia and so forth along with TibetanCL religious systems and TibetanCL languages. However, to privilege TibetNS as the home of the Gesar epic, as happens when it is declared the “national epic” of Tibet, relegates these communities to a secondary status—a periphery to the TibetanCL/TibetanNS “center.” It also affirms their politically defined boundaries as natural, rather than acknowledging the whole region shares significant cultural heritage (TibetCL) that is largely separate from specific political borders. This perception of a cultural center and periphery is both constructed and reinforced by the academic lens. Due to the structures of graduate language training, academic job market needs, and the gravitational pull of alreadyestablished undergraduate classes, TibetNS has historically been privileged as a focus of study over other TibetanCL communities that surround it, such that it reproduces their subordinate status. As a result, we overlook the transnational networks that have historically provided both meaning and significance for Himalayan communities outside of their association with TibetNS. And ultimately, there are few narratives more transnational than the Gesar epic. The epic thrives today in communities outside of the boundaries of TibetNS such that it could as easily be called the “Balti national epic” or the “Bhutanese national epic.” The Gesar epic, therefore, is a discursive site allowing for an investigation of the deployment of the term “national epic” and how language can become co-opted to naturalize political sovereignty in the contemporary cultural heritage economy.

DE-NATIONALIZING THE NATIONAL EPIC Contemporary descriptions of “epic” as a genre highlight its close association with the values and beliefs of a specific ethnic or cultural group. In John Sutherland’s introductory primer A Little History of Literature, he explains, “epics celebrate, in heroic narrative, certain fundamental ideals. And more specifically they mark the ‘birth of nations’” (2013, 15). Specifically, however, it is not simply any community that can have an epic; rather, in this model, epics themselves are evidence of greatness: Literary epics…chronicle the birth not of ‘any’ nation, but of nations that will one day grow to be great empires, swallowing up lesser nations…could Luxembourg, or the Principality of Monaco, however gifted its authors, host an epic? Could the multinational European Union have one? Such states can create literature, great literature, even. But they cannot create epic literature. (2013, 16–17) 290

— ​ W h o s e E p i c I s I t , A n y w a y ? —​ Sutherland’s work is a brief introduction to literary concepts aimed at beginning students; however, it reveals the conceptual space inhabited by epic in the minds of many—students, academics, and other observers alike. The term “epic,” and specifically the frequently used appellation of “national epic,” carries with it certain fundamental presuppositions—namely, that this piece of literature belongs to a specific group, that it expresses certain values fundamental to the group, and that that the specific group constitutes a singular, imagined community we might call a “nation” (Anderson 1983). While the term “national epic” is used with decreasing frequency in high-level scholarship, certain Euro-American notions about what qualifies as epic continue to define much of the field and often quietly restate the assumptions inherent to the term “national epic” without, perhaps, using that exact term (Dimock 2013; Repinecz 2019, 69–94). More importantly, in common parlance outside of academic scholarship, the term “national epic” continues to dominate public discourse and form general perceptions. “National epic” is not a sui generis category, however; its history can be traced back to German Romanticism and the development of the idea of folk/volk and folk literature/“volksliteratur.” The term begins appearing in English near the end of the nineteenth century, with the earliest use of the term I have found being the 1882 publication of the Kalevala, the Finnish National Epic. Traces of the concept can be found in English- and German-language literature a few years earlier, however, as exemplified by John Stuart Blackie’s 1866 analysis of Homer’s Iliad that explains “national significance is the soul of the [epic] poet’s work…the Aeneid, with Virgil, did not mean Aeneas; it meant Rome” (263) or in the 1867 publication of Julius Ley’s Zur Charakteristik der altdeutschen Heldendichtung (The Characteristics of Ancient German Hero-Poetry), which similarly links Greek national consciousness to literature (1). This concept of the national epic as a unique expression of a singular ethnic consciousness arises largely from assumptions that made up the heart of the German Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. Perhaps represented most famously by the 1812 and 1815 volumes published by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, German Romantics had a keen interest in local literature of the rural “folk,” and the so-called genre of “fairy tales.” Such researchers saw “folk literature” as an undeveloped oral literature that spoke to the heart of national identity. The Romantics took as their ideal “reconstructing the foundations of national identity in the collective memory of national literature,” while simultaneously constructing that idealized historical past through their literary publications (Lampart 2004, 178). For German Romantics, epics, therefore, reflected a more developed extension of this folk literature—a font of national identity that allowed for comparative difference with other similarly defined nation-states made up of their own “folk,” as well as evidence that one was a “great” or “sovereign” nation. Briefly exploring the development of the idea of “national epic” reveals how certain assumptions expressed in previous centuries continue to shape our understandings of “epic” today. Identifying the Gesar epic as a “national epic” elevates Tibet to the status of “great” nation-state (TibetNS) and writes Tibetan political and cultural sovereignty backward into history. This effort, however, overlooks the Gesar epic’s transnational quality and minimizes the widespread cultural celebration of the epic by other countries in the region. It reinstantiates as secondary satellites to TibetanCL life the many other communities that celebrate the epic and many of which identify 291

— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ themselves as nation-states—Bhutan, Baltistan, Ladakh, and so forth. As the next section will show, however, these communities mirror TibetNS in identifying the Gesar epic as an intrinsic part of their cultural heritage and central feature of their cultural life, undermining claims to the status of Gesar as Tibet’s “national epic.”

THE GESAR EPIC IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT Despite its identification as the Tibetan national epic, songs and stories about King Gesar are found in cultures across the Himalayan Plateau and belong as much to these cultures as they do to Tibet. The transnational nature of the Gesar epic is especially evident in its first full publication: a 1716 Mongolian-language volume published in the Chinese capital of Beijing by the ethnically Manchu Emperor leading the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE). Indeed, many Mongolians today claim that the epic originated with them and was stolen by Tibetan singers, though this theory is generally dismissed by scholars. Russian scholars do note, however, that the Mongolian versions of the Gesar epic seem to have developed relatively independently over time from a potentially TibetanCL source of inspiration (Sécénmunch 2004). This particular theory extends to the substantial Buryat versions of the Gesar epic found in northern Mongolia and Russia, which are closely tied to Buryat nationalism and representations of Buryat masculinity (Soboleva 2016; Ratcliffe 2019). While these versions of the epic were perhaps initially inspired by TibetCL, Mongolians and Buryats understand Gesar as a central component of their culture and national identity. Similar issues of cultural ownership are found in Gesar tellings to the southeast of what is usually identified as the Tibetan nation-state. One of our earliest English publications of the Gesar epic is August Hermann Francke’s 1905 A Lower Ladakhi Version of the Kesar Saga, which relates a telling of the epic transcribed by a local Ladakhi villager. According to Francke’s later writings, Ladakhi kings traced their royal lineage back to King Kesar (Gesar) (Francke 1926, 93), and certain manuscripts became treasured possessions passed down between families (Bray 2014, 299). The Gesar epic remains prominent in Ladakh today, where its performance has become a draw for tourists. Additionally, during the long winter months in Ladakh, when movement between villages is often impossible due to icy conditions and snowfall, the Ladakhi national radio station broadcasts a bard reciting the epic for several hours each day. Likely stemming from its proximity to Ladakh and potential migration between the two regions, a unique expression of the Gesar epic is prized in the nearby Gilgit-Baltistan region of contemporary Pakistan. Contemporary Muslim singers who are ethnically Ladakhi continue to recite the epic in Baltistan in an archaic and formulized Tibetan dialect. In many Balti tellings, Gesar is not the Buddhist hero we find in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Ladakhi tellings, but rather a Muslim hero (Dryland and Hussain 2014). Beyond this Ladakhi and Balti connection, the Gesar epic is also a popular tradition in Bhutan as well. The second Bhutanese king Jigme Wangchuck (Dzo. ’Jigs med dbang phyug, 1905–1952) would sponsor singers to publicly sing the epic every night (Dorji 2015), and the royal family built a special temple dedicated to Gesar on palace grounds. Françoise Pommaret and Samten Yeshi attest to Gesar’s role in a variety of Bhutanese healing rituals and relate how a performative dance 292

— ​ W h o s e E p i c I s I t , A n y w a y ? —​ based on Gesar epic narratives has recently gained popularity in northern Bhutan (2018). Indeed, one of the most complete publications of the Gesar epic today is the 31-volume edition published between 1971 and 1984 under the supervision of Lopon Pemala of the National Library of Bhutan. While there is little evidence of a contemporary tradition of specialized Gesar singing in Bhutan, many contemporary authors continue to celebrate Gesar as a model of Bhutanese culture. In a blog article, Sonam Chuki holds King Gesar and his warriors aloft as models for Bhutanese youth, whom he believes are at risk from a variety of modern problems like alcoholism, prostitution, and suicide (2017). This brief and entirely incomplete tour of Gesar epic significance in communities outside TibetNS shows us that the epic has important ties to many cultural communities on the Himalayan Plateau and beyond. Why, then, is it privileged as the “Tibetan” national epic, rather than the Ladakhi, the Mongolian, the Bhutanese, or the Balti national epic? As detailed above in the term’s roots in German Romanticism, a “national epic” is believed to reflect something essential about the “nation,” but, like all second-order categories, its deployment as a designation also has a role in constructing the “nation” itself from whence it supposedly arises. A national epic represents the mark of a “great” nation that has the opportunity to become a “nation-state,” either in its political realities or as a cultural force in the region. Calling the Gesar epic Tibet’s “national epic” privileges Tibet as the cultural font for the region, while simultaneously relegating Bhutan, Ladakh, Mongolia, and other communities as secondary cultural beneficiaries. The cultural significance and pride in the Gesar epic in these communities outside of TibetNS demonstrates why terminology like “national epic” is ultimately simplistic. These countries are more accurately described as way posts in a network of transnational cultural exchange perhaps reflected in TibetCL and that heavily involved what would become TibetNS, but which spread throughout the Himalayan Plateau such that to designate a cultural “center” and a “periphery” would be impossible. As will be discussed in the next section, the declaration of the Gesar epic as Intangible Cultural Heritage by the Chinese government and its extensive efforts to preserve the epic as a “Chinese” cultural product represents an attempt to create a new cultural center that has greater political sovereignty.

THE GESAR EPIC AS UNESCO INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE In 2009, China sponsored the Gesar epic for inclusion on the UNESCO-sponsored Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Established in 2008 and based on the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the list aims to preserve “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage” (UNESCO [2003] 2023, Article 2). As detailed by Anthony Seegar, the methods employed to bring forward a proposal for inclusion on the list vary from country to country, with some being sponsored due to direct government involvement, while others taking a more “bottom-up” approach based around the work of individual tradition-holders (2015). Once selected as an 293

— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ Intangible Cultural Heritage, governments can elect knowledge-bearers for those traditions to serve as Living Human Treasures, though the precise title given varies from country to country. China currently has six such Living Human Treasures for the Gesar epic, called “tradition bearers” (Ch. chuanchengren), who are financially supported by the government in exchange for producing a certain number of epic recordings a year and working with academic researchers at the Gesar Research Institutes that dot China’s academic landscape. The concept of “Intangible Cultural Heritage” itself grew out of a complex negotiation and reappraisal of European assumptions inherent to the idea of “heritage”— namely, a focus on constructions reflecting former glories, rather than living, cultural traditions. The earliest UNESCO reference to preserving cultural artifacts can be found in the 1972 World Heritage Convention, which sought to explicitly preserve heritage sites related to both the natural and cultural landscape. The effort, however, focused almost exclusively on large-scale constructions. Growing criticisms from several non-European countries, therefore, highlighted the need to preserve other forms of cultural tradition that were not tied to physical monuments. This widespread dissatisfaction led to the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, which served as the precursor to the 2003 Convention.4 Tracing the development of the idea of Intangible Cultural Heritage, therefore, reflects an important transformation from protecting fabricated products of heritage, to protecting the production of heritage itself through introducing the idea of “folklore” and “folklife.” However, such an introduction repeats many of the problems behind “national epic”; as noted by Anthony McCann et al. (2001), the Recommendation “envisions a dangerous nineteenth-century idealization of ‘one nation, one ethnicity’” (61). To a certain extent, the very structure of the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage reinstantiates the contemporary political nation-state—which often is grounded in the concept of an “ethnic” nationstate—as the unit of analysis through requiring sponsorship from a specific country. While the organization has attempted to subvert this by allowing multiple countries to sponsor one Intangible Cultural Heritage together, such a decision is entirely voluntary and leaves out those cultural communities who are not identified as legitimate or who do not identify with their current political country. This phenomenon is particularly evident when examining China, which has been exceptionally active in sponsoring Intangible Cultural Heritage, but has never once co-sponsored with any other country. China is in the midst of something of an Intangible Cultural Heritage craze; they have sponsored at least fifty items on the ICH lists, many of which originate among China’s ethnic minorities (Ch. shaoshu minzu). These efforts arise at least in part due to government interest in boosting China’s prestige in the international heritage economy, which favorably recognizes a given country’s antiquity and leads to increases in both domestic and international tourists (Zhu and Maags 2020). These efforts have subsequently transformed the heritage of China’s ethnic minorities into commodifiable products and experiences that highlight their “otherness” and make such communities more marketable for international and Han Chinese tourism (Yeh 2013; Makley 2018). China’s sponsorship of minority cultural traditions as Intangible Cultural Heritage is a central step in this process.

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— ​ W h o s e E p i c I s I t , A n y w a y ? —​ Additionally, however, China’s aggressive involvement in the Intangible Cultural Heritage program and its sponsorship of ethnic minority traditions as Chinese cultural products, including the Gesar epic, aims to restructure national identity. No longer is the Gesar epic the “national epic” of Tibetans, but rather the Intangible Cultural Heritage of China—a product that can be developed, supported, and promoted via the Chinese government. While such critiques against China’s policies in Tibet are common (Shepherd 2009), it also represents a modern twist on the intimate relationship between national epic, nation-state, and cultural force in the region. By publicly sponsoring the “national epic” of Tibet as a Chinese cultural product, the Chinese government is not only increasing its profile in the international heritage economy, but also coopting what has become a public symbol of nationhood to demonstrate political sovereignty over Tibet. In this way, China is relegating a product associated with TibetNS to TibetCL—identifying the Gesar epic as a cultural item within the repertoire of ChinaNS. As a result of this process, issues related to TibetNS like human rights, political autonomy, and self-representation become fundamentally moot points. Far from being merely a preservation effort, therefore, designating the Gesar epic as Intangible Cultural Heritage naturalizes China’s claims to political sovereignty over TibetNS. Such a move is possible largely because of the Gesar epic’s designation as the “national epic” of Tibet.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In this article, I have demonstrated the fundamentally political nature of the concept of “national epic” and its related expression in “Intangible Cultural Heritage.” While potentially having an origin among TibetanCL peoples, the Gesar epic belongs not to one cultural community, but to dozens. Despite its significance in Ladakh, Mongolia, Bhutan, Baltistan, and others, labeling it as the “national epic” of Tibet reflects efforts to centralize power in TibetNS as the region’s cultural center and unfairly relegates other communities to a cultural periphery. While TibetCL has frequently been advanced by scholars as the originary point for so much Inner Asian culture, such declarations of “national epic” only further obscure the cultural contributions of other communities by reinstantiating Tibet’s status as a “great” nation. Paradoxically, it is this declaration of national epic that to a large extent fuels Chinese government interest in the Gesar epic. Through the inclusion of the Gesar epic on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage under Chinese sponsorship, China is coopting the prestige of Tibet’s “national epic” and proclaiming cultural sovereignty over the TibetanCL epic tradition and political sovereignty over the people of TibetNS. By declaring it Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Gesar epic becomes a component in larger Chinese government efforts to transform TibetNS to TibetCL and produce Tibetan citizens within China’s multiethnic state. This observation speaks to the need for greater investment in methodologies that go beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis to highlight transnational and nonnational networks of significance and cultural exchange. Few things have the potential to expand beyond the modern constructed boundaries of the nation more so than stories. While such transnational methodologies that de-center singular nation-states have begun to be used in many fields, the study of literature largely continues to

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— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ rely upon national designations as the primary organizing tool for the study of epic narratives. As demonstrated with the widespread cultural significance of the Gesar epic, narratives and literature do not belong to one people, one community, or one “nation.”

NOTES 1 It should be noted that this argument reflects a long trend of identifying European forebears for Asian cultural heroes. At the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, Anagarika Dharmapala had to defend against William Jones’ claim that Siddhartha Gautama was, in reality, an appropriation of the Scandinavian deity Woden (Anagarika Dharmapala 1893, 862–73). 2 I here follow A. K. Ramanujan in using “telling” to distinguish between specific renditions of narratives that exist in the same constellation, but for which there is no identifiable originary text (1991). 3 The typology and specific Tibetan titles presented here are indebted to Timothy Thurston’s 2019 article. 4 Seegar explains that “conventions” are stronger than “recommendations,” as they are binding to the countries that cite them (2015, 273). For a more complete exploration of the development of “Intangible Cultural Heritage,” see Aikawa-Faure (2009).

WORKS CITED Aikawa-Faure, Noriko. 2009. “From the Proclamation of Masterpieces to the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” In Intangible Heritage, edited by Laurajane Smith and Natusko Akagawa, 13–44. London: Routledge. Anagarika Dharmapala. 1893. “The World’s Debt to Buddha.” In The World’s Parliament of Religions, edited by John H. Barrows, vol. 2, 862–73. Chicago, IL: Parliament Publishing Company. Anderson, Benedict R. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barstow, Geoff. 2017. The Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet. New York: Columbia University Press. Blackie, John Stuart. 1866. Homer and the Iliad. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. Borg, Selma Josefina, trans. 1882. Kalevala, the Finnish National Epic. Cambridge, MA: J. Wilson. Bray, John. 2014. “The Lost Paintings of Kesar.” In Art and Architecture in Ladakh, edited by Erberto Lo Bue and John Bray, 298–313. Leiden: Brill. Chuki, Sonam. 2017. “Reflecting on the Past to Forge the Future: What can Modern Bhutan Learn from Ling Gesar’s Youthful Bodhisattva Warriors?” The Druk Journal: A Journal of Thought and Ideas. http://drukjournal.bt/reflecting-on-the-past-to-forge-the-future-whatcan-modern-bhutan-learn-from-ling-gesars-youthful-bodhisattva-warriors/. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2013. “I Low Epic.” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3: 614–31. Dorji, Gyaltsen. 2015. “In Remembrance of Nyikems’ Past.” Kuensel, March 27. https:// kuenselonline.com/in-remembrance-of-nyikems-past/. Dryland, Estelle, and Ghulam Hussain. 2014. King Kesar of Ling. Translated by S. A. Kazmi and  M. Raza Tassawor. New York: Amazon Kindle Publishing. FitzHerbert, George. 2007. The Birth of Gesar: Narrative Diversity and Social Resonance in the Tibetan Epic Tradition. PhD diss., Oxford University. ———. 2016. “Constitutional Mythologies and Entangled Cultures in the Tibeto-Mongolian Gesar Epic: The Motif of Gesar’s Celestial Descent.” Journal of American Folklore 129, no. 513: 297–326.

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— ​ W h o s e E p i c I s I t , A n y w a y ? —​ Forgues, Gregory. 2011. Materials for the Study of Gesar Practices. Master’s thesis, Universität Wien. Francke, August Hermann. 1905. A Lower Ladakhi Version of the Kesar Saga. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. ———. 1926. The Chronicles of Ladakh and Minor Chronicles: Texts and Translations, with Notes and Maps. Vol. 2 of Antiquities of Indian Tibet, edited by F. W. Thomas. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing. Kapstein, Matthew. 2007. “Mu-Lian in the Land of Snows: A Chinese Tale of Parental Death and its Tibetan Transformations.” In The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, edited by Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone, 345–77. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Khan, Kacho Adfandyar. 2017. The Story of Rgyalam Kesar (The Legend of Ladakh). Leh: Stawa. Kornman, Robin, Sangye Khandro, and Lama Chönam, trans. 2012. The Epic of Gesar of Ling: Gesar’s Magical Birth, Early Years, and Coronation as King. Boston, MA: Shambala. Lampart, Fabian. 2004. “The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers.” In The Literature of German Romanticism, edited by Dennis F. Mahoney, 171– 89. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Ley, Julius. 1867. Zur charakteristik der altdeutschen heldendichtung. Saarbrücken: C. Möllinger. Linde, Charlotte. 2009. Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Makley, Charlene E. 2018. The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power Among Tibetans in China. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCann, Anthony, et al. 2001. “The 1989 Recommendation Ten Years On: Towards a Critical Analysis.” The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Accessed June 15, 2020. https://folklife.si.edu/resources/Unesco/mccann.htm. Mikles, Natasha. 2020. “When Is a Hat a Mountain? The Material Religion of Gesar Bards’ Hats.” Material Religion 2: 187–212. Pommaret, Françoise, and Samten Yeshi. 2018. “From Tibet to Bhutan: A Note on the Introduction of the Dance of Gesar in Bumthang.” In Musique et epopée en Haute-Asie: Mélanges offerts à Mireille Helffer à l›occasion de son 90e anniversaire, edited by Katia Buffetrille and Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, 217–30. Paris: L’Asiathèque. Ramanujan, A. K. 1991. “Three Hundred Rāmāyanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” In Many Rāmāyanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, 22–49. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ratcliffe, Jonathan. 2019. Becoming Geser, Becoming Buryat: Oral Epic and the Politics of Navigating Four Identity Crises. PhD diss., Australian National University. Repinecz, Jonathan. 2019. Subversive Traditions: Reinventing the West African Epic. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Rdzogs sprul padma rig ’dzin. 1980. Stag gzig nor ’gyed. Lhasa: Bod ljongs mi dmangs spe skrun khang. Rlangs a myes byang chub ’dre khol. 1974. lha rigs rlangs kyi rnam thar (rlangs po ti bse ru). New Delhi: T, Tsepal Taikhang. Sécénmunch, Ul’dzjit. 2004. Isslyedovaniya pis’myennoguo monguol’skoguo éposa o gėsėre. Asterion Publishing. [Self-published]. Seegar, Anthony. 2015. “Understanding UNESCO: A Complex Organization with Many Parts and Many Actors.” Journal of Folklore Research 52, no. 2–3: 269–80. Shambala Publications. n.d. “The Epic of Gesar of Ling.” Accessed April 20, 2020. https:// www.shambhala.com/the-epic-of-gesar-of-ling-3322.html.

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— ​ N a t a s h a L . M i k l e s —​ Shepherd, Robert. 2009. “Cultural Heritage, UNESCO and the Chinese State: Whose Heritage and for Whom?” Heritage Management 2, no. 1: 55–79. Soboleva, Elena Stanislavovna. 2016. “Neotraditionalism in Contemporary Soyot and Buryat Cultures: The Okimsky District Case Study.” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 3, no. 3: 258–64. Stein, Rolf A. 1956. L’épopée tibétaine de Gesar dans sa version lamaïque de Ling. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1959. Recherches sur l’épopée et le barde au Tibet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Sutherland, John. 2013. A Little History of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tashi, Tsering, ed. 1981. Gling rje ge sar gyi rtsa ba’i mdzad pa mdor bsdus dang slob dpon chen po’i rnam thar chen mo nas zur phyung snying bsdus ‘ga ’zhig. Dharamshala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. Thurston, Timothy. 2019. “The Tibetan Gesar Epic Beyond its Bards: An Ecosystem of Genres on the Roof of the World.” Journal of American Folklore 132, no. 524: 115–36. UNESCO. [2003] 2023. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Accessed June 1, 2020. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention. WindhorseTour. n.d. “The Epic of King Gesar - One of the Highest Achievements of Tibetan Literature.” Accessed April 20, 2020. https://windhorsetour.com/tibet-culture/ king-gesar-epic. Yeh, Emily. 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Zeitlin, Ida. 1927. Gessar Khan. New York: George H. Doran Company. Zhu, Yujie, and Christina Maags. 2020. Heritage Politics in China: The Power of the Past. London: Routledge.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

O D E TO M O N G O L I A N H E RO I S M T H E O I R AT E P I C J A N G A R

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Chao Gejin

The Mongolian epic Jangar is known as one of the “Three Grand Epics” of China’s ethnic minorities, the other two being the Gesar epic shared by Tibetan, Mongolian, Tu, and other area ethnic groups, and the Manas epic of the Kyrgyz (also spelled “Kirghiz”) people. All three oral epics are considered classic oral literature of the northern borderland region. In 2009, the “Gesar Epic Tradition” and Manas were nominated by China and inscribed within the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Although the Mongols had invented a script by the time of Genghis Khan (circa 1162–1227 CE), writing had long been in the hands of only a few aristocrats and monks, while the majority of the population were illiterate. Thus, in the Mongolian verbal art tradition, written literature was limited in scope, while oral literature was extensively developed (Cleaves 1982; Irinčin 1987, 86). Long oral epics comprise the overwhelming majority of Mongolian works of verbal art. The most influential and representative ones are undoubtedly the long oral epics Geser (the Mongolian variation of the Tibetan epic Gesar) and Jangar, and the epic-like work Mongγol-un niγuča tobčiyan (Irinčin 1987), translated as The Secret History of the Mongols (Cleaves 1982). This last work seems to be based on oral sources and was likely written down by scribes from live dictations (Irinčin 1987, 87). In some ways, the work has the form, feel, and “mood” of an epic and includes many epic motifs that at once make it both a powerful literary work and a historical account; it is a literary monument of the thirteenth century and an important work in world literature (Cleaves 1982, xi; Vladimirtsov 1983–1984, 7). The eponymous epic Jangar narrates the story of the heroic figure Jangar Khan, who rules the Bomba Kingdom with 12 invincible generals and 6,000 warriors under his command. In the epic, Jangar leads military expeditions to defeat invading enemies and plunder the livestock and wealth of enemy kingdoms. The Bomba Kingdom is described as rich and beautiful—a paradise with evergreen grasslands, cattle and sheep everywhere, no disease or death, and no severe winters or scorching summers: DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-25

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— ​ C h a o G e j i n —​ Jangar’s place, Bomba, Was a paradise on earth; The people there were always young; Always looking as if they were youth of twenty-five, They never looked old, and never died. In Jangar’s happy land, It is always springtime, There are no parching droughts, There are no bone-chilling cold spells; Fresh breezes softly sing, Precious mist descends on the hills; Flowers blossom everywhere, And the grasses flourish. Jangar’s happy land Is vast beyond compare; Fast steed can run for five months, Yet still not reach the borders; Here the five million blessed subjects Can live rich and fulfilling lives. (Bender and Chao 2011, 225) The Jangar epic cycle is made up of many cantos, each a separate story that forms an integral part of the whole. Local people’s accounts differ on how many bülüg, or cantos, comprise Jangar. A popular Oirat saying goes that the cantos are conceived of as “buttons” (tobchi; like the fasteners of twisted cloth, and sometimes metal, on Mongol tunics), which when fastened one by one would total 70 cantos in the complete cycle. The lengths of the cantos vary considerably, from a few hundred verses to several thousand. It is said, however, that no one singer has ever performed the Jangar epic in its entirety, as there is a popular belief that bad luck will descend on any singer who attempts that feat. It is not clear, however, if this taboo has a pragmatic function in limiting the uncontrolled growth of the story or some other purpose related to performance. Metaphorically speaking, the Jangar canto cycle is structured like a strand of pearls, with images and exploits of heroic Jangar Khan serving as the thread stringing the narrative together. Jangar Khan is both the ruler of the Bomba Kingdom and the lynchpin of the whole story. In performance, the epic cantos can be recited in any order; however, the “initial canto” (ehin bülüg), recited at the beginning of a performance, which varies from tens to hundreds of verses, tends to establish the setting and provide background for the succeeding cantos in the set. The initial canto introduces the hero and describes his noble family, his becoming an orphan at the age of two, his trials and tribulations, his childhood achievements, his steed, his noble-born Lady Agai, his rich kingdom, his subjects, his lofty palace, his 12 generals, etc. The following verses are from the initial canto: In that ancient golden age, The time of carrying forth the power of Buddha, Was born the orphan Jangar, 300

— ​ O d e t o M o n g o l i a n H e r o i s m —​ At the place called Bomba. Jangar, a descendant of Tahijolai Khan, The grandson of Tangsug Bomba Khan, And son of Ujung Aldar Khan. When Jangar was just two years old, An ogre invaded his motherland, And Jangar was orphaned, Experiencing the bitterness of life. (2011, 223–24) Moreover, the internal structure of each canto is characterized by a “ring composition,” such that each narration ends where it begins. In the most common ring composition, the canto opens and closes with the scene of Jangar and his warriors feasting in the palace—a common scene in the epic—thus at the end, the storyteller brings us back to the beginning. In this way, each canto is a complete, discrete, and systematically self-contained ring composition. The following sections introduce major features of the Oirat Mongolian oral epic tradition of Jangar, providing historical and cultural background, and insights into singers and the singing tradition, as well as the audience and reception of the tradition. Also discussed are poetic features, such as formulaic diction, rhyme, and story-patterns, settings of the epic in realistic and imaginative worlds, and, finally, the current state of Jangar storytelling.

DATING AND DOCUMENTATION OF JANGAR Scholars disagree about when Jangar was created. Some claim it was composed in the thirteenth century, while others assume that it was composed in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries because there are no clear references to historical events before that time. We just don’t have enough historical clues—references to forms of production, the organization of society, economic conditions, military activities, etc.—to precisely date the work. It is thought that for centuries, the epic was passed down mainly through Oirat-speaking Mongolian storytellers. Oirat, which means “forest dwellers,” refers to a sub-group of Mongolian people, who lived in the Siberian forests for centuries before finally moving to the Mongolian Plateau in the era of Genghis Khan, in the late twelfth to thirteenth centuries. The Oirat were shamanists, and like some other Mongol sub-groups, converted to Buddhism after Altan Khan’s (1507–1582) vigorous promotion of Buddhism. The Oirats speak the Oirat dialect and write in the Tod or Clear script, which Zaya Bandida (1599–1662), a renowned Buddhist scholar, developed in 1648. Tod script is based on the traditional Uyghurjin Mongolian script (bichig), and is still in use today. Several manuscripts of Jangar in Tod script (likely dating from the late seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) have been recovered from among the Oirats. Scholars in China and beyond generally agree that Jangar was originally composed in Xinjiang (officially, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region). Later, as some Oirats moved westward to the middle reaches of the Volga region, they brought the epic to Kalmykia in Russia. Publication of Jangar and other such epics came much later. The earliest known publication is a woodblock print of the epic Geser 301

— ​ C h a o G e j i n —​ published in Beijing in 1716 in Uyghurjin Mongolian script. The first publication of the Jangar story in China was Honggu’er, published in Chinese in 1950. In Russia, the first long version of Jangar (often called the “ten-canto Jangar”) was published in Tod script in St. Petersburg in 1910. It was dictated by the singer Eela Ovla. Formal documentation of Mongolian epics began in the early nineteenth century, after European travelers “discovered” Jangar and other narratives, and began to record them in writing. The first to do so was the German traveler Benjamin von Bergmann (Bergmann [1805] 1969). However, there are no detailed descriptions of Mongolian epic performance in historical records from Genghis Khan’s time, either by Mongols themselves or by outsiders. A few fragmentary references suggest that Mongolian armies would hold performances before military attacks, as B. Ya Vladimirtsov explains: The Venetian, Marco Polo, famous traveler of the 13th Century, telling about a battle, speaks in detail about how the Mongols played on musical instruments and sang songs before the fight. True, Marco Polo did not tell us what these songs were, no one overheard them then, but nonetheless we are able to form a judgment about these songs which the Mongols of that distant epoch sang, preparing for their famed attacks. (1983–1984, 5) In the two centuries since Bergmann discovered two fragments of Jangar among the Kalmyks, other scholars have brought to light numerous Jangar manuscripts and oral versions of the story through their work in Russia, Mongolia, and China. Among the most significant and widely circulated is V. L. Kotvicha’s publication of a ten-canto Jangar sung by Eela Ovla (1910). Later, Kalmyk scholars Anatoliĭ Shalkhakovich Kichikov and Georgiĭ Ivanovich Mikhaĭlov published a 25-canto Jangar with about 25,000 verses, based on their transcriptions of oral performances (1978). There are audio recordings, transcriptions, and published versions of Jangar in Mongolia, but there the existing texts are mostly fragmentary, and some lack a direct relationship to the Jangar epic (Rinchindorji 1999, 52–53). There has been extensive, if somewhat belated, documentation of Jangar in China too. In 1950, Bian Yuan published Honggu’er (the Chinese romanization of the eponymous hero “Hongor”) in Chinese, which he wrote from memory, after hearing recitations of the epic by a Mongolian prisoner named Manjin when they were both jailed in Xinjiang in the 1940s. (Hongor is considered the greatest warrior after Jangar, and the story is mainly about Hongor’s heroic deeds.) In the late 1970s, To. Badma and Buyankesig recorded and transcribed a 15-canto Jangar from many singers’ lips during their fieldwork. The text was published in Tod script in Xinjiang (Badma and Buyankesig 1980), and in Uyghurjin script in Inner Mongolia (Buyankesig 1982). Photocopies of a few other manuscripts of the epic in Tod script from sometime after the midseventeenth century have been published since. After so much documentation work, there are now large numbers of Jangar texts in audio and video forms, transcriptions in different scripts, and collections of ancient manuscripts held in public and private institutions, as well by individual collectors. In recent years, transcription and translation work has advanced faster,

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— ​ O d e t o M o n g o l i a n H e r o i s m —​ and there are now many versions transcribed from Tod script to Uyghurjin script, and translated from Uyghurjin into Chinese. Translations into English, Russian, and other languages are also available. The text has been preserved by various means: handwritten manuscripts by scholars and the singers themselves, lithographed and printed books, and audio and visual recordings captured in live performances or through ethnographic interviews. Handwritten and typed versions appear in various Mongolian writing systems, including Tod, Kalmyk, and Uyghurjin scripts. More recently, Jangar has been adapted into novels, short stories, plays, comic books, and films. In short, new social contexts and cultural forms are allowing new audiences to experience the old tradition of Mongolian epic in new ways. It was only from the mid-twentieth century that scholars began to systematically record and collect Mongolian epics, as well as publish transcriptions, translations, and research on them. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the study of the oral epic traditions of China’s northern and southern ethnic minorities has seen a paradigm shift. That is, in recent decades, scholars no longer analyze these oral epics exclusively as literary texts, albeit ones with engaging plots, deep cultural and historical connotations, and literary features. Rather, they now analyze these epics mainly as performed verbal art, with specific forms of delivery, rhetorical features in performance, and contexts of performance, which go far beyond examining them as literary texts. This has opened up research into the extensive connections between oral epics and social life, and the socio-cultural function of oral epic performance itself. This scholarly shift has profoundly influenced the study of Mongolian epics, especially Jangar. In fact, it was research on Jangar that led to this paradigm shift in the study of Chinese epic genres (Bender 2017, 1–15). Accordingly, today most research on oral epics in China combines Euro-American performance theories and Chinese literary methods, of the sort advocated by folklorist Zhong Jingwen and linguist Ma Xueliang decades ago (Chao 2000). Mark Bender has glossed this new paradigm as a “syncretizing approach (which seems pragmatic both in the sense of descriptive methodology and ethnopoetics politics)” (Bender 2003, 236–38). As a sign of the influence of this new “syncretizing approach,” also called “oral formulaic theory,” 710 papers utilizing this methodology were published on epic-related themes in China between 1966 and 2015 (Guo 2016). There are two broad trends shaping the dissemination of Jangar today. On the one hand, we can see that many epic singers continue to adhere to the ancient tradition of oral storytelling; on the other hand, we can also see how new technologies are profoundly changing the story itself and how people engage with the epic. Modern audiences’ understanding and reception of epics are undergoing profound changes. With unprecedented attention from Chinese educational institutions, governmental departments, and the general public, performances of and research on Jangar are flourishing. With all of this fervor and attention on Mongolian epics, some wellknown singers have become national “stars.” Not content with oral performance alone, they have increasingly circulated their stories through print publications. The famous epic singer Ja. Juunai, for example, wrote down 17 Jangar cantos from his repertoire and published them in Uyghurjin script as Juunai-u γar bičimel Jangar (Juunai’s handwritten copy of Jangar, 2006).

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JANGARCHI (SINGERS), AUDIENCES, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF JANGAR The performance of Jangar, according to oral accounts, was very popular during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). It often took place in aristocrats’ residences, herdsmen’s yurts, merchants’ quarters, and military camps on the frontier. The performances themselves were constrained by taboos. There are reports of the custom of tethering white horses or black-headed white sheep in front of the tent where performances took place, supposedly to avoid chastisement by the deities. There is also a saying that performances should not take place during the day, but at night, because the former would upset the deities. Jangar was traditionally performed by singers, accompanied by a tobshuur (a two-stringed plucked instrument), although performances without instrumentation have been increasing in recent years. With respect to the tunes used in performance, two scholars have noted, When we compared the versions of Jangar sung by six different singers in Xinjiang, we found that they were all in different tunes, except the initial Canto. In other words, Jangar’s tunes vary from region to region and from singer to singer. (Buteelt and Hasbaatar 2012, 49) In recent times, it is still possible to see collaborative performances of Jangar involving multiple performers, which have been introduced for theatrical effect and sometimes for commercial reasons, and are in marked contrast to traditional epic performances. There are also artists who perform Jangar with hoomii or throat singing, creating unique sound effects. Jangar performers are known in their communities as “Jangarchi.” They have been the bearers and practitioners of this great narrative tradition for centuries. However, over time, Jangar singers’ social status has fluctuated. At times, they were loved and respected, and at other times, marginalized and discriminated against. Oral accounts indicate that historically, there have been various kinds of Jangar performers. Some were professionals who enjoyed great patronage, including that of nobles, and earned honorary titles. The great majority, however, were avocational singers who did not earn their living by singing Jangar. Rather, they occasionally engaged in epic performance for their local communities, as a pastime. Because the Jangar epic is so large and convoluted, it takes both talent and passion to master the intricacies of performance and tell the heroic stories with fluency. Historically, Jangar singers are male, although a few female singers are known. Singers are divided into two categories in accordance with how they became a Jangarchi. One type of singer is known as a “family-inherited” singer, who is born into a lineage of performers. Here young singers learn the stories and how to perform them from their elders, and then pass them on to their children. Audiences often appreciate and value “family-inherited” singers more than other kinds of singers, because they are considered more talented and authentic. The other type of singer is an “ordinary” singer who learns the tradition informally from other singers. These singers often do not devote as much time to learning and practicing as “family-inherited singers,” so they tend not to have the same mastery of Jangar 304

— ​ O d e t o M o n g o l i a n H e r o i s m —​ performance. Audiences often view their performances as somewhat inauthentic, since such singers do not learn epic recital in a systematic way, relying on less structured means of iterative transmission. In the past, Jangar singers were mostly illiterate, so they had to commit the epic to memory, aided by its formulaic diction and rhyme scheme, and pass them down by word of mouth. With the spread of education and economic development in the twenty-first century, however, most young singers are now literate. This has changed the way singers learn the tradition (now through both texts and word of mouth), and how they expand their repertoires (occasionally writing them down to prepare for later performances). In addition to the tradition of apprenticing with a skilled Jangarchi, learners now study published texts and watch videos of Jangar performances, which are widely available on social media platforms such as TikTok and WeChat. Jangar performances were quite common in the Mongolian-inhabited areas of Xinjiang over a span of three to four centuries. In this period, there were not only many well-trained singers, but also large audiences familiar with Jangar. The singers and audiences exerted a positive influence on each other that worked to raise the level of performance. From the singers’ side, Jangarchi had to keep improving their skills in performance; otherwise, they would not be recognized by the community. From the audience’s side, they demanded performances that would best previous ones. In such an environment, the performance art flourished, which in turn enhanced the audience’s appreciation and enjoyment of the stories. Today, the performance of Jangar is still regarded as having sacred or magic power; it is not a casual entertainment, but rather a solemn event. This is reflected in the fact that there are many proscriptions on how the epic is to be sung. As mentioned, singers are not allowed to master the entirety of Jangar. They are also not permitted to change the story at will, or to express disrespect or contempt for the epic heroes. The audience too is expected to respectfully listen to the performance. In short, although the story itself is not religious per se, Mongolians have a deep reverence for the story and the act of performing it. For Jangarchi, studying and honing skills in performance is a lifelong process, and a collaborative one in which they learn from each other. Even “family-inherited” singers learn new verses, formulaic diction, and scenes from singers outside the family. This consultation and exchange only enhances the performance art, and results in much intertextuality in performance. Despite the large number of singers, over time the story has remained fairly consistent because of constraints and rules about its performance. The storyline can only be modified within certain limits, and the story itself cannot grow and freely change. Singers must adhere to many phrasal formulas and treatments of particular scenes (Vladimirtsov 1983–1984, 32). Likewise, the heroes Jangar, Hongor, and Sabur each have their own heroic epithets, such as “Aldar Noyan Jangar” (famous Lord Jangar), “Asar Ulan Hongor” (giant and strapping [literally, “red”] Hongor), and “Hündü Gartai Sabar” (strong-armed Sabar), as I’ve noted in my previous work (Chao 2000, 140). At the same time, the conditions of performance are such that singers have a lot of leeway to be spontaneous and change course, in response to audience reactions—applause, praise, spiteful comments, booing—to their storytelling. They may even add or omit certain story elements based on the audience’s response. 305

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JANGAR’S “RING” COMPOSITION AND POETICS Jangar is primarily a story of heroic conquest, with a deep concern for family lineage and loyalty or sworn brotherhood between warriors, although cantos strictly on the theme of sworn brotherhood account for only a small percentage of the total. In general, Jangar’s cantos basically revolve around conquest and marriage, and in some cases, a combination of the two. In this respect, Jangar is very similar to other Mongolian oral epics. Accordingly, Walther Heissig’s idea that oral epics have “motif chains” that are arranged in predictable and limited ways (1979, 10–12) is evident in many storylines in Jangar. For instance, many cantos of Jangar begin and end with a description of a feast in Jangar Khan’s palace, forming a typical “ring composition.” This structure essentially “freezes” time and space in Jangar. Each canto tells a story, but even so, the overarching plot of Jangar cycle does not “advance” with the telling of each canto; instead, it returns to where it began. With the ring-composition format, various cantos run parallel to each other rather than in sequence, each canto containing a story that is somewhat independent and not necessarily deeply connected to other cantos. For audiences, Jangar refers to both the entire epic cycle and specific canto(s). Moreover, when published, cantos are often given titles, for example, The Canto of Hongor’s Marriage, but in performance, singers generally do not introduce a canto by title, but rather at the end of the performance say something like, “what I just told was the story of...” It is difficult to sum up poetics in Mongolian oral poetry. Like many others before him, the Russian scholar Alekseĭ Pozdneev was unable to discern a logic to the complexities of Mongolian versification: “Laws of meter for Mongolian poetry, if they do exist, remain for me indefinite” (cited in Poppe 1979, 171). However, there is a logic and elegance to the poetics of Mongolian oral epics, which is particularly evident in their rhyme scheme and syntax. First, they have “freestyle rhymes,” which means they are not dependent on the length of the lines or the number of syllables in them. The number of words in each line varies; there can be as few as two words or as many as ten or so, which makes it difficult to see rhyme patterns, but they are there, nonetheless. Here is a two-line verse relating epithets of heroes: Asar ulaγan Hongγor mini, Araja-in naiman mingγan baγatur-ud mini. My giant and strapping Honggor, My first run of distilled milk liquor, i.e. excellent—the eight thousand heroes. (Chao 2000, 249) As we can see in this example, the last word in lines 1 and 2 are the same: mini (my) and thus rhyme, despite the varying lengths of the two lines. In the two-line verse, we can also see the head rhyme “A” and tail rhyme “ni,” demonstrating the abovementioned rhyme patterns. One of the first outsiders to notice the phenomenon of rhyme in Mongolian epics was the Finnish linguist Gustaf John Ramstedt, who argued that they utilize tetrameter (lines of verse with four stressed, rhyming “feet” or metrical units) (Neklyudov 1991, 25). Indeed, despite the various lengths of the verses, when they are broken into their composite feet, we can see that most are in tetrameter. I have documented this in my own research. For instance, the canto Hündü Gartai Sabur (one of the 306

— ​ O d e t o M o n g o l i a n H e r o i s m —​ Jangar cantos about the hero Sabar), by the singer Arimpil, has 652 lines and a total of 3,194 words, with an average of 4.9 words per line. However, leaving off the considerable number of monosyllabic prepositions and other such “function” words, the average is probably closer to four words per line. Thus, it is highly likely that the rhyme scheme is mainly in the form of tetrameter (Chao 2000, 245). This same rhyme scheme is used widely in Mongolian folk songs and other forms of oral poetry. But in general, the Jangar epic is not as rigidly metrical as the Homeric epics. Singers have great freedom to adjust their wording to complete rhymes, and there is much flexibility in many formulaic aspects of Jangar in performance. This can be seen, for example, in Arimpil’s flexible use of epithets (2004, 153–56). In addition to employing tetrameter, Mongolian epics also use various forms of rhyming, including head rhyme (alliteration), end rhyme, and internal rhyme. They also make extensive use of parallelism, which I have formerly classified into three broad categories: “juxtaposition parallelism,” “progressive parallelism,” and “overlay parallelism” (2000, 192–203). Since Mongolian languages have vowel harmony (the phenomenon where vowels in proximity to each other in the same word assimilate or “shift” to take on the same vocalic sound), we can see the syntactic characteristics of vowel harmony in rhyming.

TIME AND SPACE IN A MYTHICAL SETTING Space and time seem infinite in Mongolian epics, and Jangar is no exception. Time begins with the formation of the universe, and space encompasses the heavenly, earthly, and underworld realms. The scale of the world sketched in Jangar marks it as a major artistic achievement in Mongol tradition (Bürinbeki 1997, 47–73). However, compared with time in other Mongolian epics, time in Jangar is static; time does not move, and there is no beginning or end to the epic. The epic introduces Jangar in the initial canto, and then relates his various experiences—marriages, war, and so forth. But time is collapsed such that there is not a sequential arrangement of events, or a causal relationship between events. To some extent, space is also fixed. The epic presents the Bomba Kingdom as the center of the world; everything in the epic is seen, objectively and subjectively, from the perspective of Bomba. There are moments, however, when the dimensions of space and time are collapsed into each other. For example, if someone goes on a long journey, the storyteller does not mention how far the journey is in a unit of measurement, but rather how long the journey takes in time. Similarly, life events are measured in time, for example, “They celebrated for 60 days,” or “They gathered for 80 days,” with reference to a lively scene of grand celebration filled with singing, dancing, and drinking. Because time is essentially “frozen,” there is no change in seasons, but rather an eternal spring, filled with songbirds and fragrant flowers. The people of Bomba also do not age or die, and characters themselves do not fundamentally change. Thus, although Jangar and the great generals under his command engage in countless military campaigns, they always emerge victorious and enjoy eternal life. In effect, throughout Jangar, there is an overwhelming tone of optimism and heroism. Jangar’s palace is a central place where major events occur, important topics are discussed, and major decisions are made. This space is not only a meeting place for 307

— ​ C h a o G e j i n —​ important members of the Bomba Kingdom, but also the center of public life for the entire kingdom, where all information is gathered and dispersed. Interestingly, throughout Jangar, we are never introduced to the heroic characters’ private living spaces, and never see the characters engaging in private activities. Only the public spaces of the kingdom—the settlements of the people, the pastures for livestock, iconic buildings, mountains, and rivers—are presented, and that too with few specifics. There are just a few stray references to specific places like the Altai Mountains, Irtysh River, and Kuytun River, which are all within the homelands of the nomadic Mongolian Oirats. So, although a few mountains and rivers are referred to by name, in general, the epic geography in Jangar does not correspond closely to the actual geography of Mongolia. Also, as with many other epics, descriptions of enemy or foreign lands are uniformly minimal and vague. Jangar’s palace of ten stories and nine colors has deep symbolic meaning; it basically represents the entire kingdom. The exterior of the palace is described in great detail, and in artistic terms. There are long descriptions of the treasured objects decorating its walls, each facing a different cardinal direction. While the palace architecture is described at length as splendid and lofty, there are no detailed accounts of the interior of the palace— how the space is divided, how the rooms are decorated and used, etc. All we are told is that Jangar is seated on a chair with 44 legs and that his generals are seated to his left and right, ranked in the order of their importance. We also know that others in attendance “sit around in seven circles,” indicating that the space is very grand. The epic Jangar plays on the juxtaposition of good and bad characters, celebrating the heroic triumph of good over evil. In this way, it provides audiences with an alternate, if fantastic, version of history. Jangar and other Mongolian epics are strikingly similar in that they basically do not include real historical figures and events, even though Mongols had many military expeditions and waged a great number of battles, especially in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Major events in this period, such as Genghis Khan’s “destruction of forty kingdoms,” Batu Khan’s (1205–1255) expedition to Europe, and Kublai Khan’s (1215–1294) many conquests and establishment of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), with its capital in Dayidu (now Beijing), seem like they would have provided storytellers with great fodder for oral epics; however, this is not the case. But the reality is that Mongols avoided artistic portrayals of these real historical figures and events, unlike the authors of many other world epics that bring up or at least allude to actual historical events. With their fictional and fantastic qualities, Mongolian epics are therefore somewhat like folklore and mythology. Heroes are idealized, half-god, half-human figures who transcend human limits; enemy opponents, often in the form of “mangus” demons, are ferocious, ugly, half-human, half-animal creatures. What we find in Jangar are thoroughly imaginative stories about Mongolian heroes, and Mongolian ideas about truth, goodness, and justice.

JANGAR AS CULTURAL INHERITANCE AND “CULTURAL BRAND” Jangar, like other forms of oral storytelling, has been subject to modification, with the infusion of new ideas. As mentioned, the tradition has been adapted into various print and digital forms, and proliferated within new media. Whereas in the second 308

— ​ O d e t o M o n g o l i a n H e r o i s m —​ half of the twentieth century, many people heard Jangar on cassette players and radios, today they often watch videos of performances on their cell phones. The advent of social media has also significantly increased the distribution of the epic in audio and video formats, which were once recorded only for academic and professional use and in the hands of a few. This again places oral epics like Jangar in the hands of the general public, who record audio and video performances, and post them, often in the form of short clips, on social media platforms. With growing attention paid to safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, as stipulated by UNESCO, both public and private stakeholders have become invested in preserving cultural traditions like Jangar. In China, as in many countries, the state has assumed responsibility for safeguarding it, and provided funds and advocacy toward its cultural preservation. Besides these interventions by the state, individuals and groups in the private sector too have mobilized to safeguard and spread knowledge of Jangar—by utilizing publicity on various media, enlisting the support of expert singers and scholars, and hosting cultural festivals, such as the annual Jangar “Naadam” Festival in Xinjiang. This grand gathering, sponsored by Mongolians and members of other neighboring ethnic groups, is held in early autumn to celebrate the harvest, and allow participants to compete in grassland sports and conduct trade. There are other annual events like the Jangar Art Festival, and the Jangar Singing and Performing Gala. Local businessmen have also worked to brand Jangar as an ethnic commodity, such that we can now find Jangar-themed restaurants and Jangar-branded products including “Jangar” beef and mutton. As for the community of storytellers themselves, they have become much more incentivized to keep the tradition alive. Governmental departments have granted subsistence allowances to those identified as “tradition bearers” of Jangar, as per UNESCO’s “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” (UNESCO [2003] 2023) and the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Intangible Cultural Heritage” (WIPO 2011). A few local governments and commercial bodies have also begun promoting Jangar as a “cultural brand,” attempting to simultaneously promote economic development and tourism in their regions. Jangar has entered contemporary life in China in two main ways: cultural tourism and cultural products. Young people are increasingly taking pride in their ethnicity and their cultural heritage, of which Jangar is a key part. They are also becoming more aware of the social and economic value of Jangar’s “cultural brand,” and are creating start-ups to join the cause. Through all of these efforts, Jangar, in various forms, is reaching three main and ever-widening audiences: a professional, scholarly audience who prefers the “traditional” Jangar (and related research); a popular audience who prefers published adaptations of Jangar, including children’s picture books and graphic novels; and a cinephile audience who prefers films, documentaries, and animated features based on Jangar. In addition, audiences also experience Jangar through modern plays, and tourists especially through large-scale live performances in regions where Jangar is popular. The influence of Jangar can also be seen in the context of public art and architecture. As a prime example, in 2014 the Hoboksar County government in northern Xinjiang built the Jangar Culture and Art Palace, with a design inspired by descriptions of the hero’s palace in Jangar, and followed up by placing sculptures of Jangar, his generals, and Jangarchi, in the county seat, which local community 309

— ​ C h a o G e j i n —​ considers the birthplace of Jangar. As another example, in southern and northern Xinjiang, there are fields with large piles of stones (oboo), for the worship of local deities and dedicated to the hero Jangar, which have been used as outdoor public spaces for Jangar performances and other public events. And in Elista, Republic of Kalmykia, in Russia, there are also statues of Jangar standing in the city center, highlighting the relevance of the epic hero in that country too.

CONCLUSION The Jangar epic is an outstanding, representative work of Mongolian heroic oral epic literature. It has a distinctive “ring composition” or circular narrative that suspends its sense of time and place in local yet highly mythologized contexts. It tells of the heroic exploits of Jangar and his allies—their marriages, their alliances, their battles—in compelling stories of a fantastical nature, mostly removed from actual Mongolian history. In this highly formulaic oral genre, Mongolian sacred beliefs, aesthetic concepts, idealized pursuits, and poetic wisdom are comprehensively presented. In many respects, the epic vividly conveys the spirit of Mongolia’s optimistic attitude toward confronting life’s challenges. In this sense, Jangar can be considered an ode to Mongolian heroism. This time-honored epic is not a contemporary echo of an ancient history, but rather an art form rooted in the depths of history that has relevance to life today. It has survived to the present, demonstrating its relevance and vitality to new generations, as poets and artists continue to express the story in ever-new ways.

WORKS CITED Badma, To., and Buyankesig. 1980. J̌ angɣar [Jangar]. Urumqi: Xijiang People’s Publishing House. Bender, Mark. 2003. “Oral Narrative Studies in China.” Oral Tradition 18, no. 2: 236–38. ———. 2017. “Chao Gejin’s Contributions to Chinese Ethnic Minority Oral Literature Studies and Related Fields.”In Zhele zhi si [A long vine], edited by Hehong Gao and Danyang Luo,1–15. Beijing: China Minzu University Press. ———, and Chao Gejin, trans. 2011. “Introductory Cantos from the Mongol Epic Jangar.” In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, edited by Victor Mair and Mark Bender, 222–31. New York: Columbia University Press. Bergmann, Benjamin von. [1805] 1969. Nomadische Streifereien Unter den Kalmüken in den Jahren 1802 und 1803. Oosterhout: Anthropological Publications. Bürinbeki, B. 1997. Monggol bagaturlig tuulis-un xilug jui [Poetics of Mongolian heroic epics]. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia Education Press. Buteelt, and Hasbaatar. 2012. Mengguzu yingxiong shishi yinyue yanjiu [Studies on music in Mongolian heroic epic]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. Buyankesig, and To. Badma.1982. J̌ ingɣar [Jangar]. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House. Chao Gejin. 2000. Kouchuan shishi shixue: Ranpile “Jiangge’er” chengshi jufa yanjiu [Oral poetics: Formulaic diction in Arimpil’s Jangar singing]. Nanning: Guangxi People’s Publish House.

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— ​ O d e t o M o n g o l i a n H e r o i s m —​ ———. 2004. “Mongolian Epic Identity: Formulaic Approach on Janggar Epic Singing.” In Reflections on Asian-European Epics, edited by Ghulam Sarwar Yousof, 149–62. Singapore: Asia-Europe Foundation. Cleaves, Francis Woodman, trans. and ed. 1982. The Secret History of the Mongols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guo Cuixiao. 2016. “Koutou chengshi lilun zai Zhongguo de yijie yu yingyong” [Translation and application of oral-formulaic theory in China]. Studies of Ethnic Literature 6:120–32. Heissig, Walther. 1979. Die Mongolischen Heldenepen―Struktur und Motive. Berlin: German Academy of Sciences. Irinčin, Yekemingγadai. 1987. Mongγol-un niγuča tobčiyan [The secret history of the Mongols]. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia University Press. Juunai, Ja. 2006. Juunai-u γar bičimel Jangar [Juunai’s handwritten copy of Jangar]. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House. Kichikov, Anatoliĭ Shalkhakovich, and Georgiĭ Ivanovich Mikhaĭlov.1978. Җаңhър. Хальмг баатрлг дуулвр: 25 бѳлгин текст [Jangar, the Kalmyk heroic epic: Lyrics of 25 songs]. 2 vols. Моscow: Nаukа. Kotvicha, V. L. 1910. Taki Zulā xāni üldel, Tangsaq Bumba xāni ači, Üzüng Aldar xāni köböün, Üyeyin önčin: ǰangγariyin arban bölöq [Taki Zulā Khan’s descendant, Tangsaq Bumba Khan’s grandson, and Üzüng Aldar Khans’ son and orphan: Ten cantos of Jangar]. St. Peterspurg: The Press of Russian Academy of Sciences. Neklyudov, Sergey. 1991. Menggu renmin de yingxiong shishi [Mongolian heroic epic]. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia University Press. Poppe, Nikolaĭ N. 1979. The Heroic Epic of the Khalkha Mongols. Bloomington, IN: The Mongolia Society. Rinchindorji. 1999. Jiangge’er lun [On Jangar]. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia University Press. UNESCO. [2003] 2023. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Accessed May 25, 2022. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention. Vladimirtsov, B. Ya. 1983–1984. “The Oirat-Mongolian Heroic Epic.” Translated by John Krueger. Mongolian Studies 8: 5–58. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). 2011. “China CN179: Intangible Cultural Heritage Law.” Accessed May 25, 2022. https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/336567.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

P L A C AT I O N , M E M O R I A L , A N D H I S T O RY I N J A PA N ’ S T H E TA L E O F T H E H E I K E A N D B E YO N D

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Elizabeth Oyler

Until the late nineteenth century, the idea that there might exist a “Japanese medieval epic” was as much an anathema to the Japanese as it was to those outside Japan. This is not to say that warfare and narrative traditions celebrating both victors and the defeated were absent from Japan’s past: from the twelfth century forward, the triumphs and tragedies of warriors on the battlefield, their valor, their sacrifices, and the consequences of the wars they fought had been the subject of narrative, poetry, song, and theatre. It was not until Japan’s forced opening to the Euro-American nations in the late nineteenth century, however, that the idea of “epic” as a genre or “the medieval” as a historical period could be considered. After their arrival, these concepts from Europe and North America were embraced quickly, and The Tale of the Heike soon became “Japan’s epic.” As a work describing a symbolically cataclysmic war fought primarily on horseback by a military class, and, moreover, part of an oral performance tradition associated with blind, lute-playing raconteurs, it seemed a natural fit. This characterization was significant for the Japanese of the late nineteenth century searching for ways to map their history on the trajectory of those of their Euro-American counterparts and struggling to identify seeds of “civilization” in the burgeoning Asian imperial nation. Viewing The Tale of the Heike through the lens of the epic tradition can be useful in identifying fruitful points of comparison with European works, but it has its limitations. A known framework, even one with as much variability as “epic,” can elucidate ways that topics we associate with that genre (heroic narrative, idealized masculinities, formulaic language, etc.) were addressed in thirteenth- through fifteenth-century Japan. We must also recognize, however, the specifics and the vitality of the culture in which Heike emerged and circulated, including elements that might be missed if we are looking only for the familiar. This essay not only considers the “epic” elements of Heike, but also introduces concerns specific to the contexts in which the work was created and circulated, including the irreconcilability of warrior duty and Buddhist truth.

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-26

— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​

THE HEIKE AND LATE TWELFTH-CENTURY HISTORY The Tale of the Heike (hereafter Heike) is only one of a number of works recounting warfare during the late twelfth through fourteenth centuries in Japan. It occupies a prominent place in the canon of Japanese literature, however, because it is a thematically coherent and movingly told account of Japan’s first civil-military crisis, the Genpei War (1180–1185 CE), which brought about the rise of the warrior class that would dominate Japan in one form or another through the end of the nineteenth century. The war pitted two clans, the Genji (also known as the Minamoto) and the Heike (also known as the Taira), against each other. Both traced their roots to princes of the blood who had been removed from the imperial succession generations earlier and given large land holdings in the provinces. Each subsequently had established a reputation (and accrued significant wealth) by policing the provinces and also serving on occasion to subdue unrest at the realm’s edges. By the twelfth century, both were considered important military families and were supported by other provincial landholders whose interests they protected. The roots of the conflict between Genji and Heike lay a generation before the Genpei War. Quarreling factions within the imperial family called on leaders of the Genji and Heike for support. Two conflicts, the Hōgen uprising of 1156 and the Heiji uprising of 1159–1160, led to the rise of the Heike (who had supported the victors in the Heiji uprising) and the near extinction of the Genji, which saw the execution of all adult male members and the exile of those who were yet children. Both uprisings are chronicled in shorter war tales that were also recited by the performers of the Heike and elucidate the advancement of the Heike to the tight aristocratic circle at the center of the realm, while the Genji are pushed definitely out to the provinces, the peripheral spaces of the warrior class. The tale told in the Heike reaches back to the Hōgen and Heiji conflicts but focuses primarily on the unprecedented political rise of the Heike hegemon, Kiyomori (1118–1181), to the position of chancellor. Well-rewarded for supporting the now-retired emperor Go-Shirakawa’s faction in the Hōgen and Heiji uprisings, Kiyomori rose precipitously to the center of court politics. He eliminated rivals among the traditional aristocratic families, had his sons appointed to strategic posts, and, perhaps more importantly, married a daughter of the reigning emperor, Takakura (1161–1181). When she gave birth to a son, Kiyomori pressured Takakura to abdicate in favor of the young child. His audacity and the threat that a Heikecontrolled emperor posed to the established aristocracy resulted in, first, a planned coup d’état that was foiled before it could be attempted, and second, an uprising by a rival prince that was put down very quickly. These signs of instability gave way to war after Kiyomori’s death in 1181. The majority of the tale is dedicated to the Genji’s routing of the Heike from the capital city of Kyoto, and then the battlefield heroics, anguished partings, and losses that followed. At the war’s conclusion, the Heike were destroyed. The child emperor, whom they had taken with them as they fled the capital, was drowned in the final sea battle, and the imperial sword, one of the three imperial regalia, ostensibly gifts from the gods marking the authority of

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— ​ E l i z a b e t h O y l e r —​ the imperial family, was lost as well. The victorious Genji established a new branch of government overseeing warriors and their affairs in Kamakura, a seaside village 500 kilometers from Kyoto. This office was organized under the shogun (“military commander”). Although the Kamakura shogunate fell in the fourteenth century, the office of shogun remained an important governmental position until 1867. The war thus represented substantial shifts on the symbolic and political landscapes. The imperial family remained in place throughout, however, as it has ever since: the Genji presented themselves as restoring rightful rule to the emperor, even as they arrogated substantial powers in his name. Perhaps because one of the symbols marking divine favor had been lost at sea, the Heike narrative focuses on restoration of the former order that the regalia formerly insured. As the title suggests, The Tale of the Heike is more fully focused on mourning and remembering the war’s losers than celebrating its victors, a tendency fairly common in Japanese war tales and works derived from them. Additionally, the tale evolved over centuries, and therefore considers the war from the vantage point of a society in which the provincial warrior class had eclipsed the traditional central aristocracy politically but looked to the aristocratic past as the font of cultural and political legitimacy. The Heike thus is deeply nostalgic and filled with lament and simultaneously celebratory of the actors that brought about the end to the revered aristocratic past, if not the ruler at its apex.

TEXTUAL TRADITIONS The Heike exists in over eighty variant lines, many of which comprise a number of texts. These lines are generally categorized as belonging to either “recited” or “read” traditions. Each further grew out of practices associated with different social groups: central aristocrats, Buddhist priests, itinerant performers, and members of the newly emergent warrior class. Although there is significant overlap across the variants, the texts of the recited tradition are rooted in performance, whereas the read traditions are modeled on and draw material from official records, diaries, and other kinds of writing practices. Today, the variant representing the Heike in the Japanese canon is of the recited tradition, so it will be the primary focus of this discussion, but the idea of discrete texts and an interest in identifying and naming them is a modern phenomenon that grew out of the interest in “epic.” For listeners and readers of Japan’s medieval and early modern periods (roughly designated 1185–1600 and 1600–1868, respectively), “The Tale of the Heike” was a far more capacious category including both renditions of stories from any of the variants, and other narrative about the Genpei War, as discussed below. Performance of the Heike traditionally was the purview of biwa hōshi, or “biwa priests.” Images of biwa hōshi as non-elite itinerant performers are found in records starting in the medieval period. These performers were male, dressed in religious garb, and generally were at least nominally affiliated with a Buddhist temple. A biwa hōshi performed solo and accompanied himself on the biwa, a four-string lute. Biwa hōshi were also blind, although the definition of visual impairment in premodern Japan may well have been different from what it is for us today; they may not have met the modern definition of “legally blind.” From even before the time when the Heike was forming, people with visual impairment and without family support 314

— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​ might live at temples, where they learned the biwa and used it to accompany themselves as they performed rituals and storytelling at the temple. Such temples existed throughout the realm, and biwa hōshi working near sites associated with the Genpei War added narratives of battles fought nearby in their repertoires from very shortly after the war. Non-aristocratic roots of the Heike lie with these performers and their stories of local connections to the Genpei War. Although such narratives entertained locals with stories connecting their region to a struggle affecting the entire realm, they also served to placate the spirits of warriors and others who had died there. Concern about the possibility that restless spirits would wreak havoc in the here-and-now grew out of a combination of native beliefs about the afterlife and Buddhism, which provided elaborate portraits of the kinds of suffering after death that an unhappy spirit might endure. In this context, battlefield deaths were particularly worrisome as potential causes for posthumous anger: the business of warriors was killing (a Buddhist sin as well as a cause for ritual pollution in the pre-Buddhist belief system), and most who died in the heat of the battle did so without having the time to compose their minds and die prayerfully. By celebrating the stories of battlefield deaths, it was hoped that the dead would move on from their rancor, attain peace in the afterlife, and refrain from causing earthquakes, fires, famines, epidemics, and other disasters. The placatory dimension of Heike recitation manifests as well in its musical structure, which derives from Buddhist chant, specifically kōshiki shōmyō, a nonnarrative, musical form of preaching (Komoda 2017, 90) often associated with ritual and ceremony, including rites for the dead. Records from immediately after the war indicate that such priests were called upon to perform memorials for the elite war dead (especially those from the Heike side). The melodic patterning of kōshiki shōmyō thus became the basis for the recitational style, lending a religious tone, especially in the more lyrical passages, to recitation of the Heike. Although no moment or event can be identified when the non-elite and elite strains came together, records from the early fourteenth century include accounts of performers being called to aristocratic mansions in the capital to perform stories from the Heike. Numerous references from that century indicate that biwa hōshi were quite active in the capital region, and during this time, they also were organizing into guilds, a structure that would support blind performers through Japan’s early modern period. By 1371, a master performer known as Kakuichi had ordered a “reference text written down in order to forestall any disagreement,” should any “disciple … forget this phrase or that and provoke a dispute on the subject” (Tyler 2012, 710). His text thus is intended to evoke spoken Japanese, rather than the written “official” forms of writing of the time, which were either Chinese or a written style of Japanese close to it. Kakuichi’s recension is the best-known today and the basis for most translations into foreign languages, including the one used here (2012). The Kakuichi text earned this distinction in large part because of its structure and narrative cohesion, both of which reflect that the priests of Enryakuji temple (founded in the eighth century and vibrant during the period of the Heike’s development) had a hand in compiling and editing it. Enryakuji was one of the most powerful Buddhist temples of the time, and it still sits atop Mt. Hiei, the mountain at the northeast edge of Kyoto, Japan’s capital city until 1868 and its cultural center 315

— ​ E l i z a b e t h O y l e r —​ during the medieval period. Indication of the influence of Enryakuji priests on the shape of the Kakuichi text is found in its famous opening passage: The Jetavana Temple bells Ring the passing of all things. Twinned sal trees, white in full flower, Declare the great man’s certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end: They are as dust before the wind. (2012, 3) The “passing of all things” translates the Japanese term mujō, the Buddhist concept of impermanence. The opening lines of the Heike are perhaps the best-known literary example. Impermanence is linked in the Buddhist worldview to cyclicality, another important concept underlying the Heike and medieval Japanese culture broadly: rather than relentlessly moving forward, time, and especially human endeavors, are constantly moving in circles, emphasizing that progress is illusory. Success in one moment will be replaced by failure, and vice versa, endlessly. Whereas in earlier Japanese culture, such ephemerality evoked nostalgia and a sort of refined longing by aristocratic writers, the Genpei War and a series of other natural disasters, famine, and epidemics at the end of the twelfth century helped codify mujō as a more pessimistic interpretation of the nature of life, and the Heike as one of its clearest examples. Cyclicality as a theme also helped frame the war as restoration: by its end, the proud Heike had fallen and imperial law and Buddhist law were restored, a claim made explicitly or implicitly at the end of most of the variants. In the recited tradition, the Heike was first recorded on a series of scrolls, and the modern text is thus divided according to “scroll.” The Kakuichi text consists of twelve scrolls plus an added, shorter one, the “Initiates’ Scroll,” a Buddhist meditation on the cyclicality of life articulated by Kiyomori’s daughter, Tokuko (1155-circa 1214), the former empress, and the most prominent of the Heike women who survived the final battle. Each scroll is further divided into episodes, referred to as “ku” in the performance tradition. Each of these might be performed individually, and most can stand entirely on their own as narratives. In all, the Kakuichi variant has about 200 ku, most of which would last less than an hour in performance. On occasion, the entire tale was performed over a series of days, but it was more common for several, often unconnected, individual episodes to be performed at a time. This performance practice at once nods to the origin of the Heike as shorter stories that were eventually strung together into the longer tale, and its modularity: individual episodes were important stories on their own and became the bases for later drama and narrative. The relationship between episodes and the longer narrative, particularly in a context where writing, performing, and composing were already in productive dialogue, stands as an important feature of the medieval world embracing the Heike. This modularity is another factor blurring the boundaries of where the Heike ends and other tales or traditions begin, and it helped contribute to expansion and recasting of Heike stories over time. 316

— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​ At the same time that the Kakuichi and other performance-tradition texts were being developed, works of the read tradition were also in circulation. The oldest datable written version of the Heike, in fact, is the Engyō recension, the colophon of which dates it to 1309. Organized into six “books” rather than twelve “scrolls,” the Engyō text is further marked by its strong reliance on dates for structuring the narrative and a predominance of Sinitic expressions and syntax, both indicators of traditional, official modes of writing in medieval Japan. It and other texts of the written tradition were intended to serve as a written record of the events of the Genpei War and were conventionally understood as histories of the period. When we think about The Tale of the Heike, it is important to remember that to medieval and later audiences, it was not only an entertaining or moving story about the Genpei War. Rather, it was a multiform history, whose manifestation as document was as important as its manifestation as memorial storytelling.

HEIKE NARRATIVE AND THE CONVENTIONS OF EPIC Within the performance tradition, the episodes of the Heike are divided into categories based on a combination of their contents and the predominant musical patterns used to articulate them. Broadly speaking, most episodes are either “strong” or “lyrical”; thematically, the strong recount battles or heroic actions, while the lyrical recount scenes of parting, death, or love. In addition, some pieces consist of lists, and others of the “reading” of a document – generally an oath, a letter, or a decree. Notably, these documents are often marked by Chinese expressions and probably were not completely comprehensible to all audiences in performance, even at their time of composition: including such elements in performed variants points to the vitality of documentation in creating an air of historical veracity suggestive of the increasingly litigious and legalistic age the war ushered in, and one of the numerous registers on which the Heike creates a powerful and enduring history of this important moment.1 Elements associated with “epic” in the tale are found in the “strong” pieces, and particularly battle narratives, which include formulaic patterns for dressing the warrior; name announcing; an established order of battle; and lament. Episodes of battle generally begin with “dressing the warrior,” or a description of a hero’s armor, and, in cases of especially beloved stories, also those of weapons, horses, and saddles. These are followed by a “name announcing,” in which warriors shout out their names and lineages as they search for a worthy foe (someone of equal or higher rank). Particularly memorable is that of Imai Kanehira, who, in a last-ditch effort to allow his lord to commit suicide rather than being killed in battle, engages the enemy with: You will have heard of me long ago. Now, see me. I am before you: Imai no Shirō Kanehira, Foster brother of Lord Kiso, In my thirty-third year. Yoritomo, too, must know of me. Kill Kanehira and show him my head! (2012, 467) 317

— ​ E l i z a b e t h O y l e r —​ Battle scenes usually include the engagement between two warriors and conclude with the killer lamenting the death of his enemy – the tragedy of a brave enemy’s death inevitably draws tears from his killer. Among the most famous of the “strong” pieces is “The Death of Atsumori” (2012, 504–06), the account of the death of the eponymous young aristocratic warrior Atsumori on the Heike side, in battle. This episode includes many of the formulae associated with epic narrative. As in other epic traditions, such formulae can serve as mnemonic aids for the reciter, but, as there are no metrical or rhythmic restrictions in recitation of Japanese war tales, these function more thematically than practically, and are sometimes instead used to subvert expectations and lead to a surprising conclusion. In “The Death of Atsumori,” for example, where convention would dictate that we are first introduced to the combatants via a “dressing the warrior” sequence followed by a “name announcing” sequence, followed by a description of their battle and its tragic outcome, we find something quite different. The episode opens with the Heike in mid-flight after they have been routed from their seemingly impenetrable stronghold at Ichinotani. A Genji partisan, Kumagai Naozane (1141–1208), hoping to do battle with one of the Heike scions fleeing to boats in the offing: … rode toward the shore and found a warrior there, wearing a silk hitatare embroidered with cranes under delicately tinted green armor, a helmet with spreading horns, a sword with gold fittings, and, on his back, arrows fletched with mottled feathers. He carried a lacquered, rattan-wrapped bow and rode a dappled gray with a gold-trimmed saddle. (2012, 204) This particularly long description of the as-yet-unidentified warrior Kumagai sees in the distance, including not only his underrobe (hitatare), armor and helmet, but also his sword, bow and arrows, horse, and saddle, indicates that he is of high stature, and that his death will be significant. It is an utterly conventional introduction to a battle scene. At this point in a battle narrative, a name announcing should ensue, followed by the combatants’ engagement, in which the two men begin facing each other on horseback but often end up grappling on the ground. Instead, we find: Kumagai shouted a challenge to him: My eyes tell me that you are a man of high rank. For shame, to turn your face from an enemy! Come back! Come back! He beckoned urgently with his fan, and the other came. Kumagai halted beside him even as he rode up onto the shore and gripped him hard. The pair fell. Kumagai pinned the head to the ground, and, to take it, tore off the helmet. He beheld a youth in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, his face lightly powdered, his teeth blackened, and about the same age as Kumagai’s son, Kojirō.2 He was very pretty, too. Kumagai could not bring himself to begin. He spoke instead: “Who are you, if I may ask? Tell me your name. I will spare you.” “And who are you?” the other asked. 318

— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​ “Nobody you can have heard of: Kumagai no Jirō Naozane From the province of Musashi,” Kumagai replied. (2012, 505) The “name announcing” scene is skipped, the battle description is shortened, and then narrative attention lingers on Atsumori’s appearance, the feelings of sympathy it arouses in Kumagai, and then a conversation that reverses the very idea of the “name announcing” sequence. Rather than having it shouted to him at the battle’s outset, here, Kumagai must ask for the young man’s identity. In return, he gets not an answer, but a query about his own. And his response, rather than exhibiting the audaciousness we associate with “name announcing” sequences, is replaced by the humble “nobody you can have heard of.” Kumagai’s inclination at this point is to release the young warrior: And what if I do behead him? His losing army cannot win. If, on the other hand, I do not, Our winning army still cannot lose. Kojirō’s wound, though slight, was still a terrible shock. How this young lord’s father, then, will suffer when he learns that his son has been killed! No, I simply must spare his life. (2012, 505) Kojirō, Kumagai’s sixteen-year-old son, was wounded in battle the day before; Kumagai is moved as a parent by the young man’s countenance before him. In the end, however, Kumagai’s superiors from the Genji side are approaching, and he is forced to kill the young man, which he does with great regret, vowing to pray for him in the afterlife, but still ignorant of his name. As he goes to wrap the head (to present it to the field general), a flute falls out of the man’s robe, and Kumagai laments that a young man of such sensitivity has lost his life for no reason and to no one’s benefit. The flute then becomes the method by which the head is identified as Atsumori’s, and Kumagai learns that he is the son of Heike scion Tsunemori. Kumagai is so disheartened by the encounter that he “felt rise compellingly within him the aspiration of enlightenment” (2012, 506). This battlefield scene is thus used not to praise a worthy warrior for his skill or tenacity or to celebrate a victor in a hard-won fight. A drawn-out description of combat – which can be found elsewhere in the text – is collapsed here in favor of a lingering lament over the meaninglessness of Atsumori’s death. By recasting the “name announcing” as an intimate conversation after the engagement – when Kumagai holds Atsumori so close he can see the young man’s blackened teeth – the battlefield is portrayed as a place where parents lose children, to the benefit of neither side or any ideal. The episode concludes by focusing on Atsumori’s identity as a musician, his death signaling the passing of an age that valued such skills. And while most battle sequences end in a lament for a fallen warrior – often by his killer – this 319

— ​ E l i z a b e t h O y l e r —​ one uses the idea of the “name announcing” to underscore the pathos and tragedy inherent in such bravado: it is the hiding, rather than the shouting, of one’s name that makes Atsumori’s memorable. This is not to say that the Heike does not celebrate warrior prowess or the virtues of the warrior class. It does. But one of those virtues is an understanding of the paradox inherent in glorifying warfare. Kumagai and his compatriots shed tears over Atsumori’s death, and immediately after beheading Atsumori, Kumagai laments: Alas, … The warrior’s calling is harder than any. Had I not been born to a warlike house, Never would I have known such sorrow! What cruelty has been forced on me! (2012, 505–06) Taking life contravenes Buddhist law, and even battlefield episodes less melancholy than this one end with the acknowledgment that each loss is a tragedy, and that taking life is a sin. Notably, many battlefield episodes are titled “The Death of …,” suggesting the emphasis in the work on mourning, which points to both the Buddhist frame for the work and the work’s placatory function. This is implicit in the very title of the work, The Tale of the Heike, a nod to the losing side rather than the victors. While this episode can easily stand independently, it is also nested within the Heike in ways that add layers of poignancy and meaning. Atsumori reminds Kumagai of his own son, Kojirō, who was injured in battle the day before. The narrative of that day’s battle comes slightly earlier in the scroll, and it juxtaposes the stoicism with which Kumagai orders his son to staunch the flow of blood and keep fighting to the overwrought reaction to another warrior, Kajiwara Kagetoki, when his son pushes deep into the fray. Kumagai’s response is that of an upright, honorable, dutybound warrior, and Kajiwara’s, which involves endangering his men to retrieve his impetuous son, is that of a selfish, indulgent parent and uncaring leader, a characterization contributing to his vilification by the end of the work. “The Death of Atsumori” thus humanizes Kumagai’s stoicism, revealing his deep love for Kojirō despite his willingness to sacrifice him on the battlefield if necessary. Yet in doing so, the episode also underscores the cost of duty and fortitude, the senseless loss of life it demands, the tragedy of young lives cut short, and ultimately, the selfishness of ambition, greed, and worldly desire that cause war. These insights are made against the backdrop of the ephemerality of existence so clearly stated in the work’s opening passage. Thus, the Heike at once raises the names of warriors who fought and died in the Genpei War and simultaneously emphasizes the meaninglessness of those names in the context of a Buddhist worldview, in which fame, power, and wealth are illusory, and the only constant is change itself. Scholars of the Heike believe that this episode is a fictional account that grew from an independent short Buddhist narrative explaining Kumagai’s “aspiration for enlightenment”; he in fact did take the tonsure much later in life following a political blow which more likely caused his retreat from society. No Heike son named Atsumori cannot be found in any contemporary record. He is at best a fictionalized version of an actual Heike scion, and possibly a completely fictional character. Yet, 320

— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​ this episode is among the best-loved within the Heike and the basis for numerous later adaptations to the stage, as discussed below.

THE TALE OF THE HEIKE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN JAPAN During the centuries following the Genpei War, the Heike was performed by itinerant biwa hōshi across the realm for a wide variety of audiences. The events and consequences of a war felt predominantly by the upper classes thus reached people in distant villages across the realm, exposing them to a narrative about an important moment in the past – a memorable story of heroism, love, and loss, told in comprehensible, vernacular language. Through their performances, the biwa hōshi thus contributed to a latent sense of shared cultural identity in the medieval period; by the late 1300s, their repertoire in turn spurred the development of a large variety of narrative, song, and eventually staged drama. Short narratives providing prequels or sequels to famous episodes, first carried by itinerant storytellers and later committed to paper, circulated on their own as well, and some were later strung into longer tales. By the sixteenth century, for example, a long narrative about the life and tragic death of the Genji general Yoshitsune had been comprised from stories about his experiences and those of his closest retainer, Musashibō Benkei. In the case of Atsumori, we find a short narrative about an unborn son he left behind when he died. Although the stories themselves often introduce new characters and move in different directions than the episodes of the Heike, in the main, they focus on the most tragic – and perhaps therefore most memorable – figures from that tale. On the one hand, this nods to the ongoing interest in placation through storytelling, but on the other, it also introduces new characters, places, and themes, many of them emphasizing familial or personal relations: the tragic young warrior Atsumori is recast as the absent father for whom a child yearns. Some of these episodes are integrated into later variants of the Heike, thus expanding the corpus in new directions and making it hard to decide where “the Heike” ends and other narrative about Heike characters begins. The Japanese title Heike monogatari can be translated either as The Tale of the Heike or as Tales of the Heike, and although the former is used for most English translations, the latter suggests the multiplicity of variants and the ambiguity about what all should be considered part of the corpus. In addition to the expansion of the narrative itself, by the turn of the fifteenth century, a new form of drama was beginning to take shape, under the guiding hand of Zeami, an actor, playwright, and theorist. In noh drama, as it would come to be known, Zeami stressed the value of using extant, familiar stories as the basis for the noh, and himself wrote numerous plays derived from the Heike repertoire, including Atsumori, based on the episode considered above (Tyler 1992, 37–48). In it, Kumagai, having taken the tonsure, returns to Ichinotani to pray for the repose of Atsumori. The ghost of Atsumori appears in disguise as a lowly grass cutter playing a flute, but later reveals his true identity. He reenacts his battle with Kumagai, while Kumagai prays for his repose, and the ghost is finally put to rest. Like Heike recitation, noh grew from ritual practice, and many plays focus specifically on the placation of a restless spirit haunting a site associated with its death. 321

— ​ E l i z a b e t h O y l e r —​ Atsumori is among the finest of these. But Zeami also strove to integrate the new dramatic form into older literary traditions, particularly those of poetry. Atsumori’s death occurred on a lonely beach famous for poetry and The Tale of Genji (circa 1008), one of aristocratic Japan’s most beloved classical works by this time. The noh Atsumori, composed two centuries after the warrior’s death, is enveloped atmospherically and poetically by these associations, and it remains among the most commonly performed noh today. In addition to Atsumori, numerous other plays derived from his story have been preserved, two of which have been translated into English (Kimbrough and Lim 2013). The number of plays lost to time is unknown. The extant plays reveal that noh from the medieval period was quite varied, some being quite theatrical and enacting this-worldly events, and some (especially the works of Zeami) being steeped in poetic and ritual traditions. Like the Heike, its form and content varied considerably. As time went by, however, noh became a favored form of the military class, so it is perhaps not surprising that plays like Atsumori that elevated and aestheticized warriors became central to the repertoire. Warrior patronage of noh developed over the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period marked by increasingly frequent warfare. At this time, warriors also enjoyed and participated in kōwakamai, another performing art involving male performers narrating stories from the Genpei War period. These utilized recitation (with some melodic patterning) of a narrative taken more or less verbatim from a version of the Heike, by several young men; such is the case with the kōwakamai Atsumori. Although kōwakamai gradually lost its appeal in later centuries, it represents yet another genre in which Heike stories were kept alive and cherished during the medieval age, in this case primarily by and for members of the warrior class. But throughout the medieval period, “the Heike” was a fluid category, with new stories entering the repertoire or moving into other genres, a cultural phenomenon that, while gradually being appropriated by the warrior class, simultaneously constituted a cultural memory shared across class and geographical divides. In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) established himself as shogun and ushered in Japan’s early modern age. Lasting until 1868, this period was marked by urbanization, rising literacy, and relative isolation from the rest of the world: the Tokugawa severely restricted European trade to only one port, Nagasaki, thus shielding Japan from the momentous and often disastrous effects of European imperialism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The samurai class – descendants of warrior families that had proliferated over the course of the medieval period and whose struggles had resulted in the Tokugawa peace – were officially recognized as the ruling, privileged class, while farmers, artisans, and merchants were designated as their inferiors. Early on, noh became the ceremonial art of the shogun and thus the purview of the samurai class. During this period, the noh repertoire was winnowed to approximately 200 pieces, about a quarter of which are connected directly or peripherally to the Heike. At the same time, however, the newly important cities of Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Osaka were growing rapidly, and with them an increasingly prosperous, if less privileged, urban merchant class. New entertainments grew in the cities, including ningyō jōruri (puppet theatre) and kabuki (a classical dancedrama form), two arts that shared repertoire and competed for audiences. In contrast to the Spartan sets and simple plots of the noh and kōwakamai, these theatres 322

— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​ were commercial endeavors, and they were supported by urbanites who came to the theatre for reasons familiar to us today: the joy of seeing famous actors perform difficult roles; spectacular special effects; and unexpected plot twists in older, wellknown stories like Atsumori’s. In the context of kabuki and jōruri, Atsumori’s story is famously at the heart of Ichinotani futaba gunki (The chronicle of the Battle of Ichinotani, 1751; translated in Brandon 1975, 167–211) by Namiki Senryū. Act two depicts Atsumori’s death in terms somewhat familiar from the Heike and noh, but in act three, “Kumagai’s Camp,” we learn that the young man killed on the battlefield was actually Kumagai’s son Kojirō disguised as Atsumori, as part of an elaborate scheme involving a common kabuki plot device, the sacrifice of one’s own child to save one’s lord’s. Thus, essential narrative threads relating to the intense paternal sorrow felt by Kumagai in the Heike become the seed for developing a melodramatic and moving kabuki play, but one whose plot is far removed from the original. The two acts depicting Kojirō/ Atsumori’s death and then Kumagai’s presentation of the head to his lord are still popular parts of the kabuki repertoire. An entirely grotesque retelling of the story, it demonstrates the idealization of the warrior – the wartime predecessor of the samurai class – as someone so stoic and duty-bound that sacrifices so extreme could be expected. Such interpretations grew in large part from the demands of theategoers for ever more exaggerated situations (a thirst not limited to codes of honor by warriors), but resulted in widespread characterization of “the samurai” as a person of iron will and an unflinching sense of duty to his or her superior, and that characterization – despite its early modern origin – inevitably became attached to general interpretations of earlier Heike stories as well. In addition to the stage, other contexts of the early modern age also witnessed other cultural expressions of the Heike. For instance, Atsumori and Kumagai often appear in woodblock prints, along with other famous warriors; occasionally, they also show up in parodic scenes, where they are positioned, for example, as a courtesan with a client. Further, the variants of the Heike, noh libretti, and texts of kōwakamai were printed as books and widely circulated among an increasingly literate populace beginning in the eighteenth century. A temple near where Atsumori allegedly fell began attracting tourists by displaying “Atsumori’s flute” and other objects and documents associated with the story. Heike stories thus took new forms in print, visual art, the stage, and the built environment/landscape. The episodic nature of the work, combined with the fluidity of narrative content from the medieval period, certainly contributed to the Heike’s appeal and adaptability during Japan’s early modern age, a time when new artists further expanded the narrative boundaries and meanings of the Heike story.

CODA: THE HEIKE IN BEYOND THE WARRIOR AGE When the US forced Japan’s opening in the late 1800s, Japan began scrambling to define itself among imperial powers, and that required the development of a military. Heike stories served as one important font from which images of military might, bravery, and sacrifice for a larger cause could be found. The Heike’s long-standing status as a history of the Genpei War, combined with the layers of reworked stories – many of them quite extreme – allowed for it to be manipulated in service to creating 323

— ​ E l i z a b e t h O y l e r —​ a national identity centered on the values of honor, sacrifice, and duty: Kumagai’s sacrifice of Kojirō in The Chronicle of the Battle at Ichinotani could be looked to by parents sending their sons to war; that it was a patent fiction based on another fiction did not negate its power as a historical model to be followed. Such warrior characteristics were mobilized to heartbreaking effect as Japan took its place among imperialist nations, invading and devastating its neighbors: Japan, too, could claim an epic past, one pushing it ever forward and outward, an ironic interpretation of a tale about the dangers of ambition. Following the defeat of the Axis forces in 1945, and as Japan emerged from US occupation, the Heike lingered as a cultural touchstone. Playwrights including Yamazaki Masakazu and Kinoshita Junji have used Heike stories in their plays to explore Japan’s culpability in World War II. Films and television programs imagining the psychological states and experiences of Heike characters continue to be produced, including year-long historical dramas on NHK (Japan’s national broadcasting service). One recent example, the serial Taira no Kiyomori (2012), treats the Heike villain as an innovative globalizer. Thanks to global youth culture, today Heike characters and situations also reach non-Japanese audiences, albeit without the context, epic or otherwise, to make them meaningful. Anime and manga use Heike characters in their historical context or move them into dystopic futures, and video games similarly include Heike characters, either in historically accurate settings or in present-day or future ones. Most recently, the 2021 anime series The Heike Story by Naoko Yamada has excited global audiences. It is based on the 2016 translation of Heike into modern Japanese by Hideo Furukawa, one of Japan’s most important contemporary authors, whose work since 2011 (including a modern translation of the Heike) has been profoundly responsive to the March 11 “triple disaster” of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant failure in his hometown of Fukushima. Heike stories thus provide infinitely malleable material to maintain a tie to the past, if through constant reimagination of that past in light of current circumstances.

NOTES 1 Several studies in English focus on the Heike’s historicity and role itself as a history, including Bialock (2000, 2007) and Selinger (2013). 2 Face powdering and teeth blackening were two grooming practices common to aristocrats but not members of other classes. Mentioning it here draws attention to the young man’s status: he is clearly among the highest ranking generals on the Heike side.

WORKS CITED Bialock, David T. 2000. “Nation and Epic: The Tale of the Heike as Modern Classic.” In Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, 151–78. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brandon, James R. 1975. Kabuki: Five Classic Plays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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— ​ P l a c a t i o n , M e m o r i a l , a n d H i s t o r y —​ Kimbrough, Keller. 2013. “Introduction and Translation: Ko Atsumori.” In Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō Plays of the Genpei War, edited by Elizabeth Oyler and Michael G. Watson, 245–60. Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University. Komoda, Haruko. 2017. “The Musical Narrative of the Tale of the Heike.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music, edited by Alison Tokita and David W. Hughes, 89–92. London: Routledge. Lim, Beng Choo. 2013. “Introduction and Translation: Ikuta Atsumori.” In Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō Plays of the Genpei War, edited by Elizabeth Oyler and Michael Watson, 229–44. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series. Selinger, Vyjayanthi R. 2013. Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Symbolism in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order. Leiden: Brill. Shibata, Takeshi. 2012. Taira no Kiyomori. 50 episodes. Japan. Tyler, Royall. 1992. Japanese Nō Dramas. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 2012. The Tale of the Heike. New York: Penguin Books.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

G U A M A N P O M A’ S E P I C L E T T E R A C O M P L E X S A LV O A G A I N S T S PA N I S H COLONIALISM IN THE ANDES

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Scotti M. Norman

As expressed in the Introduction to this volume, the literary genre of “epic” encompasses what are often long narratives, across time and geography that speak on themes of power; for epics that have historically emerged in Europe and white settler colonies, that power is often grounded in pro-imperialist ideologies and white supremacy (Lothspeich). Moreover, the entrenched scholarly or academic tendency to value written or alphabetic storytelling over oral storytelling reflects white supremacist biases that degrade Indigenous or non-European societies and their oral literatures (Mignolo 1989; Brokaw 2020). The presumed opposition between lettered and oral societies was used as a justification by European imperialists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to validate exploitative colonialism, through claims of bringing “literacy,” “civility,” and “religious salvation” to Native communities across the globe.1 Those European actors who enacted conquest and the hurtful practices of colonialism with ongoing effects wrote epics of their own, centering themselves as heroes who traveled long distances to vanquish Native foes, and casting themselves as valiant protagonists in sagas of conquest (Pease 2008). One sub-genre of pro-imperialist epic literature in colonial times is the many lengthy historical narratives drafted by Spanish conquistadors during their conquest of Peru. Referred to as “chronicles” in academic studies, these sixteenth-century accounts of Andean and Inka civilizations give a distorted, biased view of their pasts, yet they have been instrumental in shaping contemporary understandings of Andean and Inka history (2008).2 The Spanish colonists who wrote these chronicles not only positioned themselves as heroes and protagonists, but also utilized their own cultural frameworks and literary and historical traditions to interpret and explain Native civilizations. Though they often consulted or interviewed members of Indigenous communities, their accounts were filtered through Spanish lenses; thus, while Native memory provided the basic information, Spanish textual authority structured and distilled the overarching themes (Salomon 1999; Lienhard 2008). More recently,

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— ​ G u a m a n P o m a ’ s E p i c L e t t e r —​ however, archaeological scholarship has challenged the premises and conclusions of these chronicles (Norman and Kennedy 2019; VanValkenburgh 2019). Prior to Spanish colonialism, Andean communities relied on oral tradition and khipu (Quechua: knot), a device that records and stores information in knotted, multicolored cords.3 A long-standing cultural practice in the Andes beginning circa 1000 CE among the Wari people, khipu cord systems are typically organized in a base-10 numerical system, and were used for the purposes of tax collection, censuses, and other forms of bookkeeping (Salomon et al. 2004). Over the last century, anthropologists, historians, and even mathematicians have attempted to decipher khipu, arguing that some of them contained phonetic information (Hyland 2017) and that they were incorporated into Spanish colonial governance through the integration of khipu boards (wooden panels with holes for strings, Hyland 2021). The use of khipu record-keeping continued through the twentieth century, even while Indigenous authors developed alphabetic literacy (Salomon and NiñoMurcia 2011). As Andean communities and Spanish authorities negotiated colonial rule throughout the sixteenth century, Indigenous elites quickly learned how to utilize writing to document and protest Spanish atrocities through the new legal system (Lienhard 2008; Salomon and Niño-Murcia 2011). Responding to and building off many of these Spanish chronicles, the Native Andean author Felipe de Guamán Poma de Ayala (circa 1535–1616; hereafter Guaman Poma) spent much of his lifetime drafting a long letter to King Philip III of Spain, which he finally sent in 1615. The letter, entitled El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, contained 1,168 pages (including 398 of his original drawings) and argued on behalf of Native authority while simultaneously warning of the atrocities of Spanish rule (Adorno 2001). The letter’s immense length, detail, framing, themes, and entanglement of Spanish and Andean literary and oral traditions make it a Native Andean epic, one in which the author argues against not only the powerful Spaniards, but also Inkas and mestizos, while advocating for Native rights and rule (2001). In keeping with the parameters of “epic” outlined in the Introduction of this volume, Guaman Poma’s letter is a clear and creative example of epic literature particularly because it is about power; further, it delineates clear protagonists and villains, and is firmly grounded in Andean oral tradition. In fact, the Argentinian historian Walter Mignolo even argues that “Guaman Poma de Ayala in Colonial Peru could be considered the equivalent of Aristotle” (Mignolo 2002, 67). Although Guaman Poma was a Native Andean, many of the ideas in his work reflect and even replicate the teachings of Spanish society and Catholicism, endorsing Euro-centric ideologies around gender, race, and class, and simultaneously reproducing Catholic models of piety and civility. Even so, Guaman Poma’s work is a touchstone and go-to resource for historians of Latin America—although his letter is not necessarily a cultural symbol for contemporary Andean communities, his work is a dominant primary source for Andeanists, particularly because of his drawings that provide incisive ethnographic analogy. In this chapter, I first give background on Guaman Poma and his epistolary manuscript, then assess its role as an epic story, and finally highlight how his letter both supports and subverts Spanish and Inka world views and ways of knowing in chronicles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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GUAMAN POMA AND HIS MANUSCRIPT As one of the preeminent Native authors in the first century after conquest, Guaman Poma has not escaped scholarly inquiry. His life history and his text, especially its philological apparatus, have been extensively researched and documented (Adorno 2001, 2008).4 Guaman Poma was probably born after Spanish conquest circa 1535 and died around the age of 80 shortly after sending his chronicle to King Philip III in Spain, in 1615. He was the son of mitimaes (groups of Andeans who resettled away from their ancestral lands) and claimed descent from the Yarovilca dynasty of Huánuco on his father’s side and from the Inkas on his mother’s side (2001, 2008). Although Guaman Poma was Indigenous, scholars believe the Spanish, Inka, and Andeans considered Guaman Poma an indio ladino, a derogatory term referring to individuals who were fluent in Spanish cultural practices and served as mediators between Spanish and Indigenous societies (Moreno 2002; Adorno 2008). Indeed, Guaman Poma was an assistant to church inspector Cristóbal de Albornoz, joining him in the first Spanish extirpation campaigns of the 1570s in the lands of Soras and Lucanas. Guaman Poma’s experience of working with Spanish priests likely shaped aspects of his manuscript, particularly in its laudatory treatment of Catholicism. Guaman Poma’s prose and style in his manuscript have received great attention from linguists and historians. Guaman Poma was clearly familiar with European styles of drawing, calligraphy, and composition (López-Baralt and Adorno 1992; Van de Guchte 1992; Fraser 1996; Adorno 2001, 2008; George 2020). He not only includes long sections of prose, but also punctuates his most strident arguments with drawings. Adorno even argues that Guaman Poma’s heavy reliance on the pictorial mode to state his positions and argue his points, particularly about the colonial abuse of the native population, suggests that he considered his drawings to be the most direct and effective way of communicating his ideas to the king and persuading him to take remedial action. (Adorno 2001, 16) That is, though Guaman Poma’s narrative passages deliver content, his drawings are the mode through which he conveyed his most subversive arguments. These drawings are typically poignant depictions of historical events and cultural practices, with central figures surrounded by words and phrases in multiple Native languages: three varieties of Quechua (Inka Quechua, Spanish Quechua, and a “middle Quechua” combining Quechua syntax and Spanish morphemes), two or three dialects of Aru, and a language derived from the province in Aymaraes (Husson 1985; Szeminski 1993; Adorno 2001). Additionally, Guaman Poma provides Quechua songs and lyrics throughout his letter, significantly rendering the oral tradition of Andean communities into alphabetic text. Guaman Poma divided his text into two main themes, as hinted at through his title: first, he sought to reconcile Andean history with biblical history to argue on behalf of Native governance and to distinguish Native peoples as “good Catholics,” and second, to outline the atrocities levied by certain Spanish priests and administrators against Andeans, while also advocating directly to King Phillip III a plan for “good 328

— ​ G u a m a n P o m a ’ s E p i c L e t t e r —​ government.” These two parts mirror Guaman Poma’s life trajectory, with the second part clearly influenced by the events occurring between 1600 and 1615. During these fifteen years, Guaman Poma made several court appearances, and was eventually forced into exile from his home community after losing a land dispute (Prado Tello and Prado Prado 1991; Salomon 1999; Adorno 2001; Olson and Casas 2015). The chronology of Guaman Poma’s letter was structured by how he and Spanish officials were positioned toward one another at various times. In earlier years, when Guaman Poma was learning how to read and write, and studying religion through local priests, he wrote sections that were more conciliatory toward the Spanish. In later years, when Guaman Poma was acting as an interpreter or cultural intermediary between Native communities and Spanish officials, his prose took a more strident turn against the Spanish. Guaman Poma’s time acting as an assistant and translator for Cristóbal de Albornoz marked one of the most significant periods in his lifetime. Albornoz was a Spanish priest who, upon hearing of a spreading heresy known as taki onqoy (dancing/singing sickness), appointed himself as the “extirpator of idolatries” and made it his mission to stamp out apostasy in the Peruvian highlands (Millones et al. 1990; Mumford 1998; Norman 2019, 2021). Taki onqoy practitioners advocated for the rejection of Spanish religion and cultural practices in favor of a return to pre-colonial huaca (any “sacred thing”) veneration. Taki onqoy adepts ritually consumed chicha (fermented maize beer), chanted, and frenetically danced, reporting that the huacas were taking revenge on the Spanish, flying through the air, and inhabiting Andeans in the form of spirit possession. Albornoz began his extirpation campaigns in 1569 and directly targeted taki onqoy in 1570 (Millones et al. 1990). His Informaciones de servicios, a series of letters written in 1569, 1570, 1577, and 1584, and reprinted in Millones et al. (1990), are first-hand accounts written to King Phillip II in which he advocates on his own behalf for a promotion from the Crown, given his work stamping out “pagan” religions. Albornoz’s movements through the Central Highlands of Peru support Guaman Poma’s claims to have participated in the 1568–1570 campaign (Millones et al. 1990; Adorno 2001). In his letter, Guaman Poma roundly praises Albornoz as an honest and good judge, and was perhaps influenced by Albornoz’s own direct correspondence with the King of Spain. Finally, from 1594 to 1600, Guaman Poma was an interpreter in legal cases centered on Huamanga (Department of Ayacucho) land titles and actively encouraged the resettlement policies of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (Adorno 2001). As a witness assisting the Spanish Crown in resettlement, Guaman Poma brought his own personal lawsuits in the name of defending his family’s land near Huamanga (Salomon 1999). Documentation from this time confirms that there was an intense legal battle between Guaman Poma’s kin (the Guaman/Tingo families) and the Chachapoyas (an Andean ethnic group located in the cloud forest, Department of Amazonas). On December 18, 1600, the court confirmed Chachapoyas’ rights to the land while condemning Guaman Poma for misrepresenting his status in court (Adorno 2001; Olson and Casas 2015). Guaman Poma was subsequently exiled from Huamanga for two years. In the last fifteen years of his life, then, as Guaman Poma finished his manuscript to send to Spain, these legal defeats must have swayed his attitude toward Spanish governance, offering an opinion toward Spanish authority that contrasted sharply with that in the first part of his letter. 329

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GUAMAN POMA’S WORK AS BIBLICAL EPIC The chapters in this volume explore various global epics and their relationship to structures of power. Globally, authors utilize the epic form to challenge, uphold, or create power, particularly in colonial contexts, and this is also the case with Guaman Poma, who resisted Spanish colonialism, in part, through appeals to Catholic doctrine. In his “epic letter,” Guaman Poma entangles well-known biblical genealogies and mythology with Andean histories to argue on behalf of Native rights and against Inka supremacy. In fact, Guaman Poma’s language quite literally parallels that of teachings on Catholicism from his youth, interspersed with Andean history. Guaman Poma begins his letter by situating himself as an advisor or confidante to King Philip III. His unstated goals are twofold: (1) to reconcile a mytho-history of Andean peoples with European biblical narratives from the beginning of time through Spanish conquest, and (2) to warn the king of an inevitable apocalyptic future resulting from Spanish atrocities levied at Andean communities, particularly if the status of Native authority were to remain undervalued (Adorno 2001, 15). In his letter, Guaman Poma sought to craft a narrative that would be legible to Spanish authorities, even while subverting the existing hierarchy of power in the Spanish colonies. Guaman Poma writes that his work will Serve as a guide for the preservation of the Holy Catholic faith, to reform errors and help save the unfaithful for the salvation of their souls, to guide Christians, priests, district officials, encomenderos (Spaniards who were in charge of extracting labor on a parcel of land) of grantees of Indians, miners, Spanish wayfarers, important caciques, common Indians. (Guaman Poma 2009, 8) In this passage, Guaman Poma identifies himself as a supporter of the Catholic church, one who intends to advocate for the position of Native peoples as moral Christians. Guaman Poma argues that all of humanity began with Adam and Eve, but that humanity’s paths divided into those of the Old and New Worlds (Guaman Poma 1615; Szeminski 1983; Salomon 1999; Ossio 2008). In one image, Guaman Poma even depicts Adam and Eve in an Andean landscape, with Adam holding the Andean foot plow while the sun and moon (two important Inka deities) watch. Guaman Poma asserts that the first generation of people came from Noah’s ark after the flood. At that point, he maintains, Europeans and Indigenous people of the Americas differed only in their geographic locations, but the histories of both groups developed into two parallel sets of four ages. For the Indigenous communities in Guaman Poma’s history, these ages were representative of different categories of people: the first “Indians” were noble and moral, albeit simple, while the people in each subsequent age simultaneously became more sophisticated and more corrupt, culminating with the tyrannical Inkas in the fourth age. One of Guaman Poma’s most significant historical subversions was to portray the Inka Empire as immoral and the Inkas themselves as perpetrators of idolatry and sin, in contrast to Native Andean communities. Foreshadowing the theme of 330

— ​ G u a m a n P o m a ’ s E p i c L e t t e r —​ the sins of women bringing the downfall of men, Guaman Poma writes that the mother of the first Inka (Manco Capac) was a “great deceiver, idolater, sorceress, who spoke with the demons of the inferno and performed ceremonies and witchcraft…So this woman was the original inventor of the huacas, idols, witchcraft, and enchantments, and that was how she deceived the Indians” (Guaman Poma 2009, 59). Here, Guaman Poma clearly attributes huaca veneration—a practice the Spanish considered idolatrous and justification for their extirpation campaigns—to the last pre-Spanish empire, that of the Inka. By assigning the sin of huaca veneration to the Inkas, and the first woman Inka at that, Guaman Poma follows the biblical story of original sin while simultaneously depicting non-Inka Andeans as good Christians. Although Guaman Poma dedicates a significant amount of text and a great number of drawings to depict the Inka as tyrannical, illustrating Inka origins, kings, queens, and other nobles, laws, government and ritual, law, and festivals, he does not cast the Inka as part of another “Age” in the biblical sense. He affirms the Inka as a temporary aberration who instituted the idolatrous practices documented by the Spanish upon their arrival. Guaman Poma instead claims that the Inka were to be part of the “Fifth Age”—the one in which Andean and European worlds were to meet and become intertwined—that should have been brought by global Christianity. However, for Guaman Poma the egregious treatment of Andean peoples by Spanish authorities prevented this Fifth Age from manifesting. The final section of Guaman Poma’s letter exposes the Spanish government’s exploitation of Andean peoples and reaffirms the right of Native authority in the Andes (Salomon 1999; Adorno 2001; Guaman Poma2009).

GUAMAN POMA AS PROTAGONIST Epic literature typically promotes a particular heroic perspective, whether in the form of grand sagas and histories, or narratives of legendary national heroes. Following this tradition, Guaman Poma casts himself as the protagonist of his story. Guaman Poma’s specific life history and status as an Indigenous provincial noble complicates traditional narratives of colonial conquest (Spanish versus Inka) by inserting a third group, non-Inka Andeans. He thus credits his own authority to argue against the rights of the Inka in favor of the rights of Native Andeans: “apparently in order to qualify as an advocate of Indian rights and appeal directly to the king, Guaman Poma calls himself a prince, glorifies his ancestors, insists on his orthodox Catholic beliefs, and states that pre-Inka Indians were Christians” (Hamilton 2009, xvii). Guaman Poma’s strategic self-positioning manifests in both his textual references and his drawings. However, as many scholars have argued, Guaman Poma’s narrative style and pictorial designs shift their allegiance to different sources of authority to speak to multiple audiences. For instance, in the manuscript’s opening sections, Guaman Poma includes a description of the utility of the text, a prayer, a letter from the author’s father, a letter to the king, a letter to the Pope, and a prologue to the “Christian” reader (Olson and Casas 2015). Guaman Poma thus invites diverse audiences to read and engage with his work. Moreover, Guaman Poma shifts his own authorial perspective throughout the text. Initially, Guaman Poma describes himself as both a “cacique principal” and a “capac apo,” terms which translate as “Indigenous leader/ 331

— ​ S c o t t i M . N o r m a n —​ noble” and “great prince,” respectively. These two terms serve different functions. The first, “cacique principal,” designates Guaman Poma as a provincial leader, or an Andean of noble standing, who would be able to speak to Andeans, Inkas, and Spaniards alike. The second term, “capac apo,” is a Quechua term and thus draws on authority stemming from Native groups (Adorno 2001; Olson and Casas 2015). Finally, Guaman Poma also links himself with the Catholic clergy as a servant to the church, thus aligning himself with Spanish principles of proper religious practice. As his letter continues, Guaman Poma’s self-portrayal shifts—at times, he is a gallant hero and a loyal counselor to King Phillip III, while at other times, he is a humble writer who recognizes the futility of his own work. These shifts in tone generally parallel the stages of Guaman Poma’s life. At the beginning of his letter, full of bravado, Guaman Poma even suggests that he should be the second in command behind only the king (Guaman Poma 1615, 967; Olson and Casas 2015). Toward the second half of his letter, however, after losing his familial lands and being exiled from his Native home, Guaman Poma is clearly both humbled and disillusioned with the weight of his own work and how he believed it would be received in Spain. Guaman Poma writes, “There is no god and there is no king. They are in Rome and Castile” (Adorno 2001, 40). This short phrase demonstrates his frustrations at the events in his own life and at Spanish governance in Peru. Finally, the last sentence in the letter ends with a formulaic phrase about the person to whom the letter is addressed, with the last two words, “los señores,” crossed out (Guaman Poma 1615, 1188). Guaman Poma thus ends his enormous tome abruptly, neglecting to name the people for whom it was intended, and deleting its final words. Throughout his letter, Guaman Poma presents himself as an authority figure for different audiences, and as the one honest person writing about Andeans, Inkas, and Spanish governance. In true epic fashion, Guaman Poma takes the reader with him on a saga through different time periods and events, all while arguing for shifts in leadership on behalf of Native peoples. It is to this argument, for “buen gobierno,” to which I now turn.

CHALLENGING SPANISH DOMINANCE: GUAMAN POMA AND “GOOD GOVERNMENT” The second part of Guaman Poma’s work, on “buen gobierno,” uses a variety of narrative strategies (argumentation, lamentation, and illustration) to highlight the abuses of the Spanish government in New Spain. Castro Marcel Velázquez argues that these themes are evinced through two complementary perspectives: the difference between ideal governance and the actual behavior of Spanish authorities, and the use of Indigenous bodies as targets of unjustified and unnecessary violence (2020). In explaining these two affronts, Guaman Poma ingeniously suggests that the casual violence against Native peoples actually undermines the goals of the Spanish Crown, in that it reduces the overall population and thus the amount of tribute that can be extracted from this population. For instance, Guaman Poma laments aspects of Francisco de Toledo’s resettlement program, which moved thousands of Native peoples from their hometowns into planned, gridded Spanish settlements to facilitate tribute extraction and visibility (Mumford 2012). In the chapter on good governance, Guaman Poma writes: 332

— ​ G u a m a n P o m a ’ s E p i c L e t t e r —​ Y como se perderá la tierra y quedará solitario y despoblado todo el reino y quedara muy pobre el rey. Por causa del dicho corregidor, padre, encomendero, y demas españoles que roban a los indios sus hazciendas y tierras y casas y sementeras y pastos y sus mujeres e hijas, por así casadas o doncellas, todos paren ya mestizos y cholos. Hay clerigo que tiene veinte hijos y no hay remedio. (1615, 446) And how the land will be lost and the kingdom will be wholly lonely and depopulated and the king will be very poor. Because of the said magistrate, clergy, encomendero, and other Spaniards who rob the Indians of their haciendas and lands and houses and crops and pastures and their wives and daughters, married or maidens, all give birth to mestizos and cholos [a derogatory term for mestizo]. There is a clergyman who has twenty children and there is no remedy. (emphasis mine)5 In this passage, Guaman Poma directly criticizes the resettlement of Andean peoples, arguing that the depopulation of Native lands will financially cost the king. Moreover, Guaman Poma infuses his criticism with harsh commentary on Spanish authorities’ sexual abuse of Andean women, which, he suggests, is causing the population of “mixed-blood” individuals to grow. Though Guaman Poma clearly has disdain for the growing class of mestizos, he appears to justify his complaints largely by warning that the forced relocation and dispossession of Andean peoples will result in the loss of money and resources for the Spanish Crown. In another passage, Guaman Poma relates the abuses of Spanish authorities toward Andeans, contesting them on ideological grounds. He writes that some Spaniards que andan entre los indios son tan señores apsolutos con poco temor de Dios y de la justicia. Hazen muy grandes males y danos a los pobres prencipales y a los indios deste rreyno. (1615, 489) who walk among the Indians are absolute lords with little fear of God and justice. They do great harm to the poor and to the Indians of this kingdom. Here, instead of appealing directly to the pockets of the Spanish Crown, Guaman Poma affirms that Spanish administrators commit blasphemous behavior, thinking themselves above the rule of both God and the law. With his usual narrative tactics, Guaman Poma again positions himself as a judge and advocate for Spanish interests, asserting both monetary and ideological rationales in his damning critique of Spanish abuses to Indigenous bodies. To address these abuses, Guaman Poma envisioned a direct conversation between him and King Phillip III, in which the author would present his manuscript to the regent, and he includes such a drawing in his letter. In his drawing, the king is depicted seated on his throne, while Guaman Poma kneels before him proffering his manuscript. In this fictional encounter, Guaman Poma advocates that he be given a position in New Spain, to address the atrocities he has outlined in his letter. Moreover, in Guaman Poma’s letter, King Phillip III asks several questions of the author, one of the most important being, 333

— ​ S c o t t i M . N o r m a n —​ Dime autor, como agora no multiplica los indios y se hazen pobres? (1615, 962) Tell me, author, how now can the Indians not multiply and become poor? In response, Guaman Poma tells the king that the abusive priests and authorities should not be able to “take” or “remove” women from their Native homes. Having crafted his arguments along both financial and ideological lines, Guaman Poma finally addresses the king himself in this fictionalized account.

GUAMAN POMA, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY Throughout his epic letter, Guaman Poma is clearly preoccupied with the purity of Andean women. Much of his obsession (and anxiety) stems from Catholic teachings, even though Andean women lost status under the Spanish. Prior to Inka and Spanish conquest, Andean women were integral to the domestic sphere and workforce, occupying a complementary position relative to men (Isbell [1978] 1985; Harris 1985; Silverblatt 1987; Rostworowski 1988; Salles and Noejovich 2006). Cultural notions of duality shaped gender relationships: men and women controlled separate but reciprocal gender-based realms, which were also integrated and equal. When the Inka conquered the Andean regions, this duality was tentatively preserved through the establishment of an ordered religious pantheon centered on Viracocha, the creator god, and a parallel social hierarchy with complementary roles for men and women in society (Silverblatt 1987). Moreover, Inka authorities utilized aclla (chosen women) as political tools. These were women whose families had given them, as child virgins, to the Inka elite, who then utilized aclla to join families through marriage, cement wealth, and control lineages (Castro-Klaren 1996). The relative gender equality under the Inka drastically shifted after the Spanish conquest of Peru. Spanish law deemed married women minors without property rights—they had to have permission from men to sell their lands, and overall, women lost both power and status to their male counterparts (Silverblatt 1987; Socolow 2015). Andean women were objectified and devalued in colonial society, and their sexual abuse by Spanish officials was rampant (Mannarelli 1990, 1993, 1998; Graubart 2000; Guaman Poma 2015; Chacaltana 2016). In his letter to the Spanish king, however, Guaman Poma places blame for this on the sexual lasciviousness of both the women themselves and Spanish authorities. As Sara Castro-Klaren argues, by accepting the validity of the myth of Adam and Eve and rejecting Andean origin myths centered on the female body and reproduction as critical generators of power and society, Guaman Poma could consider women equivalent with evil (1996, 62). Guaman Poma also ties the supposed decline in female morality to the Inka Empire, in keeping with his central argument that Native Andeans were virtuous while the Inka were corrupt. He further suggests that Inka religion had degraded moral Andeans, while the behavior of Spanish authorities created a world of chaos, and furthered Andeans’ moral decline (Graubart 2000, 2007). Guaman Poma’s opinions on female sexuality and Native women’s behavior were shaped by actual events concerning women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 334

— ​ G u a m a n P o m a ’ s E p i c L e t t e r —​ For instance, Native women often sought to enhance the practical conditions of their daily life, by marrying or having relations with Spanish authorities, and thereby reap the material benefits of those with more access to wealth and legal means (Silverblatt 1987; Graubert 2000; Guengerich 2009, 2013). Guaman Poma thus categorized women as either virtuous or corrupt: pre-conquest female ancestors responsible for the generation of Andean society were virtuous, while women who interacted with Spanish authorities were “whores” (Guengerich 2013, 672). Like the reasoning behind his argument for better treatment of Native people in general, Guaman Poma asserts that the “loose” behavior of Native women is ultimately problematic for the Crown in a monetary sense: Y anci como los indios sauen que sus mugeres andan hecha uellacas y putas, a parido de otro yndio o mestiso, de puro guerguensa no se uiene a su pueblo. O por no matallo o por no tener con ella mala uida se ausentan de sus pueblos… por la causa de las mugeres se ausentan los hombres. Y aci deue el castigo mas a las dichas mujeres. (Guaman Poma 1615, 870) And so, as the Indian men know that their women go about lecherous and whores, having borne children by another Indian or mestizo, from pure shame they do not come back to their towns. So that they do not kill [the women] or live with them in illicit relationships, they absent themselves from their communities…Because of women, the men are absent. And thus the women deserve more blame. (Guaman Poma, cited in Graubart 2000, 228) Guaman Poma here uses women as scapegoats, arguing that they are to blame for the absence of men and the ultimate diminution of money for the Spanish Crown.6 So in addition to making a case about the bad governance of Spanish authorities, Guaman Poma also makes financial and moral arguments related to Andean women in the early colonial period. Guaman Poma’s treatment of women shows his adherence to Catholic teachings and his application of them to advocate for the rights of Native authorities. By discussing the mistreatment of women by Spanish authorities in conjunction with the alleged lasciviousness of these women, Guaman Poma not only explains the problems of contemporary society. He also expresses frustration at the growing class of mestizos who were usurping land and wealth from the Indigenous elite. Finally, though Guaman Poma’s depiction of women demonstrates Catholic influence, particularly the myth of Adam and Eve, it also served a functional purpose: to admonish the Spanish Crown for the tyrannies of Spanish rule and to advocate for the rights of Indigenous elites over those of the growing population of mestizos.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Guaman Poma’s massive letter to King Phillip III is an extraordinary example of epic literature full of contradictions, pictorial and textual arguments, and rhetorical styles. Above all, Guaman Poma utilizes several Andean and European narrative 335

— ​ S c o t t i M . N o r m a n —​ perspectives and strategies to chastise Spanish colonial administration for their abuses of Indigenous Andeans for the financial (and ideological) benefit of the Crown. Guaman Poma mimics aspects of the European literary tradition to advocate for a reformulation of Spanish governance, one that would uphold the rights of Indigenous elites and devalue both Inka and mestizo populations. While scholars of Guaman Poma have dissected minute aspects of his text, here I have focused on his entanglement of biblical mythology and Andean histories, his self-portrayal as protagonist, his arguments against the atrocities of Spanish governance, and his treatment of women. Guaman Poma’s enmeshing of Andean and biblical narratives—he literally intertwines Andean history with stories from the Bible, a saga well known to the Spanish—recommends that his piece be considered a work of epic literature. By both depicting biblical figures in Andean environments and recasting biblical ages as Andean time periods, Guaman Poma attempted to create understanding and recognition of Native Andeans as the true lords of Peru and good Catholics. In the work itself, Guaman Poma accomplishes several goals: he attests to Andean morality prior to Inka governance, concurrently upholding the rights of Indigenous elites, while portraying the Inka as great corrupters. Furthermore, he attempts to legitimize the (Catholic) morality of Indigenous groups to the Spanish Crown. Guaman Poma speaks to multiple audiences in his text, all the while centering himself and his interests. In the introductory sections in Spanish, he addresses Catholics, colonial administrators, Spanish royalty, and Catholic authorities. In the rest of the work, he uses several Native languages and includes drawing that represents and speaks to Native communities. Through his appeals to diverse audiences in multiple languages, Guaman Poma positions himself as the true advocate for Native populations, his words subtly appealing to Catholic morality and hinting at financial gain for the Spanish Crown. Although he is at times unrealistic in his self-portrayal and demands, particularly in his assertion that he should speak directly with King Phillip III, Guaman Poma’s positioning of himself as a superlative hero aligns with the way many epic authors depict their protagonists. Finally, in his arguments against the atrocities of Spanish governance in New Spain and his depictions of Native women as indecent “whores,” Guaman Poma reiterates his justifications for the rights of Indigenous elites. In both cases, Guaman Poma appeals to King Phillip III on moral and financial grounds, suggesting that the horrible actions of colonial administrators—particularly in their abuses of Andean women—have created a scenario in which there are less Indigenous peoples from whom to extract tribute, and also that these actions are sinful from a Catholic perspective. The solution to these problems, he suggests, can only be in the return of Indigenous authority, as administered directly by himself. Guaman Poma’s epic letter or epistolatory epic—both its textual and pictorial aspects—serves as a bridge between the European literary and lettered traditions and Andean oral accounts. In his work, Guaman Poma periodically shifts perspectives and strategies, as informed by personal experiences throughout his lifetime. Although his arguments are often flawed and problematic (particularly those relating to women and female sexuality), Guaman Poma’s 1615 letter is an extraordinary example of epic literature, one that should be studied and compared to other global epics.

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NOTES 1 In this chapter, I use “Indigenous” and “Native” interchangeably. 2 The Andes at this time was made up of numerous independent ethnic groups incorporated into the Inka Empire, so I refer to Native/Indigenous groups and Inka as distinct entities. 3 All subsequent glossed terms are also from Quechua. 4 For other examples of “Native” writing, see Pachacuti Yamqui, Garcilaso de la Vega, and the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript. For historiographical summaries, see Salomon (1999) and Lienhard (2008). 5 Except where noted, all translations from Guaman Poma’s letter are my own. 6 Andean ethnic groups often underreported the number of men to avoid paying tribute, and many men were also lost to the dangerous mercury mine at Huancavelica.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Rolena. 2001. Guaman Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru: From a Century of Scholarship to a New Era of Reading. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen & the Royal Library. ———. 2008. “Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe (ca. 1535–1550-ca. 1616).” In vol. 2 of Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, 255– 68. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Brokaw, Galen. 2020. “An Integrational Approach to Colonial Semiosis.” In The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898), edited by Yoland Martinez-San Miguel and Santa Arias, 99–116. London: Routledge. Castro, Marcel Velázquez. 2020. “Figuras del mal gobierno: ‘Españoles soberbiosos e Indias putas’ en la obra de Guaman Poma de Ayala.” Letras 91, no. 133: 279–304. Castro-Klarén, Sara. 1996. “Las pacarinas y la virginidad, o de la sexualidad en Guaman Poma.” Nuevo Texto Critico 18 (julio–diciembre): 51–64. Coronel-Molina, Serafin. 2009. Foreward to The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615, translated and edited by Roland Hamilton, xiii–xvi. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cortez, Sofía Chacaltana. 2016. “De los tambos Incas a las tambarrías coloniales: economía colonial, legislación de tambos y actividades «licenciosas» de las mujeres indígenas.” Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 21 (November): 123–43. Fraser, Valerie. 1996. “The Artistry of Guaman Poma.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 29–30: 269–89. George, Jeremy James. 2020. “Bordering the Imagination, or Reading into the Center of Guaman Poma’s Drawings.” Colonial Latin American Review 29, no. 4: 572–601. Graubart, Karen B. 2000. “Indecent Living: Indigenous Women and the Politics of Representation in Early Colonial Peru.” Colonial Latin American Review 9, no. 2: 213–35. ———. 2007. With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe. 1615. Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Det Kongelige Bibliotek. Accessed June 11, 2021. https://poma.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/976/en/ text/?open=idm651. ———. 2009. The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615. Translated and edited by Roland Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press. Guengerich, Sara Vicuña. 2009. “Indigenous Andean Women in Colonial Textual Discourses.” PhD diss., University of New Mexico.

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— ​ S c o t t i M . N o r m a n —​ ———. 2013. “Virtuosas o corruptas: Las mujeres indígenas en las obras de Guamán Poma de Ayala y el Inca Garcilaso de La Vega.” Hispania 96, no. 4: 672–83. Hamilton, Roland. 2009. Introduction to The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615, translated and edited by Roland Hamilton, xvii–xxiv. Austin: University of Texas Press. Harris, Olivia. 1985. “Complementariedad y conflicto: Una visión andina del hombre y de la mujer.” Allpanchis 17, no. 25: 17–42. Husson, Jean-Philippe. 1985. La poésie quechua dans la Chronique de Felipe Waman Puma de Ayala: de l’art lyrique de cour aux chants et danses populaires. Série ethnolinguistique amérindienne. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hyland, Sabine. 2017. “Writing with Twisted Cords: The Inscriptive Capacity of Andean Khipus.” Current Anthropology 58, no. 3: 412–19. ———. 2021. “Festival Threads: Khipu Calendars and Mercedarian Missions in Rapaz, Peru (c. 1565–1825).” Catholic Historical Review 107, no. 1: 119–47. Isbell, Billie Jean. [1978] 1985. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Lienhard, Martín. 2008. “Indigenous Texts.” In vol. 1 of Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, 87–106. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. López-Baralt, Mercedes, and Rolena Adorno, eds. 1992. Guaman Poma de Ayala: The Colonial Art of an Andean Author. New York: Americas Society. Mannarelli, María Emma 1990. “Sexualidad y desigualdades genéricas en el Perú del siglo XVI.” Allpanchis 22, no. 35–36: 225–48. ———. 1993. Pecados publicos: La ilegitimidad en Lima, siglo XVII. Lima: Ediciones Flora Tristán. ———. 2007. “Espacios femeninos en la sociedad colonial.” In La mujer en la historia del Perú (siglos XV al XX), edited by Carmen Meza Ingar and Teodoro Hampe Martínez, 191–215. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú. Mignolo, Walter D. 1989. “Afterword: From Colonial Discourse to Colonial Semiosis.” Dispositio 14, no. 36–38: 333–37. ———. 2002. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1: 57–96. Millones, Luis, Sara Castro-Klarén, and Cristóbal de Albornoz. 1990. El retorno de las huacas: Estudios y documentos sobre el Taki Onqoy, siglo XVI. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Moreno, Manuel Aguilar. 2002. “The Indio Ladino as a Cultural Mediator in the Colonial Society.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 33: 149–85. Mumford, Jeremy. 1998. “The Taki Onqoy and the Andean Nation: Sources and Interpretations.” Latin American Research Review 33, no. 1: 150–65. Mumford, Jeremy Ravi. 2012. Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Norman, Scotti M. 2019. “Defining Identity during Revitalization: Taki Onqoy in the ChichaSoras Valley (Ayacucho, Peru).” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23, no. 4: 947–79. ———. 2021. “Catholicism and Taki Onqoy in the Early Colonial Period: Colonial Entanglements of Church Interments at Iglesiachayoq (Chicha-Soras Valley, Ayacucho, Peru).” American Anthropologist 123, no. 3: 490–508. ———, and Sarah A. Kennedy, eds. 2019. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, special issue, Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes, 23, no. 4: 807–1080.

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— ​ G u a m a n P o m a ’ s E p i c L e t t e r —​ Olson, Christa J., and Rubén Casas. 2015. “Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno and the Practice of Rhetorical Theory in Colonial Peru.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 3: 459–84. Ossio A, Juan M. 2008. En busca del orden perdido la idea de la historia en Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Colección estudios andinos 5. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Perú. Pease, G. Franklin. 2008. “Chronicles of the Andes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In vol. 1 of Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, 11–22. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Prado Tello, Elías, and Alfredo Prado Prado. 1991. Y no ay [sic] remedio. Lima: Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica. Rostworowski, María. 1988. La mujer en la época prehispánica [pamphlet]. Documento de trabajo 17. Serie Etnohistoria 1. 3rd ed. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Salles, Estela Cristina, and Héctor Omar Noejovich Ch. 2006. “La herencia femenina andina prehispánica y su transformación en el mundo colonial.” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’études Andines 35, no. 1: 37–53. Salomon, Frank. 1999. “Testimonies: The Making and Reading of Native South American Historical Sources.” In South America, vol. 3, part 1 of The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, edited by Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, 19–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, Walter D. Mignolo, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Irene Silverblatt. 2004. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———, and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. 2011. The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village’s Way with Writing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silverblatt, Irene. 1987. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Socolow, Susan Migden. 2015. The Women of Colonial Latin America. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Szemiñski, Jan. 1983. “Las generaciones del mundo según don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala.” Histórica 7, no. 1: 69–109. ———. 1993. “Idiomas de don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.” Guaman Poma 1615 7, no. 1: xx–xxxi. van de Guchte, Maarten. 1992. “Invention and Assimilation: European Engravings as Models for the Drawings of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.” In Guaman Poma de Ayala: The Colonial Art of an Andean Author, edited by Mercedes Lopez-Baralt and Rolena Adorno, 92–109. New York: Americas Society. Vanvalkenburgh, Parker. 2019. “The Past, Present, and Future of Transconquest Archaeologies in the Andes.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23, no. 4: 1063–80.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

H U M A N OW L S A N D P O L I T I C A L S O RC E RY I N T H E A N N A L S O F C UAU H T I T L A N

rsr

Martín Vega

The present essay considers the mythical story of Quetzalcoatl (“Feathered Serpent”) in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan in relation to the text’s more explicitly historical narratives. The Annals of Cuauhtitlan is one of a handful of early, alphabetic native histories that tell the story of how the Valley (or basin) of Mexico came to be settled by successive waves of migrating hunter-gatherers called “Chichimeca” beginning as early as the seventh century CE. Common to these histories is their use of the annals format, which provides a year-by-year chronology of major political events interspersed with occasional colorful anecdotes. These histories pay particular attention to the alliances and conflicts from which the Mexica emerge as the hegemonic head of a federation of city-states known as the Triple Alliance, comprised of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan. Economically, the Mexica (popularly known as “the Aztecs”) led a tribute-based empire spanning the broader region of Mesoamerica, which extended from central Mexico to Central America. The language of the Mexica, and thus the lingua franca of their empire, was Nahuatl. When Nahua scribes took to writing down the history of Postclassic Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they did so in their own language and from the perspective of their home communities, called altepetl. Though the exact authorship of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan remains unknown, the evidence points to two Nahuatl-speaking scribes from Cuauhtitlan, a city on the outer edge of the Valley of Mexico (Townsend 2017, 123; Castañeda de la Paz and Valadez Vázquez 2020, 128). An important element in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, as in other Nahuatl annals histories, is the inclusion of a semi-mythical pre-history featuring the communities, collectively known as “Toltecs,” that had built a great urban civilization in and around the Valley of Mexico prior to the arrival of the Chichimeca. In this prehistory, the Toltecs are typically represented as a society in decline and thus in prime position for a takeover by the newly arrived Chichimeca.1 Scholarly attention to the Annals of Cuauhtitlan has largely been funneled into the voluminous studies and debates on Quetzalcoatl as the ill-fated Toltec “hero.” Conversely, a handful of scholars (Nicholson 2001, 39–48; Olivier 2003; Johansson 340

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-28

— ​ H u m a n O w l s a n d P o l i t i c a l S o r c e r y —​ 2015; Townsend 2017, 123–37) have analyzed the text as a complex piece of literature unto itself, even with its contradictory and fragmented qualities. The fact that the original manuscript is now lost adds to the challenge of engaging with the text. The copy known to scholars is part of a group of texts written in Nahuatl and Spanish and collectively called the Codex Chimalpopoca. The translation used here, Annals of Cuauhtitlan, is by John Bierhorst (1992b), who has also published separately a transcription of the original Nahuatl text of the Codex Chimalpopoca (1992a). The Annals of Cuauhtitlan combines mythical lore and stories of political conflict from the mature Toltec or Early Postclassic period (circa 900–1200 CE) through the Mexica or Late Postclassic period (circa 1200–1521 CE) in the Valley of Mexico. Reading the Annals of Cuauhtitlan as a text spanning these two periods allows one to see narrative figures that otherwise operate “in the shadows.” Indeed, among the overlooked figures of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan and other early native-language narratives from Mexico are the human owls (tlacatecollo in Nahuatl; singular tlacatecolotl) that appear in pivotal moments to change the destinies of protagonists and antagonists alike.2 The story of Quetzalcoatl is in fact a richly metaphorical representation of one such moment: the shift from a vitiated Toltec regime to a Chichimeca one, after the latter’s aggressive expansion into the basin. In Mesoamerican origin stories and political histories, games and trickery serve as metaphors for political competition and, ultimately, war. In the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the tricks that the tlacatecollo play on Quetzalcoatl represent the relentless aggression of the Chichimeca, for whom the Mexica become the standardbearers. In their study on early states, David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that what distinguishes the Mexica from other powerful Mesoamerican societies is the intensity and extent to which they made war and human sacrifice the basis of their political authority (2021, 371). One should note, however, that the modern fixation on human sacrifice among “the Aztecs” is the product of a Christian obsession with converting Indigenous populations to Christianity. Though archaeological findings have shown that human sacrifice was indeed practiced across Mesoamerica, early Spanish reports exaggerated, sometimes wildly so, the numbers of sacrificial victims. Conversely, Christian moral “shock” elides the extensive forms of human sacrifice carried out in the name of Christianity and, in more recent times, “democracy,” “freedom,” “law and order,” and “modernization.” Still, to the extent that the Mexica, as descendants of the Chichimeca, became a hegemonic force, Indigenous post-Conquest narratives indeed portray them at the “apex” of a political and historiographical hierarchy. Thus, in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, Quetzalcoatl falls prey to the playful schemes, or what we may call “war-play,” of the tlacatecollo, who are led by Quetzalcoatl’s arch-rival Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”). In defeating Quetzalcoatl with their elaborate tricks, the tlacatecollo transform him into the original sacrificial victim of the Chichimeca. However, in the fifteenth century, Tezozomoctli, ruler of the Tepanec nation based in Azcapotzalco, engages in a desacralized brand of war-play that threatens the postToltec political order of the Valley of Mexico. That threat prompts the intervention of a new group of tlacatecollo, who perform a sacred rite on the future ruler of Tetzcoco (and the greater Acolhuacan province), Nezahualcoyotl. The various 341

— ​ M a r t í n V e g a —​ narratives of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan thus present a volatile political world of bitter conflicts and shifting allegiances. For their part, the authors of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan write from the perspective of their homeland, Cuauhtitlan, which, though once prominent, fell into decline after its conquest by the Tepanec nation (or the “Tepaneca”) in the fifteenth century CE. The authors’ disdain for the Tepaneca and affinity with the Mexica are evident throughout the text. In this regard, the emergence of Nezahualcoyotl as a heroic figure foreshadows the rise of Tetzcoco as a member-state of the Mexica-led Triple Alliance. The Annals of Cuauhtitlan traces the ways in which various communities of the Valley of Mexico resolve to confront the Tepaneca. Crucially, the tlacatecollo serve as supernatural representatives of this resolve. Aside from the Toltecs, the communities referenced thus far (the Mexica seated in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the Tepaneca seated in Azcapotzalco, the community of Cuauhtitlan, and the community of Tetzcoco/Acolhuacan) all trace their origins to the Chichimeca.3 At stake in the narratives of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan is a political order that includes a certain governing autonomy for the various polities of the Valley of Mexico. For the text’s authors, that order is ultimately achieved under the Mexica (Figure 24.1). While much scholarship has focused on the mythical struggle between Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, there has been scarce attention to the tropes and figures that constitute the political “dark matter” of the text. In this regard, the tlacatecollo operate as politically influential guides and intercessors in the narratives of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. A close analysis allows one to see the political sorcery of the tlacatecollo at work in this text, one of the few examples of early Nahua narrative in an alphabetic grammar.

HUMAN OWLS IN NATIVE MESOAMERICA In the aftermath of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Nahua scribes and Spanish clerics made a considerable effort to describe the tlacatecolotl, the human owl, and to translate this figure into a Christian mythos. Louise Burkhart states that in a Nahua worldview, tlacatecolotl “referred to a particularly malevolent type of nahualli, or shape-changing shaman who took the form of an animal alter ego during his or her trances. The tlacatecolotl inflicted sickness and death on people in the shape of a horned owl” (1989, 40–41). In early colonial Mexico, Christian missionaries (who were also linguists and ethnographers) saw in the tlacatecolotl an appropriate native substitute for the devil. For Burkhart, the decision to make the tlacatecolotl a substitute for the devil rested on the former’s fundamental humanness, even as this quality simultaneously “diminished the Devil into something less than the immortal Adversary” (1989, 41). In this sense, a distinctly native conception of the tlacatecolotl endured despite evangelical efforts to recast this figure as the devil. Post-Conquest Nahua scribes of the sixteenth century attested to the symbolism of the horned owl as an “omen of death” (Sahagún 1981, 161) (Figure 24.2). That characterization resonates with the visual representation of owls and human owls in pre-Hispanic Mixtec codices like the Codex Borgia (Figure 24.3).4 Studies on contemporary Nahua notions of the tlacatecolotl emphasize this figure’s resonance with pre-Christian worldviews that maintain a fluid sense of morality rather than a strict binary of good and evil (Báez-Jorge and Gómez Martínez 342

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Figure 24.1  Map of the basin of Mexico circa 1519, at the arrival of the Spanish. Wikipedia.

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Figure 24.2  Horned owl, from The Florentine Codex Book 5, folio 7r, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy (Med. Palat. 218). By permission of the Ministerio della Cultura. Further reproduction by any means is prohibited.

1998, 56; Sandstrom and Effrein Sandstrom 2021, 91). For contemporary Nahuas, the tlacatecolotl represents the shifting moods of a morally dynamic universe: the tlacatecolotl is “pious and envious; provokes discord and helps to resolve difficulties; provides food, punishes, and cures illnesses and provokes death; operates as mediator between the good and bad” (Báez-Jorge and Gómez Martínez 2000, 94). These complex contemporary Nahua understandings of the tlacatecolotl warrant a closer and more extended analysis of this figure than has been previously offered in studies of early Mesoamerican culture. Scholars focused on the Nahua tradition generally accept an understanding of the tlacatecolotl as a shaman or wizard; that understanding is reflected in the translation of tlacatecolotl as “sorcerer” in Bierhorst’s English translation of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. A close reading of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, however, shows the tlacatecolotl to be not just a sorcerer but, I propose, a “political animal.” Such a reading also prompts a reconsideration of what “sorcery” meant in the political world of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. While I focus my attention on the human owls of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the sacred myth-historical K’iche’ Maya text known as the Popol Vuh offers a compelling cross-cultural starting point for this reading. In the Popol Vuh, a group of owls (or, rather, human owls) bear the name of Rajpop achij, meaning (in K’iche’) “Military Keeper(s) of the Mat,” which alludes to a real-life title of high military rank (Tedlock 1996, 254, 348). As a group, the Rajpop achij “swoop into” three key moments in 344

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Figure 24.3  Horned owls (top left and top right) with death figures in the underworld, from The Codex Borgia, 42. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Italy. By permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

the narrative action of the text. First, as messengers of the lords of the underworld (Xib’alb’a), they summon the first set of hero twins, One and Seven Hunahpu, to play the Mesoamerican ballgame in the underworld (1996, 93–98). Second, they are told by the underworld lords to carry away the maiden Blood Moon and return with only her heart as a sacred offering; however, the maiden persuades the Rajpop achij to present a fake heart instead of her own, and they subsequently carry her out of the underworld and to the safety of the earth’s surface (1996, 98–102). Finally, they appear as messengers and couriers who to go the mountains in military service to their lords; after conquering the people of the mountains and sending back war captives, they are then officially “elevated” to the rank of Rajpop achij (1996, 189–90). Across these narratives, the nature of the Rajpop achij shifts: in the first two episodes, they are mystical animals, more owl than human, while in the third episode, they are, instead, human bearers of the title of Rajpop achij. Yet, in all three 345

— ​ M a r t í n V e g a —​ episodes they share the same qualities as messengers, couriers, and protectors. And while their original loyalty is to the powerful and malevolent lords of the underworld in the first two episodes, they show a capacity to betray that loyalty to aid the vulnerable maiden against the wishes of their lords. Indeed, Dennis Tedlock notes that in the fifteenth century a group of military captains called Rajpop achij staged a revolt against the K’iche’ Maya ruler Quicab, whom they attempted, but ultimately failed, to assassinate (1996, 327). There is the suggestion, then, that the Rajpop achij can turn against established rulers, and historically did so, transforming themselves from advisers to adversaries. As figures that move between supernatural and human worlds, the Rajpop achij of the Popol Vuh provide an appropriate lens, from the Maya tradition, for reading the tlacatecollo of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. In what follows, I consider the tlacatecollo as figures who “descend” upon the narrative at critical moments to portend and accelerate Mexica hegemony.

QUETZALCOATL AND THE TLACATECOLLO In the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, Quetzalcoatl is presented as a preeminent “offering priest” (tlamacazqui) and a “great craftsman” (huey toltecatl) responsible for the great artistic, agricultural, and architectural achievements of the Toltecs (Bierhorst 1992b, 28–30). The term tlamacazqui is in fact part of his longer name: Topiltzin Tlamacazqui Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl (“Our Lord Offering Priest One Reed Quetzalcoatl”) (28). Even when Quetzalcoatl becomes the chosen leader of the Toltecs (in 873 CE, according to the text), he continues to spend his days in seclusion: And in the time he lived he did not show himself in public. He was guarded in a chamber that was hard to reach. Many were the places in which the pages who were guarding him had sealed him up. And that’s where the jade mat was, the plume mat, the mat of gold. (30–31) In their theory of early states, Graeber and Wengrow propose three potentially overlapping bases of social power: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma (2021, 365). In reading the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, we may understand Quetzalcoatl as embodying the second basis of social power, the control of information. In the text, Quetzalcoatl is the privileged bearer of knowledge of the arts, sciences, and religion of the Toltecs. His seclusion in his temple represents the sequestration of his knowledge in a Mesoamerican version of the Ivory Tower. Indeed, when Quetzalcoatl leaves his temple, it is to ascend to even further heights: he goes to the mountaintops to perform rites of sacrifice that include puncturing himself, burning incense, and offering the blood of snakes, birds, and butterflies (Bierhorst 1992b, 30). Quetzalcoatl’s mythical Toltec government, then, resonates with historical regimes, like that of Chavín (in pre-Columbian Peru), that were organized not around direct control via militarism or a substantial administrative apparatus, but rather on “ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 389). When the tlacatecollo enter the Quetzalcoatl narrative as his political advisers, they present an alternate way of governing premised on human sacrifice. Indeed, 346

— ​ H u m a n O w l s a n d P o l i t i c a l S o r c e r y —​ an insistence on human sacrifice (“the human payment”) becomes a tacit demand presented by the tlacatecollo to Quetzalcoatl: Well, it is told and related that many times during the life of Quetzalcoatl, sorcerers [tlacatecollo] tried to ridicule him into making the human payment, into taking human lives. But he always refused. He did not consent, because he greatly loved his subjects, who were Toltecs. Snakes, birds, and butterflies that he killed were what his sacrifices always were. And it is told and related that with this he wore out the sorcerers’ patience. So it was then that they started to ridicule him and make fun of him, the sorcerers saying they wanted to torment Quetzalcoatl and make him run away. And it became true, it happened. (Bierhorst 1992b, 31) Allegorically, the persistent mocking of Quetzalcoatl by the tlacatecollo symbolizes a sustained critique of his way of governing. Within this allegory, the tlacatecollo mirror the historical emergence of the Chichimeca as a political force that imposes its will through warcraft. While Quetzalcoatl’s esoterism leads to his elevation to rulership by the Toltecs, it also places him in the sights of the politically ambitious tlacatecollo. The genius of the tlacatecollo as instigators of war-play rests in their ability to penetrate Quetzalcoatl’s defenses and exploit his vulnerabilities. In their first trick, they send Tezcatlipoca, who, in the guise of Telpochtli (“Young Man”), bypasses Quetzalcoatl’s temple guards and presents to him a reflection of his grotesquely aged face: Then Quetzalcoatl looked and was terrified. “If my subjects saw me,” he said, “they might run away.” For his eyelids were bulging, his eye sockets deeply sunken, his face pouchy all over—he was monstrous. When he had looked in the mirror, he said, “My subjects are never to see me. I must stay right here.” (1992b, 32) Having transformed himself into a young man, Tezcatlipoca embodies the vigor, strength, and beauty that will stand in sharp contrast to Quetzalcoatl’s aged appearance dramatically revealed in his reflection. In turn, the terror that Quetzalcoatl feels is a reaction not just to his “monstrous” features but to the realization that he will no longer hold influence over his subjects. The threat that his subjects “might run away,” then, is an acknowledgment of his fragile hold on political power. Quetzalcoatl’s remedy for this situation is therefore to double down on his seclusion and conceal himself in perpetuity. But with Quetzalcoatl already ensnared in their plot, the tlacatecollo concoct an alternate remedy that constitutes their next trick. Capitalizing on Quetzalcoatl’s fear of scaring away his subjects, the tlacatecollo send a featherworker to outfit him in special regalia that will conceal his appearance while allowing him to gloriously present himself to his subjects: He said to Quetzalcoatl, “My child, I say you must go out. Let your subjects see you. And for them to see you, let me dress you up.” 347

— ​ M a r t í n V e g a —​ He said, “Grandfather, do it! I’d like to see it.” And so he did it, this featherworker, this Coyotlinahual. First he made Quetzalcoatl’s head fan. Then he fashioned his turquoise mask, taking yellow to make the front, red to color the bill. Then he gave him his serpent teeth and made him his beard, covering him below with cotinga and roseate spoonbill feathers. When he had prepared it—the way the attire of Quetzalcoatl used to be—he gave him the mirror. Seeing himself, Quetzalcoatl was pleased. At that very moment, he went out from the place where he was being guarded. (1992b, 33) The featherworker thus works his sartorial “magic” to give Quetzalcoatl a complete makeover, transforming his appearance from “monstrous” to pleasant. The grooming of Quetzalcoatl constitutes the tlacatecollo’s shift in strategy to a softer hand—the featherworker offers neither ridicule nor the harsh revelation of Quetzalcoatl’s “monstrous” image, but uplifting encouragement. Yet, this softened handling conceals the true intentions of the featherworker. Indeed, by dressing Quetzalcoatl in his characteristic paraphernalia, the featherworker ingeniously transforms him into an ixiptla, or god-image, destined for another, morbid kind of public presentation, that of ritual human sacrifice.5 Appropriately, the next trick played on Quetzalcoatl revolves around an invitation that further prepares an unwitting Quetzalcoatl for his ritual sacrifice. Having primed Quetzalcoatl for his public cameo, the featherworker—crafty in artisanry and persuasion—relays the baton of trickery back to the tlacatecollo. Disguised as priestly brethren of Quetzalcoatl—that is, as fellow offering priests (tlamacazqui)— the tlacatecollo go to Quetzalcoatl’s temple with a sumptuous offering of food and drink items typically reserved for festive occasions; chief among these items is pulque, an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting the sweet sap of the maguey plant: But he said, “No, I mustn’t drink it. I’m fasting. Is it intoxicating? Or fatal? Taste it with your finger,” they told him. “It’s piquant.” Quetzalcoatl tasted it with his finger. Finding it good, he said, “Let me drink, grandfather.” And when he had drunk one draught, the sorcerers [tlacatecollo] said to him, “You’ll drink four.” And so they have him a fifth draught, saying. “This is your portion.” (1992b, 34) By passing as fellow priests, the two tlacatecollo successfully coax Quetzalcoatl into letting down his guard (in various senses) and indulging in the sour alcoholic beverage. The surreptitious feast-as-trap turns the tables, so to speak, on Quetzalcoatl’s strict adherence to his priestly penance. In the original Nahuatl text, the term for “piquant” is huitztli, meaning, literally, “thorn.”6 This same term names the maguey leaf’s needle-like points, which in turn recalls the “thorns of jade” and “needles of quetzal plumes” that Quetzalcoatl uses to puncture himself in penance (30). Metaphorically, the pulque acquires the same property as these thorns/needles, “piercing” Quetzalcoatl’s tongue with its sharp taste. 348

— ​ H u m a n O w l s a n d P o l i t i c a l S o r c e r y —​ The effect of the pulque, however, is not Quetzalcoatl’s spiritual transcendence through corporal mutilation but rather his submission to carnal pleasure alongside (and with) his “sister” in penance, Quetzalpetlatl: Having made themselves drunk, they no longer said, ‘Let us do penance.’ No longer did they go down to the water. No longer did they go out to puncture themselves with thorns. From then on they did nothing at daybreak. (1992b, 34) Whereas the first trick of the tlacatecollo produces terror (when Quetzalcoatl sees his “monstrous” image), and the second produces pleasure (when Quetzalcoatl sees himself post-makeover), this last one produces shame so strong that Quetzalcoatl abandons his realm and immolates himself (36). Thus, Quetzalcoatl’s fantastic final journey, as a postscript to his defeat by the tlacatecollo, ends in spectacular self-sacrifice. Patrick Johansson states that, in fact, the complex elements in Quetzalcoatl’s self-sacrifice provide the mythical blueprint for the funerary protocols activated upon a ruler’s death (2015, 91). Even in his ignominious defeat, Quetzalcoatl is memorialized in Mesoamerican lore and rulerly practice. Through their shrewd tricks, the tlacatecollo successfully transform Quetzalcoatl into a ritual offering, an ironic outcome of Quetzalcoatl’s refusal to offer his own subjects, the Toltecs, as “payment” to the gods. The tlacatecollo respond to Quetzalcoatl’s resistance by making him their first Toltec victim and the original example (ixiptla) of, and thus a template for, human sacrifice. In this regard, festival and feast serve as a stage and cover for the plot to overthrow Quetzalcoatl. The tlacatecollo thus overtake Quetzalcoatl through their “dark arts,” that is, through deceptive guises and setups that turn his esoteric rituals against him. Their defeat of Quetzalcoatl represents not just his immediate defeat but a shift to war-play as the basis of political authority.

TEZOZOMOCTLI AS DESACRALIZED TLACATECOLOTL As a mythical allegory (and a form of esoteric knowledge unto itself), the Quetzalcoatl narrative introduces tropes that recur in the more explicit political history of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. The repetition of these tropes is most apparent in the episode that immediately follows (by chronology) the death of Quetzalcoatl and tells of “The fall of Tollan” (Bierhorst 1992b, 37). In that episode, the name “Quetzalcoatl” is now a title held by the new Toltec ruler Huemac (38). Similar to the mythical Quetzalcoatl, this secular “Quetzalcoatl” is defeated by the trickery of Tezcatlipoca and his alter ego Yaotl (“Enemy”): these latter transform themselves into women who seduce Huemac into sleeping with them (38). As the name of Tezcatlipoca’s alter ego (Yaotl) suggests, Tezcatlipoca is an avatar of war and, in his trickster persona, of war-play. In mythical terms, the path from Toltec regime to that of the Mexica governance is paved by the escalation of political competition and war. Yet, when the Tepaneca appear on the political scene between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, as narrated in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the actions of its leader, Tezozomoctli, represent war-play run amuck and a grave threat to a post-Toltec political order in the Valley of Mexico. The threat posed by Tezozomoctli prompts the intervention of a new set of supernatural tlacatecollo to restore this order. 349

— ​ M a r t í n V e g a —​ The intervention of the supernatural tlacatecollo constitutes a test of their political will against Tezozomoctli as a desacralized, rogue tlacatecolotl. Indeed, Tezozomoctli appears uninterested in making any devotional “payment” to the gods. His regime is characterized as one of pure political calculation, with his chief aim being the expansion of his territorial dominion through the assassination of rulers and their replacement with his sons (1992b, 82). The most descriptive example of Tezozomoctli’s assassination plots is the one directed at the ruler of Cuauhtitlan, Xaltemoctzin. In that example, Tezozomoctli makes use of a strategy that mirrors the feast-turnedtrap deployed by the tlacatecollo of the mythical Quetzalcoatl narrative: 7 Flint [1408]. In this year the Tepaneca put to death the elder Xaltemoctzin atecpanecatl teuctli, who was ruler of Cuauhtitlan.7 He was hanged by judgment of Tezozomoctli, ruler of Azcapotzalco. They summoned him craftily, came and invited him to a feast in Tepanohuayan, and they took along many of his nobles and lords. And when all was ready, Tezozomoctli of Azcapotzalco killed the ruler of Cuauhtitlan. (78) Just as the tlacatecollo prepared a sumptuous feast to lure Quetzalcoatl from the safety of his temple, here Tezozomoctli’s agents “craftily” lure Xaltemoctzin and his court out of Cuauhtitlan under the pretext of a stately feast. The outcomes of both invitations also resemble each other: upon successfully tricking Quetzlacoatl, the tlacatecollo implicitly take over his realm; likewise, Tezozomoctli takes over the government of Cuauhtitlan by instituting martial rule: “For nine years Cuauhtitlan lay in darkness. No one was ruler. There was only a military chief” (78). While the story of Tezozomoctli generally proceeds in the mode of a secular history, his brand of war-play eventually provokes the magical intervention of a new group of supernatural tlacatecollo. The objective of these tlacatecollo is to protect the future ruler of Tetzcoco/Acolhuacan, Nezahualcoyotl, whom Tezozomoctli targets after assassinating his father, Ixtlilxochitl the elder (1992b, 85). Politically, Nezahualcoyotl stands in an embattled position between the Tepaneca and the Mexica: as the son of Ixtlilxochitl the elder, his survival represents a constant threat of revenge against Tezozomoctli; meanwhile, he is also the designated ruler of a state (Tetzcoco) closely allied with the Mexica. For the Mexica, Nezahualcoyotl’s survival and ascendance to the throne is critical. Thus, when the child Nezahualcoyotl accidentally falls into a pool of water, the supernatural tlacatecollo rescue him and then carry him to the top of a mountain, where they anoint him as a great future warrior destined to defeat Tezozomoctli (86). By pulling the young Nezahualcoyotl out of the water, the tlacatecollo also pull him into mythic time, thus speeding up the narrative of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. Passing over the details of Nezahualcoyotl’s childhood, the narrative immediately transitions to descriptions of him as an impressive young man who promptly proves his mettle in warfare (86). By accelerating Nezahualcoyotl’s maturation, the tlacatecollo set their magic against the political “dark arts” of Tezozomoctli. In this way, Nezahualcoyotl acquires the characteristics of Tezcatlipoca as Telpochtli (“Young Man”): just as Tezcatlipoca magically makes himself “young” in his confrontation with Quetzalcoatl, Nezahualcoyotl is quickly transformed into a strong young man to expedite the defeat of Tezozomoctli. 350

— ​ H u m a n O w l s a n d P o l i t i c a l S o r c e r y —​ While Nezahualcoyotl has the tlacatecollo as supernatural guides, he also has an earthly guide in Coyohua (“Keeper of the Coyote”). Coyohua’s name refers precisely to his role as a caretaker of Nezahualcoyotl, whose own name means “The Fasting Coyote.” As Nezahualcoyotl’s human guide, Coyohua helps to expose Tezozomoctli by “[uttering] all the things by which sorcerers [tlacatecollo] are addressed” (1992b, 7). In addressing Tezozomoctli as a tlacatecolotl, Coyohua subtly signals that the Tepanec leader is not in fact a supreme ruler but rather a military ruler, a status that echoes that of the historical Rajpop achij (“Keeper of the Mat”) as attested in the Popol Vuh. Tezozomoctli’s political status also mirrors that of the tlacatecollo of the mythical Quetzalcoatl narrative insofar as their political ambitions override their subservience to Quetzalcoatl as the established ruler. Yet, whereas the tlacatecollo of the Quetzalcoatl narrative are destined to succeed, Tezozomoctli is not. Indeed, in consistently referring to Tezozomoctli without the reverential suffix -tzin, the text of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan has already “thrown shade” onto Tezozomoctli’s rulerly ambitions. Coyohua’s verbal slight (and sleight of hand) suggests that the political winds have now turned against Tezozomoctli. The definitive sign of this political shift comes to Tezozomoctli himself via a terrible dream that he shares with Cohoyua: Who is this truly bad one that I have dreamed about? An eagle is standing on top of me. A jaguar is standing on top of me. A wolf is standing on top of me. A rattlesnake is lying on top of me. My dream terrifies me. (1992b, 88) In fact, the eagle and jaguar in Tezozomoctli’s dream represent not only apex predators of the animal world but also common titles of high-ranking warriors in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. The dream, then, is an augury of Nezahualcoyotl’s defeat of Tezozomoctli, manifested as a premonitory attack. Tezozomoctli’s terrified response indicates that he has correctly read these signs as prognostication of his own “ugly” fate. The dream thus presents a sharp role reversal for Tezozomoctli, whose status in the narrative changes from that of a predatory political animal (a tlacatecolotl) to political prey. In seeing the terrifying signs of his defeat, Tezozomoctli now resembles Quetzalcoatl when the latter looks into Tezcatlipoca’s mirror and sees his own “monstrous” image. Unwilling to accept his fate, however, Tezozomoctli further entrenches his status as a desacralized tlacatecolotl by resorting, once again, to deadly schemes; only, now, Tezozomoctli’s designs, centered on Nezahualcoyotl’s assassination, prove to be impotent. Just as the tlacatecollo of the Quetzalcoatl narrative recruit an ostensibly trustworthy aid to Quetzalcoatl (the featherworker), Tezozomoctli attempts to recruit Coyohua as a secret accomplice in the assassination plot (1992b, 88). Believing Coyohua to have earnestly accepted this entreaty, Tezozomoctli outlines a pair of schemes in succession that Coyohua purposely fails to accomplish each time: in the first scheme, Coyohua is to use a dart to pierce Nezahualcoyotl’s neck “at daybreak” to make it appear that he has “accidentally chocked in his sleep”; and in the second scheme, Coyohua is to take Nezahualcoyotl out “for some recreation” on a bridge or rooftop and have him knocked over so that it looks as though he has accidentally “fallen” to his death (88–89). 351

— ​ M a r t í n V e g a —​ In proposing these schemes, Tezozomoctli deploys what are by now recognizable tropes of sacrifice and trickery in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. The dart, for example, resembles the maguey spine used to pierce oneself in auto-sacrifice. Only now, that dart is the weapon of a surreptitious attack to take place, appropriately, in the crepuscular hour, right before dawn. In turn, the plot to take Nezahualcoyotl out for “some recreation” on a roof or bridge redeploys, in understated fashion, the strategy of the feast-turned-trap. Moreover, Nezahualcoyotl’s accidental “fall” resembles his original fall into a pool of water as a child. Here, however, Nezahualcoyotl is no longer a clumsy child, and Tezozomoctli’s plot is useless against the divine immunity granted to Nezahualcoyotl by the supernatural tlacatecollo. Pitted against the combined forces of the supernatural tlacatecollo and Coyohua as guides and guardians, Tezozomoctli’s plan to assassinate Nezahualcoyotl fails to materialize. After appearing to accept Tezozomoctli’s offer, Coyohua warns Nezahualcoyotl of Tezozomoctli’s plans and then convinces Tezozomoctli that the assassination plots have been impossible to carry out (1992b, 89). By undermining Tezozomoctli’s plans, Coyohua shows himself to be true to his namesake as “Keeper of the Coyote” and a crafty counterpart to Tezozomoctli. Coyohua’s declaration of loyalty to Nezahualcoyotl, whom he addresses with the reverential suffix -tzin, is a subtle affirmation of Nezahualcoyotl’s status as a ruler-in-waiting: “‘Have no fear, Nezahualcoyotzin, for I am Coyohua! Be glad. Rejoice. Am I not going to turn it back on this Tezozomoctli? For I am Coyohua!” (89). With these words, Coyohua positions himself as an earthly complement to the supernatural tlacatecollo. In effect, the guidance of the tlacatecollo and Coyohua leads Nezahualcoyotl to assume the governing seat of Tetzcoco and the wider province of Acolhuacan. Nezahualcoyotl’s elevation to rulership occurs in Tenochtitlan, where the Mexica ruler Itzcoatl consecrates Nezahualcoyotl’s political appointment: “Nezahualcoyotzin! The Sun and Tlalteuctli [‘Earth Lord’] have taken pity on you. So proceed to Acolhuacan. Govern your nation” (87–88). In this way, Itzcoatl joins the tlacatecollo and Coyohua in protecting Nezahualcoyotl and elevating him to political prominence. In the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, Itzcoatl’s anointment/appointment of Nezahualcoyotl crystallizes the status of the Mexica as the leading political power in the Valley of Mexico. More specifically, it solidifies the resolve of the Mexica to confront the Tepaneca. The initiative of the Mexica is therefore a rebuke of Tezozomoctli’s brand of war-play. Having been the target of Tezozomoctli’s schemes, Nezahualcoyotl verbalizes this rebuke: And Nezahualcoyotl spoke even more plainly. He told it from the beginning: how Tezozomoctli had always deceived people, and how his son Maxtlaton was ready to do just the same, etc. Then at last, the crimes of the Tepaneca could be clearly seen. (1992b, 97) While Coyohua has already subtly exposed Tezozomoctli by addressing him as a tlacatecolotl, here Nezahualcoyotl makes this image of Tezozomoctli even clearer, indicting Tezozomoctli as a war criminal. If the path to Mexica hegemony is shaped by war and conquest, Nezahualcoyotl’s surreptitious murder of political leaders bypasses the rules of military engagement and threatens political order in the Valley of Mexico. 352

— ​ H u m a n O w l s a n d P o l i t i c a l S o r c e r y —​ In turn, human sacrifice, when dedicated to the gods following appropriate ritual protocols, becomes the mechanism for defeating Tezozomoctli and consolidating Mexica hegemony. Indeed, the political and military alliance that forms against Tezozomoctli requires the sacrifice of his subjects, the Tepaneca, to facilitate a military alliance led by the Mexica. That act is carried out in Huexotzinco, in dedication to the god of that polity: It was finally decided that some Tepaneca should be sacrificed there—in public and at the foot of the Huexotzinca god, who was Camaxtle. On the eagle bowl before him, knives were laid. And with these, [the Tepaneca] were cut open. (1992b, 97) The consecration of the war pact represents a political resolve to defeat Tezozomoctli. In this way, the Quetzalcoatl myth and the story of Tezozomoctli serve as narrative bookends for how a political order comes to form in the Valley of Mexico: the Quetzalcoatl narrative anticipates the fall of the Toltecs and the arrival of the Chichimeca, while the story of Tezozomoctli’s demise explains the moment when the Mexica consolidate their political authority at the head of a federation of allied city-states that collectively trace their lineage to the Chichimeca. Ironically, then, Tezozomoctli passes from a tlacatecolotl to a historical substitute for the mythical Quetzalcoatl—in the absence of a Toltec archetype, it is now Tezozomoctli who must be defeated in order to usher in the period of Mexica hegemony. In the aftermath of Quetzalcoatl’s defeat at the hands of the tlacatecollo, Quetzalcoatl’s abdication of power consists of a song of lament, a great journey in exile, and a final act of spectacular self-sacrifice in which he transforms himself into Venus, “the morning star” (1992b, 35–36). Tezozomoctli’s demise follows a similar pattern while staying grounded in a decidedly terrestrial plane: having lost his hold over Cuauhtitlan (garnered with the assassination of Xaltemoctzin), Tezozomoctli grieves and weeps before taking to the road, telling his officials that he will go to the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (presumably to offer himself in ritual sacrifice) (93). Yet, instead of going to Tenochtitlan, Tezozomoctli commits suicide by swallowing poison in the year of 3 Rabbit (1430 CE) (93). While Quetzalcoatl immolates himself to become one with the heavens, Tezozomoctli preempts his own ritual sacrifice as the city of Cuauhtitlan burns in flames (93). Even in defeat, then, Tezozomoctli continues to act as a desacralized tlacatecolotl, this time tricking his own officials and foregoing the funerary protocols modeled by Quetzalcoatl. The Annals of Cuauhtitlan states the repercussions of a political leader’s evasion of proper ritual sacrifice by way of another story: when the Mexica official Teuctlahuacatzin likewise takes his life by swallowing poison, the leaders of the Mexica government punish him, posthumously, by rescinding the nobility of his current and future male descendants, relegating Teuctlahuacatzin’s male lineage to perpetual vassalage (1992b, 82–83). Implied in Tezozomoctli’s death, then, is the end of the Tepaneca as a political force in the Valley of Mexico.

CONCLUSION The combination of myth and political history in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan is a prominent feature of the work. As we have seen, the text vacillates between these 353

— ​ M a r t í n V e g a —​ two modes of storytelling, seamlessly weaving them together. As such, the mythical story of Quetzalcoatl is an allegory that uses the tlacatecollo to accelerate a shift from a declining Toltec regime to a dynamic Chichimeca one, leading ultimately to the formation of the Mexica-led Triple Alliance. The path to Mexica hegemony, however, hits a narrative snag with the emergence of the Tepanec nation as an existential threat to a formative political order headed by the Mexica. For that reason, another group of tlacatecollo intervenes in dramatic fashion to put a stop to Tezozomoctli and assist in the consolidation of Mexica power in the fifteenth century CE. Taken together, the various narratives of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan convey an affinity between the authors, as representatives of the city Cuauhtitlan, and the Mexica, based on a shared history of conflict with the Tepaneca. In that regard, the authors’ decision to include the burning of Cuauhtitlan by the Mexica and their allies must have been bittersweet, the silver lining being that the destruction of their occupied city results in the death of Tezozomoctli and the political demise of the Tepaneca. If mythical figures can serve as models for human actions, behaviors, and emotions, the tlacatecollo are a distinct Mesoamerican expression of political will and willfulness. In the Mexica context, political will and action, including violence, must also conform to sacred protocols of sacrifice in service to the gods, the highest form of sacrifice being “the human payment.” Graeber and Wengrow note, after all, that the three bases of power (violence, information, and charisma) usually coexist “to some degree” (2021, 365). Here, I have focused on Quetzalcoatl’s regime of knowledge-keeping, on the one hand, and on the Chichimeca regime of war and human sacrifice, on the other. In the final analysis, the mythical/supernatural human owls—the tlacatecollo—bridge these modes of political authority, just as they bridge the realms of sacred ritual and political competition. Indeed, while the tlacatecollo of the Quetzalcoatl narrative pull the mythical Toltec priest-ruler away from his private rites of penance, the tlacatecollo of the Tezozomoctli narrative pull the future ruler Nezahualcoyotl into the realm of the sacred to anoint him as the destroyer of the Tepaneca. Meanwhile, Tezozomoctli represents another kind of human owl, a purely political tlacatecolotl who bypasses sacred protocols in his suicide by poisoning, as well as in his campaign of political assassinations. We may thus understand the sorcery of the mythical/supernatural tlacatecollo, at opposing ends of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, as narrative “magic” that gives expression to a political will enhanced by contact with the sacred. In this way, we might also consider political will and willfulness to be nothing less than sorcery or its enchanted product.

NOTES 1 In Nahua alphabetic histories and visual narratives, Chichimeca leaders intermarry with the descendants of Toltec elites. This is one of the ways that the Chichimeca “overtake” the Toltecs. 2 The discrepancy in spelling, tlacatecollo having a double l and tlacatecolotl having a single l, aligns with the now accepted (if not standardized) spellings of the plural and singular forms, and this in turn is based on the different spelling conventions used by original Nahua authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 3 The term “Mexica” (and more properly “Mexica-Tenochca”) names the people of MexicoTenochtitlan, while “Tepaneca” refers to the dominant community of Azcapotzalco. In the

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— ​ H u m a n O w l s a n d P o l i t i c a l S o r c e r y —​ Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the people of Cuauhtitlan are called “Cuauhtitlancalque,” and those of Tetzcoco are called “Tetzcocatl.” 4 See Figures 1–3 in Johansson (2015, 137, 139) for more examples. 5 For an explanation of the ixiptla, see Bassett (2015, 134–61), Carrasco (1999, 83), and Clendinnen (2014, 356–58). 6 For the Nahuatl text, see Bierhorst (1992a, 11). 7 Here, “atecpanecatl teuctli” (“Atecpanecatl Lord”) is likely a title for rulership. In the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the Toltec ruler Huemac is given this “official title” (Bierhorst 1992b, 38). In the case of Xaltemoctzin, this title may therefore be a vestigial link to Toltec rulership.

WORKS CITED Báez-Jorge, Félix, and Arturo Gómez Martínez. 1998. Tlacatecolotl y el diablo: La Cosmovisión de los Nahuas de Chicontepec. Xalapa: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz. ———. 2000. “Los equilibrios del cielo y de la tierra: Cosmovisión de los Nahuas de Chicontepec.” Desacatos 5: 79–94. Bassett, Molly H. 2015. The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bierhorst, John. 1992a. Codex Chimalpopoca: The Text in Nahuatl with a Glossary and Grammatical Notes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———, trans. 1992b. Annals of Cuauhtitlan. In History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca, 23–138. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Burkhart, Louise M. 1989. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in SixteenthCentury Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Carrasco, Davíd. 1999. City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press. Castañeda de la Paz, María, and Ricardo Valadez Vázquez. 2020. “La historia detrás de los Anales de Cuauhtitlan.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 60: 121–59. Clendinnen, Inga. 2014. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Canto Classics ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Johansson, Patrick. 2015. “La Ley de Topiltzin: Fundamentos mitológicos del protocolo ritual en las exequias de los señores de Anáhuac.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 50: 91–182. Nicholson, Henry B. 2001. Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Olivier, Guilhem. 2003. Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1981. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Vols. 5–6. Book 4, The Soothsayers, and Book 5, The Omens. 2nd ed. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press. Sandstrom, Alan R., and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom. 2021. “Sorcery and Counter-Sorcery among the Nahua of Northern Veracruz, Mexico.” In Sorcery in Mesoamerica, edited by Jeremy D. Coltman, and John M. D. Pohl, 69–133. Louisville: University Press of Colorado. Tedlock, Dennis. 1996. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster. Townsend, Camilla. 2017. Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive. New York: Oxford University Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

AN “EPIC OF SORTS”

G A S PA R D E V I L L A G R Á A N D H I S I M P O S S I B L E EPIC OF THE NEW MEXICO1

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Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez

The success of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga’s La Araucana (1569, 1578, 1589) is credited with spurring an interest in epic poetry based on episodes of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Encouraged by Ercilla’s ability to refocus the literary lens from the ancient Greco-Roman past to the coeval Spanish-American scenario, a number of authors followed suit, writing about heroic episodes, for example, in the Caribbean and Nueva Granada (Juan de Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias, 1589), Chile (Pedro de Oña, Arauco domado, 1596; Diego Arias de Saavedra, Purén indómito, early seventeenth century), Florida (Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo, La Florida, late sixteenth century), Río de la Plata (Martín del Barco Centenera, Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata, 1602), Cuba (Silvestre de Balboa, Espejo de paciencia, 1608), Peru (Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo, Lima fundada, 1732), and Mexico (Francisco Ruiz de León, Hernandia, 1755). All of these poems employ the traditional epic stanza of eight lines (octava), deemed to be the most appropriate for lofty subject matters, and the quintessential metric model for the Hispanic epic (Stein 2016, 82). That meter, moreover, connected Spanish-American epic poems to recent Italian models like Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1532) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). These works infused the genre with a heavy religiosity that Spanish and Spanish-American authors consistently emulated. Still, not every author of epic poetry embraced the octava, and poems were written in a variety of other metrical patterns, including loose hendecasyllables (Melchor Xufré del Águila’s Compendio historial del descubrimiento, conquista y guerra del Reyno de Chile, 1630), silvas (Fernando de Valverde, Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacavana en el Perú, 1641), quatrains (Rodrigo de Valdés, Poema heroyco hispanolatino panegyrico de la fundación y grandeza de Lima, 1687), double fiveline stanzas (Luis de Belmonte Bermúdez, Vida del Padre Maestro Ignacio de Loyola, 1609), as well as a combination of different meters within a single poem (Diego Sáenz Ovecuri, Thomasiada al sol de la Iglesia, 1667).2

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-29

— ​ A n “ E p i c o f S o r t s ” —​ My reasons for beginning with such a detailed consideration of the formal aspects of the Spanish-American epic are not gratuitous, and they should become apparent immediately. All of the poems listed above written in octavas have fared much better in popular and critical estimation than those written with other metrical patterns, some of them experimental. While Pierce suggested that the loose hendecasyllable, for example, was quite apt for descriptions (an essential element in presenting American landscapes to European readers), even he doubted that such a meter could be successfully sustained in a long epic poem (1968, 225). The loose hendecasyllable was the meter selected by Gaspar de Villagrá for his Historia de la nueva Mexico (1610), an almost 12,000 lines-long poem that was received with little critical enthusiasm.3

GASPAR DE VILLAGRÁ AND THE OÑATE EXPEDITION (1595–1599) In his Historia, Villagrá wrote about the 1598 New Mexican entrada or expedition led by appointed Governor Juan de Oñate, a Creole born in Zacatecas in 1550. Oñate and his troops traveled north in search of a new Mexico they expected to find in the largely unknown lands past the Chichimeca territories, in present-day New Mexico. Villagrá, also a Creole (born in Puebla in 1553), was a veteran of the Chichimeca wars and a graduate of the Universidad de Salamanca, and he served in the New Mexican campaign in multiple positions.4 Despite their initial expectations, Oñate’s army failed to discover any significant riches, large cities, or powerful empires. In their stead, they encountered small villages that promptly pledged allegiance to the Spanish crown. It was not until the Acoma rebellion at the end of 1598 that Oñate’s soldiers were tested in battle. After a brutal encounter in January 1599, the Acoma were defeated, their village was razed, and prisoners and other survivors were subjected to severe punishments after a summary trial. Villagrá participated in the trial and in carrying out some of the punitive measures, taking a group of Acoma girls to Mexico City (in mid-1599) to be interned in local convents or to be employed as domestic servants. After completing the task, as well as that of recruiting new troops for the army, Villagrá decided not to return to the “new Mexico” himself. Instead, in what remains a somewhat unclear episode in his biography, he sought refuge in the convent of Saint Francis in Santa Bárbara on September 4, 1600. That he did not desert the army is suggested by the fact that Villagrá continued to serve as procurador general, as well as by his 1602 appointment as Alcalde Mayor of the Guanaceví mines, a position he could not have obtained had he been deemed to be a defector. No specific dates are known for the poem’s composition, but Villagrá must have written his Historia prior to boarding a ship for Spain on June 8, 1609, though it is also possible that he might have done some writing and/or corrections during the three months he spent on board that vessel. Since he arrived at Sanlúcar on September 27, 1609, and since the Spanish Royal Council authorized the publication of his book on March 7, 1610, it is likely that the poem must have been (almost) ready for publication upon arrival, making it an entirely American work, written on American soil by an American-born author, about an American subject.

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— ​ M a n u e l M . M a r t í n - R o d r í g u e z —​ Villagrá’s Historia is divided into 34 cantos, which, in turn, may be thematically subdivided into three parts (though the author did not do so formally). The first part, cantos I–IX, is the shortest of the three (3,569 lines), and it is devoted to the background and preparation of the expedition. Despite its relative brevity, compared to the other two parts, the lack of action slows down the reading, forcing the reader to feel the frustration and the anxieties of the troops, whose departure was delayed several times for bureaucratic and political reasons. The second part (4,011 lines) extends from canto XI to canto XXI. Here, the historiographical discourse of the early cantos in part I is complemented by a proto-anthropological poetic narrative that focuses on describing the peoples and lands encountered. The troops are constantly engaged in exploration forays (to explore the salt mines in present-day Arizona or to hunt buffalo in the great plains, among others), which renders this second part quite dynamic. Part III, in turn, begins in canto XXII and ends the poem with canto XXXIV. The 4,320 lines in this segment are the most celebrated, in great measure because of the battle scenes of the Acoma War. Epic discourse dominates this closing part, complementing the previous historiographical and ethnographic bent of the poem.

EPIC CONVENTIONS In many ways, though sometimes in his own peculiar manner, Villagrá adopted the conventions of the epic genre passed down from European antiquity and consolidated by Ariosto, Ercilla, and Tasso. In typical Virgilian fashion, for example, Villagrá opens his poem with the formulaic line: “Las armas y el varon heroico canto” (Villagrá 2010, 67); “I sing of arms and the heroic man” (Villagrá 1992, 3), a literal translation of the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid (1908, 1).5 Like Virgil (and like Homer before him), Villagrá also resorts to scenes in which deities appear to the soldiers and intervene in the action. However, rather than relying on GrecoRoman gods and goddesses, at times Villagrá uses deities from the native American pantheon, as when he summons a divine figure who appears as an old lady before a proto-Mexica army, and whom scholars have identified as either Coatlicue (Echenique March in Villagrá 1993, 90) or Tetzauhtéotl (Martín-Rodríguez 2014, 91). In canto I, the poet uses this apparition to establish a series of parallelisms through the motif of foundational travel, another staple of the Virgilian epic.6 The god appears to the proto-Mexica and urges them to march south to found the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), much as Oñate is presented in the poem as a new Aeneas who marches north and is destined to colonize (or found) the new Mexico. At other points in the Historia, divine apparitions are closely aligned with post-Ariosto epic religiosity, as when a demonic figure appears in canto XXX to tempt a mortally wounded Spanish soldier or when in canto XXXIV Villagrá resorts to the conventional motif of the appearance of the apostle Santiago and of the Virgin Mary to guide the troops to victory. Among the many other traditional European epic motifs employed by Villagrá, the presence of augurs is worth mentioning because he uses them in connection with the three main armies depicted in the poem.7 The proto-Mexica, in canto II, are guided by the prophecy of the founding of Tenochtitlan, as mentioned. Oñate’s troops, in turn, hear from the lips of a certain doña Eufemia (a character clearly 358

— ​ A n “ E p i c o f S o r t s ” —​ inspired by Ercilla’s doña Mencia) a much more weakened version of the topical foundational prophecy, when she chastises some soldiers for wanting to desert the army. By rhetorically asking, “A de faltarnos tierra bien tendida, / Y vn apazible Rio caudaloso, / Donde vna gran Ciudad edifiquemos” (Villagrá 2010, 151); “Will we lack widely stretching land, / A peaceful river of much water, / Where we may build a noble city” (Villagrá 1992, 76), doña Eufemia expresses desire rather than certainty, uttering a wish more than a promise, thereby foreshadowing the partial failure of the Oñate mission. As for the Acoma warriors, their prophetic element is connected to both native spiritual practices (the use of the sacred kivas) and to Catholic demonology, which equates the act of entering the underground kiva with a descent into hell. Thus, in canto XXVI the Acoma await “El prodigioso oraculo suspensos, / Como si en el horrible infierno brauo, / [Amulco] Vbiera estado” (Villagrá 2010, 341); “Prodigious oracle in great suspense / As if he might have been within / Hell, savage, horrible” (Villagrá 1992, 233). Comparisons based on maritime travel and scenes of storms are other traditional epic elements in the poem. Since Villagrá wrote about a land-locked territory, this may appear out of place at first, were it not for the fact that he drew from both literary conventions and personal experience (he first crossed the Atlantic as a youngster in 1569, returning to New Spain in 1576). Storms are standard semiotic referents in classical epics like Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Lucan’s Pharsalia, and Christian authors like the Venerable Bede also make ample use of them in connection with miraculous interventions. Villagrá resorts to an example of the latter to give dramatic force to the scene depicting the arrival of Oñate’s army at the first New Mexican village: the fact that the Franciscan friars who accompanied the troops succeed in bringing a fierce storm to an end through their prayers appears to be the main ideological reason for invoking this theatrical trope in canto XV. Fifteen cantos later, the poet returns to the epic storm motif, this time in the manner of Homer and Virgil, describing in vivid images the fierceness of the warriors from Acoma (Villagrá 2010, 379–80). Villagrá’s allusions to the intrinsic violence of tempests lend considerable dramatic force to the poem, as do his many similes inspired by nature and daily life. Many of Villagrá’s images were somewhat conventional in his time, because they had long been stock elements in much European epic and bucolic poetry. Take, for example, the case of hard-working bees and wilted flowers, and the many descriptions of American landscapes as a sort of new locus amoenus. Still, Villagrá succeeds at times in injecting new life into his similes and metaphors, especially when he connects them to daily-life events. For instance, at one point he compares his fellow soldiers to both toads and drunkards on a tavern’s floor when (after days of privation) they manage to quench their thirst on the banks of the Río del Norte (2010, 214). Somewhat less conventional is the author’s use of epic catalog, a long list of people or objects, which is often present in heroic poems. Villagrá employs this device in at least three different manners. First, the author follows established generic practices, enumerating plants and animals as other poets like Ercilla did before him, and naming people involved in particular actions, as a form of testimony or record of services rendered. But Villagrá also utilizes a third kind of epic catalog which seems most idiosyncratic: in canto X, the poet offers a list of six historical characters who were unjustly prosecuted, as if he were anticipating and addressing 359

— ​ M a n u e l M . M a r t í n - R o d r í g u e z —​ the charges that would be pressed against him and Oñate for excesses during the New Mexican campaign, accusations that began to circulate in court circles in 1607 and resulted in their convictions in 1614.8 While an exhaustive list of elements in Villagrá’s Historia that conform to the epic genre may not be needed for the purposes of this essay, I would like to discuss two more that help clarify the transition from the genre-conforming aspects of his poem to those in which it departs from convention. A quick look at Villagrá’s use of ekphrasis and his distinctive treatment of a classic theme in epic literature, that of the fallen beloved comrade, reveals significant insights into the “sort of epic” that he wrote. When it comes to ekphrastic description of sumptuous objects, Villagrá’s approach is significant because of both the types of objects he describes and those he does not. Except in a brief passage in canto V, where the poet enumerates in some detail artworks and curios in the palace of the Duke of Saxony, he mentions no luxurious “epic” objects—no richly decorated shields, finely carved weapons, or intricate armor. He describes the Spanish army’s weapons (in canto XXVII, for example) as rather unremarkable, and says little about those of the Acoma people, which he apparently considered even less worthy of aesthetic contemplation. As a result, his poem effectively conveys an impression of the general poverty of the area, as well as of the Oñate expedition itself. That this “Christiano Achilles” (as Villagrá calls Oñate in canto I) has no magnificent shield to offer for contemplation or any rich battle spoils to compensate for its lack in the Historia is pregnant with signification, and there is some historical context that might help explain such lack. Despite being the heir to one of the richest families in northern New Spain, Oñate struggled to fully fund his expedition (especially after the delays imposed by the Viceroy and other authorities), and he had to resort to enlisting wealthy patrons Juan Guerra de Reza and his wife as his guarantors to fulfill some of the terms of his contract.9 As I will explain in more detail below, by presenting Oñate as impoverished, Villagrá may be making a political point, one that censures the viceregal administration.

DEVIATION FROM TRADITIONAL EPIC MODELS The ekphrastic descriptions that Villagrá does offer are of capital importance in that they illustrate the poem’s departure from the conventions of European epic and, perhaps for that reason, they all center upon drawings and paintings produced by native New Mexicans themselves. The first of three such illustrations appears in canto XII, just after a party of scouts (lost in their unsuccessful attempt to find the Río del Norte) encounters and captures someone named Mómpil, who is interrogated by the soldiers about the topography of the area. With the sweep of his hand to create a “canvas” in the sand, the captive proceeds to “paint” for Oñate’s men a veritable map of the universe, in which he depicts everything from the constellations, the globe, and the oceans, islands, and continents of the Earth, to the physical surroundings in which they find themselves. He even indicates where the nearest river is and where to find the different villages in the area.10 Mómpil accomplishes all this, Villagrá sums up, “Como si bien cursado fuera, / En nuestra mathematica mas cierta,” (2010, 198); “As though he had been educated / In our mathematics accurate” (Villagrá 1992, 360

— ​ A n “ E p i c o f S o r t s ” —​ 114), and “Como si muy sagaz piloto fuera” (Villagrá 2010, 199); “As if he were a most learned guide” (Villagrá 1992, 114). Three cantos later (in canto XV), Villagrá devotes eleven lines to describing a painting in one of the native homes depicting the sacred figures known as kachinas. Later in the same canto, the poet describes Oñate’s arrival at the village of Puarái, where he and his troops spend the night. The following day, on the walls of one of their dwellings, the party is able to discern a different kind of painting when the newly applied whitewash begins to fade and to reveal some underlying narrative frescoes portraying the killing of several friars who entered the New Mexico with Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado’s expedition in 1581. Perhaps the most remarkable moment in this scene occurs when Villagrá tells his readers that Oñate ordered his men not to look at the frescoes (to avoid a potential confrontation with their hosts), but then he proceeds to describe them in full detail. This original, double game of obscuring/revealing, not-looking/describing creates a metadiscursive space which highlights modern issues such as the power of the gaze and of narrative authority. Although Villagrá mentions the Chamuscado expedition in canto V, there he does not offer his readers an account of the fate of the friars because at that point in history no one in New Spain had any news about them. In both scenes (the one at Puarái and the one featuring Mómpil), the poet surrenders control of the narrative point of view to his native sources. In doing so, he confers upon them epistemological authority and acknowledges them as thinking subjects, not as objects of contemplation, a point to which I return below in my discussion of canto XIV. As for the motif of the fallen comrade, the classic European example of it is the death of Patroclus and the ensuing lamentation and wrath of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. Villagrá, with an eye to Homer, adopts the motif but, significantly, makes the comrades brothers rather than friends: Vicente and Juan de Zaldívar, who are also Oñate’s nephews and members of the Creole elite that the poem foregrounds and celebrates. Maese de campo Juan de Zaldívar was killed in Acoma in late 1598, an episode that Villagrá describes in canto XXIII. His brother, Sargento mayor Vicente de Zaldívar, led the punitive expedition that arrived in Acoma on January 21, 1599. After a brutal battle in which Vicente de Zaldívar and his men defeated the Acoma and destroyed their village, Vicente (according to the poem) asked for his brother’s body, only to be informed that there was no body to give him, since Juan de Zaldívar had been so severely beaten that his remains were turned into an amorphous mass that was later burned (Villagrá 2010, 412). In his ensuing lament, Vicente de Zaldívar resemanticizes the landscape, turning the high mesa on which Acoma was built into a symbolic altar that holds and enshrines the remains of his brother, whom he calls first martyr of the Catholic faith in the New Mexico (2010, 414). This of course is an imprecise assertion—recall that a group of friars were previously “martyred,” as described in the Puarái frescoes—one that reflects Villagrá’s self-interest and the Creole orientation of this “epic of sorts.” In this episode, Villagrá is forced to cede narrative authority once again to his native informers. Since there is no corpse to inter, Juan de Zaldívar ceases to have a material existence of any kind and becomes the verbal presence of an absence, one that is now dependent on the discourse of the Other (Martín-Rodríguez 2015, 80–81). Villagrá could have used an omniscient third-person narrator to describe the 361

— ​ M a n u e l M . M a r t í n - R o d r í g u e z —​ fate of Juan de Zaldívar’s body (as he did in other episodes like that of the warrior assembly at Acoma in canto XXI), but here he opted not to do so, thereby adding yet another instance of heteroglotic discourse to his poem, this one verbal rather than pictorial. In an indirect but significant manner, Villagrá’s peculiar use of the motif of the slain friend/brother also highlights the conspicuous absence of another major epic topos, that of combat between enemy heroes. Hector’s killing of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad results in Achilles challenging Hector to a one-on-one fight in which Achilles succeeds in avenging his friend’s death. But in the Historia, since no one in particular is responsible for the death of Juan de Zaldívar, Vicente de Zaldívar cannot emulate Achilles’s retaliatory act, but rather is reduced to a role akin to that of Priam, when he begged Achilles to give him the corpse of his slain son, Hector. Still, the most intriguing aspect of Villagrá’s departure from the conventional motif of the combat between enemy leaders is the fact that Oñate is never seen confronting anyone in battle. When Juan de Zaldívar is killed in Acoma, Oñate is away, exploring lands farther west. When the Franciscan friars authorize the army to engage with the Acoma in battle, Oñate stays behind in San Juan de los Caballeros (Ohkay Owingeh), sending Vicente de Zaldívar to lead the expedition in his stead. Even when he sets out to fortify San Juan de los Caballeros to protect it from enemy attacks during the Acoma War, Oñate is described in the poem just walking around town, while everybody else is assigned a specific spot to defend, and while even the women of the colony—of their own resolve—have climbed onto the roofs of the houses to keep watch and fight, if necessary. For a poem that begins with the Virgilian line “Las armas y el varon heroico canto” [Arms and the man I sing (1908, 1)], the heroism of Juan de Oñate himself remains, at best, ambiguous. It is in this ambiguity that we perhaps get the most compelling evidence of Villagrá’s poignant ideological commentary on the New Mexican enterprise, as well as on the epic genre.

IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE Villagrá presents Oñate as a dubitative, unaccomplished hero, closer to the protagonist of a twentieth-century novel than of a seventeenth-century epic poem, an idea I explored in my earlier work (Martín-Rodríguez 2005, 183–86). For scholar Genaro Padilla, such a portrayal suggests a potential riff between the author and his commander in chief, as he claims in his book: “Villagrá had declared his impatience with, or abhorrence of, Oñate…by refusing to return to la nueva México only months after the [Acoma] massacre” (Padilla 2010, 126). However, as I suggest in my review of Padilla’s book, such an interpretation fails to explain why the poet-lawyer would then devote five years of his life to take care of Oñate’s affairs in Spain (2013, 469), an unlikely outcome of the alleged disaffection in Padilla’s interpretation. An alternate understanding of Villagrá’s somewhat puzzling literary treatment of Oñate would be to read it as a criticism not of Oñate but of the Spanish colonial regime’s bureaucracy and legal system. This system had, by Villagrá’s time, all but killed the possibility of bold displays of epic military prowess that had characterized earlier expeditions of conquest (if one were to consider them from the Spanish point of view, of course). Because of the new 1573 rules, known as “Ordenanzas de nuevos descubrimientos,” Oñate could not aspire to be a new Hernán Cortés or 362

— ​ A n “ E p i c o f S o r t s ” —​ a new Francisco Pizarro. Rather, he found himself leading the first major entrada subjected to the discursive scrutiny that resulted from the presence of an official secretary tasked with documenting Oñate’s every action and his army’s every move (Lane 1998, 57). Faced with such an administrative exigency, Villagrá responded by making what appears to be a brilliant literary decision, at least from our twentyfirst-century perspective: rather than writing a traditional European epic poem, he produced a hybrid text in which the epic style is constantly challenged by documentary prose, and vice versa. In order to achieve that effect, he interrupts his verses in three different places to insert legal documents reproduced word by word, but places them in contexts that could not fail to ironicize them. Moreover, by virtue of the actual documents he chose to reproduce, and the contexts in which he inserted them, Villagrá ended up effecting an unquestionable critique of (at least) the discursive aspect of Spain’s colonial system. Thus, when in canto VII he reproduces letters from the King of Spain and the Viceroy of New Spain asking Oñate to halt his march north while the authorities evaluate the candidacy of a wealthy Spaniard to lead the expedition in his stead, the poet all but denounces the lukewarm support that Oñate received from the ruling powers while highlighting the discriminatory treatment of Creoles in general.11 Oñate, Villagrá implies, was only allowed to lead this entrada because no suitable Spaniard could be found to do so, despite the fact that his superior, first-hand knowledge of New Spain’s northern borderlands should have made him an ideal candidate. In canto XIV, in turn, Villagrá copies the act of possession of the land that Oñate read aloud when the army reached the alleged New Mexico. That document rationalized the occupation of the land with expressions such as “la inhumanidad que entre estas bestiales naciones se halla” (Villagrá 2010, 224); “the inhumanity which among these bestial nations is found” (Villagrá 1992, 135). Since Villagrá inserted the act only two cantos after the one where Mómpil is shown to be equal to anyone educated in mathematics, the rationale behind the document is made to appear ill-founded. Finally, when in canto XXV he reproduces Oñate’s query about whether or not attacking Acoma would constitute a case of just war, as well as the favorable response of the ecclesiastical authorities, Villagrá exposes (intentionally or not) the flawed reasoning of the friars, something that did not escape their twentiethcentury fellow Franciscan Fray Angélico Chávez (1974, 48). Considered from this angle, Villagrá’s choice to write an epic poem (of sorts) may prove to be his most original and important contribution to the New Mexican campaign. By the time he penned it, the poet was fully aware of the fact that Oñate had failed to either find an important civilization or found a new one in the vast, unexplored northern lands. Why write in the epic style, then, when there was little (if anything) to sing about? I argue that in writing an “epic of sorts,” a generic hybrid combining heroic verse and official prose, Villagrá did to the epic genre something akin to what Miguel de Cervantes did for the genre of chivalric romances around the same time (Cervantes’ Quixote was printed in two parts in 1605 and 1615, five years before and five years, respectively, after the publication of Villagrá’s Historia). If Cervantes’ novel is credited with putting an end to chivalric fiction, Villagrá’s Historia makes it clear that, because of the constraints placed on expeditions by the Ordenanzas de nuevos descubrimientos, the traditional European epic was no longer a viable literary genre to sing about them. And, for the same reasons that the 363

— ​ M a n u e l M . M a r t í n - R o d r í g u e z —​ defeated Don Quixote ceases to be a comic fool and becomes a tragic hero at the end of Cervantes’ novel, Villagrá could present the unsuccessful Oñate not as a failure but as the victim of the malfunctioning structures of colonial power. Moreover, if we contextualize Villagrá’s Historia within his overall oeuvre rather than analyzing it in isolation, and take into account Villagrá’s trajectory as a Creole intellectual, we can see that his role as the poet/historian of the New Mexico is a major one, and his work, an intentional step in the formation of a northern borderlands proto-nationalistic discourse. Not unlike Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (circa 1568) to correct what he perceived to be distortions in the historical record made by Francisco López de Gómara in his Historia general de las Indias (1553), Villagrá penned his own Historia as an alternative record to the legal discourses the two secretaries of the Oñate army produced. In that sense, it is worth pointing out that though almost all of the important officers in Oñate’s army were Creoles (as were all of the officers with significant roles in Villagrá’s poem), the two official secretaries of the entrada were Spaniards: Oñate’s first secretary was Juan Pérez, a native of Cangas de Onís, in northern Spain, and his second, upon Pérez’s death, Juan Velarde, who was born in Madrid. As long as scholars could think of Villagrá as a military man, first and foremost, and dismiss his written contributions as that of an accidental poet or an amateur historian who could only write about what he witnessed,12 his Historia could be considered an oddity, and an argument in favor of his Creole/borderlands identitarian project (such as the one I make here) could hardly be constructed. But after I located, transcribed, and analyzed a 1587 legal document in which Villagrá mentions that he was then writing a history of Zacatecas, as well as the fact that he was employed as personal secretary of Baltasar Temiño de Bañuelos, a previously unknown discursive continuum revealed itself to me, one that suggested that Villagrá was, for all practical purposes, the unofficial chronicler of the northern New Spain borderland elites, and that he was producing a distinct and consistent historiographical record from within; that is, he wrote not from the point of view of the Madrid court, but from that of New Spain’s northern borderlands Spaniards and their Creole offspring (Martín-Rodríguez 2018). Though his 1580s history of Zacatecas may have not survived, it is obvious that Villagrá’s history of the New Mexico was not his first but a second historiographical project, the second installment of a chronicle that highlighted the accomplishments of his fellow wealthy borderland neighbors. Villagrá, in a sense, could be said to have performed for that northern New Spain society the same kind of foundational historiographical role that the Venerable Bede did for England in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (circa eighth century), a work that also combined older sources, stories told by others, and contemporary documents. Although we shouldn’t make too much of the coincidences between their respective projects, especially since there is no indication that Villagrá ever read Bede’s history, we may perhaps gain some insight into Villagrá’s motivations by considering Bede and his work. Bede was, after all, chronicling the beginnings of a people in connection with their adoption of the Christian faith, and to a certain extent, Villagrá may be said to have done the same, not only by writing about the arrival of Catholic doctrine to the New Mexico (a very important aspect of his poem) but also by writing about the first major expedition of discovery and 364

— ​ A n “ E p i c o f S o r t s ” —​ colonization conducted by a Creole commander and a largely Creole cadre of military officers, all from the very same families who had founded and/or developed prosperous Zacatecas.

CRITICAL APPROPRIATIONS Such a potential to represent the autochthonous as opposed to the foreign, and the local versus the distant metropolitan center of power, was not lost on a group of Mexican-origin intellectuals who attempted to co-opt Villagrá’s Historia for their own nationalistic purposes. That arrogation took place in the southern Colorado/ northern New Mexico area in 1898, the year in which the United States was at war with Spain. New Mexican intellectuals who had settled in the prosperous town of Trinidad, Colorado, utilized the pages of one of the local newspapers (El Progreso) to reprint in installments the entirety of Villagrá poem, including its interpolated documents. An editorial, “Preciosa joya bibliográfica: desconocida por el mundo literario” (A precious bibliographical jewel: unknown in the literary world), announcing this major endeavor on July 30, 1898, explained El Progreso’s rationale for publishing the Historia: Lea nuestro pueblo esta noble composición; consérvela y guárdela para transmitirla á su posteridad. Si EL PROGRESO no obtiene más mérito que el haber publicado esta Historia, esto sólo bastará para recompensar á sus editores por los muchos contratiempos que necesariamente son parte de la carrera periodística. (1898, 1) Let our people read this noble composition, keep it, and preserve it to pass down for posterity. If El Progreso obtains no reward other than having published the Historia, that alone would be enough to compensate its editors for their many setbacks that are inevitably part of a career in journalism. (my translation) Torn by their mixed allegiances during the Spanish-American War (to the United States as their country of citizenship, and to Spain as the land many of them saw as the ancestral origin of their own families), these late nineteenth-century New Mexicans opted to turn their gaze inward, onto their own local culture and traditions, and for this reason, claimed Villagrá’s hybrid text as foundational to their own “miscegenated” identity. At the time, New Mexican intellectuals, in all likelihood, were reacting not only to the ideological pressures of the Spanish-American War, but also to the efforts of a cadre of U.S. historians and social scientists to celebrate Villagrá’s Historia as a major historical document of the United States, although they cared very little for the poem’s literary value. John G. Shea was the first to vindicate the Historia as “a poem written here” (1887, 4). H. H. Bancroft then gave a fuller endorsement, reminding his readers that: “Of all the territories of America—or of the world, so far as my knowledge goes—New Mexico alone may point to a poem as the original authority for its early annals” (1889, 115). But as Mariano Vallejo famously replied 365

— ​ M a n u e l M . M a r t í n - R o d r í g u e z —​ to Bancroft’s collaborators, “It is my history and not yours” (cited in Padilla 1993, 30), El Progreso’s editors also seemed to want to remind Anglo-American scholars that, as far as Nuevomexicanos were concerned, Villagrá’s Historia was their history. At the turn of the century, when U.S. intellectuals were rushing to appropriate Villagrá’s Historia for nationalistic purposes, Mexico also reacted by releasing their own edition of the work in two volumes (González Obregón 1900). General Editor Luis González Obregón all but apologized in his Introduction to the first volume for reprinting what he saw as a poorly written poem, but he carefully reterritorialized it as a Mexican work by a Mexican author. In order to do so, he made sure that the bulk of his references in the Introduction pointed to the history of Mexican letters, including the works of critic Francisco Pimentel and poet Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán.13 In any case, over time U.S. scholars seemed to lose interest in the poem qua poem, such that when the next edition of the Historia appeared on U.S. soil in 1933, it was in the form of a translation in prose. Much later, as if still hindered by the endemic, slow wheels of colonial bureaucracy, Spain belatedly joined this contested politico-literary arena by releasing two editions of the Historia in quick succession, one in a series of literary and historical works related to the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and the other by a group of editors who wanted to brand the Historia as a Spanish work by appealing to Villagrá’s ancestral heritage in northern Spain. In more recent years, and with considerable strength, Chicano Studies scholars have heeded Luis Leal’s seminal call to consider the Historia part of Chicano literary history (1973, 32), and although scholarly opinion is not unanimous, all of the major anthologies and histories of Chicano/Latino literature now feature Villagrá’s text in their pages. In 1992, moreover, the series Pasó por aquí of the University of New Mexico Press, which aims to recover the state’s Hispanic literary heritage, released an edition of the Historia accompanied by an English translation.

CONCLUSION Despite these concerted attempts to reterritorialize the Historia, Villagrá’s appeal to late-twentieth and twenty-first-century readers appears to rest on the way in which he and his Historia inhabited and continue to inhabit liminal, interstitial spaces between genres, countries, and identities. Villagrá was a Creole from New Spain who received a humanistic education at Spain’s Universidad de Salamanca, then settled in New Spain’s northern borderlands, and ultimately participated in and wrote about Spain’s exploration of the New Mexico. In his Historia, in turn, he adopted the conventions of the epic genre, only to subvert them so as to expose the impossibility of sustaining an epic spirit and style in a historical context that relied more on the bureaucratic prose of the report than on the inspired exultations of the epic bard. His decision to combine verse and documentary prose in the Historia, to create “an epic of sorts,” disappointed those critics and readers who attempted to read it as a classical epic poem, but it was that decision which now makes his work read like a very modern, hybrid poem of the borderlands.

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NOTES   1 The allusion in my title is to Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel The Sorrows of Young Alfonso, in which the main narrator refers to Villagrá’s poem as “an epic of sorts” (2016, 57) to describe its peculiar epic nature.   2 For additional examples, see Piñero (1982, 172).   3 On the early reception of the Historia, see Martín-Rodríguez (2014, 210–21).   4 Biographical details are from Martín-Rodríguez (2009) and Martín-Rodríguez (2018).   5 For all quotes from Historia, I use Villagrá (2010) for the Spanish original, and Pérez de Villagrá (1992) for the translation. The 2010 edition reproduces the exact text of the editio princeps, which the 1992 edition modernizes and occasionally misreads.   6 In the Aeneid, for example, after the fall of Troy, Aeneas guides the surviving Trojans to the Latium, to become one of the founders of Rome.   7 See Martín-Rodríguez (2005, 153–89) for a more complete analysis with examples.   8 Though scholars disagree on this point, several have proposed that Villagrá wrote his Historia to, in the words of López-Chávez, “establish a record to justify his actions during the conquest as well as those of Oñate” (2016, 117).   9 Guerra de Reza’s wife, Ana de Zaldívar, was Oñate’s niece, and sister of officers Juan and Vicente de Zaldívar (Martín-Rodríguez 2009, 81). 10 Martínez points out the potential inspiration of this episode in Lucan’s Pharsalia (2020, 84). 11 Pérez-Linggi (2005, 669–70) offers details on Creole disenfranchisement in her analysis of Villagrá’s poem. 12 The following quote perhaps best summarizes such an opinion, which has lingered into our present: “The book contains very heavy, nay clumsy, poetry. Still it is exceedingly valuable. Villagran was an execrable poet, but a reliable historian so far as he saw and took part in the events himself” (Bandelier 1892, 82). 13 The text of that edition, including the prologue by González Obregón, was reproduced in the most recent Mexican edition of the poem (1993), in care of Felipe I. Echenique March.

WORKS CITED Anaya, Rudolfo A. 2016. The Sorrows of Young Alfonso. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Bancroft, Hubert H. 1889. History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530-1888. The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft Series 17. San Francisco, CA: The History Company. Bandelier, Adolph F. A. 1892. An Outline of the Documentary History of the Zuñi Tribe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chávez, Fray Angélico. 1974. My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Leal, Luis. 1973. “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective.” Revista ChicanoRiqueña 1, no. 1: 32–44. López-Chávez, Celia. 2016. Epics of Empire and Frontier: Alonso de Ercilla and Gaspar de Villagrá as Spanish Colonial Chroniclers. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. 2005. “‘Aquí fue Troia nobles caualleros’: Tradición clásica y otros intertextos en la Historia de la Nveva Mexico de Gaspar de Villagrá.” Silva: Estudios de Humanismo y Tradición Clásica 4: 139–208. ———. 2009. Gaspar de Villagrá: Legista, soldado y poeta. León: Universidad de León.

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— ​ M a n u e l M . M a r t í n - R o d r í g u e z —​ ———. 2013. Review of The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610, by Genaro M. Padilla. New Mexico Historical Review 88, no. 4: 468–69. ———. 2014. Cantas a Marte y das batalla a Apolo: Cinco estudios sobre Gaspar de Villagrá. New York: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. ———. 2015. “Violencia y fronteras coloniales en la Historia de la nveva Mexico de Gaspar de Villagrá.” In Amicitia fecunda: Estudios en homenaje a Claudia Parodi, edited by Jimena Rodríguez and Manuel Pérez, 73–90. Madrid: Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert. ———. 2018. “Gaspar de Villagrá, primer historiador de la frontera norte de la Nueva España: Nuevas perspectivas críticas y biográficas.” New Mexico Historical Review 93, no. 2: 149–69. Martínez, H. Salvador. 2020. Ácoma: Historia poética de una tragedia: Estudio históricoliterario de la Historia de la Nueva México de Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá. León: Universidad de León. Padilla, Genaro M. 1993. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin. ———. 2010. The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Pierce, Frank. 1968. La poesía épica del Siglo de Oro. Translated by J. C. Cayol de Bethencourt. 2nd ed. Madrid: Gredos. Piñero Ramírez, Pedro. 1982. “La épica hispanoamericana colonial.” In Época colonial, vol. 1 of Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, edited by Luis Iñigo Madrigal, 161–88. Madrid: Cátedra. Progreso, El. 1898. “Preciosa joya bibliográfica: desconocida por el mundo literario,” July 30, 1. Shea, John G. 1887. The First Epic of Our Country, by the Poet Conquistador of New Mexico, Captain Gaspar de Villagrá. New York: United States Catholic Historical Society. Stein, Tadeo. 2016. “Octava real y sintaxis gongorina. A propósito de La octava maravilla y sin segundo milagro (c. 1680) de Francisco de Castro.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 42, no. 83: 81–104. Villagrá, Gaspar [Pérez] de. 1992. Historia de la Nueva México, 1610. Edited by Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodríguez, and Joseph P. Sánchez. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1993. Historia de la Nueva México. Edited by Felipe I. Echenique March. Córdoba, México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. ———. 2010. Historia de la nveva Mexico. Edited by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez. Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Franklin, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Virgil. 1908. The Aeneid of Virgil. Translated by Theodore C. Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

GENDER PERFORMANCE A N D   G E N D E R E D WA R R I O R S I N   A L B A N I A N E P I C P O E T RY

rsr

Anna Di Lellio and Arbnora Dushi

This chapter contributes to knowledge of the Kângë kreshnikësh (Songs of the frontier warriors),1 the oral epic tradition of the Albanian-speaking population of northern Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo.2 Like the Kalevala in Finland, this epic is central to Albanian discourses of national identity and has shown remarkable resilience to modernization and state repression. In our reading of the Kângë kreshnikësh, we highlight some of its most important features and themes, ones that have affinities with those of other epics in the Balkans and the world. In particular, we focus on several female figures who either play supportive roles as the enablers of the male heroes or are themselves the agents of heroic acts. We further apply a critical gender lens to show how these characters present a challenge to hierarchical gender norms in Albanian society, which are based on the kanun, the customary law whose origins have been traced to the Middle Ages. The heroic masculinity of the Albanian highlanders at the center of the epic is defined by colonial power—whether the expansionist Slavic Kings pressing from the North or the Ottoman rulers. Outmatched by much more powerful adversaries, the heroes cannot dominate on their own. Rather, they require the help of magic, and various female characters—fairies, mothers, daughters, and sisters—to be successful. Standing out among them is the figure of the girl who volunteers to fight in the place of her father or brother to defend the family’s honor. To succeed in her task, this female character must be readable as a male warrior; she must wear men’s clothes and perform tasks that are, by custom, assigned only to men. This figure and related themes in the epic can be seen as an affirmation of the Albanian moral and social order with its rigid gender roles. Nevertheless, it can also be seen as a contestation of that order, even if the epic as a whole is not as subversive of male authority as some other pre-modern examples (Zemon Davis 1975). To illustrate this, we focus in particular on moments of gender performance and realignment in the stories of female characters who appear “as men” with irrepressible enthusiasm to fight for family and familial honor.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-30

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ORIGINS, REGIONAL CONTEXTS, AND MOTIFS The Albanian epic has its roots in the mountainous areas of northern Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, which for five hundred years before WWI and the formation of the modern Balkan states encompassed the boundary between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian kingdoms of Europe. The epic was the original creation of illiterate rhapsodists, or folk singers, whose descendants still perform its decasyllabic verses to the accompaniment of the lahuta (lute), a single-stringed instrument. Although classified as a cycle, the songs together do not form an all-encompassing, comprehensive narrative, as each song tells a complete and discrete story. The songs themselves are focused on the deeds of frontier warriors (kreshniks): the brothers Mujo3 and Halili, along with the agas (persons of high rank) of Jutbina, and Gjergj Elez Alia. These heroes fight to protect their homeland from two enemies: the Krajlat (“Kings” in South Slavic languages) from the North, called Shkije (Slavs) or Magyars, and the Arabs or Moors, called Harap, the Black Baloz, and the Harambash, from the sea. The heroes are fictional characters, not historical personages, operating in a poetic homeland with no defined historical time and space (Sinani 2011, 88). Albanian scholars consider the song Beteja e Kosovës (The Battle of Kosovo) the closing of the epic’s mythic-heroic theme (Mehmeti 2016, 84). This song stands apart, because unlike earlier songs, this one is set in the historical context of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans (Di Lellio 2009, 18–30). Here, the main hero, the legendary Albanian knight Milosh Kopiliq, assassinates Sultan Murat I in the battle of 1389. Although they blend both fantastic and historical elements, the songs of the Albanian epic have long provided a sense of national identity for the Albanian people, full of uniquely Albanian cultural norms, and preserving collective memory of a mythical past. Since the nineteenth century, Albanian heroic songs have attracted the attention of Albanologists and notable scholars of folklore.4 However, the establishment of a large corpus of Albanian epic songs is primarily due to the documentation work of Franciscan friars based in the Albanian city of Shkodër. In 1912, they began to collect, edit, and popularize the songs, paving the way for the epic to be constituted as national heritage. Thanks to Father Bernardin Palaj, whose role with the Kângë kreshnikësh is comparable to that of Elias Lonnrot with the Finnish epic Kalevala (Dushi 2018), songs identified as belonging to the Kângë kreshnike started to be published as early as 1913 in Hylli i dritës (The day-star), a journal founded by the poet and essayist Father Gjergj Fishta, as a forum to discuss Albanian history, literature, and folklore.5 In 1937, the Fathers Bernardin Palaj and Donat Kurti published the first large collection of frontier songs in the Visaret e Kombit (The treasure of the nation) series. Since then, scholars at the Institute of Folk Culture in Tirana, Albania, and the Institute of Albanology of Pristina, Kosovo, have continued to record and transcribe songs, and have together greatly expanded the collection of songs in the Kângë kreshnikësh cycle.6 The Institute of Folk Culture initially carried out its work as part of the nation-building project after Albania’s independence from Ottoman rule in 1912, and has continued it ever since, including through the Communist period (1946–1992). In Kosovo, meanwhile, the Institute of Albanology of Pristina had to face repression by the Yugoslav state, including the destruction of a great many recordings by Serb security forces in the spring of 1999. Now in independent 370

— ​ G e n d e r P e r f o r m a n c e a n d G e n d e r e d W a r r i o r s —​ Kosovo, the Institute continues its research on this living oral tradition with renewed energy: a series of fifteen collected volumes of songs is in production, as well as a petition to include the epic on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Despite its well-established codification, the Albanian epic’s origins have been the subject of debate for decades, mostly because its chief figures, Mujo, Halili, and Gjergj Elez Alia, also appear in the Bosnian Muslim epic Muslimanske junačke pjesme (Muslim heroic songs) and the Serbian epic Srpske junačke pjesme (Serbian heroic songs) (Sejko 2002). Because of this, some scholars have argued that Albanian songs are just adaptations of Slavic rhapsodies (Skendi 2007, 165). However, there is no evidence that the Kângë kreshnikësh is derivative of other Slavic epics. That this theory has gained significant traction at all is likely due to the fact that while the South Slavic oral epic tradition has achieved worldwide recognition, the Albanian epic has not, its language being largely unknown outside the region. The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University contains a vast collection of Albanianlanguage recordings, but it remains under-researched and unpublished (Elmer 2013, 348), while the Serbo-Croatian section, which contains material of rhapsodists living in Sandžak (Serbia) recorded by Parry and his assistant Albert Lord, is well-known and available online. This is a notable lacuna, given that four of the singers were Albanian and bilingual, and sang the same songs in both languages (Kolsti 1990). In fact, it was the surprising discovery of the link between the two traditions that moved Albert Lord to study Albanian, travel across northern Albania, and record the trove of songs now archived at the Parry Collection (Elsie and Mathie-Heck 2004, xii-xiii). Other scholars maintain that the Albanian epic originated among Albanianspeaking communities and is older than the Serbo-Croatian epics, preserving the memory of the conflict between Albanians and Slavic settlers in the Balkans around the years 700–800 CE (Sinani 2011, 11). Robert Elsie agrees that it is an oral tradition which contains much older elements but, reflecting a general consensus, writes, “it crystallized in the 17th and 18th centuries in a border region of the Balkans which separated Christendom from the Islamic world” (Elsie 2004, XVI). According to Ernest Koliqi, the affinities between the epics can be explained by the shared aversion of Ottoman subjects—Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Muslims and Catholics—to Slavic encroachment from the North (1937, 48). Setting aside the debate on origins, what is certain is that only one of all the Balkan traditions is still alive—the Albanian tradition. Even today, male rhapsodists in Kosovo and northern Albania gather to sing on private and public occasions, adding new linguistic elements and references (Neziri 2008, 125–29). These same songs provided inspiration to Albanian soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the 1998–1999 war against Serbia (Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers 2006). Nowadays, recordings of epic songs are available in the market or on YouTube, and themes derived from the epic are used metaphorically in popular music and literature. For example, the novel Krushqit janë të ngrirë (The wedding procession turning to stones, 1985) by Ismail Kadare references such songs to speak of Albanian resistance to Yugoslav political repression (Dushi 2017). This is not the case in Bosnia and Serbia, as the Slovenian scholar Matija Murko discovered as early as the 1920s. When he asked a Serbian veteran why they didn’t sing of the exploits of their own epic heroes, he told him: “It’s not worth it; this is something that nowadays interests only the journalists, educated people” (Matija Murko, cited in Koliqi 1937, 42). 371

— ​ A n n a D i L e l l i o a n d A r b n o r a D u s h i —​ The Albanian epic indeed contains stories and characters that are also found in the Serbian and Bosnian Muslim epics, as discussed in detail by Fulvio Cordignano (1943, 167–78), and also in epics across the broader Balkans (Skendi 2007, 167–201). All of these epics share mythology and themes with other great epics of the world, among them the Byzantine epic Digenes Akritas (also spelled “Digenis Akritis”) (Jeffreys 1980), and with the “western chivalric romance cycle, [which] perhaps penetrated into the Balkans when the crusaders travelled through the region” (Koliqi 1937). We can perhaps put the debate on the relation of the Albanian epic with others to rest, by concluding with Cordignano, “Folk songs and tales have no borders,” but live in different linguistic and cultural communities (1943, 178). What is perhaps more interesting than the debates about the precise origins of the Albanian epic are its poetic motifs, which were envisioned by illiterate rhapsodists, living in isolated, mountainous areas, who “freely elaborated themes common to all the Balkan people” (Koliqi 1937, 91), giving them “a different color from Slavic rhapsodies” (93). This “Albanian color,” it turns out, consists of crucial cultural and social signifiers of the nation: organizing principles and moral codes derived from customary law, an unwritten tradition first transcribed and published by the Franciscan Shtjefën Gjeçovi in 1933 (Gjeçovi 1989). Of the several versions of this law book existing in Albania, Gjeçovi’s work, the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (The code of Lekë Dukagjini), which takes its name from the Albanian medieval ruler associated with its codification, is the best known. The world of the Albanian epic is above all fantastic. There are speaking animals and mythological fairies such as the zanas (from the Latin ‘Diana,’ and like the virgin protector goddesses or vila in the South Slavic epic) (Çabej [1975] 2011, 68–93), and the ora, who are divine and comparable to guardian angels and the Greek figures of destiny (Doja 2005, 456). The heroes, however, are human characters whose actions are magnified by the imagination of the rhapsodists and belong to the cultural and social context of the Albanian highlands. Ethnicity is ascribed to the heroes through the narrative itself, and the epic makes cultural references to their membership in a “fis,” in English “tribe,” for lack of a better word (Elsie 2015). Fis are exogamous groups in Albania that follow a patrilineal line of descent and are instrumental to the fundamental ordering and structure of the Albanian society. The rules of the fis are law for the heroes of the epic (Cordignano 1943, 34). In the songs, there is no inter-marriage within a given fis. This is illustrated in Martesa e Halilit (The marriage of Halili), where the hero Halili tells the agas why he is unable to find a bride in Jutbina: Kah kam vlla e kah kam motër, deksha para n’u martofsha! Se gjithë grat e Krahinës, ku janë, Se gjithë gratë e Jutbinës ku janë, Bash si motra po më duken. All of you here are my brothers and sisters. I’d rather perish than have to get married! For all of the women here in the krahina, 372

— ​ G e n d e r P e r f o r m a n c e a n d G e n d e r e d W a r r i o r s —​ All of the girls to be found in Jutbina, All of these women to me are like sisters. (Palaj and Kurti [1937] 2007, 27, lines 76–80) A key element of Albanian culture connected to the fis is besa, one’s solemn promise or given word. Besa, which has sacred value and is considered more important than life itself, is critical in heroic men’s relationships with their brothers and other family members, other heroes, and even rivals (Shala 1981, 64). In the song Halili e merr Begzadën e bardhë (Halili kidnaps the fair Begzada), Halili even gives his word to his captive rival Stojan Harambashi to treat him honorably, not wanting to humiliate him: “Trimi trimit gjithmonë besë i nxë” (The brave always trusts another brave man) (Çetta 1974, 23, line 342). The heroes give their besa to the sun, the moon, and the fairies. In Martesa e Mujit (The marriage of Mujo), Mujo subdues the zanas, who have turned his bride’s escort into stone and captured his bride, by seizing the wild goats who give them magic powers. He subsequently returns the goats to the zanas and restores their powers, trusting the fairies’ word that they will no longer use magic against him and his entourage: Zana jeni e zana qofshi Besa besë e fjala fjalë, Dhitë e egra u qofshin falë You are zanas, you’ll be zanas. Words are words and pledges, pledges. I’ll return to you your wild he-goats. (Palaj and Kurti 2007, 9, lines 336–38) As another example, heroic girls who disguise themselves as men to fight in duels with powerful enemies give and keep pledges. In all the variants of Omeri i Ri (The young Omer), the girl warrior promises her unknowing betrothed that she will show up at his wedding if she returns victorious from battle: Besën e zotit, tha, me ta dhanë, Se sot nji javë në darsëm kam me t’ardhë, Se sot nji javë në darsëm kem’ m’u pa. Giving you my word, I promise, In a week’s time you’ll be married, And in a week’s time I will meet you. (Palaj and Kurti 2007, 87, lines 222–24) Finally, the epic is permeated with themes that derive from and reinforce well-defined Albanian codes with regard to marriage and gender roles. The kanun establishes that marriages should always be arranged, implying that it should have primarily strategic and economic functions. While marriage constitutes a strong bond between a man and a woman, with a set of reciprocal obligations, according to the kanun, a woman should remain subordinate to her husband and his family. Women are expected to have a reproductive role and maintain the honor of the family by not engaging in adultery, but have virtually no rights: a woman is like the property of her 373

— ​ A n n a D i L e l l i o a n d A r b n o r a D u s h i —​ father, husband, and sons (Hasluck 1954, 25). Historically, one chief way Albanian women were able to acquire some independence was to take a pledge of celibacy and become “sworn virgins,” that is, permanently dress and live as men (Young 2000; Berishaj 2016). This social practice was once widespread across much of the Balkan regions and survived until recently only among Albanians in northern Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro (Elsie 2012). The female characters of the epic can perform “men’s tasks” in socially acceptable ways only when presented in the guise of men.

THE FAMILY ROMANCE OF THE HEROIC SONGS The Albanian epic never mentions an important point in the kanun: the authority of the pleq (elders) to counsel the family or the community and preserve customary law (Cordignano 1943, 121). Fathers do not appear in the songs, with the sole exception of young Omer’s old and ill father. This is a circumstance that suggests, to borrow Lynn Hunt’s Freudian insight into the French Revolution, an underlying “family romance of fraternity” (1992), where communal solidarity among the kreshnik compensates for the erasure of the father, affording a greater role to other family members. In the Kângë kreshnikësh, it’s the mother of the hero who has authority and advises her son on how to interpret circumstances and prepare for a course of action. For example, in the song Muji te Mbreti (Mujo visits the Sultan), Mujo and Halili accept the invitation of the Sultan to visit him in Istanbul only after they consult their mother: Na po shkojmë e nanën po e pvetim Si t’na thotë nana po bajmë. Let us go to our mother and ask for her counsel. There will we follow whatever she tells us! (Palaj and Kurti 2007, 20, lines 36–37) Similarly, in the song Omeri i Ri, Ali’s mother tells him how to test the gender of a mysterious young guest. In the Battle of Kosovo, the Sultan’s mother is the only person who can speak freely to the Sultan. Before his departure from Istanbul, she questions, albeit unsuccessfully, his intention to go to war; at the news of his death, she curses Kosovo and dies heartbroken.7 Mothers also curse heroes, as Halili’s mother does in the song Halili e merr Dylberen e Krajlit të Talirit (Halili kidnaps the fair Dylbere of the Kingdom of Taliri), when Halili does not honor his maternal uncle, “Mos të pastë nana Sokol Halili!” (May your mother never have had you, Sokol Halili!) (Çetta 1974, 111–21, line 33). Mothers criticize their sons for their choice of brides in Martesa e Hysen Krajishnikut (The wedding of Hysen Krajishnik) (Çetta 1974, 148, lines 12–14). While some have interpreted the motif of the strong mother as a sign of an enduring matriarchy (Sinani 2011, 13), we find it more instructive to understand it as a consequence of the father’s absence and the subsequent destabilization of the family. Conflict within a brotherhood of heroes is often displaced to the sphere of women, who are considered the seeds of all discord. Women belonging to the same fis, that is, mothers, sisters, and daughters, rarely or never betray the heroes (Mehmeti 1980, 162). Yet, there is the exceptional case of Zuku, Bajraktar’s mother, who blinds her son and his horse, in order to free a captured baloz with whom she has fallen in 374

— ​ G e n d e r P e r f o r m a n c e a n d G e n d e r e d W a r r i o r s —​ love (Zuku Bajraktar). Here, a woman’s romantic desire leads her to violate fundamental family ties. More common is the betrayal of heroes by their wives, such as Mujo’s Turkish wife Mehreme, who is kidnapped by the Slavic Captain King in Rrëmbimi i së shoqes së Mujit (Mujo’s wife is kidnapped). When Mujo comes to free her, Mehreme gets him drunk and ties him up; it is only through the intervention of the zana and Halili that Mujo is released and takes his revenge by killing Mehreme (Palaj and Kurti 2007, 169, lines 335–418). The women who are the causes and trophies of wars and duels are both Christian and Slavic, their desirability justified by their foreignness and the need for exogamous marriages. Significantly, the marriages that typically follow the kidnappings of brides function as a form of reparation according to this male code of honor. In some cases, women are willing participants. For example, Tanusha in Martesa e Halilit and the daughter of the Captain King in Arnaut Osmani happily follow their seducers, betraying their own families. The female outsiders who join the fis are frequently untrustworthy. In the Battle of Kosovo songs, women are often the enemy within. Kopiliq’s wife “Llatinka e bardhë” (The fair Latinka) recommends a dishonorable surrender to the Sultan, and then an old shkina (a derogatory term for a Serbian woman) informs the Ottoman forces of Kopiliq’s secret weapon, allowing them to capture and decapitate him. Finally, a young woman spots Kopiliq as he walks away from battle, with his own decapitated head tucked under his arm, and her cries make him drop the head and die. Here and in other Albanian folktales of saintly figures who carry their heads but die when recognized by a woman, women are presented as subversive figures, sexually distracting men (Di Lellio 2009, 46–47). Finally, zana and ora, the fairies living by the rivers and in the valleys, are represented as maiden figures who eat and drink, sing and dance, and exchange besa with humans. Mostly nurturing, maternal, and protective, they can also be jealous and volatile, expressing the whole gamut of stereotypical feminine qualities. In Martesa e Mujit, they turn to stone the bride’s escort who has not respected their wish for silence. In Orët e Mujit (Mujo’s oras), oras can be vindictive, as when they risk Mujo’s life by asking him to avenge the Slavic warrior Paji Harambashi’s mishandling of them; they can be supportive like the fair ora who arranges for Halili to rescue Mujo; or maternal like the oldest ora who invites the brothers to always be united in battle.

“PASSING” AS PERFORMANCE Poetic motifs in the Albanian epic often have several variants (Dushi 2014, 27–44), as is the case with the motif of the young woman warrior. In the song Ikja e Hajkunës (The escape of Hajkuna), Mujo’s sister, who is wrongly believed to have been seduced by the Slav Gjura Harambashi, kills Gjura with her own hands, showing that she “can fight like a man” (“bash si mashkull çika po lufton”) (Çetta 1974, 105, line 272). Other heroines both affirm and unsettle the supposed uniqueness of male valor, while also exposing the social construction of gender itself. Variations on the theme of the young girl who disguises herself as a man to fight a strong enemy are found in the following songs: Omeri i ri (The young Omer; also known as Mujo’s niece); Fatimja e bardhë i del në mejdan Uroshit (The fair Fatima goes to fight Urosh) and its previous version Çika e Herrni Mustafë Agës i del në mejdan Krajlit të Sejës (The daughter of the Aga Herrni Mustafa goes to fight the King of Seja), a variant of 375

— ​ A n n a D i L e l l i o a n d A r b n o r a D u s h i —​ Martesa e Ali Bajraktarit (The marriage of Ali Bajraktari); Vajza e plakut Qefanak i del në mejdan Harapit (The daughter of old Qefanak goes to fight the Harap); Ali Bajraktari e çika mejdanxhi (Ali Bajraktar and the dueling girl); and Motra e Gjergj Elez Alisë (The sister of Gjergj Elez Alia).8 We will focus here on Omeri i Ri, first published in 1934 in the Franciscan literary journal Hylli i dritës. In this song a young woman, with shorn hair and dressed in knight’s armor, takes the place of her old and ailing father in a fight against a baloz in order to avoid family dishonor.9 No other man can rise to the challenge, because there is no son in the house and the agas of Jutbina decline to help. On the road to the battlefield, defying her father’s orders, the woman stops at the house of her betrothed Ali, whom she is supposed to marry in two weeks. She introduces herself as the young Omer, but Ali doubts his guest is a man and under his mother’s instructions challenges her to perform activities strictly reserved for men, such as singing with the accompaniment of the lahuta, and playing a game of hats. After she passes all the tests, Omer spends the night in the same room as Ali without being discovered, and finally manages to politely decline Ali’s request to become blood brothers, but gives him her besa that she will attend his upcoming wedding. She then wins the duel with the baloz and returns home. At the wedding shortly thereafter, Ali does not see his friend. Grieving his suspected death, which would be the only reason for him to break his besa, Ali stops all the celebrations. Only when the young woman reveals herself as Omer can the wedding proceed. Ernest Koliqi provides a close reading of this song because he considers it a “loyal mirror of the customs of all Albanians living in the mountains” (1937, 96). These customs include arranged marriage and related prohibitions against the bride being seen by the groom and his family before the wedding; against anyone changing the agreed-upon date of the escort’s delivery of the bride, even in the case of death in the family; and against the couple ever becoming blood brothers. In short, this song is paradigmatic of the “Albanianness” of the epic. We add to this interpretation by looking more closely at the gender dynamics in the song’s plot. The girl, whose birth name is unknown, takes the male name of Omer, changes her sartorial and bodily appearance, and when tested, performs Albanian hegemonic masculinity with seeming perfection. Omer also passes a test meant to expose stereotypical feminine sensitivity when she shows indifference to flowers put under her pillow. In the last test she undergoes, Omer shows a preference for a brass flute and a total disinterest in a gilded distaff, the ultimate symbol of the domestic sphere, and in this way rejects normative Albanian femininity. Yet, despite her efforts to be readable as a man, her physical appearance still betrays her assigned gender, raising suspicions. The songs consistently identify Omer as çika (girl) and use the masculine pronoun only when the other characters refer to her, suggesting that despite their doubts, they understand her to be a girl. When she is alone fighting the baloz, Omer struggles until the end when she manifests a physical weakness uncommon in male fighters. After decapitating her enemy, she needs the help of her horse to lift the decapitated head and place it on her saddle. The narrative of the songs maintains a biological essentialism regarding Omer’s gender and generally conflates sex and gender, implying that her “true” gender could be revealed to the others if, for instance, she were asked by Ali to compete in a test of physical strength. But he never does that. In the variant 376

— ​ G e n d e r P e r f o r m a n c e a n d G e n d e r e d W a r r i o r s —​ Vajza e plakut i del ne mejdan Harapit (The old man’s daughter goes to fight the Harap), some guards try to uncover the protagonist’s sex by looking at her through the keyhole as she bathes, but she uses foam to hide her body and cover the keyhole (Çetta 1974, 351–52, lines 164–74). Throughout all of the variants, despite finally succeeding in “passing” as male, Omer continually faces others who suspect she is a girl. For example, the King of Seja at first refuses to go out to the square to fight Omer because she looks like a young boy in the song Çika e Herrni Mustafë Agës i del në mejdan Krajlit të Sejës (The daughter of the Aga Herrni Mustafa goes to fight the King of Seja) (Çetta 1974, pp. 331–32, lines 170–72). Throughout the song, we are told of an interior feminine essence that remains in Omer, which as Judith Butler would have it, is “discursively maintained for the purpose of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (Butler 2006, 186). A discursive gender realignment only happens at the end, however, when Omer is revealed to be a girl and her marriage with Ali is celebrated. The theme of a girl who transgresses the patriarchal order by assuming a male role because the patriarch is missing, impeded, or otherwise unable to procreate is common in medieval epics from western Europe (Hess 2004; Layher 2007). In that context, what appears as a violation of the rules of the patriarchal community is normalized by the crucial need for the family to have a male heir, that is, a man who can perform the specific and authoritative role assigned exclusively to men. In the Albanian epic, however, Omer is not forced to transform herself at birth nor does she rebel against her father. This leads us to the question: How can she suddenly perform Albanian masculinity so well? We can only imagine some scenarios. Perhaps she learned, in Butler’s words, “the stylized repetition of acts” (2006, 191) of her father and other men in her community by watching and internalizing their behavior. Perhaps her father taught her how to perform tasks reserved for men by custom. However, she continues to live as a girl until circumstances require and allow her to “become” a boy in the eyes of the community. Presenting as masculine in the epic ultimately becomes a strategy for Omer to prove herself worthy of respect. We notice that in the Albanian epic world, like in early modern European literature, it is usually assumed that when women dress as a man, it is often a means for them to achieve a higher status, but when men dress as women, it often serves their purpose of getting closer to the women they desire (Perret 1985, 329). In the Albanian epic, on some occasions the male heroes wear women’s clothes in order to approach and seduce prohibited women. For instance, in Halili e merr Begzadën e bardhë (Halili kidnaps the fair Begzada), Halili is able to join Tanusha’s cortege by dressing as a maiden until he is discovered by the queen; in order to enter the palace of Begzada, Halili covers his typical Albanian men’s dress—an embroidered vest, white pants (tirqi), and conic felt hat (plis)—with women’s clothes (Çetta 1974, 28, lines 580–85). As Marina Warner writes of Joan d’Arc, when a woman “passes” as a man, she can “lay claim to greatness beyond the expected potential of her sex” ([1981] 1999, 149). Not surprisingly, this motif is a popular and provocative one in many genres including mythology, romance, folklore, and hagiography. Just in pre-modern Europe, we can find many examples—in literature, theatre, and visual art—of women “ruling the lower in themselves and thus deserving to be like men,” as they 377

— ​ A n n a D i L e l l i o a n d A r b n o r a D u s h i —​ earn sainthood and save the honor of their families by rescuing husbands from capture or fighting in the place of their less able brothers (Zemon Davis 1975, 132–33). In this sense, the girl named Omer in the Albanian epic is certainly not unique. Her ability to “pass” as male may be read as a transgression, but she faces no criticism or sanction, because she fights for her father’s honor, and her behavior is thus justified as part of the normative order of valor and honor. Yet, she seeks not only honor, but also the freedom to travel alone and meet her betrothed before their wedding, which is against customary rules and the explicit orders of her father. Her character thus opens up a space not only for the possibility of women’s heroic achievements, but also for the subversion of a gendered hierarchy of power and related gender norms. In another song with the same motif, Fatimja e bardhë i del në mejdan Uroshit (The fair Fatima goes to fight Urosh), we don’t see a happy ending. Here Fatima, a fair and slender girl, is first underestimated by a rival who announces, “Unë nuk dal në mejdan me fëmi” (I don’t fight with kids, Çetta 1974, 345, line 501). Before the duel, she asks two knights for help, but they harass her in response, so after emerging victorious in the duel, she kills them. Later, when her wedding day approaches, the would-be groom leaves and Fatima goes back home as a çika (virgin). We can speculate that the reason for this different ending is that Fatima has outperformed her betrothed in such a fashion that she is no longer acceptable to him as a bride (Mehmeti 1980, 165). Or it may be that she refuses to marry the man, thinking him cowardly because, although he knew that she was going into a dangerous duel alone, he did not accompany her (Çetta 1974, 347, line 610).

CONCLUSION The Kângë kreshnikësh epic of northern Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro is full of stories about frontier warriors—legendary heroes from the mountains engaged in battles with neighboring Slavic Kings from the North, and Arabs or Moors, from the South. This epic has strong affinities with other epics in the region, particularly the Bosnian Muslim epic, but the Albanian epic has distinctive linguistic and cultural features, steeped in the social norms of the kanun, Albanian customary law. As such, it illustrates the importance of exogamic marital relations, male valor, honoring one’s community and family, and keeping one’s word, besa, to Albanian society. Albanian society, as represented in the epic, shows both a gender hierarchy (with men on top) and a gender binary. However, we outlined episodes in the epic that seem to undercut the former, in particular. The heroic highlanders who are front and center in the epic require help from various female figures, both human and nonhuman, including fairies, monsters, and deities. Without the magic gifted by these characters, the epic protagonists would be outmatched by their much more powerful enemies. Heroes such as Mujo and Halili are most in focus, and Mujo is the leader, but all the other warriors are their peers. Fatherless, they are a band of “brothers,” who rely on the advice of strong mothers when faced with difficulties. Their wives may deceive them, but not their sisters, whose love is true and enduring. Perhaps the most intriguing characters in the epic are the young women— daughters and sisters—who take on the guise of a man to play the part of a hero, when a male character is too old or incapacitated to defend his honor in a duel. Typically, the girl must first persuade others that she is in fact a man, a precondition 378

— ​ G e n d e r P e r f o r m a n c e a n d G e n d e r e d W a r r i o r s —​ for her participation in the duel, and then defeat her rival, upholding the honor of her community and family. In the process, the girl displays skills that are generally only afforded to men, who dominate in the epic, thereby acquiring respect and freedom. In the end, however, the young woman must return to her role as a subordinate daughter and wife, but not before having challenged, albeit temporarily, socially accepted gender norms. These women are not unlike the maiden warriors in the Norse epics, who serve a similar function (Lahyer 2007, 184). Taken together, the epic narratives related to gender performance and realignment discussed here suggest anxiety about female power, and yet question the prerogative of male dominance and authority in Albanian society.

NOTES 1 Citations from the Albanian epic are from Palaj and Kurti ([1937] 2007) (with English translations from Elsie 2004); and Çetta (1974) (with English translations by Arbnora Dushi). 2 Montenegro and Kosovo were part of Yugoslavia until its dissolution in 1992, after which Montenegro and Serbia proclaimed a federation, peacefully dissolved in 2006. Kosovo, a province of Serbia, fought a war against the federation before declaring independence in 2008. 3 In keeping with the English convention, we are using Robert Elsie’s spelling “Mujo,” for the Albanian “Muji.” 4 For a comprehensive, multi-lingual bibliography of scholarship on the Albanian epic since the turn of the nineteenth century, see Elsie (2014). 5 The same journal also published excerpts of Fishta’s Lahuta e Malcís (The Highland Lute), a 15,613-line literary epic, inspired by the oral tradition. 6 For a bibliography of Albanian scholars, see Scaldaferri et al. 2021). 7 The Sultan’s mother’s advice against the war in Kosovo is in the variant sung by Mehmet Haliti (Di Lellio, 2009, 79, lines 54–7). Her reaction to the news of his assassination is in the variant sung by Ut Bojko (Di Lellio, 2009, lines 477–87). 8 With the exception of Omeri i ri, all of these variants are in Çetta (1974). 9 We use the feminine pronoun to refer to Omer, following the convention in the epic.

WORKS CITED Berishaj, Anton Kolë. 2016. Virgjëreshat e përbetuara: Jeta ndërmjet detyrimit dhe vetëflijimit. Prishtinë: Akademia e Shkencave dhe e Arteve e Kosovës. Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Çabej, Eqrem, 1975. Gjuhe, folklor, letersi, diskutime. Vol. 5 of Studime gjuhësore. Prishtinë: Rilindja. Çetta, Anton, ed. 1974. Këngë kreshnike. Vol. 1. Prishtinë: Instituti Albanologjik. Cordignano, Fulvio. 1943. La poesia epica di confine nell’Albania del nord. Venezia: Tipografia Libreria Emiliana Editrice. Di Lellio, Anna. 2009. The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic. Translated by Robert Elsie. London: I. B. Tauris. ———, and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers. 2006. “The Legendary Commander: The Construction of an Albanian Master-Narrative in Post-War Kosovo.” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 3: 513–29 Doja, Albert. 2005. “Mythology and Destiny.” Anthropos 100: 449–62.

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— ​ A n n a D i L e l l i o a n d A r b n o r a D u s h i —​ Dushi, Arbnora. 2014. “On Collecting and Publishing the Albanian Oral Epic.” Approaching Religion 4, no. 1: 37–44. ———. 2017. “Kënga për Krushqit e ngrirë të Dardanisë: Konteksti i receptimit dhe jehona e kujtesës.” In Albanologji, 29–46. Aktet e konferencës, July 7, 2016. Prishtinë: Instituti Albanologjik. ———. 2018. “Bernardin Palaj dhe Elias Lönnrot: Hulumtime krahasimtare mbi metodën e regjistrimit dhe të botimit të epikës shqiptare dhe asaj finlandeze.” In Albanologji, 55–69. Aktet e konferencës, August 8, 2017. Prishtinë: Instituti Albanologjik. Elmer, David. 2013. “The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.” Oral Tradition 28, no. 2: 341–54. Elsie, Robert. 2012. “Northern Albanian Culture and the Kanun.” Paper presented at the conference “Albanese tradities en taal: 100 jaar onafhankelijk albanië [Albanian Language and Culture: 100 Years of Independence],” University of Leiden, Netherlands, November 10. ———. 2014. “Why Is Albanian Epic Verse so Neglected?” Paper presented at the conference, “The Albanian Epic of Legendary Songs in Five Balkan Countries: Albania, Kosova, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro,” The Institute of Albanian Studies, Prishtina, Albania, August 8. http://www.elsie.de/pdf/articles/A2014AlbanianEpicVerse.pdf. ———. 2015. The Tribes of Albania: History, Society and Culture. London: I. B. Tauris. ———. n.d. “Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature: Oral Verse.” Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.albanianliterature.net/oralverse/verse_09.html. ———, and Janice Mathie-Heck. 2004. Songs of the Frontier Warriors. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. Gjeçovi, Shtjefën. [1933] 1989. Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjini. New York: Gjonlekaj Publishing Company. Hasluck, Margaret. 1954. The Unwritten Law in Albania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hess, Erika. 2004. Literary Hybrids: Indeterminacy in Medieval and Modern French Narrative. New York: Routledge. Hunt, Lynn. 1992. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. New York: Routledge. Jeffreys, Elizabeth. 1980. “The Comnenian Background to the ‘Romans d’Antiquité.’” Byzantion 50: 455–86. Koliqi, Ernest. [1934] 1937. Epica popolare Albanese. PhD diss., University of Padova. Kolsti, John. 1990. The Bilingual Singer: A Study in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian Oral Epic Traditions. New York: Garland Publishing. Lahyer, William. 2007. “Caught Between Worlds: Gendering the Maiden Warrior in Old Norse.” In Women and the Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre and the Limits of Epic Masculinity, edited by Sara S. Poor and Jane K. Schulman, 183–208. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Mehmeti, Enver. 1980. “Figura e femrës në këngët kreshnike.” Gjurmime albanologjike: Folklori dhe etnologji 10: 159–67. Prishtinë: Instituti Albanologjik. ———. 2016. “Çështje të patrajtuara në studimet tona për këngët kreshnike.” In vol. 2 of Eposi i Kreshnikëve: Monument i trashëgimisë kulturore shqiptare, 83–88. Prishtinë: Instituti Albanologjik. Neziri, Zymer U. 2008. Studime për folklorin. Vol. 2. Prishtinë: Instituti Albanologjik. Palaj, Bernardin, and Donat Kurti, ed. [1937] 2007. Visaret e kombit. Vol. 2 of Këngë kreshnikësh dhe legjenda. Shkodër: Botime Françeskane. Perret, Michele. 1985. “Travesties et transsexuelles: Yde, Silence, Grisandole, Blanchandine.” Romance Notes 25, no. 3: 328–40. Scaldaferri, Nicola et al. 2021. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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— ​ G e n d e r P e r f o r m a n c e a n d G e n d e r e d W a r r i o r s —​ Sejko, Veis. 2002. Mbi elementet e përbashkëta në epikën shqiptaro-arbëreshe dhe serbokroate. Tiranë: Bargjini. Shala, Demush. 1981. “Trimëria e femrës në veshje burri në këngët tona kreshnike.” Gjurmime albanologjike: Folklor dhe etnologji 11: 157–70. Sinani, Shaban. 2011. Etnos në epos. Tiranë: Naimi. Skendi, Stavro. 2007. Poezia epike gojore. Tiranë: Instituti i Dialogut & Komunikimit. Warner, Marina. [1981] 1999. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, Antonia. 2000. Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins. New York: Berg Publishers. Zemon Davis, Natalie. 1975. “Women on Top.” In Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 124–51. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

S L AV I C O R A L - T R A D I T I O N A L E P I C I N T H E OT TO M A N E C U M E N E

rsr

Robert Romanchuk

The Ottoman Empire, where the modern Slavic oral-traditional epic took shape— and in whose “lock and golden keys” of Bosnia the Classicists Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord tested their theory of oral composition—has been characterized by Donna A. Buchanan as an ecumene, “a space [of] intentional sharing, interchange, collaboration, or dialogue across boundaries…of nation as well as faith”; here Slavs, both Muslim and Christian, and many other peoples were “linked, for hundreds of years, by a sprawling, multicultural, cosmopolitan Ottoman theocracy” (2007, xx). Can epic be “ecumenical”? The violence of the heroes of Muslim song who helped maintain the Pax Ottomanica, like that of their Christian counterparts who fought it, represents real violence that cannot be concealed behind Ottoman “multiculturalism.” And as surely as fame “will neither die, nor perish” in oral epic, the traumas of conquest will flourish there too.1 Nevertheless, as a framework for exploring the Slavic epic tradition, Buchanan’s notion of an Ottoman ecumene is bracingly free of national and disciplinary parochialism. The Slavic tradition’s own “golden key”—its frequent model and ideal—is the junačka pjesma (“heroic song”) of the Muslim Bosniaks of the Western Balkans, which can achieve Homeric length and complexity of plot as it recalls the “men of the Border” and their battles against the Habsburgs. Without the scholarship devoted to the Bosniak epic by the oral-formulaic school of Parry and Lord, the other Slavic traditions would remain opaque. The Bosniak junačka pjesma moreover directly influenced its namesake among the Serbs, an Ottoman subject people living in the Western Balkans, characterized by their hybrid Orthodox Christian and Ottoman culture and their insurrectionary tradition. For its part, the Serbian junačka pjesma played a key role in the emergence of the duma—meaning “meditation,” but perhaps originally “word, epos” (Hrushevs′kyi 2012, 285)—set among Ukraine’s Zaporozhian Cossacks (from Turkic qаzаq, “vagabond,” “freebooter”), a likewise hybridized and insurrectionist Orthodox Christian force camped on the border with the Ottoman vassal Khanate of Crimea, “beyond the rapids” (za porohamy) of the Dnipro River. A few definitions are in order before I begin. I have adopted (and somewhat adapted) Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petković’s formal definition of epic as 382

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-31

— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ oral-traditional narrative song with little fixity of wording and stichic (line-by-line) organization, the latter features being corollaries of epic “composition in performance” (see below); and a polytropos (literally “much-turned” or “much-turning”) hero, with potential for attendant songs either of considerable length or collected in cycles. These features distinguish epic from ballad, which tells of a single, typically fatal, encounter of its protagonist in generally fixed wording and strophic (stanzaic) form (Bohlman and Petković 2012, 9–10). Such a definition is more inclusive than those based on qualities such as the length or “mythic depth” of a song (Lord 1981, 424), which denies the name epic to much of Slavic heroic narrative song and discourages comparative study. By heroic epic, I mean songs of the kind studied by Parry and Lord, which tell of returns and rescues, comings of age and weddings, and the sieges of cities, and were usually sung by men throughout the ecumene. These may be distinguished from non-heroic epic songs, whose plots might be “heroic” like those listed above, but are centered in the domestic realm and locate conflicts within the patriarchal family; these songs were frequently sung by women.2 Nonheroic epic was exchanged as well (at least, between Bosniaks and their Christian neighbors), but its paths are less conspicuous, as women had limited mobility in patriarchal societies. In these pages, I trace something resembling a unified Slavic oral-epic tradition in and around the Ottoman ecumene: unified, not primarily because it originated in Common Slavic (spoken from the fourth to eleventh centuries CE), but thanks to the shared Ottoman experience, lasting in some places up to the twentieth century. This shared experience offers insight into the content and form of this tradition, which I discuss in some detail, as well as its ritual utility, which I explore in the conclusion. To emphasize collaboration across the Slavic tradition over its division into national traditions does not mean to disregard difference. Simply put, only by acknowledging the Slavs’ experience of the Ottoman ecumene can a meaningful comparative perspective on their epic be achieved.

SINGERS, CONTEXTS, AND CONNECTIONS The work of Lord and his followers has demonstrated conclusively that the traditional, illiterate Slavic “singer of tales” in the Ottoman ecumene and beyond neither recited epic songs from memory nor improvised them on the spot. Rather, he composed them at the moment of performance, using the oral-traditional forms that made up his “arsenal”: formulas, themes, and story-patterns, the latter of which will be examined closely below.3 Bosniak and Serbian epic singers were called guslari, after the gusle, the single-stringed, bowed, droning instrument that they played to accompany their song, although some Bosniak singers made use of the two-stringed, plucked tambura. Guslari acquired their skill at singing epic in the same way that they acquired household and agricultural skills: through observation and imitation. They might sing semi-professionally, relying on other trades for their livelihood; or as professional beggars, who were frequently blind. Guslari performed in various contexts, both private (e.g., for guests and at celebrations) and public (e.g., at markets and church fairs), and until the twentieth century, Bosniak singers also sang at the courts of pashas (lords: beys and aghas). But at about this time, the Muslim kafana or coffeehouse—where men would gather to drink brandy or coffee, gossip, 383

— ​ R o b e r t R o m a n c h u k —​ and listen to heroic songs—became an important performance space for Bosniak guslari. They were hired to perform epic for the month-long Ramadan fast, singing one song at the kafana every night or even over several nights (Lord 1960, 13–29; Golenishchev-Kutuzov 1973, 269). This encouraged the development of long, complex, richly ornamented songs. Bosniak junačke pjesme are typically around a thousand verses long but frequently extend to several thousand lines; the famed singer Avdo Međedović’s songs of over 12,000 lines, like Homer’s, are exceptional (Lord 1972, 310; Elmer 2022). In the late Middle Ages, heroic ballads called bugarštice, based on Serbian oraltraditional epic, seem to have been sung at Serbian courts (Koljević 1980, 31–66). After the Ottoman conquest of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, there was no single important performance space or lengthy holiday to nurture songs by guslari among the Serbs—who, as a subject people, had less leisure time to hone and enjoy this craft in any case (Parry et al. 1953–1993, 1:16). Serbian songs are therefore less lavish than their Bosniak counterparts in plot and ornamentation alike: the longest recorded Serbian oral-traditional epic is of around 1,200 lines, and most are five or six hundred lines long (Lord 1972, 310; Elmer 2022). Turning to the Ukrainian epic, it is often supposed that the first performers of the “Turkish-Tatar” dumy were Zaporozhian Cossacks, semi-professional singers not unlike those of Bosnia and Serbia, some of whom were warriors themselves. But by the nineteenth century, all Ukrainian “singers of tales”—called kobzari or lirnyky after their instruments, the many-stringed, plucked kobza (and later, the lush-sounding bandura) or the hand-cranked lira (hurdy-gurdy)—were blind professionals who had apprenticed with a master and were organized in guilds. They wandered from village to village, performing and begging in public spaces (Noll 1993; Kononenko 2019, 44–92). The dumy were always a marginalized epic: it is believed that earlier Ukrainian singers appended them to a far older epic repertory set in medieval Kyivan Rus, the byliny (Rosovets′kyi 2018, 293),4 while later kobzari and lirnyky privileged Christian religious narrative songs (psal′my) over dumy in their repertories by a ratio of about ten to one (Noll 1993, 50–52). For this reason or another, dumy are shorter even than Serbian junačke pjesme: the longest are several hundred lines long, the shortest a few dozen. Over time, the epic tradition of the Muslim Bosniaks exerted a considerable influence on their Christian Slav neighbors, especially the Serbs of central Bosnia. Alois Schmaus notes that while scholars have often taken borrowings from the Christian tradition into the Muslim one for granted (and it is true that Bosniak guslari not infrequently included Serbian songs in their repertory), the reverse is also true: in particular, Serbian guslari would repurpose Muslim epic, “invert[ing] and turn[ing] it to their side” (1953, 105–6). It has furthermore been argued that the modern, “vital” oral epic of the Serbs was formed anew in the eighteenth century out of the “flaccid,” feudal bugarštice (Coote 1978, 272–73; Koljević 1980, 66); this “new voice,” first attested at the edges of the ecumene in Dalmatia and Slavonia (western and northern Croatia), may well derive much of its élan—more concretely, its oraltraditional forms—from the Bosniak tradition. If more comparative studies are needed to establish the precise relationship of the Serbian junačke pjesme to the Bosniak, neither has ever been systematically compared with the Ukrainian dumy. This omission is regrettable, for already in 1907 Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi compiled 384

— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ evidence that Serbian guslari performed heroic songs in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine over the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries (2012, 284–86, 485–87). He proposed that they could have influenced the Ukrainian heroic song tradition by the first half of the sixteenth century. Serbian and Ukrainian epic songs were first published by collectors in the 1810s, early in the era of Romanticism among the Slavs; their scholarly study and editing began a few decades later. Bosniak songs were first collected in the 1840s but not published in scholarly editions until the 1880s, following the Habsburg occupation. The largest corpus of Bosniak epic song is Harvard’s Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature (partly digitized at Harvard University Libraries), selections from which have been published with English translations in the series SerboCroatian Heroic Songs (Parry et al. 1953–1993). Vuk Karadžić’s Serbian Folk Songs (Karadžić 1841–1865, digitized at Monumenta Serbica), from which many English translations have been made, remains the most influential collection of Serbian epic song. Kateryna Hrushevs′ka’s edition of Ukrainian Dumy (1927–1931), from which English translations have been made more than once, most fully represents that tradition.5

HEROES, CYCLES, AND VERSE FORMS Much of the Slavic epic of the Ottoman ecumene is set, more or less vaguely, in the time of Suleiman I, “the Magnificent” (ruled 1520–1566), when, in Avdo Međedović’s words, “the empire of the Turks [was] at its highest. Three hundred and sixty provinces it had, and Bosnia was its lock, its lock it was and its golden keys, and a place of all good trust against the foe” (Parry et al. 1953–1993, 3:79). Bosniak singers especially loved Đerđelez Alija, “the Sultan’s champion” on his magic battlesteed, a prodigious drinker of coffee and wine and brother-in-God to a powerful vila (nymph). Legends about Alija’s mace and the marks of its impact, as well as about his resting place, were long preserved in Bosnia. Like other such heroes, he is said to have gone into hiding at the end of his life, to return when his people most need him. His image fuses two historical figures of the fifteenth century: Ali Bey Mihaloglu, first Ottoman commander of Belgrade, and Gerz-Iljas, a Bosnian feudal lord and warlord (Popović 1988, 163–68). The Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus of the Bosniak tradition are, respectively, the supreme commander Mustaj Bey of the Lika (a military borderland in northwestern Bosnia), the hotheaded Sirdar (Chief) Mujo Hrnjičić, and Mujo’s rakish and resourceful younger brother Halil. Like many other Bosniak songs, those about the Hrnjičić brothers often tell of their chivalrous rescues or abductions of Christian maidens depicted as eager for their protection (Golenishchev-Kutuzov 1973, 269). And few battles are fought without the uncannily clownish and miserly Tale Budalina (the Fool), strategist and judge of the battlefield, a figure connected to the world of the dead. Međedović’s monumental “Wedding of Smailagić Meho” paints a vivid portrait of Tale, who rides to war with a standard-bearer seated backward, holding an upside-down flag, and a hodja (scholar) bearing a Qur’an in one hand and a flask of wine in the other. Gjergj Elez (Đerđelez) Alia, the brothers Muji and Halili, and Bud Aline Tali are also heroes of the Muslim Albanian këngë (also spelled “kângë”) kreshnikësh, the last surviving oral-traditional epic of the ecumene.6 385

— ​ R o b e r t R o m a n c h u k —​ Formerly, many of its practitioners sang in both Albanian and Bosnian—as did one of Parry and Lord’s finest singers, Salih Ugljanin (Kolsti 1990). In Ugljanin’s Bosnian-language “Song of Baghdad,” Alija’s betrothed Fatima, having donned a warrior’s garb, presents herself as a hero to the Sultan in Istanbul and sets off to capture Baghdad’s Queen. Cycles of epic songs form around a famous hero, event, or place. While some Bosniak epic singers recognize two cycles—the “Lika songs” set in that borderland and the “Hungarian songs” set in its Slavonian counterpart (Parry et al. 1953–1993, 14:5)—it is the Christian epic traditions that are most subject to cyclization. Shorter songs on their own do not provide a broad biographical canvas for the “muchturned” or “much-turning” hero, and offer fewer of the metonymic cues that support what John Miles Foley calls traditional referentiality (1991, 97–106). Serbian epic cycles (Coote 1978, 260–69) include the Nemanjić cycle about heroes from the medieval, pre-Ottoman ruling dynasty; the Kosovo cycle recounting the eponymous 1389 battle with the Turks, with outsized contemporary nationalist resonance and, in its modern form as collected by Vuk, perhaps originating in an eighteenthcentury Habsburg Serbian ecclesiastical milieu (Coote 1978, 279n.19; Pavlović and Atanasovski 2016); the Kraljević (Prince) Marko cycle, the most “Ottomanized” and expansive of all Balkan epic cycles; and cycles about outlaws and the First Serbian Uprising against the Turks (1804–1813).7 Among the Ukrainian dumy, there is only one well-formed cycle, recounting Bohdan Khmel′nyts′kyi’s 1648–1657 uprising against the Poles, which is as controversial as the Serbian Kosovo cycle and for analogous reasons, there being evidence of its origin in a seminary milieu and later literary reworking (Kononenko 2019, 52–55, 207–8). The older and more influential corpus of “Turkish-Tatar” dumy is a true “epic in the making,” to recall the title of Svetozar Koljević’s 1980 study: in the shadow first of the byliny and then of the psal′my, it had little opportunity to crystallize around a few famous names (Rosovets′kyi 2018, 292). Hrushevs′ka (1927– 1931) and Lord (1979–1980) have nonetheless organized it into groups, some of which show the beginnings of cyclization. It must be underscored that cycles (and their precursors) are not mere scholarly constructs, but are real for a singer and his listeners: the former may know multiple songs “about Oleksii” (Noll 1993, 52), for instance, while the latter may request songs “about Kraljević Marko” (GolenishchevKutuzov 1973, 248–49). Marko Kraljević—modeled loosely on the Serbian Marko Mrnjavčević (ruled 1371–94), an Ottoman vassal king in Prilep, Macedonia, and on Marko Viteazul, a.k.a. Deli (Brave) Marko, a Serbian mercenary leader in the service of the Wallachian Prince Michael the Brave (ruled 1593–1601)—is the “most-turned” and “-turning” hero in the Slavic tradition. The epic Marko, a great wine-bibber and mace-fighter, with a demonic steed named Šarac (Piebald) and a vila sister-in-God, resembles a Christian Đerđelez Alija (eschewing Muslim coffee). Marko too serves the Sultan, and their relations are warm; he destroys his master’s monstrous enemies, the Black Arab and Musa Kesedžija (the Highwayman), in the archaic, pre-Ottoman role of the dragon-slayer. But he is an irksome vassal whose frequent defiance ranges from gestures (wearing weapons and rich clothing and drinking wine during Ramadan) to sabotage (plowing the Sultan’s highway) and lèse-majesté. The Serbian Marko assumes the features of further Bosniak heroes, such as Halil’s tenacity or Mujo’s 386

— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ volatility—he may be the butt of an enemy’s cruel joke, where heroism consists in perseverance, or fly into a violent rage; on the battlefield, he takes on Tale’s formulaic task of “making two heroes of one” by splitting him with a saber. To his compatriots, he can be brutal, mutilating Novak the smith and the beautiful, strong-willed Rosanda, sister of Leka Kapetan; or courtly, protecting maidens and abolishing the marriage tax. He may be accompanied by other heroes, in particular his brother-in-God Miloš Obilić, who plays an important but very different role in the Kosovo cycle, and the winged Relja of Pazar: all are said to bear the marks of a “dragon,” i.e., a werewolf (Parry et al. 1953–1993, 1:373n.21). If in songs Marko washes up in every corner of Ottoman Europe, from Macedonia to Transylvania, from Croatia to Crimea, and, inevitably, in a dungeon in Istanbul, in fact he really was known to all the Slavs of the ecumene and to many of their neighbors. He was the leading hero of the Macedonian and Bulgarian guslari. In the Bosniak and Albanian traditions, he becomes Alija’s brother-in-God, yet cheats in a mace-throw, prevailing on his sister Efimija to play footsies with the Muslim hero so that he falters in competition after a sleepless night (Parry et al. 1953–1993, 1:198–201; Kolsti 1990, 266–68). Songs about this complicated man were sung as far away as Romania and Slovenia, while sayings and legends about him—of his footprints and Šarac’s hoofprints, the marks of his sword and teeth, the hills of mud he cleaned from his shoes and hill-covers of wine he spilled, the boulders he threw, his resting places—circulated throughout the Balkans and even reached the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who knew him as Marko Prokliatyi (the Damned) or Pekel′nyi (of Hell), recalling the occasion when he romped through Hell and freed its sinners (Popović 1988, 23–24, 40–43). The Ukrainian dumy of the “Captives” group are set in the Crimean town of Eupatoria and in Istanbul. They feature a possible brother and sister: the Zaporozhian Hetman or warlord Ivan Bohuslavets′, and the priest’s daughter Marusia Bohuslavka, enslaved concubine of a Turkish pasha. Both are converts to Islam or affect conversion for the sake of “Turkish luxury,” and both redeem themselves through the release of Christian captives while remaining “captive” to their assumed religion and culture. Marusia is sometimes thought to be modeled on the historical Roxolana (Hurrem Sultan, née Oleksandra or Anastasia Lisowska, circa 1502–1558). A priest’s daughter from Rohatyn in western Ukraine, Roxolana was kidnapped at age twelve in a Tatar raid and turned over to the women (harem) of Suleiman’s household; she became his favorite wife and adviser and wielded great power to the end of her life (Kononenko 2019, 129–30). In contrast to these wealthy “apostate” figures is the “Vagabond Cossack,” whose dumy are set in and around Kiliia in the Crimean Khanate, south of Odesa. He is called Netiaha (Homeless), Holota (Bare-Assed), or, in his role as Hetman, Khves′ko Gandzha (Horse’s Limp) Andyber, the tradition never having settled on a single name (Lord 1979–1980, 578–79). He resembles Tale Budalina in his ragged dress and ironic speech, as well as his deadly efficiency in the field, and represents the ideal self-image of the Zaporozhians, “a celibate knighthood…[of] half-monks who, as if following Christ’s call in the Gospel (Mt 10.10), didn’t even own a change of clothes”; he represents their ideal leader as well (Rosovets′kyi 2018, 295–96). The named hero of the “Black Sea” dumy, set on a fleet of Zaporozhian raiding ships, is the Cossack secretary Oleksii Popovych (the Priest’s Son), an arrogant rake with enough sins on his 387

— ​ R o b e r t R o m a n c h u k —​ soul to sink the fleet. Oleksii is a survivor from the bylina epic of Kyivan Rus, which knows him as Aliosha Popovich, an only slightly more reputable figure (Oinas 1978, 243–44). The “Duma about Samiilo Kishka [the Kitty]”—although linked to the “Black Sea” group by its setting and to the “Captives” by its cast of galley slaves and supporting hero, a convert to Islam—features a real-life Zaporozhian hetman hero, Samiilo Kishka (ruled 1599–1602), and just possibly a historical plot (Rosovets′kyi 2018, 290): a slave mutiny on a Turkish galley sailing from Trebizond in northeastern Anatolia to the Crimean slave port of Kaffa (Theodosia). The meters of Slavic epic sung in the Ottoman ecumene largely originate in the archaic Common Slavic long epic line, made up of ten syllables with an obligatory pause after the fourth, essentially preserved in the Serbian and Bosniak junačka pjesma line (Coote 1978, 272). Below is the opening of Vuk’s “Marko and the Falcon (variant),” in a metrical translation: Marko lay sick wrapping himself cov’ring his face Next to his head his horse Šarac— On the spear sat spreading its wings, And in its beak giving a drink

next the Sultan’s highway, in a fine green dolman, with a shawl stitched silver. was his spear struck upright; tethered to the spear-shaft. a grey bird, an eagle; it made shade for Marko. it carried cold water, to the wounded hero.

In Ukraine, epic verse lost its metrical regulation entirely: the duma line, although usually comprised of seven to eleven syllables, could have as few as four and as many as thirty, with variable stress counts. Grammatical rhyme arose to mark the end of a line (Rosovets′kyi 2018, 284), as in the rhymed translation of a few verses of the kobzar Ivan Kravchenko-Kriukovs′kyi’s “Duma about the Falcon and the FalconChild” given below. Ivan Bohuslavets′, having “turned Turk,” is training a young falcon on Constantinople’s (Istanbul’s) city walls when the bird hears its father’s cry: This the young falcon perceived; it was sore grieved, its head it stooped, and its wings it drooped. Hey, then that Ivan Bohuslavets′ great pity took, the silver chains from its legs he struck, and the pearls away from its eyes he took; ordering it set on the ramparts, said he: “Now, if it tries to flee, then take it back, I decree and bring it here to me!” These passages, chosen at random, are rich in oral-traditional formulas, which range from fixed epithets (“grey bird,” “young falcon”) to common actions (“Marko lay,” 388

— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ “took great pity”) and their time or place (“next the Sultan’s highway,” “on the ramparts”).

STORY-PATTERNS, SONGS, AND SHARED MOTIFS Another of the forms making up the traditional singer’s “arsenal” is the storypattern, “a recognizable sequence of events [major themes] that allows for variation by character, incident, and geography as well as overall flexibility in detail,” in Foley’s words. The Return Song, he writes, “involves a hero in captivity who escapes and, in…disguise, tests the loyalty of his mate and other members of his family before revealing his true identity” (2010, 352). This most important story-pattern is as old as heroic epic, informing the Homeric Odyssey and the Slavic songs of captivity and return. The Slavic Return pattern, in the formal analysis of Lord (1969) and Foley (1990), consists of five basic narrative elements or major themes, in the following order: the hero’s Absence (A) from home, the result of his capture and imprisonment; some Devastation (D) experienced by his household, compounded for him by his learning of it after long sufferings in prison; his Return (R) home in disguise and testing of kith and kin; his Retribution (Rt) against his former captors, often under the pretense of fulfilling the conditions of his release; and his Wedding (W) or renewal of his wedding vows, although this element may appear earlier or be absent altogether. Story-patterns too are real for the singer, as Foley has shown: should he need to pause, upon resuming his song he “backtracks” to the last “boundary line” between two themes (1990, 284–88). In the Ottoman ecumene, the Return pattern A, D, R, Rt, W is most fully realized in the Bosniak tradition. A fine example is Salih Ugljanin’s performance of “The Captivity of Đulić Ibrahim.” Lord has analyzed this song against its Serbian counterpart, “The Captivity of Stojan Janković,” whose hero is modeled on a historical seventeenth-century Dalmatian outlaw chief (Lord 1972, 312–14). Characteristically, Ugljanin’s “Đulić Ibrahim” is 1,811 lines long, while “Stojan Janković” in Vuk’s collection is a brisk 151. Ugljanin lengthens his song by adding ornament and developing (and adding) scenes, so that Ibrahim takes a full 512 verses to reach the gate of his house, a task that Stojan completes in a mere 45. The Return pattern’s major themes are worked out differently in the two songs as well. Both heroes have long been Absent (A) from home: Ibrahim has languished in the dungeon of the Ban or governor of Zadar, a Venetian city on the Dalmatian coast, for twelve years when he learns of Devastation (D) to his household, his wife’s betrothal to none other than Halil Hrnjičić; Stojan, nine years a captive in Istanbul, has, like his Ukrainian counterparts in the “Captives” dumy, become a wealthy Muslim with no motivation to return except to see his “lovely, faithful wife.” The Devastation recounted in the Bosniak song thus has no counterpart in the Serbian—only later do we learn that Stojan’s wife too has been betrothed to another. While Ibrahim shouts in prison until the Ban’s wife compels her husband to release him (on condition that he return with Halil, dead or alive), Stojan and his nephew merely flee with the Sultan’s gold and horses. On the heroes’ Return (R), Ibrahim’s wife, with whom he will renew his vows, does not recognize him, but his mother, sister, and servant do so from the song he performs; Stojan’s wife knows her husband from his song and informs his mother of his Return. In both songs, the hero’s mother gives up the ghost upon 389

— ​ R o b e r t R o m a n c h u k —​ recognizing her son, but “Đulić Ibrahim” continues for another 818 verses, through the rest of the Return element and an elaborate Retribution (Rt) in which Ibrahim and Halil ride out to Zadar, slaughter the Ban and his officers, take his gold, release their comrades from prison, and alongside the other heroes of the Border fight a pitched battle against the men of Zadar. “Stojan Janković,” for its part, ends with the funeral of the hero’s mother: there is neither Retribution (Rt) nor Wedding (W) for the Serbian hero, although, as in “Đulić Ibrahim,” the new bridegroom is appeased with the hand of the hero’s sister. Indeed, a Return pattern lacking several major themes characterizes various Serbian songs and their Ukrainian near-counterparts. The great Serbian guslar and guerrilla Tešan Podrugović’s “Marko Kraljević and the Daughter of the Moorish King” and the kobzar Blind Ivan’s “Duma about Ivan Bohuslavets′,” for example, are based on a Mediterranean migratory plot (Popović 1988, 150): a hero is captured and imprisoned by an “infidel” warlord whose daughter nurses the hero back to health, falls in love, and runs away with him, but is later abandoned. Marko has been imprisoned by the Moorish King for seven years; Ivan, by Alkan Pasha of Kezlev (Eupatoria) for ten. Marko falsely promises to wed the King’s daughter, who frees him; Ivan demonstratively keeps his faith while marrying the pasha’s young widow (here, rather than a daughter), who frees him and his men. Marko beheads the Moorish girl in a moment of bigoted loathing; Ivan, mocked by his wife and abandoning her to join his comrades, slashes her in a mad rage as his Cossacks sack the town. Both songs develop only the hero’s Absence (A), Devastation (D), and Retribution (Rt), although his Return (absent any motifs of disguise or testing) is assumed in the frame of the Serbian song and briefly narrated in the Ukrainian. The “Duma about Khves′ko Gandzha Andyber,” by contrast, consists of Return (R) and Retribution (Rt) elements alone. In the song as performed by the kobzar Andrii Shut, Khves′ko Gandzha is returning to the Sich or camp along the “Horde road” in vagabond dress; he has fought the Tatars and been imprisoned by them—with typical Zaporozhian irony, the song merely states that he “made merry”—for “seven years and four.” He enters a tavern in Kiliia, where he is served by Nastia the innkeeper but is mocked and importuned by the gentry, who are punished by his Cossacks in retribution. The Rescue story-pattern (Lord 1960, 121–22) is closely related to the Return pattern and transforms it. Whereas in the Return Song, the hero is released at D (Devastation) and arrives home in disguise to test his wife at R (Return), in the Rescue Song at D, his release is refused, a messenger carries home his letter, and at R, his Rescue is undertaken by a second hero—who arrives in disguise at the town where the prisoner is incarcerated and is recognized and aided by a young Christian woman, usually an innkeeper, who is sworn to help him. At Rt, instead of a Retribution the rescuing hero may undergo a trial or enter a contest before releasing and fleeing with the captive. Again, the Rescue pattern is best realized in the Bosniak tradition. In Murat Žunić’s “Zaim Ali Bey of Glasinac in Gaol,” the titular hero’s rescuer is his wife Zlata, who dresses as a warrior and rides out to free her husband; she even carries off the Ban of Zadar’s daughter Ruža, whose glance is “like rippling lightning,” ostensibly as a second wife for Ali Bey (Parry et al. 1953–1993, [13]:276). Two Rescue Songs featuring Halil, performed by Alija Fjuljanin and departing from the

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— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ ideal, are “Halil Hrnjičić and Harambaša [Robber-Chief] Maleš” and “Halil Hrnjičić and Miloš Keserdžija [the Highwayman],” in which Halil rescues his brother Mujo’s horse and their sister, respectively. “Halil and Miloš” features a memorable villain somewhat resembling his more demonic counterpart Musa from the Christian tradition. There are also narrative flashbacks, a comic-erotic scene between Halil and the priest’s daughter Anđa, who “slides her bottom into his lap” as part of her offer of help—a temptation her brother-in-God must resist—and a “cross-dressing” subplot: the Ban of “Izvor,” who finds “young maidens pleasing,” finds Halil, disguised by the innkeeper Ruža as a country girl, especially so. The Serbian Podrugović sang for Vuk a well-formed Rescue Song, “Marko Kraljević and General Vuča,” in which Marko rescues three comrades imprisoned in Novi Sad’s Petrovaradin Fortress. Characteristically, at the major theme Rt (the hero’s Retribution and/or flight with the prisoner), Marko single-handedly annihilates an army and captures Vuča and his son to trade to the General’s wife for the captives. Rather more eccentric Rescue Songs are usual in the Serbian and Ukrainian traditions. Thus, in Podrugović’s “Marko Kraljević and Đemo Brđanin [the Mountaineer]” and the kobzar Strichka’s “Duma about Samiilo Kishka,” the hero acts as his own rescuer, through the subterfuge of plying his enemy with drink— and, in “Đemo,” the timely intervention of Marko’s sister-in-God, the quick-witted innkeeper Janja. Incomplete patterns are found as well. Both “Marko Kraljević in the Dungeon of Azak” (Azak being the old Turkic name of the slave port of Azov, at the end of the Azov Sea beyond the Strait of Kerch) and the “Duma about the Lament of a Captive” end before the prisoner’s liberation; in both songs, his message is carried home by a falcon or dove. However, if the “Dungeon of Azak” develops elements D (the prisoner learns of his Devastation) and R (the undertaking of his Rescue) in some detail before breaking off at the rescuing hero’s arrival in Azov, the “Lament of a Captive” treats some aspects of D—the prisoner’s lament and his conversation with a fellow captive or his sending a message home—and nothing more. The “Duma about the Falcon and the Falcon-Child,” which develops elements A (the hero’s Absence due to capture), D, and Rt (flight), is unique in that the imprisoned hero is Ivan Bohuslavets′’s young falcon and the rescuer its father. Kononenko proposes that the song is an allegory about a child kidnapped in a Tatar raid (2019, 120–23); it also appears to literalize the frequent epithet of the Slavic hero, “falcon.” The Slavic Return pattern is not limited to Ottoman space: the major themes A, D, R, Rt, W in that order are found in Return and Rescue Songs sung in northern Russia, for example, as well as those sung across the ecumene. A number of common “Ottoman” motifs, however, are apparently absent from the Russian byliny: the horrors of the hero’s prison, vividly described; the imprisoned hero learning of his Devastation from a comrade or the change of seasons from an “infidel” woman visitor; and the young female Christian innkeeper, sworn to help the hero who has just arrived in town. These motifs doubtless arise from the lived experiences of warriors in and alongside Ottoman space; that they recur in Return and Rescue Songs from Bosnia to Ukraine—moreover, at regular places in these patterns—points to the “sharing…across boundaries,” along the lines identified by Buchanan, of epic content and form.8

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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON RITUAL AND EPIC MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY Lord has traced the Return pattern to the myth of the dying god who returns: The god or hero disappears for a relatively long period of time and is seemingly dead, but eventually he returns, or is sought after and brought back. During his absence there has been devastation, but upon his re-establishment…order is restored, prosperity returns, and frequently he remarries. (1972, 311) While it may explain the origin of the pattern, this hypothesis does not account for its persistence among the Slavic “singers of tales,” for whom it was one of the most popular story-patterns. Foley’s concept of traditional referentiality, whereby “the generative congruence of individual song and general structural pattern” (1991, 105) supports a song’s aesthetic, ritual, and later, national(ist) functions, is more helpful here. If a song tradition—say, all the Return Songs known to a community—can “preserve and celebrate…group values” (1977, 148), traditional referentiality allows the performance of any individual song to “resonate…against the unspoken mythos instanced by any and all of them” (1991, 105). The fundamental “group value” is heroic masculinity, espoused by the Return Song’s male and female heroes alike: an idealized form of the shared experiences of “cross-border movement and depredation” and “captiv[ity] for many years on the other side of the frontier” (Elmer 2022). In just this way, a single Return Song performance, shared by singer and listeners—even if its pattern is incomplete, as often occurs in the Serbian and Ukrainian traditions—is a “masculine” ritual act that can itself “restore order” to the community by remodeling it in the heroic mode of the epic tradition. The efficacy of epic performance may be located elsewhere. Drawing from Freud (and implicitly, from scholarship that links epic and lament), Tomislav Longinović perceives beneath the singing of the Serbian guslar a “performance of epic [that] enables the audience to relive the trauma of conquest”: a “ritual of mourning for… injured masculinity” (2012, 227). This ritual, the repressed side of Foley’s ritual of celebration, “conveys imminent and bloody revenge for [the] humiliation…[of] centuries-old servitude to the Ottoman master” (2012, 243). Reproducing this master’s demand for submission, revenge may be directed inward: at weaker group members such as women, “seen as more likely to betray [Christian Serbdom] for the sake of wealth and social prestige” (2012, 247), and non-combatants or “local traitors of Serbdom,” who trade with the enemy (2012, 237); or even, masochistically, at one’s own injured masculinity. The Marko Kraljević cycle is for Longinović exemplary of this mourning. “Marko Kraljević Abolishes the Marriage Tax” (performed by a blind woman guslar), whose hero also abolishes the villain’s droit du seigneur and the villain (the Black Arab) himself, deplores Muslim masculinity and the Christian women who serve it (2012, 245–46). Podrugović’s Rescue Song “Marko Kraljević and Đemo Brđanin,” in which the Muslim Đemo binds and taunts the hero throughout his Devastation and, during his Retribution, is bound and taunted in turn, dramatizes the sadomasochistic compulsion to repeat masculine

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— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ trauma and vengeance (2012, 243–44). The doomed hero beheading his horse and breaking his saber and spear in the great blind guslar Filip Višnjić’s “Death of Marko Kraljević” figures a renunciation of enjoyment (i.e., castration) explicitly imagined as a denial of enjoyment (here, of heroic goods) to the Ottoman master—and thus, enjoyable all the same (Longinović 1986, 73). Studies of heroic masculinity in the Bosniak junačke pjesme and the Ukrainian dumy would be welcome complements to Longinović’s work. Finally, although women heroes are not absent in the Slavic heroic epic of the Ottoman ecumene, the study of Slavic epic femininity must turn to its non-heroic traditions: the Bosniak, Dalmatian, and Serbian so-called “women’s ballads” (including the remarkably obscene Serbian bezobrazne pjesme or “rude songs,” translated in Weissbort and Longinović 1992), as well as the Ukrainian “dumy about everyday life.” The women singers of the “ballads” use oral-traditional forms and epic meters to lead the heroes of epic, female and male, through the world of the idealized patriarchal family—and their audience in “feminine” rituals of celebration or mourning. Maidens escape arranged marriages to hated suitors and join their beloveds; young wives pray for miraculous pregnancies and give birth to dragons; older wives protect their husbands and children, murder them to their own advantage, or mourn their deaths; grannies wielding massive turds as clubs mock-heroically battle depraved shepherds. Among the “women’s ballads” are oral-traditional songs about the Bosniak Briseis and Penelope, “Hasan Čelebić was courting / Kumalić’s daughter, the maiden Hanka” by Đula Dizdarević and “The sun was warm, the rain was falling, / lady Emina was shedding tears” by Hasnija Hrustanović, told from their heroes’ points of view (Vidan 2003, 166–70, 222–24). They deserve a wide audience.9

NOTES 1 The doxologies (prayerful conclusions) to Ukrainian dumy preserve the Proto-IndoEuropean formula of “imperishable fame” in these words. 2 “Non-heroic epic” is Maximilian Braun’s term: see Vidan (2003, 14–15). 3 The formula is “a group of words…regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea”; the theme is a “group of ideas regularly used in telling a tale” (Lord 1960, 4, 68). 4 The Kyivan byliny were preserved in northern Russia to the twentieth century (Oinas 1978). 5 All of the heroic songs discussed here are available in English translation: Parry et al. (1953– 1993) (Bosniak); Low (1922), Pennington and Levi (1984), and Holton and Mihailovich (1997) (Serbian); and Tarnawsky and Kilina (1970) and Kononenko (2019) (Ukrainian). 6 On the Albanian tradition, see Anna Di Lellio and Arbnora Dushi’s chapter in this volume. 7 On Prince Marko in the Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Romanian traditions, see Margaret Beissinger’s chapter in this volume. 8 More precisely, the motifs in question are regular parts of recurring themes, which themselves “have a tendency to cling together…and to form recurrent patterns” (Lord 1960, 112). 9 Acknowledgments: My thanks to Margaret H. Beissinger, David F. Elmer, and Roman Koropeckyj for commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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WORKS CITED Bohlman, Philip V. and Nada Petković. 2012. Introduction to Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petković, 1–28. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Buchanan, Donna A. 2007. “Preface and Acknowledgments.” In Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, edited by Donna A. Buchanan, xvii–xxviii. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Coote, Mary P. 1978. “Serbocroatian Heroic Songs.” In Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, edited by Felix J. Oinas, 257–85. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Elmer, David F. 2022. “South Slavic Epic and the Philology of the Border.” In The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore, edited by Margaret H. Beissinger, unnumbered. Online ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Foley, John Miles. 1977. “The Traditional Oral Audience.” Balkan Studies 18: 145–54. ———. 1990. Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1991. Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2010. “Traditional History in South Slavic Oral Epic.” In Epic and History, edited by David Konstan and Kurt Raaflaub, 347–61. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Il′ia N. 1973. “Epos narodov Iugoslavii.” In Slavianskie literatury, edited by I. V. Golenishcheva-Kutuzova, 220–359. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Harvard University Libraries. “Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.” Edited by David Elmer, Stephen Mitchell, and Gregory Nagy. Accessed July 9, 2023. https://mpc.chs.harvard.edu/. Holton, Milne and Vasa D. Mihailovich. 1997. Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadžić. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hrushevs′ka, Kateryna. 1927–1931. Ukraïns′ki narodni dumy. 2 vols. Kyiv: Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukraïny/Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo “Proletar.” Hrushevs′kyi [Hrushevsky], Mykhailo. 2012. History of Ukraine-Rus′. Vol. 6: Economic, Cultural, and National Life in the 14th to 17th Centuries. Translated by Leonid Heretz. Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Karadžić, Vuk S. 1841–1865. Srpske narodne pjesme. 5 vols. Vienna: Štamparija Jermenskoga Manastira/Naklada Ane Udove V. S. Karadžića. Koljević, Svetozar. 1980. The Epic in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kolsti, John. 1990. The Bilingual Singer: A Study in Albanian and Serbo-Croatian Oral Epic Traditions. New York: Garland Publishing. Kononenko, Natalie. 2019. Ukrainian Epic and Historical Song: Folklore in Context. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Longinović, Tomislav. 1986. “Prince Marko’s Death.” Serbian Studies 3, no. 3-4: 65–76. ———. 2012. “Old Men Singing.” In Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petković, 225–61. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1969. “The Theme of the Withdrawn Hero in Serbo-Croatian Oral Epic.” Prilozi za književnost, jezik, istoriju i folklor 35: 18–30. ———. 1972. “The Effect of the Turkish Conquest on Balkan Epic Traditions.” In Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change, edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Speros Vryonis, Jr., 298–318. The Hague: Mouton. ———. 1979. “The Opening Scenes of the ‘Dumy’ on Holota and Andyber.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3-4, no. 1, part 2: 569–94.

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— ​ S l a v i c O r a l - T r a d i t i o n a l E p i c —​ ———. 1981. “Comparative Slavic Epic.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 4: 415–29. Low, D. H. 1922. The Ballads of Marko Kraljević. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monumenta Serbica. “Epska narodna poezija.” Edited by Mirjana Detelić and Branislav Tomić. Accessed July 9, 2023. http://www.monumentaserbica.branatomic.com/epp/. Noll, William. 1993. “The Social Role and Economic Status of Blind Peasant Minstrels in Ukraine.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17, no. 1-2: 45–71. Oinas, Felix J. 1978. “Russian Byliny.” In Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, edited by Felix J. Oinas, 236–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parry, Milman, Albert B. Lord, [and David E. Bynum]. 1953–1993. Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs [Poems]. Vols. 1–4, 6, [13], 14. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Belgrade: The Serbian Academy of Sciences; [New York: Garland Publishing]. Pavlović, Aleksandar and Srđan Atanasovski. 2016. “From Myth to Territory.” The Hungarian Historical Review 5, no. 2: 357–76. Pennington, Anne, and Peter Levi. 1984. Marko the Prince. London: Duckworth. Popović, Tatyana. 1988. Prince Marko: The Hero of South Slavic Epics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Rosovets′kyi [Rosovetskii], Stanislav. 2018. “Epicheskoe svoeobrazie ukrainskikh narodnykh dum.” Studia Litterarum 3, no. 1: 282–301. Schmaus, Alois. 1953. Studije o krajinskoj epici. Zagreb: Jugoslavenska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti. Tarnawsky, George and Patricia Kilina. 1970. Ukrainian Dumy: Original Texts. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Vidan, Aida. 2003. Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women. Cambridge, MA: Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Weissbort, Daniel, and Tomislav Longinović. 1992. Red Knight: Serbian Women’s Songs. London: Menard Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

E M P I R E A N D R E S I S TA N C E I N S O U T H S L AV I C A N D R O M A N I A N O R A L E P I C P O E T RY

rsr

Margaret Hiebert Beissinger

Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Romanian oral epics are all part of the Christian Balkan narrative song tradition.1 The genre is characterized by relatively short songs that are tales with heroic, mythic, and domestic content. They were sung primarily by men at a variety of social gatherings: weddings and other family celebrations. Oral epic flourished during the five hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Balkans (fourteenth to early twentieth century). Christian heroic epic centers on Cross versus Crescent: the defeat by Balkan Christians of Turkish Muslims. It contains tales about the powerful and powerless: the imposition of Ottoman hegemony on local populations. Dominated for hundreds of years, southeast European Christians exploited oral epic as a mechanism among the non-literate to express resistance to their subjugation. As James C. Scott notes, “Oral traditions, due simply to their means of transmission, offer a kind of seclusion, control, and even anonymity that make them ideal vehicles for cultural resistance” (1990, 160). Oral narrative song provided an effective outlet among the unlettered for communicating opposition to the Turkish presence. As a genre performed orally, it afforded opportunities for imperial subjects to challenge authority within a veil of relative safety. While the Balkans were all conquered by the Ottomans, the nature of Turkish governance differed in various regions (Vucinich 1962, 597). Michael Doyle points out that the “two major modes of imperial rule are formal and informal. Formal empire signifies rule by annexation and government by colonial governors” while “[i]nformal empire involves [a] pattern of control exercised indirectly” (1986, 135). Bulgaria, contiguous with the Sublime Porte, and Macedonia, to its west, were governed directly and formally. The Turkish presence was widespread and immediate. By contrast, Romania, the northernmost Balkan region of the Ottoman sphere, was a tributary state that experienced indirect rule. While submission and taxation were harsh realities, to be sure, the Porte was more remote. In this essay, I discuss how themes of power and dissent were voiced in heroic epic, the predominant form of South Slavic and Romanian oral narrative song. How did the discourse of resistance vary in epic performed in Bulgaria and Macedonia versus in Romania? What strategies of storytelling were employed to communicate subversive meanings? What were the messages and functions of heroic epic? For all 396

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-32

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ of the Balkan Christian subjects, the “spirit of resistance was best channeled through the oral tradition” and “was marked by struggle with the Turks and hatred of this enemy” (Popović 1988, 9). Yet, I suggest that where and how imperial control was imposed informed how this defiance was articulated. Moreover, the traditional, “historic,” ethnic, and religious identities of the heroes and their adversaries are telling in these epic genres. I argue that they provide a key to how dissent was conveyed, as well as how subjugated audiences were heartened, inspired, and entertained. In Bulgaria and Macedonia, where the Ottoman government was direct, resistance was expressed in the South Slavic “rebel” Prince Marko. Marko was a minor fourteenth-century ruler who opposed the Ottoman conquest while also pledging vassalage to the Sultan. Through the rich heroic epic tradition that developed at that time, Marko evolved into a special figure with connections to the Other World. He became, via oral tradition, a “larger-than-life symbol of…resistance against the Turkish overlords” (Foley 2010, 351). Marko’s opponents in the epic are portrayed as individuals who exemplify Ottoman power. Both Marko’s character and that of his enemies contributed to a genre that is complicated and at times ambiguous. Its depictions of right and wrong are often blurred, and its oral narratives mix historical fact with fiction. I suggest that this complex epic universe, with Marko as victor, was ideally suited to serve as a voice of opposition in a patently repressive empire and that Marko’s elevation to a semi-divine hero was what epitomized the spirit of anti-Ottoman defiance in South Slavic epic. In Romania, by contrast, where Ottoman rule was informal, resistance was conveyed through stereotypical, onedimensional depictions of heroes and Turkish foes. The champions of anti-Ottoman tales are ordinary men defending themselves and rescuing maidens as they defeat formulaic Turkish villains. Turkish antagonists are caricatured—racialized and Orientalized—as conspicuously Other: grotesque, “Black,” “heathen” outsiders intruding into Romanian village life. By rendering the Turks as “pagan” Others, Romanian heroic epic cultivated its own subversive voice. Christian and Muslim identities were essentialized as binary forces of good and evil. Through both South Slavic and Romanian epics, Balkan Christian champions overcoming Muslim Turkish adversaries represented the struggle that imperial subjects experienced. Oral epic songs were perpetuated generation after generation and served as effective channels through which communities within the Empire articulated their dissent while also providing much-loved entertainment and inspiring resilience and hope.

HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS The Ottoman Empire was the central hegemon in southeastern Europe for approximately five hundred years. It began its advance in the late 1300s and by the early sixteenth century had spread throughout the Balkans. Orthodox Christians inhabited the region as the Ottomans overran it. As such, a fundamental tension between Cross and Crescent was deeply embedded in the Turkish invasion. Until modern times, Balkan Christians identified above all in religious as opposed to ethnic or linguistic terms. It was only in the nineteenth century when national consciousness emerged that this shifted. Bulgarians and Macedonians are South Slavs who have been Christian since the ninth century. Linguistically, Bulgarian and Macedonian are closely related and both 397

— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​ are part of the eastern group of South Slavic languages. Macedonia was conquered by the Ottomans in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo. This battle is, to this day, a sacred landmark in South Slavic historical-cultural mythology since it inaugurated the halfmillennium of Turkish rule in the Balkans. By 1396, Bulgaria was also integrated into the Ottoman realm. Bulgaria and Macedonia both experienced formal governance by the Sultan and Turkish nobility, whose power was located in urban centers (Vucinich 1962, 603). In Bulgaria, the only Balkan state bordering Turkey, “Christian peasants (rayah), whom Muslims regarded virtually as cattle, were in a position of abject subjugation” (Chary 2000, 93–94). Conditions in these southernmost Slavic lands were extremely harsh, and “forced conversion to Islam” was “well-known” (Creed 2011, 18). As the nineteenth century progressed, anti-Turkish freedom fighters proliferated, and national independence crusades by intellectuals intensified. Moreover, Greek cultural and religious domination, sanctioned by the Porte, had become progressively intolerable. As a result of the Russo-Turkish War, Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman control in 1878. A growing national movement enabled Slavic (North) Macedonians to intensify their efforts to rid themselves of Ottoman and Greek hegemony after Bulgarian liberation (Panev 2000, 470). Macedonians celebrated their independence in 1912. Romanian is an eastern Romance language but part of the Balkan Sprachbund (languages related through geographical contiguity). Christianity was introduced as early as the third century in areas of what is now Romania, which Roman soldiers occupied in the second and third centuries CE. The Romanian Principalities, far from the Porte, experienced neither a critical moment that defined their medieval history (such as the Battle of Kosovo) nor formal Ottoman government.2 Nonetheless, Wallachia was forced to submit to Ottoman vassalage in 1417 and Moldavia in 1504; both became tributary states. As time went on, “further consolidation of Ottoman rule over the principalities” took place, yet “it was ­neither an annexation nor a conversion of the area into an Ottoman province, as had happened south of the Danube” (Michelson 669). Recognition of Romania’s ancient history spawned the “Latinist School” among late eighteenthcentury intellectuals who proclaimed the Latin—and thus “Western”—heritage of Romanians. Indeed, nationalism among Romanians was vigorously pursued as the nineteenth century unfolded. Demands of a local 1848 Revolution included unification of the Romanian Principalities, achieved in 1859, and independence from foreign control: Turkish suzerainty and the Russian protectorate. The RussoTurkish War brought about the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1878. It was during the nineteenth century—characterized by burgeoning national movements—that oral traditions in the Balkans began to be systematically collected. Inspired by west European romantic nationalism, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Macedonians began to publish oral epic texts in the mid-1800s. Not only was the “soul of the folk” recognized in these songs, but also epic that celebrated Christian victories over Turkish subjugation legitimized nation-building. The first collections of Romanian oral epic were made by Vasile Alecsandri (1821–1890), a nationalist active in the 1848 Revolution. Two volumes of Balade adunate şi îndreptate (Collected and Amended Ballads) were published in 1852–1853. Although the genre was traditionally called cântece bătrâneşti (ancient songs), Alecsandri dubbed the songs “ballads” (balade) to appeal to other European audiences. The eight-syllable 398

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ trochaic, stichic verse was sung by lăutari, a class of hereditary professional male Romani poet-musicians attested since the medieval period.3 Lăutari who played either the violin or cobză (a strummed lute-like instrument) would sing epic, accompanied by a small ensemble. Epic is now rarely performed although it was until the late twentieth century. The most distinguished early collectors of Macedo-Bulgarian epic were the Miladinov brothers: Dimitar (1810–1862) and Konstantin (1830–1862).4 As South Slavic nationalists, they “advocated a single Macedo-Bulgarian literary language” (Friedman 1986, 283). The Miladinovs issued a massive anthology of traditional songs in 1861, having collected the majority of them, including epic, in their native Macedonia (Friedman 2012, 295). Determined to mark the poetry as unambiguously Slavic and fearing that “Macedonian” in the title might be interpreted as justifying Greek claims to Macedonia, they titled the volume Bŭlgarski narodni pesni (Bulgarian Folk Songs).5 Like South Slavic epic throughout the Balkans, the MacedoBulgarian genre is stichic poetry and has a trochaic, decasyllabic line. While epic is no longer sung, in the past, primarily male ethnic South Slavs performed the genre. They typically accompanied themselves on the gŭdulka, a bowed instrument. Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Romanian Christians were largely non-literate peasants and employed folklore as their primary discursive form of dissent. Ottoman suppression unified them in their defiance of Islam, thereby fostering a rich oral traditional culture. The resistance portrayed in epic kindled courage and strength for generations as oppressed communities dreamed of liberation from Ottoman Muslim domination. Indeed, the narratives that historical conditions spawned among the Christian inhabitants in the Balkans formed the foundation of their epic traditions. As Albert Lord notes, the “whole genre” of Balkan epic “depends on the Turks” (1972, 299).

MACEDO-BULGARIAN EPIC Macedo-Bulgarian epic was sung for the public in languages that the Turkish overlords generally did not understand and in rural communities normally some distance from urban centers of power (Popović 1988, 10). It was not without risk, however, for epic singers to express subversive content; they were well aware of the dangers of conveying anti-Ottoman messages that were too explicit. A vast cycle of epic songs about Prince Marko, the central hero of the genre, comprises the “canon” of anti-Ottoman South Slavic epic. Known in Bulgarian as Krali Marko and Krale Marko in Macedonian,6 he was both a defender of Balkan Christendom and in servitude to the Sultan. Born around 1335, Marko was an unremarkable figure from central Macedonia. After the Battle of Marica (1371), which the Ottomans won and in which Marko’s father King Vukašin of Prilep (Macedonia) was killed, Marko succeeded Vukašin as prince of Prilep. Marko consented to vassalage under Murad I in order to maintain his privileges and position (Nicoloff 1983, 151). He did not fight in the Battle of Kosovo (1389) but did in the Battle of Rovine, in which he died in 1394, purportedly praying “to God to give the victory to the Christians even at the price of his own life” (Popović 1988, 21). The Marko of history and epic was a complex hero. As primarily a Christian champion yet in the service of the Sultan, Marko’s legendary persona was ambiguous, and while he was much admired, he was 399

— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​ also sometimes cruel and had many opponents (Nicoloff 1983, 153). As Svetozar Koljević points out, Marko was both “the most popular and…most controversial [South Slavic] epic hero” (1980, 177). Despite such contradictions, Marko is regarded as the most iconic anti-Ottoman champion in South Slavic epic: he “passionately hated his Turkish oppressors and loved his own people” (Popović 1988, xvi). While Marko was “historical,” he is portrayed in epic as a traditional hero, complete with connections to the Other World. He is known for his phenomenal strength and irrepressible behavior. Marko is magnificent, but he is also capricious, easily enraged, and inclined to drink. Formulaic epithets include not only “Prince Marko,” “Marko of Prilep,” “Marko the hero,” or “Marko the good hero” but also “wild Marko.”7 His accoutrements include weapons (mace and sword), a sable fur cap, and wolf-skin cloak, along with his horse Šarec, meaning piebald, who flies, talks, and is his alter-ego. A Macedonian singer offers a classic description of Marko, in “Prince Marko Loses his Strength”: He mounted his dappled horse: A dappled horse, a stout one, … He put on a sable-skin cap. On his cap were three mirrors, And above them peacock feathers. Marko twisted his moustache;… His falcon eyes scowled;… He buckled on a saber That had twelve buckles, … And on his saddle, by God, he tied, He tied a heavy fighting mace That weighed 600 okas. In his hand he held a war spear, Long and thin like an aspen. He was wrapped in a rough, heavy cloak.… Wherever his good horse Šarec stepped, Whether on cliffs or bedrock, The horse sank up to its knees. (Laktinski 1968, 67–68) Marko’s life-story (including childhood, marriage, and death) is embedded in his cycle of songs, an indication of his stature as an oral traditional hero. In the Bulgarian song “Krali Marko and the Three Soothsayers,” three fairies of destiny predict Marko’s extraordinary strength when he is an infant and declare that he will kill his father (Dinekov et al. 1981, 46–53). He is then placed in a basket and sent down the river, eventually found and raised by a shepherd. Later, young Marko takes the village calves to the pasture to graze. But after three days, he thrashes them to death and departs, whereupon his adoptive father banishes him. Marko is clearly an exceptional child. Lord interprets “the beating of the calves” as fitting “into [a] pattern of precocious and unusual childhood,” and argues that “Krali Marko took unto himself, or his name was attached to, stories of the lives of a special type of hero” (1991, 204, 205). In another Bulgarian song, “Vŭlkashin8 Removes Newborn 400

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ Marko from his Home,” while youthful Marko is wandering in the mountains, he comes upon two children in a cradle and shields them from the bright sun (Romanska 1971, 322–24). Their grateful mother is a samovila (a winged mountain fairy) who suckles Marko in appreciation, thus conferring to him Otherworldly strength. Later, Marko acquires his marvelous horse Sharets, likewise thanks to the samovila, who instructs him how to tame it.9 After Marko mounts Sharets, it races off at great speed, but Marko manages to cling to it, securing mastery over it—a sign of his own heroism. At the end of the song, Marko tells Sharets: ...I will be your master; You will be my faithful servant. Let’s go fight the Turks To guard the highways from evil! (Romanska 1971, 324) Marko’s opponents are virtually all “local military oppressors,” as Koljević points out (1980, 178), including Muslims and Christians—thus complicating his heroic epic identity. Moreover, some of them are quasi-historical. They figure, however, in narratives rooted in folklore. Marko’s defeat of them sometimes depends on divine intervention, reinforcing his own Otherworldly connections. In a Bulgarian variant of a well-known South Slavic epic, “Marko Kralevich and Musa Kesedzhiia,” Marko brings order, at the Sultan’s request, to a community that Musa, a road-blocker (such as Marko vows to fight in the excerpt above) has thrown into disarray (Dinekov et al. 1981, 90–100). Musa is possibly based on Sultan Bayazid’s son, Musa Çelebi (died 1413) and/or Musa Arbanasa, a chieftain of the fifteenth-century Christian Albanian Skanderbeg (Nicoloff 1983, 153). But above all he is traditional—a “dragon substitute” in a “dragon-slayer” song (Lord 1991, 200). Musa and Marko are evenly matched. When Marko is almost defeated, he is aided by a samovila who intercedes to remind him of his concealed weapons. Marko kills Musa even though Musa is the better warrior. When Marko splits Musa’s body open, he beholds his three hearts, underscoring Musa’s affinity with the traditional world of dragons. In another Bulgarian variant of a widespread song, “Krali Marko and Filip Madzharin” (Dinekov et al., 1981, 153–57), a Christian adversary is possibly linked “historically” to three different names (Nicoloff 1983, 153). Filip boasts that since he has already slaughtered so many fierce warriors, he shall dispatch Marko as well. Seeking to defend his community, Marko departs to confront Filip, meeting en route seven queens bleaching the black wool of their mourning attire since Filip has murdered their husbands. Enraged by Filip’s brutality, Marko slays him, again with divine assistance when a samovila intervenes. “Marko and Bele of Kostur” is a return song (a small-scale Odyssey)—a story pattern deeply embedded in Balkan oral tradition.10 In a Bulgarian variant (Dinekov et al. 1981, 213–17), Bele—a quasi-historical figure (Nicoloff 1983, 154)—captures Marko’s wife and son (in Marko’s absence), taking them to Kostur, a local town in Marko’s principality. Marko cleverly disguises himself as a monk and arrives there, finding Bele with his captive family, whereupon he tells them that Marko “has died.” Bele asks the “monk” to marry him to Marko’s “widow,” which the “monk” agrees to. Bele tells his “bride-to-be” (heartbroken about Marko’s “death”) to fetch 401

— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​ some things that he had taken from Marko’s manor so that he can give them to the “monk” as payment. This includes Marko’s sword, with which the “monk” beheads Bele. Reunited, Marko and his family return to their home. Bulgarians and Macedonians experienced little religious independence within the Orthodox Church due to Greek cultural hegemony, overseen by the Porte. Marko is portrayed in epic (and legend) as a defiant culture hero, a builder of Orthodox churches and monasteries (Penušliski 1966, 339). In “Seven Heroes and the Arab,” a Bulgarian variant, Marko’s rebellious spirit is expressed when he erects seventy-one monasteries without the permission of the Sultan, who angrily seeks his arrest in a proclamation, announcing: …wild Marko has risen up.… Where is there a hero born above all heroes Who can seize wild Marko And bring him alive to me…? (Dinekov et al. 1981, 107) The only warrior willing to come forth is a “Black Arab” (tsǔrn Arapin), an epithet that reflects both racial and anti-Islamic undertones in this genre as Christian South Slavic discourse of dissent. He manages to capture Marko by resorting to deception and disguise as a “Black monk.” Marko’s mother is duped by him, directing him to her son’s whereabouts. The “Black Arab”-cum-“Black monk” finds Marko working on the Saint Demetrius monastery and “blesses” him, as the singer recounts: With his right hand, he held the prayer-book; With his left hand, he held a chain. He placed the chain around Marko’s neck; He bound Marko to his horse’s saddle; He took him from the beautiful monastery; Marko screamed like an angry serpent… (1981, 109) It eventually takes the efforts of Marko—mad with rage—and six other warriors to defeat the powerful “Black Arab.” As an implicitly white Christian hero, juxtaposed with a Muslim “Arab” adversary perceived as Black, Marko here is a builder and defender of the South Slavic Orthodox establishment. An analog to these messages of cultural resistance to Turkish rule is evident in other forms of folklore among Bulgarians and Macedonians. Mumming involves individuals (kukeri or survakari) acting out seasonal ritual plays in elaborate traditional costumes. Ritual conflicts between participants, including an “Arab” who is “darkly blackened” (Creed 2011, 43), are often part of the folk dramas. Reminiscent of the “Black Arab” of epic, “Arabs” in these mummers’ plays are dressed as Turkish military figures connected with the mid-nineteenth-century struggle for liberation. Contemporary local participants maintain that kukeri/survakari have performed annually since ancient times, “even during periods of state prohibition in the Ottoman” era, and that this entailed villagers’ finding places “to enact the rituals where they were not pursued” (2011, 1, 19). The “Arab” epitomizes how South 402

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ Slavic Christian communities in the Empire persisted in telling “tales”—through both epic and mumming—that expressed their opposition to Ottoman authority. Perpetuated through the ages, these defiant narratives underscore the extent to which oral tradition embraced culturally symbolic tropes. Prince Marko, with all his complexities and ambiguities, is a spokesman of hope and resistance for South Slavs subjugated for centuries by the Ottomans. He offers them inspiration and levity through his heroic yet quirky behavior. Lord observes that Marko possesses “supernatural strength,” with “the qualities and attributes that make it possible for him to fight with monsters and disturbers of order in society and the world, to free the stag from the serpent, and his people from tyranny” (1991, 210). Indeed, a hero marked by ambiguity such as Marko—a Christian defending his people while a vassal to the Sultan, and a “historical” figure yet thoroughly traditional— made him ideally suited to be the champion par excellence of orally performed epic during the harsh and unforgiving Ottoman regime among South Slavs.

ROMANIAN EPIC The Ottoman establishment in the Romanian Principalities, while a suzerain state that exacted tributes from its subjects, did not impose formal rule. Therefore, dissent articulated in the popular anti-Ottoman heroic epic is somewhat less veiled than among the South Slavs. Individual heroes are typically Romanian Christian peasants defeating single or small groups of Turks. Romanian protagonists are mighty and fearless, but they are also quite ordinary. They are not complex, special, or semidivine like Prince Marko and do not have distinctive trappings or Otherworldly horses. Nor do their adversaries, like many in South Slavic epic, have affinities with the supernatural realm, including dragons. Neither heroes nor villains have historical roots either. Epic cycles are rare. The few protagonists in multiple songs are counterparts of South Slavic heroes such as Prince Marko, called Marcu in Romanian epic. But whereas Marko appears in scores of epic songs, Marcu functions as hero in only three on record. Moreover, while villains in songs featuring Marko sometimes have ambiguous identities, in Romanian heroic epic, they are virtually always alien, “infidel” Turks, portrayed as outsiders physically, ethnically, religiously, culturally, and geographically. In “Marcu the Brave,” Marcu is an innkeeper and a Hero of heroes, Killer of outsiders, Butcher of the Turks… (Teodorescu [1885] 1982, 713) In a drinking contest between Marcu and his adversary, called “the pagan Turk” (turcul pagînul) and “the crazy Turk” (turcul bolînul) (1982, 713–15), Marcu’s mother, the Turk’s paramour, sides with him as they inebriate her son. Marcu becomes so intoxicated that his faithful servant has to wake him up so that he can tackle the Turk and punish his treacherous mother. Infuriated, Marcu slays both of them. Marcu also figures in a classic return song (“Marcu”). Although similar to “Marko and Bele of Kostur,” in “Marcu,” the enemy who plunders his manor displays more explicit markers of his Turkish identity. For example, the Turk takes Marcu’s wife 403

— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​ to faraway Istanbul. This contrasts with Kostur (to which Bele takes Marko’s wife) and the local presence of the enemy in the South Slavic world—and epic. Marcu disguises himself as a monk, seeking to rescue his wife and avenge her captor, whom he addresses as “you heathen Turk” (turcule, hainule) (Amzulescu 1964, vol. 2, 148). Masquerading as monk, Marcu tells the Turk a deceptive story, namely, that “Marcu” has perished and that he has “buried him.” The Turk rejoices since he can now marry Marcu’s “widow.” As the Turk procures wine to drink with the “monk,” Marcu interrogates his wife in order to determine her loyalty, juxtaposing Cross and Crescent and asking: Why do you loathe Christians And take a fancy to the pagan? (1964, vol. 2, 147) Twice she assures him that she has not converted to Islam, explaining that she remains Marcu’s Christian wife, thereby reassuring him of her fidelity. As the two men then drink, Marcu reveals his true self and pulls out his sword, whereupon the Turk begs for mercy, promising Marcu anything if he will spare his life. Marcu rejects the offer and beheads him, returning home with his faithful wife. While in Macedo-Bulgarian epic, cultural-religious distinctions are sometimes blurred, in the Romanian genre, explicit juxtapositions of Christian versus Muslim identity match clear-cut understandings of right versus wrong. Due to the absence of indigenous song cycles in Romanian epic, heroes generally appear in one song only and demonstrate their strength by slaughtering marauding Turks. The Turks are rendered as nameless outsiders who are Others in monstrous ways. Called simply “Turks” or “Arabs,” they travel from “the Turkish” or “Arab land” to Romania in pursuit of local heroes to kill. These narrative scripts afford stinging, humorous commentary: Turks, unlike “normal” people, are sometimes interpreted not as people at all but as animals. By means of hyperbolic tropes, they are viewed stereotypically through a one-dimensional Romanian Christian lens— reflected in the formulaic passages that describe them. In “Badiu the Innkeeper,” the hero is not only innkeeper but “butcher of the Turks” (măcelarul turcilor) or “butcher of the mighty Turks” (Teodorescu 1982, 596, 605). Badiu is introduced while still asleep after a long night of carousing. The Turks find him and tie him up with ropes, torturing him with plans to burn him. Descriptions of Turks, especially when they burst on the scene, such as at Badiu’s home, are formulaic. Diminutive nouns and adjectives are employed in condescending epithets. The “tiny Turkish functionary” (ceauşul mărunţel) is a “tiny, dark little guy” (mărunţel şi ocheşel) (1982, 597). Other passages include sneering diminutives; a Turk (turc) becomes a “little Turk” (turculeţ) who is not only small (mic) but “teeny” (mititel). Furthermore, references to misshapen legs are topped off with crab imagery and metanarrative remarks by the singer: Look, the little Turk—oh-so “teeny;” He’s such a dainty little guy, With heels raised, With knock-knees, 404

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ With the moustache of a crayfish; With three hairs in his beard, With three in his moustache! When you look at him, You can’t keep from laughing. (Pǎsculescu 1910, 283) As Muslims, Turks are the quintessential Other among Christian Romanians. One singer calls them “foreigners, pagans” (strini, păgîni) (Şerb 1967, 625). Another comments to his audience on Badiu’s adversary: Behold, the Turk is wicked, Behold, the Turk is pagan… (Teodorescu 1982, 604) Once Badiu is attacked, his wife sends for his brother, who arrives, releases him, and together, they mercilessly slay the enemy. But while Turks in these songs may reach the shores of the Danube in Romania, they rarely make it back home again. Badiu and his brother burn them near the end of one song. Reinforcing the notion of Turks as outsiders, their ashes are carried by the wind: From here to Ioannina, From Ioannina to Istanbul, And from there to Baghdad… (1982, 606) Even the ashes of dead Turks do not belong in Romania but must rest in Baghdad, the distant Ottoman city. The hero Tanislav is known, like Badiu, as “butcher of the Turks” (Tocilescu [1900] 1980, 124). In “The Song of Tanislav,” a band of Turks encounters Tanislav’s mother at a stream laundering her son’s bloodstained clothing in the wake of a killing spree. In this binary universe, the blood of Turks is perversely different from that of Romanians: She kept washing out the blood. It wasn’t Romanian blood; It was pagan blood. (Nijloveanu 1984, 168) The Turks move on, finding Tanislav asleep on his boat on the Danube. He is accompanied by his servant, who is easily bribed by them to betray him. The Turks hurl Tanislav into the river tied to a stone, thinking they have drowned him. He survives, locates his treacherous servant and the Turks, and metes out his revenge by slaying them. Marauding Turks are stalkers often seeking to abduct maidens to take home to Istanbul. Romanian women—who risk being violated by “Turks”—figure frequently in heroic epic. Their Turkish captors are described in formulaic passages 405

— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​ filled with hyperbole and mockery. The hero “Doicin the Sick,” who is moribund when the story begins because “he has killed a hundred pagans” (Tocilescu 1980, 120), miraculously rallies his strength and valiantly defends his sister from a lecherous Turk, described as A Black, thick-lipped Arab: His chest is deformed, His back hunched-over; He’s very black and very strange! (Pǎsculescu 1910, 252) A common epithet paired with “Arab” or “Turk” is “Black, Thick-lipped” (negru, buzat), a racial slur that goes further than the Macedo-Bulgarian “Black Arab.” One singer offers an extended simile, answering his own rhetorical question by likening the villain’s anatomy to agrarian objects, clearly amusing his audience: So what was the Arab like? His body is like a barrel, His head like a container for grain, … Like the forecarriage of a plough; The eyes in his head like basins, His nose just like a gourd, His lips, enormous, His teeth like sickles, His tongue like a shovel, His molars like handmills, His feet, double carriage-poles, His hands like churns, His fingers like bars, His fingernails like adzes… (Amzulescu 1974, 176) Some songs recount the attempts of Turkish merchants to lure maidens onto their boats to show them their wares with hopes of whisking them off to Istanbul. Heroes in these tales are the captives’ fathers and brothers—ordinary Romanians—who come to their rescue and slay their abductors. Turks are often described by imagery that invokes cold-blooded fish and crustaceans. When an “Arab” arrives to kidnap the maiden Kira Kiralina, he is: Black and thick-lipped, With scales of a carp Set on his head; Two hairs in his beard, Two in his moustache; With the moustache of a crayfish As if he were the devil. (1974, 216) 406

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ In another song, Kira juxtaposes her Christian faith with the Turkish-Muslim identity of her fish-like captor who wishes to carry her off to Istanbul. Kira asks him, also indexing his “evil” sisters: How could I accept you? A Christian Romanian In an Arabian land, How would she live there? My sisters-in-law—your sisters, Snake-like Arab women. When they see me, They’ll brutally destroy me… They’ll cast the evil eye on me… They’ll poison me! (Pǎsculescu 1910, 289) Turks proverbially arrive in Romania on boats that have traversed the Black Sea from the distant Porte and are sailing down the Danube. A singer describes a huge band of them seeking the maiden Ilincuţa Şandrului: On the smooth Danube, On the flowing river, A boat is swiftly approaching, With green sails waving, Decorated on the inside, Surrounded by rails on the outside, Adorned with tapestries. Who was in the boat Propelled on the water, propelled by the wind? Some fifty [Turks] from Brǎila, Sixty Turks from Galaţi, With eighty from Istanbul, And a hundred from Giurgiu, Gathered by the Turkish captain, The captain from Oriakhovo. (Teodorescu 1982, 688) In order to project Turkish cultural Otherness, code-switching is employed as Turkish and Arabic lexicon is interjected in songs. Turkish titles (in Romanian vocative case forms) that denote Ottoman military and political ranks are used with mocking deference when Romanians address the enemy. When Turks meet Romanian women, the foreign term “temenea” (a respectful bow) is ironically invoked as in “They bowed down to her” (1982, 609). Or they greet Christian maidens as “pagans” with “Baca, baca ghiaura!” (“Look here, look here, heathen woman!”) (Nijloveanu 1984, 180). Encountering a group of women, the enemy “greeted them with salamanicu,” a “Romanianized” as-salamu alaykum (Tocilescu 1980, 129). Code-switching is also used to exoticize items that 407

— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​ Turkish merchants bring from “the Orient” to sell as they tempt maidens to join them there. Opposition to Ottoman suzerainty was typically voiced in Romanian epic by focusing on the alien nature of the enemy. Viewed as distinctly Other, Turks were dehumanized and ridiculed and their world Orientalized. They were presented as harsh, scathing, and sardonic caricatures, which Romanian audiences no doubt found humorous. Alexandru I. Amzulescu notes that hyperbole is one of the most characteristic poetic devices in Romanian epic and that it is rooted in “the necessity of accentuating the heroic content” of the genre, “putting into relief…the fundamental nature of the hero and the epic events” (1964, vol. 1, 32). The caricatured depictions of the “foreign” Turkish villains seemingly furnished a perfect foil for the heroic “homegrown” Romanian champions. But they also point to deeply formulaic understandings of Muslims and Christians and, by extension, “East” and “West” in Romanian society where it was normative for singers to depict “Turks” and Ottoman Islam in overtly derogatory terms in epic song.

CONCLUSION: THE DISCOURSE OF RESISTANCE IN BALKAN EPIC Scott observes that the “particularity and elasticity of oral culture…allows it to carry fugitive meanings in comparative safety” (1990, 162). The oral nature of traditional Macedo-Bulgarian and Romanian epic in the Balkans permitted and enabled—for generations—the perpetuation of anti-Ottoman resistance. In the South Slavic tradition, it was Prince Marko, ridding his society of hegemonic forces, who provided inspiration and courage, not to mention levity, for the audiences who listened to heroic epic during the centuries of oppression. Otherworldly, “wild Marko” was for Bulgarians and Macedonians a source of resilience and promise as a “savior” who could deliver them from tyranny. By contrast, in Romanian epic, it was the ridiculously drawn Turkish intruders, dispatched by Christian Romanians, who encouraged and delighted spectators. Overcoming the dark-skinned, pagan, sub-human “Turks” fostered strength and resolve and provided welcome comic relief. Resistance in one oral epic tradition resided largely in the deeds of the quasi-historical “special” hero, while in another, it was expressed in the grotesque villain as Other vanquished by local peasants. South Slavs all shared in the experience of the Battle of Kosovo and encoded it in their cultural memory. It furnished a pseudo-historical frame of reference and became an abiding symbol of pain, sacrifice, and struggle. Krali/Krale Marko became the repository for the narratives that voiced opposition to the consequences of that battle. No matter that he did not participate in it, but he was elevated as an oral traditional hero of fantastic deeds whose name emerged from the origins of the Balkan Ottoman period. The oral traditional songs that formed around Marko resonated among those who suffered Turkish rule. Marko proverbially defends his people from “dragons,” road-blockers, villains, and local despots—Muslim or Christian. Furthermore, he is a builder of churches and monasteries, representing the deeply spiritual—and defiant—interests of the Christian community. Both Marko’s identity and those of his opponents have always been somewhat blurred, like, one could argue, the blurring of identities within the complex ethnic mix of the Balkan world. Yet precisely as a figure cloaked in multiple layers of ambiguity, Marko is 408

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ perfectly befitting of his role as supreme hero for “his people,” the Christian South Slavs. Moreover, his adversaries, whose identities are also complicated, blend into the South Slavic Balkans as well. Romanians, on the contrary, neither endured a pivotal military showdown nor celebrated a flamboyant personality who served as an emblem of resistance in the midst of loss. They lack nationalist tropes such as Kosovo or Marko. They did, however, celebrate nation-building as they sought to unite as a country and overthrow foreign domination. Romanians keenly desired to rid themselves of the “Eastern” Ottoman presence, considering themselves descendants of an ancient “Western” Latin heritage. For this mythos, strong, organic, male Romanian heroes defeating alien “Turks” furnished compelling epic tales. Generic Romanian peasants—mighty but in no way semi-divine like Marko—are the heroes defeating similarly generic Turkish “thugs,” loathed by Romanian Christians as thoroughly Other. In selfdefense, Romanian heroes valiantly fight off Turks who drop in on them at home or on their boats. They also rescue their precious women, at risk of being raped by Turkish stalkers, rushed off to the Orient, and giving birth to Turkish children. The trope of “savage” Turks invading Romania from afar lines up in a neat binary for Romanians that is deeply embedded to this day: East versus West in ever-shifting “nesting Orientalisms” (Bakić-Hayden 1995, 917). The nature of Ottoman imperial rule, the society that it shaped in its conquest, and how it informed history determined to a great extent what heroes and villains represent in their narratives about power and resistance in Balkan epic. Heroic oral epic performed during the Ottoman period delivered messages about freedom and self-determination. Prince Marko symbolized freedom for society—“his people”—as he fortified the spirit of defiance among the South Slavs. By contrast, the depictions in the Romanian genre of the enemy epitomized the freedom to ascribe identity to Self and Others. As for functions of heroic oral epic in Ottoman Balkan society, epic ignited a spirit of courage, strength, and will and provided cherished stories that have inspired and delighted audiences for generations. In all of these ways, epic “kept people going.” In exploring—and comparing—Christian South Slavic and Romanian heroic epic, it is clear that the tales all convey an archetypal struggle: the refusal to accept and rebellion against subjugation. As Lord poignantly remarks, so many of the seemingly different plots in Balkan heroic epic are actually “the same song in respect to the pattern of captivity and freedom (release or rescue)”; they tell effectively the same story (1960, 122). Empire as the chief historical experience in the Balkans generated, via oral traditional channels, forceful narratives about “captivity and freedom,” in both large and small ways. This fundamental “tale” continues even now to resonate—not only as it relates to the recent twentieth-century communist era of empire but also as various communities in the twenty-first-century Balkan world seek to emerge from “captivity” and find their own forms of “freedom.”

NOTES   1 North Macedonia, the place name adopted in 2019, comprises Slavic Macedonia.   2 Romania formerly included the Romanian Principalities: Wallachia and Moldavia.   3 On Romanian epic generally, see Beissinger (1991, 2012).  4 Because of the comparable nature of the Bulgarian and Macedonian genres, I refer to them as Macedo-Bulgarian epic.

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— ​ M a r g a r e t H i e b e r t B e i s s i n g e r —​   5 Macedonia was an ancient Greek term that was revived in the nineteenth century (Bechev 2019, 10).   6 In Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Marko is called “Marko Kraljević.”   7 Nouns based on “kral” (king) in Bulgarian and Macedonian paired with “Marko” include, respectively: Krali/Krale Marko or Kralevich/Kraleviḱ Marko; other epithets are “Marko of Prilep”: Marko Prilepchanets/Prilepčanec, Prilepčanin, or od Prilep; “Marko the Hero” (Marko junak, Macedonian); “Marko the Good Hero” (Marko dobǔr iunak, Bulgarian); and “Wild Marko”: delibasha/delibaša Marko.   8 “Vǔlkashin” is the Bulgarian form of Vukašin.   9 “Sharets” is the Bulgarian form of Šarec and a homophone (Bulgarian and Macedonian utilize different transliteration systems). 10 On the return song pattern, see Robert Romanchuk’s chapter in this volume.

WORKS CITED Alecsandri, Vasile. 1852–1853. Balade adunate şi îndreptate. 2 vols. Iaşi: Buciumul Roman. Amzulescu, Alexandru I. 1964. Balade populare romîneşti. 3 vols. Bucharest: Editura Pentru Literaturǎ. ———. 1974. Cîntece bǎtrîneşti. Bucharest: Editura Minerva. Bakić-Hayden, Milica. 1995. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54, no. 4: 917–31. Bechev, Dimitar. 2019. Historical Dictionary of North Macedonia. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Beissinger, Margaret H. 1991. The Art of the Lăutar: The Epic Tradition of Romania. New York: Garland Publishing. ———. 2012. “Court Poetry, Village Verse: Romanian Oral Epic in the Medieval World.” In Medieval Oral Literature, edited by Karl Reichl, 386–408. Berlin: De Gruyter. Chary, Frederick. 2000. “Bulgaria (History).” In Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe, edited by Richard Frucht, 92–104. New York: Garland Publishing. Creed, Gerald W. 2011. Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dinekov, Petŭr, Todor Zhivkov, Petŭr Karaangov, and Stefana Stoĭkova. 1981. Bŭlgarska narodna poeziia i proza. Vol. 1. Sofia: Bŭlgarski Pisatel. Doyle, Michael W. 1986. Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foley, John Miles. 2010. “Traditional History in South Slavic Oral Epic.” In Epic and History, edited by David Konstan and Kurt Raaflaub, 347–61. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Friedman, Victor. 1986. “Macedonian Language and Nationalism during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Macedonian Review 16, no. 3: 280–92. ———. 2012. “Balkan Epic Cyclicity: A View from the Languages.” In Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, edited by Philip Bohlman and Nada Petković, 293–309. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Koljević, Svetozar. 1980. The Epic in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laktinski, Blagoja. 1968. Pesni za Krale Marko. Skopje: Misla. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1972. “The Effect of the Turkish Conquest on Balkan Epic Traditions.” In Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change, edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Speros Vryonis, Jr., 298–318. The Hague: Mouton. ———. 1991. “Narrative Themes in Bulgarian Oral-Traditional Epic and Their Medieval Roots.” In Epic Singers and Oral Tradition, 195–210. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Michelson, Paul E. 2000. “Romania (History).” In Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe, edited by Richard Frucht, 667–90. New York: Garland Publishing.

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— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e —​ Miladinov, Dimitar and Konstantin. 1861. Bŭlgarski narodni pesni. Zagreb: A. Jakić. Nicoloff, Assen. 1983. Bulgarian Folklore. Cleveland, OH: Self-published. Nijloveanu, Ion. 1984. Balade populare româneşti. Bucharest: Editura Muzicalǎ. Panev, Aleksandar. 2000. “Macedonia (History).” In Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe, edited by Richard Frucht, 469–70. New York: Garland Publishing. Păsculescu, Nicolae. 1910. Literatură populară românească. Bucharest: Librăria Socec şi Comp. Penušliski, Kiril. 1966. “Macedonian Local Traditions of Prince Marko.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 3, no. 3: 331–40. Popović, Tatyana. 1988. Prince Marko: The Hero of South Slavic Epics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Romanska, Cvetana. 1971. Bŭlgarski iunashki epos. Sofia: Izdatelstvo na Bŭlgarskata Akademiia na Naukite. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Şerb, Ioan, ed. 1967. Folclor din Oltenia şi Muntenia. Vol. 1. Cluj: Editura pentru Literaturǎ. Teodorescu, G. Dem. [1885] 1982. Pozeii populare române. Bucharest: Editura Minerva. Tocilescu, Grigore. [1900] 1980. Materiale folcloristice. Vol.1. Bucharest: Editura Minerva. Vucinich, Wayne S. 1962. “The Nature of Balkan Society under Ottoman Rule.” Slavic Review 21, no. 4: 597–616.

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PART IV

NEW FORMS AND F O U N DAT I O N A L S T O R I E S ( C I RC A 1 8 5 0 – P R E S E N T )

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“IT SHALL BE RULED B Y S WA L L OW S ”

THE EPIC OF THE ZULU KING SHAKA

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Phiwokuhle Mnyandu

AmaZulu (Zulu people) are famously very poetic. Like many other African peoples, as a nation and as a society, they use poetry to transmit mores, reinforce life lessons, honor individuals, and remember and recount their history, among other essential uses. In the premodern period, the Zulu were an oral people; orality was the main vehicle for the transmission of knowledge and the sharing of poetry. After a writing system was developed for isiZulu (Zulu language) in the late nineteenth century, Zulu authors began producing written literature too.1 Magema Fuze’s historical work Abantu abamnyama lapa bavela ngakona (Black people and whence they come, 1922), Langalibalele Dube’s historical novella Insila ka Tshaka (Shaka’s bodyguard, 1931), and Mazisi Kunene’s epic Emperor Shaka the Great (1971) are some of the classic literary works produced by pioneering Zulu authors. Created by Zulu people themselves, they constitute an indispensable window into the cultural and intellectual history of the Zulu people. Contrary to popular opinion, even among Africans themselves, written Zulu literature did not suddenly appear with the advent of writing, but developed gradually, intertwined with oral literature, in a way that maintained continuity between oral and written works. Traditional oral genres such as poetry (izinkondlo [poems], izibongo [appraisal poems], izithakazelo [clan-name poems]); folktales (izinganekwane); short stories (izindaba); and epics [izinkondlo zamaqhawe] have continued to the present, but are now supplemented by written literature. These genres preexisted the development of writing isiZulu; they did not begin when Zulu people started writing literature. Instead, Zulu literature diversified from being simply oral to being both oral and written. Regardless of their mode of transmission, Zulu literary works have fidelity to fundamental Zulu truths and a Zulu worldview. As scholar, Chipasha Luchembe notes about Kunene’s Shaka Zulu the Great, we may glean from it a “very fundamental description of the permanent values” that typify the lived experience of the Zulu people of South Africa (Luchembe 1977, 20). When writers like Kunene put Zulu oral literature into written form in a way that captures its original poetic style and artistry, they effectively and positively expand the corpus of Zulu literature. DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-34

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— ​ P h i w o k u h l e M n y a n d u —​ Zulu culture and history have often been subject to misrepresentations and distortions by outside, colonial-minded authors. For this reason, whether they wanted to or not, Zulu scholars and creative writers, like other African writers generally, have had little choice but to engage in revisionism through their works. In all of his work, African and South African poet laureate, scholar, historian, and antiapartheid activist Mazisi Kunene (1930–2006) embraced revisionism as a righteous mission, going so far as to make it the raison d’être of his scholarly life. Kunene is undeniably the father of Zulu epic literature, thanks to his seminal works Emperor Shaka the Great—A Zulu Epic (1979), and Anthem of the Decades—A Zulu Epic Dedicated to the Women of Africa (1981), both based on Zulu oral history. Although they were published in English, Kunene had first written both epics in isiZulu, and only then translated them into English. That Kunene did the isiZulu versions first is instructive of how important isiZulu is to Zulu epic: he saw it as integral and used it to extract meaning for his English translation. Further, he always saw writing in isiZulu as a form of anticolonial protest and a means to Zulu liberation: From the very beginning, when I started writing, I had no choice but to write in [isi]Zulu. Language was therefore a combative weapon that had to be used against occupation by foreigners. Language was also meant to operate as an instrument for the reassertion of African values, African history and a whole ideology justifying the existence of the African world… (Mail & Guardian 2016) Kunene wrote Emperor Shaka the Great because as his wife Mathobo Kunene explains, he was actually quite disappointed about the literature that was available on African heroes because it painted great leaders like King Shaka as bloodthirsty individuals because the authors did not understand their backgrounds, nor had they done adequate research on the subjects they were writing about. (Ntuli 2017) Kunene also made clear to her his mission: that his works should be “there for thousands of years so that the next generation would never be misled about their own history” (2017). A revisionist role has been played by other, unheralded founders of Zulu epic besides Mazisi Kunene. A debt of gratitude is owed to Mathabo Kunene, who serves as Director of the Mazisi Kunene Foundations and Museum (MKFM). A decade after her husband’s death in 2006, she sought to re-introduce Emperor Shaka the Great to new and younger audiences, especially in his native country of South Africa. Her efforts culminated in the 2017 publication of the work in isiZulu for the very first time, by the press of the University of KwaZulu Natal, which happens to be Mazisi Kunene’s alma mater. The Zulu version of the work, uNodumehlezi KaMenzi, was published along with the English translation from the second edition of Emperor Shaka the Great. This was a true homecoming for Emperor Shaka the Great. Although Mazisi Kunene had initially written it in isiZulu, it was the

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— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ English edition that was published first (in 1979) and went on to be published in various other languages. Almost four decades later, the work was finally returned to its mother tongue and published in its original isiZulu, where the originality of its thoughts and unique cultural contexts are given full expression and may be optimally appreciated (2017b). Here is an instance where a woman (who was not a writer herself) broke new ground long after the death of her husband to oversee the review and publishing of a Zulu epic in isiZulu. This disrupts the misrepresentation of African women as “supporters” rather than overseers of Zulu epic, for we would not have the work without Mathabo Kunene. Another important scholar of Zulu epic is Mazisi Kunene’s compatriot, Ntongela Masilela (1948–2020). He gave a talk on Kunene’s contributions to Zulu literature on the eve of Kunene’s departure from the University of California, Los Angeles, after decades of teaching in the United States. In the talk, Masilela described the two epics Kunene recorded in writing as constituting a reenactment of Zulu history, if not the recreation of Zulu history. These epics, Masilela averred, postulate African cosmology, the meaning of life, the nature of heroism, the bond between man and woman, and other related themes. [They] form a unity with other African epics, in that they establish the lines of continuity between the past and the present, as well as establishing the significance of the past for the present and the possible pathways to the future. [Kunene’s] epics within the South African context re-connect the lineages of tradition. (Masilela 1993, 14) Kunene’s preservation of Zulu oral epics, oracles of Zulu thought, in writing is critically important, for they contain some of the Zulu people’s most deeply held ideas and beliefs. In published form, these classic works have canonized intergenerational knowledge and ensured its transmission to future generations. In this chapter, I analyze the significance of the most celebrated Zulu epic, Kunene’s Emperor Shaka the Great, which tells the story of the historical Zulu king and cultural icon Shaka kaSenzangakhona, also known as “Shaka Zulu” (circa 1787–1828), who ruled Zululand, the ancestral lands of the Zulus, a few years prior to the so-called “Great Trek,” when Dutch colonists traveling north from the Cape Colony sought to usurp Zulu lands and resources. The epic recounts Shaka’s life, from his birth as an unfavored son, to his struggle to claim his birthright, the Zulu throne, to his death by assassination during a political coup. I first discuss some of the prominent features of Emperor Shaka the Great— its connections to orality and to “appraisal poetry,” its embrace of the supernatural, and its powerful female characters, particularly Shaka’s mother Nandi and aunt Mkhabayi. I analyze these features through close readings of several passages, applying a lens of Zulu ways of knowing. I note transcendental ideas in the epic, specifically, Kunene’s metaphorical use of the Zulu terms abathakathi (witches) and izinkonjane (swallows), which have deep resonance to the Dutch colonialization of Zululand. My objective is to proffer an understanding of this paradigmatic Zulu epic, which powerfully tells Zulu history from a Zulu perspective, and opens up liberatory space for the decolonization of the Zulu people.

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ORALITY AND IZIBONGO (APPRAISAL POETRY) IN ZULU EPIC In Emperor Shaka the Great, Kunene demonstrates a fidelity to the story as it is communicated in oral storytelling in isiZulu. His language has many turns of phrase and poetic elements that hint at the isiZulu original and its roots in orality. A distinguishing feature of Kunene’s epic is its reliance on oral sources and “trained national historians” (abalindi bezindaba zabadala) who take it upon themselves to preserve “not only details of each period but also the particulars of each event.” Operating as organic scholars, editors, and “peer reviewers” all at once, these indigenous historians are “recognized throughout the land as specialists who know everything about the event” (Kunene 2017a, xxxviii). Unfortunately, the oral histories of Africa are not accorded the same respect and status as the written histories of Europe and Asia, simply because they are written down and because these regions have longer histories of writing than Sub-Saharan Africa. But to a great extent, people in these “developed” too regions derive their earliest histories from oral accounts. The earliest written histories in Sub-Saharan Africa are simply far more recent. Following the esteemed Zulu poet Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (1906–1947), Kunene sought “to make certain that African poetic and cultural expressions in the African languages, originating in izibongo poetic traditions, negotiate and survive the dialectal unity and divide of tradition and modernity” (Mail & Guardian 2016). Understanding and appreciating orality and oral history is crucial for the legitimization of African epics, which are often discredited through thematic displacement by Eurocentric scholars, who judge them outside of their African contexts. This has contributed to prevalent and longstanding doubts about whether there even are “real” epics in southern Africa. This supposed lacuna could be attributed to differentials in definition and taxonomy. But problematically, as Mariam Konaté Deme explains, “Africans and other ‘primitive people’ [supposedly] do not have the mental capabilities to design the more complicated structural and aesthetic devices that are reflected in written epic” (2009, 407). Language is the repository of a culture’s knowledge, social norms, mores, predilections, and prejudices. For the Zulu people, appraisal poetry is a critically important medium through which all of these elements are conveyed and disseminated from one generation to the next. Scholars, both within and outside Africa, often refer to appraisal poems as “praise poems.” This is inaccurate because the content of izibongo is not always adulatory. On the contrary, they are generally accurate, albeit embellished, poetic accounts of individuals—their achievements and failures, and their strengths and weaknesses. Poets often provide both positive and negative assessments of people; thus, their poems may be more accurately referred to as “appraisal poems.” However, poets’ tendency to emphasize their subject’s accomplishments may have led to the misleading designation, “praise poetry.” Kunene concurs that such poems have been wrongly described as “praise poetry,” and instead calls them “poems of excellence.” As he explains, [T]hey project an ethical system beyond the circumstances of the individual. Thus, individuals are heroes as long as they fulfill the roles defined to them by 418

— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ society. If they become arrogant and disrespectful of elders (guardians of social order) they are mercilessly lampooned and demoted…They may seem obscure to those readers unacquainted with Zulu history but they are so inherently part of Zulu life that omitting them in a Zulu history epic would reduce its quality. (2017a, xxxix–x) Appraisal poems describe the extraordinary feats of notable people and are orally “published” through ornamented, artistic spoken-word performances. Over time, they coalesce into compendia by which their subjects are known. Formerly, kings were chief subject of appraisal poems. In fact, there is an izibongo for every Zulu king known throughout history, documenting the course of his life from his birth to his death. Appraisal poems are a predominant feature in Kunene’s Emperor Shaka the Great. Kunene incorporates many appraisal poems in his work, and not only ones with reference to King Shaka, but also to the kings Jama and Senzangakhona who came before him, as events involving them arise. These days, appraisal poems might feature a president of South Africa, a notable civic leader, or other people of distinction. Appraisal poems are very difficult to translate because they typically include many esoteric figures of speech—metaphors, hyperbole, metonymy, and the like. It takes a person well versed in Zulu language, culture, and history to interpret their numerous allusions and rhetorical “winks.” Appraisal poems are not to be confused with poems about “praise names.” The latter, while sometimes included in appraisal poems, are less individualized. Rather than a single person, they describe a whole group of people associated with a particular clan name or surname. It is common in Zulu society for someone to have both a real name and a praise name or names. Praise names are often couched in stories that describe a person’s heroic achievements and/or qualities. Thus, Shaka is referred to as both Nodumehlezi, “one whose fame spreads while he sits unshaken,” i.e. he is invincible, and Milwana, “small restless fire,” the name Shaka’s mother gives him in his childhood to describe his fiery temper (xxxviii). Praise names are epithets that often incorporate the names of animals, the elements, natural features such as bodies of water, mountains, and heavenly bodies, associated with their subjects. They often originate as nicknames but “stick” over time. Eventually, people become very associated with their praise names, and even pass them on to their progeny, who become known as the “son or daughter of __.” Shaka Zulu the Great is full of praise names, which are used interchangeably with the “real” names of the notable subjects. This may confuse readers who are not well versed in Zulu royal history, and therefore require a primer in Zulu culture and history.

THE SUPERNATURAL IN ZULU EPIC The embrace of the supernatural is another feature of Emperor Shaka the Great and other African epics, and a major reason that Eurocentric scholars have largely ignored and discounted them. Yet, as Konaté Deme relates, supernatural elements are integral to the genre, and for good reason: The…fantastic is part and parcel of the dramatic storyline and does not take anything away from the veracity of the tale or its true heroism. Second, the use 419

— ​ P h i w o k u h l e M n y a n d u —​ of the supernatural as a means to cope with man’s original weakness constitutes a belief system that is still widely held today in many African societies. The existence of the marvelous and the recourse to supernatural means by the hero symbolize his consciousness about his own weaknesses and limitations as a human being and his desire to transcend them. Third, the significance of the supernatural cannot be fully appreciated without taking into account the worldview that regulates the given society in which the epic is produced. (2009, 403) Emperor Shaka the Great indeed illustrates the significance of the supernatural in Zulu culture. Early in his life, King Shaka has a few brushes with the supernatural world and its diviners. The supernatural is a constant presence in his life. He has several close brushes with death—some of them foretold by diviners—but is miraculously saved in each instance. In one instance, early one morning, King Senzangakhona, at the urging of one of his wives, orders that baby Shaka, whom he has increasingly spurned, be executed by the royal executioner, Mzoneli. Moments later, while taking a walk on palace grounds, King Senzangakhona sees his son Mudli carrying a bulging sack and becomes suspicious that it contains baby Shaka. Stopping Mudli, he inquires about the contents of the sack: Mudli answers casually: ‘It is only the young of a pig.’ Senzangakhona shot through with suspicion and disbelief, Stared at him and said: ‘Let me test on it my spear-throwing skill.’ He threw his long, glimmering spear, Directing it at the center of the immobile target. Once, twice, thrice he tried, the bended-armed one, Until, embarrassed by his ignominious failure, he said: ‘Take your magic-powered beast and keep it away from us It seems jealously protected by the shoulder-blades of the Ancestors.’ Mudli deliberately hesitated, not daring to show eagerness. He said: ‘Try again my lord. Perhaps this time you will succeed.’ But Senzangakhona dared not. (Kunene 2017a, 16) Mudli then rushes out of the royal grounds and rendezvouses with Nandi, Shaka’s mother, at her mountain hideout facing her homeland of Emalangeni, to deliver the “package.” Inside they find baby Shaka alive and well. Mudli risked his own life to help baby Shaka escape the well-guarded palace where his fate had been sealed. Shaka had incredibly survived three close-range spearing attempts by the Zulu king, whom we can surmise is a master spearman. African people tend to embrace the notion that there are great, meta-physical forces that direct human life. This is a dominant theme throughout Zulu literature and Kunene’s epics. Dismissed as belief in “good luck” by far too many outside EuroAmerican observers, these forces are nevertheless regarded as an immutable fact of life, in Zulu literature and culture. By paying attention to manifestations of the supernatural and trying to see them from the perspective of Zulu people themselves, 420

— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ scholars from outside cultures can better understand Zulu epics. Of course, there is great diversity of perspectives among Zulu people themselves: some accept and appreciate primordial understandings of the supernatural, while others do not. Even some accomplished Zulu scholars, swayed by their religious convictions, allow biases to creep into their exposition of Zulu epics and by extension important facets of African life, including the supernatural. This is not unlike amakholwa, the nonsyncretic Zulu converts to Christianity who interpreted Zulu culture to Europeans in the early twentieth century, presenting it in a skewed way to suggest more similarities between the two cultures than there actually were. In Emperor Shaka the Great, few significant events seem to take place that the narrator or characters do not ascribe to the supernatural world, such that at times it seems human agency is subordinate to the whims of the supernatural order. Another example of this is when Shaka and his party, fleeing an enemy, are forced to seek shelter for the night at the forbidding homestead of Lubhadu, a notorious cannibalist. Confronted by Lubhadu about what made them seek shelter at his homestead when others dared not come near it, young Shaka responds, beseeching the cannibalist to give them shelter. Reluctantly, a puzzled Lubhadu finally accedes. Later that night after a bountiful dinner, they are awakened by human screams outside, then one of them sees a human body, Lubhadu’s latest victim, being dragged into the homestead. Why does Lubhadu spare Shaka and his party, who are outnumbered and vulnerable? The answer comes from Shaka himself, speaking to another young man from the Mkhize region: “I saw how outnumbered we were. Our escape could only have been possible through the ancestors” (2017a, 41). When supernatural intervention divinely preserves someone, that person bears the burden of assigning ­responsibility—to humans, the supernatural, or both. In this instance, the hero himself is aware of his special status and attributes their survival to the intercession of the ancestors (the supernatural). There is another crucial aspect of divine preservation: inevitability. That is, it “proves” the true identity of the hero and guarantees his ultimate triumph. For example, on his deathbed, Shaka’s father, Senzangakhona, turns to one of his wives and asks her for his favorite son and heir apparent, Sigujana: In vain, they told him he was right beside him. He claimed this was a treacherous deceit, for he saw only Shaka. Raving, he shouted “He casts his shadow over me. He stares at me with fierce eyes of the sun.” Finally he raised his hand, attempting to hold his son’s hand But he withered and fell to the ground. (2017a, 75) While this may seem like the coincidental, untimely death of Senzangakhona, which leaves important matters unresolved and endangers the kingdom, it nevertheless looks quite proper when seen through the prism of divine preservation ordained by the supernatural world, with Shaka at its center. From this vantage point, we can see that the supernatural introduces finality and order while humans struggle and despair. Thus, Shaka is not usurping the throne, but rather, fulfilling a divine “mandate of heaven,” for which he was carefully preserved. Senzangakhona’s delirium is not 421

— ​ P h i w o k u h l e M n y a n d u —​ madness. It is the supernatural “finger” pointing away from Sigujana toward the one who, while not present, still haunts their deliberations: Shaka.

THE ZULU EPIC’S POWERFUL WOMEN Kunene’s Emperor Shaka the Great also stands out for its inclusion and treatment of strong female characters. It pushes back strongly against fixed gender roles in Zulu society and counters gendered stereotypes about women being passive and weak. For example, King Senzangakhona’s sister Mkhabayi is a powerful figure who counsels her brother to pay attention to the spectacular political rise of his son Shaka, whom the king has rejected. Fearing that Shaka will usurp the throne, Mkhabayi urges Senzangakhona not to rest on his laurels and take for granted his authority, and Shaka’s restraint in changing times: Mkhabayi said to her brother: ‘It does not pay to pride oneself in a limited peace. Your son, Prince Shaka, grows in reputation and intelligence. Be wise, send your trusted messenger to bring him back. Before long, your subjects will demand his return. They may soon rail against you for your acts of cruelty, Saying: “With Shaka our future could have been a great one.”… The words of the wise change with each generation Woe unto those who cling to them even after their era!’ (2017a, 33–34) But Senzangakhona does not heed the wise counsel of this strong woman. Shaka and his mother Nandi brood in the wilderness until the former returns and claims the kingdom after the death of Senzangakhona. Shaka then unleashes a whirlwind of authoritarian rule that might have been avoided had Senzangakhona heeded Mkhabayi’s words. Even after seizing the kingdom and vanquishing his foes, the now fearsome Shaka still fears, defers to, and seeks approval from his paternal aunt Mkhabayi. He values her input on important matters including his ascension to the throne: Princess Mkhabayi bowed low and shouted the royal salute. The gathered throngs roared in one great acclamation, Shouting ‘Bayethe! Uyizulu!’ The earth itself shook… Mkhabayi by her gesture endorsed the position of the new ruler For she, senior to Senzangakhona, had served as regent. (2017a, 79) The mutual respect (and fear) that Shaka and Mkhabayi have toward each other continues throughout Shaka’s rule, and this speaks more to her strength as a character than any weakness or failing in Shaka. In fact, Mkhabayi is a dominant figure who outlives Shaka. Later, she is instrumental in his downfall by goading his halfbrothers to assassinate him:

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— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ It was on such a day that Princess Mkhabayi spoke her final words. ‘Dingane! Mhlangane! And you too, Mbopha! I am going to speak to you plainly. I am tired of thinking for those who cannot think. I am tired of endless meetings that are without accomplishment I am saying this finally: Shaka must die! You must kill him with your own hands.’ (2017a, 421) This epic does not brook a damsel-in-distress Zulu princess. Beyond Mkhabayi, there are other powerful women in Emperor Shaka the Great who do not exist simply to support men. At no point in the story does one encounter a female character without the qualities of heroism, authority, wisdom, foresight, and decisiveness, among other treasured leadership traits. We may reasonably surmise that Kunene did not have to distort Zulu history in order to imbue these characters with such qualities for they have always been present in Zulu women. Nandi is another example of a strong female character. Early in Kunene’s epic we can already see she is self-assured and strong-willed. Here is how Kunene describes her qualities: She was the fear of the timid ones; Of her the royal poets sang: ‘Woman of many tongues, inhibiter of the high places of the Assembly.’ “‘I am the daughter of the Prince of abasemaLangeni clan.’” (2017a, 5) Normally, the Zulu term “woman of many tongues” is used to describe an (overly) outspoken woman and is not meant to be flattering. It implies a woman who openly discusses all things and insists on having a say in all goings on, including those that Zulu society deems inappropriate for her, according to the times, her position, and, of course, her gender. On one level, the passage suggests that Nandi problematically disrupts Zulu patriarchal norms by engaging in uninhibited speech in official “high places of Assembly,” in other words, in the presence of important men. Kunene, however, turns this patriarchal logic on its head by extoling her (signaled by his words “the royal poets sang”) as the “inhibitor” of such places, where few if any women are found, let alone those bold enough to take the floor during deliberations. It is telling that most of the female characters, like their male counterparts, are mentioned by name in the epic. This is deliberate and in keeping with the South African philosophy of ubuntu in which referring to a person by name is considered a form of a supernatural supplication. Therefore, leaving people’s names out of the epic would have constituted their erasure. Other prominent, self-possessed female characters include, among others, Shaka’s cousin Princess Mawa, whom Shaka sends as an envoy to receive a party of newly arrived Dutch explorers on his behalf, the first official of the Zulu kingdom to do so (208); his paternal step-grandmother Queen Mthaniya, whose illness causes Shaka to cancel all festivals and seek a white man’s medical help (2017a, 259); Nomazibuko, who has a liaison with Shaka and

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— ​ P h i w o k u h l e M n y a n d u —​ gives birth to a mysterious would-be-heir (2017a, 321); and his step-mother Queen Mkhabi who holds vigil at King Senzangakhona’s deathbed (2017a, 75). Although Kunene shows Mkhabayi, Nandi, and numerous other women in Emperor Shaka the Great to be strong, independent characters with great political acumen, many outside observers overlook this and focus only on Shaka’s supposed tyranny as a leader. Yet, Mkhabayi is a powerful thought leader who wields great power behind the scenes. She and other such female characters illustrate that the epic does not relegate women to supporting and marginal roles. Mkhabayi pulls all of the strings in this story: she determines Shaka’s fate before he ascends to the throne, guides his movements during his reign, and orchestrates his eventual demise at his brothers’ hands, which I turn to next.

IZINKONJANE (SWALLOWS), NEOREALISTIC PROPHESY, AND COLONIAL “WITCHES” One of the most important episodes in Zulu history, and one which is vividly portrayed in Emperor Shaka the Great, is Shaka’s assassination by his half-brothers Mhlangana and Dingane, and another conspirator, Mbopha. It is revealing of the women-centered bent of the epic that Mkhabayi is at the center of the assassination. She insults and urges her nephews to carry out the assassination. The result is that in broad daylight, when Shaka is holding court: Shaka’s brothers appeared accompanied by their followers. They were armed with newly sharpened spears. They rushed after the king as he attempted to reach for his weapon: They stabbed Shaka of Senzangakhona from all sides… When Shaka realized the truth at the last moment He smiled and said: ‘So, my brothers, you are killing me? And you too, Mbopha, son of Sithayi! You think you shall rule Zululand after my death No, you shall never rule. Only the swallows shall rule over it.’ …They still stabbed him, making numerous wounds, Still fearing he might suddenly rise And, with the anger of the whirlwind, rush headlong at them. (2017a, 425) From this one passage about this singular event, two expressions have entered the Zulu lexicon and live on in common expressions to this day. The first is “nawe Mbopha saSithayi” (and you Mbopha, son of Sithayi). This is used in colloquial Zulu speech to express the feeling that one has been betrayed. It is analogous to the Latin phrase “et tu, Brute?” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The second expression is “ngeke nilibuse, lobuswa izinkonjane” (you will never rule it [the land], it shall be ruled by swallows). Some have interpreted this to mean that Shaka prophesied the ultimate defeat and colonialization of the Zulu people by Europeans. It is not clear whether Kunene himself believed this, but there are a few clues in the work that suggest he did. First, the death of Shaka takes place at the end 424

— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ of the epic (2017a, 524), and not long thereafter the epic terminates (2017a, 530). After Shaka’s death, Kunene seemingly had little left to say of the Zulu people or the Zulu kingdom. Second, Kunene includes a mournful three-page epilogue, titled “Dirge of the Palm Race,” in which he bemoans the “flashes of lightening [which] haunt [the] earth with destruction” (2017a, 431).2 He also prays for protection during the impending hard times which are destined to follow Shaka’s demise: Great Ancestral Forefathers because you are older than us Accompany us into the night, Tell us the tale while our trembling eyes follow the path;… Touch our shoulders and wake the ram from sleep; Give us the courage of the river. (2017a, 433) It is safe to conclude that Kunene saw the death of Shaka as a great tragedy, and perhaps considered the hero prophetic as well. More, however, needs to be said about Kunene’s use of the image of swallows. They are seasonal birds that travel from one faraway land to another. Their imagery evokes thoughts of migration and evasion. Swallows fly high in the sky out of reach; they are difficult to trap; they have ways that are difficult to understand; and they are decidedly foreign. Even today, many Zulu people believe that their lot in life— their political, social, and economic fortunes—may be explained by these words, or, as some have ventured, this curse. Thus, in contemporary conversations about the economy, decolonization, and so forth, it is common to hear people debate the extent to which “Shaka’s curse,” a neorealistic prophesy, has been reversed, or the wings of izinkonjane have been clipped. This is a controversial topic, but Kunene does not shy away from it in Emperor Shaka the Great: He who is like an Ancestral Spirit cannot be stabbed. Even now they sing his song. They call his name. They dance in the arena listening to the echoes of his epic Till the end of time—they shall sing of him… And his children shall rise like locusts. They shall scatter the dust of the enemies, They shall make earth free of the Palm Race. (2017a, 433) With its implicit nationalistic declaration of “Shaka’s curse,” Kunene’s epic is not apolitical. Even as it mourns the demise of King Shaka, it proclaims his immortality and a desire for freedom—a Zulu future that does not include the “palm race.”

THE SPECTER OF ABATHAKATHI (WITCHES), A TACTICAL CALL TO ARMS In keeping with their proclivity toward respectability and properness, Zulu people often have an aversion to non-normative behavior and social disorder. They may feel uncomfortable and seek explanations when confronted by queer events, and not 425

— ​ P h i w o k u h l e M n y a n d u —​ accept coincidences as coincidences. When explanations are not forthcoming, they may attribute such events to the supernatural, regardless of whether their outcome is good or bad. These events may involve the deeds of cultural outsiders, or the deeds of Zulu people at the wrong times or contexts. As early European settlers pushed deeper into Zululand in the early nineteenth century, they inevitably had more and more confrontations with Zulu people. One such incident happened in 1838, when the voortrekker (Dutch colonist) Piet Retief and his band encroached into Zululand, which at that time were ruled by King Dingane. The Dutch were invited to a meeting at Dingane’s homestead, where the Zulus are said to have hidden their weapons under cow dung. At a moment when the voortrekkers were unarmed and relaxed, Dingane is said to have stood up and given the following instruction to his men: “Bambani abathakathi!” (Seize the witches!), upon which Piet Retief and his men were killed. Prominent accounts of this incident relate that Rief’s party was “betrayed” by untrustworthy Zulus. In recent times, however, a more balanced picture has emerged, based on longstanding, well-known Zulu oral accounts that have been passed down from generation to generation. According to these accounts, Piet Retief and his men were far from victims of purported “native treachery.” Instead, they trespassed on ancestral Zulu lands, disregarded their social customs, and acted unethically and inappropriately according to the norms of Zulu society, upon their arrival in Dingane’s homestead. At one point, it is stated, Piet Retief and his men moved about looking at the huts. In one of the huts there was a Zulu woman who was pregnant. The shock of seeing Whites for the first time resulted in her giving birth prematurely. This incident was reported to Dingane. As superstition was still rife in those days the king came to the conclusion that Retief and his men were “Abathakathi,” i.e., people who practice witchcraft. Consequently an order was given for them to be put to death. (Simon Maphalala, cited in Shongwe 2004, 104) The extent of their breaches was seemingly clear only to the Zulus. Upon their meeting, the two cultures immediately clashed about the most basic things. The Europeans failed to grasp how odd their repeated infractions were and how seriously the Zulus took them. At that time among Zulus, consequences for social breaches were severe even for Zulus themselves, how much more so for unwanted foreigners? According to African tradition, anybody who walks around at night while looking in through doors is a malefactor. The Zulus believe that people who walk about in the night are responsible for practicing witchcraft. When king Dingane was told that his visitors had been spotted wandering about at night, he believed the worst. Even before he agreed to meet with them, he was convinced that they were up to no good. (2004, 103) The words of Dingane, giving an order to vanquish an uninvited, offending enemy— to permanently excise a foreign aberration from the space it has occupied—have 426

— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ survived to the present. They have become “canonized” in the Zulu lexicon and are still used to announce a figurative call to arms or an injunction to take decisive action. During the anti-apartheid struggle, Dingane’s words were put to great use; they were used to galvanize mass action and coordinated protest using subterfuge. Significantly, the association of unusual or undesirable behavior with ukuthakatha (witchcraft or sorcery), with its potential to bring about bad luck, is a staple of Kunene’s epic. Even before Dingane, in the time of King Shaka, there are instances of unusual things being referred to as ukuthakatha, and of people practicing witchcraft being referred to as abathakathi. The work illustrates that a person’s actions may or may not be taken as ukuthakatha, depending on the timing and severity of their offense(s), and the biases and political motives of the offender, as determined by the Zulu observer, who uses a subjective sliding scale based on Zulu social norms. In Emperor Shaka the Great, King Shaka’s father, Senzangakhona, returns home after waging war in Emalangeni without completing his mission: to kill Shaka the son he has spurned. He also deliberately did not to take any booty from the defeated nation, much to the consternation of his sister Mkhabayi. Stung by the harsh criticism leveled at him by his sister, King Senzangakhona, resorts to a familiar canard: He said to his sister: ‘You are like a sorcerer Like a witch who prospers from the tears of others I boast only of the love of the Zulu nation.’ (Kunene 2017a, 33) Thus, we find that the epic affirms the long-held Zulu belief in ukuthakatha, a specter that can be deployed offensively or defensively against people. Another example occurs at the beginning of Shaka’s life. At first, Shaka and his two siblings are not accepted by the royal Zulu house, so their mother Nandi retreats with them to her family’s homestead of Emalangeni. There, Nandi and her family mope and harbor great resentment about their daughter’s treatment in the royal court. As news of their gripe spreads, it provokes retaliatory efforts in the Zulu royal court to silence Nandi for the embarrassment. King Senzangakhona’s mother, Queen Mkhabi, avers that Nandi’s persistent gripes are building up Shaka to be more than he was expected to be: “‘She is bringing him up to bewitch [thakatha] us all’.” In other words, Shaka’s rising stature is equivalent to him doing ukuthakatha (2017a, 14). This idea that an enemy or “wicked rival” could be engaged in witchcraft [ukuthakatha] survives in South African political discourse. In their speeches during the anti-apartheid struggle, activists often referred to white, pro-apartheid leaders as perpetrators of witchcraft [abathakathi] in order to encourage the different African ethnic groups in the country to take the struggle seriously and make bold sacrifices. Even Thabo Mbaki, who would go on to become the second president of democratic South Africa (1999–2008), used the expression during a speech in 1983: Speaking at a cultural conference, Thabo Mbaki exhorted his audience to remember what the Zulu king Dingaan had said when he faced the enemy: ‘Bulala abathakathi—Kill the Sorcerers.’ In these battles between ‘us and them,’ 427

— ​ P h i w o k u h l e M n y a n d u —​ the other side was portrayed as the forces of evil, as the Antichrist, as the witches and sorcerers, who had to be removed from society. (van Kessel 2000, 8) We can see here how Kunene’s epic is deeply interlaced with the workings of power. In Emperor Shaka the Great, the extent to which people are able to increase their power through ukuthakatha and fulfill their aims or those of their allies is the extent to which they are said to be practitioners of “true” uthakathi. The more improbable or unimaginable the abathakathis’ successful feats, the more they project perfection of the art. As we have seen, this idea still has relevance in contemporary life and politics.

CONCLUSION In a sense, Kunene’s classic Zulu epic is like South African “area studies” by artistic illustration rather than scholarly description. Countless details about Zulu society and the history of King Shaka manifest naturally in the epic, rather than being described in drawn-out prose rife with subjective interpretation. Commenting on his historical work on South Africa during a 1977 interview, Kunene spoke of his fear of “succumbing to the confusion arising out of a need to define” everything, resulting in “hasty definitions that…confuse us even further” (Luchembe 1977, 15). Even today, his words remain relevant. In contemporary Zulu society, decolonialization is still a serious and relevant issue. Although Emperor Shaka the Great is ostensibly about the exploits of King Shaka, the work also offers a window into Zulu society and history. As Mazisi Kunene says in his Introduction to the 1979 English edition, which also appears in the 2017 English edition, through the epic the world “may understand the dreams and realities that have shaped the destinies of the peoples of Africa” (2017a, xxxvi). Mazisi Kunene is speaking here not only of Zulu people and not only of the distant past. He is speaking of critical issues that still shape the lives of all Africans.

NOTES 1 A Zulu translation of the Bible is considered the first book in the Zulu language. It was published by the American Zulu Mission of the American Board of Commissioners in stages: the Gospel in 1835; the New Testament in 1965; and the entire book in 1883 (Hermanson 2002, 15). 2 Kunene coined the term “palm race” to denote white people or Europeans because their skin tone may be said to resemble that on the palms of Zulu people’s hands.

WORKS CITED Dube, John, Langalibalele. 1931. Insila ka Tshaka [Shaka’s bodyguard]. Marianhill: Marianhill Mission Press. Fuze, Magema. 1922. Abantu abamnyama lapa bavela ngakona [Black people and whence they come]. Self-published. Hermanson, Eric A. 2002. “A Brief Overview of Bible Translation in South Africa.” Acta Theologica 22, no. 2 (Supplementum): 6–18.

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— ​ “ I t S h a l l B e R u l e d b y S w a l l o w s ” —​ Konaté Deme, Mariam. 2009. “Heroism and the Supernatural in the African Epic: Toward a Critical Analysis.” Journal of Black Studies 39, no. 3: 402–19. Kunene, Mazisi. 1981. Anthem of the Decades—A Zulu Epic Dedicated to the Women of Africa. Exeter, New Hampshire: Heinemann. ———. [1979] 2017a. Emperor Shaka the Great—A Zulu Epic. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. ———. 2017b. UNodumehlezi kaMenzi [Emperor Shaka the Great—A Zulu Epic]. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Luchembe, Chipasha. 1977. “An Interview with Mazisi Kunene on African Philosophy.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 7, no. 2: 3–28. Mail & Guardian. 2016. “Building A Literary Legacy.” January 22. Masilela, Ntongela. 1993. “The Return of Mazisi Kunene to South Africa: The End of an Intellectual Chapter in Our Literary History.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 21, no. 3: 7–15. Mazisi Kunene Foundations and Museum (MKFM). Accessed July 30, 2022. https://www. kunenefoundation.org/index.html. Ntuli, Nokuthula. 2017. “Mazisi Kunene Poem Finally in Home Language.” The Sunday Tribune, October 22. Shongwe, Acquirance Vusumuzi. 2004. “King Dingane: A Treacherous Tyrant or an African Nationalist?” PhD diss., University of Zululand. van Kessel, Ineke. 2000. The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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CHAPTER THIRTY

L I T H O KO

C O N T I N U I T Y, C H A N G E , A N D T H E F U T U R E O F S O U T H S O T H O P R A I S E P O E T RY

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David M. M. Riep

Lithoko (praise poems) were first documented among South Sotho communities in southern Africa by European missionaries and colonial officials in the early nineteenth century. This complex performance art has been used to praise the actions, character, and social position of kings, chiefs, men of military prowess, politicians, and male initiates, and was adapted to writing in the mid-nineteenth century through the introduction of European education systems (Khati 1985, 157). Historically, lithoko were composed by both laymen and court poets (s. seroki, pl. liroki) and were performed in public fora in order to eulogize individuals, reaffirm genealogical and social bonds, and chronicle historical episodes. This essay examines South Sotho lithoko as micro-examples of epic poetry within the larger (macro) social framework of South Sotho society in the presentday Kingdom of Lesotho and the Republic of South Africa, and explores the role of lithoko in both past and present as an artform that helps shape individual and cultural identity. While lithoko have historically included many aspects typically ascribed to epic literature, including a recollection of cultural histories, accounts of extraordinary occurrences, and interactions with the supernatural, this type of oral poetry also expresses an individual’s social growth through its central role in lebollo, or the South Sotho education system that prepares one for the social transition to adulthood. Although the significance of lebollo and other cultural institutions in which praise poetry was a central component seems to be waning, lithoko continue to be an outlet for expressing and celebrating one’s constructed image of masculinity.1 By exploring the historical content, contexts, and functions of lithoko and comparing them to current examples composed at lebollo, it becomes evident that contextual shifts and the flagging popularity of historical identity-forming cultural practices have altered this oral artform and its function as a carrier of South Sotho identity in the twenty-first century.

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DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-35

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LITHOKO: HISTORICAL CONTEXTS, CONTENT, STRUCTURE, AND FUNCTION The performance of lithoko among South Sotho societies was first observed in the nineteenth century, and early documentation provides valuable insights on this form of epic poetry. Research by authors such as Eugene Casalis, Mosebi Damane, Thekiso Khati, and Daniel Kunene provides a nuanced framework for the historical contexts of lithoko, noting that such poems were composed for a marena (pl. barena, kings and chiefs), as well as bahale (“heroes,” or individuals who have distinguished themselves through extraordinary acts of valor or cultural significance) (Kunene 1971, 1; Khati 1985, 156). As such, the subject, composition, and application of South Sotho epic poetry were “not meant for the ordinary” (Khati 1985, 156). While the primary function of lithoko was to praise individual achievements of courage, valor, and fighting skill, they equally served as mechanisms to reinforce cultural affiliation and identity, as well as communal pride and consciousness (Damane 1963–1964, 42; Kunene 1971, 1). As Khati suggests, there are generally three types of lithoko, which he defines based upon both their specific content and the context in which they are performed. These include lithoko tsa marena (poems of chiefs and kings), lithoko tsa bahale (poems of warriors), and lithoko tsa makoloane (poems of male initiates) (Khati 1985, 158–59).2 While this essay is primarily concerned with the latter, it is nonetheless essential to understand the general tenor and character of information generally found in all types of lithoko in order to gain a nuanced understanding of their role in South Sotho societies. Although there are several transcribed collections of lithoko that were compiled in the early to mid-twentieth century, including Z. D. Mangoaela’s seminal Lithiko tsa marena a Basotho ([1928] 1985), there are relatively few firsthand accounts of South Sotho epic performances dating to the nineteenth century. Among early authors on lithoko, Eugene Casalis and Thomas Arbousset provide limited descriptions in their texts, which document their time spent among South Sotho communities between 1833 and 1860, and offer keen insights on the practice and context of lithoko, against which later scholars can explore notions of continuity and change. When discussing the composition of lithoko, Casalis notes that the hero himself is almost always the author and uses the performance to relate his exploits at the urging of others (Casalis 1861, 328–29). These self-narratives, he relates, were recounted in “a high flown manner,” where the author is “carried away by the ardour of his feelings, and his expressions become poetical” (1861, 329). While one must note the obvious cross-cultural context and Victorian-era ideologies that infuse the French missionary’s interpretations of lithoko, the descriptions recorded by this European observer still seem to downplay the significance of the poetic arts among South Sotho populations. Casalis’ description of lithoko “becoming poetical,” and South Sotho seroki being “poets unknown to themselves” suggest a center-periphery approach where the author seemingly relies on the parameters of European poetry as a standard of measurement (1861, 328). This is perhaps furthered by Casalis’ suggestion that “These productions offer but little variety, because the subject is always the same. The poetry of the tender passions is still almost unknown among the Basutos” (1861, 329). Yet, when approaching lithoko from a South Sotho lens, one can clearly position this artform within the realm of poetry, in spite of the fact 431

— ​ D a v i d M . M . R i e p —​ that it does not adhere to strict meter, includes flexible stanzas of varied length, and relies upon no “prescribed rules” aside from featuring content that often follows a general “statement-development-conclusion” format (Damane and Sanders 1974, 43, 52). Rather, lithoko utilize line and rhythm as organizing aspects, often featuring a series of stressed syllables within each line (typically on the penultimate syllable of any given word), thus distinguishing these poetic expressions from ordinary speech (1974, 52, 54). This absence of rhyme and meter perhaps steered Casalis’ observations, causing him to situate lithoko outside the recognizable conventions common to European poetry, while features such as rhythm and emphasis nonetheless drew his attention toward the notion that these were perhaps “real poetical effusions” (Casalis 1861, 328). When further exploring authorship and composition, historically transcribed lithoko were broadly attributed to barena and liroki, although praise poems could be composed by men of all social standing (Damane and Sanders 1974, 21–22; Mokitimi 1990, 85).3 The position of seroki was formerly reserved only for individuals of outstanding rhetorical and performative ability, and whose aptitudes were recompensed through material rewards, social prestige, and the potential for political influence (Damane and Sanders 1974, 22).4 Liroki not only performed praise poetry in honor of barena, but also often composed—either solely or collectively—lithoko for their royal retainers (1974, 18). Although one’s poetic abilities were a primary factor in allowing them to be identified as liroki, it was not performance alone that elevated individuals to such a position. Liroki themselves were often accomplished warriors who had achieved success in martial contexts, thus giving them firsthand insight of the proceedings of war and the ability to express such feats with articulate fervor (Khati 1985, 160). The performative context of lithoko was historically centered in lipitso, or communal assemblies where chiefs consulted and informed the populace on matters of public interest. Such performances could go on for several hours and were typically accompanied by gestures accentuating the poetic content and displaying martial prowess (Damane and Sanders 1974, 27; Wells 1994, 58).5 Such gestures, known as ho tlala, simulated attacks in battle, which demonstrated the heroic acts of the protagonist or author, and were in themselves an act of self-praise (Wells 1994, 58, 60). In addition to oral and gestural components, the performance of lithoko was accompanied by a variety of other accouterments, including koto (a large knobstick that was formerly used for combat), kotjane (a small knobstick that often has a spiritual function), molamu (a straight stick used for sparring and fighting), lerumo (irontipped spears), and letsoku (red ochre mixed with fat that is applied to the body and signifies a change in one’s social status).6 Although the structures of lithoko were not formally explored until the midtwentieth century through works by Kunene, and later Damane and Sanders, it is now understood that South Sotho praise poetry operates around a series of frameworks that are unique to the genre and situate lithoko within the realm of metrical expression. Based on the work of the aforementioned authors, one may arrive at the following parameters or attributes which define the general structure of South Sotho praise poetry. The first such attribute is the use of narrative vignettes or episodes arranged around a central idea, to which the poet continually returns through repetition 432

—​ L i t h o k o —​ (Kunene 1971, 53–54, 67). Such episodes are typically arranged in stanzas, which vary in number between four and six lines (Damane and Sanders 1974, 34). Each line typically consists of six syllables, which creates a structured rhythm for the performance that is not meant for the eye, but rather for the ear (Damane 1963–1964, 45; Makhoali 1985, 177). Within each stanza, one consistently finds a framework consisting of an introduction, body, and conclusion (Damane 1963– 1964, 45; Mokitimi 1990, 89). Having established this general format and content structure, we can now turn to stylistic devices that further delimit lithoko as a unique poetic model. In this regard, it is the combined use of both repetition and parallelism that truly separate South Sotho praise poetry from other verbal expressions. As stylistic devices, repetition and parallelism work together to drive content and aid in memorization. In lithoko, this is most commonly accomplished by ending a line with a specific word, and then using it to begin the following line (Kunene 1971, 70; Makhoali 1985, 177). Kunene has identified this oblique line repetition pattern with a right-to-left slant in early twentieth-century examples of South Sotho praise poems in which syntactic slots are repeated, as well as specific words, phrases, and ideas (Kunene 1971, 68, 70–71; Mokitimi 1990, 89). When exploring this repetition of words, one must also consider South Sotho word conjugation and phonological changes as such repetition typically centers on the root component of a word rather than identical usage (Kunene 1971, 69). Another central feature of lithoko is the use of eulogues (“praise names”). Eulogues are names, words, or phrases used to extoll the hero by expressing his identity, his genealogy and associates, and performative deeds and accomplishments.7 Kunene classifies four types of eulogues found in lithoko: naming eulogues (coined aliases for the hero, each inspired by a specific set of circumstances), eulogues of associative reference (where the hero is not named, but praised for his association with other people), deverbative eulogues (factual or figural actions of the hero), and descriptive eulogues (praising qualities of the hero, such as astuteness, foreknowledge, and vigilance) (Kunene 1971, 35, 44). The use of eulogues also contributes to the unique structure of South Sotho epic poetry, as lithoko often open with a reference to the hero, followed by narrative content. This eulogue-to-narrative formula is followed throughout the poem, and thus provides another example of structural repetition. These various aspects of lithoko are demonstrated in the following example from Casalis’ The Basutos (1861), which praises Goloane, the eldest son of Morena (King) Moshoeshoe I:8 Goloane is going to fight He departs with Letsie He runs to the enemy— Him against whom they murmur Him who they never obey. They insult his little red shield, And yet it is the old shield Of the ox of Tane. What! Has not Moshesh just said, 433

— ​ D a v i d M . M . R i e p —​ “Cease to defy Goloane the veteran?” However this bay be, there are horses coming. Goloane brings back from the battle A grey horse with a red one. These will return no more to their masters; The ox without horns will not be restored. To-day war has broken out More fiercely than ever… It is the war of Putsani and the Masetelis, The servant of Mohato. Goloane has hurled a piece of rockHe has hit the warrior with the tawny shield! Do you see the cowardly companions of this overthrown warrior Standing motionless near the rock? Why can their brother not go, and take away The plumes with which they have adorned their heads?.... Goloane, thy praises are like thick haze Which precedes the rain! Thy songs of triumph are heard in the mountains, They go down to the valleys, Where the enemy knelt before thee! The cowardly warriors?...They pray!... The beg that food may be given themThey will see who will give them any! Gice to our allies, To the warriors of Makaba; To those whom we never see come to attack us. Goloane returns lame from the strifeHe returns, and his leg is streaming: A torrent of dark blood Escapes from the keg of the hero! The companion of Rantsoafi Seizes a heifer by the shoulder! It is Goloane, the son of Makao, Descendant of Molise. Let no one utter any more insolence!.... Ramakamane complains-He groans—he says that his heifer Has broken his white shoulder! The companion of the brave Goloane has contended with Empapang and Kabane. The javelin is flung: Goloane avoids it skillfully! And the dart of Rabane Is buried in the earth! (1861, 329–30)

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—​ L i t h o k o —​ As is equally evident in the preceding excerpt, the conditions under which lithoko were historically composed are significant, especially when viewing the poems not only as sources of individual achievement, but also as records of broader power relations. It is for this reason why lithoko must be evaluated both synchronically and diachronically, and why contemporary audiences must be aware of the circumstances that contributed to poetic composition. C. M. Bowra perhaps best expressed this sentiment when he stated that lithoko work “in conditions determined by special conceptions of manhood and honour. It cannot exist unless men believe that human beings are in themselves sufficient objects of interest and that their chief claim is the pursuit of honor through risk” (1952, 4–5). Such risk was largely embodied through conflict and warfare which allowed barena to show their effective leadership abilities, and warriors to demonstrate their courage and martial prowess. It is against such exploits and for this reason that successful warriors historically composed praise poetry about themselves and sometimes added additional lines to existing lithoko; seroki meanwhile publicly praised successful chiefs in order to further advertise their success and garner loyalty and support from the populace (Kunene 1971, 1; Damane and Sanders 1974, 27).

LITHOKO: CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS, CONTINUITY, AND CHANGE When discussing the role of lithoko in contemporary South Sotho societies, one must be mindful of these historical performance climates and contexts in order to gain a broad understanding of the continuity and change expressed through this artform in the twenty-first century. One major factor that has impacted the content, length, and social function of lithoko is the relative absence of large-scale conflict. As Casalis states, South Sotho epic poems were primarily “inspired by the emotions of war or of the chase,” and this is seemingly confirmed by Damane and Sanders who note that most lithoko were stimulated by war and were composed during periods of reflection in the aftermath of conflict until at least the end of the nineteenth century (Casalis 1861, 328; Damane and Sanders 1974, 23; Mokitimi 1990, 83). Yet when focusing on lithoko in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is notable that individuals identifying as South Sotho, as well as citizens of Basutoland (1869–1966) and the Kingdom of Lesotho (1966–present), have only been involved in two major conflicts, namely, World War I and World War II. This shift in social and political conditions seemingly generated a creative void, as the former circumstances upon which lithoko were primarily composed were no longer extant. Several twentiethcentury scholars have observed this shift, noting that the former war-related content had largely been replaced by content centered on local crises, chiefly disputes, and personal expressions of success and wealth (Damane and Sanders 1974, 24; Mokitimi 1990, 84; Wells 1994, 57). While the notion of modern praise poetry reflecting modern aspirations should come as no surprise, one may wonder where lithoko fit within contemporary South Sotho societies, and how they continue to function as verbal expressions of personal identity and cultural affiliation? Along with a shift away from large-scale martial conflict, the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries also brought changes in political, social, and religious contexts, all of 435

— ​ D a v i d M . M . R i e p —​ which have impacted culturally relevant practices among South Sotho communities. For example, customs such as paying bridewealth (bohali), venerating ancestors, and holding local communal assemblies (lipitso), which formerly were central in shaping South Sotho identity, have been falling out of practice. This is perhaps the result of the establishment of a national identity, and changes to power structures that minimize the relevance of kingship, the role of regional chiefs, and the significance of historical cultural practices. One such practice that has arguably seen the most significant change is the institution of lebollo, or initiation into adulthood. Historically, lebollo was considered to be the most important identity-forming practice within South Sotho culture and was compulsory for all members of society (Laydevant 1952, 55). As D. Frederic Ellenberger, a missionary in the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS), states, “It, and it alone, made a (male) youth fit for marriage, to sit in the khotla (court), to take part in public affairs, and take his place among the warriors” (Ellenberger 1912, 283). In addition, it served to uphold the South Sotho system of social organization that centered around the chief, with the initiates serving as his immediate subordinates (Laydevant 1978, 7). Thus, given the socio-political implications surrounding lebollo, it should come as no surprise that early Christian missionaries largely sought to abolish this practice.9 Aside from promoting social organization, lebollo also prepared young men for adulthood by informing them about the mysteries of sexuality and marriage, and teaching them how to praise themselves, while forming a new adult identity (1952, 59–60). Although there seems to have been a general resurgence of initiation schools in the mid- to late twentieth century, this personae-forming practice is no longer compulsory in South Sotho society. In spite of this, lebollo seems to have become a primary context in which South Sotho epic poetry continues to be composed and performed.10 In order to understand this phenomenon, it is perhaps necessary to explore the various concepts and activities associated with this institution and position them as contemporary equivalents to warfare, through which South Sotho males can assert courage, bravery, and a (re)construction of their identities. Against this absence of armed conflict, one may argue that lebollo presents an appropriate context for lithoko to be composed due to the strenuous activities involved. Indeed, a focus on exploring and exploiting one’s physical and mental limits has always been a central tenet for composing lithoko, which Kunene describes as more likely to grow out of, and flourish in, conditions of life which constitute an ever-present challenge to the valour of men … It is necessary also that those who live in these conditions be only minimally equipped to cope with their hostile environment … In other words, for as long as he can barely keep his environment under control, rather than tame it and permanently establish himself as master over it, for so long does his physical prowess remain indispensable for his survival, and thus a subject for laudatory compositions. (1971, 3–4) Lebollo serves as a primary means for social rebirth, a transition accomplished through learning the secret principles of koma, which are based around established truths thought to be essential to adult Sesotho identity, as well as through enduring mental and physical trials (Wells 1994, 41; Riep 2011, 298). Equally central is 436

—​ L i t h o k o —​ instruction in the composition of lithoko, which is commenced during the initial periods of lebollo, and continues throughout the process as the initiates develop new identities through their navigation of such challenges. As verbal signifiers of one’s entry into the adult world, these praises consist of a “combination of farewells to the past... and the construction of a poetic image of one’s (new) identity” (Adams 1974, 27). In order to highlight the identity-forming aspects of lebollo, and to position the contemporary practice of this institution alongside historical contexts when epic poetry was first composed, the following paragraphs highlight some of the physical and mental trials currently experienced through the initiation process.11

LEBOLLO: DETAILING THE INITIATION INTO ADULTHOOD The initial day of lebollo is marked by a ceremony called ho phatsa (to scarify, or to make an incision). This event marks the beginning of the first phase of initiation called ho qacha (to hide oneself), which lasts between two and four weeks. During this initial event, incisions are made on the joints of the initiate’s body and are filled with medicine which serves to protect him from evil influences (Wells 1994, 43; Riep 2011). The importance of this practice was made clear to me by an informant who explained that it ensures the health of all initiates, preparing their bodies for the strenuous activities to come (Riep 2011, 302). Furthermore, this procedure serves as a mental bolster for the participants while also providing a safeguard for the administrator of the school by ensuring that no deaths occur due to poor health. During the period of ho qacha, the initiates hide out in the wilderness and receive the first teachings on koma, as well as instruction on the art of composing praise poetry (Wells 1994, 43; Riep 2011, 303). While they are in seclusion, the initiates do not have any contact with the broader public, save for their instructors, who are known as basue (s. mosue). This term, which comes from the verb ho suha, meaning, “to tan or make hide flexible,” essentially means “tanner,” or one who makes skins supple. In the same manner that a leatherworker breaks down the rigidity of a freshly dried animal hide, the basue break down the social constructs and identities of the initiates through harsh training, causing them to emerge as newly formed adult men. Following ho qacha, a ceremony known as lelingoana la macha is held to mark the beginning of the next phase of the process. This event features former graduates who sing mangae (the versions of koma songs that are acceptable for public audiences) and lithoko, while the new initiates are further strengthened by medicines (Wells 1994, 44). It is said that the songs, many of which originated in the context of war, function as prayers to balimo (familial ancestors) and assist in building up the courage of the new students, providing them with strength and perseverance during the upcoming aspects of lebollo. These songs to balimo create an appropriate atmosphere for the rite of ho lekisoa ka moriana, where the initiates consume the medicated flesh of a bull (1994, 45). At this time, the young men are called one by one and are required to kneel down with their hands behind their backs while a freshly severed foreleg of a bull is suspended in front of them. During this event, the leg sways in front of the initiates while they attempt to grasp it with their teeth and bite off a piece of the 437

— ​ D a v i d M . M . R i e p —​ medicated flesh (Laydevant 1952, 57; 1978, 13; van Wyk and Kriel 1985, 165).12 As this is occurring, former graduates stand ready with molamo, and strike the new candidates on their backs while they attempt to successfully consume the flesh (Laydevant 1952, 57; 1978, 13). According to Wells, this ceremony serves two functions: to further fortify the initiates with protective medicine in preparation for the circumcision rite they are about to undergo, and to provide a sacrifice to balimo (Wells 1994, 44). Furthermore, this activity transmits qualities such as wisdom, courage, and power from the elder men present to the candidates (1978, 14). This arduous experience is said to harden the hearts of the attendees, creating a staunch sense of courage, as well as desensitizing them. This is perhaps best understood when one considers that the sacrificial animal is alive as its foreleg is removed and is initially shown no mercy. Following this event, the singing of mangae and lithoko continues and is maintained until the moment arrives when the initiates are led away to the area where the rite of circumcision will take place. As daybreak approaches, adult men arrive from the community and divide themselves into two groups, some remaining with the candidates, while others withdraw a short distance away with the ngaka (a healer and religious specialist) and mosue. At this time, the initiates are led, one by one, according to clan seniority, to the latter group of elders where circumcision takes place. Immediately following this procedure, the adult men gather the necessary materials and construct the initiation lodge, or mophato, where the initiates reside for the duration of their education.13 As their wounds are healing, the  continued learning of koma takes place for a period of between two and six months, along with instruction in various practical skills, and the development of lithoko for the graduation ceremony.14 During this period, the initiates are each given a new name, which further emphasizes their social death and rebirth, and then becomes a repeated element in the praise poems describing their newly emerging personality (Laydevant 1952, 50; 1978, 20, 47). As the training period progresses, a wide variety of topics are explored, although historically this instruction was aimed at the initiate’s incorporation into the community and preparation for future responsibilities as family heads and warriors (Sheddick 1953, 41; van Wyk and Kriel 1985, 165). There is also significant focus on building physical endurance, including exposure to the elements, corporal punishment, and starvation, in conjunction with the memorization of cultural history and customs, songs and poetry, and the development of practical skills (Sheddick 1953, 41; Laydevant 1978, 29; van Wyk and Kriel 1985, 165). While van Wyk and Kriel suggest that current initiation teachings shy away from their former military character (1985, 165), I experienced quite the opposite, especially during the closing days of lebollo, when the initiates returned to the community, and were led in formation by the mosue, closely following his verbal commands and hand signals. Other activities during this period were meant to physically “make one supple,” including frequent floggings, cuttings on the hands, carrying hot coals, and singing and dancing for extended periods, which are collectively doled out to all of the candidates (Laydevant 1952, 59; 1978, 21–23). After sufficient time has passed for the candidates to master these new bodies of knowledge and physical development,

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—​ L i t h o k o —​ which currently ranges anywhere between three weeks and five months, the owner of the school sets a date for the return of the initiates, who are now referred to as makoloane. On the appointed day, the young men depart the mophato, leaving all of their clothing behind. Once the premises have been vacated, the mosue sets fire to the entire complex, consuming all traces of their presence. The initiates are then instructed to run toward the village from whence the initiation process first began without turning to looking back. This symbolizes the end of their childhood, which is forever gone, and the beginning of their journey as adults. As they near the community, they are met by male family members who present them with new blankets (kobo). The new kobo are placed upon the initiates in the mosenyetso manner worn by adult men, and they proceed to the village, where women and children await their arrival. Later that evening, a ceremony is held which welcomes the new adults into the community. Formerly, this served as the occasion to present the initiates to the chief or king (1978, 48). The makoloane seat themselves in the courtyard of the initiation school administrator’s home, where a feast has been prepared, and previous graduates perform songs and lithoko all night. The following morning, a large graduation ceremony takes place and each initiate, according to seniority, recites his newly composed lithoko amidst the low drone of mangae, and thus publicly introduces his new adult persona to the community (Laydevant 1952, 63; 1978, 37, 47; Wells 1994, 46). After the lithoko have been recited, the ceremony ends, and the makoloane go their separate ways to visit their respective villages, where they continue to recite their praise poems to local communities and partake in local celebrations. Having described some of the aspects of lebollo, one can begin to understand the great extent to which physical and mental endurance plays throughout the process, and how such episodes contribute to the creation of new adult identities. Enduring such treatment arguably requires courage and valor, qualities upon which lithoko were formerly based, in the context of warfare, and which are perhaps articulated obliquely in this contemporary cultural complex. Given the centrality of lithoko throughout lebollo and relative absence of praise poetry in other contexts, we can perhaps use this as a point of departure for exploring the impact of continuity and change in South Sotho epic poetry. While Wells investigated the changing role of lithoko in the mid-twentieth century, my observations of epic poetry performances in 2010 offer further insights into the function of lithoko in the twenty-first century. Whereas previous studies have described the praise poetry of new initiates as including content that seemingly follows the historical structures of lithoko, such as beginning with one’s new name, followed by expressions of the desirable qualities of one’s newly achieved adult status, in my observations I found that such verbal expressions were greatly truncated and often consisted of just a few lines composed by the performer without adherence to the historical “statementdevelopment-conclusion” format. Rather than marking one’s new status through eloquent self-expression and extensive self-definition, many initiates referred briefly to past episodes of their lives and lamented the trials of their current existence. In the following excerpts, I demonstrate this shift by first presenting a praise poem

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— ​ D a v i d M . M . R i e p —​ transcribed and translated into English by Wells in his 1994 publication, followed by a translated series of four lithoko that I documented in 2010. Insist, insist and stop them The cows of grey haired people greatly multiply The multiply like hair on the head A person killed by spears is not buried at home A person killed by spears is buried in the fields. One who drinks water from Makhalemg, water snake When it drinks water it faces the heavens. I did not sleep well last night The baboon and the owl disturbed my sleep Your child is crying, healers This time he needs the tail brush of an ox. Shangaans and Pondos you are too ambitious What do you think you could do to us Basotho? Only Basotho can crush mine rock Basotho, the experts of manual work. (1994, 53) Soloist A: Red-Eyed Thug Men were captured Men like father Lesedi What are we going to do? I ask for light The Red-Eyed Thug, what are we going to do? Soloist B: Women of Tlokweng They held my brother close to their heart They left him sick If healing was sold I could have bought him medicine Lend me some money So I can ride the bus To go home To see my parents Women of Tlokweng To ride home to see my parents Soloist C: Women explain to me, where is old granny? She went to listed to Kaludi, when singing, she used to listen to other people before All nations are crying, they’re crying because of witchcraft Nations are crying, oh nations are crying It is very difficult, what are we going to do? Oh it’s father Mahlatsi and father Sekete

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—​ L i t h o k o —​ Oh what, tell the nation of Qwaqwa Hey what father Mahlatsi and father Sekete, oh what reveal to them, the nation of Qwaqwa Women explain to me, where is old granny? Soloist D: Hey, I’m speaking to you Sotho men I am saying to you the new leader is here, Mr. Moloi Hey, what, we have been praying, we have prayed prayers Our God, pray to the older God Hey what I am speaking Sotho men, hey excellent singers, what I am saying to you Do not play with our Sotho culture Hey, your culture of initiation schools Hey, the new year has arrived Father Moloi Listen when I am praising15 As can be seen from these examples, the contemporary lithoko I observed in 2010 differ greatly from the extensive oral expressions transcribed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are truncated in comparison to examples transcribed just three decades earlier. While it may be that my experience was simply an outlier when compared to the broader practice of lebollo and the composition of lithoko across the Republic of South Africa and the Kingdom of Lesotho, the significant shift away from the contexts in which praise poems were historically composed has arguably contributed to a structural transformation within this artform. With such complexities in mind, perhaps a question that remains is, what is the future of lithoko in South Sotho society?

CONCLUDING REMARKS As verbal expressions describing deeds of valor and defining identities, lithoko not only (re)present the individual through periods of social change and advancement but also, as Damane suggests, have served as oral exemplars of great men who became the embodiment of a bright future of the culture at-large (Damane 1963– 1964, 42). Although lithoko are still being composed and performed in the twentyfirst century, the historical topics of military prowess and chiefly accomplishments have seemingly waned, while condensed expressions of contemporary issues faced by many South Sotho males have moved to the forefront. While this may come as no surprise, given the dramatic social and political changes that have affected South Sotho societies over the past two centuries, the centrality of lithoko in identityforming cultural practices nonetheless remains significant. With an absence of largescale warfare as an impetus for creative expression and the substitution of lebollo as a contemporary surrogate, lithoko composers continue to create praise poems that assert one’s personal identity and cultural affiliation in a manner appropriate for a twenty-first-century experience. In spite of this, as the practice of performing lithoko continues to change and the related histories and characteristics of past heroes are no longer celebrated,

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— ​ D a v i d M . M . R i e p —​ the historical constructs of what it means to be a South Sotho man are inherently challenged. In lieu of the changes in both content and context found in contemporary South Sotho praise poetry, the historical collections of transcribed lithoko continue to serve as reminders of past cultural achievements and constructions of identity upon which future generations may build, and with whom the new parameters of praise poetry and self-definition will be shaped.

NOTES 1 Ongoing local and global developments on defining maleness and masculinity also complicate the role and function of lithoko in the twenty-first century. In addition, while the practice of composing and performing lithoko during lebollo is limited to male initiates, female initiates learn and perform mangae (publicly accessible iterations of the sacred songs of initiation known as likoma) in which they reference temporary male names that they use throughout the initiation process. It is notable that these names are impermanent, unlike their male counterparts, and the mangae do not praise an individual’s character or announce a newly formed identity, as is accomplished with lithoko. 2 Khati notes that poems composed for chiefs and kings were typically fact-based with the primary aim of establishing genealogy and history. In a similar manner, poems composed for warriors generally focused on actual military events and achievements, whereas poems for male initiates were often not based on fact, but rather served as outlets for self-appraisal and the reimagining of one’s identity. 3 A notable exception is the female poet Makhokolotso A. Mokhomo’s book Sebabatso. 4 Such political influence is due to one’s proximity to the Morena (king). 5 Such gestures are unusual in contemporary performances. 6 For more on these objects and their significance, see Riep (2011). 7 Because eulogues essentially identify or “name” the hero through poetic means, it is necessary to understand South Sotho naming customs, in which children are given names at birth, but may accumulate additional names over the span of their lifetime. 8 Although Casalis’ original Les Bassoutos (1859) was published in French, an English translation was produced in 1861. 9 As Wells explains, PEMS established policies to abolish certain cultural practices that were central to and reliant upon chieftaincy in order to weaken chiefly authority. The church’s objection to lebollo has engrained a negative attitude toward it among the majority of South Sotho individuals. As a result, it’s become a marginalized institution, which currently tends to attract marginalized members of society (Wells 1994, 31–33). 10 While one may still find circumstances where seroki perform for barena, these contexts are typically limited to cultural celebrations. 11 While many components of lebollo are deemed secret and sacred within South Sotho society, this essay will focus on aspects for which the author was given permission to share while attending this institution in 2010, as well as published observations, which serve to further the discussion on lithoko in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 12 van Wyk and Kriel state that the flesh is cut into small pieces and fed to the initiates, rather than being suspended. 13 In some instances, the mophato is constructed before the rite of circumcision. 14 Most contemporary initiation schools in the Republic of South Africa are now condensed to a period of one month in order to accommodate school calendars. 15 These four poems were documented by the author at the concluding ceremony of an initiation school near Phuthaditjhaba, South Africa, in January 2010.

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WORKS CITED Adams, C. 1974. Ethnography of Basotho Evaluative Behavior in the Cognative Domain Lipapadi (Games). PhD diss., Indiana University. Bowra, Cecil Maurice. 1952. Heroic Poetry. London: Macmillan & Co. Casalis, Eugene. [1861] 1997. The Basutos. Morija: Morija Museum and Archives. Damane, Mosebi. 1963. “The Structure and Philosophy of Sotho Indigenous Poetry.” Lesotho: Basutoland Notes and Records 4: 41–49. Damane, M., and Peter B. Sanders. 1974. Lithoko: Sotho Praise Poems. Oxford: Clarendon. Ellenberger, D. Frederic. [1912] 1992. History of the Basuto, Ancient and Modern. Translated by J. C. MacGregor. Morija: Morija Museum and Archives. Khati, Thekiso. 1985. “Basotho Oral Traditional Poetry (Lithoko).” In Handbook on the Teaching of Southern Sesotho, edited by Ramoshebi I. Maboee Moletsane and Carmella ‘Mateboho Matsoso, 156–70. Maseru: FEP International. Kunene, Daniel P. 1971. Heroic Poetry of the Basotho. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laydevant, Francois. 1952. The Basuto. Roma: St. Michael’s Mission. Laydevant, Francois. 1978. The Rites of Initiation in Lesotho. Translated by Graham Chadwick. Roma: The Social Center. Makhoali, M. 1985. “Circumcision Poetry (Likoma).” In Handbook on the Teaching of Southern Sesotho, edited by Ramoshebi I. Maboee Moletsane and Carmella ‘Mateboho Matsoso, 171–79. Maseru: FEP International. Mangoaela, Zakea D. [1928] 1985. Lithoko tsa marena a Basotho. Morija: Sesuto Book Depot. Mokhomo, Makhokolotso A. [1958] 2000. Sebabatso. Midrand: Perskor. Mokitimi, M. I. P. 1990. “Some Perspectives of Composition, Performance and Form of Lithoko and Lifela.” In Proceedings of the Second Biennial Seminar, Oral Traditions Association of Southern Africa. 83–93. Harare: Oral Traditions Association of Zimbabwe. Riep, David. 2011. “House of the Crocodile: South Sotho Art and History in Southern Africa.” PhD diss., University of Iowa. Sheddick, V. G. J. 1953. “The Southern Sotho.” In Ethnographic Survey of Africa, Southern Africa Part II, edited by Daryll Forde. London: International African Institute. Wells, Robin E. 1994. An Introduction to the Music of the Basotho. Morija: Morija Museum and Archives. Van Wyk, J. J., and J. D. Kriel. 1985. “Inisiasie van Suid-Sothoseuns.” Suid-Afrikaanse tydskrif vir etnologie 8, no. 4: 154–66.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“MAN IS THE CENTER”

C E N T R I P E TA L P OW E R I N T H E M A L A G A S Y E P I C TA L E O F I B O N I A

rsr

Hallie Wells and Vony Ranalarimanana

Iboniamasiboniamanoro, or Ibonia for short (pronounced ee-boo-NEE), is the farthest thing from a single story by a single author. It is reappropriated not only by each teller but also by each listener. It is a story that lives on many pages, in many mouths, on many stages. There is no “true” Ibonia—though there is one nineteenthcentury version that has become the most common reference for scholars—nor does it advance a single moral viewpoint or conclusion. Rather, like a good riddle, it enables the teller to endlessly improvise within constraints, and enables the listener to make of it what they will. It is as much about human willpower as it is about the unpredictable force of disaster, as much about destruction as it is about creation, and as much about disinheritance as it is about inheritance. It is precolonial, colonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and anticolonial. It is about the dominance of Man over Nature, and about the interconnectedness of humankind with land and non-human relations. It is about masculine power and feminine power, and about the blurriness of gender. Its contradictions are as perplexing as the titular character’s name, which has multiple spellings, and references trouble, joy, light, fire, or eyesight depending on your interpretation (Noiret 1993, 171; Haring 2013, 19). In this chapter, we examine two different Ibonias: the first, which we call “V1,” is the nineteenth-century text that is the longest, most elaborate, and is the source for most translations.1 The second, “V2,” is a contemporary bilingual French/Malagasy play by novelist Michèle Rakotoson; it was adapted for the stage by theatre director Christiane Ramanantsoa and ran in multiple adaptations in Madagascar from around 2001 to 2004. Our analysis of both V1 and V2 is further enriched by informal interviews with Rakotoson and Ramanantsoa. In examining these two variants, we argue that they both paint nuanced portraits of what we call “centripetal power,” a deliberately ambiguous term that can be interpreted as a single, unified power (everything is pulled in toward the center) and as a heterogeneous power that draws strength from many sources without collapsing or erasing them.2 Through this prism, multiple forms of power collide and intersect in both V1 and V2: sovereign, biopolitical, gender-expansive, physical, intellectual, 444

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-36

— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​ verbal, divinatory, cosmological, relational (a non-exhaustive list). Neither variant advances a single story of power. As the editor of this volume notes, one of the ways the epic genre can be characterized is through its focalization of power. Other Malagasy stories are more popularly known than Ibonia, their subjects even becoming objects of ritual veneration (Burguet and Rakotomalala 2016). These stories, too, talk of power, but they are more one-note: a couple of trickster figures subverting social and legal proscriptions, or a woman whose tragic end is precipitated by her husband’s abuse of power. These are powerful tales, yet they lack the dimensions of Ibonia—the sheer scale of the characters’ superhuman power, and of the narrative that unfolds to account for this and describe its effects. While the liveliness of other stories is evident in their continued telling and in the practices of veneration that have arisen in response, the liveliness of Ibonia resides in the epic scale at which the characters’ power lives and the manifold ways in which we can attempt to interpret it. On this basis, both variants can be classified as epics—though there is no equivalent term within Malagasy categories of verbal art. It has been called both tantara (history) and angano (folktale) by Malagasy tellers and readers (Noiret 1993), and American folklorist Lee Haring (2013) argues convincingly for Ibonia’s classification within the global genre of “epic folktale.” He cites Isidore Okpewho’s definition: a tale about the fantastic deeds of a man or men [sic] endowed with something more than human might and operating in something larger than the normal human context and it is of significance in portraying some stage of the cultural or political development of a people. (Okpewho, cited in Haring 2013, 45) With a critical view of the concept of stages of “cultural development,” we might reformulate this as “a story that portrays at a grand scale some significant aspect of a society’s cultural or political concerns and relations of power.” Both variants we discuss in this chapter fit this description, though many other iterations of Ibonia would not. In the section that follows, we outline some of the key features (characters, plot lines, themes) that both V1 and V2 share, as well as where they diverge. Then, in the section “Ambiguous Centripetal Power,” we explore V1’s nuanced portrayal of the power of the “center” in the context of the nineteenth-century Malagasy monarchy’s confrontation with missionary and colonial forces. In “The Trouble with Inheritance,” we delve into inheritance as a central preoccupation of V1 that offers critical perspectives on both gender and slavery. We then turn to V2, in “Centripetal Power in the Twenty-First Century,” to examine how this contemporary telling of Ibonia situates the individual vis-à-vis modern state power. Finally, we conclude that these two variants offer complex portraits of destructive forms of centralized power alongside alternative forms that are both balanced and networked.

THE CONTOURS OF IBONIA The story of Ibonia has at least enough cohesion for us to say that it is from Madagascar, an Indian Ocean island nation of approximately 29 million inhabitants off the east coast of Africa. Given Madagascar’s multicultural history, it is not surprising 445

— ​ H a l l i e W e l l s a n d V o n y R a n a l a r i m a n a n a —​ that scholars have noted the story’s connections to Bantu, Indian, Indonesian, and Islamic folkloric and religious traditions (Ottino 1986; Rakotomalala 2015) via the presumed first inhabitants of the island, and to Biblical references via missionization and French colonization (Noiret 1993, 187–88). Given the extreme differences between variants of the story—not only in style, dialect, and minor details, but also in fundamental plot points and characters—it is impossible to summarize the plot in a way that encapsulates all variants. What unites most (but not all) stories known as Ibonia is a series of events involving a woman who cannot have a child yet miraculously does, her son’s devotion to the fiancée he chooses while still in the womb, and the formidable obstacles he must overcome in his journey to adulthood. Many of the essential characters are also found across iterations. At the center of both V1 and V2, in addition to Ibonia, is his mother, Rasoabemanana (Good/Beautiful and Rich), and a seer with divinatory powers (Ranakombe in V1, and Ravorombe, or Great Bird, in V2). Without them, there is no story. Rasoabemanana’s resolve to have a child against all odds and against Ranakombe’s counsel is what sets the drama in motion; in both variants, she does so despite being “barren,” in a miracle that upholds the critical importance of inheritance—a theme we will return to. But Rasoabemanana does not perform this miracle alone: in V1, Ranakombe facilitates Ibonia’s conception and birth. Dozens of pages are devoted to his poetic lists of possible names and attributes for Ibonia, from which the latter chooses his name.3 In both variants, this character guides Ibonia to self-actualization. Ibonia himself is, in V1, a “disaster child” (zaza loza) whose destructive force must be tamed in order for him to fulfill his purpose. This is a character who is both calamity and salvation, the epitome of male strength yet with a woman’s hands, whose nickname means “Girds His Loins Like Manly Princess” (a reference to his cousin, Manly Princess, a decidedly genderqueer character). His capacity for violence is diminished in V2: he is merely a “naughty child” (zaza maditra) who wants to forge his own path rather than follow in his parents’ footsteps. In V1, he chooses his fiancée while still in the womb, and the central problematic of the story is that he must rescue her from her kidnapper Raivato (“Stone Man”). The fiancée is still part of the story in V2, but there is no kidnapping: she just waits patiently with her mother-in-law while Ibonia goes off on his quest. Raivato, rather than being Ibonia’s rival for a woman’s affection as in V1, becomes a challenger who poses riddles and tests, which Ibonia solves through wit and good humor rather than the physical force we see in V1. V1 has become the standard reference in literary and academic circles, both within and outside of Madagascar, as it is the most detailed and most translated; it is akin to Shakespeare’s take on Romeo and Juliet—not the only version, but certainly the most referenced and containing the most flourishes. Based on its uniqueness, we have termed it a variant, diverging from Haring’s assessment whereby V1 is not a variant because it does not differ from the norm but rather is the norm (2013, 12). While V1 may have become the primary reference point for scholars, we cannot presume its normative status among oral narrators or the general public. This variant was published in Malagasy in 1877 in an influential volume of Malagasy folklore by the Norwegian missionary Lars Dahle, who writes that the story was “partly written by a native nearly fifty years ago, and as it is here printed, is taken partly from the oral communications of its possessor” (Dahle, cited in Noiret 1993, 7). Thus, if we believe Dahle, the manuscript was written by an unnamed 446

— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​ author somewhere around 1830, and was then edited and added to by Dahle himself and by the “possessor” of the manuscript, who is likely not its author. This variant became the standard reference for new editions and translations in Malagasy, French, and English from the late 1880s until today—from Rakotoson and Ramanantsoa’s (n.d.) Malagasy/French play that we consider in this chapter, to a Malagasy comic book (Tsimitoviaminandriandehibe and Tsimitoviaminandriandehibe 2008), to a Malagasy/French edition that “modernizes” the Malagasy for young contemporary readers (Rasoloarimalala Randriamamonjy 2008), to a Malagasy/Indonesian translation (Rakotomalala 2015). In 1993, French missionary François Noiret published a revised bilingual Malagasy/French version that is closer to the Dahle text, with numerous annotations explaining his changes. This version serves as the basis for Haring’s 2013 English translation, the only English version published since 1883. Not only has this variant undergone multiple revisions and iterations, but its early publishing history is also dominated by white men. We can only guess at the identities of the two Malagasy authors of this variant, but the text itself is written in a style that comprises multiple dialects, casting doubt on Haring’s assertion that the author was definitively Merina (from the ethnic group of the Central Highlands) (Haring 2013, 15).4 All Dahle tells us is that the text came from “the west of Imerina” (Dahle in Noiret 1993, 7), and while the text does evince a preoccupation with the lives of andriana, Merina nobles, this is in no way proof of the author’s own ethnic or linguistic affiliations. Noiret, for his part, recognizes the heterogeneity of the language, which he says is difficult today for those who only speak the official language [largely based on Merina], but remains relatively accessible for those who know the Malagasy dialects […] With Ibonia, we are on the solid—and so much more universal— terrain of the old Malagasy language. (Noiret 1993, 13)5 Noiret sees diachronic language change more than synchronic dialectal variance, but we clearly have reason to doubt the confidence with which Haring asserts the author to be Merina. Other non-Malagasy scholars have gone too far in the opposite direction by overlooking regional and linguistic specificity in favor of a universal interpretation, verging on syncretism, by which the story evinces a cohesive worldview spanning centuries and continents (Ottino 1986; Goetz 1993). Scholarship on intertextuality (Kristeva 1978; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Hanks 2000) has demonstrated a more careful approach that takes cross-historical and cross-cultural connections seriously without collapsing them into a singular origin or perspective. This is essential given the historical context of V1 and the polyvocality and nuance of the text itself—themes that we turn to in the following section, as we examine the ambiguity of V1’s portrait of power.

AMBIGUOUS CENTRIPETAL POWER In this section, we show how V1 portrays a network of multiple forms of power: physical, intellectual, cosmological, sovereign, biopolitical, gendered, and genderexpansive (to name just a few). V1 insists on the potency of balanced, relational 447

— ​ H a l l i e W e l l s a n d V o n y R a n a l a r i m a n a n a —​ power, illuminating both sides of the “centripetal” coin: unitary power and multifarious power. Ultimately, we argue that although V1 appears to uphold the “power of the center”—unsurprising given its historical context, which we will explore—a bit of digging reveals a more nuanced interpretation by which it is not that the center must subsume or collapse differences, but rather that centralized power can draw strength from these differences. The center is figured as the proper place of humans in the cosmos and of Ibonia’s sovereignty (Noiret 1993, 162, 168), yet its power derives from its connections to what is not the center—the non-human entities we share the cosmos with, and the spaces that form a “constitutive outside” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) to the seat of power, defining the center by existing outside of it. In V1, Ibonia incarnates both sovereign power and biopower, in Foucault’s (1990) formulation: he is a prince with the power to make live and to make die. His ability to resurrect life—though not to create new life, a power only some women have—has Christian overtones of the miraculous, but also highlights the fundamental duality of Ibonia, the creative and destructive forces he wields in a distinctly un-Christlike manner. In his brute force that ranges from destroying his neighbors’ possessions to kicking innocent people’s eyes out, he embodies the most destructive aspects of masculine power (physical aggression, in this story, is the sole domain of men). When Ibonia’s father’s response is to attempt to kill his own son, Rasoabemanana barely bats an eye—perhaps she already anticipates that her husband’s attempts to kill their son will be futile. It is only after the father’s failed attempts to stop Ibonia’s violence through further violence that Rasoabemanana intervenes, wielding the more subtle power of verbal manipulation. By questioning Ibonia’s power, she challenges him to use it in the service of human life: if he were really a man, he’d kill that crocodile that’s been terrorizing a village up north. She manipulates him into defeating antisocial monsters at each of the four cardinal points before he returns to the center, his own village. Intellectual prowess is primarily wielded by women—not only Rasoabemanana, but also her sister, Ibonia’s aunt, who plays the strategy game of fanorona with him; this skill will be essential to his defeat of his rival Raivato. For Michèle Rakotoson, the author of V2 who returned to Madagascar after many years in France, Rasoabemanana is a pivotal character who typifies Malagasy women’s strength. We follow Rakotoson in reading Rasoabemanana as a heroine who embodies multiple forms of power; further, all of the female characters advance a portrait of gender-expansive power that blends masculine and feminine qualities.6 Crucially, Ibonia’s development into adulthood does not mean becoming more singularly masculine or singularly feminine; rather, he becomes an adult through the “fusion” of the two (Ravelomanana 2018, 316). This hybrid form of power emerges as he learns the limits of masculine violence and the feminine power of creation and restoration. The village that Ibonia resurrects is ruled by his cousin Manly Princess, whose name he nearly chose for himself and whom he chose to include in his nickname (“Girds His Loins Like Manly Princess”). Her centrality in the story as a gender-expansive character demonstrates that the fusion of both masculine and feminine qualities in a single body is not seen here as aberrant but is instead an aspirational model. Ibonia strives for Manly Princess’ expansiveness, and his journey to adulthood is complete when he saves her and her village and chooses not to subjugate them, even though he could. He thus demonstrates that he has understood the value of gender-expansive power that can not only choose not to “make die,” but 448

— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​ can turn instead to the biopolitical choice to “make live” (in this case, resurrect) and, further, let live in freedom and self-determination. Note, however, that we are still in the realm of sovereign power, necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), and slavery—this is not life and self-determination for all, only for the rulers. In V1, then, we see a reformulation of sovereignty in which creative (feminine) and destructive (masculine) forms of power combine to fashion a better kind of governance and a more expansive vision of gender. This is no accident—the story was first written around the 1830s, when literal female sovereign power ruled the country: Queen Ranavalona I sought to continue her predecessor’s establishment of the Merina kingdom as the central power reigning over the entire island, through the violent subjugation of other regions. Depending on the exact date of the first V1 manuscript, the queen was either preparing to or had already begun to expel missionaries in an effort to retain control over the country against imperial forces, including Christianity. Caricatured as despotic—though we might question whether she was more so than her male counterparts, and to what extent this characterization was amplified by the missionaries and would-be colonizers she thwarted—Queen Ranavalona I would certainly have been on the author’s mind as they penned this epic tale of Merina royalty. Haring writes that “Those who heard it performed, and those who would read it, must think of the royals and nobles they knew, Radama or Andrianampoinimerina” (Haring 1993, 39); while they are indeed likely to have thought of these male founding figures of the Merina Kingdom from the late 1700s and early 1800s, Haring fails to include either of the female monarchs whose rule defined nineteenth-century Madagascar, when the manuscript was first written down and published. Further, where Haring sees “glorification” of the andriana in this tale, we question whether we can presume the author’s positive attitude toward the noble classes. In our view, the epic does not read as a straightforward glorification of the monarchy. It was written in a region fully under Queen Ranavalona I’s rule, and the author would no doubt have hesitated to directly critique the ruling classes—the queen was known for her free hand with the tangena “trial by ordeal,” in which her detractors (and anyone suspected of petty crimes, sorcery, or Christian belief) were forced to ingest the poisonous seeds of the tangena tree to prove their innocence by surviving, or their guilt by death. With this regime as the sociopolitical context of the first manuscript, we might instead consider how the epic takes andriana history as the background for a story that is ultimately about the place of humans in the universe. If it can be read on at least these two levels today, we can only imagine how rich it must have been for a nineteenth-century listener/reader, who might have heard not only these two strata but also, possibly, inside jokes about particular monarchs that are lost on us today. By 1877, when Dahle was publishing the edited version, Queen Ranavalona I’s successor, Queen Ranavalona II, had come to power and extended open arms to missionaries and other foreigners, who would respond by colonizing the country twenty years later.7 Readers of the published version would thus have had this layer of sociopolitical context in addition to that of the 1830s manuscript. But V1 does more than illuminate human power (whether sovereign or biopolitical, gendered or gender-expansive). One of the most striking aspects of V1 is the opening scene—absent in all other variants—in which the four princes of the cardinal directions, plus the Prince-of-the-Center (who will become Ibonia’s father), 449

— ​ H a l l i e W e l l s a n d V o n y R a n a l a r i m a n a n a —​ visit their Sky Father. In addition to introducing a central theme of the story—the fundamental importance of inheritance, which we will see in the next section—this scene sets up a spatial and cosmological system that recurs throughout the story. The seer Ranakombe’s superhuman powers and cosmological knowledge orchestrate Rasoabemanana’s miraculous pregnancy, which is itself only possible through her strength of will. Throughout the story, Ranakombe guides Ibonia’s parents and Ibonia himself, preparing them for the future he foresees and helping them attain it; for this, he relies on specialized knowledge. Malagasy cultures have meaning-laden practices of organizing space through reading the cosmos, which can be seen in esoteric divinatory practices such as the sikidy (geomancy) that Ranakombe references, as well as in everyday practices of arranging and using space, such as in the layout of a house (Noiret 1993, 168). Thus, while Ranakombe alone is able, through sikidy, to foresee the trouble that Ibonia will cause, and to explain to Rasoabemanana how she could conceive this child, he is not alone in his knowledge of the meanings of the cardinal directions. When Rasoabemanana dies while giving birth to Ibonia, he meaningfully turns her head to the West. Once resurrected, Rasoabemanana sends Ibonia to conquer monsters at each of the cardinal directions, a process through which he fully becomes a man. Cosmological knowledge is not limited to the cardinal directions, but extends to ecological knowledge of animals and elemental forces. Human society is firmly entrenched here as the central seat of power—Ibonia’s village and throne are located in the center of everything—but he must first explore and understand the living world around him through the challenges his mother sets for him. Ranakombe, Ibonia, and even the enemy Raivato all exhibit deep knowledge of the ecosystem surrounding them, whether through the description of a falcon, hedgehog, or lemur, or the ability to distinguish between a nourishing rain and one that portends disaster. In Ranakombe’s long list of possible names for Ibonia, many are related to animals and their characteristics, such as “Big-Winged-Male-Falcon”: “offered or not, / takes right from under the owner’s nose” (Noiret 1993, 65).8 V1 thus bears witness to the relationship between humans and the non-human world around them. In evoking this knowledge of the ecosystem, V1 offers a window onto the richness of both Madagascar’s biodiversity and its forms of knowledge about this biodiversity. This knowledge serves to support the human community in guiding and aligning their own practices. Thus, V1 underlines the value of both specialized and everyday knowledge of the cosmos, including the ecosystem and humanity’s place within it. These are powerful forms of knowledge, without which Ibonia would get nowhere (and would not even have been born). His sovereign power complements and draws from this cosmological power without erasing or subsuming it, and the journey he makes from physical force to balanced strength is only possible through this relational, morethan-human power. None of these characters are painted in an entirely positive light, and none of them wield power entirely on their own. What emerges from the text, then, for contemporary readers, is the profoundly ambiguous and relational nature of power. Ibonia in particular causes immense suffering through his flawed struggles to assert his selfhood, garner the respect of others, and achieve his desires. In his capacity for both destruction and creation, we see the expression of a worldview that cannot be easily summarized as “good vs. evil.” Rather, destruction enables creation and 450

— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​ creation ends in destruction.9 This cycle illuminates a nuanced picture of centripetal power in which sovereign and biopolitical, gendered and gender-expansive, human and cosmological all play a role. In certain respects, Ibonia can be read as a futuristic figure who, from the heart of sovereign power, embodies a biopolitics in which no death is a final end, no birth is without destruction, and true power comes from the intertwining of multiple forms of knowledge and practice. As we will see in the next section, even a seemingly straightforward “sovereign” preoccupation with inheritance can be read in a way that illuminates contemporary conundrums.

THE TROUBLE WITH INHERITANCE Though many interpretations have focused on V1 as a love story or a moral tale about the importance of monogamous marriage (Haring 1993, 185; Tsimitoviaminandriandehibe and Tsimitoviaminandriandehibe 2008), the central problem that sets off the drama is that of inheritance. Rasoabemanana does not seek to have a child because she always wanted to be a mother; rather, her distress at not having children is provoked by Sky Father’s remark that “your sovereignty [andriana-ness] is good, but there is no child who will cry” (Noiret 1993, 34). Noiret explains this in a note: “‘no child to cry’…the dead; meaning no one to bury you (burying the dead is a criterion of humanity)” (1993, 164). Here, Noiret points to a kind of boundary maintenance between human and non-human, and this is upheld in Rasoabemanana’s reaction. She cries out to her husband: Oh Prince, the possessions are gathered here and the riches are many; but only a pumpkin (child) is missing, and so boars and dogs will inherit the kingdom and the land! (Noiret 1993, 35, italics in original) We see evidence here for a resigned recognition of the mother’s role in the social contract of inheritance, particularly for royalty. One interpretation, following Mary Douglas’ (1966) foundational analysis of pollution and taboo, is that Rasoabemanana takes the boundary maintenance between human and non-human—which is implicit in Sky Father’s remark about there being “no child to cry”—to its logical conclusion. She looks at the wealth she and her husband have amassed and bursts into tears at the thought of it going to non-human creatures who do not normally participate in the practice of inheritance. But animals are not the only beings who do not bury their dead: one of the primary punishments of slavery was that enslaved people were denied the material, cultural, and psychic benefits of both burial and inheritance, and thus were relegated to the status of animals (Larson 2000; Evers 2002; Razafindralambo 2005; Graeber 2007). Enslavement did not only mean violence, ongoing hardship, and the impossibility of accumulating wealth in one’s lifetime; it also entailed, as Zoë Crossland (2018, 230) explains, being “stripped of one’s ancestral land and tomb, and removed from the flow of blessing from the ancestors.” In Rasoabemanana’s anguish at the thought of “polluted” creatures inheriting the kingdom, we should also hear a noblewoman’s fear and disgust at potentially being relegated to the rank of the people she and her husband have enslaved: denied 451

— ​ H a l l i e W e l l s a n d V o n y R a n a l a r i m a n a n a —​ participation in the practices of burial and inheritance that define the human in both life and death. Rasoabemanana’s later remarks are similarly illuminating. When Ranakombe informs her that going through with the pregnancy will bring a “disaster child” into the world, and that this child will kill her in the process, she replies: [It’s] not [even] having disaster [that] is bad, because children are the inheritors of the father. (Noiret 1993, 36)10 According to contemporary Euro-American logics, the assertion seems to make no sense. If she died she would automatically have nothing, so what does it mean that she wants to avoid having nothing even if it means her death? Yet, as Crossland reminds us, the social death of being cut out of the flow of inheritance “reverberate[s] backward and forward in time” (Crossland 2018, 230); without children to inherit the kingdom and land, there would be no one to bury Rasoabemanana and care for her in death. Her choice, then, is a death through childbirth that will only briefly interrupt her existence, as it will ensure her future as an ancestor. She chooses this over a finite childless existence that would end in nothingness, since there would be “no child to cry.” By this choice, Rasoabemanana indicates that her own obliteration is worth it, if it secures her continued belonging in the realm of the human. She puts her life on the line not for the sake of an idealistic vision of the joys of motherhood, or even a social obligation to procreate for the sake of new life, but rather to ensure her existence as a human ancestor. This is not an ecologically altruistic message—it emphasizes the essential separateness of humanity from the non-human world—but in its evocation of the true disaster of nothingness, it resonates in the Anthropocene, on the brink of planetary extinction, in profound ways. In Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, she exhorts us not to turn away from planetary disaster either in naïve optimism or in bleak pessimism: There is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference. This book argues and tries to perform that, eschewing futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively […] Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence. (Haraway 2016, 4) If we have no planet (even a dying one), Haraway reminds us, we have nothing; in the same vein, if Rasoabemanana has no child (even a disastrous one who will cause her destruction in this lifetime), she has nothing. Rasoabemanana’s ultimate preoccupation is the continuance of a vastly inequitable system of inheritance that relegates some humans to the realm of the non-human or not-quite-human, yet she evokes a philosophy that might serve us well centuries later, still “mortal earthlings in thick copresence” with a cosmos that both creates and destroys us, that we have both created and destroyed. This theme of creation and destruction is not as salient in V2, where we turn next, but there is still an attention to the intermingled centripetal networks of power between human and non-human. 452

— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​

CENTRIPETAL POWER IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Fast-forwarding from 1877 to 2001, sovereign power has disappeared in V2, as has gender expansiveness. Ibonia no longer has the power to destroy (he is not violent, only “naughty” because he wants to chart his own path), nor does he have the power to create beyond his own life. The scale of power has been reduced to the individual, and we can see the influence of Ramanantsoa’s interpretation of Ibonia as a “progressive” figure who wants to push society forward: V2 is an account of individual will, within the confines of social norms. Ibonia’s power is to create his own life, which he does by traveling the world to see what there is to see. He is the child chosen by God to inherit his kingdom—a more Christlike figure than V1’s Ibonia— but this is only mentioned in the beginning. His status is not repeatedly referenced as it is in V1, making it easier for the audience to see him as a universal figure. Although the scale of Ibonia’s power has diminished, this variant still belongs to the genre of epic by dint of its large-scale meditation on power. As in V1, Ibonia does not act alone. The seer Ravorombe possesses esoteric knowledge and a willingness to help both Rasoabemanana and Ibonia accomplish their ends. The fundamental power of his sikidy geomancy has been replaced with a chorus of people singing the sikidim-bazaha, white people’s geomancy, which cautions: Make sure that In all your decisions Man is the center. And never do evil For in all voyages There is a return. (Rakotoson and Ramanantsoa n.d., 16/19)11 This message, which blends karmic philosophy with Christian evocations of a good/ evil binary, also echoes the centripetal philosophy of V1: Rasoabemanana’s concern for inheritance that places “noble” humans at the center, and Ibonia’s peregrinations to the four corners that always lead him back to the center, the seat of sovereign human power. Similarly, in V2 Ibonia travels to the far corners of the island, where in each place he encounters a challenge he must overcome. In the beginning, Ibonia primarily pushes against the social norms of his community, where people chide his mother for being barren and tell him he is naughty for not following in his parent’s footsteps. However, the abrupt “ending” (not the true end of the play, but the last page in the manuscript) takes us up a scale. Ibonia pushes not only against the norms of his community, but also against modern global state power. In a diatribe that fuses racist Euro-American border rhetoric with French colonial bureaucratic mania and its vestiges in contemporary Malagasy statecraft, a group of police officers demand a cascade of forms of legitimacy from Ibonia: Police officers, one after another:12 ID, permit, driver’s license, taxes, dispensation from the authorities, district papers, Native tax,13 ID documents, work card, residence permit, boarding pass, landing pass, driver’s license, social security card, insurance documents, member’s card, 453

— ​ H a l l i e W e l l s a n d V o n y R a n a l a r i m a n a n a —​ federation card, Orange Card [public transit card], blue card [credit card], silver card [senior’s card], club card, high school alum, Alliance Française card,14 library card, documents… Ibonia: huh? uhh… But I’m just stopping by. I’m just coming to see what I don’t know. I promise to go back to my [fiancée] after. Police officers: yeah, right! That’s what they all say. You think we’re idiots? Tell that to the others: illegal immigrant, bandit, dispossessor, eater of other people’s bread, impoverisher, tugger-from-the-bottom, useless mouth, savage, Businessman… (Rakotoson and Ramanantsoa n.d., 23) Against this vitriol, Ibonia’s attempts to account for himself are all the more poignant for their naivety: what Malagasy person would dare tell a French border agent that they were just visiting to see what there was to see, out of curiosity? In Ibonia’s frank response, we see a glimmer of the absurd violence through which French tourists can indeed travel to Madagascar to quench their curiosity, while a Malagasy person in France is pre-figured as part of a mass of threatening “savages.” It may seem that with V2 we’ve left behind the realm of epic and are now in a bildungsroman, in which Ibonia embarks on a quest toward adulthood and personal fulfillment. We argue that, although the scaffolding has changed—we are no longer in the nineteenth century, and modern state power has replaced sovereign power— this is still an epic, because it seeks to give an account of power at a grand scale. Ibonia’s quest for a selfhood that would make him worthy of his fiancée is one that takes him not from one battle to another but from one discovery to another, illustrating challenges that many Malagasy and non-Malagasy viewers could relate to: the tensions between self and society, and between self, society, and state. If Rakotoson and Ramanantsoa seem to assert that the power of individual will and curiosity will win out, one might be tempted to think that this is a distinctly twenty-first-century take. But one might also think back to nineteenth-century Ibonia and remember his announcement, from the womb, of his engagement to his fiancée, flouting all societal conventions (and developmental ones, no less). This, indeed, is how Ramanantsoa read V1, which in turn inspired V2: Ibonia as a progressive figure, pushing against the boundaries of convention both then and now. Both Ibonias are intertextual and cohesive, particularized and universal, cosmological and personal. They are epic in their scale-shifting, reminding us that the layout of a single house replicates the cardinal directions of the entire universe, that one character’s search for meaning in a challenging world can illustrate multiple quests in multiple social worlds across the known universe, and that scalability of imagination is perhaps the greatest human power.

CONCLUSION We have seen how V1 and V2 portray divergent visions of power. V1 was first written during a period when a protectionist queen had consolidated power across the island; it was published during the reign of a second queen whose attempts to establish reciprocal relations with foreign powers ended in disaster. In V1, where 454

— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​ sovereign power is both upheld (through inheritance and slavery) and nuanced (in the ambiguous portrayal of destruction), we see how power is ultimately networked, never the product of a single entity or emanating from a single source. Equilibrium is found in the center—where humans have their proper place while drawing on relations with and knowledge of non-human entities, and where both feminine and masculine qualities can meld. In V2, the center is similarly a source of power, a place one returns to after voyaging elsewhere. This is the center that calls Rakotoson, the Malagasy writer, back from France, and where she finds strong, positive roles for women. It is, we imagine, the place Ibonia returns to, to reunite with his love as he does in V1. Whether the monsters he faces are crocodiles, giants, or French border agents and their many doppelgangers, Ibonia reminds us that we never fight alone. Rigidly destructive power can only be met with flexible, multifarious power embedded in a lifeworld that recognizes balance—whether in gender relations, in our “thick copresence” with the non-human entities who share our planet, or in our dealings with the vast and intimate cosmos.

NOTES 1 The “1” signifies only that it is the first text we examine here, not that it is the oldest or most significant. 2 The term “centripetal power” has been used in political science to refer to a model of governance for ethnically divided societies (see Horowitz 1985); there are connections to our discussion here, but we intend a rather different meaning. 3 These sections are hainteny, a form of dialogic verbal poetry. See DomenichiniRamiarimanana (1983) and Fox (1990). 4 The Merina ethnic group of the Central Highlands subjugated in various ways, including through enslavement, other ethnic groups across the island in the 1800s, resulting in a centralized royal power that was legible as a sovereign state to foreigners such as British missionaries. In 1897, French colonizers overthrew this sovereign state and exiled the ruling monarch at the time, Queen Ranavalona III, to Algeria. 5 All translations are ours unless otherwise noted. 6 See Palmer (2021) for an account of gender expansiveness in contemporary Madagascar. 7 Two different monarchs reigned between Queens Ranavalona I and II, but neither lasted more than five years; in contrast, Queen Ranavalona I reigned from 1828 to 1861, and Queen Ranavalona II, from 1868 to 1883. The latter shared the throne with her husband, the Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony. 8 Here we draw on Haring’s translation (2013, 75), with modifications. 9 The material effects of this philosophy are explored in different contexts by Zhang (2023) and Crossland (2014), both of whom examine the role of destruction through fire in creating new sociopolitical possibilities in Madagascar. 10 Rasoabemanana repeats this line later, replacing “father” with “land” (Noiret 1993, 60). 11 Pagination reflects ambiguity/duplication in the original manuscript. 12 Bolded text is Malagasy; the rest is French. 13 This is an approximate translation. The original (hetra isan-dahy) means “per-man tax,” dating from the French colonial period when most Malagasy people were forced to either perform manual labor or pay a “per-person tax” (hetra isan’olona) to the colonial administration (R.C. 2008). 14 A network of French cultural centers backed by France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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WORKS CITED Briggs, Charles, and Richard Bauman. 1992. “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 2: 131–72. Burguet, Delphine, and Malanjaona Rakotomalala. 2016. “Héros de légende, héros de culte: La fabrique populaire du récit.” Cahiers de littérature orale 79. Crossland, Zoë. 2014. Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar: Material Signs and Traces of the Dead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. “‘I Make This Standing Stone to Be a Sign’: Material Presence and the Temporality of the Trace in Highland Madagascar.” In Time and History in Prehistory, edited by Stella Souvatzi, Adnan Baysal, and Emma L. Baysal, 229–49. London: Routledge. Domenichini-Ramiarimanana, Bakoly. 1983. Du ohabolana au hainteny: Langue, littérature et politique à Madagascar. Paris: Karthala. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Evers, Sandra J. T. M. 2002. Constructing History, Culture and Inequality: The Betsileo in the Extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar. Leiden: Brill. Foucault, Michel. 1990. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, translated by Michael Hurley, 135–59. New York: Vintage Books. Fox, Leonard. 1990. Hainteny: The Traditional Poetry of Madagascar. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Goetz, Joseph. 1993. “Introduction: Réflexion d’un historien des religions sur le conte d’Ibonia.” In Le mythe d’Ibonia, edited by François Noiret, 15–24. Antananarivo: Foi et Justice. Graeber, David. 2007. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hanks, William. 2000. Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance, and Context. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haring, Lee. 2013. How to Read a Folktale: The Ibonia Epic from Madagascar. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Horowitz, Donald L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1978. Sēmeiōtikē: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Larson, Pier Martin. 2000. History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11–40. Noiret, François, ed. 1993. Le mythe d’Ibonia. Antananarivo: Foi et Justice. Ottino, Paul. 1986. L’étrangère intime: Essaie d’anthropologie de la civilization de l’ancien Madagascar. Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines. Palmer, Seth. 2021. “Divine Monarchy, Spirited Sovereignties, and the Timely Malagasy MSM Medium-Activist Subject.” GLQ 27, no. 1: 61–84. R. C. 2008. “‘Hetra isan’olona’.” Madagascar Tribune, March 13. https://www.madagascartribune.com/Hetra-isan-olona,5375.html. Rakotomalala. 2015. Anganon’Ibonia any Indonesia – Cerita Ibonia di Indonesia. Self-published. Rakotoson, Michèle, and Christiane Ramanantsoa. n.d. Ibonia. Unpublished manuscript.

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— ​ “ M a n I s t h e C e n t e r ” —​ Rasoloarimalala Randriamamonjy, Esther, ed. 2008. Iboniamasiboniamanoro. Antananarivo: Trano Printy Fiangonana Loterana Malagasy. Ravelomanana, Jacqueline. 2018. “Les animaux dans le mythe d’Ibonia: Les expressions d’un idéal masculin.” Revue Historique de l’Océan Indien 15: 315–24. Razafindralambo, L. N. 2005. “Inégalité, exclusion, représentations sur les Hautes Terres centrales de Madagascar.” Cahiers d’études africaines 45, no. 179–180: 879–903. Tsimitoviaminandriandehibe, M’aa, and Xhi Tsimitoviaminandriandehibe. 2008. Iboniamasiboniamanoro: Ny lalàm-bady mahafaty. Antananarivo: Ivo-Kolo CEMDLAC. Zhang, Mingyuan. 2023. “Burn to Harvest, Burn to Sabotage: Between Fire and Water on a Sugar Plantation in Madagascar.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 1: 100–11.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I N S E RV I C E O F A U T H E N T I C I T Y EPIC IN CENTRAL AFRICA UNDER COLONIALISM

rsr Jonathon Repinecz

The notion of an African epic has a fraught history. An academic debate emerged in the 1970s over whether oral heroic narratives collected in Africa ought to be considered as epics. There were two catalysts to the debate: the publication of Soundjata, ou l’épopée mandingue by Guinean historian D. T. Niane in 1960 (translated in 1965 in English as Sunjata: An Epic of Old Mali); and British folklorist Ruth Finnegan’s famous assertion that “epic hardly seems to exist in sub-Saharan Africa” (1970, 108). Following the international popularity of Niane’s Soundjata, there arose a whole generation of folklorists, historians, and anthropologists who aimed specifically to rebut Finnegan’s statement, a tiny passage in her otherwise celebrated monograph Oral Literature in Africa. Among the questions raised by the wealth of scholarship that the controversy generated: How should we classify the abundant oral literature, including heroic songs and narratives of various lengths, that have been collected on the African continent? Is the notion of “epic” even relevant to Africa, or is it merely a European construct? If we are to speak of an African epic, should we base the discussion on perceived similarities of a given oral text to the Homeric poems? Or should we base it on the pioneering work of Lord (1960) and Parry (1971) on the issue of orality in southeastern Europe? Ought the legitimacy of African epic to be established through comparison with Europe at all, or should it be defined solely with reference to African material? What is at stake if critics deny the existence of epic in Africa, when it has been taken for granted in other parts of the world since the nineteenth century? As this debate unfolded, pro-epic Africanists wrote with passion. They saw it as their mission to counter a certain colonial stereotype according to which Africans were too primitive to produce anything great, let alone anything in the noble genre of Aristotle. In this vein, Brunhilde Biebuyck and Boniface Mongo-Mboussa highlighted a few colonial-era authors who had denied the existence of epic in Africa outright: Henry Louis Morgan, Hector Munro Chadwick, Nora Chadwick, and Cecil Maurice Bowra (2004, 5). Against this critical tradition, a pro-epic argument was quickly identified with an antiracist moral stance. What was at stake was not just the scientific classification of literary forms, but a desire to prove the cultural 458

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-37

— ​ I n S e r v i c e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y —​ equality of Africa with other parts of the world. This seemed all the more vital in the context of an early independence era that was hopeful but tragically disappointing. Finnegan herself, recognizing the controversy that her original argument provoked, later reversed her position (2012, xxxi–xxxii). However, as I have argued in my book (2019), colonial attitudes toward African epic were far more varied than the above summary would suggest. Focusing on the case of French West Africa, I showed how colonial writers—typically administrative agents doubling as amateur ethnographers, working in the field with the help of interpreters—were well aware of the presence of oral heroic narratives being performed by specialized bards among the people they administered. They did not hesitate to use the words épopée or épique, comparing West African traditions like Sunjata and Samba Gelajo Jegi to the Homeric classics and the French chansons de geste. But this comparison was inevitably framed in racist terms, almost always explaining away the existence of apparently rich literary cultures in Africa to an ancient influence of non-Black races among the so-called primitive Blacks. The most common explanation for this supposed foreign influence was the Hamitic myth, a now discredited notion of racialized diffusionism with roots in medieval appropriations of Biblical legend. According to the myth, the descendants of an ancient migration of light-skinned peoples from the Middle East formed, at some point in history, a superior race in “dark” Africa. These light- and dark-skinned races were said to descend from the sons of Noah, who cursed the descendants of his son Ham, condemning them to wander Africa, whereas the descendants of his son Shem were said to include Abraham, the people of Israel, and, later, the Arabs. For colonial writers in French West Africa, the possession of epic located given African communities on a racialized hierarchy of civilizations: if ethnic group X had epic, then it must have attained a higher degree of civilization through relative proximity to whiteness via an ancient non-Black influence. As such, colonialism—which was never a single, coherent ideology—did not always, or even generally, deny the existence of African epic. In French West Africa, colonial agents recognized it more often than not. Nevertheless, they interpreted African epic according to an ideology that served to justify Europe’s own sense of being at the top of a hierarchy of races, and, by extension, the colonial enterprise itself. In this chapter, I would like to extend the study of colonial approaches to African epic to Central Africa, specifically to the contexts of the Belgian Congo and Rwanda, the latter of which was a German territory until being ceded to a Belgian mandate after Germany’s defeat in World War I. These settings provide a fascinating counterpoint to the case of French West Africa. Whereas the Hamitic myth was omnipresent in colonial understandings of Rwandan oral literature—with genocidal consequences that still reverberate to this day—in Congo, the question of a hierarchy of civilizations, though present, was less pronounced. The promotion of Congolese epics, especially by an enthusiastic trio of Flemish priests of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart—Gustaaf Hulstaert, Edmond Boelaert, and Albert de Rop—working near ex-Coquilhatville (now the city of Mbandaka) from the 1920s on, served to construct ethnic categories that would render vast, proteiform African populations more understandable, governable, and amenable to evangelization. They saw the Lianja epic, which they published in multiple versions, as the foundation of a pan-Mongo ethnic heritage and language that could serve as a cradle for the reception of the Gospel. 459

— ​ J o n a t h o n R e p i n e c z —​ As elsewhere in Africa, the colonial intellectual tradition gave way, beginning in the 1950s, to a younger generation of professional scholars whose work contemporary academics still rely on. The voice of reference on Congolese epic in EuroAmerican academia would become that of Daniel Biebuyck, a Flemish linguist and art historian who, following years of fieldwork in Congo between 1949 and 1961, established his reputation as a professional Africanist. He is perhaps best known for his work on the Mwindo epic of the Nyanga people of the Kivu provinces, near Congo’s eastern border, which he and Kahombo C. Mateene published in a bilingual English-Kinyanga format in 1969. They had collected this text from a performer named Candi Rureke, a friend of Biebuyck, in 1956. Mwindo has achieved greater success on the “world lit” stage than Lianja, having been reprinted several times, translated (from English) into Japanese and partially into Hungarian, and (from Kinyanga) into Lingala, Dutch, and French.1 It has been the subject of numerous studies in comparative literature. Lianja, by contrast, exists only in the publications of the Sacred Heart priests, plus one additional French translation that Joseph Esser claimed to have collected in 1946,2 and an English translation collected in 1984– 1985 by Mubima Maneniang; both of the last two editions are rare (Esser 1957; Maneniang 1999). Far more than the missionaries themselves, whose intellectual influence was limited beyond colonial circles, it was Biebuyck, his collaborators, and students who brought Central African texts into the professional debate over African epic sparked by the reaction to Ruth Finnegan after 1970. In what follows, I present an overview of how colonial commentators approached the issue of oral epic in Rwanda and the Belgian Congo. I begin with the case of Rwanda, touching on its historical traditions and royal and pastoral poetry as candidates for inclusion as epics. I then turn to Congo, focusing on the case of Lianja and the Mongo, as promoted by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. Finally, in a coda, I survey the emergence of professionalized epic studies in Congo toward the end of colonialism thanks to Daniel Biebuyck, with Mwindo and the Nyanga taking center stage. Thus, this chapter is more about the development of “epic studies” through the case of Central Africa than it is about the Central African epics themselves. Colonial discourse used the notion of an African epic to justify its own agendas, often claiming a sense of ownership over the oral traditions it presented while effacing the individuality of performers as well as, pointedly, any trace of anticolonial sentiment, preferring to make broad claims about collective “native” psychology or identity. By recognizing how colonial writing invented the idea of an African epic, we can better grasp the epistemological violence that European colonization of literary history effected on the people who produced these literatures. At the same time as it ushered African cultural products into worldwide visibility in ways that strove to promote favorable images of the “Dark Continent,” it systematically effaced and appropriated the voices who had created them. Contemporary students of comparative literature must acknowledge the racialized dimensions of this discipline’s origins in colonial letters, the better to decolonize it today.

RWANDA AND THE HAMITIC MYTH In their survey of precolonial Rwandan courtly genres, André Coupez and Thomas Kamanzi distinguish between two types of oral literature in the country. The first, 460

— ​ I n S e r v i c e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y —​ they write, is “popular, spontaneous, and anonymous,” being “composed of fables, songs, proverbs, riddles, etc.” (1970, 1). The second is “the literature of the court, the domain of the Tutsi social class which ruled the country from time immemorial until the recent establishment of a republic” in 1962. Unlike the popular genres, which are “still flourishing,” the authors flatly declare that “Tutsi literature is dead.” The Tutsi courtly genres had been consigned to history by colonialism, the abolition of the monarchy, the advent of democracy, the rise to power of the Hutu majority, and with it, the erasure of Tutsi supremacy. The problem of Hutu and Tutsi identities, a determining issue during the turbulent years between the 1959 social revolution and the events of 1994 officially named the “Genocide against the Tutsi,” is therefore a key element in Rwandan literary history, as it is in Rwandan history in general. The precolonial kings and aristocracies were Tutsi, wielding the right to own and herd cattle as a symbol of their power. In contrast, the Hutu were supposed to be growers and peasants. Whereas the Rwandan courtly genres were identified with the Tutsi nobility, the popular genres were, and are, shared by all Rwandans—a heritage common to both Hutu and Tutsi. Both groups, including their various lineages and subgroups, have long spoken the same language and adhered to the same religious system. The history of these now hyper-polarized identities is complex and has been studied at length. Importantly, before colonialism, the categories were more fluid than they would become in the twentieth century. The first German colonists, arriving at the end of the nineteenth century, interpreted the already visible animosity between Hutu and Tutsi as “racial hatred” (Rassenhaß) when they observed the oppressive system of forced labor (ubureetwa) imposed on Hutu lineages by the last precolonial king, Rwabugiri.3 The great error of this interpretation was its ahistoricity: although a patron-client relationship based on inequality between Tutsi and Hutu had been centuries in the making, the sentiment of Hutu alienation that the Germans encountered was still recent, not a product of time immemorial. A nineteenth-century antagonism was frozen in time by German and, later, Belgian colonial administrations into a rigid binary marked not only by belief in Tutsi racial superiority, but also by a notorious system of labels included on official identity cards after 1932. In the colonial logic, the Tutsi were thought to be of Hamitic or Nilotic—foreign, less Black—origin, whereas the Hutu were thought to be Bantu, that is, a member of the “real” sub-Saharan race. All of these terms—Hamitic, Nilotic, Bantu—were used scientifically to describe language groups; the last two are still used by linguists, though today “Hamitic” has been replaced by “Afroasiatic.” During the colonial era, these terms carried heavily racialized, extralinguistic overtones. Speakers of particular language groups were classified into civilizations that could be ranked by order of evolutional advancement, radiating outward from a light-skinned cradle in North Africa or the Middle East—such as ancient Egypt, the Holy Land, Mesopotamia, or Arabia—toward the dark-skinned masses south of the Sahara. The dark-skinned Bantu were thought to have mixed, in some cases, with more evolutionally advanced, light-skinned, Hamitic invaders, giving rise to “less Black” races (like the Tutsi) who were supposed to be superior to “blacker” ones (like the Hutu). In the case of Rwanda, Hamitic origin theory suggested that the Tutsi had descended from light-skinned eastern ancestors who adopted the Bantu language of Kinyarwanda when they invaded and united what would become the Rwandan kingdom around the fifteenth century. 461

— ​ J o n a t h o n R e p i n e c z —​ Nilotic, which was also used to describe the Tutsi, had a similar set of overtones. It harkened back to Europeans’ nineteenth-century obsession with finding the southernmost source of the Nile River, a quest that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the subsequent European enthrallment with the glory of the Pharaohs. Following rivers and tributaries upstream from Lake Victoria, which itself feeds the White Nile, Rwanda would come to be suggested as a possible “source of the Nile.” Thus, the term Nilotic is in a way parallel to Hamitic, for it emphasized a supposed connection of the Tutsi to other, more advanced civilizations, especially those along the Nile. The people of these civilizations, especially Egyptians, were typically imagined as lighter-skinned than the “Africans” or “Bantu” of the sub-Saharan forests. Given this background, we can appreciate the highly racialized assumptions coloring the idea of “epic” in colonial discourse. Albert Pagès, a French priest of an order known as the White Fathers stationed in Rwanda, writes about the precolonial Rwandan kingdom: Their great men are nothing less than extraordinary beings who bend the forces of nature to their will. They are epic heroes [héros d’épopées] whose acts, from the cradle to the tomb, are marked by the fantastic. To honor and sing their Hamitic princes, the Banyarwanda have dramatized the most common actions, those least worthy of admiration, by making use of linguistic embellishments and rhetorical figures.4 (1933, 230) The recognition of epic is simultaneously celebratory and condescending, praising “extraordinary beings” as the stuff of these stories while dismissing the performance style itself as hyperbolic. The passage explicitly connects the epic-ness of Rwanda’s heroes to their supposedly Hamitic origins. The term even figures in the title of the book, Un Royaume hamite au centre de l’Afrique (A Hamitic kingdom in the center of Africa). Pagès goes on to compare the “Homeric struggles” of King Ruganzu II Ndori, a major subject of Rwandan heroic narrative who ruled in the early seventeenth century, to “the epic romances [romans épiques] left to us by the Middle Ages” (1933, 230). Once again, however, he dismisses the value of this literature on the grounds of the hero’s “treachery, cruelty, and perfidy…despite bravery exhibited on scattered occasions,” concluding that “apparently the Blacks see in all this nothing other than heroic grandeur.” This author’s celebration of African epic is only possible because it is tinged with racist condescension. Paradoxically, later scholars have been far less committed to the notion of a Rwandan epic than was this early colonial commentator. The Rwandan (Tutsi) historian Alexis Kagamé, also a priest and a specialist of courtly literature, does not use the word “epic” to refer to traditional oral genres, preferring the broad categories of war poetry, pastoral poetry, and dynastic poetry (1969, 329–31).5 It is to a subgenre of war poetry, ibitéekerezo or “heroic war poetry,” that the narrative cycle about Ruganzu II Ndori described by Pagès belongs. Kagamé’s pioneering work on Rwandan oral literature was foundational for later scholars. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that he—a product of colonial education—readily accepted the Bantu/ Hamitic racial theory as an explanation for Hutu/Tutsi difference, whereas Jan Vansina, the eminent Flemish historian who succeeded him as the dean of precolonial 462

— ​ I n S e r v i c e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y —​ Rwandan studies, dismissed it (Kagamé 1972b, 19–33; Vansina 2005, 138). Coupez and Kamanzi largely follow Kagamé’s three generic categories of courtly literature, adding a few minor ones of their own (1970, vii–ix). Strikingly, in spite of his silence on “epic,” Kagamé always uses the word aède or aoidos, a technical term referring to singers of ancient Greek epic, to refer to Rwandan performers of oral tradition. Vansina, for his part, uses the word “epic” once that I know of in a Rwandan context, in passing, to describe ibitéekerezo. He does not make much of it: for him, Ruganzu II Ndori is “the protagonist in an epic story, the hero of a great cycle of marvelous tales, some of which are endowed with great formal beauty” (2005, 44). Yet, it is the Kinyarwanda ibitéekerezo or the simple English “Rwandan historical narratives” that Vansina generally prefers. Thus, although the question of epic has continued to be hotly debated in other parts of Africa, the issue seems to have petered out in the case of Rwanda. This is doubtlessly due to the association of kings, heroes, and royal courts with Tutsi domination, the memory of which was a major pretext for the 1994 genocide. A certain animosity between the Belgian André Coupez, who, as noted above, in the spirit of republicanism had declared Tutsi literature “dead,” and Kagamé, a Tutsi specialist of the precolonial court with personal connections to it before its abolition, highlights the sensitivity of the subject (Kagamé 1972a). Indeed, the Hamitic/Nilotic vs. Bantu mythology that European colonists fabricated continues to enflame conflicts in Central Africa, as communities claiming autochthony compete with neighboring groups by casting them as invaders and, therefore, racial foreigners.6

BELGIAN CONGO: BAMANYA AND BEYOND The Hamitic myth was far less present in colonial ethnology of the Belgian Congo than of Rwanda. Colonial authors generally saw the Congo Basin as a domain inhabited by Bantu and Batwa (Pygmies) who had, for the most part, escaped the influence of intercontinental migrations, except at the edges.7 A trio of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart at Bamanya, Equateur province, who celebrated and promoted the Lianja epic—Gustaaf Hulstaert, Edmond Boelaert, and Albert de Rop—were more interested in Christianizing the populations around them and in codifying the Lomongo language than they were in theories of racial diffusionism. Specifically, this group labored to codify Mongo identities and dialects, including under this ethnolinguistic umbrella a large swath of peoples of northwestern Congo speaking more or less related languages. Hulstaert penned bilingual Lomongo-Dutch and Lomongo-French dictionaries, seeking to establish a standardized language that could be used in missionary education (Vinck 1980). The task was complex, as the peoples they tried to unite used varying terms to name themselves that did not necessarily correspond to how others named them. Nor did they, until missionary education had taken its effect decades later, share a sentiment of pan-ethnic identity or even shared language: “The ‘great Mongo people’ is a pure product of colonial anthropology; on the ground, Mongo groups are really very diverse” (Gryssels, cited in Tshonda 2016, 10). Nevertheless, this colonial invention did not stop Mongo-ness from becoming a reality that, as in so many parts of Africa, would come to serve as an idiom to express struggles for power and resources in a context of extreme precarity. A team of contemporary experts declare matter-of-factly that, in the postcolonial 463

— ​ J o n a t h o n R e p i n e c z —​ period, “Mongo identity feeds conflict in Equateur,” the province of the Democratic Republic of Congo where this ethnicity is concentrated and where the Sacred Heart missionaries worked (Tshonda 2016, 11). Buttressed by secular ethnologists, the Sacred Heart priests wrote about an overarching Mongo or “Nkundo/Mongo” people comprised of two main subgroups, the Mongo of the north and the Nkundo of the south.8 In a parallel way, they spoke descriptively of the Lomongo, Lonkundo, and “Lonkundo/Lomongo” languages or dialects, which they tried to unite in writing as a “standard Lomongo.” Nevertheless, the Lianja, which they repeatedly described as the “national epic” (nationale epos or épopée nationale) of this people, was only known in an apparent patchwork of communities: not all so-called Mongo groups could be said to perform it.9 Lianja, first published in a Dutch version by Boelaert in 1934, tells of the quest of the eponymous hero, a child prodigy born in miraculous circumstances, accompanied by his sister, to avenge their father by conquering the indigenous forest-dwellers and leading their people to settle by the Congo River. Over the next five decades, the three missionaries would publish multiple versions of Lianja in Dutch, French, and the original Lonkundo/Lomongo, typically compiling distinct performances into composite texts.10 They saw this work as part of a wider effort to Christianize the Mongo people by drawing on, rather than disdaining or suppressing, indigenous culture and language. This agenda was both practical and idealistic. It was necessary to have a standardized language so that Europeans, especially missionaries, could speak to the colonized in “their” languages without becoming ensnared in dialectal differences or being forced to settle for “intertribal” linguae francae like Lingala in the west or Swahili in the east, which Hulstaert saw as impoverished (Hulstaert 1953, 243). At the same time, an ethnolinguistic essentialism colored the undertaking, since “for Hulstaert an African should show every definitional feature of his ethnic group. If this was not the case, he was in need of help” (Van de Velde 1999, 285). Hulstaert’s long list of publications on Mongo language and literature, continued over the decades by his two colleagues, is credited with the creation of “the” standard Mongo language, as well as of having planted the seeds of Mongo identity.11 It is in this context that Boelaert and de Rop heavily promoted the Lianja as a “national epic.” De Rop, reviewing these efforts in 1955, described Lomongo as a “language of culture” (cultuurtaal), arguing there was a wealth of accomplishments in the language and that it was superior to the de-ethnicized trade languages that were taking root in the cities. They believed that “languages of culture”—that is, standardized regional tongues—could better serve Congolese missionary education by appealing to ethnic groups’ deep, unique cultural repertoires in order to guide them to the light of Christ and away from the social turmoil of mid-twentiethcentury colonial Africa. They saw said turmoil as stemming at least in part from cultural alienation. For these reasons, de Rop would write in 1975 that the Sacred Heart fathers had had dedicated themselves to “the service of authenticity…long before certain slogans came into fashion” (1975, 26, 30). This was a not-so-veiled reference to Mobutu Sese Seko’s post-independence doctrine of authenticité, under which the dictator attempted to ban certain forms of European cultural influence in Africa: in addition to renaming Congo Zaïre, he obliged citizens to replace Christian names with African-sounding ones—he himself had been born Joseph-Désiré—and famously outlawed neckties. These would-be measures of self-affirmation only 464

— ​ I n S e r v i c e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y —​ served, in fact, to distract the public from political violence during the autocrat’s 32-year grip on power. As such, authenticity was not just a postcolonial ideology in Congo; it was a colonial one, as well. It had historical roots in Europe, harkening back to the romantic essentialism of German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, and, farther back, to the Herderian volk or folk.12 Historian Flavien Nkay Malu expresses the connection between Mongo essentialism and the rising tide of twentieth-century Flemish ethnonationalism wittily: “The Flemish slogan ‘Be Flemish, you whom God made Flemish’ found among the Mongo, under the influence of Father Gustaaf Hulstaert, as its local translation, ‘Be Mongo, you whom God made Mongo’” (2004, 359). In the case of the Mongo, language unification worked in tandem with ethnic labeling and, perhaps surprisingly, literary classification, via the naming of Lianja as a national epic, to create an essentialized unit of identity to which many communities from a wide region could be said to belong. Not only did this project a European style of nationalism in the colony, but it also served to construct a basis for colonial policy recommendations. The pages of Aequatoria, a journal created by Hulstaert, were filled not just with treatises on Mongo identity, but with anxiety over Mongo depopulation due to low birth rate and exodus to the cities. The Sacred Heart group’s brand of authenticity called for a certain kind of return to tradition, but one that was colonially and religiously correct: life centered on the village, the mission, and the monogamous family; on the mother tongue and the ethnic nation; and on availability for rural labor.13 Indeed, depopulation in the 1930s was the result of increased agricultural and infrastructural corvée labor policies as the Belgian Congo struggled to increase exports during the global Great Depression. The Mongo’s fields were depleted; laborers were exhausted and therefore vulnerable to disease; and they had no time to sustain themselves through customary farming or hunting (Nelson 1994, 174). Many villagers fled to the cities to escape these conditions, sparking major social changes associated with urbanization. This wave of depopulation followed an earlier one around the turn of the century under the mass atrocities under Belgium’s King Leopold II known as Red Rubber. In the face of all this, Hulstaert attributed, incredibly, mid-century depopulation among the Mongo to a decline in African morals, specifically “harmful practices introduced during the war of 1914–1918 by Mongo soldiers supported by foolish Europeans” (1961, 4)—an apparent reference to sexual deviance and contraception. The colonial ideology of authenticity can thus be read as a call for a return to moral order, under the guise of “tradition” via the Lianja epic among other prescriptions, in order to keep the pews filled and the demand for cheap rural labor met. Yet, this ideology was not the only force at work in the rise of epic studies in Congo. The Bamanya group was well aware of earlier work on the Mongo, some of which they wrote against. Particularly noteworthy was the evolutionism of Hermann Baumann, a German anthropologist who would become a Nazi during World War II, serving as the Reich’s strategist for the retaking of Germany’s lost colonies. Baumann had seen in the Mongo an exceptional civilization in Central Africa, attributing its uniqueness to traces of a northern or “Sudanese,” i.e., non-Bantu, influence. This was especially the case regarding the epic-ness of Lianja, “whose style,” he notes, “seems to indicate a foreign provenance and recalls the key features of the epics of witches and heroes of the Western Sudan” (Baumann and Westermann 1948, 206). 465

— ​ J o n a t h o n R e p i n e c z —​ Lianja, for him, was a set of “strange, thoroughly un-Bantu myths” (Baumann 1936, 104). For Baumann, the kinship between Lianja and the kingdoms of West Africa is related to putative Mediterranean—i.e., non-Black—roots, and by extension, to their ancient cousins, the Greek epics (Baumann and Westermann 1948, 83). Interestingly, Albert de Rop specifically rebutted Baumann’s claim to non-Bantu Mongo origins in an unpublished paper, probably written in the 1940s or 50s, entitled, “Are the Mongo and their Lianja Sudanese?” For him, the answer is clearly no: the attribution of this epic to a Mediterranean source seems to strike him as an offense against the Mongo’s Bantu, or African, authenticity (de Rop n.d., 9).

CODA: THE FLOWERING OF THE FIELD Beginning in the 1950s, African epic studies in Belgium gradually transitioned from a field of mostly amateur missionaries to one of the secular professionals. De Rop, the youngest of the Bamanya trio, obtained several degrees in African languages and ethnology between 1953 and 1956 at Louvain. Nevertheless, his work never outgrew its commitment to a Christian missionary agenda or, for that matter, its indebtedness to his elders, Hulstaert and Boelaert, both of whom were amateur scholars whose expertise came from their years in the service of their flock. The work of the Rwandan diocesan priest Alexis Kagamé and the Flemish Jesuit Gaston (Vaast) Van Bulck, both of whom also had formal doctoral training, continued this intermediate phase of Catholic professionalization. But it was the anthropologist Daniel Biebuyck and the historian Jan Vansina, both Flemings born in the 1920s, who would lead Congo and Rwanda studies out of missionary hands. Both made their careers in the United States: Vansina at the University of Wisconsin and Biebuyck at the University of Delaware. Biebuyck, in particular, picked up on the Sacred Heart group’s interest in epic studies and turned his efforts to collecting, translating, and publishing the Mwindo narrative of the Nyanga. Known as a small human being of astonishing strength, Mwindo is “the destroyer of evil forces, the savior of a people, a generous leader”; he has “fabulous gifts” and “powerful…supernatural allies” (D. Biebuyck and Mateene 1969, 11). Common themes in this epic include Mwindo’s “miraculous birth” and “conflict with the father”; “the aid of maternal uncles and the maternal aunt, the alliance with the animals, the friendship with the Pygmies, the Herculean tasks imposed by the divinities,” and “the ascent and/or descent of the hero to the supernatural realm” (1969, 19). The hero’s narrative as performed by Candi Rureke and recorded by Daniel Biebucyk and Kahombo Mateene in 1956 would become the best-known and most-studied text of all Congolese epics. It brought Central African material directly to bear on the debate ignited by Ruth Finnegan: Biebuyck argued, in response to her, that Mwindo “admirably fit the standard definition and characterizations of epic literature” (1978, 3). In addition, a number of lesser-known works from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo have also been put into print. Biebuyck himself had previously published a description and summary of “Mubéla: an Epic of the Lega” in a Flemish periodical in 1953. His and Mateene’s anthology of oral Nyanga literature includes the “Epic of the Young Girl Káhindo Ngarya,” which, though shorter than Mwindo, belongs to the same Nyanga genre, kárisi or heroic narrative 466

— ​ I n S e r v i c e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y —​ (D. Biebucyk and Mateene 1969, 11–15; 1970, 24–47). Over the years, a number of scholars, Congolese and foreign, have published epics from several of the country’s regions, often under the guidance of Biebuyck and Mateene: Mbidi Kiluwe of the Luba, Lofokefoke of the Mbole, Kudukese of the Hamba, and Wabugila of the Lega, among others.14 In sum, today, it is no longer possible to doubt the existence of African, or Central African, epics. Setting aside the exceptional case of Rwanda, scholarly consensus on the issue is settled. Epic traditions from Nigeria, Gabon, Cameroon, the Swahili coast, and the southern tip of the continent have all been published and studied (Belcher 1999, 27–57). Nor is it acceptable to explain these genres away by attributing them to non-Black influence, or to dismiss them as signs of a putative Black primitivity. Tragically, contemporary conflicts show that it is catastrophic to attempt to freeze oral literary genres and other perceived ethnological traits in time as signs of hierarchized ethnic or racial identities. Though they usually recognized African epic as epic, colonial ethnographers undertook all of these strategies—denial, foreign attribution, dismissal, and fixation—in hopes of framing African accomplishments in such a way as to justify white supremacy, domination, and racism. Although African heroic narratives deserve to be celebrated, taught, and read as marvelous contributions to world literature, their history in colonial letters illustrates a paradoxical, dangerous side to the Euro-American obsession with the meaning of epic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Brunhilde Biebuyck, Birgit Ricquier, and Benoît Henriet for their generous feedback on this chapter, as well as Honoré Vinck for his archival assistance. All translations are my responsibility alone, though I was graciously helped with Dutch by Yèmi Sosanwo and with German by Justin Ward.

NOTES 1 Regarding Hungarian, Szilárd Biernaczky translated several passages from Mwindo in a general article on African epic (1983). For translations in the other languages, see D. Biebuyck and Mateene (1974, 1983, 2001, 2002). 2 De Rop doubts this claim, accusing Esser of having plagiarized Boeleart (1958, 176–77). The accusation seems all the graver since Esser was a fellow Catholic missionary of the Lazarite order. He left religious life around 1950 to marry. 3 For this general account of Hutu-Tutsi history, see Mamdani (2001, 59–71). On racial hatred specifically, see Vansina (2005, 138). 4 For reasons of space, I have translated all quotations from French, Dutch, and German, the relevant colonial languages, into English. 5 Curiously, Kagamé only uses the words épopée and épique to describe a work of his own creation, La divine pastorale (1973), a long, written poem in which he seeks to combine several of the Rwandan court subgenres in a Christianized account of creation and history. 6 See Scherrer (2002, 337–38), Eltringham (2006), Rutazibwa (2013), and Shacklock (2021). 7 Notable exceptions to the general theme of the Congo basin’s historical isolation were the Portuguese-influenced Kingdom of Kongo (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries), European trade near the mouth of the Congo River, and the Atlantic and Swahili slave trades.

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— ​ J o n a t h o n R e p i n e c z —​ However, none of these phenomena were thought to have provoked migrations on the scale of the supposed Hamitic or Nilotic dispersals across Africa. 8 Among the most influential published works were Van der Kerken (1944), Sulzmann (1947), and Westermann (1948). 9 Van der Kerken (1944) catalogues a long list of Mongo groups and subgroups, noting individually whether each one knows the “legend of Lianza.” 10 See, among others, Boelaert (1934, 1954), de Rop (1959, 1964), and Hulstaert (1985). Because these authors were so prolific, I encourage the interested reader to consult the extremely detailed bibliographies that have been compiled on each one. On Boelaert, see de Rop (1967); on Hulstaert, see Vinck (1980, 1993); and on de Rop, see Coppieters (2003). 11 See, for example, how Hulstaert describes his mission of “language unification” (taaléenmaking) in his letters (De Boeck and Hulstaert 1941, 20; Van de Velde 1999, 286). 12 On Frobenius, see Repinecz (2019, 16–20). His notion of paideuma or the soul of a civilization is close to the essence of the volk theorized by eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (Frobenius 1921; Bauman and Briggs 2003, 163–96). 13 Hulstaert paradoxically writes that he is against forced labor but in favor of corvée in cases of necessity (1944, 161). 14 See the bibliography in B. Biebuyck (2004, 119–20), as well as Jacobs and Vansina (1956), and Studstill (1984, n.d.). Biebuyck (1976) offers summaries in English of many of these narratives, including Mubéla, which he collected in the 1950s, but never published.

WORKS CITED Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baumann, Hermann. 1936. Schöpfung und Urzeit des Menschen im Mythus der afrikanische Völker. Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer/Andrews & Steiner. ———, and Diedrich Westermann. 1948. Les peuples et les civilisations de l’Afrique. Translated by Lilias Homburger. Paris: Payot. Belcher, Stephen. 1999. Epic Traditions of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Biebuyck, Brunhilde. 2004. “Bardes et épopées héroïques: Un aperçu pour la République Démocratique du Congo.” In special issue, Griot réel, griot rêvé. Africultures 61, no. 4: 109–20. ———, and Boniface Mongo-Mboussa. 2004. Introduction to special issue, Griot réel, griot rêvé. Africultures, no. 61, no. 4: 5–12. Biebuyck, Daniel P. 1953. “Mubéla: Een epos der Balega.” Band: Tijdschrift voor Vlaamse Kultuurleven 12, no. 11: 68–74. ———. 1976. “The African Heroic Epic.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13: 5–36. ———. 1978. Hero and Chief: Epic Literature from the Banyanga (Zaire Republic). Berkeley: University of California Press. Biebuyck, Daniel P., and Kahombo C. Mateene. 1969. The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga (Congo Republic). Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1970. Anthologie de la litterature orale nyanga. Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. ———. 1974. Elombé Mwindo: Mwána-Zaïre wa tángo ya bakoko. Translated into Lingala by Boguo Makeli, Kahombo C. Mateene, and Tingbo Zongo. Lubumbashi: Éditions du Mont Noir. ———. 1983. Nyanga no mukashibanashi. Translated into Japanese by Keiko Kusunose and Atsuko Furomoto. Kyoto: Dōhōshashuppan.

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— ​ I n S e r v i c e o f A u t h e n t i c i t y —​ ———. 2001. Mwindo de zwoeger: Een epos uit Congo. Translated into Dutch by Daniel P. Biebuyck and Kahombo C. Mateene. Rijswijk, Netherlands: Elmar. ———. 2002. Mwendo: Une épopée nyanga. Translated into French by Mihaela Bacou and Brunhilde Biebuyck. Paris: Classiques africains. Biernaczky, Szilárd. 1983. “Hősi epika Fekete-Afrikában.” Afrikanisztikai Hírek 2, no. 8: 3–33. Boelaert, Edmond. 1934. “Nsong’a Lianja: het groote epos der Nkundo-Mongo.” Congo: Revue Générale de la Colonie Belge 1, no. 1: 49–215. ———. 1954. “Nog over het epos van de Mongo: Hoe hij heldenzanger werd.” KongoOverzee 20: 289–92. Coppieters, Jean Pierre. 2003. De bio- en bibliografie van Dr. Albert doe Rop, m.s.c., of Nooit de moed opgeven. Asse, Belgium: Heemkring Ascania. Coupez, André, and Thomas Kamanzi. 1970. Littérature de cour au Rwanda. Oxford: Clarendon Press. De Boeck, Egide, and Gustaaf Hulstaert. 1941. “Epistolaria.” Aequatoria 4, no. 1: 19–20. De Rop, Albert. 1959. “Het epos van de Nkundo Mongo.” Band: Tijdschrift voor Vlaamse Kultuurleven 18, no. 3: 107–12. ———. 1964. Lianja: L’Épopée des Mongo. Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. ———. 1967. “Bibliographie [analytique du Père Edmond Boelaert].” Bulletin des séances de l’Académie royale des sciences d’outre-mer. Annuaire 1967. Vol. 1, 171–87. Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer. ———. 1975. “In dienst van de autenticiteit.” In 50 jaar in Zaire: Missionarissen van het H. Hart, 26–30. Borgerhout, Belgium: Missionarissen van het Heilig Hart. ———. n.d. “Les Mongo et leur Lianja sont-ils des Soudanais?” Unpublished manuscript. Borgerhout, Belgium: Archives of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. Eltringham, Nigel. 2006. “‘Invaders Who Have Stolen the Country’: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide.” Social Identities 12, no. 4: 425–46. Esser, Joseph. 1957. Légende africaine: Lyanza, héros national nkundo. Paris: Presses de la Cité. Finnegan, Ruth. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford Library of African Literature. London: Clarendon Press. ———. 2012. Oral Literature in Africa. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Frobenius, Leo. 1921. Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre. Munich: Beck. Hulstaert, Gustaaf. 1944. “Corvées et prestations.” Aequatoria 7, no. 4: 161. ———. 1953. “Lingala-invloed op het Lomongo.” Zaïre. Revue Congolaise 7, no. 3: 227–44. ———. 1961. Les Mongo: Aperçu général. Tervuren, Belgium: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale. ———. 1985. Het Epos van Lianja: Epiek en lyriek van de Mòngò. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Jacobs, John, and Jan Vansina. 1956. “Het koninklijk epos der Bushong.” Kongo-Overzee 22: 1–39. Kagamé, Alexis. 1969. Introduction aux grands genres lyriques de l’ancien Rwanda. Butare, Rwanda: Éditions Universitaires du Rwanda. ———. 1972a. “Réponse au pamphlet boomerang de M. André Coupez.” Butare, Rwanda: Université Nationale du Rwanda. April 7. https://francegenocidetutsi.org/ KagameCoupezDispute.pdf. ———. 1972b. Un abrégé de l’ethno-histoire du Rwanda. Butare, Rwanda: Éditions Universitaires du Rwanda. ———. 1973. La divine pastorale: La naissance de l’univers. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus. Lord, Albert Bates. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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— ​ J o n a t h o n R e p i n e c z —​ Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maneniang, Mubima. 1999. The Lianja Epic. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Nelson, Samuel Henry. 1994. Colonialism in the Congo Basin, 1880–1940. Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies. Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 1960. Soundjata, ou l’épopée mandingue. Paris: Présence Africaine. ———. 1965. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett. London: Longman. Nkay Malu, Flavien. 2004. “Missionnaires belges et recherche ethnographique au Congo.” In Anthropologie et missiologie: XIXe–XXe sicèles. Entre connivence et rivalité, edited by Olivier Servais and Gérard Van’t Spijker, 341–70. Paris: Karthala. Pagès, Albert. 1933. Au Ruanda sur les bords du Lac Kivu (Congo belge): Un royaume hamite au centre de l’Afrique. Brussels: G. Van Campenhout. Parry, Milman. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Edited by Adam Milman. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Repinecz, Jonathon. 2019. Subversive Traditions: Reinventing the West African Epic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Rutazibwa, Privat. 2013. “Genocide and Media.” Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center. https://francegenocidetutsi.org/RutazibwaGenocideAndMedia.pdf. Scherrer, Christian P. 2002. Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass Violence, and Regional War. Westport, CT: Praeger. Shacklock, Thomas. 2021. “Genocide Emergency: The Banyamulenge of the DRC.” Genocide Watch. September 3, 2021. https://www.genocidewatch.com//single-post/ genocide-emergency-the-banyamulenge-of-the-drc. Studstill, John. 1984. Les desseins d’arc-en-ciel: Épopée et pensée chez les Luba du Zaïre. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Research Scientifique. ———. n.d. Trois héros luba: Étude d’une épopée congolaise. Publisher unknown. Sulzmann, Erika. 1947. “Die Mongo: Studien zu einer regionalen Monographie.” PhD diss., Universität Wien. Tshonda, Jean Omasombo, ed. 2016. Équateur: Au coeur de la cuvette congolaise. Tervuren, Belgium: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale. Van de Velde, Mark. 1999. “The Two Language Maps of the Belgian Congo.” Annales Aequatoria 20: 475–89. Van der Kerken, Georges. 1944. L’ethnie Mongo. 2 vols. Brussels: G. Van Campenhout. Vansina, Jan. 2005. Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Vinck, Honoré. 1980. “Bibliographie de l’oeuvre scientifique du Père Gustaaf Hulstaert.” Annales Aequatoria 1: 13–57. ———. 1993. “Addenda et corrigenda de la bibliographie de G. Hulstaert.” Annales Aequatoria 14: 392–400.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

FEMALE LEADERSHIP A N D N AT I O N B U I L D I N G

THE WEST AFRICAN EPICS YENNENGA A N D S A R R AO U N I A

rsr

Mariam Konaté The Nigerian novelist and critic Isidore Okpewho defines oral epic as fundamentally a tale about the fantastic deeds of a man or men endowed with something more than human might and operating in something larger than the normal human context and it is of significance in portraying some stage of the cultural or political development of a people. (1979, 34) In Okpewho’s definition, only men are thought to engage in heroic actions; heroism is carved out as a male domain from which women are completely absent. The failure on the part of Okpewho and other male critics of African or epics to accurately portray the significant social, economic, and political roles women have played in their societies, and as reflected in their epics, is at the root of the exclusion, marginalization, and objectification of women in African epics. Another critic Joseph Mbele underscores this point when he writes, Feminist consciousness has yet to be integrated into the study of the African problem and has several roots and dimensions. The scholars have based their studies on epics whose heroes are male, and this, in turn, is because the research tradition is guided by a male-oriented concept of epic. In addition, the scholars have used male-centered and male-oriented conception of heroism, leaving out female characters who might embody different forms of heroism. The scholars have not even envisaged the possibility of the existence of what we might call female heroism. (2006, 62) It is clear from Mbele’s comments that he understands the fact that African women have always played pivotal roles in their societies. As many oral epics show, women have been role models, advisors, and diplomats—powerful women who negotiated alliances, maintained family and community alliances, conducted public debates, DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-38

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— ​ M a r i a m K o n a t é —​ and managed political affairs (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969; Kunene 1979; Mamani 1980; Bekeredemo 1991; Hale 1996; Niane 2006). For example, in the Ozidi Saga, the hero Ozidi gets all of his formal training in the mastery of the supernatural from his grandmother, Oreame, who is well versed in sorcery and witchcraft. Ozidi would not be able to win many battles if it were not for the supernatural help of his grandmother (Bekeredemo 1991, 27). Yet, many people do not consider Oreame the hero of this story, even though she is the one who uses her magical powers to build Ozidi up and make him victorious. Similarly, in the epic of Sundiata (also spelled “Sunjata”), the protagonist Sundiata inherits, from his mother Sogolon Kedjou, supernatural powers that propel him on an extraordinary path (Niane 2006, 8). Only seeing female characters in traditional gender roles paints women as subservient, passive, and totally dependent on their male counterparts. Consequently, women are relegated to less important roles, even when they are crucial to male heroes’ success. Addressing the male critics who have downplayed heroic women in African literature in general, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole writes, “most male writers continued to fictionalize women as objects or mirror characters that are vehicles for fostering a world of male heroism” (1997, 79). According to Kolawole, the portrayal of women in African literature “has suffered from incomplete, falsified or distorted theorizing” (1997, 67). As a result, in African epics composed by men, a world preoccupied with male titles and female kettles gives way to the milieu where male heroes and anti heroes still dominate the scene in spite of social change. Women punctuate the men’s stories but remain in the periphery of social impact. (111–12) Such depictions of women portray them as lacking agency and power. In Mbele’s words, “One of the aspects we are conditioned to fail to acknowledge is the heroic roles of women. Downplaying or failing to acknowledge these roles is an integral part of the way we conceptualize and interpret the African epics” (2006, 63). Almost all African epics are written from a patriarchal and male-oriented perspective, as all the actions of bravery, war, nation building, and leadership are led by men. Indeed, culturally determined beliefs about women have been used to not only justify their status as second-class citizens in a male-dominated society, but to also usurp their agency and limiting their ability to express themselves in the full range of their human complexity. Women are marginalized and their contributions, which are critical in aiding male heroes in achieving and maintaining power, are simply undervalued and discounted. As Mbele says, “Without the biases and conceptual limitations, we would see, clearly, the heroic roles women play in various epics, both African and non-African” (2006, 63). Kolawole explains these biases and limitations this way: “Much of the documentation of African women’s passivity emerges from lack of cultural contextualization [because] the concept of power and visibility are not universal but depend on cultural variables” (1997, 68). Although examples of African women who accomplished great heroic feats abound, written epics that underscore women’s essential contributions and elevate them to the stature of heroes are rare. In the few African epics where women’s heroism is overtly established, 472

— ​ F e m a l e L e a d e r s h i p a n d N a t i o n B u i l d i n g —​ women still have to measure up to male standards, instead of female ones. Mbele explains this as the result of a mindset that has conditioned us to conceptualize heroism and leadership as fundamentally male. In his words, As audiences, students, and researchers, we focus our attention on the male figure: we do not pay much attention to the role of the woman. We do not value the women’s roles as much as we do the men’s roles. The stories may talk explicitly about women’s roles, actions, and contributions, but these do not register in our minds the same way men’s roles, actions and contributions do. We have eyes and ears but we are conditioned neither to fully see nor to fully hear the female characters. (2006, 61) There is no doubt that a lacuna exists in previous research on African epics; there has been a failure to explore powerful female leaders in African epics on par with their male counterparts. This chapter seeks to fill in that lacuna and move beyond scholarship overly focused on male heroes. I do this by exploring the relationship between gender and power in the lives of two iconic female leaders: Yennenga of the Mossés (present-day Burkina Faso) and Sarraounia of the Aznas (present-day Niger). I analyze the contexts and structures in which these powerful historical figures lived to reveal lessons about female leadership. My main contention is that women’s roles are instrumental in African oral epics even in those with male protagonists, and moreover, that there are powerful female protagonists in African oral epics who have been overlooked in previous scholarship. I argue that this oversight of women’s leadership in African oral epics is mainly due to the gender bias of scholars who only see leadership in male terms. This study seeks to remedy this problem and effect a paradigm shift in our conceptualization of female leadership in African oral epics by drawing on Adrienne Maree Brown’s theory of feminine leadership (2017). In this chapter, I examine Yennenga in oral literature, and Sarraounia in Abdoulaye Mamani’s 1980 novel titled Sarraounia: Le drame de la Reine Magicienne (Sarraounia: The drama of the Magician Queen), based on oral and written epic accounts, to vividly demonstrate the contributions of these remarkable women.

PRINCESS YENNENGA: A SKILLED WARRIOR OF THE MOSSÉ PEOPLE In this section, I discuss the heroic character Yennenga, who was also a historical person, although we have few historical details about her as she lived nearly a millennium ago. Yennenga was a princess from a kingdom in what is now Burkina Faso, a small landlocked French-speaking country in the heart of West Africa. The oral epic of Princess Yennenga simultaneously recounts the origins of the Mossé people in present-day Burkina Faso. According to legend, there was a ruler called Naba Nedega who lived at Gambaga in present-day Ghana and reigned over the Dagomba, Mamprusi, and Nankana peoples. He had a daughter called Yennenga, whom he taught the art of riding horses and how to use weapons from a very young age, so she grew up to be a great warrior. She was exceptionally skilled with javelins, spears, and bows. Yennenga was an also extraordinarily skilled horsewoman. Legend 473

— ​ M a r i a m K o n a t é —​ has it that she was more skilled in riding horses than her brothers. She was such a fierce and skilled warrior that her father named her the commander of her own cavalry and took her with him to the battlefield. Yennenga helped her father win several wars. When she came of age to marry, Yennenga’s father was very reluctant to grant her permission to marry her because he wanted to continue utilizing her skills in battle. But we know from the oral literature that Yennenga did in fact have a strong desire to get married. As a result, Yennenga fled Gambaga and rode toward the North, where she met and married a man called Riallé, who according to some traditions was the son of a Mali chief, and according to others was a Busansi hunter. The couple had a son, whom they named Ouedraogo (Stallion) in honor of the horse that had carried Nyennega on her flight to the North. A few years later, Nyennega sent Ouedraogo to Gambaga to visit her father, give him news of her marriage and family, and seek his aid. Nedega welcomed the child and cared for him until he was ready to return to Busansi territory. As a farewell present, he gave Ouedraogo four horses and fifty cows. When he left Gambaga, the young man was accompanied by Dagomba horsemen who had seized the opportunity to leave their crowded homeland. Along with his warriors, Ouedraogo skirted his father’s village and invaded Tankourou (present-day Tenkodogo). Mossé bards relate that Ouedraogo and the Dagomba horsemen intermarried with the Busansi women and that their unions gave rise to a new group of people called the Mossé. Elliott Skinner relates that Ouedraogo thus became known as the progenitor of the Mossé people, and his mother, Nyennega, as their progenitrix (1989, 7–8), although in the oral epics themselves, Princess Yennenga herself is referred to as the mother of the Mossé people. To this day, she is still venerated as a national heroine in Burkina Faso. One reason Naba Nedega did all he could to discourage his daughter from getting married may have been that in the traditional government of the Mossé, the ruler was less concerned with the welfare of his daughters than that of his sons. Their marriages seldom benefited the political system. As a matter of fact, the marriage of a royal princess into another family often strained the relations between her husband and the ruling lineage. The reason for this was a differential in status: as wives, women had low prestige in Mossé society, but as relatives of the Mogho Naba (head of the Ouagadougou), they enjoyed high status. This contradiction made it difficult for them to accept their low status as a wife. Consequently, they often clashed with their husbands and tried to exert dominance over the women and co-wives in their compound. Since few Mossé men tolerated strife within their household, these noble wives often withdrew from their husband’s home and established one of their own (1989, 51). Despite the dilemma that royal Mossé women found themselves in after marriage, it appears that in Yennenga’s case, the main reason Naba Nedega refused to accept his daughter’s wish to marry was that she was an indispensable player in her father’s political regime. He was motivated more from a desire to keep Yennenga close to help maintain the stability of the kingdom, than a fear of potential marital strife, especially if her husband was not from a royal family. Naba Nedega exercised his paternal authority over his daughter, and refused to honor his daughter’s wish. That Yennenga challenged her father’s decision speaks volumes about her strength and determination. She took her destiny in her own hands and married against her father’s 474

— ​ F e m a l e L e a d e r s h i p a n d N a t i o n B u i l d i n g —​ wishes. She sought fulfillment in marriage in a society where marriage, especially that of a princess into a non-royal family, was revolutionary. She felt empowered by her decision to marry and have children, not out of adherence to the (obligatory) institution of marriage, but because that is what she really wanted in her life. She saw marriage as a path to freedom and self-actualization rather than as a trap, leading to an unfulfilled life of oppression, subordination, and unrealized dreams, as it certainly was the case for many other women of her era. Moreover, Yennenga used what many consider conventionally “feminine” attributes—nurturance, resilience, etc.—to disrupt the established social and political order. She also used diplomacy to her advantage in order to re-enter her father’s good graces after having run away many years earlier. She sent her first born son to her father as the means to reconnect with her father and even received economic and military help from him. This allowed her son to wage more battles and found his own kingdom, which in turn led to the birth of the Mossé people. In doing all of this, Yennenga wisely repaired the rift between her and her father, and Naba Nedega sincerely appreciated her gesture of respect. Yennenga played a crucial role in the creation story of the Mossé people. In this regard, Yennenga holds great significance not only in the genealogy of the Mossé people, but also in the oral literature of Burkina Faso, as Joyce Hope Scott explains: Among the Mossé—the dominant ethnic group of the country—perhaps no one woman is more outstanding and important historically than the Princess Yennenga, known for her might as a military leader of the cavalry of her father, Moogho Naaba. (1997, 85–86)

QUEEN SARRAOUNIA MANGOU: QUEEN OF THE AZNA PEOPLE In his novel Sarraounia: Le drame de la Reine Magiciéne, Abdoulaye Mamani tells the story of the Azna people of eastern Niger from their own perspective, not from the point of view of the French colonizers. The Azna people are a subgroup of the Hausa ethnic group, who are geographically located in present-day eastern Niger, specifically in the villages of Lougou and Bagagi. The story of Sarraounia as told by Mamani takes place in Lougou. Sarraounia is a Hausa name that means “queen” or “female chief.” According to Tidjani Antoinette Alou, the name Sarraounia is also used to “designate various functions of female leadership. Among the Azna of Lougou, Bagagi, and surrounding Hausa villages and towns of the Mawri grouppredominantly animist until recently…This title refers especially to a female lineage that held non-centralized political and religious authority” (2009, 42). Sarraounia’s role is religious, and she is believed to ensure the continuity between the world of the spirits and the world of the living through the art of divination. The title “Mangou” refers to the Sarraounia who was queen of Lougou during the brutal French colonial expedition led by Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine in 1899. (Bertho 2019, 83–84). She is said to have put up the strongest armed resistance to the French colonial army at the Battle of Lougou in 1899. The French army massacred men, 475

— ​ M a r i a m K o n a t é —​ women, and children. They raped women, destroyed villages, and burned animals alive. Although Sarraounia is celebrated as an icon of the African resistance in the oral tradition of the Aznas, she was an obscure figure in the literary and political scene in Niger prior to the publication of Mamani’s novel in 1980. It was only after this novel was published that Sarraounia became a national heroine and the history of her resistance to French colonial occupation was incorporated in the school curriculum (2019, 41–42). Commenting on Mamani’s mission as a writer, Elara Bertho states that he uses “writing to rehabilitate a history thought of as national…[and as a] postcolonial strategy of seizing fiction to react to the dominant [colonial] discourse” (2016, 387). This act of subverting colonial history might explain in part why Mamani underscores the important role that Sarraounia’s alleged mastery of supernatural powers—she was said to be well versed in witchcraft—played in her winning a psychological victory against the Voulet-Chanoine expansionist endeavor. According to Chanoine, one of the French captains, “A sorceress queen that heals is not common” (2016, 18). In fact, Sarraounia is referred to as “la Reine Magicienne” (“the Magician Queen”) on Mamani’s 1980 book cover. In Mamani’s novel, we learn that Sarraounia’s father, Serkin Aznas, was a great warrior who, on several occasions, defeated Tuareg invaders from the North. Sarraounia’s mother died while giving birth to her. When Sarraounia’s mother died, there was no other woman in the Azna kingdom who was nursing. Luckily, Dawa, her father’s friend and confidante, had a mare who had just given birth a few days earlier. Sarraounia’s father allowed Dawa to take the infant with him and have the mare nurse her. After a few months of nursing Sarraounia with mare’s milk, she survived. Growing up, Sarraounia formed an unusual loving bond with the mare that nursed her. Her spiritual father Dawa also developed a special relationship with Sarraounia. Indeed, Sarraounia’s upbringing was extraordinary in two remarkable ways. First, her mother died giving birth to her, and in the context of nineteenth-century Africa, she would not have survived if it were not for Dawa’s mare whose milk saved her life. Second, a male leader (Dawa) raised her—a baby girl—­something that was unheard of in the history of the Aznas (Mamani 1980, 22). Dawa was a healer who was well versed in the healing power of plants. He taught Sarraounia the secrets of the healing power of plants and certain wild animals. He raised her like a son and taught her how to hunt and fish, and how to find edible fruits and plants in nature. As her adoptive father and mentor, Dawa taught Sarraounia many life lessons, including how to maintain relationships with men. He instilled in her the firm belief to never be submissive and subservient to a man. He taught her to defy traditional, hierarchical gender roles that placed women at the bottom of the social ladder. He told her that, “when the time comes, [she] will know man as her servant and not as her master; [that] the male will be for [her], an instrument of ephemeral relaxation and pleasure and not an arrogant and selfish lord” (1980, 23). Sarraounia would have two lovers, Baka, a noble warrior, and Gogué, a bard and musician who is referred to as Sarraounia’s “lover-griot.” Gogué was also her confidante and serenaded her with beautiful, romantic songs every time she made a public appearance (12). Although Sarraounia was a tough warrior and respected queen, she was also renowned for her beauty, charm, and sensuality. 476

— ​ F e m a l e L e a d e r s h i p a n d N a t i o n B u i l d i n g —​ Dawa instructed Sarraounia in the art of warfare at a tender age. He taught her to be fearless, and when she was a teenager, he trained her to throw javelins, spears, and bows, just like her male counterparts. As a result of her extensive training and experience, she led successful battles against countless enemies of her people. At twenty, Sarraounia led an army that won her very first victory against the Fulanis, a rival community. After her father died when she was twenty-three years old, Sarraounia became his successor and recognized as the Queen of the Aznas. Inasmuch as a bloodline that affords access to political influence is a defining characteristic of heroes in African epics, it is significant that Sarraounia descended from a royal line. Her status as a leader of her people conferred on her certain legitimate rights and formal duties. Sarraounia is said “to have neither a husband, nor a child as her responsibilities as a magician who possesses occult secrets about life, place her above the feelings and obligations of the ordinary woman” (1980, 12). Sarraounia held office during a time of intense military threats by the colonizing French. Even so, she secured political support from allies through her peaceful and diplomatic leadership skills. One of the most noteworthy aspects of Sarraounia’s leadership was her strong commitment to democracy in the political and social life of her kingdom. She is said to have “democratized the caste system” in her kingdom (1980, 12).1 By ending the caste system, Sarraounia terminated the artificial, hierarchical boundaries that divided her people. Consequently, the Aznas felt a stronger patriotic duty to defend their kingdom against any foreign attack. She also decentralized power and delegated responsibilities so that all Aznas would feel more responsible for protecting the kingdom against foreign invasion. She surrounded herself with advisors and warriors who were loyal to her and supported her vision. She commanded respect and admiration from her people. Sarraounia had a strong and well-trained army. Sarraounia herself trained the army of courageous Azna men how to use a variety of combat arms. She mandated that every able-bodied man undergo periodic training on how to use bows and arrows, and she provided each of them with a bow and arrows in order to be ready to defend the kingdom at all times. (73–74). Another aspect of Sarraounia’s leadership was that she was a very peaceful queen who sought to live in harmony with her neighbors. She was never the first to attack any of them or threaten the peace between them, but did fight back to defend her kingdom when attacked. She is said to have never imposed her religious and spiritual beliefs on her neighbors, but always defended her kingdom by the sword and magic against all those who tried to subdue and humiliate her (1980, 33). Sarraounia built a fortress with high fences around Lougou, the capital of her kingdom in case of surprise attacks, especially by the French. Lougou was also surrounded by hills and a deep forest, which made it difficult to attack, as Mamani describes in his novel (74). The most historically significant fact of Sarraounia’s leadership was her armed resistance not only to her neighboring enemies, but also to the French colonial occupiers. Indeed, she held off the French colonial army longer than any of her neighbors, thwarting their expansion into West Africa. Her Muslim enemies had tried on several occasions to defeat her on the battlefield but to no avail. Their goal was to wage a holy war and impose Islam on the Aznas (1980, 84). The French subsequently led military operations, established spheres of geo-political influence, and eventually occupied all of the Niger region, except for Sarraounia’s kingdom. Captain Voulet, 477

— ​ M a r i a m K o n a t é —​ the head of the French expedition, made it his mission to defeat Sarraounia. He wanted not only to have French authority over Africans (whom he referred to in racist and condescending ways as “vicious big children”), but also to crush the magician queen Sarraounia who was “invincible, invulnerable and ferocious…Sarraounia must be captured at all costs and her presumed power publicly demystified. We have to destroy her village and her fetishes to establish our dominance in this region” (17– 18). Although Sarraounia was a great threat to the French imperialistic forces, Voulet was so sure of a victory against Sarraounia that he vowed, “When I pass through the region, we will never again hear anyone talk about Sarraounia and her fetishes” (67). In the French incursions, Sarraounia faced men who were better armed than she was. Even so, she squashed French colonial ambitions in West Africa. Sarraounia harnessed her spiritual and political powers to defeat enemies who underestimated her abilities as a woman.

ATTEMPTS TO DISCREDIT SARRAOUNIA’S IMPACTFUL, EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP The novel depicts Sarraounia as a fearless, independent, and yet “invisible” woman, whose integrity and humanity are constantly questioned and under attack. Her Muslim and French enemies seem to attribute her victories more to her possession of magical powers than her abilities, as they do with her male counterparts. She is depicted in both historical accounts and oral literature as a leader who was renowned and feared for both her mastery of supernatural powers and her warfare strategies (Taithe 2009; Roche 2011). Sarraounia is discounted and devalued by her Muslim enemies, and faces virulent racism and sexism from French colonizers. Sarraounia endures contempt and harassment by her Muslim neighbors not only because she is a woman who resists them and defeats them in warfare, but also because they believe she is a non-Muslim and, according to them, a pagan. For example, Sarraounia is referred to as a sorceress and a dangerous cursed woman who is not easily defeated. She is also referred to as an arrogant, callous, untrustworthy, diabolical woman engaged in witchcraft. Her Muslim enemies further call her as “a rebellious, impure and a non-believer woman” (Mamani 1980, 42). A Fulani envoy and spy states, “this cursed pagan is very well organized” (87–88). The Emir of Sokoto, the leader of the Hausa people, refers to Sarraounia as “the cursed,” “a cursed sorceress,” “a viper,” and “Satan in person.” He also calls Sarraounia’s soldiers, “pagans” (140–41). Yet, all his previous attempts to defeat Sarraounia and convert her and her people to Islam failed. Also, Sarraounia is the only leader in the region who put up armed resistance to the French. Most of her Muslim enemies were allied with the French, and sought to not only break her resistance, but also to take revenge against “this cursed pagan” (87). For Mamani, the fact that Sarraounia was so effective in resisting French colonial domination fueled the visceral racist and sexist attacks she received from both French colonists and Muslim enemies. In Mamani’s novel, the French captains and their soldiers ridicule Sarraounia in an effort to discredit her as a leader. Voulet discounts her military preparedness and downplays her status as a formidable adversary by verbally discrediting her in the eyes of his own soldiers. He is determined to capture and humiliate her, 478

— ​ F e m a l e L e a d e r s h i p a n d N a t i o n B u i l d i n g —​ sometimes referring to her as “this cursed sorceress;” other times, calling her “Satan in person.” He also calls her an “infernal sorceress” (1980, 64, 140, 145). Chanoine calls Sarraounia, “this whore of queen of the savages” (16). Some of Voulet’s soldiers refer to her as a “diabolic female” and “the sorceress” (146, 148). French colonial officers call her a witch. Her famed mastery of witchcraft was not only threatening to their authority as men and colonizers, but also seen as demonic and unnatural. Her political enemies created false narratives to dehumanize and vilify her, and tarnish her legacy. In the novel, despite all of their disparagement, Sarraounia’s enemies acknowledge how well organized and powerful she is, and how hard it is to defeat her. Even the Emir of Sokoto acknowledges that she “is strong and has secrets that are elusive to whites. She has her techniques and combat methods” (39). Nonetheless, Sarraounia still faces many obstacles in obtaining the respect that she deserves. Mamani’s novel shows that women like Sarraounia must disrupt the masculine hegemonic machinery of war. As a woman and a leader, Sarraounia accomplishes in the novel (and in reality) what was impossible for men who mounted fierce resistance to the French colonial occupation. Below I use social activist and writer Adrienne Maree Brown’s concept of “feminine leadership” to help explain Sarraounia’s unprecedented success in maintaining sovereignty over her kingdom. According to Brown, “feminine leadership” is a kind of leadership that allows people to imagine and envision a world where things that have never happened before are possible, a world that ensures that future generations are assured (2017, 65). Sarraounia was willing to take risks. She sowed the seeds of freedom in the minds and hearts of her people. She also gave responsibilities to women. They worked together to form communities that depended on each other, to create a world where more possibilities for the common good were possible. She trusted her people, and they felt valued and ready to rise to the task. They understood how interconnected and interdependent they all were. The idea of “impacted leadership,” which Brown advocates, is on full display in Mamani’s iconic novel. Mamani intentionally wanted to rewrite a history of Sarraounia that was different from the French colonizers’ version. He makes the point that it is women, as the most marginalized and oppressed members of society, who can bring about change toward a more just, equitable, and inclusive society. We see the idea of women as agents of change not only throughout Sarraounia’s reign, but particularly in her last speech to those who sought refuge with her, after her unexpected ferocious resistance to the Voulet-Chanoine encroachment into her territory: Brothers and sisters who came from elsewhere. You are welcome on Azna land. We do not speak the same language, we do not have the same beliefs, but we have the same willpower; the willpower to live free. And you appreciate even more than we do the price of freedom because you have lost it once…Here, no one will despise you and despise your customs and no one will be surprised by the way you use your possessions and your bodies…Our community is a community of tolerance where everyone lives according to their strength, their habits and principles. We have our fetishes and our taboos. Respect them, we will respect yours…You will drink from our wells and hunt in our forests. Our

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— ​ M a r i a m K o n a t é —​ rivers have plenty of fish. You will fish in our goulbis and grow corn, yam, and cassava on our fertile basins…You will live in love and dignity on Azna land. (Mamani 1980, 153–54) After battling the French, Sarraounia, along with her people, retreated to the forest and continued to taunt the French invaders day and night. There she continued to unite and mobilize all members of her village against the French. She encouraged them to be resilient in the final fight against the French. Sarraounia emphasized the diversity and equality of all human beings and considered this the foundation for creating a community where everyone feels heard and valued. The importance Sarraounia placed on unity, solidarity, and the spirit of community is essential to her vision of leadership. Most importantly, she emphasized the vital role of nature and equitable access to land in their survival as a community. Moreover, as a healer who understood the vital power of nature, and who possessed knowledge of plants, Sarraounia placed a responsibility on her people to care for and protect nature, as expressed in her speech above. Sarraounia also paid special attention to the critical role that children and women would play in the final leg of their efforts to oust the French. In the novel, Sarraounia tells the women, Do not forget that you are not only the rearguard troops, but you are also the belly of our men’s vigor. Feed them very well and provide them with plenty of water and that your smiles thrive on bravery and courage. (1980, 153) Although Sarraounia was raised and trained as a man, it was her “innate” feminine qualities (nurturing, healing, etc.), as relayed in the novel and in oral epics, that propelled her to a mythical status. Audiences think of her as a woman who effectively deployed her beauty, charm, and sensuality, along with diplomacy, resilience, and determination to protect her people and retain her dignity in the face of all adversity. Voulet was surprised by the ferocious resistance of Sarraounia and her Aznas warriors. After a night of relentless combat, Voulet and his men occupied the royal city. In the end, Sarraounia won against a much more powerful French colonial army. Her victory, however, was more a psychological and spiritual one than a physical one. Afterward, both Muslim leaders and even indigenous oral traditionalists from her own village attributed Sarraounia’s success to her “evil powers” (1980, 8). Although Sarraounia and her warriors are said to have put up fierce armed resistance to Voulet’s regiment, Mamani underscores the point that it was ultimately the psychological impact of the legend of Sarraounia as an invincible and dreaded queensorceress and healer, well versed in magic and occult forces, that took a mental toll on Voulet’s troops, leading to their unforeseen humiliating and crushing defeat: [Sarraounia] refuses to give up. She takes to the forest and continues to harass the victors. Powerfully affected by the queen’s passionate determination and, above all, terrorized by the legend that portrayed her as a formidable sorceress, large number of tirailleurs abandoned the French. It is thus a disorganized and completely demoralized army that continues on its path. (27) 480

— ​ F e m a l e L e a d e r s h i p a n d N a t i o n B u i l d i n g —​ The end result was that the remaining French troops engaged in fratricidal combat, and Voulet was killed by his own men. The irony is that from the beginning, Voulet’s imperialistic, racist, sexist, and condescending treatment of Sarraounia was meant to humiliate her and destroy her fame as an invincible magician and sorceress. In fact, he made it a question of his personal honor to break Sarraounia at all costs (1980, 64, 100). As Ousmane Tandina and Richard Bjornson write, This episode of Azna resistance to the French war machine is the one that Mamani seeks to bring alive. By resurrecting Sarraounia with his pen, he is immortalizing her: she is glorified as a national heroine proving herself in the face of a foreign intrusion into her country. Her revolt is a refusal to bow to colonial oppression, a refusal to recognize the authority of the intruders. In the eyes of the author, this refusal to submit is highly significant, especially in light of the fact that Sarraounia was able to gain the confidence of her people and even of some of her detractors. The neutralization of foreign authority is born with the desire to halt the invasion, even though there are relatively few scenes of actual confrontation, which is one of the essential ingredients of the epic. (1993, 27) Sarraounia single-handedly engineered fierce resistance to French occupation when her capital city, Lougou, is under siege. She provided political, economic, moral, and military leadership to her people and neighboring allies who sought refuge from brutal French colonizers who committed atrocities. As the novel shows, Sarraounia played a strategic role in the history of Niger’s resistance to French colonial occupation. Living in exile in the forest and leading the fight against the French, Sarraounia was one of the rare female protagonists in West African epic, and female anti-colonial military leaders in precolonial Africa.

CONCLUSION The stories of the heroes Sarraounia and Yennenga have exerted a strong and ongoing influence on their respective peoples. Sarraounia and Yennenga were powerful women who challenged prevailing gender roles and helped establish the terms of female leadership in West Africa—particularly through women-centered values and ways of knowing. Since Mamani’s 1980 novel about Sarraounia, both women have been remembered and honored in various ways. For example, in 1986 Med Hondo made the French film titled Sarraounia which won the 1987 FESPACO Yennenga Trophy Prize, furthering her reputation as a symbol of national pride and African resistance to the French colonization of West Africa. Similarly, Yennenga has been hailed in Burkina Faso as a critical world-maker at the origins of the Mossé kingdom. She is often referred to as the mother of the Mossé people and remains a national icon. The national soccer team is named Les Étalons (The Stallions) in her honor. Further, the most prestigious award of the PanAfrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the “Étalon d’or de Yennenga” (Stallion of Yennenga), is also named after her. This prize is for the film that best shows “Africa’s realities.” This international biennial film festival was 481

— ​ M a r i a m K o n a t é —​ created in 1969 to honor films made in Africa by African filmmakers that showcase African perspectives and content. In addition, streets in the national capital of Ouagadougou and the economic capital of Bobo-Dioulasso are named after Yennenga, and statues of her can also be found throughout the country. Both Sarraounia and Yennenga are cultural and literary heroines who had important impacts on the foundational histories of their peoples. Their epics are recorded in traditional oral accounts that have kept alive the histories of their peoples (Bertho 2019, 39). Both challenged not only the social and political norms of their times, but also exemplified what Brown refers to as “feminine leadership,” a kind of leadership comprised of “not just women leaders, but leaders who shift our understanding of how power can be held” (2017, 66). As we have seen in the epic literature, both women were fearless in battle. They held deep convictions about their right to be independent and free from all forms of oppression. Both women resisted political and social oppressions and changed the destiny of their peoples forever. Both significantly impacted not only their societies, but also the history of West Africa. Today, Sarraounia and Yennenga are viewed as role models for contemporary African women, showing how to overcome circumscribed gender roles and gain access to positions of power. Their leadership is the very embodiment of womanist, Afrofuturist empowerment.

NOTE 1 For an in-depth discussion of the caste system in West Africa, see Tamari (1991, 221–50).

WORKS CITED Alou, Tidjani Antoinette. 2009. “Niger and Sarraounia: One Hundred Years of Forgetting Female Leadership.” Research in African Literatures 40, no.1: 42–56. Bekeredemo, J. P. Clark. 1991. The Ozidi Saga. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Bertho, Elara. 2016. “Mémoires postcoloniales et figures de résistants africains dans la littérature et dans les arts.” Nehanda, Samori, Sarraounia comme héros culturels. PhD diss., Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. ———. 2019. Sorciéres, tyrants, héros: Mémoires postcoloniales de résistants africains. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur. Biebuyck, Daniel P., and Kahombo C. Mateene, 1969. The Mwindo Epic: From the Banyanga (Congo Republic). Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2017. Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chicago: AK Press. FESPACO. 2021. “Prizes and Juries.” Accessed June 28, 2021. https://fespaco.org/en/fespaco/ prizes-and-juries/. Hale, Thomas A., ed. 1996. The Epic of Askia Mohammed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hondo, Med, dir. and prod. 1986. Sarraounia. France. Kolawole, Mary E. Modupe. 1997. Womanism and African Consciousness. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. Kunene, Mazisi. 1979. Emperor Shaka the Great—A Zulu Epic. Exeter, NH: Heinemann. Mamani, Abdoulaye. 1980. Sarraounia: Le drame de la Reine Magicienne. Paris: L’Harmattan. Mbele, Joseph. 2006. “Women in the African Epic.” Research in African Literatures 37, no. 2: 61–67.

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— ​ F e m a l e L e a d e r s h i p a n d N a t i o n B u i l d i n g —​ Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 2006. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett. London: Longman. Okpewho, Isidore. 1979. The Epic in Africa: Toward A Poetics of the Oral Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Roche, Christian. 2011. L’Afrique noire et la France au XIXe siècle: Conquetes et résistances. Paris: Éditions Karthala. Scott, Joyce Hope. 1997. “Daughters of Yennenga: Le Mal de peau and Feminine Voice in the Literature of Burkina Faso.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, no. 3–4: 83–96. Skinner, Elliott, P. 1989. The Mossi of Burkina Faso: Chiefs, Politicians and Soldiers. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Taithe, Bertrand. 2009. The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Tamari, Tal. 1991. “The Development of Caste Systems in West Africa.” The Journal of African History 32, no. 2: 221–50. Tandina, Ousmane, and Richard Bjornson. 1993. “Sarraounia, An Epic?” Research in African Literatures 24, no. 2: 23–32.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“ T H E R E T U R N O F RO M E ”

E M P I R E , E P I C , A N D T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U RY I TA L I A N I M P E R I A L I S M I N A F R I C A

rsr

Samuel Agbamu

Difficult as it may be to arrive at a satisfactorily water-tight definition of what epic actually is (see Introduction to this volume), one can say with a certain degree of confidence that there is a long history of Greco-Roman-inspired epic poetry being composed, read, and performed in support of imperial ideologies – in the so-called West and elsewhere. Debates over the ambivalent ideology of Virgil’s Aeneid aside,1 the afterlives of this Augustan epic, written between 29 and 19 BCE, offer a rich study in the ways in which epic has often been used as an ideological tool by empires who have posed themselves as the heirs of Rome.2 Here, I take the Aeneid as a starting point to consider how epic was drawn into the service of Italian imperialism during the twentieth century, specifically in Africa. Africa occupies a prominent place both in the history of modern Italian imperialism and in the Aeneid, the first four books of are framed by Aeneas’ detour to Carthage, Rome’s future North African nemesis. Carthage, as a city founded by the legendary Phoenician queen Dido who would, in the Aeneid, fall in love with Aeneas, was able to be represented as African, Semitic, and be feminized at various points in its imperial reception history. The amenability of Virgil’s epic to the Italian colonial project in Africa was not missed by ideologues of Italian imperialism, be they liberal or Fascist. It is such uses of Virgil’s epic and epic shaped by it that I consider here. More specifically, this chapter tells the story of how epic, and especially Virgil’s Aeneid, was used in support of modern Italy’s imperial project in Africa. After outlining how European epics in general, but especially ones self-consciously modeled on the Aeneid, have been articulated into imperial ideologies in post-classical history, I focus on three key historical moments and imperialist maneuvers. First, I show how Virgil and Romanizing epic narratives played a key role in promoting the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911–1912. Next, I move on to consider the promotion of epic narratives of Italian imperialism under Fascism, focusing on celebrations of Virgil’s bimillenary in 1930. In the final section, I turn to Giuseppe Ungaretti’s La terra promessa (The promised land, 1950) as a key Italian engagement with epic, specifically the Aeneid, after the fall of Fascism and the loss of Italy’s African colonies. 484

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-39

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EPIC, EMPIRE, AND RUINS The rapid rise and precipitous fall of modern Italy’s empire in Africa complicates views of epic in the classical tradition as a genre belonging to history’s victors. In Epic and Empire (1993), David Quint suggests that the Aeneid, although borrowing from Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, establishes narrative models which are imbued with political significance. In the first half of Virgil’s epic, the Trojan prince Aeneas escapes from his conquered city, and embarks on a tortuous, wandering journey to Italy, via the North African city of Carthage. In the second half, he fights the Latins to establish the homeland of what would become Rome.3 Thus, we have one half defined by wandering, and the other half as a providential military march. These contrasting sides of the Aeneid exemplify two perspectives on epic: To the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wanderings. Put another way, victors experience epic as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience contingency that they are powerless to shape to their own end. (Quint 1993, 9) This distinction between winner and loser in the Aeneid is, as Quint acknowledges, a self-consciously artificial one. In his discussion of the shield of Aeneas (Aeneid 8.675–728), part of which shows the victory of the first Roman Emperor Octavian, who later became Caesar Augustus, over Antony and Cleopatra, the Orientalized Ptolemaic Egyptian queen, at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Quint highlights the exaggerated foreign otherness of Antony and Cleopatra’s forces, and the Romanness of Octavian’s. In reality, Actium was as much, if not more so, Octavian’s victory over his former Roman ally Antony, as it was over Cleopatra. This artificial East-versus-West, conquered-versus-conqueror binary would be restaged throughout the later European epic tradition, from the epics of Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Moors, Walter de Châtillon’s twelfth-century Latin poem about Alexander the Great, Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poetic retelling of the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), and epics on the conquest of the so-called New World to Milton and beyond. A notable exception to this trend in representing the so-called West as the inevitable victor over the East is Gian Mario Filelfo’s fifteenth-century Latin epic, the Amyris (1471–1476). This epic is based on the life of Mehmet II, the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople in 1453. This poetic exaltation, commissioned on behalf of the Sultan, stood in contrast to the other epic of the fall of Constantinople by Ubertino Puscolo, the Constantinopoleos (1455–1460), which mourned the fall of the Christian city to the Islamic invader. However, both poems, each overtly Virgilian in their epic coloring, made reference to the notion that this Turkish victory over the Byzantine Greek city was vengeance for the sack of Troy.4 This was not only poetic license exercised by epicists. Michael Kritovoulos, in his fifteenth-century history of the Ottoman conquest, writes that, following his conquest of Constantinople, Mehmet II visited the site of Troy, following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar in Lucan’s first-century CE epic, De bello civili (1928, 9.961–99), about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (49–45 BCE), Caesar himself following in the tradition of Alexander the Great who is reputed to have paid 485

— ​ S a m u e l A g b a m u —​ homage to Achilles at the ruins of the city. Here, in Kritovoulos’ account, Mehmet is reported to have said that God had reserved for him the right to have avenged the city, which he saw as Turkish, destroyed by Greeks (Kritovoulos 1954, 181–82).5 Many of these aspects of epic inspired by the Aeneid – clashes between “East” and “West,” an epic march of the victors and the mournful wanderings of the defeated, and an obsession with ruins crying out for redemption – are the key ingredients of Italy’s imperial uses of epic during the modern nation-state’s colonial endeavors in North and East Africa. Italy, with its intimate connections to imperial Rome and its legacy, moreover, has had more direct recourse to the epic world of the Aeneid than perhaps any other modern nation-state or empire dressing itself in the garb of imperial Rome. However, since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, powers across Europe and beyond have laid claim to the status of its heir, assuming the symbols, nomenclature, and imperial politics of the Caesars. All of these new Roman empires have had to wrestle with a contradiction which carried serious consequences: how to represent oneself as a new Roman empire at the same time as confronting the reality of the fall of that same empire? Central to this contradiction, as it was imagined in the ancient Roman historiographical tradition, was Rome’s conflict with Carthage, the city founded by the Aeneid’s Dido, during the Punic Wars (264–146 BCE). This series of confrontations occurred during the period in which Rome attained Mediterranean hegemony, accompanied by the spoils of empire flooding the eternal city. Yet, it was precisely these developments that, according to authors such as Sallust (2013, 42), precipitated the moral decline, stasis, and disunity that brought about the end of the Roman Republic and the advent of the rule of one man. More fundamentally, as Julia Hell argues, the Roman commander Scipio the Younger’s weeping over the ruins of Carthage once he had destroyed it in 146 BCE, most famously reported by Polybius (2012, 38.21), inaugurated for imperial powers a profound anxiety that had to be confronted (2019, 43–47). Since Scipio saw in the ruined city a reflection of Rome’s future devastation, he was haunted by the awareness that all empires fall. For Hell, Scipio the Younger’s ambivalence over the destruction of Carthage represents a foundational moment for European discourses of “neo-Roman mimesis” and their obsession with the ruins of empire. Thus, as Hell argues, imitation of Rome always brings neo-Roman imperial power face-to-face with Rome’s death, which was first staged at the moment of its ascendency to hegemony, on the smoldering ruins of Carthage (Hell 2019). It is perhaps for this reason that North Africa, associated with Carthage, became a region invested with such symbolic significance for subsequent empires that posed themselves as Rome’s heir. During Charles V’s 1535 Tunisian campaign, the Habsburg emperor represented himself as Scipio Africanus, waging war in the ruins of Carthage, and celebrated a triumph the next year in Rome’s imperial forum (Hell 2019, 111– 19). Later, French imperialism in North Africa strived to assert itself as the returned Roman empire, restoring its ruins left behind in the Maghreb. However, modern Italy’s neo-Roman imperial mimesis carried especially high stakes. Not only is Italy geographically closer to the North African coast than, say, France, Britain, or Belgium, but the unification of Italy – or Risorgimento – took place against the backdrop of rapidly accelerating European colonialism in Africa. (During the nineteenth century, developments in Italy saw increasing territories of the peninsula come under the rule of the Kingdom of Sardinia, until the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861. By 1866 all that remained outside of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy were the Papal 486

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Figure 34.1  The ruins of Carthage on the Byrsa Hill, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Tunis, Tunisia. Getty Images.

States, centered on Rome.) Rome became the capital of the new nation of Italy in 1871, allowing Italian imperial ambitions a direct claim to being the inheritor of Rome’s ruinscape. In the context of the modern Italian imperial project, launched so soon after national unification, Virgil’s Aeneid proved to be a repertoire of potent symbols and allegories around which to ideologically orientate the colonial project in Africa.

THE ITALIAN INVASION OF TRIPOLITANIA AND CYRENAICA (1911–1912) The year 1911 saw celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. It also saw Italy launch itself into a new colonial war with its invasion of the Libyan province of Tripolitania, then part of the Ottoman Empire. For decades, Italian advocates of imperialism had seen empire in Africa as the key to completing the nation’s belated unification, problematic in the varied cultural identities and unevenness of economic development between regions. Italian colonies in Africa would, it was argued, discipline Italy’s southern workforce, redirect Italian emigrants from, for example, the Americas to Italian colonies, and instill a sense of national pride. Recourse to the region’s ancient Roman history was frequent in Italian imperial propaganda. In particular, due to the region’s proximity to Carthage, and despite the fact that Carthage was in the then-French colony of Tunisia, the memory of the Punic Wars as well as that of the Carthage of the Aeneid featured prominently. Such references also circulated internationally. For example, a 1911 article from The 487

— ​ S a m u e l A g b a m u —​ San Francisco Sunday Call, entitled “Italy and Turkey War Because of an Ancient Love Affair,” claimed that “Aeneas jilted Dido and for 3000 years the Mediterranean nations have fought each other over Tripoli’s sands” (Gilbert 1911). We will see later how Fascist imperial propagandists cited this meeting as the cause of the hostilities between Italy and “Semitic people.” It is significant, therefore, to see such rhetoric appear in foreign publications at the very outset of the liberal Italian invasion of Tripolitania. In the years prior to the Italian invasion of Libya, a number of works of Italian travel writing about North Africa were published that linked Italy to the Roman Empire. Many of these were then republished during the invasion itself to buttress Italy’s imperialist aspirations.6 I focus briefly on one such volume. In 1905, the playwright Domenico Tumiati published a travelogue entitled Nell’Africa romana (In Roman Africa). This was republished once the invasion of Libya was underway in 1911. Tumiati’s travels in North Africa took place within the context of the recent unification of Italy, and a more recent series of defeats suffered by the young nationstate in its imperial endeavors in East Africa. Tumiati’s account is therefore tinged with pessimism, and at the same time a sense of Italy’s imperial inheritance as heir to Rome. From 1904 to 1905, Tumiati traveled the Mediterranean, stopping at the “ancient and perennial sources of our anima” (Tumiati 1911, xi). In his Preface to the 1911 edition, Tumiati looks back and states that “[he] was certainly not the only one of [his] generation who, wounded to death by the paralysis of [Italian] national life, searched for salvation outside the patria” (1911, xi). If, as Quint suggests, the linear narrative of epic in the tradition of the Aeneid is to the victors (1993, 9), and the wandering meanders of romance are to the losers, then Tumiati’s travels put him in a complicated space. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Italy had sought to expand its colonial territories on the Horn of Africa into Abyssinian territory, what is now Ethiopia. In 1887, Italian forces were defeated by Abyssinian troops under the leadership of Ras Alula at Dogali, while nine years later, Italian efforts to encroach into Abyssinia were again thwarted at the battle of Adwa (1896). This latter defeat put a serious dent into Italy’s confidence in itself as a nascent European imperial power, and Italy’s efforts to revive colonial expansion in Africa were put on hold until the invasion of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in 1911. At the time of Tumiati’s wanderings around the Mediterranean, then, Italy was presented with less the linear, triumphant narrative of epic, and instead was forced to confront the meandering vicissitudes of romance. However, the memories of Roman imperialism in the minds of Italian idealogues of empire provided an epic ideal toward which to strive. In Tumiati’s volume, the ruins of Dido’s Carthage loom large and serve as a denouement to his travel narrative. He travels to the site of the Punic city and frames his experience with reference to the representation of the site in the Aeneid. He arrives at the site Carthage expecting to find “a superb cataclysm of ruins, in which the Roman era is mixed up with the Punic, Catholic churches with altars of Astarte.” Instead, according to Tumiati, “you cannot imagine a greater disappointment: where Carthage was, there is now nothing” (1911, 269). To restore life to the ruinscape of North Africa, Tumiati blurred archeology and fiction in his description of the site, since the real place was insufficiently remarkable to him – a disappointment compared with the miraculous city described in Virgil’s Aeneid. 488

— ​ “ T h e R e t u r n o f R o m e ” —​ For Tumiati, Carthage comes back to life when he stumbles upon Dido’s purported bath, and launches into an eroticized invocation of her. He tells us that a guide points out to him an opening in the ground said to be the bath of the tragic queen of Carthage. Tumiati writes: Dido! [...] The Punic queen, abandoned, and killed by love, the queen who had shone in the sky of my adolescence, suddenly appeared to me living and real, in the act of climbing into the clear waters of her bath. That legendary creature of the Mediterranean, who seemed to be born of a ray of the Oriental sun, infused in the Libyan sand, had enchanted my first years more than all other heroines, in the harmonious verses of Virgil. (1911, 271)7 The name of Dido also triggers for Tumiati a visualization of Carthage as it was when Dido founded the city: Where now there is undulating sand, palaces and temples rise again, walls curve around, thousands of works resound, [all of] which prepares the world for the coming of the mistress of the Mediterranean, the rival of Rome. (2011, 272) The language used by Tumiati, of witnessing the (re)construction of Carthage, selfconsciously positions the Italian traveler as a modern Aeneas. His description of the imaginary rebuilding of Carthage clearly evokes the moment from Book One of the Aeneid at which Aeneas and his companion Achates, shipwrecked on the North African coast on their journey from Troy to Italy, catch sight of the foundation and construction of Carthage. Aeneas marvels at the urban sprawl of Carthage, a city which was once only huts, and where now Dido’s colonists are digging harbors, laying foundations for temples, and carving huge columns from the cliffs around the city (Aeneid 1.421–29).8 The Carthaginian workers are likened to bees in their productivity, and all around, activity is buzzing (1.436). Aeneas, the refugee from a destroyed city, exclaims in amazement and envy “Oh, how lucky they are, whose walls now rise!” (O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt! 1.437). Aeneas’ moment of discovery, then, is re-enacted by Tumiati, although in reverse: rather than spying the moment of Carthage’s ascendency from a collection of huts to ancient metropolis, Tumiati’s Carthage rises again from its ruins. Furthermore, like Aeneas, he is unable to remain in Dido’s Carthage – Aeneas being prevented by fate and Tumiati, because the city no longer exists.9 As a consolation, Tumiati engages in mental archeology, imagining Dido’s city at the moment of its foundation and preempting the physical archeology conducted by Italian archeologists in Libya shortly before, during, and after the invasion, facilitating the “rebirth” of the North African antiquity of the Aeneid.10 It is while standing on the ruins of Carthage that Tumiati is reminded of a line of Virgil: “tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento!” – Remember, it is for you to rule peoples with your command, Roman! (Aeneid 6.851, cited in Tumiati 1911, 277). This line occurs during Aeneas’ visit to the underworld, where he 489

— ​ S a m u e l A g b a m u —​ meets the spirit of his father, Anchises, in Book Six of the Aeneid. These words are spoken by Anchises to his son at the mythical beginning of Rome; his exhortation to “remember” invites the Roman reader – and indeed, modern Italian reader, when repeated by Tumiati – to look back in time in order to look forward. This line was also featured in British imperial discourse of the nineteenth century to refer to colonial rule in India, as when the British colonial administrator Robert Needham Cust (1821–1909) described being reminded of Virgil’s words when recalling that he “found [him]self [i.e. Cust] helping to rule millions in their hundreds of towns and thousands of villages” (cited in Vasunia 2009, 83). Here, Anchises’ words to his son facilitate Tumiati’s reflection on the fate of Carthage and the permanence of Rome’s imperial idea. “Carthage has disappeared,” Tumiati exclaims, “but the song of Virgil is eternal!” He goes on to elaborate that “Rome is not dead if I can feel in me, like a living spirit, the verse of its poets: if I am again able to cause the Roman pride and will to shine.” In summary, the Aeneid is invoked by Tumiati and his imperialist-nationalist contemporaries, such as Gualtiero Castellini (1911), Enrico Corradini (1911), and Gabriele D’Annunzio ([1911–1912] 1984), in order to orientate Italy’s imperial future, and shape it into the image of the Roman past. It provided an epic ideal around which Italian nationalists could structure the wanderings of a temporarily defeated imperial Italy. This reshaping of Virgil’s epic was also something that scholars working under Italian Fascism carried through in their imperialistic rhetoric about an Italian empire in Africa.

EPIC AND FASCIST IMPERIALISM It is well known that Mussolini’s Fascism anchored its innovations in the authority of Roman antiquity, from the adoption of the so-called Roman salute to its imperial ambitions. This reverence for ancient Rome extended to the celebration of Latin literature, in the context of which Virgil took pride of place.11 In 1930, Italy celebrated the bimillenary of Virgil’s birth. As Laura Vallortigara argues, at this time, the priorities of the Fascist regime were more limited to domestic than foreign issues compared with what would be the case about five years later. During the second half of the 1920s, the Fascist government initiated a drive toward agricultural self-sufficiency, known as the Battle for Grain, while in 1929, the year prior to the celebrations of Virgil, Mussolini and the Vatican entered into a set of accords known as the Lateran Pacts, agreements that included Fascist Italy’s recognition of the sovereignty of the Vatican City. Invocations of Virgil around 1930, then, highlighted the bucolic side of his poetry, as well as his amenability to Christianization. For example, in 1931 the Italian historian Pietro Fedele, a medievalist who served as minister of education under Mussolini, 1925–1926, wrote in Studi Virgiliani (Virgilian Studies), the publication of the Reale Accademia Virgiliana (The Royal Virgilian Academy) that, Today the voice of Virgil calls the Italians to work in the fields and, sanctified by the religion of the homeland, is listened to as it never was; and after the glory of arms, given to us by the victorious King, we strive to conquer the divina gloria ruris [divine glory of the countryside], pointed out by the Head of Government to the Italian people. And the most effective and fitting commemoration of 490

— ​ “ T h e R e t u r n o f R o m e ” —​ Virgil is undoubtedly the law of land reclamation, recently voted by the Italian Parliament. (Fedele, cited in Vallortigara 2017, 59) Thus, it was in the context of the 1928 agrarian initiatives of the “Legge Mussolini” (“Mussolini Laws”), which aimed to reclaim land for farming, that Virgil took center stage as the poet of the Georgics, his four-book poem on agricultural matters. Yet at the time of the celebrations of Virgil’s bimillenary, the seeds of a Fascist, imperialist reading of Virgil were already firmly planted. The 1930 Christmas special issue of the popular journal Illustrazione italiana (Italian illustration) was focused on the bimillenary of Augustus and was edited by the classicist Vicenzo Ussani. Contributors included Arnaldo Mussolini, brother of Benito, and Pietro Fedele (Canfora 1985). Among the twelve articles included in the issue, there is a distinctive slant toward the bucolic aspects of Virgil’s poetry and Virgil’s importance for the development of a sense of Italian national geography, in which the Aeneid takes second place to Georgics and Eclogues. For example, three articles, Fedele’s “Virgil and the Land,” G. E. Rizzo’s “Virgil and Sicily,” and Arnaldo Mussolini’s “The Sacred Grove of Virgil [near Mantua],” are concerned with the territory of the nation-state of Italy. However, two articles look at Virgil’s relationship to overseas regions and center the significance of the poet for Roman imperialism. One article in the special issue, written by Ussani himself, highlights the connections between Virgil and Roman North Africa. According to Ussani, of all the regions of the Roman empire, it was the littoral of North Africa which bears the greatest number of traces of Virgil. This is because, as the poet who wrote of the origins of Carthage, he was viewed by “Afro-Romans” as their national poet (Ussani 1930, 37). In the context of Italian colonialism in North Africa being posed as a Roman return to its former territories, bolstered by archeological excavations of Roman remains, the emphasis on a North African Latinity centered on Virgil must be viewed as part of the project of representing North Africa as historically Roman. Another article, written by Enrico Bodrero, a Fascist senator who also worked for the Ministry for Education, celebrated Virgil’s role in promoting the imperial ideal. He begins: When the last Oriental resistance fell to the universal power of Rome, the new feeling of a global unity arose in the human spirit, as a truly practical, political, and civil reality, in which each inhabitant of the world saw come true what was in various guises the dream of a just peace, of humans collected under one law, one government, one common civilization. (1930, 6) According to Bodrero, ancient Greece had become too Orientalized and was unable to ascend to the role of uniting the world under a universal civilization, a role which fell to Rome. The Augustan historian Livy and Virgil are cited as key figures in this universalizing mission. Both authors, says Bodrero, tell the story of the growth of the city of Rome and the foundations of its institutions, which would one day become those of a vast empire. Moreover, both recognize what Bodrero refers to as “the necessity and greatness of war, the expansion of Rome, from the small village 491

— ​ S a m u e l A g b a m u —​ of Romulus, to empire” (1930, 6). However, in this special issue of Illustrazione italiana in which the importance of Virgil for the entire nation of Italy, not just Rome, is stressed, there was a tension between the nation-state and the city. Rome had been the heart of the Papal States until 1870 and had been seen by early Fascists, influenced by the radical modernism of Futurism, as a decadent and ossified cadaver, the antithesis of the Fascist vision of a national Italian modernity. Bodrero sidesteps this impasse by writing that “Virgil adored imperial Rome, redeemer of the world, sacred city, creator and center of the unity of the human race, but also adored his homeland, Italy, and assigns it a role in the team of empire, affirming its superiority.” The Roman empire, although revolving around the city of Rome, requires, in Virgil’s vision, the nation of Italy as “an instrument of imperial power” (1930, 7). Furthermore, in a 1931 contribution to the published proceedings of a conference held at the Catholic University of Milan, in celebration of Virgil’s bimillenary, Gino Funaioli wrote an essay entitled “Virgil, Poet of Peace.” In this, he describes Virgil’s journey from the Bucolics to the Aeneid as “via crucis,” toward the “conquest of a new order.” Pax augustea, for Funaioli, figures in as the end of a providential march of redemption.12 The association of Mussolini with Augustus, and Fascist Italy with the Roman empire would become more explicit later on in the 1930s. However, in the early 1930s there remained dissent from interpretations of Virgil as the poet of the universal idea of Empire, seen, for example, in an article by Concetto Marchesi. In this, Marchesi suggests that Virgil was not the poet of empire, but of “men distinguished by religion, country, laws, social customs, joined together above all by suffering” (1930, 129–38). In 1935, Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, and Mussolini’s regime increasingly professed imperialism as a core principle of Fascism. The idea that Fascist Italy was resuming Rome’s imperial mission became more aggressively asserted in Italian imperial discourse, exploiting the metonymy of Carthage, standing in for the continent of Africa. The Punic Wars were frequently referred to as a point of orientation for Fascist imperial propaganda, with parallels being drawn between Mussolini and Scipio Africanus, the Roman commander who defeated the Carthaginian general Hannibal at the Battle of Zama (202 BCE). In this context, Virgil could once more be deployed as a prophet of Rome’s imperial empire, with special emphasis on Anchises’ words to his son in Book Six of the Aeneid, the same as those that occurred to Tumiati at the site of Carthage. For example, in a 1935 article on Scipio Africanus, the consul’s entry into senate to make the case for invading Africa is described as evoking “the character of the Roman people destined to ‘regere imperio populos’ as Virgil sang two centuries later” (Grazioli 1935, 4). At the same time, there were attempts made in the later 1930s to turn Virgil into a predecessor of Fascists who were racists and anti-Semites. For example, in his article in the Fascist Italian journal, La Difesa della razza (The defense of race), A. M. De Giglio argued for the existence of a “Semitic hatred” against all that Rome represents. Echoing the sentiment of the aforementioned San Francisco Sunday Call article, and exploiting the association of Carthage with notions of both African and Semitic alterity, De Giglio states that the first conflict between Judaism and Rome was on the coast of North Africa, originating with Aeneas’ departure from Dido’s Carthage (1939, 7). He then goes on to paraphrase Dido’s words from Book Four

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— ​ “ T h e R e t u r n o f R o m e ” —​ of the Aeneid (4.624) to support his point: “there will always be a struggle between the two peoples” (1939, 7). The spectacularized politics of Fascism saw an ideal model for self-representation in the epic world of ancient Rome. This was the case whether it was through texts from Roman antiquity, as with the Aeneid, or through the early Renaissance revival of ancient Rome, such as Petrarch’s Latin epic about the Second Punic War, the Africa (begun in 1337 or 1338 CE), which enjoyed renewed interest in 1920s and 1930s Italy, or indeed epic poetry written in Latin during the Fascist period.13 The developing readings of the Aeneid throughout the Fascist period stand in as synecdochic for the changing ideologies of Italian Fascism. By the end of the Fascist period, Virgil had gone from being a poet of national renewal based on agriculture, to a prophet of eternal empire, and a source of legitimization for Fascism’s increasingly explicit racism and anti-Semitism. However, once Fascism’s new Roman empire had fallen, Italy would need to reorientate readings of Virgil and epic to fit the new political reality.

AENEAS AND DIDO IN POST-WAR ITALY In this section, I focus on the publication of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s fragmentary collection of poems La terra promessa, which he began writing in 1935, the year of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, but did not publish until 1950. Ungaretti had been raised within the Italian community of Alexandria, Egypt, and had previously written in favor of Italian colonialism in Africa. In La terra promessa, Ungaretti poeticizes Italy’s search for a new national identity, among the ruinscape of war and with the loss of its African empire. This search for an identity returns to the Aeneid for orientation. Writing of his poems, Ungaretti states that, for him, Aeneas is beauty, youth, ingenuousness ever in search of a promised land […] Dido came to represent the experience of one who, in late autumn, is about to pass beyond it [the promised land]. (Ungaretti, cited in Ungaretti and Mandelbaum 1956, 168) Overarchingly, Ungaretti’s seven poems in La terra promessa are structured by loss. As Michael Hanne has shown, the collection engages both explicitly and allusively with the Aeneid (1973). The centerpiece of the collection is a poem entitled “Cori descrittivi degli stati d’animo di Didone” (Choruses descriptive of the moods of Dido). The poem is broken up into nineteen stanzas of irregular lengths. It tells the story of Aeneas in Carthage and is narrated from multiple perspectives, including that of Dido. According to Margaret Brose, the Ungaretti’s pessimism is haunted by the failures of Italian colonization in Africa, and the fall of Fascism, which betray Ungaretti’s anxieties over Fascism’s internal contradictions which doomed it to failure from the beginning (1998). To give a sense of the poem’s pervading sense of loss, I focus on verses eighteen and nineteen, which, according to Hanne, are spoken by voices of indeterminate identity – it could be Dido or someone else speaking: XVIII Lasciò i campi alle spighe l’ira avversi, 493

— ​ S a m u e l A g b a m u —​ E la città, poco più tardi, Anche le sue macerie perse. […] XIX Deposto hai la superbia negli orrori, Nei desolati errori. XVIII Anger left the fields adverse to ears of grain And the city, a little later, Also lost its wreckage. […] XIX You set pride among horrors, Among desolate errors. We have seen how Virgil was paraded as a prophetic voice of Fascism’s agrarian drive, and how this internal conquest of land presaged the external conquest of East Africa. Now, to hear Ungaretti speak of “the fields adverse to stalks of corn” and the city, lost to its rubble heaps, is to witness the recasting of the Aeneid as a tragedy. Mussolini’s agrarian drive had failed and now it remains ambiguous whether this city reduced to rubble is Carthage of 146 BCE or Rome of 1945. Ungaretti’s ruined city, which has lost even its heaps of rubble, also echoes Lucan’s characterization of Troy, at the time of Caesar’s visit, as a site where even the ruins have perished (etiam periere ruinae, 9.969). At the same time, errori evokes Dido’s words to Aeneas at the end of the first book of the Aeneid, as she asks him to recount his wanderings which have brought him to Carthage: Immo age, et a prima dic, hospes, origine nobis insidias, ‘ inquit, ‘Danaum, casusque tuorum, erroresque tuos; nam te iam septima portat omnibus errantem terris et fluctibus aestas. (Aeneid 1.753–6) But come, guest, and tell us from the beginning About the Greek tricks, and your situation, And your wanderings [errores]; for now, the seventh summer carries you In your wanderings [errantem] across every land and sea. Now, in 1950, fragmented voices can tell either Dido or Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, that he has laid pride among the desolated errors – the errors of Carthage, of Rome, and of all those who have assumed the mantle of ancient empire. Concurrently, the errors or wanderings of the poem (errori or errores) recall the distinction between Iliadic epic and Odyssean romance proposed by Quint, where the teleological trajectory of epic is reserved for the victors, the vicissitudes of romance for the defeated. It is the Odyssean first half of the Aeneid, in which the Trojan prince flees his sacked city and is washed up on the shores of Carthage, rather than 494

— ​ “ T h e R e t u r n o f R o m e ” —​ the Iliadic second half, which tells of the war in Italy at the culmination of which Aeneas establishes the origins of Rome, that is most pertinent to Ungaretti’s poetic vision. Thus, by 1950, Aeneid had become a poem of loss rather than triumph. The Italian imaginary, confronted with its own ruinscape in the wake of the Second World War, now identifies as much with Dido, the founder of the empire built to be destroyed, as with Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome.

CONCLUSION In this essay, I have given a glimpse of the ways that an epic imaginary shaped by Virgil’s Aeneid contributed to the ideologies of Italian imperialism in Africa: from epic triumphalism at the time of Italy’s invasion of Libya, in the wake of the disappointments of Dogali (1887) and Adwa (1896), to a legitimization of racist and anti-Semitic policies under Fascism’s new Roman empire. Ungaretti’s poem reflects a deep pessimism following the Second World War, set against the backdrop of the ravages of war, Mussolini’s Rome defeated much as Scipio the Younger had foreseen when he stood on the ruins of Carthage. At a time when elements of the political right frequently appeal to the notion of “Western civilization,” rooted in a construction of Greek and Roman antiquity and predicated upon narratives of civilizational progress, receptions of the Aeneid can be especially salutary. The fictions of East-versus-West, played out in epic of the classical tradition, are shown to be an illusion, the triumphal march of the spirit of Rome revealed to be riven with anxieties. The disastrous history of Italian imperialism is especially illuminating. The story of Virgilian epic framings of Italian imperialism is one in which assumptions of the ultimately triumphant narrative of epic was disrupted, and Italy was left to reorientate itself in its wanderings toward a new understanding of its national destiny.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to the organizers and attendees of the Symposium Cumanum 2021, especially to Elena Giusti and Richard Thomas for their very helpful suggestions on a paper, parts of which have been adapted into sections of this essay. Thanks also to Elena Giusti for noting the errori/errores in Ungaretti and Aeneid 4.

NOTES 1 See Giusti (2016) and Thomas (2011, 25–54) for a summary of the debate. 2 The Georgics also have a deep history of being used for imperial purposes (Kerrigan 2018). 3 On the Aeneid, see Laura Zientek’s chapter in this volume. 4 See Filelfo (1978). This epic is yet to be translated into English. For Puscolo’s epic, see Bergantini (1740). 5 For more on Xerxes’, Alexander’s, and Caesar’s purported visits to Troy, see Quint (1993, 4–8). 6 See Agbamu (2021), which focuses on a number of such texts, including Tumiati (1911), discussed here.

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— ​ S a m u e l A g b a m u —​ 7 All translations are my own except when specified otherwise. 8 These lines would later be recycled in a Latin epic written under Fascism, Martinelli’s Amba Alagia (1941), to celebrate Italian colonialism in Ethiopia. See Reitz-Joosse (2022). 9 See, however, Giusti (2017) for the temporal dislocations of Virgil’s Carthage, including the anachronism of Aeneas’ meeting with Dido. 10 For more on Italian colonial archeology in Libya, see Munzi (2004) and Troilo (2021, 77–127). 11 See Thomas (2011, 222–59); Canfora (1985); and Ricchieri (2016). On the reception of the Aeneid specifically, see Vallotigara (2017). 12 Funaioli (1931, 143), cited in Vallortigara (2017, 65). 13 See, for example, Martinelli (1941), Trazzi (1937), and Genovesi (1942). On Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy, see Agbamu (2022).

WORKS CITED Agbamu, Samuel. 2021. “Romanità and Nostalgia: Italian Travel Writing in Libya and Tunisia, 1905–1912.” CompLit 2, no. 2: 145–67. ———. 2022. “The Reception of Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 29: 83–102 Bergantini, Giacinto, ed. 1740. Constantinopolis. In Miscellanea di varie operette, vol. 1, 223–447. Venice: Lazzaroni. Bodrero, Enrico. 1930. “Virgilio e l’impero.” Illustrazione italiana 49, supplement: 6–7. Brose, Margeret. 1998. “Dido’s Turn: Cultural Syntax in Ungaretti’s ‘La Terra Promessa.’” Annali d’italianistica 16: 121–43. Canfora, Luciano. 1985. “Fascismo e bimillenario della nascita di Virgilio.” In Enciclopedia virgiliana, 469–72. Rome: Treccani. Castellini, Gualtiero. 1911. Tunisi e Tripoli. Turin: Fratelli Bocca. Corradini, Enrico. 1911. Il volere d’Italia. Naples: Francesco Perralla. D’Annunzio, Gabrielle. [1911–1912] 1984. “Canzone d’oltremare.” In vol. 2 of Versi d’amore e di gloria, 647–52. Milan: Mondadori. De Giglio, A. M. 1939. “Il Giudaismo e l’Impero Romano.” La difesa della razza 2, no. 23: 6–9. Fedele, Pietro. 1931. “Il ritorno alla terra nell’insegnamento di Virgilio.” Studi virgiliani 1: 57–75. Filelfo, Giovanni Mario. 1978. Amyris. Edited by Aldo Manetti. Bologna: Pàtron. Funaioli, Gino. 1931. “Virgilio poeta della pace.” In Conferenze virgiliane, 123–43. Edited by Aristide Calderini. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Genovesi, Vittorio. 1942. “Mare Nostrum.” In Fascist Latin Texts, edited by Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse. Accessed June 15, 2022. https://flt.hf.uio.no/work/41. Gilbert, Rodney. 1911. “Italy and Turkey War Because of an Ancient Love Affair.” The San Francisco Sunday Call, November 26. Giusti, Elena. 2016. “Did Somebody Say Augustan Totalitarianism? Duncan Kennedy’s ‘Reflections,’ Hannah Arendt’s Origins, and the Continental Divide over Virgil’s Aeneid.” Dictynna 13: unnumbered. ———. 2017. “Virgil’s Carthage: A Heterotopic Space of Empire.” In Imagining Empire: Political Space in Hellenistic and Roman Literature, edited by Victoria Rimell and Mark Asper, 133–50. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Grazioli, Francesco Saverio. 1935. “Scipione l’africano.” In vol. 58 of Africa romana: Istituto di studi romani, 1–26. Milan: Istituto di Studi Romani. Hanne, Michael. 1973. “Ungaretti’s La Terra Promessa and the Aeneid.” American Association of Teachers of Italian 50, no. 1: 3–25.

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— ​ “ T h e R e t u r n o f R o m e ” —​ Hell, Julia. 2019. The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kerrigan, Charlie. 2018. Geography and Empire in Virgil’s Georgics: A Study of the Poem and its Reception in Britain and the British Empire c. 1820–1930. PhD diss., University of Dublin, Trinity College. Kritovoulos, Michael. 1954. History of Mehmed the Conqueror. Translated by Charles T. Riggs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lucan. 1928. The Civil War. Translated by J. D. Duff. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marchesi, Concetto. 1930. “Virgilio.” Pègaso 2, no. 8: 129–38. Martinelli, Nello. 1941. “Amba Alagia.” In Fascist Latin Texts, edited by Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse. Accessed June 15, 2022. https://flt.hf.uio.no/work/123. Munzi, Massimiliano. 2004. “Italian Archaeology in Libya: From Colonial Romanità to Decolonisation of the Past.” In Archaeology under Dictatorship, edited by Michael L. Galaty and Charles Watkinson, 73–107. New York: Springer. Polybius. 2012. The Histories, Volume VI: Books 28-39. Fragments. Translated by W. R. Paton. Revised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quint, David. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reitz-Joosse, Bettina. 2022. “Vergil in Ethiopia: Nello Martinelli’s Amba Alagia.” Paper presented at the conference “‘Sub tegmine fagi’: Latin Literature and Its Verdant Afterlife,” Oxford University, June 24–25. Ricchieri, Tommaso. 2016. “‘Il poeta dell’Impero e dei campi’: le celebrazioni del bimillenario virgiliano nel 1930.” Studi storici 57, no. 2: 237–66. Sallust. 2013. The War with Jugurtha. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Revised by John T. Ramsey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Richard F. 2011. Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trazzi, Anacleto. 1937. “Augustalia.” In Fascist Latin Texts, edited by Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse. Accessed June 15, 2022. https://flt.hf.uio.no/work/64. Troilo, Simona. 2021. Pietre d’Oltremare: Scavare, conservare, immaginare l’Impero (1899– 1940). Rome: Laterza. Tumiati, Domenico. 1911. Nell’Africa romana: Tripolitania. Milan: Treves. Ungaretti, Giuseppe, and Allen Mandelbaum. 1956. “Ungaretti’s ‘La Terra Promessa’: A Commentary and Some Examples.” Poetry 88, no. 3: 168–74. Ussani, Vicenzo. 1930. “Virgilio nell’Africa latina.” Supplement, Illustrazione italiana 49: 37–42. Vallortigara, Laura. 2017. L’epos impossibile: Percorsi nella ricezione dell’Eneide nel novecento. PhD diss., L’Université de Lausanne. Vasunia, Phiroze. 2009. “Virgil and the British Empire, 1760–1880.” In The Lineages of Empire: The Historical Root of British Imperial Thought, edited by Duncan Kelly, 83–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Virgil. 2011. Aeneis, edited by G. B. Conte. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

E M P I R E A N D R E S I S TA N C E IN KAZAKH ORAL EPIC T H E C A S E O F S Ă T B E K B AT Y R

rsr

Gabriel McGuire

The epic of Sătbek Batyr (Sătbek the hero) begins on a brutal note. Late one fall evening, the titular hero hurries home across the Kazakh steppe, overcome with a strange sense of unease. Arriving at his house, he sees the light of the fire glowing through the windows as he leads his horse to the stable, only to find nine strange horses already corralled there. Clutching an axe in his hand, he makes his way toward the house in the dark and finds the ground scattered with decapitated heads. There among the slain, he recognizes the slaughtered bodies of his three eldest sons. From this opening scene unspools the tale of Sătbek Batyr, his battles with the “kăpīr” (infidel) brigands who killed his family, the cunning that leads him to victory, and his eventual honor and fame. At only two hundred lines in length, Sătbek Batyr would seem to be an exciting but minor entry in the vast corpus of Kazakh oral epic and Sătbek himself a rather trivial figure in comparison with the Kazakh Batyrs (heroes) whose exploits are lauded in other and more famous epics. The interest and the oddity of the narrative lies in the identity of the man who has killed Sătbek’s family, for he is soon identified as one “Zharmaq,” or Yermak. The tale is thus apparently an account of the death of Yermak Timofeyevich, a Cossack adventurer and mercenary who in the late sixteenth century crossed the Ural Mountains and defeated the Siberian Khanate. Yermak’s deeds became the subject of an extensive corpus of Russian legends and folk songs, many of which featured fantastic accounts of his death in battle with Turkic adversaries. Sătbek Batyr turns these narratives inside out, recasting Yermak as a violent brigand, restaging the story in the territory of present-day Kazakhstan, and telling it all from the point of view of (and sometimes in the voice of) Yermak’s killer. Yet the perspective offered is a retrospective view: Sătbek Batyr may take its antagonist from the earliest years of Russian expansion, but the work itself, first published in 1909, dates from the very last years of the Russian empire, and the clashes it narrates index the conflicts and upheavals of the late nineteenth century. Sătbek Batyr is a Kazakh, a Turkic people who inhabit the grasslands of north Central Asia and who until the collectivization drives of the 1930s practiced mobile pastoralism. The Kazakh Khanate was a polity that emerged in the late fifteenth to 498

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-40

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ early sixteenth century, eventually dividing into three separate confederations, the Orta Ju̇ z (middle horde) in the north and west of present-day Kazakhstan, the Kīshī Ju̇ z (little horde) in the east, and the Ūly Ju̇ z (great horde) in the south, each of which was ruled by a Khan who could claim descent from Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan). The Kazakhs possess a rich oral literary culture, with aqyns (singers) performing oral epics, composing new jyrs (epic songs) to commemorate the exploits of heroes and Khans, and competing with one another in aĭtys, or oral duels in which the aqyns traded insults and boasts. In the mid-nineteenth century, Islamic publishing houses in Kazan and other cities began to print chapbook-style editions of many of these oral narratives, while ethnographers like Wilhem Radloff and Ăbubăkīr Divaev collected extensive corpuses of Kazakh oral literature. In the twentieth century, Soviet scholars, including many of the most famous authors of Soviet Kazakhstan, recorded and transcribed still more examples of Kazakh oral literature.1 The epic Sătbek Batyr is the work of Aqylbek Sabalūly, or Molla Aqylbek ben Sabal, an important but rather murky figure in the history of Kazakh literature. Sabalūly was apparently born in 1880 in the northeast of present-day Kazakhstan, educated at a madrassa in the city of Semipalatinsk, and subsequently worked as a teacher in various nomadic Kazakh villages (Kamalqyzy 2016, 6–9). He died in 1919. Kazakh scholars often categorize him as one of the so-called kītabi aqyndar (book poets), a series of late nineteenth-century Kazakh writers who used their madrassa educations to translate Persian and Arabic texts into Kazakh and to transcribe and revise Kazakh oral literature for printing in Kazan, Ufa, and other centers of Islamic publishing. Sabalūly’s first publications date from the turn of the century, and his oeuvre eventually grew to some forty separate works, including original poetic works, versions of Kazakh oral literary narratives, and verse narratives adapted from classical Persian and Arabic literature. Much of what is known about his life comes from the opening lines of these works, as Sabalūly followed the convention of introducing himself to an imagined audience as though his printed works were themselves oral performances. Sătbek Batyr is thus a print artifact, but one that has its roots in the oral literary culture of the Kazakhs and is apparently based on a parallel tradition of folk narratives about Sătbek Batyr. It is composed with the hendecasyllabic metrical pattern typical of Kazakh oral literature, and characterized by the poetic devices of grammatical parallelism, repetition, and simile. The task of this chapter is to analyze the epic of Sătbek Batyr, charting the twists and turns in the epic itself and in the colonial history it is based on. If the tale is read as an indigenous representation of the impacts of Russian colonialism, what criticisms does it render? What alternative world does it imagine? Responding to these questions, this chapter reviews the place of Yermak in Russian literature and culture, examines the history of the expansion of the Russian empire into the Kazakh steppe and the representation of this in Kazakh literature, and concludes with a close reading of the epic itself. Ultimately, this chapter argues that Sătbek Batyr does not romanticize solitary rebels against the imperial order but rather dramatizes the story of colonial incursion by examining the threat it posed to the domestic life of an ordinary and rather middle-class Kazakh, one who ultimately seeks no more than a compromise that will preserve his family. In this, the text reflects the conflicts and the compromises that characterize the history of Russian colonialism in the Kazakh steppe of the nineteenth century. 499

— ​ G a b r i e l M c G u i r e —​

YERMAK TIMOFEYEVICH AND RUSSIAN IMPERIAL EXPANSION In the sixteenth century, Russia began to expand to the east, coming into conflict with a series of Turkic Khanates that were themselves remnants of Chinggis Khan’s Mongol empire. In 1552, Tsar Ivan IV took the city of Kazan, seat of the Kazan Khanate, and, soon thereafter, Astrakhan, giving Russia control of the entire Volga River basin (Romaniello 2012). To the east, beyond the Ural Mountains, lay the Siberian Khanate of Kuchum Khan. In 1582, the Russian merchant family known as the Stroganovs outfitted a Cossack expeditionary force for a campaign against Kuchum. It is at this point that Yermak enters the historical record, leading the expedition for the Stroganovs.2 The details of Yermak’s life and of his campaign against Kuchum Khan are known from a mixture of sources: contemporaneous correspondence between the Stroganovs and the Tsar, a series of seventeenth-century Siberian chronicles relating the details of the expedition, and a wealth of later Russian folk songs and legends that transformed Yermak into a popular hero. Though little is known of Yermak before he entered the Stroganovs’ service, the chronicles agree in describing him as a brigand who preyed on boats in the lower Volga but who was forced to flee after the Tsar dispatched soldiers to destroy the river pirates (Lincoln 2007, 41–42). Yermak escaped upriver with a small company of men, eventually reaching the Stroganovs’ estates. There, he was commissioned to lead an expeditionary force of some 840 men across the Urals, armed with matchlock muskets and small cannons, and supplied with food and gunpowder. Though R. G. Skrynnikov argues that Yermak’s campaign was intended as no more than “a typical Cossack raid, impetuous and irresistible” (1986, 18), it took place at a moment when weapons like those Yermak carried had begun to whittle away at the so-called nomadic military advantage. Yermak portaged the Ural Mountains, then floated downstream until he reached Kuchum’s capital of Isker, on the Ertys (Irtush) river some ways north of the border of present-day Kazakhstan, where Yermak’s guns and cannons allowed him to seize the city. Yermak then claimed the land for the Tsar and dispatched an envoy to Ivan IV, bearing an enormous wealth of captured furs as tribute (Lincoln 2007, 43). Yermak was able to hold the city of Isker from 1582 until 1585, but his situation became increasingly tenuous as his supplies of food and gunpowder dwindled and as his forces were continually attacked by Kuchum Khan, a shrewd and determined adversary. In 1585, Kuchum Khan ambushed and killed Yermak when the latter was returning from a failed voyage up the Ertys in search of a rumored caravan bearing supplies from Bukhara. Kuchum’s victory would prove short-lived, however, as a Tsarist relief force had arrived during Yermak’s absence. Well-armed and wellsupplied, the Tsarist forces consolidated Yermak’s conquest, building a series of permanent forts along the river. By 1600, the territory of the former Siberian Khanate had been decisively claimed for the Tsar (2007, 43–45). The chronicles, although they do not detail the name of Yermak’s killer, do offer detailed accounts of his death. The Stroganov family chronicle records that Yermak and his men had made camp on a small island but were attacked in the night by Kuchum’s men, adding that: 500

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ Some men remaining of the tribes say that your brave soldier Yermak started up there from his sleep and saw his company being slain by us and could not reach it, since the distance was so great, and here he fell in the river and drowned. (Armstrong 1975, 57) The Yesipov Chronicle similarly relates a death in which Yermak attempts to jump from the riverbank into his boat, only to slip and be dragged underwater by the weight of his chain mail. The Remezov Chronicle offers a far more expansive account, explaining that Kuchum had already secretly prepared a ford across the river channel to the island, then on the night of the attack dispatched a scout who returned to report that the Cossacks all slept; asked for proof, the scout went to the Cossack camp a second time and returned with three muskets and an ammunition pouch. Kuchum Khan then attacked, and: Yermak, seeing the killing of his men and no help from anywhere to save his life, ran to his boat but could not climb into it for he was clad in two of the royal coats of mail and the boat had floated away from the bank, so that, unable to reach it, he was drowned on the 6th day of August. (1975, 208) These parallel accounts of a confused military struggle in the dark and rain and of an accidental death by drowning bear little resemblance, as will be seen, to the much later tale of Sătbek Batyr’s battle to guard his home. Yet the Remezov Chronicle does pay attention to Turkic sources, reporting a series of alleged Tatar oral legends about the death of Yermak. Supposedly, the drowned body of Yermak was soon retrieved from the river and recognized by the coat of mail, but when the coat was removed, “blood gushed from the body’s mouth and nose as from a living man” (1975, 212). A series of additional miraculous signs then appear, with fresh blood again pouring out when arrows are thrust into the body and with carrion birds circling overhead yet never alighting to feed on the body. An old man then reportedly cries out that “This miracle should make them perceive the Christian God and one eternally glorifying God.” Yermak is buried according to Muslim rites, and a great funeral feast is held, after which further miracles appeared, until: Mullahs and murzas, seeing that their law was profaned and their miracles were ceasing, forbade everyone, old and young, to mention Yermak’s name so that his honor and fame should fade away and his grave become neglected. Yet to this day the infidels see on the Saturdays of the commemoration of the dead a pillar of fire rising to the sky, and on ordinary Saturdays a great candle burning at his head. Thus God reveals his own. (1975, 216) These are accounts that claim roots in Turkic oral lore yet are clearly narrated in the mode of Christian hagiographic legends and which self-evidently serve to justify Christian (and hence Tsarist) power as divinely willed. The tenuous connection with Turkic oral lore is underlined when the apparent source of these legends is finally revealed: in 1621, the Tsar ordered that information about Yermak and his death 501

— ​ G a b r i e l M c G u i r e —​ be gathered from both Cossacks and Tatars, but when questioned, “the infidels following their Koran reveal nothing” (1975, 217). Instead, the reports of Tatar legends arrive by way of the “Kalmat,” or Oirat, a nomadic people from the Inner Asian steppe east of Kazakhstan. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Oirat became a major power, expanding into the territory of the Kazakhs. In the oral literature of the Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples, the Buddhist Oirat are, like the Christian Russians, treated as an infidel Other (Kara 2010). In 1650, the chronicle reports that an envoy from the “Kalmat Ablay” appeared asking for Yermak’s coat of mail as a gift (Armstrong 1975, 218). On receiving the gift, Ablay in turn describes the death of Yermak and the miracles that followed, finally adding that, When I was a child and ailing in my stomach I was given to drink of the earth from his grave, and have remained healthy to this day. When earth has been taken from the grave and I go with it to war, I am victorious, but when there is no earth I return empty-handed. (1975, 222) Outside of the chronicles, Yermak swelled into a popular hero of epic dimensions in Russian folk songs. These songs originated among the Cossacks of the Don, Ural, and Terek rivers, but by the time they began to be collected in the eighteenth century, they had spread throughout Russia (Harrison 1975, 13). Some of these songs paralleled the accounts of the chronicles relatively closely, while others transplanted Yermak to novel territories and campaigns, sending him to war against the Ottoman empire, having him participate in the siege of Kazan, and making him the ally or even the kin of other legendary Russian heroes like Ilya Muromets and Stenka Razin (Manning 1923, 212; Harrison 1975, 14). In these songs, Yermak’s past as a brigand is a key part of his biography and he himself is a rough but charismatic figure, possessed of an almost foolhardy bravery and of the kinds of outsized appetites C. M. Bowra long ago identified as characteristic of the epic hero (1952). In one song, the reward Yermak demands for a service to the Tsar is permission to drink for free in all the taverns of the realm (Manning 1923, 212).

RUSSIAN COLONIZATION AND KAZAKH ORAL LITERATURE Just as Yermak had followed rivers up over the Ural Mountains and then down the Ertys to Isker, so too did the river Ertys later lead the Russians south into the territory of the Kazakhs, setting in motion the political and social changes reflected in the tale of Sătbek Batyr.3 In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia began to build a series of forts extending south from Fort Tobolsk along the Ertys, a river that runs north-south through the eastern part of present-day Kazakhstan, passing through what was the heart of the pasture lands of the Kazakh Orta Ju̇ z. In 1735, Abulkhair Khan of the Kīshī Ju̇ z agreed to an alliance with the Russian empire; though this was long represented in Soviet scholarship as the first step in a peaceful extension of Russian sovereignty over the Kazakh steppe, Abulkhair seems to have desired no more than a temporary alliance with Russia that would strengthen his own authority over the Kīshī Ju̇ z (Morrison 2020, 74–76). Abylaĭ, the Khan of 502

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ the Orta Ju̇ z, soon made a similar alliance, and for similar reasons. Only after the Speranskii reforms of 1822 did the Russian state seek to exert direct authority over the northern steppe, eliminating the title of Khan of the Orta Ju̇ z, dividing the northern steppe into administrative units, imposing taxes on the Kazakhs, and building a series of forts to support this consolidation of authority (Kilian 2013, 189–91; Morrison 2020, 77). The Speranskii reforms also triggered perhaps the most significant rebellion against Tsarist authority in Central Asia, Kenesary Qasymūly’s revolt. Kenesary (1802–1847), the grandson of Abylaĭ Khan, led a kind of guerilla campaign against Russian power from 1837 until his death, striking Russian settlements and then fading away into the steppe. Though this is now often represented as a war of national liberation, Kenesary’s surviving correspondence mixes protests over the loss of pastures and the construction of forts with promises of loyalty if these were removed and his own authority as Khan of the Orta Ju̇ z acknowledged. Kenesary was eventually forced to flee to south Kazakhstan, where he was finally killed in a clash with Kyrgyz who were joined by Kazakhs from the Ūly Ju̇ z opposed to Kenesary (Morrison 2020, 78–79, 119–23). Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, waves of Russian settlers moved into the steppe, and especially into the north of Kazakhstan (Khalid 2021, 104–5). The contraction of Kazakh political autonomy and the expansion of the Russian empire corresponded to changes in the production, circulation, and consumption of literature in the northern steppe. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the combination of cheap paper imported from Russia and the introduction of printing presses meant that books were suddenly no longer a luxury but a common good, with Islamic publishing houses in Kazan and Ufa printing collections of religious texts and popular folk literature that enjoyed a wide circulation (Ross 2020, 76–77). Improved trade networks and the expansion of cotton cultivation brought about an increase in wealth that spilled into religious education. Established madrassas filled with students and new madrassas were built both in the southern cities of Bukhara and Tashkent, traditional centers of Islamic learning, and in Semey, Taraz, and other towns of the Kazakh steppe (Khalid 2021, 125–26). These changes affected not only urban areas but also the Kazakhs of the steppe as well. Madrassa students earned money by spending their summers working as teachers in Kazakh herding camps, some Kazakhs themselves traveled to study in madrassas, and Kazakh oral literary texts were printed in Kazan and other cities. The literary culture that emerged from these encounters eludes easy bifurcations between the oral and the written. The earliest recorded versions of many of the most famous works of Kazakh oral literature are often the chapbook-style texts printed in Kazan, which were sometimes based on transcriptions made by Tatars working as teachers among the Kazakhs and sometimes the work of literate Kazakhs like Sabalūly. Once printed, these texts would circulate alongside the oral tradition, being read aloud in homes and public gatherings, and even consulted by aqyns themselves as they worked to refine and expand their repertoire. A Kazakh version of Alpamys, one of the most famous and widely circulated epics of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, was printed in Kazan in 1899, then reprinted seven times between 1901 and 1916. The 1899 text was the work of Zhu̇ sīpbek Qozha Shaĭkhyslamūly (1857–1937), a kītabi aqyn responsible for the printing of some of the most famous Kazakh oral literary texts, including the romance of Qyz 503

— ​ G a b r i e l M c G u i r e —​ Zhībek and a version of the aĭtys between the aqyns Birzhan and Sara (Dubuisson 2021). The aqyn Aĭnabek Nysanov recounted that he learned the epic of Alpamys not from his own teacher but rather from Shaĭkhyslamūly’s print version, explaining that in 1930, a visiting folklorist had read this and other works of Kazakh oral ­literature out loud to him (Saltaqova 2006, 328). In the final lines of his own performance, Nysanovi acknowledges this debt: Tolyq zhattap alyp em Zhu̇ sīpbek Qozha bastauyn. Ȯzīmnīng atym Nysanov, Basqa sȯz būghan qospadym. (Nysanov 2006, 112) I have learned in full On from where Zhu̇ sīpbek Qozha began. My own name is Nysanov And now my words are done.4 In their own works, the kītabi aqyns in turn often represented themselves not as ethnographers salvaging a folk tradition but rather as aqyns in their own right, their publications not mere copying but rather one new link in a chain of performances. This is dramatically manifested in the opening lines of Shaĭkhyslamūly’s version of Qyz Zhībek, in which he first calls an audience to gather around him and prepare themselves for the wonder of his words and for a sheep to be slaughtered for the guests, even as he pauses to critique an earlier print version as offering “bent and twisted words” (qisynsyz ketīp sȯzderī) he will now straighten (McGuire 2021, 41–43). The oral literature of the Kazakhs also bore witness to the economic and social changes brought about by the expansion of Russian power. The didactic poems known as zar zaman (time of sorrow) were scathing critiques of Tsarist administrators and of the Kazakh elites seen as complicit with them, and these works too were published in Kazan (McGuire 2018, 7–10). The zar zaman genre is named after a poem by Shortanbaĭ Qanaĭūly (1818–1881), who appears to have been a traditional singer, as were many of the other aqyns whose poems are gathered into the broader genre of zar zaman poetry. In the genre’s titular poem, Qanaĭūly offers a grim diagnosis of the Kazakhs’ condition, denouncing how “the profane and quarrelsome are Khan, / the stingy have become lords,” and conjuring the world-turned-upside-down quality of their life with a series of fanciful images in which “a sheep is larger than a camel, a foal greater than a mare” (Aram, araz khan shyqty / qaiyry zhoq baĭ shyqty” … “qoy zor bolyp tu̇ ĭden / qūlyn zor bop bieden) (Mădībaeva 2013, 10–11). Qanaĭūly mixes concern for a loss of piety and disregard for the tenets of Islam with denunciations of the taxes the poor must pay, for: Zhalghyz-aq qara qalady, Ūialmastan būl kăpīr Oghan da salyq salady. (2013, 95) 504

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ Though there be but one sheep left, The heathen feels no shame, In taxing even this. Qanaĭūly rarely directly names the cause of these changes—though other zar zaman poets do—but rather references kăpīrs (heathens) and offers pointed allusions to pigs, as when he writes “a son is not born from a sow, / Nor can kin be made with the wild boar” (Megezhīnnen ūl tumas, / Qaĭyn bolmas qabanda) (2013, 134–35). The critique of Russian authority in the didactic poetry of zar zaman was paralleled by narrative oral poetry that celebrated figures of resistance. Kenesary Qasymūly’s rebellion (1837–1847) against the Tsar was debated and commemorated in a rich corpus of Kazakh and Kyrgyz oral literature over the latter half of the nineteenth century, including oral epics that laud Kenesary as a hero, Kyrgyz and Ūly Ju̇ z works that portray him as a murderous brigand, and even aĭtys performances in which aqyns spar over the nature of the rebellion. In his role as hero, Kenesary is in some cases gifted with the fantastic attributes of an epic hero, accompanied by a horse that talks or even flies.5 Among the most famous of these texts is the “Kenesary-Naūryzbaĭ” of the singer Nysanbaĭ Zhyrau Zhamanqūlūly (1822–1888), who was himself a part of Kenesary’s retinue: as he recounts in his opening lines, his skill as a singer won him the patronage of Kenesary when he was only fifteen years old. The bulk of Nysanbaĭ’s narrative is concerned with Kenesary’s clashes with the Kyrgyz during the final years of his life, when he fled to the south in a failed attempt to find allies and pasture. Despite this, the text is haunted by allusions to the lost homeland of north Kazakhstan. The opening lines introduce Kenesary as the descendant of Abylaĭ Khan and lay claim to the fields and hills of northern Kazakhstan: Ăuelgī meken-tūraghy— Kȯkshetaudyng dalasy. Zhazghy zhaĭlau qonysy – Ūlytaudyng salasy.

(Dăuītov 2012, 19)

Our first home – The fields of Kokshetau Our summer pastures The slopes of Ūlytau. Memories of the struggle with the Tsar’s forces likewise shadow the battles with Kyrgyz adversaries, as when the hero Naurzybay counters a Kyrgyz warrior’s denunciation of Kenesary’s brutality by recounting Kenesary’s own flight from his homeland and by accusing the Kyrgyz of being allies of the Russians and traitors to Islam. Aqylbek Sabalūly’s own life traced these transformations: as a student, he studied at a madrassa in Semey; as a teacher, he travelled with Kazakh herding camps in the north of Kazakhstan; as a poet, he read Tatar translations of classic Persian and had his own works printed by the Islamic publishing houses of Kazan. Sabalūly’s own 1911 Sūm zaman (Age of deceit) is sometimes considered an example of zar zaman poetry (Kamalqyzy 2016, 79–90). 505

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THE EPIC OF SĂTBEK BATYR Aqylbek Sabalūly’s Sătbek Batyr was first published in Kazan in 1909, then republished in 1911. Although his is the oldest known mention of Sătbek—and the only one from before the Soviet era—Kazakh folklorists did document a series of additional versions in the 1930s and 1940s. The first of the Soviet-era versions dates from 1936 and was copied from the dictation of a singer named Mustafa who came from Karagandy, a city quite close to Sabalūly’s Qarqaraly. In 1946, the Kazakh scholar Ăuelbek Qongyratbaev collected two additional versions, one in the south near Almaty and the second while on an ethnographic expedition to Sabalūly’s region of Semey. Two additional versions were transcribed in 1948 by a Q. Baīghūttyūly, though it is not clear where or from whom. Some of these versions are in prose and some are in verse; a few are much longer than Sabalūly’s while still following his general plot. That they came from multiple regions of Kazakhstan suggests a relatively widespread oral tradition.6 Sabalūly uses the opening lines of his own Sătbek Batyr to sketch out the narrative’s setting. Sătbek’s herding camps, Sabalūly relates, were in Kenesary’s own homeland of Kokshetau, an area of grasslands and wooded hills in present-day north Kazakhstan. Sătbek himself had two auyls (herding camps), one settled in “Būrmatal” under the stewardship of his Băĭbīshe (senior wife), while the second was at the foot of “Oral” mountain under the stewardship of his toqal (junior wife). Sătbek would spend thirty days with his Băĭbīshe, after which he would begin to think about the flocks in his toqal’s care and go spend thirty days in turn with her. At the narrative’s start, Sătbek has just slaughtered a horse at his Băĭbīshe’s auyl for soghym, a custom still in practice in present-day Kazakhstan in which a horse is fattened and then killed in late fall to provide a store of meat for the winter, and he has resolved to set out for the toqal’s camp to slaughter a horse for her. Collectively, these details paint Sătbek as embodying a kind of middle-class respectability: he is neither a storied leader of men nor a brash young warrior in search of renown but rather a family man, old enough to be a father and, while not fantastically wealthy, rich enough to possess two households and to slaughter two horses for soghym. That his camps are in the prime winter pastures of Kokshetau reinforces the image of his comfort. Sătbek is unlike other heroes in his middle-aged domesticity, and unlike them too in his seeming flinching from combat. When he sees the bodies of his servants and sons lying strewn about his house, his first reaction is to seize an axe, but with the sole intent of cutting loose the horses tethered in his corral: Bolsyn dep tym bolmasa bărī zhaia, Attaryn Būrmatalgha aĭdap saldy. (Qorabaǐ 2009, 317) Thinking, let them at least be horseless, he drove the horses out and off to Būrmatal. Sătbek only abandons his plan to quietly flee under cover of dark when he looks through the window of his house and sees his daughter Bătīsh huddled by the 506

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ samovar, the prisoner and the servant of the men who surround her. Sătbek, resolved not to abandon her, crouches in the brush behind his house and, as one of the “infidels” leaves to check on the horses, strikes off his head. As Sabalūly writes: Almadaĭ ūshīp tu̇ stī basy zherge, Qūdaĭym qūat berip Sătbek erge. (2009, 318) As an apple falls to the ground fell his head, For God so granted strength to Sătbek. One after another the brigands leave the house, and one after another are beheaded in the dark, till soon only “Zharmaq” (Yermak) is left. This scene would appear to establish Sătbek as possessed of the prototypical heroic qualities of courage, cunning, and strength, yet this is a hero who dithers between fleeing and fighting and who strikes from behind in the dark. He is still a far cry from the typical heroes of Kazakh oral epic, figures whose unblemished courage and “preeminence over all” is a pattern broken by Sătbek’s ambivalence in the face of danger (2009, 372). Paradoxically, it is Yermak who appears to model the qualities of almost superhuman endurance and who is granted the epithets of an epic hero. When he leaves the house, he too is struck by Sătbek’s axe, but the blow shatters a shoulder rather than severing a head. Undaunted, he grapples with Sătbek and, despite his crippled state, throws him head over heels to the ground. As the narrator observes, Yermak: Qimyly aĭdahardaĭ kȯrīnedī, Zhihanda kez bolmadym. (2009, 319) Moves with the strength of a dragon, but rarely have I such a hero met. The two fight on, though neither is able to defeat the other until Sătbek notices his guard dog chained near the corral and lights upon a cunning strategy, bringing the fight close to the dog until: Ărkīmge ărbīr pale kez keledī, Sol khalde ku̇ shī ketken mezgīl edī. Bolysyp qara tȯbet Sătbek erge, Taqymyn bū kăpīrdīng ezgīledī. Zharmaqtyng alyp-soghyp kestī basyn, Qyzyl qan qyldy olardyng īshken asyn. Bătīsh qyz u̇ ĭde talyp qalghan eken, Ăkesīn kȯrgen tȯktī zhasyn. In the end, misfortune finds us all, The moment comes when strength fails. 507

(2009, 321)

— ​ G a b r i e l M c G u i r e —​ The black hound, Sătbek’s ally, Sets his teeth in the infidel’s leg. Now again the axe falls on Zharmaq’s skull, And they make a meal of red blood. Bătīsh, alone in the house, wearied with fear, Wept when she saw her father. Though the image of Bătīsh underlines the brutality of the raid, the wounded and one-armed Yermak’s ability to fight a Kazakh warrior to a draw makes him recognizable kin to the heroic figure of the Siberian chronicles.7 The ambiguities of Sătbek as a hero in turn bleed into the ambiguities of his broader relationship with Russian power. Though the opening scene seems to stage the arrival of Russians as a scene of “infidel” brigands shattering the warmth and domestic comfort of the Kazakh home (thus hinting at the background story of the Kazakh’s loss of the prime pastures of Kokshetau), the epic’s concluding section offers up a contrasting scene of rapprochement and even loyalty. Though Sătbek quietly buries the bodies of Yermak and his men, word of his deed eventually reaches the “Patsha,” an investigation is launched, and Sătbek and his dog made to come and stand before the throne. In the second half of the narrative, Sătbek retells in his own words the events of the first half, omitting any mention of his initial attempt to flee without fighting but adding some other details. Here, we are offered a detailed description of his arrival at his junior wife’s winter camp: Keldīm de kīshī u̇ ĭīme attan tu̇ stīm, Toqal qoĭghan ekī shyny shaĭdan īshtīm. Kelsem de sabyr, takhat qyla almadym, Zhu̇ regīm alyp-u̇ shyp men baĭghūstyng.

(2009, 321)

I reached my home, got off my horse My toqal served me tea, I drank two cups. I had come, yes, but could find no rest, My poor heart raced with anxiety. Sătbek abandons his habit of staying a full month and instead saddles his horse and sets off through the night, after which he recounts essentially the same story found in the first half, concluding with a declaration that: Menīng qylghan ănggīmem osy boldy, Kerek bolsa, kesīngīz, mīne, basyngyz! (2009, 322) This is the tale I have to tell you, If I have erred, then take my head! Yet, the Tsar is not displeased at all, but rather honors Sătbek with a degree of rank and with an exemption from tax payment, declaring: 508

— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ Ăĭ, Sătbek, men kȯrmedīm erdī, - deĭdī, Tăngīrím tīleuīngdī berdī, - deĭdī, Alym bermeĭ tūryngyz sīz zhylyna, Saghan da menīng rakhymym keldī, - deĭdī. (2009, 322) Eh, Sătbek, never have I seen such a man, God has heard your wishes, he said, This year you need pay no tax, For I too would thank you, he said. Sătbek’s dog is not forgotten, either, for the final lines record that the Tsar gifts the dog a golden collar with a medal hanging from it as a mark of regard (2009, 322). The closing mention of a tax exemption marks Sătbek Batyr as an artifact of the nineteenth century, for it was only after the Speranskii reforms that the Russian empire moved from a nominal sovereignty in which actual authority remained in the hands of a Chinggisid Kazakh elite to a system in which a colonial administration exerted direct authority, including the authority to claim taxes. Here as in the works of zar zaman poets, resentment of these taxes figures as a central concern of the poet. Beyond that, the narrative’s concern with the threat Yermak’s violence poses to the seasonal round of mobile pastoral life—the regular journeys between the herding camps of the senior wife and the junior wife, the slaughter of a horse for winter meat—arguably alludes to the larger story of the Kazakhs’ ever-increasing loss of pastureland in the face of Russian settler colonialism through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yet, the text is also full of details that speak not of nostalgia for the past but rather of the material changes of the present. The epic of Sătbek Batyr was printed on paper made cheap by the subsidies of the Russian empire, while the samovar Bătīsh crouched beside was likewise a technology introduced by the Russians. Even the tea that Sătbek’s junior wife poured him was a good that Russian trade networks had only recently made cheap enough to feature in ordinary acts of steppe hospitality.

CONCLUSION Rebecca Ruth Gould, analyzing the figure of the bandit rebel in Chechen folklore, concludes that the isolated deaths of these characters is integral to their status as heroes of anti-colonial resistance: in the context of a communal defeat, the loneliness of the bandit modeled not criminality but moral superiority, and their deaths, not defeat but honorable resistance (2014). The bandit of oral literature thus prefigures what Gould has elsewhere termed “transgressive sanctity,” in which violent resistance to colonial law is aestheticized as sacred, generating a “new norm that wields a greater, if still tenuous, authority than colonial law, and which has more hegemony than any other legal norm (2016, 62). This is a model of literature of resistance that could certainly be extended to some Kazakh literature: the Kenesary rebellion was both dismissed by Russian cadre as no more than brigandage and aestheticized in Kazakh zhyrlar as a heroic if doomed campaign in defense of Kazakh lifeways; the zar zaman aqyns did challenge the authority of colonial law by turning to the authority of Islam. 509

— ​ G a b r i e l M c G u i r e —​ Yet, the epic of Sătbek Batyr offers up a different model of resistance altogether. Here, it is not the Kazakh hero who is a brigand but rather the Cossack adventurer, and the tale ends not with Sătbek’s lonely death but rather with his reintegration into a community under the authority of the Tsar. Sătbek himself is a strikingly middle-class figure, with the violence that calls him to heroism bursting in upon a life of quotidian comfort. His heroism itself comes not from his alienation but exactly from this life of comfort, for his identity as head of a family entangles him in communal obligations without which he would have simply fled. That his violence culminates not in exile or death but rather in acts of bureaucratic accommodation arguably mirrors the ambiguities of the colonial encounter itself on the Kazakh steppe, a history that featured dispossession, rebellion, and reprisals, but also acts of cooperation and accommodation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Meiramgul Kussainova for sharing her knowledge of Kenesary in Kazakh oral literature, and to Kamilya Khamitova for her assistance in dealing with Russian-language sources.

NOTES 1 The most extensive study of Central Asian oral literature is Reichl (1992), but see also Chadwick and Zhirmunsky (1969) and Shoolbraid (1975). 2 For a general survey of the Russian conquest of Siberia, see Lincoln (2007). The various chronicles and letters that feature Yermak are available in English translation in Armstrong (1975). 3 For a panoramic account of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, see Morrison (2020); for the importance of rivers in Russia’s early expansion, see Kilian (2013). Khalid (2021) offers a valuable survey and synthesis of the social and cultural changes that followed the conquest. 4 All translations of Kazakh texts are my own. For Russian-language texts, I have relied on Armstrong’s translations (1975). Transcriptions are accordingly provided for Kazakh but not for Russian-language sources. 5 Prior (2013) includes a translation of a Kyrgyz account of the death of Kenesary. 6 In writing this chapter, I have relied on a recent Cyrillic text edition of Sătbek Batyr (Qorabaǐ 2009). A digital facsimile of the 1911 version is available on the website of the national library of Kazakhstan (ben Sabal 1911). Manuscripts of the Soviet versions are housed in the archives of the Kazakh National Academy of Sciences. 7 The editors of Babalar sȯzī suggest that Bătīsh unchains the dog and sends him to aid Sătbek. Though this detail is explicit in later variants, Sabalūly never states how the dog is freed. I have interpreted the scene as implying that Sătbek merely brings the fight close enough to the dog that he is able to bite Yermak.

WORKS CITED Armstrong, Terence, ed. 1975. Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia. Translated by Tatiana Minorsky and David Wileman. London: The Hakluyt Society. Bowra, Cecil Maurice. 1952. Heroic Poetry. London: Macmillan & Co. Chadwick, Nora K., and Victor Zhirmunsky. 1969. Oral Epics of Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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— ​ E m p i r e a n d R e s i s t a n c e i n   K a z a k h O r a l E p i c —​ Dăuītov, Sărsenbī, ed. 2012. Khan Kene: tarikhi zhyrlar, tolghaular, dastandar, p’esalar men derektī baiandar. Almaty: Ana Tili. Dubuisson, Eva-Marie. 2021. “Mapping Participant Frameworks in the Aitys of Birzhan and Sara.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31, no. 3: 357–81. Gould, Rebecca. 2014. “The Lonely Hero and Chechen Modernity: Interpreting the Story of Gekha the Abrek.” Journal of Folklore Research: An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology 51, no. 2: 199–222. ———. 2016. Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Harrison, William. 1975. “Yermak as Folk-Hero.” In Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia, edited by Terence Armstrong, 13–18. London: The Hakluyt Society. Kamalqyzy, Zhanymgu̇l. 2016. Kītabi aqyndar zhăne Aqylbek Sabalūly shygharmashylyghy. Almaty: Volkova E. V. Kara, Dávid. 2010. “Kalmak: The Enemy in the Kazak and Kirghiz Epic Songs.” Acta Orientalia 63, no. 2: 167–78. Khalid, Adeeb. 2021. Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kilian, Janet Marie. 2013. “Allies & Adversaries: The Russian Conquest of the Kazakh Steppe.” PhD diss., The George Washington University. Lincoln, W. Bruce. 2007. The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mădībaeva, Qanīpash. 2013. Shortanbaĭ Qanaĭūly shygharmalary: tolghaular, aĭitystar, dastandar. Almaty: Ana Tīlī. Manning, Clarence Augustus. 1923. “Yermak Timofeyevich in Russian Folk Poetry.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 43: 206–15. McGuire, Gabriel. 2018. “Aqyn Agha? Abai Zholy as Socialist Realism and as Literary History.” Journal of Eurasian Studies 9, no. 1: 2–11. ———. 2021. “Epic Inside-Out: Qız Jibek and the Politics of Genre in Kazakh Oral Literature.” Oral Tradition 35, no. 1: 37–66. Morrison, Alexander. 2020. The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nysanov, Aĭnabek. 2006. “Alpamys Batyr.” In Babalar sȯzī: batyrlar zhyry, edited by S. Qosan and et al., 33:65–112. Astana: Foliant. Prior, Daniel. 2013. The Šabdan Baatir Codex: Epic and the Writing of Northern Kirghiz History : Edition, Translation and Interpretations, with a Facsimile of the Unique Manuscript. Leiden: Brill. Qorabaǐ, Serīkqazy, ed. 2009. “Sătbek Batyr.” In Babalar sȯzī: tarikhy zhyrlar, 56:316–22. Astana: Foliant. Reichl, Karl. 1992. Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structures. New York: Garland Publishing. Romaniello, Mathew P. 2012. The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552– 1671. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Ross, Danielle. 2020. Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sabal, Aqylbek molla ben. 1911. Qissa Sătbek Batyr. Kazan: Karimiia. Saltaqova, Zhanat. 2006. “Alpamys Batyr (A. Nysanov nūsqasy).” In Babalar sȯzī: batyrlar zhyry, edited by S. Qosan et al., 33:331–32. Astana: Foliant. Shoolbraid, George Murray Haining. 1975. The Oral Epic of Siberia and Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications. Skrynnikov, Ruslan Grigorevich. 1986. “Ermak’s Siberian Expedition.” Russian History 13, no. 1: 1–39.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

T O L S T OY ’ S WA R A N D P E A C E N AT I O N A L N OV E L - E P I C O N PA G E , S TA G E , A N D S C R E E N

rsr

Julie A. Buckler

Since its publication in the 1860s, Count Lev (Leo) Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1869) has reigned as Russia’s most famous modern national novel-epic. From the inception of this massive project, Tolstoy had distinctly epic intentions for War and Peace. His novel tells the story of the emerging Russian nation, shaped by collective heroism and sacrifice during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion. War and Peace is a coming-of-age novel figured by a set of young aristocratic characters, male and female, each from a family with marked characteristics—the life-loving Rostovs, the disciplined and ambitious Bolkonskys, and the scheming Kuragins. With war as a backdrop, these young people seek their life’s central purpose: Tolstoy’s alter-ego hero Pierre Bezukhov, his best friend Andrei Bolkonsky, and one of Russian literature’s most beloved heroines, Natasha Rostova, at the forefront. Tolstoy’s novel was popular with audiences of its time, and it remains required reading for today’s Russian high school students, but his novel can also make a claim to universality. Readers from all over the world continue to be fascinated by Tolstoy’s peculiar blend of fiction, history, and philosophy, and by his repudiation of the “great man” theory of history. Instead, Tolstoy asserts the importance of everyday lives and innumerable small moments whose sum total determines the course of history. The productive tension between the fictional micro-scale, where Tolstoy depicts his mostly aristocratic yet all-too-human characters at ground level, and the historical macro-scale, where Tolstoy evinces skepticism toward grand narratives, is one of the most central features of War and Peace. The organic unity of these diverse elements gives this questing novel its epic quality. War and Peace was initially received by European critics as a megalith, a roughhewn monument produced by a towering “natural” genius, and War and Peace has been called the greatest novel of all time. As demonstrated by more recent scholarship, however, War and Peace also stands as a literary monument to idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, and even radical unconventionality (Morson 1987, 37–8). I would like to propose a characterization of War and Peace that knits together these two 512

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-41

—​ T o l s t o y ’ s W a r a n d P e a c e —​ perspectives, the epic and the counter-conventional. Ultimately, I argue, War and Peace is a novel-epic monument to anti-monumentality. At the time of its publication, Tolstoy himself was reluctant to identify his massive work as a novel and he was suspicious of the distorting effects of fictional conventions. In his 1868 essay “Some Words about War and Peace,” he made the provocative overstatement, “It is not a novel, still less a poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished to express and was able to express in that form in which it is expressed” (Tolstoy 1928-1958, vol. 16, 7). With its loose structure, dropped plot threads, lavish use of French, and blend of fictional and nonfictional discourses, War and Peace issues a convention-busting challenge to the novel as a literary genre, but to the novel as understood in Tolstoy’s own time. War and Peace is indeed very different from the sentimental epistolary novels and Romantic novels that preceded it, but Tolstoy’s novel easily finds its place within the canon of the later nineteenth-century realist psychological novel, both Russian and Euro-American. Moreover, War and Peace is unquestionably a historical novel and, in this way, extends the Romantic tradition made famous by Sir Walter Scott earlier in the nineteenth century. Most important, novels more generally are now seen by literary scholars as performing an anti-generic function, subsuming and critiquing other literary forms (even other novels) much as Tolstoy’s War and Peace does. I believe the term “novel-epic” best characterizes War and Peace and most truly reflects Tolstoy’s own intentions, his polemical statements notwithstanding. Henry James saw Tolstoy as “a reflector as vast as a natural lake; a monster harnessed to his great subject—all human life!—as an elephant might be harnessed, for purposes of traction, not to a carriage, but to a coach-house” (James 1897, 15059). For James, everything about Tolstoy was outsize—his aspirations, subjects, and works—and his reach corresponded fully to his grasp. More recently, Donald Barthelme’s quirky 1970 tribute “At the Tolstoy Museum” evokes thirty thousand pictures of the Count (including many “stern portraits”) as the principal holdings of an imaginary museum that also includes the 640,086 pages of Tolstoy’s complete works and an outdoor plaza sculpture of Lev Nikolayevich’s monumental head. Barthelme’s tribute is imbued with an affectionate spirit, and Tolstoy, even when monumentalized, is thereby brought closer to his audience and away from the remote reaches of the epic mode. Similarly, War and Peace is a paradoxically accessible epic work—we are awed by it, but also pulled in by the novel’s more intimate and anti-monumental humanity.

LITERARY ANTECEDENTS TO WAR AND PEACE As a Russian epic, if an unconventional one, Tolstoy’s novel responds to premodern Russian epic tales, while also contributing to the Russian nationalist project of his own time. The single most important premodern Russian epic is the late-twelfthcentury Tale of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve), written in old East Slavic by an undetermined author and adapted for the late-imperial Russian national opera Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin in 1890. In the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, Prince Igor Sviatoslavich of Novgorod-Seversk and his company ride out to the steppe in the Don River region to fight the army of the Turkic Polovtsians. Igor is taken prisoner but manages to escape, pointing toward epic battles to come. Another 513

— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ premodern Russian epic, Beyond the Don River (Zadonshchina), written some two hundred years later, describes the historical battle of 1380 on Kulikovo Field, in which the Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich (“Donskoi”) defeated the Tatar armies of Khan Mamai. This victory marked the beginning of the Russians’ successful campaign to free themselves from the Mongol “yoke” under which they had languished since the mid-thirteenth century, an effort completed by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. Both of these premodern Russian epics celebrate military exploits: in both cases, against a threat from the East. Tolstoy’s War and Peace narrates the deeds of Russians fighting to protect their homeland in the modern era, but this time the threat comes from the West. In Tolstoy’s novel, however, the epic-scale movement of military forces is not a glorious accomplishment, but rather a form of mass madness: Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and their reason, had to go from west to east and kill their own kind, just as, several centuries earlier, hordes of men had gone from east to west, killing their own kind. (Tolstoy 2007, 605) During the nineteenth century, Russian authors explored Russia’s emerging sense of national identity and destiny through literary forms. A premier example, Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls (1842), was explicitly conceived as a modern Russian epic and received as such by Gogol’s contemporaries. This masterpiece of verbal invention describes the sojourn of its protagonist, Pavel Chichikov, as he visits a collection of landowners in early-nineteenth-century provincial Russia. Chichikov’s cause is not a noble one imbued with epic grandeur: he attempts to purchase ownership of deceased serfs still listed on the census rolls in order to use them as collateral for financing the purchase of an estate. Gogol completed only a single volume of his projected three-volume (mock-)epic cycle, which was to emulate Dante in taking its protagonist on a journey-quest for redemption. While the mocking satirical tone of Gogol’s first volume with its “low” themes seemed at odds with the more traditionally epic project of celebrating heroism, Dead Souls nevertheless raised fundamental questions about Russia’s destiny as a nation among other nations, especially in its final lyrical passage about the Russian troika, an iconic sleigh with three horses abreast: Art not thou too, O Rus, rushing onwards like a spiritual troika that none can overtake?…The bells set up a wondrous jingling: rent to shreds, the air thunders and is transformed into wind: all that exists of earth flies by, and, looking askance, other peoples and nations step aside and make way for her. (Gogol 2004, 282–83) Tolstoy’s novel-epic extends this nationalist discourse on Russia’s special identity and destiny, although he does so by depicting a historical moment already more than fifty years removed from his initial readers. Tolstoy greatly admired Homer and the other Greco-Roman ancients, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, among other works, in Russian translation. It is fair to say that Tolstoy sought to play a Homer-like part in the evolution of Russian national consciousness by proposing national archetypes and ideals. Writing War and Peace, 514

—​ T o l s t o y ’ s W a r a n d P e a c e —​ he succeeded in doing so. War and Peace was not Tolstoy’s only literary work to evoke the epic style in a Russian context, however. Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad (1896–1904) describes the final doomed chapters in the life of the eponymous Avar warrior, a historical personage who joined forces with the Russians against the Imam Shamil. Literary scholar Harold Bloom celebrated this novella, which he believed to be the greatest of all works in Tolstoy’s oeuvre, declaring that Hadji Murad “lives and dies as the archaic epic hero, combining in himself all of the virtues and none of the flaws of Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas” (Bloom 1994, 336–37). Hadji Murad depicts the defeat of the main protagonist, while interrogating the complex relationship between imperial Russia and the unconquered Indigenous peoples of the Caucasus. Hadji Murad thus does not qualify as a Russian national epic, since the Russians are not the ones described in epic terms, and moreover, this work exhibits a mournful awareness of the incompatibility of the epic outlook with the modern world. In the 1860s, Tolstoy offered an expansive view of modern Russian identity in War and Peace, elevating Russian cultural traditions, natural landscape, and peasant folk. And War and Peace wholeheartedly commits to the nationalist project and glorifies the 1812 Russian military victory over Napoleon. Tolstoy’s use of the Caucasus as a literary setting in The Cossacks and Hadji Murad points to the postcolonial critique of War and Peace, however, whereby this patriotic-spirited novel “consolidated the myth of Russian imperial innocence and helped to legitimize Russia’s imperialist activities” (Thompson 2000, 87). While Tolstoy’s characters carried on their heroic struggle against Napoleon’s invaders, Russian imperialist wars against Indigenous peoples to the south simultaneously continued in full force. In omitting any mention of these southern conquests within the Russian empire and at its borderlands, War and Peace asserts that the defense of Russia from the threat of Europe was the most important national story of the time. Tolstoy’s use of the epic mode to represent both sides of this conflict in different literary works now presents to us a seemingly unresolvable contradiction, even as Tolstoy’s novel continues to be revered as a national work and a literary classic.

WAR AND PEACE: EPIC CONCEPTION AND MODERN REALIZATION Tolstoy’s diary entries for March of 1865 invoke “a cloud of joy and awareness of the possibility of doing great work” (Tolstoy 1928–1958, vol. 48, 60). In the 1864– 1865 “Drafts for an Introduction to War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes of his struggle to find a literary means suitable for the “majestic, deep, and many-sided content” of “the history of the year 1812” (1928–1958, vol. 13, 53). He described this process in a March 1868 letter to Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin as “a labor and a suffering that God alone knows” (1928–1958, vol. 61, 195). It seems clear that Tolstoy conceived of this weighty project as a modern epic. In a diary entry from January 1863, the earliest period of drafting War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote, “The epic manner is becoming the only natural one for me” (1928–1958, vol. 48, 48). Tolstoy’s diary from September 1865 expresses his intention to present “a picture of manners and customs based on a historical event: Odyssey, Iliad, 1805” (1928–1958, vol. 48, 62). And many years later, the writer Maxim Gorky recalled 515

— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ that Tolstoy had remarked of War and Peace, “without false modesty, it is like the Iliad” (Gorky 1948, 57). Progressive Russian critics of Tolstoy’s time criticized him for not conveying a sufficiently rigorous social critique of the Napoleonic era in Russia. In their view, Tolstoy glorified the Russian aristocracy and its feudal relationship to the peasant soldier conscripts, who, as Tolstoy’s novel asserts, truly won the war. In contrast, Slavophile critic Nikolai Strakhov hailed Tolstoy’s novel as a major Russian landmark in both life and literature, a precious national resource that celebrated simplicity, goodness, and truth. Strakhov published a series of responses to War and Peace in the journal Dawn in 1869–1970, lauding Tolstoy’s accomplishment: “Purely Russian heroism, purely Russian heroic behavior in all possible spheres of life— that is what Leo Tolstoy gave us…The tremendous canvas of Tolstoy is a worthy representation of the Russian people…an epic in a contemporary form of art” (Tolstoy 1996, 1106–07). At well over one thousand pages, Tolstoy’s novel has an epic heft and unfolds across a panoramic canvas. The action encompasses the western European theatre of war in 1805 and the path of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Russia in 1812, including the occupation and burning of Moscow, as well as episodes set in the capital city St. Petersburg and in provincial Russian cities such as Smolensk, Voronezh, and Yaroslavl. War and Peace features proto-cinematic epic spectacle scenes with thousands of extras, especially during the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino. Omniscient narration and absolute language frame the mountaintop epic perspectives that the novel affords its readers in such episodes. Tolstoy’s historico-philosophical digressions, moreover, were seen by Russian Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum as “elements of genre, as a sign of the epic, analogous to the digressions of the Iliad” intended to “raise the tone” (Eikhenbaum 1996, 1128–28). Even at the linguistic level, Tolstoy displays epic affinities: he lavishes epic epithets on his characters, returning to motifs such as Pierre’s girth and Princess Maria’s luminous eyes throughout the novel as both poetic device and mnemonic. Tolstoy creates several extended poetically estranging similes from the natural world that convey an epic grandeur, most notably the river of soldiers at the River Enns and the abandoned beehive to which evacuated Moscow is compared. Even Tolstoy’s syntax, with its rich use of repetition as an artistic strategy, suggests the oral epic mode. The differing views of literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and György Lukács on the nature of both epic and novel prove illuminating for Tolstoy’s novel. For Bakhtin, the epic is a closed, finished mode for stories about a past inaccessible from the present. By definition, therefore, the hero of an epic does not belong in a novel, that consummate genre of the present moment. The hero of a novel must be a character in whom “there always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness, there always remains a need for the future and a place for this future must be found” (Bakhtin 1981, 37). This characterization is a good fit for Tolstoy’s characters, who are always works-in-progress. Lukács, however, sees the Russian novel, and most particularly, War and Peace, as projecting an epic totality and constituting a “renewed epic,” in contrast to the modern European bourgeois novel. For Lukács, “Tolstoy’s great and truly epic mentality, which has little to do with the novel form, aspires to a life based on a community of feeling among simple human beings closely bound to nature” (Lukács 1999, 145). War and Peace is “like an Iliad, the story of certain men, and 516

—​ T o l s t o y ’ s W a r a n d P e a c e —​ an Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one” (1999, 151–52). Elsewhere, Lukács evokes “the naïve epic magnificence, the almost Homeric breadth and uninhibitedness of War and Peace” (Lukács 1950, 195). Indeed, Lukács sees the epic affinity in War and Peace even in more pedestrian passages: [T]he apparently accidental beginning and end of a conversation are intentional devices in Tolstoy’s method of epic presentation. They lead out of the quiet flow of life and then lead back into it again after having thrown a bright light on what is constantly going on under the surface of this calm stream of life. (1950, 183) For Lukács, Tolstoy thus brings together the qualities of the novel that we have come to associate with Bakhtin—openness and incompleteness—with a passionate striving toward an epic worldview that seeks to unite a people in common purpose, even if this unity may not ever be realized in full. This way of understanding Tolstoy’s novel—as a hybrid of novel and epic—has proved highly durable. And yet, Tolstoy’s narrator declares in Volume Three that the ancients “left us examples of heroic poems in which heroes constitute the entire interest of history, and we still cannot get used to the fact that, for our human time, history of this sort has no meaning” (Tolstoy 2007, 754). Some scholars feel that defining Tolstoy’s novels in terms of genres such as epic or psychological novel misses the point, and what matters is that “War and Peace marks a new stage in the history of the western European novel because of its concern with historical, social, ethical and religious problems on a scale never attempted in any previous novel” (Christian 1962, 121). Perhaps it is fair to say that for Tolstoy, epic is not so much a matter of genre as of mood, manner, and mode. Put another way, The Homeric tradition could liberate Russian writers from the confines of the European novel by providing terms to assert the magnitude of their subject, their magnificent calling, and the finality of their inherited spiritual authority… The novel might become Russian by being grander than anything yet written. (Griffiths and Rabinowitz 2011, 12) In this way, nineteenth-century Russian writers like Gogol and Tolstoy saw the novelepic as a vehicle for creating and disseminating a modern Russian national narrative. Tolstoy’s readers looked back from the reformist 1860s under Tsar Alexander II to Russia’s coming-of-age in the Napoleonic era under Alexander I fifty years earlier. Can a historical novel create a shared sense of a common national present? In fact, it can. The first parts of Tolstoy’s novel appeared in serialized installments in 1865 issues of the journal The Russian Messenger. Serialization was a widespread form of literary production in nineteenth-century Russia, building a community of readers that transcended the vast physical spaces of Russia, much in the manner of Gogol’s troika. A national literature in circulation and under discussion held the potential to rouse readers imaginatively toward social transformation. Readership thus forged the living link between Tolstoy’s Russian audience and the stirring experiences of their predecessors as depicted in War and Peace. 517

— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ The aspirations embodied by War and Peace reached well beyond the connection between generations of Russian aristocrats and gentry, however. Romantic nationalism and the “national idea” as it came to Russia encompassed all of Russian society. Cultural historian Orlando Figes contrasts the European-oriented Russian upper classes with the native Russian peasantry at the turn of the nineteenth century, asserting that the Napoleonic Wars provided an opportunity to forge a deeper bond: “Stirred by the patriotic spirit of the serfs, the aristocracy…began to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and search for a sense of nationhood based on ‘Russian’ principles” (Figes 2002, xxvii–xxviii). The shared hardship and ultimate victory of 1812 have played an major role in Russian culture ever since, much-celebrated across the remaining decades of the nineteenth century. In 1862, the year Tolstoy married Sophia Behrs and shortly before he began work on War and Peace, Russia celebrated both the fiftyyear anniversary of 1812 and the millennium of the Russian state, commemorating the arrival by invitation of dynasty-founding Varangian chieftan Riurik in 862. Tchaikovsky’s famous “1812 Overture” (1882), composed to accompany the seventieth anniversary of 1812, ends with a smashing finale—cannon shots, church bells, brass fanfare, full-bore percussion, and, sometimes, fireworks. And in 1912, two years after Tolstoy’s death and only a few years before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian government staged an elaborate 100-year anniversary celebration of 1812 on a national scale. Commemorations of 1812 were also popular during the postwar Soviet decades and into the present post-Soviet period, continuing the tradition of lavishly monumentalizing this central event in Russian national history. In contrast to the tradition of monumental 1812 commemorations, however, the epic aspects of War and Peace are countered by an equal and opposite emphasis on the micro-scale of history and human life. Although Tolstoy consulted numerous historiographical sources as background for War and Peace, he also relied upon human-scale period sources such as letters, diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs in order to construct a perspective closer to the ground level of events. It is also true, however, that Tolstoy used these human-scale materials to produce a novel whose ambitious scope induces the same order of respect, even awe, as the most conventionally outsize national monument. In my view, War and Peace is a monumental attack on monumentalizing tendencies, replete with figures, both human and metaphorical, which, in performing a kind of anti-monumentality, express Tolstoy’s ambivalence. War and Peace does repeatedly evoke moments that suggest themselves as large-scale historical paintings (of which the Napoleonic Wars produced no small number), and these moments are often presented to the reader in a deconstructive and often highly ironic spirit. At Austerlitz, Prince Andrei attempts to stage his decisive moment of greatness, seizing a fallen standard and calling his disordered battalion to follow him in a new charge—but he ends up flat on his back, contemplating the enigmatic lofty sky. Similarly, Nicholas Rostov is nearly crushed by the famous brilliant, doomed charge of the Russian Horse Guards. Later, in 1812, Napoleon stages his crossing of the Niemen River into Russian territory to rapturous acclaim, and then sits by inattentively as a regiment of Polish Uhlans swims the nearby river Viliya to express their devotion, many of them drowning in the attempt. Still, the grand-scale effects of such scenes linger along with the aftertaste of irony. 518

—​ T o l s t o y ’ s W a r a n d P e a c e —​ Rather than conventional heroism, Tolstoy highlights the “patriotic” behavior of a hypothetical aristocratic lady driving to her provincial estate with a cart full of her best china, joining the throng of Russians evacuating Moscow ahead of Napoleon’s advancing army. The lady who, in the month of June, was already moving out of Moscow to her estate near Saratov … with a vague awareness that she was not a servant to Bonaparte…was performing, simply and genuinely, that great deed which saved Russia. (Tolstoy 2007, 832) Tolstoy celebrates the everyday heroism of characters and situations in striking scenes, depicting, for example, the good-natured peasant partisan soldiers in winter, making camp together cheerfully during their zealous pursuit of Napoleon’s retreating army. And, of course, there is an unforgettable epilogue image of Natasha Rostov as a robust wife and mother, waving a dirty diaper. This image resembles a near-grotesque prototype for the gigantic female sculptural figures favored by Socialist Realism. This version of Natasha is brought down from her pedestal, no longer the slender and charming romantic heroine who captivated readers throughout the novel. Tolstoy’s novel-epic casts a long shadow into the twentieth century and beyond, inspiring Soviet-era epic-historical novels in a Socialist Realist spirit, as well as popular stage and screen adaptations in both Russia and beyond. All of these adaptations deployed considerable resources to capitalize on the epic potential of cultural forms such as opera and film blockbuster. Engaging and successful as these adaptations have been, however, Tolstoy’s War and Peace continues to overshadow them all. In this sense, Tolstoy’s anti-monumental novel-epic remains a towering fact of Russian and Euro-American culture.

SOVIET EPICS Tolstoy’s aristocratic background and the Christian teachings he propagated during the latter part of his life were considered suspect in Soviet revolutionary culture after 1917, but the 1928 centenary of Tolstoy’s birth occasioned an opportunity for Lev Nikolaevich to make a comeback in Soviet times. “Proletarian” writers such as Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexander Fadeev believed that Tolstoy’s brand of critical realism could be repurposed for the Soviet context, and they hoped to see a new “red Tolstoy” produce a Soviet revolutionary epic. A decade later, the Nazi invasion of Russia during the “Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945,” the Russian designation for WWII, made Tolstoy’s famous novel speak even more eloquently to Soviet readers, for whom his depiction of the Napoleonic invasion became newly resonant. During the Second World War, official Soviet pronouncements often invoked the Battle of Borodino and the defense of Moscow against Napoleon in 1812. A Soviet revolutionary epic was expected to treat heroic events in an expansive manner, using multiple viewpoints to illustrate a complex historical moment, as Tolstoy’s novel had done. A number of such large epic novels were produced during the Soviet period, all clearly influenced by War and Peace. The most 519

— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ notable of these Soviet epics are Alexei Tolstoy’s trilogy Khozhdenie po mukam (1918-1941),translated as The Road to Calvary (1946),Mikhail Sholokhov’s Tikhii Don (1928-1940), translated as Quiet Flows the Don (1996), Vasily Grossman’s Za pravoe delo (1952), formerly translated as For A Just Cause, and now as Stalingrad (2019), and its sequel Zhizn’ i sud’ba (1980), translated as Life and Fate (2006), Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957, 2010), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s three novels, Rakovyi korpus (1968), V kruge pervom (1969), and Avgust chetyrnadtsatova (1989), translated as Cancer Ward (2015), The First Circle (2009), and August 1914 (2014), respectively. These novels treat major historical events—the First World War, Russian Revolution, Civil War, Stalinist years, and the Second World War— in line with Soviet cultural and artistic policies to a varying extent, or alternately, take a more critical stance toward the Soviet state. Some of these novels have had enduring value for Russian readers and in translation, especially those by Sholokhov, Grossman, and Pasternak. Although shaped by and in dialogue with Soviet values, the set of Soviet epic novels featured here must be seen as distinct from works of official Socialist Realism such as the “production novel.” Scholar Katerina Clark expresses the difference by distinguishing between individual and collective biography: Socialist Realism… might be called a sort of ideological Bildungsroman, in that the hero’s development is largely in the area of political consciousness and acquiring Party discipline… Socialist Realist novels privilege the public plot over private life; they foreground duty, the call of the patrie, or the like. In a classic Socialist Realist novel there is effectively no interiority distinct from the exterior, no discrepancy between inside and outside – not in positive characters, at any rate. (Clark 2011, 138–39) It is worth remembering the distinct views of Bakhtin and Lukács on the differences between epic and novel, and perhaps worth noting that Socialist Realist works do not feature particularly “novelistic” characters. The non-official canon of Soviet epics, however, does include works that are unmistakably novels, and thus less subject to authoritative interpretation.

WAR AND PEACE ON STAGE AND SCREEN Stage and screen adaptations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace include Sergei Prokofiev’s Russian opera (1946), Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic-scale Soviet film (1968), John Davies’ BBC television series (1972), and Andrew Davies’ BBC mini-series (2016)— all titled War and Peace, as well as Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin’s pop opera, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012). This section explores the extent to which these diverse re-presentations of Tolstoy’s novel affirm or challenge his overall conception and literary strategies. Sergei Prokofiev’s operatic version of War and Peace germinated during the Great Patriotic War in 1941–1945, but his work had a troubled history in the postwar era. The Soviet Committee on Artistic Affairs required Prokofiev to undergo several cycles of revision; specifically, Prokofiev was compelled to heighten the atmosphere 520

—​ T o l s t o y ’ s W a r a n d P e a c e —​ of heroism and patriotism, as well as draw a more explicit connection between the events of 1812 and 1941. The final version of the opera, never performed during Prokofiev’s lifetime and fully staged only in 1959, consists of thirteen scenes and a choral epigraph, the first seven scenes devoted to “Peace” and the latter, very different six scenes depicting “War.” The initial “Peace” section of Prokofiev’s opera foregrounds the story of Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostov, depicting the beginning of their romance at an 1810 New Year’s Eve ball in St. Petersburg, up to the foiled attempt by Anatole Kuragin to abduct Natasha, and the subsequent breaking of her engagement to Andrei. (Twentyfirst-century pop opera Natasha, Pierre & the Comet of 1812 chose to focus on the same episodes from Tolstoy’s novel, which are decidedly anti-epic and not a little melodramatic.) The dance music in the “Peace” section is contrasted with the military music and mass chorales that dominate in the “War” section to come. The patriotic tone of the “War” section recalls Russian national operas of the nineteenth century, in particular Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836) (Figure 36.1). The “War” section begins with the Battle of Borodino and the Russian commander Mikhail Kutuzov’s reluctant decision to abandon Moscow to the French occupiers. Scene Twelve returns to the Andrei-Natasha story, as the two are reunited in forgiveness before Andrei dies, while the final Scene Thirteen depicts Pierre’s liberation from captivity as a French prisoner of war. The opera ends with a grand celebration of Russia’s victory in a choral apotheosis with a military orchestra on stage. The story of romantic love in the “Peace” section is subsumed by the larger story of the

Figure 36.1  Scene from the pop opera Pierre, Natasha & the Great Comet of 1812 (2012) being performed at the Tony Awards in 2017.  Getty Images.

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— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ Russian people’s love for their homeland in the “War” section, and the more lyrical mode of the first part is replaced by the more epic mode of the second part, figured by Kutuzov, a bass role (Berman 2014, 217). Over the course of Prokofiev’s compulsory revisions, the figure of Kutuzov became more monumental, even godlike. In some respects, however, Prokofiev’s opera shares in the monumental ambivalence of Tolstoy’s novel, since the composer’s original conception for the opera placed much greater emphasis on the human relationships depicted by Tolstoy, using the operatic form of “lyric-dramatic scenes.” But in the final version of Prokofiev’s opera, the collective, mass element in the “War” section becomes dominant. Thus, even though Prokofiev’s opera is not epic in style, strictly speaking, the epic mode emerges victorious by the opera’s end. This is not at all the case in War and Peace, with its somewhat deflating Volume Four (a gradual retreat and no grand battles) and odd epilogues, following the peak excitement in Volume Three (the beginning of the invasion, battle at Borodino, and occupation of Moscow). The most epic stage or screen production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is unquestionably the 1966–1967 Russian film adaptation directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, lasting more than seven hours. The making of this film coincided with the 150th anniversary of 1812, and Bondarchuk himself played the leading role of Pierre Bezukhov. Bondarchuk’s film enjoyed huge financial and logistical support from the Soviet state. The Ministry of Defense supplied military advisers, as well as thousands of soldier-extras and hundreds of horses for the big Austerlitz and Borodino battle scenes, which were enhanced by gunpowder, kerosene, and smoke grenades, and sixty antique-style cannons specially cast for the production. Several dozen Soviet museums contributed historical artifacts for use in the film sets and costumes. Bondarchuk’s film employed ambitious camera techniques, using cranes and helicopters to shoot the action in battle sequences from above and to provide panoramic views of the Russian countryside, which often figure in Tolstoy’s descriptions. The film’s camera work is dynamic, with frequent use of panning and tracking, superimpositions, and split screens; a camera operator on roller skates created a kinetic sense of waltzing at the grand ball in St. Petersburg amidst some five hundred extras. An enormous success with the Soviet movie-going public, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace won the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival, and also earned an American Golden Globe and an Academy Award for best Foreign Language Film. Bondarchuk’s War and Peace proved that the Soviet Union could produce screen epics that rivaled American epic blockbusters such as Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Doctor Zhivago (1965), in their production values (Figure 36.2). Bondarchuk’s film embodies the 1964–1968 cultural shift from the relative freedom of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “Thaw” era (1953–1964) to the heavier and more conservative “Stagnation” era (1964–1982) associated with Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev (Norris 2014, 171–73). Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is not heavily Socialist Realist in tone or form, and its cinematography might be termed modernist. Still, it was a state-approved and state-funded project, and the film ardently showcases conventional patriotism and Russian nationalism. The next filmed adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel was the twenty-part 1972 BBC TV series, which featured battle sequences shot in former Yugoslavia and “Peace” sections filmed at patrician English country homes. This series, starring Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov, was well received and appeared at a time when the 522

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Figure 36.2  Still from Sergei Bondarchuk’s film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–1967), depicting a procession of the Smolensk icon before the Battle of Borodino.

BBC was establishing itself as a producer of prestige series, releasing a TV series adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the late 1970s. This BBC version of War and Peace eschews the epic style and has interior scenes filmed in the manner of a stage play. Even the war scenes do not emphasize the epic mode, but rather feature the experiences of common soldiers at ground level. The lavishly produced six-part 2016 BBC series version of Tolstoy’s novel is often compared to the costume-drama “Downton Abbey” of the same vintage (and the actress Lily James appears in both). This slightly souped-up adaptation includes an interpolated incestuous love scene between Helene Kuragin and her brother Anatole, and another new scene in which Helene is ravished by the swashbuckling military officer Dolokhov on her fully set dining-room table. The filmic potential of computer-generated imagery along with the high-definition widescreen format greatly enhanced the possibilities available for filming the epic battle scenes and the burning of Moscow. In contrast, Dave Malloy’s immersive yet intimate “electro-pop opera” Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 started out on Off-Broadway in 2012, then moved to the meatpacking district, before opening on Broadway in 2016. This enjoyable sung-through spectacle avoids the epic style and is not remotely monumental, focusing instead on Natasha Rostov’s almost-abduction by Anatole Kuragin, also depicted in the “Peace” half of Prokofiev’s opera. One film critic wrote, “This is a pastiche score of a cavalier sort… from punk riffs to agitated Broadway ballads, mock-pompous recitative to gritty Russian folk songs or drinking choruses with klezmer clarinets” (Tommasini 2014). In this way, the pop opera adopts some of Tolstoy’s own representational strategies: his norm-busting not-a-novel includes many episodes, scenes, and moments that feel like interpolated fragments from more 523

— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ traditional, clearly distinct and separate genres, such as the sentimental epistolary novel or the Christian parable. The different stage and screen versions of War and Peace show a range of approaches to adapting Tolstoy’s famous text. Bondarchuk’s film is the most consistently monumental in its conception, although the film gives plenty of attention to the stories of individual characters and to more intimate scenes. Prokofiev’s opera was not initially conceived in such a monumentalizing spirit, but revisions required by the Soviet state pushed his work in that direction, such that the final version of the “War” part overwhelms the initial “Peace” scenes. The pop opera Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 flips that strategy by focusing exclusively on the Andrei-Natasha-Anatole episodes from Volume Two that feature in Prokofiev’s “Peace” scenes. The two BBC series—separated by nearly forty-five years—strike a balance between the monumental and the human-scale aspects of Tolstoy’s novel, but the earlier BBC production gives greater weight to the latter. None of these stage and screen adaptations come close to matching Tolstoy’s ambivalent oscillations between monumentality and anti-monumentality.

CONCLUSION: TOLSTOY’S NOVEL-EPIC TODAY War and Peace amounts to a monumental assault on monumentality, or, as I put it earlier, a novel-epic monument to anti-monumentality. The resulting richness of his gigantic text, so full of detail, repetitions-with-a-difference, and inventive figuration, makes War and Peace a consummately literary work. It is impossible to overstate the significance of Tolstoy’s novel for Russian literature and culture, beginning in its own time and continuing to the present. War and Peace is a monumental, indeed, an epic attempt to de-monumentalize history. And yet, Tolstoy’s treatment of Russian history is selective, with nationalist fervor acting as a cover for Russia’s own imperialist aspirations not treated anywhere in his vast text. The inherent tension and self-contradiction, rather than the stentorian proclamation of Truth, confers upon War and Peace its enduringly novel-epic aspect. But Tolstoy’s celebratory novelepic is silent about historical truths and imperialist misdeeds that are now widely acknowledged. The conscious work of untangling these threads by Tolstoy’s more contemporary readers is an on-going project, and the reception history of War and Peace thus remains an unfolding story.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In The Dialogic imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, and edited by Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthelme, Donald. 2008. “At the Tolstoy Museum.” In Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, edited by Michael R. Katz, 501–8. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Berman, Anna A. 2014. “Competing Visions of Love and Brotherhood: Rewriting ‘War and Peace’ for the Soviet Opera Stage.” Cambridge Opera Journal, 26, no. 3: 215–38. Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Bondarchuk, Sergei, dir. 1966–1967 Voina i mir [War and Peace]. USSR.

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—​ T o l s t o y ’ s W a r a n d P e a c e —​ Christian, Reginald F. 1962. Tolstoy’s War and Peace: A Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Katerina. 2011. “Russian Epic Novels of the Soviet Period.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina, 135–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Andrew, dir. 2016. War and Peace. 6 episodes. UK and USA. Davies, John, dir. 1972–1973. War and Peace. 20 episodes. UK. Eikhenbaum, Boris. 1996. “Tolstoy’s Essays as an Element of Structure.” In War and Peace, edited by George Gibian, 1127–28. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Figes, Orlando. 2002. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York: Picador. Gogol, Nikolai. 2004. Dead Souls. Translated by Robert A. Maguire. London: Penguin Books. Gorky, Maxim. 1948. Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev. London: Hogarth Press. Griffiths, Frederick T., and Stanley J. Rabinowitz. 2011. Epic and the Russian Novel: From Gogol to Pasternak. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Grossman, Vasily. 2006. Life and Fate. Translated by Robert Chandler. New York: NYBR Classics. ———. 2019. Stalingrad. Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler. New York: New York Review Books. James, Henry. 1897. “Ivan Turgeneff.” In vol. 25 of Library of the World’s Best Literature Ancient and Modern, edited by Charles Dudley Warner, 15057–62. New York, R. S. Peale & J. A. Hill. Lukács, György. 1999. Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1950. Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendahl, Zola, Tolstoi, Gorki and others. Translated by Edith Bone. London: Hillway Publishing. Malloy, Dave, and Rachel Chavkin. 2012. Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 [pop opera]. Morson, Gary Saul. 1987. Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace.’ Stanford: Stanford University Press. Norris, Stephen M. 2014. “Tolstoy’s Comrades: Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1966– 1967) and the Origins of Brezhnev Culture.” In Tolstoy on Screen, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons and Michael A. Denner. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Pasternak, Boris. 2010. Dr. Zhivago. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Westminster: Knopf Doubleday. Prokofiev, Sergei. 1946. Voina i mir (War and Peace). Sholokhov, Mikhail. 1996. Quiet Flows the Don. Translated by Robert Daglish. London: J. M. Dent. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 2009. The First Circle. Translated by Harry T. Willetts. New York: Harper Perennial. ———. 2014. August 1914. Translated by Harry T, Willetts. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 2015. Cancer Ward. Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Strakhov, Nikolai. 1996. “The Russian Idea in War and Peace.” In War and Peace, edited by George Gibian, 1103–06. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Thompson, Ewa M. 2000. Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Tolstoy, Alexei. 1946. The Road to Calvary. Translated by Edith Bone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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— ​ J u l i e A . B u c k l e r —​ Tolstoy, Lev. 1928–1958. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works]. Edited by V. G. Chertkov. Vols. 13, 48, 61. Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozh. literatury. ———. 1996. War and Peace. Translated by Louise Maude, Aylmer Maude, and George Gibian. Edited by George Gibian. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 2003. Hadji Murad. Translated by Aylmer Maude. New York: Modern Library. ———. 2007. War and Peace. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tommasini, Anthony. 2014. “Pastiche, Parody, Homage and Theft.” New York Times, May 22.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

ECOCRITICISM AND INDIGENOUS ANTI-EPICS OF CHINA*

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Robin Visser

In “Black Bear,” Indigenous poet Aku Wuwu (born 1964) writes: “History is like a black bear, / for thousands of years, secluded in the mountain ravines, / regardless of day or night, licking, ‘shyr, shyr’ its paws.” He evokes the Book of Origins,1 the ancient myth-epic of the Nuosu Yi of southwest China: “Bears, too, are the offspring of snow.” Yet, the poem ends abruptly: “Humans capture bear cubs to make profits on the streets; / this era has no bones, there being no dignity” (2017, 187–88). Epic time in the Anthropocene is short: the era is spineless, nature exploited, humanity cheapened, empires fall. Power ultimately accrues to no one. A dominant literary form of the Anthropocene can be termed the “anti-epic.” Presaged by anti-imperialist novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and the first Chinese science fiction novel, Tales of the Moon Colony (1904–1905) by Huangjiang Diaosou, the anti-epic of the Anthropocene calls anthropocentric structures of power into question. These literary works interrogate geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic borders, borders rife with power, only to invert conventions. They do not clarify who wields power in society and why. They do not justify that power and make it seem normal and right, which Pamela Lothspeich suggests in her Introduction to this volume is indicative of normative epics. Rather, in the anti-epic idiot savants reign supreme, only to have their lives abruptly cut short. While the Shakespearian fool is a minor character that provides comic relief, using wits to outdo people of higher social standing, the anti-epic “idiot” is a fully developed character central to the narrative, who symbolizes the desperate plight of an entire people. The anti-epic protagonist inherits characteristics of the “trickster” figure common to Indigenous folk tales, exhibiting uncanny sagacity and spiritual power, yet his role is primarily as witness to cultural and ecological destruction. Historically, the epic relayed the struggle of an entire people through a hero’s quest. Similarly, the anti-epic features the struggle of an entire people through an anti-hero’s quest. At the very moment the anti-hero triumphs, however, the narrative expectations of the epic implode. While the anti-epic retains the mythic elements of the * Portions of this chapter appear, in another form, in Visser 2023.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-42

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— ​ R o b i n V i s s e r —​ epic form, and evokes its origins in oral literature, its internal logic befuddles rather than enlightens. Positioned in liminal spaces between multiple empires, the anti-epic transcends the dualistic impasse of Orientalism created by the European imperial project and its master narratives. The ontological disorientation of the Anthropocene arises from the Occidentalism undergirding imperialism: in negating the Orient, the Occident also loses its bearings. Consequently, anti-epics feature cyclical notions of history colliding with accelerated teleological forces bent on extracting Indigenous resources in new regimes of green governmentality.2 In such regimes, bioprospecting and biopiracy are inside jobs: formerly colonized nations adopt neoliberal strategies to protect Indigenous capital from outsiders (“imperialists”) by converting it into intellectual and physical property aimed at enriching the state. Anti-epic cosmologies engage with the “geontopower” governing settler late liberalism,3 which anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli theorizes as a realm beyond biopolitics, where the living (bios) and non-living (geos) co-produce singular modes of existence and forms of power (2016). Indigenous modes of thought often perceive the interconnectedness of humans with their environments. Shamanistic cosmologies, in particular, readily attribute agency to both geos (mountains, rocks, sand, minerals) and bios. Though such belief systems promote radically non-anthropocentric detachment, they do not debase human life. On the contrary, they engage geontopower in ways that challenge the posthuman devaluations of human life that dominate most green governance policies and institutions (Visser 2019a). Far from unscientific, such cosmologies directly inform critical theory of the Anthropocene, which increasingly questions ontological distinctions among biological, geological, and meteorological entities. In this chapter, I analyze ecological anti-epics by Indigenous writers of China’s border cultures, fiction that depicts poppy-growing chieftains and would-be pastoralists battling mining conglomerates in Sichuan Province, Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetan plateau. As I elaborate upon in more detail elsewhere (2019b), diverse geopolitics in the Sinophone world complicate understandings of Indigeneity in Chinese-language literatures. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses the term shaoshu minzu 少数民族 (“minority nationality” or “ethnic minority,” a more recent translation that weakens the term’s territorial connotations) to classify 55 minority groups (as opposed to the majority “Han” Chinese, which comprise 91% of the total population). Concerned with unifying the nation-state, the PRC sets ideals of national unity (minzu tuanjie 民族团结) against national split-ism or secessionism (minzu fenlie 民族分裂), reinforcing a norm that sustains the majority and delegitimizes minority difference. This logic also undermines the legal regime providing the basis for global understandings of Indigenous rights. The influential 1981 UN Report on Indigenous Populations (Cobo Report) defines Indigenous Peoples as those that (1) have a historical continuity with lands subsequently confiscated; (2) consider themselves distinct from dominant societies; and (3) wish to continue existing in accord with their own distinct cultures and customs (Cobo 1981-1983). While current PRC policy on ethnic minorities is largely in agreement with the Cobo Report, it rejects the claim that Indigenous lands were confiscated. Further, many believe Beijing’s ultimate goal is cultural Sinification and elimination of ethnic differences altogether. This chapter roots the neoliberal practices featured in contemporary fiction from China’s border cultures in centuries of imperial agrilogistics giving rise to the Anthropocene.4 I deem these stories “anti-epics” of the Anthropocene due to their 528

— ​ E c o c r i t i c i s m a n d I n d i g e n o u s A n t i - E p i c s o f C h i n a —​ investment in enlightened “idiocy,” shamanistic cosmologies, the witnessing of cultural and ecological genocide, and hybrid temporalities.

AS THE DUST SETTLES: OPIUM AGENCY AND DECIMATED EMPIRES ON THE TIBETAN PLATEAU The industrial capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to which some attribute the start of the Anthropocene, built upon earlier colonialist drug enterprises rife with gunrunning and human trafficking. These themes are featured in the highly acclaimed Sinophone novel As the Dust Settles (Chen’ai luoding 尘埃落 定1998; translated as Red Poppies, 2002) by Hui-Tibetan writer Alai (born 1959). A novel of epic scale, set in the Sino-Tibetan ethnic corridor of Aba5 in the decades prior to the communist victory of 1949, it details the Han Chinese introduction of opium into the Jiarong (Gyalrong) Tibetan economy, transforming it from subsistence farming to commodity exchange and ultimately destroying its chieftain system. To understand the context of the novel, it is important to understand that during the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China was semi-colonized (in the form of foreign concessions, extraterritorial legal rights, treaty ports, missionary access, Hong Kong colonization) by European powers following the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Although opium was “banned,” networks created by Qing expansion into Xinjiang, Tibet, and Mongolia drove its production deep into the dynasty’s multi-ethnic frontier border regions (Bello 2001), including Jiarong. The three traditionally defined Tibetan regions are northeast Amdo, central Ü-Tsang, and southeast Kham. The Jiarong region in Aba (Ngawa) in central Sichuan province is located between Amdo-speaking and Kham-speaking Tibetans (Figure 37.1). Long marginal to both Han China and the rest of Tibet, Jiarong comprises a geographic and cultural borderland region. Some Tibetans suggest that people from Jiarong are not true Tibetans. Others insist that the Jiarong language is a very archaic form of Tibetan. The region is ethnically diverse due to its complex history. After the collapse of the Tibetan Empire, which flourished in the seventh-ninth centuries CE, the region broke up into many small principalities. The Mongols briefly conquered the region prior to establishing the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). While the Chinese loosely governed the region during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) by ordaining local chiefs, the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) finally tightened control over the region after two protracted wars in the late eighteenth century. Subsequently, a large number of non-Tibetans, mainly Han and Muslim Hui, settled alongside Jiarong Tibetans and Tibetan-related Qiang Indigenes. Thus, the Aba region is ethnically diverse due to migration and intermarriage over many centuries of warfare between rival empires. Alai’s novel largely reflects what happened historically under the rule of Liu Wenhui, a western Sichuanese warlord and the governor of Xikang, in the decade prior to the 1949 communist victory (Yue 2008, 547). It details how the Han Chinese used opium to destroy the Tibetan Chieftain system, just as the British undermined Qing sovereignty, by employing a “Capitolocene” logic (Moore 2015) of criminalizing opium in the center while allowing its quasi-legal circulation in the peripheries. In the novel, the Han Chinese emissary who introduces opium to the region strategically offers to buy back opium from the Chieftain if he uses half the proceeds to 529

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Figure 37.1  Map of Aba and Huangnan on the Tibetan Plateau. Map courtesy of the author.

buy new weapons for his Tibetan compatriots, knowing they will destroy each other more quickly that way. Significantly, the “idiot” son of Tibetan Chief Maichi and his Chinese wife promote the idea of monocropping opium poppies to the family’s local rivals. They jettison sustainable crop rotations and end up with depleted soils and no subsistence crops, while the idiot-savant narrator plants grain, monopolizing the food market and outsmarting his elder brother to gain prominence. Far from a glorious enterprise of epic proportions where the ends justify the means, the novel depicts the opium trade as brutally corrupting and its power as ultimately delusional. Initially, it portrays the Han Chinese, including the narrator’s opium-addicted mother, as particularly heartless devourers. In one scene, a mouse falls from a roof beam where opium is processed. A worker skins the mouse alive, slicing it open to remove its throbbing lungs and beating heart: ‘You’re frightening my son,’ the chieftain’s wife said with a smile….She purred like a cat as she tore at the mouse. ‘It’s delicious, just delicious. Come, my son, 530

— ​ E c o c r i t i c i s m a n d I n d i g e n o u s A n t i - E p i c s o f C h i n a —​ try some.’ I felt like throwing up. I ran out the door. I’d never believed all that nonsense about how scary the Han people were. (Alai 2002, 81) In his youth, the Tibetan-Han narrator displays empathy for the suffering of sentient beings, while the Han infiltrators, despite their affectations of civility, express cannibalistic brutality. Yet over time, the Tibetans replicate such imperialist insensitivity. When a “Living Buddha” of the Geluk sect headed by the Dalai Lama (versus the older Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism dominant in Aba, whose lamas were advising the Maichi family) warns of opium’s corrupting influence, the Chief orders the lama’s execution. His once-sensitive son gazes blankly, “forgetting we were about to kill” the lama, staring as his tongue is cut off: “With a glint of the blade, the tongue sprang out into the space between the prisoner’s mouth and the executioner’s hand, like a startled mouse” (2003, 161). The narrator was once sickened, not fascinated, by the skinning of a startled mouse. Yet, once the Maichi family colonizes its compatriots via opium, a drug-addled haze descends and the colonizers become delusional: “everything was unreal,” yet “the vast territory and never-ending time gave us the feeling the Maichi empire was unshakable and would last forever” (2003, 154). Alai’s judicious choice of an “idiot” narrator evokes notions of empire blind to its own idiocy, while simultaneously undermining imperialist characterizations of opium addiction. As Mark Driscoll recounts in his environmental history of EuropeanAmerican imperialism in East Asia, the British associated “idiocy” with Chinese opium smokers, and considered the drug less virile than alcohol, the British Empire’s drug of choice (2020, 21). Further, Alai’s choice of an “idiot” narrator has a double-entendre, as Sichuanese local opera (chuan xi 川戏), like Shakespearian drama, famously incorporates the role of the “fool” (xiaochou jiao 小丑角) who invariably manages to outsmart and trick elite and better-educated characters.6 Indeed, historically the Sichuanese managed to double opium production and significantly undercut the price of imported BritishIndian opium, further hastening imperial decline (Driscoll 2020, 258). Anti-imperialist novels at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Lord Jim or Tales of the Moon Colony, are important generic antecedents to the anti-epics of the Anthropocene. In his seminal work on the global opium trade, Carl Trocki (1999, 3–4) argues that Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is a “parable of European imperialism” that associates “idiotic” dream-like addiction to the imperialist drug pushers rather than the opium addicts themselves. He describes Jim’s moral senses as “anesthetized” and his psychic state as “atrophied,” “pleasurably languid,” and “intoxicated with imaginary success.” Conrad, Trocki argues, suggests the British dream of empire was itself a kind of opiate that deluded Britons and made it difficult for them to confront the fundamental evil of imperialism. Similarly, Tales of the Moon Colony, China’s first science fiction novel, which also features a “fool” as protagonist, goes to great lengths to delegitimize China as a geographic or moral center. Its looming colonial relationship with the people on the moon suggests a decentering not only of Europe, but also of the planet Earth itself, suggesting a narrative trajectory in which the governing metropole shifts to deep space (Isaacson 2013, 49). As the Dust Settles takes the anti-imperialist theme further by destroying cosmological conditions for an imperial center. In the anti-imperialist novel, the stubborn 531

— ​ R o b i n V i s s e r —​ imperialist fact is merely relocated; in the anti-epic novel, it is annihilated altogether. The idiot-prophet anticipates the apocalyptic decimation of earth’s creatures in the penultimate scene of the novel. He dreams that the chieftains’ estates have crumbled, leaving no life behind after the dust settles: “I didn’t even see the footprints of birds or animals. The earth was covered by dust, as if shrouded in loosely woven silk” (Alai 2002, 373–74). The Han emissary interprets his dream as a premonition of China’s longed-for unification after decades of civil war and warlord governance, but the powerfully aestheticized scene of utter destruction that ends the novel instead evokes the eradication of all living beings, portending global apocalypse in the era of the Anthropocene. Given its apocalyptic sensibilities, the subject position of Alai’s narrator deserves further interrogation. In an interview, Alai claimed his protagonist evokes an epic figure in Tibetan oral folk tales, Aku Tonpa (Ran and Alai 1999, 9). Stories of Aku Tonpa, which circulate to this day, are said to be based on a twelfth-century practitioner of Karma Kagyu (Gaju 噶举), a Tibetan Buddhist school that celebrates unconventionality and claims a continuity of oral instructions from the Buddha transmitted from master to disciple (Kun et al. 1999, 7). Aku Tonpa, which means “Uncle Teacher,” acts both as an advocate for justice, uprooting social oppression and assisting the powerless populace, and as a clever swindler, critical of religious hypocrisy. He also exhibits bawdy sexuality in Tibetan oral tales. The voracious sexual appetites of Alai’s idiot narrator signal his continuity with long-standing Tibetan oral tradition as opposed to more recent Chinese communist versions which inculcate political correctness.7 While Chinese academics often focus on the novel’s ironic portrayal of Tibetan Buddhism, it is important to recognize that the tradition encourages such critique. In his study of oral and literary continuities in Tibetan literature, Lama Jabb emphasizes that prominent clerics and ordinary folk tales regularly denounce corrupting propensities of Buddhist clergy (2015, 6). Instead, culture’s porous boundaries between sacred and profane mean that bawdy “fools” such as Aku Tonpa or Alai’s narrator often transmit profound spiritual insights due to their liminal phenomenological positioning: I’d been an idiot all my life, but now I knew I was neither an idiot nor a smart person. I was just a passerby who came to this wondrous land when the chieftain system was nearing its end. Yet heaven had let me see and let me hear, had placed me in the middle of everything while having me remain above it all. It was for this purpose that heaven had made me look like an idiot. (Alai 2002, 429) In his analysis of this passage, Yue emphasizes the narrator’s spiritual role as a passerby witness to “the end of cyclical history” (2008, 551), suggesting a HegelianMarxist historiography in which the destruction of the Tibetan chieftain system and triumph of the Communist Party mark the end of feudal imperial cycles.8 Indeed, the narrator locates the “speed of time” in “the year when the Maichi family began growing opium” (Alai 2002, 356–57), emphasizing the organizing principles of capital which drive toward what Marx referred to as the annihilation of space by time. Yet, Alai vehemently denies that the demise of the chieftain system was a “natural” consequence of historical progress; thus, Yue suggests Alai’s narrator retains 532

— ​ E c o c r i t i c i s m a n d I n d i g e n o u s A n t i - E p i c s o f C h i n a —​ (suicidal) agency: “the passerby must devise his own death along with the demise of the chieftain system upon fulfilling his mission as a witness to—not a martyr of— that history” (2008, 552). Yue’s analysis, while compelling, nonetheless fails to account for shamanistic agency in the novel. Ultimately, the entire narrative conveys the mysticism central to Bon, a Tibetan religion influenced by animist and shamanist beliefs still prominent among Jiarong Tibetans, despite the historical dominance of Buddhism. As Li Jian argues, the novel portrays Bon shamanic practices throughout (exorcisms, rituals, dream-knowledge, prognostication, curses, etc.) (2008). In the final scene as the idiotnarrator lies dying, having foreseen and accepted his fated assassination by a Tibetan enemy, the smell of liquor (the Empire’s “drug of choice”) permeates his room. He describes his body as splitting into two halves and calls on Heaven to reincarnate his soul, which “has finally struggled out of my bleeding body and is flying upward. When the sunlight flickers, the soul will disperse. There will be nothing except a white light” (Alai 2002, 433). The “idiot” is in fact a “soul” that, by bearing witness to ecological and cultural genocide, ultimately achieves pure awareness, merging with light.9 Thus, the liminal positioning of the idiot savant as a “passerby” conveys not suicidal agency but Bon shamanistic agency of immersion “in the middle of everything” while simultaneously remaining “above it all” (2002, 429).

MOŊGOLIYA: MINING RAPES AND SHAMANIC SPIRITS ON THE INNER MONGOLIAN GRASSLANDS The narrator of Moŋgoliya (蒙古里亚, 2014), an anti-epic by Mongol-Han novelist Guo Xuebo (郭雪波 ; born 1948), is likewise tasked with a spiritual mandate to prophetically bear witness to environmental and cultural destruction.10 The novel similarly adopts motifs of “idiocy” and modes of “farce” to present monumental subjects considered taboo in contemporary China: sincere spiritual faith, exploitation of traditional pasturelands by ruthless coal mining firms, and self-immolation by China’s ethnic minorities to protest government policies aimed at acculturation. It is set in twenty-first-century Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China’s third largest province situated to the north of Beijing and the Great Wall (Figure 37.2). Historically inhabited by nomadic pastoralists, migration of Han farmers to the region accelerated in the eighteenth century, when “Han-style cultivation” (as official Qing Manchu documents refer to it) restricted mobility vital to herding populations, creating serious environmental damage to herd areas (Bello 2016, 150). Government policies designed to tackle desertification, which Beijing blames on overgrazing, forced many herders to relocate to cities and seek alternative lifestyles. Today, the few pastoralists who remain on the grasslands find their livelihood challenged by stocking limits, mining concerns, infrastructure projects, and land-enclosure fences (White 2016). Pastoralists are usually non-Han; thus, tensions over land use implicate the “nationalities question” (minzu wenti 民族问题).11 Beijing has historically viewed the northern grasslands as a “green barrier” protecting the imperial capital: its function within an ecological system is to conserve water, act as a wind barrier, and inhibit shifting sand. Pastoralists, however, view their ecosystem more holistically: rather than merely shielding the nation’s capital against sandstorms, grasslands should sustain multispecies life. 533

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Figure 37.2  Map of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Map courtesy of the author.

Moŋgoliya comprises three distinct but intertwined narratives. The first is a semiautobiographical spiritual journey in which the narrator seeks his Shamanic roots, long obscured in post-1949, officially atheist China. The second are stories of the Danish adventurer Henning Haslund-Christensen (1896–1948), based on vignettes recounted in his real-life anthropological masterpiece, Men and Gods in Mongolia. The third recounts the struggles of Teelee (“Idiot”) Yesu, a Mongol herdsman battling desertification and the machinations of a coal mining company seeking to occupy his pasturelands. The three strands of this elaborate historical novel converge, quite literally, on the body of the “idiot,” a savant with savior-like qualities. Framed by the I-narrator’s spiritual quest for shamanic spirits, the novel opens with “Guo,” a renowned Beijing author, visiting an ancient cairn said to be a shaman’s altar, at the summit of Mt. Gahai near his home village in Inner Mongolia. There his deceased great-uncle, an acclaimed balladeer and shamanic healer whose life spanned the late Qing dynasty to Manchukuo,12 appears to Guo in a dream and tasks him with the mission of protecting Yesu, a herdsman. The novel later reveals that Yesu is his grandson and that Haslund, who strongly identified with Mongol culture and 534

— ​ E c o c r i t i c i s m a n d I n d i g e n o u s A n t i - E p i c s o f C h i n a —​ was an avid musicologist, was instrumental in rescuing Guo’s persecuted great-uncle from the dungeon of a ballad-loving Mongol prince. The novel implies that because Guo has inherited his family’s shamanic powers, transmitted by his grandmother and mother, he must bear witness to his cousin’s plight.13 In this way, the narrative recounts the fate of the Mongols at various periods, evoking the thirteenth-century epic The Secret History of the Mongols and Haslund’s encounters with shamans and “living Buddhas” as threads weaving the numinous soul of the great Genghis Khan to that of his humble Mongol descendent, Yesu. The twenty-first-century enemy of Mongol culture and land is a coal mining company, which enriches local officials while destroying the water, air, and land quality vital to local herdsmen and farmers. Yesu lives with an amnesiac pregnant and widowed Han woman, whom he had rescued in his pasture. The kind-hearted herdsman attempts to support her, yet battles huge coal transport trucks that bypass tolls on paved highways by barreling through his fenced-in pastureland, uprooting sparse vegetation and killing his livestock. Mid-way through the novel, a dramatic scene unfolds where Yesu drops carcasses of dead sheep, hit by yet another coal truck, in the office of the mining company executives. When they refuse to compensate him, he climbs a tall building, threatening to douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. When nervous mine owners grudgingly produce the cash, Yesu climbs down, only to be hauled away to the Banner detention center. Although Yesu admitted he was bluffing, and that his bucket only contained water, by the time the narrator visits his incarcerated cousin, Yesu is a reluctant celebrity. Journalists rush to interview him, which in turn attracts officials aimed at spin control, and he is exhausted from successive nights of sleep deprivation. The novel satirizes self-serving media hype over Yesu’s plight, and caricatures government spin in successive nightly “investigation and clarification” interrogation sessions. The darkest comic scene features an intelligence officer’s foiled attempt to determine which western cleric (Tibetan Buddhist “separatist” or Uyghur Muslim “terrorist”) influenced Yesu.14 Yet, it is not as religious devotee but prophetic savior that the simple-minded village idiot emerges as a larger-than-life character in the novel. While it initially seems comic that the pregnant Han woman calls him “Brother Jesus,”15 mispronouncing his Mongolian name as “Yuesu” (Jesus) in Mandarin Chinese, he comes to exemplify a sacrificial lamb and eternal life, his life cut short just as he comes into his own. In the penultimate scene of the novel, Yesu, one of the few villagers who had not abandoned pastoralism for farming, recovers a rudimentary understanding of his cultural roots by replacing his mud hut with a Mongolian yurt to house his new family. After the birth of the Han woman’s child, the thirty-year-old virgin (Yesu) finally consummated his relationship with her and she is now pregnant with his son. Guo (an expert on Mongol culture) is napping in the yurt, having educated his cousin on its ecologically sustainable design. Suddenly, a coal truck breaks through the steel fencing, again barreling toward Yesu’s sheep. Refusing to cower, he bolts directly into the path of the oncoming truck, waving his hands and shouting at it to stop. Instead, the driver accelerates and decimates Yesu, arms and legs akimbo, “like Jesus” on the cross (Guo 2014, 357). The annihilation of the anti-hero in the farcically titled Moŋgoliya (a misspelled homonym for Mongolia in Chinese) is witnessed by his cousin-shaman, awakened by screams of “Brother Jesus!” The 535

— ​ R o b i n V i s s e r —​ narrator lyrically aestheticizes the gruesome scene of Yesu’s body torn into tiny bits and pieces, spit out by the tenaciously turning tires, splattering blood, flesh, and bone shards in a fifty-meter path that stains the grassland. Shocked out of her amnesia, the Han woman screams the name of the driver, recognizing one of the men who had gang-raped her after she refused the out-of-court settlement to compensate for her migrant husband’s asphyxiation in the mines. Like the conclusion to As the Dust Settles, the apocalyptic ending of Moŋgoliya is abrupt and senseless, implying no form of life will escape the catastrophic logic of resource-extraction-capitalism that eradicates humanity. The chilling epilogue to the novel is titled “Please Drink Tea,” a euphemism for being treated to a “little talk” by Chinese security officers. A phone caller invites Guo to tea, warning him that a viral photo depicting protestors of Yesu’s death was traced to his computer.16 Yet, the postscript begins and ends with Guo sensing the live presence of Yesu’s spirit. Despite its Kafkaesque ending, the novel repeatedly expresses the shamanistic belief that an entire people can reincarnate, that their souls cannot be destroyed. Guo’s eco-fiction over four decades consistently conveys the philosophical sense that in the era of the Anthropocene, organized religion and scientific positivism are impotent (Visser 2019b). While his fiction suggests human existence is so malignant that life itself faces planetary extinction, he also conveys shamanistic ontologies that link geos and bios. In his anthropological study of shamanism in northern Mongolia, Pedersen explains that shamanic spirits “exist as actual things in the landscape, as virtual hypersurfaces made visible by the design of certain sacred artifacts, and on the transcendental plane of tenger” (sky, heaven) (2011, 174). As an “ontology of transition” (Pedersen 2011, 35), shamanism differs from the naturalism that dominates imperial cosmologies. Like animism, totemism, and perspectivism, it destabilizes the ontologies and hero-worship that rationalize empire.

CODA: GREEN GOVERNMENTALITY IN THE CAPITALOCENE Guo Xuebo’s novel illustrates the twenty-first-century Capitalocene logic of green governmentality informing stories by Tsering Döndrup (born 1961), a leading Tibetan writer who also details assaults upon Indigenous people and lands. Tsering Döndrup adapts traditional epic narrative forms to detail statist attacks on nomadic lifestyles, linguistic invasion of the Chinese language, and the threats to Tibet’s environment from industrial modernity. All of his stories take place in the fictional county of Tsezhung, a rural nomad locale along the real Tsechu River in his home region of Malho Mongolian Autonomous County within Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai (Amdo) (Figure 37.1), where residents are ethnically Mongolian but culturally and linguistically Tibetan. The immediate context for his 2012 story, “Black Fox Valley,” is a government campaign to “Return the Pastures and Restore the Grasslands,” as part of a major “Open up the West” (xibu dakaifa 西部大开发) campaign launched in 1999 to promote economic development. Socially engineered urbanization forced large numbers of nomad communities to resettle to new towns as part of the plan to “retire” grazing pastures. Yet, such green governmentality

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— ​ E c o c r i t i c i s m a n d I n d i g e n o u s A n t i - E p i c s o f C h i n a —​ invokes a scientific logic that interprets these peoples and territories as backward and degraded (Yeh 2005, 13–14). “Black Fox Valley” adopts narrative conventions similar to those of As the Dust Settles and Moŋgoliya: a farcical title, a “foolish” protagonist, and the aborted temporality that marks the anti-epic of the Anthropocene. Contrasting rich mountain valley ecology to cheap urban commodities and substandard construction, the story details the devolution of Sangyé, father of a family forced to relocate and once respected member of the nomadic community, into a “fool” scorned by Chinesespeaking local officials and alienated from his Sinicized daughter, Lhari Kyi. The opening taxonomy of the diverse botanical species of the mountain valley explicitly evokes the utopian “Thousand Lotus Pasture” described in the Epic of Gesar (circa twelfth century CE), said to be the longest epic in the world. This idyllic pastoral setting, long romanticized in the Tibetan, Mongolian, and Central Asian cultural imagination, sharply contrasts with the present. The title instead signifies a narrative framed by the motif of extracting Indigenous resources such as the “expensive black rock” out of the valley (Tsering 2019, 196). Although the government presents Sangyé with a 50-year “pasture usage permit” to the valley, he perceptively asks the resident lama, to no avail, why (usually red) foxes in the valley are black (2019, 170). The story’s penultimate scene resembles that of Moŋgoliya, portraying a nomad’s body and the grassland itself brutally decimated for extraction capital. On a return visit from town to their pastureland, the family compares the excavated land to the ravaged body of Lhari Kyi, crushed in an earthquake due to shoddy school construction.17 They were confronted with a sight even more shocking and incomprehensible than that of Lhari Kyi’s crushed little body. The entirety of Black Fox Valley had been dug up and turned into an expense of pitch black. Everywhere you looked there were diggers, loaders, dump trucks, and tractors scurrying like ants from a next, a seething maelstrom of activity. The roar of the machines sounded like a thousand thunderclaps booming at once. (2019, 196) Green governmentality enacts biopiracy by extracting Tibetan biological resources and legal land-rights. Offspring must learn Chinese, acculturated into Han lifestyles that alienate them from their elders, their very lives considered expendable in the race for more profits. In anti-epics of the Anthropocene, organized religion and government officials collude to decimate the environment and the ecologically balanced ways of life that sustain Indigenes on the land. With Indigenous resources utterly decimated under the Capitalocene logic of settler late liberalism, their/our history comes speeding to a halt. In turn, the agency conveyed in the anti-epic is not at a human scale. Its power emanates from realms that co-produce bios and geos. It conveys ontologies of resonance between inanimate and animate entities, where human thoughts and actions are among many manifestations of vital energy or shamanic spirits that remain.

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NOTES 1 The date of the Hnewo teyy (Book of Origins), a Nuosu Yi folk epic from the Liangshan region in southwest Sichuan province, is unknown. The earliest extant samples of Yi writing date from 1485, but Aki 阿畸 is said to have invented the Yi script during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). 2 “Green governmentality” (or “eco-governmentality”) occurs when “state and non-state actors [seek] to ‘improve’ conditions of nature and populations by introducing new cultural/scientific logics for interpreting qualities of a state’s territory. In doing so, a hegemonic discourse of ecological difference rooted in neoliberal market ideology emerges, defining some ‘qualities of territory’ as degraded, and others as necessary instruments for the improvement of populations, states, and natures” (Goldman 2004, 167). 3 Elizabeth Povinelli defines this term by combining “settler colonialism” (which seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers) with “late liberalism,” a tactic of governing difference that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, usually referred to as liberal forms of social and cultural recognition or state multiculturalism. 4 Philosopher Timothy Morton claims that agrilogistics, which he defines as logistics governing agrarian, versus nomadic or hunter-gatherer, forms of settlement, civilization, and technology, is responsible for the Anthropocene, because it conceptualizes nature as separate from humans (2016, 15). 5 Today’s Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. 6 As the Dust Settles was adapted as a Sichuan local theatre play in 2009. 7 According to a 1999 survey of fifty-three Tibetan students studying at Qinghai Education College in Xining, all the students had heard Aku Tonpa stories and twenty-one said they were sexual. However, the 1966 Chinese publication 阿叩登巴的故事 (Aku Tonpa Stories), purportedly based on 300 stories collected in Sichuan Province, criticize landlords, religious personalities, and feudalism, while “none of these stories show the seamier side of Aa khu bstan pa, e.g., his sexual exploits” (see Kun et al. 1999, 6–7). 8 The Tusi 土 司 Chieftain Chieftain system, initiated during the Yuan dynasty, adapted the Jimi system 羈縻制度 first implemented during the Tang dynasty. 9 According to Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, causal vehicles of Bon engage (1) gross or raw elements (exorcism, spirits, and rituals that overlap with shamanism); (2) energetic elements of qi (vital energy, overlapping with Daoist, Tantric, and yogic practices); and (3) light (manifesting as five pure lights, with white as the highest form of wisdom) (2014). 10 Bruce Humes provides an introduction and excerpt translation of the novel (2018). 11 A Chinese euphemism for ethnic tensions with similarly pejorative connotations of “the Negro question” in U.S. history. 12 A puppet state of the Empire of Japan established in northeast China and Inner Mongolia from 1932 to 1945. 13 Guo Xuebo tacitly acknowledged his belief that he has inherited his family’s shamanic powers in an interview I conducted with him on July 27, 2019, in Beijing. 14 From 2011 to 2013, over one hundred Tibetans enacted political self-immolation (Barnett 2014, xxxiv–xxxv). 15 The novel reveals that the woman and her husband were poor rural migrants from ­southeast Jiangxi province. Over one in ten people in eastern rural China are Christians. 16 The novel depicts a true event. On May 10, 2011, a truck ran over Mergen, an Inner Mongol activist trying to block a coal transport caravan trespassing on his pastureland. Infuriated cyberactivists called on the government to declare May 10 “Herders’ Rights Day.” 17 An ominous reference to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Qiang-Tibetan Sichuan, where 5,600–8,000 children died due to substandard school construction (Guardian 2009).

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WORKS CITED Aku Wuwu 阿库乌雾. 2017. “Black Bear.” In The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place. Poetry. Edited by Mark Bender, 187–88. Amherst, NY: Cambria. Alai 阿来. 1998. Chenai luoding 尘埃落定 [As the dust settles]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. Translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin as Red Poppies (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). Barnett, Robert. 2014. Introduction to Voices from Tibet: Selected Essays and Reportage, by Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong. Translated and edited by Violet S. Law, ix–xxxviii. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Bello, David. 2001. “The Chinese Roots of Inner Asian Poppy.” Cahiers d’études sur la Méditerranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien 32 (juillet–décembre): 39–68. Cobo, José Martínez. 1981–1983. “Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations.” United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. https://www. un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/publications/martinez-cobo-study.html. Driscoll, Mark. 2020. The Whites are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guardian. 2009. “Sichuan Earthquake Killed More Than 5,000 Pupils, Says China.” May 7. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/07/china-quake-pupils-death-toll. Goldman, Michael. 2004. “Eco-Governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of a ‘Green’ World Bank.” In Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, and Social Movements. Edited by Richard Peet and Michael Watts, 153–76. London: Routledge. Guo Xuebo 郭雪波. 2014. Mengguliya 蒙古里亚 [Moŋgoliya]. Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe. Humes, Bruce. 2018. “Borderland Fiction: The Mongol Would-Be Self-Immolator.” The AsiaPacific Journal 16.3, no. 1: https://apjjf.org/2018/03/Guo.html. Isaacson, Nathaniel. 2013. “Science Fiction for the Nation: Tales of the Moon Colony and the Birth of Modern Chinese Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 1: 33–54. Kun Mchog Dge Legs, Dpal Ldan Bkra Shis, and Kevin Stuart. 1999. “Tibetan Tricksters.” Asian Folklore Studies 58, no. 1: 5–30. Lama Jabb. 2015. Oral and Literary Continuities in Modern Tibetan Literature: The Inescapable Nation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Li Jian 李建. 2008. “Chenai luoding de shenmi zhuyi shushi yu Zangzu benjiao wenhua.” 《尘埃落定》的神秘主义叙事与藏族苯教文化 [Tibetan Bon religious culture and mysticism narratives in As the dust settles]. Qilu Journal 5: 148–51. Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Pedersen, Morton. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ran Yunfei 冉云飞 and Alai 阿来. 1999. 通往可能之路 —— 与藏族作家阿来谈话录 [A pathway to possibilities: A dialogue with Tibetan author Alai]. Xinan minzu xueyuan xuebao 20, no. 2: 8–10. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. 2014. “Bon and Shamanism.” Interview by Guildo Ferrari. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTLROrUqq5E. Trocki, Carl. 1999. Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950. London: Routledge. Tsering Döndrup. 2019. “Black Fox Valley.” In The Handsome Monk and Other Stories. Translated by Christopher Peacock, 169–96. New York: Columbia University Press.

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— ​ R o b i n V i s s e r —​ Visser, Robin. 2019a. “Posthuman Policies for Creative, Smart, Eco-Cities? Case Studies from China.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51, no. 1: 206–25. ———. 2019b. “Ecology as Method.” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 2: 320–45. ———. 2023. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan. New York: Columbia University Press. White, Thomas Richard Edward. 2016. “Transforming China’s Desert: Camels, Pastoralists and the State in the Reconfiguration of Western Inner Mongolia.” PhD diss., University of Cambridge. Yeh, Emily. 2005. “Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures to Grasslands.’” Nomadic Peoples 9, no. 1-2: 9–30. Yue, Gang. 2008. “As the Dust Settles in Shangri-La: Alai’s Tibet in the Era of Sinoglobalization.” Journal of Contemporary China 17, no. 56: 543–63.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

A N T I - E P I C A S N AT I O N A L E P I C USES AND MISUSES OF EPIC IN A R G E N T I N A’ S M A RT Í N F I E R R O

rsr Nicolás Suárez

Unlike the United States, Argentina does not have a genre in literature and film comparable to the “Western” in the United States (and the “Northern” in Canada), which glorifies and romanticizes colonial expansion and the conquest of Indigenous lands and peoples. Although there is no single explanation for this phenomenon—there are, in fact, various hypotheses—we can gain some insights into this phenomenon by examining the respective histories of colonial expansion in the two regions, and the specific images and descriptions of conquest in each. Both the North American West and the Pampa plains (Argentina’s “frontier”) were vast territories inhabited by Indigenous populations who were expelled and massacred en masse in order to allow for large-scale European immigration and settlement.1 However, the myths surrounding the history of these two zones are very different. The myths that flourished in the United States, as Ángel Rama has pointed out, did not prosper in the Pampas (1996, 54). In this regard, Darcy Ribeiro argues that in Argentina, the descendants of the European immigrants were not able to put their stamp on nationalist ideology through pioneer myths, which originated the trope of “the frontiersmen,” and his idealized form, the cowboy, about whom countless dime novels were devoted in the late nineteenth century (1972, 468). Extending this idea, Rama explains that the so-called Conquest of the Desert in 1870s Argentina closely parallels the westward advance of colonial expansion in the “Wild West,” but significantly notes that whereas the former was carried out by the landed oligarchy and the army, the latter was carried out by European immigrants themselves, many of whom were rewarded with tracts of land, due to the Homestead Acts of 1862–1916. Of course there was much racial discrimination inherent in the laws themselves and in their enactment, yet American myths continually emphasize and celebrate the efforts of individual white European settlers, purportedly independent of, and even antagonistic to the state. These same ideas also feed into American myths of “the selfmade man,” among which the figure of the cowboy stands out (Rama 1996, 54–55). Literature on the fraught history of conquest and dispossession of Indigenous lands by white settlers has dismantled “manifest destiny,” the idea that white DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-43

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— ​ N i c o l á s S u á r e z —​ Americans were exceptional and had a God-given right and responsibility to conquer the American West, especially in the period just before and after the emancipation of enslaved people, and seen it as part of a larger project of white supremacy in the United States (Taylor 1999; Greenberg 2011). Some scholars have compared this form of American imperialism with contemporaneous expansionist campaigns in Argentina (Brudney 2019). However, as scholarship on the conquest of the West in visual studies makes clear, European settlers were confronted with a very different landscape in the United States than in Argentina. To reach the West, Americans had to pass through forests and mountains in the East. In doing so, they looked out at the plains and projected the myth of an American sublime onto the West (Malosetti Costa 2005, 299–301). In Argentina, meanwhile, European settlers had no such visual cues to work with since the topography remains relatively flat, and despite the literary importance of the plains region in such canonical works as Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) and José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872, 1879). Moreover, unlike in the United States, in Argentina there were no landscape painting schools, and no advancing railway system to transport painters and photographers across the frontier. Thus, images played practically no role in the construction of an epic imaginary about the Argentine frontier, as they did in the United States. Later, when Argentine filmmakers sought to depict military campaigns in the Pampas area, they didn’t have as robust a pictorial and photographic tradition to rely upon as American filmmakers did. Not understanding this difference as a deficit, this chapter focuses on the reception and circulation of the poem Martín Fierro, as a case study to explore the complex and varied connections between epic and power in Argentine cultural history. In the first section, I discuss the publication of Martín Fierro within the framework of political debates in Argentine society in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, I read the first part of the poem as an anti-epic critique of state violence against the rural inhabitants known as gauchos, and the second part, which is in the mode of national epic, as a depiction of the assimilation of gauchos into the liberal state. Next, I examine how, around the turn of the twentieth century, conservative elites strategically transformed a quarrelsome gaucho into a paradigmatic hero, and canonized the poem as a self-legitimatizing story of Argentine nationalism and modernity. This of course sparked numerous and still ongoing debates on the uses and meanings of the epic. Finally, the last two sections of the chapter are devoted to analyzing literary and cinematic adaptations of the poem, in order to understand how and why Martín Fierro has been used for different political purposes up until today. All in all, this chapter provides not only a rich exploration of the reasons why Martín Fierro has and has not been embraced as an “epic” at different historical moments, but also another pertinent reminder that the designation “epic” is neither a fixed nor undisputed category. Rather, it is an idea and an attribute that different nationalist groups have applied to specific forms of cultural production, and over which they have been willing to fight entrenched battles.

MARTÍN FIERRO AS ANTI-EPIC During the last decades of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, the word “gaucho”—of uncertain etymology—was employed to designate 542

— ​ A n t i - E p i c a s N a t i o n a l E p i c —​ European descendants who lived in rural zones and were usually dedicated to hunting free-roaming cattle in the seemingly boundless plains. In this scenario, while wars of independence and civil wars developed in a socially and politically convulsed environment, gaucho literature emerged as a popular genre. A fundamental feature of gaucho literature, typically written in verse, is that it is not written by gauchos themselves, but rather seeks to be read (or heard, since its audience was usually illiterate) as if it had been composed by gauchos. Additionally, this style of narrative poetry was often composed in relation to particular political contexts, and pursued concrete political ends (which is why some of its authors were called gauchipolíticos [gauchipoliticians]). The idea was that the gaucho who read or heard these poems would feel part of a larger collective, whether an independent homeland (Argentina) or an independent continent (South America). Hence, according to the classic formula coined by Josefina Ludmer, the gaucho genre is defined as a use of the word/voice (of the) “gaucho” (2002, 21). That is to say, there is a learned use of the gaucho’s voice: the gaucho’s words are used, but the use of the word “gaucho” itself is also in dispute. What is in question is the definition of what a gaucho is or what a gaucho should be like: who is a gaucho and who is not? Through this formula, Ludmer describes the chain of uses articulated by the genre: the use of the gaucho’s body by the army, the use of the gaucho’s voice by literate culture, and the use of the gaucho genre to integrate the gauchos into liberal state law. These uses apply to a wide range of texts that can be classified into different historical periods in the nineteenth century: (1) the early nineteenth century when South American armies defeated Indigenous populations during the so-called “independence wars”; (2) the mid-nineteenth century when governor Juan Manuel de Rosas ruled Buenos Aires, until 1852; and (3) the late nineteenth century when internal struggles paved the way for the advent of a new liberal economic order in Argentina and other South American countries. Martín Fierro belongs to this final period, when gaucho poetry detached from political propaganda and turned into social commentary (Rama 1982, 60–63). Shortly after its publication as a modest pamphlet in 1872, Martín Fierro became a best-seller with numerous reprints, and has drawn great critical attention ever since. The text, which nowadays circulates as a single work, originally appeared in two separate volumes. The first one, El gaucho Martín Fierro (The gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872), is generally known as La ida (The flight), while the second, La vuelta de Martín Fierro (The return of Martín Fierro, 1879), is commonly referred to as La vuelta (The return). The two volumes or parts and the remarkable differences between them have triggered many debates on the value of the poem and, in particular, its epic quality. La ida is a first-person account of a fictional gaucho named Martín Fierro. Although Fierro is a peaceful peasant, his difficulties arise when he is drafted into military service against Indigenous populations on the frontier, by the state. After repeatedly suffering abuse in the military, Fierro deserts from the army only to find himself in total poverty and loneliness: Before I left with the army draft, I Had cattle and home and wife; But when from the frontier I came back, 543

— ​ N i c o l á s S u á r e z —​ All I could find was my ruined shack; God knows my friend, when we’ll see the end Of all this sorrow and strife. (Hernández 1935, 72) Stripped of his home, family, and job, the formerly diligent gaucho becomes an outlaw and a drunkard, and a quarrelsome, misogynist, racist, and murderous fugitive. His first murder occurs when Fierro insults a black woman at a saloon and then kills her partner, the Moreno (Black Man), who was attempting to defend her. While escaping from the police, Fierro teams up with Sergeant Cruz, who was formerly chasing him. Moved by Fierro’s bravado, Cruz decides to join him. They both fight against the police and finally head for the desert, seeking refuge among the Indigenous population known as the Pampas:2 We’ll be more safe with the savages Than ever we have been here. We’ll say good-bye to our sufferings, And you’ll see high jinks and junketings, The day we drop in to some Indian camp, Beyond the far frontier. (1935, 70) Seven years later, in 1879, following the major success and numerous reprints of the poem, La vuelta resumes the story of Fierro, in a more robust and attractive edition, which included ten illustrations by artist Carlos Clérice. After spending some years among the Pampas, Fierro’s life is not any better than it was before his departure. His friend Cruz dies from smallpox and Fierro buries him. Later on, he kills an Indigenous chief, releases a white woman who was held captive by the chief, and returns to “civilization,” where he reunites with his two children and meets Cruz’s son. They all exchange the stories of their lives up to that moment, and Fierro, now a peaceful old man, offers advice to the young based on his own experiences. His character has changed so much that, after facing a black man in a payada (impromptu singing duel), Fierro finds out that the black man was actually the Moreno’s brother, who is seeking revenge, but refuses to give him satisfaction in a knife duel. In the end, Fierro changes his name in an attempt to leave behind his violent past, and the family splits up again, going their separate ways. The general tone of La ida is obviously much more violent than La vuelta, which has a conciliatory and pacifying mood, as can be seen in the final verses: Yet don’t let anyone take offence, I don’t plan any folks to gall; If I’ve chosen this fashion to have my say, It’s because I thought it the fittest way, And it’s not to make trouble for any man, BUT JUST FOR THE GOOD OF ALL (1935, 305) 544

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Figure 38.1  The Fight between Martín Fierro and the Indigenous Chief, illustrated by Carlos Clérice (Hernández 1879, 22). Wikipedia.

If the first part of the poem constitutes an anti-epic critique of state violence against the gauchos, the second part mythologizes the gaucho imaginary in order to legitimize the advance of the new liberal order. It does this by associating the gaucho’s rural way of life to a presumably old, “original” world that was already in the process of disappearing, or rather was being disappeared by the state in the late nineteenth century. A biographical reading of the work suggests that the ideological change in the second part corresponds to a shift in the author’s living conditions: from 1872 to 1879, Hernández went from being an ordinary journalist and a member of the Federal Party who supported lost political causes, such as the rebellions led by Ricardo López Jordán, one of the last caudillos (rural leaders) in Argentine history, to becoming a pro-government senator. Indeed, he was known as “Senator Martín Fierro,” a nickname that fused the creator with his creation. Such change in the author’s political career, as suggested by Tulio Halperin Donghi (1985), surely impacted his attitudes toward the character. In this respect, La vuelta departs from the anti-epic orientation of La ida and depicts the assimilation of the gauchos into the national epic of the liberal state. It is not a mere coincidence that the text appeared precisely in 1879, only a few months after the beginning of General Julio Argentino Roca’s so-called Campaign of the Desert (1878–1885), a genocide that annihilated Indigenous peoples and extended the geographical limits of the modern Argentine state toward the Pampas and the Patagonia. Nevertheless, despite the fact that La vuelta abandons the anti-epic spirit 545

— ​ N i c o l á s S u á r e z —​ of La ida, it is not a full-fledged epic celebration of the nation-state. But Hernández transformation of the main character in La vuelta left the door open for future appropriations and retellings that pushed Fierro’s story further in the service of Argentine nationalism.

ANTI-EPIC AS NATIONAL EPIC One of the first attempts to link Martín Fierro to ancient Greek epics was carried out by Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, in two articles published in 1894 and 1899. Unamuno claimed that Hernández’s text was “the most genuinely Homeric that I know of in Hispanic America, and at the same time the most deeply Spanish” (1958, 90). By “Homeric,” Unamuno meant a return to “the primitive and simple,” and a case of “social atavism” that found in gaucho customs a new outbreak of the epic in the tradition of ancient Greek and Spanish literature, in the sense that works such as Homer’s or the Poem of the Cid (circa 1200) were oral tales about the origins of different cultures and civilizations. Similarly, Spanish essayist Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo highlighted the “popular spirit” in gaucho poetry, which was “epically expressed” in Martín Fierro (1948, 396). Both Unamuno and Menéndez Pelayo, as Jaime Alazraki infers, seemed to allude to certain epic features of Martín Fierro, rather than inscribing it within the epic as a fixed literary genre (1974, 434). This Hispanization of Martín Fierro, however, worked toward the academic canonization of José Hernández’s text, and that too as a national epic. Later, in 1913, the Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones delivered a famous series of lectures on the epic meaning of the poem. The conferences took place in the Odeón Theatre (which served as a venue for major cultural performances), and President Roque Sáenz Peña himself attended the event. Three years later, as part of the centennial celebrations of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, Lugones published an extended version of his conference lectures under the title of El payador (The folk singer). His main thesis, as well as the title of chapter seven, was that “Martín Fierro is a National Epic Poem,” whose value for Argentine culture is akin to that of the Iliad for the ancient Greeks. By raising the story of a contentious gaucho to the level of a paradigmatic national epic, Lugones triggered many contentious debates, but his move was very influential. Unlike Unamuno, Lugones skipped over the issue of Martín Fierro’s Hispanic legacy and linked the work directly to the heritage of Greek culture, which, he believed, was brought to the Americas by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European conquerors who were conversant with the tradition of Mediterranean troubadours from the region of Provence, and were also influenced by the Arabic culture (Lugones 1916, 80). Lugones’ lectures arrived at a time in Argentina when the gaucho population was almost extinct, and the monied classes considered the urban working class politically “dangerous.” At the same time, the Argentine state was moving to limit immigration.3 For these reasons, Lugones’ ideas were well received by the conservative elites, who canonized the poem as a self-legitimating national epic at a time when their class privilege was under threat. Although Lugones’ argument—a racialized reading of Fierro as the “hero and civilizer of the Pampa” (1916, 37)—had no literary or philological merit, it was embraced by the ruling class for self-serving ideological reasons. 546

— ​ A n t i - E p i c a s N a t i o n a l E p i c —​ One month after Lugones delivered his lectures, in June 1913, literary scholar Ricardo Rojas gave a speech on the occasion of the inauguration of the Department of Argentine Literature at University of Buenos Aires that built on Lugones’ thesis. Rojas considered Martín Fierro a national poem in much the same way as Lugones, but he situated the work in a long history of Argentine literature. Between June and October 1913, the literary journal Nosotros conducted a survey on the value of the poem, sparking further debate. The editors of the journal essentially reduced Rojas’ arguments, equating them with those of Lugones. However, in 1917, Rojas further distanced himself from Lugones by emphasizing, in the Introduction to his monumental Historia de la literatura argentina (History of Argentine literature), Indigenous contributions to Argentine language and literature, including gaucho literature, although he agreed with Lugones that Martín Fierro should be read as a hero of Aryan ancestry. Consequently, Rojas placed Martín Fierro in line with Alonso de Ercilla’s The Araucaniad (1569), a Spanish epic about the conquest of Chile that departs from European works like Beowulf (circa 700) and The Song of Roland (circa 1100), and grants heroic status to Indigenous Araucanian chiefs and their troops. Despite Rojas’ efforts, however, the process of academic canonization of Martín Fierro that Lugones initiated seemed to turn the poem into an object of consumption more suitable for intellectuals than for the popular classes, for whom the poem was intended. In the following decades, Martin Fierro became an all-encompassing national emblem and a required textbook in schools. In the 1920s, when Lugones was acclaimed as the official poet of the Argentine state, Martín Fierro was subject to nationalist appropriations by both leftist and conservative groups. Soon afterward, in the 1930s, the state itself adopted the hero with his dubious behavior as a role model through commemorations, school assemblies, and civic celebrations (Cattaruzza and Eujanian 2003, 217–62). Hernández was publicly honored and statues were even built in his honor. In 1939, Tradition Day was established as an official celebration in honor of Hernández’s birthday, thus concluding the process of canonization of Martín Fierro as a national emblem. Since then, many have read the poem as a symbol of the Argentine nation and a repository of the values of brotherhood that Fierro instills in his children in La vuelta. Further, they have viewed readings of Martín Fierro like the exegesis of a sacred text. This monological appraisal has prevailed in many governmental and academic spheres, and was reinforced through the publication of several “luxury” editions of the poem in the 1920s (Rivera 2001, 568).

DEMYTHOLOGIZING FIERRO However, at the same time, the reflections of such prominent writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada challenged nationalistic approaches to Martín Fierro. Borges discussed Lugones’ understanding of Martín Fierro as a national epic in both works of fiction and essays. Although his opinion on the text changed over time, his critique of nationalistic, exoticizing, and sacralizing readings of the poem remained a constant in his work. Early on, in the 1920s, Borges sought to strip the image of the gaucho from the heavy nationalist orthodoxy of Lugones (Montaldo 1989, 223), a program that Beatriz Sarlo condensed under the formula “avant-garde 547

— ​ N i c o l á s S u á r e z —​ urban criollismo” (1993, 112). Unlike Lugones who had a penchant for ancient epic poetry, the young Borges and his fellow writers at Martín Fierro magazine supported the appropriation of gaucho poetry in tune with the urban and cosmopolitan spirit of European avant-garde movements.4 The great misunderstanding of the Lugonesian reading, as Borges saw it, consisted in positing a murderous and racist gaucho as a role model for Argentines, in the manner of an epic hero like Achilles. This problem partly arose, as I have previously suggested, from the very ambiguity of the poem itself. Borges mainly focused on the more controversial work La ida, which enabled him to carry out irreverent readings, as evidenced in short stories like “Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)” (A biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz [1829–1874], 1944) and “El fin” (The end, 1953). The first is an account of the reasons Cruz switches sides and joins Fierro as an outlaw, while the second is a spinoff of La ida in which, in contrast to La vuelta, the Moreno’s brother takes revenge on Fierro, and kills him in a final duel. In the mid-1940s, the emergence of Peronism, a mass democratic movement of a populist orientation, driven by the thought of Argentine Army General and President Juan Domingo Perón, caused a turning point in Borges’ views on the poem. That is, the government’s use of Martín Fierro as propaganda in a range of official publications, graphic art, and radio under Perón prompted an anti-Peronist like Borges to reassess his opinions on the text. Whereas in the 1930s, the state had invoked rural traditions (and Martín Fierro) in symbolic ways through propaganda, the period 1945–1955 saw a shift toward policies that actually benefited the rural poor, as with the 1944 “Statute of the Farmhand.”5 This allowed the government to draw a parallel between the heroic character Fierro and the political figure Perón, and understand Martín Fierro as a national epic in line with the politics of an epic nation. In reaction to this phenomenon, Borges sought to separate popular understandings of Fierro from those of Perón in an essay he co-wrote with Margarita Guerrero. Here, the authors refuted Lugones’ propositions and claimed that Fierro is not an epic but a novelistic character, because he is morally imperfect. However, Borges and Guerrero acknowledge that the kind of narrative pleasure that Martín Fierro elicits in the reader is of an epic sort, since the epic was “a preform of the novel.” On the one hand, they conclude that it is reasonable to describe Martín Fierro as “epic,” even though it should not be taken as a genuine epic. And, on the other hand, they also claim that, leaving the “accident” of its verse aside, Martín Fierro can be regarded as a novel, given the order of pleasure that it provides to the reader and its belonging to “the novelistic century par excellence: that of Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert” (Borges and Guerrero 1953, 73–74). In 1948, almost contemporaneous with Borges’ reflections on Martín Fierro, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada—another prominent anti-Peronist—published a monumental treatise on Hernández’s poem entitled Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro (Death and transfiguration of Martín Fierro). This over-800 page book was conceived as a total reading of Martín Fierro, and an “essay on the interpretation of Argentine life.” In it, Martínez Estrada condemns the uncritical glorification of the gaucho, and links propagandistic uses of Martín Fierro with what he deems the constituent evils of the nation. For example, he is critical of the purportedly irreducible dichotomy between civilization and barbarity, famously introduced into 548

— ​ A n t i - E p i c a s N a t i o n a l E p i c —​ Argentine culture by Sarmiento’s Facundo, and the supposedly melancholic disposition of the inhabitants of the Pampas. Although grandiloquent in tone, Martínez Estrada’s essay is full of provocative ideas; it has left a strong mark on subsequent critics of the poem, who have examined the cultural, social, and political dimensions of Martín Fierro in nuanced ways. As for the relationship between Martín Fierro and the epic, Martínez Estrada was in agreement with Borges, and critical of Lugones. Moreover, he asserted that Hernández deliberately avoided the usual tropes and elevated vocabulary of ancient and medieval European epics, and instead embraced a more prosaic style and language that resembled that of the gauchos (Martínez Estrada 1958, 350). In his view, the fact that the protagonist narrates events about the past of his community is not a sufficient reason to regard the poem as “epic,” or to interpret the character as an epic hero (1958, 217). As Emilio Rodríguez Monegal notes, Martínez Estrada, like Borges, resisted a patriotic or nationalist reading of the poem, downplayed its epic quality, and, on the contrary, insisted on its links with the novel (1974, 300). Thus, it can be argued that Borges and Martínez Estrada not only returned Martín Fierro to the domain of anti-epics, but also turned the main character of the poem into a modern anti-hero. Just as Borges memorably proclaims in “Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz,” Martín Fierro is a book that “can be all things to all men […], for it is capable of virtually inexhaustible repetitions, versions, perversions” (2000, 40). And such multiplicity of meanings is precisely what cinematographic depictions of Hernández’s work seemed to be proving at the time, and would continue to demonstrate in the following decades.

MARTÍN FIERRO ON SCREEN: BETWEEN THE WESTERN FILM AND THE EPIC THEATRE Despite Borges’ claim that Martín Fierro “can be all things to all men,” the poem was not adapted to the screen for several decades due to litigation over the copyright to Hernández’s work. The case originated when, after adapting Martín Fierro in a now lost 1923 silent film, director Alfredo Quesada quit the film business and transferred the copyright, which he had bought from Hernández’s heirs, to one of his employees. In subsequent years, several renowned Argentine directors attempted to adapt the work, but all of them failed to do so because of this legal impediment. Then in the early 1950s, Perón’s chief of propaganda, Raúl Alejandro Apold, offered governmental support for a film adaptation of Martín Fierro, which led to Way of a Gaucho (1952), a film loosely based on Hernández’s poem, by the French-American director Jacques Tourneur. To get the film made, Apold resorted to a peculiar strategy. As Argentina’s Undersecretary of Information and Communications Technology, he set up an agreement with 20th Century-Fox Studios in the United States, allowing the film company to make profits on all films shot in Argentina, on the condition that it reinvest the profits in new films in Argentina. In fact, this was a common strategy by countries where Hollywood sought to make movies in the post-war period; they would enact “currency controls” or protectionist laws, in order to protect their own national film industries. To ensure that assets did not leave the country, the countries would “freeze” the profits of American film companies. For Hollywood studios, 549

— ​ N i c o l á s S u á r e z —​ this was not an ideal situation, but it did allow them to make films in countries like Argentina and recover assets frozen by currency controls. An additional benefit of these “runaway productions,” as they were called, was that labor was much cheaper in overseas locations, which was crucial to expensive “epic” and historical films that required a large number of extras and elaborate set, as was the case in Way of a Gaucho (Lev 2003, 147–52). The script for Way of a Gaucho was based on the 1948 eponymous novel by the American traveler-author Herbert Childs, who drew inspiration for his gaucho character from several passages of Martín Fierro, including the fight against the Indigenous chief, the rescue of the captive woman, and the conversion of the protagonist to the path of righteousness. Tourneur’s film updates the story of Martín Fierro and presents it in the fashion of an epic Western film. Moreover, given the international allure of Hollywood productions, the film worked in the service of the state’s efforts to project the Argentine national identity as an export material. However, in this anomalous hybridization of gaucho culture and the Western genre, Tourneur—who was well-known for his low-budget horror films featuring monstrous characters—demonstrated that the epic vision of Argentine nationality, as depicted by his English-speaking gauchos, was in fact a fragile construction. In 1968, another state-sponsored film, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s Martín Fierro (2007), confirmed once again the public’s appetite for nationalistic adaptations of Hernández’s work. The film presents the poem through the lens of Lugones’s reading and revives the gaucho epic of classic Argentine cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Veteran screenwriter Ulyses Petit de Murat was summoned to write the script. When the work premiered, a booklet about the film was distributed as a textbook in schools, and students went to theatres to watch the film as a school field trip. Not surprisingly, with the state support during Juan Carlos Onganía’s dictatorship, Torre Nilsson’s Martín Fierro became an immediate box office success and was the highest-grossing production in the history of Argentine cinema up to that time. Far from the figure of the rebel gaucho of La ida, the character of Fierro, as embodied in the prestigious actor Alfredo Alcón, conveyed a folkloric image of gaucho culture packaged in commercial, popular entertainment. The film opened door to a statesponsored proliferation of gaucho productions, and, in subsequent years, in concert with the boom of the Argentine folklore movement, several filmmakers forayed into epic adaptations of Martín Fierro and gaucho literature: Manuel Antín’s Don Segundo Sombra (1969), Carlos Borcosque’s Santos Vega (1971), Leonardo Favio’s Juan Moreira (1973), and Enrique Dawi’s La vuelta de Martín Fierro (The return of Martín Fierro, 1974). The most radical of such films is arguably Fernando Solanas’ Los hijos de Fierro (The children of Fierro, 1978). Envisaged as an explicit response to Torre Nilsson’s dehistoricized Martín Fierro (Getino and Solanas 1973, 95), the film reworked Hernández’s poem as an allegory of Argentina’s political history during the years of the so-called Peronist Resistance, from the fall of the regime in 1955 until the return of Perón in 1973. The story is structured in three parts, two of which are titled in accordance with Hernández’s poem, “La ida” and “La vuelta.” Between them is a third part titled “El desierto” (The desert). While the first and last sections refer, respectively, to Perón’s fall and return, “The desert” refers to the period of his exile in Spain. Using verses that emulate those in Hernández’s metrical composition, the 550

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Figure 38.2  Still from Fernando Solanas’ Los hijos de Fierro (1978) showing former police officer and Peronist militant Julio Troxler in the role of Fierro’s eldest son.

film intermingles Hernández’s story with other storylines that allude to the Peronist Resistance and were written by playwright Mauricio Kartún. With a patchwork of influences—poetry, theatre, political documentary, and musical film, among others— the resulting film stylistically resembles Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre insofar as the narration is designed to raise the working-class audience’s consciousness of their own oppression. Unlike Lugones, who racialized the story and saw Fierro as a direct descendant of ancient European epic heroes, Solanas read the poem as a story about the plight of rural workers in nineteenth-century Argentina, and linked it with the history of the twentieth-century cabecitas negras (“black little heads”), as Perón’s followers were pejoratively called. Given the controversial nature of the film, which was made between 1972 and 1975, political tumult and violence ensued. During shooting of the film, the director received death threats and some of the actors were murdered by paramilitary forces. Solanas ultimately went into exile in France, and the film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1978, although not in the official competition, since the Argentine government did not authorize for the film to represent the country. Further, the work was not released in Argentina until 1984, after the end of the bloody dictatorship that had started with Jorge Rafael Videlas’s military coup in 1976. By that time, the public had lost interest in Martín Fierro as a cultural icon who could bring together the official epic of the state and the popular epic of the working class. 551

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POST-EPIC: MARTÍN FIERRO IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY It is significant that there was a spate of films based on Martín Fierro (and shifting interpretations of the story) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The epic character of Martín Fierro—certainly one of the grandest narratives in Argentine culture—seemed to wane at the time. From then on, less controversial films based on Martín Fierro were produced, including Gerardo Vallejo’s nostalgic, documentary-esque Martín Fierro, el ave solitaria (Martín Fierro, the lonely bird, 2006), and Liliana Romero and Norman Ruiz’s animated film Martín Fierro: La película (Martín Fierro: The movie, 2007).6 In contrast to cinematic adaptations, which mostly endorse the tame gaucho of La vuelta, contemporary literary rewritings of the poem tend to endorse the rebel gaucho of La ida, in alignment with Borges’ vision of the story. These new works can be understood as post-epic, because they deal with the remains of a past epic, but preserve consciousness about the impossibility of its materialization in the present. This can be traced, for instance, in the formal and avant-garde word games of Pablo Katchadjian, who rearranges the verses of La ida in strict alphabetical order, in El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente (Martín Fierro in alphabetical order, 2007); and of Oscar Fariña, who rewrites La ida’s original verses in contemporary villero (shanty town) slang, in El guacho Martín Fierro (The orphan Martín Fierro, 2011). Among new interpretations and literary adaptations of Martín Fierro, two other works stand out due to their representation of queer and gender-variant characters, who invite us to rethink the conventional, normative brand of masculinity in gaucho poetry. Following the Borgesian tradition of seeing the poem as a non-romantic secular tale, Martín Kohan’s short story “El amor” (The love, 2015) further develops the homoerotic friendship between Fierro and Cruz, in the form of a scene of sexual intercourse while they are hiding in the Indigenous camp. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, meanwhile, makes Fierro’s wife, who lacks agency in Hernández’s poem, a strong protagonist, in her 2017 novel Las aventuras de la China Iron, translated as The Adventures of China Iron (2019). Here, after the departure of Fierro, his wife roams the Pampas and meets Liz, a Scottish woman whose husband, like Fierro, has been drafted into the army. Liz then renames Fierro’s wife “China Iron” (Fierro’s girl),7 who “cross-dresses” as a man, pretending to be Liz’s page in order to survive in the Pampas. As both women travel across the Pampas on Liz’s wagon, they take drugs, read books, and have sex, confounding the patriarchal, heteronormative orientation of Martín Fierro and escaping the surveilling, patriarchal gaze of the state.

CONCLUSION If epic and even anti-epic readings of Martín Fierro cast it as a story of normative (hyper)masculinity and heteronormativity, then Kohan and Cabezón Cámara’s postepic works deviate from such “standard” readings of gaucho literature. One renders gauchos as “effeminate” or lacking in virility (Kohan 2015), while the other shifts the focus to the women who coexisted with them (Cabezón Cámara 2019). These authors worked to desacralize a “national epic” whose canonization at the hands of the state lost sight of the fact that for many of its first consumers, at the end of the 552

— ​ A n t i - E p i c a s N a t i o n a l E p i c —​ nineteenth century, Martín Fierro was joyful reading, often shared in groups in the pulperías (general stores) or in the heat of campfires. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the poem and after more than a century of controversy, these more recent works confirm that the epic status of Martín Fierro is not to be taken for granted. It is, on the contrary, still a question that elicits passionate debate among critics and creative artists. As previously exposed, such polysemic condition is largely due to two factors: firstly, the very ambiguity of the poem—particularly, the many contradictions between its two parts; and secondly, these contradictions have been the ground for different uses and misuses of the epic in Martín Fierro, in contexts of political violence prompted by social and cultural segregation. Only in such a culturally and politically complex scenario could the anti-epic of La ida metamorphose into the national epic of La vuelta.

NOTES 1 Originating from the Quechua word pampa (plain or grassland), the Pampa region comprises the vast treeless plains of South America, including the areas surrounding the River Plate in Uruguay and central Argentina, the Argentine Littoral, and Southern Brazil. 2 The term “Pampas” can refer to a region of Argentina or an Indigenous group who live there. 3 Two laws from the first years of the twentieth century illustrate this. First, the 1902 Residence Law authorized the government to prevent the entry of immigrants and expel immigrants who “jeopardized the public order.” A decade later, in 1912, the Sáenz Peña Law established the use of secret ballots and “universal,” compulsory suffrage for native or naturalized men, which excluded non-citizen immigrants, indigenous populations, and women from the right to vote. 4 Published between 1924 and 1927, Martín Fierro was a literary magazine founded by poet Evar Méndez. Several major writers, including Borges, were frequent collaborators of this influential and provocative magazine, which had a strong inclination for radical art and avant-garde literature. 5 The “Statute of the Farmhand” regulated minimum wages and work conditions for rural workers, “introducing a public dimension to relations until then handled in a paternalistic and private manner” (Romero 2014, 94). 6 For a review of these films and others, see Bollig (2012). 7 “China” is a Quechua word meaning “girl,” and “Iron” is a literal translation of the name “Fierro” into English.

WORKS CITED Alazraki, Jaime. 1974. “El género literario del Martín Fierro.” Revista Iberoamericana 40, no. 87–88: 433–58. Antín, Manuel, dir. 1969. Don Segundo Sombra. Argentina. Bollig, Ben. 2012. “Filming Fierro: Aesthetics and Politics in Film Adaptations of Nationalepic Poetry.” New Cinemas, 10, no. 1: 63–80. Borcosque, Carlos, dir. 1971. Santos Vega. Argentina. Borges, Jorge Luis. 2000. The Aleph and Other Stories. Translated by Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin. ———, and Margarita Guerrero. 1953. El Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Columba.

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— ​ N i c o l á s S u á r e z —​ Brudney, Edward. 2019. “Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, and ‘El Indio’ in Argentina’s Conquista del Desierto.” Journal of Global South Studies 36, no. 1: 116–44. Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela. 2019. The Adventures of China Iron. Translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre. Edinburgh: Charco Press. Cattaruzza, Alejandro, and Alejandro Eujanian. 2003. Políticas de la historia. Argentina, 1860–1960. Buenos Aires: Alianza. Dawi, Enrique, dir. 1974. La vuelta de Martín Fierro. Argentina. Ercilla y Zuñiga, Alonso. 2012. The Araucaniad. Translated by Charles Maxwell Lancaster and Paul Thomas Manchester. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Fariña, Oscar. 2011. El guacho Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Factotum. Favio, Leonardo, dir. 1973. Juan Moreira. Argentina. Getino, Octavio, and Fernando Solanas. 1973. Cine, cultura y descolonización. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. Greenberg, Amy. 2011. Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Halperin Donghi, Tulio. 1985. José Hernández y sus mundos. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Hernández, José. 1872. El gaucho Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: La Pampa. ———. 1879. La vuelta de Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Librería del Plata. ———. 1935. The Gaucho Martín Fierro. Translated by Walter Owen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Katchadjian, Pablo. 2007. El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Argentina de Poesía. Kohan, Martín. 2015. “El amor.” In Cuerpo a tierra, 9–18. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Lev, Peter. 2003. Transforming the Screen 1950–1959. History of the American Cinema. Vol. 7. New York: Gale. Ludmer, Josefina. 2002. The Gaucho Genre. A Treatise on the Motherland. Translated by Molly Weigel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lugones, Leopoldo. 1916. El payador. Buenos Aires: Otero. Malosetti Costa, Laura. 2005. “¿Un paisaje abstracto? Transformaciones en la percepción y representación visual del desierto argentino.” In Resonancias románticas, edited by Graciela Batticuore and Klaus Gallo, 291–303. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel. [1948] 1958. Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. 1948. Historia de la poesía hispanoamericana. Vol. 2. Santander: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Montaldo, Graciela. 1989. “Borges: una vanguardia criolla.” In Yrigoyen, entre Borges y Arlt (1916-1930), edited by Graciela R. Montaldo, vol. 7 of Historia social de la literatura argentina, edited by David Viñas, 213–30. Buenos Aires: Contrapunto. Rama, Ángel. 1982. Los gauchipolíticos rioplatenses. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina. ———. 1996. The Lettered City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ribeiro, Darcy. 1972. Las Américas y la civilización. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina. Rivera, Jorge. 2001. “Ingreso, difusión e instalación modelar del Martín Fierro en el contexto de la cultura argentina.” In José Hernández, Martín Fierro, edited by Élida Lois and Ángel Núñez, 545–75. Nanterre: ALLCA XX. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. 1974. “El Martín Fierro en Borges y Martínez Estrada.” Revista Iberoamericana 40, no. 87–88: 287–302. Rojas, Ricardo. [1917] 1957. Historia de la literatura argentina. Vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Kraft. Romero, Liliana, and Norman Ruiz, dirs. 2007. Martín Fierro: La película. Argentina.

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— ​ A n t i - E p i c a s N a t i o n a l E p i c —​ Romero, Luis Alberto. 2014. A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century. Translated by James Brennan. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sarlo, Beatriz. 1993. Borges, a Writer on the Edge. London and New York: Verso. Sarmiento, Domingo. 2003. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Translated by Kathleen Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press. Solanas, Fernando, dir. 1978. Los hijos de Fierro. Argentina. Taylor, Quintard. 1999. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Torre Nilsson, Leopoldo, dir. 1968. Martín Fierro. Argentina. Tourneur, Jacques, dir. 1952. Way of a Gaucho. USA. Vallejo, Gerardo, dir. 2006. Martín Fierro, el ave solitaria. Argentina. Unamuno, Miguel. 1958. “La literatura gauchesca.” In vol. 8 of Obras completas, edited by Manuel García Blanco, 89–95. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

T O K E E P T H E S K Y F R O M FA L L I N G THE EPIC OF INDIGENOUS E N V I R O N M E N TA L I S M I N B R A Z I L

rsr

Tracy Devine Guzmán

Calendar year 2020 was the most destructive on record for the Brazilian Amazon and its peoples in over a decade. With uncontrolled fires eliminating a football field of rainforest per minute, violent incursions of resource pirates into protected territories, heightened political influence for ranching and agriculture industries, impunity for landgrabbers, and state sponsorship for extractivist developmentalism, Indigenous peoples became ever more vulnerable, while their struggles played out on the world stage of social media with unparalleled visibility.1 While it would be false to suggest that Native Brazilians had lived previously without grave social, political, economic, and cultural violence, the anti-Indigenous rhetoric and policy choices of Bolsonaro’s regime were unparalleled since the country’s return to democracy in 1985 and the establishment of Indigenous rights in the 1988 Constitution. Beginning in January 2019, the youth and relative fragility of Brazil’s legal and political institutions empowered the executive, his administration, and his supporters to have a disproportionately negative impact on the well-being of Brazil’s minority populations—particularly Native peoples. For readers familiar with Bolsonaro’s long career prior to assuming the presidency, his influence on marginalized communities and the ecosystems on which they depend for survival was not a campaign promise, but a death foretold. Bolsonaro promised that if elected, minority groups would “bow down” to national “majorities,” and that no additional territory would be demarcated as Indigenous land (Resende 2018). Flouting the hard-won legal guarantees of Native peoples and recycling racist hyper-nationalism from the early twentieth century, he affirmed the longstanding desire of positivists and other developmentalists to exploit the Amazon for the benefit of “all Brazilians” rather than to preserve it for the “unproductive Indians” holding the rights to some 13.8% of the national territory. Comprising 0.4% of the population of the seventh-most unequal country in the world (Gemaque 2021), Indigenous communities under Bolsonaro were targeted not only by old and acrimonious political rhetoric of “lots of land for just a few

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— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ Indians” (Ramos 1998, 37), but also by fierce, unlawful invasions that the intensification of that rhetoric inspired. Operated in service to the world’s most formidable economic powers, the deep-rooted neocolonialism of the Brazilian state took on new life, while Indigenous communities, activists, and allies could do little more than livestream violent deforestation across the globe in real time. Paradoxically, the democratization of information access and communication capabilities that made the burning Amazon visible around the world did not correlate to strengthened democratic governance in Brazil, nor to greater equity for Indigenous peoples. Instead, the increased circulation of evidence laid bare the incineration of democratic citizenship and the acceleration of the old and slow violence that has undermined the well-being of vulnerable populations for centuries (Nixon 2011). If this story of destruction seems familiar—alas, we can find scholarly and journalistic accounts of invasion, usurpation, and annihilation before and after “protecting” Native peoples became a putative goal of the Brazilian state in 1910 with the establishment of the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indian Protection Service or SPI)— what about this recent iteration makes it noteworthy? Are we moving painfully through antagonisms in Hegelian synthesis toward the realization of Spirit—peering through a lens of suffering toward a distant but plausible horizon of freedom? Or, are we witnessing a familiar, well-documented sequence of confrontation, defense, dissolution, and adjustment—at times including survival, other times, demise—as it runs through an old cycle in which dates, names, and places change, but the story remains largely the same? Paradoxically, the precarious state of Indigenous lives and livelihoods in Brazil corroborates both accounts: while access to information technologies has neither strengthened democracy nor fostered freedom for Indigenous peoples, it has created greater awareness of the historic and ongoing absence of democracy and freedom, thus bolstering transnational support for Indigenous wellbeing, including Indigenous environmentalism. This essay contextualizes this enigma historically to understand the social and political resistance to bolsonarismo—governance under Bolsonaro and likeminded politicians—as part of a longer tale of Indigenous and allied work against the devastation of people and the environment. Drawing on state documents, journalistic accounts, and testimonial narratives, and with particular emphasis on The Falling Sky—a collaborative auto-ethnography by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa and French-Moroccan anthropologist, Bruce Albert2—I argue that as communities whose well-being is intrinsically tied to the welfare of non-human and more-thanhuman beings, Indigenous peoples lived what dominant societies call “ecology” as an existential battleground well before the Anthropocene gained traction in academic or popular parlance (Crutzen and Stoerner 2000). In concert with Kopenawa’s perspective and Native philosophies from across Brazil and the Americas, what I call the collective “epic” of Indigenous environmentalism demonstrates, counter to bolsonarismo and the anti-Indigenous policies that long preceded it, how and why Indigenous knowledge can provide valuable guidance in co-existence and ecological care not only for Indigenous individuals and communities, but also for non-Native peoples and societies who have lost our way as good stewards of the Earth.

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DOCUMENTING DESTRUCTION FROM INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES Since the late 1980s, Yanomami spokesman Davi Kopenawa has become a recognized public figure in Brazil and outspoken activist on a global platform. While his work for the Amazon has been lifelong, his prominence as an advocate for his people and their home grew as recognition of Amazonian destruction accelerated thanks to the advent of social media. Even before Bolsonaro, the massive devastation and heightened public awareness of the twentieth century brought him an increased sense of urgency to offer corrective measures with Indigenous priorities in mind. As Kopenawa put it: …The xapiri [spirits] have defended the forest since it first came into being.3 Our ancestors have never devastated it because they kept the spirits by their side. Is it not still as alive as it has always been? The white people who once ignored all these things are now starting to hear them a little…. Now they call themselves “people of ecology” because they are worried to see their land getting increasingly hot. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 393) The fact that non-Indigenous people finally acknowledged global warming and the compendium of natural catastrophes that dominant societies have wrought on the natural world was for Kopenawa a positive development. His advocacy is a tale of survival grounded in deep interdependence among Native peoples, the forest, nonhuman animals, and the spiritual world—each comprising a pillar of reciprocal existence without which life as it is worth living would be unsustainable. While Kopenawa’s title comes from Yanomami cosmology, its referent evokes a familiar childhood metaphor for impending catastrophe: “There is only one sky and we must take care of it,” he observes; “if it becomes sick, everything will come to an end” (2013, 410). Kopenawa’s goal in sharing this story was to prevent the sky from falling, not only for the Yanomami, but for the forest, Brazil, and future generations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples everywhere—something that could only be achieved by increasing environmental awareness and changing public opinion. Eschewing the recognition that activism brought to his community and expressing disdain for “people of merchandise,” “Earth eaters,” and their toxic “metal smoke,” he emphasized the realist expediency of his informational campaign, fantasizing about one day being able to “hide in the forest with elders” and forget about the city entirely (2013, 400). At the same time, he recognized with fatalism that such a day might never come, and in fact, that others would have to carry on his struggle to change what Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn called the “fate of the forest” (1989). As Kopenawa put it: Even if they do not listen to my words while I am alive, I am leaving the drawing of these words on this paper skin so that their children and those who are born after them can one day see and understand them. Then they will discover the thought of the Yanomami shamans and know how much we wanted to defend the forest. (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 411) 558

— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ While it is unlikely that Kopenawa’s advocacy will arrest the tidal wave of destruction that has overcome the Amazon into the twenty-first century, The Falling Sky remains a testament to his efforts and to ways of being in and thinking about the world that are not complicit with the human and environmental impact of mindless consumerism, wastefulness, and greed. If his testimony is unable to provide salvation, or, even more modestly, point toward a solution, it does at least bear witness, recording personal tragedy and the injustices suffered by Yanomami and other Native peoples, all of which have accelerated since its publication. The Brazilian state may never hold the perpetrators of colonialist violence accountable for killing the forest, but the work represents Kopenawa and Albert’s wager that readers and history just might. Indignation is a sorry substitute for justice where impunity reigns. But is it better than nothing? If we agree with anthropologist Lynn Stephan that testimony’s power exceeds the time and place out of which it emerges to take on unanticipated meanings in other contexts (2013), the answer must be: yes. The Falling Sky lays out the trajectory of Kopenawa’s life, including the death of his family due to disease introduced by Christian missionaries; his learning processes as a shaman; and diverse forms of work with non-Indigenous peoples and institutions. Kopenawa was born circa 1956 on what would later be demarcated Yanomami territory, near Brazil’s border with Venezuela. As Kopenawa and Albert explained, their collaboration to publish the shaman’s story, which was recorded, transcribed, and revised over decades, stemmed from a shared responsibility to expose the situation of the Amazon and its beings. Kopenawa’s friend and interlocutor, Bruce Albert, facilitated the shaman’s written engagement with dominant society, seeking to distinguish their collaborative efforts conceptually and stylistically from more traditional ethnographic work. Rather than enveloping his informant’s perspectives in academic metalanguage or trying to render them more “authentic” by removing his editorial presence, Albert conceptualized The Falling Sky in creative terms—as a “textual duet,” a “shamanic intercultural polylogue,” and a “heterobiography” (Kopenawa and Albert 2013, 446–48). Considering these shifting characterizations, we can appreciate the twosome’s unique methodological achievement: on the one hand, the realization of a double-I narrative that Albert comprises together with Kopenawa; and on the other hand, the already multidimensional and palimpsestic nature of the shaman’s account. That is, Kopenawa’s voice reflects not only his memories and the history of his people— viewpoints common and important to Indigenous and many other kinds of ethnographic testimony—but also the spiritual presence of the xapiri, whom readers come to know as “‘images’ of animal ancestors and cosmological beings” residing beyond the realm of human existence readily available to the anthropologist and presumably, to readers who have not shared Kopenawa’s experiences (2013, 447). Kopenawa’s willingness to disclose details of his spiritual world on “paper skins” (peles de papel) was deliberate and calculated, reflecting a pragmatic awareness that, barring radical intervention, death and destruction in and of the Amazon would continue. As he put it: The xapiri’s words are set in my thought, in the deepest part of me. … When I am long gone they will still be as new and strong as they are now. I asked you [Bruce Albert] to set them on this paper to give them to white people who will 559

— ​ T r a c y D e v i n e G u z m á n —​ be willing to know their lines. Maybe then they will finally lend an ear to the inhabitants of the forest’s words…. (2013, 13) For Kopenawa, this hybrid, personal-communal chronicle narrated preventable catastrophe. Following generations of environmental activists before him, his perspective encapsulated their (and our) shared tragedy: that we (humanity) have the knowledge and ability to live sustainably rather than rapaciously but lack the ethical conviction and political resolve to do so. Kopenawa’s treatise thus reminds us that for all the scandal and outrage it has provoked, bolsonarismo is a manifestation of this deep-rooted culmination of shared failures, but neither their catalyst nor their cause. Since the appearance of Kopenawa’s text, as new modes of publication have become available to Indigenous scholars, activists, artists, and politicians in regions where historically, such information has circulated with difficulty and a time lag, the role of written (dominant) languages as an extension of neocolonial power has morphed into a more ambiguous instrument. On the one hand, this proliferation affords an opportunity to spread and reify the misinformation about environmental and human catastrophe that has become an unfortunate staple of our divisive global politics. On the other hand, it offers ample occasion to question or undo such propaganda, as well as to inform and educate. Writing on “paper skins” or in digital spaces is therefore not a mere tool of oppression in Indigenous communities where orality has tended to reign over textual production, or where the written word has existed predominantly in dominant and colonial(ist) languages. Rather, it forms part of a growing repertoire of political resistance. From testimonies and journalism to texts, tweets, and videos, these communication channels are a twenty-first-century version of James Scott’s “weapons of the weak”—creative modes of subversion that disenfranchised individuals and groups adopt to destabilize entrenched hierarchies of power (1985). Indigenous social media, like paper skins, have proven useful “weapons” for documenting if not winning battles that Native peoples wage for themselves and on behalf of the environment against exploitation, destruction, and death by missionaries, gold prospectors, loggers, developers, and state representatives. Tragically, a historical perspective reveals that this compendium of antagonists includes not only bolsonaristas and their ilk, who vowed unambiguously to do harm, but also agents who pledged to safeguard the people, lifeways, places, and other-than-human beings they ultimately hastened to destroy.

AGENTS OF PROGRESS AND THEIR OTHER The epic of Indigenous environmentalism is a counternarrative to the story of Amazonian destruction, which begins with an international rubber boom that spanned the end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, leading up to the devastation we witness today through deforestation, mining, ranching, and the ecological poison of hydropower. Kopenawa’s lifetime unfolded during the middle of this story in the 1950s, punctuated by agricultural and industrial expansion, growth of the cattle industry, and the developmentalism of Brazil’s 1964–1985 dictatorship. Beginning in the 1970s, the military regime’s crowning 560

— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ jewel—the Trans-Amazonian Highway—wrought new havoc on communities, animals, and lands, leading to a gold rush that killed thousands of Native people by turn of the new millennium (Fearnside 2005, 680–88). The mid-twentieth-century acceleration of Amazonian destruction both resulted from and contributed to greater national consciousness regarding the region, particularly as a source of wealth for industrious Brazilians eager for socioeconomic growth. One key initiative in this regard was the Superintendency of Development for the Amazon (SUDAM), founded in 1966 under the administration of General Humberto Castelo Branco, which created financial incentives and tax structures for investors to bolster regional modernization along with their own economic futures. On the coattails of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s “Fifty Years in Five” campaign, which had promoted interior and rural development and culminated in the 1960 inauguration of Brasília, SUDAM recycled a decades-old idea that the “green Hell” (Inferno verde) of the Amazon could easily become a relic of the past. Standing in the way were only sufficient investment and hard work. To promote this iteration of Order and Progress (Brazil’s nineteenth-century, positivist motto), the press sold the exultant vision that the Amazon was “over” (já era) because the state’s “battle against the rainforest” would surely prove victorious, as proclaimed in a 1972 advertisement. In short, the propagandists made clear, those who missed out on this life-changing opportunity would be suckers. As another 1972 ad, this one from the Banco da Amazônia, put it: “The Trans-Amazonian Highway is…the path…. A treasure awaits you. Take the opportunity….Get rich together with Brazil.” Following this yellow-brick road, patriotic Brazilians could easily line their pockets with Amazonian gold (“A ofensiva da ditadura militar” n.d.). The dictatorship’s Amazonian campaign breathed new life into the tired vision of frustrated developmentalists, industrialists, and other jungle utopians, presenting the region as an underexploited commodity that would be attractive to both national and international financiers. The accompanying images, void of life except for some doomed trees, reveal no trace of human presence whatsoever. It was therefore easy not to concern oneself with Indigenous peoples, as in this rendering, they simply did not exist. The vision of government advocates, publicists, and corporate partners indeed exemplified Mary Louise Pratt’s “empty landscape”: territories “meaningful only in terms of a capitalist future and…potential for producing a marketable surplus” (2007, 60). The dictatorship thus peddled the swan song of an “impenetrable” forest that was antithetical to civilization because of its poverty, poor communication technologies, and meager access to amenities. By installing a new economic order around the commodification of endless natural resources, they would tame the land, turning destitution into prosperity and backwardness into progress (Menna 1995, 169). In keeping with the Cold War zeitgeist of capitalist extractivism, Brazil’s authoritarian administration supported an overlapping initiative to map and mine forests of the interior. The Radar Project of the Amazon (RADAM) began in the 1970s under the dictatorship’s National Integration Program (PIN), which aimed to promote regional development and generate cultural change to facilitate the incorporation of the “backwards” north and northeast into the national community, materially and symbolically. Under the authority of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, RADAM imported radar technologies to identify and catalog the country’s natural 561

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Figure 39.1  National Progress for Sale: “The Amazon is a Gold Mine.”

resources—particularly trees, minerals, and “rocks of economic interest,” such as bauxite, iron, tin, gold, and diamonds—and to commodify them on a global market (Ministério de Minas e Energia 1974, I.44). Conspicuously absent from these assessments were impacted peoples, their knowledge systems, and their relationships 562

— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ with the land. A 438-page report on Pará state alludes only in passing to a human presence in the region, underscoring the regime’s ambition to eliminate “the primitive system of agriculture…of people without capital, with low-levels of technology, and traditional management practices,” and to replace it with a more efficient, lucrative model (Ministério de Minas e Energia 1974, III.110). To realize these goals, RADAM managers divided the Amazon and the country into a colossal grid to collect, organize, and publish vast amounts of data. Each quadrant corresponded to a flyover region with a unique name and number, resulting in the publication of dozens of reports such as those cited above (Ministério de Minas 1973). For each region, teams of geologists, geographers, engineers, and cartographers generated studies in their respective fields, identifying “potential uses of the land” that were economically fruitful. The accompanying maps of “ideal land use” defined the “natural capacity” of the Amazon as “the result of the interaction of biotic and physical factors expressed for the possibility of economic utility” (Ministério de Minas e Energia 1974). Per this profit-driven framework, portions of Yanomami territory occupied areas of low “natural capacity” where RADAM administrators advocated for national parks and ecological stations. On other Yanomami lands, however, mapping targeted mineral deposits for exploration (Graziano 1989). By the measure of its architects, RADAM was a success, paving the way for state-sanctioned invasion of thousands of extractivists into the area via clandestine airstrips near tributaries of the Rio Branco (Graziano 1989; Borges and Rajão 2016). Public outcry over illness and death among Indigenous communities resulting from the first wave of garimpeiros (small-scale gold miners) in the 1960s and 70s created the impetus behind the Pro-Yanomami Commission (CCPY 2007), which led a decade-long international campaign to demarcate and ratify Yanomami lands, finally achieving that goal in 1991 (CCPY 2007). Despite the landmark victory, illegal and deadly mining persisted with impunity, eventually taking on new life during the Bolsonaro administration.4 Whether RADAM-mapped lands were tagged for protection or exploitation, dictatorship-era concern for their fate had little to do with the peoples whose existence would be upended—or ended—by extractivist onslaught. Awash in fear of foreign takeover of the Amazon, Brazilian patriots were more preoccupied with national sovereignty—unhappy over the prospect that intervention might fall outside the state’s purview (Menna 1995; Borges and Rajão 2016). Completing the trifecta of Brazil’s neocolonial conquest, therefore, was the System for Vigilance over the Amazon (SIVAM), which began during the nineties.5 While SUDAM promoted investment and development on Amazonian territories, and RADAM identified mineral wealth, SIVAM institutionalized nationalist anxieties over Brazil’s tenuous control of the Amazon and established a radar-based system to surveil people and resources across the region. Ostensibly aimed to strengthen environmental protection, deter unlawful mining, and prevent trafficking, SIVAM created controversy during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration by outsourcing 1.4 billion dollars of technology infrastructure and expertise to US-based companies. This arrangement undercut SIVAM’s sovereignty-oriented rationale and led critics to characterize the initiative not only as corrupt, “voluntary servitude” but also, paradoxically, a “step toward the denationalization of the Amazon” (Cerqueira 2002). Less noted during the scandal was 563

— ​ T r a c y D e v i n e G u z m á n —​ the government’s cultural campaign to promote SIVAM and gain support among Amazonian populations impacted by surveillance technologies near their communities. To this end, project masterminds created an Indigenous mascot named Sivamzinho (little Sivam)—a fictional spokesperson to tout the many ways SIVAM would keep destructive outsiders at bay. Juxtaposing modern, urban dress and a traditional Yanomami hairstyle, the character made idealized Indianness a centerpiece of SIVAM’s PR crusade, advocating for the program as the best way for the country to protect “its” Amazon and population (Devine Guzmán 2013). In keeping with Brazil’s historically schizophrenic relationship with Native peoples, SIVAM placed fantasy “Indians” on center stage of the state’s neocolonial propaganda at the same time other state agents worked hard to cast doubt on the existence of their real-life referents. In 1995—two decades after the government launched RADAM and as the SIVAM project became mired in controversy—Army Colonel Carlos Menna Barreto published A Farsa Ianomâmi (The Yanomami Farce), a paranoid, scathing assessment of the “leftist manipulation” of Native peoples for political gain. A segue from the dictatorship’s violent developmentalism to the anti-Indigenous rhetoric of the twenty-first century, his book reveals the consistency of reactionary thought regarding state officials who dare preoccupy themselves with Native well-being: Anxious to free themselves from the harassment of religious orders and foreigners revindicating lost causes in favor of Amazonian Indians and forests, our governing elites … encourage the imperialist ambitions of the First World. Knowingly or otherwise, because of weakness or indifference, they draw up reserves and more reserves, parks and more parks, estranged from all that might exist aside from Indians and monkeys. [Meanwhile,] the caboclo of the northeast, who has survived miraculously in the inhospitable jungle [sic] for over a century without INSS [social security], without minimum wage, schools, or hospitals—deserves nothing. (Barreto 1995, 142–43)6 Like his twenty-first-century successors, then, Barreto supplemented his antiIndigenous rhetoric with class warfare. Not satisfied to accuse his compatriots of betraying Brazil, he aimed to pit Indigenous communities against the non-Indigenous poor: if penurious caboclos had to scrape out existence with no public services, why should “Indians” get special treatment? Penned after the 1988 Constitution and before the affirmative action measures of the 2000s, Barreto’s argument foreshadowed deep divisions that would result from the creation of differentiated rights for Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Brazilians.7 Grounded in the premise that recognizing ethno-racial difference is “racist” and comparing those who advocate for Indigenous lands to Nazis, affirmative action opponents have accused its backers of promoting ethnic cleansing and opposing the mixed-race national identity of Brazil (Nação Mestiça, 2012).

ON IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES As such conflicts linger into the present, the Yanomami case is both singular and symbolic of a larger crisis. Although Brazil’s twentieth-century indigenist tradition began 564

— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ with a military-led endeavor to “protect” Native peoples and ensure their incorporation into dominant society, military leaders (and others) during and after the dictatorship either turned a blind eye to the “inconvenient” presence of the Yanomami on valuable lands or denied their existence altogether. Barreto argued, for example, that foreign philanthropists, clergy, anthropologists, and throngs of “traitors inside Brazil” had conspired with global imperialists to internationalize the Amazon and pass control of its riches to the First World by fabricating the Yanomami out of several smaller groups (1995, 19). His sentiments echoed fears of his predecessors who had argued that Indigenous peoples were undeserving and incapable of citizenship, as well as the antipathies of his successors, who continue to lament the existence of any Native lands whatsoever. Though they date to the last century, his words also augured bolsonarismo: The Fatherland is eternal and belongs to everyone. …The evil they do today under the cloak of ‘protecting Indians’ will tomorrow be the cause of rejection and uncontrollable revolt….To hand over half of Roraima to Indians who have no [concept of] country is to betray Brazil. (1995, 21) By the end of the 1980s, the population of garimpeiros in the northern Amazon already exceeded 40,000—five times the Yanomami population at the time. During the following decade, while Barreto was busy questioning their existence, the Yanomami lost more than 13% of their population to mining invasions. Facilitating this deadly neocolonialism was the developmentalist policy of the dictatorship he served, which made it a national priority to “open up” the Amazon by tearing apart Native lands, lives, and livelihoods.

WHOSE AMAZON? The Indigenous movement, like Davi Kopenawa’s narrative, is an enduring rebuttal of this mercantilist vision of the Amazon as a metaphorical and literal gold mine— one that resists the colonialist “improving eye” that has transformed “subsistence habitants” into “empty landscapes” for over five centuries (Pratt 2007, 60). In contrast, Indigenous environmentalism conceptualizes the forest as a being deserving of respect and care—or as Pratt characterized it, a place “saturated with local history and meaning, where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories, [and occupy] places in [I]ndigenous knowledge formations” (2007, 60). In keeping with this vision, many national and international actors have sought to counter powerful developmentalist impulses by understanding and safeguarding Amazonian biodiversity rather than eliminating it. Curiosity and care for human and other-than-human lives in the region in fact developed—whether intentionally or indirectly—out of transnational collaborations realized primarily for economic, political, or scientific expediency. Heightening the suspicions of those like Barreto who feared outside takeover of the region, Brazilians from many walks of life collaborated over the twentieth century with diplomats, military leaders, entrepreneurs, missionaries, researchers, educators, and artists from Europe and the Americas to understand, govern, map, 565

— ​ T r a c y D e v i n e G u z m á n —​ market, catechize, and fictionalize the Amazon, its peoples, and its resources (Slater 2001; Grandin 2009; Garfield 2013). In his prologue to Barreto’s book, fellow military officer Carlos de Meira Mattos asserted that the entities aiming to protect Yanomami territories were “absurd and preposterous.” Their “veiled purpose,” as he saw it, was “the internationalization of the Amazon”—a dream inspired by a traitorous desire to foster “areas of interest to [all] humanity” (1995, 11; original emphasis). Having long occupied a predominant space in national and global imaginaries of the Amazon, Indigenous peoples were inexorably caught up in this transnational framework, co-existing alongside members of a diverse demographic made more complex by an influx of migrants seeking prosperity or merely survival from the region’s extractive enterprises. As Barreto reminded his readers, heightened awareness of the rainforest as a unique ecological space, as well as an imperative geopolitical one, had manifested decades earlier through a divisive UNESCO proposal to form the International Institute of the Hylean Amazon (IIHA), conceptualized during 1947–1948 with nine partner countries after talks in Belém, Mexico City, and Iquitos, and a planned institutional seating in Manaus. Through the IIHA, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Peru, and Venezuela, with support from the US and UK, sought to commission surveys in anthropology, biology, and pedology, and to conduct studies on local histories, economies, food habits, individual and communal life, and religiosity. The Institute pledged to work with local organizations to create bibliographies for researchers in all fields relevant to the “relationship of humanity to a tropical environment” (“Hylean Amazon Institute Created” 1948, 1). Despite participating in these ambitious international plans, Brazil’s national narrative vis-à-vis the Amazon and its peoples was less optimistic. Apprehensions over sovereignty spilled again into public debate, undermining congressional support for the IIHA despite backing from political and military leaders. Transnational collaboration collapsed by the early 1950s, with Brazil’s intellectual class opting instead for nationally based research operations (Chor Maio 2005, 123). At the same time, the state’s decades-old indigenist enterprise became mired in competing political tendencies: first, the official story of bringing Indians into national society, providing them patriotic education, and putting them to work in agriculture or animal husbandry throughout the country (Souza Lima 1995; Devine Guzmán 2013); and second, the less sanguine story of Indigenous defiance of such efforts—a narrative mostly missing from state archives, but traceable in the popular press. Contemporaneous stories of Indigenous confrontation, self-defense, and subversion of the indigenist apparatus peppered the news media through the 1960s, when the regime dismantled a flailing, corrupt SPI to inaugurate the Fundação Nacional do Índio (National Indian Foundation or FUNAI)—a version of which is still in existence today.8 Before and after the short-lived IIHA, individual and collective resistance to Brazilian neocolonialism ranged from organized demonstrations in urban centers and interviews showcasing Native voices, to outright revolt against the intrusion of outsiders into Indigenous territories, including acts of violence and the disappearance or death of non-Natives.9 Although Indigenous peoples comprised a tiny fraction of the national population, headlines like “Indians threaten revolt,” “Indians march on Altamira,” and “Indians attack the city in Pará” characterized 566

— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ Native agency—particularly the defense of people and land—as an affront to “Brazilian civilization” (“Atacaram a cidade” 1937; “Pobres selvícolas!” 1937; “Os índios” 1937).10 In fact, while IIHA aspirants convened across the Americas during 1947, Brazil’s media outlets reported Indigenous declarations of “war” on various state entities, including the SPI (“Os Chavantes” 1947). By 1952, after Brazilian nationalism had finally foiled plans for the IIHA entirely, Native Brazilians made headlines for failing to abide by indigenist plans for their incorporation into dominant society and the “inevitable” takeover of their lands and resources that would ensue. While some editorialists lamented the “disappearing race” that resulted from violent clashes, most newspapers labeled Native acts of self-preservation “savage,” citing “bloody fury,” and “Dantean episodes” of vengeful anthropophagy, reminiscent of sixteenth-century chronicles (“Assados e comidos” 1952; “Cenas dantescas” 1952; “Garimpeiros massacrados” 1952). Albeit circuitously, these stories reveal how Indigenous individuals and communities with differing levels of engagement with the dominant society demonstrated over decades that they were never passive victims. Rather, as engaged social and political actors, they responded consistently to generations of encroachers who sought to make their lifeways impossible. Resistance to the usurpation of Indigenous lands was intense—as it continues to be—even when material and legal resources for self-defense were scarce. Alongside Kopenawa’s narrative, these reports of self-preservation document a movement that has challenged the ecological-existential threat to Native peoples for well over a century. As then-activist, and subsequently, Minister of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, Sonia Guajajara, put it in her 2019 testimony before the national congress dominated by agroindustry: You look at Indigenous land and call it “unproductive.” We call that life. The entire world is worried about global warming. … And… [your] only desire is to authorize turning over these lands for speculation. …We will spill our last drop of blood to defend these lands. … Just because you are in the city does not mean we want to be! (2019) Although Guajajara’s testimony resonated powerfully across the globe, legislators were bound to disregard the rights and ecological stewardship of Indigenous peoples, no matter the cost.11

CODA: INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The stakes of Guajajara’s remarks and the ongoing epic of Indigenous environmentalism could not be higher in 2023, when Brazil’s Supreme Court is expected to rule on a controversial case involving the Institute for the Environment of Santa Catarina, FUNAI, and the Xokleng-Laklãnõ Indigenous community regarding a longstanding land dispute in southern Brazil (Instituto Socioambiental 2020). Of crucial importance is the Court’s earlier decision that the ruling will set a precedent for pending and future demarcation cases across the country. 567

— ​ T r a c y D e v i n e G u z m á n —​ The much-awaited decision regards the so-called marco temporal or “temporal framework” legal theory, which holds that only Indigenous peoples who can prove occupation of, or document a legal claim to traditional lands as of October 5, 1988 (when the Constitution was promulgated), can henceforward make a legitimate request to demarcate those territories. This interpretation ignores Brazilian legal tradition and is otherwise problematic for several reasons. First, it contradicts Article 231 of the 1988 Constitution, which gives Native peoples “original rights” (i.e. rights that antecede state formation) to ancestral lands, tasking the Union with demarcating them and ensuring respect for Indigenous possessions thereon. It states further that traditional lands are “earmarked for permanent possession” by Indigenous peoples entitled to the “exclusive usufruct” of their soils, rivers, and lakes. Second, the marco temporal disregards the reality that many Indigenous communities were expulsed from their ancestral lands over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making it impossible for them to document occupation as of October 5, 1988—or ever. Third, before 1988, most Indigenous peoples were officially “tutees” of the state, thus lacking judicial autonomy in the Brazilian court system to make any legal claim. And finally, the marco temporal makes no concession for the over 100 uncontacted Indigenous peoples residing in the country who have no means to prove land occupation due to the very fact that they were, and are, uncontacted (Terena 2021). In myriad ways, the marco temporal thus manifests not only the colonialist dream of Brazil’s vehemently anti-Indigenous Congress, but also, as I’ve argued here, generations of developmentalists, anti-environmentalists, and agrobusiness advocates. Theirs too is the eternal, colonialist dream of racist hyper-nationalists who continue to reject differentiated citizenship for Indigenous peoples (and Afrodescendants) with the vacuous argument, still veiled in lore of racial democracy, that the only legitimate Brazilian identity is a mestiça (miscegenated) identity (Nação Mestiça, 2012). And the marco temporal is a colonialist dream for anti-Indigenous supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, who promised long before becoming president that “not one centimeter” of Indigenous land would be demarcated under his watch. In short, the marco temporal began over 500 years ago; it is the “racial contract,” the “coloniality of power,” and “necropolitics” (the power to determine who will live and die), newly repackaged into the same fatal discourses that Native Brazilians have endured for centuries (Mills 1997; Quijano 2000; Mbembe 2019). Finally, as we have seen, Brazil’s epic of Indigenous environmentalism documents the interrelationship between Native well-being and that of the Earth. In 2023, more than 95% of Native Brazilian territories are in the Amazon, where even under relentless attack, they are critical barriers to deforestation and store vast amounts of carbon. A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed a ninefold difference in net carbon loss outside Indigenous lands and other Protected Natural Areas (PNAs) vis-à-vis inside (Walker et al. 2020), corroborating not only the findings of global institutions like the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but also the urgent messages that Native peoples have been registering nationally and worldwide for decades. Against all odds, Indigenous peoples have succeeded in bringing global attention to the human and environmental crises provoked by dominant society’s failures to respect their rights or desist from rapacious extractivism. Their continued feat 568

— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ in revealing these calamities will be of little consequence, however, if state and popular support for Native Brazilians and their homelands are only ever perceived by the powerful as an affront to sovereignty and progress. Dominant societies might do well, instead, to heed Kopenawa and Albert’s warning: “By digging so deep, the whites will tear out the roots of the sky….The sky will collapse…and every one of us will be annihilated” (2013, 287). Alliances like theirs—and ours— are even more critical to collective well-being in 2023 than they were a century ago, and they may well now be more readily fostered and more visible. But our increased connectivity and awareness will mean little if we fail to learn and to change before it becomes too late.

NOTES   1 Preliminary reports from the 2022 national census indicate that 1.65 million Indigenous individuals live in Brazil, together comprising over 300 communities of population sizes ranging from fewer than ten people to tens of thousands. This increase of over 60% since the 2010 census attests to an ongoing, critical shift in Native self-identification that began toward the end of the twentieth century, contributing to the contested nature and vulnerability of Indigenous lands throughout the country. The state recognizes over 700 territories (the vast majority of which are in the Amazon despite the fact that only half the Indigenous population resides there), and over 300 territories nationwide have yet to be officially demarcated (Instituto Socioambiental 2023). Additionally, over 100 Indigenous peoples live out of contact with the dominant society. For these reasons, who counts as Indigenous (indígena) is a controversial matter, particularly when rights and resources are at stake. In this chapter, I use the terms “Indigenous” and “Native” interchangeably, though most people prefer to identify with the proper names of their communities rather than these generic labels. On terminology and demographic shifts, see Santos et al. (2019).  2 The original version, La chute du ciel, was published in France in 2010. English and Portuguese translations were published in the US (2013) and Brazil (2015).   3 Bruce Albert explains xapiri as “spirit helpers” who manifest “images” (utupë) of a “highly heterogenous (and potentially infinite) set of beings, entities, and objects,” including animal ancestors, forest spirits, and “all the entities of Yanomami mythology and cosmology, domestic spirits (dog, fire, or pottery) or outsider spirits (ancestors of the white people, bull, horse, or sheep)” (502).   4 The massive extent of the current Yanomami crisis became evident in early 2023 when the Lula da Silva administration intervened to halt illegal mining operations and provide urgent health care for the impacted population, including hundreds of malnourished children (Nicas 2023).   5 SIVAM was the technological component of a broader initiative called SIPAM (System for the Protection of the Amazon), in existence as of 2023 (Ministério de Defesa 2023).   6 Here, “caboclos” refers to rural people of mixed Indigenous heritage.  7 For affirmative action laws regarding education and government employment (PL12.711 and PL-12.990), see Presidência da República Casa Civil, Subchefia para Assuntos Jurídicos (2012, 2014).  8 In 2023, the Fudação Nacional do Índio became the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas, and for the first time in the organization’s history, it was headed by an Indigenous person (attorney and former Congresswoman, Joenia Wapichana).   9 The infamous case of Colonel Percy Fawcett, presumably killed by “Indians” during an excursion to find a “lost” Amazonian city, preoccupied explorers for decades (“O mysterio impenetrável” 1932; “O mysterioso desapparecimento” 1937).

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— ​ T r a c y D e v i n e G u z m á n —​ 10 State-backed efforts to erase Indigenous populations manifest in official demographic data, as Native peoples went uncounted in the national census from the 1870s until 1991. The 1988 Constitution granted Native peoples the right to citizenship without automatically ceasing to be Indigenous, leading demographers to add “Indigenous” to existing color categories: “White,” “Black,” “Brown,” and “Yellow.” That year, Natives comprised .06% of the population (Santos et al. 2019). 11 In January 2023, Sonia Guajajara was appointed to lead a new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, founded by the Lula da Silva administration that took office. Her appointment, together with that of Joenia Wapichana as the head of the renamed FUNAI, has been critical in the continued struggle against anti-Indigenous legislation, including PL 490 (the “time-frame” thesis or marco temporal) passed by the lower house of Congress on May 30, 2023. As of June 2023, the legislation as PL 2903 is set to move to the Senate, where it is expected to pass. While President da Silva is likely to reject the measure, it may have enough support in Congress to overturn his veto. In the meanwhile, at the request of Justice André Mendonça (a Bolsonaro appointee), the Brazilian Supreme Court has postponed ruling on the marco temporal case outlined in this article for at least ninety days, potentially giving Congress time to codify the “time-frame thesis” into law.

WORKS CITED “A ofensiva da ditadura militar contra a Amazônia.” n.d. Folha de S. Paulo. Accessed July 9, 2023. https://quatrocincoum.folha.uol.com.br/br/galerias/a-ofensiva-da-ditadura-militarcontra-a-amazonia. “Assados e comidos pelos índios.” 1952. Folha Carioca, July 23: unnumbered. “Atacaram a cidade no Pará.” 1937. Os selvícolas mataram um funcionário publico e sua esposa e feriram um filho do casal.” A Noite (Rio de Janeiro), December: unnumbered. Barreto, Carlos Menna. 1995. A Farsa Ianomâmi. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército. Borges, Guilherme, and Raoni Rajão. 2016. “Projeto Radam: (Re)descobrindo o projeto de sensoriamento remoto aplicado ao mapeamento da Amazônia.” Revista FSA 13: 3–17. “Cenas dantescas num município matto-grossense.” 1952. A Noite, July 23: unnumbered. Cerqueira Leite, Rogério. 2002. “O Sivam: uma oportunidade perdida.” Estudos avançados 16, no. 46: 123–30. Chor Maio, Marcos. 2005. “A UNESCO e o projeto de criação de um laboratório científico internacional na Amazônia.” Estudos Avançados 19, no. 53: 115–30. Comissão Pró Yanomami (CCPY). 2007. “Quem Somos.” http://www.proyanomami.org.br/ v0904/index.asp. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoerner. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter no. 41, 17–18. Devine Guzmán, Tracy. 2013. Native and National in Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fearnside, Philip M. 2005. “Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia.” Conservation Biology 19, no. 3: 680–88. Garfield, Seth. 2013. In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. “Garimpeiros massacrados por índios antropófagos.” 1952. Correio Paulistano, July 23: unnumbered. Gemaque, Adrimauro. 2021. “A pandemia agravou a desigualdade de renda e a pobreza no Brasil.” EcoDebate, May 5: unnumbered. Grandin, Greg. 2009. Fordlandia. New York: Metropolitan Books. Graziano, Romeu. 1989. “Mineração: O Esbulho das Terras Yanomami.” Boletim Urihi 11: unnumbered.

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— ​ T o K e e p t h e S k y f r o m F a l l i n g —​ Guajajara, Sonia. 2019. “Sonia Guajajara dá aula de história sobre povos indígenas à senadora do PSL” (Testimony before the National Congress of Brazil), April 11. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc0ze7cv7dE. “Hylean Amazon Institute Created” 1948. UNESCO Courier 1, no. 5: 1. Instituto Socioambiental. 2020. “Xokleng,” by Flavio Braune Wilk. Povos Indígenas no Brasil. Accessed July 29, 2023. https://pib.socioambiental.org/en/Povo:Xokleng. ———. 2023. “Terras Indígenas no Brasil.” Accessed July 9, 2023. https://terrasindigenas.org.br/. Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. 2013. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ministério da Defesa. “Centro Gestor e Operacional do Sistema de Proteção da Amazônia-CENSIPAM.” Accessed July 9, 2023. https://www.gov.br/censipam/pt-br. Ministério de Minas e Energia. 1973. Projeto RADAM. Vol. 1. Rio de Janeiro: Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral. ———. 1974. Projeto RADAM. Vol. 5. Rio de Janeiro: Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral. Nação Mestiça. 2012. A Miscigenação Une a Nação [pamphlet]. http://nacaomestica.org/ blog4/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/panfleto_nm.pdf. Nicas, Jack. 2023. “The Amazon’s Largest Isolated Tribe is Dying.” New York Times, March 27. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. “Os Chavantes teriam declarado guerra aos brancos.” 1947. O Radical (Rio de Janeiro), July 25, 1. “Os índios em marcha sobre Altamira.” 1937. Folha da Tarde (Porto Alegre), August 6, unnumbered. “O mysterioso desapparecimento de Fawcett.” 1937. O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), July 25, unnumbered. “O mysterio impenetrável do desapparecimento de Fowcett [sic].” 1932. A Noite, March 22, 7. “Pobres selvícolas! Desamparados, os índios do Tôldo de Cretan ameaçam revoltar-se, porque querem roubar-lhes as terras.” 1937. O Dia (Curityba), December 10, unnumbered. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. “Presidência da República Casa Civil Subchefia para Assuntos Jurídicos.” 2012. August 29. http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2011-2014/2012/lei/l12711.htm. ———. 2014. June 9. http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2011-2014/2014/Lei/L12990. htm. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3: 533–80. Ramos, Alcida Rita. 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Resende, Sara Mota. 2018. “’No que depender de mim, não tem mais demarcação de terra indígena,’ diz Bolsonaro a TV.” Folha de São Paulo, November 5. Santos, Ricardo Ventura et al. 2019. “The Identification of the Indigenous Population in Brazil’s Official Statistics.” Statistical Journal of the IAOS 35, no. 1: 29–46. Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. London: Yale University Press. Slater, Candace. 2001. Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon. Berkeley: University of California Press. Souza Lima, Antônio Carlos da. 1995. Um grande cerco de paz: poder tutelar, indianidade e formação do estado no Brasil. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes. Stephan, Lynn. 2013. We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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— ​ T r a c y D e v i n e G u z m á n —​ Terena, Eloy. 2021. “Indigenous Land Rights in Brazil: Strategies for Advocacy and Resistance” (Address to US Network for Democracy in Brazil). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mYxvqBxurJQ&t=9s. Walker, Wayne S. et al. 2020. “The Role of Forest Conversion, Degradation, and Disturbance in the Carbon Dynamics of Amazon Indigenous Territories and Protected Areas.” PNAS 117, no. 6: 3015–25.

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CHAPTER FORTY

AN EPIC STRUGGLE IN M E S OA M E R I C A N I N D I G E N O U S L I T E R AT U R E S R E C OV E R I N G W R I T T E N F O R M S OF EXPRESSION

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Arturo Arias

The corpus of Indigenous literary fiction that emerged in print as of the 1980s offers a unique gaze into their ontologies enabling readers to understand their cultures’ worth. The conflict between these works and traditions from the Global North is one of ontological politics. They reopen a diversity of Indigenous paradigms in the Americas by evoking what we could label their own epic past, often recorded by way of narrativeness, a notion privileging storytelling and prose to depict creation stories, which still constitute a substantive component of their present. Though narrative has become a contested term, narratives still are, in their simplest forms, structured discursive practices that articulate signifiers for telling or retelling stories that ultimately point to larger ontological issues. In Indigenous cases, they often close the divide between nature and culture. Their semantics have forced critics working with these texts to embrace the critical importance of understanding those knowledge systems that craft the epic aspects deployed textually. In this logic, we could stretch our understanding of “epic” if we operate on the premises that First Peoples are to be believed just like Global North subjects are and should be treated equally. This is while recognizing that history is always colored by cultural or political purposes. In the Mesoamerican Indigenous case, many historical elements have been confirmed by archeological and more contemporary technological sources. This justifies exploring its broader epical perspectives. They may question Eurocentric notions of the epic, and the Global North’s seminal colonial matrix, Latin America, a product of a sixteenth-century codification of racial difference that labeled First Peoples as subalternized to Europeans, by means of a text that provincializes Latin America in turn to configure Abiayala (First Peoples’ name for “Latin America”), in its stead.1 This chapter will focus on Yukateko Maya Javier Gómez Navarrete’s novel Cecilio Chi’: Nen óol k’ajlay (2003), to illustrate how Mayas have represented ontological frameworks in their literature since ancient times. Navarrete explores a distinctive social imaginary that could be labeled “epic” in a decolonial sense. His text, written DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-45

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— ​ A r t u r o A r i a s —​ in Maya Yukateko, seeks to restore those entanglements by reconfiguring performative protocols that have been traditionally labeled as “cosmovisions” in a contemporary form such as the novel. It is in this sense emblematic of Indigenous arguments for a coevalness of modern and ancient conceptions of their world. As explained in previous articles and books (Arias 2017–2018, 2018), Indigenous literatures represent counter-discourses to Eurocentric racist clichés that racialized and subalternized their people in the longue durée of coloniality. Gómez Navarrete’s novel evokes historical milestones and stages many ontological elements that validate the Maya understanding of the world, which already existed thousands of years before the arrival of Spanish invaders and never disappeared. By operating in unprivileged peripheral spaces that question hegemonic stories on the forging of given nationhoods, emerging Indigenous narratives disrupt myths of citizen homogeneity in their nation-states. Writing from unprivileged peripheral spaces, these authors aspire to reterritorialize their displaced subalternized and racialized identities by making their subjecthood visible in their respective languages, even though all texts are published bilingually so that non-native readers can read them. In the Americas, Indigenous subjects configure the geo-social construct of European colonialism that has morphed as a modern world system. The modes of production of global capitalism are still organized by this racial mold that sustained coloniality since the sixteenth century. W. E. B. Du Bois claimed in 1935 that industrialized societies were constituted through racialization. Frantz Fanon explained the dehumanizing effects of colonization on individuals and nations 60 years ago, when stating that “(T)hey are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how” (1991, 38). More recently, as outlined in Recovering Lost Fooprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives, Latin American scholars, whether publishing in the United States like Walter Mignolo or Aníbal Quijano, in Mexico like Enrique Dussel, or in Bolivia as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, have underscored the relationship of colonialism, imperialism, and immigration as resulting from the sixteenth-century codification of racial difference that labeled subjects of Abiayala’s original nations as subalternized to Europeans (Arias 2018, 16–17, 24, 50, 86, 98). More recently, Indigenous intellectuals like Maya sociologists, Aura Cumes and Santiago Bastos (2007) and Edgar Esquit (2002), have claimed the same. Cumes and Esquit argue that first nations are still struggling to free themselves from colonialism, as nineteenth-century independence struggles benefited only Eurocentric Criollo and Mestizo populations. Maize was the cosmological epicenter of Mesoamerican culture, playing a central role in organizing a holistic web of relationships that brought together humans, animals, plants, natural forces, spirits, and landforms. In the Popol Wuj (also spelled “Popol Vuh”), the Maya creation story, the Hero Twins Jun Ajpu and Xb’alamke, male and female forces symbolizing the masculine and feminine essence of all living beings, descended to Xib’alb’a, the Underworld, defeated their Lords, then ascended to the cosmos, became the sun and the moon, and generated the water and fire needed to produce maize. After the maize grew, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane, Grandmother of Day and Grandmother of Light, ground the kernels which K’uk’ulkan, the feathered serpent, used to forge the first four men and women, the people of maize. To truly live, they must plant, cook, and consume maize. This means preserving the ecological 574

— ​ A n E p i c S t r u g g l e —​ conditions that make this possible. A Mesoamerican subject was only truly born upon creating a planting parcel, called a milpa, which included beans and squash. They understood that these crops benefited if planted together. Maize provides the structure on which beans climb; beans provide nitrogen to the soil; squash spreads along the ground, blocking the sunlight, which keeps weeds away. Their fallen leaves also become mulch. A microclimate is thus created, which retains moisture and keeps away destructive pests. Eaten together, maize, beans, and squash provide complex carbohydrates and all nine essential amino acids. They enabled Mesoamerican cultures to prosper and develop on a plant-based diet. They also eschewed domestication of animals in favor of game management, grew crops beneath the canopy of rainforests to preserve them, and created a relatively disease-free environment thanks to hygienic practices that included daily bathing and ritual sweat baths. Their ontological thinking thus centered on the milpa, demonstrating how cosmic symbolism and ecosystems were one and the same thing. The milpa was the center. The cosmic dimension kept its unity and integrity based on all those cosmic factors that determined the well-being of the milpa: the wind or the rain, the right number of long nights and of days that must pass before maize can flower, the adequate growth of vegetation in the mountains for rivers to flow properly, even the right amount of volcanic eruption, so the soil can be replenished by lava. All these factors are determined by celestial bodies. The sun and the moon loom larger, but even more subtle planetary movements are important, such as when the Earth moves closer or farther from the sun, or the solar system crosses magnetic fields that push and pull as it circulates throughout the galaxy. In this logic, rituals existed to build bridges with deities associated with celestial bodies that impacted the growth of maize. These were their deities. A semiotic signification that integrated human and natural elements with the cosmos was thus constituted, symbolized by rituals, festivities, and mythicized practices. As time went by, the cosmological machinery articulated significations that transcended the specificity of the maize cycle. It became a semantics of symbolic representation over time. Yet behind it, the cult of maize remained dominant. To exist, maize needed the sacrifice of the Hero Twins. They died as old maize stems do, to be transformed in the Underworld to seeds, then reborn as baby maize. They transformed into celestial bodies to provide just the right amount of water and warmth for the new stems to grow, for the ears of maize to develop in a healthy fashion. In turn, newer beneficiaries would also have to sacrifice themselves to preserve the never-ending healthy cycle of maize.

EPIC TRAITS RECONFIGURED IN A FOUNDATIONAL NOVEL The landing of Hernando Cortés in Mesoamerica in the present-day area of Veracruz, Mexico, on April 22, 1519, was the foundational catastrophe that destroyed the Mesoamerican life world, not unlike the Jewish Holocaust. Spaniards wantonly destroyed one of the founding civilizations of this planet, the one whose agriculturalists invented and developed maize, who eschewed domestication of animals in favor of game management, and created a relatively disease-free environment thanks to hygienic practices that included daily bathing and ritual sweat baths. As Spaniards stumbled greedily into this region, they introduced infectious diseases, including syphilis, smallpox, and measles. These last two were decisive in the fall of 575

— ​ A r t u r o A r i a s —​ Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. The smallpox epidemic, which began in 1519 and lasted into the late 1520s, killed thousands and weakened able-bodied people who could no longer grow and harvest crops. This led to mass famine and death from malnutrition before Cortés’s troops even laid siege to the city. One quarter of a million Mexicans were killed in the campaign overall, including warriors and civilians. Then came the worst. Salmonella enterica entered Mesoamerica with Spanish pigs. Locally known as cocoliztli, it produced a deadly outbreak where from five to fifteen million people died. There were twelve epidemics identified as potentially being cocoliztli. The largest were in 1520, 1545, and 1576. As Spaniards moved South, most of their battles were with infirmed soldiers.2 In her recent text Kuxlejal Politics (2017), Mariana Mora analyzes three tropes that for her define colonialization. They are the infantilization of racialized peoples, the role of the peon or servant as the naturalized space of subalternized peoples, and the representation of racialized bodies as inherently deficient. For Mora, “these three tropes operate as overlapping racialized disciplinary mechanisms that continue to circulate through the apparently color-blind neoliberal policies” implemented through globalization (2017, 17). Those tropes first made their appearance in the sixteenth century, then spiraled through time and place, going through different phases to be sure. What remained a constant was the idea of race as the basic principle for classifying and ranking colonized subjects. Grotesque descriptions of their pre-European achievements were deployed from very early on to discredit them as savages, cannibals, or heathens; redefining their identities justified enslaving them and stealing their resources. The annexation of land, appropriation of raw materials, and subjugation of colonized populations induced the economic boost that enabled European industrialization. Javier Gómez Navarrete’s novel, written in Maya Yukateko, seeks to restore the epic role maize plays in organizing Mayas’ holistic web of relationships. For this reason, he recounts aspects of the life of the historical figure Cecilio Chi’, the great Maya military strategist of the first-ever decolonial war in Abiayala, which took place in the Yucatan peninsula and lasted well over half a century (1847–1928). Gómez Navarrete also invokes the story of Jacinto Can Ek’, which Mayas know like Americans know that of Abraham Lincoln. Can Ek’, whose legal name was Jacinto Uc de los Santos, and who led the first great Maya insurrection in the eighteenth century. He adapted the name of Can Ek’, Star Serpent, to become a link to the past Itsa’ rulers. Most batabs or community leaders from Yucatan supported Can Ek’ and participated in the struggle he led to reestablish the Mayab’ with its capital in Máani’, which, besides being the town subjected to Landa’s auto-da-fé, was the originary site of the Xiu lineage. For calendric reasons, Cisteil was chosen as the place to launch the rebellion. Before the Spanish invasion, the Feast of the Feathered Serpent, K’uk’ulkan, was held there. The rebellion began with the dance of the xtoles, an ontological trope, given that this war dance references the descent of Junajpu and Xb’alamke to Xib’alb’a. After many victories, Can Ek’s insurrection was defeated by artillery units on November 26, 1761. Later, in the nineteenth century, Yucatecan authorities enslaved Mayas in henequen plantations and attacked their villages.3 Invoking Can Ek’s name, Mayas responded in 1847 with the ferocious war led by Chi’. Known in Mexico as the “Caste War,” it lasted until 1928 and killed approximately 275,000 people. 576

— ​ A n E p i c S t r u g g l e —​ During this time, Mayas created an independent republic in what is now the state of Quintana Roo, in eastern Yucatan. Javier Gómez Navarrete was born in Akil, Yucatan, in 1942. He graduated from university and worked as a teacher in San Diego Tekax, Yucatan, and later in the neighboring state of Quintana Roo. He was one of the first bilingual teachers in that state, working in an elementary school at first, then in secondary schools, and later as a supervisor of rural schools. In that capacity, he also became the mentor of many younger teachers and writers. He originally published Cecilio Chi’ in 2003 in Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and the city in which he lived. It was written in Maya Yukateko, translated into Spanish by the author, and published bilingually in both languages. His novel illustrates the political response to the events of the “Caste War” outlined in the previous paragraph. Gómez Navarrete’s novel starts with Cecilio Chi’s birth, but, in contrast to Global North biographies and historical fiction, this novel does not give a date for it. At first, no genealogy is established with the 1562 auto-da-fé at Máani’ either. Rather, the narrative voice informs readers that jaguar’s footprints appeared, surrounding Cecilio’s parents’ hut when he was born. His father is unfazed, however. He says of the jaguar, “He didn’t come to do any harm, but to deliver his strength and inspiration to my newborn baby” (Gómez Navarrete 2006, 252). Many readers might be surprised by this interpretation, especially if they are unaware of the fact that the jaguar is the most important Mesoamerican deity, representing the power to face one’s fears, to confront one’s enemies, the ability to explore the dark parts of the heart. This is not the only issue. Maya readers know about Máani’ in the same way that Americans know about Pearl Harbor. Another example of the Maya cosmological aspects in the novel is Chi’s jets’mek’ ceremony (jets means to lighten a burden, and mek’ to embrace), which introduces children to their community as their newest members, as future growers of maize. In Chapter 7 of the novel, Chi’, still a young boy, goes to gather firewood and disappears into a cave while following a dwarf. When they reach a very small, Mayalooking temple (2006, 270), the dwarf tells Chi’ that he is the jaguar enchanter. The boy notices a red feline painted on the wall (271). The figure begins to swell, then moves, and finally jumps from the wall, becoming a living jaguar. It then lies down at the dwarf/enchanter’s feet. He asks the jaguar to make the earth tremble a bit, and the jaguar roars, then returns to the wall and takes back its normal shape (272). The enchanter then teaches Chi’ how to worship Maya deities, and he advises him, first, to learn the fighting strategies of the jaguar and the rattlesnake, and, second, to always ask questions and observe every detail of his environment until he becomes a seer. Chi’ returns home three days after following the dwarf, falls into a deep sleep, and only awakens three days later, after his godfather Bernardo conducts a ceremony. Chi’ then says, “Yuun K’iin, the sun, resurrects in every sunrise; that’s how I’ll be; that’s how Cecilio Chi’ will be,” addressing himself in the third person at that young age (274). The jaguar enchanter is a dwarf. In Mesoamerican cosmology, dwarves symbolize Chak Ek’, what the Global North call Venus. This planet, a smaller celestial body than the sun, is labeled the “sun sweeper.” At dusk, Chak Ek’ is the evening star that disappears ahead of the sun; at dawn, it is the morning star that appears ahead of the sun at its heliacal rising. To establish calendric rituals associated with the movement 577

— ​ A r t u r o A r i a s —​ of celestial bodies, Mayas needed to have an exact understanding of how Chak Ek’ moved to set the dates of ritual events in their calendar. Thus, Mesoamerican cultures kept records of numerous astronomical events with mathematical precision. A case in point: a Maya astronomer established the synodic period of Chak Ek’, 583.92 days, in the great metropolis of Chi’ch’èen Itsa’ around 875 CE. The accuracy was such that his error was just 0.1%. In Europe, it remained unknown until Galileo wrote about it in 1613. Yet, it was only in 1716 that Edmond Halley published data analogous to the Maya calculation elaborated 841 years before. There is no magical realism here. It is pure astronomy, trigonometry, and calculus. In Chapter 11, Chi’ is visited by another dwarf. This time, he falls into a trance and has a vision in which the warriors carved in the stelae of Chi’ch’èen Itsa’ tell him, in poetic utterances, that they will fight by his side (2006, 289). The vision is not magical realism either. It establishes a continuity with Itsa’ lineages that governed their city, indicating the ongoing continuity of cosmological factors. Those genealogies, the text implies, cannot be destroyed by worldly acts. Thus, in this evocation, history is not just a collection of past events. It is an invocation of the transcendental magnificence of Mayanness when it comes to finding presentday solutions to contemporary crises. It is a katunic prophecy. It is not simply past. It is also present and future, impacting temporal totality, in accordance with the calendric 20-year cycles, named katuns. These signifiers, which Maya as opposed to Global North readers would instantly recognize, indicate that rootedness in the Mayab’ is everlasting. They are also signs of respect for the rites centering their cosmological practices at the epicenter of their identity, a topic to which I will return in the conclusion. In this logic, when Chi’ discovers he is a man and throws a rock to test his muscles, the Jaguar enchanter appears once more to him. The enchanter recites a few lines from the Libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel (1941), an anonymous Maya text written in the early seventeenth century, allegedly by a legendary author named Chilam Balam. Chilam means a diviner, a religious figure specializing in prophecies. Balam means jaguar, the common surname for J-men, as previously indicated.4 Given that Chi’ falls into a trance, we presume the lines read to him are part of a shamanic ritual. Indeed, every time the Jaguar enchanter or a dwarf appears, Chi’ reaches an altered state of consciousness to perceive and interact with what Mayas consider the spiritual world. This trance enables Chi’ to channel the transcendental energies of Maya spiritualism into his world and life, while also connecting him to the millennial Maya lineage of diviners and prophets. In the ceremonial dream state, Chi’ sees himself in his grandfather, who tells him that the sun forges his wisdom (Gómez Navarrete 2006, 310).

AN EPIC HERO IN THE MAKING This last vision means also that Chi’ is ready to fulfill his role as epic hero. As indicated, Mayas live in function of maize. In this logic, Chi’ is truly born only when he creates his own milpa, a tough job that requires him to cut down many gigantic trees (2006, 311), This small scene represents the true creation story of the mythic hero, because it is where Chi’ is named as a person of maize. He can now travel throughout the peninsula to prepare for his role. 578

— ​ A n E p i c S t r u g g l e —​ After building his first maize parcel in the jungle, Chi’ travels throughout the peninsula and learns about the exploitation of Mayas in the henequen haciendas. Chi’ first witnesses how a peon is whipped for being late to the henequen harvest. Full of hatred, he swears to liberate his people (2006, 320). He then visits Máani’, where the Landa auto-da-fé took place and has two visions. In the first, he learns of the burning of the books. After the Mayas are tortured by Landa, Chi’ sees Nachi Cocom, the batab of Sotuta, saying with closed fists, “They will not be able to burn my words, or turn our memory into ashes. Soon they will harvest the barbs they have sown” (303). Then, he disappears as a ghost. His words of course prefigure the future struggle Chi’ will initiate and lead. The utterances in question validate a genealogy of resistance and liberation struggle, one emphasized by Chi’s grandfather’s words: “There is no plague, drought or cyclone that has generated as much damage to Indians as the Spaniard did” (302). The signifiers create the illusion that they stand in an unproblematic relationship to the group named, that is, as if “Spaniard” were a natural social category with an objective existence outside of the discourse in question. However, this is not the case. The utterance “Spaniard” constitutes a performativity needed to think difference and validate it, even when articulating a partial fixity. At the same time, as readers, we are pleasurably entertained by the stories told to Chi’, tales mixing historical elements with fantasy and the cosmological ritualism that gives the novel its epic dimension. In the second vision, after Chi’ enters the church, the crucified image at the altar tells him that he was carved by Mayas, so his essence is Maya. When Chi’ asks him when their travails will end, the image says, “you were the ones chained; it is thus the task of Mayas to recover their lost footprints” (326). Chi’ then leaves Máani’. On the road, he meets a woman and asks her for some water (2006, 327). She gives it to him’ a reference to Mary Magdalene undoubtedly, but then she says that “the time of piling skulls is coming” (327), and adds that blood will make the four corners of the Mayab’ (the original Maya name of the Yucatan peninsula) tremble. The piling of skulls as the image makes clear invokes war. To be more precise, they invoke pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican wars, as her words are a reference to skull racks, a scaffold-like structure of poles on which the skulls of war captives were publicly displayed on poles. Called tzompantli in Nahuatl, they literally mean “skull gourds,” much like those of One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu, the parents of the Hero Twins in the Popol Wuj, whose skulls were displayed in the calabash tree after their own sacrifice. The novel implies that cutting heads is symbolic of plucking kernels of maize so they can be sowed in the following season. To learn about oppression in his own body, Chi’ seeks employment on a sugar cane plantation. There he discovers that the owner has absolute power to have sexual relations with any new bride in his dominion during the first two weeks of her married life (2006, 331), and that he just tosses out as garbage those men who are too weak to continue cutting cane, abandoning them to their deaths (332). When payday comes, Chi’ is given nothing because, he is told, he owes the owner money. To prevent his wasting the few coins that are his due, they give him three kilos (6.6 pounds) of beans and a bottle of rum (333). At that instant, Chi’ fully understands the nature of exploitation, and he abandons the plantation shortly thereafter. Again, this performative scene is articulated within a chain of signifiers constructing the figure of Chi’ as a predestined mythical liberator. The text configures a representation 579

— ​ A r t u r o A r i a s —​ of Chi’s inner core, showing that he is in preparation for the moment when he will actually become a leader. In Chapter 21, Chi’ first hears of Santiago Imán, the Mestizo separatist and Mestizo hacienda owner who led a Yucatecan independence movement from Mexico in the 1830s. Chi’ is in Tepich when a horseman enters the town and announces that Imán is advancing toward Valladolid and has promised that no Indians will have to pay taxes if he wins the war (2006, 341). Many young men depart immediately for Chemax to join him, Chi’ among them. But the narrative voice tells readers that Chi’ is going “with the heart in another place” (341). The text does not elaborate, but as readers, we may presume that he is thinking of learning the art of war so as to be able to lead a future all-Maya insurrection. The narrative voice informs us that, after the fall of Valladolid, the second largest city in Yucatan, “the commander Santiago Imán arrived like an emperor, carried in a palanquin by Indians” (343). The social hierarchy visibly explicit in this image implies that Imán is not the solution for Mayas’ ultimate needs. On his way back to his hometown of Tepich, Chi’ stops at the mouth of a cave. A strong, cold wind pulls him in. He reaches a domed space where many men are seated (2006, 364). They evoke Jacinto Can Ek, whom I discussed earlier. Chi’ claims that the memory of Can Ek lives among them. Included in this group are Manuel Antonio Ay, Jacinto Pat, and Chi’. All three decide to join forces to free Mayas from their oppressed condition. In Chapter 28, Mayas buy guns from the British across the river from the Belizean border. It takes them and their loaded mules eight days to return to Culumpich (2006, 383). This is an epic chapter displaying all the dangers the jungle can offer, with monkeys throwing zapote fruits to the column of men, defying them for crossing their territory (384), and swollen rivers nearly carrying both mules and men away (385). In fact, a few mules do get lost with their cargo in the treacherous swamplands. The narrator here clearly displays the epic nature of this struggle, emphasizing the magnitude of the Mayas’ will to prepare for war, an echo of Chi’s strategic words. Afterward, Maya leaders select Chi’ as their commander-in-chief. A ritual follows, in which their j-meeno’ob, the shamans, thank the Milky Way, which they call the feathered serpent, or K’uk’ulkan, for being connected to their umbilical cords so that they may share the cosmic fluids with all the beings on Earth (2006, 392). By the end of this ceremony, Chi’ and his entire high command feel “the weight of their destiny” (394). After Manuel Antonio Ay is caught in Valladolid with a message from Chi’, he is tortured, then killed, and his body is displayed in public (2006, 397). Next, Truheque, the creole Yucatecan commander of Tihosuco, attacks Tepich to try to capture Chi’. Not finding him, he massacres all of the Mayas he can find (402). A ten-year-old Maya girl manages to escape after being raped and informs Chi’ of what took place (403). In reprisal, Chi’ gives orders to kill all the whites in the town (404). Afterward, Captain Ongay, another creole officer with a Yucatecan army column, returns to Tepich and kills all the Mayas who survived the original massacre (405). They boil many of them alive and kill those who managed to escape or hide, by sealing all the water deposits with mud and corpses, causing them to thirst to death (406). 580

— ​ A n E p i c S t r u g g l e —​ In Mérida, the capital, Miguel Barbachano, one of the wealthiest henequen hacienda owners who was five times governor of Yucatan between 1841 and 1853, realizes that, lacking military support from Mexico, he will lose the war unless he divides Chi’ and Jacinto Pat (2006, 418), so he starts maneuvering to accomplish this. Nonetheless, Chi’ binds Pat to his army, eliminating that possibility. Barbachano then decides to seek help from the Spaniards in Cuba and ask them to annex Yucatan to the Caribbean island (457), but it is too late.

MEMORY AS EPIC FORCE After the fall of the town of Izamal (Chapter 43), and with just Mérida and Campeche left, the joint Maya forces decide to hold a religious celebration to feed the spirits that have enabled them to recuperate the land of their ancestors after fifteen k’atunes, the term for periods of twenty years in the Maya calendar (2006, 464). Again, this gesture applies Maya spirituality to current politics, and demonstrates Mayas’ holistic approach of linking the cosmos and the cycles of time in relation to Earthly life—past, present, and future—to explain their justification for the war. The military commanders’ ability to use signifiers subsumed within Mayas’ ontological understanding of their world is determined by the j-meeno’ob’s working with leaders like Chi’. The fusion of pragmatic military strategy and cosmological discourse that drives all the commanders’ decisions evidences how Maya cosmology is an alternative construction of reality that impacts all the characters. The novel also displays the functioning of cosmological power, the dynamics of social relationships, and the ultimate healing process that colonized and racialized communities needed. After the ceremony, all the commanders gather to discuss their plans to lay siege to Mérida (2006, 465). Chi’ encourages them to state what they are thinking, because “we will also have to learn to rule, and that cannot be done in a day” (465–66). Some commanders want to rebuild the city and turn it into the capital of the Mayab’ (466). Some fear that taking the city will lead to soldierly drunkenness, violence, and disorderly conduct, making them vulnerable to an attack by the Mexican troops gathering in Campeche to support the Yucatecan government. Others say that they have crossed the entire peninsula from the Southeast to the Northwest and are now fighting in its northwestern corner, geographically very far from their homeland in the southeastern jungle, with no possibility of access to provisions and arms, and they are running out of food (467). A few claim that Mérida is a “defiled land” (467). Thus, it could never become a Maya capital. After a long discussion, they agree that it is time to return to their milpas to perform the ceremony of the newborn maize. They all know that guaranteeing the continuity of the maize cycle is more important than winning a human war, even one of liberation. Chi’ lowers his head and turns his horse around in the light rain (2006, 467). He gloomily accepts the decision. The text reconfigures Chi’ at this point as a tragic hero, yet one with the nobility of the Hero Twins. As such, he too will be sacrificed, given the cosmological factor. It is an image radically different from the abject one that prevails in official colonized Yucatecan Mestizo history. At the same time, this discursive turn anticipates Chi’s coming disappearance. After all, historically speaking, Yucatecans knew that Mayas were about to take the white Creoles’ capital; authorities and wealthy hacienda owners had already fled the city with as many possessions 581

— ​ A r t u r o A r i a s —​ as they could carry. But then, the Maya army suddenly turned around and returned home. From the perspective of official Mexican history, this turn of events remains a mystery. The closest traditional Mexican historians have come to clearing it up is to say the army abandoned the battle because they saw flying ants after a heavy rainfall, Mayas’ traditional signal to start planting crops. Mainstream Mestizo Mexicans remain puzzled to this day by the sudden decision to abandon the siege of Mérida. They are for the most part unaware of Maya cosmology as well. Returning to the novel, Chi’s secretary/spy Flores murders him after his return from the front. Historically, it has never been verified that Flores was a spy. He did, however, assassinate Chi’ as described in the novel and was subsequently killed in turn by those present. What is fascinating in the text is how little space or importance is attributed to Chi’s murder. Maya readers would of course know about this episode. Yet what seems to signal its unimportance is that his figurative death had already taken place: it was effected by the decision not to take Mérida. The narrative thus concludes by focusing on Chi’s funeral, where the narrator states that “now all Mayas are Cecilio Chi’” (2006, 475). Chi’ becomes the epic mythical hero that the novel meant to construct in the first place, and is deified like K’uk’ulkan, the feathered serpent. This enables Gómez Navarrete, in the last chapter, to establish a continuity, showing how the past becomes the future in the traditional Maya cyclical conception of time. On the Day of the Dead, when Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples fraternize with their dead ancestors, Chi’s best friend José María Barrera, who had been barely mentioned throughout the novel, enters the church of Tepich and collapses on the ground “in a state of otherworldly happiness, similar to the one that Cecilio had experimented with at Máani’” (477). In a poetic discourse analogous to Chi’s utterances throughout the text, Barrera utters words about a Maya cross, adding: I want you to know that the body of my beloved son Cecilio has been transformed into earth, resin, and breath that rides in the humps of the sea, in the wind that tears off, in the footprint of the water, in the shadow of movement, in the stone of clarity… I am the Cross Tree, inspiration of Mayaness, recuperated memory tanned in the skin of pain and hope. I am everywhere and on the move toward the four directions to rejoin where the Mother Ceiba perforates the underworld.5 (477) Readers understand that deities are speaking through Barrera’s ecstatic body. When Barrera emerges from this ecstatic state, the narrator says, “the stunning darkness of a future not yet concluded opened up, an afterward that would become the Caste War” (478). The novel ends with Barrera telling his friend Manuel Nahuar that they both have been chosen to build “Báalam Naaj and Noj Kaaj Santa Cruz, from where we will continue the struggle” (478).

CONCLUSION: LIFE AS AN INTEGRATED TOTALITY For Global North readers, the conclusion of Gómez Navarrete’s novel Cecilio Chi’ may strike as an apocalyptic ending with a prophetic touch. Maya readers know better. They understand that Chi’ is now the feathered serpent, K’uk’ulkan, and he will continue leading the war as the Talking Cross. Indeed, the historical war 582

— ​ A n E p i c S t r u g g l e —​ continued until 1928. Those Mayas who fought throughout that long period called themselves cruzoob’, the followers of the Talking Cross. They built their republic with the site of the “Talking Cross” as their capital. It is now the city of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, not far from Tulum in the state of Quintana Roo. Barrera’s vision names the Late Classic Maya site of Palenque: “I am the stone cross, the true cross of Palenque … I’m green like milpa … the body of my beloved son Cecilio … rides in water’s footprints…joining my Ceiba Mother… (2006, 477),” enumerating immediately after Mayas’ perception of cosmic order with the Ceiba tree at the center of a quadripartite division of the cosmos. Already framed according to a cosmological ontology centered on milpa as previously stated, by way of this intertextual synecdoche the novel becomes an emotional commitment to presentday Maya emancipation. Milpa remains at the center. The cosmic dimension is ratified as the imagery in the novel’s last page dialogues with that of K’inich Janaab Pakal’s sky map from 683 CE, inscribed at the “Temple of the Inscriptions” (real name, B’olon Yej Te’ Naah, “House of the Nine Sharpened Spears”) of Palenque, the city-state he ruled for 68 years. K’inich Janaab Pakal (603–683 CE; Radiant Maize Flower) was the greatest and longest ruler of Palenque, deified after his death. The inscriptions on his sarcophagus state the ruler was perfectly centered on the Ceiba Mother as his sarcophagus flowed into the river of death towards his apotheosis. Using the same signs found in Pakal’s sky map, Gómez Navarrete positions revolutionary leader Cecilio Chi’ next to one of the greatest known pre-Hispanic Maya rulers, by equating their mythical deaths as consequence of their achievements, and projecting both jointly into the future as Popol Wuj’s twin brothers were, in all “dawnings” of Maya mythical history from the Pre Classic period (1500 BCE – 250 CE) to the present and future. All rituals in this spiritual path exist to build bridges with deities associated with celestial bodies that have an impact on the growth of maize. These are their deities. A semiotic signification that integrated human and natural elements with the cosmos was thus constituted, symbolized by rituals, festivities, and mythicized practices. As time went by, the cosmological machinery articulated significations that transcended the specificity of the maize cycle. The cosmological aspect became a semantics of symbolic epic representation over time, that today spreads even to literary spaces and forms, like the novel. Yet behind it, the cult of maize remains as dominant element. To come into being, maize needed the sacrifice of the Hero Twins. They had to die as old stems do, to become seeds reborn as baby maize. They transformed into celestial bodies to provide just the right amount of water and warmth for the new stems to grow, for the ears of maize to develop in healthy fashion. In turn, those who benefited would also have to sacrifice themselves so other humans, animals, and the soil could be fed. They replace previous beings as new seeds that will also transform into stems, on and on throughout the neverending cycle of circular time. New sacrificial victims like Can Ek or Chi’ also have to die to fulfill this cycle. They are now celestial bodies guarding over us but, primarily, over the healthy cycle of maize. For Mayas and for their communities, the cycle of maize constitutes a bond capable of forming an integrated totality. Its elements are intelligible to all in terms of how they relate to all particulars of their life, and that of the community of which they are members. Because of maize, life constitutes a meaningful form. 583

— ​ A r t u r o A r i a s —​ The ambiguous ending of the novel also leaves open the possibility of an ongoing Maya rebellion in the present and future, a time continuum whereby, in a cyclical fashion, what was will be. It is an emancipatory promise providing a counterpoint to official Mexican historians’ erasure of Maya subjects from the dominant discourses of Yucatan, and their ongoing racist representations of them from a hegemonic Eurocentric perspective. In contrast to this, Gómez Navarrete’s novel, with its emphasis on Maya spirituality and a cosmovision we may deem epic, articulated in a metaphysically sophisticated and politically coherent discourse, clearly breaks with the protocols and conventions of the Global North’s novelistic discourse, evidencing a decolonizing reconfiguration of Mayas within an ongoing decolonizing struggle. The discursive construction of Chi’ in this novel provides a vivid example of the decolonizing performative capacity of racialized subaltern subjects. Gómez Navarrete’s association of Chi’s quest with the ontological perspective signified in the Popol Wuj, as well as in the Books of Chilam Balam, has broad implications for decolonizing agendas. The chain of signifiers across both texts articulates a metanarrative marking the subjective meanings embedded in Maya cultural heritage, a core aspect in the broader effort of reconfiguring Indigenous modernities. Cultural change is an ongoing contingent process, and contemporary Indigenous novelists like Chi’ discursively reimagine colonial legacies as means for contemporary emancipation. They create new Indigenous social imaginaries through literature, articulating Indigenous ontologies/knowledge systems in decolonizing frameworks—a potent means toward Indigenous visibility and empowerment.

NOTES 1 Abiayala, a phrase from the Guna language, is understood to mean “land in its full maturity,” or “land of vital blood.” Bolivian Aymara leader Takir Mamani (real name, Constantino Lima Chávez)—spelling it “Abya Yala”—recommended it in the early 1980s. It was ratified at the “Kito Declaration” of the Second Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala held in Ecuador’s capital on July 21–25, 2004. The correct spelling is “Abiayala” according to the Gayamar Sabga, the official Guna language dictionary. Gunas only standardized their writing in 2006. This scriptural change was made public in 2017. 2 See Acuña-Soto et al. (2002). 3 Henequen is a strong, hard yellowish, or reddish fiber obtained from the leaves of a tropical American agave found mainly in the Yucatan peninsula and used to make twine and rope. 4 Chumayel is the name of the town where this particular book was found by Don Adumaro Molina in the early nineteenth century. It is now located at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the Princeton University Library. It is said to have been acquired from Julio Berzuna in 1945. They are called the Books of Chilam Balam in the plural because nine of them are known, all different and from different Yucatecan towns. They are written in Maya Yukateko, though some incorporate hieroglyphic script, giving the impression that they originated in the pre-conquest period. All nine claim to be the mouthpiece of, or to have been written by, Chilam Balam. Described as a “great priest,” Chilam Balam

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— ​ A n E p i c S t r u g g l e —​ lived in Máani’ (the town where the auto-da-fé took place in 1562) during the sixteenth century’s first decades. 5 Known in parts of Asia as “kapok,” the Ceiba tree is the most sacred tree for Mayas. In Maya, it is called Yax Che. According to their cosmology, it is the Tree of Life, located at the center of the Milky Way (called the Feathered Serpent by Mayas). Its roots reach into the Underworld. The Ceiba tree represents the center of the four directional quadrants.

WORKS CITED Acuña-Soto, Rodolfo, David W. Stahle, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, and Matthew D. Terrell. 2002. “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, no. 4: 360–62. Arias, Arturo. 2017–2018. Recovering Lost Fooprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives. Vols. 1–2. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2018. “From Indigenous Literatures to Native American and Indigenous Theorists: The Makings of a Grassroots Decoloniality.” Latin American Research Review 53, no. 3: 613–26. Cumes, Aura, and Santiago Bastos. 2007. Mayanización y vida cotidiana: La ideología multicultural en la sociedad guatemalteca. Vol. 1. Guatemala: FLACSO Guatemala. Esquit, Edgar. 2002. Otros poderes, nuevos desafíos: Relaciones interétnicas en Tecpán y su entorno departamental (1871–1935). Guatemala: Magna Terra. Fanon, Frantz. 1991. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Gómez Navarrete. Javier. 2006. Cecilio Chi’: Nen óol k’ajlay. México, DF: Secretaría de Educación Pública. Libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel. 1941. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mora, Mariana. 2017. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THE AFRICAN/AMERICAN ( H E RO I C ) E P I C LEE’S DO THE RIGHT THING AS C R I T I Q U E , C O M E DY, C A U T I O N

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Gregory E. Rutledge

Aristotle’s Poetics, the first critique of Greek epic and tragedy that elevated concepts such as “imitation,” “magnitude,” “unity,” “completeness,” and “catharsis” into the generic firmament, is one of the single biggest literary events in the last two thousand years in European/American history. Poetics is a philosopher’s blueprint for two genres that “imitate better [‘admirable’] people” (Aristotle 1996, 5, 9). Although not seen as such, one of the biggest cinematic events to question Poetics is Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989a). Do Right remains the cinematic archetype of the voice of “protest” against racism and police brutality, but racial protest is merely the starting point. Presented by Lee as a “bona fide classic” that addresses America’s love of celebrity-“heroes” (Jones 2020, 62), the film’s modern-trickster poetics challenges Poetics: did Aristotle “do the right thing?” A film whose comedic trickster-protagonist is overshadowed by epical “protest” politics, Do Right is a philosophical performance that re-envisions epic and dramatizes how to stop not a hero, but hero-worshipping exceptionalism. Since the Renaissance, Poetics has instructed countless scholars, philologists, and novelists, and served, in Hollywood, as “the ‘bible of screenwriting’” (Heath 1996, vii–viii; Tierno 2002, xviii). Tragedy and epic, according to Aristotle, are similar in the “action” and “magnitude” of their plots: “tragedy tries so far as possible to keep within a single day,” and “Homer’s brilliance” is that he “did not even try to treat the war as a whole” and “include everything which happened to Odysseus” (Aristotle 1996, 13–15, 38).1 In short, the writing of a better tragedy and epic—a “complete,” “whole,” or “unified” composition—is an imitative, creative act that eschews the totality in favor of a detailed excerpt. However, because these canonized genres were imitations of admirable people, for centuries Poetics led readers to conflate great people, goodness, Europeans, and “whiteness.” This is literally a tragedy of epic proportions: “Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years.… Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 1). Insofar as 586

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-46

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ they omit the grand threat of the (other)worldly unknown, essential socio-historical contexts, the contradictions of human character, the fundamental function of myth, the historical “lie” of conquerors, and human cultural diversity, Aristotelian epics literally become inflexible monuments incapable of representing real humanity. Of course, since epic is often a broad survey of a given culture, an “encyclopaedic form” (Frye [1957] 1973, 315–26) or “cultural monuments” (Biebuyck, 1978, 5, 34), it can include realistic tragedy among a panoply of generic forms, some of them—like comedy—considered an inferior mode or genre not appropriate for an epic. Lee’s Do Right is a case in point: how can a serious hero be, simultaneously, satirized? While classical, Aristotelian literary epics are considered distinct from tragedy and antithetical to the comedic, some oral epic-performance traditions reveal the expansive possibility of the form. For example, West African epic form not only compares favorably with the Greco-Roman classics, as Isidore Okpewho demonstrated in The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979), but also includes nonAristotelian performative features that broaden and diversify the meaning of encyclopedic: call-and-response, a non-Manichean sense of good/evil, bardic improvisation and error, the essential importance of femininity, deformity as a signifier of epicality, and fusions of indigenous and dominant world religions, among other things. Given this epic expansiveness, how does cinema embody a unity between classical/Aristotelian epic and dramatic tragedy, and this broader epic-performance dimension? Ousmane Sembène answered this question in the 1960s. Sembène, a Senegalese revolutionary artist known as the “Father” of African cinema, turned from the language-limiting novel to the universal image of cinema. The result was his acclaimed oeuvre of feature films intended to overcome the polyglossia of, and forge a critical post-colonial consciousness among, West Africans. Sembène used cinema (realistic drama plus epic projection) in a manner comparable to how, in David C. Conrad’s description, the jeli Djanka Tassey Condé uses oral epic to center women’s “powers of sorcery” and the hero’s inheritance of such: Identifying archetypal figures of the distant past as masters of supernatural power is the bards’ way of accounting for the ancestors’ momentous contributions to Mande civilization. Availing himself of poetic license, the Maninka oral artist paints with a vocal brush on a broad canvas of colorful sound, producing largerthan-life heroes and heroines. (Conrad 2004, xxii) Conrad’s poetry-to-painting-to-cinema metaphor is a propos. Though not from the Mande or a traditional bardic family, Sembène used the epic medium of film and tragi-dramatic plots to engage neo-colonialism. Since Sembène’s role as Africa’s representative cinematic “griot”-director is well-documented (Pfaff 1984, 40; Hale 1998, 322–23), and cinema originated in Europe, it is fitting to turn to the next generation of cinematic griots, performing from the subaltern’s position in the very seat of empire. Indeed, despite important breakthroughs in the 1980s and 1990s, most African-American directors still find themselves placed in “director’s jail” by Hollywood executives.2 Although this problem has bedeviled Lee’s career, too, he has nevertheless achieved international status, and become “The One” cinematic griot. In fact, Lee’s Do Right, the “success” which signaled the rise of African-American 587

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​ directors whose careers later came “crashing down” because of Hollywood’s racism (Ugwu 2019), also answers the question presented above. The following discussion of West African epic poetics and close reading of an excerpt from Do Right demonstrates how Lee revises epic cinema to support his cautionary poetics.

FADE IN: EPIC… “WE ALL HAVE THIS PROBLEM SOMEWHERE” Do Right adheres to Aristotelian dramatic form in terms of unity of action, time, and location, offering a realistic study of dramatic events unfolding within 24 hours on one block in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. However, Lee’s calland-response aesthetic foregrounds the film’s non-Aristotelian pedigree: the jelic call addresses the magnitude of the centuries-old problem of race, its principal characters hailing from an underclass “space Puerto Rican bright. AFROCENTRIC bright” (Lee 1989b, 29), a rich Afro-Puerto Rican-Italian-Korean-English polyglossia. Lee pairs this with the centrality of low-culture humor, teknê,3 to exploit the “largerthan-life” scale of the medium, and the response of the epical soundtrack—from the first bars of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900) “anthem” to the “broad canvas of colorful sound” that is “hyped plus… amped”4 in by Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” (1989), the signature rap track that voices uncompromising protest. The 24-hour dramatic frame advances from a hot-but-quiet dawn on a seemingly unremarkable New York City summer day to reveal that it is, simultaneously, an in media res moment in the African-American protest tradition. As the day advances, racial tensions build that rupture the normality of tragic drama and amp in increasingly epic episodes. Eventually, a quick succession of events explodes into an all-out racial war: a protest against racism in Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, an ItalianAmerican-owned restaurant, evolves from a shouting match inside to a brawl that spills outdoors; the arrival of police and the death of Radio Raheem, broadcast source of “Fight the Power” and big man of the community, who is killed when a “white” police hero places him in the “infamous Michael Stewart choke hold”; an “angry mob” from the community ransacks and torches the pizzeria, an “uprising” that pits the “mob” (Lee 1989b, 65; 1989c, 246) against the New York Police and Fire Departments; and, a dénouement that returns viewers to the wake of Radio’s death, with jazz by the Natural Spiritual Orchestra (“Wake Up Finale”) accompanying the resumption of the life-as-it-was-before tragic drama and the “FADE OUT” (Rutledge n.d.). Notwithstanding this familiar, tragi-epic frame—the centuries-old protests of enslaved Africans who killed themselves during the Middle Passage, the coded resistance in slave-era hymns, blues-era nomadism and lynch-law escapes, the rise of segregated ghetto enclaves, and the state’s punitive policing to trump freedom— that Hollywood projects onto silver screens, often eliciting stereotypical reactions by audiences who know this US history well, it is this knowing that Lee uses to mask Do Right’s real epic scale. Thus, the “Wake Up Finale” is not The End, for NSO’s “Malcolm and Martin” jazz piece begins immediately and, “AS THE SCREEN SCROLLS UP, WE SEE...” (Rutledge n.d.) competing quotes by “Martin Luther King Jr.” and then “Malcolm 588

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ X” (Lee 1989a). This order is critical since Lee apparently strikes a balance between both men and intentionally left the resolution open-ended, as he explains in an equally open-ended, cryptic manner: “I think it would be false for me to, to provide answers to stuff that I don’t know the answers to. Think I’d be abusing the medium of film.… At the end of this film, it’s like if you don’t do this, this is gonna happen. And this is mayhem, bedlam, and just madness” (Bourne 1989). Since Do Right is an all-out sensory assault, and its visual immediacy highlights its basic lessons, audiences accept the literal realism as an obvious racial allegory of protest, and the Martin-versus-Malcolm, nonviolence-versus-militancy debate as the crux of “do the right thing.” End of story—or, in the vernacular, “Been there, done that.” But Lee uses the cinematic medium, as jeli do in Conrad’s epic-canvas metaphor, to perform what I term allegorye, an open-ended, “complex allegory—not simple, one-to-one ‘moral allegory.’” Allegorye “starts with the word (narrative), but then expands to include the totality of the specific performance in which all of the elements do not equal the sum of its parts” (Rutledge 2013, 31–34). Lee’s allegorye destroys one-to-one allegorical correspondences and white/black, good/evil binarism en route to presenting an urgent, more ancient epical problematic: is it worth the time to imitate “admirable” people, to ensure that your own “better” people grace the “WALL OF FAME,” and, thus, to consume your “Heroes,” too, or would the right thing to do first be determining who is really “better?” This is no idle philosophical question for, as a number of traditional African epic performances reveal, the power of epic-oriented people is such that regarding them cautiously should, at the very least, equal the sum of the admiration bestowed upon them. Do Right takes this anti-exceptionalist position, meaning not that epic-hero ontology should be rejected, for there is a proper time, place, and manner for heroes, but that the exceptionalism that situates their greatness and assumed goodness atop the altar or on the “WALL” of everyday existence is an absolute danger. Hence, when Lee states, “And a lot of us don’t even know that these problems exist,” he does not delineate who the “us” references. “White” European Americans for sure, but the intimacy “of us” implies, more pointedly, African Americans. Afro-Italian actor Giancarlo Esposito (Buggin’ Out in Do Right), recalling how he was discriminated against by European and African Americans, reinforces this: “So I think this film is somewhat, uhm, showing us that we all have this problem somewhere.” If “we all” are involved, what are the “somewhat” and the “somewhere” of the “problem?” Esposito offers an important clarification. What he liked most about Do Right is its dramatization that racism is common to “blacks and whites,” and hence the overarching lesson: “‘No one’s perfect, do the right thing’” (Bourne 1989). Do Right pushes beyond even this, the epical problem being how racial protest, absolutely essential, obscures the exceptionalism everyone consumes. Apparently, with the question of admirable people and the 1980s protest figure Buggin’ Out in mind, Lee concretizes this specific point: The thing that bothers me about Buggin’ Out is sometimes he’s misdirected.… I don’t know if he should put out so much energy in just having a black person, y’know, on the Wall. I don’t know if it’s that important. (Bourne 1989) 589

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​ Skillfully planted behind readings that reduce the crisis to racial protest is Lee’s cautionary ethos, “this” being an allegorycal promise of “mayhem, bedlam, and just madness” that is consistent with traditional African epic-performance poetics. Do Right is a 24-hour cinematic odyssey that deconstructs formal, scripted notions of tragedy and epic, and reveals the overly flat, Us-Them allegories for what they are: temporal and ethno-national borders that tragically under-represent the Human journey. Often missing is awareness that epics are ancient and comparative and that Homer’s action implies—in the object of Troy—a corresponding and, perhaps, more “admirable” epic tradition, along with the existence of many others rendered non-poetic by Aristotle. Indeed, according to E. J. Michael Witzel, based on a “combined historical and comparative approach” to myth, it is possible to “sketch a few traits of a still earlier form of mythology, the one that humans had at the time of the so-called African Eve…, some 130,000 years ago” (2012, xi–xii). Positing African epics and African-American literature as critical methodological and comparative contexts, and a selection from a reading-script of Do Right, I use the remainder of this essay to demonstrate how Lee underscores the urgency to “do the right thing” in epic-centric New York.

CLOSE UP—THE EPIC For modern subjects, no literary genre is as serious as the heroic epic. Although Mikhail Bakhtin and Northrop Frye both accepted Aristotle’s view of epic as a closed form, Bakhtin recognized that “historically significant” events can elicit a sense of “epic time.” In this regard, since the epic as residual ancient human memory, the epic genre as an imaginary fixing and territorializing of greatness from the “absolute past” (Frye [1957] 1973, 14; Bakhtin [1981] 1994, 8, 14–15), and epic as “historically significant” events are inseparable, epic form is uncontainable. For example, streaming now in our world of Big Data is what Shoshana Zuboff labels “surveillance capitalism,” and the looming Homeric question of whether we, like Odysseus on Calypso’s isle, will be at “Home or Exile in the Digital Future,”5 as “Lord or subject? Master or slave?” This is because, Zuboff notes, the “logic”—not the technology—of the new digital forms is “unprecedented,” the unrecognizable something encountered for the first time. Since human’s encounter with the “unprecedented” is filtered “through the lenses of familiar categories,” she argues, this translation undercuts our ability to confront the problem objectively (2019, 3, 12–15). Thus, the modern western European attraction to Homer: he provides a national, territorialized epic that tames the unknown, making it known, legible, reproducible, and inheritable. Epic is, perforce, mystical, mythical, and messy—even ridiculously bombastic—because it grapples with the Unknown. Understandably, and necessarily, creating order, light, meaning, and productivity out of this chaos is often associated with the Epic Hero(ine): building walls and protecting national borders is a serious, life-or-death business. But what lurks in Zuboff’s “familiar categories,” in the chronology of “deep time,” the flow of humanity’s “kinship networks” and genres “with thousands of years behind them,” according to Wai Chee Dimock (2006, 3–5), as the greatest of threats, as an atavism of primordial fear? This deep-time epic inquiry implicates how a relatively small occurrence, at the right time and under the right conditions, could 590

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ serve as seed for an event whose branches reach a thousand years into the future. This is Shin Chae-ho’s argument in his 1925 article, “The Single Biggest Event in the Last One Thousand Years of Korea’s History” (2020), an effort to grapple with an epic turn of affairs in Korea that led to Japanese colonization. In the 1135 CE Pyongyang Campaign, a small battle between traditionalists and Confucius-oriented Sino-centrists concluded in favor of the latter. Consequently, Kim Busik, a high administrator, historian, and poet, Shin alleges, used this single incident and his sudden monopoly of power to suppress indigenous Korean culture, rewrite Korean history, and redirect Korean culture for a thousand years.6 The debacle inspired one poet-prodigy involved in the failed revolt to compose “writing on the wall,” a fauxBuddhist poem that disguised “his anger at his failure.” This occurred, writes Shin, reflecting on the event’s 1,000-year magnitude, because “it was the case of ‘a single mistake having destroyed everything’” (2020). Whether it is Witzel’s “single original African source” 130,000 years ago, or Shin’s “single mistake” 1,000 years ago that results in “writing on the wall,” epic myth represents fragments of the unknown, unprecedented Other/World still within us as “familiar categories” of primordial memory. Consequently, epic allegorye, its Other/World origin inseparable from our “familiar categories,” can never conform to the Us-versus-Them logic and one-to-one ratio of allegory to reality. Instead, epic allegorye—inclusive of Johann Georg von Hahn’s hero pattern, Carl Jung’s “archetype,” and Joseph Campbell’s “hero of a thousand faces”—is a dynamic, evershifting, multilayered ancient performance of what anthropologist Victor Turner called “Homo performans” (1986, 80–85). While rooted in humanity’s fundamental concern for security, the modern break from and disdain of insecure pre-modern cultures has often entailed a simplification and foreshortening of a past nigh impossible to reckon with. Though the Homerbased epic canon reflects this distortion, indigenous epic storytelling cultures have a complex regard for the heroes in large part because these exceptional individuals—idealized by European/American culture—are potential world-destroyers who threaten the balance between the natural ecosystem and the community. Moreover, the threat often starts from “familiar categories” within. Traditional African epics— for example, Mwindo, Ozidi, and Son-Jara (“MOS-epics”)—demonstrate a range of cautionary modes and strategies to (attempt to) contain the threat. The cautionary principle is integral to these epics not only because of the surpassing abilities and appetites of epical or epic-oriented males and females, but also because epics could start with the quiet seeds of familial discord—as the possibility that Helen left Menelaus with Paris demonstrates. The super-action of Homer’s epics obscures this truth: notwithstanding the Iliad’s epic action, the threat originates not within Agamemnon’s army or Troy’s walls, but in conflicts already within the home-borders. At the outset of the Mwindo Epic, King Shemwindo of seven-gated Tubondo tells his seven wives that he will kill any son, and thus, they must only have daughters.7 The motivation behind this inexplicable behavior becomes clear as early events—he marries and sends off his sister, Iyangura, receiving a massive bride price—reveal him to be a glutton for wealth and power. A son would threaten this. Born to Shemwindo’s seventh wife, Mwindo, called “Little-one-just-born-he-walked” (kábútwa-kénda), is immediately subject to numerous attempts by Shemwindo to kill him (Biebuyck and 591

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​ Mateene 1978, 57, n70). To escape, he flees into exile—into the wilds of the rainforest and thus symbolic death—to search for his aunt Iyangura, a symbol of natural goodness whose beauty is like “dew,” “sunrays,” and the “ntsembe-tree” (1969, 43–46, 65). Deploying trickster wit and verbal felicity to survive, he secures the necessary implements, most notably his magical conga-flyswatter, ventures to the underworld, and returns to battle and defeat his father’s forces. Chastened by defeat, Shemwindo joins Mwindo and Iyangura in a ritual of reconciliation that restores justice, gives the people democracy, and literally resurrects the dead and reverses the destruction. The classic, circular model of a complete epic action has been reached, but Candi Rureke, the shé-kárisi (bard), in fact, does not “FADE OUT” and drum-roll the credits. Owing to the very nature of epic heroes, admirable for their abilities, particular attention must be devoted to the inherently destructive character of the epic hero as a necessary formal element. Combine trickster wisdom with an epic figure— an “epic trickster,” an incarnation of humanity and the adaptability of admirable people—and the danger is that the “transgressive” epic heroes, enough of a threat already, will become “excessive” figures (Seydou 1983, 314; Rutledge 2013, 42–54). If not checked, admirable behavior could very easily become an established cultural norm that has epical, imperial, and ultimately eco-apocalyptic ramifications. Among the Banyanga ethnic group, then, Mwindo is simultaneously regarded as a hero of “reckless ambition” and a “somewhat amusing” figure (Bieuybuck 1978, 4–5). Himself now a tyrant, a threat to society and the ecosystem, Mwindo is banished from Tubondo, the rainforest, and earth to be cooled off by “the cold, and icy wind” of Nkuba, the deity of lightning (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969, 137). There is no African Achilles or massive army in The Ozidi Saga, a full-fledged theatrical performance lasting over seven nights. Instead, the audience hears Okabou Ojobolo tell, and see him and an acting troupe perform, a story in which envious generals conspire and kill Ozidi, champion of Orua State, leaving his widow and unborn son unprotected—and the state in a precarious position. Sorcery, in the form of Oreame, Ozidi’s maternal grandmother, fills the gap. But Oreame’s sorcery, tutelage of Ozidi as warrior, and her own epic power, in turn, eventually give birth to unintended, unprecedented consequences as epic copycats spread, like a contagion. Hence, Night Seven of the story CUTS TO: “Anglese,” the “Smallpox King,” apparently an Anglo-Saxon/English colonial figure even she cannot stop (Clark and Ojobolo 1977, 375, 384). Similarly, royal-family discord instigated by Magan Jata Condé, mansa (emperor) of the Kingdom of Du/Do, begins the Epic of Son-Jara. His gluttony, leading to the marginalization and disfigurement of his aunt, Kamisa, unleashes her sorcerous retribution: a Buffalo spirit that renders Du/Do a wasteland. A syncretic tale of old imperial Mali, Islamic tradition, and post-colonial French influence, the destruction of Du/Do’s fertility is interwoven with anti-capitalistic, anti-colonial morality lessons on respecting women and the less fortunate. Son-Jara’s deformity and rise as epic hero are rooted in this matrilineal inheritance and cautionary aesthetic.

CUT TO: MODERNITY What happens when this indigenous MOS-epics knowledge is charred by the ordering processes of an epic-centric, race-making modernity? African-American 592

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ storytellers have taken up this question for centuries, with an increasingly grounded awareness of the intersection between epic/myth, racism, and reality (epical realism) in a modern context lacking the myths’ cultural mooring. Richard Wright’s Native Son ([1940] 1998) epic novel, set in 1930s Chicago, is paradigmatic. A protest novel that draws upon the famous trial of the nine Scottsboro Boys, this is the racial epic within the home nation. Bigger Thomas, a poorly educated African-American youth from the underclass, confronts Depression-Era realities and a trinity of massive cultural forces: centuries of culture-denying slavery, the anomie resulting from African American’s Great Migration from rural-South to urban-North, and a regime of segregating and reservationing labor. So sophisticated and effective was the US system in the nineteenth century that Germany modeled its labor practices and concentration camps after ours. Nazi Germany’s rise in the 1930s foreshadows Native Son. In hopeful and yet matter-of-fact terms, Bigger is a US “native son,” and thus part of its socioculturalpolitical family, albeit as a second-class citizen. His accidental killing of Mary Dalton, the young heiress of the “white” family for which he chauffeurs, and the subsequent murder-rape trial he faces, allegorizes a commonplace racial tragedy. But this story masks what Wright places before readers from the outset—though blindness, pointedly, is troped by Wright to ultimately mean that people are blind to Bigger’s nativeepic instinct. A true “native son” in the US’s hero-worshipping culture, Bigger is naturally inclined to be epical, but the racial gaze blinds everyone, readers included, to this most frightening aspect of his invisibility. That Bigger consumes US popular culture—especially cinema: he first sees Mary Dalton in a documentary—is the blueprint for African-American screenwriting deployed by Lee. Wright knew the epic power of the mass media and of cinema to actively message while fostering passive reception, but his engagement was limited to study and critique of big-screen culture in Native Son. With its racial protest teknê projected from the pages of literature onto the silver screen’s broad canvas, combined with the civil rights “progress” of black directors and thespians, and empowered by the arrival of the Black Arts movement (including African epics), the magnitude of Do Right’s New York City plot elicits a far greater emotional impact. This impact masks the epic problem shared by Bigger Thomas, the characters of Do Right, and, Wright and Lee indicate, US culture: consumption driven by an underlying, vicarious desire to be the celebrity-hero. So likely are the readers/viewers to accept protest as the default and look no further that Wright and Lee work overtime to construct epic allegoryes that dispel passivity. As if Bigger’s accidental killing were not enough, he decapitates, dismembers, and burns Mary’s body, seeks a ransom, involves, rapes, and kills Bessie Mears (his girlfriend), and, indeed, comes alive with the epic challenge.8 Likewise, Lee literally shows, inter alia, that: Pino, who hates “niggers,” excepts black celebrities who are “more than Black”; racism is also a multidirectional “RACIAL SLUR MONTAGE”; righteous protestor Buggin’ Out fetishizes his Nikes; Mookie (protagonist) is a deadbeat father, and Tina a selfish and profane mother, to their son, Hector; and, Radio Raheem is not conscious of the “Fight the Power” message he bops. 9 Hence, Radio’s “prized possession—his[boom] box, ... the one thing that gave him any sense of worth,” is evidence that he, “like many Black youth, is the victim of 593

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​ materialism and a misplaced sense of values” (Lee 1989c, 165–69, 184–88, 201, 243–44). Radio’s death from Officer Gary Long’s choke hold is a modern allegory for racial protest, but more importantly, it is an ancient epic allegorye that cautions us about heroes, those who build and fight for Walls: Raheem, hero for the ­community, is, simultaneously, its threat. Lee’s allegorye, in fact, features another hero, a bridge-builder, for Da Mayor, lambasted by Mother Sister as a “drunk fool” (1989c, 136), performs a true heroic act by risking his own life to save a boy from a speeding car. Notwithstanding these many nuances and complexities, what Do Right comes down to is the main entrée that moves racial-protest allegory in the script to ­cinematic allegorye: “HEROES” culture and the uncritical consumption of the admirable. Although evident early (Mookie’s jersey), Sal’s ItalianAmerican pizzeria perfects Lee’s “native son” argument. Famous-HEROES-FAME may be the entrée, but “hero[es]” is the meaty part of an imperial palette. Literally, it’s the “hero,” a sandwich that Sal’s Famous Pizzeria makes, Mookie delivers, and the community consumes, often next to Sal’s “WALL OF FAME.” Lee repeatedly positions Sal and his sons beneath “HEROES,” the marketing legend above the storefront, at ­critical junctures—one of them being the penultimate moment before the “uprising” starts. Lee’s canted-angle technique, used to portray Radio Raheem’s epicality and ­disequilibrium, is also deployed when he positions the “HEROES” legend above Sal, Pino, and Vito. This is not to impugn Sal, a middleman-owner; quite the contrary, through iconography Lee foregrounds how US elites insidiously market, the masses ravenously consume, and the culture performs “HEROES” (Figure 41.1).

Figure 41.1  Sal and his sons, Pino and Vito, standing beneath “HEROES” legend of Sal’s pizzeria in a still from Do the Right Thing (1989).

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— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ In other words, the epic “writing on the wall [of fame]” Do Right dramatizes is how overlooking such a small detail—consuming heroes, the admirable people— starts the Human Epic that feeds hierarchies of discrimination to the masses. Radio the Black youth killed by the NYPD is the proper source of racial protest and uprising. However, Radio the hero is also emblematic of the epic threat spanning the nation and unleashing—like “Dragon”-slaying Mwindo, the “rage” of Achilles, or Ozidi’s and Oreame’s “terrorizing”—enough heat to “melt the polar caps and the whole wide world,” according to the “philosophical” ML, one of the three unemployed “Corner Men” Lee uses as a humorous chorus (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969, 130–34; Clark and Ojobolo 1977, 321; Lee 1989c, 138). The screenplay omits this cautionary point and the racial war of the plot immerses viewers in action; hence, Lee’s allegorye has to be constructed and made available for a close reading—and, consequently, a close viewing. The following reading-script starts after the NYPD officers, realizing the danger they are in, have quickly shoved Radio Raheem’s body into the back seat of a squad car.10 ANGLE--BUGGIN’ OUT Handcuffed in the squad car, Buggin’ Out shouts at the officers outside, enraged at Radio Raheem’s death.

BUGGIN’ OUT You fucking pigs! Fucking murderers! You can’t kill us all, man! You can’t fucking kill us all!

ANGLE--POLICE OFFICERS AND THE ANGRY MOB The angry mob surrounds the police. Ella directly confronts a young officer. Officer Long stands nearby, scanning the crowd. YOUNG POLICE OFFICER (to Ella, Cee, and Ahmad) Back off! ELLA Fuck that shit! YOUNG POLICE OFFICER (pushing Ella back) Back off! ELLA Get the YOUNG POLICE OFFICER Everybody ELLA fuck off YOUNG POLICE OFFICER back off! 595

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​

me, man!

ELLA (VO)

OFFICER LONG (VO) (partially inaudible) Get back! ELLA (surging toward Officer Long) Y’all______ YOUNG POLICE OFFICER Everybody The officer continues to push Ella back. ELLA (VO) (to Officer Long) _____! Quiet, you YOUNG POLICE OFFICER back off! OFFICER LONG (shouting toward Ella and the crowd) Get back! ELLA (VO) bitch! YOUNG POLICE OFFICER (VO) Back off! ... ANGLE--BUGGIN’ OUT Still resisting, an officer leaning from the front shoves Buggin’ Out to the other side of the back seat. BUGGIN’ OUT Get off me, man! Get off me, man! POLICE OFFICER (VO) Shit! BUGGIN’ OUT --Fuck off me! POLICE OFFICER (VO) Sit down, nigger! (pokes Buggin’ Out hard with his billy club) BUGGIN’ OUT Fucking-The police officer pokes him in the chest again. 596

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ BUGGIN’ OUT Damnit! POLICE OFFICER (VO) (pokes Buggin’ Out) Sit down! The police car starts to pull away, draping Buggin’ Out and the officer in shadow. BUGGIN’ OUT Fucking- POLICE OFFICER (pokes Buggin’ Out) Sit down! ANGLE--POLICE CAR Another squad car, carrying Radio Raheem, slowly pulls away through the crowd. Flanking the car are the young officer and a black-female officer, who run alongside it.

AHMAD (VO)11 Radio! Radio! Is you YOUNG POLICE OFFICER Back off! AHMAD (VO) our man? Radio! YOUNG POLICE OFFICER Back off! Back

CLOSE--RADIO RAHEEM His face up and eyes open, Radio Raheem’s body lies alone in the dark, in the back seat. YOUNG POLICE OFFICER (VO) off! AHMAD (VO) That ain’t right, man! Yo, that ain’t FEMALE SPECTATOR (VO) Radio! As the CAMERA PANS up to the rearview window,

right, man!

AHMAD (VO)

597

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​ FEMALE SPECTATOR (VO) Radio! ELLA (VO)      --busted fucking-we see angry spectators--including Sonny, the Korean clerk-chasing after the car and the police officers running just behind. AHMAD (VO) I’mo get yo back, ELLA (VO)      --busted fucking- AHMAD (VO) man! CEE (VO) Get him out! YOUNG POLICE OFFICER (to Ahmad) It’s over! ELLA I said, quiet the YOUNG POLICE OFFICER Get back, man! ELLA fuck down! AHMAD (VO) Fuck that, man! MALE SPECTATOR (VO)12 Bitch! PUNCHY (giving chase) They got Ra- YOUNG POLICE OFFICER Go fucking home! PUNCHY (tossing comics) --adiooo-ANGLE--STREET PUNCHY (VO) --oooo! The cop cars speed off, sirens blaring. They cut it so fast, they go the wrong way down a one-way street! Hands to his head and weeping, Smiley walks into the street. 598

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ SMILEY Ooh... Oohu-ohh! Hhh luhla! Wrohhhee...? Hhh-uh-hhh-uh oww-uhhuheeh... uh-hhh-huh Ra-Ra-In their haste to beat it, they cops have left the crowd. It’s at this point the crowd becomes an angry mob. The police’s racism here requires no comment, for the power of film and the existing US narratives make it a well-known fact. Buggin’ Out is physically and verbally abused, and then the “mob” of his friends issues a direct challenge to the farce of law and order. However, events unfold so fast that a critical fact races by: A black-female officer runs alongside the car, and she is called a “Bitch!” Later, a black-male officer is also verbally abused. Do Right clearly considers them accomplices, a topic worth exploring, but the reading-script and its stream of dialogue—a realistic postmodern element of the film—paint a cautionary message. Ahmad’s question, “Radio! Radio! Is you / our man? Radio!” is also a statement and lament: “You [are supposed to be] our man, Radio!” Ahmad, who exerted patriarchal authority over Ella earlier, is invested in this hyper-masculinity; so is Punchy, which explains why he throws what appears to be flyers at the squad car. But earlier in the film, Punchy rejects Buggin’ Out’s protest by “(Pointing to a Black Panther comic)” and stating, “Black Panther eat pizza, we eat pizza.” Instead of flyers, then, earlier events make it evident that Punchy—a telling moniker—is “tossing [Black Panther] comics.” Punchy’s gesture of anger and verbalized dismay, “They got Ra-- / --adiooo-- / --oooo!” is, equally, a trashing of the hero. Thus, perhaps the most poignant moment in Do Right is our last sighting of the hero of fate: Close--Radio Raheem His face up and eyes open, Radio Raheem’s body lies alone in the dark, in the back seat. The image Lee projects here is epical realism, not the graphic realism of the Iliad’s battles of glorious death, but the real-world consequences of uncritical epic praxis within the social contract. It invokes what appears to be a Female Spectator calling “Radio!” This ethereal voiceover, sounding very much like a goddess’ lamentation, lends divine sanction to Ella’s role as one who tried hardest to stem the brawl that started inside of Sal’s. Here, in direct address, Ella chides Radio Raheem for not listening and getting himself killed over a “--busted fucking--” radio. Having to repeat this reproach because Ahmad interrupts her with his heroic posturing, Ella then appears to drop wisdom on the dead Radio Raheem: “I said, quiet the / fuck down!” Surrounded by masculine authority when she states this, she is neither speaking to the Young Police Officer nor Ahmad, a friend whose response—“Fuck that, man!”— seems to be a sexist dismissal. Note that this reading-script, revealing how Ahmad’s heroic claims intersperse the cautionary mother-wit of the Female Spectator and Ella, the feminine voices of the sacred and profane, respectively, invites critical reading and viewing. Likewise, the absence of call-and-response—an African form of balance and rhythm—throughout the “uprising” reinforces disequilibrium (Figures 41.2 and 41.3). 599

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​

Figure 41.2  Ella dropping wisdom on the dead Radio Raheem.

Figure 41.3  Smiley, the “HEROES”-destroyer.

No wonder this scene ends with a disconsolate Smiley walking into the street. His presence, “in the background,” is the “constantly ridiculed and laughed at” conscience (Lee 1989b, 95) reminding humanity—with “his Malcolm X/Martin Luther King, Jr., cards”—of two things: first, “do the right thing” and think about hero-worship before you act, and second, this excessive hero-worship business is nothing to smile about. But smile Smiley does, after he lights the flame 600

— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ that destroys the “WALL OF FAME” and Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, the source of “HEROES”-marketing, “HEROES”-sandwiches, and “HEROES”-consumption, and then “pins one of his Malcolm X/Martin Luther King, Jr., cards to the Wall of Fame.” Public Enemy chants “Fight the Power!” as he does, a response that answers the call of “Smiley’s face and a smile [that] slowly travels across. It’s the first time Smiley has smiled in years and nobody is there to see this event.” Smiley, the real hero, the “HEROES”-destroyer, did the right thing, leaving ashes and ruins. Once Lee, the Do Right jeli, has directed viewers to this epic “CUT TO BLACK” (Lee 1989c, 255; Rutledge n.d.), the film is ready for a proper ending and the possible beginning of a true resolution.

FADE OUT Lee’s unprecedented epic image, as cryptic as it seems to be timeless, is a Smiley “face.” Smiley, the hero who incinerated the culture of “HEROES,” did the right thing in defiance of the Aristotelian norm that comedy is antithetical to epic: epic is “serious” and, hence, “It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic” (Bakhtin 22–23). Indeed, taking account of “heroic elements” comprising African epic traditions “reveals,” John William Johnson points out, “significant differences from their IndoEuropean counterparts” (Johnson 1992, 2). They expand the generic model of the epic performance by including non-Homeric, non-Aristotelian paradigms—specifically, a cautionary aesthetic attuned to the dangers of epic figures. As Lee’s Do Right and the MOS-epics indicate, tragic drama (real racism), epic (realism), and comedy can co-equally form an epic that is about epic culture itself. Americans have consumed so many “admirable” people that someone like Smiley cannot be recognized as the culture-hero he is. Likewise, Hollywood misreads Lee’s Do Right intent. Paramount Pictures eventually balked at “making this picture,” Lee wrote. “It’s TOO BLACK, TOO STRONG.” Instead, “They want an ending that they feel won’t incite a giant Black uprising” (Lee 1989b, 76). Because of their white-over-and-versus-black racialized hegemony, Paramount’s executives failed to realize that they were feeding the apocalyptic “writing on the wall” that has been slowly “uprising” for 500 years. Lee, as he conceived the film, was reading that “writing” and its contradictions: This film is gonna make people pick sides, especially Italians and Blacks. In my eyes, there are no winners in this one. Blacks burn down the pizzeria, but so what? Radio Raheem is dead or paralyzed and the conditions that we live under have not gotten any better. Isn’t it strange? There has been a recent upsurge in racial attacks in this country. At the same time, Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby are the biggest names in TV and film. What a paradox. A vicious idea just came in. How ’bout a scene where two people of different ethnic groups are slinging racial slurs at each other. Then we cut to several more people of different ethnicity ranking on each other. (1989b, 60)

601

— ​ G r e g o r y E . R u t l e d g e —​ The epic at home is “this mayhem, bedlam, and just madness.” Like the traditional African epic performances, the excerpted reading-script demonstrates that Lee’s Do the Right Thing is a complex allegorycal performance that recognizes the human need for proper heroes who are doing the right thing even as it cautions against epic exceptionalism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like Lee’s Do the Right Thing, this project wouldn’t be possible without a community of actors: Nora Roberts, Alfonso Bartolomé, Alex Alonso, and my wife and son for their foreign-language transcriptions/translations; several of my graduate and undergraduate students for transcriptions; and George Wolf and Pat Emile. Thank you.

NOTES   1 Writers of tragedies that engage epic topics, Aristotle suggests in Poetics (8.7), should not use the “whole plot” but compose “piecemeal” (1996, 30).   2 According to Mattie Rich, “I was told that I was in director’s jail. Director’s jail is if your film doesn’t make X amount of money, then it’s going to be hard for you to get another movie financed” (Ugwu 2019).   3 According to Malcolm Heath, “the word is conventionally translated as ‘craft,’ ‘skill,’ or ‘art,’ but Aristotle defines teknê as a productive capacity informed by an understanding of its intrinsic rationale” (Heath 1996, ix).   4 Lyrics rapped by Chuck D in “Fight the Power.”   5 Zuboff’s Chapter 1 title.   6 Rewarded by the king with a noble title, Kim soon held the post of Prime Minister and several other key roles.   7 For variants on familial discord in the Mwindo canon, see Biebuyck (1978, 68–71).   8 For more on the Mwindo Epic, see Rutledge (2013, 169–210).   9 Indeed, the “Fight the Power” chorus repeats “(Stopped up ears)” to emphasize this point. 10 This reading-script includes scene narration and camera angles, reflects Esposito’s and Roger Smith’s (Smiley) “ad-libbing” and “improved” dialogue, and features Lee’s formal use of overlapping dialogue (Lee 1989b, 54; Lee and Jones 1989). In the reading-script, I use indentation to signal streams of overlapping dialogue. All of the content in this reading-script is new (transcribed dialogue, camera angles, and narration), except for the highlighted text. 11 Who is providing this voiceover? It seems to be Ahmad, but since he and the car are in the background, and the raucous spectators are in the foreground, it would be impossible to hear him in this manner. 12 Although the speaker is unknown, the black-female officer is clearly the target of this epithet.

WORKS CITED Aristotle. 1996. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Classics. Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. [1981] 1994. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, and edited by Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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— ​ T h e A f r i c a n / A m e r i c a n ( H e r o i c ) E p i c —​ Biebuyck, Daniel P. 1978. Hero and Chief: Epic Literature from the Banyanga (Zaire Republic). Berkeley: University of California Press. ———, and Kahombo C. Mateene. 1969. The Mwindo Epic: From the Banyanga (Congo Republic), by Candi Rureke, storyteller. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourne, St. Clair. 1989. Making “Do the Right Thing.” Chamba Organization and 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. USA. Clark, John Pepper, and Okabou Ojobolo. 1977. The Ozidi Saga. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press. Conrad, David C. 2004. Introduction to Sunjata: A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples, xiv–xxi. Performed by Djanka Tassey Condé. Translated by Conrad. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frye, Northrop. [1957] 1973. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Hale, Thomas. 1998. Griots and Griots. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heath, Malcolm. 1996. Introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics, vii–lxvii. New York: Penguin Classics. Johnson, John William. 1992. Introduction to The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition, translated by Johnson, and performed by Fa-Digi Sisòkò, 1–15. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jones, Marcus. 2020. “Do the Right Thing: From Page to Screen, 1989.” Entertainment Weekly, June 1, 62–63. Lee, Spike, dir. and prod. 1989a. Do the Right Thing. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. USA. ———. 1989b. “The Journal.” In Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint, 22–103. New York: Fireside. ———. 1989c. “The Script: Do the Right Thing.” In Do the Right Thing, 116–265. ———, and Lisa Jones. 1989. Photo insert. In Do the Right Thing, unnumbered. Pfaff, Françoise. 1984. The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Public Enemy. 1989. “Fight the Power.” Do the Right Thing: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Motown. Rutledge, Gregory. 2013. The Epic Trickster in American Literature: From Sunjata to So(u)l. New York: Routledge. ———. n.d. “Do the Right Thing: The Reading-Script.” Unpublished manuscript. Seydou, Christian. 1983. “A Few Reflections on Narrative Structure of Epic Texts: A Case Example of Bambara and Fulani Epics.” Research in African Literatures 14, no. 3: 312–31. Shin Chae-ho. n.d. “The Single Biggest Event in the Last One Thousand Years of Korea’s History.” The Don-A Ilbo, 1927. Translated by Jong-Im Lee. Unpublished manuscript. Tierno, Michael. 2002. Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization. New York: Hyperion. Turner, Victor. 1986. “The Anthropology of Performance.” In The Anthropology of Performance, 72–98. New York: PAJ Publications. Ugwu, Reggie. 2019. “(Hollywood) ‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out.” New York Times, July 3. Witzel, E. J. Michael. 2012. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Richard. [1940] 1998. Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs-Hatchette Group.

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CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

LISTENING FOR EPIC SOUND AND S E E I N G W H I T E S U P R E M ACY I N R I C H A R D WA G N E R ’ S R I N G C YC L E

rsr

Alexander K. Rothe

Epic sound refers to how the film music of postwar biblical films reflected and overcame the various contradictions of postwar American society (Meyer 2015, 7). In films such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), the film music encouraged viewers to suspend their disbelief and identify with the characters on the screen. Through frequent underscoring (non-diegetic music), the full orchestral sound, and references to sacred music, film composers such as Elmer Bernstein, Alfred Newman, and Miklós Rózsa were able to immerse viewers in the film’s narrative and to bridge the gap between everyday life and the distant past in a way that belies the films’ often contradictory messages. The rising popularity of the biblical epic film in the late 1940s and early to mid1950s coincided with a religious revival of Christian and Jewish worship. At the time, the American people saw the United States as the leader and protector of the “free world,” at war with the forces of communism. Viewers of postwar biblical epics interpreted themselves as the spiritual successors of the heroic Christians and Israelites, and the Soviet Union as the modern-day equivalent of the despotic empires of ancient Rome and Egypt.1 Film audiences were thus able to simultaneously celebrate and disavow their own imperial power (Meyer 2015, 14). In this chapter, I argue that epic sound plays an analogous role in Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring), written and composed between 1848 and 1874. That is, Wagner’s music immerses the audience members in the opera’s narrative and suspends their disbelief vis-à-vis the narrative’s contradictory artistic and ideological content. Yet, my argument is not that Wagner “invented” epic sound or that Wagner’s operas somehow gave “birth” to Hollywood film music—a position that has been strongly criticized (Kreuzer 2018; Paulin 2000).2 Rather, in Wagner’s Ring cycle, epic sound plays a significant part in sustaining the work’s preoccupation with origins—of epic poetry, the Nibelung materials, and the German nation and its people. Epic sound is demonstrated in Wagner’s dramatization of the act of narration, the narrating function of the orchestra, and the leitmotifs— all of which I discuss in my analysis of Wotan’s Monologue from Walküre’s Act 2, 604

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286698-47

— ​ L i s t e n i n g f o r E p i c S o u n d a n d S e e i n g W h i t e S u p r e m a c y —​ Scene 2. Wagner, through his Ring cycle, circulated the myth that the German people were of superior Aryan pedigree, an idea he adopted from contemporaneous comparative philologists/Indologists like Friedrich Schlegel and Christian Lassen. In this way, Wagner contributed to the invention of whiteness and the promotion of white supremacy. I also briefly discuss the role of epic sound in Hollywood biblical films, and, in the concluding section, briefly return to the use of epic sound in film music, more specifically the cinematic epic revival of the early 2000s, in films such as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).

EPIC IDEOLOGIES IN GERMANY ACROSS THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY Nineteenth-century German authors and philologists were seeking not only a national epic, but also the Urepos (“original epic”)—and, by extension, the historical origin of the Indo-European language family and people. This was part of their effort to establish an ancient German lineage independent from, and superseding, French cultural and political influence. Confronted with political and social fragmentation, German nationalists saw the pan-Germanic vision of a nation bound by language and culture as an effective strategy to counteract the repressive conditions of the German Confederation following the Council of Vienna (1814–1815). That being said, it is important to realize that when these particular authors and philologists were writing about ancient epic poetry and the Indo-European language family, they were also constructing narratives about racial and ethnic origins—given that language and race were understood to be synonymous during the early nineteenth century (Bryant 2001, 4). In what follows, I show how German nationalists put epic poetry to work in order to tell the story of the German people as an Urvolk—the oldest and “purest” race of the Indo-European (“Aryan”) language family (Benes 2008, 113). During the nineteenth century, one was most likely to encounter epic studies within the larger field of philology, which at the time encompassed a broad range of disciplines: biblical criticism, classical and medieval literature, and linguistics focused on the grammar of ancient languages. Especially important in Germany was comparative philology, a type of philology that sought to order all of the world’s languages and peoples into genealogical formations. Contemporaneous with the establishment of the modern research university in Germany, the emergence of comparative philology as the dominant form of philology in German universities was guided by an “origin paradigm”—spurred by the desire to uncover a primordial Ursprache that would form the basis of German national identity and ethnic descent (2008, 10). Epic studies in nineteenth-century Germany were similarly shaped by the origin paradigm, as scholars sought a national epic along the lines of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. According to one key formulation of epic poetry at the time, Hegel’s 1835 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art—without its own epic, a group of people cannot aspire to become a nation. Hegel writes: “The epic work is the Saga, the Book, the Bible of a people…[it is] nothing less than the proper foundations of a national consciousness” (1975, 1045). Although the search for a national epic predated Hegel’s 605

— ​ A l e x a n d e r K . R o t h e —​ formulation, it took on a new urgency during the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815). Rediscovered by Johann Jakob Bodmer during the 1750s, the thirteenth-century anonymous epic poem Nibelungenlied quickly took on the function of a national epic. Nibelungenlied is divided into two larger sections, the first of which describes how the hero Sivrit (Siegfried) slays the dragon, acquires the hoard of the Nibelungs, and is killed by Hagen at the Burgundian court following his marriage to Princess Kriemhild; the second section details Kriemhild’s revenge for Sivrit’s death, how she marries and allies herself to Etzel, King of the Huns. Published in the first complete edition by Christopher Heinrich Müller in 1782, the poem was subsequently popularized in multiple editions in 1807, 1810, and 1816, by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen.3 The search for a national epic did not end with the rediscovery of the Nibelungenlied, and also included an attempt to recover the historical and mythological origins of the Nibelung materials. Guided by the thesis in Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) that Homer’s Iliad must be a compilation of much older oral songs, comparative philologists reasoned that the Nibelungenlied must be based on earlier materials. Central to this endeavor to uncover the origin of the Nibelung materials were German Indologists such as Adolf Holtzmann Sr., Adolf Holtzmann Jr., and Christian Lassen. Indology, the study of India, which in this period meant primarily the study of Sanskrit and ancient texts in Sanskrit, was among the most prestigious branches of comparative philology in nineteenth-century Germany. It provided a “linguistic Indo-European pedigree” for German greatness (McGetchin 2009, 29). In doing so, German Indology brought with it many deeply problematic racial ideas—“Aryan” supremacy and, by extension, white supremacy and a rationale for European imperialism—that in turn fed into the broader origin paradigm of German philology. In what follows, I give a brief sketch of German Indological research on the ancient Indian epic the Mahābhārata as it relates to the search for the origin of the Nibelung materials. The German Indologist Christian Lassen interpreted the Mahābhārata as a primordial Urepos, from which all subsequent world epic poetry was derived (Adluri and Bagchee 2014, 40). Lassen introduced the idea that the Mahābhārata was the story of a racial conflict between Indo-European and Semitic peoples—more specifically, the invading light-skinned Aryans and the native dark-skinned Dravidians. He hypothesized that the Indian epic must have been transmitted by the kṣatriyas, an ancient Aryan warrior and royal caste, given that only Aryan people would be capable of producing epic poetry. The original poem, Lassen asserted, had been subsequently corrupted by the “impure” brahmins—a theory that shaped reception of the epic for many years to come (2014, 42). Lassen’s successor, Adolf Holtzmann Sr., made the connection between the Mahābhārata and the Nibelungenlied much more explicit. He wrote: Just as the three epic peoples we know of, the Indians, the Greeks, and the Germans were originally one people and the Indian, Greek, and German languages were originally one language, so… also… the Indian, Greek, and German mythology were one and so too were the Indian, Greek, and German epic one. (Holtzmann Sr., cited in Adluri and Bagchee 2014, 49) 606

— ​ L i s t e n i n g f o r E p i c S o u n d a n d S e e i n g W h i t e S u p r e m a c y —​ In light of their common ethnic descent, Holtzmann argued, they must share the same Urepos. Both Holtzmann and his nephew, Adolf Holtzmann Jr., believed that they had recovered the Urepos and that the German people could not understand the Nibelungenlied—and, by extension, itself as a noble and heroic people—until it had read the “original” Indian epic. At the same time, underlying German Indology and comparative philology was a “homeland quest” to discover the origin of the Indo-European language family and people as a geographical location on the map (Bryant 2001, 17). Early “Aryan” theorists such as Friedrich Schlegel believed India to be the birthplace of the Indo-Europeans, thereby positing a noble Aryan ancestry for the German people.4 Rival theories of the homeland emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, including the Nordic lands and classical Greece. However, it was the Indian and Nordic locations that had the most appeal for comparative philologists at the German universities, who were eager to distinguish themselves from their neo-humanist predecessors. As we shall see, all three theories are at play in Wagner’s writings, with a preference given to Asia as the German Urheimat (homeland).

EPIC THEORIES AND WHITENESS IN WAGNER’S WRITINGS Thus far, this chapter has considered epic poetry written in the distant past (the medieval Nibelungenlied, the classical Mahābhārata, and the “archaic” classical Iliad and Odyssey). As a composer, librettist, and author not just writing about epic poetry in the distant past, but also composing epic poetry and music in the present, Richard Wagner confronted a number of issues in addition to those discussed above. In doing so, he drew from and expanded upon the writings of Hegel and Jacob Grimm to describe epic’s role in creating national consciousness and uncovering a common ethnic descent. When Hegel praised the epic poetry of Homer in his Aesthetics, he did not imply that contemporary authors should write epic poetry or imitate Homer. In fact, Hegel believed that epic poetry was a thing of the past and that the worldview that had supported its creation was no longer in force. He writes: “For the whole state of the world today has assumed a form diametrically opposed in its prosaic organization to the requirements which we found irremissible for genuine epic” (1975, 1109). Contemporary events, Hegel writes, are too recent in the memory to be contained as a whole, and the subject matter of these events is not sufficiently heroic to warrant epic poetry. He does, however, concede that the epic mode of composition is possible, and can be successful, in genres apart from epic poetry proper—in other words, in types of writing like the novel that incorporate elements of epic poetry. What results, ideally, is a hybrid type of writing that mixes elements of epic, lyric, and drama. Without a doubt, Wagner’s understanding of presenting epic narration within the framework of music drama, discussed at greater length below, was shaped by Hegel’s thinking. Equally influential for Wagner’s understanding of epic was Jacob Grimm, who played a key role in propagating the idea of a primordial Ursprache, and of creating a nation through a common language. Grimm’s 1813 essay “Gedanken über Mythos, Epos und Geschichte” (Thoughts about myth, epic, and history) discusses 607

— ​ A l e x a n d e r K . R o t h e —​ how history becomes myth through epic poetry. Through the medium of epic poetry, the Volk remembers its ancient past and participates in a mystical communion with the Ursprache. Grimm writes: Epic poetry is the nourishment and earthly bliss from which we live and breathe, like the bread of life; it is further and freer than the present—and the past, which is the present that has passed—and closer and more restricting than the revelation (the timeless origin). (1813, 84)5 Grimm believes that a nation shares a common ethnic descent through its derivation from the Ursprache. German epic poetry, he argues, is an expression of the German language’s—and, by extension, the German people’s—close proximity to the Ursprache. Similarly, in Wagner’s 1849 essay “Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage” (“The Wibelungen: World History as Told in Saga”), Wagner asserts that the Nibelungenlied belongs to the German people, and that through its epic poetry, the German people remembers its ancient, glorious past (1898b). My argument here is that Wagner’s adoption of racist and nationalist ideologies from the fields of comparative philology and Indology is constitutive of whiteness and white supremacy, which have characterized the field of classical music in Germany. For example, contextualizing and defining whiteness more broadly in German-speaking lands, Kira Thurman states that whiteness is evident in the response of white German and Austrian audiences to African American musicians performing German Lieder (songs); moreover, whiteness is a listening practice that insists that “the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive,” and that “rendered Blackness alien and foreign, as far removed from German culture as possible” (2021, 5). Naomi André relatedly elaborates on the continuing legacy of white supremacy in opera: “in both the United States and South Africa, the opera stage was closed to Black singers for decades, and there was a strong mechanism in place in both countries, the enactment of painful and legally enforced practices of white supremacy, that segregated these stages” (2018, 4). White supremacy includes the operatic tradition of blackface makeup, where “white singers portray negative stereotypes of Blacks” (3). Speaking of Euro-American classical music in general, Philip Ewell (2023, 75) identifies white supremacy in the “white mythology” of the Euro-American art music canon, a myth used to support “the whole enterprise of white-male exceptionalism” (2023, 75). When read alongside Ewell’s monograph, this chapter makes explicit the aspects of white supremacy underlying the Euro-American art music tradition, particularly Wagner’s adoption of symbols of racial purity from the fields of comparative philology and Indology. Although Friedrich Schlegel had posited a noble Aryan ancestry for the German people already in the early 1800s, it was not until the years leading up to and including the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 that the notion of a white Aryan race gained traction among German nationalists in response to Jewish emancipation (Fredrickson 2002, 76). Following the French occupation of Germany during the Napoleonic Wars, Jews were increasingly granted the rights

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— ​ L i s t e n i n g f o r E p i c S o u n d a n d S e e i n g W h i t e S u p r e m a c y —​ and protections of citizenship, including entry to professions that had previously been denied to them like those in the arts and in the university. This resulted in a backlash against Jews, in which non-Jews claimed to be harmed by their direct competition with Jews. Contemporaneous with the Jewish emancipation movement, German nationalists began preaching a reactionary “blood-based völkisch nationalism,” rejecting modernization and defining the nation along ethnic lines (2002, 69). Such nationalists relied upon Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 1795 treatise De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (On the natural varieties of mankind), which divided humans into five races: Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays. Yet, this division did not allow German racial theorists to exclude Jews from citizenship, so they devised a new theory that specified degrees of whiteness (with white “Aryan” being the “purest”). The notion of a white Aryan race undoubtedly influenced Wagner’s writings from the 1870s onward, along with his musical works. Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism in Music” (revised in 1869) argues that Jews are incapable of genuine artistic and musical expression, since they are without “roots” and a nation of their own.6 In 1876, Wagner met Joseph Arthur Gobineau, whose An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) had a profound effect on him. When Wagner later invited Gobineau to stay at his home in Bayreuth, the two however disagreed on the point of racial “degeneration”—whereas Gobineau saw degeneration as inevitable and irreversible, Wagner believed in racial “redemption” through a divine hero (Deathridge 2007, 73). Following Wagner’s death in 1883, Bayreuth became a site of pilgrimage for white supremacists and right-wing politicians. The Bayreuther Blätter, the house periodical of the Bayreuth Festival, became a leading platform for spreading racist ideas. In 1908, Wagner’s daughter Eva married Houston Steward Chamberlain, whose 1899 book, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The foundations of the nineteenth century, 1912), on Aryan racial theory became something of a textbook for conservative politicians. Later, Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred Wagner invited the young Hitler, a great fan of Wagner, to stay at Bayreuth in 1923, where he received Chamberlain’s blessing. After seizing power in 1933, Hitler frequently visited the Bayreuth Festival as a family guest. In 1939, Hitler instituted the so-called War Festivals for soldiers returning from the front, inviting them to attend performances of Wagner’s operas in Bayreuth. The racist and nationalist ideas outlined above are clearly evident in Wagner’s Ring cycle. Be that as it may, Wagner was not the first to write a Nibelung opera, nor was he the first to use opera as a means to communicate German nationalism. In fact, Wagner was responding to Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s call for a national opera based on the Nibelung subject. Heinrich Dorn beat Wagner to the finish line, when the former completed his opera Die Nibelungen in 1854 (Eichner 2012, 41), but it was Wagner’s Ring cycle that has had more staying power and influence. In keeping with Vischer’s ideas, Wagner saw his Ring cycle as a means to communicate thoughts of German superiority to a broader audience. In doing so, Wagner drew upon and contributed to the racist ideologies that were already present in the esoteric circles of comparative philology, making them accessible to average opera and concertgoers.

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EPIC SOUND AND WHITENESS IN WAGNER’S RING Wagner’s initial engagement with the Nibelung materials is documented in his 1848 prose sketch “Der Nibelungen-Mythus: Als Entwurf zu einem Drama” (“The Nibelungen-Myth: As Sketch for a Drama,” 1898a).7 Here, we find nearly the entire plot of what would become the Ring cycle: Alberich, king of the Nibelungs (“a race spawned […] from the womb of night and death”), seizes “the pure and noble” gold of the Rhine River, and creates from it a powerful ring that makes him ruler of the world (1898a, 301). Wotan and the gods steal the ring from Alberich to pay for a mighty castle, a crime for which they must atone. Only a hero independent of the gods, Siegfried, can free the gods from the ring’s evil spell and return it to the Rhine. Siegfried must die in order to atone for Wotan’s guilt. There is at least one crucial difference between the 1848 sketch and the final version of the Ring: at the end of the 1848 sketch, Siegfried “redeems” Wotan (i.e. he atones for the god’s theft of the ring), and Wotan remains in power and the Nibelungs are released from their captivity, while in the Ring cycle, Wotan is redeemed but nevertheless perishes in order to make way for a new era of human rule. At the time when Wagner wrote this prose sketch, he still conceived of the project as a single opera, with most of the material presented in lengthy narrations. Already evident is that Wagner intended to exclude the entire second half of the original Nibelungenlied epic, focusing instead on the events leading up to and included in the first part. On October 20, 1848, Wagner completed the prose draft of Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s death), which later became Götterdämmerung. Shortly thereafter, Wagner completed his essay “Die Wibelungen,” in which he presents his own philological treatment of the Nibelung materials. He writes: The so-called Indian Caucasus: upon […] these mountains, we have to seek the cradle of the present Asiatic peoples, as also of those who wandered forth to Europe. Here is the ancestral seat of all religions, of every tongue, of all these nations’ Kinghood. ([1849] 1898b, 260) Wagner’s description of a purported “Caucasian” race is an implicit reference to the so-called Aryan invasion theory—the idea that Sanskrit-speaking Aryans from the Caucasus swept down suddenly from the Northwest and dramatically conquered less-civilized, dark-skinned natives, around 1500 BCE. This racialized theory, so conducive to white imperialist aspirations and white supremacy, has since been discredited, with scholarly consensus now aligning with the idea of gradual migrations of Indo-Europeans into the subcontinent over centuries, framed in terms of synthesis rather than rupture, and of other factors having led to the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization (Bryant 2001). In keeping with the Indologists Christian Lassen and Adolf Holtzmann Sr., Wagner argues that the German Volk is the “favored” race within the larger family of the Indo-European people (1898b, 260). This in turn serves as the basis for Wagner’s subsequent narrative that the German Urvolk has “degenerated” as a result of its contact with “Romanic taint,” in particular the Catholic Church (1898b, 262). Wagner 610

— ​ L i s t e n i n g f o r E p i c S o u n d a n d S e e i n g W h i t e S u p r e m a c y —​ refers to Wotan as the “stem-father,” the father of the German people; Siegfried is the “God of Light or Sun-God,” the son of Wotan, who will save the German Volk from its demise (1898b, 263). After moving forward with musical sketches for Siegfrieds Tod in August 1850, Wagner broke off his work after deciding that the libretto included too much narration. He writes in a letter to Theodor Uhlig, dated November 12, 1851: But when I turned to its musical execution […] I felt how incomplete was the product I had planned: all that remained of the vast overall context—which alone can give the characters their enormous, striking significance—was the epic narration and a retelling of events on a purely conceptual level. (1988, 232) Was Wagner opposed to the length of these scenes, or had he become suspicious of epic narration in general? In his 1851 polemical treatise Oper und Drama (Opera and drama), he makes a more basic distinction between epic narration (Erzählung) and dramatic representation (Darstellung): while the former speaks to the mind, the latter appeals to “the senses by physical performance” (Wagner 1893, 119). Yet what Wagner had in mind for the Ring cycle was much more a mixture of the two (Abbate 1991; Foster 2010). He made the narrative scenes as concise as possible and dramatized the act of epic narration itself. In order to present the story’s events as vividly as possible, Wagner determined that he would need to expand his original single opera (Siegfrieds Tod) into four separate operas, here listed in the order that Wagner conceived them: Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the gods); Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), later renamed Siegfried; Die Walküre (The Valkyrie); and Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold). While the librettos were completed by Wagner in reverse order (i.e. beginning with Siegfried’s death), the musical scores were composed in the order that they appear in the completed cycle: Rheingold (1853), Walküre (1854), Siegfried (1856–1871), and Götterdämmerung (1869–1874). Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were performed separately in 1869 and 1870, respectively, and the entire cycle received its premiere in August 1876 at the newly constructed Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the site of the annual Bayreuth Festival. In keeping with the origin paradigm of German comparative philologists of the time, Wagner felt compelled to create his own Urepos from the Nibelung materials. In doing so, he relied on a number of sources in addition to the medieval epic Nibelungenlied: the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the Völsunga Saga, and Thidreks Saga of Bern. The Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Völsunga Saga were compiled in Iceland during the thirteenth century, and Thidreks Saga of Bern was most likely written in thirteenth-century Norway. Consistent with the Grimm brothers’ belief that all Germanic languages (including German and Old Norse) were descended from a single Gothic tongue and people, Wagner approached his sources as variants of a single Urmythos. He also relied on Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsche Heldensage (German legends of heroes) and Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic mythology). A brief discussion of Wagner’s treatment of Wotan in Walküre will serve to show how freely he adapted his sources to serve his own creative needs. Wagner based his Wotan mainly on Wotan-Odin in the Prose Edda, where he is the oldest and most powerful god. But he freely modified the mythology so that 611

— ​ A l e x a n d e r K . R o t h e —​ Wotan rules the world through the power of laws and contracts engraved on his spear. To obtain the spear, Wotan breaks off a branch from the World Ash Tree, resulting in the tree’s death and decay—an invention by Wagner. Although a necessary condition for his power, Wotan’s sin against nature follows him throughout the tetralogy. Wagner also draws upon Jacob Grimm’s description of Wotan as the progenitor of all human beings, as well as being a basic animating force in the universe (Magee 1990, 182). In Wotan’s Monologue in Walküre’s Act 2, Scene 2, Wagner focuses on the god’s internal conflict—Wotan’s conflicting aims of upholding order and serving as a progressive, creative force. Wagner was particularly influenced by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted the world of laws and property as an arbitrary force hindering the expression of love and the dynamic nature of human beings (Millington 2012, 97). Wotan must uphold these laws to remain in power, yet he simultaneously desires the freedom to act freely. At the climax of Wotan’s Monologue, he comes to the realization that he desires the “end” (das Ende)—the end of his rule, which is the twilight of the gods foreseen by the earth goddess Erda. This scene foreshadows Wagner’s subsequent incorporation of ideas from Arthur Schopenhauer’s 1819 The World as Will and Representation (1969). After reading Schopenhauer in 1854, Wagner reinterpreted Wotan’s character as expressing a desire for self-annihilation (Darcy 1993, 52). Wagner even composed an alternative “Schopenhauerian/Buddhist” ending for the final opera, in which he freely mixed Buddhist and Hindu elements—Brünnhilde’s act of self-immolation releases the gods from the cycle of death and rebirth, saṃsāra (Darcy 1994, 5). The alternative Schopenhauerian/Buddhist ending, however, did not make its way into the final version of the Ring cycle. No consideration of Wagner’s use of epic sound would be complete without reference to his theoretical writings on opera and drama. Theorizing in Oper und Drama, Wagner describes narrative poetry negatively as “appealing to the imagination and not the senses.” In contrast, he favors drama because it is “brought before the senses by physical performance” (1893, 119). A similar distinction between narration (Erzählung) and dramatic representation (Darstellung) appears when Wagner is discussing his Ring librettos. In a letter to Theodor Uhlig, dated November 12, 1851, Wagner writes of epic poetry: Now, when I set to work to write out the music in full, […] I felt how incomplete the proposed undertaking would be; the vast train of events […] would be presented to the mind merely by means of epic narrative. (1890, 138) Wagner believed that too much narration of past events would inhibit the emotional impact of Siegfrieds Tod—a belief that was in keeping with his broader understanding of music drama. In a letter to Franz Liszt, dated November 20, 1851, Wagner further explains how he overcame the problem of the epic narrative: I found that I should have to prepare it [Siegfrieds Tod] by another drama [Der junge Siegfried], and therefore took up the long-cherished idea of making the young Siegfried the subject of a poem. In it everything that in Siegfrieds Tod was 612

— ​ L i s t e n i n g f o r E p i c S o u n d a n d S e e i n g W h i t e S u p r e m a c y —​ either narrated or more or less taken for granted was to be shown in bold and vivid outline by means of actual representation. (1897, 170) Wotan’s Monologue is an example of the dramatized epic narration described above. In this scene, Wotan narrates his past life story to his daughter Brünnhilde. He explains that he must abandon his human children, the Wälsungs, and that he is bound by his contract with the giants. At the climax of his narration, he states that Alberich’s son will gain possession of the ring and bring about the twilight of the gods. Wagner uses various literary, compositional, and orchestral techniques to accomplish this heightened form of dramatized epic narration. In the first several measures of Wotan’s Monologue, “Als junger Liebe, Lust mir verblich” (When youthful love’s delights had faded), the god sings in a simple speech-like manner above a single sustained tone in the double basses.8 It sounds as if we are listening to events from the beginning of the world—what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the “absolute past,” a temporally valorized epic past (1981, 15). The ancient epic sound is further highlighted by Wagner’s use of Stabreim, a technique of alliteration and assonance that he adapted from Old Norse poetry. Moreover, Wotan sings in a deep bassbaritone voice, suggesting depth and gravitas, and this is the voice type Wagner frequently uses to depict old, wise, and tragic male figures, like Hans Sachs, the Dutchman, and Amfortas in his other operas.9 The second aspect of the epic sound is the narrating function of the orchestra, which performs leitmotifs that are both separate from and comment on the characters and events on the stage. A leitmotif is a short musical theme associated with a character, object, idea, or place that reoccurs in the music, often in newly transformed musical guises. The main leitmotifs in Wotan’s Monologue are as follows: “Wotan’s Frustration” (a theme featuring a descending scale with a short interrupting turn figure), “Valhalla” (a majestic theme in the brass with dotted rhythms), “Erda/The Norns” (a slowly upward-moving theme in the low strings), and “The Ring” (a descending series of minor thirds in the woodwinds).10 The reappearance of these leitmotifs both tells the story and comments on Wotan’s predicament: Wotan is cursed by the ring, which he stole from Alberich to pay for the splendid hall, Valhalla, and he is frustrated by his inability to forestall Erda’s prophecy of the twilight of the gods. The genealogical formation of language described by German philologists of the time is mirrored at a compositional level by Wagner in his treatment of the leitmotifs. In fact, many leitmotifs that appear in Wotan’s Monologue are derived from two basic leitmotif families: “The Ring” and “The Spear” (Cooke 1995). “The Ring” is associated with Alberich, who renounces love for the ring’s absolute power. “The Spear” is associated with Wotan, who renounces love for the power contained in the spear. In other words, Alberich and Wotan are two different sides of a deeper-lying system: Wotan is the ruler of the “light elves” (Licht-Alben), and Alberich that of the “dark elves” (Schwarz-Alben). Like Christian Lassen’s racialized interpretation of the Mahābhārata, the story told by Wagner’s leitmotifs narrates the history of a primordial racial conflict between two races—where Siegfried is the “redeemer” of the gods and, by extension, of the German people. 613

— ​ A l e x a n d e r K . R o t h e —​ This brings me to my final point: how Wagner contributed to the invention of whiteness and the circulation of the Aryan myth. Although Wagner did not use the term “Aryan” until his so-called “Regeneration Essays” (Religion und Kunst [Religion and art]) in 1880, he was already thinking about a “white race” by the late 1840s. This is evidenced by Wagner’s essay “Die Wibelungen,” where he refers to the German Volk as a chosen people—as the oldest and purest race of the IndoEuropean people (1898b, 259). However, it was not Wagner who came up with the notion of a white Aryan race; rather, he adopted it from contemporaneous comparative philologists—in particular, the Indologists Christian Lassen, and brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel (Benes 2008, 202). By drawing on this philological research and popularizing it through epic opera, Wagner did nevertheless contribute to the circulation of the Aryan myth by presenting it to a broader audience outside the esoteric circles of philology in German research universities.

CONCLUSION: EPIC REVIVAL AND BEYOND In this chapter, I have argued that Wagner’s Ring cycle demonstrates epic sound through its dramatization of the act of narration, the narrating function of the orchestra, and the leitmotifs. All of these features contribute to Wagner’s aim to create not only a national epic, but also an Urepos based on the Nibelung materials. In this respect, Wagner’s project was consistent with the origin paradigm of German comparative philologists who sought to uncover the ethnic and linguistic origins of the Indo-European language family—and, by extension, of the German people. Unlike the philologists who were working in the relatively circumscribed realm of the German university, Wagner sought to communicate the idea of the German people’s ancient pedigree to a much broader audience through epic opera, including in its costuming—thereby playing a significant role in promoting whiteness and white supremacy. A similar sartorial expression of white supremacy was on display in the United States Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, when rioters exhibited costumes and symbols associated with Aryan mythology. A prominent leader of QAnon wore a Viking Horned Helmet, literally invented by Wagner’s costume designer Carl Emil Doepler for the first Ring performance at Bayreuth in 1876. The contribution of Wagner’s epic opera to Aryan myth-making could not be more obvious. Wagner’s use of epic sound also provides us with insights about the Hollywood biblical epics discussed in the introduction. The epic continuity of Wagner’s music—more specifically, the continuous transformation of the leitmotifs—defies the mixed and unstable nature of much modern epic. Wagner the epic storyteller takes various materials, heterogeneous in origin and effect, and stitches them together with such skill and subtlety that the whole seems to suggest a complete world unto itself. Stephen C. Meyer makes a similar argument about epic sound in the Hollywood biblical epic. He adds that rather than seeing music in epic film as a set of stable genre features, we should focus on the function of music and sound in the process of creating the epic quality of a film—how films gesture beyond themselves at larger worlds and all-encompassing realities (2017, xi). This point ties in with my observation that Wagner’s music suggests an absolute past that is

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Figure 42.1  Nineteenth-century Wotan in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1856). Getty Images.

Figure 42.2  Jake Angeli, “QAnon Shaman,” in garb reminiscent of costuming in Wagner’s Ring cycle, protesting Donald Trump’s election loss, in Phoenix, AZ (November 3, 2020). Getty Images.

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— ​ A l e x a n d e r K . R o t h e —​ temporally valorized and sacred—and that within this music no other possibility exists but this epic past. The cinematic epic revival of the 2000s demonstrates the enduring legacy of several key aspects of epic sound. Noting this, Meyer refers to a process of decontextualization in which techniques from biblical films are used in films from the 2000s onward that do not have an explicit biblical theme (2015, 233). For example, in Gladiator, Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard’s track “Honor Him,” which accompanies the hero Maximus’s funeral, conveys a Christian-inflected spirituality through its hymn-like choral setting. Similarly, Howard Shore’s “Rohan Fanfare,” featured on “Théoden King/The Funeral of Théodred” of the soundtrack The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, uses the Dorian mode to suggest the pride and honor of the Rohan family—a technique used by Miklós Rózsa to signify the “Imperial Style” of Rome in Quo Vadis (Rone 2018, 47). As I have shown, a similar process of decontextualization may be applied to the legacy of Wagner’s epic operas. The leitmotif’s legacy in film music has already been examined in great detail (Bribitzer-Stull 2015), as well as that of Wagner’s pantriadic harmonies (Lehman 2018). Yet, there remains an aspect of Wagner’s legacy that remains underexplored: how does epic opera—and musical forms of epic storytelling in general—contribute to the construction of national, ethnic, and linguistic identity through the presentation of origin stories? In this respect, Wagner’s Ring cycle is an illuminating case study of how musical forms of epic storytelling have been used to glorify German nationalism, circulate the Aryan myth, and rationalize white supremacy and European imperialism.11

NOTES   1 According to Stephen C. Meyer, Yul Brynner’s Rameses in The Ten Commandments was a reference to Stalin or Mao, and Charlton Heston’s Moses was a symbol of the United States (2015, 117).   2 For an illuminating discussion of the relationship between Wagner and cinema, see Joe (2010).   3 On the reception of the Nibelungenlied, see Edwards (2010) and Ehrisman (2002).  4 The term Aryan (German “Arier,” French “Ariens”) was adopted in the 1770s by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron to refer to the bards and gods of the Rigveda, as well as the homeland and tribes of early migrants to Iran and northern India (Benes 2008, 201).   5 This translation is by the author.   6 On Wagner’s antisemitism, refer to the in-depth discussion in Vaget (2013).   7 The genesis of Wagner’s Ring cycle is described in Spencer and Millington (1993, 9).   8 My reference to the music of Wagner’s Ring cycle is based on the Schirmer vocal scores, using the following format: opera/page number/system/measure. Wotan’s Monologue begins at Walküre/112/2/1—i.e. five measures before the text.   9 See Franklin (2013) on the similarities of these characters, and their relation to Wagner’s own view of himself. 10 Other leitmotifs that appear in this scene are “The Sword/Wotan’s Great Idea,” “The Curse,” “The Valkyries,” and “The Spear.” My naming of leitmotifs follows “Appendix: Warren Darcy’s Guides to the Themes of the Ring,” in Bribitzer-Stull (2001).

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— ​ L i s t e n i n g f o r E p i c S o u n d a n d S e e i n g W h i t e S u p r e m a c y —​ 11 On racism in opera, a conversation that often arises is the deeply problematic practice of applying blackface makeup. See, for example, Naomi André’s discussion of Verdi’s Otello (2018, 2–6).

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— ​ A l e x a n d e r K . R o t h e —​ Franklin, Peter. 2013. “More Cases of Wagner.” In Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology, edited by Philip Purvis, 121–43. New York: Routledge. Fredrickson, George M. 2002. Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grimm, Jacob. 1813. “Gedanken über Mythos, Epos und Geschichte: Mit Altdeutschen Beispielen.” In Kleinere Schriften von Jacob Grimm, Vierter Band: Recensionen und Vermischte Aufsätze, edited by Jacob Grimm, 74–85. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1975. Aesthetics: Lecturers on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jackson, Peter, Dir. 2001–2003. The Lord of the Rings. Film series. USA. Joe, Jeongwon. 2010. “Why Wagner and Cinema? Tolkien Was Wrong.” In Wagner and Cinema, edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman, 1–24. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kreuzer, Gundula. 2018. Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of NineteenthCentury Opera. Oakland: University of California Press. Lehman, Frank. 2018. Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Magee, Elizabeth. 1990. Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGetchin, Douglas T. 2009. Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Meyer, Stephen C. 2015. Epic Sound: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———, ed. 2017. Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle. New York: Routledge. Millington, Barry. 2012. The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, His Work and His World. New York: Oxford University Press. Paulin, Scott D. 2000. “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity: The Idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the History and Theory of Film Music.” In Music and Cinema, edited by James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, 58–84. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Rone, Vincent. 2018. “Scoring the Familiar and Unfamiliar in Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings.” Music and the Moving Image 11, no. 2: 37–66. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Vol. 2. New York: Dover Publications. Scott, Ridley, dir. 2000. Gladiator. USA. Spencer, Stewart, and Barry Millington, eds. 1993. Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion. New York: Thames and Hudson. Thurman, Kira. 2021. Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vaget, Hans Rudolf. 2013. “Anti-Semitism.” In The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi, 16-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner, Richard. 1848-1874. Der Ring des Nibelungen [opera]. ———. 1890. Richard Wagner’s Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine. Translated by J. S. Shedlock. New York: Scribner and Welford. ———. 1893. Opera and Drama. Vol. 2 of Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, translated by William Ashton Ellis. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. ———. 1897. Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. Translated by Francis Hueffer. London: H. Grevel and Co.

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INDEX

rsr

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures; and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abantu abamnyama lapa bavela ngakona (Fuze) 415 abathakathi (witches) 417, 425–8 Abhinavarāmābhyudaya (Abhiramakamakshi) 234 Abhiramakamakshi: Abhinavarāmābhyudaya 234 Abram/Abraham 94–6, 98 Abu Muslim 207 Achilles 21–2, 25, 60, 62, 65–7, 71, 71n12, 218, 360–2, 385, 486, 515, 548, 592, 595 Acoma War 358–9, 362 Adhyātmarāmāyaṇam (Eluttacchan) 234, 234, 237 Ādirāmāyaṇ 233 Adluri, Vishwa 7 The Adventures of China Iron/Las aventuras de la China Iron (Hernández) 552 Aeneas 493–5 Aeneid (Virgil/Vergel) 15, 31, 33, 36–9, 42, 52, 54, 160–5, 170–1, 291, 358–9, 484–2; destiny 166–8; ecological imperialism 160–71; river Tiber in 162–5 aesthetics 68–70; of description 61 affect: defined 61; in Iliad 61–3 affect studies approach to epic 60–71 African epics see Central African epics; lithoko (praise poems); Iboniamasiboniamanoro/ Ibonia; Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan; West African epics; Zulu epic African Eve 590 African/American (heroic) epic 586–601 Ahmad, Kassim 245–6

Ajitapurāṇaṃ (Ranna) 232 Alai 529, 532–3; As the Dust Settles 529–33, 536–7, 538n6 Albanian epic: family romance in 374–5; gender performance in 369–79; gendered warriors in 369–79; motifs 370–4; origins 370–4; “passing” as performance 375–8; regional contexts 370–4 Albert, Bruce 557 Alecsandri, Vasile 398 Alexander the Great 485 Ali Bey Mihaloglu 385 Alia, Gjergj Elez 370–1, 385 Alou, Tidjani Antoinette 475 Alula, Ras 488 Amazon 565–7 Amazonian destruction 560–1 AmaZulu see Zulu people Amores (Ovid) 161 Anaya, Rudolfo A.: The Sorrows of Young Alfonso 367n1 ancestors: Mande 178; Oghuz 207; Ottoman 208; South Sotho 439; Southeast Asia 258, 264, 269–70 Andaya, Barbara Watson: The Flaming Womb 251 Anderson, Benedict 250–1 Anderson, Poul: The Last Viking trilogy 156 Andes: cultural practice in 327; Inka Empire 337n2; Spanish colonialism in 326–36 Andre, Naomi 608 Andreas 153

620

— ​ I n d e x —​ Angelico Chavez, Franciscan Fray 363 Anglophone imperialism 41 Anglo‑Saxons 146–57; aristocracy 151; culture 153; politics 150 The Anklet (Sreenivasan) 128 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 523 Annals of Cuauhtitlan 340–54; human owls in 341–2, 344–54, 344–5; political sorcery in 342, 344, 354; Quetzalcoatl and tlacatecollo 346–9; sacrifice and trickery in 352; scholarly attention to 340–1; Tezozomoctli as desacralized tlacatecolotl 349–53; and Triple Alliance 340, 342, 354; see also Nahua/Aztec Anthem of the Decades—A Zulu Epic Dedicated to the Women of Africa (Kunene) 416 Anthropocene 48–9, 452, 527–9, 531–2, 536–7, 537n4, 557 anti‑epic(s) 7, 10–11; of China 527–37; as national epic in Argentina 541–53 Antin, Manuel: Don Segundo Sombra 550 Antiqua Literatura Septentrionalis Liber Alter (Wanley) 148 Antony, Mark (Roman general) 37 Apold, Raul Alejandro 549 Apollonius Rhodius 4, 15; Argonautica 4, 15–16, 19–26, 161 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 9 appraisal/praise poems see izibongo (appraisal poems); lithoko (praise poems); praise names Aq Qoyunlu dynasty 205 Arabic epic see Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan The Araucaniad (de Ercilla) 547 Arbousset, Thomas 431 Argentine nationalism 542, 546–7, 550 Argonautica (Apollonius Rhodius) 4, 15–16, 19–26, 161; and critical race studies approach 19–26; and Greek world 19 Ariosto, Ludovico 356, 358; Orlando furioso 8, 356 Aristotle: Poetics 171n3, 586, 590, 602 Armstrong, Terence 510n4 Arnaut Osmani 375 Aryan invasion theory 610 Aryans 40, 606–10, 614–15 Asa, King of Judah 96 Asadi Tusi: Garshāspnāma 217 asceticism 232, 263 Ashoka (Mauryan emperor) 137, 139 Ashvaghosha: Buddhacarita 134 assortativity 77 As the Dust Settles (Alai) 529–33, 536–7, 538n6 Atikal, Ilanko 118; Cilappatikāram 118–30 Aṭṭar of Nishapur: The Conference of the Birds 219 Augustus, Caesar (Roman emperor) 37, 160, 485 Avesta 216, 218–19, 226–7

Avgust chertyrnadtsatova (Solzhenitsyn) 520 Azna people 475–81; see also Sarraounia Aznas, Serkin 476 Aztec see Nahua/Aztec Babylonia 91, 97, 99, 100n1, 104, 107, 109, 113n7 Babylonian Epic of Creation 104 Bacitra nāṭak (Guru Gobind Singh) 233 Bagchee, Joydeep 7 bahale (heroes or warriors) 431 Baīghūttyūly, Q. 506 Bakhtin, Mikhail 4, 516, 520, 590, 601 Balade adunate şi indreptate (Vasile) 398 Balak, Ramchand 232 Balaramadasa: Jagamohanarāmāyaṇa 234 Balkan Christians 396–7 Balkans 212n1, 369–72, 382, 387, 396–9, 408–9 Bamanya town/group 463, 465–6 “Bambani abathakathi!” (Seize the witches!) 426 Bancroft, Hubert H. 365–6 Bangha, Imre 235 Banuelos, Temino de 364 Barreto, Carlos Menna: A Farsa Ianomami 564 Barthelme, Donald 513 Bartholomeusz, Tessa 143 Bascom, William 75 Bastos, Santiago 574 Basutoland 435 The Basutos (Casalis) 433 Battle of Actium 37 Battle of Adwa 488, 495 Battle of Finnsburh 146 Battle of Kosovo 370, 374–5, 398–9, 408 Battle of Marica 399 Batuvantudave, Pandit 141 Bayati, Hasan 207–8, 211 Bede, Venerable 359, 364; Ecclesiastical History of the English People 364 Belgian colonialism see colonialism/imperialism Belgian Congo see Congo; Congolese epic Ben‑Hur (film) 522, 604 Benitez‑Rojo, Antonio 31 Beowulf 76, 78; and epic tradition 151–5; in its literary tradition 149–51; neo‑Beowulfs 155–7; network analysis 81–2; overview 146–8; recovering 148–9; role of female characters in 84 Beowulf: A Musical Epic (Davies and Wylie) 156 Beowulf: A Rock Musical (Pickering and Cole) 156 Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (TV series) 156 Beowulf: The Legend (Knizia and Howe; board game) 156

621

— ​ I n d e x —​ Bergmann, Benjamin von 302 Bernal, Martin: Black Athena 15 Bertho, Elara 476 Beschi, Constanzo 121, 123 Beteja e Kosovës 370 Beyond the Don River (Zadonshchina) 514 Bhabha, Homi 30–1, 38; “The Commitment to Theory” 35; “DessimiNation” 34 Bhagavadgītā 7, 237 bhakti (devotion) 234, 236–7, 239 Bharata dynasty 230 Bhāratamāla 237 Bharatiya Janata Party 41 Bhattikāvyam 259 Bhāvārthrāmāyaṇ (Eknath) 235 Bhim Kavi: Ḍaṅgvaikathā 236 Bian Yuan 302 Bidlisi, Sharaf Khan 208 Biebuyck, Brunhilde 458 Biebuyck, Daniel 460, 466, 467 Biernaczky, Szilard 467n1 Bigger Thomas 593 Binbaş, Evrim 203 al‑Biruni 231 Bjornson, Richard 481 Black Athena (Bernal) 15 Black Panther comics 599 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 33 Blackie, John Stuart 291 Blavatsky, Helena 141 Bloom, Harold 515 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich: De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa 609 Bodhi tree 137 bodhisatta (pre‑Buddha) 134, 139 Bodmer, Johann Jakob 606 Bodrero, Enrico 491–2 Boelaert, Edmond 459, 463, 466 Bohlman, Philip V. 382 bolsonarismo 565 Bondarchuk, Sergei 520, 522, 523 The Book of Dede Korkut 201, 205–6, 209–12, 212n13; see also Oghūznāme (Book of Oghuz) book of Deuteronomy 96 book of Exodus 94, 98, 101n22 book of Genesis 94–6, 98 book of Nehemiah 97 The Book of Oghuz see Oghūznāme (The Book of Oghuz) Book of Origins (Wuwu) 274, 277–8, 527 Borcosque, Carlos: Santos Vega 550 borderlands: Chinese 274–6, 281, 299; Ottoman‑Safavid 208, 210–11; Russian 505, 524 Borges, Jorge Luis 547, 549 Borodin, Alexander: Prince Igor 513

Bose, Mandakranta 235 Bose, Sarika 235 Botta, Paul Emile 104 Bowra, Cecil Maurice 435, 458, 502 Brazil 556–69; Indigenous perspectives 558–60 Brecht, Bertolt 551 British colonialism see colonialism/imperialism British Royal Asiatic Society 106 Brockington, John 230 Brose, Margaret 493 Brown, Adrienne Maree 473 Buchanan, Donna A. 382, 391 Buddha 133–4, 137 Buddhacarita (Ashvaghosha) 134 Buddhism 134, 137–8, 141–3, 258, 278, 286–7 bugarštice (heroic ballads) 384 Bulgarian epic 396 Burkhart, Louise 342 Burnouf, Eugène 140 Busch, Allison 236 Butler, Judith 2, 377 Caesar, Augustus 37 Caesar, Julius 160, 485; De bello civili 485 cakkhavattin (“wheel‑turner,” universal monarch) 139 Caldwell, Robert 124 call‑and‑response 588 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak) 36 Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cross) 92 Canaway, W. H.: The Ring‑Givers 156 Canto generale (Neruda) 38 The Canto of Hongor’s Marriage 306 Cape Colony 417 Capitalocene 536–7, 538n2 Carpentier, Alejo 36 Carthage 486–7, 487, 492–5, and ruins in Aeneid 485–7 Casalis, Eugene 431, 433, 435 Caste War 576–7, 582 Castellini, Gualtiero 490 Castro‑Klaren, Sara 334 Cataiyappan of Tiruvenneynallur 235 cautionary aesthetic, epic 592, 601 Cecilio Chi’: Nen ool k’ajlay (Navarrete) 573, 575–84; see also Maya Central African epics: Congolese 459–60, 463–7; Lianja 464–6; Rwandan 460–3; under colonialism 458–67 centripetal power 444–55; ambiguous 447–51; in twenty‑first century 453–4 Cervantes, Miguel de 363–4 ceyyuḷ (poetic genre) 121 Chadwick, Hector Munro 458 Chadwick, Nora 458 Chamuscado, Francisco Sanchez 361

622

— ​ I n d e x —​ Chanoine, Julien 475 Chaoskampf (motif, “struggle against chaos”) 108–9 Chatillon, Walter de 485 Chauhan, Sabalsingh 241n4; Mahābhārat 238–9 Chavkin, Rachel 520 Chen Duansheng 279 Chichikov, Pavel 514 Chichimeca 340–2, 347, 353–4, 357 Chinese epic 272–81; anti‑epics 527–37; “epic‑adjacent” speaking and singing traditions 278–80; and idea of epic 273–5; Jangar 274–6, 280, 299–310; northern heroic 275–6, 281n4; southwestern/southern creation 276–8, 281n4 Chinese Folk Artists Association 280 Chopra, B. R. Mahabharat 39–40 Chumayel 584n4 Cilappatikāram (Atikal) 118–30; colonial era reintroduction of 123–4; narrative, structure, and style of 119–21; and political movements 124–7; premodern text and reception 121–2; telling/retelling story 128–30 Citizenship Amendment Act of India 240 Clark, Katerina 520 Classics/classics 3–4, 15, 140, 279, 459, 587 Clear/Tod script 301–3 Clerice, Carlos 544 Clines, Gregory M. 232 clustering coefficient 76–77, 79–81 Cobo Report (UN Report on Indigenous Populations) 528 Cockburn, Alexander 558 Codex Chimalpopoca 341 Collins, Steven 134, 136 Collins, William A. 266 colonial odyssey 31–4, 37 colonial “witches” 424–5 colonialism/imperialism 4, 7, 10, 31–2, 39–40, 47, 50–1, 56–7, 170–1; Belgian 459–61, 63, 65–6; British 39; Dutch 417, 423, 426; German 459, 461, 465; Italian 484–95, Persian 97; Russian 499–505, 515; Spanish 326–36 The Combat of Rustam and Kamus 227 “The Commitment to Theory” (Bhabha) 35 community detection 86 complex network 74, 77 complex system 74–5 The Conference of the Birds (Attar) 219 Congo 459–60, 463–7, 467n7 Congolese epic 459–60, 463–7; colonial interpretations of 463–6 Conquest of the Desert 541 Conrad, David C. 587 Conrad, Joseph 527; Lord Jim 527, 531 Constantinopoleos (Puscolo) 485 contrapuntal reading 33, 38–9, 42

Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 293, 309 Cordignano, Fulvio 372 Cornwell, Bernard: The Saxon Stories 156 Corradini, Enrico 490 Cortés, Hernando 575 Coupez, Andre 460, 463 Cowley, Abraham: Davideis 51 Creole/creole 357, 361, 363–6, 367n11, 580–1 Crichton, Michael: Eaters of the Dead 156 critical race studies approach to epic 15–27 Cross, Frank Moore: Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic 92 Crossland, Zoe 451–2 Crossley‑Holland, Kevin 78 Cruz, Sergeant 544 Cūḷavaṃsa (“lesser vaṃsa”) 139 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 33 Cumes, Aura 574 Cust, Robert Needham 490 Dahle, Lars 446–7, 449 Damane, Mosebi 431–2, 435, 441 dāna (generosity) 134 Dang Merdu 248 Ḍaṅgvaikathā (Bhim Kavi) 236 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 490 Dante 32; The Divine Comedy 37; Inferno 32, 42 Daqiqi, Abu Mansur 216 Das Marchen im alten Testament (Gunkel) 108 Dasam granth (Guru Gobind Singh) 233 Dasaratha jātaka 231 Davenant, William: Gondibert 51 David, King of Israel 98 Davideis (Cowley) 51 Davids, T. W. Rhys 141 Davies, Andrew: War and Peace (TV serial) 520 Davies, John: War and Peace (TV serial) 520 Davis, Thadious M. 71n10 Dawi, Enrique: La vuelta de Martín Fierro 550 De bello civili (Caesar) 485 De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (Blumenbach) 609 De Giglio, A. M. 492 Dead Souls (Gogol) 514 Dede Korkut see The Book of Dede Korkut DeMille, Cecil B.: The Ten Commandments 99, 604, 606n1 democracy 341, 461, 477, 556–7, 568, 592 Der Ring des Nibelungen/Ring cycle (Wagner) 604–16; and biblical films 604–5, 616; epic ideologies in 605–7; epic sound and whiteness in 610–14; epic theories and whiteness in 607–9 “DessimiNation” (Bhabha) 34 Deuteronomistic History 96

623

— ​ I n d e x —​ Devanampiyatissa (Buddhist king) 137 DeVotta, Neil 141–2 Devy, G. N. 41 dhamma (Buddhist teachings) 138 Dhammasoka (Buddhist king) 137 dharma (righteous duty) 40 Dharmawangsa (Dharmaraja or Yudhishthira) 263–4, 270n3 Dhritarashtra (Kaurava king) 40–1 Diaosou, Huangjiang: Tales of the Moon Colony 527, 531 Diaz del Castillo, Bernal 364 Dido, Queen of Carthage 493–5 Digenes Akritas 372 Dikshitar, Ramachandra 126 Dillery, John 195 Dimock, Wai Chee 590 Dīpavaṃsa 134–6 Divaev, Ăbubăkīr 499 Divina commedia see The Divine Comedy The Divine Comedy (Dante) 8, 37 Doctor Zhivago 520, 522 Dondrup, Tsering 536 Do the Right Thing (Lee) 586–601 594, 600; racial protest in 586, 589–90, 593–4; racial slur montage in 593; reading‑script 595–8; stream of dialogue 599 Don Segundo Sombra (Antin) 550 double narratives in India 232, 237 Douglas, Mary 451 Doyle, Michael 396 “Draupadi” (Spivak) 39 Dravidian movement and the Rāmāyaṇa 11n1 Driscoll, Mark 531 Dube, Langalibalele: Insila ka Tshaka 415 Du/Do see Kingdom of Du/Do duma (“meditation”) 382, 388, 390–1 Dumezil, Georges 4 dumy (singer) 384, 386–7, 389, 393, 393n1 Duncan, Ian 151 Dungarendra Singh of Gwalior 235, 237 Dutch colonialism see colonialism/imperialism Dutthagamani (Buddhist prince) 138–9 Eaters of the Dead (Crichton) 156 Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede) 364 Eclogues (Virgil/Vergel) 161 ecocritical approach to epic 45–58 ecocriticism 45–58, 160–71, 527–37; ecocritical perspective, theories 162; and environmental justice 47–9 ecology: defined 54; ecological language 46; of violence 50–3 Eela Ovla 302

Egyptian mythology: “The Contendings of Horus and Seth” 191; “Seth and Apopis” 197; Nut 193–4; Osiris 197–8; see also Prophetic Königsnovelle Eknath 235 El cantar de mio Cid 8 Elara (Chola king) 138 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 51 Ellenberger, D. Frederic 436 Elsie, Robert 371 Eluttacchan 234, 237, 239; Adhyātmarāmāyaṇam 234, 237 emergent properties 74–5 Emir of Sokoto 478 Emperor Shaka the Great (Kunene) 415–25, 427–8 English civil wars 58n1 English epic, early modern 46 Enuma elish 104–6, 109–12 environmental justice 47–9 epic(s): defined 1–2; power in 1–3, 6–10, 17; power to theorize 3–4; and social‑justice frameworks 6; status of 5–6; written, status of 5–6; see also national epics; oral epics; written epics; titles of specific epics epic allegorye 589, 591, 593–4 epic film 2, 4, 10, 11n5, 99, 101n24, 127, 138, 155–7, 240, 324, 481–2, 520, 522–4, 549–52, 586–601, 604, 606n1, 614 Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (Okpewho) 587 epic letter/epistolatory epic 326–6 epic novel/novel‑epic 4, 10, 130, 155–6, 512–13, 515–20, 473, 475–81, 524, 593 The Epic of Hang Tuah see Hikayat Hang Tuah epic opera: Der Ring des Nibelungen/Ring cycle (Wagner) 604–16; Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (Malloy) 520–1, 523–4; Prince Igor (Borodin) 513; War and Peace (Prokofiev) 513, 520–4 epic performance: Chinese 279–81; Do the Right Thing 586–7, 589–90, 601; Jangar 300, 302–10; Slavic 383–5, 389–92; South Sotho lithoko 430–42; Southeast Asian 270; Zulu izibongo 418–19; see also oral epics; singer(s) of epic epic TV serial/series 39–40, 156, 520, 522–4 epic‑adjacent works 8; in China 272, 275, 278–81 epical realism 592–3, 599 Epic and Empire (Quint) 11n8, 37–38, 485 Ercilla, Alonso de: The Araucaniad 547 Ercilla y Zuniga, Alonso 356, 358 Errapragada: Mahābhāratamu 237 Esquit, Edgar 574 Esser, Joseph 460 Estrada, Ezequiel Martinez 547, 549 ethnic minorities in China 272–81; 527–37

624

— ​ I n d e x —​ Euro‑America: defined 11n2 European colonialism see colonialism/imperialism European Renaissance 47, 49, 54 Evelyn, John 52 Evliya Celebi 208–10 Ewell, Philip 608 Facundo (Sarmiento) 542, 549 Fadeev, Alexander 519 The Faerie Queene (Spenser) 46, 54–7 Fakoli Dumbiya 181 The Falling Sky (Kopenawa) 557, 559, 561 Fanon, Frantz 31, 33–4, 38; Black Skin, White Masks 33; and revolutionary literature 31; The Wretched of the Earth 31, 32 Farāmarznāma 217 A Farsa Ianomami (Barreto) 564 fascist imperialism 490–3 Fatimja e bardhe I del ne mejdan Uroshit 375, 378 Faulkner, Mississippi (Glissant) 35 Faulkner, William 35–6 Favio, Leonardo: Juan Moreira 550 Fedele, Pietro 490–1 Felipe de Guaman Poma de Ayala see Guaman Poma femininity: in Malagasy epic 444–55; in Slavic epic 392–3; in West African epics 471–82; see also gender; women Ferdowsi/Firdausi, Abulqasim: Shāhnāma/ Shāhnāmeh 203–4, 212n6, 212n8, 215–27 Fields, Barbara 15–16, 18 Fields, Karen 15–16, 18 Figes, Orlando 518 Filelfo, Gian Mario 485 “Fight the Power” (Public Enemy) 588, 593, 600, 602n4, 602n9 film music: in biblical films 604–5, 614, 616; in Do the Right Thing 588, 594, 599 Finnegan, Ruth 458, 466; Oral Literature in Africa 458 Fishta, Gjergj 370 Fjuljanin, Alija 390 The Flaming Womb (Andaya) 251 Fleischer, Richard: The Vikings 156 Flood, Finbarr B. 231 Foley, John Miles 6, 104, 386 “folk” epics 5 folklore 107, 176, 277, 294 Foucault, Michel 2, 30, 39, 448; Discipline and Punish 30; pouvoir and savoir 30, 39 Francisco Pimentel 366 Francke, August Hermann 292 Francophone studies 15 freedom 31, 36, 99, 142, 148–9, 307, 341, 378–9, 398, 409, 425, 449 Freeman, Rich 234

freestyle rhymes 306 French colonialism see colonialism/imperialism French Revolution 374 Frobenius, Leo 465 Frye, Northrop 590 Funaioli, Gino 492 Furukawa, Hideo 324 Fuze, Magema: Abantu abamnyama lapa bavela ngakona 415 Gajah Mada 252–3 Gandhari (Kaurava queen) 2 Gandhi, Supriya 233 Gardner, John: Grendel 156 Garrard, Greg 48 Garshāspnāma (Asadi Tusi) 217 Gattungsgeschichte (Form Criticism) 107 gauchipoliticos (gauchipoliticians) 543 Geiger, Wilhelm 134, 139–40 gender: in Albanian epic poetry 369–79; in epic narratives 76; and Guaman Poma 334–5; in Malagasy epic 444–55; in Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan 191; see also femininity; masculinity; women Genghis Khan see Khan, Chinggis Genpei War 313–17, 320–3 Georgics (Virgil/Vergel) 161 German colonialism see colonialism/imperialism German nationalism 605, 608–9 German Romanticism 291, 293 Gerrard, Lisa 616 Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso) 356 Gesar 1, 299, 301–2; 287–8, 288; as cultural product 293, 295; as de‑nationalizing national epic 290–2; in global context 292–3; introduction to 286–90; as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage 293–5 Gilgamesh Epic/The Epic of Gilgamesh 1, 104–12, 274 Gjeçovi, Franciscan Shtjefen: Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit 372 Gladiator (Scott) 605, 616 Glinka, Mikhail: A Life for the Tsar 521 Glissant, Edouard 31, 35–6; Faulkner, Mississippi 35; Les Indes 38 glorification 3, 40, 234, 449, 548 Glotfelty, Cheryll 48 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur 609 Gogol, Nikolai 514, 517; Dead Souls 514 Gomara, Francisco Lopez de 364 Gombrich, Richard 143 Gondibert (Davenant) 51 Gonzalez Obregon, Luis 366 Gorky, Maxim 515 Go‑Shirakawa, Emperor of Japan 313 Gould, Rebecca Ruth 509

625

— ​ I n d e x —​ Graeber, David 341, 346, 354 Gramsci, Antonio 2 graph theory 74 The Great Perfection of Hell 289 Great Trek 417 Greek epic 62, 71n12, 161, 170; see also Iliad (Homer); Odyssey (Homer) Grendel (Gardner) 156 Grimm, Jacob 291, 607–8, 611–12 griot see jɛli/jɛliw Grixti, Joe 155 Grossman, Vasily: Za pravoe delo 520; Zhizn’ i sud’ba 520 Guajajara, Sonia 567 Guaman Poma 326–36; epic letter/epistolatory epic 326–36; and gender 334–5; and “good government” 332–4; and his manuscript 328–9; as protagonist 331–2; and sexuality 334–5; Spanish dominance, challenging 332–4; his work as biblical epic 330–1 Gunkel, Hermann 107–8; Das Marchen im alten Testament 108; Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit 108 gunkimono aesthetics 43 Guo Xuebo: Moŋgoliya 533–6 Guru Gobind Singh 233 Guru Nanak 233 guslari (singers) 383–5, 387 Guthlac 153 Guzman, Antonio de Saavedra 366 Haarder, Andreas 148 Hadji Murad (Tolstoy) 515 Hagar, Egyptian maidservant 95–6 Haider, Najaf 233 Halili 370–1, 374–5, 377–8, 385 Halili e merr Begzaden e bardhe (song) 373, 377 Halili e merr Dylberen e Krajlit te Talirit (song) 374 Halley, Edmond 578 Hamilton, Michelle 34 Hamitic myth 459–63 Hamzah Fansuri 246, 256n9 Han Chinese tourism 294 Hang Jebat 255 Hang Mahmud 248 Hang Tuah 248–55 Hanne, Michael 493 Harambashi, Gjura 375 Harambashi, Paji 375 Haraway, Donna: Staying with the Trouble 452 Haring, Lee 445, 449 Harivaṃsapurāṇa (Punnata) 232 Haslund‑Christensen, Henning: Men and Gods in Mongolia 534 Hausa people 475, 478

Headley, Maria Dahvana: The Mere‑Wife 156 Heath, Peter 198 Hebrew Bible 11n7, 91–100; book of Deuteronomy 96; book of Exodus 94, 98, 101n22; book of Genesis 94–6, 98; book of Nehemiah 97; epic and identity 96–9; overview 93; Primary History and its sources 94–6 Hecht, Susanna 558 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G. W. F.) 5, 230, 605; The Philosophy of History 5 Heissig, Walther 306 Hell, Julia 486 Heorot series (Niven) 156 Hernández, José 542–6, 549–50; Martín Fierro 542 Hikayat Hang Tuah 245–55; “brilliant” women and “desexed” trickster 250–5; narrative strands of 248–50; text, contents, structures r246–8 Hikayat Seri Rama 261 Hill, McKinley: True Confessions of a Dumpster Diver, or, Faster thru the Biofractal 156 Hincks, Edward 106 Hindu poets: Mahabharatas by 236–9; Ramayanas by 234–6 Hispanic epic 356; see also Spanish‑American epic Historia de la nueva Mexico (Villagrá) 357–66; critical appropriations of 365–6; deviation from traditional epic models 360–2; epic conventions in 358–60; ideological and political significance of 362–5 Historia general de las Indias (Francisco Lopez) 364 Historia verdadera de la Nueva Espana (Diaz del Castillo) 364 History of Ceylon (Perera) 134 Hmong epic see Miao/Hmong epic Hoffman, Barbara G. 181–2 Holtzmann, Adolf, Jr. 606 Holtzmann, Adolf, Sr. 606, 610 Homer 99, 170, 291, 359, 361–2; Iliad (see Iliad); Odyssey 6, 15, 17, 19–21, 52, 91, 105, 230–1, 359, 389, 586 Homestead Acts of 1862–1916 541 Honggu’er (Bian) 302 Honko, Lauri: Textualization of Oral Epics 275 Honoratus, Maurus Servius 166 Hrushevsky, Mykhailo 384, 386 Hu Shi 273 Huemac (Toltec ruler) 349, 355n7 huey toltecatl (“great craftsman”) 346 Hulstaert, Gustaaf 459, 463, 465, 466 Hundu Gartai Sabur (canto of Jangar) 306–7 Hunt, Lynn 374 Hushang Shah (Sultan of Malwa) 235 Hutchinson, Lucy: Order and Disorder 51

626

— ​ I n d e x —​ Hutu people 461–2; see also Rwanda; Rwandan epic Hylli i dritës (journal) 370, 376 Ibn al‑Dawadari (historian) 203, 211 Iboniamasiboniamanoro/Ibonia 444–55; centripetal power in 447–51, 453–4; contours, history of 445–7; inheritance in 451–2; sovereignty in 448–51; terms for epic 445; two variants of 444 Igor, Sviatoslavich, Prince of Novgorod‑ Seversk 513 Ikja e Hajkunës (song) 375 Iliad (Homer) 6, 15, 19, 21, 35, 45, 52, 76, 78, 86, 91, 105, 161, 170, 230–1, 291, 362; affect and genre in 61–3; and irritation 64–7; network analysis 79–83, 80; non‑normative masculinities in 60–71; Paris’ aesthetics in 68–70; Paris’ rage 62–3; role of female characters in 83–4, 84; see also Achilles Illustrazione italiana (journal) 491–2 imperialism: Anglophone 41; ecological 160–71; see also colonialism/imperialism imported epics in Southeast Asia 257–70 Inden, Ronald 138 Indian epics 2, 5–6, 11n1, 39, 41–2; 258, 264–6; Cilappatikāram 118–30; and Hindu nationalists 240; premodern Ramayanas and Mahabharatas 230–40; see also Mahābhārata (Vyasa); Rāmāyaṇa (Valmiki) Indigenous epics in Southeast Asia 257–70 Indigenous peoples: in Argentina 541, 543–5, 547, 553n2–3; in Brazil 556–69; in China 527–37; Inka 326–36; Maya 573–84; Nahua/ Aztec 340–54; in Russia 515; see also ethnic minorities in China Indo‑European(s) 4, 106, 218, 393n1, 601, 605–7, 610, 614 Indonesian epic see Southeast Asian epics Inferno (Dante) 32, 42 injustice: hermeneutical 18; testimonial 18 Inner Asia: Oghuz exodus from 206–10; pre‑Islamic setting in 202; Turkic 206 Insila ka Tshaka (Dube) 415 Institute of Albanology of Pristina, Kosovo 370 Institute of Folk Culture in Tirana, Albania 370 Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) 277, 280, 285–6, 293–5, 299, 309, 371 Inter‑governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 568 International Institute of the Hylean Amazon (IIHA) 566 Irāmāvatāram (Kampan) 235, 239 Isfandiar (Persian prince) 215–16, 218–27 222, 224–5

isiZulu see Zulu language (isiZulu) Islam 32, 189, 191–3, 202, 206, 208–9, 387–8, 398–9, 404, 477–8, 505, 509 Israel 91–4, 96–8, 100, 100n2, 100n3, 100n5, 100n12, 459 Italian colonialism see colonialism/imperialism itihas/itihāsa 43, 134 Ivanovich, Dmitri, Prince of Russia 514 izibongo (appraisal poems) 418–19; see also lithoko (praise poems); praise names izinkonjane (swallows) 417, 424–5 Jackson, Peter: The Lord of the Rings film series 605, 616 Jackson, Michael 181 Jagamohanarāmāyaṇa (Balaramadasa) 234 Jaiminibhārata 237 Jainism 232 Jake Angeli 615 Jalayirid dynasty 226 James, Henry 513 Jangar 274–6, 280, 299–310; audiences for 304–5; as cultural brand and inheritance 308–10; dating and documentation of 301–3; Jangarchi (singers) 304–5, 309; performance of 304–5; “ring composition” and poetics in 306–7; and time/space in mythical setting 307–8 Jangarchi (singers) 304–5, 309 Japanese epic see The Tale of the Heike Japheth (son of Noah) 201, 204 jātakas (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives) 134 Jayalalitha, J. (Indian politician) 127 Jayawardene, J. R. 141–2 Jefferson, Thomas: Notes of the State of Virginia 17 jeli see jɛli jɛli/jɛliw (griot/griots) 176–7, 180–6, 587–9 jɛlikan/jɛlikanw (jɛli language) 180–6; example of 183–5 Jigme Wangchuck (Bhutanese king) 292 Jinadas 241n4; Rām rās 232 Joan d’Arc (patron saint of France) 377 Johansson, Patrick 349 Johnson, Alexander 140 Johnson, James Weldon (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) 588 Johnson, John William 601 Joshi, M. R. 237 Josiah, King of Judah 96 Juan Moreira (Favio) 550 Juki, Muhammad (Timurid prince) 223 Jupiter (Roman god) 160–1, 166, 169–70; Jupiter Optimus Maximus temple 170 Justice Party 125 kabuki dance‑drama 322–3 Kadare, Ismail 371

627

— ​ I n d e x —​ Kagamé, Alexis 462–3, 466 Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa 258–9 Kalevala (Lönnrot) 35, 291, 369–70 Kamanzi, Thomas 460 Kampan 124, 235, 239; Irāmāvatāram 235, 239 Kandasamy, Meena 128 Kanehira, Imai 317 Kângë Kreshnikësh (songs) 369–71, 374, 378 Kanku Musa 176 Kannaki’s Anklet (Patel) 130 Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit (Gjeçovi) 372 kāppiyam (poetic genre) 121 Karadžić, Vuk: Serbian Folk Songs 385 karma 40, 119, 121–2 Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmanjarī (Kumaravyasa) 237 Karunanidhi, M. (Indian politician) 127 Katchadjian, Pablo 552 Kauravas (Mahabharata family/lineage) 39, 230, 232 kavya (Indian courtly literature) 43; and poetics 30 Kazakh epic 498–510; oral literature 502–5; and political autonomy 503 Kazakhstan 212n1, 498–500, 502–3, 505–6, 510n6 Kedjou, Sogolon 472 Kedourie, Elie 143 Kemper, Steven 143 Keshavdas: Rāmcandracandrikā 236 Keshavmurthy, Prashant 233 Khan, Abu’l‑Ghazi Bahadur 211 Khan, Abulkhair 502–3 Khan, Abylaĭ 503, 505 Khan, Altan 301 Khan, Batu 308 Khan, Bayandur 205, 208 Khan, Chinggis (Genghis Khan) 301–2, 308, 499, 500, 535 Khan, Hulagu 209–10 Khan, Jangar 299–301, 306, 310 Khan, Kublai 308 Khan, Kuchum 500–1 Khan, Oghuz see Oghūznāme (Book of Oghuz) Khan, Qara 202 Khan, Sharaf 208 Khati, Thekiso 431, 442n2 khotla (court) 436 Khozhenie po mukam (Tolstoy) 520 Khrushchev, Nikita 522 Khuddaka nikāya 134 Kichikov, Anatoliĭ Shalkhakovich 302 King Asa of Judah 96 Kingdom of Du/Do 592 Kingdom of Lesotho 430, 435, 441 Kinsella, Thomas 78 Kishka, Samiilo 388 kobzari (singer) 384

Kolawole, Mary E. Modupe 472 Koliqi, Ernest 371, 376 Konate Deme, Mariam 418–9 Koolhof, Sirtjo 265–6 Kopenawa, Davi 557–60; The Falling Sky 557, 559, 561 Koskikallio, Petteri 237 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) 371 Kotvicha, V. L. 302 Kōvalaṉ katai 124 Kriel, J. D. 438, 442n12 Krieter‑Spiro, Martha 69 Krishna/Kr̥ ṣṇa (Hindu god) 2, 39–40, 237 Kristian, Giles: Raven 156 Kritovoulos, Michael 486 Krittibasa: Rāmāyaṇa 234 Kr̥ ṣṇa see Krishna/Kr̥ ṣṇa (Hindu god) Krushqit jane te ngrire (Kadare) 371 Kubitschek, Juscelino 561 Kudaman 268 Kumagai Naozane 318–21, 323–4 Kumaratunga, Chandrika Bandaranaike 142 Kumaravyasa 237–9; Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 237 Kunene, Daniel 431–3, 436 Kunene, Mathobo 416–17 Kunene, Mazisi 415–28, 428n1; Anthem of the Decades—A Zulu Epic Dedicated to the Women of Africa 416; Emperor Shaka the Great 415–25, 427–8; and University of KwaZulu Natal 416 Kuṇṭalakēci 121, 131n6 Kuragin, Anatole 521 Kurti, Donat: Visaret e Kombit 370 Kutuzov, Mikhail 521 Kuxlejal Politics (Mora) 576 La Araucana (Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga) 356 La Difesa della razza 492 La Galigo 1, 265–6 La terra promessa (Ungaretti) 484 La vuelta de Martín Fierro (Dawi) 550 Larsen, Nella: Quicksand 60, 62–4 Las aventuras de la China Iron/The Adventures of China Iron (Hernández) 552 Lassen, Christian 610 The Last Kingdom (TV series) 156 The Last Viking trilogy (Anderson) 156 Latin epic 161, 170, 485, 493, 496n8; see also Aeneid Laxdala Saga 76, 78, 86; network analysis 81–3; role of female characters in 83–5, 84 Layard, Austen Henry 104, 106 Leal, Luis 366 Lee, Spike: Do the Right Thing 586–9, 594, 601 lelingoana la macha (ceremony) 437

628

— ​ I n d e x —​ Leopold II, King of Belgium 465 Les Indes (Glissant) 38 Lesotho see Kingdom of Lesotho Ley, Julius: Zur Charakteristik der altdeutschen Heldendichtung 291 Lianja 464–6 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 142 Libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel 578 A Life for the Tsar (Glinka) 521 “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (James Weldon Johnson) 588 Lincoln, Abraham 576 lineage: Aq Qoyunlu sultans 208; Hutu people 461; Oghuz Khan 205; Persian kings 226 Lithiko tsa marena a Basotho (Mangoaela) 431 lithoko (praise poems) 430–42, 442n1; contemporary contexts in South Sotho 435–7; historical contexts 431–5; initiation into adulthood 437–41; naming eulogues 433; performative context of 432; types of 431; see also izibongo (appraisal poems); praise names lithoko tsa bahale (poems of warriors) 431 lithoko tsa makoloane (poems of male initiates) 431 lithoko tsa marena (poems of chiefs and kings) 431 A Little History of Literature (Sutherland) 290 Living Human Treasures 294 Lönnrot, Elias: Kalevala 35, 291, 369–70 Lord, Albert B. 5–6, 371, 382, 386, 389, 399, 458; Singer of Tales 6, 105, 384, 390, 393n3, 393n8, 409 Lord Jim (Conrad) 527, 531 The Lord of the Rings film series (Jackson) 605, 616 The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) 76, 78–9, 82–6 Los hijos de Fierro (Solanas) 550–1, 551 Lothspeich, Pamela 91, 240, 275, 527 A Lower Ladakhi Version of the Kesar Saga (Francke) 292 Lucan 52, 359, 485; Pharsalia 8, 52, 359 Luchembe, Chipasha 415 Lugones, Leopoldo 546 Lukács, György 4, 516–17, 520 Ma Xueliang 303 Macedo‑Bulgarian epic 399–403 Macedonian epic 396 Madagascar 444–6, 448–50, 454 Madhava Kandali: Rāmāyaṇa 234, 236 Maecenas, G. Cilnius 160 Mahabharat (Chopra; TV serial) 39–40 Mahābhārat (Sabalsingh Chauhan) 238–9 Mahābhārata (Vyasa) 1–2, 5, 7, 32, 36, 118, 133, 230–3, 236–9, 606–7 Mahābhāratamu (Nannaya, Tikkana, and Errapragada) 237

Mahabharatas: by Hindu poets 236–9; by Jain, Muslim, and Sikh poets 231–4; in Southeast Asia 262–5 mahākāvya (long or great poem) 134, 235 Mahanama (Buddhist monk) 133, 139 Maharaja Gemunu (film) 138 Mahāvaṃsa 133–44; colonial and nationalist interests in 139–43; epic source 135; epic story 136–8; ideologies in 138–9; oral/aural origins 135–6; power structures in 138–9; situating against local epics 133–5 Mahāvaṃsa, nūtana yugaya 141–2 Mahinda (missionary monk) 137 Maichi family 530, 531–2 makoloane (male initiates) 431, 439 Malagasy epic see Iboniamasiboniamanoro/ Ibonia Malay epic 257–70; see also Southeast Asian epics Mali Empire 175, 177–8 Malian epic see Sunjata fasa Malloy, Dave 520; Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 520–1, 523 Malu, Flavien Nkay 465 Mamani, Abdoulaye 473, 475–81; Sarraounia: Le drame de la Reine Magicienne 473, 475 Manas 1, 275–6, 280, 299 Mande Charter 179, 181 Mande epic see Sunjata fasa Mande people 177–183, 85; see also Sunjata fasa Mangoaela, Z. D.: Lithiko tsa marena a Basotho 431 Maṇimēkalai 121–2, 124, 131n6, 131n9 Mansa Musa (Malian ruler) 176 Mansa Sakura (Malian ruler) 176 Marchesi, Concetto 492 marco temporal (temporal framework) 568 Marko (Serbian prince) 386–8, 390–3, 393n7, 397, 399–404, 408–9, 410n6, 410n7 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 36 Marshall, Marshall 156 Martín Fierro (Hernández) 542–6; demythologizing 547–9; on screen 549–51; in the twenty‑first century 552 Martín Fierro: La pelicula 552 Martin, George R. R.: A Song of Ice and Fire 76, 79, 156 Martin, Richard 62 Martinez Estrada, Ezequiel 548 Marxism 31 Masakazu, Yamazaki 324 masculinity: in Albanian epic 369, 376–7; in Beowulf 155; in Gesar 287; hegemonic 2–3; hyper‑masculinity 599; in Malagasy epic 444–55; non‑normative in Iliad 60–71; in Slavic epic 392–3; see also gender Masilela, Ntongela 417

629

— ​ I n d e x —​ mas̱ navī (poetic genre) 203, 233 Mas̱ navī‑yi Rām va Sītā 233 Massumi, Brian 61 Mateene, Kahombo C. 460, 466, 467 May Fourth Movement 273, 276 Maya 573–84; and colonial matrix, Eurocentrism, racism 573; Indigenous literatures as counter‑discourses 573–5; recovering written forms 573–4; see also Cecilio Chi’: Nen óol k’ajlay (Navarrete) Mazisi Kunene Foundations and Museum (MKFM) 416 Mbaki, Thabo 427 Mbele, Joseph 471–3 Mbembe, Achille 31 McCann, Anthony 294 McColley, Diane Kelsey 46 McGregor, Ronald Stuart 236 McLaren, Anne 275 McTiernan, John: The 13th Warrior 156 Melaka/Melaka Sultanate 245–55, 256n8 Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad (Oswald) 60 Men and Gods in Mongolia (Haslund‑Christensen) 534 The Mere‑Wife (Headley) 156 Mesoamerica 340–54, 573–84 Mesoamerican epics see Annals of Cuauhtitlan; Cecilio Chi’: Nen ool k’ajlay (Navarrete); Popol Vuh Mesopotamia 94, 104–12, 113n4, 113n8, 113n11–13, 113n17–19, 114n27, 461 Mesopotamian epic 104– 12; characters and narrative structures 109–12; colonial discoveries and reception of 106–9; defining 104–6; see also Enuma elish; Gilgamesh Epic/ The Epic of Gilgamesh Metamorphoses (Ovid) 161 Miao/Hmong epic 277–8 Michael, Prince of Wallachia 386 migration(s): Aryan 610; Changizid 209–10; Oghuz Turk 207–9; Turkmen 209 Mikhaĭlov, Georgiĭ Ivanovich 302 Milgram, Stanley 76 Milosh Kopiliq (Albanian knight) 370 Milton, John 7; Paradise Lost 7, 37, 45–6, 50–3 Ming dynasty 275, 529 Mirkhvand: Rawżat al‑safā 202 Misra, Bijoy 237 Moby‑Dick 8 modernization: Albanian epic resilience to 369; the Amazon 561; Mesoamerica 341 Molla: Rāmāyaṇam 234 Monegal, Emilio Rodriguez 549 Mongo‑Mboussa, Boniface 458 Mongo people 459–60, 463–6

Mongolian epic see Gesar; Jangar Monius, Anne 122–3 Monsacre, Helene 68 Moŋgoliya (Guo) 533–6 Mora, Mariana: Kuxlejal Politics 576 Morgan, Henry Louis 458 Morrison, Toni 36 Morton, Timothy 538n4 Mossé people 473–5; see also Yennenga Mostowfi, Hamdollah 202–4 Muhammad, Fariduddin 219 Muji te Mbreti (song) 374 Mujo 371, 374–5, 378–9, 385–6, 391 mūlabhāsā (root, or original, language) 134 Murad IV (sultan of Ottoman Empire) 210 Murko, Matija 371 Muslimanske junačke pjesme (Muslim heroic songs) 371 Mussolini, Arnaldo 491 Mussolini, Benito 490–2, 495 Muzaffarid dynasty 226 Mwindo 460, 466, 467n1, 591–2, 595 Nader Shah (Iranian ruler) 209–10 nāga (snake‑like being) 136–7 Nagaraj, D. R. 232 Nahua/Aztec 340–54; see also Annals of Cuauhtitlan Nair, Karthika 31–2; Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata 32, 38–42 Nair, Shankar 232 nakha‑shika (description from (toe) nails to head) 41 Nandivarman III (Pallava king) 238 Nannaya 237, 239; Mahābhāratamu 237 Naranarayana (Koch king) 238 Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (Malloy) 520–1, 523–4 “national epics”: Aeneid 162; Cilappatikāram 119, 125; Gesar 285–6, 290–5; Kalevala 291; Lianja 464–5; Martín Fierro 542, 545–8, 552–3; Nibelungenlied 605–6; Shāhnāma 231 National Integration Program (PIN) 561 National Progress for Sale 562 native peoples see Indigenous peoples Native Son (Wright) 593 Navarrete, Javier Gómez 573–82; Cecilio Chi’: Nen ool k’ajlay 573, 575–84 Ndori, Ruganzu II, King of Rwanda 462–3 Nell’Africa romana (Tumiati) 488 neocolonialism 30, 32 Neruda, Pablo: Canto generale 38 network(s) 74; complex 74, 77; random 76–7; social 76–8, 77 network analysis: defined 74, 75 applied to epics 75–86, 77, 81, 82, 84; Beowulf 81–2;

630

— ​ I n d e x —​ Iliad 79–83, 80; Laxdaela Saga 81–3; Popol Vuh 82–3; A Song of Ice and Fire 81–3 network approach to epic 74–86 New Culture Movement 273 New Mexican campaign 357, 360, 363 New Testament 99 Nezahualcoyotl (Tetzcoco/Acolhuacan ruler) 341–2, 350–2, 354 Ngai, Sianne 63–4 Niane, D. T.: Soundjata, ou l’epopee mandingue 458 Niditch, Susan 92 Nilsson, Martin 75 Nixon, Rob 48 Noah 50, 98, 201, 204, 330 noh drama 321–3 Noiret, Francois 447, 451 non‑normative masculinities in Iliad 60–71 nonviolence 232, 589 Norman Conquest of 1066 CE 149 Notes of the State of Virginia (Jefferson) 17 Noth, Martin 96 Occidentalism 528 Odysseus 20–1, 45, 60, 65–7, 70, 71n12, 586, 590 Odyssey (Homer) 6, 15, 17, 19–21, 38, 52, 62, 78, 91, 105, 123, 130, 161, 230–1, 359, 389, 401, 485, 514–15, 605, 607 Oghūznāme (Book of Oghuz) 201–12, 212n1; Dede Korkut cycle 205–6; exodus of Oghuz Turks 206–12, 212n5, 212n13; legend of Oghuz Khan 201–5 Oghuz Khan 201–7, 210–12 Oghuz Turks 201, 210–12, 212n1 Oirat people 276, 299–301, 308, 502 Ojobolo, Okabou 592 Okpewho, Isidore 445, 471, 587; Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance 587 Olcott, Steel 141 Olric, Axel 107 Omeros (Walcott) 39 Oñate Expedition 357; see also Villagrá, Gaspar de Oñate, Juan de 357, 359–64 The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Woloch) 109, 111 oral epics 4–6; Albanian 369–79; Arabic 189–90; Bulgarian 396; Central African 464–6; Chinese 275–8; Kazakh 498–510; Macedo‑Bulgarian 399–403; Macedonian 396; Malian/Mande 175–86; Mongolian 299–310; Romanian 403–8; Slavic 382–93, 399–403, 408–9; South Sotho 430–42; Southeast Asian 257–8; West African 471, 473–5, 482; Zulu 415–7

Oral Literature in Africa (Finnegan) 458 Orchard, Andy 146 Ordenanzas de nuevos descubrimientos (Spanish ordinances) 362–3 Order and Disorder (Hutchinson) 51 Orientalism 4, 33, 40, 144, 528 Orientalism (Said) 33, 144 Orientalists 4–5, 32–3, 134, 140–1 Orlando furioso (Ariosto) 8, 356 Orsini, Francesca 236 Osman Ghazi 207–8 Oswald, Alice: Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad 60 Ottoman ecumene: connections and contexts 383–5; cycles 385–9; heroes 385–9; masculinity/ femininity 392–3; shared motifs 389–91; singers 383–5; Slavic epic in 382–93; songs and story patterns 389–91; verse forms 385–9 Ottoman Empire 207, 370, 382, 397 Ovid: Amores 161; Metamorphoses 161 Ozidi Saga 472, 591–2, 595 Padilla, Genaro 362 pagan 150–3, 194, 329, 397, 403–8, 478 Pages, Albert: Un Royaume hamite au centre de l’Afrique 462 Palaj, Bernardin: Visaret e Kombit 370 Pali 134–5, 138–41 Pali Text Society 141 palm race 425, 428n2 Pampas 541–2, 544–5, 549, 552, 553n2 Pan‑African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) 481 Pāṇḍavapratāpa (Shridhar) 237 Pandavas (Mahabharata family/lineage) 230 Pāṇḍavcarit (Vishnudas) 237 Paradise Lost (Milton) 7, 37, 45–6, 50–3; ecology of violence 50–3 pāramī (perfection) 134 Pāratam (Villiputturar) 238–9 Pārataveṇpā/Parata vempa (Peruntevanar) 41, 237–9 Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) 436, 442n9 Parry, Milman 5–6, 371, 382, 386, 458; Serbo‑Croatian Heroic Songs 385 Parthasarathy, R. 118–19 Pasternak, Boris; Doctor Zhivago 520 Paumacariya (Vimalasuri) 232 Pauwels, Heidi 234 Pemala, Lopon 293 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 528, 533, 534 Perera, S. G.: History of Ceylon 134 Perez, Juan 364 performance see epic performance Peron, Juan Domingo 548

631

— ​ I n d e x —​ Peruntevanar: Pārataveṇpā/Parata vempa 41, 237–9 Petkovic, Nada 382 phalaśruti (“fruit of the hearing”) 136 Pharsalia (Lucan) 8, 52, 359 Phelpstead, Carl 48 Philip III, King of Spain 328–30, 332–3, 335–6 Phra Aphai Mani (Phu) 270 Phu, Sunthorn 270 Pierce, Frank 357 Pizarro, Francisco 363 Plantationocene 49, 58n8 Plau, Adrian 232 Poetics (Aristotle) 171n3, 586, 590 Pollock, Sheldon 30, 39–40, 134, 232, 234–7 polyglossia 587–8 polytropos 383 Pommaret, Francoise 292 Pompey the Great 160, 485 Pope, G. U. 118, 123, 130 Popol Vuh 45–6, 76, 78, 86, 344–6, 351; network analysis 81, 82–3; role of female characters in 84–5 postcolonial studies approach to epic 30–43 postcolonialism 30–1 Povinelli, Elizabeth 528, 538n3 power: in academic institutions 8–9; in epics 1–3, 6–7, 10–11; to theorize epic 3–4 Pozdneev, Alekseĭ Matveevich 306 praise names 419, 433, 442n1 praise/appraisal poems see izibongo; lithoko Pratt, Mary Louise 561 Premadasa, Ranasinghe 142 Prince Igor (Borodin) 513 The Prince of Egypt (film) 99, 101n24 Prior, Daniel 510n5 Prokofiev, Sergei: War and Peace 513, 520–4 Prolegomena ad Homerum (Wolf) 606 Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Wellhausen) 95 Prophetic Königsnovelle 189–91, 194–7 Propp, Vladimir 107 prosimetric narratives 205, 210, 273–5, 278–81 Protected Natural Areas (PNAs) in Brazil 568 Pro‑Yanomami Commission (CCPY) 563 Public Enemy: “Fight the Power” 588, 593, 600, 602n4, 602n9 pulque (Mesoamerican beverage) 348–9 Punic Wars 486 Punnata, Jinasena: Harivaṃsapurāṇa 232 purāṇa/Purana (Hindu mythological narrative) 134, 233 Puscolo, Ubertino: Constantinopoleos 485 Qanaĭūly, Shortanbaĭ 504–5 Qing Dynasty 292, 304

Qongyratbaev, Ăuelbek 506 Quesada, Alfredo 549 Quetzalcoatl (“Feathered Serpent”) 346–9, 353–4; and tlacatecollo 346–9 Quicksand (Larsen) 60, 62–4 Quint, David: Epic and Empire 11n8, 37–38, 485 Quo Vadis (Miklós Rózsa) 616 Qur’an 176, 187n3, 233, 385 Qutb‑ud‑din Mubarak Shah 235 race 16–18; critical race studies approach 15–27; and dehumanization 18; and epic 15 race science 16–17 racecraft 18–19; and hermeneutical injustice 18; and testimonial injustice 18 race‑making modernity 592–3 racial hatred (Rassenhaß) 461 racial protest 586, 589–90, 593–4 racial slur montage 593 racism 7, 10, 15, 16–18, 33, 48–50, 64, 586, 588–9 Radar Project of the Amazon (RADAM) 561, 563–4 Radin Suane 267–8 Radio Raheem 593–5 Radloff, Wilhem 499 Rajapaksa, Mahinda 142 Rajarajanarendra (Chalukya king) 237 Rajpop achij (Maya title or rank) 344–6, 351 rajya (monarchical ideology) 30 Rakotoson, Michele 444, 448 Rakovyi korpus (Solzhenitsyn) 520 Rama, Angel 541 Ramanantsoa, Christiane 444 Ramanujan, A. K.: 240; “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” 41, 232, 240 Ramasami, E. V. 126 Ramaswamy, Sumathi 125, 131n10 Rāmāvatār 233–4 Rāmāyaṇa (Madhava Kandali) 234, 236 Rāmāyaṇa (Krittibasa) 234 Rāmāyaṇa (Valmiki) 11n1, 41, 118, 126, 133–4, 230–3, 236–7, 259 Rāmāyaṇam (Molla) 234 Ramayanas: by Hindu poets 234–6; by Jain, Muslim, and Sikh poets 231–4; in Southeast Asia 258–62 Rāmāyaṇkathā (Vishnudas) 235–6 Rāmcandracandrikā (Keshavdas) 236 Rāmcaritmānas (Tulsidas) 234–5, 239 Rām rās (Jinadas) 232 Ram rath yatra (Ram’s chariot journey) 41 Ramstedt, Gustaf John 306 random networks 76–7 Ranna: Ajitapurāṇaṃ 232 The Rape of the Lock 8 Rashid al‑Din Fazlollah Hamadani 202–4, 207, 210–11

632

— ​ I n d e x —​ Rassam, Hormuzd 104 Ravana 11n1, 230–2, 235 Raven (Kristian) 156 Rawżat al‑safā (Mirkhvand) 202 Razmnāma 233–4 Reale Accademia Virgiliana 490 Recommendation on the Self‑guarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore 294 Reichl, Karl 510n1 Remezov Chronicle 501 Renaissance epics 45–58, 493 Republic of South Africa 430, 441 Retief, Piet 426 Revel, Nicole 268 Ribeiro, Darcy 541 Rich, Claudius James 104 Rieu, E. V. 78 “ring composition” and poetics in Jangar 306–7 Ring cycle (Wagner) see Der Ring des Nibelungen/ Ring cycle (Wagner) The Ring‑Givers (Canaway) 156 Ritti, Shrinivas 237 Robinson, Hercules 141 Rojas, Ricardo 547 Romanian epic 403–8; oral 396 Rome 160–71, 171n5, 485–7, 492 Romero, Liliana 552 Rop, Albert de 459, 463–4, 466, 467n2 Rossam, Hormuzd 106 Rostov, Nicholas 518 Royal Asiatic Society 140 Rózsa, Miklós: Quo Vadis 616 Ruiz, Norman 552 Rureke, Candi 460, 466, 592 Russian colonialism see colonialism/imperialism Russian empire 498–9, 502–3, 509, 515 Russian epic 512–26; see also Soviet epic The Russian Messenger 517 Russo‑Turkish War 398 Rustom (Persian hero) 215–27, 222, 224–5, 227n3, 227n5 Rwanda 459–63, 466–7, 467n Rwandan epic 460–3; colonial interpretations of 459–63 Sabalūly, Aqylbek (Molla Aqylbek ben Sabal) 499, 505–7 Sāhasabhīmavijayaṃ (Ranna) 232 Sahlin, Marshall 143 Said, Edward 9, 30–3, 37, 144; Culture and Imperialism 33; Edward Said on Orientalism 9; Orientalism 33, 144 Sallust 486 Sama Dilaut 269 sanakunya (joking relationship) 177–8 Sanders, Peter B. 432, 435

San Francisco Sunday Call 492 saṅgha (monastic community) 138, 139 Santos Vega (Borcosque) 550 Sarai/Sarah 95–6 Saraladasa 239 Sarasvati, Rama 238–9 Sarmiento, Domingo: Facundo 542, 549 Sarraounia: Le drame de la Reine Magicienne (Mamani) 473, 475–81 sāsana (Buddha’s dispensation) 133, 136–7 Sătbek Batyr 498–510 The Saxon Stories (Cornwell) 156 Schaefer, Frank: Whose Song Is Sung 156 Schopenhauer, Arthur: The World as Will and Representation 612 Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Gunkel) 108 Scipio Africanus 486, 492 Scott, James C. 396 Scott, Joyce Hope 475 Scott, Ridley: Gladiator 605, 616 Second Punic War 485, 493 The Secret History of the Mongols 299, 535 Seegar, Anthony 293 Seko, Mobutu Sese 464 Self Respect League 125 Sembene, Ousmane 587 Senryū, Namiki 323 Serbian Folk Songs (Karadžić) 385 Serbocroatian Heroic Songs 385 settler colonialism 49, 157, 509, 538n3; see also colonialism/imperialism The Seventh Exploits of Isfandiar: Slaying Gurgsar 227 Seydou, Amadou 176, 186 Shahab al‑din Suhrawardi 221 Shāhnāma/Shāhnāmeh (Ferdowsi/Firdausi) 203–4, 215–27; illustrations 221–6, 222, 224–5; as national epic 231; principal characters in 218–20; Rustam and Isfandiar in 215–27; sources of 216–17; story 220–1 Shaĭkhyslamūly, Zhu̇ sīpbek Qozha 503–4 Shaka kaSenzangakhona (Shaka Zulu) 417, 419–25, 427–8; see also Emperor Shaka the Great (Kunene); Insila ka Tshaka (Dube) Shankaran 237, 239 Sharaf al‑Din ‘Ali Yazdi: Zafarnāma/Ẓafarnāmeh 202, 204, 217 Sharon, Ammel 232 Shea, John G. 365 Shin Chae‑ho 591 Shippey, Tom A. 148 Sholokhov, Mikhail 519, 520; Tikhii Don 520 Shore, Howard 616 Shulman, David 121, 230 Sīhaḷaṭṭhakathā 135

633

— ​ I n d e x —​ Simurgh 215, 218–21, 223, 226–7, 227n5 The Singer of Tales (Lord) 6, 105, 384, 390, 393n3, 393n8, 409 singer(s) of epic: dumy 384, 386–7, 389, 393, 393n1; Jangarchi 304–5, 309; jɛli/jɛliw 176–7, 180–3, 183–6; guslari 383–5, 387; kobzari 384; lirnyky 384; see also oral epics Śiñjinīyam (Anklet) (Srowthy) 128 sīra (literary genre) 190–1 Sīrat al‑amīra Dhāt al‑Himma 1 Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan 189–99 Sītācarit (Balak) 234, 232 Sītāsvayaṃvara (Venabai) 234 six degrees of separation 76 Skinner, Elliott 474 Skrynnikov, R. G. 500 slavery 5, 16–18, 35–6, 49–50, 445, 449, 451, 455, 593 Slavic epic: 382–93, 396–403, 408–9; Macedo‑Bulgarian 399–403; Macedonian 396; Russian 512–26 Smiley, as “HEROES” destroyer 599–601 Smith, George 106–7 Smith, John D. 230 Smith, William 234, 237 social networks 76–8, 77; role of female characters in 83–5, 84 Solanas, Fernando: Los hijos de Fierro 550–1, 551 Solomon, King of Israel 98 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: Avgust chertyrnadtsatova 520; Rakovyi korpus 520; V kruge pervom 520 Son‑Jara see Sunjata fasa Song of Baghdad 386 Song of Deborah 95, 101n13 A Song of Ice and Fire (Martin) 76, 79, 86, 156; network analysis 81–3; role of female characters in 84–5 Song of Miriam 95 The Song of the Cid 37 songs, epic see oral epics; singer(s) of epic The Sorrows of Young Alfonso (Anaya) 367n1 Soundjata, ou l’epopee mandingue (Niane) 458 South Asian epics 2, 5–6, 11n1, 39, 41–2; 258, 264–6; Cilappatikāram 118–30; and Hindu nationalists 240; Mahāvaṃsa 133–44; Mahāvaṃsa, nūtana yugaya 141–2; premodern Ramayanas and Mahabharatas 230–40; see also Mahābhārata (Vyasa); Rāmāyaṇa (Valmiki) South Slavic epic see Slavic epic South Sotho communities 430–3, 435–6, 439, 441–2; education system in 430; and identity in twenty‑first century 430; see also lithoko (praise poems)

Southeast Asian epics 245–55; Hikayat Hang Tuah 257–70; originating in 265–70; “imported” epics in 257–70; indigenous epics in 257–70; Mahabharatas 262–5; Malay epic 257–70; Ramayanas 258–62 Soviet epic 519–20; see also Russian epic Spanish colonialism see colonialism/imperialism Spanish‑American epic 356–7; see also Historia de la nueva Mexico (Villagrá) Spanish‑American War 365 Spartacus 522 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene 46, 54–7; A View of the Present State of Ireland 56 Spivak, Gayatri 30–1, 36, 39; “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 36; “Draupadi” 39 Sreenivasan, Kasthuri: The Anklet 128 Sri Dharmawangsa Teguh Anantawirkramotunggadewa 264 Sri Lankan epic: Mahāvaṃsa 133–44; Mahāvaṃsa, nūtana yugaya 141–2 Srowthy, A. S. Subbukrisha: Śiñjinīyam (Anklet) 128 Srpske junačke pjesme (Serbian heroic songs) 371 Star Trek (TV series) 156 Stasik, Danuta 236 Staying with the Trouble (Haraway) 452 Strakhov, Nikolai 516 Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (Zhang) 61 Strogatz, Steven 76 Studi Virgiliani 490 Styron, William 36 subaltern 36–8, 40, 573–4, 576, 584, 587 Subramanian, N. 125 Suleyman Shah 207–9 Sumamgala, Hikkaduve 141 Sundaram, R. V. S. 232 Sundiata see Sunjata fasa Sunjata see Sunjata fasa Sunjata fasa 175–86, 591–2; historical contexts 178–80; jɛliw and jɛlikan 180–3; oral tradition in 177–8; polylithic figures in 181; Sunjata Keyita 175–6, 178; see also Mande people Superintendency of Development for the Amazon (SUDAM) 561 Sutherland, John 290; A Little History of Literature 290 Syan, Hardip Singh 233 System for Vigilance over the Amazon (SIVAM) 563–4 Tahmasp, Shah 223; Shāhnāma 223, 225, 227 Tain Bo Cuailnge 76, 78, 86; representation of female epic characters in 84–5 Takakura (Japanese emperor) 313 Tale of Igor’s Campaign 513

634

— ​ I n d e x —​ The Tale of the Heike 312–24; and late twelfth‑century history 313–14; in medieval and early modern Japan 321–3; memorial in 312–24; narrative and conventions of epic 317–21; placation in 312–24; textual traditions 314–17; and warrior age 323–4 Tales of the Moon Colony (Diaosou) 527, 531 Tambiah, Stanley 143 Tandina, Ousmane 481 Tang dynasty 278 tarikh (literary genre) 43 tariko (literary genre) 43 Tasso, Torquato 356, 358 Tedlock, Dennis 346 tekné (craft or productive capacity) 588, 593, 602n3 Tēmpāvaṇi 123 The Ten Commandments (DeMille) 99, 604, 606n1 Tennent, James 140 tetragrammaton/YHWH 92–8, 100n2 Textualization of Oral Epics (Honko) 275 Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”) 341–2, 347, 349–51 Tezozomoctli 341, 350–3; as desacralized tlacatecolotl 349–53 Theocritus 23 Theosophical Society 141 Thersites 60–3, 72n13; and “iambic” irritation 63–7 The 13th Warrior (McTiernan) 156 Thorkelin, Grimur Jonsson 148 Thornber, Karen 33–4 “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” (Ramanujan) 41, 232, 240 Thucydides 92 Thurman, Kira 608 Tiamat (female “monster”) 104, 109–10, 112 Tibetan Plateau 530 Tikhii Don (Sholokhov) 520 Tikkana: Mahābhāratamu 237 TikTok 305 tlacatecollo/tlacatecolotl (human owl[s]): in Annals of Cuauhtitlan 341–2, 344–54, 344–5; in Popol Vuh 344–6, 351 tlamacazqui (offering priest) 346 Tod/Clear script 301–3 Tokugawa Ieyasu 322 Toledo, Francisco de 332 Tolkien, J. R. R. 108, 151; “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” 108; The Lord of the Rings 76, 78–9, 81, 82–6, 82, 84 Tolstoy, Alexei 520; Khozhenie po mukam 520 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina 523; Hadji Murad 515; War and Peace 512–24 Toltecs 340, 342, 346–7, 349, 353, 354n1

Torah 93, 95–7, 100n7 Tourneur, Jacques: Way of a Gaucho 550 trickster 218, 245, 247–50, 252–5, 256n12, 258, 349, 445, 527 True Confessions of a Dumpster Diver, or, Faster thru the Biofractal (Hill) 156 Truschke, Audrey 233 Tulpule, Shankar Gopal 235 Tulsidas: Rāmcaritmānas 234–5, 239 Tumiati, Domenico 488–90; Nell’Africa romana 488 Turkic epic see Oghūznāme (Book of Oghuz) Turks/Turkish people 241n3, 382, 384–8, 391, 396–409; Oghuz Turks 201, 210–12, 212n1 Turner, Sharon 148–9 Turner, Victor 591 Turnour, George 140 Tutsi people 461–2; see also Rwanda; Rwandan epic ubuntu (South African philosophy) 423 ukuthakatha (witchcraft or sorcery) 427–8 Umayyad Caliph Hisham ‘Abd al‑Malik 209 Un Royaume hamite au centre de l’Afrique (Pages) 462 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 484, 493, 495; La terra promessa 484, 493 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 272, 277, 280, 285–6, 293–5, 299, 309, 371 Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (Nair) 32, 38–42 Upham, Edward 140 US‑American epics 11n5 Ussani, Vicenzo 491 Uyghurjin Mongolian script (bichig) 301–2 V kruge pervom (Solzhenitsyn) 520 Vaḷaiyāpati 121 Vallejo, Mariano 365 Vallortigara, Laura 490 Valmiki 11n1, 126, 230, 232–3, 236–7, 240, 259, 262; Rāmāyaṇa 11n1, 41, 118, 126, 133–4, 230–3, 236–7, 259 vaṃsa (literary genre) 134–5, 144 Van Bulck, Gaston (Vaast) 466 Van der Kerken, Georges 468n9 Van Wyk, J. J. 438, 442n12 Vansina, Jan 466 Velazquez, Castro Marcel 332 Venabai: Sītāsvayaṃvara 234 Venkatesa Acharya, Kambalur 232, 238 Vessantara jātaka 134 Vielle, Christophe 237 A View of the Present State of Ireland (Spenser) 56

635

— ​ I n d e x —​ Vijaya (Buddhist king) 137 The Vikings (Fleischer) 156 Vikramārjunavijayaṃ (Pampa) 232 Vilakazi, Benedict Wallet 418 Villagrá, Gaspar de 357–66; Historia de la nueva Mexico 357–66; and the Oñate Expedition 357 Villiputturar: Pāratam 238–9 Vimalasuri: Paumacariya 232 Virgil/Vergel 31, 37–8, 42, 52, 54–5, 38, 99, 291, 358–9, 484–95; Aeneid 15, 31, 36–8, 42, 52, 54, 160–71 Visaret e Kombit (Bernardin Palaj and Donat Kurti) 370 Vishnudas 235, 237, 239, 241n4; Pāṇḍavcarit 237; Rāmāyaṇkathā 235–6 Vladimirtsov, B. Ya 302 voortrekker (Dutch colonist) 426 Voulet, Paul 475, 479–81 Vyasa 2, 230, 241n1; Mahābhārata 1–2, 5, 7, 32, 36, 118, 133, 230–3, 236–9, 606–7 Wagner, Richard: Der Ring des Nibelungen/Ring cycle 604–16 Walcott, Derek: Omeros 39 Wanley, Humfrey: Antiqua Literatura Septentrionalis Liber Alter 148 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 512–24; epic conception and modern realization 515–19; literary antecedents to 513–15; Soviet epic 519–20; on stage and screen 520–4 War and Peace (Prokofiev) 513, 520–4 Warner, Marina 377 war‑play: in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan 341, 347, 349–50, 352 The Waste Land 8 Watkins, Megan 61–2 Watts, Duncan 76 Way of a Gaucho (Tourneur) 550 wayang (artistic style) 260, 263 wayang kulit/parwa (shadow-puppet theatre) 260, 264 WeChat 305 Wellhausen, Julius: Prolegomena zur geschichte Israels 95 Wells, Robin E. 438–40, 442n9 Wen Yiduo 273 Wengrow, David 341, 346, 354 West African epics 175–86, 471–82; Sarraounia 473, 475–81; Sunjata fasa 175–86, 591–2; Yennenga 473–5 “Western civilization,” critiques of 3, 495 White, Hayden 176 white supremacy 3, 7, 10, 326, 467, 542; in Wagner’s Ring cycle 604–16 whiteness 16–18, 459, 586, 605, 607–9, 614

Whose Song Is Sung (Schaefer) 156 Willcock, M. M. 69 Witzel, E. J. Michael 590–1 Wolf, Friedrich August: Prolegomena ad Homerum 606 Woloch, Alex: The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel 109, 111 women: in Albanian epic 369–79; heroes 3; in West African epics 471–2; in Zulu epic 422–4; see also femininity; gender Woods, John 205, 211 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) 612 World Heritage Convention 294 World War I 435, 459 World War II 324, 370, 435, 465, 495, 520 Worman, Nancy 68 Wotan in Die Walküre 615 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 31, 32 Wright, Richard: Native Son 593 written epics 5–6, 10, 176, 415–18, 472–3; see also titles of specific epics Wuwu, Aku: Book of Origins 527 Xena: Warrior Princess (TV series) 156 Xinjiang 209–10, 276, 301–2, 304–5 Xokleng‑Laklãnõ people 567 yakkha (“demon” in Buddhism) 136–7 Yamada, Naoko 324 Yang Zhengjiang 280 Yanomami people 557–9, 563–6, 569n3–4 Yehud 91, 97, 100n1 Yennenga of the Mossés 473–5 Yermak Timofeyevich 500–2 Yeshi, Samten 292 Yesipov Chronicle 501 YHWH/tetragrammaton 92–8, 100n2 Yu Weiren 280 Yuan Dynasty 308, 529 Yukateko 573, 574, 576–7, 584n4 Za pravoe delo (Grossman) 520 Zafarnāma/Ẓafarnāmeh (Sharaf al‑Din) 202, 204, 217 Zahhak (legendary king) 204, 218 Zaldívar, Juan de 361–2 Zaldivar, Vicente de 361–2 Zaporozhian Cossacks 384 zar zaman (poetic genre) 504–5, 509 Zaya Bandida 301 Zhamanqūlūly, Nysanbaĭ Zhyrau 505 Zhang, Dora: Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel 61 Zhang Taiyan 273

636

— ​ I n d e x —​ Zheng Zhenduo 273–6 Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Grossman) 520 Zhong Jingwen 303 Zimmer, Hans 615 Zuboff, Shoshana 590, 602n5 Zulu epic 415–28; and colonization, decolonization 416–17, 424–8; Emperor Shaka the Great (Kunene) 415–25, 427–8; Insila ka Tshaka (Dube) 415; and isiZulu (Zulu language) 415–18; and izibongo (appraisal poems) 418–19; izinkonjane (swallows) and abathakathi (witches) in 424–8; orality in

418–19; powerful women in 422–4; and the supernatural 419–22; and ukuthakatha (witchcraft or sorcery) 427; and Zulu culture, history 415–19, 423–4, 428 Zulu language (isiZulu) 415–18; storytelling in 418 Zulu people 415; colonialization of 424; converts to Christianity 421; decolonization of 417; see also Shaka kaSenzangakhona (Shaka Zulu) Zur Charakteristik der altdeutschen Heldendichtung (Ley) 291

637