As I write this piece on Easterine Kire’s latest novel Spirit Nights (2022), I am well aware that it has already garnered much attention from many readers who have written compelling and well informedreviews. My own approach is to avoid repeating what has already been said about the novel and instead, to focus on certain aspects which show how incredible, how much of a paradigm shift Spirit Nights is to a reader’s mind frame. Allow me to ramble a little because it is almost impossible to truly review this book without delving into some kind of in-depth essay about the culture and ethos that informs the book.
From a purely literary standpoint, the novel is written beautifully with a deceptively straightforwardplot.But beneaththis apparently unembellished story, based on a Chang Naga folk tale, is a complex exploration and critique of traditional Naga culture and the roles its men and women play. From its opening pages, Spirit Nights transports you to a time period often overlooked and spins a tale of village community life, of family and loyalty, of fear and death and of the triumph of becoming the person you were always meant to be. It is a marvellous tale, gracefully told in language as beautiful as the myth that inspired it. Interspersed throughout the main storyline which alternates between the perspectives of two main protagonists (Tola, dream receiver, descended from a long line of seers and her grandson Namu, destined warrior hero), are other perspectives, other stories: tales from the Chang Naga myths and legends, particularly of a time when an all-encompassing darkness covered the surface of the earth lasting for days and days on end. There are fireside tales about doomed lovers, cautionary tales involving mighty warriors who foolishly disregard their seers and accounts of spirit carvers entwined with the story of two brothers who set out to right a wrong done to their mother: these are stories- within- story- characteristic of all oral storytelling traditions. Each tale and each account provides invaluable insight to the novel, adding layers of colour to an incredibly well-researched and well-developed world.
The book is a written creative work which retains elements of the orature that informed it. It reflects the author’s aim to incorporate the orality of the spoken word and the active presentation of the oral tradition within the confines of fiction. As such, Spirit Nights has the orality of the Chang Naga culture inscribed in writing. Indigenous stories such as the one the novel is based on, are a reclamation of indigenous voice, indigenous land, and indigenous sovereignty. And as the author shows, they are vital to decolonisation because they workboth, to deconstruct colonial ways of knowing as well as toconstruct alternative strategies to resist narratives of indigenous disappearance.
In this story, Kire brings together the roles and responsibilities of men and women of a Naga village community unit and puts oral history at the centre of her analysis. Her attention to the details of daily life expose us to the heart of the culture and spirit of the tribe. Throughout the novel, she illuminates how indigenous identities are informed by gender and life-stage, and how each individual’s fulfilment of his/her role was necessary to the healthy functioning of the society. In this way, she passes on the history and culture of a precolonial traditional Naga village to those of her readers who may remember and those who have never known it. Her intention is decolonisation; she shares these “story medicines” of traditional practices in order to recover knowledge of indigenous life-ways to inspire current and future generations. While Kire has always recognised and written about the many atrocities and injustices of our time and society, in this novel, she chooses to focus on an empowering narrative that showcases the cultural continuity of Naga traditional values and customs.Consequently, she also provides the context for the importance of relationship in the sharing of oral tradition. Who is listening thus matters very much to the kind of story that is told and the information that can be shared. Readers would do well to remember Kire’s insights into the living, relational aspect of oral narrative, such as the role of stories in passing down lessons and cultural values, the importance of relationships to the continued life of stories, and the ways in which place and context shape narrative. Itself a print version based on the oral stories of indigenous “informants,” Spirit Nights contains episodic narratives - a common structure of oral tradition, where stories are linked thematically rather than chronologically. And like all good story tellers, Kire is able to break off her narrative in ways that seem to disrupt the flow, only to weave the story components back together again into a nearly seamless whole.
A striking example of Easterine Kire’s narrative strategy and folk process of communication is how Spirit Nights plays out one of her predominant concerns, which is to relay myths and rituals that will restore community cohesion in a time of conflict and disintegration. In the novel, Naga-centred rites of passage mark the transitional or critical periods in an individual’s life, such as birth, initiation, marriage and death. The ultimate good of such rituals is to ensure the individual’s bonding with the community and the cosmos. In other ways too, she shows her commitment to recovering and receiving the mythic and restorative constituents of Naga life. An example which stands out, is the involvement of the whole community in rebuilding their village after the deadly attack by enemy warriors that had reduced the village from 22 households to only nine. In the days following the massacre, one of the things the villagers did that actually began the healing process was to eat their meals together, sharing their food, “coming together as a family, as a community in the truest sense “ (36). Conducted in the right way, the sharing of food promotes both social and physical well-being of the group such as the kind offered in the house of the seer of the village of Mvüphri, where the fire places are always kept burning and upon which are cooked great supplies of pots of meat and rice. The seer is a provider of food and shelter to people who find their way to his house. Here, the nurturing function is elevated to ritual status, ensuring harmony and satisfying not only physical needs but also psychic ones- demonstrating how intertwined physical and psychic healing are.
The examples illustrated above highlight how the functions that regulate individual life and communal coexistence and healing are those that deal with nurturing and nourishing as also with storytelling, joking, singing and so on. In fact, aside from those who are given official status by the community (headman, seer, etc), characters attain social identity through the function they perform on behalf of the community. Thus, the widower Beshang, “became the self-appointed storyteller of the village” and by virtue of being the oldest male in the village, commanded the listening respect of his audience. And Sungmo, the childless widow, forges a place for herself in a society that views barrenness a failure, a curse, by stepping in to help Tola in her time of need, in taking care of little Namu, while also making herself useful to those community members weaker than herself,visiting “house after house” lighting their fires and boiling their water for their morning meals. As a result, she places her mark on the community as a communal mother proving that a woman can be childless and a widow and still be valuable to her society.
The emphasis on nurturance in the novel, is at the heart of the concept of generational continuities(the passing on of cultural values and personal history)traditionally regarded as a woman’s domain. Anthropologists define this societal structure as“matrifocal”- a kinship system with a matrifocal emphasis- in which the role of the mother is central in terms of cultural values and kinship ties. The author pays attention to her artistic predecessors—village mothers and grandmothers who have passed on the knowledge of their culture through their stories, songs, tales and proverbs.More than a stylistic choice, this represents precisely women’s role in the community to maintain the cultural and moral order of the society.Thus, in writing about village women, and as a woman herself, Kire explores how cultural traditions have been passed down from Naga mothers to teach the craft of their cultural heritage to continuing generations of women and men. In Spirit Nights, we witness the primary orality of the grandmotherrepresented in scenes of instruction and education, demonstrating howTola strives to bring up her grandson in the ways of his people. In these scenes, the grandmother’s voice is always dominant and Namu grows up understanding how by listening, he is also participating in the rituals which reinforces his relationship with the community. In this way, Kire fundamentally creates a matriarchal community within a patriarchal set up, in which the female ancestor becomes a source of vitality and truth telling that in the endpermits her progeny to prevail. Her sharp and direct tongue is the verbal mother wit that characterises Naga women of the oral tradition. In giving us the image of Tola, aged and physically weakened, yet compelling in her ability to voice the deepest truths with courage and conviction- the hallmark of the ancestor, the author affirms those folk processes that give coherence to Naga people as a community at a time when that community most needed it.
The novel is also concerned with women’s power base in the traditional community and the limitations imposed on them. How women negotiate their position in traditional Naga cultures is directly tied to the oral tradition. Marriage, for instance, is viewed as an alliance between two families and not only as between two people and the choosing of a wife or husband is a lengthy process which involves members of the extended family. Certain taboos that applied to marriage were strictly upheld, the point driven home to all through a cautionary tale that ends with a stern warning: “Breaking a taboo always breaks the violator.” Furthermore, the importance of childbearing in relation to child rearing is something that the author, albeit briefly, also explores in the novel. Since the primary purpose of marriage in a pro- natalist society is to raise a family, when procreation doesn’t happen, the woman is seen as having failed an essential life goal. At first, Tola’s failure to bear a child even after many year of marriage is a source of great distress to her, forcing her to ask her husband to leave her and take another wife (as was the accepted social practice), while citing all the reasons why infertility is considered a curse to the family and to the community. “Tongues would wag” the novel states, as Tola “prepared to bear the veiled ostracism that accompanied barrenness.” Here, embedded in the textural background of her anguished thoughts, one can, with a little imagination, hear the constant discourse of the community members-presumablywomen-advising, instructing, commenting, gossiping. My point is, that as upholders of the tradition, women can be the harshest critics of those who cannot conform to a conventional role. Very often, they are caught in a bind because many of these traditions are not to women’s best advantage, yet they must honour them.
Central to her storytelling scheme, is Kire’s use of fiction to provide a primary means of sustaining a unique culture. She employs folk talk that is metaphorical and instructive. Her prose has the quality of speech and this oral quality is deliberate. Her writing style is unique in that it is always understated but at the same time reveals how ordinary words can sometimes have extraordinary meaning. Although the narration strikes one cursorily as omniscient, it is actually a collective narration of the community through the voice of the storyteller. The sounds of the village people- some sweet, some discordant, some joyful or mournful, as also the deadly silences and fearful whispers during the dark time, constantly structure and restructure the pattern of village life and eventually all information, whether wanted or not, is shared.
Easterine Kire’s position regarding the blending of the spiritual world with the natural world is well- known. It is not surprising then, that Spirit Nights (the title itself is suggestive) is saturated with many aspects of Naga spirituality. Based on a fantastical tale of a mythical darkness, the novel tells of how Tola, keeper of dreams, learns to trust and place full faith in the force of her dream-visions to initiate her grandson into the ways of the spirit world, thus enabling him to fulfil his destiny. Kire’s incorporation of the elements of Naga spiritual tradition in order to define and defend difference contributes to the re- evaluation of alternative world-views and other ways of knowing. Moreover, in reflecting, (re)discovering and (re)articulating her Naga roots, she portrays her Naga heritage as an alternative to mainstream culture. Through writing this story she illuminates an aspect of history that had remained invisible: her aim in uncovering and recovering the collective past is to build communities more in line with traditional Naga cultural values. In this way, she takes on her traditional role as educator of present and future generations to voice their heritagewhich has been distorted and effaced for many in contemporaryNaga community through imposed dominant cultural values and attempts at assimilation.
I conclude this rambling, essay-like “review” by asking, what is the role of the reader/audience in bearing witness to this story? How might we read it as informing our own decolonizing practices? The question of how responsibility enters the frame of storytelling is an important one; accountability is an important aspect of indigenous storytelling and the author of this novel holds trust and responsibility as key ingredients to storytelling. In order for her work to be transformative, the storyteller must feel a sense of intellectual and often spiritual responsibility to the audience she speaks to. The battle over narrative is as much about who tells the story as it is also about who defines the future.The future Easterine Kire imagines for us and the stories of the past that she reconstructs, help us to recognise our place in time, both as descendants and as future ancestors.In repositioning ourselves as authors of our own stories, she forces non Nagas to reckon with their own accounts of us. And in paying homage to her own ethnicity and culture, she paves the way for us to do the same.
Kevileno Sakhrie
Kohima