A Story as Sharp as a Knife Read online

  them. They couldn't have been individual artists and thinkers, employing the tools and techniques of traditional narrative to overreach

  or question societal norms, much less to interrogate the nature of

  the world. They could not have been poets. It couldn't be true - and

  even if it were, only their consanguineal descendants ought to be free

  to lay out the evidence supporting such a perverse and insensitive

  claim. One (but only one) of these interlaced issues merits tender

  consideration. That is the question of who is entitled to handle the

  evidence and to offer interpretations. I have tried to speak to this

  question briefly in the afterword (page 419).

  Laramie, Wyoming * 8 October 2010

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  Prologue :

  Reading What Cannot Be Written

  A hundred miles into the Pacific, drenched in

  rain and wind and mist and sunlight, lie the islands known as Haida

  Gwaii. In September 1900, a young, soft-spoken linguist with a new

  degree from Harvard and a bundle of instructions from his mentor

  stepped ashore there, planning to stay half a year, learning what

  he could of the Haida language, and of Haida life and thought and

  social structure.

  The linguist found himself confronted by great art, great devastation and great literature. His teacher had forewarned him to expect

  the devastation and the art as well. It was the literature that took

  him by surprise. And so for three and a half years he did nothing

  whatsoever but transcribe, translate and study Haida mythtexts,

  stories, histories and songs.

  Back in Washington and Boston and New York, the linguist's

  learned colleagues did not hear what he had heard nor see what

  he had seen in the texts that he transcribed, and he was not a man

  to force his views on others. He published what he could, blamed

  himself for others' failings, and went on to other work, with other

  persecuted languages, elsewhere in the world.

  The fact remains that he had heard, and had recorded as well as

  he was able, one of the world's richer classical literatures, embody—

  ing one of the world's great mythologies.

  Everything we have in the way of classical Haida literature comes

  through the transcriptions of one man - and so the subject is a small

  one. It is one specific phase of one specific oral literature, shrunk now

  to only about forty thousand lines of written text. But the world as

  a whole is what that literature, like every healthy literature, is really

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  a story as sharp as a knife

  all about - and so the subject is beyond the ability of any human

  being, or of all human beings, to exhaust.

  *

  All classical Haida literature is oral. By definition, therefore, it is

  something printed books cannot contain, in precisely the same sense

  that jazz, or the classical music of India, is music that a score cannot

  contain. Every healthy, living culture holds its stories to its heart,

  and so the book, in the fundamental yet intangible sense, is a cultural universal. This, however, is a book composed in homage to what

  script and print omit - and to the intellectual richness of a world

  where no manuscripts or printed books exist.

  Reading, like speech, is an ancient, preliterate craft. We read the

  tracks and scat of animals, the depth and luster of their coats, the

  set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of

  sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the

  wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken

  rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of

  course, the voices that we hear. We read the speech of jays, ravens,

  hawks, frogs, wolves, and, in infinite detail, the voices, faces, gestures, coughs and postures of other human beings. This is a serious

  kind of reading, and it antedates all but the earliest, most involun—

  tary form of writing, which is the leaving of prints and traces, the

  making of tracks.

  The works of literature translated and discussed here were made

  in such a world - where the performance could be read but the work could not. Now they are frozen, verbatim transcriptions of single

  performances. Voices hide in these transcriptions. If they are to speak,

  we must find a way to listen. That is difficult to do, so long as we keep

  thinking of the fixed and silent texts that have come to overshadow

  every other kind of literature in the European tradition.

  All literature is oral at its root, so the dilemma is unreal. Dante,

  Shakespeare, Melville, Flaubert, Joyce are read because they speak,

  although the pedants' books are mum. Yet the oral poet's strategies

  and tactics differ from the writer's, and the tactics of the listener

  are different from the reader's. Once it is transcribed, oral literature

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  prologue

  looks like writing - but as every reader senses, that is not quite

  what it is.

  Native American oral literature in general, and Haida oral literature in particular, seem to me far closer in spirit and in form to

  European painting and to European music than to European literature.

  This is one way out of the dilemma. Reading works of oral literature

  is more like reading musical scores and narrative paintings than it

  is like reading books. In my attempts to set the best Haida poets in

  a global context, I have found Bach and Titian and Velazquez more

  immediately helpful than Racine.

  *

  To those concerned about such things, I think it will be clear how

  much I owe to the work of several scholars. Dell Hymes and Claude

  Levi-Strauss are among the first who come to mind.

  My differences from Hymes, I like to think, are superficial. He

  used the words measured verse to describe the structural patterns of thought and language he patiently unearthed in Kathlamet, Kiksht

  and many other oral literatures. Hymes and I were completely in

  agreement about the reality, vitality and importance of these patterns - and I wish I had his great gift for discerning them. I also

  wish that he had given them a different name. Perversely, then, I

  have expressed my admiration for his work, and for his skills as a

  polylingual critic, by redefining or avoiding his key terms.

  I would be happy to have Levi-Strauss's gift for seeing narrative

  patterns too - since I suppose, as he did, that stories very often tell

  us more than their tellers ever know, and that structural analysis

  is one important means of finding out what stories have to say, to

  us and to each other. Unlike him, I think it quintessential to root

  this kind of listening in real and original texts, and to identify the

  speakers and occasions as precisely as I can. I want to know, as he

  did, how myths think themselves in people, 1 but I also want to know The end-how people think themselves in myths. These are two quite differ- notes begin on page

  ent modes of thinking. Only one of them is, strictly speaking, hu- 443.

/>   man, though both are in the broad sense humanistic, and both take

  place in human hearts and heads. When we listen to a real human

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  a story as sharp as a knife

  being telling a real myth, we can hear, feel and see the way these

  two modes of thinking interact.

  Walter Ong and others have written at great length on the nature

  of oral culture, but rarely in such works do we encounter an actual

  oral text. Still less often do we meet an actual speaker. The result

  is that the real human beings who inhabit oral cultures disappear,

  and stereotypes replace them. Native American oral poets have so

  often been mistreated in this way that their namelessness has come

  to seem routine. It is true that a few mythtellers, working in unusual

  conditions, have preferred to remain anonymous. But myths - in

  the serious sense of the word - are always told by individuals, not

  by language groups or tribes. Even when the speakers are unnamed,

  to hear what they are saying, we have to learn to hear them one by

  one, in the time and in the place where each is speaking.

  Not many of the immigrants arriving in North America, from

  the sixteenth century through the twentieth, have grasped the fact

  that they were coming to take refuge with indigenous societies of

  genuine antiquity and cultural complexity. Not many immigrants

  have taught this simple truth to their children either. Even the philosopher George Grant - a man not often tolerant of unexamined

  assumptions - could call North America "the only society on earth

  that has no indigenous traditions from before the age of progress." 2

  Grant made it his vocation to fight against defining human life in

  terms of human will, but he was captured, in that sentence, by the

  will that he decried.

  The Old World and the New are not two regions marked reliably

  on maps. The Old World is wherever indigenous traditions are permitted to exist and acknowledged to have meaning. The New World

  is wherever such traditions are denied and a vision of human triumph

  is allowed to take their place. The Old World is the self-sustaining

  world - worldwide - to which we all owe our existence. The New

  World is the synthetic, self-absorbed and unsustainable one - now

  also worldwide - that we create.

  Every language and its literature - written or oral - is also a

  world, linked to other worlds, of which the speakers of that language

  are often unaware. Every language and its literature form an intellectual bioregion, an ecosystem of ideas and perceptions, a watershed

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  prologue

  of thought. The several hundred oral literatures indigenous to North

  America - though constantly remade in the mouths of oral poets

  and new to every listener who comes from somewhere else - are

  parts of the old-growth forest of the human mind.

  Because this is a book about a Native American literature, I have

  used native names for places and for people as often as I could. I

  use, for instance, the old village names Hlghagilda, Qquuna and

  Ghadaghaaxhiwaas in place of the more current English names,

  which are Skidegate, Skedans and Masset (or Massett - a spelling that many Haida prefer). Except in a few cases where I know

  the individuals or their communities would disapprove, I also use

  people's indigenous personal names : Skaay instead of John Sky ;

  Daxhiigang rather than Charlie Edenshaw ; Kilxhawgins in preference to Abraham Jones. I know most readers of this book will find

  the Haida and other native names harder to spell, remember and

  pronounce. Acknowledging these names seems to me nonetheless

  an essential gesture of respect and recognition - one I hope most

  readers of this book will also want to make.

  Several Haida speech sounds have no counterpart in English

  and require a little time and effort to learn. A rough guide to Haida

  pronunciation is printed overleaf. Appendix 1 (page 425) gives more

  detailed information on the spelling and pronunciation of Haida

  and neighboring languages. Parts of that appendix are, I am sorry to

  say, written in technical language and could not serve their function

  otherwise. Every human language selects from the large array of possible speech sounds and lives its life within its chosen subset. There

  is no dependable way to convey, in a natural language, the sounds

  that it has opted to exclude. This is why linguistics, like all the other

  sciences, relies upon an artificial language of its own, and why this

  language - though that is not its aim - shuts the uninitiated out.

  Mouth-to-mouth training in phonetics is the only real solution, but

  anyone prepared to spend an hour reading the article on phonetics

  in a decent encyclopedia will be able to make headway. All that is

  really involved is learning the geography of the human mouth.3

  A few Haida names also appear - simply because they seemed

  to invite it - in English translation. Xhuut Tsiixwas ("Harbor-Seal

  Ebb-Tide"), for example, has turned into Seal Beach, and Jaat Sttagha

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  a story as sharp as a knife

  r o u g h g u i d e t o h a i d a p r o n u n c i a t i o n

  Bringhurst

  ship

  Rough

  Notes

  1999 ff

  2008

  approximation

  a

  a

  father / lad

  1 All doubled

  a / u

  a / i

  rather

  vowels are long.

  aa

  aa

  Latin mater 1

  2 Voiced uvular

  b

  b

  jab

  stop : like g in

  d

  d

  tidy

  go but deeper in

  dl

  dl

  Adler

  the throat.

  g

  g

  agate

  gh

  g

  3 Ejectives are

  _

  voiced q 2

  h

  h

  aha

  pronounced

  with a simul—

  i

  i

  sit

  taneous glottal

  ii

  ii

  Latin vinum 1

  catch.

  j

  j

  a jar

  k

  k

  kill

  4 Voiceless lateral

  kk

  k'

  ejective k 3

  fricative : like l

  l

  l / ll

  little

  with no voicing.

  ll

  'l

  ejective l 3

  5 Where adjacent

  hl

  hl

  Welsh llawn 4

  n and g are

  m

  m / 'm

  amid

  separate (as in

  n

  n / 'n

  anew

  Wingate), they

  ng

  ng

  singer 5

  are written with
br />   q

  k_

  Arabic Iqbal 6

  an intervening

  qq

  k_'

  ejective q 3

  dot : n[?]g .

  s

  s

  sister

  6 Voiceless uvular

  t

  t

  water

  stop : like k in

  tt

  t'

  ejective t 3

  rake, but deeper

  tl

  tl

  Atlantic

  in the throat.

  ttl

  tl'

  ejective tl 3

  7 The glottal

  ts

  ts

  itself

  catch, routinely

  tts

  ts'

  ejective ts 3

  spoken but

  u

  u

  mud

  not written in

  uu

  uu / oo

  Latin lumen 1

  English uh-oh

  w

  w / 'w

  water

  and before the

  x

  x

  German ich

  second syllable

  xh

  x_

  German Bach

  in "an ice house,

  y

  y

  layer

  not a nice

  '

  '

  'uh-'oh 7

  house."

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  prologue

  Gaxhiigans into Thunder Walking Woman. I could not translate every

  Haida name, because the meanings of some are obscure, and to do

  so would in any case anglicize the Haida texts too much.

  Very literal, inch-by-inch translation - what scholars call a strict

  morphemic gloss - is fashionable now in Native American linguistics,

  and such translations can be wonderfully revealing. They also give

  a false sense of security and of scientific precision. (To anyone who

  doubts this, I suggest taking a short passage of poetry, or a snippet

  of conversation, and translating it morpheme by morpheme from

  English into English.) I have resorted now and then to such forensic

  translation myself, but on the whole I think that this procedure tends

  to cast its light entirely on language and leave literature in the dark.

  I confess that all translation seems to me at best approximation

  - but translation also seems to me a necessary part of what Ngugi

  wa Thiong'o calls decolonizing the mind, and what Plato calls noe+n :

  that is, approximately, thinking.

  *

  Together with its rucksack of appendices, the book now carries a substantial load of endnotes. Most readers, I imagine, will need some of