by Lavie Tidhar
Gemma flushed under his look and he threw his braids over his shoulder and winked in the way girls did when they wished to kiss and to embrace.
“It will be different where I am supposed to take you,” he said. “It is my elder sister’s place, and she has never been one to abide by rules created by the minds of mortal men. If you choose to journey with me, I will return to this place when the light of the Skyworld falls on Ficandula.”
* * *
When Captain saw your father, he spat on the ground. He opened his mouth very wide and started shouting loud words.
I will not repeat them because they are blasphemous words that only an ignorant Orangutang would speak. Captain would soon pay for his blasphemy, but he did not know it just yet.
He blew on a whistle and his men came running and they pulled all the men to where the boys and the Apos were lined-up.
Your father tried to reason with Captain, but Captain was caught up in madness. Perhaps he had been bitten by a wild dog. He was salivating at the mouth, and you know it is never wise to cross the mad dog when it is on a rampage.
Your father was reasoning, still. His voice rose above the noise of the men as he tried to tame the madness in the heart of Captain’s voice.
Captain stopped shouting. He clenched his fist and closed his eyes, and then he opened his eyes again and his fist shot out.
We all fell silent.
Truly, this was madness, and we didn’t know any more what to do.
“Line up! Line up!” Captain shouted.
And his men pulled all of the fathers and the uncles and the cousins until they were standing three rows deep with their sons behind them.
He barked an order to one of the men and they went to where the horses and their cart were standing. They pulled the cart until it was in the center of the village. Flies were buzzing in the back of the cart, and there was dried blood. I thought they must have butchered a carabao or maybe a pig, or maybe they had gone hunting.
“This,” Captain shouted. “This!”
His madness was on him again. And he threw back the sacks that hid what was in the back of the cart.
* * *
Perhaps it was true what Ampual said. Perhaps the one called Maknongan looked down from the Skyworld and saw the sufferings of those who dwelt in Ficandula. By the time Gemma completed the required schooling, there were rumors of new mandates being handed down from the offices led by the Once-Masters.
Ficandula was a disgrace, one of the reports read. A village filled with rebellious and insurgent women. A hotbed of unrest, and no one knew what vipers were coddled there. The women must have loose morals, for even in the absence of men, there were always young children about—young girls with skin the color of earth, and eyes as dark as the night. Some pamphlets spoke of them as subversives, and it took Gemma the longest time to understand that they were writing of her and her cousins and the elder sisters who walked barefooted and bareheaded in Ficandula.
“They are not content to have taken our boys,” Gemma’s aunt complained. “Now, there are rumors that during the next visitation we will lose our girls.”
“So it has come to this,” Gemma’s grandmother said. “They truly mean to erase the memory of us from the face of the Earth.”
And so it was that when Ampual returned they were waiting for him. As many as had strength in their bones, for there was no telling what use the Once-Masters would have for the young when they got their hands on them, and there was no knowing what evils awaited the older ones as well.
“I hear they are very kind,” cousin Zurina said.
“Kind?” Ilyana’s voice was filled with contempt. “I have heard their kindness is such that they willingly gift women with big bellies even if the women do not ask for it.”
“What’s so bad about that?” Zurina asked. “After all, we would never have been if our mothers did not bear us?”
“But we were given as gifts to our mothers,” Gemma said. “We were answers to the prayers they offered at the altar of the goddess Ubing.”
“It is she, is it not,” Ilyana said. “It is she who summons us through Ampual.”
* * *
We knew at once that it was the work of the gods. The heads of these men were on the cart beside their bodies. Their eyes were closed, as if they were sleeping, and we thought the gods must have been merciful to them because sometimes a man’s head will be chopped off when he is awake and there is a look of terror on it. These men looked as if they were at peace.
We nodded our heads and said our commiserations to Captain. It was not his fault that the gods had slain these men.
Where were they found? What had they done that the gods should be so angered as to take their heads?
“Ficandula,” Captain shouted.
And he made gestures with his hands.
“This village is closest to Ficandula. There is no one else. Tell me who did it and I will spare you.”
Our men looked at each other. They stared at the bodies in the cart and they looked at Captain, not understanding what it was that he wanted.
The gods had killed those men. This is what they said to Captain.
* * *
“I wove a blanket for you,” her mother said. “And in your carry-all, you will find the colors of our tribe and the symbols that belong only to Ficandula.”
“You will not change your mind,” Gemma said.
“I cannot,” her mother said. “Your grandmother is on her deathbed, and I cannot leave her.”
Her mother’s arms enclosed her for one final embrace, and their tears mingled as they pressed their cheeks to one another.
“I will keep your memory alive,” Gemma said. “And I will keep the histories fresh in the minds of my tribe sisters.”
* * *
You would think an intelligent man would understand. How hard is it to comprehend the ways of the gods. They slept in the longhouse of the god of war, and for their trespass, he took their heads.
“A lie,” the Captain said. “A lie. A lie. A lie.”
He made a gesture with his hands and his men crowded us into carts and told us to leave. All of us women with our little girls and with our babies.
“Where are we to go?” Manang Bagwis asked.
“Go,” one of the men said. “Just go away.”
“What about our men? Our sons? Our fathers?”
The man who looked younger than any of the others stared at us with miserable eyes. His eyes were a fallow brown, and there was sadness in it and hopelessness and despair.
“Just go,” he said.
* * *
Their voices echoed within the belly of the ship as one by one they recited the names of the men who had been taken from their tribe. Fathers and sons, uncles and brothers, and more recently, the names of the boys who had been taken away.
Gemma recited along with them, and to the names of the men, they added the names of their mothers and their grandmothers.
“These names, we will always remember,” they said. “Because of them, we can dream and look towards a different future.”
And it seemed to Gemma that the ship shivered as they made this oath.
* * *
When we returned to our village, there was a sea of blood. We looked and we looked but we did not find any of the men. We called and we shouted, but nobody answered.
You would think the blood would smell. That is what we thought as well. That night we did not sleep in the village, but we went into the forest and slept there as our forefathers did before us.
In the forest, a dream came to all of us. In this dream, your father was standing with his cousins and his brothers. He was standing with all the uncles and all the other men of our tribe. Around their necks were the teeth of the great boar and they carried bright shields and machetes in their hands.
“We have gone to hunt,” they said. “We will take the heads of the Orangutang and offer them up to the gods. You will see what you will see.”
And we heard the sound of the gongs and the echo of their voices as they wandered away from us towards Ficandula.
* * *
“My sister waits,” Ampual said.
From the portholes, they could see green stretched out below them.
“I have other journeys to make,” Ampual said. “There are other children who must be visited.”
“Will they come to New Cordillera as well?” Gemma asked.
“There are other places on this world that will be home to others just like you,” Ampual said. “Only time will tell if your paths will cross with the paths of those others who are the thought of my other siblings.”
“Will we see you again?” It was Gemma’s cousin who asked.
Ampual smiled.
“Perhaps you will see me, perhaps you will not. But if you build a house for Ampual of the fourth Skyworld, I will come and rest my head there when my travels allow.”
As he spoke the walls of the ship turned transparent, and they could see out into the rich green of the world that lay beyond. Below them was green valley. A sparkling river run through it and circling the valley were mountain terraces all planted with young rice.
“Welcome to your home,” Ampual said. “Welcome to New Cordillera.”
His words fell into the wind, and then the ship was gone and they were standing at the edge of a mountain, the breeze blowing through their hair, tears standing in their eyes, and there walking towards them was a woman with eyes that shone like stars in the night sky and arms stretched out in welcome.
“My children,” she cried. “As I desired, Ampual has brought you to me.”
* * *
There are sounds that haunt our dreams even now. They are like to the sounds we sometimes hear in the mountains when it is very late at night. There are those who would send the Once-masters away, and we have seen those marked as the beloved of our gods as they run and hide from the hand of those who now rule over us.
We have no men or boys to send out for the great hunt. But we remember everything.
Here is your father’s belt. Here is your father’s blanket. Here are the skulls of the ones he hunted.
This is how a warrior carries his spear, and this is how he bears his shield. We have woven charms into the sheath of your machete. We have baptized your armbands with our tears.
We will beat the gongs and we will offer up our prayers. Hunt well, young ones. We will wait for you on the road to Ficandula.
* * *
Skulls line the entrance to New Cordillera. On Gemma’s fiftieth birthday, the white ones came through the portal above their new home.
When they landed, the women lured them into the village. They feted them with rice wine, with songs and with dances. Then, when the men fell asleep, the women took up their machetes.
Upon Ampual’s visit, he found the longhouse the women had built for him. Its walls were decorated with the bones of their enemies, and its floors were lined with skins—dried and stitched together.
“You have taught them well,” he said to his sibling.
“Not I,” Ubing replied. “History has taught them all they ever need to know.”
* * *
Author’s note. This story is loosely inspired by a little known incident in Hungduan (Ifugao) during the early part of the American occupation of the Philippines. Two archeologists who had violated a sacred granary were beheaded by tribesmen, and the Americans inflicted reprisals upon the men of the village.
Afterword
Ekaterina Sedia
From the Colonized Mind to a New Frontier
The book you have just finished reading is remarkable—and when I was in your shoes, as I was when I just finished reading it, it left me a bit whiplashed. The stories were diverse, sure, and yet I was stunned by the remarkable thematic coherence that runs through this collection: certain images and ideas kept popping up over and again, telling us that the state of post-colonialism comes with its own set of markers and phenomena. Regardless of the culture that has experienced colonization, its aftereffects and post-concerns are quite similar.
Instead of analyzing individual stories, I decided to tackle the emergent themes—the book is certainly larger than a simple assemblage of individual stories, and I’d like to approach it as an entity in itself rather than dissecting it into parts; after all, more than one story in this collection warns us against this reductionist impulse. Instead, I will treat it as holistically as I can, since many of the themes seem to flow from one story to the next, and to develop almost independently of the writers’ will—and this, I believe, is a sign of truly talented editors, who have selected the stories and positioned them to assure both thematic unity and clarity of purpose.
The main and most obvious theme that becomes apparent early on is the push-pull of the contradictory demands of assimilation versus appropriation—that is, as the colonizing culture attempts to assimilate the colonized into its imperial (or colonial) hive-mind, it is also eager to appropriate the trappings of the culture it has taken over, thus leaving the colonized twice bereaved—robbed of what was theirs, and the stolen cultural treasures replaced by the dominant faux-narrative.
Meanwhile, the trappings of the colonized are left empty, divorced from their cultural meaning and memory—mere trophies in the hands of the colonizers. This twin cultural assassination is apparent in many of the stories, and mirrors closely the real-world narratives.
This insight is something that I feel is uniquely endemic to this particular book, or to this particular kind of story. Too often, the colonizers perceive assimilation as voluntary, and appropriation as paying their respect to other cultures, rarely realizing the true nature of the destruction that they are causing. However, these writers see clearly the harm being done. There is a mournful thread running through, based on the realization that the colonized often irrevocably lose their own voices, and even when they do create their own stories, it is done in the language of the outsiders. This narrative transplant, when the colonized people tell their story in the language and story structure of the conquerors, is a simultaneously fascinating and heartbreaking phenomenon.
This is the terrible duality of the colonized mind, which often comes to accept the outsiders’ values as its own. This is not a free choice but a necessity—understanding the language of the dominant group is a matter of survival. (It is of course no mere coincidence that these stories are written in English.) Through needing to understand the dominant mindset, the oppressed are forced into accepting it, and this is the burden of post-colonialism: while the literal and the military shackles have been shed, the colonized mindset remains, and colonization finds its logical extension in cultural colonialism—and again, it is no coincidence that Hollywood, films and books feature so commonly in these stories.
These stories so persistently pushed upon us through every worldwide media outlet are not ours, these writers seem to say, but we will take them and make them our own. The difficulty, of course, is that taking something back and being taken over by it are not easily distinguished. Sometimes rebellion and consent may look remarkably similar. Sometimes we rebel by writing our own narratives, but end up complicit when those narratives are subsumed by the dominant culture and its language, awash in its story structures and values.
These values are so pervasive that the world we live today is constructed along the axes of the Western (or colonizing) thought: the constant Aristotelian dichotomies bisect our discourse and thoughts in every direction. Emotion and reason, art and science, male and female—all of these sharp dualities are not necessarily endemic to any given culture, but more often then not are introduced there by Western colonization.
Interestingly, this is another common thread: whether we look at the stories set in the colonized lands or in the West, science is often pitted in direct opposition to a holistic view of the world. By extension, science is often presented as a tool of the colonizers. Western reductionism, the need to dissect and disassemble and take apart
, to study the details in order to comprehend the whole, is the very nature of the scientific method, and has transcended its applications, being often applied to entire peoples and cultures and souls. We see it in the reductionism of literary analysis, the reductionism of anthropology, and of cultural history. We see echoes of this idea in many of the stories; some even take the dissecting tools and (in some cases, literally) turn them against the conquerors.
It’s a notion many of the writers explore—the weapons of the colonizers taken up by the oppressed in act of liberation. Yet, one cannot help but remember the immortal Audre Lorde’s quote about the master’s tools that cannot dismantle the master’s house, and the sense of loss and uncertainty lingers in these stories, as we are left to wonder—along with the writers—about the price paid for knowledge, as well as the adequacy of a blow that is a mere reflection of the attack.
The solution offered by several of the stories seems to be found in the integration: the tools of the colonizers are flawed, and they have to be modified, infused with cultural memory and meaning, in order to serve the oppressed. Because the very nature of post-colonialism includes the impossibility of being entirely rid of it, the best we can hope for is to comprehend the past, recognize the ongoing colonization of the mind and of internal landscapes, and to resist it as best we can.
Resistance, then: several of the stories talk about its nature, and the emerging consensus appears to be that resistance is often indeed futile; but the futility of it is not a good enough reason to stop trying. The very nature of the colonizing influence is that it is elusive and shifting, often changing its appearance or mode, and thus is extremely difficult to confront. The quest for recognition of it is never-ending, and resistance takes as many forms as the influence itself—from warfare to art. Here again we see Hollywood emerging as the cultural constant, as the colonizing influence so significant that it doesn’t need to hide—or that, by its very nature, is forced to take on many forms.
