Yanbeni Yanthan
One of Easterine Kire’s definitive literary traits that has emerged in her oeuvre of the last few years is a focus on the Other (as exemplified by the supernatural) as it intersects dexterously and fuses with the world of the human or rather, the Self. This negotiation finds culmination in her latest novel, Spirit Nights, where Kire synthesises folklore and fiction to present an informative, erudite and eloquently crafted mosaic of the Naga world and the reciprocal relationship between the two.
In this novel, Kire’s imagination takes the Naga folk narrative of the “dark time accounts” from the Rengma and Chang tribes as her point of departure for pondering over the terrors of the world, its socio-cultural complexities and exposing the foibles of human relationships. She does this by employing her characteristic inventiveness and skill of embroidering the narrative with meditative passages that cut through the omniscient narrator’s voice, which in this book, is often the meditative introspection of Tola Nyakba, the protagonist of the story. The first few chapters behave as the building blocks providing contextual information that galvanises the many paths of the story, even as we are introduced tothe other characters that play central and peripheral roles such as Namu, Tola’s grandson, who at the opening of the novel is a little boy excitedly running rings around his beloved grandmother, Topong and Sechang, her beloved son and daughter-in-law, Chongsen, Tola’s cousin and village seer and the many sub-characters who aid and prod the narrative’s forward movement. The reader is then introduced to the familial legacy of the Nyakbas, their ill-fated tragedies, their individual and collective struggles, and the overarching beliefs and customs that unite the community - which Kire does by culturally situating their lived experience in the broader context of pre-Christianised Naga society. Even as the reader moves on with the story, they are unconsciously submerged into the world of the Naga, a style that Kire seems to have mastered, as more local elements such as interjections and cultural nuances are embedded in the narration. For a native reader of today’s generation such as myself who has not grown up in the universe that Kire conjures in this book, the novel is rathera journey into another dimension which offers to the native reader the possibility and the magical potency of an alternate reality, different yet similar in the ways cultural experience is marked and mapped. To call it a retelling or a reimagining of a folktale, and interpreting it in that light would perhaps be an undermining of the creative process that births these imaginings, especially given the fact that these tellings have been harnessed from a legacy of an oral tradition of storytelling. For the non-native reader, the book is a nuanced evocation of the Naga world in all its exuberant magnificence as it uncovers bit by bit, the marrow of Naga life.
The main plot of the story centers around the dark times that engulf the villages in and around Tola’s for days on end. Although the darkness is foretold in Tola’s visions, she is unable to find acceptance or assurance as she confides with Chongsen (the official village seer, owing to his gender), who is jealous and insecure about his own inability to invoke these visions. Tola’s visions are instead mocked as the ramblings of an aged woman, and here we see how Kire’s own feminism is poised. Tola is disallowed by the custom of the village to become seer and be in-charge of the destinies of men’s lives simply because of her gender, but the inky darkness is lifted only when Tola puts her life at risk and takes over the reins of the darkness. Kire forces us to see the inadequacies of the system and the need to remedy the errors of collective judgement by providing critique in this way and offering solutions. As the village is embalmed in this steep darkness, the villagers are asked to isolate in their homes and refrain from indulging in any sort of camaraderie, and we see that in the story those who disobey the interdiction meet mysterious and untimely deaths. This invokes to the reader of today the hardness of isolationfelt during the initial stages of the 2020 pandemic where the outside became symbolic of danger and death.
The denouement of the plot is demonstrated in a high-stakes encounter between a young-adult Namu (who is ordained as ad-hoc village seer in the absence of his uncle) and the Tiger that moves stealthily between the shadows of the darkness, perforating that darkness with his bloodshot eyes. The mouth of the Tiger into which an emotionally-charged Namu innocently leaps and enters another dimension of unrealised desires and dreams is a treacherous world that seeks to attack a person in the spaces where they are most vulnerable. The tiger in this book, represents entrapment that consumes an individual rendering them powerless.
As illustrated above, the book is peppered with wise and sagacious insights that can be found in the mouths of Tola, Namu, Choba and even Chongsen, as the latter penitently confesses his imprudent behaviour towards Tola in the first half of the story. They reflect not only wise sayings intended for individuals but also for the community as seen in one of the most powerful statements uttered by the ‘visitor’ in Tola’s visions, “… a village that disregards or forgets the wisdom of its ancestors becomes a village deprived of weapons to fight threats in the future”. The later parts of story breathes through the wound of the dark days and the reader is made witness to the slow and steady healing of the “dark time” scars even as the village of Shumang Laangnyu Sang struggles to return to normalcy.
Easterine Kire is known for infusing magical realist elements in her stories that effectively blur or erode the distinction between worlds by invoking metaphors and symbols that are derived from collective memory and lived experience which in turn fuel the imagination. While she deploys these techniques in Spirit Nights, this is a book that uses its encounter with the magical to explore the themes of haunting, love and loss, betrayal and loyalty, and tribe and community while it simmers in an alchemy of the visual and the verbal.
The writer is Assistant Professor, Centre for Naga Tribal Language Studies, Nagaland University
The book review was first published in EastMojo on October 17, 2022.
