Limitrophe: situated on a border or frontier; bordering on, adjacent to. French, from Late Latin limitrophus, bordering upon, literally, providing subsistence for frontier troops, irregular from Latin limit-, limes boundary + Greek trophos feeder, from trephein to nourish.
—Merriam-Webster Dictionary
For many years I was convinced that a clear line should be drawn between documentation and invention, particularly in ethnographic writing, where one’s first obligation is to do justice to the experience of those who welcomed or tolerated one’s presence in their communities. It is all very well borrowing narrative conventions, figurative language, and montage from fiction, poetry, and cinema in order to give life to a text and counteract the deadening effects of academic jargon and abstraction—something I had done in several ethnographic books written for a general rather than specifically academic readership.1 But such experimentation, I believed, should avoid blurring the distinction between fiction, which freely invents other worlds and other lives, and ethnography, whose focus is on actual events, experiences, and persons. Nevertheless, as a poet, fiction writer, and ethnographer, I have always been drawn to such classics of philosophical fiction as Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nauseé, Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Attracted to the idea of juxtaposing showing and telling, I share Derrida’s dream of a writing that would be neither philosophy nor literature, but keep alive a memory of both.2 Might it not be more reader friendly and illuminating to interleave the distilled and generalized knowledge so characteristic of the academy with the more aporetic, eventful, and nondiscursive forms of literature? Against the European philosophical tradition that has sought to keep these modes of writing separate (assuming being and thought to be nonidentical), I draw my inspiration from a Kuranko perspective in which there is a complementary relationship between foundation myths (kuma kore, lit. “venerable speech”) that are held to be “true,” and antinomian tales (tilei) that are admittedly make-believe. While myths support the status quo—the authority of chiefs, the wisdom of elders, the alleged inferiority of women, the importance of tradition—folktales play with reality, challenging hierarchy, reversing roles, and exploring fantastic possibilities for righting wrongs and redressing injustices.
Because it does not follow that what is necessary for the common weal is equally imperative for every individual, there is in Kuranko society—as in human societies everywhere—an ironic counterpoint between the discursive values articulated in myth and the subversive tactics deployed in folktales. To cite Derrida, every culture bears traces of an alterity that refuses to be domesticated; every culture is haunted by its other.3 While myths lay down the law, reinforce respect for received values, and draw attention to the ancestral or divine underpinnings of the social order, fictional narratives address quotidian problems of injustice, reveal the frailty of authority, mock the foibles of men, and shame all those who mask their greed and ambition with the language of ideology and the trappings of high office.
This indeterminate relation between knowledge and life also informs the structure of this book. While grounded in empirical research and real events, I increasingly depart from reality in order to show what could not otherwise be told.
Northeast Sierra Leone. December 1969. In a few days it will be Christmas, but as Noah Marah and I cross the Seli River and begin our trek to Firawa, Christmas is far from our thoughts. Our path has been trodden by generations of bare or sandaled feet. The air is filled with filigrees of burned elephant grass that settle on the path like colons and commas, punctuating our way. Occasionally the conical thatched roofs of a farm hamlet appear above the tawny grassland, and we meet men and women toting bundles of firewood or sacks of rice on their heads. They exchange greetings with Noah, while peering at me from beneath their head loads. When Noah is asked who I am, he tells them I am an old pen friend who has come to visit his natal village. As for me, I am in a state of trance, as if passing from one incarnation into another. A succession of grass-covered plateaus drifts into the bluish haze of the Loma Mountains. Saurian rock formations, such as I had never seen before, rise out the landscape, yet appear to recede as we approach them. Noah says that when a man from a ruling lineage is about to die, you may hear snatches of xylophone music borne on the wind and the creaking of granite doors as the djinn who inhabit the inselberg prepare to receive another soul into their midst.
On my second night in Firawa, a group of men, women, and children gather on the porch of Noah’s brother’s house to tell stories. As Noah summarizes each story for me, I am struck by recurring scenarios and motifs. A marginalized or maligned individual—an orphan, an oppressed junior wife, a status inferior—journeys into the bush where he or she is cared for by djinn. Empowered and enriched, the erstwhile victim returns to the village that spurned him or her and receives the recognition or blessings that he or she is due.
The djinn may therefore be compared with the figure of the daemon in European thought: a redistributor of human destinies.
As the days pass into weeks, I begin to understand the ramifications of the contrast between village and bush in Kuranko discourse. The bush is construed as a wild but fecund force field surrounding the settled space of a village. This is not only because rice—the staple of life—is cultivated in farm clearings slashed and burned in the bush, or because medicinal plants are gathered, and game animals hunted, in the bush; movements between town and bush are allegories of life itself and call to mind the classical Greek antinomy of nomos (law) and phusis (life). While community coexistence depends on binding legal and moral laws, personal fulfillment in life depends on more than slavish conformity to established norms, dutiful role-playing, or adherence to tradition. It involves going beyond the social world into which one is born and tapping into life itself, which knows no bounds.
Almost all Kuranko tales involve journeys between town (sué) and bush (fira). As such, the moral customs (namui or bimba kan), laws (seriye or ton), and chiefly power (mansaye) associated with the town are momentarily placed in abeyance, and the wild ethos of the bush, associated with animals, shape-shifters, djinn, and antinomian possibilities, comes into play. Moreover, Kuranko stories are told at night, or in twilight zones that lie on the margins of the workaday, waking world. There is a close connection, therefore, between the evocation of antinomian scenarios, states of dreamlike or drowsy consciousness, and the narrative suspension of disbelief. Kuranko tilei (fables, folktales, fictions) are make-believe; they play with reality, and entertain possibilities that lie beyond convention and custom.
But do people everywhere feel compelled to come into their own by moving beyond the world into which they were born, breaking with the settled routines and habitual patterns that they were raised to regard as second nature? And is it always the case that when we are stretched to the limit we experience life with such ecstatic sharpness and painful clarity that we will declare these moments to be more existentially nourishing, and more real, than anything we find within our comfort zones and everyday routines? Does the road of excess always lead to the palace of wisdom?
In Firawa I began to realize that whatever knowledge I might wrest or distill from my sojourn there was less important than the change that might be wreaked in myself by allowing this remote lifeworld to work on my imagination and revolutionize my thinking. In construing the ethnographic project in this way, I was already outside the academic pale, though few would argue against the view that ethnography is an essay in understanding one’s humanity from the standpoint of what at first sight appears to be incomprehensible and alien, venturing beyond the margins of one’s own familiar world to explore the human condition from a radically different point of view.
Life on earth is vaster and more various than the lifeworlds of human beings. Yet we live, alone or together, in symbiotic relationships with the myriad, multifarious, and microscopic forms of life that inhabit the forests, grasslands, deserts, waterways and seas that surround us. While we may be unique in possessing a conceptual life, our existence depends on the plants and animals we eat, the timber we use for building, the bacteria, fungi and viruses in and on our bodies,4 and the companion creatures to which we become attached. This extrahuman life not only nourishes our bodies and souls; it is the source of the metaphors with which we think, the gifts we give, and the imagery of art and religion. Although it is not uncommon for intellectuals to declare that we have reached a point in our evolution when the line between nature and culture has been blurred or abolished, with virtual and built environments displacing the “natural” environments in which our ancestors struggled to survive, the interplay between human lives and life itself remains existentially fundamental. This is nowhere more dramatically evident than in tribal societies where being is not limited to human being but distributed beyond the world of living persons—a potentiality of ancestors, divinities, (totemic) animals, objects (fetishes), and even plants. In this view it would be a mistake to regard any one particular life form, such as our own species, as higher or more privileged than others.
In this book I explore our relationship with life itself through the image of the limitrophe.
The word limitrophe derives from the Latin limes (“boundary”) and the Greek trophos (“feeder”) and trephein (“to nourish”). In its original meaning, limitrophus designated lands that provided food for troops defending an outpost of empire. More generally, the word denotes a borderland between two or more states, though it also calls to mind Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of a mestiza consciousness where “phenomena collide”5—a destabilized and transgressive borderlands in which “dreams, repressed memories, psychological transferences and associations” possess greater presence than they do in ordinary waking life and religious experiences emerge from the unconscious like apparitions.6 Mention might also be made of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis that the American spirit of democracy was nourished by “the American forest, and . . . gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.”7 The frontier fostered independence and simplicity and provided a clean break with old world pretensions and arcane mannerisms. There are echoes, too, of being Beyond the Pale, a phrase that dates back to the fourteenth century, when the part of Ireland that was under English rule was bounded by a line of stakes or fences, known as the English Pale. To travel outside that boundary, beyond the pale, was to leave behind all the rules and institutions of English society, which the English considered synonymous with civilization itself.
I adapt the term limitrophe to describe, ethnographically and autobiographically, the life-giving potential of places, people, and powers that lie beyond the pale of our established lifworlds and to show that existential vitality depends on going beyond what has been prescribed by custom, internalized as habit, or enshrined in received ideas of truth and reality.
This theme has preoccupied me from the time I did my first fieldwork among the Kuranko and found myself mystified as to why people devoted so much time to ritually, playfully, narratively, and politically dis organizing or dismembering their lifeworlds only to produce situations that closely resembled the ones they overthrew.8 It wasn’t as if people were working to overthrow the social order; rather that they needed to determine that order for themselves and not feel that it determined them. In this way they connived in the creation of their own worlds, even as they worked to create a world they shared with others. I discerned this phenomenon in Kuranko initiation ritual, storytelling, and everyday palaver when people playfully picked quarrels with each other, made mountains out of molehills, or prolonged a court case with seemingly needless digressions while I stood by, wondering why instrumental reason appeared less imperative than the need to have one’s say or make one’s presence felt. There were times when I felt I was seeing the world through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. Human beings resembled Humpty Dumpty. Although you are a perfectly intact egg, sitting well balanced on a wall, you nevertheless pick yourself up periodically and dash yourself to pieces, only to put yourself back together again. The process may be seen in both individual and collective life.
How can it be explained?
Life may be full of contingency and unpredictability, and you may feel powerless in the face of forces outside your comprehension and control, but in these seemingly trivial and perverse actions of disintegration and reintegration you preempt what you fear may befall you, acting as if the world were yours to unmake and remake on your own terms, in your own time. For a moment you are no longer a bit player in someone else’s drama, or an extra under someone else’s direction; you take center stage, you call the shots.
Though I regard it as axiomatic that human beings strive to experience themselves as free in some small measure to make, unmake and remake the world into which they are thrown by circumstances beyond their control, they readily shy away from such dramatic transformations when these are imposed upon them against their will. Just as soldiers quail at the thought of being sent to a war-torn frontier, we all suffer the qualms and anxieties that attend the passage from the known to the unknown. When working in an Aboriginal settlement in Central Australia, I would hear rumors of small boys running away from initiation, fearful of the ordeals that awaited them in “business camp.” In southeast Sierra Leone, neophytes live in dread of the crocodile that will allegedly swallow and regurgitate them. In families across the world, adolescents suffer that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs as they prepare to leave home for college in a distant city. Sometimes we have to be coerced or tricked into undertaking these initiatory journeys. Often we will take the plunge because of peer pressure or simply to save face. Though our fulfillment in life may depend on braving the perils of the unknown, our faintheartedness is a reminder of our need to be secure in the lives we know, as well as strong enough to risk ourselves in the wilderness of the wider world. And, even if we don’t take risks ourselves, we often identify with those that do, vicariously casting ourselves away on a desert island, walking on hot coals, climbing Everest, exploring the Amazon, walking on the moon.
At the end of his account of a traumatic near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes (Touching the Void), Joe Simpson asks what his life would have been like had he not faced death on Siula Grande.
A part of me thinks that I would have gone on to climb harder and harder routes taking greater risks each time. Given the toll of friends over the years I’m not confident I would be alive today. In those days I was a penniless, narrow-minded, anarchic, abrasive and ambitious mountaineer. The accident opened up a whole new world for me. Without it I would never have discovered hidden talents for writing and public speaking . . .
In Peru we had gone to unusual lengths to take the ultimate risk and yet despite all the pain and trauma it now seems a small price to pay for such an inspiring adventure. Isn’t memory a wonderful deceiver? Almost losing everything in Peru was a sensation quite as life-enhancing as winning.9
Such yearnings for excess, darkness, altered states of consciousness, and the extramundane are often associated with youth, not old age. Children typically test the boundaries of what their parents decide and define for them. In this way, they experiment with their individual capacities to define the world for themselves. When my daughter Freya was eighteen months old, she was given a toy pram that she wheeled through the park and around the house, brooking no interference from her parents, jealous of her autonomy, and exhilarated by her mastery of a situation she had hitherto lived in passivity—being wheeled around in her pram by others. Six months later, Freya’s self-assertiveness was even more noticeable. “No, me do it, Daddy,” was her continual refrain, except at bedtime when she chose to have one of her parents take the initiative and read her a story. But, even then, she called the shots: “Daddy, read it!” Paradoxically, though rebelliousness may be born of this boundary testing, so too is structure and security. Even as the child transgresses external boundaries, she is building internal boundaries that will define her sense of self. While the limits imposed by others may be broken in the name of freedom—one’s capacity to decide things for oneself rather than simply suffer the decisions made by others—one is simultaneously affirming one’s being-for-oneself and one’s being-for-others. This dual impulse governs our lives beyond childhood, finding expression in the search for a wider self, new horizons, new beginnings, and what Karl Jaspers calls the Encompassing (das Umgreifende)—“the ultimate Being which is the foundation of our concepts but which can never be exhaustively grasped by them.”10 There is thus a dialectic between the orgiastic profligacy of the young and the pacific reveries of the old, and both Dionysian excess and Apollonian constraint are at play in every human situation as we struggle to reconcile the inner imperatives of our own existence and the entrenched, normative demands of a world that precedes, surrounds, and outlasts us.
Negotiating this uncertain relationship between mundane and extramundane realms is, arguably, the fons et origo of what we call religion, though cross-cultural comparison is only possible if we find a vocabulary that speaks to what is existentially there before we invoke words like religion, ecology, or culture to define it. Paul Ricoeur writes of what is “always-already present” before we have a name for it, inchoate experiences that precede or elude dates and definitions.11 For Ricoeur, this is “the enigma of anteriority”—the mystery of how we might understand “potency” before we speak of potentates or powers-that-be, how we might understand “religion” before we speak of specific creeds or traditions, how we might understand “love” before we distinguish between eros and agape. But how is it possible to speak of such diffuse and unnameable phenomena? Carl Jung’s phenomenology begins not with the names we give to things, but with “occurrences, events, experiences—in a word, with facts.”12 Moreover, Jung says, certain facts of experience are common to people everywhere, whatever their historical, cultural, or personal situations. Such experience, he argues, is captured in Rudolf Otto’s notion of the numinosum, “that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject who is always rather its victim than its creator.” Not only does this force defy our ability to control or name it; it manifests itself in so many ways that it would be foolish for us to decide which are, in essence, “religious” or “secular,” “real” or “imagined.”
Ricoeur avows, moreover, that he is not concerned with Spinoza’s “theology.” Spinoza’s alleged pantheism or atheism is irrelevant; only the notion of conatus matters. In this sense, “God is Life.”13 But life is more than the impulse to passively “persevere in being”; it consists in the search for “adequate ideas” that enable us to actively sustain our sense of presence and purpose.14 God is but one of such ideas, and its adequacy consists in its ability to help us realize our capacity for speaking, acting, praying, and even narrating our story.15 To submit to a higher power is not, therefore, to forfeit one’s own agency but to recover it through a relationship with something beyond oneself, be this a supportive friend, a divinity, a diviner, or a material object. Here the divine and the utopian coalesce as alternative symbols of what William James calls “the more.” For we are all susceptible to the uneasy sense “that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand,” and what we call religion is a set of ideas and practices for getting in touch with an “elsewhere,” an “otherness,” or a “wider self” that lies beyond the horizons of one’s immediate lifeworld, especially at times when our “lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.”16 This process of othering, which places one’s own agency in abeyance, is a precondition for clearing one’s head of confusing subjective preoccupations and returning to oneself as someone capable of taking a hand in determining his or her own fate.
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
In 2011 an Australian palliative care nurse published an account of the regrets that individuals had confided to her in the last days of their lives. In these rueful epiphanies one discerns a human need to live life on one’s own terms. We also see how difficult it is to overcome the anxieties and resistances that stand in the way of crossing the frontier from what is tried and true to what makes sense for oneself. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.”17
How universal are these variations on the theme of finding fulfillment outside any prescribed or circumscribed order?
If we remember that individuation always involves “I” and “we” aspects, then all our actions have repercussions for ourselves and for others, regardless of whether they are construed as self-serving or altruistic, rebellious or conformist. Moreover, in all societies people seek, and are encouraged, to live as if more than their own fate depends on what they say and do. Whether the common good or the good of the individual is invoked as justification for any act, neither goal can be achieved unless people act and speak as if their own lives and the life of the world were contingent upon their decisiveness. Even maintaining the world as one finds it—which is ostensibly the goal of traditional societies—would be impossible if people did not act mindfully and determinedly in pursuit of that end.
Accordingly, every human being must live for his own reasons, rather than under duress. To act as if the world were in a sense their world, and they were not mere hostages to some transcendent reality. This implies that one must live, to some extent, against the grain of the given world if one’s own world is to emerge and the vitality of the world thereby renewed. J. K. Rowling put it this way in her 2013 Harvard commencement address. “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default. . . . The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”
For Kuranko, the village sets limits, while the bush offers limitless possibilities. The bush is a metaphor for the vitality without which one’s own life becomes pointless and the life of the village dies. From a cybernetic point of view, any social system—defined as a domain of ascribed roles, inflexible rules, ancestral values, and received wisdom—drifts toward entropy unless it perennially taps into and draws upon the “wild” energies of the bush—the fertility of its soil, its regenerative resources, and even the genii loci who may bestow on a chosen individual supernatural powers. This is why African migrants commonly speak of Europe as a symbolic “bush”—a place that offers the hope of regeneration, and “a future” that is not simply a repetition of the past. And this is why the Revolutionary United Front that laid waste to Sierra Leone in the 1990s so strongly identified with the bush, locating its camps in the forests and deploying symbols of hunting and initiation to reinforce in child soldiers their rebellion against established authority.18 But “wild” power is ambiguous. Though it may give an individual a sense of being fully alive, it can ruin a marriage, destroy a friendship, and tear a community apart. Clearly, fulfillment is never an either/or matter—a question of blind obedience or unfettered freedom. A balance must be struck between the ‘I” and the “we”: between one’s own imperatives and the imperatives of living with others.
My Sierra Leone fieldwork affirmed an existential view that human life is meaningless unless we can contrive to transform the given world into a world we feel that we chose, that we can call our own. Charlotte Brontë put it perfectly in Jane Eyre.
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.19
Mikhail Bakhtin recognized this existential protest against fixed ascriptions of status, role and hierarchical order in his notion of the carnivalesque, while Henri Bergson saw the celebration of organic life as an élan vital that resists the mechanistic routines of everyday life and allows for individual creativity and freedom. More recently, Mattijs van de Port has described the bacchanalian exuberance and excess of Serb townsmen’s forays to Roma bars where frenzied music, “obscene songs, drunkenness, surrender, extravagance and the complete rejection of Novi Sad’s renowned bourgeois respectability” suggests that though Roma are stigmatized as unclean, uncouth, and unmarriageable they also provide a refuge from lives claustrophobically encased “in the rules, conventions and standard of decency prescribed by the bourgeois ideals of civilization.” Within the European social imaginary, the “Gypsy camp was an erogenous zone, the closest wildness, invested with unfulfilled desires, impossible yearnings and unsatisfied passions.”20
This vitalist strain not only finds expression in Western lebensphiloso-phie, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Bataille and Deleuze; it has analogues in traditional African thought.
Life is elsewhere—in a place remote from where I am. Though the wilderness is fraught with danger, it is also the source of regenerative power. Among the Sukuma-Nyamwezi of western Tanzania the wilderness is a place of witches and sorcerers who would destroy mhola (the social order), “but this is also where the child-bearing wife and the rain-giving king come from; and this is also where men, hit by the disaster of nzala, starvation, move to find new sources of food.”21
Curiously, too, the most distant may best articulate moral ideals. If the gods and ancestors who embody these ideals are to possess real power and command respect, they must be otiose—at one remove from the human world. Familiarity is incompatible with authority. Sukuma-Nyamwezi thought is again illuminating: “The figure of the rain-bearing king and the figure of the child-bearing wife both symbolically derive their regenerative power from their metonymical relationship with wilderness and the world of strangers.”22 Freed from the snares and ambiguities of the immediate lifeworld, remote and imagined worlds can promise possibilities that cannot be realized closer to home.
But there is a catch. The greater the distance between humans and the gods, the more problematic becomes communication between them. In practice, therefore, a kind of counterpoint or tension usually exists between sacerdotal communication (in which priests keep ordinary mortals at a distance from their gods or divine kings) and mystical communication (in which direct, unregulated, spontaneous union between mortals and immortals is possible).
Just as gods and ancestors are foci of ambivalent feelings (provoking anxiety if they become too distant or too familiar), so too are exotic and distant places. For insular Europe, the sea and the sea voyage were for centuries the prevailing metaphors for this hunger for self-realization and riches in the beyond.23 Like El Dorado and Shangrila in the West, one hears rumors among the Kuranko of a fabulous town somewhere in the hazy savannah regions to the northeast, known as Musudugu—town of women—where there are no men, where women are in possession of the most powerful Kuranko medicines and means of sorcery, and where great wealth may be gained. At once attainable and out of reach, the quasi-mythical Musudugu brings to mind the paradox of all power: that it must be theoretically accessible yet at the same time practically so scarce as to be almost impossible to access.
Consider the Azande, whose most powerful oracle (benge) originated outside Zandeland and, at the time E. E. Evans-Pritchard lived among them, had to be sought in arduous two-hundred-kilometer journeys, subject to strict taboos and frontier controls, to the Bomokandi River in the Belgian Congo. When asked why they did not cultivate the poison creeper in their own country and so save themselves the trouble of gathering it under such hazardous conditions, Zande informants expressed “disapproval” of the question, alleging that a kinsman would die if this were done. “We may suppose,” observed Evans-Pritchard, “that the mystical potency of the poison is derived partly from its scarcity and the pains that must be expended in procuring it.”24 But the power of the alien lies in its essential otherness, not simply its scarcity. As in medieval philosophy, alteritas connotes not only otherness but the possibility of transcendence. That which is furthest from my grasp and control is that which poses the greatest existential threat to my being. By making that foreign thing my own, by assimilating it to myself, by incorporating it within my being, by bringing it under my control, I disarm its menace. But, more significantly, the existential blood, sweat, and tears that go into the taming of the alien object come to imbue the object. In this way its power objectifies my power over the other. That which was alien now stands to augment rather than diminish me.
There is another aspect to this fascination with alterity. It is as if every society, like every individual, is unable to sustain its existence as an isolate—can never be sufficient unto itself. As with the classical symbolon, human beings are driven to recover the side of themselves that gets lost, eclipsed, excluded, or denied in the formation of a normative system of thought or behavior. This occluded other is usually constructed as something inimical to the social order—a source of antisocial or wild power at the same time as it is a means of regaining lost personal autonomy and integrity. In short, it is construed simultaneously as a source of constructive and destructive energy.
I see no great difference between the Zande preference for the poison oracle over the termite oracle (the less potent oracle they used before they acquired benge) and the Western connoisseur’s passion for tribal art, which, in its spurious exoticism, provides its owner with a vicarious shot of the libidinal energy and unbridled power, which, it is believed, primitives possess naturally.
It’s not always where and when you were born that matters; it’s where you were reborn—when you were initiated into adulthood and with whom; when you walked away from an arranged or unfulfilling marriage; when you decided to quit a dead end job; when you left your natal village and risked your life crossing the borderlands to the global north; when you repudiated the genre conventions and assumptions that had framed your thinking for far too long. “I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation,” writes Henry Miller, cutting his ties with America. “I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. . . . Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.”25 There are uncanny echoes here of Federico García Lorca’s notion of the duende—that dark, soul-stirring force that surges up within us, drawing us beyond ourselves, into experiences that cannot be captured in words, but are conveyed in the dark sounds of flamenco, torn from the throat, “sweeping the earth with its wings made of rusty knives.” “Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind with the odor of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly-created things.”26
New departures may not always involve forays into the wild, descents beneath the waters of an ocean or lake, journeys underground, or the violent overthrow of the social order. But they are all imagined in terms of death and rebirth.27
According to the earth-diver myths from the Americas, the world was originally a diffuse and insubstantial realm of sky and water that shared the same aqueous blueness. There is no earth. Nowhere a person can stand or settle.
Here is a Blackfoot variant of this myth.
Napioa, the Old Man, floated upon a log in the waters, and had with him four animals: Mameo, the fish; Matcekipis, the frog; Maniskeo, the lizard; and Spopeo, the turtle. He sent them down into the waters in the order named, to see what they could find. The first three descended, but never returned; the turtle, however, arose with his mouth full of mud. Napioa took the mud from the mouth of the turtle, rolled it around in the hollow of his hand, and in this manner made the earth, which fell into the waters, and afterward grew to its present size. There was only one person named Napioa. He lived in the world when the people who dwelt with him had two heads. He did not make these people, although he made the world, and how they came upon the earth no one knows. The Bloods do not know where Napioa came from. They do not know whether he was an Indian or not. He was not the ancestor of the Blackfeet, but the Creator of the Indian race. He was double-jointed. He is not dead, but is living in a great sea in the south. He did not make the white people, and the Indians do not know who made them.
Although we often dismiss such myths as prescientific speculations on how the world came into being and thereby see them solely as reflections of the culture in which they are found, myths speak to universal existential preoccupations that transcend the individual or social settings in which they first find expression.28 Hence the argument that creation myths are allegories of ontogenesis. They obliquely recount the conditions under which every individual struggles to emerge, after a long gestation, from the undifferentiated ooze of life to become his own person—a creator rather than merely a creature of circumstance.
Freud observed that small children are often incredulous at the idea of birth from the vagina and imagine that the lump inside a woman’s belly will pass from her body into the world in the same way that shit is excreted from the bowel via the anus. “The baby is produced like a piece of faeces.”29 This cloacal theory of birth is, however, not necessarily evidence of an infantile worldview. On the outlying Polynesian island of Bellona, the culture hero Ataganga began life alone, with no woman to marry. When he went to defecate, he felt something hard (or hard to excrete) in his feces. It was a small boy called Mauitikitiki. Ataganga adopted the boy as his son. A lazy and mischievous trickster, Mauitikitiki nonetheless proved his worth by fishing up Bellona’s companion island of Rennel from the ocean depths.30
According to Maori oral traditions, Mauitikitiki also fished up the North Island of New Zealand (Te Ika-a-Maui, “the fish of Maui”)—the island where I was raised. But this is not the only reason I find cloacal theories of birth plausible.
I am four years old. My sister and I are accompanying our mother on a day trip to see her friend Estelle. Estelle is married to a farmer, Cedric (“Ted”) Corney, who has driven his truck to Inglewood to pick us up. Estelle and my mother were close friends at Wellington Teacher’s Training College where they shared a passion for literature. After their marriages—Estelle to a farmer, my mother Emily to a bank clerk—they kept in touch.
After settling down with my mother at the kitchen table to drink a cuppa and catch up on news, Estelle orders her three-year-old son, Andrew, to show me around outside. Andrew leads the way to the milking shed where the cow bails and concrete floor have been hosed clean after the morning’s milking. Adjoining the shed is a holding paddock in which there are two disused effluent sumps. I walk out into the paddock and approach what appears to be a concrete slab—the foundation of a demolished outhouse. I glance back. Andrew is standing by the shed, watching me. I step onto the slab. Solid is liquid, and I am falling blindly through ten feet of liquid manure. Dark clods and clouds bump and bruise me. An acrid ammoniac fluid invades my mouth. My feet touch bottom. Instinctively, I push off and flail upwards through slime and dung, my eyes scorched, my nostrils and throat scalded. The back of my wrist miraculously hits the edge of the concrete pit. I flip my hand over and grab hold. I haul myself out into the long grass, choking and shocked. I lie there like a drowned rat, drenched and seared by the reeking manure. A soft drizzle falls noiselessly over the farm. Andrew has not moved. The gap in the caked surface through which I plunged is already closing, the scum sealing its cracked lips. I run through the drizzle toward the house. Within minutes, I am in the bathroom, being helped out of my clothes. A large bathtub is slowly filling with cold water. Estelle is apologizing to my mother for what has happened and for the lack of hot water (the coal range that heats the water has not been lit). I sit in the shallow water, my bum on the cold enamel, shivering and vulnerable, still trying to clear my throat and nostrils of the dung.
As darkness falls, I sit huddled under a blanket on the tray of Ted Corney’s truck as we jolt along the unsealed road. It seems to take ages to get home, though years later I will discover that the farm is only five miles from Inglewood. I fear that we are not going home at all but voyaging through the night to some other place altogether. Something has changed. But I have no conception of what it is or how I might speak of it.
Nowadays, I like to imagine this near-death experience as the origin of my aversion to bullshit—my distaste for pretension and prolixity, my quarrel with the academy, my contempt for those who “go along” with what others are doing simply because it is “the done thing.” Perhaps, too, my early immersion in shit presaged a lifelong fascination with how value may be found in the most mundane and despised phenomena.
In 2012 Erika Eichenseer published a selection of German folktales that had been collected by a local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at roughly the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting their own now celebrated tales. Eichenseer called her selection Prinz Roßwifl (Prince Dung Beetle), because the wisdom contained in these (mainly) peasant stories could be compared to the precious cargo of eggs that the scarab beetle conceals in its ball of dung. One might also point out that the scarab beetle is a limitrophe creature par excellence, since it actually feeds upon the feces it gathers, while bringing nutrients to the environment in which it lives. In ancient Egypt the scarab was associated with Khepri, the god of the rising sun, both of whom were thought to create themselves out of nothing, hence the existential identification of the scarab with ontogenesis (coming into being) and the renewal of life.
In short, shit is not always bullshit.
Just as we translate pig into pork, sheep into mutton, and cow into beef to assist our pretense that we are not carnivorous killers, so, in farming parlance, shit is called manure. In the same way that meat and milk nourish us, manure fertilizes the pastures on which our cattle graze. In the years before the farming boom of the 1950s, Taranaki dairy farmers could not afford superphosphate, potash, or lime and depended on liquid manure to stimulate grass growth. This period was also the heyday of the compost clubs that pooled information on how to build a compost bin and produce the dark worm-infested loam in which vegetables would flourish, though local Maori had traditionally used compost in their kumara gardens, creating the phosphoric acids and potash salts that were lacking in many Taranaki soils.31
My father, who was an avid composter, would get barrow loads of horse manure from the sale yards half a mile from our house. I would help him shovel up the dung, marveling at its shape, and help him push the wheelbarrow home along the broken sidewalk, steadying it when it lurched or my father lost his footing. I shared his satisfaction as he created layers of horse manure, grass clippings, ash from our living room hearth, and organic refuse from the kitchen—an inedible version of the layer cakes my mother made for bring-and-buy stalls at the local flower show. So shit had its place in the scheme of things, and my perilous descent into that acrid and liquid darkness on Ted Corney’s farm may have helped me acquire a life skill of getting myself out of the shit and finding in the most repellent experiences something of value, though I would never go as far as speaking of this experience as an “anal maternity” or declaring myself an “excremental anthropologist.”32
In revisiting my near-death experience, I found myself wondering what became of Andrew Corney, whom I had not seen or heard of since the early 1950s when we were Boy Scouts together. I failed to locate Andrew on the Internet, but I did find his sister Fleur, a celebrated writer of teenage fiction. I wrote to Fleur, asking if she could put me in touch with Andrew, only to learn that he had died of cancer in 2005. Fleur subsequently told me that Andrew’s childhood passion had been building radio sets, and his first teacher had been my father’s Radio Club pal, Dan Wilkinson. After graduating in science, Andrew specialized in metrology and became an internationally recognized specialist in AC calibration. But he never lost his love of amateur radio and was of the key figures in the famed Quartz Hill Radio Station on the wind-racked Wellington coast near Makara.
Through my email exchanges with Fleur, I felt reconnected with the country in which I had spent the first and formative years of my life. But I was struck by the paradox that I should now feel such a yearning for the place I could not wait to put behind me when I was twenty, convinced I had to reinvent myself elsewhere. Why should a country that I had once regarded as intellectually impoverished now seem, in my imagination, to be a source of replenishment and nourishment, while the country in which I had settled oppressed me as a rule-bound world in which I could not feel at home?
Much to my surprise, I found an answer to this question in one of Fleur’s books—I Am Not Esther.
Ellen Pilgrim is raised in a fundamentalist Christian community called the Children of Faith. At sixteen she is raped by one of the elders, gets pregnant, and is ostracized from the community as a fallen woman. Ellen gives up her child for adoption and tries to make a new life for herself. At the time the novel begins, Ellen is dependent on her second child Kirby and losing her psychological battle to escape the hold of the Children of Faith over her. Under relentless pressure from her brother Caleb, who is a patriarch of the sect, Ellen tells her daughter that she is going to Africa to work with refugees and places her in Caleb’s care. Grief-stricken and mystified by her mother’s abandonment of her, Kirby suffers the ignominy of being obliged to answer to the biblical name of Esther, to discard her own clothes, pin up her hair, and submit to an Old Testament morality known as “The Rule.” Kirby resists the “weird” disciplines of her new family and rails against her new identity. Placed in isolation for breaking The Rule, she “sat at the table and wrote, My Name is Kirby. I am not Esther. I was me. Not some robot they programmed.” Ineluctably, however, through her bond with Daniel, a cousin who is already beginning to rebel against his family, and by caring for another cousin, a small and vulnerable girl, Kirby comes to accept her lot, and though she and Daniel finally flee the community and the wrath of Caleb, she finds herself wavering between the world into which she born and the world into which she had been thrown, “swinging between Esther and Kirby.”
I read Fleur’s novel as an allegory of childhood. On the one hand, we form deep attachments to our parents, who bring us into the world, care for us, and become our first role models. On the other hand, something in us cries out against simply repeating or perpetuating their lives. Or even doing what they tell us to do. We suffer what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.”33 We want to do things for ourselves, in our own way, in our own good time. To give birth to ourselves. To distance ourselves from their world, even though we may chose it later as our own.
When I wrote to Fleur, saying how affected I had been by her novel, I asked whether Kirby’s experiences echoed her own in any way. “My own memories of a Taranaki childhood are very mixed,” I said. “I felt happy and secure in a loving family, but a complete stranger to the town, which appeared to be inhabited by eccentrics, snobs, and bigots, and whose respectable facades concealed injustices and violence.”
In response, Fleur told me that her husband had given her the idea for Esther. He had taught a boy from an Exclusive Brethren family that regarded education as evil, though the family was legally obliged to send its children to school until they were fifteen. “This boy wanted to be a doctor—argued with his father and got beaten up and kicked out of the family for refusing to comply. The door was slammed shut and he was told, ‘Henceforth you are dead to us.’ That story stayed in my head for about fifteen years until I felt it was time to write something based on it. (He did become a doctor—went to his mate’s house and they took him in.) That struggle to be oneself is something I seem to visit fairly frequently—my other long-lasting book (Slide the Corner) is about a boy who has to fight his parents’ determination that he follow their dreams, but he dreams of being a rally driver. The same theme pops up every few books, and I recognize that it springs from my childhood. Interestingly, not from the constraints of Inglewood so much—we were probably freer of that than you were since we were out in the country. Like you, we all couldn’t wait to kick the mud of Inglewood off our boots—but, unusually for a farming family, both Mum and Dad were adamant that we’d get all the education possible and we all knew we’d leave Taranaki when we finished high school.”
The parallelism between our stories was even more arresting when we shared recollections of our mothers’ friendship. As Fleur put it, “Our mothers were very much fish out of water in Inglewood back in the fifties, and I know the friendship meant a lot to my mum. She used to make trips into Inglewood once a month to visit Emily.”
Did their conversations ever turn to writing or to their shared love of literature? Throughout my childhood my mother would read us a chapter from a book after dinner—Alice in Wonderland, The House at Pooh Corner, The Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver’s Travels—and I would accompany her to the town library at least once a week. For Fleur, her mother “was key in me becoming a writer. She was always writing articles, plays, or stories—and every single night she would read to us and sometimes tell us stories she’d made up. She made words and story an integral part of my life. She had her first book published by Andre Deutsch in London in the seventies. It was called Pa’s Top Hat—we were so proud of her.”
For several years following my traumatic experience on Ted Corney’s farm, I suffered a recurring nightmare. I was alone on an iron-sand beach. It was neither day nor night, and the sea was a dark, ominous and magnetic presence, drawing me toward it. I tried to resist by clutching tufts of marram grass, holding onto a stone, digging my fingers into the sand. But nothing I did made any difference. The sea threatened to draw me into its dark maw. So terrified was I by this dream that I feared going to sleep. But one night, exhausted by my efforts to avoid a replay of the dream, I decided not to fight it any more, to accept my doom, to get it over with. The nightmares never recurred. They were replaced by dreams of levitation and of flying. If pursued by some demonic horde, I could, through sheer will power, rise above my pursuers and, in many cases, fly away from their clamoring hands. Somehow I had stumbled on the trick of acting counterintuitively. It was akin to the technique of surviving a rip: resisting the desire to swim against the current, allowing yourself to be pulled out to sea, then swimming parallel to the shore until you are past the rip and able to use the inshore waves to regain the beach. In Kilton Stewart’s controversial ethnography of Senoi dream therapy, a similar strategy is encouraged. Every morning, Senoi families participate in a ‘dream clinic’ in which the father and older brothers listen to and analyze the younger children’s dreams. Often, a dreamer has been about to fall or be attacked by some hostile force. Rather than urge the dreamer to put the nightmare out of his mind, the analyst urges him to return to it the following night, and overcome his fear by allowing himself to fall or to engage with the force from which he fled in terror. The assumption is that “dream characters are bad only as long as one is afraid and retreating from them, and will continue to seem bad and fearful as long as one refuses to come to grips with them.” Thus a Senoi analyst will say, “You must relax and enjoy yourself when you fall in a dream. Falling in the quickest way to get in contact with the powers of the spirit world, the powers laid open to you through your dreams. Soon, when you have a falling dream, you will remember what I am saying, and as you do, you will feel that you are traveling to the source of the power which has caused you to fall.”34
The paradox of the limitrophe is that what is initially encountered as a minatory or punitive force may be transformed into a source of strength if one can summon the courage to embrace it.
A Kuranko story, related by a young man called Sulimani Koroma in the dry season of 1972, dramatically captures this theme.
The story is about a small hand drum called the yimbe that is played during initiations.
At the time the story begins, this yimbe drum is in the hands of the hyenas in the bush. But, hearing it night after night, the villagers become entranced by its sound and present an ultimatum to their chief: “If you do not bring the drum to us in the village, we will go into the bush.” Concerned to keep the community together and maintain his authority, the chief promises a “hundred of everything” to anyone brave enough to bring the yimbe from the bush to the town.
A young man decides to try his luck. After saying good-bye to his mother—who fears she will not see her son again—he sets off on his quest. Deep in the bush, he encounters a cannibalistic djinn. But the djinn, impressed by the young man’s audacity and courage, decides not only to spare his life but to help him by giving him a fetish, with instructions on how to address it in time of need, as well as an egg, a live coal, and a piece of bamboo.
That night the young man reaches the village of the hyenas. Though suspicious and wary, the hyenas offer him food and lodging and accede to his request to be allowed to sleep in the courthouse—where the yimbe drums are kept. In the middle of the night, he steals the sweetest-sounding yimbe and flees. Hyena Sira, the canniest of the hyenas, who has not slept for fear of what the young man might do, rouses the other hyenas and leads them in pursuit of the thief. However, each time the hyenas threaten to overtake him, the young man summons the fetish. The first time it tells him to throw down the bamboo, which becomes an impenetrable forest that hyena Sira has to gnaw her way through. The second time it tells him to use the live coal to set fire to the grass, though hyena Sira quickly douses the flames by pissing on them. The third time it tells him to throw down the egg; it turns into a great lake that enables the young man to reach the safety of the town with the yimbe drum in his possession.
Now the djinn had given the young man the fetish on condition that he kill a red bull and offer it as a sacrifice to the fetish when his quest was ended. But the young man forgets his promise, and when hyena Sira, disguised as a seductive young woman, comes to the village and entices him to accompany her home, he sets off with no thought for his safety.
Once they’ve crossed the lake, hyena Sira leads the young man into an ambush. As the hyenas close in for the kill, he shimmies up a tree and summons the fetish for help. The fetish says nothing. Desperately he summons it again. Again no response. It is then that he remembers his broken promise, and declares that he will sacrifice two bulls to the fetish if it saves him. As the hyenas are about to tear him limb from limb, the fetish breaks its silence. It tells him to take a branch from the tree. It turns into a gun. The fetish then tells him to take some leaves. These turn into bullets. He fires on the hyenas and they flee for their lives.
The young man returns home and makes the promised sacrifice to the djinn.
Three lessons may be drawn from this story. First, we owe our lives to others. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it, “we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we coexist through a common world.”35 Second, the coherence and continuity of a community depends on decisive individual acts. Every person bears some responsibility for the society in which she lives. Third, our humanity is only fully realized when we suffer the ordeal of a second birth. In Kuranko initiation it is not the ordeal itself that possesses this transformative power; it is the neophyte’s readiness to face the ordeal with equanimity and accept that joy and pain in life are mutually entailed. This is the burden of Nietzsche’s motto, increscunt animi, vivescit virtus (the spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding), and of his view that “the value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.”36
But what if the wounding is so great that we cannot recover from it? What if the value of the life we lose is never equivalent to the new life gained? What if the nightmare of history so overwhelms us that we lose all power to act or to speak?
Historically, some of the most bitterly contested and battered provinces of Europe have been the limitrophe regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Transylvania, and Silesia. So when an ethnic German family of refugees arrived in Inglewood in 1950, I might have seen them—had I a better knowledge of the European century—as an embodiment of these tragic borderlands in which, often overnight, one’s mother tongue is banned, one is obliged to speak another language, one’s status goes from privilege to destitution, and one is forced, as the Kramers were, into a refugee camp because one has become persona non grata in the country one once called home (in their case, Silesia) and cannot return to the fatherland because it lies in ruins.
Clad in ill-fitting Red Cross clothing and footwear, they found no favor in our insular community, but when the daughter, whose name was Renata, joined our class, my heart went out to her. Though it was summer, she was dressed in a woolen skirt, rubber boots, and a threadbare jersey. Three years older than any of us, and speaking only broken English, she had endured privations I could only guess at, even years later when I tried to research her family’s pre-antipodean life. Not only did the Kramers find themselves torn between Poland and Germany, and not “fully at home in either”;37 they discovered another no-man’s-land between Europe and New Zealand that was even more deeply unsettling.
My abiding memory of Renata is her pallid beauty and the mood of sadness that hung over her like a cloud before falling as rain on the summer’s day our class went to the school swimming baths and Renata emerged from the girl’s bathing shed wearing a moth-eaten, old-fashioned woolen swimming costume that revealed her womanhood despite her brave attempts, by crossing her arms or placing one hand on her crotch, to conceal herself from our stares.
The Kramers rented a shabby council cottage opposite the railway station. Mr. Kramer worked as a street cleaner, and I would often see him chipping weeds with a hoe or cleaning a street gutter with a wire broom as I wended my way to school. Every Saturday night he and his wife would take their seats in the Town Hall and watch the same Hollywood movie I was watching, through very different eyes. Mrs. Kramer was much larger than her husband and was never seen without the fur coat she had brought with her from Europe. By contrast, her husband was a scrawny individual, always wearing the same worker’s clothes and seemingly borne down by the weight of some great woe or weariness. When the lights came on at intermission, Mrs. Kramer would dispatch her husband to the Nibble Nook to buy a packet of Minties and an ice cream cone.
How is it, I ask myself now, sixty years later, that I am able to recall these details so vividly? How can I account for the fascination this foreign couple had for me? Or the sympathy I felt for Renata, whom I sometimes saw in her parents’ company as they strolled around the town, perhaps repeating a habit formed in some refugee camp, of an evening promenade? Tony Judt speaks of Europe’s postwar history as “a story shadowed by silences; by absence.”38 Old communities, in which Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, and others lived as neighbors, imploded and fragmented. “Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people.”39 But there were many, like the Kramers, who had no country to return to. Given such traumatic displacements and permanent losses, was it possible that Renata’s real parents had been killed and that the Kramers had taken her in, perhaps to replace a child they had lost? And how had they survived the camps? Did Mrs. Kramer prostitute herself for the price of a loaf of bread, a slab of butter, a packet of sugar, a tin of bully beef? And what of Mr. Kramer during the war years, when his German ethnicity surely gave him privileges that Silesian Poles were systematically denied? What humiliations had he suffered? I have asked such questions for many years, knowing that they cannot be answered and also knowing that we inhabit the borderlands of history, shadowed by our previous lives and cursed by the indelible stain of things we did in order to survive.
One evening, Mr. Kramer came home from work and got into a slanging match with his wife. It would later transpire, from evidence heard at his trial, that these incomprehensible tirades were almost daily occurrences. According to Kramer’s own testimony, his wife refused to endure another day in that hovel, that wretched town. Their lives were more degraded than they had been in the camps. He was not earning enough. He had let himself be defeated. He was weak. He was not man enough to fight for a better life for her or for Renata.
None of this I would ever have known had it not been for my grandfather, who was the local policeman in Inglewood for thirty-five years. Though he retired from the police force in 1946, he regularly visited his successor, and the two swapped stories, some of which were passed on to me.
Kramer did not respond to his wife’s insults. He had heard it too many times before. He bided his time. He got up from his chair and walked without will or premeditation to the bathroom at the back of the house. He took his cutthroat razor, returned to the kitchen, and slit her throat.
He was tried in the New Plymouth Supreme Court, found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. This was around 1953, when I was starting high school.
Renata disappeared from Inglewood, and from my life, forever.
I sometimes think that limitrophe describes not only geographical borderlands between one state and another but psychological borderlands between states of mind and between what passes for public knowledge and what is suppressed, salted away, never spoken of because it offends our self image or otherwise outrages our sense of who we are.
It is ironic that all my attempts to locate newspaper or archival records of the Kramer trial have come to nothing and that this murder never figures in accounts of Inglewood’s violent past, though it would undoubtedly reinforce the popular claim that Inglewood is “the murder capital” and “psychopathic center” of New Zealand.
Statistics lend some support to this claim. While the national murder rate is about two per hundred thousand per annum, my hometown boasts a rate of twenty-five per hundred thousand—not alarming by U.S. standards (Inglewood, California has thirteen murders per thousand yet is safer than 25 percent of cities in the U.S.), but troubling for New Zealanders.40 It isn’t just the discrepancy between the pastoral appearance of my hometown and its hidden history of violence that is so mystifying; it is the brutal and bizarre forms this violence takes.41 A boy brings a sawn-off .22 rifle to school and kills his teacher with a single shot to the head; a young man murders a couple with a knife, then severs their genitals and nails them to a wall; the members of a rugby team gatecrash a young man’s twenty-first birthday party and sodomize him with a broom handle; the members of a local church beat a twelve-year-old boy’s brains out with a concrete block in their zeal to rid him of the devil; a forty-seven-year-old woman with a gambling addiction seduces an elderly widower, then bashes him to death with a steam iron, puts his body in the trunk of her station wagon, and drives around the province, paying off her gambling debts by forging his signature on his checks.
When I was a boy my parents and grandparents were so determined to protect my innocence that such stories seldom reached my ears. But rumor—like the shoots of the giant bamboos that grew wild in the backblocks of Taranaki—found a way through the cracks of even the best-defended homes. And as I grew older the national tabloid Truth was a source on which one could rely for the more salacious and vicious facts of life. Even though my high school did everything in its power to suppress publication of one of the worst crimes committed in its precincts, the story found its way into the pages of Truth, where I learned about the boys who, on a remote corner of the school farm, ganged up on another boy they disliked and castrated him with fencing pliers.
Just as the Greek nostos is connected to the Indo-European root nes,42 meaning return to light and life, so Maori imagine one’s home place as a hearth where a fire is perpetually rekindled and kept burning (ahi ka).
Nostalgia was originally a medical diagnosis, characterized by “erroneous representations” that caused the afflicted to lose touch with present realities. The symptoms were allegedly identical to those of grief and mourning—hearing voices, seeing ghosts, dreaming of lost loved ones and localities, losing one’s appetite, becoming immobile and depressed.43
There is, I believe, a close kinship between nostalgia and our yearning to know the truth about events that our parents and public authorities refuse to speak of. Our fascination with what is proscribed by censorship is not unlike our longing for the homeland from which we have become estranged.
For W. G. Sebald both these senses of being an outcast explained his attraction to out-of-the-way places, architectural anomalies, objets trouvés (particularly old postcards), and individuals who, so to speak, had been treated like shit.
I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another. Because in my experience once they begin to talk, they have things to tell you that you won’t be able to get from anywhere else. And I felt that need of being able to listen to people telling me things from very early on, not least I think because I grew up in postwar Germany where there was—I say this quite often—something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e., your parents never told you anything about their experiences because there was at the very least a great deal of shame attached to these experiences. So one kept them under lock and seal. And I for one doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any of these subjects. There wasn’t a written or spoken agreement about these things. It was a tacit agreement. It was something that was never touched on. So I’ve always . . . I’ve grown up feeling that there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust. And once I started . . . I would never have encountered these witnesses if I hadn’t left my native country at the age of twenty, because the people who could tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth, did not exist in that country any longer. But one could find them in Manchester, and in Leeds or in North London or in Paris—in various places, Belgium and so on.44
Sebald’s reflections on displacement and marginality echo Henry Miller’s remarks about his friend Alfred Perles. Miller describes Perles as having led so many lives, assumed so many identities, and acted so many parts that to do justice to his totality would be like reconstructing a jigsaw puzzle. “He lived continually en marge. He was ‘limitrophe,’ one of his favorite words, to everything, but he was not limitrophe to himself. In the first book he wrote in French (Sentiments Limitrophes) there were microscopic revelations of his youth which verged on the hallucinatory.”45
In retrospect, my own past sometimes takes on hallucinatory qualities. I remember the woman in my hometown who bore a child out of wedlock and was the subject of perpetual gossip, her daughter as stigmatized as the mother, their house avoided as though it were haunted or held the power to pervert anyone who came too close to it . . . the woman who had been jilted in her youth and tried to commit suicide by throwing herself into a drowned quarry that served as the local rubbish tip, only to cripple herself for life, so that her painful limp was a sordid reminder to us all of the consequences of misguided passion . . . the school year that began with two weeks of soul-destroying military drill, marching hour after hour up and down an asphalt tennis court, forming ranks, right dressing, being ear bashed, bawled out, regimented, while in the heartbreaking distance one heard girl’s voices from the gymnasium singing “Down in the Glen.”
As a boy I clung to these remote, censured, or ostracized figures as if my life depended on them. And it was not insignificant that my closest friends were a Maori boy—Eddie Ngeru—and a new boy—David Derbyshire—whose passions for model airplanes, Arthur Ransom novels, and irreverent records by Spike Jones and Stan Freberg I also embraced with gusto. Though I was marking time on an outpost far from my true home, these outside influences sustained me and gave me glimpses into my future vocation as an ethnographer.
But it was the books I read that confirmed this sense that my real life lay elsewhere.
Until the 1960s, most children’s books in New Zealand were imported from England. During the war years, and for some time after, these imports were restricted, so the few books we did acquire were precious to us. Among these were the faraway tree novels of Enid Blyton. This magical tree grew in an enchanted forest. Its upper branches were lost in the clouds, and small houses were built in its enormous trunk. When, years later, I read Italo Calvino’s philosophical fable, Il Barone Rampante (The Baron in the Trees) and saw Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting, La Voix du Sang (The Voice of Blood), I again felt the presence of an archetypal image that obliquely answers our yearning to be transported to a realm beyond the mundane one we actually inhabit. By dozing off on a summer’s day, lapsing into reverie, falling down a rabbit hole, walking through the back of a wardrobe into a land of ice and snow, or being lulled into a trance by a parent reading a bedtime story, we instantly cross a threshold into another more nourishing world. Since many of the books I read as a child were English, it was inevitable that I would fantasize England as a land as hedgerows, friendly animals, and fabulous cities. One particular illustrated book, given to me on my seventh birthday by my mother and father, perfectly captured this mystery of elsewhere. Mr. Mole’s Tunnel, told by Douglas Collins and pictured by G. W. Blackhouse, begins with the dilemma of Mrs. Mole, whose shopping expeditions to a town “on the sunny side of an enormous mountain” took “four hours to go, and five hours to come back”.46 The first illustration in the book shows Mrs. Mole trudging off from Shrew Hall to the train station. Four arms of a signpost point to “Station,” “Faraway,” Nowhere,” and “Someplace.” Mrs. Mole decides that a move to Milesaway, on the sunny side of the mountain, is the only way of resolving the situation, but Mr. Moles is averse to moving and comes up with an ingenious plan for staying put and enabling his wife to travel to Milesaway in no time at all. He would build a tunnel under the mountain.
In this simple tale is captured one of humanity’s oldest quandaries—how to be secure in some “dear perpetual place,” yet, at the same time, able to draw sustenance from the world at large.
In reality, however, it is difficult to have it both ways. No magical wardrobes, rabbit holes, beanstalks, or tunnels, or even unmagical means of air travel, make it possible to live in two hemispheres. We are not godwits, who nest in one place and feed in another. We find ourselves divided between places we visit and the place we dwell. Only in one of these places can we keep the home fires burning. In the other places, memories dim, the fires die, the hearth grows cold.
Yet there is, perhaps, more irony in this dilemma than tragedy.
As a child, listening to the story of the Billy Goats Gruff, it never occurred to me that the risks they took in crossing the ogre-protected bridge to greener pastures would not pay off. Though the story ends with the reunited family trotting happily toward a lush meadow studded with wild flowers, it is perfectly possible that within a day of reaching this utopia one of the goats looked back to the other side of the river and noticed that the pastures they had abandoned actually looked greener than the pastures they had risked their lives to reach.
Though I was raised in a loving family, this did not prevent me from imagining that my friends’ families might be more fun to live with. Mrs. Derbyshire’s meals were tastier than the meals my mother served. Eddie Ngeru’s dilapidated house was more homely than my own. Even when I moved to a city, the promise of miraculous transformation was short-lived. The streets were not paved with gold, and no wealthy merchant’s daughter fell in love with me or helped me make my fortune. For some reason my fantasizing reached an almost unbearable intensity when I was in an art gallery. It was not the paintings that carried me away, but the beautiful women I glimpsed as I moved from room to room. I came away from every visit to a gallery with an image of a dark and beautiful creature I would never have the courage to talk to, yet whose loss I would mourn for the rest of the day. Why is it that a girl glimpsed in passing, as from the window of a train, is always perfection, making the girl you actually love pale in comparison? As Montaigne, observed, “in love there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us,” and he cites Ariosto’s lines on hunting:
Just as a huntsman will pursue a hare
O’er hill and dale, in weather cold or fair;
The captured hare is worthless in his sight;
He only hastens after things in flight.47
Why are we always reaching beyond that which we actually possess? Are we victims of mimetic desire—in which things take on value because others possess them and we do not? Or is it simply that distance lends enchantment—our imaginations forever migrating to somewhere over the rainbow or beyond the horizon, so that we live in the eternal hope that in giving up or giving away all we have known, all we have acquired, we instantly earn some fabulous favor or will receive some miraculous bounty?
It has taken me many years to realize that utopia can be anywhere and to understand that in looking for it elsewhere one risks destroying the possibility of ever finding it at one’s feet. It may be that this unabated sense of mourning that rules my inner life explains the attraction I have felt for writers like Thomas Wolfe, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, W. G. Sebald, and Hannah Arendt, whose work attained its greatness in exile. And my own attenuated relationship with my native land may explain why I have always gravitated toward remote societies, drifters and derelicts, refugees, migrants, beached mariners, loners, and lost souls. Through these individuals, and in these places, I have found an oblique means of writing about my own alienation.
During the summer before I went to Sierra Leone, my wife and I would drive to Walden Pond every evening to walk or swim. By mid October the water was cold, and the woodland paths no longer crowded by pilgrims visiting the site of Thoreau’s cabin. One utterly still evening, after walking the perimeter of the lake, we came upon eight figures standing strangely apart from one another at the water’s edge, all looking toward the setting sun. As if answering an identical but inaudible summons, they held their iPads or Blackberries at arms length, like aliens making offerings to the western sky. But theirs was not some arcane ritual, but the all too human act of seeking to capture an experience that might be shared with others, posted on Facebook perhaps, with a single line of explanation—the implicit expression of a need to connect, to share what is in one’s heart or on one’s mind, and have it “liked.” I was moved by these gestures against aloneness—faint images of the light fading from the sky and the black wall of oaks and pines where, like fireflies, the flash of cameras could be discerned, fitfully keeping a memory alive despite the shadows lengthening on the lake.
Can our words and concepts be compared with these fugitive images? Can we speak of limitrophes to language—regions of experience that lie outside the limits of what can be stated or claimed as states of mind? And does fiction—and by extension all forms of imaginative art—preserve a sense of these anterior realms that, despite our intellectual legerdemain, resist the rites of naming and knowing on which we set such store?
In 2010 the New York artist Michael Prettyman began translating The Mahabharata from the original Sanskrit and creating images to accompany the text. Classically trained, and mindful that most religious imagery is figurative—four-armed Vishnu, winged angels, Jesus with his halo, the Buddha blissful in lotus position—Michael’s first attempts conformed to tradition. But the results were, to his mind, kitsch, and he experimented with other ways of doing justice to the text. One of his teachers had emphasized the monistic aspect of Hinduism, and Michael now decided that a more abstract approach was called for, a process that would involve subtraction rather than addition, that would strip away the outward forms of religious iconography or religious language in order to touch upon that which eluded conventional depictions and representations. Michael had learned that the black surface of unexposed film conceals all the colors of the spectrum. So he purchased a large sheet of photo-sensitive paper and exposed it to the night sky. He then tried various solvents, hoping they would dissolve the surface and reveal what lay beneath. His wife suggested using caustics. He added acids to his repertoire, spilling chemicals on the black emulsion and discovering abstract forms that evoked, in their randomness and unpredictability, cosmic truths that are usually obscured if not completely masked by conventional forms of expression. When Michael spoke to me about this project he cited something Picasso wrote in 1923. “Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons.”48
At the Boston airport I found myself standing behind a woman in her thirties. The woman’s daughter wore wire-framed spectacles and had a pink suitcase. I guessed her to be about ten. An older woman, who I thought at first to be unrelated to the mother and daughter, turned out to be the child’s grandmother. The younger woman was holding a paperback called Who’s Afraid of Schrödinger’s Cat? When she and her mother exchanged a few words, I got the impression that the grandmother was English, but the accent of the woman with the paperback was unstable—American one second, British the next. It was then that I remembered that in Schrödinger’s quantum world there is no either/or. Many possibilities, including contradictory ones, coexist. One can be dead and alive at the same time. One can be simultaneously living out two different destinies or be a member of two different generations. Self and other are not opposed; they are the same person realized in different aspects. Everything depends on the position, place, and point of view from which one makes one’s observations. In the words of Fernando Pessoa, each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.49