CHAPTER 11

Yonder

Ian is a strange child. He likes to be away by himself and can never be found when he is wanted.

—Rose Fairweather, c. 1905

 

 

There is a compelling passage in Siri Hustvedt's essay “Yonder” that immediately brought to my mind the life and work of the painter Ian Fairweather. Hustvedt was born in America of Norwegian parents, and her childhood map of the world “consisted of two regions only: Minnesota and Norway, my here and my there.”¹ This was the “yonder” her father described as a place “between here and there,” a place that could not be occupied without it becoming “here” and thereby creating another elusive and indeterminate yonder, elsewhere. As writers, Hustvedt and her husband, Paul Auster, were fascinated by the similarity between this genealogical or geographical utopia and the writing of fiction. For though one writes in solitude, one imagines oneself inside the minds of characters located in myriad cities, disparate landscapes, and many roomed mansions elsewhere. What Hustvedt and Auster do not mention is that this dislocation of consciousness, this awayness, can be a trap, dropping the writer out of this world into an imaginary space that claims him or obsesses her with all the power of a mirage.

Such was the case with the painter Ian Fairweather. Born in Scotland in 1891, he spent a solitary childhood with various aunts after his parents returned to India when he was six months old. When he was ten, his father retired from the army and settled on Jersey in the English Channel. But it was too late for this lonely child to form the bonds he had been denied. Without a close relationship with his mother, he could not develop a sense of himself through her, or with an-other, and he was driven to fashion his identity alone. In the absence of mirroring, his self-image was negative. And because he probably did not like himself very much, he was loath to seek in friendships and social contacts the affirmation that might change this view. Unwilling to take a chance on the future, he fell back on the past, imagining he might slough off his own mundane skin and so retrieve the paradise found in a mother's love or a close-knit family. The Orient would become this imagined Eden from which he had been expelled.

At nineteen he was commissioned officer in the First Cheshire Regiment. Taken prisoner on his second day at the front, he spent World War I illustrating a POW magazine and doing ink drawings inspired by Japanese art. After the war he enrolled at the Slade, found it stultifying, and escaped to Canada and then China (in 1929).

I saw my first Fairweathers in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in the early 1980s, and I was immediately drawn to them. The work refused categorization. Cubism, Chinese calligraphy, and even Aboriginal sand painting were all suggested, but the paintings—made of synthetic polymer paint and gouache brushed onto sheets of cheap cardboard and allowed to drip or run—had a presence and mystery that compelled me to return to them, over and over again. While Turtle and Temple Gong suggested an oriental origin for the abstract images, and Monastery and Marriage at Cana had Christian echoes, I could find no facts about the artist except that, before his death in 1974, he had lived a life of poverty and solitude on an island off the North Queensland coast.

For many years I kept postcards of two of Fairweather's paintings on my writing desk,² recognizing in this restive and reclusive individual an affinity I could not fully fathom.

Perhaps it had something to do with my own life at that time. I had recently lost my wife. I lived on the dole. Devoted to the welfare of my teenage daughter, I found it hard to make ends meet, though never rued my austere existence, writing every morning, taking long walks around a nearby mountain, shopping and preparing meals, being there when my daughter needed me. Did I somehow divine in Fairweather's distinctive paintings a similar marginality, an echo of my own hermetic life? Was his down-to-earth palette of dull blues and grays, rust red, smudged lilac, and yellow ochre evidence of some nameless loss, or his abstractions, his fascination with the East, a sign of disenchantment with the West? Could one even make such connections between art and reality when art conjured up places and forms bearing no resemblance to what we know as the real?

This was the burning question for me. For while I lived a fairly isolated life, often alone with my thoughts or unsure of myself in the company of others, I wanted art to do justice to the world not by mirroring it but by entering deeply into it, and I wondered whether this could be achieved through solitary meditation as much as through social engagement. As with art, so with the intellectual life—one had recourse to artifice, abstraction, and the arcane, to be sure, but this distancing from the empirical immediate could only be justified, in my view, if it led to an enhanced or a novel understanding of the world that lies around us, so familiar that we forget to look at it, so pedestrian that we dismiss it from our minds. And so, as I enlarged my knowledge of Fairweather's oeuvre, I grew even more admiring of the ordinariness of the subjects that had captured his attention—fish traps in a river, a house yard, a market, a birdcage, a gateway, a bridge over a canal—and the unstable materials on which he worked—plywood, butcher's paper, and cardboard. All this corresponded with my own fascination with the imponderabilia of everyday life, and the way that the most banal events or objects may illuminate the world.

As the Japanese moved south from Manchuria in the early 1930s, Fairweather began to search for a place of refuge. He stayed in Bali until his meager funds ran out, then came to Australia in February 1934. His first impressions of Melbourne presaged my own, thirty years later, walking the dismal and deserted weekend streets like a lost soul.

I seem to have done nothing but pursue with burning feet (my sandshoes are wearing rather thin) a way through endless Finchleys and Golders Greens seeking a break—an open space—any let up in this colossal monotony. There is no break—it is a whole—a matriarchy—a million perfect homes…and the Sundays—oh the Sundays—the Salvation Army prowl the empty streets.³

Fairweather was lucky. He fell in with a small group of modernists who admired his seriousness and superior draftsmanship. But within a year he moved on—to the Philippines, Shanghai, Peking, Japan, all the while sending work back to London, where it was exhibited in the Redfern Gallery to critical praise. In 1938 he returned to Australia, but when war was declared, he travelled to Thailand, Malaya, Indochina, Singapore, and Calcutta in the hope that he might be of use, even at forty-eight, to the British army. Back in Australia in 1943, he did odd jobs, lived rough—often among other outcasts—in a makeshift shack, a derelict house⁴—until, in an old lifeboat he had bought for a song, he made landfall on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, where he lived and worked, on and off, for the rest of his life.

Patricia Anderson has suggested that Fairweather's nomadism was born of a need to transmute direct experience into memory. It is not real places, people, or events he paints but his recollections of them. He moved in order that only the memory of his previous life remained, purged of the hardships he had endured, metamorphosed into abstract images.⁵

Here was a man who described himself as “selectively gregarious,” whom others would call “pathologically reclusive,” “profoundly melancholy,” and “a strange, shy man with a cultured voice”⁶ who painted at night in the penumbra of a hurricane lamp as though his Sisyphus-like task was to screen out the dross of his earthly existence in order to illuminate or protect an image of a world that could not be touched by the brutality of war, the cruelty of his fellow men, the drudgery of daily life, and the relentless passage of time. The more I read of Fairweather's ceaseless travels, his complete indifference to his personal appearance or home comforts, his penury and solitude, and his ability to paint under the most appallingly difficult conditions, the more I wondered whether this was a form of madness, though whether the blessed insanity of the maenad⁷ and the bacchant⁸ or the cursed insanity of the psychotic I could not say.⁹

Who in his right mind would have attempted to cross from Darwin to Timor on an improvised raft, as Fairweather did in April 1952?

Murray Bail calls it the act of a paranoid person. Hell, for this artist, was other people, who exhibited his work without his knowledge or consent, gloated and jeered at him, wished him ill. Like the hapless Hurtle Duffield in Patrick White's The Vivisector, Fairweather was the crook-necked white pullet that the other hens pecked at because it was different.¹⁰ To leave the henhouse seemed the only solution. And so, after months of research in the Darwin Public Library, but with minimal navigation skills, he found materials in rubbish tips and scrap yards to build his raft. With three aluminum aircraft fuel tanks, a sail made from half-rotten hessian food parachutes, and ropes, wedges, fencing wire, and other bric-a-brac, he assembled his imitation Kon-Tiki, stashed his supplies of tinned food and water, and set sail. Sixteen days later, and already given up for dead, he made landfall on the island of Roti, west of Timor.

Perhaps, as Norman O. Brown suggests, madness is not the word for what we seek, but mystery. Whether we favor Dionysian excess or Apollonian discipline, we crave what the sedentary life of suburbia or academia cannot give—what Ezra Pound referred to as the mysteries that lie beyond the doors of “the outer courts of the same.”¹¹ Yet, for we who spend so many hours writing, thinking, painting, sculpting, weaving, or practicing music in solitude, setting worldly concerns aside in order to conjure the voices, images, and forms that come unbidden only when we open our minds to them, do we not risk falling into fantasy and losing touch with the world in our haste to praise the ineffable, in our attachment to contemplation, in our search for the secret, the esoteric, and the occult? As Nance Lightfoot puts it, upbraiding Hurtle Duffield for being an “intellectual no-hope artist,” indifferent to other people: “While you're all gummed up in the great art mystery, they're alive, and breakun their necks for love.”¹²

Fairweather made no bones about his disenchantment with the Western world. In a letter to Lina Bryans in 1943, he wrote, “The painting I have done has always been an escape from our Western world—surrounded by it I seem to get sunk.”¹³ Like the islands on which he found temporary refuge or relief, Asia seemed to be a haven into which he could sail in his imagination, so that the quasi-calligraphic motifs on many of his works resemble screens or bars that give sanctuary to the vulnerable and indefinite figures within—mother and child, family groups, children, dancers, bathers, monks, and even the artist himself—all of whom possess the luminosity of stained glass.

HEADS IN THE CLOUDS

In Cambridge recently, a friend described her guitar teacher to me. He was a young man, so devoted to his music that he spent eight hours a day practicing, followed by hours reading poems by Lorca and Neruda that would help him refine his understanding of certain passages in pieces by Brazilian and Cuban composers. As my friend put it, “His head is in the clouds.” I immediately thought of Ian Fairweather, and the metaphorical contrast that informs so much Western thought, at least since the Enlightenment, between the ethereal and the material. To have a strong sense of reality is to have one's feet firmly planted on the ground, to be down to earth. Reality is a matter of addressing the needs of income and livelihood; all else places one in jeopardy of becoming distracted, absentminded, even delusional. But surely what we need to know is when to let go and when to engage, when to submit and when to act. The imagination is as necessary to our health as the workaday imperatives with which it is contrasted. Just as sleep and dreaming are as vital to our health as food and water, so we sometimes need to distance ourselves from the world, the better to engage with it. Reculer pour mieux sauter. The difficulty is using art, religion, ritual, or fantasy to get some distance from the world that has become too much for us to bear or grasp without losing touch with that world. And again, I am struck by the recurring metaphors of storm and strife—of the world experienced as a minatory force, potentially overwhelming, engulfing, buffeting, drowning, swamping—and the countervailing images of calm, of water unruffled by wind, of stillness and silence—images of what we need if we are to hold our own, refresh our minds, and endure that buffeting.

I sometimes ask myself whether people living in tribal societies are better able to get the balance right.

But this broaches the question as to the status of thinkers, artists, and storytellers in such societies.

Early anthropologists regarded “preliterate” or “primitive” people as being so absorbed in the practicalities of everyday life that all of their ritual, art, and thought was subservient to the exigencies of survival. No one had either the leisure or the incentive for abstract thought, metaphysical speculation, rational inquiry, or systematic scientific experimentation. As Paul Radin wrote in 1927, it was widely assumed that there was “a dead level of intelligence among primitive peoples, that the individual is completely swamped by and submerged in the group, that thinkers and philosophers as such do not exist.”¹⁴ But in his determination to refute the views of Cassirer and Levy Bruhl, Radin promoted an equally spurious view of the primitive philosopher as skeptic, critic, ethicist, metaphysician, cosmologist, and sage. Instead of demystifying the Brahmanical conception of the philosopher as hero—a man of genius, capable of pondering the world from afar and grasping its inner workings—Radin and his successors looked for primitive philosophers who conformed to the Western stereotype.¹⁵

The metaphysical bias of Western philosophy has not only led European thinkers to measure or explain non-Western beliefs and practices solely in terms of their logical coherence or correspondence with objective reality; it has distracted us from exploring what Malinowski called “context of situation,”¹⁶ namely, the ways in which speech and thought reflect personal, cultural, and practical interests that effectively delimit the range of what can be said or thought. Rather than eschew the view that language and thought can transcend circumstance, many non-Western philosophers find their own traditions wanting when compared with the allegedly “systematic” and “speculative” thought of philosophers like Kant,¹⁷ or focus on local sages and ritual specialists who bear comparison with the hierophants of Western thought. In this view, Africa appears to be interesting only insofar as it approximates Western conceptions of civilization—monumental architecture, monotheistic religion, centralized states, advanced technologies—or possesses philosophers like Plato, sacred or learned texts, and deep cosmological knowledge such as that falsely attributed to the Dogon sage Ogotemmeli by the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule.¹⁸ Even those philosophers who criticize this kind of ethnocentrism, arguing that “the traditional and non-traditional must be granted de jure, equal and reciprocal elucidatory value as theoretical alternatives,”¹⁹ turn to the “fathers of secrets” to elucidate the “high culture” or “great tradition”²⁰ rather than explore the existential quandaries of ordinary people which, in my view, is the milieu from which all thought springs.

It is to Michel Foucault that we owe our most trenchant critique of this Aristotelian view of the intellectual as someone whose power of reason and capacity for systematic understanding depend on his detachment from the world rather than his participation in it. But we can go further than Foucault and argue that thought is not merely an expression of a prevailing episteme in which everyone participates to some extent; it is occasioned by existential travails that cannot be reduced to any discursive regime or cultural ethos. In other words, all thought is grounded in the situation of the thinker, and is an attempt to come to terms with that situation, through stories and fantasies, experimentation and speculation, reading and reflection, conversation and consultation. As John Dewey observed, “thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on ‘general principles.’ There is something specific which occasions and evokes it,” namely, “some perplexity, confusion, or doubt.”²¹ Crisis provokes critique.

Where then, in any tradition, Melanesian, African, or European, does thought reside?

It does not necessarily find expression in the work of great minds, isolated in ivory towers, accessing libraries, using abstract language, scorning “low” or “popul ar” culture, and proclaiming universal truths. Nor need it be located in myth, cosmology, proverbial wisdom, and beliefs (in witchcraft, sorcery, ancestral influence, and ritual forms), as Wiredu and Hallen suggest. Philosophy is neither a privileged vocation nor an activity that takes place in a protected location. It is a mode of being-in-the-world, and as such it is inextricably a part of what we do, what we feel, and what we reckon with in the course of our everyday lives. This is the essence of Nietzsche's argument—that philosophical thinking is, like all conscious thinking, an “instinctive activity,” and that every great philosophy is “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”²² It is a view that Foucault and Levi-Strauss insisted on: that thought finds conscious expression in us, but is not necessarily generated by a self-conscious, thinking subject. For Heidegger, thought is similarly grounded—and may be compared with dwelling and building; it is a mode of constructive activity, a way of inhabiting the world.²³ For Heidegger's student Hannah Arendt, thought belongs to the vita activa—the social field of interest, interaction, and inter-subjectivity. Here it makes its appearance as thoughtfulness, mindfulness, care, discernment, and judgment. For Kuranko, such social skills define what it is to be a moral person. Personhood ((morgoye) consists in having regard for others (gbiliye) and showing them respect (lembe)—recognizing their status, paying them their due, contributing to their well-being. At the same time, personhood is consummated in self-restraint, bringing one's emotions under control, weighing one's words before speaking, thinking of the wider context in which one lives

Morgo kume mir' la I konto I wo fo la (whatever word a person thinks of, that will he speak; i.e., think before you speak, lest you blurt out stupid ideas).

I mir' la koe mi ma, I wo l ke la (you thought of that, you do that; i.e., think before you act, lest your actions belie your intentions).

As my friend Sewa Koroma put it:

When people do things or say things, you have to think twice, think why, why they're doing this, is it because of this? I'm young. I've got to think that even if the [Diang] chief lived a long life or I die, I have kids coming up, and if I have access to the chieftaincy they might be interested, you know. People don't write history, they don't write things down. You have to remember everything. We say, i tole kina i bimba ko [your ear is as wise as your grandfather's words]. When my father was young he was listening to the elders talk about things that happened long before his time. Then he told me those stories, and I will tell them to my son. They're not written down, but if you listen you will know them. Those are the things you have to think about, that you have to know deep down. Ade [Sewa's wife] says, “You think too much,” but I tell her there are things you have to think about, things beyond normal, so that you'll know.

Clearly, reflective thought involves getting beyond oneself—thinking of one's immediate situation from the standpoint of one's forebears' experience and understanding. This is not a quest for a transcendent view, but for identifying those factors and forces that lie in the penumbral regions beyond everyday, self-centered awareness. Reflective thought is not a matter of plumbing the psychic depths of other minds or achieving empathic understanding; rather, it is focused on one's relationships with others. The Kuranko refuse to speculate about other people's experience. “I am not inside them” (n'de sa bu ro), one is told, or “I do not know what is inside” (n'de ma konto lon). Empathic understanding is, moreover, not only thought to be impossible; it is regarded as largely irrelevant to behaving as a moral being possessing social intelligence or common sense (hankilime). The Kuranko emphasis is less on being of one mind than on moving with, working with, eating with, being with, and sitting with others (often in amicable silence). Accordingly, one of the greatest challenges to a Western anthropologist is how to acquire these techniques of practical mastery and mutuality in which a knowledge of the motives, mind-sets, and sentiments of others counts for far less than one's social skills in interacting convivially with them. As Paul Ricoeur phrased this in his last writing, our goal is not an identification with the other, which is, anyway, “neither possible nor desirable,” but “an accompanying” that means that no one will have to live or die alone.²⁴

A STORYTELLER'S STORY

I may seem to have strayed a long way from the life and work of Ian Fairweather. But I want to explore the thesis that art and philosophy carry the risk of estranging us from the world at the same time that they hold out the promise of helping us reengage more adroitly with it. It is perhaps this ambiguity that makes us suspicious of thinkers and artists, for they unsettle our certainties as well as show us new ways of understanding our existence. And so, in turning to the life and work of a Kuranko storyteller, I hope to bring into sharper relief the struggle that lies at the heart of all imaginative activity, both intellectual and artistic, to strike and sustain a balance between distancing oneself from the world and achieving a more vital involvement with it.

Flying over northern Sierra Leone, you see villages like islands in a sea of grassland and forest, interrupted by granite inselbergs and crisscrossed by dirt paths and roads. This contrast between wilderness and settlement translates into a symbolic antinomy that is basic to local worldviews, narratives, and rituals. The bush stands for awayness—an antinomian, extrasocial space of untrammeled power and peril that is, paradoxically, the source of life giving energy, in the form of fertile farmland, game animals, herbal medicines, and bush spirits (djinn). While the town is a moral space, governed by custom and law, it is only by venturing beyond the town that its vitality can be sustained, and almost all Kuranko stories are allegories of the struggle to reconcile the competing demands of being a part of a community and being independent of it. This struggle also plays out in the mind of every storyteller, for in the questing hero the fabulist invokes a figure that stands apart from the community yet whose discoveries in the wilderness may bring to that community the vital powers, magical medicines, musical instruments, and divinatory skills without which it could not exist. The stories may be set in a remote and mythical place, a long time ago, but they are about the quandaries of life in the here and now. They may appear to be traditional, but they are also the inventions of the living—imaginative means of coming to terms with the complexities of existence.

Unlike most of my Kuranko informants, Keti Ferenke would never explain things away with the stock phrases “that is how it happened” (maiya ta ra nya na), “that is how our ancestors let it happen” (ma bimban ya ta nya na), or “that is what we encountered” (maiya min ta ra); rather, he would address every situation as a moral quandary demanding discussion and, hopefully, resolution. The folktale (tilei) was the perfect vehicle for this pedagogy. Since this narrative genre was ostensibly make-believe, a form of entertainment, Keti Ferenke could cunningly conceal his serious and often provocative opinions in the stories he composed. Moreover, he could create his own stories and pass them off as part of the canon. In Keti Ferenke I found a man with an ironic and critical sense of his own culture, someone who respected conventional wisdom but saw that events in the real world constantly called that wisdom into question.

Keti Ferenke's ability to observe his society from the margins stemmed, undoubtedly, from the troubled circumstances of his early life. But though he endured loss, he did not—like Ian Fairweather—suffer lovelessness, which may explain why his view from the edge did not entail withdrawal from the world but, rather, a deeply sympathetic engagement with others whose lives had also been touched by tragedy.

The first set of events that would impact on him occurred before he was born.

For many years the chieftaincy of Diang had devolved within the Ferenke family. When Keti Ferenke's grandfather, Sewa Magba Koroma, died, the chief's son, Samaran Bala Koroma, succeeded him. But it was Bala's brother, Mamadu Sandi, who wielded the real power, a power that he abused by assaulting people, stealing other men's wives, and generally throwing his weight around. In this insufferable situation, a certain Alhaji Magba Kamara, whose mother hailed from Diang, decided to intervene. Having had a few years of schooling, Magba wrote a letter to the British district commissioner that purported to be from an exasperated and weary chief Bala, asking that he be allowed to resign the chieftaincy. Magba took the letter to Bala and explained that it was from the government and thus required his signature before development work in Diang could be approved. The illiterate Bala thus signed away his chieftaincy, and the staff of office was taken from him.

Elections for a new chief were now called, and candidates presented themselves from the two ruling lineages of the Koroma clan—the “Magbas” and the “Ferenkes.”

At this time rumors had spread that the new paramount chief would be a Muslim. But since none of the candidates were Muslims, people were mystified. Fearing the worst, Mamadu Sandi and his followers drove the Muslim Mandingos from Kondembaia, the main town in Diang. But some of the old men knew of whom the diviners had been speaking, and they travelled to Kono in search of Sheku Magba, a young man who had been apprenticed to a Muslim teacher at an early age and in whom many of the Magba family placed their hopes.

Sheku returned home to find himself at the center of arguments among the Magbas, some of whom felt he was too young to be chief, as well as attacked by the Ferenkes, who did not want their power to devolve to the junior line, or to a Muslim.

However, the elections were won by the Magbas, Sheku Magba became paramount chief, and the Ferenkes became politically marginalized.

Not only political strife cast its shadows over Keti Ferenke's early life. His sister and brother both died when they were young, and in his tenth or eleventh year, tragedy struck again.

When his maternal grandmother died in Kamadugu Sukurela (a ten-mile walk from Kondembaia), Keti Ferenke's mother asked him to go at once to Tongoma in Kono to inform his classificatory sister of the death and bring her back to Kondembaia for the funeral. But his mother was suffering from a severe headache and Keti Ferenke was reluctant to leave her.

Only when she insisted did he leave. It was the twenty-ninth of the month before Ramadan. Two days later he reached Tongoma and informed his sister that their grandmother had died. But it was now Ramadan, and Keti Ferenke's brother-in-law would not allow his wife to travel until the fast month had ended.

While he was away in Tongoma, Keti Ferenke's mother died. People were wailing, “Ferenke has not come yet, Ferenke has not come yet, Ferenke has not come yet.” Although the tragic news had reached towns throughout the chiefdom, people kept the news from Keti Ferenke, and he only learned of what had happened in his absence when he returned to Kondembaia and found himself in the middle of the funeral rites. It was now the middle of the month of Ramadan.

On the last day of the month Keti Ferenke's father went to the mosque. It was a Friday. But as Kona Sumban joined the others to pray, he began trembling and could not stand without support. People urged him to go home and rest, but he insisted he would be all right. As prayers ended, it was clear to everyone that Kona Sumban was seriously ill. They helped him to his house, but he died later that day. “It was a terrible thing,” Keti Ferenke remembered. “From Friday, through Saturday, until Sunday, no one could bury him because his death had been so sudden and so strange.”

In explaining these distant events to me, Keti Ferenke spoke fatalistically. “What Allah had destined had happened.” But he also spoke of how he was received into his father's elder brother's household and cared for as a son. “My father had gone, but chief Bala was still alive. So I was not heartbroken. I found no fault with my elder father, who provided bridewealth for me to marry and cared for me as a father. Indeed, I feel that my own father never died. So my heart is at peace.”

What I could not ask, and did not know how to ask, was whether his skill in composing thought-provoking stories had helped him make a virtue of his marginality.

In Keti Ferenke's comments on the value of intelligence, one glimpses an answer to this question.

Consider the following exposition on the power of social nous or intelligence (hankili):

 

To start with, my great-great-grandfather was a chief. Down to my grandfather, they were all chiefs. Until my father, they were chiefs. Now, when you are born into a ruling house you will be told many things. If you are a fool you'll be none the wiser, but if you are clever you will inspect everything carefully. And when you lie down, you will think over certain things. If you do this, it is good. That is how I think of things.

We say kina wo and kina wo [near homophones]. They are not one [the first means “beehive.” the second means “elder”]. If you hear kina [elder], he knows almost everything. But if you hear kina [beehive], it does not know anything. The elder could be found in the younger, and the younger could be found in the elder.

Even if a person is a child but behaves like an elder, then he is an elder. If he thinks like an elder, then he is an elder. Even if a person is old and senior, if he behaves like a child, then he is a child. Therefore, this matter of seniority comes not only from the fact that one is born first, or from the fact that one is big and strong; it also concerns the manner in which one behaves and does things. For example, you will see some old men who have nothing; they are not called “big men” [morgo ba, “elders”]. But some young men have wealth; because of that, they are called morgo ba. Therefore, whatever Allah has put in your head, that is what will make you what you are. I am speaking now, but some of these words of wisdom [kuma kore] that I am explaining to you are not known by everyone. You may ask a man and he may know them. But I have explained them to you. Therefore, am I not the elder? Therefore, if you hear the word kina you should know that it is intelligence [hankili] that really defines it.

 

Where Keti Ferenke and I differed was in the way we explained intellectual giftedness. Where he saw it as innate—a divine gift—I saw it as partly genetic, but mostly acquired. Yet our experience of creative apperception was identical, for creative ideas and “divine” inspiration were seen to arise on the thresholds between sleep and wakefulness, night and day, confusion and clarity.

“It is Allah who endows a person with the ability to think and tell stories,” Keti Ferenke told me. “It was my destiny to tell stories. When my father went to a diviner before I was born, the diviner told him that his next-born child would be very clever.” These remarks are consonant with the Kuranko idea that a storyteller simply “sets down” or “lays out” something that has been given to him or put into his mind; he is, therefore, a til'sale, “one who sets down tileinu (stories).” In this sense a storyteller is like a diviner. The diviner is “one who lays out pebbles,” though it is God or a bush spirit who implants the idea of how to interpret the patterns in the diviner's mind.

“When you are told something,” Keti Ferenke said, “it is good if it stays in your mind. Ideas come into my head, just like that. I am not asleep. I am not in a dream. But when I think of them, I put them together as a story. I could never stop thinking of stories, though I could stop myself telling them.” And he went on to describe how, as he worked on his farm or lounged in his hammock at home, he would try to develop a narrative that did justice to the idea that had been seeded in his mind, bringing it to life in an entertaining and edifying way.

Not only did ideas come to him when he was relaxed and susceptible to “divine” (we might say “unconscious”) inspiration; it soon became clear to me that his stories themselves were plotted, like folktales throughout the world, as a series of critical episodes or encounters, usually three in number, interrupting the narrative flow and creating moments of impasse and heightened suspense that are preludes to a breakthrough, a surprising intervention, a novel perspective. In Kuranko stories, these moments of hiatus and tension usually occur at a socio-spatial threshold—a river's edge, a ford, a crossroads, a bridge, the perimeter of a village, or chiefdom—or at the temporal borderland between the rainy and dry seasons, or night and day. Spatial and seasonal boundaries thus provide the Kuranko with concrete images of existential limits in the same way that images of the no-man's-land between ius humanum and ius divinum, or of a censoring ego that regulates traffic across the threshold between the unconscious and conscious, provide the European social imaginary with its metaphors of border situations. But in both life-worlds, it is quasi-human figures—djinn and fetishes,²⁵ scapegoats and homo sacer²⁶—that demarcate and embody the ambiguous zone where we cease to be recognizable to ourselves yet may see ourselves more completely than at any other time.

In Kuranko stories, these moments of maximum suspense are not only signified spatially by images of borders; they are viscerally experienced as a shift from narrative to song. At such moments of narrative hiatus, the storyteller's voice is joined with a chorus of voices, adults and children alike all chiming in. Signaling a transition from one critical episode to another, songs not only increase the intensity of audience participation; they enable everyone to actively share in the telling of the tale rather than remain spellbound as passive listeners. Not only does the song mediate an individual listener's close identification with the protagonist, who is stuck in a quandary and sings in sorrow or for supernatural help; the song helps break the impasse or spell, allowing the story to proceed toward its denouement.

Structurally, therefore, every Kuranko story encapsulates the interrupted rhythm of life itself—its periods of unreflective routine, its unpredicted moments of adversity and bewilderment, its ritualized return to normalcy. Kuranko stories play out, as it were, the existential aporias of everyday life—the descent of order into chaos, the desolating losses that follow death or migration, the estrangement of kin, the brutality of power, the falling out of friends. Like other forms of play (tolon), Kuranko stories safely enact, in ways that admit of artificial resolution, the dilemmas of life. But the operative word is “artificial,” for everyone knows that life can never be cajoled into conforming to the scenarios one wishes upon it, and it is not for nothing that stories are told in the twilight zone between day and night, between waking and sleeping, when one can for a moment accept the illusion that what one can imagine or think is also a measure of what one can actually do.