Posts filed under 'ancestral identity'

Manaschi, A Modernist Novel Inspired by Central Asia’s Oldest Epic, the Manas

November 3, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Manaschi is a powerful book that lies at the nexus between the individual and the culture they are born into.

Manaschi by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Donald Rayfield, Tilted Axis, 2021

Despite being home to incredibly rich and ancient traditions of both spoken and written word, little of Central Asian literatures is known to English-language readers. Such is what is being spectacularly rectified in Hamid Ismailov’s latest novel to appear in English—Manaschi. The text, artfully translated from Uzbek to English by the meticulous Donald Rayfield, is an ode to the deeply rooted tradition of storytelling that crosses boundaries of ethnicity, gender, age, and time, taking truly epic proportions in Ismailov’s riveting prose.

A manaschi, in Kyrgyz tradition, is the person—usually a man, young or old—who performs the recitation of the epic poetry Manas, a body of narratives that contains up to 900,000 verses, and transmitted only orally before given a written form in the late nineteenth century. Reciting the Manas is an act of shamanism; it involves phenomenal memory, years of training, musical talent, and inspiration kin to a trance state. For some, the act even enables in the performer the ability to interpret dreams or foretell the future. Learning and performing the Manas embodies a lifetime’s dedication to one of the longest oral texts known to humanity, and the sacred practice prevails to this day, as new generations—now including women—continue to be trained.

The story takes place on the contemporary Kyrgyz-Tajik border in Chekbel, a mountainous village inhabited by mixed populations of nomadic Kyrgyz and sedentary Tajiks. Bekesh, the main character, is a radio journalist who lives in an urban part of Kyrgyzstan. Upon receiving the news that his uncle Baisal—a reputed manaschi—has died, he returns to his ancestral village to attend the funeral. This visit, initially conceived as a temporary break from his modern routine, turns into a life-changing experience, opening formidable questions regarding his familial and cultural duties, his unequivocal choices on identity, and his moral responsibilities to his call as a manaschi.

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On Hunter School: Indigenous Stories from Taiwan

July 1, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Saul Thompson

The Chinese language sings an altogether different tune in the mouths and hands of indigenous Taiwanese storytellers.

Hunter School by Sakinu Ahronglong, translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk, Honford Star, 2020

“I’m dumb,” I told an editor to whom I had shown an essay. “I haven’t read much, and the things I write nobody reads. I can’t write essays like other people.”

“Sakinu, why would you want to be like anyone else?” she said. “Everything in you is literature, things other people don’t have and can’t imitate. Sakinu, let everyone know all the things you keep hidden, let your life story, and Paiwan history, come flowing out of your pen.”

Translation specializes in the improbable, bringing faraway stories to unlikely audiences. The English-language translation of Hunter School (superbly crafted by veteran translator Darryl Sterk) goes further than most in this regard, because although Hunter School was originally written in Chinese, the author has no Chinese heritage, and his people have until recently had no voice in the world of Chinese-language literature, despite being part of the Chinese world; his name is Sakinu Ahronglong, and he is an indigenous man of the Paiwan ethnicity.

Like all of Taiwan’s many indigenous ethnicities, the Paiwan are an Austronesian people more closely related to the Maori of New Zealand than to the Han Chinese who now compose the majority of Taiwan’s population. Though their voices have been marginalized, they remain inheritors of living wisdom, passed from mouth to ear for millennia. Now, Sakinu’s stories have made the quantum leap, first from fireside storytelling to Chinese text, then finally into English, and they are here to show us a new way to relate to our planet and to people who have lived closest to nature for the longest time. This book is a fighter. It had to be. It has fought its way tooth-and-claw through the brambles of oppression—cultural cleansing, intolerant Christians, economic exploitation, etc. etc.—and against all the odds, here it is.

Hunter School begins with the author, Sakinu Ahronglong, in school. Flying squirrel school. Getting to class isn’t a simple commute. Luckily, young Sakinu has a guide in the form of his father, a consummate hunter who holds deep compassion for the animals he meets on his forays, and who teaches Sakinu many things, like the names of the bigwigs in local monkey society. The early chapters are short, leading readers on a tour of Sakinu’s mountain forest childhood and his wilderness education. As the book progresses and Sakinu’s world expands, the chapters stay short. They weave a sequence of life stories, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between a wild ancestral homeland and modern life in a globalized, post-industrial country. In the wilderness, we get to know a world that, for all its wildness, is still very much lived-in (and has been for thousands of years before the Han Chinese arrived in Taiwan in the sixteenth century). These stories show us a new way of imagining the wild realms of mountain and forest, which many of us are only acquainted with (and fond of) from various ventures into the “backcountry.” Of course, it’s only the “backcountry” if you don’t live there. In these pages, we see how people like Sakinu’s grandfather used to live entirely civilized lives in the wild before the time when much of the world’s nature was cordoned off from human society, emptied of most of its indigenous residents, and divided up into national parks, commercial forestries, and mines. READ MORE…