broken strings: interdisciplinarity and /xam oral literature

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Broken strings: interdisciplinarity and /Xam oral literature

Anne Solomon

26

ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049 pp. 26–4123 (1) 2009 © Unisa PressDOI: 10.1080/02560040902738941

Anne Solomon (Ph.D, University of Cape Town) is an archaeologist and independent researcher, affiliated to the University of Bristol. [email protected]

AbstractLong of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, the Lloyd-Bleek archive of /Xam narratives and accounts has recently engaged literary scholars and poets. Yet this engagement has produced few dedicated studies, and little critical analysis of conventional anthropological readings. Consideration of the well-known ‘Song of the Broken String’ suggests that the material demands further attention to methods and neglected interpretive problems, in both anthropological and literary accounts. Such a focus on reading(s) and methods highlights common ground for debate amongst researchers who, despite diverse disciplinary interests, face the same hermeneutical task.

Keywords: Bleek and Lloyd archive, colonialism, interpretation, poetry, San history, San mythology, /Xam narrative

Introduction

The nineteenth-century encounter of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd with /Xam-speaking San from the northern Cape generated a unique archive. Comprising the only detailed accounts of southern San hunter-gatherers, their lives and worlds, these unique testimonies to an indigenous consciousness are of cross-disciplinary academic interest.

For archaeologists and anthropologists the /Xam testimonies (with English translations/ transliterations) are of evidential value: a rich seam to be mined for

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historical and sociocultural facts. In archaeo-anthropological research, Vinnicombe (1976) and Lewis-Williams (1980, 1981) demonstrated their utility in illuminating San cultural life and ‘symbolism’, but were largely unconcerned with their aesthetic, ‘formal’ or poetic qualities. Yet the material includes songs, poems and mythological narratives that, as ‘probably the earliest forms of literary expression from the African subcontinent’ (Brown 1998: 36), are of cultural and literary interest. Literary attention has focused on rewriting the nineteenth-century translations to enhance their literary qualities and accessibility (in recent scholarship, e.g. Brown 1998; James 2001; Watson 1991; and cf. Krog 2004). Watson and James aimed to use poetic form to highlight aspects of the texts assessed as encapsulating a poetic ‘truth’ (James 2001: 24) or ‘poetic idea’ (Watson 1991: 16). Brown’s approach situated the texts in relation to /Xam society and forms of African oral literature.

Though different disciplines have divergent aims, priorities and ‘disciplinary technologies’ (Preziosi 1989: passim), researchers working with the /Xam materials are all engaged in essentially the same exercise: interpreting language texts. Disciplinary grounding aside, with the /Xam language extinct all researchers are dealing with English language texts, albeit rooted in a different cultural universe. Literary scholars must therefore familiarise themselves with hunter-gatherer social and cultural dynamics and San histories. Archaeological and anthropological readings should recognise the rhetorical and textual attributes of the materials, even if (or especially because) the aim is extraction of historical and cultural facts rather than aesthetic or literary appreciation.

In practice, the crossover remains limited. Archaeologists and anthropologists typically fail to consider the testimonies as textual and/or imaginative works; literary scholars often defer uncritically to social scientists’ readings of ‘meaning’, despite awareness that such readings are manifestly unconcerned with their literary, discursive or ‘expressive’ character (cf. Brown 1998: 37). In this article I argue that literary scholars have much to offer interpretations of San ethnographies because of their expertise in language, form, textuality and reading. However, literary approaches might profitably attend further to the ‘meanings’ of the texts, since, even in translation, there can be no ultimate distinction between ‘form(s)’ and ‘content(s)’. Indeed, this principle is fundamental to poetic recastings of the /Xam materials, in which revised forms are sought to enhance poetic ‘meanings’.

Even acknowledging the ‘fusion of horizons’ that reading entails, and irrespective of the escape of language from intention, engagement with the texts demands attention to ‘original meanings’ and allied interpretive problems. In fact, critical assessment and debating of meanings and readings is sparse. Received accounts depend significantly on Lewis-Williams’s work (especially Lewis-Williams 1980, 1981). His anthropological interpretation, emphasising ‘shamanism’ and ritual, extends that of Hewitt (1986 [1976]) – still the only full-length analysis dedicated to the /Xam texts – which combined anthropological, linguistic and literary approaches, though from a structural perspective that seems problematic today.


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Lewis-Williams too favoured a structural-semiotic approach (Lewis-Williams 1981), with an influential paper (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988) initiating analysis of San arts as surface expressions of underlying neurological structures.1 This neuropsychological model grounds the hypothesis that San rock arts and some narratives reproduce the contents of shamanic visions.

However, the texts are less straightforward than these accounts of their cultural matrix and meaning(s) may suggest. Literary scholars uniformly emphasise the problems of the Bleek-Lloyd translations/transliterations, including their stiltedness and archaisms. These not only compromise the material’s literary value, but present difficulties for all readers/interpreters, and for the recognition of ‘original meaning’. With the sociocultural ground of the materials (‘shamanism’) supposedly uncovered, acknowledgement of the ambiguities and opacity of the texts has been substantially occluded. Lewis-Williams concedes that they may be cryptic and esoteric (e.g. Lewis-Williams 1998, 2006), but remains assured that their cultural frame and much of the content is incontrovertibly ‘shamanistic’. Yet, given that the texts are not transparent, nor their meaning self-evident, the claim that they describe southern San shamanism (for which no independent anthropological or historical evidence exists), is only one possible reading.

Issues of ‘original meaning’ remain crucial, in excavations of historical fact and also in relation to recuperations and appropriations of indigenous arts in the present. One text – the well-known ‘Song of the Broken String’ (hereafter ‘SoBS’) – is considered here, because its interpretation exemplifies problems in the study and understanding of the /Xam and San arts today.

Xã:ä-tiŋ’s song

The ‘Song of the Broken String’was narrated by Dia!kwain in 1875, recorded and translated by Lucy Lloyd (L.V.15.5101–5103) and published by Dorothea Bleek (1936: 134).2 Brown (1998: 68) suggests that the song’s construction around the central metaphor of a resonating string and its functioning ‘in a way that is similar to the Western lyric … perhaps accounts for its being the Bushman text most frequently included in anthologies of South African poetry’.

Dia!kwain explained that it was composed after a ‘sorcerer’ named !nuin-|kuiten, walking about in the form of a lion, was shot by a Boer after it killed the farmer’s ox (Bleek 1936: 131–134). Dying, !nuin-|kuiten instructed Dia!kwain’s father, Xã:ä-tiŋ, to sing:

People were those, Who broke for me the string. Therefore, The place became like this to me, On account of it, Because the string was that which broke for me


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Therefore, The place does not feel to me, As the place used to feel to me, On account of it. For, The place feels as if it stood open before me. Therefore, The place does not feel pleasant to me. On account of it. (Bleek 1936: 134)

Dia!kwain commented further:

Father used to sing, that the string had broken; that string was what he used to hear, when !nuin-|kuiten had called forth the Rain Bull. That was why things were not like they had formerly been. For things continue to be unpleasant to me; I do not hear the ringing sound (in the sky) which I used to hear. I feel that the string has really broken, leaving me. I do not feel the thing which used to vibrate in me, as I lay asleep…. (ibid: 135)

Finnegan (1970: 180) regarded the song as a simple elegy on a friend’s death. Hewitt (1985) invaluably drew attention to the song’s affiliations to rain and rain-making ritual, as did Scheub (1987). In recent recuperations the theme of colonisation has sometimes all but eclipsed this avenue of meaning, and the song’s relation to ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’. The standard interpretation of the song remains that it is the lament of a man mourning a lost friend, but with further layers of meaning overlain: that the friend was a ‘shaman’, that it deals with changed relations with the land, wrought by colonial encroachment; and that it figures /Xam awareness of their cultural demise.

Watson, in notes following his poetic ‘version’ of this text, described the song as ‘the most powerful single record of /Xam life losing its coherence under the impact of other encroaching cultures’ (1991: 59–60, 78). No doubt this brief and general summary is part of a deliberate strategy to allow the poetic form of his versions of the /Xam texts to ‘speak for itself’; formal reshaping takes the place of analysis of ‘meaning’. However, it enacts an interesting shift: from the attention to indigenous meaning that had reached some depth (notably in Hewitt’s work), to understanding the /Xam testimonies as ‘some of the earliest accounts in southern Africa of colonization from the perspective of the colonized’ (Brown 1998: 36).

Foregrounding the colonial impact has since become conventional. ‘The Broken String’ is, for example, the title and theme of a recent book (Bennun 2004) on the /Xam:Bleek-Lloyd collaboration and the ‘extinction’ of the /Xam. Indeed, the /Xam have become something of a cipher of relatively unspoilt autochthony destroyed by colonial oppression, with the ‘broken string’ emblematic of that retrospectively allocated identity.


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The truths of the text

That the ‘Song of the Broken String’ is an indigenous commentary on the consequences of colonisation is, however, not self-evident, but elicited by the interpreter/poet. It is instructive to consider the transformations that different writers’ methods enact.

Brown’s emendations are minimal, principally alterations of line divisions ‘to register the way the singer would pause – as !Kung singers do – at the end of each sense-unit, so generating the rhythm of delivery’ (Brown 1998: 74). The strength of the approach is that recasting the texts in forms suited to their character as oral literature is determined by fidelity to (presumed) performative settings, necessitating more rigorous attention to questions of ‘original meaning(s)’ and contexts. Brown (ibid: 52) argues persuasively that this method poses less risk of cultural appropriation.

Watson’s ‘periphrases, re-writings and re-structurings’ (1991: 11) are more extensive. Watson acknowledged this: ‘Although I have had to impose interpretations on material whose meaning had been left implicit or was only apparent through masses of narrative that had to be excluded … my practice has not been founded on personal whimsy.’ Perhaps not, but apparently minor changes forge new meanings that – even if the poet believes them to be present in the text – are nevertheless adduced. For example, though the original opens with the lines: ‘People were those/Who broke for me the string’, Watson renders it first as ‘a people’ and then as ‘other people’, then as those ‘who came’. This extends beyond formal manipulation in order to enhance, but injects the poet’s own narrative. This may be inevitable, but the aptness of that narrative is arguable.

Story and history

Watson’s alterations foreground the theme of colonial incursion by imputing a perceived otherness between the /Xam and European settlers that is not stated in the poem. However, there is little evidence that the /Xam thought in these terms. The degree to which different societies embrace an ethnic identity is situationally and historically contingent. Though the /Xam narrators regarded some Boers as cruel and unjust, and accounts in the archive recount predominantly negative experiences, there is no evidence that this was a blanket view; indeed, their relationship with the Bleek family itself suggests that their attitude to colonial society was more nuanced. Contact also provided new opportunities and goods, such as metal tools and tobacco.

A view of the /Xam that focuses inexorably on their victimhood under colonialism also underestimates their resourcefulness in the face of change. However prominent the role of colonial oppression in the eventual destruction of /Xam culture, deculturation and cultural change are more complex phenomena.


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For example, Traill has suggested that the death of the /Xam language began well before the narrators met Bleek and Lloyd – a process that cannot simply be attributed to an undifferentiated colonialist bogeyman. Traill’s analysis (1996: 183) provides much-needed historical texture, relating the decline to /Xam–Afrikaans bilingualism which may, in some instances, be interpreted as ‘valuable evidence that, in some areas of the frontier, social relations between Boers and /Xam must have evolved beyond being exclusively hostile’. Undoubtedly it was the colonial presence that tragically sealed the fate of the /Xam, and it remains an essential frame for understanding, but it is sometimes used as something of a blunt instrument.

Nor were the /Xam unaccustomed to ‘other people’. The /Xam shared their landscape with the warlike Korana (!Ora), the antagonists in several narratives. They, rather than the Boers, were the /Xam’s traditional enemy. The /Xam had also been in contact with their Bantu-speaking neighbours since at least 1805 (Deacon 1996: 247). Texts include one about a /Xam man injured by a ‘Kafir’ who had stolen his mother’s spoons (LV.4.4200–4230). European colonists were not necessarily the most feared or disliked of the /Xam’s neighbours, though they proved the most powerful.

Though several /Xam texts describe colonial cruelties, the ‘Song of the Broken String’ is not necessarily among them, even though it was a Boer who caused !nuin-|kuiten’s death. Had the /Xam owned guns while still living a more traditional life, they might well have dealt similarly with marauding predators and, objectively, there is no judgement passed in the song on the right or wrong of the farmer’s deed, nor allusion to a clash of cultures. No doubt the /Xam understood colonial culture enough to recognise that the farmer did not know that this was !nuin-|kuiten.

It is also worth remembering that this song was not Dia!kwain’s lament, but from his father’s youth. If it described a real event, it took place many years earlier (perhaps even before Dia!kwain was born, probably around the mid-1840s). The extent to which a colonial presence impinged upon /Xam traditional lifeways in the earlier nineteenth century, is debatable. Gordon and Wikar journeyed to the northern Cape in the terminal eighteenth century, but British annexation of the area occurred only in 1847 (Deacon 1996: 250). White farmers were forbidden to settle the area before 1847, though some did and white hunters operated there (Deacon 1996). It does, however, seem that it was after annexation that clashes escalated, with notorious massacres of San in the 1850s (Deacon 1996). Traill (1996: 166) records that in 1858 a trader encountered ‘large numbers’ of /Xam near the Hartebeest River, and no colonists – a situation that was reversed within a year.

The experiences of the colonised were surely textured and the colonial impact, and /Xam perceptions thereof at different times and places, require historicising. Yet the known history of the /Xam is under-integrated into accounts of the narratives. The timeless notion of poetic ‘truths’, on the one hand, and emphasis


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on an equally timeless shamanism on the other, seem to overwhelm the historical and contextual.3

Similarly, the view that the song anticipates the destruction of /Xam society (Brown 1998: 70) is of course achieved with hindsight. There is little evidence that the /Xam operated with explicit notions of the integrity of their own society and culture, which had been in flux for generations, any more than they celebrated their own ethnicity. This abstract view of cultural distinctiveness is as much ours as theirs, or at least something to be examined rather than assumed.4 The collaboration with Bleek and Lloyd pivoted on the existence of cultural difference; the extent to which /Xam traditions and identity were reified and brought into relief in the process is unclear. Further work on the materials as as an artefact of the relationship between narrators and recorders is needed.

The irony of anti-colonialism readings, however, is that they may exemplify the evidentialist error that literary scholars criticise. It is in the nature of myth and oral narrative that, in the (re-)telling, content is elaborated and re-formed (cf. Coupe 1998), often for performative impact. It is therefore problematic to read the song as an account of an actual incident, rather than as an imaginative creation, an amalgam of incidents, or perhaps a retrospective ‘take’ on events, rather than accurately recounting Xã:ä-tiŋ’s experience. Claiming that events in oral literature occurred long ago, or were related by previous generations, is a well-known device for endowing fictional narratives with factual force (e.g. Okpewho 1983). The /Xam refrain that ‘Our mothers told us …’ (or similar) may indeed describe the mode of transmission, but may equally be a narrational device.

Indigenous meanings, contemporary readings

If the theme of destructive colonialism is largely implicit in Xã:ä-tiŋ’s song, that of rain and rainmakers was central to Dia!kwain, as his further comments indicate. Watson’s ‘version’, the allied poem, ‘Xaa-ttin’s lament’ (1991: 61), and his notes, neglect this key motif.5 Brown, in contrast, explored it further, partly because his method – considering the ‘interplay’ of images, and with oral literary forms guiding recasting – demands further contextualisation.

Nevertheless, though Brown pursues the image of the broken string through related texts, the reading is somewhat restricted, and flawed by acceptance of existing (anthropological) interpretations. He identifies the ‘broken string’ as that of a musical instrument and (via Hewitt and Scheub) pursues the relationship of the ‘string’ to /Xam rain-making, but identifies the instrument as the musical bow (Brown 1998: 69–70). Yet in the published material (in other words, not buried in the archival notebooks) it is clearly stated that ‘the thong sounded like a !kummi string’ (Bleek 1933a: 378), ‘a musical instrument played by women’ (hence, unquestionably, not the musical bow, played by men). It is a minor error, and one that by no means detracts from the quality of Brown’s approach, and I cite it only


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to illustrate the limited extent to which even the more searching literary scholars seem to investigate the /Xam texts themselves (but cf. Wessels 2007).

Watson (1991: 10) referred to a reliance on archaeologists and anthropologists for ‘clues’ to the meanings of the testimonies (rather underplaying the contribution made from this quarter!). Yet this dependence is largely unwarranted. Evaluation of the aptness of readings of the /Xam testimonies does not require extensive anthropological expertise, and the foundations are easily acquired from a few key texts. Even without anthropological training, literary scholars are well placed both to critically assess anthropological readings and adjudicate between different readings, as readings, of English language texts.

The reading method cannot, I suggest, depend ultimately on notions of the autonomy of any selected extract. The ‘meanings’ of the texts are to be glimpsed in relation to other texts. Wessels has demonstrated the contribution that literary approaches can make. He submitted one story to a close reading, concluding that ‘a seemingly simple story evades easy interpretation, for it inhabits a world in which meaning is generated through an order of things whose scope lies well beyond individual stories’ (2007: 320). This is occluded by Watson’s method. He recognised that all interpretation entails imposing meaning, but judged his strategy suitable, for example, when ‘meaning … was only apparent through masses of narrative that had to be excluded’ (Watson 1991: 11). This seems to sum up the limitations of poetry in recuperations of /Xam oral literature. If the spirit of the /Xam testimonies is to be upheld, such ‘exclusion’ is problematic. An appropriate method demands considerable attention to intertextuality and dedicated, critical attention to the larger body of /Xam testimonies. The character of the /Xam’s ‘sorcerers’ is a case in point.

Rain and sorcerers

The identity of the rainmaker !nuin-|kuiten in SoBS may be read differently. /Xam testimonies about rain and ‘sorcerers’ [!gi:xa (sing.), !gi:ten (pl.)], including ‘sorcerers of rain’ (!khwa ka !gi:ten; !khwa = water, rain), were published by Dorothea Bleek (1933a, 1933b, 1935, 1936). ‘Sorcerers of rain’ would ‘lead out’ the rain, an animal that dwelt in the waterhole and walked the sky, its body the rain cloud, its legs the falling rain. The rain sorcerers’ role was to lead the animal across the land so rain would fall there. They aimed to capture a female rain: the gentle, regenerating showers (Bleek 1933a, 1933b). The Rain Bull, !Khwa, was the lethal storm incarnate (Schmidt 2000); his home was the waterhole; in fact, he was the water in the waterhole (‘water which also lives’ [Bleek 1935: 32]). !Khwa was a particular threat to disobedient female initiates, whom he abducted and drowned (BXXVII.2609–2618; LV.2.3864–3881; Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 393–397; Hewitt 1986: 279–281; Lewis-Williams 2000; Solomon 1992).


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Accounts of rainmaking have been fundamental to the shamanistic hypothesis that San arts derive from hallucinatory visions. Proposing that capturing the rain animal did not seem to describe an actual ritual, Lewis-Williams (1980) suggested that it occurred in trance states. /Xam trance-healing is inferred by analogy with recent Kalahari San healers. However, living rainmakers are ethnographically unrecorded from Kalahari San, or any San group; the existence of living /Xam rainmakers is hypothesised, not evidence-based (Solomon 2008).

The existence of /Xam shaman-rainmakers has since mutated into fact. Yet the /Xam texts suggest an alternative to the Lewis-Williamsian interpretation: that /Xam rain ‘sorcerers’ were spirits. One account of capturing the rain animal states:

Dead people who come out of the ground are those of whom my parents used to say that they rode the rain, because the thongs with which they held it were like the horses’ reins, they bound the rain. Thus they rode the rain because they owned it. Therefore people say when there is a big rain that the sorcerer has gone to loosen the thong. Then the rain falls and increases. (Bleek 1933a: 305)

Accounts of !nuin-|kuiten provide further hints that rainmakers were spirits, not living trance-healers. One account (Bleek 1933a) describes !nuin-|kuiten as Dia!kwain’s great-grandfather. Another states: ‘He was a friend of Dia!kwain’s paternal grandfather, and was “seen” by Dia!kwain’s father, Xã:ä-tiŋ, when the latter was a young man’ (Bleek 1936: 131). Of several rain sorcerers mentioned by /Xam narrators, !nuin-|kuiten is discussed in most detail (Bleek 1933a: 383–387). Dia!kwain related that

father called on him when he wanted rain to fall; although he was no longer with us, yet father used to beg him for rain. For father believed that, being a rain !gi:xa, he would hear father when he called … father prayed for rain when my brother’s wife begged him just to pray that they might return home, that rain might fall for them, for the sun was burning not a little, that the ground be made cool for them, the hill which they had to pass.6

Acceding, Xã:ä-tiŋ climbed the Brinkkop (hill):

Father spoke and said: ‘O !nuin-|kuiten, let the children return to … (their father), that he may see the the children …. Therefore do please cool for them the ground which they must pass on their return.’

And father said: ‘You who seem to be !nuin-|kuiten, you used to say to me that when the time came that you were dead, if I called upon you, you would hear me, you would let rain fall for me.’ And when father spoke thus, the rain clouds came gliding up, the rain did not pass over, for the rain clouds covered the sky. (Bleek 1933a: 382–384)


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This passage suggests that !nuin-|kuiten was not a living being even before the ‘death’ the song describes. He was ‘seen’ by Xã:ä-tiŋ when the latter was a young man – a peculiar expression to use if !nuin-|kuiten were a living band member. Xã:ä-tiŋ ‘prayed’ to him for rain – not a way of relating to the living. That !nuin-|kuiten was already dead was also stated explicitly: ‘… although he was no longer with us, yet father used to beg him for rain’; and ‘You who seem to be !nuin-|kuiten, you used to say to me that when the time came that you were dead … you would hear me ….’

Without evidence that any rainmaker made rain while alive, everything suggests that most accounts of ‘sorcerers’ describe benevolent spirits. Another passage describes men appealing to spirit rainmakers. The living would ‘speak to the dead men who are with the rain’ [saying] ‘O gallopers/O gallopers/ Do you not know me?/You do not seem to know my hut’ (Bleek 1933a: 303–304).7 The word translated as ‘dead men’ (|nu|nu:ken) is a variant of ‘|nu:ke’, meaning ‘spirit people’ (Bleek 1935:35), ‘|nu’ ‘signifying dead, departed, spirit’ (Bleek 1956: 350). Though departed, these spirits were nevertheless believed to be active and addressed and regarded as living beings. Texts describe how the dead lived a parallel life in a subterranean ‘great hole’ (L-II.6.670–671 rev.), living on as they had on earth. Nevertheless, even as spirits they remained vulnerable to ‘death’; hence !nuin-|kuiten’s subsequent ‘death’ at the hands of the armed Boer.

‘Sorcerers of game’ were also probably spirits, ‘prayed’ to by banging the ground with a stone (Bleek 1935: 35–36). Their role was to provide game by leading it to the hunter (see further below). A third category, ‘sorcerers of illness’, is discussed more fully elsewhere (Solomon 1997, 2008). It is sufficient to note that the term ‘sorcerers of illness’ included both spirit beings who inflicted illness, and living ‘doctors’ who countered them. The few unambiguous /Xam accounts of healers principally describe older women curing in a matter-of-fact manner, with scant evidence for /Xam group healing and/or ritual induction of trance as known from the Kalahari. Reading /Xam texts as describing living shaman-healers who, in trance, enjoy special powers (including out-of-body travel) derives from a failure to recognise that accounts of ‘sorcerers of illness’ include descriptions of both the living and the dead. The powers of spirits have been attributed to the living, reified as ‘shamans’. The distinction of living and dead !gi:ten is all but denied by Lewis-Williams, who maintains (e.g. 2000: 260) that the accounts describe shamans who were benevolent in life but turned malevolent after death. However, this perpetuates the founding error: using accounts of what spirits did to infer the existence of /Xam ‘shamans’.

The broken string

From this perspective, SoBS assumes a different countenance. The broken string is the severed connection between Dia!kwain’s father and the spirit-rainmaker with


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whom he enjoyed a special relationship. The image of the ‘string’ alludes to this bond, and to the magical relationship that spirit-rainmakers enjoyed in relation to the rain animal, which they, in the other world, could control to aid the living. The ‘string’ is linked too to the /Xam notion of ‘thinking strings’: things ‘by means of which they did sorcery’ (Bleek 1935: 35), referring to sympathetic connections forged in thought between the living and the dead. They were said to be located in the arteries of the throat (B.II.422 rev., BXII.1130 rev.).

In anti-colonial readings the ‘string’ is seen as the tie between the /Xam and their traditional lands but, other than references to a sense of home and homesickness, there is little evidence for this in /Xam consciousness. Rather, these readings import notions of a sacred connection to land that is well known from aboriginal Australian culture.

The reference to the place that became empty after !nuin-|kuiten’s death refers instead to relations with spirits. Reading the song alongside other texts reveals expressive conventions that assist in interpreting this reference to place in the song. In particular, accounts of the ‘springbok sorceress’ illuminate the significance of place, but demand a reading method that ranges across several accounts.

Spirit and place

Testimonies about the game sorceress, Tãnõ -!khauken, were interpreted by Lewis-Williams (1987) as describing a living female shaman, but it seems clear that game sorcerers were spirits who helped provide game:

… the spirit people mention to each other, that they may now let the things [prey animals] act nicely towards the people. They say to each other ‘Now you shall let the things behave nicely to them, on their hunts, for they are seeking things which they want to eat. They shall be lucky when they walk about here, they shall see something coming that they may kill …’. (Bleek 1935: 40; my parentheses)

The narrator clarified, saying: ‘Therefore mother used to do this, she beat the ground, she begged the sorcerers for game; as she struck down the stone she said “O my spirit people, do you no longer think of me? …’ (Bleek 1935: 36); and ‘When we beat the ground we beg of the people who own game … for it is a prayer’ (ibid: 41).

Tãnõ-!khauken was apparently one of these spirits. She would appear to Dia!kwain’s mother as a lioness, wanting ‘to see where we lived, the place to which father had taken us. That was why she had seemed to pass our hut’ (ibid: 44).

Dia!kwain continued:

And mother said to her, that she should do as she liked, she should look at the place where we were staying, to know and remember about us …. For as she had sat


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talking to mother, she had said that she now knew where we lived. Therefore she would not forget us. For she would keep going to look at us. (ibid: 44)

Dia!kwain’s father had killed Tãnõ !khauken’s springbok, unaware that it was not a ‘food springbok’. She had

sent it in among the other springbok, for she wanted it to take the others to mother, to the place where she lived. Mother had been begging for springbok to go to her, that [Tãnõ !khauken] would do as she had promised. She had been used to say that she would make the springbok travel to mother for her to eat .... Then the old woman said to mother, that mother had been asking her to let the springbok travel, that mother might have food. So as mother had begged, she would take pity on mother and let the springbok come to her, that she might eat springbok. (ibid: 45–46)

This – intervention to influence the game for the hunter’s benefit – identifies Tãnõ-!khauken as a game sorceress and as a spirit. Returning to the theme of ‘place’, another story about her relates:

The place there … where the people lived was also where the old woman lived. So the people knew her …. She used to come to the place at which we had called her name there, for she wanted to look at it, to see what was the matter, that we had called her name … (Bleek 1936: 142).

This passage is best read as describing how benevolent (though fearsome) spirits inhabited certain places – perhaps places where they had once lived, or possibly of their mortal death and burial. People believed that there they could summon spirit help. This, rather than band-land relations severed by colonialism, underpins the mention of the place that now ‘stood open’ in SoBS; empty because of the absence of !nuin-|kuiten, whom people had once called upon there ….

Discussion

The interpretation offered above is not essentially an anthropological one. It concerns possible readings of the English translations. Anthropological readings that deploy analogies with recent Kalahari San in the explication of the /Xam texts subordinate differences to broadly shared structural commonalities (Solomon 2008); this certainly does not permit attention to more subtle differences, or textual-formal features. In a different reading strategy, SoBS may be read in relation to other ‘laments’ about spirits who neglect the living. This is a recurrent refrain. Dia!kwain narrated a speech that his mother (supposedly) made, about neglectful sorcerers


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taking their thoughts away from us …. For they ought to look if we are still at the same place. They ought to look down on us …. Then I should see whether it were true, that in dying they took their thoughts away from us …. But their thoughts seem to go away from us, so that when we call upon them we do not see what they are doing for us, that we may see whether they still know us. For we call without getting an answer from them; they will not talk to us, that we may know! (Bleek 1935: 30)

Rainmakers (the ‘gallopers’ mentioned above) were implored as follows: ‘Do you not know me?/You do not seem to know my hut’ – a variation on the theme of being forgotten or ignored. Lamentation in the /Xam texts approaches a conventional rhetorical form, employed specifically in relation to relationships with dead kin who seem to have abandoned the living (or, in !nuin-|kuiten’s case, because of his ‘death’). Dia!kwain was the narrator of several of these laments and further attention might usefully be paid to individual narrators’ styles.

This method of reading texts in relation to other texts is, I suggest, essential in establishing the ‘meanings’ of the /Xam testimonies, not least because it allows such quasi-formal conventions or rhetorical devices to be identified. Placing Xã:ä-tiŋ’s song in relation to similar lamentations supports the hypothesis that SoBS too concerns relations with negligent spirits. Identifying such formal regularities also highlights the account’s literary status, conforming to criteria other than factuality.

With the attention to reading that is central to literary approaches, literary scholars may contribute to understanding the /Xam materials by critically examining readings of ‘original meanings’ in tandem with exploring literary qualities. Literary scholars may also contribute to allied debates about ethnography that ultimately concern language and/or literature. Lewis-Williams’s contention (e.g. 1980) that southern San texts are phrased in ‘trance metaphors’ is such an argument. This ‘metaphorical’ reading, and the notion of shamanic metaphors as ‘enduring knowledge structures’ (Whitley 2008), is insensitive to the character of language, myth and/or literature, as well as visual arts (cf. Solomon 2008). Underlying such ideas are problematic notions of language (and art) as reflecting neurological structures and encoding neurophysiological functioning, rather than actively shaping experience.

Seeking ‘original meaning’ is not necessarily another kind of search for fact and evidence, but may be conceptualised as an hermeneutic exercise (basic to all disciplinary approaches) that addresses persistent positivistic and scientistic thinking in archaeology. Equally, ‘original meanings’ – no matter how fugitive, fleeting or indeterminate – are crucial to debates over recuperations and appropriations of indigenous literature. Fidelity to the originals may not be the only, or primary, criterion when assessing reworkings of the /Xam testimonies, but it is always fundamental.


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Notes1 For critique of the ‘neuropsychological model’, see Solomon 1999, 2006, 2008.2 Where unpublished material from Bleek and Lloyd’s notebooks is used, their

source is the online publication of the archive (Skotnes 2005).3 Watson (1991: 70) reworked Dia!kwain’s request for cotton to sew on a button,

but the text’s presence in the /Xam archive is owing to Bleek’s linguistic interests (cf. Bleek 1873). This elevation of prosaic utterances to poetic status seems to romanticise rather than reveal a poetic truth.

4 But compare Traill (1996: 183) on one of Van Wielligh’s informants’ testimony about the end of the ‘pure Bushman nation’.

5 ‘Xaa-ttin’ in Watson’s version; ‘Xã:ä-tiŋ’ in the original. 6 I have substituted the /Xam word ‘!gi:xa’ for D. Bleek’s ‘medicine man’. She

decided that this term was inappropriate and reverted to Lloyd’s translation , as ‘sorcerer’ (Bleek 1935: 1, cf. Solomon 2008: 62).

7 The term ‘gallopers’ relates to beliefs that dead sorcerers ‘rode’ the rain, control-ling it with reins or thongs (‘strings’). If an older idea, it had merged with the /Xam acquaintance with horses in colonial times.

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broken strings: interdisciplinarity and /xam oral literature

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