Performing Identities

Celebrating Indigeneity in the Arts

GeoffreyV. Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351554619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Performing Identities brings together essays by scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving rapidly disappearing local knowledge forms of indigenous communities across continents. It depicts the imaginative transactions evident in the interface of identity and cultural transformation, raising the issue of cultural rights of these otherwise marginalized communities.

1 The Hyena Wears Darkness

Stories as Teaching Tools

Pia Thielmann

The author of the novelette The Hyena Wears Darkness (2006) is the Malawian Steve Chimombo. Born in 1945 near Malawi’s former capital, Zomba, Chimombo is one of the best-known Malawian authors outside his home country. As a creative writer and critic, he was deeply involved in the ‘Writers’ Workshop’ founded in 1970. This organization became an important hotbed for writers in Malawi. After a period of lying fallow, it was re-launched in 2007, again nourishing aspiring writers (Lee 2010: 36). Chimombo is a founding member of Malawi PEN which joined PEN International in 1994 (ibid.). In 1995, Chimombo became also a founding member of the Malawi Writers Union (MAWU) (ibid.). He won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the best first-time published poet for the Africa Region and an Honorable Mention of the 1988 Noma Award for publishing in Africa (Chimombo 1996: 9). Chimombo is a poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, writer of children’s stories, editor/publisher, and an avid collector of Malawian literature. Until September 2002, he was Professor of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. He has spent most of his life in Malawi, including during Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s dictatorship from 1964 to 1994, except part of the 1970s to pursue his seven academic degrees in England and the United States (US).¹ In an interview conducted in Zomba in June 2007 by Christopher J. Lee, Chimombo is careful to point out that his absence was no forced exile but purely for educational reasons (Lee 2010: 33, 46). Unlike such Malawian writers as Jack Mapanje, detained under Banda and now living in England, or Frank Chipasula, who escaped into exile to avoid Banda’s punishment for any criticism of his regime and is now living in the US, Chimombo may have eluded censorship, detention or forced exile through applying myth — particularly the myth of Napolo, an underground snake held responsible for landslides and floods — folklore, and an artistry that poet and critic Anthony Nazombe termed a ‘cryptic mode of expression’ (Nazombe 1995: 139) and ‘notorious obscurity’ (Nazombe 1996: 93). Chimombo himself claims: ‘Essentially, I am not a political writer, but I react to things that are happening to me at certain times, and some of them inevitably impinge on what the politics of the situation are’ (Lee 2010: 38). His response to Lee’s question about how his writing has changed bridges his stance on being or not being a political writer and his way of reacting as a writer to things happening in society:

Well, I would like to say maybe I’ve broadened my themes quite a bit. I’ve gone into a bit of feminist writing in terms of theme, especially in Breaking the Bead Strings (1995), a long poem, and the play Sister! Sister! (1995), but this was because at one time, I was asked by an organization to write on the girl-child, and it coincided with my research into the cultural aspects of beads and tattoos. My novel The Wrath of Napolo [2000] is not a change of theme. Maybe it’s a longer genre than The Basket Girl (1990), which is a novelette. But most of the themes in The Wrath of Napolo are from earlier poems like the Napolo Poems (1987), and The Rainmaker (1978), and so on. It’s a further development of themes that I tackled earlier on. Something that has changed is my delving into satire. Epic of the Forest Creatures (2005) is a satire of the movement from despotism to democracy, how the different political parties in Malawi responded to that, via Orwell’s Animal Farm [1951]. I should also say that I have been writing on themes of death and disease, The Hyena Wears Darkness (2006) being an example (Lee 2010: 37).

The Hyena Wears Darkness (Chimombo 2006), published in Zomba, Malawi, in 2006 by Chimombo’s own publishing house, WASI Publications, consists of three stories or chapters — ‘The Widow’s Liberation’, ‘The Widow’s Revenge’ and the title story ‘The Hyena Wears Darkness’.² They narrate an indigenous woman’s experience with cultural practices that may spread the HIV virus, such as kuchotsa fumbi, the ritual deflowering of initiates; kusudzula, the sexual cleansing of the widow; and kulowa kufa, widow inheritance. In the Acknowledgements to the book, Chimombo explains its evolution. Originally, the three chapters were written as separate short stories. The first one ‘Was accepted for publication in Inspiration Magazine, However, the edition it was to appear in had not come out as we went to press’. The second story ‘appeared first in Mawu Magazine, Number 2, Issue 1, 2006, pp. 22–23, 27’. The third story ‘appeared first in WASI: the magazine for the arts, Volume 16, Number 2, April 2006, pp 18–25’ (Chimombo 2006). ‘The Widow’s Revenge’ and ‘The Hyena Wears Darkness’ are also included in Chimombo’s anthology of his short stories, published by WASI in 2009 as Of Life, Love, and Death As Chimombo further explains in the Acknowledgements to The Hyena Wears Darkness, that

although published separately, the stories form a unit I am calling ambitiously a trilogy. The first story generated the rest at different times, but during the same period of inspiration. However, each story was meant, and was published, to stand on its own. Hence, after the initial story, the sequels had to have initial background information not available for readers who had not read the previous stories.

I decided to reproduce the stories as they were originally written. The background material for the sequels, it will be discovered, has been integrated in a manner to reduce redundancies. In fact, it still serves similar purposes, especially for such long stories, now serving as “chapters” in a novelette (ibid.).

During the same period of writing and publishing these stories, Chimombo also conducted research on the representation of AIDS in the arts in Malawi. The outcome of his research is a 226-page long book, AIDS Artists and Authors: Popular Responses to the Epidemic: 1985– 2006, published by WASI in 2007. He calls it his fourth book in which he analyzes popular responses to a selected socio-economic event in Malawi (Chimombo 2007: ix). This painstaking study analyzes AIDS in Malawian fiction (short story, novel), in poetry, in the visual arts (stone, canvas, 3D), other Malawian arts (music and film) and concludes with a chapter on ‘AIDS for inspiration, an assessment’ (ibid.: vii–viii).³ A strong focus is put on the short story, the practical reason being that while Chimombo apparently found only one novel on AIDS in Malawi and included it in his discussion, he found 112 short stories on AIDS between 1990 and 2006 (Lee 2010: 40).⁴ Both in the interview with Lee and in his own book on AIDS in the arts, Chimombo addresses the reason for and quality of those short stories, mainly published in newspapers. When asked by Lee whether the HIV/AIDS crisis impacted on artistic expression in Malawi, he responds:

Definitely. On a positive note, I think, it’s mostly the short story writers who have taken up the challenge of writing on HIV/AIDS … I’m saying this with some amusement … When I was evaluating short stories written by these writers, I came across an editorial which said from now on, we don’t want any love stories. Unless you have got something really new, we aren’t going to publish your short stories. What I’m therefore seeing is that the writers saw HIV/AIDS as the new way of writing love stories because most of the themes of love stories which have gone wrong, have gone wrong because they’ve been infected by … HIV/AIDS. So they could now ostensibly write on the same old theme of love, but with the virus in between … Most of these stories were, let’s say, boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-infected; or girl-meets-boy, girl-gets-infected. They part company, or they commit suicide, end of story, so to speak. It’s a kind of formula. It wasn’t as if they wanted to experiment or go beyond just writing a love story (Lee 2010: 39–40).

Chimombo’s amusement and apparent dissatisfaction with the quality of these ‘formula-stories’ is based on his understanding of the role of the writer. As he tells Lee:

I take the view that the task of the writer is to write and to write well. I am wary of people who propagate functional or fighting literatures. Once you take up a gun, you’re now being a political person who happens to be a writer. Once you take up a pen and you write, you are a writer, and your task is to write well in what you are writing regardless of the theme. You can write well or badly on a political theme, too. But the writing has got to be first if you say you are a writer (ibid.: 47).

Accordingly, he assesses the success of the arts on AIDS in his research book not on the strength of their message but the artistic skills of the artist. Citing some examples of music on AIDS, or an evening with movies at home with friends, dances to music on AIDS, sculptures or paintings displayed at private homes, or stories on AIDS read at the shores of Lake Malawi, he stresses the ‘consumers” enjoyment resulting from the quality of the respective work of art (Chimombo 2007: 218–19). Another factor Chimombo addresses regarding the success of the art on AIDS is its accessibility. Taking literature as an example, one has to be literate to read a story. Alternatively, a story can be read or told to a person or persons. But initially, the book or newspapers need to be available, one needs money to buy them, or receive them from someone who had the money or has access to one of the few libraries in the country. With a population of about 13 million, an official HIV infection rate of 14 per cent at the end of 2006 and a low English literacy rate, Chimombo is not overly optimistic about the actual and direct impact of the arts on people’s sexual behaviour (Chimombo 2007: x).⁵ Even the Government Commission on AIDS and NGO programmes that started after the first discovery of AIDS in Malawi in 1985 with civic education programmes appear not to have been successful in reducing the new infection rates (ibid.: x–xiii).⁶ Chimombo is not alone with his pessimism about the impact of straightforward warnings of all kinds.⁷ He quotes a Programme Officer of the National Youth Council of Malawi saying, ‘It is really pathetic that many vulnerable youths in the country are still ignorant about the epidemic despite the wide coverage of HIV/AIDS in news-papers and radios’ (Malawi News, 17–23 February 2007, p. 7; quoted in Chimombo 2007: 222), and an equally pessimistic international report by UNAIDS from December 2006: ‘Despite enormous global international strides to expand AIDS treatment and care programs worldwide, the number of HIV infections continues to rise’ (Nation 2006: 11; quoted in Chimombo 2007: 222).

With his stories, the novelette and his book on AIDS in the arts, Chimombo continues his experiments with a specific topic in different genres, reaching different readers, providing different aspects on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In The Hyena Wears Darkness (2006), Chimombo combines the skills of a seasoned writer that make for enjoyable reading about cultural traditions that need to be re-examined in the face of their physical danger to the community and beyond. His story is not a common love story with an HIV twist as published in the newspapers and magazines, but one with a glint of hope. It is, as he tells the reader in the introduction to the novella: ‘My own contribution to this massive national campaign to educate the public on the pandemic’ (ibid.). The cultural practices he addresses, ‘are the main, most prevalent ones up and down the country, regardless of ethnic background, as research on the subject has revealed’ (ibid.: n.p.).

As in many of his other works, Chimombo utilizes a mythical figure. While often it is Napolo, the underground snake that wreaks havoc, here it is Fisi, the hyena. The real animal, often perceived as ugly and dangerous, active at night, and feeding on carcasses, is a traditional Malawian trickster figure: in the story Fisi is also active at night, ‘feeding’ on a future carcass. Trying to play a trick himself, while an even bigger trick is being played on him, he will soon be a carcass himself. Fisi in the story is the traditional ‘liberator’ of widows, having to have ‘flesh-on flesh’ (i.e., unprotected) sex with them, so the widows will be clear of the husbands’ spirit and free to remarry. While there are professional fisis whose task is to perform an emotionless function and remain anonymous, they can also be an elder relative. In the first chapter, ‘The Widow’s Liberation’, due to time constraints imposed by the widow’s mother, the businesswoman Andaunire Ndamo, on the traditional funeral and the events following it, such as the ‘cleansing of the widow’, Sigele Jika has been elected without his consent to perform the ritual of cleansing on the young widow Atupele. The story unfolds from the point of view of this 50-year-old journalis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Plates
• Introduction
• 1. The Hyena Wears Darkness: Stories as Teaching Tools
• 2. Reading Khoekhoe and Khasi Folktales Juxtapositionally: Political Insights and Social Values in Two Traditional Narratives
• 3. ‘Kissa-Heer’: A Gem of Oral Tradition
• 4. Magical Rhythms: Psycho-Sexual and Religious Significance of Tribal Dance
• 5. Foregrounding the Margin: Traditional Value Systems of Lepchas of India and Igbos of Nigeria
• 6. Charting the Multiple Scripts of Santali: Notes Towards a Visual History of Adivasi Languages and Literatures
• 7. Translating Identity as Lexicon: P. O. Bodding and A Santal Dictionary
• 8. Marginalized Music: A Case Study from Western Orissa/India
• 9. Storying Sovereignty and ‘Sustainable Self-Determination’: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah
• 10. The Socio-Political Imperative of Nigerian Festivals
• 11. Ogoni Dances, Masquerades and Worldview
• 12. ‘Black Indian’ Women and Blood Rules: Hyphenated Hybridities on the Margins of America
• 13. Cultural Celebrations of Life: Rituals of a Hill Tribe
• 14. The /Xam Narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection: Exploring 19th-Century San Mythology
• 15. Staging the Indian Reserve: Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters
• 16. Indigenous Knowledge and Global Translation: Reconstruction of Australia through Aboriginal Imagination in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
• 17. Contesting the Curative Space: Politics of Healing in the Narratives of Nyole Ethno-Medical Practitioners
• 18. Conquering Adversity through Art: An Evaluation of Moranic Performances by the Maasai People of Kenya
• 19. Women and Indigenous Resistance in Tess Onwueme’s Tell It To Women and What Mama Said
• 20. Tracing Post-Colonial Questions in Ancient Thought
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index