Broken strings: interdisciplinarity and /Xam oral literature

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Anne Solomon

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 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 Xa:a-tin'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 Xa:a-tin'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? 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 to illustrate the limited extent to which even the more searching literary scholars seem to investigate the /Xam texts themselves (but cf. Wessels 2007).