Broken strings: interdisciplinarity and /Xam oral literature

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Anne Solomon

'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 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, Tano -!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: