Cite this Review
MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels.” Indian Writing In English Online, 13 March 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/of-journeys-and-transformations-the-natural-world-in-three-novels-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
Chicago:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “Of Journeys and Transformations: The Natural World in Three Novels.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 13, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/of-journeys-and-transformations-the-natural-world-in-three-novels-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat, Harper Collins, 2022; Where the Cobbled Path Leads by Avinuo Kire, Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2022; Spirit Nights by Easterine Kire, Barbican Press, 2022.
2022 was a good year for Northeast Indian Writing in English. The year saw the publication of at least three books that capture the changing contours of where the literature is at in the present. Taking after ecological concerns that have occupied the minds of academics, climate change activists and ecologists, Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (2022), Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads (2022) and Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights (2022) explore the mysteries of the natural world through the trope of journeys. Whether it is a journey through time as with Pariat or journeys to the spirit world as with Avinuo and Easterine Kire, the journeys effect change in the lives of the people who take them. I begin my review of the books with Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat.
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Everything the Light Touches is an ambitious book in scope, content and form. The novel spans across four centuries, covering four interconnected narratives: that of Carl Linnaeus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Evie (a botanist) and Shai. Beginning in the twenty-first century with Shai’s story, the novel is about journeys that are three-fold and overlapping—physical journeys, journeys through time and journeys towards self-discovery. Pariat combines these journeys with reflections on historical narrative, indigenous rights, folk practices and environmental concern, creating a truly heteroglossic text.
As with Pariat’s earlier book, Seahorse: A Novel, the protagonists of Everything the Light Touches venture into the unknown in order to find their “place” in the world. There are differences, however, in the way each of the characters approaches her respective journey. Shai is “directionless” and apprehensive about her return to Meghalaya (Pariat 23). Evie is uncertain about where her search for the elusive Diengïeï would take her, an uncertainty that is also compounded by the insecurities she feels about being a particular kind of academic (Pariat 113). But while the characters who are women are beset with these conflicts, the men—Goethe and Linnaeus—suffer no such worries. Goethe and Linnaeus, in Pariat’s novel, represent the white male explorer whose travels around the world leave him in no doubt of his belonging to and mastery of it. Even if mastery over the world is not the intention, as is the case with Goethe, the male characters are self-assured in their pursuit of knowledge. This idea also extends to other white, male characters in the novel such as Mr. Finlay, Evie’s love interest, and the devious Mr. Dossett. It is through such characterisations that Pariat’s research lends validity to the affective lives of her protagonists.
Pariat’s book draws upon a wealth of texts and archival material; among them, Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, Linnaeus’ Journey to Lapland, Pranay Lal’s Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Pariat’s novel has benefitted from her extensive research. The characters, taking after Pariat’s research, reveal their subjectivities accordingly. Pariat uses conversations to communicate the nature of her protagonists to the reader. Goethe is philosophical, Evie speaks like an academic even when she expresses self-doubt in being in a discipline dominated by men, Linnaeus’ poetry (except for the poem “Sestina for the Lost”) is seemingly devoid of feeling and concerned only with classifications and Shai is impressionable and undecided about her “place” in the way that those who have left home (as a fixed place) feel. There is, therefore, historical legitimacy and verisimilitude to Pariat’s characterisation that one does not often find in fiction of this scope. This attention to detail is also observed in Pariat’s description of places. As we travel with Evie from the port of Tilbury in England to Mumbai, for instance, the journey through each port and coastal town is meticulously described as they would have appeared during the nineteenth century. One is reminded, in these instances, of Amitav Ghosh whose research of the trade routes in South and South East Asia formed the backdrop and gave historical legitimacy to places in the Ibis Trilogy. Similarly, Goethe’s journey to Italy is marked by changing topographies and plant life, knowledge of the latter being a central theme in the book.
Everything the Light Touches is, most of all, a meditation on epistemology. It is about the process of knowing and how we acquire knowledge. While knowledge of nature is a central theme in the book, how we choose to know the world around us is equally, if not more, important. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fourth section which details Linnaeus’ journey to northern Finland or Lapland. Linnaeus’ method of documenting and classifying the flora in Lapland extends also to how he relates to the people living in the region. Unlike Evie or Goethe, who immerse themselves in the cultures in which they find themselves, Linnaeus views the Laplanders as little more than specimens. He acknowledges that their ways of relating to nature are different from his own, and yet, he makes no attempt to understand the world from their perspective. He is content with not knowing in spite of knowing – an epistemological blind spot, if there ever was one. Linnaeus’ concept of Enlightenment reason is also reflected in the way Evie and her contemporaries are taught botany. The dominant method of classifying plants, espoused by male professors and Professor Ethel Sargant (Pariat 112), leaves Evie feeling disconnected from the natural world she used to enjoy as a child (Pariat113). It is against such masculinist attempts at classifying the natural world that Pariat evinces a “new” approach to the natural environment couched in Goethe’s phenomenological idea of plants as ever evolving and whose uniqueness is contained in the whole (Pariat 199). Unsurprisingly, it is the women who embody this concept.
At the heart of Pariat’s novel is the Khasi folk narrative of the Diengïeï. An apparent physical manifestation of Goethe’s Urpflanze, an “archetypal plant that carried within it all plants of the past, present, and future” (Pariat 305) and “a tree that holds all trees” (Pariat 394), the Diengïeï marks a journey through time. It is this journey, marked by the quest for the archetypal tree, that causes those who seek it to arrive at some form of self-realisation and acceptance. The search for the Diengïeï links Evie’s story to Goethe’s and Shai’s as well as the historical contexts underlying each narrative. The Diengïeï, therefore, binds the ontological to the epistemological, the personal to the historical and the particular to the universal. Its story also connects the narratives in the book to the “original” nomads. When Evie ventures into the remote parts of Assam (now, Meghalaya), she meets the custodians of the Diengïeï, nomads known as the Nongïaïd loosely translated as the people who roam the earth. Themselves outcasts to Khasi society, the Nongïaïd promise Evie knowledge of what she seeks provided she leaves everything that she knows behind (Pariat 402). Like the Diengïeï which she seeks, Evie’s story ultimately passes into legend. If the quest for the Diengïeï is also representative of the quest for knowledge, then Pariat implies that true knowledge is arrived at through the relinquishing of the self. This is also true of Shai, whose narrative differs slightly from those of Goethe, Linnaeus and Evie.
Unlike the other three protagonists in the book, Shai does not actively seek knowledge; and yet, knowledge finds her. At the start, Shai possesses a shaky sense of self and sticks out like a sore thumb in Mawmalang, a village in West Khasi Hills. Her inability to accept the inevitability of death as a part of life constrains her relationship with Oiñ, her nanny. It is only when she understands the true implications of the Diengïeï that she comes to terms with mortality and the cycle of regeneration couched in Goethe’s statement, “All is leaf.” Like Evie, Shai sheds what she knows of herself in order to become what she truly is—a modern-day nomad. The book ends with Shai reconciling herself to Oiñ’s death and a sapling reaching out into the light. What belongs to the earth returns to the earth, a metaphor for the journey we must all undertake.
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Similar to Everything the Light Touches, Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads has a tree as a central motif. Kijübode, “one of last surviving of the first trees”, guards the portal between the human and the spirit realms (Kire 112). It is through his counsel that the protagonist, Vime, learns to free herself from the spirit world and return to the world of the living.
Where the Cobbled Path Leads draws upon folk narrative, particularly, the Zeme folktale of a boy turning into a hornbill following his ill-treatment at the hands of his stepmother. In Kire’s re-telling of the same folktale, however, the protagonist is a girl who, in being mistreated by her stepmother, yearns to fly. The folktale provides a cultural frame to the grief that Vime feels upon the death of her mother and her apprehension at her father’s remarriage to Khrieliezuono (Khrielie, for short). Although Khrielie is reputed to be a good woman— “good” being, in the eyes of the community, a woman who can keep house—Vime is upset lest Khrielie takes the place of her mother. Like the girl in the folktale, Vime yearns for transfiguration and wants to be with her mother where she feels she truly belongs.
Unable to reconcile with her mother’s death, Vime takes a mysterious cobbled path leading to Kijübode and, from there, enters the spirit realm with the help of a mischievous spirit called Tei. Kire successfully weaves the fantastical with the folkloric in describing Vime’s experience in the spirit world. Apart from her mother, Vime meets a former weretiger, a weaver, a caretaker of the underworld and the souls of other people who have passed on. The narrative is almost Gaimanesque in the way that Vime, confronting the “other” world, also contends with the darkness within herself. The spirit world, such as it is, houses memories that living beings have of the dead, including Vime’s own memory of her mother; a Freudian (collective) uncanny. When Vime enters the spirit world, she also confronts the unresolved feelings she has towards her mother. Although melancholy is the dominant emotion, Vime also nurses feelings of anger and abandonment when her mother passes away. When she is tricked by Tei to remain in the spirit realm, however, help comes from an unexpected quarter: Khrielie, too, is lured by Tei into the world of the spirits.
Throughout the course of the novel, Kire highlights Vime’s difference from the women of her community. Using the traditional narrative device of foil characters, Vime’s impulsiveness and non-conforming attitude is a contrast to the gentler, subdued characters of Vime’s sister, Neime, and Khrielie. However, Vime shares with Khrielie the experience of being shunted out by the community to which they belong. Although Khrielie lives peacefully with her mother and grandparents in a small house in comparison to Vime’s, Kire tells us that Khrielie’s mother and her daughter were disowned by the grandparents owing to Khrielie being conceived out of wedlock (Kire 58-59). When Khrielie joins Vime in the spirit world, therefore, she already shares in the sense of alienation that the latter feels. More importantly, the journey through the spirit world allows Vime to put Khrielie’s needs before her own. Upon realising that Khrielie has been unwittingly trapped in the spirit world, Vime determines to forgo her desire to join her mother and fight instead to return to the world of the living for Khrielie’s sake. In forgoing her own selfish interests, Vime comes to terms not only with her loss but also finds the necessary strength to overcome her grief. When Vime narrates her experiences to her family members and relatives, moreover, she performs the role of a proverbial seer who is able to traverse the realms of living and the dead, a living Paichara, the wise women who ascended to heaven from an ancestral tree (Singh unpaginated).
Where the Cobbled Path Leads marks what Jyotirmoy Prodhani terms as an “ontological turn” in the literature of Northeast India (Prodhani 1-8). The novel shows how writers from the region have re-interpreted oral narratives to discover surprising ways to relate to their world. Kire’s book draws upon various legends and folktales of Naga tribes, especially the origin myth associated with the ancestral pear tree at Chitebo from which the Angami, Lotha, Rengma, Chakhesang and Sumi tribes are said to have emerged, migrated and dispersed (Singh unpaginated). In doing so, Kire’s reflections on grief and loss touch upon universal experiences that run through all the Naga lifeworlds and beyond.
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The ontological thread that one finds in Where the Cobbled Path Leads is also present in Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights. Like Avinuo Kire’s book, Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights also dwells on interactions between the human and the spirit world. These interactions re-align the characters’ relationships to each other and the world in which they live. There is, however, a strong anthropological undercurrent to Spirit Nights that sets it apart from the novels that have been reviewed so far.
Written in Easterine Kire’s characteristic prose which is lyrical and lucid, Spirit Nights contains a glossary of indigenous place names and words and an account of the supernatural occurrence that inspired Kire’s main narrative. The novel, therefore, can be considered a work of creative anthropology wherein the ethnographer, in this case Kire, re-imagines a textual universe based on an already created story by the participants in her research. This, however, forms only one strand of Kire’s anthropological and literary endeavour. The second, more discreet strand is seen in the narration of different lores within the main narrative itself. As literary devices in the novel, the lores reflect ancient psychic states that connect the protagonists of the novel to their ancestors and, through them, to the Chang Naga lifeworld. The stories themselves effect transformation in that they serve as the basis for present and future action through numerous re-tellings. Structurally, therefore, the novel reveals a complexity that is belied by Kire’s matter-of-fact style of narration.
The narrative of Spirit Nights follows, at a cursory glance, a traditional story-telling plot: a hero is born in whose time, a crisis occurs which forces the hero to undertake a journey where, after finding himself and conquering his fears, peace and reconciliation are finally restored. But the similarity ends there. The main narrative in Spirit Nights is about a coming-of-age story about a boy, Namu, and his relationship with his grandmother, Tola. Gifted with foresight—their ancestors being seers—Namu and Tola occupy a world where past, present and future collide. In their world of dreams and visions, the path to becoming a seer is marked by visitations from spirits both malevolent and virtuous. The world of spirits sits comfortably alongside the world of the human. The spirit world, Kire reveals, is a repository of human memories pertaining to the past as well as a reflection of what is desired in the future. A journey to the spirit world, such as Namu’s journey into the mouth of the tiger spirit that wreaks havoc on the village, coalesces personal biography (Namu’s desire for biological parents) with the tales and identity of the collective (the memorialisation of Namu’s defeat of the tiger).
The spirit world represents a spiritual journey as much as a physical one. Namu’s and Tola’s journeys into the spirit world are treated by Kire as factual occurrences since the journey itself alters their physical and psychic states (Kire 124-125). A journey into the spirit world also foreshadows self-revelation. After having rescued Namu and the rest of the community from the darkness that envelops their world, Tola accepts her position as a seer; a position which had hitherto been denied because women among her tribe are not usually considered spiritual leaders. This gendered angle in Kire’s novel reflects a growing concern by writers from the Northeast region of India for greater representation of women in the canon. One is reminded, for instance, of Temsüla Ao’s Aosenla’s Story (2017) where the trials of an Ao Naga woman are rigorously explored within the confines of a heterosexual union. But while Ao’s protagonist is powerless to overcome her oppression, Kire’s Tola reveals herself as the ultimate seer by being a source of comfort and light when her community needed her the most. This transformation, however, is effected by the presence of the fictional village of Mvüphri.
It is in the village of Mvüphri that Tola’s real identity as a seer is revealed to the men in her community. Mvüphri is everything that the historical Shumang Laangnyu Sang is not. While Shumang Laangnyu Sang is, for a short period, led by a spurious seer, Mvüphri houses the most powerful seer in all of Nagalim. While the people of Shumang Laangnyu Sang are beset by jealousies and scepticism, the people of Mvüphri are welcoming to strangers even if this would have cost them their lives. The village of Mvüphri, therefore, represents an ideal that, in being constructed through the fictional, reflects the humane end that all literature strives towards. That Kire treats this fictional place as though it were real testifies to the power of her storytelling.
The unique selling point of Kire’s novel is the boundaries that the novel breaks where narrative style is concerned. The anthropological generously spills over into the literary and vice versa such that the boundaries between the factual and the fictional merge. What is achievable in the fictional world is, Kire seems to imply, also achievable in our day-to-day lives. Spirit Nights appears at a time when the world is reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic. The isolation and anguish that the people of Shumang Laangnyu Sang feel upon being separated from each other because of the unimaginable darkness and the losses they suffered because of its curse, feel eerily familiar. But if the Chang Naga community has overcome their moment of darkness, both in fiction and in reality, through the courage they have in telling their tales, then we too are capable of the same. The story is an event – what happens in stories also happens in life.
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The novels reviewed here reveal the diversity in Northeast Indian Writing in English. Whether the approach to storytelling is historical as is the case with Pariat, ontological as is the case with Avinuo Kire or anthropological in the case of Easterine Kire, they all point towards universal human experiences that transcend their contextual particularities. In each fictional work, the natural world is treated as an entity that harbours its own mysteries but which is not separate from human life. Where Indian Writing in English is concerned, such works offer the possibilities of drawing upon specific cultural heritages while addressing universal challenges.
Works Cited
Ao, Temsüla. Aosenla’s Story. Zubaan Books, 2017.
Prodhani, Jyotirmoy. “The Saga of the A·bri dal·gipa: The Ontological Turn in Northeast Studies.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2, Mar.-Jun. 2022, pp. 1-8.
Singh, Menka. “Mythical Legends and Legendary Myths: A Case Study of Khonoma, Nagaland”. https://www.sahapedia.org/mythical-legends-and-legendary-myths-case-study-of-khonoma-nagaland. 26 December 2022.
