Myth and and ethos in three novels by Naga writer Easterine Kire

Easterine Kire’s early books have a strong feminist voice running through and holding them together. Lonely or isolated protagonists struggling to overcome war, death and sometimes oppressive traditions and customary demeanours. Her feminine protagonists are patient and kind (respectful) but at the same time they rebel against their expected submission into marriage and motherhood or, calling things by their real name; they are always moving away from subjugation and conformity.

In A Terrible Matriarchy (2007), a girl grows up taking care of her grandmother—learning to be a housewife—doggedly trying to keep going to school as her brothers do. Torn between her teenage self and aspirations and the repression faced at home, this girl of this dense novel moves forward in spite of traditions and fear.

A young Naga woman sees her world collapse when her foreigner fiancée dies during the battle of Kohima and embraces her life and circumstances. Writing with a tight prose that sometimes feels ominous, Kire narrates in Mari (2010) her aunt’s life, love and passion. The novella is a literary souvenir of the once little town that became the grave of the Japanese imperial dreams.

This is the Easterine who rose up from family memories and Naga Angami collective history. Remembering how the threads of life knitted themselves over generations of women.

Everything points at a moment around 2013. Judging by the books she published from that point on, Easterine Kire was done with the concise narrative of her personal history, her feminine lineage and her people’s perils over the last 70 years. That compactly written prose, with a sense that one might call foreboding, faded from her works and different expressions found articulation.

Perhaps Easterine Kire was still tormented by her memories—and she kept undoubtedly exposing fearlessly the unwrapped layers of a woman’s life—but the Angami Naga writer changed her style. Lighter ways came and surprising scenes appeared where not everything was explicitly described for or easily understood by the outside reader. New characters (men and women) came out of fantasy, mythological beings, ghosts, peculiar plants ... the heavy realism gave way to something new.

Foundations of a new epic

Enters a man, dreaming of a sleeping river. Obsessed and straight, Vilie can’t simply dream of that place where he could get a river stone to grant him whatever wish he might have. Kire takes us with him to a modest odyssey where danger and kindness are not just adventures but ways to relate to each other in the Angami territory: Where the river sleeps (2014).

Old ways, simple manners and dialogue are the singular things that lead Vilie through his encounters in these pages. His love for the forest (“The forest is my wife”) made him the ideal traveller, reverential to life without any idealisation of Mother Nature.

Vilie, the hunter guardian of his village, is the living book of his ancestral knowledge. Respect to tradition that will ultimate cost him his life; means being bound not by morals or any obligation alien to will. By mere existence: we are bounded to each other because that’s part of our ethos, the collective spirit of one’s people.

On the same path, the Son of the thundercloud (2016) is not just a prophetic tale; the new Easterine Kire said it was more like a Christological tale. In it Rhalie, a boy born from a drop of rainwater, came to offer redemption by killing a spirit-tiger. Inhabitants of a barren land, a village of weavers witness the rebirth of life everywhere around them thanks to him.

The renewal of life cycles, and therefore the renewal of traditions have also a witness, Pele, who falls for the boy’s mother and befriends a couple of old aunties named Truth and Future-full-of-Hope. Again death arrives, not as an end but as a change of state.

Set in a land where Christianity and its parables are very much alive, religion is left out of these three books. But Faith is in. Not the blind intolerant faith of priests, sadhus and ayatollahs, the loving one of the children of this Earth. Kire is invoking us readers to believe that is the way things could happen, and most importantly: that is the way Angamis would react to wonder, spirits and emergency.

Her interest to explain (to educate the reader on what Angamis are) persists over all her works. So, every now and then a character stops the normal flow of a dialogue to engage with what might be called Wiki-style, producing a distancing effect on the readership: the story flows, the new myth navigates on these strong cultural notions, ethics, moral values—that’s how we are. But the Brechtian mechanism doesn’t work every time, and the narration suffers with some rough sentences.

There’s of course a certain epic tone in Kire’s last three novels that reads in the way the popular ginger-garlic paste is a must in Indian kitchens: we need heroic actions, extraordinary strength to be shown when the demons, the monsters or the others show their faces.

But even the strongest ingredients are just an element to a major mix: the secret to them lies not in what men and women in Kire’s texts do, it’s what guides their actions, what reveals the overall flavour and the nourishment behind the pleasure.

Moving forward, looking back

Oral cultures—like the Nagas and almost any other indigenous culture—have a unique way of thinking, as Robert Darnton has described. They don’t produce knowledge through abstraction and ideas. They think with things, or stories. Such is the legacy Easterine Kire uses to weave her last book, Don’t run my love (2018).

Though I see the ‘Red Riding Hood’, Kire takes us again to the village lost in those hills there—her people’s land. She sets carefully, in the new relaxed way, a scenario where a widow and her daughter struggle to make ends meet. They work their land—they seed, they harvest. Until a handsome man comes, passionate to marry Atuonuo, and the girl, undecided, turns him down.

The unfolding drama includes blood and violence, pretty much in the way things are today for women under patriarchy. The two women are stalked by Kevi, a weretiger who can’t control rage. The tekhumevi incarnates the sad ancestral male brutality and not even an enchanted place, populated by healers, will be of any help.

Even if we know or predict the story, that the young Atuonuo will be safe in the end, it’s simple to realise the narrative (of the trip to safeness) is actually the important thing here. Every chapter has a lesson or two; every scene offers a way to be.

This is how Kire builds a bridge across generations and cultures. One dimension therefore is time: where the ancient ways to tell stories, being straightforward and informative, provide common ground for the old and young. A name is not just a name, it has to be understood or Be truthful and trust your loved ones; so many simple principles for life Easterine Kire moulds with her beautiful words.

Kire delicately mixes live traditions with new standards. She then gives the Angami (and all of us) the chance to understand, to remember, to move forward while looking back to their ancestors’ best. That’s the gift.

The author is the co-founder of Adivaani, a not-for-profit publishing house based in Kolkata