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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
A The Scotsman Book of the Year 2021In re-telling the Inuit stories included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is 'brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy': precisely the talents for rendering, rather than appropriating these great story-cycles of Inuit culture.Here we learn of 'Sedna the Sea Goddess' and 'Kiviuq the Hunter', the central protagonists of the book's remarkable stories. They are rich in extraordinary incident. In Sedna's world women can marry dogs and have half-puppy, half-human children; birds beat their wings so hard they call down a storm on a fugitive kayak; walruses originate from... well that would be telling. Each story-cycle abounds in natural wonder, celebrating our creaturely relations with our fellow inhabitants of land and sea. 'The Old Woman Who Changed Herself into a Man', a short narrative, bridges the major sequences, telling the story of an older woman and a younger one who become lovers in the isolation of their remote home.
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iii
The Owner of the Sea
THREE INUIT STORIES
retold by
RICHARD PRICE
with an afterword by
NANCY CAMPBELL
CARCANET CLASSICS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I first encountered the Inuit spiritual world when the artist Ronald King invited me to work on a book he was making about ‘the owner of the sea’, Sedna. The story of Sedna is of a woman defying her father and her society, of a wild creature taking advantage of Sedna’s rebelliousness, and then of the severe punishment for her transgression. It is a beautiful and at the same time shocking creation story.
I immersed myself in accounts of Sedna and wrote the small number of poems that tell Sedna and the Fulmar. I didn’t stop there, though; I began to write about her more fully, ending up with the sequence collected here. After a brief pause I began to read about other legends and tales and the result is this book, with Sedna and her father at the beginning and the hunter Kiviuq and his goose-wife at the close.
As I was to learn, Inuit narratives are not ‘just stories’: they are a way of seeing the world and the life within it. So much so that when I use words here like ‘story’ and ‘narrative’, ‘myth’ and ‘legend’, I use them with implicit tongs – like the tongs that try to deprive Kiviuq of his boots at a particularly awkward moment – knowing that these words are placeholders for better concepts I can’t yet articulate or even fully understand. Even ‘spiritual’ doesn’t sound right, because it wrongly suggests a division between a supernatural world and the natural one.
There are many and contradictory ways of reading these stories. That is one of their great gifts. This is particularly in regard to how men and women work, live and love together, especially in a society living at the extreme margins of survival. Such a society has evolved a division of labour in which men are expected, roughly speaking, to do a set of certain tasks and women, roughly speaking, another – while allowing and needing flexibility and overlap. 6
Clearly, and malignly, key decisions are reserved for men. The tales pull no punches in describing how fraught with the jeopardy of violent misogyny such a society can, at its worst, be. Yet they also prod and jab at the problem of individualism within a society which only has so much room for ‘free will’. In any case, these are ancient stories and– bearing in mind the fuzzing of mythic and realistic modes we should be sensitive to in folk tales – the social norms they seem to imply are as long gone in Inuit cultures as any other (if they are long gone in other cultures…)
Perhaps it is actually best ‘not to read’ these tales when reading them: I can only encourage readers first to enjoy them, absorb them, take them in, rather than ‘read’ in the moral or literary sense, as a person might engage with any novel or film or song, taking in the story and the manner of its delivery–as you would horror, adventure, fantasy, tragedy, magic – in a spirit of receptivity which will judge only in that direct, fast-moving way any audience has in the moment. Let snagging analysis and judgement come later, if they must.
To that end I’ve tried to make these poems deliver something analogous to what I understand as the enigma and the energy of the originals, while also inevitably being different and other. There is no sense in which this book is a translation. Instead, this is a book of poems which take inspiration from prose texts published in English based on many Inuit-language versions of tales which were first rendered live hundreds and hundreds of years ago, as oral, told, stories. They are still rendered that way – in fact, more than rendered, that is what they are.
I have been especially inspired by the tales gathered from some forty elders in the first decade of the twenty-first century in the Kiviuq project, which Kira Van Deusen’s team embarked on, and which she so illuminatingly documents and reflects upon in Kiviuq: An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins. These are collected in the beautifully realised website Kiviuq’s 7Journey, www.unipka.ca. The anthropological writings by Boas and Rasmussen at least a century earlier are another source.
Taken together these stories, garnered from elders across large territories, can differ from each other in incidental detail and, just sometimes, on larger parts of a story. This has set a challenge for a poet attempting a straight line in the poetic sequence, so much so that sometimes I have resisted the straight line altogether, allowing the discontinuities to offer a breathing pause in the general flow.
Through Ronald King I was introduced to Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten’s The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic, which has become another vital guide in my understanding of Inuit cultures. There is no single Sedna or Kiviuq story – they are stories which are as alive as some still believe Sedna and Kiviuq may be alive – and to be alive means to change, to be contradictory, to be individual, to be social, even to be mercurial. Storytelling of the kind witnessed in such accounts, and which is fundamental to the transmission of the stories down the generations, is an extremely sophisticated art. Its enduring power is testified to by the detailed survival of these tales over what is likely to be thousands of years.
Clearly the poetry inscribed in this published book is at several major removes from the original stories which inspired it. The poetry is no substitute for the stories, in the way that a religious painting would be no substitute for the sacred story it tries to depict (I think of north European paintings of the Renaissance period trying to stretch back well over a thousand years to imagine scenes from the New Testament, itself a written text trying to reach back to the spoken words of Christ, who, an Aramaic speaker living close to the southern Mediterranean, would not have spoken as a first language the Greek which the New Testament ‘witnesses’ him in. Yet who would gainsay the sincerity of the painter, or their ability to 8reach back to some part at least of the core of the Christian story?)
What the reader of this book can be sure of is that key events, where there is a commonly agreed order, are told in that order, and that no key events have been invented ‘for the sake of dramatic effect’.
Sometimes I have chosen variants which may be less common in the tales but do exist. In the story of the Lake Spirit, in the present version, Kiviuq kills at one point by fire rather than by knife. The relationship between fire and life was interesting to me and I wanted to keep that less popular version. I have also suggested what I see as an understated bisexuality in Kiviuq – his wading out to the lake usually reports a swift death for the lake spirit but one earlier transcription might imply he has sex with it first. Similarly, his travelling song has variations in which the ‘torsos’ which are a challenge for him are described in different ways: specifically female; sexless; or simply ‘buttocks’. This was enough for me to make just a little bit more of that part of the story and make both women and men who desire Kiviuq an ‘obstacle’ for him. I have made all the animals in the underworld female except for the siksik, whose sex traditionally Kiviuq has difficulty in distinguishing. Again, this seems interesting to me in terms of sexuality and I have made something of that.
I have chosen a style of poetry which is both very loose – syllabically, in conventions of lines per stanza, and so on – and yet tight, allowing context and a certain dead-pan modernism, a serial minimalism, to accentuate the weight of each of the situations in which each of the central characters finds themself. Shifts of perspective – where one character’s voice is followed by another, or, in Sedna, people in the village speak as a brief chorus – are intended to give further interest to the whole, offering a dramatic and almost ‘straight to camera’ effect that is intended to help sustain the piece while avoiding one single 9voice or tone. Sometimes, as with the shifting gender of the pronouns in The Old Woman, I have engineered a grammatical change to signal one happening in the story itself; moves between tenses and between first person and third person are made where I have had particular and different intensities of story in mind. All that said, in general the brevity of each poem invites the reader to quickly skip to the next short text rather than get snagged in over-ornate versifying. These poems are meant to remember the narrative propulsion which inspired them in the first place.
In that respect I can’t help but think of Kiviuq’s travelling song, towards the end of his tale, in which he encounters a boiling cauldron with chunks of meat in it. This is an image we are given to believe is also an image of the sea and its fragments of floating ice. To complete his song-journey he has to step from one chunk to another as quickly as he can. My own poetry has often used this technique in the past – I have written in narrative sequences almost from the very first stirrings of my poetry vocation and have continued to do so throughout my poetic life – but the verse novels of Bernadine Evaristo (The Emperor’s Babe) and Dorothy Porter (The Monkey’s Mask) and the sequence nora’s place by Tom Leonard have been particularly in my mind as I have been writing this book.
What is a departure in a structural way is that I have given much more attention to the voices of the women in the stories, writing dialogues and monologues for them which, as elsewhere in this book, have taken advantage of techniques from theatre and screen. Very occasionally a modern-day narrator’s voice intervenes. I actually don’t think this is against tradition to do so – storytellers modernise, contextualise, are sensitive to and ask questions of their audience, and they explain as well. Even so, I try not to be prim or prissy or over-didactic in so doing. Once only, the narrator appears where there is a critical 10divergence of the story among sources, taking advantage of that interpretative problem as a ‘choice’ for the audience to make (as it happens, the point in question is also focussed on a deeply shocking act). Where there are Inuit words I make it very clear in the context what these words are, sometimes ‘doubling’ the Inuit word with an English near-equivalent (as Robert Burns often does with Scots and English in his work) so that I don’t have to footnote what is essentially a poetry drama.
I have occasionally allowed myself some fun with the stories – for example playing with the modern-day language of relationship-counselling in Kiviuq’s first encounter with a woman – but this has been the exception. Some aspects of the story are naturally funny in any case, funny peculiar and funny ha ha, and I believe Inuit audiences are not po-faced (this is different from being fundamentally irreverent, which this set of sequences is not).
In the epic of Kiviuq there are strange shifts in time between the episodes, perhaps a result of their being separable as stories and so each having a hidden history of their own recomposition in re-telling. It is rare for either Sedna or Kiviuq to be performed as a single sequence. This may have led to apparent continuity errors. Does Kiviuq have more than one mother, for example? She seems to die fairly early on, only to reappear much later. When exactly was sea ice created? And so on.
Sometimes these do not need to be resolved, since the dream logic of ancient tales allows a lot of disjunction; the flashback device also has its uses. Once or twice, though, I’ve chosen a particular interpretation to make a coherence and even to suggest a rich spiritual and psychological life. In the case of the two mothers, I suggest the second is actually the dead presence of the first. As the tale of the goose-wife shows, she still manages to be a vocal and, in this case, sadly 11destructive part of the family, as if Kiviuq has not learnt to let her influence go. I also follow Kira Van Deusen and certain elders in strongly suggesting that the fox-wife is a reincarnation of one of the women Kiviuq kills, though I still leave this as a suggestion, not a categorical interpretation.
The most serious gap, to my mind, follows Kiviuq’s reunion with the fox-wife. Some say they renewed their relationship, some say that the fox-wife slipped away again, and who could blame her? I felt the end of the underground sequence seems so final that I did not want to make any kind of coda for it, either a happy ever after or a downbeat recording of final parting. Instead I scripted a poem to open the next section, which tries to make a bridge between the fox-wife story and that of the goose. It is a simple reflection on the near-eternal youthfulness of Kiviuq and what that might mean for his ability to make connections to those who love him; and what that might mean for the mere mortals involved.
In this book, I’ve started with Sedna, a creation myth whose core is a female spirit or god. Then I’ve used the short narrative, The Old Woman Who Changed Herself Into A Man as a transition to the man-boy stories of the Kiviuq cycle. There are many other Inuit tales of course, but this introductory selection has, I hope, a certain narrative arc.
Earlier I said that there are many ways of reading these tales. I’d like to emphasise, though, two unambiguous truths which are central to them: that the life of creatures deserves our respect, and that human behaviour towards the creatures affects not only their well-being but our own.
Sadly, these truths have not been observed by Western society for hundreds of years and probably much longer. Ignorance of or contempt for the ecosystems of which we are certainly only a part has only accelerated in the current century, with mass extinctions and climate crisis the result. In recent decades the West has been joined in its consumption 12mania by the emerging superpowers of the East and the internally colonising giant of Brazil. The latter’s elite prefers a short-term meat economy to the long-term survival of the planet. We really are all connected, and it is an injustice of planetary proportions that no people are more threatened by the insanely consuming behaviour of these self-indulgent territories than the distant Inuit.
The Arctic heathland burns, the ice disappears, the seas rise and the oceans have fewer and fewer creatures swimming in them: Sedna has already started to withhold her bounty. Kiviuq has not been seen for many a year and may already have turned to stone.
Select Bibliography
Franz Boas, The Eskimo Of Baffin Land And Hudson Bay: From Notes Collected By George Comer, James S. Mutch, E.J. Peck, Volume 15, Part 1, Wentworth Press, 2019. [reprinted from Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 1907].
Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic, University of Alaska Press, 2010.
Knud Rasmussen, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-1929, Vol 8: The Netsilik Eskimo: Social Life and Spiritual Culture, Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag. 1931.
Kira Van Deusen, Kiviuq: An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Kira Van Deusen (selector and editor), Kiviuq’s Journey, www.unipka.ca. [2008]. This site presents the Kiviuq’s story in the words of forty Inuit elders, as part of a project by filmmaker John Houston and storyteller Kira Van Deusen. The elders were Elisapee Karlik, Bernadette Patterk, Naalungiaq Makkigaq, Mariano Aupilardjuk, Henry Isluanik, Peter 13Suwaksiork, Phillip Kijusiutnerk, Samson Quinangnaq, Simon Tookoome, Leo Nimialik, Joe Issaluk, Theresa Kimaliardjuk, Eli Kimaliardjuk, Henry Evaluardjuk, Madeleine Ivalu, Rachel Ujarusuk, Sippora Inuksuk, Jacob Peterloosie, Cornelius Nutarak, Annie Peterloosie, Joanisee Macpa, Gideon Qitsualik, Mary Ittunga, Bernadette Uttaq, Frank Analok, Moses Koihok, Margaret Nakashuk, Madeleine Makkigaq, Ollie Ittinuar, Felix Kopak, Peter Katorka, Celestine Erkidjuk, Herve Paniaq, Naujarlak Tassugat, Judas Aqilgiaq, Jimmie Qiqut, Ruby Eleeheetook, Niviuvak Marqniq, and Matthew Nakashook.
Acknowledgements
My poems are in debt to the elders, authors and storytellers cited in the Select Bibliography as well as to more general reading. Some poems collected were first published in the artist’s book Sedna & The Fulmar by Ronald King, who I am especially grateful to for introducing me to these worlds. Some of the poems here have been included in the anthology Prototype: 1 edited by Jess Chandler, in Wet Grain edited by Patrick Romero and Christian Lemay, and in Michael Schmidt’s PN Review. My thank you, too, to Michael, John McAuliffe, Andrew Latimer, Jazz Linklater and all at Carcanet, to Bill Broady, David Kinloch, Peter McCarey, and April Yee, who read versions of the text, and to Nancy Campbell for her Afterword and encouragement in this project.
THE OWNER OF THE SEA
17
THE OWNER OF THE SEA
Who remembers the names of the Owner of the Sea?
She is the Owner of the Sea,
The Woman Who Would Not Marry.
The One Who Did Not Want a Husband,
The Owner of the Sea.
She is the Woman Who Was Always Having Sex,
The Terrifying One.
The Woman Who Was Always Marrying, Always Divorcing.
She is the Owner of the Sea.
She is – Don’t name her.
Say simply the one down there.
She is the Owner of the Sea.
18
Father and daughter
My first words were an order.
I tugged off a mitten with my teeth, let it drop.
I reached up, commanded: “Hold!
Hold my hand!” He laughed, but shed a mitt, too.
He took my tiny fingers in his fist.
We walked slowly, claiming the ice –
risking frostbite, he’d brag, for love.
