A Million Years with You (10 page)

 

I was thinking that after you have lived in a tent and slept in a tent for night after night, a house seems as solid and dark as a cavern, part of another world. A tent is loose and waves about you, sifting in to you through pale green fabric the light of the sun and the moon. A tent is many things in one—a shelter from the cold night wind and from the rain which when it falls you can see the drops through the fabric, letting in shining light like drops of liquid on ground glass. A tent is a shade from the sun or a place that catches the early morning sunlight and warms the air inside like an oven. In a tent you can rig up the door-piece so that it forms a little porch for you, a shade for your door. When you wake up in the morning you see the sunlight shining in the tree roots right under your nose because you sleep on the ground, or you look up at the sky through the doorway and see the stars, or the sun rising right behind the sliver of the waning moon, and smell the first wind that lifts before dawn, which blows right over you. A house has its own individual smells and sighs and noises, like a creature, and is a world within a world, stubbornly standing up to the sun and the rain with its outside walls like a barricade so that inside the climate is always the same, the ideal of the owners. But a tent is hot at noon and cold at night, bright by sunlight and pale in the moonlight, wet when the rain falls and sighing, blowing, moving backwards and forwards with the wind.

Because you sleep on the ground you can hear things that walk past in the nighttime. The grass moves and if the creature is big enough you hear the footfalls like those of the lions who came the other night. This you never get in a thick, walled house. I've slept in a Bushman grass shelter and a Herero rondavel and they're pretty good too, but I'll take a tent any time. My tent is only a disheveled, dilapidated old thing, worn thin by wind and sun and rain, but such is the sensation of living in it.

 

As I remember the Kalahari, I believe I loved every moment of my sojourn there. This can't be true, of course, but it's a pleasant trick of memory. I saw things I'd never seen before and did things I'd never done before, many of which I recorded. For instance:

 

We went down on the flats to inspect the damage of the wildfire. Our camp is in a grove that didn't happen to burn but the land below is in utter desolation, only the orange sand and black ashes still in the shape of the grass that made them, with here and there the black ashes of leaves fallen off the bushes, or still on their vines, just in the shape of the leaves that made them but black and disintegrating into a pinch of dust when you touch them. And all around are the smoldering great carcasses of fallen trees, burned around the base but the leaves at the tops are still green and the air is filled with the smell of wood burning, and the ground is warm to walk on. And all the little succulents and all the vines that show the water-roots and all the tsama melons are burned, and no snake or lizard is here, all have been burned or gone. We saw two greater kori bustards
[large, grassland birds]
walking, white against the blackened ground. As you walk, black powder rises. My legs are dusted with black up to the knee. But Ukwane, walking along, saw a nest of edible ants—small heaps, brown, exposed because the grass has burned—and he ate some. As he did, the soldier ants swarmed all over him and bit him but he brushed them off.

I ate one too—a bite from the abdomen. You can only eat the large-headed soldier ants. The workers, I am told, are tasteless. But the soldiers taste sour and very watery, very like a blackberry a little on the green side, almost refreshing. Mine opened his jaws wide to fight my thumb before I ate him.

 

Perhaps my favorite memory is of a trance dance. These dances took place at night, and their purpose was usually to exorcise something called “star sickness,” which would often manifest itself as jealousy and other emotions that cause divisions among people, thus compromising everyone's survival. The songs that people danced to were given to them in dreams, and were meant not to influence any natural feature but to use its power. The rain dance, for example, was meant not to bring rain but to use the power of rain when people could feel it coming. Thus it was the powers of the natural world—the powers of giraffes, elands, rain, the sun, and other features—that united the people, bringing them together by dissolving emotional complexities that threatened to divide them. The strongest power, I believe, was that of the sun. A dance was supposed to start soon after dark and last until sunrise. When the sun's first flames appeared, the people would use its power and dance the sun dance. Then they'd stop, seemingly relieved and quite happy, and would go back to their shelters to rest for a while.

A dance almost always took place on the night of a full moon. If the people felt they needed to dance, the men would ask the women to start a dance fire. The women would lay a fire at a distance from the encampment, and when night came, they would light the fire, sit in a circle around it, and begin to sing. The men would join them, to dance in line around the fire, and soon enough some of the men would fall into a trance. In that trance they encountered the spirits of the dead, who were drawn to a dance fire, and also lions (perhaps also drawn to a dance fire, at least to see what was going on), as both kinds of creatures are dangerous. The trancing men would run out into the dark, cursing the spirits and the lions and demanding that they go away. The trancing men would also pull star sickness from the women and from one another and would scream it up to the sky, sending it back to the spirits who brought it. I included the following description in the second book I wrote about the Bushmen,
The Old Way
.

 

I remember the first dance that took place after we came, and how I sat in the circle of women at their invitation, not knowing the wordless song, which was complex and had nothing in common with music I knew, and I remember how I was able to keep time by clapping one line of the rhythm, trying to copy the woman next to me. I still remember how it felt when one of the trancing men, with a touch as light as a bird's wing, put his trembling hands on my chest and shoulder, and with his head beside mine pulled in his breath with long, slow groans, then suddenly leaped back and shrieked at the sky, then, almost staggering, moved on to the next woman. He had taken something out of me and thrown it into the night. At the time, such trance dancing was not known to the Western world, and I had no idea what he was doing or what I should do. So I did what the women on either side of me were doing, and continued clapping. By then, other trancing men were leaning over other women in the circle, over the children squeezed in beside their mothers, over the little babies in their mothers' capes, pulling something out of us, screaming it up to the sky.

In time, I came to understand what had been happening, what most of it meant, and I would later sit in the circle of women at many other dances, but I will never forget that first one—the dancers between the fire and the moon, the voice of the healer in my ear, the heat of his face against mine with strange, loud singing all around us. To have been part of that, that's something to remember now that I am among the last of those people to be left alive, after everything has changed.
¹

 

My parents and brother returned many times to Gautscha, and my brother devoted his life to the people there. I accompanied three of their expeditions, once staying for a year. To be in the Kalahari was surely the most important experience of my life—but it wasn't perfect. My wonderful parents, however loving, however understanding, were products of their time and culture when it came to gender issues. They believed that men were meant to do the important things and women were meant to help them. Women should involve themselves with home and children. Thus I doubt that my unassuming mom saw her own work as being of great magnitude.

This wasn't true—her findings proved to be very important—but as she saw it, it was the Ju/wasi who had great magnitude, not her. So she saw her work as useful. She was simply doing her absolute best to produce a complete and accurate record, which was what my dad had wanted her to do. His role, in contrast, was to get us in to that vast wilderness, to keep us safe while we stayed, and to get us out of there without getting lost, with enough to eat, and with enough water, gasoline, and auto parts to accomplish the mission. When he wasn't attending to these necessities, he mapped the area and took still photographs of just about everything the Ju/wasi had or did.

My brother made films. Our dad had provided him with all kinds of cameras, film, and recording equipment. In contrast, he provided me with nothing. This was not because he preferred my brother, but simply because I was female. My brother went hunting with the men and saw all kinds of wildlife in which he had no interest except as game. I couldn't go hunting. Women could have nothing to do with hunting. They couldn't even touch the bows and arrows. I could accept that, because the last thing I wanted to do was to render a hunt unsuccessful.

What I really wanted to do was to observe the wildlife. But inquiry into wildlife was unknown in the world of anthropology. At the time, any work I might have done involving wildlife would have been seen as an irrelevant aside. So the tasks assigned to me were to help the camp manager, Philip, with camp problems, and also to assist my brother in making his films by helping with such things as the sound recordings. The entire last part of the journal I've been quoting consists of notes on what was happening when photographs were being taken, and my entries are numbered according to what action the camera had captured. For instance:

 

Black and white stills. Films and notes on child behavior. (1) Dabe Ma (Di!ai's baby) urinates in Di!ai's cape. She hands him to his grandmother and wipes out her cape with straw. (2) Dabe Ma sits with his grandmother. (3) Dabe Ma walks back to Di!ai by himself. (4) In a few minutes he sits on her lap and nurses. (5) Dabe Ma gives Gao Lame
[the baby's teenage uncle]
a piece of food which Gao pretends to eat then gives it back.

 

But even these small interactions could prove fascinating. For example, I learned how hyenas copulate because some of the Ju/wa boys performed a reenactment. The event went into my journal as a photo entry because my brother happened to be filming when the boys did this. Here's the entry:

 

≠Wi/abe was playing the giraffe and the hyena songs for sound sync
[playing the songs on the string of a hunting bow, tapping the string with a stick, changing the note by pressing the string with a finger—no doubt the origin of the guitar and violin]
and in the middle of it he stopped, and he and /Giamakwe pretended to be two hyenas copulating—a majestic imitation with snarls and growls, sniffing the female's behind, and so on. One boy started as the male and the other as the female, then they swapped, shivering with ecstasy, then more growls, until the male fell away, exhausted, and curled up on his side, whereupon the female attacked him. The play lasted for hours, it seemed. The boys seemed so literal that they probably imitated the copulation process exactly, taking the same amount of time to do it. Both boys were deadpan; neither was excited or laughing, although the boy who was the male pretended to use his penis. They did this again and again and with growls and all, and it sounded exactly like 2 hyenas who were heard copulating outside of camp a few nights ago—and that went on for hours. A curious thing—when the kids acted it out, the female bucked the male off by raising her hindquarters and letting the male slip down over her head.

 

Being a girl, I was also assigned to learn as much as I could about the women and children—this being a suitable female province—which I did by going on gathering trips with the women and helping out by sometimes carrying the children whom the women brought along. My mom meticulously recorded the names of all the plants the women gathered. She produced quantities of notes such as the following, which I have chosen at random from her lengthy list.

 

23. tshũ
Wallerina nutans
Kirk. A small plant with grasslike leaves has a firm round storage organ about the size of a golf ball which grows near the surface of the ground; gathered by Band 1 in the direction of Gura and in the vicinity of Nama Pan.

24. /dobi **unidentified. A climbing vine; a fibrous watery underground storage organ, resembles a large turnip in size and shape, has rough-looking but thin brown skin; grows elbow-deep and deeper. The tubers become woody and bitter when old and are thrown away; cooked like n≠wara (#21), split on top of coals. An important food during the dry season in the Gautscha vicinity.
²

 

A more comprehensive account of plants used by the Ju/wasi has never been made. And while my mom was doing this, I was out in the veldt experiencing how these plants were collected.

I'm glad I went. There's more to the cultural implications of gender than one might think. In some cultures, women with their menstruation and sexual allure pollute the world of men and are suppressed for that reason. Not so in Ju/wa culture, where women were the equals of men in every way that mattered—substantially more so than in our culture. But they were barred from hunting, also from contact with men right before a hunt, and also while menstruating or giving birth. I have come to think that this was not because of a polluting factor or a weakness, but because of female power. Hunting was by far the most significant male activity, requiring not only great skill but also training, experience, and voluminous knowledge. Yet a woman—with no instruction, no relevant skill or training, no former experience of any kind—can make another human being. Thus female power was the antithesis of male power, and because it was so prevalent and so strong, it could overwhelm a hunt. Best to keep the two powers separate. Best to go on gathering trips. Best not to interfere with male power.