Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Terminology
- Note on References to the Bleek and Lloyd Notebooks
- Introduction
- SECTION 1 TEXT, MYTH AND NARRATIVE
- SECTION 2 INTERPRETING THE |XAM NARRATIVES: A Discussion of Three Books
- SECTION 3 READING THE NARRATIVES
- Chapter 8 Hare's Lip and Crows’ Necks: The Question of Origins and Versions in the |Xam Stories
- Chapter 9 The Story in Which ‘The Children Are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky’: Power, Identity and Difference in a |Xam Narrative
- Chapter 10 The Story Of ‘The Girl Of The Early Race Who Made Stars’: The Discursive Character of the |Xam Texts
- SECTION 4 CONTROVERSIES
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 10 - The Story Of ‘The Girl Of The Early Race Who Made Stars’: The Discursive Character of the |Xam Texts
from SECTION 3 - READING THE NARRATIVES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Terminology
- Note on References to the Bleek and Lloyd Notebooks
- Introduction
- SECTION 1 TEXT, MYTH AND NARRATIVE
- SECTION 2 INTERPRETING THE |XAM NARRATIVES: A Discussion of Three Books
- SECTION 3 READING THE NARRATIVES
- Chapter 8 Hare's Lip and Crows’ Necks: The Question of Origins and Versions in the |Xam Stories
- Chapter 9 The Story in Which ‘The Children Are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky’: Power, Identity and Difference in a |Xam Narrative
- Chapter 10 The Story Of ‘The Girl Of The Early Race Who Made Stars’: The Discursive Character of the |Xam Texts
- SECTION 4 CONTROVERSIES
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
This chapter, like the last, consists of a reading of a single narrative from the notebooks. The story, which also concerns a primal creation event, is called ‘The Girl of the Early Race Who Made Stars’. My aim once again is not to provide a definitive interpretation of the story, but to demonstrate instead something of the ability of the |Xam texts to gene - rate meaning as soon as attention is given to their details. Two major versions of the narrative occur in the collection. Together they offer, in my view, a significantly wider range of meanings than a single version would. This is not because they augment one another, however, as was the case with the versions of the narrative about the sun and the boys that I explored in the last chapter. Rather, like the versions of the moon and hare story that I discussed in chapter 8, their differences elicit questions and excite exegesis. In |Han#kass'o's version, the girl's actions follow directly from anger at her mother and, by extension, the social order (L.VIII.10:6879–84). As Belinda Jeursen (1995: 40–54) has emphasised, it is the ritual restrictions on her movements and diet at the time of menarche, enforced by her mother and other closely related older women, that elicit the girl's ire and leads her to throw ashes and roots into the sky. In ||Kabbo's longer version (L.II.28:2505–24; Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 72–79), the girl's actions are driven not only by anger, but by a calculated intent that contains benevolent elements.
The existence of different versions of the story stimulates the same sort of questions that I explored in chapter 8. Even if it is accepted that individual stories and their variants illustrate deep |Xam, Khoisan or universal structures, the question remains as to why the differences between stories and versions take particular forms. Is this variety indicative only of unconscious and hopeless struggles against the rigid determinism of the structure? Or is it chiefly a question of the preferences of different narrators, as Hewitt (1986: 235–46) implies?
- Type
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- Information
- Bushman LettersInterpreting |Xam Narrative, pp. 241 - 263Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2010