Week 10: Famous Last Words

I hadn't really realized how bad things had gotten until I finally got to take it easy this weekend... for the first time in I-can't-remember-when. I do know that this is the first time since back in August I am back to working ahead on this class, which was always my goal but one thing after another after another derailed me every weekend. Now, though, I am back on track being basically a full week ahead again. Which means I am ready to cope with whatever weirdness comes up in these next weeks.

I wrote a new story this week that I was really happy about: the "Judgement of Baboon" is a chain tale that I have been interested in for a long time, and the way it shows up in Bleek and Honey makes the story pretty confusing to read. So I thought about it really hard, and I came up with a telling of the story that I think is true to the original. Bleek had literally put a question mark at the end of the story because he couldn't figure out what was foolish about the baboon's judgment (I suspect he thought the whole story was foolish), so I decided to focus my retelling on that, thinking about it meant to make the baboon a judge in this dispute, and I am really happy with how it turned out: The Baboon's Judgment.

As a result of that story, I also did a Wikipedia Trail that was shattering; I always talk about how you never know what you will learn by following a Wikipedia Trail, but this was intense. It's one of those things where I feel like I should tell everybody about this because everybody has heard about the Nazi Holocaust, but they probably do not know about the Namaqua and Herero Genocide. I had not heard of it, and it's just by chance that the baboon story was a story collected in Namaqualand back in the middle of the 19th century. Just read this paragraph from Wikipedia... a genocide nightmare; this is from the Shark Island Concentration Camp article:

In 1906, research was conducted by the doctor Eugen Fischer on the skulls of dead prisoners and on prisoners with scurvy by Dr. Bofinger. In 2001 a number of these skulls were returned from German institutions to Namibia. The captured women were forced to boil heads of their dead inmates (some of whom may have been their relatives or acquaintances) and scrape remains of their skin and eyes with shards of glass, preparing them for examinations by German universities.

These are Herero prisoners of war, circa 1900; the photo comes from the German Federal Archives for German South West Africa: it is a postcard. Incredible.

So, that was intense to learn about, but I am glad I did, and I have so much more to learn about Africa. This is going to be a learning project that will literally take the rest of my life I suppose. And that's a good thought.

By being a student in Myth-Folklore this semester, I have managed to re-read almost all of the African units in class, making sure that all the story pages have notes (I just have Lang B and the Congo A-B to finish). That means I have added some of what I learned from all the reading this summer to the UnTextbook, so I am really happy about that.

I also figured out today just what I want to do for Indian Epics next semester! Last time I did the class, I read the Thai Ramakien, so that was the focus for all my reading and storytelling, etc. that semester. Since I had a Ramayana focus last time, I've decided to do a Mahabharata focus this time, but I really couldn't figure out how I wanted to do that... and then somehow I had a breakthrough idea this morning: I will do stories from the Aranya Parva. I probably got that idea from Devdutt Pattanaik's Aranyaka book that just came out... at least, that's the only thing I can think of that made me flash on the Mahabharata Aranya Parva as a focus. It's HUGE, which is good: about 600 pages in van Buitenen's translation, so that means it is enough for the whole 12 weeks of reading in class (50 pages of van Buitenen a week is definitely plenty of reading!), and then as "extra" I can also do readings from the old Ganguli translation, Dutt, plus Debroy, Menon, I might even splurge and buy those volumes in the Clay Mahabharata, looking at those sources for the chapters that are of most interest. I am SO EXCITED. As soon as I came up with that idea, I realized it would be a perfect way to spend the semester in terms of the reading, and it will be fun to create a Storybook with my favorite "forest" stories. 

So, I am having a blast with Brer Rabbit this semester... but now I am eager for next semester when I can plunge into the beautiful world of Mahabharata stories too. :-)