Legend Night Ritual KWS-4
Title: Legend Night Ritual
Date: 06/23/2019
Observer: Kurt Smith
Setting: 21:30 at night. Kazadisenja. At the family fortress over the shafts to the diamond mines.
Description of Activity
Dokon sits in the row of seats around the fire stage within the walled courtyard of the fortress. I was invited as a guest of Dokon, for only the masters and their children are invited to the annual Legend Ritual, though the masters could bring other children of their families to experience the legends.
About two hundred others are in attendance, seating along the rows of simple benches, with many adults watching from behind. A bonfire burns brightly inside a heavy metal cauldron on legs at the rear of the stage.
As the spectators settle in, an old woman walks, seemingly painfully, on the stage and sits in a chair, her back to the bonfire behind her, eerily illuminating her silhouette. She begins to speak in a cadence I hadn't heard before in all of my travels throughout Kazadisenja.
She spoke with a theatrical, projecting, performative voice, recalling the legend of the making of Kazadisenja, and the doom of all the Oktip, a legend of how all the islands will one day be as bare and desolate as Kazadisenja, and how the Oktip people will fight each other for precious resources during the collapse. She spoke of how the fighting will anger the spirits of the sea, and that the sea would lash out, fueled by the hatred of the people, and consume islands and their inhabitants under the waves, and that the waves would only hasten the decline of the Oktip, washing the islands' dwindling farm soils away into the depths of the ocean, leaving naught but the bare rock above the surf, and the people will mourn as they walk over lands paved with rocky veins of silver, gold, and gemstones, but have nothing to eat to fill their empty bellies. She then explains that there is hope to prevent the doom, but only the children grow to honor the same peace that their forefathers had striven for, and so to appease the spirits of the sea, who have the power to strip the land of all that the people of Oktipsenja depend on.
Reflections
The performance of the old woman's monologue appeared to be laden with cultural features to mark severity, authenticity, theatrics, and entertainment, but more interestingly was the unique syntactic form with which she gave her entire performance. The Chongja language has always been observed as a strict Subject-Verb-Object language, but in the performance, strikingly, she spoke every sentence in Object-Subject-Verb syntax. For example:
/yitja, lipi yitut, lapa yitut, lena yitut ke dishab funja gelshemelna./
village, little buildings, big buildings, stone buildings, every tree the sea will eat.
villages, little huts, big houses, stone mansions, every tree the sea will devour
[villages,...] [the sea] [will devour]
Object - Subject - Verb
I have spoken with many old Kazad inhabitants, and many are full of tales to tell me, but none have every employed this OSV syntax in speaking with me, which leads me to the conclusion that this is likely not a generational variation of speech. Further, I have passively observed speech between old and young, as well as old people among themselves, and I have not observed this OSV syntax, meaning I can rule out the possibility of observer interference, that old people may have chosen to speak to me in the common syntax since I am an outsider. I am forced to the only other hypothesis that fits: the OSV syntax is a grammatical feature of and reserved for ritual performance of an artistic nature. Whether this is an elevated style of speaking, a feature indicating an artistic/ theatrical performance, or even a remnant from an ancient OSV syntax alive now only through the highly ritualized performance of Legend Telling, I cannot say. More research is warranted, and it excites me to imagine that I may have uncovered a clue indicating Chongja's OSV historic syntax. I'll survey as many elders and people associated with the arts as I can to uncover the surface level interpretation of the unusual syntax, and perhaps that can shed some light on this feature's origins in Chongja history.
Dokon sits in the row of seats around the fire stage within the walled courtyard of the fortress. I was invited as a guest of Dokon, for only the masters and their children are invited to the annual Legend Ritual, though the masters could bring other children of their families to experience the legends.
About two hundred others are in attendance, seating along the rows of simple benches, with many adults watching from behind. A bonfire burns brightly inside a heavy metal cauldron on legs at the rear of the stage.
As the spectators settle in, an old woman walks, seemingly painfully, on the stage and sits in a chair, her back to the bonfire behind her, eerily illuminating her silhouette. She begins to speak in a cadence I hadn't heard before in all of my travels throughout Kazadisenja.
She spoke with a theatrical, projecting, performative voice, recalling the legend of the making of Kazadisenja, and the doom of all the Oktip, a legend of how all the islands will one day be as bare and desolate as Kazadisenja, and how the Oktip people will fight each other for precious resources during the collapse. She spoke of how the fighting will anger the spirits of the sea, and that the sea would lash out, fueled by the hatred of the people, and consume islands and their inhabitants under the waves, and that the waves would only hasten the decline of the Oktip, washing the islands' dwindling farm soils away into the depths of the ocean, leaving naught but the bare rock above the surf, and the people will mourn as they walk over lands paved with rocky veins of silver, gold, and gemstones, but have nothing to eat to fill their empty bellies. She then explains that there is hope to prevent the doom, but only the children grow to honor the same peace that their forefathers had striven for, and so to appease the spirits of the sea, who have the power to strip the land of all that the people of Oktipsenja depend on.
Reflections
The performance of the old woman's monologue appeared to be laden with cultural features to mark severity, authenticity, theatrics, and entertainment, but more interestingly was the unique syntactic form with which she gave her entire performance. The Chongja language has always been observed as a strict Subject-Verb-Object language, but in the performance, strikingly, she spoke every sentence in Object-Subject-Verb syntax. For example:
/yitja, lipi yitut, lapa yitut, lena yitut ke dishab funja gelshemelna./
village, little buildings, big buildings, stone buildings, every tree the sea will eat.
villages, little huts, big houses, stone mansions, every tree the sea will devour
[villages,...] [the sea] [will devour]
Object - Subject - Verb
I have spoken with many old Kazad inhabitants, and many are full of tales to tell me, but none have every employed this OSV syntax in speaking with me, which leads me to the conclusion that this is likely not a generational variation of speech. Further, I have passively observed speech between old and young, as well as old people among themselves, and I have not observed this OSV syntax, meaning I can rule out the possibility of observer interference, that old people may have chosen to speak to me in the common syntax since I am an outsider. I am forced to the only other hypothesis that fits: the OSV syntax is a grammatical feature of and reserved for ritual performance of an artistic nature. Whether this is an elevated style of speaking, a feature indicating an artistic/ theatrical performance, or even a remnant from an ancient OSV syntax alive now only through the highly ritualized performance of Legend Telling, I cannot say. More research is warranted, and it excites me to imagine that I may have uncovered a clue indicating Chongja's OSV historic syntax. I'll survey as many elders and people associated with the arts as I can to uncover the surface level interpretation of the unusual syntax, and perhaps that can shed some light on this feature's origins in Chongja history.
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