An Angami Folktale Reimagined

Book Review of T. Keditsu’s “Ukepenuopfü 

By Kevileno Sakhrie 

“Each year, Ukepenuopfü weeps, her tears bathing the skies, rushing down the mountain and flooding the plains. Each year, her beloved soaks in these tears and remembers their love.“Thus ends T Keditsu’s “Ukepenuopfü- an Angami folktale reimagined”— a poignant re-rendering of a little known Angami folk tale first recorded in 1921 by British ethnographer J.H.Hutton. 

For me, the operative word here is “remembers”. We, who for the longest time had no letters with which to document our history, our stories— how did we, remember? Nourished and nurtured by an oral culture, we remembered through song and poetry and story and marked lives, deaths, events and kinship ties with strange standing stones, menhirs.

Thus, remembering becomes all the more pressing and is not to be taken lightly because unlike written traditions, we depended on memory for the survival of our cultural memory and transmission of our oral traditions. The tale of Ukepenuopfü with its many layers of interwoven memory and echoes of the past provides us with an understanding of this past. It’s value lies in its creation of a form of shared identity and in the way it communicates this identity to new members of the group. 

In this, her debut picture book, Keditsu retells the story of Ukepenuopfü, the Angami supreme being or mother goddess, ‘the one who birthed us.’ The myth tells of how her husband being fearsome to look at, hid from their two sons. Upon being prematurely discovered by his sons, they are forced to part ways with the father making his way to the plains below. While the younger son chooses to go with his father, the elder son remains behind. So begins the story of the Angamis who believed themselves to be descendants of the older brother who was raised by his mother.

Using a creative fusion of folklore, fiction and fantasy, Keditsu’s “Ukepenuopfü” is an origin story with elements of creation myths that is concerned with the basic patterns of existence, the cycles of renewal in nature and the birth of consciousness in the human psyche. 

Intended as a read-a-loud story for children, the author explains how she wanted her own children to understand their world, it’s genesis and the people who inhabited that world. Her desire was for them to develop a profound appreciation for the survival, wisdom and bravery of their own people and the indestructible spirit and hope that have helped such cultures to endure.

As a children’s story “Ukepenuopfü” is pictorial, with full pages dedicated to visual representations to appeal to early-age readers. Through the use of rhythm, colour, texture and emotion, illustrator Alyssa Pachuau brings the folktale to life with visuals that children can comprehend and connect with. The narrative is contained in mostly one or two sentences per page in gentle and comforting prose and the nearly graphic novel layout is sure to fire a child’s imagination.

Alyssa Pachuau has risen to the challenge of making quintessentially inexplicable and formless notions and concepts in the story easy to grasp for young readers. She incorporates the trademark emblems and easily recognisable patterns of Angami tribal culture with her own creative acumen. Particularly delightful is her attention to detail in rendering the indigenous landscape, vegetation and trees native to Angami country. Truly valuable is the artist’s definitive style that captures the essence, feeling, and movement of the story as truthfully as possible.

Writers and artists know that art always means more than one thing – and sometimes it means something you didn’t intend for it to mean. Thus, judging from the way the book has already elicited very different responses from adult readers, it is obviously a book that is much more than a story only for children and more than just a new rendition of the author’s response to JH Hutton’s ethnological approach. In fact, in this author’s retelling, the folktale becomes a metaphor for many themes she herself probably never thought of.

In this way too, she brings to the fore the crucial importance of improvisation in the telling of tales and how the folktale is a dynamic living entity that is never fully controlled in the hands of its storyteller. Also since the story’s meaning is always embedded in the telling, storytelling is a profoundly interactive process that initiates an open-ended dialogue between the storyteller and listener. Hence, the listener’s crucial role in recreating the story according to the light of her/his own understanding is underscored.

In this connection, the gaps and ellipses that are usually found in folktales take on greater meaning because they illustrate the idea that a story/ text’s truest meaning lies in what it does not say, in what it represses. The author herself is comfortable in the gap, with mystery, with the unfinished – because that’s where art lives. But as a reader/listener of this tale and member of the community to which it is directed, the gaps, absences and ellipses in “Ukepenuopfü” spur me to ask hard questions about what those absences mean and about the forces that create them and their significance to the text as a whole.

As such, I cannot help but be drawn to the smaller, darker stories hidden within the larger framework of the folktale, to the  repressed stories of absent husbands, abandoned wives, separated families, single mothers and generations of women who are left behind to tell the tale to the children to keep the culture alive. They force me to realise that it is not enough just to engage superficially and passively with the ‘flat’ surface of the text and  that in any case, the surface of art is not flat, smooth or linear but has incredible depth, infinite layers and the potential to bend and evolve in complex ways. 

Keditsu knows the value of storytelling for oral communities such as ours; how it is not only a way of conveying cultural memory and history but also a way of reclaiming ancestry. As a culture bearer in touch with her ancestry, she highlights the role of the female ancestor and draws attention to the place she has in revising one’s history. What is important is not the replication of the tale but her revisionist and reconstructive purposes in using the tale as an organising principle for issues that are close to her heart.

 As such, I am led to reflect on how one’s ancestral relationship with folk culture is something that is both necessary but also problematic —problematic, because it challenges prescribed gender roles and disrupts accepted societal notions of the place of women in our society. I am also curious to know why this particular folktale has hardly been told or repeated in any way, if ever, and why we had to wait for a hundred years before it was finally “unearthed” through the “literary excavation” of a woman writer who reclaimed it, gave it expression and transformed it into a new provocative art form. 

Through her remediation of this ancient folktale, Keditsu makes us question and re-examine the mistaken view that our knowledge systems, beliefs and worldview prior to European contact and exposure to Christianity were of no value. She bears witness to a civilisation that existed underneath the white civilisation and makes us aware that there are alternative worldviews and perspectives that undermine the plausibility of any single point of view. She can be seen as the trickster writer who overturns Western biblical and modern notions through the legends and folkways of her people.

From the ambiguity of the title to the mythical ending of the story she disrupts and unsettles readers’ expectations. Like the trickster of many ethnic culture myths who shifts and disguises boundaries, undoes and redraws the traditional connections, Keditsu also blurs the boundaries between the self and the other, the real and the fantastic, between the story and reader to provoke and engage in strengthening and renewing culture and community. 

Having said all that, I confess to feeling a little disappointed on discovering that the book did not come out in hard cover. One hopes that the author and her publishers might consider this option in future editions of this book, if only for their beauty and greater appeal, collectibility and durability. With the clarity and economy of the text which also commands appreciation for its lyricism, along with the wonderful illustrations, “Ukepenuopfü” has all the makings of becoming an instant classic. 

(Dr.Kevileno Sakhrie is a prominent literary critic, academic & educator based in Kohima)