Publication: Oceania
Publication Date: 01-NOV-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Mimica, Jadran
Article Excerpt
QANG'S MASTERY OF HIS FEMININE DOMAIN
As a preamble a reflection on the structure of QANG's feminine domain within his un/conscious is in order. It will be observed that no wife of his, or any other concrete Yagwoia women, had figured in his dreams, certainly not in a central position of the ideal internal female object. As shown by the first and the last dreams (no. 2, Part I: 49-52; no. 6, Part II: 125-128) this feminine image appears as a wild forest spirit imago which structures his endo-psychic identification with the contra-sexual self. This suggests that his primary pre-Oedipal contra-sexual self-idealising dynamics, i.e., his narcissistic constitution which (as the dreams clearly show) was formed in relation to his mother, has a particularly positive valency. The primordial maternal presence is wholly in the background (as is his spirit father). This is clearly suggested by the fact that, when explicitly asked, he avers that neither parent appears in his dreams. (1) Yet in spontaneous self-accounts he invoked them as his foremost guardians. It can be said that QANG's ouroboric matrix, thanks to his mother's incorporation and transmission of his father, is constituted as a harmonious parental couple and as such it sustains his un/conscious as a maximally ego-supportive and conflict-free self-circuity. There is a clear sense of this in his self-understanding. Commenting on the power of his soul he told me:
I used to dream about the old mother. She stays (habitually) close to me. I am used to seeing the mother, she doesn't leave me. She (habitually) clears my thought (soul) and the father also used to clear my thought. (When other men try) to bring me down the father tells me: 'They want to bring you down. You mustn't ease off!' I used to see (experience his presence) thus. Eee (laughs self-content)
In the same conversation he also told me:
Another man is not able to bring down my kune umpne (soul). I am telling you, friend. They all tried to bring me down--napalye iye (shaman), poison man (sorcerer), or whatever kind of man, they all would like to bring me down. No! I am a strong man and I can bring them all down. That is me.
In his ouroboric parental core, then, QANG is self-assuredly unassailable.
The ideal feminine figure had replaced his primordial maternal image in the first initiation when he was nose-pierced (Part I: 49-52). As a specifically Yagwoia archetypal (generic) manifestation of the feminine the spirit woman had conferred upon him, in an act of mutual identification which never gave rise to a malignant possession, both an ego-affirmative self-ideal which empowered him in relation to women, and is protective and supportive of him regardless of his concrete relations with others. QANG has a healthy intra-psychic narcissistic shield which maintains a critical protective check on his dependencies on the concrete women in his life: from his classificatory mothers and sisters to his wives. The inner feminine figure to which he has a primary libidinal phallo-umbilical attachment in his un/conscious is none of his wives, or--at least overtly--his internal mother who in every other way is his overt bodily flesh identity. (2) This core psychic anchorage qua its manifest feminine imago does not represent directly any of the women with whom he is concretely conjoined. Yet as his ideal inner feminine she can and does certainly mirror all of them. This narcissistic dialectics is the condition of women's indiscriminate attraction to him. Reciprocally, as shown in the examination of Tilm's dream (Part I:39-44), it is clear that she carries specifically him as the source of her own generativity and as such the fulfilment of her womb-powers. In this perspective, whether or not all his wives have him in their un/conscious as the exclusive planter of and in their wombs is to misapprehend their factical situation since QANG has effectively made himself so in no uncertain terms. For each of them had, on average, borne him 8 children which is to say he has been in each of his wife's womb and un/conscious minimally 8x9 months of gestation not to mention the post-partum permanent fixture of child-care. Thus, that he is implanted in them for life and beyond; that he is their concrete male phallic function in and of their womb un/conscious is indubitable. But their respective endo-psychic presence in him isn't. It can be said without exaggeration that QANG is the master of his feminine domain, as a dimension of both his and his wives' un/conscious. (3)
More accurately, the dynamics of internalisation of a woman in the context of conjugal intersubjectivity is determined by the specific infrastructure of each particular egoic self and history of relations. In QANG's case his first two wives became, so to speak, secondary orbits which he attended to when necessary, but the intensifying centre of his domestic field was his 3rd wife. In his view the first two wives, especially the first, were obstinately self-assertive, always ready to argue with him about anything he would tell them to do whereas with Tilm he managed easily to maintain a most gratifying concord. (4) QANG emphasised that they were perfectly reciprocal; she would abide by his demands without protest and, vice-versa, so he did by her. His other two wives are not like that and so he is not pleased with them as he was with Tilm. But, so it seems, even she stayed in the penumbra of his internal feminine shiny object whose superlative beauty and body captured his soul in exchange for him doing the same to all other women. Indeed, his striking dream of conjunction with the white woman amplifies this situation with a profound poignancy (Part II: 125-129). In the shift from the intense oneiric eroticism and self-generation with the unknown yet supremely attractive spirit woman to the fecund wife and the mother of his five daughters sleeping next to him, he re-enters the wakeful reality of domesticity. She is his favourite but their conjugality is a well established marital interdependence as his kinship usage clearly shows--he calls her 'mother' and she calls him 'father'. His internal feminine image, although maternally toned, nevertheless belongs to the domain outside of conjugality and domesticity just as much as the streamings of the world-body's flow which she embodies--hunting and laki. And to the extent that she clearly articulates his pre-Oedipal super-ego (i.e., conscience) this self-circuity is wholly positive and ego-supportive. No guilt and remorse would proceed from within this idealising and protective sector of his egoic self. It is in the tributaries of the concrete domestic internalisations of object-relations that erosive narcissistic currents and guilt-motivated forebodings are most likely to well up in the un/conscious. A newly dead wife, dead husband, dead lover, and dead maternal relatives (mothers) are the kind of agents which gnaw on the souls of the living Yagwoia by subjecting them to pestilent unsettled scores of wrongdoings done to them while they were alive.
THE MAKING OF THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAD
Domesticity is underscored in the very name of these left-over energies of their former living embodiment. The spirits of the dead are called 'sweet potato spirits' (wopa ilymane) since they, despite all admonishments, threats, and exorcising activities from and by the living relatives, hang around hamlets and homesteads, their former abodes. More out of spite than need they are said to feed off the left-overs from human staple food--hence the eponymous 'sweet potato'. A boundless rot of domestic relations binds the living and the dead; the rottenness of this intersubjectivity matches the putrefaction of corpses themselves.
The vicissitudes and intensities of conjugal internalisations are best made manifest in the post-mortem dynamics of marital relationships. Their anticipations of the after-death behaviour as spirits are often accounted for well in advance. Thus a man and woman (as husband and wife) may make a pledge to each other regardless of any crisis situation, as an affirmation and consolidation of their conjugal feelings and care, that whoever of the two dies first s/he will not make the other's life and their children miserable by coming back as a wopa ilymane to inflict sickness on them. This is exactly what QANG and Tilm promised to each other. Specifically she told him 'If I am sick and die first you will not get sick (i.e., she will not make him so)'. She wanted him to look after their children; she would not be happy (and well disposed) if he would give some of them to their maternal uncles (her brothers) to bring them up. She will look well after him and all the children. Likewise she admonished him that if he dies first he mustn't feel bad about her. He must look after her and the children. She wouldn't marry another man. If a suitor would come into her house she would tell him: 'Oh is it you QANG (her man's name)--you came back!? You came back and you are asking me!? I will call your name thus'. This means that for her there was only him and no other man. In telling me about this QANG gave me the impression that it was primarily her desire which defined the reciprocal perspective for both of them. In putting it like this he was emphasising her devotion to him, how good a woman she was and, by the same token, his deference to her. Following her death his response to her was fully reciprocated.
A day before Tilm went into her deadly labour QANG went to Acaqopi to take his youngest daughter from a small local hospital. He had left her there in the care of relatives a week before. On the way he stopped in a place where he got caught in playing laki for a while. But the second night there he said he couldn't sleep at all because (he decided later after the event) his Tilm died. In the morning he proceeded to Acaqopi when his second born daughter (by Tilm) caught up with him and told him that her mother had died; she was already cold. His throat contracted and eyes began to weep with tears. Back in the village he felt boneless (i.e., broken down) when he saw his 'mother' dead. He learned that nobody was looking after her at her small garden house. The labour went awry as the baby (a big boy) got stuck in the vaginal canal. Beforehand a woman shaman asked for a K100 fee to be paid upfront if she was to attend to her. Tilm, already in the throes of labour, produced a Somare (K50 bank-note) and retorted that her 'father' (husband) had money to pay her. She should just extract the baby and he will pay her later. She gave her the money and shortly after died together with the baby who remained stuck in her. She was already enfeebled by the year-long drought so that the profuse bleeding finished her off. Nevertheless the shamaness took the money. Subsequently Tilm's patrilateral half brother asked her to return the money but she wouldn't; she 'ate' the money.
In his grief QANG tore and burned all his clothes, including the traditional grass aprons, chest and abdominal bands. Short of finger-lopping, shell-destruction, and money-burning, he couldn't have more articulately expressed the self-destructive intensity of his loss and grief. He thought of hanging himself but then he thought of his two youngest daughters (4 and 2 years old at the time) who would be left alone without him and this dissuaded him from suicide. (5) Losing her was a virtually total loss of himself. The aa'mekne (mortuary payment) to her maternal relatives was K360 which only amplified the loss. The monetary loss is internal to the loss of the person and the self invested in her. In fact they are aspects of a single intersubjective field of egoic relations. To the extent that Tilm died neglected by her numerous patrilateral half and full siblings, mostly brothers, their self-defence was a masterpiece of reversal of ouroboric symbiotic dependencies and strategic impotence. So when QANG reproached them for not taking care of her while he was away (note that no co-wife was involved) they said: 'She became like a man, we used to be underneath her; she used to cover us like a man. We cannot be the same kind like our sister. We are men (but) she became like a man and she used to cover us up. If she was a man she would become our father'.
The point made here is that they were dependant on her rather than her on them....
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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