Easterine Kire
Keynote address at Unity College on Naga Literature
First let us begin by defining literature because there is a lot of misconception about it in our Naga context.
Literature usually refers to “artistic writing worthy of being remembered.” It is a body of artistic writings of a country or period that are characterised by beauty of expression and form and by universality of intellectual and emotional appeal.” It is creative writing and it employs the imaginative faculty.
While the term literature is sometimes used loosely to refer to literature on medicine or literature on ornithology for example, when we talk about Naga literature, the hearers should instantly understand that we mean literary writing: we mean works of fiction, and poetic output and not academic or philosophical or historical works, not political writing either.
In 2014 I worked on a Naga bibliography of books written by Nagas and about Nagas. I recorded 561 books. Out of that list, the books that went into the category of literature such as poetry, fiction, biography, drama and short stories, numbered 49 by Naga writers. In 2015 the number probably stands at 55 or 56.
(http:www.kohimaeducationaltrust.net/kohima13.htm)
Please use the Naga bibliography as a guide if you are confused. It categorises different types of books written by Nagas according to their subject matter. Let’s educate ourselves or else people will laugh at us. Literary works are creative works and not compilations of facts and statistics, not documentation.
Quality control
Today it is a little comical that anyone who is a Facebook poet can be introduced as a writer. I have had a young man introduced to me as a Naga writer. I thought he had written and published a book or two. But he happened to have written some poems on Facebook. There is a reason why they are called Facebook poets! I want to pose the question: Is a man who has written a very poor quality book to be referred to as a Naga writer? Where is the place of quality control in all this? Who is going to decide the question of quality writing?
The Big book syndrome
At the Hornbill Literature festival, two books on Archaeology and History were released. They were thick hardcover volumes. They were not creative works. Nevertheless the politician releasing it was so pleased at the size of the books that he insisted Naga writers should henceforth concentrate on writing only ‘subject-centric’ books. In that context he meant that we should confine ourselves to writing only academic books.
In another incident, a woman from a government department advised me to not to write small books but to write a very big book. Why? Because, she explained, she liked very big books. They looked impressive!
Clearly the size of the book matters more to some readers than the content. The Big book syndrome shows that the Naga reading public is very small, but not limited. More and more youngsters are beginning to develop an appetite for reading books by Naga authors, be the book big or not so big!
For me, writing is a project of retrieval. I retrieve narratives that have been suppressed and not found the opportune moment to be voiced. I work on retrieving oral history and insider narratives and putting them in a written form. As part of the retrieval, I record the socio-cultural information that is imparted by my narrators along with oral history. All of that information has to be fleshed out into a book form that engages the interest of the readers, which is why I prefer the novel as a form of transmitting and preserving our shared memories. The recommendation that we should concentrate on building up our literature as a folk based literature is a worthy suggestion that your concept note was possibly hinting at. I have heard this suggestion elsewhere too.
But I would like to widen the borders of this suggestion and say that we should actually make our literature life-based. When readers from outside our community read our books, they want to learn about our lives, the cultural background of our society, and the rationale for why we do what we do and why we make the decisions that we make in our lives. By writing about Naga lives, readers can get to understand and see Naga culture in practice.
Much of what this seminar will focus on is the question of identity. I think it is pertinent to repeat what the editor of the Assam encyclopaedia Homen Borgohain said about us: “I feel deep pain and my heart bleeds at the thought of my Naga brothers, because you have the dual question of your sovereignty because of what you are and at the same time, you are a part of India. You are going to have to live with the two realities all the time splitting your consciousness constantly. How are you going to survive the crisis?”
We recognise that we have a fractured identity because of our experiences of double colonisation. During British occupation we identified ourselves as the barbaric races of head-hunters, which was the British definition on the Naga people. We accepted what the British wrote about us and the way we were described by them. In the narratives of our ancestors we always hear this note of describing themselves as uneducated and uncivilised, because they always used British narratives to describe themselves.
After Indian occupation we have had to live with the split consciousness, torn between Naga identity and Indian citizenship as Borgohain states. Each occupational power insisted on our inferiority and asserted their right to dominate us by virtue of their racial superiority. One of the long lasting results of occupation is the psychological colonisation we have suffered from for a long time. We didn’t know how to take pride in ourselves, our cultures, our stories, our narratives. We devalued them because we and our narratives were devalued by those who colonised us.
We have been victims of a colonised mentality far too long. In the first two General elections in Nagaland, voting was conducted at gunpoint. Colonisation made it illegal for us to be Nagas. We had to either be British subjects or Indian subjects depending on the time frame. This lingering illegitimacy of our existence still causes psychological problems for us as a people.( Filling up a form we have to enter our nationality as Indian while part of us finds that hard to accept. There is a measure of Indianness in us of course, but the degree to which we feel Indian varies from person to person.)
It’s time to recognise the value of our own literature. It’s time to stop comparing ourselves with others, our writing with the writing of other cultures, societies and nations, time to stop believing colonial definitions of us. We belong to ourselves, we are what we are. We are under no obligation to be like others.
On the question of identity most of us distance ourselves from the March 5 incident in Dimapur. We have no hesitation in saying that is not us; what happened is not the Naga way of doing things. This identity assertion shows that we pride ourselves on a more civilised Naga way of handling crime in our context. In such cases we lean back on our cultural patterns. Sudden outbursts of violence in our society always manage to have this effect on us, and we come together to assert what is our identity and what is not our identity. We isolate ourselves from the actions that we label as not-Naga. So that shows we have a clear sense of ourselves and our identity as opposed to an identity that the media tries to give us.
Identity is a very personal thing. If another person tries to define you and put you in a box, are you going to put up with that? Yet we have for two hundred years. We have allowed cultural theft to take place and cultural colonisation to continue. Colonisation always problematises identity because it tries to superimpose another identity on us. A crisis of identity and colonisation are always closely intertwined.
We have allowed others to define us and we have accepted their definition of us. We gave them the authority to decide who the Nagas are and what is Naga culture. We thereby allowed ourselves to be intellectually robbed and dictated to.
Acknowledging that we are the insider voice, we can begin the process of reclaiming our intellectual property. The insider voice is the authority. The scholar from outside who sends out lots of questionnaires to our people and then claims to be an expert on us is not the authority on us. We are the insider voice – the asli, not the nakli. We are retaking or reclaiming our intellectual independence when we take back our right to define ourselves. I want to underline that too much cultural theft has been committed on the Nagas already. The same people yesterday who dismissed our cultures as inferior have no compulsions about stealing our cultural knowledge today.
There is a tendency to compare ourselves with others, a tendency to belittle ourselves: all this is part of our colonised inferiority mentality. We think we are just not good enough. But we are. The important thing is we are trying to be our best selves. Take pride, good pride in Naga literature. We cannot write as Indians. We use English but we cannot write as Englishmen. We write as Nagas, but as Nagas embracing the wider world beyond ours, and there is nothing wrong with that. We will continue to write about Naga lives and Naga experiences and what it is to grow up Naga and think as a Naga: That will be our contribution to world literature.
