February is observed as Black History Month in the United States. The idea is to celebrate the culture and achievements of Black Americans, from the time the first 20 Africans arrived in the “New World” in 1619 as indentured servants, through over two hundred years of slavery and another hundred years of Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and to today, with an African American President in the White House. To remind myself of the extraordinary story of African Americans, I put together a month’s worth of inspirational words from the some of the leading figures, which I’d like to share with the readers of Nagablog.com.

February:

1.“… whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.”
Ralph Ellison (1914-1995), “What America would be like without blacks” (1970)

2. “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”
Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), when asked to define jazz.

3. “The day I no longer go on stage will be the day I die.”
Josephine Baker (1906-1975), a-k-a The Cleopatra of Jazz

4. “We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these.”
Ernest Everett Just (1883-1914), Biologist.

5. “The Negro is America’s metaphor.”
Richard Wright (1883-1960)

6. “It’s singing with soul that counts.”
Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990), Jazz Singer, nicknamed “The Divine One.”

7. “Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays. She is beautiful and gentle. She waits on me hand and foot. She is a swinger. She has grace. To hear her speak, you can’t believe your ears. She is ten thousand years old. She is as modern as tomorrow, a brand new woman every day, and as endless as time mathematics. Living with her is a labyrinth of ramifications. I look forward to her every gesture. Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.”
Duke Ellington (1899-1971)

8. “I am the product of the sustained indignation of a branded grandfather, the militant protest of my grandmother, the disciplined resentment of my father and mother, and the power of the mass action of the church.”
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908-1972), Politician, Preacher, Civil Rights Leader.

9. “Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous.”
A Philip Randolph (1889-1979), Union Leader, Civil Rights Leader.

10. “I just came here to entertain you. That was what I thought you wanted. I was born here.”
Nat King Cole (1919-1965), after being beaten up on stage by White Citizens Council members, in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 10, 1956.

11. “I was frightened, but I believed we needed help to get us more jobs and better education.”
Rosa Parks (1913-2005).

12. “Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Minister and Civil Rights Leader.

13. “Brother, brother, there are too many of us dying.”
Marvin Gaye (1939-1984), Musician.

14. “One of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: Whenever life doesn’t seem to give us vision, we create one.”
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), Writer-dramatist.

15. “Whatever white people do not know about black people reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
James Baldwin (1924-1987), Writer and Public Intellectual.

16. “We, the black women of today, must accept the full weight of a legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains. . . heirs to a tradition to supreme perseverance and heroic resistance.”
Angela Davis (1944- ____), Professor and Crusader for Justice.

17. “A child born to a black mother in a state like Mississippi – born to the dumbest, poorest sharecropper – by merely drawing its first breath in the democracy has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it’s not a goal worth working for.”
Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

18. “One of the best and worst things about black people is a willingness to nurse optimism that often has zero basis in fact. Call me crazy.”
Erin Aubrey Kaplan, Journalist, on hoping against hope that Condoleezza Rice would, after all, have “some bit of “sistah” empathy, some meaningful connection to black history and experience.

19. “We try to make our music so loose and hard-hitting that it hits your soul hard enough to make it open. It’s like shock therapy.”
Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970), Guitarist-Gypsy-Civil Rights Activist.

20. “When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don’t speak out ain’t nobody going to speak out for you.”
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), Grassroots Activist.

21. “Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes but the opposition he or she has to overcome to reach his or her goals.”
Dorothy Height (1912-____), Organizer of Clubs, Societies, etc. for Blacks.

22. “Future leaders, those who lead the nation, must know that the flag is red, white and blue, but the nation is not red, white and blue. It is red and yellow and brown and black and white.”
Jesse Jackson (1941- ___), Preacher and, Civil Rights Leader.

23. “I don’t like to preach too much. I like to get quiet, and then I attack through my work.”
Denzel Washington (1954- __), Actor.

24. “We can’t rely on anyone but ourselves to define our existence, to shape the image of ourselves.”
Spike Lee (1957- ___), Actor & Director.

25. “If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present; we must begin with the past.”
John Hope Franklin (1915- ), Scholar-Professor of History.

26. “Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder into it and hope your back hold up.”
August Wilson (1945-2007), Writer-Dramatist.

27. “For me, black women are the most fascinating creations in the world.”
Alice Walker (1944- ), Writer-Novelist.

28. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do have language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison (1931- ), Writer-Novelist, Nobel Laureate.

29. “This time, we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.”
Barack Obama (1961 – ), President of the United States of America. “A More Perfect Union (2008).

By Dr. Paul Pimomo, Professor of English and Co-Director, Africana and Black Studies, CWU, Ellensburg, WA, USA

Introduction:

Honorable Chief Minister, Mr. Neiphiu Rio, council of ministers, political and civil leaders, my dear overseas friends, and ladies and gentlemen:

At this time in Washington State in the U. S., it’s midnight and I would be dreaming. It’s a real joy for me to be here in Kohima, a dream come true. I’m up here at the podium this morning, instead of down there listening, not because I know more about Naga society than the rest of you. I’ve lived in self-exile for twenty-five years in the United States. On the other hand, you live and work here, you run the government, you are the leaders of the Naga society; you know better than I do the needs of our people. But in general, everybody in this room knows as well as the next person what Nagaland needs for a better future: unity and peace, hard work and honest living, and goodwill toward one another. I have no new ideas to share with you today, only a new voice for the same truths in a different context from a different set of experiences. I make a living teaching literature, so I’m going to tell you stories from different parts of the world, including Nagaland, to illustrate the two central goals of human social life throughout history, namely the common good and personal happiness through acceptance and respect in the community. Most of you will recognize the stories, so I ask your indulgence. I shall end my talk with a comment on what I see as the most pressing need of our generation, because without it Nagas have no future as a people.

Being a Naga in the world sometimes feels like an ant among elephants in the forest. You feel tiny, vulnerable, almost non-existent. You can be crushed under foot by all sorts of animals, not because they hate you but because they don’t know you exist. So as Nagas, we learn to do two things to survive: First, like ants, we have to come together and build a large mound or anthill so that even elephants take notice of it and don’t walk all over us. Second, like some ants, we have to adapt, evolve, and grow wings with which to take flight and soar even above the elephants. I’m talking about imagination, vision, and acquired worldclass professional skills. Wings. And if there are enough of us who can fly around the anthill at the approach of other animals, we can ward off threats and protect our city and our spot in the forest. Every creature in the forest knows ants can bite and sting. Ants know that too, but that doesn’t carry us far. Every ant knows that it cannot survive alone; it must be part of a large anthill. This is true especially for small groups of people like the Nagas.

Let me say bluntly that Nagas have not built a viable modern community; we are too busy tearing down each other and carting away for ourselves nature’s goods in our land and the money that comes in from India, forcing the vast majority of people in the villages and townships into poverty, and an increasing number of individuals with wings to flee the anthill of our homeland. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. That’s why we are all here today. We are here because we believe in the possibility of a thriving Naga homeland. We believe in the common good of the Naga people and we know time is running out on us.

PART ONE: The Common Good.

If we were to look at world history we will see that every group of people that have contributed to human civilization has had the common good of the community as one of its core values. This is the case despite the diversity of cultures and systems of governance.

Ancient Greece
One of the earliest myths in the Greco-Roman tradition on the purpose of social life comes from the fifth century BCE Greek Sophist Protagoras. In his “Great Speech” Protagoras tells of a primordial time when the gods formed creatures and animals, including human beings, from the elements of the earth. They then appointed Prometheus and Epimetheus to distribute various abilities and gifts to all creatures in ways that would ensure the survival of each kind. Epimetheus messed up the distribution work. He was so liberal with the gifts in the beginning that by the time he reached the humans he had nothing left to give them. Humans were left naked and unprovided for. When his friend Prometheus saw the defenseless humans, he took pity and decided to steal a survival kit from heaven for them. Taking Prometheus’ gifts of fire and technical skills, humans were able to make food and build shelter for themselves. But they still lacked one critical thing: the ability to organize themselves into a viable group, not even against the threat of decimation from bigger and stronger animals.

Zeus feared humans would become extinct. So he sent Hermes to them with the gifts of justice and shame, that is to say, a sense of social right and wrong and mutual respect, which of course are the basis for community and government. Not wanting to commit Epimetheus’ earlier mistake, Hermes asked Zeus if he should give the gifts to every human being or just to a select few. Zeus’ command was clear: “To all, let all share in them. There would be no cities if only a few shared in them as with the other crafts. And lay down the law from me to kill anyone not able to share in shame and justice as a disease to the state” (Luschnig).

As you can see, Protagoras’ story is clearly an argument for a democratic form of government based on two foundational beliefs: the god-given human ability to appreciate justice as fundamental in our dealings with each other and the human responsibility to reason and to contribute to the well-being of the whole. These beliefs were the basis for the Greek city-state.

Judeo-Christian
A reinforcement of the theme of justice and reciprocity in the Judeo-Christian tradition can be found in the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20, especially verses 12 to 17:

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you. You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. . . .[and so on].

Later the New Testament expanded on what it means to be an upright person and a follower of Jesus. This is shown tellingly in Acts 4 and 5, which describe the practice of egalitarian community among the early Christians:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was with them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put them at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need (Acts 4: 32-35).

For Ananias and Sapphira, the couple who cheated, the punishment was dire. What happened to them is reminiscent of Zeus’ law of capital punishment for people who become “a disease to the state” by their inability “to share in shame and justice.”

Buddhism and Jainism
Eastern belief traditions, especially Buddhism and Jainism from the sixth century BCE on, anticipated the New Testament teaching of benevolent empathy. Following Buddhism, Nattaputta Vardhama (popularly known as Mahavira), founder of Jainism, emphasized non-violence as the basis of life. The sacred Jain canon, The Acaranga Sutra, has a section on The True Doctrine of Non-violence, Ahimsa. The doctrinal link between it and “Thou Shall Not Kill” (of Exodus 20) is obvious. The Ahimsa rule says that “One should not injure, subjugate, enslave, torture or kill.” It was taught by Mahavira as a basic human responsibility necessary to the viability of any community. The Arhats (Blessed Ones) considered non-violence as the foundation of all knowledge. They proclaimed it as “axiomatic.” One of the earliest articulations of what has come to be known as The Golden Rule can be found in verses 25 and 26 of the Ahimsa chapter whose purpose is to teach empathy, to refrain from causing suffering and pain to others because no one wants to suffer and experience pain.

My point in reviewing and quoting from familiar ancient texts from both East and West is to suggest that the principle of the common good, starting with peaceable co-existence, was considered the primary universal human value.

Let’s move to Africa
Peace and the common good are further confirmed by beliefs indigenous societies kept current and transmitted down the generations through oral literature. It is common knowledge that traditional African folk cultures, despite their variety, believed in the continuity of life among the living, the dead, and people yet to be born. For this reason, the path in an African village leading to the burial ground was considered sacred. Chinua Achebe’s short story “Dead Men’s Path” is partly a retelling of this folk belief. In it, the village priest explains to the arrogant headmaster of a colonial school, which sits on the village path, why the path should not be closed: “The whole life of this village depends on it. Our dead relatives depart by it and our ancestors visit us by it. But most important, it is the path of children coming in to be born.”

Hence it was taboo to desecrate it or block it, for doing so would endanger the wellbeing of the village community — present, past, and future.

Indigenous Societies
An example of a similar worldview from another continent is the Native-American story of Gluskabe and Grandmother Woodchuck, narrated by Joseph Bruchac in “The Circle is the Way to See.” It is said that Gluskabe, the prototypical human being, had a hard time hunting, so he asked his Grandmother to make him a good hunting bag. After several unsuccessful tries, Grandmother Woodchuck plucked hair from her own belly and made one for Gluskabe. The young man promptly went out to the forest and announced to all the animals that the world was going to end and they would all die unless they came into his bag. All the animals heeded his call and walked into his bag. Gluskabe proudly took the magic catch to his grandmother, saying he needn’t ever hunt again because they had more meat than they would want for the rest of their lives.

But Grandmother Woodchuck was not pleased. She told the young man: “You have not done well, Grandson. We have plenty of meat now, but what about the future? What about the children and the children’s children? They will die of hunger. You cannot do this; you must do what will help our children’s children.”

Grandmother Woodchuck went on to tell her grandson that every generation has the responsibility of weighing the consequences of their actions on the land and its creatures for seven generations to come. It is said that Gluskabe obeyed his grandmother and did the right thing by releasing the animals back to the forest.

Grandmother Woodchuck’s long vision of intergenerational responsibility represents Native American social teaching. Bruchac goes on to show that, like Grandmother Woodchuck, Native-American oral culture functions from a worldview which sees not only all human beings as interconnected, but human beings as part of an interwoven natural circle of soil, water, air, light, plants, insects, and animals of all description. In short, humans are part of the natural order, not above it. We are earthlings not extra-terrestrials. Hence the need to recognize that the circle of life is the way to see.

PART TWO
The Naga Story: The Village and Colonial Legacy

Coming now to Nagaland and our culture, the Naga story can be seen as an abridged version of the world’s. In one lifetime, Nagas have traveled a civilizational journey that took some groups thousands of years. The journey from the rudiments of life in a self-contained Naga village to the Global Village of space travel, live global broadcast, the internet and email, mobile phone, instant messaging and twitter, is truly the stuff of dreams. But this highly contracted Naga journey has the two guiding principles in the global story of civilization that I’ve have been talking about: the Naga village was a model institution of the common good , and commitment to justice and human rights is evident in the Naga struggle for our identity against colonial occupation and postcolonial domination.

The Village community:

Like all peoples of the world, Nagas, too, have myths and folklore associated with our origin, migration, and settlement in the homeland. And, as important, the values that define us as a people. We are all familiar with the story of the founding of Khezhakenoma. Leaving aside the other details, I’d like to remind you of how Koza and his family were blessed with a Sacred Stone, which miraculously doubled whatever crop they placed upon it. You will also recall what happened to the stone years later. Mother Koza saw her sons quarreling bitterly over whose turn it was to spread the rice on the Sacred Stone. She realized then that the stone was becoming the source of greed and hostility among her sons, so she exploded it by lighting a big fire under it.

The thing to note here is the challenge Koza’s sons faced in sharing the Sacred Stone, the abundant source of the common good. That Mother Koza would destroy the multiplier of goods for the sake of harmony among her sons is a telling event. Like Grandmother Woodchuck in the Native American story, Mother Koza took a long view of life and acted decisively and with prescience. She got rid of the source of discord among the Koza people. The absence of the Sacred Stone did not destroy the Kozas, however. We’re told that they increased and multiplied and built six more villages, and some more and so forth, so that many of us sitting here today are the descendants of the Koza people.

Since the time of the Kozas, until recently, the village was the Naga universe; the rest could only be imagined. The village was the center of Naga life to a degree that constituted our very identity as human beings. (My friend Visier Sanyu, here, has done good research on this subject). Even today, economic circumstances have forced many of us to leave our villages, but the village has not left us. The yearning for community quintessencialized in the Naga village is deep-seated in the Naga being.

There is a reason for this of course. Our forebears did not have a literate educational system in the form of colleges and universities. But they had an effective oral and practical system of education within the village community. Those of us who are familiar with Easterine Iralu’s historical novel titled A Village Remembered know that it is based on Khonoma village, but we recognize our own villages in it. I want to quote a passage from it on the role of the traditional Naga dorm parent. He is teaching the boys of the Morung about citizenship in the village community. Here are Apfu’s words:

If you are at a community feast and take more than two pieces of meat, shame on you. Others will call you glutton, worse, they will think to themselves, ‘has no one taught this boy about greed?’ This is the key to right living – avoiding excess in anything – be content with your share of land and fields. People who move boundary stones bring death upon themselves. Every individual has a social obligation to the village. When you are a few years older and your hearts are strong within you, you will take the responsibility of guarding the village while others will go to earn a great name for our village. Your roles are different but each is as important as the other. Never be arrogant, respect yourself sufficiently so that you fulfill the responsibilities of manhood. (25)

Naga leaders, starting with the Chief Minister and his cabinet, state legislators, Naga national leaders, and church and civil society elders are the modern-day parents and Apfus of Naga society. A relevant question then is: How much of the Ten Commandments, how much of the traditional Morung guardians, how much Acts 4 and 5 Christianity do we see in the lives of our nationalist leaders, in the elite class of the state government, and among the church leaders in Nagaland? I’m not suggesting that there isn’t; only asking how much? For Nagas to survive as a people, our leaders must talk straight and live straight, and lead straight. They can’t just talk the talk; they must walk the walk.

The truth is, Naga society is in a crisis of leadership – of visionary leadership — for more than a quarter century: leadership with a plan to get us to the vision. I hope I’m wrong, but it seems everybody wants to be a leader but is clueless about the destination and the way to get there. And how can we talk about the common good of a people without good leadership — a leadership founded on values developed within communities and handed down to succeeding generations? For us Nagas, those values come from the village community, further reinforced by Christian tenets of equality, justice and mercy. Owe to us leaders of this generation of Nagas who break the sacred tradition of the community’s well being. Let me quote the words of the most powerful living person on earth, President Barack Obama, who said in his inaugural speech on January 20: “We cannot escape history. What we do will go down in history whether we like it or not.” This truth applies to the present generation of Naga leaders as well.

Colonial Legacy and Human Rights

The second goal of social life is to secure a community’s dignity as a people and respect for the individual within the community. Nagas entered modern world history in the form of British colonialism and American Protestant Christianity in the 19th century. And since 1947, the major issue has been the Indo-Naga political conflict. More than 60 years later, two things have clearly emerged. First, it is crucial for India to recognize that Naga resistance to outside domination has become constitutive of the Naga way of life. That’s who we are. Second, for Nagas, it is time to take responsibility for our lives in the present and for the future, including the kind of role we wish to play in the unavoidably interconnected world of the twenty-first century.

Let’s try to sort out both points in a nutshell. History matters. The Naga experience of being twice colonized has compounded and bedeviled the Naga national movement and Nagaland State politics. It was British colonialism that gave birth to Naga nationalism and it was postcolonial India’s domination that gave birth to armed resistance against India.

Let’s face it, the Indian government’s position on Naga self-determination was colonialist from the start. The first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, failed to recognize, so have successive Indian leaders since, the irony of the then newly independent India’s refusal to allow Nagas the same freedom from British colonial rule that it celebrated for itself in 1947. Nehru used the Indian military to stamp out a peaceful democratic Naga movement for independence. Nagas responded by raising a resistance army of our own. India countered by creating the State of Nagaland to de-legitimize the movement. After all these decades, we are still in a political impasse, more accurately, a very uneven stalemate.

Following a pragmatic of the doable rather than fanaticism of absolute principle, we can state the positions of the two sides dispassionately in hopes of getting out of the deadly impasse. First, Nagas don’t have to be an independent nation, separate from India, any more than, say, Sikkimese have to be. Second, equally possible, Nagaland doesn’t have to be a part of India any more than, say, Myanmar has to be a part of India. Third, it is easy to see that behind India’s stand is political expediency given the geopolitical facts of the region. Fourth, Naga commitment to human rights, specifically the right of self-determination, is something postcolonial India should be able to appreciate even if it is not politically expedient for India. The question is, where do both sides go from here?

Three Options.

Option One. India can relent its tough stand, invoke article 3 of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, allow a fair and internationally monitored Nagas referendum on the right of self-determination on the lines of the 1951 plebiscite (a lot of things have happened and changed since). Either way, India can take the result and do its best to help Nagas transition into self-sufficiency. This will be the most honorable and dutiful route for India to take. It will earn the gratitude of Nagas and the admiration from the world community.

Option Two. Nagas can give up our demand for sovereignty and enter into a fresh collaborative relationship with India on the principle of mutual benefit. For this to work, all three segments of the Naga society – Naga nationalists, state government, and civil society – must come together to deliberate and unite behind a new arrangement – whatever that may be.

Option Three. Do neither. Go on with things as they are and let them fester to the bitter end. This is the option to hell. And yet this is the road we are on as of now. Both sides are adamantly locked into their respective positions, and each expects the other to change while doing nothing on its part to change the unjust, inhuman situation they have created. The only way out is for both Indians and Nagas to get their heads out of the sand. That is to say, grasp the problem as something that can be amicably resolved through mutual respect and recognition of each other’s wellbeing and rights. That would change the way the problem appears to both sides. It would lead to a vision of a brighter future for both parties.

For India, Option One has crucial moral and historical implications. Indians might realize that their government’s policies and actions in Nagaland have led to too much suffering and caused unspeakable cruelty on both sides and have therefore created a moral burden for them and for India. They might see then that for India to refuse to settle the Naga Question once and for all is to be unworthy of its illustrious past as well as of its present status as a leading postcolonial nation in the world. They might also realize that having strong, friendly neighbors in the Nagas to the northeastern border will be good for India’s future. If nothing else does, as I said above, the 2007 UN Declaration on indigenous peoples’ rights offers India a timely platform for starting a new transformative relation with Nagas. Does India have the courage and the wisdom to act?

For Nagas, the economic advantages of Option Two are even greater. Tremendous opportunities may be had by aligning ourselves with India, a fast-growing economic power in the world alongside China, Japan, and South Korea. India is already improving relations with China, the leading nation in Asia. India is an official observer of China’s powerful Shanghai Co-operation Organization. Both countries are members of the ASEAN Development Bank, which, like the Bank of the South in Latin America and the Development Funds of Kuwait, UAE, and Dubai, not to mention the European Union, have begun to challenge to once unrivaled power of the IMF and the World Bank. In other words, the economic geography of the world is beginning to be redrawn at the present time in favor of Asia, particularly China and India, and an agreeable resolution of the Indo-Naga problem will doubtless put Nagas in an advantageous position. One caveat, however. A headlong rush into global capitalism without thought of its effects on other aspects of Naga society, especially the erosion of the traditional values of community and respect for one another, may not be worth it in the long run. But for the present, the immediate tasks are more urgent.

Conclusion:
To wrap up, historically speaking, twenty-first century Nagas are the political children of British colonialism and postcolonial India. Together, and with our help, they have exploded the Sacred Stone of our ancestral village community, and we are a groping nation of people killing one another and fighting over scarce goods. We can decide to stay mired in this dark, violent pit without exit, or, like our ancestors of Khezhakenoma, we can move on to build new villages in the brave, new global society. Nagas must choose quickly and wisely, or be a lost nation. There are any number of things we need to do, but two are foundational and indispensable: first, stopping the inter-factional violence; second, unifying the three constituent segments of Naga society (Nationalists, state government, and civil society) under one shared system of governance. Once this is done, we can begin the task of Naga nation building, which we hope will be an improved version of the Naga village in the 21st century.

That would require change both internal and external. And there are inspiring models to draw from other parts of the world – the African American experience, for instance.

African Americans made their long, painful march to freedom, human rights, and finally into leadership of the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth where their ancestors were once slaves. They did this through commitment to community and to one another and through faith in God. From slavery, when they were uprooted from Africa and orphaned through slave auction blocks, they cried out in songs of lamentation and grief as in “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.” And when their masters introduced them to Christianity, they empowered themselves through unwavering faith in the steadfast goodness of Jesus. They relentlessly held on to their dignity as children of God and worked their way to physical and spiritual freedom in the person of Jesus, as testified by their spirituals of hope and freedom like “Steal Away to Jesus.” That was the 300-plus years of African American journey from the cotton fields and swamps of the South to the White House.

Nagas have had it much easier despite the challenges to our rights and dignity as a people. But we have a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the world. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his historic speech, “I Have a Dream,” and declared that the Negro was not yet free in America and that America had given blacks a bad check. 1963 was also the year Nagaland became a state in the Indian Union and many Nagas cried foul on India. In the United States, the government and the people heard Martin Luther King’s cry, and African Americans marched on ahead – disciplined and united in faith and in a nonviolent struggle. This year, in 2009, forty-four years later, the United States has its first Black President, Barack Obama. This year, 2009, forty-four years after the creation of Nagaland State, the Government of India is as adamant as ever on the Naga political question and the Nagaland state government is presiding over a society almost entirely dependent on India. Nagas are still under military domination by India as well as at its financial mercy. Naga nationalist factions are engaged in a deadly confrontation with each other. And the Naga people in towns and villages have become powerless prisoners of the system from forces within and outside the Naga society. Colonialism ended for Indians, but not for Nagas. Religion, which is supposed to see people through the hardest of times, seems ineffectually, tantalizingly caught up in rituals of worship and endless prayers with precious little work – bereft of practice. We’re like ants without an anthill, scattered and trampled upon by every animal in the land.

But Nagas, too, have a dream — of a peaceful Nagaland where every child, woman, and man is fed and housed reasonably comfortably; where the traditional values of community and respect for the individual prevail, and where we are free to work and prosper, to worship and praise God, and to create and celebrate our rich cultures and nature’s bountiful gifts in these hills. We need to start building the mound, our own anthill in the global village. For that, we need everyone’s commitment and contribution starting with, I repeat, first, Naga Unity — bringing all three sections of the Naga society under one political system. We cannot fly with one wing alone. Second: learning to live in the fast changing and an interdependent global society. Nagas cannot live alone. We need our neighbors and the rest of the world, starting with the good will of Indians and India.

To the young people in this room, as a Naga elder, and in the tradition of the Morung parent advising the youth, I like to say: No matter what, hold on firmly to “Thou shall not kill” and the noble path of non-violence. Whatever you do, please don’t kill for Nagaland; and don’t die for Nagaland either; instead, live and contribute toward a better Nagaland in whatever way you can.

To our valiant national workers, I have no words of my own but those of the Israeli writer and peace maker Amos Oz: “wherever right clashes with right, a value higher than right ought to prevail – and this value is life itself.”

To the state government and the business elite, I have no right to tell you anything other than to voice the cry of the common people of Nagaland. Even a casual observer of our society can see there’s something radically wrong with the system of distributing the goods and resources of the state. For the sake of our people who are so much in need of the basic things of life like safe drinking water, roads, healthcare, food and housing, stop the excessive, crippling corruption. Reform the hugely unfair and immoral distribution system so that a livable portion of the goods trickles down to the villagers and the poor in our towns. Institute a just distribution mechanism with an independent monitoring agency, something that allows for responsibility and self-respect in public service and hope for the common people.

Lastly, where there is life, change is possible. But no one can change us unless we have the will and a plan to follow through. We have faltered as a people because we do not have a will and a plan for success. We know success doesn’t just happen; success is made. The best others can do is appeal to our better natures; they cannot change us, they cannot make us succeed. Change and success start with us, must happen in us and through us. Today is all we’ve got; tomorrow doesn’t belong to us; for that we depend on grace. Let us have the courage to change. Let us plan for success starting today.

Thank you for your patience!

Perhaps the title of this collection of poems, “Whispering Rocks,” is best explained by the author herself in the opening paragraph of her introduction to the book.  It refers to the “unshakable strength” of mute rocks that break their native silence in a language all their own because they can no longer bear their secret longings.  If this explanation does not fully satisfy, the reader who becomes privy to the whispering rocks will soon discover the aptness of the image as a metaphor for the poet’s (or poetic persona’s) own lived experiences out of which these poems emerged.  The experiences are multi-layered, and include the poet’s sense of disabling numbness in a strange land before finding company and intimacy with it, the burden of silence in the shame of being betrayed by a trusted spiritual figure, the weight of inexpressible personal loneliness and pain, emptiness of the interior life that won’t let up.  The list sounds long and dour, but ultimately this collection of poems is not about mute rocks and sealed feelings however consuming they may have been for the poet at one time.  Rather, it is a book of personal liberation, about releasing her repressed voice and reconnecting with everyday life in all its manifestations.  It is a testament to a quiet, persistent strength that comes through tough times.   

Whispering Rocks can be read in various ways.  It has poems on a range of subjects that are keenly felt.  But I’ll stay with those that have to do with Naga themes.  Readers in Nagaland will recognize these poems as familiar parts of our history and daily life: traditional village ways, small-town life, warriors and patriots, and Christianity.  I’ll pick just a few poems for illustration. 

“Down by the River Zaktsu” is set in the jungles between Lakhuti village and Assam, along the rapids of Zaktsu (a Lotha word that literally means a fast-flowing river).  Thechano Kithan is a poet of place and like all writers of that persuasion she relies on the sights, the sounds, and the feel of specific locations.  The poem evokes a day in the life of a young child spent in the company of grandpa: fishing up and down the river on a sunny day, collecting ferns and figs, wild mangoes and berries, and bamboo-shoot.  They catch fish and crab and prawn and cook them over a makeshift fireplace; they eat in wild banana leaves and grandpa drinks rice beer from a bamboo mug on a sandy dune in the afternoon sun.  A cuckoo sings nearby to the distant accompaniment of someone clapping bamboo sticks to scare away hungry crows.  The events in the poem follow the diurnal journey, from morning through afternoon and evening to sundown, when they retire to a barn in a ripe paddy field.  At nightfall, grandpa tells ghost stories and of elves and fairies and mythical pythons.  Nothing is left out in this lilting song of nature: earth, water, air, fire, sunlight, plants, insects, birds, animals, sandy beach and driftwood, as well as humans and the supernatural.  In the midst of all this is the innocent child speaker of the poem who helps complete what indigenous societies in many parts of the world call the Circle of Life, a natural network of life-forms intertwined with one another in a symbiotic web of being.  Because the poem has the rhythm and sounds of a lyrical song, one wishes it were written in a regular stanza form so as to be rendered into music.  That would have given the poem an added welcome dimension.

“The Cicada’s Last Flight,” like “Down by the River Zaktsu,” is part of a world seen through the eyes of a child.  But the scenery and time have changed.  It is nighttime in Baghty valley in Wokha district.  A reader unfamiliar with Baghty might find it helpful to know that it is not your typical Naga village, neither is it a town – it lacks the population and material wherewithal to be quite a town.  A poem set in a place like Baghty creates its own interest because it resembles many small semi-towns in Nagaland that have stayed in a sort of permanently arrested growth for decades, with no signs of either a return to the village or an advance toward town status.  The poem is about the poet’s childhood memory of kids like herself gathered around a campfire at night.  They are singing, dancing, and generally having fun together.  The action centers on a ritual invitation for the dying cicada to make its fateful flight through the night.  The children sing and skip and dance around the mulberry tree to lure the cicada to make its last journey.  It arrives, alights on a bush, and dies clinging to the tree in a death-grip that will stay put long after the cicada is dead and its carcass has withered.  This idea is reinforced by the illustration accompanying the poem.  The children’s farewell to the cicada takes center stage, but the surrounding universe of mixed reality and fairytale is summoned to participate in it.  Mountains in the distance stand guard over the valley, their dark shapes silhouetted against the moonlit sky; hunters’ lights flicker in the shadows; jackals and deer visit the gleaming streams for a drink; the campfire logs burn to capacity; the owl takes over the night; and the children go home to their beds. 

The tone and imagery of “The Cicada’s Last Flight” capture the delicate irony of a celebratory death, the ambivalence of joy and sorrow represented in the children’s song of invitation to a farewell party for the cicada.  Echoes of folklore and fairytale are woven together with childhood rhyme, yet they create the physical and natural realities of an actual place.  Like the unsuspecting reality of innocent children serenading the cicada’s death, the poem merges reality and imagination and reveals the unity of seeming contradictions evident in nature by reminding us of the “kiss of death,” of the cicada whose dry body refuses to fall off the mulberry tree, of the darkness of night temporarily dispelled by moonshine, of the nocturnal wise owl, and of the children’s fairytale life in a small town in Nagaland.    

If “Down by the River Zaktsu” and “The Cicada’s Last Flight” celebrate traditional and rural Nagaland, other poems by implication question the disappearance of the joys of childhood by focusing on the dark side of contemporary Naga society.  “A Letter to a Naga Mother” is an exhortation to mothers to keep faith with their children in an age of drug addiction and AIDS, and to lead by words and deeds of hope and wisdom.  The poet’s social conscience evident in this poem shows up in other poems as well, “Girl Child,” for instance, where the governing impulse is helpless compassion and empathy on the part of the speaker-poet.   Another poem, “A Warrior’s Dream Forgotten,” begins with contemporary Naga-on-Naga violence, but works its way back to images of healthier times in Nagaland when its strength and beauty were marked by “rushing rivers,” “grazing cows,” “autumn sky,” and the song of a “dancing hornbill.”  The Naga warrior of old has been buried, forgotten, and is now replaced by modern-day patriots, “My brothers killing each other.”  “In the soil where he [old warrior] stood once/ And dreamt of a beautiful world,/ There are piles of debris.”  The poem ends with hope, forced hope, for a better homeland.  “A Warrior’s Dream Forgotten” may not have the same imaginative reach of Easterine Iralu’s “Kelhoukevira” and “Genesis” or the conviction and satiric strength of Temsula Ao’s “The Epitaph,” but they all belong to the same Naga poetic tradition.  A homeland as steeped in folklore and nationalism as the Naga Hills are is bound to produce dreamers and patriots (as well as suckers), and poets to write about them.

Reflection is the life of poetry.  Living the present in the shadow and light of the past is the business of poets and poetry lovers.  This is best exemplified in the chant-like haunting poem titled “Under My Own Blue Sky.”  It is a moving ode to the natural world of Nagaland whose spirit breaks forth in a song of herself, like the poet who broke her own silence into poetry.  The ancient spirit of the land and the speaker-poet merge into each other and join in telling the story of the inimitable land of wild beauty and rugged freedom that is Nagaland, with its special kind of mountains, woods, flora and fauna, lakes, river beds, sky, clouds, blazing sun, the ubiquitous cicada, and legendary ancient rocks that outlast the seasons of life and death. 

Unlike our traditional Naga forebears and their trusty indigenous code of ethics, the vast majority of modern Nagas have adopted Christianity as the new set of values to live by.  Thechano Kithan’s  Whispering Rocks is a good example of Naga poetry’s beginning to reflect this change.  The book concludes with a whole section of poems that give expression to the poet’s personal faith in God.  The nine “Songs of My Souls” are devotional poems and are best left to the meditative reflection of individual readers.  There are other poems of faith and religion in the book besides the last nine.  I think even readers with no particular religious inclination or persuasion will appreciate “Faith” and “Now I understand Why” for their power and sincerity of feeling and expression.

Some of the best poems in the collection are not on Naga life.  They are set mostly in Haryana where the poet lived for many years.  They include “He still waits for the last Train,” “Moira,” “A Journey from Rewari to Panchkula,” “The Waves over Barapani,” “I have buried my dreams,” “A Song for Sheena Jones,” “The Fallen Priest,” “August at Hathnikund,” and others. “Changes” too belongs to the group except for the lack of punctuation, which generally is the case throughout the collection.  A professional editorial work would have immediately raised the quality of some of the poems.  On the other hand, the artwork accompanying the poems adds to the book’s aesthetic appeal.

Let me end by quoting my favorite line from Whispering Rocks: “And fowls chuckle at the sight of crows.” Who among us hasn’t felt like a crow sometimes or chucked at others’ foolishness at other times? Either way, it is the business of poets to turn us, occasionally, into privileged human beings by bringing back and sharing with us words from their solitary sojourns.  Here’s Thechano Kithan in “Blissful Solitude”:

In my solitary world

I gather all joys bygone;

Like a weaver and its loom,

I play with words/ Sweet like a cantilena.

Chumpo Museum Publication, Dimapur, Nagaland, 2007. Rs. 250.

 History of Naga Anthropology (1832-1947) is a short monograph on writings about Nagas by British colonial administrators and ethnographers from 1832, the year Nagas first came in contact with the British, to 1947, the year the Raj dissolved and the British officially left the Naga Hills.  The book is based on research Abraham Lotha did for the master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University in New York.  He is currently working on his PhD dissertation at CUNY’s Graduate Center.Although knowledge about the Nagas is reserved mostly for area specialists, History of Naga Anthropology is a valuable contribution to the broad field of postcolonial studies, a progressive cluster of multidisciplinary scholarship that took the Anglophone academic world by storm in the last quarter of the twentieth century.  Colonial and postcolonial studies had a huge impact especially in the humanities and social sciences including Cultural Anthropology. Postcolonial Studies’ chief achievement was the unraveling of colonialism’s ideology and its Euro-centered worldview that gave birth to such romantic notions as the “manifest destiny” and the “white man’s burden” of bringing western civilization and Christianity to the rest of the supposedly benighted and heathen world.  The belief in the civilizing mission — more accurately the propaganda of it — geared European colonialism for over five hundred years, starting in 1492, ushering in an era of material exploitation and political domination by competing European powers of the colonized societies in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Like other postcolonial studies of history, Abraham Lotha’s book places the first hundred years of writings about Nagas in the category of “colonial anthropology,” that is to say, ethnography by colonial administrators and others enabled by them in ways that directly or indirectly served the colonial functions of the powers that be.  Abraham’s book has a dual purpose: first, a historical interest that shows anthropological writing in the form of military reports, essays, descriptions of cultural practices, and monographs “developed parallel to the establishment of the British Empire in the Naga territory;” second, an interpretive assessment of the historical material from the “native perspective.” The result is that Abraham Lotha succeeds in demonstrating not only the colonial origin of Anthropology in the Naga Hills as part of a larger Indian situation, but also clearly delineates the legacy of a colonial mindset in the subsequent ethnographic work on Nagas that got disseminated among scholars, administrators, missionaries, and the reading public.

The first half of book deals with the history of the development of Naga ethnography, which falls into three broad chronological phases: Military (1832-1866), Political Control (1866-1877), Administrative (1878-1947). The second half, the last three chapters, comprises analysis and critical appraisal.

The first British to encounter the Nagas were military personnel, people like Francis Jenkins, R. B. Pemberton, and John Butler, whose job was to protect the British subjects in Assam from Naga attacks, a topic deemed important enough to find mention in the Governor General Lord Dalhousie’s Minutes in 1851.  British writing on Nagas up to 1866 portrayed them as ignorant, stubborn, and hostile to British interests.  Several monographs came out of the military expeditions into Naga territory at this time, and shorter  individual soldiers’ accounts of their experiences were published in the Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal.  These early articles, mostly in the manner of descriptive reports, sold the Nagas as exotic, wild, and savage tribes to their scholarly readers in India and in England. 

Because Naga raids on the British subjects in Assam continued, according to British reports, the colonial administration charged Lieutenant Gregory to establish a position at Samoogoodting, and with that began the phase of political control in the relationship between the British and the Nagas.  In 1874, two Naga villages “came under the protection” of the British in exchange for payment of tax, and in July of the following year the headquarters was moved from the border station to Wokha, a place inside the Naga Hills.  It was during this time that the British undertook a detailed topographical and ethnographic survey of the hills and the people. The survey accounts containing rich descriptions of the Naga country, the various tribes, and their way of life found their way into important colonial reports.  

The British entry in the Naga Hills did not stop some Angami villages like Khonoma, Kohima, and Mezoma from continuing their adventures into Assam.  To deal with this situation, the colonial Government of India decided to move the headquarters from Wokha to Kohima in 1878, while also approving the policy of subduing the “wild” Naga tribes and extending British rule over them.  In 1881, the Naga Hills became a separate district under the Raj, and from 1935 to 1947 they were administered as an “Excluded Area.”

The years from 1874 to World War II were a prolific time for British writing on Nagas by both soldiers and administrators.  They published their work in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Man, and in the government publication titled Ethnographic Survey of India.  The most substantive genre came in the form of monographs on individual tribes by British administrators with special knowledge of the tribes.  They included T.C. Hodson’s Naga Tribes of Manipur, J.H. Hutton’s Angami Nagas and Sema Nagas, J.P. Mills’ The Lotha Nagas, The Ao Nagas, and The Rengma Nagas. Much of the work at this time was influenced by the anthropological theory of diffusion and the comparative method advocated by the famous 19^th-Century anthropologist E.B. Taylor. The comparative approach, for example, prompted R.G. Woodthorpe to classify Nagas into “kilted” (Angamis) and “non-kilted” (all other Nagas), but in the end all the Nagas were assigned to the Mongoloid classification of the human race.  The history section of the book ends with a brief entry on professional anthropologists, specifically Henry Balfour, who visited the Naga Hills and wrote several articles on Nagas, and Christopher von Furer-Haimendorfs, who applied Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork method and functionalist theory onto his work among the Konyak Nagas.    

For those already familiar with the history the conclusions Abraham Lotha draws from it in the last three chapters will be of greater interest.  The critical analysis is sound and to the point, making for an uncommon if not a unique contribution to Naga cultural studies by moving the anthropological gaze from the British to the Nagas. In Chapter 3, for instance, he reminds the reader of the “intimate collaboration between science and colonial administration in the development of Naga ethnography,” since the same people filled both roles. This relationship was “seen clearly in publication and funding,” as in the case of the Naga monographs and survey reports.  Further, Abraham Lotha points to the irony in the British sense of urgency to record and preserve for the rest of the world the cultures of the Naga Hills, since the British themselves were the chief cause of the destruction of Naga cultures. The obligation to record that which they helped destroy didn’t seem strange to the British.  Despite the seeming benevolence, such rescue-recording “contributed to the maintenance of colonial rule.”

 Another insight the author offers is that traditional Naga cultures were being attacked from two related outside forces with conflicting views: one was the colonial Administration, which took it upon itself to “civilize” the primitive Nagas by stages, a policy that seemed in step with the contemporary currency of the process of evolution; and two, the Christian missionary project of converting the Naga heathens into children of God through the revolutionary act of baptism.  The end result was the same, however, that is, colonialism and Christianity put an ideology and a mechanism in place for Nagas to abandon their structures of reality and society without being aware of what they were giving up in the process. In short, despite the benevolent liberal humanist intentions of British ethnographers, and despite the Christian missionaries’ honest conviction in their mission, the material, social, political, and cultural structures they together brought about in the Naga Hills defined the future of the Nagas. They were socialized into the ideology of colonial subordination under the British and, after they left the Naga Hills, into the position of second-class citizens in postcolonial India. 

History of Naga Anthropology (1832-1947) clearly shows Abraham Lotha is a meticulous scholar and a reliable commentator on Naga history and cultures. The book is a must read for all scholars in Naga studies, not just Naga anthropologists. Its brevity does not take away from the merits of the book, chief of which is Abraham Lothas’ ability to condense a century’s worth of historical information into two chapters, followed by a critique of colonial anthropology and its legacy in contemporary Nagaland written with remarkable critical candor.                  

“My Grandmother didn’t like me. I knew this when I was about four and a half.” These are the opening words of Easterine Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy spoken by Lieno, the narrator. 313 pages and 19 years later, Lieno has an offer of marriage: “Mother and I found out that this was not the first offer I had had. There had been three others but the boys’ families had gone to speak to my Aunt Bino as was our custom. Each time, she had rebuffed them saying that I was probably too outspoken to be considered as good wife material.”

A Terrible Matriarchy is a girl’s coming of age story and it reminds one of other stories in the genre, Jane Eyre, for instance. Part of why Jane became the eponymous nineteenth century English governess is because Charlotte Bronte picks up the little girl and takes the reader along on Jane’s journey through her trying early years to her maturity into womanhood. This is what Iralu does with little Lieno (short for Dielieno). Unlike the orphaned Jane, Lieno has loving and supportive parents, but like Jane who lives with her Aunt Reed, Lieno is sent to live with her grandmother and help with household chores. And Grandmother Vibano is not unlike Aunt Reed, and the tension provoked by the older women’s obstinacy in both stories sets the direction for the rest of the girls’ lives. But the similarities between the two novels end there — at the level of the initial plots. After that, Lieno and Jane inhabit different worlds. A Terrible Matriarchy is as mid-twentieth century Nagaland as Jane Eyre is early Victorian England.  

ATM is Dielieno’s story. Her Angami name, which translates into “little errand girl,” describes much of her life from age five to twenty-three. But the story is more than Lieno’s. It is about three generations of Naga women: Grandmother, Mother, and Lieno. It is a time of rapid social change. The women’s lives intertwine intimately and contrarily, defining them as individuals and their generational differences.

The tension is most evident between grandmother and granddaughter. Grandmother has lived her life serving the men folk of the clan. Especially because her husband worked for the government and became a person of better means than most in the community, serving and pleasing him seemed a natural way for Grandmother to find her own fulfillment in life. Besides, as a woman in a traditional Angami society, she was expected to meet her husband’s needs. Naga women defined themselves and were used to being defined in relation to their men. There were perks for women who lived in this way — as supplements to successful men. Over time, they acquired a privileged status in the family circle.

Grandmother Vibano has earned this kind of status when the story opens shortly after her husband’s death. As the matriarch of her clan, with her husband’s pension settled on her, she commands deference from the men and the women alike. She’s the granddame among women and, had she known, would have fancied herself the Golda Meir, the Indira Gandhi or the Margaret Thatcher of Naga patriarchy. It’s easy to see why the circumstances that led Grandmother to this privileged position also engendered in her a tendency to dote on males. As matriarch, she can dispense her favors on whomever she liked, howsoever she wanted. No surprise then that she fawns on her grandsons and engineers to take in her niece and granddaughter as boarders for domestic help.

Lieno, on the other hand, being the youngest and only daughter of five children, feels special as the little darling of her parents and brothers. She resents having to leave her family to become “Dielieno” to the clan’s notorious enabler of male ego and spoiler of female confidence and modern education. But as the youngest female of the clan, she has little choice but to obey the wishes of the elders, even if that means being raised on anachronistic standards of female appeal and accomplishment that ignore the inevitable changes taking place in Naga society during her lifetime.   

Lieno’s mother has the unenviable position of having to navigate the troubled space between a stern, old mother-in-law and her bright, no-nonsense daughter. Not much can be expected of her especially given her frail constitution made weaker by the untimely loss of a sickly son and the drug addiction and death of another. Yet it is through this overly sensitive, long-suffering mother that the strength and wisdom of women get passed down to Lieno. It’s the kind of understanding in women that comes from generations of caring for people from birth to death — indeed from before birth to beyond death — and there are several of both in the novel.

Soon after Grandmother’s death, the mother tells her twenty-one year old Lieno: “You mustn’t be so harsh on your Grandmother. I know you were unhappy in her house but she was trying to teach you to become a good woman.” The mother goes on to explain that the reason Grandmother was partial to boys was the males-only inheritance system. It meant “widows without sons lost all their husband’s property to other male relatives,” which left women helplessly intent on marrying men with personal property, and obsessed with bearing male heirs who will care for them in old age. Grandmother saw her mother suffer on account of this custom, the mother tells Lieno, and this, according to her, shaped Grandmother’s thinking about boys and girls for life.

Lieno may not have needed her mother’s help to figure that out about Grandmother, but two other conclusions the mother draws from her narrative of Grandmother’s life are insights that Lieno needed to hear, one despite herself, the other for herself. The first is a comment on the way men generally are: “Men don’t like women who are aggressive and outspoken. They like their wives to be good workers. You are a good worker, Lieno, but you must try to be more docile.” Lieno’s mother credits Grandmother with trying to instill this practical lesson in the young Lieno. The second is a sentiment Grandmother would not have fully shared but which in a way affirms the positions of all three women: “You know that our people say we should love our sons because they are the ones who look after us in our old age. That may be true but for your father and I, it is you, our daughter, who has brought us the greatest comfort. We love all of you equally. You must always know that.”

The reader knows of course that Grandmother would ultimately lose to Lieno if for nothing else than that time favors the young. But in a bildungsroman, the plot is geared by tests of personal strength in an environment of socially accepted morals and values. So it is Lieno’s intelligence and hard work, coupled with her humanity and sense of social justice, which in the end assure her personal victory. Her mother realizes this and confirms Lieno’s coming of age in a personal tribute to her daughter: “I guess she [Grandmother] had grown up to believe that girls were weak and not as good as boys. We were all told that as children. But I know differently now. I am amazed at your strength sometimes, Lieno. The way you took over the household when Pete died. You were just eleven and a half and yet you took over my role in our family so naturally. I can see that women are not weak. They have a strength different from men.” The mother/daughter roles merge here indistinguishably, as does the grandmother’s, since it was at her house that Lieno had learned to take over the care of family so naturally. The point of ATM then seems to be that all three generations of women get to tell their stories.

Grandmother’s story has a straightforward male-centered theme from the past: “In my father’s day, boys never did any work because they had to look after the village and engage enemy warriors in warfare. The household that did not have a male heir was considered barren. They were always in constant danger if there was a war. The women would only have one man to protect them. That is why we love our male children so much and we give them the best of food. And we should.” But this is not all. Grandmother persists in having her beliefs validated even after death. True to her habit of looking to the past, she continues to haunt the tenants of her house from the grave until it goes to the person she willed it to: her infant great grandson Salhou.

Other women’s lives are included in the stories of the three major female characters. Salhou’s mother, Nisano, another long-suffering young wife and widow; Bano, Grandmother’s niece and unmarried spinster and Lieno’s older-sister figure at Grandmother’s place, who served and kept house for Grandmother till her death; Lieno’s best friend, Vimenuo, and her dutiful, caring mother whom Grandmother dismisses as a family with “bad blood” because the father is an alcoholic. These are the Naga girls and women who rise daily at dawn to fetch water, cook, clean, and care for family; who give birth, raise the kids, and mourn the dead and serve the mourners at funerals. They are the men’s caregivers, consolers and teachers; they are the keepers as well as the reformers of the traditional practices that marginalize them, the preservers of social etiquette and the upholders of the community’s virtues. There are women unlike these too, of course, whose stories find a place in ATM, like the neighborhood gossips at the water spot, the unfortunate women at the drinking houses, and smug, petty women of influence like Aunt Bino, who sent away the first three suitors of Lieno.   

There are other Naga themes woven into the lives of the women in ATM. The uneasy co-existence between traditional Naga customary practices and Christianity comes up repeatedly in the Angami ritual of loud dirges at funerals, which are politely but predictably silenced by scripture readings and prayers by local pastors. Christianity’s power over Naga customary practice in the four mourning scenes suggests the inevitable victory of the new order over the old on the lines seen in Lieno’s personal triumph over Grandmother.

Another subject alluded to in passing is the Naga independence movement. Naga nationalism is presented as a male domain. It is borne of a combination of wounded Naga pride and hopelessness in personal life. It’s what happens to impatient, idealistic young men when confronted with abuse of power and hypocrisy in public life. But most of all it is a manifestation of anger and frustration at the human rights abuses on Naga people by the Government of India. Lieno being the curious, principled woman she grows into by the end of the novel, one suspects the subject will figure more prominently later in her life. But up to this point in her experience, ATM is first and last the story of a little Naga girl who grows up to be an admirable and accomplished young woman in the ways that her society in the middle of the 20^th century would allow her to become.   

Lieno’s life is told in an unadorned language that moves because of the power of its evocative simplicity. The narrative tone and imagery fit the manners and imagination of its young protagonist-narrator. Precisely wrought images and snatches of conversation capture and suggest a whole ambience of everyday life in Nagaland. For instance, the following bits of reference that help recreate young Lieno’s daily routine in the reader’s mind: “I heard her [Bano] breaking twigs and blowing on the embers of last night’s fire. We always buried a small burning log in the ash in the hearth so that we could start the fire with it in the morning.” Or the description of Grandmother’s kettle that “was burned pitch-black from the years of being used on a wood fire. It was so old, it was dented in places.” And Grandmother’s well-stocked kitchen where “Dried meat hung from spiked bamboo over the fire.” Or a scene at the water spring that Lieno describes for the reader: “Then I put my pitcher in my basket and lifted it on the higher stone so I could carry it without any help.” And the time Lieno says she could not drink “very hot” tea like her parents always did. “So I took an extra cup and poured my tea into it and then back into my own cup. I did this several times to cool the tea.” Or the observation about how meat cooked and left overnight in the winter tasted best “because the gravy formed a glutinous base which tasted delicious [when eaten] with steaming rice.” Or the attention to detail about women’s ways with clothes at Christmas: “All the girls wore new dresses. Many mothers wore something new like a body-cloth. If it was a new blouse they didn’t quite cover it up with their body-cloth and you could see they were wearing new blouses.”

Nothing significant escapes Iralu’s eyes and memory. All dimensions of experience find their way into Lieno’s story. World War II in Kohima, for instance, as recalled by Lieno’s mother; or dreams, which play a suggestive role in Lieno’s life. And since life is incomplete without the expectation of an after-life, Iralu makes sure to include the return of the dead in the form of spirits and out-of-body visitations to their favorite haunts while alive. If there’s something left to be desired, it might be that Iralu would be as good a delineator of place as of character, or that she would give us more laughter since it’s a staple in Naga social life. There’s only a hint of humor once when Bano bursts into an uncontrollable laugh at the sight of Lieno desperately screwing her head through a sleeve, instead of the neck, of her sweater. But ATM does not need to be funny because little Lieno sings in the pages of the book (like the picture of a singing sparrow that adorns the bottom of every page of the Zubaan edition). It lacks nothing to complete the journey of a girl from childhood to womanhood, which mirrors the journey of a society whose women like Lieno and her mother have helped make the transition from an age of “ a terrible matriarchy” to one of greater possibilities. With young, progressive women like Lieno, Naga families are in good hands, and in Easterine Iralu, Naga women have an unusually clear and resourceful advocate.          

Every society and age seems to have a girl’s coming of age story that captures the society and the time so well that it becomes part of the people’s living memory for good. Antigone for ancient Greece, Jane Eyre for Victorian England, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for early nineteenth century American south, The Diary of Anne Frank for Nazi Europe, Abeng for postcolonial Caribbean, Nervous Conditions for 1960s Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), The House on Mango Street for Hispanic America, to mention a few. For mid-twentieth century Naga society, Easterine Iralu’s A Terrible Matriarchy could very well be that story. It also has the distinction of being the first Naga novel in English.

Kuknalim: Tell us about your journey from Nagaland to the States.

Dr. Pimomo:  Well, the short answer is that in the summer of 1984 I took a plane from Shillong to Kolkota, then to Mumbai, London, New York, and St. Louis, and finally landed in Carbondale, Illinois.  It was a long, uneventful series of flights half way around the world. 

There’s another way to look at my journey of course, as the logical response to an unfavorable career situation back in the mid-1980s.  After teaching English at North-Eastern Hill University for six years, it became clear to me from the academic and political environment prevailing there then (things must have changed for the better since) that I wouldn’t be professionally happy and fulfilled.  So with help from a couple of good friends, I headed for the United States to try my luck at serious academics in English literature.  My professional goal was clear from the start: I would complete the PhD and become a professor of English, anywhere in the world, including of course the possibility of returning to the Northeast.  With that in mind, I bought a one-way ticket out of Shillong to the States.  Two degrees, three universities, and twenty-two years later, I’m still professor of English at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, in the lovely Pacific Northwest region of the United States.  So you could say that the journey from my ambition of becoming a professor of English to my being one followed a fairly direct and simple route. 

The real-life journey was, however, more circuitous and complicated.  Obviously, professorship should not be a life’s destination.  Like other professions, it is merely a path to an end, a means to a purpose in life that takes a whole lifetime to complete.  But finding a good path is important, and for me the process started as a little boy in Akuk village in Nagaland.  I had just completed my first year at the village school, and was still too young to walk to the jhum paddy fields by myself, but I decided that it was time to leave the village for something bigger. I had heard of bigger things from Fr. John Larrea, a missionary, with whom I still keep in touch.  So one day I left home for Don Bosco school, Golaghat, Assam.  I couldn’t walk for long despite my determination and excitement, so my dad carried me on his back.  At Don Bosco, I learned to read and write English and got to love the language.  Three years later, I was in a Catholic minor seminary called Savio Juniorate, Shillong, developing my reading and writing skills in English, besides learning Latin, music, and the usual menu of foundational subjects for a liberal education.  I matriculated in 1968 and left for Dibrugarh.  I took B.A. Honors in English at Kanoi College, after which I taught English in Don Bosco High School and completed a Master’s in English from Dibrugarh University at the same time.  I did a stint as a lecturer in Dibrugarh University, then joined the English department in NEHU.  As I said earlier, six years into that position I left for Southern Illinois University.  My family joined me in Carbondale, Illinois, the following year in 1985. 

Looking back, my journey from Akuk village to the United States seems long and uncommon.  It sometimes feels like the boy who walked, barefoot, out of my parents’ village hut that day wasn’t me, or if it was, then it belonged to an earlier life in another world.  The two worlds are so vastly different.  But at other times, I feel more intimate with the little village boy in me today than I feel with any other version of me since, such was the formative power of my childhood.

Kuknalim:  You have been a student as well as a professor in both India and the States. What differences have you experienced in both the countries as a student as well as a teacher?

Dr. Pimomo:  You’re right, my first two degrees were from India, the last two from the States.  And I taught in two Indian universities before coming out here, and have taught in three here, so I should know.  But I’m afraid I haven’t thought about the subject seriously enough.  Let me therefore describe my experience and let people draw their own conclusions.  Differences as a student?  I’d say not that much in my case.  I worked to pay for my higher education in both countries.  But it was harder in India to align the demands of teaching and of studying for a degree.  I had to come up with my own devices to resolve the conflicting class schedules of the school I taught in and the university I attended.  In the States, on the other hand, I merely followed an existing institutional system that was already in place for graduate students to work and study for a degree at the same time.  So I’d say universities in the States have a clear advantage over those in India in providing graduate students with opportunity to pursue higher education without having to depend on parents and other sources for funds.

From the teacher’s perspective, too, I prefer the combination of lecture and student participation in the American classroom to the rather formal lecture mode of teaching in India.  I can’t imagine delivering an hour’s worth of lecture everyday to the same group of students here (which is what I used to do in India), without being criticized as a boring professor who doesn’t care whether or not the students learn.  Don’t get me wrong, lectures do have a respectable place in America education.  The idea in the States generally seems to be that whatever pedagogy works for students is worth a try, whereas in India both professor and students seem jointly responsible for making the lecture format the preferred form of education. 

Another major difference is that professors here have greater flexibility in developing and offering courses than do professors in India.  American professors decide the content and the pedagogy of the courses they teach, while Indian professors for the most part teach courses readymade for them by the department, down to the specific texts, authors, and coverage.  The result of this difference is that graduates of an Indian program come away having read the same works taught by the same professors, while American graduates of the same program could have encountered different course contents depending on the professor they took the courses from.  In other words, uniformity and coverage are valued more in Indian education than in American education.  In the States, availability of multiple curricular choices is considered a strength in any program. 

Another difference that affects both professors and students has to do with the way departments in India and in the States approach a discipline — not so much in the curricular contents but in the approach.  Take English literature for an example.  We live in a global society, so the English Literature curriculum has come to represent, at least in theory, literature written in English around the world, plus Theory, and some key non-English works in translation.  In reality, the curriculum starts with British literature, where it all began, and ends with American literature, where everything seems to converge these days.  Between these two giant bookends of English Studies can be found the literary staples of the discipline, whether you’re studying English at Oxford, Indiana, New Delhi, Singapore, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Pec, or Tokyo.  English literature from the rest of the world is scattered around and about this literary table, as it were, and some writers and scholars try to insert this text or that author, sometimes successfully, into an already packed row of British and American books and authors. 

The point I was making, though, is that the scope of English literature has become huge, and universities in the two countries deal with the challenge differently.  American departments generally take a laissez faire approach when it comes to the study of the development and spread of the English language and of English literature.  There’s little time, and even less patience in this country, for a systematic historical understanding of English literature from its beginnings to the present, not to speak of English literature at the global level but even of individual national literary traditions.  On the other hand, a sustained historical comprehension of the discipline was the goal, even if often not the result, of English literary education in India when I was a student.  In place of a comprehensive approach to literature, for which there’s neither the time nor the cultural inclination, American students are expected to quickly find an area to focus on and specialize in.  This system turns out experts in single authors, themes, historical periods, literary movements, and so on.  The academe is full of authorities in every aspect of every field; indeed the principle behind a department’s faculty personnel decisions is precisely to bring together such people in the discipline so that the department comes to represent a formidable intellectual community.  This environment can work wonders for the top-tier, research oriented departments.  The downside is that because this piecemeal and discrete approach to knowledge has been institutionalized at the national level, it tends to produce, at best, wonderfully half-educated individuals, and at worst, just plain half-educated citizenry, some of whom are over-confident in their knowledge and see the world through the limited prisms of their specialization, a quality undesirable in any global citizen, but especially so in citizens from the only remaining superpower in the world.

Kuknalim:  What subjects do you teach in your University? Which subjects do you like teaching?

Dr. Pimomo:  There are mainly three course levels in American colleges and universities: General Education subjects, or breadth courses, which all students must take to graduate; Undergraduate courses in the major, the equivalent of honors courses in India; and Graduate courses.  I teach courses at all these levels, and have taught them for long enough to realize that I need to make changes to a course when I cease to enjoy teaching it.  It goes without saying that students can’t enjoy a class that the teacher does not. 

Let me mention a course at each level that I enjoy teaching.  “Introduction to Literature” is a basic literature appreciation course.  The teacher’s job here is to show how literature teaches us to think and feel our way through life by addressing both our heads and hearts, as well as how to recognize the kinds of strategies good writers use to communicate significant ideas about life.  Literary works therefore have to be persuasive, imaginative, and relevant, whether they are poems, stories, plays, or essays.  I like the challenge of presenting literature to amateurs.  I try to show that literature at its best is a mode of seeing and living that engenders a sense of common humanity and respect for the individual.  

There are several courses in the major I love to teach.  African American literature tops the list.  I can’t think of another literary tradition that simultaneously, and as powerfully and variously, captures a people’s capacity for suffering and for creative expression in the face of the severest of conditions from which African Americans rose and triumphed.  I think the better part of who I am comes partly from the study of African American literature.

At the graduate level, I teach courses in British, postcolonial, and world literatures, as well as theory and criticism.  One of my favorites is a course called “Literary Counterpoints,” where I bring together masterpieces of Western literature, old and new, on the one hand, and their contemporary and postcolonial rewrites on the other. This allows for a systematic exploration of literary themes that had their origin in the ancient world but still matter in ours today.  As the course title indicates, the intent is to engage significant works of literature as a conversation among writers across literary periods and cultural traditions, rather than as monologues stuck in their respective times and places.          

Kuknalim:  What according to you are the merits and demerits of the education system in India and the States?

Dr. Pimomo:  I think I’ve touched on this while answering an earlier question.  But one clear merit of American education is the freedom for both faculty and students to experiment with the knowledge material they are engaged in.  The willingness to experiment also involves pedagogy, effective methods of delivering knowledge to diverse audiences.  Indian education does not ignore innovation, I’m sure, but it tends to underplay it.  It is generally geared toward passing one kind of exam or another: UPSC and any number of entrance exams into medical, technology, business, or engineering colleges.  Indians have prodigious minds for retaining information and sometimes forget that information gathering is only the beginning, not the end, of education.  In short, Indian education may be systematic and comprehensive in coverage but serves too limited a goal, while American education, though spotty and narrow, promotes innovation and professionalism.  In the end, though, they share the same difference.  The two approaches are both driven by the same goal: a job that pays the highest salary, in India or in the States.  “So what?” and “What then?” are American and Indian questions that may have become obsolete in our age of global capitalism.           

Kuknalim:  How are the students like in your University? Tell us about your favorite students.

Dr. Pimomo:  We have 9,000 or so students at Central Washington University.  They come from a wide range of socio-economic and educational backgrounds.  Most are Washington State residents and come from middleclass and working class families, including some first generation college students.  There’s a sizable number of out-of-state and international students as well. The levels of their academic preparation vary greatly.  The best could go to any university in the world and do well, some need extra encouragement and help,  most belong somewhere in between.  The majority of our students are between the ages of 18 and 23, but we have older, non-traditional students, a well as graduate students many of whom are married and have families of their own to support while pursuing their education.  The majority of our student population is white, but we have a growing number of Hispanic students, as well as Asian Americans, African Americans, and Native-Americans. 

Every teacher’s favorite students are hardworking, open-minded, personable quick learners.  I’ve had the good fortune of teaching many such students in all the universities I’ve taught, in India and here. There are also students who start out as none of the above but make progress toward these laudable qualities, and in the process make themselves their teacher’s favorites.  It is a pleasure to teach eager, bright students, and it’s easy, because here the teacher is really putting on a friendly show in front of a winning audience.  But the real challenge of teaching is service, to be useful to students who need teaching the most, and this group can come from the academically unprepared as well as the most intellectually gifted, some of whom may seem un-teachable at first.  But no student is un-teachable.  At this point in my career, I like to stay away from the notion of favorite students and concentrate on being present to as many students as I can.       

Kuknalim:  Students in developed countries usually do part-time jobs while studying. This is said to make them ‘independent’ early in life. This is also said to imbibe in them a sense of ‘dignity of labor’. How much of this is true? Do you feel Naga students need to do part-time jobs too?

Dr. Pimomo:  Doing part-time job while studying is a good thing if it makes students self-reliant and instills in them respect for the working class.  I think independence is another issue.  It’s over-rated.  Independence from whom, why, when in fact every circumstance of our existence on this earth depends on our connection with and dependence on one another and with things around us?  So, yes, dignity of labor and self-reliance are convincing enough reasons for higher education in Nagaland to put in place a work-study program.  Obviously, it should be done on a voluntary basis since there may be students who wish to pursue a specific ambition by devoting full-time to their studies, and others who may need all the time they can get to succeed in college. 

Our Naga forebears were a sturdy, hardworking, self-reliant people. They had to be to survive the elements.  Circumstances have changed for us, but the way to success, namely hard work, is the same.  Diligence as a student, giving one’s very best to whatever it is one is studying, with or without part-time work, translates into upholding the admirable Naga tradition, I think.             

Kuknalim:  What do you have to say about the shooting incident in Virginia Tech University which killed 33 students?

Dr. Pimomo:  It is a tragedy, a horrific tragedy.  Thirty-three families from seven countries, including the killer’s, suffered irreparable loss in a most violent, senseless way.  The gruesome scenes will haunt the families and friends for the rest of their lives. Their pain will not heal completely, but we hope they will summon up the courage and wisdom to accept the inevitable, and learn to live with and find peace in the memories of the good times they shared with their lost loved ones. 

Reports on Cho Seung-Hui’s life prior to the event tell the story of an extremely troubled young man going back to the early years of his life.  One thing is clear.  He suffered from a severe mental illness that did not get treated despite legal advice. The other issue is the easy availability of guns in this country.  When you put the two elements together, namely a violent, paranoid schizophrenic mind and semi-automatic guns with plenty of ammunition, which was the case with this young man, then the result can be as predictable and horrendous as the Virginia Tech massacre.  Shamefully, the national debate on gun control in the aftermath of the killings has gone, as usual, along ideological party lines.  The weapons industry and its supporters, inside and outside of the U. S. Congress, are not about to yield an inch.  Any change in the gun control law will therefore be cosmetic.  So that’s that.  The other critical issue, an effective national system of monitoring and treating mental illnesses, has been drowned out by the gun lobby.

The big picture into which the incident fits is the culture of violence.  What happened on VT campus is part of a bigger whole, starting with abusive homes and schoolyard bullying to violent street crimes, holy wars, and wars of occupation. This culture of violence and domination on a global scale is the scourge of our world today.  Discrimination, abject poverty, hatred, injustice, mass killings, genocide, hopelessness, one or a combination of these are the daily experiences of billions of people from America to Iraq, Palestine to Sudan, and many places in between.  What is the role of governments, all governments, but especially the powerful and wealthy, in engendering this global malaise, and what responsibilities do they have to help solve it?  And what’s the role of educational and religious institutions?  What about individuals?  Our capacity for knowledge, tolerance, and compassion?  These are questions that could lead us to an understanding of the causes of pervasive violence in the world, but they are left unraised for the most part, and until we know the causes of the problem, we’ll not get anywhere close to solving it.               

Kuknalim:  Besides teaching, how do you spend your time? (Hobbies, interests etc)

Dr. Pimomo:  Being professor in a university is a full-time job.  I suppose it should be, but it leaves one with little time to do anything else.  I do some volunteer work with the Faculty Union at my university and participate as often as I can in on-campus faculty forums on issues of national and international relevance.  At home, I do gardening in the backyard and help my wife with chores for relaxation.  I cook up an Indo-Naga storm once in a while, complete with dal and rice, dried fish and dhania chutney, chicken with bamboo shoot, beef tripe with ginger and basal. And I play ping-pong with my colleagues for a couple of hours a week.         

Kuknalim:  Tell us about your family.

Dr. Pimomo:  My wife, Rose Richa, is Angami from Jakhama village.  She went to St. Mary’s College, Shillong.  She works in a university as Coordinator of Student Services, some 50 miles from where I teach.  She loves her job, though the daily commute can be a drag.  Mike, our son, is 29, and lives and works in the Seattle area, a 100 miles from where we live.  He just bought a house and is busy settling in.  He’s still single.  Our daughter, Vonchi, is 26, has a master’s in Education and is a teacher; she’s married to Ben, an architect, whom she met in Washington University in St. Louis.  They now live and work in Oregon.  Rose has a sister and a brother back in Jakhama, and I have my mom and several siblings back in Nagaland as well. 

Kuknalim:  I have noticed that you are quiet an active Internet surfer. How, according to you, has Internet shaped today’s world?

Dr. Pimomo:  I do surf the Internet for news and events from around the world on a daily basis but am pretty selective about the sites I visit.  I usually check three websites on Nagaland, including Kuknalim, a few progressive sites in the States, and a couple from England.  I don’t consider myself computer and technology savvy, so if even people like me have come to depend on the Internet for most of the day’s news and commentary we read, then it seems reasonable to say that the Internet has quite literally changed our medium of relating to the world.  Print media, the radio, and TV will continue to be major sources of information, but most people want more than headliners and sound bites and so the Internet’s easy accessibility will only increase our reliance on it. 

Obviously email and instant messaging have radically changed the way people communicate as well.  I’m a real fan of the email.  I use it several times a day, at work for getting professional stuff done, and at home to stay in touch with friends here and abroad.  I co-authored a book with a professor in Japan entirely through email.  We’re working on another book the same way.  A related consequence of the Internet revolution has been the globalization of English.  The British Empire may have launched the English language to one-fourth of the world, but it is the Internet that has disseminated it to the whole world.  English used to be the language of diplomacy among nations and of trade in the metropolitan centers of the world, now it reaches every office and middleclass home via the Internet.         

Kuknalim:  How do you like kuknalim.com? Any suggestions for improvements?

Dr. Pimomo:  I like Kuknalim very much, and visit it everyday.  Congratulations on the great work, and thank you for your uncommon service to our people.  I know too little about websites to make suggestions.  But what the heck!  I wonder if Kuknalim would host an Internet Conference once a year on a significant issue touching Naga society.  Topics and details can be worked out in time.  For the first conference, panelists representing various walks of life can be invited to participate.  We can begin with Nagas who have distinguished themselves in some way.  Politicians, writers, scholars, scientists, doctors, lawyers, church leaders, social workers, Naga national workers, administrators, student leaders etc.  The conference proceedings would be published on Kuknalim.  If the papers turn out well, they can be further expanded and improved for publication in a book form as well.  If the event takes off really well, down the line, we can think of Kuknalim’s World Conference on Naga Life and Culture to be held each year in Dimapur or Kohima.  That way, Kuknalim can act as the facilitator of as well as a clearinghouse for serious discussion, ideas, and work on Nagas.          

Kuknalim:  A word of advice for Naga students.

Dr. Pimomo:  Advising people one hasn’t met can be pointless, or worse.  But in the time-honored Naga tradition of elders advising younger folks, here I go:  1) By all means, steer clear of fanaticism and extreme fundamentalism in all forms — nationalism, religion, ethnic identity etc.  2) Cultivate the spirit and practice of tolerance, empathy, and compassion toward all human beings, without exception.  3) Never kill anyone for Nagaland, and don’t die for Nagaland either; instead, live and contribute toward a better Nagaland.  4) Respect difference and celebrate diversity.  There will be disagreements, even irreconcilable differences.  At such times, follow the wisdom of the Israeli writer and peace-maker Amos Oz: “wherever right clashes with right, a value higher than right ought to prevail – and this value is life itself.”   

Thank you, Yan and “Kuknalim.com,” for giving me this privilege

Since the appearance of part one of this essay last month, there have been more clashes between the two NSCN factions in which more soldiers were killed and others injured. According to Indo-Asia News Service, October 26, more than 200 soldiers have been killed on both sides in the last three years as a result of the “bitter turf war for territorial supremacy.”

There are also increasing signs that the Naga public’s patience with factional violence is running out. Clearly, Naga nationalism is at a crossroads, and the factions have the choice to either make peace and survive together as a legitimate movement for the Naga cause or disintegrate and fall into the dustbin of history as failed revolutionary armies.

As frustrating as it must be to the factions, the image of organized crime is being associated with the warring groups in the minds of many Nagas, especially of the younger generation, not because they are against nationalism but because of what the NSCNs are doing in Nagaland. Educated, younger Nagas see the activities of the two groups as incompatible with Naga nationhood. From their perspective, what (I-M) and (K) are doing to one another is absurd. It is as though they were saying: “Let’s kill each other, destroy each other’s property and reputation and, in the process, create fear and insecurity among the Nagas because we are Naga patriots who love our homeland.” This statement makes no sense of course, and it is not what (I-M) or (K) have set out to do for themselves or for the Naga people. But intended or not, the effect of their actions on the public in Nagaland, as well as the perception they create in people’s minds, is real. Both (I-M) and (K) need to recognize this reality about themselves and deal with the situation in a real hurry.

For starters, they can look to history for a lesson. The absurdity of nationalist groups destroying one another in the supposed interest of the nation they wish to create is not new. Infighting among rival groups for dominance is as old as nationalism itself. And they are not entirely to blame either. Nationalism has been inevitably tied up with violence, to begin with, mainly because of the refusal of dominant nation-states to consider the cause of the aggrieved people unless the latter back up their cause with physical force. And when the dominant nation-state’s intransigence persists long enough (it almost always does), the aggrieved liberation party splinters into ideological groups and turn on each other. There are too many examples from the past to prove this point. Two will suffice here – Ireland (probably the longest lasting nationalist movement in the Common Era) and Palestine (the best known and consequential in our time.)

Ireland’s problems with invaders started as far back as 1166 CE, with the Normans and the English. By 1700, only 14% of Ireland was in Irish hands, the rest under English control. Their economy and way of life devastated, millions of impoverished Irish left the country, mostly for the United States, especially following the potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Irish nationalism grew and came to a head in 1920, with the Government of Ireland Act, which divided Ireland into two: Irish Free State for the mainland (later to become The Republic of Ireland) and Northern Ireland, which is still a contentious region. The rivalry between the supporters and the critics of the 1920 Treaty continued — deadly and unresolved — under different leaders and incarnations, until more than seventy years later, in 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement put an end to the cycle of internecine murder and reprisal in Northern Ireland, at least up to now.

All this is well-known information. The point of this summary, though, is to draw attention to the moment in Irish nationalism that changed it from a liberation movement against English colonial rule to the self-destructive war among the Irish themselves that it became in 1921. What is going on in Nagaland today between the two factions of the NSCN parallels the deadly rivalry between the supporters of the Irish Free State Treaty, led by Michael Collins, and the anti-Treaty Republican group under Eamon de Valera. The Irish are still paying for those leaders’ lack of vision at the momentous crossroads in their struggle for a united Irish nation.

If in the heat of present challenges, the NSCNs find Irish nationalism of the 1920s too remote for instruction, then they need only look to Palestine and see the plight of the world’s most intractable national struggle for existence. The fratricidal war between the Fatah party and Hamas. Again, outside forces have bedeviled their relations, but what Hamas and the Fatah are doing to themselves has derailed the Palestinian people’s dream for a homeland. Palestinians have never been farther from realizing their goal, since 1948, than they are today, thanks to the Fatah-Hamas rivalry.

Naga nationalism does not come close to the power and longevity of Irish nationalism nor to the global reach of Palestinian nationalism, but it shares, on a smaller scale, the same story of self-destructive behavior on the part of freedom fighters. In the prevailing circumstances in Nagaland, individuals and traditional organizations have been rendered powerless to effect change, and can do little more than exhort the leaders not to doom themselves and the Nagas by failing to learn from history. A useful way for the NSCN factions to learn is to recognize that what is going on between them is the enactment of a script from the grand narrative of nationalism itself. Simply put, they are at an agonistic moment of truth for their future, and with it the future of Naga nationalism. The narrative script indicates that each faction feels compelled to look at and approach this moment as a question of its own survival against the other party’s. But the script also shows that there is, in fact, no lasting victory in this war for one side alone. They both fall or rise together.

Of late, NSCN (I-M) has been put in the unenviable position of riding two horses (New Delhi and NSCN- K) going in opposite directions. (I-M) wants to renew the cease-fire agreement with New Delhi so it can continue to operate as the official nationalist organization in Nagaland, but New Delhi seems in no hurry to negotiate the cease-fire. And (K) is determined not only to challenge (I-M)’s position, but to put it out of business if it can. Caught between these forces that cut both ways, (I-M) feels pressured to settle for less than it is ordinarily comfortable with. But that is a premature direction to take in the absence of unity among the nationalist groups and of support from the Naga public.

As for the Naga public, the desire for unity among the nationalist groups takes precedence over factional deals with India. Last week, the GB and DB federation of Nagaland made a formal appeal to the rival groups to get past the “calls” and “press releases” for peace to real “action” for peace. Naga church leaders and organization too have repeatedly called for unity and peaceful negotiations, so have Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights, Naga Student Federation, several apex tribal bodies, newspaper editorials, intellectuals and prominent citizens. In addition, organizations from outside Nagaland, including American Baptists and the Society of Friends (Quakers), have either sent or are planning to send delegations on a mission to reconcile the NSCNs. The interest of the Quakers is particularly noteworthy because of their peerless record of work on both sides of the Atlantic for nurturing peace and respect among people in conflict, going back to the time of slavery. It is doubtful there will be another time when all these positive forces from within and outside Nagaland can unite again behind the call for peace and unity among the nationalist groups. The hope, then, is that NSCN (I-M) and (K) will start talking honestly and directly to one another instead of needling each other through the media about grudges and minor logistical details. What this global effort amounts to is that the Naga people and our well wishers expect the NSCN rivals to realize that the time is now or probably never.

Granted, the Naga public cannot fully appreciate the challenges facing the NSCNs because we have not traveled the difficult road that they have. But what is clear to all is the fact that this is a question of survival for the Nagas as a people. All of us understand that survival is an extreme condition to be in, and when the challenge to survive is against organized violence, we must consider new and radical ways of surviving. The appeals for unity suggest that peaceful negotiation is a radical — and the best — way to survive honorably in the extreme environment we are in. A successful process of peace-making at this time can become the foundation for nation-building in the future. We could realize, like some have, that the strongest nation-defining moments are those spent in resistance to might and violence, rather than in their use, that the true character of a nation resides not in the use of brute force but in its disciplined restraint, or in the worst-case scenario, its use against a greater inhumanity. For a people like the Nagas who would be a nation, then, regardless of the legitimacy of our cause, the means we adopt to reach our goal are still as important as the goal itself. The choice should be peaceful suasion and “soul force,” and the process must start at home, among us Nagas.

The alternative is devastating, even to the imagination. Without implying a parallel future for Naga nationalist workers, one is reminded of Wilfred Owen’s poetic vision in “Strange Meeting.” Owen, who fought and died in World War I, imagined the strange meeting of two enemy soldiers in Hell. Dazed and beyond help, one says to the other:

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now. . . .”

But even more telling and relevant for Nagas is the story of an Irish soldier in “The Sniper,” written by Liam O’Flaherty who fought on the Republican side against the Free Staters during the civil war. The story is set at dusk in Dublin, with the sound of heavy guns in the background, and rife with snipers from the rival armies, hiding, dodging and hunting each other in the streets. After an intense and intricate angling for the enemy, the adept sniper in the story guns down a soldier on the roof of a building across the street. He watches the enemy fall to the ground, and shudders; the lust of battle suddenly dies in him; he is struck with remorse; he curses the war, curses himself, curses everybody. He becomes curious about the identity of the enemy he has killed, so sneaks over to where the body fell, dodging a hail of bullets. Then throwing himself face down beside the corpse, “The sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face.”

Patriotism has limits. As O’Flaherty — who should know — suggests through this story, patriotism is not an end, it is a means to the well being of the larger society, and he knew Irish patriotism had clearly crossed the line when it led to fratricide. Likewise, we know Naga nationalism has crossed the line when Nagas kill one another in the name of patriotism.

For months I’ve been bothered by a nightmare.  A series of violent images, connected and disconnected and nauseatingly repetitive, has haunted me and I can’t get rid of it.  The names of places and people in these images sound familiar. 

Here are some of them:  

• Thirty houses set ablaze by Sumi youth in Wungram Colony in Purana Bazar in retaliation for the torture of three boys the night before and for the bombing of a prominent leader’s residence earlier, both supposedly perpetrated by NSCN (IM) that has connections to Wungram Colony. 
• Events in the nightmare come confused and jumbled as a whole, but some individual incidents are as clear as reading from a newspaper headline, like this one: “Nagaland teetered on the brink of lawlessness as the Kaplang faction of the NSCN gunned down two leaders of the Isak-Muivah group to avenge the seven casualties inflicted by rival militants four days earlier.”
• The players in this ritual of violence remain the same but their positions and alignments change.  So this time it was NNC’s FGN that tortured and murdered a villager from Yoruba, which was followed sometime later by another unconnected “firing incident” between FGN and NSCN (IM).
• Next came NSCN (K’s) abortive attempts on the lives of two well-known citizens in Kohima.  The tension was diffused by the Angami Public Organization, which called for the end of “the madness of violence and gun culture” among Naga nationalist groups.
• In a perverse logic of numbers reminiscent of the Wungram Colony incident where thirty houses went down in flames, NSCN (IM) cadre razed thirty houses in Jalukie-Zangdi village a few weeks later in an attempt to evict the owners from the area who, according to the group, had no right to the land they were living on. 
• NSCN-IM Chaplain Stone, his wife, and three others, traveling from Imphal to Dimapur, were abducted and murdered near Phiphema by NSCN (K).
• Ten Kuki men were killed by NSCN (IM) for terrorizing Naga villages.
• The Rev. Dr. Tuisem Shishak published a confessional public letter calling for repentance and humility among his people and for humanity and understanding among Nagas.  NSCN (IM) quickly questioned his authority to speak for Tangkhuls, and shortly thereafter he was ex-communicated from his community for six years by the Tangkhul Naga Long.  

These events and others like them all happened in Nagaland in the last five months, from April to September.  Except for the participants in this endless bloody maze with no exit, everyday reality in Nagaland has become a veritable nightmare.  But Nagas seem to have become so de-sensitized they don’t recognize it as such.   

UN Declaration:

Unlike the nights, my waking hours are pleasant.  A few days ago I was sitting with my laptop checking out Kuknalim.com in the backyard of my modest Northwest American home under a small canopy of fruit trees that had yielded the year’s harvest.  It was not quite dusk yet, but the air suddenly felt milder than I had felt all summer.  It was September 13, the day the UN General Assembly adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  Like many others, I took the declaration as a milestone for indigenous peoples of the world and a step in the right direction for humankind.  After all, if there are such things as universal human rights and freedoms that the world community recognizes, why then should they not apply to the 300 million indigenous people, including the Nagas?  Of course, a declaration of the right to self-determination is just that, declaration, not the real thing.  Yet the acceptance of the principle by the UN is a historic event, a promissory note, if you will, that indigenous people can redeem through negotiations with the appropriate governments.  I was elated.  But I was also quickly reminded of the fact that I was reading about the Declaration in the United States instead of in Nagaland, where I was born and raised but left more than twenty years ago.  So what did this news have to do with me after all these years, especially in the autumn of my life?  I think the reason is simply that we humans inevitably carry our past in us, and for some of us reconnecting with our roots becomes more compelling with age, especially if the cultural life of the people we left behind was as influential as the Nagas were when I was growing up.  Things are clearly different there now.

Realities:

So today I’m sitting in my backyard again with the nightmare of the night, trying to sort the details, events, ideologies from back home, to clarify to myself the realities on the ground.  I admire freedom fighters everywhere because they make uncommon sacrifices to secure human rights for the oppressed.  But I also know that they can change because they are people, and people and organizations sometimes change for the worse. 

A month before the UN Declaration — almost to the day — Nagas enacted the ironic situation of celebrating 60 years of freedom from colonial British rule under postcolonial Indian rule.  How about that?  Celebrating Independence Day without independence.  A symbolic gesture for a wish denied?  Or was it an enactment of a paradox?  But paradox and irony in the exercise are not confined to the Naga side.  What about India?  Is taking a paradoxical position constitutive of the history of the nation-state and of nationalism itself, both for those who would be a nation and those who would deny others the right they themselves enjoy and guard with such exclusionary patriotic zeal?  For now, though, I’d like to stay with the internal contradictions of Naga nationalism.

Within days of the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, FGN felt compelled to contradict just about every Naga organization including the NSCN (IM) by declaring that Nagas are “not indigenous people.” Because Naga territory was never completely overrun and settled in by outsiders, so the arguments goes, Nagas are not indigenous.  I can appreciate FGN’s fear of losing the distinctive history of the Naga struggle for freedom, but do Nagas have to be nearly decimated to qualify for the status?  That line of thinking would lead us to equating the millions of living indigenous people of the world to mummies in the museum of colonial genocide.  Just hours ago, NSCN (K) came out with a statement to reinforce FGN’s position.  They too argue that Nags are not indigenous people “because Nagas of Nagaland are so far the owners and rulers of our own land.”  But doesn’t the word “indigenous” signify precisely the kind of natural affinity with the place one lives in?  So how does Naga ownership of Nagaland render Nagas un-indigenous?  Besides removing the word from its etymological root, this line of  thinking has the absurd logic of a man who shoots his leg because it is not a hand.   

With such diverse and contradictory views on every issue in the Naga Question, it’s hard to separate fact from opinion, reality from fiction.  But it is important to make the effort.  So, then, Fact One: Nagaland was never overrun and completely overtaken by outsiders, and Nagas are still the majority in our land. Let’s grant this to FGN and NSCN (K) even if their stand on indigenousness sounds masochistic. 

What is the Naga Question about then?  Fact Two: Sovereign Nagaland.  For once, the sworn enemy NSCN factions agree on this goal, except that they disagree bitterly on the details, including the size of the Naga nation, over which they are both prepared to go to war.  Interestingly, FGN holds rather adamantly that independence from India is a non-issue, though they are for a sovereign Naga nation. If that sounds convoluted to others, it’s not to them because Nagas who never surrendered their independence to India in the first place cannot now be asking it back from India.  Naga sovereignty has been and is under attack by GOI, and the day India leaves Nagaland, the Naga Question will have been resolved.  This explanation sounds logical as far as logic goes, but what is logical is not necessary true or valuable.  These are the nationalist positions on the Naga Question. The rest, namely the majority of Nagas, are mostly ambivalent.  They seem to function fine under the Indian State Government of Nagaland, which has been in existence since 1963, but there are many among them who are also not averse to the idea of an independent Nagaland if it does arrive someday like a gift under a Christmas tree.   

If Naga sovereignty and its recognition by the world community is the goal of Naga nationalists, while the state government under India runs the show, what then is the nature of the relationship between Nagas and the Government of India?  Is Nagaland Indian territory or is it under Indian occupation?  Nationalists believe it is under Indian occupation.  Many Nagas don’t think so, however, and insist that Nagas were “a free people” and are a free people under India.  Nagaland is not under Indian occupation, they say; indeed, Nagas ought to be grateful to GOI for the financial sustenance it provides the people of Nagaland and for keeping the state from disintegrating. So whether or not Nagaland is under Indian occupation is up for grabs.  Until we realize that there is a fact beneath the confusion of opinions, which leads us to Fact Three:  Nagaland is under Indian occupation whether we like it or not, whether we deny it or not.  Nagas are free of course to ignore the fact and live as though the occupation doesn’t exist, as many do, but the daily events associated with it, including the governmental institutions and financial sustenance, are all reminders that Nagaland is indeed under Indian occupation.  If you don’t believe me, try telling India to leave Nagaland for good (which is what Nagas have been doing since 1947) and see what happens.  India hasn’t left.  Or imagine the UN declaring tomorrow that Nagaland is a sovereign nation, not a state within India, and see what India says and does.

Fact Four:  At this stage in the history of Naga nationalism, the signs of implosion are real and looks like Nagas need to lean on GOI.  But while not dismissing Nagas who say we ought to be grateful to GOI, let’s not forget too that it was GOI in the first place that broke our legs and is now throwing us a pair of crutches.

Fact Five:  There was a time when Naga national workers rightly commanded the respect and gratitude of the Naga people because of their love and sacrifice for our homeland.  There must still be national workers who belong to that tradition of dedicated service, and Nagas value them.  But all right thinking Nagas of every tribe and station in life who love our land, people, and cultures are sick to death of Nagas killing each other and destroying ourselves from within in the name of bogus “freedom” and through a blasphemous use of the “Nagaland for Christ” slogan.  The Naga public knows there is neither freedom nor Christ in violence.  There is no excuse for this inhumanity. 

Action now:

The needs in Nagaland are many and urgent, but two things are a foundational must for a better Nagaland.  The first requires action from Nagas, the second a fresh start and negotiation between GOI and Nagas:

• We must stop Naga-on-Naga violence and resolve our differences on the Naga Question;
• The Indian occupation of Nagaland must be addressed. Why?  Because like all other human beings, including Indians, Nagas too have the right to self determination, and the denial of that right by GOI has led to too much suffering and unspeakable cruelty among Nagas, and has also created a moral burden for India and for right-thinking, human rights-respecting Indians. India will not be worthy of its illustrious past and cannot remain a self-respecting postcolonial nation as long as it refuses to settle the Naga Question once and for all.  The UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples can be the golden hinge upon which a new and mutually enriching Indo-Naga relationship can start rolling. Once GOI in deed recognizes and implements the Naga right to self-determination, Nagas can work out their future among themselves and begin peaceful negotiations with GOI as to independence or integration, and upon what terms.  Without India’s recognition of the Naga right to self-determination, conflict is inevitable because of the nature of the relationship in place, namely control on the Indian side and resentment on the Naga side.    

As I write these lines in the first week of autumn under the same canopy of trees I read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People two weeks ago, I know spring will arrive in Nagaland, as it does in the rest of the world, if we survive the winter of our violence. The choice is ours.