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The Domestication of a Bush Demon

Anthropology and Humanism v. 19 no. 2 (1994)

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The Domestication of a Bush Demon

DON MITCHELL

Department of Anthropology

Buffalo State University

1300 Elmwood Avenue

Buffalo, NY 14222-1095

I first met the bush demon about twenty years ago when I was living in a Solomon Islands village, learning to grow sweet potatoes and make maps. Doing a little mainline cultural anthropology on the side—the usual kind of thing. Collecting tales, but as we'll see, that wasn't always deliberate.

The people I lived among rarely gave straight answers. Instead of answering a question or giving a simple explanation, they would often tell me a story. Most of the time I found this behavior productive and even endearing, but sometimes it was frustrating. Why wouldn't they just answer me? I'd been asking them questions for months—surely they knew what I wanted. Why should I have to

poke around in a story to get my answer? I wasn't there to do textual analysis.

I found myself getting irritated too often, so I developed a corrective mechanism to remind myself that I was living among people whose thought patterns and ways I didn't fully understand. I remembered how amused I'd been, and how superior I'd felt, the first time I'd watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Bogart, confused by all the cigarettes passing back and forth, said something

like, "Why doesn't everybody smoke his own cigarettes?" I'd repeat his question to myself, and that was usually enough. I didn't want to be like this ethnocentric prospector, cultural icon or not, so I'd laugh at myself and get on with it.

I needed more than a notebook and some pens to get my work done. I found myself routinely doing simple woodworking. Most of what I had to do was easy for me, since I'd learned carpentry as a youth. But I hadn't yet mastered using my machete for moderately precise wood carving. I'd gotten about as good as an older child—maybe about a seven-year old.

One day I was trying to make stakes to use in a surveying project I had going. The stake-making wasn't going well. The black palm kept splitting along the wrong line, and I couldn't get the right angle on the point. The stakes got shorter and shorter. My friend Wetu was sitting with me, and while we chewed betel and talked, he easily made two or three stakes to my one.

I had a mental defense for this sort of humiliation, too. I could usually defuse those frustrations by recasting phrases I'd read in old patrol reports, missionary tracts, and travel books, describing native astonishment at Civilized Technology. "The childlike research scholar," I'd say to myself, "cannot hide his amazement at the prowess with which his hosts wield their tools. It seems magical to him."

Sometimes I'd get the patronizing tone and archaic phrasing just right, and in the manner of the cigarette routine I'd usually be able to relax and keep working. Other times I wondered if I'd ever get anything right, and reminding myself of the myriad ways in which I was going to have to keep acting as a child in order to get my project completed made me feel even worse. But what could I do except

keep at it? I had deadlines and committees, gardens to understand, land to map. Sometimes I'd just go into my house, and almost in a frenzy to do something no one else could do, I'd use my typewriter or solve surveying problems with a slide rule. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn't. But even when it didn't make me feel better, I still made progress in my study.

The village kids threw temper tantrums when they were frustrated. They'd drop to the bare earth and scream. Older kids, connoisseurs, told me that the initial abrupt drop to the ground was the key to a memorable tantrum. You had to hit the ground fast, mouth already open, but not yet screaming. The longer the wait for the initial wail, the better. Villagers would leave their houses to watch a particularly spectacular tantrum. They'd gather around the child, watch, and make comments until it was over.

Sometimes they gathered around me and watched too. But this was usually when I'd been taught some task that everyone else—young or old—had mastered, and would be intentionally or unintentionally putting on a public performance. Generally it wasn't I who would decide when I was ready to perform publicly. My teacher, or more likely a child, would call the village to see:

"Whiteman's splitting firewood!"

"Whiteman's climbing a betel palm!"

"Whiteman's carrying a house post from the bush!"

Of course I wanted to make them proud of me, to show that I could learn their skills, and to prove them to be good teachers. I almost always succeeded in demonstrating what I'd learned, and if I couldn't do it I could always cover it up by clowning. I was sometimes tired of being the child, though, even the easily trainable child. Would I ever be just an ordinary, competent adult? Perhaps not until I moved back among my own people. I had to admit this to myself.

I tossed my machete aside and asked Wetu, "What's the word for beginner? For someone just learning to do something? Not very good at it yet?" Of course the answer I got took the form of a story, but at least Wetu supplied the phrase up front. " 'Avedai makilatu' is what we say." I didn't know those words. The story went like this:

Latamui and the Two Brothers

Two young brothers were warned not to hunt possum in a certain part of the forest, because a kapika—a dangerous bush demon, a ferocious female spirit—lived there. If they did go, they were told, they had to be especially careful of their speech. "If you slice your foot on bamboo," the old people said, "never, never cry 'Ai! Latamui.' [Ouch! I've cut myself.] because that kapika is named Latamui, and she'll get you."

The brothers did go hunting, one cut himself on bamboo, and of course he cried out, using the dangerous words.

Immediately Latamui appeared and began to chase the brothers, singing a little song something like, "I'm Latamui, and I'm going to chew you up." The brothers had only one defensive strategy. Each time she drew near, they tossed her one of their possums. She'd stop, sit, eat, and then resume the chase. But when the possums were gone, she caught and ate the older brother, bit by bit. The younger brother kept running, and escaped.

Later he returned and found his brother's heart, which seemed to be beating. He put it in the crotch of a tree. Each day he came to feed it. Eventually it transformed itself into an infant, then a child, and finally into the older brother as he had been before Latamui shredded and ate him. Later, the brothers tricked Latamui into coming to their village, where they tipped her from her seat onto a bed of red-hot stones, and she died.

"And so," Wetu concluded, "when someone isn't doing a good job, we don't call him a name. We just sing a bit of the kapika's song: 'avedai makilatu' (all chewed up). Like those stakes you're making."

A useful story. I wrote it down. At least, I told myself, I was skilled at writing things down. That night I typed it up, too.

Later, I did sometimes hurry when I went through the same part of the forest with villagers who feared Latamui. Everyone would be apprehensive. A noise from off in the bush could generate a wave of fear that washed over all of us. I was easily caught up in it myself. A tropical rain forest is an unpleasant place to be when night falls. Among other things, it's exceptionally dark. In truth, I worried more about running into a web and being bitten by a spider than I did about being chased and eaten by a bush demon. Being in Latamui's territory added to my apprehension, though. A kapika doesn't care whether it's night or day—she'll get you anyhow. But at night it was a lot more frightening to think about a kapika, so along with the rest of them I minded my step and kept my mouth shut.

Long after I left the village, that story stayed with me. I realized that I was thinking of those brothers and that demon, but I wasn't ever quite aware of how they had reentered my consciousness. I just knew that the tale had some resonance for me, so from time to time I tried try to decide what it was. Was it just my pleasure at having found a tropical analogue of the European thrown-to-the-

wolves stories? Was it because the pursuer was a woman? Was it because I'd so many times been in the place where the story had unfolded? I didn't get very far with any of these.

I told myself that I didn't really care why it stayed with me. But still—it wouldn't go away. So I set out to understand what the kapika story had taught me. Perhaps I could reduce it to cautions, in the Slovenly Peter mode:

Demons kill boys who cry when they're hurt!

Boys with too few possums can't escape danger!

Be nice to your brother, because if something bad happens he might know how to save you!

I'd been reading Slovenly Peter and other stories because, by the time I was thinking about Latamui again, I had a child to deal with, largely on my own. At last I-could be the adult expert.

I was never much for reading bedtime stories. How many times can you say, "Goodnight, moon" convincingly? How many times does the Very Little Boy need to get bigger? Surely it's only a myth that you get to the end of the story and the kid's asleep or at least groggy enough that you can escape. No, I never liked those stories much, although if the truth be told they seemed just fine to my son. He never tired of saying goodnight to the moon, to the mouse, whatever—but it never put him to sleep, either, and when the stories were done there'd still be those wide eyes, looking at me. Do something!

If traditional bedtime stories wouldn't put him to sleep, I reasoned, we might as well have some fun. That's why I began the story of Bethan and Bom, which—since it's the nineties—I'll describe as an interactive bedtime story. Even though I didn't plan it that way, it gave our sometimes chaotic lives an important continuity. The story needed to be picked up at its prior state, regardless of what

had happened in the interim. Remembering where we'd stopped was my son's task. An equally important part of the process was for him to set the stage and outline the plot for any given evening. I'd then improvise the story on that foundation.

Although Bethan (the son) and Bom (the father) always meant well, they were constantly in trouble. They'd get stuck on the roof, lost in the Niagara Gorge, and as soon as they learned to travel in time as well as space, they'd occasionally get into Triassic, Jurassic, or Cretaceous jams. They had certain significant abilities, though: speaking to animals, changing themselves into other forms of life,

instantly learning any human language, and so on. Useful traits. When Bethan and Bom needed to do things that human bodies could not do, they simply transformed themselves into other animals, got the job done, and transformed themselves back again.

Bethan and Bom took turns playing the fool, while the other one would be the wise or sensible one. I used these stories to counter my son's apprehensions, to introduce him to novel ways of thinking and being, and of course to entertain him. On a bad night I'd find myself foolishly lecturing: bedtime Anthro I, you might say. But he usually made a better audience than a room of bored freshmen

looking to fill a social science requirement. On a good night the story would move so well that I'd wish I had brought in a tape recorder. But no, I'd tell myself, we're working in an oral tradition here. We'll preserve the story in our memories.

Eventually Bethan and Bom ended up in Latamui's territory and took on the roles of the brothers. Bom said the dangerous words and was eaten. Bethan fed and resurrected him as in the original but subsequently, in return for not being tipped onto the hot stones, the kapika agreed to join the two on their travels.

I wondered whether it might be harmful to have such a ferocious character in our bedtime stories. My son hadn't seemed frightened at the beginning, perhaps because I gave him the savior's part: I had taken the blame for crying out about the bamboo and setting the kapika after us. I knew that Latamui was important to him, though, because whenever we lost the story's thread and had to review,

he could always remember what she'd been up to last.

We had made her promise to try not to eat people, and she largely kept her promise. But once in a Tokyo elevator as we were all ascending to visit a rooftop amusement park (originally described in one of Mishima's stories), she did eat a person who was rude to the Japanese fisherman who had sailed with us from New Guinea to Japan. Japanese value correct behavior very highly, I said, and

since Bethan and Bom were living among them they should honor Japanese beliefs. Latamui had meant to do the same, but being a demon she'd gone too far. She didn't seem to understand that the penalty for rudeness needn't be death. By then I had convinced myself that it was acceptable to insert an explicit moral into the story occasionally.

Bethan was able to bring the eaten person back to life, using an altered version of his Solomons Islands technique, and since Latamui always did leave the heart, Bethan had all he needed to start the revival. Since we were in Japan, of course, he enlisted the aid of some robots to do the feeding, and the regeneration was complete by the time we reached the roof. Latamui offered a formal apology, which was accepted, and everyone had a good time in the amusement park.

Latamui stayed with us for many months, generally keeping out of trouble and being a big help (she was a great hunter, which came in handy when we were hungry and lost somewhere), and her little song was good to sing when some pinching and poking seemed in order. When the story wound down about two years later, she finally dropped from sight in favor of a large pterodactyl and a gigantic cat named George.

I think bringing the kapika into our story had a greater effect on me than it did on my son, once I realized what I'd done. It's hard enough to raise a child, and it's even harder when the adult's life is difficult, sometimes in disarray, and the child is aware of it all, as children always are. In a reflective moment I asked myself in what ways I had transformed and passed on the story that I learned

while making stakes. In my version, I had set the demon on our heels and then made my son responsible for saving not just himself but me. Not only did he have to resurrect me and raise me, he had to accept my slayer into his life as a partner and ally and set off on long, difficult journeys with her. A boy, his father, and a dangerous, unpredictable demon woman: this was not an ordinary bedtime-story crew.

When my son was about eight and no longer wanted bedtime stories, we finally abandoned Bethan and Bom somewhere in the Permian Basin. But I wasn't quite ready to let go of Latamui. I was still a little worried about fallout from that demon woman. By then my son could type; so I asked him to write a story and put some of our bedtime characters in it. I wanted to see how he would

characterize us all. So again I got a bush demon story, although this time I'd asked for it. This time I didn't have to type it, either.

Bethan and Bom's Picnic

By Ethan, age 8

Once upon a time there lived a father and his son, Bethan. The father's name was Bom. One day they wanted to go on a picnic. They brought along: frozen pizza, a stove of course, their CD player and a couple CDs, 1 computer and 2 chairs, a lot of pop, a TV and a power generator and a blanket and a cordless telephone. We picked a place in the country. When we got there we set up everything, and guess what we saw in the sky? Quetzalcoatus northrupii (we called him Quetzi). We called him down here and he came. When he came down, Bom remembered that we had forgotten we should have brought a microwave along instead of a stove. So they told Quetzi to take Bom to get the stove, to put it on Quetzi's back, fly back to the house, put back the stove, and get the microwave. So they left for the house, leaving Bethan behind.

Quetzi and Bom were at the house now, and they just got the microwave. Meanwhile out in the country Bethan had thawed out some pizza and was ready to eat it when Kapika came walking along (she loved pizza) and said, "Are you going to eat all that

pizza by yourself? Bethan PLEASE!.' Can I have a piece, just 1 little piece PLEASE!!"

Bethan said, "Okay 1 small piece."

'Thank you. You are so nice Bethan."

While they were talking, Bom and Quetzi came back with the microwave.

Bom said, "Hi! Kapika."

Quetzi said, "Not her again!"

Kapika said, "Not him again!"

Then she started complaining about the pizza being cold.

In this manner the child domesticated the bush demon.