(Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature) Wendy Woodward, Susan McHugh (Eds.) - Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and The Arts - Animal Studies in Modern Worlds-Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

indigenous creatures,
native knowledges,
and the arts
animal studies in modern worlds
Edited by
Wendy Woodward
Susan McHugh
Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series editors
Susan McHugh
English Department
University of New England
Biddeford, Maine, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, United Kingdom
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, United Kingdom
Before the 2000s the humanities and social sciences paid little attention to the
participation of non-human animals in human cultures. The entrenched idea of the
human as a unique kind of being nourished a presumption that Homo sapiens should
be the proper object of study for these fields, to the exclusion of lives beyond the
human. Against this background, various academic disciplines can now be found in
the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophi-
cal grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the animal presences that
haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary stud-
ies. Instances of such work are grouped under the umbrella term ‘animal studies’,
having largely developed in relation to a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions.
How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other ani-
mals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species?
How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? While
debates around these themes continue to develop across academic disciplines, this
series will publish work that looks, more specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal
turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker
of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs,
but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. Literature, as
the apogee of linguistic expression in its complexity and subtlety, may therefore seem
a point at which ‘the human’ seems farthest removed from the world of ‘the animal’.
Our primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of
English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encoun-
ter.Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor
(that is, as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the
new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such
figuration with the material lives of animals. The series will encourage the examination
of textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with non-human
animal and advance understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts
have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. Consequently, we will
publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts across the chronologi-
cal range of English studies from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference
to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. This will be the
first series to explore animal studies within the context of literary studies; together,
the volumes (comprising monographs, edited collections of essays and some shorter
studies in the Palgrave Pivot format) will constitute a uniquely rich and thorough
scholarly resource on the involvement of animals in literature. The series will focus
on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full
range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journal-
ism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies
now engages.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14649
Wendy Woodward · Susan McHugh
Editors
Indigenous Creatures,
Native Knowledges,
and the Arts
Animal Studies in Modern Worlds
Editors
Wendy Woodward Susan McHugh
Department of English English Department
University of the Western Cape University of New England
Bellville, South Africa Biddeford, ME, USA
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-56873-7 ISBN 978-3-319-56874-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4
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Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the editors of Ceramics Art and Perception for
allowing us to reprint Nicolene Swanepoel’s essay.
Susan McHugh’s research was supported in part by a grant from the
Office of Sponsored Programs at the University of New England.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh
Part I Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories,

and Poetry of Bushmen
2 Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-Maloti 13

Michael Wessels
3 Kabbo Sings the Animals 35

Dan Wylie
4 Interrogating the Sacred Art of Vetkat Regopstaan

Boesman Kruiper 59
Richard Alan Northover
vii
viii Contents
Part II Indigenous Wisdoms, Animal Aesthetics,

and Contemporary Materialities
5 Spirit Guards: A Squad of Ceramic Dogs in South Africa 85

Nicolene Swanepoel
6 Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities, and Indigenous

Wisdoms 93
Delphi Carstens
Part III Global Flows of Animal Myths and Allegories
7 The Porosity of Human/Non-human Beings in Neil

Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys 119
Alexandra-Mary Wheeler
8 Animated Animals: Allegories of Transformation

in Khumba 139
Hermann Wittenberg
9 Magic Wells, the Stream and the Flow: The Promise

of Literary Animal Studies 161
Marion Copeland
Part IV Creative Interventions in Literary and Art Histories

of Indigenous Animal Practices
10 Border Crossings: Animals, Tricksters and Shape-Shifters

in Modern Native American Fiction 185
Daniel G. Payne
11 I’m Mad You’re Mad We Are All Mad: The Alice Diaries 205
Wilma Cruise
Contents ix
Part V Indigenous Traumas and Recoveries across

Species Lines
12 ‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming

Animals and Trauma in Some Contemporary Southern
African Texts 231
Wendy Woodward
13 Cross-Pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges of Extinction

and Genocide in Honeybee Fictions 249
Susan McHugh
Index 271
About the Editors
Wendy Woodward is Emerita Professor in English Literature at the

University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of The
Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in southern African Narratives
(Wits University Press 2008) and the co-editor, with Erika Lemmer, of
a Special Issue of Journal of Literary Studies on Figuring the Animal in
Post-apartheid South Africa (2014). Wendy organised fruitful Animal
Studies Colloquia at UWC annually from 2011 to 2015. She has pub-
lished three volumes of poetry: Séance for the Body (Snailpress 1994);
Love, Hades and other Animals (Protea, 2008) and A Saving Bannister
(Modjadji 2015).
Susan McHugh is a Professor of English at the University of New
England, USA, and researches and teaches literary, visual and scientific
stories of species. She is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across
Species Lines (Minnesota, 2011), as well as Dog (Reaktion, 2004). She
co-edited Human-Animal Studies (Routledge 2017), The Routledge
Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (Routledge, 2014) and Literary
Animals Look, a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in
Visual Culture (2013). She co-edits the book series Palgrave Studies
in Animals and Literature, and serves as Managing Editor of the
Humanities for Society & Animals.
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Glo ‘Nou ja glo as jy wil’

(Believe ‘Well yes believe as you like’), from Mooi loop. Drawing.
Courtesy Belinda Kruiper 67
Fig. 4.2 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper,
Men and women dancing, from Kalahari rainsong,
Drawing and watercolor. Courtesy Belinda Kruiper 71
Fig. 4.3 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Kom ons work vir,
ons sweet (Come let us work for, our sweat).
614790 from University of Pretoria Art Collection.
Drawing and watercolour. Courtesy Gerard de Kamper 73
Fig. 5.1 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi group detail (2004).
Courtesy of François Swanepoel 86
Fig. 5.2 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi two-headed dog detail
1 and 2 (2004). Courtesy of François Swanepoel 88
Fig. 5.3 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi studio detail (2016).
Courtesy of François Swanepoel 90
Fig. 5.4 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi and Cattle Heads. Ceramic,
studio detail (2016). Courtesy of François Swanepoel 91
Fig. 6.1 Asha Zero, Zansi nib (2008), Y_X (2012), and R lever
(2009). Acrylic on board. Courtesy of the artist 102
Fig. 6.2 Mer Roberts, There is no cure for a sudden apparition
(2011). Collage on photograph. Courtesy of the artist 105
Fig. 6.3 Mer Roberts, The changeling (2006).
Watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist 106
Fig. 6.4 Mer Roberts, Abantu bombalano (2010).
Video stills. Courtesy of the artist 107
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 8.1 Khumba film poster 141

Fig. 8.2 Still image from Khumba152
Fig. 11.1 Wilma Cruise, The Alice Diaries installation view
(2012). Courtesy of the artist 207
Fig. 11.2 Elizabeth Gunter, # 4000 (2015). Charcoal
dust on paper, 190 × 145 cm. Courtesy of the artist 210
Fig. 11.3 Elizabeth Gunter, Last, last One (2015).
Charcoal dust on paper 180 × 140 cm.
Courtesy of the artist 211
Fig. 11.4 Nicolene Swanepoel Interlock detail of work from
Little Creature/Without Pedestals (2014).
Photographed by the artist. Courtesy
of Françoi Swanepoel 218
Fig. 11.5 Nicolene Swanepoel Dance detail of work from
Little Creatures/Without Pedestals (2014).
Photographed by the artist. Courtesy of
François Swanepoel 219
Fig. 11.6 Wilma Cruise, Alice: Self Portrait I and II, (2011).
Mixed media drawing on paper. 200 × 100 cm.
Fig. 11.7 Wilma Cruise, Cradle II detail (2014).
Ceramic forms in perspex box with stand,
box: 60 × 60 × 60 cm, stand: 60 × 60 × 120 cm.
Photographed by and courtesy of the artist 220
Fig. 11.8 Wilma Cruise, The Borogoves (2015). Ceramic,
sizes various 10–17 cm. Photographed by Neil Visser.
Fig. 11.9 Wilma Cruise, Chess pieces (2015). Ceramic,
various sizes 15–35 cm. Photographed by Neil Visser.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh
As we were completing this project in 2016, indigenous people made

history with a protest that gathered together an unprecedented coalition
of not only North American tribal peoples, but also indigenous groups
worldwide in support of citizens of the Oceti Sakowin (or Sioux Nation),
who set up camp at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Blocking for now
the development of an oil pipeline slated to destroy ancient burial and
sacred sites in unceded tribal territories as well as possibly poison drink-
ing water in the Standing Rock Reservation, the peaceably assembled
‘water p rotectors’ endured being shot at with rubber bullets, beanbags,
tear gas, percussion grenades, pepper spray and even a water cannon in
freezing temperatures. Among the most widely shared photos, videos,
and stories of these events were ones that centred on human interactions
with animals.
In an incident evoking iconic scenes of US Civil Rights and African
anti-colonial movements, private security guards with police dogs clashed
W. Woodward (*) 
Department of English, University of the Western Cape, Bellville,
South Africa
e-mail: wendywoodward97@gmail.com
S. McHugh 
English Department, University of New England, Biddeford, USA
e-mail: smchugh@une.edu
© The Author(s) 2017 1

W. Woodward and S. McHugh (eds.), Indigenous Creatures, Native
Knowledges, and the Arts, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_1
2 W. WOODWARD AND S. McHUGH
with protesters, and six people including a young child were bitten.
Still older memories were stirred by shots fired by police armed with
military-grade weapons directed at people on horseback that injured one
man and his horse, and left another horse dead. Representations of more
animal presences tapped ancient sources of resilience. Downloaded over
a million times, a video shared by reporter Myron Dewey captures the
moment when a herd of American bison—tatanka to local Lakota, who
consider them sacred animals as well as religious symbols, and whose his-
tories as decimated populations are intimately tied—arrived within sight
of the camp, making the people whoop with joy. Although rife with
socially progressive potentials, the complex interrelationships of humans
and animals that make these moments in indigenous history so compel-
ling remain poorly understood, at once fitting symbols and extensions of
lives under siege.
Ancient lifeways shared between humans and animals are being lost
on ever-growing scales, only in part due to the extinctions of creatures
that once embodied them. While scientists scramble to conserve dwin-
dling populations, writers and artists direct attention to the other horn
of the dilemma: how to preserve ways of being in a world that humans
traditionally shared with other creatures, and that along with them are
threatened by the conventions of modern living. Sampling a broad array
of creative endeavours, Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the
Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds brings together work by academ-
ics and creative practitioners that explores how the ‘animal turn’ in schol-
arship informs revaluations of indigenous knowledge, in ways that launch
new possibilities for shared human-animal futures.
Traditionally, animals have been imagined in relation to spiritual
realms and the occult, whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to
ancestors, totems, talismans or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies.
With the rise of animal studies, the conventionally dismissive stance
toward such associations as primitive symbols for more vital human
relations gives way, revealing an ongoing struggle to engage with a nimals
in indigenous epistemologies at face value, on their own terms, and as
vital players in the lives of cultures. With examples from the nineteenth
through the twenty-first century, the case studies gathered here explore
the roots of the struggle in colonial contact zones, where the stakes
include conceptual as much as physical survival. Contributors’ explo-
rations of the frictions as well as crossovers between indigenous beliefs
and those of modernity taking shape in literature, film, and visual
1 INTRODUCTION 3
art ultimately situate how old ways are not only disappearing, but in
some key cases are being adapted to modern conditions in ways that
make vital contributions toward the future of life shared across spe-
cies lines.
Most essays in this collection emanated from a Colloquium on
Indigenous Knowledges, Animals and Modernity in the Arts at the
University of the Western Cape in September 2015. The first event of
its kind, it sparked discussions that lead to more questions than answers.
What happens to stories of indigenous human-animal relations when
they are told by indigenous people in colonial and postcolonial contexts?
Why are animal forms so appealing for exploring the overlap of shamanic
and artistic practice? How do depictions of human political crises like
wars and genocides involve non-human worlds? What are the cultural
effects of extinction? How can anti-colonialist and anti-racist projects be
empowered by engagement with animal poetics? Rather than seek defini-
tive resolution to any debates, this volume is designed to advance con-
versations for years to come.
Parallel developments in Environmental Humanities and Indigenous
Studies illustrate the need for more direct engagements with questions
about representation and human-animal relationships. Joni Adamson
and Salma Monani’s introduction to Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies:
Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2016) outlines the history of how
environmental studies limits these lines of inquiry to concerns about
place, more specifically, the displacements of North American peoples by
settler cultures. While their volume opens spaces for a global approach
to indigeneity, the relegation of multispecies’ concerns to the final sec-
tion follows a problematic ecocritical pattern in which animals are para-
doxically recognised as central to indigenous societies yet marginalised
in relation to human concerns. Starting with human-animal relationships
that range outside Euro-American frameworks, scholars informed by ani-
mal studies research are modelling more inclusive approaches.
Our collection comes at a very particular moment in southern African
research in Ecocriticism and Animal Studies. Fiona Moolla’s edited
volume, The Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in
Contemporary Cultural Forms (2016), is a sign of new attention being
paid to environmental and non-human animal issues. Still, only a fraction
of the chapters focus on animals and even fewer on animals in literature
and the arts. Moolla is motivated by the need to recognise the signifi-
cance of both environment and animals in African cultures, even while
she acknowledges that both the environment and animals have been part
of the essentialising of Africa.
Indigenous Creatures contradicts any postcolonial prejudice against the
magical or the holy, celebrating a sacred worldliness. Bushmen who send
their tracks through many of the essays may be quintessential exemplars
of shamanism in southern Africa but their identities are historicised rather
than romanticised, their current plight seen in terms of colonial racial-
ised inequities. The essays in this volume, then, have potential appeal for
critical race studies. Clare Jean Kim’s Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species,
and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015) differs from this volume in
that it is pitched more to audiences in qualitative political science and
American Studies. Only one of her three case studies broaches indigenous
knowledges of human-animal relations, and the sharp-focused discipli-
nary approach precludes significant attention to literature and the arts.
Because our project overtly problematises the relations of aesthetic and
political representation in part through comparing cultural representa-
tions across North America and sub-Saharan Africa, it models a different
approach to engaging with indigenous perspectives on their own terms.
In this way, our volume supports and develops early efforts to decol-
onize literary animal studies. In southern Africa, Wendy Woodward’s
The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives
(2008) may be influential in the formation of our volume, but we have
selected contributions to our collection in order to explicitly address
novels and traditions that are not covered to any great extent in her
monograph. Additionally, our collection addresses literary and artistic
forms that range widely beyond the narrative focus of The Animal Gaze.
The contents and disciplinary frameworks of Canis Africanis: A Dog
History of Southern Africa, edited by Sandra Swart and Lance van Sittert
(2007), establish clear distinctions from those of Indigenous Creatures.
The subtitle of this historical and groundbreaking collection, published
in the Human-Animal Studies series, accurately reflects the fact that it
remains particularly focused according to species, discipline and region.
Our project is broader in all of these respects, appealing to readers with
wide-ranging interests in animal issues beyond canis familiaris; in animal
studies not just in history but also in the arts, humanities and social sci-
ences; and in regions beyond sub-Saharan Africa.
Indigenous Creatures may pay respects to postcolonial ecocriticism,
especially to Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s book of the same name,
subtitled Literature, Animal, Environment (Routledge 2010), but it is
1 INTRODUCTION 5
underpinned by the assumption that human-animal studies offers a dif-

ferent model based on intersectionality rather than falling into feminist or
postcolonial animal studies per se. Our premise is to stay with the strug-
gles in all of their complexities, rather than to prioritise. The essays col-
lected here foreground and celebrate indigenous imagination rather than
being deflected by postcolonial perceptions, even as indigenous knowl-
edge may suggest enlightened ways of staying with the troubled racialised
national politics in South Africa and the USA. Thus we invert the colonial
paradigm by situating critical race within indigenous studies, and in ways
that foreground the more-than-human consequences of racialising dis-
courses at the margins of ecosystems. ‘Native’ and ‘indigenous’ are cat-
egories that already move across species lines. The categories of ‘race’ and
‘species’, as Cary Wolfe reminds us, ‘are … notoriously pliable and unsta-
ble’ (2012: 43), an aspect that informs the exploitations of vulnerable
populations  as biopolitical history has demonstrated. Understanding the
positive aspects of this pliability for resistance movments however requires
recontextualization amid cultures and concepts that precede and exceed
the classifying imagination of European settler colonialism.
Assembling artistic and scholarly responses to animal practices across
continents, our volume’s quintipartite structure emphasises creative
interventions into the politics and policing of indigeneity across spe-
cies lines. Throughout, the representations of domestic, feral, and wild
spaces of human-animal encounters assert animals’ persistence as sources
of spiritual and practical strength, whether in the forms of non-human
neighbours, working partners, or spirit guides, fostering respect for
diversity not only in cultures and ecosystems but also in imaginations.
Part I Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories, and Poetry of Bushmen
begins with records of the San or Bushmen peoples of southern Africa’s
rock art and stories associated with it, tracing different visual and poetic
efforts to restore and adapt its connections to shamanism and shape-shift-
ing from early colonial records through art and literature of recent dec-
ades. Through these texts, the section frames San culture as a case study
for working through postcolonial tensions with animality. Recovering a
past sense of human-animal community remains fraught with racist his-
tories of animalisation, a problem that cannot be rationalised or imag-
ined away and that seems crystallised in the uneasiness built into terms
like ‘bushman’. Yet avoiding these complexities only enables the perni-
ciousness of identities which have been created to serve hierarchic poli-
tics; humans divided from animals become all the more divisible precisely
because the gesture empowers denigration of humans associated with ani-

mals. Documentation of traditional ways of living with animals and the
indigenous understanding of human-animal relations guiding such prac-
tices becomes a vital means of combating prejudice and, more impor-
tantly, charting worlds outside racist mindsets.
When the documentary setup involves an illiterate colonised Bushman
translated by literate colonisers, the act of recording storytelling becomes
particularly tricky, as Michael Wessels shows in ‘Qing and the Animals
of the Drakensberg-Maloti’, which explores how San stories’ actors are
literally drawn in prehistoric rock carvings that presuppose many inter-
secting traditions of visual culture. Indigenous stories and images may
be vexing to historians in search of a singular truth, but they also pro-
vide opportunities for contemporary creative interventions. Dan Wylie’s
‘//Kabbo Sings the Animals’ explores ongoing translations of Bushmen
poetry that imagine back into existence otherwise long-gone human
relations with indigenous fauna. In ‘Interrogating the Sacred Art of
Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper’, Richard Alan Northover focuses
on a contemporary San artist’s adaptations of visual representations that
foreground the altered conditions through which traditional knowledge
persists. Their collective examination of Bushmen aesthetics through sto-
rytelling, rock art, poetry and painting makes a strong case for animist
myth as a vital practice for subjugated peoples.
Part II Indigenous Wisdoms: Animal Aesthetics and Contemporary
Materialities extends inquiries into the persistence of traditional under-
standing of the relations of human and animal life in contemporary
South Africa through such diverse manifestations as imagined returns of
mythical cryptids, connecting them to storied places and other materi-
alities of human-animal relations. Nicolene Swanepoel in ‘Spirit Guards:
A Squad of Ceramic Dogs in South Africa’ documents the provenance
of her transformative animist beings, who derive from traditions of the
Democratic Republic of Congo. These handmade and hybrid creatures—
both nkisi or spirit guards, as well as modern beings—have their potency
strengthened by found objects which become part of their embodi-
ment. Delphi Carstens’ essay ‘Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities and
Indigenous Wisdoms’ traces the porosity of boundaries between moder-
nity and indigeneities in his unusual consideration of hybridity, tricksters
and shamanism in Afrofuturist sonic fiction, literary narrative and art-
works. Together these essays offer insight into the aesthetic processes of
rendering traditional human-animal relations in modern worlds.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Part III Global Flows of Animal Myths and Allegories traces cur-
rent animal practices through the transcontinental flows of the African
diaspora by identifying forms of animist belief in popular and critically
acclaimed fiction, as well as animated film. Alexandra-Mary Wheeler’s
‘The Porosity of Human/non-human Beings in Neil Gaiman’s American
Gods and Anansi Boys’ looks in depth at the popular novelist’s mytho-
logical transformation of Anansi the spider-god, as reconfigured in narra-
tives apparently lost through colonisation and the trauma of the African
diaspora. Hermann Wittenberg’s essay ‘Animated Animals: Allegories
of Transformation in Khumba’ considers how a South African movie
made for children may deal with vexing post-apartheid issues even as it
threatens to reduce them to simplistic narrative patterns. Outlining the
broader stakes of these arguments, Marion Copeland considers ‘Magic
Wells, the Stream and the Flow: The Promise of Literary Animal Studies’
through an essay which celebrates animal studies as far-reaching and dis-
parate, as well as foregrounding the deep unconscious resources of liter-
ary animal studies which hark back to prehistory and the centrality of
ancestors in the arts.
Part IV Creative Interventions in Literary and Art Histories of
Indigenous Animal Practices squarely addresses the work of creative
intervention into exterminationist and other destructive practices within
the frameworks of literary and art history, in part by identifying patterns
of representing animals in Native American and South African artists’
own adaptations of shamanistic practices and concepts to map the com-
plex array of national and postcolonial politics that inform the persistence
of old and the emergence of new myths. Daniel G. Payne, like Wheeler,
examines a subversive trickster figure, but in ‘Border Crossings: Animals,
Tricksters and Shape-shifters in Modern Native American Fiction’ he
focuses on recurrences of it in the Native American oral tradition across
fiction by Leslie Marmon Silko, Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor. Artist
Wilma Cruise reflects on her own praxis which connects in a deeply
sacred way with animals. She theorises her approach to art making via
different models of the unconscious. By comparing some of her strate-
gies with those of Nicolene Swanepoel, she reprises and extends earlier
discussions of how materialities relate to knowledges of human-animal
relations.
Part V Indigenous Traumas and Recoveries across Species Lines fore-
grounds the radical transformations that creative imaginings of indig-
enous human-animal relations are making in our immediate political/
ecological moment. Weaving together themes from previous essays with

a sense of political urgency, the final section recasts conventional theories
of trauma through postcolonial social transformations of cross-species
relations as both imagined in fiction and recorded by a truth commis-
sion, a process first modelled in South Africa. As the popular represen-
tation of the Standing Rock protest suggests, effective systemic critique
requires a different starting point than the human identity categories
invented to serve the colonial agendas of the European Enlightenment.
As powerful traditional sources of material and affective sustenance,
human-animal relationships provide a richly storied alternative plat-
form for community action. Wendy Woodward’s essay, ‘“The Only
Facts are Supernatural Ones”: Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some
Contemporary Southern African Texts’ deals with the violence of colo-
nial or neo-colonial regimes and the resulting trauma. Each text incor-
porates an animal who functions as a filter for the trauma, and who also
embodies an intermediary between indigenous knowledge and a violent
modernity. Susan McHugh’s ‘Cross-pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges
of Extinction and Genocide in Honeybee Fictions’ writes against a grow-
ing crisis in honeybee health in recent decades. She engages with US,
Canadian, South African, Indian and Australian novelists who explore
the multispecies dimensions of honeybees’ colonial experience in the
converging contexts of mass killings of humans and animals. Checking
unbridled optimism, the final section nonetheless emphasises the con-
tributors’ overall sense that explorations of indigenous knowledge of
human-animal relations in the arts often flash up in the least likely cir-
cumstances as records of and responses to efforts to efface them.
The goal is to shed new light on literary and artistic treatments of
materials that were until recently viewed as strictly anthropological mate-
rials. Against approaches such as John Berger’s influential ‘Why Look
at Animals?’ that mythologise human-animal relations based on fantasy,
contributors to this volume engage with aesthetic practices that con-
cern traditional ways in which people have lived with and thought about
animals and how these inform and are informed by artistic practices.
With its comparative regional emphasis on Southern Africa and North
America—historical loci of the greatest ranges, respectively, of species and
linguistic diversity—the collection cannot be comprehensive so much
as suggestive of where scholarship informed by current literary, artistic
and animal theory might go. While some essays are significant for their
elaboration of highly localised animal practices and rarefied traditional
1 INTRODUCTION 9
ecological knowledge, several contributors enhance connections across

chapters by returning to familiar subjects like dogs, who along with
humans, are the most widely distributed mammals worldwide. Tracking
representations of indigenous human-animal relationships across the arts
reveals a range of potentials, including global movements along with per-
sistences and adaptations of local beliefs.
The volume as a whole explores how creative representations remain
sites of ongoing struggles to engage with animals in indigenous epis-
temologies. Whether as animist gods, familiars, conduits to ancestors,
totems, talismans or co-creators of multispecies cosmologies, animals act
as vital players in the lives of cultures. From early days in colonial contact
zones through contemporary expressions in art, film, and literature, the
essays work together not only to identify human-animal relations as his-
torical points of vulnerability but also to help to situate how indigenous
knowledge of human-animal relations is being adapted to modern condi-
tions of life shared across species lines.
Works Cited
Adamson, J., and S. Monani (eds.). 2016. Ecocriticism and indigenous studies:
Conversations from earth to cosmos. London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Huggan, G., and H. Tiffin. 2010. Postcolonial ecocriticism: literature, animal,
environment. London: Routledge.
Kim, C.J. 2015. Dangerous crossings: Race, species, and nature in a multicultural
age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moolla, F. (ed.). 2016. The natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and animal studies in
contemporary cultural forms. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Swart, S., and L. von Sittert (eds.). 2007. Canis Africanis: A dog history of
Southern Africa. Leiden: Brill.
Wolfe, C. 2012. Before the law: Humans and other animals in a biopolitical
frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Woodward, W. 2008. The animal gaze: Animal subjectivities in Southern African
narratives. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Authors’ Biography
Wendy Woodward is Emerita Professor in English Literature at the University
of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of The Animal Gaze:
Animal Subjectivities in southern African Narratives (Wits University Press
2008) and the co-editor, with Erika Lemmer, of a Special Issue of Journal of
Literary Studies on Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa (2014).
Wendy organised fruitful Animal Studies Colloquia at UWC annually from
2011 to 2015. She has published three volumes of poetry: Séance for the Body
(Snailpress 1994); Love, Hades and other Animals (Protea, 2008) and A Saving
Bannister (Modjadji 2015).
Susan McHugh is a Professor of English at the University of New England,

USA, and researches and teaches literary, visual, and scientific stories of species.
She is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minnesota,
2011), as well as Dog (Reaktion, 2004). She co-editedHuman-Animal Studies
(Routledge 2017) The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies
(Routledge, 2014), and Literary Animals Look, a special issue of Antennae:
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2013). She co-edits the book series
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, and serves as Managing Editor of
the Humanities for Society & Animals.
PART I
Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories,

and Poetry of Bushmen
CHAPTER 2
Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-

Maloti
Michael Wessels
Introduction
In 1873, Qing, a young man of San background, was hired by Joseph
Orpen to guide a colonial force through the Maloti Mountains. The force
hoped to intercept the Hlubi chief, Langalibalele, and his men who had
taken refuge in the mountains rather than surrender their guns, legally
purchased on the diamond fields, to the colonial authorities. At the
time Orpen was the British resident of Nomansland, a region that today
straddles the northwestern parts of the Eastern Cape and southeastern
KwaZulu-Natal but which then still lay outside direct British admin-
istration. In response to Orpen’s questions, Qing commented on some
of the rock art the two men saw on their journey and also recounted a
cycle of stories featuring Cagn, a mythological figure often described as
the southern San trickster deity (Lewis-Williams 2000, p. 8). Orpen pub-
lished Qing’s comments and stories along with a short account of the
journey in 1874 in The Cape Monthly Magazine. Appended to the arti-
cle are remarks by Wilhelm Bleek, the celebrated linguist and collector
M. Wessels (*) 
University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa
e-mail: mwessels@uwc.ac.za

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_2
14 M. Wessels
of folklore of the /Xam-speaking San of the northern Cape Colony.

Importantly, Bleek’s remarks also contain interpretations of the rock
art copies made by Orpen on the trip by Dia!kwain, one of the /Xam
informants who lived in Bleek’s household in Mowbray for several years.
The Orpen-Qing article has come to occupy a seminal position in San
studies, especially in rock art research. A valuable subsidiary source is the
journal account of the journey through the Maloti kept by James Murray
Grant, an officer in the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police and the
leader of the expedition to intercept Langalibalele (Mitchell and Challis
2008).
The Qing-Orpen text is hybrid, combining a European travelogue,
scholarship and analysis with San literature and San interpretation, albeit
mediated in complex ways by translation and editing.1 It is a docu-
ment of human history (the Langalibalele rebellion), of human learning
(European scholarship on rock art and folklore) and of human culture
(San rock art and stories). But without animals it could not exist. Orpen
could not have been in the Maloti in the first place without animals—he
and his men were dependent on a variety of animals for transport and
food. The San of the Drakensberg were probably less reliant on ani-
mals for their survival. Horses had only entered the region forty years
before, enabling the San to become traders and raiders as well as forag-
ers (Challis 2009; Swart 2010). While they were famed hunters who had
always eaten meat, prizing the flesh of large ‘game’ animals, the eland
in particular, wild plants rather than meat formed the bulk of the San
diet; it is physically possible that the Drakensberg San might have lived as
vegetarians. But practicalities aside, San culture is inconceivable without
animals.
Animals of all shape, size and metaphysical standing form the imagina-
tive, aesthetic and ontological core of both paintings and stories. People
not only eat and wear parts of animals, but hunting, dance and storytell-
ing all involve close identification, even merging, with animals. Horses
and baboons carried particular significance as potent protectors (Challis
2009). Claude Levi-Strauss’ (1964, p. 89) famous observation that cer-
tain animals are ‘good to think’ is certainly true of the Drakensberg San.
It is also true to say that a person is not a person solely, or even primar-
ily, by virtue of his or her relationship with other people—I am thinking
here of the notion of Ubuntu2—but through participation in an intricate
network of relations with animals as well as people, ancestors and other
animate entities, including the moon, sun, wind and stars.
2 QING AND THE ANIMALS OF THE DRAKENSBERG-MALOTI 15
Grant and Orpen
The colonial force was under the overall command of Inspector James
Murray Grant of the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police. Orpen’s
detachment of African auxiliaries, mostly Basotho, joined up with the
mounted police near today’s Qacha’s Nek. Most of the combined force
was mounted on horseback. Grant’s force alone had 200 horses. The ani-
mals struggled in the mountainous terrain: ‘The country is very difficult
and sharp for the horses’, complains Grant (Mitchell and Challis 2008,
p. 422). Orpen’s men, either unmounted or mounted on ponies habitu-
ated to the terrain, were much more mobile. Grant grudgingly concedes
that: ‘Kafirs of course can travel faster in a country like this, than we
can’ (Mitchell and Challis 2008, p. 422).3 Some of the many tensions
between the two men were directly related to the greater mobility of
Orpen’s force. Grant accuses Orpen of trying to take over command of
the force from him when Orpen asks him to arrange for his men to bring
supplies while his force pushes on ahead. This prompts Grant to accuse
Orpen of trying to turn the mounted police into a support service ‘to a
lot of dirty Basutos’ (Mitchell and Challis 2008, p. 425).
The combined force was too late to intercept the Hlubi. When it
entered the Maloti area, the Hlubi leader Langalibalele and his men
had already surrendered to the Basotho chief, Jonathan Molappo. The
surrender involved animals as well as people. With the 500 or so Hlubi
warriors were 7000 head of cattle, the sum total of the tribe’s cattle
(Mitchell and Challis 2008, p. 402).
Orpen supplies few details of the trip through the mountains, focus-
ing almost entirely on his interactions with Qing. Grant’s diary provides
more details. Animals feature prominently. Grant was disappointed that
his force received no share of the Hlubi cattle (Mitchell and Challis
2008, p. 402). Before this, he describes his difficulties in buying mielies
(maize) to feed the horses and forcing the villagers to sell him sheep and
oxen to sustain his men. He also describes the animals they saw along the
way, starting with ‘most audacious crabs’ in a stream. He records species
and numbers: the spoor of ‘a large herd’ of eland (Mitchell and Challis
2008, p. 427), ‘three Rheebok’ (Mitchell and Challis 2008, p. 428). He
quarrels with Orpen who wishes to take men off to hunt ‘Elands and
Hartebeeste close to where he is’ (Mitchell and Challis 2008, p. 436)
just after Grant has had to discipline Acting Sergeant Major Birbeck
for doing the same. The expedition later saw more hartebeest and lots
16 M. Wessels
of eland spoor as well as a wild cat, which ‘one of the Basutos’ killed
(Mitchell and Challis 2008, p. 439).
The representation of animals in Grant’s diary provides a strong con-
trast with Qing’s stories in which, as we will see, animals are presented in
an entirely different way. This is true too of the enigmatic rock paintings
they passed. Grant’s animals are flesh and blood animals in the environ-
ment, not figures in stories or paintings. At one point, though, he does
mention animals in the context of rock art, acknowledging that ‘The
paintings, many of them capitally done—a Hartebeeste [sic], baboon,
and Eland that I saw, were quite artistic’ (Mitchell and Challis 2008,
p. 434). This comes as something as a surprise, for Grant generally has
nothing good to say of anything native. He is impressed with the images’
verisimilitude, not concerned with their meaning, unlike Orpen, who
asks Qing to explain the paintings.
Orpen notes that it had been impossible hitherto to find a San
informant who was prepared to talk to Europeans about rock art, and
Qing himself proved elusive. He was away hunting and mistrusted
Orpen’s intentions in seeking him out since ‘he had never seen a white
man but in fighting’ (Orpen 1874, p. 2). Orpen ‘had almost given him
up’ when Qing unexpectedly ‘overtook’ him, indicative of his abil-
ity to move quickly on horseback in the mountains. From the first he
made a strong impression on Orpen, not only in relation to his stories
but also for his ability to move about the countryside like an agile ani-
mal. He ‘proved a diligent and useful guide, and became a favourite,
he and his clever little mare, with which he dashed and doubled among
the stones like a rabbit when his passion for hunting occasionally led
him astray’ (Orpen 1874, p. 2). While Orpen condones Qing’s love of
hunting, Grant would not have approved. He complains several times
that Orpen’s own predilection for hunting got in the way of the objec-
tives of the expedition (Mitchell and Challis 2008, pp. 402, 436, 438).
It is notable that Qing and his mare in Orpen’s description are fused;
together they move about the place with the familiarity, intelligence and
facility of a single animal; a rabbit. Orpen must have been thinking of the
wild hares he would have often seen in southern Africa. His comparison
echoes tropes of the San as wild people, people of the bush, with the
important difference that he goes on to portray Qing also as a man of
culture, an informant about rock art and mythology.
It is interesting to pause briefly to consider how Qing might have
seen horses and his relationship with them. Horses, as mentioned earlier,
only entered the area in the 1830s (Challis 2009). From the middle of
the nineteenth century, highly mobile bands of mounted San or hybrid
groups including San raided cattle across the region from strongholds in
the mountains. But horses were not only ridden; they were also painted
on the walls of shelters, especially by the amaTola, a group of people of
disparate background, predominantly San, Nguni and Khoe, but there
were also some coloureds and British deserters among them. Sam Challis
has argued that the amaTola drew power from horses and baboons in
a way that was similar to the way that the San had traditionally drawn
power from rhebok and eland, two animals that are central to the Qing-
Orpen text. Baboons and horses are often painted together in amaTola
rock art. The baboon was the ‘most powerful and binding symbol’ of
the amaTola since they were closely associated with the medicine plants
that could ensure the success of a raid and were themselves successful
raiders (Challis 2012, p. 270). Even more common in amaTola rock
art, though, is the horse. Challis notes that the horse’s ‘socio-economic
impact is evident in the rock art images of people harnessing the power
of the horse…’ (Challis 2012, p. 277). Qing was not directly linked to
the amaTola but it is likely that he knew about their rock art and their
beliefs about the horse. It is likely, too, that both Qing’s San group and
the Baphuthi, his adopted people, would have possessed ideas and beliefs
about horses that reflected the importance of the animals in their lives.
The amaTola after all, according to Challis, drew on similar complexes
of belief and practice to the San of the area with regard to baboons and
also to the eland /rhebok, which they transferred to some extent to the
horse.
When Qing himself begins to speak in the text, prompted by Orpen’s
questions about the rock art images they saw in the great shelters of
Melikane and Sehonghong, animals move instantly from the back-
ground—from carriers of men and supplies or details in the landscape—
to the fore. They become agents and characters, key elements in a social
imaginary that is much less anthropocentric than the world from which
Orpen and Grant come.
Qing and Rock Painting

Orpen uses the rabbit as a metaphor for Qing’s ability to move quickly
on horseback. A closer amalgamation of animal and human than that
involved in metaphorical juxtaposition is involved in the question with
18 M. Wessels
which Orpen elicits Qing’s brief comments about rock painting: ‘I com-
menced by asking him what the pictures of men with rhebok’s heads
meant’ (Orpen 1874, p. 2). Here the relationship is not one of analogy
or comparison but fusion. The rhebok is not standing in for humans but
is joined to the human. Moreover, it provides the upper part of the com-
posite creature, the head. Orpen’s question refers, it would seem, to a
painting that depicts therianthropes with heads that, according to Challis
(2005), are more likely eland than rhebok. Orpen also copied a paint-
ing of people, some of whom wear rhebok caps, leading a large bovine-
looking creature. Qing’s comments about the rhebok-headed men refer
to both paintings. Versions of both paintings were also published in the
article in the Cape Monthly Magazine along with a painting of men with
fishlike tails, but not before they had been inspected by Wilhelm Bleek
and by the /Xam informant Dia!kwain, whose readings of the paintings
are described in the ‘remarks’ Bleek appended to Orpen’s article and
which have been critical to the history of rock art interpretation. Qing
identifies the rhebok-headed creatures as men, and associates them with
eland:
‘They were men who had died and now lived in rivers, and were spoilt at
the same time as the elands and by the dances of which you have seen paint-
ings.’ I asked when were the elands spoilt and how. He began to explain,
and mentioned Cagn. (Orpen 1874, p. 2)
Qing’s enigmatic words have exercised interpreters since he uttered

them. He goes on to tell a cycle of stories about Cagn, but returns to the
question of the rhebok-headed men later in the text, saying:
The men with rhebok’s heads, Haqwé and Canaté, and the tailed men,
Qweqweté live mostly under water; they tame elands [sic] snakes. That
animal which the men are catching is a snake (!) They are holding out
charms to it, and catching it with a long reim [sic] (see picture). They are
all under water, and those strokes are things growing under water. They
are people spoilt by the—dance, because their noses bleed. (Orpen 1874,
p. 10)
The men are said to live below the water and to tame the snakes of the
eland. Snakes, as we will see, are another animal that recurs in Qing’s
stories. Orpen signals his surprise at the identification of the animal by
italicising the word ‘snake’ and placing an exclamation mark after it; in
the painting the animal is clearly a large hippo-like animal rather than
a snake. Challis ingeniously attributes the confusion about the animal’s
identity to Qing’s unsuccessful attempts to explain to Orpen that the
animal in the picture is, like a snake, a ‘water thing’. Qing, it has been
argued (McGranaghan et al. 2013), might in fact have had an image of a
rain snake in a shelter across the Senqu river in mind which is also being
led by men. There is a good chance that he is answering Orpen’s ques-
tion sometime after the visit to Sehonghong. The river was too full to
be crossed to view the snake image on Orpen’s visit to Sehonghong. If
Challis (2005) is correct, Qing might also be using the image of the men
with rhebok heads in the second extract to explain the concept of theri-
anthropes more generally. Orpen had clearly been intrigued by the image
of half-human, half-eland figures that he copied in the Melikane shelter a
few days before the expedition reached Sehonghong. But more might be
at play here.
Qing, Challis surmises, is using a distinctive sort of taxonomic logic in
his explanation in terms of which he refers to the men with eland heads
as possessing rhebok heads because of their role as ‘game’ shamans.
…I suggest that if Qing called them ‘men with rhebok’s heads’ then to
him at least, they were. These therianthropes had what researchers now
might analyse as eland heads, but what to Qing were rhebok heads: for
Qing, men with rhebok’s heads were those who tamed elands and snakes.
At that time, and in his understanding of Bushman cosmology and teach-
ing, they were men with rhebok’s heads. (Challis 2005, 15)
In any case, Challis observes, ‘many of the diagnostic contexts in which

eland are found are shared by the rhebok’ (Challis 2005, p. 12). A simi-
lar transposition is at play in the identification of the bovine-like rain bull
with a snake. Whatever the precise nature of Qing’s thinking here, clearly
a division among species familiar to European classification is collapsed.
Again the blurring of these divisions does not seem to be metaphorical.
In the worlds of spirit and myth, at least, the different creatures are onto-
logically interconnected.
Qing’s words about the rhebok-headed men suggest that the relation-
ship between human and animal is intimate. In the paintings, this inti-
macy takes the form of composite animal-human beings. In the text,
Qing moves swiftly from rhebok to eland—‘They [the men with rhebok
20 M. Wessels
heads] were men who had died and now lived in rivers, and were spoilt at
the same time as the elands—and, as we have seen, conflates bovine with
snake: ‘“That animal which the men are catching is a snake” (!)’. David
Lewis-Williams reads these words as referring to the transformative expe-
riences and visions that occur in trance.4 The transfiguring experience of
trance, accomplished during the dance which Qing goes on to describe
is figured in the references to dying, spoiling and going under water.
Men take on the power of animals in trance; the transformations they
experience are also figured in terms of becoming animal or part animal.
Anne Solomon (2007, p. 157) relates the same imagery not to trance
but to spirits of the dead, literally the ‘men who had died’ and who
inhabit an underwater realm. The snake in Solomon’s view alludes to
!Khwa, the /Xam word for the rain, who Solomon identifies as a ‘death
deity’ (2007, p. 154), depicted in the painting not as an actual snake,
as already mentioned, but as a bovine creature. Rainmaking, she argues,
is performed by spirits of the dead to whom the living appeal rather
than by living rain shamans. José De Prada-Samper tends more towards
Solomon’s view but argues that the underwater realm is not only inhab-
ited by spirits of the dead, which manifest as snakes, but by a large popu-
lation of different kinds of water people (2016, pp. 96, 99–101).
Patricia Vinnicombe approaches the question of the rhebok-headed
men differently, from what might be described as an ecological per-
spective, one that takes into account the habits and behaviour (even
the culture perhaps) of rhebok (2009, pp. 187–189). She asks why rhe-
bok are the second most commonly depicted animal in the rock art of
Drakensberg-Maloti area after eland; in some areas, they actually pre-
dominate. Her consideration of the respective social structures and inter-
actions of the two species leads her to conjecture that the Drakensberg
San distinguished between them symbolically in important ways. Eland,
Vinnicombe maintains, are identified with the wider human social group
since, like the Drakensberg-Maloti San, they separate into small bands in
the winter and aggregate in large groups in the summer months, while
rhebok signify the smaller family unit and practices of nurture. They are
the only animal that is sometimes depicted as suckling its young in the
rock art. The conjunction of the rhebok and human in the form of the
imagery of therianthropes signifies this close association. There appears
to be a metaphorical logic at work in Vinnicombe’s hypothesis: the social
organisation of the rhebok is comparable to the human family while the
eland can be compared to the larger social group beyond the family. But
again, it could be argued, on the basis of a reading of the role of animals

in rock art and Qing’s stories, that the relationship is more accurately
one of identification and extension than comparison. Rhebok are not
simply enlisted in a human sign system to elucidate human qualities or
attributes; they share something ontologically with humans.
Qing’s Animal Stories

Qing soon turns from the discussion of the paintings to storytelling.
He clearly was more comfortable telling stories than offering explana-
tions. The stories flow apparently unsolicited, an impression reinforced
by Orpen’s editing; he tells us how he ‘string[s] together Qing’s frag-
mentary stories’ and ‘make[s] them consecutive’ (Orpen 1874, p. 6).
By contrast the explanations of the paintings were extracted through a
series of questions and involved a struggle for intercultural translation.
The cycle of stories Qing tells feature Cagn, and all of them are popu-
lated by animals. Cagn is undoubtedly the same figure as the /Xam /
Kággen. Apart from the similarity of their names, they play similar roles
in the stories, several of which exhibit a family resemblance. Few readers
come to Qing’s stories without some knowledge of the /Xam narratives
so it is inevitable that this knowledge should enrich and enhance the way
that Qing’s stories and Cagn himself have been understood. Even the
identification of Cagn as the mantis relies on this prior knowledge since
Cagn is never identified as a mantis in Orpen’s text. The only evidence
from the Drakensberg-Maloti area of Cagn’s association with this insect
comes from brief comments made by the missionary D.F. Ellenberger
who mentions that he was told once by a Basotho man that ‘their god
(molimo-oa-Baroa) was the praying Mantis, this green grasshopper that
jumps (qotoma) and that has the attitude of being at prayer’ (Mitchell
2006, pp. 15–16).
The first story gives an account of the creation of the first eland and,
with it, of the beginning of hunting and perhaps, as Sigrid Schmidt
maintains, of ‘game’ animals more generally (Schmidt 2013, p. 78).
More precisely, the story describes not the beginning of hunting so
much as how the animals to be hunted went wild, making hunting an
exacting activity. The first eland, it should be noted, is literally of the
same flesh and blood as Cagn’s family. He is, in some sense, Cagn’s son
and the brother of Cagn’s oldest son, Gcwi, who kills him (De Prada-
Samper 2016, pp. 49, 53). This is important when considering the
22 M. Wessels
relationship between animal and human more generally in Qing’s stories

and in the related /Xam narratives. Animals are also people but become
their animal species in the course of the stories of the first times. Humans
and animals share a common ancestry. They do not belong to a separate
existential order. Animals are hunted as part of an ecological order, not
because they are less than human. On the contrary, as evidenced by their
presence in the rock art and by their place in ritual and mythology, they
possess great value; transformation into an animal signifies power and
entry into the realm of the extraordinary.
After Coti ruins her husband’s knife by using it to sharpen a digging
stick, Cagn scolds her and tells her that ‘evil should come to her’ (Orpen
1874, p. 3). Evil, we should not forget, is a translated term—there is
very little evidence of a concept of pure or essential evil in Qing’s stories
or in the /Xam materials. Here it takes the form of a pregnancy. Coti
conceives and gives birth to an eland calf, the first eland in the world.
Interestingly, even Cagn does not know the identity of the animal that
results from his curse. He has to identify the unknown animal with the
help of charms, which he sprinkles on it. He names a number of species
before guessing the right one. The process involves hailing the unknown,
which is paradoxically already in some sense known because it can be
named. Importantly it is the eland that responds to and recognises its
name. The name of the animal’s species pre-exists its existence, but it has
to confirm and assent to it.
Cagn raises the eland in a ‘secluded kloof’ with maternal care (Orpen
1874, p. 4). The contiguity between human and animal is striking at this
point. By the end of the tale the relationship changes, though, and the
story traces how this shift occurs. The animal is not only born from a
human body but is also protected and nurtured by a human. Of course,
Cagn and his family members should not be understood as altogether
human themselves. Transposing our knowledge of the /Xam stories to
Qing’s we can say with some certainty that Cagn’s family belong to the
early race in which people and animals had not yet been properly sep-
arated. Both baboons and snakes are said by Qing to have once been
men. Nevertheless, despite Cagn’s association with the Mantis and a
possible connection between the other members of his family and spe-
cific animals—Bleek suggests that Coti might be a dassie like /Kággen’s
wife—Cagn and his family behave primarily as humans, and the story
inaugurates one of the most distinctive of human activities, hunting, and
with it a greater, but not an absolute, differentiation between human and

animal. The story tells of a relationship of affinity and difference between
eland and people. The eland comes from a human body but it is not
human. It is placed outside human society, in the kloof, but also has a
role in human society as a ‘game’ animal and as an agent of transfor-
mation. Cagn intends eland (and indeed other animals) to be closer to
humans, more domestic, than they actually become. His plans go awry
partly as a result of the eland’s own efforts to escape, being speared by
Cagn, and partly because a group of young men led by Cagn’s oldest
son, Gcwi, kill the animal while Cagn himself is away trying to acquire
better weapons with which to hunt the young eland (Orpen 1874, p. 4).
It seems that this act has to be performed by Cagn himself or, at least, be
sanctioned by him.
The eland’s ‘training’ is part of a larger project: ‘He [Cagn] was at
that time making all animals and things, and making them fit for the use
of men, and making snares and weapons’ (Orpen 1874, p. 4). It has con-
sequences, however, that do not attend the ‘making fit’ of other animals
and things. The murdered eland’s churned blood gives rise to legions of
bull elands and then to female elands.5 Cagn sends Gcwi to hunt these
eland, but sets him up for failure; the antelope escape because ‘Cagn was
in their bones’. It is only when Cogaz, Cagn’s younger son, empow-
ered by his father’s blessing manages to kill two eland, that game were
given to men to eat, and this is the way they were spoilt and became
wild. Cagn said he must punish them for trying to kill the thing he made
which they did not know, and he must make them feel sore. (Orpen
1874, p. 5)
Here we can see the ambivalence in the relationship between people
and ‘game’ animals. Cagn allows people to hunt them, but makes it diffi-
cult to do so. It is notable that in the /Xam materials, /Kággen does his
best to prevent eland from being killed at all.6
All Qing’s stories concern an interplay between the human like beings
in Cagn’s family and animals. Sometimes they describe the passage from
a state in which animals are more like people to one in which they gain
the distinctive attributes of their species. Two of these narratives con-
cern baboons. In both cases the fixing of baboon identity takes the form
of a punishment. In the first a baboon wishes to take a young girl as
his wife (Orpen 1874, pp. 6–8). This actually occurs at first in another
woman’s dream but enters waking life when the baboon pursues the girl.
24 M. Wessels
She takes refuge with Qwanciqutshaa, a reclusive chief associated with

the higher reaches of the mountains. All the young women, including
this one, have previously refused to marry him. Qwanciqutshaa is first
mentioned in the text as one of three powerful chiefs, along with Cagn’s
two sons. Unlike the other two he exists outside a community. The girl
escapes the baboon by burrowing, an indication that she might still pos-
sess some animal attributes. The baboon is angry with the girl because he
mistakenly thinks that she has mocked the crookedness of his tail rather
than because she rejects him as such. Baboons and other animals, such as
lions, are sensitive to being ridiculed and stereotyped by humans in the
/Xam stories as well.
The baboon fights Qwanciqutshaa for the girl, but is defeated:
Qwanciqutshaa got it down and stuck it through with his own keerie,
and Qwanciqutshaa banished it to the mountains, saying, ‘Go, eat scor-
pions and roots as a baboon should,’ and it went screaming away; and the
screams were heard by the women at the place it came from, and all the
baboons were banished. (Orpen 1874, p. 7)
The problem it seems is not the animality or otherness of baboons

but their closeness to human beings.7 While the marriage between the
baboon and the human girl fails to materialise, it is, for a time, a possibil-
ity. Indeed, Qwanciqutshaa describes the baboon as the girl’s husband
who comes from her ‘place’, unlike Qwanciqutshaa himself, who lives in
another place. The baboon’s different identity becomes fixed in terms of
its different physique and its diet, its culture we might say, rather than its
animality. Only a page later Cagn himself delivers a similar punishment
to the baboons after they murder his son, Cogaz, and tie his corpse to a
tree:
He [Cagn] went and fetched a bag full of pegs, and he went behind each
of them as they were dancing and making a great dust, and he drove a
peg into each one’s back, and gave it a crack, and sent them off to the
mountains to live on roots, beetles, and scorpions, as a punishment. Before
that baboons were men, but since that they have tails and their tails hang
crooked. (Orpen 1874, p. 8)
That the same storyteller gives two varying accounts of the separation of
baboons from humans so close together should alert us to the fact that
these are not simple tales of origin. They simultaneously reiterate and
problematise difference rather than explain physical facts. The baboons
kill Cogaz in self-defence. He is cutting sticks which they suspect will be
made into arrows to hunt them. Interestingly they contest Cagn’s claim
to superior intelligence, the recurring basis of the assertion of human
exceptionalism: ‘Your father thinks himself more clever than we are; he
wants those bows to kill us, so we’ll kill you’ (ibid.) They mockingly
sing the words, ‘Cagn thinks he is clever’, while killing Cogaz. There is
a movement from person to animal in these two narratives. Several sto-
ries involving snakes chart a contrary passage from creature to person.
Baboons, it would appear, are too much like people—they have to be
separated from them—while snakes are too different and have to be
brought closer to the human. De Prada-Samper (2016, p. 96), though,
argues that snakes are, in some sense, already human. At least some
of the snakes in Qing’s stories are actually spirits of the dead that are
brought back to life and regain their human form. Snakes, in this read-
ing, are dead people who clearly possess the potential to transform, an
attribute, no doubt, linked to their capacity to shed their skins.
After rescuing the girl from the baboons Qwanciqutshaa is attacked
by young men from the girl’s band who wish to retrieve and marry her.
They are incensed that the girl refuses them and now claims to ‘love
none but Qwanciqutshaa, who saved me from the baboon’ (Orpen
1874, p. 7). They hate Qwanciqutshaa as a result and put snake poi-
son on his meat. He throws himself into the river but is pursued by a
gang of young women. While he was repellent to women at the begin-
ning of the story, now he cannot escape their attentions. Complaining
that ‘it is through women I was killed’ he turns into a snake and eludes
them (Orpen 1874, p. 7). He cannot escape the first woman’s love, how-
ever. Over a series of days, she lures him from the river, force feeds him
charms, holds him fast, smothers him in his kaross (an animal skin cloak),
and eventually turns him back into a man, her man.
We have already encountered snakes in the discussion of the rain animal.
They occur regularly in Qing’s stories as well in a variety of contexts. Like
eland and rhebok, they carry multiple significations: there is ‘a dynamic
assemblage of extant associations between snakes, rain, water, fertility,
blood, fat, transformation, dance and healing’ (Sullivan and Low 2014,
p. 215). In another of Qing’s stories involving metamorphosis from snake
to man, one of Cagn’s daughters runs away after her father ‘scolds’ her.
She throws herself among the snakes to ‘destroy herself’ but, ‘The snakes
26 M. Wessels
were also men, and their chief married her’ (Orpen 1874, p. 5). Cagn sends
Cogaz to recover his sister. There is a chase and a fight but the snakes are
divided among themselves. The chief himself advises the snakes not to get
angry for it is natural for people to reclaim ‘their child.’ In this story, snakes
can become kin through marriage and also show an ability to understand
human feelings. At the end of the story the snakes become people through
Cagn’s agency:
Cagn sent Cogaz for them to come and turn from being snakes, and he
told them to lie down, and he struck them with his stick, and as he struck
each the body of a person came out, and the skin of a snake was left on the
ground, and he sprinkled the skins with cannā, and the snakes turned from
being snakes and became his people. (Orpen 1874, p. 5)
Cagn himself sometimes turns into an animal, as does his counterpart in

the /Xam materials. In one of Qing’s stories he turns into a bull eland in
order to lure and kill a giant eagle that had earlier trapped him by offer-
ing to share its honey with him (Orpen 1874, p. 9). In another tale he is
said to have turned ‘his kaross and sandals into dogs and wild dogs, and
set[s] them at the Qobé giants and destroyed them’ (Orpen 1874, p. 6).
/Kággen, argues Mathias Guenther (1999), figures the openness of /
Xam belief, which in turn reflects an ability to work with uncertainty, a
prerequisite in a foraging economy. He also represents the loose bound-
aries between the animal, the human and the divine. He is at once an
insect and a man and also a supernatural being.
Relationship with the /Xam Materials

The /Xam stories are contemporary with those collected by Orpen from
Qing. As mentioned earlier, Bleek commented on Qing’s stories and on
the rock paintings copied by Orpen as did the important /Xam inform-
ant Dia!kwain. Unsurprisingly, therefore, comparisons between the two
archives have been made from the beginning. Bleek notes correspond-
ences but also differences. No two stories are exactly the same. Cagn has
more authority than /Kággen; he is less of a trickster:
But whether the stories given by !(k)ing are only tribal compositions, or
form part of the common national property of the Bushmen, a slightly
different character is attributed in them to the Mantis (Cagn = /kággen)
who, according to the myths told by our Bushman informants, is very far
from being represented as a “beneficient” [sic] being, but, on the contrary,
is a fellow full of tricks, and continually getting into scrapes, and even
doing purely mischievous things. (Orpen 1874, p. 12)
Qing tells Orpen that ‘Cagn made all things, and we pray to him’
(Orpen 1874, p. 2). The /Xam Bushmen by contrast, observes Bleek,
‘seem to know nothing of any worship of the Mantis’ (Orpen 1874, p.
12).
Cagn and his family act in more humanlike ways than they do in the
/Xam stories. As we have seen, Cagn is introduced in the first story as
busy ‘making all animals and things, and making them fit for the use of
men, and making snares and weapons.’ /Kággen’s closest family mem-
bers in the /Xam archive are referred to as animals: Dassie, Ichneumon,
Porcupine and Blue crane. We do not know whether the names of mem-
bers of Cagn’s family refer to animals, although Bleek conjectures that
Cagn’s wife’s name, Coti, resonates with the /Xam word for Dassie, the
/Xam /Kággen’s wife (Orpen 1874, p. 11).
The animal species that occur in the two sets of stories are often dif-
ferent; the stories, after all, originate in (and have been mediated by)
two very different environments. There are no springbok or gemsbok in
the mountains although eland, hartebeest, and baboons occur in both
the northern Cape and the Maloti-Drakensberg and are important to
both the /Xam and Qing’s stories. Lions and elephants are absent from
Qing’s stories too, while snakes occur much more frequently than they
do in the /Xam stories. It is notable that both Drakensberg stories and
rock paintings mostly feature animals that occur in the mountains even
though the people would also have been familiar with the animals that
populated the plains below.
In many ways comparisons are difficult given the brevity of the
Orpen-Qing archive and the context in which they were collected: a
three-week military expedition through the mountains. Orpen could not
speak Qing’s language. There was only one informant, whereas Bleek
and Lloyd had three major informants who stayed with them for years as
well as several less important ones. Clearly, though, there is a relationship
between the two traditions. The equivalence of Cagn’s name is especially
striking, as is the closeness of the stories about eland and baboons. It is
also remarkable that Dia!kwain was able to comment on the rock paint-
ings in a way that sheds light on their meaning even though he was not
28 M. Wessels
familiar with this cultural form. He came from an area in which there are
rock engravings rather than paintings. The engravings, which generally
depict a single species of animal, do not provide a close parallel with the
complex scenes found in the rock panels of the Drakensberg. As Andrew
Bank (2006, pp. 309–314) shows, Dia!kwain made guesses about the
paintings, and some of these were off the mark, but his guesses proved to
be better and much more productive for subsequent scholars than those
of the European commentators of the time.
The different environments, with their animals, are so powerfully pre-
sent in the two bodies of stories that they constitute much more than set-
ting or background. The atmosphere and mood of the Drakensberg and
the northern Cape stories differ largely because of the different landscapes
that are present in them: mist, snow, rivers, steep green slopes, on the one
hand, and dry scrub, koppies (hills), ant heaps and water holes, on the
other. The two environments are integral to the signifying economies of
the stories. Lewis-Williams (2010) has argued that the topography of the
mountains in Qing’s stories replicates the phases of consciousness during
trance. Solomon (1997) has emphasised the relationship between spirits
of the dead and waterholes in the arid Northern Cape. De Prada-Samper
(2016, p. 99) relates beliefs in an underwater world to high rainfall areas
of the region, such as the Drakensberg-Maloti, rather than to the sort of
dry areas in which the /Xam lived. It is clear that the two environments
are not simply reflected in the stories but are constitutive of them.
Despite the differences identified above, it is probably safe to assume
that the extensive /Xam corpus can be used as the basis for understand-
ing animal representation among the southern San more generally,
including the Drakensberg-Maloti area. The /Xam materials include
a great many stories that could be described as animal tales, in which
the characters are animals as distinct from people of the early race that
exhibit some of the characteristics of the animals they will become. The
Drakensberg-Maloti area must have contained stories of this type too. It
is notable that the animals in these stories are not speaking humans but
animals that speak. Their animal characteristics would have been accentu-
ated in oral performance in which the animals were mimicked. Special
vocabularies were developed for specific animals as well as different forms
of enunciation that were related to the shape of the animal’s mouth
(Hewitt 1986, pp. 51–53). Another notable feature of the /Xam nar-
ratives is the sheer range of animals present in them—the much shorter
sample of Drakensberg stories lacks this variety. Small animals are not
accorded less importance than larger, more powerful ones. The world
figured in the stories is not hierarchical. Particular species are named as
well, like long-nosed mice, for example, rather than generic mice.
In the Bleek and Lloyd archive the Bushmen are said by /Han#kass’o
at one point to be descended from springbok (L VIII.-4. 6365 rev.).8
The fact that this observation occurs only in passing in order to make the
point that present day /Xam people are not descended from the people
of the early race could be incidental—chance might have resulted in a
story about this event not being told at greater length. Its relegation to a
footnote,9 though, is suggestive of the way in which San stories generally
do not accord humans an inordinately exceptional place in the process of
becoming that has produced the present order of things. The human is
given primacy to the extent that the animals possess human characteris-
tics and lose them in the process of differentiation. This separation some-
times takes the form of a punishment. On the other hand, the animals
often seem to fulfil their true potential during the process: the loss of
human characteristics is not necessarily a fall. It should be remembered
too that the mythical period of formation has resonances with trans-
formations from human to animal and animal to human in the present
world as well.
Species in the /Xam stories of the people of the early race undergo a
process of differentiation, creating a world in which relationships of dif-
ference and affinity and their interplay produce not only endless possibili-
ties but also establish boundaries, albeit porous and fluid ones. This state
of affairs is exemplified in the mercurial figure of /Kággen. He spans the
everyday and the mythological, featuring in both narratives of the first
times and in accounts of the hunting practices that involve a sympathetic
identification with the animal a hunter shoots. /Kággen especially pro-
tects the eland and the hartebeest (also Drakensberg animals) and the
gemsbok, quagga and springbok (animals absent from the Drakensberg)
from the hunters’ poisoned arrows. With respect to the now-extinct
quagga, especially, we might wish that /Kággen had had some power
over the settlers’ bullets as well. /Kággen possesses both male and female
characteristics; he is sometimes protector but more often trickster; he
commands respect and invites ridicule; he is a childlike bumbler with
superhuman powers; he is an insect, who speaks and acts like a human
and a human with some attributes of an insect.
30 M. Wessels
Conclusion
In San stories, we have seen, animals are good to think with. But this
formulation could be too instrumentalist. It is not that animals are used
by humans to think with so much that human life, thought and culture
are impossible without animals. In certain sorts of stories—those that are
closest to myths as traditionally conceived perhaps—it is often the ani-
mals that are best to eat that are also best to think with; in the Northern
Cape these are the eland, hartebeest, springbok, gemsbok and quagga
that belong to Cagn. In the Drakensberg, the eland and hartebeest
are joined by the rhebok. Drawing on ideas of ‘new animisms’, Mark
McGranaghan (2014, p. 674) notes that the way communities like the
/Xam ‘commonly assign ‘personhood’ status to a range of non-human
groups’ enables them to make ‘[e]valuations of appropriate and inap-
propriate forms of behaviour… [that] incorporate interactions not only
with other (human) people, but also shape encounters with non-human
species’. This provides the basis of a behavioural ethos, often enacted
in stories, that draws on a human-animal continuum in which ‘physi-
cal descriptions and personal traits’ are ‘linked to positive and negative
assessments of personhood’ (McGranaghan 2014, p. 673).
Animals in both Qing’s and the /Xam narratives do not merely serve
as metaphorical substitutes for human attributes and relationships.
Animals as represented in the stories are flesh and blood beings with con-
sciousness. They respond to human beings but are also different from
humans. The first eland in Qing’s story already possesses agency; it resists
its creator’s attempts to control its behaviour. The distance between
humans and animals is bridged by the hunter’s arrow; the hunter and
animal enter a relationship of sympathetic identification, from the time
the arrow strikes the animal until it dies. The divide is also crossed in
art and storytelling. San storytellers today in the Kalahari and Namibia,
become in part, the animals of which they tell. Metamorphosis and
other sorts of interplay between human and animal are central to the
protean signifying capacity of the stories. Artists do not only paint ani-
mals but use animal ingredients in their paint, some of these for magical
reasons. In trance in the Kalahari (and beyond, if Lewis-Williams is cor-
rect), San people harness the energy and power of animals, a force that
is both spiritual and physical. This experience is figured in paintings and
also, according to Lewis-Williams, in the stories as well, which he reads
for the most part as allegories for trance journeys. In death, if we follow
Solomon (2007) instead, humans after a time as stars become fused with
animals in an underwater realm from where they continue to interact
with the living in ways that can be malign or benign. They can help heal,
hunt and make rain but can also harm and kill. Clearly the differences
and similarities between human and animal are aesthetically, epistemo-
logically and metaphysically generative.
However we read San rock art and narrative, the differences between
Qing’s representations of animals and those of the animals in Grant’s
accounts of the journey are striking. The animals mentioned by Grant
in the journey through the Maloti stand apart from humans. They are
counted, eaten, hunted, ridden and used to carry. In Qing’s stories, they
speak to humans, trick them, fight with them, help them and turn into
them. It is likely also that the humans in the story, Cagn and his family
primarily, are in some sense also animal and that their supernatural pow-
ers are attributable to this indeterminacy. The world of Qing’s stories is a
world in which the boundaries between animal and human are fluid; they
are continually subject to revision and negotiation. In one sense, these
are stories of transition and becoming. They tell of a process of greater
differentiation and separation as the order of the first times gives way to
the order of the present. But they are also reminders of the fluid nature
of being animal in the present.
Notes
1. See de Prada-Samper’s (2016) detailed examination of the genesis of
Orpen’s article in which he compares the final article with the submitted
manuscript.
2. Ubuntu is an eastern and southern African concept that has been used as
the basis for an argument for a distinctively African humanism. Since the
1990s in South Africa it has frequently been conflated with the Nguni
proverb umuntu ngumuntungabatu—a person is a person through other
persons (see Gade 2012).
3. The term ‘Kafir’ was used by Europeans to refer to speakers of Sotho and
Nguni languages in southern Africa in the nineteenth century. It has since
assumed an extremely derogatory denotation.
4. See, for example, Lewis-Williams (2003).
5. De Prada-Samper (2016) links the churning of the blood to the prepara-
tion of paint and recalls Patricia Vinnicombe’s (2009, 172) hypothesis that
painting eland could have been a way to bring back to life the eland killed
in hunting.
32 M. Wessels
6. This means, Vinnicombe (2009) points out, that ‘every time a hunter
killed one of these animals especially loved and protected by Kággen, he
incurred the displeasure of his deity.’ De Prada-Samper (2016) argues that
in the Drakensberg the chief Qwanciqutshaa, rather than Cagn himself,
assumes the role of ‘the keeper and protector’ of the eland.
7. Dorothea Bleek remarks intriguingly in a letter in 1930, in relation to the
popular misconstrual of Darwin’s theory that humans are descended from
apes, that ‘For the Bushman himself the idea would not be unfamiliar or
repulsive’ (Weintroub 2015).
8. The reference here is to one of Lucy Lloyd’s unpublished notebooks.
9. It occurs on one of the reverse pages of the notebooks used mainly for
explication of the main text.
Works Cited
Bank, A. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian world: The remarkable story of the Bleek-
Lloyd collection of Bushman folklore. Cape Town: Double Storey.
Challis, S. 2005. ‘The men with rhebok’s heads; they tame elands and snakes’:
Incorporating the rhebok antelope in the understanding of southern African
rock art. South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 9: 11–20.
Challis, S. 2009. The impact of the horse on the Amatola ‘Bushmen’: New
identity in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of southern Africa. Azania:
Archaeological Research in Africa 44 (1): 156–157.
———. 2012. Creolisation on the nineteenth-century frontiers of southern
Africa: A case study of the Amatola ‘bushmen’ in the Maloti-Drakensberg.
Journal of Southern African Studies 38 (2): 265–280.
De Prada-Samper, J. 2016. ‘A partial clue’: The genesis and context of Qing and
Orpen’s conversations. In On the trail of Qing and Orpen, ed. M. de Prada-
Samper, M. du Plessis, J. Hollmann, J. Weintroub, J. Wintjes, and J. Wright,
29–102. Johannesburg: Standard Bank.
Gade, C. 2012. What is Ubuntu? Different interpretations among South Africans
of African descent. South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (3): 484–503.
Guenther, M. 1999. Tricksters and trancers: Bushman religion and society.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hewitt, R. 1986. Structure, meaning and ritual in the narratives of the southern
San. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1964. Totemism. London: Merlin Press.
Lewis-Williams, D. (ed.). 2000. Stories that float from afar: Ancestral folklore of
the San of southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.
———. 2003. Images of mystery: Rock art of the Drakensberg. Cape Town:
Double Storey.
———. 2010. The imagistic web of San myth, art and landscape. Southern
African Humanities 22: 1–18.
McGranahan, M. 2014. ‘Different people’ coming together: Representations of
alterity in /Xam Bushman (San) narrative. Critical Arts 28 (4): 670–688.
McGranahan, M, S. Challis, and D. Lewis-Williams. 2013. Joseph Millerd
Orpen’s ‘A glimpse into the mythology of the Maluti Bushmen’: A contextual
introduction and republished text. Southern African Humanities 25: 137–166.
Mitchell, P. 2006. Remembering the Mountain Bushmen: Observation of nine-
teenth century hunter-gatherers in Lesotho as recorded by Victor Ellenberger.
Southern African Field Archaeology 15–16: 3–11.
Mitchell, P., and S. Challis. 2008. A ‘first’ glimpse into the Maloti Mountains:
The diary of James Murray Grant’s expedition of 1873–1874, Southern
African Humanities 20 (2): 399–461.
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Monthly Magazine 9: 1–13.
Schmidt, S. 2013. South African /Xam Bushman traditions and their relation-
ships to further Khoisan folklore. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Solomon, A. 1997. The myth of ritual origins? Ethnography, mythology and
interpretation of San rock art. South African Archaeological Bulletin 52: 3–13.
———. 2007. Images, words and worlds: The /Xam testimonies and the rock
arts of the southern San. In Claim to the country: The archive of Wilhelm Bleek
and Lucy Lloyd ed. P. Skotnes, 149–159. Johannesburg: Jacana.
Sullivan, S., and C. Low. 2014. Shades of the rainbow serpent? A Khoesan ani-
mal between myth and landscape in Southern Africa—Ethnographic contex-
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Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
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Bushmen as a reflection of their life and thought. Johannesburg: Wits University
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University Press.
Author Biography
Michael Wessels teaches English literature at the University of the Western
Cape. His research interests include San narrative, indigeneity, oral literature,
South African literature and Indian literature. He is the author of Bushman
Letters (2010) and co-editor of San Representation: Politics, Practice and
Possibilities (2015).
CHAPTER 3
Kabbo Sings the Animals
Dan Wylie
I want to start with two poems, namely ‘//Kabbo Sings the Animals’
and ‘Hyenas fear the Fire’, delivered by the 1870s /Xam ‘Bushman’
informant //Kabbo. The wrinkled visage of //Kabbo has become the
public face of the Bleek-Lloyd Archive, Southern Africa’s premier source
of recorded material on the so-called Bushman people, the /Xam of the
Northern Cape.1 He was probably the best informed and eloquent of
all the /Xam informants, whose combined testimony amounts to some
12,000 notebook pages. Recording testimonies from 1871 onwards, the
archive, the entirety of which is accessible online, has spawned a substan-
tial body of secondary analysis.2 I will return to certain problematic con-
texts and processes later; for the moment I want to focus on the poems
themselves, as a modern reader might encounter them for the first time,
unencumbered by background and scholarship.
The first poem seems little more than a kind of chanted list, a medita-
tive enumeration, not very interesting on the page:
D. Wylie (*) 
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
e-mail: d.wylie@ru.ac.za

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_3
36 D. Wylie
the little snake

the little snake
the little snake
the little snake
the little snake
the very little snake
the little coloured snake
the small coloured snake
the small snake
the small snake
the black snake
the long black snake
the long yellow snake
the long thick snake
the long thick snake
the puff-adder
the puff adder
the puff adder
(//Kabbo sang)
(James 2001, p. 61)
What’s most interesting is perhaps the title: not ‘//Kabbo sings to,
or about, or for the animals’, but ‘sings the animals’, as if bringing them
into being, as if organically connected to them through the power of
song itself—which in a way must be so, since right now those animal
presences are being ‘sung’ into our own minds.
The second poem feels more intriguing, hinting at customs, ecological
contexts, narratives and behaviours:
hyenas eat meat that is raw,

and they eat ostrich eggs that are raw, that are cold,
3 KABBO SINGS THE ANIMALS 37
they all eat things that are raw

for they keep no fire, they fear the fire, they run from fire,
for they remember how the hyena mother once burned her feet
when she stood on the coals of a fire at the Dawn Heart’s house:
for she had feared his assegai (//Kabbo explained) […]
(James 2001, p. 61)
From these opening lines we might draw some observations, such as

the following:
Firstly, the language and layout used here are distinctively poetic. It is
euphonious, lyrical, centred on the page, laid out in couplets, without
much punctuation. It is structured and repetitive, perhaps evoking the
textures of an oral dance-song. Secondly, it announces itself as testimony
by a specific individual—the parenthetical ‘(//Kabbo…)’—so we are
assured that this was delivered at a specific moment and situation in his-
tory. Thirdly, the poem evokes an animal presence that is an amalgam,
a complexity of: (a) empirically-observed hyena behaviour, distinguish-
able from the human (cooked vs raw); (b) a legendary ‘explanation’ of
why the hyena’s paws are now black; and (c) an evocation of a mythic
era when humans and hyenas were in communicative harmony. The
poem thus arguably manifests a certain democratic equality, an ecology
as much cooperative as competitive, with an underpinning of reverence
or respect. It would appear to support, then, William Adams’ opinion of
writing towards ‘the possibility of the decolonisation of environmental-
ism’ (Miller 2014, p. 17), and the role of indigenous knowledges in that:
[C]onservationists need to re-think their dependence on standard Western

assumptions about the ‘divide’ between people and non-human nature.
They need a more pluralist understanding of different understandings,
meanings and values of biodiversity. There is already widespread accept-
ance that indigenous or traditional knowledge is highly relevant to ecosys-
tem conservation. Compared to modern science, such knowledge may be
holistic and adaptive, gathered over generations by observers whose lives
depended on its use. (Adams 2005, cited in Miller 2014, p. 17)
Such valorisation of ‘indigenous Bushman’ eco-knowledge is indeed

widespread, ranging from James Workman’s argument in The Heart
of Dryness (2009) that Bushman lifeways offer crucial skills in an
38 D. Wylie
increasingly water-poor world, to Patricia Glyn’s recent (2013) account

of contact with contemporary Bushman Dawid Kruiper:
It is common for people who do not appreciate the restorative value of

nature to dismiss the Bushmen as ‘backward’. Too often the politically
powerful who hold the fate of Africa’s First people in their hands fail
to understand just what the Bushmen lose when they are ripped away
from the wild places that bring them joy and balance…. For we were all
Bushmen once upon a time, and their all-knowing oneness with the Earth,
its systems and inhabitants is what we lost when we left the ‘bush’.
Our psychological trauma at this separation from source manifests in

dysfunctional and violent societies, wholehearted disregard for nature’s
bounty and a terrifying assault on her creatures. (Glyn 2013, p. 141)
That ‘Western’—now global—modernity has proved unprecedentedly

destructive of ecosystems and their animal denizens is beyond dispute.
Whether resort to ‘indigenous knowledges’ such as the Bushman’s can
actually be efficacious is much less certain, especially, I will suggest, with
regard to human-animal relations. More acerbic commentators recognise
that critiquing the West via the ‘primitive’ is less often a lived actuality
than a literary trope, going back at least as far as Michel de Montaigne’s
essay ‘On Cannibals’ and migrating into the present through Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, Laurens van der Post’s books of the
1960s, to contemporary filmmakers who ‘have encoded a parable which
keeps alive the idea that modernity might still save its own soul and
restore something of the ecological balance destroyed by industrial soci-
ety’ (Tomaselli 1999, pp. 206–207). The //Kabbo poems I began with
inevitably echo that ‘parable’, though inflected by a number of incon-
sistencies, ambivalences and complications that manifest, in heightened
form, general epistemological problems in assimilating the avowed ‘holis-
tic’ attractiveness of indigenous knowledges. What, in short, are ‘we
moderns’ to make of such poems, and of the ‘indigenous’ human-animal
relations depicted in them?
In what follows I will touch on three problematic aspects: firstly,
the complexly layered textuality of these poems; secondly, the issue of
just who the ‘indigenous’ are, from whom these knowledges ostensi-
bly derive; and thirdly, the question of social or ideological predisposi-
tion in our raising such a question in the first place. How one tackles
these inter-nested issues depends on the precise questions one is raising.
Is this primarily an exercise in literary criticism, assessing the formal and

affective qualities of the poems qua poems (how do these works make us
feel about the animals depicted)? Or is it primarily an empirical-historical
question of what we can learn about the ‘Bushman’ qua Bushman and
‘his’ relations with animals and/or ecosystems (what can we learn of this
primordial state of being)? Or is it primarily an ethical search for more
holistic, temperate or compassionate ways of treating animals qua ani-
mals, with the implication that certain current treatments are unsatisfac-
tory (what can we learn from that state of being)?
It seems necessary, at least, that any approach be informed by the
growing nexus of ecocriticism, animal studies and postcolonial the-
ory. The confluence of these historically rather distinct fields of inquiry
remains fluid, as it were, and within each of them nuances, emphases
and tensions remain in some contestation. Ecocriticism, for example, has
emerged in ‘nature-writing’, ‘materialist’, and feminist and activist modes
and phases; post-coloniality has struggled to incorporate animals and
ecosystems coherently into an historically anthropocentric modus oper-
andi; and animal studies has manifested in distinct strands, as noted by
literary critic John Miller:
While critical animal studies is determined in its commitment to animal lib-

eration, animality studies (as laid out by Michael Lundblad) distances itself
from direct animal advocacy to ‘prioritise questions of human politics’
(a central theme, of course, of postcolonial studies […]). Zoocriticism, a
coinage of Huggan and Tiffin’s, designates the specifically literary aspect
of animal studies and forms a closer counterpart to ecocriticism than the
broader disciplinary sweep of the other terms allows.
So, the relationship between animal studies, ecocriticism and postcolonial

studies is marked by tension as much as continuity. (Miller 2014, p. 6)
The potential of synergy seems promising, however. In our case,

‘Bushman’ relations occurred within quite site-specific ecological
milieux, constraints and benefits, with self-evident effects on their artis-
tic and spiritual performances and rock art: this necessitates the inter-
section of ecological and animal studies perspectives. Many readers will
be familiar with the dynamic and alluring rock art, perhaps less so with
the debate around their interpretation. Those interpretations themselves
inevitably reach the world as texts, as verbal impressions or arguments.
Some interpretations (starting with Wilhelm Bleek’s daughter Dorothea)
40 D. Wylie
have attempted to explain rock art through Bushman folklore or oral

‘texts’. This is a slippery business, however: not only are folk tales or
other testimonies themselves ‘no simple sort of mirror’ of their society
(Biesele 1993, p. 14), rock art and folk tales are also not ‘illustrations’
of one another (Guenther 1999, p. 165; Wessels 2010, pp. 276–277).
//Kabbo’s orations cannot be easily commandeered to that particu-
lar project; his presence is textual and literary from the outset. Similarly,
‘we non-Bushmen’ have never physically encountered the subcontinent’s
hunter-gatherers outside of a colonial/postcolonial textual framework;
and we are dependent on that quite miniscule band of travellers and
anthropologists who have conveyed their experiences textually (incorpo-
rating film as ‘text’ for our purposes). Generally, then, our reception of
‘Bushman knowledges’ is only textual, in languages and forms other than
their putative originals, necessitating the intersection of literary criticism
and postcolonial perspectives.
This confluence might help address certain gaps in ‘animal studies’
in extant ‘Bushman’ scholarship. To be sure, the rock art experts have
unavoidably worked extensively with the art’s animal presences, their
spiritual power, their therianthropic transformations in trance-dance and
hunting-scene representations (see Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004).
This has, curiously, not been reflected in the enormous anthropological
scholarship: of over a thousand references in the bibliography of Khoe-
and San-related publications by Sheelagh Willett et al. (2002), only nine
highlight ‘animals’ as a keyword. Several dozen focus on aspects of hunt-
ing, but largely in economic or developmental terms to do with surviv-
ing ‘Bushman’ communities. Other anthropologists typically try to draw
closer to some notion of originary Bushman-animal practices, some
brilliantly—like Mathias Guenther on animals and shamanistic practice,
and Megan Biesele, a folklorist whose sensitivity to verbal nuance comes
closer to my own interest—but they typically eschew modern and post-
colonial literary representations. Deserving further investigation, too, is
the literariness of anthropological texts themselves, which we ‘tertiary
level’ scavengers must rely upon.
Moreover, there appears to be very little that focuses analyti-
cally on either animals-as-animals or animals-as-imaginings in all the
minor industry of textual scholarship that has flourished around the
Bleek-Lloyd Archive, from which//Kabbo’s testimonies are drawn.
Contributors to the most relevant collection of essays, Jeanette
Deacon and Pippa Skotnes’ The Courage of //Kabbo (2014) mention
animals frequently in passing, but uniformly in service of unpacking

the dynamics of curatorship. Shane Moran’s chapter ‘Human/animal’
in his book Representing Bushmen, excellent as it is, is about the role
of the animals in the development of language theories among Bleek
and his contemporaries, not about the animals themselves (Moran
2009, pp. 48–66). Similarly, Michael Wessels in Bushman Letters, the
theoretically most challenging study of the Bleek-Lloyd Archive and
its scholars, includes almost nothing on ecology or animal relations.
(Wessels begins to address this dimension in his essay in this volume.)
In sum, animals depicted as integral components of a functioning
ecosystem, both apart from and within the Bushman imaginative uni-
verse, seem generally to have escaped sustained attention, even though
the ecology of a hunter-gatherer society necessarily underpins absolutely
everything else we might say about //Kabbo’s /Xam society. But in this
case we are dealing purely with literary depictions of that human-animal
ecology, and those depictions are inevitably postcolonial in setting or
perspective. I shall certainly not attempt to adjudicate here between all
the tensions and continuities between these schools of thought, but will
touch on them opportunistically, and finally speculate on whether their
commonalities might be accommodated within a current re-conceptuali-
sation of animism as a world view.
What Is Alan James Doing?

As we saw, ‘//Kabbo Sings the Animals’ presents itself as a certain kind
of poetic text. Alan James’s (2001) book, The First Bushman’s Path, in
which it appears, has not been paid much literary attention, and certainly
has not been located within the nexus of animal studies and postcolo-
nial ecocriticism. A large number of the poems involve animals. James’s
poetic treatment of testimonies from several Bleek-Lloyd informants
joins several predecessors, notably Stephen Watson’s Return of the Moon
(2000) and Antjie Krog’s The Stars Say Tsau! (2004), but James’s col-
lection is distinguished by being considerably fuller, in the number of
poems, in the weight of its introduction, and in its addition of exten-
sive ‘anthropological’ notes. //Kabbo’s contributions to the volume
are the most substantial and knowledgeable—he was the oldest of the
Bleek informants, and may even have been something of a shaman. At
least two of his poems treat of a ‘First Era’, a mythical primordial time
of greater human-animal congruence, namely ‘The things of /Kaggen
42 D. Wylie
speak’ (James 2001, p. 42) and ‘The animals become animals’ (p. 45).
‘The lion eats all things’ (p. 60), is a chant descriptive of the lion’s
omnivorous power; ‘Springbok ewes in autumn’ (p. 64) celebrates the
rainy-season springbok migrations; ‘Sho/oa makes the game run fool-
ishly’ (p. 70) treats of a hunter’s magical medicines. The life this points
to is not always Edenic or safe, as//Kabbo notes in ‘The story of the
wounded hunter’ (pp. 81–84) and ‘//Kabbo and /Han≠kasso speak
of drought’ (p. 111). Ultimately, //Kabbo also relates the break-
down of /Xam society, in nostalgic vein in ‘The First Bushman’s Path’
(pp. 137–138) and ‘//Kabbo tells the genealogy of !Khi-ttu’ (p. 139).
Interleaving these poems with related accounts by other informants,
James chooses an overall narrative arrangement, from mythical ‘First
Race’ times through thematic concerns such as magical medicines and
rainmaking, to the dissolution of the /Xam (though he excludes some
of the most immediate and personalised experiences contained in the
archive). This very selectivity raises the problematics of extricating ‘indig-
enous knowledge’ or a comprehensive animal ecology from the volume,
however much the poems appear to evince just that.
James’s ‘poems’ are not translations from //Kabbo’s original /Xam
language, but versions of testimonies delivered by a number of inform-
ants to the philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd,
in Cape Town in the early 1870s. The informants, including //Kabbo,
were erstwhile inmates at the Breakwater Prison, having been convicted
of various ‘crimes’ ranging from stock theft to murder, and are often
seen as the remnants of a linguistic so-called ‘Bushman’ /Xam commu-
nity already in the process of dismemberment. No sooner had Bleek and
Lloyd fashioned an ad hoc orthography to capture the/Xam language,
than /Xam died out, a synecdoche of the near-genocidal elimination of
‘Bushmen’ generally, their lifeways, the animals and their ecosystems.
That genocide haunts all subsequent Southern African literature.
The First Bushman’s Path emerged as the latest in a long line of tribu-
tary poetic versions of /Xam testimonies: Laurens van der Post, Eugene
Marais, G.R. von Wielligh, Jack Cope, Stephen Watson and Antjie Krog
among them. James asserted to me that ‘there was no initial ‘fascination’
with the San people/culture or with the Bleek & Lloyd material: it was
merely a case of executing a literary task’ (2006, personal communica-
tion 16 August). That task arose, he wrote, because on immigrating to
Australia he ‘felt an obligation to make some positive gesture, literary or
otherwise, as a mark of respect and gratitude to the people/country/
personal connections I was abandoning’ (ibid.). As he researched, the

/ Xam material became ‘compelling’:
The more I read, the more I began to see the San people as creators and
inhabitants and possessors of a rich world, but also as victims of the greed
and power of other races, black, brown and white. The horribleness and
selfishness of human nature, the shallowness of contemporary Western civi-
lisation, glared and brayed in stark contrast to the traditional San values of
sharing and egalitarianism and living lightly on the land. (ibid.)
The potentially stereotyping and vicarious nostalgia is in a sense

addressed, however, by the very act of ‘versioning’, of broadening the
testimonies out into a modernist, more accessible poetic form. As James
told Duncan Brown:
It is an artist’s vanity to assert that literature and the other arts speak for
those who cannot speak – just because they have been stopped or dissuaded
or discouraged or disempowered from speaking – whether through personal
disability, oppression, capitalist exploitation and trivialisation, or extinction. I
wish that my poem-versions, and through them their aboriginal narrations,
might speak of, and with, the /Xam people who have been extinguished. I
also wish that the poems might confront and teach and remind and expose.
It is literature’s task to point and to prod. (Brown 2002, p. 171)
To ‘speak of, and with’, not ‘for’. As Lynda Martin Alcoff has suggested,
speaking ‘of’ may not avoid the essentialisation so predominant in the
act of speaking ‘for’ other humans (Alcoff nd). Can one say the same of
the animals in the poems? Since animals and humans are, at least in the
‘First Era’ myths, indistinguishable or equal, one might argue that the
poems speak ‘with’ rather than ‘for’ the animals, too. This would seem
to me, however, tangential to James’s project. The animal and ecological
dimension was not a particular focus for James, although ecological val-
ues inevitably emerged he wrote,
…that challenge many of the values that we hold today: respect for the
natural order, regard for animals as subjective sentient living things, fellow
creatures of the land, not just as food and as objects to be exploited… My
work certainly reflects the notion of a traditional “ecological community”,
and just as the /Xam texts unconsciously celebrate it (see for example
//Kabbo’s singing of animal names), so my work also celebrates it. (2006,
personal communication 16 August)
44 D. Wylie
The phrase ‘reflects the notion’ is crucial here: James’s versions are not
an unmediated representation of that (obliterated) ‘ecological commu-
nity’ rooted in ‘indigenous knowledges’, but an idea, a literary projec-
tion, of such a community. As several reviews and commentaries agree
(see van Vuuren 2003; Brown 2002), James is aware of the possible ethi-
cal objections to his enterprise—that it might be ‘appropriative’, might
‘obscure and subordinate’ the narrators, or involve a ‘romanticization’
and ‘excessive othering’ (James 2001, pp. 20–21). He is alert to the
tendency—inevitability, really—that the testimonies can become mere
‘objects’, exploited
…to make things that are other than what they are: they are made into
quotable bits of evidence to develop or support a proposition; they are
made into cleaned, modernised versions of the texts in part-substitute for
the real thing, and they are made to perform in guise of poems. (James
2001, p. 19)
James nevertheless defends his doing exactly this, arguing that such
modernisation is our only means ‘by which the veil of primary otherness
might be pierced or lightened’. He aims to make obscure or awkward
locutions in Bleek’s original transcriptions more ‘accessible’ to the ‘gen-
eral reader’, to perform a ‘vitalization’ of ‘slumbering’ material (p. 19).
What may be read by the English-speaking reader as ‘vital’ and compre-
hensible, however, presents the problem of whether this in effect con-
tinues to draw on established stereotypes, either of the ‘Bushmen’ or of
‘poetry’—rather like the bowdlerisation of Lakota lifeways performed
by imported Indians for Carl Hagenbeck’s circuses in Germany around
1910 (see Penny 2013, p. 57), or indeed the Bushmen in London noto-
riously derided by Charles Dickens half a century before that in his essay
‘The Noble Savage’ (Dickens 1999, p. 561).
James explains that he was, in part, stimulated by another particular
poetic ‘transnational’ project, the ‘versioning’ of native American stories
and songs by Ernesto Cardenal in a 1992 volume entitled Golden UFOs:
The Indian poems, poems that struck James as ‘lyrical, historical and con-
temporary, and democratic’ (2006, personal communication 16 August;
see also Brown 2002, p. 155). The impulse similarly to evoke poetry
from the Bleek-Lloyd Archive has been touched on by a few commenta-
tors, notably Duncan Brown. Since /Xam kukummi3 do not conform in
any way to Western genre-definitions, it is intriguing that to so many
writers poetry has seemed the best medium in which to reflect our concerns
with the vanished ecology of the /Xam. The implications are complex, even
if one feels, as Krog and James both did, that the testimonies ‘naturally fell
into poetry’ (Krog 2004, p. 10). On this view, oral performance delivery
and unpunctuated, free verse modernist poetics fall unexpectedly into step.
As is clear from his commentaries, James often considers the poetry
to reflect a performative aspect to the kukummi. Rhythms and repeti-
tions attract particular attention, as if to draw closer to a trance-dance
‘original and authentic’, ‘oral’ cultural production. This runs the risk of
reproducing a stereotype of orality, an ‘invention of oral man’, in Leroy
Vail and Landeg White’s term (Vail and White 1991), distinguished by a
poetics of generalised difference. However, in this case particularly, there
is no original performance to draw towards: even //Kabbo’s recorded
testimonies were extracted under highly artificial, dislocated and labo-
rious circumstances. They were delivered in order to be written down;
the boundary between oral and written—central to a long tradition of
anthropology—blurs or even vanishes. Moreover, James frequently com-
bines different testimonies, sometimes from more than one informant,
in order to compile a certain picture. The choices being made here are
thus primarily stylistic rather than representational; indeed, if one com-
pares versions by James, Watson and Krog, similarities to the styles of
their respective personal poems are often evident.
If Watson is drawn to a certain languid overlapping of images, a slow
and subtly repetitive progression through a poem, that affects his presen-
tations of /Xam versions, Krog and James both stay closer to the original
wording while employing more adventurous layouts common to modern-
ist, or even postmodernist, European poetics. James echoes Krog’s mod-
ernist eschewal of capitals and her use of italics for select segments. He
adds other purely typographical choices of layout, such as justifying right
rather than the conventional left. He uses such effects in his own work,
as in his volume Ferry to Robben Island, regardless of subject matter.
James also takes greater liberties with the Bleek originals, inserting more
explanatory material, combining phrases from up to half a dozen different
bits of the archive, and deliberately avoiding /Xam words (rrrú), noting
explicitly that he aims at a different, less locally-versed readership.
Whatever one thinks of the ethics of such ‘versionings’, such pal-
impsests of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, of ‘self’ and ‘other’, are both
exciting and, as Bakhtin noted of all discourse, inevitably ‘dialogic’ and
multiply layered (Bakhtin 1999, p. 114). Just who ‘owns’ these textual
46 D. Wylie
productions, then, becomes tricky—as made especially vivid in the ‘pla-

giarism’ dispute over this material between Watson and Krog (see dis-
cussion in Wessels 2010, pp. 289–293). Or it becomes moot: words
themselves, as Bakhtin also said, belong to no one (Bakhtin 1999, p.
116). Not everyone entirely approves of the choice of poetry to repre-
sent a /Xam ‘reality’. David Lewis-Williams, for one, has objected
to the poets’ ‘prettification’ of the testimonies, arguing for prose in
his own compilation, Stories that Float from Afar (2000). Those same
prose-narrative transcriptions, however, have themselves not escaped
being selected, edited and massaged in order to conform more closely
to Western preconceptions of coherent ‘story’. Narrative coherence and
meaningfulness are equally culture-bound: kukummi may present some
overlap with stories intelligible to a Western or English-speaking reader,
but also baffling differences. In effect, our writers select from the archive
that which ‘makes sense’, and re-shape that which doesn’t. This affects
anthropological writing, too; Wilmsen has shown how previous writers
deliberately omitted ‘modernising’ aspects of the Bushman groups they
were studying in order to construct a picture of their ‘purity’ which had
already become both false and partly irretrievable (Wilmsen 1989, p. 34).
We can read the poems, in one fashion, as fatally compromised by
their own textual provenance, from the initially problematic translation
processes within Bleek and Lloyd’s colonial-era source-archive, through
to the post-apartheid politics of racial guilt and restorations, and the
uneven business of twenty-first century publishing. In another mode,
however, one can also read them a historically as freestanding works of
the imagination, affective immediately and in their own right.
Perhaps we effectively read in both modes in oscillation, matching the
compromise literary strategy suggested by Duncan Brown in his chap-
ter on the /Xam in Voicing the Text, one that hovers between accessibil-
ity and the retention of strangeness. James’s poems are both dependent
for resonance upon, and in opposition to, the extensive anthropological
paratextual notes he adds to ‘explain’ them; they both feed on and coun-
ter the avowedly objective and stabilising claims to historical and anthro-
pological knowledge, presenting instead new and singular performances
of internalised, affective, poetic experiences-in-themselves. Moreover, we
not only read the texts as ‘hybrid’; we also read as hybrid. Implicit in
this idea is not only an ineluctable heterogeneity in the poems and their
presentation, but a heterogeneity in our reading; I may be a ‘Western’
reader, but ‘the West’ is also a heterogeneity.
As for the human-animal relations, then, what we get is not quite an

accurate representation of /Xam animal knowledges, nor a clear ethical
proposition useable in the present. Something closer to a feeling, perhaps
emerges through James’s versioning, and a particular one: in any per-
spective, ‘//Kabbo Sings the Animals’ can hardly be read as other than
elegy—of which the pre-eminent medium is the poem.
Who Are We Talking About?

The craggy, lined face of //Kabbo peers from almost any treatment of
the Bleek-Lloyd Archive of /Xam ‘Bushman’ testimony, iconic now of
the whole enterprise of restoring the ‘Bushman’ to a proper place in his-
tory. He has literally become a tourist attraction (see Davie 2010). But
can we really know who //Kabbo was, apart from the textual construc-
tion he has ineluctably become? We think we know certain details of his
life (see Bank 2006; Brown 1998; Deacon and Skotnes 2014). He was
a so-called ‘Flat Bushman’ from near Kenhardt in the Northern Cape,
aged in his sixties, recognised by Bleek as a particularly adept performer
of kukummi, possibly a shaman. One thing we know //Kabbo was
not: an example of some antiquarian, precolonial purity of hunter-gath-
erer life. Such purity, as revisionist commentators like Edwin Wilmsen
and Robert Gordon have argued, had long gone, if it had ever existed.
//Kabbo himself related his responses to invasion from Boer farmers,
his farm work, his train journey; he was already deeply imbricated in
modernity. A real enough life, no doubt, yet our experience of him now
is inevitably purely textual, and much of our impression of him is derived
from the quality of his testimonies, the kukummi themselves. In other
words, ‘our’ //Kabbo is primarily a literary construct—in some ways his
own literary construct—successively re-inscribed through layers of poetic
(mis)interpretation, a //Kabbo multiply imagined.
Equally slippery is the identification of ‘/Xam’: and unlike the !Kung
or Ju’hoansi groups, who still exist in some form to be exhaustively stud-
ied, the ‘/Xam’ can now only be imagined. As Anne Solomon has noted,
all the scholarship notwithstanding, ‘we still know remarkably little of
the[ir] cultural identities’ (2014, p. 333). This ignorance extends to ani-
mal relations, a crucial component of that identity.
And who are the ‘Bushmen’, of whom //Kabbo is portrayed as a
member? The extensive literature exploring the provenance and impli-
cations of the various names given to the autochthonous people of the
48 D. Wylie
subcontinent—Boschesman, Bushmen, San, Abatwa, Basarwa—is riven

with arguments about how coherent or unitary a sub-continental cul-
ture such a name might refer to. Wilmsen argues that Western anthro-
pologists essentially invented the ‘Bushman’ in order to ‘certify [their]
own ontological quest’ (Wilmsen 1989, p. 24) and ‘to serve the emerg-
ing segregationist solution to the harsher effects of [colonial] domina-
tion’ (p. 26).4 Wilmsen is echoed by Robert Gordon, who writes in The
Bushman Myth that
…the overwhelming textbook image is that they are different from us in

terms of physiognomy, social organisation, values and personality. When
we were lounging with a smug sense of ethnocentric superiority in the
Victorian era, we saw the Bushmen as the epitome of savagery. But later,
in the turmoil of the 1960s, when students were asking serious questions
about the nature of Western society, social scientists reified the Bushmen’s
egalitarianism and generosity, virtues seen to be seriously lacking in
Western society. If Bushmen did not exist, we would surely have invented
them. (Gordon 1992, p. 217)
In sum, ‘there is in fact no “real”, definitive Bushman for anthropology

to discover’ (Barnard 2007, p. 144).
If ‘Bushman’ or /Xam beliefs are too heterogeneous, fluid and unsys-
tematic to be reductively comprehended and represented (Chidester
1996, p. 51), can James’s versions of //Kabbo’s testimonies—despite
(or because of) their provenance in nineteenth-century /Xam testi-
mony—be approached through the animist lens? Are these poems a legit-
imate ‘branch’, as it were, of an inherent /Xam heterogeneity? Certainly
James himself justifies his project thus: like several previous ‘version-
ers’, he draws thankfully on //Kabbo’s own reported satisfaction that
his kukummi, in any event un-owned, changeable ‘stories that float from
afar’, were being extended into print (James 2001, p. 19).
If we cannot securely delineate the ‘Bushman’, the ‘/Xam’, or
‘//Kabbo’, it would seem we are not in a particularly good position to
delineate ‘their’ relations with animals. This has not prevented numer-
ous writers generalising about them, from the quotidian realities to their
avowed mythic, folkloric or other artistic expressions. The shaman ‘sings
the animal’ in trance-dance; the hunter feels his prey in parts of his own
body, or claims to; the presence of the hyena is made richly meaningful
by tales told of its origins; everyday conflict between men and baboons is
both made intelligible and lamented via a myth of how they once spoke
the same language. Such mythologising, it is often claimed, evinces an
organic relationship with animality of a kind that ‘the West’ has lost or
derides. To the extent that we can no longer precisely verify such rela-
tions as practised by the /Xam, we can only (and do, and James does)
draw parallels with ostensibly analogous other ‘Bushman’ groups, assum-
ing rightly or wrongly that they are similar enough for the analogies to
hold. Equally tenuous is our verification of the authorship, provenance,
performative context and social meaning of any one such story. Such
meanings differ radically from one group, period, or occasion to another
(the highly variant meanings accorded the mythical /Kaggen figure is a
well-attested instance).
The upshot is: we are not going to learn only one thing about animals
here, rather a palimpsest of meanings, accreted, entangled and always
inflected by our starting points. We are thus, our best postcolonial inten-
tions notwithstanding, ever in danger of reifying precisely the categories
and divisions we seek to supersede. Solomon may be right that there is
‘no ultimate escape from this dilemma’ (2014, p. 330). She nevertheless
usefully calls the poetic versions such as Watson’s and James’s ‘contem-
porary curations’ (p. 332) which, rather than offering monocular mean-
ings, ‘juxtapose perspectives, pointing instead towards the contingency
of interpretations and power/knowledge strategies’ (p. 336).
Animism, Animals and Alterity

Alterity is integral to identity, perhaps to consciousness itself: Bushman/
European, human/animal, self/ecosystem. Is there a way of transcend-
ing the dichotomy between the insularity of culturally-bound testimony
(the persistence of alterity) in the contemporary versionings of the
poems, and the blurring of specificity that attends comparative anthropo-
logical methods such as those implied in James’s notes on the poems? I
select ‘animism’ for consideration.
A poem like ‘Hyena fears the fire’ evokes a worldview justifiably char-
acterised as animist, if by animism one encompasses those systems—
which in some form have governed most of human spirituality for tens
of millennia—in which spiritual essence or hidden-but-accessible power
is routinely attributed to non-human creatures and objects, and is sus-
tained by both everyday praxis and by artistic performance. The term
suffered marginalisation after anthropology’s turn against E.B. Tylor’s
50 D. Wylie
rather derogatory deployment of it, ‘largely ghettoised as an example of

an early phase of academic thought and of the entanglement of our aca-
demic ancestors with colonialism’ (Harvey 2006, p. 11). However, it has
recently enjoyed something of a revitalisation. One current definition is
Bron Taylor’s:
Animism is a term that most fundamentally reflects a perception that

spiritual intelligences, or life-forces, animate natural entities and living
things. Animistic perception is often accompanied by ethical beliefs about
the kinds of relationships people have or should have with such beings or
forces, or conversely, what behaviours should be avoided with regard to
them. Animism may also involve communication or even communion with
such intelligences or life-forces. Such a worldview usually enjoins respect if
not reverence for and veneration of such intelligences and forces. (Taylor
2008, p. 92)
Central to that, as Nurit Bird-David argues in an influential essay, instead

of a ‘modernist epistemology [that] is a totalizing scheme of separated
essences’, one entertains ‘a plurality of epistemologies by refiguring so-
called primitive animism as a relational epistemology’ (1999, p. 74). In
this view, ‘meaning’ is not ‘imposed’ on things—it is not pre-given in
consciousness—but ‘discovered’ in the course of action; it is also both
physical and psychical, yet neither’ (p. 74). To illustrate: in one dimen-
sion, an epistemology of hyena presence ‘arises from the stories’ (p. 74)
told about it; in another from closely-observed real-life behaviour; and
in a third unfolding, active relations of mingled fear, respect and eco-
logical competition. Such perceptions are not locked in the past, but
feed organically into present situations and responses. Hence, as Alf
Hornborg observes, Bird-David ‘readdresses the difference between
the “pre-modern” and the “modern” in an age when such polarities
are increasingly brushed aside as modern constructions’ (in Bird-David
1999, p. 80). The First Bushman’s Path may be interpreted as exemplary
of a respect-oriented recognition of an animistic heterogeneity, in which
successive historical periods and developments, geographically distinctive
bioregions, cultural beliefs, human-animal representations, and various
poetic forms coexist, in simultaneous tension and reinforcement, within
an entirely novel ‘assemblage’ or ‘reterritorialisation’, as Deleuze and
Guattari might term it (1987, p. 55). How this works in critical practice
is a task for more extensive treatment than I have space for here, but
what follows is a gesture in that direction.
Poems as Experience
American poet Adrienne Rich said that she wanted not to write poems
about experiences, but rather poems as experiences (Rich 1993, p. 165).
The poet discovers something unexpected in the very act of writing, and
something of the frisson of that discovery is conveyed, hopefully, to the
reader. James’s account of his enterprise—above and beyond its archival
base, its anthropological explanations, its inevitable traces of earlier and
similar projects—seems to me to carry some of that energy of discov-
ery. It is there, for instance, in his teasing out of different forms and for-
mats for the various poems—here short, ‘chanted’, centred lines, there
blocks of ‘prose-poetry’, elsewhere long-lined couplets. This counters to
a degree the implication of the epigraphs and notes that the poems are in
some attenuated sense representations of /Xam beliefs, even as they can-
not pretend to represent the poet’s own beliefs. What emerges is both his
and not his, him and not him; neither fully objective nor entirely subjec-
tive. It evinces, in a way, what all writing does: on the one hand, it is
ineluctably verbally and formally derivative and therefore heterogeneous
(as Bakhtin said of every utterance, ‘filled with echoes and reverberations
of other utterances’ (1999, p. 91); on the other, it expresses Harold
Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, as the poem endeavours to ‘swerve’
(1973, p. 28), away from its source even as it necessarily cleaves to it.
James achieves this balance by ‘versioning’ the Bleek-Lloyd translations,
holding more or less faithfully to their diction while deploying the poetic
techniques of modernist poetry. It’s a delicate dance between strangeness
(of content and belief) and familiarity (of form and language), choreo-
graphed for contemporary Western readers. It both ‘innovates and inter-
rupts’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 10).
James participates in what Robert Gordon, speaking broadly, has
encapsulated as ‘our fascination with strange customs, the search
for laws of development, and the enchantment of misunderstand-
ing’ (Gordon 1992, p. 216). The first two phrases capture that ‘alter-
ity’ against or alongside which we—‘we moderns’, ‘we Westerners’, ‘we
non-Bushmen’—define ourselves. We thereby also critique our own
culture(s), often less by objective criteria than by an enchanting mis-
understanding or what Bloom might call creative misprision. We can
hardly avoid doing otherwise. What studious objectivists might decry as
‘inaccurate’, the poet or artist will defend as a creative construal of com-
monalities sustained by an agenda of empathy. Just as one might admire
52 D. Wylie
an example of Bushman rock art as a remarkably ‘accurate’ representa-

tion of an eland, say, one might in the same breath valorise its non-real-
istic ‘distortions’ (over-elongation of the legs), reading them as serving,
perhaps, a shamanistic impulse of some kind. The same goes for these
poems, I think. Their heterogeneity, their empathetic animism, their
‘translation across multiple umwelts’ (Richard Nash, in Cole et al. 2011,
p. 93), is their strength.
It remains, then, to attempt the improbable: briefly reading a final
poem through the multiple facets of a modernised animism, animal stud-
ies, ecocriticism and post-coloniality. ‘//Kabbo and Han≠kasso speak of
drought’ reads in part:
the /Xam people do not kill frogs, because if they do

then the rain does not fall, and the land becomes dry:
it is when the people kill frogs that a drought comes;
and it is when a drought comes that people grow thin;
then it is that the locusts and the springbok vanish;
then it is that the bulbs and the bushes wither away;
then it is that the land turns white as it dries out;
and then even the gambro dries so that it poisons us;
[…] drought held fast, and Tsatsi could not shoot any game,
and ≠Kammi died because she could not get meat to eat.
(James 2001, p. 111)
Again, that the piece has a title at all signifies the authorial interven-
tion, a signal that this is to be a self-enclosed artefact in the manner of
the conventional Western lyric—very different to the often rambling,
disjointed narratives actually recorded, sometimes over days. In certain
ways, then, the poem both reflects and effaces the tortuous process of
how the original translation came into being.
Secondly, the title alludes to James’s periodical resort to more than
one informant, the conflation of in fact three distinct testimonies in
order to form a new assemblage, this one centred on drought experi-
ences. This drifts, very slightly, towards that stance which conflates all the
thought of all so-called ‘Bushmen’ as members of a putative ‘“baseline
monoculture” who precede and thus transcend all of the other divided
groups of the land… symbolically decentring competing nationalities’
(Guenther 2000, p. 104). However, if the piece thus seems to exem-
plify a slightly un-individuated ‘/Xam’ event, it also endeavours to
secure its reality in individual people and relationships, such as ≠Kammi,
‘Han≠kasso’s maternal grandmother who was Tsatsi’s first wife’, as
James explains in the notes (James 2001, p. 223). Nevertheless, it is a
partially ‘fictionalised’ amalgam.5
This is reinforced, thirdly, by the form: in James’s print version it is
strictly justified both left and right, a rigid paragraphing effect closer to
prose than poetry. It announces its own textuality, its belonging within
modern print, publishing and reception realms. This runs slightly coun-
ter to the repetitive phrasing redolent of oral performance, including the
anaphoric ‘then it is’. If the prose-like format (very different from how
it appears in the original notebooks) might evoke narrative rather than
lyric, signalling a certain proximity to the modern novel, the slight archa-
ism of the language (then it is that, held fast), holding fast to the Bleek
original, pulls back towards the sense of ‘pastness’. In this lies a tinge
of nostalgia, of necessary temporal difference—a condition, in effect, of
post-coloniality both inheriting and resisting the anxieties of colonial
domination and destructiveness. The differentiation is enhanced by the
retention of one /Xam word, gambro, explained only in the notes as a
kind of cucumber or melon, one of the last to wither in drought, at that
point turning poisonous.
The poem calls attention to what has largely been destroyed, of
course, which is that particular, hunter-gatherer human-animal-plant
ecological nexus, a destruction brought about not only by drought.
That nexus rested on sets of animist beliefs and practices—here that kill-
ing frogs, thought to have ‘paranormal’ connections with rain, has the
cosmic effect of inducing drought. This example underlines the fragil-
ity of the ecology itself, of human dependency upon an animal-pop-
ulated environment, the /Xam people’s close observation of it, and a
mythic sense of continuity in and with it. But James, in this and a group
of related poems, seems rightly concerned to dislodge the Romantic or
Rousseauesque stereotype of the primitive-but-affluent ecological Eden.
These people live lightly on the land, to be sure, but are also extremely
vulnerable; in some ways not to be envied. Today, we cannot reassess this
ecology, and the role of animals in it, ‘without cross-cultural compari-
son’ perspective (Barnard 1983, p. 199). This suggests important limits:
54 D. Wylie
the /Xam relations with animals displayed here are literally a world away
from modern concerns: they have absolutely nothing to do with ‘ani-
mal rights’, ‘conservation’ or extensive domestication in their current
usages and applications; the magico-spiritual worldview is a world away
from both the scientific consensus and the inescapable mesh of com-
mercial systems. So while a post-human recognition of ‘messy, material,
and embodied contingency’ might valorise the text’s ‘mongrel’ quality
(Wolfe, in Cole et al. 2011, p. 102), even a modern-animist conceptu-
alisation strains to effect an accommodation. Melvin Konner, who spent
some time among the !Kung in the Kalahari, has asserted in The Tangled
Wing that there is simply ‘no going back’ (Konner 2002, p. 8).
Yet many continue to hope, or suspect, there is something enor-
mously valuable to be learned from versioning testimony as poetry. It
may be that The First Bushman’s Path is not only a fascinating, eloquent,
symptomatically complicated elegy to the /Xam, but also to some-
thing in ourselves—including a certain animal awareness of our own
heterogeneity.
Notes
1. The term “Bushman” is the most widely used, if problematic generic term,
which some argue should be abandoned altogether, but which some indig-
enous groups now commonly use themselves. /Xam is less tricky in its
delineation, a self-designated group which may be seen as a subset of what
colonial commentators termed Bushman, Khoisan, or San, among other
variations.
2. See The Bleek-Lloyd Archive http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/.
Scholarly work is now extensive, but includes Bank (2006), Hewitt
(1986), Moran (2009), Deacon and Skotnes (2014) and Wessels (2010).
3. A kum (pl. kukummi) is a term covering all kinds of story, including narra-
tives, myths, ‘folktales’, song, dance, and ‘theatrical’ re-enactments.
4. Wilmsen’s term finds parallels in other studies, such as Declan Kiberd’s
Inventing Ireland, and Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People;
more relevantly, Leroy Vail and Landeg White’s ‘Invention of Oral Man’
in Power and the Praise Poem and Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm’s
The Invention of Tradition. If nothing else, such studies suggest that most
human identities are imagined, if not invented—and there is no reason not
to expect something similar of the ‘Bushmen’.
5. See also, for example, Lewis-Williams’s selected version in Stories that Float
from Afar (2000, p. 78).
Works cited
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content/speaothers.html. Accessed 21 Aug 2016.
Bakhtin, M. 1999. Speech genres & other late essays. trans. V. McGee Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Bank, A. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian world. Cape Town: Double Storey.
Barnard, A. 2007. Anthropology and the Bushman. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Biesele, M. 1993. Women like meat. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Bird-David, N. 1999. ‘Animism’ revisited: Personhood, environment, and rela-
tional epistemology. Current Anthropology 40 (1): 67–91.
Bloom, H. 1973. The anxiety of influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, D. 1998. Voicing the text: South African oral poetry and performance.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, D. 2002. Reflections on The First Bushman’s Path: Interview with Alan
James. Current writing 14 (2): 155–173.
Chidester, D. 1996. Bushman religion: Open, closed and new frontiers. In
Miscast: Negotiating the presence of the Bushmen, ed. P. Skotnes, 51–60. Cape
Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Cole, L., D. Landry, B. Boeher, R. Nash, E. Fudge, R. Markley, and C. Wolfe.
2011. Speciesism, identity politics, and ecocriticism: A conversation with
humanists and posthumanists. Eighteenth Century 52 (1):87–106.
Davie, K. 2010. The wind still tells stories from a faraway place, Mail &
Guardian 22–23, 29 May.
Deacon, J., and P. Skotnes (eds.). 2014. The courage of //Kabbo. Cape Town:
University of Cape Town Press.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo-
phrenia. trans. B. Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dickens, C. [1853] 1999. The noble savage. In Selected journalism, 1850–1870,
ed. D. Pascoe. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Glyn, P. 2013. What Dawid knew. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.
Gordon, R.J. 1992. The Bushman myth: The making of a Namibian underclass.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Guenther, M. 1999. Tricksters & trancers: Bushman religion and society.
———. 2000. Contemporary Bushman art, identity politics and the primitivism
discourse. Anthropologica 45 (1): 95–110.
Harvey, G. 2006. Animals, animism and academic. Zygon 41 (1): 9–19.
Hewitt, R. 1986. Structure, meaning and ritual in the narratives of the Southern
San. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
James, A. 1996. Ferry to Robben Island: Poems. Cape Town: Eyeball Press.
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———. 2001. The first Bushman’s path. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal

Press.
Konner, M. 2002. The tangled wing: Biological constraints on the human spirit.
New York: Henry Holt.
Krog, A. 2004. The stars say tsau! Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Lewis-Williams, J.D., and D.G. Pearce. 2004. San spirituality. Cape Town:
Double Storey.
———. 2000. Stories that float from afar. Cape Town: David Philip.
Miller, J. 2014. Empire and the animal body: Violence, identity and ecology in
Victorian adventure fiction. London: Anthem Press.
Moran, S. 2009. Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the origin of language.
Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Penny, H.G. 2013. Kindred by choice: Germans and American Indians since
1800. Greensboro: University of North Carolina Press.
Rich, A. [1964] 1993. Poetry and experience. In Adrienne Rich’s poetry and
prose, ed. B. Gelpi and A. Gelpi. New York: Norton.
Solomon, A. 2014. People who are different: Alterity and the /Xam’, in Deacon
and Skotnes, 329–338.
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tal future. In Ecology and the environment: Perspectives from the humanities, ed.
D. Swearer, 89–107. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Visual Anthropology 12 (2–3): 197–212.
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University of Virginia Press.
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78–79.
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and San: An annotated bibliography. Gaborone: University of Botswana.
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Author Biography
Dan Wylie teaches literature at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South
Africa. He has published on Shaka Zulu, Zimbabwean literature, various aspects
of southern African poetry, and the interfaces between literature and ecol-
ogy. Recent publications include Elephant and Crocodile in the Reaktion Books
Animal series.
CHAPTER 4
Interrogating the Sacred Art of Vetkat

Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper
Richard Alan Northover
Introduction
Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper was born in 1969 in Tweerivieren
(Two Rivers), Kgalagadi, in the arid, semi-desert areas of the Northern
Cape Province of South Africa and died in 2007 aged 38. Despite his
premature death—his health was always fragile—he was an artist who
was considered wise beyond his age by everyone who met him:
Vetkat was born a Wiseman, and his life as outcast has made him very
deep. He is the cat who walks through the darkness, alert to everything,
never sleeping; the ‘fat cat’ who never goes hungry because nothing
escapes him. He observes and he listens and he misses nothing. That has
been his personal journey, to train himself to see. To understand human
nature. (Bregin and Kruiper 2004, p. 97; see also Lange 2006, p. 374)
In this essay, I consider the relation of Vetkat’s art to animality,

spirituality and indigenous knowledges, evident in the trance-dance

R.A. Northover (*) 
Department of Afrikaans, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
e-mail: alan.northover@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_4
60 R.A. Northover
and therianthropic figures in his art, where Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s idea of ‘becoming-animal’ gains new relevance.
A key text is Vetkat’s wife Belinda Kruiper’s auto/biography,
Kalahari rainsong, co-written by Elana Bregin, even though Vetkat only
appears towards the end of the book (Bregin and Kruiper 2004). The
images in Kalahari rainsong have been treated in a doctoral thesis by
Nhamo Anthony Mphiripiri (2008), and my essay considers, in addi-
tion, the images in the more recent publication, Mooi loop: the sacred
art of Vetkat Regopstaan Kruiper (Kruiper 2014),1 and images from
the University of Pretoria’s collection of Vetkat’s art.2 I also discuss one
particularly ‘sacred’ image that appears in Mphiripiri’s thesis but not in
Kalahari rainsong (Mphiripiri 2008, p. 359). Mphiripiri argues that
Vetkat’s art is postmodern, although, according to Nyasha Mboti (2014,
p. 484), he later modifies his view. My study is indebted to the work of
Keyan Tomaselli and Mary Lange, who arranged several field trips for
students to Vetkat’s home at Blinkwater. They helped to promote his
work in exhibitions in Durban in the early 2000s, and have published
several articles on Bushman art that help to create a context for under-
standing its significance to indigenous traditions (Lange 2005, 2006;
Tomaselli 2003, 2014a, b).
A central problem in the discussion below is the meaning of ‘sacred’
in relation to Vetkat’s art and to Belinda’s auto/biography. The subtitle
of Mooi loop uses both ‘sacred’ and ‘art’. The frequent use of the word
‘sacred’ in Kalahari rainsong, too, in relation to indigenous knowl-
edge systems, begs to be interrogated given a tension between Christian
and prehistoric notions of the sacred in relation to animality. Following
David Lewis-Williams, a leading rock art researcher who questions the
use of both the terms ‘sacred’ and ‘art’ in relation to prehistoric rock art
(2002), questions arise: To what extent is Vetkat’s work linked to pre-
colonial Bushman rock art traditions and how does Vetkat modify and
extend these traditions? Furthermore, how does Vetkat figure animals,
which are central to prehistoric rock art, in his work? It is unlikely that
Bushman rock art is best understood as a storied form. Lewis-Williams
(2013, 2014) problematises a simple linking of Bushman rock art and
myth, and argues that ‘nuggets’ of meaning, usually referring obliquely
to the central ritual of the trance dance, are instead the key to under-
standing Bushman myth and rock art.
Vetkat’s approach to his art is typically Bushman, in Mathias
Guenther’s (1999) sense that, just as foraging characterises Bushman
4 INTERROGATING THE SACRED ART … 61
opportunistic hunter-gathering in the search for food, so it characterises

their opportunistic appropriation of ideas and beliefs from other cultures,
ensuring that Bushman belief systems are open, tolerant and inherently
ambiguous. For instance, Hermann Wittenberg (2014) shows how dis-
possessed Bushmen appropriated the pastoralist Khoi’s narratives of
the jackal outwitting the lion (representing the Boer master). The for-
aging concept may help to explain why Mphiripiri initially conceptual-
ised Vetkat’s art as postmodern. Guenther (1999, p. 92) discusses how
contemporary Bushman artists incongruously combine modern items
with traditional images, ‘creating a rich body of art, highly varied and
disparate’ and that ‘the hybrid, de-centered, montage- or collage-like
collective oeuvre of the modern Bushman artists strikes the onlooker
as decidedly postmodern’. But whether it constitutes ‘a “counter-
hegemonic” discourse on such “modernity” as affects the contempo-
rary Bushman’ (Guenther 1999, p. 92) or a return to the sacred—and
some combination of the two—remains debatable. Much of this debate
is informed by Vetkat’s own origins.
Background
Vetkat was born into the impoverished and marginalised community
of #Khomani Bushmen, an indigenous hunter-gathering community
that was dispossessed in the 1930s when their ancestral lands were con-
verted into the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (KGNP, later renamed
the Kgalagadi Transfrontier park), culminating in their eviction in 1973
(Bregin and Kruiper 2004). His father, Oupa Regopstaan Kruiper
(Grandpa Upright-standing Creeper), was the leader of the commu-
nity, and had the foresight to begin launching a land claim in 1987, a
process which culminated in restoration of land to the community in
the late 1990s following the democratic transition of South Africa in
1994. Oupa Regop had wanted to enable his community to return to
their hunter-gathering way of life, thereby reclaiming their identity,
integrity and dignity, even if it meant acquiring land scarce in water
and intolerant to agriculture. According to Bregin and Kruiper (2004,
p. 55), Oupa Regop ‘was known throughout the Kalahari as a wise
soul, a visionary and a gifted artist’ who ‘had a reputation as a skilled
healer.’ These qualities characterised his second son, Vetkat Regopstaan
Boesman Kruiper, too.
62 R.A. Northover
Vetkat was the younger half-brother of Dawid Kruiper, who took over
leadership of the community from their father Oupa Regop and features
in Patricia Glyn’s What Dawid Knew. Dawid’s leadership style and his
ideas on land restitution led to violent confrontations between him and
Vetkat when the community’s claims to the land were being considered
in the late 1990s. According to his wife Belinda, Vetkat chose to end
this deadly conflict by leaving the area, in the interests of peace but at
the expense of self-isolation. He was thus always an outsider and soli-
tary figure, marginalised within the already marginalised community of
#Khomani Bushmen. His health was unstable with several close encoun-
ters with death. This is expressed in his poem in Mooi loop:
Of pain, can people

tell me nothing,
I know pain, that is life
Only with God
Is there peace?
But every time I want
to climb the ladder he
sends me back to earth
Alright then …
Here I tell of the pain as it is …
The word ‘peace’ appears in many of his artworks and could apply to
his personal suffering as a result of his poor health as well as personal and
social conflict. His awareness of universal suffering echoes the insights
of Buddhism and the suffering of Christ—he dedicates Mooi loop to
Elop, a Bushman name for Jesus—although perhaps he is better char-
acterised as a Bushman healer figure. In this sense Vetkat can be seen
as a shamanistic figure (although he was not an actual shaman) attempt-
ing to heal through his art not just himself but also his community, and
even the whole of humanity too. The trance dance is the central ritual
of Bushman religion (Guenther 1999, p. 181) and the most frequently
recurring image in Vetkat’s art. The dancing humans, therianthropes
and animals prevalent in so many of his drawings can be interpreted as
participating in the healing dance and, particularly in the pictures featur-

ing clouds and rainfall, the rain dance.
His suffering and brushes with death, his wisdom and his solitary
nature are all summed up in his name Vetkat (Fat Cat). Bregin and
Belinda Kruiper explain in Kalahari rainsong:
So Vetkat is one of those who walks between the worlds. The events of
his life have set him apart from others, have marked him with a special
wisdom. Throughout time it has been this way, that the spirits have used
illness, suffering and difference to call the chosen to them. (Bregin and
Kruiper 2004, p. 97)
Thus, some of the main concerns in his art and poetry are peace and
love, words which appear in many of his drawings. That is, peace with
himself, with God and with his fellow humans. The discovery of his
artistic ability marks a major turning point in his life. In 1999 Catharina
Scheepers and the South African San Institute (SASI) organised art ses-
sions with the people in the #Khomani community (Bregin and Kruiper
2004, p. 66). Several of the Bushmen produced astonishing work, Vetkat
being foremost among them.
No direct historical link can be established between his work and tra-
ditional Bushman rock art, yet Vetkat’s art shares some remarkable simi-
larities with the rock art traditions of the southern Drakensberg despite
its vast distance and the differences between the rock art traditions from
the two areas. In the Drakensberg, Bushmen painted images of men,
women, therianthropes and animals on the rock faces in rock shelters,
often depicting the trance dance, or elements thereof. However, Vetkat’s
ancestors lived in the more arid desert and semi-desert of Northwest
South Africa where caves and rock shelters are very rare and where
Bushmen traditionally carved images on rocks in the open veld. Human
figures are scarce in these rock engravings and most of the images con-
cern animals and entopic images (geometrics).
Vetkat’s work is not rock art, but pen and crayon on paper. Van de
Weg and Barnabas (2011) note that Matthias Guenther denies any con-
tinuity of contemporary Bushman art with the older tradition, although
they point out Vetkat’s continuity with impermanent sand art traditions.
That Vetkat relates to and extends older rock art traditions finds a pow-
erful endorsement in the words of Besa, a shaman in Botswana, who on
seeing Vetkat’s drawing of a trance dance, commented that: ‘[Vetkat]
64 R.A. Northover
could not know of all this which he painted, all of his work is sacred
secrets of the Macaucau people’ (Bregin and Kruiper 2004). Nonetheless,
aspects of his art also represent a departure from tradition, which seems
implied by lines in his poem in Mooi loop, opposite ‘The Leaf’: ‘The work
speaks for itself/everyone shall see/what they shall see…’. Vetkat’s aes-
thetics make it difficult to separate the postmodern from the sacred.
Critique of the Sacred

The word ‘sacred’ is used 23 times in Kalahari rainsong in various con-
texts relating to art (xiv, 91, 97), knowledge (1, 54, 77, 83, 91), animals
(17, 81), traditions (36), land (38, 88, 96), dance (41, 42), space (in the
Land Rover) (65), respect (80), song (81), elements or aspects of knowl-
edge (82, 91), energy (83) and fire (98). In addition, Bregin and Belinda
Kruiper make ample use of spiritual and religious language in Kalahari
rainsong, including the terms ‘synchronicity’, ‘spirit/s’, ‘Ancestors’,
‘Dream’, ‘magic’, ‘prophetic’ and ‘God’. Bregin notes how this contrasts
with the objective scientific spirit in which she is expected to approach her
study. Belinda (Bregin and Kruiper 2004, p. 11) also acknowledges how
these terms would be considered illogical and unscientific, only they are
indispensable for telling her story. While not contesting these terms, my
essay aims to clarify the meaning of ‘sacred’ in the context of Vetkat’s work.
Belinda writes of the ‘sacred knowledge’ and the ‘sacred dance’ of
the Bushmen and appears to ascribe both to a belief in a transcendent
God and the Bushmen’s belief in an immanent spirit world and ances-
tors, despite tension between the two notions. In many cases the word
‘sacred’ refers simply to traditional Bushman beliefs, rituals and knowl-
edge, including bush lore, and thus does not have a holy or numinous
dimension. In addition, it often refers to very practical aspects such as
medicinal plants and hunting skills, but sometimes to rainmaking and
other supernatural potencies. The sacredness of the knowledge seems to
be a function of its scarcity, the value of a dying tradition, the ‘secrets’
that are being lost, rather than their link to a numinous order:
Once, they were people of the spirit, strong in sacred knowledge, gifted in
healing, able to call the rain with their dancing and to access the potency
of trance. But when their land was taken from them, their power was lost
with it. Now they are sick in spirit, a broken people, whose legacy is blood
and violence, alcohol and despair. (Bregin and Kruiper 2004, p. 1)
However, the dance, the best candidate for the term ‘sacred’, although
clearly of deep spiritual significance (when not being performed for film
crews), is also immanent rather than transcendent. This is evident in
Foster and Foster’s film The Great Dance (2000). Significantly, the only
authentic, ‘sacred dance’ that Belinda describes is when the Riverbed
Kids (the #Khomani Bushman living just outside the KPNG) are not
performing for film crews but dance spontaneously, with pronounced
animality (and eroticism, an idea that is explored later) and without the
intention to access spiritual potency for any purpose:
Spirit would take them over. Their bodies would start to move with a
different kind of energy, very animal. … She’d egg him on with her flirt-
ing—seductive not in the human female way, but in a primal sense, very
animal—steenbokkie [a kind of small antelope] flirting with her mate.
(Bregin and Kruiper 2004, p. 42)
It seems clear that ‘sacred dance’ in this context has nothing to do with
transcendent notions of the sacred, but, instead, is connected to eroti-
cism and animality, which, according to the conservative Christian white
management of the National Park, were ‘manifestations… of the Devil’
(Bregin and Kruiper, p. 18). For them, presumably, the sacred would refer
to something completely transcendent on the lines proposed by Rudolf
Otto, numinous, pure, holy, fascinating, frightening, awe-inspiring and
wholly other, summed up in his phrase, ‘mysterium tremendum et fasci-
nans’ (Otto 1980). Proponents of the sacred, holy and numinous, in this
sense, would disavow the animal nature of humans and promote, instead,
movement away from animality and towards transcendent divinity.
The work of Deleuze and Guattari offers an alternative view of this misoth-
eric religious tradition. Although they highlight other potentials like becom-
ing-vegetable (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), becoming-animal is the key
term in their work that has gained a critical life of its own. Becoming-animal
is open to multiple interpretations. However, it is clear at least that Deleuze
and Guattari are as opposed to anthropocentricism as they are to dominant
forms of Western rationalism, which tends to dismiss indigenous knowledge
as unfounded superstition. Some commentators provide useful interpreta-
tions of the idea. Nato Thompson writes that, ‘When Deleuze and Guattari
write of “becoming-animal,” they destabilise the strict (and possibly arbitrary)
boundaries modernity established between humanity and the animal kingdom’
(Thompson and Thompson 2005, p. 8). Steve Baker points out that Deleuze
66 R.A. Northover
and Guattari ‘state that one of the things which happens in the peculiar “meta-
morphosis” which constitutes becoming-animal is a “deterritorialization”, a
kind of un-humaning of the human, and that this is something “which the ani-
mal proposes to the human by indicating ways-out or means of escape that the
human would never have thought of by himself ”’ (Baker 2000, p. 102). Thus
becoming-animal is neither degrading nor transcendent but leads to new ways
of being, thinking and experiencing.
There are striking similarities between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion
of becoming-animal and prehistoric hunter-gathering people’s becom-
ing-animal in the trance dance. It should be noted that although therio-
morphic humanoids are depicted in most prehistoric rock art traditions,
archaeologists have, on the whole, explained the images without recourse
to Deleuze and Gauttari’s work. The Bushman trance dance involves
transformation and altered states of consciousness, the shaman becom-
ing-animal in order to acquire the potency of spirit animals for various
purposes, in service of the community: healing, hunting, rainmaking and
warding off evil spirits. Guenther (1999, pp. 186–188) argues that the
Bushmen equate the trance dance with hunting. The shaman becomes
a predator when fending off evil spirits or an antelope when seeking
potency for other purposes, particularly healing. Guenther (1999, pp.
183, 191) uses the terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘numinous’ in relation to
the trance dance but notes how the Bushmen are open to ludic playful
moments earlier in the dance, before the more serious later stage when
the dancers cross a threshold, the shamans becoming-animal as they
enter altered states of consciousness. Becoming-animal and the trance
dance are central to Vetkat’s art with its frequent depictions of dancing
people and therianthropes.
While the images of Vetkat’s drawings invoke animality and an imma-
nent spirit world, the words accompanying his drawings often refer to a
transcendent God. The relations and actions depicted in the images are
traditional and immanent but the words are products of colonialism and
Christianity. Other elements highlight such tensions between traditions
in his images. The frequent depictions of ‘animal’ functions such as def-
ecation, urination and ejaculation in Vetkat’s art would appear to contra-
dict its description as ‘sacred’ in the transcendent sense. Even the title
of Fig. 4.1 asserts a fundamental instability in the notion of believing,
presenting it at once as both an injunction and a choice.
Lewis-Williams claims (2002) that in Bushman communities the super-
natural was seen as immanent, and the borders between the supernatural
Fig. 4.1 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Glo ‘Nou ja glo as jy wil’ (Believe
‘Well yes believe as you like’), from Mooi loop. Drawing. Courtesy Belinda Kruiper
68 R.A. Northover
spirit world and everyday life were porous and fluid rather than fixed, rigid
and hierarchical. Thus, Bushmen traditionally did not have a transcendent
notion of God, a God that is separate from and ‘above’ nature, as the word
‘sacred’ would seem to suggest, nor a belief that humans are godlike, supe-
rior to animals and separate from the rest of nature. Instead, the human,
animal and spirit worlds were seen as closely intertwined. My essay extends
Lewis-Williams’s insights. On the one hand, the notion of the sacred is a
product of settled, agrarian societies characterised by organised religion
with written holy texts, temples and shrines, and a hierarchical priesthood.
On the other hand, hunter-gatherers belong to nomadic, egalitarian, oral,
and shamanistic societies, where narratives and myths are not recorded in
writing in a final, rigid form but are fluid and flexible, modified in the con-
texts in which they are retold, with none owning the final ‘truth’. Perhaps
the respective approaches to religion can be characterised as monologic
versus dialogic, and it may be helpful to describe them as ‘vertical’ versus
‘horizontal’ forms of spirituality. This distinction is similar to that made by
Stephen Hugh-Jones between horizontal and vertical shamanism, discussed
by Lewis-Williams and David Pearce in Inside the Neolithic mind (2005).
However, I use the terms to distinguish between shamanism generally
(horizontal) and organised religion (vertical). These align with the distinc-
tion between the spirit (immanent and continuous) and soul (transcend-
ent and separate). Bregin and Kruiper (2004) use the word ‘soul’ only
a couple of times, but the word ‘spirit’ (in various forms) occurs very fre-
quently. The upright posture of humans aligns them with the vertical and
transcendent, and the horizontal posture of non-human animals, with the
immanent, a biological fact that may be taken to justify the myth of human
superiority.
This opposition between vertical and horizontal spirituality represents
a creative tension in Vetkat’s work. It was also one source of tension
between the Bushmen and the KGNP management. The more con-
servative members of the KGNP management associated the Bushman
way of life as being ‘of the devil’ and disapproved of Belinda visiting
the Bushmen. Despite their critical awareness of conservative Christian
beliefs, Bregin and Belinda’s frequent use of the terms ‘sacred’ and
‘God’ in relation to the Bushmen’s own spiritual beliefs appears very
close to the Christians’ belief in a transcendent God. This tension is
clear, too, in the written text that often accompanies Vetkat’s drawings,
where he uses the term ‘God’, confirming Guenther’s view of Bushman-
foraging ideas for contextual usefulness rather than structural unity.
The term ‘sacred’ to describe Vetkat’s work gains further complex-

ity when read through the French philosopher Georges Bataille’s (1955,
2001, 2005; White 2009) invoking animality to define it, rather than
the transcendent and holy sense imposed upon it by Christianity. David
Macey clarifies:
The unifying element in society is the sacred, which both establishes cohe-
sion and sets limits on individual behaviour. … According to Bataille, the
presence of the sacred is manifested in extreme emotion, pointless activity
such as play and non-reproductive sexuality, and body exhalations, or in
other words in everything that a rational and homogenous society would
like to expel. (Macey 2000, p. 32)
This immanent, animal notion of sacredness is activated in some of

Vetkat’s images, particularly the image that Mphiripiri (2008) identi-
fies as specifically ‘sacred’ in his thesis (Appendix 17). It is a dense, dark
drawing with the exception of three white sections. The spaces in the
drawing are very cramped, and people, animals and therianthropes are
pressed together, the figures appearing to be subterranean and often
crouching.
Unlike most of Vetkat’s art this drawing contains figures within a
strong page border consisting of thick undulating and serrated lines.
Strikingly, a bright white image of a tree appears just below the cen-
tre of the drawing. Just above and to the right of the tree two small
white spaces appear depicting people crawling (above) and dancing (to
the right). In the highlighted space to the right of the tree, two of the
figures, a man and a woman, appear to be having sex, the man enter-
ing from behind the woman. The images of birds, antelope and the-
rianthropes in the drawing and the fact that the four crawling men in
the white section above the tree are on all fours all invoke animality.
According to Bataille, prehistoric people considered animals to be sacred
as a result of their indifference to the taboos that make human society
possible. Bataille’s idea of the sacred as involving animality, taboo, trans-
gression, eroticism and excess clearly seems to apply to this drawing.
Bataille (2001; pp. 81, 117–118) argues that Christianity destroyed
and replaced earlier, very ancient notions of the sacred, which showed
reverence for animals. The Christian transcendent idea of the sacred
appears to be expressed in the words written on Vetkat’s drawings, par-
ticularly those referring to God: ‘I live because God lives’. Christianity
70 R.A. Northover
entails the paradoxical belief that one can achieve immortality (contin-
uous being) as a discontinuous being (a conscious individual), whereas
continuous being can only be achieved through death (Bataille 2001,
pp. 118–120). It involves the further paradoxical belief that one achieves
endless life as a result of belief in a continuous being who transcends
life and death (God), yet who nonetheless has the features of a discon-
tinuous being. Underwriting this complex of beliefs is a profound fear
of humanity’s ‘animal’ mortality. In this scheme the animal is rejected as
impure and profane, whereas in the older tradition, the sacred included
both the pure and the impure (Bataille 2001, p. 121). Animal nature was
demonised by Christianity and seen as degrading—hence the animal fea-
tures associated with Satan.
Criticising the attitude of human superiority, Bataille argues that ‘For
primitive human beings, the animal is not a thing. And this characterises
very broadly all of primitive humanity, for whom ordinary animality is
rather divine’ (2005, p. 55). Despite the suffering and the knowledge of
death that underlies it, the art of Vetkat expresses excess and the joyous
celebration of life in all its forms, including its violence, most notably in
its depictions of the sacred dance, which can be compared to Friedrich
Nietzsche’s ecstatic Dionysian revels. The fact that the ancient idea of
the sacred includes the impure and profane explains why Vetkat’s art can
be called ‘sacred’ not despite but rather because it depicts bodily func-
tions ordinarily subject to strict taboos. Indeed, the violence and excess
of life is particularly strikingly expressed in the image in Kalahari rain-
song (reproduced in Mphiripiri 2008, Appendix 18) of four priapic danc-
ers, the one with an AK-47 suspended above his penis, spurting bullets,
indicating how the very act of procreation implies violence and death,
although it can also be seen as a critique of the human world of work
and tools, which reduces people and animals to things. Nonetheless, this
artwork, as well as the dance depicted in it, can be considered part of the
sacred world of play, appropriating the world of work by representing it
(Fig. 4.2).
Far from providing ideas merely illustrated in the images, some coun-
ter-hegemonic European philosophy offers a framework within which to
understand Vetkat’s work and to justify the use of ‘sacred’ to describe
it in the context of indigenous cosmology, where animals are respected
and revered, and hinges on the distinction between animals in the world
Fig. 4.2 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Men and women dancing, from
Kalahari rainsong, Drawing and watercolor. Courtesy Belinda Kruiper
72 R.A. Northover
of work (as tools or things) and the world of play or art (as sacred), a
distinction implicit in Wessels’s essay on Orpen and Qing in this volume.
David Lewis-Williams’s Shamanistic Theory

Despite the fact that his theory relates to prehistoric rock art, and despite
some critics questioning its dominant position, Lewis-Williams’ (2015,
p. 60) influential theory concurs with that of Guenther on the centrality
of the trance dance and animality in Bushman culture:
The therianthropy of Upper-Palaeolithic images suggests an intense kind

of transformation, an interaction of both spiritual and material animality
with humanity. Such interaction points to mediation, first between human
beings and spirit animals, and secondly, between human beings thus
endowed and another realm of existence at the end of the narrow vortex
where the integration and the fragmentation of mental images is neuro-
logically generated. (Lewis-Williams 2010, p. 226)
One of the features of Vetkat’s art that accords strongly with Lewis-
Williams’s theory is the depiction of the trance dance. The dancing
figures include humans and therianthropes, many of which, as in tradi-
tional Bushman rock art, lack necks to attach their heads to their bodies.
Others have arms raised or stretching backwards, similar to how sha-
mans were sometimes depicted just before they entered a trance state.
As Lewis-Williams points out, although the trance dance involved move-
ment in a circle, the dance was often depicted on rock faces in a linear
form, as a result of the limitations of the medium.
Vetkat tends to suggest the circular movement of the trance dance in
his use of linear or zigzag descending lines—which interestingly suggest
the snake-like motion of the Dionysian ecstatic dance too—although he
does sometimes depict its circularity directly. Sweat generated by sha-
mans during the trance dance was believed to have healing powers, which
may explain the words in another of Vetkat’s images in the University of
Pretoria’s collection: “Kom ons rus A.S.B. (asseblief)/ Kom ons werk vir,
ons sweet” (Come let us rest please/Come let us work for, our sweat).
In this picture, zebra and ostriches—and a therianthrope with canid fea-
tures—appear to participate with the human figures in the dance, one
of whom appears to be reaching out to a large snake in the tree. The
snake is a shamanic animal, a mediator between realms, but the snake in
Fig. 4.3 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Kom ons work vir, ons sweet
(Come let us work for, our sweat). 614790 from University of Pretoria Art
Collection. Drawing and watercolour. Courtesy Gerard de Kamper
74 R.A. Northover
the tree also seems to invoke the myth of the Garden of Eden. Individual
consciousness represents a fall into discontinuous being and the world of
work, and the trance dance represents an attempt to recover, through the
loss of self, the state of continuous being (Fig. 4.3).
Unlike much traditional Bushman rock art, where females are usu-
ally depicted as sitting and clapping, in Vetkat’s art females participate
more actively in the dance itself. In the drawing from Kalahari rain-
song mentioned above, with the four priapic male dancers in the upper
panel, dancing above colourful, abstract geometric images from which
various animals and natural objects hang, there are three women in the
lower panel carrying tools and objects while they dance above geomet-
ric designs depicting the multi-coloured Kalahari landscape. Whereas the
male dancers have human heads, two of the female figures have ante-
lope heads and one has branches of trees for arms and a head—in fact, as
Mphiripiri (2008, p. 224) argues, the head may be the nest of the com-
munal weaver bird common to the Kalahari. The female figures seem to
be more grounded and closer to nature than the male figures, who seem
more violent and are more closely associated with tools (Bataille’s world
of work), although the females carry instruments, too. Here Vetkat
seems to be a visionary, open to a biocentric cosmology in and for a new
millennium, emphasising the importance of life forces in a world increas-
ingly dominated by tools and instrumental rationalism.
Vetkat’s Art as Departure from Tradition

While Vetkat’s art does show some continuity with the prehistoric rock
art traditions, most notably in its depictions of the trance dance, it shows
striking departures too. As mentioned above, the medium is different,
because he is using pen, crayon and paper rather than paint and rock
face or lithographs on stone, although he also drew in the sand follow-
ing some Bushman traditions (Van der Weg and Barnabas 2011, p. 283).
Whereas Vetkat’s art is composed within the defined space of a page and
within 1–4 horizontal panels, prehistoric rock art obeyed no such rules
of composition. The presence of written text in Vetkat’s art is an impor-
tant departure from the pre-literate rock art traditions and indicates the
influence of colonialism and Christianity, particularly in the references to
an apparently Christian transcendent God, which can be read as evidence
of settlement and colonisation in and of Vetkat’s work. However, the
animals depicted are wild rather than domesticated, linking Vetkat’s work
to the prehistoric rock art traditions where wild animals were respected
and revered, not primarily as a source of food, but as a source of spiritual
potency. Vetkat depicts himself as a small cat in a ludic image in Kalahari
rainsong. A feral cat represents a liminal, crepuscular creature able, like a
shaman, to bridge binary oppositions such as day/night, domesticated/
wild, natural/supernatural, life/death.
Unlike in prehistoric rock art, large animals do not dominate Vetkat’s
work. Presumably this is because Vetkat did not see that many large
animals as a result of the decimation of the formerly vast herds of large
mammals by colonists and the later restriction of the large animals into
nature reserves like the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the traditional
land of the #Khomani Bushman from which they were ejected. Vetkat
does, nonetheless, depict various wild animals: antelope of various kinds,
including the gemsbok (Oryx) indigenous to the area, zebra and quag-
gas, ostriches, giraffes, lions, jackals, lizards and snakes, even non-indig-
enous camels. While these can be seen as natural creatures, they also
have spiritual significance. Vetkat specifically associates himself with the
snake which appears often in his pictures, including a double-tailed one
in Mooi loop. As in older Bushman traditions, snakes have shamanic sig-
nificance, mediating between the everyday and spirit worlds. Indeed, as
Lewis-Williams argues with regard to prehistoric rock art, the animals
that Vetkat depicts are most likely not merely natural ones but may be
spirit animals connected to the immanent supernatural world.
In one image in Mooi loop, accompanied by a poem written by
Belinda, the Mantis creator- and trickster-god appears, considered in
some Bushman traditions to be the first shaman. It is both a predator
and can fly, symbolising shamanic flight to the spirit world. There is also
an abundance of birds, apparently egrets, both in terms of his work as
a whole and within individual drawings, where huge flocks fill up the
page. The birds, like the mantis, may represent the shaman’s ability to
travel to the spirit world, although the large number of birds is more
than enough to make this point. It could be that the birds represent the
excess, plethora and fertility of life, or the spirits of the dead. Vetkat’s fig-
ures, whether human, animal or therianthrope, usually lack feet, another
unique feature of his work. This could possibly suggest that these figures
are spirits, or it could simply be characteristic of his style to represent
birds mostly in flight.
Threads of light appear in some prehistoric Bushman rock art—lines
usually composed of dots—that were thought to connect this world
76 R.A. Northover
to the spirit world. In Vetkat’s work trees, gates and fences appear to
replace the threads of light, functioning as portals to a spirit world,
although the same technique is used to depict bodily functions like uri-
nation. In Mooi loop, in the poem entitled ‘The Magic Unfolds’ accom-
panied by a drawing with abundant gates and fences, Vetkat connects
them to threads of light: ‘Travels thru light/ Some say ropes to God’.
Objects from the modern world—cars, transistor radios, kitchen utensils,
and others—also represent a departure from traditional Bushman rock
art and accommodate modernity. Despite the presence of the world of
work (tools) in Vetkat’s drawings, the sacred world of play, of transgres-
sion and excess, predominates, appropriating symbolically the world
of work.
However, perhaps the most significant departure of Vetkat’s work from
traditional rock art is the inclusion of plant imagery—plants, vines, flow-
ers, leaves and trees. The paradigm of plants and fertility is more charac-
teristic of agrarian societies than hunter-gatherer ones, which, according
to Laurence Coupe (2009, p. 52), subscribe to creation myths instead.
Certainly, trees do make rare, very localised appearances in some rock art
traditions in Namibia and South Africa, and are frequent in Zimbabwe,
where they are almost always associated with unusual motifs called form-
lings, which Siyakha Mguni (2015) convincingly argues are used to depict
termitaria (termite nests, considered by Bushmen in that region to pos-
sess supernatural potency). Nonetheless, even these traditions do not fea-
ture the sheer abundance of tree, plant, leaf, vine and flower imagery that
characterises much of Vetkat’s art. One tree in Mooi loop, pale green and
yellow, leafless, and apparently lifeless, has alternating red and green dots
arranged along its trunk and branches, and a small human figure standing
in amongst the top branches. It can be considered a spiritual tree, espe-
cially in light of Guenther’s explanation of how a shaman can be led by an
animal (spirit) ‘to a Lebensbaum (“tree of life”), up which the Hai//om
shaman will climb, entering the celial [sic] domain of the spirits via this
archetypal shamanic route’ (1999, p. 188).
In Mooi loop, the first illustrated page depicts such a tree which has
various words superimposed over the roots and branches and ten birds
arranged in an arc above it. In Vetkat’s art, as in traditional Bushman art,
birds represent travel to the spirit world. In one southern African rock art
tradition, humans are depicted transforming into swifts or swallows, birds
associated with rainmaking (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004; Forssman
and Gutteridge 2012). However, Vetkat tends to depict egrets, local birds
familiar to him. The tree, like almost all Vetkat’s depictions of trees, has
a knothole that suggests a portal to the spirit world. Superimposed over
the roots (that are not usually visible in Vetkat’s depictions of trees) is the
phrase ‘One with God’, again indicating the interconnectedness and com-
mon source of all things. The following words appear on the left-most
branch: ‘windstorms’, ‘space’, ‘music/dance’, ‘brilliant stars’, ‘farming’,
‘cold’ and ‘sun’. Natural phenomena predominate, although two cul-
tural practices also appear there. The following words are superimposed
over the central two branches: ‘endless storytelling’, ‘rolling dunes’, ‘sur-
vival’, ‘water is life’, ‘obedience to God and oneself’, ‘thirstland’ and ‘red
sand’. These reveal the starkness of the desert landscape and the depend-
ency for survival not merely on water but on storytelling and a belief in
God. Along the final branch the following words can be seen: ‘rich local
culture’, ‘humbleness’, ‘silence’ and ‘fun’. The very landscape becomes a
‘sacred’ text for artistic interpretation. Besides the sublime beauty of the
Kalahari landscape invoked by the words in this drawing, ‘sacred’ knowl-
edge is expressed in the music, dance, storytelling and fun (in the sense of
sacred play).
Despite the possible Christian origin of Vetkat’s idea of God, it should
be noted, however, that Vetkat, in line with his ecological thinking, and
departing from the prehistoric rock art tradition, also subscribes to an
Earth Mother goddess figure, while at the same time alluding to Genesis.
In Mooi loop, it is written that:
The spiritual message

or story, history
behind the art is:
honour nature, in order
to protect the mother
the earth the one that is.
‘dust you are and to dust
You shall return…’
Iconically, the layout of these words resembles the shape of a clay

pot, a vessel symbolising female fertility. In his poem, ‘This is where it
stops’, he writes ‘We have lost the/strength of mother earth/we have
78 R.A. Northover
even raped her.’ In another poem, he compares the manic energy of an

environmentally destructive capitalism to tops spinning ever faster and
contrasts this with the quietness and stillness of his chosen way of life,
identifying himself with the tortoise.
In Mooi loop, Vetkat explicitly associates women with flowers and
men with leaves. He may have understood the flowers as perpetuating
life through reproduction and the leaves as sustaining it through photo-
synthesis. In this curious choice, Vetkat expresses a somewhat traditional
idea of the man as breadwinner and the woman as child-bearer. In one
poem, he alludes to the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib and the posi-
tion of Eve as mother of all humankind. Nonetheless, the image of the
Earth Mother counter-balances the more pastoral and patriarchal image
of the Shepherd Tree and the shepherd. The patriarchal tree accords with
the vertical axis of Vetkat’s art, and the mother earth with the horizon-
tal. Thus, in his art, as shamans did in their persons and rituals (Whitley
2009, pp. 180–182), Vetkat balances opposites and conflicting forces in
a dynamic tension.
Finally, the image of a hut is ubiquitous in Vetkat’s drawings, some-
thing that does not appear in prehistoric rock art, possibly because a
nomadic lifestyle meant that such structures were ephemeral. The hut
represents home for Vetkat, expresses a sense of belonging, just as the
desire and eroticism in his art express longing. As a complementary motif
to the theriomorphs and largely wild animals in his art, the hut might
also be read as extending such tension into a complex vision of indig-
enous life in the twenty-first century.
Conclusion
In its exploration of indigenous knowledge systems and animality, this
essay shows how Vetkat’s work can be linked to prehistoric Bushman
rock art traditions while at the same time it represents a departure from
them. This corroborates Guenther’s characterisation of the syncretism
of Bushman thought as consonant with their foraging lifestyle and also
aligns the prehistoric with the postmodern. In continuity with prehistoric
rock art traditions Vetkat depicts animals, humans and therianthropes
engaged in the trance dance, thus connecting them with the spirit world.
However, while animals are important in Vetkat’s art, expressing an
immanent spirituality, he uses vegetative imagery rather than that of ani-
mality to express an ecological vision of the interconnectedness of all
life. His art thus illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept not only of
becoming-animal but also of becoming-vegetable, and adds complexity

to Bataille’s and Lewis-Williams’s likewise anti-hierarchical conceptions
of the sacred as inextricable from the profane. While Lewis-Williams’s
work reveals how shamanism is present in Vetkat’s art, Bataille’s ideas
help to clarify key themes in Vetkat’s work, most notably, eroticism,
taboo, transgression, death and desire, and help to explain the pre-Chris-
tian, pro-animal elements of sacredness in Vetkat’s art. A central tension
occurs between a transcendent (vertical) and an immanent (horizontal)
notion of sacredness, linking, I suggest, the former with patriarchy and
a pastoral Christian influence in his work and the latter with a mother-
earth-centred ecological vision. His depictions of humans, animals and
therianthropes in the trance dance—that is, of becoming-animal—reit-
erate the truth that despite all the modern tools and accoutrements
depicted in his pictures, humans are still animals in their deepest being,
linked to a universal life spirit.
Indeed, the animals in Vetkat’s art are, if not spirit animals, then a
link to the spirit world. Through his art he wished, like a shaman, to
heal a humanity severed by modernity from the source of life, to help
humans find peace and to reconcile them with the fact of their animal
suffering and mortality. Vetkat’s art, as sacred play, both reconnects
alienated moderns with their prehistoric roots, in which wild animals fig-
ured centrally, and, at the same time, accommodates modernity, where
tools threaten humanity itself, achieving a precarious synthesis between
technology and animality.
Notes
1. The book is unpaginated.
2. Gerard de Kamper, the Chief Curator, Collections and Ceramics,
University of Pretoria, kindly showed me the university’s collection of
fourteen of Vetkat’s artworks on 1 December, 2015, and granted me per-
mission to use copies of the images in this essay.
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———. 2001. Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood. London: Penguin.
80 R.A. Northover
———. 2005. The cradle of humanity: Prehistoric art and culture. New York:
Zone Books.
Bregin, E., and B. Kruiper. 2004. Kalahari rainsong. Scottsville: University of
KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Coupe, L. 2009. Myth. London: Routledge.
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visual anthropology, ed. P. Hockings, vol. 19 (3/4), 371–388.
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nineteenth-century/Xam myths and their implications for understanding San
rock art. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23 (2): 241–262.
Lewis-Williams, D. 2015. Myth and meaning: San-Bushman folklore in global
context. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Lewis-Williams, D., and D.G. Pearce. 2004. San spirituality: Roots, expressions &
social consequences. Cape Town: Double Storey.
Lewis-Williams, D. and D. Pearce. 2005. Inside the Neolithic mind. London:
Thames & Hudson.
Macey, D. (ed.). 2000. Bataille, Georges. The Penguin dictionary of critical theory.
London: Penguin.
Mboti, N. 2014. To exhibit or be exhibited: The visual art of Vetkat Regopstaan
Boesman Kruiper. Critical Arts 28 (3): 472–492.
Mguni, M. 2015. Termites of the gods: San cosmology in southern African rock art.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Mphiripiri, N.A. 2008. The tourist viewer, the Bushmen and the Zulu: Imaging
and (re)invention of identities through contemporary visual cultural produc-
tions. Ph.D. thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal.
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Author Biography
Richard Alan Northover Richard Alan Northover currently teaches gen-
eral literarytheory and critical theory in the Department of Afrikaans and
Theory ofLiterature at the University of South Africa. His Ph.D., obtained at
the Universityof Pretoria in 2010, concerns the work of J.M. Coetzee in rela-
tion to animalethics.Other research interests include animal studies, myth studies,
ecocriticism,prehistoric rock art, the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Margaret
Atwood’sspeculative fiction. In addition to publishing more recently in all these
fields, in2008 he joint-published an article on the philosophy of software engi-
neering inthe Journal for the General Philosophy of Science.
PART II
Indigenous Wisdoms, Animal Aesthetics,

and Contemporary Materialities
CHAPTER 5
Spirit Guards: A Squad of Ceramic Dogs

in South Africa
Nicolene Swanepoel
In Johannesburg, southern Africa’s largest city, I exhibited an installation of

one hundred, one-foot-high ceramic dogs, during October 2004. In this
vibrant but crime-ridden city, people tend to lock themselves in, isolating
themselves from others. Many use snarling dogs to guard their property and
their lives. Dogs, unfortunately, have become icons of hate and xenophobia.
The initial stimulus for these sculptures was a canine Nkisi or power figure
from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This artefact exudes vibrant energy.
The crouching dog sits alertly, mouth open, teeth sharp, tongue lolling, ready
to protect. Wrapped around its neck is a well-worn cloth; on its back it carries
a sealed box containing secret substances. It is imbued with power (Fig. 5.1).
Traditionally such artefacts are used to protect people against destruc-
tive forces. They often bear found objects on their backs, like rusty nails,
inserted to awaken the protective spirit. They may be wrapped in pieces
of hide and cloth, perhaps imbued with the spirit of the person requiring
protection. Some have potent matter sealed up in their hollows. These
figures originate from a triangular interaction: the person requiring
protection would seek guidance from the spiritual adviser, who in turn
would design a suitable figure to be made by a crafter.
N. Swanepoel (*) 
Onderstepoort, Pretoria, South Africa

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_5
86 N. Swanepoel
Fig. 5.1 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi Ceramic. Group detail (2004).

Courtesy of François Swanepoel
Power figures might be anthropomorphic or zoomorphic. Dogs are particu-

larly powerful as they swiftly hunt down prey, and so too, symbolically, evil spir-
its or the evil actions of another. With the African artefact as original stimulus,
the real dog—its behaviour, social structures and interaction with humans—has
further dictated the development of these sculptures. As a (retired) veterinarian,
I have been preoccupied for more than two decades with the role of domestic
animals, in particular the dog, in historic and contemporary culture.
Dogs are essentially gregarious. In a wild state, they tend to live in
packs, and work together as a tight social unit. We have often, unfor-
tunately, over-exploited domestic dogs’ territorially protective instincts
as our weapons to defend our lives and possessions. These sociable and
cooperative creatures have been selectively bred and conditioned to
become insular devils in our backyards.
As are dogs, we are also intended to be: social, caring, a tightly knit,
compassionate society. Unfortunately, due to poverty and crime, especially
in large urban cities, we have lost our souls, our humaneness. These figures
5 SPIRIT GUARDS: A SQUAD OF CERAMIC DOGS IN SOUTH AFRICA 87
hope to serve as reminders that we can regain our humanity by overcoming

the paralysis of living in a state of fear. I used these figures not as symbolic
protection against actual malevolence, but to protect us against the terror
of living with the fear of something that might happen. They reveal multi-
ple ambiguities, mocking gravitas, ridiculing aggression. Rather than com-
memorating dogs as protectors of worldly possessions, by bearing spiritually
protective and healing tokens, they celebrate them as guardians of our souls.
Ultimately, the spirit guards symbolise the common South African and
global desire for a peaceful and spiritually prosperous life. In bearing tokens
of protection, hope and healing, they are vessels of meaning, vehicles to cel-
ebrate the universal bond between human and dog, the instinctive friendship
between dog and dog, and the original kinship between human and human.
A couple who bought pieces as gifts for overseas friends saw the dogs
as ‘ambassadors’, to travel and inhabit homes throughout the world. It
sparked off the desire to continue with this work, indefinitely, not only
here in South Africa, but elsewhere too. The single object that has mul-
tiplied into an installation might become an indefinite process, unlimited
in time, or social, geographic and political boundaries. The sculptures
can then adopt the colour of other cultures, by combining them with
objects found in situ. Finally they can be reunited, combining various
spirit guards from all over the word in one massive installation (Fig. 5.2).
The dogs are made of ceramic and are approximately 25 cm high. The
basic shapes are press-moulded. Once the basic forms become leather
hard, they are modelled into individual shapes, dried and bisque fired
(1060 °C). Some are fired in a single glaze firing; others go through
multiple firings (from 1060 to 1100 °C). Mostly raw ash glazes, oxides
and tin glazes are used, often in combination.
Several unfired and bisqued but unglazed pieces were on the floor,
indicating that this is not a final installation, but work in progress. To
emphasise this even more, I continued to make new pieces at the venue
for the duration of the exhibition.
Completing one hundred sculptures in a relatively short period of time
forced me to work fast. This reminded me of the ‘unknown craftsman’ of
Yanagi, who, by throwing hundreds of tea bowls in rapid succession, devel-
oped an economy of work, which in turn developed an unparalleled flu-
ency of expression. Though I hardly aspire to be such a master, I did enter
a compulsive, trance-like state, almost automatically moulding then mod-
elling another and yet another piece. The clay expressed an internal force
of its own. The spontaneous gestures of the clay gave birth to expressive
qualities impossible to achieve by slow, conscious, meticulous labour.
88 N. Swanepoel
Fig. 5.2 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi Ceramic. Two-headed dog detail 1 and 2

(2004). Courtesy of François Swanepoel
Clay allows us to form it if we coax it gently and respectfully. On the

other hand, it has a very stubborn nature; it tears, it slumps. Allowing
this nature to speak for itself is a major challenge, overcome by artists
like Isamu Noguchi. The uninitiated do not realise how demanding it is
to allow the nature of a material to speak for itself, through one’s hands.
I discovered how hard it is to work fast and gesturally, yet to retain that,
not to let this quality be lost while completing the work. It should show
as if just torn, freshly folded, in the final piece. This demands skill and
experience, a process I am eager to continue to learn!
Visitors’ responses to the work were revealing. Generally, at first glance,
viewers found the work attractive, cute and comical. Children especially
were magnetically drawn to the pieces. However, on closer inspection many
people found them disturbing, some even repulsive. The combination of
the quaintness of a pet dog with awkward additions was disquieting.
The troubling additions stimulated questioning; ‘Why is the appar-
ently contradictory or “ugly” combined with an endearing animal?’
The additions are markers or comments, often humorous symbols: a
traditional porridge spoon is ‘stirring’ or kindling a mischief or trouble.
A pair of dogs, one bearing an old rusty clothing iron, the other a dis-
carded lawnmower blade, depict ‘smoothing over’ what is crinkled. The
perception, however, was often that such figures were mutilated by pierc-
ings. Dogs with angelic wings bear nasty, sharp sets of teeth.
Collars and leads are our instruments of control over dogs. Guard
dogs are made to wear spiked, aggressive looking collars. Here they
mutate into extravagant elaborations around the necks, even around the
whole head or body. Some pieces bear thick rope leads, which were per-
ceived as hangman’s nooses by some viewers.
Muzzles curtail the aggression we have cultivated. Here they trans-
mute into instruments to silence the dogs, or, wrapped over the dog’s
eyes, prevent them seeing, to curtail their nature and awareness.
The frustration of having to carry absurdly big bundles of keys is com-
pounded by them being constantly misplaced, requiring hours of wasted
time to find. These lumps of shiny, serrated metal have become a nec-
essary obstacle in our daily lives. Of these dogs bear bouquets of keys
on their backs, or have them stuck into the body alongside nails. Of the
dogs bear the keys in pairs, like dog tags on their collars. Others wear
actual dogs’ identification discs, hinting of its ‘ownership’ by a human,
or ID discs once worn by soldiers in battle. Coupled iron padlock tabs
also simulate army ‘dog tags’ (Fig. 5.3).
90 N. Swanepoel
Fig. 5.3 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi Ceramic. Studio detail (2016). Courtesy of

François Swanepoel
With these additions I hope to awaken questioning, like an itch

demanding to be scratched, to uncover a variety of interpretations and to
reveal the duality of the superficially attractive and its underlying ‘darker’
nature. If we do not recognise, understand, acknowledge and integrate
both the beauty and the beast, we are doomed to live lives split between
the extremes of fantasy and fear.
On the other hand, the disparate combinations remind us to see
humour in the presence of suffering, to help overcome bereavement and
pain. They also show that what appears reprehensible is not always bad;
rather, the opposite is often true (Fig. 5.4).
Many viewers asked whether this work is about animal abuse. Yes, it is, in
part, but beyond being about physical abuse, it is about the abuse of their
behaviour and nature by exploiting their instincts to serve us with blind loy-
alty. More importantly, it is about the abusive inhumanity between people.
Fig. 5.4 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi and Cattle Heads. Ceramic, studio detail
(2016). Courtesy of François Swanepoel.
There were objections from purists about my using found object addi-
tions with the ceramic sculptures. An alternative was to mimic such addi-
tions in clay. After all, one of the unique qualities of clay is its capacity to
mirror other materials. Since the earliest history of ceramics the amaz-
ing plasticity of clay has been exploited, at the same time hiding its own
nature, for instance to simulate more precious bronze or silver vessels.
In revealing the true nature of the material, clay, metal, rust or rubbish,
I seek to expose the instinctive and integrated nature of the animal, be it
dog or human. The bearing of non-clay materials has also traditionally been
the function of most clay objects. Pots may contain liquids; bowls may hold
fruit. These dogs are also bearers or vessels, like the African power figures,
of spiritually charged substances. They carry these on their backs, around
their necks, in sealed-off boxes on their chests, or inside their hollows.
92 N. Swanepoel
Perhaps there is a similarity between dogs and clay. As clay is plastic,

the material moulds to suit the artist, dogs are also ‘plastic’, moulding
to the desire of the human, wanting to please and allowing the shaping
of its animal nature to suit its master’s needs. Here ceramic dogs redress
our misguided demands by bearing the more pressing spiritual needs of
contemporary urban masters.
In the multiplicity and size these pieces aspire to the status of craft,
contemporary ‘mantelpiece’ ornaments, belonging in every home. They
do not aspire to be unique pieces of fine art, but objects of use, as the
original Nkisi were of use to ward off evil. While we may not make altars
and burn candles around them in daily ritual, they do serve an impor-
tant everyday function, to remind us to be human, that we belong to a
human pack, and that we are not born to live in isolation and fear.
Let these dogs be the willing and able guardians of our heavy keys.
Let them stand, welcoming good forces rather than defending against
evil ones, at our front doors. The 1970s song sang of freedom as having
‘nothing left to lose’. We have so much to lose nowadays, and we do,
often forcibly. In the streets around my neighbourhood, one of numer-
ous local security companies’ billboards show two small kids playing on a
lawn, with the caption: ‘To be safe is to be free’.
Is there not more to being free anymore? Is safety not merely the
minimum necessary requirement before we can be free? Perhaps free-
dom should be re-defined as being at its most basic level about living in
the absence of fear, before it can become the unhindered pursuit of hap-
piness. Dogs restore our humanity. This is their task in the twenty-first
century. We can help them do this if we free them from standing guard
over our fears. Let them rather guard our souls.
Author Biography
Nicolene Swanepoel A qualified veterinarian before committing herself
full-time to art, Nicolene Swanepoel lectured and consulted in human-ani-
mal interaction and animal behaviour at the Faculty of Veterinary Science at
Onderstepoort. Participation in competitions yielded the ‘Animals in Art’ award
from Louisiana State University (1997), the ‘Trienalle Mondiale D’estampes Petit
Format’ (in 1994—one of 17 prizes awarded to a total of 830 artists from 80
countries) as well as the Glazecor Award (Ceramics South Africa, 2005). A ‘herd’
of ceramic cattle heads, ‘Hybrid Heads’ won the Premier Award at the Ceramics
South Africa National Exhibition, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery,
September 2008. Her most recent solo exhibition ‘Little Creatures/Without
Pedestals’, was held at the Irma Stern Museum in November 2014.
CHAPTER 6
Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities,

and Indigenous Wisdoms
Delphi Carstens
My intention is to present a series of uncanny animal encounters in

South African contemporary literature and art that are inspired by indig-
enous wisdoms. These are uncanny convergences, I argue, because they
engage in the liminal and ambiguous, revealing potentially fructive cross-
overs between indigenous and hypermodern belief systems. Malidoma
Patrice Somé talks about an often ‘fatal attraction’ between the postmod-
ern and the indigenous—an attraction that is muddied by the seeming
incongruence between materialism and the supernatural (1994, p. 9).
This inconsistency is one that is, however, relished and fully articulated in
Afrofuturistic science fiction as well as in Deleuzoguattarian new materi-
alist praxis. These are two interrelated sensibilities that may help to over-
come the incongruence between wildly divergent cultural approaches as
well as that between humanity and animality.
The uncanny describes a feeling of the familiar rendered strangely
unfamiliar. As with the world of emotions and affects, it is slippery,
ghostly and altogether difficult to determine. According to Nicolas
D. Carstens (*) 
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
e-mail: carstensdelphi@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_6
94 D. Carstens
Royle our present situation is itself uncanny as we are haunted by the

sense that ‘although we appear to have mastered nature, we are taking
the world to pieces in ways and speeds beyond our control’ (2003, p. 3).
The uncanny, therefore, also describes a troubled relationality: our para-
doxical sense of separation from the world of objects, environments and
animals in which we find ourselves inextricably immersed and embedded.
The porous boundaries between humans, animals and things, recognised
and celebrated by indigenous peoples (but denied and reviled by post-
Enlightenment Western ways of seeing), is a powerful ground for the
uncanny. Animals occasionally provoke in us an uncanny sense of affect—
the other to reason and rationality—but they also remind us, as Brian
Massumi writes, that we are ourselves animals, affectively diminished by
our fictions of separation (2014, p. 3).
In What animals teach us about politics (2014), Massumi locates a
hybridised animal/human politics in the capacity for aesthetic or affective
relations that humans share with one another and with our animal kin.
Claiming that language, art-making and writing are nothing more than
‘immanent counterpoints’ or ‘vital expressions’ of what animals express
through affect, Massumi argues for a politics that recognises our com-
munality with animals, a critically posthuman practice that occupies the
gap between play and combat, between observation and action (2014,
p. 59). As Stephen Jones and Christina Nadler write, however, Massumi
does not sufficiently account for the suffering that his discussion leads
to, ‘side-stepping the affective dimension of pain and violence that are as
much a part of the affective and sociopolitical lifeworlds of the human/
animal as beatitude and play’ (2014, p. 1).
The artists and writer I have chosen to discuss call attention to this
dark side of animal/human relations. Their work occupies an in-between
zone, embodying what Jane Bennett would call a ‘destructive-creative
force’; an affective praxis that expresses destruction’s ‘radically meaning-
less void’ and ‘sheer terror’ as well as creativity’s ‘plenitude’ and ‘over-
flow’ (2010, pp. 53–54) Using the uncanny, the supernatural and the
liminal, they express a trickster-consciousness that is immanent to the
world of matter-in-movement and matter-as-energy. The trickster, as
Richard Allen Northover observes elsewhere in this anthology, con-
founds the sense of the sacred as transcendent. Embodying multiplicity,
ambiguity and the porosity of boundaries, the figure of the African trick-
ster presents the sacred as something immanent, affective and embod-
ied; a position that is central to the work of Mer Roberts, Asha Zero
6 TRICKSTERS, ANIMALS, NEW MATERIALITIES, AND INDIGENOUS WISDOMS 95
and Ingrid Winterbach. For these speculative fabulists as well as for the
science fictional theorists whose work I will allude to throughout, the
trickster occupies the same hybrid political zone as Donna Haraway’s
(1991) cyborg, a zone of radical boundary dissolution and playful per-
version where life and non-life, the modern and the pre-modern, human
and animal might be brought into productive conversation.
The trickster/cyborg is the agitator of boundaries, an agent of dreams
and uncanny visions, the arbiter of mythopoesis or ‘mythic ideation’;
what the philosopher Ernst Cassirer refers to as the articulation of ‘an
almost violent separation and individuation,’ an ‘intensification’ or
‘enthralment’ that ‘breaks all bridges between the concrete datum and
the systematized totality of experience’ (1946, pp. 57–58). This kind of
violent, non-dualistic and uncanny affect-laden communicability is what
anthropologist Mircea Eliade identifies in archaic shamanism, a collection
of ritual practices (or ‘techniques of ecstasy’) which dissolve the bounda-
ries between objects, animals, humans and temporalities (1989, p. 171).
Mer Roberts, speaking directly to the crossover between cyborg, sha-
man and trickster, articulates a sequence of Stygian yet ecstatic animal-
becomings, drawing on Afrofuturistic mythopoesis to execute a synthesis
between science and the supernatural. Celebrating queerness, otherness
and alienation, her art is informed by the rhythmic and mythic pulse of
African trickster tales as well as the rituals of Caribbean Voodoo as much
as it is by the radical future-tense of science fiction. Together with Asha
Zero, she articulates what political geographer Edward Soja refers to as
a ‘third space’ of ‘extraordinary openness and critical exchange’ where
previously incompatible perspectives might fruitfully commingle (1996,
p. 5). Zero’s art situates itself directly within the vibrational affect-laden
domain of Afrofuturistic sonic fiction or electronic musical science fic-
tions, speaking intimately to the rupture and violence of Cassirer’s for-
mulation of mythic ideation. Fractaline, agitated boundaries characterise
his work, as do the shadows of carnivorous and violent African trickster
figures. His manner of artistic praxis, as I will demonstrate, attempts to
bridge the divide between what sociologist Manuel Castells has termed
the mediated and virtualised ‘space of flows’ (of high-end networked
technologies) and the increasingly displaced ‘space of places’ where
humans, animals (both real and imagined) and spirits of place once com-
mingled (1996, p. 464).
The idea of genus loci or ‘spirit of place’ animates the iconic landscape
photographs of Ansel Adams who described them as an attempt to distil
96 D. Carstens
the ‘spirit’ that moulded geological features into ‘some transcenden-

tal emotional and spiritual experience’ (in Schama 2004, p. 9). Ingrid
Winterbach distils an immanent rather than a transcendent mythic image
of landscape and memory in her novel To Hell with Cronje (2007), merg-
ing scientific materialism with the supernatural as she offers up a kind of
rural psychogeography; a random sense of the uncanny emerges through
the story’s wandering through an African landscape wherein her human
characters are redefined—as they are in the work of Roberts and Zero—
by encounters with the strata of geological deep-time as well as with the
immanent presences of animals and spirit ancestors.
Dark Haecceities: Deleuzoguattarian and Afrofuturist

Science Fiction
Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘haecceity’ to indicate a spatial sensa-
tion of time oriented around constellations of affect, referring to it as
‘a mode of individuation very different to that of a person, subject, thing
or substance,’ invoking ‘relations of movement and rest… transports of
affect … [and] favourable conditions for such transports’ to describe it
(1988, pp. 261–263). Haecceity speaks to an uncanny sense of presence,
a ‘thisness,’ or ‘feeling in the moment,’ describing a ‘capacity to affect
and be affected’; a certain ‘nowness’ of things, a mood, a current, an
immanence-laden communicative matrix in which cultures, animals and
humans, life and non-life are embedded. Experiences of a darkling trans-
port of affect wherein ecstasy and terror are commingled can be pro-
ductively described as a dark haecceity, a paradoxical affective union of
numbness, panic and resplendence inhering in a shamanic or sorcerous
visceral experience.
Radical cultural shifts and eco-social displacements require new affec-
tive approaches toward being and doing. In a global climate defined by
the spectres of socioeconomic and environmental collapse, a ‘politics of
terror’ and climate-change realities, fear is immanent and self-propel-
ling, ‘co-opting the individual at the level of affective becoming,’ writes
Massumi (2014, p. 44). Although Massumi’s proposed politics of ani-
mality shies away from the horror and fearfulness of this abject becom-
ing, Afrofuturism’s celebratory embrace of alienation and terror tackles it
without flinching, as many examples attest.
The Afrofuturist novels of African-American writer Octavia Butler—
particularly her Patternist and Xenogenesis series of novels—incarnate
a dark haecceity woven out of plots that concern weird psychic and
physical self-healings. Her ambiguously seductive dystopias reflect a dis-
tinctively uncanny sensibility where it is never quite certain that new rela-
tions of interdependence signal endings or enhancements of old regimes
of exploitation. Demanding dehumanising rites of passage, they are
accessible only to those who are at home in disaffecting lifeworlds and
who are willing to enter into intimate and perverse symbiotic allegiance
with animals and bizarre nonhuman others (Gains and Segade 2008,
p. 146). The ‘gorgeous, scary’ and decidedly ‘science fictional’ work of
Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu delineate an equally dark sensi-
bility through a conflation of human and animal, ‘collaged together as a
tactic for defying the tyrannical, taxonomical order or seeing, that most
violent imposition onto the bodies of those made into specimen’ (Gains
and Segade 2008, p. 146). As with many of Afrofuturism’s diverse pro-
jects, the intention is to craft an interspecies and multicultural zone of
possibility-space out of abominable suffering and experiences of dread
and threat.
Afrofuturist sonic theorist Kodwo Eshun refers to the ‘aural col-
lages’ of electronic musicians as divergent as Sun Ra and Underground
Resistance as a form of science fictional ‘motion capture’ that ‘virtual-
ises’ sampled frequencies from different cultural registers, connect-
ing them together into a new type of ‘sensory condition … a nervous
system’ in the process of being ‘reshaped for a new kind of state.’ This
kind of affective capture finds direct parallels in the work of Asha Zero
and Mer Roberts, who attempt to represent the trickster-like frequen-
cies of Kwaito, dub techno, Detroit techno and other Afrofuturist elec-
tronic musical styles in paint and collage. Such a perverse synaesthetic
engagement, while referencing and recontextualising the twentieth cen-
tury modernist manoeuvrings of Dada and Situationism, is more closely
related to Afrofuturism’s affect-laden confluence of abjection, ecstasy
and science fiction. This brand of motion capture in Zero and Roberts’
work locates itself in a world of new generational art and musical styles.
It represents a continuity of the Afrofuturistic impulse to, as Eshun
writes, craft ‘fictionalised, synthesised and organised escape routes’ out
of alienating and dehumanising urban environments and contexts (1999,
p. 10). This style of Afrofuturistic encounter also describes the style of
the Deleuzoguattarian encounter, demonstrating the affinity between
contemporary affect-laden expressions and their nexus in African spiritual
practices.
98 D. Carstens
Mapping the Ectoplasmic, Treacherous and Fantastical

Simon O’Sullivan talks about a Deleuzoguattarian mythopoesis that
intersects with Afrofuturism, both of them drawing on African sorcery’s
emphasis on style and affect. It constitutes, ‘a reinstation [of] a notion
of aesthetics … a name, on the one hand, for the rupturing quality of
art and ritual: their power to break our habitual ways of being and act-
ing in the world (our reactive selves) and on the other, for a concomi-
tant second movement: the production of something new … a genuine
encounter … [a] short-circuiting of sorts of our cognitive and concep-
tual capacities’ (2010, p. 197). While a Deleuzoguattarian praxis, with its
blurring of boundaries between abstract and aesthetic relations, is able to
generate critically negative ruptures, many postmodern theoretical for-
mulations appear to be caught up in ‘petrifying circularity and stultifica-
tion, devoid of any locus of negation or movement forward’ writes Sadie
Plant (1992, p. 186). This insight explains why Zero and Roberts advo-
cate acts of negation, conceived of along abstract and aesthetic lines that
defy the spectacle of mediated capitalist culture.
Wilma Cruise, elsewhere in this volume, argues for a politics of ani-
mality, grounded in the non-linguistic, mimetic, gestural and affective
world of art practice. Such a praxis, as Roberts concurs, not only serves
to make the nonhuman at least partly visible, but can be used, perversely,
to co-opt the forward momentum of scientific futurity. Roberts, for
instance, describes her experimental video, collage and painting, directly
inspired by Voodoo ritual and African trickster narratives, as ‘map-
pings’ of the ‘ectoplasmic, the treacherous and fantastical,’ explorations
of ‘mutation and science fictional transformations’ that are dedicated
to ‘evolutionary fever dreams and radical hybridization’ (2015, p. 1).
This kind of posthuman cartography can be productively aligned with
Afrofuturist concerns with negation, abjection and alienation as affective
means of engendering radical transformation.
Meaningful contemporary mythopoesis involves ‘the production
of new and different myths for those who do not recognise themselves
in the narratives and image clichés of spectacular society’ (O’Sullivan
2010, p. 206). Such a project of imaginative transformation describes
Deleuzoguattarian and Afrofuturist practices as well as those of the
South African artists and writers whose work interests me, formula-
tions that run contrary to claims that affect is beyond experience and
that aesthetics is merely representational. Asha Zero, for instance, aligns
himself with the counter-spectacle aesthetics of negation employed by

urban graffiti artists—their language of ‘discordant scenes, seemingly
incompatible ideas, images, textures, surfaces and platforms’ (de Lange
2012, p. 22). Deleuze and Guattari (1988) argue that affects and aes-
thetics are ‘events’ immanent to experience itself and not merely simu-
lations thereof. They articulate ‘event sites’ as breaks or ruptures from
habituated spatio-temporal registers, points of exile where it is possible
that something new might coalesce. ‘Such an accessing of the event,’
writes O’Sullivan, ‘might involve what Henri Bergson calls attention: a
suspension of normal motor activity which in itself allows other planes of
reality to be perceivable; an opening up to the world beyond the human’
(2010, p. 206).
At stake with these kinds of affect-laden artistic ‘events’ might be an
altering, a switching of the affective/aesthetic register in order to bring
nonhuman animality more clearly into focus. Deleuze and Guattari pro-
pose a kind of experimental and experiential rupturing process—a mech-
anism for accessing a kind of immanent beyond to everyday experience
that draws directly on shamanic praxis. Delving into the ‘memories of a
sorcerer’ in A thousand plateaus (1988), Deleuze and Guattari point out
that the speculative hallucinations of ‘experimentalist’ literature and art
provide a kind of contemporary shamanic ‘probing’ or ‘mapping’ device
that explores all manner of interlinked states of evolution and progres-
sion—from animal, vegetable, and mineral to ‘bacteria, viruses … and
unnameable waves and indefinable particles’ (1988, p. 248) The writer
of science fiction, fantasy or speculative literature, for instance, acts as an
agent of perverse commingling who dives into ‘flows of intensity,’ replac-
ing the self with ‘becomings-animal, becomings-molecular’ and, more
problematically for some, ‘becomings-woman’ (1988, p. 162). Feminist
scholar Rosi Braidotti cautions, however, against popular misreading of
Deleuze and Guattari, stating that we need to ‘disengage’ their ‘nomadic
processes of becoming from misguided attempts to go beyond human
identity’ (2011, p. 278). Instead, we need to pay attention to their con-
ceptual tools and techniques for ‘undoing, recomposing and shifting
the grounds for the constitution of … subjectivity’ (2011, p. 279). The
nature of Deleuzoguattarian methods of becoming, she explains, are
radically inclusive—‘open to all … without beginning, or end, origin or
destination; they aim at nothing other than transformations, redistribu-
tion, and displacement’ (2011, p. 279). While affirming her identity as
100 D. Carstens
a woman of European descent, for instance, Braidotti aligns herself with

a radically decentred Deleuzoguattarian subjectivity that includes a host
of ‘other’ subjectivities both human and animal, declaring herself to be
an open-ended ‘nomadic work in progress’ (2011, p. 282). This readily
aligns with a trickster subjectivity that draws heavily on African mytho-
poesis which, as Robert Pelton explains, encompasses ‘neither this nor
that but both’ (1980, p. 105).
Distorting the boundaries between genres and signs, speculative fab-
ulation of this ilk walks ‘the wavering line between science and myth,’
writes Caroll Brown (1993, p. 169). For these reasons, Deleuze and
Guattari’s combined and separate oeuvres have been productively sam-
pled by Afrofuturists and other countercultural strategists who reori-
ent themselves with their particular brand of supernaturally flavoured
and science fictional inquiry. Asha Zero is no exception. Commenting
on the visual saturation prevalent in public spaces, Zero’s oeuvre recalls
dilapidated street billboards and graffiti-soaked highway underpasses,
crafting, as I have suggested elsewhere, a ‘mythos of alteration and bifur-
cation’ that lies beyond ‘deconstruction’ and other postmodern circular
manoeuvrings (Carstens 2009, p. 26). More productively, his paintings
can be described as both Deleuzoguattarian and Afrofuturist encounters,
‘engineering diagrams that depict the dynamic flow’ between natural/
artificial, human/animal, science/supernatural as well as fiction/fact
(Carstens 2009, p. 23).
Asha Zero: Shattering Assumptions of Origins

and Boundary
‘Asha Zero’ is pseudonym, born of ‘a fascination with fragmented iden-

tities … on a skateboard somewhere near the Johannesburg airport’
(Sanford 2012, p. 34). Heavily influenced by countercultural experi-
ments of Afrofuturist sonic fiction and urban street culture, he uses
his art as the means to combat and speak to the industrialised, dilapi-
dated and alienating urban environments that surround him. Hybrid
assemblages of animal/human and technological/natural objects per-
vade Zero’s meticulously hand-painted work, tracking the ‘turbulent
violence of contemporary life in search of new patterns of organisa-
tion’ (Carstens 2009, p. 23). His ever-present symbols—ears, mouths,
teeth, eyes, arms, torn and flayed fractaline edges—are stand-ins for the
organs of reception and transmission as well as their fragmentation and
interchangeability under the aegis of ‘spectacular’ information-age soci-

ety. These disassembled parts, as he explains, are parts of a ‘machinic
assemblage’ constructed from the transport of mediated technological
affects on and across bodies, ‘combinations of mechanical and organic
components … complex fabrications of figure and non-figure, of absence
and presence’ (de Lange 2012, p. 22). As ‘engineering diagrams or snap-
shots of random combinations or processes assembled from technologi-
cal and cultural distortions,’ they beckon with an uncanny sense of (un)
familiarity, ‘tugging like catchy ringtones or snippets of pop-songs that
decay into industrial noise on closer inspection’ (Carstens 2009, p. 23).
As speculative abstract machines, his images reference the sampling tech-
niques of Afrofuturist sonic fiction, coalescing zones of occult instability
in terms of radical possibility (de Lange 2012, p. 22). Zero’s mytho-
poesis, like that of Afrofuturism, gestures to contemporary situations as
much as it does to far older ontologies, poking, playing with and shatter-
ing assumptions of origins and boundary, as well as distinctions between
past, present and future.
The trickster figure which is omnipresent in the work of both Zero
and Mer Roberts is intimately linked to the practice and folklore of sha-
manism. According to Eliade, shamans are known for their ability to take
on the attributes of nonhuman lifeforms. Shamans speak a ‘secret lan-
guage beyond language … a language of all nature that allows them to
communicate with animals and spirits’ (Eliade 1989, p. 104). According
to anthropologist Jeremy Narby, the Yaminahua shamans of the Amazon
basin call this convoluted language, rich in supernatural metaphor and
mythical imagery, ‘language-twisting-twisting’ (1998, p. 99). This kind
of artful shamanic communication, like Zero’s artistic praxis, consti-
tutes a radical sampling between and across a multitude of styles, ways
of looking and cultures of feeling, ‘circling around and sampling from
rather than crashing into concepts’ (Narby 1998, p. 99). Able to enter-
tain more than one reality construct simultaneously, shamanic trickster
language is affective and transversal; it has to do with smoothing out
differences between seemingly incompatible domains such as science,
superstition, fantasy and fact by searching out symbioses and novel alli-
ances between them. In such a dialogue, all cultural differences (and
even differences of scale, such as the micro and macroscopic, the instan-
taneous and eternal) are flattened out onto a single plane, what Deleuze
and Guattari refer to as the ‘plane of consistency’ or ‘immanence’ (1988,
p. 69). The trickster can thereby take the form of an animal/human/
102 D. Carstens
Fig. 6.1 Asha Zero, Zansi nib (2008), Y_X (2012), and R lever (2009).
Acrylic on board. Courtesy of the artist
spirit/machine hybrid. As in African mythopoesis, the trickster in Zero’s

work is both good and/or evil and/or neither. African tricksters, as
Pelton writes, confound any kind of hierarchical schemata or value
judgement, pointing toward nature’s radical multiplicity whereby no one
point of view or ‘truth’ is ever the only truly correct one (1980, p. 105).
Certain aspects of Zero’s work with the trickster suggest a specifi-
cally southern Afrofuturism. Penny Miller’s seminal Myths and legends
of Southern Africa (1979) chronicles analogous tutelary tales from the
peoples of the region in which oppositions become parallels, such as
the small becomes the large, the slow turns out to be the quick, and
the weak comes to be the strong. African tricksters, such as the hare or
praying mantis are often small, helpless creatures who manage to outwit
bigger and fiercer opponents, including humans. These small creatures
represent that which lies outside the structures and strictures of control,
agencies which can slip through the cracks unnoticed.
Nogwaja the hare materialises frequently in Zero’s art—in paintings
such as ‘Zansi nib’ (2008), ‘Y_X’ (2012) as well as ‘R lever’ (2009) (see
Fig. 6.1). In these works the figure of Nogwaja serves as a sly dig at
narcissistic identity formulation in an overwhelming image economy in
which ‘selfies’ proliferate. Zero is, of course, a cipher, a figure of noth-
ing, unlike Nogwaja who, as Noverino Canonici explains, is the ‘pri-
mary’ or ‘star trickster’ of Nguni mythology (1994, p. 44). Yet, there are
powerful identifications at work in the artist’s representations of a rab-
bity liminal figure who is both autonomous and anonymous, celebrated
and inglorious, who ‘lives and prospers on the boundaries of animal-

ity and humanity,’ who is able to partake of both worlds (1994, p. 45).
Daniel Payne, elsewhere in this anthology, writes of the chaotic, danger-
ous, disordered yet simultaneously life-affirming nature of the trickster
that refuses single vision and embraces multiplicity. While one face of
Nogwaja, the human face, is ‘self-serving,’ the animal face is ‘the master
of the unexpected,’ able to melt away unnoticed, dissect a situation from
the shadows and act decisively as any small prey-animal would to escape
predation (Canonici 1994, p. 52).
There is a cautionary side to Nogwaja too. As another contributor
to this volume, Alexandra Wheeler, observes, tricksters are not always
successful or exemplary. In his self-serving, egocentric human form,
for instance, Nogwaja ‘often appears as an unbridled creative force that
becomes a danger to itself’ (Canonici 1994, p. 54). For Zero, as Shane
de Lange observes, Nogwaja points to what it means to be (post)human
in the ‘composite landscape’ of the present, where the mediated space
constantly tugs against older emplacements, wherein we are both fixed
by our hierarchical binaries of identity while being conceptually free to
enact nomadic subjectivities (2012, p. 23).
As with the folkloric Nogwaja, however, our attempt to creatively re-
order our subjectivities can make us a danger to ourselves and to oth-
ers. Unless we (in the real world) properly take charge of our desires,
‘assuring their continuous connections and transversal tie-ins … emp-
tied doubles will triumph,’ caution Deleuze and Guattari, citing careless
experimentation with drugs, sex, etc. (1988, p. 166). Our technological
milieu finds us ‘steeped in a view of the body as subordinated to con-
sciousness and [of] ‘natural’ organic organisation [as being] radically
distinguishable from an ‘outer’ material order,’ confirm Peter Jowers
and Sean Watson, who identify the ‘lack/need/want at the heart of the
modern subject’ (1995, pp. 2–3). As a way out of the impasse of ‘lim-
ited connectivity’ brought about by rationalism and capitalism, ‘we must
become perfectly random connectors … randomly connecting signs,
symbols, energy flows, data, knowledge, fantasy, and bodies in new flows
of desiring production’ (1995, p. 3). This caveat, that Zero takes from
Nogwaja as well as from Deleuze and Guattari, is strikingly evident in the
symbolic identity fragmentation of his painted canvases (see Fig. 6.1) as
well as in his painterly alias. As the world grows increasingly more anar-
chic, ‘based on technologies that dictate the resolution of reality and the
“deresolution” of the body,’ Zero, as artist, opts for the sly invisibility
104 D. Carstens
of Nogwaja’s prey-animal form, ‘choosing anonymity over autonomy’

(de Lange 2012, p. 23).
Mer Roberts: Crafting Vehicles of Experimental

Becoming
Like the contemporary cyborg, tricksters reflect an interstitial situation and
a shape-shifting praxis. The trickster, as Roberts and I propose, is ‘a pre-
cise embodiment’ of speculative fabulation or science fiction (sf), a vehi-
cle for constructing nomadic and experimental becomings (Cartens &
Roberts 2009, p. 86). Attempting to delineate protocols for an African sf,
we equate ‘the invisible, fantastical, and strangely primitive and anarchic
chaotic intensities’ that Deleuze and Guattari define as the essence of the
genre with the registers of traditional African mythopoesis (2009, p. 86).
In her art and writing, Roberts visualises what such a world of African sf
might resemble. Hers is a world where narratives of spirit possession leak
into future dreams of evolutionary morphogenesis, a world where:
mutants with osmotic fish skins, dimension crossing abilities, tentacles, and
virtual bands of flexing matter manifest new nomadic autonomous zones
[and] exotic monsters clothed in smart fabrics and aquatic time travelers
pilot crystalline, nanotech ‘spaceships’ through virtual bands of flexing
matter (Carstens 2011, p. 1).
In developing an African sf, she has written, under the pseudonym 0rphan
Drift (0D), a Voodoo-inspired sf-theory text Cyberpositive (1995) and
evolved an intricate remixing process involving photography, paint, mono-
print and video (and often a confluence of all four). In Roberts’ art, as she
herself writes, shamanic/Voodoo ‘possession space’ serves as a metaphor for
the ontological shifts and slippages that underpin the contemporary space of
flows, reconceptualised as ‘a wasp’s nest [of] shamen connectors’ (0D 1995,
p. 14). By opening an ontological nomadic possibility-space, alluded to in
‘There is no cure for a sudden apparition’ (Fig. 6.2), her work invokes magical
tendencies within the mediated space of flows, a trickster-like space filled with
invocational objects, hidden nonhuman communicative agencies, and errant
snippets of code that randomly self-assemble, without motive or purpose.
Roberts’ imagery floats in a complex mesh of patterns, strands, static
distortions and symbols. As with Zero’s art, her bricolaged images allude
to the ontological destabilisation suggested by William S. Burroughs’
invocation of the interzone; an interstitial space of possession, delirium
Fig. 6.2 Mer Roberts, There is no cure for a sudden apparition (2011). Collage
on photograph. Courtesy of the artist
and madness. While modernist bricoleurs like Burroughs and Jacques

Villeglé used collage to deconstruct painting, Mer’s hybrid art incorpo-
rates carefully painted surfaces (Fig. 6.3) as well as elements of her own
photography (Fig. 6.2) and video work (Fig. 6.4), implying a productive
dialogue between technological simulation and original.
Simultaneously, the intensely alien nature of her imagery suggests a
journey radically forward in time into a posthuman vastness of evolution-
ary morphogenesis extending beyond any fixed and frozen conception
of what it means to be human/animal (see Figs. 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4). The
continuum of evolution is suggested by a sinuous twisting visual arrange-
ment, an allusion not only to the radical destabilisation of trickster-con-
sciousness, but also to shamanic ‘language-twisting-twisting.’ Amphibious
tricksters, such as the Abantu Bomlambo of Nguni folklore (Fig. 6.4),
are presented in her work as inhabiting a spiral intersection that traverses,
106 D. Carstens
Fig. 6.3 Mer Roberts, The changeling (2006). Watercolour on paper. Courtesy

of the artist
without beginning or end, the fluid medium of contemporary com-

munications media (the space of flows), a body that remembers ‘down
the spine’ into distant evolutionary pasts, and an affective modality that
reaches forward, speculatively, into possibility-space.
Roberts’ art is imbued with the animistic awareness that animals and
nonhuman presences (such as the climate, water, atmosphere, the stars
and ancestor spirits) are not separate from humans. Another contributor
to this anthology, Dan Wylie, talks of the fluidity of the animist world-
view of the San, with its keen sense of human/nonhuman affective
Fig. 6.4 Mer Roberts, Abantu bombalano (2010). Video stills. Courtesy of the
artist
relations that span the kingdoms of nature as well as the world of things,
objects, landscapes and meteorological effects. The African folklore
Roberts’ work references is, in particular, suggestive of the fact that our
very continuity as a species depends on finding rapport with nonhuman
others as subjectivities in their own right. Discussing folklore surround-
ing the Abantu Bomlambo, Penny Bernard and Sibongiseni Kumalo
report, for instance, that Western education, religion, politics and eco-
nomics have not yet succeeded in completely eroding a rich symbolic
vein of therianothropic African mythology that both undermines anthro-
pocentricism and serves as a ‘constraint against the misuse of resources’
(2004, p. 136). Despite the steady encroachment of civilized urbanity
and conspicuous consumption, this uncanny mythos of animal/human
hybridity, filled with experiences of ritual death and transformation as
well as orally-transmitted archaic bush-lore, is still alive and vibrant. In
the iKamanzi valley and adjacent areas of Kwazulu Natal, for example,
Bernard and Kumalo report the reinstatement of annual spring ritu-
als to the old fish-tailed and serpent deities, a revival of practices from
‘a time before … when harmony and respect between people and the
environment [had] still existed’ (2004, p. 116). Roberts’ art engages
with becomings-animal and becomings-spirit as gateways into the pos-
sibility-space of symbioses and novel alliances between nature and cul-
ture. In ‘The changeling’ (Fig. 6.3), for instance, a group of Xhosa
initiates are transformed into a poly-tentacled amphibious creature that
heralds a rite of passage from humanity to animality. This creature blurs
108 D. Carstens
the boundaries between one/many, human/animal and natural/super-

natural in order to catalyse a productive hybridisation between seeming
oppositions.
The broad African cultural bias in favour of ‘spirits’ or ‘magic’ as an
explanatory discourse seems to be in conflict with materialist science. As
I have suggested throughout, there is, however, a productive confluence
between African sorcery, Afrofuturism and Deleuzoguattarian praxis.
Mark Fisher writes that Deleuze and Guattari articulate ‘a spiraling
hyper-vortex of materialist sorcery’ which may be termed ‘theory-fiction’
or, more accurately ‘Gothic materialism’ (2001, p. 235). This, in the case
of the ‘theory-fiction,’ is because, as with sf, theories function as protag-
onists in their writing and because they describe their own approach as
experimental rather than factual (2001, p. 236). They are ‘true material-
ists’ because they favour a type of ‘Spinozist affective bodily immanence’
over the kind of ‘Cartesian mental transcendence’ so long favoured by
Western scientific and academic establishments (2001, p. 237). Finally,
they are ‘Gothic’ because their theory-fiction constantly refers to the
supernatural, the sinuous and the difficult to determine. As Steve Baker
explains, these two theorists were the first to suggest that the animal
has much to show humans when it comes to thinking ‘at the limit,’ or
thinking the ‘unthinkable’ (2000, p. 102). Resisting any authoritarian
imposition of sense or meaning, the animal for them is more than a mere
symbol of a human drive. ‘The reality of a becoming-animal,’ they write,
is that the animal is ‘the affect itself, the drive in person, and represents
nothing’ (1988, p. 259).
The point, as Deleuze and Guattari note, is to bring ‘something
incomprehensible into this world,’ to grapple with exterior forces, to
have ‘event-thoughts or haecceities instead of subject thoughts’ (1988,
p. 379). Favouring the shamanic experience of virtual/ritual (rather than
actual) death, they encourage the construction of ecstatic bodies that are
able to range ahead, glimpsing the abstract codes of potential evolution-
ary becomings. What this kind of shamanic affinity offers contemporary
artists, writers and theorists, as Roberts has written, is the possibility of
a new affective vision, one that is able to ‘mobilise somatic voyages into
transformative recoding practices’ (0rphan Drift 1995, p. 229).
The Abantu Bomlambo (Fig. 6.4), the people of the river or ocean,
are shape-shifting animal/human hybrids that embody the powers of
mutability and communion with deep-time watery ancestors. According
to Xhosa folklore, the Bomlambo call down prospective isangomas to
join them in their watery abode and to preside over apotropaic rituals
held at forest pools. Miller writes that they possess a tricksterish sense of
humour, playing mischievous but ultimately benign tricks on the unwary
(1979, p. 98). At Hogsback and e-Hala in the Eastern Cape they are the
frequent subjects of beguiling clay figurines of ichthyoid therianthropes
sold along the roadside. Schoffeleers (1979) refers to these and other
shape-shifting tricksters such as Nogwaja as key elements of an animist
African earth religion expressed through the mediumship of diviners.
Such hybrid creatures suggest a potent departure-point for contempo-
rary African science fictions, such as that enacted by Roberts and Zero:
an African-inspired mythopoesis that seeks to leap, trickster-like, over the
barriers between species, cultures and ontological worlds.
Tricksters, writes Pelton, ‘poke, play with and shatter assumptions
of origin and boundary … characterising the peculiar unity of the limi-
nal’ (1980, p. 105). Invoking the trickster-like merger between seeming
oppositions, the work of Zero and Roberts explores, as African mytho-
poesis does, the uncanny and the difficult to determine, a process involv-
ing becomings-animal, becomings-molecular and becomings-spirit as
metaphors of shamanic journeyings as well as a way of thinking beyond
human cultural, temporal, affective and spatial limitations.
Ingrid Winterbach: Arche-Fossils and Fever Dreams

Trickster tales, aside from invoking a multitude of becomings-other-
than-human, also play with registers of time. For Deleuze and Guattari,
the relations of speed—between the glacial slowness of geological and
evolutionary time, and the vertiginous speeds of human and animal
time—are what define their notion of a haecceity: ‘nothing but affects
and movements, differential speeds [that impact] the ability to affect
and be affected … [something] that directs the metamorphosis of things
and subjects’ (1988, pp. 261–262). It is this sense of haecceity and its
differential relations of speed that Ingrid Winterbach invokes in To
Hell with Cronje (2007), titled Niggie (2002) in the original Afrikaans
(which translates, directly, as ‘niece’). In Winterbach’s novel, indig-
enous and Western ways of knowing come together under the banner
of the uncanny. Her protagonists, haunted refugees from the bitterness
of the South African War (1899–1902), are like the humans and ani-
mals of modernity, ‘becoming disconnected, detaching from where they
came, and from where they are heading. Their earlier lives dissolving’
110 D. Carstens
(Winterbach 2007, p. 30). Beset with umheimlich, ‘feverish mutterings

… evil dreams, suppressed longings, and the painful memories of a frag-
ile order’ (2007, p. 31) they enter the magical time of the trickster.
The trickster haunts Winterbach’s tale from its opening to its closing
sequence, appearing occasionally to taunt and simultaneously to comfort,
wearing the guise of a seductive spectral woman/man with a feathered
cap, a slender mongoose, a severed head, a woman/insect and amor-
phous death itself. Like Zero and Roberts, Winterbach deftly treads an
unground of uncanny nature/culture fusions and becomings-animal/
becomings-spirit.
The primary ground of trickster-consciousness in Winterbach’s novel
is the landscape itself. ‘Occupied since their youth with observing and
recording nature,’ Winterbach’s chief protagonists Ben and Reitz move
through a South African landscape everywhere immanent with trickster
consciousness, one that encapsulates memories of the life it has held, that
is permeated with affects, movements and speeds. Although the historical
vicissitudes of a bitter colonial war present one level of time in the novel,
it is constantly offset by a different order of time, what the speculative
realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in After finitude (2010) refers to
as the ‘arche-fossil’: the unthinkable inhuman scales of geological, evolu-
tionary and cosmic time as well as of extinction. Reitz, for instance, con-
tinually ponders the deep-time that everywhere engulfs the landscape,
preserving the memories of an inhuman past; the ‘twilit and prehistoric
Devonian,’ the ‘watery Permian,’ the ‘desert-like, volcanic conditions
of the late Triassic,’ are clues ‘left in the Beaufort, Ecca and Stormberg’
geological series of our ‘animal ancestry’ (Winterbach 2007, p. 16).
Reitz’s travelling companion Ben is forever contemplating the eco-
logical niches occupied by the flora and fauna, wondering at the often
uncanny interrelationships between them. One morning, for instance,
Ben and Reitz come across the recent remains of war—a looted wagon
with the clean-picked skeletal remains of its murdered occupants strewn
about. Nature has done her economising here, observes Ben: ‘Vulture
eats flesh, jackal eats the flesh and bones, crow waits for vulture to open
up the carcass, bearded vulture eats the marrow in the bones, bluebot-
tle lays her eggs in the flesh and ant eats the scraps that have remained’
(Winterbach 2007, p. 28). The scene is described as ‘uncanny,’ the feel-
ing it provokes as ‘spine-tingling’—a reminder, of course, that nature will
invariably do ‘its economising with ourselves’ (2007, p. 29). Despite the
heaviness of this sudden reminder of the fate that awaits all things, the
evidence of nature’s unsentimentality provokes a paradoxical unburden-

ing, a weightlessness. Reitz describes them passing into the
…gradually opening landscape [wherein] their thoughts simply waft away,

becom[ing] wispy and as light as tumbleweed. They see the horizon, they
see the shadows of clouds moving across the landscape. They see bushes,
rocks and ant hills. What is there to add to this? (2007, p. 29)
Indeed, our thoughts fall away into the great nothingness when faced
with the immensity of geological and evolutionary time, but this should
not detract us, as Steven Meucke writes, from the fact that the very act
of cognition itself is entangled with the world of animals and ‘things’:
‘We have only ever managed to philosophise with the help of things:
the turning stars, apples which fall, turtles and hares, rivers and gods,
cameras and computers’ (2007, p. 1). Tricksters represent the uncanny
agency of ‘things’ (animals and inanimate objects, for instance), not only
in how they delineate consciousness, but also their role in articulating
the slippery and nonlinear nature of our affective capacities.
From the start, Winterbach’s narrative is haunted by these uncanny
agents who remind us of the agitated borders where landscape and
memory, living and dead, matter and quintessence, animal and human
dissolve boundaries and fruitfully commingle. In the opening scene, a
grieving farmer, haunted in his bodily habits, thoughts and dreams by
his deceased wife’s lingering presence, recounts a dream encounter with
the trickster: a strangely familiar woman who becomes a man sporting
a striking animistic object, a ‘remarkable feathered hat … soft as the
wings of a bateleur,’ glittering with flashes of unearthly ‘blue green light’
(Winterbach 2007, p. 8). Aside from the usual connotations of ‘counting
coup’ implied by the feathered cap, Winterbach exploits the more posi-
tive interpretation that can be drawn from San mythos.
Amongst the San peoples shamans frequently turn themselves into
little birds and the wearing of feathers and animal-skin hats means to
‘tread the ken’ with these animal ancestors, to ‘invoke their spiritual
and affective potency’ (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004, pp. 171–173).
This symbolism is made clear a few pages later when some ghostly !Kora
men intrude into Winterbach’s narrative. They speak an ‘extinct lan-
guage’ and wear ‘strange little hats made of skin’ (Winterbach 2007,
p. 23). One sports ‘the ears of a dead animal pricked up on either side
of his head that appear to be listening’ (2007, p. 24). The youngest has
112 D. Carstens
a tame mongoose perching on his arm and an eldritch ripple that passes
across his face revealing a ‘glint of a tuft of feathers’ on his cheek and it’s
uncertain whether he is actually a she, or even human (2007, p. 24). This
blending of human and animal features recalls the therianthropic pres-
ences that haunt San paintings, pointing toward the primal deep-time of
the ‘Early race’ and the ‘no-time’ of the ‘other world’ (Lewis-Williams
and Pearce 2004, p. 175).
In Winterbach’s narrative, these spectral presences similarly recall
the twilight world of both dreamtime and deep-time, ‘pushing against
the membrane’ that separates life from death, familiar from unfamiliar,
human from animal, science from mysticism (Winterbach 2007, p. 25).
They emanate from the landscape itself as extended affective and animis-
tic objects, indifferent to attempts to objectify or tame them; emerging
from ‘behind the rocks … from the smells and scurrying of small ani-
mals’ they taunt the characters and us as readers with fever dreams of
merged and hybridised identities beyond the ‘giveness’ or ‘taken for
granted’ of what it means to be human (2007, p. 25).
Conclusion
There is a certain expression of Afrofutursim that engages with the dif-
ficult and seemingly paradoxical negotiations implied by the term
posthuman. This is an uncanniness, a continuity of rupture, that
I have identified in Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronje as well as in the
imagery of Mer Roberts and Asha Zero. Their work, as I have shown,
manifests uncanny ‘event sites’ that require us to ‘make strange’ our
familiar worlds and to move into uncertain territories where new pos-
sibilities of being, thinking and doing beckon. Invoking the agency of
hybrid African tricksters they ask—via the self-contradictory presences
or absences of these entities—uncomfortable questions about the liv-
ing together of nature/cultures and how in control we really are of
these assemblages. Aside from what they have to say about the urgency
of merging affect and intellect, human and nonhuman, science and the
supernatural, ‘white’ South Africans like Roberts, Zero and Winterbach
are also able, via their aesthetic practices, to cultivate an Afrofuturism
that can productively engage with the problems of race (and in
Winterbach’s case language and ethnicity) in post-apartheid South Africa.
Muecke writes that we need to perform visionary and concep-
tual shifts that do not subtract from the exactitude of science nor
take ‘sacredness or even superstition out of the world’ (2007, p. 1).

Tricksters, as I have argued, not only help us to push back against the
boundaries that separate the numinous of the supernatural from the ste-
reotypically ‘cold and dispassionate’ materialities of science, but also to
muddy the waters of anthropocentric cultural construction. Perhaps the
only way to engage with such slippery signifiers and agents of bound-
ary dissolution, as these writers and artists have done, is via surprising
concepts, uncanny visions, intuitions and dreams. As I have suggested
throughout, Afrofuturism builds on a Deleuzoguattarian praxis to con-
sider the uncanny aesthetic relationality or haecceity that conceptual
entanglements between humans and animals, science and sorcery, hyper-
modernity and pre-modern folklore may conjure into being. Invariably,
such collisions engender crises of feeling and cognition that the mythic
African trickster figure, conceived of as the analogue of the hypermodern
cyborg, may help to mediate. As an agitator of boundaries, the trickster
as indigenously posthuman is also the arbiter of a special kind of specula-
tive fabulation that problematises fictions of separation.
The artists and the author whose work I have discussed utilise ele-
ments of African mythopoesis to regard the world, along with its animals
and objects, with a deep sense of relationality. Their melding of seem-
ing oppositions facilitates encounters with the uncomfortable, the limi-
nal and the difficult-to-determine. Confrontations with the uncanny, as
religious scholar Karen Armstrong notes, facilitate ‘ekstasis; a stepping
out’ from the welter of ordinary existence in order that we might see
ourselves and our relations with the world more clearly (2007, p. 61).
Indigenous mythopoesis, honed by Afrofuturism’s science fictional sense
of futurity, therefore seems especially meaningful at a time when, as
Armstrong writes, the ‘nihilistic self-destructiveness’ of modern culture
has become increasingly apparent; when the ‘purely rational,’ with its
blatant disregard of the immanent sacrality of the Earth and the affective
dimension of human/animal affective relations, ‘will no longer suffice’
(2007, p. xi).
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www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1995/wats.pdf. Accessed 1 Sep 2003.
Lewis-Williams, D., and D. Pearce. 2004. San spirituality: Roots, expressions &
social consequences. Cape Town: Double-Storey Books.
Massumi, B. 2014. What animals teach us about politics. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Meillassoux, Q. 2010. After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency.
London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Meucke, S. 2007. The cassowary is indifferent to all this. Rhizomes. 15. http://
www.rhizomes.net/issue15/muecke.html. Accessed 10 Sep 2015.
Miller, P. 1979. Myths and legends of Southern Africa. Cape Town: T.V. Bulpin
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sacred delight. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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modern age. London: Routledge.
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http://merliquify.com. Accessed 12 Dec 2015.
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& Rousseau.
Author Biography
Delphi Carstens is a lecturer and course coordinator for Humanities 100, a
multidisciplinary Foundation course at the University of the Western Cape. He
has a Ph.D. from Stellenbosch University. His research interests include science
fiction, Afrofuturism, trickster narratives, posthumanism, environmental justice,
the uncanny as well as the overlaps between nature and culture, materialism and
the supernatural. He is a member of the 0rphan Drift collective.
PART III
Global Flows of Animal Myths

and Allegories
CHAPTER 7
The Porosity of Human/Non-human

Beings in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
and Anansi Boys
Alexandra-Mary Wheeler
Animism, as with any belief system, provides its practitioners with a set
of psychological tools uniquely adapted to the environments in which
it developed. In the case of pre-literate groups as well as many literate
groups who still practise oral traditions, animistic understandings are
accompanied by indigenous knowledges that are transferred generation-
ally through the act of storytelling. Indeed fairy tales, and to some extent
folk tales, have often been understood as metaphorical reflections of peo-
ples’ customs and interrelations (Zipes 2001, p. 845). Bringing ancient
figures and their tales to more familiar settings, Neil Gaiman’s novels
American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005) may be perceived as
reconceptualisations of traditional mythologies that reflect the transmog-
rification of these narratives, and articulate ‘concerns of contemporary
society … where the spiritual link with the gods has largely been severed
and belief systems have [for the most part] lost their meaning’ (Slabbert
A.-M. Wheeler (*) 
Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa
e-mail: aalexandraw@mgi.ac.za

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_7
120 A.-M Wheeler
and Viljoen 2006, p. 71). This essay focuses on Gaiman’s use of mytho-
logical adaptations not only to explore the cultural/spiritual pastiche of
postmodern America and the effect of this cultural blending on the iden-
tities of his protagonists, but also on his use of animism as an embodied
concept (rather than a religious practice) to represent the cultural past
and to make interventions in the present. Gaiman’s rather specific invo-
cation of animism, both as a narrative device and didactic tool, is central
to my argument that it not only reconnects his characters to their histori-
cal cultural identities, but also ‘emphasises human affinity with (other)
animals’ as a historical constant through a connection to the non-human
world (Grewe-Volpp 2006, p. 71).
In ‘Animism Revisited’ Nurit Bird-David (1999) argues for the revi-
sion of modern understandings of animism by first tracing the devel-
opment of Western anthropological pursuits in this area, starting over
a century earlier with E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). What
emerges is that the Tylorian theory of animism, which was one of the
first academic attempts to define this belief system and remains central
to current anthropological debates, has not been revised to any great
extent since its formulation. Tylor understood animistic beliefs as being
the result of a particularly simplistic way of processing environmental
information. In his view, these beliefs were the result of an inability to
distinguish the animate from the inanimate, thus generating a worldview
often compared to the way in which infants process information in their
surroundings. Tylor theorised that pre-literate peoples lacked an under-
standing of how natural phenomena were produced, and so relied on an
outward projection of an internalised model of human nature to function
as an explanation for the events that they could not comprehend. He saw
this ‘primitive’ worldview as ‘infantile’ because, in terms of his under-
standing, it followed a method of analogous reasoning that equates all
external objects with a nature similar to the subject’s (Bird-David 1999,
p. 69).
From a postmodern globalised perspective, Tylor’s use of the term
‘primitive’ to describe pre-literate societies as well as his equation of the
reasoning capacity of these societies with that observed in children not
only appears pejorative, but problematic with its allusion to theories of
social Darwinism. Similarly, Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology
(1876), published shortly after Primitive Culture, describes animism as
being a belief system that evolved through the idealisation ‘and extension
of the human personality to natural objects and phenomena’ deemed
7 THE POROSITY OF HUMAN/NON-HUMAN BEINGS IN NEIL … 121
incomprehensible by ‘primitive peoples [thought to be] incapable of

grasping the true nature of material causes’ (White 2005, p. 60). Bird-
David’s article serves not only to challenge these Eurocentric social-Dar-
winian understandings, but also offers an insightful perspective on how
animism provides different ways of interpreting relational personhood as
well as the effects that this understanding may have on ecological percep-
tions of the environment. This new interpretation of animistic beliefs as
being more than a mere misattribution of anthropomorphic qualities to
non-human entities has been taken up by Graham Harvey (2006), who
argues that animistic belief systems provide some of the best examples of
the potential for positive relationships with the non-human world, and
could possibly assist with remedying current societal problems related to
climate change and bioethics through a reformulation of our relationship
with nature.
Central to modern-industrial society’s renegotiation of its relationship
with the non-human world is a change in the specifically Western percep-
tion of the human/animal and culture/nature dichotomies which situate
humankind outside the ebb and flow of the natural/non-human world.
Such thinking not only divorces humans from the environment itself,
allowing for the exploitation of nature as a resource, but also promotes
the false impression that such wilful destruction can be rationalised
on the basis that human demands trump those of all other life forms.
In order to begin to address this imbalance our societies need to relin-
quish their ‘human dominance of nature’—which necessarily involves ‘a
critique of anthropocentricism’—and replace it with an eco-centred per-
spective that ‘heeds human interdependence in ecosystems, and at the
same time does not ignore the culturally and socially constructed com-
plex of human life’ (Grewe-Volpp 2006, pp. 71–74).
A rather unconventional challenge to these dichotomies between
nature and culture can be found in speculative fiction. A popular fanta-
sist, Neil Gaiman’s extensive oeuvre notably includes the graphic novel
series The Sandman (1989–1996), urban fantasy novels American Gods
(2001) and Anansi Boys (2005), children’s novels Coraline (2002) and
The Graveyard Book (2008), as well as the English translation of Hayao
Miyazaki’s animated film Princess Mononoke (1997). To date, Gaiman’s
career has been both varied and successful with his having received sev-
eral awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Bram Stoker and the
Locus, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medals for a diverse range
of material in various media. However, as pointed out by Claire White
122 A.-M Wheeler
(2001, para. 2), it was his 2003 novel American Gods that brought him
to the attention of what she calls ‘serious literary critics’, receiving much
‘critical praise and numerous fantasy and mainstream awards’ for its
‘slightly off-skew take’ on America as perceived and understood from the
perspective of a foreigner (British Council Literature n.d.).
Following the success of American Gods, Gaiman’s subsequent novel
Anansi Boys was not received with quite the same enthusiasm, with
Kirkus (2010) claiming that although the novel was ‘more moving’ and
‘enormously entertaining’ it remained ‘less dazzling’, which may in part
be attributed to a slight variation in style, rather than in theme, and the
narrower plot focus, both of which will be addressed later in this essay.
Despite such differences in reception it is worthwhile noting that the
novels share several similarities as both are ostensibly father-son narra-
tives, speculative fictions, and variations on the Bildungsroman tradition.
However, American Gods presents its audience with a sweeping over-
view of the great numbers of foreign mythologies that exist in modern
America—and in so doing emphasises the difficulties experienced by
its protagonist when it comes to negotiating an identity for himself—
whereas Anansi Boys offers its readers a more focused exploration of the
same issues while limiting itself to the mythological background of one
particular culture. In both novels Gaiman invokes animism as a means
of reclaiming traditional cultures from their histories of colonisation,
simultaneously presenting a challenge to the human/animal and nature/
culture dichotomies, and demonstrating ‘human embeddedness in the
physical-material world’ shared with other beings (Grewe-Volpp 2006,
p. 74).
In his representation of a hybridised American pantheon, Gaiman
offers his readers narratives that explore concepts of selfhood and cul-
tural belonging while systematically providing a critique of postmodern
American life with its associated capitalist values, societal ills and tech-
nocentrism. A less attentive reading of these texts may easily result in
the conclusion that Gaiman’s novels merely appropriate mythologies
from West Africa, Eastern Europe and ancient Egypt, among others, in
order to advance the rather intricate narratives. However, the complex-
ity of these novels lies in the recognition that these myths, present in
American culture, are indicators of the personal and genealogical histo-
ries of certain characters. By casting animist gods as characters interact-
ing with humans and animals, Gaiman gives his readers opportunities to
reflect on the influence that colonisation, migration and the transatlantic
slave trade have had on American culture and the American landscape,
as well as to imagine new ways of engaging with these ongoing histories
through the medium of speculative fiction.
More so than any other genre, speculative fiction offers authors and
readers alike the opportunity to consider difficult or troubling material
at a distance. By portraying worlds that are either illogical or logically
impossible this genre provides a space where both our accepted place in
the cosmos as well as notions of ontology and epistemology can be more
readily challenged. Additionally, it offers a wider scope ‘for enabling
animal agency to become part of the quotidian world’ and for explor-
ing questions of alterity particularly in terms of the ‘boundary between
human and other sentient beings’ (Vint 2014, p. 6). For Gaiman, spec-
ulative fiction has not only proven useful in rendering an outsider’s
perspective of America palatable, but also in engaging with the more
uncomfortable discourses of race and history through animistic charac-
terisations. Where American Gods offers an expansive cultural explora-
tion of what it means to be American, Anansi Boys keenly develops the
allusions made in the preceding novel to the connection between place—
with its accompanying history, landscapes and fauna—and cultural iden-
tity. As is the case for Wednesday1 (a character later revealed to be the
Norse god Odin) and his brethren, the spider-god trickster Anansi and
his legacy are transformed as a result of having been removed from their
source culture and setting and must, in Gaiman’s novels, negotiate new
terms of existence and relevance.
American Gods offers its readers a host of recognisable characters
drawn from, but not limited to, Native American, African, Christian,
Egyptian and Norse mythology. Central to the story is the notion that
America, as a place, is a hostile land for the multitudes of supernatural
entities animating the foreign mythologies that have found their way to
its shores. For these entities, hostility manifests as a severing of the belief
systems on which they depend. Without the necessary generational trans-
ference, the traditions, concepts of personhood and native ecological
perceptions associated with these beliefs are threatened, and along with
them important aspects of an individual’s personal connection to the col-
lective history of the cultural group from which they originate.
Drawing on the underbelly of society Gaiman presents his readers
with a group of insalubrious old-world gods including Bilqis the pros-
titute, Wednesday (Odin) the fraudster, an ifrit taxi driver, and an alco-
holic leprechaun, all trying to make ends meet in a world that for the
124 A.-M Wheeler
most part has forgotten about them. In stark contrast the new gods
birthed from the ideas or consequences of a modernising society are
wealthy, attractive (with the exception of Cancer and Technology) and
more tangible. These consecrated ideas, or modern gods, have some-
thing of the animist spirit about them, but unlike the object choices
traditionally associated with animism, the nature of these entities is
expanded to incorporate not only the artificial features, but all facets
of modern society. Through the introduction of characters such as Mr.
Stone and Mr. Road, Gaiman implies that animism is very much present
in the way that modern society functions with belief acting as an animat-
ing life force.
Bird-David identifies concepts of personhood and ecological percep-
tion as being two areas that are central to a re-evaluation of animism
and its ability to represent the person as part of a complex series of rela-
tionships (a ‘dividual’ rather than an individual, to borrow a term from
Strathern2), which contrasts with Western modernist person-concepts
including spirit/body and human/animal dualisms, and the irreducibility
of the individual (Bird-David 1999, pp. 71–72). Harvey (2006, p. xix)
asserts that by ‘placing humans within a community of persons [which
includes all living beings] rather than at its peak, challenges claims to
human uniqueness (whether expressed in religious, ‘creationist’, or sci-
entific, ‘evolutionist’, discourse)’. Drawing on Irving Hallowell’s term
‘other-than-human person’, Harvey (2006, p. xvii) describes how ani-
mists ‘recognise a much wider range of persons’, and that some groups
speak about existing within ‘diverse communities of persons of many spe-
cies or “nations”’ (a conceptualisation of an intricate network of being
also discussed by Wessels in this volume):
Animisms are theories, discourses and practices of relationship, of living

well, of realising more fully what it means to be a person, and a human
person, in the company of other persons, not all of whom are human but
all of whom are worthy of respect (Harvey 2006, p. xvii).
It is the disregard of this ‘respect’, this mindfulness, this awareness of the

world which we inhabit that Gaiman so thoroughly explores through the
literal manifestation of animistic entities in his texts.
In some ways Gaiman’s novels bear likenesses to more recent South
African narratives that make use of indigenous worldviews particularly in
terms of ‘the fluidity and porousness of human identities in relation to
those of the non-human’ such as Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City (2010), Sello
Duiker’s The Hidden Star (2006) and Don Pinnock’s Rainmaker (2010)
(Woodward 2014, p. 220). As discussed by Wendy Woodward (2014,
p. 220) these texts present indigenous magic as being ‘unexceptional
[…] even if the human body is reconfigured, sometimes quite literally,
beyond rational limits.’ In a similar fashion to these authors, Gaiman uses
other-than-human beings not only to explore the centrality of animals in
our conceptualisation of the human, but to also uncover how the loss of
tradition has a detrimental effect on concepts of personhood, native eco-
logical perceptions and aspects of an individual’s personal connection to
the collective history of a cultural group.
In American Gods there are two notable instances where such losses of
tradition have been explored in terms of a disconnection between charac-
ter and cultural history. The first can be found in the following exchange
in Part One between Shadow, who uses Herodotus’s Histories as a means
to facilitate and to frame a discussion about his concerns regarding the
nature of his experiences, and Samantha (Sam) Black Crow, a part Native
American college student who acts as a mouthpiece for the postmodern
American generation:
“Herodotus. You ever read his Histories? … there’re battles in there, all
sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods.” …
“So there are stories with gods in. What are you trying to say? That these
guys had hallucinations?”
“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not it.” …
“What’s your theory?”
“That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time.” …
“Where?”
“Greece. Egypt. The Islands. Those places. Do you think if you walked
where those people walked you’d see the gods?”
“Maybe. But I don’t think people’d know that was what they’d seen.”
(Gaiman 2005a, p. 184)
During the discussion Sam’s responses are led by Shadow, who seems
to be testing a hypothesis voiced in the last line of the above extract.
For Shadow, Sam’s nonchalant remark reflects the truth of his own
126 A.-M Wheeler
experiences as he initially does not recognise the incarnations for what

they are. He is often unsure of the nature of the beings with whom he
interacts, which is fairly convincing given that within the first part of the
novel his understanding of the laws of reality are challenged and destabi-
lised through encounters with corporeal, animist deities. And the story
shows him to be in need of learning how to be a person living among
others, in Harvey’s expansive sense.
Despite the fantastical nature of some of the characters, Shadow
remains unperturbed by their implausible presence, it seems because he
is focused on his wife’s betrayal and her sudden death. However, in Part
Two, during an exchange with his resurrected wife it becomes apparent
that Shadow’s disconnection from his own existence preceded her infi-
delity:
“It must be hard,” said Laura, “not being alive.”
“You mean it’s hard for you to be dead?” …
“No,” … She shook her head. “But I was talking about you.”
“I’m alive,” said Shadow. “I’m not dead. Remember?”
“You’re not dead,” she said. “But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either.
Not really. … You’re like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world …
The best thing about Robbie was that he was somebody … he was alive …
He wanted things. He filled the space.” (Gaiman 2005a, p. 396)
By contrasting her spouse with her lover, Laura identifies that an essen-
tial part of Shadow’s selfhood, his personhood, has always been missing,
and as a result he has never been able to fully embody or claim a tangible
identity for himself. He is literally the shadow of a fully realised person.
That Shadow has little understanding of his own history and that he
lacks a sense of community become focal points in the narrative from
Part Two onwards. Titled ‘My Ainsel,’ a reference to the Irish fairy tale
Ainsel meaning ‘my own self’, it is here that the question of Shadow’s
identity really comes to the fore (Hartland 2000, p. 149). Along with
taking the name Mike Ainsel (which is phonetically similar to my ‘ainsel’
and so contains strong allusions to the question of identity), it is here
that Shadow experiences the suggestive dreams of the Wakinyau, the
Lakota’s version of the thunderbirds3 that populate many Native North
American peoples’ belief systems.
Through subtle changes in the development of Shadow’s characteri-

sation, Gaiman skilfully introduces the question of racial identity and
by extension racial history into the narrative. That Shadow is of mixed
‘race’ is indicated several times in the novel through interactions with
other characters,4 and alerts the reader to the presence of racial power
dynamics within the text. Although Gaiman initially chooses to present
people of colour without specifically indicating their cultural histories,
this is later subverted through the incorporation of animistic characters
through which these histories are revealed. This manoeuvre testifies to an
acute awareness of the inherent difficulties encountered when confront-
ing ‘race’ and racial history in fiction which remain prevalent in spite of
the distancing that the genre of speculative fiction allows. In order to
guide his audience’s inferences as to Shadow’s lineage, Gaiman draws
on many Native American mythological traditions ranging from those
associated with creation stories to those of the Wakinyau. Although all
of these are linked to an animist belief system, it is the appearance of the
buffalo man, an animistic representation of the land itself, who is a par-
ticularly important figure, functioning as Shadow’s mentor in the dream
world:
Shadow was in a dark place, and the thing staring at him wore a buffalo’s
head, rank and furry with huge wet eyes. Its body was a man’s body, oiled
and slick.
“Changes are coming,” said the buffalo without moving its lips …
“Where am I?” Shadow asked.
“In the Earth and under the Earth,” said the buffalo man. “You are where
the forgotten wait.” His eyes were liquid black marbles, and his voice was
a rumble from beneath the world. He smelled like wet cow. “Believe,” said
the rumbling voice. “If you are to survive, you must believe.” …
“What should I believe?”
“Everything,” roared the buffalo man. (Gaiman 2005a, p. 19)
Because this encounter takes place so early in the novel its relevance may
be easily overlooked, but there are several important pieces of informa-
tion that should be noted. The first pertains to the description of the
buffalo man himself, which suggests a corporeal fusion and by extension
a physical and spiritual unity between human and beast. This description
128 A.-M Wheeler
is worth noting because the composite figure suggests a deeply rooted

connection between man and buffalo that transcends bodily difference.
(The idea that ‘archaic’ shamanism manages or aims to dissolve physical
boundaries, particularly those associated with Cartesian dualism, is dis-
cussed by Carstens in this volume.)
It has, albeit erroneously, become something of common knowledge
that Plains Indians were so dependent on wild American bison for their
survival that its near extinction has become strongly associated with their
own threatened cultures, making Gaiman’s theriomorphic representation
of the land particularly apt from the perspective of popular iconography.
However, as Andrew Isenberg (2000, p. 194) explains, Native American
dependence on the American buffalo developed after the Europeans
brought horses to the West, embedding Indian and Euro-American soci-
eties ‘in the non-human natural world’ in ways that contradict human-
nature dualisms. Therefore Gaiman’s formulation and inclusion of the
buffalo man speaks not only to a mythologised Western image of the
Native Americans, connecting the near extinction of this group with
the plight of the American buffalo, but also symbolically challenges the
human/animal dichotomy central to settler colonialism.
The last point worth mentioning in relation to this animistic figure
is that he tasks Shadow, a character who at best can only be tentatively
linked to the world at large, with believing in everything. This concept
of believing in everything is also echoed by Sam in a lengthy monologue
in which she lists all of her beliefs. Of particular interest is Sam’s notion
that she is an incarnation of the Siberian Shaman Atsula,5 which in terms
of the plot reinforces the expectation that Shadow will reconnect with his
lineage/historical cultural identity and as a result his community/place
in the world, in part by identifying himself as/with a deity since many
of the prominent characters are American incarnations of foreign gods.
Therefore, when the buffalo man tells Shadow to believe everything, he
appears to be anticipating that Shadow, whose identity is still uncertain at
this point, will inevitably encounter incarnations of both the old and new
gods and as a result will be forced to acknowledge their existence and
history and, subsequently, his own lineage and place in the world.
Shadow’s difficulties with recovering and connecting to his own cul-
tural identity are exacerbated by his lack of self-knowledge. Despite
the presence of the buffalo man it is only after his dream of pursuing
the thunderbird that it becomes evident that Shadow’s mixed race her-
itage is dominated by Native American and Norse bloodlines. Indeed,
Gaiman himself refers to Shadow as Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon elsewhere

in his introduction to the short story ‘Black Dog’ (Gaiman 2015, p.
xxxvi), which confirms Shadow’s Norse identity as being linked to that of
Odin’s second son. As a product of two very different cultures Shadow
functions as the embodiment of the postmodern American predica-
ment—he is neither one thing nor the other, but a blend of all that he
experiences, every group that forms part of his ancestry, and therefore he
must believe in ‘everything’ in order to wholly understand who he is.
In many respects both American Gods and Anansi Boys can be viewed
as Bildungsroman with the protagonists embarking on their respec-
tive acts of self-discovery/recovery following the deaths of their fathers.
However, there are two important differences between the novels that
are worth mentioning. First, unlike American Gods the animist entities
depicted in Anansi Boys, with a few exceptions, do not often manifest
in the real world, which results in the narrative making use of tradi-
tional rituals to facilitate communication between the material world, as
the modernised West understands it, and the spiritual plane. Thus it is
with the assistance of traditional practitioners of magic that the central
character Fat Charlie finds himself able to cross the divide between the
corporeal and the spiritual in his pursuit of self-understanding. Second,
in Anansi Boys a large portion of the actual storytelling is done by Fat
Charlie’s father, Anansi himself, to whom the stories belong, per West
African folk tale tradition, and who at times also appears to be the
embodiment of the universal tradition of storytelling. A substantial part
of the plot pivots on the information contained within the old tales told
by Anansi, with each of the stories foreshadowing or suggesting what
action is likely to take place in the contemporary world of the main text.
For the most part, the action in the novel relies on Fat Charlie’s lack of
knowledge of these stories, and by extension a lack of knowledge about
who he is, which allows him to become ensnared in the personal-ven-
detta plot of Anansi’s arch rival, Tiger.
As the focaliser for the majority of the novel, Fat Charlie represents
not only a loss of identity, but also of heritage, made particularly notice-
able through his travels through several geographic locales associated
with traumatic historical events, including southern USA, the Caribbean,
and the UK. As the characters move between the settings, their connec-
tion to their respective collective and personal histories either strengthens
or weakens, with noticeably strong connections emerging in geographi-
cal areas typically associated with the transatlantic slave trade or impe-
rial rule. The structure of the novel strongly mirrors the triangular trade
130 A.-M Wheeler
route between West Africa, the Caribbean/American colonies and the

European colonial powers with the main narrative taking place in three
locations—South London, Florida and the composite-Caribbean island
of Saint Andrews—interspersed with distinct, traditional-style Anansi sto-
ries set in West Africa.
By decentralising the narrative while providing a connection to these
locations via migrations of Anansi’s stories through the African diaspora,
Gaiman elaborately explores how the continued telling of such tales can
connect peoples to their own histories through the spiritual and natu-
ral worlds. As discussed by Emily Zobel Marshall (2007), Anansi as a
cultural figure typically associated with the Asante of West Africa is one
that has managed to survive a cultural metamorphosis by becoming sym-
bolic of the struggles of the black slaves brought to the Americas and
being incorporated into the broader narrative of African American his-
tory. Therefore, it should be understood that Gaiman’s choice of god
alone not only signals a sustained interest in how people form identities,
which was first brought to the attention of his readership in American
Gods, but also in the continued effects of colonisation and the transatlan-
tic slave trade on the African diaspora and its connections to its animistic
beliefs and places of origin.
Opening in South London, Anansi Boys finds Fat Charlie, cut-off from
his own cultural roots, leading a half-life of harbouring average aspirations in
a sterile setting where he is both uninterested and unaware of an existence
beyond his daily routine. This half-life is dramatically disrupted by the appar-
ent death of his estranged father Anansi which sets the narrative in motion,
bringing with it questions of personal identity, cultural continuity and inherit-
ance, and the arrival of Fat Charlie’s brother, a mysterious man named Spider.
Smooth, slick, and powerful, Spider serves as a humorous foil to the
bumbling Fat Charlie, but later gains more significance as the physical
manifestation of Fat Charlie’s animist self, split off from him by a magic
curse. Although the two characters together originate from the same entity,
the removal of Spider from Fat Charlie during childhood is likened to the
cutting in half of a starfish where the two halves are capable of creating
two complete and separate beings. However, it is Spider who is introduced
as a complete character in command of their father’s supernatural powers,
including shape-shifting between species, rather than Fat Charlie. Of the
multitude of allusions to Fat Charlie’s incomplete persona, his interaction
with Monkey in the ‘myth place’ is perhaps the most revealing because
Monkey’s curiosity exposes the loss of his theriomorphic self, as well as the
possibility that, while Anansi may have died in the human world, the same
cannot be said of the supernatural world that the gods inhabit:
“Who are you?” asked Monkey. “What are you? You seem like half a thing.
Are you from here or from there?”
“Anansi was my father,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m looking for someone to
help me deal with my brother, to make him go away.”
“Might get Anansi mad,” said Monkey. “Very bad idea that. Get Anansi
mad, you never in any more stories.”
“Anansi’s dead,” said Fat Charlie.
“Dead there,” said Monkey. “Maybe. But dead here? That’s another stump
of grubs entirely.” (Gaiman 2005b, p. 155)
Fat Charlie’s travels to the ‘myth place’ begin with his desire to rid himself
of Spider. Entering this alternative space with the assistance of four elderly
female Voodoo practitioners, it is here that he meets both Tiger and Bird,
and strikes the deal in which he allows them to spirit away Spider in return for
Anansi’s bloodline, without realising that this bloodline makes their fates
inseparable. Gaiman makes his audience aware that the beings in this space
transcend modern Western society’s acceptance of a human-animal dichot-
omy by manifesting not only as both human and animal, which gives rise
to Fat Charlie’s thoughts of them as ‘animal-people’, but that their physical
attributes gesture towards an ontology that extends beyond what is imme-
diately perceived, an otherness that encompasses the symbols, the metaphors
and the associations connected with that being (Gaiman 2005b, p. 155).
With reference to Zipes’ previously cited statement that fairy tales
and to some extent folk tales can be interpreted as metaphorical reflec-
tions of peoples’ customs and interrelations, T.C. McCaskie’s (1992)
discussion of the ecological location of the Asante is essential to inter-
preting Gaiman’s presentation of these animistic gods. According to
McCaskie (1992, p. 221), the location of Asante culture within a fer-
tile natural world, containing a profusion of animal species with whom
they regularly came into contact and who were considered autonomous
beings, gave rise to a ‘tangled web of anthropomorphic resemblances’.
Traditionally, the Asante were practitioners of an animistic religion,
which Gaiman strongly invokes, structured around the worship of spir-
itual forces that influenced the universe. Nyame was the name given to
132 A.-M Wheeler
the omnipotent deity who resided in the sky and who sent his children to
Earth bringing with them names for all of the beings present in the non-
human world (Marshall 2007, p. 31). In terms of the Asante narratives,
Anansi, provider of wisdom and stories to humans (often thought of as
histories rather than fictions), existed somewhere between the ‘earth and
the sky and had the power to restructure both the world of the divine
and the human’ (Marshall 2007, p. 32).
Gaiman’s representation of Anansi draws on many of the attrib-
utes typically associated with the traditional figure including his lust-
ful, greedy and deceitful nature, and in so doing demonstrates his own
understanding of how the Asante conceived the interconnectedness of
being which is so emphasised in their stories. Gaiman manages to cap-
ture the animistic essence of these characters as well as their ecological
interconnectedness in his descriptions of Bird, Tiger and Anansi himself,
the last not only in Anansi Boys, but also in American Gods only with a
slightly different name:
He was looking at Mr Nancy, an old black man with a pencil moustache,

in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves … at the same time,
in the same place, he saw a jewelled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an
emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was
looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-coloured skin and three
sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted
with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion … and he was also seeing a
young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with
black flies; and last of all, and behind all these things … [was] a tiny brown
spider, hiding under a withered ochre leaf. (Gaiman 2005a, p. 144)
This extract poignantly captures the simultaneity of the concepts of

Anansi as God, as human being, as cultural icon and finally as animal.
Similarly, the description of Fat Charlie’s first encounter with Bird follows
an almost identical narrative strategy as he (Fat Charlie) battles to make
sense of his interactions with the literal manifestation of a cultural symbol:
[While] he knew that he was seeing a bird, mad-eyed, ragged-feathered,

bigger than any eagle, taller than an ostrich, its beak the cruel tearing
weapon of a raptor, its feathers the colour of slate overlaid with an oilslick
sheen, making a dark rainbow of purples and greens, he really only knew
that for an instant, somewhere in the very back of his mind. What he saw
with his eyes was a woman with raven-black hair, standing where the idea
of a bird had been. (Gaiman 2005b, p. 159)
Throughout the novel the shifting forms of the animist-god characters

seem to gesture strongly towards the porosity not only of the mani-
festations of the gods themselves and the way in which their forms are
interpreted, but Fat Charlie’s own sense of multispecies identity as the
spider-god’s son, for he begins undergoing a process of reclaiming his
theriomorphic self once he understands Anansi to be dead.
Citing Gaiman’s Anansi Boys as one of several examples of the death
of the theriomorphic god in literature and its association with the decline
of some of the oldest human cultures, Susan McHugh (2010) exam-
ines the prevalence of the demise of animal gods in contemporary fiction.
Her indication that Anansi Boys could be thought of as belonging to the
greater literary body of extinction narratives where ‘the deaths of divine
figures signal doom for the systems these creatures were once imagined as
protecting’ is worth noting (McHugh 2010, p. 1). However, an impor-
tant difference between the extinction narratives that McHugh goes on to
examine and Anansi Boys is that, like his associated species,  the central god
figure does not actually die, which suggests that Asante culture has not
been completely lost to the African diaspora. As with the traditional Anansi
folk tales, Anansi’s actions within the context of Gaiman’s novel conform
to his identity as a trickster figure, with the truth of his ‘non-death’ being
foreshadowed or gestured towards throughout the story. However, it is
the belief that Anansi is dead that, importantly, motivates a rediscovery and
negotiation of a transnational cultural identity for Fat Charlie.
The depiction of Anansi as something of a family man, womaniser and
deft manipulator is by no means a new aspect of the Anansi storyline,
which, as evidenced in Duane’s African Myths & Legends (1998), tradi-
tionally casts him as a clever and cunning character capable of deceiving
or exploiting the weaknesses of others. However, these narratives go to
some length to make their audience aware that all of the stories belong to
Anansi, who won them from his parent and sky god Nyame and Tiger, and
in so doing alert the reader to the inherent bias present in these tales. It is
around this bias that Gaiman has hung his reimagining of the Anansi story
as part revenge narrative and part Bildungsroman, because in it Anansi’s
death not only provides an opportunity for Tiger, with the assistance of
Bird, to reclaim the stories and rid himself of Anansi’s kin, but also for Fat
Charlie to discover who he is and to recover a sense of wholeness.
Similar to the way in which Gaiman presents his audience with a frac-
tured image of perception, culture, self and the human-animal binary, so
the structure of the narrative plays with the conventions of the fantasy
134 A.-M Wheeler
genre by refusing to conform to traditional mythology, portal-quest or

liminal modes (Klapcsik 2009). Typically postmodern in its exploration
and portrayal of fragmented selves, intertextuality and lack of certainty
within a text that refuses to uphold established and familiar storytell-
ing practices, Gaiman’s presentation of the porosity of categories as well
as the interconnectedness of being, is suggestive of a greater desire to
reconnect to those aspects, including the animal Other, which assist us
in formulating an understanding of our place in the world. Interestingly,
Gaiman only affords the ability to recognise the old gods to the four
elderly Voodoo women who, along with Fat Charlie’s mother, appear
to have arrived in Florida from the Caribbean, indicating their intimate
connection not only with the transatlantic slave trade, but also with their
West African cultural heritage. The renewed or continued practice of cul-
tural beliefs within foreign settings, even if these beliefs and their ritual
accoutrements have necessarily transmogrified, is at the centre of prevent-
ing the extinction of cultures associated with diasporas. Although these
four women in this novel appear to be the last practitioners of Voodoo,
it is through them that Gaiman illustrates the possibility for an animist
belief system to adapt to a modern existence, bringing with it connec-
tions to historical cultural identities and the other-than-human world.
Gaiman’s novels can therefore be read as more than mere appropria-
tions of traditional mythologies reimagined in Western and colonised
contexts. Through his representation of an incarnated hybridised pan-
theon unified through place and experience, Gaiman explores concepts
of self and culture while simultaneously investigating the nature of post-
modern society and what it means to be part of it. By engaging with
the metaphorical elements of storytelling and how the act of storytell-
ing itself promotes cultural transference even though the stories them-
selves may be subject to change not only as a result of natural progress,
but also as a result of current and historical social upheaval, Gaiman’s
texts indicate that human beings do not necessarily exist in a state of
absolute disconnection from—though often ignorant of or inattentive
to—their cultural, spiritual, and natural origins.
Governed by their cultural and/or social affiliations with specific
places and, as a result, specific animals—real or imagined—Gaiman’s
characters demonstrate how they provide living links to history through
which to create new robust identities within foreign settings. By draw-
ing on a multitude of animist belief systems as well as phenomena that
are virtually inextricable from modern westernised societies, the texts
invoke animistic principles not only to recover lost cultural practices, but
also to intervene on behalf of those cultures in the present. The engage-
ment with animism as both narrative device and didactic tool reconnects
Gaiman’s characters to their historical cultural identities, and along the
way challenges the widely held truth of Cartesian dualism, demonstrat-
ing how human beings are embedded in the world in which they exist,
and how they hold themselves apart from it at their peril.
Notes
1. Wednesday is the name most often used to denote the Norse deity Odin
in American Gods. Despite initially being understood as the same deity, by
the novel’s end it becomes evident that although both names may act as
signifiers for Odin, Wednesday and Odin are better interpreted as being
incarnations of the same abstract concept existing in different cultural
milieux. While the two characters may manifest in a similar way, they are
not identical. Odin’s brief interaction with Shadow in Reykjavik empha-
sises this point:
“You are Odin,” said Shadow.
The man nodded thoughtfully, as if weighing up the name. “They call me
many things, but, yes, I am Odin, Bor’s son,” he said.
“I saw you die,” said Shadow. “I stood vigil for your body. You tried to
destroy so much, for power. You would have sacrificed so much to your-
self. You did that.”
“I did not do that.”
“Wednesday did. He was you.”
“He was me, yes. But I am not him.” (Gaiman American Gods, p. 634)
2. Strathern’s concept of the ‘dividual’ was derived from her comparison
between Melanesian and Euro-American concepts of person from which
it came to be understood that the ‘Melanesian “person” is a composite
of relationships, a microcosm homologous to society at large’ (Bird-David
1999, p. 72). For further information see Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender
of the Gift (1988).
3. Described as an enormous bird responsible for the sound of thunder, the
thunderbird is a widespread figure in Native American mythology, par-
ticularly among Midwestern, Plains, and Northwest Coast tribes. In some
communities thunderbirds are considered sacred forces of nature and are
associated with the summer months, while in others, they are thought
to be powerful but ordinary members of the animal kingdom (Native
Languages n.d.).
136 A.-M Wheeler
4. An early example of this can be seen in Shadow’s interaction with Wilson.
Before his release Wilson, a warden working at the correctional facility at
which Shadow has been held, asks whether or not he is a ‘spic’ or a ‘gypsy’
or if he might have ‘nigger blood’ in him (Gaiman 2005a, p. 12).
5. The story of Atsula and her people appears in one of the sections titled
‘Coming to America’. She is the oracle of a Siberian tribe who are eventu-
ally absorbed by the Native American tribes inhabiting the pre-American
territories. Atsula’s story not only emphasises how cultural practices may
be lost through assimilation, voluntary or otherwise, but also stresses that
gods are born from the imaginations of people and so rely on their being
remembered in order to exist.
Works Cited
Bird-David, N. 1999. ‘Animism’ revisited: Personhood, environment, and rela-
tional epistemology. Current Anthropology 40: 67–91.
British Council Literature. n.d. Neil Gaiman. https://literature.britishcouncil.
org/writer/neil-gaiman. Accessed 17 July 2016.
Duane, O.B. 1998. African myths & legends. London: Brockhampton Press.
Gaiman, N. 2005a. American gods. London: Headline Review.
———. 2005b. Anansi boys. London: Headline Review.
———. 2015. Trigger warning. London: Headline Review.
Grewe-Volpp, C. 2006. Nature ‘out there’ and as ‘a social player’: Some basic
consequences for a literary ecocritical analysis. In Nature in literary and cul-
tural studies: Transatlantic conversations on ecocriticism, ed. C. Gersdorf and
S. Mayer, 71–86. New York: Rodopi.
Hartland, E.S. (ed.). 2000. English fairy and folk tales. New York: Dover.
Harvey, G. 2006. Animism: Respecting the living world. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Isenberg, A.C. 2000. The destruction of the bison. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kirkus Reviews. 2010. Anansi boys by Neil Gaiman. https://www.kirkusreviews.
com/book-reviews/neil-gaiman/anansi-boys. Accessed 4 June 2016.
Klapcsik, S. 2009. The double-edged nature of Neil Gaiman’s ironical perspec-
tives and liminal fantasies. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20 (2): 193–
209.
Marshall, E.Z. 2007. Liminal Anansi: Symbol of order and chaos. An exploration
of Anansi’s roots amongst the Asante of Ghana. Caribbean Quarterly 53 (3):
30–40.
McHugh, S. 2010. Being out of time: Animal gods in contemporary extinction
fictions. Australian Literary Studies 25 (2): 1–16.
McCaskie, T.C. 1992. People and animals: Constru(ct)ing the Asante experience.
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62 (2): 221–47.
Native Languages. n.d. Legendary Native American figures: Thunderbird.
http://www.native-languages.org/thunderbird.html. Accessed 9 Aug 2016.
Slabbert, M., and L. Viljoen. 2006. Sustaining the imaginative life: Mythology
and fantasy in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Literator 27 (3): 135–155.
Vint, S. 2014. Animal alterity: Science fiction and the question of the animal.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
White, C.E. 2001. Interview with Neil Gaiman. The internet writing jour-
nal. https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jul01/interview-with-neil-
gaiman-7011. Accessed 7 July 2016.
White, P. 2005. The experimental animal in Victorian Britain. In Thinking
with animals: New perspectives on anthropomorphism, ed. L. Daston, and G.
Mitman, 59–81. New York: Columbia University Press.
Woodward, W. 2014. Embodying the feral: Indigenous traditions and the non-
human in some recent South African novels. In The Routledge handbook of
human-animal studies, ed. G. Marvin, and S. McHugh, 220–232. London:
Routledge.
Zipes, J. 2001. Cross-cultural connections and the contamination of the classical
fairy tale. In The great fairy tale tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the
Brothers Grimm, ed. J. Zipes, 845–869. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Author Biography
Alexandra-Mary Wheeler is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the
Witwatersrand, South Africa. After having tutored English Literature at Wits
and lecturered at Varsity College, she joined the Pearson Institute of Higher
Education in 2014 as their Academic Copy Editor while pursuing her Ph.D. Her
current area of academic interest centres on the nexus of ecosophy, ecocriticism,
bioethics and zoocriticism with a focus on the work of Margaret Atwood, J.M.
Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, Ruth Ozeki and Yann Martell. Other research inter-
ests include late nineteenth-century Gothic Literature, Southern Gothic fiction,
German post-war narratives, animal rights and subjectivities, and Posthumanism.
CHAPTER 8
Animated Animals: Allegories

of Transformation in Khumba
Hermann Wittenberg
I
In cultural studies there is an increasing interest in the aesthetic, his-
torical and political dimensions of film animation, much of it focused
on the prolific output of the Disney Corporation (Giroux 1999; Wells
2009) and, more recently, Japanese anime (Napier 2005). But there is
also a recognition of the growing diversity, inventiveness and maturity
of a genre that has an increasingly global footprint, and whose cultural
significance far exceeds the field of children’s entertainment. This chap-
ter will examine a recent South African 3D computer-animated children’s
film, Khumba (2013), as an example of emerging trends in transnational
animation film production, examining how such films mediate tensions
between local, nationally-informed storytelling, and the broader genre
expectations and commercial imperatives of a global media market.
Khumba’s aesthetics derive much from Disney, DreamWorks and Pixar,
the dominant US media corporations in the field of computer anima-
tion entertainment. Their brand of animation—familiar to viewers from
H. Wittenberg (*) 
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa
e-mail: wittenberg.hermann@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_8
140 H. Wittenberg
countless animation features aimed at the youth market—is also discerni-

ble in Khumba’s feel-good plot line, in which an innocent young protag-
onist encounters numerous setbacks but eventually triumphs over violent
villains, and finds love in the process. Khumba follows a stock plot, but
unlike comparable Western models in the genre, also consciously uses
South African natural landscapes, animal characters and indigenous
myths to engage particularly local questions of race, difference and trans-
formation, though in an allegorised and less-than-direct way that would
not be experienced as politically intrusive or didactic by global youth
audiences. While keyed to the genre expectation of the international ani-
mation market Khumba also conveys significant local cultural content
making it an interesting case study of the way indigenous semiotic ele-
ments are packaged and repurposed within the commercial context of
branded global genre conformity (Fig. 8.1).
This chapter will advance a critical reading of the film and its epony-
mous zebra character, suggesting that many of the questions that trouble
post-transition South Africa concerning cultural transformation, belong-
ing and racial identity are allegorised in the film’s feel-good storyline.
Furthermore, Khumba will also be used to interrogate issues around the
representation of animals and the environment, and how digitally cre-
ated, anthropomorphised figures articulate social and political concerns
in the context of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition. As Ursula
Heise has put it, ‘[r]ather than light entertainment for children, anima-
tion now presents itself to the public as a mature visual genre that is able
to address issues ranging from war and discrimination to technological
innovation and environmental crisis’ (2014, p. 301). Khumba is a rare
example that takes on pressing social issues in a compelling way that
deserves greater attention, but, before analysing the film’s content and
style in detail, it is necessary to contextualise this approach by looking at
some of the broader issues at stake in animal representation, and situate
our reading within theoretical approaches to animation.
Contemporary animation film has, from its inception, been dominated
by an inventive depiction of animals, and it has increasingly become a
global, transnational entertainment genre. From Disney’s early Mickey
Mouse cartoons in the 1920s to the mature animation classic Jungle
Book (1967), and Pixar’s computer-generated hyper-real 3D anima-
tions that emerged in the late 1990s, a large body of visual media has
developed that utilises cute, anthropomorphised animals to appeal to
child and adult audiences internationally. It is a genre that is perennially
8 ANIMATED ANIMALS: ALLEGORIES OF TRANSFORMATION IN KHUMBA 141
Fig. 8.1 Khumba film poster

142 H. Wittenberg
successful, and often highly lucrative, making it one major area of cul-
ture where animals are pervasive. As John Berger has argued in his essay
‘Why look at animals?’ this ubiquity of animal representations in our
contemporary world can also be read as a paradoxical sign of the margin-
alisation of actual, live animals. The pervasive presence of animals in car-
toons and children’s toys is part of a ‘widespread commercial diffusion of
animal imagery [which] began as animals started to be withdrawn from
daily life’. Berger argues that the widespread ‘reproduction of animals in
images—as their biological reproduction in birth becomes a rarer and
rarer sight’ (1980, p. 24)—functions as a compensatory cultural mecha-
nism that signals a marginalisation and containment of animals in moder-
nity. The etymology of the word ‘animation’, which the Oxford English
Dictionary glosses as ‘to give life to, to quicken, vivify’ or to ‘give the
appearance of life to’ underlines Berger’s argument that such illusionary
representations compensate for the disappearance, or the actual death
of animals in urbanised modernity. Reduced to either meat or digitally
synthesised spectacle, living animals have become largely displaced in our
culture, a cultural fact to which animation films bear testimony.
Some scholars have argued, contra Berger, that such animations are
not necessarily a form of disregard and marginalisation of animals. For
Paul Wells, some ‘animated animal narratives are viewed as vehicles for
progressive, transformative agendas’ (2009, p. 11) which can give human
viewers pause for self-reflection. Already in Disney’s classic, perenni-
ally popular animation feature Bambi (1942), its animated forest crea-
tures voice an emotively powerful critique of the human disregard for
the environment and many contemporary films use animal characters
to articulate ecological and environmental concerns (Whitley 2008).
But the questions nevertheless arise: to what extent do these drawn or
digitally generated animal figures on our screens bear a relationship to
real, natural animals, and if these animations do not principally function
as proxies for human rather than animal subjects? These are animal fig-
ures that typically talk, and often wear clothes, drive cars, go shopping,
and so on. Even with the major advances which computer-generated,
photo-realist 3D characters have over an older generation of hand-drawn
cartoon figures, animated animals break all the rules of realism and veri-
similitude. Taking as an example again the depiction of deer in Disney’s
Bambi (1942), these are figures with unnaturally enlarged eyes, smiling
faces and talking mouths that bear little resemblance to the facial features
of natural animals, nor their normal modes of behaviour. As Ralph Lutts
has shown, the Disney version of Bambi depicts ‘deer visually as surro-
gate human children’ (1992, p. 165) with over-sized heads and large
eyes, thereby arousing a sense of identification and nurturance. These
deformations often reshape familiar animal forms according to a theri-
anthropic logic, making their facial features resemble those of humans
while retaining recognisable animal bodies. Animated animals are, liter-
ally, hybrid anthropomorphised figures which tell us more about human
society than a natural world. In many other cases animation produces
extreme deformations of natural bodily shape, as we can see in characters
such as the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote in Warner Brothers’ popular
Looney Tunes cartoon series.
Rather than dismissing such re-made, stretched and deformed figures
as unreliable representations or even misrepresentations of real animals,
it is important to recognise that these non-realist distortions are foun-
dational to the genre. As Eric Herhuth and other scholars have pointed
out, early twentieth-century animation in Europe and the USA was
less indebted to aesthetic traditions of naturalistic realism, but rather
‘inspired by avant-garde, modernist art’ (2014, p. 5). The Japanese ani-
mation scholar Yuriko Furuhata has drawn attention to the foundational
concept of plasticity in animation, where the flexibility of the medium
lends itself to a protean malleability of natural body shapes, stretching
and distorting them in ways that underline the basic anti-realist nature
of the genre and illustrate the inventiveness and creativity of the artists
(2011, p. 25–38). Like Furuhata, Heise similarly draws on the Russian
film-maker and critic Sergei Eisenstein, and argues that ‘plasmaticness’ is
a key aesthetic strategy in animation: ‘animated bodies, human and non-
human, are notorious for their seemingly infinite ability to expand, con-
tract, stretch, bulge, flatten, implode, explode, fragment, and yet return
to their original shapes’ (2014, p. 204). In its playful, creative non-refer-
entiality, which allows living and inanimate objects to behave in ways that
exceed the bounds of the real, animation can break with the given, and
explore possibilities and alternative modes of being that would be impos-
sible to visualise in conventionally filmed cinema.
Already in his 1941 essay on Disney, Eisenstein recognised a tension
between the ideologically conservative messaging of these cartoon films
and the utopian possibilities of their form: ‘in a country and social order
with such a mercilessly standardised and mechanically measured exist-
ence, which is difficult to call life, the sight of such “omnipotence” (that
is, the ability to become “whatever you wish”), cannot but hold a sharp
144 H. Wittenberg
degree of attractiveness’ (in Heise, p. 311). In breaking with biological

realism, animation embodies a potentiality and freedom that Eisenstein
saw as being suppressed in capitalist, industrialised societies. In anima-
tion art, humans and animals can break free from anatomical limitations
and physical laws, and in this sense they function as allegories for the
desire to escape oppressive and restrictive capitalist social relations. Wells
similarly notes that the antics of American cartoon figures are aptly char-
acterised ‘as anarchic in clichéd TV listings’ (2009, p. 6), inadvertently
revealing their compensatory, carnivalesque function in staid, predictable,
middle-class society.
Two broad critical traditions have emerged in animation scholarship,
which both emphasise the allegorical nature of the medium and the way it
provides critical insights into human culture. In both approaches, talking
animals in film are read in the context of larger social relations, political
struggles and historical forces. As detailed above, one strand in anima-
tion criticism focuses on form, as exemplified by Eisenstein’s emphasis on
the ‘plasmaticness’ of animated figures that are read as a form of crea-
tive, utopian escape from a repressive social order. Animation is, in this
view, a radically inventive medium that disrupts reification, and embod-
ies a potentiality of viewing and experiencing the given world differently.
The other major direction in animation studies has paid less attention to
form and is much more negative and sceptical, primarily focusing on the
content, theme and latent messaging of the films. This large volume of
scholarship has critiqued animation films, especially Disney Studio’s pro-
lific output, exposing its conservative ideological underpinnings. Animal
characters and their stories are seen to convey thinly veiled messaging
that affirms and reinforces conventional gender roles, racial prejudices,
class divisions and national stereotypes. Books such as Henry Giroux’s
The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (1999) and
titles such as Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films
(Booker 2010), From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender,
and Culture (Bell et al. 1995), How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist
Ideology in the Disney Comic (Mattelart and Dorfman 1975), give a sense
of the critical scholarship that has largely viewed animation as a form
of conservative cultural propaganda. Giroux, for example, has argued
that it is necessary to ‘move beyond treating these films as transpar-
ent entertainment to question the diverse representations and messages
that constitute Disney’s conservative view of the world’ (1999, p. 3).
Furthermore, Lee Artz has argued more generally that much contempo-
rary commercial animation
builds consent for global capitalist social relations, including themes of

individualism (consistently appearing as self-gratification and self-interest
of elite protagonists), deference to authority (repeatedly framing protag-
onist actions as defense of hierarchies which define acceptable behaviour
and values), and consumerism (with franchised series and ubiquitous media
product tie-ins for audience identity and affiliation with protagonists).
(2015, p. 93)
Paul Wells has taken a less suspicious approach, making the point that
animation forces viewers to recognise ‘representational difference, and
that inevitably interrogates orthodox positions, embedded ideologies,
and epistemological certainty per se’ (2009, p. 5). Animation is there-
fore intrinsically open to multiple readings, challenging the way we think
about ourselves and the world, and animated animal figures can engage
with social issues that would be more difficult to address directly because
of political, religious or social taboos.
In this essay, a reading of Khumba will be informed by these diverse
ideas, exploring the film’s creativity in creating highly plastic fictional
worlds that are allegorically reflective of the South African transitional
context and native knowledges. The film creates a fictional world that
references contemporary political complexity, and also narrates a cultural
indigeneity that is strongly underpinned by local natural landscapes and
various animals that are at home in them. But the film’s social messag-
ing, while articulating a local environmentalism and a progressive politics
of inclusivity and equality, will also be located in the larger context of
transnational animation genres, which are geared towards a commercially
driven conservatism and cultural uniformity.
II
Written and directed by the South African film-maker Anthony Silverston
and produced by Cape Town based Triggerfish Studios, Khumba traces
the adventures of a young, male zebra, Khumba (voiced by Jake T.
Austin), who is born with an aberrant skin colouration. He has too few
of the black stripes which are characteristic of his species, and because of
his predominantly white skin he is mocked as only ‘half a zebra’, despite
146 H. Wittenberg
the best efforts of his protective parents, Tombi (AnnaSophia Robb) and
Seko (Laurence Fishburne). The herd of zebras live in a curious laager-
like enclosure1 of thorns which surrounds their waterhole, so as to pro-
tect themselves from predators. In this enclaved, closed-off space, they
are cut off from the outside world, and when a debilitating drought
arrives, it is not surprising that the isolated society of zebras fall back on
superstition and irrationality: Khumba’s aberrant stripes are blamed for
the lack of rain, and he is rejected by his herd. Inspired by an enigmatic
mantis, Khumba believes that his stripes could be restored by the magi-
cal waters of a far-off waterhole. After the death of his mother, he there-
fore leaves the herd and its protective enclosure. On his adventure-filled
journey to the mythical waters, he is helped along by some new eccentric
friends: a kind wildebeest (Loretta Devine) and a somewhat camp ostrich
(Richard E. Grant). All along he is stalked by Phango (Liam Neeson), an
evil, half-blind leopard. They encounter a migrating herd of Afrikaans-
accented, rugby-playing springbok; a doomsday cult of dassies (rock rab-
bits) in thrall to their predator; a black eagle; and a mad, lonely merino
sheep (Catherine Tate) living on an abandoned farm. Humans make a
brief appearance as they traverse a nature reserve. The film ends with
Khumba finding the fabled waterhole and defeating the leopard, but
instead of the promise of having his stripes restored by the water, he now
sports the claw marks of the predator, in this way literally earning his
stripes. The film traces Khumba’s story from birth to redemption, show-
ing how he overcomes his outcast status and eventually saves the herd.
The film is set in the semi-desert Great Karoo area of South Africa, and
the large cast of animal characters aptly represents the faunal diversity of
this region.
Although the idea of half-striped zebra was originally inspired by a
recent breeding project that attempted to genetically reverse engineer
the long-extinct, semi-striped Cape quagga species (Triggerfish, p. 6),
its central references are to older histories and myths connected to the
land. A significant indigenous element of the film is the character of the
mantis, which makes its appearance at key moments in the narrative. The
mantis is the genius loci of the set, and it is not accidental that the film
begins and ends with the insect in close-up focus, thereby allowing it to
frame the entire action. The mantis (Mantis religiosa) is not only a char-
acteristic insect of the Karoo region, but also has considerable mythic and
spiritual significance in Southern Africa as an incarnation of /Kaggen,
the most important San deity. As Roger Hewitt has described it,
‘Mantids were regarded as oracular by many San and Khoe in Southern

Africa, and in the languages of a large number of these groups the word
for mantis is the same as the word for the supreme being’ (2008, p. 112).
In San folklore and cosmology /Kaggen is the ‘master of all things’,
and the mantis, the insect whose form he most often takes, is therefore
imbued with ‘a numinous aura’, as Matthias Guenther has put it (1999,
p. 64). Indigenous storytelling is pervaded by references to /Kaggen and
his enigmatic powers, and he is, as David Lewis-Williams has put it in a
seminal study, ‘a pervasive, omnipresent presence inhabiting the crucial
areas of San life’ (1981, p. 124). Furthermore, his role is that of a ‘divin-
ity who maintained an equilibrium between man and nature’ (1981, p.
124). /Kaggen was therefore strongly associated with rainmaking and
water, which was of critical importance in the semi-desert Karoo land-
scape. It is clear that Khumba’s use of the mantis figure embodies strong
references to San mythology and indigenous knowledge, and this is par-
ticularly evident when the insect intervenes in the crippling drought and
appears to point the young outcast zebra towards a magical source of
water. Although the mantis does not speak in the film, when it appears
it functions as a focaliser, drawing the viewer’s attention to the events as
they unfold through its perspective.
The film not only references pre-colonial San mythology, but also
situates itself in contemporary South African debates around racial dif-
ference and inclusive nation building. The physical characteristics of
Khumba can be read as an allegory for race and larger questions around
transformation in post-transitional South Africa. As Silverston put it him-
self in an interview,
it’s a story about difference, whether it’s skin colour or sexual orientation,
or anything, and about overcoming that feeling of being inferior because
you’re different. The black-and-white stripes is such a great metaphor for
that because it’s a visual metaphor.’ (Mallory 2013)
The racial over-determination of casting a zebra with a ‘wrong’ skin col-

our as the film’s hero suggests that the still dominant social and political
categories in South Africa, namely black and white, are simultaneously
engaged with and questioned. The name ‘Khumba’ itself is derived from
the isiZulu and isiXhosa word meaning ‘skin’, emphasising the protago-
nist’s allegorical signification as a proxy for race: at the start, he defines
his identity exclusively in terms of skin colour. His initial inferiority and
148 H. Wittenberg
sense of exclusion is derived from a perceived lack of proper blackness,

but this eventually gives way to an acceptance of himself in a context of
diversity and difference. Khumba is presented as a maverick, heroic fig-
ure who can transcend well-established racial boundaries and epidermal-
based identities, allegorising a form of racial difference that transcends
formerly fixed binaries. Khumba is thus a plastic being in the film’s story
world who does not function in any way as a natural animal, but is com-
pletely defined in human terms, and within a plot that addresses a prob-
lematic social issue rather than any ecological or environmental concerns.
But if we read Khumba more carefully and accept its animal characters
as thinly veiled proxies for human beings, the film also paradoxically reas-
serts some troubling racial categories and essentialisms. The film depicts
zebra society as initially conservative and isolationist. They are predomi-
nantly parochial and resistant to change, and moreover riven by irration-
ality, superstition and internal factionalism. Zebra society in the film is
essentially a tribal, species-homogenous polity not unlike that of the eth-
nic apartheid enclaves (semi-autonomous states, also known as Bantustans),
though updated to the twenty-first century by the ugly presence of xeno-
phobia: when a thirsty herd of gemsbok arrives from the north and wan-
ders through a gap in the border fence, they are chased away from the
waterhole. The association of the gemsbok with poor and destitute African
migrants is emphasised by their distinctively African voices, spoken by
among others, the Xhosa-speaking South African writer Sindiwe Magona.
In contrast to the gemsboks’ aural Africanness, the zebras’ speech marks
them as American, even though they have typical Zulu names (Khumba’s
mother is called Tombi, and his father is named Seko). The zebras’ accents
and the discourse patterns of their dialogue makes them sound not African,
but as distinctly African-American, which is not surprising given the iden-
tity of the voice actors chosen by Silverston for most of the zebra, with the
notable exception of young Khumba himself. We thus need to take into
account here that despite the zebras’ racially ambiguous black-white skin
colouration, their names and speech nevertheless explicitly mark them as
black. In other words, while on a visual level, the zebras could well have
functioned allegorically as signifiers for racial hybridity, discursively, through
language, the zebras become racially coded as homogenous. The negative
features of the zebras, which could well be summarised as a form of regres-
sive tribalism, are thus associated with globalised discourses of blackness.
It is in this context of the zebras’ racially coded ethnic backwardness
that we need to situate Khumba’s character, who is not voiced by a black
actor. Within the visual and aural economy of the film, his lack of black
stripes makes him literally too white and he is therefore ostracised, a tra-
jectory fitting the familiar racist trope of the ‘coconut’. His whiteness
also allows him to become a conflicted vehicle of enlightened, progres-
sive modernity, leading his people out of poverty and isolation to realise
a peculiarly contemporary vision of the promised land of multi-species
harmony and plenitude.
The national allegory of a democratic non-racial futurity is however
also grounded in references to a mythic, indigenous past. The mantis
character gives Khumba the initial impetus, though he does not directly
lead or intervene in this process, but maintains a detached, intermittently
observant presence. The mantis’s non-directive role is not only demo-
cratic, but also in keeping with /Kaggen’s traditional function in San
storytelling as an ‘incidentally and inconsistently beneficent’ character
(Hewitt 2008, p. 110). His less directly agentive trickster role is there-
fore well suited to the film’s plot development that foregrounds the indi-
vidual, heroic agency of the young zebra protagonist rather than divine
intervention, striking a canny balance between the desire for indigenous
authenticity and the neoliberal agendas of commercial cinema.
In this regard, it is useful to compare Khumba with The Lion King
(1994), one of Disney’s most successful animation films to date. Apart
from the substitution of lions with zebras, there are striking parallels
between these two animated coming-of-age stories set in Africa and
populated with iconic indigenous animals. Both films feature young
male heroes who have lost parents, and have had to leave their respective
social groups, striking out into the wilderness. Like Lion King’s Simba,
Khumba also finds two new eccentric friends, and battles with adver-
sity in order to reach maturity. In both films, the young hero eventually
triumphs over a violent, evil adversary, and subsequently founds a new
sociopolitical order. Members of The Lion King’s creative team were con-
sulted by Triggerfish Studios (Lodge 2013, online), and Khumba not
only draws much narrative material from The Lion King, but also refer-
ences the Disney classic visually, for example, when Khumba, standing
on a high rock outcrop, repeats Simba’s pose as he surveys his kingdom.
Khumba’s ultimate homage to The Lion King may well be the fact that
lions are conspicuously absent, despite the fact that they are indigenous
to the Great Karoo. In Khumba’s herbivorous world, lions would inevi-
tably have taken the negative role of violent predators, a function rel-
egated to a lone, rogue leopard and a pack of wild dogs.
150 H. Wittenberg
The Lion King has attracted a considerable volume of criticism that

has examined its larger allegorical and ideological significance. Most crit-
ics have recognised its mythic allusions, particularly its intertextual refer-
ences to Shakespeare as ‘Hamlet in furs’ (Buhler 2003), but the film’s
latent racial and political ideas have also been interrogated. Robert
Gooding-Williams argues that Hegel’s negative view of Africa as ‘un-
historical’ is problematically recycled in The Lion King: Africa is repre-
sented as a naturally existing and organically integrated ‘circle of life’, a
place of perfect harmony in which each and every species of life performs
a function useful to the others (1995, p. 374). Gooding-Williams also
argues that the film is less about Africa, but that it stages white, middle-
class American anxieties about racial minorities in the USA. The hyenas’
ascendancy under Scar’s illegitimate reign functions as an allegory for the
decay of the American inner city, as is evident in the way race and class
mark their speech (two hyenas are voiced by Latino and Afro-American
actors, respectively, Cheech Marin and Whoopi Goldberg). Darkness,
decay and disorder are eventually banished with Simba’s triumph, and a
golden, warm light once again bathes the savannah, signifying a reasser-
tion of the civilised polity over the unruly ghetto.
It would however be a mistake to characterise Khumba’s national alle-
gory in similarly conservative ideological terms. The film’s staging of dif-
ference ultimately validates rather than repudiates social transformation.
As Silverston put it, ‘the key aim was to create an entertaining animated
feature that encourages children to be not just tolerant, but also celebra-
tory of difference: whether it is in relation to race, religion, culture, class
or sexual orientation’ (Triggerfish, p. 3). The closing scenes of Khumba
are illustrative of these tolerant values when the conservative zebra herd
accommodates itself to a more inclusive, egalitarian future: at the new
waterhole, a figure for a desired multi-cultural and multi-racial South
Africa, a wide variety of diverse species, including the formerly ostracised,
generically ‘African’-accented  gemsbok and the Afrikaans-accented
springbok, live happily together. In this new peaceful, harmonious ver-
sion of a new South Africa, violence has been successfully expelled in the
form of Phango’s demise, and the film ends with all the animals hap-
pily playing soccer together, a not too subtle reference to the national
euphoria that accompanied the 2010 FIFA World Cup that was hosted
by South Africa. The closing scene also exemplifies the confluence of
contemporary and mythic elements: the soccer finale is watched over
benignly by the trickster figure of the mantis, who has, perhaps, behind
the scenes engineered it all.
The closing soccer scene, with its fluid and dynamic animal move-
ments, is also a remarkable tour de force of digital animation, illustrative
of the creative potential that highly plastic, virtual worlds have in convey-
ing positive social messaging in playful, non-didactic ways. Animation is
literally a transformative cultural technology capable of reshaping the real
in ways that re-work and transcend the given. In its depiction of harmo-
nious, ruminant egalitarianism, Khumba eventually overcomes its own
embedded racial unconscious, and in this way presents a positive national
allegory of a violence-free, future post-racial South Africa. The plasmatic
properties of the genre, showing diverse animals playing together and
hoofing around soccer balls, allows for a depiction of a utopian, social
futurity that would be more difficult to achieve in conventional cinema,
in a real world with human actors. The photo-realist quality of the ani-
mation though allows viewers to experience wholly fictional scenes as
realistic, even though scenes of soccer-playing herbivores would evidently
not occur in the natural world.
While the antics of Khumba’s anthropomorphised, plastic animals
depart significantly from their natural biological models, the richly tex-
tured Karoo setting gives the story a framing that construes veracity.
The film makes use of a painstakingly detailed and naturalistic recreation
of the Karoo landscape that is authentic and recognisable, especially to
South African viewers. The rich floral diversity of the Karoo is depicted
in photo-realist detail, and particular plants, such as the characteris-
tic succulents and endemic fynbos shrubs, are recreated in a manner
that makes individual plants botanically identifiable. Several well-known
Karoo places, such as the Valley of Desolation and the Swartberg Pass,
are recreated as settings. As Miriam Bale, in a review for the New York
Times put it, ‘[r]eal-life nature is presented as more exotic, detailed and
deeply felt than any fantasy world’ (2013, online). The following still
taken from the film (Fig. 8.2) illustrates the different aesthetic treatment
of figure and ground: there is a marked contrast between highly plas-
tic animal characters (in this case the young Khumba) and the biological
realism of a natural landscape.
The South African aspects of the film are thus not limited to a fau-
nal allegory of social and political transformation. Plants work together
with animals to give a richly detailed and authentic sense of the country’s
natural environment. As Silverston put it, ‘I’d also love for audiences to
get glimpse [sic] of a uniquely South African aesthetic, the magic and
allure of the Great Karoo—a land that captured my own imagination as
152 H. Wittenberg
Fig. 8.2 Still image from Khumba
a child.’ (Triggerfish, p. 5). Khumba is thus distinctly South African in

two different ways: firstly, as an allegorical narrative of social transforma-
tion as conveyed by a cast of anthropomorphised African animals; and
secondly, as a homage to a particular South African landscape which is
digitally recreated in naturalistic detail.
Khumba’s environmental verisimilitude owes a considerable debt
to the Disney genre of animal films, with particularly strong parallels
to Bambi. In both animation films, there is a striking contrast between
unnaturally anthropomorphised animal characters and a naturalistic real-
ism of the backgrounds and sets. When making Bambi, Disney reput-
edly sent his artists for six months sketching forest scenes in Maine’s
Baxter State Park in the US (Lutts 1992, p. 163), so as to achieve accu-
racy and a deep sense of environmental authenticity. The naturalism in
Bambi also extended into the microscopic scale: in the ‘April Showers’
scene, ‘the splash of raindrops is accurate even to the momentary cen-
tral pillar that rises when the drop hits the water’ (Lutts 1992, p. 163).
Khumba’s representation of the Karoo is similarly detailed, recreating, in
3D, an authentic and richly textured sense of this iconic South African
landscape. Both films, incidentally, are structurally similar coming-of-age
stories that feature young male herbivores who have lost mothers, have
to fend off dangers, and find love in the process.
III
One of the questions which need to be posed is how successfully
Khumba mediates its specifically local South African visual and the-
matic material on a global youth animation market where it competes
with many other highly popular mainstream commercial products such
as DreamWorks’ Madagascar series (2005–2014). Although the film was
partly funded by South African governmental agencies (The Industrial
Development Corporation, The National Film and Video Foundation,
The Department of Trade and Industry) it needed to recoup its costs
on the international film and video markets. The film’s producers and
funders may have been attracted to the idea of an authentic South
African story, moreover one that could be read as a politically correct
allegory of the country’s transformation towards a non-racial (or anti-
racist) democracy, but it also needed to be a film that could transcend
its national context and appeal to a global market. Audiences outside
of South Africa, especially young viewers, would be likely to have little
interest in the specifically local story content and its political message,
nor much appreciation of the distinctive vegetation and landscape of the
Karoo. Despite its rich localised environmental, indigenous and politi-
cal content, Khumba therefore models itself on the generic templates of
mainstream animated features. One way in which we can see this is in
the marketing material, where the film was repackaged as a more generic
adventure story, as evident in some of the international versions of movie
poster where the original Karoo landscape (featuring rocks, aloes, succu-
lents) was replaced by a lush tropical scene (palms, jungle creepers). Such
a substitution would undermine the film’s environmental message and
be incongruous and jarring to local viewers, but would help promote the
film as an exotic animal story on international markets.
The case of Khumba then allows us to reflect on a changing global
mediascape which has become much more connected and transnational
in character. Khumba is exemplary in the way it leverages its location to
commercial advantage on global media markets: South Africa is both a
site of low-cost production and a source of unique story content, which,
strategically combined with the international appeal of star names signed
up at the discounted rates of voice acting, results in a potentially lucrative
and compelling media product. Khumba is thus a good example of the
way that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the global dominance of
154 H. Wittenberg
Western entertainment media has increasingly become diffused through

the rise of a variety of ‘southern’ cinemas. According to Lee Artz,
popular television and animation feature films produced for Asia, Latin
America, Europe, and the US reveal a dramatic increase in cooperative
transnational media production and uniform images and representations,
suggesting that media structures affect entertainment content. (2015, p. 93)
But Artz also cautions that such transnational media products—whether

independently produced in non-Western locations, or partly outsourced
or subcontracted by multinational media conglomerates such as Disney,
Reliance/DreamWorks, Time Warner and Sony—tend to follow the
same well-established conventions of mainstream media. Animation,
as practised by these corporations as well as by the many production
companies in countries such as China, India, South Africa and Brazil
attempting to emulate their success, remains deeply conservative. Such
films are, as Artz argues, adept at ‘reinforcing consumerism and market
values, vigorously supplementing, if not completely displacing the com-
munity, school and family’ resulting in a positioning of ‘citizens as self-
interested, apolitical, atomized customers’ (2015, p. 94). In these films,
the plot typically privileges individualism, articulated in the figure of the
self-interested hero who successfully overcomes crises and undertakes a
personal adventure, but resolves conflict in such a way that existing hier-
archical social relations are not disrupted.
Khumba’s classic coming-of-age narrative certainly follows the plot
conventions of many other films in this genre, also featuring an individu-
alistic protagonist who strikes out on his own in pursuit of egotistic, pri-
vate redemption (he wants his stripes). But in the end, the eponymous
hero’s journey is shown to be less of an individualistic quest aimed at
personal gratification, while it has created a new, more inclusive, diverse
and tolerant society. If the film engages with existing social relations (for
example critiquing the xenophobic values of the conservative and insular
zebra herd) it disrupts rather than reaffirms the status quo, and imagi-
nes a new non-hierarchical social order characterised by free, creative play
(soccer) rather than the exercise of coercive power.
Although transnational animation is largely dominated by a uniform
brand of aesthetics, Khumba shows that commercially successful anima-
tion in the global south does not necessarily have to follow the domi-
nant cultural scripts which are disseminated by globally northern-based
mainstream multinational media corporations. As Mark Lorenzen has

shown, ‘globalization does not necessarily entail westernization of cul-
ture’ but is marked by an increasing capacity of ‘hitherto peripheral cul-
tural clusters to access export markets and develop exportable products’
(2009, p. 2). The aesthetic and cultural distinctiveness of regional media
cultures (for example Bollywood and the Japanese manga genre) have
become popular worldwide in niche markets. Such a theory of global
‘counter-flows’ (Appadurai 2013; Artz 2015) can account for the way
in which the unidirectional dynamics of cultural production can become
inverted, and allow localised cultural forms from the global south to
reach audiences in the USA and Europe. The case of Khumba shows that
such a penetration of Western-industrial markets is possible, though also
at some cost to local authenticity.
One such cost is the dominance of the well-established Hollywood
star system that continues to pose significant constraints to the growth
of emerging entertainment industries and their ability to penetrate
mainstream Western markets. The products of the global entertainment
industry continue to be dominated by a relatively small number of highly
well-paid film actors, mostly American or European, whose contractual
arrangements and marketing power is tightly controlled by the well-
established studios. The animation film, featuring synthetic characters,
potentially allows non-Western media producers to circumvent the name
recognition and marketing power conveyed by signing globally recog-
nisable star actors, and also to avoid the hefty budgetary implications.
Digitally created human and animal characters are more transnationally
portable, and can short-circuit the Hollywood star system, thereby also
avoiding the cultural and ethnic specificity associated with human actors.
In this regard, Triggerfish Studios’ strategy with Khumba has been
hybrid: its lovable digital animal characters embody an inherent cultural
portability and have the potential to attract youth audiences globally,
thereby transcending the national cultural sphere. But by signing star
voices for its principal animal characters the film was also able to gain
recognition and a wider commercial footprint in Western media mar-
kets. Actors such as Liam Neeson, Steve Buscemi, Loretta Devine, Jake
T. Austin, Laurence Fishburne and Richard E. Grant have considerable
name recognition on the important US market, giving a low-budget
production of a little known Cape Town company a major commer-
cial advantage. In Triggerfish Studio’s marketing calculus, the benefits
conveyed by the use of high-profile star voices trumped an indigenous
156 H. Wittenberg
authenticity that would have been achieved with South African voices,
which nonetheless are included, albeit strictly in the film’s lesser roles. As
a strategy in marketing, the leverage of big-name recognition no doubt
helped the film to find significant audiences outside South Africa, but it
is precisely this uneasy blending of the global and the local that is, ironi-
cally, also the film’s greatest weakness.
In a review for Variety, Guy Lodge censured the missed opportu-
nity at regional authenticity: ‘With a brashly Hollywood-flavored voice
cast… this tale of a half-striped zebra finding his place in the animal
kingdom aims squarely for international crossover appeal—rather at
the expense of its own message’. For Lodge, the film ‘does a slick imi-
tation of a DreamWorks-level jaunt, but limits local colour to amusing
sideshow attractions’ (2013, online). The film critic Rich Cline made a
similar point: ‘When this South African animated adventure embraces its
unique setting and characters, it’s visually stunning and a lot of fun. But
it also tries to force everything into a trite Hollywood formula, unneces-
sarily adding clunky songs, goofy comedy sidekicks and big action set-
pieces’ (2013, online). For international critics, then, Khumba offered
spectacular animation, but the promise of localised, fresh storytelling,
outside of the stock conventions of Western mainstream animation gen-
res, remained largely unfulfilled. Khumba’s success was thus limited by
an uneasy and ultimately unresolved tension between, on the one hand,
a highly authentic and richly detailed South African setting, and, on
the other hand, its principal animal characters who sounded and acted
American. This tension, which can also be understood in terms of a fig-
ure and ground disjuncture, may not have been jarring for its interna-
tional youth audiences, but nevertheless had the effect of reducing the
South African story to an allegory.
Although then not a resounding commercial success like some of
peers like Madagascar, Khumba is, despite its flaws, among the more
notable recent South African films, winning several national and
international film awards, and amply recouping its production costs.
Khumba continues the international success, albeit more modestly, of
other recent South African indie films such as District 9 (2009) and
Searching for Sugarman (2012). Together with more mainstream pro-
ductions such as Clint Eastwood’s Invictus (2009) and Chappie (2015),
these films are remarkable for the complex ways in which distinctively
local, post-transitional South African storylines find purchase on global
media markets through a blending of high production values and
socially conscious, progressive political values. Despite their accom-

modations to mainstream conventions and international genre expecta-
tions, these films narrate versions of the South African transition from
apartheid to democracy for the benefit of global audiences, finding
new forms to articulate specific local concerns, in particular questions
around race, nation and subjectivity. In this sense they appear to be
exemplary instances of Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of the way a ‘produc-
tion of locality’ (2013, p. 62) is inserted, often unevenly, into global
cultural circuits of media consumption. In the final scenes of the film,
the enigmatic figure of the mantis perhaps best exemplifies the inher-
ent tensions between spectacles of commercialised media entertainment
and local forms of indigeneity that remain resistant to the homogenis-
ing forces of global capital. At the end of the film, when all the animals
celebrate their new-found freedom by holding a soccer tournament,
the allegory of the 2010 FIFA World Cup does not only just signify
creative, celebratory free play but also needs to be read as an exemplary
instance of a commercialised, global media entertainment spectacle that
disrupts local culture. Caught up in the wild stampede of the soccer
tournament, and struggling to evade the mad rush of ball-kicking and
jostling animals around him, the mantis finally manages to extricate
himself from the wild melee. As a symbolic representative of the San
and Khoi indigenous cultures, deeply rooted in the land, he remains a
non-participant in this global festival, an enigmatic indigenous presence
in the film who cannot readily be assimilated to the larger project of
commercialised modernity.
Note
1.
The term ‘laager’, literally meaning ‘defensive enclosure’, is rooted in
the history of early nineteenth century expansion of Afrikaners into the
Southern African interior. In contemporary usage it also denotes a con-
servative, isolationist political stance.
Works Cited
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London: Verso Books.
Artz, L. 2015. Animating transnational capitalism. Journal of Intercultural
Communication Research 44 (2): 93–107.
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Bale, M. 2013. A zebra of a different color, or another pattern: Khumba, an ani-

mated film set in South Africa. New York times, 5 December. http://www.
nytimes.com/2013/12/06/movies/khumba-an-animated-film-set-in-south-
africa.html. Accessed 8 April 2016.
Bell, E., L. Haas, and L. Sells (eds.). 1995. From mouse to mermaid: The politics
of film, gender, and culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Berger, J. 1980. Why look at animals? About looking, 1–26. London: Writers and
Readers Publishing Cooperative.
Booker, K. 2010. Disney, Pixar, and the hidden messages of children’s films. Santa
Barbara: Praeger.
Buhler, S.M. 2003. Shakespeare and company: The Lion King and the Disney
fication of Hamlet. In The Emperor’s old groove: Decolonising the Magic
Kingdom, ed. B. Ayres, 117–130. New York: Peter Lang.
Cline, R. 2016. Review of Khumba. http://www.contactmusic.com/film/
review/khumba. Accessed 8 April 2016.
Furuhata, Y. 2011. Rethinking plasticity: The politics and production of the ani-
mated image. Animation 6: 25–38.
Giroux, H. 1999. The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Gooding-Williams, R. 1995. Disney in Africa and the inner city: On race and
space in The Lion King. Social Identities 1 (2): 373–379.
Guenther, M. 1999. Tricksters and trancers: Bushman religion and society.
Heise, U.K. 2014. Plasmatic nature: Environmentalism and animated film. Public
Culture 26 (2): 301–318.
Herhuth, E. 2014. Life, love, and programming: The culture and politics of
WALL-E and Pixar computer animation. Cinema Journal 53 (4): 53–75.
Hewitt, R. 2008. Structure, meaning and ritual in the narratives of the Southern
San. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Lewis-Williams, D. 1981. Believing and seeing: Symbolic meanings in Southern
San rock paintings. London: Academic Press.
Lodge, G. (2013). Review of Khumba. Variety. http://variety.com/2013/film/
reviews/khumba-review-1200927279/. Accessed 29 Dec 2016.
Lorenzen, M. 2009. Go west: The growth of Bollywood. Creative Encounters
Working Paper, 26, 1–38.
Lutts, R. 1992. The trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney’s Bambi and the American
vision of nature. Forest and Conservation History 26 (4): 160–171.
Mallory, M. 2013. Khumba earns its stripes. Animation magazine. http://
www.animationmagazine.net/features/khumba-earns-stripes/. Accessed
15 Nov 2015.
Mattelart, A., and A. Dorfman. 1975. How to read Donald Duck: Imperialist ide-
ology in the Disney comic. New York: International General.
Napier, S.J. 2005. Animé from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing con-
temporary Japanese animation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Triggerfish Studios. 2013. Production notes: Khumba. www.indigenous-
film.co.za/wp-content/…/Press-Kit-Final-KHUMBA.pdf. Accessed 15
November 2015.
Wells, P. 2009. The animated bestiary: Animals, cartoons, and culture. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Whitley, D. 2008. The idea of nature in Disney animation. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Author Biography
Hermann Wittenberg teaches in the English Department at the University
of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has worked on theories of spatial-
ity, the sublime and landscape in colonial and postcolonial travel writing (the
subject of his doctoral thesis) and was joint editor of the interdisciplinary col-
lection of essays, Rwenzori: Histories and Cultures of an African Mountain
(Kampala: Fountain Press 2007). His current research focuses on South
African literary studies within a broadly book-historical theoretical framework
and he has published several archival studies of the writings of J.M. Coetzee
and Alan Paton. Among his books are Paton’s lost travelogue, titled Lost City
of the Kalahari (UKZN Press, 2005), and recently, J.M. Coetzee film scripts,
titled Two Screenplays (UCT Press 2014). He also has strong interests in eco-crit-
ical writing, convened the ‘Literature and Ecology’ colloquium in Kleinmond,
and edited a special issue of Alternation focusing on oceanic and coastal themes
in South African literature.
CHAPTER 9
Magic Wells, the Stream and the Flow: The

Promise of Literary Animal Studies
Marion Copeland
Giovanni Aloi, founding editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in

Visual Culture, describes himself in a recent interview with Caroline
Picard as ‘a plant studies person’ who has begun to challenge animal
studies to move beyond its focus on mammals and erasing anthropocen-
trism1 to a consideration of ‘the atomic order and the invisible intercon-
nectedness with all that we are enmeshed in, including bacteria, viruses,
and fungi’ and the ‘rhizomatic networks of interconnectedness in which
humans, animals, plants and environments are equal parts’ (Picard
2016). Such an evolution would allow literary animal studies to continue
to expand the perspectives, consciousness and empathies of its readers.
In ‘Kinship and Kindness: On Deepening the Connection with our
Fellow Beings’, Scott Russell Sanders reminds readers that ‘what ecology
has revealed is that all of Earth’s varied habitats, species, and organisms
are bound up in an integral whole’ not unlike a cell surrounded by a
protective but permeable membrane. ‘Within that membrane, there is a
M. Copeland (*) 
Holyoke Community College, Holyoke, USA
e-mail: mwcopeland@comcast.net

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_9
162 M. Copeland
constant exchange of energy and materials.’ All of Earth’s living beings

‘are part of that flow’:
[I]t makes us and sustains us … . Every atom in our bodies has passed
through other bodies, through flowers and ferns, through rivers and rocks.
After we die, those atoms will keep circulating … . Every seeming boundary,
from the skin enveloping one’s body to the borders between nations, is per-
meable, temporary, ever shifting. The flow never ceases. (Sanders 2016, p. 32)
Sanders expands on a long tradition in ecocriticism with an inflection

that is comfortable with the view that humans are another species of ani-
mal that feels decidedly contemporary. As early as 1949, Aldo Leopold’s
‘The Land Ethic’, published in A Sand County Almanac, broadened the
understanding of community to include ‘soil, waters, plants, and animals’
referring to them all as ‘biotic citizens’ (Ryan 2016, p. C2). In 1954,
the visionary J. Allen Boone pushed the concept further still, reminding
readers in Kinship with All Life that ‘Life to [the] ancients was an all-
inclusive kinship in which nothing was meaningless, nothing unimpor-
tant, and from which nothing could be excluded. They refused to make
any separating barriers between mineral and vegetable, between veg-
etable and man, or between man and the great Primal Cause which ani-
mates and governs all things’ (Blake 2016, p. 1). Calvin Luther Martin
later refers to this holism as ‘the Spirit of the Earth’.
From such a premise, Kathy Rudy asks the relevant questions: ‘What
would it take for us to want to live in connection and harmony with the
environment like bonobos and most other animals do?’ and ‘Why did we
stop listening to other animals, to the trees, the wind, and the voices of
our ancestors, and how can we start again?’ (Rudy 2014, p. 218). She
anticipates Aloi’s challenge to animal studies when she concludes her
essay ‘Bestial Imaginings’ with the challenge of ‘transforming ourselves
into creatures that can listen and understand the language of our closest
relatives, that can respond to their desires, and that can be open to new
possibilities of life on earth together.’ These, she contends, ‘are … the
central tasks confronting human-animal studies’ (Rudy 2014, p. 218). As
Rudy’s sources suggest, of all the academic disciplines borrowing from
and contributing to animal studies, literary animal studies holds the most
promise of advancing its goals.
The examples used in Rudy’s ‘Bestial Imaginings’ are drawn from a
short story and several novels and much of the impact of her book Loving
9 MAGIC WELLS, THE STREAM AND THE FLOW … 163
Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy depends on the stories she tells in
it. ‘When we enter a good story,’ she writes at the conclusion of the book,
the lines and squiggles on the page, or the image captured on film, open
us into a new landscape of imagination. …When this happens, the shape of
our self becomes more malleable, the boundaries of our place in the world
blurred.’ (Rudy 2011, p. 202)
That suggests that Rudy sees, as I do, the promise that literary animal
studies holds to our effort to answer the what and why of the questions
she poses and certainly to our learning to love, not only other animals,
but the cosmic flow itself.
As I pointed out in the abstract of ‘Literary Animal Studies: Where
We Came From, Where We Are Going,’ an essay written for the tenth
anniversary issue of Anthrozoös in 2012:
The unique contribution Animal Studies made was to suggest that other-
than-human perspectives not only existed but could expand and enhance
human consciousness beyond what since the Middle Ages had been
believed to be the impermeable boundary between human and animal.
Increased knowledge and awareness of nonhuman possibility came and
continues to come from virtually every existing academic discipline. What
Literary Animal Studies contributes to the mix is the news that the arts,
their roots in humans’ earliest response to the world and those they shared
it with, still retain the power to rekindle that deep time when the bound-
ary between human and animal was permeable, when humans knew they
were one among many other animals, and anthropocentrism had not yet
emerged to deny that kinship. (Copeland 2012, p. 91)
That essay uses the term ‘metamorphic imagination,’ first used by

Claudia Ingram to describe the mental capacity that allows living beings
to become shape-shifters, as well as to describe the creative act,2 and
in order to argue that the title poem of Jorie Graham’s (2008) collec-
tion Sea Change, rightly read, tells us (as Aloi does) that fields and trees,
indeed the sea itself, are ‘characters in an/unnegotiable drama.’ Graham
dives deep in order to create characters whose voices are the voices of
nature reminding us, as Ariel reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father,
that ‘Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into
something rich and strange’ (Copeland 2012, p. 99). Elsewhere I argue
that Graham’s approach flags a common potential:
164 M. Copeland
Perhaps the task of art and poetry has always been to connect or recon-
nect us to a drama we have often mistakenly assumed to be only about the
human animal just as modern readers assume the drama of The Tempest to
be Prospero’s rather than Ariel and Caliban’s despite Prospero’s own warn-
ing that his story is but a dream. Graham’s poems seek to wake us from
that patriarchal and anthropocentric dream to the voices of the Umwelt,
the natural world. (Copeland 2012, p. 94)
Looking more closely at contemporary fiction, this essay examines how

literature can bring readers into the biographies and umwelts of other
species of living beings.
In Are We Smart Enough to Know If Animals Are Smart? Franz de
Waal assumes all primates harbour the evolutionary memory of a time
when, like many indigenous peoples today, human and more-than-
human, we lived in the spirit of the Earth. The first chapter of De Waal’s
book is called ‘Magic Wells,’ a term he borrows from Karl von Frisch
who first observed that honeybees perform a waggle dance to commu-
nicate information about distant pollen locations. The life of a bee, he
wrote, is ‘like a magic well, the more you draw from it, the more there
is to draw’ (de Waal 2015, p. 13). In Half Earth, Edward O. Wilson
expands the metaphor:
Each species is a wonder to behold, a long, brilliant history in itself to

read … after a long struggle of thousands of millions of years … an expert
specialist in the niche of the natural environment in which it lives. (2016,
p. 27)
After turning to the novel Anthill (2010) late in his career to bring his
readers into the lives and worlds of the ants he studies, Wilson has come
to see the need for ‘scientific natural historians’ to begin to see them-
selves as ‘custodians of the stories each species will tell as its biology
unfolds’ (2016, p. 163).
In De Waal’s current theory, these ‘magic wells’ irrigate the imagina-
tive act of getting ‘under the skin of other species, trying to understand
them in their own terms’ (2015, p. 13), and acknowledge what even ani-
mal studies and literary animal studies seem reluctant to acknowledge:
that human awareness of the lives with whom human lives are enmeshed
lie in the echoes of indigenous tribal shamanism, animism and totemism
that survive in our art and story and in their creators today. In the glos-
sary of Are We Smart Enough, De Waal defines a magic well as ‘[t]he
endless complexity of the specialized cognition of any organism’ (2015,

p. 321), offering as his first example Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a work, he
writes, that ‘forces us from the very first page to imagine what it is like
to be a bug’ (ibid., p. 7). His second example is Jakob von Uexküll’s
Umwelt, which extends the metaphor beyond an organism’s perceptual
world to the holistic vision Aloi proposes. And the third is Wilson’s novel
Anthill (2010), which De Waal describes as ‘an ant-eye view of the social
life and epic battles of ants’ (ibid., p. 9).
Catherine Parry, in Other Animals in Twenty-first Century Fiction,
finds more of the anthropomorphic and fabular in Wilson’s novel than
she is comfortable with. She fears Wilson’s readers will interpret the nov-
el’s ants primarily as metaphors intended to teach human readers about
the right and wrong ways to live in the natural world. That concern
leads her to recommend Carol Hart’s A History of the Novel in Ants as
a better example of, in Hart’s words, ‘a fictional space located entirely
in the world of ants’ (2010, p. 89). While Hart’s may be the more skil-
fully written novel, Wilson, the better myrmecologist, dives deeper into
the magic well that is an ant, and writers like Hart are indebted to the
insights he brings to the surface. Since Parry’s ultimate goal is to con-
vince her readers that even behind what have long been assumed to be
symbolic, anthropomorphic figures serving as stand-ins for the human
lurk ‘living, animate creature[s]’ that are demonstrably and accurately
nonhuman, perhaps she should simply have relied on the strength of her
book’s major premise ‘that genres of fiction make worlds, characters or
plots that are as coherent if told with ants as with humans’ (Hart 2010,
p. 90).
In both Wilson and Hart’s novels, the ant proves itself a magic well.
Similarly, the cockroach proves a magic well for Kafka as the ancient
creature has been for other researchers and artists in human cultures
all around the world since human art and story began.3 Because cock-
roaches and ants are insects rather than mammals, they also serve to sug-
gest an early proclivity in literary animal studies for the holism that I, like
Aloi and others, hope will move beyond the discipline’s largely zoo-cen-
tric bias as it evolves in the twenty-first century. To do so is not simply
a question of correcting literature with science or vice versa, but as De
Waal concludes, of both novelist and scientist opening their minds and
imaginations ‘to their [subject’s] specific circumstances and goals and
observ[ing] and understand[ing] them on their own terms.’ The way to
do this, he suggests is to return to ‘our hunting ways … not to kill but
166 M. Copeland
to reveal’ (2016, p. 275). In other words, to dive into our own magic
evolutionary wells to recapture what it was like to live in a time when,
like the other animals, all humans were indigenous peoples, shaped by
and shaping the Umwelt we share with other living beings. In Becoming
Animal, David Abram reminds us that ‘we all have our indigenous
ancestry and indeed that our hunter gatherer heritage is by far the largest
part of our human inheritance,’ an oral inheritance
informed by songs and spoken stories for many tens of thousands of years
before such stories were preserved in a formal writing system … . We could
never have survived, as a species, without our propensity for animistic
engagement with every aspect of our earthly habitat. (Abram 2010, pp.
266–267)
Moreover, according to Abram, the sensibility is a defining property of

indigeneity:
Whether in the heart of the city or the thick of the wilderness, our indig-
enous soul stirs and comes awake whenever we find ourselves thinking in
storied form, and so the buildings lean toward us and the trees in the back-
ground begin to speak in low groaning tones as the trunks rub against one
another. (Abram 2010, p. 276)
Carl Safina offers similar insight and advice in Beyond Words: What
Animals Think and Feel, a book that was described in Discover as ‘a pro-
vocative case for seeing animals through their own eyes’ (Tarlach 2015,
p. 18). ‘Who are you?’, the first question Safina poses to any creatures
he observes, provides a model for how a naturalist, like a novelist, ought
to observe his subjects—each is seen as an individual, as a subject with
a life story rather than an object to be studied. Like De Waal, Safina
reaches beyond the animal-centric toward Aloi’s holistic mode, and, like
Abram, does so through a sense of humans’ original status as indigenous
primate. Responding in an interview with Heidi Hutner, Safina acknowl-
edged that he wants his readers ‘to understand that we are all related, …
part of the same living family’ and that it is essential for us to ‘learn from
how animals live and how at peace they are with the world’, how we can
live sustainably and be at peace with who we are, the world we share, and
the neighbours we share it with (Revkin 2016).
Like the best natural scientists (De Waal singles out von Uexküll,
Konrad Lorenz, and Kinji Imanishi), the novelist’s access to their char-
acters’ inner lives must rise from ‘true empathy … not self-focused but
other oriented’ (de Waal 2015, p. 275). As animal studies has long sug-
gested, De Waal proposes that we begin by putting aside the folly of
making humanity the measure of all things and evaluate other species ‘by
what they are. In doing so we will discover many magic wells, includ-
ing some as yet beyond our imagination’ (2016, p. 275). Writing as a
scientist for a general interest audience, De Waal remains vague about a
discovery process that, as he intimates in the Kafka and Anthill examples,
is best represented through the creative process of literary fiction and
poetry. But any naturalist or novelist who foregrounds an other-than-
human animal as a character or narrator is faced with moving beyond
the human perspective. Lincoln Child points this out in his novel The
Forgotten Room:
The human point of view limits our understanding. See a penguin from
a penguin’s point of view - or from a leopard seal’s point of view - or for
that matter, from the point of view of their preferred prey, krill, squid and
fish - and you see (where humans see an ‘endearingly preposterous, comic
waddler…their upright carriage giving them a droll and fairly human
look’) an evolutionary triumph of speed, endurance, and skill. (2015, p.
313)
Although it may only be the first and perhaps the easiest step, under-
standing that we too are animals, mammals, latecomers to Earth’s great
stream of magic wells, is essential in escaping the human perspective.
And, as Aloi insists, the next step must be the recognition that no liv-
ing being exists in isolation. Its world is entangled with countless other
life forms caught in the flow or stream that feed the ‘rhizomatic’ roots
that Aloi recognizes connect humans, animals, plants and environments.
Simply put, ‘rethinking animals entails rethinking everything’ (Aloi in
Picard 2016). The holistic model Aloi proposes moves animal studies,
and therefore literary animal studies, into the vital currents of contem-
porary thought that pose ‘important questions about agency, perception,
ontology and epistemology,’ pushing ‘thinking toward under-scrutinized
areas of discourse and practice’ (Picard 2016), particularly through anal-
ysis of the arts.
168 M. Copeland
An in-depth look at three contemporary holistic novels will help us

see how and why literature enables readers to enter the worlds of oth-
ers and see those worlds from other-than-human perspectives. The first
novel, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ Reindeer Moon (1987), utilises the
oldest and most traditional way—shape-shifting. The second, Emma
Geen’s debut novel The Many Selves of Katherine North, provides the
most up-to-date blend of technology and neuro-science. And the third,
Laurence Gonzales’ Lucy, employs a blend of hybridity, trans-species sci-
ence and evolutionary wisdom. Reindeer Moon is set in the Palaeolithic
past and focuses on the character of Yanan and her clan, while The Many
Selves of Katherine North unfolds in a near future in which technologies
compete to provide researchers in animal behaviour with young humans
gifted with the plasticity to shape-shift mentally into the bodies of other-
than-human beings and record their experiences and encounters in lan-
guages the scientists who buy their services are comfortable with. And
the third, Lucy, is set in the present day. Reading them together shows
how much our understanding of ourselves and appreciating the depth of
our own magic wells depends on our grasp of the perceptual worlds of
other species.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ Reindeer Moon takes readers well into
their hunter/gatherer pasts, into the ‘Late Galactic Maximum when
much of Europe (including the British Isles as far south as Bristol) was
covered by permanent ice-sheets’ (Patten 2014). The worldviews of
its characters, human and other-than-human, are based on Marshall
Thomas’s study of the !Kung people of Botswana and Namibia, then a
hunter/gather people, and of the Bushmen in the Kalahari Basin about
whom she wrote in The Harmless People (1959), and later of the Dodoth
people of Northern Uganda. In 2000, to mark the turn of the cen-
tury, she returned to these indigenous peoples to reassess what she had
learned from them, the Umwelt they share with the life forms that sur-
round them, and the lifeways they also share. The resulting The Old Way:
A Story of the First People is, like the novel Reindeer Moon and as the back
cover of the paperback edition promises, a ‘brilliantly conceived, wise,
and hauntingly vivid portrait of the natural and social worlds inhabited
by people living much as our earliest human ancestors must have.’
Although Reindeer Moon was followed by a novel sequel, Animal
Wife,4 the majority of Marshall Thomas’ publications since have been
non-fiction studies of animals,
the kind of animal studies she’d wanted to do since childhood, but had
reluctantly set aside because they weren’t [at the time and, unfortunately,
by some now] considered intellectually respectable. “People didn’t think
animals thought, or remembered, or had minds!” she says indignantly.
(Smith 2013)
Over the years her deep dives into the magic wells of dogs, cats, deer and
other animals have provided readers with glimpses into the hidden lives
of a number of species, wild and domestic and somewhere in between,
and drawn readers into these lives with a semblance of the same magic
power that enables Yanan’s shape-shifting in Reindeer Moon to draw us
into the lives of the wolves, mammoth, deer and birds of prey that share
her clan’s living world. Patten considers Reindeer Moon ‘a neglected mas-
terpiece’ (Patten 2014). And I concur: certainly it has been neglected by
traditional literary studies and remains, more unforgivably, neglected by
literary animal studies.
Two episodes in Reindeer Moon that struck me when I first read
the novel still strike me as seminal. The first occurs when Yanan is a
young girl and her sister Meri only a toddler. Finding themselves sepa-
rated from the tribe and lost in frigid winter weather, the two survive
by finding shelter with a lone mother wolf struggling to raise her one
surviving cub by herself. She embraces them partly out of what Lori
Gruen later terms ‘entangled empathy’ and partly out of her canny rec-
ognition that Yanan was old enough and skilled enough to help her
in the hunt that would keep them all alive. The wolf ’s decision sug-
gests Marshall Thomas’ early insight into the magic well of wolf/canine
behaviour and consequent reversal of the then prevailing anthropo-
centric theory of the development human/animal bond in general and
canine domestication in particular: Reindeer Moon shows readers that
cohabitation with humans was the wolf ’s idea not the human’s, an idea
that shapes the fates of all the novel’s characters, humans and wolves
alike, from then on.
The close relationship affords the girls the opportunity to observe
the ‘very large wolf with long, thin legs, big feet, and pale yellow-grey
eyes’ who ‘seemed to love her pup as a woman loves her child’ (Marshall
Thomas 1987, p. 115), more closely than either ever had before. As
Donna Haraway suggests in The Companion Species Manifesto, because
each absorbs something of the other, each is fundamentally changed,
the wolf becomes dog, the cub remains Meri’s companion when she and
170 M. Copeland
Yanan rejoin their clan, and Yanan’s dive into the magic well of the wolf
prepares her ghost to become her tribes’ shape-shifting spirit-guide after
her death.
Much of Yanan’s shape-shifting is based on Marshall Thomas’ obser-
vations of indigenous African traditions, particularly on Bushman spir-
ituality. In ‘Embodying the Feral: Indigenous Traditions and the
Nonhuman in Recent South African Novels,’ Wendy Woodward dis-
cusses in some detail a young adult novel, Rainmaker, by Don Pinnock.
Its human protagonist is in training as a Bushman shaman. ‘Calling ani-
mals,’ Pinnock explains in the novel, a strategy used in hunting, means
‘you can enter their world with your spirit’ (Woodward 2013, p. 230).
By releasing Yanan from her earthly body Marshall Thomas enables her
to embrace the non-human world5 more deeply and directly than a living
human shaman might.
Then, through her, the group’s hunters are able to sharpen their abili-
ties to think as both their predators and prey think, keeping the clan safe
and rich in meat. As Kit will do in Geen’s The Many Lives of Katherine
North, Yanan experiences becoming almost every species who share her
clan’s Umwelt. But no incarnation is as intimate and intense as when,
consciously desiring to understand these imposing creatures who are
her clan’s main food, she becomes a female mammoth. The first thing
she notices is how the females and their young keep in constant touch
through vocalisation—squeaks and grunts, rumbles and trumpets, and
‘low rolling [ultrasonic] calls’ she had been unable to hear as a human
(Marshall Thomas 1987, p. 289). After the group’s matriarch embraces
her, she is accepted as one of them, and soon learns to recognise indi-
viduals by their voices. After that, Yanan dreamt of grass:
Every night I slept deeply. Every night I dreamed of grass, with the wind
making footprints on it as far as I could see. No lions, no people, were in
this dream - just grass. Not even in dreams would anyone dare to bother
us. Never did I feel so safe or sleep so well. (1987, p. 292)6
Embraced by the other females and calves of this matriarchal society she
finds herself reluctant to return to her patriarchal clan.
Toward the end of Reindeer Moon, after Yanan has been trapped
within a birch tree by the clan’s shaman to punish her malingering, the
novel evolves from its zoo-centric emphasis to a more holistic vision,
as Yanan realises that the birch feels and understands the insects who
inhabit her bark, worries about fire taking advantage of her rootedness,
and also is aware and envious of shape-shifters of other species who come
into the birch grove ‘at night in human form’ (Marshall Thomas 1987,
p. 380).7
Like Yanan, the birch is especially drawn to two mammoth spirits who
take the form of women:
Both were tall and strong, and their dry skins were covered with fine
wrinkles. Both had long, coarse hair in hopeless braids, made with no
skill at all, like the clumsy braids that little children make when no one
helps them. But the minds of these women were far from their braids …
They walked … side by side, not one behind the other as we would do.
(Marshall Thomas 1987, pp. 380–381)
But most significantly, she sees that these ‘spirits weren’t owned by our
shamans and their power to shape-shift came from something more
magical and mysterious than a tribal shaman’ (Marshall Thomas 1987,
pp. 380–381). Specifically, it is through being literally encapsulated
in a tree’s position that Yanan comes to fully appreciate the fluidity of
unrooted life forms, repositioning the vegetal not in contrast to but in
profound connection with human and other animal life. Currently,
Marshall Thomas, ‘sparked … by biologist Lynn Margulis’s ground-
breaking writings …. show[ing] how life on Earth was formed by sym-
biosis, that we really are just different forms of one single thing’ (Smith
2013), is at work on a book about bacteria.
Katherine (Kit) North, the human protagonist of Emma Geen’s The
Many Selves of Katherine North, is one of Shen Corporation’s most expe-
rienced ‘phenominauts’ with seven years of experience in ‘jumping.’ She
projects her consciousness through a neurological interface that will
remind many readers of the technology utilised for a similar purpose in
the film Avatar more than of Yanan’s ghost in Reindeer Moon. Hers is a
technologically facilitated version of shape-shifting.
In the novel, Shen Corps’ phenominauts are projected not into a liv-
ing animal but into the bodies of laboratory-grown animals of whatever
species is being studied made specifically for research purposes. Such
bodies, released into the actual worlds of the study animal, carry Kit
and her fellow phenominauts into the life stories of many other-than-
human creatures, predator and prey, mammal, bird, and reptile, and they
record their experiences there through equally advanced technology. The
172 M. Copeland
novel shares a sampling of these recordings with Geen’s readers, allow-

ing them to virtually experience the sensory perceptions, emotions, fears
and joys of a variety of their non-human neighbours. Geen’s hope is that
such encounters will open the minds of readers, as in the novel they are
intended to open the minds of researchers, to worlds otherwise assumed
to be far from their own experience and perception.
The novel’s theme is clarified in Geen’s closing ‘Disclaimer.’ She
emphasises that science as we commonly think of it is ‘a discourse of the
third person, seeking to seize and solidify the other’, while the world
itself remains, as it has always been, ‘not one but multitudes, with as
many ways of being as there are beings,’ and ‘as many other valid ways of
knowing’ (2016, p. 351). For her as for De Waal, literature, not science,
offers ‘the opportunity to glimpse such refractions thrown by the world
as though from a diamond’ (Geen 2016, p. 352). ‘[T]o walk a mile in
someone’s shoes, she writes, ‘is not just to take on an element of their
embodied experience but to take part in their journey. Such skinwalking
is the magic of fiction’ (Geen 2016, p. 352).
Geen’s allusion to skinwalking ties the novel, like the other novels
considered here, to the traditions of indigenous peoples, in this case to
American Indians such as the Navaho not as those traditions have been
assessed by colonial powers, but as the people who live within an Umwelt
in which such traditions live and breathe experience them. Now that a
more authentic version of skinwalking/shape-shifting is beginning to
be reflected in animal-centric literature, concepts like spirit animals
and shape-shifting are also being understood in their original context.
Interestingly, not only are these concepts deeply embedded in contem-
porary animal fantasy novels but used in many such novels in contexts far
closer to their original meanings in indigenous cultures than to interpre-
tations by ‘first world’ scholars. Like the equally underappreciated genres
of animal-centric children’s and young adult novels, many animal-centric
fantasy novels remain, like Reindeer Moon, neglected masterpieces (see
Copeland 2003).
Often novels written for younger readers offer the clearest insights
into the worlds of companion species and best clarify the value of older
non-anthropocentric lifeways. For instance, in Book I of Brandon de
Mull’s Spirit Animals: Wild Born (2013), the young human protagonists
make clear that they understand that ‘spirit animals do not only exist
to let us swing a sword harder. There can be aspects to the connection
more valuable than running fast or jumping high.’ Lenore’s sprit animal,
Briggan the Wolf, connects her to the wolf as visionary Packleader,

Moonrunner, and Pathfiner (de Mull 2013, pp. 111–112), traits deeply
connected to the spirit of the earth and its magic wells of life forms. The
young selkies in Emily Roach’s The Children of the Far Islands (2014)
are well aware of the gifts their lives as seals bring them. They are able
to communicate in what seem to the human ear to be ‘high-pitched
squeals, tweets, and whistles’ that they recognise as language and ‘hear
other creatures speaking as well … the light chatter of fish … the heavy
cello-like singing of a passing pod of killer whales … the clicking and
yapping of dolphins, the low growl of tuna, and the distant chatter of
smaller fish’ that constitute the oceanic Stream (Roach 2014, pp. 213–
214): ‘When his voice gained power, rising through the water in a twist-
ing, haunting tune without words, Gus realized that she recognized the
music’ (p. 207)8 that appears to be akin to what Gonzales identifies in
his novel Lucy as ‘the Stream’.
While evading the label of young adult novels, Reindeer Moon, The
Many Selves of Katherine North, and Lucy share with that genre the
advantage of young adult protagonists, pliable and caught up in the
throes of body change that encourages readers ‘to a different way of
questioning, sensing, and feeling, of which,’ Geen emphasises, ‘Kit’s
story is only the beginning’ (2016, p. 352). Geen uses science fiction,
technology, and science to achieve what might be better achieved by
Kit’s body and mind and her own deep evolutionary history in order
to dramatise for her reader how the odds are currently stacked against
the true magic of shape-shifting in the modern world. Ultimately Geen
makes clear how disappointing Kit’s technologically enhanced experi-
ences prove. And they are rendered even less fulfilling when her company
and others like it begin to turn away from their original scientific mission
to a commercialised version that might best be described as shape-shift-
ing tourism. Adding another layer of irony, the company makes Kit the
poster girl for the profitable enterprise, ultimately replacing her with a
simulation that is ‘more reliable’ than Kit herself and then also replacing
the real animals whom tourist phenominauts encounter with more reli-
able—and safer—Disney World simulations.
The Many Selves begins, however, in the midst of Kit’s most intense
and authentic embodiment: As a fox, when she finds herself responsible
for the survival of a young orphaned ‘kit’, she becomes deeply entan-
gled in the life of an individual creature, largely ignoring the lives of
foxes in general, the scientists’ interest. (Recall Geen’s observation in her
174 M. Copeland
‘Disclaimer’, that we commonly see science as ‘a discourse of the third

person,’ whereas literature, especially animal-centric and socially con-
scious literature is more likely to speak in the first person and even in the
voices of other-than-humans.) To present a non-human character, pro-
tagonist, or narrator convincingly enough for readers to entangle them-
selves empathically in their lives, literature must thrust readers into their
individual lives, their world, their Umwelt\—what Darwin called ‘the
entangled bank’—and provide settings as convincingly drawn as the char-
acters themselves.
Geen, whose current PhD work is in psychology and philosophy,
makes it clear to her readers that while ‘sympathy … is felt from the out-
side, [like science, offering] the third person perspective, empathy … rec-
ognizes the connection with and understanding of the circumstances of
the other’ and, developed early in human children, forms the basis for
‘thoughtfully tak[ing] the perspective of another being’ (Geen 2016, p.
44). It consists of ‘a reflective act of imagination that puts her into the
object’s situation and/or frame of mind, and allows her to take the per-
spective of the other’ (Geen 2016, p. 48). It is not simply a matter of
putting one’s self into another’s shoes, paws, fins or wiggle.
There are dangers inherent in the process if one relies totally on emo-
tion or, as science has tended to, totally on reason. Both, like animal
studies in general and literary animal studies in particular, have to ‘be
well informed about the other’s developmental, ecological and envi-
ronmental histories as individuals and as members of a species’ (Geen
2016, p. 60). The process requires ‘openness to learning and gathering
of information across differences, critical reflection and … consultation
with people who have experience with and knowledge of the life-worlds
of specific others, for example ethologists, ecologists, primatologists, and
life-long care-takers’ (Geen 2016, p. 60).
The irony inherent in all three of the novels discussed here is that
what modern man and modern science and corporate technology like
Geen’s Shen Corps has called reality is revealed as fiction (Prospero's
dream) and what we’ve been taught to label fiction—only let’s pre-
tend—is revealed as closer to what the holistic real world with its magic
wells, stream and flow may be. Reversing this error will ultimately
demand, as Donna Haraway has long insisted, moving beyond replac-
ing the anthropocentric. W.J.T. Mitchell concludes in his introduc-
tion to Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of
Species and Posthumanist Theory, that we are already in need of ‘a new
term to designate the hybrid creatures that we must learn to think of,
a ‘human/animal’ form predicated on the refusal of the human/animal
binary’ (Mitchell 2003, p. xiv).9 Perhaps, as Rudy suggests in ‘Bestial
Imaginings,’ no literary character more clearly illustrates this than
Gonzales’ titular hybrid human/bonobo character, Lucy.
Like Marshall Thomas’s novel, the inspiration for Lucy came from
ancient indigenous worlds, in this case the relics of North America’s
Southwest Indian cultures in 1994 when Gonzales was studying petro-
glyphs in the New Mexican high desert10 and had ‘a vision of a girl coming
out of the rocks from ancient time—this beautiful creature emerging into
sunlight’ who seemed ‘to be half human half something else’ (Questions
2016). Transfixed, it struck him that she was ‘a cross between a human
and an ape,’ a cross he knew by then was scientifically possible (ibid.). She
haunted him but he struggled to find a form and plot until the summer of
2007, fourteen years after the incident in the petroglyph-rich desert, when
he shared the vision with his youngest, then eighteen-year-old daughter.
Through her response, his vision of light became the Lucy of the novel.
His vision connects Lucy from its inception with the indigenous wis-
dom of the Indians of the American Southwest. But Lucy may have lit-
erary roots in the rejected hybrid ape children born into the family of
Timothy Findley’s Dr. Noah Noyes in his too often undervalued novel
Not Wanted on the Voyage. First published in Canada in 1966 and in the
United States in 1984, and now out of print here, the novel retells the
Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark through the perceptions of Motyll,
Mrs. Noyes’ blind cat whose own children fell victim to the doctor’s sci-
entific experiments and who, like her human companion, is not wanted
on the voyage when the ark sets sail. Filtered through Mottyl and Mrs.
Noyes, Findley’s novel sabotages the anthropocentric Biblical traditions
that underlie Christianity and Judaism, proposing in the place of landfall,
olive branches, and patriarchy, the rainfall and endless oceanic journey
appropriate to a holistic vision of earthly life such as Aloi’s.
Lucy looks more human than does Findley’s Lotte, but is uncom-
monly athletic and strong, at home in the wilderness, and speaks fluently
in several human languages as well as in bonobo and Stream. Once her
heritage is known, there are many humans who consider her non-human
and, as Publisher’s Weekly observed, she ‘becomes a magnet for the con-
troversy that has colored debates between creationists and evolutionists
for decades, as well as an object of interest to a clandestine military think
tank’, issues it feels ‘fail to do justice to the many controversial points the
176 M. Copeland
novel raises’ (Review 2010, p. 26). The name her father chooses for his
daughter alludes to Lucy, the oldest human (Australopithecine) remains
unearthed at the time, even though her father maintains that he didn’t
name her for that: ‘I named you because Lucy means light’. The major
theme in Lucy is the connection her hybrid genes and inheritance have
to the Stream. The addition of Lucy’s DNA would deeply alter human
evolution, making it possible for modern humans, as her father had
dreamed, to renew the connection they had with the Stream when they
too lived as indigenous beings.
‘The Stream’ is Gonzales’ term for the communication that flows
among all the animal species with the exception of contemporary ‘civi-
lized’ humans. As Lucy’s father says, ‘The forest is alive with language.
Listen to it now … A positive flood of information, an eternal stream …
Everything speaks, even the trees’ (2010, p. 9). Even now, remnants of
being a part of the Stream remain, latent in most of us and in some few,
like the Native Americans among whom Lucy finds a home and other
indigenous peoples, as strong as when all humans accepted themselves as
one animal among many. This ecocentric animist theme is everywhere in
Lucy. Early on, Jenny Lowe, the neighbouring primatologist who rescues
Lucy when her father is killed in a revolutionary uprising in the African
nation where both have been involved in ape research for some years,
recalls her first visit to Lucy’s father’s encampment and their spirited dis-
cussion about which of the ancient ancestors of humans had language.
Stone claimed that Homo erectus must have, pointing to the group’s well-
organised elephant hunts in Spain and adding that in Lucy’s words, it’s
how all the animals communicate: ‘We’re all in the Stream’ (Gonzales
2010, p. 56).
Later, escaping those in the United States who would take her cap-
tive, Lucy again finds herself ‘in the forest’ where she ‘returned to the
Stream and learned new signals of deer and moose and red fox and tim-
ber wolf. Moose. Rabbit. Eagle. Beaver. She saw few people out there’
(Gonzales 2010, p. 59). ‘Lucy listened to the crickets talking about what
had happened that day and the day before and during their long history
on earth. They had very high voices but Lucy could slow them down
and understand. “They sounded like a choir singing Gregorian chants,”
her father had once told her. “They talk so much because they have so
much to say. Some birds do that, too,” and Lucy liked to sit out in the
morning and listen to them reminisce about the days of the dinosaurs’
(Gonzales 2010, p. 62). This description helps to explain young Lucy’s
extraordinary wisdom and also captures a sense of what humans could

recall were we to reorient ourselves in relation to the living world.
Lucy’s biological and Kit’s technological hybridity render Mitchell’s
‘infrahuman’ literal. In Lucy’s case her father’s reasons for creating her,
however ethically questionable, reveal all the positive as well as the nega-
tive aspects of human nature and of the anthropocentric culture modern
humans have established. Lucy herself provides an evolutionary overview
of her hybridity to a US Senate committee convened to decide how she
is to be categorised and treated, citing the close relationship of humans
and the other great apes/primates, particularly the chimpanzee and bon-
obos (Gonzales 2010, p. 189).
The novel, easily labelled social satire when considered by reviewers or
literary scholars, is read more accurately when Lucy’s hybrid biology is
seen to echo the hybrid nature of the satyr in Classical Greek drama and
the novel is seen through the ecocentric and animistic message underly-
ing satyr plays. This message is particularly evident in the ending of the
novel when Lucy finds acceptance and a home among Native Americans
who have retained their traditional beliefs: Grandmother White Feather,
echoing Marshall Thomas’ Animal Wife, tells Lucy that her own
‘great-grandfather was one-quarter wolf’ but that they hadn’t had one
like Lucy ‘here in many generations’ (Gonzales 2010, p. 304). A tell-
ing number of animal-centric novels transport readers from the modern
Western world into the worlds of indigenous peoples. Most often they
are the worlds of other-than-humans but on occasion, as here, they
include indigenous humans like Grandmother White Feather's Oglala
Lakota tribe and Yanan and her clan.
Gonzales, like Marshall Thomas and Geen, shares the conviction of
Calvin Luther Martin and David Abram that the ancient human lifeways
are far from extinct. The final pages of his novel anticipate the birth of
Lucy’s child, fathered by ‘a man who speaks to horses and calls wild deer
to his side’ (Rudy 2014, p. 26), in whom her father’s dream to both
save the bonobo from extinction and make humans more like the peace-
ful bonobos than like the more warlike and aggressive chimpanzees will
become flesh. Through the child’s bonobo grandmother’s genes, Lucy’s
affinity for the Stream will be re-woven into human consciousness at the
genetic level much as Gonzales’s story reweaves them into readers’ imag-
inations.
Gruen notes in Entangled Empathy; An Alternate Ethic for Our
Relationships with Animals that we can ‘enhance our capabilities to
178 M. Copeland
engage with earth others and to understand their “perspectives” by look-

ing to other cultures and traditions, such as the aboriginal cultures that
inform [Val] Plumwood’s writing’ (2015, p. 72). She defines this process
as ‘storied empathy … the capacity to engage with very different oth-
ers through narrative, literature, art, and storytelling,’ adding that ‘this
capacity, if honed, might help to engage empathically with the more-
than-human world’ (2015, p. 72). Entangled Empathy reminds us ‘that
we have the capacity to engage with very different others through narra-
tive, literature, art, and storytelling’ (2015, p. 72).
Evolutionary memory anchors us all, however tenuously, to the
stream and flow that allow us to dive into the magic wells of fellow
beings and draw that living water to the surface. Marshall Thomas offers
Yanan as girl and ghost, Gonzales offers human-bonobo hybrid Lucy and
Geen offers Kit’s many selves as bridges or conduits to reconnect with
our own deep evolutionary history, tribal and indigenous, so that we may
explore our own shape-shifting powers, becoming other in the waters of
the magic wells and streams that surround and engulf us. Literature and
art have been dangling such bait since humans first embraced animism
and shamanism and totemism, even before we turned our rituals into art
and story, image and song.
Abram sees reading as ‘an intensely concentrated form of animism
… as outrageous as a talking stone or a talking spider,’ and claims it
‘is homologous[,…and] directly related to the way a non-writing cul-
ture […] experiences the whole of the sensuous surroundings as expres-
sive, as speaking, as animate, as alive’ (2016). Reading novels like
Reindeer Moon, The Many Selves of Katherine North and Lucy, it is hard
not to see literary forms as central to the proliferation of the new sensi-
bility that Abram characterizes as
a new vision of our planet that has been gathering, quietly, even as the old,
armored ways of seeing stumble and joust for ascendancy, their metallic
joints creaking and crumbling with rust. Beneath the clamor of ideologies
and the clashing of civilizations, a fresh perception is slowly shaping itself -
a clarified encounter between the human animal and its elemental habitat.
(2010, p. 299)
Opening our minds and hearts to that sense of wonder that allows tradi-
tional storytellers to bring their listeners into the worlds of other-than-
human life forms reminds us that those worlds survive at the roots of our
evolutionary history to reweave us into the flow of story. The power of

mind that enables such magic has been called, by me and others, by vari-
ous names: imagination, whether empathetic or metamorphic, daydream-
ing, let’s pretend, even shape-shifting. Edward O. Wilson recognises it
simply as ‘biophilia that inner love of the living process’ and ‘the natural
world,’ the living world that is the ‘ancestral environment’ of all living
things (2016, p. 211).
Notes
1. In no way is this to suggest that animal studies or literary animal stud-
ies back away from the deep wells of mammalian species or stop the
struggle to expose the myopia inherent in anthropocentrism. The need
to continue while evolving is clear as Derrick Jensen argues in The Myth
of Human Supremacy (2016). His earlier A Language Older than Words
(2000), which comments that Con Slobakchikoff’s Chasing Doctor
Doolittle: The Language of Animals ‘elegantly shows that everything in
our world is interconnected, and animals, plants, even bacteria are sen-
tient, conscious, and much like us,’ is equally relevant.
2. It is relevant that, as Maria Popova points out in her essay on the poet
Jane Hirschfield, ‘the state of intense focus in the creative act [is] known
as ‘flow’ (2016). When in that state of ‘deep concentration, the self disap-
pears. We seem to fall utterly into the object of our attention, or else van-
ish into attentiveness itself’ (ibid.).
3. I discuss this at some length in Cockroach (2003) and in the chapter I
contributed to Insect Poetics (2008).
4. Animal Wife reflects Marshall Thomas’s profound understanding of the
human/animal binary in indigenous art and story where the animal
wife or husband is ubiquitous. Boria Sax’s The Serpent and the Swan:
The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature (1998), while focusing on
Eurasian versions of the tale, informs readers that the animal bride story
occurs wherever indigenous humans have settled and survived. The ani-
mal form each assumes, ‘reflects the culture and climate of the areas
where the story is told’ (p. 8). His recognition of Marshall Thomas in
the book’s acknowledgements speaks to the importance of her writings:
‘She has’, he writes, ‘provided me with inspiration, through both her fine
books and her encouraging remarks’ (p. xiii).
5. Pinnock makes clear that Bushman shamans’ embodiments include not only
animals, birds and fish, but plants as well (see Woodward 2013, p. 230).
6. A powerful parallel might be drawn between Yanan’s dream and the cen-
tral theme and metaphor of Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem (2004), as
discussed in my review (2009–2010).
180 M. Copeland
7. One of the earliest non-fiction books for young adults suggesting the
importance of recognising both the holistic vision advocated by Aloi as
well as the need for humans to be aware of and to attempt to understand
the perspectives of other living creatures empathizes with trees as well:
Herbert and Judith Kohl’s A View from the Oak: The Private Worlds of
Other Creatures reissued by the Sierra Club in 1988. The Kohls, well-
respected educators, attempt to enable readers to view the world of ticks,
flies, birds, jellyfish and other animals through their other-than-human
senses, rather than our own.
8. Readers may want to delve into this same magic and mystery in what are
conventionally considered adult novels such as Deborah Harkness, The
Book of Life (2014) and Steven Lloyd Jones, String Diaries (2013).
9. Equally suggestive is Mitchell’s use of totemism as a synonym for animism
in the preface.
10. There is a fascinating parallel between Gonzales’ origin story and the
scene that is the culmination of Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams: The Half-
Life of Gregor Samsa (2011). His cockroach character, Gregor Samsa, is
taken into this same desert by an Indian friend who wants him to see the
petroglyphs his ancestors had created and, in the sunset glow they see
the human figure on the stone begin to grow and metamorphose into an
insect, a ‘sacred image’ symbolising the ecological and biological redemp-
tion of the world (Copeland 2008, p. 169).
Works Cited
Abram, D. 2010. Becoming animal: An Earthly cosmology. New York: Pantheon
Books.
———. 2016. The spell of literacy. Children of the code. http://www.chil-
drenofthecode.org/interviews/abram.htm. Accessed 08 Sept 2016.
Blake, H.E. 2016. Editorial. Orion, April 1.
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Author Biography
Marion W. Copeland is an independent scholar specializing in literary animal
studies, affiliated with the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts and
Humane Society University (HSUS), USA. She is the author of Charles Eastman
(Ohiyesa), Cockroach (Reaktion Books), Apes of the Imagination: A Bibliography
and numerous articles and reviews. She contributed an article on Primates in
Literature to the International Encyclopaedia of Primatology (Routledge 2016).
She served until recently as fiction and literary criticism editor of Society and
Animals, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Dakin Humane Society,
Springfield and Leverett, Massachusetts.
PART IV
Creative Interventions in Literary and Art

Histories of Indigenous Animal Practices
CHAPTER 10
Border Crossings: Animals, Tricksters

and Shape-Shifters in Modern Native
American Fiction
Daniel G. Payne
From ancient oral traditions to modern literature and film, virtually every
society has its own version of the creation story, of human and non-
human entities that can transform themselves into different shapes, and
of tricksters of various types. These stories reflect the indefinable, mys-
terious, unquantifiable powers that lay beyond the material, empirically-
based world that most of us see all around us, and remind us that there
is always an element of chaos and mystery in the world, no matter how
diligently modern science seeks to provide rational explanations for phe-
nomena that often seem to defy such explanations. As David Suzuki and
Peter Knudson write in Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of
Nature,
D.G. Payne (*) 
SUNY Oneonta, Oneonta, USA
e-mail: Daniel.Payne@ononta.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_10
186 D.G. Payne
In the words of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, the Native

trickster represents the chaos principle, the principle of disorder, the force
careless of taboos and shattering bounds. But from the point of view of the
deeper realms of being from which the energies of life ultimately spring,
this principle is not to be despised. (Suzuki and Knudson 1992, p. 35)
In the contemporary novels of Native writers Louise Erdrich, Thomas

King and Gerald Vizenor, trickster figures are incorporated in ways that
reflect Campbell’s notion of the chaos principle. This is seen in Erdrich’s
often subtle blurring of the lines between humans and animals in novels
such as Tracks and the Antelope Wife. King and Vizenor take the bound-
ary transgressions of their trickster characters even further, calling into
questions notions of race, literary technique, and other topics in their fic-
tional realities.
The mischievous ‘trickster’ is a common character in Native American
stories and folklore. As Kenneth Lincoln writes
Coyote, hare, raven, crow, jay, wolverine, loon, or spider: a recreant spirit
masks as an animal wandering through hundreds of tribal Indian myths.
He resists the boundaries of any given species and is likely to appear at
any time in any image. Trickster goes his ways “undifferentiated”, …This
figure, also known as Old Man, scavenges in and out of the tribal world a
gamesman, glutton, amoralist, comic rapist, world transformer, and impro-
visational god. He steals wealth, devours game, breaks rules, seduces the
princess, procreates plants and animals, and makes up reality as people
unfortunately know it, full of surprises and twists, contrary, problematical.
(Lincoln 1985, pp. 122–123)
The presence of tricksters is also widespread in modern Native American

novels, and has evolved as traditional Native folklore has been influenced
by (and in turn has influenced) modern narrative theories and fictive
approaches. One of the most intriguing aspects of how modern Native
American novelists have used this traditional trope in their work is the
way in which they have used it to transgress boundaries: between ani-
mals and humans, between Native and non-Native cultures, and between
the earthly world and the fantastic. In the context of Western societies,
where these boundaries are often used to distinguish binary concepts,
literary works that question or blur these boundaries are in themselves
transgressive as they challenge these binary constructions. Because
the Trickster was often used in Native folklore as a transgressor of
10 BORDER CROSSINGS: ANIMALS, TRICKSTERS AND SHAPE-SHIFTERS … 187
boundaries and a force inciting disorder, the adoption of this traditional

character by modern writers to challenge contemporary taboos and cul-
tural beliefs and stereotypes seems a logical extension of a traditional
form.
Native American creation stories provide some of the more striking
departure points from Judeo-Christian creation stories, and some of
these differences contain tropes and themes that also appear in mod-
ern Native novels. While there are numerous different renditions of the
Native creation story, one significant difference from the biblical version
of Genesis is that rather than having a male character (Adam) play a pri-
mary role in the creation story, a female character (often referred to as
‘Sky-Woman’) is at the centre of things. Another difference is the place
of animals in the creation; for example, North America is often referred
to as ‘Turtle Island’, for it is on the back of an enormous turtle that the
land is sculpted with the aid of other animals. The animals themselves are
not inferior beings, but other peoples, and as such they have the ability
to think and often, to speak. Compare this to the Bible, where the only
animals with the power of speech are the snake and Balaam’s ass, both of
whom speak through the aid of supernatural means. In a chapter enti-
tled ‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened’, a comparison of biblical and
Native creation stories contained in The Truth About Stories: A Native
Narrative, King points out some of the aspects of the Native American
creation story that present challenges for non-Native audiences: ‘the talk-
ing animals [in the Native creation stories] are a problem [for Western
audiences] … the elements in Genesis create a particular universe gov-
erned by a series of hierarchies—God, man, animals, plants—that cele-
brate law, order, and good government, while in our Native story, the
universe is governed by a series of co-operations—Charm, the Twins,
animals, human—that celebrate equality and balance’ (King 2003, pp.
23–24).
While the old stories, including many versions of the creation story,
survived in Native American oral traditions and early writings based on
these traditions, critic Charles R. Larson suggests that the Native writers
who first engaged in literary production (between 1880 and 1920) show
a sense of hopelessness, and he states that the ‘question of Indian con-
sciousness was, indeed, a confusing one’ (Larson 1978, p. 10). The 1890
Wounded Knee Massacre, in which anywhere from 150–300 unarmed
Lakota were slaughtered by the US Cavalry (historians debate the num-
bers), was marking the end of the long genocide known as the Indian
188 D.G. Payne
Wars. Amid the consequent confinement of adults to poorly organ-

ised reservations and the deportation of children to residential schools
designed to deprive them of their languages and cultures, a whole gen-
eration of Native writers struggled to tell their stories.
These writers were focused less on the past—their cultural heritage,
stories, and worldview—and were concerned more with a dismal, diso-
rienting present and increasingly tenuous future. The traditional notion
that humans and animals were separate but closely linked nations was
replaced by the Judeo-Christian notion that animals were of a distinct
and lesser order than humans—and, in fact, that differences between
human races could be accounted for in a similar way. The porous, mul-
tifaceted borderlands between humans and animals that once served as
material for Native storytellers were now being replaced by stories influ-
enced by conquest and colonialism. The Native perception of animals
as ‘other peoples’ rather than a lower order of existence is perhaps the
most distinct and fundamental difference between traditional Native and
Western views of humans and animals, and one that was increasingly
threatened as Native cultures struggled to maintain their traditional val-
ues amid the loss of ancestral lands and traditions across North America.
The Native American writers of the past fifty years, however, as Larson
points out, differ markedly from their predecessors:
When we leave the first group of Native American novelists and pass on
to their successors, we begin to notice a sharp change in perspective—in
their concern with their “Indian-ness.” Increasingly, as these novels are
read in the order in which they were written, we see the writers themselves
become aware of their own ethnic consciousness, moving from assimila-
tion, through the equally frustrating period of cultural syncretism ([Darcy]
McNickle and [N. Scott] Momaday), and finally toward a separate reality’
(Larson 1978, p. 11).
This ‘separate reality’, as Larson calls it, includes a rebirth of interest in

Native stories, folklore, and heritage and a sense of pride in the differ-
ences between Native and non-Native cultures.
The 1973 Wounded Knee Incident, also known as the Second Battle
of Wounded Knee, in which over 200 Lakota and American Indian
Movement advocates seized the iconic town, marks a profound shift
in attitudes toward what it means to be indigenous by the end of the
century. In the 1960s and 1970s, an increased focus on issues such as
cultural diversity and the ethical treatment of animals was likely another
factor that brought alternate views to the fore, and helped generate
interest in new critical approaches such as human-animal studies. As con-
temporary Native American novelists reclaimed the stories and traditions
of the past, animals, shape-shifters and tricksters once again appeared in
modern stories that drew on traditional sources to create fresh, new liter-
ary creations.
Virtually every critic of modern Native literature acknowledges that
the ‘Native American Renaissance’ begins with Kiowa author Momaday’s
Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968), drawn from
his life among Pecos Pueblo people in New Mexico. While animals do
not play as prominent a role in House Made of Dawn as they would in
many of the Native American novels that followed, the human relation-
ship to the landscape is central to the novel, as it is to Native American
cultural traditions. As Chadwick Allen points out, ‘Landscape functions
in House Made of Dawn not only as setting, but also as an essential char-
acter’ (Allen and Scott Momaday 2005, p. 211). Briefly stated, House
Made of Dawn tells the story of Abel, a young Pueblo veteran of the
Second World War who returns to his native New Mexico and discovers
that he no longer feels at home in his own community. As King, a fellow
Native American novelist and critic, writes, at first glance the story seems
quite familiar: ‘The return of the Native. No problem here. A common
enough theme. Until Momaday begins to complicate it … what makes
the novel special and what allows us to use it as a starting point are the
questions that it raises and its concern with narrative strategies. As well
as what it avoids’ (King 2003, p. 102). Starting with Abel’s name, which
also has contextual meaning for a non-Native audience as the victim of
the Bible’s first fratricide, Momaday explores differing cultural notions of
good versus evil. He creates, as King writes,
a novel in which aspects of an unfamiliar universe stood close enough to

parts of a known world so that the non-Native reader, knowing the one,
might recognise the other. Ironically, Christianity, which had been a door
barred against Native-non-Native harmony and understanding, suddenly
became an open window through which we could see and hear each other.
(King 2003, p. 102)
In this context, one of the subjects that Momaday develops in his work
(including his poetry and non-fiction) is the difference between the
190 D.G. Payne
Native American view of the natural world and that of the mainstream
American public. This is particularly true of the period during which
House Made of Dawn was published, which preceded the significant envi-
ronmental legislation and reforms enacted in the 1970s. As Kimberly
M. Blaeser succinctly states, ‘Momaday ironically contrasts the Native
idea of an ethical spiritual relationship with a living earth to the con-
temporary Western view’, and so contextualises the global environmen-
tal movements also gaining interest at the time he was writing amid a
much longer struggle between indigenous and colonial cultural values
(Blaeser2006, p. 197).
While animals, shape-shifting and tricksters are not a significant part
of the novel, apart from a story told to Abel by his grandfather, they
lurk at the periphery. Abel never knows his father, mother and brother
who die young, so his only significant link to his tribal identity comes
through his grandfather. His sense of alienation from his community is
exacerbated by his wartime experiences, and he is referred to as an eagle
in a cage, which makes an incident where he kills an eagle—a callous vio-
lation of the spiritual traditions of his people—seem to be an act of self-
negation. As Larson writes, Momaday’s ‘overall picture of the American
Indian in House Made of Dawn is pessimistic … even many of its poetic
sections bespeak an underlying sense of futility, of nihilism’ (Larson
1978, p. 82). After murdering a man, Abel spends time in prison and
then in Los Angeles before beginning the process of healing, aided by
a Navajo friend. He returns to New Mexico to care for his dying grand-
father and continue his own healing process, aided by the return to his
native landscape and its creatures.
In a moving description of the desert southwest and the animals that
become active at dusk, Momaday points to the significant presence of
non-humans:
Coyotes have the gift of being seldom seen; they keep to the edge of vision
and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And
at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river
with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke.
They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to. (Momaday
1968, p. 56)
Although it is just a passing reference, the symbolic significance of the

coyotes—the animal that is most commonly associated with tricksterism
in Native folklore—is a feature that stands out in Abel’s long journey of

healing and redemption. As Eric Cheyfitz writes
ubiquitous in the stories of Native oral cultures, moving fluidly between

what the West categorises as human and animal forms, as well as between
what the West categorises as genders, the trickster is a consummate fig-
ure of communal conflict … . The trickster figure is always both losing and
regaining balance in extreme social situations, but is never apart from the
social. (Cheyfitz 2006, p. 62)
The critical and popular success of House Made of Dawn served as a

catalyst for the discovery and success of other Native American writ-
ers, including Erdrich, King and Vizenor. Erdrich’s novels have in
turn attracted a substantial popular audience, and received a great
deal of critical acclaim; for example, her novel The Round House was
named as the 2012 National Book Award winner in the U.S. Porous
boundaries between human and animal worlds are a recurring theme
in many of Erdrich’s novels. Sometimes, they are a central part of the
story, sometimes a relatively small part of her narrative. Often critics
ignore them in favour of human dramas. For example, scholarly dis-
cussions of Tracks (1988), part of a quartet of novels that focus on an
extended community of Chippewa, white, and mixed-blood charac-
ters, portray Erdrich as troubling indigenous politics through a story
that
gives a thick history of a community that does not seem predicated on a

fixed form identified as either tribal or national; rather, this history func-
tions as both a precondition of and an obstacle to a more fully articulated
tribal nationalism, in which communities dispute their own legacies as well
as their own futures, often simultaneously. The result is a communalism
that can leave questions of sovereignty unresolved or even muted. (Krupat
and Elliot 2006, p. 46)
In Tracks, as in most of Erdrich’s novels, there are numerous first person

accounts that blend together in the story, producing a tapestry of the
community through several of its members in what critic Jace Weaver has
dubbed ‘communitism’ (Krupat and Elliot 2006, p. 147).
One of the most intriguing aspects of Erdrich’s portrayals of com-
munity is the inclusion of animals in those communities. As Vizenor
192 D.G. Payne
writes, ‘Erdrich names moose, pigs, bears, cats, and other animals, but
the most common authored animal in Tracks is the dog’ (Vizenor 1998,
p. 140). Drawing upon Native American folklore—in which humans fre-
quently have certain characteristics similar to those of animals, and vice
versa—Erdrich often uses animals as counterparts—and sometimes as
literal parts—to the human characters in the story. For example, when
a catastrophic fever strikes the reservation, one of the characters, Moses
Pillager, ‘defeated the sickness by turning half animal and living in a
den’ (Erdrich 1988, p. 35). The den is located in the woods surround-
ing Lake Matchimanito, ‘a lonely place full of the ghosts of the drowned
and those whose death took them unaware’ (Erdrich 1988, p. 35). The
only characters comfortable in this area are, like Moses, members of the
Pillager family, who are part of the community but retain a separate iden-
tity that unnerves many of their neighbours.
This separate identity is not just a familial trait, but is linked to that of
animals—primarily dogs in Fleur’s case, and cats in the case of Moses—
that have an affinity to the Pillagers. During the fever, Moses moves to
an island on the far side of the lake, and when he does, ‘the cats went
with him. And now, whenever Moses walked into town, he wore a neck-
lace of their claws around his neck’ (Erdrich 1988, p. 35). While this
image is not a particularly pleasant one for modern readers, it probably
reflects Moses’s identification with cats (as a bear claw necklace or eagle
feathers did in traditional Native societies) rather than constituting a
‘trophy.’
While there is relatively little in the way of literal shape-shifting in
Tracks, in one of Erdrich’s later novels, The Antelope Wife (1998), the
story abounds with beings who sometimes appear human, and some-
times appears as antelopes, frogs, and talking dogs. The title character,
Matilda (who is also referred to as Blue Prairie Woman’s daughter, Other
Side of the Earth, and Nameless) is from a family of antelope people, an
excellent example of the porous boundaries between human and animal
in Erdrich’s fiction—and is captured by Klaus Sawano, an ‘urban Indian’
of Chippewa descent who falls in love with Matilda, marries her, and
eventually sets her free so she can become one of the antelope people
once again.
King’s critically acclaimed novel Green Grass, Running Water is one of
the most complex, challenging examples of recent Native American fic-
tion. As succinctly conveyed by Kathryn Shanley, the novel
calls into question categories of thinking about Indian bodies in time and
space, in myth, history, and legend. Contrariwise and comic, the novel
upsets hierarchical rankings and colonial categories, as its many stories
weave in and out of each other in mythic/real time. In a sense, creation
itself within the text is not exactly prior; in the face of King’s narrative tem-
porality, the power of hegemonic discourse dissipates. (Shanley 1999, p. 36)
The creation story and trickster not only feature prominently in King’s
fiction, but also it might be said that he himself assumes the role of trick-
ster/novelist in his storytelling.
His style in this novel, as Krupat and Elliot point out, resembles the oral
delivery of a traditional storyteller but … frequently involves leading fig-
ures of Western history, myth, and religion: a literary cosmopolitanism
that incorporates the world of Western literature through narrative models
belonging to oral, tribal traditions. (Krupat and Elliot 2006, p. 161)
The narrative moves back and forth between its human protagonists,
a group of old Natives ironically called Hawkeye, the Lone Ranger,
Ishmael, and Robinson Crusoe, names taken from foundational texts of
Western colonisation that ‘presume the colonial subjugation of indige-
nous peoples’ (Krupat and Elliot 2006, p. 161).
King’s emphasis on Native folklore is signalled right from the open-
ing words of Green Grass, Running Water, when he introduces Coyote, a
trickster whose actions have the ability to produce destruction and chaos,
even in the so-called real world:
So. In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water. Coyote was there,
but coyote was asleep. That coyote was asleep and that coyote was dream-
ing. When that coyote dreams, anything can happen. I can tell you that.
(King 1993, p. 1)
At the end of the novel, an earthquake—that King suggests is caused

by Coyote’s dancing—destroys a dam, thereby restoring the course of
a river pent up by modern technology. The creation myth and the con-
cept of creation is at the heart of the novel, and reappears many times,
often in the form of entire chapters that put the realistic parts of the
story on hold while the concept of creation—creation of the world,
194 D.G. Payne
creation of the story, creation of any and every thing—is emphasised. As

Henry Beston writes in The Outermost House, ‘Creation is here and now’
(Beston 1928, p. 216), a concept that King drives home in Green Grass,
Running Water; creation is not just an event that happened in the dis-
tant past, as described in Genesis, but is an ongoing and indistinguish-
ably human-animal process.
In addition to differentiating between the Native story of the crea-
tion and the biblical version, the differing role of animals in Native and
Western worldviews is also developed within the narrative. The trickster,
Coyote, is a main character and he is a talkative one. In one ribald and
amusing passage reiterating the creation story, Changing Woman (the
ur-mother sometimes called ‘Sky-Woman’ or ‘Charm’) falls out of the
sky and into a canoe full of talking animals. She falls right on Old Coyote
who goes ‘Psssst … he makes that sound. Like something that has gone
flat’ (King 1993, p. 159). The canoe is filled with ‘poop’ and out of the
poop jumps a little man with a filthy beard who introduces himself as
Noah. ‘Any relation to Eve?’ asks the little man, ‘She sinned, you know.
That’s why I’m in a canoe full of animals. That’s why I’m in a canoe full
of poop’ (King 1993, p. 160). He asks Changing Woman to show him
her breasts, and she turns to one of the turtles in the canoe who tells her
not to do it, because ‘he’ll just get excited and rock the canoe’ (King
1993, p. 160). Noah becomes upset, not simply because she won’t show
him her breasts, but because she’s talking to the animals: ‘Talking to the
animals again, shouts Noah. That’s almost bestiality and it’s against the
rules. What rules? Christian rules’ (King 1993, p. 160). Noah’s objec-
tion to the turtle’s sound advice (and to talking with animals generally) is
delightfully absurd and draws an amusing distinction between the place
of talking animals in Western and Native cultures.
In addition to the differences between Native creation stories and the
biblical version, including the presence of talking animals in the Native
version, in Green Grass, Running Water King illustrates another enor-
mous difference between the two cultures and their creation stories:
Native stories include a great deal of humour, sometimes scatological,
sometimes ribald. In his collection of essays, The Truth About Stories: A
Native Narrative (2003), King compares the differing versions of the
creation story, noting that ‘the sober voice in the Christian story makes
for a formal recitation, but creates a sense of veracity’ (King 2003, p.
23). The Native tellings are more exuberant, but, he writes, ‘the talking
animals are a problem’ and present us with a stark choice:
a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act or a world in which

creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides
toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony;
a world marked by competition or a world determined by co-operation.
And there’s the problem. (King 2003, p. 23)
In other words, animals are either part of the community, as they are in
the Native stories, or they are excluded. Or, as the American environ-
mentalist Aldo Leopold framed the issue in his classic A Sand County
Almanac (1949),
a land ethic changes the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-
community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fel-
low-members, and also respect for the community as such. (Leopold 1949,
p. 241).
King’s story clarifies the important differences that follow from indig-
enous worldviews of the ‘land-community’ or the non-humans as com-
munity members.
Vizenor’s Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987) is
perhaps the outstanding example of a novel in which a Native American
novelist combines traditional Native tropes of shape-shifting and the
trickster with modern non-Native narrative structure and theories.
Vizenor, who in addition to being a novelist is a respected poet, teacher,
and literary theorist, has given several interviews and written about
the trickster figure in Griever, which sheds light on his complex, mul-
tifaceted narrative structure. As Deborah L. Madsen states, ‘Vizenor is
a writer whose work departs radically from traditional forms and tech-
niques, challenging existing conventions in every literary genre. Reading
his work is difficult.’ (Madsen 2009, p. 1).
It is also worth the effort, for, like that of Momaday, Vizenor’s fic-
tion skilfully combines Native and non-Native allusions and methods. As
Vizenor says about Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the point is to cre-
ate connections, foster ‘Native-non-Native harmony and understanding,
[and create] an open window through which we [can] see and hear each
other’ (King 2003, p. 102).
Border crossings of all kinds are central to Vizenor’s literary vision.
Like Erdrich and King, Vizenor is ‘descended from what he calls “cross-
blood” or “mixed blood” origins’, in his case ‘primarily French and
Chippewa-Ojibway (Anishinaabe) and he traces his family through many
196 D.G. Payne
generations on what is now the White Earth Reservation in northern

Minnesota’ (Madsen 2009, p. 3). Deeply in agreement with King’s inclu-
sionary politics, he has taken a leading role in preparing a new constitu-
tion for the White Earth Reservation that would protect the tribal rights
of mixed blood descendants, arguing that ‘tribal membership traditionally
was based upon adoption, family, and kinship ties, not blood quantum’,
which he refers to as a ‘colonial imposition’ (Madsen 2009, p. 8). Griever:
An American Monkey King in China is ‘dedicated to mixedbloods and
compassionate tricksters’, and the protagonist is himself a mixed blood.
The author’s biography appears to shape the narrative in other ways
as well. When Vizenor was just twenty months old, his father was mur-
dered in a crime that remains unsolved, and Vizenor spent several years
being moved around between a series of foster homes and the homes of
relatives. The experience was so traumatic that he became mute for ‘the
entire third year of his elementary schooling’ (Madsen 2009, p. 4). The
importance that he places on words and stories (as well as his prodigious
literary output) is probably due in part to this experience in addition to
his Anishinaabe cultural heritage.
In 1983, Vizenor spent a semester teaching as a ‘foreign expert’ at
Tianjin University in the People’s Republic of China, which is the setting
for Griever. While in China, he became fascinated by similarities between
the Native American trickster and another cross-cultural and cross-spe-
cies figure, the Chinese Monkey King. In Fugitive Poses (1998), a collec-
tion of literary essays, he writes:
The Chinese Monkey King, in The Journey to the West, is the cousin of
naanabozho, the native trickster; the natural stories of their provenance are
stone, water, and [what Vizenor captures in his mashup neologism] surviv-
ance. The mind monkey and native trickster are the clever teasers of cre-
ation, totemic conversion, and even their own continuance in literature.
(Vizenor 1998, p. 1)
Vizenor often uses the term ‘mind monkey’, a Buddhist phrase that con-
veys a sense of the erratic, untamed mind, as a synonym for the trickster
Griever, whose shape-shifting takes place primarily in his own mind and
is more figurative than literal.
Griever is, in part, a novelist-trickster’s response to the monolithic
oppressiveness of communist China. As Vizenor writes in his essay collec-
tion Fugitive Poses,
Yang Hansheng, then vice chairman of the China Federation of Literary

and Art Circles, declared that “our literary and art workers should
adhere to the slogan of literature and art in the service of people and of
socialism,” but he observed that “some writers and artists have shown
themselves apathetic by their manifest lack of interest in writing about rev-
olutionary history,” and “by their fondness for love stories and the fab-
rication of bizarre preposterous plots; or by concentrating on depressing,
negative things.” (Vizenor 1998, p. 3)
This type of ‘party line’ thinking presents an irresistible target for a

writer-trickster, particularly one who celebrates the ‘trickster of libera-
tion’, and Vizenor attacks it with undisguised glee.
The novel opens with a letter from the protagonist Griever de Hocus
to China Browne, who, like Griever, is from the White Earth Reservation
in northern Minnesota. Griever’s surname in the novel is reminiscent of
‘hocus pocus’, a phrase used to refer to magicians and their illusions, an
allusion that well befits a trickster character. Griever, writes Vizenor, is a
‘mixedblood tribal trickster, a close relative to the old mind monkeys; he
holds cold reason on a lunge line while he imagines the world’ (Vizenor
1987, p. 34). Griever’s mother, Coffee, barely knew Griever’s father, and
names her eldest son after her compulsive ‘griever meditation’ a practice
that is reputed to ‘cure common colds, headaches, heartaches, tired feet
and tired blood’ (Vizenor 1987, p. 40). Griever’s own ‘griever medi-
tation’, however, differs from that of his mother—he digs holes in the
earth into which he shouts his rage and fears.
The importance of words, stories, and transformation is emphasised
at the outset of the novel. At the university, administrators and commu-
nist party cadres discourage too much personal contact between the for-
eign teachers and the Chinese students. Because he speaks no Chinese,
Griever is dependent upon government liaisons, student, and colleague
translators, and people he meets who happen to speak some English.
This results in a number of comic exchanges as Griever struggles to
make himself understood. He carries a scroll holstered at his side at like
a weapon, and with paper and some pens, the trickster and ‘holosexual
mind monkey’ creates his own reality:
He thinks backward, stops time like a shaman, and reverses intersec-

tions, interior landscapes. The lines and curves in his pictures are dance,
meditation moves, those silent gestures in an opera scene. Prevalent time
198 D.G. Payne
and space are dissolved in ecstasies, but there is much more to this trickster
than mere transcendence. Griever discovers events, an active opera and an
audience, all at once on rough paper. He paints the comic resolutions back
into tragic dances; he paints to find a patron. (Vizenor 1987, p. 50)
In an interview with Jack Foley, Vizenor discusses his propensity for creating
his own distinctive vocabulary, including the term ‘holosexual’, by which he
is ‘referring to the entire sexual and erotic energy of every cell in our bodies,
in order not to reduce this rich and complex energy of eroticism and sexual-
ity to the mere restrictive binaries of gender’ (Foley 1999, p. 310).
Griever is a ‘trickster of liberty’—Vizenor’s next book, in fact, was
entitled The Trickster of Liberty—a trait that first surfaces while Griever is
a schoolboy in a biology class assigned to dissect frogs. Before the dissec-
tion could begin, he packed the frogs into his lunch sack and ‘liberated
them one by one on the shaded cool side of the school building. There,
in the gentle fiddlehead fern, he imagined that he became the king of the
common green frogs’ (Vizenor 1987, p. 49). When he returned to the
classroom he was confronted by the science teacher:
“We must have the frogs to finish our experiment,” she demanded with
her thumbs held high, blood-red fingernails extended.
“The frogs are alive,” he pleaded.
“Griever, give me the frogs this instant.”
“The frogs all jumped over the fern,” he explained as he turned toward
the students, tapped the toes of his shoes together, and pinched his ear.
Someone croaked and the students laughed and bounced at their desks.
“Mark my words, little man, you will be punished for this,” said the
teacher. She snapped her fingers and ground her teeth.
“Not by the frogs.”
“This is a scientific experiment.”
“Not by the frogs.” (Vizenor 1987, p. 50)
This action and those that follow in the novel indicate that as a ‘trickster
of liberty’, Griever’s ideals extend to animals as well as to humans.
Griever’s role as a liberation trickster in China begins in a public street
market shortly after his arrival in Tianjin. He finds his first ‘patron’, a
rooster he calls Matteo Ricci, at a stand where a ‘chicken cutthroat’ kills

and sells chickens. Griever manages to persuade the befuddled cutthroat
to sell him all of the chickens live, and then sets them free in front of
a gathered crowd of Chinese people and foreigners, shouting ‘This is a
chicken liberation, not a television talk show. Free the chickens’ (Vizenor
1987, p. 34). The cutthroat sneers at Griever, calling him ji wang,
‘chicken king’, and a foreigner who turns out to be another one of the
American teachers at the university and who helped translate the nego-
tiations between Griever and the cutthroat, exclaims ‘just our luck, ten
thousand miles from home and we end up with the weirdies’ (Vizenor
1987, p. 46). Unlike Griever, his colleague finds his liberation of animals
to be entirely incomprehensible.
In an interview with Vizenor, Robert A. Lee asked the author,
‘Transformation might almost be the name of the entire textual game
in the novel. Not only Griever himself but the rooster who keeps him
company. Who is this rooster?’ (Vizenor and Lee 1999, pp. 116–117).
‘Matteo Ricci is the rooster of deliverance’, responded Vizenor,
and the tricky chicken of native survivance. Griever liberated the great
cock at the street market and ordained him then and there with a new
name … . Matteo Ricci is a prancer, and the trickster holds his bright cock
on a tether. Griever was known as a comic liberator and a riotous, subver-
sive teacher, and that tricky persona was understood and tolerated in the
context of the many stories and opera scenes of the Chinese Monkey King
in The Journey to the West. (Vizenor and Lee 1999, pp. 116–117)
Owning the scene’s absurdity, Vizenor nonetheless conveys his sense of

the shared struggles of domesticated animals and colonised Native peo-
ples through the affinities of trickster and rooster, both bright, cocky,
and eventually free. It also offers a foretaste of how empathies fostered
by such affinities inform social action.
Later in the story, Griever—who has painted his face as the Monkey
King and substituted an image of a monkey on his government-issued
identification card—witnesses a caravan of official vehicles carrying political
prisoners to be executed. The prisoners had been convicted in show trials
and then paraded through the streets as ‘cheers broke clean from apart-
ment windows, [and] wild applause tripped from high balconies (Vizenor
1987, p. 149). Thousands of onlookers line the streets, and Griever leaps
onto one of the army transports and stops the procession. In the chaos
200 D.G. Payne
that ensues, some of the prisoners manage to escape and Griever slips
through the crowd and returns to the university’s guesthouse.
In addition to using his trickster powers to relieve human oppres-
sion, Griever turns his talents against animal exploiters. Egas Zhang,
whom Vizenor described in an interview as ‘the sinister chain smoker
and foreign affairs director at Tianjin University’ plays the villain’s
role in the novel (Vizenor 1987, p. 119). From the moment he meets
Griever, Zhang continually pesters him for bear paws and gall bladders,
which reputedly have aphrodisiacal power in Chinese medicine.1 As the
bear is one of the most powerful totemic animals in Native American
folklore, Griever is particularly offended by this request. Zhang has a
deep-seated mistrust of foreigners that arises in part from an affair his
wife had with a Westerner while Zhang was working as a translator in
Africa. She gave birth to a blond daughter, Hester Hua Dan—probably
a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne from The Scarlet
Letter, who could not hide that her daughter was not her husband’s.
Griever is drawn to Hester, and when he learns that she is pregnant, he is
delighted; not so her father, who drowns both Hester and her daughter,
Kuan Yin, in a pond on the university grounds, behind the guesthouse
for foreign teachers where Griever stays.
The trickster gets his revenge by finally providing Zhang with the
‘aphrodisiacs’ for which he was always pestering Griever:
Egas was always asking me for aphrodisiacs, bear paws and gallbladders. If
I ever see him again, he’ll be walking and talking like a mutant hermaph-
rodite, because I gave him a strong dose of estrogen. The dust he thinks is
bear paw will give him the big tits he always wanted to see, his very own
tits, and raise his voice in less than a week. (Vizenor 1987, p. 133)
This trickster deed brings about another type of transformation,

although it is certainly not the one Egas Zhang intends, and at once
avenges the murder of his girlfriend and child as well as making a strong
statement against animal exploitation.
After the death of Hester Hua Dan, Griever decides to leave China,
but by unconventional means—he procures an ultralight plane (provided
by China Browne’s brother, Slyboots Browne, back on the White Earth
Indian Reservation), and flies to Macao with Kangmei—another blond
mixed blood—and Matteo Ricci. As Griever writes to China Browne,
Kangmei and Matteo Ricci are with me. She’s a mixed blood, related to
Hester Hua Dan and Kuan Yin. You can imagine what the peasants must
think when we come down out of the air, a mixedblood barbarian trickster
in an opera coat, a mixedblood blond who speaks Chinese, wears a cape with
bundles of silk seeds under her arms, and a cock tied behind the ultralight
seat. Kangmei knows how to raise silk worms and where to find wild ginseng,
can you imagine silk farmers on the reservation? (Vizenor 1987, p. 233)
The notion of silk farmers on a Native American reservation seems out

of place both in a geographical and a cultural sense, particularly from the
perspective of Griever, a trickster of liberation whose antipathy to animal
exploitation runs deep. Although Vizenor remains uncritical of silk farm-
ing as an industrial form of animal exploitation in the novel, here it is
introduced as an extension of blurred human and animal boundaries.
Much has been written about the manner in which Vizenor combines
modern literary narrative techniques and theory with traditional Native
themes and tropes. As Deborah L. Madsen asserts:
It can be productive to ask of Vizenor’s work not whether he is a post-

modernist writer, as some critics suggest, but why the concept of postmod-
ernism should be invoked in relation to his writing. The answer lies in the
double nature of Vizenor’s approach to writing as a tribal author. On the
one hand, he seeks to articulate a vision that is grounded in his tribal expe-
rience; on the other hand, he is aware that this tribal context has been mis-
appropriated by the dominant culture within a paradigm of savagery versus
civilization—those “wicked terms”, as he calls them … .  Contemporary
critical theory, particularly the writings of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François
Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and others of the poststructuralist school of
thought, is used by Vizenor not to display some putative deconstructive
allegiance on his part; on the contrary, critical theory serves the interests
of bringing tribal epistemologies to a contemporary readership. (Madsen
2009, pp. 22–23)
While the other Native novelists discussed here break down borders
between Western notions of literary technique and Native oral traditions,
storytelling, and folklore, as well as boundaries between humans and
animals, Vizenor’s work and worldview seem calculated to break down
boundaries wherever he finds them—as befits a ‘trickster of liberation.’
Yet the varying uses of trickster figures by all three to engage tribal epis-
temologies consistently lead to their development of their implications
for human-animal relationships.
202 D.G. Payne
Having begun this essay with an epigraph about the importance of

storytelling, it seems appropriate to end with a story—a Native American
creation story as told by King in his essay collection The Truth About
Stories, where he begins every chapter with a version of this story, which
emphasises the important role played by animals in the creation of the
world:
There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space
on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time
someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the
voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes
in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the response of the
audience. But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the
turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away.
One time, it was in Prince Rupert, I think, a young girl in the audience
asked about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of a tur-
tle, what was below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told her. And
below that turtle? Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.
The girl began to laugh, enjoying the game, I imagine. So how many
turtles are there? she wanted to know. The storyteller shrugged. No one
knows for sure, he told her, but it’s turtles all the way down. (King 2003,
pp. 1–2)
Note
1. As Adam M. Roberts and Nancy Perry write,
The ongoing trade in bear parts and derivatives poses perhaps the most
pervasive threat to bears. The bear parts trade affects almost all bear species
and could have significant global impacts on bear populations in all parts
of the world. The United States Department of the Interior is responsi-
ble for issuing export permits for specimens of 132 American black bears.
Permits allow the exportation of American black bear claws, feet, skins,
and skulls for jewellery, rugs, and trophies. The Agency is also supposed to
issue permits for any bear gallbladder leaving the country. Although gall-
bladders found abroad are claimed to be from American bears, representa-
tives of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service claim “that the U.S.
Office of Management Authority has not issued any export permits for
commercial export of these galls.” This international trade in bear gallblad-
ders and bile (used in traditional medicines prescribed throughout Asia and
in Asian communities around the world) is the real threat to bear survival
because of the significant potential demand. Estimates suggest that bear
gallbladder was first used as many as three thousand years ago in Asian
medicinal pharmacopoeia as a “cold” medicine to treat “hot” ailments
such as fevers, burns, swelling, and sprains. (2000, p. 2).
Works Cited
Allen, C. and N. Scott Momaday. 2005. In The Cambridge companion to Native
American literature, ed. J. Porter and K.M. Roemer, 207–220. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Beston, H. 1928. The outermost house. New York: Doubleday.
Blaeser, K. 2006. Cannons and canonization: American Indian poetries through
autonomy, colonization, nationalism, and decolonization. In The Columbia
guide to American Indian literatures of the United States since 1945, ed. E.
Cheyfitz, 183–287. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cheyfitz, E. 2006. The (Post) Colonial Construction of Indian Country: U.S.
American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law. In The Columbia Guide
to American Indian litatures of the United States since 1945, ed. E Cheyfitz,
1–126. New York: Columbia University Press.
Erdrich, L. 1998. The antelope wife. New York: Harper Collins.
———. 1988. Tracks, New York: Henry Holt.
Foley, J. Interview with Gerald Vizenor, Mythosphere, August 1999, Vol. 1, Issue
3, 304–318.
King, T. [1993] 1994. Green grass, running water. New York: Bantam.
———. 2003. The truth about stories: A Native narrative. Minneapolis:
Krupat, A., and M. Elliot. 2006. American Indian fiction and anticolonial resist-
ance. In The Columbia guide to American Indian literatures of the United
States since 1945, ed. E. Cheyfitz, 127–182. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Larson, C. 1978. American Indian fiction. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press.
Leopold, A. (1949). (1970). A Sand County almanac. New York: Ballantine.
Leopold, A. 1966. A Sand County almanac. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lincoln, K. 1985. Native American renaissance. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Madsen, D. 2009. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press.
Momaday, N. 1968. House made of dawn. New York: Harper and Row,
Publishers.
204 D.G. Payne
Roberts, A.M., and N. Perry. 2000. Throwing caution to the wind: The global
bear parts trade. Animal law review 6: 129.
Shanley, K. 1999. Talking to the animals and taking out the trash: The functions
of American Indian literature. Wicazo sa review 14 (2): 32–45.
Suzuki, D., and P. Knudson. 1992. Wisdom of the elders: Sacred native stories of
nature. New York: Bantam Books.
Vizenor, G. 1987. Griever: An American monkey king in China. New York:
Illinois State University Fiction Collective.
———. 1998. Fugitive poses: Native American scenes of absence and presence.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Vizenor, G., and Lee, R. 1999. Post-Indian conversations. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Author Biography
Daniel G. Payne is a Professor of English at SUNY College at Oneonta. His
book-length works include Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing
and Environmental Politics (1996); The Palgrave Environmental Reader (2005);
Writing the Land: John Burroughs and His Legacy (2008); Why Read Thoreau’s
Walden? (2013) and Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston (2016).
Dr Payne also directs the biannual John Burroughs Nature Writing Conference
& Seminar, commonly referred to as the “Sharp Eyes” Conference, at SUNY
Oneonta. In 2012 Dr Payne was honored with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award
for Excellence in Teaching.
CHAPTER 11
I’m Mad You’re Mad We Are All Mad:

The Alice Diaries
Wilma Cruise
Art-making and shamanistic practices imply that conscious thought is

bypassed and the unconscious or preconscious dominates (Burgin 1991,
p. 215)1. In this essay, I invoke the metaphor of ‘madness’ as Lewis
Carroll articulated in Alice’s conversation with the Cheshire Cat in Alice
in Wonderland. This is not the madness of the clinical order but one in
which words and objects become unhinged from their usual contexts.
I suggest that those who work at the interface of the physical and the met-
aphysical, such as shamans, sorcerers and artists are able to facilitate such
unhinging. It is these practitioners who are in a position to re-establish a
sacred connection with the animal, one which John Berger suggests we
as modern humans have lost. Berger laments the absence of real animals
in contemporary human life. He says that modern humans have forsaken
their connection to the natural order when animals ‘entered the imagina-
tion as messengers and promises’ (Berger 2007, p. 252). Identifying this
estrangement from the time of Descartes to its apogee in modern times,
he maintains we as humankind have isolated ourselves from other species.
W. Cruise (*) 
University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa
e-mail: wcruise@global.co.za

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_11
206 W. Cruise
By marginalising animals in zoos2, exploiting them as commodities, repro-

ducing their images—not symbolically but realistically and thereby reduc-
ing the animal to its sign—we have effectively pushed the animal into a
‘receding past’ (Berger 2007, p. 255). He further purports that, ‘Therein
lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalisation. That look between
animal and man … has been extinguished’ (Berger 2007, p. 261).
There have been challenges to this Cartesian, anthropocentric view
with attempts to return the animal to its rightful place in a post-human-
ist world. In post-humanism the assumption is that humankind is no
longer the central being—the single experiencing subject around which
the world revolves in a kind of pre-Copernican manner. The humanist
enterprise founded in the Enlightenment foregrounds reason, rational
discourse and language. The animal in this scenario was relegated to the
margins, its lack of language rendering it, according to Heidegger, ‘poor
in world’ (1929–1930, in Derrida 2008; pp. 80, 155). These human-
ist assumptions are now being challenged not necessarily to reject the
human but to render it with ‘greater specificity once we have removed
meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason,
reflection and so on’ (Wolfe 2010, pp. xxv). The human animal thereby
becomes at one with the ontological as well as evolutionary continuum
of animal life. By opening the pathways philosophically, humans can
once more connect practically and spiritually with the animal in a man-
ner which, according to Berger, we have lost. In this way post-humanism
is also prehumanism referring to a time in prehistory in which we were
embedded in a biological continuum (Wolfe 2010, p. xv). In order to
regain the sacred connection to the animal, humankind has to suspend
reason and the comfort of rational discourse.
In this context, I investigate the work of South African artists,
Elizabeth Gunter and Nicolene Swanepoel as well as my own art-
works from The Alice Diaries3 and Red Queen to Play4. Swanepoel and
Gunter, like me, consciously use the unconscious as an imperative in
their art-making practices. Using what Carstens calls ‘uncanny con-
vergences’ (see his essay in this volume) we juxtapose animality and
humanity to transcend the incongruence between ‘two wildly diver-
gent’ discourses (see Carstens in this volume). I consider our artworks
in terms of various models of the unconscious including the Freudian,
shamanistic and ‘Wonderlandian’. In the process I suggest that Hélène
Cixous’ écriture féminine, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts
11 I’M MAD YOU’RE MAD WE ARE ALL MAD: THE ALICE DIARIES 207
Fig. 11.1 Wilma Cruise, The Alice Diaries installation view (2012). Courtesy
of the artist
of animal-becoming and writing like a rat, are useful metaphors for my

own and other contemporary South African women artists’ creative
processes.
The Alice Diaries (Fig. 11.1) and Red Queen to Play form part of
The Alice Sequence, a series of exhibitions in which I investigate the
animal-human interface using Lewis Carroll’s texts, Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice
Found There (1871) as an overarching metaphor—a meta metaphor as
it were. That I chose Carroll’s two stories as a conduit for my research
needs some explanation. Alice in Wonderland was the first book I read,
or can remember reading. Thus, it has been a part of me since the incep-
tion of my conscious self. However, the chief reason for using it as
a metaphor for my visual research is that the animals in Alice have the
knowledge, the language and the (albeit upside down) reason, as to how
Wonderland works.
The White Rabbit, much like a modern corporate executive, is for-
ever rushing off somewhere lamenting his lateness. ‘Oh my ears
and whiskers’ (Carroll 1982, p. 20), he cries as he rushes past the
208 W. Cruise
bewildered Alice. His task is urgent, but it is never made clear to Alice
or to us, her sympathetic fellow travellers, what his urgent business is.
In the upside down, rabbit-hole world, all sense of who Alice is falls
away. She is not even sure of her size. ‘Who are you?’ asks the haughty
caterpillar and a little later, the pigeon—who thinks she just might be a
serpent—asks, ‘What are you?’ (Carroll 1982; pp. 47, 54). Alice does
not have the answer to either question. The caterpillar’s question is sig-
nificant. Who is Alice and, by extrapolation, who are we? Are we right
to presume our position of superiority in relation to the animals? Do we
really deserve our place on top of the Cartesian pile? Carroll’s creatures
pose these questions and others of an ontological and logical nature.
Alice might well be seen as a forerunner for a post-humanist world, in
which humankind is no longer the central and only significant speaking
being. Her dream world, in which animals speak, points the way back-
wards towards an idealistic world, in which animals and humans co-exist
on equal terms.
In making my artworks I relied on another fictional character’s advice.
Elizabeth Costello suggests that it is via poetics that understanding with
animals might be reached (Coetzee 2004, p. 111). Costello’s implica-
tion is that it is through affect rather than reason that we get closer to
the animal-other. Poetry and, I would add, art more generally lead the
way to new understandings. It can also be argued that the largely uncon-
scious means of creation in the studio mimics that of the inchoate com-
munication that takes place between the human and the animal-other.
Artistic practice is of such a nature that the end goal cannot be predicted
with any clarity. This is like embarking on a journey with no destination.
This conundrum of not knowing one’s endpoint was captured in a scene
in Alice in Wonderland. In conversation with the Cheshire Cat, Alice
asks,
“Would you tell me, please, which way I want to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where —” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. (Carroll

1982, p. 62)
The journey of creativity is justified by reaching that elusive somewhere

even though it remains unidentified. The markers of the journey are gov-
erned by unconscious impulses—inchoate directions governed as much
by the imperative of the hand as of the head. Is ‘madness’ a precondi-
tion of making art? Certainly, it appears so when it is difficult to state in
advance where one is going. As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice, ‘we’re all
mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad’ (Carroll 1982, p. 64). The Cheshire
Cat invokes the power of madness, assigning this condition to himself as
well as Alice. He seems to imply that madness places him in a position
of knowing authority in Wonderland. Appearing and disappearing as he
does is an act of magic or sorcery.
In their chapter, ‘Memories of a Sorcerer’ (1987, pp. 239–252),
Deleuze and Guattari liken the writer and philosopher (and presum-
ably the artist) to a sorcerer. One who occupies a liminal position as,
contradictorily, being both part of the pack and having an anomalous posi-
tion in the pack (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 239, 243), ‘Sorcerers
have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of fields or
woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the vil-
lage, or between villages’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 246). Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari list what the anomalous individual is not—
it is not a unique specimen, nor a perfection of a type, nor the emi-
nent term of a series, nor an individual, nor a species—he might even
be a Cheshire Cat! It only has affects that teem, swell and seethe (1987,
pp. 244–245). An anomalous individual is not an elevated human indi-
vidual but a ‘phenomenon of bordering’ (1987, p. 245) with becoming-
animal being ‘an affair of sorcery’ (1987, p. 247). Further a sorcerer is one
who responds to the injunction to ‘write like a rat’. The imperative is to
either stop writing, or write like a rat in which case writing becomes an act
of becoming and ‘all becomings are written like sorcerer’s drawings’ (1987,
p. 251). Writing like a rat implies a scurrying forward momentum, a move-
ment that occurs without much thought. Writing and creating is thus pro-
pelled by an unconscious urge—an unpremeditated need to express oneself.
In spite of a certain circularity in the argument Deleuze and Guattari’s
description has merits since the role of the sorcerer is not one of fixed
identity, rather it is a series of identities never reaching an endpoint.
Nevertheless, Steve Baker suggests that Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the
word ‘sorcerer’ is metaphoric.
210 W. Cruise
Fig. 11.2 Elizabeth Gunter, # 4000 (2015). Charcoal dust on paper,

190 × 145 cm. Courtesy of the artist
It does seem to be an extraordinary word to introduce. But I think it’s

partly used tongue-in-cheek—‘we sorcerers’, they call themselves—and
partly a means of avoiding or minimizing the use of other more contem-
porary but equally loaded terms, such as “artist”. Language does a peculiar
but particular kind of work for them. It’s to be taken seriously but not
always literally, addressing a ‘reality’ but often in deliberately arcane terms.
(Williams and Baker 2001)
A metaphoric reading of Deleuze and Guattari is constructive, since if

one were to interpret ‘sorcerer’ literally, one would come to an impasse.
Shamans are ordinarily understood to enter a state of trance from which
they emerge ‘with the power real or assumed of passing at will into a
state of mental disassociation’ (Chatwin 1997, p. 96). Since making art
involves considered, rational actions, the magical and even trance-like
conditions associated with sorcery are inimical to the act of creation.
Accepting a metaphoric reading of ‘sorcerer’ opens the possibilities of
other interpretations because, and in spite of, the need for rational action,
artists do work in the area of the unknown, a place close to madness.
Elizabeth Gunter, also a South African artist, works on the interface of
conscious thought and intuitive practice. Gunter is known for her large-
scale detailed animal drawings—dogs, but also more unusual representa-
tions, such as rhino foetuses and horse foals about to be born or stillborn
(Figs. 11.2 and 11.3). Her animals seem to occupy a liminal position
Fig. 11.3 Elizabeth Gunter, Last, last One (2015). Charcoal dust on paper,
180 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist
between life and death. They hang in space between two states of being.
As Carstens would articulate it, this ‘is a zone of radical boundary dis-
solution and playful perversion where life and non-life, the modern and
the pre-modern, human and animal fruitfully commingle’ (see Carstens
in this volume). Contradictorily, considering the darkness of this liminal
place, the images elicit a great tenderness.
I am loath to use the word ‘hyperrealism’ to describe the almost
photographic detail of her charcoal dust drawings. Gunter’s works go
212 W. Cruise
beyond realism, reaching into the realm of the metaphysical. Surprisingly,

given the detail in the works, the artist does not rely on a model, neither
a physical one nor a photographic representation (2016, personal corre-
spondence). Her animal images appear as if unbidden on the paper dur-
ing the act of drawing. Gunter recalls a childhood memory of imagining
herself lost in the world, and lost to the world.
I … became aware of a wordless centre, a muteness that is not without

meaning. It is that muteness that I try to mark, because to my mind it
is where I find mutuality with animals, or where I feel my own animality.
Some idea of what non-human animals feel like—the same as what I feel/
experience when I draw: mute meaning. (2016, personal correspondence)
She is in a place beyond words. In that moment, she ‘becomes animal!’

(2016, personal correspondence). Her ‘realism’ is of an affective kind
depending on emotional resonances of the images. In becoming-animal,
Gunter paradoxically leads us to the heart of the animal-human question,
letting us ‘experience the animals as the only population to which [we]
are responsible in principle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 240).
But is the role of all other artists to be understood in such a way? In a
metaphorical sense this is possible. Baker, citing Tucker, uses the exam-
ple of Antoni Tàpies who wished to breathe ‘life back into humble but
essential things of the world …. Tàpies functions like a shaman … redi-
recting attention … to an animistic integration of self and world’ (Baker
2013, p. 128).
Ceramic sculptor Nicolene Swanepoel is an artist that commin-
gles material practice with an animistic sensibility. As a white African,
Swanepoel became interested in indigenous knowledges through rep-
resentations of animals in her art. Since cattle are significant cultural
markers in South Africa it was natural for her to turn to the study of
their importance, not only in terms of native cosmologies but also in
terms of colonial and postcolonial interpretations5, an investigation that
leads to her engagement with other significant species in indigenous
thinking.
In her dissertation at the University of Johannesburg, she examines
the topic through words and objects. Entitled Representations of Cattle
as Cultural Markers: Towards South African Identities it explores both
the historical and contemporary role of cattle in the spiritual and meta-
phoric life of the nation:
Cattle have been a crucial axis in African history. From the first gingerly
steps of colonial feet on southern African shores, locals relented and
exchanged a beast or two for exotic objects. Transactions soon soured and
cattle then became the steeds on which to chase the invaders back to their
ships .… As cattle provided sustenance, transport, symbolic wealth and to
many provided a channel of communication with revered ancestors, under-
standably, they were highly valued. Sometimes traded, but mostly battled
over, they are so interwoven in our culture that they have become power-
ful symbols of South African identity. Ever popular in contemporary cul-
ture, depictions of and objects relating to cattle abound. (Cruise 2011)
Her central argument focused on the concept of hybridity using indig-

enous breeds of cattle as symbolic references to the complexities of the
post-liberation era in South Africa. In 2007 the first ceramic sculptures
of Swanepoel’s hybrid herd manifested themselves. Sculptures of seventy
head of cattle were exhibited on her degree exhibition (see Swanepoel,
this volume).
After that, the ‘herd’ grew as Swanepoel continued to explore the rich
topic of cattle in South African life. Since ‘cattle’ have been central to
the traditional cosmology of sub-Saharan African peoples they have been
entwined with South African history since the first arrival of the Bantu-
speaking tribes from northeast Africa around 590–700 AD. They have
also been an area of contestation. From the first encounters of colonisers
and Khoi c.1652 to the 19th century, ‘border’ wars and into the apart-
heid years, cattle and their significance have been fought over. But there
has been a change in attitude since the liberation of South Africa which
has resulted in a multifaceted view of the cultural complexities of South
Africa where hybridity is the hallmark. In spite of a recent willingness
to embrace the beauty of the indigenous Nguni hides, ‘cattle’ remain
an area of contestation. The ritual killing of bulls, similar to the coming
of age annual First Fruits Festival, by barehanded young men still takes
place. In one notorious incident, an animal was slaughtered in a sophis-
ticated urban area as a ritual thanksgiving to the ancestors. The loud bel-
lows of the suffering bull, a requirement of the practice, disturbed finer
sensibilities and divided commentators along lines of cultural rights ver-
sus cruelty to animals. As Woodward has pointed out, differences in cul-
tural practices as to the slaughter of animals, provoke heated arguments:
‘Tradition became a pugilistic adversarial identity …’ (Woodward 2008,
p. 11). In this scenario, the subjectivity (and suffering) of the animal
became lost in the human political debate.
214 W. Cruise
After her degree project, Swanepoel pursued the ever-growing expan-

sion of her hybrid herd. Using a plaster mould she press-moulded cat-
tle heads. The head was formed, ears and horns were added while the
clay was leather hard and the mould used over and over again. While
the skull of the animal was a constant, the placement and size of the
horns were not. Varying from large to small and angled differently, the
horns individualised each head, as did the placement of the ears and the
details of the eyes in their sockets. Like a real herd of cows, genetic simi-
larities were marked by individual characteristics that allowed for infi-
nite variations. But it was in the surface treatment of the cow heads that
Swanepoel most fully explored her concept of hybridity. Like the hides of
the native Nguni cattle, the variations of colour, pattern and texture on
the ceramic heads allow for a symbolic reading. In images, drawings and
transfers, Swanepoel intertwined history and nature, the natural and arti-
fice, animal and culture. By so doing she resurrected valuable but forgot-
ten and displaced animal symbols. She wished to redirect awareness and
re-establish a sense of meaning, belonging and agency in a world which
is increasingly alienated and dehumanised (Cruise 2011).
Her interest in other cosmologies extended beyond cattle to include
other symbolic creatures such as dogs. A case in point are the spirit
guardians, a group of small ceramic dogs inspired by canine Nkisi or
power figures from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She playfully
called her figures ‘my NikkiNkisi’. She saw the Nkisi as ‘symbolic protec-
tors of our souls’ (see Swanepoel, this volume). In making these works
Swanepoel had to suspend conscious control over the process. This was
dictated by the necessity of having to produce hundreds of versions of
the same form. Invoking the notion of Yanagi’s ‘unknown craftsman’ she
set about rapidly producing the forms in an unthinking, repetitive and
ultimately meditative process in which she entered a ‘compulsive, trance-
like state’ (see Swanepoel, this volume).
Like a sorcerer, her studio practice appears to bypass rational control,
a process that also finds resonance with Hélène Cixous’ écriture fémi-
nine. Cixous suggests reformulating the relationship between language
and the body. She rejects what she terms ‘critiques that persist in a logo-
centric Cartesian discourse that posits the mind as the source of writ-
ing’ (Dobson 2004, p. 130). Écriture féminine ‘is impossible [to define]
… except through subjects that break automatic functions, border run-
ners never subjugated by any authority’ (Dobson 2004, p. 127). This
process is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘writing like a rat.’
By breaking ‘borders subjugated by authority’ Swanepoel becomes

something other (than human)—she becomes animal.
Nevertheless, one has to approach ‘becoming-animal’, like the term
‘sorcerer’, with caution. While it is a useful metaphor there is no living,
breathing creature involved. Donna Haraway, for example, prefers to
refer to the living animal, not an abstract nor abstracted entity. Although
she uses the term ‘animal-becoming’, Haraway explicitly rejects Deleuze
and Guattari’s ‘fantasy wolf-pack’ theory:
Here I find little but the two writers’ scorn for all that is mundane and
ordinary and the profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and
with actual animals, even as immeasurable references to diverse animals
are invoked to figure the authors’ anti-Oedipal and anti-capitalist project.
Derrida’s actual little cat is decidedly not invited. (Haraway 2008, p. 27).
Haraway’s view is borne out by Deleuze and Guattari’s astonishing claim

that ‘Anyone who likes dogs or cats is a fool’ (1987, p. 240). It appears
then, in the debate on the animal, the animal has got lost, especially the
animal that occupies a liminal position of a companion species. Cum
panis, to break bread, is the figure that Haraway uses in her attempts
to get down and dirty with her ‘messmates, to look and to look back,
to have truck with’ (2008, p. 32). In Haraway’s messy coshaping, cum
panis rejects the ethical dualism that frames the question in either/or
terms. She claims that the question is incorrectly framed, rooted as it is
in ‘the dualisms and the misplaced concreteness of religious and secu-
lar humanism’ (2008, p. 89). From the perspective of companionate
relations,
we are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocat-

ing complexity all the way down. Response and respect are possible only
in those knots, with actual animals and people looking back at each other,
sticky with all their muddled histories. (Haraway 2008, p. 42)
In this respect Haraway’s ideas resonate sympathetically with those

of Cixous and Luce Irigaray who reject ‘secular humanism’ in lieu of a
spiritual and feminist connection with animals (Irigaray 2004, p. 201).
Cixous’s critique of a patriarchal ordered system of writing implies a
less structured, more affective (and perhaps more messy) relationship
with animals. Écriture féminine does in some aspect reflect Deleuze and
216 W. Cruise
Guattari’s concept of animal-becoming. Both are fluid states of being

where identity and body are transcended. The concept of suspension of
self, implied by ‘writing like a rat’ resonates sympathetically with ‘libidi-
nal feminine writing’ (Dobson 2004, p. 127) on a metaphoric level, in
which the process is a utopian ideal rather than a static state.
Although Swanepoel said that she was not familiar with the writings
of Deleuze and Guattari, this focus appeared to inform her 2014 exhi-
bition at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, South Africa entitled,
Little Creatures/Without Pedestals Another Time, Same Place: The Re-
Evolution of Animals. In this exhibition, she seemed to have evoked their
central concept of animal-becoming in which the ineluctable opposition
of human and animal is collapsed. The binary terms merge into a uni-
tary, albeit expansive, concept that involves an intuitive mode of being
based on a constellation of affects that is inchoate and unconscious. She
described her process of creation thus:
Lumps of clay have transmogrified into animals of various kinds. They are
not made to comply with a planned design, but grow according to the
whim of the clay. Each little figurine emerges into its own individual being.
Most look different to anything we have yet encountered, neither animal
nor human. A few may suggest (but do not represent) existing animals—
equine, feline, bovine, hominid, not only the latter, but all uniquely sapi-
ent. (Swanepoel 2014, personal communication)
‘Writing like a rat’ is an apt metaphor for Swanepoel’s praxis. In the art-
ist’s words a cornucopia of creatures emerged from ‘the primeval mess’
of her studio (Swanepoel 2014, personal communication). Her creatures
poured forth from a creative well almost of their own volition. They are
neither animal with human features nor a human with animal features,
or a hybrid, but a newly developed animal, a hypothetical being that
evolved according to circumstantial conditions. With a fierce intensity
bordering on the obsessive these creatures sprung seemingly unbidden
from their creator’s fingers. They were modelled with urgency. The artist
used the tip of her (supposedly uniquely and superiorly human) oppos-
able thumbs to make marks for eyes, mouths and ears and although she
never explicitly said so, it appears her hands did the thinking. It is as if
that very entity that defines us as human—the upper cortex, our rational
brain is in suspension. It does not come into play in this very fierce act
of becoming. The final form of the clay animal embodies the urgency of
the unconscious impulse, which achieves physical form through the mal-
leable clay. The animals are not only visual, but also tactile, mirroring the
process of the hand. The desire is to lift the figures, fingers are lured to
handle the forms, even to lift and touch them with lips.
Swanepoel heightened our awareness of the uniqueness of all sentient
creatures. She drew attention to each one’s own set of well-developed abil-
ities. A superior sense of smell is suggested, for instance, by an elongated
‘head’, abstracted into a long multi-tubed appendage (neck-head-snout, per-
haps reminiscent of the nose of an aardvark). Prominent ears have superior
hearing. A domed head might indicate a more developed sense of intellect.
But not one of these qualities elevates one creature above the other—they
are all uniquely specified, all exquisite in their own ways. These creatures
stand or sit, lie in dorsal or sternal recumbency, crawl or stand. They stand
apart or interlock, they play alone or dance with each other. They display all
the behaviours of sentient social beings (Figs. 11.4 and 11.5).
The same sense of urgency that informed the creation of these
beings, governed the selection of pedestals (Fig. 11.5). Like much of
her praxis the choice of pedestals was a planned strategy and driven by
a contradictory urgency governed by pre-rational impulses. The pedes-
tals were not manufactured nor designed. They are found objects that
come mostly from the farming environment of Swanepoel’s hometown,
Grabouw. Many were from her small farm—a rusted table, a log of wood
or a discarded chair. These quotidian objects indicate that no creature
is special (or ‘specie-al’) in any hierarchical sense. None is to be placed
above another. It is exactly this familiarity that makes them approachable,
touchable, sense-able and intimate (Figs. 11.6).
This democratising impulse is what informed the exhibition. If all
creatures are equal surely humans as (other) animals are to be included.
Swanepoel said,
perhaps we can step back and evaluate the damage we have wreaked on
our environment and the creatures dependent on it due to our assumed
‘superiority’ and attempted control of power over everything on earth.
Once we appreciate that we are but a small part of our universe … and
respect all other elements in it, we might begin to try to undo and repair
our destructions. (Swanepoel 2014, personal communication)
A similar approach informs my work in its primary focus on displacing

the hierarchical human self, prized in modern art, with a lateralising
218 W. Cruise
Fig. 11.4 Nicolene Swanepoel Interlock detail of work from Little Creatures/

Without Pedestals (2014). Photographed by the artist. Courtesy of François
Swanepoel
post-human connection to other animals. Throughout the series of

Alice exhibitions Alice functioned not only as an exemplar of the human
but she can also be regarded as my alter ego—that part that delves
into the dark hole of the unconscious. It has been suggested by Wendy
Woodward, in discussion at the 2015 Indigenous Knowledges Colloquium
at the University of the Western Cape, that my praxis has shamanistic
elements, a term I might have in the past rejected because of the implica-
tion of free form mysticism and a neo pagan cosmology. Nevertheless,
Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the sorcerer, as the anomalous being
who is part of the pack and yet beyond it, is one with which I am com-
fortable since it implies a process rather than a being with a fixed identity.
I have long been aware of the function of the unconscious in my work
which can be said to operate in ‘the space between’. This gap can be
articulated as a Lacanian rupture between word and image. It is a place
where the unconscious is made manifest. It is also arguably the place
Fig. 11.5 Nicolene Swanepoel Dance detail of work from Little Creatures/

Without Pedestals (2014). Photographed by the artist. Courtesy of François
Swanepoel
where non-verbal communication between human and animal takes

place.
The dominant model for the unconscious lies in the psychoanalysis of
Jung and Freud. It is a concept with which I engaged in my research
in 1997, Artist as Subject: Subject as Object. As I then argued, art and
dreams share similar properties, which allow unconscious, barely felt
ideas to find form within images that permit decoding of their manifest
content. The connection between the creative process and dreams has, in
terms of my experience, a sense of ‘fit’. I may start a sculpture with a for-
mal problem as its initial premise. At that stage, the content of the work
is only apprehended subliminally, if at all. The preconscious is allowed
reign. The sculpture reveals its meaning only after completion, a process
which may take months or years. Its content is that not only made vis-
ible to that abstract entity, the viewer, but most importantly, to me the
artist. The work of art, like dreamwork, provides encoded information
220 W. Cruise
Fig. 11.6 Wilma Cruise, Alice: Self Portrait I and II, (2011). Mixed media
drawing on paper. 200 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist
Fig. 11.7 Wilma
Cruise, Cradle II
detail (2014). Ceramic
forms in perspex
box with stand, box:
60 × 60 × 60 cm, stand:
60 × 60 × 120 cm.
Photographed by and
courtesy of the artist
Fig. 11.8 Wilma Cruise, The Borogoves (2015). Ceramic, sizes various

10–17 cm. Photographed by Neil Visser. Courtesy of the artist
that informs me of my subconscious fears, thoughts and desires. That is,

using similar tools of metaphor, metonymy and displacement, both art
and dreamwork permit access to the unconscious.
However, the earliest Freudian model viewed art and dream as a man-
ifestation of neurosis6. This view was modified by Rycroft who main-
tained that art-making is not only the function of the unconscious but
works in conjunction with the secondary processes of the ego (1975,
p. 304). Since the actual act of making art requires conscious gestures
such as mixing pigment, cleaning brushes or sharpening sticks it requires
a conscious functioning individual to perform these actions. I have
found, like Gunter and Swanepoel, that the id and ego, madness and
sanity, work hand in hand in the creation of art. In this sense art-making
moves from the Freudian understanding of art as the outpourings of a
neurotic to one of normative functioning (Cruise 1997, p. 65).
In spite of this shift from a pathogenic interpretation to one of
healthy function, the concept of the unconscious in its Freudian inter-
pretation became one with which I was increasingly loath to engage.
222 W. Cruise
I found theoretical support for my instinctual rejection within the pages

of A Thousand Plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari explicitly ques-
tion the arborescent structure of the unconscious, what they call the ‘dic-
tatorial conception’ (1987, p. 17) of the hierarchy of superego, ego and
id. Preferring the distribution of centredness across the rhizome figure,
they maintain that the issue is to ‘produce the unconscious, with its new
statements, different desires’ (1987, p. 18). As I understand it, art-mak-
ing is not then an oneiric function serving the purpose like dreams which
render unconscious suppressed thought and desires manifest (albeit in
coded form). Instead the act of art creates thoughts, not excavated from
the suppressed id as Freud would have it, but produced and enacted at
the moment of creation.
This approach is in accordance with my studio praxis, which is one of
production that is not pre-planned but ‘thought-out’ in the act of mak-
ing, and parallels the action of inter-human animal communication. In
art-making it is as if the hand does the thinking. I have learned to trust
its imperative as it reaches for the brush or clay. Heidegger gives promi-
nence to the human hand, distinguishing it from the animal paw or claw.
The hand gives, the paw grasps. Without asserting the human exception-
alism implied by Heidegger’s observation, experientially I support the
Heideggerian claim of the ‘hand’s complex relation to thought’ (Baker
2003, p. 152). There is thinking that is achieved by the hand, a type of
pre-cognitive action that slowly reveals its thought processes in the mate-
rial results of its actions. Is this the madness to which the Cheshire Cat
was referring?
Without doubt the artist works in an area of the unknown, a place
close to madness, acting as a conduit between the world known and the
world yet to be known. Theorising the space between human and animal
and rejecting Cartesian dualism does bring me close to a shamanistic or
animist position in which no differentiation is made between the physical
and metaphysical. Like Gunter, I intuit myself into the life of animals in
the act of creating. Through the medium of clay, I evoke living flesh. In
this way, I attempt to connect with and ‘breathe life’ into the animals I
make from inert material.
Thus, with little preparation or pre-thought, rabbits, cats, pigs,
dogs, puppies, baboons and even armless infants emerged from the
studio in both three dimensional and two dimensional form during
the years of The Alice Sequence. Two drawings made early on in The
Alice Sequence, titled Alice: Self Portrait I and II, in which the adult
Fig. 11.9 Wilma
Cruise, Chess pieces
(2015). Ceramic,
various sizes 15–35 cm.
Photographed by Neil
Visser. Courtesy of the
artist
‘Alice’ bemusedly contemplates the animals fixed to her breast, illus-

trate the inchoate nature of the creative process (Fig. 11.6). In making
these works thought was suspended and intuition or the intelligence of
the hand came into being. Action preceded thought. It may be argued
that action created thought. It is the ‘doing’ that generated knowledge
becoming a non-linguistic knowing that itself was embedded in act.
The artworks, both sculptures and drawings, were made without precise
analytical intent, which allow for semiotic changes of signification that
may lead in many directions suggested by the metaphor of the rhizome
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 7). This allows for a multiplication of
languages with not one being prioritised above the other. This clearly
opens the door for the possibility of ‘languages’ that are non-linguistic,
mimetic, gestural and affective. In other words, it permits the argument
for animal languages that do not mimic the human logocentric one.
In September 2015, the sixth exhibition in The Alice Sequence opened
at the Clay Museum—part of the Rust-en-Vrede Gallery in Durbanville,
Cape Town. Entitled Red Queen to Play it coincided with the fifth
224 W. Cruise
exhibition in the series, Advice From a Caterpillar, which was show-

ing concurrently at the David Krut Project Space at the AVA Gallery
in downtown Cape Town7. At the Clay Museum I installed Cradle II
(2014–2015)8, in which the armless babies depicted in Cradle (2014)
were packed one on top of the other in two transparent boxes (Fig. 11.7).
The forms were lit from the interior by concealed LED lights.
Taking the opportunity to utilise the two built-in cabinets that line
the walls of the museum and which normally display small, functional
ceramics I made a series of small sculptures (Fig. 11.8).
In one cabinet, consisting of ninety individual spaces, I placed freely
modelled heads. The heads were responding once again to the impera-
tive of the hand—emerging from what again Swanepoel calls the ‘prime-
val mess’ of clay. In the installation at Rust-en-Vrede, the disembodied
heads were positioned to stare out at the piles of babies. They acted as
macabre witnesses to the scene. Some are recognisably animal: baboons,
birds, cats, rats and mice. But some are neither human nor animal recall-
ing Swanepoel’s ‘Little Creatures’. In order to capture the nature of the
making I entitled this piece The Borogoves, a word derived from Carroll’s
nonsense poem, The Jabberwocky.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
and the mome raths outgrabe’ (Carroll 1982, p. 134).
As Humpty Dumpty later explains to Alice in Through the Looking

Glass: ‘Borogoves are thin shabby looking birds with feathers sticking
out all round’ (Carroll 1982, p. 185).
In the other cabinet, I placed twenty-four figures informed by the
shape of chess pieces. Again, these one-off creatures are not anthropo-
morphised animals but a mixture of animal and human (Fig. 11.9). The
figures appear puzzled as to where they are, where they are going or how
they fit into the larger game. Despite rank—queen or bishop, pawn or
knight—they are powerless. On the other side of the looking glass, Alice,
representing humankind, is a pawn in the giant chess game represented
in Carroll’s narrative. Curiously, the exhibition, Red Queen to Play, has
less to do with the animal and more to do with the human side of the
equation. Unlike the other exhibitions in the series, the animal-other has
been displaced to the margins, while the human is placed at the centre of
the catastrophe. Just who the Red Queen symbolises in the drama of the
exhibition is not clear. Might she represent humankind in general or the
artist in particular? Either way she is the one who controls the moves. As
in chess, humankind is moving inexorably towards the end game.
In spite of the apocalyptic scenario evoked by the notion of the end
game, this exhibition like the others in the series is not intended as a
homily. Nor is it intended as an illustration of Carroll’s tales. To remind
myself and the viewers of this fact, I attached the following extract on
the wall in vinyl letters, ‘You know very well you are not real’ (Carroll
1982, p. 164). Rather, Red Queen to Play, like the other exhibitions in
the series, is a way of making sense of an increasingly confusing and dan-
gerous world. Life can be a dream or a nightmare. Our task is to try to
make sense of our place in it as we tumble through time, together with
our co-travellers, the animals whose planet we share.
Returning to Berger’s lament, I likewise mourn the loss of the
contemporary human animal as part of the continuum of animal life
(Berger 2007, p. 252). In the present post-humanist period, even
though we know more about animals than ever before, we have become
ever more distant from them (2007, p. 257). In order to regain the
sacred connection to the animal, humankind has to suspend reason and
the comfort of established epistemologies. The implication is we have
to unknow in order to reconnect with the animal-other. In order to
unknow one has to enter the space between reason and affect, body and
mind, animal and human. This is the place where there is no certainty
and where symbolic language fails in its structured discourse. Much
like in Alice there is no guidance as to where to go or how to go. All
appears to be nonsense. Her stumbling around in a dreamland mimics a
practice of making art which initially at least is directionless and incho-
ate. The hand is the organ that has the intelligence. It appears to be
guided more by affect than reason, which like the interchange between
human and animal, is only known in its unknowability by the emotional
resonances. Material, mind and hand merge in a single act of becom-
ing artist/animal, a metaphor that usefully describes the mad process of
creation, that which Deleuze and Guattari call ‘writing like a rat’. This
figure describes the scampering forward imperative of the creative act.
Making the unknowable at least partially visible is the task of shamans,
sorcerers and artists.
226 W. Cruise
Notes
1. Burgin (1991, p. 215) suggests the term ‘preconscious’ instead of ‘uncon-
scious’, since unconscious denotes that which is unavailable to conscious
thought except in coded form. In this essay the terms ‘preconscious’ and
‘unconscious’ are used relatively interchangeably. Due note has been taken
of their more precise definition.
2. Like his earlier thesis on the male gaze Berger maintains that zoo animals,
like women, are the observed never the observer (Berger 2007, p. 251).
3. The Alice Diaries was exhibited at Circa on Jellicoe, Johannesburg, South
Africa, July–August 2012.
4. Red Queen to Play was exhibited at Rust-en-Vrede Gallery, Durbanville,
South Africa, August–September 2015.
5. The following discussion is extracted from my article Hybrid Herds pub-
lished in Ceramics: Art and Perception (86) 2011.
6. Freud suggests that creating art is an act of sublimation; a defence mecha-
nism which deals with suppressed subject matter too painful to handle in
conscious thought (See Cruise 1997, p. 8).
7. This exhibition was previously shown at the David Krut, Maboneng
Gallery in Johannesburg in May and June 2015.
8. This is a variation of Cradle I (2012) first exhibited at Circa Gallery in
Johannesburg in 2014.
Works Cited
Baker, S. 2003. Sloughing the human. In Zoontologies: The question of the animal,
ed. C. Wolfe, 147–164. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2013. Artist|animal. Kindle edition. University of Minnesota Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Artist-Animal-Posthumanities-Steve-Baker/
dp/0816680671. Accessed 17 Jan 2016.
Berger, J. 2007. Why look at animals? In The animals reader: The essential classic
and contemporary writings, ed. L. Kalof, and A. Fitzgerald, 252–261. Oxford:
Berg.
Burgin, V. 1991. Perverse space. In Interpreting contemporary art, ed. S. Bann,
and W. Allen, 124–138. London: Reaktion Books.
Carroll, L. 1982. The Complete illustrated works of Lewis Carroll. London:
Chancellor Press.
Chatwin, B. 1997. Anatomy of restlessness: Uncollected writings, ed. J. Borm and
M. Graves. London: Picador.
Coetzee, J.M. 2004. Elizabeth Costello: Eight lessons. London: Vintage Books.
Cruise, W. 1997. Artist as subject: Subject as object. Master’s thesis, University
of South Africa.
———. 2011. Hybrid herds. Ceramics art and perception 86: 50–53.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guatarri. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo-
phrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. 2008. The animal therefore I am (more to follow). M-L. Mallet (ed.),
D. Wills (Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press.
Dobson, J. 2004. Hélène Cixous (1937). Contemporary critical theorists, ed. J
Simons, 118–134. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gunter, E. 2016. Personal correspondence. Cape Town.
Haraway, D. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Irigaray, L. 2004. Animal compassion. In Animal philosophy: Ethics and identity,
ed. P. Atterton, and M. Calarco, 193–195. London: Continuum.
Swanepoel, N. 2014. Personal correspondence. Cape Town.
Williams, G., and S. Baker. 2001. Where the wild things are: An interview
with Steve Baker. Cabinet Magazine 4. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/
issues/4/stevebaker.php. Accessed 2 June 2015.
Wolfe, C. 2010. What is posthumanism?. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Woodward, W. 2008. The animal gaze: Animal subjectivities in Southern African
narratives. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Author Biography
Wilma Cruise is a South African sculptor and visual artist who writes extensively
in the field of ceramics. She works mainly with fired clay in her renderings of
life-sized human and animal figures. Cruise’s latest solo exhibition was entitled
The Alice Sequence. Her public works include the National Monument to the
Women of South Africa at the Union Buildings, Pretoria and The Memorial to the
Slaves in Cape Town, in collaboration with Gavin Younge. She has participated
in the Havana Biennale, the Florence Biennale and the prestigious 7th Gyeonggi
International Ceramic Biennale in Seoul, Korea. Cruise’s doctoral studies at the
University of Stellenbosch focused on a creative exploration of the animal ques-
tion.
PART V
Indigenous Traumas and Recoveries across

Species Lines
CHAPTER 12
‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’:

Dreaming Animals and Trauma in Some
Contemporary Southern African Texts
Wendy Woodward
Each of the texts analysed here deals with the violence perpetrated by
colonial or neocolonial regimes and the resulting trauma for the narrator
or characters. Each text incorporates animals—birds, insects, reptiles as
well as mammals. Not only does the figure of the animal function as a fil-
ter for the trauma, but the animals also embody intermediaries between
traditional indigenous knowledges and a violent modernity. There Was
this Goat (2009) by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele
unpacks a seemingly incoherent testimony by a putatively mentally dis-
turbed witness. The investigation is non-fictional and is presented like an
unfolding detective narrative. The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo
Agualusa (2007) is a tale told by a gecko set in a deceptively stable
Angola which conceals the past cruelties and tortures of the Civil War
(1975–2002). The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2004) by Mia Couto
satirises neocolonialism in a rural village in Moçambique along with
W. Woodward (*) 
Wits University Press, Johannesburg, South Africa
e-mail: wendywoodward97@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_12
232 W. Woodward
international involvement after that country’s War of Independence

(1964–1974). Reading these three narratives together, I identify how
animism suggests an approach to revisiting traumatic events in ways that
clarify how the material presence of animals shapes the experience of
trauma.
The very terminology I have deployed here could be regarded as
problematic. An unreflective use of the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’
suggests an overarching ‘transition narrative’ with its ‘conceptual tel-
eology and binarist tendencies’ as Harry Garuba argues (2003, p. 262).
These texts, however, do not figure indigenous knowledges as ignorantly
predating a more enlightened western modernity. Instead There Was this
Goat, The Book of Chameleons and The Last Flight of the Flamingo have
cast animist tradition as potent and agentive within modernity in cen-
tral ways. In all three texts the political is inserted within ‘animist mate-
rialism’ which is ‘grounded in a religious consciousness of the material
world’ (Garuba, p. 268)’ In all three texts the non-human is embedded
within this spiritualising of the material through dreams and the limi-
nal by means of an ‘animist unconscious’ defined as ‘a form of collective
subjectivity that structures being and consciousness in predominantly
animist societies and cultures’ (Garuba p. 269). Garuba suggests that
in literary practice ‘the animist world-view… devolves into a representa-
tional strategy that involves giving the abstract or metaphorical a material
realization’ (p. 284). To what extent the goat, the gecko and the flamin-
gos flicker between the metaphorical and the material in their respective
texts is central to my enquiry.
My concern is also with the phenomenon of trauma, relevant to all
the stories. For Stolorow, trauma engenders an ‘isolating estrangement’
in which an ‘experiential chasm separate[s] the traumatized person from
other human beings’ (2007, p. 14). Via Gadamer he argues that the ‘dis-
crepant worlds [between “normal” and traumatised people] are felt to be
essentially and ineradicably incommensurable’ (2007, p. 15). At the same
time the traumatised person ‘long[s] for twin ship or emotional kinship’
to counteract such ‘feelings of singularity, estrangement and solitude’
(2007, p. 49). Stolorow also mentions how coping with trauma fol-
lows the imperative of ‘being-with one another in our common finitude’
(2007, p. 50). An animist appreciation of the world can mitigate against
such feelings of isolation with the nonhuman embodying the potential
for an unsentimentalised ‘kinship’ in the face of trauma. Non-human ani-
mals in these texts are embedded in a trans-species witnessing of human
12 ‘THE ONLY FACTS ARE SUPERNATURAL ONES’: DREAMING … 233
trauma, they foretell it, guide it, even direct it. They are politicised, as
well as liminal, inhabiting dreams and visions, straddling ahistorical,
mythical time and the linear time of modernity.
The experience of reading texts which include trauma is a difficult
one. If we, as readers, identify too seamlessly with the trauma survivor
or the victim this vicariousness denies their history while foregrounding
ours. Dominick LaCapra suggests, rather, that ‘empathic unsettlement
… involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself
in the other’s position while recognising the difference of that person
and hence not taking the other’s place’ (1999, p. 722). The non-human
beings in these texts contribute to the phenomenon of empathic unset-
tlement for the reader as witness, I would argue. As liminal animals, they
are unexpected and mysterious. Both present and absent, they defamil-
iarise realist modes of narrative. Felix’s interrelationship with Eulalio, the
gecko, in The Book of Chameleons fosters our sense of his ‘difference’ as
his connection with the reptile estranges. In Last Flight of the Flamingo
liminal animals and their satirical counterparts distance us from the
embodied horrors of postcolonial Moçambique. Mrs. Konile’s inclusion
of a goat unsettles the listener primed to empathise with her testimonial
narrative. Yet these non-human animals elude a symbolic economy that
values them only in human terms as they feature crucially in their respec-
tive texts as embodied beings as I will show below.
In the text by Krog et  al. about Mrs. Konile’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) testimony a goat is foregrounded
in the title because Mrs. Konile’s inclusion of the animal is initially
unclear—the goat appearing in her dream cannot be incorporated seam-
lessly into the realist narrative of the Commission. The TRC, set up in
1996 to address violence and human rights abuses perpetrated under
apartheid (1948–1994), was described by Dullah Omar, former Minister
of Justice, as imperative for South Africans ‘to come to terms with their
past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconcilia-
tion’ The tripartite authorship of There Was This Goat bravely opens up
searing questions of identity and difference between the authors them-
selves. Mrs. Konile’s son, Zabonke John Konile, was part of the so-called
Gugulethu Seven, young men who were killed by policemen in 1986. It
was undeniable that ‘the victims were shot at very close range’; even so
‘the inquests (1986 and 1989) [found] that the seven men had died in a
legitimate anti-terrorist operation’ (2009, p. 6)’. A small group of men
(mostly youths and untrained) were infiltrated by two police informers
234 W. Woodward
and then ambushed. The incident has become iconic of apartheid ‘evil’
and the subject of two documentary films (2009, pp. 7–9). That the
Gugulethu Seven ambush was part of the first TRC hearings in Cape
Town illustrates its significance (2009, p. 5). That Mrs. Konile’s testi-
mony has become the subject of a book-length analysis is a direct conse-
quence of translation problems at the TRC itself which failed at the time
to understand her testimony or even to assign it due respect.
Dualistic discourses of animality and humanity recur in the moth-
ers’ testimonies and in the forgiveness of the murderers by some of the
mothers of the murdered men. The policemen had used ropes to move
the men’s bodies, an action which Mrs. Ngewu interpreted as illustrating
that the policemen saw their sons as animals. She asked ‘[Why] would
they drag my son, was he a dog?’ (2009, p. 10), but another mother,
Mrs. Miya, problematises this comparison:
What makes me cry now is that these policemen they were treating people
like animals… But even a dog, you don’t kill it like that. You even think
that the owner of the dog loves it, even an ant a small ant you think you
have feelings even for an ant. But now our own children they were not
even taken as ants, if I say they were treated like dogs are, that’s not how it
happened. (2009, p. 10)
Mrs. Miya’s critique of the tired simile of humans being treated ‘like dogs’
echoes that of Njabulo Ndebele. In ‘The Year of the Dog’ he also argues
against this violent metaphor, maintaining that the depiction of a dog as
an ultimate victim has justified violence against canines and that, given the
reality of a relationship with a beloved and loving dog, dogs should be cel-
ebrated not denigrated (2007, pp. 251–56). Mrs. Miya elicits extraordi-
nary compassion in the face of her son’s brutal death ‘even for an ant’.
When LaCapra suggests that ‘[e]mpathy is important in attempting to
understand traumatic events and victims’, he refers to the witness of a trau-
matic event. Mrs. Miya, traumatised by her son’s death evinces empathy in
a very particular way for a creature not usually so acknowledged. Although
her worldview is not obviously an animist one, in her expressions of empa-
thy for animal life there are suggestions here of Garuba’s notion of a ‘col-
lective subjectivity’ which shames the murderers of the Gugulethu Seven
for having dismissed the humanity of their young victims.
Both Mrs. Miya and Mrs. Konile below implicitly challenge the par-
ticular trajectory of the TRC, its ontological assumptions of the human
and that an orderly closure of different cases will result in reconciliation,

a challenge that is figured specifically in terms of human-animal dualisms.
LaCapra is critical of ‘fetishized and totalizing narratives that deny the
trauma that called them into existence by prematurely (re)turning to the
pleasure principle, harmonizing messages or optimistic, self-serving sce-
narios’ (1999, p. 723). In the TRC, as Krog et al. note, however, the
mothers of the murdered men were expected to forgive their killers who
had applied for amnesty, to be ‘resilient’ in the face of a ‘brutal regime’
and ultimately to ‘triumph over evil’ and be ‘forgiving’ (2009, p. 56).
The act of forgiveness, as Mrs. Ngewu put it, would render the murder-
ers ‘human again … so that all of us get our humanity back’ (2009, p.
12). In the response at the time, TRC commissioner, Pumla Gobodo-
Madikizela felt that Cynthia Ngewu, ‘open[ed] the door for [the mur-
derer Thapelo] Mbelo … to re-enter the moral realm of humanity’
(2009, p. 12). Mrs. Konile, on the other hand, refused to accede to such
a ‘harmonizing’ act, withholding forgiveness for Mbelo and ‘was strident
in her rejection of the Boers’ (2009, p. 197).
The enlistment of empathy for non-human animals by Mrs. Miya or
the representation of ‘humanity’ as a ‘moral realm’ foregrounds the fig-
uring of human-animal dualisms, some implicit, some explicit. Such a
comparison is extant not only in the testimony of traumatised women
trying to make sense of their tragic losses or in the framing words of a
TRC commissioner but also in the discourse of Krog, who had worked
as a journalist at the hearings. In the present time of the book, as Krog
confesses to feeling ‘strangely unsettled’ (2009, p. 197) that Mrs. Konile
had ‘reject[ed] the Boers’ (2009, p. 197), she renders her memory of
the perpetrator Bellingan’s apparent signs of brutality in savagely ‘animal’
terms. Bellingan’s ‘complete lack of humanness’ elides with his lack of feel-
ing in the amnesty hearings. His face is ‘cruel and snarling’ (2009, p.
197). She is appalled at ‘the monstrousness of his dead eyes’ and ‘small
animal-like teeth’ (2009, p. 197, emphasis in original). What is animal
then is despicable, outside of morality, which is a human preserve. Such
anti-animal dualism is commonplace in the media; when people behave
harmfully to other humans they are often described as acting ‘like ani-
mals’.
The rigidity of this human-animal dualism is, however, contra-
dicted by Mrs. Konile’s central reference to her dream about a goat, a
dream which she had the night before she heard of her son’s death and
which discomforted her profoundly. Unlike the other mothers of the
236 W. Woodward
Gugulethu Seven who lived in greater Cape Town, Mrs. Konile lived in
Indwe, an impoverished rural village in the Eastern Cape which would,
potentially, have more links to Xhosa traditional knowledges and find
succour in an animist meaning-making system which may stand in for the
kind of kinship that Stolorow notes as a desiring characteristic of trauma
sufferers. On the other hand, for the reader the centrality of the goat
in Mrs. Konile’s testimony is unsettling, even foreclosing the possibility
of empathy with her. In the original TRC hearings the presence of the
goat generated a lack of comprehension on the part of the translators,
and possibly the listeners. It is this lack that Krog et al. labour to rem-
edy in their book. Because a goat in Xhosa culture embodies a connec-
tion with the ancestors, they explain, the goat in the dream which stood
by the door on his/her hind legs and the dreamer’s feeling of strange-
ness suggested ‘techniques of the ancestors to prepare Mrs. Konile to
receive the bad news about her son’ (2009, p. 55). The recounting of
this goat behaviour, of her dream within an animist unconscious, surely
signifies Mrs. Konile’s resistance to the modernity of the TRC and to its
expected, ‘totalising’ narrative. The goat seems to be both an animal and
a spiritual messenger, but Krog et al. differentiate the embodied and the
spiritualised being: ‘The goat is not a goat. Like others in her culture,
[Mrs. Konile] perceives the goat in the night-dream to be something else
in the daylight’ (2009, p. 55).
Garuba’s view is more holistic; animist materialism, he suggests, needs
to be valued on its own terms, for it ‘often provides avenues of agency
for the dispossessed in colonial and postcolonial Africa’ (2009, p. 285).
Certainly, Mrs. Konile’s recounting of the actions of the dream-goat who
is a harbinger of trauma is an assertive strategy. Her valuing of the dream
animal may suggest an unconscious desire on her part to remain in myth-
ical time rather than having to function within the horror of historical
time which included the violent death of her son and the added ordeal of
the TRC. Krog et al. remark on the way that the dream engenders feel-
ings of foreboding and horror in Mrs. Konile but they do not explore
extensively the meaning-making of animism in Mrs. Konile’s worldview.
Their purpose in unpacking the mysteries of Mrs. Konile’s testimony
is very different from Garuba’s substantial consideration of animism in
contemporary Africa. Still, under the heading ‘An African psychological
reading’ Krog et al. note that, in what they term a ‘cultural unconscious’
(2009, p. 55), the goat functions as a sign. Additionally, they bemoan
the lack of a sentence in Mrs. Konile’s translated testimony introducing
the appearance of the goat as part of a dream, a sentence which would

have rescued her from ‘the psycho-pathological wilderness into which a
reader of the English text might have cast her’ (2009, p. 56). Animist
beliefs, they suggest, are entirely rooted in Xhosa culture; such beliefs are
inaccessible within the translations made into English at the TRC. Yet a
reading sympathetic to the inclusion of a non-human animal deployed
within an animist materialism would be equipped to acknowledge the
dream world and empathise with the profound trauma of Mrs. Konile
which cannot be easily recuperated, in spite of the TRC conventions
geared towards what LaCapra terms ‘optimistic, self-serving scenarios’
and which manifest in the TRC hearings as imperatives for forgiveness
and reconciliation.
Representations of the animist unconscious and dream animals in
the fictional texts are more expansively imbricated in human trauma.
In Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons, Felix Ventura, the
protagonist, lives with the trauma of being ostracised due to his albi-
nism. Albinos are constructed in many African countries as embodying
the quintessential other. Regarded as neither black nor white, they may
fear for their physical safety because their body parts are desired for muti
(medicine), a fate suffered by many albinos.1 At the very least, Felix lives
with sexual rejection and an awareness of his difference. Abandoned at
birth, he was adopted by an educated man, becoming a consummate
magician of genealogy; he creates false identities, selling new family his-
tories to the ‘chameleons’ of the title—men who need to camouflage
themselves for political reasons.2
Felix’s story is told by a gecko, a creature with whom he very explic-
itly experiences ‘twinship’. Eulalio, as Felix christens him, is a tiger gecko
who spends time in shadows and in fissures of walls. Felix, his closely
observed human counterpart, similarly has to avoid the sun because of
his albinism. Kathy Rudy writes of ‘being called to a new form of sub-
jectivity’ when we ‘let go of old notions of human exceptionalism’ which
pertains to Felix’s newly connected sense of self (2014, p. 213). He tells
the gecko that ‘“we must be related” as they both have “terrible” skin,
“dry [and] rough”’ (2007, p. 5) with Felix recounting stories nightly
to the gecko (2007, p. 4). The lizard, who thinks of himself as being
‘like a little night-time god’, lives with the trauma of his own shape shift-
ing from a human into a reptile identity (2007, p. 5). Quite how this
happened is never clarified in the novel yet the implicit shape-shifting
as well as the dreams being conversations with the ancestors, according
238 W. Woodward
to another character Angela Lucia, locate the narrative as one of animist

materialism set within modern Angola.
The gecko is Felix’s familiar. Animism is, of course, a relational epis-
temology as Elina Helander-Renvall reminds us, or a ‘collective subjec-
tivity’ in Garuba’s words, and this is constantly illustrated in The Book of
Chameleons (2014, p. 248). The gecko’s repetitive dreams of different
lives and histories contribute to a blurring of identities between human
and non-human in a kind of intertwined unconscious, as human and non-
human are drawn into the realms of magic and spirituality as though the
process is entirely natural. Wheeler, in this volume, notes the same trajec-
tory in Gaiman’s novels. Often Felix recounts his own dreams of interac-
tion with the gecko as a human being, replicating Eulalio’s dream from
the night before, thus underscoring their mental twinship over lifetimes of
flux and shape-shifting. As the novel shifts fluidly between and into minds
and bodies, so Bushman paintings discussed in this volume (see Wessels
as well as Northover in this volume) visually depict actual shape-shifting
creatures. Eulalio exists with his own trauma of being in the body of a
gecko, nostalgic for his previous human form, seeking connection with his
human other. In a dream of encountering Felix in a sunny scene of sea
and sand dunes the latter claims ‘I am a man of no colour’ (2007, p. 79),
but Eulalio cannot countenance that his friend is colourless in the sense
that he ‘lack[s] a soul, lack[s] life’ for ‘[i]t seemed that he had not only a
life but several lives, in and around him’ (2007, p. 80). Metamorphosis,
potentially, is not confined to the gecko’s lives but gestures to Felix’s
shifting identities as well and is congruent with Felix’s celebration and
acknowledgement of animism. Animism is sustaining for him, even restor-
ative, as it seemed to be for Mrs. Konile in her narrative of events.
If lives and histories are indeterminate then time and memory are
unreliably dreamlike. For Eulalio:
Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train …

things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but
they’re so far away we can’t touch them. Some are so far … and the train
moving so fast, that we cannot be sure any longer that they really did hap-
pen. Maybe we merely dreamed them? (2007, p. 139)
The fictional, constructed nature of existence, vulnerable to time and

memory, gestures self-reflexively to the writing of the novel itself that is
imaginatively dreamed up. Much of the narrative occurs in liminal zones:
Felix conjures fictitious memories for his clients and Eulalio’s recurrent
dreams punctuate the narrative. Felix assigns the name Jose Buchmann
to a man who demands a newly invented history and genealogy. So taken
is Buchmann with his manufactured identity that he begins to believe
in the fantasy narrative, searching for his ‘parents’, further confusing
what is ‘real’ and what is fictional in an animist materialism. Like one of
LaCapra’s ‘fetishized and totalizing narratives that deny the trauma that
called them into existence’ Buchmann’s celebration of a fictitious, famil-
ial identity negates the horror of his history of loss and trauma (which
the reader is only subsequently apprised of) as he opportunistically grasps
onto an ‘optimistic, self-serving scenario’.
Memories of the horror experienced during the Civil War, a trauma
hovering at the edges of the narrative, are too historically ‘real’ to be
inserted within the animist unconscious, however. Such representations
contradict the dreamlike narratives of human-non-human kinship and
identities within a cruel modernity that contrasts with the timelessness
of Felix and Eulalio’s interactions. Felix has fallen in love with Angela
Lucia, a photographer, whom Felix regards as ‘pure light’ (2007, p. 40).
Light swirls around her figuratively and literally. She claims to ‘collect
light’ through her images as though photography is a mystical pursuit,
as though even the scientific is magical (2007, p. 51). But her body is
scarred with signs of past trauma, locating her incontestably and una-
voidably within a postcolonial modernity. The novel is brought towards
its end somewhat melodramatically in a scene of bloody retribution. Felix
offers sanctuary to an old man living in the sewers but his historical iden-
tity, it transpires, is that of an agent for State Security. Years before he
had tortured the pregnant Marta to death; then his henchman set upon
torturing her newborn baby who was Angela. The fictitiously named
Jose Buchmann was her father, the Portuguese husband of the black
woman, Marta. Edmundo Barata dos Reis, the torturer, taunts him now
in Felix’s house sneering that he lacks the ‘passion’ and ‘courage’ to kill
him, whereupon Angela, up to ‘a man’s job’ shoots him at point blank
range (2007, p. 159). In the ‘real’ world, humans seem doomed to rep-
licate and repeat trauma. Both Agualusa and Couto have their narratives
suggest its cyclical nature, with a belief in an animist universe constitut-
ing a putative remedy—not as a denial of the trauma nor as a sentimen-
talising of suffering, but as a sincere alternative.
The melodrama at the end of The Book of Chameleons is recounted
by Eulalio, in a trans-species witnessing. The dream narratives of
240 W. Woodward
shape-shifting and of the blurring of identities are displaced by the his-

torical narrative of trauma which is both political and personal, as though
modernity supersedes animist beliefs. But then Agualusa returns us to
the gecko’s narrative about the bougainvillea growing apace above the
body of the dead dos Reis, and Felix not being sure whether he can for-
give Angela for shooting the man. In the gecko’s final dream, a lucid
one, he speaks, as a human, to Jose Buchmann, who suggests that Felix
was implicated in dos Reis’s activities as both had studied with Professor
Gaspar and were ‘one of his tribe’, a mystery that Agualusa, refusing a
totalising narrative, leaves us with (2007, p. 174). The novel is brought
finally to unhappy closure by Felix’s narrative for Eulalio is dead, dying
‘in combat, like a hero’ with a scorpion in his jaws, a creature whom
he had described earlier as supremely ‘evil’ almost as though the gecko
embodies a proxy victimhood for human violence (2007, p. 179). The
gecko is sacrificed and Felix frets that it had all been a dream and worries
that if he digs beneath the bougainvillea the human body will not exist.
Still, Angela is ‘real’. She sends him postcards and Polaroids of her trav-
els and he hopes to find her in Brazil. He supplicates with the spirit of
Eulalio, asking him for aid in making the right choices, elevating him to
an animist god. At the same time, Agualusa has him confess:
I’m an animist. I’ve always been an animist, though I’ve only lately real-
ised it. The same thing happens to the soul as happens to water—it flows.
Today it’s a river. Tomorrow it will be the sea. Water takes the shape of
whatever receives it… Eulalio will always be Eulalio, whether flesh (incar-
nate) or fish. (2007, p. 180)
When Krog et al. claim that ‘A goat is not a goat’ they differentiate
between the spirit animal and the embodied animal in the quotidian.
Agualusa seems to have his character deny this split, for whatever shape-
shifting the gecko does, he will remain essentially himself and beyond
categorisation.
Freed from the Western-rationalist posture of journalistic enquiry
guiding the narrative of Krog et al., Agualusa’s fiction inhabits an ani-
mist ontology. The jolt comes from confrontation not with the fluidity of
material and spiritual animals but rather from the arbitrariness of human
separation and elevation from obligations to them. Eulalio being ‘fish’
recalls Buchmann asking Felix when they are dining together to ‘try and
see things from the victim’s point of view’ referring to the snapper on
their plates (2007, p. 37). Felix is ‘horrified’ and unable to eat. The gecko
observing the scene remarks ‘[Felix] knows he is a snapper (as we all are)
but I think he would rather not be eaten at all’ (2007, p. 38), Felix’s
trauma does not hark back to the history of the Civil War like that of the
other characters, but is embodied in a baseline exclusion, more like that
of certain animals in a biopolitical framework. His shift in awareness here
from the consumer to the consumed and his rejection of Buchmann’s
detached bonhomie in questioning whether the fish would prefer to be
eaten ‘with sadness or with delight’ (2007, p. 38), revivifies what Adams
terms the ‘absent referent’ (1990, p. 40) as well as demonstrating a sen-
sitivity to animals in the quotidian via an animist unconscious. More
sinisterly, Buchmann could be suggesting that Felix is a perpetrator of vio-
lence, but in the broader narrative the gecko is a gecko, existing without
duality in the sensitive, liminal space of Felix’s animist unconscious.
Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo has the father of the
unnamed narrator show this sensitivity to embodied animals, flamingos
who are hunted by men to demonstrate their masculinity, in spite of
the birds’ saving of wrecked fishermen’s lives by denoting the proxim-
ity of land. The novel is a satire on neocolonialism and hypermasculinity,
mocking both the administrator with his acquisitive First Lady, and the
peacekeeping UN forces who naively believe that they are ‘the masters of
frontiers, able to manufacture concord’ (2004, n.p.). Instead, a number
of the latter explode serially without trace except for a penis left on the
roadside or on a ceiling. The narrator styles himself as the translator of
the village Tizangara, where ‘the only facts are supernatural ones’ (2004,
p. 1) and is assigned to the bemused Italian investigator, Massimo Risi,
although he himself cannot speak Italian. Such translation issues recall
and implicitly parody, perhaps, the difficulties at cross-cultural translation
which featured in the TRC in relation to Mrs. Konile’s testimony, where
a decontextualised mistranslation depicted her as an unreliable witness
ungrounded in ‘reality’. The fictional narrative has a dreamlike quality
replete with characters who appear to emanate from fables and fairytales,
with the non-human characters deriving from an animist unconscious.
The narrator constructs his own myth: a mother who cannot see him,
whose ‘advice consisted mainly of silences. She spoke with the accent of a
cloud’ (2004, p. 29). His father seems, initially, to reject such myth mak-
ing. He tells his son of being a game warden for colonialists and about
the trauma of torture (after reporting the son of the administrator for
illegal hunting) which has left him maimed.
242 W. Woodward
Animality recurs in the person of the unnamed narrator. When he

hears the first of the current explosions, he retreats to the bush, ques-
tioning whether he was ‘turning into an animal, into the laws of claws
and talons’ (2004, p. 87). The spirit of his mother who stops him from
investigating newly laid mines is unhappy that he seems to be ‘living
where animals live’ (2004, p. 88). His response ‘Is there anywhere now-
adays that isn’t the realm of animals?’ (2004, p. 88) suggests that the
animal realm is one of depravity, or certainly one that is inimical to the
realm of humanity, a dualism redolent of the construction of humanness
in the TRC discussions above. On the other hand, the narrator envies ‘a
creature who lives in a burrow’ for knowing how to survive in darkness.
Were he such a creature ‘[w]hen it was time to cross over beyond life, I
would know how to dwell on the other side’, connecting the subterra-
nean creature with death, but positively (2004, p. 102).
The novel also features Garuba’s sense of an ‘animist materialism’ with
the characters interpreting events in the material world as having a spir-
itual provenance. Couto has the village construct its own animist beliefs
underpinned by notions of a collective identity for ‘we were Africans in
flesh and soul’ (2004, p. 6) as opposed to the whites who lack stories
and the ‘government leaders who don’t observe ceremonies in honour of their
ancestors’ (2004, p. 74). The narrator peppers his accounts with proverbs
(‘A donkey in the company of a lion no longer passes the time of day with
a horse’ (2004, p. 3) and refers to ‘the lie that we only have one soul’
(2004, p. 27) echoing Felix’s realisation of the fluid mobility of a soul.
Temporina, a woman with no shadow, with the body of a girl but the
face of an old woman seduces Massimo Risi who is overwhelmed by the
dreamlike illogicality of the village, telling the narrator that while he can
speak the language he cannot fathom ‘this world here’ (2004, p. 26). The
investigating Risi is confused by the villagers’ belief that the UN soldiers
are exploding because of their sexual activity and that the culprit is Anna
Godwilling the local sex worker (it transpires eventually that the adminis-
trator was laying fresh mines in order to maintain foreign interest and to
stimulate aid to Tizangara, a fact which is not supernatural but historical).
Animals recur in Tizangara’s animist materialism: Massimo is accused
of killing the praying mantis in the guesthouse with the corpse considered
as ‘something more than an insect’ (2004, p. 43) and as the remains of
the deceased Hortensia—a praying mantis is not a praying mantis in this
context. Surely, any animist representation of a mantis recalls Bushman
beliefs in Cagn or Kaggen as discussed by Wessels, Northover and
Wittenberg in this volume. When a goat is knocked over by an official
car, his dying bleats punctuate and undermine a pretentious occasion.

His owner tells Massimo later that he is ‘linked to the deceased’ (2004,
p. 26). Traumatised by his billy goat dying in front of him, the owner
asks for compensation not only for the animal but also the psychosomatic
itches which now plague him. In a literal crossover between human and
non-human he himself has had to impregnate his female goats, he claims.
In another bizarre human-animal miscegenation, the administrator writes
to Comrade Excellency about a male donkey who has apparently given
birth to a human child ‘born wearing military boots’ (2004, p. 136). The
administrator is fearful that the birth might be a ‘factually authenticated
truth’ (2004, p. 137). Torn between an animist unconscious and moder-
nity he is split, asking rhetorically: ‘How could one reconcile the explanation
for such a thing in the context of current ideas? Or even according to the old
Marxist-Leninist conjecture?’ (2004, p. 137). As he does in many of the
stories in his earlier collection Voices Made Night (1990), Couto satirises
indigenous knowledges as superstition, beliefs which can be exploited by
the unscrupulous targeting the ignorant or gullible.
The flamingos, however, are situated very differently from any other ani-
mal in the novel in relation to animist beliefs. Couto never satirises the birds
and the human conception of them as he does other local animist mate-
rialism. Instead, they are depicted lyrically and mythically. The narrator’s
mother and father embody universalised masculine and feminine principles
in their connections with the birds and the legends they construct about
them. For his mother, watching the birds in flight at dusk is a ‘sacred’
moment, with the flamingos inspiring her singing. In her view ‘it was fla-
mingos that pushed the sun so that day could begin on the other side of
the world’ (2004, p. 31). In spirit form, she extends her imagining of the
flamingo who plans to fly from the sky of day and to ‘cross the frontier’
to the starry sky ‘inappropriate for flight’ (2004, p. 91). The massed birds
begged the flamingo not to leave but he ‘wanted to go where there was
no shade or map’; that he had ‘grown tired of living in one body’ suggests a
propensity for shape-shifting (2004, p. 91). The flight is figured poetically:
Then the flamingo launched himself, bow and arrow stiffened in his body.
And off he flew like the chosen one, elegant, shedding his weight. Seen in
flight like that, it was as if the sky had gained a vertebra and the cloud, out
there ahead, was merely the soul of a bird … it was light itself that was in
flight. And with each flap of its wings, the bird was slowly turning the sky’s
transparent pages. (2004, p. 92)
244 W. Woodward
In this way, the first sunset followed by the first night is occasioned
within a creation myth imagined by the narrator’s mother. The flamingo
is central, bringing about a new earthly and heavenly dispensation within
liminal time. The flamingos, potentially, are transcendent creatures, com-
forting both the characters as well as the reader with the prospect that
the narratives of trauma could be healed.
The narrator’s father, Sulplicio, initially has a stronger material con-
nection with embodied flamingos than his wife who mythologises them,
although when they save him after being washed overboard on a fish-
ing trip he sees them as ‘ghosts grazing the floor of the darkness’ and
‘angels’ (2004, p. 105). He learned bird language, perhaps to counter-
act the horror of his first memory when he was unable to kill flamin-
gos or eat their flesh. His grandfather ‘was teaching us to be men, with
their burden of cruelty’ (2004, p. 147). The child Sulplicio failed ‘the test
of male power’’ (2004, p. 149) identifying animistically with the bird
being killed: ‘That blow settled in my soul. The bird was dying inside me’
(2004, p. 148). Such embodied empathy or ‘symphysis’—to use Ralph
Acampora’s term—legislated his childhood in which he was constantly
humiliated for not being manly (2006, p. 23). Now, as though his rela-
tional epistemology ill-equips him for living in the present day, he orders
his son, the narrator, to wipe his voice off the recorder which he criti-
cises claiming ironically: ‘Once upon a time we wanted to be civilised. Now
we want to be modern’ (2004, p. 150). Couto has Sulplicio critique how
their desires have been framed within colonial prejudice—which first
regarded indigenous people as uncivilised/savage, and now as mechanis-
tically lacking. It invites comparison with how Felix’s moment of realisa-
tion when he refuses to eat the fish on his plate is one of trans-species
connection apparently beyond the political, but Eulalio recognises that
Felix’s sense of victimisation is situated within the traumatic prejudice he
has endured which is not so much colonial as African.
Likewise, the animist ending Couto scripts for the narrative appears to
be a triumph for the spiritual and for indigenous beliefs over modernity.
In the penultimate, traumatic scene the solitary narrator sees an island
floating past as though the river were in flood. The island is peopled with
the dead, but, as ancestors, they fail to acknowledge or recognise him.
Then the narrator in the company of Risi and his father (who has dis-
carded his bones, the better to ‘dream himself’) sees the whole country
disappear into an abyss after an explosion (2004, p. 171). Risi tries to
clutch onto modernity, desperate to safeguard his reports and files which
had vanished into the ‘vortex, the nothingness’ (2004, p. 173). In an

intertwining of political critique and the apocalyptic, Couto has Sulplicio
explain what has happened: the ancestors, critical of many countries in
Africa where the ‘ambitious’ govern like ‘hyenas’ and where indige-
nous and Christian antidotes are ineffectual then ‘decided to transport
those countries to the skies that can be found in the depths of the earth’
(2004, p. 174). There the countries were ‘suspended, awaiting a favoura-
ble time when they would be able to return to their own ground’ (2004,
p. 174). Until such time, in a kind of animist suspension, landscape and
inhabitants exist in a limbo, ‘transmuted into non-beings, shadows await-
ing their respective people’ (2004, p. 175).
A dugout that emerges from across the abyss is transformed into a
flamingo as it disappears into the distance with Sulplicio on board. The
narrator and Risi wait, hoping for ‘another flight of the flamingo’ (2004,
p. 79) as the Italian makes paper birds with his report for the United
Nations sending them into the abyss until, finally, the narrator hears his
‘mother’s song, the one she sang so that flamingos would push the sun
from the other side of the world’ (2004, p. 179). The ending returns
to the flamingos, to nature and to the power of the ancestors to bring
about change—suggested here by the new day ushered in by the birds.
‘Animist logic’ according to Garuba ‘reabsorbs historical time into the
matrices of myth and symbol’ (2003, p. 270). The flamingos, then, are
not ultimately indicators of a transcendence that denies traumatic narra-
tive, although Couto’s ending avoids finding a political solution within
modernity and has recourse, instead, to indigenous beliefs, to the spiritual
and to the animal almost as though a more realistic solution to the prob-
lems of Tizangara would be just as fantastical. The flamingos who will save
the world do not seem divorced from those flamingos who exist in the
everyday. Sulplicio, in getting into the dugout which is also a flamingo,
heals the split between the spirit bird and the embodied one. A flamingo
is a flamingo; this elegant bird is a vehicle between materialist and animist
ontologies, suggesting a political and culturally transformative potential in
fiction which may not, for example, be available in the history of the TRC.
Conclusion
The flamingos in The Last Flight of the Flamingo inhabit a liminal
time and space. The magical apocalyptic ending is both a comment
on the sustaining power of animist beliefs as well as a confirmation
246 W. Woodward
of the impossibility of finding a realistic solution to the problems of

Moçambique. The country disappears, historically bludgeoned into noth-
ingness by wars, neocolonial corruption and international ineptitude. The
Book of Chameleons, similarly, ends with the preponderance of animist
‘logic’ over that of the linear time of history, which it ‘reabsorbs’. The
gecko is inserted into a mythical, liminal time, and transmuted into a lit-
tle god and guide once Felix acknowledges his belief in animism. There
was this Goat ends on an exclusively humanist note. The text is brought
to closure with the news of the death of Mrs. Konile and an acknowl-
edgement of the tragedy of her life even as her daughter is celebrated for
being a survivor and for being astonishingly ‘humane’ (2009, p. 214).
In its closure, There was this Goat dispenses with animals and animist
beliefs, stabilising humanity instead and celebrating a positive future for
Mrs. Konile’s daughter. The eponymous goat is not figured here as an
animist creature, fluidly moving between the ‘real’ and the mythic; it has
been kept firmly within boundaries, venerated only when ‘it’ embodies
a sign, when ‘it’ carries a message from the ancestors. Contradictorily,
it is quite possibly the dream of the goat that emboldens Mrs. Konile to
refuse the recuperative narrative of the TRC itself, with its emphasis on
Christian forgiveness.
In the Angolan and Moçambican fictional narratives, however, the
animals endure in the respective closures. Both gecko and flamingos
proffer kinship for the traumatised humans and are figured as embod-
ied creatures of the animist unconscious enduring in a discordant moder-
nity. At the same time, they foster the reader’s empathic unsettlement.
In The Book of Chameleons one cannot deny the past trauma, nor naively
celebrate a happy resolution: Eulalio is dead, Angela has absconded and
we are not sure of Felix’s ethics. Still, a gecko is a gecko. The storytelling
gecko remains, imaginatively, a presence even in his absence. In The Last
Flight of the Flamingo the human characters, poised at the edge of an
abyss, are absent even in their presence, distanced by the emphasis on the
lyrically dreamed flamingos, who are their potential saviours. Ultimately,
a flamingo is a flamingo—an embodied as well as a threshold being with-
out contradiction.
Mrs. Konile and the fiction writers include the magic of indigenous
knowledges and indigenous creatures in a secular modernity blurring the
differences in an animist unconscious which does not deny history but re-
imagines it through local spiritualties. In this way we as readers have our
attention drawn, through the goat, through the gecko and through the
flamingos to the fantastical nature of historical ‘facts’. Whereas the novels

celebrate animist belief, There Was This Goat seems, like the TRC itself,
to be uneasy about the animist beliefs of Mrs. Konile. While Krog et al.
reflect on this uneasiness, the text itself does not foreground the sustain-
ing power of the animist unconscious for Mrs. Konile. Unconstrained by
historical ‘realities’, the modern worlds of Couto and Agualusa are filled
with enchanted animals and humans. Animist beliefs sustain the char-
acters who are restored by the trans-species witnessing of their trauma.
The animist unconscious, Agualusa and Couto suggest, has to be rescued
from the prejudices of modernity. Indigenous creatures and beliefs in
their healing spiritualties may well help us to draw back from the personal
or apocalyptic abyss as we sit, like Felix and the unnamed narrator of The
Last Flight of the Flamingo, poised at its vertiginous edge.
Notes
1. Recent novels have picked up this issue. See Petina Gappah’s The Book of
Memory (London: Faber and Faber, 2015) and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra
Crossing (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2013).
2. As I prepare to write about this text, my dog tries to flush a creature out of
the hedge. It is a juvenile dwarf chameleon, unprepossessingly light brown
to blend with the dry winter hedge, a survivor in the face of cats, butcher
birds, pesticides and dwindling habitat. I have not seen a chameleon for
more than a year—its appearance seems synchronous—an animist interpre-
tation on my part.
Works Cited
Acampora, R.R. 2006. Corporal compassion: Animal ethics and philosophy of body.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Adams, C.J. 1990. The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical the-
ory. New York: Continuum.
Agualusa, J. E. 2007. The book of chameleons. D. Hahn trans. London: Arcadia
Books.
Couto, M. 2004. The last flight of the flamingo. D. Brookshaw trans. London:
Serpent’s Tail.
Couto, M. 1990. Voices made night. D. Brookshaw trans. Oxford: Heinemann.
Garuba, H. 2003. Explorations in animist materialism: Notes on reading/writing
African literature, culture, and society. Public culture 15 (2).261–85.
248 W. Woodward
Helander-Renvall, E. 2014. Relationships between Sami reindeer herders, lands,

and reindeer. In The Routledge handbook of human-animal studies, ed. G.
Marvin, and S. McHugh, 246–258. New York: Routledge.
Krog, A., N. Mpolweni, and K. Atele. 2009. There was this goat: Investigating the
Truth Commission testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile. Scottsville: University
of KwaZulu Natal Press.
LaCapra, D. 1999. Trauma, Absence, Loss. Critical Inquiry 25 (4): 696–727.
Rudy, K. 2014. Bestial imaginings. In The Routledge handbook of human-animal
studies, ed. G. Marvin, and S. McHugh, 208–219. New York: Routledge.
Stolorow, R.D. 2007. Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoan-
alytic, and philosophical reflections. Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series. Vol 23.
New York: Routledge.
Author Biography
Wendy Woodward is Emerita Professor in English Literature at the University
of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of The Animal Gaze:
Animal Subjectivities in southern African Narratives (Wits University Press
2008) and the co-editor, with Erika Lemmer, of a Special Issue of Journal of
Literary Studies on Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa (2014).
Wendy organised fruitful Animal Studies Colloquia at UWC annually from
2011 to 2015. She has published three volumes of poetry: Séance for the Body
(Snailpress 1994); Love, Hades and other Animals (Protea, 2008) and A Saving
Bannister (Modjadji 2015).
CHAPTER 13
Cross-Pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges

of Extinction and Genocide in Honeybee
Fictions
Susan McHugh
Set in the Sundarbans, India’s and Bangladesh’s vast tide country of man-
grove swamps, Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide (2004) intertwines
history and mythology to glimpse the precarious lives of local people and
wildlife. Ghosh’s story is the first extended treatment in English of the
massacre of Morichjhãpi (1978–1979)—an incident in which hundreds of
people initially dislocated by the Partition of British Colonial India were
killed and many more dispersed by authorities for attempting to found
a Dalit (untouchable caste) nation on tiger conservation land in West
Bengal—and explains how the violence registers a far greater threat to
the state than conventional ethnic rivalries (Singh 2011, p. 250).1 For, in
the novel, the conditions giving rise to the incident emerge through an
ancient myth about local animals shared by Hindu and Muslim inhabit-
ants of the region, who share therein ‘a faith that moves from country to
country and even between faiths and religions’ (Ghosh 2004, p. 206).
S. McHugh (*) 
English Department, University of New England, Biddeford, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4_13
250 S. McHUGH
Sung, read, performed, and translated by characters with various ties

to the atrocity, the triumph of the forest goddess Bon Bibi in saving
the boy Dukhey from being eaten by Dokkhin Rai, the demon king of
the south in tiger form, helps to elaborate how human-animal relations
mitigate contested claims to indigeneity. In a novel centrally concerned
with the politics of conservation vis-à-vis the poorest of the world’s poor,
the myth enhances understanding of what happened in Morichjhãpi
by asserting local people’s knowledges of native royal Bengal tigers as
becoming even more dangerous by association with monarchy, coloni-
alism, and nationalism (Jalais 2005, p. 1758). Moreover, the myth pin-
points another human-animal relationship as the people’s motive for
entering the tiger-demon’s forest in the first place: the boy’s human
betrayers, all sea traders, are repaid by ‘swarms’ of bees, who in the nov-
el’s contemporary English translation are cast as Dokkhin Rai’s minions,
‘ordered’ to fill their boats with honey and wax (Ghosh 2004, p. 292).
Bringing to the novel indigenous honey-hunters’ knowledges of
the aggressive defensiveness of native rock bees (Apis dorsata) helps to
explain why the diabolical deal is premised on the sailors’ agreement
not to touch the honeycomb in the forest. Such perspectives might also
introduce new threats, including how today’s ever-increasing demand for
organic honey collected in the Sundarbans exacerbates the spiralling deci-
mation of bee populations and their ecosystems already severely depleted
by climate change. Ghosh stops short of depicting bees as passive victims
of ‘the traditional crude and destructive methods’ of collecting wild bees’
products, which threaten tribal peoples’ ability to sustain not only the
short-term profits of honey sales but also their own ability to feed them-
selves from plants that require the bees to pollinate them (Thomas et al.
2002, p. 2), opting instead to make them a more active presence.
In so doing, the novel accelerates the development of a new trope of
bees and humans as sharing in the biopolitics of indigenous knowledges.
Hovering between exploited animals and self-determining communities,
honeybees can organise affective assemblages that extend beyond human
realms. Through their stories, writers like Ghosh are organising complex
responses to acts of genocide alongside extinctions that in turn cast the
looming global threats of ecocide as resisted at local levels. But to do so
effectively requires more nuanced understandings of bee swarms.
This essay centres on how bee encounters mark transformative
social desires amid conditions that have become dire for humans as
well as bees and the flowering plants that depend on them, especially
13 CROSS-POLLINATING: INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES … 251
in representations that connect honeybees to modern histories of

North American native peoples. More explicitly than The Hungry Tide,
two more recent novels—Louise Erdrich’s A Plague of Doves (2008)
and Douglas Coupland’s Generation A (2009)—are haunted by hor-
rific events involving both animals and humans: a multiple lynch-
ing that becomes eerily redressed in part through a deadly bee sting,
and an attempted cultural suicide of a tribal nation at the site of the
world’s last honeybee hive. Drawing out fraught honeybee-human his-
tories more typical of the Americas, these novels indicate the potential
in literary animal studies to advance a genuinely decolonised indige-
nous politics that is recuperative, as opposed to restorative or recon-
ciliatory (Nasady 2016, p. 16), and along the way inspire engagement
with how exactly superorganisms like honeybees and humans operate
at their best.
Rather than writing and reading animals as having natural affinities
with some but not other kinds of people, scholars at the crossroads of
Native American and animal studies have long demonstrated how fic-
tional representations foster sympathy with animals together with indig-
enous peoples and their environments (Copeland 1983). Reading ‘the
creatures in [N]ative literature’ as more than ‘mere representations’
(Vizenor 1998, p. 141), they chart how concepts of indigenous people-
hood extend to non-human animals in ways that are vital to their mutual
survival. Such mappings of local actors in places and communities can be
sources of political resistance, anchoring ‘modes of indigeneity … that
defy state narratives and survive despite being targeted for eradication’
(Rifkin 2012, p. 84; see also Stremlau 2011; Justice 2008). Identifying
‘ethical intersubjectivity’ as extending across species lines in modern
native storytelling (Pexa 2016, p. 656) provides a starting point for
decolonisation, but only towards situating how and where they inform
broader models for social agency (McHugh 2011, p. 169).
Approaching the problem from another angle, the scholarship of
biopolitics, which is coming to recognise the exclusion of some kinds
of humans and all non-humans from social obligation as an effec-
tive method whereby modern states pursue eradication policies (Wolfe
2012), remains haunted by what Achille Mbebe terms the ‘necropo-
litics’ of racism and colonialism as ongoing in genocide (2003), and
arguably extended by exclusion of non-Eurowestern voices from dis-
cussions of the implications of multiple species in political exemptions
of humanity from legal protection (Wehilye 2014). Reframing living
252 S. McHUGH
human bodies as assemblages of multiple species at many different scales,

Donna Haraway explores a more radical line of thinking about bodies
and species, reconceptualising them from discrete, transparent catego-
ries to imbricate, opaque affective linkages (2008, 2016). What exactly
it will take to transform everyday notions of the social to include animals
alongside humans as biopolitical actors—and not just victimised reac-
tors—remains to be seen, but can be glimpsed through changing depic-
tions the so-called hive minds of biological superorganisms like humans
and honeybees being pushed to the edge of existence.
In Erdrich’s novel, the racist fallout of the lynching of Ojibwe people
by white settlers—which is an event loosely based on a historical inci-
dent—turns on a swarm of honeybees, whose provoked attack sets in
motion a land reclamation effort, all premised on indigenous knowledges
of personhood as relationally constituted across not just species lines
but also a/biotic divisions. In Coupland’s novel, a worldwide disappear-
ance of honeybees leads eventually to the collective self-destruction of
the Haida people, explained through the capacity of honeybees to reflect
and influence human traditions of becoming eusocial creatures, and,
along the way, their response to a shared vulnerability to an alienating
synthetic drug pushed by multinational corporate interests. Key details
about the current situation of honeybee science and culture regarding
swarm behaviour emerge through comparison of the novels with other
representations of bee swarms, particularly contemporary accounts of the
swarm’s relevance as an irreducibly social form for political engagement.
Although honeybees conventionally are used as symbols of utopian alter-
natives to human societies, growing understanding of their biopolitical
significance as eusocial pollinators shifts them into closer alignment with
human worlds, in which their biopolitical histories as colonial animals
trouble those of North American peoples.
Why Honeybees?
Indigeneity immediately raises the question, where do honeybees
belong? In most places where they live today, honeybees are not native
and not wild, complicating associations with indigeneity and also envi-
ronmental concerns about their impending doom. Because the Western
or European honeybee (Apis mellifera) constitutes the main pollinator
population being systematically monitored, they have come to serve like
the proverbial canaries in coalmines, indicating alarming rates of their
own along with wild bee and other pollinating species’ declines in recent
decades. As animate creatures who assist in the sexual reproduction and
genetic out-crossing of most vegetal species—an estimated 75% of crop
plants, including most fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, as well as 90%
of wild plants worldwide—their disappearances can never be just ends in
themselves.
Biologically gynocentric and colonial organisms, honeybees also bring
together complex cultural as well as agricultural histories, particularly
in the Americas, where they had long gone extinct before seventeenth-
century Europeans arrived with their hives. Not long after, Thomas
Jefferson apocryphally wrote, ‘The Indians… call them the white man’s
fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settle-
ments of the whites’ (Jefferson 1998, p. 79), a fantasy that exemplifies
how bees became enlisted in the ideological along with material pro-
cesses of settler colonialism, if not the fragility of relations that are bring-
ing worldwide food production to record highs along with catastrophic
breakdowns.
First observed in 2006, the phenomenon now known as Colony
Collapse Disorder (CCD) in commercial honeybees marks a tipping
point in terms of mobilising public efforts to stem a tide of die-offs.
Stupefying in retrospect, the health of the pollinating species responsi-
ble for so much crop- and wild-plant diversity was not a major conserva-
tion consideration until the mid-1990s. Public interest lagged at least a
decade behind the initial reports of massive losses by commercial bee-
keepers, who sounded a global alarm that has yet to abate. While scien-
tists fail to settle on a single cause, the CCD crisis increasingly appears
to be a symptom of the highly contingent and unsustainable growth of
‘apis-industrial agriculture’, a peculiar form of animal farming in which
we consume not the bodies but the products of their labour (Nimmo
2015, p. 185). For industrial-scale agriculture—propelled by the dou-
bling of the world’s human populations and the increase of our caloric
consumption by almost a third, all within the past 50 years—has grown
to depend on monocrop fertilisation by commercial apiculture of the
European honeybee, quickly becoming in turn ‘the best-known insect on
the planet’ (Seeley 2010: 3).
Never simply confined, dominated, or exploited when housed in
fields to do their thing, honeybees are self-organising societies that can
thrive in symbiosis with humans or, more to the point, in the trust of
well-informed, skilled, and diligent beekeepers with access to sufficiently
254 S. McHUGH
diverse quantities of flowering plants and medicines. Problems arise when

humans and bees together become unevenly engaged in biopolitics. And
it is on this point that honeybees enter appropriately uneasily into con-
temporary stories of the lives and deaths of indigenous populations, par-
ticularly in the form of swarms.
Pursuing the earlier findings of Karl von Frisch and Martin Lindauer
that honeybees communicate through dance, entomologists-turned-
popular-science-writers like Bert Hölldobler, E.O. Wilson, and Thomas
Seeley clarify the analogy between a hive’s bees and human brain cells
(2009): ‘in both cases, a constellation of units at one level of biologi-
cal organization cooperate closely to build a higher-level entity’ (Seeley
2010, p. 237). In part to correct the modern misperception captured in
Charles Butler’s 1609 title, The Feminine Monarchie, Seeley in particu-
lar has studied how bee swarming—the unique behaviour through which
bees collectively choose a new home from among several options—
resembles a peculiarly US model of democratic negotiation, with differ-
ent options presented and voted on by the entire group. Yet, in much
the same way that settler family lore of being descended of an ‘Indian
princess’ distorts histories of Native North American contributions to
modern democracies (Justice 2005)—notably the historical influence of
the Iroquois Constitution or Great Law of Peace in the formation of the
US Constitution, ironically the basis on which Native American sover-
eignty later became eroded and genocide enacted as official policy—the
royal-family discourse persists in obscuring the distribution of power in
the hive. Looking more closely at how bee and human-colonial histories
intersect in fiction, it becomes clear that swarms gain interest as much for
what they undo as for what they do.
Propping Personhood
At a pivotal moment in a long and complex novel, Erdrich’s The Plague
of Doves turns to bees as eusocial beings whose presence holds great sig-
nificance to Ojibwe as well as self-identified ‘mixed blood’ characters
of European and Native American descent. Several other animals in the
novel extend Erdrich’s longstanding ‘concerns with human and non-
human personhood’ as means of ‘expos[ing] Western understanding [as
inadequate] … to native ways of knowing’ (Rainwater 2011, p. 153). In
contrast, superorganisms intrude here as part of a subtle strategy more
sharply geared to clarify the mixed-species social contexts required of
indigenous knowledges that tie people to other forms of life, taking

Erdrich’s career-long explorations of her own mixed blood heritage in
new directions.
Rising to fame despite immediate accusations of being ‘academic,
post-modernist, so-called experimental’ at the cost of attending to ‘his-
tory or politics’ (Silko 1986, p. 179), decades later Erdrich’s oeuvre has
become celebrated for cultivating a complex aesthetic that uses multiple
strategies relentlessly to resist and roll back the erasure of indigenous cul-
tures (Strehle 2014, p. 109). One such strategy in The Plague of Doves
involves a distinct departure from the metaphors, shape-shifters, and
other extraordinary depictions of animals typified in Native American
novels (see Payne, this volume). In contrast to the titular birds revealed
to be extinct passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), European hon-
eybees present no easy metaphorical equivalence to any kind of person
in the story, but instead provide a living embodiment of the relational
matrix through which an indigenous sense of personhood comes into
being (see Wessels, this volume).
In a rare reading of the novel that attends to animist ontologies,
Catherine Rainwater draws on anthropological accounts to show how
the story consistently thwarts Eurowestern divide-and-conquer expecta-
tions by depicting characters only ever relationally, identifying individual
animals and even things as ‘nonhuman persons who are animated in the
novel according to traditional Ojibwan belief’ (2011, p. 158). While her
theory explains some of the novel’s intertwined narrative trajectories,
Rainwater does not apply it to the honeybees who enter at the end of
the story. For, even as her account rounds out the novel’s spectrum of
non-human agents, the swarm identifies how the realities of interspecies-
intercorporeal vulnerability extend beyond the ethical-intersubjective
ideals of personhood, and muddies the identifications of and with indig-
enous creatures.
Accurately to the mid-twentieth-century time period it depicts, The
Plague of Doves does not introduce honeybees as a threatened population
so much as a social group through which people come to recognise and
articulate Native American world views. Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, one
of the novel’s mixed blood narrators, finds a sense of pride and purpose
in his Ojibwan heritage through living with a hive of feral honeybees.
More specifically, at a point at which the bees are forced to leave their
hive, Bazil discovers through them an empowering sense of communica-
tion with a non-human person.
256 S. McHUGH
Reflecting on his young adulthood, Bazil recounts his torrid affair

with Cordelia, a white woman eventually revealed to be the lone, infant
survivor of the murder of a settler family that inspired the lynching of
three native people, one a 13-old boy, just as in the 1897 killings that
are the historical inspiration for the novel (Beidler 2014). Known by eve-
ryone else to be ‘more than [a] garden-variety bigot[]’, Cordelia, Bazil
takes a long time to realise, otherwise has no dealings with native peo-
ple: ‘I’d always be her one exception. Or worse, her absolution’ (Erdrich
2008, p. 292). During their breakup years earlier, though, all he knows
for certain is that she has married a white man while stringing Bazil
along. Meanwhile Bazil has let his ambitions languish to the point that
he can no longer afford to keep his childhood home, the back wall of
which he ‘let … go to bees’, in part because their ‘hum made the whole
house awaken’ (p. 286).
But the hive proves a special manifestation of the Ojibwan relational
matrix, and in a way that leads to a greater affirmation of indigenous
knowledges. After reluctantly selling to Cordelia’s husband Ted, a real
estate developer keen on teardowns, Bazil moves into a motel but finds
that it is only partly ‘guilt at having abandoned the bees’ that forces his
change of heart. More profoundly, they have helped him to sense his
house as alive:
It was as though the house was calling out to me, telling me that it loved
me, that its destruction was a cruel and unnecessary adjunct to my decision
to break things off with C[ordelia]. (Erdrich 2008, p. 286)
Upon Bazil’s arrival with Cordelia to save the house, Ted responds to
her pleading with anger, smashing the bee wall, and immediately the
white couple are ‘swarmed by the bees’ and covered in ‘massive amounts
of stings’ (p. 289).
The differences in how honeybees respond to Native- and European-
American characters suggest that the story lends them a political intentional-
ity, or at least a sense of poetic justice. Bazil carries Cordelia away, and her
witnessing his comparatively callous disregard of Ted’s suffering spells the
end of the affair. The fact that only two bees sting him with no apparent
malice—‘I think … [they were] young bees that did not know me’ (Erdrich
2008, p. 289)—sets an even stronger contrast with Ted’s death a year later
from anaphylactic shock caused by a single bee sting. But the swarming
rhetoric proves misleading; rather than true swarming behaviour, it recalls
a scene from a different postcolonial fiction, in which a native bee colony

turns on another character bearing a heavy settler legacy.
In J.M. Coetzee’s semi-autobiographical Boyhood: Scenes from
Provincial Life (1998), the English-speaking white boy John visits his
Afrikaans grandfather’s farm in the Karoo region of South Africa, and
approaches a wild hive. Attracted to ‘fierce little, black bees’, a descrip-
tion that identifies them as the native Cape honeybee subspecies (Apis
mellifera capensis), John fails to get them to see that he is different from
those who have robbed them before. He wishes them ‘to recognize that
he, when he visits, comes with clean hands, not to steal from them but to
greet them, to pay his respects’, but is promptly sent ‘running off igno-
miniously across the veld with the swarm behind him’ (Coetzee 2008, p.
97–98). Whereas Coetzee’s honeybees invite alignments of indigenous
bees and peoples, writing histories of violent displacements of indigenous
populations as vividly alive in the failed negotiations across species differ-
ences, the stinging death of Erdrich’s Ted is at best ironic, a backfiring
of colonialist history as embodied by colonial animals. Only the fate of
Erdrich’s swarm suggests a radical rethinking of politics, quite literally
from the ground up.
Quite apart from the romantic fallout of the incident itself, the per-
spective that the bees help Bazil to gain in The Plague of Doves guides a
new course for his life and that of his people. The disrupted hive’s action
proves a major turning point for Bazil, who immediately commits his
career to Indian law, and eventually moves to the neighbouring reser-
vation where his mother grew up and where he successfully works as a
tribal court judge towards a greater goal of securing tribal sovereignty,
as detailed in Erdrich’s sequel The Round House (2012). Upon return-
ing to the gardens in flower at the site of his old house, Bazil finds that
the bees have swarmed after all, and in a way that allows them to flour-
ish. Although highly implausible because European honeybees are not
ground bees, the relocation of the swarm to the town cemetery where
they build a hive ‘beneath the earth’ and get busy ‘filling the skulls with
white comb and the coffins with sweet black honey’ (Erdrich 2008, p.
291) has again a certain poetic logic at the end of The Plague of Doves,
given Bazil’s specialty in land claims. For Bazil’s interpretation of sov-
ereignty guards ‘tribal law on tribal land’, grounded in ownership as
interpreted not by US law so much as by ‘a historical native continuum’
(Valentino 2011, p. 134) that his own gentle relations with the bees
come to embody.
258 S. McHUGH
Foreshadowing the fate of the bees, Bazil quips early on, ‘The ground
swallows and absorbs even those who form a country, a reservation’, but
never the traditional tribal ‘love and knowledge of the land and its rela-
tionship to dreams’ (Erdrich 2008, p. 115). The honeybees who prop up
a social matrix that fosters his home-love in turn embody the responsive-
ness required of responsibility to the land and all its inhabitants, which
is nothing so patronising as environmental stewardship nor objectifying
as ownership. Through their colonial histories, broadly writ, bees loft a
living, non-human, collective means of coming to terms with and within
indigenous knowledges. More comparisons with earlier fictional rep-
resentations of swarms that also revisit horrific human histories help to
clarify the indigenous politics at stake in contemporary fictions that more
explicitly and accurately present swarms as forms of expression of honey-
bee intelligences.
Swarming Girls
Quite apart from the reactionary or hostile stance projected by Ghosh,
Erdrich, and Coetzee, swarming is the unique behaviour through
which honeybees routinely and collectively choose a new home from
among several options. When a hive decides that it’s big enough, the
old queen leaves with more than half of the worker bees to form a new
colony. Terms like ‘queen’ again belie the fact that they are organised
not by a ‘feminine monarchie’ but rather a ‘honeybee democracy’,
at least in the sense proposed by Seeley, whose extensive studies reveal
the complex negotiations through which bees successfully propagate
new colonies. When a healthy hive reaches a critical mass, around half
stuff themselves with honey and depart with the old queen in a peace-
able swarm formation, which quietly settles in a temporary spot while
scouts go out, returning to share information about different nesting
options through waggle-dances. The process concludes with a collective
decision to move into a permanent home. An eerily similar process to
what goes on between the neurons in our brains when we make deci-
sions, swarm negotiations demonstrate the defining hive mind quality of
a superorganism.
In recent fictions, swarms more precisely call attention to the com-
plex roles of non-human intelligences in mediating indigenous pasts
and futures. Three feature not boys but girls attracted to gynecentric
communities who find themselves at the centre of the activity—swarms
literally settle on their bodies—in which the girls recognise non-human

collective intelligence as the organising factor. Each novel is ostensibly
about the girl’s coming to terms with the racist and colonialist legacies of
her own human community, only the swarm triggers her key transforma-
tions. In each story, she is moved to become a beekeeper, and actively to
distance herself from settler inheritances. What is perhaps most curious is
that, across the decades, the girl character-type increasingly, if haltingly,
is also identified as indigenous.
In David Malouf ’s critical success Remembering Babylon, the girl
Janet eventually lives as a nun in a convent, a situation ripe for interpre-
tation as a beehive metaphor except that she also works there as a bee
developer of international standing. Her decision to hybridise indig-
enous Australian native stingless with imported European honeybees
figuratively folds back on her youthful love for Gemmy, who is a white
man assimilated to Australian culture in an aboriginal community as
well as the historical figure at the heart of the story. In early discussions
of Remembering Babylon, an exclusive focus on human dimensions
fuelled critiques of Malouf ’s silencing of indigenous people’s voices
in favour of spinning a pastoral idyll that privileges European view-
points. More recently, Clare Archer-Leane links the novel’s concerns
with human animality to its visualisations of human-animal encounters
in order to show how the story deconstructs romanticised nature in
order to introduce a more explicitly ‘post-pastoral’ vision (2014, p. 5).
Her argument builds from an animal-centred reading of the novel by
Graham Murphy, who persuades that Gemmy unwittingly calls atten-
tion to the ‘uncomfortable truth’ of the common human animality of
colonisers and their ‘others’ (2011, p. 75). Yet, as encounters that do
not idealise or transcend their conditions, the narrative moments fea-
turing human-animal intimacies reveal struggles to articulate new ways
of relating (Archer-Leane 2014, p. 8), perhaps nowhere so clearly as in
the depiction of Janet’s bees.
European honeybees kept harmoniously alongside stingless native
varieties invite another kind of symbolic reading as utopian-animal alter-
natives to the novel’s fraught human-colonial politics. But the particu-
lars of Janet’s bee encounters layer in a practical transformative potential
that leads her off course from settlement life, perhaps most significantly
because Janet is the novel’s only major white character born in Australia.
She initially laments that she cannot share directly in nostalgia for her
family’s Scottish home, but, as the story unfolds, their expressions of
260 S. McHUGH
longing lean towards replication, even parody, of European pastoral ide-

als. Like Erdrich’s Bazil, Janet introduces a different relation to non-
human personhood and indigenous land claims, and the swarm scene
explains how. Suddenly finding herself covered in bees, newly pubescent
Janet remains uninjured not simply because she remains still in her own
presence of mind but more importantly because she melds with the hive
mind, engaging with swarm consciousness: ‘her mind had for a moment
been their unbodied one and she had been drawn into the process and
mystery of things’ (Malouf 1994, p. 143). Suggesting more to the
coincidence that the typical bee swarm weighs exactly the same as the
neurons in a human brain (3 lb/1.5 kilograms), the scene is also a rare
attempt to represent swarm thinking.
In the absence of any all-knowing leader, planner, or even supervisor,
the twenty- to eighty-thousand bees of a hive govern themselves collec-
tively, a process that becomes all the more critical when several thousand
peel off to found a new colony. Whether bees or brain cells, the indi-
vidual unit contributes limited information or intelligence to a process
that results in decisive action on the part of the whole superorganism.
Seeley’s studies of how bee swarms almost always choose the best avail-
able nesting location lead him to conclude that they serve also as com-
municative models ‘for building groups far smarter than the smartest
individuals in them’ (2010, p. 7). Because this all-important delibera-
tion happens only after they have left their old home, the waggle-dances
through which bees share and deliberate options are performed atop
each other’s bodies, in a swarming mass. Janet thus becomes conscious
of something greater than she could ever have known as the bees repur-
pose her body as a temporary communication platform.
Seeing herself afterward ‘through Gemmy’s eyes’, in ‘his astonished
look’ (Malouf 1994, p. 144), Janet knows instantly that she has become
permanently altered by her sense of communication within the swarm.
The novel does not clarify whether the swarm is of imported European
or native stingless bees—and among the latter, whether it might be one
of the most common two Australian honeybee species, Tetragonula
carbonaria or hockingsi—which in itself seems significant, blurring the
non-human lines of native and coloniser, just as Gemmy does in the
human realm. As a first-generation settler, Janet’s life with hybridised
bees allows her to body forth an alternative to the displacement and
destruction that is the fate of his adoptive community at the hands of
other white people, an unlikely alliance among the old and new natives
of different species taking shape in other contemporary swarming fic-

tions as well.
In Sue Monk Kidd’s bestseller, The Secret Life of Bees, the swarm
experience inspires the girl Lily to flee from a brutal father with her
African-American nanny, who in the Jim-Crow-era deep Southern USA
is threatened with lynching for registering to vote. Reminiscent of
Erdrich’s Bazil’s house, the bee swarm originates from a hive within an
outer wall of Lily’s childhood home, and in a way that leads to a refram-
ing of personal suffering within political issues. Like Janet, Lily becomes
‘the perfect center of a whirlwind cloud’ (Kidd 2002, p. 4) of bees, only
one that quickly disappears, indicating a rare split decision that can result
in the failure to form a new colony. With the girl as its sole human wit-
ness, the swarm arrives here too as an inspiration for socially progres-
sive change. Lily and her nanny quickly find shelter in a community of
African-American women who worship with honey in the tradition of
their slave ancestors, and she apprentices beekeeping with their leader.
More a commercial than critical success, The Secret Life of Bees inspires
far more explicit accusations of ‘cultural theft’ (Grobman 2008) than
Remembering Babylon, though along similar lines. The events of 1964’s
Freedom Summer, a pivotal moment in African-American history, are
reduced to a backdrop for a white writer’s story of a self-identified white
girl becoming profoundly changed by being welcomed into an intimate
group of black women. Trading in racial stereotypes, the novel intro-
duces all of the black women as caricatures, whether mammies, haters, or
nutters, but importantly does not leave them there.
That all the central female characters eventually and explicitly ques-
tion racist reductions of people to type aligns them with Bazil, Gemmy,
and Janet as complicated, changing, and changed characters in (rather
than caricatures of) painful social legacies, in this case, the US history
of slavery and segregation. While Janet gains a sense of female empow-
erment and appreciation for others’ indigenous knowledges, for Lily
intimacy with the bees begins a process that leads her to embrace the
evolving animist faith that brings together ‘all these women, all this
love’ (Kidd 2002, p. 301). And, undermining Lily’s first-person narra-
tion, all along the novel hints that the girl is being kept from knowing
that her long-dead mother wasn’t white, and that she may be directly
descended of the bee-loving black women, which does not seem to
matter in the end. Following a pre-apis-industrial-agricultural model
in which beehives are maintained in situ, the descendants of imported
262 S. McHUGH
European honeybees and African slaves make a life and a living peace-
ably together in the end.
Such a possibility is more explicitly pursued in Lindsay Eagar’s The
Hour of the Bees (2016), in which adolescent Carol comes to embrace
her heritage through witnessing her grandfather’s fanciful stories of bee
swarms come true. A young adult novel, the narrative mostly centres
on the Chicana protagonist’s dramas with her sister and other school-
girls, but is punctuated throughout by her grandfather’s insistence that
they embrace their ‘Spanish’ heritage in the New Mexico desert. Just as
in Laline Paull’s apis-centric The Bees (2014), another novel set and pub-
lished in the twenty-first century, humans and honeybees alike are slated to
fall victim to the displacement of Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer ideals with
the dubious progress of industrial agriculture. As part of learning to appre-
ciate what bees can do, however, Carol intervenes on their behalf and in a
way that ultimately saves the family farm because she comes to value her
heritage, as signalled by her final embrace of her birth name Carolina, the
only name by which her grandfather recognises her. Moreover, by the end,
evidence arrives via a swarm of bees that his tall tales of being on the land
for over a thousand years may be true, and that they are therefore also
Native Americans. Her experience of being covered by a swarm results in
her family’s relocation to his family farm, saving it from developers, and
their consequent collective decision to become beekeepers. Although the
cultural reference points otherwise remain vague, the explicit admixture of
Anglo, Chicana, and indigenous elements that Gloria Anzaldúa identifies
in ‘The New Mestiza’ (1987), here dramatised in a coming-to-conscious-
ness with the help of bees, indicates how this particular human-animal
relationship enables complex negotiations of indigeneity.
Through these examples the girl-navigates-indigenous-politics-via-
swarm narrative is seeming to write itself, but under what conditions? If
the massive die-offs of honeybees in the past two decades have inspired
‘a renaissance of bees in the modern imagination’ (Botelho 2016,
p. 99), then it only becomes evident when bees move to the center of
the story. Bee-centric narratives like Paull’s The Bees and Jay Hosler’s
graphic fiction Clan Apis (2000) invite readers to learn about life in the
colony from bees’ perspectives, but the present-day conditions of disaster
enframe the latter novel’s hive in the form of a severely depleted, indus-
trial landscape. Spinning out this trajectory, when honeybees themselves
are threatened with extinction in Generation A, a more profoundly trans-
formative potential appears to emerge.
Becoming Swarm
Published a year after Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves and arguably the
most prominent contemporary novel to detail the looming global
threats accelerated by the commercialisation of honeybee pollination,
Generation A likewise casts honeybees as plot drivers, only in a more
prominent role. After their mysterious disappearance from the entire
planet, honeybees miraculously reappear only to die in stinging incidents
that become major global events. All are recounted through the perspec-
tives of their victims, thus setting the polyvocal structure of the novel as
well as the gathering of five unrelated characters by a ‘supposedly extinct
bug’ (Coupland 2009, p. 50).
At face value, the five people have so little in common that the stings
seem utterly random, scattered as they are across the globe. Only each
recipient proves to have been ‘deeply isolated’ with no prior experience
of meaningful intimacy, and, at the momentous moment, caught in acts
that express a longing to be
involved with the planet—[Zack] using satellites to do sketches in an Iowa

cornfield; [Samantha] making Earth sandwiches in New Zealand; [Julien]
being expelled from virtual gaming worlds in Paris; [Diana] being excom-
municated from the afterworld [by her preacher and sometime lover] in
Ontario; … [and Harj] simply participating in global consumer miasma in
Sri Lanka. (Coupland 2009, p. 151)
Departing from the model set by Coupland’s Generation X (1991),

there is no frame story except the bees’ all-but-extinction, which emerges
between the lines of the first-person trauma narratives more typical of fic-
tions of indigenous creatures (see Woodward, this volume). The world of
Generation A is gloomy—in their lifetimes, honey, apples, and almonds
have become extremely high-end, black market fare, amid a new norm
characterised by rapidly deteriorating transportation, communication, and
economic systems—and, when faced with the question of what they feel
about bees, the stinging victims voice a mixture of remorse for what peo-
ple have done and nostalgia for where they have been, often expressed
through a primal pollination scene featuring bees and wildflowers. The
connection becomes more direct as their shared story develops.
Scientists determine that the bee sting victims or, as Julien dubs them,
the ‘Wonka children’ share a rare aversion to a highly addictive new drug
called Solon that promises to correct the modern maladies of loneliness
264 S. McHUGH
and boredom by making people crave solitude, and making time seem
to pass more quickly. Only the pharmaceutical company leaders know
that, wherever the drug is produced, bees and other insects disappear;
‘beepocalypse’ proves just a symptom of farming’s impending ‘pharma-
geddon’, that is, the agricultural-pharmaceutical complex’s profit-driven,
global-scale ecocide. Through the novel, Solon’s story emerges as that of
a vicious cycle of ameliorating the ‘collective fear about food’ amid the
‘massive crop failures’ of the ever-growing pollination crisis propelled by
the drug’s production (Coupland 2009, p. 136).
According to Harj, the group’s eternal optimist, the sudden self-res-
urrection of their individual bees is meant to call attention to more than
just the Wonka children’s natural resistance to the drug. He thinks that
honeybees want ‘to let the world know that the bees are still around’,
and ‘in a highly visible manner that seemed entirely calculated […] to
give humans hope and encouragement’ (Coupland 2009, p. 136).
Actively shaping stories, honeybees foster hope in people who can repli-
cate their eusocial model in order to eliminate the very threat to collec-
tive existence.
For the Wonka children’s immunity to Solon lies in their capacity to
produce a rare protein that serves as a cheap starter for Solon as well
as its potential antidote. As Diana puts it, the bees highlight how the
five are ‘damaged in a distinct way … [via] our mutant protein-making
genes’ (Coupland 2009, p. 151). Initially this information is suppressed
from them while technicians milk their blood in laboratory isolation,
effectively treating them as industrial-agricultural animals, and, worse,
surreptitiously cloning their brain material and feeding it to them all
to see what happens to their mutant protein when shared across bod-
ies. Serge, a researcher gone rogue, reveals these horrific details after he
holes up with the Wonka children on the pretext of further study, but
really to speed up the process whereby the five find that their shared pro-
teins enable them, through the stimulus of oral storytelling, to become
a collective ‘superentity’ like a swarm, smarter than the smartest indi-
vidual among them (Coupland 2009, p. 355). When this happens, they
narrowly avert Serge’s attempt to murder and eat them in search of the
ultimate high, but where this happens also matters to the story of honey-
bees.
The location of Serge’s final experiment is Haida Gwaii, a western-
Canadian island group of multiple significances, including biodiverse
landscapes so rich that they have been called the Galápagos of the
North, archaeological sites dating back 13000 years, and a continu-

ous presence of Haida people across eight millennia. The site where
the last bee colony died in the near future of Coupland’s fiction,
the setting serves also as a final frontier in the Haida’s battle against
Solon, which makes users untrustworthy because they ‘stop caring
about the tribe’ (Coupland 2009, p. 173). As the Wonka children
form a ‘hive mind’ that thwarts the evil scientist’s plan (Coupland
2009, p. 344), the five observe the sudden, violent disintegration of
the Haida, and conclude that Serge has more successfully pursued
another mad plan to use Solon, as Zack says, ‘to destroy a tribe—a
society’ (Coupland 2009, p. 347).
The ending restores their agency, however, as the remaining Haida
gather at the site of the last beehive, ceremonially taking the drug
together, one by one experiencing its alienating effects to their collec-
tive destruction. Although Zack wants to intervene in what appears to be
a mass cultural suicide, Diana clarifies that it’s the tribe’s own business,
‘something larger than us … [that] played itself out’ (Coupland 2009,
p. 361). Like the colonial bees before them, indigenous humans can-
not continue with the ordinary business of life after the destruction of
the very conditions within which they once could negotiate alternatives,
but their final gesture is as collective as it is constructive. Ultimately, the
swarm intelligence or ‘hive mind’ activated by honeybees in the Wonka
children transforms them from isolated, vulnerable individuals into a self-
protecting collective, and witnessing the Haida’s dissolution commits
them to continue together through storytelling.
Especially in comparison with the earlier fictions, in which charac-
ters’ encounters with non-human sentience in a swarm event inspires
their resistance to oppression through embrace of indigenous knowl-
edges, the CCD-like fate of honeybees along with a tribe—and both
in their different ways instructing the Wonka children about how to
negotiate collective life and death—figures a message about the prac-
tice of fiction so compelling that in critical discussions of Generation
A so far it appears to have staved off any allegations of cultural theft.
Projecting a near future in which honeybees’ disappearance signals
severe diminishments of global plant varieties, food supplies, mobility,
and economies, Generation A’s most visible loss is a culturally specific,
communal sense of connectivity embodied by bees, lamented by the
last of the Haida, and partially recovered across species lines by the
Wonka children.
266 S. McHUGH
Swarming Futures
Midway through Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden
Pavilion—told from the perspective of the arsonist of the titular national
monument—the narrator interrupts his own story with that of a bee.
More precisely, amid the tale of a rising single-minded obsession with
the destruction of beauty as embodied by the Golden Temple, another
potential for desire takes wing through a cross-species encounter:
It came flying through the omnipresent light on its golden wings, then
from among all the numerous chrysanthemums chose one flower and hov-
ered in front of it. I tried to look at the flower through the bee’s eyes. The
chrysanthemum stood there with its proper petals spread out, yellow and
flawless […] a suitable object for the bee’s desire. What a mysterious thing
it was to lurk there, breathing, as an object for that shapeless, flying, flow-
ing, moving desire! (Mishima 1990, p. 158)
Although literary insects are often linked to mental breakdowns (think

Kafka’s Gregor Samsa), Mishima’s bee instead nips at the budding psy-
chosis. A momentary peaceful departure for a character set on a course of
violence and utter alienation in post-imperial Japan, the scene glimpses
the positive affect of social engagement with others that makes contem-
porary bee fictions so compelling.
Flash forward 50 years and entomological accounts of swarming
honeybees are revealing democratic negotiations that operate in mirror-
image patterns to the ways in which our own brains’ neurons are increas-
ingly understood as operating in conversation with each other, not
following a chain of command as it was previously assumed. Political sci-
entists embrace the new model of swarming as a more ‘lively’ and accu-
rate baseline for the ‘agentic assemblages’ that constitute the vibrancy
of social engagements (Bennett 2010, pp. 31–32). Media theorists map
emerging political potentials through the swarm-like orchestrations of
flash mobs through social media (Parikka 2010, p. 43). The novels gath-
ered here indicate an even greater potential in swarms to negotiate and
share knowledges of indigenous creatures.
What may be more difficult to grasp is how the social move-
ments grounded in these formations are guided by ‘alternative log-
ics of thought, organization, and sensation’ (Parikka 2010, p. xix) that
are more directly apprehended through identifying overlaps between
the ways in which humans and animals operate as superorganisms.
The performance of ‘the power of the politically activated multitude,

in the form of the swarm’, is not so much an emancipatory guide as an
affirmation of long-suppressed political potentials (Chambers-Letson
2014, p. 109). What the fictions discussed above suggest is that learn-
ing more about honeybees may have to involve unlearning our sense and
sensibilities of them as instrumental objects or individual subjects, and
along the way reckoning with the settler legacies that reinforce such lim-
ited views.
Anxieties about bees’ and other eusocial insects’ separation from ‘human
will’ used to result in dismissal of such ‘radical autonymy’, what Eric Brown
elaborates as their existence ‘beyond our capacity for language’ (2008,
p. xii). Identifying a potential backlash, Jacques Derrida could easily iden-
tify ‘the old yet modernized topos of the bee’ in Jacques Lacan’s discount-
ing of honeybee communication as ‘coding’—that is, as exhibiting purely
mechanical or ‘animal’ reaction without the possibility of a response (2008,
p. 123)—despite compounding scientific evidence that over the past century
relentlessly demonstrates how bees share knowledges at and beyond human
capacities. The scientific histories of apis-industrial agriculture may well be
caught up in settler histories of transporting these colonial animals outside
their native habitats and into violent scenes of confrontation in indigenous
human histories, but, fortunately, the story appears to be changing.
Appreciated as the fulcrums of ecosystems, pollinators like honeybees
are so effective at maintaining the genetic diversity that allows plants to
adapt to changing conditions through flowers that with bees’ help pro-
duce well-formed fruits with fertile seeds that it is not just the plants but
also other birds and insects as well as all sorts of other organisms that
in turn rely on them in order to flourish, in some cases even to survive.
Although pollinators are not limited to honeybees, their recent, rapid
and substantial incorporation into global food chains makes it easy to see
them as brokers of the futures of richly mixed-species communities. As
honeybees become both mechanism of and limit to modern-industrial
mechanisms whereby people exert control over each other and other spe-
cies, the ‘hive mind’ or collective-personhood intelligence epitomised by
their swarming behaviour may be precisely why they are calling forth rec-
ognition of complexly indigenous knowledges of human-animal r elations.
Erdrich and Coupland cast them in a biopolitical frame, wherein trau-
mas begin ‘before the law’, with the utter disregard for human as well as
nonhuman lives deemed less than fully human (Wolfe 2012), and more.
Together these novels indicate that what bees communicate may not be
268 S. McHUGH
so important as how they do so, that is, as radically democratic collec-

tive models of and for Native North American societies. To date, only
Coupland elaborates how that may be the very source of their contin-
ued existence, and the only hope for our own and other species. Taking
wing through the interwoven stories of multiple human narrators in each
novel, honeybees emerge as endangered communities not just like but
deeply entangled with human ones, social forms that are flying, flow-
ing, moving desire out of the exterminationist trap and into a flourishing
future, at least, in fiction.
Note
1. O.K. Singh spells out how their position differs from that of ‘the trib-
als’ assisted by the NGO Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada
Movement) who protested their displacement from ancestral lands by
‘mega-dam construction projects’ along India’s Narmada River because
the Morichjhãpi refugees were multiply-displaced persons reforming them-
selves as an active threat to state forces when forming a ‘“nation” within
the nation’ (2011, p. 250).
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Chambers-Letson, J.T. 2014. Commentary: A new fable of the bees. In Animal
acts: Performing species today, ed. U. Chaudhuri, and H. Hughes, 104–110.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Copeland, M. 1983. Black Elk speaks and Ceremony: Two visions of horses.
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Derrida, J. 2008. The animal that therefore I am, ed. M-L. Mallet and trans, D.
Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.
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Erdrich, L. 2008. The plague of doves. New York: Harper Perennial.
Ghosh, A. 2004. The hungry tide. New York: Harper Collins.
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Malouf, D. 1994. Remembering Babylon. New York: Vintage.
Mbebe, A. 2003. Necropolitics, trans. L. Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.
McHugh, S. 2011. Animal stories: Narrating across species lines. Minneapolis:
Mishima, Y. 1990. The temple of the golden Pavillion, trans. and ed. I. Morris.
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doves, 103–114. New York: Continuum.
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Author Biography
Susan McHugh is a Professor of English, and researches and teaches liter-
ary, visual and scientific stories of species. She is the author of Animal Stories:
Narrating across Species Lines (Minnesota, 2011), as well as Dog (Reaktion,
2004). She co-edited Human-Animal Studies (Routledge 2017), The Routledge
Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (Routledge, 2014) and Literary Animals
Look, a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2013).
She co-edits the book series Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, and
serves as Managing Editor of the Humanities for Society & Animals.
Index
A camel, 75
African-American people, 96 cat, 16, 59
Africans, 3, 6, 8, 15, 42 gemsbok (oryx), 27, 29, 30
Albinism, 237 giraffe, 75
Alice in wonderland, 205, 207, 208 jackal, 61, 75
American Gods, 7, 119, 121, 123, lion, 24, 27, 61, 75, 149
125, 129, 132 lizard, 75
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 262 ostrich, 72, 75, 132, 146
Anansi Boys, 7, 119, 122, 129, 130, quagga, 29, 30, 75
132, 133 snake (Cobra), 18, 20, 22, 72, 75
Animality, 24, 39, 49, 59, 60, 65, 69, steenbok, 65
70, 78, 96, 99, 206, 234, 259 swallow, 76
Animals (image “Let us rest”) swift, 76
(image “Believe as you wish”), 143 tortoise, 77
(image “Sacred dance”), 64, 65, 70 zebra, 72, 75, 149, 156
antelope therianthrope, 69 Animism, 41, 49, 50, 52, 119, 120,
egret, 75, 76 122, 135, 164, 178, 236, 238,
horse or quagga, 29, 30, 146 246
jackal therianthrope, 18 Anthropocentrism, 161, 163
lizard, 75 Arrows, 25, 29
ostrich, 72, 75, 132, 146 Art, 3, 5, 7, 9, 60, 62, 63, 78, 79, 95,
snake (cobra), 18, 20, 22 98, 144, 165, 178, 197, 212,
zebra, 72, 75, 149, 156 219, 221, 225
Animals (text) Asante, 130–133
antelope, 23, 65, 66, 69, 74, 75 Australia, 42, 259
bird, 131–133
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 271

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56874-4
272 Index
Australian aboriginal people, 43, 178, numinous, 66

259 transcendence, 66
Cixous, h., 214, 215
Clare Archer-Leane, 259
B Colonisation, 74, 122
Baboons, 14, 17, 22–25, 27, 48, 222, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), 253
224 Communities, 30, 40, 124, 191, 250,
Butler, Charles, 254 251, 267, 268
Bataille, Georges Couto, Mia, 231
continuous and discontinuous Cruise, w., 7, 98, 207, 220
being, 69
eroticism, 69
excess, 69 D
taboo, 69 Death, 20, 30, 62, 63, 70, 79, 107,
transgression, 69 112, 129, 133, 146, 192, 234,
violence, 70 235, 239, 242, 257
world of play, art, 70 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Fêlix,
world of work, tools, 70 50, 60, 65, 66, 78, 96, 99, 100,
Becoming animal, 20, 166 103, 104, 109, 209, 214, 215,
Bennett, Jane, 94 218
Biophilia, 179 becoming-animal, 60, 65, 66, 78
Biopolitics, 250, 251, 254 becoming-vegetable, 65, 78
Bird-David, Nurit, 50, 120 Derrida, j., 201, 267
Brown, Eric, 267 Douglas Coupland, 251
Bregin, Ellana, 60, 61, 63, 64, 68 Drakensberg-Maloti, 20, 21, 28
Bleek-Lloyd archive, 35, 40, 44, 51
Bushman, #Khomani, 61–63, 65, 75
Bushmen (San), 4–6, 27, 29, 38, 48, E
63, 66, 68, 76 Earth Mother, 77, 78
Ecocriticism, 3, 39, 41, 162
Ecology, 41, 45, 53, 161
C Écriture feminine, 206, 214, 215
Cagn, 13, 18, 21–24, 26, 27, 31, 242 Eland, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 27, 30
Canada, 175 Empathy, 51, 167, 169, 174
Cape honeybee subspecies (Apis mel- Erdrich, Louise, 186, 251
lifera capensis), 257 E.O. Wilson, 254
Cattle, 15, 17, 212–214
Chicana people, 262
Christianity F
Devil, Satan, 70 ‘Feminine monarchie’, 258
god, 68, 69, 74 Folktales (kukummi), 40
Index 273
G India, 154, 249

Gods, 2, 111, 119, 122, 123, 128, Indigeneity, 3, 5, 145, 157, 166,
133, 134 250–252
Ghosh, Amitav, 249 Indigenous knowledge systems, 60, 78
Guenther, Matthias, 26, 40, 60, 63, Iroquois people, 254
147
Gaiman, Neil, 7, 119, 121
Gordon, Robert, 48, 51 J
Gunter, e., 206, 210 James, Alan, 37, 42–45, 48, 51, 53
Gynecentric community, 258 Jay Hosler, 262
Jefferson, Thomas, 253
J.M. Coetzee, 208, 257, 258
H Jose Eduardo Agualusa, 231
Haraway, Donna, 95, 169, 174, 252
Haida Gwaii, 264
Haida people, 252, 265 K
Harry Garuba, 232 //Kabbo, 35, 38, 40, 42, 47
Healing, 25, 63, 64, 72, 87, 190, 247 /Kaggen, 41, 49, 146, 147
Heritage, 128, 134, 175, 188, 255, Krog, Antjie, 42, 231, 236
262 Karl von Frisch, 164, 254
Hölldobler, Bert, 254 Karoo, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153
Holistic or holism, 37, 38, 165, 166, Kopano Ratele, 231
170, 174, 236 Kruiper, Belinda, 6, 59, 61, 63–65
Honeybees, Australian (Tetrogonula Kruiper, Dawid, 38, 62
carbonaria and Tetrogonula hock- Kruiper, Oupa Regopstaan, 61
ingsi), 260 Kruiper, Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman,
Honeybees, European (Apis mellifera), 6, 59, 60, 71, 73
252
Honeybees, rock bees (Apis dorsata),
250 L
Horses, 14–17, 177 Land
Human-animal studies, 4, 162 dispossession, 61, 236
Hunting, 14, 16, 21, 22, 29, 40, 64, restitution, 62
66, 165 sacred, 64, 65
Lindauer, Martin, 254
Lange, Mary, 60
I Lewis-Williams, David
Identity, 8, 19, 22, 24, 49, 61, 99, altered states of consciousness, 66
103, 122, 126, 129, 130, 133, entoptics, geometrics, 63
140, 147, 192, 213, 216, 233, portals to the spirit world, 76
239 potency, 64, 66, 111
Immanence, 101 shamanism, 68, 72, 79
274 Index
therianthropes, 63 Pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical corpo-

trance dance, 60, 63, 66, 72 rations, 264
Lindsay Eagar, 262 Plant studies, 161
Literary animal studies, 7, 161–163, Plants
165, 169, 174, 251 flowers, 76, 267
Lynching, 251, 252, 256, 261 leaves, 76
Lacan, Jacques, 267 trees, 76
vines, 76
Poetry, 5
M Postcolonialism, 4, 7, 39, 212
Madness, 105, 205, 209, 210, 222 Postmodern, 60, 61, 78, 93, 100,
Mantis, 26, 75, 146, 147, 149, 157, 120, 122, 129, 134
242 Procreation, 70
McHugh, 8, 133 Profane, 70, 79
Mestiza, 262
Mbebe, Achille, 251
Metamorphic imagination, 163 Q
Mishima, Yukio, 266 Qing, 6, 13, 15–22, 25–28, 30, 31, 72
Morichjhãpi, massacre of, 249
Mphiripiri, Nhamo Anthony, 60
Myth, 6, 19, 49, 60, 74, 100, 131, R
193, 241, 245, 249 Rabbit, 16, 17, 207
Rhebok, 17–20, 25, 30
Rock art, 5, 6, 13, 16–18, 20, 21, 31,
N 39, 60, 63, 72, 74–76, 78
Native American beliefs, 177 Rainwater, Catherine, 255
Nonhuman beings, 233
Norse mythology, 123
Nosisi Mpolweni, 231 S
San, 5, 6, 14, 16, 17, 30, 31, 42, 63,
106, 146, 147, 157
O Seeley, Thomas, 254
Ojibwe people, Ojibwan relational Shamanism, 4–6, 79, 101, 164
matrix, 252, 256 Shamans, 19, 20, 66, 72, 101, 111,
205, 225
Snakes, 18, 20, 25, 27, 75
P South Africa, 5, 6, 8, 59, 61, 63, 76,
Parikka, Jussi, 266 87, 112, 140, 146, 147, 150,
Passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migrato- 153, 156, 212, 213, 257
rius), 255 Spirit, spirituality
Paull, Laline, 262 flight to spirit world, 75
Index 275
horizontal and vertical spirituality, Trauma, 7, 8, 231–233, 235–237,

68 239–241, 244, 246, 247, 263
mediation, 72 Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
sacred, 1, 4, 64, 66, 68, 77, 243 233
soul, 38, 61, 68
spirit world, 64, 68, 75, 76, 78
supernatural, 8, 31, 64, 66, 75 U
Steenbok, 65 Umwelt, 164, 165, 168, 172, 174
Stories, 1, 3, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22, The unconscious, 7
24–31, 44, 127, 129, 130, 132, United States, 175, 176
133, 144, 149, 164, 171, 185,
187–189, 191, 194, 196, 197,
199, 202, 232, 243, 250, 254, V
264 Vizenor, Gerald, 7, 186
Story, 21–23, 25–27, 29–31, 49, 64,
123, 129, 133, 146–148, 151,
153, 156, 164, 177, 178, 185, W
187, 189, 191, 193, 194 West Africa, 122, 130
Swanepoel, n., 6, 7, 86, 88, 91, 206, Wolfe, Cary, 5, 174
212, 214, 216, 218, 221, 224 Watson, Stephen, 42, 46
Symbiosis, 171, 253
Sympathy, 174, 251
X
/Xam, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26–30, 42,
T 43, 45–47, 49, 53
Therianthrope, 72, 75
Therianthropes, theriomorphs, 18–20,
63, 66, 69, 72, 78, 79, 109 Z
Theriomorphs, 78 Zoo-centric, 165, 170
Tigers, 250
Totemism, 164, 178
Transcendence, 66, 108, 198, 245
Transformation, 7, 22, 25, 66, 72, 98,
107, 140, 147, 150, 151, 153,
199, 200

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indigenous creatures,

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940220

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Credit line: Ariadne Van Zandbergen/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Part I Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories,

2 Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-Maloti 13

3 Kabbo Sings the Animals 35

4 Interrogating the Sacred Art of Vetkat Regopstaan

Part II Indigenous Wisdoms, Animal Aesthetics,

5 Spirit Guards: A Squad of Ceramic Dogs in South Africa 85

6 Tricksters, Animals, New Materialities, and Indigenous

Part III Global Flows of Animal Myths and Allegories

7 The Porosity of Human/Non-human Beings in Neil

8 Animated Animals: Allegories of Transformation

9 Magic Wells, the Stream and the Flow: The Promise

Part IV Creative Interventions in Literary and Art Histories

10 Border Crossings: Animals, Tricksters and Shape-Shifters

Part V Indigenous Traumas and Recoveries across

12 ‘The Only Facts are Supernatural Ones’: Dreaming

13 Cross-Pollinating: Indigenous Knowledges of Extinction

Wendy Woodward is Emerita Professor in English Literature at the

Fig. 4.1 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Glo ‘Nou ja glo as jy wil’

Fig. 8.1 Khumba film poster 141

Wendy Woodward and Susan McHugh

As we were completing this project in 2016, indigenous people made

© The Author(s) 2017 1

underpinned by the assumption that human-animal studies offers a dif-

because the gesture empowers denigration of humans associated with ani-

ecological moment. Weaving together themes from previous essays with

ecological knowledge, several contributors enhance connections across

Susan McHugh is a Professor of English at the University of New England,

Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories,

Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-

© The Author(s) 2017 13

of folklore of the /Xam-speaking San of the northern Cape Colony.

Qing and Rock Painting

Qing’s enigmatic words have exercised interpreters since he uttered

In any case, Challis observes, ‘many of the diagnostic contexts in which

again, it could be argued, on the basis of a reading of the role of animals

Qing’s Animal Stories

relationship between animal and human more generally in Qing’s stories

with it a greater, but not an absolute, differentiation between human and

She takes refuge with Qwanciqutshaa, a reclusive chief associated with

The problem it seems is not the animality or otherness of baboons

Cagn himself sometimes turns into an animal, as does his counterpart in

Relationship with the /Xam Materials

Kabbo Sings the Animals

© The Author(s) 2017 35

the little snake

hyenas eat meat that is raw,

they all eat things that are raw

(James 2001, p. 61)

From these opening lines we might draw some observations, such as

[C]onservationists need to re-think their dependence on standard Western

Such valorisation of ‘indigenous Bushman’ eco-knowledge is indeed

increasingly water-poor world, to Patricia Glyn’s recent (2013) account

It is common for people who do not appreciate the restorative value of

Our psychological trauma at this separation from source manifests in

That ‘Western’—now global—modernity has proved unprecedentedly

Part I Reimagining Animal Myths: Art, Stories,

Part II Indigenous Wisdoms, Animal Aesthetics,

Part IV Creative Interventions in Literary and Art Histories

Part V Indigenous Traumas and Recoveries across

Fig. 4.1 Vetkat Regopstaan Boesman Kruiper, Glo ‘Nou ja glo as jy wil’

Fig. 8.1 Khumba film poster 141

underpinned by the assumption that human-animal studies offers a dif-

Susan McHugh is a Professor of English at the University of New England,

Qing and the Animals of the Drakensberg-

Qing and Rock Painting

Relationship with the /Xam Materials

Animism, Animals and Alterity

the /Xam people do not kill frogs, because if they do

Interrogating the Sacred Art of Vetkat

Critique of the Sacred

Vetkat’s Art as Departure from Tradition

Spirit Guards: A Squad of Ceramic Dogs

Fig. 5.1 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi Ceramic. Group detail (2004).

Fig. 5.2 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi Ceramic. Two-headed dog detail 1 and 2

Fig. 5.3 Nicolene Swanepoel, Nkisi Ceramic. Studio detail (2016). Courtesy of

Dark Haecceities: Deleuzoguattarian and Afrofuturist

Mapping the Ectoplasmic, Treacherous and Fantastical

Asha Zero: Shattering Assumptions of Origins

Mer Roberts: Crafting Vehicles of Experimental