Euphemisms about Scatological Crap.

My first week of classes, done. As usual, I have an 8:30 class Friday morning, which was harder than usual to get up for this morning since I stayed up too late talking with the housemates about hair removal systems, soup, and the cathartic effects of swearing. I've intelligently participated in a discussion about Native American Folk Tales and taken five pages of notes, and I still don't think I'm technically awake.

The above discussion (had, not surprisingly, in my American Lit. class) was a little frustrating to me, because everyone seemed so embarrassed and puritanical about it. Y'see, we were supposed to read Christopher Columbus and some Native American trickster tales in order to learn (once again) that the native population of this land was a large, diverse, and strongly oral culture which the Europeans raped, pillaged and looted, all while maintaining that they were 'bringing the heathens into the saving light of Christendom'. Honestly, sometimes I don't even know how I, as a white Christian of European heritage, sleep at night.

Anyways, we read some excerpts from the "Winnebago Trickster Cycle" (BTW, does anyone else find it repulsive that North Americans managed to eradicate an entire tribe and so entirely commercialize them that now we hear 'Winnebago' and we think of a large and inefficient camper van driven by old men in Bermuda shorts?) which, in a nutshell, dealt with 'Trickster' disguising himself as a women by using an elk's kidneys and liver to make breasts and a vagina, then, after he gets fround out, eating a bulb on a bush that sings "He who eats me will defecate" and then farting and shitting so hard he has to swim up out of it.

Pretty graphic, eh? As my professor delicately put it, these were highly 'scatalogical and taboo-oriented tales'.

Now, we come to the point. Really.

The tales weren't nearly as funny, or as interesting, as they could have been, because they were very obviously encrusted over with european puritanical 'editing'. These tales had to be translated from their native languages, obviously, a process which was done through several different layers of interpreters in the 1910's. What this means is that these tales, which should be talking about shit and sex and farting, instead very primly refer to 'excrement' and 'intercourse' and 'passing wind'.

To use an expression of my own: what a load of shit! The tales are told so literally that any possible knowledge about how these tales would have been enjoyed by the pre-adolescent native children they would have been told to becomes purely speculative. Half the point of these stories is that they are dirty, that they do say words that one wouldn't normally say. This goes against our sense of what is socially acceptable, and so we laugh because our expectation is different from the reality. That's humour, folks!

But this prim and proper white man who sat in his double breasted suit at his mahogany desk, carefully inscribing these words in his finest penmanship, clearly missed that point. By turning 'shit' into 'excrement' he sanitizes the story, makes it clean and scientific. Which basically means that he's killed the whole story. The story is all about what isn't acceptable, what isn't normal -- yet somehow this stupid anthropologist rendered it in acceptable language.

A little excerpt, to show you what's making me so mad:

"Trickster now took an elk's liver and made a vulva from it. Then he took some elk's kidneys and made breasts from them. Finally he put on a woman's dress. In this dress his friends enclosed him very firmly. The dresses he was using were those that the woman who had taken him for a raccoon had given him. Now he stood there transformed into a very pretty woman indeed. Then he let the fox have intercourse with him and make him pregnant, then the jaybird and, finally, the nit. After that he proceeded towards the village."

Leaving aside all the notions of what makes a woman a woman (vagina, breasts, dress -- a whole other topic I could rant for days on) do you see what I mean? How all emotion, all feeling, all humour, all humanity, has been leeched out of this story by the prim and proper words and diction? It's like even in 1912, when the natives were all but dead anyways, and a few anthropologists were racing to collect some few fragments of their culture which had been deemed worthy of study, even then, these white men still couldn't bring themselves to accept native culture fully. They still had to translate it, force it into an acceptable mold, strangle it with Victorian notions of propriety and modesty. It sickens me.

Another quotation:

"Now [Trickster] began to break wind again and again. "So this is why the bulb spoke as it did, I suppose." Once more he broke wind. This time it was very loud, and his rectum began to smart. "Well, surely it is a great thing!" Then he broke wind again, this time with so much force, that he was propelled forward."

The story goes on escalating until Trickster is farting so hard that, even when he gets a whole village to pile on top of him, the force of the explosion still sends everything flying. This is funny! Just say the word 'poop' to any small child, and their ensuing hour of hilarity will convince you that if this native story was told properly, it would enthrall and amuse little children for months, possibly even years.

But thanks to the (pardon the pun) tight asses who translated this, now all we have is a sanitized, academic shell of what was once a story.

[NB -- I swear a lot in this post. Just to let you know, this isn't my normal way of being. I don't swear casually. But, for this post, I partly needed to do it to explain the native tale to you, and partly to express my own frustration and inherited guilt over what the Europeans did to the natives. It feels weird apologizing for swearing in a post where I get mad at someone else for not using explicit language enough, but that's the paradox of being me, I guess.]