excerpt from born liars

im doing a test translation for a book project thats gonna be published in turkey and wanted to share the part below about shamans...

Vancouver Island sits adjacent to the North American mainland, its southern tip pointing towards Seattle, its northern tip looking out across the Pacific. On the map it resembles a giant longboat frozen in the act of leaving the shore. Between the island and the western coast of British Columbia is a slender strip of water, home to fjord-like inlets, sounds, and hundreds of densely forested, rocky, almost impenetrable islands. For thousands of years, a fishing people known as the Kwakiutl populated this archipelago, as well as the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland. The Kwakiutl were famous for their beautiful art and pottery and for idiosyncratic customs like the potlatch, in which the chiefs of different bands competed to give away the most wealth. They were also famous for their shamans - healers who could cure people of their sickness by communicating with the spirits. On a primitive recording made in 1887 by the anthropologist Franz Boas, we can hear a Kwakiutl shaman singing a healing song. The shaman's name is Quesalid (pronounced Kesalid), and Boas also transcribed his account of how he became a shaman. It is a story that pulsates with the mysterious power of deceit.

In Native American tribes, shamans were something like a cross between rock stars and priests. They were highly respected, even feared, and they tended to be rich, because families were prepared to pay highly for their services. In his youth, Quesalid was an angry young man; almost alone amongst his friends, he was sceptical about the powers of the shamans, and resentful of their prestige. He believed they were frauds who preyed on the needy, the vulnerable and the foolish, and became determined to expose them. First, he would win their trust so that they would share their secrets with him. Then he would tell the world, and break their power forever.

Quesalid started to associate with the shamans in his community until eventually one of them offered him an apprenticeship. Sure enough, his first lessons were an education in deceit: he was taught how to simulate fainting and nervous fits (sometimes shamans would appear to be in a battle with the spirits) and about the practice of “dreamers”: spies employed by the shamans to eavesdrop on private conversations around the village and report back to them, so that later they could seem to intuit the symptoms and origin of the patient's condition. He even learnt the best trick of all - the signature move of Kwakiutl shamans. When a member of the tribe fell sick, the shaman would be called for a consultation, and if he deemed it worthwhile, an elaborate ritual would be enacted. At a fire-lit ceremony filled with music, singing and chanting, the shaman would lean over the body of the sick person, place his mouth to the affected part - the patient's chest, for example - and appear to suck out the evil spirit. This much was common to all the shamanistic schools of the Northwest. The twist added by the Kwakiutl shamans was that they would actually suck a physical manifestation of the disease out of the sick person's body. It formed a powerful dramatic climax to the performance, and rarely failed to cure. Now Quesalid learned how it worked: before placing his mouth to the patient's body, the shaman hides a little tuft of eagle down in his mouth and bites his gums to make them bleed. As the drums beat faster and the music comes to a crescendo, he lifts up his head and spits out the blood-soaked tuft. He then solemnly presents it to his patient and the onlookers.

Quesalid's worst suspicions were confirmed: even the greatest magic of the shamans was in truth, a shabby trick. He determined to continue his inquiry before publicising his findings. But then something unexpected happened. His apprenticeship amongst the shamans became more widely known, and one day he was summoned by the family of a sick boy who had dreamed of Quesalid as his healer. It was known that when this happened, whoever the ailing person had dreamed of would be more likely to cure them. The family, who lived on a nearby island, were desperate for help; Quesalid could hardly say no. As night fell, men from the boy's village came in their canoes to collect him. Having already secreted some eagle down under his upper lip, he set off, nervously, to perform his first healing ceremony.

Coming ashore, he was welcomed into the house of the boy's grandfather. In the middle of the house was a fire, surrounded by men, women and children. The boy was at the rear. He seemed very weak, his breath short. As Quesalid knelt down besides him, the boy opened his eyes and said in a faint voice, “Welcome. Have mercy on me that I may live,” and pointed to his lower ribs. Quesalid placed his mouth to the boy's body, biting into his gums as he did so. After a few seconds he lifted his head and spat the bloody down into his hand. He sang a sacred song taught to him by the shamans and danced around the fire, holding the down in his right hand for all to see, as the musicians played louder and faster. Quesalid returned to the boy, now flanked by his mother and father, and showed him his former sickness, before burying it in the hot ashes of the fire. The boy sat up. He was better already.

Afterwards Quesalid was acclaimed everywhere as a great shaman. Perhaps the only person who didn't believe that Quesalid had performed something magical was Quesalid, who, retaining his critical distance, interpreted the boy's recovery in psychological terms - it was successful, he said, “because he believed strongly in his dream about me”. But Quesalid's success had shaken his scepticism. As word of his first triumph spread, he accepted invitations to practice his technique at the healing ceremony of neighbouring tribes, and found that he could cure patients that they had declared beyond hope. In the years that followed he became a fully-qualified shaman and grew famous and wealthy practicing the art he once dismissed as a sham. Quesalid didn't tell Boas exactly how he believed his own cures worked. But he certainly took great pride in his work. He would have been insulted had some cynical young man called him a liar.

 

right on

 

umm..yes? ...and i know about enes, right down to his eligibility problems, etc...

 

lol, thats one thing so unturkish about me its not even funny....men who dislike raki here are like....well, they are viewed as if there is something fundamentally wrong with them you know?....i hate the way raki smells and tastes.....