| Description |
When the design of this string figure emerges, the strings that form the four ‘young girls’ may make some of the figures appear to have ‘a belly’. The string figure-maker and the audience are always excited to see what will emerge, and say e.g. Nambokoyn. Kondamiñ wanjiŋ. ‘Young girls. Two are pregnant.’
Every Awiakay girl knows the consequences of being discovered to be pregnant. If she is not married, she will be pressed by her family to reveal the name of the man with whom she had sex. When she does, the two lovers will go to the village court and will either decide to get married or have the man pay compensation for each time they had sex. Under the pressure to tell who impregnated her, a girl sometimes gives a wrong name, and thus pushes an ‘innocent’ man/boy into marrying her. The boys/men who would often prefer to stay single, usually deny having had anything to do with the girl, but eventually give in to the pressure.
Aware of the consequences of being discovered to be pregnant, the young female string figure-makers are sometimes embarrassed to say that any of the ‘young girls’ in the figures are ‘pregnant’, and just say “young girls”, or even deny that any of them looks pregnant. The young man who helped me transcribe the video footage, bitterly objected when he heard the string figure-maker in the video say that none of the young girls were pregnant. To the young man, it was clear that two of the girls represented in the string figure were ‘pregnant’, and he was thus acting in the way people in the village do when they deliberate about whether or not a young girl is with child.
For the Awiakay, the meaning behind the string figure ‘young girls’ is therefore deeply embedded in their lifeworld: it is charged with social attitudes and personal memories of concrete cases.
A stage in the making of this string figure is named ekia kopa ‘belly button’ (Hoenigman, forthcoming). Although traditional pollution taboos are no longer as strictly observed as they used to be, childbirth and anything connected to it, including words denoting placenta (poŋaya), umbilical cord (ekia) and the baby’s navel (ekia kopa, lit. ‘head of the umbilical cord’), is still not a topic of conversation in the presence of men. However, the string figure-maker who makes ‘young girls’ does indicate when ekia kopa ‘the belly button’ stage is reached, often with some relief, as if to indicate that the ‘young girls’ will soon emerge. Just as being entangled with the umbilical cord can be fatal for a baby, entangling the strings before the ekia kopa stage may mean that the string figure will not come up.
Images:
02: Darja Munbaŋgoapik showing the final design of nambokoyn ‘young girls’
03: nambokoyn ‘young girls’ viewed from the string figure-maker’s perspective
Hoenigman, Darja. Forthcoming. Talking about strings: The language of string figure-making in a Sepik society, Papua New Guinea. Language Documentation & Conservation Journal.
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