| Description |
The word yawiyam refers to young unmarried men. When this string figure emerges, the maker points at the three ‘figures’ in the middle, referring to them as the young men. If any of them looks like it has a belly, they say that there’s a pregnant woman standing there. The final design of this string figure is similar to the ‘young girls’, however, there are four ‘girls’ in that one, whereas only three ‘persons’ appear in this one.
When the design of this string figure is finished, an eloquent maker will pull two strings representing the young men with his or her teeth, hold the two loops between the thumbs and the index fingers, and make them ‘hit’ each other repeatedly, meaning that the young men are fighting now. While doing so, the string figure-maker repeats“yaynmari, yaynmari, siŋganmari, yaynmari, yaynmari, siŋganmari,”. While these are not Awiakay words, and the Awiakay say they do not know their meaning, they sound like words that might have been adopted from (or just phonetically resemble) the neighbouring Karawari language, where –mari is a common ending in male names (for the significance of such untranslatable words in Awiakay songs see Hoenigman 2015: 213–243).
Images:
02: yawiyam: ‘young men’, string figure design
03: ‘young men’ fighting
Hoenigman, Darja. 2015. ‘The talk goes many ways’: Registers of language and modes of performance in Kanjimei, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Canberra: The Australian National University. (PhD thesis.)
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