Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China by Erik Mueggler

Author:Erik Mueggler [Mueggler, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780226483412
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

A Purchase

As I settled down next to Lichink’æp’ò’s unwashed feet for yet another night, I held out little hope for anything more of Li Bicong. I knew several so-called àpi̠p’ò of his kind: foolish old windbags who, when plied with alcohol, would incoherently mime a few verses of poetic language to impress visitors. I had been down this road early in my fieldwork, and it was humiliating to find myself here again so late in the day. Still, I liked his skill with the flute. Lichink’æp’ò, perhaps kept awake by my own quite horrible feet, was thinking along much the same lines. He scolded me for wasting my money. “The old buffoon just wants to get drunk. Maybe he remembers a little of the nèpi̠—that bit he chanted sounded like something—but probably not. Tomorrow he will be ill with a headache, and he will send us away. You are a big spender, but that doesn’t work with rascals like him.”

In the morning the fine sunshine had given way to fog. We intercepted Li Bicong as he trudged wearily up the hill after his goats, looking unwell. He had vanquished one of the bottles I had given him; the other was not in evidence. We learned later that his wife had confiscated it as predicted. He squatted under the same tree and motioned us to sit. “Let’s get started,” he said, grimacing. I thumbed my recorder and he launched into a rapid stream of five-syllable lines, each passing by in less than a second, followed closely by the next. He didn’t pause until I had to turn over the tape at the thirty-minute mark. After two hours Lichink’æp’ò went down to the house and brought back a jar of tea, which we all shared. Now and then Li Bicong would slow for a story or an explanation. But mostly he chanted at a breakneck pace, for more than four hours. The next day he started in again, this time on the Sleeping in the Forest chant. This performance was slower, since the chant had a more leisurely cadence and most lines had two extra syllables inserted at their center. When we said goodbye the morning after, I gave Li Bicong the last two hundred yuan I carried, braving Lichink’æp’ò’s emphatic disapproving glare. He tucked it into the hollow behind the beam without saying a word.

I delayed my departure from Júzò for two months. Lichink’æp’ò and I spent nearly every day huddled with one àpi̠p’ò or another in my little room in Júzò’s elementary school, playing each rapid verse repeatedly, transcribing it, then working out a translation into ordinary Lòloŋo, usually clarified with Chinese, from which I constructed an English approximation. Parts of the chant, particularly the introductory and concluding segments of each song, were demanding, but our consultants understood most of the rest easily enough. The chief difficulty was length. The male ritualists, who came expecting libations, lasted only an hour or two into each session. But Àp’ìmà stuck, always alert and cheerful, returning each day for nothing more than cup after cup of green tea with red sugar.

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