Encounters with Paul Celan's Poetry by Räsänen Pajari;

Author:Räsänen, Pajari;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 4

Squalls II

Aerophones, Air-Stones

Schwirrhölzer fahren ins Licht, die Wahrheit

gibt Nachricht.

“Schwirrholz” is a bullroarer, an aerophone known from all over the world, but best known as an instrument of the Australian aboriginals, as well as the Maori, and the natives of New Guinea and North America. Among the variants of this instrument is also the traditional toy used in Europe. What should especially interest us here is maybe its status as an aerophone and as the representative of a divine voice or voice of the ancestors, its role in a “drama of death and resurrection” and in initiation rites, especially its relation to circumcision—and finally, the connection between air as “Luftstrom”1 and the rite of circumcision as initiation.

Frazer’s The Golden Bough tells us of tribes in New Guinea whose “tribal initiation, of which circumcision is the central feature, is conceived by them, as by some Australian tribes, as a process of being swallowed and disgorged by a mythical monster, whose voice is heard in the humming sound of the bull-roarer.”2 The initiation happens in these tribes in a mighty spectacle, in which, “after a tearful parting from their mothers and women[-]folk, who believe or pretend to believe in the monster that swallows their dear ones, the awe-struck novices are brought face to face” with a monstrous structure, a hut built for this special occasion, a betel palm as its backbone and “adorned by a native artist with a pair of goggle eyes and a gaping mouth”; then “this imposing structure, the huge creature emits a sullen growl, which is in fact no other than the humming note of bull-roarers swung by men concealed in the monster’s belly”; later, after being released from the monster’s belly, each young man must

undergo the more painful and dangerous operation of circumcision. It follows immediately, and the cut made by the knife of the operator is explained to be a bite or scratch which the monster inflicted on the novice in spewing him out of his capacious maw. While the operation is proceeding, a prodigious noise is made by the swinging of bull-roarers to represent the roar of the dreadful being who is in the act of swallowing the young men. (The Golden Bough, 694)

The bullroarer, the “harmless wooden instrument” that makes the air speak and that is not supposed to be seen by women or children or anyone uninitiated on pain of death, is a metonymy for the rite of circumcision itself and also for the “grandfather,” or the dead ancestors, who have of course had to undergo the same horror of being swallowed up by the “bull-roarer”—the bullroarer who at last bites off and swallows up the foreskin, as the women will be told.3 This “drama of death and resurrection,” in its several variations characterized by secrecy, intimidation and even threat of death, involving wild mythical stories told to the uninitiated and to those about to undergo initiation, the myths that culminate in a theatrical spectacle, in which the yet uninitiated believe that they

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