I realise that this attack of textual claustrophobia was brought on by repetitious rituals from the world of folklore. Don’t touch this, do touch that; don’t cross the threshold – step over it. Throw that tooth over the roof, no no, good grief, over the fence. Spit over your right shoulder, wait, stop! Over the left! You only have to go home to the next village and the signal code changes. In the fucking village of Small Baba, the locals spit over their left shoulder, against spells, while in fucking Big Baba, they do it over their right shoulder. And how lucky you are, you’re thinking, to live in a de-ritualised and de-mythologised world where a person can relax, kick off his shoes, put his feet on the table and twiddle his thumbs without fear of baleful consequences. But perhaps there’s something else on your mind? Fear of the existence of parallel worlds, for example?
In the Serbian fairytale called The Speechless Language, a shepherd goes into a wood, on his way to his sheep. All at once the woods catch fire, and a snake is trapped by the blaze. The shepherd takes pity on the snake and saves it. The snake winds itself around the shepherd’s neck and orders him to take him to his father, the snake-emperor. He warns him that the snake-emperor will offer him immense riches, but he says no, all he’d want from the snake-emperor is to know the animal language. So that is what he asks for. At first the snake-emperor refuses, but the shepherd is stubborn and eventually the snake-emperor gives in.
‘Stop! Come closer, if that is what you want. Open your mouth!’
The shepherd opens his mouth, and the snake-emperor spits in his mouth and says: ‘Now you spit in my mouth!’ The shepherd spits in his mouth.
They spit in each other’s mouths three times, and then the snake-emperor says: ‘Now you possess the animal language. Go, and tell no one what you know, for if you tell a living soul, you will die that same moment.’
And this shepherd with the newly acquired skill – of understanding speechless language, the language of animals and plants – became a wise man.
Language serves the process of mutual understanding. We enter effortfully, we gesticulate, we wring our hands, we explain, we translate our thoughts, we interpret, we break into a sweat, we furrow our brows, we act as if we have understood, we are convinced that we have understood, we are convinced that we know what we are talking about, we are convinced that they understand us, we translate other languages into our own. And all our endeavours boil down to this: we miss the meaning. For if we were truly to understand one another, speaker and listener, writer and reader, you and I, we would have had to spit into each other’s mouths, entwining our tongues and mixing our spittle. You and I, editor, we speak different languages: yours is only human, whereas mine is both human and serpentine.
Are you frowning now? Thanks a lot, you’re thinking, it’s too much already. Don’t forget that what you have found out, struggling through to reach the end of my text, is only a smattering, a trivial fraction of the whole ‘babayagology’. And what were you thinking of? That the entire history of Baba Yagas (sic!) can fit into a few dozen pages? And that you have solved the problem with a bit of help from Aba Bagay, an obscure Slavic scholar from eastern Europe who is only too pleased to shed a bit of light on these matters?
I opened the door just a crack, and let you scratch the tip of this enormous iceberg. And the iceberg is formed of the millions and millions of women who have always kept the world going and still keep it going. (I’m speaking your language now, that’s enough of the picturesque stuff.) I am sure that in reading my ‘Baba Yaga For Beginners’ you did not notice one particular detaiclass="underline" in many tales, Baba Yaga sleeps with a sword beneath her head. We have found all manner of things in your author’s fictional dyptich, but not a single mention of a sword!
Let me make myself quite clear: I am not like your author. I know about that sword under Baba Yaga’s head, and I believe in its deep significance. I’m convinced that accounts are kept somewhere, that everything is entered on the record somewhere, a painfully huge book of complaints exists somewhere, and the bill will have to be paid. Sooner or later, the time will come. So let us imagine women (that hardly negligible half of humankind, after all), those Baba Yagas, plucking the swords from beneath their heads and sallying forth to settle the accounts?! For every smack in the face, every rape, every affront, every hurt, every drop of spittle on their faces. Can we imagine all those Indian brides and widows rising from the ashes where they were burned alive and going forth into the world with drawn swords in their hands?! Let’s try to imagine all those invisible women peering out between their woven bars, from their dark bunker-burkas, and the ones who keep their mouths hidden behind the burka’s miniature curtains even when they are speaking, eating and kissing. Let’s imagine a million-strong army of ‘madwomen’, homeless women, beggar women; women with faces scorched by acid, because self-styled righteous men took offence at the expression on a bare female face; women whose lives are completely in the power of their husbands, fathers and brothers; women who were stoned and survived, and others who perished at the hands of male mobs. Let’s now imagine all those women lifting their robes and drawing their swords. Let’s imagine millions of prostitutes around the world reaching for their swords; white, black and yellow slaves who were trafficked, sold and resold at meat markets; slaves who were raped, beaten, stripped of their rights, and whose masters cannot be stopped by anybody. The hundreds of thousands of girls destroyed by Aids, victims of insane men, paedophiles, but also of their lawful husbands and fathers. The African women who are shackled with metal rings; the circumcised women with their vaginas sewn up; the women with silicone breasts and lips, botoxed faces and cloned smiles; the millions of famished women who give birth to famished children. The millions of women who pray to male gods and their representatives on earth, those shameless old men with purple, white, gold and black caps on their heads, tiaras, berets, keffiyehs, fezzes and turbans, those symbolic substitutes for penises – all those ‘antennae’ that help them to commune with their gods. That all these millions of women, instead of going to the church, the mosque, the temple or the shrine, which anyway were never really theirs, go in quest of a temple of their own, the temple of the Golden Baba, if they really have to have temples at all. That they would finally stop bowing down to men with bloodshot eyes, men who are guilty of killing millions of people, and who still have not had enough. For they are the ones who leave a trail of human skulls behind them, yet people’s torpid imaginations stick those skulls on the fence of a solitary old woman who lives on the edge of the forest.
I, Aba Bagay, belong to the ‘proletarians’, to the hags’ International, for I am she over there! Don’t tell me you’re surprised. You might have expected it; you know yourself that women are ‘masters’ of transformation, a talent that has been dinned into them by many centuries of living underground, where they ‘mastered’ all the skills of survival. After all, weren’t they told right at the start that they were born of Adam’s rib and only had a place in this world so they could give birth to Adam’s children.
Farewell, dear editor! Soon I shall change my human language for a bird’s. Only a few more human moments remain to me, then my mouth will stretch into a beak, my fingers will morph into claws, my skin will sprout a covering of glossy black feathers. As a sign of goodwill, I am leaving you a single feather. Take care of it. Not to remind you of me, but of that sword under Baba Yaga’s sleeping head.