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 Critical Approaches to Children’s
Literature

Series Editors
Kerry Mallan
Faculty of Education
Children and Youth Research Centre
Kelvin Grove, Queensland
Australia

Clare Bradford
School of Communication and Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood, Victoria
Australia
This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on chil-
dren’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contem-
porary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range
of children’s texts - literature, film and multimedia. Critical Approaches to
Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally
recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new
combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and
cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14930
 Perry Nodelman

Alternating
Narratives in Fiction
for Young Readers
Twice Upon a Time
Perry Nodelman
CRYTC, Department of English
University of Winnipeg
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-50816-0 ISBN 978-3-319-50817-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50817-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934526

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
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other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adapta-
tion, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter
developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
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tional affiliations.

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The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began in a classroom a number of years ago—or rather, in the

spirit of ‘twice upon a time’, in two classrooms. The classrooms were
occupied by University of Winnipeg students in two sections of a course
of Canadian children’s literature, one section taught by my colleague
Mavis Reimer and one taught by me. As Mavis and I explain in an essay
we later wrote about these classes, ‘Teaching Canadian Children’s
Literature: Learning to Know More’ (Nodelman and Reimer 2000), we
had noticed that many of the novels we were thinking of teaching shared
similar plots or characters. Some of them even had the same words in their
titles. Nor could we think of many American or British books that focused
so much on these matters. Wondering if these shared characteristics might
represent something distinctly Canadian, we decided to organize our
courses around these novels; and since we were both teaching the course
in the same term, we realized we could double our group of specimen
novels by choosing a completely different group of them for each of our
classes. Once the courses began, each of us invited our students to con-
sider what the novels had in common and what that might mean; and for
balance and as a challenge to any generalizations we might try to make, we
also included a number of novels that seemed to represent less central
concerns. After our students developed lists of shared qualities, we visited
each other’s classes to tell the other students about our own students’ lists
and ask for their input, with the result that the students in the two classes
were able to add to and complicate each other’s ideas.
One of the items on the list our students had produced by the end of the
term went like this: ‘Most (but not all) of the novels switch repeatedly

v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

between two contexts, or have two stories going at the same time. For
example, the novel might be structured around two different points in a
series of events (flashbacks), two different focalizing characters, or two
different historical settings. The two contexts come together dramatically
at the central moment of the plot.’ As Mavis and I report in our essay,
then, ‘Perry Nodelman has developed an interest in the prevalence of
narratives with two focalizations that our students helped make us aware
of. He has been developing an increasingly lengthy list of Canadian
children’s novels that operate in this way, and begun to speculate about
their significance’ (Nodelman and Reimer 2000, p. 31).
The many years of speculating that followed have resulted in this book.
It would not have existed without the perceptive students in those courses
so many years ago, or without Mavis Reimer’s part in that old project.
But, you might well ask, doesn’t this book discuss novels produced
elsewhere than Canada? Yes, it does—lots of them. My first forays into
thinking about alternating narratives concentrated on Canadian issues, as
revealed in two essays published in the journal Canadian Children’s
Literature, ‘Of Solitudes and Borders: Double-Focalized Canadian
Books for Children’ (2003) and ‘A Monochromatic Mosaic: Class, Race
and Culture in Double-Focalized Canadian Novels for Young People’
(2004). At the time, I note, I was identifying the quality that I was
studying as ‘double-focalization’. It was only after realizing that narrative
theorists used that term to refer to a quite different phenomenon that I
began to speak about ‘alternating narratives’. I also wrote ‘At Home on
Native Land: A Non-Aboriginal Canadian Scholar Discusses Aboriginality
and Property in Canadian Double-Focalized Novels for Young Adults’, a
chapter in Home Words (2008), a book about ideas of home in Canadian
literature for young people edited by Mavis. The book as a whole grew out
of another item from those lists our students had developed: ‘Questions
about the safety and comfort of home are central to these novels.’
But then, as I continued to work on this topic, I kept encountering
American, British, and Australian books that exhibited some of the same
characteristics. With fairly easy access to books in English from other
places, and with writers, editors, and critics in vastly different places
aware of and often influenced by what is happening elsewhere, English-
language children’s literature tends to be an international phenomenon. I
soon realized I had to give up my idea that there was much that was
distinctly Canadian about alternating narratives except the fact that there
were so many of them, that Canadian writers seemed to be particularly
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

drawn to producing them. As I have argued in my earlier work on this

subject, the alternation of narratives in Canadian novels does indeed
resonate in intriguingly distinct ways in the context of Canadian history
and culture. But as I hope this book reveals, those Canadian novels also
share much with many other books for young readers published in the
USA, the UK, and Australia. In order to highlight the international scope
of this study, I have identified the country and date of publication of each
of the novels with alternating narratives I discuss here when I first mention
them. As my project has developed, at any rate, I have come to believe
that, while the Canadian-ness of the Canadian novels I discuss here is
significant, there is equal significance in the ways in which they reveal the
consistent themes and patterns of writing for young people produced
internationally—the themes and patterns I explore as being characteristic
of writing for young people in my 2008 book The Hidden Adult: Defining
Children’s Literature.
As I expanded my focus to include novels from other places, I had a lot
of assistance in finding the novels for young people with alternating
narratives that my project came to include. Requests for examples of
such books that I made on the Child_Lit (Theory and Criticism of
Children’s Literature) and Yalsa-Bk (YALSA Book Discussions) listservs,
and on Facebook and other social media, resulted in far more titles than I
had originally thought possible. The helpful staff in the children’s depart-
ment at McNally Robinson bookstore in Winnipeg added still more, as did
Judith Ridge in response to requests I made to her for information about
Australian novels with alternating narratives. With the help of these
resources and others, I was able to develop a list that has now grown to
include over 400 novels.
I am not the first scholar to be intrigued by novels for young readers
that include alternating narratives, and I am pleased to acknowledge the
extent to which my thinking about them has been especially influenced by
the work of two others. Robin McCallum offers an insightful exploration
of what she identifies as ‘interlaced dual narration’ in her 1999 book
Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of
Subjectivity; and Melanie Koss’s doctoral dissertation, A Literary Analysis
of Young Adult Novels with Multiple Narrative Perspectives Using a
Sociocultural Lens (2008); Melanie was kind enough to give me access
to it.
I also owe a debt to Carol Matas. Carol and I have collaborated on two
fantasy series of novels for young readers: the four books of the Minds
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

series and the three books of the Ghosthunter series. We had published the
earlier volumes of the Minds series before I began my scholarly work on
novels with alternating narratives. Even so, it took me some time to realize
the significance of the title of the first of those novels: Of Two Minds.
Carol and I chose that title both because the novel’s two central characters
each have unusual mental abilities and because the two of us were the
minds that created it. But Of Two Minds and all the other books I have
written with Carol switch between the points of view of two central
characters. They are all of two minds, all novels for young readers that
offer alternating narratives. I suspect that much of what I have learned as
a scholar about such books emerges from my efforts to tease out what
Carol and I had done in our novels and why we had done it without any
theoretical awareness of its implications.
Because most of my work as a scholar has emerged from my under-
graduate and graduate-school training as a close reader in the tradition of
what was once called the New Criticism, it tends to focus on very few
texts. As a result, trying to make sense of the large body of novels with
alternating narratives that I came to be aware of was a challenge for me. I
would not have been able to meet that challenge without the assistance of
some very helpful software: Devonthink Pro Office allowed me to create a
database of the novels I was reading and an efficient system of tagging the
various aspects of my subject to which they seemed to have specific
relationships. Once I had developed that database, OmniOutliner Pro
allowed me to determine the best order in which to discuss those various
aspects of the novels. I am grateful to the developers of these products for
making the organizational aspects of my project so relatively effortless.
Finally, I am especially grateful to Asa Nodelman for his careful work in
getting the manuscript of the book in shape for submission to the
publisher.
This book is dedicated to Billie Nodelman, who has been one of the two
voices in the alternating narratives that make up the unified story of our
marriage for the past forty-six years.
 CONTENTS

1 Alternating Narratives: An Introduction 1

2 Alternating Narratives as Puzzles 21
3 Alternating Narratives and Represented Writing 43
4 Fictional Collage as Alternating Narratives 67
5 Distance Education: The Readerly Effects of Alternating
Narratives 89
6 Alternating Narratives as Variations of Each Other 121
7 Structural Ideologies in Alternating Narratives:
Individuality 143
8 Structural Ideologies in Alternating Narratives:
Connection and Community 163
9 Structural Ideologies in Alternating Narratives:
Indigeneity 199

List of Works Cited 235

Index 243

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Alternating Narratives: An Introduction

Why, to begin with, twice upon a time? Because twice is not once. Telling
a tale twice, as writers do when they provide different descriptions of the
same events from the alternating points of view of different characters
involved in them, is a relatively sophisticated form of storytelling, a form
that readers expect in complex adult fictions by difficult writers like
Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner, but one that seems miles away from
the simpler world of stories of the sort that often begin ‘Once upon a
time’––far enough away to make stories told twice seem alien in the
context of literature for young readers.
Once upon a time, most typically, there was . . . a tiny mouse, a timid
rabbit, a lonely princess, a youngest son. Once upon a time, above all,
there was a child or youth, a boy or girl about to experience something
interesting or exciting, something that will somehow make his or her life
better. ‘Once upon a time’ is one of the primary markers of stories told for
children, a signal anyone familiar with Euro-American culture in the last
few centuries will understand. The focus on ‘once’ is suggestive: Reports
of events that happened ‘once’ tend to be one-sided. The tale about the
three little pigs is just that, and only peripherally a story about the wolf
they interact with. Even in retellings of the tale like Jon Scieszka’s The
True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf (USA 1992), there is still just
one story told once, describing the events as the wolf experienced them––
though admittedly, readers need to remember the other more familiar

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Nodelman, Alternating Narratives in Fiction for Young Readers,
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50817-7_1
2 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

story of what the pigs thought was happening in order to understand the
humour of this alternate version.
That singularity of focus might happen because, while ‘once’ is clearly
not now, there is an important way in which for young readers it is now, or
at least supposed to be now. Perhaps unlike Scieszka’s Wolf, which seems
to require a more knowing and therefore less sympathetic audience, many
stories describe situations that once happened to someone else in such a
way that they encourage young readers to recognize a similarity to them-
selves and their own situations now. They ask young readers to see
themselves in their main characters as a way of teaching them something
about themselves. Perhaps the mice or princesses or children who lived
once upon a time learn something in the course of their experience that
young readers can, ideally, understand as a lesson for themselves. Or
perhaps the mice or princesses or children simply represent what adults
imagine young people are or ought to be, so that young people reading
about them might learn to admire and adopt a similar youthfulness.
Conventionally, and therefore, for most people nowadays, most often,
‘once upon a time’ is a signal that the story to follow is not only about
the fictional characters and situations it describes––that it is also about
who its young readers ideally are or ought to become.
As happened once, so things continue on in contemporary literary
texts intended for young readers––not just those for young children,
but also the teen audiences ‘young adult’ literature declares itself to be
intended for. Whether they begin with ‘Once upon a time’ or not, texts
for young people tend to tell one story––a clear line of events concen-
trating on one identifiably childlike or youthful central character who
young readers are being invited to identify with; as John Stephens
rightly says, ‘the majority of children’s fictions employ only one foca-
lizing character’ (2010, p. 56)—that is, the one from whose point of
view events are being described. The main characters of these texts are,
like James Barrie’s Peter Pan or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, char-
mingly egocentric, ingenuously anarchic, and incredibly lucky; or like
Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit or Frank L. Baum’s Dorothy in Oz,
simultaneously brave in the face of danger and meekly happy to
acknowledge their need for adults to protect them from it. As I have
argued in my book The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature
(2008), texts for young people often reaffirm the same conventional
assumptions about what it means to be childlike or youthful, and often
invite young readers to understand themselves in these ways.
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 3

In order to encourage young readers to do so, these texts convention-

ally focalize events from their main characters’ point of view and provide
those characters’ responses to them. Whether the story is told in first
person (as in, say, Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
or Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight or third person (as in E.B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books), it tends to describe
events as the young protagonist would see them or understand them. A
comment by Laura Amy Schlitz in a note in her Newbery Award-winning
book Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (USA 2007) reveals how key that focus
is to widespread conceptions of writing for children: ‘It really isn’t possible
to write a play with seventeen equally important characters in it . . . . So I
decided to write seventeen short plays—monologues—instead of one long
one, so that for three minutes, at least, every child could be a star’ (viii). As
adults most often understand the process, every child reading any text
written for children should be a star, and is encouraged to be one by
identifying with a focalizing character.
Schlitz does not acknowledge the possible confusion of a child trying to
figure out how to respond to a text unconventional enough to contain
seventeen different role models for stardom—–or for that matter, twenty-
two, as there are in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Not only is it more difficult
to follow two or more interwoven stories at once, but it seems logically
impossible to identify with two or more different characters at once. Once
upon a time, identifying is easy. Twice upon a time, it is not––especially for
readers who have been trained by their experience of many books to
expect always to be able to identify. Such a reader will start out reading
the first part of a book identifying with its focalized character. But then
chapter two comes along with a different focalized character, often one
with different ideas about the same events. What is an obedient reader
trained in convention to do? Suddenly see through the blindness or
inadequacy of the first character’s version of events? Refuse to accept the
second character’s views altogether? Try to be empathetic with and see
oneself as similar to two quite different people? Or learn to be less ego-
centric in one’s reading habits, just give up on identifying altogether,
distance oneself from both characters, and become a detached observer,
a critically thoughtful outsider?
Whichever of these choices individual readers make, they are no longer
reading as most adults assume most young people do read and ought to
read children’s and young adult fiction. Telling the same story twice or
more, first as one character experiences it and then as one or more others
4 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

do, flies in the face of common adult assumptions about how young
readers ought to read and even about why children’s and young adult
literature exists.
In The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Fiction (2002), Maria
Nikolajeva offers a discussion of Susan Cooper’s novel Seaward (USA
1983) that shows what happens when a reader with a strong awareness
of the conventions of literature for young people experiences a novel built
on alternating narratives. The alternating narratives of Seaward tell the
stories of Cally and Westerley, who start out in quite different and separate
worlds but find themselves together in a dreamlike fantasy place, where
they first have separate alternating adventures and then meet, after which
the novel continues to report their differing responses to their shared
adventures as they head towards the sea. Their adventures involve fantastic
beings and events based in Welsh legends and rife with allegorical over-
tones, so that the book reads like a kind of symbolic psychic journey, with
everything that happens more meaningful than real.
At one point, Westerly and Calliope are told that the world they are in is
not their own, ‘but it is an image of your own. An echo’ (Cooper 1983,
p. 125). In operating as a description of such an echo, Seaward seems to
be exactly the kind of text that invites identification to promote self-
understanding––or it would be, if it were about one main character rather
than two alternating ones. Nikolajeva describes her response to these
events in this way:

Writing about Seaward in 1990, I without the slightest doubt interpreted it

as Cally’s story, viewing Westerley as her companion, Animus, or helper. I
believe that my choice was affected by the author’s as well as my own
gender. Several years later, one of my female students wrote a paper about
Seaward, interpreting it just as unproblematically as Westerley’s story. This
gave me serious reasons to reconsider intersubjectivity in the novel.
(Nikolajeva 2002, p. 92)

After a few pages of interpretation, she concludes, ‘The intersubjective

reading of the characters enables us to reconcile the two separate narra-
tives, the two separate inner journeys, viewing them as two sides of the
same quest for self, in which the two concrete figures are interchangeable,
not least because their gender complementarity makes their story more
universal’ (p. 94). Finally, whether one character or the other is the ‘real’
one does not matter, because under the apparent two-sidedness there is
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 5

really just one story with one shared and indeed universal meaning being
told here. One can identify with both the characters because they are
actually differing facets of the same unique entity.
Later in The Rhetoric of Character, in a discussion of John Marsden’s
Letters from the Inside (Australia 1991), Nikolajeva reaches a similar con-
clusion. While the novel proceeds by means of alternating letters between
one girl in prison and one out,

Viewing the novel as a depiction of an inner world rather than of external

events, we may suggest that the whole correspondence is the product of one
person’s imagination. Perhaps Tracey is suffering from an identity split and
has written letters to herself . . . . on the other hand, the source can be
Mandy’s fancies, caused by her anxiety about her brother. Since there is
no authorial discourse to guide the reader, the reliability of both voices is
dubious. (p. 255)

What fascinates me is the anxiety that Nikolajeva, a knowledgeable spe-

cialist in literature for young people, expresses about the possibility that
there might be two different and unresolved points of view operating in
these novels. The anxiety seems to arise from generic expectations about
how texts for young people operate and should be read––as stories about
characters readers should identify with in order to learn about themselves.
As I have suggested, a reader cannot easily identify with two different
characters at the same time. The anxiety is resolved when the two different
characters can be read as a single complete one––one who can be identi-
fied with, understood as an un-conflicted whole and learned from, and
who thus accords with conventional expectations of how texts for young
people work.
But as Nikolajeva reveals, Seaward and Letters from the Inside are
complex and ambivalent enough to challenge those conventional expecta-
tions. I turn instead, then, to what appears to be a much more conven-
tional novel. Kevin Henkes’s Words of Stone (USA 1992) is much like
Henkes’s other children’s novels, like, say, Olive’s Ocean or Protecting
Marie. All three are quiet, introspective stories about sensitive children
on the brink of adolescence, learning to deal with their emotional pro-
blems in ways adults hope child readers will learn from. But unlike the
other two, Words of Stone has two alternating central characters––and that
makes Words of Stone a telling example of the kinds of problems stories
told twice create.
6 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

As the novel begins, Blaze lives on a hill in rural Wisconsin with his
grandmother and widowed father, and Joselle has come to visit her grand-
mother on the other side of the hill. He is small for his age, shy and
withdrawn, while ‘her arms and legs looked meaty’ (Henkes 1992, p. 22)
and she is confident and aggressive; he thinks of her as ‘this curious girl
who reminded him of wild, impish, confident children he had only known
in books’ (p. 86). But despite their apparently opposite characters, their
situations are similar. Both are isolated and solitary. Joselle has been
isolated by her mother’s decision to leave her at her grandmother’s and
seems to be rather antisocial, but Blaze seems to have chosen his current
solitude, for at school ‘he was treated with genuine fondness by students
and teachers alike’ (p. 16) and readers learn that after his mother’s death,
he destroyed one of each pair of animals in his toy Noah’s ark, ‘because a
pair of anything didn’t seem right’ (p. 15)––as perhaps a pair of protago-
nists does not seem right in a children’s novel?
Nevertheless, this pair has other things in common. Both have similar
reasons to be unhappy. Not only is Blaze without a mother, but his father
is ‘a private person’ (p. 16), his distance revealed by the art he makes:
‘Everyone in Glenn’s paintings seemed to be detached, lost in a cool,
claustrophobic dreamworld’ (p. 41). Joselle has no memory or knowledge
of her father, and her mother has grown tired of dealing with Joselle and
has dropped her daughter off at her grandmother’s in order to be at home
alone. Their grandparents seem equally solitary. His says of hers, ‘I’m not
even too familiar with Floy . . . . I guess the hill is big enough and our
houses are far enough apart to keep our lives separate’ (p. 89).
Nevertheless, Blaze’s father is beginning a new relationship with a
woman Blaze likes and who gradually draws him out of his isolation and
into a connection with her; and Joselle’s mother is also close to the
beginning of a new relationship, this one with a man Joselle has little use
for and who, oppositely, seems to be pulling her mother away from her.
For readers of texts for young people, the plot that develops here is
unlikely to be surprising; the two protagonists meet, and after various
misundertandings, become friends. Having heard about Blaze from her
grandmother, Joselle decides to ‘complicate the life of Blaze Werla’ (p. 32)
in order to feel better about her own complicated life by arranging stones
on the hillside into his dead mother’s name; she does not know that Blaze
gathered the stones as a memorial for his mother. When they meet and
become friends, he does not know she was the perpetrator of what he has
rightly understood as an attack on himself; and she lies to him about other
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 7

things also, because she believes he would not want her for a friend if he
knew the truth. When Blaze does learn the truth, the friendship turns
sour––and before a reconciliation can take place, Joselle and her grand-
mother also learn a truth, this one about her mother not having left as they
had thought, and so Joselle is sent back home again. At the end of the
novel, however, Blaze reads the words ‘I’M SORRY’ on the hillside
(p. 151), realizes Joselle is back, and sets out to renew the friendship––
and also, to tell his own family things he has kept hidden from them. As
happens in many novels for young people, a happy ending occurs when
characters isolated from and at odds with each other see past their appar-
ent differences, arrive at a better understanding of what they misunder-
stood before, and come together to form a new relationship based on what
they now know they have in common.
But if what happens is not surprising, how it is described might be.
Because the focus switches between Blaze and Joselle––a few chapters
labelled with his name followed by a few labelled with hers––identifying
with one or the other, as texts for young people conventionally invite
readers to do, seems difficult. At first, moving from Blaze’s understanding
of events to Joselle’s after he first sees the mysterious words on the hillside
might strike readers as an invitation to explore her experience simply to
gather more information about Blaze, with whom they have already been
invited to identify. Indeed, one of the first things the text reveals is that
Joselle has been responsible for what so distressed Blaze, which might well
invite distance from her and more sympathy for him. But then this chapter
also reveals why she did it, how it emerges from her own sadness and
isolation, a revelation which invites empathy––and, therefore, perhaps,
identification? ––with her also.
But as I have suggested, that doubling of identifications is difficult, if
it is even possible—and meanwhile, the text seems to be inviting read-
ers to do something different. Most immediately, it moves attention
away from what the characters experience onto how they experience it.
A once-told story focalized through its main character invites readers to
see things as the main character does without even necessarily being
aware of doing so. But a second focalizer seems to demand an aware-
ness of how the two different characters represented are in fact differ-
ent––how they perceive and think about their experience in different
ways. As the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin suggests of what he understands
to be the polyphonic fiction of Dostoevsky, ‘those elements out of
which the hero’s image is composed are not features of reality––features
8 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

of the hero himself or of his everyday surroundings––but rather, the

significance of these features for the hero himself, for his self-consciousness’
(1984, p. 48). For Bakhtin, the focus in Dostoevsky is on ‘the hero’s
discourse about himself and his world’ (p. 53); for readers of texts with
alternatingly focalized narratives like Words of Stone, the consciousness
that structure creates of differing understandings of the same events
similarly invites a focus on the character’s discourse about themselves––
on how they understand themselves. As might be expected, then, much of
the text of Words of Stone describes Blaze and Joselle’s efforts to under-
stand themselves and their own behaviour.
In doing so, it invites readers to connect the two. Why provide two
different points of view if not to invite a comparison of them? Indeed,
Mike Cadden sees that opportunity as a key to the ethical value of Young
Adult novels with alternating narratives. In more conventional novels with
just one focalized central character, ‘by employing an all-too-reliable
young adult’s consciousness, the YA novelist often intentionally commu-
nicates to the immature reader a single and limited awareness of the world
that the novelist knows to be incomplete and insufficient. It is a sophisti-
cated representation of a lack of sophistication; it is an artful depiction of
artlessness’ (2000, p. 146). If a writer feels an ethical need to, as Cadden
says, ‘help the reader to recognize the contestability of any immature
consciousness in the narrative’ (p. 147), providing another narrative
focused through another character is one way doing so: ‘no single position
in the text is clearly endorsed or becomes clear at the expense of others,
which enables the reader to consider the rightness of the positions based
on the specific details of the narrative’ (p. 147). Exactly because it creates a
distance that prevents easy identification with one character, the opportu-
nity for comparison is ethically responsible.
The text of Words of Stone explicitly invites that sort of comparison.
When Joselle’s mother leaves, her grandmother says, ‘It could be worse––
that little Werla boy from around the hill doesn’t even have a mother’
(Henker 1992, p. 25). After telling about Blaze, she adds, ‘So you see . . .
you’re not the only one with a complicated life’ (p. 27). Joselle’s response
to the comparison is itself comparative: ‘She hoped that the skinny red-
head’s life story would be worse than hers’ (p. 26), and her creation of the
words of stone emerges from the comparison: ‘She wasn’t exactly sure why
she had done it––except she sensed that if she could make someone else
more confused than she was, the weight of her own emotions might be
lifted’ (p. 37).
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 9

As a reader making the kinds of comparison these passages seem to be

inviting, I find myself drawn away from empathy with the characters into
the aesthetic distance of a more analytical kind of thinking about them. I
no longer just experience along with them, I also find myself thinking
about the meaning of their experience for themselves and also for me. I
can do so because of the expectations I have developed from my earlier
experiences of reading literary texts––and most significantly here, an
expectation that all the components of such texts fit together, that they
cohere as a whole. Certainly texts are, as many readers often claim, open to
a multiplicity of interpretations depending on what different readers bring
to them. But I suspect that readers who are sympathetic enough with a
literary text to have had a positive experience of it have done so on the
basis of some conscious or unconscious thinking about, and some overall
conviction of having grasped, a sense of its completeness as an experience
that they find personally satisfying.
Developing such a sense is a learned skill, and some inexperienced
readers may not have learned it yet. But even texts for the most inexper-
ienced readers operate on the assumption that those readers know––or are
in the process of learning to know––how to think about texts in ways that
will reveal the relevance of the different parts of the texts to each other.
Even word books for babies assume that their neophyte intended audience
will understand that meaning emerges from making connections between
words and visual representations of the objects the words stand for (and,
often, teach that skill in the process of assuming it and therefore allowing
adults sharing the books to teach it to those who do not yet know it).
Assuming, then, that even the least experienced of young readers
operate with (or are in the process of learning) assumptions about a
text’s cohesiveness, I conclude that I am not likely to be alone in finding
myself responding to the alternating narrative of Words of Stone as a sort of
detective trying to solve a mystery; Nikolajeva has a similar response to
Seaward. Why this departure from normal expectations? In trying to
answer that question, I respond to the text as something to think about,
not just something to empathize and identify with.
Having shared Blaze’s confusion when he first sees the words of stone,
for instance, I then respond to the following but, it turns out, chronolo-
gically earlier section that tells of Joselle’s thoughts as she decides to
arrange them, as the solution to a mystery. I am also aware that it is a
solution Blaze himself is unaware of––that I know more than he does,
which makes it harder for me to think of myself as being similar to him.
10 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

Later, the novel reminds me of my superior knowledge when Blaze

decides that the wrong person, his father’s girlfriend, is responsible for
arranging the stones (p. 62), and when, after Joselle befriends him, he
thinks, ‘If they did become true friends, maybe he could tell her about the
words of stone. Maybe she’d know what to do’ (p. 84). I become aware of
similar ironies when Blaze concludes, after Joselle tells him her lie that she
is an orphan like him, ‘And to have Joselle confide in him about her father
bonded them’ (p. 89). The same dynamic moves in the opposite direction
when I read Joselle’s sections with a deeper knowledge of what Blaze is
thinking than she has. Because the novel so often invokes its readers’
awareness of having more knowledge of a complex situation than the
characters involved in the situation do, it encourages readers to resist
identification with those who know less.
Observing Blaze and Joselle from the outsider’s viewpoint created by
my knowing twice as much about their situation as each of them do, I can
see not only differences in their understanding, but also, threads of con-
nection between them that they themselves are not aware of––for instance,
a shared interest in observing life on the other side of the hill: ‘Sometimes
Blaze lay on the hill and watched the Stark house. Nothing interesting ever
happened’ (p. 17); or ‘Joselle noticed movement on the hill. It was the
red-haired boy. Blaze Werla. Joselle watched him intensely . . . ’ (p. 30).
Indeed, ‘Sometimes Joselle tried to see herself through Blaze’s eyes’
(p. 100).
Since Blaze and Joselle’s tendency to observe each other matches what I
have viewed as the novel’s invitation for me as a reader to observe them, I
might, at this point, retract my earlier statement that the characters are not
easy to identify with. The structure of alternating narratives has actually
created an identification by inviting me to see as they do. But the way they
see requires, paradoxically, that I empathize with detachment.
Observation requires some distance from what one observes––a photo-
graph or painting makes little sense to those who put their noses on it. The
observational mode created by the alternating narratives draws attention
to the distance, the separation and isolation, that are such key factors in
both Blaze and Joselle’s experiences. Readers learn through alternating
insights into Blaze and Joselle’s thoughts how they misunderstand each
other and also, how they deliberately and often successfully misrepresent
themselves to each other. Each of their stories focuses on what they choose
to keep hidden and whether or not they will tell it––and when the secrets
become known, it does, at first, draw them even further apart.
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 11

The effect is of two solitudes, only barely breached in the brief and even
then partially illusory moments of their friendship. By the end of the novel,
they have had some contact and developed more understanding of each
other than they first had, and they seem to be moving from isolation into
connections with each other and with the adults in their lives. But tell-
ingly, the novel ends before their reunion. There is a sense that other
people are always more complicated than we ever know, that human
beings will always misunderstand each other, be isolated and at a distance
from each other even when at their closest. The observational distance that
emerges from alternating two narratives turns out here to be a metaphor
for the novel’s view of how people always interact with each other.
That view seems surprisingly pessimistic in the context of a novel
intended for young readers. Fiction for young people usually tends to be
more utopian in its descriptions of relationships, less focused on what
hampers contact and more determined to assume that how one person
comes to understand things is a universal truth––one universal enough to
be shared by others, to sustain a happy ending, and to represent how
readers ought to understand things also. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising
that Words of Stone––still, after all, a children’s novel––seems to insist on
the possibilities of contact and connection between its characters even
while reinforcing their isolation and separation. It does so in a number of
ways.
First and most obviously, its two solitaries meet and come, at least a
little, to understand and empathize with each other. As Joselle helps Blaze
past his fear of her grandmother’s dog, she thinks, ‘He needs me . . . .
Blaze Werla needs me’ (p. 98); and in the last paragraphs of the novel, a
happy ending involving togetherness does seem to be about to emerge
from Joselle’s ‘I’M SORRY’ and Blaze’s decision to forgive her and to tell
his secrets to his family. Second, the comparisons that emerge from Blaze
and Joselle’s alternating narratives and reveal their similar isolation also
invite readers to think of the two characters in relation to each other, and
to see what they share: their detached and absent parents, their lack of
contact with other children, their observational habit and imaginative ways
of thinking, their pleasure in inventing imaginary people––he imaginary
friends, she the characters evoked by differing perfumes in a game she
teaches him. Third, the novel contains many symbols of connection.
Unlike his father’s paintings of ‘detached’ objects, for example, the one
Blaze paints contain symbolic objects that all imply connections between
people: ‘His key collection also symbolized Joselle, since she had it now.
12 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

And Joselle’s button represented both of then, too; it was hers, but it was
in his possession. We’re all linked in certain ways, he thought’ (p. 138).
Joselle also envisages a similar linkage as she forms the word ‘ORPHAN’
on the hill: ‘she wasn’t entirely certain if she was referring to Blaze Werla
or to herself’ (p. 71).
All of these connections undercut the novel’s focus on isolation in a way
that brings it closer to the mainstream interest of children’s fiction in
contact and communication. But the isolation also undercuts the attempts
at connection. For me, the final effect is the tension of a happiness not
quite achieved by a community of isolates, a happy ending that sadly seems
to represent all that we human beings in our inevitable separation from
each other can hope for. Furthermore, while the happy ending seems to be
there as one of the characteristics necessary to define the novel as a text for
young readers, the sadness that permeates it both emerges from and is
supported by its structure of alternating narratives. This form of telling the
same story twice seems seriously at odds with the more optimistic con-
ventions of literature for children and young adults––just as does the
presence of many monologues in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!).
But Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! won the Newbery Medal as the worth-
iest text of American children’s literature in its year of publication. And in
recent decades, young readers have had a growing number of opportu-
nities to read books that operate in such unconventional ways. Since the
1970s and increasingly in the last few decades, publishers of children’s
books in the USA, the UK, Canada, and Australia have been producing
books with not just one central character, but two, three, four, or more
equally prominent characters described in turn in alternating narratives
often labelled with the characters’ names and often focalized through each
of their experiences and responses. As I have worked on this book, I have
come upon over 300 English-language novels for children and young
adults with two alternating narratives (many of these labelling their alter-
nating narratives with their two central characters’ names), almost fifty
with three alternating narratives, and at least fifty more with four or more
alternating narratives. Furthermore, ‘Alternating Narratives’ or ‘Different
Focalizers’ are not the sort of terms used in library catalogue classifica-
tions, so identifying books of this sort in advance of reading them is not
always easy. I know there are many more such novels in existence, and yet
more continue to be published.
Not all of the alternating narratives in these novels are obviously or
consistently focalized through one of the characters they describe. In Mal
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 13

Peet’s Tamar (UK 2005), for instance, not only are there alternating
narratives describing events in the lives of different characters, but also,
there are switches in focalization amongst the characters involved within
one of the narratives. In Julie Hearn’s The Minister’s Daughter (UK
2006), one of the narratives offers an omniscient narrator who is capable
of entering the thoughts of any or all of the characters and does so with
different characters at different moments.
Furthermore, other novels for young readers offer other forms of
narrative fragments in alternation with each other. Some, like Cornelia
Funke’s Inkheart (Germany 2003) use fragments from other authors or
from imaginary texts as epigraphs to each of their chapters. In Jonathan
Stroud’s Heroes of the Valley (UK 2009), the epigraphs tell a continuous
story on their own; each chapter begins with an excerpt from the tale of a
great hero, and what follows describes what is represented as the real
events that the tale is based on. In novels like Teddy Steinkellner’s Trash
Can Days (USA 2013), meanwhile, materials from other sources are
interspersed amidst and among narratives describing events as the char-
acters experience them: Facebook updates, IMs, blog entries, handouts
from the principal, letters between the principal and a teacher, notes the
characters write to each other. And in texts like Jan Mark’s The Hillingdon
Fox (UK 1995), the entire novel consists of alternating diaries or journals
written by the characters.
In all these cases, the alternation of differing narrative fragments invites
young readers to figure out the connection of the fragments with each
other in order to understand the story as a whole. In all of them, what
happened once upon a time emerges from what happened differently twice
or more within that time or in some related time. While this book centrally
concerns novels like Words of Stone with alternating chapters or sections
focalized through different characters, I also consider a wide range of
other uses of alternating fragments, in the belief that they all relate to
each other and produce similar problems for readers and similar literary
and ideological implications.
While ‘once upon a time’ is still by far the most common kind of
storytelling for young people, twice or thrice or many times upon a
time is no longer even mildly unusual. We might well ask why so many
novels for young readers repeat the same devices that appear in Words
of Stone. Might the widespread use of these devices mean that they are
less challenging to the norms of literature for young people than they
seem? In her study of novels of this sort for young adults, Robyn
14 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

McCallum concludes that ‘the dialogic potential of multivoiced and

multistranded narratives is frequently contained through implicit
authorial control manifest in the narrative, and thematic and intertex-
tual structures used to organize and structure the various narrative
strands or voices. These strategies also deny characters agency and
disable intersubjectivity’ (1999, p. 37). Furthermore, McCallum sug-
gests, ‘interlaced dual narration [what I am here calling “alternating
narrative”] . . . can be a particularly problematic form. The tendency to
structure narrative point of view oppositionally often entails that one
dominant narratorial position is privileged and dialogue is thus sub-
sumed by monologue’ (p. 56). Perhaps such novels are less ethical than
Cadden believes.
Considered in that light––and in the light of Nikolajeva’s attempts to
read dual narratives as single ones––Words of Stone might actually be more
one-sided than it at first appears, more conventionally like more obviously
normative texts of children’s literature. The apparent balance of equalities
that the alternating narratives imply and that keeps Blaze and Joselle
isolated from each other even at the end may be undermined by what
McCallum identifies as a privileging of one dominant narratorial position.
For one thing, the novel offers many hints that Blaze and Joselle represent
two different social groups. Blaze’s father is a teacher who does art, and his
grandmother keeps a comfortable middle-class home, tends a garden, and
makes all their meals from scratch. Joselle’s mother buys their clothes in
thrift shops. Her grandmother’s house is messy and her furniture worn,
and her cooking consists mostly of reheating pre-prepared products. While
it is never said, it seems clear that readers are to assume that Blazes family’s
lifestyle is preferable. While Joselle aspires to join Blaze’s family, Blaze
never expresses an equivalent wish to join hers; and it is obvious that
Joselle’s mother’s isolating and self-indulgent ways represent a less desir-
able form of parenting than the interest, concern, and affection his rela-
tives and his father’s girlfriend offer Blaze––obvious, indeed, that any
willed isolation from others is less desirable than attempts to empathize
and reach out. The novel simply takes it for granted that the habits and
values of Blaze’s family are superior to those of the one Joselle seems to
belong to.
But even if texts with alternating narratives subvert their potential for
varying from conventional values, I still have to ask why so many of them
exist in the first place. Why express the same familiar values in unnecessa-
rily more complicated ways?
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 15

The existence of so many novels with alternating narratives might

simply be a sign that children’s literature is becoming different and more
complicated, possibly because childhood and the children it addresses have
become different and more complicated. For Eliza Dresang, technological
changes in how people communicate with each other have led to equiva-
lent changes in writing for young people: ‘Three digital age concepts
underpin and permeate all the radical changes that are taking place in
literature for youth: connectivity, interactivity, and access’ (1999, p. 12).
As my discussion of Words of Stone reveals, the use of alternating narratives
could certainly represent an interest in connectivity and interactivity.
While Maria Nikolajeva accepts that, ‘in our time, impulses from film,
TV, video, teenage fashion, rock texts, the toy industry, advertisements,
cartoons and entertainment are important in the evolution of children’s
literature’ (1996, p. 65), she sees a move towards the kinds of complexity
alternating narratives represent as inherent in the way specific kinds of
literature operate. For her, it is the pressure of the ‘semiosphere’ of
children’s literature––the discreet but evolving collection of codes that
define what it is––that makes it ever more complicated. Once a literary
code has become established, it becomes standardized, so that ‘the longer
a code has been central, the greater the risk that it will become petrified
and lose its appeal to readers. At this point, peripheral and therefore more
flexible codes come and take its place’ (p. 63). In traditional children’s
literature, once-told tales with single main characters readers can identify
with have been central; and so, from a point of view like Nikolajeva’s, it is
almost inevitable that twice-told or thrice-told tales will come to be
written, and, simply in being innovative, achieve acclaim.
Elsewhere, in an article called ‘Exit Children’s Literature’, Nikolajeva
suggests ‘an ever-growing segment of contemporary children’s literature is
transgressing its own boundaries, coming closer to mainstream literature’
(1998, p. 222), and concludes that ‘sooner or later, children’s literature
will be integrated into the mainstream and disappear’ (p. 233). In recent
years, certainly, the growing number of adults who enjoy what is still
called Young Adult literature, and the development of a similar but slightly
more sophisticated genre of ‘New Adult’ fiction, might suggest that
Nikolajeva’s prediction is coming true, albeit more so because more adults
are responding to simple texts than because writing for young people is
becoming more sophisticated. By and large, however, children’s literature
tends to be a resilient genre, quite resistant to change. Despite Dresang’s
and Nikolajeva’s claims about a growing sophistication, a trip to the
16 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

children’s section of a bookshop will quickly reveal that the vast majority
of books published for children or young adults are much like already-
existing texts, much like books for young people have always been. Unlike
the novels I am discussing here, most offer one central child or teen
character’s focalization, contain no other narrative fragments, and arrive
at something that can easily be interpreted as a moral.
Furthermore, as I have suggested might be happening in Words of
Stone, many apparently non-conventional books for young people repli-
cate recurring themes and conventional characteristics of writing for
young people under their apparently non-conventional surfaces. Perhaps
because adult ideas about childhood and youth have not really changed
even in an apparently different technological age, the literature resists
change, pulls innovation back towards what is conventional.
Nevertheless, some recent writing does at least appear to be multivocal
and otherwise unconventional, and Dresang and Nikolajeva suggest why
innovations like alternating narratives might bring success to writers and
publishers––for instance, awards like the Newbery medals awarded to
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998), Lynne Rae
Perkins’s Criss Cross (2005), and Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over
Manifest (2010) as their year’s best book for young people by an
American; or the Michael L. Printz award for best Young Adult book
published in America awarded to Aidan Chambers’s Postcards from No
Man’s Land (awarded in 1999), Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last
(2003), Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), Melina
Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (2009), John Corey Whaley’s Where Things
Come Back (2011), and Nick Lake’s In Darkness (2012); or the
Carnegie medals awarded to Robert Swindells’s Stone Cold (1993),
Chambers’s Postcards (1999), Mal Peet’s Tamar (2005), and Patrick
Ness’s Of Monsters and Men (2010) for the best children’s novel published
in the UK; or the Canadian Governor-General’s Award for Wendy
Phillips’s Fishtailing (awarded in 2010) and Caroline Pignat’s The Gospel
Truth (2014). Texts of this sort announce themselves as engaged
responses to contemporary childhood, as being current and relevant
enough to bring great power in the field of children’s publishing. But if,
in fact, this more complex and sophisticated writing does cleave to con-
ventions enough to represent excellence in the field despite its apparent
contemporaneity (and I believe that in order to gain recognition it must
do that), then it can accomplish two things at once: It can seem powerfully
current at the same time as it reconfirms the older and even more powerful
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 17

convention. It can co-opt innovation in the service of a one-sided con-

servative tradition.
That possibility comes to seem particularly relevant in a consideration,
not of innovation in texts for young people generally, but of the use of
alternating narratives specifically. According to Bakhtin, novels are inher-
ently polyphonic, containing a variety of different voices and thus inevi-
tably representing a variety of different points of view that therefore
undermines the authority of any single one of the views. As Rachel
Falconer suggests, Bakhtin posits ‘a pair of forces that, throughout the
history of language, have been constantly at war’ (2010, p. 165). The first
‘is ‘monologic,’ centripetal and unifying’ (p. 165)––and thus confirmative
of mainstream social ideologies. The second force––the dialogic––’is cen-
trifugal and strives continually to evade capture in official discourse’
(pp. 165–6). As Falconer suggests, ‘dialogism is clearly the privileged
force in Bakhtin’s analysis’ because it ‘represents the force of language in
its most democratic, generative, and creative aspect’ (p. 166).
While novels always represent a dialogical heteroglossia––a variety of
differing voices and positions––powerful ideologies work to make fiction
more monological by trying to impose an official point of view and an
official language over the many different voices. On the other hand, as
McCallum argues, the use of multiple narratives can enable ‘the construc-
tion of a range of perceptual, attitudinal and ideological viewpoints asso-
ciated with the subject positions occupied by characters’ and ‘can efface,
and thereby destabilize, a reader’s sense of an implicit single authoritative
narratorial position’ (p. 36). That is especially true in what Sara Day calls
‘multivoiced narration’: ‘These novels—in which narrative responsibility is
shared by at least two narrators or focalizers—enact Mikhail Bakhtin’s
concept of polyphony by explicitly demonstrating the mutual influence
and interplay of multiple voices’ (2010, p. 66).
McCallum identifies Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (USA 1968) as an early
precursor of the many books for young readers that uses ‘interlaced binary
narrative’––another term for what I am here calling alternative narratives. But
while The Pigman alternates between the teenaged Lorraine and John’s
descriptions of their encounters with an old man they befriend and betray,
the two cast doubt on the dialogism of alternating narrative by offering just
one understanding of what happened and what it might mean. They write
about what happened after the events, in a journal that will record what has
now become history, so that any earlier variations in their responses have been
absorbed by their shared knowledge of what it all has led to, their shared
18 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES IN FICTION FOR YOUNG READERS

interpretation of what it means, and their implicit agreement with what each
other has already written as they take up the story in successive sections. The
Pigman thus uses its alternating narratives to confirm a one-sided view of the
events it describes. Two different people have come to see things the same
way––the one and only right way. In bypassing and even erasing the differ-
ences that seem to justify its alternating structure, The Pigman might well offer
insight into what later, less obviously monological books are in the process of
doing also.
Lest that seems overly pessimistic, however, and in the name of dialo-
gics, I would also like to propose an alternate possibility. In writing for
young people, the pressure of the genre might well lead to texts subsum-
ing the potential for dialogue in alternating narratives in an underlying
monologism; but then the very presence of the two dialogues might open
a way beyond the monologic. Once there are two or more streams pre-
sent––and once the two streams seem to possess equal status, as they so
often claim to do in the texts I am considering here––then there are
opportunities for alternate readings of them. Such texts might then be
understood to speak beyond and even against their own intentions, to
move beyond the monologue hidden in their dialogue to an actual and
actually ambivalent dialogue. Perhaps Blaze’s family’s values are less attrac-
tive than Joselle’s after all?
At any rate, my intention in this book is to take a closer look at a range
of texts for young people with two, three, and more alternating narratives,
and with other uses of alternating narrative fragments, in order to develop
a better sense of how the alternating structures and voices work and what
sorts of values they operate in aid of. I focus first on the ways in which
authors set up and make use of alternating narratives, and how the alter-
nating narratives work to shape and give structure, and therefore meaning,
to the stories they tell. Following that, I consider ways in which, as
differing versions of the same events, alternating narratives operate as
variations of each other––versions in writing of how variations operate in
music. I then explore how the form of alternating narratives supports and
allows for the expression of significant themes and ideologies in literature
for young people, and how writers make use of this form to support or
subvert monological understandings of the world young readers live in.
Underlying all these discussions is an effort to develop a better under-
standing of how a form so apparently alien to the conventions of writing
for young people has come so quickly to be understood as conventional,
and an effort to understand how alternating narratives do and do not
 1 ALTERNATING NARRATIVES: AN INTRODUCTION 19

transgress the conventions of writing for young people, and do and do not
represent what is old and what is new. My attempts to answer these
questions build on—and thus, inevitably, test and problematize—the
ideas about the conventions of writing for young readers that I considered
in my book The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature.
My focus throughout is on literary structure––on how the relationships
of alternating narratives work to shape their effect on readers and their
meanings. My work here then relates to Fredric Jameson’s project in The
Political Unconscious of viewing aspects of literary construction that have
been more traditionally seen in purely aesthetic terms as historically based
conveyors of ideological content––as expressions of what he identifies as
‘the ideology of form’ (1981, p. 76). For Jameson, the production of
aesthetic or narrative form is ‘an ideological act in its own right, with the
function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable
social contradictions’ (p. 79); the ideological messages of such solutions
are ‘distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the work’ (p. 99).
While I base my considerations of fictional structure in the ‘New Critical’
kind of close reading of texts that I first learned as a graduate student many
decades ago, and while I engage with structural and narratological
approaches to the novels I discuss, my project here connects most sig-
nificantly with the kinds of narratology Monica Fludernik refers to when
she says, ‘These approaches attempt to combine ideological frameworks
. . . with the more formal concerns of narratology’ (1996, p. 51).
In pursuing my goal of understanding alternating narratives, I refer
both to texts for younger readers and texts for somewhat older ones––to
what I identify more generally as ‘texts for young readers’. There has been
much critical discussion of how what is called ‘young adult’ literature is
similar to and/or different from what we call ‘children’s’ literature––the
extent to which young adult literature can be understood, as Karen Coats
suggests, ‘as a type of literature that has its own constellation of concerns
that mark it as distinctive from literature for either children or adults’
(2011, p. 317). There can be no question that it does, indeed, tend to
have different concerns––as different as the lives of younger children from
the lives of the teenagers it focuses on often are. As Coats suggests, ‘YA
literature is organized around the same sorts of tensions that occupy the
physical bodies and emotional lives of its intended audience’ (p. 316),
especially in terms of questions of power and sexuality. Nevertheless, as I
argue in The Hidden Adult, I believe that YA fiction, which almost always
shares with children’s fiction the fact that it is written by writers older than
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Meisenbach, Riffarth & Co. Berlin heliogr.

WATUSSI

Wenn man das heutige Urundi betrachtet, so erhält man den

Eindruck der grössten politischen Zerfahrenheit. Im Norden den
Einfällen Kigere's, des eroberungslustigen Häuptlings von Ruanda,
im Süden den Razzias arabischer Sklavenhändler ausgesetzt, sind
die Warundi in unzählige, durch Zwistigkeiten getrennte Gemeinden
zertheilt und werden durch den räuberischen Hirtenadel der Watussi
ausgebeutet. Es ist kein Wunder, wenn sie mit Sehnsucht dem
Auftreten eines »Mwesi« entgegensehen. Einmal ist ihnen ein
solcher schon unter deutscher Flagge erschienen, freilich nur als
Pionier und den Nachfolgern die Pfade ebnend. Wenn diese
eintreffen und versuchen, die deutsche Herrschaft in Urundi zu
begründen, so werden sie — wenn es eben die rechten Leute sind
— keinerlei Schwierigkeiten sondern begeisterten Empfang finden
und im Stande sein, der deutschen Sache ein noch unberührtes, gut
veranlagtes Naturvolk zu gewinnen, welches jedenfalls bestimmt ist
in der Zukunft der Kolonie die wichtigste Rolle zu spielen.
Die grosse Empfänglichkeit der Warundi lässt auch schliessen,
dass ein von Norden kommender Missionar dort die grossartigsten
Bekehrungs-Erfolge erreichen könnte. Jedenfalls scheint es
rathsam, Urundi von vornherein einer bestimmten Konfession von
Missionaren zuzutheilen, damit das traurige Schauspiel des
Religionskrieges in Uganda keine Wiederholung finde.
An die Warundi schliessen sich südlich vom Mlagarassi die
Wa h a. Dieselben sind den Warundi nahe verwandt, sprechen
dieselbe Sprache und zeigen nur geringe Abweichungen, die auf
den langjährigen Verkehr mit Wanyamwesi hinweisen. Im Aeusseren
und der Tracht gleichen sie den Warundi, besitzen jedoch ziemlich
viel Baumwollzeug. Die Hütten sind stets höher als ihr Durchmesser,
innen durch Strohwände getheilt, geräumig und freundlich. Sie sind
oft in grossen Dörfern mit bis zu 120 Hütten vereinigt, während man
in Urundi nur von verstreuten Weilern reden kann. Der Grund hierfür
liegt in den vielen äusseren Feinden, welche die Waha bedrohen
und sie zwingen, in grossen Mengen zusammenzuleben. Die
Getreidevorräthe bewahren sie in mächtigen runden Holzschachteln.
Die Dörfer sind oft mit Stangenzäunen umgeben.
Der
A c ke r b a u wird
mit grosser
Sorgfalt betrieben
und es macht
sich in den
Kulturpflanzen
der Einfluss
Unyamwesi's
geltend. An die
Stelle der
Banane, die
seltener wird,
treten Sorghum
und Mais, auch
Maniok, Pataten,
Hülsenfrüchte,
Zuckerrohr,
Tomaten, Getreideschachteln Wohnhütte Getreideschober
Grundnüsse und Bienenstock Geisterhütten
Tabak werden der Waha.
angebaut. Die ausgedehnten Waldwildnisse bieten gute Gelegenheit
zur J a g d.
Die Vie h zu ch t ist nicht bedeutend, der Rinderstand wurde
durch Einfälle der Wangoni und im Süden auch der Massai decimirt.
Doch trifft man noch ziemlich viel Kleinvieh und Hühner, auch
Tauben, die in den im westlichen Unyamwesi gebräuchlichen
Taubenschlägen gehalten werden. Bienenzucht ist sehr häufig, die
Stöcke bestehen aus cylindrischen, mit Lehm bestrichenen Körben,
die auf niedrigen Gestellen ruhen.
Die Waha verfertigen Rindenzeug nicht nur aus dem Ficus,
sondern auch aus einem der Miombo-Gruppe angehörigen
Waldbaum. Doch dient das aus letzterem gewonnene Zeug mehr zu
Schlafmatten, da es steifer als das Ficuszeug ist. Auch die grossen
Holzschachteln werden in ähnlicher Weise aus Baumrinden
hergestellt und geschickt vernäht. Selbst Kanus zum Uebersetzen
des Mlagarassi werden aus Baumrinde zusammengenäht. Zum
Unterschied von den Warundi besitzen die Waha Trommeln
länglicher Form in verschiedener Grösse.
Ihre Be w a ff n u n g besteht aus Wurfspeeren, Bogen und Pfeil.
Die Wurfspeere haben in den Schaft eingelassene Spitzen, sind
leicht und werden stets zu zwei getragen. Doch sind auch die
Warundi-Speere mit kürzeren Schäften und eine andere Speerform
mit Schaftzwinge üblich, die angeblich die ursprüngliche sein soll.
Die Pfeile sind zierlich gefertigt und gleichen jenen der Warundi; die
Bogen sind nicht besonders kräftig. Schwerter in Holzscheiden sieht
man nur vereinzelt. Originell ist eine aus Kalebassen und Stroh
gefertigte Kinderpuppe.
Die Waha unterstehen kleineren Häuptlingen, welche theilweise
Watussi-Blut haben. Den Verkehr mit der Aussenwelt vermittelt das
S a lz, welches in Uvinsa, im Süden des Landes, gewonnen wird und
von sehr guter Qualität ist. Man trifft im Lande zahlreiche
Wanyamwesi-Händler, welche Salz, Kleinvieh und Honig kaufen, und
Messingdraht, wohl auch einzelne Gewehre einführen. Ebenso
machen die Waha Reisen nach Unyamwesi und gelangen bis
Tabora. Früher waren sie ihrer Ungastlichkeit halber berüchtigt,
gegenwärtig lernte ich sie als gutmüthiges, freundliches Volk
kennen, welches Europäern sehr geneigt scheint.
 Es war oben
schon mehrfach von
den Wa n g o n i oder
Watuta die Rede,
einem räuberischen
Zulustamm, der vor
jedenfalls nicht
allzulanger Zeit aus
Südafrika
eingewandert ist und
sich in Sprache,
Tracht und Sitten
sehr rein erhalten
hat. Die Wangoni
sassen früher in der
Gegend von
Urambo, von wo aus
sie die
Nachbargebiete
verheerten. Nach
ihrer Niederlage
durch die deutsche
Schutztruppe unter
Lieutenant Langheld,
Puppe der Waha. — Rindenzeughammer, Uha. zogen sie sich nach
— Trommel der Waha. — Speer der Waha. dem südlichen Ost-
Ussui zurück, wo sie schöne Dörfer und Reiskulturen besitzen und
vollkommen friedlich leben. Ich kam mit diesem merkwürdigen
Stamm niemals in Berührung und kann daher nichts Näheres über
denselben mittheilen.
Zuletzt erübrigt noch von jenem Volk zu sprechen, welches den
Verkehr mit der Küste vermittelt und welches sich am meisten
fremden Einflüssen und fremder Kultur zugänglich erweist: den
Wa n ya mw e si. Alle Reisenden von Burton und Speke an, und
darunter vorzügliche Beobachter wie Paul Reichard und Stuhlmann,
haben sich bereits eingehend mit diesem Volke beschäftigt, sodass
ich mich betreffs desselben kürzer fassen kann.
Unter Wanyamwesi verstehe ich die Bewohner der von den
Küstenleuten als Unyamwesi bezeichneten Landschaft, die im Osten
an die Massai-Steppen, an Turu und Ugogo, im Norden an den
Victoria-Nyansa vom Speke-Golf bis zur Bukumbi-Bai, im Westen an
Usinja, Ussirombo und Uha grenzt und sich gegen Süden in noch
unbekannter Entfernung erstreckt.
Der N a me U n ya mwe si ist, wie ich durch viele und sorgfältige
Erkundigungen im ganzen Lande, von Usukuma bis Urambo erfuhr,
k e in nationaler, sondern von den Küstenleuten dem Lande
beigelegt. Er bedeutet »Mondland«, U-nya-mwesi d. i. Land des
Mondes. Diese, schon den alten Reisenden bekannte Ableitung
wurde neuerdings bezweifelt und behauptet, dass in Unyamwesi
eine Stammsilbe »nyam« enthalten sei. Dies ist jedoch unrichtig wie
man daraus ersehen kann, dass z. B. auch die Bewohner von Turu
nicht »Waturu« sondern Wa-nya-turu, die Leute von Ruanda Wa-
nya-ruanda genannt werden und dass es zahlreiche ähnlich
lautende Landschaften, wie U-nya-nyembe, U-nya-nganyi giebt,
woraus deutlich hervorgeht, dass »nya« etwa »von« bedeutet, also
Wanyaturu »Leute von Turu«, Wanyamwesi, »Leute von Mwesi«
Mondleute.
Dass das im Worte enthaltene mwesi hier wirklich Mond
bedeutet, wurde mir von alten Küstenleuten sowohl, wie auch von
Eingeborenen stets versichert und kann als zweifellos betrachtet
werden. Daraus jedoch einen Schluss ziehen zu wollen, dass
Unyamwesi das Mondland der Alten sei, wie dies in neuerer Zeit
vielfach geschah, scheint mir verfehlt. Ein solcher Schluss wäre nur
gestattet, wenn der Name ein einheimischer wäre, während er wie
gesagt den Küstenleuten, also den Swahíli seinen Ursprung
verdankt. Wie diese dazu kamen das Land als »Mondland« zu
bezeichnen, ist nicht schwer erklärlich. Denn den Arabern und damit
auch den intelligenten Swahíli war ja sehr wohl bekannt, dass die
alten Geographen ein »Mondland« im Innern Afrika's, an den
Quellen des Nil, vermutheten. Als nun Karawanen in jene Länder
vordrangen, war es sehr begreiflich, dass sie in dem reichsten und
wichtigsten Lande des Innern, in dem Lande, welches im Handel die
grösste Rolle spielte, das Mondland U-nya-mwesi zu erkennen
glaubten. Oder mit anderen Worten: Nicht weil im Innern Ostafrika's
ein Unyamwesi existirt, kann man darauf schliessen, dass dasselbe
mit dem Mondland der Alten identisch sei, sondern weil die alten und
arabischen Geographen in Innerafrika ein Mondland vermutheten,
wurde diese Landschaft von den Küstenleuten »Unyamwesi«
genannt.
Die Wanyamwesi selbst gebrauchen diese Bezeichnung unter
einander niemals, sondern trennen sich in verschiedene grosse
Stämme wie Watakama, Wasukuma[24], Wasumbwa, Wafioma und
Wakonongo. Sie sind jedoch sehr deutlich als ein Stamm
charakterisirt und sprechen auch dieselbe, nur dialektisch
abweichende Sprache. Der Hauptunterschied zwischen den
verschiedenen Wanyamwesi-Stämmen liegt in dem mehr oder
weniger starken Eindringen der Küstenkultur.
Am ursprünglichsten haben sich die Wasukuma, besonders in
den östlichen Distrikten von Ntussu und Meatu erhalten, während die
Wasumbwa und Watakama, besonders die Leute von Urambo, in
materieller Kultur den Swahíli der Küste kaum nachstehen.
Die Wanyamwesi sind mittelgrosse, kräftiggebaute Leute von
meist dunkelbrauner Hautfarbe. Die südlichen Stämme sind
schlanker und grösser, die Wasukuma untersetzt und dunkelfarbiger
oder scheinen wenigstens so, da ihre Unreinlichkeit die Hautfarbe
schwer erkennen lässt. Sie haben ziemlich ausgeprägten
Negercharakter und physisch einen recht einheitlichen Typus. Nur
die Bewohner des östlichen Usukuma, besonders die von Meatu,
scheinen hamitische (Wataturu) Blutmischungen erhalten zu haben.
Alle Wanyamwesi sind unbeschnitten. Als Stammesmarke kann
eine von der Nasenwurzel zum Ohre verlaufende Reihe von
Narbenverzierungen gelten, auch werden die oberen vorderen
Schneidezähne vielfach dreieckig ausgesplittert. Doch sind beide
Merkmale nicht mehr allgemein verbreitet. Haarfrisuren kommen
nicht vor, doch werden die Haare vielfach rasirt. Die Ohrläppchen
werden besonders in Usukuma ausgedehnt und Messingspiralen
darin getragen. Die Weiber im Süden des Landes tragen nach
Küstenart runde Holzscheiben im Ohr. Die ursprüngliche Kleidung
der Wanyamwesi ist Fell, in den westlichen Distrikten auch
Rindenzeug. In Usukuma tragen die Männer ein Ziegenfell, das den
Oberkörper, niemals jedoch die Schamtheile bedeckt, manchmal
gehen sie auch ganz nackt. Die Weiber tragen Lendenschurze aus
Leder und verhüllen oft auch den Busen.
Sonst wird fast überall europäisches Baumwollzeug getragen,
welches das solide eingeborene Baumwollzeug und das Rindenzeug
fast völlig verdrängt. Letzteres dient kaum noch irgendwo als
Kleidung, sondern nur mehr zu Schlafmatten. In Urambo,
Unyanyembe, sowie anderen Plätzen der Karawanenstrassen sind
bedeutende Mengen Baumwollzeug vorhanden und Männer und
Weiber unterscheiden sich in der Tracht kaum von der
Küstenbevölkerung.
Als Schmuck dienen Glas-, Holz- und Eisenperlen und mit
Messing- oder Eisendraht umsponnene Darmsaiten, sowie
Eisenarmringe. Die Elephantenjäger und ihre Frauen pflegen
Armringe zu tragen die aus der Sohle des Elephanten geschnitten
werden. Im östlichen Usukuma findet man sehr grosse milchweisse
und blaue Glasperlen, die jetzt durch keine Karawane mehr
eingeführt werden und sehr alten Ursprungs sind. Die jüngeren
Weiber tragen Holzperlen als Amulett um den Hals; Eisenschmuck
ist ein Zeichen verheiratheter Frauen. Als Kopfschmuck der Krieger
dienen in Usukuma Büschel von Federn und Stroh (Abb. pag. 61).
Den Charakter der Wanyamwesi hat Paul Reichard mit grossem
Geschick beschrieben. Bei allen ihren Fehlern ist ihnen doch ein
ausserordentlicher Unternehmungsgeist und eine für Afrikaner
seltene Arbeitskraft eigen, welche sie zu einem wichtigen
Kulturelement macht.
Die
Wo h n u n g
sämmtlicher
Wanyamwesi ist
die Rundhütte mit
Kegeldach und
cylindrischem,
lehmverputzten
Unterbau. In
Usukuma und in
den westlichen
Distrikten hat sich
diese Form noch
rein erhalten, in
der weiteren Wohnhütte Vorrathshütte
Umgebung Geisterhütten Taubenschlag
Tabora's wird die der Wanyamwesi von Urambo.
Hütte jedoch allmählich durch den Tembe ersetzt. Zu Speke's Zeiten,
also Anfang der sechziger Jahre, gab es solche noch viel weniger
und ältere Leute erinnern sich auch noch sehr genau an die
Entstehung des Tembebaus. Derselbe fällt mit der Einführung der
Feuerwaffen zusammen, gegen welche die alten
Befestigungsformen nicht genug Schutz boten. Man erbaute daher
um die Rundhüttendörfer Tembenringe, deren Styl halb den Arabern
Tabora's, halb den Wagogo entlehnt war.
Ursprünglich waren diese Temben reine Befestigungen und nicht
bewohnt; ich fand heute noch solche unbewohnten Tembenringe in
Kirambo. Später zwang der Raummangel sie zu bewohnen, neue
Aussenbauten mussten natürlich im Tembestyl erbaut werden und
nach und nach entwickelten sich aus den Dörfern förmliche
Labyrinthe, deren Mittelpunkt jedoch noch sehr oft einige grosse
Rundhütten des Häuptlings einnehmen. — Die Temben haben
rechteckigen Querschnitt, sind aber mannshoch und besitzen
glattverputzte Wände und ein ebensolches Dach. Gegen aussen und
gegen die Eingänge zu sind sie mit Schiessscharten versehen und
bilden oft recht starke kleine Festungen (Abb. pag. 62, 93 u. 113).
Die grössten und schönsten Rundhütten in Unyamwesi,
überhaupt im Innern Afrika's, sah ich in Urambo. Sie sind sehr
sorgfältig und fest erbaut und haben ca. 10-15 m Durchmesser und
12-30 m Höhe. Letztere Höhe sah ich bei den wahrhaft pyramidalen
beiden Hütten des Häuptlings Mlamira von Kirambo, in welchen
Hunderte von Menschen Platz haben. Sie ähneln im Styl den Hütten
der Wasegua. Ein Verandaraum, dessen Aussenwand theils mit
Lehm ausgefüllt ist, theils nur aus Pfosten besteht, umschliesst
ringförmig den cylindrischen Innenraum, der meist keine Theilung
hat und mit dem Dach einen sehr hohen Raum bildet. Darin steht
das Bett aus glatten Brettern und der Feuerheerd, bestehend aus
drei festgebrannten Lehmkegeln. Das Dach ohne Mittelpfeiler ist
stark geneigt und mit ziegelförmig übergreifenden, koncentrischen
Grasschichten sorgfältig gedeckt. Das Getreide wird in eigenen
Vorrathshütten untergebracht.
Aehnlich, doch weit mangelhafter sind die Hütten der Wasegua
errichtet. Sie besitzen ebenfalls keinen Mittelpfeiler. Der Innenraum
ist meist durch eine Querwand in zwei Hälften getheilt, deren
vordere das Vieh, die hintere, ganz dunkle die Menschen bewohnen.
In einem durch Stangen abgegrenzten Dachraum sind mächtige
Vorrathskörbe für Getreide aufgestapelt.
In Usukuma sind die Dörfer nicht selten wie in Schaschi durch
buschige Euphorbienhecken in kleine Komplexe getheilt. Fast stets
schliessen sie sich an die felsigen Granithügel der Gegend, die als
natürliche Befestigungen dienen und deren Klüfte im Nothfall einen
Zufluchtsort bieten. In den Wasumbwa-Gegenden überwiegt der
Stangenzaun noch vor der Tembebefestigung, während diese sonst
überall vorherrscht.
Im Gegensatz zu vielen ihrer Nachbarn, welche, wie die Warundi,
in Weilern hausen, sind die Wanyamwesi echte Dorfbewohner und
vereinen sich stets zu oft sehr ansehnlichen Niederlassungen.
Vielleicht hat dieser, durch die kriegerischen Verhältnisse
begünstigte Geselligkeitstrieb viel zu der Entwickelung dieses Volkes
beigetragen. Wenigstens findet man in Urambo, wo die grössten
Dörfer liegen und alle Bewohner sich in ausgedehnten Ortschaften
koncentriren, auch die höchste Kultur in Unyamwesi.
Die Wanyamwesi sind sehr tüchtige Acke r b a u e r, ihre Felder
sind gut gehalten und werden mit grosser Sorgfalt gepflegt. Die
Hauptnahrungspflanze ist Sorghum. Neben dieser wird auch vielfach
Mais und Mawele (Penicillaria), in Usmau, Urambo und
Unyanyembe auch Reis gebaut, der durch die Araber eingeführt
wurde. Ausserdem giebt es fast überall Hülsenfrüchte, Mais,
Pataten, Kürbisse, Gurken, Grundnüsse, seltener Bananen, Tomaten
und Maniok. Baumwolle wird in Usukuma, Tabak und Hanf überall
angebaut. Wo die Wanyamwesi mit Arabern und Küstenleuten in
nähere Berührung kamen, merkt man deren Einfluss in der Anlage
der Felder und in dem Vorhandensein fremder Kulturpflanzen, an
welche sie sich rasch gewöhnen. Ausser dem Reis haben sie in
vielen Gegenden auch Obstbäume, Citronen, Mangos, Guayaven
und Papayas übernommen.
 Den Sorghum pflegt man nach der Ernte auf flachen Steinplatten
mit langen Stangen zu dreschen, sodann wird er in Holzmörsern
weiter enthülst und in den Vorrathsbehältern aufbewahrt. Auf flachen
Steinplatten wird er mit einem Reibstein zu Mehl gemahlen. Nach
der Arbeit wird der Mahlstein mit einem eigenen Besen reingekehrt.
Durch das fortwährende Reiben wird die Steinplatte nach und nach
ausgehöhlt und die Granitfelsen Usukuma's tragen oft derartige
Vertiefungen, die auf alte Dorfstätten schliessen lassen, wo sonst
längst keine Spur mehr von solchen vorhanden ist.
 Die Vie h z u ch t
hat in Unyamwesi
durch die
Rinderseuche stark
gelitten, welche
einen grossen Theil Feldbeil der Wanyamwesi.
der Zeburinder wegraffte, so dass man solche nur selten antrifft.
Doch giebt es überall und besonders in Usukuma viele Ziegen und
Schafe, letztere mit sehr schwachem Fettschwanz, sowie Hühner,
deren Eier nicht gegessen werden. Tauben findet man besonders in
Urambo, wo sie in netten Taubenschlägen gehalten werden. Die
Wanyamwesi essen Fische in vielen Gegenden garnicht und
schätzen dieselben überhaupt nicht sehr, während sie
(hauptsächlich die Wakonongo) gedörrte Maden mit Vorliebe
geniessen. Tabakrauchen ist bei Männern und Weibern sehr beliebt,
auch der Hanf, der aus Kürbiss-Wasserpfeifen geraucht wird, ist weit
verbreitet.
In vielen Gegenden jagen die Wanyamwesi eifrig; es giebt unter
ihnen berufsmässige Elephantenjäger (Makua), die den Küsten-
Makua starke Konkurrenz machen.
In den Geräthen und Waffen der Wanyamwesi zeigt sich
ebenfalls die Tendenz, von anderen Stämmen ihnen passendes zu
entlehnen und nach eigenem Ermessen abzuändern.
Besonders interessant ist das eingeborene Baumwollenzeug, ein
ungemein festes Gewebe, welches schwarze und gelbe Streifen und
einen Quastensaum hat.[25] Es ist jedenfalls eine Nachahmung der
Küstenbaumwollzeuge, zu welcher wohl ursprünglich Swahíli oder
Araber die Anleitung gaben. Diese Stoffe wurden viel erzeugt als
Küstenzeug noch selten war. Gegenwärtig hat die Herstellung dieses
Zeuges im südlichen Unyamwesi ganz aufgehört und beschränkt
sich auf Usukuma. Rindenzeug wird, wie erwähnt, fast garnicht mehr
gefertigt.
In Schmiedearbeiten sind die Wanyamwesi recht geschickt; die
Hackenklingen beziehen sie zwar aus Usinja und auch in Usukuma
sind die Schmiede meist Warongo aus Usinja, doch im Süden,
besonders in Urambo, trifft man einheimische Arbeiter. Diese hausen
in eigenen offenen Hütten und verstehen selbst
Gewehrbestandtheile zu repariren. Sie benutzen nicht selten
Schraubstöcke und andere Geräthe von der Küste.
An Waffen trifft man sehr verschiedenartige Formen. Im Süden
des Landes, hauptsächlich in Urambo und Unyanyembe, herrschen
Kapselgewehre vor, in Usukuma sind solche noch sehr selten. Als
ursprüngliche Waffe der Wanyamwesi erscheint der Wurfspeer mit
eingelassener Spitze, wie er heute noch im östlichen Usukuma in
charakteristischer Form gebraucht wird (Abb. pag. 61). Daneben
giebt es allerlei Arten Zwingenspeere: kurze mit Messingverzierung,
lange mit lanzettförmiger Spitze und Paradespeere (in Ntussu), die
im Kleinen die Massai-Speere nachahmen. Wuchtige Spiesse mit
eingelassenem Dorn werden auf Elephantenjagden benutzt; deren
Spitze ist manchmal vergiftet. Nur bei Tänzen dient die in Usukuma
übliche alte Form der Wataturu-Speere.
Leichte Bogen mit Pfeilen und Köcher trifft man überall, die Pfeile
werden nicht selten vergiftet. Schilde giebt es fast nur in Usukuma,
sie sind aus Büffelhaut, länglich mit einer Einkerbung in der Mitte
(Abb. pag. 61).
Als Musikinstrumente dienen die halb eiförmig geformten
Karawanen-Trommeln (Mganda), Antilopenhörner und lange aus
Rohr und Kalebassen gefertigte Trompeten.
Korbwaaren werden mit grossem Geschick gefertigt und es dient
dazu eine eigene Nadel. Ebenso sind grosse und kleine Töpfe
hübsch ausgeführt.
 Besonders charakteristisch für die Wanyamwesi ist der
K a r a wa n e n h a n d e l, der den tiefgehendsten Einfluss auf ihr
ganzes Dasein ausübt. Während fast alle anderen Stämme
Ostafrika's, selbst jene unweit der Küste, in ihrer bedürfnisslosen
Indolenz ruhig daheimbleiben und höchstens genehmigen, dass
Karawanen von der Küste zu ihnen kommen, haben die
Wanyamwesi schon seit Jahrzehnten selbst Karawanen
zusammengestellt und dieselben nach der Küste sowohl, wie auch
nach entfernten Elfenbeingegenden gesandt. So alt übrigens als
man vielfach annimmt — also etwa bis ins klassische Alterthum
zurückreichend — ist dieser Karawanenhandel keineswegs. Dies
beweist nicht nur die überall verbreitete Tradition, sondern auch die
ungeheuere Zunahme, welche der Karawanenverkehr und damit die
Einführung europäischer Erzeugnisse seit den sechziger Jahren
genommen und der Umstand, dass gewisse Stämme notorisch erst
in ganz jüngster Zeit sich an diesem Handel betheiligt haben.
 Korbnadel,
Wasukuma.
Köcher Elephantenjagd- Speerform der Speer,
aus Urambo. speer, Wasukuma. Wanyamwesi. Usukuma.

Einen Anhaltspunkt für das Alter des Karawanenverkehrs bietet

uns der Stammbaum der Häuptlinge von Unyanyembe:
 Swetu I.
|
Fundikila
|
Miasere --------+
| |
Swetu II. Kiunge (Ziehsohn)
| |
Bibi Niasso Isike.

Swetu I. soll alt geworden sein, Fundikila starb als reifer Mann,
Miasere starb jung und hinterliess den unmündigen Swetu II., an
dessen Stelle sich sein Ziehsohn, Kiunge, der Herrschaft
bemächtigte. Dessen Sohn war der bekannte Isike (Sike), dessen
Feste 1893 von Lieutenant Prince gestürmt wurde, worauf Bibi
Niasso eingesetzt wurde.
Swetu I. hat also vor höchstens 100 Jahren regiert. Unter seiner
Regierung drangen die Elephantenjäger Mparangombe und
Ngogome aus Usagusi — die heute noch in zahlreichen Liedern
verherrlicht werden — so weit nach Osten vor, dass sie mit
zeugtragenden Eingeborenen und Küstenhändlern zusammentrafen.
Letzteren folgten sie an die Küste und gaben dann, in die Heimath
zurückgekehrt, den Anstoss zur Eröffnung des Karawanenverkehrs.
Das Erscheinen der Wanyamwesi an der Küste gab auch den
Swahíli und Arabern Veranlassung in dieses neuerschlossene Land
einzudringen. Dies geschah ca. 1830; doch erst 1846 wurde Tabora
begründet, nachdem eine etwas ältere Niederlassung in Msenne bei
Urambo aufgelassen worden war. Das Jahr der Begründung
Tabora's ist vielen dort lebenden Arabern genau bekannt.
Das Vorhandensein Tabora's als Handelsemporium gab den
Wasukuma Veranlassung dorthin zu kommen und ihre Produkte
umzutauschen. Diese waren früher niemals aus ihrem Lande,
geschweige denn an die Küste gekommen und erinnern sich daran,
dass Swahíli, die aus dem Massai-Lande, also wohl von Tanga oder
Mombas kamen, ihnen zuerst Baumwollzeuge brachten. Auch nach
Begründung Tabora's kamen die Wasukuma Jahre lang nur dahin
und ziehen erst seit ca. 20 Jahren nach der Küste.
Die grösste Bedeutung hat der Karawanenhandel bei den
Wasumbwa des westlichen Unyamwesi erlangt, die überhaupt die
höchste Entwicklung ihres Stammes darstellen. Sie unternehmen
Züge nach Unyoro, Ruanda und Manyema, früher reisten sie auch
nach Umbugwe und an die Grenze des Massai-Landes, doch hat
dies aufgehört, seit die Wasukuma ihnen dort zu starke Konkurrenz
machen. Diese bereisen die Uferländer des Victoria-Nyansa bis
nach Kavirondo hin. Sobald diese Handelszüge genügend Elfenbein
gebracht haben, wird eine Karawane nach der Küste
zusammengestellt, an der sich auch viele Leute betheiligen, die dort
Arbeit und Verdienst suchen. Mit Zeug und andern Artikeln reich
beladen kehren die Karawanen in die Heimath zurück, um bald
wieder neue Züge nach entfernten Gegenden zu unternehmen.
Die Wanyamwesi sind tüchtige, sehr ausdauernde Träger,
allerdings nur auf Karawanenstrassen brauchbar, wo sie reichlich
Wasser und Nahrung bekommen. Sie haben die unangenehme
Eigenschaft nur auf den Schultern zu tragen, so dass die Lasten alle
länglich oder in Halblasten, Midalla, verpackt werden müssen, die an
die Enden einer Stange gebunden werden können. Diese scheuert
die Schulter des Trägers nicht selten blutig, was ihn jedoch wenig zu
kümmern scheint.
Der Karawanenverkehr gab auch Veranlassung zur
A u s wa n d e r u n g und Begründung von Kolonien im Auslande. Der
Grund dazu lag theils in politischen Unruhen, theils in dem
natürlichen Wandertrieb dieses Volkes. Man findet Wanyamwesi-
Kolonien nicht nur in Ugogo, Ussandaui, Irangi und neuestens auch
in Umbugwe, sondern auch in Manyema und Katanga. Ueberall
gelangen sie den Eingeborenen gegenüber zu Einfluss und bilden
ein wichtiges Kulturelement.
 Ueber das i n n e r e L e b e n der Wanyamwesi theile ich nur der
Vollständigkeit halber einige Notizen mit, die ich im Lande sammeln
konnte und verweise im Uebrigen auf Reichard und Stuhlmann, die
Gelegenheit hatten den Stamm genauer kennen zu lernen.
Die G e b u r t eines Kindes giebt keinen Anlass zu besonderen
Festlichkeiten, höchstens die von Zwillingen wird durch einen Tanz
gefeiert. Der Vater giebt dem Kinde einen Namen — meist nach dem
Grossvater oder der Grossmutter — den es lebenslang behält.
Daneben sind oft viele Spitznamen üblich, die oft bekannter als der
wirkliche Name sind. In Usukuma ist der Kindesmord unbekannt. In
den von Swahíli vielbesuchten Gegenden, wie Urambo, hat sich der
Küstenaberglaube verbreitet, dass ein mit Zähnen geborenes Kind
dem Vater den Tod bringe. Es wird aber nur getödtet, wenn der Vater
ein Häuptling ist. Als Kinderspielzeug dienen aus Lehm gefertigte
kleine Puppen. Der Bräutigam erwirbt die Braut durch Kauf vom
Vater; nach einem Tanzfest wird sie ihm übergeben. In Usukuma
wird nach der Brautnacht ein Ochse geschlachtet und mit den
Verwandten verzehrt. Vielweiberei ist üblich, in Usukuma hat aber
nur ein Häuptling mehr als zwei Frauen. Eine unbeliebte Frau wird
einfach zurückgeschickt, der Vater muss dann den Preis wieder
herausgeben. Bei den Wasumbwa muss der Vater selbst im
Todesfall der Frau den Brautpreis ersetzen, oder eine Schwester der
Frau stellen.
Bei Krankheiten werden entweder Pflanzenmedizinen angewandt
oder der Zauberdoktor geholt, der dann aus Hühnerdärmen
bestimmt, welche Krankheit vorhanden ist und diese durch allerlei
Hokuspokus mit einem Holzschüsselchen, mit Amuletten u. s. w.,
auszutreiben sucht. Ein Besessener geniesst in Urambo ein Schaf
mit Zauberarznei, geheilt darf er keinen Kopf, Herz oder Magen und
kein am selben Tage geschlachtetes Thier essen. Wie so viele
Bantu, so glauben auch die Wanyamwesi nicht an natürlichen Tod.
Stirbt Jemand an einer Krankheit, so wird der Zauberdoktor befragt,
der dann wieder aus Hühnerdärmen sein
Orakel fällt. Dasselbe lautet entweder dahin,
dass die Geister der Verstorbenen ihn
getödtet hätten, oder Jemand wird als der
Bezauberer genannt. Dieser wird in Urambo
von den Verwandten getödtet, in Usukuma
vor den Häuptling gebracht, sein Vermögen
eingezogen und er selbst verbannt. Das
Honorar des Zauberdoktors beträgt eine
Hackenklinge.
Todte werden bei den Wasumbwa in den Puppe aus Lehm,
Busch geworfen, nur Häuptlinge auf einem Wasukuma.
Stuhl sitzend begraben. In Usukuma werden alle Verstorbenen mit
angezogenen Beinen, auf der Seite liegend, begraben, der Häuptling
hockend mit erhobener Rechten, die durch Lehm gestützt wird.
Den Geistern der Verstorbenen, die den Lebenden im Traum
erscheinen, werden kleine Hütten erbaut und Opfer an Pombe und
Mehl dargebracht. Stätten von Geistern, wie Baobabs, werden mit
Gras bestreut. Sonst schützt man sich vor ihrem Treiben durch
Amulette, deren es für jeden Zweck, für Jagd, Viehzucht, Krieg u. s.
w. verschiedene giebt. Menschliche Holzfiguren sind sehr selten, ich
fand eine solche in Usukuma, die bei Geistertänzen dienen soll.
Die Wanyamwesi werden von Mtemis (Häuptlingen) regiert,
deren Verwandte Mwanangwa (Prinzen) genannt werden. Auch hier
zeigt sich die Erscheinung, dass grössere Königreiche nach und
nach in kleine Fürstenthümer zerfallen. Eine Art Oberherrschaft über
fast ganz Unyamwesi übte Jahre lang der bekannte Mirambo von
Urambo aus. Auch dessen Nachfolger, Mpanda Charo (Beherrscher
der Königreiche), spielte noch eine grössere Rolle, während unter
dem jetzigen jugendlichen Häuptling Tuga Moto das Reich immer
mehr zerbröckelt. Ein Theil der Wafioma erkennen Kassusura von
Ost-Ussui als ihren Herrscher an.
 Die Häuptlingswürde ist
thatsächlich erblich, dem
Namen nach besteht ein
Wahlkönigreich, doch wird
eben fast immer der Sohn
oder sonst nächste
Verwandte des verstorbenen
Häuptlings gewählt. Manche
Häuptlingsfamilien
behaupten von Watussi
abzustammen, doch lässt ihr
Typus davon jedenfalls
nichts mehr erkennen. Amulettfigur der
Kleine Stammkriege sind Wasukuma.

häufig und werden mit ziemlicher Erbitterung

geführt, die Dörfer des geschlagenen Feindes
werden verbrannt. Kriegsgefangene werden zu
Sklaven gemacht und meist an Küstenleute
verkauft. Im Lande selbst findet man auch
Hüttenamulett ziemlich viele Sklaven aus Manyema, vom
der Wasukuma.
Tanganyika u. s. w., die sich guter Behandlung
erfreuen.
Grössere Kriegs- und Raubzüge werden von einzelnen
Häuptlingen mit ihren »Ruga-Ruga« (Räubern) ausgeführt, die
phantastisch geschmückt ins Feld ziehen und oft zur wahren
Landplage werden.
Die Wanyamwesi sind ein kriegerischer und muthiger Stamm,
besonders wenn es sich um die Vertheidigung von Haus und Feld
gegen einen wirklichen oder eingebildeten Feind handelt. Sie sind
dann weit ernstere Gegner als etwa die Massai und wissen ihre
zahlreichen Gewehre und ihre festen Dörfer tüchtig auszunutzen.
Europäern sind sie im Allgemeinen geneigt und wenn es doch in
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