POLITICS OF NARRATION: MYTHICAL DISCOURSE IN KIRE’S SON OF THE THUNDERCLOUD
POLITICS OF NARRATION: MYTHICAL DISCOURSE IN KIRE’S SON OF THE THUNDERCLOUD

Summary/Abstract: Writers are committed to the power of proof, reasoning and technical solutions to every possible problem faced by humanity. Convincing through proof and argument is construed to be the presentation of reality. Sometimes reality is so complex that it is not possible for the narrative to be rational and logical. Climate change induced disasters and famines are a reality today. Easterine Kire, a writer from Nagaland in the North East of India, expresses the pressing concern of climate change and the role of narrative retelling of a Naga creation myth in her novel Sonof the Thundercloud (2016). The plot of the novel is the journey of Pele, a man who lost his family and happiness due to a devastating famine. His journey leads him to a drought affected “abandoned village”, Noune, where he meets two sisters who were four hundred years old and had been living on “hope”. They tell him of their wait for a prophesy, the birth of the Son of the Thundercloud, which would regenerate the land to its vegetative resplendence once again. Pele becomes a witness to extraordinary events of climate change and participates in the process of protecting the agents of the new environmental condition. The mythical narrative offers an alternative truth and points out that it is through language that the natural world is reduced to objects or resources to be subjectivized. Mythical discourse is beyond the rational and beyond the language dictated by culture that people respect and thus,care for the systems that support life. In this paper I propose to study Son of the Thundercloud in order to discover the mythical discourse that helps us to create anew human condition and offers a truth that allows us to rethink our responsibility to the environment we live in.

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