How to joint a chicken

My child is going to school at an odd time, when we haven’t quite figured out how to give a vaccine for the pandemic of the day to children, and after we’ve figured out (at least in this country) that maybe it doesn’t matter because we don't care if they get sick.

My child is going to school and I keep thinking about chickens. Specifically, a chicken: the one I remember seeing from my screen window in the village on the island of Y when I was about five, running for its death because its head was already cut off, spurts of blood gobbing wet in the air, trickling down dark in the sand where I played. I remember it ran from the stump where it was parted from its head for perhaps 30 seconds, maybe more, the children of the village running screaming after it. I wanted to be outside with them and also remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach, the wrongness of a chicken without its head. The stump was just by Karunse, the small brackish water that flowed past our house to the sea. Karunse was untouchable, used for defecation by the village, and I remember wondering if the chicken would slip in its headlong hurry down into the slurry and murk and disappear, accelerating its movement to that body of water and losing us a good dinner as it went down for the third time.

Instead, it simply slowed down, uncertainly, one clawed foot pawing the air of eternity. It was jointed by dinner time. Awhile before this chicken dinner, when I was even younger, I remember we cut the tree down (the one where the chicken was beheaded) to save ourselves from the 10 or 15 pound coconuts that would fall on windy nights like bombs on our roof, terrifying me. So we turned that tree into a butcher’s block. Our tin roof stayed flat and knife-edged to the sea. I remember the feeling of the tin cutting deep in my thumb when I went shopping for the metal for the roof with my father at the hardware store 30 miles away across the sea on the island of B. I was about five then, too, like my oldest is now.

I was five years old and I’d never eaten a properly jointed chicken. I keep this in mind because I am living in a world that turns on joints that make no sense, and because Lewis Hyde leans heavily on the joints of myth to make his stories about Trickster swing and sway properly in Trickster Makes this World. Chickens (I remember my mother saying many times) were never jointed properly in Indonesia. They were cut on the bias, against the grain, across the marrow. They were shank-broken and sharded. You’d find pieces of bone in your curry. For my mother, whose mother was a farmer’s daughter from Maryland, this failure to properly separate cartilage from cartilage never seemed less than obscene. There was a way to joint a chicken (so my mother said), but I grew up in a world without drumsticks.

In Trickster, Hyde spends ink and energy suggesting that an ability to butcher and joint cleverly is part of the Trickster way. I’ve been chewing on this like gristle, though, and it doesn't quite sit against the bad jointing I saw in Indonesia, which is Trickster territory if ever I’ve been there. Engines quit for no reason. Devils make hay with air conditioning units on hot days. No one is ever quite what they seem, and even the official art form on Java is a series of skins laid against the light to form shifting shadows. Those shadows themselves can be Tricksters or not or both or neither depending on the story, and you never know until you fall asleep and the shadows leap into the final act and the gas kerosene lamps go up whether you are witnessing a traditional play (Tricksters without surprises) or a new play (Tricksters configured, disfigured, and re-figured in ways you don’t expect if you grew up on the old stories). No matter what, though, if you see a shadow puppet play there are always Tricksters.

Tricksters and badly jointed chicken. It seems to me as I send my daughter to school in a pandemic that I’d like more of both. The world she is growing up in feels smothered by grief to me. Rainier almost lost her snow cap this year in the heat wave. Shasta lost hers entirely. My daughter talks about smoke season like it happens every year, and it has for all of her five short years. For decades before she was born this city never saw smoke, but she doesn’t know that. She’s spent close to half her life living with a pandemic, and because of the closed minds of her fellow citizens Covid will be an endemic disease in this country for the rest of her lifetime. She takes it all in stride where I feel suffocated and look for escape. Where I feel like the helpless chicken, choked on blood and looking for a way out.

Another where: where I look for new ways to re-tell stories, to re-joint the bird of state, the tales we tell ourselves that feel so stale now. Maybe where is the ur-question for me. The chicken runs and ends up helter skelter, feet in Seattle. Head gone. Or so it seems to me. And what’s Seattle? Stolen Duwamish land. Steel-and-glass hub of the future. Fishermen’s port. Plane town. Gold rush (longer ago). And to me: that little westward looking window that’s as close as I can get to the island of Y from Turtle Island. That last one is why I stay.

I’m writing like this because I feel a need for more personal narratives. National narratives feel close, toxic, oppressive. I’ve come to live in a country where one party has staked its vision for the future on a narrative of the past that requires white innocence, legislates it where it does not exist, and which perforce requires the silence of everyone who isn’t white. I look at my white daughter and worry she’ll hear these messages even when I teach her different, teach her to regard herself as a guest.

Sometimes it feels like the country is the chicken with its head cut off, and everyone is tired and no one wants chicken for dinner, because nationally speaking we’ve all run out of recipes. There are no fresh stories, no fresh spices, we’ve cut ourselves off to anything that’s truly disruptive. But I am, I remember, from the fabled spice islands, and I have not run out of stories to tell. I hope you haven’t, either.

But every day as I walk around with this sense of choking oppression at the narrowness of the life we are all living together now, I wonder if there isn’t some joint, some cut on the story bigger than pandemic, than global warming, than forest fires. Something behind it. And the thing I keep coming back to isn’t capitalism, isn’t corporatism run amok (a Javanese word, by the way, and one of two to leap into English), isn’t any of the usual suspects you might run across in certain leftward political circles. No. To me, raised on Tricksters and stories, one of the core problems with a society where we are consumers first and citizens second is that we lose the capacity for surprise. Trickster goes silent. The chicken drumsticks are always lined up under plastic Saran Wrap and nothing in the grocery store ever seems out of place, no matter how many migrant workers died in the hot sun to bring us our food.

Perhaps I’m suggesting that my concern with the American society I’m living in today is not so much whether some of us are far too rich or even whether a large number of us have decided that a racial category that gave us class superiority a half millennia ago is Bible writ, but really whether any of us have the room to dream and listen to and even tell complicated, dangerous stories anymore. If we can’t tell new stories, how can any of the rest of this change? Without stories, where are our heads, really? Dead in the sand.

It’s hard for me to even find time to write in this blog. I’m tired out. The village it took to raise me (literally) is not a social structure that seems imaginable to my neighbors, and so I don’t have much outside help raising my kids (my partner is amazing and that’s not the point here). I have a job that is not writing this blog. I like it, even. I have hopes and dreams and fears, a passionate dedication to throwing oval-shaped bladders of leather in the air, and a toxic sense of living in the wrong place and time, all the time.

So this post, like a headless chicken, has run out of room to run. What am I asking for? Maybe I’m asking if you dream. Maybe I’m asking you to dream if you haven’t in awhile. Dream a little bit. See if you can find a new way to slip the knife into the cracks of our time. Pry. Look for the joints and stuff a knife in there (even dull from dis-use) and shove it about. Break it. Break the knife or break the sky but crack something up. Do something new. Maybe, as Hyde suggests, you’ll be the kind of Trickster who neatly slides the knife into a seemingly invisible joint we’ve not seen before, slides the cartilage apart, giving us a clean new cut. Maybe you’ll just hack at it. Chop up the bone shards and make a curry.

Whatever you do, you aren’t in Karunse yet. Neither was my chicken and my five year old is still running free. So are your dreams, if you can remember them. If you can remember them (and I think we all need each other to try).