Old Town School – On The Road

Dispatches from the road from our wayfaring travelers.

Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

Here at the southern tip of Asia, the beaches shelve off precipitously into the Arabian Sea. Waves that have traveled from Africa are almost right on the sand before they break. It makes for treacherous swimming, and every year a few tourists venture too far and are washed out to sea. Along this stretch of coast hundreds of double-ended fishing craft launch through the surf every day. No diesel engines here, these are craft propelled exactly as they have been for millennia, by a crew of fifteen or twenty sailors pulling against the tide with oars. They drop enormous nets just past the breakline, with floats on the top and rocks as sinkers tied to the bottom. Two swimmers are sent to the shore with ropes, and as teams gather on the beach to haul in the catch, they’ve created a perfect purse net.

The hauling is a spectacle in itself, requiring an hour or two for a team of sixty or more. It is essentially a tug-of-war with the sea. One man anchors each line and coils the ropes as they are pulled in. The rest of the team hauls vigorously when a wave is approaching to take advantage of its forward momentum; then they dig in their heels and strain to keep the backflow from pulling their catch back out to sea. When each hauler progresses up the beach until they reach the anchor man, they run forward to the front places, which are right in the teeth of the surf. All of this is coordinated by rhythmic chants, a call and response that echoes up and down the beach, rising and falling with the momentary needs for extra exertion when a particularly large swell is washing back out. By and by, the net itself appears in the surf, filled with thousands of silver fish, flashing and writhing in the sunlight. It takes a special effort to actually land this catch, which must weigh well into the thousands of pounds.

Then the village women appear will all manner of tubs and buckets. They separate the fish by species. Some are loaded into basins and carried away on the women’s heads immediately to market. Many more are spread out over a vast expanse of beach to dry in the sunlight for the rest of the day; they are gathered together and carried off in the evening – while the fishermen play a pickup game of cricket.

The entire scene, from dawn to dusk, feels timeless – it has probably changed very little in the past few thousand years. It is also striking for its entirely communal nature. No individual could haul in those nets; they require the joint effort of the entire community. No single person could contend with two tons of seafood to process and market; it needs participation from everyone, sharing in both the bounty and the labor. Sustenance demands that every member of the community pulls their own weight, otherwise they won’t have dinner on the table tonight.

As an outsider observing this simple spectacle, it’s impossible to avoid drawing parallels to our own existence in the complexity of Chicago. The metaphors beg for a reflection. Is there anything that compels our participation as a community with such singleness of purpose? What do we have in our lives that requires us to join together and pull in the same direction? Every day? If there is an answer, I believe it is in the stewardship of our traditional heritage. Music and dance are ephemeral, they’re present right now, and then they are gone. But the sustenance and passage of that “intangible heritage” from this generation to the next does indeed call for our common attention, perpetually. And just as the act of hauling nets shapes the fishing communities of Kerala, the enactment, over and over again, of our musical rituals defines our own sense of community. It is what makes the work that goes on every day at Old Town School so vitally important. We all have to participate today, or we’ll lack our soul force tomorrow.
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Filed under: Uncategorized by Bau | November 6, 2009 | Comments (0)