INTRODUCTION

This chapter, like the last, consists of a reading of a single narrative from the notebooks. The story, which also concerns a primal creation event, is called ‘The Girl of the Early Race Who Made Stars’. My aim once again is not to provide a definitive interpretation of the story, but to demonstrate instead something of the ability of the |Xam texts to gene - rate meaning as soon as attention is given to their details. Two major versions of the narrative occur in the collection. Together they offer, in my view, a significantly wider range of meanings than a single version would. This is not because they augment one another, however, as was the case with the versions of the narrative about the sun and the boys that I explored in the last chapter. Rather, like the versions of the moon and hare story that I discussed in chapter 8, their differences elicit questions and excite exegesis. In |Han#kass'o's version, the girl's actions follow directly from anger at her mother and, by extension, the social order (L.VIII.10:6879–84). As Belinda Jeursen (1995: 40–54) has emphasised, it is the ritual restrictions on her movements and diet at the time of menarche, enforced by her mother and other closely related older women, that elicit the girl's ire and leads her to throw ashes and roots into the sky. In ||Kabbo's longer version (L.II.28:2505–24; Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 72–79), the girl's actions are driven not only by anger, but by a calculated intent that contains benevolent elements.

The existence of different versions of the story stimulates the same sort of questions that I explored in chapter 8. Even if it is accepted that individual stories and their variants illustrate deep |Xam, Khoisan or universal structures, the question remains as to why the differences between stories and versions take particular forms. Is this variety indicative only of unconscious and hopeless struggles against the rigid determinism of the structure? Or is it chiefly a question of the preferences of different narrators, as Hewitt (1986: 235–46) implies?