Temsüla Ao (1945-2022): Author Profile
Community: Ao Naga (Naga ethnic group) native to Mokokchung District of Nagaland in Northeast India.
Wikipedia Page
Temsüla Ao (1945-2022) was an Ao Naga poet, writer, and ethnographer who spent her life advocating for and carving out a distinct Naga identity in a homogenizing culture that treats the "North East" of India as a unified space. As a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota from 1985 to 1986, Ao was connected to the American Indian Studies Department. There, her interactions with the indigenous people of North America "heightened [her] awareness of the vulnerability of all indigenous cultures in the face of rapid modernization and other related forces". This inspired her to start documenting the oral storytelling of her own tribe, the Ao Nagas. Thus her work as a writer, educator, and government official was driven by a desire to support Ao Naga people and depict their complex history through her literature. In her introduction to These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, she stresses the importance of carving out a Naga identity in the face of the violence the community has faced and the stresses of modernisation. She writes:
Her writing style also plays a role in this: Ao plays with the English language, reshaping and remixing it to convey vernacular speech without sanitising or stripping it of its original rhythms and emotions.A few of the stories in this collection try to capture the ambience of the traditional Naga way of life, which, even for our own youngsters today, is increasingly becoming irrelevant in the face of the ‘progress’ and ‘development’ which is only now catching up with the Naga people... The inheritors of such a history have a tremendous responsibility to sift through the collective experience and make sense of the impact left by the struggle on their lives. Our racial wisdom has always extolled the virtue of human beings living at peace with themselves and in harmony with nature and with our neighbours. It is only when the Nagas re-embrace and re-write this vision into the fabric of their lives in spite of the compulsions of a fast changing world, can we say that the memories of the turbulent years have served us well (Ao, 2005).
Her work includes the short story collections These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2005), Laburnum For My Head (2009), and The Tombstone in My Garden (2022), a memoir titled Once Upon a Life: Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags (2014), the novel Aosenla's Story (2017), and an ethnographic study of Ao Naga cultural practices titled The Ao-Naga Oral Tradition (2000). She also published several collections of poetry, including Songs that Tell (1988), Songs that Try to Say (1992), Songs of Many Moods (1995), Songs from Here and There (2003), Songs from the Other Life (2007), and Songs Along the Way Home (2019).
Some excerpts of poems from Ao's collection Songs From The Other Life (2007)
"History" speaks to Ao's project of protecting and reviving Naga history:
"Blood of Other Days" depicts the process of colonisation with a special focus on the role of religious missionaries in the erasure of indigenous cultural practices:These Songs
From the other life
Long lay mute
In the confines
Of my restive mind.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They now resonate
In words of new
Discernment
To augment the lore
Of our ancient core.
These Hills Called Home (2005) is a collection of ten short stories that explore how ordinary people dealt with the violence that erupted in Nagaland due to clashes between the Indian State and militants who were fighting for an independent Naga state. In an interview, she explains that in these stories, she has tried to "to portray the human suffering on account of the conflicts and therefore the conflicts themselves were used as a background only. The emphasis was not to identify’ winners or losers’ but to empathize with the ‘victims’ on both sides" (The Thumb Print Mag).Then came a tribe of strangers
Into our primordial territories
Armed with only a Book and
Promises of a land called Heaven
Declaring that our Trees and Mountains
Rocks and Rivers were no Gods
And that our songs and stories
Nothing but tedious primitive nonsense.
We listened in confusion
To the new stories and too soon
Allowed our knowledge of other days
To be trivialized into taboo.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We borrowed their minds,
Aped their manners
Adopted their gods
And became perfect mimics.
- "The Jungle Major" explores the role women played in the Naga insurgency and the power of subversion in survival. The story follows Khatila and her husband, Punaba who joins the rebel army. This puts her in a dangerous position with government forces. However, she manages to save him from arrest by using femininity to undermine both oppressive military power and patriarchal notions of womanhood.
- "The Last Song" deals with the military's use of sexual violence against women as well as the power of folk song and traditional culture in resistance. The story of that "Black Sunday" in the village ends with a post-script that depicts the importance of oral storytelling in keeping the memory of history alive, an essential facet of Naga culture. (You can read the full story here.)
- "The Pot Maker" depicts the way in which traditional artistic practices (in this case, pot making) are transmitted from generation to generation. The transfer of skills, in this context, is more than just information being passed on - it is a cultural genealogy that has to be kept alive. Ao also complicates traditional artistry by drawing attention to the gendered lines along which labour is divided, and what that actually means for women in particular.
A representative quote from the short story "The Last Song":
‘Grandmother, what are you talking about? Whose last song?’
The old storyteller whips around and surveys the group as though seeing them for the first time. She then heaves a deep sigh and with infinite sadness in her voice spreads her arms wide and whispers, ‘You have not heard about that song? You do not know about Apenyo? Then come and listen carefully...’
Thus on a cold December night in a remote village, an old storyteller gathers the young of the land around the leaping flames of a hearth and squats on the bare earth among them to pass on the story of that Black Sunday when a young and beautiful singer sang her last song even as one more Naga village began weeping for her ravaged and ruined children (Ao, 2005).
Writing On and Interviews With Temsula Ao
"Carving a Niche: An Interview with Temsula Ao" by I Watitula Longkumer (2024) (Postcolonial Text): "There can be no such ‘prescription’ for preserving any culture. It is the people themselves who will have to decide how to adapt to the old ways to suit present circumstances without abandoning or compromising the values enshrined in the culture. It is here that the question of identity comes in, and I believe that one can retain one’s intrinsic identity and still be a world citizen."
"Temsula Ao (1945-2002): A Tribute" by Prof. G.J.V. Prasad (Usawa Literary Review): "Temsula Ao sings of her lands, about her state of mind, and about her community. She writes about the damage done to her people, their sense of uprootedness, and their wounds and pains. If the Christian missionaries in the colonial past had estranged her people from their past and their traditions and ways of life, the continuing violence and tensions had also eroded any semblance peace, of living in harmony with the land to which you belong, in a place which belongs to you."