Folk Tales of New Caledonia — Part 2: The Cyclone · Kanak Music and Dance · The Rat and the Octopus · How the Takata Bohendiou Read Rain Instead of Fine Weather
Part Two completes our reading of Louise Michel's 1885 collection with the four pieces Part One held back, in the book's own order: her storm memoir of two cyclones lived through at Noumea, her account of Kanak music and the pilou-pilou dance, Charles Malato's animal fable of the rat and the octopus, and the tale of the takata Bohendiou, the healer-seer who read rain instead of fine weather.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In this part:
- The Cyclone — Michel's own storm memoir: the immense calm, the night the sea and sky merged over Noumea, and the shore the morning after, where an octopus opens its human eye among the shells.
- Kanak Music and Dance — the rounds of the pilou-pilou, quarter-tones soft as drops of water on leaves, bamboos struck in cadence, and the great historical dance in which the tribe lives in the sun and dies in the shade.
- The Rat and the Octopus — the fable Charles Malato gathered on the great land: a rat who eats the sugar-cane canoe his friends built him, and the kind octopus who carries him ashore and is repaid so badly for it.
- How the Takata Bohendiou Read Rain Instead of Fine Weather — the old takata, answerable for his prophecies, promises the tribes a fine sun for their ambush, sleeps three days on niaouli flowers, and lets the cyclone answer for him.
The pieces:
01:45 — The Cyclone
10:24 — Kanak Music and Dance
13:55 — The Rat and the Octopus
19:16 — How the Takata Bohendiou Read Rain Instead of Fine Weather
Source and rights: Kanak legends and tales as collected by Louise Michel in Legendes et chants de gestes canaques (Paris, 1885), in fresh in-house English translation from the French for this performance. Michel died in 1905; Charles Malato, who gathered the rat and octopus fable printed in her book, died in 1938 (death year re-proved from authority records at the Part One build). The book and its makers are in the public domain. Screened for this shelf and not read: The First Ouainth (meal) of human flesh, set aside by class, as were The War as told by the Kanak of Noumea, The Daughters of the Chief of Belep, The Breaths, and Medieval Customs in Caledonia, each read in full and set aside under this shelf's content screen. With Part One, these two episodes read every narrative piece of Michel's collection that passed the shelf's screen; no completeness for Kanak folklore is claimed — this is Michel's collection, billed as her book presents it.
Narrated by Scratch.
Music: Tabla Horizon — opening and closing theme, with a short instrumental separator between stories, and no music under the narration.
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