Eastern kire biography channel
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Easterine Kire, born in Nagaland, North-east India, has a PhD in English literature from Pune University, India. Kire’s first book of poetry (Kelhoukevira,1982) was the first book of English poetry to be published by a Naga. In 2003, she published the first novel by a Naga writer in English, A Naga village remembered (Ura Academy). Kire was awarded the Governor’s medal for excellence in Naga literature (2011), and in 2013 Catalan PEN, Barcelona honoured her with the Free Voice award.
Her second novel, A Terrible Matriarchy (2007) was selected by Indian Literature Abroad for translation into the UN languages. It has been translated into Norwegian and German and Marathi. Her novel Bitter Wormwood (2013) was nominated for the prestigious Hindu Prize, and another novel, When the River Sleeps won the award in 2015. Her books, Mari, and Son of the Thundercloud have received critical acclaim. She has also written five children’s books, several articles and essays.
Kire is also a member of the band, Jazzpoesi. The digital CD released in summer 2013, topped the Norwegian Jazz charts. Kire’s poetry has been translated to Croatian, Uzbek, German, Catalan and Bengali.
She will be staying in Manipal as part of the scholar-in-residence program for the month of January, 2018. The schedule of sessions with her will be posted soon.
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Easterine Kire: Spirituality, Nature and Nagaland
February 28, 2022
Easterine Kire is a poet, novelist, Jazzpoetry pioneer; a “one-woman cultural renaissance” (Vivek Menezes, Scroll). Her latest novel, Spirit Nights, delves deep into the spirituality of her indigenous community, primarily through an elder woman protagonist who experiences prophetic dreams and feels the spiritual world deeply.
What follows is a short essay Easterine wrote for us at Barbican on her personal experiences with spirituality.
My generation of Nagas accept that our territories are shared between human and spirit inhabitants. In our cultural life, all teaching revolves around respect. We live our lives showing respect for the human world and the animal world, as well as the spirit world. I have experienced encounters with spirits beginning from a young age. At age four and half, I had a small spirit friend. He was a boy. Even as an adult, I have had spiritual encounters in several places. Deep spiritual awareness comes quite naturally to most Nagas.
A key aspect of Naga spirituality is dreams. We believe we receive messages and warnings about impending tragedies in dreams. There are many types of dream-metaphors and the ‘owner of the dream’ interprets the metaphor accordingly. Here’s an example: if one dreams of a big tree falling, this is interpreted as a warning of the death of a parent or spouse. Thus, dreaming itself is a very important aspect of our spiritual experience. I can recall several warning-dreams that came true in my life. Not all dreams warn of tragedy. Dreams can also foretell success in an enterprise, success in a marriage proposal, a happy meeting of friends to take place. These are just some examples, and there is much more to say. Ultimately, dreams and dreaming are important windows into the spiritual world. This is why they play such a vital role in Spirit Nights.
My tribe identifies spirit beings by their appearance, locations they frequent a The protagonist of The Man Who Lost His Spirit, one of ten hauntingly brief stories in Easterine Kire’s spare, exquisite new collection The Rain-Maiden and the Bear-Man (Seagull Books), blunders in leaving his spirit behind in a tall tree in the forest. His companions attempt retrieval, but he was not the same and “began to change in subtle ways” so that his wife “grew cold with fear. Who was this stranger who had usurped her husband’s body?” The victim – he is named Pesuohie – realised that there was only one solution, and headed right back to the tree, leaving his family sobbing and bewildered. But now he was armed with ancient wisdom from the village seer, so “this time he would not be defenceless, or without knowledge”. Biding his time in the way he had been advised, he kidnapped his own true spirit, then cajoled and threatened it back towards the safety of home. “People watched from behind their doors, awed by the strange ritual,” Kire writes. “A man who had left his spirit behind in the forest would be helped by his clansmen to get his own spirit back. But who had ever heard of a man trying to bring his own spirit back?” It is an apt query, with implications far beyond this one narrative, because so much of this author’s remarkable oeuvre keeps pivoting to the themes of existential retrieval and purposeful restitution. In fact, all through the last two decades, in an extraordinary fury of poems, short stories, histories, novels, and a separate profusion of words and music she calls jazzpoetry, this quietly irrepressible one-woman cultural renaissance has pioneered, nurtured, led and exemplified the modern literary culture of Nagaland, while also establishing herself in the front line of contemporary indigenous literature. Just like Pesuohie’s exploit, we have never seen anything like it before. “Every story has the right to be heard.Naga writer Easterine Kire’s clear bright sound over a sleeping world
Some stories are more desperate than others