Oeuvre de chair: la petite histoire du pic mangeur d'hommes

Résumé

The full richness of Iroquois myths is rarely appreciated. Straddling many of the boundaries of the social imagination, they explore the most secret byways of Iroquois thought and tradition. In pursuit of this end, they utilize the most repressed and misunderstood of the languages expressed by and inscribed upon the body: cannibalism, which is the most brutal and raw expression of orality. At the margins of this cannibal discourse there is a place for a rhetoric of society. At the very core of the myth which is discussed in this paper, cannibalism becomes a social language, describing scenes which belong to day-to-day life. For instance, such is the case with hunting. The expression of these quotidian concerns in mythic form is a strategy for the denunciation of Iroquois social reality, or its acceptance only in the most distorted guise.

The myth discussed here commences with the entrapment of two brothers, when their prey, a woodpecker, metamorphoses into an alluring female. The skeletons of the two brothers are added to a pile of bones. Eventually, eight more brothers are lured to their deaths, leaving only two out of a dozen siblings alive. The youngest of the brothers enlists the reluctant aid of a cannibal, rolling head who is his maternal uncle. The rolling head turns into a whirlwind, and attacks the two sirens, turning them first into bones, and then back into birds. All but one of the ten dead brothers is revived.