“Felling the Ancient Sweetgum”: Antiphonal Folk Epics of the Miao of Southeast Guizhou

Abstract

This paper concerns a cycle of folk epics that circulates among a large subgroup of the Miao who call themselves Hmu, living in parts of southeast Guizhou. The narrative songs are performed antiphonally and relate exploits of the Miao's mythic ancestors during and after the creation of heaven and earth. In 1983 a Chinese version of the cycle entitled Hxak Hmub: Miaozu shishi f1j~ ~ i~· was published. The songs in it were collected and edited by Ma Xueliang g,!f:. ~ and Jin Dan ~ Ii. In the summer of 1985 my wife, Fu Wei, and I traveled to Guizhou Province to meet with Jin Dan. I was in the process of translating the text of the cycle into English, but was stumped by more than a hundred terms which neither my Chinese-English dictionary nor my colleagues at Guangxi University could decipher. I was also interested in learning more about the cultural context of the songs and the manner in which they were performed. It is my purpose in this paper to set forth some of those findings and to offer for perusal one representative epic, titled Felling the Ancient Sweetgum. I shall frrst discuss some contextual background on the Miao, then comment on