Syaman Rapongan’s ‘The mythology of Badai Bay’: A symbolic father’s legacy

Abstract

Syaman Rapongan (1957–present) is a Tao Indigenous author from the Orchid Island (Taiwan) and Badaiwan de shenhua, a collection of his tribe’s myths, was his first publication. In its introduction, he explains how these myths’ intrinsic value system allows him to face the difficulties of our modernized and globalized society, where individuals often lose their sense of belonging and life’s meaning. The Lacanian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati traces this lack of meaning back to a loss of the ‘symbolic father’, who once provided the individual with both the interdicting function of a symbolic law and the recognition – thus, the word – to participate and speak in society. After a few years in Taiwan, where he studied and worked until the 1980s, Syaman Rapongan returned to Orchid Island and rediscovered this sense of belonging by re-appropriating Tao legends, rituals, productive skills, thus receiving his own father and the other tribe members’ recognition. The father figure as the storyteller par excellence passing on that symbolic word is the giver of Badaiwan de shenhua. Moreover, father-like characters and father-related emblematic images (e.g. the house), significantly recur both in these myths and in several subsequent stories. Taking advantage of Recalcati’s reflection, this article integrates an ecocritical approach to Syaman Rapongan’s literature by interpreting its recovery of the Indigenous paradigm as a recovery of the symbolic father. Through the analysis of examples from Badaiwan de shenhua and other stories, it demonstrates how the cosmopolitan value of his narrative does not reside so much in the revival of an ante-litteram ‘ecological’ lifestyle, but in its sine qua non, or the recovery of the ‘symbolic father’.