Zarkeen

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

More myth than novel, Zarkeen is both a brilliant delineation of a primitive psyche and a fascinating narrative about the birth of the arts. The setting is a prehistoric cave, the point of view that of the shaman-like woman Zaru, who, confined during pregnancy, discovers through dream, intuition, and legend the magical powers of language and drawing. When two other pregnant women join her in the cave, they become three primal graces whose combined inspiration fosters the sister arts of music and sculpture.

This short fiction can be read on several levels: as “a profoundly ironic parable of sexual politics” (pointed out on the cover) and as an allegory of modern sexual redefinition (suggested by the conclusion). Its real power is, however, its poetic expression and its original interpretation of Female as Muse. Zarkeen is a modern fertility myth of ancient first beginnings in which woman remains, in Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “the Other,” but no longer a passive social victim. Here she is the destined leader of the People (women), an equal of the leader of the Hunters (men), Keenig. Here, unlike the so-called Golden Age of women in primitive societies where she was Earth Mother or Goddess, but without social influence, she is both creative source and public authority. Here, too, there is simple elegance and psychological realism in the telling. Through Zaru’s poeticized and considered physical sensations: “Now the floor rises. I move around the scent of the place where my body has emptied its inside black self. My feet feel the slope and move my body up until I can no longer stand. If I make four feet instead of two, I can move forward” (p. 51), the author convincingly portrays the extraordinary physical imagination of a prehistoric woman. Through this woman’s pregnant images, such as those of widening, stretching and opening, of cave and belly and circular ball, the author also confirms that womankind’s most elementary language and mode of thought is that of giving birth. Thus the female is the natural creator both in life and art.

Also accompanying Zaru’s narrative are occasional cave-like line drawings, which serve to illustrate her vision. Vision is, in fact, what characterizes this fiction. A poetic and visionary tribute, Zarkeen is a literary step forward in that largely unexplored mythological country where the female is the supreme artist.