“It is a gospel truth: at the fringe of language where words fail us, we turn to song and dance to express what speech cannot – dialects of the body that all can speak but few can completely understand.”
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It’s late, but Viper stays out on the front porch, waiting for her father to return from the village borders. He always takes much longer than promised; she knows that he patrols the perimeter fastidiously, securing the darkest corners and the brightest streets, his forked tongue flicking in and out warily as he slithered. She asked once if she could assist, believing that the night watch could be finished by two snakes in half the time, only to be answered with his sad smile and apologetic prohibition. She doesn’t ask again; she never will as long as her gums remain empty, devoid of hard enamel and poison.
It upsets her greatly to see him like this. Although he tries hard to conceal his disappointment, it shows in the way his posture deflates whenever he looks at her and the disconsolation in his voice which he tries to pass off as tiredness. Despite this, she cannot deny that when he holds her tight and tells her how much he loves her she doesn’t fault him for his stubbornness, feels guilty if she does.
.
The plan is so horribly simplistic that she doesn’t expect it to fail.
A friend living in the village knows a few restaurants that throw out their old knives in the trash. Viper waits until the owners cannot see her and then quickly filches the blades, tucking them into a small bag carefully so as to avoid piercing the cloth. When she finally has procured two of nearly the same size she is ready to proceed with her idea. With wiredrawn pieces of fabric, Viper fastens them tightly to the roof of her mouth and dips their wickedly sharp ends into tomato juice. Stepping back, she inspects her work in a polished copper mirror. As fangs, the knives are larger than she would like, but otherwise she is sure that they would be completely functional.
On her way to show her father, she trips, and then there is all this blood.
The crash summons her mother first, who has been looking for her the past half hour. She comes into the hallway and cries out in shock – Viper lies on the wooden floor with blood caking her lips and a pair of sharp knives protruding from her lower jaw. Her father appears next in the doorway, having just returned from seeing a friend, freshly picked lotus flowers in his tail.
The flowers seem to take an eternity to fall, and she is in his coiled body by the time they hit the floor.
Viper doesn’t remember the long journey down to the village to find the local doctor. Neither does she remember the knives being untied and pulled from her mouth, the gaping wounds stitched up quickly and skilfully. What she does remember is being held safe in his grasp and catching a glimpse of something behind his softening eyes; for once he looks at her without that familiar flash of disappointment, of hopes dashed to the ground.
She still carries the scars, slightly off-white and pinkish, two rough lines running from underneath her chin to the bottom of her lip demarcating out a history of her foolishness on her scales.
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At nine years old, Viper takes up the ribbon and deserts the fangs that will never appear. Her mother once told her that the markings on Viper’s back were closely knit together in some resemblance of ancient Chinese poetry. This is her defining characteristic that she is proud of; she flaunts it shamelessly in her performances, a dazzling spiral of diamonds and creases, calligraphic brush strokes moving too quickly to be read.
This is the bare minimum she can offer her parents to allay their disappointment. She tried talking to them, writing poems, but soon found that nothing else was able to contain, as music could, the unsayable feelings that transcend conscious thought. Ultimately, this is poetry of the soul – she will lighten their hearts, spin new notes and capture in performance the words too difficult to speak.
The music starts, a cue for her to begin her routine. She twirls the ribbon gently, circling it above her head, creating a crimson halo of thought. This is the prelude, where she animates the satin with tenderness, with melancholy, to give it character. Her body, powerful and torsional, duplicates the undulating path of the ribbon on the floor. At the climax of the piece, the notes come faster and louder; she fumbles with the ribbon, a moment’s weakness in its end licking the air, then she recovers her composure. In retrospect, the key of the accompaniment is too high, its cadences too harsh. She knows now that it has to be transposed downwards a couple of semitones for future performances, until it is in the key of sorrow.
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The large axe-bearing ox doesn’t notice her until she gets within striking range. Her tail snaps forward in an arc – quite literally a bullwhip – and lashes him in the stomach. A large gong sounds, alerting more warriors to the serpentine intruder. They run at her, swinging halberds and maces; she snakes past them, tripping them in her wake. When she reaches the large bronze gong and raps on it three times, the other four leap into the fray.
Surrounded by five fighters, Viper positions herself, coiling her body and hissing. It is part of her nature as a dancer after all; she is the opening act, the initiator of their large battles. She thinks of it as a performance in different parts, the battlefield a stage and the combatants all characters and dancers. Accordingly, she works her ambient emotions into her fighting; sinuous and tortuous movements to convey despair at the battle of Weeping River, ferocious jabs and potent strikes to represent rage when they fought a gang of bandits that had burned down an entire village.
Shifu often criticises her for fighting with her heart. He tells her that one should be more subtle with her strength when fighting, but she rarely listens, with all due respect. As with the gorilla she brought down the day she acquired courage, he doesn’t see the truth behind the dynamics of her manoeuvres; a purposeful catharsis of emotions that she cannot bear to carry.
She spirals once more, beckoning them, as if inviting them to dance.
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Here’s a question: I am Viper, and I like to dance, but why? The answer is that there are actually two queries masquerading as one; why am I Viper, and why do I like to dance? The former should elicit a simple response from a child, the latter requiring deeper introspection as an adult, even though both are essentially different nuances of the very same question: Who am I and why am I what I am?
.....
Interestingly, I spent the morning going to school fantasising that the first song that they would sing in Chapel today was going to be 'Hasa Diga Eebowai'. I was genuinely disappointed when it wasn't.