Details

Latitude

-4.71979

Longitude

143.6055

Start Date

2018-08-18

End Date

2018-08-18

This figure represents an old woman urinating. In the past, when women wore grass skirts, they had a special way of moving them both when they sat down in the house, or when they went to urinate. The fringes of the grass skirt were carefully lifted with a special, recognisable move when a woman crouched to urinate, and then patted back down after she stood up again, which the string figure-maker tries to imitate by patting the ’fringes’ in the string figure. As mentioning female urination, let alone seeing a woman doing it, used to be a strict taboo, and is still not a topic of conversation, making this string figure always invokes loud laughter, especially because the figure-maker also makes the sound “sssss, ssssss” – alluding to the sound of urination. These are the same sounds with which people try to teach babies to pee when they lift them out of their baskets, sometimes holding them over the edge of the canoe, so that they urinate into the river. Using this sound in connection with an adult person makes it even more amusing. This string figure is also called ‘the front fringe of a grass skirt’, to avoid uttering the word for urination. Images: 02: ‘Front fringe of a grass skirt’ 03: ‘An old woman peeing’ 04: Nancy Yoŋgondam demonstrating how women had to lift the front fringe of their skirts when urinating

Sources