Storytelling Week 4: A New Hope

It was a harsh landscape they worked, not at all like what home had been like.  The land here was thick and lush but the weather was much more turbulent, for part of the morning it rained and for the second half the sun shone so brightly that it was hard to do anything except lay in the shade until the morning was over.  Then in the evening the weather cooled remained steady until dark in which case the weather lowered to almost freezing, however this was okay because it was the same day in and day out, there were no seasons here.  This place was a new start for humanity, a new place, a new landscape, a new planet to colonize.

One of the most important aspects of colonizing this new planet was not creating shelter, or creating a government, it was creating a food source.  The colonizers stayed in their bunks on the Discovery, the ship that carried them to this new haven, they were all chosen for their abilities, abilities that would be crucial to their survival on this new planet.  The most important person to be brought, however, was the farmer, he knew the key to creating raw foods and since the beginning of the famine on Earth, he was the most important person.  Not the engineers, not the doctors, and not the builders, but the farmer was the most important; therefore they chose him to lead them.  He was a simple man with rough hands and steady work ethic and he proved his worth day in and day out.

Every day, after the heat of the morning had passed, he plowed his newly acquired vast lands.  He planted every day, sowing the seeds into the new terra they found themselves on.  Like every other day, today was a day of plowing, he was using his massive industrial plow as he made his furrows in the soil.  It was tough going, the soil here was much more thick and retained thousands more minerals than the soil on Earth had.  He focused on his task, back and forth, across the land until suddenly his massive plow came to a quick halt, the plow’s instruments beeping alarms.  Something was in the soil. 

He exited the vehicle and with great caution walked around to inspect what had caused his plow to halt, what could be so great that his machine would halt so quickly?

To his surprise he found the object sticking up out of the ground, he could tell the shower of dirt it had created when it impacted the ground had covered it.  He walked closer and began to rub the soil from what he could only assume was an emergency evacuation pod, which was most likely ejected when the sister craft to the Discovery malfunctioned and caught fire.   That single malfunction had caused what they assumed was the entire population of the craft to perish.  He moved quickly, removing the film of dirt that covered the window and was surprised to find that the craft was empty except for one small…baby.   With this discovery he quickly opened the pod and removed the child from the cryogenic sleep pod in which it was encased, thankfully it began to cry, a strong healthy wail.

He was so surprised by this that he became overwhelmed with emotion.  Their new population was small and as of the past decade it had become harder for their population to procreate, making this child the first good thing they had encountered on this new and unforgiving planet.  This child would be treasured, she would be loved, and she would be the first of the new generation to reside on this planet.  He took the child back to the Discovery and called everyone in to show them the miracle that had survived one of the biggest disasters they had encountered since leaving Earth.  The entire community would raise this little baby girl with love and compassion, and she would become the farmer’s first child.  She would be seen as a good luck charm as within the next year three more baby girls would be born and they would be raised as sisters.  This was the beginning of a new journey for everyone.

Authors Note:  Last week I chose to take on a setting within the future and I enjoyed so I decided I would try the trend again in a different way.  When I think of a farmer I think of giving life, taking a seed and creating something more something useful.  This led to the thought of what it would be like to colonize and try to tame the soil of a foreign planet and what a gift finding a child would be, such as in the story of Sita's birth when she is found within the furrows of her father's fields.

(Sunity Devee)

Bibliography:  

"Sita and Promila" by Sunity Devee, from Nine Ideal Indian Women (1919). Web Source: Indian Epics: Reading Guides.

Reading Diary B

A lot more information came from this version of the Ramayana that was from Sita's point of view.  This version focuses on Sita and how misfortunate her life seems, it focuses on her destiny as Ravana's ultimate destruction, however that makes her life full of unhappiness.  There are good times whenever she, Rama, and Lakshmana are in the forest  in their little hut and come to think of it that seems the only time she was truly happy except for right after their wedding.

In these last few scenes Ravana is killed with an arrow to the heart and all of Lanka is sad. Then as in the other version of the Ramayana, Rama tests Sita's purity and she walks into the fire to prove that she was still pure.  Then after they reach home, the citizens of Ajodhya whisper of Sita's possible impurity reach Rama and he decides that his people come before his queen.  So Rama asks his brother to take his PREGNANT WIFE and LEAVE her in the forest!  He left his pregnant wife in the forest alone by herself! So then she is found by Valmiki and he takes her in as his daughter and helps her raise her twin boys, and he becomes a poet of the Ramayana and so on.  Then Sita returns to Rama with her sons but asks the Earth to swallow her up when he asks her to prove herself again.  Her suffering and unhappiness is over.

There's also the addition of the story of Promila, the wife of Indraji and crown princess.  The whole scene is completely different from the public domain Ramayana.  It depicted Indrajit as a proud prince who spent time with his wife in their pleasure palace surrounded by a beautiful garden full of flowers.  His wife Promila was very beautiful and brave and she entered the city of Lanka following her husband by riding up to Rama on a charger and telling him that she will enter the city whether he wishes her to or not, and he allows her to enter the city.  In this version Vibhishana betrays Ravana and allows Lakshmana to enter a hidden door in a temple and kill Indrajit while he is trying to pray to the fire god Agni.  Promila is so loyal that she burns herself with her husband during his funeral!

(Indrajit)

Reading Diary A, Devee

For this reading diary I decided to read Nine Ideal Women: Sita and Promila by Sunity Devee provided free online.  I've noticed several differences between this telling of the Ramayana and the Public Domain version I read before.  This version seems more detailed and includes more dialogue between the characters, spending a lot of time on the characters and their relationships.  It provided more information on Sita's birth which was absent from the version I had been reading.

Section 1 and 2:  These scenes capture the birth of Sita, who, in the bigger picture, is plotted to be the downfall of Ravana.  The events that happen to Sita are directly caused by the fact that Ravana would not let the holy men travel his lands without providing tribute and thus Ravana caused his own end.  What's most interesting though is that Sita is unaware that her father found her while plowing his fields and that he and her mother automatically accepted Sita as their daughter and princess without a second thought!  These scenes seem to explain a lot more why such a life is given to Sita.

Section 6:  Something that called my attention was the description of Rama as the sun-prince and Sita as the Moon-princess, that had never been mentioned before and I thought it was an interesting way to sort of throw into the story the idea of fate, that the two were destined to be together in order to bring about the downfall of Ravana.  Their whole union was planned in time before their very existence!

(Birth of Sita)