KLZYGRZYK, Freedonia. This landlocked nation was the scene of some of the most bitter battles of the twentieth century as well as a number of monumental natural disasters, and as a result its borders have been described by one cartographer as “a moveable feast.”
Lake Oethzrk: Freedonia’s only navigable body of water.
“Freedonia, she is the battered wife of geography,” says Emil Zlotny of the University of Phlegmkz. “Bosnia takes a swipe at her, an earthquake comes along and gives half of the Plzrtz province to Burkina Faso–it never ends.”
The constant upheaval means Freedonians have lost more than just land mass, however. “When Czechoslovakia czeched out in 1992, someone had left our national epic poem, The Globblamon, in a locker at a bus station in Prague,” says Ranek Beramagou. “We had no long boring work of verse to inflict upon children in 8th grade language arts classes.”
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All that is about to change, however, as a crack team of American liberal arts majors has been dispatched to the war-torn nation to help rebuild its national myth from scratch, an undertaking that scholars say is the first of its kind in world history. “In the past when a nation was destroyed it was embalmed in a museum in a more prosperous country,” says Michael van der Wermer. “The problem for Freedonia was they couldn’t afford a pencil to write down their oral culture.”
“Okay, so boy meets girl, boy loses girl, dragon eats girl.”
van der Wermer and three other recent college graduates with degrees in the humanities or social studies have been meeting regularly with displaced natives, collecting bits of folk wisdom that they hope to weave into an epic tale for present and future Freedonians, even if no one in the past ever heard of it. “A work such as Gilgamesh or Beowulf is really important to the identity of a people,” says Marci Ulrich, who majored in the History and Philosophy of the Humanities and Social Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “It becomes part of the warp and woof–probably also the weft–of the fabric of their lives.”
Aid workers hand footnotes across dangerous rapids.
Paul Fussel, who fashioned his own interdiscipinary major at Oberlin College out of bits and pieces drawn from linguistics, ethnomusicology and Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza, says he’s encouraged by the progress the group has made in just two short months on the job. “At first the elders would complain that they were hungry,” he recalls. “I told them–’This is like homework, you don’t get a snack until you tell me how the earth mother gave birth to the first Freedonian.’”
“Please–no more rhymed couplets!”
Amanda Taft-Hartley, a University of Wisconsin Comparative Literature graduate who is taking a year off before starting work on her masters degree, says the group is focusing like a laser on the work they still have left, however. “I don’t mean to downplay the importance of potable water and passable roads to get food to outlying areas,” she says, “but if your country doesn’t have an ancient poem to call its own, you’ll never get written up in the top academic journals.”
