ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how folklore and myth serve to forge a continuity between life and death through Easterine Kire’s ecocritical narratives Son of the Thundercloud (2016), When the River Sleeps (2014), and the illustrated The Rain-Maiden and the Bear Man (2021). The chapter positions Kire’s narratives as textual representations/explorations of the liminal spaces between life and death, human and non-human, through storytelling/oral histories of the Angami Nagas. It investigates how the loss of oratures, myth, and legend becomes a metaphor for the death of an organic conception of nature, implying the importance of storytelling and folklore in maintaining the ability to perceive a web of life and death. It also highlights how Kire’s death lore can be seen to offer a ‘healing through storytelling.’
