Parallelism in the Hanvueng: A Zhuang Verse Epic from West-Central Guangxi in Southern China

Parallelism is ubiquitous in Zhuang poetry and song and hence also occurs in ritual texts and a range of oral genres. Curiously, this salient fact has generally escaped the notice of scholars writing on the subject of Zhuang poetics. Discussion has generally been concentrated on line length, rhyming patterns, and stanzaic structures as found in Zhuang traditional song genres.2 This essay looks specifically at the phenomenon of parallelism in one particular ritual text from west-central Guangxi. The Hanvueng is a long verse narrative that is recited at rituals intended to deal with cases of unnatural death and serious family quarrels, especially fraternal feuds. The plot involves an old king and his son by his first wife, Hanvueng. After his wife dies, the king remarries a widow from a commoner family, who brings a son with her. She and her son, Covueng, then set out to disenfranchise Hanvueng and drive him out. Hanvueng goes into exile, but the old king becomes ill and has him recalled. The struggle continues when Covueng attempts to kill Hanvueng while the two are hunting. He finally succeeds in having Hanvueng sent down a well to search for water, and then murders him. After his death Hanvueng flies into the sky and establishes a realm there, from which he rains pestilence down upon his former domain. Covueng sends an eagle and a crow up to the sky to resolve his dispute with Hanvueng. In the end Covueng retains the earthly domain, but pays an annual rent to Hanvueng in the sky. Meng Yuanyao and I have recently published an annotated edition of a Hanvueng manuscript (Holm and Meng 2015). With a total length of 1,536 lines, this text is quite long for a Zhuang vernacular ritual text. In some ways it provides a reasonably close parallel in form and Oral Tradition, 31/2 (2017): 373-406