October 16, 2001
The Spot, SUNY Stony Brook, New York
Last night I performed Hainuwele: The Story of a Dema Girl at The Spot as part of a drag performance event.
The work was inspired by an Indonesian myth about a mysterious girl named Hainuwele. In the version of the story I encountered, Hainuwele possessed the unusual ability to pull useful objects from her anal cavity. The people around her became jealous of her gifts and eventually murdered her, chopping her body into pieces and burying them in the earth. From those buried remains grew cultivated plants and tubers, transforming Hainuwele into an agricultural ancestor whose death gave rise to food and culture.
For the performance I wore a dress sewn from burlap and a long blonde wig. Combined with my long beard, the overall effect was something like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a witch doctor. Hidden beneath the dress was a large cavity constructed from a plastic pumpkin. The pumpkin functioned as a stand-in for Hainuwele’s anal cavity and remained concealed until the performance began.
As the Pixies song The Sad Punk blasted through the speakers, I lip-synced and moved across the stage while the lights flashed around me. During the performance I painted the word DEMA across my chest in large red letters.
At key moments I reached into the hidden cavity and removed a series of objects: toy gold coins, cigarettes, candy, and other small gifts that I tossed into the crowd. These objects referenced the gifts Hainuwele produced in the myth. What begins as a strange miracle in the story eventually becomes the source of envy, violence, and transformation.
Part of what attracted me to the Pixies song was the repeated scream of:
“EXTINCTION!”
The refrain echoed throughout the performance like a warning of what was about to happen. The song shifts between pop melody and violent punk energy, creating an atmosphere that felt unstable and increasingly ominous. Several audience members later described the performance as frightening.
I was interested in the collision of mythology, drag, agriculture, ritual, humor, violence, and transformation. Hainuwele’s story suggests that food is never simply food. It carries memory, sacrifice, desire, jealousy, death, and renewal.
For me, Hainuwele was an experiment in bringing an ancient agricultural myth into a contemporary performance setting. Whether the audience understood the myth or not, they were witnessing its central drama unfold: gifts emerging from the body, envy taking hold, and the promise that something new might grow from destruction.
Hainuwele is often known as “The Coconut Girl” because of her miraculous birth from a coconut blossom. However, the myth ultimately explains the origin of cultivated tubers and other staple food crops, which emerge after her dismembered body is buried in the earth.