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February 13, 2026
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from “Where the Kaluli Live”
in An Elemental Thing
by Eliot Weinberger
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“A Kaluli lives in two worlds,” writes Eliot Weinberger, the world of people and the world of birds.
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The poet Forrest Gander calls An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger the “best book by our best living essayist.” Gander particularly admires the way Weinberger “heaps our plate with the facts of life as they are perceived by non-Western cultures, and he does so without patronizing qualifications—'they believe,’ etc.—so often used to distinguish non-scientific modes of experience and explanation.” In the paragraph of the week Weinberger describes a singing ceremony of the Kaluli, an indigenous group living in the rainforests around Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea.
Paragraph of the Week
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Each village lived in a single longhouse, and the long-houses were hours apart. Once or twice a year, a village would invite another to come sing. As night fell, the visitors arrived in a double line, carrying torches, and climbed the stairs into the suddenly silent longhouse of their hosts. Stretching the entire length of the interior, the two rows, after long moments of expectation, hissed loudly ssssss, like a tire deflating, and abruptly sat down, revealing four singers, each identically and splendidly arrayed as birds, face and body painted red, eyes outlined in a black and white painted mask, Bird of Paradise feathers sprouting from armbands, head in an aureole of black Cassowary feathers with a single weighted and bobbing white feather in the middle, and a cascade of yellow palm leaf streamers arching from the waist up to the shoulders and down to the floor.
—Eliot Weinberger
Commentary
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“A Kaluli lives in two worlds,” writes Eliot Weinberger, the world of people and the world birds. “The passage of life is from infant to bird.” Human songs are bird songs and “they describe a journey, each place-name bringing up nostalgic associations, for a tree is a home, a garden is food, a bird is a person, and life is a map and a song a path through it.” When separate villages met in a longhouse, designated singers were dressed in feathered gowns, “splendidly arrayed as birds.” Each singer sang until someone in the group moved to tears stabbed him with a burning torch. “Deep in the isolation of his song, the singer continued, unresponsive as he was burned again and again, until his song ended and another singer began, building the crescendos that would lead to his own burning.” Before the Kaluli ended these rites in 1984, the word for “tomorrow” and “yesterday” in their language were the same. Even though that is no longer true, “the same birds who were once Kaluli” singing
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“ee-yehhhh-u
ee-yehhh-u
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susulubee susulubee susulubee
are still in the trees.”
—THE
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Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
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A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
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Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
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The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
