Ecological Transmogrification and the Survival of Myth in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die

Abstract

In recent scholarship, orature theory has emphasised the instability of oral forms, particularly myth’s capacity to survive through performance, repetition, and transformation. Drawing on this insight and ecocritical close reading, this paper develops the concept of ecological transmogrification: a change in the mode of existence of myth, from external material practice to internalised ethical principle, that occurs when the ecological and material conditions sustaining a myth are destroyed. Reading Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die (2012), the paper traces this process through the Musudugu myth, agricultural imagery of seed and fallow field, and the proverb “never cut the rope,” rooted in the material practice of protecting rice farms. It argues that when Finaba returns to her war-ravaged and deforested homeland, the destruction of the rope precipitates a change in the myth’s mode of existence where the proverb is no longer sustained by any material object but instead survives as an internal decision Finaba carries with her. War, migration, and diaspora, this paper argues, do not themselves cause this transmogrification; rather, they relocate and regenerate a myth that ecological rupture has already transformed. Myth therefore survives environmental and historical rupture not through preservation, but because ecological destruction specifically compels it to relocate into a new material, ethical, and narrative form.