Before this poem was a poem, it was something older.

That is not quite a figure of speech. When Mamang Dai writes about a mountain speaking, about a shaman laying down his spear to make a sign, about a hawk returning from the west, she is drawing on a body of knowledge that has never been written down. It has lived, instead, in the bodies and breath of the people who carry it — the Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, Dai’s own community — passed between generations through ritual recitation rather than pages.

Understanding this changes everything about how you read “The Voice of the Mountain.”

The Adi people practice a faith called Donyi-Polo — literally, “Sun-Moon.” It is an animist religion, which means that the natural world is understood not as inert matter but as alive with spiritual presence. The sun and the moon are the great witness-deities, observing the world with an eye that sees everything. Particular mountains, rivers, forests, and ponds are inhabited by their own spirits. Nothing in the landscape is simply scenery; everything is participant.

This worldview is transmitted through a sacred oral literature called the Abang. The Abang is recited — sung, chanted, performed — by the nyibu, the ritual specialist whom outsiders often translate as “shaman” or “priest.” The nyibu is the human technology of the oral tradition: his body is the library, his voice is the text. During ceremonies, he recites cosmogonic chants in which he speaks not merely about the forces of the universe but as them — taking on the voice of the river, the ancestor, the spirit of a particular hill, giving each its due in an ordered sequence of ritual utterance.

This is the literary tradition that underlies Dai’s poem. The poem’s great anaphoric catalogue — “I am the desert and the rain. / The wild bird that sits in the west. / The past that recreates itself…” — is not borrowed from Walt Whitman, though critics make that comparison often. It is the rhetorical structure of the Abang, the nyibu‘s method of speaking the cosmos into order, brought into the English lyric form. When the mountain-speaker says “I am,” again and again, it is performing something that the Adi oral tradition has always done: asserting the presence and agency of the non-human world through the act of speech.

There is another ritual form that matters here: the pengey. This is a funeral elegy performed by the nyibu, in which he verbally conducts the soul of the deceased through the geography of their life — naming the places they loved, the people they knew, the landscape they moved through. At the end of the journey, the nyibu transforms, in the ritual imagination, into a hawk, and flies back to the living from the west (where the dead go) to the east (where the living are, where the sun rises). The soul departs westward; the shaman-hawk returns eastward.

Now look again at the poem. “The wild bird that sits in the west.” The warrior who “from the east… returns.” The speaker who is “the breath that opens the mouth of the canyon” and finally “the sleep in the mind of the mountain.” This is the pengey‘s directional geography, folded into the lyric structure. The poem is, among other things, an elegy — for what exactly is left productively unstated, but the structures of loss and return are there.

“I know, I know these things / as rocks know, burning in the sun’s embrace.” This line is the poem’s epistemological declaration, and it is a challenging one for readers formed by the Western intellectual tradition. We tend to reserve “knowing” for minds — human minds, perhaps animal minds in a generous moment. Rocks do not know. They simply are.

But in Donyi-Polo, this distinction does not hold. The mountain is inhabited; it perceives; it accumulates. Its knowledge is not identical to human knowledge but it is not less than human knowledge either — it is older, broader, slower, uninterested in the brevity of individual lives. The poem is asking you to take this seriously not as mysticism but as an epistemology: what would it mean to attribute genuine knowledge to the non-human world? What would it change in how you live, how you use the land, how you think about time?

Dai herself has written and spoken extensively about the Abang and its significance — calling it “the classical Adi literature” in an interview with scholars Jyotirmoy Prodhani and Urvashi Kuhad. She has noted that the Abang has “several Abangs” within it, each branching into others, like a tree that contains all its own branches. The image resonates with the poem: a speaker who is the desert and the rain, the wild bird and the warrior, the child who died and the woman who survived — all of these are branches of the same tree, all spoken by the same voice, all held inside the mountain’s long sleep.

What Dai is doing, in one sense, is translating this tradition for readers who will never hear it recited. She is making it legible in English, in the conventions of the contemporary lyric, to an audience that will encounter it on a page rather than around a fire or in a ritual hall. This is an act of cultural preservation and also an act of cultural risk: the translation is never complete, and what is lost in it is, in some ways, the very medium — breath, performance, the nyibu‘s body — that gives the Abang its power.

But the poem knows this. Which is perhaps why it ends not with knowledge claimed but with knowledge resting: “I am the sleep in the mind of the mountain.” The mountain is not performing. It is simply there, holding everything it has always held, waiting.