Tevâ is one of the main characters in my (WIP) story Empire's Wake, which takes place in the City-State of Ranai after the death of the last Namitan Emperor.
Text from the image and more on the Wetki, Wetki genders, and Tevâ trivia under the cut.
Tevâ
Age: 36 Gender: Female / Uncle Ethnicity: Wetki
Tevâ is a cultural attaché to the Port District of Ranai, representing the interest of the Port's Wetki community. Like many Wetki in Ranai, Tevâ was born on an outlying island of the archipelago where Wetki are still the majority population. She first came to Ranai looking for work to support her twin sister, Pâlâu, and her children.
When Pâlâu died, Tevâ returned to her village to care for her children until they came of age to be raised by the men of the village. Her children grown and her sister dead, Tevâ, having lived most of her life in Ranai, was sent back to the city to study under a Wetki elder there. Her elders hoped she might become a representative to her people: a few years later, she did.
Tevâ's is very carefully of her image: she must remain relatable to Wetki and palatable to Ranaites. Her clothing is crafted to preserve Wetki elements and elicit feelings of foreigness and tasteful respectability in Ranaites.
Wetki wear amulets suspended to their loincloths. Tevâ favors the Four-Face Bird, which has apotropaic qualities.
Ranaite (left) and Wetki (right) clothing. [Tevâ is depicted wearing Ranaite clothing and Wetki clothing, to illustrate how her outfit balances the styles of both.]
The Wetki
The Wetki are indigenous to the Ojame Archipelago where Ranai is situated and are part of a larger cultural group indigenous to coastal regions of Eastern Uanlikri. Like in most of the regions they inhabit, the Wetki of the Ojame Archipelago have been displaced by successive colonizations and conquests of the archipelago. The Wetki excell at making use of the roughest coastal terrains, which has often been used as an excuse and justification to displace them out of more favorable stretches of coastline. Because of this, most Wetki communities are poor and survive on marginal lands. Wetki tend to have poor feather health due to poor diet and exposure to saltwater spray.
In the Ojame archipelago, the Wetki are a minority on Êrar, the largest island, but remain a majority on most of the Archipelago's smaller islands. The Wetki are renowed for their reedwork, producing reedboats, mats, baskets, cordage, and many other things. Most Wetki in Ranai come from other islands, though some communities exist in periphery of the city and are being slowly encroached on by Ranai's growth.
Gender among the Wetki
Like most antioles, Wetki usually give birth to twins. Wetki have an unusually high ratio of same-sex twin pairs, and sex their children at their first year, much before secondary sex characteristics become apparent with puberty.
Wetki societies is strictly gendered, with three distinct genders: woman, uncle, and bachelor. All female Wetki are women or sisters. Male wetki are either uncles or bachelors depending on the sex of their twin: males in a male-male pair become bachelors and are raised separately upon puberty, and males in a male-female pair become uncles and are raised with the women.
The basic familial unit is the sister-sister (or sister-uncle) pair, raising the women's children together with no acknowledgement of individual motherhood by one twin or another (this is true of sister-uncle pairs as well). Bachelors live communally in bachelor-houses and are attached to the village in general. Wetki do not recognize the notion of fatherhood. Sister-pairs raise their female (and uncle) children into adulthood and their male children until the age of nine, at which point male children a raised in the bachelor-house and do not interact with the village's women again until adulthood.
Leaving the village to find work is usually reserved for bachelors, who bring back money and goods for the village. Women and uncles are expected to stay in the village, where women wield all the political power - Wetki are strictly matriarchal. It is, however, not uncommon for bachelors working outside the village to defect - to move out permanently and stop bringing back money to the village, impoverishing it in the process. Village work and goods are usually distributed communally in a process overseen by the Elder-sisters, but in very poor villages, conditions in bachelor-houses may be poor, encouraging defection, and sister-pairs with few social connections may find themselves left behind when resources are short. In such villages, it is not uncommon for sister-uncle pairs to allow the uncle to leave with the bachelors and find work in the city, a choice which is considered heart-wrenching by most Wetki, and is looked down upon as improper mingling of uncle and bachelor genders.
Tevâ and Wetki genders
Tevâ was from a impoverished village such as these, where bachelor defection was high due to poor conditions in the bachelor-house and bad treatment of the bachelors. Tevâ and Pâlâu's mothers died young, leaving them with weak social connections in the village. Tevâ and Pâlâu suffered the brunt of the village's poverty, a fact which was exacerbated when Pâlâu layed male twins. In the face of this untenable position, Tevâ decided to leave with the uncles and the bachelors to find work in Ranai and support her sister. This decision was highly unconventional and put her at odds with the Elder-sisters of her village. Wetki gender is as much about action as it is about biology: Tevâ's decision to leave was interpreted by her community as the incomprehensible decision to become an uncle.
When Pâlâu died, Tevâ returned to her village to raise her sons until they turned nine. After her sons moved with the bachelors, her position in the village became increasingly difficult. The position of a widow-sister is never easy, especially with no children, but Tevâ's experiences of living in the city among Ranaite and Wetki bachelors set her apart from the rest of the village's women, and with no desire to swear sisterhood to another widow-sister, there was no role in sight for Tevâ to occupy.
Shortly after Tevâ's sons left, the village's Elder-sisters were replaced, turning village politics upside down. The new Elder-sister, part of a sister-uncle pair, was determined to turn things around and part of a general movement among the Wetki of the Archipelago to militate for Wetki rights. The new Elder-sister saw great value in Tevâ: though now widely seen as an uncle, she was by birth a woman, with an intimate knowledge of Ranai that very few Wetki women could claim, and no role to fulfill in the village, Tevâ seemed the perfect candidate to act as a spokesperson for Wetki in Ranai.
More trivia
Among Ranaites, Tevâ presents herself unambiguously as a woman. Ranaites claim to be egalitarian but were historically matriarchal, and Tevâ's gender is often a boon in politics.
Tevâ was trained by Nwucâ and Cicwu, Elder-sisters in Tambwâlili, a Wetki village being slowly swallowed by Ranai's southward expansion.
Most Wetki in Ranai dress in Ranaite fashion, or with the traditional Wetki loincloth and net with the addition of a Ranaite shirt to cover their necks. Tevâ's style is an original creation designed with the help of Tambwâlili's elders.
Most Wetki, like Tevâ, forego shoes in favour of the traditional coat of red latex on their soles.
Tevâ works closely with Aliti, one of the councillors in Ranai's port.