(11,081 words, or start from the beginning.)
Nakaweshimi has an infant
child at her breast. Lac watches her stomach grow rounder every day and wonders
how she’ll cope with the demands of two nursing babies, two tiny children who
must be attended to around the clock—though she’s never seen a clock, unless
you count the one on his wrist. Laura should have it easy by comparison.
Western women don’t nurse infants as long, and alternative forms of sustenance
are much more accessible. His family won’t go hungry, even with him away—not as
long as the Hofstetters keep driving his wife into the city to get groceries,
with stops along the way to help her feel less trapped at the scientific
institute in the mountains overlooking Caracas.
He pushes it from his
mind. Because there’s no need to worry. Because even if there were something
wrong, there’d be nothing for him to do about it. Before now, it never occurred
to him the explorers he was so fascinated with growing up must have worried
about their wives’ fidelity while they were away from home during all those
ridiculous stretches of time, off in one of the dwindling regions of the map
with mystery still on offer. They must have directed their thoughts to maddeningly
ambiguous details in letters, alert to clues of budding… Enough.
The success of this
expedition hinges on his ability to observe, and subsequently on his ability to
synthesize his observations—so for this trip to serve any purpose at all, for
him to come through it with anything to show, he needs to concentrate on his
work. He knows the end point of all this obsessing over what Laura may be doing
with some notional scientist at IVIC, a married man himself—and is he even a
scientist?—is nothing but deeper obsession, more troubled sleep. So, through an
exertion of will, he calls his attention back to what’s going on in the
shabono, as he’s done countless times since returning from Ocamo, corralling his
thoughts back to the questions at hand.
There are a lot of sick
kids. It seems there are always sick kids at Bisaasi-teri. The headman is sick
as well, reduced to loafing around, swaying idly in his hammock for most of the
day, clutching his side, hardly able to do his own gardening. Another man,
Horeshemowa, pogo-sticks around on his one leg, the other having been ravaged
by a snake’s venom. So many details and impressions: which to record and in
what order? Children play. Children always play. Parents and other adults
always shout at them to keep it down, to quit being so damned annoying.
The games consists of
various elements of adult life they look forward to enjoying. If they don’t
die. The boys recreate everything in miniature. They shoot miniature arrows
from miniature bows. They blow dirt through miniature blowguns into each
other’s faces, emulating the shabori’s delivery of ebene into one another’s
nostrils. They even build miniature yanos, the simple shelters their fathers
and brothers and uncles build to sleep in when they’re on long hunting trips.
He’s seen the boys capture bees, holding them ever so delicately, so they could
tie a string around their thorax. Thus hobbled, the hapless creatures are
allowed to escape, but the added weight and drag slows their retreat across the
central plaza of the shabono. The boys pursue, often firing their miniature
arrows, though they have next to no chance of ever hitting the target. In Michigan,
they’d be admonished; where will those wayward arrows land? Here, they’re free
to flirt with myriad dangers. And they love it.
It’s not fair at all for
the girls. They’re not just imitating the duties of adult women; they’re taking
them on. They babysit, fetch water, tend to fires, and leave with the older
women late every afternoon to collect wood, returning with heavy straps across
their foreheads, leaning forward to balance their absurd loads. They don’t
complain. They don’t seem to care much that the boys are granted far more
freedom from responsibility. Really, they almost seem to relish the importance
of their tasks, some of them anyway. Others take on the harried and
longsuffering demeanor of the older women. So much to do. So much foolishness
to deal with.
The more time Lac spends
among the Yąnomamö, the less alien they seem. They’re just people, carving an
existence out of their little corner of the jungle. They talk and laugh and
eat. They joke about farts and tease each other for having saggy butt cheeks or
filthy foreheads. They gossip while they’re stuffing roasted plantains in their
mouths. Their mundane concerns are tied up with their spiritual beliefs and
practices, with perhaps less of a divide separating the two realms than obtains
in Western societies.
Tell that to Mom, he
thinks, recalling his mother’s myriad prayers personalized for individual
saints.
Their language is nasal.
At first, they sound whiny, kind of the way French people always sound snooty. Over
time, though, you begin to listen for cadences and subtle variations in tone.
You hear the music instead of just the dominant key. Their hygiene and their
manners—or lack thereof—are more difficult to adjust to. They’re just people,
yes, but really gross people, often quite rude as well. But it’s your rules
they’re violating, you have to remember, and as long as you’re out here it’s
their rules you must adhere to.
Up to a point at least.
But they really are
different. Some of the women you see were kidnapped, stolen away from their
husbands and kinsfolk in some rival—perhaps by now some allied—village. Lac
doesn’t see any of them resisting or protesting or behaving in any way as
though they’re living in captivity; he’d have little to go on if put to the
task of discerning between Bisaasi-teri natives and abductees from outside
villages. What would Laura, with all her theories about the effects of
psychological trauma, make of that? These women can’t simply accept being torn
away from their families, can they? What if they have children when the raid
occurs? Yet no one seems to be trying to escape.
He’ll have to get their
stories, in time. He supposes if the village as a whole can turn on a dime with
its attitude toward distant or neighboring villages as strategy or honor
dictates, then perhaps it’s not such a stretch to believe individual women
could adapt to their new circumstances after being forcibly relocated. Still,
there must be a period of adjustment; there must be some individuals who handle
the upheaval better than others.
Yes, they are different,
markedly, from people you’d meet in the States. You take one of them off to the
side and explain to him, as best you can, what your plans are regarding your
genealogical research, and he seems fine with it, shows no anger, nary an
indication of disapproval. Indeed, he seems curious about the process and the resulting
pool of findings. It’s their own families whose histories I’m after; why
shouldn’t they be interested? And the details should be still more interesting
to a man with political ambitions, one who wishes to become a great shabori, a
great waiteri, perhaps someday the headman, the pata, of his own village, all
of which is true of his closest informant Rowahirawa.
So you tell him your
plans and he seems sanguine. Then you start asking him for some names and he
looks at you like you just groped his wife. When you repeat back to him some names
he’s just whispered in your ear—whispering them into his own ear in deference
to their sacredness—he proceeds to smash everything within reach, trashing your
notes, knocking over your table, and then threatens to kill you, chasing you
from your own hut. You may, at this point, suspect this is just Rowahirawa up
to his pranks again, so you begin the process anew with another, more even-tempered
informant, only to meet with essentially the same outcome.
Yes, they certainly are
different in certain regards. Lac sits on a log at the edge of the plaza,
observing, going back to basics. No one can say he hasn’t made progress; he’s
got the families arranged in clusters in his notes, so he has a rough idea
who’s related to whom. He has a bead on most of the children’s parentage, along
with most of the kids’ names. But he’s reached a point where he has no idea how
to proceed. So it’s back to watching and looking for details he has yet to
notice, back to being a silent observer, for a while. Ethnography at its most
basic: sitting here observing and recording your impressions. For many
anthropologists, that’s about as far as it ever goes anyway.
I could have signed on
for a short stay too, he thinks. Six months, from November to May, the jungle’s
dry season—I’d already be a good chunk of the way through. The clock would be
ticking on my projects, sure; as of now, I have little confidence I’ll have my
genealogical charts filled in by the time I’d be preparing to leave. But I
could come back. Yeah, the first trip could be six months, and I would come
back for two or three subsequent two-month stints. That would give me plenty of
material for my thesis, and then a book. I could build a teaching career on
that. That’s how most anthropologists do it. Not Lachlan Shackley though. No, I
had to arrange to stay in the field as long as possible; I had to seek out Dr.
Nelson and set up a plan to squeeze in some more time out here—in exchange for
me serving as a liaison with the villagers, and in exchange for the
genealogical information I already planned collect anyway.
The Yąnomamö are largely
unknown to anthropologists after all, and so many of their villages remain
uncontacted. It’s a significant opportunity, both for him personally and for
the science of anthropology—along with Nelson’s contribution to the science of
genetics and any discoveries he may light on about the effects of radiation by
comparing these so-called native soil populations to people exposed to the
aftermath of the detonations in Japan. So here I am, self-marooned. If there’s good
news, it’s that having angered the Yąnomamö so many times, each time having
witnessed them return to an even keel, I find myself less frightened for my
life at any given moment. That makes for a far less stressful existence. And it
opens the way for me to test several plans for getting the information I need.
Lac has considered
concocting some elaborate story about how his hut is a magical dwelling place
for the buhii of the ancestors, where they not only tolerate but encourage the use of their names. What’s
stopping him from tricking them like this? They play tricks on him all the
time. Somehow though, the idea strikes him as a step too far. Trust may not be
earned in the same ways among the Yąnomamö as it is in Northern Michigan, but
such a scheme would set a bad tone for his project, establish a problematic
theme in his research.
Such shenanigans would
likely go over well enough with the fans of any books he writes for a popular
audience, should he decide to write about them, but his fellow scientists
wouldn’t be amused. Who’s to say the plan wouldn’t backfire anyway? Indeed, one
of the likelier outcomes would be that his informants, given this sign of his desperation,
would clam up, sealing their lips even tighter whenever he comes around
quizzing them on the names of their family members. As it stands now, he
manages to get a name here and there. They know he wants more, but so far they
seem neither inclined to help nor especially determined to thwart his efforts.
Really, they seem to think the whole thing is a joke.
One minute they’re mad,
the next they’re trying to contain their laughter at his foolishness. Besides,
the more he listens to their complaints, the less he thinks their concern is
with angering the spirits of their ancestors; the dead are gone, living on
hedu, the Sky Layer. They claim the reason hearing the names is unbearable to
them is that they can’t stand being reminded of their lost family members. By
using their names, you’re calling attention to their absence, to the fact of
their being dead. That’s how they explain it anyway. According to Rowahirawa,
there’s only one thing to be done to honor or memorialize the dead: avenge
them.
Lac hopes to see the
rituals associated with one of these revenge missions one day, but in the
meantime he wants to know how the Yąnomamö’s aversion to being faced with
reminders of dead family members squares with their mad obsession with their
own honor, the demand for respect that drives their efforts to keep their own
names off-limits. For my grandfather’s name, it’s about the painfulness of his
memory, but for my own name it’s about being afforded the proper deference—it’s
about status. Just as the only reasonable response to a death is revenge, the
man whose name is spoken publicly likewise feels honor-bound to at the very
least scare the living hell out of the person who spoke it. It’s amazing they
don’t spend more time fighting than they do. Even the young children, barely
walking, are pressed to repay insult for insult, blow for blow, in their
dealings with other children. The child who turns to his mother for comfort
after being struck by a playmate receives nothing but goads to retaliate. If
you let offenses go unpunished, they seem to think, you’re inviting more. You
can’t rise in status as long as you let people push you around.
And forbearance?
They recognize no such
virtue. Which makes my position, Lac thinks, even more precarious. What choice
do I have but to allow myself to be pushed around at certain points, to a
certain degree? I can’t go around challenging men to boxing matches. I can’t
start shooting people with my shotgun. Yet every insult I let stand, every act
of bullying I stoically withstand, serves as an advertisement of my
vulnerability—a giant “kick me” sign slapped on my back. And just as you must
guard your own status by refusing to tolerate slights of any kind, you can also
bolster your standing by disrespecting someone else and getting away with it.
It’s a bully’s paradise. An arena for competitive posturing.
Lac has even begun to
suspect this urge to prove one’s ability to disrespect others with impunity is
what lies behind the incessant demands for his madohe. It’s more than mere
greed. They demand, he gives. Their status grows, his diminishes. In this
light, his refusals no longer appear adequate; he’s still being seen getting
harassed and threatened on a daily basis and doing nothing about it. He thinks
back to those two machetes that were stolen from him the first week he was in
the field. The man who’d rescued him when he fell behind the party of hunters that
day ended up with one, so Lac assumed his brother had taken the other. It
turned out he hadn’t.
The village is quiet
today, save for some banter and the sounds of children at their games. Since
arriving in Bisaasi-teri, Lac has stitched three large lacerations on
villagers’ heads. Two of these injuries were sustained during club fights he
witnessed, the scars from which the men display proudly by cutting their hair
into tonsures which serve as windows onto the grotesque. The third was a woman.
What he’s observed is that the injunction to respond violently to any offense
forces some physically or politically weak men to displace their anger,
striking their own wives instead of attacking the culprit. Or striking their
dogs. In either case, Lac, to his stubborn chagrin, finds himself running
headlong into another limitation to his cultural relativism.
When you lash out at
someone weaker than you out of fear for your actual tormentor, what are you
displaying besides your own inferiority, your own cowardice? Sure, you’re
showing everyone you have a line that once crossed can’t be uncrossed. But how
does turning your anger toward a bystander dissuade would-be bullies? Aren’t
you signaling your impotence, your inability to retaliate properly? Aren’t you
telling the offender he’s got nothing to worry about because you’ll find some
other outlet for your rage? I mean, anyone can beat up a woman—unless, I
suppose, she’s under the protection of a large contingent of her male kinsfolk.
This is why, incidentally, women seem to prefer marrying men from their natal
village; it means they don’t have to step out from under that protection.
And dogs? Really? You
have to kick a dog to prove how tough you are?
Pathetic.
You don’t see truly
powerful men clubbing their wives over the head or throwing rocks at their
dogs. Bahikoawa’s wives are all intact, no lopped-off fingers, no mutilated
ears, both of which Lac surmises are common wages of infidelity. I guess you
could say these men are expressing their anger through the only channels they
have available to them—and express their anger they must, as their upbringing
has inculcated in them since toddlerhood. One generation of women bequeathing
to their boys the ethos that will result in the next generation’s abuse.
If I were a Yąnomamö, he
thinks, I’d display my fierceness, my waiteri, by having a pretty wife with a
smile on her face. And perfect ears. I’d only challenge the men who offended
her, laughing off insults to myself.
But that’s not right.
Because if you were a Yąnomamö, you’d be brought up the same way they are, and
they aren’t raised to think very highly of women, or to value their happiness.
Women, the men joke, are never happy. Putting any stock in their happiness
would be a losing investment.
Lac stands and looks
around the plaza, cognizant of the oddness of his behavior but past caring; by
now, the Yąnomamö wouldn’t be surprised if he sprouted a third leg… or turned
into a hummingbird and started buzzing and flitting about their heads. The men
would watch it happen, then weeks later they’d be shooting ebene up each
other’s noses and squatting down to tell the story of how the clownish nabä up
and turned into a three-legged hummingbird. They’d waddle side-to-side in
rhythm with their words, gesturing in pantomime of the arc of his flight. That
nabä, the shabori would say, he darted right up in my face—POW—hovered around making a sound like, vvvrrrhhh, and then he flew off so fast, wwwaaayyy over there.
Lac laughs at the
impression playing out his imagination, the storyteller like a roosting bird
rousing itself to put on a preening display to dazzle a mate. He walks toward
the shaded dwellings beneath the high roof, roughly in the direction of
Bahikoawa’s yahi—his immediate family’s section of the shabono, his house—where
he gravitates, not because he’s planning to leave the village and go back to
his hut, nor to visit Nakaweshimi or the headman’s younger wife, but rather
because he has a vague intuition it’s the best direction to amble if he wants
to witness something interesting—even though the headman’s family life is remarkably free from drama, at least by Yąnomamö standards.
He could look at it as
progress, his boredom. At least boredom presupposes a level of comfort, a lack
of fear. Though it may rather be that he’s too spent to be scared of anything
just now. If a giant serpent rose up out of the Mavaca and crashed through the
shabono, he would probably just stand there watching the carnage unfold. Except
he has to stay alive and in one piece for Laura and Dominic and Kara.
Unless—maybe they’d be
better off without him.
Enough of that, he tells
himself. By any outward measure, you’re doing well, considering the nature of
the enterprise you’ve embarked upon. You’re going to keep moving forward with
it because that’s all you can do, keep moving forward. Feeling low, wallowing
in doubt, that helps nothing. If you start to feel low, that’s when moving is
most imperative. Moving and working. Or else the lowness will lead to
inactivity, which will in turn lead to you feeling even lower, and on and on in
a downward spiral of pathetic passivity, a vortex which would also draw your
family down into its gulping maw. So move your ass Shackley. Can’t figure out a
way to make progress on your genealogies? Put them aside and get to work on
something else. I mean, for Christ’s sake, it’s not like you’ve mastered the
language yet. Rowahirawa says you sound like a besotted monkey eating a
panicked toucan.
Ha ha. That son of a
bitch.
So enough with these
vague intuitions and all this waiting around. If you think you should track
down Bahikoawa and see what he’s up to, then go find him.
Lac scans the plaza:
children playing, men crossing from one side to the other to visit neighbors,
and a group of three men—no, four—squatting for a confab. He turns and walks
over to them, unsure as always whether his presence will be tolerated or
whether he’ll be bullied and chased away. Bahikoawa is holding court. It looks
as though he’s feeling better; he’s not wincing and grabbing at his side like
he was before. He does still look sick though, tired and uncomfortable. Does
that mean he believes some shabori from a rival village has sent a hekura to
gnaw at his soul? Lac will try to ask him when next he has the chance.
Right now, the headman is
talking about war strategy again. Lac approaches in an arc, listening in from
afar to glean as much as he can before getting harassed or chased away, if
that’s how the men are to react. Specifically, they’re discussing Karohi-teri
and whether the people there will support Bisaasi-teri should they take up arms
alongside Monou-teri against Patanowä-teri. Karohi-teri is the home village of
Rowahirawa, and it seems he may have left on bad terms. Bahikoawa responds to
another man’s voicing of this concern by pointing out that the insulted man
isn’t a pata, isn’t influential enough to sway the village’s browähäwä.
Rowahirawa is still away
on his hunting trip, but the men decide to put the question to him when he
returns. Patanowä-teri is a massive village, the men there notoriously waiteri.
If the Monou-teri headman attacks them, accompanied by a contingent of
Bisaasi-teri raiders, there could be hell to pay. Once the decision is made to
consult later with the sioha, the men stand and disperse, returning to their
yahis, where they’ll laze until the sun swings low enough that its rays aren’t
beaming directly onto the plaza. Then it will be time to set those hekura to
work stealing and retrieving souls.
Lac is left standing
alone, once again with no idea what to do with himself. At least he got some
good information, but it was mostly stuff he already knew. He almost misses
Rowahirawa—until he remembers how things turned out with his earlier translator
and chief informant, the bright young man who had a better grasp than anyone
else in the village of what Lac was after in any given situation and what he
needed to know. Lac never learned this kid’s name, and at any rate he’s gone
now, though where he went and for how long remain open questions. At the time
of his leaving, Lac was beyond caring. Maybe he planned to leave all along, Lac
thinks now; that’s why he didn’t bother trying to arrange a longer-term
partnership with him—a mutually beneficial one. That could be why he chose
instead to help himself to whatever he wanted from the hut.
Oh, he was tricky about it
too. He had Lac’s number like Lac can barely imagine having any Yąnomamö’s
after knowing them for so short a time. He always knew the perfect time to
strike; he always knew the perfect face to show; he always knew how to be
helpful to the point of indispensability. Two and a half weeks in, Lac was utterly
dependent on him. All the while, he was secretly enriching himself with Lac’s
madohe. The machetes—one of which he traded to another man Lac once thought he
could safely depend on—were only the beginning. Wherever he is now, he has an
axe for himself, one to trade, several empty cans for use as grinding surfaces
to make ebene from hisiomo, which Lac would have gladly given him upon request,
boxes of crackers, bags of oatmeal—does he know how to prepare it?—and the tarp
Lac had been using as a poncho. Anything else? The young man had also taken
with him any remaining openness or inclination on Lac’s part to seek friendship
among the Yąnomamö.
He understands. He may as
well have a Vegas-style neon marquee over his head: “I possess valuable goods
but know nothing.” To them he’s a rich, ignorant nobody, ripe for a con. The
troubling thing, the thing Lac doesn’t want to acknowledge, is that he was so
confident in the young man’s good intentions; he liked him; they liked each
other; there was no reason for them not to help each other out, no reason to
deal double. All that time, though, while smiling to his face, while flashing
his eyes in understanding, a look of friendship, the kid was robbing him blind.
Up till he discovered the
full extent of the young man’s thievery, Lac had been taking some reassurance
from his calculation that his food supplies may last him until Clemens’s
return. He no longer has recourse to such calculations. He’ll need to hunt.
He’ll need to rely on the Yąnomamö. Or else: he also has the option of turning
to Padre Morello and the other Salesians at Ocamo. Of course, that line of
dependency comes at a cost of its own—what might they ask for in return? But
here in the jungle, you do what you must.
Really, though, Lac tells
himself, it’s inexplicable why more of them aren’t stealing from you. They could
rather easily. But theft, despite the padre’s pronouncements, really is
discouraged; calling someone a thief is an insult among the Yąnomamö as well,
though they think of it somewhat differently. Theft for them is ungenerous,
stingy, demonstrating a lack of the compulsive charity they boast of engaging
in. So it could be worse. Really, you’re lucky just to be breathing still. Healthy
and in one piece.
Walking back to his hut,
not dejected but in a funk, he’s chased and surrounded by children. Time for
some language games. Doing something useful will make you feel better.
*
Last winter, as he was preparing to board a freighter in New York in the upcoming fall, bound for Venezuela, Lac went to a theater
with Ken Steel, one of his best friends at U of M, to watch the heavyweight
champion Sonny Liston lose his title to Cassius Clay. The outcome of the fight
incensed many people in Ann Arbor. Clay is boastful and disrespectful. Everyone
was eager to see him take his long-overdue whooping. Even the way he moves is
offensive, so cocksure, so provocative. But, for Lac, there was something there
beyond the total disregard for proper form evinced by Clay’s antic style, which
he found just as infuriating as everyone else, something mesmerizing. His
movements are so graceful, fluid, precise. The enchantment of sport is borne of
witnessing the superhuman interlocking of will to bodily action; the superior athlete
is able to set his plans into perfect motion, manifesting desire as living deed,
a feat all the more impressive for taking place against the efforts of an equally
determined opponent; he moves and adjusts at the speed of thought—faster even—and
spectators are captivated by the calculated blur, the flow of furiously
choreographed execution, every twitch of tightly honed muscle engineered on the
fly to fulfill a single objective: victory.
Lac thinks of this
whenever he sees the Yąnomamö on the hunt. He was following the delegation from
Bisaasi-teri on their way to Karohi-teri, but someone caught sight of game,
sending everyone darting off into the gray shadows of the primeval forest. Lac
doesn’t even know what they’re chasing exactly; there was a whisper, but he was
too far from the whisperer to make it out. He clutches his shotgun as he runs
to catch up, ready to avail himself of any opportunity to demonstrate his
hunting prowess.
Should he fire his gun
though?
The men have been making
him feel like a kid riding in the back of his parents’ car, whining, “Are we
there yet?” at intervals. They keep responding with the same phrase, “A brahawä
shoawä,” which he takes to mean, “It’s still a long way off.” But by now they
must be close. In earshot of a shotgun blast? He can’t know. He also can’t know
how the Karohi-teri would react to hearing such a sound.
Weighing the risks
against the benefits of helping the men in his party procure some meat, which
they’ll grill or smoke until it has the look and taste of a charred hockey puck,
he opts for shooting anything he sees. Peering into the profusion of shadowy
wet leaves, the space around him throbbing with dense and buzzing life,
clicking insects joined by a chorus of distant birds, he spies a blankness
through the foliage, an absence, not just of game but of some natural element
that rightly should be there in front of his eyes, some quality he believed
this place, Amazonia, would possess. Instead—a mess of overgrown ferns, tangled
lianas, tornadoes of gnats, all suspended in a sticky soup of heavy overheated
air alive with ravenous biting insects.
A feeling grips him, a
sensation of buoyancy, like a giant’s hand clasping his body, lifting him from
the ground. He rises from his crouch to stand at his full height. Turning
around, he sees a half circle of Yąnomamö men, their unfamiliar faces painted
black, their bows stretched and creaking. A single word rings through his mind:
ambush. The feeling is of being caught in the open, helpless, doomed.
Lac turns and dashes into
the undergrowth, realizes the hopelessness of his flight, turns again, aims his
rifle, and fires. He doesn’t know if he’s hit his target; he can’t make out any
bodies through the acrid smoke. But he’s aware of the loosing arrows, hears the
sound, hears them hiss through the air, their poison tips thudding into and
burying themselves in flesh. He steps backward: one step, a stagger, another
step, and now he’s falling back, back through thick clouds of sleep, falling
and falling until he lands, startled, in his hammock, in his mud-and-thatch hut
thirty yards from the main shabono at Bisaasi-teri, where the Mavaca empties
into the Orinoco.
It’s morning. They leave
for Karohi-teri today. He’ll see where that bastard Rowahirawa is from. He
hopes they’re not all like that guy. He can be funny, sure. But one of him is
more than enough.
*
The Yąnomamö travel single-file
along their trails, if you can call them trails. You have to keep your eyes
focused on a space maybe three feet from the ground, where someone might
casually reach over and snap a twig, leaving the top segment dangling from the
separated fibers of bark. I suppose, Lac thinks, if they can pick up enough
detail from a footprint to recognize its maker, they should have no trouble
finding signs like broken branches, bent leaves, and kinked stems. But there’s
an insouciance about their trailblazing, as though they drift into a trance
while walking. Lac takes to his notes whenever they stop and tries to map their
progress against his best estimation of the layout of the landscape, but he
didn’t need any map to discover that his traveling companions had taken him up
a steep incline for hours, summiting a substantial hill or low mountain, adding
an enormous amount of exertion to their trek—when it would have been much
easier to go around the damn hill.
His frustration upon
making this discovery must have been conspicuous enough, as the men were
briefly stunned into silence, until they burst out laughing. Only a crazy nabä
would get worked up about such silliness. As careless as their course strikes
him at times, he can’t help being impressed by their familiarity with the vast
terrain and with their uncanny sense of distance and direction. They know
exactly where they are at any point in their progress, and that’s likely why their
trails are so minimally developed.
The Yąnomamö know, or
seem to, which direction every village and garden and major landmark is. No
matter where you are, you can ask them and they’ll point, accurately as far as
Lac has been able to ascertain. They’ll explain the distance by pointing to
where the sun would be by the time you finished traveling there. Or if it’s
more than a day’s walk away, they tell you how many “sleeps” before you arrive,
having to rely on fingers and toes for numbers greater than two, because they
lack words for them.
Maybe they enjoy cresting
mountains; maybe the climbs afford chances to take in the beauty of rare vistas.
If so, Lac wishes someone would have encouraged him to look up and enjoy them
himself.
He hasn’t yet picked up the
trick of spotting game while focusing his gaze on the search for signs of the
trail, a skill the Yąnomamö are exquisitely adept at. They must be lifting
their gaze, he reasons, at frequent intervals, a feat they can pull off because
they know the trail intimately. Lac on the other hand could rely completely on
the man in front of him for his bearings and still seldom catch sight of
anything worth hunting. Likewise, if he gave up entirely on spotting game he’d
still have difficulty keeping to the trail; it wouldn’t take long for him to be
lost—Rowahirawa likes to tell him to take the lead whenever they’re hunting or
traveling in a group, so they all can laugh when he wanders off course almost
immediately. He’s determined to develop both skills, one at a time if
necessary, but eventually he’ll be able to exercise them simultaneously like
the Yąnomamö.
The most important skill
for to him acquire now though is getting the names they so steadfastly avoid
divulging. When you’re watching them scold a storm, it’s easy to feel smug—though
even that practice has an undeniable intuitive appeal. For Westerners too the
gods dwell in the heavens; we’ve even had those who casts thunderbolts down to
Earth. You feel smug, Lac thinks, whenever they do something you understand the
goal of but know won’t work. Except for the healing rituals the shabori perform;
those are just sad. The bullying for the sake of status is the big example, as
so much of it involves harassing or assaulting those weaker than you, women or
dogs, or ignorant nabäs. Such transparent efforts to win renown ought rightly
to establish nothing other than the bully’s own weakness—but the Yąnomamö don’t
think like that. For them anger and immediate retaliation, and even status, are
mostly a means of deterrence. If you don’t get angry at someone, you’re
inviting further abuse. Directing that anger at someone other than the actual
offender, while not ideal, is better than not doing anything. It still tells
covillagers how you have a line you can’t be pushed beyond without triggering
violence, however pathetic its expression.
Some men lack any such
line. They must not fare too well.
The single-file
progression of the envoys isn’t the most conducive arrangement for easy
conversation, so the Yąnomamö stick to one-liners. They shout jokes. Lac almost
never gets them. He hears the Yąnomamö laughing, smiles dumbly, and looks down
at the ground, seeing the scuffed and deeply wrinkled boots, caked in dried
mud, pinching and chafing his aching feet.
Whenever the smugness
evaporates, Lac is left with a feeling of dread and diminishment. Our cultures
may have achieved starkly uneven levels of technological advancement, he
thinks, but no single person carries the entirety of his culture—a fact which
is especially true of people from more advanced societies. Think how little of
your own world you could recreate from scratch—and then realize you’d die shortly
after beginning the effort because you depend on that culture you can’t even
begin to reproduce for survival.
He once stood outside his
father’s house looking up into the autumn sky, searching for the tiny satellite
the Russians named Sputnik. He remembers it now because it caused in him a
similar feeling of diminishment. The soviets are our rivals; our society had
been bested. Was the feeling his own, he wonders now, or had it crept in from
that wider society? Couldn’t one forget the military ramifications for a moment
and marvel at the collective ingenuity of his fellow humans, no matter how
hostile to us some of them may be?
“It’ll be missiles next,”
his father said, “and it only takes one.”
Malcolm Shackley had been
serving in Germany at the tail end of the war. He has stories about the
Russians he will never tell.
“If you want to do
something worthwhile,” he said to Lac, “go to school to be an engineer or a
physicist.”
Lac was coming inside
after a fruitless search of the night sky over Port Austin when his father gave
him this commission. He would have never admitted to anyone how much his heart
swelled. He’d thought his dad was disappointed in him, his second-born son, because
he hadn’t allowed himself to be pressed into joining the military. It had been
good enough for the men of his
generation, his father surely thought; what more did this new crop of starry-eyed
young weaklings want, other than to work as little as possible? Lac would have
expected any of his father’s recommendations regarding career choice to come
with some reprising of this theme. Instead, he offered up this higher calling.
Lac filled out the paperwork to apply for Physics and Engineering courses at
Sault St. Marie the following summer. That would have been eight years ago now.
It wasn’t until he was
allowed to transfer to U of M that he took his first anthropology class, with
Dr. Service, to fulfill a prerequisite. That class inspired him to take the
next one, this time with Dr. White, both courses together effecting a one-two
combination that sealed his fate, bringing him to the present moment, in which
he’s once again feeling the dreadful suspicion that his might not be the ascendant
culture, or that his identity as a vessel of that culture can only fail to establish
his personal authority—or for that matter his basic personal worth—so far
removed from its natural parameters, in the absence of its most preciously
impressive trappings and accoutrements.
The Yąnomamö never doubt
the superiority of their own culture, of their very substance as humans. When
two brothers loosed their arrows and the moon’s blood fell to the earth, it
fell most thickly on the ground beneath whichever village you yourself happen
to have been born in, or so everyone seems to believe. And all this madohe?
Gifts from the hekura, given to the nabä, the degenerate subhumans from the
outer rim of This Layer, solely out of mischief, as a colossal prank. That’s
just like them. Really, it’s a wonder Lac isn’t having far more trouble than he
is holding on to his metal tools. He thinks back to all the effort he put into
securing the door of his hut, and then to secure the inner door into his
storage area, the space separated from the main room by the extra mud and
wood-frame wall he’d decided to build.
It wouldn’t keep them
out, not if they were determined, not if they were shameless in their efforts
and didn’t bother trying to be quiet and inconspicuous. He has grand plans to
travel to every village he hears of, collecting census data and recording minor
variations in their languages and customs, perhaps even stitching together some
semblance of a transtribal history—or folk history anyway. How can I do that
when traveling to a single nearby village causes me so much hand-wringing?
And fear for his madohe
is only part of that worry; he has no idea how this new village is going to
receive him—if they’re going to
receive him. This is the place Rowahirawa hails from, his most aggressive and determined
bully among the Bisaasi-teri. They could all be like him at Karohi-teri. He may
be closer to the norm in most of the Yąnomamö villages.
This last thought has a
peculiar effect on Lac, as it reminds him how many questions he could
potentially answer merely by visiting more villages. He would be able to see
how normal Rowahirawa really is. He could see how big the villages are on
average. He could see how far manufactured goods have made it along the trade
networks. Curiosity competes with caution. And aren’t the risks to his supplies
just another practical hurdle he can apply some thought and ingenuity to
addressing? And the risks associated with making first contact—a flash of
remembering his arrival at the Bisaasi-teri shabono—he can probably learn to
minimize those as well. Anyway, making first contact, availing yourself of the
last remaining opportunities to record such experiences—that was one of your
main motives for choosing the Yąnomamö in the first place.
But, oh, how little I
knew.
As for Rowahirawa, he’s a
pushy, disrespectful jerk, it’s true. He’s also currently my best informant.
Anxiety and wounded pride aside, I could do worse than meet a village-full of
men who turn out to be half as helpful.
Still… an entire village-full?
He steps over a low
branch and feels a painful pinch in his foot when he returns it to the ground.
Long periods of walking, followed by long periods of sitting, riding in a boat,
lying in a hammock—his legs and feet are constantly stiff and sore. He envies
the Yąnomamö their wide-splayed, never-shod feet, thickly calloused—though when
they get wet they become vulnerable to thorns and sharp twigs. The whole group
will halt in its progression as one of them stops to dig the barb out of his
toe. And their legs—they have the most flexible knees Lac has ever seen on
anyone in his life, squatting for hours at a time, bouncing and rocking as they
give their nighttime speeches—a custom Lac has only recently witnessed since he
usually goes back to his hut as soon as it looks like everyone is about to turn
in—and bouncing and rocking and dancing as they recount their myths.
He does see them stiff
and grunting once in a while, but not like him. His feet and legs join his
acute anxiety and a host of other contributors to his insomnia, and his
near-constant exhaustion has been the bane of his days in the jungle. If he
could just get a few good nights’ sleep, well, then he’d be as sanguine as he
should be about visiting all these villages.
At least the damned
bareto aren’t making him feverish anymore, or leaving welts all over his skin,
though they are still an incessant nuisance. Even the Yąnomamö suffer their
unending attacks; the few who’ve managed to get their hands on shirts or
dresses eagerly don them for the modicum of protection they offer from the
insects—bareto during the day, mosquitoes at night. Lac watches the poor
children, whose smiles and laughter and fun-loving acceptance are the only
reason he’s still here and still sane, watches them twist and smack their
shoulders, slap their arms and legs, the erratic dance you do when you’re
besieged by tiny biting bloodsuckers. He’s thought of bringing repellent spray
for them when he returns from his next visit to a town, but he knows it would
be pointless.
He could never bring
enough.
*
Rowahirawa walks up into
a yahi and stands before a man lying in his hammock. “This is the man whose
wife’s vagina I ate,” he says to Lac as he grabs the poor man by the ankles and
dumps him on the ground. To eat a woman’s vagina, Lac has learned, is to have
sex with her.
The laughter hits Lac
like a punch to the gut.
Partly from the pent-up
tension, partly because it’s nice to see the unprovoked hostility directed at
someone else for once, Lac takes a perverse delight in his informant’s attack
on the man he’s made a cuckold. But the laughter catches him off guard. He
tries to scan the vicinity for signs of trouble, afraid Rowahirawa’s lark might
cause a melee, but he can’t see much because he’s doubled over with tears in
his eyes.
Upon entering the
shabono, Rowahirawa marched to the center of the plaza and struck the visitor’s
pose, which consisted of him standing erect, his joints locked, his chin in the
air, his weapons at the ready, all the while ostentatiously unmoved by the
warriors celebrating his arrival by clacking their bows and arrows and clubs
together, randomly lunging at him before pulling back, singing his praises,
extolling his ostensible fierceness. But, despite this initial display,
Rowahirawa is clearly not shying away from the trouble he left behind in
Karohi-teri.
So this character I’ve
been dealing with is a rare son of a bitch by Karohi-teri standards too—good to
know. Lac recovers his equipoise and pricks his ears for danger. It seems no
further fighting will ensue. The Karohi-teri are so cowed they’re leaving even
him alone, though he sees their eyes flashing looks at him, the Drowned Man,
the infamous nabä. You’re supposed to enter an allied shabono with fanfare, it
turns out, as Rowahirawa did. The other men from Bisaasi-teri are outside
washing the mud from their legs and painting their bodies with the red nara
paint they use back home to make their bodies appealing to the hekura.
Rowahirawa explained that
the Bisaasi-teri men will enter the village two at a time, dancing around the
rim of the plaza in full regalia. Lac in turn said he really wasn’t up for any
of that, so Rowahirawa let him tag along as he ducked into the shabono of his
home village to present himself and announce the presence of his temporary
covillagers outside. His first act of diplomacy was to dump this man from his
hammock. Perhaps because the man suspects the delegation outside is actually a
raiding party, neither he nor any of the men of his patrilineage responds to
the offense with anything more provocative than a few lame insults and limp
protests.
After recovering from his
bout of laughter, Lac is immediately irritated with Rowahirawa for adding to
the already excruciating tension. The Karohi-teri don’t know what to do about
the presence of this frightened—hysterically laughing—nabä in their village.
Since he’s a stranger who snuck in without invitation, they should probably
kill him, but he’s accompanying one of their own on his embassy. Anyway,
they’ve heard all about him; they know he behaves strangely, not following their
customs, scarcely aware of how contrary his actions are to any viable
prescription for proper behavior.
Lac was following close
behind Rowahirawa until he walked into the man’s yahi and assaulted him. Having
backed away, first as he was laughing, then from apprehension, Lac now finds
himself standing alone in the midday sun, exposed, at the edge of the plaza.
The villagers must be eager to examine me, he thinks. I’m only being left alone
for the moment because etiquette prevents them from approaching me—or because
they’re still afraid this could turn out to be a raid. Though if it were a
raid, Rowahirawa marching right in to announce the presence of the others would
be strange—at least according to what Lac has been told about how raids are
usually conducted. Of course, they may be reasoning that Rowahirawa himself
might not know what the other men from Bisaasi-teri are planning.
Lac keeps his hands
straight down by his sides, moving as little and as slowly as possible, unsure
where or how to stand, what expression to arrange his mouth and eyebrows into
signaling. He tells himself it hardly matters; they don’t seem to notice stuff
like that anyway. Rowahirawa, meanwhile, only stands over the cuckold long
enough to get the better of him in an exchange of insults before continuing on
to another yahi, presumably the headman’s. Lac follows.
The men greet each other
as kin and Rowahirawa tells him about the Bisaasi-teri waiting outside. The
headman orders some young men—sons, nephews—to prepare food for their guests,
and they promptly, excitedly, run off to the gardens outside the shabono. The
arrival of guests from a neighboring village is a big event for any Yąnomamö, a
chance to meet new people and reconnect with long-lost family members. Now,
Rowahirawa is telling the Karohi-teri headman about Lac, the Bisaasi-teri’s
visiting nabä, the “ankrauhpowahist” who wants to learn how to be a true human,
a Yąnomamö, descendant of Bloodmoon.
When Lac turns, he sees
that nearly every pair of eyes in the village, from the young boys to the
longsuffering mothers, to the wizened old men, are on him. Ah, he thinks, but
how can I learn how to be a true human from these people if they’re so damned
interested in learning about me and whether I’m made of enough human stuff
myself to qualify for lessons? Rowahirawa is explaining to the headman that the
nabä doesn’t even mind if you speak his name aloud. He comes over to nudge Lac,
saying, “Shock-a-lee,” exaggerating the difficulty of the pronunciation to
highlight its exoticness, its ridiculousness.
Lac smiles
generically—any nuance to his expressions would be lost on them anyway, as
those to theirs are to him—and corrects his guide: “Shackley.”
The headman responds with
a look that’s both intense and bemused. He considers the sounds he’s heard,
considers Lac’s person in full, and then says, “Shaki?” Rowahirawa erupts in
laughter, startling Lac. The headman smiles as well, at the joke he’s
apparently just made. Lac has to wait for Rowahirawa, doubled over now himself as
he was moments before, to recover his composure before he can ask for an
explanation.
“Shaki,” he repeats,
holding up his hand as if pinching a bug between his forefinger and thumb,
producing a buzzing sound by humming through his clenched teeth with parted
lips. Another word for bareto? Mosquito? No—suddenly Lac understands, and the
meaning weaves itself in and under and out between their two languages and
cultures with such wanton disregard for the boundary separating them that it
ties his mind in a messy knot. Shaki: a bee. A pesky bee. A busy bee. That’s
me, he thinks, laughing along at last, me walking around with my notebook,
ceaselessly barraging people with questions, a consummate worker, a pest. At
once, he feels both embarrassed and proud at this solemnly facetious
christening. He knows somehow his new nickname will stick.
Children are rushing up
and hiding in the shadows of their neighbors’ yahis to get a peek at him from a
safe distance. His presence alongside the official emissary constitutes a
breach of protocol—but then, so does screwing another man’s wife and then
dragging him out of his hammock as a reminder. Lac was determined to see
everything he could of the meeting from beginning to end; he’d wanted to see
how Rowahirawa would announce the presence of the villagers he’s been living
with as he completes his bride service. Lac looks around, wondering whether
there might be a shortage of women at Karohi-teri, but it’s impossible to tell
from what’s visible to him now. The women would be gathering firewood or
tending to their hearths, corralling their children. Or they may be hiding,
suspicious of the Bisaasi-teri men’s intentions, and those of their pet nabä.
When the boys the headman
sent off to the garden return, they’re carrying enormous clusters of plantains.
Courtesy demands the host feed his guests, apparently even before they enter
the shabono. Lac watches as the headman uses strips of bark to seal a carrying
package for the food, a large bundle comprised of the plantains, red palm
fruits, big chunks of charred meat, and what looks like flat pieces of cassava
bread, all wrapped in an impromptu spherical basket for Rowahirawa to hoist up
on his back, brace by a strap across his forehead, and take to his friends
outside.
Rowahirawa and the
headman keep up a constant banter, but they mutter, as if in a hurry to share
secrets at volume. A handful of other men pass through the yahi and engage in
similar exchanges; Lac begins to suspect something underhanded may be in the
works, but then he remembers the Yąnomamö’s penchant for rumormongering and their
uncanny ability to know things long before they logically should. Is that what
this is? Are they gossiping? Or is Rowahirawa divulging intelligence about how
best to curry favor with the larger group? The small snippets he manages to
pick up seem to be about developments in the lives of kin, but they could be
talking about anything.
At last, the welcome
basket is ready and Lac follows behind Rowahirawa as he heaves it up, arranges
the strap, and lugs it outside, carrying a couple heavy clusters of plantains
himself. Outside, the Bisaasi-teri men are busy decorating their bodies. In
addition to the red paint in circle patterns or squiggly lines, they’re
attaching long feathers to their armbands—from turkeys or parrots or whatever
other birds whose plumage they admire. Most of them have on their monkey tail
headbands. The final touch involves spreading tiny white feathers all over
their hair—a symbol of their peaceful intentions. Pressing the plantains
proffered by the Karohi-teri headman into their cheeks, the men help each other
reach difficult stretches of their backs and ensure the paint and feathers are
evenly distributed.
Lac takes a moment to
look each man up and down. He can’t help comparing them in his mind to
rambunctious young boys who’ve stolen their mom’s lipstick to draw on each
other before burying a pair of scissors into a pillow. He grins. If they notice
at all, the Yąnomamö see his mirth as further redounding to their pride in the
impressive beauty of their regalia.
When at last they’re ready
to enter, a signal is given and the air immediately thickens with anticipation.
A near silence ensues and Lac, wondering why the event has suddenly become so
tense, has an ominous feeling that violence may be imminent, despite the
friendly initial greetings and gifts of food, despite the pillow feathers.
Next, he has the disturbing idea that something he’s done or failed to do has
offended the Karohi-teri—or maybe somehow by merely being present he’s raised
the risk of tipping the already tense moment over, causing it to spill over
into deadly conflict. There’s no denying he’s an object of fear and
fascination; he saw it in their faces, saw it at a glance.
As efficiently as their
rumor mills turn, the people here must have already heard all about him. That
would mean they already associate him, as the Bisaasi-teri do, with the madohe
he’s known to possess and to hand out in exchange for certain odd services of
value to him. They may have heard as well that you can sometimes acquire these
goods through simple bullying. Lac looks over at Rowahirawa, who’s responding
to the tension by donning a devilish grin—devilish and what else? Not
disdainful exactly, but light-heartedly supercilious. Playfully contemptuous.
He’s amused by all this fuss, all these supposedly fierce warriors engaging in
their silly rituals; he plays along himself but doesn’t take any of it
seriously. And maybe he shouldn’t. He’s just walked into his home village,
insulted and assaulted a man, a man who apparently already had plenty of reason
to despise him, and walked back out with nary a consequence. Not the slightest
rebuke from the headman. Maybe Karohi-teri’s waiteri—the fierce ones—aren’t that
fierce. But Bahikoawa must have thought them competent enough warriors to
recruit them into military service alongside his own village’s waiteri, so
their collective potential for killing must be significant.
Maybe Rowahirawa has been
bullying that man for years and the Karohi-teri have come to accept it. There
were in fact shouts of disapproval and calls to desist before the squabble escalated.
Maybe Rowahirawa enjoys the Yąnomamö version of diplomatic immunity, since he’s
serving as something of an ambassador between villages. Maybe they all just
know Rowahirawa is an asshole and they don’t bother trying to do anything about
it.
Remember you don’t know,
he tells himself; all you can do is keep the questions in mind and pay
attention.
When the men are prepared,
a loud whistle is sounded to make way for their procession into the plaza. “You
wait outside and slink in after the waiteri are lined up,” Rowahirawa says,
“like the women.” The sly grin makes Lac wonder if these are his honest
instructions or if they’re part of some larger joke. Do the Yąnomamö use
sarcasm? They definitely know how to say one thing to imply the opposite. With
proper emphasis, for instance, ma, the word for no, actually means something
like, “Hell yes!”
The uproar attending the
entry of the first dignitaries dashes Lac’s original impression of the
Karohi-teri as a more timid group. Voices take up the swooping howl he remembers
so well, dipping and swelling alongside the furious clacking of bows and clubs
and arrows. Lac begins to understand the tension rising in anticipation of the Bisaasi-teri’s
entrance. Two men at a time—beginning with the most important and renowned—march
dramatically, flamboyantly, around the edge of the shabono’s plaza, fully armed
and highly decorated, incorporating props like large palm leaves or sections of
thatching into their chargings forward and back. It’s a war dance. The
Karohi-teri meanwhile stand in front of their yahis shouting and howling,
brandishing and banging together their weapons, declaring these men are beautiful
and impressively vigorous, real killers.
Lac leans his head in
under the post running across the top of the gate and tries to witness as much
of this ceremony of arrival as he can. Every pair of dancers reenacts the
standard entrance and each circles in opposite directions; they dance for a few
minutes and then depart once more from the shabono. One after another they half
march, half gambol in, full of swagger and unfazed by the powder keg volatility
of the horde, relishing it even, exhilarated by it, delighted to be at its center,
to be its masters—however illusory and short-lived that mastery may be.
Once they’ve all taken a
turn, they re-enter the shabono en masse and line up in the center of the plaza,
each man gazing blankly into the distance above the thatched lean-to wall,
effecting a heroic stillness in the face of the chaotic flattery engulfing him.
There they stand as the local men dance around them in a mad frenzy of clacking
wood. This is when Lac decides it’s safe to sneak in.
After some minutes, each
man is singled out and led away to the yahi of one of the prominent local
families. Lac shuffles unceremoniously around the edge of the plaza, hoping to
avoid the spotlight of attention and thus the commotion he senses is in store
for him. But, in trying to be inconspicuous, he couldn’t be more glaringly on
display. Next time I visit another village, he thinks, I’m decking out and
marching in with the rest of them. Two men take hold of his arms and drag him
to the center of the courtyard, despite his feeble efforts to resist, and begin
taking up the anticipated examination, pinching and pulling at his chest
hair—“Like a monkey’s,” they proclaim—flashing disgusted or startled
expressions, testing the hardness of the muscles on his arms, delighting in the
pinkness of his pinched and squeezed and abraded flesh. I’m my own one-creature
iterant petting zoo, he thinks, for groups of high-strung pre-adolescent boys
with seven-foot bows and six-foot arrows.
To avoid being swallowed up
by his claustrophobic panic, Lac casts his mind into the abstract realm of
anthropological hypotheticals. If we were to welcome a Yąnomamö explorer into
our midst in Ann Arbor or Port Austin, how would we receive him? How would his
treatment differ from mine as I’m introduced to these villagers? We wouldn’t
crowd around him so tightly, threaten to suffocate him, poke and prod and grab
and pinch him, at least not with such abandon. We’d be curious, wildly so, but
there’d be some check to our enthusiasm, some compunction preventing us from
conducting so physical an examination—a being with his own mind, his own
boundaries. A being with dignity.
Hands slip in and out of
his pockets. He twists and blocks reaching hands from accessing his genitals.
We do sometimes put exotic foreigners on display and gawp at them. If they’re
Amerindians, they’ll be decked out in elaborate feather headdresses—a more
advanced version of the pillow-down hair coverings on these men here? If
they’re doing their war dances or rain dances to the beat of their
ground-shaking drums, then young boys will admire them, want to live like them,
imagining them freely roaming the vast grasslands aback their piebald horses,
on the trail of buffalo herds vast enough to black out the plains all the way
to the horizon. They’ll wonder if they could survive like that themselves, away
from cities, away from the profusion of small-minded rubes populating their
home towns, away from the demands of school and the soul-smothering weight of
the adult lives in store for them—wonder too if living like that they might be
happier, their spirits bound by fewer shackles, freer to soar.
Lac gasps for air and
squirms to find his footing as he’s caught up in the surge of bodies. He
clutches his notebook until his finger joints feel apt to burst, grateful he
decided not to bring his voice recorder or either of his cameras, grateful most
of all he decided to hide his shotgun in the jungle outside the village… mostly
grateful. The Plains Indians you see back home in those demonstrations, those
reenactments, those performances—those Indians are conquered people,
desperately clinging to whatever semblance of dignity they retain as they dance
for their conquerors and their conquerors’ children, children who don’t know
how to feel about their vaguely traitorous wish that the outcome of the campaign
of conquest had been otherwise, that at the very least the Indians had been
left the space to carry on their ways as a sovereign people.
The scenarios are too
different for any more fruitful comparison. In earlier centuries, European whites
would capture natives and bring them home to display like zoo animals in cages.
At least they’re not building a barred pen for me here, he thinks, though
having some bars to separate us might not be so bad. At least they’re not
setting a giant cauldron to boil, with me in it, like the cannibals in
cartoons.
“Did you see Omawä when
he brought you back to life?” one of them shouts.
How do you tell them
there was no flood? That you never drowned? How do you tell them about the
world outside the jungle, the civilization that within a few generations will
have swallowed all the Yąnomamö culture whole? Is there a way to say it that
will make them stop handling him so roughly, pulling the hairs from his chest?
Is there a way to say it that will make them back off enough for him to catch
his breath?
By the time Lac himself
is brought to a hammock and forced to lie down, where he knows he’s supposed to
don an impassive expression like the men from Bisaasi-teri, a sort of recumbent
version of the visitor’s pose, with the men of Karohi-teri meanwhile running in
a group from yahi to yahi as if to raid them individually, killing the visitors
from their allied village, but not really killing anyone, only pretending,
threatening—by this time Lac has sunk into a profound resignation. Some outer
boundary separating him from the world, from other men, has been shattered and
lies in pieces all over the courtyard. It happened when he stopped squirming,
stopped trying to push away every reaching hand, stopped rambling nonstop, and
all but went quietly limp.
The stench of body odor
is seared into his nostrils; he’s smeared all over with red paint and black
paint. The red is for the hekura, the black for battle. But this is supposed to
be a visit to bolster an alliance. The Karohi-teri host a feast and regale
their guests with poetry and song; the next day they show their generosity and
loyalty through excessive giving or imbalanced trading—giving till it hurts and
then some—secure in the knowledge that soon the visitors will throw their own
feast where they’ll return favor for favor, gift for gift, thus cementing the
alliance. So why all the black charcoal body paint and feinting lunges? The
final step in the establishment of friendly relations is for the waiteri from
each village to join forces and conduct a raid together, in this case probably
against Patanowä-teri. And the Monou-teri will probably be coming along too, if
they’re not leading the charge.
And me, Lac thinks: Where
will I be when this raid occurs? What will I be doing? Staying at home with the
women?
Links to chapters (Table of Contents)
Find my author page.
Posts on Anthropology: