Amerindians

AMERINDIANS

For contemporary Caribbean people, the Amerindians are both a legacy and a living presence. It is as the former that they have chiefly entered the Caribbean literary imagination. As a living presence, Amerindians have a significant presence in Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, with smaller groups in St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago. The largest population is in Guyana where Amerindians are the fastest growing minority, still the poorest and most marginal group, but recovering from years of population decline to one of an increase of at least 25% to around 40,000 over the past thirty years as belated improvements to their material standards have brought better health and reduced infant mortality. The contemporary Amerindian population in Guyana is divided into three peoples: Arawakans, Caribans and Warraus, survivors of a series of population movements in the whole Guiana region beginning about 12,000 years ago. The complete, whole world of Guyana's Amerindians, vividly and sympathetically described in Im Thurn’s Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), of course no longer exists (its archaeological record is recorded in Denis William's important book, Prehistoric Guyana (2002)), and for many contemporary Amerindians improvements in material standards and life chances are rated much more important than the survival of Amerindian languages and culture. However, there is now a generation of educated Amerindians who are actively engaged in speaking up for their own people’s future, committed to getting all other Guyanese to confront the realities of discrimination and racial stereotyping (as ‘Bucks’) and ensuring that their presence in Guyana is no longer marginal. Judaman Seecoomar’s book, Contributions Towards the Resolution of Conflict in Guyana contains several extensive interviews with members of Guyana’s Amerindian communities that throw light on Amerindian perceptions of relations with Guyana’s other ethnic groups, and both ethnic tensions within the Amerindian community and communal processes for resolving conflict. For a summary of contemporary Amerindian organisations see Maximilian C. Forte's edited collection Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean (2006).  

For the Europeans who came to the Caribbean and the Americas, the record is one of genocidal shame and at best the kind of curiosity recorded in studies such as Peter Hulme's Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (1992) and Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and their Visitors (2000).

As legacy, for the Caribbean region as a whole, there have been different levels of response between the Spanish-speaking islands of the Greater Antilles and the Anglophone Caribbean to the Amerindian past. Both in fact (a Taino biological inheritance can be claimed by many mestizo people of Cuba and Puerto Rico) and in reconstruction (in historiography and in public presentations) the former have placed much greater emphasis on understanding the continuities as well as the disappearances of the Amerindian past. What the historical reconstructions of scholars such as Irving Rouse reveal (The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People who greeted Columbus (1993), is a past that challenges the themes of most post-Columbian Anglophone Caribbean historiography. What Rouse shows is the stable existence from around 900 AD (until the post-Columbian genocide) of a sophisticated agrarian civilisation of around one million people, in villages of up to 2000 people, with chiefdoms, a class system (but no slavery), developed pre-industrial technologies (pottery, weaving, carving, boat-making) and an extensive system of trade. This was a civilisation that arose in the Caribbean, developing from one of several much earlier migrations from the mainland of South America. One wonders, idly, how the Tainos (for whom, as in the developed civilizations of the mainland, ball games played a central role in their cultural and civic life) would have taken to cricket? 

There have been as yet few interpreters of the Amerindian presence from within. There is the artist George Simon and poet David Campbell (‘Through Arawak Eyes’ in Independence 10, NHAC, 1976), but as yet most writing about the Amerindian presence comes from outside. There are historical reconstructions such as De Lisser’s The Arawak Girl (1958) and Mittelholzer’s Children of Kaywana (1952) and  in Beryl Gilroy’s Inkle and Yarico (Peepal Tree, 1996) which brings to its portrayal of eighteenth-century island Carib life (St Vincent) considerable imaginative depth. Gilroy’s fictive portrayal of Carib life is imaginative rather than ethnographical, but convincing in its grasp of a world with its own logic, its wholeness and a total ‘literacy’ with the ways of nature. Above all, the villainous Englishman Thomas Inkle (who sells his Amerindian partner, Yarico, into slavery), is left with his memories of the Carib’s stories: ‘like fresh dreams, newly washed, newly woven and true to the daily lives of the community’. Perhaps, most outstandingly, in Kevin Baldeosingh's speculative/historical novel  The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (2005) the first incarnation is as one of the Tainos who encounters Columbus and is taken back to Spain. Here is historical writing which is both enriched by contemporary historical research, vivid in its sense of character and of the world-shattering enormity of the confrontation. Its place as the first incarnation in a novel that extends into the present is a powerful statement of the genocidal  foundations of the contemporary Caribbean. Another more recent novel that draws resonances between the Amerindian past and the present is Jennifer Rahim's Goodbye Bay (2023) where the naming of place (Macaima) and the bay connects the willed suicide of Warao women by drowning rather than suffer rape by soldiers in Spanish Trinidad to the similar death of a woman called Marie who drowns herself after being raped by one of the village's contemporary rulers, from the plantation-owning De Valremy family. The Warao heritage continues in the present of the novel (set in 1963) in the two characters who are least trapped by history, particularly Macaima's midwife and healer, Mama Gloria.

There are a number of non-fictional biographies of lives in the interior, Vincent Roth’s A Life in Guyana, vols 1 & 2 (Peepal Tree, 2003) and Matthew Young’s Guyana the Lost El Dorado: My fifty years in the Guyanese Wilds (Peepal Tree, 1998) which give interesting insights into Amerindian lives in Guyana during the first half of the 20th century, not as ethnographic subjects but as workers and agriculturalists in the hinterland. In A Life in Guyana, Volume 1: A Young Man's Journey, 1889-1923, Vincent Roth, as the son of the celebrated ethnographer, Walter Roth, could not be other than an interested observer of Amerindian life in Guyana between 1907-1923. As a surveyor he depended heavily on Amerindian knowledge and skills in mapping the interior and he gives a picture of Amerindian life being drawn through missionary contact inexorably towards cultural loss and involvement (at the peripheries) in the mainstream. In A Life in Guyana, Volume 2: The Later Years 1924-1935, in writing of his work as a magistrate in charge of the vast NorthWest district, Vincent Roth had an intimate view of the stresses on Amerindian life in the pre-war period and sometimes of the conflict between Amerindian lifeways and colonial law. In particular, he writes angrily of the colonial neglect that left many Amerindian communities on the verge of starvation as they were drawn away from old ecologies of hunting and farming into intermittent employment in colonial economy. Matthew Young also gives incidental glimpses into changing Amerindian lifestyles between the 1920s to 1970s, revealing, in passing, how much he and Guyana owed to the knowledge and skills of Amerindian peoples in the task of mapping and road-building in the interior. 

There is, of course, the work of Wilson Harris, in particular Palace of the Peacock, The Sleepers of Roraima (1970) and The Age of the Rainmakers (1971), which offers a deep and idiosyncratic focus on the Amerindian presence and some of his most beautiful and poetic writing. From an Amerindian perspective, however, the themes of Harris’s writing might well provoke some ambivalence of response. No one has plumbed the meaning of Amerindian myth so seriously (other more conventional retellings are to be found in the work of Jan Carew in ‘The Coming of Amalivaca’, and for younger children in the stories of Janet Jagan), but one senses that what is attractive about the Amerindians for Harris is that they can be seen as the least assertive of all Guyana’s ethnic fragments. There is the old Arawak woman in Palace of the Peacock, with ‘the air of wisdom that a millennium was past, a long timeless journey was finished without appearing to have begun, and no show of malice, enmity and overt desire to overcome oppression and evil mattered any longer’ (p. 71). Similarly, in ‘Yorokon’ in The Sleepers of Roraima, the disintegration of Amerindian cultures is portrayed as the necessary threshold to the ‘Catholic native’. And later, as the Caribs contemplate their likely extinction: ‘They ceased, too, to care about dwindling numbers since numberlessness was native to heaven, stars beyond reckoning’ (p75). As Harris indicates, his purpose is not to ‘ring those vestiges round but to release them as part and parcel of the mind of history – the fertilisation of compassion’. (Rainmakers, p. 79).

Several writers who have absorbed the example of Harris’s liberation from Caribbean conventional realism have also written about the Amerindian presence. There is the work of Pauline Melville in several of the stories in The Migration of Ghosts (1998) and in the novel, The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997). In Michael Gilkes's play Couvade (1974), a contemporary drama of an artist, Lionel's obsession with his work on an Amerindian-themed painting, to the detriment of the needs of his pregnant wife, Gilkes draws on the Amerindian ritual of couvade (where the father of the coming child takes to his bed at the moment of the mother's delivery and symbolically suffers the pangs of childbirth) to explore how the present must come to terms with the past. In Andrew Jefferson-Miles, The Timehrian (Peepal Tree, 2002), Amerindian mythology is used in an even more Harrisian way (though less religious/idealist in direction) to counter tendencies towards closed, functional systems of thought. At the heart of Jefferson-Miles’s magical-realist narrative are the Amerindian figures of the ‘timehr’ and the god, Amalivicar. The former is the painted child of Amerindian legend, whose role is as the conscience that drives the narrator to consider the importance of recovering the ways of those, like the Amerindians, whose ‘ways of living are dark-sided in the shadow/composite of history’s giants’. Amalivicar, in legend the flute-playing son of the wind, god of searching and restitution, is the ancestor/god who rescues the narrator from the silent, memoryless madness that afflicts him after the novel’s catastrophe.

There is also Anthony Kellman’s The Coral Rooms (Peepal Tree, 1994), which confronts the Amerindian legacy in both an imaginative and very honest way. When Percival Veer, in a hallucinatory state following a long dive through a flooded underground cave, reaches an inner cavern, he has an epiphanic vision of a group of people in an Amerindian village. Then he notices one of the women wears a cross and thinks, ‘Even here in this Eden, cultural confusion, assimilations of greed, pollution of the dialect’ (p. 83). Then he looks again and can only see a crude tableau as in a museum. There is no recovering the pastoral purity of his first vision. Later, in an echo of the Taino act of ritual purification, Percival begins to vomit violently: his ‘sacrificial body’ becoming ‘a duct releasing the waste his soul’s island had accumulated…’ (p. 89) The connection between purity and corruption is also made in Churaumanie Bissundyal’s sympathetic treatment of the contemporary Amerindian presence in Guyana in Whom the Kiskadees Call (Peepal Tree, 1994). When Bissundyal's searching character Challu accompanies Amerindian Sugar Plum to her home in the NorthWest district, he thinks it looks ‘as if earth and heaven meet here’. But the vivid descriptions of the Amerindian settlements on the Barima river, reveal a tainted paradise and a life where if peace captivates the visitor, the emptiness of poverty has driven Sugar Plum into prostitution in Georgetown. Bissundyal worked as a schoolteacher in the NorthWest, and his descriptions of people and place have both poetry and the feel of authenticity.

One of the most imaginative (and integrative) treatments of the Amerindian presence is to be found in Andrew O. Lindsay's counter-factual novel about Robert Burns in the Caribbean, Illustrious Exile: Journal of My Sojourn in the West Indies  (2006) in which Burns is not saved by the successful publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and has to take up the post of book-keeper on a Jamaican sugar plantation. In the second part of the novel, in flight from the horrors of slavery, Burns takes refuge with Amerindians in the interior, learns their language and writes many of his famous lyrics in Wai-Wai (which are an appendix to the novel).