The way around : finding my mother and myself among the Yanomami

236 Pages·2015·4.14 MB·English

by  David Good

Dedication
To my daughter, Naomi —
may you grow up with a foot in both worlds,
and a heart big enough to hold your entire family
Epigraph
“Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote
parts.”
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
September 9, 2011: 5:43 a.m.
ONE How I Got Here
September 9, 2011: 8:04 a.m.
TWO Reunion, Union
September 9, 2011: 8:32 a.m.
THREE Jungleland
September 9, 2011: 9:21 a.m.
FOUR Taking Time
September 9, 2011: 10:27 a.m.
FIVE Home
September 9, 2011: 11:12 a.m.
SIX My Yanomami Ways
SEVEN Returning
EIGHT The Good Project
Photos Section
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
September 9, 2011
5:43 A.M.
UPPER ORINOCO, YANOMAMI TERRITORY
We were trekking through a thick of jungle, past our old village. The
deserted shabono still stood, but it had been swallowed up by grass and
brush that had not been cleared in over a year. This was to be expected,
of course. This part of the jungle, this deep in the territory, the flora of
the rainforest can choke a clearing in no time flat.
Set your machete down for any stretch and it is like you were never
there.
As we passed, I could see the left-behind artifacts of village life:
gathered stones, clotheslines, abandoned hearths, broken cooking
implements, tattered pieces of Western-style clothing. This had once been
the center of activity, the focus of a people—my people—and now it was
like a ghost town.
Irokai. I used to live here and play here, my mother said. Well, not in
this exact spot, not in this same shabono, but in this general area. I used
to lie in my mother’s hammock and laugh and laugh.(Okay, maybe it
wasn’t the very same hammock she uses now, but another one just like
it.) I closed my eyes and imagined what our family’s area would have
looked like many years ago, but I could not picture it. I had seen
photographs—but, still, I could not picture it. I looked around and
around but could find no touchstones, no markers to take me back
twenty-plus years—something, anything to let me know I had walked this
ground before.
Irokai-teri. The people of Irokai. The people of my birth. The
Yanomami of my home village, scattered now throughout this jungle,
many of them clustered in and around the village they had once called
home. The village of my mother, my cousins, my tribe. . .
They are a seminomadic people, the Yanomami, and so it often
happens that when a village moves they must make return trips to pick
clean the gardens they have left behind while the new gardens take root.
We had set out from the riverside village earlier this morning, at first
light, to see what we could see. I could not think how to tell my mother I
wanted to visit our old village. I could only say, “Irokai-tekeprahawe.”
(“Irokai, far away.”)I could only make a going motion with my hands.
Somehow, my mother understood.
I was allowed to believe the trip was my idea, but it was time for a
group to head out to the garden anyway. Irokai-teke. The garden of
Irokai, where there was work to be done. They were going with me or
without me. We would be gone for several days. There was a group of us,
fifteen or so, and we would splinter into smaller groups as we made our
way—usually with the men out in front.
It was a long haul, but I could not put a clock on it. This part of the
world, there was Yanomami time and there was outsider time. For an
outsider, even for some of the missionaries familiar with the region, it
could take an entire day to cover this ground. But for this group—oh,
man, they plowed through the rainforest like nothing at all, cutting a new
path where the old one was meant to be. Like they were walking on a city
sidewalk. Barefoot, no less. Me, I was wearing sneakers, which actually
were a kind of hindrance once they became wet and soaked through with
mud, but the soles of my feet had not been toughened to withstand the
uncertainties of the rainforest floor.
As I walked at the butt end of our group, trailing my mother and a
small cluster of women who seemed to take pity on me and slow their
pace so I wouldn’t fall too far behind, I wondered if my bare feet would
ever be tough enough for the rainforest floor—probably not, I feared.
And it was not just the hard earth that caused my feet such trouble. No,
there were roots and fallen branches, rocks and creepy-crawly things—
all the jungle-variety nuisances you’d expect. But there were also thorns,
muddy slopes, protruding sticks that could pierce the soles of your feet,
bloodsucking parasitic fleas, snakes, and spiders and about a hundred
different dangers, a hundred different ways I could trip, cut, or otherwise
hurt myself as I scrambled to keep up. I needed a second set of eyes just
to look down and watch where I stepped, while the first set of eyes could
look up and ahead.
The garden just beyond the communal living area still yielded its
share of crops, so the Irokai-teri visited the abandoned area from time to
time. This explained why there was at least the semblance of a trail. We
had been this way before—we, as in my people; we, as if I belonged. It
also explained how the trip came about in the first place. See, it made no
sense to go on a sightseeing mission, just so I could visit the place I had
once lived, but it made all kinds of sense to organize this trek in search of
food. Plantains, mostly, but there were also various fruits. We would
bring back what we could carry to the people of our village. The women
had brought along several empty baskets for just this purpose—the
jungle equivalent of bringing your own eco-friendly bags to the grocery
store, I guess.
I thought it was remarkable that the garden continued to thrive, after
being neglected for so long. It spoke to me of the strength and resilience
of my people left alone in this same jungle, untended. In this one small
way, the area still lived and breathed and continued to provide.
In our core traveling group there was me, my mother, my two
“wives,” and another woman from the village who’d brought her infant
child along for the adventure. Even the woman with the child was making
better time than me. The men were way, way ahead, but they carried a
much lighter load—just their bows and arrows. The men were meant to
be quick on their feet, agile, able to quickly draw their weapons in case
an animal appeared that might make a suitable dinner, or in case the
group was attacked by enemy raiders. The women were burdened with
baskets and clothes and firewood . . . and, me.
It was hot—not crazy hot, the way it can get in the middle of the day,
but hot enough. I was bone tired. I was twenty-four years old, in
reasonably good shape, but my mother and these other women were
running me into the ground. I was dragging, flagging, spent. At one
point, one of my wives saw that I was having some difficulty and stopped
to wait for me. She motioned to my pack, as if she meant to carry it. I
responded with bluster. I said, “Yanomami keya!” (“I am
Yanomami!”)As if I had something to prove—to myself, to the people of
my village . . . to my mother.
“Yanomami keya!”
The others, they could see that I was struggling, so it was decided
that our core group would stop for a rest beside a narrow creek, and as
we set down our few things my mother reminded me in broken English
and the generic, universal hand gestures that had quickly become our
primary means of communication that this wasn’t the first time I stood on
this very spot. She pointed to me. She pointed to the creek. Then she
smiled and pointed back to me, and back to the creek, and I understood
that I used to splash in these waters as the village elders fished, as the
women washed our clothes and cleaned our pots. I had seen pictures of
this very spot, I now realized. Home movies, too—shot by my father when
I was only a year or so old. But my memories were once-removed. I
could not recall ever being in just this place, in just this way.
Here again, I could not close my eyes and picture the scene from so
long ago. I could only picture the pictures I had already seen. There was
nothing in my view to take me back to how I was as a child, to where I
was as a child, other than my mother’s constant gesturing, and the
corresponding images I could recall from the thousands of photographs
my American anthropologist father had taken during his time stationed
here.
Still, it was a good place to be, just then, and as I set down my pack
and rested along the muddy creek bed I was overwhelmed by a sense of
satisfaction. That is all it was, contentment, but in that moment it was
everything. To know that as a small boy I had breathed this air and
splashed in these waters . . . to know that I had traveled from half a
world away and then some . . . to know that I had arrived in the place
where I began, reunited with my Yanomami mother and reentangled with
the many branches of her family (my family!) after more than twenty
years . . . It was enough to just lie out by the water and listen to the
thrum of jungle activity.
I thought back to what I knew of my father’s first visit to this part of
the world, as a graduate student. He had come to this jungle in 1975 on a
$250,000 grant from Pennsylvania State University to monitor the
protein intake of the Hasupuwe-teri. He traveled with steamer trunks,
medicines, food, trade goods—and enough gear to stock an Eastern
Mountain Sports outlet. I was here with a backpack and a couple
thousand dollars scraped together from my hourly-wage jobs. I had a
machete, a hammock, maybe a tube of Neosporin., My father was
concerned about my safety, of course; but he also told me I was nuts, to
head this deep into the jungle with such limited resources; he told me I
had no idea.
He was right, of course, but I couldn’t afford to listen to him—
meaning, I didn’t have that kind of money to mount an expedition of such
size and scope. Meaning, I couldn’t go against my own instincts. My gut
told me I was meant to make this trip—my heart, too. I had everything I
needed, I stubbornly thought, and so I set out for the jungle. Yeah, I was
afraid, but I accepted that I would be afraid. I was cool with it. Yeah, I
was in over my head, but I’d decided early on that whatever obstacle,
whatever uncertainty would come my way, I would compartmentalize my
fear and find a way to power past it. I would keep laser-focused on my
mission to find my mother and rediscover my indigenous roots. And here
I was, in the thick of the rainforest, doing just that.
I closed my eyes for a moment, and in that moment I think I fell
asleep. I cannot be certain, but I believe I drifted off for a beat or two,
listening to the music of my two wives, chattering in a tongue I could
barely understand. The admonishing tones of the young Yanomami
mother speaking to her restless child. The familiar sound of my own
mother, calling to me from the other side of the creek in the sweet,
singsong voice I thought I might never hear again.
It felt to me like home.