Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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"She said, 'This is your wife and this is your wife. You're going to have children with them.'"

 

 

David listened politely, thinking that perhaps "wife" was being used as a loose kinship term. The Yanomami classify relatives in a different way from Americans. For example, a maternal aunt is also addressed as "mother" and a paternal uncle as "father" (hence the mix-up over David's own uncle).

 

"I just sort of thought, you know, I have a brother there, a sister there, an uncle there - oh - and a wife here," he says. "But then, as I spent more time in the village it became evident to me that they were absolutely serious in becoming my wives."

 

Yarima began to push David to consummate marriages to the girls, who David thinks were in their late teens. On one occasion, while David was bathing in the river, the women ganged up on him, saying "Come on, we have to do this!"

 

David instructed his translator to tell them he had a wife waiting for him back home - not true, but it made no difference to them anyway. He receded into the water, resisting their pleas.

 

The purpose of his visit to the jungle wasn't just to get closer to his mother, but to understand better what his father had gone through in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Like his father before him, David found he was a constant source of amusement.

 

"The Yanomami have a particular sense of humour," says Caballero. "They always make jokes of everything and they love to tease, especially nabuhs."

 

The Yanomami have little concept of the very different lives of outsiders. Many put nabuhs' lack of practical and language skills down to the only thing it could be - stupidity.

 

"I would say Yanomami keye - I am Yanomami," says David. "And then I would fall down riverbanks, I'd trip over vines, I'd hit the wrong tree and all these biting ants would fall on my head… They just thought it was absolutely hilarious."

 

A couple of months after David first arrived at the village a big day came. He opened a small black box containing crackers and jam. These were emergency rations, in case he got sick of eating grub worms and termites - but he was in a culture where everything is shared.

 

"We had this sort of crackers and jam festival," he says. "Everyone was so happy, so content eating this food, which was for them so exotic."

 

Since his father's time, some of the Hasupuweteri have taken to wearing clothes and watches. While he was in the forest David gave away all his best clothes, thinking that a cheap pair of trousers or trainers meant nothing to him but would be treasured by the recipient of the gift.

 

When he returned to the mission downriver, his appearance had undergone a transformation.

 

"I looked so bad, so dirty, so raggedy that the missionary said: 'You're starting to look like a Yanomami,' and she gave me some clean clothes. It was kind of funny, that I was starting to become a Yanomami, needing donations."

 

On a separate visit to the mission - this time with his mother - David managed to establish a Skype connection with his father.

 

"My father said to my mum, 'You still look young and beautiful'. And she said, 'You look old!'"

 

Yarima was disturbed by Kenneth Good's baldness, since the Yanomami do not go bald. He had to run and get a baseball cap before they could continue the conversation. David watched his father making his mother laugh - the two seemed to be getting on well.

 

"They just seemed so natural together," he says. "It was clear that my mum didn't want to talk about the past. She was telling my father that I was married and I had two wives. And she told him that she was going to take me back, I was going to be down here. She told him to tell me not to run away from my wives."

 

 

David spent three months in the Amazon, but he travelled around, making four separate visits to his mother. Yarima couldn't understand why he kept coming and going. David didn't try to explain that he was in the process of establishing a non-profit organisation and was conducting research across the region.

 

He knew when he left for the final time it would be hard.

 

"When you untie the knot that hangs your hammock - in their eyes that's the ultimate symbolic gesture that you're leaving. And as soon as I untied that knot, there were tears all over. It just moved me so much."

 

 

 

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Yarima was devastated. It seems she really had believed David would settle in the village forever.

 

"I told her, 'I'll be back'. Unfortunately, it's been two years and a lot longer than I wanted it to be," he says.

 

He wants his organisation, called The Good Project, to help indigenous people find their way in the market economy, a process he sees as inevitable. He says that those who live in more Westernised villages near missions can struggle with their identity, just like he did.

 

"Today there are Yanomami who are becoming criollos - who are becoming Venezuelan. But just because they learn Spanish and are wearing clothes, they are no less Yanomami. Who am I? Am I Yanomami or am I nabuh? The Yanomami see me as a nabuh and the nabuh see me as Yanomami. I get caught in the middle. The person I am today is completely different from the person I was five years ago. I am now proud to be a Yanomami-American, I'm proud of my heritage. I love my mother and I look forward to being with her again and studying Yanomami ways. I want to create this bridge of friendship between the Yanomami and this world of the United States - and I want to bring to it the perspective of someone who is a family member. I am not an anthropologist, I'm not a politician, I'm not a missionary. I'm a brother and a son."

 

 

 

 

 

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Kenneth Good's marriage to the young Yarima divides opinion.

 

In the documentary film Secrets of the Tribe, Good's former teacher Napoleon Chagnon accused him of exploitation and even "paedophilia".

 

Other anthropologists are less categorical.

 

"By Yanomami standards it was not an unethical thing," said Terence Turner, from Cornell University in an interview for the same film.

 

"But the fact remains that Ken Good is not a Yanomami and by… the standards of his own society he was marrying a girl who was not of an age to make a decision for herself."

"Where do you draw the line - if there is one?" Good asks, in the documentary film Secrets of the Tribe. "Seeing as I have lived with them so long, that line fades away - there is no line."

 

Age is unknown amongst the Yanomami since they have no counting system (they only have words for "one", "two" and "many"). So in his memoir, Good is not specific about Yarima's age when they first had sex - he wrote that she was "about 15".

 

Yarima would have married another man if he had backed out of the betrothal. She had had her first period and so, in Yanomami culture, was of an age to settle with a husband and have a family.

 

"We're always trying to judge from our own perspective - an ethnocentric view," says David Good.

 

"You have to keep in mind our ancestors didn't have to go through the maturation of adolescence that we have to go through in the modern world. Girls became married and started having children after their first period.

 

"And I always tell people, my father married my mother, but my mother also married my father. You know, it was a mutual agreement between two people and it's not like he snatched her away. This was a marriage based on love and romance and friendship."

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In 1985 I spent three month visting Bonhooghly. I spent much of my time moving around the village, helping Nirmal in his teaching. I was frequently asked if I was married. On one occasion, a local widow invited Nirmal and I for supper, and introduced me to her three teen-age daughters. "Which one would you like to marry?" she asked. Nirmal provided no guidance whatsoever. A marriage to a Westerner - virtually any Westerner - was considered a great catch. The bride would live abroad, and with luck the rest of the family would be allowed to follow. Marriages in India are rarely "love matches". They are business transactions - arrangements between families. Bride and groom have little say. (Had I not had the opportunity many years later to intervene and help Lucina on her extraordinary journey, she would never have completed her education and instead would have been married off some years ago to a boy from a family in Singapore.)

 

I was 33 in 1985, perhaps twice their age, but it was difficult to judge. Village girls mature physically at a slower rate than in the West. Nor was this the only occasion on which I had to politely decline such an offer.

 

I had formed a close friendship with a man named Ashraf and his family for instance. At the time his wife was dying of cancer, and I guess my visits helped. I taught English to his daughter Mridula, who I had known since my first visit in February 1982. She would have been about 17 in 1985.

 

On a later visit in 1987, Ashraf impulsively said, "You marry her! take her back to England with you!"

 

 

 

 

Even now, in my early 60s, enthusiastic discussions regularly take place regarding my marital status.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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But what I have never been able to get past is the abiding certainty that the language and cultural barriers, the isolation, the distance from home and family, would bring suffering to a lonely young bride.

 

 

 

 

 

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In the village, the way of life is such that one is constantly surrounded by love and family. It is not idyllic - malicious gossip is also constant.

 

 

 

 

 

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But then, people are people, wherever you go, and certain aspects of human behavior are indelibly the same, as far as I have seen.

 

 

 

 

 

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So I chose a different path to the one taken by Kenneth Good.

 

Mridula married a local man, Ashraf, and moved into the compound owned by him and his two brothers.

 

 

 

 

 

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And years later, because of this, I met his niece Lucina, and her story changed for the better as I've earlier described.

 

 

 

 

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And when I visit the three households in that compound, I am surrounded by family.

 

 

Next: Lost Cities

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Bitter fruit

 

We are here on earth to do good for others.

What the others are here for, I don't know.

W. H. Auden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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According to a report commissioned by the U.N. on the “Situation of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” indigenous people have a lifespan up to 20 years shorter, on average, than non-native people in their countries.

 

 

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Poverty, malnutrition and infectious diseases conspire to shorten their lives, the report says.

 

 

 

 

 

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While indigenous peoples make up around 370 million of the world’s population – roughly five percent – they constitute about one-third of its 900 million extremely poor rural people.

 

 

 

 

 

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Brazilian indigenous people have the same health, education and human rights problems, and are as socially and economically marginalised, as native peoples elsewhere in the world.

 

 

 

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Most of the native population lives in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, where their ancestors were saved from genocide at the hands of colonisers, unlike the indigenous people of Brazil’s southeastern coast.

 

 

 

 

 

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As noted earlier, there are still isolated Amazon tribes that have never had contact with the outside world.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Guaraní Kaiwoá people, especially, are in permanent conflict with large landholders over land ownership; their leaders and young people have been murdered, the suicide rate is up among teenagers, and they are plagued by alcoholism and hunger.

 

 

 

 

 

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Crammed together on insufficient land to support their way of life, outside cities that have grown prosperous on monoculture crops like soy and sugar cane, indigenous groups are demanding demarcation and enlargement of their territories, to cope with their growing population. But the prospects are not promising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Landowners with legal title to their properties are putting up fierce resistance, and have taken legal action to suspend the handover of some indigenous lands already earmarked and approved by the national government.