I. An Orchid that Smelled of Chocolate

The sky is bright and high, the perfect definition of a nice day. We drove almost an hour out of the buzz and fuss of Havana to visit the artist. Lush fields of vegetation decorated the road trip. The world calmed down to two colours, hues of blue and green, smiling and dancing under the sun. Cuba is truly the great fertile land.

I was touring in her garden. The feasting and business have now concluded. She spoke Spanish. I grasped only a little but replied fondly, mumbling, in some words of English or French I thought she would understand. The artist’s wife was showing me around her little paradise. The trees and different plots around the house encapsulated an entire flora. We walked into a more secluded part in the shade. It is the orchidarium. I understood the word chocolate. Bending closer, a pink and purple orchid did smell wonderfully like chocolate.

Then, she smiled, touched her cheekbones and said “Taíno”. Indeed, two things coming from this side of the planet. From that moment, I remembered the world Taíno and would always associate it with the smell of chocolate.

Asking around, I was told that apparently the Taínos were a people of the past, they have ceded into hearsay and legend. Likely she was only hypothesizing. High cheekbones, a tawny complexion. No one really knows.

I did not want to forget, and kept the word with me, hoping to come back to it one day.

II. Another Shore

“They will give all that they do possess for anything that is given to them, exchanging things even for bits of broken crockery,” he noted upon meeting them in the Bahamas in 1492. “They were very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces…. They do not carry arms or know them…. They should be good servants.”(註1)

III. The Sound of the Taíno

What is the sound of the Taíno? The language, the people? Or something else?

Speech to the Taínos (Huatey, 1511)

Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea … They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valour, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break.

Huatey, the legendary Taíno chef who headed a native guerrilla resistance against Spanish colonists, led a siege against the Spanish fort at Baracoa, Cuba, pinning the Spanish in the fort for months. Huatuey was eventually captured and burned alive at the stake and is considered the first hero in the struggle for Cuban independence. He was holding out a basket of gold and jewels as he gave this speech.(註2)

IV. The Ethnolinguistic Distance

The starting point is our literature. […] Our literature is our mother; we are attached to it as to a centre, an origin, a basic form of sustenance, a reassurance. Within it, all seems familiar, familial; outside it, everything begins to seem strange.

The circle beyond this isn’t far removed from our own; a merely regional distance is involved. […]

The true Other begins a little further away, at the point where the very ‘soul’ of the literary population (authors and characters) seems put together in unfamiliar proportions and with unusual emphases. […]

The third distance might be said to be metaphysical in kind – it is the distance imposed on us by literatures such as the Chinese or the Japanese. […]

However, one last distance is possible (that is our fourth circle) – the distance that separates us from the literatures we might call ethnographic….(註3)

V. Proof of Sound

Tobacco タバコ たばこ

The image that comes to mind might be that of ashy and rotting lungs found on cigarette packages, a guilty pleasure. Oh the woes of modern life and vices! Not entirely, but the ceremony is certainly lost. Tobacco is the Taíno word for pipe smoking a sacred herb, something the Spanish learnt from a terra nullius.

What is the Taíno word you use most often? Barbecue, the wholesome American backyard family meal? Canoe? Guava?

—

A memory, a historical encounter, sonic dissent, Roland Barthes and a Taíno word that has taken over the whole world, these are the five blocks collected on a chain to inspire a thought.

—

The Taínos were the first ones to meet the fateful Spanish fleet on the shores of the “New World”, or Guanahaní. They were handsome and kind. They were met by guns, germs and steel. They were obliterated. So it seems, they had vanished. The vanishing Indian. It’s a very typical encounter story with white European newcomers, from beginning to the end.

The schools tell us that the Taíno are gone.(註4) The school textbooks for children sometimes seem too simple. However, they are the silent and seldom questioned building blocks of a budding vision of the world that often requires a long and laborious return to reconciliation.

But are the Taínos gone? Option A – the annihilation of the noble savages makes the terra nullius claim sound. It is only appropriate the settlers take on the burden of civilizing the New World upon themselves. Option B – the Dark Forest theory. The Taínos had to run and hide for their lives. Do the natives also move? This challenges our idea of a people, unchanging, stuck in the past.

What makes a Taíno. If we believe in blood quantums and genetic analysis, then traces of Taínos remain.(註5) We can come down to studies such as those of mitochondrial DNA that we inherit from our maternal ancestors or the Y chromosome that men inherit from their fathers. Life finds a way, even though the path is lined with gender bias, violence, gaps and mysteries.

If the world is not only black and white. Then, between red, black, yellow and white, are there other colours? Creolized(註6) free communities call themselves maroons, a colour and a possibility in between black and red. I would rather be a disciple of Édouard Glissant, a great spirit of the neighbouring Antilles, who proposed a more open idea of creolization(註7), a structure of rhizomes, who can spread roots but are also making connections.  

We differentiate between dead languages and modern languages. They are often dissected and burdened with the idea of extinction, bound by scientific methods, such as those of genetic analysis related to the idea of race and descent, notions to sterilize, to create distance and to exclude.

How do we make a language live and celebrate it rather than mourn it? I admire Huatey’s use of language for dissent. Between death and modernity, words find a way to linger and can be adopted. The story does not only have to be told from the perspective of dead white men.
How do we pass on the Taíno proof of sound? By letting go of structures, to creolize and to pronounce. By questioning the words we use. By passing on stories unburdened by footnotes. By listening hungrily. 

The knowledge of the Taíno lives on, not only in creolization and their words, but also in their land, flora and fauna.

To finish, I have a story for the next time you eat a guava.

In the New World, indigenous peoples commonly believed that the souls of the dead took the form of animals and moved freely among the living in the night. The bat and the owl were very important symbols in Taíno mythology and death. To the Taíno, the bat represented the opías [the spirits of the dead]. Fruit-eating bats […] loved dining on guavas, which is also the favorite food of the Taíno spirit of the dead.(註8)

Now you have a clue how to make friends from another world.

Epilogue

The School of Mutants art collective, of which I am a member, had the idea of developing new works for the 2021 Havana Biennial. We have always been very interested in exploring multi-linguistic environments. I picked up the Taíno research lead and started collecting different kinds of information. Unfortunately, the situation for the liberty of artistic expression in Cuba has been under heavy assault lately with repercussions on individual outspoken artists. I hope this short piece offers you a glimpse of Cuban culture and would like to call your attention to recognizing current Cuban creative practices and the challenges culture workers face.