Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  A German research team had been down here the year before, Philippe told me. The team’s members had isolated a single tree and fumigated it. When the insects dropped off, hundreds of them, the Germans found that 80 percent couldn’t be identified — and that was just from a single tree!

  Shakai stopped suddenly in front of a strange tree. He glanced at Philippe, then started to explain something. Philippe translated. “He wants you to know this tree is called the walking palm. It’s the only tree that walks.”

  I wrinkled my brow. “Walks?”

  “Yes, if you look at the roots …” Philippe began. Shakai was gesturing at the base of the tree. It was held up on a thicket of branches, a cage of root fibres. “Everything in the forest competes for sunlight,” Philippe explained. “The roots don’t have to go far to find water. It’s everywhere. But the canopy can become so thick that all life here must find ways to get to the sunlight. In this case, if a larger tree grows over the walking palm, the roots on one side will die off and it will grow new roots on the other side. Since you can see that the tree is held up by the roots, it literally walks back over into a patch of sunlight. The tree can move about sixty centimetres in a year, about five centimetres a month.”

  Shakai said something again. Philippe leaned toward him. “He wants you to know that the jungle is always changing. It’s evolving all the time.” Shakai reached for a leaf from the next tree over. To me it looked like all the others. Philippe translated. “This kind of leaf is toxic. In fact, almost everything is poisonous here in the forest. In this case, the ants — see here, there are little holes where they’ve eaten a part of the leaf in the middle — know this leaf is toxic in certain doses and they know exactly how much they can eat before it kills them.

  Shakai spoke again. The language sounded clipped and staccato, vaguely like Japanese. “He’s saying now that a few months ago they started to notice that the leaves of this plant were growing in a different way. The leaves started to grow with the little holes already in the middle of them. The leaves were mimicking the holes made by the ants, and now the ants will come to one of these new leaves and think that leaf has already been eaten. So the ants move on to the next plant. Do you see?”

  He held up the leaf. A scattering of tiny round holes were clearly visible. “The eco-system is incredibly dynamic here. It’s like a race between the predators and the prey, one always trying to stay a step ahead of the other. The Achuar understand this. They’re a part of the place.”

  Throughout the day Shakai showed us the medicines, or tsuak, that are harvested from the forest. One leaf, dried and crumpled up, smelled exactly like garlic. The Achuar use it to boost their immune systems. In another case, a parasite that causes a form of flesh-eating disease is treated with the roots of a particular cactus plant. At another little clearing Shakai dug his machete into the white bark of a large tree, and it bled. A bead of thick red liquid dribbled from the wound, exactly like blood.

  Shakai dipped his finger into the fluid and invited me to do the same. I tasted it. It was vaguely sweet. “In Achuar,” Philippe explained, “this is called arushnumi numi. Numi is the word for ‘tree.’ In Spanish we call this sangria de dragon — “dragon’s blood.” Now there’s a medical company interested in this ‘blood.’ It’s a natural antibiotic. The Achuar use it to clean wounds. It’s good for mosquito bites, too. It makes the swelling go down.” Philippe paused. “In my trips into the jungle I’ve counted more than fifty-two different plants that the Achuar use as medicines.”

  “What about malaria?” I asked.

  Even Shakai turned at the sound of that word. “Chukuch,” he muttered.

  “That’s the word for malaria,” Philippe told me. “For this they take wayusa. They make it into a tea, and every morning they drink it. That’s also when they tell their dreams and myth stories.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you were going to tell me the story about the bird that was in love with the moon.”

  “Ah …” Philippe began, but just then Shakai turned quickly and grunted something at him. “Rain is coming,” Philippe translated.

  We both looked up, and it was true: something was different in the air. Shakai began to pick up his pace, and we hadn’t gone more than a few paces before we heard a distant clap of thunder.

  “When we get back to the huts, remind me to tell you about the wayusa, but now I’m sorry … we have to move quickly.” He darted after Shakai, and I sighed and clumped after them.

  Before we reached the dugout the sky opened up. Rain splashed down unmercifully. Even the birds grew silent. Huge cracks of thunder rolled across the sky. They rumbled on and on before finally tapering into the soft slap of the rain on the river.

  The first extended contact with the Achuar came in 1976 when a young Frenchman named Philippe Descola came to study them. Descola was a student of the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who taught him to look for the underlying meaning of things, to search for the fundamental structures on which Achuar society was built.

  Descola stayed for two years, and from his field notes he cobbled together a remarkable book called The Spears of Twilight. I had an English translation of it, though it was already musty with jungle air. I read it with my flashlight when I couldn’t get to sleep.

  The Achuar, Descola contended, don’t have the same sense of space we have. They have no place names to speak of except the names for their rivers — the Kapawi and the Pastaza. They wouldn’t be able to tell you where they were born, not because of forgetfulness or ignorance but because the place had ceased to exist. There are no large rocks in the jungle here. Everything is organic material, so there are no landmarks of permanence. Even the lifespan of a broad, tall tree isn’t long in comparison with trees in temperate forests. Things grow incredibly fast so that any given patch of jungle will look completely different, in fact, will be completely different, in only a few months. Remember, this is the place where some trees can literally walk.

  The jungle is ever-changing. Even the various twists and bends in the river transform as large trees fall into the river, pulling away the earth underneath them, eroding the bank, and altering the course of the river. A typical Achuar settlement has garden patches of manioc, yams, and sweet potatoes, but these last only five years or so. House beams resist the elements for perhaps ten years, and when their homes eventually collapse, the Achuar simply move on and leave the remains to the encroaching jungle. Nothing in the environment can be counted on as an unmoving point of reference. Everything constantly grows and changes.

  The Achuar don’t even have directional terms for north, south, east, and west. Instead, their only words of direction are the relative terms for upriver and downriver.

  By the time I arrived, all that was beginning to change. Forty years ago there were no metal tools here. Now everyone seems to own a machete. Shakai was especially adept with his, swiping away overhanging roots and vines, or with a simple tap of its sharp tip, cutting off a piece of fishing line.

  I asked Shakai about his machete through Philippe, and for a moment the Achuar seemed perplexed. He didn’t know where the machetes had come from. In his youth they had used stone axes. These new tools were much better. The Achuar dubbed them “polished stone axes,” or simply adopted the Spanish word machete.

  Certainly, a long metal blade is a handy piece of technology in the forest — so much so that it’s now almost indispensable to the Achuar. What’s more, this piece of technology — and to us an extremely primitive one — has radically changed the Achuar way of life and their whole sense of space. It’s now possible for them to move through the forest quite easily. The singular importance of travelling solely by water no longer holds the precedence it did only a couple of decades ago. The Achuar can clear out landing strips for airplanes, and invariably villages of a type that never existed before spring up along these same airstrips. Permanent villages. I’d already seen the one where we’d landed. There was a clapboard school there, even a soccer pitch.
All of this was completely new.

  It’s almost scary to think how much a new implement like a machete can change a way of life. And think of the barrage of technology facing the Achuar in the very near future. All of them are now aware of the airplanes coming in from some unknown outer world, great metal birds that carried both the strange and powerful white people, as well as their goods — cooking pots, machetes, and weapons far superior to anything the Achuar had ever previously used.

  So, though languages and cultures are both socially and environmentally constructed, one might also say there’s an element of something we might call technological construction. There’s a lot of overlap between these different sources of cultural construction, of course. That a hut is built along parallel lines with the river is environmental. The family groupings that occupy them are societal constructions. But the tin roof I saw near the airstrip is a technological innovation. And clearly this sort of thing, this introduction of metals, is going to have a profound and irreversible effect on the Achuar way of life.

  No one really knows where the Achuar people originally came from. The Amazon River Basin is perhaps the least-studied linguistic area on Earth. As many as three hundred languages are spoken here, belonging to some twenty different language families. In addition there are a dozen or so isolate tongues.

  Some things seem quite simple in Achuar. This language, for example, classifies all animals into two general groups: yojasmau yatia, which means “animals that smell good,” and yojasmau yuchatai, which means “animals that smell bad.” Essentially, it’s their coding for animals that can be eaten and animals that can’t. Monkeys, for example, are widely consumed, taken from high branches with lethal blow darts. Strangely enough, though, the word hunting doesn’t really exist. A vast range of euphemisms and circumlocutions are used instead, the point being that any word directly referring to the chasing down and killing of an animal might anger the spirits of the forest. So, for instance, an Achuar hunter might come to a place underneath a tree and say, “The parrots have pissed here.” This is a code, almost slang, and anyone familiar with this particular group of Achuar would know instantly that it means there’s a monkey in the branches above them. They don’t want to alert the monkey’s spirit, the animal’s wakan, to the dangers of human beings. Something about an animal’s wakan still understands human speech, so it’s best not to say anything out loud. It’s prudent not to refer to them directly.

  All living things in the forest are invested with wakan. A loose translation might be “soul,” but such words are loaded with cultural baggage and translation of this term into English is particularly difficult. For one thing, when an Achuar dies, his or her wakan will be lodged in a particular spot in the body. It seems to move around, this wakan, and according to Achuar belief, if the wakan at death resides in a human’s liver, then it will next become an owl. If it’s stuck in the human’s heart, it will become a grosbeak, a small yellow bird. And if the wakan is in the flesh or even in the shadow of the dead person, it will then become a small red deer. Sometimes a person’s wakan can even end up in the ears or eyes, and when that happens, it reincarnates into one of the huge neon-blue butterflies I’d seen. The Achuar are vaguely afraid of those butterflies. They know these huge insects carry the souls of the dead so that when I pointed one out to Shakai, asking what it was, he shied away from the question and said it wasn’t important.

  That afternoon we went still farther upriver to visit another Achuar community, specifically the house of a man named Naanch. Achuar names are really quite beautiful. They’re meaningless on the written page, so I urge you to try them out loud. They need to be heard to be fully appreciated. Men’s names crackle with consonants, names like Kawarunch, Washikta, Tsukanka, Wajari, Jimpikit, and Yurank. Women’s names, as in many cultures, seem softer and lighter: Atinia, Entza, Chawir, and Senur.

  The jungle around the Kapawi is constantly alive with sounds, and the Achuar language mirrors it. Achuar dialogues are peppered with onomatopoeia, words that sound like the thing they’re describing. Pak is the sound of something cracking, like a twig when it’s stepped on, and puj is the noise of falling water. Of course, the written letters here are based on Spanish pronunciations so that the final j in puj is an aspirated h (just as in the Spanish name Juan). The sound then of puj is more like poohhhhh, letting the h rasp a bit at the back of the throat so that it does sound vaguely like flowing water. With the same aspirated h, the Achuar say juum, juum, juum to mimic the growl of a jaguar. They’re a very aural people and live in a world without books, without written texts, so their words and phrases are often borrowed from the noises around them.

  Achuar is also a highly ritualized tongue, and we were about to see one of those rituals. A visit to another man’s house is an elaborate affair, studded with regulations and protocols. Philippe told me, as we were getting out of the dugout, that there were very strict rules for our visit to the hut of Naanch. There was to be no photography, for one thing. Once, said Philippe, a tourist took a photo of a pet monkey, and a few days later the monkey died. Some Achuar believed the camera was to blame for the animal’s death.

  “Also,” Philippe continued, “when we go into the hut, you must follow Shakai carefully and do everything he does. At the doorway you must say ‘Winiajai.’ ”

  I’d already learned this word. “Isn’t that the greeting — like hello?”

  “Well, yes, sort of, but it’s really used only when a visitor has come, and only the visitor will say it. It means, literally, ‘I come.’ And then Naanch will answer you with ‘Winitia.’ That means ‘Come’ — like ‘Come in.’ This is part of the ritual.”

  Inside the thatch hut the mood was vaguely tense, slightly uncomfortable. In the middle of the dirt floor perched on a small carved stool like a throne sat Naanch. As we paraded in, each of us stopped at the door and pronounced the ritual greeting.

  Shakai had gone in first. This wasn’t Shakai’s village, but he was apparently known and accepted here. A long, low bench was wrapped around the outside of the hut, at least on the side where the door was. Shakai sat and then I did likewise beside him. Philippe parked himself on the other side.

  We were sitting in the front part of the house, known as the tankamash, the men’s area. All Achuar huts are divided carefully along an imaginary line down the middle, a demarcation that usually runs parallel to the direction of the nearest river. Behind the imaginary line lies the women’s area, the ekent. This division of the hut is still apparent in all Achuar homes. It’s the kind of social construction that anthropologists delight in, though, truthfully, they aren’t strictly women’s and men’s areas.

  The idea of the tankamash, the so-called men’s area, is that it’s the part of the house where visitors are received. The ekent, meanwhile, is the sleeping and cooking area. Naanch, the husband, plainly lived in the women’s area, though no other adult males, besides himself, were allowed in that area.

  Naanch was on a stool directly on the line between the women’s and men’s areas, and behind him in the ekent, his pregnant wife scurried about getting the nijiamanch ready. Nijiamanch is a sort of beer made from manioc roots. It’s fermented by human saliva, and as Naanch’s wife crossed into the men’s area to hand out our wooden bowls of the stuff, I got my first close-up of it. Long, cloudy threads swam in the soupy mixture. I couldn’t bear to look at it, much less raise it to my lips. Philippe took a few tentative sips and tried not to grimace too noticeably. Shakai gulped it down with relish, and the pregnant woman hurried over to him with a second bowl. She also had a baby hanging from her hip, and two other children, both girls, played behind Naanch in the ekent. The oldest daughter, a girl of about five, was fiddling with a sharp machete. It was as long as her arm, but no one snatched it from her. Neither of the parents even looked at her. It was perfectly natural for a child to twirl this dangerous slice of metal. Its cutting edge glinted in the shadows, and I had to fight the impulse to get up and take it away from her.


  When we were all served our bowls of manioc beer, the ritual dialogue began. This ritual dialogue is called aujmatin, and it goes on for quite some time. Shakai spoke without gazing at Naanch. Naanch, in turn, answered, keeping his eyes firmly off to the side.

  The aujmatin carries little real meaning in itself. It’s a repetition of stock phrases designed to point out some aspects of the Achuar value system: things like the importance of a visit, rules of hospitality, the duty of relatives to help one another, and most important, the obligation of men to display bravery.

  Translated, the start of the aujmatin sounds something like this.

  “Brother of my brother-in-law, I have come.”

  “Haa. You have come to visit. It is right. I have been waiting.”

  “Aih.”

  “To do what I should be doing, I am here, waiting.”

  “Brother of my brother-in-law, you are here for me.”

  “Haa. Without knowing the news you bring, I am here. I am at home.”

  “Aih.”

  “I am waiting here for you to tell me the news that you bring. That’s why you have come.”

  “Aih.”

  And the ritual continues like that for quite a while.

  As Shakai spoke, Naanch punctuated the speech with frequent grunts of “Aih” and “Haa,” which basically meant “It is true.” When Naanch talked, Shakai performed similar sets of punctuation. Neither one really got to any sort of point, but that was the point. The language was highly ritualized, a sort of disarming of any possible tensions before the real purpose of the visit commenced.

  I peered into the wooden bowl on my lap. Naanch’s wife kept her eyes on our bowls, waiting to refill them should they become empty. A chicken lurched into the house through a hole in the fencing that served for walls. Naanch’s wife shooed it out and ordered the second child to take the baby from her.