Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  After all of these fiestas and rejoicing, D. Bartolomé Colón spoke to the king Behechio and this lady, his sister Anacaona, about how his brother the Almirante [Admiral] had been sent by the king and queen of Castile, who were very great kings and lords and had many kingdoms and people under their dominion, and that Colón had returned to Castile to see them and tell them of the many lords and people of this island who were already giving tribute, and of the tribute that they paid, and it was for this reason that the Adelantado had come to him and his kingdom, so that they might see him and be received as lords and in sign of their subservience they might give some tribute.6

  What the Spanish needed most was food; and the cacique and his sister agreed to supply them with cassava bread, dried fish and cotton in return for being, broadly speaking, left alone. It is the politics of the protection racket. Early the following year, 1497, the Spanish returned to collect their tribute. Again, they were fêted. Now Colón sent for a caravel to be sailed along the north coast to the nearest harbour, some six miles away from the village. Anacaona suggested to her brother that they go to meet the ship, staying overnight along the way in one of her own settlements, a sort of hamlet-cum-treasury where she stored many prestige goods. Among these were highly prized carved wooden objects such as zoomorphically shaped ritual chairs, called duhos, made by the women of the island from the dense, hard wood lignum vitae…

  The Lady presented Don Bartolomé with many of these seats, the most beautiful, which were all black and polished as if they were of azavaja [jet]; and offered all the other things which were for table service (and naguas of cotton, which were like little skirts carried by the women from the waist to midleg, woven of the same cotton, white and marvellous) and it pleased them for him to take whatever he would. They gave him four balls of spun cotton so large that it pained a man to lift them.7

  Anacaona, then, was conducting her own, independent diplomacy with Colón, a reflection of her political and social status, and one suspects that she might have been seeking a more intimate alliance with the new power in the land. When they arrived at the coast…

  The king and the queen, his sister, each had canoes, very large and well painted and prepared, but the lady, being so regal, did not want to go in the canoe, but only with Don Bartolomé in the boat.8

  In return, and as a gesture of superiority, the caravel fired off a number of its cannon, spreading general panic among the Taíni until Colón’s laughter convinced them that it was merely a performance to amuse them: an early display of gunboat diplomacy.

  Six years later, in 1502, a new governor visited. Behechio had by now died and Anacaona now ruled solely as queen of Xaraguá. The new Adelantado, Nicolás de Ovando, charged with controlling the unauthorised settlement of Spanish renegades in Xaraguán territory, arrived without any knowledge of the previously cordial relations between Colón and the Xaraguán caciques. The version of events told by Bartolomé de las Casas, in his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, is brief and shocking. Anacaona prepared for the new governor’s visit as she had before, and welcomed his party of soldiers with her customary hospitality. However:

  …to this kingdom there came one day the governor who ruled this island, with sixty horse and three hundred foot or more, though those on horse be enough to lay waste to the entire island and Terra Firma. And above three hundred lords and nobles went out to him when he called them, promising them no harm, and he commanded that most of those lords be put by deceit and guile into a very large house of straw, and when they were closed up within, he ordered that the house be set a-fire and those lords and nobles be burned alive. And then they rushed upon all the others and put an infinite number of people to the sword, and the lady Anacaona, to show her the honour due her, they hanged her.9

  Like Njinga and Malintzin, Anacaona’s bit-part role in the narrative of European conquest is all too short. Only Njinga has left her own words to indicate something of her relations with the invaders. Even so, we can say that in the Americas and in Africa women’s exercise of power and the political and social skills that went with it were part of the indigenous cultural repertoire. Parallel narratives recorded in their arts and crafts show that women made and displayed nuanced, complex and confident expressions of solidarity, ideology and their own capabilities. Evidence is also emerging that in some societies women possessed the means to mediate their status even more directly.

  Matriarchs of Chaco Canyon

  I had just finished my archaeology degree at York University when I went to live in Arizona for six months. In March 1985 my friend Laurie Reiser drove me from Tucson up into the high country of northern New Mexico. Winter snows had only just begun to melt and, by chance, we were the first people to make it into Chaco Canyon that year: we had it to ourselves. The most sophisticated architecture of pre-Columbian North America is to be found here among the bone-dry mesas and buttes of the Colorado Plateau, and Pueblo Bonito, the unique half-moon-shaped terraced ‘great house’ at Chaco Canyon’s heart, is one of the outstanding monuments of any age, reminiscent of the Colosseum in Rome. Its 650 rooms fan out and up from a plaza, whose sunken, circular ceremonial rooms or kivas, now roofless, look like giant fishing ponds. Except that there is no water here; and nor has there been for hundreds of years, since the effects of a wave of droughts that began in the twelfth century were exacerbated by poor water management and, eventually, by the cutting down of the last trees. The sophisticated agriculture and trade on which Chaco culture thrived became unsustainable. By the time of the first Spanish incursions into the region, Pueblo Bonito, and Chaco, had been abandoned. Today it is a landscape of wonder and mystery, of humbling wind-riven terracotta beauty, empty of people but for the faint echoes of their voices.

  For the Navajo nation, who arrived in the Four Corners region in the 1500s, these people were the Anasazi, the ‘enemy ancestors’. Elsewhere across the Southwest the remains of enormously impressive cliff-dwelling settlements, reminiscent of the Dogon villages of the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali, testify to widespread and successful settlement, heavily influenced by brilliant Mesoamerican ceramics and weaving and their crucial vegetable ‘guild’ of beans, maize and squash. In the excavated settlements, very low humidity has preserved an astounding array of organic artefacts, from elaborate baskets to feathers, textiles, string and wood.

  Chaco culture was confident and highly specialised. The crafting and precision of the dry sandstone walling of the pueblos is a marvel in itself, in places still standing to several storeys. Mastery of geometric forms, astronomical and solar alignments, unique T-shaped doorways and thermally efficient roofs with terraces accessed by ladders indicate a high degree of organisation and planning, and of cosmological awareness. Anthropologists have always been interested in trying to understand Puebloan society, even though no written narratives survive to tell of their lives. Highly decorated hand-coiled pottery, textiles, a wealth of domestic paraphernalia and the evidence of burials recovered by archaeologists, the apparent social exclusivity of some of the structures and the survival of a handful of Pueblo settlements into the modern era has encouraged more than a hundred years of ethnographic study, scholarly debate and even more wishful speculation.

  The pueblos, or villages, of Taos, Hopi and Zuni, which sit either side of the Arizona/New Mexico border, retain many of their customs and traditions. Alongside the daily tasks, including grinding corn and cooking, their women seem also to have traditionally specialised in the production of decorated ceramics for food and water storage. Dazzling bi-chrome painted patterns have evolved and been handed down through the female line for many generations and anthropologists have tried to use clusters of discarded sherds on excavated Pueblo sites to try to reconstruct elements of the social dynamics of those societies – with limited success, it must be said. In particular, the matrilocal residence patterns of contemporary pueblos, in which married couples go to live in the wife’s parents’ home and where land is owned and bequeathed through the femal
e line, creating tight-knit female household groupings, has prompted archaeologists to look for evidence of such patterns in the excavated settlements of the Anasazi.

  A paper published in the journal Nature Communications in February 2017 has revived this old debate. Like the skeletal material from grave Bj581 in Birka,# bones have been reanalysed from excavations conducted around the turn of the twentieth century – long before an appreciation of indigenous sensitivities prevented such intrusive investigations. In particular, scientists wanted to test the remains found in a very special room, no more than 2 by 2 metres (6½ ft square) in square plan and one of the first constructed at the settlement, as far back as the ninth century CE. Room 33, as it is known, functioned as a crypt – a highly unusual feature of Chaco settlement – accessed by a small hatch high in one wall. The founding burial, that of a male in his forties, killed by a single blow to the head, lay on a bed of wood ash and sand on which lay scattered several thousand turquoise beads from many necklaces and bracelets. He was accompanied by abalone shells brought from the distant Pacific coast and a conch shell trumpet, and covered in a thick layer of sand that was sterile except for a pair of ceramic vessels. Above him a second burial was placed, also with several thousand turquoise beads, before a plank floor was laid over the whole. Twelve further individuals were interred above the wooden floor during a period, now confirmed by radiocarbon dating, of over three hundred years. They were entombed with an immensely rich inventory of materials: more beads, a cache of flutes, ceramic bowls and pitchers and carved ceremonial wooden staffs. In adjacent rooms lay the remains of more staffs, pottery, jewellery and precious scarlet macaws from South America, highly prized for their marvellous bright feathers.

  DNA, the genetic blueprint, was successfully extracted from nine of the individuals: six males and three females. To the surprise of the scientists, they showed identical mitochondrial DNA. The inescapable conclusion is that each was related to a single original female, either as mother to daughter, grandmother to grandson, or similar, which could be reconstructed as a hypothetical family tree spanning five generations. This was a single matriline, a dynasty expressed exclusively through female inheritance and representing a continuous social elite of the pueblo, perhaps of the whole Chaco region. Not surprisingly, the results have been widely reported in popular magazines and in newspapers in the United States.

  What are the implications of such social structures for women’s lives? First, it meant that, unlike the communities of Early Medieval Europe, it was men who had to adapt their behaviours to those of their wife’s family. Instead of a Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir having to please her exacting and sceptical mother-in-law, a new husband would have to live up to the behavioural expectations of his wife’s parents. He must learn to get along with his wife’s sisters, brothers and uncles; he must adapt to their routines and family mores. For women, family solidarity was a powerful means of expressing identity and control over the running of the home. If the husband laboured in the fields and gardens, he did so on his wife’s plot. Family narratives were passed through the female line, too. Men wishing to maintain social bonds with their own brothers and sisters and their childhood friends must find spaces and activities where they might enjoy their own confraternal company – and there are suggestions that those kivas with fire pits and weaving looms might have been used by men as sorts of clubhouses: ‘men sheds’, to use the modern idiom. Anthropologists have identified evidence of matrilocal residence elsewhere – in the Nair community of Kerala in southern India, in parts of southwestern China and in the hunter-gatherer !Kung people of southern Africa.∫

  It remains to be seen whether scholarly scrutiny will cast doubt on the new findings. But to members of existing indigenous groups in the region, where matrilocality is still practised, the results will come as no surprise.

  Anne Bradstreet: High and Mighty

  As a writing mentor for the Royal Literary Fund, I was once inundated with student essays on a long verse of praise by the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), of whom I knew nothing. The verse in question is called In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth, of about 125 lines, written in iambic pentameter: each line comprising five pairs of ‘de-dum’ syllabic pairs:

  Now say, have women worth, or have they none?

  Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone?10

  That a female poet of the period should write in praise of Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) is hardly surprising. As the two lines above suggest, the poem bears a strong message of feminine solidarity, which continues with this rather neat pay-off:

  Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long,

  But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.

  Let such as say our sex is void of reason

  Know ’tis a slander now, but once was treason.

  Bradstreet’s theme here is that Elizabeth’s feminine virtues of goodness, clemency, wisdom, justice and learning were proof against those learned men who denied women’s fitness to rule; and Anne enjoys, in passing, sly digs at both the Catholic Spanish monarchy, for whom Elizabeth was a heretic, and that of France, whose Salic Law proscribed the accession of a female ruler:

  Who was so good, so just, so learn’d, so wise,

  From all the Kings on earth she won the prize.

  Nor say I more than truly is her due.

  Millions will testify that this is true.

  She hath wip’d off th’ aspersion of her Sex,

  That women wisdom lack to play the Rex.

  Spain’s Monarch sa’s not so, nor yet his Host:

  She taught them better manners to their cost.

  The Salic Law had not in force now been,

  If France had ever hop’d for such a Queen.

  But can you Doctors now this point dispute,

  She’s argument enough to make you mute…

  As for those martial virtues traditionally associated with princes, Elizabeth possessed them in abundance: she put down rebels in Ireland, came to the aid of the king of France and, in facing up to Philip II of Spain’s planned invasion of 1588, taught him manners…

  She rack’t, she sack’d, she sunk his Armadoe.

  With Elizabeth’s passing in 1603, the ‘Rose, once so lovely fair’ may now have withered but the queen’s example as a ‘Virago’, an ‘Amazon’, a ‘glorious sun’, was without parallel among rulers. The poem is hagiography, a portrait of a secular sainthood much cultivated by Elizabeth herself. There are puzzles, however. On the face of it, Anne might have made more of the ironies inherent in Elizabeth’s unique position as a female ruler: that she, a virgin queen, was both mother to her nation and, in her own words, married to her people. The virgin mother being something of a literary and spiritual trope, the poet’s apparent failure to, as it were, sink the putt, needs some explaining. But it turns out that the Virgin Mary is not the only elephant in this room. In learning more about Anne Bradstreet’s life and career, one is drawn to a surprising conclusion: that her poem in praise of Elizabeth I actually carries a more intriguing and subversive coded message whose target is, in fact, male.

  Anne Dudley was born in 1612 in Northamptonshire. Her father, Thomas Dudley, who had fought at the siege of Amiens in 1597 under Queen Elizabeth’s banner, was a steward in the service of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln and married to a Dorothy Yorke. Anne was betrothed at the age of sixteen to one of her father’s younger associates, Simon Bradstreet. In the same year, 1628, she survived a smallpox outbreak. At the same time her father and new husband became involved with the Massachusetts Bay Company, whose formation was propelled in part by the lure of wealth and in part by antipathy towards the Catholic sympathies of the new king, Charles I (reigned 1625–49). In 1630 they sailed for New England on board Arbella, the flagship of John Winthrop’s fleet. A year later they established a capital for the colony at what is now Cambridge, just 5 kilometres (3 miles) or so up the Charles River from the Shawmut Peninsula on which Boston
had recently been founded.

  Anne’s social and cultural milieu was politicised and intellectual. Both she and her husband were closely involved with the founding of Harvard University in 1636. Two of the Bradstreets’ sons – she bore eight children, all but one of whom survived infancy – were graduates. She must have known Anne Hutchinson, the charismatic Massachusetts midwife and Puritan firebrand for whom England became too dangerous and who was to be excommunicated and banished from the colony in 1638.

  Anne Bradstreet accumulated a substantial library and seems to have written poetry as a natural expression of her social, domestic, religious and philosophical life, immersed in the governance of the colony and in the politics and theology of non-conformism. Her poems express love for her children and husband; extol the seasons and contemplate the ages of man. She wrote, too, of the heartbreak of losing the family home to fire in, of all years, 1666. Her audience was primarily familial, but there is a strong sense that the artist wanted to communicate more publicly: she turned her creative thoughts to monarchy and the relations between Old and New England, in a poem in which the colony – Old England’s daughter – laments their estrangement while the mother country shares its own pains, of civil war…

  Art ignorant indeed of these my woes,

  Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose,

  And must my self dissect my tatter’d state,

  Which Amazed Christendom stands wondering at?

  And thou a child, a Limb, and dost not feel

  My weak’ned fainting body now to reel?

  This physic-purging-potion I have taken

  Will bring Consumption or an Ague quaking…11