guyana
Land of Many Waters
200 BCE
The drift that brought my body to these mud flats of the Essequibo delta continues its embalming language. It tells me I am stranded, unconscious, and surrounded by hundreds of fire crabs. They are approaching. I can feel it now, tiny scratchings through this silkening, gluey bed. I open my eyes and try to move my fins. The crabs shrink back from me, rippling red. Is it blood? Pain. Skelele. Where?
The crabs form a line to my ear. I am
pinned in the mud.
I can’t scream. No sound comes out.
“He is okay. They rescued him,” they whisper.
Seawater streams from my eyes.
Blind me
touch numbed minds and soul.
But please
fire me with strength again
to make this living whole.
I can lift my fin-hand to my face, and a kasike crab rides on it.
“Is okay, is okay. You will get there. You just have to go up the mighty Essequibo to meet your people.”
Trust. But all I feel is weakness. The Mighty Essequibo. Here on the edge of its never-ending mouth. The end of the Caribbean where my sea is brown and brown is as vast as mud-grey sky, stretching sallow all around me. My heart sinks in this flatness. No peak of land in sight, only brown-water horizon. Is it river or sea?
I see a dark flock of birds approaching, carrying something heavy between them. The iron-renk of silt and sheen of watery light is swallowing me.
Waiya waiya lambatti aye, waiya waiya
lambatti oh …
the fire crabs’ song is mournful. Wailing.
I am dying again for my people, Ni Ara
naniki, all of us.
Peel-neck vultures are lifting Skelele over the mud flats. His head hangs.
Oh waiya lambatt, yuh mooma send fuh call you waiya waiya lambatti aye …20
Keening. They lower him and he can barely stand.
But he moves!
I try. I, we, can barely stand
thigh deep, our mudholes filling with tears.
Hahom. Half time, double-breasted love. Ifé.
Waves of sea pain, sky joy, water rightness
earth tightness, weave us upright.
The vultures spiral above us and fire crabs fan out, as we touch our muddy hearts, searching for the glow of their goldness again. Wholeness.
A chattering green cloud of parakeets swoop in a fluster at us, brushing off our mud and wounds with their wings, fussing, nipping at our hidden nutmegs, until we can smell and taste them again. Until we can laugh out loud and rise! Opaque milky light licks us with its coastal tongue, diffusing our senses into calm.… Expanse. Rise. They are lifting us. Light. In this light it was as if the light of all past days and nights on earth had vanished. It was the first breaking of dawn of the light of our souls.
This land of mine, this Demerara green heart of mine, steaming forest flooring a vast tapestry. The bumps of knitted trees, dense as brain coral, sit alive and solid. Ribbons of rivers and shadows of clouds ripple through.
Kabukali, mora, crabwood
wallaba
purpleheart, greenheart
this green reef
and crown of the sea
breathes for us.
In the distance, the strength of mountains seeps. We inhale the expanse of this land, its fertility.
Mist
the thickening light seeps
into green skin and shivering thighs.
Milky mother-of-pearl sky
breathing wet promises
of more to come …
Mist us.
Make light the storms
and surges, the sudden squalls
wrap fear in cloudy tissue
tenderly.
Mist our distress
with that quiet white veil.
We breach the black-tea waters of the Essequibo River, pushing hard up through frothing rapids. A giant otter ramps on ahead and its family follows us, and … A white fury and foam churned and raced on the black tide that grew golden every now and then like the crystal memory of sugar.21
White sandbanks and red clay patches flash past and time is shifting back faster. We are stronger.
This is our river, our path.
A blurry shape is running through the bushes on the bank and before I know it, I call out in Patamona:
“There is a high mountain that is untouched …”
And Skelele replies above the crashing rapids,
“… with waterfalls running down from it.”
Our chant sends naniki shifting — an Aimara wolf fish and a shoal of black piranha morph out of the river onto the bank, into Massacooramaan. He roars, red eyes blazing, and Skelele keeps up the chant.
“It has the Kapon people, who are untouched as well.
They take care of their animals and forests.”
A huge bat lands on a boulder, shaking itself into Bush Dai Dai, snarling at us, and we dip.
Veering off into the Potaro River we are heading for foothills and the flow is stronger but so are we. Now I shout,
“At the edge of the mountain, there is a spot …”
And Skelele knows. “… where you can see everything.” 22
Rippling full speed ahead, a large anaconda erupts into Wata Mooma, with her roiling hair of snakes. She shoots out of the water, but not before us … the skeleton footfall on the river bank and in the bush, we are Patamona and Akawaio now, sprinting swiftly through the forest, effortlessly, following the river, shiningly as powerful as our creator sun and jaguar.
Our jaguar morphs into Piai Man, loping ahead, his long earlobes swinging, leading us in ascending rhythm to a chorus of the trees. A sleek tapir crashes, grunting behind us and we cannot stop, or break the drumming of our feet, or the roar in ourselves, our naniki, the voice of water, thundering loud.
We barely skid to a stop on the edge of bare rocks jutting out against the roaring water. Kaieteur Falls plunges past us, cascading into mist and, looking up, the vast brown sheets fade into white sky.
This majesty is deafening. Commanding us to shrink into the size of a leaf. Wet, trembling, and small, our hearts are faltering with the outpouring of loud tons of water. Depths ending in clouds and this belt of ripping white and caramel rolling from the sky. We stop.
Our shaking subsides.
Piai Man’s ribs are heaving. Our tapir’s lungs pumping. Hu. Breath. Skip breathing … and the fugitive fiery green of dreaming leaves turned faintly silver and grey in anticipation …23
As our breath is swallowed by the falls, the energy of a strong presence is spreading out from behind the thundering wall. Piai Man nods at it as we step back a bit.
He points with his stick and then gives it to us.
Skelele leans forward, holding the stick out. He touches the edge of the falls with it and the water parts, offering us a narrow rock path. But who dares step away from this magnetic grip? We look down again, and shrink even more into our bellies.
Piai Man nods again.
It is pitch-black once we edge completely behind the falls. Dark as my sea depths, but loud.
A voice echoes above the thunder in Patamona: “You know how long I waiting fuh y’all? Wha tek yuh so long?”
Dim brown emerges from black. The shrivelled shape of an old man with his back to us in Kaieteur, Kai’s House,24 an endless cave of dark glistening walls.
“Greetings, Old Kai!” we shout and bow our heads in respect.
“I know Piai Man bring you here, but wha’ Pia twin name?” he asks, without turning.
We answer as one: “Makonaima, ‘Great Spirit.’ He who made you immortal when your canoe went over the falls.”
“And who is they mother? I know whey yuh wan’ go … but y’all can’t just get there so, no matter how much skills yuh have!”
He knows our time is running too fast.
I answer quickly, “Their mother was Usi-Diu, ‘Seed-Tree.’ 25 But we …”
Old Kai turns and steps closer to Skelele. His face is barely visible, scarred as the rocks.
“And who was they father? Eh?”
“The Sun!” Skelele replies instantly.
“Yuh think yuh smart!” he snarls. “So then yuh know ’bout yuh girlfriend here? Them Kalina’s Amaná, so-called ‘self-conceiving Mother whose essence is time’? Or she otha name, ‘Wala Yuma,’ ‘spirit of the kinds,’ ruling water spirits. Eh? Yuh know ’bout she?”
I am behind Skelele, between him and the water curtain, but I’m shifting as Old Kai continues. A burning, unfurling, powerful snaking feeling.
“Amaná had twins too. Tamusi, born at dawn and Tamulu, born at dusk. Ask she — she the ‘Sun-Serpent’26 — how she renews she self.”
Skelele spins around just as the heat is unbearable and I feel my feathered wings and burning sun-serpent skin shedding, off, off my woman self. My eyes are as wide as his in surprise, a shock and sparks flashing through me.
“Ah ha ha hah! So, whey the mother of Pia and Makonaima live?”
Gaping, Skelele barely whispers, “Mount Roraima …” when Old Kai pitches back into the dark — expelling us with a blast of air through the thick falls.
Hurtling, plunging to the churning pool beyond our sight, we spiral.
I try. My sun-serpent wings partially unfurl, but not all of me follows.
Plunging.
Skelele’s sky self dips a little with my weight and he waves Piai’s stick, but it doesn’t help much.
Coasting over a green sea of trees
I flail
fighting for air.
Birds of passage
became birds of plastic.
Choked by my own history
by legends of eternity.
Skelele sees through me
what I have eaten
and cannot digest.
He knows this sickness
of the pelicans, albatrosses, gulls …
Migratory.
My goddess in me
fire in me.
Please, Zuimaco.
We drop onto the edge of a clearing on the Pakaraima Highlands, and we didn’t imagine this, but whoever did — brought our future here. Here in the shadow of the Great Roraima, we are on the edge of a Patamona village in 2200, and we can see in the distance, ziplines running from mountain to mountain. A never-ending train track cuts across them too. But here are houses made of jasper. The stone is cut into square pieces and placed neatly on top of each other.27 The homes glow deep red and warm with their own light. Open doorways are connected across this circular settlement, by glittering quartz paths. All of the mined gems are returned to the land here, now honoured and listened to, by these people. Stories of the wires, wireless, artificial anti-intelligence, history, and “advancement” are in the rocks and soil here. An antenna of diamonds, released from their captive settings, stands sparkling and wavering, all the way up into the sky. A young woman is at its base now, coding the next stone’s return to its resting place. There is a peace and calm, a sort of light, coming from her and from others, who are coming out of the buildings now. They are gathering.
A chanting is coming from fifteen highland villages and in this one, a shaman is surrounded by fifteen toshaos, who are young leaders like us. The shaman leads, with one voice from his throat and another from his belly, and in it we hear the “birth of music … embryo of melody,” growing with instruments we don’t know, howls, trills, building beyond language, song, words …
As if they are calling the night in
Dusk is falling like rain
Is it rain
Or streams of tears
Off the top of Roraima
Salt of the earth tears
Or Makonaima’s mother’s
As she sees all
The wrongs
A mist of tearfalls
From her heights
Darkening
Clouding
Changing
This village into trees. Into night. Karaya. A moon is rising and the singing fades as our ears tune to the tree frogs. A sound in my Ke Ara bones, of night. Piercing, winking waves, echoing
Night
Night
Night
Waking all night things while putting the world to sleep. A symphony so loud here, as if the trees and darkness are shrieking themselves into blackness.
My ears seek the wind and another sound that soothes me — leaf surf. Wind rolls a long deep wave through the trees, and I follow it. Another, with a fizzing hush as it outruns me. The foaming of surf.
In this liquid night, the frogs crackle the music of a reef alive, and float me up. Up to the canopy of a moonlit silver sea where I used to “fly,” before I met Skelele. Always. White waves touching black shores and coconut leaves clattering, glittering sharply, waving back to karaya. Once, breeze held me as I leaned back to look at the moon. It entered me and I wept. I wept, realizing that I never before wanted to be with another in effortless flight. That was my fantasy. But now the wind itself is with me. Singing and soaring, saying things that give us homes along the way. Whisper it again inside me. Tell me it is possible. In the sky. In night and love.
Into a sky now, so bright with stars — we see the bones of slayed spirits in The Shaman’s Journey Across the Milky Way.28 And we are airborne, with the young toshaos, rising with tiger owls, great horned, black-banded, striped owls. The Ancient of Heaven, Tamosi and our brothers Amalivaca and Vochi,29 fly with us and the sky glitters brighter.
Forest sea shimmering
looming
the House of Gods
glooming
upward.
It is stretching. Even as we rise. Growing up into a massive Coomacka Tree. Shooting up into the sky. Kabo Tano’s sky.30 Ours.
Dawning. It is.
With us spiralling up against the rock-face walls of this tree, with condors, sunbirds, two giant harpy eagles, and only the sound of our toshaos now. But something is breaking.
Cracking.
It is the sound of a legend being born. The Carib wisdom of man’s greed. Cutting the trunk of the source of blessings for more. Always wanting more, but left with less.
The top half of the tree of life is falling. Cut. Crashing morning into forest below.
Shuddering the earth, sea, and sky, sending clouds of forest birds and macaws into the air, screaming.
Cut down.
But we are rising with the great birds, with the peach light, leaving Earth People’s needs below.
Ever rising to the source of inspiration.
Soaring with a million feathers of pre-history.