It seems like a disparate event from a couple of days ago, but let’s pair it with the Great Crisis of the age anyway. As European governments come up with ways of dealing with the migrants’ crisis and the President-elect repeats his plans to shield America, a professional photographer chanced upon an ‘uncontacted’ Amazonian tribe in the wilderness of the Brazilian state of Acre. These indigenous people constitute a grouping among many such tribes that live in the Amazon rainforests. In widely reported news, an expert said he was glad nobody understood the language of the people which had contributed to their so-far unhindered existence. Conservationists say all such tribes are threatened by illegal loggers, miners, traffickers, and, I add, sundry offshoots of the modern economy. There are layers of a cruel irony here.
So they found out about another group of leaf-appareled nomads. But is the primitive tribe ‘uncontacted’ now that it’s been irreversibly ‘discovered’? In a way, could the chance encounter itself constitute a momentous disruption?
We already have magazine covers depicting the exotic find. Expect publications and TV documentaries. Soon, if not already, the tribe will be studied and academised. What kind of social structures do they have? How are ‘they’ different from ‘us’ and the rest of the indigenous peoples? Are they an ‘open’ society? At what level should they be placed on the primitivity scale? It gets more interesting still.
The new tribe fascinates because very little of it is known. What happens when, in the service of academics, some member is taught the language of the discoverers? To remind yourself of just how menacing contact can be, think of the arrival of Europeans of all hues from across the Atlantic to the New World. Far from a one-off event, the process of discovering entailed defining and appropriating the Americas. It was protracted and complicated but irrevocably decisive.
The encounter with the ‘native’ necessitated that the native learned the language of the discoverer – in most cases, English, but also Spanish, Dutch and French. Language, as we’ve come to know, comes in a substantial goody bag. English or Spanish were not just the language of commerce by which the ‘natives’ would learn to sell their land and resources and enter the slave market. The language would change them for good. If not wiped out of existence by the various contingencies resulting from the momentous contact, they would be defined and simultaneously constructed by the Europeans so that many years thence, even if the colonial project ran out of steam, the natives would have changed so much there would be precious little left to go back to.
Save a few pockets, most pre-colonial cultures have been wiped clean in the Americas, so there aren’t many people in need of recovering an indigenous past. But it’s complicated elsewhere too.
In parts of Africa, the Middle East and South and East Asia, people unwittingly recognise themselves through categories constructed in colonial times. ‘National’ and ‘tribal’ identities, the ‘nation-state’, government structures, the common law of England and Wales, education, for instance, are concepts that came from European colonisers. Many in these parts of the world (including the scribe) are more conversant in English than they are in their own languages. The migrants from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere come from states carved out by colonial powers in the preceding century. Today, they flee regions with dictators long propped up by western powers or states subjected to ‘regime change’ contrived in western capitals.
The people in and from former colonies don’t simply abide by the categories established in colonial times; they embody them. They continue to live the imperial project long after its formal conclusion. In most cases here, a pre-contact, uncontaminated past cannot be reclaimed, which brings us back to the just-discovered tribe in Brazil.
Untouched primitivity is fascinating partly because it has been transformed into a cultural fetish. A search has been triggered for ‘tantalising’ clues to Brazilian tribe’s way of life. In Gore Verbinski not-so-acclaimed film The Lone Ranger (2013), Johnny Depp plays a native ‘Indian’ who serves as a living display at a shabby circus exhibition. The film is dispersed with his flashbacks of playing sidekick to a white outlaw-hero. Unfortunate linguistics repeats itself as the just-discovered Amazonians have been dubbed ‘the Indians of the headwaters of the river Humaita’, not ‘the real Americans of the America that was before the Lone Rangers came along’.
It’s always bothered me why Americans call themselves that. Nothing sinister about it, mind you. I like the American people for a number of reasons – their creativity, their warmth and enterprise, and the fact that they’ve accomplished a great country. I just don’t get the nomenclature. It stands out as a historic wrong. A grave one. The people of the American continents are diverse, robust and intriguing. In South America, they speak Spanish, but they’re not Spaniards or Portuguese in the same way that African Americans aren’t Ugandans or Somalians – they never were perhaps since these are modern colonialism-bequeathed states. Most of my favourite actors are Americans of Italian descent. Many of the US’s famous statesmen have been people of Irish, German and English descent, and the whole white population of the US can safely said to be of European descent.
In this case, the word ‘descent’ should remind us that the white people of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Zimbabwe, South Africa can all, with a stretch of the imagination, be called migrants. Interestingly, the fact that the native populations of many of these parts don’t exist in significant numbers anymore is not referred to as a crisis. If only the Amazonians had placards.
The writer is a lecturer in English Literature at Government College Lahore