Monday, August 24, 2020

Waorani

In 1956, when my parents and I were living in Quito, a group of Waorani warriors attacked five American Evangelical missionaries. They speared the men to death, threw their bodies and belongings into the Curaray river, and vanished into the forest. 

The Waorani, a Stone Age tribe living in the Amazon forest, were a far cry from Rousseau’s “noble savage.” They were extraordinarily violent—not only did they kill every outsider that came into their territory, but they slaughtered each other as well. One study found that, over five generations, 42% of Waorani deaths--women and children as well as warriors--were caused by revenge raids carried out by Waorani from neighboring groups.

In other respects, however, the Waorani showed traits that we consider exemplary. They lived in complete harmony with Nature, trusting that the forest would provide for all their needs. With their blowguns and curare-tipped arrows they hunted only the animals they needed for survival. They had little notion of past and future, and drew no difference between the physical and the spiritual realms. 

Our house backed onto the grounds of HCJB, The Voice of the Andes, a radio station manned by American Protestant missionaries who lived in a neat little American-style suburb surrounding the station. My parents became friendly with some of the families, and one of the men, who took music lessons from my father, was instrumental in our eventual move to the U.S. At age twelve, although I envied their manicured lawns and pristine houses, I resented the missionaries’ frequent allusions to Jesus and their endless Bible quotations, and I kept warning my parents that their supposed friendliness was a ploy to convert us to Evangelism. Secure in their Catholicism, my parents would laugh and urge me to be more tolerant. 

The deaths of the five young missionaries, who left behind their wives and half a dozen tow-headed infants and toddlers, devastated the HCJB community. What had begun as an exciting adventure to bring Jesus to a previously uncontacted tribe ended in a tragedy made all the more wrenching by the unexposed film found in the dead men’s pockets, which documented their final hours. 

The men’s first attempts to contact the Waorani consisted of flying over their settlements in a yellow single-engine plane and dropping gifts of pots, buttons, ribbons, and machetes. In return, the Waorani sent up a parrot, with a piece of banana to sustain him during the journey, in a sturdy cage made of woven reeds. 

After several fly-overs and gift-drops, the missionaries landed on a strip of sand by the Curaray river. Soon, three Waorani emerged from the forest: a young man, a girl who looked about fifteen, and an older woman, all wearing only a g-string. With many smiles and welcoming gestures, the Americans bestowed more gifts, including a model airplane. Then they put a shirt on the man, whose name was Nankiwi, and, without further preliminaries, put him on the plane and took him for a ride. 

Reading the Americans’ journal half a century later, I am astounded that they give no hint of any doubts about the wisdom and ethics of their project. Rather, the journals reveal nothing but exuberant confidence, optimism, and the conviction that this is the Lord’s work, which will result in the happiness and salvation of their intended converts. 

Nankiwi shouted with excitement during the entire plane ride, and by the time they returned to the beach, the Americans had decided to call him “George.” The girl they nicknamed “Delilah.” Whether they gave the older woman a name the journal does not say. 

I remember at the time looking at the photos of this naked girl, just a few years older than I, and wondering about her new American name. I knew about the Biblical Delilah, the voluptuous seductress who betrayed Samson. I found it weird and disquieting that they would name the girl after her. Surely the missionaries were aware of the original Delilah. Were they trying to be funny, or what? 

After more gifts and pleasantries, the man and the girl returned to the jungle, and the woman followed sometime later. Euphoric with the success of this first contact, the missionaries prayed and sang hymns, and settled down on the beach to await their next visitors. 

When they finally came, armed with spears and the gift machetes, they massacred the Americans in  minutes. 

I was enthralled by the mystery and violence of this story, and a part of my childish self admired the Waorani. Good for them, I thought, for not wanting to be converted, wear clothes, and sing hymns! Good for them, for defending their exciting life deep in the dark and unknown jungle. The lack of apparent justification for the massacre added to its fascination. Why had the Waorani seemed so friendly at first, and then suddenly changed their minds? 

Two years after the killings, Elisabeth Elliott, the widow of one of the slain missionaries, picked up a Bible, put her toddler on her back Indian style, and walked into Waorani territory. Unlike her husband and his friends, she was accepted. Other missionaries soon joined her, and the Waorani converted to Evangelism. 

Eventually, the new converts explained what had caused the massacre. It seems that Nankiwi and the girl were romantically involved, but her family and especially her brother were against the relationship. When the pair went to meet the missionaries, the older woman accompanied them as chaperone. But when the girl’s brother saw the couple returning unescorted from the beach he became enraged and turned on Nankiwi who, to distract attention from himself, said that the missionaries had attacked them. This prompted the warriors to organize the revenge raid. 

Today the majority of Waorani live in villages, go to school, and enjoy internet access. They have mostly stopped killing each other. They wear clothes, and have forsworn polygamy, their chants and dances, and their ayahuasca rituals. Some still hunt, but many depend on the ecotourism industry for economic survival. Despite the protection afforded by the Ecuadorean government, their lands are under constant threat by the oil companies. 

But a couple of Waorani groups, the fiercest, refusing to be Westernized, have retreated to the few remaining deep jungle pockets, from which they continue to repel invaders with their spears, and possibly a machete or two. 

Delilah, photographed by one of the missionaries


Friday, August 14, 2020

Needlepoint

 

Prompted by the inexorably shortening days, I have, like the chipmunks in my yard, been gathering provisions for the coming winter. My main provision so far is an enormous needlepoint kit that, if I ever finish it, will be big enough for a dog bed or a baby mattress. 

The design is a bouquet of blowsy rococo roses garlanded in blue. In needlepoint, I confine myself to botanicals because--unlike geometric forms, or, worse still, animal faces—they are utterly forgiving. Nobody cares if a leaf is slightly crooked, or a millimeter too long or short. But mostly I chose this particular design because the border and background are a cheerful yellow, and I expect I’ll need to have a lot of yellow around in the months to come. 

A good needlepoint kit relieves you of the need to make decisions. It is a lot like painting by numbers, only slower. You can sit there in a kind of trance, lulled by the pop of the needle coming through the canvas, by the swish of the thread in its wake, and think of nothing, letting your hands do the work while your eyes rejoice in the color of the yarn. 

You can’t be completely oblivious, of course, but compared to writing, needlepoint is like floating on your back in a warm pool versus doing the butterfly stroke in the North Atlantic. So I am a bit worried that I’ll find the embroidery frame (did I tell you that I have a magnificent free-standing embroidery frame?) more enticing than the laptop. 

When the French writer Colette was in her sixties, she developed severe arthritis of the hip. Orthopedics in the mid-twentieth century being in a primitive state, Colette was eventually confined to bed in her apartment overlooking the courtyard of the Palais Royal. 

Refusing even the relief of aspirin, which she said clouded her thinking, she continued to write until she died at eighty-one. But she didn’t only write—she also did needlepoint, and covered the seats of her dining room chairs with tapestry flowers and fruits. All through the German occupation of Paris, she wrote and embroidered, embroidered and wrote, referring to her pen and her needle as the paired horses that pulled her through her days. 

At the moment, I too am suffering from hip troubles. Unlike Colette, however, I know that if only I can get on some surgeon’s schedule (they’re all backlogged due to the pandemic), I will get speedy relief. Like Colette and her fellow Parisians during World War II, Americans right now are having to contend with an enemy that, albeit silent and invisible, is as ruthless as the Nazi invaders. But unlike Colette I can protect myself with a mere scrap of fabric across my face, and I don’t have to fear the sound of boots on cobbles in the night. 

My plan to prevent embroidery from taking over my writing is to save it as a reward for pages filled, although if past experience is any indication, the sheer relief of having written—and not having to write again until tomorrow—will be all the reward I need.


Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Dame Julian and I


Across the seven centuries that separate us, I hear her voice whispering to me. The anchoress Dame Julian of Norwich and I have so much in common these days that we are practically twins. Like me, she lived in a time of plague. Like me, she isolated herself in a small space, though her cell, or anchor hold, which was attached to the church of Saint Julian, was a lot smaller than my cottage in the retirement community where I reside.

Her cell, I am told, had three windows. One gave into the church, so she could follow the Mass and take communion. Another opened into the street, and through it she would speak to the people who came to her for advice. The third window was the one through which her followers would hand her food and take away her wastes.

I too have windows in my cottage. Seven centuries have seen major improvements in sanitation, so waste disposal is not an issue. But my food is delivered at my door every evening at 5:30, and although people don’t come to me for advice, friends do come and sit on my porch, where we mumble at each other through our masks. My cottage is not attached to a church, but its back windows look out into a cathedral of trees, which change their vestments with the season, and where choirs of birds sing their own versions of Gregorian chant.

Like me, Dame J was a writer. She was the first woman to write a book in English, Revelations of Divine Love. I am not even the first woman to write a blog, but I nevertheless feel a strong sense of kinship with her, and as I sit tapping at my laptop I can practically hear the scritch scratch of her goose quill on parchment.


Also, like me, she had a cat! (Unlike me she didn’t have a husband or a dog in her anchor hold, but I’m focusing on similarities here.) When the spirit moves him, Telemann jumps onto my keyboard and edits my writing. I wonder if Dame Julian’s cat ever stepped on her work before the ink was dry, and left little flower-shaped prints all over her manuscript?

Julian tells us that in one of her visions God showed her a hazelnut. “What may this be?” she asked. And He answered, “It is all that is made.” I don’t quite know what this means, but she tells us what it meant to her: “In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
 

Julian is so reassuring! (She’s also the originator of that COVID-era mantra, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”) I would like to find a hazelnut to meditate on, but the closest I can get to one around here would be an acorn, and right now the chipmunks and squirrels have eaten every last one. But as soon as the oaks drop their next crop in September, I will fill a little bowl with acorns to keep on my writing table, next to my laptop and my cat.



Followers