Cicadas

Independent Project, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff

Cicadas Postcolonialism in the Amazon Rainforest

Sometimes when you travel somewhere, it feels like there should be more. You saw the faded photographs, creased postcards, displaying only the good and none of the bad. You delude yourself into believing that perhaps, on the other side of the sky, lies where you are meant to be. And sometimes – mostly – you are wrong. But also, just on the odd occasion, you could be right. Which is why the need to travel grasps so many people in its tight embrace and will not let them go. She was still searching – dancing between horizons for the elusive ambience of home. Before, light had slipped into the air surreptitiously from candles in wooden shacks and blazed from the ferocious golden sun. Now it blazed fiercely too, not from the pallid star, but from the white bright lights inside of all the homes. She was back. Unsure of what to do, of how to find a place to be anymore. Unable to move far without the chill of the air creeping into her bones, her soul. And yet, there was food and money. There were café’s with fast talking hostesses and cool, pale-eyed people sipping sedately in an effort to drive away the mundanity of their lives. That made a difference of course. But it also induced a sadness in her that she had never felt before. She had heard stories about the pale skinned people while she was there, on the other side of the Atlantic and further. She had reminisced upon the stories silently on her way home, when treading carefully among the Spanish-built brightly coloured stone houses of the city that crumbled in the humid sunlight, as though they knew that they weren’t supposed to be there. One particular story had stuck in her mind more viciously than the others. The story of Arturo; the water baby.

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Independent Project, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff

A couple sleeps – a baby lies with his muddy brown eyes wide-open, blinking uncommonly long eyelashes gently. His name is Arturo; noble, courageous. The door of the shack opens slowly. Two pale faces glisten in the moonlight, standing framed in the opening. Arturo blinks at them, uncomprehendingly – he has never seen a pale face before and his young curiosity outweighs any other emotion. They are tall, the figures– with unblemished skin and matching faces. When they reach spindly fingers towards him, he is still not afraid. They hold him to their chests and whisk him away into the night. A mother wakes up in the morning without a son. But what the tall figures do not realise is that someone is watching them. Antonio, only seven, follows them into the night, having seen them walking away from the shack. His little feet pad with no noise, unshod. His mama is dead, and his father working in the city far away. Only his aunt cares where Antonio is, but she is long asleep. He often roams the stretch, playing with the stray dogs and cats, climbing the trees to release the green fruit. Following the two down to the shore, he watches as they board a boat, paddling in the dugout canoe silently. Antonio, skilled already, follows them on his own tiny canoe. He does not see the baby; only white faces reflecting eerily in the water of the Amazon and a bundle wrapped in blue cloth. He thinks that it must be an animal being prepared for slaughter a tortuga perhaps. But he is not sure and wants to know where the pale faces are going. Antonio has never paddled this far from home before in the darkness, and although the sun is soon to rise, he is beginning to get scared. The wide river stretches darkly out in front of him, and the fireflies that hover in the distance are beginning to look like the red pupils of hungry caiman – they are uncommonly still in the darkness. And then, after paddling round one more sweeping meander of river, Antonio sees a stripe of light sand. The androgynous men are pulling up to the banks, kneeling down at the rivers edge. Antonio copies, dragging his canoe up stealthily in the dark further down the beach. The moon is round and bright in the sky, and the tortuga are crawling up onto the beach, burying their precious eggs among the sand. Antonio watches as the men crouch down at the waters edge. From the bundle a figure is released into the moonlight. Little arms and legs claw, and coffee caramel skin glistens. Antonio creeps closer. This baby is one of his own, Arturo – the pale men have Arturo! Something is wrong he realises. Brought up hard but superstitious, Antonio is now scared. The baby squeals with pleasure as he is doused in the warm river water. The men, wading deeper now, hold him further out into the river, and he squirms in their arms. Antonio thinks of the piranhas that roam the shore. But he can hear the clicking of the river dolphins, and they will keep the baby safe – raising pink heads surreptitiously out of the water like blooming flowers. Suddenly, there is a loud splashing. The baby is no longer being doused gently, he is being held under the water, held and held, and the men are mumbling in sync, not in Spanish, nor in Cocama, but in a foreign tongue. The splashing ceases and Antonio feels hot tears come to his eyes. He does not make a sound and does not run to stop the men who are drowning his kin. The men leave as a red dawn appears. The baby lies immobile on the shore and Antonio runs to him, picks him up in trembling arms, shakes him, feels for a heartbeat. He, young as he is, knows that the baby must be returned. He cannot tell if he is alive or not. ‘Blessed!’ they cried when Arturo finally opened his eyes. After Antonio had brought him back to the village, still breathing, they had prayed for him all day and night. They had descended into 2

Independent Project, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff

the jungle and found remedies from the oar tree and now Arturo had opened his eyes. But there was a change. His once muddy brown eyes became an odd clear blue, tinted with the rose pink of the dolphins. An odd baby, who doesn’t cry. His mother holds him to her breast, cries over him. But he is not well unless being bathed in the river water. Only then does he seem to be more than a shell. And after three more days, the baby dies. And the legend of the pale men lingers on. She had been spat on, the night she heard that story. The wooden shack that doubled as a church had been split down the middle – men on one side, women on the other. A flautist played haunting music and the enigmatic preacher rolled ecclesiastical Spanish off his tongue as if it were lyrics to a song. She, due to her foreignness, was placed directly at the front. And so the full string of spit caught her in the face. She tried not to wince or to make a noise; the Peruvians were on the floor now, worshipping so hard that she could almost hear brains straining towards the otherness they strived. Later, in stuttering Spanish at the palm fronded shack that was serving as her home, she asked her host if he could tell her a story. It was her last night, and she wanted to learn as much as she could. But the whole night had taken on a cruel irony after Raetar finished telling her the tale of Arturo. She was not disrespectful, her creamy blancmange coloured skin not allowing her that liberty, but the nonsensicalness that she had witnessed that night made her want to laugh, and teach the Cocama’s why they were wrong to worship their ‘Dios’. That is, until she realised that it was Western teaching that had made the problem in the first place. So instead, just as she had planned, the next morning she packed her bag, thanked her host profusely and given him $100 at the sight of which he almost began to cry. She was not meant to pay him. But how could she not, seeing how much he needed it, and how little she did? Tears in her eyes as the peke-peke drew away from the bank and a jungle breeze waving the palm trees in farewell, she left; wishing she could break the church cross that haunted her vision, in half, as she watched the village recede into the distance. There were no cicadas now. Raetar had said they acted like soul spirits, revealing unknown things to the self in the depths of the murky jungle through their constant noisy companionship. Now, there was just an empty-full city. She faced a paradoxical loss, as she had more company here than she had ever had in Peru and yet she felt alone. And she could not stop dwelling on it, her time spent in the Amazon. Perhaps only because that was all she had ever done, really. There was nothing else to compare it to. But, what most stuck with her, even after the memories began to fade into snapshots of happiness, was the notion that something had gone badly wrong. For how could it be that those intelligent, stoic, calm people had become so deluded? They did not hate her, it was not in their nature, but there was a fear of light skinned people, Caucasian peoples, which ran deeply into their psych and revealed its self in their stories. For they had come, raped, pillaged, taken, eaten – those conquistadors, and when the Peruvian’s gained their independence, they had glorified in it. Even she had known of independence day, on the 28th of July, from the flags that flew high and proud and were better kept than many of the wooden houses that they flew from, in the depths of the jungle. And yet, Dios remained. And the soul speaking cicada’s, spirits of the forest, did not really amalgamate well with God.

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Independent Project, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff

The sun was going down where she was, and it would be going down in Peru too – with its early sleeps and early rises. She was holding onto the memories too tight and she needed to let them go, let them become a part of her. And yet, she didn’t want to. The Peruvians held on tight to their memories, so why shouldn’t she? The rain-slicked pavement glistened silver in front of her. Her feet clicked upon the stone. And looking up to the skies to a dusk that was so red that it resembled those in Peru, she realised that although she would probably never see the place again – although she had no blood connection to the Cocama’s and their forest, nor the long, winding river that ran through it – it would always be her home. Perhaps not her only home, but home nonetheless. She had left a piece of her heart in the jungle, and she would always care about its inhabitants. So, as the bright white city lights flickered on with the coming of the moon, she made a promise that if she could stop others from doing what the white men did to Arturo, and what the conquistadors did to the Inca’s, she would.

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