THE NARRATOR is going up a highland river in an unnamed South American country. Who is this narrator? What can he be made to be? This is often where fiction can simply become false.
To make the narrator a writer or traveller would be true to the actual experience; but then the fictional additions would be quite transparent. Can the narrator be a man in disguise, a man on the run? That would be true about the region. In 1971 Michael X, the Trinidad Black Power man, after he had killed two people in Trinidad, went to Guyana (physically like the country of the narrative) and made for the interior, to hide. And many years before, one of the last men of the Frank James gang, looking for a sanctuary outside the United States, fetched up in the Guiana savannah country, lower down from the forest. (So I had heard when I went there on my own journey. Local people were proud of the connection; and I, too, thought it glamorous, having seen as a child the Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda films about Frank and Jesse James.)
A man on the run would have been true to the place. But narrative has its own strictness. It requires pertinence at all times, and to have given that character to the narrator would have introduced something not needed, a distraction, something that wouldn’t have tied up with what was to come at the end of his journey.
Better, instead of a man on the run, have a narrator who is a carrier of mischief. A revolutionary of the 1970s, say. A man seeking the help of up-country Amerindians to overthrow the African government on the coast. Such a situation wouldn’t only echo the truth of more than one country in the region. It would also hold certain historical ironies.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the time of the Dutch and British slave plantations on the coast — the Dutch and British no longer interlopers on the Spanish Main, but sovereign powers — when slaves ran away to the interior, Amerindians hunted them down for a bounty. Now, at the time of the story, the Africans on the coast, descendants of the slaves, have inherited the authority of the old colonial government. They have a substantial educated and professional class. They are the rulers now; and the Amerindians are culturally what they were two hundred years before.
So for this narrator — who is more than a traveller looking for new sights — everything seen on the river has many meanings.
At the stern of the boat there is a man with a shotgun. From time to time he fires at the birds following the boat; and after every shot he laughs. It was perhaps with this sense of sport that his ancestors hunted down African runaways. Not with guns then, but with arrows — delicate little wands with the merest metal tip, not at all dangerous-looking, looking more like toys. They are still made: the arrows and quivers in the craft shops on the coast are exactly like the real things, fifty or sixty years old, that can be seen, coated with dust, in the ramshackle little museum — hardly touched since colonial days — in the capital.
And — perhaps, perhaps, the narrator thinks — this old instinct, this old attitude to the African, can be revived now, to serve a higher cause. Though when the boat stops at the villages, and the narrator considers the blank faces, the stillness of the staring people (after the first agitation), he has his doubts, comparing these withdrawn, passive river people with the Africans on the coast, and with the liveliness of revolutionary tribal people in other continents.
The once-a-week boat on this river is a cause for excitement at all the villages. At one shady village a woman comes down the zigzagging yellow ramp with a basket of food for the man with the shotgun: various things in tins and wooden bowls, separately tied up in cloth. The man doesn’t look at the woman when he speaks a few words to her; and later she comes down again with some cassava bread, two halves of a big stiff whitish disc about half an inch thick, with something of the appearance of granulated polystyrene.
The man breaks these halves into smaller pieces and wedges them between the bowls and tins and the side of the basket — roughly, as though the wrapping up of food in cloth is something that only women do. Later, when they are on the smooth river again, and the time has come to eat, the man unties all the dishes and — with sudden seriousness — breaks off small pieces of bread to dip into them. Cassava bread is part of every mouthful that he chews. It is the staple; it bulks out the meal.
The narrator asks for a piece, to try. The man laughs, pleased to be of interest. Below the unexpected sourness of the bread there is almost no taste.
The light alters; the mood of the day alters. The sun, more directly overhead, strikes down between the forest walls, and the river becomes full of glare. The river changes. The man with the gun, his meal finished, the dishes rinsed in the river and put back in the basket, is now sitting in the bow looking out for snags. He sits and watches and never stirs.
The narrator, with the sourness of the cassava bread lingering in his mouth, and a memory of its grittiness, thinks of the world’s staples. Rice and wheat and other kinds of grain are grasses. Cassava — a cousin of the red-leaved poinsettia — is more miraculous. It is a root, and it has a poison. It would have taken centuries for the remote ancestors of these forest people, after the crossing over of their ancestors from Asia, to have made their way down the continent to these forests and rivers. How many centuries more before the discovery of cassava? And how many centuries after that for the folk invention of the simple tools for getting rid of the poison?
Thinking like this, thinking of all the inventions of these isolated people, the narrator begins to think of the antiquity of the forest. Not new, not virgin. Those villages on the river would have been like the towns of the classical world, rising for millennia on the middens of their predecessors.
All at once, then, the light altering again, acquiring colour after glare, the river journey is over. It is about four o’clock, two hours to sunset. There is a new clearing in the forest, with a damaged stretch of low dirt-yellow bank — not the high bank of the Indian villages. There is no well-made ramp, just a number of crumbling chutes. After a day of river and sun and forest and Indian faces, the narrator is startled to see two almost naked white boys with bows and the small Indian arrows hiding behind the grass and boulder at the water’s edge. Not the arrows of the craft shops on the coast: the real arrows, from the forest. For a moment or two it is like being taken back to the beginning of things. Before white skins turned another colour, and yellow hair turned black.
There is no mystery: the children are from the new settlement in the clearing. They are playing at being Indians. The narrator is expected.
The narrator will stay for a few days here. The settlement is not his final destination. He will rest, take guides and go on. He will have to go on foot. The river cannot be navigated beyond this point. Beyond this are the boulders and the shallow rapids.
The settlement is the site of a religious mission. It is a newish religion, with a Christian basis. It has established itself in the country, both on the coast, where its followers are African, and in the interior, where it is getting Amerindian converts.
On the coast, among the Africans, it is even popular, because it promotes the idea of voluntary service as a two-way traffic, a form of international exchange. This means that the local country doesn’t simply receive foreign volunteers. Favoured local people who accept the religion can be sent abroad as service volunteers, to Europe, the United States, Canada, and even West Africa. Since few people on the coast have the means to travel (and most of the black population want to migrate to northern countries), there are any number of Africans, among them the relatives and friends of local politicians, who want to be volunteers and go abroad.