Un elogio del porvenir

Why this child so spin-spin spin-spin Why this child can’t keep still Why this child so turn-round turn-round Why this child can’t settle down (…) “Poor Grandma” by Grace Nichols, 2013: 19

Typically in the ethnography of Lowland South America, men are described as the travellers par excellence. By contrast women are described as ‘immobile’, confined to life around the house and farm. As Murphy and Murphy (1974: 218) have described with regard to the Munduruku, the “female stays home, the male leaves. The woman works in the village or close to it, but the man ranges out in hunting, fishing, trading (…)” The theme of structural female immobility was perhaps most prominently laid out by Melatti about the Gê, and seen as being due to uxorilocal rule. However, as the author pointed out, the immobility of women/mobility of men under the marriage regime is compensated by a naming system, in which names of women “move” via their brothers, while conversely, male names return to their original homes, via their sisters (Melatti, 1979: 46-79).

Ethnographies that followed tend to point out this correlation of men and movement, women and immobility (for instance Gregor 1977; 1985). According to them, female agency and women’s learning derive socially and geographically from the ’inside’, from close kinship relations and are characterized by house-centred immobility. Men’s learning, in contrast, derives from the “relationship with beings and spaces ‘outside’”, affinal kinship and moving away from the houses, between forest and cities (MacCallum 2001: 48). The female/ consanguine/ inside versus male/ affine/ outside, is also proposed by Descola (2001: 101-108) with regard to the

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Ashuar, who like the Makushi, have very loosely defined gender roles. The same dichotomy is suggested as being common for the Guiana region by Rivière (1969; 1984; see also Butt Colson 2009a), reinforced by the tradition of uxorilocal marriage arrangements, where men move and women stay in their natal community.

Fisher (2001: 115) shows, in the case of the Kayapo, that “gender attributes” can indeed differ throughout a woman’s life cycle, and points to the “inconstancy of gender imagery”. Farage (1997: 140) argues with regard to the Wapishana that knowledge is equal to both women and men, but increases with the loss of vitality and distance to one’s gendered body, connected to the reduction in sexual and reproductive activity (p. 140). Similarly, for the patrilinear Muslim Bedouins, older postmenopausal women are considered masculine, or “like men”, due to their loss of reproductive capacities and menstruation. Their acquired ‘maleness’ and the fact that they are less or not sexually active, makes them purer, closer to god, their movements not in need of monitoring, and allowed to participate in male activities such as prayers and, in extraordinary circumstances, sacrifice and slaughter of animals. As Abu Lughod (1986: 134) observes, “only for men and postmenopausal women can sexuality be divorced from reproduction”.

Farage (1997: 134-36) further suggests that as age subsumes gender, female trajectories become more analogous to those of men throughout time. This is interesting when considering the issue of mobility. In a similar vein, I would suggest that as they grow older, the movements of Makushi women become more analogous to those of men, which is connected to the change in “gender imagery” and their enhanced wisdom accumulated through experience – wisdom which is essential when on the move, especially alone.

As most travelogues in this thesis derive from the experiences and memories of Makushi women, this chapter focuses on the gender specificity of movement. It discusses the role and implications of mobility in the lives of Makushi women, and is in particular narrated by Celia, a middle-aged woman from the village of Surama, who guides us through various other female accounts. It shows how many Makushi women, at a young age, are taught to fear the dangers of journeying away from their home, but how their immobility changes in the course of their lives and their trajectory corresponds increasingly to that of their husbands and men in general as they get older. Thus, Celia’s story points out that a woman’s agency and trajectory cannot simply be defined as static and stable as often presented.

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Celia and I

One day Celia commented in a spooky tone of voice, just when her grandchildren were listening carefully: “I di frighten Lisa [me, author] bad [breathed out] when she di coming! I jus’ frighten you [looking towards me]! The eyes [“blue”], they go thief me away, if I lazy or something. You eyebrow them too long [stretched, high tone; laughing]. I frighten she bad [stretched, high]!”

Neither of us can exactly remember when and how we became “accustomed” to each other. This happened gradually, when we met frequently in the same places: at the many birthday parties, dancing to old-school reggae, drinking one bowl of Kari after the other until late, making jokes and laughing a lot; helping other villagers on their farms or with thatching their roofs, going fishing or sitting in the cassava house scraping cassava roots the whole afternoon, going on journeys to the forest, other villages, Georgetown, Lethem, Brazil.

The notion of “accustomed”, or “customed” in Creole Guyanese, plays an interesting role in Celia’s narrative and in the way she relates to people and places. It is closely connected to the aspect of “getting stuck” and “sticking” with a person and place. Sometimes she would lament to me, “I don't know why I'm there with you all the time. I get 'customed’ to you, must be”, as if she did not know what she liked about me at all and why she got “stuck” with me the way she did. Similarly, when once staying in Georgetown, she said “First I did not like the place, then I forget.” The process of “getting accustomed” is thus a process of transformation and familiarisation. Becoming accustomed to something, someone or somewhere for the Makushi also means one loses fear. Kane, aranne’pe pra wai – “No, I am not afraid anymore”, meaning, “I am accustomed” now. What is interesting about the notion of ‘accustomed’ is that seemingly fixed categories of strange and familiar become rather fluid, moulded through life experience, apprehension and movement.