The Happy Arawak

Allegedly, I have Arawak blood in me.

My mother told me as a little boy that I was descended from an ancient Indian tribe, the Arawaks. That accounted for my almond eyes, she said. They were a peaceful people; there were still some living in the Caribbean, she said. My Bajan grandfather, so my mother also told me, was trampled to death by a stampede of horses years before I was born. I used to imagine the warm scarlet issuing from my black grandfather's nose, trickling gently into the burning dirt of some dusty plain somewhere. I pictured the horses idly chewing their hay after they had been corralled.

My English granddad died two decades ago. He was a strong man, a frightening man, and he spoke his mind. He was earthy, awkward and had never left the country. He was from a different age. He never, ever smiled. He'd had a hard life already, and then his daughter had gone and married a ‘coloured' - that had really put the zap on his head. Before he got ill he took me to football matches and told me about Stanley Matthews and Bobby Moore. Occasionally I would ask him if Pelé or Eusébio weren't good players too, and Granddad would matter-of-factly say: ‘Nah!'

I switched sports. ‘What about Muhammad Ali?' I'd asked. ‘He was good though, wasn't he?'

‘Nah!' he said. ‘Now Jack Dempsey, he was a real boxer.'

Despite all this, it has always been the English side of my ‘heritage' that I have chosen to privilege. As a child growing up under the cold easterly winds of remote rural Lincolnshire, the Caribbean side provided me with no succour whatsoever; it always appeared banal in the extreme. Being outside of general society was not a good starting point for a working-class boy. As for Barbados itself, I never felt like going there. What could a tiny island twenty-one miles long by fourteen wide have to offer, I used to wonder, apart from stock paradisal motifs: white sand, crystalline waters and blood-orange sunsets? It was a one-dimensional platform for tourists.

Now aged forty, an inner-city English teacher, a wrong peg in the wrong hole, I find myself thinking: ‘Is this it? There must be more to life than rain, high prices, late capitalism and the iron cage of reason.' I return in my mind to the two grandfathers, and how different they had been: one familiar and one a mysterious Other. My English grandfather was someone whose emotions I never saw, save for moments when he betrayed himself - like when he gave me a gold watch on my twenty-first birthday. There were tears in his eyes that day. Afterwards, at college, my friends said it was a rubbish brand, and I stuffed it in a drawer. His general unhappiness and denial of the achievements of other ethnicities resonated with me now, and I ruminated on a happier region where it seemed I had a connection. And so started my search to unearth a little of my ancestry.

I discovered that the Arawaks originated in the Amazon basin and travelled to the Caribbean in pre-Columbian times. Following the decimation of the Arawak people by Spanish forces in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, those who subsisted (and it is disputed whether any survived) were forced back onto the South American mainland, where they integrated into the general population. Some academics report that there are now some 2,500 people of Arawak descent in Guadeloupe and Venezuela, but there is no consensus on the details. It was starting to occur to me that the Arawaks might be a lost nation.

Further probing revealed other information about the decline of the Arawaks. At the time Columbus encountered them in 1492, there were between three and four million Arawaks, or Taino as they are also known, living in the Caribbean. Within ten years that population had been reduced to a remarkable sixty thousand, mainly through disease: ‘smallpox, influenza, yellow fever and the measles',(1) but also through Spanish brutality and Carib Indian aggression. There are claims that the warlike Caribs, supposedly a cannibalistic social group, even went so far as to incarcerate and fatten Arawak children for consumption (though I have also read that the Arawaks, too, had a predilection for eating people).

Anthropologist William Keegan has argued that although the Arawaks were effectively eradicated, their genes survived through interracial mixing. He observes that ‘the destruction of Taino society after 1492 is one of the greatest tragedies of the conquest of the Americas ... because they were the first of the Native American societies to be devastated in this way - and because their destruction was so comprehensive'.(2) Many of the male Arawaks were wiped out; the women, superior in Arawak matrilineal society, became wives of European colonists or of the Caribs who had invaded their islands.

Subsequent searches yielded little more. My readings only offered disappointment: ‘The Tainos are no longer among us; their genes have been diluted among new Old World populations. Their culture ... is for all practical purposes gone as well,'(3) writes José R. Oliver in The Indigenous Peoples of the
Caribbean.

The only link I could find to the present was a tenuous one: I looked to the Garifuna people. The Garifuna are descended from West African slaves who had been shipwrecked on Saint Vincent around 1635. They stayed, and mixed with the native islanders. These were widely believed to be Caribs, though it has been suggested that ‘events may have been the other way round - that Arawak-speaking people, with the help of the earliest Spaniards, may have been encroaching upon the Caribs'.(4) In this scenario, the Arawaks were in the ascendancy and were dominating the Caribs, which would mean that it would have been the Arawaks that were mixing with the slaves. The Garifuna moved to Central America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today they are most numerous in Honduras and Guatemala.

Nowadays the Garifuna are a ‘transnational, modern ethnic group whose members live in a variety of circumstances in several Central American countries, the United States, Canada, and England ... their use of a distinctive and esoteric language and a sense of common origin holds them together and they are beginning to attract attention as a potentially important political force'.(5) In short, they are thriving. The Garifuna language is considered part of the Arawak family of languages. In 2001, the language, music and dance culture of the Garifuna was ascribed the status of a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of
Humanity by UNESCO. Garifuna music and dance combines circle dances, satirical work, a cappella songs and the popular punta music, where dancers move their hips from left to right in a circular motion. There is now even a world music genre known as punta rock.

Today the Garifuna live along the Caribbean coast in Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Honduras. They also inhabit Trinidad, Dominica and Saint Vincent. My father was a Bajan black man with Arawak blood in him. His descendants still live, and, according to some (notably the Happy Planet Index), are among the most successful and sustainable human communities on the planet.(6)

I feel relieved. For now, I'll stop looking.

1. Wilson, Samuel, ‘Introduction to the Study of the Indigenous People of the Caribbean', in The Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean, Samuel Wilson, ed., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
2. Keegan, William, ‘No Man [or Woman] Is an Island: Elements of Taino Social Organization', in The Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean, Samuel Wilson, ed., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
3. Oliver, José R., ‘The Taino Cosmos', in The Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean, Samuel Wilson, ed., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
4. Gonzalez, Nancie, Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
5. Ibid.
6. See www.happyplanetindex.org/why.htm. The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an index of global well-being conceived by the New Economics Foundation (nef), a progressive UK think tank. It provides an alternative measure of national success in place of Gross National Product. Nef notes that the HPI ‘doesn't reveal the "happiest" country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet's natural resources into long and happy lives for its citizens'. In the HPI economies are stripped to the most basic level: what we put in (resources) and what comes out (human lives of different lengths and happiness). A score on the HPI index is calculated by:

Life Satisfaction x Life Expectancy
---------------------------------------------
Ecological Footprint

Latin American countries are among the most sustainable and happiest on the planet in HPI terms. Their citizens live long lives of a significant happiness and do so by using less of the Earth's resources. El Salvador comes in at ninth place on the index; Guatemala, eighth; Honduras, seventh; Cuba, sixth; Panama, fifth; Costa Rica, third; and Colombia, second. The UK groans at 108th, and the US weeps abjectly at 150th. The levels of well-being in Central America are followed by some of the Caribbean islands: Saint Vincent is tenth, Saint Lucia eleventh and Antigua sixteenth.

Robert Harding