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CHAPTER 1

Testing the Waters

Despite physical discomforts, periods of boredom, ailments ranging from funguses and dysentery to malaria and hepatitis, and periodic ridicule for being culturally clueless, we have always loved ethnographic fieldwork. We recently found a typescript, dated 1972, intended for a book that we started writing in New Haven but never finished. It began:

Whether it's an indication of a certain alienation from our own society, a basic function of the ethnographic process or — as seems likely — some combination of the two, we have always felt life most viscerally while doing fieldwork, whether in Peru, Martinique, Andalusia, Chiapas or, most particularly, Saramaka. For us, in the field, there is a remarkable openness to reality, a switching on of all one's senses, and a fantastic investment in human relations. Life becomes delightfully refreshing.

This retrospective confessional continued, "We truly lived for the summers, spending autumns digesting, writing up, and publishing our last summer's work, and the springs preparing for the next." That was the mindset that set the course for our professional, and in many ways personal, lives for many decades.

In 1964, the idea of Rich doing dissertation research with people known as "Bush Negroes," the descendants of self-liberated slaves in the Dutch colony of Suriname, had begun to grow on us. We knew that Melville Herskovits, the founder of Afro-American studies, had considered Suriname's six Maroon "tribes" at one end of his "Scale of Intensity of Africanisms" in the Americas (with Harlem Negroes at the other, most assimilated, end). We'd read about the research that Dutch anthropologists had recently undertaken among the Ndyuka Maroons of eastern Suriname. And we'd seen the magnificent photographs by French geographer Jean Hurault of proud Aluku Maroons who since the late eighteenth century had lived just over the border with Guyane.

But there was a potential problem. In the 1960s, anthropology was still viewed largely as the study of people who, in that pre–politically correct era, were classified as "primitive," and the Harvard department specified that the Ph.D. could be awarded only to students who had carried out at least three months of fieldwork in a non-Indo-European language. Saamakas, despite their "primitiveness" on almost every other criterion, were ruled out, since at the time scholars considered that all creole languages — including the one spoken by Saamakas — were the bastard offspring of Indo-European languages such as English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch. (That meant that a student could not get a Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard with a dissertation about, say, Martinique or anywhere in Afro-America. As Caribbeanist Sidney Mintz is said to have joked, "If they don't have blowguns and you can't catch malaria, it's not anthropology.") Rich managed to slip through only thanks to a bizarre loophole. The two summers we'd spent doing fieldwork with Zinacanteco Indians in Mexico, who spoke a Mayan language called Tzotzil, officially met the non-Indo-European language requirement, and he was thus authorized to undertake dissertation fieldwork with Saamakas.

By 1965, we had begun corresponding with Dutch scholars, who warned us that the recent damming of the Suriname River by Alcoa and the colonial government, which had flooded out six thousand Saamakas from their villages in central Suriname, might make the colonial government wary of anyone doing research in the area. But we decided to give it a try. In the summer of 1966, after brief fieldwork in Mexico, we picked up a string hammock in the Yucatan and flew to the Dutch colony, with a brief stop in Papa Doc's Haiti. Our goal: securing permission to carry out fieldwork among the Saamaka, then some twenty thousand people living in seventy villages along the upper Suriname River.

Our memory of the two-week bureaucratic marathon in Paramaribo is of countless hours sitting on wooden benches in lonely government waiting rooms. It was clear early on that our fate depended directly on District Commissioner Jan Michels — a man whom, we later learned, Saamakas called Tu-Buka-Goni (double-barreled shotgun) because he spoke out of both sides of his mouth. Michels eventually gave us the go-ahead on the condition that we not spend time with the communities displaced by the dam. He also offered to arrange our transportation to the gaama's village and to provide proper letters of introduction.

With our upriver departure set for the following week, we began to be bombarded with well-meant advice by everyone from old government hands who had visited the interior to storekeepers, the East Indian family who'd rented us a room, and the chief of police who had impounded our passports "just in case." We were not taken in by their tales of a jungle teeming with snakes and jaguars and rivers swarming with bloodthirsty piranhas. But we did take the advice of merchants who had outfitted previous mining and scientific expeditions to the interior, purchasing knee-high boots (essential protection against snake bite, they said), U.S. army surplus nylon-and-net zipup hammocks like those being used in Vietnam ("against vampire bats and malarial mosquitoes"), and certain types of cloth and rum that they claimed were preferred by "Bush Negroes." Once in Saamaka, we learned better. We never once donned the clumsy boots (instead going barefoot throughout our stay) or slept in the coffin-like hammocks. The only resemblance between the cloth we'd bought and that used by Saamakas was that it contained stripes, and the 150 proof rum was much stronger than anything Saamakas drank or even used for libations.

On the morning of our departure we set out in a government jeep for the sweaty, bumpy ride that brought us after several hours to the massive hydroelectric dam at Afobaka. The district commissioner's three Saamaka boatmen — Neiso and his two assistants — were there waiting for us and helped transfer our gear, now covered (like ourselves) with red-brown bauxite dust from the road, to a government motor canoe for the trip upriver. It was only as the boatmen pointed the slim craft out into the artificial lake that we looked back and saw the immensity of the construction, the broad sweep of concrete in between hundreds of meters of high packed red earth, looming up from the fetid water.

At last we were on what Saamakas were still calling "the river," negotiating a tortuous path lined on either side with the bare grey tops of forest giants, standing as skeletal sentinels in a vast space of death. As we followed the course of the twisting, ancient riverbed, far below us,the Saamaka steersman would point and call out to us the name of each submerged village, buried forever beneath the muddy waters — houses, shrines, cemeteries, gardens, and hunting grounds, places where great battles had been fought and famous miracles effected.

After four or five hours in the eerie silence of the lake, we heard a low roar that grew louder as we approached. Suddenly we broke into the exuberance of the bright green forest and plunging waters of the most famous rapids on the Suriname River, Mamadan, "Mother of all Rapids." The river rushed at us from all sides, the foaming water coursing through numerous channels and plunging over giant boulders. After the boatmen poured libations on shore at the shrine to the Wentis (gods of the rapids and the sea), we spent a fitful night's sleep on an island in the midst of this liquid plenitude.

It was still early the next morning when we arrived upstream at Abenasitonu, Neiso's home village, and one of the first of the Saamaka villages that had not been sunk by the dam. Our gear was deposited in the house of the Moravian schoolteacher, away on summer vacation, and we were told to wait there while the boatmen continued several days upriver to the village of Asindoopo to ask Gaama Agbago whether theycould bring these whitefolks into Saamaka territory. Four days later, the boatmen returned with formal permission to proceed, and we set out again upstream.

At the time, no outsiders — whether from the government or elsewhere — ventured into Saamaka territory without this nod to the principle that the gaama, on behalf of his people, maintained full territorial control. The government's unilateral decision to build the Afobaka dam had, of course, slashed a deep wound into this long-respected sovereignty. But in 1966, any non-Saamaka setting foot in their territory still did so as a guest of the Saamaka people. For them, the treaty that their ancestors concluded with the Dutch crown in 1762 not only ended decades of bitter warfare but also established three inalienable principles: freedom (from slavery), independence (from the colonial society — the right to govern their own society as they wished), and control over their own territory, stretching from Mawasi Creek (some fifteen kilometers downstream from the dam) to the headwaters of the Suriname River. Gaama Agbago was fond of repeating the litany, "From Mawasi on up, the forest belongs to us."

During the rest of the upriver journey, we stopped for brief visits in village after village, seeing bits and pieces of a way of life that looked more exotic than anything we'd ever imagined — libations being poured before a gabled coffin as women shrieked in mourning, men sporting shiny gold earrings, bright patchwork capes, embroidered neckerchiefs, umbrellas, variously curved machetes, tasseled calfbands, multicolored beaded sashes across their chests, and hats that varied from berets and fedoras to panamas and pith helmets — evoking for us visions of seventeenth-century pirates of the Caribbean. Between villages, sometimes for an hour at a stretch, we glided next to forest walls of breathtaking beauty, seeing only the occasional fisherman or a woman paddling a small dugout canoe laden with garden produce. Over and over, we passed through foaming rapids, marveling at the boatmen's skills and knowledge of every twist and turn and rock in the river. Throughout the voyage, we pestered them about Saamaka words, building on our knowledge of Sranantongo (the coastal Creole), which we had learned from a Dutch radio course, and which they spoke as a contact language. Rich was already getting used to being called "Lisati" (the Saamaka pronunciation of Richard) while Sally's name, easier for Saamakas to pronounce, remained intact.

On the afternoon of the third day, we arrived at Tuliobuka ("Mouth of Two Rivers") where, over a mighty rapids on our right, the Gaanlio flowed into the Suriname. We entered the left-hand, quieter flow of the Pikilio, which led to the gaama's village several kilometers upstream. A messenger had been sent ahead that morning to alert him of our arrival, but we were told to wait in the canoe until we received permission to disembark. After a half hour baking in the sun, we were led ashore and into Gaama Agbago's council house, a kind of throne room that took our breath away. Michels had told us that during the reign of Atudendu, Agbago's immediate predecessor, visitors literally crawled through the doorway until being signaled to rise. The Herskovitses wrote about their arrival in what they called "the Court of the Granman" in 1929, greeted by multiple shotgun salutes and much "hallooing of the women," and devoted more than half a dozen pages of their book to a description of the council house and its ceremonial stools, umbrellas, and other accoutrements. Even in 2015 a blogger wrote of visiting the Saamaka "King" in his "Royal Palace."

Our boatmen ostentatiously wiped their feet on the large doormat and bowed down as they entered, and we followed suit. The gaama was reposing on a large, cushioned steel chair, flanked on either side by a dozen wicker armchairs set on a platform. He wore a fedora, a tailcoat made from a bright Union Jack, green and blue pinstripe pajama pants, and red high-top basketball sneakers, unlaced. In one of the armchairs, a young man who we later learned was a foster child of the chief named Line ("Lee-nay"), was casually thumbing through a Dutch movie magazine.

The gaama motioned to us to come forward, and indicated the two adjoining armchairs. After an exchange with the boatmen about the trip, he recounted some of the history of outsiders visiting Saamaka territory and poured a libation of rum, informing the ancestors of our arrival and asking that they protect us during our stay. Hearing that we'd lived in Martinique, he told us how, in his youth, he had shipped out on a steamship from Belém and how he and his fellow sailors, on shore leave in Fort-de-France, had been arrested and spent time in jail in the wake of a political assassination. He boasted about the size of that ship and gave a vivid imitation of the sounds of its powerful, chugging engines and its foghorn.

When we were finally given an opening to explain the reason for our visit, Rich summoned up his best effort at Sranantongo to outline ourgoals, saying we wished to learn how Saamakas lived and mentioning gardening, hunting, woodcarving, and of course language. But because the several weeks we could stay on this visit would be far too short, he said, we wished to return some months hence and stay for two years. Later we realized that he'd been far too direct — as newcomers we had little sense of the subtleties of Saamaka etiquette, let alone the linguistic tools to produce it. The gaama answered graciously but noncommittally, offering us the use of a wood-frame guesthouse he maintained for government visitors, and inviting us to join him in a ride back to the coast in three weeks, when he was due in Paramaribo for official business. We presented him with several of the gifts we had brought and our meeting was over.

The next morning, we met again with the chief, asking him whether we might arrange to eat our meals with a local family — as we'd done in previous fieldwork in Peru, Martinique, Spain, and Mexico. He answered cordially, but refused, explaining that people moved around a great deal to forest camps and spouses' villages, and offering instead to obtain for us whatever food we needed. He had apparently heard from the boatmen how mosquitoes had been attacking us through the open mesh of our Yucatecan hammock, and generously offered us a sturdy Brazilian substitute.

Our first days in Asindoopo, a village of several hundred people, included frequent periods of boredom and frustration. Complete outsiders, we were tolerated as amusing curiosities by some and as possible sources of tobacco or trinkets by others, but also left alone for long periods. No one seemed to want to take responsibility to engage us. Despite our requests, no one agreed to teach us anything about canoeing or cooking or gardening. Rich spent most mornings fishing in the river and most afternoons with a group of young men playing soccer at the nearby Moravian mission, after which they drank beer and listened to calypsos and soul music on a battery-driven phonograph while pouring over a deck of Nu-Vu playing cards. Sally, visiting village women, was frustrated by quick shifts from cordiality to hostility when she asked questions about harvesting rice, sewing clothes, or carving calabashes. Our handwritten notes from the period report such gems as "Bought one fish from a little boy for 2 fishhooks, but Sally dropped it in the river as she was cleaning it. No one saw." Children sometimes burst into tears at the mere sight of us — once, when a little boy cried at seeing Rich, one of the gaama's wives teased him, "Better get used to it. That's what you'll see when you go to the city." When young men or women took us to nighttime dances in nearby villages, our Saamaka clothes evoked loud hooting and clapping as people pulled and adjusted them to show us exactly how to wear them. Women must have retied the knot of Sally's waistkerchief a hundred times. And late evening visitors to our house would encourage us to get into our hammock if we were tired, saying they would just stay and watch.

Slowly, however, we began to forge relationships. Abatili, a thirtysome "grandson" of the gaama who lived in Dangogo, the gaama's natal village a few kilometers upstream, and one of Rich's new soccer-playing friends, took a special interest in us and began sending us small gifts — a bird he'd shot, a carved comb, two eggs. As one of the gaama's official boatmen, he took advantage of his access to an outboard motor to bring us to Dangogo several times. There we met his grandmother Nai, who gave us a bucketful of oranges on our first visit, and with whom we participated in a large feast in honor of her deceased mother a few days later.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Saamaka Dreaming"
by .
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