Mark Ford teaches in the English department at University College London.
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Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989
pages 21-22 | 3317 words
Turning down O’Hanlon
Mark Ford
- In Trouble Again: A Journey between the Orinoco and the Amazon by Redmond O’Hanlon
Penguin, 368 pp, £3.99, October 1989, ISBN 0 14 011900 0
- Our Grandmothers’ Drums: A Portrait of Rural African Life and Culture by Mark Hudson
Secker, 356 pp, £12.95, June 1989, ISBN 0 436 20959 4
- Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma by Charles Nicholl
Secker, 320 pp, £12.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 436 30980 7
In The Orators W.H. Auden classified bird buffs as ‘excessive lovers of self’: they illustrate the psychological type who is ‘unable to taste pleasure unless through the rare coincidence of naturally diverse events, or the performance of a long and intricate ritual’. Redmond O’Hanlon sees his own career as a bird-watcher originating along similar lines to this but rather more romantically. It all began when he was four and three-quarters. A mistle-thrush dropped half of an empty eggshell at his feet on the lawn of the Wiltshire Vicarage where he grew up: ‘Being unaware, at the time, of the empty cosmos, of the unfeelingness of causal connections, I concluded that this message of brown and purple blotches on a background of browny-white had been intended just for me.’
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 1 · 11 January 1990
From John Ryle
In his review of Redmond O’Hanlon’s In Trouble Again (LRB, 7 December 1989), Mark Ford speaks of a journey of exploration ‘in search of a remote and ferocious tribe called the Yanomami … reputedly one of the most aggressive peoples on earth’. The Yanomami, according to the reviewer, ‘are said to’ practise female infanticide; their young men engage in bloody ritual battles with gigantic clubs; they ingest hallucinogenic snuff and marvel at polaroid photographs. After one day in a Yanomami village, we are told, the author of the book is forced to withdraw because he cannot satisfy their demands for presents of food …
For the sake of those interested in the actual lives of tribal peoples, as opposed to their role as topoi in travel narratives, it should be pointed out that O’Hanlon has not been the only unwelcome visitor to Yanomami territory recently. Other arrivals, Brazilian garimpeiros – miners in search of gold – have been less tractable – in fact, they have shown themselves to be far more ferocious than the Yanomami. Their invasion of Yanomami lands has resulted, during the last six months, in the deaths of at least four Yanomami, including women and children, at the hands of heavily-armed garimpeiros in the vicinity of illegal airstrips in Roraima. The miners outnumber the Yanomami, whose total population in Brazil is under ten thousand. The Brazilian Government response to incidents of this kind has been to expel, not the miners, but the Catholic missionaires, anthropologists and medical teams working with the Yanomami, who are their only source of outside help. The action of the Government simultaneously obstructs the reporting of further acts of violence and increases the exposure of the indigenous communities to the diseases brought by outsiders, to which Yanomami have little resistance. Judicial orders for the removal of miners from Yanomami areas have not been acted on.
The reality of life for the Yanomami is that they are no longer remote and by no means invincibly warlike. On the contrary, like other hitherto sequestered Amerindian groups, they are fatally vulnerable to sudden incursions from outside. The recent visit to Europe by Davi Yanomami, one of the very few Portuguese-speaking Yanomami, and Claudia Andujar, a Brazilian who has spent the last decade working in their defence, has begun to draw international attention to their current plight. Those concerned with the fate of tribal peoples as their worlds are penetrated by the forces of capital should help maintain the momentum of the Yanomami defence campaign. They can do this by supporting Amnesty International and Survival International in their efforts to confront the Brazilian Government and the newly-elected President of Brazil with the serious consequences of their predecessors’ actions towards the Yanomami and the urgent need for a change of policy.
John Ryle
London W11
