Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  Finally Paul said, “We’re at that age where we have to ask ourselves: Am I going to start a family, or remain a bachelor?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. No Name Creek sounded especially loud that morning, flush with the previous day’s showers; it flowed accusingly over its stones.

  “I’m not sure I want a family,” Paul continued. “I’m thirty seven. I feel like not having kids is a way of fighting.”

  “Fighting what?”

  Paul went into a head-tilted, toe-tapping, thinking smile and finally said, “Fighting against … Help me out here, amigo.”

  I only vaguely glimpsed what Paul was driving at. Then he lit up and said, “It’s when they really get you!”

  “They?”

  “The advertisers, the marketers, the culture. They kinda-sorta have you when it is the stuff you have to have. But they’ve got you by the balls when it’s the stuff your vulnerable kids just have to have.”

  He squinted toward the woods, as if listening to the creek, and continued: “I’ve got a friend, about forty, who’s got two kids. He says to me, ‘Paul, if you don’t have kids, you’re not in the game.’ Not in the game? What game? You go from comparing jobs and salaries to comparing what school your kids got into.”

  He talked about how having kids in any society, anywhere in the world, is a way of saying that society is good. Or at least good enough. Worth perpetuating. He wasn’t sure whether he felt ours was.

  “But what about you?” he finally said. “Are you going to get married, have kids? What about Leah?”

  I looked away from Paul and at the 12 × 12. It stood there staring at me, silently, simply. A fixed point in a swirling universe.

  So I told Paul that I had a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amaya.

  He looked a little startled. After a moment, he shifted position in his chair and said with a kind expression: “Talk to me, my friend. We’ve got time.”

  I hesitated. My daughter was in Bolivia, with her mom, and this was the longest I’d been away from her. I thought about her every day, saw her expressions in Allison Thompson’s face, and kissed her photo each night before going to bed. I didn’t like to talk about it. I kept my love for her close to my chest because talking about her was like reopening a wound. Just as I had been repressing my anger toward the three gangs that had attacked me, I’d been repressing a confusion of feelings about my fatherhood. Beyond the wound of physical separation was a sense of failure: I hadn’t lived up to the ideal my Catholic parents and I had of what a father, a family should look like.

  Deeper still, the stakes of a flattening world had gone up exponentially since her birth. What had before been my life’s work was now a question of what kind of world my daughter would inhabit, a world whose future appeared bleaker by the day.

  The wind whistled a little in the trees; No Name Creek lowered its voice. I started talking.

  MY DAUGHTER, Amaya Powers Cortez, emerged from her mom’s womb in Bolivia. Amaya (“beloved first daughter” in Quechua and “spirit” in Aymara) took her first breath in a hospital surrounded by palm trees whipping and swaying furiously in an angry sur that had blown up from Antarctica, slicing a chill through the tropical heat. One of the four doctors attending my daughter’s birth handed the newborn to her mom, Ingrid, who then passed her to me. I felt the purest love imaginable stir inside, things I had absolutely never felt before.

  But I wasn’t to dally. In Bolivia the baby belongs not only to Mommy and Daddy but to a web of extended family. I passed Amaya to Mama Martha, her maternal grandmother, who passed her to Papa Mike. Then she was passed to Tio Eduardo, Tia Alison, and Tia Melissa. Each person kissing her pure white forehead, her red hair, looking into her gray-green eyes — she was a carbon copy of me, looking nothing like any of them, but nobody minded a bit. She was part of la familia. We then ate quail eggs and drank champagne, pouring the first few drops onto the floor as a gift to Pachamama, Mother Earth.

  My own parents became “Mama Anna” and “Pop Bill,” and despite the initial shock to their values, they played those roles with genuine love and grace. So, essentially, my daughter was born with three mothers and three fathers, and that was just the beginning: today, I can’t count the number of her Bolivian relatives, and of the many neighbors and friends who love her as much as any relative.

  “¿Dónde está nuestra Amaya?” — “Where’s our Amaya?” — the neighbors would say when Amaya was a year old. Ingrid or Mama Martha would pass her over the little fence and she’d disappear into their house for hours. I’d hear my daughter squealing with laughter.

  Little red-haired Amaya grew up with her mom, extended family, and a slew of neighbors in a kind of kunda household. My mother came down to Bolivia several times and joined in with the clan. Amaya’s hands and feet hardly touched the ground that first year — she was always in somebody’s arms. I lived in my own house and visited her all the time and was accepted as part of the family.

  From a Western perspective the whole arrangement was extraordinarily nontraditional, but it worked beautifully. Ingrid — a strongly independent twenty-six-year-old Bolivian biologist — and I decided from the beginning on two things, both grounded in that peculiarly Latin idea of destiny: First, for a variety of interwoven reasons, we decided that our fate was not to remain together as a couple, whether in a traditional marriage or not. And second, we considered without question that we had been destined to bring Amaya into the world, and though we would likely live on different continents at various points in our daughter’s life, we would do everything in our power to give her the best possible life.

  During the first two years of Amaya’s life, we took her all around Bolivia, which is to say into places of great natural beauty. Bolivia is three times the size of the UK and has only nine million people. It’s a world without edges, one of V. S. Naipaul’s “half-made societies.” This is not a bad thing. It means the other half still belongs to Pachamama and still breathes. It means that the other half might still be left alone, instead of slashed and mined, produced, packaged, marketed, and sold. It means it’s still soft.

  Amaya wandered among the giant fern trees of Amboro National Park, in the shadow of a jaguar-shaped Inca temple, as I scribbled away in the artist’s retreat where I was on a fellowship finishing my book Whispering in the Giant’s Ear. On the other side of Bolivia, in the famous Madidi National Park, rare monkeys came down from the trees into our canoe and scurried over to the eighteen-month-old Amaya. Fearlessly she reached out her tiny hand, and one of the smaller monkeys grabbed it. Amaya spoke to the monkeys, gesturing with her other hand to the trees, and then pointed at herself and said “Amaya.” They listened and then responded. Amaya argued with them about something but then broke out in a grin and took their hands in hers.

  Around Bolivia we traveled, Amaya making friends with humans and other species. Ingrid and I were constantly awed by the way our daughter brought joy into so many people’s lives, just by her very presence. And everywhere we went, the rainforests, cloud forests, raging rivers, and Andean peaks seemed a perfectly natural, fresh world to grow up in. Bolivia seemed insulated, protected by low human population density, strong indigenous traditions, and geography, with the seemingly impenetrable Amazon on one side and the towering Andes on the other. Yet, as was happening around the world, the rainforest, that strange green beast, was being slain. It got worse each year. The very monkeys that befriended Amaya began fleeing into the last remnants of their reserves. I knew that unless the global economic system causing this destruction was fundamentally changed, Amaya’s children would not have any at all left to enjoy.

  I BEGAN TO SEE MORE CLEARLY in my work that, along with the forests, the Flat World was eliminating the people who live in them, rapidly spreading across the globe, the pulses on the earth’s heart monitor ceasing. Flatlining. Of the sixty-eight hundred languages spoken now, half will be dead in fifty years — about a tongue per week. When languages are forgotten, the culture itself s
oon follows, as if the memory of what it means to be of a certain people can be expressed only in that language. Next on the wait list for oblivion are the Amungme of Indonesia, Paraguay’s Enxet, and Kenya’s Ogiek. Within Bolivia, tribes like the Pacahuara, Araona, Uru-Chipaya, and Weenhayek are also on the way out. The villain most often cited is the spread of global capitalism, including the impact of television.

  As a father, I now felt the stakes of my work had sharply increased. I loved Amaya deeply and wanted the world she would live in to be kind and fair. I felt, in an increasingly personal way, how the Flat World virus, by destroying nature, also destroys those societies living in harmony with nature, hundreds of them. In Amaya’s Bolivia, this was epitomized by a remarkable woman named Kusasu.

  In my two years of work in Noel Kempff National Park, in the remote east of Bolivia, I befriended Kusasu — the very last speaker of Guarasug’wé. I went to Kusasu’s village, Bella Vista, deep inside the park with the desire to help save her tribe from extinction. My project team and I had written it as an activity in our workplan as part of a much bigger aid and conservation project covering that region. The activity: “Cultural survival: Guarasug’wé.” Through reclaiming language and handicrafts and securing land for the final Guarasug’wé, perhaps we could apply defibrillators to bring the culture’s heartbeat back, to tease a stubborn blip from the flat line on the monitor.

  The trip to Bella Vista was magical. With a skinny park ranger named Misael, I raced up the Iténez River in a motorized canoe to the Guarasug’wé area. Light shimmered on the immense, beautiful river. The water reflected the sky and the thick forest around us. We sliced through the water, into a candy store of multicolored birds: wading in the shallows, soaring above, fleeing just ahead of us.

  I’d stayed up late the night before, poring over everything ever written about the Guarasug’wé — a grand total of one book, anthropologist Jurgen Riester’s Guarasug’wé: Chronicles of Their Last Days. Candles and incense ablaze, and Andean music on my stereo — charangos and walaychos strummed to the rhythm of wancara drums, overlaid with zampoña cane panpipes — my imagination followed Riester’s account into the Indian Territory under the Amazon’s seven skies, heading toward the Guarasug’wé Ivirehi Ahae, or “the land without evil.” I had also met in person with Dr. Riester, and he told me that for the Guarasug’wé, a canoe carries a person to the next world after death. Your soul travels up an Amazon River tributary like the one Misael and I traversed, toward a hole in the sky, finally slipping forever into the seven skies.

  For several hours, the sameness of the jungle wall seemed to be luring us toward that eventual hole in the sky. I pulled my green park ranger—issue rain jacket tight around me and closed my eyes, imagining the fish, caimans, and eels below and the jaguars and foxes lurking just out of sight. Finally we passed a structure. Then another. Huts made of thatch, with the roofs caved in; Misael told me that these were the places where Guarasug’wé used to live.

  We arrived in Bella Vista, climbing the embankment and heading to the schoolhouse. There we convened a meeting with the local community, to brainstorm strategies for cultural rebirth. “Yo soy Guarasug’wé!” — “I am Guarasug’wé!” — an old woman said. I realized who she was: Kusasu. She must have been eighty and had a long gray braid hanging over each shoulder. She sat with her spine straight, her firm jaw set, and her attractive, softly wrinkled face held high. Though she said this in Spanish, she quickly repeated the same thing in Guarasug’wé, which caused the dozen teenagers present to break into embarrassed giggling.

  Staying strong, answering the teenagers without scorn or raised voice, Kusasu said, “Why do you laugh? How can you remember your language if you do not speak it?” She then shifted her gaze to me, “You can call me sarí — grandmother.”

  With this, the teenagers laughed outright at her. The Guarasug’wé teens, in their shorts and T-shirts, had adopted the style of their adolescent counterparts in neighboring Brazil. Misael and I continued this ruse of a meeting, our presence revealing itself for what it was: a fool’s errand. Kusasu was the only one who spoke a decent smattering of the language. This wasn’t a culture; it was a hospice of fullblown AIDS patients on their last T cells.

  Still, Kusasu had a vitality about her, inviting us back to her home after the failed meeting. Her nephew had hunted a tapir in the forest, and the large animal was roasting on a spit. She pointed to a leafy plant that she said cures rheumatism; she pressed my palm against a tree and said their mattresses used to be made of this bark. Like the few words of Guarasug’wé she still spoke, Kusasu offered these things up to me proudly. Even under the direct barrage of mocking teenagers, she had been unwavering, certain of the language and customs she held tight to her chest.

  While eating later with Kusasu and several relatives in the open-air kitchen next to their hut, I asked the old woman about Ivirehi Ahae, the Amazon’s seven skies, and the canoe ride to the hole in the first sky. She told me that was what “the ancestors believed,” but real emotion broke only through when she said, “Sometimes I miss Mother.”

  She chewed a piece of tapir, staring off toward the river and the disappearing forest over the river, in Brazil. “It’s nice to have a mother,” she finally continued. “We would work all day, talking Guarasug’wé.” Her eyes closed, the rounded lids like moons, imagining the past.

  “Who can I speak the dialect with now?” she asked. “My children don’t want to speak it, and my aunts and cousins are dead. Dead! Sí, estamos perdiendo la cultura un poco” — “Yes, we’re losing a little bit of our culture.”

  With this understatement I completely lost my appetite. Excusing myself I walked down to the river and sat there in silence until well after sunset. That night I slept fitfully, getting up at dawn to a sunrise over the river and marshlands, pink freshwater dolphins surfacing, and a hawk flapping to the other side of the river with a large fish in its claws. The tragic story of Kusasu’s people wasn’t unlike that of the Amungme, the Enxet, and the Ogiek: a story of twenty-first-century races falling off the flat edge of the world.

  For centuries the Guarasug’wé lived in communal longhouses where everything was shared. Their simple houses were easily abandoned as they migrated through the Chiquitania into the Amazon on the parallel trail of good hunting grounds, the Ivirehi Ahae, or “land without evil.” The Guarasug’wé believed that our physical life formed part of a reenactment of the archetypal journey to Ivirehi Ahae. The prominence of Ivirehi Ahae in the Guarasug’wé worldview was magnified as Portuguese and Spanish colonists — and later the Brazilian and Bolivian governments — penned them into an ever-narrower area. Remarkably, the Guarasug’wé eluded these opponents right into contemporary times, as they continued their search, now with time running out, for the land without evil.

  But industrial capitalism dealt the coup de grâce in the mid-twentieth century. Massive quantities of rubber were needed for a growing fleet of motor vehicles in the United States and Europe, and some of that rubber was found in Guarasug’wé lands. Bolivian and Brazilian rubber tappers on the payroll of wealthy barons invaded, enslaving the Guarasug’wé. They were also given license to kill those who resisted.

  A few held on, abandoning one shelter after the next as they fled deeper into what is today Noel Kempff National Park. But soon there was nowhere else to go. The rubber tappers were everywhere, and all that was left was to surrender or fight. The last Guarasug’wé chief died in a standoff with well-armed and rubber-hungry invaders; their final shaman fell in a pool of blood soon after. The spine of their political and spiritual leadership cracked, and the last fifty or so Guarasug’wé, including a younger Kusasu, disbanded and huddled together in the homes Misael and I saw along the banks of the river — to die.

  Before I left Bella Vista, Kusasu took my lightly freckled Irish hand in her wrinkled, bony one. The sound of our canoe’s motor overpowered the swish of the river’s eddies. I knew, as Kusasu did, that there was really nothing to say, so I ju
st held her hand in mine for a very long moment — and then let it go.

  LIKE JACKIE, KUSASU IS A WISDOMKEEPER. Against odds, she has fought the good fight by simply being who and what she is, rather than letting herself be melted into an endless homogeny. Sometimes now, when I hold my daughter’s hand, I can feel Kusasu’s in the other. Amaya’s hand is tiny but growing, pink and soft; Kusasu’s is dark, calloused, thick with heavy veins. Amaya takes my hand loosely, telling me about her day. Kusasu’s grip is steadfast, insistent, and sometimes feels like a vise.

  I gave my daughter an indigenous name. Her mom and I kept up the tradition of letting her hair grow without a single haircut for her first two years and then cut it in a ruthuchiku, or traditional community haircutting ceremony. I teach Amaya about indigenous values of love of nature (about Pachamama). I even authored a children’s book titled Kusasu and the Tree of Life that portrays a Chiquitano girl who learns from the Guarasug’wé to integrate ecological consciousness into her Western university studies, bringing her skills back to her people. Is all of this enough? Amaya is a Flat World child who now lives in Santa Cruz, a globalizing city of two million inhabitants in Bolivia. She attends prekindergarten at Cambridge College, an English-speaking school.

  I look down at my hands: Amaya holds one, Kusasu the other, the creative edge being born and dying as the Flat World crushes in on us from all sides. For a moment, it seems possible that if we find more hands to hold, we can walk with strength into the flattening world, planting seeds of the old cultures for the young to cultivate. It is not that we want the world to remain static, unchanging forever. Change is inevitable, but is there a way to change without destroying cultural and ecological diversity? If we connect to others who want this new paradigm shift, it might be possible to bend the Flat World in enough isolated places and communities that they eventually push out and touch at their fragile, diverse edges.