Marc Nair

Over breakfast, Nacho tells us about the village’s chief ‘chemist’, Tigre, who is responsible for tasting each of the 40 drums of fermented sugarcane alcohol that the village is preparing for the ceremony. These are giant metal containers, eight of which were newly purchased in Columbia at a cost of almost $1,000 USD. They take their ceremonies very seriously.

The sugarcane is first pressed flat using noisy motors (that start up at 2am) and then is boiled and fermented along with cocoa, coffee or corn. The chemist will test if the alcohol is fermented enough, whether it is too sweet or needs to be sweetened further. While they started the bulk of the fermentation two weeks ago, top-ups may occasionally be required, hence the late sugarcane pressing. Only when the chemist has tasted all the jugs would he be able to ascertain and pronounce the exact date of the chicha. Alcohol drives the ceremony (as it should)!

There is such clarity to the light here. Everything sings in Technicolor. Is it the absence of pollution? Or the isolation that allows the eye to focus and marvel at even the simplest things? The Guna certainly know how to use colour. It is everywhere, in their blankets and hammocks, in the intricacies of the mola fabric and certainly in the colourfully painted boats and houses.

There is a special breed of dog in Armila, called tipo perro, roughly translated to any kind of dog. Mongrels live everywhere. They are the most faithful, the kindest and the most obedient.

Luis tells us that in San Pedro de Atacama, nobody is allowed to dance. Musicians’ play and people get up, and the band has to tell people to stop and sit down. Maria chimes in: A long time ago in Iceland, there was a law against dancing. And it means that today, nobody really knows how to dance. Icelanders are people who stand. Despite being a performance artist, Maria remains self-conscious when she moves. She is still herself, vulnerable. But the focus is on care and consent and not on pushing the body through its boundaries.

Today, Nacho talks to us about the various ceremonies that girls go through in the community.

When God, Baba Dummad,  made the world, everything he did was hand in hand with a woman, the Great Mother, Nana Dummad. This is the starting point for the value of the woman and the main reason why ceremonies are focused on women. 

When the Earth was created, Baba created another world and told Nana to stay on Earth with humans and watch over them. That is why the earth is figured as feminine. When humans die, they will go to the other world. In their life on earth, everything is preordained by Baba and Nana.

There are four ceremonies in the life of a Guna woman:

1. Eko Ina (needle + chicha)
Perforation of the nasal septum (two months) The whole community is invited. This is a one day affair. It is done using a single needle. Chicha (fermented sugarcane) is drunk in copious amounts. The ceremony is done in the chicha house (a kind of religious communal building) Men and women are separated. After three toasts, the little girl is brought with a dance to the middle where the mother and the piercer await. The scream of the baby when the septum is pierced is a sign of happiness for everyone. This is a compulsory ceremony for all girls.

2. Ina Suit
This happens when the girl is seven years old, which is the middle age between being a child and a young woman. This involves a long chicha, over three days. The girl’s family prepares for this for two years. The community helps the family out to house the guests and provide fish. El Cantule, (The Cantor) is the MC, he sings different names for the girl. The mother will have to pick the name of the daughter. It will be a Guna name, just like a baptism). This is an optional ceremony. Usually, families who are better off will undergo this ceremony.

La Ayate is the woman who will cut the girls’ hair. Only women are allowed around the girl. There are various ‘event highlights’ over the three days. A communal spirit is evident, with people sharing biscuits, cigarettes and beer. Armila is the only community that opens itself to foreigners to experience this. 

3. Celebrating Puberty
The third ceremony is to celebrate puberty. It is obligatory. After the girl’s first menstruation, her mother will lick her in the fish. The parents will go house to house and ask the men to cut leaves and bring fish, while the women get water. The father gathers wood to build a small house for the girl. She will stay there for seven days. On the seventh day, people enter the house of the girl, put water into the tortuma (a small bowl made from coconut husk) wash the girl eight times (because the sun has eight brothers). They then use jagua, a kind of pigment, like henna, to cover the girl. This is a symbol of purification, a representation of mother earth. For example, when it rains and the river rises, it brings the overgrowth from the jungle and throws it into the sea. This is is the same as the woman. As she prepares to be fertile, the water is a kind of washing away of the detritus.

4. Becoming a woman
The last ceremony takes place when the girl is around 15 years old. This the age when she is deemed ready to become a woman. Her hair is cut short and she will be ready to leave for further studies and even get married. She will also start to wear the traditional Guna clothing. 

This last ceremony isn’t obligatory but it is important. It helps to keep the family, and by extension the village, together.

The other fascinating bit of history is the process of arranged marriages, which used to be the norm but are no longer practiced.

On arranged marriage

In the past, arranged marriage was the norm and the decision was always made by the parents of both families. The reputation of the family was always considered, not just the man himself (in Guna society, the woman’s family holds more power). The man would move into his wife’s family home after marriage.

In the traditional marriage ceremony, the woman would begin being completely covered in a chair. The man would then be placed in a hammock. The woman would be on top of him. The family would then swing the hammock and sing about different (deep) things, such as the duality of life and the beauty of nature. The couple will then be washed and they will return to the hammock. This process will be repeated four times. After that, everybody leaves except for the man’s father, who occupies a hammock on one side, while his mother is in a hammock on the other side of the couple. The couple are not allowed to consummate until the process is completed.

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the woman’s father will bring the man, together with his machete, to the mountain. The man has to chop 100 (yes, 100!) trees. And he has to bring four of them down to his wife’s kitchen. While he’s there the woman goes to take her husband’s things back to her house. When the man returns, she will receive him with a dish of bananas at his house. They are given a hammock in the corner of the man’s house. Everything, from birth, to life to death, happens in the hammock.

Time here is defined by mealtimes and larger village events. We are apprised of what will happen the next day just the day before. Schedules are made to be malleable. Today we are looking forward to welcome Maria, the last member of the residency. She couldn’t make the flight on Thursday because it was full. I think there was space for no more than seven passengers on the plane.

Today is also a birthday in the village and there will be a fire, which I believe will be a communal gathering. There will also be beer. This last is significant because beer is generally only sold and consumed on the weekend. The Guna are very strict on this. While foreigners aren’t subject to the same restrictions, nevertheless we feel we should observe them as well out of a sense of solidarity.

Part of breakfast this morning is arepas, a kind of flatbread made of corn. There are many different ways of making corn, and Aida, Nacho’s daughter-in-law, fries the palm-sized puffs. They are like flattened muffins, slightly grainy in texture and utterly delicious. We eat them with a sunny side up, dipping the arepas in the runny yolk. As usual, there is fruit. This morning it is pineapple and oranges.

Nacho and Luz head off to Puerto Obaldía to wait for the plane that will be bringing Maria. I decide to shave my head. It is fuzzy. Luis helps me boil a pan of water, and I shave in full view of Nacho’s household. The kids gather around, fascinated by my headblade, while the novelty of a foreigner never seems to wear off for the children. They are polite though, never invasive.

The children here are magical. The village has 200 children out of a population of about 600. The children are everywhere, running around from sea to shore to hut. They are insatiable but also highly trained, helping to take care of younger siblings, carrying wooden washing boards down to the river and even helping to cook in the kitchen. A far cry from children in cities, who are thrown from school to enrichment class with hardly a chance to breathe. It’s all about assessment and over-learning. At night in Singapore, anxious parents gather outside enrichment centers, desperate to hear from teachers about what new skill the students have learned that day.

In Armila, children swim in the sea, unbound. No one watches over them. Learning is a kind of diffusion, watching and mimicking their elders. The end of the world could come, and methinks Armila would carry on without a care.

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The weather these days is changeable. Morning is bright and blazing, the right amount of cloud in the sky. Tourists would call this paradise. By lunchtime, distant thunder speckles the horizon and a light rain begins to fall. It keeps us fluid, uncertain. What we want to do tomorrow may not be what we end up doing. It also keeps us shapeless, ideas slip in and out. For someone so fixed on projects, I find myself productive and yet loose, happy to read or chat with the others

I am in awe of Ocean Vuong’s memoir/long poem/novella, ‘On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous,’ One of five books I have brought with me. His writing is dense with detail yet twists into unexpected turns of phrase. Here is just one example:

“The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.”

The first statement is a humdinger. Deep and infinitely reflective. Then he goes on to enact a memory, one that pulsates with war and death and loss. Something absolute and heart wrenching. He offers just three details about her, how and where Grandma knew her, what her sandals were made from and how she died. Then he ends this memory by comparing erasure to a ruin that does not exist, and finally comparing it to a language.

How does one even write to that point? And all this as an aside in a passage where he recounts his journey home after learning about the death of his friend and lover, Trevor. It is a passage about silences; he doesn’t go to Trevor’s house and when he returns to his own house he doesn’t speak to his mother in Vietnamese, but only in English, a tongue distanced.

It is an implicit form of narrativity and meaning making that is rare indeed. I feel absolutely pedestrian by comparison. Ocean Vuong sets a bar that ceases to exist the moment he writes.

Maria is a trained concert pianist, just like Luis. She is now a performance artist and speaks Spanish. Only Caroline and I don’t speak the language. Even Charlotte, from France, understands though she can’t speak. It does mean that certain swathes of the conversation pass me by, so I focus instead on gesture and tone. The lilt and heft of voice.

In the afternoon, Nacho begins the first of his informal lectures. This first one is on how the Guna people came to have their own autonomous region. It is an amazing story of grit, foresight and a refusal to compromise. It also emphasizes the importance of not giving up on the land you have been given.

History of the Guna (as told by Nacho Crespo)

The Guna had a large territory back when Panama was part of Columbia. Guna territory stretched from Shark Cape to Carti. The territory was called San Blas Islands, also known as the Guna Yala.  

When Panama became a republic, they wanted to protect their borders, so they brought people from Gabon to be police men and to settle the Guna territory.

The government wanted to integrate the Guna territory, but it became an imposition on the Guna,. They had to give up their language, clothing and rights. In return, they were taxed and were subject to violence. They were even forced to adopt Roman Catholicism as their faith. 

In 1925, the Guna Yala declared war on the national police who were stationed in their territory. This did not come out of the blue. The Guna had spent 12 years observing the police. On 25 Feb, 1925, the Guna attacked during a carnival, when the police were relaxed and not on their guard. The Panamanian government sent an army, but the Guna had shrewdly made a deal with the US government beforehand to back their revolution. The Panamanian government closed the border with the Guna, but they were self-sufficient and resisted for 13 years. 

In 1938, Panama decided they had to make the Guna Yala part of the country, but the latter insisted that they need ed to have, in writing and in law, a defined autonomous region. 

Notable highlights in Guna history:
1968 – The first time a president in Panama involved the working class and indigenous people in politics
1980 – Two MPS who are Gunas and 5 representatives who are Guna Yala were in parliament 
1997 – a Guna MP demanded that San Bas be officially changed to Guna Yala (which means Guna territory). 

There are 49 communities of the Guna Yala. Each one has 5 representatives. They meet as a General Congress two times a year. To develop an independent economy, the Guna started to build a tourism infrastructure in the country, sending their young people overseas to gain expert knowledge. The Guna also want to revise the education system: the first three years in school would be taught in Guna, not Spanish. There is no private property for the Guna. By law, you cannot sell land to another foreigner.

The three main tools that the Guna use to confront the world are language, religion and education. They learn the language wherever they go, understand faith and commit themselves to learning about another country. But education beyond the Guna comarcha, which was seen as a tool, became a threat because of brain drain. T

The Panamanian government found traces of gold on Guna land and wanted to mine, but they were stopped. The Guna believed that was is under the ground also belongs to them, this informs their mythology. 

Tourism is another double-edged sword for the Guna. If the Guna are poor, they are poor by choice, because land is abundant. The road that connected the Guna at Carti brought tourism and created a big impact . On many islands, their way of life changed and the Guna forgot their old ways. Money brings corruption and greed.

If a man doesn’t have a horse, he has no spirit If a group of people have no land, they have no spirit. 

Guna Proverb

At dinner, the fish we are eating (each one has a small whole fish) was caught by a blind fisherman. After dinner, Nacho opens a bottle of Abuelo rum and we share shots topped with a squeeze of lime, freshly plucked by Luis from the tree behind the house.

There are bottles of Abuelo rum on the beach, and this leads us into a general discussion about the drinking habits of the Guna. Apparently, alcohol is tightly controlled here. The congress buys cartons of beer for USD 11 from a small duty-free store on the very edge of Panama. The beer, MF (Luz jokes that it stands for mother fucker), is only for export, but the Guna have wrangled an agreement to buy a set number of cartons each week, around five. The beer is then sold to different houses, like a co-op, at USD$15 a carton. Each house then sells a can at $1 each. This helps to divvy up the profits and ensures that no one family has a monopoly on beer. And the profit the council makes is used to affect repairs and maintain the village. Drinking is generally allowed only on weekends and drinking on the streets (when it isn’t a festival) is frowned upon. This weekend, the village is really quiet as everyone is gearing up for the chicha ceremony.

Armila

The day begins in rain. It turns the ground muddy, holds us within the long silence of the rising river. The morning passes in cups of coffee. I write a little, trying to capture the sense of the city seeping out of me. I have not shat in three days. Perhaps this is the body still trying to hold on to its history.

In the rain, 
I watch the world seep out of me. 

It bleeds, slowly. 
Days have to pass before the post world becomes
the past world, the old world. 

It is hours of forgetting minor disasters,
sudden silence after the downpour. 
 
The rain mixes with shouts of children,
running games with no head or tail
a melange of wrestling in the soft mud. 

Rain streaks every face, tips glistening 
leaves, keeps the spiders indoors. 

I make a small sketch of a wall of Nacho’s house. The main subject is a television encased in a kind of cupboard. I have seen idols kept in such enclosures before, and assumed the day before, when it was closed and locked, that it contained something of religious significance. This is, to my knowledge, the first sketch I have ever done!

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I suppose the television is its own god and still keeps its devotees all over the world.

When the rain stops, I walk to the beach to find more subjects for my Plastic Ghosts series. The pickings are equally varied, and rich, as the day before. It never ceases to amaze me, looking at the range of things that end up in the ocean. You would think that with 70% of our bodies filled with water, we would have more respect or even solidarity with the ocean.

After lunch and another downpour, we take a walk out of the village and into the outskirts of the jungle. It is an uneventful walk, save for the mud and some beautiful tiny blue seeds that I want to come back and collect.

We end up where the river forks in three directions. Upstream is where water is collected and piped to the community. Straight ahead is the path into the mountains, and following the stream downriver would meander away from the village and back into jungle.

I record a few tracks of the flowing water, bringing the mic low as it rushes over the rocks, moving it closer and then further away to mimic a phaser effect. Sound is always a useful layer in performance.

Before dinner, we head over to meet Nacho, who is back from his trip, at his house. He is a natural born storyteller, drawing his audience in effortlessly. He asks us for fragments from our own language, writing them down as he hears the words and then repeating it back to us almost faithfully. He regales us with tales from his life, of the many countries he has visited and the many beautiful girls he has met. This is an adventurer in the truest sense of the word. We are sitting in a house that he built from scratch with his hands. Men like Nacho are few and far between in the world .

I give him the numbers one to ten in Mandarin, then in Malay. Malay is a lot easier for him to grasp. And he starts to compare some of the words to Guna. 

Satu (one) – a small fish caught in the river
Dua (two) – the femur bone
Lima (five) – a whetstone, used to sharpen knives

Coincidences, accidents of sounds. Perhaps that is all language is; a concatenation of various shapes in the mouth, given meaning through time and chance, through use and usefulness.

Armila

I am woken by a human alarm clock around 5am. He walks around the houses yelling for people to wake. Today is a big day. Armila is hosting Juegos Florales (Floral Games), a day of competition amongst various schools in the district.

The human alarm clock is replaced shortly after by a very loud radio blaring the latest in Latin pop. It is enough to send me reeling from bed.

I go for a walk along the beach before breakfast. The day is mild and cloudy. I walk between large hacks of driftwood speckled by plastic bottles and styrofoam. A little further on, past the women washing clothes, the beach begins to stink with an accumulation of trash. It smells like a dumpsite. Trash rolls in from the Atlantic and lands on the shoreline of Armila. It is a double insult to this community who has eschewed so much of the modern world. And in return this is what the world has to offer. Not support for their schools, not cooperatives for the local artisans, but castoffs from capitalism.

After breakfast, a brief chance to connect to the Internet. It’s a dollar for a thirty-minute chance to connect to the world beyond. Subject to the weather in Panama City, of course. Only WhatsApp text messages make it through. Even emails can’t be opened.

We have been invited to observe the school competition. It was supposed to start at 8am, but at 10am, the only thing that’s going on is a drawing competition and a spelling bee. I am asked to dictate 50 words to children, reading them out in English and offering a mangled translation in Spanish. At least I learned a few words along the way!

The competition itself, which takes place in the Congress Hall, a kind of communal community space, is a mix of poetry recitation, singing and dancing acts for kids from four different schools. 

Later in the afternoon, we sit with our guides, Luz and Luis, to give them a sense of our plans for the residency and what we would like to achieve or work on.

It would be good to try my hand at sketching, I think, though in the end I might just default to photographs. I’m thinking of making a series of images of found plastic objects on the beach and writing poems in response to them.

Enroute

A large storm rolled in right after breakfast. The skyline quickly became obscured. A dark wall of cloud hefted its mass over the bay and dumped a boatload of rain on the Casco Viejo. The rain abates in time to grab an Uber to the regional airport.

At the airport I meet Verónica from Puerto Rico, Charlotte from France, Berenike from Belgium, Caroline from the U.S.A. and Nacho Crespo, who’s going to be our local Guna host. He bids us a warm welcome but has to stay in the city on business. He’ll join us in a couple of days.

The plane I’m on is tiny. So tiny that some SUVS are probably larger. Everything is weighed, including the passengers. The plane, which flies to Puerto Obaldía three times a week, is heavy with boxes of goods, letters and indeterminate parcels. For many people, this is the postal service. There is no road from Panama City. It ends at Carti. And the only way from there is a bumpy eight-hour boat ride. No wonder a large crowd was waiting for the plane as we roared in just above the sea, and skidded to a stop.

Puerto Obaldía is hot and rather barren. We stop for a welcome beer before heading to the boat that will take us to Armila. We also have to go through customs, because we are on the border with Columbia, a thirty-minute boat ride away.

The first glimpse of Armila is that of a sleepy hamlet. Narrow one-man skiffs skim the waves; children splash around in the shallow water and the bass from a Latin tune carries over to our speedboat. It’s an unseasonably hot day, which makes everything pop in colour.

The rest of the day is a haze of explanations from our guides Luz and Luis, who are accomplished artists.

Luz is a visual artist and Luis is a musician who can play just about any instrument. But jet lag overpowers my best intentions, and I am in bed well before 9pm.

Panama City

After commuting for 33 hours, I arrive in Panama City in the evening. There’s just enough time to walk around Casco Viejo, the old city, which at first glance feels rather unfriendly with its short streets and uneven lighting.

Large patches of shadow challenge the pedestrian. Everyone looks wary and walks quickly. My decision to sling my camera doesn’t seem too wise. But far from being run down, many buildings have been restored and gentrified into quiet restaurants pulsing with mood lighting. They look expensive, even from the outside. I am on an artist’s budget, so I head for the Coca-Cola Cafe, a recommendation from my hostel. Inside, a pair of cops are sat at the bar, instantly negating the unfriendly African men who glared when I walked though the doors. The cafe is homely and old-fashioned in that mix of American diner and family restaurant. A Coca-Cola girl smiles down on all of us, bestowing fizzy life and love from a cooler of glass Cola bottles.

There are riots sparking in Bolivia and Barcelona on the television. The menu is understandable, but I thought my translation app would allow me to converse. Not so. The quick-fire Spanish I overhear catches me off guard and I have to end every interaction with a pathetic “no habla Espanol.”

I decide to walk a little beyond the pretty buildings after dinner. The streets quickly shift to being a lot grimier. Rough looking youth loiter on street corners, sharing space with old men declaiming outside family-owned mercados (markets) and corner rent-a-cops, hard-eyed and unsmiling.

I pass three instances of religious fervour; a man preaching to a bunch of bored pigeons in a park, another man, seen through clear glass doors, holding a mid-week service and the last the impassioned sounds of prayer and tongues in Spanish coming from the ruins of a building. An enterprising pastor has set up a PA system and he was busy praying for and delivering people from within half-finished masonry. Not all of God’s work is done in the light.