Elizabeth Zelvin
has visited us before. I asked her back
to celebrate her new novel, Voyage
of Strangers, about what really happened
when Columbus discovered America. She is the author of the Bruce Kohler mystery
series. Her stories have been nominated three times for the Agatha Award and
for the Derringer Award for Best Short Story. Liz is a psychotherapist who
lives in New York City and is a valued colleague in the New York mystery
writing community.
Annamaria Alfieri
Voyage of Strangers is not a mystery, though it's the sequel
to a mystery short story that appeared in Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine. It is,
however, crime fiction. The protagonist and his adventures are fictional. The
crimes--rape, murder, auto da fe, and
genocide, among others--really took place. Voyage
of Strangers is set in cultures that no longer exist: Spain and Hispaniola from
1493 to 1495. While life in fifteenth-century Spain is well documented, from
the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to the horrors of the
Inquisition, the Taino culture that Columbus and his men discovered and
destroyed is gone. Only in recent years have Dominicans and Puerto Ricans
carrying Taino DNA begun a painstaking reconstruction of the Taino language and
culture from the fragments that remain.
So how does a
novelist write about it? Given the limited primary sources, my method was much like
that of today's self-identified Taino: fragments and imagination. Part of the
creative process consisted of transposing my own experiences to the characters
and settings in my story. While this is true for any writer of fiction, I found
that I could take some risks, some imaginative leaps, in interpreting what I
read about one traditional culture in the Caribbean because I had some
familiarity with traditional cultures in West Africa, where I lived as a Peace
Corps Volunteer in the 1960s.
As I discovered
when I started researching Columbus's second voyage, there really is remarkably
little primary source material. A lot of the "facts" we take for
granted are interpretations, stated with enough authority and repeated often
enough that eventually they are no longer questioned even by historians. For
example, take the Carib tribe called the Canibale. Yes, that's where we got the
word "cannibal." Did they really eat human flesh? Kirkpatrick Sale,
author of Christopher Columbus and the
Conquest of Paradise, says even the possibility was mentioned only twice in
contemporary accounts of all four voyages: when a Spaniard reported "the
neck of a man was found cooking in a pot," and on another occasion,
"a human arm ready for roasting on a spit."
Sale says
"it is hard to think that European seamen would be able to distinguish a
disembodied neck or arm as distinctly human, and not from a monkey, say, or a
dog, and in any case there is no evidence that they were to be eaten...Both seem to be simple examples
of people who, when primed with dark presuppositions, find what they expect to
find. That is all there is. There is no further support for the legend of Carib
cannibalism in any of the firsthand accounts of the Caribs over the next
century".
I chose to
believe Sale. I also found convincing his statement that "whenever the
people of an island were submissive or at least nonhostile, the Spanish
declared that they were the Tainos, or good Indians, and whenever they were
deemed to be hostile or at least defensive, they were said to be the warlike
Caribs, the bad Indians." Remember that the Spaniards made no attempt to
learn the Taino language, but relied on captive "interpreters" who
knew no Spanish. Remember, too, that when Columbus first sailed, he expected to
find the Indies--Japan or China--and prepared to communicate with the Great
Khan by bringing along a scholar of ancient Hebrew. He never lost his belief
that these rich and civilized lands were just a little farther on and that he
had explored "the Indies," not a New World.
Having made my
sailor protagonist, Diego, an outsider--a marrano,
a secret Jew--I was able to express my skepticism about some of Columbus's
beliefs and my horror at some of the Spaniards' actions, through him. I allowed
his Taino friend Hutia to explain to him that when the Taino talked about
cannibalism, they were just kidding. I based this interpretation on something I
experienced myself when I lived in Côte d'Ivoire in Africa. Two of my Ivoirien
friends, who were educated city dwellers one generation removed from
traditional villages, came from different tribes. "Your grandfather ate
people!" was a common joking insult between them.
Furthermore, I
wouldn't be surprised if the Taino told these invaders with their terrifying
horses and metal weapons whatever they thought they wanted to hear. They
certainly did that about the presence of gold on Hispaniola. The island had a
relatively small amount of alluvial gold washed down from the mountains. This
convinced Columbus that there must be a mine--the legendary Cibao--and he
didn't want to hear that belief contradicted. Many Taino were killed or
enslaved for their inability to provide an abundance of gold that simply did
not exist.
