Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It arose from the incapacity to manage the unmanageable, from the
sense that self-objectification was always already elusive, from the onto-
logical conditions of becoming Other, from the hunger of the Black Cai-
man that it reflected and instantiated. Moreover, shame was contagious
and it was no coincidence that shame began pursuing me just as I began
to pursue it. Doing anthropology among Indians in the Chaco made you
some kind of parasite; you just had to work out precisely what kind you
wanted to be, or better yet not begin the journey in the first place. And I
had even more difficulty identifying of what, precisely, I felt ashamed.
14
Like Primo Levi, I could find no obvious transgressions beyond the great-
est transgression of them all: the very act of being there, of witnessing
that to which it is impossible to reliably bear witness. It took me a long
time to realize that shame was a riddle without an answer and that this
was the only answer to discover. And I was not alone.
“Everything that was me was insufficient,” wrote Miguel Bartolomé,
who slept with a pistol under his pillow and had nightmares of malevo-
lent spirits during his three month stay among Garaigosode in 1969.
15
At least four others I know of gave themselves over fully to the embrace
of the Black Caiman, fits of skin rending insanity or depression followed
with a shot in the head, a car driven off a hillside, the fetishes of tradi-
tion and ethics feeble talismans against such shameful impotence. All
the decent ones felt it to some degree, the darkness beckoning with rage,
madness, despair.
One morning while I was staying in Filadelfia, Iodé returned to the
garage carrying the groceries she had bought with the night's earnings.
She offered me a little plastic box of yogurt. I thanked her and refused.
She was upset. “Why are you ashamed of being my friend?” she asked.
“Eat this. It is not bad. I want to adopt you in the old way; you will be my
older brother. I will be your sister, your little-bird-mother. Your whore-
mother.”
She handed me the yogurt again, and stretched out on the ground. My
face burning, I opened the carton and began to eat.
