Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (24 page)

Godo put me off temporarily. “Let me think about this, Daniel. When you leave for Porto Velho, I will give you my answer.”

A few weeks later, during a visit by Godo to the Pirahãs to trade for Brazil nuts, I boarded his boat to visit with him and drink some coffee.

“Daniel, I have thought a lot about your offer,” Godo began. “I cannot accept it. You see, I need my son to work with me. I am too poor to hire help. But if he leaves and learns all these new things, I am sure that he will stay in the city and never come back here. He will stay and make money in Porto Velho or Humaitá and not help his father.”

“But Godo,” I pleaded, uncontrollably meddling in his family affairs because I was shocked at this selfishness, “you are ruining Juarez’s future just for your own interests.”

I was really upset. I noticed that Juarez and his stepmother, Cesária, were looking askance at us from the back of the boat, their heads down.

“Maybe I am ruining his future. Or maybe I am not. Only God knows, Daniel. But I know that I need Juarez here with me, now.”

In complete exasperation, I gulped down the rest of my
cafezinho
(a small cup of strong black coffee) and excused myself to go back up the bank of the Maici to my house. I knew that Godo’s attitude was typical of most caboclos. Children were for the economic help of the parents. People didn’t waste their primary assets, their children. They were yours to do with what you wanted, and you wanted them to help you financially.

Years later Godo asked if he could still accept my offer. Juarez was in his midtwenties by this time. “No, Godo. Ricardo no longer lives in Porto Velho, so I don’t know anyone there now who could train him.”

Ultimately, Juarez’s story became a tragedy, common enough among the caboclos. As I was completing the first version of this chapter, I learned that he had been killed in a motorcycle accident on the Transamazon Highway. I have nearly been killed more than once riding my motorcycle down the Transamazon. I thought long sad thoughts about Juarez and the miserable end of the promising young life whose potential was never realized.

Summing up caboclo culture fails to do justice to their rich system of beliefs and way of life. Ultimately, the caboclos had come to play as much a role in my life as the Pirahãs, as I immersed myself more deeply into the world of the Amazon. Like the Pirahãs, they have been among my dearest friends and my most exasperating acquaintances.

But I couldn’t conclude even this cursory survey of them without mentioning their readiness to fight. Caboclos live by a code similar to that of John Bernard Books, John Wayne’s final movie character, in
The Shootist:
“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.” Amazonians will help you if you ask. They will give you their last food if you need it. But they are severely sensitive to slights or any sign that you think you are superior to them.

Sometimes just my white skin and foreignness offends this sensitivity. This is because many Brazilians have come to believe that Americans are racist and feel superior to all other peoples. Sometimes those offended by my mere presence feel it incumbent upon them to try to intimidate me for their friends to see.

Many times I have been asked,
“O que é você?”
(What are you?) or “What are you doing in Brazil?” or “What are you trying to steal from our country?”

The balance between showing toughness and using common sense is a vital one to acquire when traveling in the Amazon. The Pirahãs have learned this lesson. And so have the caboclos. Neither will back down if the odds are even. But both will avoid a fight if the odds are obviously against them. It took me some time to learn the lesson for myself, after committing mistakes that could have been very costly.

Once when my family was living with the tribe, an enormous boat, of a size normally seen on the Madeira, the Amazon, or the Rio Negro, three decks high and one hundred feet long, came up the Maici to our village. It was high water, so the boat seemed to be parked right in front of our house at the river’s edge. The river was only a foot or so from the top of the bank then, though it is more than forty feet below the top in the dry season. The boat was so close and the river so high that the crew could peer into my house. The crew was large, perhaps as many as thirty-five men. I could see that they were staring at Keren and my daughters, now just past puberty. I reacted instinctively and boarded the boat, a thirty-year-old gringo, five feet nine and 155 pounds.

“What are you doing on Indian land?” I demanded of the owner, a huge man named Romano.

“We are looking for hardwoods,” he replied coolly.

I looked around. One man on the crew had a white fleshy orb in the socket where I expected to see his eye. Another had a scar from his forehead to his throat, clearly from a knife. Another had a scar across his belly. I noticed that all of them were built better than I was, with rippling, well-defined muscles exuding power. But as an indignant father and husband, I ordered them off the Pirahãs’ land.

“Who are you to tell us to leave?” Romano asked. “An American ordering Brazilians off Brazilian land?”

“The FUNAI
delegado
in Porto Velho, Apoena Meirelles, told me to make sure that no one came on this land without his permission,” I responded truthfully but naively, simply not grasping how offensive this could be to a native-born Brazilian. I also did not realize that the FUNAI was largely irrelevant to caboclos, even though I could not function without the foundation’s permission and support. This happened early on in my career, before I knew better.

I was ready to act. I didn’t know what I would do if this turned out badly, though. I had no plan. But to my relief, after a silence during which the crew continued to stare at my house and Romano just looked at me, he suddenly ordered his men to start the boat and prepare to leave. He offered me coffee and we drank it, syrupy sweet espresso. He said goodbye politely and they pulled out. Another lesson I have learned: mean-looking people can in fact be nice.

Caboclos, like the Pirahãs, are isolated even from other Brazilians, something that the Pirahãs notice when other Brazilians or foreigners come onto their land. This was made clear to me years ago by caboclo reactions to members of the Projeto Rondon. This project was a government-sponsored initiative to aid the health of the poor of Northern Brazil and increase the social awareness of privileged Southern Brazilians by bringing teams of college students from the South to the more remote and primitive areas of Brazil for short visits to provide dental and medical care. Once when I arrived at the Auxiliadora, where Godofredo and Césaria still lived, some men called to me as I was passing the shade tree that they sat under. They were sipping iced-cold Antarctica beer, dressed in shorts with flip-flops, and shirtless.

“Seu Daniel, como é que vai? Sabe rapaz, na semana passada tinha um grupo de estrangeiros do seu pais aqui. Falavam português enrolado que nem você!”
(Mr. Daniel, how is it going? Last week there was a group of foreigners here from your country. They spoke Portuguese poorly just like you!)

“A group from
my
country?” I asked, surprised that any group of Americans would ever travel to the Auxiliadora. “Where were they from?”

“They were here with the Projeto Rondon. They were all from São Paulo.”

I walked away amused that to the caboclos there was little difference between a gringo from the United States and a Brazilian from São Paulo.

Part Two LANGUAGE

11                  Changing Channels with Pirahã Sounds

C
aboclos, travel, and other experiences of the Amazon were ultimately just means to an end. My experiences in the region were ordered around my struggle to figure out the grammar of Pirahã. As I made progress, excruciatingly slowly, I realized that this language was unusual—profoundly so. Initially I recognized this as I analyzed the way it organized its sounds into words. I based my conclusions about its uniqueness on field research with Tzeltales in southern Mexico, training with Comanche and Cherokee speakers in Oklahoma, helping missionaries analyze other Amazonian languages, and wide reading.

I usually did my serious work on the language in the loft of our tribal house. It was built parallel to the river’s edge to catch breezes. Our house had a storeroom and a ceiling made of ax-hewn boards over our sleeping areas (to prevent crawling, hopping, and slithering life from falling on us while we slept and also to make those rooms a bit cooler).

The triangular space created between my thatched roof and board ceiling was open on both sides, and there was enough room for me to put a table and a couple of chairs up there for my linguistics work. I referred to this space as my study. It was extremely hot in this relatively closed space, and there were snakes, frogs, tarantulas, and other critters in the thatch, but it gave a small bit of privacy from the village, so that my language teachers and I would have fewer distractions. Access to this space was by a homemade ladder nailed onto the living room wall just below my desk.

When I worked in my study, I was so hot that my T-shirt clung to me and my hair stuck to the sides of my head. But I learned to ignore that. It was the animal life that continued to keep me alert and wary.

From time to time I would have to stop working while small frogs jumped out of the thatch in panic with snakes slithering behind them. None of the snakes were very large, but some were venomous. They lived in the thatch, which was apparently a great hunting ground. I learned to keep a hardwood club at my feet or on the chair next to me. When I heard the thatch above my head rustle, I would scoot back my chair, pick up my club, and wait. First a frightened frog would jump out. I tried to kill them too. (I wanted all life out of the thatch.) But they were too fast and small. Then I knew that whatever had frightened the frog would not be long behind, so I would wait. Several times a snake would poke its head out. Since I was waiting, the slithery pest was almost always a goner.
Wham!
The club would bang the snake’s head against the thatch and support poles. I would toss the snake out into the jungle and go back to work.

I lived and breathed the Pirahã language while I was in the village. But my initial optimism about analyzing their language faded as I began to grasp just how difficult it was.

We have all seen Hollywood movies in which some explorer or scientist learns a tribal language fluently in just a short period of time. These seemed silly to me now as I struggled to learn more about this language and express myself in it. There were no textbooks. There was no one who could translate Pirahã sentences into Portuguese, except in the simplest paraphrases. Even after six months, I wasn’t sure that I understood anything my teachers were saying to me. It got very discouraging at times. But I saw that three-and four-year-old Pirahã children learned the language and I dared to believe that I might eventually speak as well as a three-year-old.

Although linguistics was my intellectual pursuit among the Pirahãs, I never lost sight of the fact that I was being paid by churches and individual Christians to translate the Bible into the Pirahã language. However, in order to do this I needed a thorough understanding of the structure of the language. The two goals were at least compatible at this stage.

Pirahã has one of the smallest sets of speech sounds or phonemes in the world, with only three vowels (
i, a, o
) and just eight consonants (
p, t, k, s, h, b, g,
and the glottal stop
x
) for men and three vowels (
i, a, o
) and seven consonants (
p, t, k, h, b, g,
and
x
) for women (they use
h
both where men use
h
and also where men use
s
). Women have fewer consonants than men. This is not unheard of, but it is unusual.

The term
glottal stop
will not mean much to many readers since it is a sound that is lacking from the phonemes of most European languages, including English. But it is important in Pirahã. In English we occasionally make the glottal stop in interjections, such as
uh-uh
(no). Whereas a consonant like
t
stops the flow of air coming out of the mouth just behind the teeth and a
k
cuts off the air with the back of the tongue raised against the palate, a glottal stop is produced by closing the vocal folds tightly and cutting off the flow of air before it gets into the upper portion of the throat (the pharynx).

To appreciate how small Pirahã’s list of sounds is, consider that En glish has approximately forty phonemes, depending on the dialect. And English’s inventory is by no means unusually large. Hmong of Vietnam has over eighty. At the other extreme, only Rotokas (New Guinea) and Hawaiian vie with Pirahã for smallness of phonemic inventory—both have eleven phonemes, the same number as Pirahã men.

Some have asked whether a language can communicate complicated information with only eleven phonemes. A computer scientist knows, however, that computers can communicate anything we program them to do, and that they do this with only two “letters”—1 and 0, which can be thought of as phonemes. Morse code also has only two “letters,” long and short.

And that is all any language needs. In fact, a language could get by with a single phoneme. In such a language words might look like
a, aa, aaa, aaaa,
and so on. It’s not surprising that there is no language known with only one or two sounds, since the smaller the phonemic inventory, the longer words have to be to provide enough information for speakers to distinguish one word from another (otherwise they would sound too much alike) and the harder it becomes for our brains to tell words apart (words that are too long would require too much memory to distinguish, among other problems). So if there were a human language like the binary language of computers, humans would need computerlike brains to use and recognize the very long words that would be necessary. Imagine trying to tell a word of fifty consecutive
a
’s apart from a word of fifty-one
a
’s.

There is therefore a tension between learning a large number of phonemes to keep words a more manageable size, versus learning fewer phonemes while letting words “grow” a bit. Some languages can be complicated in both ways. German has both long words and a large set of phonemes, for example.

A couple of English examples can help us see how we use phonemes to distinguish words. In the words
pin
versus
bin,
for most speakers the only way to distinguish which word means a small pointed fastener and which is a container is that one has the phoneme
p
and the other has
b;
otherwise the words are identical. This means that
p
and
b
are meaningfully separate sounds in English, unlike the two types of
p
in
pin
and
spin.

In the latter words, the
p
of
pin
is aspirated, meaning that a puff of air is emitted with its pronunciation, whereas the
p
of
spin
is not aspirated. (You can see this by holding a piece of notebook paper about three inches from your mouth when pronouncing these words in a normal voice. The paper will bend forward with the “wind” of aspiration from the first word, but not the second.) For this reason, in our alphabet we distinguish between
p
and
b,
a meaningful distinction, but not between the two
p
sounds of
pin
and
spin,
since we can recognize such words with or without aspiration. (Audrey Hepburn, influenced by her native Dutch, tended not to aspirate consonants and most people hardly noticed.)

This distinction between some sounds according to their position in the syllable is important for linguists but is not meaningful in English—any English speaker will understand
pin
and
spin
whether or not the
p
’s in the words are aspirated.

In
sheet
versus
shit,
the difference in sound for a native speaker of English is found in the tenseness of the tongue in producing the vowels. However, since the second word uses a vowel not found in Romance languages, like Spanish or Portuguese, speakers from these languages can have embarrassing moments trying to distinguish such words, since the two sounds are separate phonemes in English but not in Spanish or Portuguese.

For an inventory the size of Pirahã’s, words need not be quite so long as we might expect, however, because of two additional tools: context and the tones I mentioned earlier.

Context helps to distinguish meanings in all languages. Consider the English homonyms
to
versus
two.
If I ask you, “How many did you say?” and you respond
tu
(spelled phonetically), we know that only
two
and not
to
could be meant in this context. In fact most potential ambiguities are avoided by context.

I sat one day with Kóxoí at the table under my thatched roof in order to learn more about the sound structure of Pirahã words. Keren appeared with a cup of coffee. She gestured at Kóxoí to see if he would also like a cup. Kóxoí smiled and said, “
Tí píai,
” which I immediately guessed to mean “Me too.”

To check this out, I organized a few elicitation sentences to confirm my hunch, acting out and saying, “Kóxoí drinks coffee, Dan
píai,
” “Kóxoí drinks coffee, me
píai,
” and so on.

I recorded examples and isolated the phrases for
me too, you too, her too,
and so on. Then I asked Kóxoí to repeat them to me so that I could verify their pronunciation.

What he gave me was surprising and confusing.

He repeated, “
Tí píai.
”

I repeated.

He said, “Right,
kí píai.
”

“What did you say?” I asked with frustration and surprise. Why was he changing the pronunciation? Was there a more simple expression than I had thought?

“
Kí kíai,
” he repeated.

Now I was beginning to question my own sanity. Three different pronunciations in three repetitions. I was sure that the
k
sound, the
t
sound, and the
p
sound were meaningful units of speech—phonemes—of Pirahã. Phonemes are not supposed to be interchangeable! Change Tim to Kim to Pim in English, for example, and you don’t just get alternative pronunciations, you get separate words.

“
Kí kíai?
” I asked.

“That’s right,
pí píai
” came the exasperating answer.

In other repetitions, Kóxoí then gave additional pronuciations (again, the
x
represents the glottal stop of Pirahã): “
xí píai,
” “
xí xíai.
”

I wondered whether Kóxoí’s pronunciation was just “sloppy” compared to other Pirahãs or whether some deeper principle of the language was being illustrated by this variation. It might be that this word was changing meaning in ways that I wasn’t perceiving. Or it could just have been an example of “free variation”—a nonmeaningful difference in pronunciation, as inmy Southern Californian alternative pronunciations of
economics
as “
ee
conomics” and “
eh
conomics,” with no intended differences in meaning. I eventually concluded that it was indeed free variation.

I observed several other examples of this variation from many speakers. Some people gave me many pronunciations for a single word, like
xapapaí, kapapaí, papapaí, xaxaxaí,
and
kakakaí
for the English word
head.
Or
xísiihoái, kísiihoái, písiihoái, píhiihoái,
and
kíhiihoái
for
liquid fuel
(kerosene, gasoline, butane, etc.).

I saw that Pirahã allows an astonishing range of variation among consonants. This surprised me, especially in a language with so few phonemes. But at the same time I discovered that Pirahã makes such extensive use of tone, accent, and the weight of its syllables that the language can be whistled, hummed, yelled, or sung.

For example, the sentence
Káixihí xaoxaagá, gáihí
(There is a paca there) has a musical form. It is this musical form that is whistled or hummed or sung.

The vertical lines in the example indicate word boundaries. The notes between the lines are the musical representation of one word. The caret (^) under a note indicates that the syllable is louder than other syllables in the same word. A whole note (hollow oval) represents the longest syllable type in the language (consonant + vowel + vowel) and a quarter note (black oval) represents the shortest syllable in the language (consonant + vowel). The other notes and length dots represent syllables of other lengths—Pirahã has five syllable lengths. The relative height of the notes, that is, the syllables, indicates the tone. A higher note is a syllable with high tone. A lower note is a syllable with low tone. A connecting line between two notes, a musical “tie,” indicates that there is a movement from a low tone to a high tone or a high tone to a low tone, with no pause between the two end points. In the musical representation of
káixihí,
the first group of notes has a falling tone, followed by a short low tone, with a preceding break in the whistle (where the glottal stop would have been in
káixihí
), followed by another short break (where the
h
would be) and a short high tone, and so on. The word, without consonants or vowels, is stressed (volume-adjusted) according to syllable weight. Thus, the syllable boundaries are clearly present in whistle, humming, and yelling channels, all of which figure in this musical representation even though the phonemes themselves are missing.