Cumandá Part I

The first two chapters of Cumandá seemed to be from a nineteenth century travelogue, a type of literature that swelled upon library shelves during this time as privileged Europeans dutifully recorded their experiences in foreign lands. Typical accounts from Latin America reveal the awe felt by their writers as they described what was to them an extraordinary landscape and a population that required scientific ordering. Indeed, Mera paints an immense and majestic physical environment, like an endless organic cathedral, and conscientiously describes the different tribes and their customs. But what these chapters also share with the nineteenth century travelogue is that they are largely devoid of human characters and interactions – a strange way to begin a tale of impassioned racial strife and impossible love between youths. Travelogue writers frequently favoured descriptions of the environment over the indigenous people they encountered, the former evoking the sublime and the latter often shock and repulsion, or they made no differentiation between the two. It is interesting to note that the cover of our edition also lacks human representation – it could be a book about tropical plants.

In Cumandá, descriptions of the environment and people blend into one another, such as the anthropomorphic whispering of the river, the way love is likened to a protective bark and the organic way it sends its roots into the heart, and women said to have the qualities of certain birds. This tendency is especially true concerning indigenous people, whose character is frequently described in the same terms as the environment in which they live. The indigenous characters encountered so far strike me as static and archetypical. They can be put in two categories – punks or poets – the belligerent jíbaros and the friendly záparos – the barbaric types who tear out eyes and burn down houses and the lyric/folkloric types who express themselves in romantic prose. To be fair, the white character Carlos is just as one-dimensional as the melancholy poet archetype, and the racially ambiguous Cumandá is beginning to reveal her surprisingly strong character in the face of obstacles to their relationship. However, this book appears to be written to be easily digested by a European audience that already felt both physically and morally distant from the jungle and the people who inhabited it, and Mera doesn’t employ descriptive language or social commentary that would convince them to feel otherwise.

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