Kanaima / Tiger
(for Richard and David)
In the darkest middle of the rubber walk
where the interweave of overhanging branches
was thick above the road, the four schoolboys
walking home (loitering in the roadside bush,
collecting shiny rubber seeds in their wooden pods)
suddenly stopped – movement, talk, breath,
all stopped: for there in the road, yards ahead,
stood a black tiger. He had appeared out of nowhere.
When I first saw him he was simply there; his cold
green eyes looked straight at us, four human statues
with shoulder-slung bookbags and gaping mouths.
He looked long, then turned his head and strode
into the bush on the other side of the road.
It was the first time any of us had seen
a black tiger. For the next two weeks they sent
the Land Rover to collect us after school,
making of the magical rubber walk
a ninety second blur of dark green gloom
incensed with the damp smell of leaves. But
we were soon walking again, collecting rubber
seeds and daring each other to step
into the undergrowth and enter the darker
realm of the tiger. “It wasn’t a tiger,”
Jude Santiago had said, the day after we saw it;
“remember how he watch at we and think?
My father say tigers don’t think. Was
Kanaima. Kanaima was looking for somebody:
lucky it wasn’t we.” And he was right,
the creature did look at us and think.
So it was Kanaima . . . And yet something
in my head made Jude’s dark certainty
impossible for me. My father was certain
it wasn’t Kanaima; Jude was certain that it was,
and mine was that painful uncertainty
that helped define my childhood plight:
Caught between their “wrong” and our “right”.
Now time and distance have tamed the memory,
and the fear has drained away: I have
long since learned to say “jaguar” instead of
“tiger” (in contexts where that kind of accuracy
matters). But whenever I rummage in the deepest
drawer of childhood memories, I still
cannot decide whether it was tiger or Kanaima
that looked hard at us that day, that
found us wanting and calmly walked away.
Mark McWatt (The Journey to Le Repentir)
Mark McWatt’s footnote to the poem declares that “‘Kanaima’ in Amerindian lore, is an avenging spirit that can assume any form it wants as it moves through the forest in pursuit of its human victims.” As we reflect in the month of September on the Amerindian Heritage in Guyana, various works of literature will come to mind in which the concept of Kanaima is treated. The treatment is quite different in each, giving the impression that these writers have different ideas about what Kanaima is. When we include the oral literature in this study, variations increase, strengthening the perceived notion that there are various unreconciled ideas that exist in the inconstant realms of myth, folklore and belief.
But that is erroneous. Belief in Kanaima is unshaken, and there is little doubt as
