Talking Taino: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective

12. Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (2004)

12 Eats, Shoots, and Leaves The Caribbean islands are a great place to take a vacation. One of the most common vacation activities is lying on the beach and reading a good book. In this regard, let us suggest Lynne Truss’s (2003) book: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. This runaway bestseller is about, of all things, punctuation. The title comes from a joke about an undereducated nature writer who used the words of the book title to describe the diet of the Panda. The problem is that the punctuation gives the impression that the Panda eats dinner, shoots a gun, and leaves the restaurant (an “Oxford comma” has been added to give the Panda time to escape). What does that have to do with the Caribbean? First, it places you on the beach reading a good book and it highlights our shift in emphasis from animals to plants. All of our previous chapters have dealt with animals, yet plants were the major component of the Taíno environment, diet, and material culture. Finally, it provides the basis for connecting the seemingly random comments on plants that we offer here. So you are sitting on the beach reading a good book. The coconut palms and casuarinas are swaying in the breeze. There are banana plants (bananas don’t grow on trees) used tastefully as landscaping, and the waiter just brought you a rumbased drink. There are other beautiful flowers—bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, ginger lilies—blooming in the gardens. But you will not find names for any of these plants in the Taíno dictionary. They were all introduced from other tropical lands. Their presence is the outcome of what Alfred Crosby (1972) called the homogenization of the neo-tropics. There are, however, some intriguing stories. Eats, Shoots, and Leaves / 67 In this chapter, we will mostly be talking about what is not Taíno. Sometimes you need to define your subject by describing what it isn’t. People tend to assume that the environment that surrounds them has always appeared that way. In considering Taíno plants, we begin by describing what came after the Taínos. In the 1980s there was a television commercial in which a very Navajo-looking woman said, “You call it corn, we call it maize.” This statement is inaccurate on many fronts. First, the Navajo use the Aztec word (which was “Xinteotl”) for the plant that scientific taxonomy has named Zea mays.The word maize actually comes from a Taíno word: Mahiz (in Spanish, maíz) (pronounced: “my ease”; in contrast to the modern pronunciation: “maze”). The last Native American to call corn “maize” likely died in the sixteenth century . So where did the name “corn” come from? Before the Americas were “discovered ,” the British used the word “corn” to denote any kind of small bits. This included salt (as in “corned beef”) and several cereal plants producing edible seed, such as wheat, rye, oats, or barley. Remember Jack London’s (1913) story about John Barleycorn?The Europeans called maize “Indian corn,” which was later shortened to just corn. Spanish accounts suggest that mahiz was eaten like today as corn-onthe -cob and only rarely was allowed to ripen for the making of cornbread (Johnnycake ). However, recent studies using a microbotanical identification technique called starch-grain analysis indicate that maize was much more important toTaíno subsistence than previously suspected. Corn is often identified on stone tools used for cutting or grinding, which suggests that corn was regularly shredded, dried, and ground into meal. In his treatise on the Natural History of the New World, Oviedo described a plant with which he was unfamiliar. Because his descriptions were published so early in the exploration of the Americas (1526) many people believed that banana’s TAÍNO WORD TRANSLATION Mahiz Corn Tabaco Tobacco Mapu Large, red tree Tuna Prickly pear fruit unknown Salt none Banana none Coconut none Sugar none Casaurina pine 68 / Chapter 12 were native to the Americas. (Note: in order to preserve the pronunciation of a foreign plural name ending in a vowel, it was common, in the past, to insert an apostrophe or tilde; the former has since become known in England as the greengrocer’s apostrophe.) Bananas were, in fact, a recent introduction from Southeast Asia. Coconuts, the plant that typifies the Caribbean landscape, cuisine, and bar tabs, are not native to the Americas. These plants were...