Source: Guardian Weekly
Picture of an indigenous Nukak woman. Photograph: Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty ImagesNetherland by Joseph O'Neill is one of the most talked-about novels in recent years. "A great American novel," one critic called it. "A post-9/11 masterpiece," said another. It has even been given the presidential thumbs up by Barack Obama: "an excellent novel," he told the BBC.
But Netherland touches on a secret that involves the cocaine trade, guerrilla warfare and the Amazon rainforest, and which strikes right to the heart of the US’s war on drugs in Latin America.
At the very beginning of the novel the narrator, Hans van den Broek, describes this scene with his wife:
"...one evening in the spring of this year, 2006, Rachel and I are at home, in Highbury. She is absorbed by a story in the newspaper. I have already read it. It concerns the emergence of a group of tribespeople from the Amazon forest in Colombia. They are reportedly tired of the hard jungle life, although it's noted they still like nothing better than to eat monkey, grilled and then boiled. A disturbing photograph of a boy gnawing at a blackened little skull illustrates this fact. The tribespeople have no idea of the existence of a host country named Colombia, and no idea, more hazardously, of diseases like the common cold or influenza, against which they have no natural defences."
These "tribespeople" are the Nukak, Colombia's last hunter-gatherers. There was a media frenzy about a large group of them who turned up at a town in the remote Amazon in early 2006, and I met them shortly after the frenzy died down. Their plight is desperate. This week, indigenous Colombians are in London to launch a campaign to save the Nukak from "extinction".
The newspaper reports claim the Nukak had mysteriously wandered out of the wilderness, asking to join the modern world. But these stories are entirely misleading. The Nukak didn't leave their homes in the rainforest mysteriously, nor can it seriously be said they declared themselves ready to join the modern world. What actually happened was that bloody fighting in Colombia's little-known civil war engulfed the Nukak's land and forced them to flee elsewhere.
O'Neill's narrator, for one, was misled. He says the Nukak are "reportedly tired of the hard jungle life", but in reality the majority of the displaced Nukak would like to return home. Indeed, there are ongoing attempts, made in coordination with Colombia's national indigenous peoples' organization, ONIC, to make that return possible.
O'Neill's narrator also remarks that the Nukak had, "no idea of diseases like the common cold". This simply isn’t true. By the time Hans van den Broek read about them in his newspaper, an estimated 50% of the tribe had already been killed by western diseases since they were first forced from their land in the late 1980s.
"From what I’ve seen, the majority of the Nukak are thinking of returning to their territory," says Albeiro Riaño, a doctor who has worked closely with them since 2007. "That’s their intention. That’s their priority, if it’s safe enough. There are exceptions, four or five families, but in general the desire is to return."
Many of the Nukak I met said much the same. "I want to go back. There was more meat there, more fish," one woman, Rosa, told me. Another, Paolina, described how bad things had been before they fled. "They wanted to fight us, they wanted to kill us," she said, referring to the armed personnel invading her land.
Ultimately, the Nukak’s problems stem from coca, the raw material for cocaine. Coca growers have invaded Nukak land and brought bloody violence with them as the army, paramilitaries and guerrillas fight over the coca trade. Colombia's drive to stop coca cultivation is backed by the US, which provides training and billions of dollars to Colombian security forces.
You could say Obama’s choice of novel couldn’t have been worse. It would be much better for him to ignore Hans van den Broek, unreliable like so many literary narrators, and trust what the Colombians visiting London this week say about the Nukak: that they, along with 17 other Colombian tribes, face a "high risk of extinction". This is a desperate, tragic situation that Obama and the rest of us can, and must, help remedy.