Max Ruiz, Cimarron
Not many years ago, during a stay in Martinique, a book on Maroons happened to come into my hands. After reading it, my view of the Caribbean changed. It was as if I was receiving a message from centuries ago, which I understood to be this: There is no force stronger than the desire to be free. When I would feel locked up by the armies of commodification, when the world seemed to be controlled by the manufacturers of obedience, this message took on a singular validity. It was if I was trying to establish a dialogue with the Maroons. I began to look for them. Where were they? Had they run away from the plantations? Had they gone deeper into their thick world, interwoven with liana, logs, ferns, branches and foliage? Had they turned invisible?
While on walks through the Martinique forest, I could feel the weight of the Maroons, their memories, and I began to connect them with my own story. On those journeys, I took pictures like a student taking preparatory notes with no anticipated plans.
In sorting out those images, not knowing what to do with them, I discovered a sign. A figure in the sky in Martinique was telling me: Here we are. This photograph that had been waiting for me for four years made me understand. I started to work.
Another memory came back to me from oblivion. During my studies at the Pan American School of Art in Argentina, one of our teachers, Julio Ardiles Gray, urged us to question reality through the journalistic research of our own environment. His theory, backed by his admirable work, was that any person of our immediate surroundings had interesting, important and revealing stories to tell; that not only the important characters “made” history.
One day I went to see my grandmother Inés and asked her to tell me something about her life and her childhood. She was a secretive person, very reserved, who never talked about herself. As expected, she started saying that she had nothing interesting to tell, but I insisted. With the excuse of some “school homework,” I managed to convince a story out of her. My grandmother told me something that she had never revealed to anybody before, not even to her children or her husbands. Slowly, she told me of her arrival to America.
Running away from the misery and lack of a future in Spain, my nine-year-old grandmother and her parents immigrated to Brazil, attracted by promises of work and prosperity. They arrived poor, exhausted but confident that Brazil was a land of hope. At the harbor, however, labor traffickers were waiting for them and suddenly they were prisoners of a fazendeiro (farmer), living in animal barricades, working from dawn to dusk, and paid only with coupons to buy groceries at the landlord’s store. They were slaves.
My grandmother’s father said that they would escape this hell. And so that evening, they fled. “But,” grandma added, “they sent people after us.” Pursuers. “Within few days, we had reached the border of Argentina and Paraguay. We were almost out of danger,” she said. But then they were caught. “My dad,” grandmother said without changing her tone, “killed him with a knife.” Then he ordered his wife and daughter to go to the Argentinean side. He went in the opposite direction to throw the pursuers off their trail. “We will meet in Argentina,” he promised. Nobody ever heard from him again.
This is my story too. Thanks to that great-grandfather, I am free. Bless him.