Guava: the living, the dead and the enigma of the fruit

The mythology of the Arawaks of the Greater Antilles is a fascinating subject of study, full of unsolved enigmas, true challenges to the intelligence. At times, attempts to solve them have followed deductive paths that emulate those followed by Sherloc Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character, although not always with his successful destiny. 

For centuries practically the only thing that was known about the subject was what was collected by Friar Ramón Pané, a Catalan religious of the order of the Hieronymites, commissioned by Christopher Columbus to “learn and know about the beliefs and idolatries of the Indians”, who spoke some of their language and lived among them for several years, during which time he wrote the “An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians“, the only direct source on the subject.

Pané’s original, written between 1495 and 1498, was not preserved and his work has reached the present through translations and summaries: Peter Martyr D’Anghiera made a Latin compendium in a letter addressed to Cardinal Ludovico of Aragon, published in 1504; Bartolomé de Las Casas made an extract which he included in his Apologetic History of the Indies; Fernando Columbus, the Admiral’s son, included it in its entirety in his father’s biography, written in Spanish, but he died in 1539 and left it unpublished; an Italian translation of it was made by Alfonso de Ulloa in 1571. The manuscript of Ferdinand Columbus was also lost, so only the above-mentioned versions of Ulloa, d’Anghiera and Las Casas are known today.

These circumstances have stimulated the detective approach in the exegesis and verification of the content of Pané’s work. Although progress has been made in this field in recent decades thanks to the efforts of archeologists, linguists, anthropologists, mythologists and historians, our knowledge continues to be plagued by gaps and unproven hypotheses. At the same time, in the countries of the Greater Antilles, interest in aboriginal culture has grown as a result of a greater awareness of its role as one of the roots of the current identity of their peoples, which has contributed to a greater visibility of the unsolved problems and the different proposals for their solution.

Among the most discussed chapters of Pané’s work are chapters XII and XIII, which deal with beliefs about the dead. In a previous work (Cagüeiro, Decoding the Myth) we talked about the deep causes that originate some of these beliefs. In this opportunity, we will take a closer look at the vision that the Arawaks had about the dead, through the clues provided by the etymological analysis of four Island Arawak words present in those chapters. They are: opía, operito, goeiza and guayaba.

Because they are indispensable for the analysis and because of their brevity, we reproduce these chapters in their entirety below, as they appear in the new edition with an introductory study, notes, and appendices by José Juan Arrom, Duke University Press, Durham, London, 1999. Translation by Susan C. Griswold.

CHAPTER XII

Concerning what they believe about the dead wandering about, and what they are like, and what they do.

They believe there is a place where the dead go, which is called Coaybay, and it is located on one side of the island, which is called Soraya. They say that the first person in Coaybay was one who was called Maquetaurie Guayaba, who was the lord of the said Coaybay, house and dwelling place of the dead.

CHAPTER XIII

Concerning the shape they say the dead have

They say that during the day they hide away, and at night they go out to walk about, and they eat a certain fruit that is called guayaba, which has the flavor of [quince], and in the daytime they are …, and at night they change into a fruit, and they celebrate and accompany the living. And in order to recognize them, they observe this procedure: they touch one’s belly with their hands, and if they do not find his navel, they say he is operito, which means dead: that is why they say the dead have no navel. And thus they are sometimes fooled when they do not notice this, and they lie with one of the Coaybay women; when a man thinks he has her in his arms, he has nothing because the woman disappears in an instant. They still believe this even today. When a person is alive, they call his spirit goeiza, and when he is dead, they call it opia. They say this goeiza appears to them often, in a man’s shape as well as a woman’s, and they say there have been men who have wanted to do battle with it, and when such a man would lay his hands on it, it would disappear, and the man would put his arms elsewhere into some trees, and he would end up hanging from those trees. And everyone generally believes this, the children as well as the adults, and that it appears to them in the shape of father, mother, brothers, or relatives, and other forms. The fruit they say the dead eat is the size of a quince. And the aforesaid dead do not appear to them in the daytime, but always at night, and that is why one is very fearful who ventures to walk alone at night.

Opía

Let us begin with the word opía, the name of the spirit of people after death, as Pané explains. In the note on this word that Arrom includes, it is stated:

Ulloa: opía; Las Casas: hupía. Both variants seem to correspond to the Island Carib oupoye-m ~ opoye-m, “esprit” [“spirit”] (Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire caraïbe-francais, facsimile ed., Leipzig, 1892, p. 424)¹.

Indeed, both Pané and Breton indicate that in the structure of the word opía some morpheme corresponds to the referent “spirit”; however, the fact that we are talking about the “spirit of the dead” shows that there must also be another morpheme indicating the type of spirit in question, which corresponds to the moderately polysynthetic nature of the Island Arawak language, where different parts of speech come together to form words of many syllables².

In Lokono, a language spoken in the Guiana region of South America and related to Island Arawak, the word meaning ‘spirit’ is üya, also huia, ia, ueja úeja, úejahu, recorded by C. H. de Goeje with the meanings of ‘spirit’; ‘that by which plants, animals and men differ from dead matter’; ‘something etherical: shadow, image, aroma, etc’³. For its part, the Arawak-German dictionary of the Moravian Brothers points out: ‘shadow’, image’, ‘spirit’ (schatten, bild, geist)⁴.

Now we can segment the word opía as follows: opi + ia. It is immediately revealed that the second morpheme (ia) is the one that corresponds to the meaning ‘spirit’.

As for opi, we consider that it corresponds to the root apɨ, which in the Proto-Arawak that originated the Arawak language family, means ‘bone’, as recorded by various authors, including David L. Payne⁵. Many languages of the family preserved forms of the word very similar to that of Proto-Arawak, including Island Arawak, but in Lokono this word adopted the form abona, abbuna, according to C. H. de Goeje⁶.

Thus, opi, ‘bone’ + ia, ‘spirit’ = opia, ‘bone spirit’.

Bones in the Island Arawak agro-pottery culture were a symbol of death and the spirits of the ancestors⁷, which explains the literal meaning of the Island Arawak word opía.  Occasionally, bones were used to invoke the forces of the spirits as part of the idols⁸, and the behíques (shamans) practiced prolonged fasts as part of their preparation to invoke the cemís(deities or ancestral spirits), according to Bartolomé de Las Casas⁹.

How can we verify this proposal in another way? Let us turn, as Arrom did, to the Carib-French dictionary of Father Raymond Breton, and we find the word abo with the meaning of ‘bone’¹⁰ and also epou, with the same meaning¹¹. The latter is recognized in the structure of oupoye-m ~ opoye-m, which is evidence that its literal meaning is ‘bone spirit’, as is the Island Arawak word opía.

Likewise, we find the Island Carib words mápoya and máboya, both with the same meaning of ‘evil spirit’, ‘devil’¹². Evidently they correspond to the Island Arawak word mabuya, which, according to the 19th century Cuban lexicographer Esteban Pichardo, means ‘the devil’¹³. For his part, C. H. de Goeje specifies that aboa in Lokono means ‘sick’ and also ‘devilish’¹⁴. Evidently the Arawaks associated one thing with the other, considering that the illness came from an evil spirit.

Probably the structure of mabuya is as follows: ma(n), ‘all’, ‘entirely’¹⁵ + abu, ‘bone’ + ya, ‘spirit’ = mabuya, ‘entirely bone spirit’, ‘entirely devil’, ‘great devil’.

It is interesting to note that in both Island Carib (epou / abo) and Island Arawak (opi / abu) there are two different ways of designating the referent ‘bone’, one using the phoneme /p/ and the other using the phoneme /b/.

Operito

According to Pané, operíto means ‘dead’. Arrom limits himself to pointing out that it is evidently related to the word opía¹⁶.

We will segment operito as follows: opi + erí + to. We already know the first morpheme and it means ‘bone’. On the other hand, erí is a morpheme that we have analyzed in other works and whose meaning is ‘human being’, ‘person’, ‘people’¹⁷. It can be found in several Island Arawak words recorded by chroniclers, such as eyerí, matunherí, baharí, guaxerí. The first is an ethnic denomination and the other three are titles that express the dignity or status of people.

Finally, the suffix -to / -tu, as we also explained in previous works, is a form of the word oto (also utu, otu, uttu), which means ‘daughter’. It has, among its functions, to form noun adjectives and attributive adjectives¹⁸.

Thus, opi, ‘bone’ + erí, ‘people’ + –to, (noun-forming adjective suffix) = operito, ‘bony people’.

It can be seen that, when opi and erí are joined, the phoneme /i/ of the first word is elided. In Lokono, the rules of vowel reduction prescribe the same process, as can be seen in Willem J. A. Pet’s work, A Grammar Sketch and Lexicon of Arawak (Lokono Dian)¹⁹.

Goeíza

Pané refers to goeíza as the spirit of living people. Arrom makes the following analysis:

Ulloa: goeiz. Brinton thinks that goeiz probably is a corruption of guaiza. Las Casas describes the guaizas as “very well-made masks”, and he comments with regard to the pronunciation: “these faces or figures, which they called guayças, the letter y long”. Because isiba [in Lokono] is ‘face, countenance’, wa-isiba would be ‘our face, our countenance’ ²⁰.

For our part, we consider that the segmentation of the word should be: gua + y(a) + sa = guaysa. The form goeíza must be due to some distortion in the long and tortuous path of the registration of the word, which includes a chain formed by Pané, Fernando Colón and Ulloa, with possible errors in its different links when listening, reading and writing the word.   

As Arrom points out, the first morpheme, gua, corresponds to the cognate Lokono wa, ‘us’, ‘our’. We know the morpheme ya, meaning ‘spirit’, and finally sa, corresponds to its identical cognate in Lokono, which has several meanings: ‘good’, ‘formed’, ‘healthy’, ‘child’, ‘egg’²¹.

Thus, gua, ‘our’ + y(a), ‘spirit’ + sa, ‘good’ = guaysa, ‘our good spirit’.

Let us remember that the agro-potters Arawaks feared the opias and for that reason they did not dare to walk alone at night. In contrast, the spirits of the living were “good”. In a more general analysis, it is noted that the opias maintained behaviors incompatible with tribal society, where the organization of work and community social relations demanded discipline and social cohesion. Behavior in accordance with these qualities was validated in the moral norms as “good” and observed by all members of the tribe, which caused great admiration in Europeans, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, who recorded it in his chronicles (see entry Cagüeiro, decoding the myth).

As for the guaízas, masks that represented human faces, we consider that this word has the same etymology, gua-y(a)-sa, since the face was considered the image of the spirit, or as the proverb of the western culture says “the mirror of the soul”, although surely with a much more literal meaning.

Guayaba

In the chapters of Pané reproduced above, the friar makes four references that mention certain relations between the opias and the guava (guayaba) or other fruit. Let us look at these references again, in the form in which Arrom transcribed them:

a) They say that the first person in Coaybay was one who was called Maquetaurie Guayaba, who was the lord of the said Coaybay, house and dwelling place of the dead.

b) They say that during the day they hide away, and at night they go out to walk about, and they eat a certain fruit that is called guayaba, which has the flavor of [quince].

c) …and in the daytime they are … , and at night they change into fruit, and they celebrate and accompany the living.

d) The fruit they say the dead eat is the size of a quince.

In the interpretation of these fragments, several of the gaps in our knowledge and unproven hypotheses to which we referred at the beginning can be appreciated. They can be qualified as real enigmas and we list them below:

1. Which fruit is the one actually mentioned?

In Ulloa’s version the name of this fruit appears as guabazza, while d’Anghiera records it as guannaba. Antonio Bachiller y Morales considered it to be the soursop (Annona muricata Lin.), but Arrom retranslates it as guayaba (guava) and bases this decision on the fact that soursop does not resemble quince while guava (Psidium guayaba Lin.) does in shape, texture and flavor. He also adds: “This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that the Lord of the Dwelling Place of the Dead was called, precisely, Maquetaurie Guayaba“²².

Some authors, such as Carlos Alberto Hernández Oliva and Lisette Roura Álvarez do not consider these arguments sufficient and doubt that the fruit in question is guava²³.

2. What is the meaning of the word guayaba in the name of the Lord of Coaybay?

The archaeologist and historian from Dominican Republic, Manuel García Arévalo, believes that this is due to the predilection of the dead for this fruit²⁴.

The puertorican archaeologist José Oliver, for his part, considers that the word cemí, “is intimately related to the concept of sweetness” and this concept in turn, with the sacred. From this reasoning, he concludes that “Taino mythology used the guava as the ‘food’ that reflected the magical condition of ‘sweetness’ “. As for Maquetaurie, he refers that “in addition, it bears the title of ‘Guava’, which is a direct allusion to its quality of ‘sweetness’ (semí, çemí), of being ‘sweet like the guava’ “²⁵.

3. What is the meaning of the expression in paragraph c).

How is it possible that the opias turned into fruit made feast and went together with the living? In fact, Pané later contradicts this statement when he writes: “they often appear to them in the form of both men and women”; previously he had said “and to get to know them they touch their belly, and if they do not find their navel, they say it is an operito, which means dead”. This implies that opias commonly appeared to the living in the form of human beings, with the only difference of not having a navel.

This contradiction is important in that it suggests that Pané was confused about the concepts he was writing about and reveals the need for a new approach in his interpretation.

4. What is the etymology of the Island Arawak name of the fruit in question?

In our opinion, the answer to the last question may be the key to answering the remaining questions. We will start from the hypothesis that we are dealing with the guava fruit. As Arrom pointed out, the fact that this word is one of the names of the lord of Coaybay is a clear indication that supports this supposition.

In the structure of the word, there are three morphemes gua + ya + ba. The first two are already known to us. As for the suffix -ba, it has an identical cognate in Lokono with the meaning of ‘again’, ‘also’²⁶. Moreover, it indicates that the action of the verb implies physical or psychological movement away from the reference point of the speaker (i.e., away from the speaker at the moment of enunciation, or away from his usual place of permanence, or away from where he should be)²⁷.

We are now in a position to decipher the literal meaning of the word: gua, ‘our’ + ya, ‘spirit’ + –ba, ‘again’ = guayaba, ‘our spirit again’, ‘our new spirit’. In Lokono the suffix –mi, ‘new’, after the name of a person or animal, indicates that the person or animal is no longer in the world of the living²⁸. This seems to be the same use that the Antillean agro-pottery Arawaks make of the suffix –ba in the word guayaba.

Although in this case the suffix -ba does not attach to a verb, it adds to the meaning of the word the message that we are talking about something that is moving away from us, something that leaves us, as the spirit does when the person dies. Note the ability of the Arawak languages to elegantly express complex and subtle ideas.

Immediately the answers to the questions we asked ourselves are revealed: Arrom was right; indeed, the guava is the fruit of which Pané speaks. Maquetaurie does not take his middle name from his predilection for the fruit, nor from its “sweetness”. He is simply the master of ‘our new spirits’. Pané’s confusion is clarified: the opias did not become fruit, they became ‘our new spirit’. Here it is evident that the friar’s knowledge of the Island Arawak language was limited. Let us remember that he himself says that he was assisted by an interpreter.

As Holmes’ famous oxymoron warns, “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”. It is the fruit that takes its name from the opia’s predilection for it. So, in addition to ‘bony spirit’, the Island Arawaks called the souls of the departed, ‘our new spirit’. As C. H. de Goeje points out, for the Arawaks it was taboo to use certain names in certain situations or at certain times (day or night) and they believed that not complying with this prohibitions could offend the spirits²⁹. Taking into account the fear of the opias that the Antillean agro-pottery Arawaks showed during the night, it is very possible that they did not mention them by that name at night. This may help to explain why Pané says that “at night they became fruit”, when in fact what happened is that at night they were called by another name.

The results achieved reveal the potential of linguistic analysis to increase our knowledge of Island Arawak culture. The findings of the study can be used in new works that go even deeper into these topics.

Notes

1. Arrom, José Juan, in Pané, fray Ramón. Relación acerca de las antiguedades de los indios (nueva versión con notas, mapas y apéndices de José Juan Arrom). Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. La Habana. Page 73.
2. Valdés Bernal, Sergio. 2018. “El legado aruaco en el español cubano”. In Cuba: arqueología y legado histórico. Editorial edition, Julio A. Larramendi. Scientific Editor, Armando Rangel Rivero. Ediciones Polymitas S. A. Ciudad de Guatemala. Page 194.
3. Goeje, C. H. d 1928. The Arawak Language of Guiana. Cambridge University Press. New York. Pages 203-204. www.cambridge.org.
4. Hermanos Moravos. 1882. “Arawakisch-Deutches Wörterbuch, Abschrift eines im Besitze der Herrnhuter Bruder-Unität bei Zittau sich befindlichen-Manuscriptes”. In Grammaires et Vocabulaires Roucouyene, Arrouague, Piapoco et D’autre Langues de la Région des Guyanes, par MM. J. Crevaux, P. Sagot, L. Adam. Paris, Maisonneuve et Cie, Libraries-Editeurs. Página 157. http://books.google.com.
5. Payne, David L. 1991. “A classification of Maipuran (Arawakan) languages based on shared lexical retentions”. In Handbook of Amazonian Languages. Vol. 3. Derbyshire, D.C.; Pullum, G. K. (editores). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Page 396.
6. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Page 247.
7. García Arévalo, Manuel. 2019. Taínos, arte y sociedad. Banco Popular Dominicano. Santo Domingo. Page 182. https://issuu.com.
8. García Arévalo, Manuel. 2019. Op. cit. Page 171.
9. Las Casas, Bartolomé. 1909. “Apologética historia de las Indias”. In Serrano y Sanz. Historiadores de Indias, Page 447. Madrid. https://archive.org.
10. Breton, Raymond. 1999. Dictionnaire Caraïbe-Français. Ediciones Karthala e IRD. París.           Page 3. http://www.karthala.com.
11. Breton, Raymond. 1999. Op. cit. Page 108.
12. Breton, Raymond. 1999. Op. cit. Pages 290, 291.
13. Pichardo, Esteban. 1875. Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas. Cuarta Edición. La Habana. Page 229.
14. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Page 19.
15. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Page 112.
16. Arrom, José Juan, en Pané, fray Ramón. 1990. Op. cit. Page 71.
17. Celeiro Chaple, Mauricio. 2023. Cagüeiro: decoding the myth. https://www.laotraraiz.cu.
18. Celeiro Chaple, Mauricio. 2023. Cauto: the river an the name. https://www.laotraraiz.cu.
19. Pet, Willem J. A. 2011. A Grammar Sketch and Lexicon of Arawak (Lokono Dian). SIL e-Books. Page 9. https://sil.org.
20. Arrom, José Juan, en Pané, fray Ramón. 1990. Op. cit. Page 72.
21. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Page 152.
22. Arrom, José Juan, en Pané, fray Ramón. 1990. Op. cit. Page 71.
23. Hernández Oliva, Carlos Alberto y Roura Álvarez, Lisette. 2001. “Reflexiones en torno al tema de la muerte en la mitología y la plástica aruaca”. In Gabinete de Arqueología. Boletín No.1. Año 1. Pages 36-44. Oficina del Historiador de Ciudad de La Habana. Editorial Boloña. http://cubaarqueologica.com.
24. García Arévalo, Manuel. 2019. Op. cit. Page 176.
25. Oliver, José R. 2016. El centro ceremonial de Caguana, Puerto Rico. Simbolismo iconografico, cosmovisión y el poderio caciquil Taino de Boriquen. BAR Publishing, Oxford. Pages 72, 114.
26. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Pages 101-102.
27. Pet, Willem J. A. 2011. cit. Page 36.
28. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Page 203.
29. Goeje, C. H. de. 1928. Op. cit. Page 237.