Yaya and the Ancestral Mother’s Inheritance

The miscegenation with aboriginal women gave rise to the primary nucleus of Creoles who, together with other human factors, later constituted the Cuban nationality. Spanish men were the other major ingredient of this mixture that emerged during the first stage of the colony, a period in which few European women settled in the country and the introduction of African slaves did not reach the massiveness it did in the second half of the 18th century, when the dizzying development of the sugar plantations began.

In the first three centuries after the conquest, Creole families descended from aboriginal women predominated. This can be inferred from genetic studies and historical population and immigration figures. Research by Marcheco et. al. shows that 34.5% of Cubans today come from a Native American ancestral mother, a proportion that in some provinces is close to 60%¹. This proportion is extraordinarily high if we take into account that Cuba’s population, which in 1774 was 172,600 inhabitants, subsequently experienced the introduction of 750,000 African slaves, more than one million European and Antillean immigrants and around 125,000 Asians².

During those three hundred years, many of the characteristics of Cuban nationality were delineated, although nationality was not forged until the middle of the 19th century or even later, as some researchers maintain. Many of the behavior patterns (customs, uses, traditions, habits), symbols, shared meanings and cultural conventions that characterize Cubans had to originate in that family environment connected by maternal lineage with the aboriginal community society. Let us remember that the family is the most important agent of socialization in the life of an individual, not only because it is the first agent, but because it constitutes the link between the individual and society³. 

In addition, in the rural communities and small towns that appeared during this stage, many of them emerged from ancient aboriginal settlements as a result of their integration into the latifundia system of herds and corrals, the bonds of mutual help that characterized the community society survived in new forms among the neighbors, giving rise to an important distinctive feature of Cubanness. This environment must have also favored the transmission of other cultural traits of Indo-Cuban origin.

When assessing the reasons why the aboriginal heritage has been largely unnoticed until now, the following factors should be taken into account: we were always able to compare ourselves with the Spaniards, since immigration from the Iberian country continued until the 20th century; the same happened with the natives of Africa, since it was not until the 19th century that the slave trade disappeared. This comparison contributed to the awareness of our identity, of what differentiated us from the others and of what there was of them in us. Perhaps that is the main reason for the success of the characters of Cuban Buffo Theater: the negrito, the Galician, the mulatto and the guajiro. However, the aboriginal roots, once mixed, could not be contrasted due to the absence of referents.

Furthermore, from the very beginning of the conquest and throughout the colonial period, the Spaniards fostered a racist attitude towards the aborigines. They identified them with backwardness and ignorance, and even promoted the false idea of their total extinction. For this reason, the mestizos of that origin hid their origin and did not consciously cultivate the traditions inherited from their ancestors through the maternal branch. All the colonial institutions, including the Catholic Church, conspired to impose their ideology and to set aside and make invisible the Indo-Cuban culture.

In this paper we intend to demonstrate, through the analysis of the etymology of the word yaya, how, even today, the voice of the ancestral aboriginal mother resounds in Cuban homes, which constitutes a living proof of the Indo-Cuban heritage.

The Diccionario de la lengua española of the Royal Academy of Spain lists the word yaya as follows:

yaya. f. 1. infantile. Chile, Cuba and Peru. Cutaneous wound. ║2. colloquial. Chile. A physical or moral defect, which can cause the sufferer of discomfort or harm.║ 3. Colombia and Peru. A certain species of mite. ║ 4. Cuba and Dominican Republic. Tree of the anonaceae family, with straight and slender trunk, lanceolate leaves, hairless, whitish flowers and flexible and strong wood. ║5. Peru. Small flaw or defect in the finish of a product, which determines its sale at a low price.  ■ ~ cimarrona. f. Cuba. A tree with a highly branched trunk, oblong and shiny leaves, small yellow flowers, solitary in the leaf axils, whose fruits are used as fodder for sows⁴.

The homophones and homographs also included in the Diccionario de la lengua española with the meanings of ‘woman who takes care of children’ (used in the Philippines) and ‘grandmother’ (of Inca origin), will not be analyzed.

Cuban lexicographers of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century did not include the word yaya with the meaning of ‘cutaneous wound’, but they did do so for the meanings that name tree species. In our opinion, this is linked to the supposed infantile character of the word when it is used in its first meaning.

The Cuban scholar, Bachiller y Morales, as well as the Puerto Rican Cayetano Coll y Coste, mention that the aborigines used the word yaya to refer to buboes, especially syphilitic buboes^5,6. In 1665, Raymond Breton had already collected the word among the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles with the same meaning⁷.

In 1881, Rufino José Cuervo included yaya with the meanings of ‘sore’ and ‘certain species of mite’, in his Apuntaciones críticas sobre el lenguaje bogotano, which shows that in Colombia this word is also used in its meaning of ‘cutaneous wound’.  He also conjectured that its origin is indigenous⁸.

In 1904, the Chilean Rodolfo Lenz recorded the word yaya in his Diccionario etimológico de las voces chilenas derivadas de las lenguas indígenas americanas with the meaning of ‘language of young children, insignificant ailment or injury of young children’. This author doubts that it comes from Quechua, taking into account that in Colombia, where the word is also used, this language “does not seem to be in use”⁹.

In 1923, Fernando Ortiz includes yaya in his vernacular dictionary, Un catauro de cubanismos, where he notes:

Yaya – Harm, pain, in familiar language. According to Coll y Toste, yaya was the name given by the Antilleans to syphilitic pemphigus. By extension, it has come to be here, as in Colombia, infantilism or vulgarism, synonym of pain. And it should well be included in a dictionary of Cubanisms, as in the Castilian ones, the synonym of pupa is included, which is none other than the vulgarism buba, that is, also, syphilitic pemphigus. This parallel derivation of two different roots is curious¹⁰.

In this paper we will start from the hypothesis that the word yaya is of Arawak origin. The Arawak language family was widely spread in South America and influenced other language families in the continent, which explains why the word we are analyzing is found in such an extensive region and in countries far away from each other.

To examine the etymology of yaya, we will use, as we have done in other studies published in The Other Root, the comparative study technique, aimed at identifying lexical and phonetic similarities between Island Arawak, the language spoken by our aborigines, and other languages of the same family, mainly the Lokono of the Guianas region.

C. H. de Goeje refers the following meanings in Lokono of ü-ya (also huia, ia, ueja): ‘principle of life, spirit’; ‘that by which plants, animals and men differ from dead matter’; ‘something etherical’ (shadow, image, aroma, etc)¹¹. For its part, the Arawak-German dictionary of the Moravian Brothers notes: úeja, úejahu, ‘shadow’, image’. ‘spirit’ (schatten, bild, geist)¹².

As can be seen, the Arawak word ü-ya has several meanings. In the mythology of the Antillean agro-pottery aborigines there is a character named Yaya. In explaining the etymology of this name, José Juan Arrom notes: “in Arawak Ia means ‘spirit, essence, first cause of life’. Forming a superlative by duplication, Yaya is equivalent to ‘Supreme Spirit'”¹³.

In the present case, the word yaya has another meaning, here ya is used in Island Arawak to name ‘pain’. This meaning is not included in the sources consulted for Lokono, but it fits exactly the description of “something etheric” that does not have a physical nature, such as ‘shadow’ or ‘image’.  The reduplication in Lokono, in addition to indicating a greater intensity of a state or quality, is also used to indicate repetition or plurality¹⁴. In this case it indicates that the pain is not momentary but persists (repeats) over time. Because skin wounds, particularly those caused by syphilis, cause the kind of prolonged pain we have described, they were named yaya in Island Arawak.

The analysis developed so far allows us to explain the first, second and fifth meanings of yaya in the Diccionario de la lengua española: ‘cutaneous wound’; ‘physical or moral defect that can cause discomfort or harm to the sufferer’; and ‘small flaw or defect in the finish of a product, which determines its sale at a low price’, respectively. It is evident that the second and fifth are derived from the first.

As for the third meaning, ‘a certain species of mite’, it is related to species of these insects that cause painful wounds on the skin. The Diccionario de americanismos of the Association of Spanish Language Academies provides more details in the description of the mite named yaya in Colombia and Peru: “Very small red mite, which adheres to the skin of people and mammals, causing much itching all over the body (Trombidiidae, Trombidium americanum)”¹⁵.

The Cuban lexicographer Esteban Pichardo, in his Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas, includes the words biyaya and cayaya, both from the Island Arawak. The first is a synonym of bibijagua, a kind of ant, and is used in a metaphorical sense to name a very diligent, active and industrious person¹⁶, as for the second, Pichardo points out that there is a type of wild plant that has a strawberry that perfectly portrays the bag that forms under the skin the nigua, an insect similar to the flea, but smaller, whose fertilized females penetrate under the skin of animals and man, where they deposit their eggs, causing severe itching and ulcers, so in some parts of Cuba it is given that name¹⁷. This fact suggests that cayaya is synonymous with nigua.

It is logical to suppose that the names of the biyaya and cayaya, with the morpheme yaya in their structure, are motivated by the painful conditions caused by the bibijagua when it stings and the nigua when it penetrates the skin.

The chronicler Fernández de Oviedo refers to a variety of pineapple (Ananas comosus) called yayama by the aborigines¹⁸. As is well known, the leaves of the pineapple have thorns that make it difficult to reach the fruit, which is located in the center of the plant. Its unprotected collection implies the risk of punctures and wounds, which seems to explain the name.

Finally, the fourth meaning of yaya, ‘tree of the anonaceae family, with straight and slender trunk, lanceolate leaves, hairless, whitish flowers and flexible and strong wood’, is motivated by the cutaneous wounds caused by the whips improvised with its branches, the best for this purpose, according to Pichardo¹⁹.

In Cuban homes, mothers pronounce a typical phrase to console their children who have hurt themselves: “poor little boy who got a yaya”²⁰. It is the voice of the ancestral aboriginal mother that for five centuries has been transmitted from generation to generation and is an example of how the bonds that unite us with our ancestors of that origin subsist, even without being noticed.

Research on Cuban culture and identity still has a long way to go in the study of the aboriginal legacy. In this sense, the results of the present work are only a small sample of what is possible.

References

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