The Survival of Afro-Indigenous Symbols: A Story of Secrets

In the Caribbean, Indigenous lineages survived as natives mixed with the maroons, the Black self-emancipated rebels. The maroons fled far from Spanish settlements and towns into the mountains, mixing with the Indigenous communities. Yet, Black communities are often represented as though it were impossible for us to carry Indigenous lineages and traditions. As I consider 500 Years, and as I consider my own body as the result of three peoples meeting in the eye of the hurricane, I must tether their histories once again.

Belkis Ayón, the Afro-Cuban artist who opened the realm of fantasy and Afro-spirituality with her signature woodcuts and collagraphs, gestures to the role of secrecy in cultural preservation. Scaled figures camouflage into negative space across Ayón’s body of work. Her Resurrection, from 1998, a grayscale collagraph on nine sheets of paper, depicts a group of black-and-white subjects emerging from a pitch-black opening. Whether they are emerging from a mountain, a cave, or from inside a river, they have emerged from obscurity into visibility. Ayón’s Resurrection evokes one of the first true Afro-Indigenous concepts: the evolution of the Arawak word símara.

Símara, which means both “arrow” and “a rebel,” is the origin of “maroon.” If one considers how arrows were related to early Indigenous rebellion, the duality of the word makes more sense. The Arawak-language símara became the Spanish word cimarron, which later became the English word “maroon.” Just like a Black self-emancipated rebel or an Indigenous warrior, the arrow camouflages into the mountain, darting toward its target at an unexpected moment. The Indigenous símara came to define the first 400 years of Black self-emancipation in the Americas. In Ayón’s Resurrection, the camouflaged maroon emerges from opacity, but not enough to be recognizable.

In Coco Fusco’s The Undiscovered Amerindians (2012), the past and present are conjoined to explore the perpetual exploitation of Indigenous and Black people. “Let me feed the girl in the cage a banana so my wife can take a picture! I’ll pay $10,” says a white man, seeking to bribe the native museum staff, in an engraving that fictionalizes the Whitney Biennial and reflects Fusco’s street performance installation in which individuals in supposedly Indigenous garments were placed in a cage. This performance mirrors the actual caging and exhibition of a Black young man named Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo in 1902. Sequestered from Central Africa and forced to live in the cage with orangutans in the zoo, Benga spent his days being watched by thousands of spectators; he was either in tragically silent or in open rebellion, threatening to strike, bite, and kick the onlookers.