Series Title: UTOPIA - Book One Title: HYBRID

Utopia

Chapter One

The Yanomam Controversy

Third generation survivors of the Holocaust of Humanity sit around the Lar, a large opening in the centre of their Shabono. Paolo, the designated keeper of the fire, a slender moquenque, recently incorporated, spurs the coals and places a new semi-burnt, mid-size log from the nearby stack of firewood gathered by the coop that afternoon and heaped next to the old.

The twenty gathered members of the clan stretch their limbs while sharing the day's trials and victories in soft, intimate voices as they take off their reed woven smocks under which, to protect their genitals, they wear guayucos, a short skirt covering of the same woven reed fabric worn by both sexes and tied around their waist with strings pulled from the font. Their skin tones range from lighter to darker tones of bronze and beige. A diet rich in a red root taken as a tea or roasted, oriro, protects and adds luster in the sun. Their eyes range in color and shape, some were green, others dark blue, almost black, and yet others amber with oblique or almond shapes.

A man from the construction coop, his face and shoulders all scratched up, with lacerations on his thighs and stomach recounts the day's challenge among friends. Nearby, a small circle of women laughs and cheers delighted by the children's songs and rhymes. Many women's smocks have come off revealing bands of a thinner woven fabric strapping their breasts and tied in the back. This new generation had achieved a high degree of sophisticated designs ranging from geometrical to abstract figures and life forms in black and white and hues of color embellishing their skin, fabrics and pottery.

". . . the mother jaguar woke up and ran after me at the speed of lightning," the constructor narrates, "I was trying lianas on the canopy bridge when I stumbled over the cutest cubs." He recalls. His friend gives him a pat in the back. "Ouch." they all laugh.

The survivors' architectural designs included arboreal bridges on which they could travel longer distances in less time. They were working on a major canopy highway that would take them farther than they had ever been before.

"I stopped and that's when I saw the mother jag, so close I could touch her. She was sleeping. Ooof! She woke up! The chase ended when I fell through the canopy and landed on a monkey spider web." The men laugh harder still.

The people at the lar slowly fall silent when Sabia, a small, elderly woman with kind, serene oriental eyes, joins the circle and sits with her legs crossed. She straightens her back and nods to the gathered with a slight smile on her lips while she claps twice letting the crowd know she will speak. Then, she closes her eyes and throws her head back. When she brings her head forward and opens her eyes again, everyone is expectantly watching her. She breathes in and out slowly allowing the Universal Spirit to speak through her.

"Legendary tales abound in the ancient towns' libraries of the modern world telling of a creature part spider, part human, known as the Queen of the Jungle, Taha-rai of the Yanomam, the legendary spider woman. Taha-rai, an Amazon legend who once lived in these forests we now occupy."

"Who were the Yanomam?" One of the children asks.

Sabia nods.

"There were thousands of them before the modern world. But they died out as unscrupulous merchants, gold-diggers, anthropologists and other scientists, brought diseases, prostitution, and worst of all, displacement, to their civilisation. The Yanomamo in Brazil were from the south-west, and the Yanomami from the northeast lived in another country called Venezuela. Both nations had settlements in the inter-fluvial lands between the Rio Negro and Rio Branco before the Holocaust. The wet and dry seasons ruled their diet and customs. But while studying their culture, visiting anthropologists gave rise to a controversy about the Yanomam which was never disavowed before the Ecotomb."