Thinking with Cannibals Parama Roy (bio) Cannibal Writes: Eating Others In Caribbean And Indian Ocean Women's Writing BY NJERI GITHIRE'S CANNIBAL CLAIMS The taste for human flesh has always been with us. Cannibals have been good to think with in a number of intellectual and imaginative endeavors. Literary texts from Homer to Montaigne to Melville are prodigally supplied with them, as Maggie Kilgour and Frank Lestringant have made abundantly clear.1 Cannibals and cannibalism, it seems, have also been critical in the history of natural and moral law from classical times through the European Enlightenment.2 And if William Arens is to be believed, cannibalism is one of the foundational fictions of the discipline of anthropology.3 Arens's broad claims about the plausibility of the existence of socially sanctioned cannibalism rather than its pathological or emergency varieties may have been widely disputed. But the debates that his claims have engendered among anthropologists and postcolonial scholars suggest that man-eating remains both highly charged and imperfectly assimilated in the humanities and social sciences.4 ________ Ever since Columbus's voyage to the Americas, the conceit of cannibalism has been crucial to an understanding of the history and culture of the Caribbean, Brazil, the South Pacific, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. As is now well known, the word "cannibal" dates from Columbus's voyages to the Americas and is famously a corruption of the name of the Carib people. In a context marked by more than the usual [End Page 161] complement of rudimentary translations and incomplete records, Columbus apparently came to believe that his Arawak informants, neighbors to the Carib, saw the latter as corporeally monstrous and frightful in their appetites, as evidenced by their predilection for human flesh. Columbus himself did not encounter the Caribs until his second voyage, nor did he witness any acts of anthropophagy, though he readily accepted the assertion of his companion, the royal Spanish physician Diego Alvarez Chanca, that the mere presence of human bones in Antillean homes substantiated charges of man-eating. Thus a resonant legend was born. Kelly Watson remarks acutely that tales of cannibalism exist in an inverse relationship to a project of pacification and civilizing (and occasional extermination). Noting the diaspora of cannibalism from the Americas to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century, she remarks: "It seems that once the tangible threat of contact with savagery was eliminated, cannibalism was no longer an important topic of discussion in a particular region. Rather[,] accusations of cannibalism lodged against Native peoples traveled along a moving imperial frontier."5 Njeri Githire's comparative study of the cannibal complex in the islands of the Caribbean and the western Indian Ocean authenticates this conclusion; as the author demonstrates, cannibalism became a mobile template for pacification, available for deployment in new contexts (Madagascar, East Africa) when locals proved recalcitrant to surrendering their sovereignty. It is important to note that in a certain imperialist schematic, cannibalism may be squelched temporarily but is never vanquished once and for all; it remains lodged stubbornly in the imperial imaginary, most commonly (though not invariably) as the practice or identity that permits the distinction between the civilized human, endowed with maximal normative value, and the minimally human or, even worse, the animal-man (Robert Esposito's term) who assaults the species status of anthropos as one who engages in nonreciprocal feeding upon the flesh of nonhuman animals. Columbus's log reports (albeit with some skepticism) on the cynocephalic character of cannibals, and some of the early illustrations of the New World showed dog-headed men and women going about the grisly task of dismembering human bodies. Cynocephaly was, as Githire notes, "yet another example of cannibals' fiercely depraved attributes" (14). Attributes like perverse or [End Page 162] promiscuous tastes (for human flesh and for excrement) made the cannibal isomorphic in some respects with the dogs, wolves, and vultures that were the macabre nonhuman beneficiaries of battlefield carnage in writings from the classical through the early modern period.6 Given the powerful resonance in the global north of cannibalism as an emblem of primitivism and monstrosity requiring pacification, it is perhaps no surprise that some postcolonial writers and...