INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHT
D.O: Jaime Martinez Tolentino is
married. He’s a father of five, 2 females, 3 males. One son is a medical
doctor, one daughter a nurse, another son a social worker, another daughter a
financial adviser, and another son a captain in the U.S. Army. He has 2 Ph.D.’s,
one in French literature, and the other in Spanish and Latin American
literatures. He has degrees from New York University, the University of Madrid,
the Sorbonne, in Paris, and the University of Massachusetts. He was a college professor for 36 years, both
in his native Puerto Rico and in the U. S. Thanks for joining us on the blogs,
Jaime.
JMT:
You’re welcome, Damilola.
D.O: After Guanina’s morning bath
she was happy and began to an old Taíno song as she tied her damp hair into two
long, tight braids, but suddenly she remembered what day it was and sad. It was
her birthday, and according to the ancient law, that evening she had to go
visit the bohique, the odd medicine man Coabey, in order to learn what the
future had in store for her. Why was this young woman sad knowing she would
learn of the future? Shouldn't learning about the future make anyone glad?
Because by doing this you know what problems there is ahead and the ritual you
will perform to halt that. Tell us why she was afraid Jaime.
JMT:
That is part of the foreboding that forms part of the mood of this chapter, set
in a world of magic and the supernatural.
In my story, the Taínos have forebodings of the arrival of the Europeans
on their islands, just as the Maya left evidence, in their Book of the Books of Chilam Balaam, that they expected the arrival
of the white men.
D.O: Why couldn't anyone refuse
going to Coabey to learn of the future?
JMT:The
medicine man held a very high position in the Taíno hierarchy. In matters of teaching, healing, and religion
they were even more revered that the chief (cacique). Remember that the native American Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) who was
one of the leaders at the Battle of the Little Bighorn River in 1876 where the
Custer Battalion was totally annihilated,was a Sioux medicine
man.
D.O: Who is Yukiyu?
JMT:
Yukiyu was one of the two supreme Taíno gods. He was the god of good, of the
harvest, of noble actions and of love.
D.O: The start of this book was like
when God first made the world and felt it needed humans to live on it. I like
the uniqueness in that aspect of the book. What inspired such dynamic idea? You
must have done enough brain storming, right? *smiles*
JMT:
I didn’t have to do all that much brainstorming. Curiously enough, the stories of the creation
of human beings in several cultures are quite similar. Thus, the Taíno version is somewhat similar
to the Maya version, which in turn is quite similar to the version written down
in the Christian Bible.
D.O: Tell your potential readers
about Juracán. His hatred baffled me.
JMT:
Juracán was the other Supreme god in the Taíno dichotomy. He was the god of evil, and Yukiyu’s sworn
enemy. He represented the tempest,
warfare, ill luck, illnesses and evil acts and thoughts.
D.O: The Caribs are another set of
enemies of the Tainos. Why do they hate them?
JMT:
The Caribs were a totally different indigenous people who inhabited the Lesser
Antilles, while the Taínos inhabited the Greater Antilles, at the time of the
arrival of the Spanish at the end of the 15th century. They were more warlike than the Taínos, and
they often raided Boriquén (Puerto
Rico), taking their captives away with them.
In 1493, when the Spanish first saw Boriquén,
the Caribs had already reached what is today’s offshore Island of Vieques,
which is a municipality of Puerto Rico.
It is somewhat ironic that after the Spaniards defeated the Taínos in
battle (1514), the few Taíno warriors who managed to escape allied themselves
with the Caribs to harangue the Spanish in firefights. Eventually, the Spanish alsoannihilated the Caribs.
D.O: Cutting Coabey's speech short
here "You return to my hut to learn what your brief, unfortunate life is
to be?" Hmmm. Will the future be disastrous for Guanina?
JMT:
Yes, it will. According to Taíno
history, eventually Guanina fell in love with the Spaniard Cristobal Sotomayor,
and she, together with Sotomayor, was killed in an ambush set by her brother,
Chief Agüeybaná.
D.O: The message for Guanina was
that the Taíno nation would be wiped out by something coming from the ocean. Will
this tragedy occur?
JMT:
Yes, it will. Between 1510 and 1514,
most Taíno warriors were killed in battles against the Spaniards, and during
the following 300 years, the rest of the Taíno people disappeared through
illnesses brought by the Europeans, through their harsh treatment of Taíno
workers panning for gold in the rivers of Boriquén,
and later working in the sugarcane fields.
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were no pure Taínos living in Puerto
Rico.
D.O: Guanina is always drawn to the
sea which took both herparents. She has an unexplainable fascination with the
sea. Is this another way this evil sea plans to take Guanina’s life?
JMT:
You guessed it. Her undoing, and that of
the Taíno nation itself will be at the hands of the Spaniards, who came to our
island by sea. Individually, Guanina
will fall in love with one of “the gods come from the sea,” and being with him
will bring about her own death.
D.O: The Great Conch Shell possesses
magical powers. What's its role in the story?
JMT:
Later on in the novel, a conch shell will be used to announce the landing of
the Spaniards on the island. They will
meet with Guanina and Agüeybaná, the
younger’s father, Agüeybaná, the
elder, who will make a pact of non-aggression with them. That pact will allow the Spaniards to build
up their forces, and eventually conquer all the Taíno nation. Therefore, the conchshell is a symbol of the
tragic end to befall the Taínos.
D.O: What's the central conflict for
the book Taíno?
JMT:
It’s the old evil vs. good, Europeans Vs. native peoples conflict, in which the
technology of the invaders (they had rifles and gunpowder) and their military
might (they had horses and German Shepherd hunting dogs) will triumph over the
lesser developed Taínos. However, in a
strange turnabout of events, the Taínos will get a sort of final word in:
through racial mixing, the Taínos will survive to the 21st
century. Moreover, the descendant of the
Taínos, will learn about their ancestors through archeology. The final irony will be that a descendant of
the Taínos, who did not possess a writing system, will be a writer (me) who
will write their story for all the world to read about it. That story, of course, is my historical novel
Taíno.
D.O: Briefly tell us about the Taínos.
Who they are.
JMT:
Perhaps you should ask “Who were
they” because the Spaniards wiped them out completely. They were a very gentle primitive people who
had fled South America by reaching the delta of the Orinoco River, in
modern-day Venezuela, and then island-hopping through the Caribbean Sea until
they reached the two islands of the Greater Antilles that they would inhabit: Hispaniola (home of today’s Dominican
Republic and Haiti) and Boriquén
(modern-day Puerto Rico). Some of them mixed with white Spaniards, and later
with black African slaves, to produce their modern-day descendants, the Puerto
Ricans. We have many notes on them
written by Spanish priests, and our archeologists have restored beautiful
ceremonial plazas in the mountainous Utuado region, and in the south of the
island, near Ponce, in the vicinite of Tibes. The government agency in charge
of preserving Puerto Rico’s history, the Instituto de CulturaPuertorriqueña,
has, on its official seal, a Taíno, an African slave and a Spanish conquistador
to show the racial mixture from which we come.
There are many books on Taíno history and archeology, but no novels such
as Taíno, until now. I’m sending you a
map of Puerto Rico so that you’ll have an idea of our island.
D.O: When will this book be
released?
JMT:
I’m currently seeking a literary agent to represent the book and sell it to a
publisher.
D.O: Jaime. *smiles* When did you
get into writing?
JMT:
I began writing in my 3rd year of college, at New York University,
in 1964. Inexperienced fool that I was,
I began a novel about African slaves and slave hunters at that time. I got to about page 3 before I realized that
I could not complete a novel then. I
began writing in earnest in 1975, in Puerto Rico, when I edited an anthology of
short stories by 7 Puerto Rican authors, including myself. I have never stopped writing since.
D.O: At what time did you start
accepting the responsibilities of being a writer? Because a lot goes into being
one.
JMT:
At the beginning of my writing career, I published both academic writing and
fiction. It was only around 2006, after
I had retired from university teaching, that I decided to go into the full-time
writing of narrative non-fiction, and fiction.
I am very glad that I took that decision. I have also made sure that I
publish in as many countries as possible.
So far, I’ve published in Puerto Rico, the U.S., Canada, Spain, Germany,
Italy, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and the Internet.
D.O: Does Taíno give us the assurance that writing is what you want to do?
JMT:
Yes. In that book I use a series of different techniques, all of which I have
mastered over the years. I feel very
comfortable writing, and I am confident that I write well. In fact, I am considered one of Puerto Rico’s
best current writers, and proof of that is that my bio appears on WIKIPEDIA and
in several print encyclopedias of Latin American writers.
D.O: What trends have you observed
in the story Taíno that could make it
a Best Selling?
JMT:Taínois a historical novel along the
lines of the American author Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots. Roots, the story of an African man taken prisoner in Africa and
brought to the US as a slave, traces that character’s (KuntaKinte) descendants,
right up to the moment in which Roots
was being written, and right up to its African American author. I do the same
in Taíno, but instead of following
one blood line, I follow two of the three that have combined to form modern-day
Puerto Ricans: our Taíno and our African roots. Roots was aired over US
television as a mini-series, in
1977, and it received 37 Emmy
Award nominations
and won nine. It won also a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award.
I would love for Taíno to have that success, but I’m not holding my breath.
D.O: Are there general guidelines
that you have for writers, in terms of how they should write a power packed
material?
JMT:
Write what you love, don’t compare yourself to any other writer; write EVERY
SINGLE DAY, even what you write is not very good. The exercise is important. And, above all, don’t give up; if you
persevere, you will triumph.
D.O: Thanks for coming on the blogs
Jaime. I wish you all the success in your publishing career.
JMT:
Thank you, Damilola, for inviting me.
Good luck to you, too, in your writing endeavors. As a gift, here are a copy of the film cover
for Roots, and of my proposed cover
for Taíno, as well as the seal of the
Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, a map of Puerto Rico, statistics on the
islands of the Greater Antilles, and a map of that region.
Jaime on Wikipedia
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Copyright © 2013 Damilola Ogunremi, All Rights
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