MONDI of the MIND
The tree which moves some to tears is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing that stands in the way
William Blake
The mondi in Curaçao is a dense, thorny mantle of shrubbery that covers the arid hills of the island, overgrown with ensnaring lianas, varieties of cacti and prickly acacias and the poisonous bringa mosa, and interspersed with small, hardy trees that can survive in the long periods of drought. It is a dry wilderness that is hard to penetrate - in no way, a woodland of lush, green trees. Only on the highest hills, where the air is more humid and cooler, an occasional orchid blooms.
Why would anyone want to wander into such a dense, thorny wilderness? After speaking enthusiastically about my latest adventure in the mondi, a friend remarked “what is the point of cutting a trail down an overgrown gully, then clambering up a steep, gravelly slope just to get back to the same place where you started?” adding, “when I go for a walk, I like to have a clear goal, a beautiful place I want to reach. But just to go down a rooi and up again? If you have seen one mondi, you have seen them all.”
Yet I, and my companions on this challenging hike at Seru Bientu in the Christoffel Park, are exhilarated. They are the “speurneuzen” – perhaps best translated from the Dutch as the “archeology and nature sleuths” – whose official name is “The Curaçao Archaeological Exploration Group.” Every Thursday morning, these not so young men and women set out to comb the mondi for archeological and historical remains, rare plants and animals, and to document their exploratory trips with photographs, maps and written reports that enable other experts – archeologists, geologist, biologists – to carry on further research. The group came about in 2008, when, on my yearly visit to the island, I introduced my brother Fred, with whom I always loved to explore the mondi, to my former classmate François, who was equally passionate about the mondi. Soon they were joined by other mondi-lovers and set out to explore Curaçao’s landscape, basing their search for archeological remains on old, historic maps.
Ser’i Bientu – Hill of the Wind - is itself an extraordinary place with an aura of its own. Here the Curaçao trade winds are at their strongest, bending and contorting trees, making them dance, while the ground is covered by the distinctive orange tinted rocks of the Kenepa formation. On this hill, the higher peak of the Ser’i Bientu ridge, we stand above the dark blue sea with its turquoise bays on the island’s south coast, and behind us rises the highest peak of the island, the Christoffel, and its surrounding hills, all covered by dense mondi. But the most striking feature of Ser’i Bientu are the sabal palms with their smooth, bulbous trunks and waving crowns, that grow nowhere else on the island. It is like entering an enchanted world.
We start our hike by sliding down a slope on the western side of the Ser’i Bientu ridge, overlooking the bright yellow Kenepa plantation that stands out against the dusty green of the mondi below. Yes, we have to slide down, as the hill is so steep and gravelly with hardly any trees to hold onto, so that it is hard to keep your balance while standing upright. It is here that we find a lone white orchid in bloom.
As we reach the rooi, the gully between two hills, we enter the mondi será – the ‘closed’ mondi – that here is especially overgrown. At this point Carel, who has fallen behind while busily photographing plants and birds, decides to return to the top, with Eliane joining him for company. While waiting for us, they delight in the opportunity to savor the magic of Ser’i Bientu.
Now we have to make our way through the vines and topple infrou cacti, progressing slowly, in the hope of reaching a more open path, perhaps one made by the deer that can be found only on the hills of the Christoffel park. After an hour and a half in this dense shrubbery, with no wind and only the occasional blue of the sea peeking through the tangled lianas, we realize we won’t be able to reach the end of the rooi and decide to go up a hill that looks less densely grown that should take us back to the Ser’i Bientu ridge.
It is again a similar gravelly scree slope, but this time much steeper than the one we slid down on, and it seems to end at high cliffs of the Kenepa formation. Fred and Hettie and later Gerlof make it to the cliffs somehow, but I search for another way up where I can see the sky ahead of me, so that I won’t have to climb those cliffs that look crumbly to me. I feel assured, with Ben behind me, as he overheard that I do not like being the last one up and risk being left behind.
I hold on to sparse trees and bushes, so not to slip back down the steep hill, carefully avoiding the infrou cacti, and hoping the next bush I grab blindly, will not be a poisonous bringa mosa. But I no longer care, my adrenaline takes over. Only when Ben and I are almost there, does my exhaustion reach a peak. I drink all the water I have, eat my rescue candy for energy, and somehow make it to the top of this outcrop of the Ser’i Bientu ridge. Tired, but with a joyful sense of accomplishment, I re-surface from the closed world of the mondi into the open air, where sabal palms wave in the wind and a striking large orange rock stands out against the blue of the sea.
Why did we go down the rooi, on Ser’i Bientu, even though it did not take us anywhere? The speurneuzen would say, to see what we could find – perhaps signs of phosphate mining such as found in the nearby hills; a blooming orchid; unusual trees or birds. Or to know where the rooi is going, to see how far down we can get, if it is possible to reach the road to Kenepa, to understand the lay of the land. Because we have not been there before – or simply, “because it is there” – to paraphrase the proverbial answer attributed to Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest.
There is the sense of exploration of the unknown, of adventure in the wilderness. But how much wilderness can there really be on such a small, narrow island that is less than 70 kilometers long and at the most 16 km wide? Can you really get lost in the mondi? Is it possible there are places where no other human being has been?
It is interesting to note that the Papiamentu word “mondi” also means forest – our language makes no distinction, allowing the imagination to turn the dry shrubbery into something far grander and more heroic. Just as the word “seru” for the island’s humble hills that do not rise above 400 meters, also refers to lofty mountains covered by snow.
As children, we would turn the Plain of Hato – a narrow strip of red sand, bounded by the rough North Coast and a limestone ridge – into a veritable desert in which you could get lost for days without finding an oasis. The exploration of the great explorers spoke to our imagination, acting the discovery of the North and South Poles, to find Livingstone in the heart of Africa, to climb Mt. Everest. Then there were the children’s stories of solving mysteries, like those of my favorite author, Sientje van Iterson, whose adventures took place in the island’s old, forsaken plantation houses and the surrounding mondi. The books’ title pages said “voor oudere jongens”– for older boys – which angered me, for after all, they were written by a woman, in fact a woman I knew personally. But that did not stop me from devouring those books.
It is our imagination that calls us to explore the mondi. In Mountains of the Mind, the author – and mountain climber – Robert McFarlane writes “We read landscapes (..) we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.” This is why the mondi appeals to some of us, while to others, like by friend quoted above, it is just another hindrance to be cleared, a “green thing that stands in the way”.
The Christoffel Park was established over an area of 2,300 hectares, covering not just the highest “mountain” on the island, but all its surrounding hills, including Ser’i Bientu. This was in 1978, long after I left the island, but on my yearly visits, much before the ‘speurneuzen’ were formed, my brother Fred and I would wander through the mondi in this large park, climbing the Christoffel off-trail from every possible side; discovering the manganese mines that were lost even to the rangers; scouting the ruins of old plantation houses, and of course, marveling at the sabal palms on Ser’i Bientu.
The borders of the park gave us a sense of security to explore the mondi without the danger of trespassing on private property and being challenged by an enraged owner with a shotgun. Moreover, with much less chance of being mugged, as violent attackers – a growing phenomenon on the island – would likely stick to the city and not be found wandering in this difficult terrain.
Within those borders, mondi-walking is perhaps also a way of crossing borders – to cut a path where it is hard to get through, where the mondi is “closed” – the mondi será. The idea that I can go across something that is closed is an act of crossing boundaries that provides a sense of freedom, a sense that no rules can stop you.
In a way, entering into the mondi is, for me, an act of reclaiming the forbidden domain where, as a little girl, I was warned never to tread because of all the dangers lurking in the dark, dense shrubbery. It was the chaos beyond the cosmos of the safe home. I often wonder if these fears were instilled only in little girls, to keep us at home, as the boys enjoyed the freedom to wander into the mondi and shoot iguanas with a slingshot.
Making my way across the mondi symbolizes, for me, the blazing of my own trail on this little island where all the ways were set, where social behavior was strictly controlled while I was growing up, particularly for women. Even – or rather, especially – for the more privileged among us.
On another level, this need to explore – here, the countryside – parallels the need to explore the secrets of the past, to unearth the truth about the island’s social hierarchies and their unspoken rules that keep everyone in their place – something that has always grabbed me as a child. To explore is to find out for yourself, without asking, without a guide who shows you the way, who gives you the answers.
Secrets, too, have a boundary, a boundary that the curious among us desire to cross – the boundary of knowledge. A secret is what one person knows, or is allowed to know, but is hidden from others. Or, what is known by all, but cannot be spoken out loud, such as knowledge about the brua, the local voodoo-like practices; about the tambu, the ecstatic drum dance that was still forbidden in my childhood, and most of all, about the yu dj’afó – the ‘outside children’ a fact of life that was so commonplace in the patriarchal colonial society in which I grew up – itself an act of crossing the borders of race and class, afforded to privileged white men.
And the shadow of slavery still hovers over these hills – in ruins of plantation houses with slave-bell pillars, in what was believed to be the tiny cells where rebellious slaves were incarcerated. The impenetrable mondi around the Christoffel would have provided shelter and temporary freedom for the enslaved who had escaped from the nearby plantations during the Great Slave Rebellion in 1795. In my youth, the knowledge of slavery was, in some ways, a kind of dark, open secret that was shoved into history books, allowing descendants of slave-owners to distance themselves from all traces of a social order erected by their ancestors.
The etymology of the word ‘mondi’ is a question of speculation. It might come from the Spanish and Portuguese ‘monte’ which means mountain – and which can also refer to ‘forest’, in regions where mountains are forested. Similarly, to Curacao’s ‘seru’ (mountain) that is covered with ‘mondi’ (forest) – to play with the ambiguity of the word and its aggrandizement on this small island.
But I prefer to think of the consonants that link mondi to mundu – meaning “world” - as to me, entering the mondi is a total immersion into an entirely different world. It is perhaps to lose the way, and then, unexpectedly, to come upon an elusive deer drinking from a puddle in a rooi, that just filled with water from yesterday’s rain.
Proverbs in Papiamentu with the word mondi abound – the poet, translator and ardent proponent of Papiamentu, Lucille Haseth, provided me with at least fifteen. The mondi in all these sayings is deep inside the creatures who live there, be it the deer, goats, wild donkeys and a great variety of birds – it is their nature, and a wild place of freedom, even if it might offer a meager existence. “A deer will always return to the mondi” and “The quail says: better a hundred years of hunger in the mondi, than one day inside a house”.
On this visit, after an absence of seven years, I notice that the idea of the mondi has gained a broad appeal – judging from groups on social media called “re-discover your mondi side” and “mondi addiction”; from “Mondi Mágiko,” a night walk through a magically illuminated grove; and “Mondi Fun”, a children’s discovery program. Even holiday accommodations lure potential tourists with the word “mondi” in their names, while increasing numbers of jeep and walking tours bring more and more visitors into the mondi.
With this new popularity of the mondi, which mondi are they talking about in each of these instances? What is the mondi to all these people? To each of us, the mondi means something different – here I have reflected on what it means to me. It is, indeed, the mondi of the mind.
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Rita Mendes-Flohr - email: ritme4@gmail.com
Jerusalem, February 12, 2020