Emerging from the golden sandstone of the Caribbean earth, this figure holds more than form—it holds memory. Carved between the 10th and 15th centuries, when the Taíno people shaped these islands into a mosaic of thriving communities, it is not merely an object but a cemi: a vessel of sacred power. Its contours—neither fully human nor animal, but something transcendent—map a cosmology where ancestors, nature spirits, and living beings flowed together like the trade winds.
Study its openwork body, how the negative spaces seem to breathe. The wide, hollow eyes peer beyond our world; the gaping mouth could be singing or swallowing spirits. Serpentine motifs coil around its limbs—perhaps Boinael, the rainbringer, or Guabancex, she of the hurricanes. Every incision was a prayer, every curve an act of devotion. The softened edges, worn by generations of reverent touch and tropical rains, only deepen its power. This is no artifact behind glᴀss, but a being that has weathered.
Imagine it in its original splendor: painted with vibrant bija red, placed in a batey (ceremonial plaza) under a ceiba tree’s canopy, absorbing the smoke of burning tobacco and the rhythm of areíto dances. The Taíno world thrived on such bridges between realms—where farmers became poets chanting to Yúcahu, the cᴀssava spirit, and where bohiques (shamans) decoded visions in these very stones.
Then came 1492. The figure’s last living witnesses may have watched Columbus’ ships crest the horizon. Its custodians likely perished in gold mines or from foreign plagues. Yet here it remains—not as a relic of the “extinct,” as colonizers claimed, but as proof of endurance. Modern DNA studies reveal Taíno ancestry alive in millions across the Caribbean diaspora. Their words—hammock, hurricane, tobacco—still shape our tongues.
To stand before this cemi today is to stand at a crossroads. The wind through its perforations sounds like maracas; the shadows it casts at noon form shapes suspiciously like petroglyphs. It asks us to unlearn the myth of the “vanished Indian” and to hear, instead, an unbroken whisper: We shaped these islands. We are still here. The stone’s patience outlasts empires. It waits for those willing to listen.
