Behold the Black Caiman by Lucas Bessire

Bessire's Behold the Black Caiman read for me as a diary of a witness, an anti-hero who experienced senseless, incomprehensible violence and wanted to use the process of writing to attempt to give form and coherence to his experiences working with the Ayoreo people.

Bessire's writing style exemplifies this assertion. His writing seems to me to be a frenzied effort to inscribe on paper his own experiences of fragment making violence before the pieces fall off into nothingness. It is with this intention that he writes sentences like, "I remember those scenes now as a series of disjointed images of brown skin and muscle cramps and biting flies and acrid smoke and tepid water and earnest voices..." in which these image-fragments are not divided with the use of a comma, but seem to flow fluidly into one another with the use of the 'and,' just as how the work itself tries to piece together disappearing fragments. It is definitely the most violent ethnography I have read, and Bessire's descriptions of gratuitous violence is one way of dealing with these experiences.

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