My Mother and the Tsantsa

The head-shrinking (or tsantsa) tradition among the Jivaro tribes of the Amazon was alive and well when my parents and I arrived in Ecuador in the 1950s. We first saw a couple of tsantsas inside a glass case in Quito’s folk-art museum.  They were fist-size, the skin black and leathery, the eyelids and the grotesquely large lips sewn shut with coarse string, and the hair—which had retained its original  length—streaming down the non-existent back.

They were like puppets out of a nightmare, and I could barely stand to look at them, especially after reading the description of how they were made. The captured enemy’s head was cut off, its contents were removed and replaced with a small wooden sphere, the skin was tanned, and the resulting object was dried and shrunk by covering it with hot rocks and sand.

My mother badly wanted a tsantsa.  She admired all things indigenous, and had acquired a number of hand thrown pots of various shapes and sizes, a chief’s regalia made of pounded tree bark covered with tropical bird feathers, a nine-foot blowgun with its quiver full of curare-tipped arrows.  A tsantsa would have made an exciting addition to her collection. But there was a problem:  real shrunken heads were not only expensive, but the Catholic Church forbade the faithful to own them.  Fortunately, there was a lively trade in fake tsantsas made from monkey heads, goat skin, and who knows what else.

When we moved to the U.S., my mother’s artifacts came with us.  (Those were the days when you could travel on a plane with a nine-foot blowgun and a supply of paralyzing, curare-tipped arrows and nobody asked any questions.) The first thing my mother did in our new house was to arrange her collection.  The delicate, earth-colored pots went on a shelf.  The blowgun and the arrows—whose tips she had snapped off to prevent mishaps while dusting—hung on the living room wall, next to the chief’s ceremonial garb with its once colorful bird feathers.  The tsantsa, however, lived inside a brown paper bag in the hall closet.

This was Birmingham, Alabama, and I was fourteen years old.  When guests walked into our living room and beheld the display, their mouths would fall open.  My mother loved this, and would proceed, in sketchy English, to relate the origins and uses of each object. Meanwhile, in a corner of the room, I would wither with embarrassment.  Why, I wondered, did she have to make us seem even more weird than we already were?  My survival strategy among my peers in those days was to try to blend in as best I could, but my mother seemed to delight in emphasizing our foreignness.

As she neared the end of her lecture, I would pray, God please, don’t let her show them the tsantsa!  But she always did.  She would fetch the brown paper bag from the closet, thrust in her hand and bring out the head with a flourish. The guests would gasp and recoil in horror as she stood there triumphant, holding the thing by the hair, like Judith with the head of Holofernes.  Only after she had given a detailed description of the beheading and shrinking process and let the company sweat for a while would she disclose that this particular head was a fake.

Where, I wonder, is that brown paper bag with its pseudo grisly contents, after all these years?  Where are the blowgun, the quiver, the chief’s ratty outfit?  I don’t want to know.  But I do have one of my mother’s Ecuadorian pots in my living room.  It doesn’t scare the guests.