Mali Cax Yum, Savannah Shaman
I shot her in the shadows of Roraima when she was a teenager. We climbed that rock for three days in an expedition led by her father, a dying shaman. I asked him what he was dying from, and the translation came back as one word: "Impotence." His daughter was named Cax Yum, the goddess of the woods, and she won a blowdart contest in the autonomous region of Guyana, right on the border with Venezuela, where Roraima looms out of the savannah. She shot a pig with a poisoned dart from more than one hundred meters distance, and she is now the only female shaman in the history of her tribe. She's added the Asian name for flower, Mali, and now goes by Mali Cax Yum, which is a marketing bonanza if I have ever heard one.
Gallery is COMING JULY 31.
Cax Yum, in Guyana, aged eight. Posing with rainstick.
After adding the name Mali from her studies in Borneo and Thailand, Mali Cax Yum was painted in a mix of tribal influences, borrowing from the Amazon, New Guinea and Burma.
Roraima
Mali Cax Yum was born here, on this tepui on the border of Venezuela and Guyana. The surrounding lowlands are called the "Sabana," for savannah not unlike Eastern Africa.
It is an all-day journey across the Amazon in smaller and smaller planes, over the Orinoco to Puerto Ordaz, and then to the Brazilian border in the very south of Venezuela. Blue's plane is picking up a small family from a diamond mine along the way to Roraima.
Mali in modern dress with tribal influences.
Hiking up the cliff face to the top of Roraima. This tepui is the source of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World."
MALI CAX YUM, the Savannah Shaman
I shot her in the shadows of Roraima when she was a teenager. We climbed that rock for three days in an expedition led by her father, a dying shaman. I asked him what he was dying from, and the translation came back as one word: "Impotence." His daughter was named Cax Yum, the goddess of the woods, and she won a blowdart contest in the autonomous region of Guyana, right on the border with Venezuela, where Roraima looms out of the savannah. She shot a pig with a poisoned dart from more than one hundred meters distance, and she is now the only female shaman in the history of her tribe. She's added the Asian name for flower, Mali, and now goes by Mali Cax Yum, which is a marketing bonanza if I have ever heard one.
Gallery is COMING JULY 31.
Louise Katten Erickson, artist
Stockholm artist Louise Erickson agreed to do a series of warpaints for Mali Cax Yum, and is pictured here at work in the Yellow Shoppe in Bethesda.
Soon.
From atop Roraima.
Shaman or warrior?
The debate over Mali's true nature is a popular topic in Guyana. She works with poisons and has been accused of poaching corrupt government officials with her deadly aims.
Macuto, Venezuela. The collapse of this building is a source of much of Mali's rage. Her family lived here, and perished in the mudslides of Macuto on Christmas Eve. More than 50,000 people died in the disaster, barely noted during the holiday season. The buildings are still in a broken mess today, 15 years after the disaster.
This is Mali's sister's bedroom. After seeing this place, Mail went back to Roraima and stayed there for three years, looking for poisons in the unknown flora of the tepui.
The small plant at bottom left is p. tremorsis, a lethal weed that has terrible effects on testosterone. If ingested, the victim loses any ability to create testosterone, and usually falls into a dark depressive state. The plant was only identified by science in 2008, but is long known to the shamans of the Amazon.
This is the route up Roraima.
Another poisonous plant found only on top of Roraima: p. florensis. This is Mali's favorite tea brew, and it has immediate effects on the nervous system if ingested in great quantity, or if applied directly to the bloodstream from a small prick, even from a needle. Delivered by arrowhead, a small does of its nectar is fatal in minutes.
The only cactus that grows on Roraima, a variation of the blue cactus of central america, but also deadly, and the third substance used by Mali Cax Yum in her efforts to keep the savannah wilderness pristine.