The Aboriginal Encounters the Conquistador:
 Jamaica Kincaid's "Ovando"

 Micheline Adams
 College of the Bahamas

 he short story "Ovando," published in Conjunctions in 1989, stands

 out among the other pieces in Jamaica Kincaid's oeuvre. The text
 does not focus on gender, and, although it is highly allegorical, the
author has turned away from the figures of mother and child to explore those
of conquistador and Aboriginal. Modern Caribbean narrative has dealt only
infrequently with Amerindians, though it must be acknowledged that Wilson
Harris has always insisted that they have played a crucial role in the formation
of the Caribbean psyche and that their cultures should be tapped as a
wellspring of creativity by the people of the region, and Kincaid has allegorised
the experience of the region's Aboriginals not only in this work but also in the
illustrated children's book Annie, Gwen, Lily, Pam and Tulip (1989).
 But, generally speaking, the conception of the Aboriginal is far from whole,
being based on myth combined with a limited Eurocentric vision. In his
examination of the encounter between Europeans and Aboriginals of the
Caribbean, Peter Hulme contends that colonial discourse created a binary
impression of Amerindians- "fierce cannibal and noble savage" that has
been corroborated even by modern history texts; he argues further that
anthropological studies have tended to extend this ethnic stereotyping (47).
The preponderant conception of the Aboriginal is as victim, however. In fact,
the sense of victimisation that once preoccupied the region's intellectuals
was formed in part because of the near decimation of these first peoples.
One can argue that they are conceived as the consummate victims in the
region's history, even more so than slaves are, not only because they are
represented as abused and silenced but also because, in actuality, they have
been virtually erased.
 Kincaid travels back to the inception of West Indian history to examine
the intersection of the old world and the new. According to its author,
"Ovando" was an effort to produce a "grand work about the question of
dominion" (Kincaid, interview with Perry 501). The story is told by an