142 MICHELINE ADAMS

Amerindian whose gender remains indeterminate.' It begins with the line "A
KNOCK AT THE DOOR," and with this abrupt opening the historical figure
Frey Nicolas de Ovando enters the Aboriginals' lives.2 It should be
acknowledged that since Ovando is the first European whom they see, he
also recalls Christopher Columbus and all that he brought to Caribbean
history (Ferguson Where 133), but the misadventures of the actual Ovando
in Hispaniola strongly colour this allegory.
 Ovando was a knight of a religious order in Spain who was sent by his
monarchs to take charge of their first colony, Hispaniola, in 1502, ten years
after the initial landfall of Europeans in the Caribbean. S. Lyman Tyler draws
from the first hand testimony of Bartolom6 de Las Casas to detail Ovando's
cruelties. Shortly after arriving, the governor devised the encomienda sys-
tem. He authorised certain Spaniards to take charge of groups of Aboriginals
who, according to the monarchs' decree, were to be proselytised in the Catho-
lic faith and paid for the labour they completed on land and in mines. How-
ever, by placing the Aboriginals in the hands of others, he effectively gave
up control over their welfare and turned a blind eye to their inhumane treat-
ment. He is also known for torturing and massacring large groups of natives,
including caciques, and he showed no chivalry in terms of gender, for he had
the innocent Amerindian Queen Anancanoa killed. His materialism is evident
in the fact that despite his religious affiliation, he had special written permis-
sion from Ferdinand and Isabella to wear lavish clothing and jewellery.
 In a sense, the actual Ovando is a caricature of a conquistador: all of the
ruthless qualities that are associated with these questing Europeans are
multiplied in him. Kincaid takes this caricature from history and installs
him in her text as an emblem of imperialism and colonialism, but because he
was an especially cruel human being, the brutality, the blindness and the
single-mindedness of these political systems are underscored.
 When Ovando arrives at the narrator's home, he is described in this
striking fashion:

 he was a complete skeleton except for his brain which remained and was
 growing smaller by the millennium. He stank. Immediately I was struck by

'Ferguson believes that the narrator has a female "sensibility" ("A Lot of Memory"
14). She refers to the narrator as she in Where the Land Meets the Body. However,
Kincaid explains that the narrator is nameless and genderless because "the people
who lose" have neither names nor sex ("A Lot"). I agree with Kincaid that the
gender of the Aboriginal in "Ovando" should be irrelevant in our apprehension of
the horrors perpetrated on these peoples.
2 Ferguson considers how the word ovando resembles ovum. She explains, too,
that ovan is the "Arabic for zero and cipher, hence a mere nothing" (Where 135). I
would like to point out that Ovando fittingly contains within it the seed for the
phrase "over and over," evoking the notion of history repeating itself as it does in
neo-colonial practices.