Among my peers it is known that one’s own stories are partially written somewhere else. We read horoscopes written in places from which our stars cannot be seen. We are used to following the news from countries that rewrite our laws and rebuild our images. We schedule our hairdresser appointments according to the phases of the moon. We listened to songs that taught us things in languages that our parents didn’t know. We watch foreign shows and learn foreign art. We let the storm change our plans and the newsfeed guide our revolution. We were not trained to listen to our voices as unique and irreplaceable. We listened and repeated. And we listened so much. We became proficient listeners. We learned that language has a body. That it can talk, interfere, change the course of events. It can silence, send us to jail or bring us places. Once written, a language can set rules and test the boundaries of one’s skin. It may enlarge one’s world while suppressing others’. Its body is shifty, displacent. When spotted, it veers onto something else. It can’t be fixed no matter how solid its figure may look. Text is the sovereign’s hand, the liar’s credit and the poet’s length. It demands handling under limitless reconfigurations. Unfixable, untameable. Its body is unresolved yet as present as the gravity of things. Ungraspable, moving, queer. Cuir! Phantasmic as the mothers of the mothers of our mothers. Here like the kin we never knew. Deviating presence that rejects space. Who’s the text, who’s the law, whose body is language?
A few years ago I wrote a poem titled She Man as They Danced. It brought to my world a lightness to pronouns that I lacked. In the poem, pronouns moved at the speed of verbs. They bended, twisted, followed an ancient rhythm. Time is this rhythm. Languaging is naming accordingly. And I take the act of naming just like the people before me named their children. It is about care, blessing, recognition, the given of existence, the welcoming to one’s world as part of one’s self. It involves love before knowing. It’s a gesture of faith. Once embodied, language will reconfigure, revolve, turn and question itself. It moves both like time and like flesh. Laws are amended, promises are questioned, contracts grow old, names are forgotten and rumours grow into power while documents are invalidated. Language, like kin, descends, and we must be ready for that. It comes down from our mothers as it does from the parliament. It comes down as bodies, and it dances among us. It’s a dance of writing, reading, performing, executing, obeying and being, a dance to be learned, incorporated. Like the child that learns her mother’s tongue, the convict that learns her sentence or the writer that learns herself.
Earlier this year, the two images above came into my possession. In one of them, Cláudio Villas Boas, a famous sertanista1, is photographed writing in the Xingu area in Brazil in the middle of others. Together with his brothers Orlando and Leonardo Villas Boas, Cláudio played a crucial role in the negotiations with the Brazilian government that led to the multiple manifestations of the Estatuto do Índio, that is, the laws that describe, create, and incorporate the bureaucratic existence of the Povos Originários2 under the Brazilian legislation system. In the center of the image, Cláudio writes. He wears sunglasses. In the second image is Hugo Gernsback (Luxembourg, 1884 – New York 1969), known for publishing the first science fiction magazine3 in the United States, wearing his invention, the Isolator, a wearable device that eliminates external distractions with the objective of optimising concentration. On this image there is just one person. That person also writes. The writer is wearing an enclosed helmet; we don’t see his face. There’s an oxygen tube on a table. There’s also a table on the first image. The writers in both images are right-handed. They touch the paper with their left hands.
In popular and academic conceptions of the author, writing frequently involves a battle with the exterior world as though physical reality must be pushed outside of the literary space in the search for a purer, clearer environment. As if writing is connected to a bodiless mind, to a ghostly presence or to the divine that does not belong to earthly affairs. Writing assumes a spiritual quest, a lonesome journey of the writer towards the unseen. Like Pythia the Oracle of Delphi, a meditating bhikkhu, a brilliant novelist, a judge returning a verdict, or a Yanomami xamã, all of whom for a moment negate their own bodies in order to connect to something else that demands embodiment in order to take place. This conflict between the "external” and the body seems to be a necessary condition in the moment of writing. But what does the writer bring from this place of embodiment back to the ground, to the fellow people that didn’t partake in the communication with the non-physical realm?
In 1973, the Brazilian statute 6.001 was promulgated. Better known as the Estatuto do Índio, it specified that Brazilian laws would extend to the Povos Originários, with the provision that they must undergo a process of assimilation to be mediated by an external guardian. The reasoning behind the provision was that they were seen under the law as being ‘relatively incapable’. It was also written that any member of any people would be allowed to request a liberation from such system as long as they were over 21 years of age, that they were able to communicate in Portuguese, that they were apt to exercise useful activities in the national community, and that they were able to understand national costumes. Since then these laws have received new amendments. One in 1988 and the last one in 2002, in which the assimilationist perspective is discarded, but where several other aspects of the bureaucratic body remain in negotiation. Text, in the case of statute 6.001, transcended the skin. From the outside. Forceful incorporation. It’s a similar process to what Gayle Salamon describes in her book Assuming a Body - Transgender and Rethorics of Materiality when talking about sex determination:
Genital configuration as a determinant of either sex or gender happens exactly once –at birth– for normatively gendered people. But for transpeople it happens a second time as they try to conform their bureaucratic sex with their phenomenological sex. This illustrates that genital configuration as a means of determining sex is appealed to only when there is already some kind of gender trouble at issue, when an individual is already unreadable in some way. 4
Salamon not only underlines the entanglement of text and genital configuration for transpeople as a tension between bureaucratic and phenomenological sex, she also posits this in terms of the readability of an individual body. Bureaucracy intertwined with the body. The body is reshaped, determined, enclosed. Language here descends from the government as a body that does not necessarily correspond to anything or anyone. The bureaucratic body, or the body of law, is a summoned entity, one that must be understood as a moving, undefined and yet latent corpus among us.
In his book A Queda do Céu, David Kopenawa, a Yanomami xamã, gives an account of the Xapiri. Xapiri are within a category in the Yanomami cosmology that belongs to invisible beings from the perspective of the common person. They behave as ‘image-beings’ of primordial ancestors that can through the xamã ‘come down’ to earth and dance. By doing so, their subjective perspectives are part of the xamã’s body and they are able to develop different relationships with other entities that populate the universe and make sure that various cosmic events follow its course. The Xapiri are therefore seen as auxiliary spirits. Spirits that not only move the world but that carry the history of the Yanomami people with them.
Kopenawa didn’t write his book himself. It was co-authored by Bruce Albert5, an anthropologist and long time friend of Kopenawa, who captured fragments of their lifelong conversations in a series of transcriptions. David Kopenawa is clear with his literary intentions and states that the book is for white people, for them to understand the Yanomami, hoping that this way their children and the following generations may start listening to the forest’s inhabitants. It is with that in mind that he believes in a future with more respect and accuracy towards the Yanomami. In one of the conversations with Bruce Albert , Davi Kopenawa points out the phantasmic aspect of the interviewer as a new body devoid of readability in the community:
A long time ago, you came to live among us and spoke like a ghost. Little by little, you learned how to mimic my language and to laugh with us. We were young, and at first you didn’t know me. Our thoughts and lives are different, because you are son of this other people, that we call napë. Your teachers didn’t teach you how to dream like we do. Nevertheless you came to me and became my friend. You stayed by my side and later wanted to know the sayings of the Xapiri, which in your language you call it spirits. So I gave you my words and asked you to take them away, to be known by the white people, who don’t know anything about us.6
Kopenawa shares his message by telling his stories to Bruce, who turns them into the book, published in 2015 in French and recently translated into Portuguese. Throughout the written pages we find drawings by David that illustrate some of his stories. But at the end of the introduction, instead of drawing, he writes down, by hand, the following sentence: “Myself, a Yanomami, give to you, the white person, this skin of image that is mine.”. A skin of image is how David refers to our written material, to our books and stories. For David, as he repeatedly mentions, there is a clear distinction between the oral language used to pass on the messages of the Xapiri and the stories of his kin, and the written language used by white people to pass the stories of their own predecessors. In his own written words, David Kopenawa give us not only the beginning of his knowledge and cosmologies as a Yanomami, but also a different understanding of text. One that is understood through the idea of a body, of the skin, of embodiment per se.
What do we know about our own visiting spirits? The spirits that visit us everyday and move our world? How do we listen to them and how do they play with us? Language brings them down to earth and we must get to know their bodily features. Their intentions. If language carries them, we must know language. By that I don’t mean their structure. Language should not be dissected to be understood. They must be re-introduced, re-acquainted. Like straight parents who get the chance to re-know their child as a queer person. Outside of us, who are they, how do they dance, what’s their skin of image?
SHE MAN AS THEY DANCED
He woke as he hers. She dressed as they talked. He voice as they sentence. He follows as she knew. He plan as they belt. His letter as her phone. She hung as they wrote. They foot as she hand. He dressed as she song. Her love as his me. She man as they danced. He story as she swam. She her as he listened. They blew as they war. He sex as he moon. She told as they fell. He cries as she word. He her as they sexed. He prays as she water. She moons as they wait. He thought as her trees. He rent as she rent. Her toe as they went. She you as she wears. He mom as they looked. She bird as his first. They write as he skirts.
– Lucas Odahara. May, 2019
1 Sertanista is the person with a great knowledge of Sertão – a subregion of the Northeast Region of Brazil.
2 Povos Originários is a Portuguese term referring to the different peoples that inhabited and partially still inhabit parts of the Brazilian territory prior to the European colonisation.
3 first launched in April 1926, Amazing Stories is an American science fiction magazine by Hugo Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing. Printed publication resumed in 2018.
4 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body - Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, (New York: Columbia University Press 2010), pp.179.
5 Kopenawa, Albert, Bruce, Davi. A queda do céu : Palavras de um xamã yanomami. São Paulo : Companhia das Letras, 2015. pp. 63
6 translated from Portuguese by the author. Original: Faz muito tempo, você veio viver entre nós e falava como um fantasma.1 Aos poucos, você foi aprendendo a imitar minha língua e a rir conosco. Nós éramos jovens, e no começo você não me conhecia. Nossos pensamentos e nossas vidas são diferentes, porque você é filho dessa outra gente, que chama- mos de napë. Seus professores não o haviam ensinado a sonhar, como nós fazemos. Apesar disso, você veio até mim e se tornou meu amigo. Você ficou do meu lado e, mais tarde, quis conhecer os dizeres dos xapiri, que na sua língua vocês chamam de espíritos. Então, entreguei a você minhas palavras e lhe pedi para levá-las longe, para serem conhecidas pelos brancos, que não sabem nada sobre nós.