The Guarani: from jejuvy to recovered word
Far from being banal deaths, indigenous suicides in Mato Grosso are also protest, ritual, performed by a culture that survives by a very tenuous and beautiful thread. Now, a national campaign wants to defend their lands and forests, their distinct tempo, their singularity made possible. Fabiane Borges, Vernilde Santos* Performative ritual: The day dawns with an indigenous Kaiowá-Guarani strangled. A sneakers shoelace stretches taut from the tree. Bathed, perfumed and kneeling.[1] The village of Bororo knows what this deals with: it is jejuvy. This however is not a comfort, it is a ritual of death. The word jejuvy in the Guarani language[i] has a semantic weight that signifies a tightening of the throat, annihilated voice, impossibility to speak, suffocated words, imprisoned soul. It is through the ritual of jejuvy that the Kaiowás commit suicide, by strangling or ingestion of poison. Despite being recognized as an ancestral ritual practice, in recent years jejuvy has spread through the villages on an epidemic scale. There are nearly 50 suicides per year, involving youths from 9 to 14 years of age. According to data from the Indigenist Missionary Counsel (CIMI), the numbers began increase in the 1980s, doubled in the 1990s and hit record levels in the 21st century, reaching more than 50 per year. This article does not deal with deaths through malnutrition, the homicides among the indians themselves or the incessant battles between the indigenous peoples and the ranchers, facts that are equally shocking[ii]. The suicides (jejuvy) are usually committed by strangling (the ancient method) and sometimes by ingestion of monoculture poisons (new method). Rejected is any “pollution” like bloodletting or physical cutting, so that the word is not lost. Many Guarani consider suicide to be a disease produced by the imprisonment of the word (soul). It is through the mouth that the word is released. If there is no place for the word, there is no life. Because of this, at the time of death, there must be nothing that cuts otherwise the word is dissipated. In suffocation, the word / soul remains as an agglomeration of energy and could come back for revindication at another time. According to narratives of the Kaiowá themselves regarding the indigenous persons who commit suicide, they unify links that extend from the individual act inherent to the human condition and solitude of each, to the political meaning of the collectivity, “to be among the others”, producing limi-symbologies: the hangings, the poisonings. Acts that condense and point to the rescue, perhaps impossible, of a “way of being”, as the Kaiowá customarily say. And if for them language is one of the most important ways a being manifests itself, by impeding that, also the subjects are impeded of existence. The suicide epidemic would be the collective response to the impossibility of expressing the singularity of this people. Liberating suicide Many indigenous groups, including the Guarani Kaiowá, live in precarious encampments within the ranches of the large landowners, who in the name of expansionism or of some other barren and unjustifiable reason, took their lands by force – and still take, by unequaled arms. This is one of the motives most indicated by the indigenous peoples, indigenous advocates and anthropologists for the cause of the epidemic of suicides among the Guarani Kaiowá, the loss of land, of the tekohá, the place where they “realize their way of being”. If until about 40 years ago the Kaiowá and Nhandeva lived in great houses named ogajekutu-ogaguasu, uniting up to one hundred family members, today they live in miniscule houses, many still made of clay, without the protection of the forest, sheltering only one nuclear family. The extended family structure, whose governance is based in prestige and religiosity, became disorganized, in that the indigenous were not successful in substituting their cultural prestige for that of the whites. With the decimation of their lands, without the rites of planting and harvesting, the collective sagas of hunting and fishing, they have no reason to continue their rites, and accordingly lose those practices with the land, also losing their culture. All the same, what still subsists, in a curious way, is the Guarani language, which is the major focus of insistence and resistance of this collective body.
Imprisonment of the soul
Singularity
Language as resistance
Liberating suicide
Many indigenous groups, including the Guarani Kaiowá, live in precarious encampments within the ranches of the large landowners, who in the name of expansionism or of some other barren and unjustifiable reason, took their lands by force – and still take, by unequaled arms. This is one of the motives most indicated by the indigenous peoples, indigenous advocates and anthropologists for the cause of the epidemic of suicides among the Guarani Kaiowá, the loss of land, of the tekohá, the place where they “realize their way of being”.
If on one hand the suicides by hanging or by ingestion of poison can signify the suffocation, it can also signify the desire for liberation – it is on this point that ritual suicide functions as ethical, aesthetic and intervention performance; gestures of enunciation. The tragic functioning as signal denoting reversion on the indigenous question. Since the “suicide epidemic” began spreading in the villages, activists, students, researchers, people linked to the independent media began to view this situation with greater attention, forming alliances and becoming cooperatives in the struggle for Guarani land, by way of amplifying these signs, still being emitted in total invisibility. There are some indigenous groups principally indigenous professors connected to the university and local leaders, who dedicate their lives to this cause, the number of leaders who have died in this arduous task exceeds our imagination.
Meaning
In spite of the many suicides being committed in more secret places, there exist a large number of cases that occur in places of perambulation, the “public” places of the village like streets, gardens, areas where the suicide can be seen without much difficulty. There are nuances that help to clarify and also to inquire into this form of death. It is not a pact with the decimation, with the genocide, with the ethnocide. It is not cowardice in the face of destiny, but a brave and ultimate act as way of amplifying the meaning of the misery to which they are being submitted. The trees, the shrubs, the gardens, any place that has been a suicide site becomes marked in the village and fixed in the imagination, in the quotidian language and in their struggle against the confinement. The deaths continue to speak especially to sensitive hearts still connected by belief in the spirit of nature and the emission of her signs.
Memory
The rites, dances, canticles and struggles survive through pure insistence. The sensation we have in our being in the village of Bororo is that this culture survives by a thread both very tenuous and beautiful. As one voice that forces itself to speak, but already not sounding as accustomed. Sounding aphonic, agonized, stammering, insists on manifesting. A ritual of remembering. A residuum. The resistance of certain canticles and gestures. The Kaiowá Guarani fighting dances recall the martial arts, of sword fights. They are done with fragments of wood, knives and stones, resembling ninja fights.
Dona Tereza Guarani is one of the last elders of the village. She conducts the rites of the Bororo village with a rugged and concentrated voice, powerful hands that move the maraca, pounding steps that reverberate on the clay ground. In the ecstasy, brought about through song, which we feel, we ask ourselves how is it possible that they still chant and dance and struggle in this way. In the name of what force? Dona Tereza makes an explicit effort so that this Kaiowá culture is maintained, because the great majority of her people see no reason to continue the rites. Many already no longer know how the dances and beating of the path were done. The indigenous elder Tereza, woman of prayer, woman who cures, the woman entrusted with the cultural rituals of the village, takes it upon herself to support the memory and meaning of the rites of the ancestors. Gathering sons, grandsons and friends to learn the songs and dances before she dies. This is the purpose to which she dedicates her life. Her power as shaman is not impeded by the witness of many suicides in her own family.
Revocery
Adherence to life is an imperative of domination, of the exercise of power – and of inclusion. When there is something more intense than adherence to life, there is media tactic, there is resistance, there is the potency of protest. Yet what is it that the Kaiowá love more than survival? It is, though stifled, what still cries out through the public space of the village, that is a favella that is city that is field. There is something these indians desire more than being included in the stupefaction of globalized bio-politics, in the misery imposed by neo-liberal policies. It is a form of life not content with the miserable survival of the white or the ‘indian’. In this case we think that it does not deal with indigenous inclusion in national society, but in the mobilization of society for the recovery of indigenous lands to collaborate in the process of this other ‘indian’ that the indigenous himself does not know and is tasked to become.
The struggles of the agrarian movements in Brazil have intensified in the last 30 years and gain ever-greater global visibility as a function of their extreme importance. The indigenous struggle is one more of the agrarian struggles in the country, the most ancient, having experienced the greatest usurpation and decimation. The processes of confirmation and settlements are far from finished and it is with great effort, tension and deaths that realization of these is effected.
Our challenge in generating a network of collaboration capable of changing the social perception regarding points tangled by society is both urgent and of great relevance. More than perceptual change, amplification is necessary of the relational spectrum of the social movements so that they gain the possibilities of diversified action. The role that media, Greenpeace and IMC (Independent Media Center) have exercised in these contexts is an aperture for considering how autonomous groups, organized or not, are able to act together with the social movements (our greater public space). Their activities are still precarious, but signal possibilities. For beyond denunciation and support, it is necessary to create means that become more incisive in effectuating of certain political projects of the civil society movements, as is the case of the pro-Guarani movement launched in September of 2007 and that recently began to emerge for broader society[iii].
Recognition
This media tactic campaign, activist, created for the most part by Guarani indigenous leaders and supported by CIMI, call for the recognition of the 32 indigenous lands of the Guarani People, call for the deceleration of the industrial agriculture and livestock market in the region of Mato Grosso do Sul, the reforestation of the decimated areas, respect and recognition of a tempo that does not need to be the same as every one else. But also demanding access to what there is of relevance in (inter)national society, taking into account the conquests of science and of technology, etc.
There is much to consider in the intervention of these suicides in the white, indigenous and mestizo social imagination. But one thing is certain: these deaths have made evident the impasse this indigenous people experience, and reach out to us as warning signs of this unsupportable condition, indignant, shameful that the ideals of civilization, of development and of economic growth provoke. It is necessary to act before all difference disappears.
* This article was originally posted on the site Le Monde Diplomatique:
http://diplo.uol.com.br/2008-02,a2168
Other sources for research:
http://www.guarani-campaign.eu
http://www.midiatatica.info
http://www.rizoma.net
http://hemi.nyu.edu
http://www.midiaindependente.org
[1] Traditionally the Guarani do not hang themselves, loose from the ground. They would tie a rope to a tree stem, fairly low, kneel and lean forward to tighten the rope around their neck in order to strangle themselves. This implies that they could stop the act any moment should they hesitate or change their mind. Nowadays it has become more frequent to actually hang themselves.
[i] The Guarani are divided into three groups: Guarani-Nhandeva, Guarani-Kaiowá and Guarani-Mbyá. At the time of European arrival, these indigenous people numbered circa 4 million persons. At present there exist circa 40 thousand, spread through regions of Southern and Southwestern Brazil. In Mato Grosso, 27,000 are estimated to live in 22 small areas. The village of Bororo being one of these, presented in this text, sheltering 12 thousand Guarani-Kaiowá on 3,600 hectares of unproductive land without forest. There exist more than 90 churches among them catholic, evangelical and espiritas, which vie amongst themselves for indigenous adherence to their beliefs and modes of conversion.
The territories of the Guarani extend Northward, to the Apa and Dourados rivers and south to the Serra de Maracaju and the tributaries of the Jejuí river, arriving at an east-west extension of approximately 100 km, on both sides of the Serra do Amambai embracing an extension of land approximately 40 thousand square miles, divided by the Brazil-Paraguay border.
[ii] download the year report on violence on www.cimi.org.br
[iii] see for more information on this campaign: http://www.guarani-campaign.eu and www.campanhaguarani.com.br
