Kamña’s Fire, Kina’s Calling

Kamña’s Fire, Kina’s Calling [1]

One must leave the island in order to see the island[2]

It is the time of fire. And Kamña wants to expand its blaze. The fire of Kamña is gunpowder, flame and fuel for an unbound fire that scorches the earth, that drowns villages, that decimates people. Kamña’s insatiable thirst still lusts to carve out deserts. Kamña wants meat, lot’s of it, red and bloody, sacrificing hordes of sacred animals[3]. Kamña fights in name of a diabolic God who wants nothing more than to be forever God, trusting that God and “mine” are one and the same thing.  Since the “first contact” [sic] with Kiña, Kamña brought along the metal smoke, the epidemic smoke[4], the smoke of the bomb-that-burns-within.[5]

Kamña’s fire has no limits, no body of its own and wants to expand its blaze even beyond the “dismembering of immense areas of land – still today under the control of a small number of families since 1534 when the Hereditary Captaincies were established”, the first method of territorial dispossession used by the Portuguese Crown to seize the lands of Pindorama[6].

Kamña is the master of unspeakable methods of disappearance – vanishing whatever it wants: rivers, peoples, forests, animals, bodies, students, activists, macaws, pumas, children, archives, museums, communities… All that stands in its way, Kamña makes disappear. Intoxicated with its latifundary Cartesianism, Kamña is unable to understand that, in truth, nothing disappears. Everything that Kamña makes disappear, eventually reappears, uprooted or unearthed. Everything returns to haunt it.

Chorus: And who is Kamña? Kamña is a sly beast. Kamña is a beast that tames. Kamña is inHuman. Kamña is unReasoning. Kamña brings inCivilization. Kamña is gunpowder. Kamña is rifle. Kamña is highway. Kamña is white powder that falls from the sky and burns within. Kamña is arson. Kamña is fire seen from above. Kamña is napalm. Kamña is tarmac. Kamña is easy rider[7] . Kamña is maxi (bomb).[8]

Kamña is us, inhabitants of this ever-expanding desert known as modernity. Yet Kamña’s primordial mythological drama[9] is to repeatedly face two of its most significant and noble enemies: the Forest and its inhabitants.

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breathe

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It was the end of the dry season and the first drops of Amazonian rain were falling on the bonnet of the car. K. asks me: is there somewhere you’d like to stop and film? I reply: K, the only thing I really want to film is the (highway) BR 174, could we take a detour there? K. looks at me and laughs, you’re clearly not from around here, steps on the accelerator and says: The BR 174 is our only way there. Overwhelmed, I gulp and say: Then I’d better start filming now.

In the car, the radio broadcast comes and goes, just like the conversation with K. The rain thickens and silences all communication. The windows fog up and we can barely see ahead. The BR-174 extends over exactly 971km from Manaus to Boa Vista. The tarmac slashes, in vertiginous waves, through the Amazon jungle. It’s hard to hold the camera, each shot shudders with the road. The sound of rain overlapping the car engine is deafening. I take the microphone and place it on the bonnet.

Low clouds pass over the road, and open a glimmer of light. I take the cue to thank K. for the journey, the company and, most of all, for having managed to find Sr. Egydio. It took months of searching, trying in vain to reach him via the usual means of long-distance communication (phone calls, emails, online messages). No such luck. K. told me she only managed to find him because she grabbed the car and drove out three hours in the rain to Presidente Figueiredo[10], without a proper address, upon arrival she saw a red flag standing on a small wooden house and thought: this must the place. K. got out of the car and clapped her hands outside the house. And there he came, softly footed, at his gentle pace.

Indigenous rights militant and educator Egydio Schwade has lived for over 30 years on the margins of the BR-174. He has transformed his house into a house of culture called Urubuí, an homage to the river, that flows mightily parallel to the highway. It is in the House of Culture of Urubuí that over 3000 drawings are kept, made by the Kiña during an early experiment in bilingual literacy led by Egydio and his companion Doroti Alice Müller Schwade, in Kiñayara[11] – their mother tongue – and in Portuguese, a demand by the Kiña to defend their rights in the world-tongue of Kamña.

In the library of the House of Culture of Urubuí, books about beekeeping, permaculture, biology, critical pedagogy and Indigenous writing fill the shelves. On a nearby wall, painted green and faded by time and light, an expressive Indigenous face weeps over the BR-174, on a poster for the Movement to Support the Waimiri-Atroari Resistance.

Before we start the interview, a group of biologists from Minas Gerais arrives quietly, all dressed in white, as if in a research laboratory. Egydio and his son Maiká take them to a homespun cane chair, where extremely rare Amazon bees have made their nests. The scientists delicately open the cane with pincers and extract a miniscule yellow goo, which they deposit in a vial: eggs laid by the queen-bee.

On the balcony of the small wooden house, Egydio’s hands pull images from a small photo album: Here’s Doroti with our sons next to the Yawará school, they attended the school like almost all the residents of the village. Women, men, children and even babies participated. An indigenous child smiles in the foreground, behind her, two extremely fair children also smile next to a group of Indigenous children and women. In the middle of a forest trail, a group of Indigenous men, laughing, point their arrows towards Egydio’s camera. Here are the boys from the village playing with their bows and arrows during a walk. Kiña’s arrows pointed towards Kamña’s camera-eye. Here, a different Kamña, bringing not gunpowder, fire or weaponry, but coloured pencils, open ears, and sheets of paper.

Egydio and Doroti Schwade were sent by the FUNAI (National Indigenous Foundation) to the Yawará village of the Waimiri-Atroari in 1985 to conduct with them a first literacy project, while helping repair the damaged reputation of public institutions in the region[12]. “After the success of the diretas já [Direct elections now] campaign[13], the winds of change were about. Everyone was dreaming of a new direction for official Indigenous policies”[14]  writes Egydio Schwade, recalling their lived experience with the Kiña.

Arriving at Yawará, Egydio and Doroti brought with them years of experience in the struggle for Indigenous rights in the region, as well as Tact, Time and Listening. Inspired by Brazilian educator and thinker Paulo Freire in his already celebrated and fundamental Pedagogy of the Oppressed[15], the educators put in place first and foremost a common space for attentive exchanges with the community at Yawará, through a daily practice of drawing.

Paulo Freire’s philosophy adopted by Egydio and Doroti, could not anticipate Kina’s expression of the historical traumas they had experienced. The method became mostly a device for creating the conditions for exchanges to take place, by way of horizontality and improvisation, gradually eliciting the possibility to speak and be heard. The creation of this space “without fear of freedom”, is the essence of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, one in which education is seen first and foremost as a “practice of freedom”[17]. In his own words:

genuine education is not made from A to B, nor from A over B, but rather from A with B, each mediated by the world. A world that overwhelms and challenges them respectively, producing visions or points of view about each other. Visions impregnated with anxieties and doubts, with hopes or hopelessness that entail significant concerns[18].

It is within this context that the drawings made by Kiña emerge as subjective, as much as objective expressions of their experiences and world as well as, unexpectedly, as a radical portrait of Kamña.

“What did Kamña throw from the airplane that killed Kiña? Kamña threw kawuni (from above, from an airplane), like a powder that burnt the throat and soon Kiña died.” With great caution, we sought from the start to hide our curiosity in relation to these questions. We knew we were under constant surveillance from those conspiring to cover up the crimes.

Searching the National Archives, I come across a series of documents from the SNI (Serviço Nacional de Informação, National Security Services) listing the names of Egydio and other anthropologists and indigenous militants like Darcy Ribeiro as participants in the Indigenist Pastoral meetings constantly surveilled by undercover agents . Egydio looked over the documents and breathed, unsurprised and untroubled.

Searching the National Archives, I come across a series of documents from the SNI (Serviço Nacional de Informação, National Security Services)[20] listing the names of Egydio and other anthropologists and indigenous militants like Darcy Ribeiro as participants in the Indigenist Pastoral meetings constantly surveilled by undercover agents[21]. Egydio looked over the documents and breathed, unsurprised and untroubled.

Following Paulo Freire’s method, the literacy process was conducted with the autonomy of Kiña. They began with drawings, which they mastered brilliantly. From the drawings they extracted letters, and from the letters, phrases and finally small texts, in their mother tongue. The exercises were carried out in the village. At school, they were displayed publicly, commented on, and enriched in viva voce. From this process, all the richness of their territory emerged: animals and plants, their vision of the world and how everything was celebrated in their festivities and rituals. Their history, of course, also came up – Kiñayka = the History of our people. Practically all of them were youth or children, all survivors of very recent massacres. And so they began to reveal what the military had done to their people, during the construction of the highway BR-174, tearing up their territory. And, at the end of the class, almost always the same question: “Why did  Kamña = “the civilised” kill Kiña = our people?  Apiyemiyekî?” = Why?.[22].

Next to a Kiña drawing, drawn with strong lines in black, leaf-green and sky-blue, we can see two malokas (indigenous houses), two red-skinned men and two hoes in purple and black, accompanied by the following annotation:

Tikiryia[23] disappeared

Kamña arrived

Taboka[24] arrived

Tikiryia disappeared

Why?

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breathe

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During my 57 years of militancy for indigenous rights, this was the question that most silenced the depths of my heart, writes Egydio, in an email following our interview. Kiña’s drawings and their questions became a channel of communication, if not of therapy, about the violence of Kamña. Through gestures, words and silences, Kamña’s violent genocidal methods were articulated throughout the literacy experience.

In 1986, less than a year after this experimental pedagogical project had begun, Egydio and Doroti Schwade were expelled from the Yawará village.

At dusk on the 4th December, 1986, I had just spread over a hundred drawings of animals made at the school, all over the floor and table of our little house. We were surrounded by most of the village: boys and girls who would choose the drawings for the first book to be published by the Kiña. It was then that the FUNAI car pulled in. It was the person in charge of the Waimiri-Atroari reservation, coming to order our expulsion. We only had enough time to hurriedly gather our things and board the car. It was already getting dark. When I bid farewell to the Tuxaua[25], crestfallen and sad, all he said was: “Egydio, you, Doroti and CIMI, weak just like us!”[26]

As we reached the end of Egydio’s steadfast and quivering account, the dogs were barking and lunch was ready to be served. The account asked for silence. K. looked at me and said with her eyes: I think now it is time to breathe, let’s leave Sr. Egydio to rest. Yes, of course.

K. and I went to get a coffee and tapioca on the edges of the city, on the banks of the Urubuí river. Absorbed by the intensity and speed of the river, silence settled between us. Nothing was stronger than these waters, the low reverberations of their flow. No alphabet, all is language.

*

Kiña’s Calling

menyayakî henya? henya kepate

‘Do you see?’ ‘I see it!’

‘piapiakepa!’ – ampakepa yainîpî’

‘Do you see this?’ – said another parent of his.[27]

In the late afternoon, K. and I took the drawings out onto the veranda, light was needed in order to see the drawings. I tried multiple times, without luck, to pull focus on each of the sheets of paper. The photographed images seemed infinitely distant from the haptic reality of those drawings: pale pink in relief, almost tearing the macaw-blue, graphite powder, embossed alligator. Each stroke almost traversing the sheets of paper, such was the force, the intensity of the pencil against the image’s skin[28] — braille with no alphabet.

Kiña seemed to irrupt through the sheets of paper. Seeing, or rather touching those drawings seemed to be a way of seeing oneself through the eyes of another: watches, roads, cars, trucks, knives, machetes, radios: Kamña’s alphabet is spelled.

Now, Kiña’s drawings looked back at us. More than anything, they irrupted from the page towards touch. To see them really meant to touch them. Or, in the words of Didi-Huberman,  “ultimately, seeing is only thought and experienced through touch”.[30]

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. […] If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

If the drawings can now finally look back at us, touch us, it is because we have at last understood that what they narrate can not be expressed by sight alone. If Kamña’s fire is the fire of light that desires to see everything, reveal everything, Kiña’s subversion is a game of mirrors: I hold the pencil-mirror to paint your portrait, Kamña. What we see looks back at us.

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post script

A year after visiting the House of Culture of Urubuí, I was invited to talk about the research and making of Apiyemiyekî? (2019) as part of a virtual conference about archives, memory and subjectivity with a group of women researchers from PUC-RJ (The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro). Four hours’ time difference separated us, though our respective computer screens gave us the illusion of being together in a small and engaged gathering. frutapao (the group admin) lets us know: we’re going to watch a few minutes of the film and then we’ll come back here to discuss it.

Opening scene: the winding highway BR-174 in black and white, filmed with a shaky camera, from within a car. K.’s voice irrupts from the image: Hi Ana, I wanted to say… I don’t know if your research goes beyond 1985 or not (the year marking the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil) but if it does, I think Egydio might have more to say about what happened and the consequences of it… Because it’s as if the dictatorship never ended for the Indigenous, and they are still at the receiving end of all this violence, this violent charge . At this exact moment a number of unknown profiles invade the group, with the following images: a young man films himself whilst a woman (who we can’t see) performs felatio out of frame, a young half-naked woman performs a choreography for the camera, two men humiliate another stretched out on the floor, pretending to “search him” and finally nazi parades, rifles, machine guns, pleasure-less pornographies and electoral slogans in green-and-yellow, whilst in the chat the same phrase is repeated over and over again: where is the man in this !@#$%& conversation? Accompanying the images, a deafening cacophony of sounds silenced any possibility of communication. Staggered as we were, it was impossible to carry on.

We reconnected later, groping for a way to describe, to find a name for what had happened. Trembling with words, a different alphabet was born. Stammering, unformed, delirious. In my notebook, I find these cryptographies ripped against the paper skin: resistance, struggle to keep on living, against the appropriation of life, body memory, the historical force of the river, delirium, haunting, river that invades the highway, a perfect uchronia.

After the cyber attack, I went out with a friend to talk. It was the end of the day and the sun was setting, enormous, knowing, whole. When I told him what had happened, he stopped and thought a moment and then said: but wouldn’t it be you – researchers of memory and the senses – who are the real hackers of Kamña’s latifundium? [31]

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