Imagining Community
Paulo Scott
Regardless of the territorial área extension, there are always huge distances that can be detected between people, groups of people, there are always significant difficulties of integration, regardless of criteria selected, there is a crystallization that must be constantly confronted, diluted, removed.
In this sense, in Brazil – just to highlight one of the many possible situations to be identified in my country –, integration between indigenous people and non-indigenous individuals is far from satisfactory, far from being resolved, not only in the Amazon region, but in other regions of the federation as well.
This reality (the distances and tragedies of this reality) was one of the reasons that led me to write the novel Nowhere People, whose protagonist is an indigenous Guarani teenager, Maína, who refuses to accept her status as being excluded from society, from the so-called white society. In the narrative, she wishes to overcome, at all costs, the invisibility that surrounds herself and that has surrounded her group, her people, her reality for centuries. She seeks to change her destiny, to have her existence recognized, to have her narrative considered and, more than anything else, to understand and integrate into a world that – because of the process of usurpation from the arrival of the European settlers in 1500 – is not hers.
The research I carried out in order to write the novel Nowhere People led me into contact with some indigenous communities, especially of the Guarani ethnicity; these contacts were also made aiming at producing short essays and fiction pieces beyond the story of Maína, exposing a reality unknown in other parts of the world and unknow to many Brazilians as well.
The last contact I had with the Guarani was at the Morro dos Cavalos (Horses Hill), indigenous area, located in the Southern region of Brazil. There, I had the opportunity to interact with a young indigenous leader; her indigenous name is Kerexu.
Kerexu, together with other women of her tribe, has created a cultural center where they promote activities that educate about the Guarani philosophy of the preservation of nature. With an extraordinary understanding of the need that we all have to reach the other, she knows the importance of informing and showing, but also the importance of receiving.
On the last day of a series of meetings I had with her, Kerexu, in the space where lectures on environmental preservation were taking place, was scheduled to speak of a pajé, a shaman, a spiritual leader of quite advanced age from a nearby tribe. For health reasons, the pajé could not attend, but he had sent a message with information that Kerexu tried to pass on to all who were present.
The message said that in a grove, in a wood or in a forest , the true integration between the trees was not due to the beauty of their flowers, or the movement of their leaves, and their branches, or the singularity of their crowns, but due to the energy of their roots, their vibration, their signs. He said that the roots were what made possible the essential exchanges, the search for the harmony of the system of trees that form a grove, a wood or a forest.
Between the lines of the pajé’s message was the idea that the language of approach and exchange cannot do without deep empathy for the cultural structure that makes each identity, each individuality, a unique and necessary identity, each person a single and necessary person – so as not to reduce anyone's identity to mere superficialities, appearances, stereotypes.
These superficialities, appearances, are elements that in some way encourage the imaginary between different cultural realities, but they do not have the strength and relevance of a denser, a more intense, approach, the power of an integration process whereby the exchange of essential references is possible between different cultural bases.
Literature, considering literature within the spectrum of art, is a very effective way to reach the other, to understand the other. For this reason, it becomes a privileged cultural factor, a manifestation of behaviors and thoughts record that serves as a bridge between the imaginaries of two very different cultural communities.
Integration of different experiences requires language channels that find in the artistic expression some facilitating, instigating and dynamic dimension. Art in general and literature in particular, due to their many peculiarities – starting with their narratives, capable of transporting a particular reader to the place of the other, to the look of another – provide windows that greatly facilitate understanding between communities, between countries, between regions subjected to a globalized world.
In this sense, I do think that it is possible to affirm that there is an insurmountable need for narrative formulations capable of projecting truths wich can only be constructed at the level of the literary work – the formulation of stories that contain a fable logic that condenses fundamental, perennial, permeable, and – as far as possible – universal dilemmas and imposes itself on reality, a reality whose distances have been reduced due to new communication technologies, a reality that is often standardized and yet always surprising.
The internet, particularly its audiovisuals sides, promotes a very expressive circulation of information, of cultural manifestations, from one side of the planet to the other. It seems, however, that this reality demands a complement, a deepening in which the literary narrative, the literary imagination, is installed and impacts the perception of the other and the culture of the other with different qualities and depths.
The organic dimension of experiences of exchange, of assimilation of idiosyncrasies, virtues, hopes and difficulties of the other, from a sensitivity disposed to the transfiguration of that experience of exchange into a perennial fictional narrative is an opportunity that may work against the superficialities of a world that has been condensed into superficial patterns of language.
The balance of a globalized world is also subject to crystallization, processes that need to be relativized, diluted. An exchange experience needs to be intense and guided by language (by a language project) that does not make the other a brief summary, a mere stamp, but that takes the other as a reference and influence in structuring a life and vision willing to be intense and less full of trivial certainties.
The image of the vibration of the roots in the message sent by the Guarani spiritual leader seems appropriate even as metaphor. In the writer's view, in a world that is perceived to be a diminishing world, there is the possibility of understanding that the other will always be inexhaustible, that the other must be reached, as part of an existence that will always be greater than the immediacy of the economic, military, religious interests that do create some bridges, but these are not bridges capable of sustaining the soul, the wholeness of groves, woods, forests.