Mnemonic traditions and listening

[asakiyume]

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé linguist, writer, and activist, reminds us ... that Indigenous people do not have “oral traditions,” but rather “mnemonic traditions.”⁸ ... Western modernity, with its countless institutions and homogenizing temporal framework, always sees the oral as preceding the written, as falling somewhere behind in the chronology of development. But as Ailton and many other Indigenous people explain, the practice and activation of memories – through dreaming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and various other activities – are ways of belonging to and sustaining the cosmic sense of life.

⁸ See Yasnaya Aguilar Gil, “(Is There) an indigenous Literature?”, trans. Gloria Chacón, Diálogos 19.1 (Spring 2016), p. 158.

She goes on to quote Ailton about the importance of listening and then to unfold that:

“Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth” (p. 38) ... Listening means being alive, staying alive, and keeping the ecosystems to which one belongs alive as well. Listening is caring. Not listening brings war: that is, a type of destructive encounter, a form of non-co-existence. We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears ... Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened.

I love this statement: We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

I love this! Mnemonic traditions. Much better.

(eta) Maybe I can order a desk copy!

[asakiyume]

If you get this one, definitely also get Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. It's longer (though still short).

You might also like the video of Ailton addressing Brazil's congress in 1987. The occasion was writing a new constitution after the fall of the dictatorship, and indigenous people were there to press their demands. He was dressed in a white suit, and as he spoke about indigenous worldview and rights, he gradually painted his face with what's called in Spanish huito, in Portuguese and English jenipapo, dye, which is commonly used throughout the Amazon. This is where he begins to apply it.

[sovay]

He was dressed in a white suit, and as he spoke about indigenous worldview and rights, he gradually painted his face with what's called in Spanish huito, in Portuguese and English jenipapo, dye, which is commonly used throughout the Amazon.

That's an incredible gesture.

[asakiyume]

It really is--it's enacting reclamation and transformation all in one and performatively uttering what it is that he's there to demand be preserved and respected.