Creativity as Transformation in Amerindian Poetics: Toward Literary Deterritorialization in Brazil

Introduction

For comparative studies of poetic traditions, dealing with the challenges of addressing non-Euro-American forms of expression while coming from a Euro-American inheritance involves an active effort to denaturalize premises of universality of literary values. In order to carry out a meaningful dialogue with Indigenous poetic forms, for instance, we first need to engage in a practice of self-reflexive questioning about the assumptions underlying the very notions of creativity we articulate. Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's characterization of minor literature (18), I suggest that deterritorializing or "minoritizing" Euro-American literary frameworks implies fostering a political sensibility to emergent poetics and collectivities, as well as developing an increased awareness of the taken-for-granted character of perceptions proper to the Euro-American emphasis on individuated subjectivity–and of its tendencies to obscure its situatedness.

Let me clarify at the outset that when I say "Euro-American" or "we," I do not refer to a reified, unchanging, monolithic construct, but to discursive traditions that dwell in North American and Western European categories, vocabularies and frames of reference, regardless of being located in Europe or in the Americas, and whose perspectives are to a large extent informed by Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian lenses or filters–even if not in stable, homogenous ways. Moreover, this clarification is important to prevent us from falling into the trap of a Manichean dichotomy between a readily familiar Euro-America versus a presumably unfathomable non-Euro-America.

From this perspective, this article seeks to contribute to preparing the ground for practices of cross-cultural engagement that are more symmetrical and well-informed, and to go beyond stereotyping, romanticizing, or reading otherness as incommensurably alien. The main idea put forth here is that contrasting modes of creativity exist between lowland Amerindian poetics and fundamental presumptions of Euro-American literary modes of composition. A brief discussion of Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino's ethnographic research among the Marubo, a Panoan people from the Javari Valley (Western Amazonas, Northwestern Brazil),¹ advances this argument, illustrating how a dynamics of unfolding and differential replication involving different beings that proliferate across the cosmos constitutes one of the main thrusts of poetic composition in Amerindian forms of expression–in a manner that is distinct from the Euro-American idea of ex nihilo creation as an event arising from an identifiable and fixed subject.

In the following sections, we will see how these regimes of creativity, in spite of not regarding the element of individuality as of paramount significance in composition, position shamanic verbal arts specialists as actualizing, realm-connecting mediators, rather than ego-grounded, stabilizing authorial sources. In the light of this discussion, which addresses Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto and Vanessa Grotti's recent anthology on Amerindian forms of ownership, Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino's study among the Marubo, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's observations about poeisis (production) and praxis (action) in Indigenous Amazonia, my goal is to facilitate and refine the conversation between literary theory and Amerindian poetics.

Altership and othering

In Ownership and Nurture: Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations, Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto and Vanessa Grotti propose the idea of "altership" to emphasize how humans in Indigenous Amazonia are not exactly creators in the sense of an individual author (20), but rather alterers, "capable of othering themselves and switching perspectives in order to appropriate new songs and new names" (21). By presenting that proposal, the ethnologists are interested in making explicit the contrast between the individuation of property in Western property relations and the multiplicity of alterities that constitutes forms of ownership in Indigenous Amazonia.

This is not the same as saying that a notion that could be related to a property regime does not exist among Indigenous groups in the region (also when the complex relationships they establish with the State and market economy are considered), but that the specificity of the idea of Western property as the institutionalization of ownership, predicated on assumptions of individualism and possession, needs to be acknowledged–in other words, its presumed universality...