There was something dreamlike. Suddenly, I found myself walking through the big dark house where a man nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once lives, watching the meeting between two prominent Brazilians on the international cultural scene: she, a writer and plastic artist, with works currently exhibited by Cartier Foundation, in France, after visiting Shanghai, China; he, a bestselling philosopher, has his most recent book already translated into several foreign languages. The two indigenous people were moved by the meeting after many years without seeing each other.
Davi Kopenawa’s house, called Watoriki, in a region of the Yanomami Indigenous Land called Demini, looks like a place of dreams. The circular maloca, with a large inner courtyard, is at the foot of an immense rock, a single stone of something like a hundred meters high and a few hundred meters wide. Next to the dark stone, the large house, which houses about 150 residents, looks like a small ring thrown to the ground.
Ehuana Yaira Yanomami also lives in Watoriki. Trained as a teacher, she studied the evolution of traditional rites related to girls’ first menstruation. This work resulted in a textbook on menstruation, marriage, sex and birth. “Yipimuwi Thëã Oni: Written Words About Menstruation” was written with anthropologist Ana Maria Machado and published in 2017 with support from the MEC (Ministry of Education and Culture) in a collection of books on indigenous knowledge at school.
But the biggest impact came from his work as a draftsman, giving visual form to myths and other elements of Yanomami culture. On the day I witnessed her meeting with Ailton Krenak, when we were visiting the Indigenous Land on the occasion of the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of its approval, at the end of May, she commented in frustration that she had not been able to go to France for the opening of the exhibition “Utopia”. , in the city of Lille, where his works appear alongside works by other Brazilian indigenous artists, such as Jaider Esbell (Macuxi, died in 2021). A few days before the premiere, Ehuana realized that she had lost her identity card and that was why her passport was not ready in time to embark for the opening of the show, on May 14. She intends to go see the exhibition as soon as she gets her travel document. The event, curated by the Franco-Brazilian anthropologist Bruce Albert, is on view until October 2nd.
Last year, the drawings by the professor, writer and artist had already been presented in Shanghai, China, in an exhibition also promoted by the Cartier Foundation.
Shortly before the meeting between the two, Ailton Krenak commented on the release of new translations of his book “Ideias Para Adiar o Fim do Mundo” into a series of foreign languages, such as English, Italian, Turkish, Swedish and German. The indigenous leader made famous at a young age for a performative speech during the debates in the Constituent Assembly, which was preparing the 1988 Charter, is today a celebrated philosopher in various corners of the world.
Initiated in the national political movement alongside Davi Kopenawa and other indigenous leaders in confronting the project of the government of General Figueiredo (1979-1985), the last of the Military Dictatorship, which wanted to reduce the rights of the original peoples, Krenak returned to Kopenawa’s house to the celebration of a victory for the indigenous movement (the ratification of the Yanomami Land, in 1992) and the discussion of the challenges posed by the current government, also with a military background, which, more than forty years later, seeks to reduce the rights guaranteed to indigenous people in the Brazilian Constitution .
The President of the Republic often says that “the Indians are increasingly similar to us”. That meeting of excellences made it clear what a dream it would be if the uneducated president were “more and more like the indigenous people”. But in truth, he is a long way from the Nobel Peace Prize; he is unable to produce anything related to the arts, let alone to exhibit in Paris or another capital; or let alone writing books of philosophical thought on how to delay the end of the world, when all his actions seem geared to hasten the apocalypse.
