by Daniel Munduruku
It is never easy to write about other cultures with a tranquil mind and certain that there will be misunderstandings, nor secular stereotypes, which, so many times, diminish others personal experience.
It is never easy to use the right and proper words to express the peculiarities and particular ways that a culture holds within itself.
It is never easy to talk about others without having to apologize, nor develop great anthropological issues that may justify one’s inability for personal and epistemological understanding of ways of life, social organization, or even beliefs that inhabit the souls of those who are opposed to us.
To do that, one needs to place oneself in someone else’s shoes, to feel as if they belonged to their culture, integrating themselves, erasing themselves, deleting themselves. All that to be able to open one’s mind to think about the world from another culture’s point of view, which is, to a certain extent, to deny oneself, one’s world, the culture where they are inserted. Only then it will be possible to depict a world totally alien to the scenario inhabited by the one who describes it.
Literature is, by no means, the best way to accomplish this journey. Without barriers, it can certainly describe the darkness and light of a singular universe. Without the need to abide by the western world logic, literature can question it by relating to other non-linear logical systems which do not ask for empirical proof of existence. One can get to know other possible worlds beyond the typical mythical western narrative, which claims to hold the absolute truth in their myth of foundation.
All these thoughts and feelings crossed my mind and heart when I was reading The Musician, of the acclaimed writer, Heloisa Prieto, whom I have been close to for at least 30 years and whom I have been observing, both as an apprentice and friend. Yet, these conditions, instead of tainting my reading, gave me a more potent dimension of her work: she can travel through both worlds, sometimes acting as a mouthpiece for the ancestral point of view brought by the wisdom of Popygua, the elderly shaman, and the young woman named Marlui, or by questioning the western world bent linearity in its relentless thirst for power, control and colonialism. The latter represented by the wish to kidnap the young musician’s soul who allows himself to be allured by the speech of power conveyed by the words of the lawyer, Dr. Alonso, and his daughter.
For an attentive reader, this book will offer them both a teaching and a riddle. The teaching is revealed by several lines enunciated by the Indigenous characters, all of them central to the plot. The same goes for the riddle. As a certain shaman named Jesus once said: “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Munduruku
The Musician is available in English at www.themusician.info
It will be published in Portuguese in August 2024 - details will be updated here on final.show, watch this space!