Oral poetry of the Andes and Amazonia

Abstract

In the essay I propose to give an account of an ancestral corpus, although new in its outline, since it involves the appearance of the indigenous as a subject of enunciation. I will stop at the abduction of writing as a new process and I propose to focus our attention on the word-voice that is not reduced to the wordletter steed. This does not require alphabetic writing, we find it in various forms and it allows us to express what a culture wants to transmit: I think of the kené [1], expressions of the Shipibo-conibo design or the payllay among the Quechua that explains that they want to communicate, amen of the still indecipherable quipus [2] Andean [3]. These same can be found in facial designs, without forgetting that the body itself is a form of language. The lecture that I will do implies the presence of several systems. I suggest that the current corpus of indigenous literatures accounts for an oral poetics that explains them, rooted in the updated memory of the ancestors and expressed in their activities (daily, traditional, rituals, cycles and seasonal periods, etc.). I support it in the people-culture pair that is based on history and accounts for a demonstration, whose historical reference will be the “long duration”. It is not reduced, therefore, to the candid writing/orality opposition, but to a dynamic relationship between word-voice, brand, sign or trace, body designs, etc. These poetics correspond to the domain of the word, so the orality of which we speak involves the continuity of an expression that writing does not always show in its linear capture, with respect to the autonomy and the confluence of the different forms that are produced in the event. True, they are accusing a new scenario that has to do with the modern abduction of writing. In the same sense, I will dwell on the logic of violence that embodied the presence of the old stranger (conqueror, Spanish or Portuguese) who now lives in that colonized mixture of our being. At the same time, it implies a look with respect to the European ego that constitutes the disseminator of modernity. Impossible to explain it, if we do not include in our agenda a reflection on territory and dispossession.