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Sounding eeeeeee: Stretching phyto vibrancy beyond anthropology

2023; Wiley; Volume: 125; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.13866

1548-1433

Julie Laplante, Daniel Alberto Restrepo Hernández,

History and Politics in Latin America

“Go ahead, take your shoes off and walk toward the beach. This way your head won't heat up along the path.” Kai begins to walk. Sol had been wandering for months in a speculative postnatural expedition when she met him on the littoral of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. They could see the mountains on the horizon from the accidented landscape. As they walk toward what had been Palomino village, planty growths along the way burst of light as Kai pronounces what seem to be their names in diverse Indigenous and Spanish voices or tonalities, yet not only.1 Grandson of three people and of three Indigenous women with tumbaga traits hardened by that wild and inexpugnable maternity of the mountains, Kai speaks with a serious yet serene expression. His fingers move, animated by quasi-autonomous flying colors, weaving macramé butterflies with yellow, green, and purple waxed threads tying three ancestral worlds and well beyond their vague thresholds, surpassing ephemeral asphalt roads, extractivist mining companies, and the anthropo-scenic 7G gibberish of Colombian towns and villages. Kai looks young, yet also seems to have no age and no interest knowing what it would be. “Kogui and Iku Nations have not disappeared, nor has the Wayúu Nation or the Molilones Nation. They thrive as the Sierra Nevada, Macuira mountains, and the Perijá mountain range do as well, three mountainous motifs entangled in the same mesh of continuous growth.” Then he explains that the three mountainous universes and their living creatures are sensors of frequencies where world-becomings inscribe themselves in subtle traces, variegated information piercing thought, a buzzing triggering the activity of a kind of living seismograph. *** The road meanders below toward Palomino River. They slowly enter in the fresh current of the river, its vibrations and tempos overtake them in a wavy manner. The surrounding trees shudder with the lukewarm breeze of the river, bringing forth the textility2 of the world made up of the thought of its living. Taken by the river currents, they feel an oceanic flux in waves, circumvolutions, spirals—a fluid, ubiquitous and exponentially multiple center of the world that is both everywhere and nowhere, never pinned to the earth, neither as a menhir nor an obelisk, always in-between ebb and flow. Elemental powers assemble beyond a linear vision of time, where ancestralities and actualities meet without losing their momentum. Sol perceives Kai in-between matrix forces, dressed in artisanal wefts made and embroidered by his three ancestral worlds and sending back in numbered motifs to the tissue of the world's thought: a sort of cross sea in waves (olas de pensamiento), ever on the point of breaking to surf and tap into for potentials already there as well as always unfolding in unsuspected new ways.3 Kai explains: “The first to arrive to this world were Wayúus. They transformed themselves into clouds, rain, rock, plants, mountain, sun, stars, and wind, bringing balance and imbalance. We are also Wayúus, and it is not clothing or material means that make us who we are. It is eeeeeee, the infinite, the whole canvas of thought that made them Wayúus, as it makes us Wayúus. There are no Wayúus, nor Koguis or Motilones, without a sense of eeeeeee in their territories.” Kai continues (now oddly syntonized in Sol's memory in a weft of waves, resonances, and colored threads) that all territories have ancient names in cosmogonic languages, and the best way to pay the earth is to name it well, invigorate thought with sensuous sonorities.4 *** Sol remembers it from afar while canoeing down a river with a forgotten resonating name . . . Nietzschean words float by: “It is this way with all of us when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities . . . at least not derived from the essence of things . . . a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished . . . some drained of sensuous force.”5 New promising rhythms reach her during the nth heat wave hitting the North, the water level at its lowest in 70 years, its speeds lessened by the reduction of its flows. With a few remaining anthropologists, they embark in the canoes downriver seeking ways to teach/learn on, with, from, through watery pathways. The air had become too sterile in the university buildings, now making them wasted horizons. The “conservation” parks are depleted, littered in excess of signs, restrictions, and sprays used by people to differentiate themselves from the insects and forests they nevertheless fled toward as the city air got stale. The postnatural expedition navigating in-between parks and cities offers solace. It is midsummer, and they glide calmly with the river currents when an elderly woman appears in the distance. She is sitting in a chair set in the sand in the low riverbed and orange sunset light watching over her granddaughter playing in the water. “Where are you going?” “To Paughan reservoir” (old hydro-electricity dam that had flooded a small village, church and farmlands in the early 1900s). “Ah, encore une trotte” (still a ways)! Along the journey, after being coldly unwelcomed approaching a few people sitting on the dock of a now-abandoned restaurant, they cross under the bridge and pause near impressive boulders, which they climb to get a view downstream. The majestic larch tree6 reaching high above toward the skies easily sways into a windy conversation. “With Innu in Nitassinan, I learned to mix it with bear fat to soothe and restore skin irritation.” Surprised to hear of this tangible possibility, Sol lit up recalling how her chronic eczema had calmed down when larch near her home began to grow steadily into her imagination. “You went directly towards it!” “Akemantak” Sol whispers, suddenly possessed by a kind of revelation (Figure 1). *** Sol returned to the arid lands from where she and her Wayúu friend started a pilgrimage to the Sierra to pay the earth. The mountains reach the sky in the far south like a vague mirage, undulating in the steppe heat. Instead of the old open ranchería built up with bahareque7 under the subtle trupillo8 shades and in-between hens and goats jumping around, she found wires and electricity towers striating the lands: an infrastructure for a new open charcoal mine in proximity. Even the small river was depleted, as if a demiurgic hand had taken it away from its ancient bed. A surviving trupillo on a side of the road quivers in the breeze and racket of remnant black dust. Even if its ecology was erased around and its roots are compressed under the remaining cement, it is still there, like an immutable stone ancestor. Not even a wild animal perched itself on it in years yet . . . Sol embraces it and hears a voice, an uninterrupted eeeeeee “Be like water, surround things and recompose with them effortlessly.” Kai's voice stems from the tree, a gnarly sort of mastery of nonmastery9 teaching Wayúus to let their own thoughts flourish from the sand.10 Echoes vibrate with what Sol was still learning with a basaa healer in Africa11: becoming water, sand, larch, or trupillo; riding elemental or vegetal lines is becoming light and supple; tending to suspension12 in the open air. As with burning, plants love and cheer the cleansing power of wind and water to spread and thrive, all coinciding with ancestral teachings and maybe prospective vague anthropological ones, too. Storying with plants might in these ways be attentional instead of intentional, lateral rather than frontal, compos(t)ing with phýein and more generally with what is yet to come, improvising sonorous sensations,13 committing to the vital task of proliferating meaningful foreseeable futures.