Jaguar-Totem Genre Transformations
The legacy of Guimarães Rosa is palpable in more contemporary works. “‘Onçanta,’ um totem” (2015), by Sérgio Medeiros (b. 1959), a contemporary poet based in Santa Catarina, is a hybrid text made up from citations of anthropological works, personal reflections, and literary criticism around a Xavante tale, “O rapaz, a onça, e o fogo” (“The Boy, the Jaguar, and the Fire”). The story explores the curious relationship between a Xavante Indigenous man and a jaguar, in which the jaguar becomes affectionate toward the human being and gives the young native a precious gift – domestic fire:
O relato indígena narrava a inusitada relação entre um jovem xavante e uma onça, relação que implicou o afeto do felino para com o ser humano e que culminou na doação ao indiozinho de algo precioso: o fogo doméstico ou de cozinha.
The Indigenous tale tells of the unusual relationship between a young Xavante and a jaguar, a relationship that involved the affection of the feline towards the human being and that culminates in the gift to the young native of something precious: domestic or cooking fire. (Medeiros 2016)
Medeiros meditates on the paradoxical and unconventional characterization of the jaguar: both a ferocious and friendly animal, a kindly grandpa, who assumes contradictory identities:
[A] onça não era um personagem “convencional”, tampouco “bonzinho”, pois, quase ao mesmo tempo, ela se apresentava como um animal feroz e um simpático e bondoso “vovô”, assumindo assim, ao longo da ação, identidades contraditórias e mesmo opostas. Apenas no final do conto a onça adquire, finalmente, uma aparência inequívoca e definitiva. Esse caráter paradoxal da onça […] se tornou […] um grande enigma para mim. (Medeiros n.p.)
[The] jaguar was not a “conventional” character, or a “kindly” one because, almost at the same time, he came across as a ferocious animal and a kindly and friendly “grandpa,” assuming in this way, in the course of the action, contradictory or even opposed identities. Only at the end of the story does the jaguar finally acquire an univocal and definitive appearance. That paradoxical character of the jaguar […] became […] a great enigma for me. (Medeiros 2016)
The ambiguity of the feline, Medeiros confesses, goes all the way to the end of the story. He meets the Indigenous storyteller, Jerônimo, but that does not necessarily help resolve the instability and inconstancy of the jaguar’s nature. This for Medeiros eventually inspired his own poetic practice in light of Viveiros de Castros’s “transformational” perspectivism by experimenting with hybrid genres such as lineated prose, poetic narrative, literary essays, dramatic poems/poetic plays, and, more recently, visual (often non-alphabetic) poetry. Like the jaguar that becomes human and vice versa, Medeiros’s work features stories that become other stories, versions of versions, works that oscillate between poetry, prose, drama, and aphorisms, often telling versions of the same story. For Medeiros, the jaguar is a metaphor or emblem of a “relato ‘selvagem’” (“wild story”) that cannot or will not be domesticated:
A onça, tal como o relato indígena no qual ela está inserida, participa de vários gêneros, sem pertencer na verdade a nenhum (cf. Derrida), pois troca constantemente de máscaras ao longo do diálogo com o “neto” que a visita em sua toca mágica.
The jaguar, just as the Indigenous story in which he is inserted, participates in a number of genres, without really belonging to any (cf Derrida), because he constantly changes masks in the course of the dialogue with his “grandson” who visits him in his magical den. (Medeiros 2016).
“Onçanta,” thus, is a further development of the idea of transformation, where the mode of representation itself, the various verbal genres, change identities, so to speak.