In the Beginning Was the Animal

The male and female toads of the verses sung (previously in secret) in Hernández’s forge thus return (openly sexual) to the Kutral-Có lagoon: “y nos revolcamos [Liz, Rosario, Kauka, Catriel, Millaray y la China] hasta ser tan sapos como los sapos que saltaban alrededor y sapos copulamos ahí en ese barro que parecía el principio del mundo y como habrá sido en el principio nos amamos todos sin pudores” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 154).1 The forbidden verses I refer to are recited by the men while looking at the young women in the foreman’s absence: “La sapa estaba tejiendo / Para el sapo un gran bonete / La sapa que no se descuide / Y el sapo que se lo mete” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 115). In this tangle of eager bodies, reborn in that mud, it is now possible to postulate another world, another origin. Upon “sentirse sapos de otro pozo,” only the fluctuating banks of the Paraná River, “ese animal que gusta de vivir en partes” (175), can offer refuge to the group threatened by the advance of the Argentine army. Returning to the image of the river, then, is another way of reactivating the imaginary of the first local expeditions along the Río de la Plata and its tributaries; it is going back to the beginning to ask ourselves: what kind of society could we have become if we had sought to learn from and cooperate with those who already lived here instead of destroying them? Cabezón Cámara takes on precisely this task of imagining and rewriting that past, but from the certainty of its everlasting postponement given the present writing of the novel itself. For this reason, the work closes in the following way: “Hay que vernos, pero no nos van a ver […] Así viajamos” (185). While the Iñchiñ people, like a poltergeist, are lost behind the protective fog of the Paraná River and its streams on a journey towards an uncertain destination, what is emphasized with increasing insistence is “cómo el mundo entero es un solo animal” (180).

Thus, I return then to recover that prefix “em-” from the verb “emperré” because Cabezón Cámara’s novel is about/sobre that animal that we are and how within/dentro de that animal always beats the possibility of encountering the other to establish a family, a community in which cows and oxen “gozan de la misma vida leve que todos, Iñchiñes también ellos” (182).

Now, if modernity has imposed an instrumental vision of nature based on “an anthropocentric and androcentric episteme” motivated by the accumulation and expansion of capital, the Anthropocene “[f]orces us to rethink ourselves as anthropos, but it also leads us to rethink the link between society and nature, between human and non-human” (Svampa and Viale 2020: 199). The Iñchiñ community is located at the antipodes of anthropocentrism, androcentrism, and capitalism: its members reject this dualistic vision of nature, which tends to establish and reinforce chasms between humans and non-humans. The novel thus plays on a relational paradigm, based on the interdependence and sustainment of life proposed by Indigenous American worldviews and popular feminisms or ecofeminism.

Are the Iñchiñes in their wampo-canoes the ones who navigate between the island-stanzas of Cabezón Cámara’s poem “El colapso ecológico ya llegó,” which closes the volume by Svampa and Viale? This poem is woven from a verbal isotopy that articulates “decir,” “saber,” “hacer olvidar” and “dar batalla/pelear” with a community of those colonized by modernity, of which the speaker “I” emerges as a conscious spokesperson for the critical moment we are experiencing. Just as in the novel, in this poem, modernity bursts in as a heartbreaking, tragic, historical experience: the colonized have been “arrancados” from Pachamama, separated from nature (Cabezón Cámara 2020, “El colapso:” 295). In these verses, the imminent climate of confrontation is also repeated, tinting them with that combative tone, typical of the avant-garde poem-manifesto: “Peleamos. / Tenemos que pelear. / Vamos a pelear. / Como hijos de la Modernidad / o como colonizados por ella / como colonizados. / Peleamos” (298).

However, the key postulate of the 2017 novel ‒ “cómo el mundo entero es un solo animal” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 180) ‒ now radically mutates in the 2020 poem. In “El colapso ecológico ya llegó,” the Argentine writer doubles down on the challenge, and thus, the speaker asserts: “Todo es humano. / No existe cosa tal / como una sola humanidad. / El yaguareté es humano. / El tapir. La vaca. / Y el monte todo. / Y la selva. / No existe cosa tal como una sola humanidad” (Cabezón Cámara 2020, “El colapso:” 296). Cabezón Cámara recycles Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ideas from La mirada del jaguar (2008), quoted in Svampa’s article (2019: 32) as well as Svampa and Viale’s book (2020: 200).2 In the poem, Cabezón Cámara emphasizes the need to change our capitalist paradigm. In this sense, it is noteworthy to point out that the writer takes this premise a step further within the body of the poem itself and recycles phrases from Svampa and Vaile’s work. She explicitly asserts this in the subtitle/clarification of the poem (2020, “El colapso:” 295). These recycled phrases from Svampa and Viale’s book do not appear in Cabezón Cámara’s poem enclosed in quotation marks. Viveiros de Castro’s original phrase is: “Humanity is the universal foundation of the cosmos. Everything is human” (2013: 57). Within the Amazonian model studied by Viveiros de Castro, “the world is populated by many species of beings endowed with consciousness and culture, and each of these beings sees itself as human and sees the others as non-human, that is, as animals or species of spirits” (Svampa and Viale 2020: 200). Without a doubt, this intrinsic connection and modification of the world-organizing postulate of the 2017 novel and the 2020 poem merits further examination. Just like Ocampo and the character of China, with these verses Cabezón Cámara deepens the gesture of her colleagues: she goes back to the very heart of her work published in 2017 and throws these kick-words toward our present with “menos modales que una mula” (Cabezón Cámara 2020: 14). But that is another adventure.