Everyone should see
How the earth [1] unfolds like a flower
—(Ayvu Rapyta, translated by Douglas Diegues, 2006)

Come here, take the dirt, the fill from the hole. It’s been dug.
I‘ve really gone down deep! Can’t you hear my call?
—(Popol Vuh, translated by Dennis Tedlock, 1996)

Contrary to what his opponents think, Zipacna, the K‘iche’ Mayan god who calls out from the bottom of a hole in the Popol Vuh excerpt quoted in the epigraph, is not digging his own grave; he is digging a shelter for himself. In order to discuss the Guarani Kaiowá Letter, the text denouncing human rights violations that most impacted on Brazilian society in the first decade of the twenty-first century,[2] this chapter addresses not only land, shelters and graves, but also dirt and flowers. Signed on October 8, 2012, by 50 men, 50 women and 70 children from the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community, living camped on the banks of the Hovy River in Iguatemi, Mato Grosso do Sul, the Letter went viral on social media and triggered an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity. It gathered support not only from those sharing in a common cause, but from thousands of Brazilian and foreign “co-signatories” who added Guarani Kaiowá to their profile name as part of their extended family (Sobrenome). This chapter recalls the main events concerning the Guarani Kaiowá Letter signed by the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community and suggests we take one additional step by including it in the range of contemporary literary production in Brazil. I start by recollecting the incisive text written by Eliane Brum (Decretem nossa) in the heat of the events that surrounded the Letter’s repercussions. Brum ends by asking “what words are for us?” As I transpose this question to the field of literary studies, I wonder: what indigenous words are and what they can do at the heart of literature written in Brazil. The first part of this article discusses our conception of literature, its relations to human rights and how an indigenous letter can affect Brazilian literary history. The second part contextualizes the history of the Guarani and the challenges they have faced, ending with an analysis that emphasizes the literary impact of the Letter and the link between indigenous land rights and the right to authorship.

Written as a claim for territory that asks for the right to die in the land of ancestors, and addressed to governmental and law enforcement authorities in Brazil, the Guarani Kaiowá Letter constitutes one of the most powerful counter-conquest texts in contemporary Latin America. In order to talk about the poetic and political force of the Letter, this text begins with the right to inhabit the land—the ground—on which we live, walking through the right to inhabit words—the “strenuous yet winged ground” (Baptista 119) on which one writes. Moving between land and letter, I resort to the testimony of Hipólito and Epitácio, two Guarani (ñandeva) men from Mato Grosso do Sul. For them, ritualized Guarani words “have land,” ijyvýva, while Christian words “have paper,” ikuatiáva (Chamorro 279). Up to now, governmental responses continue to “have paper,” but have not had land. [3] In this context, I propose that the discursive field of literature can give a response that offers proper justice to the Guarani call for land rights. At the heart of South America, this call also cries out from the bottom of a hole, tragically echoing the verses of the Mesoamerican K‘iche’ peoples’ great cosmo-epic.

First Part: On Land and Literature

It should first be emphasized that this document—especially as it is a traumatic document of the real—should not be considered as fiction. The Guarani Kaiowá Letter does not belong to the fictional realm, but it can belong to the literary field, just as the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, [4] the Jesuits Letters, Father Vieira’s Sermons and many descriptive treatises, travel reports and other socio-historical documents that, having transcended their initial space of inscription, make up the body of literature production in Brazil. This is the conception of literature proposed by Luiz Costa Lima: a “heterogeneous” discursive field including what he refers to as “hybrid forms,” such as letters, essays, books of maxims, diaries and autobiographies, which—in spite of not having initially been intended to be poetic or fictional—can be incorporated into the main body of literature if they present prominent distinguishing features that differentiate them from other similar texts. If hundreds of letters written by indigenous groups have been circulated online and are part of the current history of these peoples’ social and territorial claims, why did the Guarani Kaiowá Letter from the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community raise so much popular commotion? My suggestion is that this letter has a distinguishing feature that calls for explanation so that we may better understand its force.

What constitutes the “erratic character of the literary field,” as Costa Lima beautifully puts it (336), is “the possibility that a certain work may change its original inscription” (348). Accordingly, “out of fictionality, literature encompasses works that, having lost their original intention, find shelter elsewhere, i.e., change their role while still being engaged in their own interest” (347). Finding shelter elsewhere is exactly what concerns this article: this Letter will continue to be engaged in its own interest even after its initial moment of action—taking on a new role as a “Letter from Indigenous Literature produced in Brazil.” I argue, therefore, that this claim for the land that belongs to the Guarani Kaiowá should not be divorced from the literary territory to which they are also entitled.[5] Bearing in mind that even though the initial intention of the Guarani Kaiowá Letter was not literary—it is, after all, a political and social document that makes a denouncement and calls for help—one nevertheless gets the impression that it found its wide- spread reception because of the powerful language that characterizes it: “Through the richness of its language, literature becomes its second home. This dislocation is not a charitable gesture. For it to take place, the work must display a distinguishing feature” (Costa Lima 350). As I shall demonstrate in the second part of this article, this distinguishing feature is linked to the way the letter’s signatories appeal for death. As we shall see, this appeal is precisely what produces the torsion that repositions the Letter as a literary letter. Thus, following the mobilization for the legal recognition of their lands, tekoha, in Mato Grosso do Sul, I propose the inclusion of the Guarani Kaiowá Letter in the territorial realms of contemporary literature, considering that their ancestral territorial rights are parallel to the right to inclusion in the literary discursive terrain. The ownership of their land, after all, should not be decoupled from their sheltering in the literary terrain, especially because “land,” “word” and “soul” are not dissociated terms in Guarani, as I shall demonstrate in my discussion of the letter. It could even be said that what we refer to as literary, according to the aforementioned Guarani conceptual framework, points to “land words” rather than “paper words.” Therefore, I would suggest that the right to literature should be a discursive territory shelter.

Literature and Justice

My suggestion, however, is confronted with the question of the limits of the literary as regards minority forms of discourse. In recent Brazilian literary criticism, this debate was raised by Marco Piason Natali’s article “Beyond the right to literature,” which, in turn, engages critically with Antonio Candido’s “The right to literature.” I became familiar with this discussion through Jaime Ginzburg, who summarizes it in Crítica em tempos de violência (Critique in times of violence) by arguing that “the need to think in contemporary terms about the rights of societies and groups excluded by historical violence leads to the fundamental question of what we mean by literature […]” (204).

Candido’s “The right to literature” approaches literature in the widest sense as “fabulation” and concludes by supporting the dissemination of canonical literature, its educational value and critical training as a right that is systematically denied in countries such as Brazil, where most of the population is not taught how to read and write. However, the socially engaged and humanistic perspective of Candido’s text (written before the boom of cultural studies), which justly defends the participation of groups excluded from literacy, also reiterates the view that European literature is the paradigm of the universal—the view that is at the core of Natali’s criticism. In addition, I note that Candido’s perspective is tied to a teleological and evolutionary conception of popular expressions as a primitive stage that preceded the advanced and erudite European systems, as becomes clear when he says that “to enjoy [fiction] is a right of every society’s peoples, from the Indians who sing of their hunting prowess or dance, calling upon the full moon, to the finest of scholars […]” (180). In other words, he does not take into account that those “Indians” can also produce texts and be erudite, since the understanding of “text” that informs his perspective is limited to European-rooted standards.[6] In counterpoint, it must be remembered that anthropologist Antonio Risério, as early as 1993, argued in favor of expanding the notion of literature so that it could also include non-Western poetics and practices, according non-literate skills no less prestige.

Natali’s article, in turn, builds on recent debates that arose from cultural studies and gained momentum in American academia in the 1990s, along with the Marxist thinking that was renewed by postcolonial studies. In a way, these debates produced a split between literary criticism that focused on the Western canon and the literary criticism that focused on other socio-political approaches. Natali’s article talks about literature as a field undermined by the notion of a harmonious “universal,” and concludes by suggesting (in a “perverse” way, as he puts it) that justice and literature are not necessarily linked, since the very universal notion of the literary produces a “violent translation” that by including differences ends up eliminating them. In other words:

To name as literature, or fiction, that which is something else would therefore be an example of the necessarily violent translation that muffles the difference contained in practices arising in conceptual horizons that include other possibilities for understanding the relations between verbal objects, the representation of reality, and the place of the human subject in the creation and reception of texts.
(Natali 191)

Therefore, if Antonio Candido defends the right to literature, understood according to the paradigm of the “universal,” as well as its local adaptations, Natali proposes to put aside the literary in favor of discourses that resist a very particular “universal.” However, it is important to note that both texts, Candido’s and Natali’s, share the common refusal to include “non-Western” Amerindian texts as part of literature. This inclusion isn’t even an issue to Candido, simply because he wouldn’t view indigenous “texts” as being on par with those of the colonizers and their descendants, while, to Natali, it would correspond to a “violent translation.” This means that both authors conceive of literature the same way: as a field of similarities that, as such, can be emulated or abandoned. Thus, they forget that modern literature is born in the late eighteenth century as a discursive space of resistance (Candido for relying on a hierarchy of discourses and Natali for rightly criticizing this hierarchy)—a field in which potential differences were continuously emerging.[7] I could then translate the question that is implicit in both the texts as follows: if literature is a European institution brought by the Americas’ colonizers, wouldn’t the inclusion of an indigenous letter (or one from other minorities) under the same category be a contradiction, or, worse, an abuse?

A Literature of Peoples

Between these two approaches, which after all converge, I propose a third way of thinking about indigenous texts: to think of them within the literary field, understood as a discursive space of reception and production of differences, just as I have been proposing to think of a literary theory that is altered by what was considered non-literary (Librandi- Rocha). That is why I do not follow the solution of glimpsing “the space beyond literature’s frontiers” (Natali 191). First, because the very field of literature is broad enough to include different and heterogeneous texts and concepts; second, because of a distinct conception of discursive politics: to consider literature as only a European product limits the scope of the literary. In this respect, it is the same argument according to which indigenous thought cannot be referred to as philosophy because it is not written in the light of the model of Western philosophy.[8] In the perspective that I am suggesting, including does not mean granting a right; rather it means recognizing the equality of rights. 

Thus, what I advocate is by no means the “assimilation” or “integration” of indigenous discourses, as one would see the assimilation of these groups in Brazilian society as a “whitening”; on the contrary, I advocate for the return of the indigenous repressed, as in the case of those who added Guarani Kaiowá to their names, as part of who they are. This takes us back to a basic question: if the numerous letters written by European colonizers are documents of our literature, why couldn’t the same be said in relation to a letter written by an indigenous group? Above all, this issue involves the challenge of thinking about the possibility of different literary histories,[9] as we shall see.

A Different History

Antonio Candido’s Formação da literatura brasileira (Formation of Brazilian Literature) is clear: “our” literature is born as the literature of the colonizing masters, produced in “uncultivated land” for “us,” their descendants (10). In the light of deconstructionist and cultural studies, as Paulo Franchetti has pointed out, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to digest the way this “we” is read: those who are not part of this “we” and who do not include themselves among these “descendants” are multiplying by means of affirmative actions in literature and in other, always obliterated, forms of writing.

Therefore, one could say that the problem (or solution) here is that today “we” does not necessarily coincide with the narrative of the “we” proposed in Formação. We also read in the 1962 preface to the second edition of Candido’s work that it seems to him “that Arcadianism was important because it consolidated Western literature in Brazil, thanks to the universal standards that guided it and allowed us to articulate our literary production with the system of expression of the civilization to which we belong, and within which we have slowly defined our originality” (17). I would say that including the Guarani Kaiowá Letter (and other indigenous texts) also means “to articulate our literary production with the systems of expression of the civilization to which we belong,” except that civilization, in this case, is native, not just European. In other words, it is a matter of claiming a different affiliation. Thinking of the Guarani Letter as part of the tradition of contemporary literature is to forge a bond, at last, with other forms of thinking and being in the territoriality of Brazil.[10] The fact is that native civilizations have always been part of the agenda of Brazilian literature; however, they have always been approached via delegation: to the best of my knowledge, no native text authored by indigenous peoples until the twentieth century has been considered part of Brazilian literature, except as a quotation, source or inspirational reference. Such Indianism is an uninhabited commonplace, devoid of the peoples who it intends to represent. This scenario has been changing dramatically with the emergence of indigenous writers in Brazil and the increase in studies about Amerindian poetics in the twenty-first century.

Literature and Not-belonging

In his text “Still Brazilian?” (“Ainda brasileira?”), Fernando Scheibe makes a far-reaching suggestion: to put aside the notion of “literary system” and return to the sources of “literary manifestation.” The suggestion is rich in potential developments, since it motivates us to step beyond the aegis of the formation of a national literary system to rethink contemporary productions subsumed by “schools” or “systems.” These manifestations can be seen as a plurality of events disturbing the national unity that was prevalent in conceptions of literary history in Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The inclusion of an indigenous letter involves a revision of the term “Brazilian literature,” for either it would require an extension of what “Brazilian” is, so as to include indigenous peoples and their languages as part of a Lusophone literature, or it would imply disregarding the term in favor of a broader, generic scope: that of literary texts produced in Brazil.

In this sense, talking about the Guarani Kaiowá Letter means broadening horizons and bearing in mind a regional reality: that of South America, which therefore includes areas subjected to Iberian colonization and the current borders of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as a multilingual scenario encompassing Portuguese, Spanish, Portunhol and various Guarani dialects. It is within this paradigm that I propose the inclusion of the Guarani Kaiowá Letter as a manifestation of contemporary literature, understanding literature in a broad and minor sense at the same time—that which is born of not-belonging: outside the national scope, yet within the literary field,[11] in other words, rather than a literature of the people, a literature of the peoples, “expressing the plurality and uniqueness of the different ways of living and representing the world” (Mota 45).

Let us return to Abel Barros Baptista’s argument that literary nationalism, which “requires that literature made in Brazil must be Brazilian” (Ideia de literatura brasileira 24), is in itself a European Romantic project of appreciation of the national, the exotic and the distant landscape. However, what was to be a historically dated project became an inalienable law, thanks to the way historical Romanticism coincided with the political independence of Brazil: “the event that really prevents the exhaustion of the Romantic project’s authority in its historical moment” (25). Due to this “coincidence of fates” (28), one cannot think of literature outside the law that bound the literary to the representation of the nation (according to conciliatory standards), which, in turn, underlies a dichotomy widely disseminated in literary criticism: local/universal, since “harmony between the local and the universal is also established through the national project” (39). Today, even with the crisis in the harmonic vision of the nation, and with the possibilities of rethinking literature in other terms, the harmonizing law between literary creation and Brazilian reality “renders illegitimate any tendency for the possibility of literature resisting Brazil” (31). And again: “breaking this harmony would mean unleashing uncertainty about the fate of Brazilian literature: hence the force of the law […]” (31–32). I would say, then, that running the risk of including the Guarani Kaiowá Letter is a gesture that only makes sense and has value if it defies this law, deliberately throwing us into uncertainty: that is when we realize that what disappears is not literature, but an idea, a proposal that has become law. The Letter we will read below is also a matter of law. It says that Brazilian justice does not represent the Guarani Kaiowá, and it declares their death. It is interesting to think that Indianist literature linked to the national Romantic project, in turn, declared the literary survival of past exterminated indigenous peoples yet forgot about the living (among them, especially the Guarani, who had become enemies of Brazilians because of the Paraguayan War). Including the Guarani Kaiowá Letter means to include the living Guarani peoples, thereby confronting the founding law of Brazilian literature twice over. Once freed from this law, we will be able to think of what was obliterated. Before we read the Letter, let us briefly consider two points.

Education and Translation

In his book, Jaime Ginzburg suggests rethinking the question of literature, bearing in mind its educational impact, as a "concrete project" (205) that I also consider to be fundamental. Including the Guarani Kaiowá Letter in the canon means working toward introducing it to Brazilian students at schools and universities. As Pedro Cesarino says:

the intellectual upbringing that begins in primary education does not take into account the existence of Amerindian cultures (never mind African or Asian ones), shunned in favor of Euro-American canons. This systematic neglect is a huge loss to cosmopolitan knowledge, since it prevents the access to unfathomable sources of indigenous thought and creation. (6)

For this “cosmopolitan knowledge,” the notion and practice of translation has been a key component of a widely welcome and ethically and aesthetically successful partnership among anthropologists, poets and literary critics who have been working together in translating African-American, quilombola and Amerindian songs and narratives. One example, among many, is the work of poet and translator Josely Vianna Baptista, which in Roça barroca translates three Mbyá-Guarani sacred songs from Guairá, Paraguay, which are part of Ayvu Rapyta, followed by her poems “Moradas nômades (impressões e vestígios de viagem)” [“Nomadic dwellings (impressions and remnants of travels”]. As Francisco Faria says, Roça barroca is a “poetic/political project that combines artistic invention, cultural intervention, interdisciplinary dialogue and a revision (perhaps even a reassessment) of our cultural heritage” (148). This project allows us to establish entry points for dialogue (conceiving literature as a lingua franca) in which both Western and non-Western texts mutually modify one another.

Second Part: The Pyelito Kue/Mbarakai Letter

The Kaiowá (along with the Mbyá and Ñandeva in Brazil) are part of the great Guarani nation that inhabited the River Plate Basin in South America when the Spaniards and Portuguese came to the region in the sixteenth century.[12] Despite the fact that trauma originating from the conquest affected the continuity between the “historical” groups of the sixteenth century and the “ethnographic” ones of the twentieth century, some components of the Guarani “ways of being” have been recreated “in the face of increasingly adverse conditions” (Monteiro 475), such as “the prophetic discourse and a deep sense of identity” (476). Only specialists could determine if one could look at the Guarani Kaiowá Letter as part of “prophetism,” for it would seem plausible to include it in the tradition of the rebellious movements of resistance discourses that, since the sixteenth century, have combined prophetic and subversive discourses against “the way of life imposed by the karaí Christians” (485). 

Most information about Guarani history in colonial times refers to the Jesuit reductions in the context of Iberian colonies (the first reductions were founded in 1610), and bandeiritismo in São Paulo (expeditions against indigenous peoples—see Monteiro 497). With the destruction of the Guairá missions between 1628 and 1632 by paulistas, thousands of Guarani moved to São Paulo (an estimated 30 to 50 thousand); others (about 10 thousand) moved to the banks of the Uruguay River. Some missions were also relocated to more remote areas along the Uruguay and Paraguay Rivers. This context implies at least three things: the Guarani are at the origin of history of territorial formation in Southern Brazil; they are also at the origin of the constitution of Southern and South-eastern populations—both Spanish and Portuguese peoples have “incorporated Guarani women and the mixed population that emerged” (Monteiro 482–83.). Also, Guarani dialects were part of the “língua geral” (“general  language”) that  significantly influenced  Brazilian Portuguese.

The Guarani Today and the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay Groups

Guarani Kaiowá people today are made up of two groups: the Guarani, who call themselves Ñandeva and are also known as Ava-Chiripa, and the Kaiowá, who call themselves Pai Tavytera in Paraguay. The third Guarani subgroup living in Brazil and Paraguay is formed by the Mbya. The Kaiowá are the largest of the Guarani subgroups, and they “have always inhabited Northern Paraguay and Southern Mato Grosso” (Almeida 17). Their history of contact with non-indigenous populations and the growing and systematic occupation of their lands since the nineteenth century [13] reproduces the extensive disrespect toward indigenous rights in Brazil that Manuela Carneiro da Cunha accurately summarized: “Every step is a slight fraud, and the final product resulting from them is a complete expropriation” (82).

The families living in the Pyelito Kue and Mbarakay communities that signed the letter inhabited the territory that is currently in dispute “without having their lives and activities harassed by the non-indigenous” until the 1940s and 1950s, when President Getúlio Vargas promoted the occupation of rural areas, bringing a huge influx of gaúchos and paulistas to the region (Silva). That was when indigenous peoples started being “dumped” into reserves (Brand). Those who stayed outside the reserves live in extremely precarious situations, while seeking to return to their former territories in order to rebuild their tekoha, “the place and the environment where there are given conditions that make it possible to be a Guarani” (Meliá, “A história de um guarani”). It is the term that summarizes the complex relationship between occupying a space characterized by walking (oguata), living together and sharing a cosmogony, as we shall find as we read the Letter.

The Letter

The letter is introduced as a “Letter from the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay Guarani-Kaiowá community of Iguatemi – Mato Grosso do Sul to the Brazilian Government and Justice”:

We (50 men, 50 women and 70 children) Guarani-Kaiowá communities originating from tekoha Pyelito kue / Mbarakay, we write this letter to present our historical situation and a final decision in regard to the order expressed by the Federal Court of Navaraí MS, as Case No. 0000032-87.2012.4.03.6006, on 29 September 2012.

A year and two months before the Letter was made available, and after three days and nights of preparatory prayers for returning to their tekoha, the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community made their way back on August 8, 2011, making it known that this time they would not leave until the demarcation was completed. It was their third attempt to return: both the first time, in July 2003, and the second, in December 2009, the group was beaten to the ground and thrown to the wayside by gunmen who worked for the local ranchers. In 2011, the same procedure was repeated, until the Letter came to light on October 8, 2012. Initially, the group had camped in an area in the Santa Catarina Ranch. They were attacked, their shacks were destroyed and their tarps were confiscated, according to a document submitted to the authorities by the Aty Guasu Assembly. On September 5, 2011, those who remained were violently expelled to the banks of the Hovy River, where they became isolated, unable to cross to the other side, since the vine bridges they built were constantly destroyed. State military and civil police forces even built barriers on nearby roads to prevent food from reaching the indigenous community, according to a public denunciation statement released by the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples (CIMI) on September 9, 2011. In November 2011, another Aty Guasu Assembly published a “Declaration against the death threats” and reported another shocking event: a Presidential Delegation had been to the area where the conflict was taking place, and even though the group was being escorted by National Public Security Force officers, four people threatened them on the road. The four people were filming them from a car: “One of them introduced himself as the mayor of Iguatemi; another one said that he was the chairman of the Rural Union of Iguatemi—Mato Grosso do Sul. Both of them are farmers in the Pyelito Kue-Mbarakay region” (CIMI). 

The situation of the indigenous people on the riverbank remained precarious when on September 17, 2012, Federal Judge Sergio Henrique Bonachela issued a decision in favor of the owner of the Cambará Ranch, recognizing the validity of the rancher’s ownership and determining the eviction of the indigenous group. That was when the letter was sent by email to Egon Heck, coordinator of the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples (CIMI), along with a report of the Aty Guasu Assembly, that concluded that “you cannot evict indigenous peoples from the bank of a river.”

We received information that our community will soon be violently attacked and thrown off the riverside by the Federal Court of Navaraí, MS. Thus, it is evident to us that the very action of the Federal Court generates and increases the violence against our lives, ignoring our rights to survive on the riverside and in the area of our traditional Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay territory.

Anyone knowledgeable about Latin American literature is aware of the importance of banks, and in the Brazilian context, more specifically, of the importance of riverbanks, symbolized by João Guimarães Rosa in his short story “The Third Bank of the River,” published in his 1962 book Primeiras estórias. In the case we are discussing here, it is the banks of the Hovy River in question:

To whom should we denounce the violence committed against our lives? To which Justice of Brazil, if the Federal Court itself is generating and fueling violence against us? We have evaluated our current situation and came to the conclusion that we will all die very soon, and we do not have nor will have the prospect of a dignified and fair life either here on the riverbank or far from here.

“The Third Bank of the River” has been previously considered a territory of the dead (Wisnik). In the story, a son is always on the riverbanks waiting for his father, and when his time to occupy the space in the canoe in the middle of the river comes, he struggles with fear, hesitates and runs away. The story is also the story of this guilt. As we read the Guarani Kaiowá Letter from the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community, we find ourselves in the same position as this son. Therefore, many of us decided to add Guarani Kaiowá as a surname; even nowadays, many still continue to do so on social networks. When they say “we do not have nor will have the prospect of a dignified and fair life either here on the riverbank or far from here,” these poor, miserable and hungry people appeal to the symbolic milieu that we inhabit: the pit, the mass grave, the prolonged and unpunished death, hoping that some kind of redemption in the river and its third bank is possible.

We camped here, 50 meters from the bank of Hovy River, where there were already four deaths, two by suicide and two as a result of beatings and tortures by farmers’ gunmen. We have been living on the bank of Hovy River for over a year and we don’t have any assistance, we are isolated, surrounded by gunmen and until today we resisted. We eat food once a day. We have been through all of this to retrieve our old Pyleito Kue/Mbarakay territory.
(Guarani-Kaiowá)

The response from the Guarani Kaiowá reaches us in a faint and injured voice. This voice recalls the fraud, cowardice and bloodshed that the history of Brazil has always “transcended”—relying, unfortunately, on the support of much of its literature.

In fact, we know very well that at the heart of our ancient territory several of our grandfathers, grandmothers and great-grandparents lie buried. This is where the cemeteries of all our ancestors are. Aware of this historical fact, we are about to die and we want to die and be buried with our ancestors right here where we are today, so we ask the Government and the Federal Court not to order the eviction, but to enact our collective death and to bury us all here.
(Guarani-Kaiowá)

A report from Brazil’s Indigenous affairs bureau (FUNAI) talks about the importance of graves among the Guarani:

For the Kaiowá, burying people in a land with which they do not have a relationship of identity, that is, a land to which they do not belong, is an anomaly that is hard to balance in cosmological and spiritual terms. At some point, it must be repaired to restore proper sociocosmological order. Since graves (yta) constitute significant and materially visible evidence connecting the indigenous people to their territories, many non-indigenous land owners destroy the ones that they find within the limits of the ranches […].
(Silva)

According to usual logic, people do not ask to be killed, unless their life is so miserable and unbearable that it does not seem to be worthy. In the Letter, a sentence condenses the power of this unusual appeal:

We ask, once and for all, to enact our decimation and total extinction, and send several tractors to dig a big hole to throw and bury our bodies. This is our request to the federal judges. Already we await the decision of the Federal Court. Enact our collective death of the Guarani and Kaiowá of Pyelito Kue / Mbarakay and bury us here. Since we have decided not to leave, neither alive nor dead.
(Guarani-Kaiowá)

The letter is precise: they will not leave “alive,” i.e., expelled as they have always been; “nor dead,” in turn, an expression similar to “not even if they kill us,” expresses zero tolerance for any kind of eviction— hence the very specific request made to federal judges: “bury us here” and send tractors to dig a big hole. It is not, therefore, a claim to live in the land that belonged to them, as they no longer expect to have that right that has always been denied, but the request for a pit, “a big hole to throw and bury our bodies,” since that way they will not leave the land where their ancestors lie. This unprecedented request reverses the logic of large landowners who exploit huge territories with a few hundred head of cattle or for large-scale production of soybeans or sugar cane. “The Guarani do not leave deserts behind” (Meliá, “A terra sem mal dos Guarani” 36), as a leading scholar in Guarani studies explains as he refers to the aforementioned concept of tekoha. We can better understand this in the light of such a letter, which reveals how intense their sense of connection with the land is. This bond that can be translated into our terms as “poetic,” since it is also linked to the notion of “land words,” not just “paper words,” as we indicated at the beginning.[14]

We know that we have no chance of surviving with dignity here in our ancient land. We already suffered a lot and we are all massacred and dying apace. We know that we will be expelled from the bank by the Law, but we will not leave the bank. As a native and historical indigenous people, we simply decided to be collectively killed here. We have no choice, this is our last unanimous decision in regard to the order of the Federal Court of Navirai-MS.

The letter then ends with a characteristic epistolary formality, as if what had just been said did not preclude their politeness toward those who are their perpetrators:

Yours sincerely, the Guarani-Kaiowá from Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay

After the Letter

Following the impact brought by the letter, the court decision was suspended, and the indigenous group was offered an area where they are living while waiting for the demarcation. In January 2013, a detailed identification and demarcation report about the Iguatemipegua indigenous territory (Silva), signed by the anthropologist who coordinates the FUNAI team, was approved and published in the Official Federal Gazette. As I write this, the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community continues to live in one hectare of land, with almost no room to move, in a 90-day waiting period that will be followed by another 60 days for assessment and referral to the Ministry of Justice. The fact is that there are 46 ranches within the recognized territory (41.571 hectares), and nothing will be done while the government and the ranchers do not reach an agreement on reparations. It should be remembered that according to the Constitution of 1988, the process of demarcation of indigenous lands in the country should have been completed in 1993. More than 20 years have gone by since the end of this period. Moreover, as the Kaiowá leader Oriel Benites says, “devastated lands, with no forest, are being returned [to indigenous peoples]” (Sposati).

The letter brings into play a long history of repression, ethnocide and genocide, exposing it as it reverses a discourse that has always praised dead indigenous peoples, while in practice it continued to ignore and exterminate the living. Now, a contemporary indigenous group asks to be “killed,” since this would not differ from what has been perpetrated for centuries. This is how they denounce such a crime, asking for help in a surprising way. In doing so, they show that they are not voiceless victims and expose who the killers are. Their weakness takes the shape of strength and therefore becomes poetic force. Unlike what we see in other letters that have been circulating online, the twisted tone of this text manifests a dramatic force; it affirms while also denying; it claims innocence while accusing; it lives while it asks to die. And thus, as the Guarani-Kaiowá express their request to die, they prove to be more alive than ever.[15]

The Right to Land and Literature

Jacques Derrida, in the last chapter of his book Parages, recalls the “noble French political and literary tradition” that, from Voltaire to Camus, would argue that literature is the right to life: “the right of literature, the right to literature not as a right to death—and terror—but as the right to life, right to beyond the right and right to the abolition of death penalty” (272). Derrida then proceeds to review Maurice Blanchot’s “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” which seems to point in the opposite direction: literature as the right to death, the major expression of revolutionary freedom during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Blanchot’s La Part du Feu, Derrida recalls, was published a year after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, in turn, was written 100 years after 1848, when Victor Hugo voted for the abolition of death penalty in the Reign of Terror. It is worth highlighting the following passage of Blanchot’s “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” since it is useful for understanding the twist that the Guarani Kaiowá Letter throws in:

This is the meaning of the Reign of Terror. Every citizen has a right to death, so to speak; death is not a sentence passed on him, it is his most essential right; he is not suppressed as a guilty person—he needs death so that he can proclaim himself a citizen, and freedom makes him be born out of the vanishing of death. (319)

Is it not strange that these words describing the French Revolution are a perfect fit for the Guarani Kaiowá Letter? Is this not exactly what they are saying? That death is not their sentence, but the essence of their right? The right to be buried in the land of their ancestors, the land that has always been theirs, that was denied and suppressed since the conquest? And that’s what they ask (or rather demand) from the Brazilian government: enact our collective death and bring tractors to dig our grave? Is this not a gesture of ultimate freedom: freedom from the Terror of the massacre that is always disguised and brought against them?

The right of literature to death lies at the origin of rights, as Derrida says: the right to kill, to kill oneself, and to death penalty. But there is another aspect of this debate that brings us out of the terror that it refers to; as Derrida indicates: 1) literary language is contradictory and restless (it says one thing and something else turns up); 2) the death principle is also the principle of resurrection and health, and there is hope in the materiality of language, for words are things that give us more than we comprehend; and 3) Blanchot speaks of death as the inability to die.

Therefore, making a case for the inclusion of the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay Letter as part of “our” literature implies a twofold movement: first, to undermine this “our” by expanding it, taking colonial domination away from us, so that this “our” can also belong to indigenous peoples. And again, this is neither a benevolent inclusion nor an inclusion that eliminates differences. This is about including them as a group that produces texts, tells its history and owns its voice. In our discursive regime, this is what we call “authorship,” the right to literature as the right to authorship and authority. Second, the right to literature as reversal of death penalty, since in our discursive system—and now I refer to the Western one—there is territory to which survival is reserved: this territory is the written archive that will shape part of a tradition that the dead leave to the living and through which they dialogue. It is up to readers to make this survival happen or not. This is the meaning of the right to literature enunciated by Brás Cubas according to the following argument by Abel Barros Baptista that seems to match Blanchot/Derrida: “as if death were part of an inevitable event in a process through which someone becomes an author: as if, conversely, all authors were unable to die. In fiction and through fiction, what I am announcing here is the inescapable presence of death in the disposition of the literary text” (Baptista, O livro agreste 166).

Caminha’s Letter Reversed

In this context, the concise and incisive Guarani Kaiowá Letter becomes the new letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, but reversed. If the latter is a letter on the finding of Brazil, the former is a letter on losing Brazil. This act of losing might have to do either with the end of Brazil, disappearing in the ashes of its own people, history, flora and fauna or, on the other hand, the end of the “major” Brazil that the first letter announced, to open the possibility of a “minor” Brazil that has always existed and will always exist.

If Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter (which first showed up in literary histories only in the nineteenth century) told the news of the “finding” of the Land of Santa Cruz, the letter signed by 50 women, 50 men and 70 children of the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay community puts into question a five centuries cycle and presents the possibility of different futures. While Caminha’s letter was addressed to the King, the Guarani Kaiowá Letter is addressed to Brazilian Judiciary. While the Caminha’s letter initiated the colonization process in writing, the Guarani Kaiowá Letter acts as the quintessential decolonizing document in Brazil.

However, as previously discussed, there is an even more radical difference: while Caminha’s letter provides news of the living indigenous groups that he found in Brazil, the Kaiowá Letter gives news of their impending collective death. The first letter marks a beginning; the second is a farewell. It turns out that things are reversed in a chiasmatic way here: in the first case, many of the living indigenous groups will be exterminated by wars and epidemics; in the second, those on the verge of disappearing will multiply and be reborn with the force of their words. In the first case, Brazilians will be born as the mestizos of such an encounter and confrontation, and pau-brasil will initiate Brazil’s genealogy; in the second, Brazilians will return as natives of the extended Guarani Kaiowá family to proliferate in the rhizomatic space of the Internet. Indeed, its impact has given us the chance to state that “everyone is indigenous in Brazil, including me,”[16] and my name is Guarani Kaiowá, Munduruku, Kadiwéu and Canela, just as André Vallias’s beautiful poem “Totem” encapsulates. The poetic and political force of the Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay Letter: that is what this chapter sought to describe.

Notes

[1] TN. “Queremos que todos vejam/Como a terra se abre como flor.” “Terra” translates as “land,” “earth” and “dirt.”

[2] The letter was first published by the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples (CIMI) on 10 October 2012, along with a report from Aty Guasu, the Guarani General Assembly.

[3] The Guarani Kaiowá Pyelito Kue/Mbarakay territories were recognized by a report from the Indigenous Affairs Bureau (FUNAI) published in the Official Federal Gazette in January 2013, but said recognition has not yet been written into law.

[4] See Lopes Braga, who discusses the reception of the Letter in Brazilian literary historiography.

[5] The link between indigenous literature and territorial issues is put forward by Lucia Sá in her important book, Rain Forest Literatures (2004).

[6] Anita de Moraes presents other examples of this approach in Candido.

[7] I am thinking here of Michel Foucault’s archeology of Modern literature, described as a tradition of transgression and innovation, from the German Romanticism to the French Symbolists, epistemologically distinct from the previous rhetorical model of the Belles Lettres.

[8] This informs Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s anthropology (A inconstância da alma selvagem and “Perspectival anthropology”), which proposes a translational operation; I think literary criticism should also address this translational task.

[9] What Monteiro says about indigenous historiography also holds true for Brazilian literary history: “Generally speaking, historiography—especially Brazilian historiography—has given indigenous peoples the role of a mute extra or of a passive victim of the colonial processes that involved them” (Monteiro 476).

[10] Guarani descent is linked to the first indigenous mothers of the first Brazilians and the first Hispanic Americans in Southern/Southeastern South America (Monteiro).

[11] Here I follow Abel Barros Baptista (“Ideia de literatura brasileira”) and his argument in favor of literary cosmopolitanism.

[12] “From the Chaco to the Atlantic, from the Southern captaincies to the River Plate Basin, the Guarani presence encompassed, in the sixteenth century, a vast area that today includes the Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul, as well as neighboring countries” (Monteiro 476–77).

[13] See Antonio J. Brand.

[14] In her ethnological work resulting from living and participating in various rituals and walks with the Kaiowá in the area of Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Gabriela Chamorro summarizes: “The Kaiowá and Mbyá territories could be compared to a babbling body. The world comes into existence through words. Before creation, words already babbled in the depths of matter” (Chamorro 25).

[15] “This letter drilled the wall of hypocritical silence that often prevents indigenous voices from being heard by other citizens in the country and, thanks to the informal online network of social media, it eventually had to be disclosed by mainstream media. When everyone—that is, all those who say ‘all’ as a cry of rage and war—added ‘Guarani Kaiowá’ to their profile names, it was as if Brazil had discovered another Brazil” (Viveiros de Castro, “Somos todos eles”).

[16] A clin d’oeil to Viveiros de Castro’s idea that “everybody is indigenous in Brazil, except those who are not” (Entrevistas).

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