The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman’

The fold behind the knee review by Stephen Corry of ‘The Falling Sky: words of a Yanomami shaman’ by Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert This should become one of the most Albert writes additional chapters, important books of our time. Davi glossaries and notes, explaining his Kopenawa has several stories to tell; role and providing a wealth of one is that the Amazonian background material – all this Yanomami aren’t impressed with comprises the final part of ‘The our society, and that’s putting it Falling Sky’. The whole is an mildly. The Indians have a way of impressive monument to a lifetime’s looking at the world which could collaboration, work, and friendship. hardly be more different than ours, and they want to keep it that way, or The opening volume is Davi’s at least some do. It’s a slap in the detailed account of Yanomami face to the West’s creeping, and cosmology, and it uncovers a markedly adolescent, view that if we worldview as complex as any major don’t yet have quite all the answers, religion. Tribal beliefs are not a we’re well on the way to finding simple matter; this is no primitive them. nature worship, nor is it for the squeamish. It’s is a multicolored We’ve failed to convince the vision, vaguely reminiscent of a Yanomami that ours is the only Hieronymus Bosch triptych, of correct way, and irrespective of beauty and love, but also of whether you believe that’s romantic dismemberment, ‘cannibalism’, fantasy, or at least food for thought, death and destruction. Vulvas are Kopenawa’s book is destined to ‘eaten’, which is how the Yanomami become a seminal work in describe sex, and a bad-smelling anthropology, and hopefully much penis incurs the disdain of spirits more widely. and leads to nowhere good. ‘The Falling Sky’, the first book by a The universe is multifaceted and Yanomami, is best described as four multilayered, an ever changing place, volumes in one. It was constructed full of hidden forces, helpful, by the French anthropologist Bruce mischievous, or murderous, all Albert, who recorded many dozens shifting and mutating depending on of hours of Davi talking, over a how they’re treated, and even on period of decades. He arranged and what mood they happen to be in. transcribed the result, went through However unpredictable, they do the edit step-by-step with Davi, who stick to certain conventions – and made amendments, and translated that’s a point I’ll come back to. the book himself, directly from Yanomami into French. (The English What ordinary folk perceive of all translation by Nicholas Elliott and this is just the tiny tip of a deeply Alison Dundy is excellent.) esoteric and exotic reality. The 1 skillful and highly trained shaman The Yanomami are far from unique ‘drinking’ yakoana snuff (it’s actually in discovering how to trigger the blown up his nostrils), takes on the brain into something other than the strength to enter this hidden cosmos. ‘ordinary’. Similar transcendence is He becomes not only aware of its of course embedded in humanity’s forces, good and ill, but can – indeed expression, its art and beliefs must – enlist them to try and defend everywhere, and to dismiss its his community. importance is surely shortsighted (unless we really want to be Actually, the shaman’s role is even controlled, rather than served, by more important. The hidden machines and computers). universe of the xapiri and many other ‘spirits’ requires constant ‘The Falling Sky’ is without doubt the intervention to maintain balance: most authentic account of the shaman has no option but to Amazonian shamanism ever work ceaselessly to keep life recorded. It’s the nearest thing to bearable, not only for his own sitting around a fire in a communal people but – astonishingly – for Yanomami dwelling (round, everyone, everywhere. As Davi says, thatched, and open to the center, a ‘We shamans simply say that we are bit like the Elizabethan Globe theater protecting ‘nature’ as a whole thing. viewed from above) and just We defend the forest’s trees, hills, listening, uninterruptedly, to a mountains, and rivers; its fish, game, shaman’s words. That’s best done spirits, and human inhabitants. We around dawn or dusk, those edgy even defend the land of the white times when the world really does people beyond it and all those who mutate, more magically of course live there.’ when there’s no electric light to blunt the daily drama. The snuff is hallucinogenic. Though not the same as the famous Davi’s explanation of the Yanomami ayahuasca or yagé, it’s certainly universe is a brilliant illustration of powerful enough to ensure that how people’s worldviews merge what you see when you ‘drink’ it such everyday reality with other defies rational analysis (though dimensions, which themselves are doubtless many will try). That’s seen as equally real. That may be another significant point: we might less understood in industrial have persuaded ourselves that societies than it once was, but it science and industry, based on remains demonstrably true: in spite numbers, Cartesian thinking and of the current attempt to reduce replicable proof, are the key factors everything to monolithic certainties, in human life. The shaman, on the our ‘reality’ really is that much of other hand, believes that all the what happens takes place inside us. ‘merchandise’ we produce as a Even when unnoticed to all except consequence is not as conducive to the person affected, such things our wellbeing as is human society – (love, is one example) can be the the resolutely complex and logic- most important and life-changing defying ways we treat ourselves and aspects of our existence. As each another. psychotherapist Carl Jung said of his autobiography, his memories of what had actually happened were 2 mere ‘phantasms’ of little Yanomami Park Commission (CCPY), importance compared to his started in 1978 by Albert himself, recollections of ‘inner’ experiences. Brazilian photographer, Claudia Andujar, and Italian lay missionary, Davi’s shamanic drawings are Carlo Zacquini. The trio built on scattered through ‘The Falling Sky’, earlier work, particularly by and his own autobiography anthropologist couple, Brazilian, comprises the second book in it. It’s Alcida Ramos, and Scotsman, another first: that of an Amazon Kenneth Taylor, and the campaign Indian whose life uniquely straddles was pushed onto the world stage by three worlds. Davi is an occasional, Survival International. though reluctant, world traveler; he’s also a spokesman and The focus was on pressing the internationally recognized activist government to abandon reserving for indigenous rights, who has the Yanomami only small pieces of already played the key role in saving land around a few communities, and his people. However, first and to campaign for a single Yanomami foremost he’s a child of the territory. Stopping the road was rainforest, who saw his people die of essential. epidemics brought in by government agents and missionaries, later As he recounts, Davi soon became embarking on his long shaman’s the principal protagonist for the apprenticeship as a response. Unlike movement and began a series of many indigenous activists nowadays, uncompromising meetings with he’s unschooled and has always government officials, eventually lived in the forest. Close to sixty (his reaching the president himself. He exact age is speculative), he’s often first left Brazil – for Britain and visited tribes other than his own, Sweden – when he was invited by including some very recently Survival International to stand contacted. alongside it when the NGO was awarded the 1989 alternative Nobel Davi has never read anyone’s prize. Survival’s publicity catalyzed biography; his is a unique, first-hand the issue in a way never seen before account, standing on no other for any Amazon Indians. That trip shoulders. It’s unlikely to be was followed by one to New York, emulated. Although it hasn’t yet when Davi met the UN Secretary been translated into Portuguese, General. A German newspaper later Davi can speak that language, though titled him ‘Dalai Lama of the not with total fluency. He learned its rainforest’! Brazilian variant when employed first by missionaries and then the In the 1980s, a new and even more government’s National Indian acute threat had arrived on Indian Foundation (FUNAI). When road territory, an invasion of illegal gold building arrived in Yanomami miners. About twenty per cent of territory in the 1970s he quickly saw Brazilian Yanomami died as that it was going to destroy the epidemics of measles, cerebral Indians. malaria, and flu, swept the region, and as mercury waste poisoned their At first, he didn’t know of the food. The shamans saw these organization trying to save them, the illnesses as ‘epidemic smokes’ 3 against which they lacked real comparative ignorance and power. They were a repeat of the superficiality. Of course, he doesn’t diseases which carried off Davi’s think we know much either, mother when he was a child. Her certainly nothing like we think we body had been hastily buried by do! missionaries and could not be found – an unthinkable desecration, as I’ll He’s visited Europe and North explain. America a few times, usually cities, which he sees as particularly If the destruction of American inhuman with their inequalities and Indians through illness might be overcrowding. He observes, ‘People thought to dilute the culpability of constantly ask you for money for the invaders who brought the everything, even to drink or urinate… diseases, there is certainly no Their hearts beat too fast, their mistaking the guilt of the miners thought is seized with dizziness, and who killed with gun and machete.

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