Introduction

 iii.1.1.When we apply the terms “oral” and “written” to poetry, we should not forget that the logic of binary oppositions, when applied to cultural facts, always depends on historical delimitations and geopolitical perspectives. Since writing separates the sign from the reality it represents in a system of differences and permutations, it would have given rise to extraordinary forms of memory, thought and action, which is believed to have enabled the development of civilizations. From the standpoint of the history of writing (Christin 2002; Powell 2009), which is intertwined with the origins of hegemonic cultures in the East and West (such as the Greek and the Chinese), the confrontation between orality and writing tends to highlight the discontinuities that led to modern sign and language theories. References to oral traditions, on the other hand, are easily applied to define primitive or intermediate stages of civilization. However, seen from the perspective of non-hegemonic cultures (such as the natives of the lowlands of South America, which we present here), one can find forms of continuity between oral traditions and different forms of thinking and representing that enable broader concepts of writing (Lévi-Strauss 1962; Derrida 1967; Severi 2015). For didactic reasons, the two perspectives will be referred to here as “hegemonic” and “non-hegemonic”, although we should keep in mind that the boundaries often intersect and feed back into each other in the same way as with orality and writing.

Hegemonic perspectives^[1]

 iii.1.2.“Oral poetry” is used to define two types of compositions in verse: on the one hand, it refers to orally composed and performed poems without reliance on writing, such as ritual songs, lyric and narrative poems; on the other hand, it refers to oral performance from texts previously or simultaneously written, such as modern songs, spoken word, and hip hop (Zumthor 1983; Finnegan 1992; Caplan 2014). The concept of oral poetry points, above all, to vocal performance (Hymes 1981; Bauman 1984; Zumthor 1983), as opposed to written form, as the main means of circulation of words organized in a rhythmic-melodic structure (Meschonnic 1982). The etymology of “oral” (from Late Latin oralis, derived from os, oris, mouth) indicates a prior connection with voice and speech.

 iii.1.3.Historically, oral poetry appears first in archaic rites, such as ritual poems based on rhythms, sound patterns and repetitive structures that are sung in laments, praises, ceremonies, and incantations (Zumthor 1983). In the traditional history of literature, oral poetry is evoked to refer mainly to two types of orally composed and performed verse: narrative (such as epic and ballad) and lyric poetry; broadly speaking, oral lyric poetry corresponds to a wide range of short non-narrative poems which are sung, such as love songs, hymns, war songs, lullabies, songs to accompany dancing and drinking, and many others (Finnegan 1992; Zumthor 1983; (Song, Songlike).

 iii.1.4.Oral poetry is also used to refer to oral performance of written texts, such as spoken word, slam and rap. Spoken word corresponds to a poetic performance in which a poem is read or recited (Smith 2009). In these performances, the poet explores the potentialities of the voice, improvisation and word play. Developed in the early 1980’s, rap (rhythm, metre, line) is characterized by an emphasis on the rhythm of the drum machine and the conversational tone employed in the way of reciting (Toop 2000). Slam poetry is composition in verse made to be performed in a competition. According to its precursor, the American poet Marc Kelly Smith, it is “the marriage of a text to the artful presentation of poetic words onstage to an audience that has permission to talk back and let the performer know whether he or she is communicating effectively” (Smith 2009).

 iii.1.5.The concept of oral poetry can be also extended to a new set of practices which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century at the intersection of historical vanguards and changes in communication technologies, like sound poetry (McCaffery 1978). Henri Chopin defines two historical moments for sound poetry: before the 1950s, when, in clear rupture with poetry performed with a declamatory style, the vanguard artists made various experiments in the fields of phonetics, vocal and acoustic elaborations; and after 1950, with new forms of processing the voice and the auditory elements in a poetic work (Chopin 1992).

 iii.1.6.Scholarship on oral poetry expanded during the Romantic era. Based on the idealistic view that national roots were tied to primeval expressions of emotions which are by nature expressed in rhythmic and figurative form, the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth established a strong relationship between poetry and orality, as the early bards used the same language “spoken by men” (Appendix to Lyrical Ballads, 1802). With the stress of modern and avant-garde poetry on typography and page settings, orality and performance issues (when not related to colloquialism) became more and more a matter of research for folklore scholars. From this perspective, methodologically, the folklorists tried to trace historical and geographical origins of oral traditions and aimed to place them in a wide system of classification (Finnegan 1992).

 iii.1.7.The findings of Milman Parry (1928) established a new paradigm of oral poetry scholarship. Studying the phraseology of Homeric verse, particularly the epithets, Parry demonstrated that the economy of Homer’s verse is based on oral-formulaic composition, through which “a group of words is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea” (Parry 1971, 272). Widely embraced, the oral-formulaic theory became a trending term employed to describe a broad field of poetic compositions (Lord 1960; Foley 1985). Oral-formulaic theory eventually also became involved in performance issues related to literature, which were discussed in France in a rather different way by Zumthor (1987), in relation to the performance of romance literary texts during the Middle Ages, and by Rémy Dor (1995), who coined the word orature to study the performance of written texts in the old Turkish tradition. Performance studies also called attention to the fact that oral poetry is produced in a context in which the significant dimensions of the body, voice and gestures must likewise be considered (Hymes 1981; Bauman 1984). Zumthor also criticizes “graphocentrism” in the studies of oral poetry and proposes to shift attention from the linguistic dimension to the vocal medium, that is, from orality to the material and symbolic qualities of vocality (Zumthor 1983).

 iii.1.8.The oral-formulaic and performance paradigms also revealed that the cleavage between the oral and written might be used to subdue cultural practices linked to tradition, folklore, and popular culture within the field of literary studies (Finnegan 1992). However, Bakhtinian studies on popular culture and “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 2009; 1981) unveiled ideological and political aspects implied in different uses of language and style. Colloquialism or colloquial style (Bridgman 1966) also became key concepts in the history of modern poetry and the novel. The presence of ellipsis, redundancy, and syntactic fragmentation, as well as the use of dialects and jargons ended up imposing deep transformations on the form of the modern and contemporary novel and poetry, in which the relations between orality and writing are implied.

 iii.1.9.The emergence of new technologies of recording, processing and transmitting sound cast into relief problems surrounding the technical conditions of orality production. Within this perspective, the issue was no longer one of describing the patterns of oral traditions, but understanding how new technologies change communication systems (McLuhan 1994; Ong 1982; Havelock 1963). Walter Ong, for instance, shows how the psychodynamics of orality affect the forms of thought and communication in non-literate societies. His method is based on the differentiation of primary and secondary orality. The first describes the manifestations of cultures untouched by the culture of writing, while the second revolves around oral culture defined (and implicitly influenced) by the written and printed word (Ong 1982).

(Some) Non-Hegemonic Perspectives

 iii.1.10.Issues surrounding writing and orality were also the source of major philosophical and anthropological debates that, in one way or another, ended up affecting poetry and lyric studies. Perhaps one of the most compelling moments in the last decades is Jacques Derrida’s (1967) critique of “phonocentrism”/“logocentrism”, or the tradition of thinkers he relates to “metaphysics of presence”. According to Derrida (1967), voice (or speech) are to be considered the privileged place of truth regarding reality, because of its immediacy in relation to the body and in relation to the instant in which consciousness unfolds itself. By contrast, writing is considered as indirect, secondary, like the sign (taken in the medieval sense of aliquid stat pro aliquo); according to this view, it always points to something outside itself. Now, Derrida argues, this metaphysics always conceals a presence that is unstable in itself, one that is subject to the flux of meanings in time (Derrida 1967, 93). In this regard, meaning should be thought of rather as a trace, a reality that can never be fully grasped and whose sense will always be deferred (différance). Seen this way, it is not the relationship between a signifier (expression, writing) and a signified (meaning, presence) that defines language (and thought), but rather the relationship between a trace and a supplement.

 iii.1.11.Derrida’s arguments are important for the discussion of oral and written poetry, and also have an impact on theories of orality and literacy (Ong 1982, Goody & Watt 1963), especially on the hypothesis of primary orality or a precedence of voice over writing, in which the idea of an original truth is implicit. For Ong, oral cultures are radically distinct from literate cultures, and in this difference an irreducible difference between two forms of thought and civilization is implied. His theory is based on two premises: on the one hand, the studies by Parry (1928) andLord (1960) on the formulaic character of Homer’s epic, which show that prior to the invention and use of the alphabet, formulas (or clichés) ensured the organization and memorization of ancient epic-narrative texts; on the other hand, the study by E. Havelock (1963) on Plato, which demonstrates that it was only after having internalized alphabetic writing, which had also become a set of formulas (in the view of Plato’s Phaedrus), that the Greeks were able to free their minds to think in more original terms (Ong 1982, 24).

 iii.1.12.It is interesting to note that Ong seeks to go far beyond traditional studies on orality, and proposes a more radical and perhaps much more controversial cultural rift. For Ong, oral cultures maintain a “magical” relationship with language (1982, 32-33), while understanding reality through ready-made formulas, and for this very reason they tend to themselves remain in a state of redundancy and repetition of the knowledge already acquired by their ancestors, becoming highly conservative and traditional (as opposed to being inventive). In short, oral cultures are homeostatic (Ong 1982, 31-34), which is a more refined way of saying that they are repetitive, because they are not analytical, but aggregative (see Auerbach 1953, on parataxis in the Chanson de Roland).

 iii.1.13.No matter how much Ong desires to recover the power of the spoken word over the written one (let us recall that, besides being a researcher and writer, Ong was a preacher), he lapses into paradoxes that end up revealing ethnocentrism. For instance, when he defines the oral word as sound and the written word as sign, he implies that oral (illiterate) cultures tend to repeat things so as not to forget them, so as not to lose them in the flow of events, which makes them more conservative; by contrast, literate cultures, which separate thought from fixed expression on paper, move more easily between interiorization (the individual freedom to think) and exteriorization (the modification of things and ideas/beliefs thanks to mass dissemination). Although he considers that the homeostasis of oral culture engenders a strength and beauty of its own in verbal articulation – because it maintains the “magics” – Ong makes it clear that oral cultures are eventually overcome by literacy processes (or civilization processes), which democratize the capacity to internalize thought and enable creativity (1982, 173-175). Thus, in modern societies, orality is seen as being reserved for the possibility of giving a communitarian, i.e. religious, meaning back to the word (Ong’s final words precisely carry the weight of the Christian preacher’s words).

 iii.1.14.In addition, even important theorists of the oral tradition-performance relationship, such as Paul Zumthor (1983), can sometimes fall into the trap of logocentrism. No one can deny that Zumthor opened new paths for the study of oral poetry beyond folklore and classical epic studies, expanding his concept of performance to all vocal arts (storytelling, theater, opera, song), while also detailing formal features belonging both to written and oral poetry, such as rhyme and alliteration. But it is not difficult to identify here an affinity with Husserl’s thinking about voice as a phenomenon prior to sign, an anteriority that is supposedly the matrix of an original and true concordance between consciousness and body – which Derrida (1967) had already deconstructed. Considering voice to be the basis of a theory of oral poetry, Zumthor attributes a character of anteriority to language itself: “the voice is a word without words, purified, a vocal thread that frailly links us to the Unique. It is what the first theologians of language, in the 16th century, called verb… or Husserl’s ‘phenomenological voice’ […] that is consciousness” (Zumthor 1983, 13, my translation). However much he wishes to embody voice in performance, and relate it to a worldliness (to use a Husserlian term), Zumthor attributes to voice characteristics of a metaphysical presence, i.e. of an essentialism that seems to become more and more untenable today.

 iii.1.15.From an African perspective, Amadou Hampaté Bâ (1981) recovers the “living tradition” of the southern Sahara, and intends to demonstrate that in traditional cultures, “the bond between man and the spoken word” (Bâ 1981, 167) is stronger, and that this reflects the myths of the divine origin of the word. The Bambara tradition of the Komo (Mali) teaches that “the Word, Kuma, is a fundamental force emanating from the Supreme Being himself – Maa Ngala, creator of all things, it is the instrument of creation” (Bâ 1982, 168). The fact of having a divine origin, however, does not prevent the word from being fully realized in the material world, and, more than that, from participating in the effectivity of the world and of things; i.e., the word conveyed by tradition has a force of realization. Hence, for traditional Bambara thinking, what we call poetry or lyrics is a form of applied knowledge insofar as the recitation of songs, formulas, and proverbs is part of various craft activities: “traditional craftsmen accompany their work with ritual chants or sacramental rhythmic words, and their very gestures are considered a language” (Bâ 1981, 180-181). In one of the chants transcribed by Bâ, one can clearly see the entanglement of the Creator’s Word with the craft activities:

The smith forges the Word

The weaver weaves it,

The leather-worker curries it smooth.

(Bâ 1981, 181)

 iii.1.16.Although there is a specialization, in the African tradition described by Bâ, of those who dedicate themselves to the art of speech – the so-called griots, a term that should be replaced by dieli (Bâ 1981, 191) – the need to recite chants and other genres of the art of speech is not exclusive to a specialist: “poetry” permeates all sectors of human life, it is the basis of an entire educational system that is passed on from generation to generation, and that is not only perfected but also adapted to new situations. This is the case of the mutual influence of the written culture of Islam on the Fulani and Bambara tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the way Islam adapted itself to this tradition, which created new ways of transmitting the religious texts and precepts contained in the Quran and Islamic doctrine (Bâ 1982, 196-197), as different forms of translation took place in North Africa (Diagne 2022). This points to several intersections, and also to many forms of transformation that refute both the hypothesis of an original and authentic orality, as well as the theory of homeostasis of oral cultures. Incidentally, Hampâté Bâ’s (1981) works also relativize the necessary link between epic orality and formulaic style: the mnemonic process of the Fulani and Bambara tradition is not formulaic, but onomatopoeic: songs, sayings, and proverbs are always enunciated from a purely onomatopoeic and melodic segment, which serves as a key to initiate a certain theme, and, from that theme, to develop specific genres related to economic/cultural activities (Casta 1969).

 iii.1.17.Among the peoples of Amazonia and South American lowlands, the question of writing and orality has always raised much debate, since these peoples were seemingly illiterate before the arrival of the Europeans, or else developed forms of writing that until recently were considered quite rudimentary compared to Eastern and Western writing practices such as those of the Chinese or the Greek. In the tradition of texts about the “discovery” of America, it was common to say that these peoples had “neither Faith, nor Law, nor King”, according to the formula coined by Portuguese explorer and writer Pero de Magalhães Gandavo (1980, 10), arguing that their language lacked the “letters” F, L and R. Modern anthropology has completely rejected the prejudice that Amerindians had no religious, juridical or political organization, but some old questions concerning their forms of language often remain biased. Such is the case in the famous chapter “A Writing Lesson” from Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques: “That the Nambikwara [native people from Central Brazil] could not write goes without saying. But they were also unable to draw, except for a few dots and zigzags on their calabashes” (1962, 288). We know that when addressing writing (or the absence of it), Lévi-Strauss is not specifically interested in the writing/orality debate, but rather, in describing primitive structures of social and political organization in contrast with the history of Western societies, in which the development of writing would be used as a way to “facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (1962, 292).

 iii.1.18.In De la Grammatologie, Derrida (1967) questions precisely why we cannot consider as writing those “few dots and zigzags on their calabashes” that Levi-Strauss had glanced over, which demonstrates that even the most prepared ethnologist is not exempt from ethnocentric positions derived from a long logocentric tradition. In this same chapter, moreover—and this is not the scope of Derrida’s critique, but of the arguments I will develop here—Lévi-Strauss describes verbal quarrels between two groups of Nambikwaras in preparation for a war. In the ethnographer’s observation of what is said in these disputes, curious reflective moments appear, in which the ethnographer reveals himself in relation to what he does not know: the dialogues, he says, “consisting mainly of monologues, in alternation, on a plaintive, nasal note that I did not remember having encountered before” (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 295), and, further on, “after some dancing and singing... tempers began to run high... the noise of argument-cum-singing set up a tremendous row, the significance of which was lost upon me” (1962, 295). What follows is that it is precisely those things that elude the anthropologist’s understanding (the singing, the dancing, the vocal and nasal alternations), or that seem less important to him than the observation of behavior, that might be what is essential – at least insofar as thinking about the relationship between writing and orality is concerned.

 iii.1.19.In South America anthropological and literary tradition, attention to the language and “text” of native peoples has always been important, since Jesuit missionaries like Joseph de Anchieta (1534-1597) and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1585-1652) began writing seriously in Tupi and Guarani. In the Brazilian case, attention to Tupi-Guarani languages defined the work of nationalist romantic writers of the mid-19th century, such as José de Alencar (author of the celebrated O Guarani) and Antonio Gonçalves Dias (1823-1864). The latter, incidentally, incorporated in his poetry (“I-Juca Pirama”, 1851) a great number of terms from the Guarani language (in addition to discussing issues of anthropophagy) in such a way that the indigenous element appears as a legible inscription. This inscription (an aboriginal subtext that speaks against the grain) can be read even in rhythmic elements, which echo indigenous songs, especially through the use of structures of repetition (parallelism), of parataxis and intensification. Meanwhile, in South America’s ethnographic and anthropological tradition, works such as that of Curt Unkel (aka Curt Nimuendaju) stand out. As early as 1914, he published in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie a careful and extensive transcription of mythical narratives of the Apopocuva-Guarani from São Paulo. Nimuendaju’s methods inspired the work of the Paraguayan ethnographer León Cadogan, who in 1958 published the transcription and commented translation of a large quantity of Guarani-Mbyá mythopoetic texts, which he called Ayvu Rapyta. Both Cadogan and Nimuendaju influenced French anthropologists Alfred Métraux (1928) and Pierre Clastres (Clastres 1974), the latter of whom published a translation into French of the Ayvu Rapyta under the title Le grand parler (1974), which seem to literarily justify his anarchist-poststructuralist theory of the “society against the state” (1974).

 iii.1.20.The Ayvu Rapyta deserves a separate consideration. It is a cosmology, describing, in large sequences of heterometric verses, the emergence of the ancient deities (or ancestors) and the various stages of the creation of the universe, of the earth, and of creatures. In the beginning of the first sequence we learn that, before creating anything, Nãnderu Papa Tenonde has to create himself by unfolding (ombojera) his body from an “ancient darkness”. Soon after this auto-genesis and after creating his descendants (ancestors), Ñamandu Ru Tenonde begins to create or unfold (oguerojera) the principles or foundations that will structure cosmic harmony:

Nãmandu Ru Ete – Ancestral

from his first celestial being –

from his celestial science –

the creative knowledge – begets –

vapor-tatachina – flame-tataendy –

Standing upright –

from celestial being –

from celestial science –

conceives the foundations of the soul-voice –

(Müller 2023, 15)

 iii.1.21.It is remarkable that, according to Mbyá cosmogony, instead of creating things or beings (planets, stars, plants, animals, humans), Ñamandu unfolds (out of his knowledge or science, mba’ekuaá) the principles that should structure the universe – and that at the same time organize life on the planet. These are two kind of principles: first, the natural ones, like vapor/mist/smoke (tatachina) and flame/fire (tataendy), which, when combined, both create life and harmony; but these principles are also cultural, as the shaman uses vapor and flame for healing bodies. Second, there are language (ayvu, a word that means both language and soul), love (mborayu, love or affects in Spinozian sense) and mba’e a’ã, a word that we translate as singing-drive, because it means the drive (élan) for singing/dancing, but also any drive for rhythm. Taken together, these five principles functions as Alfred N. Whitehead’s eternal objects; they are vectors that direct the universe and life toward satisfaction and beauty, what the Mbyá call teko porã, the good way of living according to the ancient principles. Here it is worth remembering that the “ancient” for the Mbya is not the “traditional”, which must be followed with obedience, but the ceaseless and unchanging, that, once transgressed, will imply some form of imbalance.

 iii.1.22.As far as rhythmic structure is concerned, at first glance the heterometric verses seem to make use of the formulaic style as defined by Parry (1928) and Lord's (1960) studies (see above). However, observing the art of Mbyá basketry, one can see that certain patterns are repeated both in poetry and in the weaving the fibers, and we know that for the Mbyá the art of basketry is of utmost importance (Müller 2023): baskets are not only objects of domestic use, they are also forms of representation of the sacred, and, we would say, forms of cosmological and cosmographic representation. Seen from a social perspective, the arrangement of words and verses in the Ayvu Rapyta and the art of basketry are part of the same way of thinking about socio-cosmic intertwining (Müller 2023a). In other words, for the Mbyá, the poetry of weaving, singing, dancing, and farming are all forms of socio-cosmic interweaving (Guss 1990).

 iii.1.23.Here we are facing a phenomenon that clashes with the Western way of thinking of poetry, and certainly with another way of thinking of the relationship between written poetry and oral poetry, especially with regard to an ethnocentric theory of writing. Along these lines, Dominique Gallois (2002) and Bruna Franchetto (2021) sought to demonstrate that some ancestral peoples of the Amazonian region (Kuikuro and the Wajãpi) developed graphic forms (of body painting and weaving) that can and should be considered as writing, although they are neither alphabetic nor phonetic.

 iii.1.24.However, Kuikuro and Wajãpi graphisms are not a language composed of signs that represent things; they are not forms of representation in the Western sense, but rather forms of shamanic agency; they do not “represent, but have an agency towards humans and other beings that populate the Wajãpi cosmos” (Franchetto 2021, 5), which include humans and non-humans, living or supernatural, present and past beings, since most of the Amazonian cosmologies are multidimensional or “multinatural” (Viveiros de Castro 1992). As a matter of fact, Franchetto follows Carlo Severi’s “chimera principle” (2015), which shows to what extent the straightforward Western orality/writing opposition tends to obscure more complex relationships between graphics/pictograms, ritual and social memory in oral traditions. In cultures such as that of the Kuikuro in Amazonia, it is possible to unveil “an overlap between drawing and writing” (Franchetto 2021, 6) and both are connected to ritual chants and together constitute a shamanic perspective of socio-cosmic memory. Analyses like Franchetto’s and Severi’s force the studies on orality and literacy to move beyond another kind of logocentrism, one that supposes alphabetic writing (and books) to be the aim of civilization, with everything necessarily having to end in a book, to quote one of Mallarmé’s literary mantras. On the other hand, these analyses also deconstruct the opposite thesis, which states that in orality and in oral cultures there is something akin to a forgotten paradise of authenticity.

 iii.1.25.More recent studies on Amazonian cultures focus on subjectivity, personhood and dialogism in oral poetry. Pedro Cesarino’s (2011) ethnographic-literary study of the Marubo singers (of western Amazonia) has shown that the Marubo shamans disclose a “fractal person” while performing the chants: the singer’s body is considered to be merely a “carcass” occupied by other “doubles” (humans and non-humans, animals or plants, or “spirits”); meanwhile, his own I could go elsewhere, inhabit other “carcasses” or “wigwams”. If it was possible to translate this situation to a literary image, one would say that a Marubo shaman is like the Amerindian version of Fernando Pessoa, who depersonalizes his own authorial subjectivity and creates several authors/poets, each with a personal style. However, the Marubo shaman, instead of creating several heteronyms (like Bernardo Soares or Alvaro de Campos) in a human “monodrama”, instead creates and performs his self (within himself) as a whole opera with humans and non-humans, and his own self is sometimes totally absent, going to inhabit another body-wigwam. The Marubo case is interesting for lyric studies not because their oral poetry repeats or develops some special feature in composition (like formulaic verse), but because it challenges the traditional assumptions of subjectivity in lyric discourse (Fechner at al. 2022), including the modern idea of depersonification (Friedrich 1956). It is also necessary to point out that this fractal subjectivity is rendered by a special form of language, a “twisted” language coursing through the ordinary Marubo language, articulated by the shamans only, and whose translation into Western languages demands both ethnolinguistic and poetic skills creating a shamanic poetics of translation (Cesarino 2011, 127-160).

 iii.1.26.In a similar direction, Ian Packer (2019) studied the Krahô singers (of eastern Amazonia), who not only depersonalize themselves and give voice to non-human beings, but who also create a polyphonic performance, in which present and past, local and alien voices and styles are intertwined. In the “Maraca Songs”, the animals’ perspective or agency can provoke modifications in the phonetic, syntactic, and semantic structure of a song, causing, for instance, the jaguar’s speech to roar, and the rhythm of a tapir song to emulate the animal’s satisfaction while playing in the mud, on the phonetic and syntactical level (Packer 2023). Furthermore, the Krahô singer’s art is not praised for its originality, but often for the way he or she can borrow (or translate) from neighbor singers sometimes belonging to other ethnicities, producing heteroglossia in poetry (Bakhtin 1981).

 iii.1.27.In my current research (Müller 2023) on, and translation of the Kaiowa-Guarani oral tradition I also maintain that what is at work in Kaiowa poetry is not only the formulaic style, but rather the effects of repetition/variation and the long timespan of the singing sequences of refrain-verses. As it happens, with the Krahô and Marubo, the Kaiowa guahu is a ritual song in which animals’ subjectivity is expressed in terms of language; but the animal in question is both objective and subjective, natural and supernatural, because personhood is fractal. Thus, when the shaman sings a guahu on certain birds (like the partridge), he is both helping the partridge’s soul to communicate and helping the partridge-soul of someone else to bespeak something important for the community, or to address someone’s illness. In other words, there is a way of writing in the guahu that enables the reading of a relationship of continuity between different worlds and species: animals and humans, the living and the dead, ancestral (“divine”) beings and present-day beings.

 iii.1.28.Besides these sacred chants, the Kaiowa people perform the kotyhu as a more “profane” danced song with several participants in order to express affective moods (love, despair, longing, seduction). In the collection of kotyhu performed by shamans Waldomiro & Bonifacio Flores and Jamercia Benites (Flores et al. 2020, 324-397), the kotyhu takes place during several hours, and the refrain-verses are repeated in each song in patterns of 6, 12 or sometimes 20 times, with small but important variations. The whole ritual repetitions and intensifications of tone might recall minimalist music or a rave party. However, if we “time-lapse” these refrain-verses, we find a narrative thread that expresses a subject often related to real affective relations happening in the community or among the singers/dancers. This sequence of songs (which I abbreviate) may help to illustrate this intense structure of the kotyhu in its timespan:

[…]

He came just like you told

Crying just like you told. [repeats 6 times]

Wearing the beautiful headdress again. [repeats 6 times]

I'm not happy anymore, he told me. [repeats 4 times]

I'm leaving too, so she said. [repeats 8 times]

Don't leave me now, I beg you. [repeats 12, 6 and 4 times]

[…]

(Flores at al. 2023, translated by A. Müller & Baba Badji)

 iii.1.29.While the shaman and the participants sing (accompanied by maracas and other percussive instruments), they can vary the phrase melody, tempo and dynamics in order to express different aspects of the same refrain-verse. The singers often detach and recombine words morphologically, adding suspense in the phrase (e.g., “Wearing the beautiful head… dress again”). The kotyhu also employ a mix of sacred and profane language, reinforcing at the same time creativity and sense of belonging. It is not by chance that in some old Guarani chants such as the Ayvu Rapyta, mborayu (love) appears as a foundation of the cosmos: it is a force of social cohesion and balance with nature, helping to produce the good way of living or teko porã. Therefore, one could say, quoting the famous Adorno study on lyric and society (1991), that for most Amerindian people, social life resonates in the verse, if we also assume that the meaning of social life encompasses birds, armadillos, rivers, plants, and all invisible beings.