Mediating the New Human - Behold the Black Caiman - page 100

Guidaigosode from Campo Loro who entered the Totobiegosode villages
with portable cassette players in hand.
One morning, Jochade's son-in-law played the tape of the 1979 cap-
ture of the Totobiegosode band led by Jochade's brother Pejeide. He made
no fuss about it and didn't tell me what it was. But at the first tones of
muffled and distorted sound, the handful of younger men sitting nearby
knew. One laughed hard, one walked away, two listened quietly. In the
foreground were staccato shouts between men, moving in and out of
range, punctuated by short screams, sounds of the tape recorder being
dropped and picked up and dropped again. After two or three minutes I
realized there was also a steady background sound, but one I could not
identify, a continuous blanket of distant moaning, something almost
human but not quite. Jochade's son-in-law said it was the sound of the
women and children who were too paralyzed to run away during the
attack. This was the noise they made when they believed they would
soon be massacred. Jochade and the others could identify most of the
individual voices on these tapes. I asked the young man to turn it off, and
we sat as wind rushed through leaves and dragged up dust.
Such recorded sounds, of course, did not catalyze a new memory proj-
ect for Totobiegosode. Rather, their durability stood in stark tension with
the projects of self-transformation effected through the immateriality of
radio sound. One night around the fire, Jochade looked up and said that
he wanted to use cassette technology to record old-style songs like the
one Yoteuoi had just finished singing. In the next breath, however, both
men said such efforts were doomed to fail. They concluded that Cojñone
like me would end up with the only lasting records of their voices, stories,
and songs.
“If we don't have a way to record these songs, they will be forgot-
ten,” Jochade began. “I don't want this, so I have a tape recorder. If the
children don't want to learn these songs, they will be lost. If the Cojñone
record our stories and songs, they will always have them.”
“That is right,” Yoteuoi agreed. “We can tape-record our songs, but
it will be pointless. We elders have already forgotten some things, the
names of some things, because we didn't have tape recorders before when
there were still people alive who knew those things very well.”
“The Cojñone never forget anything,” Jochade concluded. “Like Dupa-
deuruode , the Word of God. It is very old but it comes from the Cojñone
because they recorded it and then they wrote it down.”
For Totobiegosode, recording and preserving was never so simple. Pre-
cisely at the moment of materialization, the ideal moral self—like the
sound and spirit through which it emerged—dissolved once more.