Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to Indians. They positioned themselves as exceptionally close to
Cojñone
within Ayoreo communities, but they were often desirable to outsiders
precisely to the degree of their supposed savagery. As one middle-aged
client put it, man to man, on a dark corner along Filadelfia's main street,
mistaking my familiarity with Iodé for complicity, “I prefer Indian girls.
When they are older, forget about it. But you can find very young ones,
new ones, especially these Ayoreo. They will do anything you want; they
are just savages. You only have to give them a Coca-Cola and they are
ready. But, you have to be firm with them, show them you are a man.
They like it if you are tough on them, you know, give them a slap.”
Somewhere at this extreme point of desire and disgust and despair,
the incoherent force and tangled logics of shame split and doubled back
yet again. The New People were violently taught to be ashamed of both
the Christian God
Dupade
and
Cojñone
of all kinds. Yet these girls often
described the selling of their bodies as precisely the opposite, a radical
and unsettling kind of agency. They said they did not
ajengome
in front
of the
Cojñone
. They didn't even call it work. They said
ore cana
, they were
just playing. They refused to be ashamed by
Dupade
or the
cucha puyade
or
Cojñone
of any kind. In fact, they said, the
Cojñone
desired them. Even
the Mennonites followed them like dogs, eager to “drink our bodies.”
With the money they earned, they supported extensive groups of peo-
ple—parents, children, husbands. They had nicknames known only to
their sisters. With their flamboyant fashion, unique slang, and brazen hu-
mor, they were something like role models for the young girls growing up
hungry in the grit of unauthorized urban camps. The
Cojñone
bulldozed
their camps by day, but at night, the same men returned.
Shame was a constant in the Place-Where-the-Black-Caiman-Walks, ex-
tending in all directions, the afterlife and texture of those points where
colonial violence, bodily perspectives, and subjective immanence col-
lided and collapsed under their own weight. Its incoherence filled in gaps
of all kinds: the aporias of testimony, the impossibility of category, the
failure to understand, the unassumable conditions of becoming, the lim-
its of empathy. It mediated and inscribed the profound contradictions be-
tween opposed moral economies of Indigenous life in the Chaco. Shame
was the remainder to constantly unraveling Ayoreo efforts to transform
moral humanity; the testament to the fact that the conditions of life and
being were never quite possible; the tension between the human and the
inhuman; the impossibility of distinguishing between punishment and
reward, innocence and guilt, right and wrong.
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