Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
search for radical possibility to the contents of a “primitive ontology” or
a “society against the state” is not the solution but part of the problem.
It reproduces the metanarrative that liberalism tells about itself and thus
reanimates the colonial space of death for many people like Ayoreo.
Yet what kind of figure can I conjure to offer something better? Surely,
the Ayoreo people I know unanimously insist, do not look to the rup-
tured clothes of the
urusori
or the swollen gums of the
Puyedie.
They offer
no comfort, no redemption, no healing magic, no easy way to make sense
of dehumanizing nonsense. (And that is precisely why they should not
be ignored.)
Instead, the Ayoreo-speaking
Puye
is both an unexpected stranger and
as predictable as the discarded plastic bags that litter the
villa miseria
.
Her outsideness threatens to undo the outside itself. Thus, the
Puye
may
proclaim raucously that vice is life, that
urusori
is the only form of reason
that makes sense these days. She stumbles and trips across three zones of
nonlife at once, a living death and deathly life that is the mirror image of
the differentiation and homogenization of the human/nonhuman that
is the technique of colonial terror, a mimetic difference the
Puyedie
sell,
eat, smoke. Lines of flight devolve like the delirious mocking words of
the
Puyedie
themselves, chanted like an incantation to the herky-jerky
rhythms of negative becoming in a hypermarginal world.
Her voice was hoarse, her speech slurred:
i was young when i came
Before the bus station
i was young when i came
i was pretty
i lived with my gold teeth
i was a doctor
i was a doctor
Now i have no teeth, you see
But i was a doctor
it is because of my vice
i was a doctor
Now i have beer
Now it is cocaine paste
it is shoe glue
it is alcohol
i was a doctor
i left him because he was jealous
