Young Wayuu are expressive and smiling. During the reading aloud session, everyone participated with interest, choosing texts and assuming the role of volunteer readers. But there was an eleventh-grade boy who stood out, Kelvis Dilan Epiayú, who told an old guajiro story, The Rabbit and the Mapurito. With this experience, among others, Mónica Lázaro De la Hoz narrates her experience as a promoter of reading in communities of La Guajira.
I
The desert has no roads. For long stretches there is nothing to stop the gaze. Everything resembles emptiness. But small eddies may appear. It is when the sand manages to squint his body, so strong, that at sight it seems to incite the wind, and that he receives its yellow palm. It’s easy to get lost.
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He had gone to Cabo de la Vela once. To continue along the Alta Guajira is to enter the intense landscape of the desert. After 6 hours of travel, as if you were leaving an unreal place, an afterlife, you arrive at the village of Puerto Estrella.
The topic of conversation that afternoon, while we were having dinner, was the death of a young man who had gone out to sea fishing with his father. The tide rose and the boy fell into the water. Marlene, the librarian, the hostess, and her family commented on the event in a serious tone, concerned about the treatment that is given in their community to these circumstances related to accidental death.
I was thinking of the Jepira , but thought it was inappropriate to ask. Later, curled up in the hammock, I imagined the boy’s soul turned into a yoluja, traveling to the guajiro beyond. The traditional way to get there is by flying or walking on the sea. In the geography of Hades it is the Acheron River that leads and precedes the entrance to the destination of the dead. In the case of the Jepira it is not an underworld, because the place where the Wayuu dead arrive is a particular point in the sea of Cabo de la Vela.
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yl
Young Wayuu are expressive and smiling. During the reading aloud session, everyone participated with interest, choosing texts and assuming the role of volunteer readers. But there was an eleventh-grade boy who stood out, Kelvis Dilan Epiayú, who told an old guajiro story, The Rabbit and the Mapurito , published in Spanish by the Ekaré publishing house. As soon as he saw it, he decided to “read it”. I use the quotation marks because what he actually did was tell the story in his own words in Wayuunaiki.
The bridge of translation not only involved moving from one language to another, but also from written to oral. I do not know Wayuunaiki, but I do know the particular expressiveness of orality, and this young man used it: tones, gestures, body postures. The audience was linked to history. Perhaps something similar happens when the Jayeechi are told, narrative songs, or sung narratives, traditional in the Wayuu community, and that long ago began to disappear. Surely this young man carries in his narrative spontaneity vestiges of this roots.
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The best-known story of the Jepira is that of Ulépala, a man who, being just married, loses his wife. In the midst of the devastation, she visits him and, attending to his desperate insistence, allows him to accompany her to the mansion of the dead, moving “illegally”, that is, not flying over the sea but crossing a cavernous path that lies below of him (version of Ramón Paz Ipuana, 187). She shows the place to her husband, who does not enjoy the delicacies offered, nor the body of his still beautiful wife. The female role, as it is traditionally conceived in the Wayuu “real world”, is disrupted in the afterlife, since in the afterlife women are not obliged to be faithful or to attend to family responsibility. Ulépala, disoriented in that other order in which he is suddenly imbued, soon decides to leave. When you leave, a learning journey awaits you close to powerful Wayuu gods.
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IV
Also in La Guajira, towards the center, there is a different mythological universe, that of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
After the visit to Puerto Estrella, the idea arose of sharing a workshop on the afterlife, reflecting on life after death and imagining that diversity of atmospheres built around the inevitable reality of dying.
Young men from the Dumingueka Kogi reservation in Mingueo hardly participated. We share readings starring characters like Cerberus and Anubis, sinister watchdogs that greet humans at the end of their lives. The teacher of the Kogi tradition class, Lucas Coronado, was encouraged to tell some mythical data of the place that ancestrally received its dead.
V
Nabbᵾdue is located on the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra. In that place also a black dog receives, but above all accompanies and guides the newcomers. His name is Piushkaldadziwa. As a kind of mythical reiteration, in Nabbᵾdue, as in Jepira , there is the displacement of a newly married man who accompanies his wife along the path of the dead.
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On this occasion, thanks to a sacred mask, the husband is able to identify the soul of his partner, already separated from the body. After introducing themselves to various caretakers who record their steps, they ascend to the snowy peaks. Being already in Nabbᵾdue, he manages to converse with those there, from whom he receives instructions on how the funeral rituals should be performed. When he dismisses his wife and begins the return, he decides to collect some seeds from trees that do not exist in the world of the living. The feat, of course, displeases the trees. They start to chase him. The husband runs to the exit, closing a door that was never opened again. No one else would return from that place [1].
WE
In the book The Great Initiates, by Édouard Schuré, the following sentence is pronounced in Orpheus’s voice: “Eurydice, long live, you would have given me the intoxication of happiness; Eurydice, dead, made me find the truth ”(167). As is known, the image of a man who, saddened, goes to the underworld seeking to recover his love is classic in Western mythology, due to the tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Upon listening to the Wayúu narration, Michell Perrin transcribed it into Spanish and French, and titled it thus: The journey to the beyond. Eurídice guajira.
In the Wayíu and Kogi myths both men enter unknown worlds thanks to wives who died abruptly. They return, like Orpheus, with an unprecedented learning. Perhaps it is a repeated motif in multiple mythologies, it would be interesting to review its symbolic place.
[1] This synthesis integrates information received by Professor Lucas Coronado and the version published by Reichel-Dolmatoff.
Bibliography
-Paz Ipuana, Ramón. The history of Ulépala. Juan Duchesne Winter (Comp.), Beautiful invisibles that protect us. Pittsburgh: International Institute of Ibero-American Literature, 2015.
-Perrin, Michell. “The trip to the most. Eurúdice guajira ”. Juan Duchesne Winter (Comp.), Beautiful invisibles that protect us. Pittsburgh: International Institute of Ibero-American Literature, 2015.
-Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. The Kogi: a tribe from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Colombia. Bogotá: FCE, 1985.
– Schuré, Édouard. The great initiates. Bogotá: Universal Editions, 1987.
